Laura Ellis News

Kentucky Shakespeare, the Official Shakespeare Festival of the Commonwealth, announces the 60th anniversary season of the free Kentucky Shakespeare Festival. The extended 11-week, 7-production, 64-performance season runs May 27-August 9, 2020, at the C. Douglas Ramey Amphitheater in Old Louisville's Central Park.

There's just one final week to submit votes for the 2019 BroadwayWorld Louisville Awards, brought to you by TodayTix! Vote today to make sure your favorite local theatre's achievements and performers are recognized!

We're heading into the final week of voting for the 2019 BroadwayWorld Louisville Awards, brought to you by TodayTix! Vote today to make sure your favorite local theatre's achievements and performers are recognized!

There's just two weeks left to vote for the 2019 BroadwayWorld Louisville Awards, brought to you by TodayTix! The people have spoken nominations are set, and now you can vote to make sure your favorite local theatre's achievements and performers are recognized!

There's just a few weeks left to make your voice heard and submit your votes for the 2019 BroadwayWorld Louisville Awards, brought to you by TodayTix! The people have spoken nominations are set, and now you can vote to make sure your favorite local theatre's achievements and performers are recognized!

It's December! Voting is now underway for the 2019 BroadwayWorld Louisville Awards, brought to you by TodayTix! Now you can vote to make sure your favorite local theatres and performers are recognized. Check out the first set of stats below.

Voting is NOW OPEN and the first votes are in for the 2019 BroadwayWorld Louisville Awards, brought to you by TodayTix! The nominees are set, and now you can vote to make sure your favorite local theatres and performers are recognized!

When Harvey Fierstein dropped this story on the world in1981 as Torch Song Trilogy, it ran more than four hours. It was a seminal work in LGBTQA+ theatre, a frighteningly intimate story contained within an epic timeframe.

Kentucky Shakespeare announces a live radio play production of George A. Romero's 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead. This production will be performed live at the Louisville Public Media Performance Studio on select nights October 2-31, 2019.

Now comes the third chapter in director Amy Attaway's 'Game of Kings' series, which began with Richard II in 2017, followed by Henry IV, Part One a year ago, and will finish with Henry V in the summer of 2020.

Recently featured in a New York Times project called "Black Writers of Our Time," Philadelphia-based playwright James Ijames is an artist on everyone's A-list. His newest play, Kill Move Paradise, is a new take the Elysium of Greek antiquity. Inspired by recent events, the play is an expressionistic buzz saw through the contemporary myth that 'all lives matter.

Kentucky Shakespeare announces the 2019 SHAKESPEARE IN THE PARKS tour. Their 6-actor, 90-minute production of MACBETH will tour to 28 parks in Louisville, Indiana, and other Kentucky cities this spring, bringing free Shakespeare to neighborhoods April 6-May 25, 2019.

On October 30, 1938, just before 8:00 pm, Americans gathered around the radio to listen to Mercury Theatre On The Air, an anthology series produced and hosted by Orson Welles. That evening's program, scripted by Howard Koch, was a modern-day adaptation of H.G. Well's The War of the Worlds, one of the first tales of alien invasion, in which Martians emerged from meteors to lay waste to all of the Earth's civilizations. Except that Koch, with help from producers John Houseman, Paul Stewart and Welles himself, structured the program to play, at least in the first moments, as special news bulletins interrupting a normal performance by a dance orchestra. The ruse seems thin even for the time, but Hitler had 'annexed' Austria a few months earlier, and was threatening to do more, so the program struck a chord and the resulting panic in the area in close proximity - Welles' Martians landed in a New Jersey pasture, sent East Coast residents scurrying across bridges and clogging highways.

Kentucky Shakespeare is announces the production of Orson Welles' radio drama of H.G. Wells' science fiction masterpiece The War of the Worlds. This 6-actor, 70-minute production will be performed live at the Louisville Public Media Performance Studio on select nights October 10-28, 2018.

From humble beginnings as a rough Off-Broadway workshop to the glitz of Broadway and Hollywood, Grease The Musical is nothing short of a global phenomenon. Centre Stage London brings this celebrated musical back to London with an all new cast!

Kentucky Shakespeare kicks off its 58th annual free Kentucky Shakespeare Festival in Central Park with a comedy, a history, and a tragedy. The season begins with their professional productions of The Comedy of Errors on May 30th, then Henry IV, Part I on June 14th, followed by Othello on July 28th. Each production will run for two weeks, followed by all three productions in rotating repertory July 10th-22nd. An addition to this year's schedule are Bard-A-Thon Double Feature Saturdays. On July 14th A Comedy of Errors and Othello will be performed and Othello and Henry IV, Part I will be performed on July 21st.

Kentucky Shakespeare kicks off its 58th annual free Kentucky Shakespeare Festival in Central Park with a comedy, a history, and a tragedy. The season begins with their professional productions of The Comedy of Errors on May 30th, then Henry IV, Part I on June 14th, followed by Othello on July 28th. Each production will run for two weeks, followed by all three productions in rotating repertory July 10th-22nd. An addition to this year's schedule are Bard-A-Thon Double Feature Saturdays. On July 14th A Comedy of Errors and Othello will be performed and Othello and Henry IV, Part I will be performed on July 21st.

In her staging of The Merry Wives of Windsor, director Jennifer Pennington taps into the unique reservoir of contextual opportunities of a mid-Twentieth Century setting. By placing the action in the 1950's, she puts a refreshing spin on one of the most featherweight of Shakespeare's comedies.

Dialing It UpThis quote from a live cabaret performance by Charles Busch could be referencing his play, Die! Mommie Die!, which is a parody of the kind of grotesque, overwrought melodrama that fueled the careers of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in the 1960's. Busch is certainly juicing up an old model, registering the conniving and backstabbing plot twists beneath a veneer of arch camp.