Saturday, June 29: The first in a summer series of family-friendly movies shown on a big screen in Poughkeepsie’s Upper Landing Park, with the span of the Walkway over the Hudson as backdrop. Food trucks will be parked onsite, and there will be live music provided by Crash and Byrne (7 p.m.) and family activities before the show.
The rationale for a Toy Story 4 to happen had to be a good one – something beyond guaranteed great box office and merchandising potential. It went through several major rewrites over a period of more than five years, and perhaps it was in contemplating the need for this movie to exist at all that the writers hit on the idea that makes it work.
June 20-July 28: The storied theater lab inherits a complex, dual responsibility: to entertain, challenge and edify us as good theater does, and to serve as Petri dish for the cultivation of new growth in a time when biodiversity has been largely choked out of the biggest stages.
Saturday, June 23: Almost all performers who got their start at the grind of standup feel driven to return to it from time to time, to reearn their stripes and relate to a live audience. Not many, however, play venues like Bethel Woods when they do.
As a venue, Opus 40 is the Red Rocks of Ulster County. Good thing that, under the stewardship of the writer, artist and self-taught musicologist Tad Richards, music at Opus 40 has been brilliantly curated for decades. Catch Cirkus Luna at 1 p.m. on Saturday, June 22; Makbet on Sunday, June 23.
June 21-July 14: This is a story that has resonated for decades with youngsters and grownups alike. Lucy Simon (Carly’s sister) set it to music, with a book by Marsha Norman, Pulitzer Prizewinner for ‘night, Mother. The original 1991 Broadway production of The Secret Garden won three Tony Awards and four Drama Desk Awards.
British actress/model Lily Cole portrays a promiscuous small-town woman who meets a terrible fate at the hands of a vigilante mob in the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ video “Sacrilege,” filmed in Rosendale.
The first play of Shadowland’s season is a new drama by D. W. Gregory, Memoirs of a Forgotten Man. Based on true events, it chronicles the tale of Alexei S., a Soviet journalist with perfect memory who is seen as a threat by Stalin’s propaganda machine and targeted by a government censor.
It’s always tough to decide which shows to catch at any new summer season of the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, but 2019 – its 33rd year – is shaping up to be tougher than most.
If you’re not gifted with precognition, the surest way to anticipate what stage hit is in the making is simply to attend plenty of each summer’s offerings on the Vassar College campus. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hit show Hamilton got its start at Powerhouse Theater at Vassar.