Drop in on a rehearsal of a high-school musical and you’re likely to find kids doing what kids do, until the stage manager calls “Places, please,” indicating the rehearsal is about to begin. At White Plains High School earlier this week, actors, technicians and musicians had their eyes on the… Read More →
This year’s high-school-musical video series is “Running Lines,” in which we ask student actors to talk about their favorite lines and then deliver them. Yesterday, I visited White Plains High School, home of the year’s first musical, “The Sound of Music.” Here, Melodie Badillo, Will Socolof and Jimmy Sorrow run… Read More →
The calendar may say January, but in the world of Danielle Rudess, the founder and sole proprietor of the loudest, proudest moment on the high-school-musical calendar — the annual Metropolitan Awards held each June — it might as well be spring. Rudess, the Metros producer, is looking for judges for… Read More →
When Jim Breuer steps up to the mike this weekend for four shows to open Levity Live — the brand-new comedy club in the Palisades Center Mall — he knows he can get laughs the easy way or the hard way. With his droopy eyelids and sharp features, Breuer seems… Read More →
The producers at Hudson Stage Company announced today that the spring show at Pace/Briarcliff’s Woodward Hall Theater will be Lanford Wilson’s “Talley’s Folly,” a two-hander about love and loss between a rural Missouri woman and a Jewish accountant from St. Louis. The winner of the Pulitzer Prize, it will be… Read More →
When the Family Theater Production of “Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” pushes off the shore next week on a monthlong run at Westchester Broadway Theatre in Elmsford, it’ll be led by two 24-year-olds who took entirely different journeys to the dinner-theater stage. The musical — based on Mark… Read More →
Yes, there’s the opening of “Antics Roadshow” sketch comedy (Ship of Fools Productions) in Nyack and the dark “The Wild Party” (Little Radical Theatrics) in White Plains, but there are other shows running this weekend, too. Here’s a sampling from across the Lower Hudson Valley: Present at the creation The… Read More →
Michael Mirra’s Little Radical Theatrics — a troupe that scratches a theatrical niche for actors between high school and community theater — has done some pretty dark musicals over the past few years: “Sweeney Todd,” “Reefer Madness” and, this weekend, the Westchester premiere of Andrew Lippa’s “The Wild Party,” a… Read More →
Dana Duff, Brianne Higgins and Brooke Malloy — the women of Ship of Fools Productions — finish each other’s sentences and constantly make each other laugh. Which is a good thing, considering their company’s first outing is this weekend’s “Antics Roadshow,” an evening of original sketch-comedy akin to “Saturday Night… Read More →
John Cariani doesn’t make a habit of stopping by productions of his charming play “Almost, Maine,” but he’ll make an exception on Saturday when he visits Nyack’s Elmwood Playhouse to see the show and take part in a post-show Q&A. “Peter Danish is involved with the show and he’s a… Read More →
Wiley Hausam, the director of the Purchase College PAC, is headed west to open at new performing arts hall at Stanford University. Before he leaves — he starts his new job on Feb. 1 — I asked him to answer a few questions about his experience at Purchase, his home… Read More →
Wiley Hausam, who directs Purchase College’s PAC, is heading west to become managing director of Stanford University’s yet-unopened Bing Concert Hall, the university announced this week. Hausam came to Purchase in 2008, having run NYU’s Skirball Center. Once here, he ushered in changes at the PAC, holding annual galas that… Read More →
Jazz guitarist John Pizzarelli has made a career putting his own spin on songs written when he was just a twinkle in his father’s eye: works made popular by Nat Cole, Frank Sinatra, Richard Rodgers and Duke Ellington. “The idea is that the music is not finite,” says Pizzarelli, the… Read More →
Been crazy busy filling in on the Weekend section and not out and about seeing shows. But there’s hope on the horizon, as groups start cranking up their winter/spring offerings. And those High School Musicals are not far off. First, a look at this weekend. Here’s today’s story: 100-minute ‘Hamlet’... Read More →
