Turandot Grandly Usurps Saint-Saëns at Belk Theater

Review: Opera Carolina’s Turandot

By Perry Tannenbaum

When we gauge the cultural influence of Giacomo Puccini, we’re most likely to invoke the operas he composed that were subsequently repurposed into megahit Broadway musicals. The American colonialism that fueled the domestic tragedy of Madama Butterfly eventually suffused the spectacular Miss Saigon, and La Bohème, Puccini’s verismo masterwork was Americanized – Greenwich Village filling in for Paris – and turned even more successfully into Rent.

But we don’t readily think of Puccini in terms of grand opera, ALL CAPS, unless we narrow our focus to the Italian master’s last work, Turandot, the one opera he didn’t live to complete or see premiered in 1926. The fate of nations routinely hung in the balance when Verdi selected his libretti, but for Puccini, this tale of ancient China and Peking stands apart from his more private and intimate norm. If Traviata is Verdi’s most visionary work, anticipating Puccini, then Turandot is Puccini’s grandest and most retro work.

Opera Carolina’s history with the work tallies well with its popularity. This is the sixth time the company has staged Turandot, decisively trailing Puccini’s big three, Bohème, Butterfly, and Tosca, two of which have reached double figures. Yet since James Meena, a devout Verdian, arrived on the scene in 2000, Turandot has maintained parity with its kindred, staged three times since the turn of the century.

We must, begging Milady’s pardon, bestow an asterisk next to the current incarnation of Peking’s princess. If she wasn’t exactly a last-minute or eleventh-hour replacement for Camille Saint-Saëns’ Samson and Delilah, it’s fair to say that she was an eleventh-month substitution for the previously slated season closer.

Yes, a grand opera was inserted at Belk Theater as the clock or calendar was winding down! Around the world, Maria Callas, Birgit Nilsson, and Joan Sutherland are among the celebrated dramatic sopranos who have graced the powerhouse title role, and the Franco Zeffirelli production at the Metropolitan Opera is as revered for its stateliness and splendor as the Notre Dame Cathedral.

Grand? Monumental.

Needless to say, the Opera Carolina production didn’t figure to deliver legendary grandeur. But instead of smoke and mirrors, set designer Anita Stewart and lighting designer Michael Baumgarten call upon scaffolding and projections to bridge the gap. Stage director Jay Lesenger wisely keeps the curtain down over Stewart’s barebones set until Meena, down in the orchestra pit with the Charlotte Symphony, can begin working his magic with the score. It doesn’t take long to taste its beauties, ranging from delicate to majestic, or realize Meena’s deep affection for it.

Parallel to the build-up to Prince Calaf’s climactic confrontation with Peking’s ice goddess, when the princess asks him three riddles that he must solve – or die – there’s a steady build-up of ritual. A Persian prince has failed the Trial of Three Riddles and must be beheaded. To declare his candidacy, against the fervent wishes of his father and his dear maidservant, Calaf – “The Unknown Prince” – must strike the gleaming gong near the gates of the imperial palace. To stage a new trial, there must be a public proclamation, holy men must gather, the Emperor must preside, and Turandot herself must pose the riddles.

It’s a regal crescendo of pomp, ceremony, and colorful, eye-popping costuming from Anna Oliver that ultimately matches the trumpets heralding the divine Principessa. Watching the royal entrances of Emperor, Turandot, and their respective ministers and maidservants, high up and almost level with the proscenium, I had to wonder how much more scaffolding and stairs there must be hidden in the wings so that all these nobles, old and young, could safely ascend to those lofty heights.

At ground level, my worries began as soon as soprano Jennifer Forni made her auspicious Opera Carolina debut as Liù, the maidservant who has devoted herself to dethroned Tartar king Timur simply because her son, Calaf, once smiled at her before he fled the kingdom. Forni distinguished herself within the first ten minutes with her sweet fruity timbre recounting Liù’s backstory, and her buttery soft notes put the protagonists waiting for their big moments in serious jeopardy of being upstaged. After all, Renata Tebaldi, Renata Scotto, and Montserrat Caballé are among the notables who have been drawn to this role.

If we don’t see or hear the very best of Diego Di Vietro early in Act 1, there was enough Luciano Pavarotti DNA surfacing in his tenor to assure us that he would likely be equal to Calaf’s big “Nessun dorma” moment when the curtain rose on Act 3. The extra panache that was missing before intermission arrived on time, and Lesenger made more of Calaf’s first private moment with Turandot, calling upon Di Vietro to conquer the princess with brutish aggressiveness and charm. The chemistry that was so sorely missing when Opera Carolina brought Turandot to the Belk in 2009 had finally been recovered, making for a more deeply satisfying ending.

Though Lesenger could have given her more to do during Turandot’s icy phase, Amy Shoremount-Obra was certainly majestic, intimidating, and cruel as the Principessa in the stunning trial scene. Nor am I quite sure that Baumgarten took the best approach in lighting the Princess when she first appeared. Yes, Shoremount-Obra was dazzling but blinding might be equally accurate as the lights were so dazzling that there was no chance to behold the beauty of the Princess’s face, utterly bleached by the spotlight. (My photographer agrees.)

Yet there is visual drama in this tense ceremony as Turandot gradually descends the long staircase from her lofty height as her successive riddles are solved. Shoremount-Obra visibly becomes more human and vulnerable as she comes closer to the Unknown Prince’s level at the climax of Act 2 and he proves more and more worthy of her. The dramatic soprano’s stamina wavered just slightly after intermission in her pre-dawn duet with Di Vietro, but by this time, Shoremount-Obra’s beauty had been revealed and the chemistry was kindled.

Otherwise, there was no lack of strength or color among the remaining cast. John Fortson was austere and imposing in all of the Mandarin’s proclamations. Jeffrey McEvoy, Zachary Taylor, and resident artist Johnathan White were delightful as Ping, Pang, and Pong when we needed comic relief. Garbed and bearded in gray, basso James Eder brought out a paternal spirituality in the blind King Timur, and Elliott Brown, decked out in enough gold to be declared a Sun King, was a magnificent Emperor Altoum.

Rather electrifying, all around. Bravi.

Charlotte Symphony’s New Maestro, Kwamé Ryan, Thrills a Packed House

Review: Tchaikovsky & Brahms at Belk Theater

By Perry Tannenbaum

April 5, 2024, Charlotte, NC – The audience at Belk Theater didn’t rise and sing the National Anthem as we do at the start of every new Charlotte Symphony season, but the occasion – Tchaikovsky & Brahms – was auspicious enough for Symphony president David Fisk to take the stage, notes in hand, and introduce the Orchestra’s newly designated music director, Kwamé Ryan. On the heels of CSO’s announcement that they were already at over 80% in reaching its $50 million fundraising campaign goal, ensuring Symphony’s financial stability, Classics subscribers had multiple reasons to express their enthusiasm – as Fisk spoke and when Ryan made his entrance. Both events had been sufficiently ballyhooed in the press. Fisk could wait a leisurely eight minutes after the normal starting time to make his appearance, so the usual curtain-up helter-skelter of late arrivals had subsided. Unless Ryan raised his eyes to the uppermost balcony, he saw a packed house ready to erupt.

Ryan’s greeting was even more personable than Fisk’s intro, so audience adoration actually rose a couple of notches before quiet prevailed and he could put his baton to use. This really was the beginning of a new Kwamé Ryan era, and the director designate did not fail to take advantage of that vibe. Instead of the “Star-Spangled Banner,” Ryan began his reign with what felt like the next best thing. With the composer seated in the orchestra, poised to receive more audience adulation, Ryan and Symphony performed Wang Jie’s Symphonic Overture “America, the Beautiful.” A self-professed “lover of adventure on mountains and cliffs,” Wie was thrilled when the Colorado Springs Philharmonic asked her to create a work inspired by nearby landmark Pikes Peak and the song written by Katherine Lee Bates in 1895 to a melody composed more than a decade earlier by Samuel A. Ward.

The commission was not at all outré, since Bates’s original poem was inspired by her first trip to the summit of Pikes Peak. You might say, however, that Jie’s music was inspired by America in 2016, since her description of this work stresses the unifying effect of the song amid political turbulence. She aimed for a piece that acknowledges how “fractured” we are while expressing the hope that a “re-harmonized” take on the anthemic song could still have healing and unifying powers. Fractured episodes alternate with Jie’s re-orchestrated presentations of Ward’s melody, presented in chunks of eight bars each until all of “America, the Beautiful” is reprised with brassy grandeur, followed by a frantically accelerated coda. Curiously, the piece probably does sound a lot more hopeful today, eight years after it was premiered barely two weeks before Election Day. A revision today might not contain the same wan, ruminating passage from the French horns or the silvery wistfulness from concertmaster Calin Ovidiu Lupanu. Wie’s energetic balancing act was almost nostalgic.

Although cellist Joshua Roman performed Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme in Charlotte as recently as 2012 during an All-Tchaikovsky concert led by Christopher Warren-Green, the piece didn’t skyrocket to mountaintop status for me until Gautier Capuçon played it at the glorious Dvořák Hall during the Prague International Festival of 2019. Reaching that stratosphere would be difficult for both guest soloist Sterling Elliott and Ryan, navigating Pyotr’s score before the vivid memory of Semyon Bychkov’s exploits with the Czech Philharmonic had fully faded. Indeed, the delight and perfection of the Prague experience drifted beyond reach by the time Elliott and the CSO had traversed the mid-tempo prelude, the rococo theme modeled on Mozart, and the first two variations at a friskier pace. Ominously, it dawned on me that this was the first piece I was hearing Ryan conduct with Symphony that wasn’t composed by an American citizen.

With the onset of the dreamy Variation III, Elliott and Ryan found their footing, bringing forth the full sublimity of the Andante sostenuto. At that point, knowing that some bodacious virtuosity lay ahead in the final four Variations and the crowdpleasing coda, I resolved to try and watch Elliott from the perspective of those in the audience who were experiencing the Rococo for the first time. Wiping the slate clean not only enhanced my own experience, it plugged me into the excitement and wonder of the Belk Theater crowd as the buoyed Elliott slashed through the pyrotechnics in the latter half of Tchaikovsky’s concerto and shredded his bowstrings. If you factor in opening night jitters, Elliott’s encore figures to be even more awesome.

The Brahms Symphony No. 1 built to a similarly walloping climax after intermission. Limited rehearsal time – or simply the limited time Ryan and the Orchestra have had to become acquainted with each other – may have accounted for the somewhat listless and shapeless reading of the opening Un poco sostenuto and its subsequent transitions back and forth from Allegro. It was in the ensuing Andante sostenuto, where acting principal oboist Erica Cice had multiple chances to shine bookending principal clarinetist Taylor Marino’s eloquence, that the ensemble seemed to discover its voice, capped by some subtle soloing from Lupanu.

Marino spun a little more magic, in league with principal flutist Victor Wang, at the start of the third movement Allegretto as the ensemble ramped up for the grand finale, where Brahms First echoes Beethoven’s last. Here was where we could find the most encouraging examples of the pacing, sculpting, and exhilaration we can expect as Ryan settles in with Symphony for seasons to come. Repeatedly, principal French hornist Byron Johns was impressive, first as he hovered above the brass and later in concert with the other horns. There was admirable warmth from the strings in the big tune, with effective spotlights from Wang, Cice, and the four trombones. Everything was clicking during this finale, which crested with thunder, and the audience called Ryan back from the wings again and again with a standing ovation.

Falletta and Wilborn Dazzle at the Knight

Review: Charlotte Symphony Plays Wagner + Strauss

By Perry Tannenbaum

March 22, 2024, Charlotte, NC – Charlotte Symphony’s latest concert pairing, Wagner + Strauss, is logical and cohesive enough, but with the two Germans represented by the “Liebestod” (love-death) from Tristan and Isolde followed by the great Death and Transfiguration tone poem, abundant jollity seemed unlikely at Knight Theater. Wedged between these famed titans of 19th and 20th century music, however, were two lesser-knowns, Richard Strauss’s contemporary Oskar Böhme (1870-1938) and American composer Julia Perry (1924-1979). Thankfully, these composers, especially Oskar, lightened things up. Originally scheduled to perform with Symphony in August 2020, renowned conductor JoAnn Falletta returned for her first guest appearance with the orchestra since 2002, and principal trumpeter Alex Wilborn, similarly postponed by the pandemic, made his solo debut in Böhme’s Trumpet Concerto.

When former Symphony music director Christof Perick last performed the “Liebestod” at Belk Theater – almost precisely 15 years ago – he also paired the piece with a revered Strauss tone poem, Also Sprach Zarathustra. Strauss was one of Perick’s prime passions, and the Friday evening performance reaffirmed that the ardent Prelude and Liebestod remains deeply embedded in the ensemble’s DNA. Falletta’s reading, gradually peaking to a lovers’ climax, with delicious peeps at the hypnotic love theme that blossomed with promise, made me feel afterwards like asking if anybody else in the audience craved a cigarette.

Musically, it seems like a trumpet is a better post-coital sequel for Symphony than a cigarette when they finish the Liebestod, for who can contemplate Strauss’s Zarathustra without recalling its trumpet heraldry? Now that Wilborn is in the principal chair, he could bring us a virtuosic account of Böhme’s Trumpet Concerto with a surprise bonbon afterwards. The opening Allegro moderato brought forth a beautifully burnished tone from Wilborn’s horn and delectably supple phrasing, hardly seeming to challenge his technique, while Falletta emphasized the massiveness and lyricism of the orchestral accompaniment. That foundation segued nicely into the middle Adagio religioso movement, which began with stately dignity from the strings and brass and peaked with soaring aspiration from the soloist, no less pleasing than the melodic opening movement. It was only in the closing Rondo that we could savor anything close to Wilborn’s full virtuosity. Some real jollity here.

Perhaps both Wilborn and Falletta felt that the fireworks were all too brief in Böhme’s finale, for after the audience ovation, the trumpet virtuoso returned with perhaps the lengthiest encore ever heard at Knight Theater. Jean-Baptiste Arban’s “Variations on The Carnival of Venice” had all the virtuosic challenges and exploits you could ask for, with merciful orchestral interludes between the clusters of variations so that Wilborn could catch his breath. It wasn’t just speed that was demanded: in the most intense variations, we needed to make out the main melody amid a blizzard of relatively quiet filigree. The effect was sensational, exhilarating, and exhausting. Falletta showed us how much fun she was having long before she could rest her weary arms and face us again, and Wilborn, in a gesture that promised both him and his audience some respite, jokingly signaled to us when there were only three variations remaining.

Sadly, it would be an understatement to say that African American composer Julia Perry’s work has been neglected in her homeland. Only a handful of recordings – and no full-length CDs – exist from her voluminous output, which included 12 symphonies and four operas. The work unveiled in Charlotte, A Short Piece for Orchestra (1952), has only been recorded once, 14 years ago by the Imperial Philharmonic of Tokyo.

Falletta’s helter-skelter reading of the work made it feel far more modern and audacious than the more lyrical and legato Tokyo take under William Strickland’s baton. A live performance certainly brought out more textures after the raucous opening, including some dreamy reeds from principal clarinetist Taylor Marino and acting principal oboist Erica Cice. From the rear of the ensemble, a snare drum’s tattoo and some noodling from a celesta crept in. Really lovely stuff. My first exposure to Perry came just three days before her centennial birthday might be celebrated (apparently, there’s a half-billion-dollar bond deadline that’s considered to be a bigger deal).

The crisp dynamics that distinguished A Short Piece made a difference once again as Falletta turned to Tod und Verklärung. There was thunder like Perick brought to the work plus a little more electric crackle. In the more sweeping passages, the orchestral blend was as exquisite as ever, yet there were also ample opportunities for Cice, Marino, principal flutist Victor Wang, and concertmaster Calin Lupanu to shine in the hushed moments. Perick’s interpretation had more narrative cohesiveness and continental flavor, while Falletta’s took the piece in a more American direction, almost exiting the realm of a tone poem and crossing over into a concerto for orchestra. Opening up the dynamic range was certainly an intriguing and exciting approach. After waiting an extra four years, Falletta clearly triumphed in her return.

Vampires and Trumpers

Theatre

Reviews: Vampire Lesbians of Sodom and Thanksgiving: 2016

By Perry Tannenbaum

For devout upstanding citizens who had decided way back in the hippie ‘60s that Greenwich Village was an abominable den of sin, Charles Busch’s Vampire Lesbians of Sodom was a flaming and perverse poke in the eye. Or an argument clincher when it landed on Macdougal Street in 1985. The New York Times raved, the extravagant little trio of sketches became a cult obsession, and Vampire Lesbians had a five-year run.

Busch slipped away from his castmates when the review came out in the early morning after the Provincetown Playhouse premiere and had a good cry. Why did this diva desecrate his mascara? His career in theatre was now assured. He would write more outrageous comedies and send-ups that he, as the prima donna, could cross-dress and slay in, most famously Psycho Beach Party.

Vampire Lesbians made it to Charlotte at the Pterodactyl Club in 1991, after the slightly wholesomer Psycho Beach had paved the way during the previous year. George Brown directed this orgy of sacrilege with fiendish glee, while Innovative Theatre co-founder Alan Poindexter starred with Keith Bulla as the titular vamps.

With the Rev. Joe Chambers carrying the torch for fundamentalism in the wake of Jim Bakker’s disgrace, Banktown was still a very Christian place. It was my sacred duty to bring my daughter, not yet bat mitzvahed, to see Poindexter in all his counter-culture glory. After beholding the kinky wonders of Psycho Beach, my Ilana would have kissed Alan’s feet.

Flash forward to 2023. Poindexter is gone and the Pterodactyl Club, the one-time cultural capital of Freedom Drive, is goner. But thanks to Nicia Carla and her PaperHouse Theatre, Hollywood antagonists La Condesa and Madeleiné Astarté (a Succubus and a Virgin Sacrifice back in their Sodom days) are undead again!

Taking on Busch’s mantle, Carla directs and stars in this stunning revival at VisArt Video, tucked into the nether region of a strip mall on Eastway Drive – I’m trying to make this little suburban dive sound as risqué as the Pterodactyl! Walls are black as you walk inside, and hostesses in Goth attire and makeup are there to greet you. Whatever Google Maps has told you (it misled both me and my wife Sue on separate occasions), you can now be sure you’re in the right place.

Small as it is, the inner sanctum of VisArt is perfectly sized for Busch’s secret forbidden rites. The seats are soft enough to keep butt burnout at bay for 90 minutes, even if you don’t stretch for intermission and fall prey to the treats in the lobby. Yet sightlines are not ideal according to Sue’s scouting report.

The PaperHouse cast multitasks even more than Busch’s original ensemble, just six players covering the 14 roles instead of seven. All six are battle-tested in madcap comedy, so this outrage is hardly outside their comfort zones. Nicia probably hasn’t had this much fun onstage since Poindexter directed her as The Witch in Hansel & Gretel. She minces and manipulates here as the Virgin Sacrifice, growing regal and stentorian as theatrical megastar Astarté as she assaults the Left Coast. Opposite her, Ashby Blakely is a steely, sneering diva bridging four millennia as The Succubus, aging gracefully into La Condesa and crossdressing in costume designer Beth Levine Chaitman’s most outré couture.

That isn’t to say that Josh Looney and Charlie Carla are anything less than visions of decadence as Sodomite musclemen Ali and Hujar in complementary S&M outfits and Wagnerian wigs. Nicia is already fairly slutty in the opening sketch despite her somewhat revealing white dress, willing to break her hymen with Ali or cut a deal with the cave monster Succubus. Subsequent scenes in Hollywood and Sin City climax in a couple of startling onstage costume changes, most improbably by Tanya McClellan who snoops into La Condesa’s boudoir as gossip columnist Oatsie Carewe.

Gosh, it’s good to see McClellan back onstage in manic comedy mode. Squinting her snoopiness, she sniffs out the ungodly acts performed by Nicia as Astarté on La Condessa’s protégée, luminous Sarah Molloy as flapper Renee Vain, and her meddlesome boy toy, Looney as matinee idol King Carlyle.

Hard times for a vampire? You’ll need to come back after intermission for Blakely’s final transformations. Andrea King’s choreography, on loan from Jane Fonda, elegantly shows off McClellan’s dancing prowess.

Anyone who reads advice columns or cruises social media at this time of year will have an accurate inkling of what Thanksgiving: 2016 might be about. Millions of Turkey Day hosts are wondering how they will keep opposing family factions from shouting their lungs out or coming to blows while the sharp cutlery is still on the table. Playwright Elaine Alexander smartly calculates that the situation is prime fuel for a dining room comedy – or tragedy – but the world premiere of Charlotte’s Off-Broadway production now at VAPA also reveals that the NC native had a tough time deciding which way to go.

Ground Zero for the annual onset of hosting panic was clearly in November 2016 when Hillary Rodham Clinton resoundingly won the popular vote for the US presidency while Donald Jefferson Trump won the Electoral College – and the White House – just as resoundingly. Liberals, Democrats, and rational folk are still in shock. Yet as Alexander deftly reminds us along the way, they are all blissfully unaware of the betrayals of good sense, rationality, rule of law, and democracy to come.

As the West family up in the liberal Northeast prepares to host young Eric’s girlfriend, riding up the highway from Alabama, the aroma of crisis already fills the suburban kitchen. Papa Harry, after diligently knocking on hundreds of doors crusading for Clinton, was hospitalized – either for a nervous breakdown or a heart attack – immediately after watching CNN declare Florida for Trump. The chief Turkey Day watchword from Harry’s physician is for wife and son to prevent the shell-shocked Hillary soldier from indulging his CNN addiction.

Taking to drink in the wake of her husband’s collapse, either out of worry or guilt, Renee has pretty much abandoned any serious intent to impress Brittany, the Southern belle she’ll be meeting for the first time. So it has fallen to young Eric to try to cook a luscious feast for his beloved, even though Mom hasn’t properly shopped for the occasion. Some improvising and substitution will need to be done. Worse, frozen will occasionally need to stand in for fresh.

Worst of all, Brittany voted for Trump, so Eric desperately hopes to keep talk of politics – the subject Dad is obsessed with and still agonizing over – away from the holiday dinner table. Harry has enough difficulty digesting that his son would date a girl from Alabama. Nor does Dad have enough self-awareness to realize that, in a reflexive action stemming from his years in community theatre, he mocks every Southern drawl he comes in contact with.

Finding out she’s a Trump voter could send him over the edge. Getting Dad to refrain from talking politics promises to be even tougher than steering him away from CNN. Finessing how to keep Brittany off the touchy subject is a bridge Eric hasn’t crossed yet.

As a director, Alexander casts father and son perfectly. Matthew Howie is a master of timorous anxiety as Eric. He can craft crescendos of panic and befuddlement while doing a hilariously awful job of warding off disaster with a shit-eating smile. Nor could we improve much on Tom Ollis as Harry. Since his 1997 debut at Theatre Charlotte in Arsenic and Old Lace, Ollis has grown into the most visible volcano on the Metrolina theatre landscape. Whether as Mr. Blonde in Reservoir Dogs, Sweeney Todd, or Titus Andronicus, Ollis is peerless at seething, suspecting, and erupting into towering, raving rages.

Since Harry is also a trial lawyer recently dismissed from his law firm because of his excessive zeal, Ollis can feast on numerous opportunities to cross-examine everyone in sight, bullying and browbeating every witness. Alexander’s women don’t get nearly as much scenery to chew, but her casting choices are nearly as impeccable.

Donna Norcross seemed to be battling opening night jitters early in Act 1 as Renee, but as Mom yielded to a multitude of wine refills, Norcross also relaxed, becoming quite powerful in the Act 2 denouement. Quite ripe for stereotyping, Michelle Strom as Renee entered the West home like a sudden ray of sunshine, without the preamble of a knock or a doorbell chime, her drawl as wide as the Mississippi. No, Dad could not restrain himself, nor could I blame him.

As you can imagine, the setup of Thanksgiving: 2016 is almost pure comedy – until the Trumper truth finally comes out, as an announcement rather than a shy confession, with the proud flourish of a cheerleader’s somersault. Looking from Strom to Ollis as we reach intermission, we can only wonder whether Dad will clutch his head or his heart.

But what can come afterward from our host, our hostess, and from poor Eric? Admirably enough, Alexander lets her characters carry her along across Act 2. But her impulse to bludgeon Harry with more secrets and uncomfortable turns this comedy upside-down. We transition, not very gradually, from a Neil Simon comedy of futile secret -eeping to an impactful series of revelations that conjures up Sophocles’ Oedipus, Strindberg’s The Father, or Albee’s Virginia Woolf. Those revelations are topped off by a  couple of increasingly jaw-dropping ideological rebukes to Harry’s smug liberalism that might shake you up a bit.

We seem to fall over a cliff here, with too little before intermission to prepare us for the high drama afterward. By the time the cast is taking their bows, Renee has radically transformed from a borderline bimbo into a pieta resembling Steinbeck’s Rose of Sharon on the final pages of The Grapes of Wrath. Instead of dumping us off a high cliff, I’d advise Alexander to lay down more track that would guide us around the mountain: a sudden dramatic swerve – not too sudden – would be more satisfying than this swan dive.

A visit to VAPA for Thanksgiving: 2016 is still worth it, delivering hearty laughs and a gasp or two. By all means, dig in!

Moulin Rouge! Welcome to the Megamix of Pops and Plots

Review: Moulin Rouge! The Musical! at Belk Theater

By Perry Tannenbaum

Even before the first downbeat, the musk of forbidden fruit fills the air at Belk Theater each night as Moulin Rouge! The Musical! readies to detonate. Against a scarlet backdrop and under a proscenium studded with vanity bulbs and panning red spotlights, scantily-clad chorines slink onstage, showing limbs and cleavages like ladies in Amsterdam’s red-light district slyly advertising their merch. Elegant tuxedoed gentlemen puffing on cigarettes enter at the opposite end, consumed by each other nearly as much as by the ladies’ legs.

The ban on taking photographs, policed by Belk’s ushers wielding official signage, is already in force as soon as the first glove and high-heeled shoe come into view.

Like our more raucous welcomes to Cabaret and La Cage aux Folles, what follows in leering silence is sexy and showbizzy,. The aroma of illicitness only increases when the music kicks in – unmistakably purloined from the Top 40 pops charts as soon as we hear “Voulez-vous couchez avec moi, ce soir?” for the first time. Why trouble to compose fresh tunes, like John Kander or Jerry Herman, when you can steal or lease pure gold from a multitude of hitmakers and hire a team of co-orchestrators led by arranger Justin Levine to stitch them together?

That’s what book writer John Logan has done in adapting and updating Baz Luhrmann’s gaudy 2001 film, with costume designer Catherine Zuber and choreographer Sonya Tayeh adding their sinful embroidery and panache. All of this talented team knows that mercenary greed is as much at the heart of Moulin Rouge as glitter and concupiscence. Labelle’s “Lady Marmalade” will soon be followed – inevitably – by Barrett Strong’s “Money (That’s What I Want).”

Our beautiful and consumptive heroine, Satine, wants to sell herself to the lecherous Duke of Monroth, but only because she mistakes the handsome young Christian, a budding songwriting genius from Ohio, for her buyer. Christian is no less smitten by Satine, but his prime motive for invading her boudoir, after witnessing her killer cabaret act, is to sell her on a musical show he has written with Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Santiago, a dashing Argentinian dude.

The nightclub glitz is interrupted by a detour to Bohemia, where we catch up on the Christian’s backstory with Toulouse-Lautrec, and preceded by the commerce behind-the-scenes between the two charismatics in the story – the predatory Duke and club owner Harold Zidler, our wicked emcee. Zidler, portrayed with garrulous savoir-faire by Robert Petkoff, hypes and sells his jewel’s charms, wheedling and boasting as he pimps. Since the financial fate of Moulin Rouge now depends on Satine’s success as a temptress, Zidler’s domineering mode is reserved for her.

Petkoff is marvelously matched with Andrew Brewer as the Duke. With a sinister sneer, Brewer aristocratically assesses and stalks his prey, hardly troubling himself to move around or give up his proprietary lounging position. Until he strikes like a snake when he takes his turn backstage in milady’s boudoir. In the wake of Satine’s onstage glitter – including “Diamonds Are Forever” morphing into “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” before swerving into “Material Girl” – the Duke answers brutally with a Rolling Stones medley. Brewer pounces on “Sympathy for the Devil” and builds from there with “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” and a climactic “Gimme Shelter,” maybe the most savage and primal track in the history of rock.

If that weren’t enough contrast to dramatize the Duke’s first big splash, consider the sweetness of Christian Douglas as Christian, serenading Satine with Bizet, Offenbach, and “La Vie en Rose” during his pitch. That’s the business end of his visit after springing a new song on Satine that he has written just for her, Elton John’s “Your Song.” Christian is also a crack lyricist. Back in Montmartre, he’s doctoring a Toulouse throwaway into promising shape as “The Sound of Music.”

Lowered from the flyloft on a decorous trapeze after her extended build-up, Gabrielle McClinton gets every lift she could possibly need from director Alex Timbers’ staging to bedazzle the Duke, Christian, and her breathlessly salivating audience. To me, she’s a letdown in more ways than one. Given a megamix that evokes Marilyn Monroe, Madonna, and Beyoncé in a matter of minutes, Satine should be a goddess who commands the leading men’s adoration. But instead of mesmerizing, McClinton is… meh.

It would be hugely consoling to be able to report that McClinton’s tearjerking efforts as the dying Satine are any more riveting than her diva moments. But there’s a bit of a plot megamix going alongside the pop megamix, so McClinton’s opportunities to rouse our empathy don’t quite keep pace with Mimi’s in La Bohème or Violetta’s in La Traviata. Christian has framed what we’re watching as his story and Zidler wants everyone to care that the fate of the Moulin Rouge hangs by a thread.

Our wicked emcee is augmented by the lowlife charms of Nick Rashad Burroughs as Toulouse, Danny Burgos as Santiago, and Sarah Bowden as Nini, Satine’s sexy sidekick: reminding us that love and art desperately for sale. So there would be barely enough room for Satine to be both Mimi and Sally Bowles – or Violetta and Gypsy Rose Lee – even if there weren’t more than 70 songs on the playlist to navigate.

But there are more than 70 songs swirling at us, some on replays. Paradoxically that’s what saves this Moulin Rouge superstorm from itself despite the vacuum at its vortex. The fun is not only in the pacing, the spectacle, and the jets of confetti that that tops off Zidler and Luhrmann’s circus style of cabaret. It’s in our efforts as well, episode after twisted episode, to keep up with the anachronistic onslaught of melodies and lyrics that pelt us throughout the evening. By hearkening back to 19th century hits at one end of the spectrum and contemporary sounds at the other end, this epic playlist is cunningly engineered to confound.

Whether you are old or young, devoted to pop hits or the classics, whether or not you remember when rock was young or even have a clue what Tin Pan Alley was, you will face moments at Belk Theater when you’re asking yourself: have I ever heard this song before? and what the hell are they playing now? Because its score thrusts you far outside of how you normally absorb a musical, casting you out into the realm of memories, half memories, and speculation, Moulin Rouge succeeds at sucking you in. There’s no songlist in the playbill to cling to as you swim this ocean.

Even if you’re fully versed in Luhrmann’s film, you will likely be cast adrift or taken by surprise, for Logan and Levine haven’t stood pat. Not only Beyoncé, but also Pink, Sia, Lorde, Katy Perry, Britney Spears, Rihanna, Adele and others are mixed into the fresh brew. And Lady Gaga!?!

If you’re a Broadway or jukebox musical maven, there’s another sort of question you’ll be asking yourself. How did Elton John’s “Your Song” get in here when Sir E never had the chutzpah to put one of his megahits in any of his own musicals? Good grief, they actually got the rights to perform part of a Beatles song?

Teasing you out of thought on your drive home, you will likely continue pondering what you heard or may have missed inside the lacy valentine world of Moulin Rouge. Yes, Elvis and the Everly Brothers were covered, but what about Gershwin and Cole Porter, Charlie Chaplain and Fats Domino? Likely you’ll shuttle back to remembering that Nat King Cole and Whitney Houston were enfolded in this musical’s fond embrace. There were whiffs of Marilyn Monroe and Madonna.

That’s when you realize that Satine and the Moulin Rouge nightclub – the red windmill, if you need a translation – swept you away after all.

Normality Attacks a Serial Killer in Catch the Butcher

Review: Catch the Butcher with Post Mortem Players @ CATCh

By Perry Tannenbaum

Serial killers, wherever they prey on young defenseless women and girls, are universally detested, even by fellow criminals. Yet these monsters, vying with vampires in wickedness and cunning, surely have a captive audience that greatly outnumbers their victims. Identify one and he’s frontpage news, sure to draw breathless airtime on local and national TV. Invent one who is truly special and you may spawn a bestseller and even an Oscar winner.

Yes, the guilty pleasures of sopping up the gory conquests of killers at-large and thrilling in the hunt to stop and avenge their rampages are perverse addictions shared by millions. Our susceptibility to the lurid scent of butchery was more than enough license for playwright Adam Seidel to bring us Nancy, his sacrificial lamb in the grimly satirical Catch the Butcher.

Nancy doubles down on the audience’s unspoken perversion: she wants to be abducted by “the butcher of Harbor Park.” Night after night, she sits alone on a park bench deep in the darkness of that dreaded landmark, fearing that she will be stalked and longing for it. As directed by Heather Wilson-Bowlby in the current Post Mortem Players production at CATCh, the company’s first sally into the QC, Nancy is almost advertising her yearning.

She’s reading The Stranger Beside Me, Ann Rule’s account of her friendship with serial killer Ted Bundy, a classic in the true crime genre. Heather-Bowlby’s mischievous touch, we will learn, is especially apt because the Harbor Park butcher dabbles a little in literature, dedicating a poem to each of his victims. Nancy’s fandom runs deep, admiring the fiend’s verse and feeling an unspoken kinship.

Parallel to this literary thread, the action of the early scenes is dark, silent, and animal until the Butcher pulls off his abduction. The silence of this lamb, as her killer circles ever more closely around her, is not merely evocative of a silent movie creepshow, begging for organ music in the background. We come to realize that it was also like a National Geographic documentary depicting a mating ritual in the wild.

Throughout Nancy’s bizarre captivity, Seidel has his fun juxtaposing the sophisticated with the primal and the drudgery of domesticity with our natural savagery – to shocking or comical effect. Numerous twists are in store as this butcher-victim pas-de-deux develops, including at least one complete flip-flop. And why not, seeing that Nancy and the butcher of Harbor Park were actually stalking each other?

If you don’t scan the QR code on Post Mortem’s flyer before the lights go down, gaining access to the full digital “Slaybill,” you won’t have any idea of where the silent opening scenes are happening, who we’re watching, or when the action takes place. That heightens our suspense and delays the onset of humor we’d expect at CATCh (Comedy Arts Theater of Charlotte). You’ll know most of the details if you’ve read the script beforehand, but Wilson-Bowlby flouts the playwright’s insistence that we’re in the present day, giving her star headphones instead of earbuds and a boombox instead of an iPhone.

We’re no further back than 1980, when The Stranger Beside Me was first published, but the copy that Jackie Obando Carter is clutching shows considerable wear and age. Costume designs by Carter were no more decisive to my eyes in designating the decade. More impressive were the design and execution of special effects that Carter and Hilary Powell collaborated on: one stabbing was particularly impressive since, at CATCh, my wife Sue and I were seated as close to the action as we would be watching a card trick.

Carter’s chemistry with her abductor, Chuck Riordan as the Butcher, is deliciously volatile. The vibe is more spiced with sensuality on Carter’s end as Nancy tries to divert and charm Bill – revealing his name bares the first chink in the Butcher’s armor – as her survival instincts kick in. While Nancy is dazed and disoriented when she first awakens in the Butcher’s soundproofed dungeon, this is what she quested for during her previous vigils in the dark.

She is not like us. She needs prodding to scream her loudest and confirm Bill’s soundproofing. A knife at her throat as she sits helplessly handcuffed to a chair? Carter must calibrate the mortal terror that Nancy is experiencing with her fantasy fulfillment and delight. The more we realize how diligently Nancy has worked to be here, the more we appreciate the complexity of Carter’s performance.

Since she candidly lets out that the Butcher and his technique aren’t what she expected, Bill is also a bit disoriented as he realizes what he has stepped into. Being measured against the glamor and terror of Nancy’s dream serial killer begins to tilt his attitude toward defensiveness and appreciation. While maintaining his dominator role, he finds he must prove himself as a ruthless butcher and sustain the admiration his victim has professed toward his poetry.

Riordan, like Carter, is making his QC debut in a role that requires deft and sudden navigation. But he has significantly more leeway in how he portrays this monster as his vulnerabilities are exposed. He doesn’t get to be quite so sure of himself as the adventurous nothing-to-lose Nancy – deviations from glamor, savoir faire, and fearsome menace all redound in his favor as we see more beneath his façade. He’s an anti-villain, in a sense.

Riordon can thus roll with the moment and seem authentic so long as he doesn’t fumble his lines or visibly stumble in his actions. Especially in Bill’s domesticated scenes, Riordon can mute his paranoia and be altogether humdrum. There are key moments when Riordon is suddenly called upon to show a killer’s steel or a lover’s grace. He masters these with aplomb, and he’s strong on Bill’s telling trait: he wants to make his mark with his murders and his poetry, desperate for both notoriety and acclaim.

It would be heartless to give an even sketchy summary of how the story unfolds with Seidel’s unfailing logic. So let’s concentrate on a sequence that was pivotal for me.

To gain precious time, Nancy has convinced Bill that she wishes to hear the poem that was written about her. Bill not only picks up on the ploy, he notices that, compared with previous victims, Nancy isn’t as terrified when a knife is at her throat. She is not what he expected. He must consider the possibility that Nancy is a cop or an FBI agent, particularly after she escapes her handcuffs to use the toilet.

Fast forward a bit past some juicy action, one of them with French toast, and Bill has finished his new poem. We haven’t sampled the Butcher’s literary craft before, so we presumably know less about what we can expect than Nancy. “A Single Rose,” as Bill titles it, is recognizably dreadful – so dreadful that I initially suspected that the serial killer was laying a fiendish trap for our lady in distress, testing whether her esteem was worth having.

Asked for her reaction, Nancy comes back with an utterly hilarious, magnificently audacious response: “It’s not your best work.”

At this point, we had reached a realm of dark humor that was unfamiliar to me. In perfect style. From here, Seidel could take us wherever he wished – even upstairs, out of the Butcher’s dungeon, to a new household.

In the aftermath, we get to know the couple’s next-door neighbor, Joanne – a bubbling busybody portrayed by Jennifer Briere, yet another talented Post Mortem newcomer. She enters through the front door with a bundt cake, then a vase filled with freshly cut roses, seemingly well-acquainted with the welcoming-new-neighbors drill. Briere is especially precious when Joanne learns how Milwaukee, wherever that is, differs from Texas. You will see that all the audacity Nancy has shown us before is eclipsed the moment she dares to open the front door for Joanne, defying Bill’s stern commandment.

Reviews of Catching the Butcher sometimes cite Silence of the Lambs as an inspiration and inevitably Dexter, because the original Nancy in the 2015 Off-Broadway production, Lauren Luna Vélez, was a fixture in that series. If you’ll permit a more classical viewpoint, Seidel’s macabre comedy reminded me more of John Fowles’ The Collector, may favorite horror novel alongside Dracula. Bill is more of a scientist than Hannibal, less of a gourmand.

The household idyll we see blossoming after intermission, with its undercurrent of doom, took me back to prelapsarian Adam and Eve, with snoopy vivacious Joanne subtly installed as our Serpent. Wilson-Bowlby may have been feeling similar vibes as she staged the ending, giving it more of a wedding or honeymoon tang than Seidel could have imagined. Quite wonderful.

Kennedy’s Bridge Circle Meets Its Quota of Quips – and More

Review: The Thursday Bight Bridge Circle at Theatre Charlotte

By Perry Tannenbaum

Since 1987, the last time I watched a live performance at St. John’s Baptist Church, I haven’t cut a deck, played a hand, won a rubber, or even bid a single No Trump – I’ve even lost track of my copy of Charles H. Goren’s Point Count Bidding. But since that night when PlayWorks staged The Octette Bridge Club at St. John’s, I haven’t needed much knowledge about the game of bridge or its culture. My last brushes with the game were in Sunday columns I would read in the arts section when The Charlotte Observer was a traditional newspaper.

So it was a little concerning, when I sat down at Theatre Charlotte for the premiere of Ray Kennedy’s The Thursday Night Bridge Circle, that I found no less than four bridge teachers were credited in the playbill for their contributions. My concerns were thankfully unfounded. Visitors to the Queens Road barn will not be assailed with bridge terminology, the intricacies of bidding, or even extensive card play.

Louise Kennedy’s circle is a looser agglomerate than P.J. Barry’s octet, which was an unwavering group of eight sisters. And it’s only Louise’s circle tonight because hostess chores hopscotch from member to member on successive Thursdays. Nor are participants constant, we learn, as Louise welcomes us to her cheery, symmetrical, split-level living room – two tables flanked by two sofas – a luxe scenic design by Tim Parati that gives us peeps at the garden and the foyer.

Tonight, for example, Louise’s college co-ed daughter, Mary Carter Kennedy, is in town to play one of the hands, to be partnered with Louise’s mother-in-law, Mrs. Kennedy, who has earned a risqué reputation in LaGrange, North Carolina, as a liberal. Since one of the regulars can’t make it this week, dear Louise is bracing herself for the arrival of Miss Virginia, who will likely be roaring drunk as soon as she can guzzle sufficient booze. Excitement is ratcheted up further by a new player that only our host knows, Carmella, feared to be a judgmental Yankee – and to have a profession!

Imagine that!

The two tables are filled out by Bootsie and Cluster, gals from Louise’s generation, and two more elders, Miss Caroline and the eternally disapproving Mrs. Coltrane, Louise’s mom. You can bet there will be plenty to rouse Mom’s umbrage, beginning with the fact that housemaid Margaret and her daughter Bernice will be mixing drinks, pouring beverages, and preparing the hors d’oeuvres. Mary Carter also has a truckload of disclosures that will disconcert her granny.

Hosting such an exhilarating event is so intricate, complex, and daunting that Louise – or anyone who hosts the circle – cannot be expected to participate in the cardplaying. The standard of perfection is too high for a hostess to divide her attention. Tables must be carefully set, partners thoughtfully chosen, and place cards placed exactly so at every chair.

Sadly, Carmella hasn’t chosen the best night for her first sampling of Southern hospitality – or the best year. It’s 1970, LBJ is midway through his second term and the backwater of LaGrange still has separate black and white schools, bathrooms, and post offices. “It’s always been that way,” Miss Caroline complacently declares, and none of the LaGrange ladies except the liberal Mrs. Kennedy seems to suspect that Margaret or Bernice might be discontented with the racist status quo.

Needless to say, Kennedy has concocted a comical time bomb that is primed to explode before our eyes. Desegregation has arrived and Louise’s mom and husband have decided to send their imperiled offspring to military school – a betrayal of Louise’s bestie, Bootsie, who was counting on her public-school solidarity. Nor will Mary Carter, an activist at school, take this well, while Carmella and Mrs. Kennedy will be reliably alarmed. Toss in a stray N-word from Virginia when she’s sufficiently lubricated and you may conclude that a polite evening of bridge has been scuttled.

Before his fictional kindred took the stage on opening night, the playwright Kennedy spoke to us about his autobiographical work and introduced us to the real-life Mary Carter, proudly sitting in the third row. So when Tonya Bludsworth entered as Louise, it was a bit like a continuation of the playwright’s monologue, except that the hostess was giddier with excitement and nervousness because she didn’t know how the evening would go.

Sketching each lady who would sit in each bridge chair, the intro was a bit draggy despite Bludsworth’s fretful charm, particularly since the playwright doubles down on his intros by granting Louise mystical foresight into who is arriving at her front door – tripling down when she greets them by name. Most people will be delighted with Kennedy’s style, which endows most of his characters with the ability to come up with a Southern-fried quip or a salty simile in nearly every sentence.

Almost by magic, Kennedy is able to differentiate between his ladies anyway, thanks to the big family squabble and the political, class, and age divides. Dennis Delamar’s stage direction is as handsome as Parati’s set, elegantly accessorized by “props team” Lea Harkins and Lois Marek. No doubt Delamar’s successes are facilitated by the presence of at least three more actor-directors in his cast, Corlis Hayes as Margaret, Paula Baldwin as Mrs. Kennedy, and Bludsworth as the fourth ace. Assistant director Dee Abdullah is no slouch, either, as a dramaturge.

Kennedy’s lapses into logorrhea may be the result of his not realizing the full power of his script, which bursts forth with terrific force on Queens Road, first when Hayes reacts to the bombshell dropped by Kathryn Stamas late in Act 1 as the soused Virginia (which Grace Ratledge as Mary Carter and Ashley Benjamin as Bernice refuse to let go) and then a stunner by Ann Dodd as Mrs. Coltrane when she is unexpectedly confronted deep in Act 2.

Costume designer Angeli Novio accepts the challenge of making the hotsy-totsy New York lawyer, Stephanie DiPaolo as Carmella, stand out among the local LaGrange fashionistas in her haute couture. DiPaolo does her Long Island accent lightly enough to maintain her stature as an evolved Yankee outsider, but instead of leaning more into her legal expertise and feminist superiority, the playwright lets her devolve into an excuse to more thoroughly introduce us to the natives.

No matter how charmingly Jenn Grabenstetter as Bootsie and Amy Pearre Dunn as Cluster expound on the origin of their Dixie nicknames, I just don’t care, even if it did incentivize them to audition. Let’s get to the juicy stuff quicker! And when we do get there, let Baldwin have more space to bemoan and bewail how her son could conspire with Mrs. Coltrane to send her dear grandson off to a boarding school. It’s a glaring plot point that needs to be addressed – and weren’t we in the middle of a war in 1970?

Regardless of how much more meat Kennedy could pile onto our plates (and how much candy he could discreetly remove), Hayes makes an enduring impression in her climactic monologue, deftly calibrated by the playwright not to become a tirade. Ginger Heath, anointed my first Best Actress many years ago, get surprisingly little to sink her teeth into here despite her imposing wig, but that only spotlights the exploits of the newbies all the more.

Benjamin absolutely commands the stage when she unexpectedly returns in Act 2 as Bernice, a bit of a surprise after her badly miked debut as Tinman last September. That leads to a rather memorable sequence of assertiveness, contrition, and reconciliation begun by Dodd in her QC debut as the formidable Mrs. Coltrane. I didn’t expect to weep after intermission, but I did, even while the quips kept landing.

The Full Cerrudo Experience Is a Hit in Come to Life

Review: Charlotte Ballet’s Come to Life at Knight Theater

By Perry Tannenbaum

March 7, 2024, Charlotte, NC – Midway through his second full season as artistic director, we can now say that Alejandro Cerrudo has stamped Charlotte Ballet as his company. The corps looks fresh, peopled with more newbies we’re getting to know than trusted heirlooms who have long since proven their mettle. The choreography on their current Come To Life program at Knight Theater – Cerrudo’s Little mortal jump, Jiří Kylián’s Petite Mort, and the world premiere of Penny Saunders’ Beat the Clock – is beguilingly adventurous. Wow factor? Check.

For those of you who remember the 1950s, yes, Beat the Clock exhumes the classic TV game show hosted by the preternaturally vacuous Bud Collyer and sponsored by Sylvania. So at first, it wasn’t at all apparent that Saunders was targeting gender roles in those ancient days. But while the jackpot money was still flying gloriously above the dancers portraying the announcer, the host, the contestants, and the amped audience, we were cinematically fade-dissolving into a different scene as the shower of bills hit the ground.

This was a panel discussion where three women discussed the provocative question of whether housewives could benefit from additional education. Though it’s a godsend for the choreography, the discussion got heated, which may frustrate a few feminists in the audience. What frustrated me, however, was that Saunders’ sound design wasn’t as clearly audible for the panelists as it was for the archival gameshow track.

As the panelists’ hubbub subsided at stage right, there were a few moments of split screen as Michael Korsch’s lighting intensified at stage left for a briefer husband-and-wife scene, where both of the marrieds ended up feeling ignored and unvalued. Is this why we won the war? Sometimes, it felt this way. This brief microcosm gave way to two concluding community scenes, the first spotlighting the women and the finale embracing the entire 14-person ensemble.

Kerri Martinsen’s costume design had something to say about conformity in the outfits sported by the gameshow contestants and audience, later giving way to assorted nondescript outfits. Similarly, Maurice Mouzon Jr. as the announcer and James Kopecky as the host wore uniform outfits – with glittery silver blazers, to hell with historical accuracy. Back then, the em in emcee stood emphatically for master of ceremonies, so I suspected that Saunders and Martinsen were double-underlining their point.

After the first intermission, the repertoire flipped from cinematic to theatrical, with costume designer Joke Visser adorning Kylián’s men with gilt-edged cavalier attire that fit tightly and, for his women, the stiffest possible dresses. Suffice it to say that you’ve probably never seen women move laterally across the stage as these ladies in black do. Nor can it be doubted that these ladies – or their dresses – are the little deaths implied by Kylián’s Petite Mort title. Scored with slow movements from Mozart’s 21st and 23rd Piano Concertos, Mort both celebrates and lovingly skewers classic elegance – with a beautiful set of pas de deuxs between the ensemble segments and a couple of breathtaking transitions that require some nifty undercover choreography of their own.

The most eye-catching pairings among the six couples, for me, were Kopecky and Samantha Riester along with Raven Barkley and Rees Launer. Your mileage may vary, especially if you’re witnessing Charlotte Ballet for the first time, and the six couples will change from performance to performance (only Reister and Kopecky are constants, and they will be swapping out dances and partners). Just try not to gag on the relentless grace and symmetry.

If Kylián’s piece was a wry and perfect gem, then Cerrudo’s Little mortal jump, premiered by Hubbard Street Dance back in 2012, impacted like a coolly calculated over-the-top extravaganza. Korsch italicized the spectacle with his lighting design, principally when he aimed his beams at the audience and when he illuminated rows of vanity bulbs on cue. Branimira Ivanova’s costumes arguably upstaged Korsch’s lighting and Cerrudo’s choreography, literally stopping the show and putting two of Charlotte Ballet’s dancers in suspended animation, pinned to the scenery. Well before that, it was apparent that Cerrudo’s scenic design – massive movable boxes about as high as a school locker – was an integral part of his choreography. The movements of these huge boxes made transitions between scenes a constant source of excitement and surprise.

Ten pieces on Cerrudo’s playlist, listed alphabetically rather than sequentially in the program booklet, add to the kaleidoscopic swirl of his scenario and the giddy, stagey energy of the dancers. So his magical moment of suspended animation stands all the more dramatically apart from the hectic electricity that bookends this utterly unique pas de deux. Cerrudo’s piece, longer than the others, fit in well with them, maybe even eclipsing them a little. More comfortable in his leading role, his welcoming remarks were confident, for his invitation to support CharBallet’s 2024-25 season would soon be buttressed with a stunning program. The buzz in the house seemed to indicate that Cerrudo is winning over fervent new fans in his audience and onstage. As one ticketholder summarized, leaving the elevator that descends into the nearby parking garage: “Holy cow.”

Small Sizing Yields Big Rewards in DCP’s Fun Home

Review: Fun Home at Armour Street Theater

By Perry Tannenbaum

Across the way from the Gershwin Theatre, where Wicked has been running for over 20 years, you can find my favorite Broadway theater, Circle in the Square. At the other end of an underpass that connects the two venues – and two or three flights of stairs underground – you and 800+ plus patrons (less than half the Gershwin’s capacity) can have a theater-in-the-round experience in a space that’s like a wee oval basketball court or a hockey rink.

I’ve seen seven different productions at this underground stadium since 1999, most unforgettably the world premiere of Tennessee Williams’ Not About Nightingales that year and the visionary waterworld of Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses in 2003. Right now, two other Circle gems are playing in Metrolina revivals, Lombardi at the Lee Street Theater in Salisbury and five-time Tony Award winner Fun Home at the Armour Street Theater in Davidson.

A couple of admirable versions of Jeanine Tesori’s musical have already run in the QC, a Broadway tour at Knight Theater and an Actor’s Theatre reprise on the Queens U campus, so the current Davidson Community Players production, directed by Danielle Melendez, has big shoes to fill. What strikes me most positively about DCP’s effort, however, is how small it is. If you’re sitting in the front row, as my wife Sue and I were last Saturday evening, some of the action will be right next to you. Or behind you.

From that vantage point, DCP is better than even the 2019 Actor’s Theatre production at Queens’s Hadley Theater in replicating the intimacy of the Circle in the Square experience. Set designer Chip Decker, who stage directed the Hadley production during his years at the helm of ATC, retains his bright visual concept – a departure from the more funereal Broadway and touring versions – in depicting the Bechdel Funeral Home, allowing Alison Bechdel’s cartoons free play on the translucent windows of the parlor.

Often, they’re animated, with Bechdel’s words and drawings blooming before our eyes.

As we watch Lisa Kron’s adaptation of Bechdel’s graphic novel unfold, there’s a nice little studio perch set aside at stage right for the full-grown Alison to narrate. Sometimes as Alison, Kel Wright insinuates herself into the action, lurking in the main playing space, sketchbook in hand, as Small Allison and Middle Allison act out her vivid memories of growing up at a Pennsylvania funeral home and coming out as a lesbian at Oberlin College.

The bright visual concept tracks better with Kron’s book, because darkness only gradually seeps into the story. Alison’s dad, Bruce, seems like a bookish, excessively neat and proper mortician at first, mainly because he and his dutiful wife Helen conspire to hush up his big secrets. When Small Alison and her brothers sing “Come to the Fun Home,” a faux commercial jingle for the funeral home, the childish glee is as contagious as an early Jackson 5 hit or something fresh from little Donny Osmond and his backups.

Bruce may discourage these boisterous outbursts, but he cannot suppress them. Similarly, when Small Alison wants to go to her school party in jeans and sweater, Bruce can temporarily impose his will by shaming his daughter into wearing a dress. It’s only in retrospect that we and the full-grown Alison realize that Bruce was mostly protecting himself, shielding the truth of his own sexuality rather than upholding propriety.

Ironically, the fulcrum begins to shift for Middle Alison at Oberlin College, where she discovers her own gayness. This is jubilantly proclaimed in “Changing My Major (to Joan),” a song that equals the joy of “Fun Home” and surpasses it in exuberant sensual comedy. Tesori is at her best in these chamber sized songs with their pop flavorings and their Avenue Q spice. Even at her peak in Caroline, or Change and Kimberly Akimbo, Tesori’s other acclaimed shows, there’s a little bit of Sesame Street mischief going on.

Having coped with Bruce’s escapades for decades, Helen understandably freaks out when her daughter informs her that she has come out. Alison can only see her mom’s distress through a haze of misperception. Yet we always like Alison because she not only observes herself and her family with her sketchbook, she perseveres on her path and eventually, if still hesitantly, confronts her problems.

Despite Dad’s disdain, she continues to opt for cartooning instead of “serious” art, continues to wears jeans instead of dresses. Faced with Joan’s advances, Middle Alison retreats… temporarily. She seems to hibernate and marinate after writing home about her gay epiphany, processing Dad’s puzzling evasiveness and Mom’s distress, but she elects to bring Joan home with her when she returns from Ohio on winter break.

Darkness falls gradually, but it falls hard.

Mortician, English teacher, preservationist, and molester of underage boys – there’s a lot to unpack, even for adults in the audience, as we try to understand and judge Bruce in the context of his times. Coming off his outré antics in Vampire Lesbians of Sodom,Ashby Blakely is as varied, complex, and nuanced as we’ve ever seen him as Bruce. At times, he roars in his tyrannical moments, overpowering the small house. Like all the other players, he’s miked, but thanks to Kathryn Harding’s exemplary sound design, there’s never any distortion, clipping, or dropouts to mar the show or its music.

The one major sacrifice for theatergoing purists is the lack of a live orchestra at Armour Street. Nevertheless, Harding contrives a surround effect by channeling the prerecorded soundtrack and the amplified voices from the rear speakers. It was a pretty unique front-row experience for me, rather enjoyable.

After her exploits at Booth Playhouse as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, Alison Rhinehardt had already convinced me that she could overpower Armour without a mic. As Helen, she predictably knocks her showpiece, “Days and Days,” out of the park with diva aplomb. Until then, she’s rather wholesome and humdrum, accentuating Mom’s breakout.

Nor is there any perceptible cratering when we scrutinize the less familiar names in this cast. Recently unveiling her directing chops in the Queen City Concerts premiere of Local Singles,Wright brings an exacting intensity to Alison that always captures the drama, even when she sings. “Caption,” she keeps barking in Kron’s script, so her valuation of le mot juste always seems foremost as her castmates take care of the graphics.

As the Bechdel brothers, Aiden Honeycutt as John and Grayson Flowers as Christian help turn Small Allison’s “Fun Home” promo into an exhilarating panorama. Bailey Fischer takes flight almost from the first moment we see her as Small Alison – goodness, energy, and precocity personified until her last “Flying Away” moment. That energy is formidable when Ann Schnabel must take over as Middle Alison, especially in the intimidating context of a matriculating college freshman. In a sense, then, her “Changing My Major” is as much a rebirth as it is an affirmation.

It’s the needed embrace of the real world that will ultimately help her in coming to terms with the truth about Dad.

Criminal law is far more confident than my feelings in determining who the forbidden fruit is among the remaining cast. As the revelatory Joan, Sierra Key seems healthy enough, her seductiveness sufficiently muted for a Midwest coed. At school and visiting the funeral home, Key hits all the notes that emphasize Joan’s savoir-faire and discretion without pounding them. As the Bechdels’ handyman, Bart Copeland struts and preens enough to convince us that he’s also a consenting adult.

When he switches roles and becomes a former student that Bruce picks up on his nocturnal rambles, Copeland calls upon the naivete that made his star turn as Pippin so compelling last spring at Theatre Charlotte. Topped with a mop-top wig, you’ll see he’s also a perfect fit for Tesori’s retro pop music.

Doubling the Fun

Okay, so maybe you weren’t duly impressed that two shows are now running in Metrolina that premiered at the same Broadway theater. We can do better. Weirder. This coming weekend boasts two different shows set at a funeral parlor! Yes, as Fun Home continues for two more weekends up in Davidson, down here at Booth Playhouse, Charlotte Conservatory Theatre is bringing us the world premiere of Nan-Lynn Nelson’s Leaving Watermaine, directed by the playwright.

It opens on leap day this Thursday, at the tail-end of Black History Month, for a four-day run. By the end of Act 1, we’re greeted with a busy weave of plot threads involving undertaker Werly Mainlodge, his three daughters, and their beaus – both beloved or unwanted. Which of the three young ladies will be leaving first? Elopement or honeymoon? Will the Klan intervene on the eve of the planned departure?

Has there been a KKK lynching or a passionate murder? Or is the presumed victim still alive? Mystery, racism, colorism, and comedy peep into what seems like a tragedy, so you’ll need to stick around after intermission to learn how the dangling threads sort out. Nelson seemed to have it all calculated, incorporating her own musical soundtrack into her sound design.

Dialing Up the Almighty in Memphis

Review: The Mountaintop at Theatre Charlotte

by Perry Tannenbaum

A stage with a particularly authentic – or imaginative – set design is a good start for a director who wishes to immerse you in the world of a play. Yet few productions surround you with the theatre experience, making you feel outside your own world and inside theirs. Sleep No More was dedicated to achieving this mission with a Macbeth makeover up in Manhattan’s Chelsea district at a spooky hotel, where I saw it in 2015. So was Then She Fell the following night in Brooklyn, where I was plunged into the imagination – and mental illness – of Lewis Carroll.

In Charlotte, such efforts have been comparatively infrequent, but not unknown: Chickspeare’s Fefu and Her Friends on Cullman Avenue in 2001, numerous “environmental” productions by Carolina Actor’s Studio Theatre (CAST) in their days on Clement Avenue, and Matt Cosper’s legendary Bohemian Grove of 2014 that was staged god-knows-where – you had to agree to be kidnapped in a van by The Machine at the Actor’s Theatre parking lot to attend.

They do make an impression, these hyper-immersive presentations.

Cut to the legendary Queens Road Barn for the latest Queen City experiment in environmental staging. Yes, that’s Theatre Charlotte – in Myers Park! – on the cutting edge with its new production of Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop. Directed by the ageless Corlis Hayes and designed by Chris Timmons – with a nine-person “Lobby Transformation” team – this is the first fully-staged drama my wife Sue and I have seen in the 501 Queens Road lobby since the spare and forlorn Waiting for GODot in 2007.

Together with invaluable help from David Gallo, set designer for the 2011 Broadway production, and props designer Brodie Jasch from Fayetteville’s Theatre Squared, Dr. Hayes and her production team aim to take us back to the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on the night of April 3, 1968. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., returns from the Mason Temple, where he has just delivered his eerily prophetic “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech.

Every detail of the last room occupied by MLK has been replicated with meticulous authenticity – night tables and their contents, lamps, the chair and its fabric next to the window, the window curtains, the bed coverings – all the way down to the upside-down zero on the door to Room 306. With walls within walls, you must enter through this door to get your first view of the new theatre space in the lobby created for this production. Only the ceiling remains unaltered, with its fans and extinguished holiday lights. Explanations are appended in the digital program for those details which couldn’t be ascertained and those that would have conflicted with Hall’s script.

Since there is no intermission and all the usual concession outposts have been whisked away, they have thoughtfully made “Room Service” available to ticketholders via a QR code. In more ways than one, we are treated like kings at The Lorraine. Fun fact: the fateful motel was actually named after the hit 1928 song, “Sweet Lorraine,” popularized by jazz artists Teddy Wilson and Nat “King” Cole.

For all of Dr. Hayes’s reverent devotion to getting the look and feel of The Lorraine recreated as faithfully as she can, we soon see that it isn’t a shrine. Hayes is equally bent on getting to the heart of Hall’s pointedly irreverent drama. Hall provides ample time for solemnity and anguish at the end, but until then, she wants us to see the soon-to-be-martyred icon as a man, not a god, and not even as a holy man. The real Martin – or as God likes to call him, Michael – had his foibles, vices, and infidelities.

And notwithstanding the resounding valedictory declarations of the Memphis speech we’ve heard over and over – “So I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man” – Hall insists on reminding us that King did have worries and fears.

All obeisance to King’s saintly aura is swiftly discarded almost as soon as we see Justin Peoples taking on the role, before he walks through the audience to take a pee. Not only is he unkempt after his oratorical exertions and his walk through the rain, he has largely dropped his dignified public persona, at ease if not quite relaxed. Though he diligently examines his room’s rotary phone to make sure it isn’t bugged, we can hear that he has switched from formal to casual mode as soon as he speaks. It’s with an unmistakably Southern accent!

Immediately disarming. Neither the touring production by the famed Penumbra Theatre of Minneapolis that ran at Booth Playhouse in 2014, nor the homegrown Actor’s Theatre run of 2018 at Queens University, directed by April Jones, had quite the same spontaneous or undignified impact. The smallness of the lobby space at the Queens Road Barn certainly helps in establishing a closer intimacy with King and a sharper look at his vulnerabilities.

Maybe that folksy drawl would have been even more impactful if Peoples had held back on it until MLK had dialed room service after normal closing hours. The arrival of LeShea Stukes as the fetching Camae, a housemaid moonlighting as King’s waitress, would have been a good moment for Peoples to turn on the Southern charm. But for those of us who have seen The Mountaintop before, Stukes brings with her more than Camae’s sensual allure, more than her extra Pall Malls to satisfy King’s chain-smoking, and more than her working-class sass.

She now gives us solemn glances from behind King’s back, fully aware of the gravity of her true mission before she discloses it, morphing from pursued damsel to admonishing paramour to chum to messenger of God. None of these fresh wrinkles quite accounts for the marvelous voodoo or the juju that Hayes, Peoples, and Stukes have conjured up in creating the playful, poignant, and profound chemistry of this Camae and MLK.

Lighting designer Jennifer O’Kelly gently signals those moments when Camae might be contemplating why she’s there, foreshadowing the AV extravaganza that will accompany Stukes’ final mountaintop revelations. She will almost be speaking in tongues when we reach this visionary summit.

There’s little theology here, for when King dials up the Almighty, pleading his case for more time on this turbulent planet, she hangs up on him. Yet there just may be some deep dialectic in Hall’s scheme that narrows the gap that we might feel between God’s biblical judgment upon Moses at Mount Nebo and the judgment upon Martin in Memphis.

Moses was given a precise catalog of his greatest sins. Maybe in an afterlife he learned not to shatter any holy tablets or assault a boulder without God’s approval. But what was the great sin that deprived MLK of the Promised Land that awaited his people? The answer never comes explicitly in the play, but King’s sins – though relatively petty until we consider possible adultery – are graven in its marrow.

In an age when not a day goes by without yielding fresh images, outrages, and crimes committed by a lying orange buffoon, we might find ourselves shocked to be shoved towards such traditional moral moorings. Some of these values were written long ago in our marrow. Leading a people may still require adhering to a higher standard in God’s job description, not flouting the laws and proprieties that apply to everyone else.

Peoples and Stukes, with plenty of finely judged assistance, have found a way to make The Mountaintop more poignant, relatable, and human. Hall’s work becomes more touching, meaningful, and necessary each time I see it.