Masquers Playhouse Giving Tuesday Virtual Festival
Did you miss the Livestream? No worries! We’ve got the entire broadcast here. See the time codes below to jump around to the sections you want to watch.
On Giving Tuesday, December 1, 2020, Masquers hosted a day-long virtual festival with special guests and performances! Scroll down to see when each segment starts. You can watch the entire Livestream using the player above or scroll down to the time segment or guest or artist you are interested in watching. Then click the “starts at xxx” to be taken directly to that segment on YouTube.
Starts at 32 mins
Masquers Playhouse Virtual Festival Kick-Off
Start Giving Tuesday and our Virtual Festival off with an extra dose of fun and holiday cheer! Hosted by Alana Keys-Wagner and Carl Smith.

Starts at 1 hr : 31 mins
Music from Who’s Feeling Young Now
Who’s Feeling Young Now is a bluegrass band from the Bay Area. The band features Niko Quale on fiddle and vocals, Lucy Khadder on bass and vocals, Silas Jude on banjo, and Teo Quale on guitar and vocals.

Special Community Spotlight
Pt. Richmond History Association and Richmond History Museum, with special guest Karen Buchanan, is dedicated to promoting awareness of the community’s exciting and colorful history.

Starts at 2 hrs : 37 mins
Dance with Justin Cole of Joy in Motion Dance
This hour is sure to be high energy and will get you up on your feet. In addition to performances and TikTok-style fun, we’ll enjoy some fun cardio sure to help you burn off those extra Thanksgiving-calories!

Special Community Spotlight
Richmond Main Street, with special guest Alicia Gallo, is dedicated to revitalizing historic Downtown Richmond as a pedestrian-friendly urban village, offering products, services, arts, and entertainment that reflect the community’s rich and diverse heritage. Learn how you can shop local safely at Downtown businesses this holiday season!

Starts at 3 hrs : 31 mins
Season by Season podcast LIVE! with Alexis & Kit
This live broadcast of their successful podcast is a celebration of poetry, music, sound, and the rhythm of nature. Sit back with some warm cider, tea, or cocoa and be inspired by the world around you! Visit their website.

Starts at 4 hrs : 38 mins
Story-time with Mrs. Claus
Most children will not be able to meet Santa in person this year. Don’t worry. He will be joining us live! And Mrs. Claus is joining too. She’ll be reading two of her favorite Christmas stories.

Special Community Spotlight
Parents, Resources, & More (PRAM), a community-driven non-profit organization supporting families with young children living in the Bay Area, working to create a vibrant, engaged community of healthy, happy, well-informed parents and children.
Tandem – Partners in Early Learning engages the whole community to ensure all families have the resources, skills, and confidence they need to support their children’s kindergarten readiness. We offer a variety of programs, events, and activities that provide children and families with access to books and an ecosystem of support for parents/caregivers for promoting children’s healthy social-emotional development literacy and language development, early learning, and kindergarten readiness. Stay tuned to hear more about our free online resources and a chance to support our work.

Starts at 5 hrs : 38 mins
Music from Crying Uncle
Whether playing straight-up bluegrass or virtuosic Dawg Grisman tunes, Crying Uncle delivers amazing instrumentals and vocal leads and harmonies that catapult the band into an elite sphere of artistry. Winners of the 2018 Pickin’ in the Pines Band Contest in Flagstaff AZ, and selected by the International Bluegrass Music Association to perform at IBMA’s 2018 World of Bluegrass in North Carolina, CU is making waves in the bluegrass community. Brothers Miles and Teo Quale are National and State Champion fiddlers and pickers.

Special Community Spotlight
Point Connect Radio & Point Richmond CERT with special guest Edie Sellers with tips to keep us safe this holiday season and special shout-outs to the organizations in our community making a the pandemic a little bit easier for all of us

World Premiere Reading
ACT 1 starts at 6 hrs : 40 mins with opening remarks from the playwright Judith Offer
ACT 2 starts at 8 hrs : 11 mins
World Premiere Reading of Judith Offer’s newest play about the voting, arrest, and trial of America’s most famous Suffragette, Susan B. Anthony.
The famous suffragist, Susan B. Anthony, did actually vote once, fifty years before it was legal. Judith’s newest play, carefully researched, tells how and why she and 13 other women in Rochester, New York did it, what happened after, and what these events showed about women’s roles in America in 1872. Originally written to help celebrate the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage in America, this story has new poignancy given the events of the recent presidential election.
Featuring

Judith Offer
Playwright
Judith Offer got involved with writing history plays during one of the earliest of her twenty-five years of volunteer teaching of drama in a number of Oakland schools. A fourth-grade teacher requested a California history play, and she found the process so fascinating, and fun, that she wrote a workbook
full, California History Plays for Young People, which sold throughout the state. This led to a full-length musical, A Shirtwaist Tale (Music by Arkadi Serper) about a garment strike in Lower East Side NY in 1909, and Compared to What?, the play about the Pullman Porters that Masquers has scheduled for next season. Judith has a number of non-history plays, too, including 15 others produced in the SF Bay Area, a one-act that has traveled to ten states, and a couple of libretti looking for a composer. Her oeuvre focuses on good parts for women and the different ethnic and national groups that populate the United States, especially African Americans. She is also a poet, with five poetry books and a long list of publications in various journals. She is the mother of two grown daughters and an 8-year-old grandson, Sam, and has lived in the same house in Oakland for 40 years with her husband, Stuart Offer.
For endless other details, check www.JudithOffer.com.

Shay Oglesby-Smith
as Susan B. Anthony
Shay has been performing in the Bay Area for over 25 years. She’s appeared at her beloved Masquers Playhouse multiple times and considers it her “home theater”. Other theaters she’s worked in include: Contra Costa Civic Theatre, The Campbell Theater, Altarena Playhouse, and New Conservatory Theatre Center. Just a few of her favorite roles are: Sylvie in The Nance, Bev/Kathy in Clybourne Park, Sonia in Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, Amanda in The Glass Menagerie, and Rosalind in Photograph 51. Shay looks forward to the day we can all enjoy live theatre again. Until that time, stay safe, wash your hands, and please wear a mask.

Heather Warren
as Mary Anthony
Heather is very grateful for the opportunity to perform again after a brief quarantine hiatus. She has longed to perform with Masquers Playhouse, and she is thrilled her introduction is with this new work! Heather was last seen as Ilona Ritter in She Loves Me (Pinole Community Players) with her dear friend Carl Smith, and she is dreaming of the day when she can share the stage with her fellow performers again. In her unprecedented amount of free time, Heather has been teaching herself piano, spending time outdoors, choreographing for kids camp, and enjoying potatoes in their many forms.

Michele Delattre
as Gula McLean
Michele Delattre is a longtime Masquers member happily acting, directing, and wielding the occasional broom or paintbrush. Elsewhere she is the Curtain Theatre’s artistic director, producing free Shakespeare in Old Mill Park, Mill Valley. Her California acting credits include many East Bay community theaters, ShotzSF, Pacific Rep in Carmel, and San Francisco Shakespeare Festival. When she is not wearing a theater hat, she plays Celtic traditional music with her husband Don Clark.

Linda Ellinwood
as Rhoda Degarma
An artist and active member of GearBox Gallery in Oakland, Linda first appeared in Masquers Most Happy Fella in 1985 and has been a stalwart member since then. She was Lobby Manager for six years and has acted, costumed, built and designed sets, stage managed and directed. Favorite roles: Dr. Livingstone in Agnes of God and Hedy LaRue in How to Succeed… Directing favorite: City Of Angels.
She is excited to be part of bringing Just Vote to life.

Logan Schluntz
as Edwin Marsh
Logan Schluntz is thrilled to be in his first production at Masquers Playhouse. Before Covid, he was in Urinetown (Officer Barrell) at Landmark Musical Theatre and Evil Dead, the Musical (ensemble) at Las Positas College, and Matilda the Musical (Ensemble/Mafia Goon) at Contra Costa Musical Theatre. He’s currently in the inaugural class of the Las Positas College Actor’s Conservatory. He would like to thank family and friends for their support and really hopes to be on stage in person again soon.

Vaughn Mayer
as Beverly Jones
Vaughn Mayer is excited to perform his first Zoom script reading and his first time working with Masquers! Before the Pandemic he was in Drinking Habits at Santa Clara Players, going to school, and working as a food server. During these hard times, Vaughn keeps busy by holding down a steady job and staying connected to and supporting his friends. This being his first performance since the Covid-19 outbreak, he was elated and grateful for the opportunity to perform again and hopefully help make the holidays a little brighter.

Greg Lynch
as William Hall
Greg, a San Francisco native, has performed in largely musical theater around the Bay since the mid-1980s with companies ranging from Diablo Light Opera Company, Contra Costa Musical Theater, Contra Costa Civic Theater, Pinole Community Players, Douglass Morrisson, and Stage 1 Theatre in the East Bay, and Hillbarn Theatre, Pacifica Spindrift and Foothill Music Theatre to the South. Cherished dramatic roles include Bruce Niles in The Normal Heart at Pittsburg Community Theatre and Miss Tracy Mills last fall in Town Hall Theatre’s The Legend of Georgia McBride. Thank you Carl Smith for luring me out of my pandemic doldrums for my first Masquers (and Zoom) gig!

Jason Berner
as Sylvester Lewis
Jason Berner previously appeared at Masquers as Hector in The Gamester. He has performed at theaters across the East Bay, including Pinole Community Players (Death Trap, Laughter on the 23rd Floor, Harvey), Contra Costa Community Theatre (All the Way, You Can’t Take It with You), Chanticleers (Rumors, Born Yesterday), and Vallejo Shakespeare (Taming of the Shrew, Titus Andronicus, Measure for Measure). During the day, Jason works at Contra Costa College. Go Comets!

George Doerr
as Elisha Keeney
George has been a stage actor since 1987 and a Masquers member since 1996. He has performed in numerous theatres primarily in the East Bay including Pinole Players, Pittsburg Community Theatre, Chanticleers, and Altarena in addition to the Masquers. Favorite roles include Felix Ungar in The Odd Couple and Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls. Just Vote will be George’s first Zoom performance.

Mark Shepard
as Judge Henry Seldon
Mark has performed in comedy, commedia dell’arte, musicals, modern and classical drama, and Shakespeare all over the Bay Area. In addition to his work as a graphic designer, Mark enjoys genealogy, jewelry design, camping, photography, and being a grandfather. He couldn’t do this without the love and encouragement of his wife Laurel.

Norman Gee
as Frederick Douglass
Norman has enjoyed working in Bay Area Theater for years, with companies including SF-Shakes, Word for Word, Lorraine Hansberry Theater, TheatreWorks, Shotgun Players, Central Works, Perspective Theater, Ubuntu (now Oakland Theater Project), SF-PlayGround.
Founder of Oakland Public Theater, Norman creates ‘a different kind of Black Theater, expanding notions of culture to encompass often invisible roles of African Americans. He will be directing Judith Offer’s COMPARED TO WHAT? at Masquers Playhouse in the coming season
So what happens next?