The Great March 2024 Cultural Crawl

 

        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 Irish was $10 at Road Less Traveled.  

We beat a path several times to the Buffalo International Jewish Film Festival, which took up residence on the biggest of the three screens at the Amherst Theater. What sticks with me: The documentary “Jews of the Wild West” with its revelation about Josephine Marcus, a/k/a Sadie Earp, who became Wyatt’s common law wife after she hooked up with him in Tombstone, Ariz., in 1882 (look her up in Wikipedia, an amazing life); the pervading sense of dread in "Shoshana," set in those uneasy days around World War II during resistance to the British Mandate in Palestine; and the sticky relationship in "The Other Widow," where a mistress in Paris keeps returning to Shiva to mourn her lover and begins to befriend his wife.  

Had the films been available for streaming on the Internet, like they were during the Covid years, I would have been able to see all of them and they wouldn’t have gotten in the way of several other ambitions for the Crawl. We missed the well-received “Fauci and Kramer” (not Cosmo, the character from Seinfeld, but Larry, the playwright) out at the new Canterbury Woods theater. Lukewarm reviews diverted us from “The Polish Cleaning Lady’s Daughter” at the Paul Robeson Theater, the annual “Buffalo Quickies” short play festival at the Alleyway Theater, and the all-female “Hamlet,” staged by the Brazen-Faced Varlets at the old Ujima Theater on Elmwood Avenue.

We found our way to the new Ujima, though, for two of the three installments in “HERStory: 3 Stories, 3 Women, 3 Weekends,” all one-act, one-woman testimonies, all brief (not much more than an hour) and all sassy and engaging.

Finally, we made a first-ever visit to the long-established dinner theater at Desiderio’s restaurant in Cheektowaga. Jay Desiderio, the producer and director and an old-time acquaintance, was a charming host. The play, “I Ought to Be in Pictures,” was one of those Neil Simon comedies that isn’t ordinarily staged and featured one of our favorites, David Lundy, as the curmudgeon Hollywood screenwriter who unexpectedly reconnects with his long-lost daughter. The dinner – haddock Italian style for me, chicken marsala for Monica, plus an Italian wedding soup replete with little bitty meatballs – was superior to other dinner-theater fare we’ve had elsewhere. Only complaint – the wine list. Alas, no prosecco by the glass.

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IN THE PHOTO: From left, Steve Copps, Aleks Malejs and Anthony Alcocer in promo photos by Eric Tronolone for "Betrayal."