New Haven gave a celebratory send-off Monday to a community theater troupe bringing a homegrown hip-hop musical to Europe.
Rafael Ramos, the producer, and Vanessa Soto, who plays the female lead in the Bregamos Theater Company’s award-winning production of the hip hop musical Kingdom, will be among the cast and crew representing the Elm City and the U.S. at the International Community Arts Festival in Rotterdam at the end of March.
The mayor and other dignitaries came to principal Kim Johnsky’s Fair Haven Middle School Monday afternoon for a celebratory send off, and to enjoy a few excerpts..
While it is surely an honor to be selected as one of only two U.S. community theater companies to attend the festival, with the anointing, said Ramos, came the necessity to raise money to pay for six cast members, three technicians, playwright, director, and producer to go to Rotterdam for six days.
“Through our most recent performances, including A Taste of JFK, private house parties, and donations, we raised $9,000.”
As a result, Aaron Jafferis (pictured below), the writer and lyricist for Kingdom, is going to help Jessica Quinones, one of the interns from the Sound School, who is in charge of lights, and Satchel Ramos (producer’s son) and the other technicians, experience theater in a European setting.
Quinones has never been out of the country. She has been checking out Rotterdam online. When she heard Dutch food doesn’t have the greatest reputation, she sighed and said, “Well, there’s probably a McDonald’s.”
Young Ramos, who’s been to Italy with his grandmother, said he’s looking forward to seeing how other countries do theater.
So is the director, whose play will have its first international performance within two weeks. Kingdom, which won, the Most Promising New Musical award at the New York Musical Theater Festival in 2006 and ran in New Haven in February 2007, depicts the struggle of Juan and Andres, two friends caught up in the gang life in part because there are so few perceived alternatives.
Jafferis went to Hillhouse High School. He gets much of his material from the life of the New Haven streets that he knew. He is excited, he said, about what international travel was going to do for the young people going, most of whom had never been to Europe.
“In high school,” he said, “I went three time to Leon, Nicaragua, New Haven’s sister city, in that program, and it changed my life.”
How so?
“It gave me a new perspective about what young people here take for granted — like having water without having to walk miles to get it. Also I think our kids will see that young people in other countries are more politically involved than Americans. We’re getting more focused with Obama and all, but it’s only a step.”
Jafferis said evidence of that was the pre-festival publicity about Kingdom. “It seems to focus on the parallel line of the Iraq War and the Bush administration in the play. That is, joining the Latin Kings gang seems a better alternative to Andres and Juan than the army. [Andres is Gabriel Hernandes, on the right, and Juan, Michael Improta in the photo below] . I’m not surprised that the festival is focusing on that aspect.”
The mayor hailed the group as New Haven’s ambassador. He said,he was particularly proud of the inclusion of performance space in many of the new schools being built through the citywide school construction program.
He also noted the “realness” of community theater’s issues and themes. “There is nothing more real in the city than Fair Haven” he added. “Your achievement reflects well on us all,” he said.
Then he amiably warned the cast members to behave.
Click here to follow the Bregamos production and the workshops it will be giving at the festival.
Ramos said when Bregamos returns, it will offer a technical workshop to bring more young people into theater and the theater trades, such as carpentry and electricity. Doing this, and in an intergenerational manner, is part of Bregamos’s mission.
The workshop will be a lead-in to the Fair Haven group’s next production Real Women Have Curves, a play by Josefina Lopez. The play, set in L.A., tells the story of an immigrant family sewing to survive. One young woman aspires to the American dream while her sisters are cowering in fear of immigration raids.
In other words, stories close to Fair Haven’s heart.
Likewise, Jafferis’ next work, “The Weird Sisters,” is another hip hop musical, a companion to Kingdom, about young women struggling with ambition, money, and the pull of bad gang influence. And, yes, indeed, the piece is inspired by the witches written about by ye olde hip hop Elizabethan playwright, Will Shakespeare. It premiers at the Educational Center for the Arts on Audubon Street on May 29.