Fort Hill Players’ Joan Charischak sent the following

“SEEKING TALENT FOR JANUARY SHOWCASE

How often have you thought,  I was perfect for that role.  I hate auditions!
I have a monologue I’ve always wanted to do.  I’m just dying to sing a solo.
There’s this scene I’d do in a heartbeat.  I’m a dancing fool without a stage.

Well, here’s your chance to get your act together and perform it.  Fort Hill Players is seeking performers for their annual showcase production: FROM THE WINGS, to take place Jan. 29 & 30, 2010, at Rochambeau School Theater in White Plains.  Short monologues, one acts, poetry, scenes, etc. (readings or fully produced) Original works are welcome, as are singers, dancers, musicians, and possibly variety acts.

Send a description of your piece to: FHP@FortHillPlayers.com.   Deadline:  Nov.30, 2009.  Questions, Info: 914-946-5143 or FortHillPlayers.com

Children’s Shakespeare Theater in Palisades has added box-office hours for its fall production of “Much Ado About Nothing.”
The box-office hours at Palisades Presbyterian Church will clear the lines at the door. The box office will be open Nov. 2 from 5 to 9 p.m., Nov. 3 from 5 to 8:30 p.m., Nov. 4 from 4 to 7 p.m. and Nov. 5 from 4 to 7:30 p.m. Performances are Nov. 6, 7, 13 and 14 at 8 and Nov. 14 at 2.

Tickets are $12, $10 for seniors and $8 for children. With pre-purchase only, buy 5 and get the 6th one FREE!

The box office and performances are at Palisades Presbyterian Church is at 117 Washington Spring Road, Palisades. Details at www.childrensshakespeare.org.

If you’re looking for something to do with the kiddos today and tomorrow, Little Village Playhouse presents a haunted house today from 4 to 8 and tomorrow from 3 to 7 at 42 Memorial Plaza in Pleasantville. The suggested donation is $5 and a two-story haunted edible gingerbread house will be raffled off “by Willoughby S. Bumblewitch.” That’s a lot of gingerbread. Go to LittleVillagePlayhouse.com or call 914-747-6206

We live in a vampire moment: The “Twilight” book series is all the rage; “True Blood” vamps it up on cable; and “Cirque du Freak” is now in theaters.

But Antrim Playhouse director Randy Accardi says they are all branches of the same tree planted by Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, “Dracula.”

This weekend, just in time for Halloween, Antrim opens a three-weekend run of “Dracula” at the playhouse in Wesley Hills, in a faithful adaptation of Stoker by Steven Dietz.

Douglas J. Aguirre, a retired NYPD officer from Middletown, N.Y., plays the title role. To get into role – which presents Dracula growing younger as he tastes new blood – Aguirre has let his fingernails grow long. When he is old, he strokes his fingernails absentmindedly; when he is young, the nails are weapons.

Accardi has directed some of Antrim’s most successful musicals of late – “West Side Story” and last season’s “Miss Saigon” – but never a drama.

Merman’s in; Minnelli’s not.

Fanny’s in; Barbra’s not.

In decades writing about theater for Playbill magazine and in nearly a dozen books, Robert Viagas has interviewed many stars.

The founder of Playbill.com and host of Playbill Radio, the Mamaroneck resident has had a seat on the aisle to every Broadway show for years, seeing those stars firsthand.

So when Applause Books wanted a book about stars of Broadway musicals, Viagas was their man.

The result is “I’m the Greatest Star” (Applause, $29.99).

Tom Kitt, a graduate of Byram Hills High School, has been busy with several projects, including writing a musical with Green Day. But he hasn’t put “Next to Normal” behind him.

On Wednesday, Kitt and fellow Tony-winner Brian Yorkey will premiere a new song — “Something I Can’t See — which they wrote with input from the show’s Twitter followers. Of the more than 850,000 followers on Twitter, Kitt and Yorkey sifted through more than 4,000 suggestions posted 140 characters at a time and eventually settled on “Something I Can’t See,” which  will be performed by cast members Louis Hobson (Dr. Madden) and Aaron Tveit (Gabe) at 92Y Tribeca (200 Hudson Street) on Wednesday, October 28 at 7:00pm.

The one-night-only event will include a panel discussion featuring Kitt, Yorkey, director Michael Greif and producer David Stone.

Tickets and information are available at www.92YTribeca.org.

Next to Normal sought ideas from the Twitter followers on all aspects of the new song, from which characters are performing it and where it takes place in the musical’s storyline, to song structure and lyric suggestions.

The song will not be incorporated into the Tony-winning musical.

Fans around the world are encouraged to follow the event live via the show’s Twitter (www.Twitter.com/n2nbroadway) or by searching #n2nevent on Twitter.

At several points in “Rose” — Martin Sherman’s one-woman show on stage through Nov. 1 at the Schoolhouse Theater in Croton Falls — the title character, in the middle of recalling a memory that is becoming painful, disavows it.

“I don’t remember,” she says. “Perhaps I imagined it.”

She might have lived through a pogrom in her tiny shtetl in Ukraine. Or it might just be a memory borrowed from “Fiddler on the Roof.”

She might have survived a brutal crackdown in the Warsaw Ghetto. Then again, who knows?

I’ve got some things taped to my rarely visited cubicle that bring me joy when I see them: Pictures of my kids when they were tiny, my daughter Bridget’s charcoal rendering of a tree, and this quote from the NYT obit of Mel Gussow, a theater critic who was a playwright’s champion.

It never fails to make me smile and the observation is so keen:

“In a lecture, called “The Role of the Critic,” Mr. Gussow told an anecdote about an actor who played the doctor who appears only very briefly in “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Mr. Gussow said the actor described the play this way: “It’s about this doctor who takes this crazy lady off to an asylum.”

“It taught him much, he said, about what it means to be a player, of any sort, in the theater. “For an actor or a playwright, even a critic,” Mr. Gussow concluded, “one must always believe that what one does is important.”

Last night’s gala benefit at the Beach Point Club in Mamaroneck was a great affair, with support coming from all quarters.

The raffle, toward buying a new film projector, pulled in nearly $20,000, thanks in no small part to the cajoling of Debbie Chapin, who also ran the non-silent portion of the evening’s festivities, auctioning off vacations to those who came ready to spend.

Mark Ettenger, the theater’s president, delivered a tribute to Seth Kaplan, who was co-president until his unexpected death this summer. Then it was on to a checklist of achievements: a firmer financial footing, partnerships with groups like Purchase Rep and Anna Becker, grants and help from state Sen. Suzi Oppenheimer, who was on hand.

Executive director Lisa Reilly was upbeat, praising her staff and the work that went into this season on all fronts: music, bluegrass, children’s programming, film and theater.

She then introduced the Emelin’s Bravo Award winner, Westchester native Rita Houston of WFUV radio, who spoke eloquently about the vital and long-range benefits of exposure to the arts.

The evening closed with the Todd Londagin Five, a tight little band that played some great numbers. Londagin plays a mean trombone and even did a little tap dance.

Great stuff that bodes well for the little theater on Library Lane.

When some singers rehearse, they need an accompanist, a vocal coach and plenty of quiet.

Singer Liz Callaway just needs a CD and a full tank of gas.

“I do most of my rehearsing in the car so I drive and practice along to piano tracks,” says Callaway, a Broadway veteran of “Miss Saigon” and “Cats.” “People have no idea what I’m doing.”

All that practice — in a silver Toyota Camry while running errands near her Croton-on-Hudson home or on the Taconic — is paying dividends: Callaway is out with first CD in eight years, “Passage of Time,” on the Bronxville-based PS Classics label.

She’ll be singing songs from the album next week at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Room, a cozy venue where Callaway says you can “get dressed up or wear jeans.”

When Suzanne Ochs of Dobbs Ferry trekked north to audition for Brewster Theater Company’s “Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean,” she didn’t know a lot about the show.

“I had the 6,000-foot view of what it was about: a group of women getting together, anniversary of James Dean, and they talk about stuff in the past,” she says.

What that “stuff” was, she wasn’t entirely sure.

Now she has an up-close view. This weekend and next, Ochs will play Mona, a West Texas woman whose life was forever changed when James Dean came to town to film “Giant.” (Sandy Dennis played Mona on Broadway and in the 1982 film.)

Oscar Wilde wrote “Lady Windermere’s Fan” — a skewering of Victorian morals in general and marriage in particular — in 1892, but that doesn’t mean it has to stay there.

Purchase Repertory Theatre presents “Lady Windermere” this week, with performances Tuesday through Sunday. Produced by the senior Acting Company, director David Bassuk has moved the action ahead a bit, to 1910-11, a decade after the playwright’s death.

One might consider this a small adjustment, but only if one isn’t a student at Purchase, where the shape of skirt, the taper of a coat and the color of a cravat occupy a great deal of time and research: 1910 is not 1908, nor is it 1912.

Jack Gremli at Nanuet High School is directing “The 1940’s Radio Hour” and is having a tough time finding a 1940s coca cola soda machine for the set. Anyone have any leads or idea? Reach out to Jack ASAP at jgremli@nanuetsd.org.

In the airy atrium of Maria Fareri Children’s Hospital in Valhalla last Saturday, a couple sat in the front row of assembled chairs listening intently with other invited guests to poems being recited.

The poems were special, written by pediatric patients, youngsters living with pain, all too accustomed to the hospital’s monitors, pills and needles.

For the better part of an hour, the couple watched actors from Infinity Repertory Theatre Company in Bedford Hills performing “Notes from a Hospital Bed” — the collected thoughts of Maria Fareri’s Poetry Corner. The poets meet weekly whenever they are in the hospital for treatment, under the auspices of the facility’s Child Life and Creative Arts Therapy department.

There were poems about pain, about friends, about family and sunflowers.

In the world of the theater, it’s called “The Scottish Play” as uttering its name, except in performance, is considered asking for it.

In the world of opera, it’s “Macbeth,” say it loud, sing it proud.

“We don’t call it ‘The Scottish Opera,’” Taconic Opera general director Dan Montez says with a laugh. “But there’s a different Verdi opera, ‘La Forza del Destino,’ which is the one you’re not supposed to say when you’re actually in the theater.”