Music Hall

The Chesapeake Music Hall took its 15-member cast of singing and dancing actors and a sound and light crew on the road Saturday to do excerpts from a dozen Broadway shows for the Performing Arts Association of Linthicum, and PAAL never looked or sounded better.That's at least partly the work of lighting and sound designer Garrett Hyde, technician Karel Richardson and light man Greg Guthman, who turned the auditorium at North County High School into a cabaret for this show.Music hall owner, general manager, director, choreographer and costumer Sherry Kay provided costumes for "Mame," "Annie Get Your Gun," "South Pacific," "Oklahoma," "Fiddler on the Roof," "Damn Yankees," "Little Shop of Horrors" and "42nd Street" and assisted with split-second changes.

After performing a free acoustic set at Fells Point's Sound Garden record store on Friday, New Jersey-based quartet the Gaslight Anthem performed to a sold-out crowd at Washington's U Street Music Hall. Intern Jake Fewster had this report: The U Street Music Hall lights went out and Fugazi's “Waiting Room” blasted through the speakers as the Gaslight Anthem took the stage Friday night. Just as the second verse began, the band crashed in with a single chord that rang out as the crowd erupted in excitement.

Charles Dickens' miserly curmudgeon, who is visited by ghosts of the past, present and future on Christmas Eve, has held unique appeal since he was introduced in 1843. Gaining added musical charm recently, Ebenezer Scrooge now rivals Santa Claus as a holiday favorite. Like Santa, Scrooge is ubiquitous at holiday time, popping up simultaneously at several locations. One singing Scrooge opened Saturday to a full house at Chesapeake Music Hall. Another opens tonight at Colonial Players and a third opens at Chesapeake Arts Center tomorrow.

Washington's 9:30 Club, run by Bethesda-based I.M.P., and U Street Music Hall have formed a cross-venue booking alliance, the two Washington clubs said today. They say the partnership will allow them to foster up-and-coming talent. "There will be bands that we present at U Street Music Hall that will one day headline at Merriweather," said I.M.P. chairman Seth Hurwitz, who also runs the Columbia amphitheater, in a statement. It also enables the two clubs to be competitive against Live Nation, which opened the Fillmore in Silver Spring in September in a bid to grow its slice of the midsize club market.

The Chesapeake Music Hall -- the only dinner theater in Annapolis -- will let the curtain fall on its last performance at the end of this month, succumbing to competitive pressure after 15 years. The music hall, just off U.S. 50 a few miles west of the Bay Bridge, has been managed by Sherry Kay Anderson for the past five years after she and her then-husband, Doug Yetter, purchased it in 1995. The facility had two previous owners, both of whom declared bankruptcy. Anderson was unavailable for comment yesterday.

You've got to like Irving Berlin's musical "Annie Get Your Gun" if only for its sheer political incorrectness.In this show about Annie Oakley, stone-faced Indians say "How," the leading man avers that his bride-to-be must be as "pink and as soft as a nursery," and the heroine can win the man of her dreams only by losing a shooting match to him on purpose.But what it lacks in egalitarian consciousness, it makes up for in hits. For, as the Chesapeake Music Hall's current production of "Annie Get Your Gun" reminds us, the Berlin standards just keep a-comin' from one end of the score to the other.

A review of "A Chorus Line" at Chesapeake Music Hall in the July 24 Arundel edition of The Sun misspelled an actor's name. Her name is Andrea Elward. Also, two characters in the show, Bobby and Mark, became conflated in the editing process.The Sun regrets the errors.Chesapeake Music Hall, which just presented one milestone in musical theater history, "Oklahoma!," has opened another.With "A Chorus Line," the company has moved from the first show to integrate songs into a plot to move the action to a landmark concept musical, with neither story nor stars.

The Chesapeake Music Hall's production of "Mame" deserves great acclaim.For a ma-and-pa troupe to come up with a production as good as this one is miraculous. And much of the miracle work is done by Sherry Kay, who not only plays the title role with aplomb but also is co-producer, choreographer and costumer.Kay's Mame shows softness as well as strength. She is gorgeous in stunning gowns and the other costumes, and dance numbers are impressive.Based on the novel "Auntie Mame" by Patrick Dennis, the show tells the story of a 10-year-old boy sent to live with an aunt whose idea of child-rearing includes teaching youngsters to mix martinis and dance the tango in a speakeasy.

Chesapeake Music Hall resumes its "Jazz At The Music Hall" series at 8 p.m. Sunday with a re-creation of clarinetist Benny Goodman's famous January 1938 Carnegie Hall concert.This first concert of the new year celebrates the first time jazz was played in the venerable hall in New York.Drummer Brooks Tegler leads a 13-piece orchestra that will perform everything heard that evening, from the opening "Don't Be That Way" to the closing "Sing, Sing, Sing.""Jazz At The Music Hall" is produced by jazz writer and broadcaster John Tegler, who will narrate the concert and tell how Goodman's orchestra was booked on a stage that had been considered too august for jazz musicians.

Chesapeake Music Hall pays tribute Sunday to legendary jazz vocalist Billie Holiday in the fifth of its Jazz At the Music Hall series of concerts.Ronnie Wells, one of the top jazz singers in the Baltimore-Washington area, portrays Holiday. Wells is backed by her husband, Ron Elliston, and his quartet,Wells, who teaches jazz vocal techniques at the University of Maryland, has been a frequent performer at U.S. and international jazz festivals, appearing throughout Europe and North and South America.

L aurie DeYoung doesn't hesitate when asked for a defining moment from her 24-plus years as the morning voice of WPOC-FM. The moment was not heard on air, has nothing to do with the country music the station plays and happened well out of the public eye. But it goes a long way toward explaining why she has remained a dominant force on Baltimore's airwaves for more than two decades, and why she was honored in Nashville on Tuesday with her induction to...

For nearly all of the 15 years of the Chesapeake Music Hall, Annapolis native David Bosley-Reynolds was a bedrock of its productions, starring in everything from Little Shop of Horrors to Oklahoma! Since that venue near the Bay Bridge closed in 2004, Bosley-Reynolds has been flourishing at Toby's Dinner Theatre in Baltimore and Columbia. BroadwayWorld.com voted Bosley-Reynolds the 2007 Actor of the Year, in recognition of his performances in five musicals in 12 months: The Full Monty, Little Shop of Horrors, Titanic the Musical, Fiddler on the Roof and The Sound of Music.

George Strait's successful country music career has spanned more than three decades. The native Texan, who in 2006 was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, has more than 50 No. 1 hit singles and has won dozens of awards, including honors from the Country Music Association and the American Music Awards. Strait, a current Grammy nominee, performs Saturday at 1st Mariner Arena. Country music group Little Big Town will also perform. The show starts at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $54.50-$64.

It's the tap, tappiest time of the year. Maybe you're soon headed up to New York City's Radio City Music Hall for the Christmas Spectacular? The show is terrific, trust me. I've seen it dozens and dozens of times. But not this year. Doctor's orders, you see. I'm in Rockette Rehab. Like most love affairs gone bad, mine with "America's dancing daughters" began innocently enough. In 1994, I was a hot-shot publicist, recently axed from my senior vice president's position at a global public relations firm.

New York - Sixties' doo-wop, Roaring '20s syncopation, '80s disco and Great Depression blues. Song titles like "Big Girls Don't Cry" "Fancy Dress," "Saturday Night in the City" and "What About Love?" These musical styles and songs belong to the four shows competing for best new musical at tonight's Tony Awards ceremony (8-11 p.m., WJZ-Channel 13). The shows might not appear to have much in common: They take place in separate eras; they look and sound dissimilar; they have disparate plots; and their characters have different goals.

Turning a mystery novel into a musical is a tricky proposition. Turning an unfinished mystery into a musical is tricker still. But that's the neat feat Rupert Holmes pulled off in his 1986 Tony Award winner, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Holmes achieved this delicate task with two gimmicks. First, he framed Dickens' final effort as a play-within-a-play. And second, he added audience participation by allowing theatergoers to vote on the ending. Even so, the show is far from fail-proof. Most of the characters are over-the-top and, some of the songs - by the man who wrote "Escape (The Pina Colada Song)"

If you want high comedy, you might follow Shakespeare's advice and "get thee to a nunnery" -- the one at Chesapeake Music Hall where "Nunsense" is playing until Feb. 13. Besides providing plenty of laughs, the Little Sisters of Hoboken make you feel like a child again, especially if you spent part of your childhood in Catholic schools. Dan Goggin's 1984 comic hit tells the hilarious tale of nuns who put on a show to raise funds to bury four of their colleagues temporarily stored in the freezer.

MARYLAND'S 2006 election will feature compelling races for U.S. Senate, House of Representatives and governor. But a Democratic Party rally in Montgomery County last week made clear that the performance of President Bush and Republicans in Washington will be a dominant theme in those campaigns. Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean's pep talk at the Music Hall at Strathmore Hall indicated that the coming election season will focus as much on Social Security reform, federal deficits and the nuclear option for ending judicial filibusters as on local issues.

In the opening minutes of this elating documentary, Martin Scorsese, executive producer of Lightning in a Bottle, takes the stage at New York's Radio City Music Hall to introduce an all-star concert on Feb. 7, 2003, as an attempt to tell the 100-year history of the blues. The film, which opens today at the Charles, may not be in the same league as the movie of The Band's farewell concert, The Last Waltz (1978), which Scorsese directed. But it's a passionate and magnetic celebration. Out of a six-hour marathon, director Antoine Fuqua has carved a 109-minute film that sizzles with bold fusions and contrasts.