In the four plays I just saw at the Shaw Festival, accident and unpredictability are constant, as are contradiction and reluctant confession. Some are triumphs, others anything but, but the liquid nature of identity is everywhere. Even the reliability of time is up for grabs. That’s the case in Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia” (Studio Theatre, through […]
Michael Lasser
Posted inArts & Entertainment
THEATER: 2013 Shaw Festival
So far, I’ve seen only half the plays at this year’s Shaw Festival, so it wouldn’t be fair to draw final conclusions. But at this point the word for this season is — with exceptions — mediocre. Only director Jackie Maxwell’s production of George Bernard Shaw’s “Major Barbara” in the small Royal George Theatre transformed […]
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Stratford Festival
Assume you can manage one night at this summer’s Stratford Festival. Even then, it will be costly — B&B’s, the good restaurants, and tickets have risen dramatically in recent years. But if you’re willing to set the alarm for an ungodly hour to make the four-plus-hour drive in time, you can complete a four-play marathon. […]
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THEATER PREVIEW: 2013 Shaw Festival
How long can you call yourself The Shaw Festival if you do hardly any Shaw? For most of the last 30 of its more than 50 seasons, the Festival in nearby Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, has mounted a dozen plays, more or less, between April and late October, including three or four by George Bernard Shaw, and […]
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THEATER: “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
For a director, William Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is always threatening to become “A Midsummer Night’s Nightmare.” The wide-ranging play, currently at Geva Theatre Center, dives headlong into comedy at the same time that it sidles more subtly toward tragedy. The challenge is to give full expression to its contradictory nature yet come away […]
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THEATER REVIEW: “Funny Girl”
UPDATE 5/10/13: The JCC has announced that, due to popular demand, an additional performance has been added to the run on Sunday, May 19, at 7 p.m. You can understand why a community theater would want to revive a fondly remembered musical like “Funny Girl.” It ran for more than 1300 performances when it first […]
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“The Whipping Man”
“The Whipping Man” by Matthew Lopez begins in desolation and ends with not much more than a speck of hope — a meager sense of opportunity if the characters can somehow overcome years (even centuries) of experience (and history).
Posted inSpecial Sections
The people’s buildings
The best American public buildings are open and accessible. Even in a nation worried about security, we enter them largely without fear or even concern. They meet the tests of function and beauty, not only for the rulers and the rich, but for all of us. Frank Lloyd Wright wrote, “The mother art is architecture. […]
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THEATER: “You Can’t Take it With You”
I’d have liked to join in the congratulatory chorus for Geva Theater Center’s 40th anniversary season, especially when it is beginning its season with a great American family comedy, George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s 1937 Pulitzer Prize-winning “You Can’t Take It with You.” A deeply warm, graceful, and funny play about an eccentric family […]
Posted inCulture
Rochester Fringe Festival, Day 3: “Casey Jones Costello Sings the Great American Songbook” review
The name of the program I saw late afternoon Friday was “Casey Jones Costello Sings the Great American Songbook,” and that is precisely what young Mister Costello did to the delight of a large audience at Java’s on Gibbs Street. A student at Nazareth College with a rare and reassuring passion for the unequalled American […]
Posted inCulture
Rochester Fringe Festival, Day 1: “The Bicycle Men” review
Good old-fashioned vulgarity is taking a terrible beating these days at the hands of young playwrights who never learned that four-letter words and exaggerated descriptions of sex aren’t especially funny in and of themselves. It’s not the profanity I object, to but the witlessness that accompanies it. Without wit or cleverness, vulgarity flying around a […]
Posted inSpecial Sections
THEATER: Let’s put on a show!
Geva Theater Center’s artistic director Mark Cuddy calls the huge piece of kraft paper his “planning wall” for the season he is working on — lists in different colors with dividing lines between them, but also extra sheets of paper tacked up helter-skelter to give it the look of the organized chaos it probably is. Yet that list of more than 50 titles eventually leads to the six main-stage plays (plus the annual production of “A Christmas Carol”) that Geva is betting on for the next 11 months.
