Operation Backpack & Paige Davis making lots of improvements
              By: Sandi Durell
TLC Trading Spaces’ host Paige Davis is passionate when it comes to her involvement as spokesperson and board member for Volunteers of America, the sponsor organization for Operation Backpack, this much needed charitable cause. In a phone conversation I had with Paige, she was extremely enthusiastic and adamant about the importance and necessity to get the word out to as many people as possible in our New York community that homeless children need a chance at normalcy when attending school, like every other child,. It’s as simple as a new backpack filled with the school supplies required for that specific age group to help remove the stigma attached to homelessness.

Brian Stokes Mitchell             
               By Patrick Christiano

The Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center is presenting the man the NY Times dubbed “the last leading man,” the powerful baritone Brian Stokes Mitchell, in concert on Saturday July 2 at 8:30 pm.  Mr. Mitchell can also be seen on the big screen opposite Angela Bassett in the Tri Star comedy JUMPING THE BROOM.

Producer Daryl Roth on Her Commitment to Bring Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart to a Larger Audience           By Ellis Nassour
Daryl Roth ..... Photo Barry Gordin
Daryl Roth is one of theater's -- Off Broadway and Broadway -- most prolific producers. She’s long been a champion of serious theater. She has generously underwritten plays at not-for-profits, earned Tony Awards for Proof, The Goat or Who Is Sylvia? and August: Osage County,countless other nominations, including last season's The Temperamentals and a 2010 Lucille Lortel Award for Lifetime Achievement for her championing of Off-Broadway. This season, one of her proudest accomplishments has been bringing Larry Kramer's 1985 Off-Broadway playThe Normal Heart, which centers on the human and political factors surrounding the early days of the AIDS epidemic.

Laura Michelle Kelly
      Mary Poppins Says Hello to Isabel!

                  By Isa Goldberg
Having just been startled by the larger-than-life Mary Poppins, I was enchanted to meet the Olivier Award-winning actress who reprises the role on Broadway. Somewhat diminutive and astonishingly beautiful, Laura Michelle Kelly radiates a spellbinding charm.

Colman Domingo         Colman Domingo Living Large
                   By Patrick Christiano
Born and raised in Philadelphia Colman Domingo moved to San Francisco at the age of 21 soon after graduating from college, a couple of years after a  professor told him “he had a gift for acting,” embarking on a two decade long journey of learning his craft. He played all sorts of roles in theater, film, and television, while watching, learning and reading masters like Stanislavski and Uta Hagen. He eventually made his way to New York and Broadway. And now the LOGO star is an award winning actor riding the crest of a wave, which caught momentum a few years ago with his performance in the acclaimed musical Passing Strange.

Paul Libin... By Patrick Christiano“I want to promote Broadway.” That’s Paul Libin, Vice President of the Jujamcyn Theaters and chairman of Broadway Cares/Equity fights AIDS, speaking about his passion—the theater in general and and Broadway, in particular. This past January, Libin, who has maintained a summer home on Gardiner’s Bay in East Hampton with his wife Florence for over 40 years, was appointed to Chairman of The Broadway League, marking an ironic twist in his career that began Off Broadway in 1956 as a gofer working for Jo Mielziner on the musical Happy Hunting with Ethel Merman and Fernando Lamas. He has done it all during his illustrious career and for 30 years was the President of the league of Off-Broadway Theaters.

          By Gerard Raymond
The recently announced Tony and Drama Desk nominations confirm what New York audiences already knew: the season has been great for Bobby Steggert.  Last fall, the 29 year-old Maryland native gave a white-hot performance in the role of Mother’s Younger Brother, the romantic lad who is ready to “blow things up” for a cause, in the regrettably short-lived Broadway transfer of The Kennedy Center revival of Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens musical Ragtime.

Talking to Mary Beth Hurt about ‘Rain’ and the Human Footprint
 Will Rogers, Mary Beth Hurt             By Isa Goldberg

Andrew Bovell’s “When the Rain Stops Falling” is a complex drama set over four generations of two families between 1959 and 2039.

The Boy from ‘Memphis’  By Isa Goldberg

With racial issues as a recurring element throughout many new productions this season, the Obama presence is everywhere on Broadway. “Race”, David Mamet’s new play, the revival of the old-fashioned musical “Finian’s Rainbow”, the first 90’s musical to be revived on Broadway, “Ragtime”, and Bill T. Jones’ biographical show, “Fela”, about the Nigerian singer and political activist.

Talking to Laura Benanti “In The Next Room”
By: Isa Goldberg
Watching Laura Benanti one might imagine that success comes easily. With three Tony nominations and one Tony Award for her blazing performance in “Gypsy”, several recording albums, and a recurring role on TV’s “Eli Stone” behind her, one would never entertain the grueling spinal surgery that followed a potentially paralyzing pratfall in “Into the Woods”, or the loneliness and awkwardness she recalls feeling as a high school student. Regardless, she is in private conversation just as she is in public, lovely and unassuming.