Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun is one of the best-known and most often-studied American plays of the last 60 years, but many people mistakenly assume it is an integrationist polemic. That’s perfectly understandable. The youthful playwright endured anti-black rage and violence when her family moved into a white neighborhood. But the Younger family’s encounter with the white Neighborhood Improvement Society is one episode among many. In this Syracuse Stage production (running through March 11), Raisin feels more like a compelling family drama that justifies comparison with Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, which opened a few years…
Author: James MacKillop
We often try to get our grip on the deeper nature of the United States by reading compellingly written lives of leading citizens. Consider Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography or Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father. Or the essence of such stories may be distilled in fiction. The promise of zooming from social bottom to the top in Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick (1868), although little read today, lurks in the phrase the “American Dream” and populist discontent. So it is with Peter Sinn Nachtrieb’s absurdist comedy Bob: A Life in Five Acts, running through Saturday, Feb. 17, at Le Moyne College. Bob…
With 52 performers on the floorboards plus 13 players in the orchestra, the musical stage version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame shapes up as the grandest production ever from the Baldwinsville Theatre Guild (running through Saturday, Feb. 10). If the citation of the Alan Menken-Stephen Schwartz score brings to mind the 1996 Walt Disney animated film, don’t be misled. This much more mature stage version of the Victor Hugo classic comes from Peter Parnell’s 2014 book and became infamous among musical theater buffs when, in spring 2015, it did not go to Broadway. Among this Hunchback’s many allures is…
Although Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey’s Next to Normal is not usually spoken of next to box office smashes like Wicked, it may well be the landmark musical of the 21st century. It nudges the form of the genre onto new ground. A third-generation rock musical, Normal, which runs through Feb. 11 at Syracuse Stage, begs comparison with the ambitious harmonies and juxtapositions of Jason Robert Brown (Parade) or Stephen Sondheim, only younger and hipper. Diana Goodman (Judy McLane) suffers from a cascade of mental disorders that raise ethical concerns and deeply affect all the members of her household. We…
Ever since Central New York Playhouse moved into Shoppingtown Mall five years ago, it has launched every January with a madcap farce. Kind of a firecracker of hilarity against the darkness, frost and gloom. Some shows, such as last year’s One Man, Two Guvnors featuring Josh Mele, emerge as the strongest offerings of the year. This year there’s nothing chancy about Boeing, Boeing (through Saturday, Jan. 27), the most reliable of all French bedroom farces. What’s different this time are all the new faces, including director Noelle Hedgcock and four female cast members. Most audiences enter Boeing, Boeing with a…
It’s called moving up to the pros. In an unprecedented ascension, actor, director, playwright and costumer Garrett Heater, a multiple Syracuse New Times Syracuse Area Live Theater (SALT) Award winner with different community theater companies, has become chairman of the board and interim artistic director of Syracuse Opera. It’s obviously a boost for Heater, most of whose career lies ahead, but also a tribute to the professional standards some local companies have achieved. Famous Artists claims that the October-November run of The Lion King brought in the highest gross receipts in Syracuse theatrical history with $4.1 million. More than 53,100…
It’s a snowy night in New York City, Dec. 21, 1942, as the live action radio hour of the Manhattan Mutual Variety Cavalcade goes on the air, broadcasting from the seedy studios of radio station WOV. It is the golden age of the American popular song, when Gershwin’s “Love is Here to Stay,” Harold Arlen’s “That Old Black Magic” or Rodgers and Hart’s “Blue Moon” are heard every day. As reprised in Walton Jones’ The 1940s Radio Hour, running through Saturday, Dec. 16, at the Central New York Playhouse, everyone also knows the menace of World War II after a…
Fifty years of marriage. Nineteen songs. Two characters (with frequent costume changes). And one set: a four-poster bed. The Tom Jones-Harvey Schmidt musical comedy I Do! I Do! was long a staple of area dinner theaters, and came close to wearing out its welcome, much like its older sibling, the oft-produced Jones-Schmidt hit The Fantasticks. But when we encounter the show again after a long absence, such as the welcome Redhouse Arts Center revival running through Dec. 17, we can see its longevity is based on something substantial. There is more to it than mere winsomeness. I Do! opened in…
The words “includes audience participation” can provoke the same wariness in a playgoer that “some assembly required” do in a gift-giving parent. Will you become the tongue-tied stooge of an intrusive performer just for sitting in the wrong place? In Duncan Macmillan’s new play Every Brilliant Thing, running through Dec. 10 at Ithaca’s Kitchen Theatre Company, perhaps 20 audience members sitting in different places get into the act, but most of the time it’s painless, like reading a one-syllable word, on cue, off a Post-it note. But the dialogue between player and audience, the complete deletion of a fourth wall,…
A television show. A stage play. A movie. It’s not usual for a property to be all three of these things, but Frost/Nixon is different. TV host and sometime comic David Frost recorded nearly 30 hours of interviews in 1977 with disgraced President Richard Nixon to produce a three-part syndicated show that truly made waves, a landmark for the medium. British playwright Peter Morgan produced his stage play Frost/Nixon about how that happened in London in 2006. It is now making its area premiere, running through Saturday, Nov. 18, at Central New York Playhouse. Director Ron Howard’s film adaptation that…
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Although this play is intended to baffle as well as astonish and delight us, most of the audience will enter Syracuse Stage’s current production (running through Sunday, Nov. 12) with more than an inkling of what’s coming. That’s because Mark Haddon’s 2003 novel, on which it is based, has an almost cultish following, approaching what Catcher in the Rye once enjoyed. Many will know that the central character is a teen named Christopher Boone, who is on the autism spectrum. He’s a math genius who does not want to be touched,…
James MacKillop and Bill DeLapp Credit director Sara Caliva and stage manager Cynthia Reid for tightening the pace of the 13th annual Syracuse New Times Syracuse Area Live Theater (SALT) Awards, held Nov. 5 at Syracuse Stage. Technical difficulties delayed the start until after 8 p.m., and the show ran without intermission until 11:20 p.m. It was a longish haul, to be sure, but there was always something happening on the Archbold stage to maintain the interest of the packed audience, with plenty of sippy-cup libations to complement the good cheer. There were 11 selections from different shows, including video…
Farragut North and Frame 312. Just in time for election week, Rarely Done Productions brings us two plays from director CJ Young on political issues in tandem under the heading “Red, White & Rep” at Jazz Central. Politics and conspiracy theories are the subjects we don’t want to discuss at Thanksgiving dinner, but onstage they involve us and throw off sparks. Farragut North (through Nov. 17), about chicanery on the campaign trail, and Frame 312 (through Nov. 18), which concerns the aftermath of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, are not tightly complementary. And only two players in supporting roles appear…
M. Jones’ 70 Scenes of Halloween is set in a shabby suburban living room on Halloween night with a steady stream of kids ringing a loud doorbell. It’s made up of short, itemized bits separated by blackouts, whose numbers are called off by an officious Stage Manager (Donovan Stanfield). But sometimes the numbers come out of order, meaning we’re supposed to tell — from costume changes, among other things — that the scene we’re watching came before the one that preceded it. Much of this show, running through Sunday, Oct. 29, at the Redhouse Arts Center, is indeed unpredictable. It…
“The Crucible” and “As Is” recall political and human struggles.