In order to become the title character in Shirley Valentine, Grace Diaz Tootle had to memorize 55 pages of dialogue.

Author Jonathan Raab has published four works of historical fiction, including Rosa and Shadow and Light. It’s a tough row to hoe, combining real people and events (successfully) with elements of suspense, classic crime noir and the fertile prose of one’s own imagination.

When the national touring production of The Wizard of Oz arrives at the Johnny Mercer Theatre March 2, Cassie Okenka will have walked down the Yellow Brick Road something like 340 times.

There are several strong similarities between the stage version of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and Mel Brooks’ The Producers. Both began as non–musical movies – funny stuff, in both cases, but not exactly blockbusters at the box office.

Central to the plot of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is the relationship between its central characters, a pair of con men on the French Riviera. Lawrence Jackson and Freddie Benson are two sides of the same slick coin – they’re Quixote and Panza, Bialystock and Bloom, Abbott and Costello.

All Walks of Life's (AWOL) final production of Choices this past Saturday night, a hip hop adaptation of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, was a riveting show and that seemed to meet the expectations of an eager audience.

It’s been a while since a local theatre group took on the classic musical Annie. The timing of this Savannah Children’s Theatre production, set in the 1930s, couldn’t be better given today’s sorry economic climate. It’s downright eerie hearing the dialogue discussing massive job losses, shuttered factories, and a mounting sense of public outrage.

All Walks of Life (AWOL) started in 1997 as a simple gathering of poets, musicians, and MCs at Savannah State University. Incorporated as a non-profit in 2004, the organization provides arts and technical education for at- risk youth, while striving to reach their goal of developing youth in an environment that encourages respect, education, creativity, and especially, nonviolence.

No less a country music star than Reba McEntire has given her seal of approval to the Savannah Theatre, where Country Star Revue has just begun a three week–run.

  The Savannah Children’s Theatre is hoping to “absolutely delight” audiences with their fifth season’s opening production of Annie. Kelie Miley, director of the Children’s Theatre, has this to say about the upcoming production:

Mike and Jill, Robbie and Julia. Mike and Julia, Jill and Robbie. They're the same people. The national touring production of The Wedding Singer, which visits the Johnny Mercer Theatre Jan. 26, is all about a four-cornered love triangle. Husband-and-wife musical theater team Michael and Jillian Zygo have the lead roles, Robbie Hart and Julia Sullivan, who meet cute and flirt, lose each other and flirt, then realize they can't live without each other. And ...

Tom Coleman’s all–time favorite play is the Tom Jones/Harvey Schmidt musical comedy The Fantasticks, which features ordinary people learning to enjoy — the hard way, sometimes — life’s little blessings.

For the better part of the past 20 years, Tim Cridland has been driving sharp skewers into his tongue and pushing them out through his neck, chewing on shards of glass, using his body to conduct electricity and walking barefoot across a bed of razor–sharp knives.

Early one evening in 2004, Matthew Lord was in his dressing room at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, waiting to go onstage for his Met debut in Boris Godunov. His cell phone rang; it was the Heritage Foundation in Grapevine, Texas, where Lord and his wife lived.

Reports of the imminent demise of Savannah’s community theatres may have been premature. JinHi Soucy Rand, a community activist who happens to be an 18–year veteran of the local stage scene, is embarking on a mission to make things better for everyone.