March Comes Roaring in on Area Stages and Screens

The weather may not be getting any warmer, but our entertainment options continue to heat up.

Time Stands Still continues at Heartland Theatre this weekend, with its last performance on Sunday at 2:30 pm, with J.B. and Oklahoma! also finishing at Illinois State University's Westhoff Theatre and Center for the Performing Arts and As You Like It taking its last bow at Illinois Wesleyan's McPherson Theatre. J.B., Oklahoma! and AYLI all run through March 2.

Paddy Moloney and the Chieftains are coming to the Bloomington Center for the Performing Arts for a 3 pm show on Sunday, March 3, in plenty of time to boost your Irish spirits before St. Patrick's Day. This traditional Irish band has won six Grammys in an illustrious 50-year career. Their new album Voice of Ages celebrates that 50-year anniversary with contributions from Bon Iver, the Civil Wars, the Decembrists, Imelda May and Paolo Nutini, among others. You can see a teaser for that album here. For ticket information regarding the March 3 concert at the BCPA, click here.

Heartland Theatre will hold auditions on March 6, 7 and 8 from 7 to 9:30 pm for its April production of Will Eno's Middletown. Director John Kirk will be looking for an ensemble of 9-10 actors to play all 26 roles that make up the small burg called Middletown. Kirk has provided audition information here for prospective actors.

For one night only on March 7, Champaign's Art Theater will offer F.W. Murnau's classic vampire thriller Nosferatu, a silent from 1920. The Andrew Alden Ensemble will provide live musical accompaniment to Nosferatu for this screening, using piano, strings, synthesizers, percussion and electric guitars to bring a spontaneity and immediacy to Murnau's story of the creepy count. This is not the dark, elegant lord of later vampire films, but a strange and hideous pale creature with pointy teeth and ears. He's so much scarier this way!

The Art is also looking for entries into its New Art Film Festival, which takes place in April.They're looking for films by anyone in Illinois, but especially central Illinois, and they'll take features, shorts or "webisodes," preferably made within the last three years. The deadline is March 8, and you'll need to get a DVD to the Art by then. You'll find details here and updates here.

To Kill a Mockingbird is the March show for Community Players, with a preview performance on March 14 and "regular" performances continuing March 15-17 and 21-24. The play, based on the much beloved novel by Harper Lee, tells the story of a Depression-era Southern lawyer named Atticus Finch and his children, Scout and Jem, as the family is caught up in a trial involving a black man falsely accused of a crime. Finch is defending Tom Robinson on rape charges, and the injustice of that trial casts a deep shadow over the entire town, but especially on Scout, who grows up fast as events proceed around her. Marcia Weiss directs for Community Players, with a cast that includes Maggie McHale as Scout, Haani Ansari as Jem, John Bowen as Atticus, Ryan Rembert as Tom Robinson and Bruce Parrish as the mysterious Boo Radley.

Tales of the Lost Formicans, Constance Congdon's exploration of American society seen through the eyes of aliens from the future, opens at Illinois State University on March 28. Deb Alley directs this eccentric comedy for Centennial West 207, with Michelle Stine as a mother forced to move home with her own mom and dad, who will be played by Jacki Dellamano and Joseph Faifer, while her unhappy son, played by Carlos Kmet, acts out. There's also a strange neighbor who happens to be a conspiracy nut, with Hannaniah Wiggins in that role.

March 28 is also opening night for Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart, directed by Henson Keys for the University of Illinois's Department of Theatre. This fiery account of the first reaction to the AIDS epidemic from within New York's gay community has the potential to break your heart. It has every time I've seen it. It will play within the cozy confines of the Studio Theatre at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts.

Click here for information on The Normal Heart and all the other music and dance pieces coming up at Krannert Center.

As always, I will keep you updated with more events as they appear on my radar. Stay tuned!

News and Reminders for 1-29

Just a few notes before today gets away from us:

Auditions for Community Players' production of To Kill a Mockingbird continue tonight at the theater on Robinhood Lane in Bloomington. Tonight's session begins at 7 pm. To read more about the play and the novel it's based on, click here. Performances are scheduled for March 15-17 and 21-24. No prepared monologues necessary; auditioning actors will do cold readings from the script. For more information, email director Marcia Weiss at mlcweiss@yahoo.com. But be quick about it! Auditions will be finished after tonight.

Also tonight, Mathew Green's one-act play Vacation will be given a reading at the Station Theatre in Urbana. Katie Baldwin directs this romantic boy-meets-boy comedy starring Tanino Minneci and Maxwell Tomaszewski. This reading is free and open to the public. It begins at 7:30 pm tonight, with a brief musical introduction beginning at 7.

Tomorrow night is your one chance to see the film that goes behind the scenes at New York's "Create a Play in a Day" project. It will be showing on January 30 only at selected movie theaters. The closest theaters airing this cinema event are Willow Knolls 14 in Peoria and the Savoy 16 near Champaign. Tomorrow night only!

Masters students in theatre at Illinois State University are selling merchandise with a dancing Shakespeare and/or the ISU School of Theatre and Dance logo on them this week and next in the vicinity of the Airport Lounge between Centennial East and West. This is a fundraiser to help send the masters students to a conference this spring. But it means you can get your hands on t-shirts, caps, sweatpants, tote bags and fleece with ISU Theatre and Dance all over it. Find a masters student to get an order form, or hang out in the the Airport Lounge and you should see one.

Community Players Announces Its 90th Season!

Community Players is a Bloomington-Normal institution, founded in 1923 by a group of local theatrical enthusiasts that (as I've heard the story) included movers and shakers like playwright Rachel Crothers and Carl Vrooman, Woodrow Wilson's Secretary of Agriculture.

For their 90th season, CP will undertake a mix of musicals and straight plays, classics and newer works, comedies and dramas. Something for everyone!

First on the schedule is the musical "Legally Blonde," based on the movie of the same name. It's about a smart but kind of daffy blonde named Elle, who decides to try Harvard Law School after being dumped by a boyfriend who's on his way there. But once she hits Harvard, Elle's priorities change, even if her love of pink fashion does not. Bright and charming, "Legally Blonde" featured Christian Borle, now starring in NBC's "Smash," when it was on Broadway, with Laura Bell Bundy as Elle and former Miss America Kate Shindle as her rival. "Legally Blonde" will be presented from July 12 to 29. Note that it is considered a summer show rather than a regular season offering for CP.

Opening August 30 is the Kaufman and Hart classic "You Can't Take It With You," one of the most-performed comedies in the history of the American stage and winner of the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The movie version, which starred Jean Arthur and James Stewart as the young lovers and Lionel Barrymore as happy-go-lucky Grandpa Vanderhof, who doesn't believe in paying taxes, won Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director (Frank Capra). "You Can't Take It With You" has a large cast of eccentrics, with two guys making fireworks in the basement, a would-be ballerina trying out her moves in the living room, a drunken actress who falls asleep on the sofa, and a former member of Russian royalty who is now a waitress.

"Leaving Iowa," a comedy that centers on family vacations, will be performed as a Lab Theatre presentation from October 4 to 7. "Leaving Iowa" comes from playwrights Tim Clue and Spike Manton. Clue says, "The real spark behind this work comes from being children of parents from the now dubbed 'greatest generation.' Leaving Iowa is a toast to their idealism and character, and perhaps a little roast of their undying dedication to the classic family road trip. Leaving Iowa is a postcard to anyone who has ever found themselves driving alone on a road, revisiting fond memories of their youth."

CP will finish up 2012 with "Irving Berlin's White Christmas," a stage version of the perennial fave Bing Crosby/Danny Kaye movie. The stage musical keeps the plot about a pair of musical comedy performers who are also WWII veterans who put on a show to honor their old commander. The book is by David Ives and Paul Blake, with a score that includes Irving Berlin's "White Christmas" as well as other Berlin hits like "Happy Holiday," "Blue Skies," "Let Yourself Go" and "I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm." Of that last bunch, only "Blue Skies" appeared in the movie. "Irving Berlin's White Christmas" opens November 29 and plays till December 16, 2012.

The first show of 2013, scheduled for January 24 to February 3, 2013, will be Ken Ludwig's door-slamming opera farce "Lend Me a Tenor," wherein a man who always wanted to sing Otello gets drafted to do just that after the famous Italian tenor who was supposed to sing the role with the Cleveland Opera takes too many sleeping pills and can't be roused. "Lend Me a Tenor" was revived on Broadway in 2010 with a cast that included Tony Shalhoub and Anthony LaPaglia, with "Hangover" star Justin Bartha as Max, the lowly assistant (and tenor) who finds himself in the middle of the mess.

The lone drama on the schedule is "To Kill a Mockingbird," a stage version of another much-loved book and movie. Harper Lee's original novel about a lawyer taking on a racially-charged case in Alabama during the 1930s and the effect on his family won a Pulitzer Prize, while "To Kill a Mockingbird" the film won Oscars for Gregory Peck for Best Actor, Horton Foote for Best Adapted Screenplay and a trio of designers for their Art Direction. From March 14 to 24, 2013, Community Players will be performing the stage adaptation by Christopher Sergel which was presented at Steppenwolf Theatre in 2010.

And they'll finish the season with "Monty Python's Spamalot," another Tony-Award-winning Broadway musical based on a film ("Monty Python and the Holy Grail"). Monty Python's Eric Idle put together a combination send-up of Broadway shows in general with a spoofy storyline about King Arthur and his knights wandering around having adventures, with favorite bits from the movie (the Black Knight who keeps losing appendages and insisting it's just a flesh wound, the Knights Who Say Ni, a psychotic rabbit, a snotty French guy who tells them "Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries") as well as new characters and outrageous situations and songs. "Monty Python's Spamalot" will play at Community Players from May 9 to 26, 2013.

For subscription information as well as updates about auditions, casting and directors, visit the Community Players website.