After months of planning and discussion, Church Hill Theatre proudly announces its 2024 season of outstanding plays. As always, the offerings will include old favorites, edgy new dramas, and a family-friendly musical. With a renovated building, comfortable new seating and improved sound and lighting equipment, CHT will offer audiences a truly professional theater experience.
Charley’s Aunt by Brandon Thomas will be the first production of 2024, being presented March 8 through 24. It is a farce in three acts that centers on Lord FancourtBabberley, an undergraduate whose friends Jack and Charley persuade him to impersonate the latter’s aunt. The complications of the plot include the arrival of the real aunt and the attempts of an elderly fortune hunter to woo the bogus aunt.
My Fair Lady, by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Lowe, to be presented June 7 through 23, is a musical adapted from the book Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw. It is a satire about class distinctions in England during the early 20th century. It centers around a cockney flower girl, Eliza Dolittle, who is taken in by linguist Henry Higgins, who bets his friend, Colonel Pickering that he can improve her speech and manners sufficiently to pass her off as a duchess. This musical has delighted audiences since it opened on Broadway in 1956.
August Osage County, by Tracy Letts, playing September 13 through 29, is a highly entertaining play about a very dysfunctional family. The father has vanished, the mom pops pills, and the three sisters have shady little secrets. Variety called it, “…ferociously entertaining…,” and Time Magazine wrote of it, “This original and corrosive black comedy deserves a seat at the dinner table with the great American family plays.”
Ride the Cylone, by Jacob Richmond and Brooke Maxwell will appear on the Church Hill stage November 8 through 24. This cult favorite musical follows six members of the Uranium City High School Choir who are involved in a horrific roller coaster accident. A mechanical fortune teller, the Amazing Karnak, offers renewed life to the teen who makes the best pitch. Who will survive?
The Green Room Gang will once again gather in July to teach and create theater for young people.
The 2024 season will culminate with a production of A Christmas Carol December 13, 14, and 15. Using the radio play script that has become a standard at Church Hill Theatre, the new presentation is being created. Details are still being formulated.
The Live Chesapeake Film Festival begins at noon on Sept. 30 at the historic Avalon Theatre with the Maryland Premiere of Karen Carpenter: Starving for Perfection, a captivating and unvarnished documentary about the singer’s tragically short life and enduring musical legacy. The representatives of the film team, including Executive Producer Andy Streitfeld and Associate Producer Jon Gann will be present to answer questions.
The closing film, The Automat, is a national sensation that makes its Maryland debut in the LIVE Chesapeake Film Festival. The film tells the 100-year-story of the iconic restaurant chain Horn & Hardart, the inspiration for Starbucks, where generations of Americans ate and drank coffee at communal tables. Director Liza Hurwitz will join us from New York to answer questions from the audience.
The Mahler, conducted by NMF’s Artistic Director, Richard Rosenberg, is a spectacle to behold. In typical maximalist fashion, the work calls for the Festival’s entire musical personnel, including mentors and even a few arts administrators. In addition to double the standard number of wind instruments and many, many strings, the piece has a few other unique instrumental elements, such as the inclusion of mandolin and guitar in the fourth movement. This massive collaboration for the five-movement symphonic work has been an excellent opportunity for the Festival apprentices to learn from their teachers in the field. Its performance will blow you away with its power.
Left to right: Front row: Schuyler Helmsley as Lavendar, Liam Kruhm as Eric, Charlie Thomas as Nigel, Carly Mourlas as Matilda, Sydney Hill as Elsie, and Isla Clemens as Alice.
Marc Castelli has been painting the workboats, watermen, and log canoes of the Chesapeake region for over thirty years. He is considered by many to be a master of his watercolor medium and a renowned artist of the Chesapeake. The MassoniArt gallery has represented Castelli for over twenty-five years with an annual one-man show. Encompassing only three weeks, Castelli’s special exhibition, Working Portraits / watermen.2, features the second in a series of Castelli’s portraits of watermen. These are not generic images or archetypes but portrayals of real people Castelli feels privileged to know.
Also included in the exhibit are focused images of the watermen on their workboats. For Castelli these watermen are not just figures to populate a painting. “There is no such thing as a generic waterman. The men in the paintings are knowable to themselves, their families, and to their compatriots.”
The Fiber Arts Center of the Eastern Shore invites you to their latest exhibit featuring the work of quilt artist, Alice Kish, who has been quilting since the 1970s. Alice is a prolific quilter who has made the progression of creating traditional quilts and now enjoys the world of creating modern quilts that have a message. Alice has been a past quilt guild president, quilt shop owner, quilt teacher, and co-author of a quilt book called “Great Expectations-Quilt Shop”.