On Monday night I attended my 9th Ivey Awards. Yes, even before I started Cherry and Spoon in 2010 and started getting press tickets to the event in 2013, I was still a theater geek (read all the words I've written about the Iveys here). The Ivey Awards are my favorite theater night of the year, not so much for the awards themselves, but because it's a celebration of another year of amazing local theater that gathers all of my favorite theater artists in one room. Even though I've met many of them, I still get starstruck when I walk through the crowd and every other face I see is someone I've enjoyed watching on stage. I love to watch awards shows on TV so it's a thrill to get all glammed up and actually attend one in person. I even painted my toenails with a glittery green called 'One Short Day' - appropriate because of its musical theater geekiness and and because this event that I look forward to all year goes by in a whirlwind of people and honorees and loud music and conversations. And now it's over for another year, but more great theater is still to come which we will be celebrating next year!
Joe Dowling, the Guthrie Theater's recently retired artistic director, was honored at the 2015 Ivey Lifetime Achievement Award, the celebration of Twin Cities theater, on September 21 at the Historic State Theatre in downtown Minneapolis. Critically-acclaimed actor Mikell Sapp received the Emerging Artist Award.
Irish playwright and actress Laoisa Sexton's new play THE PIGEON IN THE TAJ MAHAL has been selected by the Irish Repertory Theatre for inclusion into it's esteemed Fall 2015 New Works Reading Series and will run on Friday, October 2 , 2015 at 3 pm at the DR2 Theatre, 103 East 15th Street in Union Square. The reading will be free of cost and open to the public but reservations are requested and strongly advised. Call 212-727-2737 to RSVP.
The Irish Repertory Theatre (Charlotte Moore, Artistic Director; Ciaran O'Reilly, Producing Director) proudly begins the 10th season of its Reading Series with Laoisa Sexton's THE PIGEON IN THE TAJ MAHAL, directed by the Irish Rep's Literary Manager, Kara Manning. The staged reading will take place on Friday, October 2 at 3pm at the DR2 Theater, 103 East 15th Street (the Irish Repertory Theatre's temporary home during current renovations). The reading is FREE and open to the public. An RSVP to the Irish Repertory Theatre Box Office at (212) 727-2737 is strongly suggested.
This year's Dublin Theatre Festival programme will stage 28 world-class productions, spanning 22 different stages across Dublin city and suburbs. 11 new Irish works will premiere over 18 days alongside acclaimed productions from France, Belgium, Portugal, the Netherlands, the UK and Denmark.
There's no big opening number, no splashy dance with dozens of chorus girls and boys, no pit orchestra, no large moving set pieces, no colorful glamorous costumes. ONCE is not your typical musical. In fact, according to The Cherry and Spoon Music-Theater Spectrum it's not a musical at all, but rather a play with music. Yet this atypical not-really-a-musical musical won eight Tony Awards in 2012. Why is that? Why was this quiet and quirky musical based on a little Irish movie awarded Broadway's biggest prize? Perhaps because it is different from other musicals. Perhaps the voters awarded the creative and organic way music is used to tell this beautifully simple and non-traditional love story. ONCE is a new kind of music-theater, and proves that musicals don't always have to be big and loud to have a profound effect on the audience. ONCE is quietly, beautifully stirring.
What do you get when you combine a talented young playwright, an excellent cast that includes five up-and-coming actors and two beloved veterans of local stages, stirring a capella gospel music arranged by a local musical legend, and the Twin Cities' best director of 'theater musically?' You get CHOIR BOY, a lovely and affecting play about a young gay man coming of age in an African American boarding school. The playwright is Tarell Alvin McCraney of the excellent Brother/Sister trilogy that Pillsbury House Theatre has produced in its entirety in the last several years. While those plays have an epic, mythical quality, CHOIR BOY is more grounded in reality, but just as beautifully written. Add in musical direction and arrangement by Sanford Moore and direction by Peter Rothstein, an expert at using music in the best possibly way to enhance the theatrical storytelling, and you have something quite special going on in the Guthrie's Dowling Studio.
Erik Heger returns to the Guthrie as the man at the center of an Arthur Miller masterwork, THE CRUCIBLE. Directed by Joe Dowling in his final season as Guthrie artistic director, the play can be seen on the Wuertle thrust stage.
The Guthrie Theater today announced the nine productions that will be included in the theater's 2015-2016 subscription season, including To Kill a Mockingbird, Pericles, Harvey and South Pacific on the Wurtele Thrust Stage and The Events, The Cocoanuts, The Real Inspector Hound/The Critic, Trouble in Mind and Disgraced on the McGuire Proscenium Stage.
Arthur Miller's 1953 play THE CRUCIBLE is a classic of the American theater, and dramatizes one of the greatest failings of the American, or rather pre-American, judicial system. During the infamous Salem witch trials of the late 17th Century, twenty people were put to death for the crime of witchcraft, following a long history of the execution of 'witches' in Europe. Arthur Miller explores the larger themes of this horrible incident through a very personal story of one affected family, making the play at once intimate and epic. Despite being over 60 years old, the themes of religious fanaticism, mob mentality, and persecution of people who are different are sadly as current as they were during the McCarthy era when the play was written. The Guthrie's grand production of this classic with a cast chock-full of talent is truly something to behold.
The Guthrie Theater previously announced that its outgoing Director Joe Dowling, the longest tenured artistic director in Guthrie history, will appear for an In Conversation moderated by New York Post theater columnist Michael Riedel tonight, April 21 at 7:30 p.m. on the Wurtele Thrust Stage.
The Guthrie Theater today announced that its outgoing Director Joe Dowling, the longest tenured artistic director in Guthrie history, will appear for an In Conversation moderated by New York Post theater columnist Michael Riedel on Tuesday, April 21 at 7:30 p.m. on the Wurtele Thrust Stage.
After playing to sold-out audiences in New York, American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.), in a coproduction with the Guthrie Theater, is thrilled to present the West Coast premiere of Anne Washburn's Mr. Burns, a post-electric play (tonight, February 18-March 15, 2015).
The Guthrie Theater announced today that Joseph Haj will become its eighth artistic director in July 2015, succeeding Joe Dowling. The announcement by Board Chair Lee Skold and Search Committee Chair Patricia Simmons ends an extensive year-long search.
Yesterday I sat on the famous thrust stage of the Guthrie Theater and watched a bunch of soldiers, lovers, and fairies dance, sing, fly, converse, love, hate, and generally cavort around in a bare circular space. Or was it all a dream? Such is the Guthrie's latest production of perhaps Shakespeare's best loved romantic comedy, A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM, that after three hours of spellbinding theater, you're not quite sure if what you saw just happened, or perhaps, as Puck suggests in his epilogue, it was all just a dream. Artistic Director Joe Dowling has returned to an old favorite in his final season at the Guthrie, assembling a gorgeous and talented cast of local favorites with a few national talents thrown in. It's no wonder that he returned to this show; this MIDSUMMER is a dream of a production, with plenty of spectacle in the form of dancing, flying, singing fairies, humor in the form of typical Shakesperean hijinks, and heart in this sweet romance that ends with a neat happily ever after. Everything about it is truly a delight.
The Guthrie Theater and The Acting Company (TAC) reunite for a seventh year to present A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court - a satirical story adapted by acclaimed local playwright Jeffrey Hatcher from the novel by Mark Twain - in repertory with Macbeth, Shakespeare's dark and powerful tragedy.
The Guthrie Theater and The Acting Company (TAC) reunite for a seventh year to present A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court - a satirical story adapted by acclaimed local playwright Jeffrey Hatcher from the novel by Mark Twain - in repertory with Macbeth, Shakespeare's dark and powerful tragedy.
Philadelphia Theatre Company's continues its 40th Anniversary season with the Tony Award-nominated play Mothers and Sons by Terrence McNally tonight, February 6, through March 8. Directed by Wendy Goldberg, the cast features Hugh Kennedy, Emmy Award-winning actress Michael Learned, James Lloyd Reynolds, and Patrick Gibbons and Jacob D. Wilner in alternating performances.
Get to know Christina Acosta Robinson, who plays the two queens in in Joe Dowling's fantastical re-telling of A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM on the Guthrie Theater's Wuertele Thrust stage.
After playing to sold-out audiences in New York, American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.), in a coproduction with the Guthrie Theater, is thrilled to present the West Coast premiere of Anne Washburn's Mr. Burns, a post-electric play (February 18-March 15, 2015).
