Monthly Archives: April 2025

Renée Fleming Provides the Glitter in Symphony’s Glitzy Spring Gala

Review: Charlotte Symphony @ Carolina Theatre

By Perry Tannenbaum

March 28, 2025, Charlotte, NC – In so many ways – for me, for Charlotte Symphony enthusiasts, and for the city – last week’s Spring Gala at the Historic Carolina Theatre was a thrilling revival and an orgy of nostalgia. First and foremost was the reopening of the ancient movie theater and concert hall, dormant movie-wise since 1978 and briefly revived in the late 1990’s by Moving Poets Theatre of Charlotte and the beloved Creative Loafing Theatre Awards. The Carolina has stood in midtown Charlotte since 1927 and the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra sprang to life there with its first public performance on March 20, 1932. So a couple of auspicious centennials are on the horizon during the next decade.

On the other hand, Carolina Theatre crystallizes what Symphony has become in its recent years of modernization. Within the past month alone, our orchestra has performed in front of movie screens on three programs, John Luther Adams’ Become Ocean, John Powell’s How to Train Your Dragon in Concert, and the glittery Spring Gala featuring Renée Fleming. If memory serves, we hadn’t seen Fleming perform with the Charlotte Symphony since 2004, and the last time my mom and I saw her at the Metropolitan Opera was in 2014, playing the title role of The Merry Widow.

The epic assemblage of National Geographic footage added extra dimensions to Fleming’s live rendition of her Grammy Award-winning album of 2021, Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene – or it would have if the soprano had actually sung more than two of the album’s 17 tracks in front of the lushly cinematic backdrop. Two additional screens flanked the stage, not only tripling the Geo cinema to near-surround proportions but also supplying the texts or translations of the songs if you could peel your eyes away from Fleming, still glamorous at 66, accompanied by pianist Bradley Moore.

Cinematically and acoustically, the renovated Carolina Theatre was quite good for its age, too, but not spectacular. If you came to behold the sensational, that was taken care of before you entered the hall, for the glow of the lobby and the Carolina signage could be seen from blocks away as you began grappling with the riddle of where to park. Inside the lobby, where the sleek glassy modernity of the hall clashes with the quaintness of the updated Roaring Twenties marquee, you’re already in the presence of something unique, but when you enter the hall, spanking new with all its old-timey trimmings, you feel like you’re inside a time capsule.

So it’s hard for a critic to be churlish about Fleming delivering less than a quarter of her original Anthropocene in live performance when the 15 songs she substituted were so well-chosen and – mostly – flawlessly sung. From the album, Kevin Puts’s “Evening” and Reynaldo Hahn’s “L’heure Exquise” were the most delightful, but an objective assessment of Nico Muhly’s “Endless Space” was impossible for me. This was where the screens surrounding Fleming exploded with National Geo imagery: the glories of sky, ocean, rivers, and ice, followed by the ravages of fires, floods, drought, and sunbaked skeletons. Hazel Dickens’ “Pretty Bird” and an aria from G.F. Handel’s Atalanta were charming enough, but chiefly backed by massive tree trunks, comparatively sleepy on celluloid.

My favorites among Fleming’s inserts were Curtis and Pearce Green’s “Red Mountains Sometimes Cry,” Maria Schneider’s “Our Finch Feeder” from Winter Morning Walks,Giacomo Puccini’s “O mio babbino caro” from Gianni Schicchi,Rodgers & Hammerstein’s “The Sound of Music” and Joseph Cantaloube’s “Baïlèro” from his Chants d’Auvergne. Allow me a little churlishness on “Baïlèro”: although it was the most achingly lovely song that we heard before intermission, still magical though stripped down to Moore’s accompaniment, a full orchestral version with Symphony could have elevated the magic to sublimity with its lovelorn oboe passages and sprinklings of harp. Recorded versions by Frederica von Stade, Kiri Te Kanawa, and Victoria de los Angeles are the best – along with Fleming’s own, the final track on her 1998 Beautiful Voice album.

When Charlotte Symphony finally assembled onstage, it was more than an hour after president and CEO David Fisk and Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles graced the evening with their gala presences and welcoming remarks. A bit undermanned for guest conductor Courtney Lewis in his Charlotte debut, the Orchestra sounded lackluster in the Overture to Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro and downright moribund in the Overture to Gabriel Fauré’s Masques et bergamasques. It amazed me to find that nothing could mar or spoil this occasion when you felt privileged to be there. Partly because our expectations had been politely lowered, Lewis and Symphony seemed to overachieve in Richard Rodgers’ “Waltz” from Carousel.

Fleming’s voice has lost some of its creaminess above her midrange and I found myself rooting for her to easefully reach her top as she climbed to the climax of R&H’s “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” But Renée had banked plenty of his goodwill for arts lovers long before she resigned recently from the tainted Kennedy Center. Decades before she put her heart post-pandemic into the global environment, she championed American opera, most notably in 1998 when she premiered the role of Blanche in André Previn’s A Streetcar Named Desire while also collecting American arias into an 11-track album representing nine composers, I Want Magic! The aging diva is still banking residuals and Spotify pennies for her exemplary recorded output. Meanwhile, each time Charlotte Symphony had the chance to play live behind Fleming, they seemed to play better, producing fresh magic aplenty for us all – with the promise of much more from Fleming and the Carolina Theatre in years

Uhry’s “Parade” Marches on, Trampling Justice for Leo Frank

Review: Parade at Belk Theater

By Perry Tannenbaum

A couple of simple online searches confirm the widespread shibboleth. “Everyone loves a parade” summons up millions of quotes and images – not to mention the occasional book, song, movie title, and a BRAND NEW sealed board game on eBay. Try “everyone does not love a parade” on Google and the engine blinks, seizes up, and drops a couple of pistons, yielding pretty much the same results, except for a couple of incredulous newspaper headlines.

“Who Doesn’t Love a Parade?” asked the New York Times in an opinion piece back in 2018. Jim Tews, the author of the piece, breaks rank with his headline in his opening sentence: “I love a parade.” No, we must go further back to 2007, when opinion writer Susan A. Nielsen wrote in the Seattle Times – on the Fourth of July! – asking, far more accusingly, “What kind of sick person doesn’t love a parade?”

“I recently became aware,” she begins solemnly, “that some people, including my spouse and closest friends, hate parades.” Mercifully, she does not name names, but you can almost hear their diabolical cackles in the background.

Not a peep of dissent from the Google results on the rest of that webpage or the next five. Everybody loves a parade; that’s the settled truth. Unless they are still alive and sequestered in Seattle.

So be forewarned: in Alfred Uhry’s retelling of the events that led up to Leo Frank’s murder trial in 1913 and his lynching two years later, his protagonist/victim is a man who despises a parade. A specific parade. Instead of attending the Confederate Memorial Day parade in Atlanta on April 26, 1913, he opted to go to work at the National Pencil Company, where he was superintendent. It will cost him.

Onstage at Belk Theater, where the touring version of Uhry’s PARADEopened on Tuesday, Frank gets to say that, as a Jewish man from the borough of Brooklyn, he still feels like an outsider: “How Can I Call This Home?” he laments. His bad feelings would only be exacerbated if he were to attend a parade celebrating the Confederacy. What is there to celebrate?

Atlanta prosecutor Hugh Dorsey and extremist pamphleteer Tom Watson were the foremost public figures – and the loudest – to proclaim that such an explanation for Frank’s truancy from the parade was impossible. No, the real reason he went to National Pencil that day was to ambush, rape, and murder 13-year-old Mary Phagan, who came to her workplace simply to collect her weekly pay. Quaintly enough, in cash.

For those who rushed to judgment against Frank without solid evidence to back their convictions, The Confederacy, civic pride, and celebration were all synonymous with this spurned parade. Just by choosing Parade for his title, Uhry was taking Leo’s side, flouting the idea that the word blends naturally with bliss. Led by Watson and Dorsey, the parading goes on despite criticism or opposition, becoming an orchestrated stampeding of Frank’s rights and humanity, deeply drenched in antisemitism.

Retribution for Dorsey and Watson? Hardly. Dorsey would subsequently be elected Governor of Georgia and Watson would become a U.S. Senator.

Plagued by technical difficulties when Halton Theater was young, the 2006 production of Parade at CPCC Summer Theatre didn’t rock my world, though my world is deeply drenched in Judaism and Jewish culture. So my wife Sue and I were surprised by how powerfully this touring production impacted.

It was like a stunning gut punch for me in the wake of Charlottesville, Pittsburgh, and the uptick of antisemitism since October 7. I felt physically nauseous as this horror of sensationalized press, suborned testimony, and a grotesque parade of cookie-cutter witnesses – factory girls who were obviously coached – took on the rancid smell of an inevitable conviction.

You could see Frank’s righteous self-confidence crumbling along with the suave composure of Luther Rosser, his cocksure defense attorney. Long before vigilantes entered the picture.

For others without my Ashkenazi DNA and yeshiva background, Parade might not elicit the same visceral response. It would be interesting to see whether Uhry, the Atlanta native who also gave us Driving Miss Daisy and The Last Night of Ballyhoo, would have had more success if he had worked alone on Parade – without the music and lyrics of Jason Robert Brown and the co-conceiving of the esteemed Harold Prince, who also directed the original production.

The upscaling of Uhry’s script was certainly warranted by the Leo Frank tragedy – and the crucial action that must unfold in a chaotic courtroom – but the timing was not ideal after Ragtime, painted on a far broader canvas, opened earlier in 1998 in a bigger house. Michael Arden’s restaging for the 2023 revival of Parade can also be off-putting if you don’t care for actors lurking silently around the action between scenes and becoming stagehands during transitions.

We cannot accuse the lead performances of any such artificiality. The passion of both of the principals reaches deep down into this cast, from Max Chernin as Leo to Jack Roden as Mary Phagan’s aspiring boyfriend. So the level of melodrama in their voices, ardently singing Brown’s Tony Award-winning music, rises to operatic levels and beyond.

Chernin is freed from meek innocence during Leo’s trial, becoming his own demonic caricature in “Come Up to My Office” as the robotic factory girls horrifically distort his personality. It was painful to watch him rise from his seat at the defense’s table, climb to the platform where witnesses gave sworn testimony – and Judge Leonard S. Roan presided – only to surrender totally to the girls’ perverse depiction of him and jubilantly surpass it.

Easily as talented as Chernin, Talia Suskauer struggles to clarify Lucille Frank’s marital problems with Leo, perhaps because her biggest opportunity, “What Am I Waiting For?” is saddled with lyrics by Brown that are too subtle. They have an arranged marriage in Uhry’s telling. While Leo has yet to cope with the cultural distance between Brooklyn and Atlanta, there is still an intimacy gulf after four years.

It would help a little if Suskauer sounded Southern more often, but if Parade is already grabbing you with its systemic intolerance, Lost Cause immorality, Gestapo cops, and hypocritical pomposity, the drawl deficit will evaporate amid the deluge of her straightforward “You Don’t Know This Man.” One of the chief beauties in Uhry’s script, true history be damned, is the growth of Lucille in Act 2, triggered by her “Do It Alone,” flung at Leo while he’s festering in jail, hoping for a retrial.

On the cast album, that song sounds like a vehicle for Streisand at her most histrionic, but Suskauer blazes her own trail. Implausibly, I haven’t found a single cover of this raging powerhouse outside of cast albums on Spotify.

As the ranting Tom Watson, we get Griffin Binnicker in a Colonel Sanders suit feverishly waving a bible – like a nightmare premonition of a J.D. Vance presidency. No less irritating or unscrupulous, Andrew Samonsky as prosecutor Hugh Dorsey is yet another evocation of the sort of pure evil politician we thought was ancient history.

There is more than a sprinkling of prejudice in Leo’s views of the South and his sexism. These go unchecked until Lucille rightfully scolds him and proves herself. As for Leo’s chronic alienation, aloofness, and lack of social skills, Uhry seems to overlook the fact that Frank was elected president by the 500 members of his local B’nai Brith and was instrumental in getting the national organization to stage its 1914 convention in Atlanta.

As a truly innocent little weakling, Olivia Goosman still stands out as Mary Phagan, and the creators are wise to bring her back to life a couple of times – during the courtroom trial and when the lynching becomes imminent. The only taint on her is her susceptibility to her dearest admirer, Roden as Frankie Epps.

It wasn’t her fault that Roden reminded me so chillingly of Hitler Youth once the mass hysteria began, another flashback to fascism that refuses to die.

Maybe the most delicate part of the storytelling is Uhry and Prince’s concept of the three African Americans who testify against Frank. Though both men are likelier suspects than Leo, neither Robert Knight as janitor Newt Lee nor Ramone Nelson as escaped prisoner Jim Conley comes off as a mouth-breathing predator. Knight is the meeker character (and the likelier suspect), yet even without Leo’s Ivy League education, Newt has a better grasp of how to deal with cops.

Same with Nelson, though as Conley he is gifted with a more elegant and dangerous street wisdom. You might easily associate him with the world of Porgy & Bess if you can imagine him as the best of Sporting Life and Crown – capsulized to a point where it under-employs Nelson’s talents.

Most nuanced among the Jim Crow roles is Danielle Lee Greaves as the Franks’ housemaid, Minnie McKnight. Scenic designer Dane Laffey gives us a playing space that looks more like a lumberyard or a construction site than a battlefield, a boulevard, a governor’s mansion, a courthouse, or a business executive’s home. We’re more inclined, in this hardscrabble world, to empathize with Minnie’s corruptibility or tribal loyalty.

And she has regrets over her incriminating testimony to luxuriate in after the trial. Unlike Chris Shyer as Governor Slaton, Greaves has little power to act on her remorse. Shyer has a wider, more satisfying character arc to work with. Thanks to projection designer Sven Ortel, we get stage-filling front-page headlines every step of the way, a parade of Watson-sparked alarms from the first news of the Phagan’s murder until Leo is hanged. So our first visit to Slaton’s mansion after the murder shows him prodding Dorsey to find and convict the killer as quickly as possible.

Capitulating to media pressure.

Later, once Lucille gets the green light to advocate on Leo’s behalf, the Governor of the great state of Georgia becomes Lucille’s private investigator, a white-haired Paul Drake to her Perry Mason. Then, in a U-turn to real life, he commutes Leo’s sentence. Nice try, Guv!

We have some empathy as well for Michael Tacconi as on-the-skids reporter Britt Craig, who “scoops” all other Atlanta reporters in spreading malicious disinformation about the case. Until he sees the light, he may seem like a tool for Dorsey and Watson. Just an average Joe grasping where his bread will be buttered.

Not a bit of empathy goes out to Evan Harrington as the Old Confederate Soldier and Judge Roan. Because of their majestic dignity, neither of these upright gargoyles has any regrets. To our great misfortune, such folks are still around, still waving their flags, and still parading.

“Violet” Comes from Country in a Musical Teeming with Blues and Gospel

Review: Violet at Theatre Charlotte

By Perry Tannenbaum

So here’s something we’ve learned over the past month on the Charlotte theatre scene. There are two schools of thought on how to portray a horrifically scarred woman onstage. Back in late February, Carolina Actors Studio Theatre took the cinematic approach at the original Mint Museum on Randolph, painstakingly applying makeup to their leading lady, Zoe Matney, before every performance of Alabaster, down the entire left side of her body from head to ankle.

Now we have the Violet approach at Theatre Charlotte, where Destiney Wolfe stars in the title role with a hideous scar that looks more like a fine line drawn with a red ballpoint pen than a shocking horror. So it was – minus the fine red line – when Lauren Ward originated the role in 1997 on Broadway and when Sutton Foster revived it there in 2014.

Besides the risk of an Emperor’s New Clothes moment from an innocent child (“But Mommy, Violet doesn’t have any scar!”), it figures to be more effortful to watch Wolfe without the scar everybody onstage is talking about and constantly having to imagine a scar we are not seeing. That’s different from reading “The Ugliest Pilgrim” by Doris Betts, the short story that this Jeanine Tesori-Brian Crawley musical is based on.

Until the fourth page, the scar isn’t explicitly mentioned. Once the word is seen, it quickly becomes the center of the story – the reason why Violet is on a bus from Spruce Pine, NC, to Tulsa, where she ardently believes a venerated TV preacher will heal her terrible affliction. Nothing on the remaining 25 pages contradicts the image engraved in our imaginations.

Within the blissful two dimensions of a book, we don’t need to keep imagining what isn’t. Perhaps more subtly, as demonstrated by Matney’s portrayal of June in Alabaster,we can gradually get used to the disfigurement, look past it, and see the person. Along the way, we could also find plenty of relief looking at June’s unscathed side.

Notwithstanding her terrible scar and her pathetic reliance on Oral Roberts – oops, I mean the famed Oklahoma preacher – Violet is clearsighted enough to grasp her most valid reason for boarding the bus. Spruce Pine is a very small-minded town. Her elders stare at her in pity and her peers are worse, shunning her, mocking her, and pranking her.

As the saying goes, she needs to get out and meet people. Spruce Pine isn’t the place for it.

Betts had Violet saying that in a more biblical way: “Good people have nearly turned me against you, Lord. They open their mouths for the milk of human kindness and boiling oil spews out.”

Told objectively by Crawley rather than in first-person by Betts’s Violet, we see the townsfolk clearly sooner rather than judging them on a single casual quote. Scarred or not, Crawley and Betts agree on one key point: Violet is way too thin-skinned.

Meanwhile, reasons for dismissing Violet’s self-pity – and doubting her self-awareness – are multiplying. Before the bus reaches Arkansas, she has hooked up with two military men who are quickly captivated by her. Both of them, one black and one white, are eager to show their ardor on a stopover in Memphis, where they spend a night out together.

So the necessity of imagining that hideous scar becomes more urgent for us.

Thankfully, the Memphis sojourn allows Tessori to naturally widen her musical palette, welcoming us to the blues along with the Beale Street underbelly of town. Violet’s dream of healing and her actual Oklahoma encounters with the Preacher are welcome prompts for Tessori to branch out further into righteous, stomping, spirit-of-the-Lord gospel.

A five-piece band led from the keyboard by Danielle Barnes Hayes leaned into the gospel music at the Preacher’s revival meeting as lustily as the more countrified tunes that had gone before. Our eagerness to hear those gospel strains was certainly piqued and primed last Saturday when a seven-voice choir greeted us in the lobby of the old Queens Road Barn, accompanied by a wee electric keyboard, singing hymns and shouts for a half hour before showtime.

While director Stuart Spencer skimps on makeup design, he is deeply attuned to the material, having been part of the Davidson Community Players cast when Violet had its regional premiere in 2010. Was it a makeup job on Cassandra Howley Wood that gave me such a favorable impression of her local debut and the show? Or was it simply the intimacy of Armour Street Theatre, bridging the gap between first-person narrative and Broadway musical?

At the bus station where Violet embarks on her odyssey, at the Memphis music hall where Asley Benjamin belts a couple of songs, and at the Tulsa TV revival, a bigger stage is surely better. More space for more people and more decibels! More opportunities for lighting designer Gordon Olson to colorize costumer Sophie Carlick’s shiny robes for the Preacher’s hallelujah choir – and to add pizzazz to Sharlie Duncan’s choreography!

To their credit, neither of the soldier boys seriously believes that Violet will look any better after her Oral rendezvous in Tulsa when she reboards her Greyhound bus, heads back home to Spruce Pine, and stops off in Arkansas for another meet-up. With Sean Bryant as Flick and Ethan Vatske as Monty, the interracial relationship and rivalry between the soldiers occasionally becomes more compelling and suspenseful than Violet’s cosmetic quest.

Bryant gets the advantage of a more instructive interracial relationship between Flick and Violet. On the way to learning that her inner scars are more debilitating – and curable – than her outer ones, it’s necessary for her to appreciate that there are other, more serious skin problems in life. Beginning with pigment. In the Betts story, there’s one other huge hurdle in Violet’s spiritual growth that we don’t hear about onstage: her use of the N-word. More of Spruce Pine needs to be exorcized from her soul than she realizes.

On top of that, this thin-skinned Violet is stubborn, too. As dynamic as Wolfe’s vocals are, her adamant refusal to believe that anyone besides her daddy could love her is the most startling aspect of Violet we must encounter. We recognize this trait in people we’ve met, maybe in ourselves. Violet’s stubbornness goes so irrationally deep that it not only prolongs her path to enlightenment, it obliges Crawley to pile on a flashback recalling a cruel prank that was played on her by her schoolmates.

Counterbalancing Bryant’s shyness and vulnerability as Flick, Vatske draws the luxuries of being the more cocksure and aggressive Romeo. Just sitting down to play poker with Flick and Violet softens us up to Monty, and confident as he is, Vatske keeps us a little in suspense about with whether he’s playing with the lass or serious. The way Vatske is playing him, you’re not sure whether Monty is sure himself.

This upsized Violet is a special boon for Henk Bouhuys, who draws two plum roles, the sometimes surly, sometimes avuncular Bus Driver and the charismatic Preacher. Never mind that that the Preacher is surrounded by a fervid Gospel Choir, both in the TV flashback and in Tulsa, Bouhuys dominates the stage with his fiery motormouth exhortations.

It’s awesome enough to make his backstage powwows with this pilgrim unexpectedly tender and poignant – a quietly dazzling reality check – and allows Wolfe to enlarge upon Violet’s devotional and delusional traits.

Unfortunately, on a big musical stage, Bouhuys’s dazzle and the decadence of Memphis nightlife tend to cast the flashback scenes between Young Vi and her Father into comparatively dreary shadow. To put it bluntly, when Tessori worked with the multiple Allisons of Fun Home in 2015, she had a superior book and lyrics from Lisa Kron.

So Spencer, Abigail Sharpe as Young Vi, and Nick Southwick as her dad are doing the best they can with the weak hand they are dealt here. It’s heartwarming to see the widower dad teaching Young Vi how to play poker in order to jumpstart her math skills. “Luck of the Draw,” blending this flashback with Violet’s cardplaying triumph over Monty and Flick, puts Sharpe and Southwick to their best use.

But these flashbacks, before and after the catastrophic accident that scars Violet, are also the best reason why we never see that scar on the face of either protagonist. It would need to be applied to Young Vi during the show, a fearsome hurdle for a makeup artists and stage managers.

The script and the dumpy cardigan sweaters the Violets wear supply a wonderful way to differentiate between the two. When we first see Wolfe huddled at the bus station and boarding her bus, she looks more homeless than scarred. It’s only after dark in Memphis, when she’s escorted to the music hall by two strapping soldiers, that Wolfe tosses her cardigan aside and shows signs of full-blooded womanhood.

Miracle of miracles, she becomes flirty!

Shouldn’t Gardner’s “A Small and Humble Erasure” Be Retitled – and Replayed?

Review: A Small and Humble Erasure at Davidson Community Players

By Perry Tannenbaum

As playwright Tracy Letts knows well, there are unpleasant truths at the heart of American life and the American Dream. “Sometime tonight, when the temperature of your home drops to a specific mark and you hear the heater come on because that’s what you’ve programmed it to do, remember that you live in a cocoon of comfort and safety because a lot of people who came before you weren’t afraid to get their hands dirty.”

Those clear-eyed, merciless words were delivered by the Mayor Superba of Big Cherry at the climax of The Minutes, Letts’ unexpectedly savage and sensational 2017 drama. The Metrolina premiere was presented last month at the Armour Street Theatre as Volume 1 of Davidson Community Players’ Sacred Places project. With a no less of an innocuous title, the world premiere of Stephanie Gardner’s A Small and Humble Erasure is completing DCP’s project – with a sacred place that hits closer to home.

Gardner has actually customized her script for Armour Street and for the members of the cast, directed by Michelle Medina Villalon. While Letts located his drama at a fictitious City Hall built on the blood of slaughtered Native Americans, Gardner’s piece reminds us that Theatre Charlotte is built on more sacred ground, over a cemetery consecrated for African American slaves.

And she tells us, naming names, just how this cemetery was “deconsecrated” and who was responsible. Mayor Ben Douglas and numerous councilmen are in the room where it happened, all of them white men from respected Charlotte families: Baxter, Hovis, Albea, and Wilkinson – with mischievous colorblind and gender-blind inroads in Villalon’s casting. Starting with the famed Mayor whose name is perpetuated on the QC’s international airport.

A future councilman, attorney John Small, introduces the motion at a City Council meeting in 1936, nine years after Theatre Charlotte had been founded as the Charlotte Drama League and five years before the Old Queens Road Barn celebrated its housewarming. By this time, Tom Humble had settled into his role as Little Theatre of Charlotte’s artistic director.

So the workings of this Small & Humble alliance give Gardner’s title a clever double entendre. Humble, at least, is haunted by the fact that his new fixture in Charlotte’s cultural life was built on the backs and graves of Southern slaves. Big Cherry, on the other hand, leans into their past desecrations after the truth is painstakingly revealed to them by a rogue councilman. Their actions are sensationally horrifying, while Gardner’s white folk are more decorously rueful.

Of course, there’s considerable satirical bite to Gardner’s concept, above and beyond the casting vengeance she takes on all the benign and virulent segregationists who are culpable for this sacrilege. An African American, Andrew C. Roberts, portrays both Mayor Douglas and plutocrat Harold Dwelle, and Amy Wada, an Asian American, is our narrator!

She brings us into the Myers Park homes of these benefactors, the Dwelles and the Myerses themselves, delving into the petty maneuverings of their estates. These include the hallowed cemetery and the adjoining Cherry neighborhood. Yes, DCP executive director Steve Kaliski & Co. could have easily called their pairing “The Cherry Project.” Interestingly enough, both Cherrys have insulting and racist slurs associated with their names as well as complicit Mayors in their dramas.

Making Amy Wada our personable and slightly stressed narrator is obviously an entertaining choice. But I’m not always aboard with the idea of actors behind her frequently breaking character and interrupting her – perforating and undermining the seriousness of her narrative, threatening to trivialize the history.

Getting Hank West, indisputably one of Charlotte’s best, to play Tom Humble is a similarly two-edged sword. Villalon and Gardner must have been sure that West gave the best audition, and he impeccably balances the Indiana native’s haughty elitism, his ambitions for the Queen Road Barn, and his conscience. But for those of us who have seen West’s work over the last four decades, it’s a bit of a hurdle disliking his Humble in the artist’s worst moments.

Clean-cut with mature Everyman looks, Mark Ariail is a fine complement to West as the conniving Small, the lubricant that connects Humble and Myers Park to the Charlotte City Council. We have a hard time labeling him as evil despite the obvious earmarks. Little Theatre was little, after all, and Queens Road was the closest the fledgling company could hope to get to the QC’s high-priced Uptown real estate.

Gardner seems willing to allow that the upstanding Charlotte citizens of the 1930s were shaped by their times and less eager than Letts to condemn and ridicule them for their actions and customs. But she does provide a second backdrop to the unfolding Small & Humble “erasure”: black folk who set the plutocrats’ tables and black folk who were buried beneath them.

Roberts is neither of these, but he’s useful in Gardner’s concept beyond his key roles as Dwelle and Mayor Douglas. He’s also “new” to the cast, so Wada can be explaining the history – and the colorblind casting – to him as well as us. Lowell Lark, when he removes the enslaved Harvey Foster’s bloody bandage from his head, becomes a somewhat comical Councilman Baxter when the Theatre Charlotte ordinance is passed, returning years and years later to haunt Humble and become part of Queens Road lore. When that happens, it no longer seems amiss that he doesn’t strictly conform with Gardner’s description of him as a 17-year-old when he died.

Myneesha King as Johnsie Foster, the Dwelle family housemaid, gets to be a sometimes-acerbic conscience for the great white benefactors of Myers Park – and she’s pretty sassy toward Amy, so it isn’t a demeaning role. King is also significant the living descendant of the buried and betrayed slave population distilled into the voice and wounded image of Harvey Foster.

Briefly, King can relish returning as Barbara Burke, the first African American to appear in a Little Theatre production in 1970. It’s Wada, though, who points out that this was three years after Humble retired. Then we hear the vanilla quote in our newspaper’s coverage straight from King’s lips: “If the whole world would say people are people and not what color you are, it would be a wonderful place.”

We do get along here in Charlotte, don’t we? Ironically enough, Gardner reminds us that the first play produced at the new Little Theatre, once the gravestones were cleared away, was Moss Hart & George S. Kaufman’s George Washington Slept Here. Talk about a whitewash!

The white women of Myers Park, bless their hearts, are at least ambivalent about what’s going on over at the top of Queens Road. Pam Coble Newcomer as family matriarch Mary Rawlinson Myers insists that the Negro Cemetery should belong to the Cherry community in perpetuity, but has neglected to ensure that her wishes are legally airtight.

Along with King as Johnsie, we empathize with Mary the most, especially since she’s confined to her deathbed. Newcomer is liberated from her bedclothes for two comical turns, becoming Councilman Albea and Little Theatre actor Jack Knell. Jack’s wife, Dorothy Knell, is also in the cast of the first show presented at the new theater in 1941, so Cat Rutledge completes the amusing little gender-blind episode.

Rutledge, like Newcomer, also gets to have fun at City Hall as Councilman Wilkinson, one of our proud city’s banking visionaries. (Is the notorious boulevard named after him? Yup.) She also comes out as perhaps the meanest meanie onstage at Armour Street, jousting with both Mary and Johnsie as Mary Myers Dwelle – or Mary II – as she helps push the Little Theatre initiative through City Council.

Perhaps because she also pushed through the first art museum in the state, The Mint, Myers’ aristocratic daughter is allowed to luxuriate in regrets similar to Humble’s. Aw, cut them some slack, Gardner seems to say. Better to simply mention The Mint, IMHO.

Volume 2 isn’t speckled with shameful or diabolical celebrations like The Minutes, last month’s Volume 1. Nor does it chill us like Mayor Superba’s cynical admonition, cited above. The best Humble can do is “I don’t know how to fix it.” Honest enough. Mary Dwelle is more pragmatic and resolute, asking us “Why should we have to leave town for our culture? We’ll build it here!”

Ninety years later, the QC is teeming with theatre artists who believe Charlotte shouldn’t be the largest city in the country without a regional professional company. They’re still waiting for that same Myers Park/Banktown resolve to lead somewhere.

Maybe Roberts, the newbie to A Small and Humble Erasure, has drawn Gardner’s most devastating line. “Excuse me,” he asks Amy, “am I playing a white guy??”

His disdain and disgust speak volumes.

Needless to say, it was a bit awkward to be driving back home on I-77 through Charlotte after this bold show in Davidson. If DCP’s collaborator, Anne Lambert & Charlotte’s Off-Broadway, could contrive to bring Small and Humble to this side of Lake Norman, it might find a bigger audience at the right place. With the potential of reaching the right audience and getting the right proactive reaction. I’d suggest a peppier title, like The Small & Humble Desecration, when that happens.

Davidson Community Players now performs at three different venues, adding Davidson College and the Cain Center in Cornelius to their portfolio over the years. What do you have, Charlotte?

It’s like this on the QC’s pitiful theatre landscape: Since DCP’s Sacred Places began last month, two modest professional productions have opened in the QC, by CAST and Charlotte Conservatory Theatre – both of them at The Mint Museum. Yeah, that’s how much local theatre building we’ve done in the last 90 years.

Poiesis Quartet and Charlotte Poet Laureate “Jay” Combine for a 7th Street Benediction

Review: The Poetry of Music at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church

By Perry Tannenbaum

March 22, 2025, Charlotte, NC – You can’t say that 7th Street Concerts isn’t daring – or eclectic. Just within the past four weeks, the series has presented music ranging from the 12th to the 21st centuries, Hildegard van Bingen to Sky Macklay, with a heavy dose of Baroque writing in between. The two programs were staged just above street level in the St. Peter’s Episcopal Church sanctuary and then upstairs in the meeting hall. If that range weren’t sufficient, the latest concert featuring The Poiesis Quartet layered on spoken word by Charlotte’s poet laureate, Junious “Jay” Ward: four poems written specially for this “Poetry of Music” event.

The back-and-forth between the outré string quartet and the 2019 International Slam champ worked better than the average churchgoer would have hoped or believed. At times, the spoken word was a welcome counterbalance when the mod string compositions grew chaotic, cacophonous, or weird, for Jay’s modes were predominantly cosmic and engaged, without any lapses in lucidity. At other times, when the music grew quiet, dreary, or repetitive, it suddenly dovetailed handsomely with Jay’s rhythms and musings as a background.

It’s hard enough nowadays to discourage symphony subscribers from applauding between movements of a large orchestral work, and the corporate smiles that appear on musicians’ faces during these unexpected intervals only compound their awkwardness. “Sure, we love it when you applaud!” the performers seem to be saying through clenched teeth. So it’s been praiseworthy, both at Spoleto Festival USA and now here in Charlotte, to see musicians and conductors leaning into the idea that there shouldn’t be any applause until the end of a piece, a cluster of pieces, or the end of a concert. We can all stay in the moment longer and go home sooner.

Speaking on behalf of the quartet, cellist Drew Dansby made the request while making his acknowledgements and introductions. The pieces, about 41 minutes in length on their Spotify counterparts, would be played without any significant pauses – and without any notice about how Jay’s four poems would be wedged in. As a latecomer who had missed two-thirds of 7th Street artistic director Kristin Olson’s welcoming remarks, I may have been more disoriented than the punctual ticketholders when Poiesis readied themselves for the third movement Scherzo of Béla Bartók’s String Quartet No. 5 (if for no other reason than the printed program said it would be Quartet No. 3).

Was Jay even in the house as he began reading “Stunted,” his first poem? Lurking behind my left shoulder in the corner of the hall, outside my line of sight, he began behind a music stand holding a mic. Coming to me via a loudspeaker, his voice sounded pre-recorded! There was plenty to distract us onstage, for Poiesis doesn’t merely sport BIPOC credentials: more than a dash of gender fluidity greeted our eyes, along with assorted piercings. The first violinist’s long hair and attire, for starters, initially made Max Ball’s gender a mystery. Not to worry, Ball switched chairs at least twice with Sarah Ying Ma during the course of the program, so both genders earned first violin laurels during the evening. Choices in attire – and pronouns, if you read the program booklet – underscored the freewheeling fluidity.

Bartók (1881-1945) had completed five of his six string quartets before Dmitri Shostakovich had completed his first, so he is undoubtedly the wellspring for the modern rep. The Tokyo Quartet recording of the complete string quartets has been my favorite for over four decades. Since vinyl and cassette dubs. In the meanwhile, I’ve heard spirited live accounts by the St. Lawrence Quartet at Spoleto Festival USA and by the Emerson Quartet at Aspen, the latter a two-night marathon of the complete cycle. So it was rather astonishing to hear Poiesis’ confidence as they attacked the difficulties of the Scherzo and savor their maturity in intertwining its acerbic lines and sustaining its odd Bulgarian rhythms. Later that night, it was quite astonishing to come home and read that the Poiesis violist, Jasper de Boor, was currently a student of Ayane Kozasa, a mainstay at Spoleto and a member of the revered Kronos Quartet.

The entire quartet was playing at that high level before veering off into terra incognita – four works, two complete quartets and two excerpts by composers who were all unfamiliar to me. The excerpted composers, Joe Hisaishi (1950- ) and Winston-Salem native Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson (1932-2004), were my most egregious oversights. To those in the audience who were new to the Bartók string quartet soundworld, Hisaishi’s “Phosphorescent Sea,” the second movement of his String Quartet No. 1, was no less enticing. A printed illustration of M.C. Escher’s woodcut (sadly, not the correct illustration) added further allure to the evocative piece. Sonorous harmonies evoked the oceanic calm and its immanent magic until Ball pierced through on first violin with harmonics that conjured up the bioluminescence, sounding at times more like a flute than a stringed instrument over the plucked chords of Dansby’s cello.

Perkinson’s “Calvary” quartet, built on the traditional African-American spiritual of the same name, was easily the most soulful piece of the evening – and among the pair that were most uplifting. Like “Only Black,” which had been interwoven with Hisaishi’s “Sea,” Jay’s “All the Colors” was less topical and street-smart than “Stunted” but more serious, meditative, and profound. The quiescent second movement Adagio from “Calvary,” with its moody dialogue between De Boor’s viola and Dansby’s cello, provided the most appropriate platform for Jay to be seated onstage at the center of the Poiesis Quartet. Better yet, after Ying Ma soared above the viola and the cello – with a part that could almost have been scored for a second viola – the piece comes to a complete halt, accommodating the poet perfectly.

In Many Many Cadences by Sky Macklay (1988- ), a screechy scherzo that yields grudgingly to a dyspeptic drone from the lower strings before all four members get hyper, was undoubtably the best piece on the program for Jay not to write a poem for. Described by the composer as “lonely, disjunct ends-of-phrases [that] eventually congeal and transform into new kinds of phrases and sound objects,” her best-known piece – the opener on Spektral Quartet’s Grammy-nominated Serious Business album – is militantly modern. Yet Ma and Ball were obviously having a merry time helping Macklay “stretch the listeners’ perception of cadences” until De Boor and Dansby could join the party. It would have been a hoot to hear this spray of sound cells and objects down in the sanctuary!

After Jay joined Poiesis onstage for the “Calvary” excerpt, it seemed like we were headed for an anticlimax as the poet left the stage and began circling the hall as the ensemble launched into their finale, String Quartet No. 2 by Eleanor Alberga (1949- ), the longest piece of the evening. With its many varied episodes, gorgeously stitched together, Alberga’s piece abundantly merited its length and earned our extended delight. Teeming with prickly sonorities and folksy rhythms, Alberga’s quartet perfectly bookended the program with Bartók’s.

Theatrically, it also solved the problem of how to follow Jay’s onstage powwow with Poiesis. “Growth” may not have been loftier than “Only Black” and “All the Colors,” but it was certainly more speechy and oracular. Jay recited rather than read this last poem, adding to his spontaneity and flexibility. He walked slowly toward the stage from our left when we heard his voice again, able to look across the audience as he declaimed. Most of us likely assumed he would join the musicians onstage as before. Instead, he backed away down the center aisle that split the audience while the music soared and slowed, reaching an equally unexpected pinnacle. Backlit by the stage lights, there was a bright aura around Jay as he raised his voice, before Poiesis concluded with a final frenetic flourish. It was a uniquely magical moment, as if the poet were giving the musicians his benediction.

“Look! Here you are, the impossible, tall in the midst of chaos— a rose, a bloom of color broken beautiful against a morning sun.”