The following is a press release from the Salem Theatre Company. The Salem Theatre Company's popular "Music & More Series" starts Season Eight with two diverse and entertaining offerings: belly-dancing and quick fiction. Exquisite Corpse Dance Theatre offers their original theatrical ... more »
The Salem Theatre Company is gearing up for the start of its eighth season in September. Some updates on upcoming events, season tickets, and more: This Saturday and Sunday, August 14th and 15th, the Salem Theatre Company is offering their fifth annual free improv comedy show Improv on ... more »
Salem Theatre company's artistic Director John Fogle believes " that the arts exist - and will forever exist - as mankind's unique problem-solving tool. Theatre models human experience. Be it a tragedy, comedy or something in between, a play presents a troublesome situation and shows us ... more »
The Salem Theatre Company is spoiling us. Hot on the heels of its enthusiastically received production of Hair and in memory of Tony award winner Frances Sternhagen's appearance on the new STC stage in May, renowned playwright Richard Dresser will be in town for the company's production ... more »
Alan Ayckbourn's Table Manners catalogs how six intimately involved characters can be so emotionally disconnected. So very British is this comedy, now at Gloucester Stage Company under the direction of GSC Artistic Director Eric Engel. The pretense of manners in clipped Brit-speak is ever ... more »
Acting coach Sara Maurno has founded "WalkTheWalk," in residence on Artists' Row. She will offer private instruction and three workshops this summer, including "Ophelia Rising," a performance workshop for girls 13 to 15. What do you offer Salem that's not already here? My ... more »
This square-state bred Polack with a bad case of wanderlust has a propensity to shave his flowing locks in fits of rebellion, and so it was with great joy and a bit of post-millennial irony that I watched the Salem Theatre Company rehearse for its Thursday opening of Hair: The American ... more »
Filling a small room to capacity, citizens of Newburyport and the Northshore prepared to see Theatre in the Open's performance of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. An existential and minimalist play, Waiting for Godot doesn't have an elaborate stage. A single leafless tree and a black ... more »
Sybil has nothing on me, Dave Rich or John Fogle. We have our reasonably orderly North Shore "civilian lives." But mix in a passion for theatre, a very busy schedule, and two back-to-back shows (the just-closed LATER LIFE at Salem Theatre Company, and the opening-May-7 HALF WITS ... more »
Remember Bunny, Charlotte's deliciously waspy and cruel mother-in-law in Sex in the City? Catch her on stage in Salem May 23rd with STC's Artistic Director John Fogle at a benefit performance for the theater company. Two-time Tony Award® winning actress Frances Sternhagen will join ... more »
Those of us who really like cocktail parties know that the best way to attend one is on the periphery. Watching from the edge, a comfortable distance from the chatter, makes both the conversation and the music seem more interesting, with a hint of mystery and melancholy. A.R. Gurney ... more »
The face of Marblehead actor Stephen Cooper has been plastered all over the place these days. On the poster, he's sporting a black eye and a bow tie. Cooper stars in Later Life, which opens this weekend in the Salem Theatre Company's new space. Written by A.R. Gurney and directed by John ... more »
We are always anxiously waiting on the new enticing productions that the Salem Theatre Company will be putting on. UNDERPANTS, NAUGHTY AND NICE, and CHILD'S CHRISTMAS IN WALES are just a few of the great ones we've seen. Last month the STC opened a new space at 90 Lafayette Street with ... more »
Wouldn't it be a better world if long locks and an openness to public nudity were rewarded in this lifetime as during auditions for the beloved musical "Hair"? This is not to say that an understanding of 1968 hippie culture or a nice set of pipes is under appreciated, as when Bonnie ... more »
Who is Bill Hanney? His name has been emblazoned in the local newspapers ever since his plan to buy the North Shore Music Theater has been in place! Mr. Hanney just might be the Zorro of the New England Entertainment circuit! After all, he is known in his corner of the world for rescuing ... more »
If we leave our February calendar in the hands of the Salem Theatre Company, the month proves to be filled with entertainment. Following months of renovating the space at 90 Lafayette Street, the theater opens next month with Comedy Fridays, Drama Saturdays and Music Sundays. Familiar ... more »
Their days of schlepping are over. The leadership from The Salem Theatre Company stood around their new space on Lafayette Street earlier this week and laughed as they counted the various spaces they've rented over the years. Something like a dozen, from churches to schools to municipal ... more »
By Dinah Cardin I once had the pleasure of being directed by Georgette Beck in one of her own plays at the Marblehead Arts Festival. During warm, summer evening rehearsals at the Unitarian Church, she cooed folksy pet names at us and laughed easily, but also cracked the whip when she ... more »
By Dinah Cardin Marbleheaders are spoiled for choice this week for theater options. While the Mugford Street Players are staging the more intimate play Bountiful at the Firehouse Theatre, a huge cast of characters are kicking up their heels at the middle school in an ambitious production ... more »
Tonight, the award-winning Mugford Street Players begin a nine performance run of Horton Foote's moving drama "The Trip to Bountiful" at Marblehead's Firehouse Theatre. The play, written in 1953 for live television and the subject of an acclaimed 1985 motion picture, follows the ... more »
By Bill Humphreys I sat in a cozy restaurant watching David Mauriello stir his soup with a fork ... It was one of those elongated, heavily silent moments before epiphany strikes. We had spent the past hour degrading the film industry, for its lack of imagination in effectively ... more »
I attended the press night of the American Repertory Theater's new co-production with the British troupe Punchdrunk of Sleep No More - a wordless rendition of Shakespeare's Macbeth - performed on all four floors of an abandoned school in Brookline. I was slightly familiar with Punchdrunk ... more »
My wife Jean and I went to London last month to sample the treats in the finest theatre-city in the world. By our best count, it was our seventeenth stay in London, our earliest in 1971 before our first wedding anniversary. Then, for twelve years, we hosted a London Theatre Tour, escorting ... more »
Art Throb: John Fogle from Charlotte Cheshire on Vimeo. more »
He never had to come to rehearsal or learn his lines and in fact, never makes an appearance on stage. Still, thanks to actors Paula Plum and Nancy Carroll, by the end of David Hare's BREATH OF LIFE, you know Martin. And you don't like him very well. The Gloucester Stage Company production ... more »
On July 16th, the Salem Theatre Company will open its 23rd Main Stage play, Steve Martin's adaptation of The Underpants, by Carl Sternheim. The script is both an adventure and a delight from a director's perspective. It is rife with Martin's trademark comic wit, innuendos, and ... more »
There's much buzz about the recent demise of the North Shore Music Theatre - which I have been following with a mixture of fascination and rue. In the 1990s, my wife and I created marketing materials for NSMT and I worked as a theatrical photographer for a number of shows. It was, I'm sure, ... more »
David Allen George, actor and Salem State College professor, never dreamed of another career. "There wasn't anything else I was going to do," he says. He looks for that passion in his students, as well. "You say to students when they come in that you hope they're bitten. And you can see it on ... more »
Theater People... For me, the term can conjure up images as disconcerting as hungover birthday party clowns. A cacophony of megalomaniacle laughter escaping from holes in faces surrounded by strategically placed facial hair- five o'clock shadow of severest woe... There they are, the theater ... more »
There's an age-old battle raging in the Boston theatre scene this week prompted by a negative review in the Boston Globe of the Huntington's current production of Pirates! (Or, Gilbert and Sullivan Plunder'd). The theatre's website trumpets that their "...young, brilliant creative team has ... more »
Just as we at Art Throb have recently gathered to unite cultural organizations and artists under one roof, so, literally, has a huge cross-section of the arts community of Salem. Call it serendipity or great minds thinking collectively or timing, but Joe Cultrera's championing of St. ... more »
For the past 30 years, I've straddled two worlds - marketing and theatre. The former has fed my family while the latter fed my spirit. But the mix often created kind of psychic indigestion. Marketing:101 teaches us to sell the benefits, not the features, of our product. This notion has ... more »