to another style completely, one that does a disservice to the father of modern drama.
Mason and Wilson revised the piece into a daytime drama. The characters appear out of time in using modern intonations, while the music and its placement in the script was cheesy. Having a character give a raspberry to her oppressor during one of the most dramatic moments of her onstage existence made for silliness, not tension. By turning this script into a soap opera, this collaborative team created a piece in the style that Ibsen fought against 120 years ago.
Meanwhile, the Prather Family of Theatres has opened their third venue with a high-stepping production of Crazy for You. Broadway Palm West does the dinner theatre execution just differently enough to keep it from feeling like every other dinner theatre; the generally tasty food is served buffet-style and the stage is larger than a postage stamp. They've also concentrated on impressive dancers and choreography to sell tickets. Finding the niche that had been missing from Phoenix theatres, in addition to their prior experience, has given them a strong start. Although their survival through their first Phoenix summer is chancy, I look forward to their next offerings.
Mark S. P. Turvin
Minneapolis/St. Paul
A superlative production of Merrily We Roll Along at the Guthrie Lab, directed by John Miller-Stephany and choreographed by Marcela Lorca, makes the most of the musical's primary asset—Stephen Sondheim's terrific score—and does the best it can with George Furth's long-winded, poorly motivated book (based on the Kaufman and Hart play). Ken Barnett, Christa Justus, and Jim Lichtscheidl are an engaging central trio, while Mimi Wyche is authoritative as the ambitious Gussie. Add to the mix strong supporting performances by Natalie Moore and Tinia Moulder, plus Andrew Cooke's fine musical direction, and you have a major success for the Guthrie.
Minneapolis Musical Theatre produces shows that would otherwise go unseen in the Twin Cities. Director Steven J. Meerdink has a taste for arch camp, a predilection that marred his otherwise interesting conception of an intimate Candide. But he is right on target with the delightful Howard Crabtree's When Pigs Fly, at the troupe's Bryant Lake Bowl Theatre home base. The gay-themed revue, written by Mark Waldrop and Dick Gallagher to fulfill Crabtree's conception, is smartly performed by Kevin Hansen, Eric Johnson, Gregg Peterson, Paul Whittemore, and Meerdink, with Katie Hoody and Tony Schiefert doing yeoman service at piano and percussion.
Amidst all the musicals, Eye of the Storm Theatre gives a notable accounting of Collected Stories at the Theatre Garage, with Shirley Venard and Larissa Paige Kokernot, under Casey Stangl's direction, providing a skilled balance of the older and younger authors in the Donald Margulies two-hander about friendship and literary ownership.
One has to admire the proficiency with which producer Judy Craymer, librettist Catherine Johnson, and director Phyllida Lloyd have found a way to shoehorn fistfuls of ABBA songs into the musical comedy framework of Mamma Mia!, seen in a lengthy tour stop at the Historic Orpheum Theatre. One doesn't have to admire the results to note that a houseful of ABBA fans grew ecstatic at the opening strains of each familiar number, and laughed delightedly at the pedestrian script. Casting a class act like Dee Hoty in the central role, with Michele Aravena as her daughter and Gary P. Lynch as the potential father who sings the most, was also a smart move. The juggernaut continues.
Michael Sander
St. Louis/Kansas City
There still are some versions of A Christmas Carol here and there, and Nutcracker ballets are popular, but traditional holiday fare is changing, even at theatres in the Midwest, where tradition is usually all-important.
The Kansas City-based Missouri Rep is doing A Christmas Carol once again, and the Nebraska Theatre Caravan is bringing its version to the Fox Theatre in St. Louis, but for a shorter run. Meanwhile, the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis will run The Royal Family, a venerable play by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber based on the Barrymore acting clan (and currently enjoying a London revival starring Dame Judi Dench), Nov. 30-Dec. 30, and then follows in January with Avenue X, the Off-Broadway a cappella doo wop musical about race relations in 1950s Brooklyn—not your usual holiday fare. And in Kansas City, the Unicorn produces David Lindsey-Abaire's Fuddy Meers for the same run.
The New Theatre Restaurant, a Kansas City tradition, stretches things even farther with Lumberjacks in Love, by James Kaplan and the late Fred Alley, from Nov. 8-Feb. 3. Gary Holcombe and Danny Cox lead the cast, bolstered by Kansas City regulars like Donna Thomason, Cinnamon Schultz, and Dean Vivian.
The downtown St. Louis HotHouse Theatre recently brought the pseudonymous Jane Martin to her first St. Louis production with Flaming Guns of the Purple Sage (closed Dec. 2).
But as winter settles into Missouri, there's good news ahead for next summer. The St. Louis Shakespeare Festival, the free theatre in Forest Park that opened last year with Romeo and Juliet, will be back in 2002 with—what else did you expect—A Midsummer Night's Dream. More than 30,000 people attended last year's production.
Joe Pollack
Wisconsin
Two young actresses with relatively short Milwaukee resumes recently drove two edgy and successful productions. Alicia Bercovici was the picture of manic energy and loony intensity in her portrayal of Jackie-O, the incest-determined twin in Bialystock & Bloom's fine staging of Wendy MacLeod's absurd comedy, The House of Yes (closed Nov. 25). And Jeana Stillman delivered an emotionally harrowing performance in her portrayal of a peep show stripper in the Cornerstone Theatre Company production of William Mastro-simone's Sunshine (closed Nov. 25).
Bercovici played a mentally troubled young woman whose spirited sexual pursuit of her twin brother sets the outrageous tone of The House of Yes. The character, Jackie-O, is the most over-the-top member of the toxic Pascal family. The conflict arrives with the other twin's struggle to escape the family's dark clutches. Michaelangello Matarrese did his best Milwaukee work in his natural and charming portrayal of the twins' sexually predatory brother. Director Jonathan West captured the comedy's supercharged and overheated tone in the production.
In a superbly genuine performance, Stillman inhabited the quickly changing emotions of a woman who has the bravado to expose herself for money, but such low self-esteem she thinks she deserves to be punched. Cornerstone is the new Milwaukee theatre company founded by Broadway and television actor Cotter Smith and his wife, Heidi Mueller Smith. Cotter Smith played the no-nonsense paramedic with whom Sunshine seeks refuge as she flees her abusive husband. Heidi Mueller Smith directed the taut production.
Milwaukee actor and playwright Michael Neville's new dramatic comedy, Decent Ordinary Criminals, is not ready for prime time. The play about "the troubles" in Northern Ireland and a campaign to win a Nobel Peace Prize for an unlikely candidate lacks clarity and focus. It was given a production by Playwrights Theater of Milwaukee (in association with Amethyst Productions) that closed Nov. 17.
The Professional Theatre Training Program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee will not recruit new students for next school year, according to William Robert Bucker, the new dean of the Peck School of the Arts. The program has been without a permanent director since James DePaul resigned last December. Bucker said the PTTP will take a year off from teaching and producing while the faculty and staff regroup and formulate a rebuilding plan.
Damien Jaques
Detroit
Griff has lost his best friend, Milt has lost his brother, Ned has lost his wife, ex-priest Larkin has lost his faith. Only one of these golfing buddies can find what he's lost, but redemption of all kinds is attainable in Golf with Alan Shepard at BoarsHead Theater from Nov. 15-Dec. 16.
Carter W. Lewis' comedy—nobody sets a tragedy on a golf course—is about growing old and playing golf (no, they're not the same thing). Its title refers to the moment when astronaut Shepard stood on the moon and whacked a golf ball a great distance.
Unlike the moon, Golf with Alan Shepard is loaded with atmosphere. Most of it is of the human variety: Thom Haneline (Griff), director John Peakes (Milt), Robert Hall (Ned), and Larry Sharp (Larkin). Rob Eastman-Mullins' set, a split-level, very green approximation of a golf course, provides additional ambience.
Practiced in homiletics, it is Larkin who most often makes the connection between life and golf, as in "Always replace your divots. That way, when you look back, you won't be embarrassed." Sharp, speaking softly and moving deliberately, commands every scene he is in.
Missizzy and the Angel Tree, kicking off Detroit Repertory Theatre's new season, Nov. 1-Dec. 30, starts out one way and suddenly goes off in another direction. Nobody involved seems to have noticed. The program calls Daniel Du Plantis' play a comedy when it is, in fact, a tragedy; the worst things happen to good people.
No wonder the actors in Bruce Millan's production seem bewildered. Nor does it help that for the opening 10 minutes the background music—Patsy Cline tunes—is played so loud as to be foreground music.
The time is 1963, the place Laurel, Miss. The curtain opens on Miss Isabelle Byrd, known as Missizzy (Nina Kircher), who is white, serving breakfast at home to her friend, Joseph (Robert Vogue-Williams), who is black. Miss Isabelle has recently returned home from "the Jackson nuthouse," having been dispatched thither by her husband, Damon, whose name Miss Isabelle pronounces as "demon." Damon (Joseph Haynes) is indeed a first-class bigot, who had his wife committed because she was friendly toward black people. At least that's how the situation appears, although Damon has a black fishing buddy.
Aside from a few weak jokes about Ku Klux Klan members purchasing bargain outfits at a white sale, very little is comic in Du Plantis' so-called comedy.
Martin F. Kohn
San Francisco
Berkeley Repertory's production of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing (playing The Roda Theatre through Jan. 8) does very little to enhance the reputation of this lesser comedy. Brian Kulick's wayward direction (abetted by Mark Wendland's surreal set design) manages to obfuscate the simplistic plot lines. The cast is decidedly uneven and, in the play's pivotal love story, Sterling Brown's Benedick is not even a contender in his sparring with Francesca Faridany's radiant Beatrice.
Bay Area musical theatre continues to offer staged revivals of works rarely seen by today's audiences. Marin Theatre Company presented (closed Dec. 9) a marvelously rewarding production of Moss Hart's Lady in the Dark (music by Kurt Weill, lyrics by Ira Gershwin). The dream sequences may not have been as sumptuous as in the original 194l production, but as directed by Lee Sankowich, with music direction by Billy Philadelphia and choreography by Richard Gibbs (co-founder of Allegro Theatre), it was a thoroughly engaging revelation of a groundbreaking American musical that (incidentally) preceded Oklahoma! by two years.
Goat Hall Productions recently presented Gian Carlo Menotti's 1949 Pulitzer Prize-winning opera, The Consul, a musically haunting work that now seems prophetically timely—it's a tale about anarchists and refugees at the mercy of a faceless bureaucracy. San Francisco music lovers are discovering this intimate "Cabaret Opera" company on Potrero Hill, founded by Artistic Director Harriet March Page and dedicated to introducing works of new composers as well as rarities by Barber, Bernstein, and Britten, as well as Menotti.
Cal Performances at UC Berkeley presented the Bay Area premiere of Matthew Bourne's The Car Man, which played seven sold-out performances at Zellerbach Hall. Subtitled "an auto-erotic thriller," it tells the tale of a mysterious drifter whose sexuality disrupts a small Midwestern town in 1960. The dance drama, set to the music of Bizet's Carmen with a story echoing the film noir The Postman Always Rings Twice, is another memorable sensation from the director-choreographer who, in 1999, scored a Tony Award-winning triumph with his gender-bending staging of the classic ballet, Swan Lake.
A. J. Esta
Philadelphia
Star turns garner all the attention, but there is something uniquely satisfying in the seamless collaboration of a strong ensemble. Several smaller companies, including the new Three-Legged Theater Company, Azuka Theatre Collective, and Fictitious Theatre Company, showcased the depth of the city's acting pool with strong productions of Savage in Limbo, Sincerity Forever and The Loyalist, respectively. But it is the Delaware Theatre Company's nearly flawless presentation of Thornton Wilder's Our Town that fully captures the sense of community an unassuming ensemble can bring. Tenderly directed by Fontaine Syer, DTC's Our Town is the perfect tonic for these troubled times, a reassuring and affirming production that eloquently states that although life is far from perfect, it is nevertheless an experience to be treasured.
A top-notch musical ensemble gives My Fair Lady the royal treatment in a splendiferous holiday offering from the Walnut Street Theatre. At once both risky and conventional, director Charles Abbot abandons the stiff upper-crust English accents of Professor Higgins (James Brennan) and Colonel Pickering (the sensational John-Charles Kelly) while maintaining Eliza Doolittle's (Jessica Boevers) cockney slang. Initially distracting, the result is essentially the same: Eliza sounds atrociously out of place. Although the action focuses on the unlikely Higgins/Eliza duo, this mammoth production, beautifully sung and choreographed, is balanced by a host of excellent supporting performances. In addition to the aforementioned Kelly, Jane Altman (Mrs. Higgins) is a constant delight and, as Alfred P. Doolittle, Bernard Wurger happily prances through "With a Little Bit of Luck" and "Get Me to the Church on Time" with an abundance of devilish glee. With dazzling costumes and wonderful music galore, like the transformed Eliza, the Walnut's production is an alluring mix of grace, beauty, power, and charm.
Not as successful, but almost as musically satisfying, is the Prince Music Theater's world premiere of Me and Mrs. Jones. Starring Lou Rawls and the music of Gamble and Huff, the show is well sung—but poorly acted, choreographed, and directed. A musical revue in search of a story (the shallow book serves only to introduce the next R&B classic), Me and Mrs. Jones nevertheless manages to be consistently diverting on the strength of Rawls silky baritone and its soul-filled Sound of Philadelphia score.
J. Cooper Robb
Seattle
Of course there are the Nutcracker, the pageants, and the omnipresent Scrooges in Seattle this season. But for those for who yearn for a Spirit of Christmas Novelty to come for a visit, several local companies are presenting unexpected holiday fare this year.
Believe it or not, three of the offerings are not only original, but also musicals. Chad Henry, the local composer of such past Seattle hits as Angry Housewives and The Magic Miss Piggle Wiggle, has a winner running at the Seattle Children's Theatre, The Hoboken Chicken Emergency (through Jan. 5), an original adaptation of the Daniel Pinkwater story in which a missing centerpiece to the family meal triggers a frantic search.
Over at On the Boards, local musician Reggie Watts (of the band MakTub) takes a sly sledgehammer to holiday traditions with A Very Reggie Christmas (through Dec. 16), alternating slots with one of the most bizarre, if endearing, acts to appear on the Seattle scene in years, The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players. This trio of Dad on guitar and vocals, Mom on slide projector, and seven-year-old daughter Rachel on drums present a multimedia extravaganza built around slides found at estate sales.
The 5th Avenue Musical Theatre Company's new Artistic Director David Armstrong is taking a double risk with The Prince & the Pauper, a co-production with Minneapolis' Ordway Center for the Performing Arts, playing now till Dec. 15. First off, this new musical by Ivan Menchell, Marc Elliot, and Judd Woldin, based upon the Mark Twain novel about royalty and wretch trading places, is still under construction. Secondly, it's running in a slot normally reserved for such traditional fare as Peter Pan (which is indeed available over at Issaquah's Village Theatre, now till Jan. 20). But Armstrong's subversive campaign to win his audiences over to newer and lesser-known fare may well pay off. (Note: though billed as a "world premiere," this is actually the second full production, which follows a one-week mounting last summer at Kansas City's Starlight Theatre featuring some of the same cast, including Broadway vets Cameron Bowen and Marc Kudisch as the Pauper and Miles Herndon, respectively.)
Finally, for those who don't want to stray too far from Ebenezer and company, the Seattle Repertory Theatre presents a revival of Dan Sullivan's Inspecting Carol (through Dec. 30), his farce from several years back about a struggling theatre company whose annual production of the Dickens classic is interrupted by what they believe to be a visit from an NEA inspector. Sullivan's patchy script will undoubtedly be greatly supplemented by the direction of long-time pro Jeff Steitzer, who also has a role in the show, along with such local luminaries as Barbara Dirickson and R. Hamilton Wright.
John Longenbaugh