The Nutcracker at Warner Theatre

Wallace Norman

WALLACE NORMAN is the founder and Producing Artistic Director of Woodstock Fringe. Beginning in 2002 and for more than a decade. Woodstock Fringe produced the annual Woodstock Fringe Festival of Theatre and Song. The first Festival of Theatre and Song spanned two weeks. Ten years later the festival was six weeks long. Over the course of that decade, Woodstock Fringe was the producer and host of some 400 performances of original plays, solo performance art works, chamber opera, puppet theatre, concerts of new American songs, high-art clown shows, and readings of more than 50 new plays. In 2005 Wallace instigated the Woodstock Fringe Playwrights Unit, a playwriting laboratory. The Unit is now in its 18th year. The Unit met in Greenwhich Village in New York City every other Tuesday until the Covid plague arrived. The Unit continues to meet every Tuesday evening using the Zoom platform. Wallace is a playwright, director, actor and singer. He has appeared in more than sixty-five productions in Off-Broadway, Regional, Stock and Hudson Valley theaters. Wallace has been a soloist at Carnegie Recital Hall and participated as a singer in the Eugene O'Neill Playwrights Conference Cabaret Symposium. For years prior to moving to Woodstock, Wallace was a denizen of the Off-Off Broadway arena in New York City. In his city days Wallace produced over 30 works for the stage. He was a founder of The Gilgamesh Theatre Group, part of the “At The Beckett Theatre Campaign" on 42nd Street in NYC. Norman also has enjoyed a long and artistically rich association with Golden Fleece, The Composer Chamber Theatre. At the beginning of his theatrical career he was mentored by Lou Rodgers, Artistic Director of Golden Fleece both as a performer and theatre producer. Wallace trained extensively at the Herbert Berghoff Studio in NYC and at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts. He taught acting at Nassau Community College. Plays recently directed in the Hudson Valley include: The Realistic Joneses, by Will Eno (Performing Arts of Woodstock); Breaking The Code, by Hugh Wittemore (co-director Bette Siler); Happy Days, by Samuel Beckett, produced by Woodstock Fringe; Proof, by David Auburn; It Can’t Happen Here by Wallace Norman; Old Hickory, by Ric Siler; Women on Fire, by Irene O’Garden, The Great Nebula in Orion, by Lanford Wilson and Oh Virgil!, A Theatrical Portrait by Wallace Norman. Oh Virgil! was commissioned by the Virgil Thomson Foundation.

Bette Carlson Siler

Bette Carlson Siler is an actor, playwright and director. Bette’s plays have been produced by The Estrogenius Festival and Emerging Artists in New York City, New Jersey Repertory Company and the Vermont Playwrights Circle. During the pandemic, her plays were part of "Healing Voices", produced by the McCarter Theatre Centre and the George Street Playhouse. She is a member of the Woodstock Fringe Playwrights Unit and has developed, directed and performed plays with the Fringe since 2011. As an actor, she’s been fortunate enough to study monologue work with Stella Adler in New York, Chekhov with Earle Gister (Yale School of Drama) and Shakespeare with Toby Robertson (RSC, Old Vic). She has performed at Arena Stage/Living Stage in Washington, D.C., California Actors Theatre in Los Gatos, and at the Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts in Santa Maria, California. Some of her favorite roles include Winnie in Beckett’s Happy Days (directed by Wallace Norman), Vivian Bearing in Wit and Jenny Diver in The Threepenny Opera. Taking this triptych of plays to Edinburgh is a dream come true… and there is no one she'd rather throw her hat in the ring with than Ric Siler and Wallace Norman. You take the high road and I'll take the… well, you know the drill. See ya in sunny Scotland!