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.

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.

Anna Becker’s “Insights & Revelations Performance Series” officially takes up residence down-county at the Emelin Theatre on Oct. 1—after having lived in Mount Kisco and Pleasantville—with “Inside Shakespeare with The Shakespeare Society.”

Writes Becker: “The acclaimed Shakespeare Society gives us a behind the-scenes look at the process of taking Shakespeare from the page to the stage with Elisabeth Waterston (Classic Stage Company’s The Tempest opposite Mandy Patinkin and The Public Theater’s Much Ado About Nothing opposite Sam Waterston), Randy Harrison (Justin Taylor on Showtime’s “Queer As Folk”) and other notable Shakespearean actors in an open rehearsal of “Measure for Measure.”

“Commentary and discussion with Michael Sexton (pictured), The Shakespeare Society’s Artistic Director, and Shakespearean scholar Ruth Carpenter. A discussion and reception with the artists follows the program.

The show is at 8, the tickets are $25. The Emelin is at 153 Library Lane, Mamaroneck. 914-698-0098. www.emelin.org. Photo by Ellen Kelson

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.

“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 »

Beth Leavel, Tony winner for “The Drowsy Chaperone,” will join Hudson Stage’s Divas ‘09 fund-raiser July 11 in Yorktown Heights.

Leavel, who has a wicked sense of humor and a great voice, will join Liz Callaway and a list of yet-unannounced divas. Hudson Stage, started 10 years ago by Olivia Sklar, Denise Bessette and (Callaway’s husband) Dan Foster, is an exceptional local theater company.

Each summer—and always the weekend I am on vacation—they hold a wingding of a shindig featuring Broadway songbirds.

It’s just nine miles from Purchase College to Mamaroneck’s Emelin Theatre.

But for the Purchase Repertory Theatre’s junior company, this weekend’s trip to the Emelin will take them a lot farther than down the Hutch to Mamaroneck Avenue and Library Lane. It will teach them a useful skill: How to create a show in one place and take it elsewhere.

Tomorrow, the company — which has always performed in Purchase’s Abbott Kaplan theater — opens  a weekend run of David Ives’ “All in the Timing,” eight one-act plays.

The 23rd season of Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival includes an old favorite, a new favorite and a show artistic director Terrence O’Brien will tackle for the first time.

Performances will begin June 20 and, while the exact order of openings is not set yet, O’Brien hopes to open the three shows — “Pericles: Prince of Tyre,” “Much Ado About Nothing” and “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)” — in consecutive weeks.

“We’ll be running repertory the entire summer,” O’Brien says. “It’ll be great for the actors who enjoy switching parts, doing one play one night and doing something hopefully very different another night. And with the third play, people actually get to have a night off every so often.”

Anna Becker’s wonderful “Insights & Revelations Performance Series”—at the Rosenthal JCC at 600 Bear Ridge Road in Pleasantville—will give theatergoers a peek at Aquila Theatre’s Off-Broadway adaptation of “Catch-22,” starring John Lavelle (Broadway’s “The Graduate”) as Yossarian.

The performance is Sunday, Dec. 7 at 7 p.m., on an off night from its New York City premiere engagement. Aquila company members will present scenes from this new adaptation, and discuss the making of this production.

It is directed by Aquila’s artistic director, Peter Meineck, a Katonah resident, who will lead Sunday’s discussion. Afterward, the artists will join the audience in the lobby for a champagne and dessert reception.

The worst thing about great theater is the best thing about great theater: What’s here for a moment — the way a smile crosses a woman’s lips, the gleam in a man’s eye — is gone before you know it.

That ephemeral nature is what brings people out to live theater, and it’s why, having only recently discovered the wonder that is the Purchase Repertory Company, I vow not to miss another show there.

Take William Saroyan’s “The Time of Your Life,” performed by the Senior Acting company, through tomorrow in the black box theater at the Purchase Performing Arts Center.

Purchase Repertory Theatre’s production of Stephen Adly Guirgis’ “The Last Days of Judas Iscariot” is foul-mouthed, offensive, three hours long — and not to be missed.

It is daring, effective and masterfully acted by a cast of 16 Purchase conservatory students who, it is safe to assume, are only a few years removed from Broadway and feature films.

You can see them now for $20 a ticket.

If you’re lucky enough to find yourself in the Purchase College Performing Arts Center black-box space for one of the final three performances (today at 2 and 8, tomorrow at 2), you’re in for a wild ride.

Married people get a knowing gleam in their eye when they hear a newly minted husband say “She’s different now that we’re married,” but in the case of Craig Lucas’ “Prelude to a Kiss,” there’s something to it.

When an old man shows up at a wedding reception and asks to kiss the bride, something metaphysical happens: He inhabits her body and she inhabits his.

For Maddie Corman, who’ll play the bride, Rita, in a staged reading at Irvington Town Hall Theater on Saturday — it’s a benefit for the theater’s Clocktower Players — it’ll be a homecoming of sorts. The professional actress started her acting career on the Town Hall Theater stage — in the children’s theater that was founded by her mother.

Back then, there was no heat, no elevator and no air-conditioning, Corman says, three situations that have been remedied with annual fund-raisers.

When he was growing up in Larchmont in the late ‘80s, Marc Rosenthal tagged along as his older brothers, Tom and Ben, formed bands and played gigs in local clubs, even at the famed CBGB in the Bowery.

“At a very small age, at 12 or 13, I’d see the rehearsal process,” says Rosenthal, who now goes by his stage name, Milton. “Seeing them book gigs, loading in at the clubs, learning how to put together a set list, seeing a band fight, seeing how songs got written, seeing how you chose covers. And meeting touring bands who were professional that had managers and labels and seeing how it worked.

“From the age of 4 or 5, it’s really all I ever wanted to do. But to be able to see it with my brothers doing it only fed the fire,” he says.

By the time his brothers went off to college, their kid brother had formed a band of his own.

With Sunday’s opening of Jason Robert Brown’s new musical, “13,” Broadway finds out what it’s like to be a newly minted teenager in 2008.

Directed by Jeremy Sams (“Noises Off”), “13” is about Evan Goldman, whose parents’ divorce uproots him from Manhattan and transplants him in Indiana, just in time for his bar mitzvah. He has to navigate a new school with all its cliques, hierarchies and rumors.

There’s not a single adult in the cast and one unseen adult (musical director and conductor Tom Kitt, from Armonk) in the pit.

DreamWorks has just released the first track from “Shrek the Musical.”

It’s the song “I Know It’s Today,” sung by Leah Greenhaus, Westchester’s Marissa O’Donnell and Tony-winner Sutton Foster.

Read about Marissa, and the song here.

Hear the song and download it here.

“Shrek,” based on the DreamWorks films which were, in turn, based on William Steig’s books about a swamp-dwelling ogre, has music by Jeanine Tesori and book and lyrics by David Lindsay-Abaire. It is directed by Jason Moore and stars Brian d’Arcy James, Sutton Foster, Chris Sieber and John Tartaglia.

Previews begin Nov. 8 for a Dec. 14 opening at the Broadway Theatre. Tickets at 212-239-6200.