Erin Keane

Actors Theatre of Louisville opens its 37th Humana Festival of New American Plays this week. The theater has produced more than 400 world premieres during the annual event since it founded the festival in 1976, and will welcome more than 40,000 patrons to nine new plays by eleven playwrights over the next six weeks.

"I passionately believe that it’s important that artists have champions, and Actors Theatre is honored to be able to provide a creative and supportive space for playwrights to develop their work," said artistic director Les Waters at a press conference today.

In the Victorian era, genteel young ladies were expected to be proficient in those arts considered appropriately feminine , like sketching, singing and dancing. But photography, with its bulky, messy equipment, wasn't thought a suitable hobby for a young lady. Alice Austen (1866-1952) was a bit of a rebel, though. The daughter of a well-t0-do Staten Island family, Austen discovered photography at age 10 and grew up to be one of the groundbreaking American female photographers of the  19th and early 20th century.

Danville native Frank X Walker made history last week when Governor Steve Beshear appointed him the next Kentucky poet laureate. Walker is the state’s first African American poet laureate, and at 51, he’s also the youngest.

Neurotic writers manipulating their self-aware fictional characters isn’t a new device, but unlike similar stories, The Bard’s Town’s funny and engaging “Chasing Ophelia” isn’t concerned with picking the navel of the writer’s creative processes or artistic tensions. For a romantic comedy, this play’s concerns are remarkably, well, theological: is an unseen, omniscient being really in charge of us, and how do we deal with feeling abandoned by him?

Classical music fans have a packed weekend ahead -- the Louisville Orchestra and the Russian National Orchestra are both playing the Kentucky Center's Whitney Hall with acclaimed piano soloists.

On our audio diary series The Big Break, we hear from Louisville Ballet trainee Claire Horrocks on staging the market scene in Act Two of "Romeo and Juliet," opening March 1, and studio artist Brad Raymond discusses his role in the chorus of "Don Giovanni," his final role with the Kentucky Opera. 

Learn more about our audio diarists, who report in every Thursday on life in Louisville's performing arts companies. 

The Kentucky Shakespeare Festival is moving forward with a 2013 summer season and with establishing an annual "destination model" summer theater festival in Louisville. 

Last summer, the festival’s board gave themselves a February deadline to raise an extra $300,000 to fully fund two summer productions in advance or cancel the 2013 season. The oldest annual free Shakespeare in the Park festival will open “Twelfth Night” in Central Park in June. 

Three live, free literary events are scheduled between now and next Monday, each with their own character of place and vibe. 

Friday, February 22: Punk Rock Poems & Novel Drinking Games

Louisville’s Center Stage opens Andrew Lloyd Weber’s “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” this week. The musical was the first Andrew Lloyd Weber/Tim Rice collaboration to be staged, but it didn’t really catch on until the two had a smash hit with “Jesus Christ Superstar” in the early Seventies.

The musical tells the Old Testament story of Jacob's favored son Joseph and his twelve jealous brothers. Joseph's a big dreamer -- and his dreams tend to come true -- so when he dreams that he will one day become king, his resentful brothers conspire to sell him into slavery.