This week: Queen’s Hall debut of Theresa Awai’s “Coming Home”

Director Raymond Choo Kong makes some adjustments to the cast photo, with Nikki Crosby, Clifford Learmond, Caroline Taylor and Cecilia Salazar standing around playwright Theresa Awai

Every role is challenging for me in its own way, but dramatic roles (in comedy-loving, or comedy-acclimated, Trini audiences) prove the most terrifying before a play’s debut.

Still, it is not often that an award-winning team of local actors are assembled on one stage, led by an award-winning director in a gripping local play by an award-winning local playwright.

Written by Cacique Award-winning actor and playwright Theresa Awai, “Coming Home” is a provocative, poignant, funny and ultimately heart-warming new work that tells the story of how one family’s decades’ old secrets, jealousies, and rivalries are uncovered when four strong-willed siblings battle over their deceased mother’s will. As the action unfolds, we find that blood is indeed thicker than water… until everyone reads the will.

Cacique Award-winning director Raymond Choo Kong has pushed himself and the whole cast to dig deep for this challenging work, giving audiences a rare opportunity to see some of Trinidad’s most well-known actors – often best-known for their comedic skills – showing their dramatic chops. That I can most certainly testify to!

The talented cast features Cecilia Salazar, holder of a record nine Cacique Awards and fresh off her triumphant portrayal of Gene Miles, as eldest sister Kathleen. The ever-popular and multiple Cacique Award winning Nikki Crosby and Clifford Learmond play Kathleen’s two younger siblings Elizabeth and Julius, while newcomer Caroline Taylor (errr, me) – winner of Commonwealth and Hutchinson awards for Theatre – plays estranged baby sister Jennifer. Rounding out the cast are veteran actor and radio personality Maurice Brash, alongside Rachel Bascombe-Koranteng and Chris Smith.

The hard-hitting family drama unfolds at the Queen’s Hall from Thursday 29 March through Sunday 1 April, with an opening night special where all tickets are just $100 each. Tickets Friday through Sunday are $150 general and $200 reserved seating, and go on sale at the Queen’s Hall Box Office on Monday 26 March, 12pm–6pm daily, tel: (868) 624-1284. Showtimes are 8:30pm Thursday through Saturday, and 6:30pm on Sunday. Tickets are also be available from Green Street Sports Bar & Grill (667-2495); Zippers (Ellerslie Plaza, 628-7978, & West Mall, 633-8308); Stetchers Trincity Mall (640-9274); Michael & Jody’s Gulf City Complex (653-0404); and the Card Gallery Price Plaza Chaguanas (672-9842). For more information email raymondchookong@yahoo.com; or call (868) 384-8663 or (868) 320-8215.

Huge thanks to yesterday’s opening night audience (& for letting us know dis “hard-hitting family drama is in fact a Trini dram-edy! LOL). Big big love to my sistas Cecilia & Nikki – it has been an honour (& a terror) to share the stage with you – & to the whole cast & crew: Clifford, Chris, Rachel, Maurice, Celia, Gregory, & Raymond. Now to try put something in de gas tank for de next three nights!

Hopefully this won’t be the only run… but we shall see…! Thanks & blessings. And happy Liberation Day!!!

Mar 2 2012

The 20th anniversary of Caribbean Beat magazine

Our exciting new 20th anniversary issue (#114: March/April 2012) of Caribbean Beat is on Caribbean Airlines planes; in the mail to subscribers; and online, where you can also access a complete flip-book of the current issue.

Looking forward, and looking back

Over our 20 years publishing Caribbean Beat for BWIA and now Caribbean Airlines at MEP Publishers, we’ve had the privilege of working with some of the finest writers, designers, photographers, sales reps and editors in the region.

Our beloved editor for the past five years has been longtime Beat contributor Judy Raymond, who shortly takes up her new position as editor-in-chief at the Trinidad & Tobago Guardian newspaper. The last two Beat issues have been some of her finest, and we thank her for her outstanding work with the magazine.

We also bid farewell to two other wonderful colleagues, Helen Shair-Singh and on-the-job trainee Ariann Thompson. As with all in the Beat family, we look forward to their continued contributions to the magazine, though now in a different capacity.

We take the opportunity now to welcome new international sales rep Yuri Chin Choy to the fold, and welcome back our former editor Nicholas Laughlin this May, joining founding editor Jeremy Taylor and contributing editor Caroline Taylor on our editorial team. Stay tuned for details of our exciting new editorial board – as always, the Beat is in the finest hands!

So a very special thanks to all our readers, advertisers, contributors and partners over the last 20 years, who’ve made Beat one of the longest-running and most widely read magazines in the Caribbean diaspora! We remain as ever the magazine of the true Caribbean.

Here’s to the next 20 years!

Photo above: The MEP staff and Caribbean Beat team in the garden outside our offices in late 2011. Standing (left to right): Jeremy Taylor, Denise Chin, Halcyon Salazar, Hazel Mansing, Jacqueline Smith, Judy Raymond, and Caroline Taylor. Seated (left to right): Ariann Thompson, Kevon Webster, Joanne Mendes, Helen Shair-Singh, and Bridget van Dongen. Photo: Ariann Thompson.

A full version of this post is also available on the MEP website.

Jan 9 2012

MEP partners with Piranha for full-scale recycling programme! :)

International Recycling Symbol (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We’re fairly tree-huggy over at my day job at MEP Publishers. Over the last few years, we’ve slowly moved closer and closer to being as green a publishing company as one can be in Trinidad and Tobago. We donate as many working electronic items as we can to schools and nonprofits. We’ve recycled paper for several years with ACE Recycling (and used “draft” mode and printed on both sides as much as possible). We try to keep run the airconditioning as tepidly as possible. We’ve switched to using printing partners for our books and magazines that use more sustainable materials (paper, ink, machinery) and processes (literally saving millions of pages of paper each year).

Piranha: recycling beacon

And now, through a partnership with Piranha International – the only company in Trinidad, as far as I know, that handles virtually every form of recyclable and e-waste – we can now extend that to recycling glass, plastics, aluminium, e-waste and more.

Piranha is a company that people probably have read about in the newspapers, as they’ve formed several partnerships with other local businesses – Plastikeep, Guardian Holdings, the Trinidad & Tobago Film Festival, Brian MacFarlane, the Tourism Development Company, and others.

So, with Piranha, we’re delighted to finally have created a system for preventing our various waste products from ending up in a landfill. It also saves our staff members from having to take their recyclables to numerous different places in trying to be ecologically responsible. Even for someone who gets as excited by recycling as I do, the ritual was becoming a bit tiresome.

A longer verion of this post can be found on on the MEP Publishers website.

Jan 6 2012

Birthday astrological musings

Happiness isn’t a state you acquire by luck. It takes hard work and relentless concentration. You have to rise up and rebel against the nonstop flood of trivial chaos and meaningless events you’re invited to wallow in. You have to overcome the hard-core cultural conditioning that tempts you to assume that suffering is normal and the world is a hostile place. It’s really quite unnatural to train yourself to be peaceful and mindful; it’s essentially a great rebellion against an unacknowledged taboo. Here’s the good news: 2012 will be an excellent time for you to do this work…

A definition of depilated Beauty: The Birth of Venus (1486), by Sandro Botticelli. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In Botticelli‘s painting The Birth of Venus, the goddess of beauty and love is shown arriving on dry land for the first time after having been born in the ocean. Naked, she is trying to cover her private parts with her hand and thigh-length hair. Her attendant, a fully clothed nymph, is bringing a cloak to cover her up. Analyzing this scene, art critic Sister Wendy suggests it’s actually quite sad. It symbolizes the fact that since we humans can’t bear the confrontation with sublime beauty, we must always keep it partly hidden. Your assignment in the coming year, Capricorn, is to overcome this inhibition. I invite you to retrain yourself so that you can thrive in the presence of intense, amazing, and transformative beauty.

– Robert Breszny

Jan 6 2012

New interview with Kathy & Karen Norman (K2K) on Discover, and new issue of Beat

Machel Montano on the cover of Caribbean Beat issue 113 (January-February 2012)

It’s 2012 (my birthday, actually!), and we’ve started the year with a bang!

At Discover Trinidad & Tobago’s website, we’ve just added a new interview with debutante mas band designers Karen and Kathy Norman (K2K), the ladies behind the new medium-category, all-inclusive Carnival band “The Waters – Seas of Consciousness”. Read all about them here.

Over at sister publication Caribbean Beat, we sent out our newsletter yesterday (if you haven’t already subscribed, you can view the last edition or sign up for free here), featuring all the buzz around Trinidad & Tobago Carnival, what’s happening around the region, and much more.

It also highlights the new Caribbean Beat website (which I’ve been working on since 2009!) and heralds Beat’s five-year anniversary of publishing under Caribbean Airlines, and upcoming 20th anniversary issue this March/April.

And of course, you can keep up to date with all the action via our newsletter; via Twitter; and via the Facebook pages for Discover Trinidad & Tobago and Caribbean Beat.

We hope the new year has started well for you! Stay tuned for our favourite soca picks for Carnival 2012 thus far…!

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Looking forward, and looking back

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Piranha: recycling beacon

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