Search Results

If you’ve seen stage farces under less-than-optimal conditions, you know how difficult they can be to pull off. Off-color jokes slide into offensiveness. Characters slip into stereotypes. And the harder the push for laughs, the more desperate it all seems. Because in farce, it’s not about unique characters, it’s not about surprising plots and it most certainly isn’t about any sort of insight into human behavior. It’s about creating a mechanism that makes an audience laugh until its collective sides…

This week, thoughts on “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” at Clowes Hall,” new games from Indiana manufacturer Fundex, and a handful of holiday movie releases. The con game musical “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” jauntily bounced into Clowes Hall on Dec. 11 for a week-long stay and withstood a lifeless opening 15 minutes or so before at last making a connection with the crowd. Swinging charts, clever lyrics, relatively foolproof physical comedy moments and a patient crowd willing to chuckle at every smutty line…

Perhaps the most performed American opera, “Susannah” tells of a good woman brought down by the hypocrisy of her Appalachian town. Spotted bathing nude in a creek by townspeople looking for a spot for revival meeting baptisms, the parentless 19-year-old’s reputation and spirit are soon destroyed by gossip-and the visiting preacher. It’s an opera with sex (implied), death (thanks to an angry brother), religion (including a revival service) and-something you don’t see in many operas-square dancing. What it also has…