I wrote about Justin Boccitto’s NYMF-bound musical “Count to Ten” earlier in the week. Here is news about getting tickets to the popular festival:

The busy summer at the Port Chester Council for the Arts continues. They’ve already presented “Urinetown” and “The Wiz.” This weekend, it’s “Disney’s High School Musical—One Act Edition.”

Yorktown Stage’s production of “Footloose” — on stage for just one more weekend — starts with a jaw-dropping dance number, set to the show’s title song.

We see Ren (August Abatecola) among his hip Chicago friends who dance like pros and who, this being the Chicago of musical theater, are dressed in all-black leather and sheer tops, just like in another Chicago of musical theater: Kander & Ebb’s “Chicago.” (There they are, at right, in a photo by Patrick Vanden Bergh.)

This is Ren’s crowd. This is what he’s used to.

And this is what he loses when his mother drags him to Bomont, a dusty crossroads in an unnamed state in the middle of nowhere, a town so backward that it has outlawed dancing.

Got an email today about a production of the Shades Repertory Theater, a group I’d never heard of, that operates out of the Central Presbyterian Church on New Main Street in Haverstraw.

If you want to have “Dracula” at Halloween, you have to audition in August and that’s what director Melinda O’Brien is doing next week. Melinda, half of the M&M in M&M productions (with her husband, Michael Muldoon), directs the show at Hand to Mouth Players, which will run Oct. 22 to Nov. 1.

Something for nearly everyone at a venue near you this weekend.

When Betsy Walkup entered that dance audition in 2007, she had an edge: She had been taking classes for about a year — and she was younger than most of the people trying out.

“I got into hip-hop when I turned 60,” says the kindergarten teacher from Bronxville. (That’s Betsy, No. 61—for her age—in the center at right, in a photo courtesy Gotta Dance & NBA Entertainment.)

“I discovered that I loved it and that it was genuine, so I took a class every Saturday at New York Sports Club in Manhattan, on Broadway.”

The folks in those Saturday classes called her “Betty,” not Betsy, so that became her hip-hop persona, a character she’d play, a woman who could shake things that the kindergarten teacher would keep still.
Betsy would use an inside voice; Betty was as wild as the street.

The Emelin Film Club’s screening of “Gotta Dance” — about the first-ever New Jersey Nets senior citizen hip-hop team — was something special, made more so by the emergence, after the lights came up, of director Dori Berinstein and a half-dozen of the dancers, who performed on the stage.

The film was even sweeter the second time around and Marshall Fine, my former JN colleague, did a fine job of framing the post-show conversation.

I got a chance to chat with Betsy Walkup, a Bronxville woman who figures prominently in the story. By day, she teaches kindergarten on Long Island. But this dance team gave another side of her personality a chance to emerge: a woman named Betty who shakes it like there’s no tomorrow and who can’t get enough hip-hop.

Alan Ayckbourn’s “Relatively Speaking,” getting a spirited production at Nyack’s Elmwood Playhouse, will not change your life.

But if a midsummer diversion is in order — and when is one not? — the four-person British comedy might do the trick.

Ayckbourn, one of Britain’s most prolific contemporary playwrights, churns out comedies like Stephen King once cranked out novels, from “How the Other Half Loves” to “Absurd Person Singular” to last season’s Broadway trilogy, “The Norman Conquests.”

Arts on the Lake at the Lake Carmel Cultural Center in Kent has a great variety of offerings, a true community center that is well-supported. Their latest program, set for Aug. 1, is topical and historical at the same time.

“Gotta Dance,” Bedford-based documentarian Dori Berinstein’s funny, touching and toe-tapping award-winner, will be screened tomorrow night at Mamaroneck’s Emelin Theater. It’ll be followed by a Q&A with Berinstein and Chappaqua’s Betsy Walkup, a schoolteacher whose personality changed completely when she tried out for the New Jersey Nets’ first senior hip-hop dance team.

Yes, seniors doing hip-hop. But it’s more than just cute old folks shaking their booties. “Gotta Dance” extends the story to talk about self-esteem and aging, about finding value in yourself long after society’s sell-by date.

Tickets are just $15 and include a post-screening Q&A led by Marshall Fine. Read more of this entry »

During the school year—actually all year long—Justin Boccitto travels from school to school across the Lower Hudson Valley, teaching magical dances to teens for their high-school and youth-theater musicals. This summer and fall, his dance card will be filled with “Count to Ten,” a new musical written by Michael Blevins, that Boccitto and The Group Theatre Too is producing.

They’ll take “Count to Ten” to the New York Musical Theater Festival in October, a huge coup, but an expensive one. To raise money, they’re holding a cabaret on Aug. 2 at 3 p.m. and 7 p.m.

“A Cabaret for Count To Ten”— at the Cultural Arts Playhouse in Mamaroneck—will feature a who’s who of teen talent from across the Lower Hudson Valley.

Read more of this entry »

I’m the theater guy—and I don’t like that the Emelin doesn’t have a legit theater program—but you have to like that Lisa Reilly and her team at the Mamaroneck venue are trying new things for the upcoming 2009-10 season: Great Traditions and Dance.

Mamaroneck’s Carly Rose Sonenclar, who played the Young Cosette in the Broadway revival of “Les Miz,” will play Melissa Gilbert’s daughter, Carrie, in the national tour of “Little House on the Prairie The Musical.”

The tour kicks off at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, NJ, Sept. 8  through Oct. 10. For tickets, call 973-376-4343 or go to www.papermill.org.

Here is the link for the tour Web site.

http://littlehousethemusical.com/

Alan Menken keeps it local on Sept. 13 at 7 p.m., when the eight-time Oscar-winner takes part in “Broadway Tonight” at the Tarrytown Music Hall, 13 Main St, Tarrytown.