Oscar Wilde News

Al Pacino was in a play that he was making into a film and simultaneously directing a documentary about the production. He will join us at the Egyptian and Aero Theatres to discuss his obsession with Oscar Wilde's SALOME.

Theater at Monmouth's 44th season continues with the opening of Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera, Patience, or Bunthorne's Bride on Friday, September 20 at 7:30 p.m. The society ladies in the village are mad for aesthetic poets but the poets are in love with Patience, the village milkmaid. The young ladies' military suitors see no point to overblown verses but give it a try to win back the ladies' hearts. Things are touch and go for a while but in the end everyone lands a suitable partner, even if it is only a tulip or lily.

The Kennedy Center hosts its 12th annual Page-to-Stage new play festival from Saturday, August, 31 to Monday, September 2, 2013, featuring more than 40 theaters from the D.C. metropolitan area, all with a mission to produce and support new work. The three-day, Center-wide event offers a series of free readings and open rehearsals of plays and musicals being developed by local, regional, and national playwrights, librettists, and composers. A performance schedule appears on the following pages. Participating theaters include:

Fresh from the success of Night of a Thousand Judys, The Meeting* hosted by Justin Sayre - the acclaimed comedy/variety show hailed as 'rambunctious, uproarious and unpredictable' by The Wall Street Journal, 'delicious and delightfully droll' by The New York Post, and 'hilarious and sardonic' by The Village Voice - has moved to 54 BELOW for a six month run. The next show will be on Wednesday, August 28 at 9:30 PM. Known for its signature blend of outrageous comedy, politics, culture and everything in between, The Meeting* moves uptown after four seasons of packed houses in the West Village. Justin Sayre and The Meeting* were named one of the Top 10 nightclub shows of 2011 by Time Out New York, received the 2012 Bistro Award for 'Comedy Artistry' and a 2011 MAC Award nomination for Best Male Comedy Performance.

The Velocity of Autumn, a new two-character play from Cleveland-based playwright Eric Coble, opens at Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater under the direction of Artistic Director Molly Smith and by special arrangement with HOP Theatricals, LLC.

Opening the season is Lillian Hellman's brilliant 1934 play, The Children's Hour. Bullying, sexual confusion and suicide provide the basis to this dark piece. A show written 79 years ago, yet so poignant to our current state.

Mauckingbird Theatre Company presents a gender-bent interpretation of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, directed by Mauckingbird Artistic Director Peter Reynolds, today, August 7-25. This production marks the company's most ambitious production to date, and, keeping true to its acclaimed reputation, will deliver a 'post-gay' performance that looks beyond gay pairings to the relationships and emotional connections of the story.

The Pearl Theatre Company kicks off its 30th anniversary season-the second season in its new home on West 42nd Street-with the first New York revival in 15 years of George Bernard Shaw's You Never Can Tell in a co-production with the Gingold Theatrical Group that is directed by David Staller. RunningSeptember 3-October 13, the show's sumptuous costumes, elegant settings and Shavian wit will raise a champagne toast to a year of celebration at The Pearl, where Shaw, following Shakespeare, has been the second most produced playwright in The Pearl's history. The production is also the centerpiece of the Shaw New York 2013 festival.

Kansas City Repertory Theatre will kick off its 2013-14 season with the world premiere of The Tallest Tree in the Forest, a new work about the life of African-American performer and activist Paul Robeson, written and performed by Daniel Beaty and directed by Moises Kaufman. The show runs August 30-September 28 at the Rep's downtown theatre Copaken Stage, 13th and Walnut Streets. The Tallest Tree in the Forest is a co-production with La Jolla Playhouse.

Synetic Theater kicks off its 2013-2014 season with a new adaptation of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, directed by Synetic Founder and Artistic Director Paata Tsikurishvili. Synetic's reinvention of this classic tale features dynamic movement and multimedia, and promises to be a unique fusion of visual and verbal poetry that will explore the internal and external dimensions of Wilde's only novel, which many consider his most personal work-a timelessly supernatural story of man's endless conflict with the nature of mortality.

Barrington Stage Company (BSC), the award-winning theatre in downtown Pittsfield, MA, under the leadership of Julianne Boyd, Artistic Director, and Tristan Wilson, Managing Director, presents Scott and Hem in the Garden of Allah, a world premiere play written and directed by BSC Associate Artist Mark St. Germain about the friendship and rivalry between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.

An elegant and intriguing literary debut, The Mrs. Mulholland Trilogy, is a three part, fictional, memoir set in 1890's London and published exclusively for eReader, offering maximum portability for a global, eco-conscious, eCognizant readership. Available for instant and exclusive download to eReader, the first part, Mrs. Mulholland, Part One: Spring, makes quality reading easy for Summer 2013.

Due to overwhelming demand, Three Oaks Theater Festival co-founders John Stoops, Tim Evans, and Marc Grapey have added a second performance of Complicated, a new musical from Poi Dog Pondering. Complicated will play tonight, August 3 at 8:00pm and 10:30pm EST (7:00pm and 9:30pm CST).

British playwright Duncan Macmillan was asked numerous times to adapt Don Juan Comes Back from the Warby Odon von Horvath, and after reading it in the original German as well as a few translations, he felt compelled to accept the challenge. "I thought it was a fascinating play, to take this extraordinary character - the archetypal lover Don Juan - and refract his character through the dark experience of going through the war, and coming back to a war-torn Berlin as an older man, looking for love and redemption." Macmillan's version of the play has only been produced once before, at the Finborough Theatre in London in 2012. Macmillan traveled to Pittsburgh to attend rehearsals and work with director Alan Stanford and the cast for its U. S. premiere. This production will run August 8-31.

Since its foundation in 2010, critically acclaimed theatre company Fourth Monkey has established a reputation for productions that are as entertaining as they are challenging. Having previously secured two Edinburgh Fringe sell-out laurels (for its adaptation of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE in 2010 and Sarah Kane's 4.48 PSYCHOSIS last year), it returns to theSpace on Niddry St. this year, today, 2-24 August, with three productions.

Mr. Pim Passes By, a 1919 comedy of manners and morals by British author A. A. Milne, will make its Nashville debut August 2-10, for five performances in the Dead Poet's Society Auditorium on the campus of Montgomery Bell Academy. Presented by Carrick Productions, Mr. Pim will play two weekends: today and Saturday, August 2-3, and August 9-10, at 7:30 p.m., with a matinee on Sunday, August 4, at 2 p.m.

The Shaw Festival is one of the two major Canadian theatre celebrations, the other being The Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario. Both are professional high quality venues.