Review: Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer at ImaginOn
By Perry Tannenbaum
November 22, 2025, Charlotte, NC – Okay, so Christmas erudition isn’t my thing. Thanks to the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, my familiarity with the biography of Jesus, from the Anunciation to the Resurrection, is sufficiently sketched out, though not nearly as complete as my knowledge of Moses and Joseph. My familiarity with Christmas and the Nativity comes mostly from network TV, the annual inundation of all media, neighborhoods, and supermarkets with the holiday spirit when the season comes around, various musical and movie masterworks such as Messiah and The Christmas Carol, and very infrequent visits to Christians’ homes when their trees were decorated.
All of this is to say that, until a couple of days ago, my ignorance of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was quite profound. Silly me, I thought “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” was simply a hit song recorded by singing cowboy Gene Autry that has haunted the airwaves and shopping malls since 1949. It wasn’t until Children’s Theatre of Charlotte premiered this past weekend at McColl Family Theatre in ImaginOn that I found out that Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was also a well-known story – and has been since the original song by Johnny Marks and story by Robert L. May was adapted for an animated TV special by Marks and scriptwriter Robert Penola in 1964.
Sam the Snowman, Hermey the elf, Mrs. Donner, Clarice the doe, Yukon Cornelius, snow monster Bumble, Boss Elf, Coach Comet, and the Misfit Toys were all new to me as the Children’s Theatre Rudolph unfolded. Only later was I informed that my own stepchildren had grown up on all of them. Maybe my daughter, too! Sadly, all this nostalgic family info arrived too late to sway my affections toward what I had just seen onstage. As much as I’ve always adored the Rudolph song – or perhaps because of that longtime adoration – I found that I disliked this precious and sugary musical.
Let’s begin with the costume designs by Kahei Shum McRae, so lovingly faithful to the original TV art. That’s a huge problem for me. Since cartoons and animation were defined for me in my childhood by what they delivered, ranging from Snow White and Batman to Bugs Bunny, Bullwinkle, and Hanna-Barbera, the advent of Claymation, Animagic, and stop-motion – whatever you call it – seemed like a clumsy step backward to me. Sure, the small-scale props and dolls cast 3D-like shadows, but they were as immobile and expressionless as dolls or puppets, plopping you awkwardly back into the real world.
Though McRae successfully recreates the feel of the old TV evergreen, he is hamstrung by that objective and all its cuddly clunkiness. Sam the Snowman seems to truly roll across the McColl stage inside his snowy skirt and plaid vest, and the puppeteers who team up to form Bumble are barely more terrifying than a jellyfish of similar size. To the rescue come youth and adult actors who can visibly inhabit McCrae’s costumes and give them energy and spontaneity.
Woke objections that have been raised against the tale didn’t faze me, though they likely dulled the edginess that director Christopher Parks could have brought to this production if he had defied them. Au contraire: Amp up Santa’s rejection of Rudolph’s shiny nose, the other reindeer’s bullying, Donner’s male chauvinism, and the fearsomeness of Bumble (a name change might also help) so that our hero’s sufferings are more in line with those we find in our favorite fairy tales.
Politically correct or not, triumphs over mighty evils are more satisfying than triumphs over muted evils that fade away as soon as they’re opposed. Forbidden to associate with his sweetheart Clarice and banished from his reindeer team and their games, Rudolph runs away instead with Hermey, the misfit elf who would rather become a dentist than build toys. Vance Riley has the perfect elfin look as Hermey, with a resemblance to Will Ferrell that plays well into the misfit’s wackiness.
But it’s Tilly McDaniel as Rudolph who best models why this live theatre Red-Nosed Reindeer, vapid as it may be,is so much finer to me than the TV travesty. Under her adorable reindeer jumpsuit, McDaniel is recognizably human – or venison – rather than clay. When the lovely Julia Straley, as Clarice, comes on to him with praises galore, Rudolph’s reaction is a cosmic blush: Rudolph’s nose suddenly glows, and McDaniel flies up into the air. There’s genuine emotion here, notwithstanding the slaughterhouse hoist..
On the other hand, I subjected myself to all of the Animagic version I could find on this side of the $8.99 paywall. Everything I saw struck me as painfully primeval and lifeless – you’d have to pay me far more than nine bucks to watch it all. Only a few snippets of Santa can be found in the clips and trailer I sampled, enough to firm my conviction that John DeMicco as Santa and Allison Snow Rhinehardt as Mrs. Claus are far more rewarding than their Claymation counterparts. Rhinehardt even adds some grace notes that give the impression that Mrs. C is pushing back against Santa’s grumpiness and prejudice.
Likewise, Carlos Nieto and Ericka Ross convince us that Rudolph’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Donner, have real souls instead of clay molds. You can feel that they’re genuinely worried about their cute little oddball offspring. Our host and narrator, Brandon J. Johns as Sam the Snowman, was geniality itself, establishing a fine rapport with the matinee audience and delivering “A Holly Jolly Christmas” with nearly as much avuncular jollity as its originator, Burl Ives.
Moonlighting from multiple puppeteer exploits, including the bodacious Bumble, Alex Manley gets his face time as the Boss Elf, so sunny that you never believe he really opposes Hermey’s dentist dreams in his heart of hearts. Richard Edward III drew two chauvinist bucks to portray: Coach Comet, Clarice’s intimidating dad, and Yukon, the flamboyantly superfluous gold-digger that Rudolph and Hermey meet in their travels. Kids of all ages seemed to delight every time Edward wielded his prospector’s pick-axe, particularly when we learned – or at least I did – that he wasn’t hunting for gold.
Reviews: Eureka Day at The Arts Factory and Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike at the Cain Center
By Perry Tannenbaum
Although conflict and chaos onstage oftentimes shock and alarm us, they can also be the springboards to comedy and satire. On balance, that is likely how you will experience the two new productions that opened last weekend, one at The Arts Factory on the JCSU campus and the other at the Cain Center up in Cornelius. On the heels of its Best of the Nest triumphs, Three Bone Theatre brought Jonathan Spector’s Eureka Dayto the QC for its Metrolina premiere.
Higher degrees of carefully crafted chaos here. And degrees of relevance the playwright himself never dreamed of.
Adding to Three Bone’s winning momentum, Eureka Day won the 2025 Tony and Drama Desk Awards on Broadway for Best Revival of a Play. Critics agreed on the revival category because it had tiptoed into NYC 6 years earlier at a 65-seat black-box theatre after its 2018 world premiere in Berkeley, California. More, much more about Berkeley in a minute…
Leaning on some Tony Award mojo of its own, Davidson Community Players has brought Christopher Durang’s Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spiketo the Cain. Durang’s valedictory was a Tony and Drama Desk Award winner back in 2013 – and a smash for Actor’s Theatre of Charlotte and its quondam artistic director Chip Decker in 2014. Decker, we will see, is the bridge between DCP and ATC’s Stonewall Street days.
A far wider spectrum of conflicts here, sprinkled with stretches of wistful ennui, and peppered with a mighty eruption. Hold tight.
For all of its QC Nerve glory, Three Bone did not fill the Factory on West Trade Street for its champagne premiere last Thursday. A bit of a black eye, methought. But the effervescence of the Eureka Day School principal and his executive committee under the stage lights easily equaled the bubbly that awaited us after the show.
Living in perhaps the left-est part of the Left Coast, principal Don and his Berkeley committee cohorts, all parents of enrolled students, can be expected to “model” an especially welcoming brand of wokeness. Their conversations will be properly framed, non-judgmental, viewable through multitudinous lenses, devoid of racist stereotyping and gendered pronouns, with plenty of spitballing and so much to unpack at every turn. Feeling seen and not being othered are watchwords for their woke happiness.
As the 2018-2019 school year begins, the committee is meeting in the vacated elementary school’s library, blithely colored with shelves full of books and proudly decorated, even during the first Trump presidency, with trendy progressive slogans. We join them near the end, when the plate full of scones is almost gone. All five of these adults in this kiddie-flavored environment are too energetic and engagé to be afflicted with malaise, except for the placid Meiko, who is perpetually knitting.
Yet they’re deliberating on a question that would seem to lack urgency now that the new school year has begun. Should the dropdown menu where prospective parents indicate their nationalities be changed on the admission form – or is it OK?
On such weighty issues, the consensus decreed by the executive committee’s bylaws is easily attainable. But outside this quaint kiddie nook, where adults look comically oversized, a crisis is brewing in the homes of two committee members that will tear the committee apart, along with the progressive free-thinking community around it.
Consensus or not, Eli is the most important member of the group, since he is Eureka Day’s chief financial backer. He is also, we quickly learn, carrying on a lukewarm extramarital affair with Meiko, veiled by their children’s playdates if their respective spouses are not around.
The secrecy of this romantic liaison is discreetly maintained, but the consequences are about to break loose when a mumps outbreak hits the school. Neither of the playdate children has received an MMR vaccination: Eli’s son because he was on a slow vaccination schedule, and Meiko’s daughter because she’s a staunch anti-vaxxer.
Meiko’s views align with those of board president Suzanne, while Eli’s align with newcomer Carina’s, this year’s revolving board member. The pathologically open-minded Don is childless, so he has no skin in the game when the committee reconvenes. A consensus trainwreck looms as the committee deliberates over whether to keep Eureka Day open and how. The pressure is on: a letter from the Alameda County Health Department goes out to all parents tonight.
Considering that the original Eureka Day premiered in Berkeley more than 18 months before the onset of COVID, Spector’s original script – deftly updated for its 2024 Broadway opening – was remarkably prescient. To vaxx or not to vaxx had not become a burning national debate during the 2017-2018 school year of the original script. That perspective is not altered in the 2024 revision, but what remains visionary is how principal Don and his committee decide to address their impasse.
Years before most of us had ever heard of ZOOM or attended an online meeting, Eli proposes a Community Activated Conversation livestream headquartered in the school library. As the committee huddles around a MacBook, we’ll notice that the “Welcome to Your 2018-19 School Year” sign has come down from the upstage wall, leaving a blank space for projecting the text messages from parents who have checked into the live chatline.
Eli and Don have envisioned all this as a wholesome Town Hall meeting where consensus will descend upon them all like a divine nimbus. Instead, some of the most hilarious chaos I’ve ever witnessed anywhere. Not only have Robert’s Rules been tossed into the nearest dumpster, but parents are not all compelled to remain on-task or on-topic. Dignity, decorum, restraint, self-censorship in Berkeley? Wrong address.
If you think we might have a problem tracking two media and two disjointed conversations at once – a problem compounded when two or three committee members are speaking at the same time – think about what director Tanya Bludsworth, lightboard operator Amanda Liles, and the cast have to deal with. On top of the intricately crafted chaos of Spector’s script (text balloon captions coupled with the committee’s dialogue through over 140 precisely placed footnotes), there’s an unpredictable downpour of audience reaction as the chaos intensifies.
Even without an audience, these are rough seas to navigate. Add us, and we had conditions that were impossible to simulate in rehearsals before opening night. Those of us who were there experienced – and participated in – something truly unique.
The unanticipated assault on the actors’ expectations didn’t seem to faze them at all. Although Spector appends special instructions in his script about how to present his amazing Scene 3, warning the production team in various ways against burdening the audience with sensory overload, when done right, the audience actually adds to the spontaneity of the performances we see.
If the actors can allow the surprises and shocks of the audience’s reactions to feed into the shocks and surprises they’re supposed to project at a Town Hall meeting where consensus has gone colossally wrong.
As moderator, mediator, Rumi fanatic, and deep breath/consensus advocate, Rob Addison, as the relentlessly conciliatory Don, draws the juiciest assignment as the hilarity peaks, totally losing control of his ideal modeling of community and redefining futility in his attempts to restore order and civility. Considering how pathologically woke and ecumenical this principal is, I’ll confess to harboring extreme schadenfreude when Addison’s sweet Utopia shattered.
Spector’s prime target remains consensus, and delightful to watch Addison in the crosshairs. But in a new episode added for the Broadway revival, we can see more emphatically that the Eureka Day principal has learned his lesson… and done his homework.
And whom would we rather see get her comeuppance than Donna Scott, Charlotte’s baddie diva as Suzanne? Yet it was likely Suzanne’s counterbalancing empathy, conscience, and vulnerability that drew Scott to this superbly nuanced role. Suzanne’s microaggressive bossiness and Don’s preternatural open-mindedness inspire the pushback that often brings the other committee members’ roles most vividly to life.
As Carina, Vanessa Robinson has the most uphill battle against Suzanne: newbie newcomer versus committee prez and Afro versus white. What juices up Robinson’s role, beside Carina’s zingers, is the opportunity for her to form a paradoxical intimacy with Scott, for Suzanne and Carina both misperceive each other. One of the supreme crowns of womanhood is their ability to apologize.
Notwithstanding her philosophical agreement with Suzanne, we see very early in Amy Wada’s rendition of Meiko that the board prez perpetually rubs her the wrong way. On the other hand, despite the wavering passion she feels for Eli, she is doubly in his debt. Righteous indignation and self-reproach obviously coexist at the heart of Berkeley life, and Wada has plenty of both to project. She seems to know how to knit, too.
After his luminous performance two years ago as Prior Walter in the QC Concerts production of Angels in America, you could rightly presume that Eli would be a piece of cake for Brandon Dawson. And it is. We get all the contours of Eli from Dawson, the conscientious benefactor, the adulterous lover, and the person who suffers most as a guilt-ridden father.
Eureka Day was a fairly lighthearted comedy in 2018. Recent history has helped it to gain considerable urgency, relevance, and weight.
In the long run, Durang’s Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike may turn out to be less of an evergreen than Eureka Day. Much of the comedy and impact mustered by the indolent Vanya depend on the contrasts between his elder Boomer generation; brought up on hula hoops, Howdy Doody, Snow White, and Davy Crockett; and millennialsbrought up on video games, cellphones, Avatar, and the Kardashians.
Vanya and his sister Sonia have basically tossed away their lives caring for their dearly departed professorial parents, who named them after Chekhov characters. Years and decades have passed them by, as they continue to vegetate and lapse into ever more laughable ennui.
Ironically, they replicate the chronic ills of the Good Doctor’s most famous tragicomedies, The Seagull, The Cherry Orchard, and Three Sisters. Will the blue heron appear on the pond today? There isn’t much excitement or suspense in the siblings’ daily lives, and they know it.
Thank heavens, there will be visitors, visitors as colorful as the siblings are drab. First to enter will be Cassandra, the family’s longtime soothsaying cleaning lady – and cook, if she’s in the mood. If you don’t know the Greek myth of Cassandra, Durang obligingly has Vanya explain it. The many prophecies and platitudes that Cassandra spouts seem to strike her by surprise in the daffy portrayal by Wandy Fernandez.
So even she can’t explain all she prophesies, chiefly “Beware of Hootie Pie.” He, she, or it is not listed in the cast. Nor can Cassandra pinpoint who must heed her warning.
In the middle of a languid reminiscence, Sonia suddenly remembers that her elder sister, Masha, is on her way. Unlike her homebound sibs, Masha has ventured out into the world and become a fabulous Hollywood success. Her career may be on the wane after being tethered to a wildly acclaimed action franchise, but her celebrity arrogance remains intact.
For those who remember the theatrical entrances designed to greet theatre legends with lusty ovations, this was one of them. Durang custom-tailored the role of Masha on Broadway for Sigourney Weaver, who was roundly snubbed by the Tony Award and Drama Desk critics despite her excellence.
Masha certainly doesn’t suffer the indignity of arriving alone. At her heels is Spike, her current boy-toy after five failed marriages, dispatched to retrieve Masha’s Snow White costume from the car.
At this point, it’s necessary to realize that we’re in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, down the road from the farmstead where Dorothy Parker had lived for about 20 years. An “extremely wealthy woman” has taken over the place and invited Masha to an exclusive costume party designed to acquaint her with the famous, literary, and important people in the area.
In her great benevolence, Masha has secured additional invitations for her interesting siblings and, of course, for Spike, who will lead Snow’s entourage as Prince Charming. The large garment bag that Spike has brought in – the man is ripped and, within minutes, stripped down to his tight undershorts – also contains Disney costumes ideally tailored for the future princess’s retinue: two of his best-remembered dwarves.
To Masha’s surprise, neither Vanya nor Sonia is flattered by the costumes provided by Hootie Pie. Aha! The prophecy! Meanwhile, Masha quickly has cause for further discontent. Near-naked Spike has been spotted down at the pond, dallying with a pretty woman who is decades closer to his age.
Nina, as forewarned by Cassandra, will pose a threat, but she turns out to be an aspiring actress who worships Masha, totally thrilled to meet her. How can they not bring her along to the costume party?
DCP director Caroline Bower gives Decker his second chance to design the Bucks County cottage, and he does not fritter away the opportunity to enlarge his concept for the wider, deeper Cain venue. This cottage, far more than the one on Stonewall Street, is worthy of neighboring Dorothy Parker’s acreage. It boasts a dimension usually overlooked in Charlotte set design: height.
Aside from the Old Barn on Queens Road, when was the last time you saw roof beams at a local theatre production in the QC?
The Davidson Community acting performances are also up to the high bar set by Theatre Charlotte, particularly William Reilly as Vanya. He absolutely blisters the climactic monologue when Spike proves inattentive to his new experimental play. Till then, Reilly is remarkably serene and stoical, gazing slightly upwards with the pleading look of a martyred saint.
If Vanya is wistfully regretting his unlived life, Valerie Thames as his younger adopted sister Sonia is loudly bemoaning and bewailing hers, more of a blatant riff on Chekhov’s suffering sisters. I’m not sure anyone has spoken more deliciously absurd lines since the days of Oscar Wilde. Without the slightest trace of self-awareness, Sonia declares that she has too much time to spare for reading.
At her exquisite worst, Thames has a spontaneous moaning contest with Masha, cleverly framed as an acting lesson in tribute to the celeb’s fading glory. It takes a lot of energy to compete with Masha’s self-absorption.
As the celebrated Masha Hardwick, Debra Allebach can’t share her siblings’ woeful regrets over their lost youths. Instead, she is desperately striving to regain hers via storybook or Hollywood tabloid romance with Spike. Yes, you can still have abundant energy in your fifties, blithely asserting you’re still in your early forties, and acting even younger.
But we can’t simulate actual youth. We’ve all seen some pretty grotesque facelifts that prove my point. That’s the agony Allebach must face up to. It’s rather sad when Vanya’s mighty monologue wakes her up. Until then, what a bitch!
Portraying – or is it modeling? – Spike, Vic Kuchmaner gets to prance around in the cloud where many of his generation reside, disregarding what’s happening around him to the extent of rarely logging in to real life. Reminds me so much of the self-proclaimed “teen idol” who portrayed Lloyd Weber’s Joseph at Central Piedmont ages ago.
Spurning Spike and latching onto Vanya as devotedly as to Masha, Nina is a sweet counterbalance to Spike and his charismatic superficiality. Emma Kitchin endows the nymph with a luminous simplicity that helps to clarify Durang’s deepest intentions. On the surface, it does ultimately appear that the playwright is siding with crotchety old Vanya in decrying the mindlessness of modernity and longing for the good old days with all their faults.
Kitchin’s enthusiastic attachment to Vanya and his work opens our eyes to another contrast that’s getting roasted: Hollywood at its worst matched against Broadway at its best.
Whether you head for The Arts Factory or Cain Center to get your comedy fix this weekend, you won’t go wrong.
Review: Charlotte Symphony Plays Respighi’s Pines of Rome
By Perry Tannenbaum
November 14, 2025, Charlotte, NC – Neither Maurice Duruflé nor Ottorino Respighi would rank high among composers that Charlotte Symphony subscribers most wish to hear. The orchestra’s previous two music directors, Christopher Warren-Green and Christof Perick, never performed Respighi as part of the orchestra’s classics series – he remained the province of guest conductors – and the Duruflé Requiem, after concerts by the old Oratorio Singers and Carolina Voices early in the century, hadn’t surfaced at all locally since 2007.
So a pairing of Duruflé’s most highly regarded work with two Respighi favorites, The Pines of Rome and The Fountains of Rome, didn’t figure to fill Belk Theater with rabid enthusiasts. Yet the sheer scale of the Requiem, calling forth the Charlotte Master Chorale under Kenney Potter’s leadership, made the Belk an obvious choice over the snugger Knight Theater.
Although our current music director, Kwamé Ryan, brought us Respighi’s Roman Festivals last spring, a guest conductor was once again on the podium for these more beloved Roman delights by the Italian icon. While a Duruflé-Respighi pairing will never be boffo box office, starting with the Requiem – which likely drew hundreds of the choristers’ family members to these performances – made the host of Master Chorale choristers onstage before intermission available to swell the audience for the Fountains and Pines afterwards. Adding to the electricity in the house, guest maestro Francesco Lecce-Chong deployed two groups of brass players upstairs to opposite sides of the grand tier for the final “Appian Way” section of The Pines.
Based on Gregorian themes from the Mass of the Dead, the Requiem sounded like the oldest piece on the program, though it was the newest. Fortifying that impression was the dominant role of the Chorale compared to the two soloists, mezzo-soprano Megan Samarin and baritone Eleomar Cuello. Most of us likely felt that Cuello’s noble bearing and vocals in the “Domine Jesu Christe” section were all too brief: even there, the choir had the larger share of the singing.
Samarin’s conquest in the middle “Pie Jesu” section, an ethereal solo, also seemed too fleeting, though here the Chorale was silent. Sampling recorded versions of the Requiem on Spotify and Apple, you’ll probably conclude that the orchestral version performed at the Belk packs more wallop than the organ scoring, which was probably the version that Carolina Voices chose 18 years ago at the Friendship Missionary Baptist Church. Another reason for the guest vocalists to make a more muted impression this time.
The fourth section, the “Sanctus,” decisively upstaged Cuello as Lecce-Chong rallied the forces of the orchestra and the Chorale together, but the baritone returned for a second cameo during the first half of climactic “Libera Me,” fueling the fires of the choral “dies irae” that followed. Somehow, the sublimity of the concluding “In Paradism” doused those fires. The beatific loveliness of the women’s voices certainly made for a heavenly arrival, yet the men miraculously eclipsed them in their visionary entrance, truly a mystic chorus of angels.
Instrumental excellence peeped in occasionally during the Requiem, chiefly in Timothy Swanson’s oboe obbligato for the “Kyrie” section, in bassoonist AJ Neubert’s “Lux Aeterna” intro, and in the exquisite welcome to “In Paradisium” from yet another principal, harpist Andrea Mumm Trammell. Even more play was afforded to the players in the Respighi pieces with all their resplendent colors and shadings.
Memories of hearing Respighi are invariably more sugary to me than the actual music, which under Lecce-Chong’s baton, especially in The Fountains of Rome, was refreshing and exhilarating – and, of course, effervescent. Neubert probably made an even stronger impression on oboe in his lovely, languid sketching for “The Fountain of Valle Giulia at Dawn,” with principals Taylor Marino on clarinet, Jon Lewis on cello, and Victor Wang on flute following eloquently in the same opening section.
The sunnier middle sections, depicting “Triton Fountain” and “The Fountain of Trevi,” were more impressively orchestral and brassy, Triton’s horn issuing an early proclamation at the beginning of his section and a rampage of brass, chiefly trombones, heralding midday at Trevi, Rome’s most majestic fountain. No doubt the audience was a bit surprised by the delicacy of the Fountains finale, “The Villa Medici Fountain,” and its sprinkling of percussion, celesta, and soft chimes, simulating a distant church at twilight.
My mind had first been changed on Respighi way back in 1997 when Daniele Gatti had led the London Royal Philharmonic into town with diva pianist Alicia de Larrocha. His rendition of The Fountains with the Londoners was sufficiently revelatory for me to place a rush order for Gatti’s recording of Respighi’s complete Roman trilogy, where additional revelations awaited: Roman Festivals and Pines of Rome were both more powerful, varied, and grand. Though The Pines had popped up on my calendar at the dearly departed Eastern Music Festival in 2011, this was my first opportunity to hear – and compare – Fontane di Roma and Pini di Roma in the same live concert.
With a feel as sure for Respighi as Gatti’s, Lecce-Chong’s performance was worth the long wait. “The Pines of the Villa Borghese” had a marvelous orchestral bustle before principal trumpeter Alex Wilborn was dispatched to the wings for the signature eerie effect in the solemn “Pines Near a Catacomb.” Even more quietude came with “The Pines of the Janiculum” as piano, clarinet, cellos, and a soft oboe anthem enhanced the magic. But the epic build and variety of “The Pines of the Appian Way,” seasoned with prerecorded nightingale chirruping and crowned, at the end of a satisfyingly long and majestic crescendo, with the outbreak of brass from the balcony, surpassed the grandeur of the Respighi we had heard before and joined the peaks of the Master Chorale as the pinnacles of the evening.
Review: Murder on the Orient Express at Theatre Charlotte
By Perry Tannenbaum
We can thank the Brits for the notion that passenger trains should run with absolute timeliness and precision. Now that Ken Ludwig’s meticulous adaptation has opened at the Queens Road Barn, we can also thank Agatha Christie, Britain’s most avidly read mystery writer, for her Murder on the Orient Express. Layer on Jill Bloede’s bubbly direction – and dialect coaching – and the treacherous trip rattles along with a savory continental flavor.
That soupçon of glitter and effervescence is greatly enhanced by Theatre Charlotte artistic director Chris Timmons’ fleet and fluid set design, an art deco wonder that transitions delightfully from an Istanbul hotel to a smoky train depot to the luxe interiors of the Orient Express. Since the landscape and snowscape outside the legendary train are also moodily conveyed by projections, it’s difficult to draw a precise borderline between Timmons’ scenic exploits and his lighting design.
While the paucity of professional theatre companies in the QC continues to account for the plethora of professional-grade acting talent we behold at the Barn, so does the opportunity to appear in opulent costumes such as those designed by Sophie Carlick – for hotel waiters, train conductors, and various glitterati who can afford a first-class sleeping compartment on a luxury transcontinental train.
Speed is beneficial in a murder mystery, especially as it plods along, contrary to real life, when we’re introduced to a multitude of suspects who have sufficient motive to commit the cold-blooded crime. Anyone who grew up watching the Perry Mason series on TV (or has binged on it more recently) knows the classic drill: the murder victim antagonizes a slew of enemies. So many enemies that we’re unsure who might have done the deed and more than mildly uncaring about the victim, no matter how brutally they were killed.
Ludwig admirably singles out our obnoxious victim-to-be and all the antagonisms he can spark while introducing us to Christie’s heroic protagonists, Constantine Bouc, owner of the Orient Express line, and peerless detective Hercule Poirot. There will be debate about Bloede’s decision to shitcan Poirot’s mustache wax and twirls in favor of a more conventional groom, but Brandon Samples’ initial entrance as the Belgian is star quality.
There’s a bit of aristocracy to Samples’ bearing that allows Poirot to fit in with his fellow passengers, including a princess, a countess, and a colonel. While Timothy Hager zestfully cements his repulsiveness as Samuel Ratchett, it’s also important for us to see that Poirot has sufficient dignity, discernment, and assets to reject Ratchett’s crass job offer.
Poirot also offers Samples a few brief episodes of befuddlement, for the culprit he is hunting leaves a blizzard of clues.
Unlike all of those complacent Perry Mason victims destined for the morgue and a court-ordered autopsy, Ratchett is keenly aware that he is being hunted. He’s willing to retain Poirot for a fabulous amount of money to protect him. Perry, you’ll remember, doesn’t arrive on the scene until after the wrong suspect is accused and arraigned. Here, Poirot is directly involved while the victim is alive. So when Samples shows no guilt or remorse for not accepting Ratchett’s offer after he is murdered, we’ll need further reasons for despising the playboy.
Christie piles them on and, in doing so, makes the bizarre solution to her mystery more plausible, for Ratchett is far more monstrous than he first seems to be.
Yet the elegance, hauteur, and glamor of the leading ladies would seem to instantly eliminate them from suspicion – or any close acquaintance with the vulgar victim. To think that Paula Baldwin as the Russian Princess Dragomiroff would deign to inflict eight stab wounds on the repellent Ratchett seems like sacrilege.
Likewise, Julia Howard as the serene and mysterious Countess Helena Andrenyi from Hungary seems worlds away from the slain playboy. The ethereal Gretchen McGinty as English governess Mary Debenham, also a smashing beauty, seems to live in an entirely different sphere, more involved with Scottish Colonel Arbuthnot (Ben Allen with a brash brogue) than the slain American.
As for Kathryn Stamas, as an esteemed actress traveling under the assumed name of Helen Hubbard, she is sufficiently brash, loudmouthed, and inconsiderate for us to worry whether Ratchett, trying to get some sleep next door and stewing with rage, will burst into her room and murder her. Murdering him would ruin her delight in riling him with her late-night singing.
However laudable it might be to murder Ratchett, three acts of God will prevent the ghoulish plan from eluding discovery: the unexpected arrival on board of legendary unraveller Hercule Poirot, the serendipitous intervention of Orient Express owner Constantine Bouc in securing a first-class compartment for Poirot, adjacent to the victim’s room. After these pieces are in place, with Bouc ready to serve as Poirot’s loyal sidekick, comes the fortuitous storm that halts the regal train in a snowbank out in the wilderness, giving Poirot sufficient time to investigate.
Bouc is obviously a key prong in Christie’s plotcraft, allowing Poirot to board the Orient Express and vesting him with the authority to investigate. Otherwise, our mustachioed sleuth wouldn’t be able to scan all our suspects’ passports or rummage through their luggage. Dramatically, he enables Poirot to interview all the suspects, another ritual of the mystery genre, corresponding to Perry Mason cross-examinations, that cries out for swift pacing.
The venerable Dennis Delamar would seem ideal for bestowing the requisite bonhomie on our gracious host and eager sidekick, except… for all his wholesome triumphs as Henry Higgins, Grandpa Vanderhoff, Kris Kringle, John Adams, Hucklebee, Jacob the Patriarch, and many more, has he ever done a French accent before? Maybe that was the question Delamar was asking himself on opening night when he uncharacteristically stumbled over a few of his opening lines.
Even for a semi-pro like me, those are lines you should be able to say in your sleep. Of course, Double D never broke character during his difficulties, so to neophytes in the audience, it may have seemed like the garrulous pensioner was stumbling over his English. Delamar’s imperturbability in this brief crisis only made Bouc more charming when he righted himself – and real panic was safely in reserve when the unsolved murder, right under his nose, threatened the image and prestige of his company.
Bouc also serves as a buffer between Poirot and the petty annoyances presented by our suspects, allowing Delamar to display his comedic chops. Samples, on the other hand, gets to revel in flipping over innocent façade after innocent façade in revealing the secret underbellies of his artful gallery of suspects. The parade of skeletons emerging from closets can’t help but add to our merriment.
So most of the actors on stage need to be adept not only in erecting their respective façades, but also in carrying off those deliciously satisfying moments when they are so disconcertingly exposed. Joshua Brand as Ratchett’s querulous secretary seems particularly innocent and above suspicion, while Emma Brand as the Princess’s trembling missionary ward is even further above. So pleasant when they fall.
Climb aboard this fatal train, and you’re likely to find the ride more fun than you expect.
A vampire visits a comely maiden dressed bewitchingly in black for Halloween. A werewolf goes to a special summer camp for monsters. A strange woman with a cloven head conspires with a mouse to murder an angel. These are among the seasonal dainties served up by Concord-based Post Mortem Players in Laugh ‘Til You Die, their second annual invasion of the QC, continuing at The VAPA Center through October 12.
Subtitled “A Night of Spooky Sketches & Songs,” this Charlotte’s Off-Broadway production is even more freewheeling and fragmented than last month’s Meet and Greet medley of one-acts at the VAPA Black Box. Eleven sketches and songs paraded across the cramped stage on opening night, but that number figures to fluctuate as the second weekend of the run rolls in.
That’s because the musical chores are handled by a revolving roster of guest artists. Last weekend, these included Cole Thannisch, Myles Arnold, and cast members from Post Mortem’s upcoming production of The Rocky Horror Show. Rocky, Magenta, Frank-N-Furter, Columbia, and Riff Raff will all be on hand to torment Brad and Janet up yonder in Concord, when the full Rocky premieres on October 23 at the Old Courthouse Theatre’s new Wilson Family Black Box.
Meanwhile, enough of the gang showed up in full costume to fill the VAPA stage for two of the ghoulish musical’s signature numbers, the dreamy “Science Fiction Double Feature” and the imperishable “Time Warp” dance orgy. The young lions and lionesses will return for two of the three remaining Charlotte performances. More adventurous and exhibitionistic theatergoers will likely opt for the Rocky visitation at the Saturday night special, which amps up the macabre mischief with a costume contest.
Most lamentably revolving out of the guest rotation will be Arnold’s rousing rendition of the “Oogie Boogie Song” from The Nightmare Before Christmas, a charming amalgam of Cab Calloway, Fats Waller, and The Grinch. Thannisch yielded nothing to Arnold’s exploits in terms of charisma, smoothest and most urbane in his golden jacket as the evening’s first vampire.
Director Alli B. Graham mostly had Thannisch and Arnold singing to members of her sketch cast, so the shuttling back and forth between sketch and song flowed quite naturally. Because Nicole Cunningham wrote three of the five Laugh ‘Til You Die blackouts – each of the three a screwball parody – there was a stylistic consistency as well.
After serving as a very willing recipient for Thannisch’s vampire advances, staged far too chastely by Graham for a Charlotte audience, Cunningham cunningly continued as a witch named Laura in “Cry Witch,” strewn with references and quotes from Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Laura seemed to be a Halloween witch rather than the real thing, married to Ryan: Dalton Norman dressed up as a fiery red devil.
The hellish secret they share is a piña colada-flavored pair of edible panties that was very unfortunately misplaced. Christine Hull, skilled at overacting in the grand Saturday Night Live manner, is the community’s moral watchdog and grand inquisitor, sending Norman and Cunningham into a nicely frothed panic. So refreshing to see a genuine witch hunt, isn’t it?
In a nicely gauged solo, Cunningham – in a costume that reminds us of an airline stewardess – welcomes us aboard a cruise along the River Styx with wonderfully plastic cheer in “Onboarding.” Since Gretchen isn’t getting off at Hades like the rest of us, maybe because she’s been there and back, she allows herself a certain amount of smug superiority mixed with her peppiness toward those of us who will stay the course. The rest of us, she serenely predicts, will jump ship. Not a preferable option.
Zaniest of all, Cunningham has penned the surreal “Cilantro and Old Lace,” where we encounter Hull once again as a cutesy mouse named Michelle and the creepy Bobbi Hawk as the cloven June, a somehow embittered woman with a meat cleaver embedded across her head. Whether or not it has anything to do with the blood-spattered cleaver, June holds some kind of grudge against the angel (or fairy?) Rhea, a precious and catty Norman in drag.
Yes, Rhea is irritating, but maybe not to the extent that she should fall victim to the deranged June taking advantage of her nemesis’s cilantro allergy. Cilantro doesn’t exactly replace the arsenic in the familiar – and similarly off-kilter – Arsenic and Old Lace. Cunningham serves the more iconic poison as a side dish.
The remaining skits are written by Andrew Pippin and Mortem marketing manager Kimberly Saunders. “Final Girl” by Saunders has arguably the least Halloween aroma of all the Laugh ‘Til You Die segments, though its ends with a fairly creepy twist. Dave Gilpin is both boss and job interviewer as Mr. Smith, eventually allowing himself to be coaxed into giving his own assistant – Hull already in her mousey mode – a crack at the opening.
Neither Cunningham as Candidate 1 nor Steve Harper as Candidate 2 earns an on-the-spot job offer from Mr. Smith before Hull gets her chance to shine in the spotlight. Harper charmed me more as the also-ran, so efficiently toting his portfolio and handing Mr. Smith his résumé. Graham must have been equally charmed in her director’s chair, for she brought Harper back for an encore immediately afterwards, clutching his portfolio for dear life as Arnold slayed in his Oogie Boogeyman showstopper.
Pippin’s “Camp Amamonsta” has as much Halloween seasoning as “Cry Witch,” with a pinch more plotting, swift pacing, and a delicious ending, though Graham’s staging is a bit stagnant. Hull is at her most fulsome as Kate, the camp counselor welcoming all her monster campers to their first day – fulsome enough for us in the audience to feel included in the welcome.
The opening day lineup includes Hawk as Vampire Bella, Norman as Jackula III, Marcella Pansini in the thankless sheet-over-her-head role as a banshee ghost, and the wondrous Harper as Harry the Werewolf, though you might perceive a lick of Cowardly Lion. Into this idyllic bliss, a scorned outsider will intrude: Gilpin as Dave. A human being!
Hull retains an all-you-kids-play-nicely airiness amid the hullabaloo as Kate when it turns out that Bella is carrying on a forbidden romance with Dave. Like the rest of us, Dave is confident that his beloved merely has cosplay friends rather than fearsome monsters. Truth is, the bully among the campers, Jackula seems more likely to chugalug a beer than gobble up Dave. Harry? He’ll probably follow Jack’s lead. Whatever.
To avoid all these threats, Bella manages to talk Dave into pretending he’s a new camper rather than an outsider. Dave, however, doesn’t discard his insouciance, playing along rather than realizing he’s in peril. Yes, Pippin’s playlet actually has a setup that he could extend as long as he wishes.
At present, that isn’t too long, though we encourage Pippin to have second thoughts. Meanwhile, there’s a nifty ending in his hip pocket.
If you put the full Concord production of Rocky Horror on your calendar, you will be treated to multiple helpings of the leggy Lindsey Litka-Montes as the Popcorn Usherette and Magenta. She vamped me pretty good in “Science Fiction Double Feature,” camping next to me in the front row before making her rounds among the paying customers.
I confess to finding her even more tempting than the popcorn.
Review: Little Shop of Horrors at Theatre Charlotte
By Perry Tannenbaum
Sunny, frolicsome, dark, and bizarre: it’s tough to say whether the best landing spot for Little Shop of Horrors is during the spring, that fragrant time of flowering hope and romance, or the fall, that decaying season of colorful rot and the macabre. All of the Metrolina theatre companies and colleges that have taken us back to Skid Row this century have chosen one of those two seasons for reprising Howard Ashman’s 1982 adaptation of Roger Corman’s cult comedy flick.
The tally among executive directors, department heads, and boards has been decisively autumnal. Judging by the full house on opening night last week at Theatre Charlotte, which previously staged Little Shop in the spring of 2008, I’d say that the movers and shakers at the Queens Road Barn have seen the light and aligned with the popular vote.
No other explanation for the robust turnout – or the rabid response – springs to mind. There was nothing novel or pricey about TC’s prepublicity, unless Facebook and Instagram are suddenly breakthroughs. Nor is name recognition a factor when you consider the director, the lead couple, or the choreographer.
Only if they knew that Kevin Roberge would be can’t-miss as Mr. Mushnik, owner of a perishing Skid Row flower shop – or that real-life dentist Nehemiah Lawson would be don’t-miss as sadistic dentist Orin – would people be flocking to Queens Road with raised expectations. And if you hadn’t seen their award-winning collaboration in Next to Normal down at Fort Mill Community Playhouse two years ago, you wouldn’t know if it was director Scott Albert who chose Peter Liuzzo as his preternaturally nebishy Seymour or the other way around.
Sometimes you need to listen to the vox populi, and sometimes you must try to blot it out. For me on opening night of Little Shop, it was both. My Apple Watch faithfully notifies me the next morning when sound pressure levels reach or exceed 95dB at concerts, musicals, or plays attended the night before. If the noise tops 100dB, the usual number of notices is one to three.
Little Shop smashed that norm, hitting or exceeding the 100dB bar 14 times, and topping out at an astonishing 115dB. I could see it coming when Liuzzo and Gabriella Gonzalez as Audrey, his newly-won sweetheart, merged their voices in the climactic “Suddenly Seymour.” Three doo-wop vocalists emerged from a tenement apartment door, adding glitz, glamour, and sensuality to the spectacle: Olivia Greene as Ronnette, Tia Robbins as Crystal, and Jessica Milner, a trio of rookies.
Then as Seymour and Audrey responded to each other, Liuzzo dug out his coming-into-manhood voice and began belting wildly. Not to be upstaged, Gonzalez, previously confined to the sugary “Somewhere That’s Green,” let loose with her piercing pipes.
When something is this sensational in a community theatre production, I often find myself weeping or sobbing. This time, my instincts had me clamping my hands over my ears in self-defense. Didn’t do much good.
Tinted by J.P. Woody’s groovy lighting, scenic design by Gordon Olson revels in the squalor of the skids with a doo-wop funk and loving detail that reminded me of Mad Magazine comic strips devoured in my youth. The era is the prehistoric ‘50s, when teens toted transistor radios to stay in touch with the Top 40, and Alan Menken’s musical score reveres those vibes as if they are gospel.
From Seymour’s nerdy sweater vest to Orin’s biker black jacket, Rachel Engstrom’s costume designs are also onboard with the ‘50s beat, with such an outrageous variety of looks for the vocal trio that you can look at them as district goddesses. Props, including a mini press camera and various-sized potted Audrey 2’s that double as puppets, are also a treat from Lea Harkins – plus Orin’s diabolical dentist’s drill.
Besides getting the right moves from his talented cast alongside choreographer Georgie DeCosmo, Albert’s stage direction fosters all kinds of synergies that pave the way for Audrey 2 to have the sleek looks of a garish concept sports car and the voice of a rabid boar. Named after his idolized co-worker, Audrey 2, the carnivorous plant that Seymour suddenly discovers during a total eclipse of the sun, has a special cunning, speaking only to Seymour to get his way.
The voice comes lustily from Toni “Aideem” Morrison, and the movements of her leaves and tendrils come mostly from a team of three unseen puppeteers. When the side wall of Mushnik’s Skid Row Florists slides shut to hide the store, a beehive of activity with puppeteers and stagehands is dressing the interior more and more lushly with Audrey 2’s foliage as the bloodthirsty monster grows.
By the end of opening night, that side wall had been dinged with cracks and bruises, and one stagehand, in damage-control mode, was seen frantically exiting at the end of a scene change. The tech perfection extended similarly to the sound: just one brief dropout assailed Gonzalez, and that’s all. Every note from the four-piece band led by Ellen Robison from the keyboard came through undimmed.
Except when the audience broke loose.
Aside from the original Audrey, none of the main characters is burnished with virtue. Seymour’s origins, though not otherworldly, are no less mysterious than Audrey 2’s, orphaned at the flower shop’s doorstep as a babe and living there ever since. His homicidal tendencies, awakened by the arrival of Audrey 2, prove to be benign when he has to pull the trigger.
Munchnik is no less compromised. Although he has opened his door to Seymour, the lad has always slept out front under the cash register. Until he overhears Orin advising Seymour to leave Skid Row with his newfound cash cow, Mushnik never considers adopting the waif or making him his heir. In the hard times, when Mushnik is on the verge of permanently shutting down his shop, there’s not a peep from him that indicates he has given Seymour’s future so much as a thought.
Liuzzo plays his side of this relationship with gratitude, servility, and fear, while Roberge as Mushnik can load up on scorn, exploitation, and intimidation. Nebishy meets nasty. With those considerable hits to Seymour’s self-esteem, Liuzzo’s timidity can extend toward keeping his feelings for Audrey hidden, especially since she is already in Orin’s firm and abusive grasp.
Framed by the threats of an insanely sadistic dentist and a man-eating alien plant with dreams of global domination, the mundane frictions between Seymour and Mushnik can seem comical. But the best comedy contrivance, preserved by Ashman from the Charles Griffith screenplay, is the mutual non-relationship between Seymour and Audrey: both of these sweethearts have good reason to feel unworthy of the other.
It’s pretty classic how clearly Liuzzo and Gonzalez venerate one another before they connect – adding fuel to the explosive audience reaction in Act 2 when they have their “Suddenly Seymour” moment. Roberge coming up on them and taking it all in during an extended smooch is a cherry on top.
Contrasting with all this bliss and twisted domesticity are the crazed, barbecued voices of Lawson and Aideem. Since the days of silent film, dentistry has proudly perched on the knife’s edge between comedy and horror. Thanks to this delicious script, Lawson gets to sharpen that blade more keenly by adding masochism. Not to worry, after Orin nourishes Audrey 2 piecemeal, Lawson returns after intermission in a series of cameos to entice Seymour with additional money-making opportunities.
Yet it’s Aideem who endures forever as Audrey 2, aided by a wonderful tech flourish in the epilogue. His bubbly vibrato is not the deepest I’ve heard out of Audrey 2’s maw, but it’s more than sufficiently low, spirited, and spicy. Aideem’s performance will likely draw another noise notification if you’re wearing an Apple Watch. The final bows certainly will.
Did somebody just say something about FREE SPEECH?? Yeah, about a billion times per second if you’re tracking social media, college campuses, nation’s capitals, and late night TV. Still no theatre critic we know would dare suggest in today’s torrid media climate that the subject generates too much heat and too little light – or that babble about free speech serves as a black hole for time and breath better spent discussing other freedoms.
Addressing the US Congress in 1941, Franklin Delano Roosevelt looked forward to “a world founded on four essential freedoms.” Useful, breathtaking, and a better way to spend January 6 than a subsequent US President chose. When I was graduating junior high more than a half century ago, those four freedoms were still on the curriculum, and my entire class wrote essays about them.
For the record, I wrote about FDR’s Freedom #4, Freedom from Fear.
One of the things we love about Afro-American literature is that their writers show us that freedoms worth prizing are as numerous as personalities – that those dearest to us are an uphill struggle to achieve. In Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, returning to the Metrolina area for at least the sixth time this century, every member of the Younger family knows the struggle from the moment they rise in the morning.
Now some of these struggles are fairly picayune, giving a homey warmth to Hansberry’s various yearnings for freedom that we easily empathize with. Take little Travis (Solomon Doleman), for instance, yawning himself awake with his mom’s help for another school day. The youngest Younger doesn’t have a room or a bed of his own, sleeping right before our eyes on the living room couch as the lights go up.
Hell, he doesn’t even have a regular bedtime, since we’ll soon learn that he cannot claim his place on the couch until Dad has finished scheming and schmoozing with his ambitious pals. Walter Lee and his son Travis may both be sleep deprived due to the drinking and scheming of the previous evening, but their first challenge of the day requires teamwork.
Otherwise, they won’t be able to visit the toilet or groom themselves for the day. As if out in the wild, the family must post a lookout on the hallway, so that they can seize control of the single bathroom that serves multiple families in their Chicago tenement. Then this treasured privacy must be passed along to another member of the clan. Yes, it’s a bit comical to watch so much family tension generated over so little. Yet this is part of the layout of the Youngers’ survival.
FDR’s Freedom #2, Freedom from Want, is also in the foreground as the Youngers’ successful capture of the bathroom plays out as a backbeat in opening scene. Looking at the Youngers’ apartment for the first time at Matthews Playhouse, we find that director Corlis Hayes and set designer Bob Croghan have pulled back a little in rendering the wear and weariness we should be seeing if Hansberry’s description of the kitchen-dining-living room were followed to the letter. “Cracking walls”? Didn’t see them.
Throughout the evening, there’s a similar shift away from the groaning and wailing tones you might remember from the last time you saw Raisin. That suffering patina has been natural for Raisin since it premiered as the first drama by an African-American female playwright to reach Broadway in 1959. The weight of ancestors hung in the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on opening night, and the fate of the race seemed tethered to the audience’s response.
Likely, at the tender age of 29, Hansberry didn’t view her rise to prominence with such solemnity. The heritage of her family and its struggles, including her father’s fight against a restrictive Chicago housing covenant, are in the annals of the Supreme Court and resulted in a Hansberry v. Lee victory in 1940. As seething, cautionary, and defiant as Raisin often seems, we can look at all the Youngers and see them as positive, determined, and aspirational.
Her banner is Langston Hughes’s 1951 poem, “Harlem,” and its main subject, “a dream deferred.” Hughes offers half a dozen prognostications of what might happen to it. Next to sugaring over, drying like a raisin would seem to be the most benign outcome.
Walter Lee’s dream of opening a liquor shop can hardly be deferred for more than a day, when his mama Lena expects a $10,000 check from his late father’s life insurance. Before he even has his necktie on properly, Walter Lee is lobbying his wife Ruth to soften Lena up so he can calmly present his business plan to his god-fearing mama. Ruth has other concerns: on the surface, it’s feeding her guys breakfast and getting them out the door.
Deeper, and still hidden from everyone else, Ruth is also considering the future of her family from her perspective as a mother.
Ruth’s worries and dreams do not align with her husband’s at all – aside from wishing him success. Two other dreams vie for priority in the family. The comparatively breezy Beneatha wants to go to medical school. But not right now. First, Walter Lee’s younger sister wants to start guitar lessons. Or to see what new revelations from Africa come her way from her new Nigerian acquaintance, Joseph Asagai, who clearly aspires to supplant Beneatha’s current beau, the starchy and monied George Murchison.
But the $10,000 check will be in Lena’s name, so what does she want? Here the BNS Productions’ dingy set is absolutely true to Hansberry’s spirit, for Croghan only provides a sliver of a window to allow any light in from the outdoors. It’s barely enough for Lena’s scraggly little houseplant, propped up with wee splints, to survive. Hardly big enough for more than a couple of Youngers to gaze out at the street.
Lena isthe Younger who cherishes the dream of Carl Augustus Hansberry, the playwright’s father, to live in a house that can accommodate all her family – along with a little plot for her to maybe grow a garden. If the best value for her money happens to be in Clybourne Park, a whites-only subdivision, fine: her family will certainly not trouble anyone else’s.
Such a rock! Yet Lily Oden plays Lena with a maternal softness, speaking her mind clearly, but never thundering like a prophet on a mountaintop. She does come off as old-fashioned in her confrontation with the godless Beneatha. The slap is still there, life-sized rather than the hand of God. While it may serve to compromise her moral authority, it emphasizes the intensity of her dream, coloring it with a determination to somehow repair and unify her crumbling family.
Along the way, we can feel that Oden has her recognizing that slapping and bullying aren’t always the best paths. That’s especially true in this Playhouse version where BNS mainstay Jonavan Adams is Walter. The way Adams gazes out at us as he articulates his dreams is a bit drier and wearier than most Walters we’ve seen, needing less of a gap to close before shedding his supplicating impulses and coming into manhood.
It appears as if he may let us down in the crunch, but Hayes gives him a life raft at a key moment in his planned capitulation to the white homeowners’ representative: a portrait of Walter’s father, “Big Walter,” hanging on an upstage wall. We see this – and Lena’s insistence that Travis remain in the room – working on Adams at his tipping point.
Unless you’ve seen Renee Welsh-Noel and her wackier exploits at Children’s Theatre of Charlotte, you might not fully appreciate all the nuance and texture she brings to Ruth and her strained position among the Youngers. She’s the bad cop tasked with prodding the menfolk awake, getting them fed, and off to work and school on time… the responsible parent who must deny Travis his 50¢ for school because the family can’t afford it.
Over and over, she is overruled by Walter and Lena, who can point proudly to Beneatha as the outcome of their spoiling. It’s almost as if Ruth doesn’t have aspirations anymore – until the breaking point when her yearnings and her resolve gush forth.
About the only flaw I found in the Regal cast (a second, overlapping Grove cast takes on all the morning and afternoon performances) was K. Alana Jones’s portrayal of Beneatha. I like how Jones plays and exploits the two men who are dating B, and the relationship with Walter is pitch-perfect. But Jones doesn’t seem to get how brainy and rad Beneatha is for a Southside Chicago co-ed in the ‘50s – or how full of herself and entitled she feels as such a progressive try-everything visionary.
The boyfriends for this BNS-Matthews Playhouse production are exactly as you remember them. Sha’Heed J. Brooks is delightfully starchy as George, the snobbish plutocrat who looks down upon Beneatha’s kin, particularly Walter, to his peril. By contrast, Dionte Darko as Asagai wonderfully captures both the exotic and the naïve aspects of the foreign exchange student. Yet with a worldly urbanity mixed with ancient wisdom, Asagai can effortlessly put Beneatha on the defensive.
With brisk pacing – and maybe some deft cutting – the production speeds by, the three original acts performed with one intermission. Yet Hayes somehow squeezes in the visit from the Youngers’ neighbor, Mrs. Johnson, whose scene and character has been dropped from every Raisin production to reach Broadway, including the revivals that featured Phylicia Rashad in 2004 and, ten years later, Denzel Washington.
Ericka Ross is quite obnoxious and brassy as Johnson, chiding Lena for buying into a white neighborhood and forecasting doom, even if she won’t convince everyone that the scene should stick. Bobby Tyson as Bobo and Henk Bouhuys as Karl Linder stand on firmer ground – and draw more dramatic assignments.
Nattily dressed in one of costume designer Emily McCurdy’s most stylish creations, Tyson is the only person during the whole liquor store scheme who doesn’t merely phone in. He has the guts to come by and deliver the bad news to his crony in person … and the moxie to show his irritation when Walter doesn’t immediately grasp how thoroughly they’ve both been screwed.
You’ll notice an awkward exit or two from guests at the Younger abode but none more heated or satisfying than the retreats of Mr. Linder, the Clybourne Park emissary. Bouhuys endows him with all the patronizing pomposity you might expect from an upper level Wells Fargo executive. Hayes strips Linder’s scenes of the buffoonery we may remember in past productions, where it might have seemed proper to boo and hiss his every word.
Bouhuys doesn’t bumble, but he does seem doubly non-plussed. He really cannot grasp why the Youngers won’t defer their dream any further when faced with the absurdity of moving into a neighborhood where they are not wanted – so not wanted that community has banded together to buy them out. Don’t they understand the arithmetic? By accepting Clybourne Park’s offer they could make a profit!
Or at least they could negotiate. Who are these maniacs that refuse to cash in?
What’s often overlooked in the onrush of the great Raisin in the Sun climax is how pivotal Walter Lee’s most humiliating moments are in triggering his turnaround. Yes, he stoops to Stepin Fetchit minstrelsy in furiously declaring his determination to ask Linder back and accept his offer, rightfully drawing Beneatha’s disgust. But Adams shows us that Walter has also seen the spectacle he has made of himself.
Auditions are a kind of interview, and interviews are a kind of audition. You enter, drop a résumé on somebody’s desk, and minutes or hours later, you exit elated or deflated. Instant drama. Singularly human. A paradigm of life.
At the VAPA Center, auditions and interviews are the entire evening for three weekends in Meet & Greet, a themed set of three one-act comedies produced by Charlotte’s Off-Broadway in the COB Black Box. Yeah, from the outside looking in on aspirants and applicants who have stressed for weeks preparing, strategizing, dressing, and grooming for the big moment or trial by ordeal, the denouement can be quite entertaining.
We can laugh our heads off at these overinvested humans and empathize at the same time. Imagining we were them or grateful that we are not.
Of course, there are perils for playwrights working within these familiar templates. Skirting predictability is the keenest, particularly if your audience has been exposed to sketch comedy over and over.
You can rest assured that each of the playwrights featured at VAPA contrives to make the familiar ritual different from what we expect, concealing at least one twist and surprise. Neither Susan Lambert Hatem’s Hamilton Audition nor Don Zolidis’s The Job Interview far exceeds the length of a typical TV sketch, so opinions will likely vary on whether they transcend the streaming standard.
Both of them have yummy roles for multiple players, so transcendence becomes less of a factor if you’re seeking comedy simply for escape in these dark days. The incontestable headliner of the evening is the finale, Meet & Greet by Stan Zimmerman and Christian McLaughlin – in terms of length, number of histrionic roles, and prestige. Zimmerman’s fame rests chiefly upon his extensive writing credits, most notably the beloved Gilmore Girls and The Golden Girls.
Meet & Greet clocks in at more than twice the length of most sitcom episodes. Between laughs or afterwards, you may catch yourself pondering why.
COB’s producing artistic director – and VAPA Center co-founder – Anne Lambert has her energetic hands all over this one-act hodgepodge, starring as The Director in her sister’s Hamilton Audition and (what else?) stage directing all that follows.
There may be an inside joke here. Do you really audition for the role of The Director in the play you have programmed by your sister at your own theatre? Do you think director Anna Montgomerie invited Lambert to play the role, or was the inviting done in the opposite… direction? Wouldn’t Lambert, not the shyest person on the Charlotte theatre scene, have leveraged some of her status – and experience – in determining how her character should be written and played?
We’ll never know, unless the saga of putting Hamilton Audition on its feet spawns another script. In the present instance, Lambert has invited the most prodigious voice in town to audition for the lead role in an all-female production of Hamilton, and the diva who has graciously consented is apparently the only person on the planet who has never heard of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s megahit.
More likely, people who come to see Hamilton Audition will not realize that Lambert was a co-founder of Chickspeare, which pioneered all-female productions of Shakespeare in the QC. It is not at all far-fetched to say that Lambert inspired the role she is playing as well as the play her sister has written. Posters on the rear wall touting fictional Chickspeare productions practically shout this in-joke out loud.
From appearances, you might conclude that Lambert is more out of her element directing a hip-hop musical than Nasha Shandri as Shondra Graves is auditioning for the role of Aaron Burr. Just you wait. Although she looks perfect for her dashing Founding Father role, Shondra gives a more atrocious hip-hop reading than you would dare to expect from The Director.
Comedy gold.
Amazingly, Shandri is supposed to be no less ignorant about rap than she is of Hamilton! Suddenly, the whole idea of a pioneering all-female version seems like a certain disaster… with fallout for females and minorities. It’s at this point that Graves and The Director probe the sexism that already lurks in the original gendered Hamilton. So yes, Hatem has put some meat on her hambone dialogue.
Whether or not Zolidis replicates that feat in The Job Interview is more open to question. The bio in the digital program, summoned by your QR code reader, states that Zolidis is one of the most prolific and produced playwrights in the world. Maybe the thuddingly generic blandness of this title explains why Zolidis was so previously unknown to me nonetheless.
Fortunately, his Job Interview playscript proves to be livelier and more imaginative. The basic premise, we will soon find, ensures that the sparks will fly. Both of the applicants waiting to be called into T.J.’s office, Chloe Shade as Marigold and Marla Brown as Emily, will be interviewed at the same time, adding the elements of confrontation and fierce female competition to the drama. For Emily, it’s already life-or-death.
If you’ve inferred that T.J. is eccentric and perhaps sadistic, you’re on the right track. Rahman Williams as T.J. doesn’t ask his applicants a scripted set of questions – or even the same questions. Deepening his aggression and moving us abruptly from interview to audition, he challenges Marigold and Emily to show him how they would handle specific on-the-job situations.
Not only might we say that the difficulty of the questions and roleplay challenges seems to be tipping the scales of fairness way off kilter, but we can also discern radical differences in the temperaments and preparedness of the two candidates. It would be impossible to find an aspect of Emily’s performance where she outscores her rival… aside from how desperately she needs this.
Now anybody interviewing for a job knows that he or she is already facing steep odds, but knowing that you’re outclassed during the interview is a special torture, one that permits Brown to go totally nuclear as Emily. On the other hand, Shade can play with the absurd and ballooning insult that Marigold, in all her perfection, is obliged to keep competing with this loser – and that the outcome still lies in the hands of this outrageous interviewer.
Rahman, in the meantime, gets to play with the disconnect between T.J.’s spit-and-polish military background and his high-level position at Build-a-Bear Toys. Three tasty roles, all well-done. During the run, Nicole Cunningham shares Shade’s chores.
Contrary to what you may be thinking while it plays out, Zimmerman & McLaughlin have aptly named their Meet & Greet. Take it in the same way that the four auditioning actresses do and ride the rollercoaster. To make it all tastier, two of the four have a history together, co-starring long ago during better days on a hit sitcom, Lane Morris as the embittered psycho Belinda and Stephanie DiPaolo as the bimbo Teri.
For my generation, I was thinking Joyce DeWitt and Suzanne Sommers from Three’s Company, but you might hear different echoes. Teri is the airhead who tends to spoil everything, or she is deeply misunderstood and cruelly typecast. Bubbling and pouting seem to be her main forms of expression. Also in the room before Teri’s majestic entrance is Marsha Perry as Desiree White, with some sort of acting experience as the star of the “Real Housekeepers of Palm Beach” reality show.
Contrasting nicely with Desiree and her leopard-skin bodysuit is Joanna Gerdy as the splendiferously monochromatic Margo Jane Mardsden, who has fallen from her regal perch as living Broadway legend due to a combo of drink and disgrace. Being among this gaggle, especially the déclassé Desiree, is already a devastating humiliation.
Yet as we can hear as they emerge from their auditions, both Desiree and Margo are spectacularly successful in their auditions for the role of Andrea, the leading lady of an upcoming series pilot. Leopard Skin draws uproarious laughter from the sanctum within before Diva Nun draws a thunderous ovation. Which one do the showrunners, producers, and writers inside actually prefer?
Every word that Tommy Prudenti utters as the Casting Assistant is a tantalizing clue to what the show and Angela will be, and there is a girlish coyness about him… and a deceptive servility. All through this epic catfight showdown, Zimmerman’s Golden Girls pedigree is on display in a blizzard of quips, taunts, and one-liners. We shall only divulge the maestro’s recipe for “sidewalk pizza” here: you jump out the window of a tall city building.
Depending on how well you adapt Jane Austen’s most beloved novel, Pride and Prejudice,the result on stage or screen can range from Hallmark saccharine to comedy grandeur. At their best, adaptations of recognized classics revel in their new media, rivaling Fiddler on the Roof onstage, High Society onscreen, or Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro at the opera house.
Results with P&P largely reflect how deeply a screenwriter or a playwright savors the perfections and delights of Austen’s narrative, dialogue, and wit… and how well he or she channels and tweaks the author’s temperament. What’s most daunting in 2025, more than two centuries after Pride and Prejudice was first published, is the sheer number of adaptations, good and bad, that already exist.
Back in the world of books, a welter of variants and sequels to Pride and Prejudice flourishes, from Austen copycats to audacious apostates who lavish fresh condiments, such as vampires and zombies, onto the original. Onstage and in musicals, the onslaught hasn’t been so fierce, but new acolytes have plenty of TV versions – around 25 – strewn onto their path to Broadway, which most recently had a musical based on the Austen classic, First Impressions, in 1959.
To their credit, Lindsay Warren Baker and Amanda Jacobs took a different path to retelling Pride and Prejudice in their new musical, AUSTEN’S PRIDE. Their visionary concept has Austen, prodded by her sister Cassandra, rewriting an earlier draft from years before, titled First Impressions, and turning it into her beloved chef d’oeuvre right before our eyes.
Recast into a theatrical idiom, with Austen’s characters also offering their input, the musical plays like the rehearsals and development of a new stage work. Austen, vivaciously played by Olivia Hernandez at the Knight Theater in Charlotte, becomes an active, sometimes hyperactive collaborator with characters onstage, like a director or a playwright with her players.
Since Baker & Jacobs have ordained that Austen herself evolves and develops during the process as much as the story itself, Austen supplants her sassy and superb Elizabeth Bennet as our protagonist. Or does she? Behind the scenes, director Igor Goldin decides how much time Hernandez spends onstage in close proximity with Delphi Borich as Elizabeth – and how often she will upstage her by reacting.
Hernandez gets a vast catalog of reactions to call upon: various smiles, gasps, and interactions with Austen’s manuscript, whether it’s jotting things down, feverishly crossing things out, or just pondering, hesitating, and deciding. It’s easy to become captivated with Hernandez’s full repertoire – and to welcome reprises of her greatest hits – but, churlish as it might be to say it, Goldin should be holding her back more than he is.
If you happen to love Austen’s masterwork, Hernandez’s presence infuses her creators’ concept with surprising magic. Example: as she stalked the big proposal scene in Act 1, where Darcy and Elizabeth approach each other from opposite wings, I found myself sobbing before their impassioned dialogue even began. Somebody on the Knight Theater stage seemed to be sharing my reverence for what was about to happen.
While Hernandez becomes a wee bit repetitious, we could definitely benefit from seeing a more fine-grained development of Borich’s evolution as Elizabeth from wit to wisdom. That would push back a little on Baker & Jacobs’ intentions, true enough, but it would also narrow the gap between the ceilings they have placed on Borich’s and Hernandez’s performances. Fine as Borich is in navigating Elizabeth’s misperceptions and epiphanies, Hernandez is diva class, exactly right for a midlife Austen seeing herself as a brilliant young Elizabeth in her rearview mirror, more beguiling but less mature.
Without pedantry, Elizabeth is teaching Austen while the author does the hard work: crafting Elizabeth and her world. Austen’s yearnings, worries, and epiphanies all get more urgency from Baker & Jacobs and more power from Hernadez’s glorious larynx. Her best notes pierce our hearts more than our ears.
Some of Pride’s impact derives directly from Austen’s text: the language of Elizabeth’s letters, the dialogue of Mr. Darcy’s first and second marriage proposals, and the most memorable snippets from Mom and Dad. But some of the deftness that Baker & Jacobs bring to the task of distilling the triple plot of P&P for the stage is discernible in the music they make together.
They bring out Kevyn Morrow as Mr. Bennet more than we expect in a musical with “Silly Girls,” a conspicuously Tevye-the-Dairyman moment, and they give Dan Hoy extended play as Fitzwilliam Darcy at precisely the right moments. Hoy not only finds the nuances of the nobleman’s arrogance and humanity with admirable exactitude, he reminds us that this role – and that of Heathcliffe – were deemed by Hollywood to be the rightful property of Laurence Olivier.
Yet there are elements of Austen’s Pride that are laudably free of pretension, leaning away from Broadway glitz toward chamber-music decorum and perfection. The pit band at this Knight Theatre production numbers only nine players, including music director Kerianne Brennan at one of the keyboards.
Scenery by Josh Zangen is equally elegant and spare. Windows in Austen’s study, accented simply with glowing potted flowers, fly upwards when we transition to her novel-in-progress. When we need to conjure up the splendor of Bingley’s Netherfield estate, a chandelier drops down to simulate his glittery ballroom.
Emily Rebholz not only makes Darcy and the dudes manly with her costume designs, she also distinguishes beautifully between the decorous Bennet sisters and the more matronly/professional Austens. When Kate Fahey, as the frivolous and flirtatious Lydia Bennet, attempts to tempt Darcy’s longtime acquaintance, dashing militiaman George Wickham, only four more redcoats need to be sewn to conjure up his regiment for “I Can’t Resist a Redcoat.”
The frilliest Rebholz creations are reserved for Austen’s most high-strung women, Elizabeth’s irrepressibly vulgar and mercenary mom and Lady Catherine de Bough, Mr. Darcy’s imperious aunt. Sally Wilfert makes a hearty meal of both of these delicious witches, as marmoreal and severe as Lady C as she is fidgety and flighty as Mrs. B., singing “My Poor Nerves” in her dopier chores.
Three other players fend off idleness by playing multiple roles, helping Rebholz to put further limits on her fittings. When not overshadowed by Lydia as her sister Kitty, Cali Noack transforms into Georgiana, Darcy’s younger sib. After shining as the hilariously awkward and pretentious Mr. Collins – whose marriage proposal to Lizzy must be declined without laughing in his clergyman’s face – Paul Castree radiates the dignity and urbanity of Mr. Gardiner.
Before strutting beside Castree as the decorous Mrs. Gardiner, Sarah Ellis has a couple of more provocative turns, first as Mary Bennet, the most bookish and moralizing of Lizzy’s sisters, and then as Caroline Bingley, notable for her three “My Dearest Jane” cameos to Elizabeth’s long-suffering elder sister – and the eye-popping color of that dress.
Jane isn’t the easiest or plumiest role to play, asking Addie Morales to be both modestly discreet and passionately adoring when Charles Bingley pays her his attentions. Morales tips the balance between these two postures so obviously that her amorousness can no doubt be seen from the balcony. While that does compromise the quality of Darcy’s perceptions on behalf of his friend, Cole Thompson endows Bingley with such wholesome and abundant cluelessness – and such lanky Ichabod Crane ungainliness – that their comedy works nicely.
Although the role is not included on the cast list or the who’s-who bios, Dianica Phelan gives us a fine, albeit brief, portrayal of the pragmatic Charlotte Lucas, who accepts her friend Lizzy’s discard, Mr. Collins, for her husband. Mostly, Phelan portrays Austen’s sister Cassandra. So after joining with Hernandez in “Choices,” the opening duet concerned with how to exhume First Impressions and follow up on the success of Sense and Sensibility, she’s there on two fronts to consider women’s choices in Austen’s life and in her signature novel.
The feminist tang so easy to overlook in Austen’s work gracefully surfaces as these circumscribed choices are doubly aired. While Charlotte and Elizabeth are discussing the merits of marrying for love against marrying for security, their author and her sister, Cassandra, are debating the matter with a little more heat and real-life experience.
That’s one of the reasons Austen’s Pride delivers extra boosts of relevance and drama in Baker & Jacobs’ adaptation, along with its tuneful novelty. This fresh take on Pride and Prejudice, deftly balancing comedy and romance, is ready for primetime and its Broadway aspirations, with room left over for further developing its scenic dimensions and tech adornments.
Would it rub you the wrong way to be solicited by a beggar selling candies outside your favorite theater? What if we add a tramp handing you your tickets, then a drunk, a druggie, a streetwalker, and a guy hawking fake Rolexes for six bucks lining the path to your seats? Welcome to experiential theatre at the Arts Factory on West Trade, where Cormac McCarthy’s THE SUNSET LIMITED is rounding the bend into its second weekend.
Or if you’re already fondly familiar with how Carolina Actors Studio Theatre means to do things, welcome back to the good old days.
CAST artistic director Michael Simmons doesn’t merely content himself with just these genial Skid Row stereotypes. No, no, no, for then your experience would normalize as soon you entered the theater.
Not so fast, for Simmons’ rather fiendish set design has at least six walls. After you enter the theater doorway, you need to wind around a cruddy corridor to reach another doorway that leads into the shithole apartment where McCarthy’s action takes place. This is absolute brilliance from Simmons, since the seediness of our host’s life helps to balance the to-be-or-not-to-be debates to come.
This point gets double-underlined when our host, a hulking Black ex-con, triple locks his front door behind his reluctant – and relatively puny – white guest. Subtly, something may click instinctively in us as we hear the clank of the locks. We are locked in this space for the duration of this debate, and the longer we linger, the more forceful White’s arguments become that Black’s life is cramped, sordid, and futile. We’ve gotten a taste.
It’s director Dee Abdullah who layers this emphatic entrance for Zach Humphrey onto the script, a nice touch. McCarthy also tips the balance of the debate in this harrowing direction, for Thom Tonetti as White is armed with more age, experience, education, wealth, and endowed with a professorial intellect.
In a jumpsuit designed by Abdullah, Humphrey appears to have more keys and tools dangling from him than locks on his doors – as if he’s a janitor or a subway worker. That’s where Humphrey saved Tonetti from jumping in the path of an oncoming train, catching him and carrying him home.
If Tonetti stays too long, his rescue becomes a kidnapping, and Humphrey seems to understand there’s a time limit on how long he can hold his suicidal guest against his will. His main intellectual artillery is the Holy Bible, bolstered by his faith, which he frequently brandishes if he’s not thumbing through it. Trying to preach this book to the local drunks, derelicts, and druggies hasn’t yielded any positive results – and he’s been at it long enough that The Greatest Book Ever Written engraving has worn off its cover.
Without a doubt, Humphrey has the more urgent, desperate, and anguished role, especially when Tonetti rubs his nose in his past and present failures – and the squalor surrounding them both. At his most fragile moments, we see Humphrey processing the devastating irony that he has admirably served his time, licked his wounds, and freed himself from one prison only to lock himself in another.
(McCarthy called his players Black and White in his 2006 script, subtitled “A Novel in Dramatic Form,” but those names are absent from the actual dialogue and the CAST playbill.)
One of the reasons we manage to like Humphrey more is his ability to admit, no offense to Jesus or Scripture, that he is intellectually overmatched. Teaching should trump preaching since it’s fortified with facts and knowledge. Won’t it simply hurt horribly when the Sunset Limited rams into him? No, Tonetti calmly responds, at 70mph, the train would outspeed his neurons.
If we press the pause button here, we can scrutinize a telling moment, for Tonetti – (and maybe McCarthy) has miscalculated. Trains don’t ever speed past train platforms at 70mph, needing to decelerate and accelerate before they’re gone. And if McCarthy had only had the luxury of a Google Hub a couple of decades ago, he could have ascertained that the max speed for MTA subway cars is 55mph.
So Tonetti has an extra psychological advantage: when he starts spouting facts – real, imagined, or fabricated – Humphrey will not contradict him. Yes, he does have all the time in the world to throw himself in front of the Sunset Limited, so he can remain calm and keep his cards close to the vest. If he maintains his resolve, whether combatively or cordially, he will prevail. He even realizes that he can spare the time for a cup coffee of and a bite to eat.
Heightened emotions from Tonetti spill out when he is most tellingly challenged and when he swerves to the counterattack. We may be hoping that Humphrey goads him sufficiently to spew out all the venom, hatred, resentment, and bitterness that lurks inside him, resulting in some sort of cleansing purgation. Or exorcism, since a dilapidated bible is ready-to-hand.
As it turns out, Tonetti has had too little connection with other humans for oceans of accumulated bile to come cascading out of him. Maybe he’s only metaphorically a professor! There is an enervated numbness to Tonetti that makes his sudden outbursts all the mightier.
It’s all a conspiracy, for we must factor in how Simmons has configured his black box into a thrust staging. The thrust of the compacted performance space, extending from Humphrey’s kitchen to his triple-locked door, implicates us all as it heightens our involvement.
When telling his gory prison tale of intense violence and grim survival, he was looking straight at Tonetti… and me right behind his left shoulder! And when I viewed both men sitting close to me in profile, I couldn’t help glimpsing how audience members in two other sections were reacting.
Yeah, it’s intense but sometimes a little comical. Face it, since the days of Socrates and Plato, any philosophical or existential dialogue will have its circular, tedious, or repetitive patches. You’ll be seeing smiles from other people across the way, some deeply pondering expressions, and the occasional blank wearied stare.
For me, that added to the experiential realism of my evening and enhanced my involvement.
Art on My Sleeve 