Got a call from Jack Batman and Bruce Robert Harris at White Plains Performing Arts Center this afternoon.

They’re not sitting idol—I mean idle — this summer. They’re announcing the following “challenge” to find Westchester’s Best Singer, Best Dancer and Best Comic.

First up is the singing competition, in two categories — Age 10-16 and Age 17+.

Registration, [...]

Here’s this week’s video, tied to Friday’s Fourth of July performance by John Pizzarelli at Caramoor.

Nyack High School’s production of “The Phantom of the Opera” won six awards from the National Youth Theatre.

The regional awards — Nyack was in the northeast region — were selected from a group of more than 170 productions in more than 90 different theaters in more than 60 cities spanning 23 states. Winners were [...]

All is not as it seems in “Twelfth Night,” now in repertory at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival in Garrison.
When you see Feste, the fool, you’re looking at the play’s wisest character.
Behold Cesario, the faithful servant boy, and you’re looking at a lady in disguise.
And Malvolio, the haughty servant who would hold all to his [...]

If theater is meant to spark conversation, its mission is accomplished with Penguin Rep’s latest production, Joel Drake Johnson’s “The Fall to Earth.”

The play’s final moment — which Johnson has said was meant to be “deliberately ambiguous” — certainly had people talking after Sunday’s matinee.

“What does it mean?” one woman wondered aloud.

“Do you think…?” [...]

It started in 2005, Anna Becker recalls, at a conference table at Northern Westchester Center for the Arts, which was in its final months.
Becker had been called in to advise Michael Unthank, who had just taken over at NWCA.
“He asked me what the place needed to be more complete as an arts center and I [...]

“If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken and so die.”
So says Orsino, the lovestruck duke in the opening of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night.”
Director John Christian Plummer will have musicians play on when the romantic comedy opens tonight at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival in Garrison.
Plummer, [...]

Five years ago this month, Michele Pawk clutched her new Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a play as an alcoholic mother in “Hollywood Arms.”
Starting tonight, she plays another mother in “The Fall to Earth” at Stony Point’s Penguin Rep in a production that runs through July 20.

Pawk plays Fay Schorsch, a role [...]

When Paul Binder and Michael Christensen met at the San Francisco Mime Troupe in 1972, they clicked right away.

“We had a great time together,” says Christensen. “We made each other laugh. We enjoyed hanging out. Ideas would tumble and we always existed in a spirit of play. We played a lot together, like brothers.”

They are [...]

“Celebrate” starts, appropriately, with a confetti cannon, this 30th anniversary spectacular of the one-ring wonder known as the Big Apple Circus.

The Huesca Brothers tumble their way through a rapid-fire act that involves one brother flipping the other over and over using just his feet. It’s a routine that will make back-pain sufferers wince but [...]

Another busy week. I filed today’s Antrim review, which you were able to read here, first. Tomorrow, I’ll advance opening night of “The Fall to Earth” at Penguin Rep in Stony Point. Saturday, I’ll advance opening night of “Twelfth Night” at Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival in Garrison and Sunday, I’ve got an interview with Anna [...]

Got an update on Hudson Stage’s annual fund-raiser, Divas 2008, which is set for July 19 at 7 p.m., which coincides, sadly, with the Kramers’ annual jaunt to Cape Cod.

In recent years, this star-studded affair has drawn Broadway’s creme de la creme to Westchester: Past “Divas” have included Liz Callaway, Cady Huffman, Audra McDonald [...]

You can never go home.

If you’re best-selling author Eric Weiss in Donald Margulies’ “Brooklyn Boy,” — the final show in the 71st season of Antrim Playhouse, now on stage through Sunday — going home means visiting your ever-critical father in his Room 212 at Maimonides Medical Center, and still not measuring up.

ou present him with [...]

Summer isn’t just for Shakespeare. The Axial Theatre is planning “Axial Under the Stars,” on Saturday, July 12 from 7 p.m. on. It’ll be at the Martha Guinsberg Pavilion at the Mohegan Colony Schoolhouse, 99 Baron DeHirsch Road in Crompond. Tickets are a manageable $5 per person and reservations can be made at 914-286-7680.

Here’s the [...]

As someone who loves words, Carlin was always a favorite. In my book, this routine is right up there with “Who’s on First?”