The final quarter of 2023 was a wonderful whirlwind as I made my Off-Broadway debut at MCC Theater stage managing Gavin Creel’s extraordinary musical: Walk on Through: Confessions of a Museum Novice.
This was my third go-round with Walk on Through, having first worked on its premiere concert presentation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2021, then again on the 2022 industry presentation at Signature Center. It’s been one of the greatest privileges of my artistic life to be a part of this team and to watch this show develop and deepen and blossom into what it has become.
After our previous super-speedy processes putting the show on its feet, it was marvelous to have a chance to really dig into the piece during rehearsals, explore and discover during tech, and truly live with and in the show for over 50 performances. And what a beautiful show to live with and in. Especially with this group of people.
2023 is speeding by. It’s been a fairly epic year already, with more exciting things on the horizon. I’ll dedicate a separate post to the fabulousness coming this fall/winter. In the meantime, what have we missed?
In May, my play, Fire Thief, had its first professional full-scale production at LAB Theater Project in Tampa. The whole production process was wonderfully collaborative, resulting in some excellent rewrites, a spectacular set design, and a really lovely production. I had the great pleasure of seeing the show in person (twice!) and I’m truly pleased and proud to be part of the LAB Theater community of artists.
We had another triumphant and joyous season at The Spiegeltent (part of Summerscape at Bard College) this summer. The programming was jam-packed with some of my favorite artists from seasons past, plus a whole host of wonderful new additions. We had a stellar Bluegrass Festival, one of the best weddings I’ve ever worked OR attended, Martha Redbone, Nona Hendryx, Britton & the Sting, John Cameron Mitchell, countless fantastic DJs… the list goes on and on. Did I mention the aerial pole dancer? Our new home, The Crystal Roxie, is a beauty, and I’m looking forward to many more summers dancing the nights away with our amazing production team and artists.
And finally (for now): I just got back from Hamburg, Germany, where I was thrilled to stage manage Aa aB: Bend, a world premiere collaboration from Aszure Barton & Artists and Ambrose Akinmusire & Zubin Hensler. Just a crazy pile of talented people, coming together at the Kampnagel International Summer Festival to make something utterly gorgeous and unforgettable.
I have a moment’s pause between adventures, which is a great time to update this site with a mad dash through recent gigs and travels.
First: In September 2022, I spent a glorious month in New Zealand, touring with Black Grace dance company (and then traveling on my own.) The tour rehearsed and opened in Black Grace’s home town, Auckland, before moving on to Wellington and Christchurch. In my expanded role as Technical Manager as well as Production Stage Manager, I had the chance to really connect and collaborate with the amazing crews at each venue. We also incorporated some exciting new elements into the show that we weren’t able to tour with in the U.S., so there were many adventures and experiments with beautiful hanging set pieces, live painting, and white marley. Black Grace never fails to inspire me–they constantly push themselves as artists and they strive to make meaningful, personal, powerful work. O Le Olaga (Life) was as stunning in New Zealand as it was on the U.S. tour, but with the added vividness of playing for a hometown crowd. We had fabulously full, enthusiastic houses at the Aotea Centre in Auckland, the Opera House in Wellington, and the Town Hall in Christchurch.
Personally, not only was the tour a great challenge and thrill for me professionally, but it was also an opportunity to get to know the marvelous people and places of Aotearoa. Traveling with the company and on my own, I found incredible generosity of spirit, kindness, and humor, in addition to staggering natural beauty and fascinating, complex history. And, of course, trolls (thanks to the Weta Workshop.)
While in Wellington, I also got to meet up with a fantastic group of actors and directors to start developing a production of my play, Heart of Oak. We workshopped the text (a bittersweet tale of adventure on the high seas, featuring a princess who became a pirate, her crew of fierce women, and the prince who’s fallen in love with the princess-turned-captain) and devised some new material during a wonderfully fun day in the Wellington suburbs. In the past several months, we’ve developed the show into a radio play, to be performed live in front of an audience, complete with foley sound effects and several sea shanties. Coming to a Wellington theater later this year!
In December, 2022, I was lucky enough to be reunited with the team behind Walk on Through: Confessions of a Museum Novice. Fresh off their great success at the O’Neill, Gavin, Linda, and the rest of the gang brought the show to the Irene Diamond Stage at the Pershing Square Signature Center in NYC for an industry reading presentation. It was a truly crazy, inspiring week getting to stage manage for these amazing folks again. The show continues to grow and bloom, becoming even more itself with each incarnation. The new design elements were stunning and I was honored to be a part of incorporating them into the piece. The team that has been assembled, onstage and off, is a true testament to the quality of the show and the brilliance and kindness of Gavin Creel. I’m so excited to see where Walk on Through goes next.
Immediately after our super-intense handful of days at the Signature, a few of us headed uptown to get to work on Bassline Fabulous at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. This was a collaboration between the immensely inventive artist Machine Dazzle and the marvelous Catalyst Quartet (artists in residence with Met Live Arts). There were enormous foam core books, donuts, a giant glue bottle, and so many more impossible fabulous props and costume pieces–all folded into a performance inspired by the Goldberg Variations, played in their entirety by the Catalyst Quartet. While surrounded by a 200+ year old panoramic painting of Versailles. Never a dull moment with Met Live Arts!
Summer 2022 has been filled to the brim with some old favorites from the pre-pandemic era–Spiegeltent at Bard College and a US Tour with Black Grace dance company.
Spiegeltent returned with its usual flare, even if we were in the Cristal Palace instead of our beloved Magic Crystal tent. This season featured many favorites from seasons past, including Mwenso and the Shakes, Nona Hendryx, and of course the divine Mx Justin Vivian Bond. It was wonderful getting to return to the tent after such a long absence, and it was especially lovely to share the experience with such a wonderful group of colleagues and friends old and new. My time up at Bard ended on a particularly high note, as I had the honor of stage managing the Summerscape Gala honoring Ted Chapin.
In late July, I switched gears and headed out on the road with Black Grace dance company as they toured the US for the first time since 2019 (when I first traveled the country with them). We opened at the Lensic in Santa Fe before settling in at Jacob’s Pillow and the Joyce. 12 performances, 12 standing ovations as we premiered two new pieces (“Fatu” and “O Le Olaga (Life)”) and featured two marvelous pieces from the rep (“Handgame” and “Minoi Minoi”). I’ve been looking forward to reuniting with this company since I fell in love with them three years ago. I could hardly have asked for a better tour experience (though I probably could have done without catching Covid for the second time in the midst of our travels–miraculously, I was the only one affected and the shows were able to go on!). The program we presented was incredibly strong and meaningful, and the company is in fine form (and full of dear, brilliant people).
Up next: In about 10 days, I head to New Zealand to stage manage the national tour on the company’s home turf! It’ll be my first time in that beautiful country and it should be a pretty wild ride. We’ll be in Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch, and after that… a couple of weeks of wandering for me and maybe a few days of rest for one of the hardest working dance companies I know!
2022 has brought me back to the wonderful Arc Stages in Pleasantville, where I’m stage managing Michael John LaChiusa’s See What I Wanna See. It’s been a long while since I worked on a musical or an opera, and this is kind of both! The score is challenging and complex and really stunning. The show is a proper beast and every day I’m impressed by the musicianship and talent of this cast. (And I’m a sucker for a good Rashomon-style story structure.) Rehearsals are going swimmingly, complete with testing and masking and all sorts of other interesting aspects of theater in the time of Covid. At its core, though, this process is theater business as usual (or, at least, what we’d like “usual” to be): fueled by camaraderie, hard work, thoughtfulness, and resourcefulness. It’s gonna be mighty good. Tickets are available here.
In playwriting news, my play, All the Things We’re Supposed to Be, has been recognized with an Honorable Mention from the Jewish Plays Project as part of their 11th Annual Jewish Playwriting Contest. It’s awesome to be recognized along with such excellent fellow playwrights. I look forward to checking out as many of the other selected plays as I can! The full list of recognized plays and playwrights is here. And the New Play Exchange link to my play is here! (It’s one of my favorites.) Give it a read [Get yourself an NPX membership and give it a read…). Tell me what you think!
After the long dark weirdness of 2020, I’m back for my sixth season as a manager at Santaland at Macy’s Herald Square. Getting ready for this season was a challenge, with design changes to the land, new staff to hire and train, and Covid protocols to incorporate into what’s already a pretty complicated operation. But we did it. And now somehow we’re already half-way through the season! It’s beautiful to be back with this weird and wonderful community, doing this unique, emotional, deeply empathetic work. We’re all so happy to be connecting with each other again. Even the old familiar stresses inherent to any year at Santaland are kind of sweet this year, as they bring with them a sense of normalcy. But most significantly, I’m truly thankful for the daily acts of kindness and thoughtfulness I get to observe and take part in at the land. What a silly place. What a wonderful gig. As the song goes… there’s no place like home for the holidays…
Way back in 2006, I took a whack at reinventing the Prometheus myth as an exercise for my first college playwriting class. By the end of that year, I had a full draft. The first professional reading of anything I’ve ever written was that play, Fire Thief, at the Workshop Theater in early 2007. A few years later, I massively rewrote the play and put on a full production (with one of the best casts I’ve ever worked with) at the Looking Glass Theatre in Hell’s Kitchen. And then I put it in a drawer. And somehow a decade went by. This year, Skeleton Rep was looking for submissions for their Salon Series. And since their mission is exploring modern myth… I took Prometheus and co. out of the drawer. I’ve been working and reworking Fire Thief for about half a year and it’s amazing to see how the play has grown up and evolved. There’s no scene, no page that hasn’t been touched, but somehow it is, in essence, the same play I started fifteen years ago. Last night–after three speedy rehearsals spaced out over about two weeks–we had a reading. And while that was just a taste of what this play can be… it was a mighty good taste. You can check out the edited video here. Stay tuned for whatever’s next for this play…
On the horizon… The Workshop Theater’s Out of the Hat Festival is back again. I believe… I’ve written something for every Out of the Hat so far. And this year’s crop of plays are looking great! The prompt for the festival (which calls for short plays written for randomly selected and paired actors inspired by a single word prompt) is “home.” My play, Quo Vadis, was written for two fantastic actresses, Sarah Spring and Cherrye Davis. They are incredible. We filmed our reading this morning and the video for Quo Vadis and more than twenty(!!!) other short plays will be available on YouTube this December. I’ll throw that link up here as well. In the meantime, here’s a snapshot of these two fabulous performers knocking it out of the park via Zoom.
After a crazy, beautiful summer Production Managing at Montgomery Place as part of Bard Summerscape, I’m back in NYC and happy to have a wonderful pile of projects to close out the year.
First, I am so grateful and proud that my first post-shutdown theater project is stage managing Katori Hall’s masterpiece, The Mountaintop, at Arc Stages in Pleasantville. Directed by Ryan Quinn, and starring Gabriel Lawrence and Shavonna Banks, this production is moving, powerful, vivid, and honest. It defies belief that this cast and crew built this show in less than three weeks. It’s stunning and meaningful, and I can only hope that my future theatrical endeavors live up to this high standard on and offstage. We had a great opening weekend, and tickets are available for our remaining performances (10/8, 10/9, 10/15, 10/16, 10/17).
Right after I say goodbye to The Mountaintop, I’ll be setting up camp at The Metropolitan Museum of Art as Production Stage Manager for Met Live Arts. First up is Gavin Creel’s personal musical journey through the Met: Walk on Through. A full evening of original songs, inspired by the Met collection and full of life and joy and reflection. Gavin is such a wonderful talent (and good human) and this show promises to rock pretty damn hard. Tickets are available for the 6pm and 8:30pm shows on 10/25. (Photo credit: Andrew Keenan-Bolger)
And just in time for Halloween, we’ve got a haunting and beautiful concert “Celebrating Arvo Part at the Met.” This concert, performed at the Temple of Dendur, will be epic and extraordinary. I also can’t quite believe that I’ll be helping to put on a show, complete with chorus and orchestra, in one of my favorite spots in the museum. Tickets!
The Pollinate Project is officially live! We “opened” a week ago and our audience already stretches from Oslo to Oakland. The site is really a marvel, with several different ways to navigate the works and new discoveries around every corner. The same piece looks and feels dramatically different depending on the path that gets you there. I’ve been bouncing around the site for weeks and I still haven’t poked my head into every corner. Check it out here!
I’m very excited to be one of the twenty artists chosen to participate in Amanda + James’ Pollinate Project this month. It’s a real privilege to be part of this community of singers, writers, sculptors, dancers, choreographers, film makers, performance artists, composers… These are artists without traditional boundaries, taking an opportunity to stretch, play, and reinvent. We all started with the same prompt, creating 20 different pieces. These pieces were then passed along to other artists in the group, and we all created pieces in response to what we received. We’ll repeat this process a couple more times, like a giant game of artistic telephone. I’m having a great time with this already and I can’t wait to see what we wind up with.
Laura Hirschberg: Playwright, Director, Stage Manager 