When Suzanne Ochs of Dobbs Ferry trekked north to audition for Brewster Theater Company’s “Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean,” she didn’t know a lot about the show.

“I had the 6,000-foot view of what it was about: a group of women getting together, anniversary of James Dean, and they talk about stuff in the past,” she says.

What that “stuff” was, she wasn’t entirely sure.

Now she has an up-close view. This weekend and next, Ochs will play Mona, a West Texas woman whose life was forever changed when James Dean came to town to film “Giant.” (Sandy Dennis played Mona on Broadway and in the 1982 film.)

Oscar Wilde wrote “Lady Windermere’s Fan” — a skewering of Victorian morals in general and marriage in particular — in 1892, but that doesn’t mean it has to stay there.

Purchase Repertory Theatre presents “Lady Windermere” this week, with performances Tuesday through Sunday. Produced by the senior Acting Company, director David Bassuk has moved the action ahead a bit, to 1910-11, a decade after the playwright’s death.

One might consider this a small adjustment, but only if one isn’t a student at Purchase, where the shape of skirt, the taper of a coat and the color of a cravat occupy a great deal of time and research: 1910 is not 1908, nor is it 1912.

Are you a huge fan of La LuPone? Is Pinchas Zuckerman all over your iPod? Can’t get enough Bill T. Jones?

Wiley Hausam hopes so, and he hopes you’ll want the chance to not only see these stars on stage, but mingle with them and others after they perform at Purchase College’s Performing Arts Center.

For a while there, Patti LuPone was having a nervous breakdown nightly, twice on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

In a performance that earned her Tony, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards, LuPone was Mama Rose in “Gypsy” on Broadway.

After I wrote about “Gotta Dance,” Bedford filmmaker Dori Berinstein’s charming documentary about a senior hip-hop dance team, I got a lot of emails.

Here’s a link to the story.

When and where, people wondered, would “Gotta Dance” be screened nearby again?

The answer is Monday (Sept. 21) in Pleasantville at the Jacob Burns Film Center.

The Hollywood Reporter called “Gotta Dance” “a feel-good movie if ever there was one,” adding: “Dori Berinstein’s Gotta Dance … leaves you with that oh-so-rare but genuine warm and fuzzy feeling.” 

And this movie comes with a live performance. After Monday’s 7:30 p.m. screening, I’ll join Berinstein and six members of the NETSational Senior Dance team for a Q&A after the screening.

Bring a friend or several.

Here’s a link to the trailer.

Tickets are $9 for JBFC members, $13 for non-members.

Patrick Lennon’s Aery Theatre Company presents its third annual 20/20 Play Festival this weekend and next at Philipstown Depot Theater’s cozy space at Garrison Landing in Garrison.

Lennon wants Aery to be an incubator for dramas written, directed and performed by local artists. The 20/20 Play Festival, with funding from the? Putnam Arts Council and co-produced by Philipstown Depot Theater, presents 10 short plays of 20 minutes or less. (Submitted plays were winnowed down to 20 and 10 were chosen for performance.) Read more of this entry »

One of my happiest what-took-me-so-long discoveries last season was the excellent work being done on Anderson Hill Road in Purchase, by aspiring actors and actresses at Purchase College.

Sometimes, reading a play requires getting up and giving it a try.

Members of Brewster Theater Company’s play-reading group — The Armchair Actors — will be doing just that at their next meeting, Aug. 26, as they read and sing “Kiss Me, Kate,” Cole Porter’s musical take on “The Taming of the Shrew.”

Got an email today about a production of the Shades Repertory Theater, a group I’d never heard of, that operates out of the Central Presbyterian Church on New Main Street in Haverstraw.

The Emelin Film Club’s screening of “Gotta Dance” — about the first-ever New Jersey Nets senior citizen hip-hop team — was something special, made more so by the emergence, after the lights came up, of director Dori Berinstein and a half-dozen of the dancers, who performed on the stage.

The film was even sweeter the second time around and Marshall Fine, my former JN colleague, did a fine job of framing the post-show conversation.

I got a chance to chat with Betsy Walkup, a Bronxville woman who figures prominently in the story. By day, she teaches kindergarten on Long Island. But this dance team gave another side of her personality a chance to emerge: a woman named Betty who shakes it like there’s no tomorrow and who can’t get enough hip-hop.

Arts on the Lake at the Lake Carmel Cultural Center in Kent has a great variety of offerings, a true community center that is well-supported. Their latest program, set for Aug. 1, is topical and historical at the same time.

During the school year—actually all year long—Justin Boccitto travels from school to school across the Lower Hudson Valley, teaching magical dances to teens for their high-school and youth-theater musicals. This summer and fall, his dance card will be filled with “Count to Ten,” a new musical written by Michael Blevins, that Boccitto and The Group Theatre Too is producing.

They’ll take “Count to Ten” to the New York Musical Theater Festival in October, a huge coup, but an expensive one. To raise money, they’re holding a cabaret on Aug. 2 at 3 p.m. and 7 p.m.

“A Cabaret for Count To Ten”— at the Cultural Arts Playhouse in Mamaroneck—will feature a who’s who of teen talent from across the Lower Hudson Valley.

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A rhinoceros has been seen barreling down the rues of  Berenger’s French village.

Before long, there’s a crash of rhinos roaming the town, and his neighbors are disappearing.

How absurd.

Peekskill’s Mighty Theater, the resident company of the Paramount Center for the Arts, presents Eugene Ionesco’s play “Rhinoceros” Saturday at the refurbished moviehouse.

Christina Colangelo—of the theater-loving Linen-Colangelo-Cribari Theater Syndicate—dropped me a line about Port Chester Council for the Arts’ upcoming show.

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