For the City Times

The fourth annual ARTi Gras festival of the arts will be popping up around Portage County in March. This year the festival is expanding into Stevens Point, Amherst, Bancroft and Almond, with a mixture of theatre, art and music.

A highlight of the 2017 festival will be performances of an original children’s musical, Lil Pea, performed by Sarah Lawrence College, and featuring art work by local students. The show will be performed at the Portage County Library on Saturday, March 11, at 9:00 a.m., and at the Bancroft School at 3:30 p.m.

The performers will stay after each performance to answer questions and sign autographs. Lil Pea was written by Stevens Point native Allen Lang who teaches theatre at Sarah Lawrence College in New York.

The Lettie W. Jensen Community Center in Amherst will present an afternoon of comedy by the Silver Foxes senior theatre group on Monday, March 13 at 2:00 p.m. The performance includes a short one-act play, Mrs. Sorkin, and vignettes from the pen of housewife columnist Erma Bombeck of Nagging, American Style! The afternoon performance is presented free of charge.

Almond High School will host a performance of the Tony Award-winning play The Gin Game by D.L. Coburn on Wednesday, March 15, at 7:00 p.m.  The play, performed by the award-winning Wisconsin Rapids Community Theatre is the WRCT entry in the 2017 state competition of community theatres and previously toured to Milwaukee. Admission to the show is free.

The ARTi Gras festival of the arts runs March 9 – 18, with nearly 50 events taking place in eight communities and more than a dozen venues around the Central Wisconsin area. A complete schedule of events is online at www.wrctheatre.org/artigras, and brochures are available at area arts and cultural organizations and at the Wisconsin Rapids Community Theatre office.