Cowles, assistant director of the school’s high-energy, animated comedy, “The Commedia: Princess and the Pea,” which opens Thursday at Liberty High in Eldersburg, was looking for students with cartwheeling abilities to entertain audiences at the top of the show.

Cast members — consisting of 25 students — wore costumes decked out in rainbow patches and had their hair in bubble braids tied with multicolored ribbons. A crew of about 50 students supports the show.

Performances will be held Thursday and Friday at 7 p.m., and Saturday at 11 a.m., 2 p.m., and 7 p.m. Each runs for about an hour.

The show is a unique retelling of the classic fairy tale “The Princess and the Pea,” in the style of old Italian theater, leaning heavily on physical comedy. The show is undoubtedly engaging for kids and adults alike.

Danielle Dickstein, theater teacher and director of Liberty’s drama program, said she wants her students to have experience performing a wide array of themes and styles.

This show, which has a captivating set design and impressive ensemble,  gives the Liberty students an opportunity to perform children’s theater.

Student designers were involved in every element of the show, said Dickstein: “My goal is for students to be able to walk away with as many skills as possible. That doesn’t have to be in theater, but transfers to all kinds of different walks of life and careers.”

Jamie Poczekaj, 16, is an 11th grade sound designer for the show. She worked on the soundboard for last year’s productions of “Cinderella” and “Eurydice,” but this is her first time doing sound design. She appreciates the opportunity to learn new skills and said she wants to work in sound design again for the school’s next production, “Guys and Dolls.”

This production makes use of Kelsey Alexander’s crochet and theater skills. Alexander, 16, is a junior who plays Columbine, one of the show’s narrators. She volunteered to crochet the pea for the show. She said that Liberty’s theater company is the best one she’s ever been a part of. “We just have so much fun doing everything,” she said.

“There’s a notion about bad high school theater,” Dickstein said, but she rejects that as a premise for high school shows. She wants her students to be proud of the work they’ve done, and she knows the students can achieve high standards of performance, she said.

Her students agree and appreciate the quality of the shows and the energy and enthusiasm of the participants.

“It’s so fun and bright and colorful,” said Connor Reinartz, 15, who plays the prince, describing the show and the environment. “If I’m feeling like sad in class, I look forward to coming to rehearsal afterwards,” he said.

Maxwell Karper, 17, is a junior who initially started performing theater in first grade. He plays Punchin and Mezzetino in the show, the “absent-minded” adviser to the queen. He was one of the students chosen to perform a cartwheel and round-off. “This drama program is so fun. One of my favorite parts is absolutely just how accepting everybody is,” he said.

Zoe Layton, 17, is a senior who plays the queen. “I love being a different role than I am in real life. I love being evil. Like evil roles are my favorite kind of roles because I’m usually super sweet in real life,” Layton said.

Unlike Karper and Layton, Brooklyn McCulloh, 14, has never performed theater before. “I’ve definitely found out that I love acting, and I want to be an actress when I grow up.” She said she learns a lot by observing her fellow students who have years of experience, and was thrilled when she was accepted to the program. She encourages all students to try performing.

Show performances will be held at the Liberty High School auditorium at 5855 Bartholow Road in Eldersburg. Tickets can be purchased online at libertylionsprideplayers.com/tickets. Priority access tickets cost $15 and allow ticket holders auditorium admission 40 minutes before the show time and 10 minutes ahead of general admission. General admission tickets cost $10 and allow entrance 30 minutes before showtime. $12 general admission tickets can be purchased at the door.

Have a news tip? Contact Gabriella Fine at gfine@baltsun.com or at 443-900-1296. 

Messina and The Road Runners will be performing music associated with their latest live album, “Here, There and Everywhere,” at 8 p.m. Nov. 25, according to a news release. Messina has described the album as an eclectic mix of folk, country, rock and Latin from different phases of his career.

He is perhaps best known for playing the bass guitar for the seminal 1960s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame band Buffalo Springfield. After Springfield disbanded in 1968, Messina co-founded the pioneering country rock band Poco. In 1971, he joined forces with the then-unknown Kenny Loggins to form one of rock’s most successful recording duos.

Over the next eight years, Loggins & Messina released eight albums, selling more than 16 million recordings of such hit tunes as “Danny’s Song” and “Your Mama Don’t Dance,” the release says.

Tickets to the Annapolis concert cost $71 to $96, including fees.

Have a news tip? Contact Mary Carole McCauley at mmccauley@baltsun.com and 410-294-0169.

MEXICO CITY — Frida Kahlo’s “El sueño (La cama)” — in English, “The Dream (The Bed)” — is causing a stir among art historians as its estimated $40 million to $60 million price tag would make it the most expensive work by any female or Latin American artist when it goes to auction later this month.

Sotheby’s auction house will put the painting up for sale on Nov. 20 in New York after exhibiting it in London, Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong and Paris.

“This is a moment of a lot of speculation,” said Mexican art historian Helena Chávez Mac Gregor, a researcher at UNAM’s Institute of Aesthetic Research and author of “El listón y la bomba. El arte de Frida Kahlo (The Ribbon and the Bomb. The Art of Frida Kahlo).”

In Mexico, Kahlo’s work is protected by a declaration of artistic monument, meaning pieces within the country cannot be sold or destroyed. However, works from private collections abroad — like the painting in question, whose owner remains unrevealed — are legally eligible for international sale.

“The system of declaring Mexican modern artistic heritage is very anomalous,” said Mexican curator Cuauhtémoc Medina, an art historian and specialist in contemporary art.

Judas in bed

“El sueño (La cama)” was created in 1940 following Kahlo’s trip to Paris, where she came into contact with the surrealists.

Contrary to contemporary belief, the skull on the bed’s canopy is not a Day of the Dead skeleton, but a Judas — a handmade cardboard figure. Traditionally lit with gunpowder during Easter, this effigy symbolizes purification and the triumph of good over evil, representing Judas Iscariot who betrayed Jesus.

In the painting, the skeleton is detailed with firecrackers, flowers on its ribs and a smiling grimace — a detail inspired by a cardboard skeleton Kahlo actually kept in the canopy of her own bed.

Kahlo “spent a lot of time in bed waiting for death,” said Chávez Mac Gregor. “She had a very complex life because of all the illnesses and physical challenges with which she lived.”

Frida and surrealism

Although Kahlo’s painting is being auctioned alongside works by surrealists like Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning, she did not consider herself a member of the movement, despite having met its founder, André Breton, in Mexico and had an exhibition organized by him in Paris in 1939.

“Breton was fascinated by Frida’s work, because he saw that surrealist spirit there,” said Chávez Mac Gregor.

Kahlo, a committed communist, considered surrealism — a movement proposing a revolution of consciousness — to be bourgeois. As Chávez Mac Gregor noted, “Frida always had a critical distance from that.”

Despite this, specialists have found elements of surrealism in Kahlo’s work related to the dreamlike, to an inner world and to a revolutionary and sexual freedom — a concept visible in a bed suspended in the sky with Kahlo sleeping among a vine.

‘Crazy-priced purchases’

“El sueño (La cama)” was last exhibited in the 1990s, and after the auction, it could disappear from public view once again, a fate shared by many paintings acquired for large sums at auction.

There are exceptions, including “Diego y yo” ( “Diego and I”), which set Kahlo’s record sale price when it sold for $34.9 million in 2021.

The painting, depicting the artist and her husband muralist Diego Rivera, was acquired by Argentine business owner Eduardo Costantini and then lent to the Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires (Malba) where it remains on exhibit.

Medina, the art historian, regretted that the “crazy-priced” purchases have reduced art to a mere economic value.

He lamented that when funds purchase art as mere investments — like buying shares in a public company — the works are often relegated to tax-free zones to avoid costs. Their fate, he said, “may be worse; they may end up in a refrigerator at Frankfurt airport for decades to come.”

A female artist

The current sale record for a work by a female artist is held by Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1,” which fetched $44.4 million at Sotheby’s in 2014.

However, the auction market still reflects a profound disparity as no female artist has yet exceeded the maximum sale price of a male artist. The current benchmark is “Salvator Mundi,” attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, which was auctioned by Christie’s for $450.3 million in 2017.

LOS ANGELES — Yoko Ono will stage her first solo museum exhibition in Southern California at the Broad museum this spring. The legendary 92-year-old artist, activist and wife of John Lennon is set to open her show, “Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind,” on May 23. The interactive exhibition, organized in collaboration with Tate Modern in London, will run through Oct. 11, 2026, the Broad announced Thursday.

One of the first things guests will see when they approach the museum during Ono’s show will be an outdoor installation created using the Broad’s olive trees from its outdoor plaza. These will be transformed into “wish trees” for the city — a nod to an installation that Ono first created in 1996 at Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Santa Monica. Viewers will be invited to write wishes on tags and attach them to the branches.

“Yoko’s work has never been bound by place or time, but this really feels like the right moment for a show like this in Los Angeles,” Ono’s studio director, Connor Monahan, wrote in an email. “Her work transforms audiences from observers into participants, helping to shape the works and the exhibition itself. That sense of agency and connection feels especially powerful right now, and I think Los Angeles, with its spirit of experimentation and openness, will really embrace that.”

Ono has been a riveting, beloved and sometimes controversial force in the worlds of music, art and pop culture since the early 1960s when she became associated with New York’s John Cage-inspired Fluxus movement — formed by a community of experimental artists who based their work in performance practice and avant-garde principles.

From the start, Ono’s art was performative and interactive. It was also informed by the trauma of living in Tokyo during World War II, an experience that would feed her lifelong commitment to peace, love and understanding between people and communities.

Her positivity famously resonated with Lennon upon their first meeting in 1966 at London’s Indica Gallery where Ono was setting up an exhibition of conceptual, interactive art. One of the pieces featured a ladder with a magnifying glass at the top. When Lennon climbed the ladder and looked through the magnifying glass, he made out the word “yes,” written in small letters on a canvas attached to the ceiling.

“So it was positive. I felt relieved. It’s a great relief when you get up the ladder and you look through the spyglass and it doesn’t say ‘no’ or ‘f— you’ or something, it said ‘yes,’” Lennon said in an interview with People about his first meeting with Ono.

“Yoko Ono’s ideas about peace, imagination and collective participation are both timeless and newly urgent at a moment when division seems to dominate every news cycle, and communities here and around the world resiliently build toward a better future,” Joanne Heyler, founding director and president of the Broad, said in an email. “The multidisciplinary and wide-ranging practice she began more than 70 years ago remains strikingly contemporary, as the boundaries between art, music and performance are, in her hands, challenged and reshaped, creating fresh emotional connection.”

Heyler also noted that the museum rearranged its calendar to make room for Ono’s show in order to “quickly bring its timely themes to L.A.”

The Broad show will feature Ono’s interactive “instruction” exhibits from the mid-1950s to the present. These pieces feature brief texts that suggest actions for guests to complete or contemplate. Viewers will also see the typescript drafts for her 1964 book, “Grapefruit,” which includes more than 200 instructions in the form of music, painting, events, poetry and objects.

Ono’s work as an activist will also be highlighted through materials and ephemera used in her peace campaigns, including protests done in collaboration with Lennon such as “Acorn Event” (1968) and “Bed Peace” (1969), in which the husband and wife staged bed-in events in Amsterdam and Montreal where they sat in bed and took questions from the press in an effort to speak out against the Vietnam War.

There will also be plenty of film and video in the exhibition, including footage of “Cut Piece,” a legendary piece of performance art first staged in 1964 at Yamaichi Hall, Kyoto, in which Ono sat quietly while the audience cut away pieces of her clothing.

“With so many creatives calling it home, Los Angeles is the perfect place to honor Ono’s boundary-pushing practice and enduring vision,” Sarah Loyer, Broad curator and exhibitions manager, wrote in an email. “Ono’s work from the 1950s to today asks us to look at the world differently and find ways to make change, often starting within ourselves, toward peace. In Ono’s work, personal stories and collective action come together in ways that I think will really resonate with Angelenos.”

©2025 Los Angeles Times. Visit latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

The band is up for Best Alternative Music Performance for “Seein’ Stars”; Best Rock Album for “Never Enough”; Best Metal Performance for “Birds”; Best Rock Performance for “Never Enough” and Best Rock Song for “Never Enough,” according to the awards ceremony’s website. Nominations for the 68th annual awards were announced Friday.

What’s more, those five nods are history-making, according to a social media post by the band’s label, Roadrunner Records, which said that Turnstile is the first band ever nominated across the rock, alternative and metal categories in a single year.

“Never Enough,” which was released Jun 6, is the band’s sixth album.

Turnstile was formed in 2010 after some of the band members have said they met through Towson University.

The band’s current iteration consists of front man and producer Brendan Yates, guitarist Pat McCrory, bassist Franz Lyons, drummer Daniel Fang and its newest member, guitarist Meg Mills. The group is in the midst of a European tour, according to its website.

The recent haul brings Turnstile’s Grammy nomination total to nine, including three nominations in 2022 and one the following year.

However, the band has yet to pick up one of the coveted statuettes. Turnstile fans can tune in Feb. 1, when the award ceremony will be held in Los Angeles, to find out whether this year is the charm.

Have a news tip? Contact Mary Carole McCauley at mmccauley@baltsun.com and 410-294-0169.

At first glance, Murphy’s painting resembles a conventional still life of a cantaloupe and four apples on a napkin. But as viewers lean closer, slightly raised words begin emerging almost ghostlike from the canvas: “abortion,” “DEI,” “victim,” “intersectional” and “equality.”

These terms, taken from a list of words that whistleblowers from the National Science Foundation said were flagged as unacceptable by the Trump administration on grant applications for research projects, recede into the background of Murphy’s painting and nearly fade from view — an effect that operates almost subliminally.

“These paintings were a way for me to process my feelings,” said Murphy, who directs the Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Visual Arts and voted for Kamala Harris. “If you use the words ‘women’ or ‘breastfeeding’ in an application for a research grant, you’re likely not going to get it. This is more than just rhetoric; it is having a real impact on women’s lives.”

She’s among the artists and cultural groups who individually and collectively are using paintbrushes, musical instruments and publications to push back against what they view as the Trump administration’s attempt to curtail free speech.

Those efforts include Fall of Freedom, a series of live and online concerts, readings, comedy acts and exhibits that will take place coast to coast, including in Maryland, on Nov. 21 and 22. The initiative is being described as the first coordinated, nationwide “creative resistance” to the president’s efforts to reframe American cultural life.

However, talk of censorship makes many conservatives roll their eyes. It is liberals, they say, who have been functioning as the nation’s thought police.

David F. Tufaro, a real estate developer who was the Republican candidate for mayor of Baltimore in 1999, is disturbed by the removal of the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument from his former neighborhood of Bolton Hill. it was among four Confederate monuments taken down by former Mayor Catherine Pugh under cover of darkness in 2017, days after a “Unite the Right” rally in Virginia turned violent, claiming three lives.

Tufaro pointed out that removing monuments because they espouse an unpopular political viewpoint is an act of censorship in and of itself.

“I was shocked when this beautiful monument to Confederate soldiers who died in battle was removed without public discussion or debate,” he said. “It should be restored to its rightful place.”

(Trump later ordered that many of the monuments removed nationwide in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd be reinstalled, though his directive didn’t apply to Baltimore because the monuments weren’t on federal land.)

Although censorship is an especially hot-button topic right now, this isn’t the first time in American history that tensions between opposing political factions have spilled over into efforts to muzzle dissenting points of view. Charges of censorship were lobbed during the Sedition Act of 1798, during 1950s-era McCarthyism and during the culture wars of the 1990s.

“Censorship can be imposed by the political left or the political right,” said Janet Marstine, a former museum studies professor and author of an book about censorship called “Curating Under Pressure.”

“The problem is that censors erase complex areas of history. In order to create an anachronistic, nostalgic view of America, you have to reduce the gray areas to all black or white. When you take away opportunities for audiences to engage in critical thinking about history and culture and science, we become a citizenry that can’t think critically about other things, including voting. And that’s scary.”

Of course, not all reasons for withholding artworks from public view are politically motivated. For instance, the American Visionary Art Museum decided this fall to include Koreloy Wildrekinde-McWhirter’s sequence on child rape in its yearlong mega-exhibition, “Fantastic Realities.” But curators left out one etching that served as the crux of the series because they feared it was so graphic it would distress visitors.

But most headline-grabbing anti-censorship protests are political.

Fall of Freedom, which is being organized out of New York, has already begun generating buzz. That’s partly because it has attracted such influential supporters as the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage, filmmaker Michael Moore, musician John Legend and author Jennifer Egan.

Kennedy Center fans, artists weigh boycotts under Trump: ‘I won’t pay money to be disgusted’

Organizers are encouraging artists nationwide to mount a series of simultaneous public events that take aim at such Trump administration initiatives as the January takeover of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the abrupt dismissal of former Librarian of Congress (and Baltimore resident) Carla Hayden and the defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

“Fascism isn’t going to wait,” Brooklyn-based artist Dread Scott said during an October planning session for Fall of Freedom. “If artists wait for a year and a half to speak up, the world won’t look the same as it does today.”

People from opposite ends of the political spectrum often use the same words and phrases — “censorship” and “partisan ideology” and “rewriting history” — to talk about the actions to which they object, whether that’s liberals toppling the statue of Christopher Columbus into the Inner Harbor in 2020, or the Trump administration ordering a comprehensive review of Smithsonian exhibitions to ensure that museum administrators are not “replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth,” according to the president’s March 27 executive order.

Fall of Freedom participants are not unaware of the irony. Some say that any event aimed at combatting censorship is morally obligated to make room for opposing points of view.

“Democracy does not look like silencing the voice of your opponents or pulling funding from your opponents,” said Stevie Walker-Webb, artistic director of Baltimore Center stage, which will participate in Fall of Freedom by reopening and expanding the theater’s Indigenous Art Gallery.

“When fascist regimes take over, two things tend to happen,” he said. “Some people fall into line, and some people resist. We at Center Stage have a third response, which is to create something so joyful that maybe it makes people in the other line rethink their politics.”

For Walker-Webb, that means everyone is welcome at Center Stage — including the commander in chief.

“I would honestly love it,” he said, “if the president wanted to come and experience the work we’re doing.”

As of noon Friday, six Maryland groups had registered to participate in Fall of Freedom, according to an interactive map on its website.

Those events include a screening of the 1993 David Grubin film “Degenerative Art” in Hyattsville, a pro-Democracy dance party at Baltimore’s Penn Station and artist talks at Bmore Art by local creators whose work deals with issues ranging from immigration to global warming to the plight of Baltimore’s squeegee workers.

“This is a moment when it’s really important for every voice to be heard,” said Inés Sanchez de Lozada, Bmore Art’s gallery coordinator.

“Artists are very resilient and strong and they know how to fight for their freedoms. No matter what this administration does, artists are not going anywhere and art is going to continue to happen.”

Some cultural workers are mounting independent protests against censorship that align with Fall of Freedom ideals but that aren’t necessarily part of its of public events.

For example, earlier this fall, Sherald cited censorship concerns after her painting of a transgender woman posed as the Statue of Liberty drew Trump administration backlash. Although Smithsonian officials attributed the brouhaha to a misunderstanding, “Amy Sherald: American Sublime,” is running instead at the BMA through April 5.

“At a time when transgender people are being legislated against, silenced, and endangered across our nation, silence is not an option,” Sherald wrote in a statement explaining her reasons for canceling the Washington show. “I cannot in good conscience comply with a culture of censorship, especially when it targets vulnerable communities.”

Have a news tip? Contact Mary Carole McCauley at mmccauley@baltsun.com and 410-294-0169.

2025 Bay Bridge Run 10K (Sunday)

The Bay Bridge Run returns this Sunday morning, marking the only time all year the bridge is open to pedestrians.

The race runs across the eastbound span — that’s the two-lane one.

Runners, friends and family are invited to an afterparty on the Eastern Shore side of the bridge after the race.

Annapolis Jazz & Roots Festival

This weekend is the first of two that make up the Annapolis Jazz & Roots Festival.

The event features around a dozen acts in various venues around Annapolis.

The first act Friday night is an Eva Cassidy Tribute by Alexis Tantau. Saturday afternoon brings the Art, Music and the Muse interview and exhibit by Jabari and J.C. Jefferson. The latter’s quartet will also perform afterward. Sunday brings a soulful funk and rock concert by the Michael McHenry tribe.

The schedule, venues, and tickets can be found on the festival’s website.

Taste of Fall on West Street

This ticketed event is put on by the Inner West Street Association to help fund some of its other festivals.

Attendees will be able to try season-appropriate offerings from several West Street restaurants like Stan & Joe’s and 49 West. There will also be desserts, cocktails and live jazz music.

Tickets are on sale for around $50 on Eventbrite.

Shrek the Musical at Severna Park High School

Severna Park High School students are opening their fall production this weekend, Shrek the Musical.

Shows on Friday and Saturday begin at 7 p.m., while the Sunday show begins at 2 p.m.

It follows the same plot as the 2001 animated movie starring William Steig’s beloved green ogre. The original production went up on Broadway in 2008.

Tickets are $10 for students and $15 for everyone else.

Interested in seeing your event on this list? Contact Benjamin Rothstein at brothstein@baltsun.com, 443-928-1926.

“Downtown Frederick, MD was devastated by two floods 50 years ago,” a trailer for the hourlong documentary begins. “It looked like something right out of a disaster movie.”

Historical, black-and-white footage of a sleepy rural community morphs into an airborne shot of a thriving metropolis.

“How did they go from this,” the narrator asks, “to this?”

“InSpired” — a pun on Frederick’s trademark clustered church spires — is the latest documentary produced by the same filmmaking team who created “The House on Jonathon Street,” a documentary chronicling the former “Black Wall Street of Maryland” in Hagerstown.

Both movies are produced by Russ Hodge; narrated by his wife, Cynthia Scott; directed by the producer’s son, Patrick Hodge; and released by their 3 Roads Communications video company.

According to the website, “InSpired” follows the city from its precolonial days to the present.

Viewers nationwide who study Frederick’s renaissance will “have a complete context for understanding how their city or town can make some of the positive changes that Frederick has,” the website reads.

More than 60 screenings of “InSpired” have been scheduled on PBS stations, according to a news release. The film will broadcast in Baltimore and Washington at the same times: 3 p.m. on Nov. 16 and 9 p.m. on Nov. 21.

Have a news tip? Contact Mary Carole McCauley at mmccauley@baltsun.com and 410-294-0169.

So, Austin acknowledged, she had to mount the adaptation at her own Compass Rose Theater, the professional teaching theater where she was named artistic director in June.

It just so happens that this year marks Austen’s 250th birthday. (She was born Dec. 16, 1775.) And that the playwright, Emma Whipday, is named for the heroine of another Austen work.

Whipday, an English playwright and lecturer at Newcastle University specializing in Shakespeare and Renaissance literature, said she was exposed to Austen’s work from a young age.

“I think it was one of those novels that my mum pressed on me and just said, ‘You have to read this,’” Whipday said. “The thing that I really fell in love with about her work is the combination of really beautiful, moving love stories that are tightly plotted and keep you page turning to find out what happens to the central characters, but combined with this fully realized social world where every character sort of leaps off the page through their dialogue, and you feel like you’ve just stepped into this other time and place.”

She added her appreciation for Austen’s family dynamics and the intricate, clockwork-like quality her plots have. Before “Pride & Prejudice,” Whipday also adapted her namesake book, Austen’s “Emma” and “Sense and Sensibility.”

“Pride & Prejudice” follows Elizabeth Bennet as she discovers love and navigates social mores, all the while surrounded by her four sisters, mother and father. Caleigh Riordan Davis plays the character in Compass Rose’s upcoming run.

“Part of it was just, selfishly, I wanted to … get to step inside the novels that way, and get the privilege of living alongside those characters,” Whipday said. “I don’t think I felt like the adaptations that exist are lacking in any way … but I suppose I wanted to see if it was possible to create an adaptation that would be able to follow the plot, follow the characters, and keep as much of the spirit of the original alive, so that audience members who came to it for the first time had what they experienced as the novel brought to them.”

Whipday said some other adaptations take liberties to work onstage, like combining two of the sisters into one, so Whipday made it a goal for herself to keep those elements intact. She also focused on ideas like the meaning of home, family relationships, and how one’s role within the family develops.

She also felt that Austen tried to see the best in her characters and wanted to make sure that came across in her script.

“Mrs. Bennet is often played as an overbearing mother trying to marry her daughters off. I think I brought this sense of, ‘Gosh, the stress of having five daughters in a world where women couldn’t earn a living.’ That’s terrifying. ‘How can you equip your girls to be OK in the world?’” Whipday said. “The central love story, because we see it so much from Lizzie’s perspective in the novel, Mr. Darcy has to seem quite unlikable to the reader, because that’s how we’re seeing it, but obviously, on stage, you can see them both and see what they’re both going through. And so I wanted to give a little bit more of his awkwardness, his introversion, his difficulty in being in groups.”

Austin said that, on top of the humor, the adaptation skillfully makes the story more digestible for modern audiences.

“It really cut to the heart of the novel,” Austin said. “Sometimes there’s a lot of exposition, and I thought it was interesting how Emma could cut some of the exposition, but it [still] smoothly followed the characters, so you could know ‘who was this,’ ‘who was that,’ and that you could follow the plot line easily, even if you had never read Jane Austen before.”

Looking back on Austen’s 250th birthday, both Whipday and Austin expressed that they wished she had been able to write more before she died at the age of 41. Despite having written only six books, with one more left unfinished, Austen’s impact as an author can still be felt to this day.

“The other thing that’s really exciting to me about how Austen’s novels are being celebrated in this way and are enduring in this way is that they are romantic. I think romance novels tend to be the bottom of the pile in terms of people’s judgments of them, especially if people have a literary background,” Whipday said. “And yet, Jane Austen is at the heart of the academic establishment, and everyone recognizes how wonderful she is.”

“Pride & Prejudice” at Compass Rose Theater opens on Nov. 14 and runs through Dec. 14. Tickets are available on Compass Rose’s website.

The theater just wrapped up a production of “Annie,” which was nominated for a Helen Hayes Award, which recognizes theater excellence in the Washington, D.C., region. It’s the ninth nomination the theater has received. It will produce “Rent” and a cabaret show in the first half of next year to close out its 2025-26 season.

Have a news tip? Contact Benjamin Rothstein at brothstein@baltsun.com, 443-928-1926.

Ross, whose soft-spoken TV lessons on “The Joy of Painting” reached millions, painted more than 1,100 works on his public television program and nearly 30,000 in his lifetime. Few reach the market.

The cabin-by-the-lake scene sold at Alex Cooper Auctioneers, and like many privately owned Ross pieces, it was originally a gift from the TV instructor. According to the auction house, the recipients passed it to their daughter, who, upon her death, willed it to her brother-in-law, the seller, who contacted the Baltimore County business this spring.

“I don’t think he had any idea what its value was,” said John Locke, a senior specialist at the auction house who first spoke with the seller. When told the painting could fetch more than $20,000, the seller “was really surprised,” Locke said.

The first bids for the painting were made online Friday morning, surpassing the company’s high-end estimate of $30,000 before the auction even began. When its lot number was called and the handful of in-person customers heard the starting price of $35,000, some gasped, another shook her head and one woman muttered, “wow.” A signed Pablo Picasso poster had sold for $1,100 just moments before.

Like many, Locke said he has “positive connections” with the artist — the 29-year staff member said he would turn on “The Joy of Painting” to help calm his crying baby — but he “never would have guessed” Ross’ work would pull so much cash.

“A next generation is going to come up. He won’t be as well known,” Locke told The Baltimore Sun. “He’ll kind of be, ‘that was my parents’ art and I don’t understand what the big deal was.’ So these guys sold it, in my opinion, at the right time.”

No one in the Towson showroom placed a bid on the cabin painting, and the buyer’s name was not identified.

Similar auctions coming to public TV’s rescue

While sales like Friday’s are rare, dozens of other Bob Ross paintings will be auctioned in coming months to support public broadcasting.

Bob Ross Inc., the company Ross founded in 1985 alongside his wife, Jane, and business partners Walt and Annette Kowalski, has collaborated with the nonprofit syndicator American Public Television to auction off 30 original paintings. The first three will be sold by the Los Angeles auction house Bonhams on Nov. 11, with the rest hitting the market throughout 2026.

All proceeds will go toward easing the burden of licensing fees for public TV stations, which face an uncertain future as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, one of their most significant funders, prepares to shut down.

A September news release called the charity sale the largest single offering of Bob Ross originals to date. Although paintings — and fakes — appear online, the company rarely sells pieces from its archives.

When Bob Ross Inc. President Joan Kowalski, daughter of the cofounders, heard the Towson price, she asked, “Is that good?”

“I don’t know enough about these auctions,” she told a reporter. “I was hoping you could tell me.”

Kowalski said the company certifies Ross paintings it reviews “because there’s so many bootlegs out there.” Without consistent markets, some buyers may have been “ripped off,” she said. Locke noted the last Ross painting Alex Cooper sold, 15 or 20 years ago, brought $8,000.

If the upcoming fundraiser raises “real money” for public broadcasting, Kowalski said, “I would probably do it again.”

Although Friday’s lake scene came from a private seller, Alex Cooper’s director of art, Kathleen Hamill, said it was “very exciting” for the Towson auction house to feature Ross.

Several Alex Cooper staffers serve as on-air appraisers for Maryland Public Television’s “Chesapeake Collectibles.” Hamill said showcasing work by Ross, whose art and persona are often invoked by public media supporters, felt fitting.

“We love to have it just to draw attention to public TV,” she said.

Have a news tip? Contact Luke Parker at lparker@baltsun.com, 410-725-6214, on X as @lparkernews or on Signal as @parkerluke.34.