Matte O’Brien and Matt Vinson are two young Americans who think the most famous of all Canadian novels, Anne of Green Gables (1908), is really about us in our time. Although set in remote Prince Edward Island, the story of the plucky red-headed orphan Anne Shirley has sold more than 40 million copies and has been frequently adapted for stage and screen. This new version, making its world premiere at Auburn’s Merry-Go-Round Playhouse through July 25, bears the subtitle “A New Folk Rock Musical.” That “folk” in the subtitle does not imply echoes of the Maritime Provinces, as in the Broadway hit Come from Away, but rather like Hair’s Galt McDermott finding a second youth. Director…
Author: James MacKillop
Disco died, but Saturday Night Fever still lives. It’s a paradox: Although a fashion moment, with bell-bottom pants and bright colors, fades away, one of its prime expressions, a 41-year-old movie, has not become campy and is still in many people’s minds. Director John Badham’s 1977 film never has to be revived, because it never went away. What is surprising is that the stage version, a compelling crowd-pleaser, is seen so little. Cortland Repertory Theatre brings us up to speed on that, with a splashy show running through July 7. Producer Robert Stigwood brought Fever to the London stage in 1998, where its success prompted a 501-performance run in New York City during 1999 and 2000. Although…
Into the Woods After six years of turning its bustling Shoppingtown mall venue into an audience destination, artistic director Dustin Czarny’s Central New York Playhouse continues to bring back the hits of the outfit’s previous incarnation, Not Another Theater Company. The Stephen Sondheim musical Into the Woods, first performed in May 2011 at the New York State Fair’s Empire Theater, might have been the earlier company’s biggest box office. The revival runs through Saturday, June 23. The current space is smaller, but director Korrie Taylor and producers Michaela Oney and Sarah Anson have performed magic on a budget, especially with Stephanie Long’s costumes. From the original production, only Kathy Egloff as Jack’s harridan mother has been retained. Her wail…
At Cortland Repertory, Tom Stoppard’s uproarious comedy Rough Crossing might fairly be described as little-known, yet its setting and premise are immediately familiar. We are on a luxury liner in the 1930s when only the wealthy could travel. Shelley Barish’s nautical art deco set and Jimmy Johansmyer’s period costumes could just as easily serve for a production of Cole Porter’s Anything Goes. Two world-famous playwrights, Sandor Turai (James Taylor Odom) and Alex Gal (Tanner Efinger), are rewriting their next musical comedy, which they expect to complete en route and premiere in New York City. The title signals how the voyage will be going. Stoppard may have a reputation for high-domed, cerebral drama, like Arcadia or The Coast…
The biggest jukebox musical of them all has been drawing huge regional crowds for nearly two decades, but only with touring companies. That’s ABBA’s Mamma Mia! 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 27 at MGR’s scenic Emerson Park venue near the shore of Owasco Lake. Local companies have not wanted to touch Mamma Mia! for many reasons. One is that it’s such a big show, with 52 dancing feet, sometimes bare, sometimes in flippers. Costumes call for about an acre of silver spandex to sculpt shapely thighs. Read: A Shakespearean Summer: 12 venues for live theater in…
Matt & Ben Presented by Ithaca’s Kitchen Theatre Company Boys will be boys. Sometimes, these days, girls are also boys. So consider Mindy Kaling and Brenda Withers’ satirical spoof Matt & Ben about how two fractious twenty-something guys happened to write an original screenplay that was instantly produced and won an Academy Award. Kaling and Withers, who were also twenty-something when they wrote Matt & Ben, saw the roles as vehicles for themselves. Keeping with that casting choice, the season finale at Ithaca’s Kitchen Theatre Company (through June 17), directed by Shana Gozansky, puts two women in the title roles. Not so much for feminist politics, as for laughs. As the reader has already assumed,…
University directors have to rely on the talent that happens to be at hand, and Director Brian Cimmet has all the right people.
Actor Brett Schneider likes to quote the 19th-century maestro Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin as saying, “A magician is an actor playing a magician.” Sorry, kids, this means that what we call “magic” is created out of talent, discipline and hard work, especially rehearsal. Robert-Houdin (whose name inspired Erich Weiss to change his to Houdini in tribute) is also saying that a magician is not a shaman or priest. Instead, like any actor, such as Robert De Niro in Raging Bull or Meryl Streep in Sophie’s Choice, the performer employs some elements of self. Schneider is the 32-year-old lead in Andrew Hinderaker’s…
We approach a cult musical differently from your garden-variety hit. With a hit like Guys and Dolls or South Pacific, we don’t expect surprises and are comforted by familiarity. A show cannot become a cult favorite unless it has been wounded, like with a host of savage reviews or disastrous box office, but is championed by an impassioned minority convinced against the odds of the show’s brilliance that wants us to share that vision. Director Robert G. Searle is a cultist for the Tim Rice-ABBA musical Chess. He makes a compelling case for the show, which runs through April 28 at Shoppingtown’s Central New York Playhouse. Part of being in the cult is remembering the…
Along with being a Central New York premiere, this is the second-ever U.S. production of the show, titled “Defying Gravity.”
The show is being performed by the Syracuse University Drama Department.
A Few Good Men Earlier in this decade Central New York Playhouse’s predecessor, Not Another Theater Company, was establishing a network of performers as well as a critical reputation at the Locker Room on Hiawatha Boulevard. That venue could never attract the kinds of crowds that now come to the playhouse’s Shoppingtown Mall venue. For a second time artistic director Dustin Czarny is reviving a hit show from the earlier company, this time with two of the previous leads, Jordan Glaski and Katie Deferio, in the same roles. Aaron Sorkin’s A Few Good Men, running through Saturday, March 24, is not only the greatest courtroom drama of the last generation, but also one of the most significant…
An unexpected loud clatter punctuates the opening scene of Ernest Thompson’s domestic comedy On Golden Pond, running through Sunday, March 18, in the brand-new Redhouse at City Center space. Querulous retired English professor Norman Thayer Jr. (Fred Grandy) is opening his summer retreat in Maine when, crack! the screen door falls off its hinges and slams on to the porch. This caused a moment of concern for Redhouse fans during opening night: Just five weeks earlier the place was covered with grit, and you had to wear a hard hat to take a step. But no, the falling door is…
There’s a new Syracuse name and location to learn: City Center, in the 400 block of South Salina Street. That’s what we have been calling just the Redhouse at City Center: 40,000 square feet in a multimillion-dollar design by Schopfer Architects LLP, with two theaters, one up to 350 seats and the other with 125 seats, plus a studio/rehearsal room that seats up to 65. All around is lots of razzle-dazzle space, including a catering kitchen, suitable for upmarket parties and wedding receptions. And there is enough parking to accommodate every visitor. Revamping the entire Sibley’s department store shell will…
Larry Kramer, now 82, is an American playwright and AIDS activist best known for his groundbreaking 1985 work The Normal Heart. In that play Kramer made a hard-hitting case for gay rights, and also depicted two men kissing on stage, almost the first time audiences had seen such a thing. That kiss does not appear in David Drake’s one-man play The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me, a Rarely Done production running through Saturday, March 10, at Jazz Central. Then again, Kramer doesn’t appear, either. It’s all about the unnamed narrator, played by long-distance runner Junior Morse, who represents the playwright.…