Bob Chapel spent the entirety of last year on sabbatical: three weeks teaching at the Russian Academy of Theatre Arts in Moscow, directing The Laramie Project at the University of Michigan, and spending a semester as artist in residence at the University of Tasmania.
 No amount of improv could save this season at the Heritage Repertory Theatre—construction and an absent director closed the curtain for 2007. |
“Yet he still managed to cast and hire the Heritage Repertory Theatre’s season through the power of e-mail,” says James Scales, the theater’s assistant business manager, with a stage laugh. Chapel, programming artistic director for Heritage Repertory Theatre (HRT) (www.virginia.edu/heritagerep), had planned a similarly ambitious year for 2007, despite plans to direct a play in Michigan and take part in the summer Semester at Sea session.
Not even the power of e-mail could salvage the 2007 season, however: A recent press release from UVA announced that HRT will abandon the season in light of construction of Ruffin Hall and the Arts Grounds Parking Garage—two projects that closed Culbreth Road to through traffic on December 11. Culbreth Road is projected to reopen in February 2008, and the theater plans to resume performances that summer.
Chapel and Scales talked about finding a new venue, but Chapel, writing from Moscow, says that “there were no other theaters in the area that could accommodate the kind of production values our patrons have come to expect.” They nixed plans to bus patrons to performances, as well—buses could bring ticketholders no closer than Beta Bridge, with a sizable walk (for the silver hairs, anyway) to the Helms and Culbreth theaters where HRT performs.
On the plus side, Chapel says that the Arts Grounds Parking Garage will put an end to fights for parking spaces, a common problem with HRT’s relentless and overlapping performance schedule. Additionally, Chapel plans to repair a hydraulic fly system in Culbreth, installed when the theater opened in 1974.
