1. Monday events that you don’t want to miss

    Join us for a discussion with playwright Kia Corthorn and Todd London, Artistic Director of New Dramatists. This is a League of Professional Theatre Women event. Doors open at 6:00 pm! 

    Do you like Jazz? Celebrate Women’s History Month at the Schomburg Center’s annual Women’s Jazz Festival. Join us for an exploration of sacred music from Spirituals to Gospel with Alicia Hall Moran, Mezzo-Soprano and vocalist Marcelle Davies Lashley. Come dance the night away from 7:00 - 9:00 pm. Tickets are $25 ($20 for Schomburg Society members.)

  2. Hamlet or Richard III? Romeo & Juliet or Henry V? In celebration of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s unprecedented five-play, six-week residency this summer at Lincoln Center Festival 2011 in Park Avenue Armory, The NYPL is forming a DREAM TEAM with Lincoln Center to announce Bard Madness, possibly the first Shakespeare tournament of its kind.  Not unlike the brackets familiar to sports fans, Shakespeare fans can fill out a grid to determine Shakespeare’s greatest play – with prizes going to those players whose choices most closely line up with the winning brackets.  Now until midnight on April 13, Shakespeare fans should visit Facebook.com/LCFestival or Facebook.com/Shuttlespeare to enter the competition.  Visitors will be asked to fill out an online bracket, predicting the fates of 32 of Shakespeare’s plays – does The Taming of the Shrew beat A Winter’s Tale?  Is it King Lear or Macbeth? – whittling the candidates down to one final play! The “games” will then take place between April 14 through April 23 with the matchups being determined by 60% public votes and 40% by a panel of Shakespeare experts.  Let the games begin!    

    Hamlet or Richard III? Romeo & Juliet or Henry V? In celebration of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s unprecedented five-play, six-week residency this summer at Lincoln Center Festival 2011 in Park Avenue Armory, The NYPL is forming a DREAM TEAM with Lincoln Center to announce Bard Madness, possibly the first Shakespeare tournament of its kind.  Not unlike the brackets familiar to sports fans, Shakespeare fans can fill out a grid to determine Shakespeare’s greatest play – with prizes going to those players whose choices most closely line up with the winning brackets.  Now until midnight on April 13, Shakespeare fans should visit Facebook.com/LCFestival or Facebook.com/Shuttlespeare to enter the competition.  Visitors will be asked to fill out an online bracket, predicting the fates of 32 of Shakespeare’s plays – does The Taming of the Shrew beat A Winter’s Tale?  Is it King Lear or Macbeth? – whittling the candidates down to one final play! The “games” will then take place between April 14 through April 23 with the matchups being determined by 60% public votes and 40% by a panel of Shakespeare experts.  Let the games begin!  

     

  3. Happy 100th BDay, Tennessee Williams

    Today would have been the 100th birthday of renowned, Tony Award-winning and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tennessee Williams, who penned “The Glass Menagerie,” “Streetcar Named Desire,” and “The Rose Tattoo” among many others. He also wrote “Cat On A Hot Tin Roof,” so this doubles as our weekly Caturday entry. So happy birthday Tennessee, and happy Caturday everyone! The photo above of Tennessee is from 1941 and was taken by Vandamm Studios. It’s currently in our Billy Rose Theatre Division at the Library For The Performing Arts.

  4. The calendar has moved to March, so we thought we’d share this image of Julius Caesar - who really should have watched out for the Ides of March. The image is of a performance of Shakespeare’s play about the ruler’s life, and is located in our Billy Rose Theatre Collection at the Library for the Performing Arts.

    The calendar has moved to March, so we thought we’d share this image of Julius Caesar - who really should have watched out for the Ides of March. The image is of a performance of Shakespeare’s play about the ruler’s life, and is located in our Billy Rose Theatre Collection at the Library for the Performing Arts.