Shakespeare With Benefits Presents Sandy Relief: A Bard-Based Variety Show, Feat. Olympia Dukakis, Today

Shakespeare with Benefits (http://shakespearewithbenefits.org/) presents Sandy Relief: A Bard-Based Variety Show, a special performance to benefit Hurricane Sandy victims via New York Cares. This one-time benefit performance will take place at The West End Theatre, Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew, 263 West 86th Street at West End Avenue, 2nd floor tonight, December 17th at 7:30 pm (Doors open at 7:00).

Sandy Relief: A Bard-Based Variety Show features classical actors and singers, with special guest, Academy Award-winner Olympia Dukakis, sharing their talent, passion and creativity to raise money for hurricane relief efforts. The program uses Shakespeare as a springboard for a reverent and irreverent revue that includes songs, soliloquies, scenes, even swordplay in a delightful mélange of Bard-based entertainment for the ages and all ages!

General admission tickets are $20 and can be purchased in advance at http://shakespearewithbenefits.org/tickets/ or at the door, CASH ONLY.

All proceeds will go to New York Cares to benefit Hurricane Sandy victims. Shakespeare with Benefits is working with directly with New York Cares and is committed to helping rebuild New York City in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy through art. If you cannot attend, we invite you to make a donation to help support the on the ground efforts of thousands of volunteers working in the neighborhoods hardest hit by the storm. You can make your tax-deductible donation directly to Shakespeare with Benefits' beneficiary, New York Cares at http://shakespearewithbenefits.org/. Just click on the Donate button. New York Cares has been working around the clock to assess needs as they develop and to deploy volunteers as quickly as possible. The needs generated by this storm are enormous and will continue to grow in the weeks and months ahead. A contribution of any size will make a world of difference. Your donation will be put to immediate use, and will support efforts in the days, weeks and months ahead.

Olympia Dukakis is an award-winning actress of stage, screen and television. Her memorable performance in Moonstruck earned her both an Academy Award and a Golden Globe in 1987. She has accrued a host of awards and accolades for her many performances in, among others, Sinatra, More Tales of the City and Joan of Arc. A longtime lover of the stage, she received Drama Desk and Outer Circle Critics Awards for Rose (2000), as well as two OBIE Awards for A Man's a Man and Christopher Durang's The Marriage of Bette and Boo. Together with her husband, Louis Zorich, she founded and ran The Whole Theatre Company in Montclair, NJ for fifteen years. Last summer, she delighted audiences as Prospera in The Tempest at Shakespeare & Co. in the Berkshires and will return there in the title role of Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children next summer. She recently performed the title role in King Lear in a benefit performance for the HERO Theatre. Another project dear to her heart is a documentary, Beneath the Olive Tree, which reveals the treatment of female prisoners of war in Greece. Her autobiography, Ask Me Again Tomorrow: A Life in Progress, was published in 2003.