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 […]
Michael Lasser
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.
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 naïve 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 […]
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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) […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
