Favorite stage plays

I did some acting in high school back in the mid 1960's and then a bit more in college. Not at all cutting edge stuff.
Then I saw a stage version of Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf. I came out of it totally drained and with an immense appreciation of acting. I did community theater for a decade or two.
"What a dump." 3 memorable words from the play, requiring an actress with an immense sense of timing.

our town

inherit the wind

guys and dolls

for years we've gone to a lot of summer theatre in a few small towns a couple of hours north of us, a lot of them are local history plays or small canadian productions

i have to admit, i'm not a big fan of large scale musical theatre productions like Cats or Phantom

in the 80's in Toronto i saw Evita it was okay, but a small production of The Mouse Trap was better, and an equally smaller production of something called Sister Mar Ignatius Explains It All To You (along with a one act play called Dentity Crisis) was even better

I've seen something like 75 to 100 plays in small theaters, most stupifyingly boring. But not all. I happen to be no fan of the soliloquy mode. I liked a couple of my husband's plays, but then I would..

Problem is, I don't remember the names of what I liked in all those small theaters.
There was a quiet play, name not remembered, with, I think, a young Mary Elizabeth Mastroantonio. Can't find a link online.

Liked a play by Sam Shepherd, quite good, forget the name.

I enjoyed a couple of Teatro Campesino plays, the San Francisco Mime Troup, and some plays by the East West Players.

I am preternaturally adverse to musicals. Did see Evita, eh, ok.
I have a faint memory of seeing a play re the chicago seven and liking it.

rjb, When I was stationed at Walker AFB in Roswell, NM, I belonged to the little theater group, and the best and the one I remember was "Caine Mutiny." The guy who played Capt Queeg really did a professional job even though the set was amateurish. I became a fan of Herman Wouk for a few of his books aftewards. I did everything but the acting; like lights, sets, tickets, sound, curtain...it was really fun.

I love theatre, particularly Shakespeare. When I was a working journalist in Detroit, I loved the productions featuring the MFA candidates in theatre. I volunteered at American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge and now volunteer at Shakespeare and Company in the Lenox.

I have lots of memories. An excellent Richard III. A Servant of Two Masters. Julie Taymor's work with actors and puppets. A Taming of the Shrew so lovely that I still cry when trying to describe it.

Noises Off
Dracula
Equus
Tiny Alice
Les Miserables (not a fan of musicals, but there's an exception to everything)

last summer my mother was supposed to go see a play with a seniors group she belongs to, about three weeks before the performance she fell (not badly hurt but bruised (including tailbone))

there was no way she could sit on a bus or in the theatre, she tried to give the ticket away to a few folks but nobody would take it (trip, visit to Uncle Tom's Museum, shopping and play in the Town of Petrolia, and buffet dinner at a golf course on the way home)

she asked if i'd go, and i thought, why not, the play was fantastic, perhaps the most fun i've had in a long time

The 39 Steps

The play's concept calls for the entirety of the 1935 adventure film The 39 Steps to be performed nearly verbatim onstage, but with a cast of four. One actor plays the hero, Richard Hannay, an actress plays the three women with whom he has romantic entanglements, and two other actors play every other character in the show: heroes, villains, men, women, children and even the occasional inanimate object. This often requires lightning fast quick changes and occasionally for them to play multiple characters at once. Thus the film's serious spy story is played mainly for laughs, and the script is full of allusions to (and puns on the titles of) other Alfred Hitchcock films, including Rear Window, Psycho and North by Northwest.

at one point the two men who portray every other character in the play, at one point they portray landscape, including a bog, thorn bushes and craggy mountain sides, very entertaining

I can't remember if I saw Equus on tv or in the theater; thinking, tv.

I woulda liked that one..


Just remembered, I liked Kentucky Fried Theater - Zucker, Zucker, and Abrahams, we used to call them, though Wiki has it that they are Zucker, Abrahams, Zucker. These are the people who did Airplane..

I very rarely get to the theatre these days. My favourite playwright would probably be Samuel Beckett and I was disappointed that I missed Ian McKellen in Waiting for Godot when he was in Australia recently.

I miss live theater. Haven't gone in ages. It's become too damned expensive. Bronx cheer for that.

Roberta, One the reasons I enjoyed visiting London was that many theaters have tkt sales before the shows, and the selection are usually enough to satisfy anybody wanting to see a live show.

Is there still an off-Broadway scene? Are there still fresh plays and not musicals based on Disney movies?

Yes, there's still off Broadway.

Just went to my first play in NYC. Sidetracked at the Abingdon Theater.

It finished it's limited week run this afternoon. I went because my friend Erik was in it. It was his first run in a NYC play.

Quite funny and very good acting.

http://allevents.in/mobile/event.php?city=Abingdon&eventid=180385795364220

I saw Julie Harris portray Emily Dickinson in the one-woman play "The Belle of Amherst."

Speaking of stage plays, my daughter Katrina performed on stage in plays intended to present classic literature to young people. Katrina was typecast into roles playing snobby, condescending females. She was very funny at it. She played the snobby girl next door to the sisters in "Little Women" as well as the snobby, spoiled princesses in "Twelfth Night" and "Midsummer Night's Dream."

Wow, if you can only see one musical running on Broadway or touring right now, definitely see Wicked.

It turns the silly old Wizard of Oz into a social satire focusing on mass-media propaganda and how the truth is so very different from what's told to us.