[announcer] Art loft is brought to you by, [advertiser] Where there is freedom, there is expression.

The Florida Keys and Key West.

[announcer] And the friends of South Florida PBS.

[announcer] Art loft.

It's the pulse of what's happening in our own backyard as well as the taste of the arts across the United States.

Every story deserves to be heard.

[announcer] In this episode theater and performance.

The stage as the setting for artistic expression and the creative ways, performance can remind us of our shared experience.

My name is Larry Fields and I am the Executive and Artistic Director at Fantasy Theater Factory at the Sandrell Rivers Theater.

Fantasy Theater Factory, we have a long history we've been around for about 40 years and we started really with a focus on theater for young audiences.

So that's the theater for children in like elementary school.

People who are theater patrons, patrons of the arts, they don't just materialize into adulthood.

It's something that people grow up doing from the time that they're children.

Theater for kids is in many ways, you know.

The concepts are the same.

It's got to be engaging.

You know we have to keep their attention.

And children, of course, don't have a lot of the pretenses that adults might have, you know.

An adult might sit through a really dudge show and just kind of be polite and go, okay.

But if you've lost the kids, you know it.

We have roots and Commedia dell'arte and then sort of a broad slapstick style.

So with a lot of elements of clown and things like that.

And so it's really engaging.

And everything that we do has an educational component to it.

So we have a couple of our big pillars of our mission are environmental education and literacy.

Coming into the Sandrell Rivers Theater as the Managing Operator, we have expanded that mission.

Our mission is still primarily focused on theater for young audiences but we've now added programming for general community.

So that includes things like our concert series, and even a comedy series and an art exhibition series.

So we've really expanded what we do.

And part of that also is doing theater for adult audiences, too.

We did a program called "Deep Fake" which is about this concept of what can you believe now?

And it was a device theater piece which is where the creative team, the actors and the director and the designers, everyone comes together, and as a collaborator.

It's like most things, it didn't, you know.

Things did not go to plan, but happily, so.

I started as an actor, that's what I went to school for.

And that's what I was down here doing.

I was working at all the different companies and I auditioned for a company called Fantasy Theater Factory as an actor.

And they wouldn't have me the first time around but persistence pays off And I re-auditioned and they were great.

I really connected with what it is that we do.

But the Sandrell Rivers Theater really is a gem in our community.

First of all, we're really centrally located, we're right on Northwest 62nd street and seventh Avenue one block off of I95.

A lot of what we do is free and low cost.

$5 and $10 tickets are sort of the norm for us, because again part of our mission is making sure that, this is accessible to everybody.

This is actually part of Miami-Dade county's plan to have smaller cultural venues in the community.

So that's why Miami-Dade is doing the Westchester Cultural Facility further South.

And that was part of the reason that this facility was put here.

So, people don't really have to leave their communities to go and experience a really, first rate cultural facilities.

She gave me her recipe.

My name is Shirley Richardson, and I am co-founder.

And Executive Director of M Ensemble Company.

We are the oldest, not just African-American theater company but the oldest theater company here in Miami-Dade County.

M Ensemble Company started in 1971.

That's a long, long story under the direction and founder the late TG Cooper.

And he decided to come to the University of Miami and pick up his master's degree.

And while he was there, he had to do a project called "Purlie Victorious", and he needed a black cast and a white cast.

Unfortunately, there weren't many black students on campus at the University of Miami during that time.

I think there were about three of us.

So he recruited the three of us.

TG left but before he left he some money and he left a staff in place, and we maintained that relationship with him until his passing.

We are here now at the Sandrell Rivers Theater, after being bounced around from one place to another.

I can't even tell you how many places we've been.

There've been so many trying to keep up the legacy.

Being in this space, it allows the company to show the audience the technical aspects, because in many places that we've been in, we have not been able to really see it that we really want to see it, you know.

We the Kings of Harlem, we had all these seats were out and they were conformed into a basketball stadium.

The space was set up, to give you that ambiance being back in that time in this old stadium where the first basketball, black basketball team played and the story behind all of that.

But the biggest impact is that the presentations that we bring to the stage is to playwrights, you know.

The plays that people never heard of, stories that they never heard of.

These are the stories, these are our stories these are our words.

And so that's important.

It's a lot of work, but, it's the passion that keep us going.

And hopefully when it's time to pass that torch we will be able to identify those people who has that same kind of passion and willing to make the sacrifices to keep it going.

You know, we're 50 years old now.

So there is the legacy.

And we are in institution [announcer] To get tickets and information on both the Fantasy Theater Factory and him M Ensemble visit Sandra Rivers Theater.com Head to Instagram and visit at Miami City Ballet to find out more about upcoming shows.

And for a behind the scenes, look with performers.

Next step, Rocky mountain PBS gives us a contemporary look at how impressionism influenced more than just the visual arts.

You know, the arts at the time sort of the head cross-pollination same time with the impressionist movement what happening there were impressionistic tendency in poetry and so in music.

So artists at the time were not in a vacuum and the music because it it responds to the same sort of stylistic tendency, We do believe that it helps our visitors immerse more in in a time and go back in time.

My name is Angelica Daneo.

I am Chief Curator and Curator of European art before 1900 at the Denver art museum.

As we often do an exhibition, we actually include music throughout our galleries.

And we did the same this time with our Claude Monet Exhibition.

We listen to music of the time and trying to find the right rhythm for certain paintings.

You might have something that is very slow and sort of with a slower cadence, which doesn't go well with the scenes of Bodhi Gira, which are an explosion of colors and an explosion of brilliance.

So we do look at the paintings and we do listen into the music and like any visitors really tried to look, what does this help me, When I look at this painting?

My name is Lawrence Golan, and I'm a Symphony Orchestra Conductor and I'm the Music Director of the Denver Philharmonic Orchestra.

We have this wonderful partnership with the Denver Art Museum and the partnership revolves around the Monet Exhibit.

Obviously there'll be having many wonderful paintings by the great French impressionistic painter, Claude Monet.

And we will be playing this French impressionistic concert.

The impressionistic movement and music took place primarily in France around the turn of the last century, so around 1900.

One thing the impressionist to composers were very concerned with what is the emotion that the listener will feel.

WC's prelude to the afternoon of a fawn is perhaps the quintessential impressionistic piece.

It starts out with just flute solo by itself with no ac compliment.

And even the notes that WC chose for that opening solo are very chromatic.

Meaning it doesn't establish a key.

It doesn't establish any one note as being more prominent.

It just sort of meanders around through different notes.

That is emblematic of impressionism, both in music and in art where we're not exactly sure what we're looking at or what we're listening to.

It sounds very nice, but what exactly is that.

with the French impressionistic painters, similarly they weren't trying to be very realistic with them.

They were, it was more like eluding to an image.

The painting behind my back is by a Monet painted around 1873.

And it has all the qualities of this particular movement.

And Monet does it with great effects.

Given really the impression of a busy street.

It doesn't define every single top hat.

It doesn't define every single gown and petticoat.

And so this was the criticism from the intellectuals that were favoring the Academy.

They said the who's the one that gave the term, the derogatory term impressionism, really criticized this, this black figures.

In fact, he called them black tongue lickings.

This was looked unfinished.

It looked too sketchy, but this was not the point of the impressionist that they wanted to give the impression, the feeling of that scene in that moment.

That has translated into the music in a similar way.

You get the impression of a certain structure or of a certain harmony, but it's not crystal clear.

[announcer] WGBH.

Boston takes us to the stage for a pivotal moment in theater history re-imagined into a new production, Jared Berwyn reports.

We have a story we'd love to tell you about a play a play that changed my life.

[jared] Indecent is Pulitzer prize winner, Paula Vogel's new play about an Incendiary one.

Written more than a hundred years ago.

God a vengeance is a Yiddish drama by Polish playwright.

Shola Marsh.

It's about a brothel owner eager to see his daughter move up in society by marrying a Rabbi's son.

The only hitch is the daughter has fallen love With a prostitute downstairs.

So imagine this being written in 1906, the first love presented between two women and certainly the first kiss.

[jared] Indecent Vogel tracks the play from its inception to its resurrection during World War II.

She has found a kindred spirit in channeling the youthful audacious playwright.

Once upon a time, I was a young playwright myself.

So I do think that there's a young playwright principle where you want to walk into the salon and light the bomb and throw it into the salon and that here's my new play.

Boom [jared ] Despite it's lesbian subject matter when God a Vengeance first debuted it actually wasn't controversial.

The love between women was seen as a kind of pure and beautiful love story.

By the men in the Yiddish salon in the Yiddish Renaissance, it was seen as something that was beautiful.

It went on tour from 1907 all over Europe.

[jared] The scandal came when God a Vengeance finally opened on Broadway in 1923.

And anti-immigration sentiment was taking hold in the US and seeing the play for the first time the mainstream Christian audience was unnerved.

And what's happening is that there is a great deal of hatred.

The rise of the KKK and the Jew is seen as someone who was invading American soil.

So here, I mean, all of these issues it's when people say, you know, what is Indecent about?

Yes, it's about a play.

But it's really not about the censorship of the play.

It's really not just all of the multiple love stories.

It's how do we describe or catch a moment in time?

When we as a country, all of our neighbors all of our friends, all of our family are in danger.

It was a real lightning rod for tremendously, you know important issues and questions about immigration.

[jared] Rebecca Taichman is Indecent Director.

She discovered God a Vengeance, as a graduate student at Yale.

Which also houses Shola Matias papers.

Just asking about what in a deeply corrupt world is there the potential for true love in a world that conspires so heavily against the basic principle of love.

[jared] Shortly after the play opened on Broadway, it was actually a Rabbi who filed a complaint.

Concerned over how his community was being portrayed.

In short order, the cast producer and theater owner were put on trial for obscenity.

To what was the tone of trial?

Nobody was allowed to get onto the stand.

So the deck was really, really stacked.

The writer of world literature.

I couldn't walk into that court.

[jared] Roughly 10 years ago, Taichman brought the story to Vogel, who then spent the next seven years writing indecent.

I got to imagine, well, what was it like when my grandparents came to this country?

What was it like to walk down the lower East side?

What was it like to speak Yiddish?

What was it like to know all of those songs?

[jared] Music is both instrumental to how Indecent unfolds and how Vogel writes.

She creates soundtracks to guide her through each act.

[woman] Of all the boys I've known and I've known At my computer and the music is so, so very beautiful.

It made me weep every night.

I feel that music is the most pure art form.

I hope I don't get drummed out of the drama to skilled for saying this, but I feel that music is pure emotion.

[jared] When it opened on Broadway in 2017, Indecent marked the Legendary playwrights long overdue Broadway debut.

And Taichman won a Tony for her direction.

What is musically?

It feels like we bought them out for too long beside the pause.

I don't know that I see it as a personal validation but a real deep kind of honoring of the power of this story.

[jared] The production here is a rare remounting of the Broadway one with nearly the full cast intact.

As Indecent continues to find life its creators say it also continues to find resonance.

Am heartbroken, honestly to say it feels more and more relevant than I wished.

You know, I ever could have wished it would.

I'm done being in a country that laughs at the way I speak I feel that this is a play about us knowing in this moment of time, Who are the immigrants in America?

Who is this happening to now?

What side are we on?

Are we paying attention?

Tangible love is what am looking for Tangible love is what am looking for And I forget what it feels like To be held by a man Who can show me Oh show me Key Largo Original Music Festival is basically a six days of local and out-of-town talent.

And the idea for the festival is to bring to bring musicians together, to have that kind of comradery and idea sharing and all that kind of stuff.

And then of course play it for the guests and for the people that live here in the Florida keys.

And the festival set up in sets.

And what we do is we mix artists local artists and out of town artists kind of together.

A lot of times they know each other but sometimes they don't.

And then sometimes depending on how they played together or just how well they get along and click then they all play as well.

And it's pretty magical.

Oh its no surprise My feeling told me If am the sky Into real life My name is Adrian rolandic and I am really happy to be a part of the Key Largo Original Music Fest.

Conch town was a song that I wrote in the kitchen of my rent controlled apartment that I gave up.

I came down to visit the Keys, loved it and decided to move there.

So I went back home, packed up all my stuff and wrote this tune Conch town because everything's on Conch Rock in the Keys.

It was sunset hour She's pictured this She's doing a conch town Jim half penny and Sean Bern and Melody.

And they coming to this festival for a long time I've know that both Jim and Sean, can jam on anything without knowing the songs.

So it's really wonderful that it becomes like this whole bigger sound than you playing by yourself because they're capable of joining in and jam with you.

It's awesome.

Every new thing that I get Just seem to break But you can always depend On old dogs and deer old friend Every good thing I Songwriters are looking for an outlet for original music.

And so what our festival does is it allows us songwriters talent venue to play in their original music and also for guests to be able to hear the original music from the songwriters.

So the other thing that's really cool, is when a songwriter comes to our festival has had a big hit.

You get to hear the song the way they meant for it to be heard and play.

Thank God am a simple man Thank you.

[announcer] Head to KeyLargo original music fest.com to find out more about this year's festival.

[announcer] Art loft is brought to you by Where there is freedom.

There is expression, The Florida Keys and Key West.

And the Friends of South Florida, PBS.