Stage
When people ask why they don't write musicals like they used to, composer Richard Rodgers and lyricist-librettist Oscar Hammerstein's "South Pacific"-winner of both the Pulitzer Prize for drama and the Tony for Best Musical-is the kind of show they have in mind. Audiences walk up the aisle humming songs
Stage
When Stephen Sondheim and George Furth's "Company" first opened on Broadway 42 years ago, it was a strikingly innovative show, a witty but serious musical about the ambiguities of marriage at a time when the rising divorce rate was still new enough to be startling. Adults were living together
Stage
Every now and then, a community theater meets a rich but demanding play head on, with such discipline, conviction, and passion that it soars beyond ordinary expectations and imperfections to achieve something thrilling. Librettist Alfred Uhry and composer-lyricist Jason Robert Brown's "Parade," currently playing at the JCC's CenterStage, is
Stage
The 2006 musical, "Grey Gardens," takes its name from its setting, the 29-room Easthampton palace inhabited by the wealthy Bouvier family. It is a strange concoction of a show that never decides what it wants to be. Or maybe it wants to be too many things for its own
Stage
In "A Moon for the Misbegotten," just who are the misbegotten? In Eugene O'Neill's last completed play, neither Josie Hogan nor Jim Tyrone is born out of wedlock, yet both inherit something accursed; some failure of genetics or upbringing puts them at odds with the rest of the world.
Stage
Skip Greer and James Holloway give wonderfully satisfying performances as, respectively, Arthur Przybyszewski, a 60-year-old donut-shop owner in a declining Chicago neighborhood, and 21-year-old Franco Wicks, a hotshot black kid who needs a job but has large dreams along with the intelligence and imagination to reach for them. As
Stage
Method Machine is a young local theater company given to such terms as "inciting," "stimulating," and "risky" when it talks about itself. It had to have had those kinds of words in mind when it took on the first part of Tony Kushner's challenging - some might say daunting
Stage
Less than two years ago, Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel threatened legal action against Deborah Margolin's "Imagining Madoff," a play that imagined a conversation between Wiesel and Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff. Margolin's revised version, which replaced Wiesel with a fictional writer and Holocaust survivor named Solomon Galkin, is now playing
Stage
I've never met Ginni Harden Pierce, yet I feel that I know, almost intimately, a dozen different people she has inhabited in utterly believable performances. A gifted creator of character, she has appeared on local stages for more than 40 years, bringing to life a wide range of personalities,
Stage
Lyricist-librettist Tom Jones and composer Harvey Schmidt's "I Do, I Do" is, at its best, a pleasant little two-character musical about Agnes and Michael's marriage, from their wedding night in their new house to the day when, many decades later, they move out. In a series of vignettes, it
Guides
Anybody who can't find something to see in the five pages of single-spaced listings I perused for the 2011-2012 theater season must be bloody hard to please. They include performances by some 30-odd companies from Geva Theatre Center and the Rochester Broadway Theater League to Black Sheep Theatre Coalition
Stage
A trace of transparency: long-time reviewers (I'm one of them) soon learn that it's impossible to set aside whatever assumptions, attitudes, and memories they've accumulated. Even so, you do your best to take each play as it comes. The result won't be perfect, even though it may be surprising.
Stage
After sitting through two disappointing seasons at The Shaw Festival in 2009 and 2010, I approached this season with some trepidation. Would the dumbing down of plays and the pandering to audiences that have begun to characterize Shaw under artistic director Jackie Maxwell continue, or would the Festival reassert
Stage
After sitting through two disappointing seasons at The Shaw Festival in 2009 and 2010, I approached this season with some trepidation. Would the dumbing down of plays and the pandering to audiences that have begun to characterize Shaw under artistic director Jackie Maxwell continue, or would the Festival reassert
Stage
Maybe operating on the principle of something for everyone, the Stratford Shakespeare Festival provides enough variety in 2011 so that anyone who sees all 12 plays will come away excited by some and irritated by others. Not only by the smashes and flops that are part of any theatrical
Stage
The Shaw Festival's roster of plays for 2011 looks like any other recent season, but for some reason it feels hard to get excited about most of Artistic Director Jackie Maxwell's decisions even though this is the Shaw's 50th anniversary season. There's the usual mix of plays by George
Stage
With 46 cast members, Geva Theatre Center's irresistible production of Meredith Willson's 1957 musical, "The Music Man," is its largest in nearly 40 years of professional theater in Rochester. It's an exercise in just how happy a non-stop hullabaloo can make an audience. Mark Cuddy's affection for the material
Pop Culture
When people talk about quality of life in Rochester, they routinely mention the parks and the Finger Lakes, the professional sports teams and Geva Theatre, the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra and the clubs, and all the museums and colleges - and so they should. But there are also essential
Stage
If you're interested in serious theater, both classical and experimental, the University of Rochester's International Theatre Program may be just your cup of tea, provided you don't require polished professionals as long as the cast is eager and intelligent. Undergraduates play all the roles, though they receive direction and
Stage
Just a block up the street from the shabby office that serves as the only set in August Wilson's "Radio Golf," a wrecking crew stands ready to demolish the abandoned house at 1839 Wylie in Pittsburgh's Hill District. The play, set in 1997, is the last in Wilson's remarkable
