WAM Theatre, the Western Massachusetts-based “theatre for everyone that benefits women and girls” has, in short order, put the region on the national theatre map for innovative programming, leadership, and philanthropy. The brain-child of Canadian-born theatre director Kristen van Ginhoven, who co-founded WAM in the Berkshires in 2010, WAM has become known for quality theatre productions, many written by, directed by, designed by, and starring women. These productions share a women’s point of view.

But, they’re theatre for everyone, and WAM productions, from Lauren Gunderson’s Emilie: La Marquise Du Chatelet Defends Her Life Tonight  and Winter Miller’s In Darfur to Kate Cayley’s The Bakelite Masterpiece, receive rave reviews. WAM’s Fresh Take Series of staged readings of new plays showcase promising playwrights with something to say. In 2016, Fresh Take produced a reading of Kate Hennig’s The Last Wife, a modern take on Katherine Parr’s marriage to Henry VIII. This past fall WAM presented a fully-staged production of the play at the Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre on the Shakespeare & Company campus in Lenox, Massachusetts.

What distinguishes WAM from other theaters and brings the theatre international attention is its philanthropic mission. A portion of the proceeds of the box-office receipts goes to a non-profit organization, chosen by the WAM team, that directly benefits women and girls. The Soldier On Women’s Program, a national initiative to help women veterans returning from active duty to reclaim their lives, was the recipient of proceeds from The Last Wife. WAM was honored as the Outstanding Philanthropic Corporation by the National Philanthropy Day Committee of the Western Massachusetts Chapter of the Association of Fundraising Professionals.

Van Ginhoven entered professional theatre with a degree in theatre performance from Dalhousie University in Halifax, NS. As an actor, she performed at Shakespeare-By-The-Sea, in Belgian productions of David Auburn’s Proof, and Arthur Miller’s A View From The Bridge. She has worked at the renowned Stratford Festival in Canada, The Capital Repertory Theatre in Albany, and most recently staged Lauren Gunderson’s I and You as the season opener of The Chester Theatre Company. As a theatre educator, she has trained the next generation of theatre artists.

“WAM’s greatest success in all ways is being a philanthropic professional theatre company. We pay everyone who works with us a equitable rate that is in line with the other companies in our area, plus we donate 25 percent of the box offices from our main stage productions to our beneficiaries,” van Ginhoven says. “It’s amazing. If we can do it, everyone can. We are growing slowly and conservatively. We aren’t doing ‘pie in the sky’ projects. We are making plans, very, very detailed plans, for every single project we undertake. Next year is the first year we are really leaping with our budget.”

2014: Christina Gordon, Sipiwe Moyo, and Shannon Harris in “In Darfur” by Winter Miller. Photo by Enrico Spada.

Van Ginhoven attributes WAM’s success to its programs and people. “People love that their support of WAM does two things — a double WAMmy, at least — that their ticket price or donation, not only provides jobs but also creates opportunity for women and girls, locally or globally. They love the social entrepreneurship aspect of WAM. We also live in an area that is culturally rich, with lots of engaged global citizens so our work really speaks to the people in this region.”

WAM is unique as a model in the non-profit theatre industry, so networking with like business models is challenging. “Like in anything, it’s about finding like-minded people and being resourceful in connecting- joining committees, boards, organizations and saying ‘yes’ to any opportunity in order to build your community,”, says van Ginhoven.

WAM and Van Ginhhoven have been working to build better networks with women leaders in theatre and the non-profits. To that end, WAM co-hosted the first Berkshire Leadership Summit on October 28-29 on the Shakespeare and Company campus in Lenox, Massachusetts. The program was based on research that San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater commissioned from the Wellesley Centers for Women. The two-day event, which sold out, was for women in artistic or administrative leadership positions in the non-profit theatre and those who aspire to be.

“When I stood up at a microphone at American Conservatory Theater’s Women’s Leadership Conference in 2016 and said WAM Theatre would host a summit as a next step in the national conversation around gender parity in the theatre, never, ever did I think it would result in this sort of response,” Van Ginhoven explained. “The desire for this sort of event is SO clear. In early August we informed 75 people (from around 30 different U.S. states and five Canadian provinces) that they were accepted into the Berkshire Leadership Summit. Seventy-five percent of them received some sort of financial aid, thanks to our sponsors and the donors of the GoFundMe campaign.”

Kristen van Ginhoven, founder, WAM Theatre
BERKSHIRES, Massachusetts
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Top image: 2016: David Adkins and Corinna May in The Bakelite Masterpiece by Kate Cayley. Photo by Emma K. Rothberg-Ware.

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Kevin Rhodes may be known in Massachusetts as the maestro of the Springfield Symphony Orchestra and Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra in Boston, but his baton reaches far beyond the state’s borders. Rhodes also conducts the Traverse Symphony Orchestra in Michigan and regularly flies across the pond where he’s well known for his conducting in Norway, Paris, and beyond.

Rhodes has conducted in the major musical capitals of Europe for over two decades, leading major productions at the Paris Opera, Vienna State Opera, Berlin State Opera, Milan’s Teatro alla Scala, Dutch National Ballet, Verona Ballet, and Stuttgart Ballet. Last season, he made his Norwegian National Ballet debut conducting Don Quixote, after conducting an all-Balanchine program, an homage to the late New York City Ballet dancer Violette Verdy at The Paris Opera, and Nureyev’s production of Raymonda in Vienna. Rhodes added a Romeo and Juliet in Stuttgart to the mix, alongside his annual appearance as conductor for the Rudolf Nureyev Gala at Vienna State Opera Ballet. The upcoming season is equally frenetic with a return to Raymonda and a mixed-bill in Vienna and Swan Lake in Stuttgart, as well as plans to conduct the Nureyev Gala on what would have been the late dancer’s 80th birthday.

All that world travel aside, New England remains culturally exciting to Rhodes. “The close proximity of so many instrumental artists, which allow us to have this wonderful orchestra in Springfield of a quality completely out of proportion to our region’s population size, is a gift from which we all benefit,” he says. “While it’s part of the cultural life per se, the incredible beauty of New England certainly adds dramatically to the joy of creating art here.”

KevinRhodes after Stuttgart performance of Romeo and Juliet. Photo courtesy of Kevin Rhodes.

For the Indiana-born conductor, who began his professional conducting career at the age of 16 in his hometown, the road to New England took a transatlantic detour. After receiving his bachelor of music in piano performance from Michigan State University, he subsequently earned his master of music in orchestra conducting from the University of Illinois. He moved to Switzerland to become a house conductor at Basel’s Stadttheater, before moving to the larger Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Dusseldorf, where he led hundreds of performances of the operatic repertoire, from Die Zauberflöte to Der Rosenkavalier, while simultaneously serving as the principal ballet conductor at the Vienna State Opera. During his time in Europe, Rhodes led repertoire ranging from the operas of Strauss, Verdi, Puccini, Massenet, Mozart, and Smetana to the major ballets of Prokofiev, Stravinsky, and Tchaikovsky.

It’s not all classical music for Rhodes. In 2015, he conducted the Springfield Symphony Orchestra at the nationally-televised season opener of the New England Patriots at Gillette Stadium with rapper T-Pain. He’ll take on the Star Wars and Star Trek Sci-Fi Spectacular for a Springfield Symphony Pops.

Photo by John RobertWilliams

Rhodes is excited about his performances in Springfield this year. “Our season grand finale with legendary pianist Misha Dichter in an all-Rachmaninoff program is, for sure, among those I can’t wait to perform, as well as combining our choruses with the University of Massachusetts choruses for the Verdi Requiem. There’s a super cool concerto for trombone and orchestra by Japanese composer Yoshimatsu, played by our own principal trombone Brian Diehl;  a new cello concerto by American composer Lowell Liebermann played by star cellist Julian Schwartz, and well, every concert has something I’m really looking forward to, as it turns out.”

Kevin Rhodes–conductor, Springfield Symphony Orchestra
Westfield, Massachusetts
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Top image: Kevin Rhodes. Photo by Anne Deniau

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​​The new opera My Lai, with music by Jonathan Berger and libretto by Connecticut author Harriet Scott Chessman, opens the 2017 Next Wave Festival at Brooklyn Academy of Music. It won’t be the first time that the horrors of the Vietnam War have made their way into the American cultural vision. The musical Hair captured the pain of the era, and the musical Miss Saigon transported the Madama Butterfly story from turn-of-the-century Japan to 1975 Saigon. Playwright David Rabe’s Vietnam War Trilogy—The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, Sticks and Bones, and Streamers—explored the pain of the period, as did Terrence McNally’s Bringing it All Back Home. My Lai, however, may be the first opera to deal with the Vietnam war to be funded by The National Endowment For The Arts, and commissioned and performed by the Kronos Quartet.

Chessman has spent most of her career writing fiction. Her five novels have made the San Francisco Chronicle’s Best Books list, and her work has been featured nationally. Writing an opera libretto was not on her radar—until she met Berger.

Chessman met Berger, co-director of the Stanford University Arts Initiative, through her husband. “The idea was Jonathan’s,” says Chessman of writing the libretto. “He had been drawn to the figure of Hugh Thompson (the helicopter pilot who intervened in the My Lai massacre) for many years. Jonathan knew he wanted the opera to have one singer (Thompson), and to take place in a bare room in the VA Hospital in the South, where Hugh lived his last days, sick with cancer. He knew he wanted the opera to be about Thompson’s memory of that morning in South Vietnam.”

They began their collaboration on what became My Lai in 2013. First Chessman wrote the libretto, her first attempt at opera. “Jonathan responded to various drafts of the libretto, for a year and a half, before he started to compose the music,” she says. “Of course, I had Jonathan’s other music, two chamber operas, Theotokia and The War Reporter, in my head as I wrote. I understood the tone and the resonance, the meaning he was going for.”

Chessman and Berger have tweaked My Lai after initial performances at Stanford and Chicago in 2015. “Essentially, though,” says Chessman, “the primary way My Lai is changing is through the beautiful, sharp direction of Mark DeChiazzo, who is also the creator of the videography, and through the growth of the character Hugh Thompson, in Rinde Eckert’s superb performances.”

After the performances September 27-30, The Kronos Quartet will tour My Lai internationally. Chessman, meanwhile, will get to work on a new libretto and a book of short stories.

Chessman and Berger have collaborated on a second work, Death by Drowning, a piece for chamber group and tenor inspired by a Yiddish folk tale. It premieres at Stanford on October 26th, at the Daniel Pearl World Music Days Concert.

Chessman evolved into a New Englander. “Each summer in my childhood we lived in New Hampshire for two months, and the rich, peaceful beauty of that area has always felt like a touchstone for me,” she says, noting she attended school in New England at Northfield Mount Hermon, Wellesley College, and Yale University before settling in Connecticut for almost 30 years. Then, she had a stint in California, but admits she always “felt that New England was home.”

“The peacefulness of the Connecticut shoreline, and the whole landscape of New England: water, meadows, woods, hills, cities, villages inspires me,” she says. “Our house  is in the woods, next to the Guilford Conservation Land Trust, and this spot is rich in the quiet I need for writing. This is home.”

Harriett Scott Chessman
Guilford, Connecticut
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Top image: Performance of My Lai, photo by Zoran Orlic.

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Hartford’s TheaterWorks is a crown jewel in New England’s cultural scene, known for over 30 years as a theatre company that showcases non-traditional plays and new works that are far from mainstream. At TheaterWorks this past season, Richard Dreyfuss starred in Relativity, a new Mark St. Germain play about Albert Einstein; food chef Rossi was profiled in Jacques Lamarre’s deliciously funny Raging Skillet; and audiences were treated to a sensitive production of the award-winning musical Next to Normal, a poignant story of a family’s dealing with bipolar disorders. Even the holidays get a different twist with the annual Christmas On The Rocks, a series of playlets that turn traditional Christmas tales into hysterically funny non-traditional laughs.

Rob Ruggiero, the visionary producing director of TheaterWorks since 2012, and a member of the theater’s artistic leadership for 24 years, has put the intimate downtown Hartford theater on the national map. He’s directed over 50 productions for TheaterWorks, and stewards the theater’s other plays and musicals.

The road to TheaterWorks began in Milford, Massachusetts, where Ruggiero grew up. He attended Stonehill College. After school, he started as an actor, but held a variety of jobs, from running a frame shop to working at a nursing home, to starting a non-professional theatre. But, he wanted to direct, so he went to Rutgers. He was teaching at Rutgers and directing in regional theatres, building a solid free-lance career, when he met TheaterWorks’ founder, Steve Campo. He was invited to Hartford. He kept coming back, until he moved to Hartford in 2010.

Rob Ruggiero on the set of Next to Normal, photo by Lanny Nagler.

Ruggiero’s artistry extends beyond Hartford. His Broadway credits include Looped (starring Valerie Harper in a Tony-nominated performance) and High (starring Kathleen Turner). Off-Broadway, he conceived and directed the original musical revue Make Me a Song: The Music of William Finn. Ruggiero conceived and directed the world premiere musical portrait of Ella Fitzgerald entitled Ella, which has been seen on more than 24 regional theater stages nationally. His production of Stephen Sondheim’s landmark musical Follies won awards in St. Louis this year.

Ruggiero is also a familiar face at Goodspeed Musicals, down river from Hartford in East Haddam, Connecticut, where he’s staged La Cage Aux Folles, Fiddler on The Roof, The Most Happy Fella, Carousel, and Showboat. He received Connecticut Critics Circle Awards and Broadway World Awards for those musicals. The Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization now licenses his version of Showboat for regional theater productions.

The cast of Goodspeed’s The Most Happy Fella, directed by Rob Ruggiero. Photo by Diane Sobolewski.,

Currently, Ruggiero is working on his 10th production at Goodspeed, a revival of Rags, the famous musical flop of 1986. Featuring a book by Joseph Stein, who wrote Fiddler On The Roof, music by Charles Strouse of Bye Bye, Birdie fame, and lyrics by Wicked’s Stephen Schwartz, Rags told the story of European Jews trying to make a new life in America, after arriving on Ellis Island. The musical starred Teresa Stratas, an acclaimed Metropolitan Opera star making her Broadway debut, alongside veteran Broadway actor Larry Kert, and up-and-coming star Terrence Mann, who’s now Artistic Director of Connecticut Repertory Theatre’s Nutmeg Summer Series. Rags closed after a handful of performances, but a cast recording was made. The musical developed a cult following because of its exquisite score, and Goodspeed, masters of reviving musicals that deserve a second chance, are reworking Rags, with Ruggiero at the helm.

“We are completely revisiting Rags, with Stephen Schwartz and Charles Strouse actively involved in the process. David Thompson is revising the script penned by the late Joseph Stein. We’ve refocused the role of the leading lady, dropped some characters, rewritten or added others,” says Ruggiero, who added that Goodspeed, known for giving neglected musicals a second chance, has been working on it for months. Rags runs October 6 through December 10.

Rob Ruggiero–Artistic Director, TheaterWorks
Hartford, Connecticut
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Goodspeed Musicals
Haddam, Connecticut
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Top image: Christiane Noll and David Harris from Ruggiero’s production of Next to Normal, photo by Lanny Nagler

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