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PICT REFUGEE RHAPSODY OPENS THIS FRIDAY! TICKETS ARE ON SALE NOW!

 

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Sanctified Explores Through Music How Diverse Attitudes are Transformed into an Inspired Unity

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Merrily We Roll Along - A Children’s Ditty No More

Marnie Quick as Beth, Dan Mayhak as Frank, Catherine Kolos as Mary, NathanielYost as Charley and David leong as Joe Credit: Deana Muro     Judging by the full and rich sound of the first notes music director, Douglas Levine gets from his eight-piece orchestra, you have to assume Front Porch Theatricals is giving its audience a exemplary production of Merrily We Roll Along. And you’d be right.     Off to a good start musically, the show goes on to feature some fine vocal and acting skills from its cast of, would you believe, 19.     Talk about a challenge. In her directorial debut no less, actor and educator, Daina Michelle Griffith, corrals this expansive cast with the skill a Catholic nun herding a group of grade schoolers to daily mass. Only this is no throng of pre-teenagers but a horde of professionals with talent galore up to the task of bringing Broadway‘s legendary Stephen Sondheim‘s work to life.     The musical...
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Art of Wise – Antebellum Horror in the Deep South

  Karla C. Payne, Justus Payne, Sheldon Ingram and Adjoa Opoku-Dakwa Credit All Photos:  Credit:  L. Martello/18ricco If you’d want to experience a good example of how those in power use fear as a tool of subjugation, you might want to reserve a ticket or two for the world premiere production of Art of the Wise . The play, the fifth in playwright Mark Clayton Southers’ series of ten works, each set in a different decade of the 19 th century, centers on two families living on a cotton plantation in 1822 Deep South Alabama. Jenny Malarkey, Joseph McGranaghan* and Maddie Kocur The slave owning Wise family is shown in marked contrast to their enslaved cotton field workers, who, as was the custom, took the surname of their master. In the past I’ve said that playwright Southers is one heck of a story teller, and his latest opus follows suit by having a strong narrative that’s both intricately written, intensely entertaining and emotionally rousing. The drama wastes n...
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