Very Late for May!

May has been happening all around me and I am egregiously late in giving you the 411. Or 5-11, since that is today's date. Let's get this May party started, tardy or not.

First, Laughter on the 23rd Floor, a Neil Simon comedy that hit Broadway in 1993, opened last weekend at Community Players. There's one more weekend of this Laughter left, with the show closing on May 17. It's set at a TV comedy show in the 50s, with a brilliant, erratic, funny man named Max Prince, inspired by Sid Caesar and his time on Your Show of Shows, as the centerpiece. We see the writers' room, a place a lot like the one the real Neil Simon got his start, and the motley crew of writers, all based on or inspired by the talented but crazy people Simon and his brother wrote with, from Carl Reiner to Mel Brooks and Larry Gelbart. There's even a woman in the bunch, hugely pregnant Carol, who fights for the right to be as funny as the boys. On Broadway, Nathan Lane played Max Prince, with Mad Men's John Slattery, recent Oscar winner J. K. Simmons and Mark Linn-Baker, TV's Cousin Larry from Perfect Strangers, in the cast. For Community Players, Marcia Weiss directs Brian Artman as Max Prince, along with Melissa Breeden, Drew German, Hannah Kerns, Joshua McCauley, Bruce Parrish, Mario Silva, Chris Terven and Andrew Werner. Get all the info here.

On television this week, we're seeing the season finales of Nashville on Wednesday, Grey's Anatomy, Scandal and Elementary on Thursday, and the last episode ever of Mad Men on Sunday night. Late Night with David Letterman finishes for good next week, with Dave's swan song on Thursday, May 20. If you're not weeping after Mad Men takes its final bow, maybe Letterman's will put you over the top.

Over on Turner Classic Movies, May spotlights the movies of Orson Welles every Friday night. We're coming up on a Friday full of Shakespeare by way of Welles, with Chimes at Midnight, also called Falstaff, with Welles playing Falstaff, before Othello and Macbeth. In a nice bit of companion programming, TCM will air a very different Macbeth, Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood immediately after Welles' version. They're both well worth watching for their treatment of Macbeth's witches alone. If you stick around for Kurosawa, it will take you well into the night on Friday May 15.

Since we're talking Shakespeare, it's a good time to remind you that season tickets for the Illinois Shakespeare Festival are now on sale. This summer we'll be seeing Love's Labour's Lost, Richard II and Q Gents, a hip-hop take on Two Gentlemen of Verona from the Q Brothers, along with a special presentation of Love's Labor's Won, Scott Kaiser's sequel to Love's Labour's Lost. Click here to get the details on reserving tickets.

Heartland Theatre's 2015-16 season packet should also be reaching you soon, highlighting five subscription shows -- the annual 10-Minute Play Festival, this time with nine brand-new, winning short plays on the theme "Class Reunion," coming up in June; Nina Raine's Tribes, directed by Sandra Zielinski, set for September; Intimate Apparel by Lynn Nottage, directed by Don LaCasse, in November; Bruce Norris' Pulitzer-winning Clybourne Park, directed by Heartland's new artistic director Rhys Lovell, next February; and Love Letters by A. R. Gurney, directed by Ron Emmons, in April 2016. Extras on the 15-16 schedule include one-acts dealing with "A Fork in the Road" under the New Plays from the Heartland banner in July and a reading of An Alliance of Brats, an adaptation of an Ibsen play, newly translated by Nigel O'Hearn and produced by ISU third-year MFA Joey Banks, in December. The lineup is listed here. Watch your mailbox for season subscription details. And get your reservation in now for the always-popular 10-Minute Play Festival, which opens with a special Pay What You Can preview performance on June 4.

What's Coming Up at Community Players in 2014-15

Community Players is the first local theater out of the box with plans for their 2014-15 season. As usual, Players will combine American classic stage plays with big, boffo Broadway musicals to create their season.

The Philadelphia Story, the Philip Barry comedy about the privileged classes enjoying their privileges, created a comeback on stage and on film for Katharine Hepburn, who played Philadelphia socialite Tracy Lord. Tracy is set to marry "man of the people" George Kittredge, but temptation in the form of newsman Macauley Connor and her ex, C. K. Dexter Haven, looms large as the wedding nears. Community Players will present The Philadelphia Story as their September 2014 show, with performances September 4-7 and 11-14.

Next up will be Rent, the Broadway musical that transfers La Bohème to Alphabet City in Manhattan in the late 80s. Rent composer Jonathan Larson passed away unexpectedly at the age of 35 just before the show's first off-Broadway preview, but his creation lived on in the hearts of countless fans. This story of young artists trying to live the Bohemian life in the wake of AIDS, drugs and landlords ended up with three Tony Awards and a Pulitzer Prize. Rent will open November 6, with performances continuing through the 23rd.

After that, it's back to the American classics. Of Mice and Men, the John Steinbeck drama from 1937, is scheduled for January 15 to 25, 2015. Steinbeck focused on migrant workers Lennie and George, two sad souls looking for a place in the world during the Great Depression. Broderick Crawford and Wallace Ford were the first stage Lennie and George, while Lon Chaney, Jr. and Burgess Meredith were unforgettable in the 1939 film and Steppenwolf Theater's John Malkovich and Gary Sinise brought Of Mice and Men and these two wounded characters back on stage and on film.

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, a Broadway musical based on a non-musical film, comes to community Players from March 12 to 29, 2015. With music and lyrics by David Yazbeck and a book by Jeffrey Lane, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels tells the tale of two con men plying their trade fleecing rich women on the French Riviera. Freddy and Lawrence are competitors turned partners, but a beautiful mark may just turn the tables on them. Marlon Brando and David Niven were the first actors to play the roles in 1964's Bedtime Story, but Steve Martin and Michael Caine were the ones who started the Dirty Rotten Scoundrels tradition. On Broadway, with musical additions, it was Norbert Leo Butz and John Lithgow.

A less familiar Neil Simon play, Laughter on the 23rd Floor, is up in May. It's autobiographical, which you might expect from Simon, but about the part of his life when he worked as a comedy writer for Sid Caesar on Your Show of Shows in the 1950s. Caesar and his Show are translated into Max Prince and a weekly comedy show bearing his name, with other real comedy writers like Mel Brooks and Larry Gelbart showing up loosely disguised on the cast list. Expect Laughter on the 23rd Floor in performance from May 7 to 17.

Finishing up the season is Annie, that barnburner of a musical about a red-headed orphan that opened on Broadway in 1977 and didn't close till 1983. A new, updated version of Annie is filming in New York right now with Quvenzhané Wallis as the title girl, so there should be plenty of buzz for the original by the time it hits the stage at Community Players in July. There are lots of roles for kids in this one, too, which makes it different from Rent and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, which have much more mature themes.

And that is what Community Players is showing for the latter part of 2014 and the first half of 2015. It's a little early to plan ahead, but Rentheads may be doing just that for their beloved show. Players is offering all the details here.