This week on Open Air, KALW’s radio magazine for the Bay Area performing arts, guest host Renee Kemp talks with actors John Bambery and Nanci Zoppi who play the leads in the San Francisco Playhouse production of the musical Sunday in the Park with George, which runs through September 8.
With text and music by Stephen Sondheim, Sunday in the Park with George is inspired by the famous painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by French pointillist painter Georges Seurat (1859-1891). The musical gives a fictionalized portrait of the painter (played by John Bambery) and his interaction with the people in the painting, including his lover, Dot (Nanci Zoppi). Sunday in the Park with George won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize and was nominated for 10 Tony Awards, including Best Musical.
From the Bay Area Playwrights Festival (BAPF) we meet with director Amy Mueller and with contributing playwright T.D. Mitchell, whose play VRTU-L is one of the plays of the festival. Director of VRTU-L, Erik Pearson, joins the conversation.
The 2018 edition of the BAPF wraps up over this coming weekend, July 27-29, with six play readings and a number of special events at Potrero Stage (1895 - 18th Street) in San Francisco.
Also stopping by is self-described ‘All-American tall-talesman and dime-a-rhyme vaudevillian’, Clyde Always, also known as ‘The Bard of the Lower Haight’, to talk about The Clyde Always Show!, playing at the Marsh in San Francisco through August 29. With raucous, uplifting, and profoundly fun-loving zaniness, featuring shiver-giving tall-tales, foot-stomping songs, hilarious monologues-in-verse Clyde Always covers every topic under the urban overhang, and more.
Plus, we check in with the goings-on at Music@Menlo’s sixteenth festival, Creative Capitals, in a conversation with cellist Nicholas Canellakis. The 2018 edition of Music@Menlo takes a musical and historical journey through seven cultural Capitals of Western Music: London, Paris, St. Petersburg, Leipzig, Berlin, Budapest, and Vienna. Through August 4, the festival presents concerts, master classes and multimedia symposia in three venues in Atherton and Menlo Park.
Open Air with guest host Renee Kemp, heard live on Thursday, July 26 at 1pm. Listen now or anytime…