Theater Thoughts

So much theater around here now that Curtain Up! has opened the season and only so many pages on the calendar. To date, we've checked off three of our must-sees (you ought to see them too) and they've been full of surprises.  We couldn't miss our good friend Julie Kittsley as one of three women of a certain age (she's the one on the left in the picture) taking their first surfing lessons and diving deeper into their lives in "Wipeout" at the Alleyway Theatre. The surprise here, aside from the fact that everybody spends the entire play on surfboards, are the seats reconfigured into a broad oceanfront. This one ends Sept. 28. The surprise at Ujima Theatre, aside from the bigger-than-usual crowd, is the play itself, "The African Company Presents Richard III," a spotlight on a little-known slice of theatrical history dating to 1821. It runs through Sept. 29. A bunch of terrific performances in this one, notably Gerald Ramsey as the character Papa Shakesp...

For "Private Lives," which opened Friday night at the Irish Classical Theatre Company, fight director Steve Vaughan and intimacy director Jessica Hillman-McCord should have been elevated to the top of the credit page.          In cahoots with director Chris Kelly, they're responsible for inflating the already risqué 93-year-old Noël Coward comedy into a riot of romantic mayhem that leaves the stage littered with debris in between smooches steamy enough to serve as illustrations for a sex manual.           Right from the start, it's a design for domestic disaster – an upper-crust divorced couple from England honeymooning with their new spouses at the same hotel on the French Riviera. Can the divorcées resist being drawn back into what attracted and repelled each other in the first place? No, they can't.            Ben Michael Moran, seen just a few weeks ago at the ICTC as the strait-laced police of...

            Our Great Cultural Crawl of March 2024 has finally concluded and, just like a pub crawl, the challenge now is remembering the stops along the way.              Totally unforgettable was the one in the middle of the trek – Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal” at the Irish Classical Theater, a masterpiece of buttoned-up emotional mayhem. The acting was stellar and we caught it on a night that not only featured a talkback with the cast, but also closed captioning, which eliminated the dialect problem we sometimes have at the Irish. It was so good that it made for unfair comparisons a night later when we ventured a couple blocks south on Main Street for the well-staged but less literary “The Light Fantastic,” a spooky comedy with loud thumps and books flying off shelves in the Road Less Traveled Theater. The other unfortunate comparison came at the bar. Same little split of a proper prosecco that was $8 at the Ir...

  Three nights, three soups, three shows. First night soup. Mushroom at DiTondo, former Italian family restaurant refashioned into an upscale attraction for foodies at the edge of downtown Buffalo . Best dish of the itinerary. Flat 12 mushrooms. Delicate flavor, perfect creaminess. First night show. Decorators’ Show House, former St. Patrick’s Friary House, a dark, imposing Gothic monster at the edge of reclaimed industrial Hydraulic District, not far from the current Buffalo News offices in Larkinville. Lots and lots of little friar bedrooms, many of which I wouldn’t mind settling into, unlike some of the previous Show Houses. Especially loved the new M P Caroll Hardwood floors and the vintage tin ceilings. Second night soup. Seafood bisque at 2 Forks Up, restaurant on the rustic edge of suburban Getzville specializing in lobster. Meaty beyond expectations.   Second night show. The Alleyway Theatre’s “Golden Girls: The Lost Episodes, Vol. 3.” Subtitled “A Naughty Drag...

  The savory smell of something on the stove welcomes us into the Ujima Theater for this 2021 Pulitzer Prize finalist by Zora Howard called “Stew.” We’re in a kitchen, a functioning one. Water runs from the taps in the sink and there’s a wastebasket stashed under the food prep island for the scraps from an endless succession of carrots, string beans, peppers, onions and potatoes that are sliced, diced, scooped up and thrown into a big pot on the back burner.           I can’t help but recall the old theater adage – the one that says if you see a gun at the beginning of the first act, it’s going to be fired before the end of the third act – and wonder if it applies to knives. Will there be brandishing? Not literally, but they’re constantly in motion.           Mama’s cooking is the heart and soul of this 90-minute visit, which begins with Mama (Karen Saxon) declaring that she’s going to cat...