Connecticut Travel

In conjunction with the current show on Great Cats, Dr. Luke Hunter is presenting a lecture at 6:30 p.m. on January 28 Lions. Luke Hunter is the President and Chief Conservation Officer of Panthera. Before joining Panthera, Hunter worked for the Wildlife Conservation Society as the head of their Great Cats Program and he taught wildlife ecology at universities in Australia and South Africa. He has worked on the ecology and conservation of carnivores for more than two decades, starting with his doctoral and post-doctoral work on re-establishing populations of lions and cheetahs in areas where they had been wiped out by people in South Africa. That research helped develop protocols which now act as the standard for large cat restoration, and have resulted in over 45 new populations of wild lions across Southern Africa.

At Panthera, he oversees the planning and execution of the organization’s field programs around the globe, and supervises the scientific priorities of Panthera’s work. He is especially focused on developing and scaling up solutions to widespread retaliatory killing of big cats by rural communities, and on improving the protection of wild cat habitat. He also works on reducing the impacts of legal recreational hunting on leopard and lion populations in Africa; in the Brazilian Pantanal to reduce the conflict between ranchers and jaguars; and in Iran on Persian leopards and the last surviving Asiatic cheetahs. Hunter supervises graduate students working on wild cats around the world, focusing especially on initiating comprehensive studies on very poorly studied species such as African golden cats and Sunda clouded leopards.

The galleries open at 5 p.m. and the lecture begins at 6:30. RSVP to info@brucemuseum.org. For more area information visit www.visitfairfieldcountyct.com

Stop by the Historical Society on Saturday, Jan. 30 between 10:30 a.m. and 2 p.m. to preview the upcoming April 2016 exhibit, America’s Pastimes: Sports and Recreation in Litchfield.

The history museum’s curator of collections will be on hand to discuss his research and the exhibit planning process, and to talk with guest about your own experiences as an athlete, a fan, a coach, an enthusiast, or just an occasional participant.

Visitors will have the opportunity to preview collection items that will be on display and provide feedback on preliminary designs of the exhibit.
The staff of the Litchfield History Museum wants to tell your stories! If you have any items that might be relevant to the exhibit-sports and recreation objects, images, and stories-please bring them to share. We need more submissions for inclusion in the exhibit to make this exhibit as community-focuses as possible. No submission is too big or too small. No registration necessary. Snow date: January 30.

For more information on what to see and do in the Litchfield Hills www.litchfieldhills.com

The Warner Theatre will be hosting the Bridal Event 2016 on Sunday, January 31 from 11am-3pm in the Carole and Ray Neag Performing Arts Center. Previously held at the Cornucopia Banquet Hall, this event has become an annual “must” for soon to be brides.

This year’s event will include over 50 vendors and venues to help couples with all of their wedding needs. Paul Samele owner of P Sams – Chatterley’s and the new management for the Cornucopia Banquet Hall will participate, along with The Wedding Embassy, Cutie Pie’s, Michaels Jewelers, Sunset Meadow Vineyard, Creative Line Production’s, Carriage Limousine, Music express, Wedding Cakes Unlimited and many other CT businesses.

Admission and a chance to win one of the fabulous door prizes donated by participating vendors are FREE. Some of the fabulous prizes include: limousine service, photo booth, engagement picture and many more.

For more area information on the Litchfield Hills visit www.litchfieldhills.com

About the Warner

Built by Warner Brothers Studios and opened in 1931 as a movie palace (1,772 seats), the Warner Theatre was described then as “Connecticut’s Most Beautiful Theatre.” Damaged extensively in a flood, the Warner was slated for demolition in the early 1980s until the non-profit Northwest Connecticut Association for the Arts (NCAA) was founded and purchased the theatre. The Warner reopened as a performing arts center in 1983, and restoration of the main lobbies and auditorium was completed in November 2002. In 2008, the new 50,000 square foot Carole and Ray Neag Performing Arts Center, which houses a 300 seat studio theatre, 200 seat restaurant and expansive school for the arts, was completed. Today, the Warner is in operation year-round with more than 160 performances and 100,000 patrons passing through its doors each season. Over 10,000 students, pre K-adult, participate in arts education programs and classes. Together, with the support of the community, the Warner has raised close to $17 million to revitalize its facilities. NCAA’s mission is to preserve the Warner Theatre as an historic landmark, enhance its reputation as a center of artistic excellence and a focal point of community involvement, and satisfy the diverse cultural needs of the region. To learn more about the Warner Theatre, visit www.warnertheatre.org.

A remarkable photographic chronicle by legendary Life Magazine photojournalist Bill Eppridge of the Beatles’ historic 1964 visit to the United States will be featured in a Western Connecticut State University Art Gallery exhibition that will open Tuesday, Jan. 19, and continue through Saturday, March 13, at the university’s Visual and Performing Arts Center. A collection of 55 black-and-white photographs taken by Eppridge during his coverage for Life of the British rock group’s visit to New York and Washington from Feb. 7 through 12, 1964, will be shown in the exhibition, “The Beatles: Six Days That Changed the World,” sponsored by the WCSU Department of Art.

Eppridge, who resided in New Milford in his later years, died in October 2013 in Danbury after an extraordinary career as a photojournalist spanning 60 years. He is widely recognized for capturing iconic images of contemporary history including the Beatles’ Feb. 9, 1964, appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and the poignant image on June 6, 1968, of a busboy kneeling beside the mortally wounded Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in a Los Angeles hotel kitchen moments after his assassination. “You are not just a photojournalist,” he said in recalling the Kennedy image. “You’re a historian.”

Yet the WCSU exhibition of selections from his 1964 Beatles tour photo shoot, which consumed more than 90 rolls of film and 3,000 photographs, would have been impossible without the mysterious recovery of these images seven years after they went missing and the painstaking work of Eppridge’s editor and wife, Adrienne Aurichio, to review and organize this vast photo archive into a comprehensive record of the Beatles’ tour as it unfolded.

Aurichio recalled in a 2014 essay for CBS News marking the 50th anniversary of the Beatles’ “Ed Sullivan Show” appearance that the 26-year-old Eppridge found himself in the right place on the morning of Feb. 7, 1964, to draw the assignment from Life Magazine photography director Dick Pollard to cover the Beatles’ arrival that day at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York. He followed the Beatles as Life’s photo correspondent throughout the first six days of their U.S. tour, shooting spontaneous images documenting performances, rehearsals and private moments during the tour that established the group as an international rock ‘n’ roll sensation.

At the time, Life Magazine published just four of the images from Eppridge’s assignment, and the original film submitted to the Time-Life photo lab for processing could not be located when he attempted several months later to retrieve the images. By his account, at least seven years passed before the film turned up on his desk with no explanation of how it had been recovered. Aurichio’s role in re-creating Eppridge’s Life photo chronicle of the 1964 Beatles tour began in 1993 when she came across one of his prints from the shoot while researching photographs for a magazine project. Intrigued at the prospect of discovering more photos from the Beatles visit, she soon learned the full story of Eppridge’s recovered film chronicle, which provided the images featured in the WCSU exhibition and in the book, “The Beatles: Six Days That Changed the World,” released in 2014 by Rizzoli Publishing.

In his acknowledgments for the book, Eppridge noted that Aurichio played a critical part as co-editor in “piecing together my story. I relied on her vision and experience as an editor to research and unravel the photographs, and then pull them together in chronological order.” Aurichio observed that Eppridge’s photographs of the Beatles’ 1964 visit reflect the fact that “he made pictures as they happened, never staging anything. The pictures are so personal. You know that there

Featuring 40 quilts from artists of the Women of Color Quilters Network, the Bruce Museum presents “And Still We Rise: Race, Culture and Visual Conversations” from January 16 through April 24, 2016. Using the powerful medium of story quilts, the exhibition narrates nearly four centuries of African-American history, from the first slave ships to the first African American president and beyond. This exhibition, now on a national tour, is curated by Dr. Carolyn Mazloomi and presented by the Women of Color Quilters Network in partnership with Cincinnati Museum Center and National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.

The exhibition gives voice to personal, authentic, and unique histories of African-American men and women from relating painful stories of enslaved ancestors, to highlighting contemporary political leaders and drawing attention to social challenges our nation continues to face today,” explains guest curator Mazloomi, who is an accomplished artist, writer, former aerospace engineer and founder of the Women of Color Quilters Network.

The beautifully hand-crafted quilts narrate stories of the African-American experience that include Phillis Wheatley, the first African American woman to have her work published (in 1773); the Harlem Renaissance; baseball legend Jackie Robinson; Academy Award-winning actor Hattie McDaniel; Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm and the tragedy of Trayvon Martin.
Story quilting is an art form that goes beyond the simple quilting patterns familiar to many people. It expands on traditional textile-arts techniques to record, in fabric, events of personal or historical significance. Through the accessibility of their colors, patterns and symbols, the quilts of “And Still We Rise” relate narratives that enable conversations about sensitive topics from our national history, furthering the discussion of racial reconciliation in America.

For more information www.visitfairfieldcountyct.com.

TheatreWorks New Milford has announced their 50th Anniversary 2017 season which includes five main-stage shows, five free staged readings, and plans for their ongoing TheatreWorks Kids (TW Kids) program.

The main stage season will kick off in February with Peter and the Starcatcher by Rick Elice with music by Wayne Barker. This musical play is billed as a “grownup’s prequel to Peter Pan” and is the innovative and imaginative story based on the novel by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson. A company of a dozen actors play more than a hundred unforgettable characters, all on a journey to answer the century-old question: How did Peter Pan become The Boy Who Never Grew Up? The play is under the direction of Alicia Dempster of Danbury.

In May comes an adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, a satire on the perils of Stalinism. This adaptation by Ian Woolridge is a parabolic exploration of totalitarianism anywhere, and has given the world at least one immortal phrase: “Some are more equal than others.” The animals on a farm drive out their master and take over and run the farm themselves. The experiment is successful, except that the pigs who assume leadership show that their character does not equal their superior intelligence. The show is under the direction of Kevin Sosbe of New Milford.
Summer brings a unique rock and roll musical from Off-Broadway, Zombie Prom, book by John Dempsey with music by Dana P. Rowe. Zombie Prom is the fictional story of a teenage boy who is literally brought back to life by the love of his high-school sweetheart. Directed by Matt Austin, this sharp- witted contemporary show has been touted by New York Law Journal as being “brighter and better-crafted than both The Rocky Horror Show and Grease put together, with 1950’s musical wit and breathtakingly catchy, rich melodies.”

Director Brad Blake returns to TheatreWorks in September with Stephen Sondheim’s classic musical, Merrily We Roll Along. This tale which runs backwards in time from 1976 to 1955, examines the lives of three people whose friendship is tested by time, events, ambition and fate. It crackles with the wit, humor and intensity that embody the spirit of New York City and the true meaning of ‘making it’ will lift your spirits and break your heart.

Wrapping up the season in December is a romantic comedy by Sarah Ruhl, Stage Kiss, directed by Nina Agostine Smith of Waterbury. Stage Kiss is a blend of lively comedy and backstage farce which brings together two actors whose former love affair ended disastrously. They meet in a new production of a bad 1930’s romance, playing – what else? – former lovers who fall in love all over again.

For more information on the 2017 Mainstage Season, the Page2Stage Staged Reading Series, the TheatreWorks Kids’ program, and to purchase tickets and subscriptions, visit theatreworks.us or call the box office at (860) 350-6863.