Farewell to Rep Stage, BMA exhibit goes national, and Howard student performs at Carnegie Hall – Baltimore Sun

For all its holiday cheer, December all the time comes with a blast of cold air — and this yr, unfortunately, isn’t any exception.

While there may be plenty of reports from the local arts community this week to warm the spirit — from a Howard County eighth grader who recently performed his own composition at Carnegie Hall to an revolutionary program by the Baltimore Museum of Art — local theater lovers are feeling the chilliness from the planned demise of an anchor institution.

Howard Community College recently announced that it would shut down Rep Stage, its award-winning skilled theater this spring on the conclusion of its twenty ninth season.

“The school operates on a lean budget, and we must prioritize programs and services that directly serve students,” Grace Anastasiadis, a spokeswoman for the faculty wrote in an email to The Sun. “After much deliberation, Howard Community College made the choice to shut Rep Stage.”

Rep Stage has two full-time employees whose contracts expire June 30. Anastasiadis said they will apply for other job openings at the faculty.

The theater’s shuttering is a giant loss for local residents, who after May may have to travel to Baltimore or Washington to view big budget productions employing profession actors. While Howard County has much-loved community-based playhouses resembling Toby’s Dinner Theatre, Rep Stage is the county’s only fully skilled theater.

Joseph Ritsch has consistently mounted skillfully acted, thought-provoking plays within the nine years that he has been Rep Stage’s producing artistic director; the theater has been nominated for 51 Helen Hayes Awards (the Washington area’s version of the Tony Awards) since its founding, and has won seven.

Ritsch wrote in an email:

“I feel honored to have been an element of the Rep Stage history for the past nine years. In fact, I’m saddened by the indisputable fact that Rep Stage is closing, but I’m hopeful that my love of latest work, the collaborative process and centering artists can flourish in recent and exciting ways on this industry meaning a lot to me.”

Anastasiadis estimated that disbanding the theater will save the faculty greater than $300,000 annually in salaries and production costs, or lower than 1% of the institution’s $40.3 million budget for this fiscal yr, which represents a 7.6% increase over the faculty’s 2021-22 budget.

That cash goes for other things, she said, from keeping student tuitions inexpensive (there was no tuition increase this yr) to providing overdue raises for faculty and staff to beefing up the faculty’s technological infrastructure.

As worthy as these goals are, what seems at risk of getting lost is the sort of character constructing that the humanities provide. Theater asks difficult questions. It explores painful moral decisions. It exposes audience members to at times radically different points of view. It teaches empathy.

Isn’t that what a university education is alleged to be about?

Most musicians practice for a long time before receiving a coveted invitation to perform at Carnegie Hall.

But Aditya Bhandari recently took the stage for the third time at Latest York’s musical mecca — and he’s just 13.

The eighth-grade student at Folly Quarter Middle School performed his own composition on the piano on Nov. 20 on the institution’s Weill Recital Hall as a part of a youth competition sponsored by the Brooklyn Music Teachers Guild.

He called his one minute, 45-second piece “California Meandor” and said it was inspired by the winding roads around the town of Half Moon Bay, where his family vacationed over the summer.

“At dusk and sunset, it’s so foggy you’ll be able to barely see the road,” he said.

Adi, as he is thought to his family and friends, has been playing the piano since he was 5. He made his Carnegie Hall debut at age 8 on that instrument as a part of one other competition sponsored by the music guild, and made a return visit one yr later, in 2019.

But he didn’t begin composing until he found himself mostly confined to his home throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I had insane amounts of time,” Adi said. “Sometimes once I’m practicing the piano and I get slightly bit bored, I drift off into my very own creative pondering. I spotted that among the things I used to be playing out of boredom sounded pretty good, so I started writing them down.”

He enjoyed every thing about his trip to Carnegie Hall: the joy of a jaunt to the Big Apple, meeting his fellow contestants, and having his photo taken with the Ukranian-American composer and pianist Alexander Peskanov, certainly one of his music world heroes.

Perhaps most of all, he’ll always remember what it was prefer to rest his fingers on Weill Hall’s Steinway, the classical music world equivalent of a muscle automobile.

“That piano was just huge,” he said. “Nevertheless it was surprisingly easy to play. The soft notes were soft, but they weren’t muffled and there was no echo. It’s just really flawless.”

The Baltimore Museum of Art’s revolutionary “Guarding the Art” exhibit, through which security guards were hired as guest curators to mount a show of their favorite artworks, made a nationwide splash when it debuted last March.

Media outlets from The Latest York Times to CNN clambered over each other to interview such creative personalities as guards Kellen Johnson, an aspiring opera singer who selected paintings that remind him of music, and Michael Jones, who felt so protective of his favorite murals — a 1925 door knocker shaped like the top of Medusa — that he designed a special case to forestall it from being by chance damaged by visitors.

Now, the museum has launched a program to assist other museums across the country mount their very own versions of “Guarding the Art.”

There will likely be a guidebook written by one current (Jess Bither) and one former (Alex Dicken) security guard, and the BMA will designate a program manager to work with the museums.

First up: the Phoenix Art Museum, which is able to open its show in 2024, thanks partly to a grant from PNC Bank and the Pearlstone Family Fund.

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“It was all the time a part of my vision to encourage other museums across the country to bring ‘Guarding the Art’ to their institutions,” Amy Elias, the BMA trustee who had the thought for the exhibit, said in a news release.

Finally, we’d prefer to offer a belated congratulations to Sun columnist Dan Rodricks, whose debut play “Baltimore, You Have No Idea” sold out all three of its performances on the Baltimore Museum of Art last weekend.

A solid of seven (including the playwright) delivered to life stories from Rodricks’ 4 a long time as a journalist, from the lady who married right into a Baltimore crime family to the previous drug dealer attempting to construct a recent life after prison.

Rodricks wrote in an email that the positive response his debut drama received had exceeded his expectations.

“We were pleasantly surprised when all three performances sold out so early,” he wrote. “We had no idea!”

But when like me you’re kicking yourself that you just in some way missed the show, don’t despair. You may get a second likelihood.

Rodricks wrote that he and the director and solid are discussing bringing the show back for an extended run — possibly as early as next yr.