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Each little red star is a clickable link to additional information on whatever listing it appears beside. It might be a link to an article in a local newspaper, or it might be a press release the company has sent me.** Gail’s Best of 2011 **
Posted by Gail M. Burns - December 2011
Best Productions of Shakespeare
“Twelfth Night”
Bakerloo Theatre Project
Bakerloo once again took an empty storefront in downtown Troy, NY, and proved that great theatre has nothing to do with multimillion dollar houses and proportionally enormous budgets for lights, sets, and costumes. The image of Lily Junker as the mourning Olivia wearing not widow’s weeds, but her dead brother’s military uniform, will stay with me for a long time.
“As You Like It”
Shakespeare & Company
Just a lovely, fresh, fun production of everyone’s favorite Shakespeare Comedy with a stellar cast of Shakespeare & Company stalwarts. Tod Randolph was superb as Jacques. I can’t wait to see her play Edith Wharton at The Mount in August 2012!
Best Straight Plays
“The Belle of Amherst”
Triple Shadow
Such a delight to meet my old friend Emily Dickinson again! Watching Mari Andrejco’s fine performance as the setting sun filtered through the branches of the apple trees outside the Triple Shadow Performance Barn in East Otis, MA – just beautiful.
“My Name is Asher Lev”
Barrington Stage Company
A moving and mature look at one young man’s struggle to resolve the conflicts between his religious and artistic callings as he comes of age. I loved the simple and elegant set by Daniel Conway and the very painterly light design of John Hoey.
“Eurydice”
Walking the dog Theater at PS/21
Again, the mating of a wonderful playwright (Sarah Ruhl), an inventive director (David Anderson), and a beautiful natural setting (underneath the tent at PS/21 in Chatham, NY) made for magical and memorable theatre.
Honorable Mention
“The Seagull”
Main Street Stage
A strong final effort by this hardy troupe in their storefront space on Main Street in North Adams. While the space was never ideally suited for use as a theatre, the company hung in there through thick and thin and presented many thought-provoking productions of seldom-seen plays.
Best Musicals
This was a banner year for musical theatre in the region!
The Who’s “Tommy”
Berkshire Theatre Group at The Colonial Theatre
A seldom-seen show with a young, big-name star lured the hard-to-reach 15-25-year-old audience to the Colonial Theatre. Randy Harrison, in the title role, and James Barry were stand-outs, as was the edgy, minimalist set by Gary M. English. Sadly, this production ran only ten days.
“Guys and Dolls”
Barrington Stage Company
Fun, fun, fun! A perfect cast performing one of the best American musical comedies of the 20th century.
“You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown”
The Ghent Playhouse
Astoundingly, the perfect cast dropped in to director Judt Staber’s hands for this charming production. Mark Schane-Lydon was a delightful and thoroughly canine Snoopy.
“The Drowsy Chaperone”
The Theater Barn
The Barn pulled out all the stops to squeeze this great big homage to musical theatre onto their small stage with boffo results.
Honorable Mention
“Merrily We Roll Along”
The Theatre Company at Hubbard Hall
TCHH proved once again that there is nothing substantially wrong with Sondheim’s celebrated 1981 “failure,” and an awful lot right. I always love driving through the cornfields of Washington County, NY, to see intriguing theatre and opera (more about that later) in this 1878 wooden opera house.
Best Operas
“The Sorcerer”
Valley Light Opera
There is never a bad time to see this seldom-produced early effort by Gilbert & Sullivan. Director Chris Rohmann shook things up by casting a woman in the title role – the very talented Heather Davies – which gave a whole different meaning to Sir Marmaduke’s exhortation to his guests to “Eat, drink, and be gay”!
“Don Pasquale”
Hubbard Hall Opera Theater
Live productions of opera in the United States are priced mainly for that 1% of the population who control 90% of the wealth. The rest of us have to make do with recordings, radio, and “live” broadcasts…unless you live in reasonable driving distance of Hubbard Hall, where every summer you can go to the opera for $30 or less! In “Don Pasquale” director Heidi Lauren Duke moved the action of this 1843 opera buffa from Rome to Hollywood in its silent film heyday. With a ramp that wrapped right around the full orchestra running from the stage to the floor, HHOT brought the action to the audience and the opera to people.
Best New Works
“The Best of Enemies”
Barrington Stage Company
Part of the Berkshire County-wide Lift Ev’ry Voice Festival which spawned three theatrical productions examining race relations, “The Best of Enemies” – an electrifying look at the true story of the friendship that developed between Ann Atwater, a black civil rights activist, and C.P. Ellis, the Exalted Cyclops of the Durham (NC) Chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in 1970′s – was hands-down the best non-musical play of the season.
The Panto: “Menageries à Trois”
The PantoLoons at The Ghent Playhouse
The PantoLoons’ annual effort always makes my Best Of List because every year these talented local folks go out of their way to write and stage something fresh and funny. This year it was (The Three) Bears vs (The Three Little) Pigs in a Romeo-and-Juliet/West-Side-Story tale of star-crossed, cross-dressing, cross species lovers, with Mark Schane-Lydon as a memorable Goldilocks.
“The REAL (Desperate) Housewives of Columbia County”
Taconic Stage Company
Every summer Carl Ritchie, who’s a big deal in Canadian theatre BTW, pens a musical revue that he stages at the marina on Copake Lake. This summer’s offering allowed five beautiful and talented local ladies of a certain vintage, to prove that they are still sexy, still funny, and still able to sing up a storm. Cathy Lee-Visscher who played a demure matron of Dutch descent here, showed up four months later as a male, chauvinist pig (literally, she played a boar with attitude) in The Panto.
Best Comedies
“The Hound of the Baskervilles”
Shakespeare & Company
It was funny the first time, but it was side-splitting, roll-in-the-aisles, wet-your-pants hilarious in this second staging in the larger Founders’ Theatre, proving that sometimes bigger IS better and size DOES matter – but ONLY if you are working with the Holy Trinity of Berkshire County Comedy – Jonathan Croy, Josh Aaron McCabe, and Ryan Winkles.
“Stones in His Pockets”
The Theater Barn
A small gem of a show that manged to be both very funny and deeply moving at the same time. Two of my favorite Theater Barn actors – Matthew Daly and Trey Compton – who were fabulous together a couple of seasons back in “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,” played dozens of different roles just by changing their hats in this exploration of humankind’s deep need for identity and dignity
Honorable Mention
“Sylvia”
Berkshire Theatre Group at the Fitzpatrick Main Stage
This gentle comedy was perfectly cast with David Adkins as a man in mid-life crisis and Rachel Bay Jones as the bitch who gives him a new lease on life, much to the chagrin of his wife.
Best I-Don’t-Know-What-Category-to-Put-It-In Production
Frank London’s “A Night in the Old Marketplace”
MASS MoCA
Still a “work-in-progress” after more than a decade, this concert staging was just a big ol’ pile of Yiddish Klezmer madness. Parts I loved and parts I hated but the whole intrigued me and the cast was spectacular. I eagerly bought the CD.
Best New Things
“The Happy Day, or The Wizard of the Elm”
Berkshire Music School at The Colonial Theatre
Sadly, this reworked production of a charming 1904 operetta written by Pittsfield residents had only one performance at The Colonial, and that wasn’t open for review. I was delighted to be a part of that audience and thoroughly enjoyed myself…Ooops, was that a review? Sorry! Well, what I am trying to say is that I hope that this show goes on to have a full production in the very near future and that more of you have a chance to see that theatre is not just an important part of Pittsfield’s present and future, but a defining part of its past as well.
Something’s Afoot…
Lots of efforts that started in 2011 bear keeping an eye on in the future, although I hesitate to label any of them the “best” at this juncture.
Berkshire Actors Theatre premiered at the New Stage Performing Arts Center with a solid production of “Four Dogs and a Bone.” One show does not a theatre company make, but I will be interested to see what they do next.
Spectrum Playhouse in Lee, formerly St. George’s Episcopal Church, is one of a growing number of sacred spaces now being used as performing arts venues – the Minerva Arts Center (formerly Our Lady of the Incarnation Roman Catholic Church) and the MCLA Church Street Center (formerly Congregation Beth Israel synagogue) in North Adams are the others that spring quickly to mind. Other houses of worship are looking to rent their spaces as performance venues to help the congregation stay in their beloved buildings as attendance and donations continue to dwindle.
I am still confused by the merger of the Berkshire Theatre Festival and The Colonial Theatre into the Berkshire Theatre Group. They still feel like two different organizations to me, and it doesn’t help that they still have separate Web presences and each is still presenting pretty much the same kind of stuff it did before the merger. Some heavy-duty marketing and branding work is in order here.
While I do not review Williamstown Theatre Festival productions, I do live in Williamstown and I heard plenty of scuttlebutt about Jenny Gersten’s first year as Artistic Director. From reading my colleagues’ reviews and listening to my neighbors’ descriptions of their experiences attending or ushering at performances, I gather that she got off to a rocky start. Two natural disasters – snow collapsed the roof of the set shop in February and Hurricane Irene flooded their props storage facility in September – were out of Gersten’s control but added major financial and creative burdens to her load. I hope Gersten has learned from her mistakes and that Mother Nature is kinder to her in her sophomore year at Wiliamstown.