If you thought beach season was over, think again. Cape May, on the southern tip of the Jersey Shore, claiming the title of “America’s First Seaside Resort,” offers way more than the typical beach attractions – sand, surf, and arcade rides. And while it says on the calendar that Columbus Day is Oct. 10, that three-day holiday is celebrated as Victorian Weekend in Cape May. 

With many of its bed-and-breakfasts and condo rentals dating back to Antebellum times, Cape May is a Victorian architecture treasure land that entertained presidents, ranging from James Buchanan, widely regarded – perhaps until recently – as the worst president in U.S. history. He squired Southern belles with sparkling wine at a White House party as Civil War broke out. Buchanan, a bachelor president, also partied at Cape May’s Congress Hall, where you can still book a room and enjoy a meal, indoors or out, at the Blue Pig Cafe. Book-ending Buchanan, President Ulysses S. Grant, who helped Abraham Lincoln win the war and save the Union, also stayed at Congress Hall.

Take one of the available Victorian Weekend Trolley tours and explore the area’s treasures. Choose from Mansions by the Sea, Ghosts of Cape May, the Underground Railroad, and Cape May’s Forgotten Sports History. Afterward, you can go shopping, have lunch al fresco along the Washington Street pedestrian mall, or drop by the crafts fair at the Emlen Physick Estate. Here, you can also reserve a brunch or dinner table at Vintage, a climate-controlled tent bistro amid the estate’s flower gardens. (It’s BYOB for wine or other adult beverages.) A tour of the 1879 Physick mansion museum, one of Cape May’s finest examples of Victorian architecture, is recommended. And if you’re theatrically inclined, stick around for Phantoms of the Physick Estate: Spellbound Sisters, a haunted-house melodrama.

If you stay for the week, Cape May Stage offers performances of Send in the Clowns for its back-to-back Sherlock Holmes Weekends starting Oct. 14, in which clues are presented Friday and Saturday evenings for a mystery that is solved by scouring the streets of Cape May. There’s a Sunday night reveal with prizes for the winning sleuths. Meanwhile, enjoy dinner at neighboring 410 Bank Street or Elaine’s Cape May.

And, oh yes. The boardwalk, beach, and the Atlantic Ocean are open 24/7. Cape May-Lewes Ferry is about an hour and a half drive from Easton to the Delaware Shore in Lewes.

Victorian Weekend, Oct. 7-10, capemac.org/experience/special-events/victorian-weekend; 
Sherlock Holmes Weekends, Oct. 14-16, Oct. 21-23; capemac.org/experience/special-events/sherlock-holmes-weekend
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The Chesapeake Film Festival, which has been mostly virtual the last couple of COVID years, returns to in-person screenings Sept. 30-Oct. 2 at the Avalon and Ebenezer theaters in downtown Easton. (Masks optional.) Then it continues with free at-home streaming Oct. 3-9. The live festival opens late Friday afternoon at the Eastern Shore Conservation Center courtyard with a reception honoring filmmakers and donors. Tickets, $125, include admission to the films, starting with a series of environmental documentaries and shorts Friday night at the Avalon. On Oct. 1, day 2 of the festival focuses on “Women of Impact.” Leading off with The Glorias, a narrative feature about the life and work of Gloria Steinem, it features Julianne Moore, Timothy Hutton, and Better Midler. Next is Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché, regarded as the first female feature film director. “Women of Impact” resumes with a Sunday, Oct. 2, matinee at the Ebenezer with a William Wyler classic, Roman Holiday, starring Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck. Part II of the double-feature is Directed by William Wyler, produced by his daughter, Catherine Wyler, who will be on hand afterward for a Q&A. Admission is $15 to $25 for in-person screenings. Free at-home streaming begins at 9 a.m. Oct. 3 and ends at midnight Oct. 9.

chesapeakefilmfestival.com
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Also at the Ebenezer: The Prager Family Center for the Arts launched the new international concert series led by Grammy-winning pianist and composer Gabriela Montero on its Sept. 17 opening night. Next up in the series, on Oct. 29, is pianist Yuja Wang of China, winner of both Gramophone’s Young Artist of the Year and Musical America’s Artist of the Year awards. Montero returns to the Ebenezer stage on Nov. 19 with Puerto Rican soprano Larisa Martinez, and the star attraction announced so far in the series – Oscar and Emmy-winning violinist Joshua Bell – with a reprise performance the next day. Canadian pianist and multi-Grammy nominee Marc-Andre Hamelin will be in concert on Dec. 10. Montero returns in a Dec. 17 “Irish Christmas” program with Anthony Kearns, who has performed with the Irish Tenors. After a winter hiatus, the series resumes next summer with two more concerts anchored by Gabriela Montero, starting June 3 with Cuban saxophonist Paquito d’Rivera. Twenty free tickets for each concert are set aside for “underserved communities.”

monteroprager.com/concerts
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The Classic Theatre of Maryland (formerly the Annapolis Shakespeare Company) goes back to its roots, as it does at least once a season, by presenting the Bard comedy Twelfth Night, Oct. 7-30 at its theater/cabaret at 1804 West St. (We believe 1804 refers to a street address, not a date of origination for the company.) Here, Classic Theatre reimagines Shakespeare’s romantic, separated-twins/mistaken-identity comedy as a golden age Hollywood tribute. Upcoming cabaret shows feature vocalists Ruby Hayes (Oct. 17) and Heather Maxwell (Nov. 14). They’ll be followed by dual theatrical favorites for the season: White Christmas (Nov. 25-Dec. 24) and A Christmas Carol (Dec. 2-24). While they’re at it, Classic Theatre throws in a Dec. 5 cabaret show starring Broadway’s Ian Knauer (Dames at Sea, Anastasia). 

classictheatremaryland.org
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Sabra Richards and her daughter Lynn Richards collaborate on an unusual, if not unique, sculptural exhibit at the Dorchester Arts Center in Cambridge. Kiln-formed fusible glass is Sabra’s principal medium. She chooses glass of myriad colors and creates still more hues by layering various components to be fired along with strands of cane pulled into the malleable glass framed by welded steel to mount wall constructions. Lynn, a third-generation artist in her mother’s artistic mold, incorporates found streetscape elements in her glass and steel sculptures. Together, they are “Richards & Richards” and their show is “Glass, Light, and Steel.” Also at the Dorchester center is “Natural Evidence” by Caroline County environmental artist and writer Mary McCoy who works mainly with such found materials as grapevines, oyster shells, and butterfly wings along with the written word. Both shows open on Sept. 30 and run through Oct. 29.

dorchesterarts.org/exhibits

Steve Parks is a retired New York arts writer and editor now living in Easton.

Michael Repper makes his debut on Sept. 29 as just the third music director in Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra (MSO) history, succeeding Julien Benichou, who reigned with his baton for 17 years following the MSO’s founding maestro, Don Buxton.

Considering his appointment was not announced until mid-June – around the time Benichou’s MSO contract was up, and he became artistic director of the Washington Opera Society – Repper considers himself fortunate to have a piece he chose on his premiere concert program. “Julien did the lion’s share,” Repper said of the orchestra’s upcoming 25th anniversary season programming. “I’m very excited about the soloists he lined up.” That includes guest piano soloist Michael McHale, who will open the concert at Chesapeake College with Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 (“Emperor).” But the second half features Robert Schumann’s Symphony No. 3 in E flat major (“Rhenish”), selected by Repper. “Next season will be all mine,” he says.

The 2022-23 season for Repper and the MSO continues, as usual, with two more concerts of the same program in southern Delaware and Ocean City area beach communities. The next set of shows are in November with a “Four Seasons” program of Vivaldi and Piazzolla, followed in early December by “Holiday Joy” favorites and the annual New Year’s Eve gig at Easton’s Christ Church. After a January-February break, the orchestra’s Elizabeth Loker Competition takes center stage. It will bring the winner of its young musicians’ prize, along with Brahms’ Tragic Overture and Florence Price’s Symphony No. 1, which was also the first symphony by an African-American woman performed by a major orchestra – the Chicago Symphony – in 1933. Repper and the MSO wrap up their first season together late next April with a piece by Louise Forrenc, an 18th Century French composer chosen by Benichou, a native of France, who also selected Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 1 and Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9 (“From the New World”) for the finale.

While Benichou left big shoes to fill at the conductor’s podium, Repper, 31, brings a broad and deep resume for a music director his age – having already conducted orchestras on four continents. Aside from Delmarva’s professional ensemble, Repper directs the Northern Neck Orchestra of Kilmarnock, just across the Chesapeake from Virginia’s Eastern Shore, the Ashland Symphony Orchestra in Ohio, and Peru’s Central Ensembles of Sinfonia in that nation’s Lima capital. Additionally, in a position he’s held since age 22, he is also the music director of the New York Youth Symphony at Carnegie Hall. That he will be leaving the youth symphony after one more season is “a bittersweet occasion,” Repper says, citing the “amazingly talented kids I’ve met and helped nurture there.”

Speaking of mentoring, Repper counts Marin Alsop among the most influential musical figures in his life, starting at age 13. Describing what could well be an example of paying it forward, Alsop was mentored by Leonard Bernstein late in his life. “What she has done since,” says Repper, “ranks with historic proportions.” As a result, Repper, a native of southern California, moved to Baltimore. “I wanted to be closer,” he said of the people he studied under at the prestigious Peabody Conservatory, including Alsop and Swiss conductor Gustav Meier. It was there he also met Benichou during Repper’s time as a conducting fellow and guest conductor of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, of which Alsop served as the first woman music director of a major American classical orchestra. It is also where Repper met many of the musicians he will now lead at MSO.

In the last year, the MSO has presented another significant professional opportunity for Repper. Not all of his many projects involved fully professional musicians. He taught students. He led orchestras comprised of adult freelance pros, volunteers, and talented youngsters. The MSO, led by board president Jeffrey Parker, consulted with the union that now represents the orchestra, Musicians’ Association of Metropolitan Baltimore, Local 40-543, American Federation of Musicians, among many other sources, in selecting their new maestro.

“We are delighted to welcome Michael to the Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra,” Parker said at the time he announced Repper’s appointment. “And we’re confident he will continue to build its reputation as an exceptional regional orchestra as he inspires and engages both our audiences and the communities he serves.”

To that end, Repper says one of his priorities, even above seeking recording opportunities for the orchestra, “is to make our concerts such a fun experience that our Delmarva fans come back again and again as we attract a new fanbase.”

Besides conducting, don’t be surprised if Repper takes a turn at the piano one evening. “I’ve played since I was four, and while I’m not sustaining myself as a concert pianist, I make sure I’m always playing, or I’ll forget,” he says with a laugh, adding that he “sometimes still plays a concerto with the orchestra.” In rehearsal, we guess. But you never know.

On increasingly rare occasions when he’s not on the road, Repper lives in Charlottesville to be with his girlfriend, who is studying law at the University of Virginia.

Steve Parks is a retired New York arts writer and editor now living in Easton.

Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra Season Openers:
Thursday, Sept. 29, 7: 30 p.m., Chesapeake College, Wye Mills
Saturday, Oct., 1 7:30 p.m., Cape Henlopen High School, Lewes, Del.
Sunday Oct. 2, 3 p.m., Performing Arts Center, Ocean City.

midatlanticsymphony.org

 

Join filmmaker Tori Paxon for the premiere screening of “Foolproof”, a ten-episode web series created and produced right here in Talbot County.

In the premiere episode, you’ll meet your new best friends—Clark, Reggie, and Tegan—as they navigate relationships, adulthood, and friendship over drinks at their local bar. Starring Marco Garcia, Erik Fair, and Manisha Camper, members of the supporting cast are Bella Hawkins, Erinne Lewis, Jess Newell, Brandon Hynson, and Richard Spearman.

Directed by Jasmynn George, “Foolproof” was created by Tori Paxon, a Black Queer woman writer living in Talbot County. The series’ twofold mission is to bring more awareness to local Black talent while highlighting LGBTQIA storylines. Each character is loosely based on people, situations, and conversations from Tori’s life.

Along with being filmed in the Stoltz Listening Room in partnership with the Avalon Foundation, the production was made in collaboration with local artists and small businesses on the Eastern Shore.

Follow along behind the scenes @foolproof_ws

“Foolproof – A Web Series”
Saturday, September 10, 2022
Doors: 6:30 p.m.; Show: 7 p.m.
Avalon Theatre

Tickets: $20

“Haste still pays haste, and leisure answers leisure;
Like doth quit like, and MEASURE still for MEASURE.”

– Capitalized emphasis indicated by William Shakespeare

Tragedy and comedy are what the all-volunteer Shore Shakespeare company was about until personal tragedy – and a worldwide pandemic – shut it down for a year in 2020. The pandemic, of course, shut down almost every company staging live performances, from super-selling Broadway shows such as Hamilton to touring troupes like Boston-based Brown Box Theatre that brought Shakespeare in the park to towns all over the Delmarva Peninsula. After 11 years, Brown Box, established in 2010, folded. Shore Shakespeare, established in 2013, overcame both COVID and, more devastating to its survival, the death of its co-founder Christian Rogers.

Last summer, 2021, Shore Shakespeare rose from its twin setbacks to stage as a tribute to Rogers “A Little Touch of Shakespeare: On the Theme of Love,” It featured scenes from tragedies – Othello, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and The Merchant of Venice; as well as comedies – Much Ado About Nothing, Taming of the Shrew, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

Beginning Labor Day weekend, Shore Shakespeare returns after three years with its first full production of a Bard play – Measure for Measure, starting at Adkins Arboretum near Ridgely, then playing the following two weekends at Oxford Community Center, and ending at Chestertown’s Wilmer Park.

Among the leading players is Avra Sullivan, cast in two roles not usually paired in Shakespeare’s so-called “problem play.” Sullivan gives credit to her director, Greg Minahan. (“It’s regarded as a problem play because it’s a problem for the director,” Minahan says, “whether to play it more as comedy or tragedy.”) “It was Greg’s idea,” Sullivan says of Minahan, who also directs himself in the lead as the Duke of Vienna and a disguised friar spying on the deputy standing in for him. Sullivan plays Mariana, betrothed (but for her lack of a dowry) to Angelo, the duke’s pompous deputy played by Will Robinson, as well as Escalus, Angelo’s attaché. “It works,” Sullivan says of her dual roles, adding that “to make them different adds to the challenge.” Playing Lady Macbeth, she says, was her favorite role with Shore Shakespeare. “It was kind of on my bucket list.”

An early Measure for Measure scene set in a brothel depicts the moral morass Vienna has fallen into. Angelo, determined to eradicate this wickedness, intends to make an example of Claudio, who has gotten his fiancée pregnant before their wedding date. The penalty Angelo imposes is beheading. “In his mind, he didn’t do anything wrong,” says Paul Briggs, who plays opposite Avalon Robuck as Juliet, Claudio’s intended. In much of the play, she clutches a baby doll in the “role” of their bastard child. Avalon’s mother, Heather, plays Claudio’s novitiate sister Isabella, who pleads with Angelo to spare her brother. The duke’s appointee offers to let Claudio live only if lovely Isabella surrenders her virginity to him. Angelo is spurned at first, but later a tryst is arranged with Mariana conspiringly disguised as Isabella. (Shakespeare characters, famously, are easily fooled, even by intimate partners.)

 

Meanwhile, the duke, undercover as a friar, sees what overreaching moral authority Angelo is up to. “I see him principally as a hypocrite,” says Robinson of the jerk he plays. “He’s legalistically minded but also power hungry. He thinks the duke has given him free rein.”

Heather Robuck interprets Isabella as a novitiate virgin with a guarded worldview. “She very much wants a strictly structured life so as not to be tempted. She’s smart and virtuous, but there’s a little sass in there when in defense of her brother.”

Minahan sees the play and the evolving judgment of his character as a contest between “mercy and justice. But he finds that there is a third choice – consequence for choices – which does not include beheading for fornication.

Hence, the title Measure for Measure and its explication in the final scene rehearsed on a lawn in Denton and a set that will move from site to site in September on the mid-Shore. By then, the cast will be fully costumed and rehearsed – no more asking for lines and just delivering them.

Steve Parks is a retired New York arts writer and editor now living in Easton.

Shore Shakespeare presents Measure for Measure
2 p.m. Sept. 3 and 4, Adkins Arboretum, 12610 Eveland Rd., Ridgely (free with $5-$15 arboretum admission)
6 p.m. Sept. 10, 3 p.m. Sept. 11, Oxford Community Center, 200 Oxford Rd. (free)
6 p.m. Sept. 17, 3 p.m. Sept. 18, Wilmer Park, 118 N. Cross St., Chestertown (free)

All performances are outdoors; bring lawn chairs or blankets; shoreshakespeare.org

 

The Avalon Jazz Experience makes its debut Labor Day weekend in Easton’s historic performing arts center. But actually, it’s been going on this time each year since 2009 – by a different name. And his name is Monty Alexander.

If you check out the 78-year-old Jamaican-born jazz pianist’s website, you’ll see a fond-farewell note headlined “All good things . . .” in which he thanks his fans “for a wonderful ten years of my festival’s namesake in Easton.” First launched and produced by Don Buxton and Chesapeake Music with a single concert, the Monty Alexander Festival continued uninterrupted in residency at the Avalon – “we had the 400 seats needed to draw that kind of talent,” Bond says – until the COVID-mandated virtual concert in 2020. Alexander completed his festival run last year.

Al Bond, president and CEO of the Avalon Foundation, says it was a mutually amicable decision. Alexander concurs and wrote as part of his farewell, “I am stepping aside and letting the festival take a new shape and a new name.”

“Monty Alexander was really important in establishing the jazz brand in Easton,” says Bond, adding, “We all decided it was time to move on and have a different featured performer from year to year.” That begins with the Marcus Roberts Modern Jazz Generation anchoring the new festival in a primetime Saturday performance on Sept. 3 at the Avalon Theatre.

In a 2014 “60 Minutes” telecast, famed trumpeter and Jazz at Lincoln Center director Wynton Marsalis asked, “Who’s the greatest American musician most people have never heard of? To me, it’s Marcus Roberts. I’m biased because Marcus worked in my band when he was just starting. But anybody who’s heard him at the piano usually agrees: He’s a fearsome and fearless player and a homegrown example of overcoming adversity with excellence.”

Marsalis may also be biased because his brother Jason is the drummer in Roberts’ trio, which also features bass player Rodney Jordan. The adversity Roberts faced was his blindness since the age of 5. He overcame it as a child, in part, by teaching himself to play the piano his parents bought him. Sightless, he bumped into it when he arrived home from school that day.

Besides his trio partners, Roberts will introduce 11 young musicians he mentors to bring jazz to a new generation. “It’ll be a crowded Avalon stage,” Bond predicts.

Dominick Farinacci, who’s played the Avalon before, returns with his new band Triad along with guest vocalist Shenel Johns on the opening night of the Jazz Experience. Trumpeter Farinacci just completed a residency with Triad at the legendary Manhattan jazz club, Birdland.

Also returning to the Avalon is Jon Thomas, a recent graduate of the Juilliard School and winner of the ASCAP Foundation Herb Alpert Young Jazz Composer Award. Pianist Thomas will lead his band Firm Roots and vocalist Imani Rousselle in the matinee festival finale Sunday, Sept. 4.

“We have vocalists bookending the festival with a mid-career trumpeter and just the kind of up-and-coming musician we’re trying to give exposure to,” Bond says of Farinacci and Thomas. “In between, we have the elder statesman [Roberts] bringing his trio and a lineup of hot-shot young players as his way of introducing the next generation in jazz to this community.”

It figures to be a memorable Experience.

Avalon Jazz Experience concerts, 8 p.m. Sept. 2 and 3, 4 p.m. Sept. 4, Avalon Theatre, 2 E. Dover St., Easton; avalonfoundation.org

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If you’re out of town over Labor Day weekend – maybe at the beach – you can make up for missing the Avalon Experience at the next major jazz celebration in the area – the Rehoboth Beach Jazz Festival, Oct. 13-16. Among the headliners for the four-day-and-night fest are the John Pizzarelli Trio, Peabo Bryson, and Sheila E. Regarded as the top female drummer on the jazz and pop circuit, Sheila Escovedo was a protege of Prince before his death in 2016.
Festival locations: Cape Henlopen Performing Arts Theatre, Rehoboth Beach Convention Center, Bally’s Dover Casino Resort, Lewes Farmers Market, Epworth United Methodist Church, and the Rusty Rudder; rehobothjazz.com

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Fifteen months after Lin-Manuel Miranda’s blockbuster Founding Fathers musical was to make its Baltimore debut, “Hamilton” opens for a three-week run at the Hippodrome Performing Arts Center downtown. COVID postponed or canceled all shows at the Hippodrome and most Maryland indoor concert and theatrical sites in 2020 and into the summer of 2021. But don’t wait until Columbus Day, or even Labor Day, to get your tickets for this rescheduled tour of Broadway’s hit historical drama set to a hip-hop beat. Although some shows are nearly sold out, as of this writing, you can still find seats for “Hamilton” from Oct. 11 through the night before Halloween. Tickets range from a $75 bargain (don’t count on seeing the whole stage), while premium seats go for up to $1,500. “Hamilton” still sells, even without Miranda impersonating him. So if you want to see it live this side of Broadway, where tickets may cost you many more $$$$, step up sooner than later.

Hippodrome Performing Arts Center, 12 N. Eutaw St., Baltimore; ticketsales.com/hamilton-tickets

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The Maryland State Fair holds forth the next three extended weekends through Sept. 11 at the Timonium fairgrounds with everything from thoroughbred horse racing to the “Paul Bunyan Lumberjack Show,” from ax-throwing to swine swimming races and, of course, the carnival midway, farm-fresh food pavilions, and assorted live entertainment.

Open this week through Aug. 28, also Sept. 1-5 and Sept. 8-11, 2200 York Rd., Timonium; marylandstatefair.com

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Meanwhile, the Maryland Renaissance Festival, an end-of-summer/early fall tradition for decades, opens Aug. 27-28 and runs through Labor Day, Columbus Day, and weekends through Oct. 23 between Annapolis and Crownsville. My first acquaintance with the faux 14th-to-17th century arts-and-entertainment “faire” was in Columbia in the 1970s – yes, way back in the last millennium – where I discovered the juggling-and-jokester Flying Karamazov Brothers, who were neither Russian nor siblings. Nor could they fly. But they sure could get a laugh, as they did later on Broadway. Show up, and you may discover the next Renaissance-to-Broadway act.
10 a.m.-7 p.m. on festival dates, 1821 Crownsville Rd., west of Annapolis; rennfest.com

Steve Parks is a retired New York arts writer and editor now living in Easton.