Neal Zoren

5 days ago | delcotimes.com | Neal Zoren

The late Orien Reid enjoyed conversation. And it wasn’t confined by where to get the best prices on food, commodities and household goods. A natural doer, an instinctive leader, and a person who lived the usual parallel lives as a professional, a wife, a daughter, a mother, and consumer, Orien’s talk was wide-ranging. She was open about what was happening in her life, shared a lot of information and insights, and said what she learned or concluded from them.

1 week ago | communitynews.org | Neal Zoren

Giacomo Puccini once said, “God touched me with His little finger, and said, ‘Write for the theater, only for the theater.’”For me, “theater” is the operative word in that quote. In the decades I’ve been writing about live entertainment, I’ve favored opera productions that stress theater, the putting on of a play and deft characterization as much as it concentrates on the music, vocal, and orchestral.

1 week ago | communitynews.org | Neal Zoren

Gorgeous vocals, rich in context and emotion as well as lithe, pitch-perfect sound, combine with palpable, believable romance and smooth storytelling to make Princeton Summer Theater’s production of “The Bridges of Madison County” an early highlight of the fledgling summer season. Eliyana Abraham’s staging moves deftly between intense passages in which unexpected love takes root, buds, and blooms to burgeoning and mundane sequences that show the everyday give-and-take of Iowa farmwife.

1 week ago | delcotimes.com | Neal Zoren

Kyra Kennedy has a knack for being cast as famous women. On Friday, she begins a monthlong stint as Ellie Greenwich, composer of dozens of pop music hits — “Chapel of Love,” “Da Doo Ron Ron,” “River Deep-Mountain High, “Be My Baby,” “I Can Hear Music” — in a Bucks County Playhouse production named for one of Greenwich’s biggest successes, “Leader of the Pack.”Last summer she played another Pantheon composer, Carole King, in “Beautiful” at the Paper Mill Playhouse.

2 weeks ago | delcotimes.com | Neal Zoren

Viewers of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” know the character of Shy Baldwin, the popular singer who boosts Midge’s comedy career by asking her to be the opening act for his national tours. Baldwin appears in Seasons 2, 3, and 4 of the “Maisel” series, most prominently in Season 3. The person you see playing Shy Baldwin is actor Leroy McClain. Seeing doesn’t always tell the entire story. The person you singing as Shy Baldwin is an actor well known to stage folks, Darius de Haas.