Stage West News

Diversionary Theatre will stage the musical play Moscow as the sixth and final show of their 2009-2010 season. Moscow is a musical play involving three men attempting to define who they are and why they are confined together in an abandoned theatre. While enduring their 'soul searching,' they make use of their time by playing sockball and by acting out various roles from Anton Chekhov's play The Three Sisters. While self exploration, relationship conflict and gay romance are part of the chemistry, Moscow amplifies universal and eternal questions: 'Who are we, Where are we, and Why are we here?'

Piven Theatre Workshop will end the world premiere of Number of People, written and directed by Emilie Beck on April 11th.

'Reefer Madness', the hit madcap 30's musical based on the anti-marijuana propaganda movie of 1936, will end its run at the Rising Action Theatre on April 11.

Good News! Jim Leonard, Jrs. depression-era epic of faith and truth ‘THE DIVINERS' receives a miraculous new imagining and power-house performances in The Production Company's second offering of 2010!

Paul Garman, Executive Director/Producer and Steven Glaudini, Artistic Director/Producer of Musical Theatre West are proud to announce the 2010-2011 Season at the beautiful Carpenter Performing Arts Center in Long Beach.

The Bay Area's award-winning Rough and Tumble proudly presents the World Premiere of A HISTORY OF HUMAN STUPIDITY, the company's first commission for the stage, and second collaboration with acclaimed playwright and former Neo-Futurist Andy Bayiates (43 Plays for 43 Presidents). Rough and Tumble founding Artistic Director Cliff Mayotte helms this hilarious journey through stupid human behavior, featuring Louise Chegwidden, Eowyn Mader, Carolyn Doyle, Charisse Loriaux, and Betsy Picart, with original music composed and performed by renowned Bay Area jazz composer Phillip Greenlief. A HISTORY OF HUMAN STUPIDITY plays April 8-25 (press openings: Friday, April 9 and Saturday, April 10) at LaVals Subterranean Theatre in Berkeley. For tickets ($16/20) and information, the public may call 510-499-0356 or visit www.randt.org or brownpapertickets.com.

THE COMMON AIR, a new social comedy written by Alex Lyras and Robert McCaskill, directed by Robert McCaskill and performed by Alex Lyras, will open at 45 Bleecker Street Theatre on Wednesday, April 14, 2010. Performances begin Wednesday, April 7

Celebrating fifty years since the original publication of this stunning American masterpiece, TheatreWorks, the nationally acclaimed theater of Silicon Valley, presents TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, dramatized by Christopher Sergel and based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Harper Lee.

Celebrating the theatrical playground that is terraNOVA Collective, this special evening will begin with a Welcome Reception at 7pm in the upstairs theater at Performance Space 122 with appetizers and drinks. The Mainstage Performance will begin at 8pm.

Furious Theatre Company remains in residence in the Carrie Hamilton Theatre for the Los Angeles premiere of boom by Peter Sinn Nachtrieb, writer of Furious Theatre's much acclaimed, award-winning 2009 production of Hunter Gatherers. boom will preview on Wednesday, May 19; Thursday, May 20 and Friday, May 21 at 8 p.m. with an opening date of Saturday, May 22 at 8 p.m. and run through Sunday, June 20 at the home of Furious Theatre Company, the Pasadena Playhouse Carrie Hamilton Theatre, 39 S. El Molino Ave. in Pasadena.

Piven Theatre Workshop will host a pre-show event in observance of Holocaust Remembrance Day on April 11, 2010 at 1:15PM, prior to the matinee performance of Number of People. The hour long program will feature speeches by Rabbi Josh Feigelson, Campus Rabbi & Senior Director Fiedler Hillel at Northwestern University, and Fr. John Karjte, Chaplain and Director of the Sheil Catholic Center at Northwestern University; a special performance of 'Raining Season' by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Teen Committee on Conscience; and Hannah Senesch's song 'Eili, Eili' led by David Y. Chack, President of the Association for Jewish Theatre.

Piven Theatre announces the extension of Emilie Beck's Number of People, directed by Emilie and featuring Piven Ensemble Member Bernard Beck. The production is adding a week of performances and now runs through April 18, 2010, at Piven Theatre Workshop, 927 Noyes Street, Evanston.

The ghosts who have taken up residence with The Production Company are a restless lot, filled with a crackling, questing vitality rarely found even among the living. As embodied with disquieting fierceness by Sara Lilly, David Ross Paterson, and Skip Pipo in COPENHAGEN, this endlessly fascinating play by Michael Frayn is directed with surgical exactitude by August Viveirto to a fever pitch. These spectral presences just won't stop haunting one another with their questions and revisions and caveats. Give them the courtesy of your full attention, and you'll find them taking possession of your own imagination as well, probably raising your blood pressure in the process. They prove themselves electrifying companions.

A married couple with Broadway credentials will take to the stage at Lincoln Amphitheatre this summer, playing President Abraham Lincoln and his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln.

THE COMMON AIR, a new social comedy written by Alex Lyras and Robert McCaskill, directed by Robert McCaskill and performed by Alex Lyras, will open at 45 Bleecker Street Theatre on Wednesday, April 14, 2010. Performances begin Wednesday, April 7

Little House on the Prairie, The Musical, a new musical based on the beloved Laura Ingalls Wilder series of classic American books, will take the stage thru March 28, 2010 at the Fox Cities Performing Arts Center. Melissa Gilbert, who rose to fame as a child playing Laura in the hugely successful NBC television series 'Little House on the Prairie' during the 1970s, now continues her legacy 'on the prairie' by taking on the role of 'Ma.' Little House on the Prairie, The Musical will also star Steve Blanchard as 'Pa' and Kara Lindsay as Laura.

Dallas Theater Center is bringing together Dallas-Fort Worth arts organizations and cultural institutions to produce the metroplex-wide Foote Festival (www.footefestival.com) March 14 - May 1, 2011, to celebrate the life and work of the late award-winning Texas playwright Horton Foote (March 14, 1916 - March 4, 2009).

The hit madcap musical based on the 1936 anti marijuana propaganda movie ran for almost a year in Los Angeles to packed houses. It transferred Off-Broadway in 2001 but the 9/11 tragedy put a hitch in the New York Success. It was subsequently filmed as an HBO film-- 'Reefer Madness the Musical'.

Little House on the Prairie, The Musical, a new musical based on the beloved Laura Ingalls Wilder series of classic American books, will take the stage March 23 - 28, 2010 at the Fox Cities Performing Arts Center.

Actors Theatre will end its run of SECRET ORDER at Stage West at Herberger Theater Center on March 21.