September 2024: So many curtains up!



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 Shakespeare. He should get nominated for another Artie Award. 

Our Curtain Up! night choice on Friday the 13th was the Irish Classical Theatre Company's "Dracula (A Comedy of Terrors)," the surprise being that it wasn't Irish or Classical at all, but rather a raucous romp around an Elvis-like vampire (shirtless Jorge Luna), with a raucous audience to go along with it. And then there was the stage crew in black-and-red capes. It's up through Sept. 29. 

The weather for the Curtain Up! street party out on Main Street was as perfect as it could get for the fire jugglers, the marching drum corps and Lee-Ron Zydeco, set up as usual in front of the Bijou Grill. 

Meanwhile, George Caldwell's group turned lobby of the Alleyway Theatre into a 52nd Street jazz club, stopping every buzz of conversation. Enough of a surprise, that, but then there was young singer Alex MacArthur, who looks like a different person without her glasses. She just keeps getting better and better. 

Now all we have to do is find nights to satisfy the Dunkirk Observer paperboy in me at the musical "Newsies" at the Shea's 710, which ends Sept. 29; the gawky high school sophomore in me at "The Prom" at MusicalFare, on stage through Oct. 6; and my inner anarchist at the comedy at the Kavinoky, "POTUS: or Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive," which won't open till Oct. 4. Fitting them in among the three shows we still have tickets for at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake before that season ends in mid-October is going to be a challenge. 

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