Theater

Some Like it Hot: Depression never looked so spectacular

Winner of four Tony Awards, including Best Choreography and Best Costumes, Some Like It Hot is a non-stop fun fest of top-notch singing, dancing and heartfelt jocularity! PPAC presents this tap-dancing, razzle-dazzling Broadway hit that won more theater awards than any show in its season, including a Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album. Based […]

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Picnic: Sometimes the ants show up uninvited!

The Arctic Playhouse presents “Picnic” by William Inge and directed by Karen Besson. In 1953, when the play premiered on Broadway, Picnic won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama as well as the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play. Picnic explores themes of love, family, sexuality, repression, rites of passage, disappointment, and the complexities of human […]

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Merrily We Roll Along: “I’d rather be me any day!”

The Community Players proudly present Merrily We Roll Along. The production follows three friends— Frank, Charley, and Mary— in reverse chronology, from the 1970s to the 1950s. In 1976, Franklin Shepard is a wealthy Hollywood producer, and as the story moves backwards in time the audience learns of his meteoric rise from penniless dreamer to […]

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Fat Ham: Reinventing a Shakespearean classic

FAT HAM by James Ijames, directed by Don Mays, is a funny, poignant play that deftly transposes Hamlet to a family barbecue in the American South to grapple with questions of identity, kinship, responsibility, and honesty. Wilbury Theatre presents this 2022 Pulitzer Prize winner for Drama in a candid, hilarious and thought-provoking tragedy that presents more as […]

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Dead Man’s Cell Phone: One ringy dingy….

Through the Glass Theatre Ensemble presents Sarah Ruhl’s surrealist comedy Dead Man’s Cell Phone at AS220’s Black Box. Ruhl is known for her probing humor, vivid imagination and poignant humanity. Director Olivia M. Sahlin artfully takes on challenging topics in a world of ordinary people living extraordinary lives, and small coincidences opening into quirky metaphysical […]

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The Curious Incident of the Dog in the night-time: Frailty of genius needs an audience!

Burbage Theatre Co presents The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, based on the novel by Mark Haddon, and adapted by Simon Stephens. Its title refers to a short story that features a Sherlock Holmes mystery. Director Karen Carpenter delivers a production that is as funny as it is moving.  Meet Christopher, a […]

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Down, But Not Out: The ongoing saga of the Bristol Theatre Company

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 […]

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Profiling Rhode Island’s Community Theaters: The stories behind our neighborhood storytellers

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 […]

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