Before he says a word, an old Broadway type, who is completely a figment of my imagination, pushes back from the battered upright against the wall, chomps on the cigar in the corner of his mouth, and offers up the benefits of his years in what they used to call The Business. “So, kid,” he […]
Michael Lasser
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
Best Bets at Rochester Fringe: Michael Lasser’s picks
One review of “The Bicycle Men” called it “a genial spoof.” So is this going to be one of those things that’s much funnier when you’re having a fourth beer with friends and making up a musical at 3 in the morning? But a naรฏve Yank who gets stuck while biking through France also conjures […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Shaw’s syncopated season
America’s characteristic sound is restless and just off the beat, especially in the loose, driving textures of ragtime, jazz, and the blues, shrewdly borrowed by the musical chameleons of Tin Pan Alley. The U.S.A. in the 20th century came to be syncopation’s natural habitat. This summer, though, the Shaw Festival, just over the border in […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
The skinny on Stratford
It’s too soon to tell if the Stratford Shakespeare Festival’s 2012 season is a momentary departure from previous years or an accelerated veering off in new directions. It’s also fair to assume that some things won’t change. It’s still the same four and a half hour drive to the small (and often hot and humid) […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Another opening, another show
Even if some of his neighbors don’t know what the word means, Ed Sayles has a lot of chutzpah. Now in his 31st season as producing director of Auburn’s Merry-Go-Round Playhouse, Sayles and the staff have re-invented the Playhouse’s four-musical summer season as the first annual Finger Lakes Musical Theatre Festival. It will mount 29 […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Shavian shenanigans
More than a century of theater history buttresses the Shaw Festival’s choices for 2012, an 11-play season that takes playgoers from the United States to Norway to Tahiti without ever leaving the Festival’s three theaters set amidst the flowers, restaurants, and tourist traps of Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. The Shaw is setting out to do what it […]
