9am: Transformation 2020: Popular Democracy Defined The Center for Popular Democracy (CPD) and Level Forward are bringing a variety of Broadway creative talent and energy to the three day summit Transformation 2020: Popular Democracy Defined September 24-26. The event aims to get out the vote and focus beyond the ballot.

In addition to performers and performances from plays including Cadillac Crew, What the Constitution Means to Me, Sanctuary City, and Slave Play, as well as musicals Oklahoma!, Jagged Little Pill, 1776, Jeannette, and Letters to the President talk forward panels and keynotes, and a special session with the Broadway Advocacy Coalition, attendees will also have the opportunity to attend “Creativity In Action” sessions that pair talented guests with issue experts from a variety of organizations. Topics include:

“LGBTQIA+ Identities and Activism” with Lauren Patten, NYC Human Rights Commissioner Carmelyn P. Malalis, and the organization Craft Your Truth

“Creating a Culture of Consent” with Kathryn Gallagher, Celia Rose Gooding, and Ilse Knecht from the Joyful Heart Foundation

“Mobilizing The Power of Black Expression” with Joaquina Kulakango, Jakeem Dante Powell, and LaTosha Brown from Black Voters Matter

“Human or Nah? Racism and Anti-Blackness in Arts & Real Life” with Laurel Harris, Daniel J. Watts, and Latrina Kelly-James from the Center for Popular Democracy

2:30pm: Martha Matinee: The Eve Project By Martha Graham Dance Company. Finale of “The Eve Project,” the company’s celebration of the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote.

A film by Julien Bryan of Martha Graham in her masterwork Frontier from 1935 will be presented. The matinee will also include the premiere of 19 Poses for the 19th Amendment, a montage of submissions from the Company’s Instagram challenge. The competition asked people to replicate poses of Graham and highlighted her revolutionary approach to representing women onstage. Winners of the challenge will be announced.

3pm and 8pm: Irish Repertory Theatre: Belfast Blues a tapestry of autobiographical stories told from Geraldine Hughes’s perspective as a little girl coming of age in the war-torn Belfast of the 1980s. These stories bear insightful witness to the many faces of “trying to live a normal life” amidst the violence born of the longstanding conflict between Catholics and Protestants.

Hughes staged her final performances of Belfast Blues at The Lyric Theatre in a 2019 co-production presented by herself, Brassneck Theatre Company, and the Lyric Theatre as part of West Belfast’s Féile an Phobail. Irish Repertory Theatre will open its digital fall season with the never-before-seen video captured last year during those final performances of this autobiographical play.

The stage production of Belfast Blues is directed by Emmy winner Carol Kane.

4pm: Bristol Old Vic: Romantics AnonymousBook by and directed by Emma Rice, with music by Michael Kooman and lyrics by Christopher Dimond

Romantics Anonymous was last seen at the Bristol Old Vic in January this year and was about to start a tour of the USA when the pandemic struck. Wise Children are delighted to announce that Romantics Anonymous will perform again, for one week only, streaming live from the Bristol Old Vic. Each night will be a truly one-off experience.

Angélique is a gifted chocolate maker overcome by social anxiety and Jean-René is the boss of a failing chocolate factory. When Angélique takes a job in Jean-René’s struggling factory, a fragile love affair unfolds. Funny, tender and painfully awkward, Romantics Anonymous is a delicious love story about breaking the mould and finding the courage to be happy.

The world premiere of Romantics Anonymous was originally produced by Shakespeare’s Globe for the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse by special arrangement with Radio Mouse Entertainment.

6:45, 7:45 and 9pm: Miranda: A Steampunk Opera LUMA, the country’s growing festival for art, tech and storytelling, will leverage its worldwide network of talent to reimagine how musical theater and opera are presented live in the era of COVID-19. 

Debut a fully immersive production of Kamala Sankaram’s dystopian courtroom drama Miranda: A Steampunk Opera streaming live in two distinct formats: through a fully immersive VR theatre app built for Vive/Oculus headsets and via real-time computer animated film streamed live through YouTube. The production is co-created by Tri-Cities Opera and co-presented by Opera Omaha. 

Miranda transports us to a dark American future where growing class disparities have reached epic proportions and the criminal justice system serves only as a parody of what it once represented. A wealthy socialite has died and three suspects’ lives are on the line. They’ll each testify in aria for a chance at freedom. The live audience serves as judge and jury–but can they even accept their own role at face value? Or has the game been rigged from the start? 

Sankaram’s score balances apocalyptic pop beats with the lush lyricism of classic opera, adding a rich texture to a tale that explores themes of class, bureaucracy and self-determination. The work is being directed and adapted from its original 2013 production by Alison Moritz (Washington National Opera, Opera Omaha, Tanglewood Festival), working with lead designer Diego Martinez and Co-Executive Producer Tice Lerner. The production concept was developed by LUMA’s Joshua Bernard and Tri-Cities Opera’s John Rozzoni. 

The show’s leading cast members sing live as their full bodies are motion-captured in real time and mapped onto meticulously crafted digital avatars designed for this groundbreaking production. 

Miranda: A Steampunk Theatre Experience combines the quality of performance and broad accessibility of a large Broadway theatre with the emotional connection that can only be achieved in a small, immersive production. The style of production also creates the possibility for live theatre to incorporate cinema-scale effects typically impossible to replicate on-stage. To present Miranda, Enhance VR and LUMA have developed an original live theater framework application built on industry-standard 3D gaming tools including Unity and Photon. 

7pm: The Silverfish Urban Stages until September 27
Meghan Loughran’s play starring Holly Davis, Nikki M. James, George Salazar and Kate Wetherhead tells the story of a young, broke couple in love thrown a curveball, and come up with a plan. “It might not be a plan that “good people” would go for, but when you’re young and in love and desperate and poor, the word “good” can mean a lot of things.”

7pm: Hamlet in Bed Play-PerView A “reunion reading” of Michael Laurences Off-Broadway play featuring Annette O’Toole and John Glover. Lisa Peterson will direct, with proceeds going to Rattlestick Playwrights Theater (where the play premiered).

Hamlet in Bed is a twisty, darkly comic, and poignant story about mothers and sons. About what it means to live a life in the theatre, both a generation ago, and now. And about families—the ones we’re born into, and the ones we find along the way.

7:30: Puccini’s Turandot A legendary ancient princess presents each new suitor with a series of riddles; success will win her hand, but failure costs his head. One brave warrior prince rises to the challenge, determined to thaw Turandot’s frozen heart. Puccini lavishes the tale with some of his finest and most spectacular music—not to mention “Nessun dorma,” an aria instantly recognizable far beyond the confines of the opera house. Combined with Franco Zeffirelli’s breathtakingly opulent production, it makes for one of opera’s grandest experiences.

7:30pm: Music at the Mansion: Rosemary Loar Rosemary Loar brings her many decades of experience from her roles on Broadway, Off-Broadway and regional theaters to the cabaret stage. You will hear the powerhouse songs : If He Walked Into My Life, Some People, With One Look and Memory.

Her backstage stories tie everything together weaving an evening of music and merriment. Truth is always funnier than fiction and she promises to tell a lot of truths.

Rosemary Loar is a veteran of six Broadway shows and has had leading roles in two Off-Broadway productions, four national tours and numerous regional theaters. (Phoebe Award best musical theater actress). As a concert artist she has been featured on PBS, at Carnegie Hall, Town Hall, North Carolina Symphony, and cabarets in New York, LA, Chicago, Kansas City and for over a decade in Munich. In 2012 Ms. Loar won the MAC Hanson Award for continuing excellence in Cabaret. For more information, visit www.rosemaryloar.com .

7:30pm: Horizon Theatre: Completeness What happens when brain and heart collide? Two grad students might have the answer, if they can look up from their research long enough to find out. By Tony-Award-Winning playwright Itamar Moses (The Band’s Visit)

8pm: Kennedy Center: A Time to Sing: An Evening with Renée Fleming and Vanessa Williams Isolation and harmony, fragility and resilience, oppression and hope.

These are the emotions of our time, and the subjects explored in A Time to Sing — a very personal collection of songs to be performed by two of America’s most celebrated vocalists in a unique event at the Kennedy Center.

This is a rare opportunity to view these artists and experience the healing power of the performing arts.

Tony nominees Renée Fleming (Carousel) and Vanessa Williams (Into the Woods) will welcome audiences back to The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts September 26 at 8 PM ET. 

The evening, which will also be live streamed and offered for on-demand viewing, will include a new song written for the concert by Tony nominee Andrew Lippa. Rob Mathes serves as music director.

A Time to Sing: An Evening with Renée Fleming and Vanessa Williams, which launches the Washington, D.C. venue’s On Stage at the Opera House series, will mark the first in-person performance at the Center since the pandemic began. 

8pm: Metropolitan Playhouse: A Woman’s Honor This satiric piece is about an attractive young man accused of murder who chooses to suffer for a crime he did not commit rather than spoil the honor of the woman with whom he’d spent the night of the murder and who could give him an alibi.  A newspaper account released strategically by his lawyer telling of his situation motivates a number of women to come to sacrifice their honor for his old-fashioned morals by saying they were the woman he’d been with, though each has their own specific reasons for wanting to declare themselves.  Rather than give them names, Glaspell gives allegorical titles to each: The Shielded One (though she reveals herself as Mrs. Oscar Duncan within the play), The Motherly One, The Scornful One, The Silly One, The Mercenary One (who’s really looking for a stenographer’s job and leaves when it’s assumed she’s come for the same reason as the others), and the Cheated One.  The play becomes a discussion of what “woman’s honor” really is, the Scornful One saying “woman’s honor would have died out long ago if it hadn’t been for men’s talk about it,” to which the Motherly One replies, “I suppose it really has to be kept up, as long as it gives men such noble feelings.”(1)  When the Shielded One baldly asks them to define woman’s honor, their answers include “a thing men talk about,” “a safe corner,” “a star to guide them,” to which the Shielded One replies, “Aren’t we something more than things to be noble about?”(2)  The women ultimately decide that the position is actually boring, the Motherly One suggesting that they get a plan for men to be noble about something else.  Finally, as the they argue about who should be “the woman,” now clear that none of them is in actuality, the Prisoner throws up his hands and ends the play by saying to his lawyer, “Oh, hell.  I’ll plead guilty.”(3) 

8pm: Jack Was Kind All for One Theater Through October 10
Tracy Thorne wrote and performs this “intimate, confessional play examines long-seated issues of privilege and complicity.” The production will be presented live on Zoom, four times a week, Wednesday-Saturday through October 10 for limited audiences.

8pm: MIT’s Playwrights Lab: Mortality Rate: Recalculating by Anupama Phatak ’21. It’s 100 years in the future, and efforts to preserve human life have evolved to new heights; it is now normal to predict the probability of dying for every action, from mundane chores to experimenting with drugs. In this society obsessed with taking the uncertainty out of life, college student Viva tries to balance her fear of making mistakes with her desire to make a difference in the world.

Directed by Shira Milikowsky, with Jenelle Chu, John Clay III, Ann Sanders, and Layan Elwazani, and stage managed by Marci Skolnick

8pm: New York Neo-Futurists: CyberWrench The New York Neo-Futurists go LIVE online with CyberWrench, a monthly collection of Neo-Futurist digital experiments presented in random order. As Neo-Futurists, we still are who we are, where we are, doing what we’re doing. The main difference? You can join us wherever you are. In your house. On the road. In the bathtub. We won’t tell. If you’ve seen The Infinite Wrench, our award-winning, ever-changing attempt to perform 30 plays in an hour, you know that if you’ve seen the show once, you’ve seen the show ONCE! With CyberWrench, we expand beyond the theater and invite you to come play with us. 

8pm: Seven Minutes in Heaven Colt Coeur. A reading of this ten-year-old play by Steven Levenson (Dear Evan Hansen) set in 1995 that follows six high school freshman on a splintered night of dysfunctional party games, fumbling first kisses, ruined reputations, broken promises.

8pm: Insulted. Belarus(isa) Wilma Theater. In solidarity with the people and theater community of Belarus, dozens of theaters worldwide are presenting readings of Andrei Kureichik’s sensational new play, ​​​​Insulted. Belarus(sia). Directed by Guillermo Cienfuegos and starring Joe Spano. Caroline Clay, Ashlie Atkinson, Joshua Bitton, Alex Neher, Rachel Brunner and Aric Floyd.

Kureichik’s 7-character play tells the story of the first month of the Belarusian revolution, its ups and downs on the eve of the inevitable democratization of the country after 26 years of dictatorship. All characters have real prototypes, in some you will recognize former and current leaders of the country, in others – incredible Belarusians who have gone out to battle the totalitarian machine, sometimes at the cost of their lives, their freedom, and their loved ones. They represent polar points of view in the awakened Belarusian society. Much of the dialogue is directly taken from actual speeches and statements. The author tells of the tragic escalation of violence and repression employed by the authorities to repress freedom-seeking Belarusians with bayonets and clubs, and expresses his hope that solidarity, truth and faith in human values will inevitably lead to victory over evil.

9PM: American Dreams ASU Gammage/Working Theater etc. In Leila Buck’s play, a TV game show vote has the audience vote on who gets to be a citizen. (The audience actually gets to vote.) Through November 15, at the website of Arizona State University’s theater.