By Bill Hirschman
Variations on a Theme
The Harvest One Act Play Festival, sponsored by the Variations Theatre Group in New York City, has accepted two plays each from local actor/playwrights and close friends Mark Della Ventura and David Sirois for presentation between Oct. 14-22.
The Floridians will also perform in Della Ventura’s plays Small Membership and The C Word, and Sirois’ Granny’s Bones and Martin’s Dilemma to be mounted at the Hudson Guild Theatre in Chelsea.
Both are members of the ensemble at the Alliance Theatre Lab which featured both actors this year in Sirois’ Brothers Beckett.
Getting Away With Murder
Well-known theater figure Tony Finstrom’s new work, Murder in Gin Lane, will get a staged reading Oct. 24 as the first production in Jan McArt’s Theatre Arts Guild Play Reading Series at the Wold Performing Arts Center in Lynn Unversity in Boca Raton.
Director Wayne Rudisill will lead a cast including Jeffrey Bruce, to appear in Joseph and the Amazing Tecnicolor Dreamcoat at the Maltz Jupiter Theatre; Iris Acker, the host of television’s Onstage with Iris Acker; Beth Holland, president of the board of directors of The Symphony of the Americas, and Jan McArt, the South Florida theater pioneer currently directing Lynn University’s theatre arts program development.
The news release sets out the premise: “Gin Lane is a narrow Southampton road filled with ocean-front mansions, out on the end of New York’s Long Island. Max Greenway, a Broadway producer/director, died there last spring – apparently a suicide. But his widow, the former stage star Delphine Davenport, thinks it was… murder! She and her French maid Fifi are spending Labor Day weekend at this country cottage with her stepsister, Winnie and an old boyfriend, Inspector Benjamin Walker, formerly of Scotland Yard. And she intends to solve this ‘homicide’ before Monday… if it kills her.”
Tickets cost $10 and reservations can be made at (561) 237-9000.
Comedy Tonight (Not)
Broward Stage Door has shelved plans to move its current Coral Springs production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum to its new third stage at the Byron Carlyle Theatre in Miami Beach next month.
The large cast and projected weekly running cost were not offset by disappointing advance ticket sales in the new location. The company still plans to move its next Broward-based show, Guys and Dolls, to the Carlyle at 500 71st Street from Dec. 9 to Jan. 8.
Stage Door was also negotiating rights for a smaller budget show for the same space for this fall, said Derelle Bunn, executive producer/artistic director.
Funny Thing continues to run in the Coral Springs theater through Oct. 9. For more information, call (954) 344-7765 or www.stagedoortheatre.com
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