FORT WALTON BEACH — The Okaloosa Chamber Singers, directed by Dr. Marilyn Overturf, celebrates its 15th season with Christmas concerts at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 30 at Trinity United Methodist Church on Racetrack Road in Fort Walton Beach and at 4 p.m. Dec. 2 at First United Methodist Church in DeFuniak Springs on the Circle.

The DeFuniak Springs concert is sponsored by The Florida Chautauqua Inc.

"Carols and Candlelight" brings warmth and the spirit of the season through the carols and arrangements of John Rutter and Mark Hayes, as does Bach’s Advent Cantata 140, "Wake, Awake" with chamber orchestra.

Featured instrumental soloists include Ingrid Roberts, violin, and Alice Biggar, oboe, and OCS soloists, sopranos Esther Tiedemann, Uma Jolly, and Nancy Ratcliff, with basses, Richard Montague and David Jones.

There will be audience participation in carol singing. Okaloosa Chamber Singers concerts are free and open to the public, with a suggested donation of $15 per person or $25 dollars per couple.

Contact Dr. Overturf at 682-9651 or email marilyno@cox.net.

This article originally appeared on Crestview News Bulletin: Okaloosa Chamber Singers to present Christmas concerts

CRESTVIEW — With cards to write and send, presents to buy and wrap, fruitcakes to re-gift, decorations to put up and all the rest of the Christmas hubbub, it’s easy for the holiday’s message to get lost among the frenzy.

Fortunately, opportunities abound to relax and let the season’s joy overflow at the north county’s many live Christmas concerts. Student, community and professional groups offer a bounty of holiday music, with many performances free or at a small cost.

• ‘Carols and Candlelight’

Nov. 30 and Dec. 2• Okaloosa Chamber Singers, under Dr. Marilyn Overturf’s direction, celebrates its 15th season with Christmas concerts at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 30 at Trinity United Methodist Church on Racetrack Road in Fort Walton Beach, and 4 p.m. Dec. 2 at First United Methodist Church in DeFuniak Springs. The DeFuniak Springs concert is sponsored by the Florida Chautauqua, which will serve refreshments after the concert.

Selections bring the season’s warmth and spirit through the carols and arrangements of John Rutter, Mark Hayes and J.S. Bach, including his Advent Cantata 140, “Wake, Awake,” which a chamber orchestra will accompany. There will be audience participation in carol singing, including “O Come all Ye Faithful,”  “Silent Night” and “Deck the Halls.”

The concerts are free, with a suggested $15 donation per person or $25 per couple.

Contact Overturf, 682-9651 or marilyno@cox.net, for more details. Visit okaloosachambersingers.org to hear performances.

• Baker School band Christmas concert

Dec. 4 • The Baker School middle school band presents its annual Christmas concert of holiday favorites at 7:30 p.m. in the school auditorium. Admission is free.

• Holiday Pops Concert

Dec. 7• The Northwest Florida Symphony Orchestra will celebrate the holiday season in festive style at 7:30 p.m. with a Holiday Pops Concert featuring light classics, pops selections and the ever-popular carol sing-a-longs. The Northwest Florida Symphony Chorale and the Belle Voci women’s vocal ensemble will join the orchestra for this popular annual event held in the Mainstage theater of the Mattie Kelly Arts Center on the Niceville campus of Northwest Florida State College.

The concert continues the orchestra’s 25th season celebration and includes works such as “Deck the Halls,” “Let it Snow,” “Sleigh Ride,” “Sweet Little Jesus Boy,” “Sanctus (Processional),” “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen,” “Veni  Veni” and George Frederic Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus.”

Tickets are available by phone or web for $22.50 each for adults or $16 for youth age 18 and younger and active duty military. Current NWFSC students may request one free ticket per student ID in person from the Box Office. Online ticket sales are available through www.mattiekellyartscenter.org. 

• Davidson Winter Concert

Dec. 11• The Davidson Middle School chorus performs its annual Winter Concert at 6:30 p.m. in the Crestview High School Pearl Tyner Auditorium. Admission is free.

Selections, some of which will spotlight solo vocalists, include “The Three O’Clock Rehearsal of Combined Band and Chorus for The Very Merry Christmas Musicale,” “Feliz Navidad,” “Island Noel,” “Let it Snow!,” “Candle in Your Heart” and “Carol of the Bells.”

• Baker high school band Christmas concert

Dec. 11• The Baker School high school band presents its annual Christmas concert of holiday favorites at 7:30 p.m. in the auditorium. Admission is free.

• Crestview High School chorus Christmas concert

Dec. 13• The 130-voice Crestview High School chorus’ Christmas Concert is at 7 p.m. in the Pearl Tyner Auditorium. An eclectic program of traditional and contemporary seasonal tunes, plus other choral works, will comprise the evening.

Included will be the humorous but challenging “Fruit Cake” song. The concert concludes with the massed chorus and alumni performance of the “Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s “Messiah.” Tickets — $5 adults, $2 students — are  available at the door.

• ‘A Victorian Christmas’

Dec. 13 •A festive night of Victorian holiday traditions with Christmas carols, dancing, desserts, wassail and a special visit from Father Christmas will be 7:30 p.m. in the Mattie Kelly Arts Center’s McIlroy Gallery at Northwest Florida State College in Niceville.

“A Victorian Christmas” features the college’s 26-voice mixed Madrigals Singers ensemble, the women’s Belle Voci ensemble, and the 12-member NWFSC dance ensemble.

This event is sold out but no-show tickets might be available at the door. Tickets are $25 each. All proceeds go to the NWFSC Fine Arts Scholarship fund.

• Schola Cantorum Christmas concert

Dec. 17• Schola Cantorum, the Northwest Florida State College-based “school of singing,” will present its annual Christmas concert series, including a 7 p.m. performance at First Presbyterian Church of Crestview. The ensemble comprises trained vocalists from throughout the county under Dr. John Leatherwood’s direction.

The group will perform a repertoire of seasonal music from several centuries, including “The Wexford Carol,” “Sir Christèmas” and “Amid the Calm of Winter’s Rest.” Selections also include “As with Gladness Men of Old” and “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.” Admission is free, though a donation will be accepted.

Contact Leatherwood, 729-6071 or leatherj@nwfsc.edu, for more details.

• Baker School choral concert

Dec. 18• The Baker School middle and high school choruses will present their Christmas concert of seasonal music at 7:30 p.m. in the auditorium. Admission is free.

• Big Red Machine Christmas concert

Dec. 18 • The 280-member Crestview High School band will present its annual Christmas concert at 7 p.m. in Pearl Tyner Auditorium. Expect seasonal favorites and other orchestral musical treats from the band’s several ensembles, including swinging holiday sounds by the jazz band. Admission is free.

Contact News Bulletin Arts & Entertainment Editor Brian Hughes at 850-682-6524 or brianh@crestviewbulletin.com. Follow him on Twitter @cnbBrian.

This article originally appeared on Crestview News Bulletin: Christmas concerts set throughout December in Okaloosa County

NICEVILLE — Ya gotta love singing and dancing nuns, especially when they’re the Little Sisters of Hoboken. I’ve had a thing for them ever since my pal Dan and I bought tickets to see the original “Nunsense” from a man hawking his while we waited in the TKTS line in Times Square.

Understandably, the Theatre Development Fund folks who run TKTS warn you not to buy tickets from anyone but them, but this time, we hit the jackpot. By the time we left the Douglas Fairbanks, our jaws hurt from laughing and my side hurt from when I slid out of my seat while howling during one hysterical scene. (It was the Act I closer when Mother Superior accidentally gets stoned.) But we were hooked. As the show’s tagline reads, “Nunsense is habit-forming.”

Such is the humor awaiting the local audience Nov. 29 when Cindy Williams, of “Laverne & Shirley” TV fame, stars as Mother Superior in the touring production of “Nunset Boulevard” coming to the Mattie Kelly Arts Center at Northwest Florida State College. She joins a long and distinguished cast who’ve performed the character, including Kaye Ballard, Rue McClanahan, Sally Struthers, Phyllis Diller, Honor Blackman and Edie Adams.

“Nunsense,” Dan Goggin’s loving homage to his Catholic formative years, begun as a line of greeting cards, has grown into a substantial franchise. He followed with “Nunsense 2: The Second Coming,” “Nuncrackers: The Nunsense Christmas Musical” and four more installments. He even oversaw a special New Orleans production of “Nunsense,” restaged with actors in drag, called “Nunsense A-men.”

The original show has been translated into more than 20 languages and has been produced more than 8,000 times around the world. It was the second-longest running off-Broadway production in history, surpassed only by “The Fantastiks.”

The latest incarnation, “Nunset Boulevard,” a tender poke at “Sunset Boulevard,” Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber’s stage musical of Billy Wilder’s classic piece of 1950 film noir, finds the Little Sisters of Hoboken in California. They have been invited to perform at the Hollywood Bowl and are thrilled at the opportunity until they arrive and realize that they are actually booked into the Hollywood Bowl-A-Rama — a bowling alley with a cabaret lounge — and not the famed outdoor amphitheater they envisioned.

New songs include “Hello Hollywood,” “The Bowling Ball Blues” and “The Flickers.”

There’s nothing terribly cerebral about any of the productions in the “Nunsense” franchise, and that’s most of the fun. Sometimes theatergoers just want to be entertained. And there’s nothing more engaging than singing and dancing nuns. Get in the habit on Nov. 29.

This article originally appeared on Crestview News Bulletin: PREVIEW: More ‘Nunsense’ coming to NWFSC's Niceville campus

NICEVILLE — When “Fiddler on the Roof” opened Sept. 22, 1964, it ran 3,242 performances before closing almost eight years later. It was revived four times on the Great White Way alone and has had thousands of productions around the world.

Now, the latest national tour of the show that brought such Broadway standards as “If I Were a Rich Man,” “Tradition,” “Sunrise, Sunset” and “Matchmaker, Matchmaker” comes Dec. 3 to the Mattie Kelley Arts Center.

A full-scale musical masterpiece, the professional touring production features a crew of 67 actors, musicians and technical staff to recreate and populate Anatevka, a poor Russian Jewish village in 1905, on the Russian Revolution’s eve.

Times, they are a-changing, even for the village’s sheltered people.

“Fiddler” has stolen audiences’ hearts all over the world with its humor, warmth and honesty. Based on Sholom Aleichem’s stories, it has a rousing, heartwarming score and timeless songs as Tevye, a poor milkman, tries to keep his family and village’s beloved traditions and faith strong despite a changing world.

With memorable, hummable tunes by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, Broadway legend Hal Prince directed and choreographed the original production.

In the production coming to Northwest Florida State, veteran Broadway actors Jimmy Ferraro and Dee Etta Rowe, who have actually been married to each other for 25 years, just like their characters, will play the starring roles of Tevye and his wife Goldie.

With its warmth and sometimes rousing, sometimes heartfelt numbers, “Fiddler on the Roof” is a celebration of “Tradition” and a salute “To Life.”

La chaim!

Want to go?

The national “Fiddler on the Roof” tour plays at 7:30 p.m. Dec. 3 at Northwest Florida State College’s Mattie Kelley Arts Center. Tickets are $45 each from the box office by phone, online or in person. Call 729-6000 or see www.mattiekellyartscenter.org.

Contact News Bulletin Arts & Entertainment Editor Brian Hughes at 850-682-6524 or brianh@crestviewbulletin.com. Follow him on Twitter @cnbBrian.

This article originally appeared on Crestview News Bulletin: PREVIEW: ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ coming Dec. 3 to Niceville

When I was in Vermont, I never had apple pie. But the name just sounds autumnal, doesn’t it?

You can cheat and buy a package of two 9-inch pre-made piecrusts. But given time, it’s a feeling of deep satisfaction to make your own.

CRUST 3 cups plain flour 1½ tsp salt 3 tbsp sugar 1 cup Crisco (from experience, I learned to not substitute a store brand for the real thing when dealing with shortening) 1/3 cup ice water

Toss the flour, salt and sugar to mix. Cut it together using a wire pastry blender or two knives until it “looks like coarse meal.” (I had no idea what that meant, but all the recipes say to do it. It means to make it chunky.)

Sprinkle with some water. Start gathering it together with a fork, then give up, stick your hands in, and work it into smooth dough. (Make sure you wash your hands first, though.)

Divide the dough into two balls, one slightly bigger than the other one. Roll it out between two sheets of floured wax paper.

FILLING 2½-3 pounds Granny Smith apples, peeled and sliced ½ to 2/3 cup brown sugar 1 tsp cinnamon 1/8 tsp salt ¼ cup flour 2 tbsp butter

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.

Line a 9-inch pie pan with the larger of the two crusts you rolled out. I found it easier to position the crust if it is on the bottom sheet of wax paper, which you invert and then peel off.

Mix the sliced apples with the sugar, cinnamon, salt and flour. Pour it into the pie shell and dot with slices of butter.

Cover with the top piecrust. Trim off the excess dough, and then pinch the edges together. Poke vent holes in the top. (Mom always made the letter “A” for apple. I assume it was apple, anyway.)

To make the pie festive, make autumn leaves and arrange on top. Mix in a bit of yellow food coloring in half the remaining dough and some red coloring in the other. The only practical way of doing so is with your hands. Be prepared to have yellow and red fingers for two days.

Using leaf-shaped cookie cutters or a sharp knife, cut out several red and yellow leaves and arrange them on top of the pie. Mix the remaining bits of red and yellow dough together to make orange dough and repeat. Draw “veins” in the leaves with the sharp knife.

You can also make an egg wash (some egg mixed with a bit of water) and paint it over the pie. That’ll give it a nice shine when it’s done baking.

Bake about 45 minutes. Halfway through, cover the edges with aluminum foil so they don’t burn.

This article originally appeared on Crestview News Bulletin: CULINARY ARTS: Vermont apple pie

I love good Southern cornbread dressing, but being from points north, my Yankee genes sometimes ache for breadcrumb stuffing. With Turkey Day being hectic, here’s how I cheat and still serve up a great dish of stuffing that even my Crestview-born roommate grudgingly admits is pretty tasty.

2 boxes turkey flavor stuffing mix 1 pound bulk mild Italian sausage (or four sausages with the skin pulled off and meat crumbled) 1 large onion 3 cups chicken broth to replace water in stuffing mix directions Olive oil Parsley, sage and thyme to taste (if you’re a Simon and Garfunkel fan, feel free to add rosemary)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

Dice the onion. Sauté the sausage and the onion in a tablespoon of olive oil over medium heat.

Heat the chicken broth in a microwave or pan to almost boiling. Mix in the stuffing mix, and add the sausage and onions. Season to taste.

Pour the mixture into a 9- by 13-inch baking dish. Bake for about 20 minutes until top turns brown.

Contact News Bulletin Arts & Entertainment Editor Brian Hughes at 850-682-6524 or brianh@crestviewbulletin.com. Follow him on Twitter @cnbBrian.

This article originally appeared on Crestview News Bulletin: CULINARY ARTS: Yankee stuffing

CRESTVIEW — The production of “Arsenic and Old Lace” by the new community theatre troupe is more than a delightful evening of murder, mayhem and elderberry wine. It is a significant milestone in the north county’s cultural life, marking the return of community theatre. That the show is sheer delight from start to finish is just the icing on the cake.

Joseph Kesselring’s magnificent black comedy has delighted American theatre audiences for decades. With its old-timey, stately veneer, it’s tempting to think you’re about to settle in for an evening of dated drama and hokey jokes that might have evoked howls in the 1940s but just seem dumb today. Not so. 

Kesselring’s tale of gracious murderesses, their frazzled, recently engaged nephew, his preacher’s daughter fiancée, his gangster brother, a mad plastic surgeon, another sibling who thinks he’s Teddy Roosevelt, and a cop on the beat who’d rather be a playwright, remains as fun and fresh today as when it was written in 1940.

The as-yet unnamed Crestview community theatre group bringing it to life on the Warriors Hall stage has done a marvelous job of evoking the ambience of an old Brooklyn house. The set, under the direction of Eric Wintersteen, is perfectly overdecorated with ample opportunities for exits and entrances, door slamming and Teddy Roosevelt’s frequent charges up the San Juan Hill of the main staircase.

Coupled with delightful costuming and makeup, the visual appeal of the show is as important as the acting, and for the most part, the performers were bang on target. Particularly enjoyable is Sandra Peters as spinster Abby Brewster. I’ve been dying to see Sandra act since she first arrived in Crestview and told me she’d been on New York stages.

We were delighted with the performance of Crestview High School senior Jack Barr as the frazzled Mortimer, theatre critic nephew who discovers Abby and her sister, Martha, played convincingly by Asleigh Gonyea, have been performing acts of mercy by poisoning lonely old men seeking to rent a room in their rambling old home.

“This has developed into a very bad habit,” Mortimer tells his aunties when he learns they have buried 12 victims in the basement.

Jeremy Faust was particularly well cast as evil brother Jonathan Brewster, who returns after 20 years of gangsterhood around the world. The role was originated by Boris Karloff, hence multiple references to the famed Universal Pictures monster actor. As plastic surgeon Dr. Einstein, Ronald Walker seemed to channel Peter Lorre, who made the role famous in the 1944 film, bringing the character lots of delightful menace.

Sean Peters, Sandra Peters’ husband, as the play-writing policeman Officer O’Hara, and Teagan Faust as Mortimer’s  fiancée Elaine, topped the list of favorite performers.

A few technical glitches were ably covered, including Walker quipping, “Must be a short” and banging the wall when a lighting miscue caused a flicker. 

I might also gently offer a criticism about the casting of Officer Brophy, ably played by Victoria Martin who butched up her performance of what is usually a male role. Next time, just make it a female patrolman. There’s always an element of distraction when a member of the opposite sex plays a role meant for the other.

But that little bone is minor. Overwhelmingly the evening was a delight. Filled seats in Warriors Hall indicated the community craves live theatre, even when two shows were running simultaneously, as happened last weekend. And now that we know the hall in the Whitehurst Municipal Building can accommodate theatricals, it’s time for the city to put in some theatrical lighting. It’ll only increase the value of Warriors Hall as a community resource.

And, from a purely selfish standpoint, I can’t wait to see the hall enhanced for our new community theatre troupe’s next production. If it’s anything like “Arsenic and Old Lace,” it’ll be another sell-out.

This article originally appeared on Crestview News Bulletin: 'Arsenic' marks return of Crestview theatre: Review