ON a recent humid Sunday, 26 members of the Harmonium Choral Society shuffled into Grace Episcopal Church here and dropped their belongings among the pews. As they stood in a scattered group, they locked gazes, stretched their arms skyward and hissed at one another.

That was a warm-up for a three-hour session that would culminate in the recording of three minutes of original music, created on the spot, to be woven into the Shakespeare Theater of New Jersey’s production of “Hamlet,” which is running in Madison through Oct. 11. Music previously recorded by the group would be used at other points in the play.

Bonnie J. Monte, the Shakespeare Theater’s artistic director, approached Harmonium’s director, Anne Matlack, about a collaboration after she heard the singers at a First Night event in Morristown last year.

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After nine grinding years of war, the once-mighty soldier abruptly comes unglued. Denied an honor he thinks he’s due, he goes to kill the officers he holds responsible, but after his night of rage finds he has slaughtered barnyard animals, not generals.

Shamed beyond endurance, he plans suicide. “A great man must live in honor or die an honorable death,” he tells his wife. “That is all I have to say.”

The soldier is Ajax, fighter of the Trojan War, his downfall portrayed in a Greek tragedy written more than two millennia ago.

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“The Gingerbread House,” a new play by Mark Schultz at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, hits an iceberg just a few minutes into the first scene, in which a young married couple chill on the living room couch in front of the television.

Toys and general kiddie detritus surround them in disarray, suggesting a wearying day of parenthood. Brian (Jason Butler Harner) stirs from his exhausted slouch. “Honey,” he says, “I think we should sell the kids.”

Stacey (Sarah Paulson) responds with a blank stare and a light laugh. “Maybe we can get a new fridge,” she says dryly.

But Brian isn’t kidding. He’s sick of the children. “We can start our lives again,” he says in a coaxing tone. “We can have it back. All of it.”

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Mental illness on the stage and screen is often portrayed in extreme ways, and not just for dramatic effect. In Western culture psychic pain has tended to be seen as the territory of the artist, visionary, rebel and genius, from Emily Dickinson to Sylvia Plath and Friedrich Nietzsche to John Forbes Nash Jr. So it should be no surprise that madness is often used to signify creativity, sensitivity or spiritual and intellectual depth.

In “Proof,” for instance, a troubled math prodigy fears she will unravel like her brilliant father, and in “Equus,” recently revived on Broadway, an emotionally flattened psychiatrist envies his young patient’s creative religious passion, however warped. In “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” mental illness is portrayed as the only refuge of the social misfit.

“Depression can appear to embody an aesthetic or moral or even political stance,” the author and psychologist Peter D. Kramer writes in his book “Against Depression.” In our culture, he added, it “is what tuberculosis was 100 years ago: illness that signifies refinement.”

Brian Yorkey, 38, and Tom Kitt, 35, the creators of “next to normal,” were keenly aware of that romantic strain and studiously worked to avoid it. “Someone said to make her a painter,” Mr. Yorkey said of the protagonist, Diana. “I said no. She’s a suburban mother.”

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Professor JEREMY DAUBER (Yiddish Department, Columbia University): We have “Fiddler on the Roof” in Hindi, and we have “Fiddler on the Roof” in Japanese, so clearly the stories that Sholem Aleichem told, even translated, have this universal appeal, and I think a lot of it has to do with the way his stories talk about the appeal of tradition and the struggle of maintaining tradition in a rapidly changing world.

[BETTY] ROLLIN: Theodore Bikel, who has played Tevye more than 2,000 times, is now touring a one-man show called “Sholem Aleichem: Laughter Through Tears.”

THEODORE BIKEL (Actor and Singer): Sholem Aleichem doesn’t only appeal to Jews. I get non-Jewish audiences who find parallels in what he wrote and how he wrote. I ask them, “What does this play mean to you?” Pogroms, Jews, Russians, turn-of-the-century shtetls ””“What does that mean to you?” And they said, “Tradition.” We know what that is. We know what it is when children don’t want to follow the tradition of their parents.

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Listen to it all. This interview is about 9 1/2 minuteslong and says so much about our society and what we value right now. Take the time to listen to it all and do not miss all the incoherence in her remarks.

Each year, churches large and small stage Christmas dramas, plays and musicals like this one to unite their people in common purpose, have a little fun or get non-churchgoers in the door, ideally for good.

This year, fallout from the nation’s battered economy has brought added drama.

Some amateur Marys, Josephs and Bob Cratchits are enduring their own hard times. For them, the stage provides escape into someone else’s skin, a support network that might have disappeared along with a job, and a chance to deepen their spirituality at a trying time of year. For many families in the audience, the performances are free entertainment when tickets to “The Nutcracker” are a luxury.

All those things are true at Arvada Covenant Church, which staged the musical comedy “Bethlehem’s Big Night” last weekend after months of planning and practice.

One innkeeper’s wife has a 9-month-old baby and can’t find work, but she chipped in making costumes and props. The understudy to Mary’s mother was laid off and her husband moved out of state to find work, but she was still backstage memorizing lines at the last rehearsal.

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I caught this earlier this week and thought it was a really nifty story. I was unaware of this research–watch it all and see what you make of it.

No googling or using references, etc. Who is the only American writer to win an Academy award, a Tony award, and the Pulitzer prize. I didn’t know and wondered if you did–KSH.

Watch it all. Also, here is one Judy Collins version of the song.

Finally, one of my favorite discussions of this wonderful song may be found on NPR’s Performance Today from May 2002.

Now it’s “Godspell” that is saying “no go” on Broadway.

A revival of the 1970s Stephen Schwartz flower-power musical about Jesus has announced it will not open as scheduled, the fourth production to put on hold plans for a New York run this season.

“I am devastated that, due to the loss of a major investor in the harsh reality of a slowing economy, there were no other options at this time than to postpone,” Adam Epstein, “Godspell” producer, said Tuesday in a statement.

“Godspell” had been set to open October 23 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. The musical, reportedly budgeted at more than $4 million, joins a growing number of shows that are doubtful for Broadway engagements in a nervous, recession-wary environment.

“There are so many variables in bringing a production to Broadway — theater availability, artists’ schedules, and securing capitalization to name but a few,” said Howard Sherman, executive director of the American Theatre Wing.

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A nifty Youtube video–watch it all.

Actress Helen Mirren has played countless royals ”” Cleopatra, Queen Charlotte, Queen Elizabeth I and II.

It’s no coincidence. Aristocracy is in the blood, she tells Renee Montagne. Even the working class women in her family were “queenly.”

Her new memoir, In the Frame: My Life in Words and Pictures, outlines her aristocratic beginnings, from a time before the Mirren family was known as such, until she found a very special “religion” ”” the theater.

No matter how perfectly she may play a queen, however, she admits that she still gets intimidated when she gets a script and sees the “enormous number of lines” she has to learn.

Listen to it all from NPR.

His recommendation [for how to watch one of his plays]?

“Pretend you’re at the first play you’ve ever seen ”” have that experience ”” and I think ‘what the play is about’ will reveal itself quite readily.”

Ben Brantley, chief drama critic of The New York Times, says Albee is “without peer among American playwrights.”

“Certainly of his generation,” Brantley says, “but I would say period.”

Among living dramatists, Brantley says, no one else takes the grand themes Albee does.

“I’m not talking about questions of politics or immediate topical issues,” Brantley stresses. “Edward Albee asks questions ”” the most basic existential questions. He confronts death, he confronts sex with, I think, eyes that remain very wide open.”

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If you haven’t made a 100 things I would like to do before I pass from this world to the next list, do make one and make sure seeing this musical one time is on there–KSH.

You’re almost starting to sound cynical again.

The good news is it’s a spectacular country. We’ve been around for 230 years in spite of human nature, because that’s what the Constitution is all about. It’s saying, of course everyone’s gonna try and take control. Of course they’re gonna subvert every law that’s supposed to keep them in line. Of course the president is gonna want to be imperial, of course Congress is gonna want to become obstructionist, of course the judges are gonna be activist. Duh. They figured this out in 1787 and drew up a few sheets of paper that have kept the country in line. It’s a great place to live.

Read the whole interview (Hat tip: Green Mountain Politics 1).

Mary and Joseph were headed for Bethlehem when the donkey hauling the Virgin spooked, bucked her and bolted. Joseph frantically jumped on the donkey’s hind end but fell off and got caught in the reins. The creature kept going, dragging Joseph behind for several hundred feet before it finally settled down.

That mishap, of course, doesn’t appear in the Bible. It’s from a so-called living nativity scene that was performed here two years ago at the Fellowship Baptist Church.

These Christmas season spectacles, in which human volunteers and farm animals are recruited to stand in for Mary, Joseph and the rest of the crèche-come-to-life, are growing in popularity. They’re drawing big crowds, especially children, who are sometimes allowed to pet the barn animals and take a peek at the swaddled infant starring as Baby Jesus. But the realism has ushered in some less-than-joyous moments like the one at Fellowship Baptist.

“We don’t have that scene anymore,” says Pastor Andy Wallin of this church near Philadelphia, which now uses a tape recording to narrate how Mary and Joseph arrived at their destination. “We gave up on trying to tame the donkey.”

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“IN an instant all will vanish and we’ll be alone once more, in the midst of nothingness.”

When the actor Wendell Pierce spoke these words in performances of “Waiting for Godot” here last month, he really was in the middle of nothingness, or what looked a lot like it.

The performances, by the Classical Theater of Harlem, took place outdoors in parts of the city particularly hard hit by Hurricane Katrina and slow to recover. In the Gentilly section, a gutted, storm-ruined house was used as a set. In the Lower Ninth Ward, where one of the largest black neighborhoods in a mostly black city was all but erased by roof-high water surging through a levee, the intersection of two once-busy streets was the stage.

The streets are empty now, lined with bare lots. A few trees and houses stand far off. Reclamation work by returning homeowners and volunteers is under way. But some residents live in cramped trailers supplied by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, here widely despised for its inefficiency. Under the circumstances, Beckett’s words sounded less like an existentialist cri de coeur than like a terse topographic description.

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When Paul Chan visited New Orleans for the first time in 2006, the gutted houses, abandoned streets and bare trees reminded him of Samuel Beckett’s legendary play Waiting for Godot.

“The sense of waiting is legion here,” Chan said. “People are waiting to come home. Waiting for the levee board to OK them to rebuild. Waiting for Road Home money. Waiting for honest construction crews that won’t rip them off. Waiting for phone and electric companies.”

The artist and activist says the desolation in New Orleans inspired him to “create art in places where we ought not have any.” This weekend, Chan’s vision comes to fruition in the Lower Ninth Ward, where the New York public arts group Creative Time and the Classical Theater of Harlem are staging free, outdoor performances of Waiting for Godot. They will continue next weekend in the city’s Gentilly neighborhood, in front of a flooded home.

Listen to it all from NPR.

Any minister of religion who despairs of the secular obsessions of modern society hasn’t been paying much attention lately to the Chicago theater scene. These last couple of weeks, it’s felt like every opening night has been the harbinger of another religious debate.

Let’s take it from north to south.

Up in Glencoe, Southern Protestants currently battle Southern Catholics in Evan Smith’s limp new comedy, “The Savannah Disputation.” In Evanston, a progressive Anglican minister is trying to square her faith with familial reality in Keith Bunin’s slick, smart and theologically obsessed drama, “The Busy World is Hushed.” On the North Side of Chicago, the Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s skilled director Anna D. Shapiro has taken that old rationalist Arthur Miller and ramped-up “The Crucible” as a probing of the dangerous gap between factual truth and hysterical belief. And in the Loop, Sarah Ruhl’s unruly epic “Passion Play” is deconstructing the political and human manipulation of the Passion of the Christ over two continents, 500 years and more than three hours of stage time.

Some of this is theatrical business as usual — to go to the theater every night is to ponder the meaning of life with atypical and probably unhealthy regularity. But you couldn’t see all (or even most) of these shows without noticing the sudden preponderance of actors in vestments.

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The Broadway musical has won several awards and was later tuned into an American movie called The Birdcage, which starred Robin Williams and Nathan Lane. La Cage features a gay couple in which one partner runs a French nightclub and the other performs there as a drag queen. The couple has been together for 20 years but make changes when their son bring home his fiancee and her conservative parents.

Janine Papin, Trinity Prep’s fine-arts department chairwoman, said earlier that she wanted do the show to “push the limits.” She said the play is about family and tolerance, not about homosexuality.

Fred Trabold, a 32-year-old attorney who graduated from Trinity in 1993, agreed with the bishop’s decision.

“The issue is whether the Trinity Preparatory School, which is an Episcopalian school, should honor the bishop of the Episcopalian church,” Trabold said. “It’s not a matter of homophobia. I saw the movie The Birdcage and it was hilarious.”

[Bishop John] Howe had no further comment Friday night two hours before curtain.

“I really have said all I want to about it,” he said.

Ah, er, might one point out that it is the Episcopal Church? Episcopalian is a noun. Anyway, read it all.

Trinity Preparatory School’s production of La Cage aux Folles will be performed off campus at a local theatre this weekend, billed as an independent show with no ties to the Episcopal school.

Headmaster Craig Maughan announced the decision in press release this morning. There will be four performances of the musical at the Orlando Repertory Theatre.

The production was to open last weekend at the private school near Winter Park but was cancelled at the request of Bishop John Howe, head of the Episcopal Diocese of Central Florida. Howe, a leader among the nation’s conservative Episcopal bishops, thought the comedy featuring a gay couple and actors dressed in drag was inappropriate for a Christian school.

We regret the scheduling of this performance has been interpreted as a departure from our 40-year history as an Episcopal school,” Maughan said in his statement Thursday. “The students who worked hard to prepare for this play had neither a political nor social agenda.”

The decision to cancel the show — a culmination of Trinity Prep’s summer theatre program — angered some students, parents and alumni who questioned why Howe should dictate shows at the independent school. They also said the award-winning musical, which opened on Broadway in 1983, promoted tolerance and family values, even if not of the traditional sort.

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Two Orlando theaters Saturday offered stages for a prep-school production of La Cage aux Folles that was halted after an Episcopal bishop complained about the show’s themes.

Both the Orlando Shakespeare Theater and the Orlando Repertory Theatre — a group for youngsters — offered Saturday to provide a venue next weekend for Trinity Preparatory School’s performances.

“We do it with enthusiasm,” said Jim Helsinger, artistic director of the Orlando Shakespeare Theater.

Trinity Prep’s fine-arts director, Janine Papin, who directs the show, said Saturday that she would keep her promise to let the school’s board of directors decide this week whether to let students resume performances at the school’s auditorium.

“I do believe things will turn out well,” she said. “I am an optimist, and I believe there is a learning lesson in all of this for us.”

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The school theater production aimed to “push the limits,” and it did — way too far for its conservative Episcopal bishop.

Trinity Preparatory School canceled its opening-night performance of La Cage aux Folles on Friday at the request of Bishop John Howe, head of the Diocese of Central Florida.

“His request was not to stage the production, and we decided to honor his request,” said Headmaster Craig Maughan, who called off Friday’s and tonight’s planned performances. “I met with the cast and all the people involved in the production and announced the decision and explained it to them.”

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Update: Some background from yesterday’s article in the paper here.

Daniel Beaty is the star and author of a one-man play called Emergence-See! In it, a sunken slave ship from the past ”” with its cargo of bones and chains ”” magically surfaces alongside the Statue of Liberty in present-day New York Harbor.

The play portrays the response of 43 different characters ”” old, young, male, female, straight and gay, all of them black ”” to this puzzling event. Their reactions to the suddenly inescapable memory of slavery vary dramatically.

Beaty stands 5 feet 11 inches tall. But as he changes characters, he swells into a bigger man, slumps into the size of someone smaller, and shrinks into a child. He recites poems that he has written, and he sings like a trained opera singer ”” which he is.

Listen to it all from NPR.

Many young people rank listening to a sermon right up there with a trip to the dentist’s office or taking a pop quiz.

But what if that sermon included miming, inspiring music and dramatic dance moves?”Some people go to sleep listening to preachers,” said Mason Porter, a Dallas mime who uses his talent for the dramatic to encourage people to embrace the Christian faith. “We’re outta the box.”

Mason and his twin brother, Jason, are founders of the Wandering Mimes Ministry, a 17-member group of Christian mimes and dancers with the motto, “We are just showing the world what they refuse to hear.”

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