Playhouse on the Square's 2020-11 season is an interesting blend of regional debuts and revivals. I'll write more about the shows later but for now this is what the season looks like.

Those who have missed the sound of Jordan's singing during his recovery are in for a treat. He will be joined by Carla McDonald, Lili Thomas, and David Foster in a concert benefiting Sudden Arrhythmia Death Syndrome.

Call 901-270-5372 or email SADSbenefit@gmaill.com to make your reservation.

Event: Benefit concert for SADS Foundation (Sudden Arythmia Death Dyndrome)
Start Time: Monday, March 29 at 7:30pm
End Time: Monday, March 29 at 8:30pm
Where: Playhouse On The Square

Wild Legacy is Memphis director and playwright Gloria Baxter's theatrical homage to Olaus and Mardy Murie, the celebrated husband and wife naturalists who aided in the establishment of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. This commissioned piece created by Voices of the South is being prepared for touring. I'm having coffee with Gloria Saturday morning and will have more about Wild Legacy soon.

Susan Ellis wrote a nice preview of Theatre Lite's latest offering 2 Across. I've got to admit, I'm not into puzzle books or romantic comedies so a "comedy about crosswords and romance" isn't all that appealing. On the other hand this young group is all about getting back to basics: "to awaken the imagination and ignite the senses with the first word spoken... Without scenery, sets and full-out costumes." And they perform at the Beignet Cafe where they make the beignet pyramid, which is a pyramid of beignets drizzled with chocolate sauce, topped with cherry pie filling, powdered sugar and whipped cream. So there's that.

Lastly, if you've always wanted to check out the FreakEngine but didn't want to have to stay up until midnight to do it now's your chance. For the first time ever FreakEngine, a popular, long-running, ever-evolving variety show that features improv comedy, performance art, dance, music, and yes, "torturous human experiments" will be performed in prime time. $10 at the Evergreen Theatre.

FreakEngine perform The Oracle

UPDATE: Wild Legacy, which is mentioned above and listed in the calendar has been postponed. Darius Wallace's solo show Hold Fast continues at TheatreWorks through this weekend. Wild Legacy, a commissioned piece celebrating the creation of the Arctic National WIldlife Refuge, is part of a much bigger national celebration of ANWR that has been moved from spring to fall. Somehow the schedule change fell through the cracks. I only discovered this morning when I sat down to talk with the show's creator, Gloria Baxter.

Very sorry for any confusion.

• Michael Ching

Ching announced to his staff on Friday, March 5 that he will move to Ames, Iowa with his family sometime in May 2010. The relocation is a result of a new position attained by Ching’s wife, Barbara. Barbara Ching, a current member of the English Department at the University of Memphis, has been named chair of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences’ English Department at Iowa State University. Michael Ching looks forward to taking time off from the administrative side of opera to compose and spend more time with family.

Michael has been the Artistic Director of Opera Memphis since 1992, often acting as Executive/General Director. He brought an innovative, collaborative spirit to the job. Under Ching Opera Memphis began experimenting with non-representational sets and costumes. In recent seasons he's developed a partnership Midtown's classically eclectic New Ballet Ensemble. His tenure also witnessed the construction of the Clark Opera Memphis Center in East Memphis.

"I have been privileged to work with a great group of supporters and staff who have all striven to make Memphis a better place," Ching says. "I have enjoyed working at a company that places opera in the context of the Blues and the birthplace of Rock and Roll. That work, of providing opera with a distinctly American cultural context, is not done, and I hope that Opera Memphis will continue to provide a unique voice for this unique community. Send me some barbecue in Iowa!"

A production of Ching's own a cappella version of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream had been planned for Next year's opera season.

There's some footage of Ching conducting a rehearsal at the end of this clip.

Remember when musicals were made into movies and not the other way around? These days it's getting harder and harder to tell The Orpheum's Broadway series from its film series. Six of this years eight touring musicals started out on the silver screen. Seven if you cheat a bit and credit The Wizard of Oz as source material for Wicked.

WICKED

October 13-31, 2010

Love it or loathe it there can be no doubt Wicked, an effects-laden musical about the witches of Oz, brings the green to Main & Beale. It certainly cast a spell on Memphis theatergoers last season who turned out to see the show in big numbers. The Orpheum's aggressive pre-sale strategy also worked like magic, making tickets disappear at an astonishing rate.

Tonight there's a dinner preview of the Tennessee Shakespeare Company’s all-female production of Julius Caesar, which opens on March 26. Actors will perform scenes from the show and Iren Zombor, a cellist for the Memphis Symphony Orchestra, will play selections from Bach and Kodaly sonatas.

Monday, March 8, 6 p.m. Interim restaurant, 5040 Sanderlin Avenue. $35

Ticket are available at tnshakespeare.tix.com.

I just got a copy of the Green Shakespeare Symposium's logo. And I like it enough to share it.

T-shirt friendly. Eat your heart out Che.

This will be a unique opportunity for audience members to converse with leading scholars in this emerging field of ecocriticism, which is the application of environmental studies to literature. For example, the discussion will explore ways in which Shakespeare's works explore the idea of "nature;" fantasies of rural retreat from the city and court; connections between humans and animals; anxieties about manipulation of genetic stock; and contemporary ecological disasters.

I'll have more on this as the event gets closer.

In a recent interview Ballet Memphis' founding director Dorothy Gunther Pugh speculated that her company might currently be developing more original work than any other ballet company in America. It looks like all that hard work is paying off.

Ballet Memphis will make its John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts debut as part of Ballet Across America, an exploration of the breadth and depth of the art form that showcases the best companies from across the country.

Ballet Memphis will perform Trey McIntyre’s In Dreams set to the music of Roy Orbison.

It was a little bit like being in church. While debuting a series of promotional videos last Tuesday ArtsMemphis' CEO Susan Schadt mentioned Memphis' third-place ranking on Forbes “most miserable” cities list and the room erupted in shout-backs. “We are not,” affirmed Chris Reyes the founder of Live from Memphis, ArtsMemphis' multimedia collaborators. Schadt called for an antidote to all the negativity, a directory of all the people and things that give Memphians pleasure Then she introduced LFM's creative director Sarah Fleming who said a few words about the new spots which will appear on TV, the Internet, and on the big screen at Malco's Cinema Paradiso.

I think “Pleasure-maker is going to be my new moniker,” Fleming said before screening “Art is...” a compilation of five 30-second spots using local performing artists to promote themselves and ArtsMemphis. “It's a good representation of the work we've done over the past several years,” said Fleming who is also a co-creator of ArtsMemphis TV.

“Art is,” thoughtfully shot by Memphis artist and videographer Eric Swartz and scored by local composer Alan Hayes is a throbbing montage of dance, welding, painting, acting and musical performance stitched together by a pair of actors, and a trio of dancers monologuing about the meaning of art.

The commercials are edited like Nike spots with dynamic visuals that never overwhelm the personality of the artists being interviewed. Some of the more up-front dialogue may flirt with arty cliche but Reyes & Fleming's team have managed to dig a little deeper and cram a lot of actual content into these 30-second bites.

• RECKLESS at Rhodes

I first encountered Craig Lucas' Reckless when I was a student at Rhodes and it was fun to visit with this darkly comic, distinctly American answer to Candide in the place where I discovered it. And Candide for that matter.

David Jilg's gently surreal production effectively tells the story of Rachel a happy middle class wife and mother who goes on the run on Christmas Eve after her husband confesses he's hired a hit man to kill her. Reckless was a belated Christmas treat that looked so good it was easy to get lost in the visuals and not notice that everything started at a fever pitch and stayed there. This is a show about a woman who can't stop talking until, after enough horror, she finally does. The director almost has to be a conductor to pull it off. Still awfully glad I caught it before it went away. And sorry to have missed Hay Fever at the U of M, but Lucas' work arrives less often and I just haven't been in a Cowardy mood lately.

Church & State:
Java Cabana hosts a "new kind of political theater" that doesn't seem all that new. Or theatrical.

• Poster for MAKE AMERICA

Intermission Impossible: Let's start with a strange question. Your show is inspired by a James Madison essay where he refers to the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution as America’s “Political Scriptures.” Is there some semantic advantage in using spiritually-charged language to define man made documents?

Project: Motion is joining forces with Seattle artists Juliet Waller Pruzan and Stephen Hando and Pennsylvania dancer/choreographer Ursula Payne for AXIS, an intimate, insightful, and occasionally hilarious collection of performances.