In 2004, Matt Sax had a meltdown of sorts.

“I wondered ‘What am I doing with my life?’ ” he recalls.

He was 20.

The Mamaroneck native – then a sophomore theater major at Northwestern – decided to do something “absolutely extreme,” entering a play in the Edinburgh International Fringe Festival.

The extreme part was that he hadn’t written [...]

Here’s a brief chat with Laurence Holzman and Felicia Needleman, the lyricists and librettists behind “The Jerusalem Syndrome,” part of the New York Musical Theater Festival. The show opens this week.

Got this email from the folks at the Dobbs Ferry schools:

Have you always dreamed about being on Broadway?
(We’re at 505 Broadway in Dobbs Ferry.)

Have you always yearned to work in the theater?
(Drama or Musical)

Have you always aspired to be a stage director?
(MS/HS Auditorium)

Don’t look any further, we have the job for you! Dobbs Ferry Middle [...]

This week’s “In the Wings” video catches up with “Kent Stories” at Arts on the Lake, which runs Friday and Saturday.

“The Jerusalem Syndrome” sounds like it could be a ’70s disaster movie — perhaps starring George Kennedy or Charlton Heston.

In fact, it’s a new musical comedy at the New York Musical Theatre Festival, from Sept. 23 to Oct. 5.

But keep Charlton Heston in mind.

The show — with music by Kyle Rosen and a book [...]

If, as Robert Frost wrote, “good fences make good neighbors,” a group in Kent hopes that neighbors make good theater.

Friday and Saturday night, the stories of Kent residents will be played out in the basement of the old firehouse on Route 52.

A project of Arts on the Lake, “Kent Stories: Neighbors Portray Neighbors” is directed [...]

Playing the larger-than-life, no-nonsense blues singer Bessie Smith off and on for eight years has changed Miche Braden.

“There’s a lot of things I might have let pass that I don’t let pass anymore,” says the singer-actress-arranger-musical director, whose first name is pronounced “Mickey.”

“I’ve definitely grown a lot doing Bessie,” Braden says. “Whatever she thought came [...]

When independent filmmaker Julie Cohen went to see “As You Like It” at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival in Garrison last summer, she had Channel 13 on her mind: She was working on a documentary for the local PBS station at the time.

But when she and her family spread their blanket and settled in for [...]

The fall is full of theatrical offerings. Here’s a fairly comprehensive sampling of professional and community-theater productions on the schedule.

Axial Theatre Company starts its 10th season with a party, the group’s benefit auction dinner on Oct. 18 at 7 p.m. at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Pleasantville. For reservations to the benefit, call 914-286-7680. Axial’s [...]

Two directors represent both ends of the directorial spectrum in this week’s “In the Wings” video.

Total Teen Productions, run entirely by teen-agers, will present Stephen Schwartz’s “Children of Eden” at the Tarrytown Music Hall, Oct. 24-26, with half the proceeds going to the Make-A-Wish Foundation of the Hudson Valley.

The co-directors are Georgina Simon, 15, of Hendrick Hudson High School, whom I’ve interviewed several times, and 16-year old Evan Bernardin.

Georgina has [...]

When Fox Lane High School graduate Karla Cheatham Mosley says “things are a-brewing,” she’s putting it mildly.

This week, movie audiences will see her, albeit in a tiny role, in “Burn After Reading” the new Joel and Ethan Coen movie.
She appears in a party scene where her character’s upwardly mobile husband (“Spring Awakening” producer Pan Bandhu) [...]

An interesting RAND report was issued yesterday, linking arts education to the survival of art. Here’s the release.

IMPROVING ARTS EDUCATION IS KEY TO STEMMING AUDIENCE DECLINE, RAND STUDY FINDS
Policymakers have underestimated the critical role of arts learning in supporting a vibrant nonprofit cultural sector, according to a RAND Corporation study issued today. The study was [...]

Broadway stars Cris Groenendaal, Kevin Gray and Craig Schulman—who have all played the title role in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “The Phantom of the Opera”—will bring their considerable talents to the Paramount Center for the Arts in Peekskill on Nov. 8 in an evening they call “Three Phantoms In Concert.” The show starts at 8.

They sing [...]

Blanche Rothstein remembers when she first knew she wanted to be an actress.

“I played an oak leaf in the second grade,” she says.

That was at P.S. 63 in The Bronx — when Calvin Coolidge was president.

“I was so enamored of being on the stage that I wanted to do that forever,” she recalls.

It may not [...]