Despite a down economy, local stage companies managed to soar

If theater people need something to celebrate, they should just look back a year when the sky was indeed falling, and ponder the sky that did not hit us.

Along with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, jobs and population kept fleeing Central New York. The always-helpful National Endowment for the Arts reported that 98 percent of the American public will never see a live theater production of any kind. Ever resilient, companies fought back, as if joining Carlotta belting out “I’m still here” from Sondheim’s Follies. So, counter-intuitively, there were two more productions than last year, with an increasing capacity for risk-taking. Amazingly, we had a record 13 premieres from regional stages, counting Ithaca openings. At year’s end two new takes on familiar vehicles, Little Women from Syracuse Stage/Syracuse University Drama Department and the Talent Company’s White Christmas, were both doing sellout business. We’re still here, and we’re dancing.

The downturn did have some malign effects. Glimmerglass Opera of Cooperstown, the most labor-intensive company in the area, cut back from its usual summertime roster of four productions and sent out the general manager in a curtain speech to plead for more donations. It worked, and by year’s end the ledger looked encouraging. Syracuse Stage dropped one show and added the holiday co-production with SU Drama, previously an extra, to the subscription package. 

More baleful was the decision by The Post-Standard to omit most stage reviews from the daily’s print editions and make them available only online. This puts additional responsibility on the alternative weekly, the Syracuse New Times, which we gladly accept. Stage will remain one of our prime bailiwicks, with as much space for analysis as we can spare, and a color production pic. And the paper will also continue with its Syracuse New Times Syracuse Area Live Theater (SALT) Awards next spring.

Syracuse Stage. The contrast between the end of artistic director Timothy Bond’s first season last spring with the beginning of his second signals his adjustment to life in Central New York. If the 2008-2009 season honed an edge, the 2009-2010 season offers comfort food. 

The Stephen Sondheim review Putting It Together (January-February) suffered from a misplaced confidence in director Rajendra Ramoon Maharaj, whose short, unhappy tenure with the company ended last spring. Broadway stars like Chuck Cooper and Lillias White were first-class musicians, but Maharaj’s attempts to tart up the action did not win over the anti-Sondheim faction while dismaying the master’s most passionate devotees. Bridget Carpenter’s Up (February-March) was a strained piece of whimsy about a star-struck loser’s attempts to achieve 15 minutes of fame by putting his life in jeopardy. Director Penny Metropulos, imported from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, glossed over the intimations of suicide implicit in the dialogue and spelled out in the program notes. Susannah Flood’s fast-talking eccentric stole the show but unfortunately disappeared in the second act. 

Bond’s sole directing venture in 2009 was the well-received revision of Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett’s Diary of Anne Frank (April). Wendy Kesselman’s revamping emphasized Anne’s Jewishness and excised optimistic passages that some have found bogus. SU Drama student Arielle Level gave us a hyperkinetic, youthful Anne more moving in her humanity than her saintliness. Coming just in time for subscription renewal was Regina Taylor’s Crowns (May), an African-American musical review linked to the ornate hats worn in black churches. Director-choreographer Patdro Harris ably guided the five mature women and rebellious city girl Shannon Antalan, but contralto Roz White won top place with her “His Eye is on the Sparrow.”

In a break from tradition, Syracuse Stage presented only two shows in the fall, but both have been warmly embraced by local audiences. Picasso at the Lapin Agile (opening in October instead of the usual September) by Steve Martin, self-described as born to do stand-up comedy, delivered lots of laughs and won back oodles of fickle subscribers. SU Drama actor Craig MacDonald as Gaston, the skeptic with prostate problems, was never in better form. Your scowling churl at The New Times thought director Penny Metropulos was mistaken to stage Picasso as farce when Martin craves to be seen as a wide-market Tom Stoppard. 

What really pointed the new directions preferred by Bond is the much-loved holiday co-production, the musical version of Little Women (November-December). Consider the contrast with Maharaj’s multicultural Godspell of the previous year. Especially heartening was the feeling of winning against the odds that pervades this production. Visionary musical theater authority Marie Kemp championed the wonders of the Kim Oler-Alison Hubbard collaboration in workshops last year, and as Marmee, the girls’ mother, delivered the break-down-the-house solo, “I Have a Garden.” Director-choreographer Anthony Salatino’s authority over new material tells us any subsequent productions will have to pay attention to what he created. 

Currently running parallel in the Storch Theater is the one-man re-creation of the 1946 Frank Capra Christmas movie classic, retitled This Wonderful Life (December), with the dynamic James Leaming taking on all roles from Old Man Potter to ZuZu.

The Kitchen Theatre. The company in the 73-seat venue in Ithaca (soon to be larger) becomes more of a regional presence each year, a strong competitor at SALT time. Artistic director Rachel Lampert has a canny eye for fresh, challenging but accessible works done to performance standards that equal or surpass those of any in the state, including that overpriced island on the Hudson. 

The year began quietly with Francesca Sanders’ one-woman I Became a Guitar (January-February), a poetic family drama exploring how the inner life is realer than the external. Next came the return of Brian Dykstra, the internationally known playwright who has settled in Ithaca and written several works for the Kitchen stage. His ironically titled A Play on Words (February-March) applies David Mamet rhetoric to George Carlin’s mad obsessions with language and semantics. (Two neighbors squabble over the meaning of the line “I don’t give a hang.”) Dykstra’s works are always directed by artistic partner Margarett Perry.

Perry also guided a second world premiere from Rachel Axler, a veteran writer from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Her comedy Archaeology (April-May) gave us slackers in an unnamed college town reacting and adjusting from an earthquake. Norm Johnson’s astonishing set, one of the most emphatic anywhere all year, allowed whole buildings to shift 15 degrees on cue. For Scott Brown and Anthony King’s two-person Gutenberg! The Musical! (June-July), Lampert directed company favorites Karl Gregory and Tyrone Mitchell Henderson as two dozen characters who simultaneously explain how the printing press changed Western culture while constructing a musical comedy.

Fall selections favored the counter-intuitive. Lampert guided Bob Clyman’s sardonic comedy Secret Order (August-September), in which we learned about the back-stabbing careerists that control cancer research. Ted LoRusso’s First Day (October-November), yet another world premiere, was a unique blend of movement and percussion that depicted a young man’s impressions as he took on a new job in the Big City. Lampert returned to helm the area premiere of Arlene Hutton’s Last Train to Nibroc (November-December). What first seemed like a budding romance about young people from rural Kentucky at the beginning of World War II turned into an unpredictable dialogue of status, values and self. The year ended with two more new works by Dykstra: Ho!, a dark fantasy in which Santa Claus has become a predatory corporate entity, and A Christmas Tree Story (December), about how a Vermont youngster was rescued by a benign witch. 

Rarely Done. Living up to his company’s name, artistic director Dan Tursi brought in rare discoveries never seen before in town, some to stump the most serious theater buff. Neil LaBute is one of the most highly regarded contemporary playwrights, largely shunned by other companies. His three one-acts set with Mormon characters known as Bash (March) call for bravura delivery of deeply unsettling material. David Simmons, already a recognized soloist, properly set teeth on edge with the first, a Utah adaptation of the myth of Iphegenia. But the evening belonged to chillingly soft-spoken Erin Race in her first lead role as a contemporary Medea. 

Edmonton-born Brad Fraser is one of Canada’s best-known and most controversial playwrights, but his Poor Superman (April-May) was reset in Syracuse with jokes about The Post-Standard and Trexx. Production problems, like coordinating action with scenes projected from a DVD, hampered the staging of a complex story of crossing sexual taboos while fielding allusions to old comic books. Good moments were shared by Brian Hensley as a philosophical AIDS victim and Anne Fitzgerald as a wise-cracking, non-singing Elaine Stritch. 

Keeping all the allusions in order was a big part of the fun in Dorothy Kingsley’s Valley of the Dolls: The All-Male Version (May). For starters, Jacqueline Susann’s uber-trash novel, a roman à clef, yielded one of the campiest movies of all time in 1967. Garrett Heater, astonishingly fetching in drag, was at once a pouty Barbara Parkins (from the film) doing a character based on author Susann. Josh Smith simultaneously served up the movie’s Patty Duke doing Judy Garland. It’s an outrageously ambitious conceit that works best with performers adept at impersonation, like Heater, Smith and especially Jimmy Wachter. 

Audience participation of a different kind was called for in Michael Heitzman and Ilene Reid’s Bingo: The Musical (June). To keep snooty audience members from sneering at the working-class women who are addicted to the game, everyone received cards and started playing before and between the action. Several local actresses broke out of their usual personae, so that height-challenged Kate Huddleston was supposed to be a secret basketball player, and the usually sleek Katheryn Guyette turned sleazy to deliver the naughty lyrics of “Gentleman Caller.”

Bob and Jim Walton’s Mid-Life! The Crisis Musical (September) suffered from a title that made the revue sound like a rival to Menopause: The Musical, when it was really as sophisticated and envelope-pushing as a New Yorker cartoon. Intimate female health questions were still part of the mix, as with the tap-dancing pap smear routine. Some of the greatest moments of hilarity were achieved by veteran players: Suzanne Tiffault with her breasts caught in the wringer of “Musical Mammogram,” Shaun Forster as a henpecked macho basketball player, Tina Lee as a trailer-trash housewife, and Aubry Ludington Panek as a down-market Dolly Parton. 

A Christmas Survival Guide (December) by James Hindman and Ray Roderick likewise offered terrific material hidden behind a lackluster title. Along with much spoofery, such as a splendid Peter Irwin in a version of “Silver Bells” with cell phones, came unashamed awe for the sacred holiday, like Dana Sovocool’s cliche-smashing “O Holy Night.” Elsewhere, Sovocool showed off his comic chops as we had not seen them before. In between was the fully staged premiere of Len Fonte’s Werewolf (October), developed by the Armory Square Players, where the playwright has been a shaping figure. Despite the threat of the supernatural implied in the title, the horrors faced by Syracuse high school teacher (Tom Minion) are all too natural, if unspeakable. Good roles, too, for young student Keegan Lounsberry and former student, now lawyer, Peggy Droz.

Simply New Theatre. John Nara’s company, with the most controversial material seen anywhere this year, was one of the few left struggling to use the Mulroy Civic Center, the late Joe Golden’s bequest to the community. To meet the venue’s high costs, Simply New arranged short runs, usually with a Saturday night opening, and full houses. With unapologetic arrogance, the management treated his efforts with contempt. At year’s end Nara learned he was kicked out of the BeVard Room, which he had used so adroitly, to allow traveling professional companies rehearsal space. 

Before eviction, he had a good year. Talking With (January-February) by the pseudonymous “Jane Martin” is often dismissed as a series of audition pieces for women, but director Heater made sure he had the strongest talent and also emphasized the dark themes that unite the 11 monologues. Heater delighted in casting against type, such as the usually smiling song-and-dance girl Kristie Grant becoming an outraged screamer or the assertively feminine Judy Schmid turned into a dikey, hard-bitten rodeo rider. Others rose with the most demanding material, such as the two vignettes on the acceptance of death with Rosemary Palladino-Leone and Binaifer Dabu (in native Parsee costume), and Moe Harrington as the Juilliard-trained aesthete who has slid from Chekhov to something less dignified. 

One of the most argued-over dramas of the past decade, Martin McDonagh’s Kafkaesque The Pillowman (March) finally made a Central New York debut on Navroz Dabu’s amazing set, which looked uncannily like the one in the original London production. Former light comedian Heater (having a great year) reached a career peak as the victimized writer Katurian, browbeaten by the good and bad cops (Wil Szczech and Josh Canfield). Trumbo (May) presented one man at a desk reading old letters, but for Bill Molesky it was the fulfillment of a deep commitment and the actor’s top performance of the year. Dalton Trumbo was a blacklisted screenwriter when movies were still thought cultural junk, but he was a brilliant wordsmith who, in an age before e-mail, wrote some of the most literate missives in American history. 

When attempts were made to stage Alan Rickman and Katherine Viner’s My Name is Rachel Corrie (September) in Manhattan, censorious forces closed it down. Indeed, some audience members came to the BeVard to scowl and not to clap during the show, adapted from the diary and letters of a perhaps naive American peace witness on the Israeli/Palestinian border. Newcomer Jillian Dailey’s bravura solo explored all the nooks and crannies in an idealist’s heart and found her a more human than willing martyr. 

Finally, while the author has a reputation for impenetrability, James Joyce’s The Dead (October), the 1999 Tony winner with a score by Shaun Davey, was a surprise box-office smash. Astute casting choices sharpened the many supporting roles, such as having jazz singer Lorraine Grande come on as the oldest of the Morkan ladies who host the evening, or bringing in Joe Pierce in dundrearies as the haughty voice of the privileged classes. Susan Blumer and Bill Molesky stole scenes as a squabbling mother and grown son, but the evening belonged to two familiar voices, Kevin McNamara and Aubry Panek, as the young couple whose marriage is not what they thought it was. The second act’s solo, “Michael Furey,” for the still-radiant Panek (formerly Ludington) was a career peak.

The Talent Company. Under Christine Lightcap’s driving leadership, the MGM of local companies gave us three richly produced, exuberant shows, each taking a different artistic direction. The riskiest of the three was Marvin Laird and Joel Paley’s Ruthless! The Musical (April), a wide-ranging spoof (Mame, Gypsy, The Bad Seed, Applause) that was catnip for theater buffs. Costumer Jeanette Reyner never worked better magic, including period leopard duds for the drag role of Sylvia St. Croix (Jimmy Curtin). Baldwinsville elementary student Julia Goodwin, an irrepressible musical bulldog, was the sine qua non for Ruthless! but lovely Julia Berger, previously in the chorus of The Producers, broke through as a gifted light comedienne who really knows how to sing. 

Tursi directed Ruthless! and the other two Talent Company productions, each a bigger project than those at his own Rarely Done company. Lightcap and Tursi rethought the company’s perennial favorite, West Side Story (July), injecting new blood in a now 52-year-old show. This meant Sharks and Jets the age of high school kids, with 15-year-old soaring soprano Mary Vinciguerra as Maria, and Ithaca College student Tim Quartier, with a voice ready for grand opera, as Tony. As spicy Anita, the role written to steal the show, Maria Pedro was fresh out of Fayetteville-Manlius High School. All grown up and professional was the choreography of Daniel Lake, brought in from Manhattan for the occasion. Nadine Cole’s musical direction honored one of the greatest scores ever written. 

The score for Irving Berlin’s White Christmas (November-December) was greatly improved from the 1954 Bing Crosby-Rosemary Clooney movie. The trick was inserting earlier Berlin hits like “I Love a Piano,” which turned into a show-stopping dance number with returning company favorite Gary Troy (from New York City) and Brandi Ozark Weston (from Virginia), with choreography by Michael Groesbeck. Musically, the top of the evening went to the side-by-side solos, “You Didn’t Do Right By Me” from Colleen Wager (formerly Walsh) and “How Deep is the Ocean” from beardless Bob Brown, his only lead of the year.

Wit’s End Players. As in other recent years, artistic director David Witanowski focuses his efforts on only two shows but they must be of completely different type. Last winter was the time for seriousness, featuring David Mamet’s landmark drama of moral chicanery in the real estate business, Glengarry Glen Ross (January). Michael O’Neill stood out as Shelley Levine, the guy who suffers as much for his ethics as his inability to close a sale. William Finn and Rachel Sheinkin’s offbeat The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (October) was the rare example of a very recent Broadway hit on local boards. A bevy of new faces shone as the contestants, starting with Dan Williams as the kid with the unlikely foot method. Danielle Nash in “The I Love You Song” was the lonely girl with only a dictionary as a friend. Elizabeth Luttinger fired up the overachiever who could speak six languages and could play every instrument in the pit. Brian Scott, dressed in his Boy Scout merit badges, sang of the unfortunate effect competition had on his, um, manhood. Alex Gherardi, relatively speaking a veteran because of his exposure in Le Moyne College productions, got wails of laughter from lines like “Correct” and “Incorrect.”

Appleseed Productions. Alone among local companies, Appleseed is a forum for directors with competing visions, with the most unlikely juxtapositions. Artistic director Jon Wilson promotes less of his personality and personal tastes in what we see. Only in the Atonement Lutheran Church basement on 116 W. Glen St. does an ironic retelling of the Jekyll-Hyde story come just before a broad comedy set in a Southern diner. 

Dustin Czarny opened the year with one of the biggest casts of the season for Dale Wasserman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (January-February), with veteran player J. Brazill reaching a career high as Randall P. McMurphy, looking more like Che Guevara than Jack Nicholson. Continuing a company tradition of getting a big musical on the boards ahead of most of the summer season, Czarny revived Stephen Sondheim’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (June), proving a choice role for company regular Greg J. Hipius as Pseudolus the slave. Some supporting roles literally belong to veteran players such as Lanny Freshman as Senex and Michael Spinoso as Hysterium. Their quartet, with Hipius and Mark Allen Holt as the courtesan dealer, “Everybody Ought to Have a Maid,” rightfully steals the show. Forum also marked the smashing debut of Danan Healy, a knockout beauty who knows how to tell jokes and can melt hearts with the otherwise lesser song, “That’ll Show Him.” 

SALT-winning director Sharee Lemos got new direction from some of her favorite players in Tom Griffin’s The Boys Next Door (March), a sensitive comedy about the harried leader (Tom Dowd) of a group home for the mentally challenged. Leading man good-guy Joe Pierce was reduced to childishness, while utility character player Alan D. Stillman plumbed new depths as the most tragic of the boys. The only Appleseed production under Jon Wilson’s hand was the mock British comedy, I Shot My Rich Aunt (May), really an American sitcom in tweed. Nora O’Dea was the dowager who caught the bullet, and Wendy Sikorski was the spicy lovely all the boys lusted for. David Vickers stole scenes as the clergyman we thought was stuffy but really brimmed with lust under his tight white collar.

In the doldrums of late summer Appleseed mounted four one-acts, mostly by distinguished playwrights David Ives, Sam Shepard and Jean Paul Sartre. Beloved local actor Al Marshall reportedly stole the show in Kyle Bass’ Spoons, directed by Donna Stuccio. After Labor Day Dan Stevens revived Ken Ludwig’s 1930s-style farce, Lend Me a Tenor (September), with excellent costumes by Barbara Toman. The role of the go-getting gofer Max gave us a good picture of how much Terry LaCasse has learned since enrolling in the drama program at Le Moyne College. 

The most ambitious 2009 production at Appleseed, artistically and intellectually, was Jeffrey Hatcher’s new play, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (October-November), directed by William Edward White. A drama for our time, Hatcher’s Jekyll convinced us that Robert Louis Stevenson’s original was impossibly naive. Jim Uva projected both depth and breadth as the really not-so-good doctor in his newly more complex form, but Dabu, usually a distinctive and identifiable figure, kept popping up in disparate, who-am-I-now roles as a child, later both adult men and women, and also something in between. Harrington concluded the year with Della’s Diner: Blue Plate Special (December), a cult musical-comedy from the South. Tamaralee Shutt, in a succession of tacky costume changes, all with big-hair blonde wigs, connected with the Southern soul.

Cortland Repertory Company. Artistic director Kerby Thompson’s continually winning formula includes plenty of risk, such as a dance musical set in Haiti and the documentary trial of a playwright accused of the crime of homosexuality. Caribbean rhythms abounded in the early Lynn Ahrens-Stephen Flaherty musical Once on This Island (June). Director-choreographer Daniel B. Hess moved all the gods and demons around the floor with quicksilver grace. Lovely Traci Allen held the virginal but plucky center, while Kelli Blackwell shimmied like nobody’s business in the most vibrant number, “Mama Will Provide.” Paul Rudnick’s comedy I Hate Hamlet (June-July) pitted a self-doubting TV actor (Dustin Charles) against the ghost of an overbearing John Barrymore (Robert Boardman), so that the living man might appear in Manhattan’s Shakespeare-in-the-Park. Tony Capone’s direction hit all the right notes and drew a touching performance from Heather Shisler in the usually thankless role as the Ophelia-like girlfriend. 

Hess returned to direct the major musical of the summer, Jerry Ross’ Damn Yankees (July), staged in faux nostalgia for 1955. Not very 1950s-ish was the casting of a dynamic African-American singer, Alyson Tolbert, as the temptress Lola, who gets what she wants. Not only can the devil, Mr. Applegate, be counted on to have the best lines, but as embodied by company favorite Dominick Varney he improvised even more uproarious lines in the show-stopping soft-shoe, “Those Were the Days.” 

While France and England are the nations we usually link with the idea of farce, Paul Slade Smith’s Unnecessary Farce (July-August) posited a Scottish connection. His tartan-clad heavy, Joshua Murphy, belched out an Edinburgh brogue more incomprehensible than those from the druggies in Trainspotting. Former SALT nominee Morgan Reis glowed under Thompson’s direction as the accountant, a beguiling straight woman. 

CRT’s bid for high seriousness, Moises Kaufman’s Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde (August), was undercut by director Bill Kincaid’s unwise choices. He depicted Wilde (Brian Runbeck), an imperious wit in life, as an unhappy martyr, while the bullying adversary, the Marquis of Queensberry (Kyle Kennedy), morphed into a farcical cartoon figure. Stuart Ross and James Raitt’s Forever Plaid (August-September), not seen in the past five years, was a four-part harmony comfort for audiences still longing for popular music before The Beatles. The show had four equally strong players, but Christopher Lukos had the sharpest delivery of the mock-dorky humor, and Christopher Timson smashed the vanilla mode with Johnny Ray’s torch song, “Cry.”

Merry-Go-Round Playhouse. Now in its 51st year, artistic director Ed Sayles’ Auburn venue, known as “Broadway in the Finger Lakes,” remains the only company to do turn-away business on a regular basis. MGR’s ability to draw audiences with disparate vehicles—a flapper comedy from the 1920s, a Disney kids’ musical, and a show about working-class male strippers in Buffalo—portends well for the future. Recession be damned: MGR could be on the verge of a big-scale musical theater festival, like Stratford or Niagara-on-the-Lake in the Finger Lakes, only with dancing girls. 

David Yazbek and Terrence McNally’s The Full Monty (June), which ends with blue-collar blokes showing their pink behinds, turned out to be tuneful, complex and touching. Peter James Zielinski and Brad Nacht proved not only tough guys can dance and sing but also that sensitivity runs under their dirty fingernails. The one beige behind belonged to Rob Barnes as Horse, whose “Big Black Man” really did stop the show. Disney’s High School Musical (June-July) premiered on television and in floorboard versions has played to different demographics than those usually seen in Emerson Park. No matter. Director Kate Swan made the teen characters widely appealing without resorting to cornball emotions. Much of the heavy lifting went to Ayessa Herrera as the Hispanic math whiz and Michael Parker Hayes as the hoop-dreamer who has to choose between the court and the stage. Meegan Midkiff as the scheming snot Sharpay got to have lots of vicious fun. 

Although it opened in 1925, the Vincent Youmans-Otto Harbach No, No Nanette (July-August) still burst with tap-dancing energy. The lioness’ share of the laughs were purloined by two women in supporting roles: Andrea A. McCullough as the wisecracking maid Pauline, like a post-graduate Patsy Kelly, and ultra-endowed Synthia Link as the Frisco showgirl Flora Latham. Artistic director Sayles has said more than once that Michael Bennett’s A Chorus Line (August-September) is his favorite show, which explains why it was the season’s major production. Exceeding the process of the script, he auditioned more than 2,000 aspirants for 19 roles. The top winners were Elizabeth Early as the not-quite over-the-hill Cassie (who must wow us), Megan Jimenez who wails “What I Did for Love,” flame-haired Kate Marilly as the cynical Sheila, and the much too luscious (she never got “Looks: 3” as a score) Cameron McLendon as Val in the T’n’A song. 

The extended post-Labor Day season allowed MGR to reprise the smash box office and critical hit of 2006, Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story (September), with Erik Hayden once again channeling the soul of the doomed 22-year-old Texas rocker. Finally, almost up until the frost was on the pumpkin, director-choreographer Brett Smock, a company favorite, returned to stage I Left My Heart: A Salute the Music of Tony Bennett (October). No attempt was made to mimic the great one, and instead Pat McRoberts, Rob Sutton and Marty Thomas reminded us of the songs that kept Bennett in the spotlight for more than 50 years.

Hangar Theatre. The first summer under new artistic director Peter Flynn assured all the regulars that the Ithaca company on the far side of Cayuga’s water was in good hands. He brought up bosomy Emily Skinner for Claudia Shear’s Dirty Blonde (June), the Mae West tribute. Some of the best lines came from West’s own stage plays, which shook up all the squares in her day. “Controversial” is a word usually associated with David Mamet, but even more so with his 2008 comedy November (July), in which a lunkhead U.S. president (Wally Dunn) goes out of his way to offend liberal sensibilities, as if they were somehow incompatible with the law. Jokes about the eradication of Israel brought gasps from the Ithaca audience. Understandably there was much applause at curtain time for the Jewish lesbian speechwriter, Sharon Eisman, who graciously suffers under his boorishness. 

The hottest ticket of the summer was Jonathan Larson’s AIDS-themed rock opera Rent (August), one of the first productions by any regional theater. Although director-choreographer Devanand Janki managed to get the whole sprawling monster on stage for experienced Rentheads (they drove in by the hundreds), the very intimacy of the Ithaca space heightened the emotions that were more diffuse in Manhattan’s Nederlander. The juiciest single role, Maureen, permitted Catherine Stephani to soar with the two most memorable numbers, “Tango Maureen” and “Over the Moon.” Also standing out in the large cast was Anisha Nagarajan as the exotic dancer Mimi Marquez. 

Syracuse University Drama Department. With The New York Times calling recent SU Drama alumna Vera Farmiga “the next Meryl Streep,” local confidence is running high. Nothing is impossible, with a slate that featured a Restoration comedy with real yuks, pumped new blood for a well-used warhorse, and a show that had some accessible, even moving absurdism. 

William Congreve’s Way of the World (February) astonished audiences who thought that students glued to iPods could speak so well, with top honors to Brendan M. Cullen and Stella Heath and loud applause for Kelsey Stalter, Jessica DeScipio and John Garry in key supporting roles. Way was director Malcolm Ingram’s best-ever revival of a pre-Shaw comedy. Usually sunny director Marie Kemp, much associated with musical theater, plunged into the heart of darkness with Rebecca Gilman’s Boy Gets Girl (March), a hard-edged drama of stalking. Speaking some of the roughest dialogue heard anywhere all year was James Weirich, who scared the pants off (his intention) of audience members, while Sarah Neslusan was the girl (make that woman) who fought back. 

Many of the selections from the John Kander-Fred Ebb review The World Goes ’Round (April-May) came from shows that never play here, like Flora the Red Menace, and we liked savoring what we’re missing. Benjamin Michael and Eric Jarboe enjoyed stylish moments, but the review gave more to the female side, including Naomi Seifter, Mary Kate Morrissey and Kathleen Wrinn. Choreographer Kim Hale assisted director Nathan Hurwitz to make World as much a dance show as a musical. 

Star choreographer David Wanstreet and director David Lowenstein restored the magic to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! (October). The excellence of Emma Ritchie’s soprano as Laurey lingers in the mind months later, but two uproarious supporting comic players, Mary Kate Morrissey as Ado Annie and Jacob Heimer as Ali Hakim, exceeded expectations. French-Rumanian absurdist Eugene Ionesco’s one-acts, the comic Bald Soprano and the bleak Chairs (November), shook up audiences 50 years ago and can still rattle your brain and your composure. Director Rodney Hudson got student actors Peter Hourihan, Jr. and Stalter to walk and sound as though they were four times their ages. Jasmine Thomas disrupted the nutcase order in Soprano.

Le Moyne College Boot & Buskin. After several years of spreading its net as wide as possible, Le Moyne returned to classics, one modern, one Elizabethan. Director Michael Barbour’s staging of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (February-March) emphasized the playwright’s links to Brecht, Pirandello and Joyce. Young all-stars, already featured in other college productions, distinguished themselves: Alex Gherardi as the Stage Manager, Kim Pompo as the bride Emily and Zach Chase as the groom George. Shakespeare’s As You Like It (October-November), with all the cross-dressing and peek-a-boo games in the woods, lends itself well to college production. Director Steve Braddock reconceived the Forest of Arden as an Adirondack Northern Exposure. Lauren Pisano in the choice double-gendered role of Rosalind was both mighty and alluring. Terry LaCasse, now a student but a fixture in community theater since his childhood, created a dapper, quick-witted Touchstone.

But wait, there’s more: 2009 yielded many other floorboards footnotes:

• The Redhouse, Laura Austin’s well-equipped facility at the edge of Armory Square, expanded offerings in all the arts but cut back on live theater with four productions, all running less than a week. Actor-playwright Patricia Buckley opened with Evolution (January), the first of more than a half-dozen original works by local playwrights. A mime with the former Gams on the Lam company, Buckley employed expressive body language along with original music by Marc Mellits for a comedy-drama about two dissimilar sisters and their mother. Gams pal Leslie Noble directed, with Buckley taking all roles. 

The remaining three were all imported from out of town. Carlo Alban’s Intringulis (May) depicted the terrors and joys of being an aspiring child actor on public television while also an illegal immigrant from Ecuador. Brooklyn’s three-person Debate Society returned for A Thought About Raya (October), by 1920s-era Russian absurdist Daniil Kharms, an explosive, transitionless, laugh-out-loud anticipation of Samuel Beckett. The Canadian-based dance/clown/mime troupe Nuit Blanche (December) made a memorable U.S. premiere. The deadpan humor of Buster Keaton ran side-by-side with “Dancin’ Cheek-to-Cheek” in Chinese.

• To complete their 50 years in community theater, Jack and Doris Skillman’s Onondaga Hillplayers had to decamp and move down the road from Inn of the Seasons to new digs at the Links at Sunset Ridge in Marcellus. The winter show featured the de facto repertory company of director Tank Steingraber and players John G. Seavers, Mary Kate Migdal and Karen Alexander in Neil Simon’s Last of the Red Hot Lovers (March). The foursome returned for Muriel Resnik’s G-rated sex comedy, Any Wednesday (October-November). Migdal, as businessman Seavers’ mistress, never looked sexier and did not let a silver tongue-stud hamper her lines. Karen Alexander, as the cheated-upon wife, like Myrna Loy come back to the earth, got more than her share of the best lines.

• Famous for their free performances in Thornden Park over many years, Ronnie Bell’s Syracuse Shakespeare Festival has also been indoors during the winter at the previously inhospitable SU Warehouse on East Fayette, fortunately remodeled before year’s end. This year began well with Romeo and Juliet (January), featuring an incandescent Jo D’Aloisio at the doomed Capulet girl. Some of the strongest scenes played opposite SALT-winner Katharine Gibson as the Nurse, younger than that role is usually seen. In Elizabeth Rex (April), a show created at Ontario’s Stratford Festival, Ryan Maness was the transvestite actor who teaches a grieving Queen Elizabeth, Susan Wolstenholme, how to find her femininity. The summer production, frequently rained out, cast Tony Bersani, one of the finest baritones in the county, as Prospero in The Tempest (August).

• Len Fonte’s Werewolf at Rarely Done proved that the Armory Square Players’ script-in-hand readings of new plays that take place every third Sunday continue to pay off. Now in its 24th year, presently under Donna Stuccio’s leadership, the organization is bigger than ever, with more manuscripts submitted and more critics kibitzing. December brought five entertaining playlets from Amy Doherty, Kathy Kramer, Peter Moller, Joel Potash and Stuccio herself.

• Starting under the Appleseed aegis, Dustin Czarny also launched the improv company, Don’t Feed the Actors, which later appeared at different venues and by year’s end was giving birth to a new company that will produce dinner theater at the Locker Room on Hiawatha Boulevard, north of Carousel Center. 

• Every performance of Bob Greene’s interactive mystery-comedies at his ACME Mystery Company is different. Usually housed at the Spaghetti Warehouse on North Clinton, Greene also toured venues such as Yesterday’s Royal at Sylvan Beach. The recession-proof ACME gave more than 100 performances while developing new scripts. Greene’s own The Sound of Murder (January-March), spoofing the Rodgers & Hammerstein warhorse, delivered Mark Holt as Sister Adolf. C.J. Young’s Death Warmed Over (March-April) had company regulars like Jennie Russo and Megan Flannigan playing characters named Crystal Pane and Jane Doe. And Dan Stevens, one of the most familiar names in community theater, wrote and starred in A Tomb With a View (September-November), in which wife O’Dea played a character named Aida Possum. 

• As it has almost every May this decade, Cruizin’, conceived by New Times publisher Art Zimmer, packed houses at—where else?—the New Times Theater at the New York State Fairgrounds. Zimmer never appeared on stage and was instead played by co-producer Michael Wallace, who needed a cravat, a lapel pin and a bright blazer, while his wife Holly Wallace played Shirley Zimmer without visual cues. The ever-changing salute to golden oldies took on a new title, Cruizin’ with Nick and Friends, as Nick Mulpagano with about a dozen of his favorite impressions, from Elvis to Sonny Bono. Retained from the earlier corps of singers was Elizabeth Fern, whose hysterical Cher upstaged Mulpagano’s Bono, but her “Believe Me” really knocked the crowd over. A welcome newcomer to the cast was singer-comedian Shaun Forster, whose “Earth Angel” and “Rags to Riches” reminded how much passion there was in the beige decade of the 1950s. 

• Two new plays also pioneered new venues. Mark Cole’s An Evening with Alan and Lawrence (May) took place at Studio 24, otherwise a photography studio on Court Street near Sedgwick. In this one-of-a-kind dialogue between words and music, Cole played Lawrence, an obsessed and somewhat annoying antiquarian who matches wits with an unruffled pianist (Robert Auler), performing selections from the romantic repertory, particularly works of Robert Schumann. There’s conflict, rising action and a dramatic payoff when music triumphs. Alan and Lawrence was reprised in November before a huge crowd at the SUNY-Oswego campus, where Cole is chair of the drama department. 

• Another original production from the SU Drama Department premiered at the Everson Museum of Art’s Hosmer Auditorium before traveling to different venues around town. Lauren Unbekant’s Woman in the Blue Dress (October) was inspired by the Renoir painting of the same title in the Turner to Cezanne art show. Wrinn delivered a lighthearted lesson on Impressionism, the male and female gazes and 19th-century female assertiveness. Direction from Unbekant’s former Gams on the Lam pal Noble guaranteed that the words moved. 

• Among the baker’s dozen of world premieres in Central New York, former Syracuse Stage artistic director Robert Moss opened his adaptation of the early George Bernard Shaw novel, Cashel Byron’s Profession (November) at Ithaca College.

• At St. David’s Celebration of the Arts, where theater had not previously been included, director Lemos revived Mamet’s Duck Variations (May) with Al Ross and Joe Pierce as the philosophical gents on the park bench. A labor of love, Lemos has championed Duck Variations for 30 years.

• At the Paul Robeson Performing Arts Company, the big show in the intimate space on East Genesee is the current Black Nativity (December-January) by black America’s poet laureate, Langston Hughes. Co-directors William H. Rowland II and Annette Adams-Brown reprised the reverent but humorous retelling of the Gospel story, with Joshua Se’Quan Williams and Nicole Blue as the holy couple, searching for a place at the inn.

Syracuse theater also experienced its share of curtain calls:

• Salt City Center for the Performing Arts, the company Joe Lotito founded and gave so much of his life to, will survive his passing. Lotito’s death at 82 in October dominated everyone’s mind at the end of the year. Subject of a Nov. 11 Syracuse New Times cover story, Lotito at the end commanded universal love and respect for all he had given us. Sweeter things got said about him, all deserved, than he had been used to hearing in life. Even in his last year, without a permanent home, he still succeeded in what he wanted to so most: getting shows on the boards. 

Longtime associate Shirley Fenner (aka Mrs. Gerald Reidenbaugh) soloed in Widow’s Pique (January-February) adapted from two short stories from North Carolina writers, where Fenner lived before her return to Syracuse. They were witty and poignant, with an unexpected touch of naughtiness. Fenner returned for Alfred Uhry’s Driving Miss Daisy (October), with David Walker as Hoke, but the run was cut short by Lotito’s passing. At year’s end the official announcement was that Brown would take over the Salt City name, putting his own company, Opening Night Productions, on indefinite suspension.

• Rosemary Nesbitt, who died at 84 in August, might have been best known as an arts doyenne in Oswego. But in 1942, while still in high school, she founded the Baldwinsville Theatre Guild, the area’s oldest continuing theater company. And one of the great spark plugs of the guild, John McFall, who launched 40 years of musicals with Oklahoma! in 1966, died in November after a long illness.