Stacy Wolf and Drew Carr Will Be Featured on Theatre Book Club With Katie Birenboim

Berkshire Theatre Group (BTG) and Kate Maguire have announced Theatre Book Club with Katie Birenboim's upcoming guests: author of Beyond Broadway: The Pleasure and Promise of Musical Theatre in America and Director of the Program in Music Theater at Princeton University, Stacy Wolf on June 1 at 4pm; and actor, dancer and writer Drew Carr (BTG: Fiorello!) on June 8 at 4pm.

Each episode will be streamed live on BTG's Facebook page (Facebook.com/berkshiretheatregroup/live), as part of their online Learn at Home series. Each episode will be available on BerkshireTheatre.org and Facebook following the live stream.

Each week, Katie will feature a new guest from the theatre community and discuss either the guest's favorite play or musical or their professional involvement with a production. Katie and her guest will discuss questions they had in reading the play, the transition from the reading of a play to putting it on its feet in performance and interact with the audience on the Facebook live stream.

Theatre Book Club with Katie Birenboim featuring guest, Stacy Wolf

June 1 at 4pm
Streaming to BTG's Facebook Page

Theatre Book Club is back with an exciting guest, Stacy Wolf, one of America's foremost scholars on musical theatre. Wolf serves as director of the program in music theatre at Princeton University, received a Guggenheim fellowship in 2017, and is the author of several seminal texts on musical theatre and its study, including Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical; A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical; and the co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical. Katie will be chatting with Wolf about her newest book, which came out just this winter, Beyond Broadway: The Pleasure and Promise of Musical Theatre Across America. As the title implies, the book examines the ways and the extent to which musical theatre persists in American culture "beyond Broadway," on local, educational and amateur levels.

Theatre Book Club with Katie Birenboim featuring guest, Drew Carr

June 8 at 4pm
Streaming to BTG's Facebook Page

For Katie's eighth episode, she will be chatting with Drew Carr (who appeared with Katie in BTG's Fiorello! in 2017) about Matthew Lopez's epic two-part play, The Inheritance. Based on Howard Ends by E.M. Forster, The Inheritance tracks the lives and losses of contemporary gay men living in New York City as they grapple with the aftermath of the AIDS epidemic. Asking questions like "what do we owe our forebears who perished during the crisis," "how do we honor and remember those we lost," and "how does AIDS continue to affect the lives of gay men today," The Inheritance was a smash hit in London, garnering rave reviews, sold-out theatres, and various Olivier awards, including Best New Play. When it transferred to Broadway this fall, however, it was faced with considerable criticism, in part because of casting. Katie will be discussing all this and more with actor Drew Carr, whom she met during the New York run of BTG's Fiorello!. In addition to his career as an actor and dancer, Drew writes prolifically about his experiences as a gay man in contemporary New York City.