Sandy Zwier News

Admission to individual SPARK events April 6-8 is now available online at pittsburghCLO.org/SPARK. For a small donation to Pittsburgh CLO's Audience Development and Education programs, members of the public are invited to peek behind the scenes of a musical in the making as 10 writing teams from across the country converge in Pittsburgh to showcase their work through a series of public presentations featuring local and national actors. Performances will take place at venues throughout the Cultural District.

The Washington DC area is truly lucky to get the last leg of the RAGTIME - THE MUSICAL National Tour this toasty weekend. Currently playing at the Wolf Trap Filene Center until Saturday, June 11, RAGTIME's director Marcia Milgrom Dodge has pieced together a powerful show full of emotion, beautiful imagery, and strong voices.

Walking into the Music Hall at Fair Park Tuesday night, I was extremely eager to enjoy Ahrens and Flaherty's lavish, Tony Award-winning score in the tour of RAGTIME. Together with Terrence McNally's dynamic script, RAGTIME is celebrated as perhaps one of the greatest book musicals of the past two decades. Unfortunately, in spite of all of its inherent strengths, technical troubles plagued the tour's opening night performance. I left the theatre completely disappointed.

Rhode Island audiences, prepare to be dazzled. RAGTIME is - deservedly - one of the most highly acclaimed musicals of the last two decades and the touring production now playing the Providence Performing Arts Center does the show's rich legacy proud.

At the beginning of Act II of Ragtime, Terrence McNally's masterful musical adaptation of E. L. Doctorow's novel, journeyman pianist Coalhouse Walker Jr., decimated by the murder of his beloved Sarah, sings, 'Say goodbye to music / Say goodbye to light.' This sums up my feelings about Theater League's production of Ragtime, which arrived for a brief four-day stay at the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza on Thursday night. The original 1998 Broadway production won a Tony Award for Best Score, but many patrons who packed the Fred Kavli Theatre on opening night were dismayed to discover that Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty's sumptuous, moving songs were being played from pre-recorded synthesized music tracks. Despite superb performances from the entire cast, Theater League's Ragtime suffers greatly from this omission, which was apparently a decision of Phoenix Entertainment, the independent theatrical producing and management enterprise in charge of producing the show.

At the dawn of a new century, everything is changing…and anything is possible.  RAGTIME returns to the road in an all-new touring production that Bloomberg News hails as "explosive, thrilling and nothing short of a masterpiece." North America will be swept away by this ravishing and relevant production, with performances starting Tuesday, October 27 at the Smith Center for the Performing Arts in Las Vegas.  BroadwayWorld has as first look at the cast in action below!

The Saugatuck Center for the Arts' Mason Street Warehouse (400 Culver Street) kicks off its professional summer theatre season with the gritty glamour and glitz of Cabaret. This updated version of the popular Broadway production opens at the Saugatuck Center for the Arts tonight, June 26 at 8:00p.m. and runs through Sunday, July 12.

The Saugatuck Center for the Arts' Mason Street Warehouse (400 Culver Street) kicks off its professional summer theatre season with the gritty glamour and glitz of Cabaret. This updated version of the popular Broadway production opens at the Saugatuck Center for the Arts on Friday, June 26 at 8:00p.m. and runs through Sunday, July 12. Tickets for the show can be reserved online at sc4a.org or by calling (269) 857-2399.