Theater – Past Productions

Fall 2023: As You Like It (presented by the Theater Club) SUNY Broome Theater Club presents As You Like It, written by William Shakespeare and directed by Mary Donnelly, on November 17 & 18 at 7 p.m. Published in 1623, this comedy tells the story of love between Rosalind and Orlando after Rosalind is banished without cause from Duke Frederick’s court. The cast featured Cooper Ely, Asphalt Larsen, Israel Sepulveda, Dylan Heier, Darian Ely, Kylie McClenon, Kirsten Groats, Conor Morrison, River Pullis, Ford Egnor, Wyatt Quail, Kellan Sisco, Manny Garcia, Cameron Cole, Harper Leyba, Eirik Kunz, Elizabeth Harley, Emily Milk, Noor Bourbega, and Annalisa Kuklis.
Spring 2023: 12 Incompetent Jurors (Presented by the Theater Club)

The SUNY Broome Theater Club presents 12 Incompetent Jurors, written by Ian McWethy, and directed by Gemma Barber and Ezra Garcia on Friday, May 8 at 7 pm.

This 2016 comedy, a spoof of 12 Angry Men, is about 12 jurors assigned to a case of a man accused of stealing half a dozen cats. What seems like an open and shut case, devolves into derailed deliberations and increasingly improbable relations among the jurors.

The cast featured SUNY Broome students Asphalt Larsen, Annalisa Kuklis, Olivia Ketzak, Victoria Milk, Cooper Ely, Kylie McLenon, Magnolia Beeman, Cameron Cole, Darian Ely, Sasha Lofthouse, Harper Leyba, Kirsten Groats, Liilan Booldiis, Brian Smith, Abby Molineux, and Sebastion Quarella.

The Cast of 12 Incompetent Jurors

Spring 2023: You Can't Take It with You (THR 246)
The SUNY Broome Theater presents You Can’t Take It With You, written by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart and directed by Mary Donnelly and Jacob Donlin on Friday April 28, and Saturday April 29 at 7 p.m. Cast of

The story follows Alice Sycamore, who falls in love with Tony Kirby, the son of her boss at a Wall Street financial firm. While Alice’s family is quite eccentric, pursuing hobbies such as writing plays, making fireworks, and dancing, Tony’s family is straight-laced and conventional, with a strong sense of propriety. Hilarity ensues when Tony brings his parents to meet Alice’s family and Alice fears that the two families may never be able to come together.

The cast featured Cooper Ely, Fedeline Jean-Philippe, Connor Coniglio, Tara Pitcher, Ezra Garcia, Gemma Barber, Jordan Ramsey, Kirsten Groats, Sebastian Quarella, River Pullis, Austin Tompkins, Harper Leyba, Lauren Pittari, Brian Smith, Olivia Ketzak, Magnolia Beeman, Darian Ely, and Frankie Haggerty.

SUNY Broome Theater Club presents A Night Of One Act Plays, on December 2 and 3 at 7 p.m. This performance will be comprised of four one act plays including He Said, She Said, directed by Ohana Smith, Fourteen, directed by Laur Pittari and Jacob Donlin, You Can’t Force Love, directed by Caitlin Breen, and finally Conflict and Cannibalism, directed by Gemma Barber. Fall 2022: A Night of One-Acts (Presented by the Theater Club) Both He Said, She Said and Fourteen are written by Alice Gerstenberg, You Can’t Force Love was written by Marnie Mitchell, and Conflict and Cannibalism was written by Alister Barber. The cast included SUNY Broome students Kirsten Groats, Cooper Ely, Maggie Beeman, Laur Pittari, Gemma Barber, Tara Pitcher, Jordan Hurlburt, Jordan Ramsay, Angel Choi, Abby Molineux, and Sasha Lofthouse. All of the plays performed are in the public domain or performed with the permission of the authors.
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SUNY Broome Theater’s virtual production of Shakespeare Bits and Pieces: Words of the Bard of Avon debuted on the SUNY Broome Youtube channel May 10, 2021.

This retrospective of some of his most famous words is free, educational and illuminating, as many of Shakespeare’s words and quotes are now a part of the popular culture. The link to tune in is below.

The show features period music by SUNY Broome’s Music Adjunct Professor and Guitar teacher Paul Sweeny along with Barbara Kaufman as well as period songs. It also features Instructor Ed Evans, and SUNY Broome theater alumnae who trained here with director Katherine Bacon.

This rare opportunity features selections from a long list of Shakespeare’s plays such as Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Taming of the Shrew, Julius Caesar, Henry VI, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, The Tempest as well as some of the famous Sonnets.

View this production on the SUNY Broome YouTube channel.

Richard II scene

Cast of Yours Truly, Jack Frost

SUNY Broome Theater will present its first ever virtual production with a children’s show at holiday time. The schools in our entire region was invited free of charge to this pre-recorded, livestreamed performance the week of December 14, 2021.

The 30-minute play, Yours Truly, Jack Frost by Tim Kelly is meant for children approximately 7 to 10 years old but it can also be for all children or adults of any age! It is a sparkling story full of intrigue, interesting characters and even a dog that talks. It is the story of the old-fashioned Jack Frost who provides all the frost for the holiday season, and the greedy businesswoman, Evelina Muggleworth, who wants to steal Jack’s formula and market it to the world.

Performed live in the theater four times in years past, Yours Truly, Jack Frost was always a hit. The cast is currently rehearsing, all online of course, and experiencing the challenges and opportunities offered by this new way to deliver a show,” said theater director Katherine Bacon. “We are grateful to BOCES for helping us to share the performance details with the elementary schools in our region,” she said.

Cast of Curtains Up Directed by Associate Professor Katherine Bacon, SUNY Broome Theater’s fall 2019 production is CURTAINS UP ON BROADWAY: A Selection of Stage and Film Masterpieces. An evening of all Pulitzer, Oscar and Tony winning works, all are from plays that were made into films. Director Katherine Bacon is appearing in the production along with her students in one role. Live music accompanies this entertaining and educational evening of plays and films that have inspired generations. 7:30 pm on Thursday and Friday, November 21 and 22 in the Student Center on the SUNY Broome campus. Call for reservations at 607-778-5191. Scene from Curtains Up

The King Stag

Directed by Associate Professor Katherine Bacon, SUNY Broome Theater’s spring production will be “The King Stag,” written by Italian playwright Count Carlo Gozzi in 1762. The classic commedia dell’arte play has been translated, adapted and performed for almost three centuries. Set in the fantastical world in the Kingdom of Serendippo, the plot involves mistaken identities, star crossed lovers, spells, animals and magicians – including many of the stock commedia characters. Gozzi is noted for taking ancient myths and turning them into relevant morality tales. Turandot, the famous Puccini opera, and The Love For Three Oranges, the Prokofiev opera, are two great works that were based on plays by Carlo Gozzi. The King Stag

SUNY Broome Theater will present one of the most popular plays by the recently deceased comic playwright Neil Simon this fall. “Rumors” will be performed at 7:30 pm Thursday, Nov. 15; Friday, Nov. 16; and Saturday, Nov. 17, 2018, in the Angelo Zuccolo Little Theatre, located in the Student Center.

“On Aug. 26, the world lost what the New York Times called the ‘Broadway Master of Comedy’ in 91-year-old playwright Neil Simon,” said theater director Katherine Bacon. “We are proud to be able to honor this great comic writer by presenting one of his most popular plays. Don’t miss the chance to see this hilarious comedy by this Pulitzer-prize winning, legendary playwright.”

Simon was nominated for four Oscars and received a number of Tony Awards. In fact Neil Simon, received more Tony and Oscar nominations than any other writer, not just playwrights.
Cast ImageNeil Simon’s list of works is too long to name, but he wrote 30 plays including “The Odd Couple”, “The Last of the Red Hot Lovers”, “Plaza Suite”, “The Goodbye Girl”, “Sweet Charity”, “Barefoot in the Park”, “Brighton Beach Memoirs”, “Broadway Bound”, “Biloxi Blues”, “The Dinner Party” and the play for which he won the Pulitzer, “The Drama Desk”, and the Tony, “Lost in Yonkers”. He wrote adaptations of many of his works for television movies and screenplays. He also wrote for a number of early television comedy shows along with Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Sid Caesar, etc. He also wrote the book for four musicals including the smash hit “Promises, Promises”.

Cast of Neil Simon's Fools
SUNY Broome Theater presents Neil Simon’s “Fools” on Thursday and Friday, November 16 & 17 at 7:30 pm in the Student Center. One can reserve tickets starting on November 8 by calling 778-5191. Tickets are $10.00, $5.00 for students.

 

“The students and I are lucky and thrilled to be working again with a play by Neil Simon,” said theater director Katherine Bacon. “He is still considered the premier comedy writer for the stage, for film and for musical theater.”

Cast of Max Frisch's The Arsonists
SUNY Broome Theater presents The Arsonists by Max Frisch as its spring production. Translated by Alistair Beaton, the play is a provocative mix of dark comedy, realism, farce and social critique. Director Katherine Bacon says the play was “originally titled Biedermann and the Firebugs, and is considered to be Frisch’s best play. It has been said that his work is a commentary on the inability of intellectuals to expose evil and take a stand against it, as in what he witnessed as the rise and supremacy of the Nazi party. Others have said that Frisch meant to criticize Switzerland’s (his home country) neutral stand to Nazism during World War II. The play seems to say that we can’t be decent people at home while ignoring the evils of the world, but it does so in a delightful way. Frisch worked with and was heavily influenced by playwright and director Bertolt Brecht. Therefore the play, and our production, have a Brechtian style.”

 

A review in The Guardian said, “Frisch’s theme, as Alistair Beaton’s sharp new translation makes clear, is bourgeois guilt … compact, well-characterized and easily applicable to today’s world … a timeless political satire.”

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SUNY Broome Theater’s director Katherine Bacon (pictured 4th from the left in the photo) is proud to present the 2016 Scene Study Showcase featuring the work of famous playwrights mainly to mark the passing of the renowned American author Edward Albee who passed away this September. “The Zoo Story,” his first well-known play and a scene from the rarely performed “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” are featured. A scene from “Antony and Cleopatra” is performed also to mark the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare this year. David Mamet and Neil Simon scenes are also presented as well as one musical scene from “The Phantom of the Opera.” Performances were Thursday and Friday, November 17 & 18 at 7:30 pm.
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Performed on April 14 and 15 2016

 

“The Periods & Styles of Acting Class” was proud to present the Student-Choice Spring Showcase featuring the work of great playwrights. Performed on Thursday and Friday, April 14 and 15, the Showcase included a staging of an original work titled Thank You Rosa (on Rosa Parks) in support of this year’s Convocation theme of “Civil Rights” and in partnership with the newly formed “SUNY Broome Women’s Institute.” Also seen were the work of playwrights Tennessee Williams, August Wilson, Arthur Miller, Samuel Beckett, William Inge, Tony Kushner and our own Jan Quackenbush.

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Performed on November 19, 20 & 21st at 7:00 pm.

 

Theater students enacted the original Rod Serling script just as it was done for television on March 4, 1960. Gore Vidal’s “Visit to a Small Planet” refers to our planet Earth and is a rarely produced comedy with an alien who is quite fascinated with the human race.

Anne Serling, the daughter of Rod Serling, was a special guest in the audience on Saturday evening and Larry Kassan, a Rod Serling expert, conducted a stimulating Q & A after the show on Friday evening.

Directed by Associate Professor Katherine Bacon the cast featured from left to right: Ulrich Henry, Dallas Elwood, Madison Donaldson, Matthew Waskie, Gabriella Arshi, Elizabeth Youket, Christian Webb, Juwuan DeJesus and Megan Voss. Seated is Tijuanna Chrispin. A cast member missing from the photo is Alex Bojan. Director Katherine Bacon appeared as the Narrator (with the lines originally said by Rod Serling) in the Serling play.

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Flights of Fancy: Four Plays by David Ives was the first ever production of SUNY Broome’s theater to perform in the community. There were two successful performances at the Schorr Family Firehouse Stage in Johnson City. Performances were at the college’s theater on May 8 and 9 following the renaming of the famous Little Theater to The Angelo Zuccolo Little Theater and also May 14 and 15 at the Firehouse Stage.

The show kicked off another first ever for SUNY Broome which was Performing Arts Week — 8 straight days of showcasing the work of our theater, music, dance and oral interpretation students.

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The play version of The Thirteen Clocks by James Thurber had two performances in late November of 2014 in SUNY Broome’s Little Theater. Directed by Katherine Bacon the cast included Jackson Somerville, Dallas Elwood, Greg Kenyon, Hannah Merrell and Beth Moffitt in the principal roles. Also in the cast were Rebecca Ollerenshaw, Tijuana Chrispin, Christian Webb, Curtis Brock, Erika Harper and Logan Smith who appeared a guest artist. Joy Thornton was the narrator.

The story of The Thirteen Clocks is internationally famous. Our version of James Thurber’s famous story was adapted and produced by Frank Lowe for the stage in 1976. The most famous of the many audio recordings is by the wonderful Neil Gaiman. Though this play is like many fairy tales in that the handsome prince saves the princess from an evil duke and marries her, it is quite different in one particular way. The Prince in our story can choose from many princesses in his realm but he wants this particular princess because she has a “warm hand and a warm heart.” The book and play are famous for Thurber’s unique cadenced style with a constant complex wordplay and hidden rhymes much like in blank verse.

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Two Pieces from his early life 1937-1945

 

You will see segments from the heartwarming and funny Brighton Beach Memoirs and Biloxi Blues, two of the plays from Neil Simon’s autobiographical trilogy. These rarely done works both won Tony and Drama Desk Awards and were made into major feature films. They are pure Neil Simon. Don’t miss the chance to see a “touch” of the early life of this Pulitzer-prize winning, legendary playwright. Simon wrote 87 stage plays including The Odd Couple, The Sunshine Boys, Rumors:A Farce, The Last of the Red Hot Lovers, Plaza Suite, The Goodbye Girl, California Suite, Chapter Two, Sweet Charity, Barefoot in the Park, The Star Spangled Girl, Broadway Bound, The Dinner Party, Lost in Yonkers, They’re Playing Our Song and, oh, so many more.

Featured in photo are 5 SUNY Broome students from the cast of 12. Appearing in Biloxi Blues are Dallas Elwood, Logan Smith, Shane Smith, Alexander Marin and Jackson Sommerville.

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SUNY Broome theater’s fall 2013 production was Molière’s SCAPIN, presented on November 21 and 22 in the college’s Little Theater. Famous French playwright and actor Jean Baptiste Poquelin, better known as Molière, wrote scathing comic dramas that are as enduring today as ever. The comedic farce SCAPIN was first produced in Paris in 1671. Molière’s themes and hilarious situations still manage to resonate after four centuries. Our production features a modernized version of SCAPIN by Bill Irwin and Mark O’Donnell.

 

SUNY Broome student Jeff Tagliaferro is starring in the role of Scapin with Logan Smith in the role of Sylvestre. Rounding out the cast are Arman Rahimi, Alex Marin, Ali Cekic, Gregory Kenyon, Erika Harper, Hannah Merrell and Arica Hayes with Assoc. Professor Katherine Bacon directing

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The spring 2013 production was a scene night titled A Woman Scorned. Conceived and directed by the Dr. Carol Silverberg, the evening highlighted the work of 20th century American women playwrights, Maureen Watkins, Beth Henley, and Wendy Wasserstein. The evening’s first selections came from Watkins’s Chicago, the play that inspired the hit Broadway musical. Following the notorious acts of the legendary Roxie Hart, audiences viewed a tale of attempted murder and intrigue in scenes from Beth Henley’s Pulitzer Prize winning dark comedy, Crimes of the Heart. The evening concluded with Wasserstein’s one-act comedy Medea, a delightful mixture of modern New York humor combined with that of the Greek playwright Euripides.

 

The cast featured Rebecca Harding, Rachel Hardy, Jaimie Girnis, James Bullis, Jonathan Collins, Brionna Cicak, Dylan Gardner, Arica Hayes, Alex Marin, Arman Rahimi, Jeff Tagliaferro, Mariyah Wayman, and Cassidy Wright.

Performances were April 26 & 27 at 7:00 pm in SUNY Broome’s Little Theatre.

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Gripping Drama Featuring Traditional American Songs

 

Slated for November 8, 9 and 10 in the Little Theater at 7:00 pm

For the 150th commemoration of The Civil War, BCC Theater presents A Heart Divided, a play that sheds light on the controversy that continues in 2012 to divide our nation, north and south. BCC theater students are pictured in rehearsal for this powerful story. The play depicts a family that moves from a New York City suburb to Redford, Tennessee, where they encounter a culture that shocks them – one that proudly flies a Confederate flag. The family’s teenaged daughter Kate aspires to be a playwright and falls in love with the handsome scion of the town, Jackson Redford III, whose great grandfather died a Civil War hero. Kate is torn between her own upbringing and that of the boy with whom she has fallen in love and the whole family is gripped by a conflict that has tragic results.

BCC theater students Rebecca Harding and Bobby Cebula play the roles of Kate and Jackson. Rachel Hardy, Jaimie Girnis, Dylan Gardner, Cassidy Wright, Joy Thornton, Stephanie Reyes and Jonathan Collins round out the cast. BCC music student Shawn White will accompany the production. A Heart Divided was written by the husband and wife team of Cherie Bennett and Jeff Gottesfeld. The performances are Thursday, Friday and Saturday, November 8, 9 and 10 at 7:00 pm in the Little Theater.

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BCC student actors performed in A.R. Gurney’s The Dining Room. Cast members are: Tom Larison, Joel Nelson, Brionna Cicak, Rebecca Harding, Rachel Hardy, Dylan Gardner, Jaimie Girnis, Cassidy Wright and Alexander Marin.

 

The Dining Room was written in 1982, the play is a mosaic of interrelated scenes – some funny, some touching — which create an in-depth portrait of a vanishing species: the upper-middle-class WASP. The “dining room” itself is used as a symbol of the vanishing family life in America that began to dissolve in the late 20th century. As family-centered mealtimes began to disappear, the dining room, as society knew it, began to disappear too. In the production, the actors change roles, personalities and ages as they portray a wide variety of characters, from little boys to stern grandfathers, and from giggling teenage girls to Irish housemaids.

One of the most produced playwrights in America, A. R. Gurney’s many plays include The Cocktail Hour, Love Letters, The Middle Ages, Another Antigone, A Cheever Evening and What I Did Last Summer. Gurney is a New Yorker originally from Buffalo.

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Standing Left to right: Dylan Gardner, Rachel Hardy, Tom Larison, Brianna Wagstaff, Joel Nelson, Lianna Hill. Seated left to right: Rebecca Harding, Jeff Tagliaferro, Brionna Cicak

 

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Left to right rear are cast members Rachel Hardy, Rebecca Harding, Brionna Cicak, Jeff Tagliaferro, Dylan Gardner, Lianna Hill and Tom Larison.
Front left to right are crew members Jihee You and Gayani Bulathsinghala

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Seated Left to right are: Jeff Tagliaferro, Brionna Cicak, Rebecca Harding, Director/Teacher Katherine Bacon and Lianna Hill Rear is Jihee You, Rachel Hardy, Tom Larison and Dylan Gardner

The Advanced Acting class will be performing Scenes of the 19th Century Masters on Friday and Saturday, November 18 & 19 at 7:00 pm in the Little Theater.

The famous plays from which scenes will be presented are: An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen adapted by Arthur miller, The Marriage Proposal and The Sea Gull by Anton Chekhov, and Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.