Community Corner
Celebrity Readings Monday at SOPAC
The SOPAC event benefits the South Orange Maplewood Adult School
The Adult School benefit Celebrity Readings—to be held Monday at 7:30 p.m. at SOPAC—is now in its sixth year. According to director and host Emily Zacharias, the series of staged readings by veteran theater performers is a format that gels perfectly with the institution's mission.
"This is absolutely a perfect brand of entertainment for the Adult School because it's fine literature being shared with an adult audience," said Zacharias, a Maplewood resident who's been an Adult School trustee for four years.
It's Zacharias's third time hosting the show—which formerly went up in local schools before finding a home at SOPAC—and this year's slate of performers is comprised of Eddie Korbich, Alan Zweibel and Isaiah Sheffer.
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Maplewood resident Korbich currently plays Scuttle in Broadway's production of "The Little Mermaid" and will read the J.D. Salinger story "The Laughing Man."
Short Hills resident Zweibel, one of the original "Saturday Night Live" writers and a winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor, will read two selections from his new book "Clothing Optional."
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Last up will be Sheffer, executive director of the long-standing "Selected Shorts" program at Symphony Space on the Upper West Side—which also airs on WNYC—whom Zacharias calls "the high czar of performing short stories." He performed at Celebrity Readings last year and will read T.C. Boyle's tale of a restaurant critic, "Sorry, Fugu."
"There's simply no one more discerning in the literature he brings to the stage, and no one who knows better how to storytell," said Zacharias.
Tickets to the show are $35 and are available at the SOPAC box office, or can be purchased online.
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