Where Is the Love?
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What they are is a nonfunded nonprofit that over the last two years has put on 16 different play readings at Sulzer, with over 60 actors participating. The library, at 4455 N. Lincoln, a block from Hissong’s home, was a good venue–“clean, well located, with parking”–and they were able to book space there (first a meeting room, then the auditorium) for a couple of afternoons and two evenings a month, eight months out of the year, without charge. (When they needed money for royalties or postage Hissong reached into his own pocket.) Two of the four monthly dates were used for rehearsals, two for performances. “We did everything from Shakespeare to Shaw to brand-new work” and, Hissong says, were building a following, with an audience of about 50 showing up for each production.
Hissong was shocked, and when he let Aspect’s actors and audience know that the season would have to be suspended, they protested to the library by phone and mail. A letter from Godziela in response mentions the donation jar and the piano and says the space requested by Aspect “was deemed not feasible due to the volume of library programming and requests from other outside groups.” The company’s supporters dispute this. One past audience member, William Kelley, wrote back that “as a frequent [library] patron, I know that it is not unusual to find the lecture and performance space…empty and locked….It just doesn’t make sense. You’ve abruptly terminated an ongoing relationship with an organization…that is a credit” to the library, with “no warning.”
Word is My Night at Jacques’: An Offenbach Folly nearly turned into a Light Opera Works folly. Classically trained mimes T. Daniel and Laurie Willets were hired by artistic director Lara Teeter to direct the musical, which re-creates a 19th-century French music hall, but halfway through rehearsals there was a parting of ways. “It just wasn’t working out in terms of staging the musical-theater portion of the show,” says LOW managing director Bridget McDonough. “Artistic differences,” says Willets. The upshot: Michael Kotze came in to direct and Teeter took over the choreography, while local actors Tempe Thomas and Joey Belmaggio stepped quietly into reworked mime roles that serve as the show’s bookends. Daniel and Willets are credited in the program with “additional staging.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/J.B. Spector.
