Wilma Theater

The 1984 that the Wilma Theater unveiled last night makes a strong impact as a piece of multimedia theater, a horror story told in the manner of a nightmare. The production is also an expressive and engrossing summing-up, politically and aesthetically, for artistic director Jiri Zizka, the Czechoslovakian emigre who knows whereof George Orwell speaks in this vision of the totalitarian state in absolute triumph. So does Pavel Kohout, the exiled Czechoslovakian playwright whose adaptation is used.

Mayor Rendell yesterday called on a group of the city's top business leaders to support the Wilma Theater as "one of the key portions of the Avenue of the Arts project. " His administration, he said, is "committed to making a reality" of "an arts and culture district second to none. " The mayor made his pitch to about 50 representatives of the business and cultural communities, who assembled in the 31st floor atrium of the ARA Services Building on Market Street. The Wilma staged the event to give impetus to its capital campaign, now in its fourth year, aimed at raising $6 million for a new 300-seat theater at Broad and Spruce Streets.

In the cold, hazy light of a December afternoon, Blanka and Jiri Zizka stood at a podium gazing out over a small and buzzing crowd assembled at the northeast corner of Broad and Spruce Streets. This was The Day for the Zizkas, Czech emigres whose theatrical visions have driven the once-obscure and tiny Wilma Theater in less than two decades to critical acclaim and national prominence, and now on this day, to a new official home nestled within a spanking slab of a parking garage on South Broad Street, the Avenue of the Arts.

Capping a successful season that began with a move to a new performance space, the Wilma Theater yesterday received 19 nominations for 1997 Barrymore Awards for theatrical excellence, more than any other Philadelphia-area theater. Each of the company's first four productions in its new theater at Broad and Spruce Streets on the Avenue of the Arts received at least one nomination. Avenue X received nine nominations, Quills six, Arcadia three and The Ruling Class one. The Walnut Street Theatre garnered the second most nominations with 14. It was followed by Bristol Riverside Theatre (10)

The Wilma Theater posted a banner across its website late Wednesday to announce that Jiri Zizka - a cofounder of the modern Wilma on Broad Street and a major force in Philadelphia's evolution as a vibrant city for live theater - had died. No details were posted and no one was reachable at the theater after 10:30 p.m., when word of the posting began to spread. Zizka, with his wife, Blanka Zizka, came from Czechoslovakia and formed a relationship with the theater company they would take over and move into new directions.

A new Wilma Theater will rise in what is now a parking lot at Broad and Spruce Streets, a site the city has been struggling to sell for eight years, Philadelphia officials and the developer said yesterday. The 300-seat theater will be included in a parking garage designed to eventually serve a new wing of what now is the Hershey Philadelphia Hotel, Mayor Goode said at a news conference. At the same time, the project's developer, Norman Wolgin, said the Hershey has had financial problems and soon will be replaced by an international hotel operator that intends to bring in European tourists.

The Alfred Bloomingdale we are introduced to at the Wilma Theater is a man who believes in the absolute efficacy of property and power over love as a winning principle. His sexual tastes are no surprise. They fit in with those of his favorite author, the Marquis de Sade. "You've heard of S and M?" he asks a pretty model in one of the more absurd lines in a play that is shot through with howlers. Now, Alfred Bloomingdale was a real person, a member of Ronald Regan's kitchen cabinet, a Yale-educated philanthropist whose family once owned the famous department store.

The big scene in The Concert at St. Ovide Fair is played in total darkness. The blind protagonist has extinguished all light to gain the advantage over his cruel tormentor. The audience at the Wilma Theater is in the same fix as the villain. There is no way of getting a fix on the position of the attacker, who slips about in the blackness with the ease of one who knows no other environment. Sensory deprivation is a dramatic device that the playwright, Spain's Antonio Buero-Vallejo, has used elsewhere.

TRUMPETER LOUIE Armstrong is one of the most famous jazz musicians of all time. But few knew that the real-life Armstrong was very different from his larger-than-life stage persona. The man behind the image is the subject of Terry Teachout's "Satchmo at the Waldorf" starring John Douglas Thompson as both Armstrong and his manager, Joe Glaser. The show, starting Friday through Dec. 2, takes place in Armstrong's backstage dressing room at the Waldorf Astoria and focuses on his upbringing, his relationship with his mobster manager and his views on the civil-rights movement.

"Macbett," a grotesque comedy by Eugene Ionesco, translated from the French by Charles Marowitz. Directed by Blanka Zizka; set, costume and special props design by Hiroshi Iwasaki; original music and sound design by Adam Wernick; lighting by Jeff Brown. Presented by the Wilma Theater at 2030 Sansom St. through Nov. 15. Eugene Ionesco's biggest joke of the evening is his program note that he "ended the name of my play 'Macbett' with two t's so that it wouldn't be confused with the play by Shakespeare.

Theater 1812 Productions: It's My Party - The Women & Comedy Project An exploration of the role of comedy in women's lives. Closes 5/19. Plays & Players Theatre, 1714 Delancey St.; 215-592-9560. www.1812productions.org . $28-$38. A Little Night Music Award-winning Sondheim musical. Closes 6/30. Arden Theatre, 40 N. 2nd St.; 215-922-1122. $36-$48; $15 children 12-18. Acting Naturally: Blithe Spirit A novelist finds himself haunted by the ghost of his first wife. Closes 5/19.

'If you had a time machine . . . " is the theme of the 2013 Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts, now in its final week. Unvoiced is the rest of the question: ". . . where would you go?"

For seven years, BalletX has held sway on the Avenue of the Arts at its home stage in the Wilma Theater. Their Wednesday-evening spring run opener had three world premieres that began with the very dark - in all senses - Instantly Bound and ended with the bright, lighthearted Stations of Mercury . BalletX artistic directors Matthew Neenan and Christine Cox chose choreographers for this program that had me wondering about the connection between...

Multitudes the Kimmel Center wanted, and multitudes it got. With its 100-foot time tunnel, a 20-minute commissioned piece of music theater in the lobby, and other lures, the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts on Thursday woke the Kimmel from its usual somnambulism. Opening night of the biennial festival, which runs through April 27, coincided with regular subscription concerts in the Kimmel's two bigger venues by the Philadelphia Orchestra and Philadelphia Chamber Music Society.

Poets and playwrights have glorified the exploits of seafaring men since Homer's Odyssey . The Wilma Theater presents a more personal, though no less inspiring, look at this tradition in its riveting North American premiere of Richard Bean's Under the Whaleback . Bean's episodic play portrays the lives of North Sea fishermen across three generations, showing a patrilineage of hardscrabble boys who live long enough to sire sons before expiring...

'It's 11 o'clock. " "At night?? Did we have dinner?" Energy drinks and whiskey, plus the occasional $17-a-pack cigarette, are what these people live on. No sleep, no kindness, no food, nothing but blind ambition. Which is, as Marc Antony told us, a grievous fault, and, dude, these people pay grievously. Actually, the above-quoted conversation is one of the few person-to-person exchanges in the short moralistic comedy Assistance by Leslye Headland ( Bachelorette ), the Wilma Theater's latest, under David Kennedy's snappy direction.