GRACE NOTES: Wednesday, February 25, 2026

 

Today’s Highlights:

 

  Punish Me, world premiere by Dukakis, directed by Monique Sorgen, featuring Michael Dukakis (Nick), Dylan Griner (Damon), Lidia Porto (Carmen Diaz). Brianna Bell (Giselle), Jaiden Blessing (Shelly), Anuradha Seneviratne (Booker), and Peter Nikkos (Father’s Voice), closes at LA’s Hudson Backstage Theatre.

 

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  Broadway Grosses for the week ending Feb. 22.

 

Click here for the complete analysis.

 

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  A reading of Tina Preston’s Passage will take place Sun. Mar. 1 at 3 PM at LA’s Odyssey Theatre (link not available), directed by Roxanne Rogers.

 

  V Cate, Suzanne Fletcher, Lisa Littman, Jennifer Stefanisko . Jacqueline Wright, and Gray Palmer.

 

  Five women on a ship are confronted with passion, anger, desire for freedom, determination and hopelessness. Do they share a heart? We see through events lost on men.

 

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  DC’s Signature Theater will present The 2026 Sondheim Award Gala will take place Mon. Mar. 16 at The Anthem.

 

Recipient: Vanessa Williams

 

 Nancy Anderson, Mark G. Meadows, Nova Y. Payton, and Awa Sal Secka.

 

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  National Theatre Live will present a screening of London’s The Audience, by Peter Morgan, directed by Stephen Daldry, on Sat. Apr. 4 at 3 PM at LA’s James Bridges Theatre.

 

  Helen Mirren (Queen Elizabeth)

 

  For 60 years, Queen Elizabeth II met with each of her 12 prime ministers in a private weekly meeting. This meeting is known as The Audience. From Winston Churchill to Margaret Thatcher and David Cameron, the Queen advised her prime ministers on matters both public and personal. Through these private audiences, we see glimpses of the woman behind the crown and witness the moments that shaped a monarch.

 

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  The Santa Monica International Jazz Festival will run May 1-9 at various Los Angeles locations.

 

Click here for the complete schedule of events.

 

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  SheNYC Arts will present the world premiere of Elizabeth Addison’s Chasing Grace, to run Mar. 12-29 at ART/NY Mezzanine Theatre, directed by Jacinth Greywoode, with music direction by Jacinth Greywoode.

 

  Gabrielle Beckford and Harper Miles, with LaDonna Burns, Chantelle Guido, and more TBA.

 

  The show follows a writer as she sorts through the memories of her time in early recovery inside a women’s treatment facility, where survival meant learning how to stay, how to listen, and how not to run. As the writer shapes her treatment experience into a new musical, memory and rehearsal collide. The women she once lived beside reappear, not as cautionary tales, but as full, complex human beings whose stories demand dignity, humor, and care.

 

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  Boston’s Speak Easy Stage Company will present Jordan Harrion’s The Antiquities Mar. 6-28 at the Calderwood Pavilion, directed by Alex Lonati.

 

  Harry Baker, Catia, Kelsey Fonise, Jesse Hinson, John Kuntz, Alison Russo, Anderson Stinson III, Helen Hy-Yuen Swanson, and Tobias Wilson.
  The play is set in the not-so-distant future, and concerns the efforts of the AI curators at The Museum of Late Human Antiquities as they attempt to reconstruct the past through vinyl records, yoga mats, and other relics  But as their exhibit grows, so do the cracks in their understanding, in this timely and provocative examination of what it means to be human.

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  The  Odyssey Theater has announced its upcoming productions.

 

Click the link above for all the productions.

 

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   “A Complete History of Ragtime” is now available  to read here.

 

There is also an option to submit a question.

 

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   Penelope, by Alex Bechtel, Grace McLean & Eva Steinmetz, has been extended through Mar. 1 at Lyric Stage Boston, directed by Courtney O’Connor.

 

  Aimee Doherty (Penelope)

 

   A generous glass of bourbon, a five-piece band, and ninety minutes is all Penelope needs to tell her side of the story as she embraces her heartache, loneliness, and resolve during the wait for her husband Odysseus to return from a seemingly endless war. Her son has disappeared. Relentless suitors prance before her. Days drone on as she is left to wonder who she is if she is alone. From jazz to folk to indie rock, Penelope dishes the dirt in a captivating cacophony of emotions that redefines what we might know of her through a modern lens.

 

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   Quincy’s Jones’ Quincy’s World: The New Founding Father of American Music will run Mar. 5-8 at Beverly Hills’ Wallis Center, conducted by Rachael Worby.

 

  Vanessa Bryan and Brandon Victor Dixon.

 

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 Jesse Tyler Ferguson has purchased the rights to Tru, the 1989 play about writer Truman Capote by Jay Presson Allen.

 

Ferguson has revealed that he will be performing in an upcoming New York production of the solo play. Dates, theatre, and additional information TBA.

 

  Adapted from Capote’s own words, Tru takes place in 1975 in his New York apartment during the writer’s final days. Having recognized thinly veiled versions of themselves, Manhattan socialites, including Babe Paley and Slim Keith, have turned their backs on the man they once considered a close confidant after an excerpt from Capote’s infamous unfinished roman à clef, Answered Prayers, has been published in Esquire. Alone and lonely, Capote soothes himself with pills, vodka, marijuana, and chocolate truffles, all the while musing about his checkered life and career.

 

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  The Office! A Musical Parody will close Mar. 21 after 7 years at Off-Broadway’s Jerry Orbach Theatre, directed by Donald Garverick.

 

  Annabelle Grace Woodard, Nic Rubano Brayden Krikke, Madelyn Matthews, Kayla Moore, Larie Rodriguez, Emily Boggs, Daniel Starnes, Isabela Gaya, rylee Vogel, and Ned Way.

 

 

 

 


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