Sweet Charity
At the Writers’ Theatre
By Dan Zeff
Glencoe – The original 1966 production of “Sweet Charity” had a cast of about two dozen, a large pit orchestra, and a vast Broadway stage. The revival at the Writers’ Theatre uses a cast of 11, a five-piece band, and plays on a stage the size of a large suburban patio.
So, how well does the Writers’ version compare to the original? Very well indeed, thanks to a delicious leading performance, inventive direction, choreography that skillfully utilizes the theater’s stage space and the dancing, singing, and acting skills of a talented ensemble.
“Sweet
Charity” tells the bittersweet story of Charity Hope Valentine, a New York City
hostess at a honky-tonk dance hall and an eternal
optimist with an unfailing ability to pick the wrong men for her love life. The
story takes her through a series of relationships, all ending in heartbreak.
She wants to love and be loved (“I have so much love to give,” she cries in one
heartbreaking line). Charity is surrounding by her hard boiled colleagues in
the dance hall, all bruised by life and hiding their disappointments under a
veneer of cynicism.
Photo Credit: Michael Brosilow
The show features a score by Cy Coleman (music) and Dorothy Fields (lyrics) and a book by Neil Simon, a pedigree flashy enough to concoct a major hit. The production had a healthy run on Broadway, largely based on a star performance by Gwen Verdon in the title role and the choreography and directing of Bob Fosse. It’s not a great show, but it has some first rate production numbers plus the winsome Charity character to hold the narrative together.
The Writers’ Theatre casts Tiffany Topol as Charity. Topol sings acceptably, dances very well, and endows her character with a fetching innocence that can charm the most hardened audience. Charity is often portrayed as a woman who’s been around the block more than once with men and may even be a part time prostitute. The prostitution angle is ambivalent in Topol’s performance, but she projects a warm-hearted, eager quality that is positively endearing. Best of all, Topol has great acting chops. Toward the end of the show Charity is faced with some really emotional situations that Topol brings alive with a poignant sincerity that is genuinely moving.
The other 10 members of the cast all play multiple roles. The revelation is Jarrod Zimmerman, who plays accountant Oscar Lindstrom, Charity’s nerdy and neurotic suitor, with a wonderful blend of comedy and inner confusion. Charity and Oscar are trapped in a stalled elevator, and Oscar, being claustrophobic, freaks out. It’s a scene ripe for slapstick over-acting that Zimmerman turns into a comic gem. And his final scenes with Charity convey a pain and regret that are a model of sensitivity and real anguish.
Ericka
Mac and Karen Burthwright are first rate as Charity’s closest friends at the
Fan-Dango Ballroom. Both lend a spicy edge to the show with their characters’ jaundiced
attitude toward the sleazy life they lead and their recognition that moving to
a better life is a pipe dream.
Photo Credit: Michael Brosilow
James Earl Jones II does a show-stopping number as the leader of a kooky religious cult called the Rhythm of Life. His big production number drops into the narrative out of the blue but pays its way with its offbeat funny lines and dance movements. Jeff Parker (who has the best pure singing voice in the cast) is fine as an Italian movie star who enters Charity’s life inadvertently for a single evening. Statuesque Emily Ariel March makes an eye grabbing impression as the movie star’s temperamental mistress wearing an evening dress of minimal body coverage. The remainder of the versatile cast consists of Katie Spelman (who is also assistant choreographer), Travis Porchia, Liam Quealy, and Adam Estes.
Choreographer Jessica Redish doesn’t try to replicate Bob Fosse’s inimitable style, but she nicely adjusts her dances to the small performing space and small ensemble, turning the intimacy of the theater into a virtue. Her delightful version of “Rich Man’s Fugue” was the dancing highlight of the night.
The small orchestra is situated on a balcony that overhangs the stage, sharing the upper space with the performers. The accompaniment is very good, led by the splendidly potent trumpet and flugelhorn work by BJ Cord. Doug Peck is the musical director (Tom Vendafreddo is the pianist/conductor) and Peck, as usual, has done wonders with the orchestrations, especially in the brassy “Hey, Big Spender” and “I’m a Brass Band” numbers.
Director Michael Halbertsam pulls the show’s various elements together, accommodating the virtues of the original musical to the reduced ensemble size and confining stage space, thus converting limitations into opportunities.
The designers have done their part, starting with David Hyman’s deliberately tacky dance hall costumes worn by the jaded hostesses. Colette Pollard’s bi-level set allows the staging to engage the eye vertically as well as horizontally, along with giving Halberstam and Redish welcome additional space for their production numbers. The actors move props on and off stage between scenes with efficiency, sometimes flavored with jaunty humor.
The lighting design by John Culbert and the sound design by Joshua Horvath work make visual and aural make major visual and aural contributions. Culbert and Horvath convey the stalled elevator scene with a single square of light complemented by the sounds of the incapacitated lift, allowing the audience’s imagination to fill in the realities of the location.
The Writers’ Theatre doesn’t offer a company full of great singers, but “Sweet Charity” isn’t a singing show. Being a Bob Fosse creation, it’s a dancing show, leavened with Neil Simon’s wit and wisecracks. The success of any “Sweet Charity” revival lies with the production numbers and the ability of the title character to win the hearts of the audience with her charm and pluck. And that’s where the Writers’ Theatre comes up big.
“Sweet Charity” runs through March 31 at the Writers’ Theatre, 325 Tudor Court. Most performances are Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 4 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 and 6 p.m. Tickets are $35 to $70. Call 847 242 6000 or visit www.writerstheatre.org.
The show gets a rating of 3½ stars. February 2013
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.
Like Dan on Facebook. Become a Friend!!!
**************************
Hamlet
At the Writers’ Theatre
By Dan Zeff
Glencoe – The Writers’ Theatre staging of “Hamlet” is a fine introduction to the tragedy for audiences encountering Shakespeare’s classic for the first time. The show is cleanly spoken and the action is easy to follow. The revival runs almost three hours with two short intermissions but the pace of director Michael Halberstam’s production moves so rapidly that the time zips by.
Halberstam does not load his staging with directorial concepts. There are no bright ideas that displace Shakespeare with the director’s footprint. The play demands countless choices by a director and Halberstam has met all the challenges, resolving the script’s knotty problems with intelligence and theatrical savvy. But his greatest achievement is casting Scott Parkinson as the melancholy Dane.
Photo Credit: Michael Brosilow
There are innumerable ways to play the character of Hamlet. Parkinson, with his slight build and Nordic look, is an intense, excitable prince. His mad scenes are realistic enough to make us wonder if the prince really has lost his mind, and yet when he proclaims, “I know a hawk from a handsaw” we recognize that beneath all the showy frenzy there is a sharp, steely intellect at work. But overall Parkinson’s Hamlet lives on his nerve ends. The death of his father has shaken the prince to his core, and his mother Gertrude’s marriage to his uncle tears him apart psychologically. You can read Freudian overtones into Hamlet’s passion for Gertrude, but Parkinson doesn’t overdo it. His love for his dead father matches his love for his living mother and the emotional load is unbearable.
At the Writers’ Theatre, Parkinson’s performance soaks up almost all the production’s oxygen. The supporting performances feed the star character and they are variable. Larry Yando, as usual, distinguishes himself, this time in a variety of small roles. He’s brilliant as the ghost--bitter, angry, despairing, and demanding his son avenge his murder. He reappears as a superb First Player, with his Hecuba speech, and then again as the Player King and finally as a richly comic Gravedigger.
There are problems with Liesel Matthews’s Ophelia and Michael Canavan’s Claudius. Matthews never seems quite comfortable in the role and there isn’t any sexual frisson between her Ophelia and Hamlet. Caravan is a dignified and royal Claudius but the character never comes across as a tortured villain. His relationship with Gertrude seems bland, when it should be giving off waves of sensuality. Shannon Cochran is excellent in her scenes with Hamlet but Gertrude’s relationship with Claudius needs a more heightened erotic dimension. Curiously, those fine actors Timothy Edward Kane and Kareen Bandealy don’t make much of an impression as Laertes and Horatio respectively. A couple of the actors in small parts aren’t yet ready for prime time Shakespeare.
Photo credit: Michael Brosilow
On the plus side, Ross Lehman is outstanding as Polonius, something of a silly ass but still nobody’s fool. He delivers Polonius’s charge to his departing son Laertes with parental concern and much good sense. Billy Fenderson gives Guildenstern some unexpected stage presence as a kind of medieval Danish frat boy. And in a nice in-joke touch, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern make their first entrance with a visual quote from Tom Stoppard’s “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.”
Like nearly all revivals of “Hamlet,” the director takes some liberties with the text. Audiences may be startled to see the play open at the court in Elsinore and not on the castle ramparts. Halberstam drops that opening scene and gets right into the complex domestic narrative. Lines are excised and some words are changed, but all in the service of keeping the pace fast and the Elizabethan language intelligible. A few of the deletions do undercut the action. I missed the comedy and the expense of that ninny courtier Osric. The final duel scene that results in a stage littered with stabbed and poisoned corpses is a bit too condensed, with Hamlet’s death lacking any big emotional payoff. Characters die in rapid order and the play ends. But these are minor complaints in the big picture that displays “Hamlet” as a great piece of storytelling.
The production gains much from the intimacy of the Tudor Court stage, where the audience views the action at point blank range. Collette Pollard has designed an all-purpose setting dominated by a brick wall at the rear of the stage and a brick and masonry floor that combine to evoke the Elsinore castle, inside and out. David Hyman’s costume designs range from the historical to the contemporary without ever looking out of place or anachronistic. Sarah Hughey’s lighting design and Mikhail Fiksel’s sound design both make appropriate atmospheric contributions.
But ultimately it all comes down to Parkinson. The ultimate test of an actor is how he speaks the famous soliloquys. Parkinson and Halberstam obviously have given the speeches much thought and the happy result is a freshness that gives new insight to even the excessively familiar “To be or not to be.” Parkinson addresses the audience directly in most of the soliloquys, not as recitations but as sentiments that probe the young man’s soul. They cap a performance that is both thoughtful and exciting and essential viewing.
“Hamlet” runs through November 11 at the Writers’ Theatre, 325 Tudor Court. Most performances are Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 4 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 and 6 p.m. Tickets are $35 to $70. Call 847 242 8000 or visit www.writerstheatre.org.
The show gets a rating of 3½ stars. Sept. 2012
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.
Like Dan on Facebook. Become a Friend!!!
http://facebook.com/zeffdaniel
***********************************
By Dan Zeff
Glencoe– For its scintillating revival of “A Little Night Music,” the Writers’ Theatre has condensed the Sondheim classic into a chamber musical. The action is played out on a small thrust stage enclosed by lacy floor-to-ceiling curtains. The only set is a raised two-step platform in the middle of the playing area. The intimacy of the staging brings the audience into close touch with the wit, sophistication, and gentle eroticism of this most worldly and elegant of American musicals.
“A Little Night Music” is Sondheim’s adaptation of the Ingmar Bergman film “Smiles of a Summer Night,” a droll story of sexual musical chairs among the middle and lower classes in provincial Sweden at the turn of the last century. Three generations of characters assemble and reassemble romantic relationships until everyone is reasonably paired up at the end. But along the way there are shouting matches, tears, trysts, even a game o Russian roulette.
Sondheim conveys this complex sexual merry-go-round with some of his most brilliant and exquisite lyrics. The only hit to come out of the score is “Send In the Clowns” (whose international popularity mystified the composer), but his graceful operetta-ish score is a continuous flow of comic, wise, dramatic, and romantic songs.
The core characters are a middle aged Swedish lawyer named Fredrik Egerman and his ex lover, actress Desiree Armfeldt. Egerman has a 20-year old son named Henrik by his first marriage and, as a widower, married 18-year old Anne, a lass he had known since childhood. The marriage is in its 11th month and still unconsummated because Ann is shy. Henrik is a divinity student tortured by raging hormones exacerbated by his passion for his teen-aged stepmother.
Photo Credit: Michael Brosilow
Desiree stops in the town to perform with her acting company and she and Fredrik meet, igniting the old flame of their love affair. Desiree is currently the mistress of Count Carl-Magnus Malcolm, a pompous and preening dragoon. Charlotte, the count’s wife, is in constant agony over her husband’s infidelities and general boorishness. He’s a lout but she loves him. Egerman’s lusty maid Petra leads the below stairs characters, the only person in the play having a good time for the entire duration of the story.
Presiding over the romantic couplings around her is Desiree’s mother, the aged Madame Armfeldt, a famous, and successful, courtesan in her time. She now lives in opulent retirement with her memories of happier days and her granddaughter Fredrika, Desiree’s child. The peremptory Madame Armfeldt took custody of the girl to insulate her from Desiree’s bohemian lifestyle. Add Madame Armfeldt’s butler Frid, a man who matches Petra’s lusty nature, and you have a combustible mix of sexually charged personalities who gather at a weekend house party called by Madame Armfeldt at her daughter’s insistence. It’s at the house party that the characters rearrange themselves into proper romantic combinations. Some of the newly assembled relationships may not last long but they grant the characters at least momentary respite from their jealousies and sexual longings.
William Brown has demonstrated a deft hand at directing high comedy at the Writers’ Theatre and elsewhere and his staging gives “A Little Night Music” a proper veneer of wry wisdom, lust, and humanity. He does end the show on an unexpected note that may startle fans of the musical. The audience can decide whether it adds or detracts from the final mood.
Photo Credit: Michael Brosilow
The production is spot-on in its casting. Area theatergoers will be familiar with the three featured performers—Jonathan Weir as Fredrik, Shannon Cochran as Desiree, and Deanna Dunagan as Madame Armfeldt, and they do not disappoint. Weir is best known as a classical actor but he displays a surprisingly strong voice to enhance his portrait of the beleaguered Fredrik, dealing simultaneously with a kittenish wife less than half his age and a son roiling with turbulent emotions. Cochran fits Desiree’s personality to perfection, a woman in early middle age who has seen much and done much, droll and very delightful. Her yearning and expressive take on “Send In the Clowns” is a production highlight. I’ve seen more acerbic Madame Armfeldt’s than Dunagan’s portrayal but the actress deftly conveys the old woman’s urbanity, imperious nature, and cynicism.
The others in the cast are well up to the mark, especially as vocalists (neither Weir, Cochran, or Dunagan are primarily singers). Tiffany Scott is terrific as the unhappy Charlotte, trying to keep a civilized facade to conceal her hurt and anger over Carl-Magnus’s crass conduct. Her rendition of the “Every Day a Little Death” says everything that needs saying about loving an inattentive and insensitive husband. There is real bite and intelligence in her performance. Royen Kent succeeds in the difficult role of the anguished Henrik, a young man who is the butt of the older characters around him as he burns with longing.
Kristen French is fine as the immature and feckless Anne, a young lady emotionally unprepared to be the wife of a successful middle-aged man. Brandon Dahlquist throws himself into the role of the officious Carl-Magnus with lip-smacking relish, and he has one of the best voices in the company. And a special round of applause goes to Brianna Borger as Petra, who stops the show with her stirring rendition of “The Miller’s Son.” The ensemble is handsomely rounded out by Shannon Corey as Desiree’s daughter, J. Michael Finley as Frid, and Cory Goodrich as Desiree’s maid Malla.
The story is worldly, charming, and rueful--emotions eloquently displayed by Sondheim’s score, abetted by Hugh Wheeler’s underrated book. At the Writers’ Theatre the show moves largely through the music with almost no choreography. The production dispenses with the Greek chorus of five lieder singers in the Broadway version, their singing interludes performed by the main characters. The elegance of the show is handsomely reinforced by Rachel Anne Healy’s stunning costume designs. Kevin Depinet is the scenic designer but most of the set consists of Nick Heggestad’s properties design, a sumptuous collection of furniture and carpets and candelabras. Jesse Klug’s lighting design bathes the production in a mellow midsummer Scandinavian glow. Andrew Hansen is the sound designer and Valerie Maze conducts the superb chamber music quintet that does great credit to Sondheim’s lilting waltz-driven score.
“A Little Night Music” runs through July 8 at the Writers’ Theatre, 325 Tudor Court. Performances are Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 4 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 and 6 p.m. Tickets are $45 to $65. Call 847 242 6000 or visit www.writerstheatre.org.
The show gets a rating of 31/2 stars. May 2012
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com
Like Dan on Facebook. Become a Friend!!!
http://facebook.com/zeffdaniel
*************************************
At the Writers Theatre
by Dan Zeff
Glencoe – Sexual passion and religious faith battle it out in “Hesperia.” Sex holds a clear edge in the production at the Writers’ Theatre.
The play title is the name of a small Midwestern town that’s the home to devout Christians like Trick and Aaron and Daisy. Some time before the action begins, young Claudia arrived from California in spiritual turmoil and seeking peace and consolation, fleeing from life in the pornographic film industry in Los Angeles.
Claudia finds succor in Hesperia’s
sympathetic Christian fundamentalist community. She particularly finds
religious counsel and then romance with the devout Trick, with their wedding
set for the near future. For some obscure reason, Claudia sends a wedding
invitation to Ian, her porn film partner and lover in California. Ian shows up,
on the run from unspecified pursuers seeking money he owes them. Ian, who grew
up in the Hesperia area, takes to the religious spirit of the people he meets
in the town and decides he wants to convert from his tawdry life to a
faith-based existence.
Ian’s appearance in Hesperia roils a number of the locals, especially Trick’s cousin Daisy, a young woman with no sexual experience. Her hormones raging, Daisy falls in love with Ian who professes he loves her, though he previously admitted to Claudia he loved her. Ian also crosses paths with a naïve youngster named Aaron, living in a state of confusion and frustration over his awakening sexual feelings.
Claudia had already confided to Trick that she had made pornographic movies in California but the young man shows commendable understanding and forgiveness. After Ian’s unexpected arrival, Trick tries to keep his cool. He befriends Ian and encourages the visitor’s decision to turn over a new leaf and join the company of the faithful in the town, even though Claudia is understandably uneasy about her ex lover’s sudden leap of faith.
The 90-minute single act play consists of a series of scenes mostly involving two or three characters. The sexual heat escalates to a series of passionate encounters among Ian, Daisy, Claudia, and Trick. The religious faith of Daisy, Trick, and Aaron is unquestionably sincere, with its call for sexual abstinence until marriage, but they are in a losing fight against the power of sex. Aaron’s sexual confusion is intensified after he finds a DVD that shows Claudia and Ian doing their porn thing.
Photo by Michael Brosilow
“Hesperia” is obviously a very personal work for playwright Randall Coburn. He went through stages in his life that were marked first by Christian fundamentalism and then by an abusive sexual relationship. His play provides some stimulating dialogue about faith that is neither patronizing nor doctrinaire. His characters are well drawn and their individual crises hold the audience’s attention. The love scenes certainly do not lack commitment from the performers.
But the play is better in its parts than as a whole. I had trouble accepting that Ian really was trying to convert to a religious faith in spite of a sharply observed and sensitive performance by Nathan Hosner. Kelly O’Sullivan is an attractive Claudia, but she comes across as a sweet young lady and it’s difficult to place her in the rough and tumble world of pornographic movies. Aaron’s finding the incriminating DVD provides Tyler Ross with a strong and credible emotional scene, but the DVD still seems like an unnecessary plot device (Trick already knows about Claudia’s porn career in California). And after 90 minutes play just stops, Aaron and Daisy languishing offstage and Ian leaving town with strangers in a car with California license plates, his future unknown but probably unhappy.
Photo by Michael Brosilow
The young ensemble does very well by Coburn’s script. In addition to Hosner and O’Sullivan, there are incisive and sensitive performances by Erik Hellman as Trick, Rebecca Buller as Daisy, and Tyler Ross as Aaron. The direction by Stuart Carden is intelligent and unobtrusive. Chelsea Warren designed the open set, Jacqueline Firkins the costumes, Heather Gilbert the lighting, and Mikhail Fiksel the sound.
“Hesperia” runs through March 18 at the Writers’ Theatre, 325 Tudor Court. Most performances are Tuesday and Wednesday at 7 p.m., Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 4 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 and 6 p.m. Tickets $45 to $65. Call 847 242 6000 or visit www.writerstheatre.org.
The show gets a rating of three stars.
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com. February 2012
Like Dan on Facebook- Become a Friend!!!!
http://facebook.com/zeffdaniel
***********************************
The Real Thing
At the Writers’ Theatre
By Dan Zeff
Glencoe—“The Real Thing” is a Tom Stoppard comedy about marriage, infidelity, and a bunch of other things. Being a Stoppard play, it is witty, sophisticated, and literate. And it’s receiving a glittering revival at the Writers’ Theatre. The opening night audience apparently loved it. I wish I could share their enthusiasm.
For a Stoppard play, “The Real Thing” is a pretty conventionally presented story. It has none of the philosophical and theatrical whiz bang of such Stoppard classics as “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” “Jumpers,” “Travesties,” and “Arcadia.” In “The Real Thing,” Stoppard tells a straight ahead story of two failed marriages involving a successful British playwright (Henry), two actresses (Charlotte and Annie), and an actor (Max). Three peripheral characters appear in the second act.
As the story opens, Henry is married to Charlotte but loves Annie, who is married to Max. By the third scene, Max and Charlotte are made aware that their spouses have been having an affair and their marriages are over. Henry and Annie move in together, and they are the central figures in the rest of the play, with occasional appearances by Charlotte. Max disappears from the stage, though at the end of the evening we hear that he is remarrying.
My problem with “The Real Thing” is that I couldn’t warm up to any of the characters. I loved their eloquence and prickly urbane dialogue, but after a while being in the company of so many super articulate people gets wearying. No major character is ever at a loss for words, no matter how emotionally fraught the situation. Even Debbie, the teen-age daughter of Henry and Charlotte, is ostentatiously precocious, matching Henry and Charlotte flippancy for flippancy and witticism for witticism.
Henry delivers some great set pieces that dazzle the ear with their eloquence and intelligence. Annie has struck up a friendship with Brodie, a Scottish pacifist soldier now in prison for an act of vandalism against an English patriotic monument. Brodie has written a play pouring out his bile against the ills he sees in British life and Annie asks Henry to edit the script. Brodie’s writing is awful and presents Henry with a platform for ridiculing the play and lauding the power of words to change the world, if used properly. It’s a wonderful mini essay on the English language but it sounds like Stoppard talking, not a spontaneous monologue by a character, no matter how educated and civilized he may be.
And so it goes for the whole show. Nobody is ever at a loss for the telling riposte or scintillating observation. Even when the normally phlegmatic Henry turns fiercely jealousy at the possibility that Annie is having an affair with Billy, a young actor, his anguished response is phrased in perfectly chiseled prose. All the main characters endure some emotional pain, but Stoppard never allows their distress to interfere with their ready repartee.
Stoppard injects some literary and musical inside material throughout the play. Annie and Billy rehearse scenes from John Ford’s Jacobean tragedy “’Tis Pity She’s a Whore” that underscore the passion developing between the two moderns. Henry has a guilty pleasure of loving rock music of the 1960’s, so we hear swatches from Herman’s Hermits, the Monkees, and Procul Harum as well as reverential praise for the Righteous Brothers. To balance the musical pallet we get bits from Bach and a Verdi opera. All these emendations provide opportunities for humor without really illuminating the narrative.
The Writers’ Theatre ensemble under Michael Halberstam’s
smooth directing is first rate. Sean Fortunato, a Writers’ Theatre regular,
dominates the play as Henry, a man who arouses much irritation among the other
characters for his glib emotional distance, until he comes apart facing Annie’s
possible infidelity. Fortunato tosses off Stoppard’s verbal arias superbly,
especially the playwright’s marvelous bit using a cricket bat as a metaphor for
the need to treat words respectfully. 
Natasha Lowe is outstanding as Charlotte, handling her loss of Henry with dignity and class and a strong ascerbic sensibility. Carrie Coons is likewise excellent as the more emotional but equally intelligent Annie. Henry certainly knows how to pick strong women. Rae Gray is fine in her single scene as Debbie, a girl about to go out into the world with her parents’ misgivings but obviously able to take care of herself, no surprise considering her blood lines.
The three supporting male characters are well played by John Sanders, who takes his cuckolding hard in the first act as Max; Jordan Lane Shappell as Billy; and Ryan Hallahan in a brief but telling scene near the end of the play as the belligerent Brodie.
The play’s title explores the realities and illusions of love and art. For example, which is truer to art, Brodie’s wretchedly written play that still brims over with ferocious commitment or Henry’s revision, much better written but perhaps at the cost of the passion that gave birth to the play originally? It’s all stimulating food for thought as explored in Stoppard’s elegant, epigrammatic style, especially if the listener has a high tolerance for self-consciously brilliant dialogue.
The production in the intimate Writers’ Theatre profits from Collette Pollard’s inventive set, with its sliding drawers and fluid shifts in location, adroitly managed by stagehands between scenes. David Hyman designed the costumes, Heather Gilbert the lighting, Mikhail Fiksel the sound, and Nick Heggestad the properties.
“The Real Thing” runs through November 20 at the Writers’ Theatre, 325 Tudor Court. Most performances are Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m. Saturday at 4 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 and 6 p.m. Tickets are $45 to $65. Call 847 242 6000 or visit www.writerstheatre.org.
The show gets a rating of three stars.
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com. Sept. 2011
Visit Dan on Facebook
**********************************
Heartbreak House
At the Writers’ Theatre
By Dan Zeff
Glencoe – George Bernard Shaw subtitled his play “Heartbreak House” as “A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes,” with a special nod to Anton Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard.” The parallels between the two plays are suggested rather than specified, though both take place on a rural estate, both portray the futile lives of the leisure class, and both present characters who tend to fall in love with the wrong person.
The main difference between Chekhov’s classic and “Heartbreak House” is that the Russian drama is about real people. “Heartbreak House” is populated by two-dimensional men and women who talk a great deal but provide little human connection with the audience. The characters are mostly posturing, self indulgent, and self-pitying folk who exist primarily to recite Shaw’s observations about politics, society, and relations between the sexes.
“Heartbreak House” is a challenging play, with its lack of coherent plot and endless conversations among people who enjoy saying shocking things to each other. It requires a large ensemble of actors who can talk Shaw’s talk with humor as well as intelligence and with more emotional credibility as the script implies. The Writers’ Theatre has assembled a fine cast under the direction of William Brown, a proven hand at this kind of verbal comedy/drama. The company does what it can to bring the characters alive, but the play remains elusive, verbose, and very long.
Shaw wrote “Heartbreak House” during World War I, though the play wasn’t published until 1919 and first staged in 1920, and in New York City rather than England. The Writers’ Theatre revival moves the time to 1940, at the onset of World War II, but the time is of little consequence. The men and women talking away at Captain Shotover’s provincial estate are hermetically seal from real life. They mock each other and moon about, oblivious to any real world outside their cloistered existence.
Captain Shotover (perhaps Shaw’s mouthpiece) is an elderly former sea captain, disillusioned and a bit senile when it suits his purpose. To his country house come a bizarre assortment of people, led by his daughters Ariadne Utterwood and Hesione Hushabye. The most vibrant character in the play is youthful Ellie Dunn, a woman weary of poverty who is happy to marry for money, even if it means wedding that nasty capitalist Boss Mangan.
Ellie’s father, Mazzini Dunn is a wise but impractical man who fails in business but triumphs as a sympathetic humanist. Hector Hushabye is a self-dramatizing womanizer. Randall Underwood loves his sister in law in vain and Ellie pines for Hector until she learns the man is Hesione’s husband. Into this menagerie plunges a canny burglar, who by a very long arm of coincidence is a rascal who once served under Captain Shotover.
At the end of the play, a dirigible drops a bomb on the estate that kills Boss Mangan and the burglar, “the two practical men of business.” Until that moment there was no indication anywhere in the play that a war was going on.
After two extended acts of random confrontations among the main characters, the final act settles in to analyzing the state of the neurotic and purposeless leisure class in particular and English society in general. The mood is censorious, with Shotover contributing aphorisms, as he has throughout the first two acts, about the country being rudderless, the “crew is gambling in the forecastle, the ship will strike and sink and split.”
“Heartbreak House” may have struck sparks among English audiences back in the early 1920’s, when the catastrophe of World War I was fresh in their minds. A play that implies the disastrous war was at least partly the fault of an indecisive and pleasure-seeking ruling cast would have created a shock of recognition. But nearly a century later, the play lacks that historical immediacy. Today’s society may have its problems, but they can’t be laid at the feet of a languid upper class too effete to steer the ship of state in the right direction.
So what we have is two hours are 45 minutes, including two intermissions, of talk among eccentrics and bohemians. Much of that talk is witty and insightful. After all, this is Shaw. But in the absence of recognizable human beings who lead realistically human lives, the show gets to be a long sit.
The Writers’ Theatre cast includes familiar faces, like Karen Janes Woditsch as Hesione, John Lister as Boss Mangan, and John Reeger as Captain Shotover. Whether intentionally or by happy chance, the roles of Ellie Dunn and her father are played by a pair of Asian-looking actors, Atra Asdou (Ellie) and Kareem Bandealy (Mazzini). Their characters are outsiders in the play, subtly underscored by the actors’ ethnic contrast with the Anglo-Saxon types around them. And they both deliver strong performances.
Shaw typically makes his women stronger characters than the men, and so it is in “Heartbreak House,” with the exception of Reeger’s droll Shotover. Woditsch, Asdou, and Tiffany Scott (Ariadne) are sharper than the men folk they deal with, and they are the characters most worth listening to.
The supporting male roles are taken by Lister as Boss Mangan, Martin Yurek as Hector, Kevin Christopher Fox as Randall Utterwood, and Tim Gittings as the burglar. They are a foolish and purposeless bunch, not to be taken seriously, but the Writers’ actors have plenty of fun with their extravagant emotional outpourings. Jeannie Affelder completes the ensemble as a no-nonsense Scottish nurse who rules the Shotover household from below stairs.
Keith Pitts designed the handsome and detailed country house garden where most of the action takes place. Rachel Anne Healy’s costumes look as much 1920 as 1940, but no matter. The characters live in a world beyond time. Jesse Klug designed the lighting, which features a blinding flash to represent the off stage bomb explosion. Andrew Hansen is the sound designer and composer.
“Heartbreak House” runs through June 26 at the Writers’ Theatre, 325 Tudor Court. Performances are Tuesday at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday at 2 and 7:30 p.m., Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 4 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 and 6 p.m. Tickets are $45 to $65. Call 847 242 6000 or visit www.writerstheatre.org.
The show gets a rating of three stars. April 2011
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.
Visit Dan on Facebook.
****************************
Do the Hustle
At the Writers’ Theatre
By Dan Zeff
Glencoe – Brett Neveu’s “Do the Hustle” at the Writers’ Theatre is a slender play, filled with unsavory characters who spend most of the show’s 85-minute duration snarling and cursing at each other. But it does offer diversions in the form of slight of hand con games two grifters inflict on gullible victims, known in the con lexicon as “marks.”
The two con artists are the father and son team of Eddie and Sam Sisson. Eddie is a veteran of small time swindles, assisted by the 17-year old Sam. The Sissons do not live in the glamorous and big time world of “The Sting” or “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.” One of their cons, in a public library, nets $20. The play builds to its climax with the elaborate execution of a con that involves maybe $1,000. The Sissons have chosen a tough way to make a living.
Along the way, the play portrays the uneasy relationship between Eddie and his son. Eddie is a sleaze, funneling his mother and his drug-addicted wife into the big con that ends the play. Eddie has been Sam’s mentor, but Sam has a streak of independence that rears its head as the big con is about to unfold. Sam is an intense, wary teenager, wound very tight emotionally. His bond with his father is laced with suspicion and mistrust, leading to the play’s rueful final image as the lights go down.
There is a bit of black humor in “Do the Hustle” but mostly the play is just black. An atmosphere of betrayal filters through all the action, the Sissons betraying their marks, members of their family, and maybe each other. The high moral ground is nowhere to be seen.
The action proceeds through a series of short scenes that take the Sissons to various locations in their pursuit of the marks’ money. The time is early winter and the place is an unnamed Midwestern city that could be Chicago. It’s a grungy world well suited to the tawdry characters. Eddie and Sam both dress like inhabitants of the street. Their careers as conmen definitely have not translated into prosperous lifestyles.
A blue ribbon cast portrays the shabby lives of the Sissons. Francis Guinan is superb as the grizzled, bullying Eddie Sisson, capturing the character’s petty criminal personality and absence of conscience in his behavior toward every other character in the play. It’s a totally convincing and authentic rendering of a lowlife.
Patrick Andrews’s Sam Sisson seethes with barely suppressed resentment throughout the story. Andrews is a slightly built young man but he exudes a riveting physical presence through his brooding silences mingled with violent verbal outbursts. With a role model like his father, it’s not surprising that Sam views his world with hostility and suspicion. I couldn’t take my eyes off Andrews, especially in his moments of taut silence.
Joe Minoso and Karen Janes Woditsch portray seven supporting characters between them with conviction and versatility. Woditsch in particular delivers a trio of women living on the edge and justifiably apprehensive about Eddie Sisson’s motives.
Kevin Depinet designed the flexible set, with sliding panels at the rear of the stage moving the action from place to place as the performers carry appropriate props on and off the intimate playing area. Rachel Anne Healy designed the thrift shop style costumes. Charles Cooper designed the dramatic lighting and Andrew Hansen the sound (and original music).
“Do the Hustle” isn’t an appetizing play. None of the characters are admirable and the world they inhabit is grim. As a short theatrical foray into the lower depths of contemporary society it has some interest, though I didn’t detect any attempts at social criticism, even though Eddie Sisson tends to pontificate about the nature of the con. What works best are the down and dirty, sometimes ferocious, performances by Guinan, Andrews, Minoso, and Woditsch.
“Do the Hustle” runs through March 20 at the Writers’ Theatre, 325 Tudor Court. Most performances are Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 4 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 and 6 p.m. Tickets are $45 to $65. Call 847 242 6000 or visit www.writerstheatre.org
The show gets a rating of three stars. February 2011
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.
Visit Dan on Facebook.
***************************
She Loves Me
At the Writers' Theatre
By Dan Zeff
Glencoe – “She Loves Me” meets the Writers’ Theatre. The encounter becomes one of those musical comedy experiences that leaves an audience sighing in contentment.
“She Loves Me” ranks
among the most charming musicals in American theater history. The score by
Jerry Bock (music) and Sheldon Harnick (lyrics) won’t make any hit parades
because the songs are entirely in the service of character illumination and
plot development. The show doesn’t rely on glitzy production numbers or glamorous
leading characters. The musical triumphs on its warmth and wry humor and a delightful
pair of lovers who don’t discover they are lovers until the end of the evening. 
“She Loves Me” is based on a Hungarian play from 1937 that was turned into a classic romantic film in 1940 called “The Shop Around the Corner.” The story takes place during the early 1930’s in an unnamed central European city, likely Budapest. The outside world may be inflamed by the Great Depression and the rise of fascism but in the cozy world of “She Loves Me” a collection of average and agreeable men and women just get on with their lives.
The story locale is Maraczek’s Parfumerie, a store that sells beauty products to women. The central characters are Georg Nowack, the bachelor manager of the store, and Amalia Balash, a young women newly employed at Maraczek’s as a clerk. Georg and Amalia develop an instant antagonism toward each other. What they don’t realize is that they are also pen pals, exchanging romantic lonelyhearts letters as “Dear Friend.”
Georg and Amalia bicker through two-thirds of the show before they discover their pen pal relationship. They are astounded that they really love each other and their embrace at the final blackout provides one of the more satisfying happy endings in modern musical theater.
The storyline is scarcely cutting edge. The theater is filled with plays and musicals about men and women who are hostile to each other for most of the show before falling in each other’s arms at the final curtain. It’s not matter but manner that makes “She Loves Me” such a winner, thanks primarily to the seamless integration of songs and dialogue into Joe Masteroff’s warm and sympathetic book.
The intimacy of Writers’ Theatre is the ideal venue for the low keyed realism of “She Loves Me.” And director Michael Halberstam has assembled a blue ribbon cast who charms (it’s impossible to get away from that word) the audience.
Jessica Mueller has become one of the top young divas in area musical theater so her delightful portrayal of Amalia is no surprise. I’ve seen Rod Thomas in several productions in the past few seasons but his Georg Nowack surely represents his finest work. Georg is an ordinary person in an ordinary job but his feelings run deep. Thomas makes this commonplace but yearning character a real romantic hero, and his chemistry with Mueller is spot-on.
Heidi Kettenring normally is the star in area musicals. Here she plays Amalia’s fellow clerk Ilona Ritter, a woman on the make for a permanent romantic relationship who has an abrasive affair with store clerk Steven Kodaly (James Rank), a shameless womanizer. Kettenring makes this potentially vulgar character into a charmer (there’s that word again) who finds her own true love by the end of the story, adding to the audience’s satisfaction.
Ross Lehman plays Mr. Maraczek, the owner of the store, who thinks Georg is playing erotic games with his wife. Lehman often tends toward exuberant comic performance but in “She Loves Me” he’s a model of understatement and the production is the better for it. Like Kettenring, Kevin Gudahl normally is a star, but here he is perfectly cast as a gentle and self-effacing clerk in Maraczek’s who assists his friend Georg in finally connecting with Amalia.
The show has a kind of chorus in three actresses who play store customers—Kelli Clevenger, Bethany Thomas, and Stephanie Herman. Jeremy Rill plays a worldly waiter at a chic restaurant where Georg and Amalia have an unexpected meeting. Bernard Balbot plays Arpad, a young deliver boy at Maraczek’s who aspires to become a full-time clerk. Andrew Goetten is a busboy who also doubles as a Christmas caroler. No matter what the sizes of their roles, they are all delights.
The storyline of “She Loves Me” may seem simple but this is an intricate show to stage. Halberstam is a master at melding the musical numbers into the flow of the narrative. He obtains performances of truth and humanity from his ensemble without ever striking an arch or cutesy note. Halberstam turns the theater’s limited physical playing area into a virtue, bringing the attractive men and women and their personal problems to within touching distance of the spectators.
Atmosphere is everything in this show. Nan Zabriskie’s costumes perfectly capture the feeling of the 1930’s. Jack Magaw’s set design coverts the stage from the outdoors into the store interior by the characters rolling a few props onto stage (applause for properties designer Nick Heggestad here). Keith Parham’s lighting and Ray Nardelli’s sound design are both essential co-contributors.
This isn’t a dancing show, but choreographer Jessica Redish has created some pleasurable dance interludes, notably witty shadow dances behind a curtain at the restaurant. Ben Johnson directs a fine chamber quartet who ably accompany the performers and further reinforce the mittel Europa flavor of the story. All in all, an irresistible production.
“She Loves Me” runs through November 21 at the Writers’ Theatre, 325 Tudor Court. Performances are Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 4 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 and 6 p.m. Tickets are $45 to $70. Call 847 242 6000 or visit www.writerstheatre.org.
The show gets a rating of four stars. Sept.2010
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.
Visit Dan on Facebook.
*****************************
A Streetcar Named Desire
At the Writers’ Theatre
By Dan Zeff
GLENCOE—“A Streetcar Named Desire” is a great play and the Writers’ Theatre delivers a solid revival, with one glaring flaw.
The production been much anticipated this season, not only because we rarely see this masterpiece on a local stage, but also because David Cromer directs. Cromer has become the director of the moment nationally after building a notable career in Chicago theater and anything he directs automatically becomes an event.
Audiences anticipating Cromer’s reinvention of the Tennessee Williams drama will be disappointed. Cromer’s staging is mostly faithful to the playwright’s script, with only a few minor, and unnecessary, embellishments. “Streetcar” is powerful enough to hold the audience without directorial bright ideas, a truism Cromer mostly honors.
The Writers’ Theatre has stocked its ensemble with local performers, nearly all with basically storefront theater experience. The absence of familiar faces gives the production a fresh look, and Natasha Lowe delivers an exceptional performance as the doomed Blanche DuBois. She is surrounded by fine complementary work from a half dozen players, but there is one huge stumbling block.
“Streetcar” is essential a duel, with vulgarity, emotional brutality, and insensitivity ultimately triumphing over art, beauty and sensitivity. In a Tennessee Williams play, delicacy always goes down before the onslaught of crass realism.
Stanley Kowalski is a coarse blue-collar type, bursting with animal vitality. Stella Kowalski is Blanche’s younger sister, in thrall to her husband’s sexual magnetism, while Blanche is revolted by Stanley’s cynicism, lust, and volatile temperament.
Matt Hawkins is either miscast or misdirected as Stanley. Granted, Marlon Brando’s original performance on Broadway and in the film is one of the iconic acting jobs in American theater history, but I’ve seen the role performed with great strength and insight by actors who avoided the Brando shadow.
Hawkins plays Stanley as a near hysteric, often screeching out his rage or frustration. Stanley may be a brute, but he should be a charismatic brute. Hawkins’s Stanley is more of a skittish punk and bully. This Stanley is a small man emotionally and scarcely the callous adversary who ultimately defeats the vulnerable Blanche. Here he is merely boorish, robbing the play of a large chunk of its dramatic potency in the conflict between the two main characters. Even Stanley’s horrifying rape of Blanche at the end of the play comes off as a mere pettish assault.
Blanche has her failings. She’s manipulative, delusional, and neurotic, but she’s always fascinating. Maybe in another life she could have been a grand lady, cultured and capable of honest love. Still, her erotic and decadent appetites, her fragile personality, and her emotional self-indulgence might have been baggage that would destroy her in any life. Lowe’s Blanche is a maddening, tragic woman who isn’t strong enough to withstand life’s hard knocks. Blanche is an endlessly engrossing character and Lowe is eloquent and heartbreaking in her portrayal.
Stacy Stoltz is a fine, earthbound Stella, a character intelligent enough to make the spectator question what she sees in the crude and abrasive Stanley on the Writers’ Theatre stage. Danny McCarthy fine as one of Stanley’s poker playing buddies, a pathetic middle-aged man who for a time becomes Blanche’s suitor. There is also good work from Loren Lazerne as an upstairs neighbor and Jenn Engstrom as his wife. The ensemble is filled out by Ryan Hallahan, Derek Hasenstab, Carolyn Nelson, Rosario Vargas, and Esteban Andres Cruz.
Cromer has injected cameo appearances by the ghosts of Blanche’s tragic young husband and the boy’s lover. The husband committed suicide after Blanche discovered his homosexuality and his death launched Blanche on her long downward psychological spiral. The apparitions do the play no harm but they are scarcely necessary. We’ve already seen the troubled inside of Blanche’s head through the woman’s own words and actions.
Collette Pollard has designed an extraordinary set that fills the small Writers’ Theatre acting space with the Kowalski’s claustrophobic two-room apartment and a stairway leading to an upstairs apartment. Janice Pytel designed the gritty 1940’s clothes. The sound design by Josh Schmidt leans heavily on discordant New Orleans jazz music, ramming home Blanche’s disordered mind a little too insistently. Likewise, Heather Gilbert’s lighting often turns nightmarish, again to emphasize what we already know, that Blanche is living on her nerve ends and on the brink of collapse.
The jazz music aside, the production doesn’t sufficiently create the hot and humid and exotic New Orleans backdrop that underpins the play’s mood. Possibly that’s the fault of the theater’s intimate playing space.
Overall it’s good to have a decent rendering of “A Streetcar Named Desire” back on a local stage. And I won’t soon forget Lowe’s performance as Blanche. A more successful Stanley would have elevated this production to something really special.
“A Streetcar Named Desire” runs through July 11 at the Writers’ Theatre, 325 Tudor Court. Performances are Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 4 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 and 6 p.m. Tickets are $40 to $65. Call 847 242 6000 or visit www.writerstheatre.org.
The show gets a rating of three stars. May 2010
Contact
Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com
Visit Dan on Facebook.