Arts & Culture

When “Rent" stormed Broadway back in 1996, it was already a landmark. Its creator, Jonathan Larson, had died of a aortic aneurysm at age of 35. His death was on the day his rock musical updating the opera “La Boheme” was to begin previews Off Broadway.

Following in the footsteps of the Jane Pickens Theater in Newport, Providence’s Cable Car Cinema recently launched a web-based fundraising campaign for a digital projection system. The single-screen art house theater must raise some $50,000 soon to purchase this new technology, or risk falling out of the movie business.

The film industry will soon transition from the expensive, traditional 35mm film reels to the new, crisp digital prints, making the Cable Car’s 250 pound projector from the 1950s more obsolete than a record player.

Mixed Magic Theatre says it will open an art gallery at its Pawtucket theater. The first artist to show there is Morris Nathanson, an interior designer and artist. Mixed Magic co-founder Ricardo Pitts-Wiley says the art gallery will complement the existing performing arts spaces.

“Well, it’s part of a long, kind of a long process at Mixed Magic Theatre to develop a full-service, if you will, a full-bodied performing art space and the art gallery is really the third leg of that development,” says Pitts-Wiley.

The art gallery at Mixed Magic Theatre opens on Sunday.

Providence’s newest theater, the Wilbury Group operates out of a defunct mill in Olneyville. These nights they are taking on a feisty play, “The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity” which was a runner-up for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize. While it begins with a look at professional wrestling, Bill Gale says it aims considerably higher.