Legendary actress Chita Rivera will be on hand Oct. 25 to sign autographs and help mark Stage Left Children’s Theater’s 10th anniversary.

The event is a Casino Night fundraiser at the Holiday Inn at 329 Route 303 in Orangeburg, from 8 p.m. to midnight. The evening will feature casino tables such as blackjack, craps, roulette and Texas Hold ‘em. Drinks and hor d’ouvres will be served.

Ayn Lauren, artistic director and founder of SLCT, says money raised will help to offer scholarships to needy participants in the children’s theater troupe.

Tickets for the event are $75. Call 845-365-9000 or go to www.stageleftchildrenstheater.org.

Purchase Repertory Theatre’s production of Stephen Adly Guirgis’ “The Last Days of Judas Iscariot” is foul-mouthed, offensive, three hours long — and not to be missed.

It is daring, effective and masterfully acted by a cast of 16 Purchase conservatory students who, it is safe to assume, are only a few years removed from Broadway and feature films.

You can see them now for $20 a ticket.

If you’re lucky enough to find yourself in the Purchase College Performing Arts Center black-box space for one of the final three performances (today at 2 and 8, tomorrow at 2), you’re in for a wild ride.

So much to see on local stages this weekend.

Let’s start with “The Woman in Black,” a thriller that ends Penguin Rep’s 31st season in a Stony Point barn theater. If you love a well-told story and the opportunity to use your imagination, make this the show that gets you up the Palisades Parkway to Stony Point. You won’t be disappointed. The cast of three includes Tom Frey and J.C. Hoyt — and the rarely seen title character — in performances that keep you on the edge of your seat. It’s a thriller through and through, with great lighting and sound effects that put a chill in the air in the tiny 100-seat theater. “The Woman in Black” runs through Nov. 2, a great Halloween-season outing. Call 845-786-2673 or go to penguinrep.org.

Tickets are now on sale for Bedford Community Theatre’s production of “The King & I,” to be performed at the Bedford Hills Community House (at 74 Main St. Bedford Hills) on Nov. 14, 15, 16, 20, 21, 22, 23.

All seats are $15 (reserved seating). To reserve tickets, call 914-244-0474.

BCT’s production is directed by Carin Zakes with musical direction by Kirk Ehrenreich.  Karla Diamond is choreographing the production with a cast of more than 40.

Performances will be Friday, November 14 at 7:30 p.m.; Saturday, November 15 at 3:00 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.; Sunday, November 16 at 3:00 p.m.; Thursday, November 20 at 7:30 p.m.; Friday, November 21 at 7:30 p.m.; Saturday November 22 at 3:00 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.; final performance on Sunday, November 23 at 3:00 p.m.

For directions to the theatre, visit www.bedfordcommunitytheatre.org.

Photo by Diane Bradsell: Peter Green as the King and Amanda Goodman as Anna Leonowens in the Bedford Community Theatre production of “The King & I.”

“The Jerusalem Syndrome,” with a book by Mamaroneck’s Felicia Needleman and Laurence Holzman of Dobbs Ferry, won awards of excellence from New York Musical Theatre Festival today.

The musical, about a psychological anomaly in which visitors to Jerusalem become convinced they’re figures from the bible, played six performances in the festival, which concluded its fifth season on Oct. 5, after 241 performances over the course of 21 days.

At key points during “The Woman in Black,” the final production in Penguin Rep’s 31st season, one of the actors snaps his fingers and the scene is set: Lights change, fog rolls in or sound effects take the audience to another place.

Those are some pretty powerful fingers.

“The Woman in Black” is an exceptional piece of theater, in the great tradition of spell-binding thrillers. It’s nothing short of magical, drawing on all departments to deliver a completely entertaining 100 minutes.

Here’s a quick video review of “The Woman in Black,” the final show in a very successful 31st season at Penguin Rep in Stony Point.

Download:

Rose Cremonese Norton is one of those directors who inspires repeat customers, both in the cast and in the audience.

Thirty-seven years ago, kids she had choreographed in “West Side Story” at Westlake High School came back from college and told her they missed doing theater.

“They said ‘You gotta start a group,’ and I said, ‘Oh, I don’t know about that…’”
It turns out, she did know — and she’s been in the know ever since.

For Actors Conservatory Theatre director Arlene Wendt, “Shenandoah,” the musical about a Civil War father of six who struggles to keep the war at bay, was a risky choice.

“Shenandoah” plays this weekend and next at Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Hall in Yonkers.

“It’s not done often,” she says, “because it has so many men in the cast.” And even if you get men to audition, she says, it’s not easy to find an actor to play Charlie Anderson, the patriarch of the Virginia family, a role created by John Cullum on Broadway.

“I think it’s a role that mature men die for,” she says. “It’s like Don Quixote or Tevye. I feel blessed to have Steve.”

Married people get a knowing gleam in their eye when they hear a newly minted husband say “She’s different now that we’re married,” but in the case of Craig Lucas’ “Prelude to a Kiss,” there’s something to it.

When an old man shows up at a wedding reception and asks to kiss the bride, something metaphysical happens: He inhabits her body and she inhabits his.

For Maddie Corman, who’ll play the bride, Rita, in a staged reading at Irvington Town Hall Theater on Saturday — it’s a benefit for the theater’s Clocktower Players — it’ll be a homecoming of sorts. The professional actress started her acting career on the Town Hall Theater stage — in the children’s theater that was founded by her mother.

Back then, there was no heat, no elevator and no air-conditioning, Corman says, three situations that have been remedied with annual fund-raisers.

For nearly half of her life, Michelle Mohan has been in one hospital or another.

The Bronx 17-year-old has mitochondrial disease, which she explains with a familiarity born of repetition.

“The mitochondrial cells are like the power plant in your body, which break down your energy and sugar and everything,” she says from a bed at Maria Fareri Children’s Hospital at Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla. “When kids have mitochondrial disease, it can affect any system in your body. For me, I get really tired easily and I have a lot of stomach problems and I’m in a wheelchair.”

The Masters School presents Brecht’s “The Good Woman of Setzuan” at 7 p.m. Oct. 24 and 25. Performances are in the Claudia Boettcher Theatre on the school’s campus in Dobbs Ferry. Admission and parking are free, no tickets are required.

Lakeland High School’s Wig ‘n’ Whiskers troupe presents the Italian comedy “Scapino,” full of physical humor and slapstick jokes, Nov. 6-8 at 8 p.m. at the Lakeland High School auditorium.

Yorktown High School presents the drama “Dracula” on Oct. 24-26. The school’s auditorium is undergoing renovations, so the show will be played in a tent on the school grounds. That should make for a creepy setting, right around Halloween. Call 914-528-0600 Ext. 246.

It is likely that Kate McGarry is the only singer out there with an album that includes songs by Irving Berlin, Joni Mitchell and The Cars.
“Keep ‘em guessing,” she says with a laugh.

On her four albums, McGarry has delved heavily into the Great American Songbook, but nobody would put Ric Ocasek with Berlin and Rodgers & Hammerstein.

Nobody but McGarry.

The Cape Cod native, who now calls Tarrytown home, will open the Tribeca Cabaret Series at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center on Oct. 17 and 18, with a concert that draws heavily from her new album on Palmetto label, “If Less Is More … Nothing Is Everything.”

Backing her will be her husband, Keith Ganz, on guitar, Gary Versace on organ, piano and accordion, Sean Smith on bass and Alvester Garnett on drums.

When he was growing up in Larchmont in the late ‘80s, Marc Rosenthal tagged along as his older brothers, Tom and Ben, formed bands and played gigs in local clubs, even at the famed CBGB in the Bowery.

“At a very small age, at 12 or 13, I’d see the rehearsal process,” says Rosenthal, who now goes by his stage name, Milton. “Seeing them book gigs, loading in at the clubs, learning how to put together a set list, seeing a band fight, seeing how songs got written, seeing how you chose covers. And meeting touring bands who were professional that had managers and labels and seeing how it worked.

“From the age of 4 or 5, it’s really all I ever wanted to do. But to be able to see it with my brothers doing it only fed the fire,” he says.

By the time his brothers went off to college, their kid brother had formed a band of his own.

If high-school theater troupes do straight plays in the fall and this is the fall, then this must be high-school-theater-troupe-straight-play season.

OK, that syllogism stunk, but you get the idea: While the winter and spring are turned over to things musical, this is the season of the straight (non-musical) high school play.

I think Horace Greeley and Scarsdale are the exceptions to this rule: They do their musicals in the fall.