Artistic Director

Playwright Paula Vogel and director Molly Smith have been friends and colleagues for so long that at times they seem to share the same thoughts. When they show up for an interview in Smith's office, they take one look at each other and laugh as they realize they are both wearing bolo ties. (Smith immediately removes hers.)A native of the Pacific Northwest, Smith is completing her first season as artistic director of Washington's Arena Stage. Vogel, a former Marylander, won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for her play "How I Learned to Drive," the current production at Arena's Kreeger Theater, under Smith's direction.

The office of Coleen M. West, executive director of Howard County Arts Council, is dominated by a huge abstract oil painting that stands guard over the room. West's desk is a glorious mess: Papers, drawings and pamphlets for events sponsored by the arts council litter the desktop.With so much on her plate, West, 39, and the council's deputy director, Debbie Meyer, face an imposing task.The council's $660,000 annual budget must go a long way toward operating the county's Center for the Arts and funding exhibitions and programs.

Kyle Secor is known to millions of viewers as Detective Tim Bayliss of "Homicide: Life on the Street." But for the last four years, he's had another less widely known life as artistic director of "Homicide Live," an annual stage show in Baltimore starring Secor and other actors from the award-winning NBC drama.Each year the cabaret-like show has grown, and with a move to Center Stage, the troupe will be larger than ever for the March 7 production, with Clark Johnson, Richard Belzer, Callie Thorne, Jon Seda, Toni Lewis and Peter Gerety, according to Secor.

As the final strains of Dmitri Shostakovich's Second Piano Concerto fill the Meyerhoff during rehearsal, concertmaster Herbert Greenberg leans toward the teen-ager at the Steinway, taps him lightly on the back with his violin bow and says, "Bravo!"Orion Weiss, 17, nods and gives the concertmaster a huge smile, full of youthful exuberance. He seems to say, "Yes! I'm here, playing Shostakovich. Life is beautiful!"He arrived Wednesday night, a young man in the service of his muse. At first he thought the offer was a joke: Fly to Baltimore and replace the great Andre Watts in three performances of a major work.

Totem Pole Playhouse, the summer theater nestled in Pennsylvania's Caledonia State Park, is in the midst of the second production of its six-play season. Alfred Uhry's 1997 Tony Award-winning play, "The Last Night of Ballyhoo," continues through July 4 and features several current Baltimoreans -- actors Wil Love and Rosemary Knower and director Carl Schurr (who is also the theater's artistic director) -- as well as former Baltimorean Tess Hartman. The production will move to Philadelphia's Walnut Street Theatre in January.

IN many fields, growing old means cutting back on your professional responsibilities. But for orchestra conductors, figures of mythic virility and longevity, advancing age seems only to entail taking on more obligations.Consider Kurt Masur, the 71-year-old music director of the New York Philharmonic. Last week, it was announced that, beginning in 2000, Mr. Masur would become the principal conductor of the London Philharmonic. In London, The Guardian reported that the German maestro would, naturally, be resigning his New York position, which pays him $1.3 million a year.

For more than 20 years, he has been a part of the Baltimore classical music scene. Now Edward Polochick is heading west. He's been named music director of the Lincoln Symphony Orchestra in Lincoln, Neb."I am thrilled about it," he says.However, Polochick, 46, is not done with Baltimore yet. "Baltimore will remain my home," he says. "I have no plans to move."Instead, he'll rack up a whole lot of frequent-flier miles as he continues to be artistic director of Concert Artists of Baltimore and remains on the conducting staff at the Peabody Conservatory.

Irene Lewis, artistic director of Center Stage, will direct the New York Shakespeare Festival production of Thornton Wilder's "The Skin of Our Teeth" in Central Park this summer.Wilder's 1943 Pulitzer Prize-winning account of one family's survival through the ages will star "3rd Rock from the Sun's" Kristen Johnston as Sabina, the seductive maid, and Broadway veteran Frances Conroy as matriarch Mrs. Antrobus.John Goodman is under consideration as Mr. Antrobus.The first non-musical, non-Shakespeare production the festival has produced in the park, the play also will mark Lewis' first non-Center Stage assignment since becoming artistic director in 1992.

Airline strike postpones Chinese ballerina's arrivalBallet Theater of Annapolis' new soloist, Chinese ballerina Zhirui Zou, has had a change of plans. She was supposed to arrive tomorrow on a Northwest Airlines flight, but the airline's pilots have been on strike since last weekend.BTA artistic director Edward Stewart said the dancer has found a USAir flight that will bring her to the United States Saturday.BTA had planned a welcome for Zou tomorrow, with flowers, members of the ballet and a translator.

At the O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Conn., the drama is usually confined to the staged readings of 12 new plays presented each July.But this year, those in attendance reportedly were gasping -- and some even moved to tears -- before the first play premiered. This emotion was generated when Lloyd Richards, artistic director of the O'Neill's prestigious National Playwrights Conference, announced that he will step down at the end of next summer's conference.Richards, who rose to national prominence when he directed the Broadway premiere of "A Raisin in the Sun" in 1959, has shaped and guided the Playwrights Conference since 1968.

Theater directors around the country are mourning the death of Michael Philippi, a theatrical lighting designer and Rodgers Forge resident, who died Tuesday in Chicago. According to the Cook County medical examiner's office, Mr. Philippi, who was 58 and had lived in Baltimore since 1993, collapsed and died on a downtown Chicago street. The cause of death has not been determined. Mr. Philippi was on his way to a technical rehearsal at the Goodman Theatre where he was working on its production of Alan Gross' "High Holidays."

Something might be rotten in the state of Denmark, but the future is looking brighter for Baltimore Shakespeare Festival. The festival, which has a new artistic director, a revamped mission and - in its current production of Wittenberg, a modern day "prequel" to H amlet - one of the strongest shows the troupe has mounted in years. For much of the year, the troupe has taken a performing hiatus, while it tended to administrative matters, such as hiring Michael Carleton as the artistic director to replace the departing James Kinstle.

A few years ago, when the University of Baltimore unveiled its intimate Performing Arts Theater at the Student Center, a handsome new Steinway concert grand, selected by eminent pianist Yefim Bronfman, was part of the package. That piano will soon get a significant workout. A "Great Pianists Series" will be inaugurated during the 2008-2009 season, starting on Oct. 11 with jazz pianist Ellis Marsalis, father of Wynton and Branford, among others. The senior Marsalis is a considerable force in his own right - as a performer, composer and teacher.

As the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival prepares to celebrate its 15th anniversary with the production of Twelfth Night that opens Friday, it is grappling with major decisions that could change its fortunes. After a decade and a half, the company has yet to establish a real foothold in Baltimore. It continues to struggle artistically and, as a result, doesn't attract a large audience. Many productions have been emotionally remote, or earnest and plodding. Directors have cast skilled actors but have failed to make the best use of their talents.

Gardner selected for Rep Stage job Rep Stage, the professional theater in residence at Howard Community College, has announced the hiring of Lee Mikeska Gardner as managing director. Gardner has been interim managing director since July. He previously held the position of grants writer and consultant from January to July last year. Before he came to the Rep Stage, Gardner spent six years as managing/producing director with the Washington Shakespeare Theatre Company, six years with Shenandoah Playwrights Retreat as associate artistic director and resident director and 12 years with the Wooly Mammoth Theatre Company as assistant to the artistic director, artistic associate, and founder and director of the Theatre School at the Wooly Mammoth.

JAN WOLKERS, 81 Novelist, poet and sculptor Novelist, poet and sculptor Jan Wolkers, whose sex-charged books helped shake off the shackles of postwar conservatism in the Netherlands, died yesterday at his home on the North Sea island of Texel, his publisher said. His best-known book was Turkish Delight, about a stormy relationship between a sculptor and his girlfriend who break up and are reunited shortly before she dies of a brain tumor. It was published in 1969 and has been translated into a dozen languages.

In her 17 years as Center Stage's artistic director, Irene Lewis' forte has been delivering the unexpected. It's no coincidence that the motto for Baltimore's largest regional theater is "Smart. Bold. Alive." So it's more than a little surprising that Center Stage is opening its 45th season this month with Arsenic and Old Lace -- a 1939 farce that is a fre quent staple of high school drama clubs. The play is about two sweet, spinster sisters who have concocted a recipe for homemade elderberry wine that literally is a killer.

Scrutinize your salad. Peruse the parsnips. Better yet, concentrate on the carrots. Do you see one - and only one - vertical orange veggie brandishing a playbill and a miniature AK-47? Baltimore's newest theater troupe takes its name from a quote by the painter Paul Cezanne: "The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution." Single Carrot Theatre's opening salvo will be fired tonight at the company's official debut at Theatre Project, when Single Carrot opens a two-week, 11-performance run of Adam Rapp's Red Light Winter.

Jim Petosa, who shepherded a troupe of actors from a summer theater to a regional company with a $5.2 million budget, has announced that he will step down as artistic director of the Olney Theatre Center. But he's not leaving until December 2008 and, even then, will remain on the board of directors. For years, Petosa has divided his responsibilities between Olney and Boston University, where he heads the theater program. "My life in Boston has been getting more and more complicated," Petosa said yesterday.

Men in dinner jackets and women in hats swirled to the tunes of the Count Basie Orchestra. A scene from a 1940s movie? No, this picture wasn't black and white, it was in living color. This was "Salut! Everyman Goes to Town," Everyman Theatre's annual soiree. This year, the Hippodrome Theatre at the France-Merrick Performing Arts Center was transformed into a 1940s supper club. Guests were encouraged to dress accordingly. And Everyman board chair Zelig Robinson and wife Linda Robinson led the way - he in a dinner jacket; she in a mink stole from her mother and a cute little cocktail cap that had belonged to her mother-in-law.