Cast announcement !

The casting is now complete for the Tom Dudzick comedy, Miracle On South Division Street. This is a very funny and touching play for the holidays - by the same playwright who gave us Greetings a few years ago.

Miracle on South Division Street finds the Nowak family, amidst the urban rubble of Buffalo’s East Side, performing their unique Christmas ritual of gathering at the shabby old homestead to commemorate the family “miracle.” According to legend, on Christmas Eve in 1942 the Blessed Mother herself appeared to Grandpa in the family barbershop.  Now Clara, the family matriarch, happily tends the family heirloom, a twenty-foot memorial shrine to the Virgin Mary which adjoins the house. As the play develops, daughter Ruth divulges her plan to finally “go public” with the miracle by creating a one-woman Christmas Show about the sacred event. But during the course of the meeting, the entire family’s faith is shaken to the very core when a deathbed confession causes the family legend to unravel. The results are heartfelt and hilarious!

CLARA will be played by Peggy Cosgrave. Peggy has not only done a lot of work on Broadway, Off-Broadway, Film and Television . . . but she originated the part of Clara in the New York production! It goes without saying that we're very lucky to have Peggy in the cast.

RUTH will be played by Brandy Zarle. Brandy is a very busy New York actor who has appeared here at Shaker Bridge three times - in Boston Marriage, in Time Stands Still and last season in Or. I'm always excited for the chance to work with Brandy again.

Playing Ruth's brother JIMMY will be David Bonanno. David has appeared on Broadway, off-Broadway, in several national tours and at some of the great regional theatres of this country - including the Weston Playhouse, where he's familiar to virtually everyone.

Rounding out this amazing cast, playing Ruth's sister BEVERLY is Jeannie Hines. Jeannie has appeared on this stage eight times, but everyone remembers her in Sylvia. Twenty years from now someone will come up to her in the grocery store and call her Sylvia. Now you'll be able to add Beverly to the list.

Opening night is December 6 . . . you don't want to miss this one!

Frankie and Johnny

Here we go . . . it's season seven!
We started out with Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune by Terrence McNally. A beautiful play, and it was created by two remarkably talented actors: Grant Neale and LeeAnne Hutchison. I told them last spring, when they were here doing North Shore Fish, that whenever I thought about Frankie and Johnny - I heard them. And now that they've done it, I can't imagine anyone else in those parts.

"It was a tremendous fart . . . "

The review came out on the first weekend, and it can only be described as a rave. Here it is:

‘Frankie and Johnny’ Make Passionate Theater at Shaker Bridge

By Nicola Smith

Valley News Staff Writer

Saturday, October 12, 2013 

(Published in print: Saturday, October 12, 2013)

Johnny’s a guy who’s hard to love. He pushes too hard, talks too much, doesn’t take no for an answer and is a sap, to boot. Frankie, on the other hand, is all sharp elbows. She talks too little and doubts too much and tries to put as much distance as possible between herself and Johnny’s crazy insistence that they’re magic, based on one admittedly incendiary sexual encounter. And in Terence McNally’s funny, romantic, radiant play Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune , they’re meant for each other. Johnny thinks they are, anyway, but Frankie’s got other ideas.

The two-person play, which was first produced off-Broadway in 1987 with Kathy Bates as Frankie and F. Murray Abraham as Johnny, opens Shaker Bridge Theatre’s season this weekend in Enfield.

I’d seen another production of this play some time ago, and wasn’t enamoured of it. And the movie adaptation, directed by Gary Marshall and starring Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer as, rather implausibly, lonely souls who’ve bottomed out in the love department, had a bad case of terminal cuteness. It’s the kind of movie where stereotyped old ladies sitting at the next table comment on the action — Look, Marge, he’s asking her out. You don’t say, Gladys! Now he’s kissing her! Pass the smelling salts! And we’re supposed to say, Adorable!

But in this entrancing version, directed by Bill Coons, all of Johnny’s moony, swoony, let’s-get- married love talk, which sounds completely nutty at first considering they don’t really know each other at all, starts to work on you, just as it does on Frankie.

Johnny’s a short-order cook in a New York coffee shop, and Frankie’s one of the waitresses. They’re supposed to be middle-aged, and less-than-perfect looking, and I haven’t seen one production where the actors actually met that standard of unremarkableness. This one’s no different. The two leads, Grant Neale and LeeAnne Hutchison, are not middle-aged and they’re attractive. But they’re so persuasive as the two lovers who spend one evening making love, and then circling each other until dawn comes, that it doesn’t really matter.

The point McNally is making isn’t new — love can make us extraordinary — but he sells it with such feeling, panache and good will that he reminds us of the transforming power of love. Frankie really would prefer, all things being equal, to be left to herself without a nudge like Johnny around to tell her that he knows what she thinks and feels. Johnny is manic, on fire with the certainty that Frankie is The One. He’s a preacher and she’s the potential convert, hard and cynical on the outside, but more vulnerable and wanting to believe than she lets on.

Both Hutchison and Neale are outstanding as Frankie and Johnny. She’s tense, wary, angry and impatient. He’s ardent, jokey, demanding and relentless. Alone, they’re just two people going about their lives, but together, they sand away each other’s rough edges. What they give each other is possibility, and that most delicate of butterflies — hope. In less capable hands, the play could verge on gooey, but director Bill Coons makes it an expansive, big-hearted evening of theater.

“Frankie and Johnny at the Clair de Lune” continues through Oct. 27 at Shaker Bridge Theatre in Enfield. For more information and tickets, call 603-448-3750 or go to shakerbridgetheatre.org.

Yeah, we do good work here. 

Here are some more photos from this wonderful production.

"You're not the easiest person to talk to."

"There's nothing better than this . . . "

"Ice for a burn?"

"See that old couple down there?"

"I knew what it was like to be loved"

"I want more, I need more"

"I don't love you!"

"Your Prince Charming is here!"

"Johnny . . . shhhhh."

North Shore Fish

NORTH SHORE FISH

Well, season six is over and it ended with the surprising popularity of North Shore Fish, by Israel Horovitz. Here are some pictures 

(not in any particular order) from the production:

"I was sixteen years old . . . "

Flo has had it!

"Where's Flo - she sick again?"

"Nice day, huh? Beach weather."

"Don't none a ya's worry"

"This stuff is double-dated!"

"Don't ask me, I just work here."

"Momma, it's coming!"

"Isn't she cute?"

"I gotta red-tag it."

"You grabbed me like I was product!"

"We're just floating around . . . "

"You split my lip!"

"Florence, you were always it."

"You're carryin' what?"

"You tell that blowha what I spoke!"

"You wanna get married?"

"What do we do now, Porker?"

"You look wicked familiar"

"You drivin' that blue Duster with the GOLF license plate?"

"Living with him is like a dog living in a dead man's house."

North Shore Fish

Going into the second week of this great production.
The review came out today, and here it is:

‘North Shore Fish’ Explores Humanity in a Failing Fish-Processing Plant

By Katie Beth Ryan

Valley News Staff Writer

Thursday, April 25, 2013 

On the surface, there’s nothing particularly special about the people in North Shore Fish, Israel Horovitz’s drama depicting the last days of a fish processing plant that’s currently being produced by Enfield’s Shaker Bridge Theatre.

The employees at North Shore Fish clock in and pass their time on the assembly line with salty banter, talk of babies and wayward husbands, and recollections of the plant’s better days. Their humor is bawdy. They refer to people of Japanese ethnicity with one syllable. Their mobility is limited; the character of Maureen (Jeannie Hines) plans to go on a grand vacation, but it’s eventually revealed that her destination is Connecticut.

These are unsophisticated people, yet each is familiar, and that’s where much of the appeal of North Shore Fish lies. Unless you’re in the top 1 percent, you probably know people like this, whose chief concern is earning enough to pay rent and stay on time with car payments. The cast in Shaker Bridge’s North Shore Fish does an admirable job of making these characters and their struggles endearing, and there’s not a weak link among them.

North Shore Fish is set in Gloucester, Mass., a working-class seaside town that was in the headlines a few years ago when a group of teenage girls were thought to have formed a “pact” to get pregnant. In the mid-1980s, when the play is set, the fishing industry that has sustained the town for generations has hit the skids. The most immediate drama comes with the arrival of Catherine, the new government safety inspector (Kay Morton), whose professional resolve butts up against the seedy tactics of Sal (Grant Neale), the ne’er-do-well plant manager. In the past, bedding the inspector had worked to his advantage. Kay is wise not only to the plant’s shady production practices, but to Sal’s sleaziness, and his first pass at her proves to be his only one.

At this point in his life, Sal’s shoulders sag under the weight of every poor decision he’s made (and he’s made his share). His woman problems span the size of Gloucester, and the employees at North Shore Fish get regular exposure to Sal’s troubles through Flo (LeeAnn Hutchison), with whom he’s alternately fighting or necking like the world is about to end. Through Neale’s performance, we see a man who has managed to manipulate the people around him, but with the plant’s all-but-certain closure, is being shut out by forces beyond his control. “It ain’t my fault. I did my job,” he says defiantly. In that moment, Neale delivers us Sal in his essence: someone who has succeeded at nothing but failure his entire life.

As Porker, the play’s other male, Bill Sawyer deftly balances his character’s duties as comic relief, butt of jokes and shoulder to cry on. But it’s the largely female workforce at North Shore Fish that carries the show. No one would confuse these women for being worldly, but they’re not dumb, either. They see the writing on the wall. This factory is limping along toward a certain death. Several production lines have already been shut down. The women who remain have steeled themselves for the plant’s closure, but have few ideas as to what directions their lives will take when they are no longer “fish people.”

By Shaker Bridge standards, this is a large cast (the theater’s last production, Underneath the Lintel, was a one-man show). Director Bill Coons has done great work with smaller casts, and here, he gives us a sense of what he can do with an ensemble. Each actress brings a lot of heart to her performance, and the ensemble as a whole plays well off one another. Of particular note are Laine Gillespie as Josie and Hutchison as Flo. Like all of the female characters, Josie and Flo are what some might call “tough broads.” In playing a put-upon wife who’s struggling not only with the loss of her job, but of her youth, Gillespie hits all the right notes, showing the real person struggling behind Josie’s tough North Shore exterior. Hutchison’s Flo is the saucy one of the group, stretching the limits of propriety with her language. She’s also in a dicey situation with the married Sal, and haunted by memories of the way his last affair ended. Flo is a woman of many struggles, and Hutchison expertly unveils her character’s conflicts, internal and external.

There’s a lot to love about North Shore Fish. Sure, there are familiar plot devices (the birth of a baby in the midst of bad news, signalling a new beginning), and times when the story gets a little over the top. But these moments are few, and they’re usually rescued by a moment of levity. It’s a night of theater that’s charming, endearing, and engrossing.

North Shore Fish opened last Friday evening, after another drama, that of finding the surviving Boston Marathon bombing suspect, played out all day on the world stage. I can’t speak for the other theatergoers Friday, but North Shore Fish allowed me to leave behind the events of the day. A great piece of theater should allow us to replace whatever troubles occupy our minds for a spell, and embrace someone else’s struggles. In this regard, and others, North Shore Fish succeeds.

North Shore Fish runs weekends through May 5 at Shaker Bridge Theatre.

Katie Beth Ryan can be reached at kbryan@vnews.com.

or 603-727-3242.

And here are some pictures:

If you haven't seen it, get to it soon.

Underneath The Lintel

This wonderful little piece by Glen Berger and starring John Shuman has finished it's run here at the theatre. The reviews were glowing. One critic said that it was played "with terrific comic intensity," and with "vital urgency." Another critic said "Shuman was marvelous" as he "does his magical transformation from a somewhat silly librarian into an insightful sage among us, the wandering truth-teller of ancient myths and history." The audiences loved the show, but despite all the advertising and word-of-mouth, they were smaller than they should have been. Maybe a "one man" show is something that keeps people away because they think it will be limited in scope, in presentation, in imagination. Wrong - John got standing ovations because he and the show were really, really good.

Here are some photos from the production:

If your book is 113 years overdue, you go to the counter and pay your fine!

His dog was named Zebrina!

Aha!! Evidence number one!

Underneath The Lintel

Brisbane skies.

There you have it. Another theatre has expressed some interest in having John and I bring the production to them. We'll see. It's a great piece, and John is astounding in it.

Speed-The-Plow

Well, Speed-The-Plow has closed. A great production, with some amazing actors. The review called it an "energetic production" and was really positive. I'm now into rehearsals for Underneath The Lintel (more about that in an upcoming post), but thought I'd share some production photos with you.

Isn't that a bitchin' cool idea?

Here I am - deal with it.

Yeah, forge that bond.

Or, you could team up with me . . . 

I don't undertand you.

Do you want to understand?

How do you take your coffee?

Congrats on my new job!

You want a thrill?

I'll kill you right here!

Bob - we made a connection!

Let's turn the page.

Could this day get any worse?

When you read this book . . . 

So there you have it - Jeremiah Wiggins as Bobby Gould, Jonathan Anderson as Charlie
Fox and Sheila Tapia as Karen.