Hello <<First Name>>,

Such a big year we are still having here at WLT. We have well and truly marked and celebrated our amazing seventy years. We have mounted four highly successful productions, with our fifth and final on the boards and heavily into rehearsal and opening around a month hence.

London Suite directed by Santo Gaetano promises to be a wonderful conclusion to the year. If you're free tomorrow pop along to the theatre for our Open Rehearsal followed, as always, by refreshments and your chance to chat with the cast and director.

The finale to the year will be Cordell Day on Sunday 11 December. Our in-house awards will be announced, as will our 2017 season of plays introduced by their directors. This is a day of tradition at WLT and will be the final chance to salute our seventy years. Your invitation appears in this edition.

London Suite

By Neil Simon
Director: Gaetano Santo

Auditions

Bad Jews

By Joshua Harman

Director: Tess Maurici Ryan

The night after their grandfather's funeral, three cousins engage in a verbal (and somewhat physical) battle. In one corner is Daphna, volatile, self-assured and unbending. In the other is her equally stubborn cousin Liam, a secular and entitled young man, who has his shiksa girlfriend, Melody, in tow.

Stuck in the middle is Liam's brother, Jonah, who tries to stay out of the fray. When Liam, Jonah and Daphna are left to determine who ends up with a precious family heirloom in the wake of their grandfather’s death, a vicious and hilarious brawl over family, faith and legacy ensues.

Exploring the ties that ultimately keep families knotted together, Bad Jews is a biting comedy about family and faith that questions what you choose to believe when you're the chosen.

 

Audition dates:
Saturday 19 November 1-4pm & Sunday 20 November 12-3.30pm

Auditions by appointment only. Email Tess Maurici Ryan  terese_m@hotmail.com


Season: 9-25 February 2017


Click Button below for full details.

Sitting Pretty

By Amy Rosenthal
Director: Robert Harsley

Williamstown Little Theatre

Sitting Pretty by Amy Rosenthal

Directed by Robert Harsley

Performance - Friday 16 September 2016 (Opening week)

Reviewer – Jennifer Paragreen

Sitting Pretty is the first play written by English playwright, Amy Rosenthal, daughter of Jack Rosenthal, whose screenwriting credits include television’s Coronation Street. Quality genes and a Masters in Playwriting from Birmingham University stood the then mid-twenties graduate in good stead as she created a charming comedy about two middle aged sisters whose lives seem on completely different trajectories.

The play also has roles for a kind and well intentioned middle aged man, a philandering artist and his much younger mistress as well as five ill-assorted members of an art class: a total of ten actors providing plenty of room for amusing interactions and a dash of poignancy.

The key characters are the two sisters and the contrast between them could not be more marked.

Director, Robert Harsley, has been fortunate to find two extremely talented actors who look so physically different to inhabit these roles.  In the opening scene blonde haired Nancy (Margie Bainbridge) is moping around the flat slovenly dressed, depressed, overweight and uncommunicative having been recently retrenched from her low paid office job. 

In contrast, her dark haired sister, confident and assertive Nina (Marianne Collopy), arrives home briskly in smart business regalia from her job as an art historian at the National Gallery and goes at full tilt into a breathless monologue about the day’s activities and her determination to get her sister out of the house and into the workforce.

The pivotal point in the story occurs when Nancy is bullied into going to the Gallery and overhears a blazing row in the café between middle-aged Lothario, Philip, convincingly played by Mark Monroe, and the pert and pretty Zelda, the sassy Dasana Smyth, his current life model and lover, who wants to move on. This leaves a job vacancy which Nancy decides to fill blissfully unaware that the position demands nudity. 

The five eccentric members of the art class are an interesting bunch played by actors with varying levels of experience. Elegantly dressed Marilyn Davies played Sylvia, a snobbish woman desperate to impress with frequent reference to her son’s success “in high places”, an ill-matched couple Bridget (Andrea Tappe) who loves to bake cakes and to boss her scowling and miserable husband, Martin (Ian Tweeddale), the rather stiff and brittle Josie (Roberta Szekeres), one of Philip’s now rejected conquests, and, finally, the rather enigmatic young Luka skillfully depicted by Angus Turner-Summerton who had to depend on body language to convey his frustrations. 

Nancy accepts the friendships offered in the art class, cake from Bridget and, it would seem, even conversation with the taciturn Luka, and grows in confidence in all aspects of her life.  

In the meantime we learn that a doomed love affair in Florence some thirty years earlier has caused the seemingly confident and successful Nina to cut herself off from the possibility of a deep relationship, ignoring even the tentative friendship offered by the kind and caring Max, sensitively played by David Efron.

The tables have turned. Nina decides to vacate the scene and take up a job offer in Dublin while Nancy is now much happier in her own skin and her increased confidence rubs off on others as Max seems likely to deepen the friendship with her and Philip has lost his artist’s block. 

Perceptive direction by Robert Harsley made the most of the three interconnecting stories of the two sisters with Max, the disintegrating relationship between Philip and the much younger, feisty Zelda and the interactions of the art class members.

The nudity aspect was handled tactfully. The humour in the dialogue shone through but not at the expense of some of the more serious reflections on concepts such as body image, youth and aging, wasted opportunities, the artistic process, sibling relationships and interdependence.

There were some priceless moments such as Margie’s facial expression when she realised Nancy had to remove her
clothes, fireworks in the sparring between Philip and Zelda and real poignancy created in the moving conversation between Nina and Max at the beginning of Act II.

The young actors, Desana Smyth and Angus Turner-Summerton, acquitted themselves most impressively.

The action of the play takes place in three locations; the sisters’ flat, an artist’s studio and a café at the National Gallery. A sliding wall proved to be an efficient means of transforming the London living room into the well-equipped studio. Another wall, augmented with a community notice board, was swung into position to suggest the Gallery café. The layout worked well but unfortunately moving the furniture for each scene was time consuming and slowed the pace of the production and the repetition of rather vapid bridging music did little to enliven the process.

Peta Ripper’s costume designs were well suited to the play, conveying the personality and state of mind of each wearer.

Amy Rosenthal’s play proved to be a good choice for an enjoyable evening’s entertainment with its emotional range moving from the humourous to the poignant.

Jennifer Paragreen 

The Cast Were All Sitting Pretty

What a wonderful season it was of Sitting Pretty by Amy Rosenthal at the Williamstown Little Theatre.  Under the keen and enthusiastic eyes of director, Robert Harsley, with Assistant Direction and costumes by Peta Ripper, a very entertaining play evolved.  Robert was wonderful making sure the cast felt comfortable and he brought to life the humour of this script. We all felt so lucky to be working with him. Peta Ripper was so organised with the costumes but the best bit was the food at rehearsals. Each week , Peta seemed to come up with a new culinary delight

It was inspiring working with such a talented cast. They were absolutely amazing. Loved being a big sister to Marianne Collopy’s  Nina. She was wonderful to work with and I loved treading the boards with her in our warm-ups every night.  It was lovely sharing the couch with the talented David Efron every night – even if I was crying and he was holding a dead plant! 

So, what was interesting about the rehearsal period was midway through we had the lovely Mark Monroe step up to play Philip the artist. Mark was amazing the way he learnt the lines and gave such a beautiful personification of the suffering artist, Philip.

Dasana Smith was an amazing talent to work with. She is definitely a star on the rise. Her sense of timing and the way she developed her character was amazing. We had such a lovely time together in our scenes and we both felt truly relaxed playing.


Margie Bainbridge (Nancy)

Front of House Volunteers

Cordell Day Invitation

Anniversary Despatches

Onwards, Upwards and Many Awards -
1990-2015

The last of our Pleasant Sunday Afternoon Entertainments marking our 70th Anniversary year was held on Sunday 25 September. Judi Clark convenor of The Ladies Who Lunch (organisers) has written about these events. We also have photos from the day and links to several videos. Thank you, as ever, to our excellent caterers from the committee who, yet again, provided a wonderful feast to accompany mainly sparkling wine that flowed freely from the bar - Shirley Sydenham and Bernadette Wheatley.

As the convenor of the sub-committee duly dubbed The Ladies Who Lunch, I, along with Lois Collinder and Robyn Legge, want to thank all of the people involved with the three Pleasant Sunday Afternoon Entertainments. From Committee, in particular Shirley Sydenham as our liaison person, to performers, backstage crew and others who helped out in various ways, we really appreciated the time that you gave us to make all three afternoons very pleasant indeed. I also want to thank Lois and Robyn for their time and effort – we really didn’t spend that much time lunching. Wrangling 3 retired but busy ladies with overseas travel plans was not an easy task! We had some lively discussions about which plays and which excerpts, especially for the second and third programs, and spent a lot of time becoming intimately acquainted with the photocopier. Thanks also go to Gillian Senior/Wadds who was the major contributor of the first event, along with our nonagenarian Matron of the Anniversary year, Ella Bambery, as the star, and several wonderful octogenarians, all of whom shared lovely stories of the early days of the theatre company. We would also like to acknowledge Robert Glass, who is the author of “A Small Intimate Theatre of our Very Own”, published in 1996 for our 50^th Anniversary. This was a very valuable resource for the first two programs, so thanks, Bob.

We all had a good time, and we hope you did too.

See you on Cordell Day.

Judi Clark