Cortland Repertory Theatre. Ever-youthful Kerby Thompson has made himself a revered public figure in Cortland County with a winning mix of the reassuring, the quirkily offbeat and the gutsy. Audiences know that even if they never have heard of the show, they’re going to have a good time, such as the gentle spoof of the disco era, Rick Seebers’ 8-Track: The Sounds of the 1970s (June). Theatergoers have come to expect an Agatha Christie mystery, but director Jim Bumgardner enriched that chestnut The Mousetrap (July). Dustin Charles’ Detective Trotter bristled with class anxiety, and Joshua Forecum’s Christopher Wren was squirming atop a perch previously occupied by Psycho’s Norman Bates. Thompson’s direction of the summer’s big musical, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (July-August), underscored the show’s roots in New York City’s Actors Studio. Daniel B. Hess’ choreography was as relentlessly exuberant with the football players as with Miss Mona’s girls. 

While all these were credits to the company, two riskier productions really helped CRT make its mark in 2008. Bert Bernardi’s direction of choreography of the hyper-camp Johnny Guitar: The Musical (August-September) wasted no time with flaccid subtlety. You did not have to see director Nicholas Ray’s landmark 1954 film to get the hilarity of this role-reversing western. Scott Moreau was posturing beefcake in the title role, and Chris Nickerson the kinetic Dancin’ Kid. High-voltage electricity leapt between Chrysten Peddie’s vampish Vienna (the Joan Crawford role) and Megan Rozak’s pit-bullish Emma (the Mercedes McCambridge part). But with Aaron Sorkin’s A Few Good Men (August), whose large cast must have broken the bank, Thompson proved that his company is about more than parfaits and marzipan. Bill Kincaid’s hard-hitting direction erased memories of film actors in the same roles, even if we know the story. Jonathan Self as Lt. Kaffee was a playboy prosecutor educated into maturity by pursuing the case, and Kyle Kennedy shook the timbers with the speech that begins, “You can’t handle the truth!” as the initially charming but compromised Lt. Col. Jessup. Packed houses stood in ovation night after night.

Syracuse University Drama Department. Despite the lack of a pit in the Arthur Storch (formerly Experimental) Theater, four of the year’s six productions were musicals. Given the resources of the Syracuse Stage complex, the glut of talent among the students, and the disregard for box-office tyranny, SU Drama can go where no other company dares. Mary Zimmerman’s lavish, cultish, exuberant Arabian Nights (February) is a case in point. Lovely Danielle van Gal, one of the stars of the current crop of students, played eight roles, each in a different costume by Megan Moriarty. Director-choreographer Anthony Salatino and music director Nathan Hurwitz joined forces for the thunderous Sweeney Todd (April-May), with a non-majoring student, Eric Bilitch, scoring in the title role. 

John Kander and Fred Ebb’s feel-bad musical flop Steel Pier (October) lacks hit songs, but director-choreographer David Wanstreet transmuted it into pure gold. His staging of the death-sprint after hours of marathon dancing was a truly wrenching moment. Leslie Noble’s tight direction of Carlo Goldoni’s Italian farce Servant of Two Masters (March) ran more smoothly than a Swiss watch. Lanford Wilson’s off-Broadway hit from the 1960s, The Rimers of Eldritch (November), presented problems no other company would accept: achronological speeches and 17 players who never leave the stage. Director Gerardine Clark solved them, drawing memorable performances from Kristian Rodriguez, Patrick Murney, Amy Shapiro, Alanna Rogers and Tara Windley.

Le Moyne College Boot & Buskin. Anjalee Nadkarni’s farewell production, Anton in Show Business (February), by the pseudonymous “Jane Martin,” was characteristic of her time here. The offbeat comedy about producing Anton Chekhov in San Antonio pushed student abilities to the limit and maybe a bit beyond. Rhawnie Reil, Alecia Wortman and Marissa Roberts met the challenge, and tiny, feminine Kim Pompo delivered three drag characters. Michael Barbour’s black box production of An Evening of Ives (April) covered some of the same ground as Rarely Done’s All in the Timing, also by David Ives, but with some brilliant, never-before-seen bits. Alex Gherardi, Eileen Behan, Zach Chase, Katie Edwards and Mike Kuhla were there for the laughs. Nadkarni’s departure meant a return to classicism in the fall, with Steve Braddock’s mounting of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband (October-November), which boasted period costumes worthy of the Shaw Festival. Fiona Barbour stole scenes as a Lady Bracknell-worthy dowager, Nick Barbato was the goody-good husband with something to hide, and Eileen Behan was the naughty scarlet woman who wanted to reveal what was hidden. 

But wait, there’s more: 2008 yielded many other floorboards footnotes.

• The award to a performer showing grace under pressure goes to tenor Drew Slayton of Syracuse Opera. Called in last April to sing the lead, Canio, in Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci at the last moment, Slayton performed flawlessly on Friday, even without a single rehearsal with the rest of the cast. While practicing a handstand before Sunday’s matinee, Slayton fell, breaking his clavicle. Clearly in pain, he went on with a cape that covered his useless arm in a sling. Still singing in top form, Slayton was getting along fine until the scene where he is supposed to strangle the soprano, Nedda (Jee Hyun Lim), but he could get only one hand around her neck. Ms. Lim wins the supporting award for so graciously assisting in her own murder.

• In the year’s best conventional wisdom-defying moment, octogenarian playwright-actor Lou Cutell arrived from Hollywood and, without any local connections, brought his senior citizen sex comedy Viagara Falls (title misspelled for copyright reasons) to the nearly always empty Carrier Theatre of the Mulroy Civic Center in mid-July. With his better-known co-star Harold Gould (The Sting, Rhoda), Cutell easily filled the place and left lots of smiles when he moved on to the next burg. Instead of leaving behind a silver bullet, he told us, years after the demise of Summerfest, that there is a summer market for live theater in Syracuse.

• After being thwarted countless times, Robert “Tank” Steingraber finally got his cherished British comedy on the boards for this Onondaga Hillplayers production. He took The Farndale Avenue Housing Estate Townswomen’s Guild Dramatic Society Murder Mystery (February-March) to Jack and Doris Skillman’s always-sold-out dinner theater at Inn of the Seasons, 4311 W. Seneca Turnpike. It turned out to be a clever idea, a kind of community theater Noises Off in which everything goes perfectly wrong. Kelley Loan-Witter scored in five roles, shortly before being sidelined by serious illness.

• ACME Mystery Company’s moving force Bob Greene reports another successful year in 2008, providing more than 100 performances at a variety of venues throughout New York and Pennsylvania. The interactive spoof mystery comedies still continue at the Spaghetti Warehouse, 689 N. Clinton St. ACME, which exclusively uses materials developed by local playwrights, plans to perform four to six new scripts in the coming year.

• Armory Square Playhouse founder David Feldman, godfather of hundreds of many area playwrights, resigned as artistic director after 23 years. 

• The Redhouse, Syracuse’s other professional theater, has become a multi-use facility where live drama is still a part of the mix. The sole, in-house production was the artistically successful edgy comedy Lovesong (May) by John Kolvenbach, making its East Coast premiere. Peter Moller, much associated with Redhouse’s ancestor, Contemporary Theatre of Syracuse, directed. Other shows were imports. Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen’s The Eaten Heart (September-October) was the identical performance that the cutting-edge Debate Society presented in New York City. November brought Peter Brooks’ Le Tragedy de Carmen, a pocket version of Bizet’s warhorse songfest, done in cooperation with Syracuse Opera.

• Artistic director Todd Ellis cleverly employed the same initials, SCT, for his parallel companies Syracuse Civic Theatre and Syracuse Children’s Theatre. After the disappointment of his Broadway-bound Idol: The Musical in 2007, the “Civic” side of the equation pulled back. The major production was an adaptation of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (November), shown in matinees to school audiences. Ellis says he is no longer “producing Cecil B. DeMille or any musicals.” 

• Joe and Pat Lotito’ peripatetic Salt City Center for the Performing Arts appeared at three venues this year. Aubry Ludington-Panek revived Joe DiPietro’s comic revue I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change (January-February) at St. Claire Auditorium; Panek had appeared in the long-running Rochester production of this show, and no other director knows it better. Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw (May), a little-seen misfire, was at the State Fairgrounds’ New Times Theater. Most congenial was Jazz Central for Shannon Tompkins and Bob Brown’s direction of Side by Side by Sondheim, with singers Cathleen O’Brien, Elizabeth Fern, Dana Sovocool and Shawn Forster in top form.

• Now settled into new digs at 805 E. Genesee St., the Paul Robeson Performing Arts Company mounted two dramas this year. Yale Drama graduate Samuel L. Kelley directed two one-acts in September and October: The Blue Vein Society was Kelley’s adaptation of a short story by 19th-century African-American writer Charles Chesnutt, with the Blue Veins as haughty pale sorts who sought to exclude socially their darker brethren, and Sweat, George C. Wolfe’s adaptation of a Zora Neale Hurston story, which featured rising international star Tinuke Oyefule. Company head Bill Rowland and Annette Adams-Brown collaborated on Langston Hughes’ self-described “gospel song play” Black Nativity (through Jan. 11), a joyous, high-spirited retelling of the Gospel of St. Luke.

• Steve Braddock’s annual productions for Gifford Family Theatre might be Syracuse’s best-kept theatrical secret, despite their playing to constantly sold-out houses. Most adults do not realize that Gifford shows, at Le Moyne College’s Coyne Center for the Performing Arts, include some of the most ingenious staging to be found anywhere in the area. Steven Dietz and Allison Gregory’s Go, Dog, Go (May) adapted the P.D. Eastman book popular for more than 40 years. Like Susan Strohman’s The Lion King, Dog brought an avant-garde sensibility to popular entertainment, as well as concepts from French post-modernism, to make kindergartners giddy. The oldest member of the cast, a 20-ish Carmen Viviano-Crafts, was hilarious in dual roles.