A dangerous vamp puts the moves on a museum guard in Rarely Done’s The Shape of Things

Appleseed celebrates the works of Israel Horovitz with a pair of one-acts

A trio of high school misfits raise a ruckus in Speech & Debate

Syracuse Stage goes Down The Rabbit Hole for a wild version of Lookingglass Alice

Two theater companies get their spoof on with Star Wars: The Musical

SU Drama tackles early Shakespearean farce with Two Gentlemen of Verona

William Shakespeare’s early play The Two Gentlemen of Verona arrives in town amid low expectations. Among the least performed of all his works, Two Gentlemen is usually cited as his weakest comedy. It does not merit a swipe in the satirical Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged), and if it were not for John Guare and Mel Shapiro’s interracial rock musical version in 1971, we’d barely know it at all. 

And baby makes three: Alex Gherardi and Carmen Viviano-Crafts in Le Moyne College’s Emma’s Child.

Syracuse Shakespeare Festival gets off Scot free with its well-done Macbeth

An attic of memories sparks fraternal conflict in Syracuse Stage’s The Price

Of America’s seven or eight greatest playwrights, the late Arthur Miller is the most user-friendly. In his most often-performed works, All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, View from the Bridge and After the Fall, he delivers heartfelt speeches of deeply resonant emotion in plain English. Meaning lies reassuringly on the surface. His Blue State politics, still in line with that of most audiences for live theater, favor transparent analogies and eschew metaphysics. 

A new floorboards troupe gets off to a fast start with the marital comedy Run for Your Wife

 Ray Cooney’s British farce Run for Your Wife consorts in high-risk behaviors. One is bigamy: trying to keep up an intimate life with two wives in the same town. The second is trying to set up a dinner theater at the Locker Room Sports Bar’s Fire and Ice Banquet Hall, 528 Hiawatha Blvd., on the North Side of recession-wracked Syracuse. Getting a new company off the ground is harder. Bigamy can be managed with a well-sorted schedule as long as you keep your name out of the papers. Dustin M. Czarny’s Not Another Theater Company, closer to home, makes a deeply serious commitment to beat the odds in these gloomy times: be as silly and air-headed as humanly possible while perfectly on cue.