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 created by Rondi Reed, who was this year’s Best Featured Actress in a play for her work in “August: Osage County.” Both plays began life at Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago.
In Joel Drake Johnson’s “The Fall to Earth,” Fay checks into “a typical chain motel in a small American town” with her daughter, Rachel.It’s not clear why they’re here. It is clear that Fay is a nervous wreck. She speaks constantly in rapid-fire fashion, her daughter offering monosyllabic answers.

“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 they make it look as easy as a walk the park.
The inimitable Barry Lubin is in fine form as Grandma the clown, deconstructing what the audience has just seen in his own particular way.
Fellow clowns Fumagalli and Daris are classic tumblers who blend comedy with their act, eliciting titters from the 3-year-olds in the front row – and their parents.
Two acts take children’s toys to a whole other level.
Yelena Larkina gives hula-hoop lovers something to shoot for – and then some – in a stylized routine titled “Wedding Rings.”
“Jump for Joy” has the Kovgar Troupe doing double-Dutch times three, with six jump ropes going at once.

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 and Shoshanna Bean.

This year’s event — which gets under way at 7 p.m. on the 19th with cocktails and hors d’ouevres — was to be hosted by Matthew Arkin, seen in “Murderers” last season, but he had to withdraw.

Stepping in to host are Alan Campbell (Tony nominee “Sunset Boulevard”) and his wife, Lauren Kennedy, who played Lady of the Lake, “Spamalot,” live in Mount Kisco. (They’re pictured at right, photos courtesy Hudson Stage.)

Producer Denise Bessette confirmed that sisters Liz Callaway and Ann Hampton Callaway will both perform at Divas this year, Liz fresh from Feinstein’s in NYC. As Liz is married to Hudson Stage director Dan Foster, and in keeping with the family theme, Bessette’s sister, Mimi, will lend her talents to the evening, too.

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 invite:
“Come for one, stay for all”

Axial Under the Stars is a casual evening of theatre in Northern Westchester County.

Please visit our website at www.axialtheatre.org”

In a couple of weeks — at 2 p.m. on June 28 and 29 — theatergoers, or should I say “librarygoers,” will be able to take in the Westchester premier of five one-act plays by local playwrights Robert Zaslow of Mahopac, Keith Whalen of Peekskill and Mark Jacobs of Garrison.

The event, at the Ossining Library at 53 Croton Ave., is free of charge and includes the following shows, according to a release I received this afternoon:

“A Woman Scorned” by Robert Zaslow: A one-way flight of fancy about a romance that goes south when a not-so-young man decides to go west. Featuring Robert Zaslow and Jessica Chazen.

“Cliché” by Keith Whalen: A man on the edge, in danger of losing his job, sits down on a park bench and pours his heart out to a stranger, only to become exasperated with her odd way of speaking. Featuring Scott Faubel, Betty Slack, and Kevin Kanin.

“The Staining of the Shrewd” by Mark Jacobs: Kids can dress like adults, talk like adults and even act like adults, but Danny and Iris will make you laugh out loud as they show that kids don’t quite think like adults. Featuring Nadia Alexander and Asher Muldoon.

“No Freud Please” by Mark Jacobs: The first time a man says “I love you” is typically a moment of high romance. In “No Freud, Please” these simple words lead Kate and Ross to confront life, love and neurosis. Featuring Sarah Hunt and Patrick Reese.

“Cinnamon Apple Pie” by Robert Zaslow: A ‘70’s coming-of-age comedy about a wise-ass bar mitzvah boy, a black porter and a mystery woman on a train where the one-liners start in Plattsburgh and end in Poughkeepsie. Featuring David Thompson, Mike King, Heather Hanneman, and Bob Zaslow.

Some material in the shows may not be appropriate for young children.

For tickets, call 914-739-3402.

She played Golda Meir on Broadway and is about to play her again in London, but Tovah Feldshuh will bring her one-woman show, “Golda’s Balcony,” to Bronxville for a six-show run this weekend.

William Gibson’s Broadway hit comes to Reisinger Auditorium at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, with the following playing schedule: May 29 and 30 at 8 p.m.; May 31 at 3 p.m. and 8 p.m.; and June 1 at 3 p.m. and 7 p.m.All tickets are $40 with discounts for groups over 20 people, as well as senior and student discounts.

To purchase tickets, you can visit SMARTTIX on the Internet at: http://www.smarttix.com/show.aspx?showCode=GOL3

You can also call SMARTTIX at 212-868-4444.

All seats are general admission, but are excellent due to this theater’s intimate size.

After Sarah Lawrence, Feldshuh is off to the West End, where her run opens June 7.

Pamela Moller Kareman has been laughing a lot lately.That’s not to say that the director at the Schoolhouse Theater in Croton Falls isn’t taking her work seriously.It’s just that she’s working on Neil Simon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Lost in Yonkers,” a story that mixes heart-rending scenes of familial dysfunction with laugh-out-loud comedy.“Lost in Yonkers” comes at the end of a successful season at the Schoolhouse: from the world premiere of Todd Susman’s “Locked and Loaded,” about men making life-changing choices, to a stunning production of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” that transferred to Manhattan for a month-long run to “Appointment with a High-Wire Lady,” about memory, love and loss, to Neil Simon.“Lost in Yonkers” opens tonight and runs weekends through June 1 at the tiny theater in Croton Falls.Neil Simon? At the Schoolhouse?“We have discovered that this time slot for us, in the warmer, nice weather, brings in lots of interest from groups,” Kareman says.“It’s a balance that everybody has in theater,” she says. “We want to do work that we’re interested in exploring, but we also want to please the crowd. It really was a lesson we learned with ‘The Last Night of Ballyhoo’ a few years back.”“I reread it and thought it was Neil Simon at his most poignant and it’s still so funny,” she adds. Read more of this entry »

Playwright Howard Meyer says he tends to ruminate with his plays, drawing on experiences he’s had and people he’s met over the course of years.

He’ll work on them for a few months and shelve them and then come back at them with new eyes.

For his latest play, “AngelBeast,” which gets a gala Opening Night tonight for a four-weekend run at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Pleasantville, Meyer – co-founder and artistic director of Pleasantville’s Axial Theatre – drew on two experiences he had while teaching.

For a couple of years, he taught playwriting to inmates at Sing Sing prison. Under the auspices of the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program, Meyer met with small groups of men in the maximum-security prison in Ossining, teaching them to express themselves through writing, plays in particular.

Setting foot in the prison scared him at first, he says, but over time his attitude changed.

“It was a profound experience of getting to know these guys and coming to like a lot of them and having a connection with a lot of them,” he says.

“We looked at their writing but also got to talk about their pasts. And often (their behavior was shaped) because of abusive homes or broken homes or falling into gang situations.”

The Village of Briarcliff Manor Recreation & Parks Department presents the 2008 Summercliff Players in Les Miserables.

The production is directed by Kathleen Donovan-Warren with musical direction by Nadia Rizzo and technical direction by James Britt. Tuition is $400 and registration is not limited to residents of Briarcliff Manor and Ossining.

The program is being offered to middle- and high-school students. Interested parties for tech crew are also welcome. Auditions are June 1 at 1 p.m. and June 2 and 5 at 6:30 p.m. at the Briarcliff Manor Recreation Department, 48 Macy Road, Briarcliff Manor.

Rehearsals begin June 23 and performances are Friday, Aug. 1 and Saturday, Aug. 2 at 7:30 p.m.

What are the odds?

Two local theater troupes mounting the same musical on the same weekend? Actually, it happens more than you might think.

The latest coincidental bit of stagemanship comes in a couple of weekends, when Byram Hills High School and Irvington’s Clocktower Players each present the Broadway musical “Swing!”

In Armonk, at Byram Hills High School, the show is May 15 at 7:30 p.m. and May 16 at 8 p.m. (Call 914-273-9200 ext. 460, or e-mail stagetkts@byramhills.org.)

In Irvington,  performances of “Swing!” are at the Irvington Town Hall Theater, 85 Main St., on May 16 at 8 p.m., May 17 at 2 and 8 p.m. and May 18 at 2 p.m. (Call 914-451.6602 or go to www.irvingtontheater.com.)

Wherever you see it — and you can catch it at both venues, if you’re in the mood — you’ll hear some great tunes, from “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” to “Stompin’ at the Savoy” and “In the Mood.”

Jack W. Batman had a tough act to follow: His own.

In the first year of Batman’s reimagined White Plains Performing Arts Center, the producer presented “Man of la Mancha,” “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and “Ragtime” and, tonight, finishes the season with “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.”

Season 2 will begin with a “spotlight musical” – a small-scale presentation of a big musical, similar to this season’s “Ragtime.”

The show is Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Evita,” with a two-weekend, eight performance run beginning Sept. 26. “Evita” is separate from the mainstage season and gives Batman and team the opportunity to branch out from classic Broadway to anything that strikes their fancy.

“If we want to do something that’s not a classic musical or something that’s Off-Broadway that we like, or an operetta, we can do it as a spotlight musical, a smaller-scale production,” he says.

On the mainstage, the producer is giving his growing audience a taste of everything:—A family friendly show for the holidays “Oliver!” in a four-week run from Nov. 20 through Dec. 14;—The more sophisticated “A Little Night Music” from March 5 through 22;—And the blockbuster “Hello, Dolly!” April 30 through May 17.

You can’t blame Matt Wilson if he’s hearing voices these days.

As J. Pierrepont Finch, the lead character in “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” – which begins a three-week run tonight at the White Plains Performing Arts Center – Wilson hears the “voice” of the book offering tips on how to achieve what the title suggests.

The voice is provided by Tony Award winner David Hyde Pierce (“Curtains”).

In the musical – which won six Tonys, including best musical, and the Pulitzer Prize in 1962 – Finch, a window washer who dreams of climbing the corporate ladder, begins doing just that, when he follows the book’s advice.

But there are other voices, too.

There’s J.B. Biggley, the big boss of World Wide Wickets, a pompous and impervious character played by Nick Wyman, a Broadway veteran of “Les Miserables” and “The Phantom of the Opera.”

Campbell Scott may live in Connecticut now, but he hasn’t forgotten his Westchester roots when it comes to three of his loves: theater, literature and music.

• Tomorrow night, the son of acting greats Colleen Dewhurst and George C. Scott will bring Ronan Noone’s one-man play “The Atheist” to Westchester Arts Council’s Arts Exchange in White Plains, to kick off the venue’s Theater Week.

• On April 10, Scott will read short stories – “Thurber, Cheever and some other great choices” – at the Katonah Museum of Art.

• And on May 31, he and his band, The Right Out Louds – playing The Beatles, U2 and Hendrix, with Scott on the drums – will play at the Katonah museum’s annual benefit, at Roosevelt Ballroom in Yonkers.

He phoned from his home.

I was in my car the other day and I heard this ad for an oil company. And I thought, “That sounds like Campbell Scott.”

That would be Chevron.

Any of your friends ask you about that?

People do mention it. Knowing that I’m such an environmentalist, they’re shocked.

Award-winning Westchester playwrights Rosemary Foley and Albi Gorn will have their works, “Ophelia’s Mother” and “It’s About Forgiveness,” performed as part of the Acting Company of Greenwich’s popular lunchtime series, Play With Your Food, not to be confused with the Play With Your Food summer play-reading series at Stony Point’s Penguin Rep.

You’d have to have a really good memory to recall dining in Rye and having Martin Dockery as your waiter.

“I was so bad at waitering,” he recalls with a laugh. “I was never fired. Fired makes it sound dramatic, like there was a showdown. But so many places, the writing would be on the wall when my hours would just get cut down and there’d be someone new who’d I’d have to train and then, all of a sudden, I wouldn’t be on the schedule.”

At least he took it well.

“I wouldn’t argue. I wasn’t mad,” says the 39-year-old playwright and storyteller, who comes to Pleasantville’s Rosenthal JCC Theatre on Saturday with a one-man show called “Wanderlust,” about his travels from temp worker to West Africa in search of an epiphany.

Dockery has temped for nearly a dozen years, starting at the New York Stock Exchange, a job he chronicles in “Wanderlust.”

He worked there for several years – after his Rye waitering career ended – and made enough money to travel.

Then the serial backpacker returned to another temporary job, made enough money to travel again, and repeated the process.

The temping, which seemed like a good thing to do “in anticipation of other work” was a means, but to what end, he began to wonder.

“It’s a prologue to what you’re really going to be doing, but I’ve spent more than a decade in this prologue phase,” says Dockery, who is currently temping in the education department at the Museum of Modern Art.

“This isn’t my real job. It’s just something I’m doing in anticipation of what I’ll eventually be doing. But after a certain amount of time, you have to wonder if the anticipatory job is, in fact, your real job.”

That’s why he picked up and went to West Africa, landing in Senegal in 2004 with no plans between the day he landed and his return ticket five months later. His travels took him to 11 countries in that span.

“I had no idea where I was going to go or what I was going to do,” he says. “I didn’t know anybody.”

What he had was “this romantic idea that if you put yourself in some extreme location, like a great set, a great story should unfold. Lots of people before me have gone off to the desert and staggered around and had revelations and visions. I guess I fancied that if I staggered around a bit in this similar setting, that would happen to me.”

And that’s what Saturday’s show is about.

The problem he soon encountered was that nearly everyone in Africa spoke French, a language Dockery knew not at all.

“My ability to speak fluently to people was very encumbered,” he says.

Still, he kept a detailed journal of what he did, who he met and what they talked about, gathering stories from Africans and fellow travelers.

Performing “Wanderlust” is a different experience every time, Dockery says.

“I know what I’m going to say, but it’s not written down word for word,” he says. “It’s roughly the same each night, but I work off a mental outline. I’ve told it to myself several times and to Jean-Michele Gregory, the woman who’s directing it.”

But it’s not improvised, says Dockery.

“Extemporaneous is the best word, and it’s got a lot of syllables,” he says dryly. “It sounds good. I’m an anticipatory employee who does extemporaneous monologues. If I could just figure out how to put that onto a resume.”

Gregory encouraged Dockery – a Rye Country Day School graduate who won the Paul Newman acting award while getting his English degree at Kenyon College – to craft his experiences and journals into a piece of theater.

“The show is about the connections you make, even when you don’t speak the language,” he says.

“When you travel like this, even though you’re going there hoping for the big Hope Diamond moment – the epiphany in the sky – along the way you are having moments that are real and meaningful but that sneak up on you that are smaller but are as profound once you stop to recognize them,” Dockery says.

“The show is those moments strung together like some kind of necklace.”