Actors

Thank God You're Here is a show aimed at everyone who misses Whose Line is It, Anyway?, an earlier series that featured improvised comedy and taped long and hard enough until the featured performers came up with material that was actually funny. Here, dispensable host David Alan Grier and unnecessary judge David Foley oversee the proceedings as a series of comic actors are thrown into ridiculous costumes and are plunged, ostensibly unprepared, into comic vignettes with other actors in which the first line of the sketch is, invariably, "Thank God you're here."

Hugh Laurie wields a mean electric guitar, has one of prime time's best scowls and plays an American doctor with enough artistry to have picked up a pair of Emmy nominations, a couple of Golden Globes and a Screen Actors Guild Award. It wasn't so long ago that someone like the Oxford-born, Cambridge-educated Laurie, if he appeared on a series like Fox's House at all, would play, well, an Englishman. Perhaps not the supremely silly upper-class twit he embodied so memorably in Jeeves & Wooster, the vintage British series, but at least some sort of Brit.

Playwright David Mamet's award-winning dark comedy "American Buffalo" will make its first appearance at Howard Community College's Theatre Outback tomorrow and will run through June 13.The angry and harrowing play, which won the Drama Critics Circle Award for best American play and the Obie Award in 1977, put Mamet on the cultural and theatrical map.The story of the greedy pawnshop owner Donny, a loser ex-convict named Teach and a naive boy called Bobby...

At 8 o'clock this evening, Turner Network Television, which coyly designates itself "The Best Movie Studio on Television," will broadcast a two-hour adaptation of George Orwell's "Animal Farm." If you are getting married or being launched into space at that moment, rest easy: Seven "encores" are scheduled over the next two weeks.TNT's publicity declares this "the most ambitious film ever made for television." Not only that, TNT also proclaims that the film "is destined to become the most important television event of the year."

Mills E. Godwin Jr., 84, a former two-term Virginia governor recognized for his work to modernize the education system, died Saturday in Richmond after being treated for pneumonia. Mr. Godwin, elected as a Democrat in 1965 and as a Republican in 1973, was praised by leaders of both parties for transforming the once largely rural state with a community college system and a state sales tax for school improvements.Huntz Hall, 78, star of more than 100 "Bowery Boys" and "Dead End Kids" films in the 1930s through the 1950s, died Saturday in Los Angeles of heart failure.

Baltimore police officers Clanett Boone and Mary Ann Miller can't work undercover. Not because they have grown tired of the spontaneity and rush, but because they fear being recognized and blowing a bust, or worse.Boone and Miller star in the comedic "Cop for a Day" public service announcement airing on local television. Neither officer had acted before, but the spot's frequent appearance has made them recognized throughout Baltimore -- they can't go anywhere without getting stopped, asked for an autograph or teased by colleagues about their celebrity.

Chesapeake Music Hall. "Sugar Babies," a dinner theater production. 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. June 12 and 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. June 15 at 339 Busch's Frontage Road, Annapolis. Ages 17 and older. All parts open, except Prima Donna. Be prepared to sing, dance, and read; accompanist provided. Call 410-974-1822 or 410-626-7515.Children's Chorus of Maryland. Open to ages 6-16. Auditions, by appointment only, begin Friday in the Towson office, 100 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Call 410-494-1480.Maryland Renaissance Festival.

In a way it's ironic that Elia Kazan is being honored for his achievement in film. Because it was as a theater director that he made his biggest impact on American culture.Kazan brought the work of playwrights Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and William Inge to life on the stage, most famously with "Death of a Salesman" (1949), "A Streetcar Named Desire" (1947), "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" (1955) and "The Dark at the Top of the Stairs" (1957).In 1931, he co-founded the influential Group Theatre, which was dedicated to bringing work by new, socially conscious writers to the fore.

MOSCOW -- For much of the past decade, Russian theater has been like an assembled company standing on stage in the glare of hot, bright lights, pelted by one tomato after another from a hostile house.The "tomatoes" have been unfamiliar and lethal -- poverty, diminishing audiences and even unaccustomed freedom -- but they have had an extraordinary effect. Instead of darkening theaters from Moscow to Magnitogorsk, adversity has electrified many of them."It's Russia," says Anatoly E. Polyankin, director of Moscow's Satirikon Theater, laughing.

Alumni Theatre Company. Director, musical director, technical staff and running crew needed for fall production of "Back to Bacharach and David." Director with musical experience preferred. Also needed are stage manager, light and sound technicians, prop person and costumer. Some positions paid. Call 410-455-4400.Everyman Theatre. Open auditions for equity and non-union actors for 1999-2000 season of plays. Roles available for all ages. By appointment only -- 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. today and noon to 5 p.m. Saturday.

Edgar A. Poe, local author and poet of much renown, was laid to rest at Westminster Hall yesterday inside a simple redwood coffin, after a grand theatrical and oratorical send-off to usher him, as he once wrote, "into the region of shadows." Of course the true Poe remained buried beneath the monument on the northwest corner of the church grounds in Southwest Baltimore, near where his body was placed hastily in a family plot soon after his death on Oct. 7, 1849. But yesterday the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe's death was revived, so that the great poet could receive the eulogy that eluded him in the days following his demise.

In 1963, 13-year-old John Rothman watched and listened intently as his father and several other prominent Baltimoreans sat around the family dining room table planning a crucial element in the city's cultural life. "They were talking about how Ford's Theatre was being torn down and how there would be no professional theater here," Rothman says. "So they were going to found one." The result was Center Stage. Donald Rothman, a prominent lawyer who died in June at age 86, guided the creation of the company and its move in the early 1970s to its present location on North Calvert Street.

The 8-ton steel set that fills the stage for the Kennedy Center's new production of Ragtime, with its four levels of scaffolding adorned with lacy, Gothic arches, becomes a visual metaphor for the relentless forward thrust of history. Each level is crowded with actors portraying the different social groups and celebrity figures in the U.S. in 1906 - a Jewish immigrant and his daughter; an upper-middle-class Victorian family; an African-American jazz pianist, his sweetheart and their child.

Casablanca, the classic movie about love, sacrifice and the Nazis, is at the very heart of a new documentary that is about, well, love, sacrifice and the Nazis. Cinema's Exiles: From Hitler to Hollywood looks at film and social history of the 1920s, '30s, '40s and '50s through the lens of German and Austrian filmmakers, composers, cinematographers, actors and screenwriters forced to flee Hitler's Germany. Some of the newcomers failed in Hollywood, some thrived, but mostly they just survived.

The Fantasticks , off-Broadway's longest-running musical (1960-2002). Its simple boy-girl story is a twist on Romeo and Juliet, with their scheming mothers pretending to be feuding neighbors who oppose their children's having a romantic relationship to ensure that they'll actually have one. The innocent teenagers fall in love to provide a moonlit happy ending in Act 1 and find problems when the sun rises in Act 2. Instead of getting married, they go...

Now starting its seventh season, Bay Theatre is known for professional excellence, innovatively produced within the confines of its 20-foot-wide stage. Its fame has grown, as I discovered in June at the annual conference of the American Theatre Critics Association in Washington, where a few of the 90 critics assembled had heard good things about the Annapolis-based company. Last season the nonprofit professional Bay Theatre Company became an Equity theater, a status that requires half of the actors in each production to be members of the Actors' Equity Association union.

The approach of its 60th birthday is not time for coasting at Colonial Players, but rather a time for blasting off into bold and uncharted territory: Jam the entire process of creating a play into a sleepless 24-hour period, culminating in one-night-only performance on Saturday. The purpose is to funnel into 24 hours all of the activities that usually take Colonial Players at least two months to accomplish. It should interest serious theatergoers and fascinate anyone dreaming of a career on stage or behind the scenes.

Actors wearing suits the shade of egg yolks cruise down a stage on scooters. Balloons bob on the breeze. There's a line of Keystone Cops, and performers silently mime bits of slapstick during scene changes. Director Ian Gallaner has festooned his Chesapeake Shakespeare Company production of The Comedy of Errors with trappings designed to make the show feel buoyant and swift, but unfortunately, the actors can't pull off the kind of high style he has in mind. I couldn't help wishing that Gallaner had devoted less time and effort on what essentially are garnishes, and focused instead on developing even a single compelling performance on the stage at the Patapsco Female Institute's historic ruins.

Sherrie Westin's smash-hit Sesame Workshop annual bash at Cipriani 42 Street gets our vote as the benefit that most benefits its generous donors. The evening, with Anderson Cooper and the Muppets hosting, let people go home at 9:30 p.m. My date whispered to me that he had seen there "every important person I've ever known in New York!" The evening was inspiring, with an emphasis on how Sesame Street helps millions of children in India to better preschool education. Since one out of every six kids in the world lives in India; this is really something!

The gentle whimsy of Aurand Harris' 45-year-old play, Androcles and the Lion, enchanted young audiences and those young at heart for the past two weekends at Anne Arundel Community College with its message of kindness toward fellow human beings. The timeless play is based on one of Aesop's fables, a familiar story of a young slave who removes a thorn from a lion's paw and becomes his friend. Harris employed elements of Commedia del'Arte style of Italian theater, where troupes of energetic actors wearing elaborate costumes and masks entertain audiences with uplifting stories that laugh at human frailties.