Peter Vitale

It's the final week left to vote for the 2023 BroadwayWorld Raleigh Awards! Voting ends on 12/31 at midnight. Don't miss out on making sure that your favorite theatres, stars, and shows get the recognition they deserve!

It's December, and the first standings of the month have been announced as of Tuesday, December 5th for the 2023 BroadwayWorld Raleigh Awards! Don't miss out on making sure that your favorite theatres, stars, and shows get the recognition they deserve!

Happy Holidays! The latest wave of standings have been announced as of Monday, November 27th for the 2023 BroadwayWorld Raleigh Awards! Don't miss out on making sure that your favorite theatres, stars, and shows get the recognition they deserve!

The opening of William Shakespeare's critically acclaimed play Much Ado About Nothing opens November 18 at PlayMakers Repertory Company. 

​​​​​​​PlayMakers Repertory Company's vivid reimagining of one of the world's best psychological thrillers, Hamlet streams this weekend. 

Get a first look at photos of Hamlet, coming to PlayMakers Repertory Company next month.

PlayMakers Repertory Company has announced the full cast for its production of Shakespeare's Hamlet. Directed by Vivienne Benesch (Birthday Candles), performances run from January 25 – February 12 in the Paul Green Theatre located in the Joan H. Gillings Center for Dramatic Art on the UNC Chapel Hill campus. 

Multiple Obie Award-winning actor David Greenspan stars in Kesselring Prize-winner Matthew Freeman's Back at the Start: A Situation Comedy, an outlandish, surreal six-part audio drama released by the Brooklyn-based independent theater production company Theater Accident.

INTO THE WOODS is new artistic director Marcela Lorca's debut directorial outing for Ten Thousand Things after the retirement of renowned artist and social change agent Michelle Hensley, the founder of the company. Seeing this Sondheim masterpiece up close and stripped of pretentiousness is a treat.

Ten Thousand Things is a treasure: a company dedicated to bringing live theater to marginalized and underserved audiences for free. Founding Director Michelle Hensley retired in June of 2018. So this production is the first in new Artistic Director Marcela Lorca's inaugural season, and is directed by Randy Reyes, who is Artistic Director of Theater Mu locally. The mission of TTT is clearly in safe hands, especially given the extant structure of the Artist Core, a group of veteran performers who provide guidance and active advice to the organization.

Michelle Hensley, retiring Artistic Director and Founder of Ten Thousand Things, is a gift. A gift to theater, a gift to Minnesota, a gift to the world. She taught us a new way to do theater, a new way to experience theater, one that considers who the audience can and should be, which is everyone. Read her book ALL THE LIGHTS ON if you want to know more about it, or go see her beautiful swan song THE GOOD PERSON OF SZECHWAN, which is also the first play that TTT ever did nearly 30 years ago when Michelle started it in California. We've been lucky enough to have TTT as a vital part of the #TCTheater community for 25 years, a tradition that will continue after Michelle's retirement under the leadership of new Artistic Director Marcela Lorca. One can only hope that all of the artists and audience members she's worked with and influenced in those years will continue on this tradition of inclusive, accessible, imaginative theater that is unlike anything else.

It never fails. Whenever I go to see a Ten Thousand Things show, the storytelling is so clear it's as if I'm truly seeing it for the first time, even if it's a piece I've seen one or many times before. In their signature bare bones theater style, they've cut out all the fluff from the beloved musical FIDDLER ON THE ROOF to get right to the heart of the story. Even though I've seen the show twice in recent years, I've never been so caught up in and felt so deeply the story of one man's struggle with holding to his traditions, while still loving his family as they begin to change and grow out of those traditions. The brilliant Steve Epp makes Tevye so real and human, and along with the other eight members of this terrific ensemble playing multiple characters, makes the world of Anatevka palpably real and somehow modern, despite still being anchored in time and space. Because 50 years after it was written, this story about a family of refugees fleeing persecution and violence in their beloved homeland to find safety in America is as timely as ever.

?The village of Farmingtown has been devoid of men for so long that when one returns from the far away and long-lasting war, the first woman he meets rushes up to him and inhales him deeply. This hilarious and oddly touching moment at the beginning of Kira Obolensky's new play FORGET ME NOT WHEN FAR AWAY sets the tone for this playful and poignant fairy tale about a soldier returning to a home he once knew. Ten Thousand Things has been on the road with the show for a few weeks, performing at correctional facilities, community centers, and other unlikely venues. As director Michelle Hensley said in her introduction of the show, the fact that this play has resonated with such diverse audiences in different ways is a credit to the skills of the playwright, who has created a world outside of time and space that somehow feels familiar and relatable to everyone. This world is brought to life in the beautifully sparse way that only Ten Thousand Things can do, with a brilliant cast of six performing in a fully lit room in a space so small that they literally trip over the audience. The fanciful story is grounded in truth and made to feel very real by the universality of the story, the charming accessibility of the language, the up-close-and-personal performances by the actors in whom you can feel every nuance of every emotion through a look in the eyes, the twinge of a facial muscle, or a subtle movement of the body. Ten Thousand Things harnesses the magic of theater in its most basic form like no other company can.

No one does musicals like Ten Thousand Things does musicals. And even though it defies everything we know about musical theater, after seeing a TTT musical I think that maybe that's the way musicals should always be done. The music, like everything else about the show, is stripped down to the very basics, extraneous layers removed to reveal the very heart of the matter. A one-man orchestra provides the minimal accompaniment, and the small cast imperceptibly transitions from speaking to singing, so that you can't even tell where songs end and begin, it's just all one seamless story. And above all else, Artistic Director Michelle Hensley and all of the artists at Ten Thousand Things are storytellers. Whether it's Shakespeare or a classic American musical, they share the story in a pure and unadorned way so that all of their audiences, whether prisoners or seasoned theater-goers, can hear it and see themselves in it. One such masterpiece is their latest musical venture, THE UNSINKABLE MOLLY BROWN, a reprise of their very first musical venture 15 years ago. It's lovely, spirited, sweet, funny, moving, heart-warming, and real.

A sell-out in 2010 and a big hit in 2012, Park Square brings 2 Pianos 4 Hands, the delightful play about two piano whiz kids with stars in their eyes, back to the stage for the holidays. A side-splitting celebration of dreaming of greatness, 2 Pianos 4 Hands is a perfect show for the entire family, children ages 10 and older.

A sell-out in 2010 and a big hit in 2012, Park Square brings 2 Pianos 4 Hands, the delightful play about two piano whiz kids with stars in their eyes, back to the stage for the holidays. A side-splitting celebration of dreaming of greatness, 2 Pianos 4 Hands is a perfect show for the entire family, children ages 10 and older.

No one does Shakespeare like Ten Thousand Things. They manage to boil the text down to its bare essentials, and convey the heart of the story in a way that feels fresh and modern. This season they bring their unique Shakespeare style to perhaps his most well-know play, the story of star-crossed lovers that inspired all others, Romeo and Juliet. In the typically minimalist production (since TTT performs on location at prisons, homeless shelters, and community centers, the paid public performances are also in a small, fully lit room with little in the way of sets and costumes), director Peter Rothstein and his fantastic cast of eight playing multiple characters bring this familiar story to life in a unique way.

With Sexy Laundry opening tonight, the entire cast roster for the theatre's biggest season is almost complete. Nearly 300 Minnesota artists - including actors, directors, designers and technical operators - will mount 18 productions on two stages. The season lineup confirms Park Square's commitment to the work of women writers like Amy Herzog, Michele Riml and Alice Walker. The casting emphasizes Park Square as a home for local artists of color, from returning favorites like James A. Williams, T. Mychael Rambo and Regina Williams to dozens of debuts like Dominique Wooten, Kurt Kwan and Sarah Ochs.

The Triangle Lab will work with Ten Thousand Things Theater (TTT) in spring 2014 to bring TTT's unique model of theater creation, performance, and outreach to Bay Area audiences, including those who have little or no access to the arts. The Triangle Lab, a joint program of California Shakespeare Theater and Intersection for the Arts, seeks to integrate art into community life.

A sell-out in 2010, Park Square Theatre brings 2 Pianos 4 Hands, the delightful play about two piano whiz kids with stars in their eyes, back to the stage for the holidays tonight, December 5-30, 2012. A side-splitting celebration of dreaming of greatness, 2 Pianos 4 Hands is a perfect show for the entire family, children ages 11 and older.