Three nights. Three soups. Three shows.

 

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 Parody,” with cast of seven men portraying eight characters, including the four principals from the “Golden Girls” TV series, plus Yetta, the grandmother from “The Nanny.” Near sell-out crowd, overwhelmingly female. Filthy and uproariously funny. Sitting in the second row, not only was I baptized with “douche” water during a satirical commercial, but also had a visit from Blanche (Michael “BeBe” Blasdell), who perched on my lap and sank my face into her bosom.



Third night show. Opening night at the D’Youville Kavinoky Theatre for “The Sound Inside,” a tense and highly literate life-and-death drama in which power dynamics swirl between two finely portrayed characters – a creative writing professor at Yale (the always wonderful Aleks Malejs in a role originally played by Mary-Louise Parker) and the brilliant, emotional wreck of one of her students (Brendan Didio, who’s off to a good start in D’Youville’s new MFA program in partnership with the Kavinoky). Could have used a touch of Blanche from “Golden Girls,” though, to make sure my eyes stayed open.


In the photos: The Decorators' Show House from the outside. The Golden Girls pose for photos with a pair of enthusiastic fans after the show. Publicity photo by Nicholas Tiboni for "The Sound Inside."



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Great March 2024 Cultural Crawl

Image
            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...
Read more

March 13, 2022: "Stew" at Ujima and "Pride and Prejudice" at the Kavinoky

Image
  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...
Read more