Alan Osburn: I Dedicate This One To Ken

From Alan Osburn: As the Producing Artistic Director I have the wonderful opportunity to sit in on design meetings and watch all of these creative people continue to impress and inspire me with their passion and experience. I get to step into the room next to my office see costumes appear where a couple of days ago there was just some fabric. I can go to a rehearsal and watch these talented actors just come up with stuff that makes Michael’s face glow with wonder. But I also have moments of extreme sadness in dealing with very sensitive situations.

When Michael cast these five triple threats I couldn’t have been happier for him. But like the holidays, sometimes with great joy, there comes great sadness. I got a call today from Ken Robinson, one of the members of the cast. For those of you who saw The Full Monty he was Malcolm, the guy who sang Is This the Wind at the funeral in act two, which Ken did beautifully. Ken came to Michael and me a few days ago and told us he had hurt his knee outside of the rehearsal process. Today, after many trips to his physical therapist, his doctor, and after having an MRI, he informed me that he did indeed have a torn meniscus in his knee. With this being such a heavy dance show, and knowing that he would also have to dance on a raked stage, it was clear to me that the best thing for both the show and Ken’s health was that I would need to replace him. As a producer this is one of the hardest calls to make, especially with someone like Ken.

I don’t think most people have a true understanding of how deeply passionate performers feel about what they do. How euphoric they feel when they hear the sound of applause or laugher coming from the darkness just beyond the edge of the stage. Or understand the deep seated drive that actors have to finish the second act of a show, even when they just slipped on the stairs during intermission and cracked their head open and are covered in blood, as one of our Youth Repertory Theatre students (Alex Killan) did this past summer.

On the phone today Ken told me he would do whatever it would take to somehow still be in the show, which basically means he would have to ice, stretch, and heat his knee constantly, and still hold down a full time job, spending his evenings and weekends grimacing in pain, praying that no one in the cast or crew would see him because as he put it he “didn’t want the show to suffer.” We are very fortunate to have in the wings the very talented Marco Robinson who will join the company tomorrow. But for tonight, here’s to Ken, our first choice, our friend, and an inspiration to anyone who has ever had to play hurt for the good of the show.

Pictures:

#1: Ken peforming with Saturday Evening Post in The Music Man

#2: Ken playing the role of Malcolm in The Full Monty

#3: Ken in Sunday in the Park with George

#4: Ken in I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change!

Reviews: Sunday in the Park with George

Cast, set paint artful play
By Mark Arnest, The Gazette (Feb. 1)

• “The Fine Arts Center Theatre Company’s production of “Sunday in the Park with George” ranks with the center’s best productions.”
• “It’s the most beautiful show I’ve seen on that stage…”
• “The orchestra, conducted by Sandi Shroads, has never sounded mellower or more delicate, shimmering colors matching the visual splendor.”
• “And the cast members — especially leads Brian Hutchinson and Carmen Mock — make Stephen Sondheim’s challenging music and lyrics sound as effortless as a walk in the park.”
• “Hutchinson’s voice combines beauty and power, and he’s equally convincing as the obsessive Georges and the vaguely dissatisfied George. Mock delivers Sondheim’s intricate patter with a bright, buoyant voice.”
• “You’ll be intrigued by this courageous and intelligent production of a courageous and thought-provoking piece — and the ticket prices ($26-$31) are cheap for a production of this quality.”

Sunday in the Park with George review
By John Moore, Denver Post (Feb. 1)

• “Director Alan Osburn's elaborate staging is capably performed to standards few area companies can match. The eight-member orchestra is as always a strength, and, for a show built on the concept of this being a canvas come to life, set designer Christopher L. Sheley has outdone himself, particularly in how he, like Seurat, toys with perspective and dimension in creating living stage paintings like "Bathing at Asnieres."
• “This all builds to a magical stage moment in which a fevered Seurat, employing all his artistic hallmarks of design, tension, balance and light, finally sees just how to place all of his pieces on canvas. Suddenly these real people (well, a few are pop-up boards) morph into clay models that Seurat manipulates into their final positions. It's a stirring, act-ending moment … “

Sunday in the Park preview

FOX 21’s Meaghan Collier previews the Fine Arts Center Theatre Company’s production of the Pulitzer Prize winning musical, Sunday in the Park with George, featuring interviews with actors Brian R. Hutchinson, Carmen Mock and director Alan Osburn. Watch the video.

John Updike on Georges Seurat

Celebrated writer John Updike reviewed the Georges Seurat MOMA exhibition in The New York Review for Books (Jan. 17), writing, "Impressionism, our impression is, proceeded by instinct, its stabs of high color pursuing what the eyes of Monet and Renoir and Pissarro and Sisley found in the open air, as sunlight's spectrum flitted across the sight of haystacks, poppy-dotted fields, and rippled water. Analysis was left to Post-Impressionism, whose varied masters, with a greater or lesser degree of programmatic determination, put forward terms for their own art and the art of the future. Neither Cezanne nor Van Gogh was more resolutely theoretical than Georges Seurat."

• Impressionist and Modern Masters
• Sunday in the Park with George

Sunday in the Park with George: FAC performs musical masterpiece about painter Seurat

Read the complete press release.

COLORADO SPRINGS (Jan. 2, 2008) – In the past 50 years, there have only been three musicals to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama: A Chorus Line, Rent and Sunday in the Park with George. The Fine Arts Center Theatre Company will present Sunday in the Park with George, Jan. 25-Feb. 17, in the SaGāJi Theatre.

Written and scored by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, Sunday in the Park is a moving study of the enigmatic painter Georges Seurat that won a Pulitzer Prize for its insightful and personal examination of life through art and the artist. Act one follows Seurat as he fights a losing battle to maintain a relationship with his mistress, Dot, as he creates his painting, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, amid the scorn of the artistic community. The second act takes place 100 years later, introducing us to his American descendant, also an artist, burned out and uncertain of the path he must take.

The show was specifically chosen to correspond with the FAC’s special exhibition, Impressionist and Modern Masters, on exhibit through March 9. Much of the second act is set at an art exhibition opening in a museum.

“What better piece to do at an arts center that recently completed a $30 million renovation and who is currently exhibiting one of the country finest exhibitions of Impressionist and post-Impressionist art?” asks Alan Osburn, Producing Artistic Director of the FAC Theatre Company. Osburn, who directed last season’s Into the Woods – another Sondheim/Lapine collaboration – is directing Sunday in the Park.

The scenic designer will feature the artistry of Brian Jude Beacom, who will recreate Seurat’s paintings: A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte and Bathing at Asnieres, along with painting over a dozen life-size, two-dimensional cut outs of various people and animals found in the La Grande Jatte painting. Seurat painted La Grande Jatte in two years; Beacom will have four weeks.

The show stars Brian R. Hutchinson as George and Carmen Mock as Dot. Hutchinson earned the 2006 Denver Henry Award from the Denver Theatre Guild for “Best Actor in a Musical” for his work in Assassins (yet another Sondheim-penned work) as John Wilkes Booth at the Aurora Fox Theatre. Hutchinson was a finalist for the 2006 Denver Post Ovation Award for “Best Year by an Actor,” highlighted by his role in Cabaret.

More information concerning tickets sales for individuals or groups, and the Curtain Call Society can be found at csfineartscenter.org or by calling the FAC Box Office at 719.634.5583.

Read the complete press release.