It’s a Gas

From the Theater Vault Dept.: Talk about a fairy-tale world. For a few seasons over thirty years ago, the Cohoes Music Hall was home to Heritage Artists, a professional theater ensemble heavy on musicals that guaranteed excellence. Talk about evanescence! Nothing at all comparable has taken its place in the Albany area. Even as trivial a piece as “Pump Boys and Dinettes” proved stellar.

                                                                                        

IN THE FAIRY-TALE WORLD of musical theater, characters are inclined to sing for what seems to be any reason. Sometimes they burst into song when you least expect it; sometimes they tire you with it; sometimes it seems that they’ll never stop talking get on with the singing.

“Pump Boys and Dinettes” features almost no talking. Short, and short on plot, it simmers from song to country-flavored song with a wit and sparkle that leaves you dazzled. As the season-closer for Heritage Artists, it’s been setting the Cohoes Music Hall rocking to the antics of a quartet of good ol’ boys at a gas station somewhere on Highway 57 in North Carolina – and the sassy sisters who run the neighboring diner.

Let’s put it on the line here: there’s absolutely no reason not to see this show. The performers, all of whom sing and play instruments and even dance from time to time, are the sort you wish would show up at your company picnic and take over the entertainment. The music, all  country-flavored, will appeal to anyone who enjoys good music and has no objection to laughing now and then.

The tickets don’t cost much more than what you’d pay to see a couple of movies, and this is an event that stays with you longer.

Hard-Working Bard

WITH ALL DUE RESPECT to the late James Brown, I believe that the hardest-working man in show business is Bridge Street Theatre’s Steven Patterson. He co-founded the theater; he handles publicity and building repairs. Sometimes he takes tickets or sells concessions, or possibly both. Other times he’s onstage, taking on a remarkable range of roles, from ensemble comedy to solo drama, from contemporary classics to whatever you call Eugene O’Neill.

Jack Rento as Julian, Em Whitworth as
Rosemary, Andrew Gorhring as
Henry, and Steven Patterson as
William Shakespeare.

In the case of “Rude Mechanics,” world-premiering on the Bridge Street stage, he essays that dizzying range in one show, playing three roles ranging from the frantic to the ethereal, with (literal) Shakespeare in-between. And he’s playing these in the company of three other actors who help spin a dizzying web of confusion and intrigue backstage of a production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” that’s about to be performed before King James I and some royal visitors from Spain. It’s 1612. Cast members are succumbing to the plague infecting London.

That’s why Julian Crosse will be going on as Francis Flute, who plays the female role of Thisbe in the play-within-this-play. Julian is nervous, excited, terrified – a panoply of emotions that give Jack Rento, making his Bridge Street debut, a hilarious set of instant transformations.

The Big, Fat Lummox

Guest Blogger Dept.: We welcome back Booth Tarkington, whose 1916 novel Seventeen was, like most of the author’s books at the time, a best-seller. It’s fair to day that it hasn’t aged well; in fact, one wag observed that, if it were to seem relevant today, it should be retitled “Thirteen.” It offers the lovelorn William Sylvanus Baxter, pining with infatuation for the baby-talking Lola Pratt, a summer visitor to William’s midwestern town. The boy is about to join a number of his friends, all vying for Lola’s attention, on a picnic excursion.

                                                                                          

IN THE MORNING SUNSHINE, Mrs. Baxter stood at the top of the steps of the front porch, addressing her son, who listened impatiently and edged himself a little nearer the gate every time he shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

“Willie,” she said, “you must really pay some attention to the laws of health, or you’ll never live to be an old man.”

“I don’t want to live to be an old man,” said William, earnestly. “I’d rather do what I please now and die a little sooner.”

“You talk very foolishly,” his mother returned. “Either come back and put on some heavier THINGS or take your overcoat.”

“My overcoat!” William groaned. “They’d think I was a lunatic, carrying an overcoat in August!”

“Not to a picnic,” she said.

“Mother, it isn’t a picnic, I’ve told you a hunderd times! You think it’s one those ole-fashion things YOU used to go to—sit on the damp ground and eat sardines with ants all over ‘em? This isn’t anything like that; we just go out on the trolley to this farm-house and have noon dinner, and dance all afternoon, and have supper, and then come home on the trolley. I guess we’d hardly of got up anything as out o’ date as a picnic in honor of Miss PRATT!”

Mrs. Baxter seemed unimpressed.

Fair Seedtime Had My Soul

 ADAM ALEXANDER, whose curiosity prompted travel all over the world collecting endangered vegetable seeds to grow and share, writes that

“Crammed into two fridges in the garage behind my study are jars and boxes filled with envelopes containing – at the time of writing – 499 varieties of vegetable seeds, sadly most no longer commercially available.” Adam Alexander grows some 70 varieties a year for food and seed-saving, something he started doing in the 1970s, although back then it was only about producing vegetables.

The seed-saving part of his book The Seed Detective starts in 1988, with a pepper. The author discovered it in the Ukrainian city of Donetsk; more specifically, in a farmers’ market stall, grown by a granny too poor to buy seeds and thus in the habit of saving them.

He doesn’t identify the woman except as a generic type, but notes that he “would always seek out this individual when scouring food markets around the world.” He’s extolling a generic grower, of course, but a grower of very specific produce: Vegetables that sprout from seeds uncorrupted by the chemical processes that have allowed Big Ag to copyright what once was a gift from Nature.

The “tennis-ball-sized sweet pepper with a fiery heart” kicked off Alexander’s search for other heritage and heirloom seeds around the world, many of which he than grows in his garden in eastern Wales. It’s a proving ground for his research as well, as he studies these vegetables to discover exactly what the word “heritage” means in relation to each.

Breaking the Curse

From the Food Vault Dept.: It delights me to discover that a restaurant I enjoyed visiting decades ago continues to thrive. Here’s one of them, in another twenty-year lookback. Although I dined at Lanie’s a couple of times after writing this review, I haven’t been back in a long while. A glance at the restaurant’s website confirms that the menu has changed and prices, you won’t be surprised to learn, have increased. So don’t be lulled by what’s listed below – those prices are mementoes of a fabled past.

                                                                                          

“THERE WAS A LOT OF TALK about how this spot had a curse,” says Lanie Lansing, “but I think the success of a restaurant really depends on what the people around it want. You can’t open a doughnut shop in an area that doesn’t eat doughnuts.”

This spot in Loudonville’s Kimberly Square hosted The Bistro most recently; before that, Olivia’s, Smoothy’s and Desperado’s, among others. Lanie’s vision, and it’s been quite a success during the restaurant’s nearly two years of operation, has been to offer a family-friendly menu that also features some fancy stuff, in a space that’s as suited for after-work relaxing as it is for full-scale dining.

But the emphasis is on casual. No white linen here, and you’re as likely to spot a pizza on a table as you are a complicated seafood dish. Lansing opened her restaurant with a well-focused vision, a vision that evolved during her many years in the business, which included 16 years as a bartender. “I worked at Ralph’s Tavern, J.T. Maxie’s, Thirsty’s, the Barnsider and many other places. But I always wanted to have my own restaurant. I love to cook. My whole family cooks. When we decided to go into this place, my husband gave up his contracting business to help me.”