Category Archives: Theatre

Hohenstein Gets Greedier in His Second Go-Round With “Peter and the Starcatcher”

**Review: Peter and the Starcatcher at Matthews Playhouse**

By Perry Tannenbaum

July 12, 2025, Matthews, NC – Though their names are similar and they’ve both written about Peter Pan, the temperamental gap between James M. Barrie and Dave Barry would seem to be as wide as oceans. Barrie created Peter in 1904 as an embodiment of eternal youth and the spirit of noble adventure. A century after Peter made his stage debut (played by a woman, of course), Barry teamed up with Ridley Pearson to write a novel-length prequel, Peter and the Starcatchers, keeping the non-fantasy base of the story in Victorian England while snatching Neverland from up among the stars and plopping it down on an earthly ocean.

What Rick Elice seems to have done, in returning the Barry-Pearson preteen page-turner to its stage origins, is to worshipfully replicate all the seagoing pirate action of Starcatchers along with Barry’s choicest quips. Then to supercharge the effect, Elice seems to concentrate it all so that it flies by in a blizzardy blur, all the more frenetic because scenery is stripped so bare – people become doors, ropes become ocean waves, and flag streamers are crocodile teeth – that we’re exercising sizable hunks of imagination to fill out what’s actually happening before our eyes.

Barrie fairies were jubilantly diced and desecrated by Barry’s mischief and mirth: or so it seemed the first three times I saw Elice’s Peter and the Starcatcher – on Broadway, on tour, and at Theatre Charlotte, directed by Jill Bloede. Having read Barry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning humor pieces for decades, I was so sure of my familiarity with America’s beloved joke-and-quip machine that I never bothered to read a single page of his Starcatchers. My naïve conclusion was that Elice had simply let the Barrie-Barry mashup work its magic with as little intervention – and budget – as possible.

My fourth encounter with Starcatcher at Matthews Playhouse, once again directed by Bloede, helped to enlighten me. In her previous work with the script, the evanescence of the budding relationship between Peter and Molly Aster – and the poignancy of their parting – felt more touching to me than previously. That’s significant compensation for anyone who adores Barrie’s original story, whose magic can seem drowned in humor, wit, and shtick when first encountering Starcatcher.

This time around at Matthews Playhouse, another thematic thread struck me for the first time: Elice’s orphaned Peter reaches puberty without ever having a first or last name. By now, it will only come with his consent. At the other end of the moral spectrum, Black Stache has been searching throughout his pirate career for a hero antagonist who will perpetuate his fame.

So their first grand meeting and tussle have biblical Israel-Angel proportions and consequences, or Robin Hood-Little John echoes if you prefer a secular, literary parallel. Two combatants become permanently linked and one of them emerges with a new name. Bloede’s staging here, when Peter gets his name from Stache – and later when Pan is added on – brought a new aura to those moments.

That’s what sent me to the web in search of Barry-Pearson’s actual text. Elice’s wit and humor seemed to chime with the belly laughs Barry’s newspaper columns repeatedly deliver. But is the class clown who grew up no less jokey truly capable of such yiddishe flavor and mythic depth? My suspicions were confirmed in the very first sentence of Barry’s saga: it already includes Peter’s name! An even more amazing revelation awaits if we read on. The jokey Barry tone we know and love is nowhere to be found in the opening chapters we can sample at Amazon. Instead, Barry and Pearson were following along on the dark gallows humor path that Lemony Snicket had pioneered with his Series of Unfortunate Events books for kids.

Deep breath. In my previous reviews of Starcatcher, I repeatedly gave Barry too much credit and blame for what I had seen and much too little to Elice. Both the jokiness and the mythic dimensions of Starcatcher can be credited to Elice – with additional bravos for how thoroughly he convinces us that this is how Barry would tell the origin story of Peter Pan.

Meanwhile, community theatre in Davidson, Charlotte, and Matthews continue to reap the dubious benefit of having so little professional-grade theatre in the Queen City. What a cast Bloede has assembled! Before the show began, representatives from the North Carolina Theatre Conference presented artistic director Sarah Bumgardner with their Theatre of the Year Award for 2024. So the folks backstage with their costumes on, waiting overtime for the ceremonies to conclude, were obviously under extra pressure to deliver. Even Bloede was nervous!

No matter how good your cast is, there’s plenty of stage business to be nervous about in running Starcatcher.Actors must move all the props and furniture around and keep track of all the many Yvette Moten costumes they must find and change in and out of as we move from a London dock to two sailing ships to a faraway island with a beach, a mountain, and a jungle. Stage manager Jessie Hull had to be preternaturally adept. Molly must float in the air. Peter and some nameless alley cat must fly. A lot going on while the quips shoot out at us, many of them newly minted to mock Myers Park and nearby country clubs.

Nearly all of these players were newcomers to Starcatcher, beginning with Joshua Brand as Peter and Emma Brand as Molly, presumably arriving on the Fullwood Theater stage with ready-made chemistry. Their boy-girl antipathy is no less charming than their tentative stabs at intimacy, and both can seem fueled by the promise of adventure and ignited by its thrill. The only holdover from Bloede’s 2018 cast is Johnny Hohenstein, who in bygone days crossdressed to portray Mrs. Bumbrake, Molly’s flirtatious nanny.

With even more liberties, including more than a slight leftover effeminacy from Bumbrake, Hohenstein burst into full flower as the carnivorous Black Stache, heartily devouring the scenery in Stache’s emblematic amputation scene. His eyes shone greedily as he attacked the hambone bits, and yet a queer kind of avuncular calmness came over him as he finally met his predestined antagonist and named him. For some reason, Hohenstein drew the only problematic microphone on opening night but remained unflustered by its fussiness.

Of course, one of the glories of Peter Pan is its superabundance of meanies and piratical buffoons, and we do not lack them here. In her latest crossdressing exploit, Andrea King was the perfectly servile and supercilious Smee, with glints of valor and wickedness. Chip Bradley was the wily Slank, Captain of the Neverland,who steals the precious trunk full of starstuff from under the nose of Lord Aster, the Queen’s devoted ambassador and most eminent Starcatcher. Andrew Pippin portrayed the austere Aster with sufficient British crust, entrusted with the mission of transporting the precious starstuff cargo to Rundoon, where the trunk can be dumped into a nearby volcano and kept out of evil hands.

When we reach the faraway island where Peter and the trunk of starstuff serendipitously wash ashore, we will find that Neifert Enrique is the outré and eccentric King Fighting Prawn, monarch of the Mollusk natives. Was this the wildest of Moten’s costumes, or was it Hohenstein’s at the start of Act 2 during his brief song-and-dance as one of the Mermaids? Maybe Ryan Caulley snatches the prize toward the very end as Teacher, a salmon magically transformed into a Mermaid sage atop a lifeguard’s chair. It was a fitting reward for Caulley after a full evening gagged as Captain Scott from the first moment we saw him aboard his ship, the Wasp.

Ben Allen as Prentiss and Alijah Wilson as Ted were more individualized than Peter’s fellow orphans had been in previous productions I’d seen, and Miles Thompson was more rounded and nuanced as Alf, the smelly sailor who woos and distracts Molly’s nanny. Davis Hickson wasn’t as giddy and over-the-top as Hohenstein had been as Bumbrake at Theatre Charlotte in days of yore, so the Alf-Bumbrake thing (with Alf breaking most of the wind) was less orgiastic now and more genuinely warm.

The Delphic Oracle Sings The Go-Go’s

**Review: Head Over Heels at Duke Family Performance Hall by Davidson Community Players**

By Perry Tannenbaum

Heaven, Elysium, Utopia, Paradise, and Arcadia are all perfect places in our minds, too placid and static to be considered as settings for comedy, thrilling action, or drama. If you were in search of a perfect backdrop for the music of The Go-Go’s, you would more likely pick a city on the California coast, Las Vegas, or even Indianapolis than opting for heaven or the Elysian Fields.

That’s not how Jeff Whitty saw it when he conceived Head Over Heels. You get the idea that, after birthing Avenue Q, Whitty almost had free rein from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival to do anything he pleased. Whether he was inspired by the Elizabethan aura of OSF’s outdoor and indoor stages in greeny Ashland, Oregon – or bound to play up to them – Whitty reached back to The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia by Sir Philip Sidney, first published by the Countess in 1593.

Whitty had absolutely no intention of bridging the two eras – or smoothing the discordance between Elizabethan and Go-Go’s English. Whitty does tone it down a bit when Philoclea, the younger daughter of Arcadia’s King Basilius, tells her ardent admirer Musidorus to “Speak English, not Eclogue” when the shepherd boy begins his wooings.

At about the time that Head Over Heels premiered at OSF in 2015, Something Rotten!, with Will Shakespeare as its rockstar, was premiering on Broadway. That might explain the lukewarm reception that greeted Whitty’s show when it had its NYC premiere in 2018, for its Broadway run fizzled out in less than six months.

You can judge for yourself at spacious Duke Family Performance Hall as Davidson Community Playhouse rather splendidly presents its summer musical in nearly all of its gender bending glory. For this Metrolina premiere, projection designer Caleb Sigmon, scenic designer Ryan Maloney, and costume designer Yvette Moten fill the Broadway-sized stage on the Davidson College campus with eye-popping color and Hellenic style.

With the disclaimer that I’d never heard a single bar of Go-Go’s music before Head Over Heels came to our region, I can say that I delved into The Go-Go’s greatest hits afterwards on Spotify and listened to the original Broadway cast album. From the opening “We Got the Beat” onwards, the two generations of singers up at Exit 30 on I-77 beat them both.

Word of DCP’s excellence has extended its reach, and director Chris Patton and music director Matthew Primm have reaped the benefits. Belting the Go-Go’s “Beautiful” to her own mirror, Jassi Bynum is the vain elder sister, Pamela (a name apparently invented by Sir Philip). No less capable of letting loose, Kiearra Gary is the obedient “Good Girl” sister, Philoclea. And the well-established powerhouse, Nonye Obichere, is Mopsa, who seems for awhile to be a third sister until we learn that she is actually the daughter of the King’s steward, Dametas.

When Mopsa’s heart is broken, she will flee to Lesbos (wink, wink) and sing “Vacation.” Obichere slays at least as convincingly as the sisters.

It’s easy enough to get confused by the parents because they’re all white folk who fit nicely into Sidney’s Grecian mold but look nothing like their offspring. Yet Lisa Schacher, not seen hereabouts in a truly breakout musical role since the early days of QC Concerts, keeps her where-have-you-been-all-my-life belting capabilities under wraps until after intermission as Gynecia, the Arcadian queen. We’re not just talking Judy Garland belting, for Schacher crosses over the borderline to Whitney Houston territory along with Bynum, Gary, and Obichere.

Once whatever was clogging Tommy Foster’s larynx in the first moments of Saturday night’s performance as Dametas was expelled, the longtime veteran reminded us that he could also wail. Saddled with a more earthbound voice, Rob Addison brings a nicely grizzled dignity to King Basilius that is forceful enough for the lead vocal of “Get Up and Go” and his climactic king-and-queen duet with Schacher, “This Old Feeling.”

Kel Wright, whose pronouns are Kel and I in her coy bio, is the gender-fluid complication roiling the eternal placidity of Arcadia. She is the ardent shepherd boy Musidorus, Philoclea’s bestie since her tomboy days, who must disguise himself as an Amazon warrior, Cleophila, after he’s banished from Arcadia in order to regain access to his lady love.

Everybody seems to be attracted to Cleophila, though they come to all the possible conclusions about the Amazon’s true gender. It’s a mess – a hormonal thundershower that afflicts the King, the Queen, and their daughters. All of them scurry about in a mad passion that comes off with all the innocent merriment of a musical comedy. Adding to all of this hilarity is the disconnect between Wright’s tinniness and the Amazon’s virility, so feverishly irresistible to Pamela and her mom.

All of this mad pursuit, however, happens under the cloud of a prophesy that threatens Arcadia’s doom. A snake sent by Pythio, the Delphic Oracle, lets loose of a letter summoning King Basilius to the temple to hear the Oracle’s oracle. In Sidney’s original manuscript, not recovered until 1908, the prophecy is given concisely in verse at the end of the novel’s opening paragraph.

Thy elder care shall from thy careful face

By princely mean be stolen and yet not lost;

Thy younger shall with nature’s bliss embrace

An uncouth love, which nature hateth most.

Thou with thy wife adult’ry shalt commit,

And in thy throne a foreign state shall sit.

All this on thee this fatal year shall hit.

Whitty actually retains the adultery line – with its apostrophe! – but flips the plotlines of the elder and younger daughters. In Arcadia, Basilius is seeking to preserve his family and kingdom, but in Head Over Heels, he’s also battling to ward off the mass extinction of Arcadians. Forget about the “fatal year”: Each time one of the four prophecies is fulfilled, a flag will fall. If Basilius fails to confound the Delphic Oracle’s prophecy and the fourth flag falls… game over. If he succeeds in thwarting the prophecy even once, Arcadia is saved.

The roadblock to all this heroic questing and defying taking hold at Duke Family is the sensational Treyveon Purvis as the glittery Pythio, who describes themselves as a “non-binary plural.” No, that isn’t verbatim from Arcadia. We don’t need to understand every word of “Vision of Nowness” instantly as Pythio bodaciously belts it. If you don’t catch a phrase the first time or Purvis slurs it, you’ll get a second chance. Besides, the Go-Go’s lyrics are of little consequence once the song is done.

But the four prophecies and the fluttery flag drops are the whole damn evening, so when Purvis garbled every one of Pythio’s pronouncements – and the flag bit as well – much of what followed became equally incomprehensible. Why were those flags falling again? Was Foster wildly excited when he caught those falling flags, or was his Dametas frantically panicked?

Never could get a read on all these things until I sorted them out later at home. A few other gems had eluded me when I perused the script. For example, when Wright is lavishing her outsized voice on Musidorus’s “Mad About You,” the shepherd’s backup group are his sheep, altering the Go-Go’s deathless lyric to “Ma-ad about ewe.” Bleating as they sang? I don’t remember.

Nor did it quite register that Pythio’s backup were all snakes. So there was little chance for me to savor Purvis’s best line of the night: “Snakelettes, slither hither!” They are only named that one time, so catch it if you can.

Arguably, the main historic aspect of Head Over Heels was that it offered Peppermint, as Pythio, the opportunity to be the first openly trans actor taking on a major role on Broadway. There’s summery breeziness to this show and a cozy ending, not nearly as biting as Avenue Q. Maybe if the Broadway production had had the chance to run for a full summer, it might have found its legs instead of perishing in the dead of winter.

It’s the Go-Go’s, after all. Just don’t go in expecting the usual Jack-shall-have-Jill windup. Whitty remains a bit queer.

Spoleto’s “Turn of the Screw” Upstages Theatre Launches

Reviews: White Box, Polar Bear & Penguin, and The Turn of the Screw

By Perry Tannenbaum

Programming at Spoleto Festival USA is noticeably more fragmented and bunched-up this season (May 23-June 8), making it a little easier for jazz fans and theatergoers to see the entire sets of offerings without overstaying their budgets. Most of the jazz performances are blocked together on the tenth day through the sixteenth day of the 17-day festival, though Cecile McLorin Salvant and Phillip Golub could be savored on Days 5 and 6. Theatre presentations, however, were not to be seen at all until Day 7, and will continue – though never more than three of the five at once – until the last evening of the festival.

But the best theatre you’ll see here in Charleston this season may turn out to be an opera, Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw, with a script by Myfawnwy Piper adapted from Henry James’s ghostly novella. The world premiere production is directed by Rodula Gaitanou, who triumphed so decisively with her revival of Samuel Barber and Gian Carlo Menotti’s Vanessa two seasons ago.

The Piper script is certainly more family-friendly than the James novella – but not altogether stripped of the novella’s wispy psychological complexities. Scenes are more fragmentary than most old-time operas, more in keeping with the layout of a Renaissance tragedy. Yet Gaitanou doesn’t settle for our imagining the scene shifts from indoors to outdoors or from night to day.

Each scene change in Yannis Thavoris’s extremely supple, elegant, and creepy scenic design is punctuated at Dock Street Theatre – which itself dates back to 1736 – with the drop and rise of a black scrim. These blackouts take us back to the days of silent film, before the simplicity of jump-cuts was imprinted into our DNA. They also place a greater emphasis on the wonders of Britten’s interstitial music, which almost covers every scene change behind the curtain perfectly.

In the one exception, where the scene change must happen without musical cover, soprano Elizabeth Sutphen as James’s famously inexperienced and beleaguered Governess steps in front of the curtain for the space of an aria while the scenery changes behind her. The whole effect of Gaitanou’s staging was magnificent in a way that I hadn’t anticipated. Britten’s music seemed to infuse the pores of every actor, even boy soprano Everett Baumgarten as the possessed Miles, whose vocal lines were as simple and pure as a choir boy’s.

No wonder legendary soprano Christine Brewer as Mrs. Grose, the housekeeper, believes that Miles was incapable of violence. And indeed, the horrific denouement hinges on the boy’s natural delicacy. All is not placid when the child draws our attention. There is major orchestral turbulence when Miles, behind the Governess’s back, tears up the letter she has written to his uncle – and wild skittering sounds when he hurriedly gathers up the pieces of paper from the floor.

Not only does Thavoris’s scenery harmonize with his costume designs and synchronize with Britten’s music, it is wondrously detonated by Paul Hackenmueller’s lighting. At key moments throughout the two-act opera, the huge mirror that nearly dominates the set turns translucent or transparent, revealing the ghosts that haunt the estate. These ghosts might simply stand there in Hackenmueller’s eerie blue light or they might come to melodramatic musical life and sing.

Omar Najmi sings the narrative prologue before tackling the charismatic tenor role of Peter Quint, the more malignant of the two ghosts. His wholesome and romantic appearance, like Miles’, belie the evil lurking within – but Quint’s evil is never under musical restraint. There never needs to be any question that Quint is a madman, and Najmi never leaves any doubt.

The struggle between Quint and Miles is more titanic than that between the other ghost, Miss Jessel, and Miles’ sister, Flora. Yet an extra eeriness had wafted into this Spoleto world premiere on opening night because the singer portraying Jessel, Mary Dunleavy, was still recovering from an illness. She still acted the role, lip-synching to Rachel Blaustein, who sang the role from offstage. Blaustein sometimes sounded sepulchral and indistinct from wherever she was sequestered, in and outside Dunleavy’s body, depending on where she stood.

Fortunately for Blaustein and all the other treble voices at Dock Street, but especially for us, there are English subtitles on hand when the text might otherwise be lost. Sometimes, as when Baumgarten sings “Malo, malo,” it’s just good to have the projected text above the proscenium to confirm what we’re hearing!

Aside from the oddity of these subtitles for a Broadway show, it’s hard to see why this gripping production couldn’t be a hit. Dunleavy’s interactions with Israeli soprano Maya Mor Mitrani, singing the role of Flora, are particularly outré and suggestive. Though the text never seems to give her enough to justify her take, Mitrani’s brattiness only clashes with the elegance of her lavish Victorian dress, and there’s a frequent sense of jealousy toward Miles because of the attention he draws under Quint’s spell.

In the climactic lake scene, where the ghost of Jessel supplicates Flora, Gaitanou tosses aside any notion from fussy modern lit critics that there is ambiguity on whether James’s ghosts are real or figments of the Governess’s fevered imagination. We see Jessel, floating above Flora in her boat on the lake, long before the Governess does. Until then, she’s quietly ashore on a quaint little bench, absorbed in a book.

Numerous creepy touches abound, not the least of them involving the onstage curtains that hide or highlight the ghosts lurking behind the huge mirror. Suddenly the curtain begins rustling behind the children and adults onstage – yet nobody there notices for the duration of the scene. But we do.

White people obsessed by the white polar regions has been a powerful theme since Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein (1818) and Edgar Allen Poe wrote The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym (1838). It was still in the air when Swedish adventurer Salomon August Andrée proposed a new method of mapping out the North Pole to the Royal Geographic Society in 1895: exploring the region in a hydrogen balloon.

Once again, wind conditions weren’t ideal. But Andrée, more adventurous than patient, lifted off with his comrades anyway and… vanished. For 33 years, nobody knew their fate for certain until their remains were recovered and brought back ceremoniously to Stockholm in 1930. The fullest narrative took another 66 years to recover, pieced together with the journals of the three explorers and the partial restoration of Strindberg’s photographs.

Sabine Theunissen rewinds the story in White Box in its US Premiere at Emmett Robinson Theatre on the College of Charleston campus. From a theatrical standpoint, it’s a very quirky and visual retelling, making liberal use of Nils’s photographs and primitively enhanced animations. He seems to be more of Theunissen’s protagonist than Andrée, but none of the three men onstage has any dialogue.

Thulani Clarke and Fana Tshabalala are designated as Dancers in the Spoleto program book, while Andrea Fabi is labelled Performer, presumably because he shapeshifts between Nils and Andrée. Given the silence of the humans, the old-timey camera, mounted on a wooden tripod and occasionally capable of a life of its own (thanks to puppeteer Meghan Williams), could be regarded as a fourth character.

So far what we’re describing might be viewed as akin to silent film, even though Catherine Graindorge adds violin and viola from one side of the hall and Angelo Moustapha adds piano and percussion from the other. Not even granted a bio in the program – or present for the final bows – Maria Weisby delivers all the info we can hear via pre-recorded Voice Over.

It’s hard to detect any consistent intent or message in Theunissen’s various caprices. Her Dancers are part of the expedition party and they aren’t. Their choreography from Gregory Maqona is more African than Nordic and so are their skins. The same disconnect doesn’t always apply to Graindorge’s music composition, but aside from the honky-tonk piano by Moustapha bookending the narrative, his percussion has more of a jungle flavor than an evocation of windswept Arctic tundra and ice caps.

And Theunissen’s declaration that she must tell her tale backwards to tell it right isn’t religiously carried out – though we did learn why the expedition was doomed from the start toward the end of the show. Somehow, all of Theunissen’s quirks and incongruities worked beautifully, even poetically. And viscerally.

When Nils stands doomed on a sea of ice, dancing with his mammoth camera, we can join him in tossing accuracy and logic to the winds.

Even more fanciful was the children’s show that opened on the same Saturday that White Box closed, Polar Bear and Penguin, written and acted by John Curivan and Paul Curley. Brrrrr! So theatrically speaking, it was a bipolar weekend in balmy Charleston.

Curivan and Curley (who better to concoct this alliterative title?) had some bipolar intentions of their own. For polar bears are only found natively in the northern hemisphere while penguins are natively confined to the south. Wherever they bump into each other on runaway icecaps, their personalities are also poles apart, replicating the ancient grasshopper and the ant fable. In floating igloos.

As Polar Bear, Curivan is all carpe diem: see a fish, catch a fish, eat a fish. Curley is more communal, considerate, and calculating as Penguin. In the here-and-now, Penguin will catch a fish and share a fish. Longterm, he will catch another fish and save it for later. Curivan uses his paws to bash a hole in the ice and grab his prey. The more sophisticated Curley – yes, Clara Fleming’s costume design includes full-length tux jacket and tails – extracts a fishing pole from Penguin’s little cave.

Ah, but they don’t merely catch fish out there in the frozen North or South. Penguin hooks a bottle, Polar Bear hooks a shoe, and something with buttons pops out of the deep, maybe a cell. Curivan and Curley subtly remind us with these human throwaways – and the occasional sound of airplanes above – that these primal and adorable creatures are cast adrift and endangered by the overreach of civilization.

Global warming.

Meanwhile, Polar Bear and Penguin demonstrate that their differences can be bridged as they become best friends. Until a crisis emerges at a cookout that irresistibly engaged the participation of the ankle-biters in the audience. Penguin was cooking up a glorious fish dinner from a hidden spot upstage while Polar Bear was downstage waiting for dinner, sorely tempted by an overflowing pail of raw fish that they had caught and agreed to save for later.

Each time Penguin exited to tend his unseen campfire, a new wave of temptation assailed Polar Bear. As if Peter Pan and Tinkerbell were hovering somewhere in the darkened hall, children all over the Rose Maree Myers Theatre in North Charleston began hollering to Polar Bear not to eat the damn fish.

In some ways, our innocence remains intact.

But Curivan and Curley didn’t leave us with a happily-ever-after ending. Before the lights went down, Polar Bear and Penguin reconciled, closer friends than ever before. Bear achieves better impulse control while Penguin tempers his hoarding tendencies. All that chumminess, sad to say, didn’t prevent a further thaw of the ice that connected their little caves. So they finally drifted towards opposite wings of the stage, separated forever.

A little girl sitting in front of us burst into tears, inconsolable as her mom carried her away. She likely got the point more keenly than her peers – and likely better than many of her elders here in Trump Country.

The bulk of Spoleto’s theatre lineup has yet to open, The 4^th Witch opening on June 4, Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski making its bow on June 5, and Mrs. Krishnan’s Party arriving on June 6. Until then The Turn of the Screw reigns as my top pick, with a final performance on June 6.

Get as Close as You Can to “She Kills Monsters”

**Review: She Kills Monsters at the Parr Center**

By Perry Tannenbaum

When you think about it, not too many comic books get to be adapted into plays or musicals. Movies and TV seem to be the hallowed afterlife of superheroes and Marvel headliners – except for that regrettable Spiderman the Musical fiasco. Only video games, if memory serves, make it to the big screen. But never to a live stage. Monopoly, Chutes & Ladders, and other pop culture board games were similarly neglected until Clue proved that it could have legs onstage.

So now we have playwright-director-choreographer Qui Nguyen’s She Kills Monsters, inspired by the legendary Dungeons & Dragons board game, onstage in Charlotte for at least the third time in the last 10 years, beginning with a UNC Charlotte production in 2016. In some ways, the current Central Piedmont Theatre production is an upgrade from the 2022 version presented at the Arts Factory by Charlotte’s Off-Broadway.

The bigger, newer Parr Center offers the spaciousness for scenic-and-projections designer James Duke to make Nguyen’s spectacle more spectacular. In cahoots with lighting designer Jeff Childs, costume designer Freddie Harward and prop designer Maxwell Martin have the equipment and budget to splash additional color across the Parr stage. Add the sound designs of Montavious Blocker and Carly McMinn and you have a sensory-rich fantasy brew.

To stage his own scripts and bring martial arts action into live theatre, Nguyen established the Vampire Cowboys Theatre Company in 2000 – and himself as the godfather of “Geek Theatre.” Presumably, he was convinced stage combat and martial arts could be a more visceral experience in live performance than it is on film, even if the resources of slow-motion photography, AI, and animation had to be tossed aside.

Much of Nguyen’s geekery can be comic book silliness and free-range Gothic imagination, delighting as much in creating outré villains as in birthing super-powered heroes – with a smattering of witchery and magic on both sides. What makes She Kills Monsters especially clever and brilliant is Nguyen’s use of Dungeons & Dragons as a game within a drama. His hero, Agnes Evans, uses D&D as a tool to recover the essence of her younger sister Tilly after her untimely death.

You will wonder how this can be possible if you don’t already know that D&D can be deeply and extensively personalized. You can create your own module for the game and envision heroes and monsters based on your own friends and enemies: a wonderful way for high school teens to vent their thwarted loves and seething hates.

Key example: Tilly, venerated as Tillius the Paladin among D&D geeks in Athens, Ohio, was jealous of her elder sister’s boyfriend, Miles. So along the path of Tilly’s scenario, Agnes will discover that Miles is a villainous force who must be vanquished, even though the evildoer has been imprisoned in a huge gelatinous cube.

That discovery will pale in comparison with the discoveries Agnes makes about Tilly’s sexuality. Geeks are merging with Greeks in Athens, as Nguyen is quite aware, so his female warriors will not be as straight as Homer’s Amazons.

Nor can Nguyen’s Athens be down in Georgia, for he has ordained that Agnes is average – the birthright of all Ohio citizens. For Agnes, it’s a journey into the underworld just to meet Chuck, who will serve as Dungeon Master for the surviving sister while entrusted with the precious posthumous work of Tillius the Paladin.

Layered onto all this teen angst (Tilly’s) and Agnes’s quest to recover her dead sister’s lost soul – both in the D&D game and in real life – is another Narrator, a high school guidance counselor, and numerous mundane classmates that Tilly has mirrored and immortalized in “The Lost Soul of Athens.” My picks for most lethal are the Athens High cheerleaders, Tina and Gabbi, turned into succubi in the D&D realm.

Carly McMinn directs the show, immersing herself and her cast in the action to a fault. I’m not sure McMinn sat herself more than three rows away from her players during rehearsals at the Parr Center. By the time Nguyen’s words reached my party in Row G, much of the Vietnamese playwright’s snappy dialogue had become unintelligible.

Get as close as you can if you wish to hear as joyfully as you’ll see.

If you don’t mind experiencing She Kills Monsters like Greek drama, knowing the plot beforehand, you can freely read and/or download the script online. Otherwise, you’re adding the Neil Simon layer afterward. If at all.

Generally speaking, the vaunts, boasts, and challenges within the game are louder than the conversations inside Agnes’s apartment, Chuck’s store, or the guidance counselor’s office – and more often competing with the soundtrack, which is not at all Dean Martin. Is it Beck’s “Loser” or LL Cool J’s “Mama Say Knock You Out” or Smashing Pumpkins as suggested by the script? Couldn’t say.

McMinn and her choreographers capture the spirit of Agnes’s odyssey beautifully, true to Nguyen’s saucy mix of fantasy and reality, silliness and profundity, fun and feeling, play and play. Fight choreographer Elizabeth Sickerman and dance battle choreographer Becky Rooney both grasp the double layer of artificiality that protects us from viewing violence, injury, blood, or death in the D&D world as any more serious than AEW on TNT.

But unlike AEW, Sickerman and Rooney can take advantage of the outright artifice for comedic purposes. How bad is it, then, if Tillius the Paladin wields her mighty sword – The Eastern Blade of the Dreamwalker, forged from the fiery nightmares of Gods and blessed by the demons of Pena – and slashes at a Bugbear, missing her target by two yards? Not at all. Especially if the Bugbear is mortally wounded anyway. Or if any other fearsome adversary writhes in agony, breathing its last for no apparent reason.

A little of this ridiculous fakery goes a long way.

To be fair, if McMinn doesn’t have her protagonists consistently declaiming at sufficient decibels, she has the wisdom to see that their character arcs are moving in opposite directions to make reconciliation – or even acquaintanceship – possible. Nguyen takes more care with the nuances of Agnes’s evolution since it’s moving in parallel directions in altering her relationships with Tilly and with Miles.

So Saskia Lewis as Agnes has a bunch of calibrating to do as she moves from average and static to insightful and savage. Lewis must be awkward for a while with her blade, shield, and helmet before Agnes the Ass-hatted can morph into Agnes the Badass. She also goes through gauche stages with Miles, with Vera the guidance counselor, and her squeamish attitude toward Chuck (some of it quite warranted).

It’s a curve that Lewis delineates well, though she never quite figures out how to give Average Agnes any spark or gusto. A little dopiness might do it. Or a little surprise when Agnes discovers she can have fun.

Whether or not McMinn saw the 2022 Monsters at the Arts Factory, she and Claire Grant demonstrate that less can be more in portraying Tilly and Tillius. Grant is never quite the legend Charlie Grass was as Tillius in 2022. There is no warpaint on Grant. You might even catch her slouching once or twice. She is mighty, yes, but we also see her as vulnerable. This Tillius is one that Agnes can envision, not the invincible Tilly she wants her to see.

Very likely, Brian DeDora was mostly enticed by the monster-in-gelatinous-cube side of Miles when he auditioned for the role, but I couldn’t help liking him even more as the wholesome boyfriend. Nguyen gives DeDora a wonderful pathway into making mundane Miles likable, for he earnestly wants to be a part of the D&D fun and fantasy once Agnes has gotten the bug.

Aside from Kameal Brown as the guidance counselor, slightly tainted by adulthood, all the other women get to revel in D&D nastiness and badassery. My favorite is Ashlie Hanke as Lilith Morningstar, Tilly’s right-hand fantasy demon, followed closely by Anaiah Jones and Kristina Ishihara as the Evil cheerleader succubi.

Hanke gets the best crossover into reality as Lily, more closeted at Athens High than Tilly. To Hanke’s credit, Lily is poignantly burdened with the sad consequences of spurning real-life Tilly to keep her cover. When they aren’t tormenting Tillius & Crew as succubi, Jones and Ishihara can tag-team Tilly, cruelly teasing her over her sexuality. Even if they’re a bit stereotyped as cheerleaders, they make Athens High more real.

All three of these wicked slayers are radically red-faced in New Landia, the country where Tillius tries to recover her lost soul. Their having to un-paint and repaint is the only good excuse I can imagine to explain why everyone onstage isn’t miked. So for me, it’s a love-hate relationship with these vicious vixens.

Among the remaining men, we should first consider the storytellers, Elon Womble as our Narrator and Maximilian Novick as geek master Chuck. Nguyen doesn’t specify how our Narrator should be attired, but he broadly suggests that she or he radiate a Lord of the Rings aura. Accordingly, Novick sports a garish green medieval outfit over long black boots, an implicit invite for us to straddle the real and fantasy worlds as the story unfolds.

Novick can roam more freely between teen nerdiness and master of the dark arts, a transition marked by donning a monkish cowl and deepening his voice. There’s also a mix of gawkiness, horniness, and bravado that Novick obviously relished.

As Orcus, the retiring Demon Overlord, Truman Grant gets to wear more majestic horns than those sported by Lilith (some history between them is hinted at). For old-school aficionados of The Wizard of Oz, Orcus might pleasantly echo the roaring veneer of the Cowardly Lion. Grant’s demon doesn’t suffer from self-image hangups, and he’s more of a careless, world-weary slacker than timid, having shrewdly traded Tillius’s soul for a badass TV/VCR combo.

Evangelicals and assorted homophobes despise She Kills Monsters, especially when it defiles their precious schools. Once again, such harmless and rollicking sacrilege is happening again in the QC. It’s particularly distressing for the haters to see Tillius and Orcus uniting with Agnes on her adventure. Both of them can tell the Ass-hat a thing or two about how to die.

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.

Risen from the Dead, CAST’s Alabaster Is All About Artists in Crisis

Review: Alabaster at The Mint Museum

By Perry Tannenbaum

Google and Alexa will tell you if you ask: it’s a little bit more than a 17-mile drive from Bessemer to Alabaster, Alabama. Every source I’ve checked also confirms that Gip’s Place, the last backyard juke joint in America, was in Bessemer until its blues guitarist founder, Henry “Gip” Gipson, passed away in October 2019 at the age of 99. It’s useful to know that when we meet Weezy, the first character to speak at the Mint Museum – in the first Carolina Actors Studio Theatre production anywhere since its 2014 NoDa demise.

Weezy tells us that she lives at a small farm “right near” Gip’s Place in Alabaster.

True, we have ample reason to question Weezy’s veracity from the get-go, since she also introduces herself as a goat. Titling her comical drama Alabaster,playwright Audrey Cefaly could coyly blame her geographical inaccuracy on this cantankerous barnyard beast she created. But the choice, invoking the special malleability of a stone that has been reshaped by sculptors and artisans for millennia, is clearly an artist’s choice.

As we continue to follow the scrappy encounter between two artists in backwoods Alabama, one a celebrated photographer of celebrities and the other an unknown painter, we often find that Weezy – among other things – is Cefaly’s surrogate. In one meta moment you can look out for, Weezy even delivers a message from the playwright to one of our protagonists.

Mostly, Weezy serves as an irascible Jiminy Cricket for June, the one human survivor on the farm. When she isn’t offering up prompts and explanations channeled from Cefaly, she becomes June’s better self, the self that is wishing to break free of her self-imposed isolation and artistic obscurity. When sweet optimism sours into clear-eyed skepticism and cynicism, Weezy becomes the painter’s inner voice: June’s worst critic.

And sometimes, she’s a goat, caring for her ailing mama. Weezy is fluent in English and goat. Occasionally, she’s also clairvoyant.

Both Bessemer and Alabaster are prone to tornadoes. Cefaly’s tornado has radically reshaped June, demolishing her farm and turning the entire left side of her body into a relief map of scars, patches, pocks, and swirling melty skin. Playing the role of June, Zoe Matney has a l-o-o-o-o-ng pre-show routine, for she must spend much more time than usual backstage getting director/makeup designer Michael Simmons’ concept applied – front and back, from torso upwards – with help from assistant director/makeup artist Dee Abdullah.

Then she is onstage as the audience arrives, long before lights dim and Weezy enters.

If Weezy weren’t there, we must also remember, we wouldn’t have a reason to hear from June, though her first response to the goat’s prodding is no more than a well-chosen finger. Fortunately, we are quickly liberated from the confines of an inner dialogue by June’s distingué visitor, Alice.

Acquainted, you can bet, with Annie Leibovitz and no further than a light meter’s distance from Demi Moore, Alice’s career has recent taken a hairpin turn to the scarred-women project she’s working on now. June is her seventh subject, and Alice works in multiple media. Trying to reach the traumatized inside of her subjects – all women – while finding the dignity and beauty mixed with the deformity outside, Alice documents them in video interviews and, when the time and light are right, by snapping coffee-table-quality portrait photos.

Are these scars a form of artwork?

A fresh aspect of artist’s choice comes into play with Cynthia Farbman Harris as Alice. Alabaster premiered in December 2019, just two months after Gip’s passing, in Fort Myers, Florida – the first stop in a “Rolling World Premiere” presented at 11 member companies of the National New Play Network, a rollout spanning from New Jersey to Oregon. The QC had a company in that Network, Actor’s Theatre of Charlotte, which had rolled with some of these co-op premieres before.

When asked about the switch away from glamor assignments, Alice deflects at first. She only gives herself away slightly when asking June about her “accident” – a word more apt for her own trauma – and when, egged on by June’s questioning, she scrolls back far enough among places she’s been before Alabaster to her rehab.

So it shouldn’t be too surprising to learn that Actor’s Theatre was scheduled to premiere Alabaster in the latter half of its 2022-23 season, just over two years ago. More of you will remember that Actor’s Theatre did not make it to the end of 2022, planting its gravestone among the most honored companies in Charlotte’s theatre cemetery before the halfway point of its 34^th year.

For Harris, who auditioned for that abortive ATC production, it was a matter of not forgetting. She had worked with Simmons at CAST, with a variety of other stints at Moving Poets, Queen City Theatre, and Theatre Charlotte – including a pair of diva roles, Maria Callas in Master Class and Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire. If the role of Alice stuck with her after ATC’s demise, there must have been plenty of meat on the bone.

With an eye toward reviving the edgy theatre vibe that reigned while ATC, CAST, and QC Theatre were all up and running, Cynthia and her husband, actor Michael Harris, have founded Actors Collaborative Theatre to help make it happen. The new ACT is an associate producer of Simmons’ rebirth, while Moving Poets and Charlotte Contemporary Theatre are among the companies listed in the digital playbill on CAST’s thank-you list.

If you know how long ago Harris starred as Blanche, then you know Alice is bit of a stretch, no matter how much she wanted it. We’re not just talking about the yoga scene. With Abdullah serving as intimacy director, June’s master bedroom becomes more than an artist’s studio. Scars and all, June brashly inquires whether Alice is gay, before we learn the photographer’s full backstory.

Somehow, Matney and Harris make their love-hate relationship work altogether naturally and spontaneously. It only becomes a little more cerebral than Cefaly imagined it. They lean into the age difference a little instead of pretending it doesn’t exist. But they do traverse the long, rugged terrain to the primal mode. The two artists debate whether their meeting is like The Bridges of Madison County or not. Yet they could also debate whether they are both hostile animals locked in cages of their own making – while the liberating keys are always in their hands.

Actually, they do talk about that.

Matney’s performance is every bit as stunning as Harris’s, if for no other reason than June is so moody and mercurial. Ambivalent about having her paintings exposed to outside world, June is living with desperate intensity in her present isolation, hoping for a sunnier future – she has invited Alice here, though she is wary – while repeatedly tortured by her past trauma.

Something as trivial as the beep of Alice’s camera can trigger flashbacks to the worst. Adding to the inner psychological circuitry are the stresses of fresh lightning and thunder – plus the partial nudity at the start of the photo session. Matney calibrates her various disturbances well when her hurting is raw, and she channels energy convincingly into compensatory actions when June is striving to appear calm and well-adjusted. She also leaves room for just the right amounts of flirtation and coquetry.

Kelly Mizell, who plays Weezy, can tell you how long ago Harris sashayed into Nawlins as Blanche, for she was an outstanding Stella Kowalski in that same Theatre Charlotte Streetcar way back when. Given the opening entrance, this talking goat decisively demonstrates that she can still command a stage before discreetly receding into the background, sometimes as a handy guide, sometimes as an annoyance, and sometimes as a mind-reader.

Mizell gets to show Weezy’s tender side caring for Bib, her mostly pallet-of-hay-ridden “Mmaaahaaaahaaaa… maaaaaah!” You can see Harris wanting to play Alice enough to partly bankroll and publicize a production, but with so much stage time and so little spotlight (or vocabulary) as this old goat, Debbie Swanson had to really want this Mama Bib role. She’s wonderful when her moment comes.

Otherwise, there are remarkably few signs that Simmons and the Harrises are doing all this on a shoestring. Lighting design by Dave Meeder easily ranks with the best we’ve seen at the Original Mint’s Van Every Auditorium on Randolph Road. Tim Baxter-Ferguson, another name we fondly associate with a bygone era, installs a marvelously rusticated twin-level set design that simultaneously gives off vibes of woodsiness, springtime color, and irreversible damage.

Sophie Carlick’s costumes don’t have to be lavish, but they enable June, Weezy, and Alice to radiate an outdoorsy aura. Cleverly enough, June’s bedroom outfit hides her preoccupation with painting as decisively as her splotched overalls proclaim it, but the goat costumes also strike a perfect note. So do the many artworks fashioned for June’s artistic oeuvre on barnwood, to be auctioned off when Alabaster completes its run.

Simmons’ sound design and special effects are on-point, but I wish they had impacted more: louder, with more lightning crackle and windy sweep. Nor was the ringtone on Alice’s cell as ugly as Cefaly intended. As a photographer, I had to chuckle at the sadly unprofessional equipment we were seeing, including a camera with an onboard flash. Yet I could empathize with Harris – and admire her all the more – when she had to keep that lame videocam running and the still camera showing snaps on its screen.

When Alice instructs June on how to use a smart phone, when she shows her how to trip the shutter, and how to review the photo portraits on the wee screen… Quiet moments like these resonate with us, because they are part of a bonding process, two healing processes intertwining. Two resurrections. Three if you count the rehab June and Alice join in on with those barnwood scraps.

Good reasons to smile as we left the Mint. Along with the resurrections of CAST and a vital drama Actor’s Theatre never got to present.

“The Play That Goes Wrong” Fits Perfectly at The Barn

**Review: The Play That Goes Wrong at Theatre Charlotte**

By Perry Tannenbaum

Every time Inspector Carter declares his determination to solve “The Murder at Haversham Manor,” lights at Theatre Charlotte suddenly turn a lurid red to triple-underline the melodrama. This may be the only technical element that consistently goes right in The Play That Goes Wrong, now running – and decomposing before our very eyes –through February 23.

The mantelpiece over the fireplace in Charles Haversham’s study remains a work-in-progress long after the master is murdered. The painting above the mantle – clearly the wrong painting – doesn’t stay where it belongs, and a pesky door stubbornly resists efforts to unlock it when it isn’t wandering off its hinges. In similar disrepair, we may count the phone, the intercom, the elevator leading up to the second-floor office, and the walls themselves.

It is a precisely flimsy set, lovingly put together by Theatre Charlotte artistic director Chris Timmons, so precisely flimsy that it must conform to approximate dimensions to accommodate the cast. So active that the set predictably won the Tony and Drama Desk Awards for best scenic design in its 2017 Broadway debut. Like Michael Frayn’s famed Noises Off, another British play-within-a-play that goes comically wrong and wronger – but on a stage that revolves a full 180ᵒ – the set is like a machine. It could be packaged like an Ikea kit.

Written by Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer & Henry Shields, The Play That Goes Wrong nestles more naturally at the Old Queens Road Barn than at Knight Theater, where the national tour touched down in the QC six Novembers ago. The basic concept is that a small-time community theatre, perennially understaffed and underfunded, has suddenly received a grant that will finally enable it to present a full-fledged production.

No longer will Chekhov’s classic Three Sisters be reduced to Two Sisters at the Cornley University Drama Society. Nor will Lloyd Webber’s resplendent Cats be shrunk to Cat. It’s the birth of a new era!

But unfortunately, the new era hasn’t ushered in an influx of fresh acting talent and technical know-how. Dennis struggles with her lines and usually mispronounces the tough words written on her hands. Jonathan repeatedly re-enters the action before he’s supposed to. Sandra has an unfortunate knack of being in the wrong place at the wrong time; and her understudy, Annie, after subbing for Sandra when she’s knocked unconscious, reads terribly. Yet she refuses to yield back her role when Sandra revives.

Props aren’t reliably placed in their assigned locations by the incompetent crew. When they are properly placed or deployed, like the stretcher needed to carry the corpse through the finicky front door, they may not function properly. The Duran Duran CD, sought after by lighting-and-sound man Trevor before the play begins, will turn up inconveniently onstage deep into Act 2.

Which reminds me: even though those redlight cues are absolutely reliable, the portentous sound cues accompanying them are not.

Tonya Bludsworth directs all this carefully calibrated chaos with an able assistant director, Brian Lafontaine. Together, they and Brandon Samples as Chris bring out a key point that didn’t strike home for me as forcefully when I saw the touring version in 2019. Chris not only plays the plum role of Inspector Carter in The Murder at Haversham Manor, but he also serves as the stage director, prop maker, box office manager, and PR rep – totally responsible for this catastrophe, and obviously overstretched.

On the smaller Theatre Charlotte stage, Samples is closer to us and we can focus on him more sharply than if his flop sweat were dripping down at Knight Theater. Makes a difference when one protagonist seems to be especially invested in the worsening outcome, valiantly trying to cover up the metastasizing miscues, and gaping at the sheer scale of his own mismanagement and incompetence.

For me, Sample’s visible struggles – from his nervous shit-faced grins on up to his hissy fits – made Chris a little more poignant for me. Here is a man who cares so much about theatre, and he’s watching all his multiple shortfalls in artistry and management implode so spectacularly. We can feel for the rest of this woeful team, but not nearly as much.

Lee Thomas earns a distant second place in our sympathies just for the physical punishment he takes as Charles Haversham, the stepped-on, sat-on, and mishandled murder victim. Or for the dismal ratio of abuse absorbed to dialogue delivered. When he finally does speak, maybe for the first time at Theatre Charlotte since 2020, it is as an actor of mind-boggling incompetence, eclipsing nearly all of his castmates. Thomas is rather good at looking quietly embarrassed, confused, and discombobulated.

Jenn Grabenstetter as Sandra starts off in a sympathetic slot, cast as Florence Colleymore, the murder victim’s bride-to-be. Our empathy for her slackens when we learn that Charles’s brother, Cecil Haversham, is Florence’s true love. Or when we see how stylized Sandra is as a performer. Or when she skips ahead one line, answering Inspector Carter’s questions before he asks them. But we feel for her – a little bit, anyway – when the front door flattens her and her castmates prop her up inside a clock. When Florence revives, she has to battle Annie to reclaim her role with some fine screwball fight choreography by Allison Collins.

The character arc for Rachel Mackall as Annie is even more transformational, for her Florence starts off in a near-catatonic monotone until she does the first of her pratfalls, scattering the pages of her script and maybe dislodging a contact lens. That raises Annie’s energy level, leading to the subsequent miracle where, battling Grabenstetter for the spotlight, she suddenly has her lines memorized while becoming a vicious gladiator.

More WWWF-style action would not have been amiss, but there’s still plenty.

Like Selsdon in Noises Off, Dennis’s prime reason for existing in The Play That Goes Wrong is to roundly muck things up. Lewis, Sayer & Shields seem to be indicating that he’s inept, miscast, or over-the-hill. What the hell, Bludsworth casts a woman in the role, the venerable Andrea King, who may have actually portrayed more women on QC stages than men and describes herself like a cute puppy for sale in the digital playbill.

With so much incompetence surrounding the Haversham Murder production, it’s a bit cruel to arraign her as the sole culprit for substituting turpentine when a decanter of adult beverage is served to guests at the Manor. Or it is when that happens for the first time. It’s on her when the screwup is repeated, sparking a prolonged series of spit-takes because she has also forgotten a line that would propel the action forward instead of casting it into a never-ending loop.

King maintains a cheery insouciance no matter what kind of havoc she causes, enabling Cody Robinson as Robert to become king of the spit takes as the bride-to-be’s brother, Thomas Colleymore. With a preternatural Joe Belushi energy, Robinson demonstrates that Robert’s distaste for “White Spirit” can actually increase with each sip! When we think Robinson’s frustration and rage have peaked or even exceeded expectations, he still turns it up a couple of notches.

Adam Peal as Robert and Roman Michael Lawrence as Trevor fill out the roster of actors implicated in the murdering of The Murder at Habersham Manor. Robert is not only amateurish but also a carefree hambone, so naturally Chris gives him two roles to botch. Initially, Peal appears as Cecil Haversham, Charles’s scheming brother and Florence’s true love. But there’s more to butcher when Robert resurfaces as Arthur the gardener, laying on some eyewitness evidence.

Did I mention that Trevor, after losing track of his Duran Duran treasures, must abandon his functions as lighting and soundman when Annie, replacing Sandra, is also stricken? That script-scattering pratfall was just the beginning of her misadventures. While Lawrence has already shown us – and will continue to show us – how badly Trevor performs at his chosen specialties, we can brace ourselves for his slaughter of Florence Colleymore, postponed only by his reluctance to play the role.

On my second viewing, it was possible to pay more attention to the convoluted mystery plot by “Susie H. K. Brideswell.” Now I can confidently proclaim that Habersham Manor is a masterpiece of implausibility. Doesn’t work at all.

Woefully, Theatre Charlotte doesn’t seem to have experienced a financial windfall that parallels Cornley University’s. That would have enabled them to append a faux playbill for the Habersham Manor production to the conventional Play That Goes Wrong program. Then we could learn the last names of the players and the Habersham roles they play with less fuss and bother. A few tidbits about the players also enriched the experience of the touring production.

Apparently, when the playwrights founded their Goes Wrong franchise (Peter Pan and The Nativity are among the spin-offs), they must have been focused on crafting three of the roles for themselves to perform in London and Broadway – and meshing with Nigel Hook, their mad genius set designer. So they didn’t insist that their faux playbill must be printed to accompany the show.

That lack of detailing serves to emphasize where The Play That Goes Wrong doesn’t measure up to Noises Off! Frayn’s work fleshes out relationships between the actors onstage when they’re backstage and, with its first-act rehearsal scene, gives us a more vivid idea of how the play-within-a-play is intended to go. For that reason, despite all the hilarity that Lewis, Sayer & Shields deliver, I’d hesitate to recommend The Play That Goes Wrong to anyone who is new to theatre – or hasn’t experienced a play that goes right.

But for sheer fun in frightening times, this show is welcome medicine for everyone else. TikTok & Friends may have brought nostalgia for America’s Home Videos to a screeching halt, but this latest romp at the Queens Road Barn revives the special pleasure – and laughter – of similar train wrecks large and small running right at us, non-stop, on a live stage.

Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, directed by Corlis Hayes, last came and went at Central Piedmont Community College in 2015. Back then, the production demonstrated how ill-suited even a renovated Pease Auditorium was for the best of August Wilson’s dramas. Panoramic Pease has now been demolished, so it will be interesting to see Hayes come back again to the CP campus, along with Jonavan Adams reprising his role as Herald – at a real theater in the fledgling Parr Center. Dominic Weaver, also in the mix ten years back, gets a juicier role this time as Bynum, the conjuring root doctor.

Turner, the second play in Wilson’s decade-by-decade traversal of the 20th century, The Pittsburgh Cycle, is set at a Pittsburgh boarding house in 1911. Rather than hinting at WW1 later in the decade, the drama hearkens back to slavery, the Civil War, and their aftermath, both glorious and sad.

“Every character has a story, and every story has a song,” says Hayes. “The play explores African American identity, healing from trauma, and the power of community and self-discovery. More significantly the play is an examination of Black people in transition during The Great Migration.”

This weekend only!

“Bright Star” Shines Zestfully in Matthews

Review: Bright Star at Matthews Playhouse

By Perry Tannenbaum

Though it never settles down here in the QC, it’s nice to know that Steve Martin’s beautifully crafted Bright Star, while tracing its graceful decades-longstory, carves a North Carolina oval around Charlotte. Crisscrossing between Asheville and Raleigh with stopovers in Hayes Creek and Zebulon. Martin’s music leans pleasantly westward, delivering bluegrass and mountain flavors, brightly flecked with sounds of the comedy polymath’s signature banjo. Nor in transporting the original “Iron Mountain Baby” story to the Blue Ridge Mountains, does Martin neglect the rhythm of the rails, for a train traveling over a river is pivotal to the plotline.

So of course, this genial musical, which stopped at Belk Theater on its national tour in 2018, is a perfect match for Matthews Playhouse (and its nearby depots) as it arrives for a richly deserved revival. Newly crowned last month with the 2024 North Carolina Theatre Conference Community Theatre Award, headquartered at the Matthews Community Center, this company is perfectly poised to deliver the authentic vibe.

Under the meticulous direction of Paula Baldwin, it does. Her design team, also leaning mountainward, delivers a rusticated look overall, with Yvette Moten’s varied costume designs pushing gently back against the drift of scenic designer Marty Wolff’s driftwood-and-tree-trunk set. Even when we’re at the Asheville Southern Journal, where Alice Murphy passes judgment on manuscripts by Carl Sandburg and Tennessee Williams, the fancy signage over the office is painted on wood. This buttoned-up office is no less rusticated than Jimmy Ray Dobbs’ porch at the mayoral mansion in Zebulon, way over past Raleigh.

And the music! Nestled in an upstage shed framed by the timbers, musical director Ellen Robinson leads a zesty septet from the keyboard, with Nelson Frazier on the banjo. Edie Brickell’s lyrics ain’t no great shakes, but he had a hand in composing the music, so we’ll give him a pass.

Shuttling across the Tarheel State, we also shuttle between 1923 and 1946, when Alice decides to tell us her story. Although I loved the tale when I first set sight on it over six years ago, it wasn’t until I revisited it last week that I experienced its full power. Part of the revelation came from the alchemy of gradually remembering the Bright Star story as it unfolded anew inside Fullwood Theater – knowing what was coming a few minutes before it happened – and part of it came from Baldwin and her company simply doing a better job.

It seemed like the director of the touring production, whose name I didn’t mention in my review, cast his Alice solely on the basis of how well she personified the spinster-like stickler editor of 1946 rather than how well she evoked the vivacious and vulnerable underage victim of 1923. But Hilary Powell is consistently flesh-and-blood in spanning the wide gap between her prim present and her more primal past.

Powell decisively makes these Alices different people when we finally get to see the lass who captivated Jimmy Ray, the mayor’s son. Her smiles are like a sudden outpouring of sunshine on a previously rainy day. When we first saw her as a formidable editor, still aggrieved by her ancient breakup, we could hardly guess how it all had ended. As open and joyous as she once was, the prestigious editor is now largely inscrutable. Was her dear Jimmy Ray cruel and alive or devoted and dead?

Turns out there’s another possibility when we delve into Alice’s past, meet Jimmy Ray, and revisit their illicit romance. Lit up by Powell, Nick Culp as her beau brings us more radiance, eclipsing the touring portrayal we saw in 2018 as charismatically as his paramour does.

While we’re time-traveling out in Asheville and over in Zebulon, the story in Hayes Creek moves steadily forward from 1945, when Billy Cane returns from WW2, apparently unscathed, undecorated, and unkissed. He’s an aspiring writer with many stories to tell about his hometown, so it’s natural that the owner of Margot’s Bookstore is the first to greet him – clearly more chastely than she’d like. Billy’s heart is set on Asheville, where he hopes to publish his first works in the Southern Journal.

Not above a little subterfuge, Billy pens a letter of recommendation from Thomas Wolfe to bring along with his manuscripts to the Journal office. Gatekeepers Lucy and Daryl find Billy’s presumptions ludicrous, blithely tossing the unknown’s precious manuscript in the trash before his eyes. Fortunately, Alice happens by and, knowing that Wolfe has been dead these seven years, finds herself impressed by Billy’s duplicitous audacity.

We can presume that Billy knew enough about Wolfe’s connection to Asheville to accurately gauge how a recommendation from him would resonate there. Conveniently enough for Martin’s purposes, Wolfe’s Asheville home – a boarding house really, if you remember Look Homeward Angel – wasn’t turned into a memorial landmark until 1949. Sandburg’s home in Flat Rock, as you may know, is also a National Historic Site.

Billy sheepishly realizes that he’s been busted by the person he most wishes to impress, which only enhances his naïve charm. Alice keeps one of the manuscripts, not to publish but because she sees promise. Subsequently, she puts Billy under Daryl’s tutelage as his personal editor and sounding board. Robert Allen isn’t too swishy as Daryl but gay enough, and he provides a cosmopolitan contrast to Joshua Brand’s wide-eyed innocence as Billy.

I’m willing to entertain the idea that Brand is fulfilling the role of a drop-dead dreamboat, but it’s Hannah Daniels as Lucy who cements his magnetism, coming on to Billy after his first tastes of alcohol. Brand is hit-and-miss in rendering Billy’s reactions, overacting more than once, but I’ll admit that made him more unpolished and adorable for me.

Truth is, the augmented professionalism of Theatre Charlotte and Matthews Playhouse – in the absence of big Equity companies across the Metrolina region – makes me miss community theatre. Yet I also found the exaggerated greenhorn aspects of this Billy to be very complementary to the dark, melodramatic side of Martin’s yarn. Softened only by his contrite drunkenness deep in Act 2, Darren Spencer was absolutely fiendish as Mayor Josiah Dobbs, more like the ketchup Trump we’ve never seen than the eating-cats debater who is merely hilarious TV.

Jimmy Ray’s dad was a man who could stuff a newborn baby in a satchel, board a train, toss his grandson in a river, and inspire a lurid folksong. Spencer revels in the moment and Baldwin makes a point of triple underlining it. She also makes sure that Culp and Murphy don’t mute their reactions to the loss of their child and the atrocity.

Of course, in this retelling, the satchel dropping doesn’t become notorious. Alice keeps seeking to discover the whereabouts of her adopted son and her parents nurse their regrets, dad for signing the papers and mom for letting him. Compared to Mayor Dobbs, John West as Daddy Murphy and Liz Waller as Mama are benign, eventually earning our empathy with their years of suffering, estrangement from their daughter, and remorse. Even at his worst, West contrasts meaningfully with the diabolical mayor, rejecting his grandson out of wrongheaded righteousness rather than self-interest.

Back in Hayes Creek, Daddy Cane and Margot eagerly follow Billy’s progress over in Asheville. Looking at Todd Basinger as the dad, you can easily see where Billy’s simplicity and goodness came from. And if Gabriella Gonzalez as Margo seems conspicuously more experienced as an actress than Brand, that also plays beautifully. Remember, she’s a successful bookstore owner. Like Alice, she knows good writing when she sees it.

Daddy Cane has a big secret, but in a moment that reverberates back to Ulysses’ scar in The Odyssey, the secret gives itself up without him. Aristotle himself would have been delighted to see how Baldwin brought his concept of anagnorisis – the moment of recognition – to life. That heart-stopping revelation brought me close to tears, mostly because I saw it coming.

Art on My Sleeve

PERRY TANNENBAUM >>> Covers and Critiques the Performing Arts

Category Archives: Theatre

Hohenstein Gets Greedier in His Second Go-Round With “Peter and the Starcatcher”

**Review: Peter and the Starcatcher at Matthews Playhouse**

By Perry Tannenbaum

The Delphic Oracle Sings The Go-Go’s

**Review: Head Over Heels at Duke Family Performance Hall by Davidson Community Players**

By Perry Tannenbaum

Spoleto’s “Turn of the Screw” Upstages Theatre Launches

Reviews: White Box, Polar Bear & Penguin, and The Turn of the Screw

By Perry Tannenbaum

Get as Close as You Can to “She Kills Monsters”

**Review: She Kills Monsters at the Parr Center**

By Perry Tannenbaum

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

**Review: Parade at Belk Theater**

By Perry Tannenbaum

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

**Review: Violet at Theatre Charlotte**

By Perry Tannenbaum

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

Risen from the Dead, CAST’s Alabaster Is All About Artists in Crisis

“The Play That Goes Wrong” Fits Perfectly at The Barn

**Review: The Play That Goes Wrong at Theatre Charlotte**

By Perry Tannenbaum

“Bright Star” Shines Zestfully in Matthews

Review: Bright Star at Matthews Playhouse

By Perry Tannenbaum

Review: Peter and the Starcatcher at Matthews Playhouse

By Perry Tannenbaum

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Review: Head Over Heels at Duke Family Performance Hall by Davidson Community Players

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Reviews: White Box, Polar Bear & Penguin, and The Turn of the Screw

By Perry Tannenbaum

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Review: She Kills Monsters at the Parr Center

By Perry Tannenbaum

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Review: Parade at Belk Theater

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Review: Violet at Theatre Charlotte

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Review: A Small and Humble Erasure at Davidson Community Players

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Review: The Play That Goes Wrong at Theatre Charlotte

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Review: Bright Star at Matthews Playhouse

By Perry Tannenbaum

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**Review: Peter and the Starcatcher at Matthews Playhouse**

**Review: Head Over Heels at Duke Family Performance Hall by Davidson Community Players**

**Review: She Kills Monsters at the Parr Center**

**Review: Parade at Belk Theater**

**Review: Violet at Theatre Charlotte**

**Review: A Small and Humble Erasure at Davidson Community Players**

**Review: The Play That Goes Wrong at Theatre Charlotte**