St. John's Conservatory Theater
St. John's Conservatory Theater (SJCT) was a not-for-profit theater company at the St. John's Episcopal Church in Ogdensburg, NY. History In 2014, Michael A. O'Donnell, St. John's Church rector invited his brother Richard O'Donnell, who founded several theatre companies including New Age Vaudeville, The New Variety, and the Black Pearl Cabaret, to produce and create a theatre in the St. John's Parish Hall located on the corner of Knox and Franklin, Ogdensburg, NY. Richard O'Donnell (principal founder) then recruited several church members including Stephen Chambers, Angela Dwyer, Christopher Dwyer, and Ryan Woodard (along with Michael O'Donnell, accredited as co-founder) to mount the first production. R. O'Donnell initially produced, wrote and directed a readers theater-style interactive show titled ''Alice Isn't All There'' which eventually developed into full-scale musical comedy productions. He continued producing at the St. John's Parish Theater until June 2017 where produ ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Richard O'Donnell (playwright)
Richard O'Donnell (born June 17, 1956) is an American playwright, composer, lyricist, poet, actor, and stand-up comic. He has worked and lived in New York City and Chicago, where he has written and performed for the stage and television. O'Donnell co-wrote the ASCAP award-winning Off-Broadway musical comedy '' One & One'', and Radio City Music Hall's ''Manhattan Showboat''. He founded the New Age Vaudeville theatre company, the New Variety cabaret, the Black Pearl Cabaret, and St. John's Conservatory Theater. As a stand-up comic, he was the executive producer and host of the Fox, Chicago comedy variety television show ''R. Rated''. Early life and education Richard O'Donnell began in the entertainment industry as a professional ventriloquist. While in Jr. high school, he ran away with the Sells & Gray 3-ring tent circus at the age of 15, sleeping in the back of a truck that transported their elephants, Bessie and Anna May. O'Donnell was eventually forced to return home to ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Oliver Twist
''Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy's Progress'', Charles Dickens's second novel, was published as a serial from 1837 to 1839, and as a three-volume book in 1838. Born in a workhouse, the orphan Oliver Twist is bound into apprenticeship with an undertaker. After escaping, Oliver travels to London, where he meets the " Artful Dodger", a member of a gang of juvenile pickpockets led by the elderly criminal Fagin. ''Oliver Twist'' unromantically portrays the sordid lives of criminals, and exposes the cruel treatment of the many orphans in London in the mid-19th century. The alternative title, ''The Parish Boy's Progress'', alludes to Bunyan's ''The Pilgrim's Progress'', as well as the 18th-century caricature series by painter William Hogarth, '' A Rake's Progress'' and '' A Harlot's Progress''. In an early example of the social novel, Dickens satirises child labour, domestic violence, the recruitment of children as criminals, and the presence of street children. The novel ma ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Shall We Gather At The River
"Shall We Gather at the River?" or simply "At the River" are the popular names for the traditional Christian hymn originally titled "Beautiful River" and subsequently titled "Hanson Place," written by American poet and gospel music composer Robert Lowry (1826–1899). It was written in 1864 and is now in the public domain. The title "Hanson Place" is a reference to the original Hanson Place Baptist Church in Brooklyn, where Lowry, as a Baptist minister, sometimes served. The original building now houses a different denomination. The music is in the key of D and uses an 8.7.8.7 R meter. An arrangement was also composed by Charles Ives, and a later arrangement is included in Aaron Copland's ''Old American Songs'' (1952) in addition to being used by German composeAnton Plate in 'At The River' (2003), and by American wind band composer David Maslanka in his Symphony No. 9 (2011). The song was sung live at the 1980 funeral of American Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. The ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Washington Irving
Washington Irving (April 3, 1783 – November 28, 1859) was an American short-story writer, essayist, biographer, historian, and diplomat of the early 19th century. He is best known for his short stories " Rip Van Winkle" (1819) and " The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (1820), both of which appear in his collection '' The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.'' His historical works include biographies of Oliver Goldsmith, Muhammad and George Washington, as well as several histories of 15th-century Spain that deal with subjects such as Alhambra, Christopher Columbus and the Moors. Irving served as American ambassador to Spain in the 1840s. Born and raised in Manhattan to a merchant family, Irving made his literary debut in 1802 with a series of observational letters to the ''Morning Chronicle'', written under the pseudonym Jonathan Oldstyle. He temporarily moved to England for the family business in 1815 where he achieved fame with the publication of ''The Sketch Book of Geoffrey ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Orchard Of Hide & Seek
An orchard is an intentional plantation of trees or shrubs that is maintained for food production. Orchards comprise fruit- or nut-producing trees which are generally grown for commercial production. Orchards are also sometimes a feature of large gardens, where they serve an aesthetic as well as a productive purpose. A fruit garden is generally synonymous with an orchard, although it is set on a smaller non-commercial scale and may emphasize berry shrubs in preference to fruit trees. Most temperate-zone orchards are laid out in a regular grid, with a grazed or mown grass or bare soil base that makes maintenance and fruit gathering easy. Most modern commercial orchards are planted for a single variety of fruit. While the importance of introducing biodiversity is recognized in forest plantations, it would seem to be beneficial to introduce some genetic diversity in orchard plantations as well by interspersing other trees through the orchard. Genetic diversity in an orchard would p ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
A Kreepy Christmas Carol
A, or a, is the first letter and the first vowel letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, and others worldwide. Its name in English is '' a'' (pronounced ), plural ''aes''. It is similar in shape to the Ancient Greek letter alpha, from which it derives. The uppercase version consists of the two slanting sides of a triangle, crossed in the middle by a horizontal bar. The lowercase version is often written in one of two forms: the double-storey and single-storey . The latter is commonly used in handwriting and fonts based on it, especially fonts intended to be read by children, and is also found in italic type. In English, '' a'' is the indefinite article, with the alternative form ''an''. Name In English, the name of the letter is the ''long A'' sound, pronounced . Its name in most other languages matches the letter's pronunciation in open syllables. History The earliest known ancestor of A is ''aleph''—the first letter of the Phoenician ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens (; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era.. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime and, by the 20th century, critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories are widely read today. Born in Portsmouth, Dickens left school at the age of 12 to work in a boot-blacking factory when his father was incarcerated in a debtors' prison. After three years he returned to school, before he began his literary career as a journalist. Dickens edited a weekly journal for 20 years, wrote 15 novels, five novellas, hundreds of short stories and non-fiction articles, lectured and performed readings extensively, was an indefatigable letter writer, and campaigned vigorously for children's rights, for education, and for other social re ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Victorian Era
In the history of the United Kingdom and the British Empire, the Victorian era was the period of Queen Victoria's reign, from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. The era followed the Georgian period and preceded the Edwardian period, and its later half overlaps with the first part of the ''Belle Époque'' era of Continental Europe. There was a strong religious drive for higher moral standards led by the nonconformist churches, such as the Methodists and the evangelical wing of the established Church of England. Ideologically, the Victorian era witnessed resistance to the rationalism that defined the Georgian period, and an increasing turn towards romanticism and even mysticism in religion, social values, and arts. This era saw a staggering amount of technological innovations that proved key to Britain's power and prosperity. Doctors started moving away from tradition and mysticism towards a science-based approach; medicine advanced thanks to the adopti ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Commedia Dell’arte
(; ; ) was an early form of professional theatre, originating from Italian theatre, that was popular throughout Europe between the 16th and 18th centuries. It was formerly called Italian comedy in English and is also known as , , and . Characterized by masked "types", was responsible for the rise of actresses such as Isabella Andreini and improvised performances based on sketches or scenarios. A , such as ''The Tooth Puller'', is both scripted and improvised. Characters' entrances and exits are scripted. A special characteristic of is the , a joke or "something foolish or witty", usually well known to the performers and to some extent a scripted routine. Another characteristic of is pantomime, which is mostly used by the character Arlecchino, now better known as Harlequin. The characters of the usually represent fixed social types and stock characters, such as foolish old men, devious servants, or military officers full of false bravado. The characters are exaggerated ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Circus
A circus is a company of performers who put on diverse entertainment shows that may include clowns, acrobats, trained animals, trapeze acts, musicians, dancers, hoopers, tightrope walkers, jugglers, magicians, ventriloquists, and unicyclists as well as other object manipulation and stunt-oriented artists. The term ''circus'' also describes the performance which has followed various formats through its 250-year modern history. Although not the inventor of the medium, Philip Astley is credited as the father of the modern circus. In 1768, Astley, a skilled equestrian, began performing exhibitions of trick horse riding in an open field called Ha'Penny Hatch on the south side of the Thames River, England. In 1770, he hired acrobats, tightrope walkers, jugglers and a clown to fill in the pauses between the equestrian demonstrations and thus chanced on the format which was later named a "circus". Performances developed significantly over the next fifty years, with large-sca ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Alice Isn't All There
Alice may refer to: * Alice (name), most often a feminine given name, but also used as a surname Literature * Alice (''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland''), a character in books by Lewis Carroll * ''Alice'' series, children's and teen books by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor * ''Alice'' (Hermann book), a 2009 short story collection by Judith Hermann Computers * Alice (computer chip), a graphics engine chip in the Amiga computer in 1992 * Alice (programming language), a functional programming language designed by the Programming Systems Lab at Saarland University * Alice (software), an object-oriented programming language and IDE developed at Carnegie Mellon * Alice mobile robot * Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity, an open-source chatterbot * Matra Alice, a home micro-computer marketed in France * Alice, a brand name used by Telecom Italia for internet and telephone services Video games * '' Alice: An Interactive Museum'', a 1991 adventure game * ''American McGee's Alice' ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |