Biddy was co-founder and artistic director of the Shipping Dock Theatre. Her life and work will be commemorated on Saturday with a service that’s open to the public.
Shipping Dock Theatre
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Remembering Rochester theater icon Barbara Biddy
As co-founder and artistic director of Shipping Dock Theatre, the late Barbara Biddy gave Rochester audiences entertainment that could be edgy, but was frequently thought-provoking for over 30 years.
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‘Shear Madness’: the ride
‘Shear Madness’: the ride Warning to those suffering from vertigo: Do not ride Shear Madness. The largely improvisational comedy, now at Geva, runs at a frenzied pace, thrusting the audience through an enervating and hilarious trip. The evolution of the play began in Rochester in 1976 when Geva put on a play called Who Dunnit?. […]
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Onstage 9.28.05
The history of rivals Funny, horrible, and ultimately shattering, Suzan-Lori Parks’ Topdog/Underdog, a drama of way-inner-city life, won the Pulitzer Prize. It’s a downright showy play with extremely demanding movement and dialogue for two actors. Shipping Dock’s intimate space is incapable of the grand setting Topdog/Underdog got in a big Broadway theater, and that’s a […]
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On stage 6.29.05
Rock the cradle The latest in Shipping Dock Theatre’s historical tear is Canadian playwright Jason Sherman’s It’s All True. This time we get a close-up on American history: the legendary first performance of The Cradle Will Rock. In 1937 socialist writer Marc Blitzstein (Billy DeMetsenaere) had in his hot little hands a satirical opera about […]
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The queen won’t quit
A former editor said that we need to recognize that an arts community is made up of individuals. Shipping Dock’s performances are making it hard not to. Their current work is a beauty; but I’ll remember it as a harrowing example of an artist’s overdoing the idea that the show must go on. All this […]
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An engrossing ‘Trial’
Fred Nuernberg is giving a heroic performance locally in a Canadian play about a truly great US poet, Ezra Pound, who was accused of treason following World War II. Pound exiled himself from the US to Mussolini’s Italy at age 39, and throughout the war, he broadcast to American soldiers his messages of hatred […]
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Queasy queens and claptrap death
A leader in alternative theater, Shipping Dock chose an offbeat gay Christmas comedy for the holidays. But The Crumple Zone by Buddy Thomas is slight and uneven and needs all the theatrical help it can get. On opening night it didn’t get much. Under the pressure of a major case of amateur actors’ opening-night panic, […]
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Through the eyes of a child
There’s a formula for single-actor plays that can get pretty tedious. “What’s that you say, Mr. President?” the actor playing some famous person says, then answers in an effort to imitate the president’s voice. Some are historically interesting and even showcase an actor’s versatility. But in The Syringa Tree Shipping Dock Theatre is offering a […]
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Women out of time
Hugh Leonard’s Love in the Title, now playing at Shipping Dock Theatre, is certainly a women’s play, but not the kind anyone is familiar with. Three female actors play three generations of an Irish family’s women. But in Leonard’s fantastical plot, the women aren’t exactly reunited, because they didn’t know each other at these ages. […]
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Third time is not a charm
I was sure that the Shelagh Stephenson was Irish, but she isn’t. She was born in Northumberland, where her play Ancient Lightstakes place. That may be significant, since an Irish novelist in the play turns out to be English, from Hull, a port city that I think is in Northumberland. Indeed, almost all the characters […]
