Patches News

As Lee Hall's The Pitmen Painters, inspired by the true story of a collection of miners who art history books now refer to as The Ashington Group, commences, the title characters are quite figuratively blank canvases.  Raised to spend nine hours a day working the northern English coal mines from the time they're still boys, the small gathering of fellows who decided they wanted to learn a bit about culture through weekly visits from a university art professor have never set foot in a gallery and know nothing of the great works most of their countrymen would recognize as part of common knowledge.  Their understanding is that there is some 'secret' behind art that only the elite know about, giving them the ability to determine what's good and what isn't.

'Trying' hits the trifecta with excellent writing, acting, and directing as it examines the final days of an aging jurist working with his determined young secretary in Georgetown, Washington, DC from 1967 to 1968

Dollywood welcomes the summer travel season with its annual KidsFest celebration featuring the new Adventure Theater and an all-star lineup of eight different family variety shows, each headlining one week of the festival from June 11 through Aug. 1.

Dollywood welcomes the summer travel season with its annual KidsFest celebration featuring the new Adventure Theater and an all-star lineup of eight different family variety shows, each headlining one week of the festival from June 11 through Aug. 1.

Welcome to 99 AND UNDER THE RADAR: A LOOK AT INDIE THEATER'S MOVERS AND SHAKERS, BroadwayWorld's new weekly series that showcases standout productions and production companies from the independent theater scene in New York City. Each week, independent producer Michael Roderick will be discussing the latest goings on in the theatrical wings, highlighting those with potentially bright futures. This Week's Topic: Getting to the 'Source' of the Indie Theatre Community.

Director Aldo Pantoja's deeply moving production of CRUMBLE (LAY ME DOWN, JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE) might be the best show Single Carrot has yet done.

Today, we are taking a listen to ANYONE CAN WHISTLE and COMPANY, two of the most genre-bending and revolutionary musicals of the latter twentieth century, both boasting Sondheim's strongest songs of the sixties. These recordings contain some of the most legendary and illustrious Broadway casts of all time and include the names Angela Lansbury, Lee Remick, Bernadette Peters, Elaine Stritch, Raul Esparza, Dean Jones, Larry Kert and Jane Krakowski, just to name a few...

Today's Broadway Blogs on BroadwayWorld.com from Friday, April 2, 2010.

Miriam Zendle speaks to choreographer Lizzie Gee and Pirate King Ricky Rojas from the award-winning all-male Pirates of Penzance, soon on at Wilton's Music Hall

The award-winning VITAL THEATRE COMPANY is pleased to announce the production 'UNCLE PIRATE,' with book by BEN H. WINTERS, music and lyrics by DREW FORNAROLA and directed by JEREMY DOBRISH, based on the book by DOUGLAS REES.

JUST ANNOUNCED FREEWAY & JAKE ONE - Tue. Feb 16 - DOORS @ 7PM SAM MOORE 'The Original Soul Man' of Sam & Dave - Sun. Feb 21 - DOORS @ 6PM, PORTUGAL. THE MAN - Fri. March 19 - DOORS @ 7

The award-winning VITAL THEATRE COMPANY is pleased to announce the production 'UNCLE PIRATE,' with book by BEN H. WINTERS, music and lyrics by DREW FORNAROLA and directed by JEREMY DOBRISH, based on the book by DOUGLAS REES.

The award-winning VITAL THEATRE COMPANY is pleased to announce the production 'UNCLE PIRATE,' with book by BEN H. WINTERS, music and lyrics by DREW FORNAROLA and directed by JEREMY DOBRISH, based on the book by DOUGLAS REES.

The award-winning VITAL THEATRE COMPANY is pleased to announce the production 'UNCLE PIRATE,' with book by Ben H. Winters, music and lyrics by DREW FORNAROLA and directed by Jeremy Dobrish, based on the book by Douglas Rees.

The award-winning VITAL THEATRE COMPANY is pleased to announce the production 'UNCLE PIRATE,' with book by BEN H. WINTERS, music and lyrics by DREW FORNAROLA and directed by JEREMY DOBRISH, based on the book by DOUGLAS REES.

The award-winning VITAL THEATRE COMPANY is pleased to announce the production 'UNCLE PIRATE,' with book by BEN H. WINTERS, music and lyrics by DREW FORNAROLA and directed by JEREMY DOBRISH, based on the book by DOUGLAS REES.

Those folks you will see sweating in Chicago's Loop for the next three weeks won't be working too hard, wearing too many clothes or worrying about the local real estate market. They will merely be lucky Chicago theatergoers, responding to the warmth, light and fire of the very first touring production of the 2008 Tony Award-winning Best Musical, "In The Heights."

I had the immense pleasure of taking another visit to Grover's Corners, New Hampshire last week, via the fascinating David Cromer production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town that opened in February at the Barrow Street Theatre. Back then I wrote that the director's non-traditional take on the play - which remains completely faithful to the author's text and themes - was one of the most exciting theatre events of the season. On second look, with a mixture of new and old cast member, I'd say it's the best theatre production I know of currently playing in New York.

Although operetta wasn't completely on its way out when Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II brought Music In The Air to Broadway in 1932, the popularity of the genre was indeed waning a bit as jazzy and witty scores by the likes of George and Ira Gershwin, Rodgers and Hart and Cole Porter dominated the decade's theatre music. But the creators of Show Boat, just five years earlier, weren't done quite yet.

Sometime after Betty and Adolph and long before Hunter and Jeff, another pair of New York actors wrote a musical with juicy roles for themselves and achieved their dream of taking it to Broadway. Not exactly hippies, but inspired by the dramatic possibilities of the flower power movement, bookwriter/lyricists Gerome Ragni'>Gerome Ragni and James Rado'>James Rado devised a story where the former played Berger, a high school student and de facto leader of a tribe of Manhattan hippies, and the latter was his newly-drafted buddy Claude, who can't decide if he should join his friends in burning their draft cards and, if necessary, fleeing to Canada, or comply with his parents' wishes that he go fight in Vietnam for his country.