On and Off 1898

Ensemble Theatre Company of Santa Barbara has announced its 2024-2025 season: “Legends and Legacies.” Featuring an electrifying lineup of timeless classics and contemporary masterpieces sure to captivate audiences! 

Ford’s Theatre will present The Ford’s Theatre Legacy Commissions: A First Look on January 26-27, 2024. Learn additional details!

South Coast Repertory presents pianist/actor/playwright/producer Hershey Felder for a limited engagement of Hershey Felder as George Gershwin Alone, Jan. 18-28 on the Julianne Argyros Stage.

Tickets for TheatreWorks Silicon Valley’s highly-anticipated, limited engagement of the hit solo show Hershey Felder as George Gershwin Alone will go on sale to the public 1pm PST, Friday, December 15, 2023.

But one thing I promise you, you have never seen it done like this before. And you probably won’t ever get another chance to see something quite this inventive in any given year of Houston theater. This is a thrill to witness, and unlike anything out there. It manages to be THE BLAIR WITCH of stage stories, something you almost can’t explain fully.

Hershey Felder brings the tour de force musical masterpiece 'Hershey Felder as George Gershwin Alone' to TheatreWorks in Feb. 2024.

The Washington Stage Guild's 2023-2024 season continues with the playwright the company has most frequently produced (30 productions of 27 plays), G.B. Shaw and his play Arms and the Man.

FSU/Asolo Conservatory for Actor Training celebrates its 50th anniversary season with a production of Chekhov's Three Sisters.The FSU/Asolo Conservatory for Actor Training marks its 50th anniversary in partnership with the acclaimed Asolo Rep Theatre in Sarasota, Florida.

Ensemble for These Times announces its season opener, 'Transformations,' featuring music by Schoenberg, Bielawa, figgis-vizueta, Schreker, and Thomas. The concert will be performed in-person and live-streamed from Old First Concerts in San Francisco on September 22, 2023, at 8:00 p.m.

Generic Theater inaugurates its 43rd season with Flyin' West, written by award-winning playwright and New York Times bestselling author Pearl Cleage. Terrance Afer-Anderson directs this production, running weekends September 8th - October 1st at Generic Theater, Norfolk's underground theater located in the basement of Chrysler Hall.

“The Enigma I will not explain – its 'dark saying' must be left unguessed... further, through and over the whole set another and larger theme 'goes', but is not played.' Prom 14 turned out to be something of an enigmatic night across the board, with the listener left to interpret or speculate about the greater meaning of the work, and transported to magical planes via Beethoven’s Piano Concert No. 3 in C minor, Noriko Koide’s Swaddling Silk and Gossamer Rain, and Elgar’s ‘Enigma’ Variations.

“The Turn of the Screw,” a deft psychological exploration of the dimensions of horror and the human mind. UAO’s successful staging of the work appropriately raised more questions than it answered, about danger, fear, the limits of human perception, and a host of other commonplaces in horror.

Anything with the name Mark Twain on it draws a crowd.  “Twainiacs” like me will always show up.  This particular piece of Clemens’ literary output languished inside a file cabinet at the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley for a century.   It is difficult to know what to say about IS HE DEAD. It is a bold choice by Director Charlotte Gilman and the OCTA Board.   Gilman has chosen to direct IS HE DEAD in the imagined style of the time.  It is easy to imagine in a touring Chautauqua tent show in rural Kansas or Missouri at the end of the nineteenth century.

What did our critic think of IS HE DEAD at Arkansas State University Beebe?

The Paul Robeson Award will be bestowed on Dale R. Shields for 2021, Pearl Cleage for 2022 and The Black Repertory Theatre of Kansas City for 2023.

Irish Repertory Theatre will present The Letters Series, featuring Dear Liar by Jerome Kilty & George Bernard Shaw, directed by Charlotte Moore. See who is starring, and learn how to purchase tickets!

ETT (English Touring Theatre) has announced their new production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and further programming for 2023.

Musicologist Joseph Kerman is probably most widely remembered for calling Puccini’s TOSCA “a shabby little shocker.” I wonder whether he’d have something similar to say about Giordano’s FEDORA, which brought the Met audience to its feet on New Year’s Eve?

Thanksgiving this year was a wonderful gathering at home, enjoying the riches of food and family. Ironically, the next night was spent ruminating about how Life Sucks. This work by playwright Aaron Posner is a modern adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s 1898 play, Uncle Vanya. Big Idea Theatre has brought this tale to life with a mishmash of quirky personalities and underground flair.

The horror of this story is in all of the things that you don’t see, and all of the unspeakable scenarios that may emerge from the unchecked imagination.

 Pregones/Puerto Rican Traveling Theater's musical Aloha Boricua —the epic saga of the first mass migration of Puerto Ricans to Hawai'i— will run Off-Broadway and for the first time at Miriam Colón's historic Puerto Rican Traveling Theater on west 47th street, Manhattan, on December 1-18. 

SBCC Theatre Arts Department will present a student showcase production of THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST by Oscar Wilde, Directed by Katie Laris, November 9-19, 2022 in the Jurkowitz Theatre.  

The Schenectady Symphony Orchestra is kicking off the 2022-2023 season by returning to Universal Preservation Hall for another collaboration with Skidmore College 3 p.m. Sunday, October 23.

Tennessee Shakespeare Company announced its 15th performance season in Memphis featuring expansions of its on-stage productions, educational programming, and outreach initiatives projected to create a record 40,000 points of contact in the coming year.

Ballet Tech’s Kids Dance will return to The Joyce Theater (175 Eighth Avenue) with a program devised by the organization’s new artistic director, Dionne D. Figgins. The production celebrates founder Eliot Feld, featuring some of his early Kids Dance pieces as part of Ballet Tech’s expanding repertory.