Legendary BALM IN GILEAD Opens Tomorrow at ISU

Lanford Wilson's Balm in Gilead occupies a special place in American theater history. It was Wilson's first full-length play, establishing him as a major voice in the 60s off-off-Broadway movement at  La Mama and marking a seminal point in off-off-Broadway history. It also created a major moment for Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre when company member John Malkovich directed a production of the play in 1980, putting a national spotlight on Steppenwolf and actors like Gary Sinise, Terry Kinney, Glenne Headly, Jeff Perry, Joan Allen, John Mahoney and especially Laurie Metcalf, whose amazing monologue lit up the stage.

Since most of Steppenwolf's ensemble came from Illinois State University, a new production at the ISU Center for the Performing Arts makes perfect sense. It's a nod to ISU theater history, to some of its most notable alumni, and to the kind of rock-and-roll theatrical style that drove those alums into the national consciousness.

John Tovar directs the ISU Balm in Gilead that opens tomorrow night at 7:30 pm, with a large cast that includes Angie Milton as Darlene, a wounded, naive newcomer to the grungy all-night diner in Manhattan where the action is set; Steve Carr as Joe, a small-time drug dealer with a big problem and a big debt; Troy Schaeflein as Dopey, a junkie and something of a narrator; Tori DeLaney as Fick, a down-and-out addict; Betsy Diller as Ann, a former teacher turned street hooker; and Jack VanBoven, Dylan Dewitt and AnneMarie Owens as the cafe's manager, cook and server. Tino Avila, Abbie Brenner, Parker Carbine, Rashun Carter, Krystina Coyne, Taylor Eaves, Christian Frieden, Jeremy Gavin, Rondale Gray, Mikey Hendrickson, Malachi Hurndon, Will Olsen, Sarah Seidler, Clare Ellen Supplitt, Al Vitucci, Bobby Voss and Asa Wallace round out the ensemble as assorted users, pushers, hustlers, drunks, bad guys and whores who hang out there, with Katie Capp, Rachel Katz and Josephine O'Shaughnessy as a trio of rowdy children who make a scary Halloween run through the disarray. 

Balm in Gilead runs at the Illinois State University Center for the Performing Arts from April 13 to 21, with evening performances at 7:30 pm and a matinee on April 15th at 2 pm. For more details or to reserve tickets, contact the CPA box office at 309-438-2535 between the hours of 11 am and 5 pm on weekdays. You may also purchase tickets online at Ticketmaster.

Shepard's LIE OF THE MIND Opens Tomorrow at ISU

When playwright Sam Shepard passed away in July, Illinois State University theatre professor Lori Adams decided it would be an appropriate memorial to direct one of his plays as part of the fall ISU season. Adams chose A Lie of the Mind, one of Shepard's best.

Shepard specialized in family drama threaded with dark, cynical humor, and that is certainly true of A Lie of the Mind. The play involves two families linked by a dysfunctional marriage and defined by a history of violence.

There's Jake, a man so consumed by jealousy and rage that he lashes out with his fists, and his wife, Beth, the person he lashes at. When the play opens, Jake has beaten Beth so badly he isn't sure if she's alive or dead. She is alive, but she has serious brain damage. By the end of the play, the reverberations of Jake's violence split the families and their secrets wide open.

On Beth's side, we see her father, Baylor, mother Meg, and brother Mike. They are ill-equipped to deal with her condition, with very few emotional tools of their own, except, of course, rage. Her dad also has a gun and he really likes to shoot things. Jake's side isn't any better -- he has a smothering mother, Lorraine, a sister, Sally, hiding family secrets, and a brother, Frankie, who has a kinder nature than the other toxic men in the play, but also a bad habit of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

After auditions last month, Adams' cast included Parker Carbine as Jake, Gina Sanfilippo as brain-damaged Beth, Dylan Dewitt and Elena Sasso as her parents, Raul Marron as brother Mike, a chip off Baylor's block, Abby Langner as Jake's mother Lorraine, Betsy Diller as sister Sally and Everson Pierce as sweet brother Frankie.

On the production side, Emily Kinasz is costume designer, Kayla Brown has lights, Morgan Hunter is in charge of sound, and Nick Kilgore and John Stark were listed as co-scenic designers.

A Lie of the Mind officially opens at the ISU Center for the Performing Arts at 7:30 pm tomorrow night, with performances continuing through a 2 pm matinee on October 1. For tickets or information, contact the CPA box office at 309-438-2535 between 11 am and 5 pm Monday through Friday.

If you'd like to see a sneak peek, the cast will also offer a short scene from their production on the ISU Quad as part of the SEVEN kickoff program. SEVEN is a wellness campaign bringing together a variety of campus groups and resources, including the College of Fine Arts. As their contribution, actors from A Lie of the Mind will perform a short "teaser" scene at Schroeder Plaza on the Quad sometime between 11 am and noon, while other SEVEN activities are taking place. For more information on the SEVEN kickoff, click here.

Coming Up On Stage at ISU in 2016-17

Tickets are now available for Illinois State University's 2016-17 theatre and dance season, a season full of different and intriguing choices. There's something sweet (a radio play version of It's a Wonderful Life), a major piece of existential theater history (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead), a little U.S. history (1776), and several trips to other parts of the world, with New Zealand (Waiora), Argentina (The Walls), Egypt (The Coffee Bar), Mexico (The Heresy of Love) and a dystopic future India (Harvest) all on the map.

Four of these plays come from the 1960s with a fifth set in the 60s, although I don't know if that was intentional or just a coincidence. Still, The Walls, The Coffee Bar, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and 1776 are all products of that particular influential period in world theater, and Waiora is set in 1960s New Zealand.

In case you're keeping track, there are five male playwrights* to three female playwrights, and four male directors to three women, with one directing assignment still to be announced. Among the playwrights, two are American, two hail from the British isles, and four come from the rest of the world. Here's what the lineup looks like:

WAIORA by Hone Kouka (directed by Kim Pereira)
September 30–October 8, 2016, in the Center for the Performing Arts
Hone Kouka was the youngest ever writer to win New Zealand's Bruce Mason Playwriting Award (in 1992). He is of Ngati Porou, Ngati Raukawa and Ngati Kahungunu descent, and he often writes about Maori characters and issues. Waiora tells the story of a Maori family struggling to find an identity and a sense of home when they move from a rural life to a more urban one. 

THE WALLS by Griselda Gambaro (directed by Bruce Burningham) and THE COFFEE BAR by Ali Salem (directed by Janet Wilson)
October 21–29, 2016, in Westhoff Theatre
These two short plays, to be performed together as one evening of theater in Westhoff Theatre, deal with political issues and how artists respond in the face of repression and fear. Argentine playwright Griselda Gambaro wrote The Walls in 1965, putting a harsh spotlight on the kidnappings, torture and executions that were part and parcel of daily life under the Argentinian police state. In Egypt, Ali Salem used humor and satire in The Coffee Bar, his 1968 play that critiques the politics of power and the effect on the powerless.

FALL DANCE THEATRE CONCERT (artistic director, Sara Semonis)
November 3–5, 2016, in the Center for the Performing Arts

IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE: A Live Radio Play adapted by Joe Landry (directed by Connie de Veer)
December 2–10, 2016, in the Center for the Performing Arts
It's a Wonderful Life, the 1946 Frank Capra movie about a man who meets an angel on Christmas Eve and learns his ordinary life was worth living, often shows up at the very top of Favorite Movies Ever lists. Joe Landry reimagined it as a 1940s radio play, with actors behind big standing microphones, scripts in hand, sound effects performed with wood blocks and car horns, and a big APPLAUSE sign cuing the audience.

ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD by Tom Stoppard (directed by Paul Dennhardt)
February 17–25, 2017, in Westhoff Theatre
Tom Stoppard turned Hamlet sideways when he wrote Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, showing what was happening with these two minor players while Hamlet was off propelling the action Shakespeare gave him. Shakespeare's leading characters do show up now and again, but the focus is really on courtiers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, tossed about by storms they really can't see or understand.

1776, with book by Peter Stone and music and lyrics by Sherman Edwards (directed by Lori Adams)
March 3–10, 2017, in the Center for the Performing Arts
What with all the Hamilton brouhaha, 1776 -- originally on Broadway in 1969 -- is finding a new popularity. Like Hamilton, 1776 looks back at the very beginning of the United States, but it works with John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson instead of Alexander Hamilton. We see delegates from the 13 colonies as they debate independence from England, with prickly Adams on everybody's nerves, Jefferson acting as the wordsmith for the Declaration of Independence, and Rutledge, the delegate from South Carolina, insisting on taking out any anti-slavery language.

THE HERESY OF LOVE by Helen Edmundson (directed by Robert Quinlan)
March 31–April 8, 2017, in Westhoff Theatre
British playwright Helen Edmundson is best known for adaptations of literary classics like War and Peace and The Mill on the Floss, both with the Shared Experience ensemble and for BBC radio. This time, Edmundson writes about Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a nun and poet in Mexico in the 17th century struggling to balance her love of learning and need for self-expression with her religious faith. The Heresy of Love was first performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon in 2012.

HARVEST by Manjula Padmanabhan
April 21–29, 2017 in the Center for the Performing Arts
The New York Times called Manula Padmanabhan's "sci-fi parable" Harvest "a dark fantasy about a high-tech racket in body organs." Set not that far off in 2022, Harvest focuses on the life of a poor, unemployed man in a third-world country. In need of money and some modern conveniences like running water, Om agrees to sell his organs to be harvested for the benefit of someone in a wealthier country. The company behind the harvesting, InterPlanta, acts as Big Brother, looking in on Om and his family to see how their investment is working out, as the poor organ donor begins to realize what kind of bargain he has made.

SPRING DANCE THEATRE (artistic director Darby Wilde)
April 27–29, 2017 in Westhoff Theatre

* I am counting Peter Stone, who wrote the book for 1776, as its playwright for this tally.

It's That Time Again -- February Fever!

I'm late out of the gate, but February entertainment options are not. They're starting up soon, and you need to know to get your tickets, your DVR fired up, or your snacks ready.

Right now, Champaign's Art Theater Co-op is offering Trumbo, the biopic about blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, starring Bryan Cranston in the title role. A big part of the Dalton Trumbo story involves the Oscars, as his work won two of them during a time he couldn't take credit for it. An English writer named Ian McLellan Hunter "fronted" for Trumbo on the 1953 film Roman Holiday, which won an Academy Award for its writing, while Trumbo used the pseudonym "Robert Rich" for The Brave One in 1956, another Oscar winner for its story. And this year, Cranston is nominated for his work as an actor in Trumbo. You'll find the film at the Art tonight and tomorrow at 10 pm, with showings at 11:30 am on Saturday the 6th and 2:30 pm on Sunday the 7th and Wednesday the 10th. Yes, those are odd times, but Trumbo is worth a look.

On February 5, Illinois Wesleyan University's School of Theatre Arts presents Sarah Gancher's Klauzal Square, a ghostly story of bullying, religion, and the power dynamic among preteens, inspired by a real Budapest playground built on top of what was once a Nazi mass grave. IWU senior Tyler Stacey directs a cast of five, including sophomore Libby Zabit, who plays Klara, the one with a ghostly friend, along with Hailey Lechelt, Jackie Salgado, Kristin Solodar and Brooke Teweles. Performances of Klauzal Square run from February 5 to 7 in the E. Melba Johnson Kirkpatrick Lab Theatre on the Wesleyan campus. Call the box office at 309-556-3232 for ticket information.

Next week, Heartland Theatre kicks off the winter part of its season with Clybourne Park, Bruce Norris's Pulitzer, Tony and Olivier-winning play from 2010. The play, which functions as a companion piece to Lorraine Hansberry's award-winning A Raisin in the Sun, uses events in one Chicago house, shown in 1959 and then 2009, to illuminate the racial issues underlying where and how we live in America. In the 50s, Clybourne Park is a white, middle-class neighborhood, and a white couple named Bev and Russ are selling their home to a black family. When we see it again in 2009, it has become an all-African-American neighborhood, but white people are trying to move back in, pushing all the black people out and razing houses to the ground in the name of gentrification. The same actors play different people in the two timelines, giving them a chance to take on more than role, in some cases on opposite sides of the issues raised. Heartland Theatre's Artistic Director Rhys Lovell is at the helm of Clybourne Park, with a cast that includes John Bowen, Anastasia Ferguson, John Fischer, Joshua McCauley, Elante Richardson, Michelle Woody, Tim Wyman and Kristi Zimmerman-Weiher. For show dates and times, click here. For reservation information, try this page.

The musical Ragtime takes the stage at the Bloomington Center for the Performing Arts on February 11 for just one show at 7:30 pm. It's not clear from the BCPA site who is performing this Broadway musical, which played for two years before the turn of the 21st century and earned three Tony Awards, including a Featured Actress win for Audra McDonald, who only had two Tonys back then. Ragtime was her third, but she has six now, if you're keeping track. Ragtime is based on the E. L. Doctorow novel, showing a swirling series of events in American history that involve people from disparate parts of society -- the upper and lower classes, a jazz musician, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe -- against a backdrop of a very American form of music. Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty wrote the score, while Terrence McNally wrote the book.

The Illinois State University School of Theatre and Dance also kicks off its 2016 theatre season next week, with Illinois Shakespeare Festival Artistic Director Kevin Rich directing... Shakespeare! It's Romeo and Juliet this time, that timeless tale of star-crossed lovers who fall for each other in spite of parental disapproval and a climate of feuds and fighting in old Verona. Romeo and Juliet opens in Westhoff Theatre on February 12, with James Keating and Kaitlyn Wehr as R and J. Performances continue through the 20th, including a 2 pm matinee on the 14th if Romeo and Juliet is your idea of a cool Valentine's date. For more information (including a link to buy tickets), check out this ISU press piece.

If Hamlet is your favorite Shakespeare play (and it is mine), you're in luck. Illinois Wesleyan University's School of Theatre Arts is putting Hamlet on stage at the Jerome Mirza Theater in McPherson Hall on February 23, 24, 25, 26 and 27 at 8 pm and February 28 at 2 pm. IWU professor Christopher Connelly directs Shakespeare's longest play, the tragedy of the Prince of Denmark as he muses on life, death, revenge, and what to do about the rotten state in which he lives. No poster for this one that I could find, so let's content ourselves with a picture of David Tennant as Hamlet on a British stamp from 2011.

Street Scene on Broadway in 1947.

ISU Theatre is back on February 26 with the opera version of Elmer Rice's Street Scene, directed by new faculty member Robert Quinlan. Rice wrote the book of the musical, too, moving the action from a sweltering day on the front steps of a tenement in a "mean quarter of New York" in the 1920's to the same hot spot in 1946. The plot involves various residents of the building, as they gather to gossip, flirt, fight and generally push against each other in their small square of real estate. The opera's music was written by Kurt Weill, while poet Langston Hughes provided the lyrics. The 1947 Broadway production won Tonys for Weill and its costume designer, although it has never been revived on Broadway. When casting was announced, Quinlan's ensemble included Rebecca Crumline as Anna Maurrant, an unhappy woman who lives in the tenement behind the stoop; Joshua Ramseyer as her violently jealous husband; Morgan Melville as their daughter, Rose; and Kevin Alleman as Sam Kaplan, a Jewish boy who's in love with Rose. Street Scene is scheduled for performances in the ISU Center for the Performing Arts from February 26 to March 4. 

Closing out the month, Arts at ICC will present The Dead Guy by Eric Coble, with performances from February 26 to March 6. Coble's 2005 play looks at the continuing appetite for reality TV and the moral price we pay, focusing on a show (also called The Dead Guy) with a shocking premise. Contestant Eldon Phelps gets a cool million dollars to appear on the show, but... There's a big but: Eldon is required to spend the entire amount during one week, with his death looming at the end of it, live and on TV. As he goes through his spending-a-million week, the audience is busy voting on how he should kick his reality TV bucket. Ouch. ICC Theatre is giving you six performances to catch The Dead Guy, with shows on Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30 pm and Sundays at 2:30 pm starting February 26. I am also without a poster for The Dead Guy at ICC, but Proper Hijinx Productions in Texas has a nifty one for their current production that you can see here.

Red Tape/Stage Left MUTT Pairs Director Vanessa Stalling and Actor Daniel Smith

Daniel Smith (L) and Michael Reyes as they appear in Mutt.

In this election year, two Chicago theaters -- Stage Left and Red Tape -- are collaborating on a very political play. Mutt, a new play written by Christopher Chen, is described as a "blisteringly funny satire that skewers not only the elephants in the room but the donkeys too," as it "burns down the entire house of racial cards." Mutt opened on stage at Theater Wit on January 9 and it runs till February 14.

I am alerting you to the existence of this production of Mutt not because of its timeliness, although that's certainly a big plus, but because of its central Illinois connections. Director Vanessa Stalling is someone I met in the masters' program at Illinois State University when she was finishing up her MFA in directing there, while Dan Smith, who plays the candidate on the left in the Mutt poster above, frequently appeared on stage at the Station Theatre in Urbana before he left for Chicago. He also happened to be in an acting class I once took in Champaign. That may not seem like much of a coincidence, but the classes I shared with Vanessa and Dan were more than 20 years apart, so it seemed striking to me.

Vanessa Stalling showed her strong directorial hand on A Midsummer Night's Dream, Mrs. Packard,  The Maids, Gone Missing, Pullman WA and Mud while at Illinois State University. She was the Associate Artistic Director at Redmoon Theatre before she came to ISU, and since she left, she's directed Suzan-Lori Parks' The America Play at Oracle Theatre and Circuscope at Actors Gymnasium, continuing to add striking visual style and energy to illuminate complex material

As for Dan Smith... In the early 90s, he played a variety of major roles at the Station in shows ranging from Tennessee Williams' The Night of the Iguana to Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, Craig Lucas's Reckless, Eric Overmyer's In Perpetuity Throughout the Universe and Terrence McNally's The Lisbon Traviata. He showed again and again that he can be compelling and charismatic no matter who he's playing. In Chicago, Dan has appeared at the Goodman (King of the Yees, Measure for Measure and The World of Extreme Happiness) as well as Victory Gardens (Never the Sinner), the Piven Theatre Workshop ( and Steppenwolf, where he created a role in Tina Landau's Space and traveled with the show when it moved to the Public Theatre in New York.

Dan's role in Mutt is Len Smith, which already sounds like it fits. As you can see in this teaser video, Len is "exciting and non-threatening at the same time" as well as "a mix of every major race in the world." He's a multi-racial war hero who looks like the perfect candidate for canny political operatives looking to score a presidential home run.

You can see a lot more about Mutt at both the Stage Left and Red Tape sites as well as on their Facebook pages and Stage Left's Youtube channel.

The Tragedy of War: TROJAN WOMEN Takes the Stage Tonight at ISU

You won't find many 2400-year-old plays that survive and flourish in the 21st century. But that is exactly what The Trojan Women has achieved since Euripides brought his play to the theater competition at the City Dionysia festival in 415 BC, during the Peloponnesian War. The Trojan Women came in second that year. The obscure playwright who won doesn't really matter, because Euripides and The Trojan Women have triumphed where it counted. They're still here.

Among Greek tragedians of the time, Euripides was not as big a name as Aeschylus and Sophocles, who racked up far more Dionysian victories than he did, but by the 18th and 19th centuries, English poets were lauding him and writing odes in his honor. Elizabeth Barrett Browning famously called him:

Our Euripides, the human,
With his droppings of warm tears,
And his touches of things common
Till they rose to touch the spheres.

There's something in the "common" and "human," as well as a focus on women, that helps explain why modern writers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Ellen McLaughlin (not to mention Carole Braverman and her Yiddish Trojan Women) have been drawn to translate and adapt his work. After all, there has always been war and women have always been used and abused as "trophies, spoils, baggage," as McLaughlin's script puts it.

Connie de Veer, who is directing The Trojan Women (and McLaughlin's adaptation) for Illinois State University's School of Theatre and Dance, echoes that thought. "The Trojan Women is an anti-war play that focuses chiefly on the costs of war levied on women," she writes in her director's note for the play. "The women of Troy suffer colossal losses -- of loved ones, home, identity, status, selfhood, purpose, and finally, ownership of their own bodies. Sadly, such is the nature of war to this day."

De Veer goes on to quote Grace Halsell and an article in The Washington Report about the fallout on women after the Serbian war. Halsell says, "... women have always suffered from rape--especially during wartime. Helen of Troy was a war trophy. So was Cleopatra. They go under the heading: to the victor belong the spoils. Rape was always regarded as an inevitable by-product of war."

Recognizing that and personifying the consequences of war is exactly what The Trojan Women is all about. With their city reduced to a pile of ash behind them, these sisters, wives and daughters face a future of exile, rape, slavery, and endless mourning for the parade of loved ones they've lost.

Although that kind of climate may seem difficult for today's college kids to access, de Veer gives credit to her actors and designers. In her words, they "have worked courageously and honestly to access their own grief, loss, and longing in order to tell this story with truth, passion, and compassion. We hope our efforts invite you to do the same, uniting us all across barriers of culture and time, in the universal and inevitable hard work of grieving."

Her cast includes Brandi Jones as Hecuba, the queen of Troy; Bree Haskell as Helen, the stolen bride whose angry husband started this war; Clare Supplott as mad Cassandra; Mary DeWitt as Andromache, the widow of Trojan hero Hector and mother to his doomed son;  Mark de Veer as god Poseidon; RJ Cecott as Talthybius, a Greek soldier; and Spencer Brady, Paige Brantley, Olivia Candocia, Gina Cleveland, Krystina Coyne, Vanessa Garcia, Johanna Kerber, Becky Murphy, Shakeyla Thomas, Samantha Peroutka, Leah Soderstrom and Kaitlyn Wehr as the Women of Troy.

Scenic designer is Samantha Gribben, Anna Hill designed the costumes, Kyle Techentin did props and Hannah Beaudry is in charge of hair and makeup for the production, while Laura Bouxsein is stage manager.

The Trojan Women begins tonight at Illinois State University's Westhoff Theatre, with performances continuing through November 14. For information, click here. For tickets, you can call the box office at 309-438-2535 or go directly to Ticketmaster.

Hang on Tight -- October's Getting Scary!

October is brimming over with Things to Do, ranging from a little musical comedy and a big announcement to a whole lot of drama.

This first weekend in October is a big one for local theater, with events that include Fences, the August Wilson play about a garbage collector who once dreamed of becoming a major league baseball player, opening in Westhoff Theatre at Illinois State University, Little Shop of Horrors and its big green carnivorous plant from Outer Space at Eureka College Theatre unfurling its leaves, and eight characters in the annual McLean County History Museum/Evergreen Cemetery Walk showcasing local history taking their places grave-side in Bloomington. Over in Champaign, Parkland College presents Jennifer Haley's video-game-based scary story Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom tonight through October 10, while the Station Theatre offers Will Eno's The Open House, a quirky and strange dysfunctional family drama, from tonight through the 17th.

Fences is one of Wilson's "Century Cycle," with a play devoted to each decade of African-American life in the 20th century. This one takes place in the 1950s; its original Broadway production earned four Tony Awards, including Best Play, Best Director for Lloyd Richards, Best Actor for James Earl Jones and Best Featured Actress for Mary Alice. Like James Earl Jones and Mary Alice before them, Denzel Washington and Viola Davis won Tony Awards in the 2010 Broadway revival for their performances as Troy Maxson, a garbage man with thwarted dreams, and Rose, his second wife. In a related August Wilson note, Denzel Washington recently announced his intention to produce filmed versions of all ten plays in the "Century Cycle" for HBO, with Fences -- which Washington will direct, produce and star in -- up first. Viola Davis will be there for Fences, as well.

ISU's Fences is directed by Duane Boutté, with a cast that includes Hannaniah Wiggins as Troy, Marixa Ford as Rose, Emmanuel Jackson as their son Cory, Gregory Hicks as Troy's younger brother Gabriel, Bryson Thomas as Lyons, Troy's son from a previous marriage, Timothy Jefferson as his friend Bono and Janiya Franklin as Raynell, a late addition to the family. Performances are scheduled for October 2 to 4 and 6 to 10. For ticket information, click here.

Illinois Wesleyan enters the fall theatrical fray with the Midwest premiere of Blown Youth, a play that serves as playwright Dipika Guha's response to Shakespeare's Hamlet. Guha muses, "It was borne out of my desire to challenge the notion that Hamlet (the character) is the embodiment of human consciousness when he is, in fact, a man. Where Hamlet’s madness smacks of genius, would a woman in his shoes be seen as just as stunningly witty and seductive -- or just a pain in the ass hysteric?" IWU's production of Blown Youth is directed by Nancy Loitz and opens with a performance at 8 pm on October 6. Call 309-556-3232 to reach the box office.

October 6 is also the date for the big announcement of what the Illinois Shakespeare Festival has planned for next summer. They promise a "spectactular" season coming up in 2016, but you'll have to wait till after the 6th to find out exactly what that entails.

The theatre program at University of Illinois kicks off its fall season with Michael Gene Sullivan's 2006 adaptation of George Orwell's 1984 opening October 15 in Colwell Playhouse at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. Tom Mitchell directs this stage version of the classic science fiction novel that introduced concepts like "Big Brother," "doublespeak" and "thought crimes" to the lexicon. Click here for more information.  

You can also catch a free concert version of the musical Dreamgirls at Krannert Center presented by the Banks, Bridgewater, Lewis Fine Arts Academy on Sunday, October 18th. Local C-U singers Noah Brown, Crofton Coleman, Sherrika Ellison, Tyra Nesbitt and Erica Smith will light up the Henry Krieger and Tom Eyen score, which features big pop hits like "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going," "One Night Only" and "I Am Changing."

Whose Live Anyway? with a cast that includes Jeff B. Davis, Greg Proops and Ryan Stiles, as well as Nashville heartthrob Charles "Chip" Esten, returns to the Bloomington Center for the Performing Arts on October 17 for one performance only at 7:30 pm.

On October 23, Illinois State University's School of Theatre and Dance is back with Dale Wasserman's stage version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, directed by Lori Adams for the Center for the Performing Arts. Cuckoo's Nest was an award-winning (and frequently banned) book written by Ken Kesey before it became a play, and an award-winning movie directed by Milos Forman afterwards. The role of rebellious mental patient Randle McMurphy, played by Kirk Douglas and Jack Nicholson on stage and on film, will be played by Kyle Fitzgerald for ISU, with Kate Vargulich as his nemesis Nurse Ratched, and Josh Pennington and Matt Frederick as fellow inmates. I haven't seen an image for the ISU production, so that is Ken Kesey's book cover you see here.

Walking With My Ancestors, Ama Oforiwaa Aduonum's powerful examination of the ghosts of slavery as expressed in song, dance and words, returns to New Route Theatre, again directed by Kim Pereira, for one night only on October 23. This time, Walking With will be presented at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Bloomington at 7:30 pm on the 23rd. Tickets are available in advance by e-mailing New Route at New.Route.Theatre@gmail.com or at the door on a first come/first served basis for a suggested donation of $10.

And that's what I have for you to pencil into your calendars right now. Stay tuned for updates as I get them!

It's Neil Simon Weekend

Neil Simon owns more Tony and Oscar nominations than any other writer, at least according to PBS and their American Masters documentary about him. They also say that he's the only writer ever to have four simultaneous Broadway productions. The New Yorker, meanwhile, says that "since 1970 almost no day has gone by without a professional production of a Neil Simon comedy playing somewhere in the country."

According to my count, he has 14 Tony nominations plus three wins, four Oscar nominations, and four Emmy nominations dating from 1957 to 2001. Oh, and he has a Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Lost in Yonkers.

If you're curious about what four plays were running at the same time, a quick check of his Internet Broadway Database credits show Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple, Sweet Charity (for which Simon wrote the book), and Star-Spangled Girl all playing from December of 1966 to June of 1967. That's what you might call running the Broadway table.

Right now, you have two opportunities to see Simon's work in person, with Brighton Beach Memoirs, the semi-autobiographical piece about a teen boy in Brooklyn in the late 1930s, at Illinois State University's Center for the Performing Arts through the 27th, and The Odd Couple, the perennial favorite about mismatched roommates that's spawned two movies and two TV series, at Illinois Central College in East Peoria this weekend and next.

And if that isn't enough Neil Simon, you can top it off with the movie version of The Prisoner of Second Avenue, starring Jack Lemmon and Anne Bancroft as a married couple adapting to major changes when events conspire against them. Turner Classic Movies will air The Prisoner of Second Avenue at 7:15 am on Monday, September 28.

But before that...

Third-year MFA director Jonathan Hunt-Sell is at the reins of Brighton Beach Memoirs, one of Simon's most successful plays both artistically and financially. The play's original production spent three years on Broadway and earned Tony Awards for director Gene Saks and actor Matthew Broderick, who played Eugene Jerome, the stand-in for Simon. For ISU, Garrett Douglas takes the role of Eugene, with Jimmy Keating as his brother Stanley, Gloria Petrelli and Graham Gusloff as his parents, Christina Duris as Aunt Blanche, and Cassandra Conklin and Megan Tennis as his two teenage cousins, whose presence causes Eugene even more tsuris in the crowded Jerome household.

Tickets are available at the College of Fine Arts box office at 309-438-2535 or through Ticketmaster. Four performances remain, with tonight's curtain at 7:30 pm, 2 pm and 7:30 pm performances tomorrow, and another matinee on Sunday at 2 pm. Tickets are also available through ticketmaster.com.

Over in East Peoria, ICC presents The Odd Couple starting tonight at 7:30 pm. The original production of The Odd Couple ran for 964 performances from 1965 to 67, winning four Tonys, including awards for Best Actor Walter Matthau, Best Director Mike Nichols, Best Scenic Designer Oliver Smith, and a Best Author Tony for Neil Simon himself.

For ICC, Robin Berkley directs, with scenic design by Rob Fulton, who most recently did the spectacular set you see at Heartland Theatre for the play Tribes. Berkley's cast includes Chris McHenry as Felix, the fussy neat freak roommate, and Alek President as Oscar, the messy one.

Tickets to The Odd Couple are priced at $5 for students and $7 for adults. Call 309-694-5136 for more information.

IN THE NEXT ROOM (OR THE VIBRATOR PLAY) Opens Thursday at ISU

Sarah Ruhl has become a major player in American theater over the past few years. Since The Clean House in 2004 -- a Susan Smith Blackburn Prize winner and a Pulitzer finalist -- Ruhl has hit the big time with Eurydice, Passion Play and Dead Man's Cell Phone and In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play), her first play on Broadway. The Vibrator Play was nominated for three Tony Awards, including Best Play, and it, too, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

In each of these plays, Ruhl wraps her poetic, distinctive voice around issues big and small, from love to death, from passion to religion, connection, power, humor and gender politics. Her work is fresh and different, with liberal helpings of fantasy, wit and intelligence and some seriously interesting female characters.

Locally, you could've seen The Clean House at Heartland, Eurydice at the Station Theatre in Urbana, Passion Play in the Center for the Performing Arts at Illinois State University and Dead Man's Cell Phone at Eureka College. Now director David Ian Lee brings In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play) to the CPA at ISU, as well, completing the Ruhl picture.

In the Next Room is lighter, both in tone and situation, than some of Ruhl's other works, tackling the invention of the vibrator as a medical device to cure hysteria in women in the 19th century. Ruhl's story isn't fact-based in terms of the real inventor. Instead, it gives us the fictional Dr. Givings, who is a proponent of using this new technology to bring relief to his unhappy patients. This is all for the good of science, you understand, or for therapeutic reasons, not erotic or prurient in the least.

But his own wife is quite curious about what exactly is going on behind the door into his office, curious enough to talk to his patients and even to sneak into his exam room when he's not there to see what the brouhaha is about. In fact, the image of Catherine Givings with her ear pressed to the door graced the cover of the published script.

At its heart, The Vibrator Play is about more than just vibrators. It's about freedom and repression, about taking ownership of one's own body, about loosening both literal and figurative stays.

Grad students Natalie Blackman and Colin Lawrence will play the Givings for ISU, with Allison Sokolowski as Mrs. Daldry, one of Dr. Givings' patients, Graham Gusloff as Mr. Daldry, Dario Carrion as a male patient who also benefits from the good doctor's ministrations, Kelly Steik as the doctor's helpful office assistant, and Brandi Jones as a wet nurse who provides a different point of view when Catherine Givings needs it.

Performances of In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play) begin Thursday, October 2 at the ISU Center for the Performing Arts. For more information on all of ISU's upcoming performances, click here. To find out about buying tickets, click here.

Catching HAY FEVER Next Week?

It seems like Illinois State University's fall semester has been underway for forever. It's really only been a bit more than a month. But that's plenty of time to get a cast and crew ready for Noel Coward's Hay Fever, a 1924 comedy about an eccentric theatrical family enjoying a weekend in the country.

I call the Bliss family theatrical even though Judith, the mother in the mix, is the only one with a career on the stage. Judith has supposedly retired, but she's still quite the diva. Her husband David is a novelist, while their son Simon fancies himself an artist and daughter Sorel is an ingenue who longs to be "a fresh, open-air girl with a passion for games."

They're all more than a bit crazy. When they take to their country house for the weekend, each member of the Bliss family invites a guest, unbeknownst to the others. Let's just everybody is planning a flirtation with someone. Judith has invited a handsome young boxer named Sandy, while David's guest is Jackie, a dippy but pretty flapper, Simon's is a vamp named Myra and Sorel's is Richard Greatham, a diplomat with a stiff upper lip and more of a sense of propriety than the other nuts and bolts in the bunch.

Once they're all jumbled together in one household -- tennis, anyone? -- things get crazy quickly. The Blisses are already 'round the bend, but their guests and their put-upon housekeeper Clara (she used to be Judith's dresser when she was on the stage) will have to move fast to keep their wits about them.

Hay Fever is not the best-known among Coward's plays, but it does enjoy fairly regular revivals. It's hit Broadway four times, the most recent in 1986. Closer to home, Illinois Wesleyan University put it on a year or two ago. But now Illinois State University and director Sonja Moser are offering their own take on this lighter-than-air confection from 1924.

Moser is known for her singular, often physical approach to material. Her Electra, a show she directed at ISU and then moved to Chicago's Mary-Arrchie Theatre Company, was both musical and meta-theatrical, with country rock songs, a lot of mud and loads of energy.

What will an artist like Moser do with a bon bon like Hay Fever? We'll have to wait till September 24 to find out.

This Hay Fever stars MFA acting candidate Bethany Hart and undergrad Nico Tangorra as Mom and Pop Bliss, with Kaitlyn Wehr and Kyle Fitzgerald as Sorel and Simon. Eliza Palumbo will play Jackie, with Alejandro Reya as Sandy, Gabriela Rivera as Myra, and MFA actor Colin Trevino-Odell as Richard. Lauren Sheffey will play Clara, the housekeeper, with an added character named Amy played by Nicole Greco.

Hay Fever plays in ISU's Westhoff Theatre from September 24 to 28. You can get more information here or go here to order tickets.

April Showers Us with Entertainment

April is certainly being generous with the showers so far. Luckily, it's also loaded with entertainment choices. I suggest you get out of the rain and get into a theater forthwith. As it happens, I will be spending my weekend at Actors Theatre of Louisville's Humana Festival of New American Plays, and I will report back on everything I see there next week. Meanwhile, back in Central Illinois...

Illinois State University's production of The Exonerated, the sharp piece of documentary theater by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen about eight people wrongfully sent to death row, is officially sold out through the end of its run this weekend. But you can always try to get on the wait list through the ISU Center for the Performing Arts box office. The Exonerated benefits from a terrific production brought to life by director Cyndee Brown and a committed cast. Let's just say it's worth the wait list.

Also continuing through this weekend is New Route Theatre's Gidion's Knot, a new play by Johnna Adams. A parent, played for New Route by Gabrielle Lott-Rogers, confronts the teacher, played by Kathleen Kirk, who suspended her son, raising issues of discipline versus free expression, conformity versus eccentricity, and, of course, the balance between parenting and teaching when it comes to controlling  -- or not controlling -- our kids. Because the play is set in a classroom, director Don Shandrow has placed his production in one, too. That classroom is in the Mt. Moriah Christian Church on Washington Street in Bloomington. For all the details, click here to see New Route's Facebook page for the event.

Emily Mann's Mrs. Packard, another ISU production about wrongful incarceration, opens tomorrow night with the first of eight performances in the Center for the Performing Arts. Like The Exonerated, Mrs. Packard is based on real events and real people, although in this play, the title character is not sent to prison, but to a mental hospital. . The real Elizabeth Packard was shut away in an asylum in Jacksonville, Illinois in 1860 when her vindictive husband decided her political views were dangerous. Emily Mann (Execution of Justice) not only wrote Mrs. Packard; she directed its world premiere at the McCarter Theatre, where she is the artistic director. Third-year MFA directing candidate Vanessa Stalling, who did The Maids and A Midsummer Night's Dream last year, is at the helm for ISU.

The Grand Budapest Hotel is getting some TV commercials right now, giving you a hint of what this "filigreed toy box of a movie," as Peter Travers called it in his Rolling Stone review, is all about. He went on to say the movie is "so delicious-looking you may want to lick the screen." Licking the screen or not, there's a lot to be attracted to in The Grand Budapest Hotel, which is making believers out of even the anti-Wes Anderson crowd. In this one, Anderson concocts a beautiful trifle of a story, set in a European hotel over decades of its life, with eccentric characters, gorgeous art direction, and a lighter-than-air plot that may just waltz away with  your heart and any early 20th century romantic notions you're carrying. Although The Grand Budapest Hotel isn't playing in Bloomington-Normal, it is in Champaign, where the Art Theater Co-op has screenings scheduled through April 10.

Illinois Wesleyan Theatre gets back in the game with The Drowsy Chaperone, the fizzy little musical about a man who lives through his cast recordings. As our "Man in Chair" opens the show, he puts a record (yes, an actual vinyl record) from his favorite 1920s Broadway musical on the turntable and the show suddenly comes alive, with its entire tap-dancing, plate-spinning, ditty-singing, roller-skating, airplane-flying cast right there in his walk-up apartment. In the right hands, The Drowsy Chaperone is delightful. Director Tom Quinn is banking on Elliott Plowman as his "Man in Chair," Erica Werner as Janet Van De Graaff, the show-off Broadway star/bride-to-be in the show within the show, Marek Zurowski as her intended groom and Jenna Haimes as the chaperone in the title. The Drowsy Chaperone plays in IWU's McPherson Theatre from April 8 to 13.

Eureka College's production of the musical Godspell opens April 9. The pop/rock/folk/gospel score for this quintessential 70s musical about Jesus and his apostles was composed by Stephen Schwartz, now better known for Wicked. That score included the song "Day by Day," which broke out as a hit single. Godspell started at Carnegie Mellon University and then played LaMaa off-Broadway. By 1972, it had hit Canada, where its cast included Victor Garber, who would play Jesus in the movie version, as well, along with a host of names from Second City Toronto, like Martin Short, Gilda Radner, Eugene Levy and Andrea Martin. I saw the show in Chicago when I was in high school, with Joe Mantegna as Judas. Chip Joyce is directing and choreographing for Eureka College and the always excellent Joel Shoemaker, a Eureka alum, is part of the cast. Tickets are $5 for performances through April 13. Click here for all the details.

Iron, Rona Munro's gripping drama about a woman in prison and the daughter who tries to reconnect, opens at Heartland Theatre on April 17. Munro is a Scottish playwright who has a way with emotional tension and human fallout in her plays. In this one, Munro is exploring how we hurt each other and yet still keep reaching out to connect. Christopher Connelly, recently named Heartland's new artistic director, directs Lori Adams as Fay, who is in jail for killing her husband, while Alyssa Ratkovich plays opposite as her daughter Josie. Ashley Donahue and Marcus Smith check in as the two guards who rule Fay's world. Performances of Iron will continue through May 4, and you can get show times and reservation information at the Heartland website.

Also on the 17th, director David Ian Lee and his cast bring Shakespeare's Pericles to ISU's Westhoff Theatre. Storm-tossed Pericles, Prince of Tyre, loses and finds his wife and his daughter (named Marina because she was born at sea) as he wanders through dangerous waters and even more dangerous lands ruled by evil people of various stripes. There's incest, attempted murder, a very bad riddle, pirates, sailors, kings, a bordello and a virgin, pulled together by a narrator named Gower. In the cast list posted last fall, grad student Faith Servant was slated to play Gower, with another MFA actor, Ronald Roman, as Pericles, Molly Briggs as Thaisa, his wife, and Andrea Williams as daughter Marina. Pericles will take its voyages at Westhoff from April 17 to 26, and, as always, tickets are available through the CPA box office.

Just after Iron opens, Heartland will hold auditions for its annual (and very popular) 10-Minute Play Festival on April 21 and 22 from 7 to 9 pm. Winners were announced April 1, and they include Joe Strupek of Bloomington-Normal, whose play The Decoy involves a wooden duck. Each of the eight winning Fowl Plays involves a bird of some sort, from a small bird in a box in Blaise Miller's Bird on a Ferry to a man who thinks he used to be an owl in Whoooo? by Russell Weeks, a woman pretending to be a parrot in Ron Burch's Polly, crows on paper as drawn by a child in The Murder of Crows by Nancy Halper, crows made of paper in Claire BonEnfant's The Caw-Caw Conspiracy, a pair of eagles that may break up a couple in Tim West's Two in the Bush and a beautiful bird in the park that may bring two artistic women together in Fly Girl Fly by Brigitte Viellieu-Davis. There are some 23 roles available in these eight plays, with all age ranges invited to audition.

If you enjoyed Jon Robin Baitz's Other Desert Cities at Heartland Theatre earlier this year and you'd like to compare/contrast with another production, or if you missed that one and you'd like to catch up, you might want to try the Station Theatre in Urbana, where Kay Bohannon Holley directs the piece in performance from April 24 to May 10. Her version of the wealthy Wyeth family of Palm Springs features Carolyn Kodes-Atkinson and Steven M. Keen as matriarch and patriarch Polly and Lyman Wyeth, Joi Hoffsommer as Polly's sister Silda, and Kate Riley and Joel Higgins as Brooke and Tripp, Polly and Lyman's conflicted daughter and son. It's when Brooke comes home with a tell-all book that things start to get interesting Chez Wyeth.

The Normal Theater begins a salute to Harold Ramis, the actor/writer/director/all-around great guy who passed in February, with one of his best movies. Groundhog Day, wherein Bill Murray relives one day of his life again and again, is on screen at the Normal Theater on April 24 and 25, followed by another Ramis/Murray collaboration, the army buddy comedy Stripes, on the 26th and 27th. They're both worth a look as a reminder of the genius of Harold Ramis, a fantastic writer, a brilliant director and an Illinois boy done good who left us much too soon.

And if all of that's not enough to keep you busy in April, I don't know what is!

It's a Month of Fred Astaire, Music, Dance and WONDERFUL LIFE at Every Turn

There is always a lot happening in Bloomington-Normal and environs in December, and yes, most of it is related to the holiday season. Most, but not all. You can expect to hear the words "wonderful life" fairly often, however. Here are some of the highlights of what's happening this month...

I already told you that December is Fred Astaire month at Turner Classic Movies, which means I will undoubtedly be glued to the telly every Wednesday. You'll find Flying Down to Rio, The Gay Divorcee, Roberta, Follow the Fleet and The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, all Fred-and-Ginger pics, along with Second Chorus, where he was paired with Paulette Goddard, and The Sky's the Limit, where Fred plays a pilot opposite Joan Leslie, spilling from Wednesday the 4th into Thursday the 5th; You'll Never Get Rich and You Were Never Lovelier, the two Rita Hayworth choices, The Band Wagon and Silk Stockings, the two with Cyd Charisse, plus Three Little Words, The Belle of New York, Yolanda and the Thief and The Ziegfeld Follies on the 11th and 12th; the last Astaire/Rogers pairing in The Barkleys of Broadway, a reprise of The Band Wagon, and The Broadway Melody of 1940, Easter Parade, Royal Wedding, A Damsel in Distress and Finian's Rainbow, an example of Astaire in his elder years, on the 18th and the cusp of the 19th; with the cream of the Astaire/Rogers crop -- Top Hat, Swing Time and Shall We Dance -- saved for Christmas night. Filling out that night will be Carefree and those Barkleys of Broadway again to round out the Fred-and-Ginger oeuvre. That's the end of Wednesdays in December, although New Year's Eve, a Tuesday, will see all three That's Entertainment packages of MGM song-and-dance clips, which of course include Mr. Astaire.

The rarely seen musical Chess is the December offering at Urbana's Station Theatre. The male half of the musical group ABBA -- Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus -- wrote the music while Tim Rice provided the lyrics for this exploration of international chess intrigue, including the hit single "One Night in Bangkok." Mikel J. Matthews directs a cast that includes David Barkley, Warren Garver and Kevin Paul Wickart in performance from December 5 to 21. Click here to get the Station scoop.

Bing, Danny and White Christmas come to the Normal Theater's big screen from December 5 to 8. That's followed by Will Ferrell as a very large Elf on December 12 and 13, a small boy's singular devotion to a Red Ryder BB gun in A Christmas Story on December 14 and 15, and It's a Wonderful Life all the way from December 19 to Christmas Eve. The others seem to pop up every year at the Normal Theater, but it's good to see Elf, a particular favorite of mine, join the class.

Illinois State University's Fall Dance Concert under the direction of Darby Wilde will be in performance December 5, 6 and 7 at the Center for the Performing Arts on the ISU campus. The program will include "classical and contemporary dance pieces including guest artist Jennifer Harge's Before I Started Flying, an abstract work exploring spiritual pathways and undesired states of being; Lachrymae, a trio choreographed by Gregory Merriman to the music of Benjamin Britten, about being alone and together; and #connected?, a collaborative work by Darby Wilde with an original score by Aaron Paolucci, which journeys into the world of social media." Tickets are available through Ticketmaster or the CPA box office at 309-438-2535.

Bloomington-Normal high school actors are invited to audition for the 2014 Intercity High School Shakespeare productions of As You Like It and Romeo and Juliet. Auditions will take place in ISU's Centennial West 214 on Thursday, December 5, from 7 to 9 pm and Saturday, December 7, from 9 am to noon. Performances are scheduled for January 31 and February 1, 2014. For more information about auditions, contact Cristen Monson.

If music is more your style for the holidays, the Madrigala offered by ISU's Madrigal Singers on December 13 and 14 may be just the ticket to ring in the season "with drinks, desserts and delights!" They will sing traditional madrigals as well as other holiday music, with pieces like "Moro Lasso," "The Twelve Days of Christmas" and "Angels We Have Heard on High" on the program.

Sally Parry directs the radio play version of It's a Wonderful Life, complete with a sound effects guy (or foley artist) on stage, scripts in hand, and all sorts of Golden Age of Radio escapades, at Community Players from December 12 to 15. Nine actors will portray the radio actors and crew, with Thom Rakestraw as George Bailey, the sweet everyman who doubts the value of his own existence, Hannah Kerns as his lovely wife Mary, Bob McLaughlin as evil Mr. Potter and other characters not so evil, Dave Lemmon as loopy Uncle Billy and other characters not so loopy, John Poling as angel Clarence and other characters not so angelic, Nancy Nickerson as Mrs. Bailey and other maternal types, Annie Weaver as Zuzu and other children, John Lieder as the announcer and Herb Reichelt as the foley artist providing key bells and whistles. Click here for all the details.

The annual event known as the Pantagraph's Holiday Spectacular offers three performances at the Bloomington Center for the Performing Arts from December 13 to 15. It's huge, it's spirited, it's... Spectacular! There are singers, dancers, actors, Wooden Soldiers, Alphabet Blocks, Jingle Bells and even local politicians making cameos. You can see the whole cast list here -- it's bound to include someone you know. Lori Adams is back as director, with a script once again by Nancy Steele Brokaw.

If you are looking for a totally different take on It's a Wonderful Life... I don't know exactly how this is going to work, but the Art Theater Co-op in Champaign is putting on something called It's a Heckleful Life! on Wednesday, December 18 at 10 pm. Billed as "in the tradition of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Rifftrax," the Art will screen the real It's a Wonderful Life film accompanied by sarcasm, ribbing and heckling from four C-U area comedians. It sounds a bit like people throwing toast at Rocky Horror, but apparently these comedians will simply throw insults at Jimmy Stewart and company. The "Destroyers of Christmas Joy" are Jessica Coburn, Matt Fear, Charlie Hester and someone known as "Quizmaster Chris."

I admit I had a crush on Peter Noone of the musical group Herman's Hermits when I was about nine or ten. My older sisters and I had a stack of 45s like "Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter," "I'm Henry VIII, I Am," "This Door Swings Both Ways" and 'The End of the World" that we listened to over and over and over. Presumably Noone and whatever incarnation of Herman's Hermits we're up to will be performing some of those as well as other Herman's Hemits hits when they come to the Bloomington Center for the Performing Arts on December 19 with "An Olde English Christmas with Herman's Hermits starring Peter Noone." The letters are tiny and difficult to read on the poster image, but I think it says: "On a frosty night 'neath a winter moon, come and sing a Christmas tune. With good cheer and joy, we all will croon with Herman's Hermits starring Peter Noone!"

And that's what's tempting me this holiday season. You'll definitely hear more about all of these as December progresses, with additions and updates along the way.