Theater

It was a moment: The stage was awash with glittery dancers tapping with suave, loose-limbed precision, row after row, and suddenly, the orchestra quit and the dancers kept tapping, and the sound from the Warner stage was like soft, rushing, persistent, swelling rain.
Then the orchestra picked up and we were back to “Anything Goes,” the very silly musical with the very wonderful Cole Porter songs such as “You’re the Top,” (the song that rhymes Caesar salad with Berlin Ballad) “I Get a Kick Out of You,” and the soulful “All through the Night.”

The musical “Little Shop of Horrors,” joins such warped, unsettling shows as “Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” and “Urinetown,” which, considering what they deal with, human pot pies and toilets, create big, happy audiences.
The horror in “Little Shop” is a devil of a carniverous plant that promises its caretaker, Stanley (James Donohue), love, fame and fortune in exchange for fresh human blood.
Stanley works in Mr. Mushnik’s flower shop, a foundering business in a bad neighborhood.

It’s shift work that allows John Smith, as ordinary a fellow as his name, to keep two lives: one with Mary in Wimbledon; another with Barbara in Streatham.
Two lives and two wives.
That’s the idea that propels “Run for Your Wife,” a British farce written by Ray Cooney and set in Thatcher world, 1975.
That means bell bottoms, Beatles T-shirts, flimsy mod dresses, lengthy sideburns, longterm unemployment and a persistent effort to make things hilarious by bringing in the gay guy from upstairs to redecorate Barbara’s bathroom.

It was a brave move for CENTERstage Productions, a small community theater group.
George Bernard Shaw is one thing, but his “Caesar and Cleopatra,” requiring a desert sphinx, a couple of giant armies clanking around with swords and helmets, the torching and sacking of the world’s (at the time) greatest library as well as oceanic skirmishes on horseback all on Rhinebeck Performing Arts Center’s modest stage took moxie.
But no problem.