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Eric Schaeffer's American premiere of the musical The Witches of Eastwick won't open at Signature Theatre's new theater in Shirlington until June of next year, but the tickets go on sale today in honor of that other witches' day, Halloween. The musical had its world premiere in London under Schaeffer's direction in 2000, and ran for a year and a half. It has music by Dana P. Rowe and book and lyrics by John Dempsey, the same team that wrote The Fix which Schaeffer directed at Signature in 1998. It is slated to run in Signature's 299-seat theater from June 5 to July 15, 2007.

The 2006 installment of Extreme Exchanges, an experimental melding of theater and discussions examining social issues, will be offered this evening at the Silver Spring facility of Round House Theatre. The first Extreme Exchanges was staged in New York during the 2004 Republican National Convention. This will be the second event here in the Potomac Region. Theater artists will present short works developed on themes related to the current election under the general topic of Dreams and Nightmares for America: A Halloween Election, and then there will be moderated audience discussions of the issues raised. The event begins at 7:30. Admission is free.

The New Play Reading Series at Arena Stage has been set for the 2006-07 season. It includes one night readings of new plays by Karen Zacarías (author of Los pecados de Sor Juana (The Sins of Sor Juana)), Tazewell Thompson (Constant Star) Eric Overmyer (On the Verge or The Geography of Yearning) and Nilo Cruz (Anna in the Tropics) as well as two student authors from Yale and the University of California at San Diego. The first offering is set for November 6 when Molly Smith will direct a reading of Bolero by Nilo Cruz. Admission to each reading is $10. The full schedule is included in the listings on Arena's page of Potomac Stages.

Tonight through Saturday night, the National Symphony Orchestra Pops Halloween concert will include skeletons dancing to Karma Camp's choreography for a medley of familiar tunes including Michael Jackson's Thriller. (You might catch a few bars of the theme from The Adams Family as well.) The concert, titled Marvin's Monster Mash for Pops conductor (and A Chorus Line composer) Marvin Hamlisch, will include music from the stage by the likes of Andrew Lloyd Webber (The Phantom of the Opera) John Kander (Kiss of the Spider Woman) Stephen Schwartz (Wicked) Stephen Sondheim (Sweeny Todd) as well as movie music by Bernard Herrmann (Psycho) Max Steiner (King Kong) Franz Waxman (Bride of Frankenstein) and even a touch of Harold Arlen (The Wizard of Oz). Among Camp's skeletons will be dancers Brooke Atwell, Danielle Eden, Allison Parris and Samantha Zavras who are students at the Musical Theater Center in Rockville.

Two of Northern Virginia's community theater companies have decided to merge. C.A.S.T. in McLean, which stood for Community Alliance Supporting Theatre in McLean, and the Great Falls Players both have been performing at the Alden Theatre in the McLean Community Center, although the Great Falls Players also performed some of their shows at the Great Falls Grange. The two have merged to become the McLean Community Players, with plans for a three show season each year to consist of two plays and a musical. Their production of Born Yesterday is up and running at the Alden and the next play will be Life With Father next February.

The journal of "show biz," Variety, has profiled Washington's Theater J and its string of world premieres saying "Under artistic director Ari Roth, the theater has gained national prominence as a home for edgy, politically charged plays -- and for nurturing risky new works." The article praises the theater's "progressive board of directors and sophisticated urban audience, much of which is not Jewish" saying "the theater is not afraid to tackle controversial subjects head-on. In general, it seeks plays that have some Jewish context, ranging from oblique to explicit." It cites the premieres by the likes of Richard Greenberg (Bal Masque), Ariel Dorfman (Picasso's Closet), Joyce Carol Oates (The Tattooed Girl), Wendy Wasserstein (Welcome to My Rash and Third) and Neena Beber (Jump/Cut) in prior seasons and Laura Shaine Cunningham (Sleeping Arrangements) Thomas Keneally, (Either, Or) and the English premiere of a drama by Motti Lerner later this season as well as the current offering at the theater, the world premiere of Robert Brustein's Spring Forward, Fall Back. The full text of the article can be viewed at http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117952335.html.

The theater carries her name because she started it all when a Parks and Recreation Department theater project in Baltimore ended in 1962. Audrey Herman started her own company in the tiny room with a square stage just 13 feet on a side, and the institution has continued long after her death in 1999, but her "Spotlighters" added her name to make it Audrey Herman Spotlighters Theatre on Saint Paul Street. Today the company mounts no fewer than ten plays each season as well as a host of other late-night specials in the 86 seat house. Their current project is part one of Tony Kushner's two-part epic Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes which continues through November 12. They will do part two next season. The theater will host a birthday party celebrating Audrey Herman on Sunday, October 29, and is asking those who knew and worked with her to contribute anecdotes to complete an Audrey Storybook. The party itself will just be "Lite Fare and Birthday Cake" with no cover charge. Anecdotes and reservations are requested by this Thursday, October  26 by email at  Info@spotlighters.org or by phone at 410-752-1225.

David Sobelsohn, the founder of Washington's Footlights Drama Discussion Group, will be honored by the Cultural Enrichment Committee of the District's International History Week organization during a ceremony to be videotaped this afternoon at the studios of Channel Ten in Fairfax. Sobelsohn will receive the Performing Arts Award, one of six awards in as many categories. The award is in recognition of his contribution to the cause of the performing arts through his founding of the group which brings theater lovers together with playwrights, directors and scholars each month for an exchange of views about a current play. Often the group selects a play that is being performed locally so that they can attend a performance as well. The event begins at 1 pm and is open to the public. The address is 2929 Eskridge Road.

There will be a new category in the  Helen Hayes Awards that recognize outstanding work in professional theater when the awards are presented in 2008. Starting with the judging cycle that begins January 1, 2007, the Helen Hayes judges will be assessing performances not just by individuals but by the entire ensemble of a play or a musical. The awards will be presented as the Canadian Embassy Award for Outstanding Ensemble in a Play and the Canadian Embassy Award for Outstanding Ensemble in a Musical.

The Washington Savoyards, a company that has performed every extant Gilbert and Sullivan opera, will be performing its winter and spring 2007 shows at the Atlas Performing Arts Center on H Street NE rather than at the Duke Ellington Theatre on 35th Street NW. Of the shows announced, only one is a Gilbert and Sullivan evening and that is a reduced version. The company will open Cole Porter's Kiss Me, Kate in February, a shortened version of a Gilbert and Sullivan classic, The Condensed Mikado, in March, and Franz Lehar's Viennese operetta The Merry Widow in April.

The Russian State Academic Volkov Theatre in Yaroslavl, Russia has invited the College of Arts & Sciences at American University to send its world premiere production of the musical They Shoot Horses, Don't They? to perform as part of the Seventh International Theatre Festival there this December. The show, by playwright Nagle Jackson, features a score by Robert Sprayberry. Before departing for Russia, the show will be performed here in the Harold and Sylvia Greenberg Theatre on Wisconsin Avenue October 19 - 28. Potomac Stages is not able to provide coverage of all collegiate theater but we have included this production in the listings for those who might want to catch it before its departure for Russia.

Two unrelated items deserve attention by theater lovers this morning. First is the word that a fire at the Folger Theatre yesterday was extinguished with no lasting damage, but that it will result in the postponement  of the opening of Folger's new show, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is being directed by Joe Banno. Instead of beginning previews on October 19, the show will probably have its first performance about the 26th. Also of note today is the fact that ArtSpeak!, the program that brings big name theater people, such as Broadway performers, to answer audience questions and perform a little for students, families and the general public at the Poe Middle School in Annandale VA, will begin its tenth season tonight. Cabaret and Damn Yankees star Meg Gillentine, who appeared on Broadway in Cats, The Producers, Fosse and The Frogs will be the guest. The event begins at 7 this evening. It is free and no reservations are required.

The television program Just Theater, on which Potomac Stages' Brad Hathaway discusses current productions with Montgomery Access Theatre Critic Faiga Levine, returns to Access Montgomery's cable channel 19. The program airs tonight and every Friday night at 9:00 and again on Mondays at 5:30 pm. The first program of the season features discussions of The Foreigner at Olney Theatre Center, State of the Union at Ford's Theatre, Red Light Winter at Studio Theatre, Cabaret at Arena Stage and the book American Presidents Attend the Theatre by local writer Thomas A. Bogar.

Arena Stage will clear out its closet on Saturday with a costume sale featuring items used in such plays as South Pacific, Damn Yankees and M. Butterfly. The sale will not be be held at Arena in SE, but at the Arena Stage at 14th and T facility, best known recently for hosting the shows of the Washington Stage Guild. It runs from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and items can be purchased with cash or credit cards but not personal check. The next day, the Smithsonian Associate program kicks off a new series titled Broadway to Hollywood which will examine the interchange of material and talent between the center of theater activity in the United States during the twentieth century, Broadway, and the headquarters of the movie industry three thousand miles west in California. The Smithsonian's curator of popular culture at the National Museum of American History, Dwight Blocker Bowers, and the University of Maryland's English professor Jackson Bryer, begin with a look at dramatic plays that have been made into movies including Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Philadelphia Story. The program begins at 1 p.m. and admission is by tickets which cost $25 and can be ordered during business hours at 202-357-3030.

Today's new reviews are of shows that have such short runs they close in just a few days.  Shlemiel The First, the delightful klezmer musical being given a staged concert production at Theater J had its first performance on Sunday and will close with the noon performance on Friday. Get Your War On, the staging of the anti-Bush Administration comic strip at Woolly Mammoth opened last Thursday and will close on Saturday. Readers who want to catch either show had better make their plans quickly.

Ron Rosenbaum, the columnist for the New York Observer whose book The Shakespeare Wars challenged conventional wisdom over the way the works of the bard should be presented both on paper and on stage, will appear in a discussion with John F. Andrews, president of the Shakespeare Guild, this evening at 7 o'clock at the Corcoran Gallery of Art on 17th Street NW.  The event is one of a series sponsored by the English Speaking Union, of which Andrews is the Executive Director. The series also includes a November 8 conversation with Michael Frayn, author of dramas such as Copenhagen and comedies such as Noises Off which will be offered for free at the Shakespeare Theatre on 7th Street on November 8. Admission to tonight's event is $20.

This rare Saturday publishing of Potomac Stages is occasioned by the short visit of the Beatles Tribute Show Rain: The Beatles Experience to the Warner this weekend. The show opened last night and plays this evening and a matinee tomorrow. The show will have a similar short stay at the Hippodrome in Baltimore next week end, playing the same Friday and Saturday night, Sunday matinee schedule. Click here to read our review.

Despite having announced a suspension of operations for the time being, Fairfax's Theater of the First Amendment has scheduled a free reading tonight of a family friendly play based on a Persian folktale. The play, The Patient Stone is by Amin Neshati and Kristin Johnsen-Neshati who adapted the tale from the modern re-telling by Iranian writer Sadeq Hedayat. The free performance will begin at 7:30 at the Old Town Hall, 3999 University Drive in Fairfax. As the work continues, additional free readings are planned for December 1, 2006 and March 2, 2007.

The theater enthusiasts who usher in the region's theaters and participate in Potomac Stages' Ushers' Favorite Show Award program have named two productions their favorites among all the shows they saw in September, the MetroStage production of Girl in the Goldfish Bowl  and In The Continuum at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company. Girl in the Goldfish Bowl is still playing at MetroStage in Alexandria while In the Continuum has closed because its cast of two have taken the show on tour. Both shows were also designated a Potomac Stages Pick when we first reviewed them. At the end of the year, the participating Ushers will be asked to chose from among the monthly winners to name a favorite show of the year. To be eligible to participate in the Ushers' Favorite Show Award program, a theater lover must regularly volunteer at live theater events and also regularly see shows at a number of theaters. To sign up to be an Ushers Judge, send an email message to Ushers@PotomacStages.com.

Starting this week, daytime visitors to Ford's Theatre will have a chance to catch a glimpse of what the Lincoln assassination meant to the owner of the theater, which would be forever remembered for the events of April 14, 1885. A one-act, two-character play written by Richard Hellesen, One Destiny, finds Harry Ford being consoled by actor Harry Hawk who delivered the famous line “…you sockdologizing old man trap!”  that John Wilkes Booth knew would get enough of a laugh to muffle the sound of his entry into Lincoln's box. Local actors Michael Bunce and Stephen Schmidt bring Ford and Hawk to life for a 35-minute presentation. Admission is free, but a handling fee of $1 is charged for advance tickets. Both advance and day-of-performance tickets are available through the box office at Ford's. Performances will be at 11:15 am and 1:15 pm on selected days including this Friday. There will be an 11:15 am performance on Saturday. The full schedule for the balance of the run through October 21 is available at http://www.fordstheatre.org/Pages/home/home.htm. 

The NVTA, formerly the Northern Virginia Theatre Alliance but now simply the NVTA to accommodate members from the District and Maryland, has issued the calendar listing the shows that the 24 member theaters have slated for their 2006-07 seasons. The membership consists of nearly one third of the seventy-seven community theater companies we track at Potomac Stages. The calendar lists over 83 productions: over fifty plays, twenty musicals, ten shows for or by children and a smattering of special events and one-act festivals. There are surprisingly few duplications this year. Both Reston Community Players and St. Marks Players will be doing Alfred Uhry's warm drama The Last Night of Ballyhoo, and both Castaways Repertory Theatre and Tapestry Theatre have scheduled Beth Henley's Pulitzer Prize winning play, Crimes of the Heart. As to musicals, Aldersgate Church Community Theatre and Sterling Playmakers are both programming You're A Good Man Charlie Brown and both Fauquier Community Theatre and the Reston Community Players have Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat on their slates. Among the intriguing works that haven't seen many community theater productions are local playwright Roberto Aguire-Sacasa's comedy Say You Love Satan and the new musical fantasy of spirits coming to grips with their deaths, A Fine and Private Place, both at Dominion Stage, a new mounting of Terra Nova, the story of Captain Robert Scott's attempt to be the first to reach the South Pole which the Port City Playhouse has scheduled, Silver Spring Stage's mounting of the drama of the Leopold and Loeb case, Never the Sinner, and the Prince William Little Theatre production of Harry Chapin's musical The Cotton Patch Gospel.  The schedules of the individual theaters can be viewed on their Potomac Stages' page by clicking the links below:

Aldersgate Church Community Theatre
Arlington Players, The
British Players
Castaways Repertory Theatre 
Chevy Chase Players
Dominion Stage
Encore Stage and Studio
Fauquier Community Theatre
Great Falls Players
Hexagon
Little Theatre of Alexandria
McLean Theatre Alliance
Pied Piper Theatre
Port City Playhouse
Prince William Little Theatre
Reston Community Players
Rockville Little Theatre
Rooftop Productions
St. Marks Players
Silver Spring Stage
Springfield Community Theatre
Sterling Playmakers
Tapestry Theatre Company
Vienna Theatre Company