Since its founding in 1999, CTH has presented a repertory of works ranging from traditional classical playwrights (Anton Chekhov, Euripides, and William Shakespeare), to established 20th century playwrights (August Wilson, Langston Hughes, and Jean Genet), to new plays by emerging playwrights which we believe will stand the test of time. The intern(s) hired for this…
NEW YORK (March 17, 2015) — The Classical Theatre of Harlem (CTH) (Ty Jones, producing artistic director; David Roberts, managing director) proudly announces plans for its landmark 2015 season. The Harlem-based American theatre company will present its 15th Anniversary Celebration and Benefit Concert this spring, featuring songs from the eagerly anticipated musical Witness Uganda, winner…
I recently had the pleasure of waiting a mere six hours to get free tickets to the Public Theater’s production of “Much Ado About Nothing” in Central Park. The next night, I breezed into Marcus Garvey Park, no waiting or tickets required, for an equally invigorating production of “Romeo and Juliet,” directed with deliberation and…
Hip-hop music from the nearby baseball diamond wafts into Verona. A stray tabby and a cloud of fireflies crowd its lanes. At “Romeo N Juliet,” a free performance staged in an amphitheater at Marcus Garvey Park by the Classical Theater of Harlem, the distractions of an uptown summer evening compete with a centuries-old tragedy. At first, it…
The subway is the city’s great equalizer, a place where all of New York can jostle peaceably. But in “Dutchman,” the incendiary 1964 play by LeRoi Jones, proximity breeds anger, then danger, then death. The playwright, who would change his name to Amiri Baraka and who died in January, said he wrote “Dutchman” in a single…
The subway may be an edgy experience on a good day, but the 1964 encounter between a black man and a swivel hipped white woman, at the center of LeRoi Jones’ allegory, Dutchman, may terrify today’s rush hour straphanger. As mounted by the consistently wonderful Classical Theater of Harlem in tandem with National Black Theater, this…
Most New Yorkers are familiar with Shakespeare in the Park, and if you are visiting New York it is certainly worth the time in line to score tickets to this free event. Less well-known, but much more accessible is The Classical Theatre of Harlem whose production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream will run until…
No, Daddy, I won’t marry that man, the young woman says. Her best friend has romantic problems, too; she adores a man who considers her a hideous loser. A group of untalented blue-collar guys are rehearsing a play for the city’s elite. A supernatural being uses a magic herb to make people want to ravish…