Much meaning for Legally Blonde: The Musical, running through July 6 at Cortland Repertory Theatre, depends on the shade of pink. Our heroine Elle Woods (Lara Hayhurst), who proves she has guts and brains when she wows Harvard Law School, is often outfitted in pink. In dressing her, costume designer Jennifer Dasher rejected all the banal choices, like cotton candy or Barbie, in favor of an intense Elsa Schiaparelli pink. A small decision itself but indicative of a show and production that blow away the 2001 film it’s based on. If you have only seen Reese Witherspoon’s fluffier-than-air hit movie, you’ve missed all the fun. top-zaymov.ruThe 2007 musical version…
Author: James MacKillop
Revered Broadway playwright Neil Simon passed away last August at age 91, leaving behind a legacy too sizable to address in this space. Yet Rumors is a Neil Simon comedy that doesn’t feel like a Neil Simon comedy. It’s running through Saturday, June 22, at Shoppingtown’s Central New York Playhouse. Thirty years ago when Simon’s name still meant box office gold, the master was nettled by carpers who sneered that he was writing the same formula over and over. To refute them he constructed, but also parodied, a classic farce on French and English models. That meant people of higher social station than the usual crew from Brighton Beach, heady pretension begging for humiliating…
Composer William Finn was never one for mere boy-meets-girl musicals or even boy-meets-boy shows. His best-known works, Falsettos (1992) and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (2005), are hardly conventional, but they do not ask us to deal with the horrors of sudden death from a brain hemorrhage or arteriovenous malformation. That was Finn’s real-life experience, which he addressed through the healing power of art, in a book co-written with James Lapine and his own compositions and lyrics. Finn’s musical A New Brain — a Rarely Done production running through Friday, June 21, at Jazz Central — is never flippant about mortality, yet he can’t resist telling us about the ordeal while sprinkling in some…
The life of the English theater’s first woman playwright Aphra Behn (1640-1689) was so fabulous it almost feels invented. Along with being the first professional woman writer of any kind, she traveled with royalty and served as King Charles II’s spy. Born in a remote South American colony, there was always some question of what her actual name was or whether she forged her resumé. Refuting the Puritanism of the previous regime, her plays always pushed the edges. The management of her sensational private life could have taught a thing or two about managing lovers to Helen Gurley Brown or Carrie Bradshaw. And as demonstrated by Liz Duffy Adams’ play Or, What She Will, running through…
It’s now regarded as the granddaddy of 1950s rock musicals, even though it first started as a wild parody of the Eisenhower era. That’s Grease, which launches the summer season at Auburn’s Merry-Go-Round Playhouse as part of the annual Finger Lakes Musical Theater Festival. The show runs through June 26 at MGR’s scenic Emerson Park venue near the shore of Owasco Lake. Speaking of scenic, Cortland Repertory Theatre has also kicked off its summer at its quaint pavilion near Little York Lake in Preble. The Lady with All the Answers, a one-woman show about newspaper advice columnist Ann Landers, entertains audiences through Saturday, June 15. Jim Jacobs’ and Warren Casey’s Grease has become such…
Jason Alexander was in the original cast of Neil Simon’s Broadway Bound (1987) and won a Tony Award for singing and dancing in Jerome Robbins’ Broadway (1989). Yet most audiences cannot overlook nine years of delivering the goods as George Constanza on TV’s Seinfeld (1989-1998). As Bill DeLapp’s May 29 Syracuse New Times cover story “Stage Struck” pointed out, Alexander thought mostly about the stage from childhood and that movies and television were useful detours until he could return to the boards. As the cover story also revealed about his plans for Syracuse Stage’s production of The Last Five Years…
Hard times foster lyricism. The 1930s and 1940s were unquestionably tough decades: unemployment, Jim Crow laws, the Dust Bowl, followed by bloodshed on distant shores. The swinging, upbeat music put together by Fran Charnas for The All Night Strut!, running through Sunday, June 9, at the Redhouse Arts Center, will cheer the hearts of audiences old enough to remember when telephone exchanges had words in them, but it so often comes with an undercurrent of deeper feeling. A representative number, although not a show-stopper, is Herman Hupfield’s “As Time Goes By,” the theme from Casablanca (1942), but written 11 years…
The National Institute of Health reported not long ago that although men still consume more alcohol than women, the differences in abuse between the genders are diminishing. Unchanged are our judgments of the sexes. Men might produce the occasional Foster Brooks, but most are seen as smelly boors and drunk drivers. Women alcoholics, on the other hand, are often seen as feckless victims: clueless preys of jocks and fraternity boys who get what’s coming to them. Playwright Tara Handron has studied the phenomenon closely. She worked with 15 women for her master’s thesis at Georgetown and felt that the material was too poignant for a mere case study. Thus came Drunk with Hope, dramatizing how a…
Central New York Playhouse’s inventive production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (through Saturday, May 18) takes William Shakespeare’s fantasy comedy in new directions. The scene is Athens, New York, somewhere in the Hudson Valley, adjacent to the Catskills. It’s in the 1930s, as we tell immediately from Diane Bates and Simon Moody’s one-of-a-kind costumes. Add to that, period music like “Moonlight Serenade,” making wordplay on Shakespeare’s title. When a group of working stiffs, led by the fussbudget Peter Quince (a fastidious Strange David Fuller), get together to put on a production of the ancient Pyramus and Thisbe, they forge ahead…
Rape, forced intercourse, was first a moral question: a sin. Subsequently it became a legal question: a crime. More recently it has become a political question. When we hear about a posse of high school football players repeatedly raping an intoxicated girl and posting their deed on social media, many in the audience will have their minds made up before the action of Naomi Iizuka’s Good Kids begins. If the story were as simple as our preconceptions, Good Kids could not so readily rivet our attention for an uninterrupted 100 minutes. The season finale from the Syracuse University Drama Department…
The local premiere of Matt Cox’s off-Broadway smash Puffs marks a generational departure for executive director Dan Tursi’s 14-year-old Rarely Done Productions. Although the company has been dark for a few months, its core audience is still robust, as was seen in the well-attended 50th anniversary production of Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band last winter. For this outing (running through Saturday, May 11, at Jazz Central) Tursi has turned over the reins to Krystal Wadsworth with a cast of 11 mostly new faces in as many 30 roles. Then again, as Rarely Done has always favored the paradigm-busting…
Thanksgiving dinner has long since ceased to be the holiday painted by Norman Rockwell. Given the changes in most families, through education and migration, it has now become the day of making peace with people you are related to but have become very different from, like the talkative uncle who believes every foul frippery uttered on Alex Jones’ InfoWars. The differences in Stephen Karam’s The Humans, through May 12 at Syracuse Stage, are not so profound. Small sharp differences, however, are constant sources of irritation and pain. The Blakes are a working-class family from Scranton, Pennsylvania. Part of the significance…
The one-actor drama about cyberwarfare, Grounded, has been a magnet for female talent. Superstar director Julie Taymor helmed the Public Theater opening in 2014, which lured Anne Hathaway to New York City for a 90-minute marathon of conflicted emotions. Composer Jeanine Tesori has spoken of turning the stage work into an opera. After Kate MacCluggage wowed Ithaca’s Kitchen Theatre Company audiences last year with her Ironbound, she was asked what she’d really like to do for a follow-up. Her immediate answer was to play the ace fighter pilot in George Brant’s Grounded. When company artistic director M. Bevin O’Gara read…
The “alt” in alt-weekly stands for alternative. In the first 10 years of the Syracuse New Times there was no question what we were an alternative to. The then- Newhouse newspapers, under pugnacious publisher Stephen A. Rogers, dominated political and social discourse in town. Indeed, it was to counter the malign behavior of what we used to call “the dailies” that I first became involved with our own now half-century-old alt-weekly. The Herald-Journal, the now-extinct afternoon daily, had run a series of attacks on the English Department at Onondaga Community College, of which I was then a member. The focus was on a fresh-faced, untenured assistant professor named Thomas McKague, then in his first semester. He had…
An early review described Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead as “Waiting for Godot with more laughs.” The show, which opened when the playwright was 28, is that uncommon modern drama more often read than performed. So many undercurrents of meaning, so many words calling for close attention. Getting laughs with a show that runs nearly three hours calls for passionate commitment from the director and cast, which is delivered at the Central New York Playhouse production, running through April 27. Alyssa Otoski Keim, making her local directing debut, says R&G is her all-time favorite play, and that she’s long wanted to get this on stage. We can tell. Otoski Keim, who trained at the Moscow Art…