Hawaii
Maui students
have a lock on
Shakespeare contestFOR many years now, I've been a judge in the English-speaking Union's high-school Shakespeare competition, where winners from participating schools gather at Wo International Center and do a monologue and later recite a sonnet, with cash prizes going to all and a trip to New York and national competition for the winner. The judges have no idea what school each contestant represents, but for the third time in the past few competitions, the winner has come from Maui. Jon Beavers of Baldwin High won this year with his hilarious monologue of a drunken porter in "Macbeth." Winner in both her junior and senior years was Cassandra Wormser of Maui's Seabury Hall and now a drama student at UH who most recently starred in a Peking Opera there ... It wasn't a trip to Manhattan, but 30 Hawaiian-immersion students from Molokai's Kualapu'u Elementary were thrilled nonetheless when they were flown to Honolulu to participate in the 2002 Governor's International Conference on Volunteerism. Kumu Henry Pali reports fund-raising efforts on the Friendly Isle could only bring 13 students to the Big City, but First Hawaiian Bank said "No way," and funded the trip so all 30 could attend, thanks to a special fare from Island Air ...
NOT that we don't have our share of beauties in the Islands, anyway, but visiting this week is Miss Southeast Texas 2002, a prep for the Miss Texas contest, and she's being shown around by Miss Downtown Honolulu 2002 Liane Mark. The two spoke and sang yesterday for Big Brothers/Big Sisters and tomorrow morning will be at Kamiloiki Elementary with the Positive Connections program, and at Kapiolani Hospital from 1-3 p.m. tomorrow ...
Tropics topics
SOCIALITE Carol Brooks invited a couple hundred of her closest friends to the Tropics Showroom of the Hilton Hawaiian Village Saturday night to see the lounge show British entertainer Stuart Gasston presents on cruise ships around the world. He mixed a variety of tunes ranging from "Jekyll/ Hyde" and "Les Miserables" to wizened vocal takeoffs on the likes of Perry Como and Billy Eckstein. He also told some British jokes I enjoyed. Emcee Jimmy Borges kept things going after Gasston's show, doing a few tunes himself and calling up the likes of Kanoe Cazimero, Larry Paxton, Stefanie Smart, former Miss Hawaii Candes Gentry and even yours truly to sing a parody I wrote many years ago about hostess bars, "Korea," with apologies to Leonard Bernstein ...
Mark your calendars
IT'S oldies-but-goodies time on Hawaii's theater scene. Army Community Theatre is reviving "Flower Drum Song" through March 16 at Fort Shafter; Manoa Valley Theatre opens its revival of "Song of Singapore" tomorrow night; "Mame" will appear at Diamond Head Theatre March 20; Brad Powell is reprising The Actor's Group's venerable comedy, "Harvey," at the Yellow Brick Studio on Keawe St.; and Joyce Maltby, fresh from doing the new musical version of James Joyce's "The Dead," is moving into safer territory with the Kaufman & Hart comedy, "You Can't Take it With You" opening April 5 at HPU ...
Dave Donnelly has been writing on happenings
in Hawaii for the Star-Bulletin since 1968.
The Week That Was recalls items from Dave's 30 years of columns.Contact Dave by e-mail: ddonnelly@starbulletin.com