Performing Art

Springfield Theatre Centre had a big hit last year with its production of Annie. The same STC directing team (Julie Davis, Doug Hahn, Gary Shull) is back with this week’s opening of Bye, Bye Birdie on the main stage of the Hoogland Center for the Arts. The show runs two weekends, April 29-May 1 and May […]

Many of this weekend’s theatrical offerings are focused on the celebration of the official opening of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum. A big downtown block party, with history as its theme, is planned for a large area stretching from the Lincoln Home neighborhood north to the museum, 212 N. Sixth St. On the grounds of […]

Missouri-born, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lanford Wilson has been writing plays since the off-off-Broadway movement began in New York in the 1960s. His first plays were produced at Café Cino and the still-in-operation LaMamma Theater. A few of Wilson’s plays made it to Broadway, and one, Fifth of July, will be seen here, in the University […]

So many companies in the region have scheduled productions of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast during the next few months (including the Springfield Muni, St. Louis’ Muny Opera, and the Little Theatre in Sullivan), I wish they could have been spread out a bit. Undoubtedly one of the best of the lot is the current production […]

How long has it been since a high-school show caused controversy? A few years ago, Springfield High School’s production of a harmless Gilbert and Sullivan operetta caused a stir when a female student was cast in a male role. And a few high schools around the country have received some ire by staging The Laramie […]

A deliriously affectionate ensemble of actors is having a ball in Springfield Theatre Centre’s production of the 1930s comedy You Can’t Take It with You, by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman, which concludes its run this weekend at the Center for the Arts (8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday). Felicia Coulter must […]

Many area theaters take the opportunity to present new and innovative works during the winter months, something I noted in my last column. The latest example of this trend is Born with a Veil, a work by local playwright Kari Catton Anderson that is being given a workshop production in the third-floor Club Room of […]

The theater department at Parkland College in Champaign invites community members to participate in campus productions. By combining the talents of student and community actors, Parkland has been able to give us such outstanding recent productions as Assassins and The Laramie Project. This week, the college stages a play for young people, The Phantom Tollbooth, […]

Let me mention some of the many good things that happened on area stages in 2004 before taking a look at what’s planned for the Springfield-area theater scene this year. The Hoogland Center for the Arts is undoubtedly the main story of the arts community this past year. Not a week goes by in which […]

If you’re looking for an alternative to Christmas-show overload, check out the Portuguese Rodeo Clown Company, which features three actors performing improvisations and other comic antics onstage for one night at the Hoogland Center for the Arts. The “clown company” includes Andy Lee and Johnny Molson, co-hosts of a show on WMAY (970 AM), and […]

It’s Thanksgiving, and that means the start of the Christmas season. The holiday theater season kicks off next week with A Yuletide Festival of Song and Dance, a show by the Mature Mob that’s being presented Thursday-Sunday, Dec. 2-5, at the Hoogland Center for the Arts. This year’s production, in which Mrs. Santa Claus and […]

Springfield Theatre Centre opens its production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman this week on the main stage of the Hoogland Center for the Arts. Don Russell, Loretta Hess, Mac Warren, and Rob Decroix, respectively, star in the roles of beleaguered Brooklyn salesman Willy Loman, his wife, and his two sons. The casting of […]