Far from being mindless, what Syracuse Stage’s “Noises Off” has to say about vanity and art resonates deeply. The show runs through Sept. 30.
Author: James MacKillop
There’ll be none of that “Shh-shh, don’t tell” business. Under Dan Stevens’ direction, the cast of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap (through Sept. 22 at Central New York Playhouse) dispenses with the post-curtain admonition that we not give away the identity of the culprit in the still-startling twist ending. As the drama opened in London nearly 66 years ago and has run through more than 25,000 performances, nearly everybody knows whodunit going in. No matter. Knowing who the killer is in director Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho does not stop people from watching it again. There are so many other things to amuse…
Savor for a moment the paradox in the title of Joe Kinosian and Kellen Blair’s musical comedy Murder for Two, running through Sept. 15 at Auburn’s Merry-Go-Round Playhouse. If there are only two persons, how can there be space for a victim, a perpetrator, a detective or, for that matter, the butler? It turns out they’re all there, including a ballerina, three rowdy choirboys and a psychiatrist, but not the butler. There are two performers: Short Anthony Norman plays the investigator Marcus, while tall Noel Carey supplies all the rest, including all suspects, for more than 90 wild minutes, with…
The summer shows from Cortland Repertory Theatre are coming to a close with The Rat Pack Lounge, a musical salute to the era of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. that runs through Saturday, Sept. 8. The show is not being performed at the Little York Lake pavilion, however. Cortland Rep is presenting this unknown but somehow familiar musical review — guided by director Mark Reynold, who helmed Newsies earlier this summer — at the company’s very contemporary but still intimate downtown location, 24 Port Watson St. All five singers — four men, one woman — and the…
The upcoming stage season features plays with short titles (Elf), plays with long titles (Jackie Sibbles Drury’s new work has 26 words) and plays with really familiar titles (The Sound of Music, Steel Magnolias). Quite possibly the most talked-about new show will be the world premiere of Kyle Bass’ Possessing Harriet, the first professionally produced drama based on Syracuse history. But all drama is presented in two masks, and sometimes it’s just for raucous fun, like Reefer Madness: The Musical. For the 2018 Arts Issue, here’s what’s coming to the stage in 2018 and 2019: Syracuse Stage 820 E. Genesee St.;…
Cortland Repertory Theatre continues its summer with the company’s annual female-centered comedy. Last year it was an obscurity, Katherine DiSalvino’s Nana’s Naughty Knickers. This year’s choice, Women in Jeopardy! (through Saturday, Aug. 25), comes with stronger credentials, its premiere having been a surprise hit at Rochester’s Geva Theatre Center just three years ago. Better yet, its playwright is Wendy MacLeod, a darling of off-Broadway for shows like The House of Yes (1990, later a Parker Posey movie), about a woman who thinks she’s Jackie Kennedy. What she has done here is both edgier and funnier. Action begins when two plainly dressed, 40ish divorcées, the taller, talkative Jo (Stefanie Londino) and the shorter Mary (Charlie Jhaye), retreat…
The time of roller disco, legwarmers, rainbows and unicorns may not have lasted long, but it continues to be celebrated in popular culture as if it were the Regency era. Consider the afterlife of legendary movie flop Xanadu (1980) a monument to that fleeting moment. The musical fantasy with Olivia Newton-John and Gene Kelly was so reviled in its day that its reception prompted the creation of the dystopic Oscars known as the Golden Raspberry Awards or Razzies, which it “won” for best director (Robert Greenwald). The reception of the soundtrack album, however, was entirely different. Teeny- boppers of the day swooned over it. That’s how cults are made. Thirty-eight years later, those kids are grown…
There’s plenty of comedy to chew on with It’s Only a Play from playwright Terrence McNally, who arguably ranks among our top 10 living dramatists — although he has not previously been known as a gagsmith. His best-known works, like Master Class and Frankie & Johnny in the Claire de Lune, are graced with sparkling wit but not in nearly every speech. McNally labored on It’s Only a Play through four rewrites over 36 years before it became a smash with Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick in 2014. It takes practice to hit the bull’s eye, as it does here…
Music from the golden age of pre-rock composers is still played all the time, but many of the best numbers are buried in shows too stumbling to revive. The plan has been to rewrite the shows, dropping the dud songs and drawing new ones from the composer’s backlog, and turn the whole thing into a dance musical. Thus George Gershwin’s Girl Crazy morphed into Crazy for You and Harry Warren’s old movie 42nd Street transmogrified into Gower Champion’s stage spectacular. So that’s how we have the new 2016 Irving Berlin dance musical Holiday Inn, which was rejiggered from Paramount Pictures’…
“Our Town” Cortland Repertory Theatre artistic director Kerby Thompson prerecorded his curtain speech for Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (running through Saturday, Aug. 11), as he dropped his usual gesture of taking a costume from the show when speaking (usually good for a giggle). That’s because as the actual director of this evergreen American drama, he has already put so much of himself into it, even while taking a role. As one of the four or five works that everyone knows, like The Odd Couple or To Kill a Mockingbird, any production of Our Town has to retain what everybody loves…
It’s our classiest cultural commute: Cooperstown’s world-class Glimmerglass Festival is the only venue under a two-hour drive from most parts of Onondaga County. While producing operas, both familiar and rarely done, is the main activity at the venue’s Alice Busch Opera Theater, it’s called a festival for good reason. The top draws of the summer are Leonard Bernstein’s blockbuster musical West Side Story, which has sold out all remaining performances, and Gioachino Rossini’s The Barber of Seville (Aug. 3, 9, 11, 13, 25), which is always one of the three or four most popular comic operas. Audiences are less likely…
Pippin A massive hit in 1972 and the 34th longest-running Broadway musical of all time, Stephen Schwartz’s Tony Award-winning Pippin has been strangely absent from local floorboards for some time. That may be because it has been a favorite of high school programs, as it is a story of maturation and calls for a large cast. Yet director Garrett Heater’s Syracuse Summer Theatre mounting of Pippin, running through Aug. 5 at the Mulroy Civic Center’s BeVard Room, is no kids show. The frequent eroticism in Bob Fosse’s dance numbers would addle the school board. And choreographer Jodi Bova-Mele’s recreation of…
Jukebox musicals allow fans to revisit the past without mawkish nostalgia or sneering camp. Chris D’Arienzo’s cleverly put-together Rock of Ages, which runs through July 28 at the Central New York Playhouse in Shoppingtown, celebrates the music of the 1980s, especially acts like Styx, Twisted Sister and Pat Benatar. The set swarms with artifacts that disappeared decades ago, like boom boxes bigger than a man’s head and men’s hair bigger than a boom box, but the music does not feel like it ever went away. Indeed, it did not. D’Arienzo is ahead of rival compilers on several counts. Nearly every song is a familiar hit; he never has to rely on an obscurity to…
Getting the flop Walt Disney film Newsies (1992) on the musical stage was a two-decade-long struggle for prolific composer Alan Menken. Although often placed in the Disney stable, Menken, who also wrote Little Shop of Horrors, contains multitudes. His musical numbers in Newsies gave him a personal investment, and after its initial disappointment he was encouraged that it drew large numbers of fans during the glory days of VHS video rentals. So Menken enlisted play doctor Harvey Fierstein (Kinky Boots) and choreographer Christopher Gattelli to produce Newsies: The Musical in 2012, and it ran on Broadway for 1,004 performances. The show makes its area premiere at Cortland Repertory Theatre, where it runs through July 28. The Disney imprint…
Turning from a new tuner with the world premiere of Anne of Green Gables this week at Merry-Go-Round Playhouse to an old-school classic, director Michael Barakiva’s rowdy staging of John Kander, Fred Ebb and Bob Fosse’s hearty perennial Chicago, now at Ithaca’s Hangar Theatre through Saturday, July 14, is unlike any other seen in these parts. Or maybe anywhere. First Barakiva returns to the premise of the original 1975 production, setting the action in a gritty Prohibition-era nightclub. Action spills out onto the stage’s side tables and up several rows. Secondly, together with choreographer Mimi Quillin, he reimagines some of the best-known numbers like Billy Flynn’s “Razzle Dazzle” to give them a wittier spin for a knockout punch. Tall,…