by Dr. L. Todd Thomas The Diary of Anne Frank by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett is the stage adaptation of The Diary of a Young Girl, a book compiled from three volumes of diary entries written by Anne Frank while she and her family were hiding for two years during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Her father published these as a book in 1947, it was reprinted in English in 1952, and first presented as a stage play […]
by Thomas F. Cole “Where there’s hope, there’s life. It fills us with fresh courage and makes us strong again.”—Anne Frank, 6 June, 1944. Eight people in hiding for their very lives, and one of them has become the face of the Holocaust, the systematic murder of the Jews of Europe and Hitler’s Final Solution during WWII. That face belongs to Anne Frank, who is convincingly played by Saginaw native and the current Miss Bay County, Jaeleen Davis, in Pit […]
Written by Laura Izzo Bravo to the cast and crew of Pit and Balcony’s production of “The Diary of Anne Frank.” It is a powerful performance of a powerful masterpiece. This classic play opened Jan. 26 and the entire stage came to life as the cast embodied the persona of their characters and the dramatic lighting engaged the audience to follow the characters as they took ownership of the stage. During the concluding “talk back” session, Director Danielle Katsouls shared […]
Written By Mark De Wolf-Ott A sense of magic was in the air when Pit and Balcony opened its production of “The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe” on Friday night (Dec. 1). There were all kinds of characters in this C. S. Lewis imaginary snowy kingdom. A white stag, a unicorn, beavers, wolves, a faun (half man, half goat), a centaur (half man, half horse), a fox and a deer — and they all talked! How enchanting is that? […]
Written By Mark DeWolf-Ott And so it goes, heaven knows Anything Goes And it certainly did as the 86th season of Pit and Balcony Community Theater of Saginaw opened on Friday, Oct. 6, with a revival of the so-named popular Cole Porter Broadway show. Directed by Michael Wisniewski, the musical began with a few missed cues, technical glitches and opening night jitters. But it passed as Reno, played by Kaitlyn Riel, started the show with “I Get a Kick Out […]