Stage and screen actor Billy Magnussen (pictured above) seems to have had a lot of fun playing Rapunzel’s Prince in the movie adaptation of Sondheim’s Into the Woods, which was the second highest-grossing film this past weekend. Magnussen made his Broadway debut in 2007, playing one of the bathhouse patrons in the revival of Terrence McNally’s The Ritz, wearing nothing but a towel around his waist. He won a 2013 Tony nomination for his performance in Christopher Durang’s Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, playing a boy toy who spends much of the play showing off his bare chest. He politely declined to remove his shirt for this photograph.

The Irish Classical Theatre Company will be celebrating its 25th anniversary next season. Now in the process of choosing the plays that will be part of the line-up, one thing is for sure, a revival of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband. A perfect choice, ICTC always does well with Wilde.

Shakespeare in Delaware Park celebrates its 40th anniversary this coming summer. Tom Loughlin will direct Romeo and Juliet with Saul Elkin as Friar Laurence; Steve Vaughan will direct an all-male version of Twelfth Night with Tim Newell as Olivia. General auditions for the season will he held on February 14th. Save the date; this year’s Fabulous Feast will be held on Saturday, March 28th.

Following in the steps of last year’s very entertaining Robin Hood, director Chris Kelly returns to TOY to helm Crash, a play adapted from the novel by Jerry Spinelli. Opening January 30th, the show will star Jesse Tiebor, Faith Walh, Bobby Cooke, Linda Stein, Ricky Marchese, Reed Bentley, Jessica Wegrzyn, and Mike Randall.

The Broadway-bound play, The Heart of Robin Hood, starring Gabriel Ebert and Euan Morton is now playing at the Royal Alexandra in Toronto through March 1st.

Buffalo native and SUNY Fredonia graduate (BFA in Musical Theater) Devon Goffman will be in town appearing at Shea’s in the national touring production of Motown the Musical!, January 20th-25th. The Broadway production closes on January 18th.

Chautauqua Theater Company will kick off its 2015 in July with Thornton Wilder’s classic Our Town. The season will also include Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel and Shakespeare’s Henry V.

It is definitely still winter, but the box office phone lines open on January 10th for the Shaw Festival, 1-800-511-SHAW. Among the contemporary plays presented this season, Tony Kushner’s very long titled The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures (July 11th-October 10th).

And speaking of long titles, up next for Road Less Traveled, the recent off-Broadway play A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney, by Lucas Hnath. The show opens January 23rd, directed by Katie Mallinson, starring Robert Rutland, Darryl Hart, Gerry Maher, and Marisa Caruso.

We lost several theater luminaries in 2014. Stage and screen star Edward Herrman (pictured left) died on December 31st. Now best known for TV’s Gilmore Girls, Herrmann appeared on Broadway in A.R. Gurney’s original production of Love Letters in 1989. By the way, Gurney’s new play Love and Money will premiere in July in Connecticut.

Back in the early 90’s, actor/comedian Steve Martin first ventured into writing with the play Picasso at the Lapin Agile, featuring Pablo Picasso and Albert Einstein meeting at a bar. The play opened at the Steppenwolf in Chicago in 1993. Now Tom Dooney returns to ART of WNY to direct the piece, starring Sean Marciniak (Picasso), Matthew Chavez (Einstein), Diane DiBernardo Blenk, David Mitchell, Keith Wharton, Stefan Brundage, and Eric Mowery. The show opens on March 5th at ART in the Box, 16 Linwood.

Laura Lonski, Courtney Hoerner, Lisa Marie Leone, Brianna Batista, and Shayna Raichilson-Zadok (pictured below, left to right), portray members of the Susan B. Anthony Society for the Sisters of Gertrude Stein in the comedy 5 Lesbians Eating a Quiche, presented by The Fearless Players, also at ART in the Box. Directed by Todd Fuller, the show opens January 15th.