The Cast of Our Town Photo Credit all to Kgtunney Photography I remember reading Thornton Wilder’s homey play, Our Town , while still in high school. Young, naïve and wet-behind the ears, I, living in a small Western Pennsylvania town at the time, related to the play on a visceral level. Richeyville, where I grew up starting at age 12, was enough like Wilder’s Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire to strike a familiar chord. Both had a soda shop, paper boy news deliveries, dairy delivered to the front door and a homespun atmosphere where folks took their time and lived mostly uneventful lives among tree-lined streets and middle-class sensibilities. Years later, now middle-aged, I saw my first live performance and spent much of the experience comparing it to the memories of my youthful introduction to the drama as well as feeling it again with a sense of nostalgia. Wilder wrote the work in 1938, but set it a few decades earlier in the years 1901 to 1913. Apparently a simp...
(photo credit: David Allen for Opera San Jose) Falstaff Join us for the final opera of our 2025-26 Season... and Christopher Hahn's final opera as General Director of Pittsburgh Opera ! Verdi's Falstaff comes to Benedum Center from April 28th through May 3rd . Beloved buffoon Sir John Falstaff has fallen on hard times. But being a ladies’ man (or so he’d like to think), he drunkenly schemes to cash in on his wit and charm by wooing the wealthy wives of Windsor, Alice Ford and Meg Page. However, when these women uncover that he has sent them both identical love letters, they hatch a plan of their own to teach Falstaff a lesson he won’t soon forget! The music matches the merriment and mischief of this madcap romp. See why Verdi’s buoyant comedy, based on Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor , is considered one of the best comedic operas of all time! FREE childcare is available at our Sunday matinee performance ! Or, l...