Category Archives: Theatre

Side-by-Side, Davidson College Symphony and Charlotte Symphony Perform Schubert’s “Great”

Review: Schubert Symphony No. 9 in C Major (“The Great”)

By Perry Tannenbaum

There are members of the Theatre Department at Davidson College who will tell you – off the record, of course – that Duke Family Performance Hall, notwithstanding its fine physical appearance and advanced technical capabilities, presents formidable acoustic challenges for their dramatic and musical productions. It’s difficult for actors to project their voices to the back of the hall and up to the highest balcony, more so when musicians in the orchestra present a further barrier. So it was with a mixture of curiosity and trepidation that I attended my first purely musical event at the Duke. Considering that this was a Side-by-Side concert by the Davidson College Symphony and the Charlotte Symphony, I had to do a double-take when I saw our CVNC listing that specified Tyler-Tallman Hall as the venue. I’d gone to concerts at Tyler-Tallman on numerous occasions and, even with its balcony overhang, the room seats less than 200, hardly ideal for a confluence of two orchestras with 98 musicians listed on the program. So after my double-take, I made sure to double-check.

Now I don’t wish to exaggerate. When Christopher Warren-Green took the stage to conduct Tchaikovsky’s Jurists’ March followed by Schubert’s Symphony No. 9, I never counted more than 91 musicians at one time from the combined ensembles. The Schubert actually thinned out the ranks, for the phalanx of five percussionists for the Tchaikovsky was reduced to one principal from the college ensemble when we reached the symphony. You might think that the dampening effect that bedevils theatrical productions at the Duke might actually benefit such a mighty orchestral armada, but that hypothesis wasn’t tested in my presence. The hall was outfitted with an acoustic shell that prevented sound waves from escaping to the wings of the stage or to the impressively tall fly loft above.

In a hall that hardly seats more than 600, less than a third of the size of Belk Theater in Charlotte, a little more breathing room for the sound would have been welcome. The blare of the nine-piece brass section at various points in the Tchaikovsky could be especially unnerving. Davidson College Symphony director Tara Villa Keith had told us in her opening remarks that the last Side-by-Side rendezvous of the orchestras had been ten years ago, so the Tchaikovsky seemed to turn into an adjustment period for both the musicians and the audience. Compounding those adjustments was the unfamiliarity of the music. With only a single oft-anthologized recording to be found in searches of Spotify and Amazon, it’s unlikely that anyone who wasn’t onstage or in the college’s music department had ever heard of the D Major composition before.

More clarity amid the assaults of percussion would have made this new experience more enjoyable, along with greater precision when the 67 strings played at maximum speed. Along the way, introductions to the main theme and its reprises, sounded very much like similar episodes in Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker and other ballet suites, and the brass steadied themselves in the latter segments, especially the trombones, so I was encouraged as I became more accustomed to the acoustics. Hopefully, this performance was a tune-up for a future encore at the Belk, where I doubt this march has ever been played.

As the Schubert Ninth (“The Great”) unfolded, I found that I was able to ignore the acoustics for a while. When the passages verged on fortissimo, I found that I’d occasionally recover my objectivity and reaffirm that there was little more warmth or clarity in the music than you might hear on an old broadcast where the radio had been turned up to an unwise volume level. Yet in between those trying fortissimos, Schubert’s grand tapestry contains plenty of passages that allowed individual sections and soloists to shine. That didn’t happen immediately in the Andante section of the opening movement. Violas and cellos were sleek and mellow, but the brasses were collectively smudged and the French horns, so crucial at the very beginning, were somewhat fuzzy. Order prevailed with the first marching episode and hints of the big tune to follow when Schubert would decisively plunge into his Allegro ma non troppo section. Numerous relapses into muddiness plagued the music until the trombones entered with a firm, focused sound. Only one treacherous episode marred the rest: in a work scored for two flutes, the five who played together here – two from Charlotte, three from Davidson – sounded mushy and shrill. The speed-up led by the clarinets helped us forget this discomfort and the reprise of the trombones was even better.

While the ensuing Andante con moto wasn’t all quietude, it wasn’t pocked with the fearsome fortissimos we had to weather up until then, so the performance became rather pleasurable. Early and late in the movement, there were some gorgeous passages delivered by Davidson’s principal oboist Katherine Copenhaver, discreetly backed by principal clarinetist Ava Pomerantz. The tutti were far crisper at reduced volume and the sforzandos, punctuated by principal Davidson timpanist Cole Warlick, struck with a zesty exhilaration. Section work from the French horns and the flutes – only three playing here – snapped into a sharp unison. After a lovely hush, the entrance of the cellos over pizzicato violins propelled us toward a deftly managed resolution. The penultimate Scherzo movement swayed attractively in its 3/4 tempo with occasional detours into gravitas that made the prevailing lightness all the more beguiling. Warren-Green deployed four of the trombones here, one more than specified in the score, and he once again ventured to field five flutes. Everything remained under superb control, and the tutti at the end of the movement was the best so far.

Clarinets and woodwinds had their finest moments igniting the Finale, where Schubert’s valedictory C Major Symphony truly becomes “Great” for me. Copenhaver and Pomerantz had more fine moments here, especially when we arrived at my favorite theme, which always strikes me as having a circus or carnival essence when it gathers its full force. But there is also an exotic beauty to this memorable tune as the woodwinds majestically marshal its pace to full cruising gear. The full brass section was very fine with its answering heraldry, but the trombones, used by Schubert with unprecedented daring, were exemplary – all six of them sharing the spotlight here. The trumpets also shone when their big moment came, just after the oboes signaled for the circus parade one last time.

Exactly half of the musicians listed in the program were from the Davidson College Symphony, so this was truly an equal partnership. Presumably, the Duke is a more convivial venue when this Symphony is 49 members strong instead of 98, but there were likely some hidden benefits to the collaboration process even if more of the rehearsal time should have been spent in Davidson. Early last month, the Charlotte Symphony performed the Schubert Ninth at Belk Theater as part of a larger program that included Beethoven’s Fidelio Overture and the world premiere of Leonard Mark Lewis’ percussion concerto. However intense or organized the college students’ participation in that earlier rehearsal may have been, it surely enriched the overall collaboration in a unique way, a win-win-win for the Charlotte Symphony, the Davidson College Symphony, and all of the devoted patrons who filled the Duke for this Side-by-Side effort.

Will Eno Makes Indecision an Honorable Way of Life

Review:  Middletown

By Perry Tannenbaum

“Daytime. Night-time. Enough. I get it.” Folks in Will Eno‘s Middletown may remind you at times of the stark simplicities of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. There are definitely absurdist and existential ideas running amok in Eno’s quaint American village, but there were other modernist ideas vying for our attention as actors in the nine-member ensemble swerved in and out of character, broke the fourth wall, or simply joined us in the audience as loudmouth spectators. Disbelief was not to be suspended for long in this amiably odd student-directed production by the Davidson College Theatre Department at the Barber Theatre. Nor was information very useful here, though the question of where we were was quickly addressed and muddled. Among the candidates instantly put forth by Google in Connecticut, Ohio, New York, New Jersey, or Rhode Island, Eno’s Middletown is none of the above – or possibly all of the above. “Middle” can certainly mean average in an Our Town way, or it can mean between in an existential way, at the crossroads between the past and future, the intersection where all times meet. Now.

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Eno’s playfulness wasn’t long in coming. His Cop broke the fourth wall in welcoming us as “Ladies and Gentlemen,” but the rest of the ensemble, planted in the audience, went about exhausting all the other possibilities of whom the Cop might be addressing – to such an epic length that we might have forgetten this catalogue was nothing more than a greeting. Then we came to the scene that most reminded me of Waiting for Godot. Sauntering out of the audience, the Cop encountered the Mechanic who was loitering in the middle of the stage. The interrogation that followed mixed silliness, slapstick, and brutality in a fashion that resembled the Beckett recipe. It also served to introduce us to the two subspecies that inhabit Middletown, those who have settled positions in life and those who are in transition, in between what they used to do and what might come next. Not surprisingly, Eno had us empathizing with his unsettled middle people. Indecision seemed to equal sanity in his universe.

Dressed as a mechanic, the Mechanic was no longer working as one. Perennially holding a beer bottle in his hand, Sam Giberga showed us that the Mechanic might have a buzz going, but not enough for Matt Hunter as the Cop to toss him in the slammer. The costume and the beer bottle also told us, as the evening rolled along, that despite the Mechanic’s search for a new direction in life, he wasn’t pursuing it at warp speed. Near the end of this bittersweet comedy, a parade of other actors – out of time or in a dream – came by and dressed the Mechanic in something emblematic of his or her profession. One of the nurses helped the Mechanic into a lab coat, the Astronaut contributed his helmet, the Librarian draped a book bag on his arm, and the Cop surrendered his walkie-talkie. All directions were possible in this fantasia.

In subsequent appearances, Hunter managed to convince me that the Cop’s unexpected, random brutality toward the Mechanic had been as much the result of boredom as anything else. Actions by the Librarian, the Astronaut, and the nurses underscored the point that people are basically going through the motions at their jobs. The people who interested Eno the most were those in search of motions through with to go. Futility abounds: in a scene with a tour guide and two tourists, it was hard to tell who was trying hardest to help the other out. None of them had much of a clue.

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After the Cop chased the Mechanic off the stage, Mrs. Swanson arrived, a newcomer to Middletown. Hers was a more consequential scene, for she not only met the Librarian, who was eager to fill in Mrs. Swanson on the nebulosities that form Middletown’s history (Vickie Williams was a marvelously professional and preoccupied Librarian), she also met John Dodge, another listlessly searching townsperson. Not yet visibly pregnant, Mrs. Swanson was the embodiment of expectation, but her husband was never around to share her anxieties or her bliss. John, on the other hand, was perpetually downcast and lacking in initiative. Knowing Mrs. Swanson’s story and hearing that she was naming her unborn son John, John still didn’t act on his obvious affection for her.

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These two central roles were the best suited for collegiate actors, and both Savannah Deal and Ryan Rotella were superb. Only Deal was truly age-appropriate last year when the two appeared in Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice. Here, their unaffected styles made their scene work even more satisfyingly. Rotella’s hangdog approach to John gave the untethered man a cuddly, pathetic appeal, while Deal’s slight cheerfulness always seemed undercut by her disorientation, uncertainty, and profound loneliness. The common bond that united both subspecies of Middletowners, both the shiftless and the settled, was the loneliness that made Mrs. Swanson and John appear to be natural soulmates.

For this production, Barber Theatre was configured in stadium style, half the audience facing the other half with the stage in the middle. Scenic designer Neil Reda didn’t often have much to show us in the middle, but for Act I, he set up two colorful pairs of housefronts facing each other from opposite ends of the stage, about the size of a changing cabin you might rent at the beach. As the 10-minute intermission ended, ensemble members planted themselves at both sides of the house to discuss what they – as audience members – saw in Act I. It wasn’t a particularly enlightening discussion, of course, digressing into a guy on my side of the theatre marveling at the memory of one of the women on the other side. A latter-day Pirandello prank, perhaps?

During the interval, however, Reda’s two set pieces were swiveled around, revealing yet another aspect of what Middletown might be. On the other side of the exterior doors we saw in Act I, there were now two hospital rooms, one for Mrs. Swanson and one for John. In one room, there was an impending birth, while on John’s side, there just might be an impending death. Eno gives us a grimly humorous takeaway here: if you’re thinking about suicide and not absolutely sure you won’t have regrets, use a clean knife to better ensure your recovery.

Of course, the bigger takeaway was the one laid out before the audience. Middletown is that seemingly large space between birth and death, the entirety of our awareness. One of the ensemble members comes onstage to plant a little tree there, but it is whisked away before the important action resumes.

Sweet and Sour Romance for V-Day

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Preview:  Three Bone Theatre Presents Love/Sick

By Perry Tannenbaum

Three Bone Theatre has mostly been a fringe group during its first four seasons, starting out at UpStage in NoDa and performing there as recently as a year ago. For 2016-2017, Three Bone has taken it up a notch, settling in at Duke Energy Theatre as one of Spirit Square’s three resident companies, with more of a mainstream look and plenty more seats to fill.

Starting off with Theresa Rebeck’s Seminar in August and following up with Heidi Schreck’s Grand Concourse in November, Three Bone proved they were ready to make the UpStage-to-Uptown leap. With their upcoming production of Love/Sick coinciding with Valentine’s Day, they’re doing it with marketing savvy as well.

“The placement of Love/Sick in the season was definitely intentional,” says Three Bone artistic director Robin Tynes. “Everyone loves romantic comedies that end happily. This piece questions that a little bit and tells the sweet and the sour of relationships. What’s so great about the show is that it is enjoyable for couples and singles alike. The show has an awesome blend of hilarity and sucker-punches. Relationships are hard and these quirky stories offer something for everyone.”

Playwright John Cariani, who also starred in the 2015 off-Broadway premiere of Love/Sick, is better-known for Almost, Maine, one of the most frequently produced comedies across America in 2009-11. That’s when it jumped around the Metrolina area, with productions in Davidson, Ballantyne, and CPCC.

Pam Coffman was in that CP presentation and comes back to Cariani as one of the 10 cast members at Duke Energy. She knows the territory well. Instead of introducing us to a single pair of loving – or unloving – protagonists, Cariani presents us with a cavalcade of couples. Almost, a fantastical town in northernmost Maine that “doesn’t quite exist,” was the unifying geography of the earlier set of playlets. In Love/Sick, we’re in a surreal suburbia – less whimsy and no Northern Lights.

“All of the stories take place at the same time in the same town, with the town’s Super Center as the common thread throughout the play,” Coffman explains. “While the themes are also very similar – the quest for love, falling in love, maintaining love, loss of love – Cariani presents these themes in a darker, perhaps even cynical way. If Almost, Maine is a Moscato, then Love/Sick is a Cabernet Sauvignon – truly enjoyable, with a little bite on the end.”

Cariani’s suburbia is also a little more orderly than his Almost, for the scenes in Love/Sick aren’t merely different couples at the same time. This parade represents different stages of romantic relationships, presented in sequential order. Within this pattern and loose cohesion, there can also be wide variety.

 

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Like most of the other cast members, Amy Wada appears in multiple vignettes, once as Celia on the threshold of marriage and later as Abbie, a weary stay-at-home mom. Like Coffman, Wada appeared in Almost at CP in 2011, so Love/Sick for her is a Cariani déjà vu.

“The main difference between the two plays for me is how each scene ends,” says Wada. “In Almost, Maine, there is always some sort of closure to the relationship. The couples don’t always end up happy or together, but there’s some sort of punctuation at the end of each scene. In Love/Sick, Cariani leaves the status of the future of each couple’s relationship up in the air and for me, as an audience member, makes it more interesting.”

Coffman and her scene partner, John Xenakis, are the only members of the Love/Sick cast who don’t have multiple scenes. Furthermore, they don’t appear until the closing scene. So until last week, when they moved from their rehearsal space to Spirit Square, the actors really didn’t see each other perform – or experience a conventional run-through. When you’re in scenes that are essentially self-contained and disconnected from the rest, you can expect a director (Sean Kimbro, in this case) to run rehearsals out of sequence to respect his actors’ time.

The concluding scene, however, is somewhat different from those that precede. While Cariani might leave the future of his couples open-ended, he’s a bit tidier with his overall design. As Emily, we see Coffman as a woman who is wandering around the surreal suburbia’s supermarket by accident, stranded there just temporarily because she missed her connecting flight.

“She happens upon her ex-husband who now lives there,” Coffman says. “As the scene unfolds, they realize they are both single again, and begin to wonder if destiny has brought them together. The beauty of this scene is that, because these characters have lived longer and experienced more life, they are able to explore all of the love themes that have been touched on in the previous vignettes. The result is a bittersweet compilation of the many roads love can take, and hopefully, the desire to ‘do love’ better.”

In the process of this meeting – maybe a fresh beginning? – Emily and her ex become the vehicle that circles us back to the opening scene. If we haven’t realized it before, or if we’ve allowed ourselves to forget, all of Cariani’s scenes were occurring simultaneously.

Do the whimsy and brevity of the scenes take away from their impact? Not for Wada: “Even though the situations aren’t always realistic, what’s actually going on and the feelings the characters are experiencing are truthful and raw. The length of the pieces doesn’t affect the arc of each story. We can relate because we’ve all been somewhere along the spectrum of these relationships.”

Part of the fun for couples on a date night, perhaps a belated Valentine’s Day celebration, will come from the special connection that Three Bone is making with their community partner du jour, the 100 Love Notes Foundation. Established more than a year ago by Charlotte assistant city manager Hyong Yi in memory of his wife, Catherine Zanga, Yi went around town passing out his love notes celebrating the relationship that ended when she died of ovarian cancer.

The idea, the celebration, became an Internet phenomenon and then a foundation. Last week, Three Bone took to the streets and handed out a fresh batch of lunchtime love notes. According to Tynes, there will be more of “spread the love” opportunities at each performance of Love/Sick and more acts of random kindness on the streets.

“In such an anxiety-ridden and divisive time,” Tynes says, “we could all use a little more love. We will have the opportunity for our audience members to contribute their own love notes, with the possibility of their notes appearing in a slideshow before each performance.”

Or after? There were some tweets from God recently before Queen City Theatre Company’s Act of God at Duke Energy Theatre, but the 2015 Broadway revival of Sylvia took it a step further with the help of photo text messages from audience members transmitted during intermission. When the cast took their final bows, an adorable slideshow of audience doggie photos began right behind the actors.

How appropriate, then, that Three Bone Theatre’s production for Valentine’s Day will feature a similar embrace of their audience!

American Reset Brings New Relevance to “Ragtime”

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Preview: Ragtime

By Perry Tannenbaum

Things were so different in 1906, when E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime begins. Theodore Roosevelt, a conservationist Republican, was in his second term at the White House. The wave of immigrant Jewish refugees, fleeing pogroms in Russia, was at its peak.

American women would have to wait three more presidential elections before they could vote, but the charismatic Emma Goldman was one of the strong voices agitating on the streets. Jazz had yet to be born in New Orleans, and the African-American superstars who sparked its popularity were still children, but Scott Joplin had already codified the architecture of ragtime.

When Terrence McNally adapted Doctorow’s 1975 novel for the musical that opened on Broadway in 1998, costumes worn by Goldman, by Tateh the Jewish immigrant, and by ragtime piano player Coalhouse Walker added to my impression that Ragtime was so yesterday. Women had already ascended to high elective offices and had figured prominently in presidential politics. Jewish immigrants and their descendants had crafted the very framework of Hollywood’s studios and Broadway’s musical theatre. Satchmo and the Duke were far in the rearview mirror of American cultural history, and Michael Jackson was deep into his reign as the King of Pop.

Surely we had matured as a nation since those primitive days Doctorow and McNally chronicled. Each time I saw Ragtime again, in 2001, 2005, and especially in 2011 – when Barack Obama was President, and Hillary Clinton, his most formidable opponent in the 2008 election, was Secretary of State – my sense of our superiority and progress as a nation continued to grow.

Then came 2016. The shocking election result. The inauguration. The women’s demonstrations across America and across the ocean. The opening assault on immigration.

Or how about Trayvon Martin, Ferguson, and the cavalcade of atrocities posted to social media since early 2012? When Ragtime arrives this weekend at Halton Theater in a new production by CPCC Theatre, it won’t seem as quaint and primitive as it did five years ago. In so many ways, we’ve punched the reset button.

When I saw Brian Stokes Mitchell as Coalhouse, the rousing song he introduced, “Wheels of a Dream,” seemed to be dreaming of today – or 1999, when I saw Mitchell at the Ford Theatre on 42nd Street, and the whole ensemble transformed “Wheels of a Dream” into an anthem at the end of the show. This week, when Charlotte powerhouse Tyler Smith takes on Coalhouse, I’ll have to humbly concede that his anthem is still envisioning a better tomorrow that hasn’t come.

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Smith was never under any illusions. “This country was founded on principles that were never all-inclusive,” he says. “Our recent presidential results showed the world how much racial hatred still looms here.”

After a couple of lightweight roles at CP in last winter’s Irving Berlin revue and last summer’s Sister Act, Megan Postle is eager to show some range – and depth – as Goldman. “I have a personal attachment to Ragtime,” Postle reveals. “It was my first Broadway show. My aunt took me to see the original cast.”

One of the fascinating things about Ragtime is its mix of historical and fictional characters. Doctorow also gives cameos of varying lengths to J.P. Morgan, Booker T. Washington, Harry Houdini, Henry Ford, Admiral Peary, and Evelyn Nesbit.

But none of the historical characters is altered more in trafficking with Doctorow’s fictional characters than Emma, who sheds her anarchist and assassin tendencies. “Goldman is the Greek chorus for Ragtime,” says Postle. “She speaks for all members of the human race who feel there is inequality.”

Emma also helps to stitch the various strands of the plot together. Coalhouse and Tateh head two of the three families that anchor this story. They are the outsiders while the third family, prosperous inhabitants of New Rochelle, complete the New York triangle of the story. Sailing off to join Admiral Peary’s polar expedition as we begin, the Father waves to Tateh, who is on a raggedy ship that has nearly completed its voyage across the Atlantic to Ellis Island.

From that point, the story forms an epic arc that resolves gracefully as the full company delivers its epilogue. Along the way, we glide past a labor strike by exploited millworkers in Massachusetts, Goldman’s galvanizing oratory, horrid police brutality, and audacious, explosive, vengeful responses from Coalhouse.

Smith admits that racial issues have heated up since the most recent 2009 revival of Ragtime on Broadway and the end of the Obama presidency.

“Today’s Coalhouse is every father, husband, brother and son killed without proper justice being served,” he said. “Every wife, sister, mother and daughter who have to feel the grief and bear the weight of losing a lost one while nobody seems to care. People like Eric Gardner, Trayvon Martin, Keith Lamont Scott, the mothers of all those murdered in Chicago. There is a line sung in the show saying ‘we’re all Coalhouse.’ It hits home because it is true.”

Tom Hollis, CP’s drama chair, chose Ragtime for the 2016-17 season back in the spring of 2015, around the time when the announcement of Donald Trump’s candidacy was greeted with more laughter than alarm. Hollis considered it then in the vein of 1776, the musical that was already set to run last September, just before the first presidential debate.

He still does. “When we were doing 1776 in the fall of 2016, we were constantly being struck by the parallels to life today,” Hollis says. “Each generation of Americans has had to face coming up with an answer to these issues because they are woven into the fabric of our country. That we haven’t been able to find a permanent solution is the sad irony of our history.”

A hard, tragic compromise on slavery clouded the happy ending of 1776, and what happens to Coalhouse clouds the ending of Ragtime. A member of the New Rochelle family who was inspired by Goldman ultimately vows to keep Coalhouse’s story alive, while Tateh achieves the American dream.

Billy Ensley, a mainstay of the CPCC Theatre for decades, will play Tateh at the Halton. It’s just the latest in a series of Jewish roles that he has played over the course of his acting career, including Eugene in Neil Simon’s Broadway Bound and two ill-fated historical figures, San Francisco activist Harvey Milk and Atlanta’s Leo Frank. Wrongly convicted of the 1913 murder of Mary Phagan in Atlanta – and subsequently lynched – Frank was the tragic hero of Alfred Uhry’s Parade, presented at the Halton in 2006.

So for Ensley, it’s a journey back to the same period with a similar rueful takeaway, even if Tateh does end happily.

“Current events regarding immigration have only strengthened the way I have always felt about those that are marginalized, forgotten, discriminated against,” Ensley says. “We all deserve a chance to live fulfilling, safe and happy lives, and those of us that have that already should do what we can to see to it that others less fortunate can as well. Our country was built by immigrants.”

Ensley offers advice for immigration opponents: “For those today in favor of a closed-off America, I suggest a trip to Ellis Island and a little research on where the people came from that made this country the wonderful and rich country that it is.”

Travel advisory: Ellis Island is just a short boat ride away from the Statue of Liberty, depicted on the cover of numerous editions and translations of Ragtime.

Hit the Road, James, With a Mind-Boggling “Hitchhiker’s Guide”

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Review:  The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

By Perry Tannenbaum

Can this really be the end? Citizens of the Universe and its indefatigable intergalactic peacekeeper, James Cartee, are leaving Charlotte, heading for Texas, and only possibly leaving an appendage behind them to carry on their mission. Closing with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy at the Unknown Brewing Company, their most lavish production since they adapted The Princess Bride at the now-defunct Breakfast Club in 2011, COTU is going out with a big bang.

Two parallel events trigger the sci-fi comedy as we meet the shambling, stiff-necked Arthur Dent, who never sheds his PJs and bathrobe throughout his mind-boggling travels. On the earthly plane, Arthur is battling to keep his Cottington home from demolition by the county to provide a pulverized right-of-way for a new thruway. He’s ready to lay down his life for his property, and he’s actually lying down in front of his Cottington cottage so that the county bulldozer can’t move further.

Meanwhile, on a more galactic plane, Vogon overlords who are constructing a hyperspace bypass have slated Earth for demolition. Why a perpetually moving planet in a perpetually expanding universe would be slated for demolition is beside the point, do you hear me?

By the most improbable coincidence, Arthur is singled out for rescue by Ford Prefect, an embedded alien who contributes to the Hitchhiker’s Guide as a roving travel writer. Yes, when Douglas Adams first conceived his sci-fi serial for BBC

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Radio in 1978, ebooks were already on his imaginary assembly line. Arthur frequently consults his pocket reader after hitchhiking aboard a new space cruise or during his downtime, but it is Mandy Kendall who brings The Book to life between stints as our narrator.

She’s also, as our costume designer, the person who makes COTU’s valedictory so outré sensational. Arthur may be a humdrum everyman, with Chris Freeman faithfully executing his shambling duties, but Tom Ollis and Billy Whalen, tethered together as two-headed galaxy prez Zaphod Beeblebrox, take us back past the disco ‘70s to the hippy ‘60s with their outfit. Loud colors, a florid headband, with brash tie-dyes clashing unapologetically against paisleys.

Of course, Beeblebrox doesn’t exhaust the weird phenomena Kendall must costume on Arthur’s odyssey. Other cameos range from Ravenous Bugbladder Beast of Traal (Greg Irwin), Marvin the morose robot (David G. Holland), Deep Thought the computer (Martin Barry), a Whale (Kevin Sario) swimming with a Bowl of Petunias, and the two life forms on our planet that are smarter than we are, mice and dolphins.

Freeman maintains a British diffidence that occasionally flares into puzzlement amid his haywire journeying, but Nathan Morris as Ford is the optimistic huckster forever urging Arthur onwards, almost oozing insincerity when the going gets tough. Like the brainy Trillian and the gregarious Book, Ford is occasionally incomprehensible when he uses jargon that is outside the ken of the BBC and the OED.

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Both Ford and Kendall occasionally stumbled on their lines Saturday night when they wandered through this alien corn, less like the terminology of a botany catalogue than the brainchildren of Lewis Carroll. By comparison, Elisha Bryant skates through these lingual brambles effortlessly as the other earthling in our story, not merely assimilating into the galactic hierarchy after being kidnapped by Beeblebrox, but becoming his/its/their right-hand organism.

If you saw Bryant’s work recently in two of the plays at Children’s Theatre’s WonderFest, including the title role in The Commedia Snow White, her excellence at the Unknown Brewing Company will come as no surprise. Every time Bryant appears, it’s in a different costume. Trillian is adequate reason for Arthur to keep on traipsing across the galaxy.

Aside from their helter-skelter production style or their intriguing choices of classics and film adaptations, COTU is best known for pioneering new venues, going where no other theatre company has presented before. Surrounding the players with a wall of wooden casks and an armada of tall stainless steel brewing tanks, the Unknown was surprisingly apt for a sci-fi comedy.

Yes, the sound seal between the brewing room and the bustling taproom wasn’t perfect as the evening ripened, and the makeshift seating wasn’t cushy enough to prevent the onset of butt burnout at the end of the show. But you can settle into the general seating with your brewski in hand, and there was a convenient food truck parked outside last Saturday night on the corner of S. Mint and Lincoln Streets. I can vouch for the blackened salmon sandwich that I took into the theater, but once the lights went down, I couldn’t accurately describe all its green and crunchy contents.

Getting the answer to the meaning of life from Deep Thought is a profound reason for going, so I won’t be a spoiler. But the anthem near the close of Act 2 is such an emblematic goodbye that I can’t resist. After sitting behind the control board for most of the night, cuing projections that I suspect he devised and overseeing the excellent sound, Cartee strode forward to the stage and joined the action – as a dolphin. Somehow in time-honored comic book style, Adams had brought us back to Earth just before the wily dolphins threw off their domesticated disguises and fled the planet.

“So long,” they sang in a joyous, rudimentary production number, “and thanks for all the fish!” Goodbye to you, too, COTU. Thanks for sticking with it so long through so many challenges and hardships.

 

 

An Act of God Ordains Wedolowski as Divine Vessel

Theatre Review: Queen City Theatre An Act of God

By Perry Tannenbaum

 

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After gracing Broadway’s Studio 54 with his presence in the body of Jim Parsons, God has chosen Duke Energy Theatre at Spirit Square for his newest abode and the body of Queen City Theatre Company’s Kristian Wedolowski as his instrument. As may be divined from the title, An Act Of God, there is no intermission as God gives Charlotte his new Ten Commandments – but flanked by two of his angels, the obsequious Gabriel and the trouble-making Michael, there are occasional interruptions, with faux questions from the audience.

The zenith of David Javerbaum’s career, which took a major upswing during his tenure as head writer and executive producer of The Daily Show (not to mention his participation in Jon Stewart’s knee-slapper textbook, America: A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction), this script began up in the proverbial cloud as @TheTweetOfGod and coalesced into The Last Testament: A Memoir by God in 2011, four years before Parsons was appointed as his vessel. Not having spoken to us for nearly two millennia, Javerbaum’s God has a lot to get off his chest.

He’s tired of man’s misconceptions about God, tired of our demands upon him, and he’s developed a painful insight: mankind has been fashioned too much in his image, an arrogant, vengeful asshole. Not only has God been thinking about his anger management issues and a reset for the Ten Commandments, he’s contemplating a rollout of Universe 2.0. Steve Jobs seems to be his role model.

Act of God turns out to have two simultaneous organizing principles. While we’re seeing the big reveal (thanks to the multimedia ministrations of Lore Postman Schneider) of the New Ten Commandments, some of which are holdovers from the Original Ten, God is also giving us the lowdown on the early chapters of the Book of Genesis, Adam and Steve through Abraham. Then we’re doing a jump skip to that notorious parenting episode when God allowed his kid to come down here.

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We still have to brave Wedolowki’s Uruguayan accent to comprehend the word of God, but he has made large leaps in mastering American cadences, so the wacky incongruity works in his favor after a while. Christopher Jones seems to embody the Serenity Prayer as Gabriel, though we suspect he’s terrified of the boss, and Steven B. Martin as Michael is perpetually flirting with a furlough to the Other Place, sporting the thinnest veneer of obedience.

The show had already taken the Donald aboard when it reopened this past summer on Broadway starring Sean Hayes, but artistic director Glenn Griffin adds new topicality, acknowledging that the bible chronicles “alternative facts” and warning against faith in the Carolina Panthers. He also takes the opportunity to turn his pre-show greetings into an extension of what follows, giving God the benefit of a really big Ed Sullivan-style intro. WFAE radio host Mike Collins is the unseen Voiceover. We only mention that because I haven’t been a guest on Collins’ Charlotte Talks for over a year.

Wacky Magrath Sisters Still Deliver Southern-Fried Hilarity

Theater Review: Charlotte’s Theatre Crimes of the Heart

By Perry Tannenbaum

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It’s been a long time – nearly 15 years as far as I can tell – since I’ve spent an evening with Beth Henley’s lovable Mississippi Magrath Sisters. Looking in on them at Theatre Charlotte’s revival of CRIMES OF THE HEART affirms how vividly these deftly differentiated sibs stick in a theatergoer’s memory. First and foremost, you’ll remember kooky Babe, who doubts her own sanity after shooting her husband. Carefree temptress Meg seems to be the enviable paragon, looking down on her sibs as she waltzes back to the home sod with her Left Coast cool, but she’s beginning to doubt her own specialness now that her stab at stardom has come up empty. Lastly, that dear and dutiful doormat, Lenny, with her shriveled ovary and low self-esteem.

If the 1981 Pulitzer Prize winner is beginning to show its age, I couldn’t tell it by the audience reaction at the Queens Road barn. The quirkiness and the comedy still work, but at a distance of 35 years, we can begin to appreciate what made CRIMES OF THE HEART so unique when it burst upon the scene.

Prize-winning plays and novels set in Dixie had invariably been about elegant, decayed, and tragic folk, following the Southern archetypes embraced by William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, and Harper Lee. Henley showed us once and for all that the eccentricities celebrated in You Can’t Take It With You could play just as well down in Mississippi – even when peppered with dark Arsenic and Old Lace humor.

Yet Henley’s comedy is notably more realistic than Kaufman’s crowdpleaser and both lighter and saner than Arsenic. That’s because the Magrath sisters are quirky rather than balmy – and because no significant antagonist appears onstage. When Cousin Chick drops by to chide or alarm the sisters, she is more of an irritant than an antagonist, her exits usually comical hasty retreats. She’s more like the recurring meanie from a TV sitcom than a force to reckoned with. The only real threat is State Senator Zachery Bottrelle, convalescing offstage somewhere with the bullet hole in his gut that Babe put there.

The Magrath Sisters came equipped with leavening agents that had usually been absent from American comedies: sorrows and regrets. You could easily presume that these were Southern heirlooms from Williams’ iconic dramas, but I wouldn’t dismiss the possibility that this quality in Henley’s heroines may have had its roots in the novels of Jane Austen. Like Gentle Jane, Henley doesn’t presume to show us how men speak to each other when ladies aren’t in the room.

Directing for the first time at Theatre Charlotte, Christian Casper isn’t trying to reimagine our leading characters. Nor is set designer Chris Timmons trying to depict the Hazelhurst, Missisippi, home as any more luxurious or squalid than you might expect. We’re in a bland, slightly cheesy smalltown home, and its only discordant element is the dwarf fridge in the kitchen.

One of the ways that Henley binds her comedy together and makes it memorable is with the pair of ceremonies framing the action in celebration of Lenny’s 30th birthday. As you’ll see in the final moments, budgetary constraints are a bit more exposed than strictly necessary – cakewise and candlewise. But if Casper isn’t sufficiently savvy about the technical strategies to make the final scene truly shine, he certainly doesn’t mess up the opening.

Lenny’s clandestine celebrations get us off to a charming start with Meredith Westbrooks Owen as the pitiful birthday girl, repeatedly hunched over her wee little cupcake, singing to herself. Comedy – and the big news about the crime – burst in with Zendyn Duellman feasting on the role of Chick. Catty, gossipy, and fault-finding don’t completely describe Chick, for she’s also vulgar and trashy, richly deserving the Magraths’ scorn. Picking up a pair of pantyhose that Lenny has obligingly bought for her at the store, Chick begins squirming into them before our very eyes.

Henley meant Chick’s struggles to appear “slightly grotesque” in her stage directions, but Casper has Duellman going way beyond that. Like Lenny, we don’t care whether Chick remembers her cousin’s landmark birthday or not, but the same lapses from her younger sisters clearly hurt. Lenny’s clandestine candle-lighting lingers as an subliminal rebuke, underscoring her siblings’ tendency to be insensitive, neglectful, and self-absorbed. Beyond that, they expect Lenny to perform all the family’s mop-up chores, chiefly the onerous task of caring for bedridden Old Granddaddy.

From the moment that Jennifer Barnette enters as Meg, there are conflicting airs about her of regality and rebelliousness, elegance and uncouth. One minute, she’s lighting up a cigarette to vex Chick, the next she’s disconcerting Lenny by cracking pecans with her shoe. What a fascinating character arc for Barnette as she careens from Coca-Cola and stolen candy crèmes to bourbon and birthday cake. But of course, Barnette’s physical comedy – or even Chick’s, for that matter – will pale in comparison to Babe’s prodigies.

Emily Klingman performed them on opening night with a neurotic edge that eventually won me over. She repeatedly convinces us that Babe is the youngest, most immature person onstage, quite capable of obsessing morbidly over why her mom killed the family cat when she committed suicide. And hey, when a kitchen oven and a chandelier are among your props, you will get laughs.

Self-sacrifice is enough to win our affection for Lenny, but Henley calls upon two good men to help in sealing our fondness for her more self-centered sibs. Allen Eby is Doc Porter, surprisingly mellow for a man whom Meg left drenched and limping after a spectacular breakup during Hurricane Camille. On the other hand, Cole Long as dorky Barnette Lloyd, the legal eagle who is trying to keep Babe out of jail, seems uncannily capable of homing in on his client’s ditzy wavelength.

Less Bard and More Beer

Theater Reviews: Every Christmas Story Ever Told (and then some!) and The Great American Trailer Park Christmas Musical

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By Perry Tannenbaum

Four centuries after William Shakespeare’s death, Charlotte’s own Chickspeare inhabits a parallel universe. Or maybe it’s retribution: while all of the Bard’s works were performed by all-male theatre troupes, all of Chickspeare’s productions since 1998 have been “All women! All the time!” as originally promised. The “All Shakespeare” in the middle of that slogan was gradually blurred and dropped as the Chix added Reduced Shakespeare Company lampoons to their rep and then ventured father afield.

Written by Michael Carleton, James FitzGerald, and John K. Alvarez, Every Christmas Story Ever Told (and then some!) is very much in the spirit of Reduced Shakespeare’s original assault on the Elizabethan titan’s complete works. The parentheses in the title, the quickie romp through multiple classics by three actors playing multiple roles, and the devotion of all of Act 2 to a single extravagant lampoon all follow the Reduced template.

But gender only begins to describe the difference between Chickspeare’s version and the 2010 Actor’s Theatre Every Christmas. The new model is as much an event as it is a theatre production, an experience that begins and ends at the newer NoDa Brewery on N. Tryon Street. In between, there are a couple of shuttle bus rides back and forth from the original Brewery location on N. Davidson Street. You’ll find more brew choices on tap at North Tryon, but the enticement of lifting a mug and participating in the many “To beer!” toasts during the Chix performance at North Davidson is hard to resist.

Few did last Friday night. Besides the brewskis, we had Anne Lambert lubricating the experience with a steady feed of Christmas trivia challenges on the bus ride to the show and the conviviality of the Chix banditas – Sheila Snow Proctor, Lane Morris, and Tanya McClellan – during their performance. But mainly, it was the beer that induced the party atmosphere.

Directing the show, Joanna Gerdy and Andrea King had a healthy disregard for the script. The playwrights labored under a handicap that never afflicted the Reduced Shakespeare collaborators when they chose ancient targets like Hamlet, the Bible, and American history for their merry desecrations. Unlike your seasonal carols, most of our familiar Christmas stories aren’t free-range prey. Copyright law prevents satiric assaults upon Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, the Charlie Brown Christmas, and the Yuletide yarns of Truman Capote, Dylan Thomas, and Jean Sheperd.

When Carleton, FitzGerald, and Alvarez lashed out at these restrictions, the result was “Gustav, the Green-Nosed Rain-Goat,” not the funniest sketch you’ll ever see. Morris never plays the mutated venison as if it were comedy gold, so there’s never any deadly straining to make it funnier than it is. We’ll raise a glass, and then we’ll move on.

The premise of the show is that Proctor wishes to proceed traditionally with a presentation of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, but Morris and McClellan are sick and tired of the same old stuff. Before they’ll allow Snow to read her Dickens and play her Scrooge, she must join them in a medley of other Christmas faves, including Frosty the Snowman, Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade, the Grinch, O’Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi,” and – maybe if there’s enough time – the inevitable It’s a Wonderful Life.

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There isn’t enough time, but that doesn’t deter Morris. While Proctor is on-task as Scrooge, with McClellan visiting her as all three ghosts, Morris keeps insisting that Proctor is George Bailey, inflicting on us a bevy of characters from New Bedford Falls, including George’s guardian angel, his brother, his banker nemesis, and his adoring wife. By the time Lane reaches the wife, it comes off oddly like a female impersonation.

Fortunately, Proctor is the ideal Scrooge in the face of these torments. There’s a bit of Oliver Hardy and Bud Abbott in her forbearance, but we somehow remain on her side throughout her ordeal. At the climax of Christmas Carol, Morris is still bedeviling her, so she finally submits to becoming George Bailey – in a schizophrenic frenzy that finds her shuttling between Scrooge and Bailey as both McClellan and Morris assail her.

In her surrender, Proctor produces a Jimmy Stewart impersonation that’s barely good enough to let you know what she’s doing. It will probably improve during the next couple of weekends as the run continues, but I’m not sure it should. Likewise, Proctor can be a mite slow changing costumes, but McClellan’s patience with her cast mate is so priceless, it would hardly pay for Proctor to hurry.

It’s been a rocky road for Actor’s Theatre of Charlotte since developers forced them out of their longtime home on Stonewall Street last summer. We thought they would resurface on Louise Avenue, but negotiations there collapsed, and the company tacked toward Freedom Drive. City and county paperwork delayed the opening, so their Toxic Avenger was redirected to a nearby church, and the current Great American Trailer Park Christmas Musical has been rerouted to the Patricia McBride and Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux Center for Dance, Charlotte Ballet’s HQ on N. Tryon Street.

I was curious to see how director Chip Decker and his design team would adapt to studios with so much space and such a high ceiling. With two fair-sized ramshackle trailers, topped by two jumbo projection screens, height isn’t a problem, and the design team fills out the stage with a fence, some Florida flamingo kitsch, an incongruous array of Star Wars memorabilia and, dead center of the stage between the two trailers, a half-decorated Christmas tree.

That odd tree, straddling the borderline between Rufus and Darleen’s properties, triggers Betsy Kelso’s plotline. Rufus loves Christmas and adores Darleen, but mean Darleen snarls “Bah” and “Humbug” to both. She will not decorate her trailer or even allow Rufus onto her property to decorate her side of the tree. That’s a source of huge consternation to Betty, the manager of Armadillo Acres, who has always wanted – but failed – to win the big prize awarded to the best-decorated trailer park. A vague curse plagues Armadillo Acres, and it too will to be exorcised before we reach a happy ending.

There’s a certain amount of respectability in Betty, so we’re fortunate that it is more than counterbalanced by the trashiness of her other tenants, Pickles and Lin (short for Linoleum). They also come in handy when ghosts are needed to populate Darleen’s Dickensian dream sequence. Rufus’s romantic fantasies and Betty’s hopes of nabbing top kitsch honors are revived when Darleen, in an effort to pull the plug on the park’s Christmas lights, gets electrocuted by Rufus’s déclassé cable-splitter and wakens with amnesia. That enables her to forget what a Scrooge she is and the fact that she belongs to Jackie, owner of a slutty pancake joint.

If you missed the first and second comings of this trashy romp, it’s good for you to know all the basics I’ve detailed. Although Actor’s Theatre has done well with the Charlotte Ballet space, they have thoroughly failed to conquer its acoustics. So the songs and lyrics by David Nehls are more crucial to your enjoyment than usual – but often unintelligible over the four-piece band led by music director Brad Fugate.

Tommy Foster isn’t as rednecky as Ryan Stamey was as Rufus, but he’s a tad more pathetic and lovable. Karen Christensen is more than sufficiently bitchy as Darleen, and we often forget that Matt Kenyon is in drag as Lin. (So does he, I suspect.) But Jon Parker Douglas nearly steals the show as Jackie when he is possessed during the climactic exorcism. It’s an epileptic farting fantasia that isn’t quickly forgotten – and the kind of broad physical comedy this acoustically-challenged show desperately needs.

 

Spirit of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever Peeps Through at Matthews Playhouse

Theater Review: Matthews Playhouse of the Performing Arts: The Best Christmas Pageant Ever

By Perry Tannenbaum

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A week after reviewing the world premiere of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever: The Musical, commissioned by Children’s Theatre of Charlotte and staged at ImaginOn, I found it easy to imagine that the Barbara Robinson stage play it was based upon could be headed toward oblivion. Driving along I-485 toward opening night of the current Matthews Playhouse production of the non-musical, I had a poignant realization that this could be the last time I’d see the infamous Herdman siblings – “the worst kids in the whole history of the world” – without the new music by Jahnna Beecham and Malcolm Hillgartner that accompanies their superb adaptation.

Directed by June Bayless with a cast of over 40 children and adults, the Matthews production mightily reinforced my impression that the Beecham/Hillgartner musical boasts more vivid storytelling than the 1982 playscript, adapted by Robinson from her own 1971 young adult novel. Not always embracing the challenges – and rewards – of dramatization, Robinson often delivers her story to us second-hand through her narrator, Beth Bradley, a young girl who has a great vantage point for the unfolding events but doesn’t play a key role.

Instead of seeing her younger brother, Charlie, getting in trouble for saying that the best thing about Sunday school is its welcome refuge from the Herdmans, Robinson is content to have Beth telling us about it. Where Beecham and Hillgartner show us how the six Herdmans terrorize Charlie and his schoolmates in the lunchroom – with a dynamically choreographed, hard-rocking “Take My Lunch” production number – Robinson carries out that chore by having Beth confide in us or by Charlie whining about it to his dad.

A huge turning point in the plot, triggering the complication of the marauders invading the church pageant, comes when Charlie claims not to care about surrendering his lunch to a bullying Herdman, because even more enticing goodies are doled out to him after Sunday school. In the musical, this happens in the midst of total lunchroom pandemonium. In the play, it’s merely a dialogue that Bayless can stage in front of the curtain to mask a scene change. Time after time, watching the Robinson version just five days after the new musical demonstrated how deftly upsized the new version is and how static the old one was.

The disparity was magnified, of course, by the intrinsic differences between a generously budgeted professional effort and a more modestly funded community theatre production. But watching less polished performers at a more rudimentary facility also offers insight into why this clunky script is so beloved, mounted at least a dozen times over the past 14 holiday seasons in the Charlotte metro region. Rambunctious and rowdy as they are, the Herdmans are hard roles to mess up. Even when the savagery of the roles goes visibly against the grain of the young actors, the result remains very entertaining. The climactic Christmas pageant, dominated by the kids, is even more foolproof. At a church or school play, stiffness and self-consciousness are the norm, so any glints of talent and naturalness are gravy.

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I wasn’t always sure that Bayless really wanted to transcend the awkwardness of school theatricals. Every actor and actress under the age of 21 faced the audience directly at an angle of zero degrees throughout the 68-minute performance, assuring the same degree of spontaneity for much of the dialogue. When we reached the most chaotic scene, in fact, as firemen ran through the audience in response to an alarmist distress call, panicky children were herded into a circular cluster – and every single child was facing in the same direction, toward us!

The imaginativeness of the staging can be gauged by the beginnings of the two pageant rehearsal scenes. In the first, the kids were curiously quiet and inert before Grace Bradley arrived, but in the second, there were all kinds of noise and commotion. Why the difference? Very logical: in the second scene, the script calls for Mrs. Bradley to demand that the kids quiet down.

No doubt, this style of staging can be adorable. In the actual pageant, all of the heavenly angels came downstage and filled the space from wing to wing as they sang, the littlest angels on the outside flanking a perfectly symmetrical phalanx, with the tallest at the center – like a snowcapped mountaintop crowned with glittering haloes. Trouble was, this angelic row almost completely blocked our view of the Herdmans behind them, getting miraculously wrapped up in the spirit of the Nativity scene they were acting out.

Somehow the impulse to gratify parents and relatives in the audience – those whose kids were in the choir – took precedence over giving the story its maximum impact when it mattered most. The artistry of Evan Kinsley’s lighting design, isolated the Herdmans from the surrounding shepherds, villagers, and wise men, was largely wasted here, for the transformed kids emitting this unexpected glow were almost totally obscured from view. The three busybody gossips, Grace’s implacable detractors, entertainingly sat themselves among us to watch the pageant. They could pretend to have been amazed at the Herdmans when the holiest moment arrived, but I was frustrated by it.

Not having seen such a large cast of unpolished actors in a long while, I found myself tickled at the rich variety of shy, stiff, and promising performances, some of which were brimful of oddly channeled energy. It’s best to dwell on the standouts, I think. While there was a nice shambling quality to Michael Smith as Mr. Bradley, who would rather not see the pageant even if his wife and kids were going to be in it, Nicole Cardamone Cannon as Grace was easily the best of the adults, almost radiant in her forbearance as she dealt with the Herdmans and reassured their victims.

JJ Twer as Beth had a winsome personality as our narrator – and her mom’s prime defender – but Thomas Mink as little brother Charlie pleased me a little more, high-spirited despite all his grievances and more consistently intelligible. Among the Herdmans, the girls have the plumiest roles, and Bayless has cast well here. Ella Osborn as Imogene is a snarling wildcat until the role of the Virgin Mary domesticates her, and Grace Ivey remains implacably exuberant as Gladys, even after landing the role as the Herald Angel. A day after the show, Ivey’s “Shazzam!” is still ringing in my head.

Hey, Hey, We’re the Herdmans!

Theater Review: The Best Christmas Pageant Ever: The Musical

By Perry Tannenbaum

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So the holidays are here, and we know the live entertainment drill: inevitable revivals of A Christmas Carol, Nutcracker, and The Best Christmas Pageant Ever plus a few fresh novelties to liven the mix. This year, one of the novelties is also one of the inevitables. For while it’s possible to see the customary stage adaptation of Barbara Robinson’s Yuletide favorite at Matthews Playhouse starting on Thursday, Children’s Theatre of Charlotte unveiled the world premiere of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever: The Musical on Black Friday.

Robinson adapted her 1971 novel for the Seattle Children’s Theatre in 1982, and the proliferation of productions across America has arguably made the playscript more beloved than the book. So the team of Johanna Beecham and Malcolm Hilgartner, adding their lyrics and musical score, did the prudent thing in adapting Robinson’s stage version.

Nearly 34 years to the day since the story succeeded in Seattle, a whole generation of parents who saw Best Christmas Pageant onstage as children are bringing their offspring to ImaginOn to see The Musical. Our Children’s Theatre, which has grown to national renown during those intervening years, had to add five performances to the run before opening night – a tribute to their prestige as well as the bankable title.

Turns out that the Robinsons, the playwright (who died in 2013) and her daughters, were pretty prudent themselves in choosing Beecham and Hiltgartner. They seem to know what can be enlarged to musical proportions and how to get the job done. I’d also say that Best Christmas Pageant is easier to swallow than A Christmas Carol was when it morphed into Scrooge.

Big crowd scenes can be magnified most easily from stage to musical dimensions, but A Christmas Carol doesn’t really abound with them. Scrooge’s workplace and Cratchit’s home aren’t bustling places, and London is a cold, lonely, and forbidding city until Ebenezer’s reformation. So a couple of parties and a funeral were supersized, effervesced, and choreographed for Scrooge. We’re also more familiar with the older, more entrenched Dickens tale, so tampering is riskier, more jarring.

 

Recognizing that they’re primarily dealing with schoolkids, normal ones in fear of the notorious Herdmans, they make sure to create their biggest scenes when kids congregate, at church for Sunday school, at school during lunchtime, and at their rehearsal hall near the fateful church kitchen. The catastrophic rehearsal scene, causing Rev. Hopkins to cancel the pageant after the Herdman herd has stampeded it, is rockin’ pandemonium.

Beecham and Hiltgartner are more artful even before that in their depiction of the adult antagonists. What I labeled as the four Old Biddies, when Jill Bloede directed the play for Children’s Theatre in 1995, are now three parents of Beth and Charlie Bradley’s classmates. Luanne, Connie, and Betty start us off singing “Perfect Little Town,” as beautifully harmonized and sugary as the overdubbing Connie Francis cooing “My Happiness.” They are natural allies of the dictatorial Helen Armstrong, the rigid director who is usually in charge of the unchanging Christmas pageant year after year.

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But Armstrong is hospitalized this year, so the vocal trio mobilizes with Helen to convince Grace Bradley, Beth and Charlie’s mom, to take over just before auditions. In the play version, all four women wielded old-fashioned phones in cajoling Grace. A musical allows for more fanciful, comical liberties. By the end of another pop rocker, “Counting on You,” the ladies have circled to the opposite side of McColl Family Theatre from Helen’s bedside to resume their vocal trio assault on Grace at the Bradley home, with the siblings and their father joining in on the hubbub.

If the ladies can be more ridiculous now – a big if, since Bloede had Alan Poindexter and Sidney Horton crossdressing as two of the hags in ’95 – then the Herdmans can be more fearsome and ferocious to counterbalance them. Augmenting their chaotic energy is the fiendish work of choreographer Ron Chisholm, who keeps the six Herdmans and their terrified victims spread across the stage in frenetic action. Even Rev. Hopkins must be convinced of their true menace.

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We are far closer here to believing Beth’s famed opening pronouncement: “The Herdmans were the worst kids in the whole history of the world.” Where Bloede capitalized a bit on the fact that rather entertaining performances could come from kids who might be visibly reluctant to immerse themselves in the full barbarity of a Herdman, current Children’s Theatre artistic director Adam Burke will have no such laxity.

As Imogene, the Herdman who takes the role of Virgin Mary by the throat, Carlyn Head is an absolute she-wolf in her howling vocals, and there is only the slightest glint of cuteness in Charli Head as Gladys, the little sister who pounces on the role of Herald Angel. With all of this vocal artillery hurled at her from young and old, Ashley Goodson can be sweet and caring as Grace, but when those moments arrive for reasserting control and conviction, she also unveils a voice of steel.

So when the Herdmans come around to the spirit of the Nativity, Grace is a little more amazing than she was in the play version, but I’m more thankful for the fulminating comic relief from Allison Snow Rhinehart, thwarted each time she issues a demand or insists that the Herdmans must be thrown out of the pageant. As phlegmatic as Rhinehart is, Tiffany Bear as Connie, Olivia Edge as Luanne, and Tracie Frank as Luanne are purest plastic, aging Supremes wannabes.

Arella Flur is more than satisfying as Beth, but she’s usually upstaged by Bennett Harris as the bullied younger brother or Ryann Losee, the tattletale Alice who lets Imogene snatch the role of Mary from her without a struggle. Bobby Tyson’s comic timing is so sharp in the minor role of Mr. Bradley that it’s reassuring to see him get a duet with wife Grace late in the show, and Dan Brusnson is the kindliest, most Christian Rev. Hopkins that I can recall. Among the male Herdmans, Colin Samole as Ralph and Rixey Terry as Leroy impressed me the most, but I don’t think either is written fully enough.

At least not yet. Estimates of the running time that I’ve seen in the Children’s Theatre press releases and in their program booklet have ranged from 60 minutes, approximately the length of their 1995 production, to 80 minutes in the current playbill. My clocking of the Sunday matinee at under 67 minutes suggests that the piece I saw underwent feverish modifications in its final weeks of rehearsal.

I point that out for a couple of reasons. It illustrates that Burke and Children’s Theatre, who commissioned this world premiere, have taken significant ownership in intensively shaping the product. It also suggests to me that the process isn’t finished, that the 80-minute target that seems more sensible to me might be what we see the next time The Best Christmas Pageant Ever: The Musical opens at ImaginOn. Or even by the time it closes on December 23.

Maybe then I’ll be able to say that this is the best Best Christmas Pageant Ever ever. It’s pretty damn close right now – and a very gratifying achievement at Charlotte’s fantasy palace.