Keith Waits - Page 12

A June 13 fire on the roof of the Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts has closed the facility until at least June 25, forcing at least two local theatre companies to revise plans for upcoming productions and raising questions about the opening of the next entry in the PNC Broadway in Louisville series. The fire broke out around 2:00pm in an area in which construction crews had been executing repairs on the roof and was brought under control by the Louisville Fire Department within about two hours.

Bunbury Theatre has offered an impressive season this year, with John Logan's Red serving as its crowning jewel. I have to say I was unfamiliar with Master Harold and the Boys going into this production, but it is safe to say that Bunbury rides the momentum generated by Red and ends this stellar season on a high note.

Kentucky Shakespeare Festival opens a new summer season with laughs and gusto in The Comedy of Errors. A delightful romp at the C. Douglas Ramey Amphitheater in Central Park, the play serves up boundless humor in a manner comparable to a Bugs Bunny cartoon set in Greece. The rain did not hinder a single beat of the opening night performance and the modest audience was not disappointed. A comedy indeed, this production has everything: mistaken identities, sight gags, pratfalls, puns, and sexual innuendos. This show proves that Shakespeare knew what he was doing as he helped define comedic tropes and that the Festival in Central Park is back for a great season.

In a rough East London flat, Cougar Glass (Remy Sisk) sits nearly naked under a sunlamp, implacable behind sunglasses, drinking beer and smoking a cigarette. As his partner, Captain Tock (Brian Hinds) talks incessantly while setting up for Cougar's '19th' birthday party, the sleek narcissist remains unmoved, waited on by the Captain like a Royal Prince.

Sometimes a character stands out from the source material and starts to establish its own reputation. Actors start to circle the part and gauge if and when they might get a crack at it. For men, in straight non-musical plays, Hamlet, Macbeth, Willy Loman, Stanley Kowalski, are a few that have achieved iconic status. Specifically black characters? The list is shorter: Walter Younger in A Raisin in the Sun would be one. There have been other plays and roles of note, but not until you get to August Wilson do you find a greater repository of suitable candidates.

Sherry Kramer's How Water Behaves is kind of a crazy play. Warm, funny, engaging, illogical, improbable, and slightly surreal - it is maddening in how it pulls these disparate qualities together for a conclusion that explodes expectations of narrative logic while somehow staying true to its own, unique sensibility.

Since her death from cancer on May 4th much has been written about Derby Dinner Playhouse Producer Bekki Jo Schneider and her achievements and contributions to our community and region. She was, after all, an extremely successful business leader in a field - for-profit theatre that's not Broadway - in which the phrase 'extremely successful business' is almost unheard-of. The list of awards, citations, and official recognition she received for her success, locally and nationally, is truly impressive.

A good villain is hard to come by. Bad guys are hardly the type of characters you root for but when they suck you in-watch out! At Commonwealth Theater Center's annual Young Shakespeare Festival, the current installment of Richard III zeros in on the villainous King Richard who manipulates, slaughters and even delights in his bloody pursuits for power over England.

In her staging of The Merry Wives of Windsor, director Jennifer Pennington taps into the unique reservoir of contextual opportunities of a mid-Twentieth Century setting. By placing the action in the 1950's, she puts a refreshing spin on one of the most featherweight of Shakespeare's comedies.

Dialing It UpThis quote from a live cabaret performance by Charles Busch could be referencing his play, Die! Mommie Die!, which is a parody of the kind of grotesque, overwrought melodrama that fueled the careers of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in the 1960's. Busch is certainly juicing up an old model, registering the conniving and backstabbing plot twists beneath a veneer of arch camp.

I'll be honest. I was not a huge fan of the musical Oklahoma! In my opinion, it's one of those creaky old chestnuts that gets done to death by every theater company at some point or another, right up there with other overdone 'classics' like The Music Man, My Fair Lady, or Oliver! I appreciate the historic value of these oldies, but I feel like newer and lesser-known fare gets shoved aside.

Boatwright is an original play written by and starring Emmy Nominated Actor Patrick Tovatt about an eccentric man getting up in years living in a humble abode where he spends his days writing and singing little ditties on his guitar and building boats. One day, a young man walks into his establishment and what was once a quiet and simple life is instantly turned on its head. With a set conceived by three-time Emmy award-winning designer David Weller, this play is gorgeous and makes the stage at this theater seem much larger than it is in real life while keeping the good taste to present it in a simple fashion appropriate to the material.

Christmas. A time of family togetherness - that's the tradition anyway. But Paula Vogel knows that the holidays are also a time in which long-simmering conflicts rise to the surface. In The Long Christmas Ride Home, she presents one family's yuletide journey from home after a confrontational visit with one set of grandparents that leaves a very permanent residue.

This two-person show begins in a remote getaway where a reticent but gifted writer, Olivia (Lauren Argo), has sought seclusion to write a novel. In the middle of a blizzard, a brash and youthful Sex-blogger, Ethan (Winston Blake), bursts in, disrupting Olivia's quiet. Appearing to be complete opposites, Olivia more attracted to the older culture of literature, and Ethan wildly success in the world of social media, they find common ground as writers and quickly make one another's acquaintance. Worlds collide as they uncover the complexities of sexuality and romance in the age of the internet, and they show one another the value of the present, hopes for the future, and the dangers of the past.

Documentary-style theater is not a genre I am well-versed in. It very well may be that I have missed out on a preponderance of strong examples, but the only play that springs to mind readily is Moises Kaufman's The Laramie Project. Like that play, Stanton's we, the invisibles employs personal anecdote, newspaper articles, interviews and creative nonfiction devices to educate on and proliferate the significance of important social issues. In the case of invisibles, the anchor is the real-life alleged rape of a maid named Nafissatou Diallo by infamous former International Monetary Fund Leader Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

There is electricity in the air during this time of the year at Actors Theatre. Humana Festival is in town and with it patrons are introduced to new and exciting works that get their start on Actors' stages. Included among these works, the season's Actors Apprentices get time to shine with You Across from Me.

Sleeplessness is something we can all relate to, and The Patron Saint of Losing Sleep opens with a wonderful comic montage of Ada (Trina Fischer) struggling with insomnia. Up, down, tossing, turning, collapsing to the floor like a cartoon. Trina Fischer's performance as Ada begins with an engaging slapstick grace that barely hints at where this character will take us before the play is over.

Tori Amos' 'Raspberry Swirl' pumps throughout the theater as I enter it, and I cannot help but feel as though I have been transported into some sort of concert. I almost instantly settle into the energy as I recognize several artists I like in the preshow music. A theme arises: These artists are all women. These artists are all women whose careers and specifically selected songs are about female empowerment. I take this knowledge in, and enjoy the music. I think I know what kind of show I'm about to see.

Marginal Loss is a play written by Deborah Stein about an investment firm previously located in the Twin Towers trying to gather the fragments of their business in the wake of the 9/11 tragedy. They find themselves working at a backup facility in New Jersey struggling with limited resources and wondering which of their coworkers made it out alive.

Whether or not Lost in Yonkers is Neil Simon's greatest play may be arguable; there are a lot of plays to compare it to, but it did win the Pulitzer Prize in 1991, beating out plays like Six Degrees of Separation. Although it does have plenty of humor, including several classic Simon one-liners, it is most distinguished by the heartfelt pathos that refuses to be resolved in a tidy fashion.