harold and maude

Based on the 1971 cult film, the Paper Mill Playhouse’s 2005 world premiere of “Harold & Maude: The Musical” starred Academy Award winner Estelle Parsons in one of the most unconventional love stories ever written. When Harold, a 19 year-old obsessed with death, meets Maude, a vivacious and eccentric 79-year-old widow, an unlikely May-December romance blooms, as Maude becomes a life-affirming beacon for this self-destructive rich boy. With music by newcomer Joseph Thalkin and lyrics by theater veteran Tom Jones (The Fantasticks), the very creation of “Harold & Maude: The Musical” offers another variation on the May-December theme.

• also visit
  www.papermill.org

Estelle Parsons & Eric Millegan, featured in the musical adaptation of “Harold & Maude”

bucky

Most people have heard of the charismatic jazz guitarist John Pizzarelli. Jazz devotees probably knew about his dad Bucky first. As Bucky tells it, John avoided jazz - a genre his father had mastered - and played rock music before going full circle to become one of the most famous contemporary jazz musicians in the world. State of the Arts visits with Bucky, and learns how music runs in the family.

hear bucky and john play “three little words" from the album: the pizzarellis, bucky and john: contrasts - arbors records, 1998

• also visit
  www.riverwalk.org/profiles/pizzarelli_b.htm

Bucky & John Pizzarelli

Guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli

young composer

Kyle Boatwright’s choral composition Rain was the Grand Prize winner of the 2004 Harmonium Choral Society competition for high school composers throughout New Jersey. The composition is a setting to “Rain,” a poem by Robert Creeley. Boatwright wrote the piece while a student at Princeton Day School, in Princeton, New Jersey, where she studied composition with the renowned composer and jazz pianist Laurie Altman. State of the Arts introduces viewers to both teacher and student, as a way of exploring the how the right mentor can make such a profound difference in the life and career of an artist.

watch a performance of “rain”
read robert creeley’s poem, “rain”

• also visit
  www.harmonium.org

Composer Kyle Boatwright

Kyle Boatwright and her mentor, Laurie Altman

dollmaker

Born in California in the 1930’s, the innocence of Fusaye Kazaoka’s childhood was shattered when all Japanese-Americans living on the west coast were deported to internment camps following the attack on Pearl Harbor. After the war, Kazaoka and her family found both work and tolerance in Charles Seabrook’s vegetable processing plant in Seabrook, New Jersey. Currently living in Bridgeton, Kazaoka has developed into a master of both Japanese doll making and origami and is committed to sharing with others the arts and culture of her family’s native Japan.

Watch a story about the Japanese American community in South Jersey, focusing on the Seabrook Buddhist Temple (where Fusaye Kazaoka is a long-time member)

• also visit
  www.wheatonvillage.org/downjersey/featuredfolkartists/fusayekazaoka
  www.origami.com

Japanese craft artist Fusaye Kazaoka