This is the fourth article in a series about community theaters located throughout Rhode Island. The Community Players’ first performance was the 1921 staging of Milestones, a three-act melodrama that followed an upper-middle-class English family over the span of 52 years. It appeared on the Old Star Theatre stage – a former Masonic Temple on […]
This is the third article in a series about community theaters located throughout Rhode Island. “Our folks are up against it, and up against it good,” says actor Mickey Rooney as Mickey Moran, in the 1939 film Babes in Arms. He’s the teenaged son of vaudevillian performers whose careers have tanked after the advent of […]
This is the second article in a series about community theaters located throughout RI. According to the American Theater Association, it has always been difficult to get an accurate count of community theaters in operation in the United States and its territories – currently guesstimated to be over 6,000 venues. This is because of their […]
Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream may not have been the first play to parody amateur theater, but his depiction of the exceptionally incompetent Mechanicals certainly created the mold for more modern-day, like-minded British comedies like Noises Off and The Play That Goes Wrong. Christopher Guest’s now-iconic Waiting for Guffman – a mockumentary about the aspirations […]
We live in a time when many theaters are still in a state of recovery from the crisis of closure and contraction caused by the pandemic. Fortunately, we live in a region where national tours are being launched, local venues are offering regional premieres of innovative plays, and local playwrights are getting their due in […]
Surely, you know the story. Set in mid-19th century London, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is a morality tale about Ebenezer Scrooge’s one-night transformation from malevolent miser to charitable cherub. After revisiting the lost opportunities of Christmas past, witnessing the wasted potential of Christmas present, and foreseeing the impending horrors of Christmas yet to come, […]
Doing a Block Island retreat. Touring the East Bay Bike Path. Exploring some of the state’s 266 hiking trails and numerous world-class gardens. Lounging on the beaches that dot over 400 miles of coastline. Experiencing WaterFire and other invigorating outdoor art installations. These are the things that make summer in the Ocean State so enjoyable. […]
There’s a tendency of late for directors to re-envision Shakespeare’s masterworks by staging them in a different time and territory, and with a more modern temperament, as if today’s audiences needed an assist in finding the plays’ relevancy. This misguided movement was recently touched on by satirical digital news source The Onion in a mock […]
When Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was granted public domain status in the 1970s – when copyright for the work reached its term of the author’s life plus 100 years – the freedom of not having to pay licensing fees or stick to the original text resulted in all kinds of poetic license in numerous, widely […]
If this Gamm Theatre production of It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play was any more adorable, it would be licking your nose and following you home from the theatre. How could it not be adorable? Its source material is the abundantly charming 1946 holiday film classic directed by Frank Capra and starring everyman […]