Theater

Yes, we’ve heard lately about the 47 percent of Americans said to pay no federal income taxes (the elderly, the unemployed, the college bound, the afflicted, the impoverished and the very, very wealthy with sharp accountants).
But we have ignored the outliers, that 2 percent of the population that is successful, wealthy and incapable of minding the rules most people follow, most of the time.

Critics can argue about John Steinbeck’s merits as a writer — even he never thought he deserved the Nobel Prize — but “Of Mice and Men” remains a powerful portrait of the heartbreaking aspirations of simple, fallen men and the honest comradeship, even love, that can exist between them.
It has no artistic pretensions nor grandeur; yet there is something magnificent in the telling of this ultimately tragic fable, even on the small stage in The Sherman Playhouse’s current revival.
Although Steinbeck published “Mice” as a book, he always intended it to be staged.

In the opening scene of “The Threepenny Opera” the stage of Rhinebeck’s Performing Arts Center is transformed into the back alleys of 19th-century London. A single, dim light hanging from the ceiling casts dark shadows on the ensemble of thieves, prostitutes and beggars, posing as still as a painting on the impressive two-story set that features archways and curving staircases (and even a hidden prison).

The play “Parasite Drag”, playing at Shakespeare & Company through this Saturday, feels in some ways like a first draft in need of a clear-eyed editor. A grimly funny family melodrama about two estranged brothers who come together as their sister is dying, it’s full of distracting inconsistencies, clichés, and lines that are out of character or seem like the author editorializing. But not even an editor could cure the play’s overarching problem: the pileup of traumas that overwhelm the plot and ultimately sink it.