Syracuse New Times’ Syracuse Area Live Theater (SALT) Awards have rated performances by the calendar year, Jan. 1 to Dec. 31. Starting this year, the calculations for the SALT Awards will follow what we usually call “the season,” from Labor Day of one year until the end of August of the next. The current awards have already been announced, and those winners came from shows that were mounted from Jan. 1, 2013, through last August. After that the new SALT seasonal calendar will prevail, with an awards show slated for later this year.
David Witanowski is reviving his Wit’s End Players theater company with a production of Les Misérables to open June 6 in the Mulroy Civic Center’s Carrier Theater. Dark since a poorly received Cabaret in June 2010, Wit’s End, over the previous eight years, set high standards and broke new ground. A stylish production of My Fair Lady with Dani Gottuso won the first SALT Award (2004), while no one else would touch supposedly niche-market shows like The Mystery of Edwin Drood and Assassins. In the interim Witanowski has published two novels, Reynard the Fox (2011) and The Baron of Maleperduys (2012).
Official announcements from the District Festival, uniting the resources of the Redhouse Arts Center, Rarely Done and Appleseed Productions, have yet to appear, but word is leaking out. All three productions call for large casts, requiring time-consuming auditions. The dates are certain: Wednesdays through Sundays, June 4 to 22, at The Redhouse.
We always knew calendars were arbitrary. Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, is a movable date in September. The feds begin the fiscal year in October, and for the Celts it’s Halloween. Now some calendar shake-ups for local theater are on the way, so it’s time to look at changes the next 12 months can bring.
Since their founding in 2004, the - Rarely Done will bring us Stephen Sondheim’s Company, a landmark in musical theater over the last 50 years that has not seen a local production in the last 25.
- The Redhouse venture is A Year with Frog and Toad, based on the “easy reader” children’s fiction by Arnold Lobel that began serial publication in 1970. Up close the show feels like an inverted version of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comic strip, in which adults act out the anxieties of childhood, like waiting for a letter that does not arrive.
- Director Sharee Lemos and Appleseed deliver the least-known item, but one with impressive credentials. In 1999 Gregory Boyd and Frank Wildhorn premiered The Civil War, a compendium of music on many themes, South and North, black and white. It competed for many awards at the time. Wildhorn also composed to the score for Jekyll & Hyde, a memorable success for director Lemos early in the last decade as well as The Scarlet Pimpernel. This will be a concert version.