Entertainment

Curtain Up, Monmouth County: A Thriving Theatre Scene Right in Our Backyard

If you think you need to head into Manhattan to experience great live theatre, Monmouth County has a friendly reminder for you: some of the most vibrant, accessible, and exciting stage work in New Jersey is happening right here at home.

Published

9 months ago

February 18, 2026

Jersey Javelin

From professional productions in Red Bank and Long Branch to community-driven performances in Middletown and Manasquan, the Monmouth County theatre scene is alive, evolving, and packed with opportunities to be entertained, inspired, and surprised over the coming weeks and months.

Whether you’re a lifelong theatre lover or someone just looking for a memorable night out that isn’t another dinner reservation, now is a perfect time to take a seat and let the lights go down.

🌟 Two River Theater: National-Caliber Work in Red Bank

At the heart of Monmouth County’s professional theatre world is Two River Theater in Red Bank, a venue that has quietly built a national reputation for excellence. Known for blending classic plays with bold new voices, Two River consistently attracts top-tier talent while staying deeply connected to the local community.

This season, audiences can expect productions that feel timely, emotionally rich, and thoughtfully staged—exactly the kind of theatre that sparks conversation on the car ride home. Two River’s work often mirrors the human experience in a way that feels personal and relevant, making it a favorite for both seasoned theatre-goers and first-timers alike.

Beyond the mainstage productions, Two River also hosts readings, talkbacks, and special events that invite audiences deeper into the creative process—turning a night at the theatre into a full cultural experience.

🎬 New Jersey Repertory Company: Bold Stories in Long Branch

Just a short drive away, New Jersey Repertory Company (NJ Rep) in Long Branch continues to be one of the most exciting engines for new and contemporary plays in the region.

NJ Rep is known for championing original work—stories that feel modern, daring, and often emotionally raw. These productions frequently go on to have lives beyond Monmouth County, but local audiences get the thrill of seeing them first.

If you enjoy theatre that challenges expectations and explores complex relationships, NJ Rep’s upcoming slate is a must. Their intimate performance space makes every show feel close and immersive, reminding audiences why live theatre remains such a powerful art form.

🎶 Algonquin Arts Theatre: Historic Charm Meets Broadway Energy

In Manasquan, the Algonquin Arts Theatre brings a different but equally exciting flavor to the county’s theatre mix. With its beautifully restored historic interior, Algonquin is a beloved destination for Broadway-style productions, touring shows, and special theatrical events.

Algonquin’s programming often leans toward crowd-pleasing favorites—perfect for date nights, family outings, or introducing younger audiences to the magic of live performance. The venue itself adds to the experience, offering a classic theatre atmosphere that feels like stepping into another era.

🎭 Community Theatre: The Heartbeat of Local Creativity

One of Monmouth County’s greatest strengths is its community theatre scene, where passion and creativity take center stage.

Groups like MAC Players at the Middletown Arts Center prove that you don’t need a Broadway zip code to produce compelling theatre. These productions bring together local actors, directors, designers, and volunteers—many balancing day jobs and family life—who come together purely for the love of storytelling.

Community theatre performances often surprise audiences with their quality, warmth, and authenticity. They’re also a wonderful way to support local artists, meet neighbors, and feel connected to the creative spirit of the county.

🎟 Why Theatre Matters—Especially Here

Live theatre offers something increasingly rare: shared experience. In a world of streaming and scrolling, sitting in a room with fellow audience members; laughing, holding your breath, or tearing up together, creates a sense of connection that lingers long after the final curtain.

Monmouth County’s theatre scene also plays a vital role in supporting local businesses. A night at the theatre often turns into dinner in Red Bank, coffee in Long Branch, or dessert in Manasquan, helping keep downtowns lively and thriving.

And unlike big-city theatre, Monmouth County venues remain approachable: easier parking, friendlier prices, and a sense that the performers on stage are part of the same community as the audience.

🎬 Take Your Seat

With professional productions, innovative new plays, historic venues, and passionate community performers, Monmouth County’s theatre scene is stronger than ever.

So if you’re looking for something different to do this season; something inspiring, entertaining, and uniquely local, consider trading the couch for a theatre seat. The lights are dimming, the stage is set, and some of the best stories in New Jersey are unfolding just minutes from home.

All you have to do is show up.

Related Topics:Actors Actresses Entertainment Monmouth County Theatre

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Features Editor The Jersey Javelin oversees long-form features and signature storytelling at The Jersey Review, focusing on depth, context, and cultural relevance. With a disciplined editorial eye, the Javelin selects stories that cut through noise - profiling people, places, and moments that shape New Jersey’s identity. Each feature is approached with precision and restraint, favoring clarity over sensationalism and substance over trend. The Javelin’s work is defined by thoughtful reporting, narrative balance, and a commitment to stories that endure beyond the news cycle.

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Editorial

The Screwtape Letters in New Brunswick | Nov. 7–8

Published

16 hours ago

November 7, 2026

Shannon

Promotional artwork for C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters stage production at New Brunswick Performing Arts Center.

More than 80 years after C.S. Lewis imagined a senior demon giving advice to his younger apprentice, The Screwtape Letters is still finding new audiences.

This weekend, the battle moves to New Brunswick.

Fellowship for Performing Arts is presenting its stage adaptation of Lewis’ Christian satire at the New Brunswick Performing Arts Center, with two performances today, Saturday, November 7, at 4 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., followed by a final performance Sunday at 3 p.m.

The production runs 90 minutes without an intermission and is recommended for audiences 13 and older. Children under 4 are not admitted. A short discussion follows the performance.

Hell Has an Office

The premise remains one of the most unusual in Christian literature.

Rather than telling its story from the perspective of a believer resisting temptation, The Screwtape Letters turns the camera around.

Screwtape is a senior demon in Hell advising his inexperienced nephew, Wormwood, on how to corrupt an ordinary human being referred to simply as “the patient.”

God becomes “the Enemy.”

Virtue becomes a problem.

Everyday weaknesses become opportunities.

The humor comes from watching familiar human behavior described from the opposite moral perspective.

Lewis first published the letters in installments during 1941 before the complete book appeared in February 1942. The work became one of his earliest major commercial successes, years before The Chronicles of Narnia made him a household name.

Taking an Epistolary Book to the Stage

Turning that structure into theater presents an obvious challenge.

The original work consists largely of letters from one demon to another, not conventional scenes filled with dialogue and action.

Fellowship for Performing Arts founder and artistic director Max McLean adapted and directed the stage production, transforming Screwtape’s correspondence into a theatrical performance centered on the demon’s office in Hell.

FPA describes the production as a faithful adaptation exploring temptation, spiritual warfare and human behavior through Lewis’ wit and satire.

The production has developed a long life of its own.

Fellowship for Performing Arts says The Screwtape Letters has previously had an extended New York run, a sold-out engagement in London and five U.S. tours. The organization has also acquired film rights to the work and announced plans to develop a motion-picture version.

Faith Without a Conventional Sermon

Lewis rarely approached Christianity by simply telling readers what to think.

In The Screwtape Letters, he used satire.

That gives the work an unusual place in religious literature and makes it particularly suited to a theater company trying to reach beyond a strictly church audience.

Fellowship for Performing Arts describes its mission as creating theatre and film from a Christian worldview for a diverse audience. The New York-based company has produced several works connected to Lewis and Christian thought.

The New Brunswick engagement is straightforward about its religious foundation, but the material itself spends much of its time examining recognizable habits: pride, distraction, selfishness, relationships and the small compromises people make without thinking much about them.

That may help explain why a book written during World War II can still fill theaters in 2026.

The technology changes.

Human nature is a little harder to update.

What to Know

C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters
New Brunswick Performing Arts Center
11 Livingston Avenue
New Brunswick, New Jersey

Saturday, November 7: 4 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.
Sunday, November 8: 3 p.m.

The production runs approximately 90 minutes with no intermission. Ticket availability varies by performance and seating section.

For readers who know Lewis primarily through The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Screwtape Letters shows a very different side of the same writer.

No wardrobe.

No talking lion.

Just a demon at his desk trying to explain why human beings make his job so easy.

Entertainment

Kevin Smith’s SModcastle Film Festival Returns to Atlantic Highlands for Four Days of Independent Film

Published

6 days ago

November 2, 2026

Silver Screener

For four days this week, one of Monmouth County’s most unusual movie theaters will turn almost entirely over to independent filmmakers.

The fifth annual SModcastle Film Festival runs Thursday, November 5, through Sunday, November 8, at SModcastle Cinemas in Atlantic Highlands, with features, shorts, documentaries and animation screening across the theater’s multiple screens.

The festival opens Thursday night with Serena, a 2026 science-fiction thriller starring Steven Strait and Andi Matichak. The film follows a struggling former rock star who agrees to beta test an advanced chatbot, only to find the relationship becoming much more complicated than expected. The opening-night screening is scheduled for 7:30 p.m.

From there, the schedule expands quickly.

Friday evening begins a series of numbered screening blocks, followed by a filmmaker mixer. Saturday becomes the festival’s busiest day, with screenings running from late morning into the evening across several auditoriums. Sunday continues with additional films before the festival closes.

A Film Festival Inside Kevin Smith’s Childhood Theater

The location gives this festival a little more character than the average multiplex event.

Smodcastle Cinemas sits at 82 First Avenue in Atlantic Highlands, in a building that has shown movies for more than a century. Filmmaker Kevin Smith grew up going to the theater and later became one of the partners who took it over in 2022. His longtime friend and Clerks collaborator Ernie O’Donnell is also involved in ownership and operation.

That history matters because Smith’s career began only a short drive away.

The Highlands-raised filmmaker made Clerks at the Quick Stop in Leonardo, building one of New Jersey’s best-known independent-film stories out of borrowed money, local locations and a very small production.

Now independent filmmakers are bringing their own work into the movie theater where Smith spent part of his childhood.

It is a fitting circle.

A New Jersey Premiere With an Especially Appropriate Story

One Sunday selection seems almost made for this particular festival.

Directors’ Commentary, written and directed by Joel David Santner, receives its New Jersey premiere Sunday, November 8, at noon.

The film follows an aspiring screenwriter whose career and marriage are falling apart before fictional versions of the filmmakers who inspired him begin appearing in his life. Those inspirations include Kevin Smith, Edward Burns and George Lucas.

Santner’s own production story carries some of the same independent spirit. According to the filmmakers, the feature was financed on credit cards and shot guerrilla-style with a four-person crew on weekends in Los Angeles.

Bringing that movie to Kevin Smith’s own theater is the kind of coincidence independent film fans will probably appreciate.

More Than One Type of Movie

Smodcastle’s festival is not restricted to a single genre.

Organizers accept feature films, short films, animation and documentaries from filmmakers around the world. A panel selects the work that ultimately makes it onto the theater screens.

That wide range is part of the appeal. Audiences can move between films they may never encounter at a mainstream theater, often with the people who made them sitting only a few rows away.

For filmmakers, that may be even more valuable than the screening itself.

Festivals are one of the few places where someone who spent months or years making an independent movie can finally watch strangers react to it in a dark theater.

And in Atlantic Highlands, that theater happens to belong partly to one of New Jersey’s most famous independent filmmakers.

Event Details

Smodcastle Film Festival
November 5–8, 2026
Smodcastle Cinemas
82 First Avenue
Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey

The festival’s current schedule and ticket availability are available through Smodcastle Film Festival and Smodcastle Cinemas. Get Tickets HERE.

Entertainment

New Jersey’s Lost Films Come Back to Life at Monmouth University

Published

7 days ago

November 1, 2026

Silver Screener

The Jersey Review - New Jersey’s Lost Films at Monmouth

Some of the most revealing pieces of New Jersey history were never made for theaters.

They were home movies, local news footage, public films, community celebrations and recordings that spent decades sitting in archives.

On Saturday, November 7, some of that material will come out of storage.

The second New Jersey Archival Film Festival is scheduled for 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. inside the Great Hall at Monmouth University in West Long Branch. The event is free and brings together footage held by archives, universities, historical societies and other cultural institutions from around the state.

The festival is presented by the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance, the New Jersey Caucus of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference and the Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music.

A Very Different Kind of Film Festival

There are no red carpets or studio premieres here.

Instead, the program includes material that might otherwise remain seen mainly by researchers.

One selection looks at the New Jersey Turnpike. Another documents the relocation of a historic Victorian house in Englewood.

There are family home movies connected to Garret A. Hobart Jr., footage from Trenton, old Atlantic City images, scenes from the Wildwoods and a film trip through Vineland.

The morning program even includes Joe Albert’s Fox Hunt and Other Stories from the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, presented by the Media Burn Archive.

The result is a moving collection of small pieces of the state rather than one sweeping documentary trying to explain all of New Jersey at once.

Atlantic City Before the Casinos We Know Today

One of the most intriguing entries is Easter on the Boardwalk, presented by the Hagley Museum and Library.

Festival organizers describe featured material that includes footage of a 1950s Easter parade in Atlantic City.

For anyone accustomed to seeing Atlantic City through casino towers and modern Boardwalk tourism, archival footage offers something different.

The buildings change. The clothes change. The cars change.

The Boardwalk remains recognizable.

That is part of the strange appeal of old local film.

A familiar place can suddenly feel foreign.

Monmouth County Gets Its Own Look Back

The afternoon program moves closer to home.

“Talking 250,” presented by the MonmouthNJ 250 Committee, will connect the program to New Jersey’s role in the nation’s 250th anniversary.

Monmouth County Archives will also present Monmouth County Then and Now.

Other selections cover subjects including Newark’s Ironbound neighborhood, Rutgers’ first graduating class in Puerto Rican Studies and a performance by jazz musician Joe Wilder preserved by the Institute of Jazz Studies.

There is even campus footage of a snowy day at what was then New Jersey State Teachers College at Trenton.

None of it sounds like blockbuster cinema.

That is exactly the point.

Why Old Film Matters

Historic buildings can be restored. Documents can be scanned. Photographs preserve a fraction of a second. Film does something else. It shows people moving through a place.

A car turns a corner. A family walks along the Boardwalk. A crowd gathers. Someone looks toward a camera without any idea that another audience may be watching decades later.

The New Jersey Archival Film Festival is built around preserving and sharing those moments.

It is also a reminder that history does not only belong to presidents, governors and famous names.

Sometimes history is an Easter parade.

Sometimes it is a family picnic.

Sometimes it is a home movie nobody expected anyone outside the family to see.

And sometimes those ordinary pieces of film become the clearest window we have into what New Jersey once looked like.