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Wednesday, June 19,2013
STAGE

Redneck Rhapsody

By James MacKillop
Under its blue state skin, Central New York has a hidden yearning for country music. So when country tastes and styles become grist for red-hot satire, we know just how the gags break.
Wednesday, June 19,2013
STAGE

No Fooling

By James MacKillop
Simon has never been a neglected playwright. Then again, letting some of his shows go fallow as we rethink his strengths has clearly been a good idea. Now in his twilight years, almost age 86, Simon isn’t producing anymore, and we’ve begun to miss him.
Wednesday, June 19,2013
STAGE

Womb with a View

By James MacKillop
The new production at Ithaca’s Kitchen Theatre Company begins with a stark, off-white square, the size of a parlor, and one metal chair without arms. Nothing else. High above this spartan space, scenic designer Alexander Woodward has placed a square frame, the same dimensions as the one on the floor.
Wednesday, June 12,2013
STAGE

Sleuth or Consequences

An Agatha Christie puzzler starts the summer season at Cortland Repertory

By James MacKillop
Stylish Agatha Christie mysteries have flourished at Cortland Repertory Theatre for several years now. The company really has the hang of them, beginning with dialect coach Dustin Charles, who commands British accents of different classes and, in the case of the season opener, The Unexpected Guest, two social classes in Welsh. Costumer Wendi R. Zea loves period costumes; this is a late Christie, 1958.
Wednesday, May 29,2013
STAGE

Setting the Stage

Classics and newbies mix it up for Syracuse Stage’s 2013-2014 slate

By James MacKillop
Call it balance, if you will. The holiday show for Syracuse Stage’s 2013-2014 season will be the best-known stage work in the English language, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, albeit a new, non-musical version by innovative playwright Romulus Linney.
Wednesday, May 22,2013
STAGE

A Homer Run

A cast of one inhabits multiple roles for Syracuse Stage’s An Iliad

By James MacKillop

For several hundred years, the sprawling stories of western culture’s oldest epic, Homer’s The Iliad, were recited and acted out before they were written down. Even when seen on the page, certain pages seem to cry out to be spoken:stark verbal encounters and the hair-raising viciousness of battle.

Wednesday, May 22,2013
STAGE

Shakes It Up

Hamlet Cha Cha Cha kids the Bard in Central New York Playhouse’s musical spoof

By James MacKillop
As you can tell from the title, Hamlet Cha Cha Cha is not a tragedy about a melancholy Danish prince who can’t make up his mind. Strange to say, this Hamlet (Peter Dowling), sometimes called “Hammy,” speaks quite a few of the lines from Shakespeare. Like, “O! that this too solid flesh would melt,” only here it becomes a gag line.
Wednesday, May 15,2013
STAGE

Herstory Exam

Kitchen Theatre honcho Rachel Lampert mines autobiographical amusement with And, Lately. . .

By James MacKillop
It’s hard to tell where the curtain speech (comments about exit doors, cells phones and so on) ends and the action begins in And, Lately. . . . Actor-playwright Rachel Lampert, who is the producing artistic director at Ithaca’s Kitchen Theatre Company, asks for a show of hands, “There isn’t anybody here who doesn’t know me, is there?” One timid hand goes up. With a shrug of the shoulders, she then advises, “You will.”
Wednesday, May 8,2013
STAGE

Back to Bataan

Nurses experience World War II up close and personal in Appleseed’s Cry Havoc

By James MacKillop
In her program notes for Cry Havoc, fledgling director Lois Haas describes her campaign to get Appleseed Productions to mount the dramatic rarity as a “labor of love.” Haas, a stalwart at the company for many years, sees Allan R.
Wednesday, May 8,2013
STAGE

Hook, Lines and Tinker

Peter Pan soars in a new Redhouse interpretation

By James MacKillop
Newsflash: Peter Pan is actually a boy, or, rather, a strapping American adolescent with a certain amount of swagger. After a century of tinkering with the text, cartooning and musicalizing, Peter Pan has come to mean for many audiences a singing, 60-year-old retired female gymnast who flies around the stage on visible wires.
 
 
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