The Cleveland Play House celebrates the 50th anniversary of the publication of Anne Frank's immortal diary with a fine production of Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett's Pulitzer Prize-winning adaptation of 1956, The Diary of Anne Frank (through May 17). Director Scott Kanoff, literary manager and resident director of The Play House, breathes new life into the oft-told tale of a family forced into hiding in Nazi-occupied Holland. A great cast--spearheaded by Rebecca Feldman, an Anne look-alike--includes Richard Farrell, Geraldine Librandi, Christopher Wynkoop, Lisa Bansavage, Davis Hall, Jamie Bennett, Eliza Foss, Tess Hartman, and Rohn Thomas.
Dobama Theatre closes a daring season with The Art of Success (through May 18), English playwright Nick Dear's farcical revision of the life, times, and art of William Hogarth, the 18th-century painter and engraver. Drawing liberally from history, Dear creates a world of brothels and bawds, murder and corruption; a time both imagined and real. Despite some heroic individual performances--most notably by Paula Duesing, who delivers an intoxicating brew of lewdness and cunning as a prostitute, and Timothy H. Champion as the oily and pragmatic Robert Walpole--the production grows tedious. The mind is engaged, but never the heart. The Art of Success was produced as a mostly British import at New York's Manhattan Theatre Club in 1990; there's an English sensibility for satire and farce that eludes the Cleveland premiere.
Meetin's On the Porch, a quartet of one-act plays by Donald MacKechnie, traces the lives and friendship of three women in a small Nebraska town, from 1900 to 1985. At Ensemble Theatre, through May 18, the play embraces two world wars, as well as the secrets and lies even best friends employ in dealing with one another. The author's spare dialogue reflects the narrow world of these women. Cleveland actresses Mary Jo Alexander, Juliette Johnson, and Dawn Pierce are featured; Licia Columbi directs. MacKechnie, who lives in Los Angeles, is the founding artistic director of GeVa, a professional theatre in Rochester, N.Y.
--FRANCES HELLER
Dayton's leading troupe, The Human Race Theatre Company, ends its season on an ambitious, confident, yet beguilingly intimate note with Ohio's first regional production of Tony Kushner's Angels in America: Millennium Approaches (through May 11) in the 223-seat Loft Theatre. (The second part of Kushner's epic, Perestroika, opens the Loft season in September.)
With entrances and exits problematic on the Loft's shallow, extra-wide thrust stage, director Bob Hetherington leaves characters onstage between scenes--praying, sleeping, or simply frozen in time. This reinforces Kushner's kaleidoscopic vision of a superficially isolated but profoundly interconnected world, wherein a gay man's hallucination can intersect with a Mormon housewife's disturbing dream. Angels' scenic designer David Centers has ingeniously re-thought the presentation of the play's supernatural portents--including the cliffhanger ending's winged angel--without diminishing their impact.
Eight solid actors, led by resident artists Bruce Cromer (alternately fierce, tender, and sassy as Prior Walter) and Scott Stoney (enjoyable, but too avuncular as Roy Cohn). They convey the work's broad range of drama, farce, soap opera, black comedy, history, and tragedy.
The Human Race, hoping to reduce a cumulative deficit of $100,000, has launched an unusual collaboration with the better-financed Victoria Theatre Association, Dayton's Broadway presenter. Race's new "Next Stage" series combines three of its productions--To Kill a Mockingbird (Nov. 4-9, Victoria Theatre); Taking Sides (Jan. 14-Feb. 1, Loft); After-Play (April 29-May 17, 1988, Loft)--and two touring shows.
Columbus' Red Herring Theatre Company ends its fourth season with a superb area premiere of The Road to Mecca (through May 17, Riffe Center's Studio Two). Veteran actress Ionia Zelenka is understated but triumphant as the aging artist near the end of her road in Athol Fugard's South African drama. Michael Garrett Herring directs the well-designed season finale.
Red Herring, which moved into the Riffe Center this season, will return to its former Milo Arts Center home for its first summer show, Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape (July). Next season: Punch and Judy (Oct. 30-Nov. 23); Night Hawks (Feb. 5-March 1), a new mystery by Columbus' Johnrick Hole; and Old Wicked Songs (April 23-May 17, 1998).
--MICHAEL GROSSBERG
Due to the illness of wife Joyce Ebert, Arvin Brown has pulled out of directing The Joy Luck Club at Long Wharf Theatre (April 15-May 25). The adaptation of Amy Tan's novel, slated to be Brown's last staging effort of his 30-year tenure as the New Haven theatre's artistic director, will now be directed by Seret Scott.
Further upstate, Hartford Stage is causing a furor with the world premiere of Richard Foreman's Pearls for Pigs (March 29-May 3). Many subscribers don't know what to make of the phantasmagorical, 80-minute piece, which concerns an actor-director whose "poor, poor brain has been damaged by life." The set-up is part commedia, part Marat-Sade, as the character, dubbed The Maestro (David Patrick Kelly), takes the audience to task for not appreciating the artistic jewels he's throwing before us swine. Although an angry, self-indulgent, and self-pitying piece, Pearls is often fun in its giddy destruction of audience expectations. Hartford Stage does a 180 with its next production: Fascinatin' Rhythm, a new Gershwin revue (May 10-June 15).
Seven Angels in Waterbury serves up its own world premiere about a songwriter. Heart and Soul: The Life and Times of Frank Loesser (April 17-May 4) is a compilation of that composer-lyricist's work. Six able performers (Rebecca Baxter, James Beaman, James Darrah, Laurie Gamache, Laura Kenyon, and Patrick Ryan Sullivan) cavort under the sprightly guidance of director-choreographer Richard Sabellico. Unfortunately, the continuity--as written by Loesser's daughter, Susan--is wan and humorless. The performers divvy up the narration, but we don't care enough or learn enough about the man to give the evening a rise. A less loving, more incisive rewrite might help.
Constant rewrites and workshops couldn't save Julie McKee's The Adventures of Amy Bock, at New Haven's Yale Repertory Theatre (March 27-April 18). Based on fact, this tale of a woman inventing various lives for herself was nevertheless unconvincing.
Also heavy-going is Stamford Theatre Works' Stage Struck (April 23-May 11). The Simon Gray comedy-thriller, at best a pale imitation of Deathtrap, is done in by unlikely British accents and an unclear sense of where the comedy is.
--DAVID A. ROSENBERG
While Third and Indiana (March 20-May 4)--the Arden Theatre Company's adaptation of journalist Steve Lopez's inner-city novel--received accolades, symposia, and sell-out crowds, this writer felt that Hammers (March 26-April 20), by Conrad Bishop and Elizabeth Fuller of The Independent Eye, was the more exciting premiere.
Other than their newness, and the fact that the theatres which housed them are literally around the corner from one another in Philadelphia's Olde City neighborhood, the works are very different. Third and Indiana, adapted and directed by Artistic Director Aaron Posner, is a large, loud play, coiling several stories set in North Philadelphia's "Badlands" through quick scenes juxtaposing humor and violence, tied by video commentary.
Hammers was inspired by the story of Sarah Winchester and her bizarre mansion, built nonstop over 38 years, but was also a larger meditation on obsession, produced in the Eye's impeccable style. Performances by Fuller, Kevin Augustine, and Sonja Robson were particularly memorable, as were Elise Viola's framework set, Craig Young's poetic lighting, and Fuller's eerie music.
On March 31, performer Laurie Beechman held a benefit for actor Doug Wing at the Walnut Street Theatre, drawing over 700 people despite the season's biggest snow storm. Both Wing and Beechman are cancer survivors.
The Walnut's Studio Three production of Faith Healer (April 15-27) featured Wing as Teddy, with understudy Steve Tague relieving him admirably. William Leach played the title role, with Carla Belver as his wife, in director Malcolm Black's effectively stark production of Brian Friel's all-monologue drama.
Studio Three also presented a powerful revival of Oleanna (March 18-April 6), with Greg Wood and Maggie Siff in a refreshingly detailed and genuine production of David Mamet's confounding exploration of power, self-awareness, and communication.
Rockwell Productions at the Media Theatre for the Performing Arts has a colorful and poetic revival of Sigmund Romberg's The Desert Song (April 16-May 18) starring Deborah Jenkins and Russell Cusick; and the Bristol Riverside Theatre presented a large-scale Romeo and Juliet (March 18-April 3), with G.R. Johnson and Elizabeth Mestnik in the title roles.
--MARK COFTA
Randy Strawderman, actor, dancer, choreographer, playwright, and director, has been named artistic director of Barksdale Theatre--replacing John Glenn, who leaves at the end of June.
Strawderman comes home to Barksdale, where he has displayed his talents during a long and auspicious history with the theatre. He directed Barksdale's three longest-running productions: Godspell, in 1975; Red, Hot & Cole (which he co-authored and staged for an abbreviated run in Los Angeles), in 1978; and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, in 1984-85. Glenn's final production at Barksdale, Molly Sweeney, is Brian Friel's tale of a woman, blind since infancy, who moves from a familiar but sightless world to a strange new existence. The title role is played by Kelly Kennedy.
Five Guys Named Moe, an exuberant, ebullient, and dance-filled musical based on the rhythm-and-blues of Louis Jordan, is the final offering of TheatreVirginia's current season; the show features Robert F. Chew, Darren Lee Frazier, Erich McMillan-McCall, Timothy Cole, and scene-stealing New Yorker Steven X. Ward. Emily Beck's scenery is eye popping, especially in the second act.
Theatre IV has two concurrent shows. A musical adaptation of Sleeping Beauty (May 7-25) is a Family Playhouse production, written by Peter Howard and composed by Ron Barnett. And Jack And Jill--Jane Martin's play, which premiered last spring at the Actors Theatre of Louisville--runs in the Little Theatre, May 1-18, with Duke LaFoon and Dawn Westbrook performing under the direction of Steve Perigard.
The premiere of local playwright Harry Kollatz Jr.'s surreal The Persistence of Memory is being given at the Fire House Theatre, May 1-17, directed by Jim Warren. Kollatz, who worked his way through college as a newspaper copy boy, based his comedy on the absurd 1966 efforts of a bunch of locals, who wanted a work by Salvador Dali to spice up the Confederate memorials along historic Monument Ave. (Their efforts failed.)
Swift Creek Mill Playhouse's reprise of its 1986 record-breaking hit, Little Shop of Horrors, is playing to sold-out houses once again. The show is scheduled to run through July 19.
--CAROLE KASS
Sylvia, A. R. Gurney's clever canine comedy, is filling the Chapel Theatre of the Salt Lake Acting Company with unrestrained laughter (April 26-June 15).
According to Gurney, this not-too-improbable story of how the love between a man and his female dog threatens his marriage mirrors the playwright's own relationship with his dog and his wife. Gurney has created a new type of anthropomorphized character. The irresistible Sylvia, whose name is on her tag when she finds Greg (Geoff Hansen) in Central Park, is played by a young woman (Jenniffer Buckalew). The dog understands both Greg and his wife, Kate, and speaks back to them in a range of emotions with a well-developed, colorful vocabulary.
Sylvia has been the most frequently produced play during the 1996-97 professional theatre season throughout the U.S., with at least 29 separate productions. This phenomenon exposes the human fascination with animal psychology--a fascination Gurney exploits in hilarious fashion.
Sylvia is an animal whose human characteristics are emphasized; she is, nonetheless, believably canine. Gurney's creation is quite different from the cartoon-like animals on stage at Salt Lake's Pioneer Theatre Company in Stephen Sondheim's and James Lapine's Into the Woods (April 30-May 17).
Not to be outdone with animal lore, Plan-B Theater Company is staging Beginnings (May 8-31), at Salt Lake's Aardvark Cabaret. The production uses puppetry and masks to explore--seriously--various myths from different cultures, including those which describe why animals are endowed with certain traits.
Yet again, Salt Lake City is offering diverse, well-crafted theatre; right now, however, everyone's efforts seem intended to increase understanding of our four-footed friends.
--CLAUDIA