Here are some of the plays I’m looking forward to seeing in the 2012-2013 Rochester theater season. The good news is that this season there are more plays I want to see than I have room to write about. (For a full listing of all upcoming area theater productions, check rochestercitynewspaper.com, or the weekly theater […]
Michael Lasser
Posted inArts & Entertainment
THEATER: “[title of show]”
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 […]
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 […]
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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 […]
