By Amanda Krotki
Tony Award-winners “Dear Evan Hansen” and “The Band’s Visit” are both on the 2019/20 Hippodrome Theatre season schedule, along with several classic crowd-pleasers. Ron Legler, president of the France-Merrick Performing Arts Center, announced the lineup for the 2019/20 Hippodrome Broadway Series on Jan. 17.
As sorry as he says he is for yelling “Heil Hitler! Heil Trump!” last Wednesday during a performance of “Fiddler on the Roof,” Anthony Derlunas’ drunken shouting angered many around town, and put some of the Hippodrome’s theater-goers on edge for fear of another anti-Semitic outburst (or worse).
Today, a group of Baltimore actors announced they’ve banded together in solidarity against hate, forming the Guerrilla Theatre Front to put on theatrical performances “with no bounds” and without “the traditional footholds of theater spaces and companies”—which is to say, in impromptu pop-up fashion, and in unconventional places.
A man who stood up during intermission last night at the performance of “Fiddler on the Roof” at the Hippodrome Theater downtown and shouted “Heil Hitler! Heil Trump!” was escorted out of the building, and was permitted to walk away free after police made contact with him.
From a new IMAX projection system for the Maryland Science Center to larger-than-life exhibits for kids to learn and play, state officials today signed off on more than $6 million in bond-funded grants to help some of Baltimore’s top downtown institutions with large-scale projects.
University of Baltimore MFA student Nancy Murray recounts the day she got to know Joan Rivers quite personally.
In my acting days I had a reputation for being able to play any character at a moment’s notice. It didn’t matter if it was a murderous psychopath, a disco-dancing diva or a Puerto Rican man. If I played the character I could make it believable. I liked this about myself. I thought it said something about my ability to empathize with others. I was grateful for it because it meant that I always had work.
Who better to talk about the harms of bullying than a tragically misunderstood witch? Those jeers about warts and green skin; insinuations about evil spells… Fairy tale creatures can be so cruel. Which is why Elphaba, the star witch from the hit Broadway musical Wicked — which happens to be playing at the Hippodrome right now — is being brought in to teach students at Baltimore’s Booker T. Washington Middle School for the Arts about the negative consequences of bullying on Thursday.
Captain Isaac Emerson, the inventor of the Bromo-Seltzer headache remedy and builder of the iconic Bromo Seltzer Tower on Baltimore’s west side, was said to “interest himself thoroughly in everything tending to advance our city, and [be] a patron of all worthy enterprises seeking to push Baltimore to the front.” So I bet he would approve of the Baltimore Office of Promotion & the Arts’s push to make his horizontally-challenged building the centerpiece of what would be Baltimore’s third arts and entertainment district.
The Bromo Tower Arts and Entertainment District would cover 117 acres on the west side between Park Avenue and Paca, bounded by Read Street on the north and Lombard on the south. Within the district qualified artists as well as building owners could apply for tax breaks.
Currently known as the Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower, the structure has already been repurposed. Artists rent out studios on several of the Tower’s 15 small floors and show their work in a monthly open house. The Tower is also home to the monthly poetry reading, Benevolent Armchair.
Now, arts and nightlife are probably not enough on their own to save a struggling city, but it’s certainly more pleasant than some other remedies. And it would be nice to see some support for the Hippodrome and Bromo Seltzer.
Maryland economic development officials should make a decision on the neighborhood’s arts and entertainment designation by June 1.
