Move over, Neil Simon, and make room on the literary bench for Jacques Lamarre, one of Connecticut’s newest playwrights to hit one out of the ballpark.  Lamarre, who calls The Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford his day job, where he works as the Director of Communications, has a long history in the theatrical world.  He has worn a cap as publicity director at the Hartford Stage, the Yale Repertory Theatre/Yale School of Drama and TheaterWorks/Hartford so he’s no stranger to the footlights.

His first serious playwriting wasn’t serious at all:  it was a pair of children’s plays, “Pied Piper” and “Rapunzel,” produced when Lamarre was in college in the late 1980’s.  The plays were part of the American Stage Festival in Milford, New Hampshire and featured young Equity-eligible actors as stars.  Unfortunately both shows are, in Lamarre’s words, “now part of the dustbin of history.”

After taking playwriting courses in college, he didn’t really write again until 2004.  A fortuitous meeting with the actor Jeffery Roberson, whose on-stage persona is the international drag queen Varla Jean Merman, led them to collaborate on seven shows, the most recent being “The Loose Chanteuse.”

Roberson who lives in New Orleans uses phone and e-mail to exchange ideas, songs, monologues and video concepts with Lamarre and they refine them back and forth.  “The Loose Chanteuse” has been selling out all summer in Provincetown on Cape Cod and then will tour San Francisco and Los Angeles and maybe even make it off-Broadway.

(In the photo: Jacques Lamarre)

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PALACE THEATER KICKS OFF NEW NATIONAL TOUR OF “SPAMALOT”

By Don Church & Tony Schillaci, Critics On The Aisle™

The Tony Award-winning Monty Python musical “Spamalot” premieres at the glorious Palace Theater in Waterbury for three performances on September 24 and 25. This most recent national Broadway tour will kick off the theater’s 2010-2011 Webster Broadway Series, sponsored in part by WTNH/MyTV9.

According to the Palace’s Sheree Marcucci, the show is “lovingly ripped-off from the internationally famous comedy team's most popular motion picture, ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail,’ and is the winner of three Tony Awards, including Best Musical, as well as the Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Awards for Best Musical.”

This fractured version of the legendary tale of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table’s quest for the Holy Grail, “Monty Python's Spamalot” features a chorus line of dancing damsels and knights, flatulent Frenchmen, killer rabbits, flying cows, a legless knight and bawdy musical numbers.

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Journeying
With Shakespeare

By Irene Backalenick

Is Shakespeare enjoying a new Renaissance Era these days? It would seem so,
judging by the number of productions recently on the boards….at least in our
area. So far this summer, this critic has seen seven—yes, SEVEN-- offerings. And
there are more to come in August. The Elm Shakespeare Company”s “The Winter’s
Tale” opens August 19 at New Haven’s Edgerton Park. And the Stratford Library and Square One Theatre Company will sponsor an August 14 visit of the Hudson Shakespeare Company of New Jersey, with its production of “The Tempest.”  Held on the grounds of the long-closed American Shakespeare Festival Theatre in Stratford, this historic site, for a brief moment, will re-experience past glories.
         
In short, there is no end to the Shakespearean immersion. Is this overkill? Yes and no. Some of the productions soared, while others were merely ordinary. Yet, invariably, one comes away edified. However often we see or read Shakespeare’s plays, there are always new insights to be gained from the text. Or, it may be,
as our lives move along, a new perspective can be brought to an old, favorite
play. To quote a cliché, Shakespeare never goes out of style.

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