3pm: The Gifts You Gave to the Dark (Origin 1st Irish Theatre Festival) Darren Murphy’s The Gifts You Gave to the Dark, kicked off Irish Rep’s digital summer season in May in its world premiere. It was written specifically for digital media in reaction to the ongoing COVID-19 health crisis. Confined to his bed in Belfast with COVID-19, Tom is unable to visit his mother, Rose, who is dying in Dublin. In this last phone Tom tells his mother the story of a journey – an image of a perfect day they once shared. It’s a Belfast story, and it’s the very last thing he can do for his mother – the only thing he can do for her. As he speaks, he takes his mother home on her final voyage, during the last ten minutes of her life.

Wexford Arts Centre presented the world premiere of in April 2018, in the Wexford Opera Fringe Festival followed by a national tour in 2019 as part of the First Fortnight European Mental Health Art and Cultural Festival.  

Presented by Wexford Arts Center (Wexford)

Written and performed by Michelle Dooley Mahon

Directed by Ben Barnes

4pm: Starry Concept Recording Virtual Listening Party By Broadway Records. Broadway Records will host a virtual listening party in celebration of the 1 year anniversary of the original concept recording of Starry.  The party will feature the musical’s writing team, Matt Dahan and Kelly Lynne D’Angelo and cast members Mariah Rose Faith, Dylan Saunders, Joe Viba, Jaime Lyn Beatty, Jeff Blim, Natalie Llerena, and Michael Minto from this hit viral musical, reuniting for the first time since the album’s release. 

5pm: Virtual Halston: Jesse TylerFerguson (“Modern Family”) and his husband, lawyer Justin Mikita. 

Virtual Halston is produced by Ruby Locknar and Jim Caruso, with animation and artwork by B.T Whitehill.

6pm: A Shero’s Journey Or What Anacaona And Yemayá Taught Me (African Caribbean Mixfest 2021) In this play by Guadalís Del Carmen, Zoila leaves everything behind after tragedy strikes, embarking on a journey with two ancestral figures

7pm: Blood, Water, Earth By La Mama Part of Reflections of Native Voices Festival. An embodied incantation, Blood, Water, Earth traverses sacred alignment from cosmos to womb to earth, it’s symbolic ritual renewal, and a symbolic stripping away of colonial impacts on Indigenous womxn. Channels the ancestral and elemental, the performance acknowledges inter connectedness and shared experiences of Konkwehon:we (Indigenous womxn), holding a Konkwehon:we/Mana Wahine worldview in the vanguard.

Available through Feb 7.

7pm: Delejos (from afar) This performance is written and directed explicitly for Zoom. The show transforms a Zoom room into an immersive theatre experience, re-imagining it’s familiar presentation tools through live set changes, lighting cues, “camera angles”, a musical score, at-home VR “headsets”, and a sprinkling of magical realism.

Delejos takes you into Julie Piñero’s pre-pandemic pursuit of a question that became central to today’s COVID world: Do we lose something simply because we’re far from it?

When Julie’s partner Jose Zambrano unexpectedly died in 2019, she decided to take a journey through his work-in-progress design for a VR video game he called “Delejos.” It’s a game about overcoming physical separation, inspired by his own experience of forced immigration from Venezuela.

By his design, players journey to connect to something they love from afar. So, equipped with his larger-than-life legacy and the tools Julie mines from her own latinidad, she ventures through his game in search of connection with him. What she finds, however, is his larger path to hope in the face of chaos.

Writer-performer Piñero is a comedian and producer best known for her work on Audible’s Mind Power Mixtape and Come Out, Come Out, HuffPost’s Crash the Party, and Thrillist’s Food/Groups. Producer Caitlin Stone has worked for video teams at HuffPost, Bravo Digital, and Bon Appétit.

7pm: The Homebound Project: Sixth Edition available until Sunday Jan 31. Given the prompt “2021,” the following performers will appear in short works by the following playwrights:
Christopher Abbott and  Dylan Baker and Becky Ann Baker in a work by David Lindsay-Abaire, directed by Paul Mullins
Jojo Brown in a work by Cece Suazo, directed by Jenna Worsham;
Michael Chernus in a work by Adam Rapp
Dalia Davi in a work by Ren Dara Santiago, directed by Jenna Worsham;
Nicholas Gorham in a work by Brian Otaño, directed by Tatiana Pandiani;
Emily Kuroda in a work by Kate Cortesi, directed by Jenna Worsham;Eden Malyn and Catya McMullen in a work by McMullen
Carolyn Ratteray in a work by Bekah Brunstetter
Stacey Karen Robinson in a work by Sharon Bridgforth
Paul Sparks in work by Brian Watkins, directed by Danya Taymor
Babak Tafti in a work by Colette Robert, directed by Taylor Reynolds
Daigi-Ann Thompson in a work by Julissa Contreras;
Special guest appearance by Amanda Seyfried musical performance by Sting.

7pm: The Black Queen Screen Tests, Act 2 By The Tank Created by Jerome A Parker. An ALL-BLACK, virtual, workshop production of “The Black Queens, or House of Dinah” built to elevate the theatricality and explore the “live.” On November 20th, 2020 – after a series of in-house workshops – the Tank hosted a live stream of our experiments. But most importantly, this endeavor was created and entirely run by a 20+ team of BLACK creative artists, artisans and technicians.  

This absurd musical, which taps into the art of drag, mixes lip-syncing and live moments of dance and music to tell an intergenerational BLACK, QUEER story of self-reliance, resilience and survival. Songs from jazz legend, black/queer icon Dinah Washington’s catalogue were celebrated here – and new, hybrid, virtual theater positions were created and built by an ALL-BLACK TEAM!  

The cast of The Black Queen Screen Tests includes Amanda Moreau (Wilhelmina), Joshua Josey (Lady), James Edward Becton* (Felicia), Joyia D. Bradley (Gladys), Suzanne Darrell*† (Tamika), Theodore Alexander (Wilhelmina Double) and Marcus L. Braggs (Lady Double).

7:30pm: Lungs By Old Vic Last July, stage and screen stars Claire Foy and Matt Smith reunited for a string of socially distant performances of Lungs at the Old Vic in London.

Now, the ticketed production, directed by Matthew Warchus, back for a live playback.

In Duncan Macmillan’s Lungs, Foy and Smith, who co-starred as Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Phillip in the first two seasons of Netflix‘s The Crown, portray a couple grappling with the decision to bring a child into today‘s world.

The streams are available to watch internationally via Zoom. After purchasing a ticket, a login is sent at least 24 hours in advance of the live streamed performance.

7:30pm: Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holländer The earliest of Wagner’s operatic creations to remain in the standard repertory, Der Fliegende Holländer marks the true beginning of the composer’s remarkable career as an innovative and revolutionary artist. The score is an extraordinary combination of operatic lyricism, theatrical insight, and magnificent effects. And while many of the features of conventional opera can be found in this work, the way that Wagner integrates them into the fabric of the score clearly foreshadows his later technique of a continuous musical flow. The two lead roles also represent archetypes to which he would return in his later works: the otherworldly outsider and the woman who sacrifices herself for his salvation.

7:30pm: Beirut MCC Theater Available through January 31
Marisei Tomei, Oscar Isaac and Patrick Breen star in a reading of the play by Alan Bowne that launched MCC in 1987 (a rebroadcast of the virtual event from April.) Set in a dingy Lower East Side apartment in the 1980s, Beirut follows the story of Torch (played by Oscar Isaac), a young man who is in quarantine after testing positive to a nameless disease. His girlfriend (Marisa Tomei, reprising her award-winning role from 1987), refuses to leave him isolating alone.

7:30: Anjou: The Musical Horror Tale A modern Mexican opera with music by Guillermo Mendez M. and lyrics by Mendez and Guadalupe Sandoval, in a new English translation by Javier Vilalta, directed and edited by Roberto Araujo.

The complete cast includes Roberto Araujo, Jonathan Burke, Jay Armstrong Johnson, Jelani Remy, and Adam Roberts as Henry; Taylor Iman Jones, Bianca Marroquín, Julia Murney, and Kristie Dale Sanders as Catherine de’ Medici; Caroline Bowman, Shereen Pimentel, and Eva Tavares as Margot de Valois; Javier Muñoz as “Charles IX;” Austin Colby as Arthur; and Nathan Cockroft, Kevin Curtis, Gabriel Hyman, and Michael Perrie Jr. as Spirit/Mignon. Bianca Marroquín will also serve as The Narrator.

 As Charles IX is crowned as the new monarch, the Catholic church puts pressure on Queen Catherine de’ Medici to eradicate Protestantism in France. The treacherous queen has a plan of her own: to remain in power through her beloved and overly-conceited son, Henry of Anjou, and to plan her daughter’s wedding with a Protestant knight, while executing one of the bloodiest events in history.

Available through Feb 2.

7:30pm: The Nourish Project WP Theater available each night through Feb 7th. A 70-minute show conceived and directed by Rebecca Martinez has a large cast and uses music, dance, and poetry, with the intent of allowing the virtual audience “to follow their curiosity and explore their own paths during the experience.”

8pm: Stars in the House It’s Guest Host Week! It’s Guest Host Week!  Join host Christine Pedi for a… “Pedi Party” with guests Bryan Batt, Brad Oscar, Jason Graae and Michael West

8pm: Belfast Blues Theatre@Home Winter Festival at Irish Rep. Autobiographical stories written and performed by Geraldine Hughes are rooted in her perspective as a little girl coming of age in the war-torn Belfast of the 1980s.

8pm: The Scourge (Origin 1st Irish Theatre Festival) “Death by a thousand cuts” – that’s how Michelle Dooley Mahon describes Alzheimer’s disease after witnessing it strike down her mother Siobhan. As Mahon relives that time, her humorous and moving memories and rapier-like observations introduce personalities, history, and a nostalgic archive of an ordinary Irish small-town family forced to become extraordinary in their attempt to cope.

Wexford Arts Centre presented the world premiere of in April 2018, in the Wexford Opera Fringe Festival followed by a national tour in 2019 as part of the First Fortnight European Mental Health Art and Cultural Festival.  

Presented by Wexford Arts Center (Wexford)

Written and performed by Michelle Dooley Mahon

Directed by Ben Barnes

8pm: The ShowBiz Quiz: Broadway Records By Playbill The ShowBiz Quiz, where Broadway and Theatre Trivia combine into the most feverous fun online! Play seven quiz-tacular rounds of trivia – with prizes and surprises around each corner. Remember: “the faster you answer correctly, the more points you earn!”

Kelli O’Hara, Renée Fleming, More Sing Adam Guettel’s Myths & Hymns (Episode 1) By MasterVoices The central project of MasterVoices’ 2020-2021 season will be a virtual rollout of award-winning composer Adam Guettel’s theatrical song cycle, Myths and Hymns, in an online staging conceived by Ted Sperling. Inspired by Greek myths and a 19th-Century Presbyterian hymnal, the 1998 cycle is a kaleidoscopic collection of musical genres as it explores the nature of faith and longing in a secular world. New short musical films will illustrate the protagonist’s attempt to seek answers in four ways – through Flight, Work, Love, and Faith. The four chapters of this personal voyage will be released in free digital installments throughout the winter and spring.

Molly Sweeney Lantern Theater Company through February 14. This Philadelphia company’s newly filmed performance of Brian Friel’s gentle tale from the shifting perspectives of Molly Sweeney, her husband Frank, and the surgeon who values his skills above his patients.

The Niceties Forward Theater through February 7. In this Wisconsin theater company’s production of the play by Eleanor Burgess, Zoe, a Black student at a liberal arts college, is called into her white professor’s office to discuss her paper about slavery’s effect on the American Revolution. What begins as a polite clash in perspectives explodes into an urgent debate about

Cathy Belton, Derbhle Crotty, and Aisling O’Sullivan portray three women, two of them sisters, who have drifted apart and are now catching up over coffee. Over the course of three conversations spanning five years, we learn that they have allowed relationships with their partners to come between their relationships with each other. Gradually, a common secret of tragic consequence is revealed.

Bernadette Peters, David Hyde Pierce, More Star in Jerry Herman Tribute From Pasadena Playhouse Pasadena Playhouse will pay tribute to the late composer of Hello, Dolly!, Mame, and La Cage aux Folles with You I Like: A Musical Celebration of Jerry Herman.

Conceived and music directed by Andy Einhorn, the revue will be available to stream January 10. A live virtual opening night will also take place that night, with guests including Bernadette Peters and David Hyde Pierce.

Available to stream through February 7.

The Haunting of Alice Bowles A new theatrical production streaming online from Original Theatre Company (Apollo 13: The Dark Side of The Moon) debuts.

The Haunting of Alice Bowles by Philip Franks, based on M.R. James’ short story The Experiment, stars Janie Dee, Max Bowden, Stephen Boxer, Jack Archer, Alexandra Guelff, Robert Mountford, Poppy Roe, and Tim Treloar.

In 1918, the recently widowed Alice Bowles is left destitute as she seeks to solve a mystery left by her late husband Francis. Moving to 2020, YouTube urban explorers Matt and Caitlin uncover a mysterious grave in an abandoned churchyard. What starts as harmless entertainment turns darker when their discovery begins to unwrap a mystery which has lain dormant for over a century.

The digital production is co-directed by Philip Franks and Alastair Whatley, designed by Adrian Linford, and edited by Tristan Shepherd, with sound design and original music composed by Max Pappenheim.

Ham: A Musical Memoir Sam Harris’s sensitive and prodigiously talented boy survives the Bible Belt through talent and moxie, which lead to fame and fortune, but when the rocky road of desperately seeking acceptance finally reaches a dead end, he is forced to confront the internal demons that haunt him.

Encores! Inside the Revival: Tap Dance Kid New York City Center. Directed by Kenny Leon (A Raisin in the Sun) dives into the 1983 Tony-nominated musical The Tap Dance Kid, centered around the life of an upper-middle class Black family and a ten-year-old’s dream of being a professional tap dancer despite the challenges posed by his lawyer father and society. Leon, alongside book adapter Lydia Diamond, will give audiences an up-close look at the percussive heart of the story with the help of choreographer Jared Grimes and cast member from the original Broadway production Dulé Hill.