Temperatures have been dropping and clocks have fallen back, but the arts season in Greater Binghamton remains in full flower. Did you have a chance to art walk or gallery gaze? Did you attend a play or a concert? How about that great bar band?
Please share your reflections of the week (and check back later to BAMirror for some soon-to-be-posted reviews).
Did the arts keep you warm this week?
November 8, 2010 — Barb Van AttaOne Response to “Did the arts keep you warm this week?”
Contributors
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broomecountyarts
Barb Van Atta
Sharon Ball
Broome Arts Mirror 
November 9, 2010 at 8:53 am
I walked across the yard last night to see “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change” at the Cider Mill Playhouse in Endicott.
I did not know what to expect walking in, having previously looked at the simple set and wondering just what would be in store this evening. I was entertained for over two hours with some great theater.
The play involves two couples who travel through a chronology of love from the first date all the way through having children, middle age and getting older and with the one couple at the end of the show at a funeral wake, being what we call professional mourners, not even sure of whose funeral they are at. We travel through the various stages of love in song. The score by Jimmy Roberts featured Jan DeAngelo and an accompanying violinist and four vocalists: Shannon Roma DeAngelo, Rebecca Orly Cohen, Jared Eberlein and Michael Andrako, who has soloed with Boston Pops Orchestra. All were pretty much equal in quality and tone, and the music just flows from song to song. The whole play moves right along rapidly. It is uplifting after having come out of election week and now moving into to the doldrums of an early winter here with November upon us.
The set makes your imagination work: costume changes; character changes, no place for a nap.
In television and the movies, you sit on your backside and might as well have retired your imagination to the bedroom already. You don’t have to know when to laugh; that is supplied via a laugh track. You don’t applaud from your couch. Live theater is much different; you really have to think and use that imagination — you get right into it. This is participatory.
Times are changing here in America — a few people seem to be carrying the weary rest of us through this period of economic trauma. Mark my words; we will look back at this time not as a depression but as America at its best. This show, the script and this production were rejuvenating, refreshing and new — a clean break, if just for one evening. Part of the audience did stand for an ovation last night. It won’t be a wasted evening to get out and see this show — part of the Cider Mill’s 35th year.
Tickets: http://www.cidermillplayhouse.com
Jim Ciotoli