Tag: theater

The Secret Garden; Mystic Pizza

My wife and I saw two musicals in July, The Secret Garden and Mystic Pizza. The former we saw at the Mac-Haydn Theatre in Chatham, NY on

“In a house of secrets, a young girl unlocks the door to forgiveness, love, and new beginnings.” The children’s novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett was first published in book form in 1911. Decades later, it became a Broadway musical.

The book and lyrics are by Marsha Norman; she won a Tony for the former and was nominated for the latter. The music by Lucy Simon, sister of Carly and Joanne, was also nominated for a Tony. 

The theater always attracts top-notch young adult talent. J. Peter Bergman wrote in the Berkshire Edge: “Wild Handel plays Mary Lennox. Did I say ‘plays’? I should have said ‘becomes,’ for that is what happens here. She is the star of this show, and she deserves to be, for she is both amazing and more amazing in this role. She has the self-assurance of a woman of 30 who has played all the tough parts right. She sings beautifully, acts thoroughly, and maintains an India-influenced English accent throughout the show.” 

But the cast was strong throughout. Since I wasn’t at all familiar with the source material – though my wife was – it took a few minutes to grasp the narrative flow. But it was quite worthwhile.  

Connecticut

I saw the movie Mystic Pizza when it came out in 1988 or perhaps early 1989. My recollection  is that I liked it. But I couldn’t remember the plot.

As it turns out, the musical I saw at Capital Rep in Albany on Saturday, July 18, had much of the storyline from the Wikipedia description of the film: 

“Sisters Kat and Daisy Araújo, and their friend Josephina “JoJo” Barboza, are young Portuguese-American women working as waitresses at Mystic Pizza, a pizza parlor owned by Leona…in the fishing town of Mystic, Connecticut. But no husband for Leona.

What the movie DIDN’T have was a litany of music from the 1980s. While well-performed throughout by the talented cast, some landed better than others. Small Town (Mellencamp) FOUR times? And I ceased to believe that Girls Just Want To Have Fun.

But other songs worked better, notably Into the Mystic, which is a 1970s song, but whatever, tied to Kat and her would-be beau Tim. 

And while Steve Barnes from the Times Union (paywall likely) didn’t buy it, both my wife and I thought Charlie, the preppy courting Daisy, sold Hit Me With Your Best Shot.

Barnes also noted: “Veteran local actor Marc Christopher makes the most of his debut at The Rep, becoming hilariously over the top in multiple roles, especially as a restaurant critic so imperious that he makes Anton Ego from the movie ‘Ratatouille’ seem friendly.” He was also the priest who was to perform the wedding ceremony for for JoJo and Bill, which was hysterical.

Barnes noted that the “17-member cast gorgeously singing Starship’s ‘Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” …felt more like a concert than an evening at the theater.

The show is playing through August 9. 

 

Cap Rep: Archduke

the Great War

The play Archduke. playing at Cap Rep in Albany, NY, through Sunday, March 29, is about the plot to assassinate the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which helped start World War I.   

Yet the story is not only informative about the political machinations that preceded the Great War but is often quite laugh-out-loud funny.

Archduke was written by Rajiv Joseph, who has had 17 plays produced in 20 years, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo.” It was previously produced at a theater in Philadelphia, with mostly the same small cast and the same director, Blanka Zizka

The play opens with 19-year-olds Gavrilo (Suli Holum) and Nedeljko (Sarah Gliko) meeting at a secret location in Belgrade. As John Green would say Everything Is Tuberculosis. The two young men and a third, Trifko (Brandon J. Pierce), are all suffering from the deadly disease.

Meaning of life

Impoverished and looking for meaning in their too-short lives, the trio have been recruited by a Serbian army officer named Apsis (James Konicek, the only one not from the Philadelphia cast) to train to liberate Serbia from its Austro-Hungarian overlords. The leavening of the indoctrination comes from Apsis’s savvy cook, Sladjana (Melanye Finister), who slyly undermines her boss’s mission. Is despair and destruction the only path? 

While the dialogue was fictionalized, the narrative of these young men being recruited by the anti-empire Black Hand is historically accurate.

An interesting choice by director Zizka was the casting of 40ish women as Gavrilo and Nedeljko. Per the program: “Zizka believes that casting shouldn’t be based on finding an actor most like the character, because ‘acting is transformation.'”   

The production is further enhanced by the imaginative staging – the intentionally anachronistic wheeled chairs cracked me up – and the effective projections designed by Jorge Cousineau and Michael Long.

If the play Archduke comes to your town, go see it.  Here’s the page about its Philadelphia run in early 2025 and the Playbill from its off-Broadway production in late 2025. My wife and I saw it at Cap Rep on Saturday, March 14, at the matinee.

Black Theatre Troupe of Upstate New York (BTTUNY)

Eclipsed

On June 21, 2021, it was announced that the Black Theatre Troupe of Upstate New York (BTTUNY) will be a Resident Community Company at Capital Repertory Theatre (theREP) (251 N. Pearl Street).

“For eleven years of programming, [BTTUNY] (formerly named Soul Rebel Performance Troupe) has had no permanent performance space, which necessitated an ongoing search for venue availability for every show the company produced. With dedicated headquarters in Capital Repertory Theatre for their upcoming productions, Founding Artistic Director Jean-Remy Monnay states, ‘…it is very exciting to know that BTTUNY has a secure home base for all of our shows this season and into the future. To know that we can plan a full season of work because we don’t have to worry about ‘where’ the next production will take place, is just so wonderful. With this residency, BTTUNY can grow. Our programming can grow, and so can our audience base.'”

This is way cool. My wife and I have spent a fair amount of time in the “new” CapRep building. For the past few Octobers, it has hosted the Readers Theatre fundraiser for Wizard’s Wardrobe, an afterschool tutoring service in Albany’s South End . 

Support

“In addition to providing space on both of their new stages (the Lauren and Harold Iselin Studio and the theatre’s Main Stage) – Capital Repertory Theatre (and the Proctors Collaborative) will provide some support to BTTUNY such as ticketing, marketing, and development support, and some production support as outlined in the agreement between BTTUNY and the Proctors Collaborative. However, BTTUNY remains its own company. All programming and decisions for BTTUNY remain in the hands of Monnay and his board of directors.”

Part of that ticketing support this year included offering season ticket holders of Cap Rep and Proctor’s Theatre in Schenectady – this year, we took both! – complementary Try Me tickets. The Proctors Collaborative, including the Universal Preservation Hall in Saratoga Springs, uses this method to promote programs that might not have as much visibility. BTW, I’ve never been to UPH and need to rectify that. 

 On the list of Try Me tickets was a BTTUNY production of Berta, Berta. What’s that? From playwright Angelina’ Cheri’s website: “After committing an unforgivable crime, Leroy is granted one final wish: a chance to make amends with his long-lost lover Berta. Their reunion swells from a quarrelsome conjuring of the past to an impassioned plot to escape their impending fate.

Song

“The play is inspired by the prison chain gang song ‘Berta, Berta’, which originated on Parchman Farm, Mississippi State Penitentiary. It is a fictional origin story.”

The CapRep /BTTUNY description is slightly different. To my mind, it’s more accurate:  “Set in 1920s Mississippi, ‘Berta, Berta’ tells the story of Leroy, a Black man sent to jail for following a White woman down the street to help her–a supposed crime that never existed. Prison changes him, and upon getting out, he finds himself to be a true criminal. Before giving himself back up to the police, however, he is determined to make amends with his long-lost girlfriend, Berta. The play highlights themes of doomed love, tragic misunderstandings, a flawed and biased prison system and magical realism.”

Review

The review in the Berkshire Eagle by J. Peter Bergman is spot on. “On director Michael A. Lake’s three-room set, Sadrina Renee and Alvin Kershaw play their story with grace and passion and their very professional abilities. You can’t help falling in love with these troubled people as they live through their traumas and their needs…

“This is a play like no other I have seen, and I have seen a lot of plays in my lifetime. There is rarely a moment when the two players are still, and those are all utterly romantic. Lake has kept Berta as active as a person could be at two in the morning. Leroy, on the other hand, facing disgrace and arrest, is as calm a human being as possible, an amazing feat of control. The way in which he responds to her would make him as fidgety as Berta, but instead, his calm is sometimes chilling.”

The play’s short run ended in October, but BTTUNY will be performing more programs this season. Valley Song by Athol Fugard will be at Hubbard Hall in Cambridge, NY, about an hour from Albany, on November 15-17 and 22-24.

They will perform Once On This Island on CapRep’s main stage from February 6 to 16, 2025. I saw this show at Proctors in 2020, just before the pandemic.   

The final BTTUNY performance of the 2024-25 season will be Eclipsed by Danai Gurira from May 29 to June 8 in TheRep’s Iselin Studio. Based on the quality of Berta, Berta, I imagine these will be fine performances. 

Rebel Without A Cause; SIX

Divorced, beheaded, survived

I haven’t attended enough cultural/entertainment events for my tastes of late. While I did go to the reopening of the Spectrum Theatre on April 24, I haven’t been able to get there since, and I want to soon.

I saw Rebel Without A Cause, the first James Dean movie I ever viewed.  Experienced with a 21st-century lens, Jim Stark (Dean) seems less a rebel than, in the words of ScreenRant, “a troubled youth struggling to find his place in a society he sees as hypocritical and devoid of meaning.”

Indeed, it is the high school clique that almost immediately scorns him without much provocation who are at least as broken as he. The knife fight between Jim and Buzz (Corey Allen), a few years before West Side Story, is said to reflect the “social pressures of male teenagers.”

Surely, Jim is frustrated by his ineffectual father Frank (Jim Backus), who allows Jim’s mother Carol (Ann Doran) to uproot the family at the first sign of difficulty.

Control

Jim’s one male friend, Plato (Sal Mineo), is a real outsider, abandoned by his parents, needing “to assert some control over a world in which he feels powerless and invisible.”

Jim’s classmate Judy (Natalie Wood, later in West Side Story) evolves from her disregard for Jim as her classmates did, while missing her old relationship with her father (William Hopper from Perry Mason), to Jim and Judy becoming surrogate parents to Plato.

Indie Wire makes the case that Plato is the first gay teenager on film while avoiding getting stopped by the restrictive Hays Code

It’s an interesting slice of life, with Ray (Edward Platt from Get Smart), the cop specializing in dealing with youth a sympathetic character. Even if it is “overwrought and cloyingly melodramatic,” I still appreciated the chance to see it on the big screen.

Famously, the three leads all died too soon. In a gallery of Lost Photos From a Legendary Hollywood Archive, Dean is captured just a month before he died in a car crash at the age of 24 on 9/30/55, even before the film premiered. Natalie Wood drowned at sea in 1981 at the age of 43. And Sal Mineo was murdered in 1976 at the age of 37.

Divorced, beheaded, died…

SIX, which my wife, daughter, and I saw at Proctors Theatre in Schenectady I don’t think is that compelling a book. I had listened to the music beforehand. But for what it is, it does the thing extremely well. It was an 80-minute rock show with a sextet of Henry VIII’s queens.

The Times Union review by Katherine Kiess is about right. “Styled as a ‘Renaissance Idol’ belt-off…they compete in a glamor-coated trauma Olympics to see whose marriage was the worst.”

You can tell it was a rock show because they namechecked “Schenectady!” a half dozen times before the “LED wall panels and cathedral windows that become everything from a church confessional to a dating app screen.”

The four-piece band, the Ladies In Waiting, cooked.  And the singers were excellent. So it’s perhaps not great theater but, as the Los Angeles Times noted, it is “unapologetically revisionist. That’s why it’s successful.” And entertaining enough.

Spectrum movie theatres are back!

mint brownies

Since I publicly mourned its closing on February 24, I’m happy – nah, ECSTATIC! – that the Spectrum movie theatres are back!

Per the press release: “Spectrum 8 Theaters first opened in 1983 by two couples who previously had owned and operated an independent movie theater, the Third Street Theatre, in Rensselaer.” I used to attend the Third Street. “For decades, the Spectrum has been synonymous with independent, upscale programming of avant-garde, foreign, independent, and widely-released features.”

Scene One Entertainment and its CEO Joe Masher is promising  to “restore the selections that made the Spectrum’s concession stand a treasure: locally-sourced cakes, pastries, cookies, gluten-free delights, real butter on fresh, hot popcorn, and mint brownies.” Many of these elements disappearted during Landmark’s seven-year operation at 290 Delaware Avenue.

“The old new Spectrum” has installed an exhibit titled ‘Looking Back, Heading Forward’ featuring 12 local artists with a nod to the past and to the future showing portraits and people gathering together around the arts.

The theater is now “hiring for all positions here at the Spectrum. Be part of the comeback story in Albany’s Delaware Avenue neighborhood.” A very small part of me is tempted, but no.

My first film…

I’m enough of a geek that I feel as though I should go to the grand reopening. I’ve seen Amelie, Cinema, March of the Penguins, and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, all at the Spectrum. I also watched The Wizard of Oz at the Spectrum in 2022, and even if you’ve seen it on television, I’m recommending that you view it on the big screen.

And I saw Polyester at the Third Street Cinema! They will be offering the  ODORAMA CARDS, which you obviously need.

Still, I’m going to opt for a film I’ve never seen, which meanseither The Bodyguard or Rebel Without A Cause. Having seen NONE of Jamres Dean’s films in a cinema, I’ll probably opt for Rebel.

I still don’t kno what “regular” film I will see. The rrailers have often helped me to decide, and except for Covil War, I don’t know much about the current films. 

Musical

My wife and I saw the Spring Awakening at Cohoes Music Hall on Saturday. As this review in Nippertown notes, it is excellent. You should know that it deals with mature and intense themes.

It’s playing one more Thursday through Sunday. A member of the cast and one of the musicians attend our church, and another musician sold us our house back in 2000; I knew about the actor but not the musicians beforehand.

We saw a production of this musical back in 2010. while the set in the new profduction wasn’t as snazzy, I thought this production flowed better than the earlier one.

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