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Galleries / Arts & Culture

Charleston Staged

Photography Aleece Sophia; courtesy of Charleston Stage & Kate Thornton PhotographyPhotos 23Issue May 2023
A Christmas Carol in 2022.JFK and Inga Binga.Disney's The Little Mermaid in 2017.Next to Normal in 2014.Shakespeare in Love in 2018.The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time in 2019.Chief Resident: Julian Wiles at the Dock Street Theatre, where the regional theater company he founded has been in residence since 1978.Filling Seats: Wiles launched Charleston Stage in 1978 with little more than a dream and has grown it to an award-winning professional company known for presenting challenging, moving, and entertaining productions, like The Seat of Justice (above), a Wiles’s original produced in 2004 and 2016 that explored racism and South Carolina’s role in the Brown v. Board of Education decision.(Left to right) Wiles’s dedicated donors include long-standing supporters like Mary Ellen Way and The Sottile Foundation.Marybeth Clark has worked alongside Wiles since 1997 and will step into his shoes as artistic director.In 2010, Wiles was honored with The Elizabeth O’Neill Verner Award (now known as the Governor’s Award for the Arts), alongside author Pat Conroy and artist Jonathan Green.“Education has always been integral to who we are,” says Wiles, who founded the company for youth theater.Today, the TheatreSchool summer program (formerly called SummerStage) introduces 300-some children to the theater arts.“Theater is like family,” says Wiles, whose own family (daughter Marianna, Wiles’s late mother Erline, son Nicholas, and wife Jenny Hane) has been involved in Charleston Stage in numerous capacities, from sewing costumes to participating in the school.Wiles and Jenny, a retired educator.Broad Casting: Large-scale productions with custom-tailored costumes, professionally designed scenes, and full hair and makeup are what audiences have come to expect from the city’s most established theater company. This photograph was featured in the 2010-11 ticket brochure to represent all of the productions that season.In Tune: Musicals and original screenplays and scores are regulars in the company’s lineup, including the production of Gershwin at Folly in 2007. The Gershwin family and estate made the full catalogue available to Wiles, who was able to incorporate the original full-scale music.Street Smarts: The company’s “first blockbuster,” says Wiles, was his original musical, Seize the Street!, staged in 1979 on top of a parking garage.The half-pipe production was reprised in 1994 and toured England in 1983.Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat was one of the first Broadway shows Wiles ever saw, and one of the first he produced as a College of Charleston student.he Ghost of Theater Future: Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol was Charleston Stage’s first production in 1978, complete with greenery hauled from Wiles’ parents’ farm and furniture schlepped from his apartment. Fresh takes on family-friendly classics have been a mainstay of the company’s repertoire.Fact & Farce: In this season’s staging of JFK and Inga Binga, a reprise and revision of Wiles’s work first produced in 2012, “I played it up more as a farce, while staying true to known facts,” says Wiles. This is among the seven of his 30 original plays to be published.Wiles at the Dock Street Theatre in 2010.

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As Julian Wiles takes his final bow after 45 years as the founding director of Charleston Stage, the show goes on, stronger than ever
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