Holiday Happenings

By Brianne Harrison

The holidays are here, and there are plenty of ways to get into the spirit this weekend. Here are some of our favorites:

Jingle All the Way Holiday Run, 12/3: Jog off some of your holiday indulgence and raise money for Special Olympics New Jersey. Dress up in your most festive running gear (prizes for the best outfits!), bring some friends or family members, and join the fun!

Festival of Trees, 12/2-1/10/10: Morven Museum & Garden in Princeton is dressing up for the holidays. Trees decorated by area businesses and organizations will be gracing the museum’s galleries—stop by and be inspired!

Holiday Light Show, 12/3-1/3/10: Be amazed as over 100 Christmas trees, floating on Lake Meone, light up to music in an orchestrated show. There will also be a Christmas Train, a Magical Talking Tree, and Story Time with Mrs. Claus every weekend in December.

“A Dickens of a Weekend,” 12/4-5: Catch a trolley in Spring Lake and enjoy costumed carolers, a scavenger hunt honoring Dickens’ Mr. Fezziwig, a Dickens-themed cocktail party, and a performance of “Scrooge”.

Cape May’s 36th Annual Christmas Candlelight House Tours, 12/5, 12/12, and 12/19: What better way to see Victorian Cape May than by candlelight? Explore at least 14 homes, inns, hotels, and churches decorated for the holidays while listening to carolers and strolling musicians.

Model Train Exhibit and Tree Lighting Ceremony, 12/4-29: The Barron Arts Center turns on their lights at their annual Tree Lighting Ceremony this weekend. There will also be collections for the Mayor’s Food Bank and for Angel PAWS, a non-profit organization dedicated to finding homes for stray, homeless, and abandoned animals.

Sister’s Christmas Catechism, 12/5: CSI meets Bethlehem as the Sister of Late Nite Catechism takes on The Mystery of the Magi’s Gold.

Messiah-A Sacred Oratorio by George Frideric Handel, 12/6: The New Brunswick Chamber Orchestra partners with the State Theatre to perform one of Handel’s most celebrated works.

New Jersey's Theater District

By Brianne Harrison

I had the pleasure this past weekend of attending the Dublin Symphony Orchestra's performance at the State Theatre of New Jersey in New Brunswick. I'm a little embarrassed to admit that, despite the fact that I've lived less than 40 minutes away for the past three years, I'd never been to the State Theatre. I'd hardly ever been to New Brunswick. After this weekend's performance, however, I definitely plan to return to both.

The State Theatre looks tiny from the outside, but once you're inside you're in a huge space that doesn't appear to have a single bad seat. The acoustics are great; the decor tastefully art deco. And the entertainment's top-notch too. The Dublin Orchestra has moved on, but there's something for everyone in the coming months: The Russian National Ballet Theatre will be performing Cinderella, the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra takes the stage on March 7 and 22, Dora the Explorer Live runs March 10-11, Hairspray takes its bows two nights in a row, the National Acrobats of China will arrive in April, and Opera A La Carte will present the Mikado. If you're looking to introduce the younger members of your family to theater, there's Milk and Cookies, a lively, interactive series of free performances featuring storytelling, music, puppetry, and more. Six of these events (three in spring and three in fall) are staged each year. The next one is scheduled for March 14.

The State Theatre's location, in the middle of the cultural district, means it's easy to make a trip to the theater a night out. The Heldrich Hotel, which houses Christopher's Restaurant and Daryl Wine Bar and restaurant, is right across the street, and surrounding the theater are a number of chic restaurants and bars offering anything you could possibly want for dinner (or lunch, if you're catching a matinee).

If nothing at the State Theatre appeals, there are several other theaters in the immediate area, including the George Street Playhouse and the Crossroads Theatre Co., which won a Tony Award for best regional theater in 1999.

New Brunswick is one of New Jersey's most successful urban-renewal stories, and the cultural district is an excellent example of that. It's definitely worth a visit--or three.

Reexamining the World’s Oldest Profession

By Brianne Harrison

Mrs. Warren’s Profession, currently onstage at Princeton’s Berlind Theater, is a play of surprises both for the audience and the characters. The characters, particularly Mrs. Warren’s cold, unsentimental, highly educated daughter, Vivie and her layabout suitor, Frank, are shocked to learn that Mrs. Warren’s fortune has been made through prostitution, a subject rarely onstage now, and one that was particularly taboo back when the play was written, in 1893.

That a play like this should have been written in the last gasp of the straitlaced Victorian era is one surprise for the audience. That it should be sympathetic to Mrs. Warren’s choice of profession, the plight of women at that time, and written by a man are three more. That man is George Bernard Shaw, one of the preeminent playwrites of his time.

Shaw is perhaps best known to today’s audiences for Pygmalion, which inspired My Fair Lady. With Mrs. Warren, Shaw takes one of the ideas developed in Pygmalion a bit further: it’s hard for a Victorian woman on her own. Even with her education and polish, Eliza Doolittle’s only real option is working in a flower shop—barely a step above peddling nosegays in Covent Garden. The young Mrs. Warren faced a similar problem. Women’s work at that time was low-paid, menial, and often dangerous (the character gives a vivid description of a sister who dies working in a lead factory). So, she used what she had to get by: a pretty face, which she eventually parlayed into a profitable franchise.

This play is not only about “the profession” (which is never mentioned by name), but also about the relationships between mother and daughter and the struggles women faced to achieve economic stability and be viewed by men as equals (a subject that many of us can connect with even today). Vivie, who stomps around and acts like a bratty teenager who naturally thinks she knows more than her mother throughout most of the first two acts, is a woman ahead of her time. Cambridge-educated, she has no use for romance and even comes across as quite masculine, with her hand-crushing handshake, love of mathematics (a pursuit which was essentially reserved for men at that time), and rejection of marriage and family life. Despite this, the men in the play view her as a child who needs protection. Her mother doesn’t fare much better, in their estimation. But these women clearly don’t need protecting—they’ve done just fine on their own. No fainting Angels of the Household here.

The play has its problems for sure (including a mixed-message ending) but it, like Vivie, was ahead of its time and deserves some notice because of that. Prostitution is still a subject that raises eyebrows and invokes stereotypes, but what Shaw understood was that for some women, it wasn’t a bad job at all. It’s certainly nothing to be ashamed of—it’s not a sin, it’s business. A profession, like any other.