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
Stage
The fire started on the eighth floor of the 10-story Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in Lower Manhattan at 4:45 p.m. on Saturday, March 25, 1911. Within 45 minutes, the New York City Fire Department had the blaze under control, but in only 15 minutes flames had swept through the building, killing
Stage
Even though the musical revue, "Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris" plays all over the English-speaking world, I think it's fair to say that most people have no idea who Brel is. A songwriter and singer, he was born in Brussels in 1929, spent most of
Stage
Plink, plank, plunk is roughly equivalent to the sound of a guitar, but clink, clank, clunk is the sound of "6 Guitars" landing on the stage of the Downstairs Cabaret Theatre. Solo performer Chase Padgett, who co-wrote the script and score with director Jay Hopkins, portrays six different guitar players
Stage
I resent the way younger generations than mine have reduced the standing ovation - the highest praise an audience can give - to an exercise in obligatory self-indulgence. But when Maureen McGovern finished her one-woman show, "Carry It On," at Geva Theatre Center last Saturday night, I was on my
Stage
Popular singer Maureen McGovern's one-woman show, "Carry It On," appears to be less than a play but more than a cabaret act. Maybe McGovern's own term for it - "theatrical musical memoir" - is as serviceable as any. Especially since, as she says, "I don't like categories." The show, now in
Stage
At the very start of the printed text of "Marie Antoinette: The Color of Flesh," playwright Joel Gross admonishes directors to keep the play's many scenes moving seamlessly as if it were a movie. Director David Runzo does just that in the production that opens Blackfriars' new season. For this
Pop Culture
The world, like everybody's handheld screen, keeps getting smaller. I still haven't figured out why anybody wants to watch a movie on a cell phone. Maybe it's generational; I'm unrepentantly old. But the good news is that large screens are helping to shrink the planet even more than usual. Simulcasts
Stage
Beneath the opulent dress and sycophantic manner of court composer Antonio Salieri lurks a complex character of raging needs and malicious manipulation. Although Peter Shaffer named his 1979 play, "Amadeus," after Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and set it in the Viennese court of Emperor Joseph II in the late 18th and
