Shakespeare on the Sound is assembling its annual gala for April 18 (Saturday) at the Wee Burn Country Club in Darien and will honor the original founders who established the outdoor theater 20 years ago.
The benefit is a prelude to the production “All’s Well That Ends Well” June 11-28 in Pinkney Park in Rowayton, a comedy that probes the conventions of gender and the sensitivities of the elderly who lament the loss of authentic values and the rise of a new self-centered generation.
Leslie Lawrence returns for her fourth year as the head of the committee arranging the benefit and is joined by Heather Silver who collaborated with Lawrence in 2012. “Our gala tends to be a quirky kind of fun evening,” Lawrence says. “After all we’re a theater.”
In 1995, Megan Crowley McAllister contacted Ezra Barnes to determine if an outdoor theater could be viable in Rowayton's Pinkney Park. Clearly, the answer was YES. Ezra became the founding artistic director of Shakespeare on the Sound, and today is the artistic director of the Young Actors Workshop in Brooklyn, NY and a working performer. The first board: Susan Reed Basche, Dorsey Gude, Tim Massad, Megan Crowley McAllister, Adrienne Southworth, Steven Southworth and Andy Woolford will be celebrated.
The concept for the theater was created around McAllister’s kitchen table in Rowayton in 1995. She recalls the first production in the park, “Much Ado About Nothing,” when the lights failed and, at another point, the sound system was inaudible. They pulled up an automobile and illuminated the stage with the beams of the headlights. And McAllister, the lines imprinted from all the rehearsals where she sat in, flitted between the blankets in the park, reciting the dialogue of Shakespeare’s characters, the lines imprinted in her mind from all the rehearsals she chaperoned.
The gala offers cocktails, silent and live auctions, dinner and dancing to the music of The Merlin Band which one reviewer said has a “great take on rock classics. They are super versatile and guaranteed to raise the roof on any party. They make you want to move, sing . . . and toast your pals to good times.”
Tickets are $220 (in limited quantity), $300 for patrons, and $500 for benefactors. Tables (for 10) are also available, $3,000 for patrons, $5,000 for benefactors.
Reservations and additional information are available by calling (203) 299-1300 or online at www.shakespeareonthesound.org.
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