Live Arts at the Morris Museum
Live Arts at the Morris Museum, a bold new performance series, introduces cultural climate change to Morris County’s Morris Museum in historic Morristown, New Jersey. Innovative artists from around the world and around the area will dominate the season with world and regional premieres of the most interesting new work being created in music, dance and theater.
Live Arts at the Morris Museum is the brainchild of the new Curatorial Director of Live Arts, Brett Wellman Messenger who comes to The Morris Museum by way of The Santa Fe Opera and Peak Performances.
“I see this series as an impetus for exciting, new conversations with our audiences. They are savvy, sophisticated and ready for new cultural adventures right in their own backyard,” Messenger said. “We’re presenting works that align with the Museum’s evolving mission to explore sound, motion and kinetic art onstage as well as in the galleries.” Cleveland Johnson, Executive Director, says “The Morris Museum is a rarity in the museum world—it has its own performing arts facility. The Museum can become home for those eyeing new horizons, who are ready to be surprised, who are hungry for new artistic creations.”
On Thursday, June 6th there will be a Live Arts at the Morris Museum Launch Event where Kyle Marshall Choreography, who appear later in the season, will preview their new work, a duet called Horizon.
WHERE: Museum’s 312-seat Bickford Theatre, Morris Museum, 6 Normandy Hgts. Rd., Morristown
Dzul Dance:
The Last Mayan King
WHEN: Friday, September 20, 8:00PM, Saturday, September 21, 2:00PM
Javier Dzul has of the most impressive and exotic resumes in modern dance. He grew up in the jungles of southern Mexico performing Mayan ritual dance until the age of 16 when he became the last king of his Mayan tribe. He then left his home, becoming a principal dancer with Ballet Nacional de Mexico and Ballet Folklorico de Mexico before he went to Ballet Nacional de Cuba. From there he got a scholarship to study with Martha Graham and danced with the company and also worked with Pearl Lang and Alvin Ailey. Along the way he learned and performed aerial work. That, along with the Mayan history, the influences of modern dance legends is traced on his remarkable body and in the vastly rich physical vocabulary he draws upon in his extraordinary work. His choreography exudes a sinewy, sinuous muscularity befitting Mayan royalty. The Last Mayan King channels the ferocity and grandeur of Mayan culture and Dzul’s own trajectory. Despite the ravages of the conquistadores, Maya culture never vanished and remains thrillingly alive onstage in Dzul’s work.
Rob Kapilow
What Makes it Great/American Song Book/Cole Porter
Featuring Broadway stars Michael Winther & Sally Wilfert
WHEN: Sunday, October 6, 2:00PM
The witty and urbane Cole Porter joyfully pushed the envelope of musical theater in the 1920s, 30s and 40s with ultra-sophisticated, often risqué songs banned by the censors and adored by theatergoers. Unlike most of the 20th century’s great songwriters, Porter grew up in a world of unbelievable wealth and privilege that included Yale, Harvard and astonishingly lavish travel. Yet beneath his socially perfect public persona was a hidden private life that influenced nearly all of his music and lyrics. Broadway stars Sally Wilfert and Michael Winther join Rob Kapilow for a musical tour through Porter’s extraordinary life and career, as they take a fresh look at Porter’s complex highbrow/lowbrow sensibility in classic songs like “You’re the Top,” “Night and Day,” “All Through the Night” and “Begin the Beguine."
Sylvia Milo
The Other Mozart
WHEN: Friday, October 18, at 8:00PM, Saturday, October 19, 2:00PM and 8:00PM
“Imagine an 11-year-old girl performing the most difficult sonatas and concertos of the greatest composers…with precision, with incredible lightness, with impeccable taste,” the Austrian press raved in 1763. That 11 year old girl was Maria Anna (nicknamed Nannerl) Mozart and The Other Mozart is an award-winning play based on the true story of the sister of Wolfgang Amadeus. A prodigy, keyboard virtuoso and composer who performed throughout Europe with her brother to equal acclaim, her work and her story faded away by the age of 18, lost to history in the shadow of her famous brother. This innovative production, created and performed by Sylvia Milo, imagines the life of the forgotten genius through her letters and features an original score written by Nathan Davis and Phyllis Chen (who appears with her own show later in the Live Arts season) featuring music box and toy piano. “Strikingly Beautiful” – The New York Times
Telegraph Quartet and Robert Sirota
Wave Upon Wave
WHEN: Sunday, November 3, at 2:00PM
San Francisco’s vibrant, young Telegraph Quartet joins forces with esteemed composer, Robert Sirota to perform his moving work, Wave Upon Wave. In this piece, which was commissioned to Telegraph Quartet, Sirota looks “inward to examine the topography of the human heart. Wave Upon Wave is about our fears, our hopes and our prayers that we will triumph over the forces of darkness that threaten to overwhelm us,” he says. If the string quartet is the mountaintop experience for composers, then Sirota has found the perfect musical partners to lift his work, and us, to the summit. Robert Sirota will be at the performance and will participate in a discussion about his work. In addition the Telegraph Quartet will perform Bartok’s String Quartet No. 4 and Haydn’s String Quartet in F Major, Op. 77, No. 2 to create an afternoon of glorious music.
10 Hairy Legs & Doug Elkins
Trouble Will Find Me: Remixed (World Premiere)
WHEN: Thursday, November 21-23 8:00PM
New Jersey’s own dance heroes, 10 Hairy Legs, celebrate the artistry of the male dancer. They will join forces with up-from-the-street choreographer Doug Elkins for Trouble Will Find Me: Remixed, a new site-specific piece staged, fittingly, in the Museum’s Main Gallery with the new exhibition, Aerosol: Graffiti l Street Art l New Jersey l Now as their backdrop. This unique and playful World Premiere allows the audience to experience ‘dance in the round.’ Trouble Will Find Me: Remixed will feature a new soundtrack of surprising pieces of music ranging from baroque to contemporary pop. Audience members are invited to sit, walk, and move about during this fresh dance happening. Each performance will be different as the nimble dancers respond spontaneously to the soundtrack (which will be played on shuffle) so that every performance is developing right before our eyes, a user-friendly Russian roulette of dance. There will be a cash bar in the gallery so audience members can imbibe during and after the performance which will then evolve into a social affair/dance party with the artists.
Yevgeny Kutik
Music from the Suitcase
WHEN: Saturday December 21, at 8:00PM and Sunday December 22, 2:00PM
When Yevgeny Kutik was five years old, he and his family emigrated from the deteriorating Soviet Union to the United States. They had to leave most of their possessions behind and fit everything else into just two suitcases. Yevgeny’s mother, a violin teacher, insisted on filling one of the suitcases with sheet music from the family’s collection. Years later, Yevgeny began to explore the music from the suitcase and was enthralled with the pieces he discovered, many of them banned by the Nazi State Music Bureau for being degenerate. “They began to organize themselves into a distinct array of moods and themes…Russian folklore, fantasy, and poetry. It reminds me of what we went through and how far we have come,” Kutik says. Composer Richard Strauss headed the bureau for two years and tried to ensure that banned music by composers such as Mahler and Mendelssohn survived the Nazi reign. Music From A Suitcase unifies Strauss’ own luscious scores with prominent works by four composers whose music was banned: Mendelssohn, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Mahler. The various ways in which these five composers antagonized the Nazis through their artistry are exemplified in their respective pieces, highlighting the resilience and enduring power of art to fight tyranny and oppression.
Cast members for the show include Elizabeth Eisenmenger, John Traier, Karen Bednarz, Gary Koseyan, Debbie Buschsbaum, Carl Bergmanson, Victoria Lopez, Emma Himmelhock, Steve Adubato, Joe Krisocki, George Rex, and Lawrence Kelly.
Shakespeare in the Park in Bergen County is back for a second year! Black Box Studios initiated free performances of Shakespeare’s works in 2018, with rotating performances of Twelfth Night and Macbeth. 
AUDITION NOTICE:
Happy Together Tour 2019
Gary Puckett & The Union Gap (left) is thrilled to be on the Happy Together Tour again. Puckett’s trademark voice will be belting out his hits one more time. Fans will affectionately remember “Young Girl,” “Over You,” “Woman, Woman,” “This Girl Is a Woman Now,” “Lady Willpower,” “Don’t Give in to Him,” and more.