Joe Dowling News

A number of prominent theatre companies and artists from Ireland are taking part in this year's 9th annual Origin's 1st Irish Festival taking place from today, September 6, to October 3.

Center Stage has announced it has chosen The Thanksgiving Play by award-winning playwright, director, choreographer and performer Larissa FastHorse as its Fall Play Lab to begin the 2016/17 Season. The Play Lab will be held September 16-18 at Lord Baltimore Hotel.

Irish Repertory Theatre has announced its Fall 2016 Season. On the Francis J. Greenburger Mainstage will be FINIAN'S RAINBOW, adapted and directed by Irish Rep Artistic Director Charlotte Moore, and starring Melissa Errico ('Billions', Encores! Do I Hear A Waltz?), who will reprise her role from the acclaimed 2004 production.

A number of prominent theatre companies and artists from Ireland are taking part in this year's 9th annual Origin's 1st Irish Festival taking place from September 6 to October 3.

PA'I Foundation, in association with Kumu Kahua Theatre, presents a 3-day Playwriting Workshop for island writers, with Native American playwrights Larissa FastHorse and Ty Defoe. The workshop ? designed to serve writers of all levels, from novice to experienced ? will focus on jump-starting the writing process, exercises for the imagination, writing from your cultural perspective, and practical tips for completing and developing your work. Think of it as a crash course in getting started!

Following last month's announcement of the incoming Jerome and Many Voices Fellows, the Playwrights' Center is pleased to introduce the 2016-17 McKnight National Residency and Commission recipient, two 2016-17 McKnight Fellows in Playwriting, six new Core Writers and three 2016-17 Core Apprentices. McKnight Theater Artist Fellows will be announced in June.

Penguin Rep Theatre kicks off its 2016 season with a special event - 'Great White American Teeth' - written and performed by Fiona Walsh, directed by George Heslin, tonight, April 30th and May 1st.

Penguin Rep Theatre kicks off its 2016 season with a special event - 'Great White American Teeth' - written and performed by Fiona Walsh, directed by George Heslin, April 30th and May 1st.

Artistic Director Joseph Haj just announced his inaugural mainstage season with The Guthrie Theater.

St. Ann's Warehouse continues its highly successful Inaugural Season in its "stunning" (New York Magazine) new theater on the waterfront in Brooklyn Bridge Park with the New York City Premiere of the American Repertory Theater's Nice Fish, conceived, written and adapted by Mark Rylance and Louis Jenkins, directed by Claire van Kampen, and starring Rylance. The production will run for six weeks, February 14 - March 27, in the Joseph S. and Diane H. Steinberg Theater.

The Shakespeare Theatre Company presents a madcap night of life in the theatre with The Critic and The Real Inspector Hound, directed by STC Artistic Director Michael Kahn, and featuring an ensemble cast that takes on both shows. A coproduction with the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, the production runs at STC's Lansburgh Theatre (450 7th Street NW) from January 5 through February 14.

Mark Benninghofen is known to many from years of performances at the Guthrie, on screen and in the ad world but not so much in musicals. Learn more about the man and this musical and get to Latte Da to see it pronto.

Next on the Main Stage, The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey will present Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett's drama, The Diary of Anne Frank, adapted by Wendy Kesselman and directed by Joseph Discher. Nearly 75 years ago in the Netherlands, a young girl received a diary for her 13th birthday. Today, Anne Frank's humor, strength, and innate goodness continue to shine forth from her words to inspire readers and audiences of all ages. The powerful story of her family's will to survive comes to unforgettable life for a new generation in this adaptation of the Pulitzer, Tony, and NY Drama Critic's Circle Award-winning play.

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.