Arts Features

The well-loved tale of redemption popular this time of year, A Christmas Carol, wasn’t sparked by joy, but sorrow. When London journalist and author Charles Dickens wrote what became the most copied secular Christmas fiction, he was dejected, financially stressed and fighting for societal reform. To publish Scrooge’s trials in time for Christmas, he had […]

Bye Bye Birdie is a satirically corny, upbeat and schmaltzy musical waxing nostalgia about the 1950s. The show was a hit on Broadway when it debuted in 1961 and only grew in popularity with the release of the 1963 Ann-Margret film. It delivers a hefty songbook of toe-tapping tunes including “How Lovely to be a […]

August Wilson’s Fences is one of those plays that most people read at some point in their education, but only by seeing it performed can one fully grasp its poetic simplicity. Fences was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award for its intricately woven story of the personal struggles of a 1950s Black family […]

Area audiences have the chance to catch a new (for Springfield) musical about a small group of World War I heroes, and this writer hopes you take it. The Hello Girls is an uplifting and exciting history lesson that chronicles the journey of five courageous women who served as bilingual telephone operators on the front lines […]

Ten actors playing more than 60 characters will tell the real-life story of how the community of Laramie, Wyoming, reacted to the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay college student, in 1998.  The Laramie Project, a play by Moisés Kaufman and the Tectonic Theater Project, opens Nov. 7 at University of Illinois Springfield.  “It […]

Springfield native Matthew Brookens has written, produced, directed and starred in “Illinois Hell Hole,” a project he describes as a “two-hour, fully scored horror-comedy audio drama.” This oddball extravaganza aired on NPR Illinois (91.9 FM) in three parts Oct. 28-30 as a uniquely flavored Halloween treat, with spooky humor and voice performers ranging from narrator […]

Little Shop of Horrors is a 90-miniute, sci-fi musical-comedy skillfully co-directed by Ginny Racette and Joe-Michael Jackson that transports you to a graphic novel, B-movie version of Skid Row – the infamous 1960s stretch of the Bowery District in lower Manhattan. Inspired by Roger Corman’s gruesome cult film, Little Shop of Horrors, this musical adaptation […]

Beetlejuice Jr. is a family-friendly, hour-long, gothic funhouse adaptation of the Tim Burton cult-classic film of the same name. Cleverly directed by Nicole and John Sivak, it’s an irreverent, zany show full of humor, heart and enormous sand worm puppets. The plot – as Beetlejuice declares in his meta opening number, “Being Dead” – is […]

“To the coves and the caves and the people from the planes…. five days… 19 animals… and 7,000 strays!” Most people of a certain age can vividly recall where they were and what they were doing when they learned on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, that the United States had been attacked. While many […]