Mondays are Dark.

Hmm.  We spun the Carbonell Awards and Cirque Dreams stories off into their own posts.  We'll have to do some digging to keep this week's MaD looking full.

Radiant
New Theater is opening the world premiere of Shirley Lauro's The Radiant this week, and has landed a fairly major actress to star in it.  BroadwayWorld and The Miami Theater Examiner both have stories.

Elite
Not to be outdone, Mosaic Theatre has announced they're bringing in Jenny McKnight to appear in Dusk Rings a Bell.

Sightings...
Rachel Bay Jones is appearing in the first major New York City revival of Hello Again, according to Playbill.

New Stuff
The Miami Herald reports that the New World School of the Arts is holding its annual showcase this Friday, March 25.

Ghost of a Seed
The Shiny Sheet learns what led to the creation of Ghost Writer, the current production at Florida Stage.

"...and reading The Scene, of course."
ArsthPOV asks some of the cast of Jersey Boys what they've been doing when they're not onstage performing. (None of them actually mention reading Mondays are Dark.)   We know that Joe Bwarie, at least, made the trip to the Broward Center to catch the Florida Sunshine Pops' tribute to Frankie Valli.

Finally, the one Spider-Man Article We'll Link To.
You might have noticed that we've refrained from mentioning all the hullabaloo surrounding Spider Man: Turn Off the Dark.  The Producer's Perspective sums up our views nicely.

Sometimes, They Come Back
The LA Times reports that The Pasadena Playhouse is not only back in business, but has announced a full five-show season. 

With three shows staged so far, Hershey Felder's one-man "George Gershwin Alone" opening April 12 and "Twist — an American Musical" scheduled to open June 25, the Playhouse will have fulfilled the main obligation left over from its bankruptcy: providing five more plays at no further cost to the 5,300 subscribers who'd paid in advance for an aborted 2010 season in which just one of the six announced productions was staged.

The company had closed its doors in February 2010, and emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy this past October.

Ripples from The Grove
The Coconut Grove Playhouse is still shuttered, but its influence still echoes.

• The Palm Beach Daily News reports that Alfred Browaning Parker, the architect who over saw the renovation that defined the Playhouse's "live theatre" era in 1954, passed away on March 11.
• The Bergen Record reports that Stage Manager Beverly Randolph died on March 15, succumbing to brain cancer.  She met her husband, James Eisner, when they both worked at the Playhouse 39 years ago.

Meanwhile...
...in Palm Beach, the Royal Poinciana Playhouse is still closed, and The Palm Beach Daily News  - or at least Bob Rodenberg, writing "special to" - expresses serious doubts about the man most vocal about saving it.

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist. The greatest trick Patrick Henry Flynn ever pulled was convincing Palm Beach that he actually sought to save the Royal Poinciana Playhouse.

In fairness, the Theater Scene must point out that while Rodenberg implies that The Guild listed questionable expenses "while doing nothing," he also utterly failed to mention that The Guild does produce events through out the year, such as the upcoming Centennial Follies.  Which Rodenberg would know if he read the Daily News:

Oct 30, 2010  ...the Palm Beach Theater Guild is planning to produce its version of the local, um, “talent” showcase in the spring... The early word is that the 2011 Follies will be a book musical — already being penned by a stable of writers including Palm Beach Post columnist Frank Cerabino, artist/cartoonist Pat Crowley, Helen Guest, Paul Noble and Mia Matthews... Broadway vet Barry Ingham, a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, will direct.

Rodenberg also alleges that the building's owner, the Sterling Organization, tried to get the Theatre Guild to rent the theatre, an arrangement that Flynn has insisted that Sterling would not entertain.  Rodenberg did not supply names of Sterling representatives.

In fact, in a stunning lapse of journalistic integrity, The Daily News failed to post any of the supporting documentation. Not a single PDF of a public record, not a link to a single database entry.  Contrast this to last year's Naples News exposé of Gary Waldman and Jamison Troutman.  Not only was the article professionally written in an objective tone, but every document mentioned is made available to the reader.

While the Theatre Scene has its own doubts about the viability of The Playhouse and the Theatre League's business plans for, we're frankly appalled that a daily newspaper would print such a bold example of yellow journalism without even the slightest nod to current professional standards. We didn't think we could think less of "The Shiny Sheet."  We were wrong.