Christopher Akerlind News

Learn more about how Broadway star Brenda Braxton joins the production team of 'Pay the Writer' and adds her talent to this captivating show. Find out what her role is and how her involvement enhances the production.

Pay the Writer, the world premiere of a new comedy-drama by New York Times Bestselling Author Tawni O’Dell, will open August 21, 2023 Off-Broadway at The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre at The Pershing Square Signature Center.

A seismic theatrical jolt shot through the theatre world this past Thursday evening when a startling, radically deconstructed production of Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches opened at the Arena Stage; this interpretation grabs you like a “fever-dream” of the mind.  As soon as I walked in to see this interpretation of this classic play of the American canon, a distinctly European sensibility took hold, and I noticed the chandeliers were all covers in heavy tarp/sheeting and the Angel was raking the theatre-in -the -round stage while moving gradations of sand around an inner circle.  This Angel appears with some frequency in this interpretation and we are reminded that there “are” angels in America ---perhaps we do not need be ruled by the crazed politics that divide us.  We can choose to fight our biases and preconceptions.

Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater has announced the cast and creative team of its upcoming production of Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches, which will run March 24 April 23, 2023, in the iconic in-the-round Fichandler Stage. See first look photos of the cast.

Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater announced the cast and creative team of its upcoming production of Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches, which will run March 24 – April 23, 2023, in the iconic in-the-round Fichandler Stage.

Drama students at Jacksonville's Douglas Anderson School of the Arts are speaking out after their upcoming production of the historical queer drama, Indecent, was canceled by the local school board.

Quite possibly, a perfect production.  Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage’s Tony Award-nominated CLYDE’S at the Mark Taper Forum is heartfelt, funny, and seriously delicious.

Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage and director Kate Whoriskey will bring their latest Broadway triumph, “Clyde’s,” a co-production with Goodman Theatre in Chicago to the Mark Taper Forum November 15 to December 18. It recently concluded the Goodman engagement.

In CLYDE’S, playwright Lynn Nottage posits that salvation comes in the form of a sandwich...in more ways than one.

The 1/52 Project, the new financial grant program founded by Tony Award-winning set designer Beowulf Boritt, has selected the first seven early-career designer recipients to benefit from $100,000 in grants.

Celebrated creative collaborators over two decades, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage and director Kate Whoriskey will return to Goodman Theatre with their latest Broadway production, Clyde’s, launching the Goodman’s 2022/2023 Season.

A marvelously theatrical, dream-haunted evening tells of gay-rights activist Harvey Milk’s life and death.

Winners for the 66th Annual Drama Desk Awards were announced today. See the full list here! This year’s Drama Desk Awards will take place at Sardi’s Restaurant on June 14th. See who was honored from Broadway, Off-Broadway, and Off-Off Broadway.

Nominations for the 66th Annual Drama Desk Awards were announced today, and the full list of nominees is available here as well as information on who was eligible.

Portland Stage closes its 2021-2022 season with a new play with music that is really a chamber opera, SABINA, about the pioneer in psychoanalysis, the muse and lover of Carl Jung and colleague of Sigmund Freud, Sabina Spielrein. Sabina’s story from Jung’s catatonic patient to medical student and respected doctor in the turbulent years leading up to WWII is a fascinating one, filled with history and hope.

After a two-year pandemic delay, the new musical Sabina arrives on stage tonight at Portland Stage. The new musical features Stephanie Machado in the title role, with Philip Stoddard as Carl Jung and Bruce Sabath (Company, Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish) as Sigmund Freud. The cast also includes Jason Michael Evans (Anastasia National Tour) and Sarah Anne Fernandez (Wicked National Tour). 

The touring production of Waitress, playing a limited engagement at Playhouse Square’s Hanna Theatre May 26 – June 26, is looking for two young girls to alternate performing the role of “Lulu” during the five-week run. Auditions for Lulu will take place on Monday, May 9th, at Playhouse Square.

Waitress on tour is now on stage in Charlotte for a special five-week engagement through May 22nd, 2022 in the Booth Playhouse, followed by a five-week engagement at Cleveland's Playhouse Square May 26-June 26, 2022 in the Hanna Theatre.

Sabina is a profoundly moving psychological mystery, the story of Sabina Spielrein, a catatonic 19-year-old Russian girl who is sent to the Burgholzli Institute by her parents as a last resort. She is found there by Carl Jung, who is looking for a patient on whom to try Freud’s not-yet-proven Talking Cure.

Stephanie Torns will star in the lead role as Jenna Hunterson after understudying the role at the American Repertory Theater, prior to the Broadway run, as well as on Broadway. Stephanie also played supporting and ensemble roles throughout the original Broadway run and the show's restaging in 2021.