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It’s been a long time since I believed in faeries. However, as I sat down in a packed theater for the St. Michael’s Drama Club production of Peter Pan, I was determined to let my faith be born again.

Held on the main stage of the McCarthy Arts Center, the student-produced play featured an impressive array of colorful costumes, swashbuckling scenes and, of course, flying.... Read more

Real crime is no laughing matter, especially a vicious homicide. Yet the audience for Mildred Taken Crazy — a short play based on a notorious late-19th-century murder in Montpelier — can expect some humor at its performance in Burlington next week. Bellows Falls-based actors/playwrights Steve Friedman and Denny Partridge like to say: “Our plays are always funny, no matter how serious.”... Read more

Two original sins haunt America’s history: Native American genocide and African slavery. Their consequences have undermined some of the highest ideals of our founders, especially the principle that “all men are created equal.” The legal system in particular has never treated people of color impartially in the United States. Even in 2008, African-Americans are grossly overrepresented in the prison population and underrepresented in positions of power.... Read more

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So you think Shakespeare is boring, eh? Vermont Stage Company's new production of King Lear will quickly dispel that notion as it explodes onto the FlynnSpace stage.

Fights, betrayal, backstabbing, bloodshed, love, sex, madness - King Lear is a complex family drama set in a nondescript time period.... Read more

Tragedy begins at home. Even sorrows enacted on a grand political scale — dynastic struggles, wars between countries — often stem from conflict within families. William Shakespeare distilled this pattern, writ large in England’s past, in his histories and tragedies. They reverberate with issues that still sting today: siblings who become rivals, spouses who betray one another, and parents and children who seesaw between love and hate.... Read more

When it debuted in Berlin in 1928, The Threepenny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper) instantly turned old-fashioned opera into groundbreaking musical theater. It had a political edge, thanks to the lyrics of Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), and its music was infused with the sounds and sensibilities of 1920s German cabaret, courtesy of the great composer Kurt Weill (1900-1950).... Read more

When is a toy not really a toy but a dramatic set? Not to mention an oracle, a sort-of GPS for domestic orientation, and a bit of a ruse?... Read more

Parents and schoolteachers know that all kids go through stages. At Burlington’s Very Merry Theatre, it’s the actual stage that counts. Make that center stage. VMT, the brainchild of Donald Wright, began in 2002 as a summer drama camp in which a small herd of spirited children modified Shakespeare — call it Baby Bard.... Read more

Tea and flashbacks?... Read more

It’s been a long, strange trip for David Schein since he graduated from Burlington High School in 1967. He left town to study drama and writing at the University of Iowa, did post-Beat experimental theater in Berkeley, taught drama in the projects of Chicago, and traveled to Europe, Tijuana and Ethiopia. What he’s become, besides the director of the Arts Council for Chautauqua County in Jamestown, N.Y., is a sort of unofficial professor of what he calls “arts-a-nomics.” That is, the study of bartering creativity for resources.... Read more