BY KAREN BOSSICK
R.L. Rowsey has been appointed Company of Fool’s season producer.
And producer, director and theatre consultant Kent Thompson will serve as Company of Fools’ interim producing consultant for the next six months.
Rowsey, a long-standing Company of Fools artist, returned this month to help shape and guide the company’s 23rd season, which will start with this summer’s productions and run through the spring of 2019. He will also work part-time over the next several months to execute the remainder of the company’s 22nd season.
Thompson will help Rowsey assess Company of Fool’s strengths and determine how to focus and structure the company for the future.
Rowsey has directed dozens of community musicals. He sang the title role in Michael Nyman’s “The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat.” R.L. also taught and directed at The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Studio Theatre and Wooly Mammoth Theatre Company before working as musical director and conductor for the national tours of several Broadway Musicals.
He moved to Hailey from Richmond, Va., in 2000 with his partner John Glenn. Rowsey will continue his work as education artistic director for the Sun Valley Summer Symphony, music director for Light on the Mountain Center for Spiritual Living and conductor for Caritas Chorale while serving with Company of Fools.
“I will be working with the Fools not full-time but some hours every week,” he said. “Working to make sure, as others lead conversations about what’s over the horizon, that plays happen. Making sure that Company of Fools continues to connect with this community as it has for decades. I have the pleasure of working with others to determine what Company of Fools’ 23rd season might reflect.”
Company of Fools will unveil its 23rd season not on April Fools Day as is customary because that’s Easter but on April 2, he added.
Thompson served as producing artistic director of Denver Center Theater Company for 12 seasons, producing and directing more than 120 plays and developing the theatre’s artistic and strategic vision. He also promoted the organization at the local, regional and national levels.
Prior to that he was producing artistic director at Alabama Shakespeare Company and on the board of directors of Theater Communications Group, the national organization for the professional nonprofit theatre. Company of Fools was the first theatre in Idaho to be awarded that group’s Constitutuent Theatre status.
Thompson is a graduate of the College of William and Mary and an alumnus of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London.
Rowsey’s knowledge of the community, his artistic voice and his long history with Company of Fools should mesh with Thompson’s experience of growing and guiding successful theaters to create a vibrant path forward, said Kristin Poole, artistic director at the Sun Valley Center for the Arts.
“It’s exciting work—work that we are all eager to begin,” she added.
Ilane Becker, who joined the company in January 2017 as associate artistic director, has stepped down as interim artistic director, resigning from her position. Becker served for several months in an interim leadership capacity following the death of artistic director john Glenn.
She guided Company of Fools through a difficult period, directing a couple of its plays. And she will return to the Wood River Valley this spring to direct the “A Bee Mini-Musical. The play will have student matinees April 19-20 and public performances April 21 and 22.