IN THE AIR: FREE MUSIC, MOVIES AND MORE

Jul 18, 2017

Week two of this summer’s Movies in the Park series in Red Bank features an entry from the ‘Star Wars’ catalog. Below, Layonne Holmes fronts the Motor City Revue in a return to Sandy Hook Wednesday.

There’s a chance to imagine yourself as part of the biggest franchise in film fantasy history. Some power pop on the dock. A heat-blast of Latin-flavored jazz in the park. A little beach-music soul on the sands. And one of the world’s most beloved plays on yonder grassy knoll.

It’s all going on beneath the setting sun and stars of the Greater Red Bank Green — and all fabulously free of charge in the evenings to come.

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July 18, 2017 - 10:50 am |

LINCROFT: MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S MERRIMENT

Jul 11, 2017

Grab your folding chair, pack a picnic basket, and get thee to the Great Lawn at Brookdale Community College, where the Shakespeare on the Lawn presentation of A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM gets well-met by moonlight beginning this Thursday.

If ever was such a thing as “entry level Shakespeare,” then A Midsummer Night’s Dream is that single most easily inaccessible work with a little something for everyone: a hyper-kinetic love story; some slyly supernatural shenanigans courtesy of mischievous magical beings; a charming little play-within-a-play, and some of the author’s wildest opportunities for honest-to-goodness belly laughs, courtesy of the outsize ambitions and actorly egos of the play’s “rude mechanicals.”

It’s also the Shakespeare work that’s most at home in the open air — a thing best done the way the Bard intended, with un-amplified voices, improvised solos by Mother Nature’s minions, and an audience of engaged, enthusiastic (and ever so spirited) folks from all walks of life. And, beginning this Thursday evening, July 13, A Midsummer Night’s Dream becomes the perfect vehicle for the Shakespeare on the Lawn series to get back to its roots, with a new outdoor production on the Lincroft campus of Brookdale Community College.

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July 11, 2017 - 12:00 pm |

LINCROFT: TAKING ‘MEASURE’ OF SHAKESPEARE

Jul 5, 2016

Kate Bader (center) performs a scene from “Titus Andronicus” during last year’s Shakespeare on the Lawn presentation on the campus of Brookdale Community College. The summer series returns on Thursday evening with “Measure for Measure.” (Photo by Brookdale Community College)

Ask any Shakespearean scholar you happen to see: the historic incubator and natural habitat of the Bard’s classic tragedies, comedies and histories has little to do with stuffy theater boxes, scratchy formalwear, and snoozing patrons of the arts. Rather, it’s an experience that’s best realized in the open air — with un-amplified voices, improvised solos by Mother Nature’s minions, and an audience of engaged, enthusiastic (and ever so spirited) folks from all walks of life.

It’s a tradition maintained locally each year on one of the greatest, greenest spaces of the Greater Red Bank Green — and, beginning this Thursday evening, Shakespeare on the Lawn returns to the Lincroft campus of Brookdale Community College for a 15th annual edition, with a new look at William Shakespeare’s tragicomic “problem play” known as “Measure for Measure.”

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July 5, 2016 - 12:15 pm |

LINCROFT: A BLOODY GOOD BIT OF BARD

Jul 7, 2015

The annual Shakespeare on the Lawn (represented here by last year’s production of WINTER’S TALE) returns to Brookdale Community College this Thursday with the tragical history tour that is TITUS ANDRONICUS.

Presented to audiences in such plein-air settings as the original Globe Theatre, the works of William Shakespeare have always carried echoes of nature’s gleeful chaos, even under the most climate-controlled of conditions. And every year at about this time, an army of thespians takes to the patios, parks, lawns and beaches of this land to bellow the Bard’s iambic pentameter beneath the setting sun and stars.

It’s a tradition that has a long track record in the annual Summer Shakespeare Ensemble productions at Brookdale Community College, now in their 14th season.

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July 7, 2015 - 5:40 am |