Monthly Archives: May 2024

“Hadestown” Makes a Merry, Satiric Tragedy

Review: Hadestown at Belk Theater

By Perry Tannenbaum

The last time HADESTOWN sauntered into town with its jazzy swagger was almost exactly 18 months ago, Election Day 2022. Perfect timing. When Matthew Patrick Quinn as King Hades brought down the Act 1 curtain with “Why We Build the Wall,” the thrust was so hideously Donald-like that two MAGA maniacs sitting in front of us, clearly offended, huffed out of Belk Theater and didn’t return after intermission.

Well, Quinn and his tectonic shelf-shaking bass baritone voice are back in the title role – the chief reason why my wife Sue would return to see Hadestown a third time if he and the Anaïs Mitchell musical should come back yet again. Yeah, he is that good. And even though The Wall is a bit in the rearview mirror as a national topic of conversation, the satanic aura of Hades still adheres to the corrupt kingpin of the GOP.

Maybe in a different way this time. More than Hades’ striking xenophobia, a strange attitude for a king of Hell, my lingering distaste was for the god’s rabble-rousing dictatorial strut. #MeToo was probably past its fullest bloom in 2022, though it still weighed on the elections, but in 2024, I couldn’t help paying closer attention to Hades’ “Hey, Little Songbird” propositioning of Eurydice.

When she eventually followed the slick monarch to the Netherworld and climbed the stairs to his boudoir, where she would sign away her soul behind closed doors… Yeah, Eurydice’s slow assenting ascent turned my thoughts northward to Stormy Daniels testifying in a Manhattan courtroom earlier that day in the hush money trial. Another little songbird.

To dwell on how deeply Hadestown resonates with the American political scene is to ignore that it first workshopped in New York before the master of Trump Tower declared his candidacy. It also disrespects how well Mitchell retold the story before it developed its adhesive powers. We see Quinn as Hades soon enough, but he doesn’t assert himself until he becomes impatient for Persephone’s annual return to the underworld after she has brought on spring and summer here above.

Until then, Lana Gordon as Persephone and Will Mann as our host/narrator Hermes are the prime charismatics. Next to their flamboyance, Orpheus and Eurydice are rather tame, despite J. Antonio Rodriguez’s pure high tenor and Amaya Braganza’s street-urchin perkiness. Musically, Mitchell lavishes her best invention on Hades and Orpheus, which makes sense since Orpheus has always represented the power of music while Hades, alias Pluto, has always stood for mindless greed.

Gordon and Mann are expected to light up the stage with their outsized personalities, their pizzaz, and eye-popping color – costume designer Michael Krass’s best – chief reasons why Hadestown rolls along so grandly, backed up less brashly by Braganza’s kooky charm and Rodriguez’s botanical magic.

But Mitchell’s book is also provocative, darkly portraying the world above as stricken by an apocalyptic nuclear winter or irreversible climate change, needing Orpheus’s musical magic to set things right and Eurydice to supply him with inspiration and encouragement to finish his cosmic song. The core of this world-changing song, appropriately enough, is wordless. Mitchell gives us a nice touch of the universal here.

Mitchell herself was the original Eurydice when her show first surfaced in New England in 2007. For me, that explains the most annoying, least enduring traits of Hadestown: its devout unpretentiousness and its dogged determination never to proceed too far without undercutting itself and reminding us that this is merely theatre. We’re having a party, y’all! Have a drink!

All the musicians are perennially onstage with the actors, particularly the ponytailed Emily Frederickson, who occasionally sashays among the cast with her trombone when called upon for her tastiest licks. For backup vocals, three more angels are engaged as the Fates – Marla Loussaint, Lizzie Markson, and Hannah Schreer – all of whom pick up various instruments during the evening. Could we have Orpheus trudging out of Hades, a fearful but trusting Eurydice behind him, without being tracked by a backup group?

Mitchell and director/developer Rachel Chavkin apparently didn’t think so. Maybe they’ve never experienced Christof Glück’s Orfeo ed Euridice at the Met’s Lincoln Center production, where the legendary newlyweds walk up a long, steep, irregular staircase splayed against the upstage wall, carrying torches to light up the tunnel.

Or perhaps they had seen that opera and realized that youngsters in the audience, not knowing how Vergil and Ovid told the tale, would be bummed by the tragedy if Glück hadn’t appended a happy ending. The whole evening seems cushioned by Chavkin and Mitchell’s worry that they might lose a key demographic along the way if the seriousness of the tragedy remained undiluted by mirth, merriment, and David Neuman’s most festive choreography.

Not to worry, when the Fates take their toll, the hearty, genial, and avuncular Hermes will be there to console Orpheus and all his bummed fans. Along with a big brassy jazz band. Raise another glass!

Shakespeare, Airplanes, and Jazz in CP’s “Twelfth Night”

Review: Twelfth Night at the Parr Center

By Perry Tannenbaum

Shakespeare’s best comedies are bursting with multiple plots, and two of the most perfect – A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night – are the most dizzying and delightful. It is quite likely that the latter, later work was first performed on Twelfth Night of 1601 to celebrate the newborn century on January 5 (with a singing clown suggestively named Feste). Yet time, scholarship, and heavy-handed dramaturgy have tended to darken many modern-day productions.

That’s why the current Central Piedmont Theatre version at the Parr Center, adapted and directed by Elizabeth Sickerman, is so refreshing. Twelfth Night has at least four main plots: Viola’s separation and reunion with her twin brother Sebastian, Duke Orsino’s unrequited love for the widowed Countess Olivia (seconded by Sir Andrew Aguecheek), Viola’s crush on Orsino while disguised as his manservant, and the wicked prank concocted by Aguecheek, Sir Toby Belch, Feste, and Maria to send Olivia’s ambitious and party-pooping steward, Malvolio, to the madhouse.

Of these, the most dominant plot should be the Viola-Orsino mess, for it sprouts so many delicious complications. Acting as Caesario, Orsino’s servant, Viola is dispatched to to Countess Olivia’s manor to plead on behalf of the Duke – only to have the Countess fall in love with her. Olivia’s inclinations toward Viola/Caesario not only enflame Orsino’s jealousy, they also lead to an absurd duel with fellow coward Sir Andrew. Meanwhile, she encounters Sebastian’s close friend, Antonio, who puts all his money in Viola’s care, mistaking her for her twin. You can easily imagine what happens when Sir Andrew makes the same mistake.

Ultimately, the mistaken identities reach the giddy point where Olivia cannot recognize her own husband just hours after their marriage. Ah, a honeymoon to remember.

So to tip the balance toward empathizing with Malvolio, simply because he is incidentally berated as “a kind of puritan,” is rather perverse. Elsewhere, I’ve seen the steward outfitted with a Puritan’s hat. Far more stupidly, I’ve heard a theatre sage say Malvolio was modeled on Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, born in 1599. Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex (1485-1540), instrumental in the English Reformation, is a more feasible candidate. Sickerman not only discards such nonsense, she transports the action from ancient Illyria, at the heel of Italy’s boot, to a coastal town immersed in the Jazz Age.

Costume designer Emily McCurdy certainly goes with the Roaring 20’s flow. Orsino and Olivia could easily pass for the recently reprised Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan on Broadway, surrounded by flappers and jazzy gallants galore. The moving pieces and projections of Jennifer O’Kelly’s scenery, more evocative of summer than winter, have enough classic detailing for Viola to sit at the foot of an Ionian pillar when describing herself sitting like “Patience on a monument.”

Nor does the music veer from the vintage of Prohibition days. Montavious Blocker has choice cuts of Duke Ellington and Sidney Bechet in his soundtrack, and just a few bars of music arranger Matt Postle’s chart for “Come Away, Death,” transformed from a lover’s lament into a jivey jump tune, are enough to conclusively vanquish melancholy, injecting Feste’s song for the lovesick Orsino with catchy mischief. The debris downstage suggests an Amelia Earhart plane crash rather than Shakespeare’s original shipwreck, and Charles Lindbergh could have inspired Sebastian and Viola’s matching outfits. Except for the tacky slacks.

If you’ve seen Twelfth Night before, Sickerman cordially adds to the Bard’s dizzying layers of identity, cutting some expositional text and casting females in key roles. Not one of them is a Chickspeare alum. Saskia Lewis as Feste, Rhianon Chandler as Antonio, and Kameal Brown as the recklessly unknighted Dame Toby Belch are all QC newcomers to me. If only Aryana Mitchell, portraying Viola, had an identical twin sister to take on Sebastian!

We are centuries away from the Protestant Reformation or the English Restoration, although Sickerman seems to beach the sibs closer to the Pilgrims’ beloved Plymouth Rock than to the Adriatic coast. Such oceanic distancing frees Malvolio from a dungeon of scorn when Central Piedmont’s plotters and nobles plunk their preening steward into a humble barrel to punish his prudery.

He isn’t the clown among the comical group, but Sickerman allows Truman Grant as Malvolio to loosen up, so that his usual rigidity is now almost elegance, mockable now as uppity pretense. Another sign of Sickerman’s lighthearted touch: her pick for the incredulous Sebastian is Timothy Snyder, who is at least a foot taller than his “twin.”

The disparity was so great, that I didn’t catch on at first. Brown’s outfit as Dame Toby, more like Miss Marple than a Falstaffian drunkard, compounded my early confusion, making me feel like newbie to the comedy while I got oriented. Struggling to remember a single instance when the euthanized CPCC Summer Theatre ever presented such a challenging comedy, I stumbled upon another reason why this excellent production was so refreshing.

All the cast was youthful, like the summer college grads who swarmed to Charlotte during CP summers to launch their pro careers. Not one old-timer in the bunch!

As a result of coping with all the period, costume, and gender changes, my disorientation was dispelled at the same time that I was learning to trust the youngbloods performing at CP’s New Theater, which has thankfully replaced panoramic Pease Auditorium but lamentably failed to showcase nearly as much CP talent. The mental training wheels that I had doled out to all these student efforts quickly flew away.

But along with a lightened, more secular and decadent Malvolio, there was newfound pleasure in the other creatures onstage who no longer needed to orbit around the self-absorbed steward. The Malvolio miasma that I’d felt since my first encounter with Twelfth Night in a college Shakespeare seminar, taught by a professor victimized by the prevailing obsession with the “puritan,” finally evaporated.

Twelfth Night, or What You Will has always been an awesome comedy for me. Now it was fun. I’d barely appreciated the bounty of fascinating character sketches that the Bard serves up here.

Now Viola is the patient, softspoken eye of the storm, and Mitchell is keenly sensitive, alternately anguished and bemused by all the passion and folly that surround her. Mitchell’s discreet takes, shared with us, make her a sort of co-emcee with Feste, though Sickerman asks too many eyerolls from her. Fitz Fitzpatrick is only slightly over-the-top with the lovesick gushings of Orsino, chiming well with a lounging Duke or a mob boss. Yes, that sleek robe has a Godfather aura before we see Fitz in the Gatsby threads.

As Olivia, Arianna Zappley does not yield at all to Fitzpatrick in regal dopiness. The two are as perfect a matching pair as the twins, made for each other, yet both are insanely lucky to land one of the sibs. Rounding out the symmetry of the two couples as Sebastian is the disproportioned Snyder, who does manage to nearly equal the calm of his diminutive twin – even though the Illyrians mistake him for her over and over. Playing Sebastian’s closest friend, the wrongly arrested Antonio, Chandler helps the prisoner to emerge as a neat counterweight to Malvolio, who is rightfully chastised for his presumption, though the penalty is too harsh.

There’s a little more slapstick flavor to the motley crew who bedevil Malvolio – and a bit more spice. Evelyn Ovall as Olivia’s waiting-gentlewoman Marie, who forges her mistress’s handwriting in the billet-doux that entraps the detested steward, is destined to marry Brown as Dame Toby. I’d like to think Ellington and his orchestra would have consented to play at the wedding reception, but I’m not sure.

Dopiest of the conspirators and clearly the least self-aware is Salim Muhammad as Sir Andrew, usually exiting with an absurdly military goosestep. In his challenge to Caesario/Viola, Muhammad now dons boxing gloves instead grabbing a sword, magnifying his ineffectuality with his effeminate pawing as he briefly combats the well-matched Mitchell.

Lewis effortlessly steals nearly every scene she appears in as Feste, convincing me along the way that this clown was intended to upstage all others. Not only does Feste sing lyrically and wittily – compared to the other lovers who barely stammer their effusions – she proves to be a better actress than the leading lady, Viola. Visiting Malvolio at the mouth of a barrel he believes is dark hell, Feste gives bravura performances as Sir Topas, a parson supposedly sent to determine how mad this lunatic is, interspersed with imitations of a sincere jester. Lewis cackles and coos this cruel vaudeville as bewitchingly as she swings death, ranging further than anyone else.

Photos by Perry Tannenbaum

Saltwater Glory from the CSO in Seafaring Works by Britten, Williams, and Vaughan Williams

Review: A Sea Symphony at Belk Theater

By Perry Tannenbaum

April 26, 2024, Charlotte, NC – Whether you love the sea for its surf, its tidal rhythms, its abundance of exotic creatures large and small, or its sheer vastness, Charlotte Symphony’s A Sea Symphony will deliver manifold delights – and a thrilling storm or two at no extra charge. The marquee piece, also known as Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No. 1, soars with enough poetry and ambition to be compared with Beethoven’s Ninth. The four-movement piece, studded throughout with the poetry of Walt Whitman, takes only five minutes less the Beethoven colossus to play, with the assistance of the Charlotte Master Chorale and two fine guest soloists, soprano Georgia Jarman and bass-baritone Andrew Foster-Williams. More than one Symphony season has concluded with the mighty Choral Symphony and nothing else on the bill, so it is quite generous that conductor laureate Christopher Warren-Green precedes A Sea Symphony with two other substantial seafaring works, Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes: Four Sea Interludes and Grace Williams’ Sea Sketches.

Artistically, opening night was a conquering hero’s triumphant return. Yet it was a mixed bag from a box office perspective. While the orchestra level was conspicuous disappointment, pocked with empty seats on a cloudy, balmy night, the grand tier was packed with loyalists and plutocrats, rewarding the performers’ upward gaze (if they ignored the sparsely populated balconies above). Warren-Green’s affinity for this music from the British Isles proved to be as deep as Vaughan Williams’ affection for Whitman.

Across the Carolinas, I’d venture to say that full-length productions of Britten operas are thinly scattered over the years, even at Spoleto Festival USA (Curlew River) or Brevard (A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Turn of the Screw). Nobody around here realizes that Britten set another great classic, Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, to music?The scraps of Peter Grimes that Warren-Green brings us are therefore hugely philanthropic, even if they reprise a work the maestro introduced at Belk Theater ten years back.

In the first three of the four movements, Warren-Green reminded us how exquisitely he crafted color and texture. Following a dreamy “Dawn,” the middle movements were especially sublime. “Sunday Morning” was dotted with tubular bells – you could almost feel the mist they were ringing through – and that tolling was echoed in “Moonlight” with a simple conspiracy between harpist Andrea Mumm and flutist Amy Orsinger Whitehead. Not really simple if you listened closely, for the single notes they played were not in strictly regular tempo. The magical ritardando was guided by Warren-Green’s instinctive baton. Most everybody will be impressed with the orchestral power of the “Storm,” fueled upstage by the percussionists, but Britten provides an added wallop with the lull in his tempest, ominous with subterranean quaking.

If he weren’t almost a Welshman by birth, you wonder how Warren-Green would have become smitten by the music of Grace Williams (1906-1977). Looking the Welshwoman up in Spotify or Apple Music will likely steer you wrong – to a Christian music artist by the same name who looks, depending on how her hair is combed, like either Renee Fleming or Celine Dion on her album covers. If you dig a bit deeper on Spotify and Apple Classical, you can find a fine 2000 recording of the five Sea Sketches for string orchestra on the CBC label with Roy Goodman leading the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra. As you might imagine in a piece that is as meticulously pictorial as Debussy’s La Mer, a live performance discloses buried treasures above and beyond Warren-Green’s more sensitive response to the score. Most memorable for me were the ethereal “Sailing Song” and the concluding “Calm Sea in Summer,” distinguished by its beautifully modulating tempo and its simulation of the quiet wash of wet sands on the shore.

All isn’t dainty, however, though the opening “High Wind” isn’t blessed with full orchestral artillery. That movement is powerful in its own right, and “Breakers” is definitely punchy. In the middle of the five pieces, “Channel Sirens” might be the most intriguing, not seeming to target either the glamorous temptresses of The Odyssey or any kind of alarm. Williams may have been picturing tugboats in muddy or nocturnal waters, I don’t know. The music cast a uniquely portentous spell.

You really need to hear A Sea Symphony in live performance, not only for the bone-rattling surges of orchestra, chorus, and vocal soloists resounding through the Belk, but for the extended pianissimo at the end of the concluding “Explorers” movement. The outer movements, “A Song for All Seas, All Ships” and “The Explorers,” are epics in themselves, fittingly for Whitman containing multitudes. You might feel that we have reached the end of this mighty chorale when the opening movement ends, but it we are less than a third of the way into our voyage. The finale will be longer, grander, and more oceanic. In between, there’s the relative quiescence of “On the Beach at Night Alone” and the jaunty heraldic “Scherzo: The Waves,” where the Master Chorale, wonderfully prepared by Kenney Potter, give the lead vocalists a well-needed rest before their final cosmic exploits.

And if you’re familiar with Whitman’s “A Passage to India,” you know that cosmic is no exaggeration as the souls of the singers join the Good Gray Poet, in his most pantheistic and mystic dimensions, beyond the seas to the far reaches of the universe. Some big names have been attracted to the baritone part, including Thomas Hampson and Simon Keenlyside on the CDs that I own, but Foster-Williams emphatically holds his own – while Jarman easily surpasses most of the sopranos I’ve heard on recordings of this demanding work, nicely combining the power and beauty of both camps. She’s formidable as both a dramatic and lyric soprano.

“Mrs. Doubtfire” Flips Wacko to Wisdom Overnight

Review: Mrs. Doubtfire at Blumenthal Performing Arts

By: Perry Tannenbaum

Pardon me a second, but I seem to be noticing stretch marks on my suspension of disbelief. Three nights before the curtain rose on the touring version of Mrs. Doubtfire that rolled into Belk Theater, I saw a rather fine production of Twelfth Night across town at Central Piedmont College. Since both of the brief runs include at least one matinee between now and Sunday, my experience of seeing two wives who fail to identify their true husbands can be intensified, compressed into the space eight hours, if you wish, after my relatively relaxed 75-hour exercise.

In Shakespeare’s 1601 comedy, Olivia marries Sebastian – much to his delighted befuddlement – the twin brother of the disguised Viola, the woman who has actually smitten her. Later, on the same day of her wedding to Sebastian, whom she believes is Caesario (!), Olivia encounters Viola still in her disguise, who has the gall to deny they are married!

In the 1993 film starring Robin Williams and in the Broadway musical adaptation of 2021, the mix-up occurs earlier in the action – but after a lengthy Daniel-and-Miranda marriage that has produced three darling Hilliard children from its intimacies and one bitter divorce from its hostilities. The set-up for Daniel’s makeover zoomed by so quickly on opening night that, aside from throwing his son a super birthday party despite Mom’s insistence that he was grounded for his poor school grades, I really didn’t grasp how he had gotten Miranda so pissed.

Not that I blamed her. Rob McClure as Daniel was so hyper, manic, and over-the-top in his early scenes, like a cut-rate Robin Williams in his early nanu-nanu years, that it was easier to wonder why Miranda had married him than why she would file papers. This is one grating, irritating, self-absorbed dude who is spoiling his kids, always “on” in his daddy role, like a badly misfiring Williams improv shtick on latenight TV. Until suddenly, like in an epiphany, he hears the family court judge’s decree and finds himself poignantly pleading for a greater share of his children’s lives.

his is only the beginning of Daniel’s lightning-quick transformation, for it isn’t going to be merely skin- or mask-deep. In Mrs. Doubtfire, to be fair, Daniel is really trying so hard to deceive Miranda – and regain his precious access to his kids, who clearly matter more to him than their mom. So he commandeers all the advanced mumbo jumbo of modern makeup science via his gay brother Frank and his partner Andre. A true artist, he proceeds to artificially boost his bustle and decks himself out as a ragout of Miss Marple, Margaret Thatcher, and Julia Child. With a Scottish accent.

Meanwhile, our playful Daniel sabotages his ex’s email search for a nanny (a bit nasty, really) and moves himself to the head of the line of nanny telephone applicants, impersonating all the losers before shining as Mrs. Doubtfire, a name he improvises on the spot. Cunning and very much in character, except that he’s suddenly catering to his ex-wife instead of blithely ignoring her.

The nanny who appears at the Hilliards’ threshold for “her” in-person interview not only fools Miranda, he also fools his three kids. Well he might. This nanny is not at all Daniel anymore. The voice, the tempo, the personality, and the parenting approach are all radically different. Instead of his previous happy-go-lucky, laissez-faire practices, he now leapfrogs Miranda and becomes sterner, stubborner, and more demanding than she ever was.

Conceived as a stopgap avenue to his children while he regains Miranda’s trust, Mrs. Doubtfire succeeds beyond Daniel’s dreams. She’s a godsend, not only as a caretaker, but as a friend, confidante, and a chef! Miranda cannot remember when she was so happy and wouldn’t ever dismiss Mrs. D in favor of Daniel, no matter how thoroughly or sincerely he has reformed by the time the judge reconsiders custody.

This irony brings no consolation to the kids. As long as the Mrs. Doubtfire ruse continues to deceive them, they are missing their dad. The son, Christopher, has lifted his grades under the new nanny’s guidance, but he still blames himself for the divorce.

So it’s a mercy that Chris and his older sister Lydia accidentally figure it out after a few weeks. A louder tinkle in the toilet on opening night would have made it clearer how this happens.

Otherwise, the show ran better than I expected, rewarding my suspended disbelief with some zany antics and absurd predicaments. Thanks to a humorless family court social worker and an equally stolid TV showrunner, who merely doesn’t display her amusement, Daniel is forced to portray himself and Mrs. Doubtfire simultaneously on two occasions.

These crises force Daniel to enlist emergency assistance. When Romelda Teron Benjamin pops up as the frightfully upright Wanda, the social worker, for a home visit at Daniel’s shabby new apartment, Frank and Andre also show up fortuitously when Wanda wishes to interview both Daniel and Doubtfire. Aaron Kaburik as the brother is the more frantic of Daniel’s speed dressers, unable to tell a lie without raising his voice to fortissimo. Nik Alexander as Andre is the calmer and cleverer of the two, with a soupçon of flare, saving the day by secretly whipping out his cellphone.

Daniel’s second crisis builds slowly to a wonderful catastrophe as Stuart, the hunky new boyfriend, invites Mrs. Doubtfire to join him and the family to celebrate Miranda’s birthday – at the same restaurant where Daniel must meet with Ms. Lundy, the TV producer, to discuss a new series built upon his improvised personae. Once again, Frank and Andre are recruited for the quick changes – maybe in the ladies’ room. Fearing what Mom will or won’t see when she goes to see what has become of Doubtfire, Giselle Gutierrez and Sam Bird (alternating with Axle Rimmele) as the elder sibs must spring frantically to the rescue, reassuring a dubious Miranda that all is well.

McClure does his best work during this hectic denouement, and against all odds, we don’t absolutely despise Maggie Lakis as Miranda, though we’re rooting against her all evening. She and Benjamin eventually melt appealingly. Aided by Daniel’s conspicuous indifference toward his ex, despite Doubtfire’s meddlesome jealousy, Leo Roberts gradually gains our favor as Stuart, even if he is pumped-up and comparatively normal.

Music and lyrics by Wayne and Karey Kirkpatrick do little to elevate or damage the script adaptation by John O’Farrell and Karey K, which not only gives Andre a cell but equips the Hilliard home with wi-fi and spoils the kids with various screens, apps, and video games. No melody stuck with me, but I liked the energy of “Make Me a Woman” for Daniel, Frank, Andre, and ensemble. “I’m Rockin’ Now,” with Mrs. Doubtfire fronting the ensemble, brings us handsomely to intermission.

Two other comic gems can be commended, Jodi Kimura’s stone-faced turn as producer Janet Lundy and David Hibbard’s lachrymose portrayal of Mr. Jolly, the kiddie TV host that Daniel is destined to replace. Hibbard is like a Captain Kangaroo who long ago lost his hops, hopelessly lapsed into senility. It was generous of the writers to keep Jolly employed on the new show.

Private Anguish and Global Triumph Keynote “Everybody’s Got a Story”

Review: Everybody’s Got a Story at VAPA

By Perry Tannenbaum

If you like taking things apart and seeing how they work, there’s an interesting tension at the heart of Everybody’s Got a Story to Tell,the new Charlotte’s Off Broadway production at the VAPA Center. COB producer Anne Lambert describes it more accurately in her subtitle, “The One-Person Play Project.” Then if you apply a QR code reader to your program leaflet, you’ll find that Lambert pulls against the marquee title when she observes that, for some, performing onstage for an audience is a dreaded terror while for others it’s an addictive drug.

Onstage – or on The Moth Radio Hour – baring yourself to the world can be an exhilarating high, especially when you’re showered with laughter and applause. But it turns out that, although we’re certainly watching folk in the addict category, they’re not always telling us their own story. Or blurting it out to us compulsively as might be implied by Everybody’s Got a Story to Tell.

No, when you scan the three titles of the playbill, you’ll hit a roadblock to that confessional concept at the bottom of the page where you discover Eartha Kitt: Cotton to Caviar, written and performed by Toi Reynolds-Johnson. Before that title explodes any notion of a purely soul-baring evening of personal trials, the first play of the evening, Reflection: The Musical might detain you momentarily. Many, many confessions have been crafted into song. But not spontaneously. We know better.

Enriching this impure brew of personal effusions, the names that precede the titles splashed in yellow mustard typeface come into play: director Rob Coppel behind the scenes and PJ Barnes, very much up front as our host. Before we watch Reynolds-Johnson, Spencer Hawkins, and Tyler Wills perform the works they’ve written, Coppel and Barnes conspire to glue the disparate pieces together into a cohesive whole and conjure up the illusion of a natural flow.

Barnes as our emcee actually precedes us into COB’s VAPA nook, welcoming us as we enter and encouraging us to make ourselves at home. So briefly, we are part of the show for those who are already seated. The transition between greeter and emcee is as smooth as possible as the lights dim and Barnes starts strutting the stage in his more prestigious persona, weaving our everybody’s-got-a-story theme. How much of this BS is freshly improvised is hard to discern from whatever Coppel and the writer/performers have fed him in scripted form or as a sort of “head arrangement” as jazz musicians would call it. Whatever, Barnes is one slick and nicely turned-out dude.

The polished impression that Barnes makes contrasts nicely with the vulnerability Wills projects in Reflection, a glittery gay man who is freshly suffering the gut punch of a breakup and feeling the sting of a rejection that will linger for more than a month. After an opening communion in front of a vanity mirror, it’s very apparent that self-loathing is also prominent among Wills’ ills, for he resolutely removes his cruising gear – rhinestone high-heels, high-cut denim shorts with glitter belt, and matching pullover – in favor of workout wear that might be adopted during the isolation of a pandemic.

Double underlining Wills’ self-flagellation, he covers both his vanity mirror and a full-length mirror in shrouds. The powder room is transformed into a house of mourning, and reflection is now done by journaling. In a series of songs and vignettes, Wills is reliving his story rather than telling it. Dramatic intensity is paradoxically increased by Wills’ refusal to break the fourth wall and speak to us, but the intimacy of our encounter with the playwright/lyricist suffers as our peeping is prolonged.

Nor do the pre-recorded melodies, composed by pianist David Roach, dispel the oppressiveness of the 40-day vigil as Wills continues to pour out his anguish and bewail his betrayal. Three nights before Passover, the 40-day, 12-step slog toward self-acceptance and reaffirmation began to feel to me like the Israelites’ 40-year exodus in the Sinai Desert. I gradually despaired that the next song would sound much different from the one I was hearing.

Wills and Roach need to tighten up their collaboration. Or else they need to liven it up with a greater variety of mood and tempos. We’re convinced that Wills has a fine voice and vocal range while we’re frustrated at not seeing more emotional range. Another way to let more light into Reflection before the inevitable uncovering of the mirrors would be by letting us in, occasionally poking some holes in that fourth wall, breaking up the tedium of self-involvement. Just allow the piece to breathe in the here-and-now with occasional retrospective commentary.

Or maybe Wills and Roach overestimated the amount of suspense they were creating. More, please.

Notwithstanding Wills’ final affirmations, I welcomed back Barnes and his stylish patter with more enthusiasm than I’d anticipated. Hawkins and his You’re Accepted offered even more refreshing contrast, though it was also fueled by a breakup. Instead of grieving and self-quarantining, Hawkins deflected, launching into a series of spurious podcasts behind his laptop as if broadcasting his vocational and romantic woes to the wide world live from Davidson. After the parched drought of Reflections, we experienced a dizzying blizzard of sudden twists and turns, inexplicable leaps, mood swings, and casual reveals.

The more Hawkins revealed, the less authentic and autobiographical this confessional, by a Davidson College admissions officer, seemed to me. Cynical, cruelly dismissive, and burnt-out toward the pile of college admission essays on his desk, Hawkins was rather wickedly at-odds with the confessional mode of writing he was practicing himself.

Hopscotching as it does, Hawkins’ script defies a linear summary, likely because it has less to do with the troubles a college administrator has with women and his job, more to do with that cloistered academic’s difficulties in understanding and managing himself and what he’s doing. The quick pacing nicely supports our narrator’s caprices and indecision. What we wind up with is an artful and funny portrait of a peppy but unreliable narrator who lets down his guard often enough to clearly see both his charms and his flaws.

Of the two complete plays, Hawkins’ non-musical was better, but although Reynolds-Johnson’s Eartha was only presented in vignettes after intermission, it easily laid equal claim to the distinction of best on the bill. And where you had to wonder how autobiographical or authentic You’re Accepted and its admissions essays were, you could instantly perceive Reynolds-Johnson’s inspiration. Just look at her eyes! If she didn’t have the idea to portray Kitt on her own, somebody else surely suggested it. Likely on numerous occasions.

We can perversely suggest that R-J looks more like Eartha Kitt than Eartha herself, for when we see her as a child, born on a South Carolina plantation and rejected by both her parents in the opening Cotton scenes, she already looks like the woman she would become at the Caviar conclusion. And the powerhouse superstar who would one day bewitch Orson Welles, make Lady Bird Johnson weep at the White House with her Vietnam War comments, conquer Europe, and play Catwoman on the hit Batman TV series was never more than 62 inches tall.

R-J, likely no taller than her subject, revels in every phase of the Eartha bio. Even the digital playbill doesn’t say, but she’s probably as responsible for the spot-on costumes and props as she is for the writing – though Eartha wrote three autobiographies, plenty to glean from. Nor is R-J at all uncomfortable in sprinkling her various scenes and costume changes with frank narrative, engaging directly with her audience at times. Allowing the diva even more stature in her Caviar phase, Coppel brings Barnes back for one last hilarious shtick as the cabaret queen’s worshipful lackey. Although Adrienne Williams takes on her most prominent role here at the keyboard, we barely get a taste of the Evil One’s full repertoire in snippets of “C’est Si Bon” and “Santa Baby.” Just a cursory look and listen to the top stuff a Google search led me to was more than enough to convince me that there’s plenty of juicy episodes, from her tête-à-têtes with Welles to her verbatim White House harangue, remaining to be unveiled in the complete Eartha.As they stand, the vignettes at VAPA are very tasty and satisfying, but the complete Cotton to Caviar will be richer and spicier.

Photos by Perry Tannenbaum