Capital Region and the arts 2024: Our writers look back

Steve Barnes, editor 

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Starting more than a decade ago and lasting for about five years, I reviewed an average of 120 performances annually. Most were theater productions, but also plenty of comedy and occasional concerts.

This year, I sat in a theater barely more than two dozen times. Because of changes in the Times Union editorial department over the years, and behind-the-scenes shifts in my job more recently, we had to make hard decisions about what not to cover on a review basis while still trying to highlight for readers the diversity of our region’s rich cultural offerings. (Also, my colleague Katie Kiessling has taken over reviewing the Broadway tours that come to Proctors in Schenectady.)

In surveying what I did see on stages in 2024, what remains most prominent in memory are brave and touching moments. Comedy and joy abounded, to be sure: the zaniness of on actor playing all the parts in Adirondack Theatre Festival’s “Todd vs. the Titanic” in June, the exuberant “Legally Blonde” at Playhouse Stage in July, the riotous farce of Barrington Stage’s “Boeing Boeing” later that month.

But more lasting for me as a viewer was the belief in the edifying as well as entertaining aspects of theater that was abundant all year, delivered by actors at the peak of their craft: in “Sweat” at Capital Repertory Theatre, Bridge Street Theatre’s “Uncle Vanya” and “Griswold,” “Flight of the Monarch” at Shakespeare & Company and, especially, Barrington Stage’s “Forgiveness.”

As a unifying if unintentional theme for year’s body of work, each in varied ways strived for something that was most explicit in ATF’s “Todd vs. the Titanic,” which had voluminous depths beneath its comedy: They staked a claim for art’s inextricability with the human soul.