By DANIELLE TEPPER

As Olivia Mullen knows, the works of William Shakespeare are a fundamental component of any acting student’s growth as a performer. The Red Bank Catholic junior has shared passions for drama and music, and to her ear, Shakespeare embodies both.

“Shakespeare’s work is beautiful,” she told redbankgreen this week. “It comes to me almost like a song. I’m not nervous performing it.”

Mullen’s heartfelt appreciation of the Bard of Avon won her a spot in the 29th annual English-Speaking Union‘s National Shakespeare Competition held in New York last month.

Each year, high school teachers across the country select two students from their theater classes to audition. In Monmouth County, 15 schools were represented at the regional branch competition at Brookdale Community College, where Mullen took first place.

“I didn’t even expect to be chosen to compete,” said Mullen, 17, of Middletown. “And then I wound up going to New York.”

All the competitors were put up in the International Student Center for a one-night stay, during which they were treated to an acting workshop at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.

“That night, everyone just wanted to talk,” said Mullen. “We were sleeping nine to a room with bunk beds, and everyone was so interested because we were all from different places, but we had a 5 a.m. wake-up call. It was exhausting, but amazing.”

At the semi-finals, held at Lincoln Center on April 23, each student performed a monologue and a sonnet of their choosing. Mullen went with Sonnet 36.

“I picked a sonnet that wasn’t recommended because it’s a bit tricky and complex,” said Mullen. “But I’m glad I chose 36 because no one else did it, and there were a lot of repeats.”

While she may not have won the grand prize (a full scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art’s Young Actors Summer School in London), Mullen said the entire experience had a significant impact on her future plans.

“I’m definitely going to pursue acting, and most schools want some background in Shakespeare,” she said. “It’s a hard skill to acquire, but it’s important to appreciate it.”

Mullen has been researching Carnegie Mellon’s musical theater program as well as the drama program at Juilliard, and said she’s open to either.

“I have a passion for both, so I’d be happy either way,” she said.

By JOHN T. WARD

With hizzoner’s grudging acquiescence, redbankgreen hereby nominates Little Silver Mayor Bob Neff as the Green’s most lyrical mayor.

Neff gets the nod for his state-of-the-borough speech, delivered in the form of a poem shortly after he was sworn in to his first full term Wednesday night.

Neff employed meter and rhyme to recap the past year and dish out recognition to various locals.

Here’s the poem:

Last year, this time, three feet of snow, gave Little Silver fits.

Later still, Irene’s ill will, and earthquake tremors, hit.

Our EMS and Fire Police, our firefighters too,

Police and Public Works prevailed, as they always do.

Nature triumphed only once, our mayor fought that fight,

But Suzy, missing Don (for sure) went into that good night.

Others lost set spirits low – Chief Ambrosino, Chip Connell,

And Bernie Marx, who served our town, they surely did it well.

Retirement blessed Tom Mancuso, Bob Tetley and the Chief.

And Susan Edwards said goodbye, Anita’s her relief.

Memorial Park is now online, from Goff a big hooray.

The courtyard at Point Road is cool (plans by Jim Gilday).

The world’s stage was “occupied,” on Wall Street most of all.

Bin Laden’s end by Seal’s shot – free people cheered his fall.

What’s to come? Well, who’s to say, but issues that loom large,

Are Parker House, replacing bridges, perhaps a new garage?

Spiffed up recreation fields are up for some discussion,

a winery, new homes and more, keep planners’ meetings buzzin’.

Arnold and Smith are new this year, they joined Chief Shaffery,

They’ll keep us safe in two-aught-twelve, the best is yet to be.

With Dan and Don, and Dane and Jon, and thankfully Stuart and Dave,

Your Council works hard, and, says this bard, prudently makes its way.

I’ve missed some names – we know you’re there, and no offense was meant.

Appreciation is the key, our thanks was the intent.

My rhyme is done, the meter’s busted, besides, it’s growing late,

Happy New Year to all of you, who make Little Silver great!

By JOHN T. WARD

The Parker House, Little Silver’s oldest surviving homestead, has won addition to the state Register of Historic Places, Mayor Bob Neff tells redbankgreen.

Neff, a former journalist, sent redbankgreen the following dispatch on the case:

Little Silver – A state review board of noted architects and related experts on historic sites and structures today unanimously approved the nomination of the Parker Homestead to the New Jersey Register of Historic Places.

Inclusion within the register requires satisfaction of rigid criteria, helps protect the site, is an important qualification in grant and aid applications, and clears the way for national recognition.

Mayor Robert Neff Jr., who attended the hearing in Trenton, thanked the state Review Board for Historic Sites for its support for the nomination, which now goes to the State Historic Preservation Officer for listing on the register, and then to Washington, D.C. to be signed onto the National Register of Historic Places, according to Meredith Arms Bzdak, Ph.D, a partner with the borough’s consultant, Mills + Schnoering Architects, LLC.

Preliminary work at the site and the consultant’s fee is being funded through a $44,625 grant from the Garden State Historic Preservation Trust Fund.

“This is an important step on our journey to preserve this important landmark for future generations,” Neff said. “We continue to work with the original grant money, and intend to aggressively seek additional grant money now that the nomination is on its way.”

The Parker Homestead was built by Peter Parker in 1667, and has sections dating to 1720, the early and late 19^th Century, and the 1910s and 1920s. It is located on Rumson Road near Sickles Park. Little Silver, before separating from Shrewsbury, had been known as Parkerville.

Also attending yesterday’s meeting was Councilman Jon Bitman, liaison to the Parker Homestead Board of Trustees, chaired by Monte Edwards. Chester Apy, a member of the board, attended and spoke in support of the nomination.

“It was invigorating listening to the Review Board’s discussion, because they seemed so in support of it, commenting on the beauty of the main house,” Neff said. “This was substantiation by outstanding, objective professionals who truly understand historic structures that this is not just a nice old house, but an historic treasure warranting national recognition.”

The site was listed in 1976 on the state register, which at that time did not entail such a detailed and rigorous application, and did not qualify the site for inclusion on the National Registry, according to Bzdak.

The homestead, which includes a main house and three outlying barns, was acquired by the borough from Julia Parker, the last descendant of the original family, who passed away in 1996. Former Mayor Suzanne Castleman was the driving force behind the acquisition, and she was a strong supporter of the project until her death in July.

Check out this brisk little intro to the world of Red Bank’s Cliff Galbraith, creator of Rat Bastard comic books.

The video is from a series of profiles called Create or Else put together by the ad agency Ogilvy & Mather.

‘Rat Bastard’ tells the gritty, spandex-free tale of Roscoe J. Rodent, a scrawny private detective – and rat –plying his trade in a teeming urban world of the future called ‘Manhattan Empire.’ Once licensed for development as a television cartoon, the concept went dormant with the demise of the UPN network. But Galbraith revived the idea as a conventional panel-framed comic book several years back when he found himself coping with a recurrence of Lyme disease.

“It turned out to be very therapeutic,” Galbraith tells redbankgreen.

“There were people in the company who were aware of me,” Galbraith says of his inclusion in the O&M series, which also spotlights a multimedia artist, a muralist/bike restorer, a Lego sculptor, a rock-magazine publisher and others.

The Galbraith segment was shot at his Harding Road home and elsewhere in town last summer, he says.

Galbraith recently completed another installment of the Rat Bastard series, and plans to introduce the comic as an iPad app in the fall.

By DUSTIN RACIOPPI

John Grandits, the accomplished children’s author and member of the Red Bank library board, is in an especially cheery mood these days.

That’s saying a lot for the ruddy and avuncular 61-year-old, who’s often fueled up on equal amounts of No Joe’s coffee and zest for speaking with schoolkids all over the country.

Earning a star in the Kirkus Book Review and an order for a second edition of your book, which hasn’t even hit bookstore shelves yet, can do that.

“I’m bullish on John Grandits this week,” he said.

After 10 years working on his second children’s book (he’s also published two children’s poetry books), Grandits is ready to hit the self-promotion circuit in advance of the July 4 release of Ten Rules You Absolutely Must Not Break If You Want To Survive The School Bus.

In the book, Grandits takes readers on the journey of Kyle, who’s yet to ride the school bus and has serious anxiety and fears about the whole enterprise — something most of us can relate to.

“His first day on the bus, he feels like a zebra in a lion party,” Grandits said.

Luckily for Kyle, though, he’s got a big kibitzing brother, a “school bus expert,” who lays out — you guessed it — 10 rules you absolutely must not break if you want to survive the school bus.

Which Kyle promptly breaks the very first day.

The bespectacled Kyle, surrounded by various people he imagines as mean, evil animals, is a nervous wreck, which causes him to quickly get flustered and somehow break all the rules his brother imparted.

For example, rule No. 7: Never talk to girls, because, “they were as mean as snakes, they never stopped talking and they hated sports.”

In breaking the rules, Kyle finds himself in just about every situation that uninitiated school-bus riders across the world lose sleep over: standing out, encountering a bully, being the last one on the bus and, of course, talking to a girl.

But somehow, Kyle makes it out in one piece, and at the end of the day, is holding his head high with pride, and makes a rule of his own (we’re not spoiling).

“I wanted to write a book about courage,” Grandits said. “It’s tough being a kid. Fear is with you constantly.”

For Grandits, seeing the book through to this point has been a test of patience. He started it a decade ago, and after dusting it off and finishing it for editing, dealt with pushed deadlines, rotating illustrators and other reasons for it to “languish in the publishing world.”

But kind of like certain nerve-wracking bus rides, Grandits is happy with the way it all turned out.

“This one happened to take a long time, but that’s OK,” he said. “On to the next one.”

The book goes on sale July 4, and will be available for purchase online and at River Road Books in Fair Haven.

By TOM CHESEK

First of all, it’s pronounced CAN-did-uh. Say it like Can-DEE-dah, and you’re referencing a 1970 hit by Tony Orlando & Dawn. Or you could be talking about a yeast infection.

Speak it as intended, however, and you’re stylishly dropping the name of a sharply written comedy classic that represented an early success for the great George Bernard Shaw. The centuries-spanning, Nobel Prize (and Oscar) winning, Irish-born wit and human rights champion was last seen on the stage of the Two River Theater with a topical (if threatening to topple) production of Heartbreak House a couple of seasons back. Beginning with the first of four preview performances on Tuesday night, Two River Theater Company puts on a Shaw once more, with a major revival of the 1898 Candida.

The new TRTC artistic director John Dias inherited this project — in which the strong and supportive wife of a respectable clergyman must make a choice between her husband and a passionate young poet who enters her life — when he took over the creative reins last September. Master facilitator that he is, Dias set about matching the play to a director who, more than anybody else in the business, has kept the soul and wisdom of “G.B.S.” readily accessible on our cultural GPS.

As the founder of NYC’s Gingold Theatrical Group, the actor-producer-director David Staller initiated a little undertaking called Project Shaw — a mission by which every one of Shaw’s full-length plays, skits, one-acts and puppet shows would be performed (often with all-star casts and sometimes for the first time in the United States) as a “concert” style reading. Having successfully presented all 65 of them (and having turned right back around and started up all over again), Staller has arrived at station stop Red Bank to direct Sue Cremin, Steven Skybell and Will Bradley in Two River’s Candida — and it was there that the redbankgreen Drama Desk caught up with this expert on all things Shavian.

CANDIDA creator George Bernard Shaw, pictured with his greatest contemporary champion, director David Staller.

DAVID STALLER: I think it’s because these plays only truly spring to life on their feet. The very worst thing you could do is to confine these plays to the printed page; to approach them purely as an academic and to force-feed them to students in school.

But to hear Shaw’s words performed by a cast of really good actors is something else entirely. A play like Man and Superman is so smart, and so funny, when you’re listening instead of simply reading.

So how does CANDIDA stack up against some of Shaw’s other best known stuff, like PYGMALION, ARMS AND THE MAN, CAESAR AND CLEOPATRA? And would you describe it a “political” play, in that pretty much everything he wrote addresses some underlying issue?

I feel confident that it’s a classic, because it deals in universal truths. It’s about shared quests: who we are, and who we want to be.

It’s been referred to as a ‘Victorian boulevard comedy,’ but what it is really is a damned brilliant play. It raises some maddening questions, but like the best of Shaw’s plays, Candida is not about debate, it’s about discoveries, about the belief that everyone has rights.

In this case, about a woman’s right to exercise control over her own destiny, which surely raised a few eyebrows and popped a few monocles in its day.

That Shaw allowed this woman to ponder her independence; to live a free and fulfilling life, was unthinkable then. Shaw was knocked out by Ibsen’s A Doll’s House when he went to see it — but it bugged him that the character Nora in the play just walks out on her husband, with no means of support, nowhere to go. Shaw’s attitude was that it was a stupid choice; that she should stay and negotiate from a position of power.

Well, CANDIDA had a pretty powerful proponent for years, in the great stage actress and producer Katharine Cornell.

Cornell played the role five times on Broadway, working with Burgess Meredith and others, and she was more or less responsible for how the play is produced these days. The last time she did it, Cornell acted alongside young Marlon Brando — and Marian Seldes told me once that the onstage marriage of Cornell and Brando was not an easy one.

You can almost forget sometimes that old Shaw was still around for the age of Brando, the A-bomb, television, and also the Victorian era of Oscar Wilde, Dickens…

He lived nearly 95 years — and as far as I’m concerned the only reason he didn’t make it to 100 is that he climbed up on a ladder, a tall house ladder, and fell when he tried to prune a tree branch with a pair of shears.

It’s just amazing to contemplate the history that he lived through, and of course he remained sharp and lucid to the end. He was a playwright, a great critic, a novelist, essayist, and a journalist.

Do you think that his celebrity, his instantly familiar look and style, helped to get his plays produced in his lifetime? Or was the fact that he was treated as a cute old curmudgeon a drawback by then?

He was very famous in the later decades of his life, although that didn’t always help his plays to get produced… and there’s a sense that Shaw was always willing to make himself into a public buffoon, to deflect from the seriousness of a lot of his themes.

Behind the almost pixie-ish quality was a very real commitment to human rights. He fought so hard for rights — not just humans but animals; to him any living being had the right to respect. His work remains very contemporary that way — and I long for the day when Shaw’s work is no longer relevant.

Candida begins four nights of previews Tuesday, March 22; opens Saturday, March 26, and runs through Sunday, April 10. Tickets are $35 – $61 (with a new discounted price of $24 for anyone 30 years and younger) and are available by calling the TRTC Box Office at 732.345.1400, or visiting the TRTC website for schedule details and availability — as well as info on dinner/show packages and other special-event performances.

By DUSTIN RACIOPPI

A few days before Thanksgiving, Britt Melewski walked down to his favorite bar, Murphy’s Tavern in Rumson, and ordered his drink of choice, a Pabst Blue Ribbon in a can. It was a celebratory libation, he said, for writing his best work to date.

The thickest part of March

Will be a Monday drawn in snow

The simplicity of the poem, and its possibilities, is exactly what Melewski has learned in his years developing as a poet.

“There’s a lot more to poetry than getting drunk and writing something down,” Melewski said.

Those words, sneering and satirical, have something of a Dylan Thomas quality to them, and Melewski, after a retreat to the West Coast to study the art of verse, is back in Rumson and working his way toward what he hopes will be a career as a published poet.

The framework is laid for the 25-year-old.

Next month, his work will be read at the second annual writer’s festival in Asbury Park. In the spring, he’ll have two of his pieces published in Liebamour magazine, and is currently studying in an MFA program at Rutgers University — the third college he’s attended. It’s this academic go-round that Melewski believes will prime him for the path he should be taking.

Although Melewski’s always had a passion for writing, it wasn’t until he left New Jersey to study poetry and literature at San Jose State University that he fell into a community of writers that gave him insight and a sense of who he should be as a writer. It also gave him a chance to be with his father, who divorced his mother when he was in high school.

“That was a big turning point in my life, to live with him and to see him for more than a week,” he said.

Then he got accepted to Rutgers. Melewski returned to Rumson in June, armed with more confidence and defined goals — some big, some small.

“(William Stanley) Merwin used to say you have to write 70 lines a day. I try to write 70 lines a day, but I’ll be happy if I get to 30,” Melewski said. “It’s funny. Obviously it’d be great to make a career out of writing, but my goal is to stick to the truth everyday. If you stay true to your voice and the poetry inside of you, it doesn’t matter.”

Melewski is a simple guy with complex thoughts and ideas. He doesn’t subscribe to any particular fashion; he prefers well-worn jeans and a button down, wearing his hair just above his shoulders and perpetual scruff on his face. When he’s not at school or working as an aide at Monmouth Medical Center’s mental health association, he can be found at a local watering hole, and always with a PBR, talking Yankee baseball — and is sure to pull a notebook from his back pocket to veer off briefly to the page before returning to ask the score of whatever game is on TV.

What really matters to Melewski is people, and specifically, understanding them. That’s where his writing comes in. It’s a daily process of learning and writing, re-writing and reflecting, he said.

“I deal with problems through writing and trying to understand. Some people try to hit you with their car. You deal with it in different ways,” he said. “I’ll try and write a book. You can hit me. That’s fine, I guess.”

As it goes with art, getting to where he wants to be is going to take a long time — if ever, in the crapshoot of signing a book deal — Melewski said. But if he strikes a nerve and connects to somebody else, then those written lines have paid off.

So long as they’re true.

“You’re not just writing to the wall. It definitely matters because even ancient writers, they had a certain audience in mind,” he said. “I don’t write to the audience. I’m not Danielle Steele, but you respect the audience, and you respect them by being honest.”

More of Melewski’s work can be viewed here. And a Facebook link to the writer’s festival, to be held at Plan B restaurant on February 6, is here.

It’s sale time, as Saturday’s Red Bank Townwide Yard Sale gets ready to unfold under warm and sunny skies.

Today, the Yard Sale website carries the third-annual event’s information packet for shoppers, a downloadable PDF that includes a locator map and addresses of registered sellers, along with brief information about what’s for sale.

More than 115 homes are participating in the border-to-border bargain bonanza, which this year has a new host: the Friends of the Red Bank Public Library. In conjunction with the event, the group is kicking off a three-day used-book sale at the library Saturday morning.

The library, at 84 West Front Street, will also be where registered yard-sale sellers can pick up free helium balloons to decorate their home displays and help visitors find them. Balloons will be available from 7:30 to 10a.

The info pack is available at the Yard Sale website, which has helpful information on how to conduct a successful yard sale, what to do with leftover goods, and feature stories.

Have a great time, folks, and please remember to be careful crossing streets with your armloads of bargains.

That’s right, Sunday is not solely about football. Another kind of contact event — one also best enjoyed with a cold beverage — has been claiming a regular monthly audience in Red Bank.

The River Read series, dedicated to poetry, fiction and any other literature that might be read or recited aloud, continues this Sunday at its home of the past year, the Dublin House.

Presented by local poet John Petrolino, the series grew out of a feeling shared by him, Mark Brunetti (publisher of The Idiom Magazine) and Word Riot publisher Jackie Corley that Red Bank needed more of a literary scene.

“Mark, Jackie, and I travel all over the state to readings, and sometimes out of state when we’re featured,” says Petrolino. “I’m in Red Bank, which is a cultural epicenter, is centrally located, and it has no place for writers. So I got the idea for a series, and here we are.”

He says the aim is not merely to host readings but to “establish a community of writers.”

The forum is is dedicated to all forms of literature and spoken word. Events include one or two feature readers, “meet and greets,” Q&A sessions, book signings, and an open mic for any other attending writers.

Brunetti and Barbara Crooker will read their stuff this Sunday. Here’s the schedule looking ahead:

October 10 Gregg Glory and Rich Fireman
November 7 Mihaela Moscaliuc and Suzanne Parker
December 12 George Witte and Laura McCullough

River Read is held on the second floor of the Dub, at 30 Monmouth Street, at 2p. Admission is free.

For more information, contact John Petrolino.

Novelist and educator Kaylie Jones (right) would seem to have had a storybook upbringing— but as we observe in today’s edition of Red Bank oRBit, it was an environment where “keeping up with the Joneses meant going drink-for-drink against people who could be as competitive about their consumption of cordials as they were in their passionate professional pursuits.” With the publication of her memoir Lies My Mother Never Told Me, Jones details the devastation that alcoholism wrought upon a family in which literature and liquor were given equal heft.

The author comes to Red Bank tonight for a reading and signing appearance at NovelTeas Authors Aromas & Gifts on Bridge Avenue — and we’ve got an exclusive interview, right here in the paperless pages of Red Bank oRBit!