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Career Highlights: A graduate of New York’s High School of the Performing
Arts and Columbia University, Toby came to Maryland in 1959 as a teacher.
With the birth of her children, she briefly left the workforce, but soon she
was teaching drama classes and became involved in the Burn Brae Dinner
Theater. When her classes outgrew Burn Brae she worked with the Rouse
Company to bring her activities to Columbia. In 1975 she founded the
Columbia School for Theatrical Arts. In 1979 she opened Toby’s Dinner
Theatre in Columbia which today offers a five show season of major musicals.
Toby’s
Dinner Theatre is in the former Garland Dinner Theatre in Columbia. Toby
says that she had been so involved in the aspirations of her students that
she was looking for a way to provide performance opportunities beyond their
participation in youth programs. What she wanted to establish was a
professional production company and it need not be a dinner theater. But,
when the Rouse Company that developed Columbia asked her to bring her
theater activities to Columbia and the Garland became available, it seemed
to be a match.
The
reputation of the work performed at Toby’s has grown with each succeeding
season. In 1998 the performance of David James earned Toby’s its first Helen
Hayes Award. Since then, there have been twenty eight nominations for work
at Toby’s including four nominations for Toby herself in the category of
Outstanding Director of a Resident Musical. She was nominated in 1998 for
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, 1999 for Children of
Eden and 2002 for another mounting of Joseph and, then, in 2003,
she won the award for her direction of Jekyll & Hyde. Toby directs
practically all of the shows at Toby's.
As a
director, Toby seems to have mastered the art of blocking scenes in a
theater in the round so that no one side of the audience feels slighted,
while at the same time, it doesn’t seem that the actors are constantly
revolving to face different sides. She manages to find motivation for
movements so that they seem natural rather than mechanical. She also manages
to retain some of the most talented performers and designers. Her long-time
collaborator, choreographer Ilona Kessell, has been nominated for at least
one and sometimes two Helen Hayes Awards for outstanding choreography every
year for the last five years, winning it in 2002 for Damn Yankees.
Kessell says Orenstein "taught me how to tell the story," but cites Toby's
work with adult and young students as the incredible part. "She's
given a lot of people huge opportunities to learn and hone their skills."
The talent she attracts and the collaboration have made the productions at her dinner theater
fully competitive with other professional theater in the Potomac Region.
Potomac Stages reviews of the work of Toby Orenstein as of 2-09-04:
Ragtime
Footloose
Fiddler on the Roof
Annie Get Your Gun
Jekyll &
Hyde
The Jazz Singer
The Wizard of Oz
Annie
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