By Deborah Harkins

The (pleasant) challenge for 40-year-old director Kirsten Kelly: Mount a play involving 50 brides and 50 flight-suited, helicopter-dangling grooms on the stage of a 60-seat theater.

By Elizabeth Hemmerdinger

“Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me” is an always-entertaining, often startling, paean to an often irascible, fiercely perfectionistic, always independent, long-lived woman who has no intention of leaving the followspot behind.

By Deborah Harkins

“Sojourner Truth was an architect of democracy as we know it! She was the first black woman feminist ever!” the opera director mused. “I started to get grumpy—Who has tucked this woman under the coffee table, and why have they done it?”

By Deborah Harkins

Sojourner Truth’s stemwinder of a speech, set to music—with one change.

“Flamin’ Amy” Coleman has red hair and a voice “bigger than God.” Here, to inaugurate WVFC’s series “Days of Their Lives”—profiles of accomplished women with unusual jobs—is a peek into the everyday world of a chanteuse.

“Ohmigod, I just finished having dinner with the archbishop of La Cattedrale di San Marco Argentano, in his quarters. Eleven nuns cooking, cleaning, serving his every need. I just can’t help thinking, “What’s a nice Jewish girl like me doing in a place like this?”

The 1 percent vs. the 99 percent? I’m talking about eighteenth-century France. Versailles, in particular, where a frivolous, pea-brained princess and her equally dimwitted spouse went from fabulous royal phenoms to Public Enemies One and Two.

This week’s Wednesday 5 is all about women dominating the arts on multiple platforms: the small screen (the Emmys), the big screen (international film festivals), the stage (Off Broadway), and the page (the memoir as art).

As Audra McDonald, Judith Light, and Judy Kaye walked away with 2012 Tony Awards, we reveled in their beautiful, moving, and funny acceptance-speech performances.

British actress Tracie Bennett has turned heads across oceans—first at the Laurence Olivier Awards, and now on Broadway, where she has a 2012 Tony Award nomination for ‘End of the Rainbow.’

Whether Cynthia Nixon ends up with a Tony statuette or not, we suspect that the words “Best Actress” will remain hers forever.

Next in our series of WVFC BFFs recently surprised with Tony nominations: Linda Lavin, honored for “The Lyons,” which was described by “The New York Times” as ” Nicky Silver’s savagely sentimental portrait of familial loneliness.”

In our second Tony-nominee Video Pick, some moments with star director Diane Paulus and actor Audra MacDonald, both among many nominations (all the way up to “Best Revival of a Musical”).

Here, so you can celebrate the Tony nominees, is some choice video from “Other Desert Cities,” which garnered two nominees, Stockard Channing and Judith Light.

By Elizabeth Hemmerdinger

Bonnie and Clyde want some time with NYC theater audiences. And they have guns.