1940!

In many of America’s cities, theatre history exists in plain sight. Whether inside a museum or on a street corner, fascinating pieces of theatre lore exist, waiting to be discovered by an interested passerby. Here are ten inspiring displays of theatre history I saw up close and in person this summer, from New York City to Washington D.C. and beyond. You can visit them too—and many are free to see! 

Town Hall Theater will present THT Artistic Director Doug Anderson's “A History of the American Musical” four-class series, beginning Monday, March 8th.

The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center has announced a Fall Season of digital concerts to replace each of the performances originally scheduled for Alice Tully Hall -- Front Row Mainstage, 16 newly-curated concerts drawn from CMS's vast archive of high-quality recordings.

 The Orchestra Now (TŌN), Bard Music Festival, and Bard College Conservatory of Music will present Out of the Silence: A Celebration of Music. The video series of four free live-streamed concerts for string orchestra, piano, and percussion is coming to UPSTREAMING, the Fisher Centera??s virtual stage, from September 5 - 26. 

 In the context of ongoing national debates over immigration, the timely new two-hour documentary The Chinese Exclusion Act, from Emmy® Award winning documentary filmmakers Ric Burns and Li-Shin Yu, will debut as a special presentation of the award-winning PBS television series American Experience on Tuesday, May 29 2018 at 8:00-10:00 PM ET. The film is narrated by actor Hoon Lee (Banshee).

Manfred Honeck will return to the New York Philharmonic to conduct Sibelius's Violin Concerto, with Nikolaj Znaider as soloist; Mr. Honeck's own arrangement of Dvorák's Rusalka Fantasy, orchestrated by Tomáš Ille; and selections from Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty, Thursday, May 3, 2018, at 7:30 p.m.; Friday, May 4 at 11:00 a.m.; Saturday, May 5 at 8:00 p.m.; and Tuesday, May 8 at 7:30 p.m. The following week, Nikolaj Znaider will make his New York Philharmonic conducting debut leading Elgar's Cello Concerto, with Jian Wang in his subscription debut, and Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 1, Winter Dreams, Thursday, May 10, 2018, at 7:30 p.m.; Friday, May 11 at 8:00 p.m.; and Saturday, May 12 at 8:00 p.m.

Today it is too easy to get down on our frail featherless friends. We are birds of a unique ability to fly. It is easy to dis, but deserves much more that's not to missed from our fellow monkeys who have elevated our canopy to reach closer to our internal gods above and inside. I will celebrate the best of humankind and try to write a pictorial story with no direction in sight. It will be an image game.

Russia's profound and far-reaching impact on 20th-century culture will be explored at the 2013 annual Bard SummerScape festival, which once again offers an extraordinary summer of music, opera, theater, dance, film, and cabaret, keyed to the theme of the 24th annual Bard Music Festival, Stravinsky and His World. Presented in the striking Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts and other venues on Bard College's bucolic Hudson River campus, the seven-week festival opens on July 6 with the first of two performances of A Rite (2013) by the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and SITI Company, and closes on August 18 with a party in Bard's beloved Spiegeltent, which returns for the full seven weeks. Complementing the Bard Music Festival's exploration of “Stravinsky and His World,” some of the great Russian-born composer's most captivating compatriots provide key SummerScape highlights. These include the first fully-staged American production of Sergey Taneyev's opera Oresteia; the world premiere of an original stage adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov's seminal novel The Master and Margarita; and a film festival titled “Between Traditions: Stravinsky's Legacy and Russian Emigré Cinema.” Together, SummerScape's offerings will continue Bard's yearlong tenth-anniversary celebrations for the Frank Gehry-designed Fisher Center, which commence with a month of special performances in April.

If, indeed, 'it takes a village,' and if, as the poets say, 'no man is an island,' then perhaps no art form is more collaborative than live theatre. With a village of artists backstage and offstage assuring that each production is mounted, then coming to life during each performance, the collaborative effort is renewed. And what audiences see onstage is the collaboration of artists, the people who comprise the acting ensemble, the folks who bring the stagebound script to life, sending it soaring into our imaginations.

The NYC400 is the first-ever list of New York City's ultimate movers and shakers since the City's founding?from politics, the arts, business, sports, science, and entertainment.

Director Ed Shea keeps the authors' light touch on heavy issues in this comedy that plays at the Warren, RI theater through February 15th