Students in improv class at the Youth Onstage! Community Performance School create a human machine.

The big news at Youth Onstage! this spring is the emergence of new theatre artists.

Franceli Chapman, 20 years old and a freshman at Lehman College, C.U.N.Y., is co-directing Left of the Moon, YO!'s new workshop production, which opened April 7. Franceli is a graduate of the Youth Onstage! Community Performance School and the Development School for Youth. She is an acting dynamo, having appeared in four productions at the All Stars Project in the last 12 months. Franceli played Friar Tuck in the February 2005 YO! production of Robin Hood: A Political Romance; she was a member of the youth ensemble in the dance-play with music, License to Dream; she created and played a number of roles in the Youth Onstage! Experimental Theatre Workshop production, Our City; and she performed herself in Have You Ever Seen a Dream Rapping?, the Castillo Theatre's 2006 Black History Month production. (All of this, while being a full-time student and holding a job as human resources director!)

In the current Youth Onstage! workshop production, Left of the Moon, Franceli is the assistant director and chorographer. Combining storytelling, dance and drama, Left of the Moon, is a poetic play about the beginnings of the cultural movement called "The Sixties." Left of the Moon opened Friday April 7 at the All Stars Performing Arts and Education Center, 543 West 42nd Street between 10th and 11th Avenues. Tickets are $15. Group, senior and student discounts available. TDF accepted. For tickets call 212-941-1234 or click here.

Darnell Cadet and Snigda Sarkar in Our City, the Youth Onstage! fall production.

Youth Onstage! has also launched an on-going Playwriting Workshop for the development of new playwrights. The workshop, which is led by YO! Artistic Director, Dan Friedman and Brian Mullin, a founding teacher of the Youth Onstage! Community Performance School and director of YO!'s "New Voices" play reading series, hopes to produce a script (or two) to be produced by YO! for the fall 2006-2007 season. Also, check the Theatre for the Whole City website for a May date for a play reading of Unarmed at Ragnarok, a new political revue by Michael Reyes, an Iraqi war veteran and a member of Youth Onstage! The reading is being produced by Youth Onstage!'s "New Voices" Playwriting Workshop.

If you are between the ages of 14 and 21 and interested in studying the basics of theatre and performance with the Summer Theatre Institute of the Youth Onstage! Community Performance School, which meets Mondays through Thursdays from July 10 through August 12, please click here for an application or call Dan Friedman at 212-356-8250.