I would like everyone to stop using “community theatre” as a punch line or punching bag.

Read More

By Steven LaVigne There are over 500 film adaptations of Charles Dickens’ writing.  At least 20 of these are based on his 1838 novel, Oliver Twist. Among them is a 1922 version starring Jackie Coogan as the title character opposite Lon Chaney, “the man of a thousand faces” as Fagin. Taking a look at this

Read More

By Steven LaVigne Films based on the work of L. Frank Baum have been made for over a century. The first Wizard of Oz film was made in 1910. The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1914) was a film before it became a novel, The first feature length version was released in 1925 starring Dorothy Dwan

Read More

My Fair Lady is one of the theater’s most phenomenal musicals.

Read More

by Steven LaVigne It was Martin Charnin’s idea to transform Harold Gray’s comic strip, Little Orphan Annie, into a musical. However, when he first suggested it to playwright Thomas Meehan and composer Charles Strouse their response was negative. They gradually came around to the project. At the time, the United States had survived the Nixon/Watergate

Read More

by Steven LaVigne Although it didn’t happen often enough, several movie musicals managed to capture the brilliance of their stage beginnings. This production of Show Boat, brought to the stage in 1927 by Florenz Ziegfeld and considered the first great musical of the Twentieth Century is a perfect example. Released by Universal, the 1936 version

Read More

by Steven LaVigne As anyone who’s read about or taken a class in the history of musical theater knows, Oklahoma! was an innovative musical whose original production changed the genre forever. Prior to 1943, musicals usually opened with a chorus of pretty girls singing and dancing in order to draw in the audience, especially the

Read More

by Seven LaVigne Theater directors generally stay in the theater, but some have branched out with films – not always successfully. For every Mike Nichols, Bob Fosse or Joshua Logan, there’s someone who should have known better. Harold Prince (1928-2019) is one of them! Fortunately, he only made two movies. Winner of an unprecedented 21

Read More