Shakespeare & Company Gala 2025

Honoring Annette Miller and John Douglas Thompson

By: Charles Giuliano - Jun 30, 2025

Gala 25 of Shakespeare & Company honored alumni of its Center for Acting Training, Annette Miller and John Douglas Thompson. Both are distinguished “lifers” who have been with the company for more than 20 years. Annette was already an established actor when she enrolled.

Initially in sales, after seeing an August Wilson play at Yale Rep, John got a late start in theatre. He enrolled in the Brown University/Trinity Repertory Company program in Providence, Rhode Island. Having completed a two year program he spent that summer of 1994 in training at S&Co. That led to a distinguished career performing the major roles in the canon. He recently performed Othello at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Currently he is a part of the HBO series The Gilded Age. He will participate in a reading at S&Co. later this summer.

Currently Miller, with Stephanie Clayman, and Yvette King, appears as a Holocaust survivor in The Victim. The one-act play by Lawrence Goodman has opened to rave reviews for its world premiere. She is best known for her one woman play Golda’s Balcony.

She is the winner of the 2003 Elliot Norton Award and IRNE Award for Best Actress as Golda Meir. She received an Elliot Norton nomination for Best Actress for Martha Mitchell Calling in 2008. At Shakespeare & Company, she has appeared in Richard III (Duchess), The Ladies Man (Madame Aigreville), Martha Mitchell Calling (Martha), which she also toured at Stageworks Hudson (Best Actress, Independent News 2007), The Actors Playhouse, and at the Nora Theater Co. (2009 Elliot Norton Award nominee); Full Gallop (Diana Vreeland); Golda ' s Balcony (Golda); Love Letters and Ancestral Voices (with A.R. Gurney); Collected Stories (Ruth Steiner); Richard III (Margaret); Twelfth Night (Maria); Merchant of Venice (Nerissa) and Ethan Frome (Zenobia).

On Broadway, she appeared in The Odd Couple, female version (Sylvie), and Off Broadway in The Primary English Class (Debbie Wastba). In Boston , she appeared at the Shubert Theater in Dance of Death (Woman with Ben Gazzara, Colleen Dewhurst), Nobody Dies on Friday at A.R.T. (Paula Strasberg), The Seagull (Arkadina), Hamlet (Gertrude), The Cherry Orchard (Madam Ranyevskaya), Glass Menagerie (Amanda), and Sisters Rosensweig (Sarah). She has appeared in such films as Autumn Heart, Next Karate Kid, Night School, Boardwalk, and The Company Men, and on television in As the World Turns (Smythe/Bettina)  and Brotherhood (Kate).

Thompson is a Tony Award nominee and the recipient of two Drama Desk Awards, three Obie Awards, an Outer Critics Circle Award, and a Lucille Lortel Award. Astrid and I first saw him at S&Co. in 2008. Early on I found his Richard III problematic. My paradigm for the role was Sir Lawrence Olivier’s. It was a film I often presented to students.

That got us off to a bad start but the beginning of passionate debates and many interviews. As a jazz critic I was involved in the Terry Teachout one-man-play Satchmo a the Waldorf. To help John with research I cut a set of Armstrong CD’s as well as those of Jelly Roll Morton. The play focuses on Satchmo later in his career when he was more of a celebrity than cutting edge musician as he had been in his youth.

In the summer of 2013 we had lunch in Pittsfield and he had just performed the August Wilson play Joe Turner’s Come and Gone in LA at Mark Taper Theatre. I asked him about it.

“It’s the role that made me want to be an actor,” he said. “It was a dream come true because I thought I would never have a chance to do it. I thought I was getting too long in the tooth to play Herald Loomis.

(Joe Turner's Come and Gone, 1984, is the second in a series of August Wilson's The Century Cycle, which chronicled the struggles and lives of African Americans in the 20th century. It is set in the second decade of the 20th century and chronicles the lives of a few freed former enslaved African Americans in the North.)

“As Wilson wrote him he’s 32-years-old. When I was out there playing him I went from 49 to 50. We went up May 8 and my birthday was May 28. Obviously, age-wise, I’m too old to play the character. I knew that going into it that I might never get the opportunity to play it because I’m too old now. So I was very thankful when Phylicia Rashad asked me to be in the production; to play Herald Loomis.

“It was a full circle event for me in my life. It’s part of my own personal mythology. The whole event of going to that play. The date that didn’t show up. Going to the play myself. Seeing this work was perhaps the second or third play I had seen in my life. Being so profoundly moved by the story. The nobility of all these African Americans on stage; all at once in the same play.

“I had romanticized this play in my mind over and over and over again. When and if I get a chance to be in it. My biggest challenge when I got the role was moving away from romanticizing it; the play and the character and the role. And start to do the hard work of understanding the character and truly understanding the play. Understanding what August Wilson was trying to get across to the audience.

“It was really really hard for me. It didn’t turn out the way I had been fantasizing about it. Thank God I had Phylicia Rashad. She guided me through this maze. It’s one of those roles you could so easily turn into anger. You’re very upset about what’s happened to you in your life. You hate people. You hate everybody. You hate yourself so all that comes out of you is pure anger because of the situation. She was there as a faithful guide to direct me to some vulnerable aspects of the character, which really helped me.”

Though regarded primarily for his classic roles he has explored a wide range of diverse work. After touring with Satchmo in 2015 he told me. ” I come back to New York to do The Father and The Doll’s House in rotating rep at Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn. I play The Captain in Strindberg’s The Father and Torvald in Ibsen’s The Doll’s House. As far as I know this repertory has never been done before, certainly not in this country or internationally. Strindberg and Ibsen were not the best of friends. These plays seem to be in dialogue with one another.

“My roles in both plays are similar in that I'm playing a husband and father but differ in their approaches to the male dynamic in what would seem to be good marriages somehow gone sour.

“I’ve done some Ibsen in the past, I did Hedda Gabler at New York Theatre Workshop. I played Judge Brack directed by Ivo von Hove, but I’ve never done any Strindberg.

While much in demand he has returned to S&Co. for special projects. He joined Olympia Dukakis in a 2013 production of Mother Courage and Her Children.  She became ill not long after a well received opening. In 2015 he portrayed Ira Aldrich the first black actor to perform Shakespeare on the London Stage. Red Velvet by Lolita Chakrabarti was directed by Daniela Varon.

After a cocktail hour the Gala moved to the theatre. There was a long performance by the large percussion ensemble Berkshire Batteria. The audience wandered in before artistic director, Alyn Burrows, initiated the program which honored Miller and Thompson. They each spoke with eloquence, humor and passion of the lifelong impact of their early education at the Center for Actor Training. A video was projected that included many tributes to them from colleagues and critics.

From the audience, founding artistic director, Tina Packer, gave unscripted remarks about how the Center is the heart and soul of the company mandate. She recalled early days with John and Annette. At the end of his life her husband initiated the Dennis Krausnick Fellowship Fund. It supports diversity and launches the careers of young performers.

There was a fundraising session with patrons raising paddles starting at the level of $10,000. There were more and more raised in categories that descended from $5,000 to $1,000, $500 and an avalanche of pledges of $250. It was noted that graduates of the program figure prominently in major theatre education.

To better understand its mandate board president, Bev Hyman, PhD, later told dinner guests that she and her husband attended a Weekend Intensive. She explained that they are not actors and that her husband is a psycho analyst. From the audience, Thompson quipped “He’s an actor.”

Astrid and I were invited to join his table of friends including his chiropractor, manager, the director Daniela Varon who was one of his early teachers, as well as the actress Kelley Curran who appears with him in The Gilded Age.

He was swarmed with well-wishers. It was remarkable to experience his charisma, warmth and energy. I finally got to ask a question.

In episode one of the new season his daughter, a secretary to spinster sisters, takes ill. I asked “Does your daughter die?”

There was a hard pause before he replied “Yes, I know. I could tell you. But then I would have to kill you.”

Curran softened that by telling me that “We have to sign NDA agreements.” We will have to wait and find out but look forward to seeing her this season in episodes 4 and 8.

My “interview” this time was brief and pithy. Before we left John suggested that I review him later in the summer and that we would find time to resume what has evolved as a unique relationship and dialogue.