Category Archives: Theatre

Gentleman’s Guide Brings New Balance to Love & Murder on Tour

Theater Review: A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder

By Perry Tannenbaum

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In its original form as a 1949 motion picture – adapted from a novel by Roy Horniman – Kind Hearts and Coronets hinted obliquely at its dualities. But when Robert L. Freedman took over the story for his musical collaboration with composer Steven Lutvak, nary a mention of the famed Alec Guinness comedy vehicle was on the title page on opening night in 2013. Instead, audience and critics encountered A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder, a sharper description of the attractions to be found in Monty Navarro’s lurid confessions.

We seem to be hearing Navarro’s confessions on the eve of his march to the gallows. Short-circuiting any fears that we are about to see a grim tale of ruthless bloodlust and implacable retribution, the stage is ornately set up to replicate the style and era of vaudeville. On Broadway, everything in Monty’s narrative was reenacted on a proscenium stage within the proscenium of the Walter Kerr Theatre’s stage. Critics were charmed by the frank artificiality of this transformative concept, showering Gentleman’s Guide with both the Tony and Drama Desk awards for best musical. Audiences? Not so much: the show shuttered after a respectable 26-month run, hardly a smash.

It seemed to be a different story on opening night in Charlotte, where the touring version of Gentleman’s Guide is playing at Knight Theater, a cozier destination than Belk Theater, where most national tours are staged. A full house at the Knight, boxy though it might be, just feels more like a Broadway experience, and the audience’s reaction to the welcome novelty was noticeably electric. At the Knight, the cerebral nature of this story wasn’t at all off-putting.

Cut off by his grandpa from the status and riches of the D’Ysquith family, Monty only learns of his noble lineage after his mother’s funeral, thanks to the helpful gossip of Miss Shingle, a maidservant he has never met before. Papers discovered in mom’s humble flat confirm Shingle’s assertions, so Monty tries to reestablish his family ties. After all, despite being the son of a washwoman, he’s ninth in line to become the Earl of Highhurst.

The luscious Sibella Hallward is more than adequate incentive for Monty to murder the eight who are before him line, for she is disinclined to wed a pauper – and her looks open wide vistas of alternatives. So it is here that the dualities of this nifty plot conjoin. To rise in Sibella’s estimation, Monty is hormonally driven to murder his way to the top of the bunch.

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It won’t be a vulgar or brutish journey, for Monty’s murders are cunningly devised to evade detection. But along the way – say midway in his murderous exploits – Monty meets a D’Ysquith, namely young Phoebe, who appeals to his heart and mind as much as Sibella enchants his eyes and loins.

While Monty’s labors are mercifully condensed in number from Hercules’ mythical 12, the serial murders can become somewhat tedious and banal when performed within two prosceniums. What keeps us interested through two acts and a 2:09 playing time are the emerging love triangle, steadily intensifying toward a farcical climax, and the ripeness of most of the D’Ysquith victims for their colorful exterminations.

Nor does it hurt that all of the doomed D’Ysquiths are portrayed by the same actor, John Rapson, a Herculean feat that more than matches Monty’s. As the body count rises, so does the frequency of crossdressing, and the women nicely illustrate the range of worthiness that the D’Ysquiths actually have for extinction. Lady Salomé D’Ysquith Pumphrey, a totally wretched stage actress, is probably the easiest to dispatch with a clear conscience. But the mammoth Lady Hyacinth D’Ysquith undertakes beneficent projects all across the globe. She is also the toughest to extinguish, for Monty sends her off to various needy destinations where war, disease, or cannibals might act as his homicidal proxies.

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Ultimately, Monty is challenged to liquidate themost detestable of the D’Ysquiths, Lord Adalbert, the current Earl. To illustrate the prodigious odiousness of the man, he must be paired with a wife, Lady Eugenia, who is nearly as waspish and hideous as he. Lord and Lady D’Ysquith host a formal dinner, where Monty, Phoebe, and Sibella are the invited guests. Repeatedly, husband and wife snarl and hiss at each other like raging jungle cats before suddenly regaining their highborn composure.

Rapson takes on all his D’Ysquiths with satisfying gusto. His Lord Asquith D’Ysquith, the one truly benign member of the clan, is positively Dickensian. But at the dinner table, I did wish that the full house of Charlotte theatergoers could have been rewarded with the awesome flair – and phlegm – that Jefferson Mays brought to Lord Adalbert on Broadway. Kristen Mengelkock as Lady Eugenia was certainly sufficiently provoking.

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As fine as I thought Bryce Pinkham was on Broadway as Monty, I found a smidge more sparkle from Kevin Massey when he mingled with his women. Both ladies were up to the high Broadway standard in vying for his affections. Every movement by Kristen Beth Williams as Sibella was worthy of a Vogue magazine spread or a Victoria’s Secret brochure, and Kristen Hahn was the essence of wholesome refinement as Phoebe. Both Kristens teamed up beautifully with Massey in their farcical trio, though their door slamming was bit sloppy. You certainly won’t wonder why Linda Cho won the Tony for best costume design when these ladies are onstage.

With such a fine set of frontliners behind him, Rapson may not be a dominant as Mays, but the touring show comes off as more balanced, the Love and Murder more equally weighted. Some of the enthusiastic crowd may have been surprised because Guinness’s legendary screen performance shaped their expectations.

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Only two other players need to be mentioned, a testament to the compactness of A Gentleman’s Guide. Jennifer Smith insinuates herself beautifully into the beginning and ending of our story as Miss Shingle – and with “You’re a D’Ysquith,” she probably has the catchiest tune in the show. Off my radar since he appeared in a summertime musical revue at Theatre Charlotte in 2001, Ben Roseberry returns to town as Chief Inspector Pickney. Not only does he arrest our protagonist – for the one murder he didn’t commit! – he gets the opportunity to be seduced by Williams in a climactic tête-à-tête with Sibella.

Roseberry isn’t the first Broadway pro to make Charlotte’s community theatre proud, and he won’t be the last.

Stirring the Pot in a Bronx Soup Kitchen

Theater review: Three Bone Theatre’s Grand Concourse

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By Perry Tannenbaum

Most people, particularly the homeless and the poor, don’t need to be told that soup kitchens are all about feeding the hungry who are beaten down – temporarily or permanently – by the harsh realities of our teeming cities. But to an unexpected degree, Heidi Schreck’s Grand Concourse, set in one of these missions of mercy at a Bronx church, struck me as a play about soup.

Not to worry, the current Three Bone Theatre production, at Spirit Square through Saturday, occasionally delves into the question of how to best serve the poor. Yet we aren’t out there among the hungry who are gratefully lapping up their free lunches. Instead, we’re behind the scenes – in the actual kitchen of the soup kitchen – so we’re mostly involved with the providers of the meals, not the recipients.

Sister Shelley runs the kitchen, a nun who has chosen to discard the traditional costume and struggles to sustain another habit: prayer. Setting the kitchen timer on her microwave to one minute, she can’t nearly fill it with 60 seconds of earnest supplications. A new volunteer, Emma, enters in the next scene, and it’s really her time at the kitchen – first as a volunteer and then as a salaried worker – that shapes the arc of our story.

About two-thirds through the action, which clocks in at 95 minutes, I had the feeling – can I admit it was a worry? – that we were watching one of those incubator stories about a flawed, wounded, immature young person who experiences growth and healing via the subtle balms of acceptance and friendship. We’ve seen a few of these, haven’t we?

Lovely Emma turns out to be a different kind of apprentice, partly warm-hearted and enterprising but also partly toxic. The two men in this tragicomedy, Oscar and Frog, help in sharply defining the best and worst of Emma. Among her initiatives, the boldest is to expand the mission of the soup kitchen into helping the regulars get on their feet and find jobs. Appropriately, the first beneficiary of these attentions is Frog, who has long disregarded the taboos against camping out by the church and fraternizing with the kitchen folk.

Her effect isn’t so benign in her various interactions with Oscar, the maintenance/muscle guy who regularly drops by for sandwiches kept in the fridge, usually lingering to lend the women a helping hand. Emma works on Oscar’s eyes with her good looks, then on his sympathies with her big lies. Everyone around Emma is hoodwinked as she spins plausible yarns to her mother, about her mother, and about herself.

There is more complexity with Sister Shelley, who is dealing with her crisis in faith and the oncoming death of her dad. Unlike most volunteers, Emma returns for a second day, becoming a standout simply by persevering. Continuing to volunteer, Emma introduces new variations to the daily soup – a whole eggplant one day, maybe a few pinches of fennel the next. But she’s stirring the pot at a deeper level when she starts helping Frog to hop out of hopelessness. Why haven’t the sisters thought of doing that before? It starts Shelley to wondering.

It also starts to make it obvious that Schreck isn’t primarily concerned about Emma’s apprenticeship. This playwright’s eyes are trained most diligently on how all the characters are affecting one another. What’s simmering up in the Bronx, workday after workday, is a human soup of interaction and influence – and this humble little soup kitchen is a microcosm for the Grand Concourse that is humanity. It’s a volatile stew without any pat or easy endings. It keeps on boiling along.

There are plenty of energies distributed among this unpredictable foursome, and director Robin Tynes does a fine job in making sure we see how different – and how unevenly distributed – these energies are. Shawna Pledger hasn’t been this wired onstage since she made her first Charlotte splash in the title role of Sylvia four years ago at CP. Here she’s rechanneling that restless energy into Shelley, a neurotic and indecisive nun whose ultimate crucible will be forgiveness when young Emma pushes her to her limits. Pledger’s is an intense energy pent up in a pressure cooker of religious tolerance and discipline. Even when she stumbled on a line on opening night, it came out like part of Sister’s high-strung struggles.

Emma’s confusions are on a more elemental, hormonal level than Shelley’s, and Callie Richards gives her a variety of erratic, moody, and sensitive shadings. Nothing about Richards’ demeanor suggests that Emma is a temptress. Nor are Jason Estrada’s costume designs spurring her in that direction. She’s sneaky, deceptive, and her conquest of Oscar is like a raccoon invading your attic in the middle of the night. Suddenly, she’s just there.

Watching things unravel, we don’t know exactly how to analyze Emma’s ultimate violence. It’s passive-aggressive, to be sure, and its effect is irreversible, but Richards is careful not to give away how intentional it may have been. Life is often messy precisely because we encounter chaotic, messed-up people like Emma behaving irresponsibly.

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As portrayed by Nicholas Enrique Pardo, it’s easy to come away thinking of Oscar as a genial sacrificial lamb, pounced upon by both Emma and Frog. But his victimhood is more complex and unique than that, for he had trained to be a dentist in the Dominican Republic before the process of immigrating to the US effectively stripped him of his credentials. Now he holds down a day job to survive and attends a community college to improve his employment prospects. Pardo just struck me as too young to have all that mileage and dentistry in his rearview mirror – but I didn’t detect much in Schreck’s script that exposed this shortfall.

Likewise, Bill Reilly may be a wee bit young to comfortably fit the aging hippy profile sketched for Frog, but he turns in such a compelling performance as this eccentric loose cannon that all incongruities quickly cease to matter. Reilly’s entrance at the dawning of his reclamation is delightful, largely because he himself seems shocked and disoriented by his new attire. The whole outing would have been even more extraordinary if Steven Levine’s fight choreography had been more meticulous.

Notably more shabby – and less clinical – than the Playwrights Horizons’ off-Broadway production, Ryan Maloney’s set design jibes better with the way most out-of-towners think of the Bronx. This kitchen is more welcoming and, with Jackie and Peter Hohenstein’s prop designs, still richly detailed.

The carefully crafted clutter and slovenliness of the kitchen also accords with the episodic manner that Schreck relies on in telling her story. Watching the jagged sequence of scenes unfold, it seemed that the playwright may have pieced them together like journal entries, maybe shuffling the order, discarding numerous scenes, and cutting out minor characters – the mother, the head nun, and a pesky teen delinquent – along the way.

We sift through a cunningly calculated slovenliness to get at Schreck’s takeaway, with a few loose ends purposely left dangling. You won’t be as sure of what to make of Grand Concourse as the many tidier comedies and dramas you’ve seen before, but you’ll likely be more convinced of its authenticity.

Forget All That Money Stuff and Be Happy

Review:  You Can’t Take It With You

By Perry Tannenbaum

When it first came to Broadway, just after the 1936 election, Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman’s You Can’t Take It With You was steeped in the Great Depression – and a deep suspicion of the efficacy of government. Twenty elections later, as the audience favorite returns to Theatre Charlotte yet again in a truly sharp production directed by Mitzi Corrigan, the anti-government sentiments of the Sycamores and family patriarch Martin Vanderhof may strike some longtime subscribers as more virulently right wing than they remember.

Previous revivals of the show that I’ve seen tended to portray the whole extended family – except for Alice, who has ambitions and craves normality – as lovably eccentric, even borderline daffy. With the pandemonium that cuts loose at the end of the first two acts, that’s certainly a major part of the impression that Kaufman & Hart sought to convey.img_5635But the wonderfully avuncular Dennis Delamar as Grampa Vanderhof has a bit of an edge to him when an IRS agent comes calling about those income taxes he has never paid. There’s a “government of the people” tinge to his reaction as he demands to know how his money will be spent, but there’s also a saintly element of renunciation – for he has willfully abandoned the hustle-and-bustle of capitalism outside his home and devoted himself completely to doing as he pleases in and about his own roost.

Although there’s plenty of hustle-and-bustle inside the home, all except Alice fit the same mold: busy and industrious though they are, none of them has a job. How pleasant and agreeable such a bunch must have seemed to Depression Era Americans! Not only aren’t they competing with anybody in the jungle of a desperately shrunken job market, they’re genially and energetically coaxing us to toss aside all our anxieties about getting and spending. Forget all that stuff and be happy.

Corrigan softens the usual daffiness just enough for us to see the eccentricities of the Sycamore household winking at us as the sunny side of American individualism rather than principled silliness. This puts Alice in a somewhat different light, more akin to the disagreeable hetero son in La Cage aux Folles than we usually see. Cora Breakfield takes nicely to these fresh shadings of her role, subtly aided by costume designer Chelsea Retalic. The dresses she changes into for dates with her beau Tony Kirby are darkly elegant, but the clothes she wears coming home from work are less flattering.

Set design by Chris Timmons is uncommonly handsome, further discouraging our impulse to view the household as a clown car. Della Knowles is less outré as Essie, Alice’s hopelessly bad ballet dancing sister, and Stephen Peterson is mellower than most versions of their father Paul, the fireworks enthusiast. Johnny Hohenstein mostly lurks contentedly in the background as Paul’s lab assistant, Mr. De Pinna, briefly taking the spotlight when he models for Penny Sycamore’s long-unfinished painting of a Greek athlete.

These finely judged touchups allow Alice’s mom, Penny, and Russian dance teacher Boris Kolenkhov to emerge more emphatically from the general hullaballoo. When Tony’s parents unexpectedly arrive to meet their prospective daughter-in-law’s family, these emphases pay off. It’s Penny, after all, who scandalizes Mrs. Kirby by declaring spiritualism an obvious fake, shortly before Boris shocks Mr. Kirby by wrestling him to the ground.

Jill Bloede makes Penny a blithe short-attention-span spirit, while Frank Dominguez turns Boris into a spectacularly bellicose poseur – with some brash assistance from costumer Retalic. The Kirbys are nicely matched to absorb these indignities, John Price as the orchid-cultivating plutocrat and Corlis Hayes as the delicate Mrs. Kirby. Price especially traces a graceful character curve, ultimately receptive to Vanderhof’s soft sermon – and itching for a rematch with Boris! Armie Hicks cuts a fine figure as Tony, well mannered yet susceptible to the charms of both Alice and her family.

Standing out among the unwelcome intruders, Mike Carroll brings a starchy persistence to the IRS agent, while Rick Taylor layers on a New York vulgarity to the Head G-Man. The aging waifs that the Sycamores embrace during this farce are closer to caricature and more delectable. Zendyn Duellman has a regal tipsiness to her as the soused actress who wanders into the scene, and Suzanne Newsom is superbly compromised as the Russian royal, Olga Katarina, exiled to waiting tables at a Child’s restaurant.

I waited and bussed tables at multiple Child’s locations around Times Square during one memorable summer break. There were 45s by the Four Tops playing on the jukebox and no aristocrats sitting down for dinner. So I can personally vouch for Olga’s humiliation.

The Nerd Who Terrorized New Jersey

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Theater Reviews:  The Toxic Avenger and Pride and Prejudice

By Perry Tannenbaum

I’m not sure how or when such epithets as “Armpit of the East” or “Scrotum of the Nation” rained down on New Jersey, but they were certainly commonplace before the onset of The Sopranos or Chris Christie. It’s also clear that when Lloyd Kaufman and Joe Ritter cooked up their 1984 screenplay for The Toxic Avenger, they weren’t intending to prettify the Garden State’s battered image. About the only love they showed for Jersey was shooting the film there.

A mere 24 years elapsed before Joe DiPietro and Bon Jovi keyboardist David Bryan, following their successful collaboration on Memphis, hooked up on a Toxic musical adaptation. The record-breaking reception of the show in New Brunswick, before its off-Broadway transfer in 2009, only underscored how highly Jerseyites cherish their notoriety.

DiPietro liberally refashions Kaufman’s original plot, but political corruption, organized crime, unconscionable pollution, and unchecked violence are still among its hallmarks. Actor’s Theatre of Charlotte, newly resurrected on Freedom Drive after its recent homelessness, embraces all of these horrors with the merry glee it applied to Evil Dead The Musical seven years ago. Billy Ensley directed that 2009 gorefest on Stonewall Street, but ATC artistic director Chip Decker takes the reins here, reminding us that crass sci-fi musical parodies are at the core of this company’s DNA.

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Journeying from screen to stage, Melvin Ferd the Third has lost his signature janitorial mop, but he’s still a hopeless nerd and still smitten by the blind Sarah, who is now a librarian. The new Melvin is an environmental crusader from the get-go, and his plunge into an oozing drum of green toxic goo is far more malignant, ordered by corrupt Tromaville mayor Babs Belgoody. Where does Melvin find the goods on Mayor Belgoody’s polluting schemes? At the library, of course, cleverly filed away by Sarah where they are least likely to be found: among the important policy speeches of Michele Bachmann.

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Something underhanded seems to have occurred here, since Bachmann didn’t achieve her peak infamy until the 2012 election cycle. Suspicion falls on the prankish Decker, who compounds his violations of DiPietro’s script by introducing the image of Donald Trump later in the evening. Hopefully, that glorified groper will be forgotten by the time the Avenger concludes his rampages on November 12.

Yes, if you didn’t already know, what doesn’t kill Melvin makes him Toxie, the avenging mutant monster. This is exactly where Actor’s Theatre upstages the off-Broadway production once again. In 2009, Ensley simply had the luxury of a better pool of actors to choose from for Evil Dead. This year, Decker enjoys no luxuries whatsoever. ATC and City Hall couldn’t dot all the i’s on permits for the new location at 2219 Freedom Drive in time for opening night last Wednesday, so Decker & Co. were obliged to move next door to Center City Church & The Movement Center at 2225 Freedom.

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On very short notice. So the set designer is listed as Dire Circumstance in the playbill while other members of the design team have vanished altogether. Whether by accident or design, then, Decker doesn’t make the mistake that plagued the off-Broadway show: overproduction. In the New York version, when Melvin emerged from the chemical dumpsite as Toxie, the green carbuncled mask that covered his head was not only horrific, it robbed actor Nick Cordero of all further facial expression.

Jeremy DeCarlos doesn’t have to combat that handicap. As cool, graceful, and intelligent as DeCarlos has always seemed onstage, I expected both the nerdy Melvin and the homicidal Toxie to be difficult stretches for him. Clearly, I had no idea how well DeCarlos could channel the dopey sound and body language of Jerry Lewis as the socially inept earth scientist. When he emerged from the flimsy façade of chemical drums as Toxie, there were some wrappings on his arms to offer a semblance of might, but it was Decker at the soundboard who offered the more telling boost, amping up DeCarlos’ voice and synthesizing his monster roar.

No, the wrappings and the roars don’t close the gap between DeCarlos and fearsomeness – but that’s another reason why his Toxie is so much more hilarious than the more technically polished off-Broadway version, which often forgot it was a spoof. Leslie Giles certainly isn’t forgetting her spoofery as Sarah, helpless ingénue or aggressive vamp as the occasion demands – and her blind stick shtick with the hapless Melvin is a corny gift that keeps on giving. Sarah’s big number, “My Big French Boyfriend,” struck me as the best in the show.

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Lisa Hugo, who was so precisely calibrated in the complex leading role of Stage Kiss earlier this year, the last ATC production at Stonewall Street, gets to loosen up in multiple roles. When she isn’t the melodramatic, megalomaniacal Mayor, she’s usually Melvin’s disapproving Mom. These two nasty women turn out to be old enemies from their school days, so their “Bitch/Slut/Liar/Whore” confrontation deep in Act 2 was a manic reminder of a similar duet in the Jekyll & Hyde musical. Ma Ferd also gets an effective “All Men Are Freaks” duet with Sarah.

Ryan Stamey and Dominique Atwater divvy up nearly all the remaining roles, more than I could keep track of, with Matthew Blake Johnson subbing for Atwater on opening night. Somebody needs to terrorize Sarah, toss Melvin into the toxic goo, get their asses kicked by Toxie, scurry around with missing limbs, and represent the hordes of Tromavillians who idolize the grotesque mutant. Stamey and Johnson performed every one of these worthy missions, and more, with the suave sophistication you would expect.

Yes, the middle school auditorium atmospherics of the Movement Center hall are somewhat against the grain of the gorey Toxic Avenger irreverence, but it served better than expected for what turns out to be a unique guerilla theatre project. If you arrive early for one of the remaining performances, you might get a brief tour of the new ATC space next door. What’s going on now on Freedom Drive bodes well for the company and the resourceful artists who make it go.

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Jon Jory is best known as the artistic director who brought renown to the Humana Festival and the Actor’s Theatre of Louisville – and widely believed to have penned Keely and Du, Flaming Guns of the Purple Sage, and Anton in Show Business under the penname of Jane Martin. When it comes to adapting Jane Austen, whose Pride and Prejudice is currently on view at Pease Auditorium in a CPCC Theatre production, Jory is no dilettante. He has also adapted Sense and Sensibility and Emma.

Even if all the subtleties aren’t always pointed under Heather Wilson-Bowlby’s poised direction, it becomes obvious that Jory’s adaptation preserves the style and thrust of Austen’s liveliest masterwork. Most of the credit goes to Moriah Thomason as Austen’s prejudging heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, though it’s hard to deny she is amply counterbalanced by the hauteur of Brian Logsdon as Fitzwilliam Darcy. Thomason unveiled her elegance in the ATC production of Stick Fly back in February. Here she adds vivacity and wit, so I couldn’t get enough of her.

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We see where Elizabeth gets her wit from in Tony Wright’s slightly jaundiced portrait of her father, and Anne Lambert’s rendition of Mrs. Bennet has more than enough vanity, giddiness, and silliness to distribute among the younger Bennet sibs. My chief disappointment was the hoarseness that afflicted Lexie Simerly as Liz’s elder sister Jane. If only she could have borrowed some extra decibels from Iris DeWitt, whose towering presence made the imperious Lady Catherine De Bourgh a perfect victim of Elizabeth’s punctiliously polite sass.

Jane Shall Have Jill in DC’s Hip-Hop “Midsummer Night’s Dream”

Theater Review: A Midsummer Night’s Dream

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By Perry Tannenbaum

If you have the notion that America’s liberal arts colleges are hidebound guardians of the past, mired in fossilizing traditions, you may wish to check out Davidson College’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Unorthodox thinking was already obvious when I looked at the cover of the playbill. Instead of the Grecian colonnades or laurel wreathes you might expect for a lyrical Shakespearean comedy that mostly transpires within 25 miles of Athens, the cameo portrait of Fairy Queen Titania and the bewitched Bottom is done in comic strip style. All of the basic info – title, playwright, director, dates – is set in that impossibly perfect hand-lettering that worshipers of Superman and Batman grew up with. Furthermore, entering Duke Family Performance Hall, I was already tipped off to the fact that director Ann Marie Costa would be infusing the Bard’s text with plenty of hip-hop rhythms and dance, thanks to the ministrations of beatmaker Mighty DJ DR and spoken word artists Boris “Bluz” Rogers and Carlos Robson.

Given the problematical acoustics of the Duke, I was fairly anxious about what I might need to contend with in the style – and the beat – of this production concept. But there was more. In the opening scene, when Egeus petitions the heroic Duke Theseus in hopes that he will force his daughter Hermia to marry Demetrius, the groom he intends for her, there were a couple of radical switches. Hermia’s father was nowhere to be found, replaced by Egeia, a heartless mother. Perhaps more shocking, Hermia’s true love, Lysander, had also disappeared, replaced by Lydia. If Joe Gardner’s elegantly simple set design and Martha Making’s contemporary costumes weren’t enough, Lydia’s plan to elope with Hermia and marry her assured me that we weren’t in ancient Athens anymore.

I would have been dizzy with disorientation if these alterations had been delivered with hip-hop embroidering, but the lovers’ couplets and the mechanicals’ prosaic rehearsal scene afterwards were plainly spoken. As so often happens, the uniqueness of a Midsummer Night’s Dream production becomes manifest when we leave Athens behind and plunge into the nearby woods. Back in 1987, when NC Shakespeare was still alive and touring, Hermia and Lysander traipsed into the forest carrying their own Samsonite luggage. In 2003, deposed Charlotte Repertory Theatre founder Steve Umberger found refuge at Theatre Charlotte, bringing Cirque du Soleil acrobat Karl Baumann with him – to go where no Puck had gone before. Costa says in her director’s notes that she was inspired by a recent visit to New York City, where she saw spontaneous performances by street musicians, beatmakers, and break dancers in the city’s public parks. The nocturnal woods is exactly the right place for disorientation to be encouraged.

So as soon as we first saw Puck conversing with the First Fairy, we got a steady flow of hip-hop movement, choreographed Emily Hunter – with plenty of urban attitude – accompanying the hip-hop reaffirmations that most of the fairy dialogue is rhymed. Tatiana Pless was so vivacious as the Fairy that I presumed she was Puck for a few moments, but not to worry, Pless got more play and multiple costume changes as Mustardseed and Moonshine. Graham Marema was quite engaging as Puck after her comparatively subdued arrival, but it was Colin Bye’s bravura exploits as Puck’s master, King Oberon, that enabled the whole hip-hop concept to click. His tall frame topped with a pom knit hat, Bye became a living breathing testimonial to the efficacy of YouTube hip-hop tutorials. He rarely moved from one spot onstage to another without a lithe moonwalking glide – nearly on point, increasing the impact of his lanky height. The sensation Bye made as Oberon was only enhanced by the starchy, stiff, and proper impression he made in his other role as Theseus in the opening scene.dsc_0758

While discord between Hermia and her mom unsettles Athens, there is parallel discord in the fairy kingdom, where the proud Queen Titania is denying custody of an adorable kidnapped boy – and conjugal visitations! – to King Oberon. To bring peace to both kingdoms, Oberon must teach Titania a lesson and restore Demetrius to his previous fiancée, Helena. Oberon dispatches Puck to retrieve a faraway flower whose juice can be made into a love potion that can be applied to a sleeper’s eyes. When the sleeper awakes, he or she will fall in love with the first person or animal that comes into sight. Oberon himself applies the potion to Titania, but fortunately, he deputizes Puck to find Demetrius and apply that same potion so that he’ll become enamored with Helena again when he awakes. Half of the fun we experience in the woods results from Puck messing up and applying the potion to Lydia instead of Demetrius. The other half comes from what Puck gets right, transforming the incorrigible Nick Bottom into a man with a donkey’s head in the middle of the mechanicals’ inept rehearsal. That’s who – or what – Titania sees when she first awakes.

After seeing Midsummer numerous times before, I found Kanise Thompson a little less shrewish than most Titanias because of the boogie in her movement and the hip-hop delights of her fairy entourage. Arrayed in the funky garments of the hip-hop culture, this entourage combined to make the queen’s bedtime the most regal event of the evening. Thompson did reappear later in the evening as Hippolyta, whose nuptials with Theseus were another regal event, but her best moments came when she heaped love on the repellent Bottom and when she sensuously reconciled with Oberon. Although he couldn’t compete with the most commanding Bottoms that I’ve seen, Sam Giberga had some bodacious moments as Nick, particularly when he was vaunting his versatility as an actor and getting vamped by the queen. Louder braying, please!dsc_1063

The whole hip-hop concept went so well for me that acclimating to the gender and sexuality alterations presented more of a challenge. Sarah Kostoryz as Helena may have more reason to be offended by Lydia’s advances, but the text offers no guidance, and she reacted as if a Lysander were still pursuing her. I’ve also seen more vicious taunting of her shorter rival Hermia when their antipathy heats up. As Hermia, Izem Ustun could give the most conventional performance among the lovers, for it made no difference who her admirers were when both of them abandoned her. Uztun swam bravely against the handicap of her relative conventionality, no more sensitive to Hermia’s shortness than Kostoryz’s provocations warranted.

Soft-pedaling her altered sexuality, Blaire Ebert was a very courtly and principled Lydia, and she tore after Demetrius fearlessly. Now when Lydia’s conflict with Demetrius escalated from verbal to physical, I could perceive some difficulties in the audience. As Lydia and Demetrius rolled over one another on the forest floor, there seemed to be a mixture of shocked silence, nervous laughter, and redoubled laughter from various sections of the house. There was no avoiding it: the lesbian Lydia’s attack on the straight Demetrius often had the look of lovemaking as they lingered on the floor. Similar to Ebert, Ed Pritchard portrayed Demetrius as if nothing had changed, a problematical proposition when your fiancée turns out to be gay or bisexual, but the text offers no more guidance to our Demetrius than it does for Helena or Lydia. I would have expected all four of the lovers – especially during the taunting and fighting – to have more fun with the newly hatched absurdities.

The cuts that Costa applied to the script may have shortened the mortals’ time onstage more than the fairies’, or maybe the extra juice from the hip-hop idiom just made the fairies more exciting and accessible. I’m sure that I’ve seen Midsummer productions where the mechanicals don’t perform their Bergamask after their travesty of a tragedy, and I’ve also seen productions where the fairy king and queen don’t return. Returning both of these to the final scene added to the sense of revelry, merriment, and magic. When the last huge exits went to King Oberon and Queen Titania instead of the three newly wedded Athenian couples, the sudden hush when Puck was left all alone onstage was all the more poignant and dramatic. After such an unusual, energetic staging, Merema had no difficulty at all in coaxing us to give her our hands.

The Electoral College in Elementary School

Reviews of Grace for President and Fall Works

By Perry Tannenbaum

We’ve been favored with a couple of Grace shows from Children’s Theatre over the years. There were two productions of Amazing Grace, a charming but trifling little piece, in 1999 and 2005. Before the encore, there was the incomparably richer Boundless Grace, deeply infused with African rhythms and culture, that won Creative Loafing’s Show of the Year laurels in 2000.

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So for those of you who recall those pre-ImaginOn productions, it may be important to emphasize that there’s no kinship between them and the current world premiere of Grace for President through November 6. Mary Hoffman created the previous Grace, of Gambian descent, in a series of books that depicted her heroine with playacting impulses rather than political ambitions. Grace Campbell is a more recent brainchild by Kelly DiPucchio, slightly browner in LeUyen Pham’s illustrations than her Woodrow Wilson Elementary teacher, Mrs. Barrington, but never assigned to an ethnic group.

From the first page on, DiPucchio’s Grace is more about feminism than racial pride. Mrs. Barrington brings a poster to class at the start of the school year with all the US presidents on it, and Grace asks, “Where are the GIRLS?” After getting the lowdown, Grace stews at her desk momentarily before announcing that she would like to be president. Despite the snickers from several of Grace’s classmates, Mrs. Barrington deems this impromptu ambition to be a “star-spangled idea” – clear proof that DiPucchio intended her story as a musical all along.

Clocking in at 57 minutes, Joan Cushing’s adaptation actually expands upon DiPucchio’s slender volume, with a robust – and resourceful – song list. When Grace starts campaigning against Thomas Cobb, the nominee from Mr. Waller’s class, Grace and Thomas sing in debate-like counterpoint, not harmony, each candidate spouting a separate line. And while it’s doubly lamentable that a two-party system is axiomatic in this story and that genders represent the party lines, when the guys sing “Boys Boys Boys,” it rings like a barbershop quartet.

Cushing does churn out some pabulum along the way in explaining what elections are, but she bravely follows in DiPucchio’s footsteps in trying to explicate that grim Founding Fathers albatross, the Electoral College. We skim over some fairly muddy waters when Barrington and Waller establish a system where each of their students represents one of the states, unevenly weighting their votes.

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The outcome partly redresses the inequity. Cobb seems to have a lock on the election because the boys hold the majority of the electoral votes. Our intrepid heroine therefore comes up with a platform designed to change some minds, listening to her classmates while Cobb mainly coasts. Party lines have held fast when we reach the end of the roll call of states, so the election is still up for grabs as Sam, representing Wyoming, gets set to cast his measly three electoral votes.

“My vote counts!” Sam sings out, an epiphany yet to be reached by millions of unlikely American voters.

I won’t tip the results of this suspenseful election, but I’ll credit set designer Anita J. Tripathi with heightening the tension by dropping down an electronic scoreboard over her gallery of presidents to give us a running total of electoral votes until the confetti moment when the shunned wallflower Sam makes his decision. We’re supposed to greet the result with jubilation, but overall, the students of Woodrow Wilson Elementary are even more set in their voting patterns than adult Americans.

Although director Michelle Long pilots the most polished production I can remember at Wells Fargo Playhouse (the smaller ImaginOn theater), I found myself fighting the notion that this wasn’t really a Charlotte production. Most of the seven-member cast is new to the Charlotte scene, all except one are making their first 2016 appearance, and all the designers seem to be making their Uptown debuts.

Youngsters shouldn’t have any problem warming up to Talia Robinson as Grace. Her sunny optimism in launching her campaign is only slightly clouded by the prospect of opposition, and Robinson’s attitude toward her classmates usefully blends the callings of public service and leadership. After starring last December in the title role of another Cushing world premiere, Ella’s Big Chance,  Margaret Dalton as Mrs. Barrington is the most familiar face we encounter. She gives us that ideal teacher we never had, not only radiating energy and encouragement but also drawing inspiration from her pupils’ ideas.

The other Ella alum in the cast, Sean Powell, infuses Thomas Cobb with a patrician smugness as he initially intimidates Grace, singing his own praises in “My Accomplishments.” Until the denouement, Powell keeps the concept of doing for others totally alien to Thomas. Shivam Patel’s debut as the outcast Sam is as impressive as Robinson’s, for suffering often has deeper roots than righteous indignation. While Grace is affirming that girls can now win as never before, Patel makes Sam’s discovery that he matters just as heartfelt and liberating.

While the script is intended to remain serviceable for election years to come, there was one aspect of this world premiere bears the fresh fingerprint of 2016. A couple of errors that were noted in the Observer review on Friday morning had been expunged from the script by the time I attended the Saturday afternoon performance. Politicians may resent fact-checking during their hotly contested 2016 races, but playwrights and theatre directors evidently don’t.

 

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As Charlotte Ballet launched its 2016-17 season, the final season for Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux as president and artistic director, one thing became very evident during the Fall Works program: Bonnefoux’s successor won’t need to do any rebuilding. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen so much energy expended by so many dancers so brilliantly. Five of the 18 dancers we saw are new to the troupe this year, and one – a soloist! – was recruited from Charlotte Ballet II, the company’s apprentice ensemble.

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When we first saw Dwight Rhoden’s rousing paean to 80s club culture, The Groove, kicking off the 2012-13 season at Knight Theater, it was almost exhausting to watch at the end of that program. This year, it led off the evening in the you-ain’t-seen-nothin’-yet slot, no less astonishing in its unflagging exuberance than it was before. Surely newcomers to Charlotte Ballet performances must have been wondering how they could follow such a barrage of fast-paced bravura.

Those of us who had seen Ohad Naharin’s Minus 16 at Spoleto Festival USA had no such worries. Part of the wildly varied suite came to Charleston when Naharin’s Batsheva Dance Company made its Spoleto debut in 2007. Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater brought the full suite to Spoleto in 2012 – shortly after their stopover at Knight Theater!

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The spectacular core of the work is Naharin’s setting for the traditional Passover seder song, “Echad Mi Yode’a,” in a frenzied recording by The Tractor’s Revenge. It’s a song that cycles to 13 in much the same way that stanzas to “The 12 Days of Christmas” expand. Instead of ending with a “partridge in a pear tree,” each of the Hebrew stanzas concludes with “our One God in the heavens and the earth.”

Naharin sits 18 dancers in semi-circle before us, all of them clad in black suits, white shirts, and black fedoras, emblematic of Israel’s ultra-orthodox Jews. Each time we reach the end of a stanza, 17 of the dancers rise to their feet in a prayerful wave that sweeps the group from left to right. The eighteenth dancer catapults himself to the floor in an epic flop, as if shot from a cannon – or flung from the explosion of a terrorist bomb.

Each number draws a new signature movement from Naharin as the stanzas grow longer. Each stanza ends with the same wave and explosion as we proceed toward 13, all the dancers returning to their chairs to start each stanza. What I called the “regimented hysteria” of Naharin’s choreography is compounded as we draw closer toward the end, for the “black hat” Hasidim do the unthinkable: they begin throwing more and more of their clothing into the air until all their outer garments – from hats to shoes – lie in a chaotic pile in front of them. Unforgettable.

One of my grandfathers was a Hasid. I’m certain that if I’d seen him in his underwear, I would have been cast straight down into Gehenna.

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Yet the suite began innocuously – and comically – with Maurice Mouzon Jr. from Ballet II standing in front of the stage at intermission, morphing from motionlessness to tentative dancing to bodacious acrobatics before the ensemble’s prelude to the core ritual. Things lightened up immediately after the mass rending of garments, with a bouquet of Harold Arlen songs and some truly hilarious – and spontaneous – hijinks with Dean Martin’s “Sway” as the prime backdrop.

All of the troupe came out into the audience and chose partners whom they led onto the Knight stage. A block party broke out with a cornucopia of delights: sensuousness, grace, shyness, awkwardness, and hambone scene-stealing were all abundantly on display. Nor was the fun finished when patrons were sent back to their seats and the dancers took their bows. The crimson curtain kept rising and falling, each blackout hatching a new zany tableau.

Not all of the hambone came from the amateurs, that’s for sure.

Not Your Same Old Vampire

Reviews: She Who Watches and Charlotte Symphony

By Perry Tannenbaum

Performances of She Who Watches run through Oct. 30 at Frock Shop.

 

When J. Sheridan Le Fanu serialized Carmilla in 1871-72, Count Dracula wasn’t even a gleam in Bram Stoker’s eye. Yet a quarter of a century later, when Dracula became the paradigm for modern vampire literature, Stoker himself acknowledged that Le Fanu’s most famous novella was a part of that gleam. So after a steady sprinkling of October visitations from the undead lord of Transylvania — no less than seven Metrolina Dracula productions since 2002 — it’s nice to see a change of pace in the form of a new PaperHouse Theatre adaptation of Le Fanu’s spellbinding horror classic.

Eerie echoes are a key motif in the storytelling, which co-directors Nicia Carla and Chester Shepherd have retitled She Who Watches in their adaptation. The narrator of the story, Laura, is haunted by a nightmarish experience from her childhood, when she awoke to find a teen-aged girl in her bedroom. That girl seemed to fall into a slumber on Laura’s chest, but when she awoke the second time, what the girl was doing made her shriek in terror. And then, before her governess could come to the rescue, the girl vanished into thin air!

It would be cruel to divulge much of what happens 12 years after this creepy prologue, but you’re correct in assuming that the beautiful face indelibly etched in Laura’s memory is Carmilla. How Carmilla returns to Laura’s home — and ultimately, her bed — took just under 69 minutes to deliciously unfold on opening night, with neat surprises and more eerie echoes along the way. That’s about the same amount of time you might spend in your family car getting from the I-277 overpass to the dubious thrills of Scarowinds.

It’s a shorter, more enjoyable evening at PaperHouse’s customary haunt, The Frock Shop. Le Fanu’s story placed the action at a lonely Austrian castle in a place called Styria, but the parlor of the Frock Shop cottage on Central Avenue seems to suit Carla and Shepherd quite dandily. The antique atmosphere is built in, augmented by a gallery of starchy, frilly, diaphanous, and full-length costumes designed by Magda Guichard.

Lighting designer Chaz Pofahl, strategically potting the illumination levels, is certainly a part of the spooky conspiracy, but our stage directors also utilize the windows lining two of the parlor’s walls to pique the suspense and ambiance. Perhaps emboldened by the numerous film, stage and TV adaptations of Carmilla that have come before, Carla and Sheperd have done some character shuffling as well. Instead of a kindly father, Laura’s lone parent is a coolish mom, and instead of a distressed friend of her father, General Spielsdorf, we get a more down-to-earth and frazzled Aunt Jean.

The core protagonists remain the same, and we’re very fortunate there. After two strong outings in Theatre Charlotte’s Miracle Worker and PaperHouse’s Much Ado About Nothing, Sarah Woldum is probably the busiest actress in town this year, taking on the role of Carmilla. She seems to revel in the menace of this role, seething with a mysterious intensity when she isn’t softening her prey with endearments. The whole chemistry of her is different from Dracula’s, seemingly resistant to daylight, but you wonder whether her episodes of weakness are symptoms of a gnawing blood hunger or simply playacting to draw sympathy. When Woldum becomes the predator, Carmilla’s rapacity is as much sexual as it is animal.

Racquel Nadhiri spoke too softly at the outset, compounding my difficulties with her Jamaican accent, so I won’t give her top marks as our Narrator. But Nadhiri beautifully captures the mixture of attraction and repulsion that is the essence of Laura’s reaction to Carmilla. Our empathy for Laura’s victimhood is that much stronger because it stems from her sunny heroism.

The ending that Carla and Shepherd have devised for her — distinctly different from Le Fanu’s — fits Nadhiri like a glove, and you might say that the word “bloodcurdling” was specially cooked up to describe her screams.

Two interludes punctuate the action, so you can get refills on the beverages that were served on the front lawn as you first entered, or you might nosh on cream puffs and sausage balls. When we reached the denouement, the audience was split in two, half of us ascending the staircase to witness the climactic encounter between Laura and Carmilla in the bedroom, half of us remaining downstairs to hear the disclosures that Laura’s mom receives from Aunt Jean.

You’ll have a better appreciation of the synchronicity of the two scenes from the downstairs vantage point, but everyone gets the chance to see both scenes — because, we realize, they actually occur simultaneously.

As I’ve already hinted, the cold and clueless Mother isn’t the plum role here, so you won’t be seeing Andrea King at her best, though she’s very good, of course. Most of the scene stealing comes from Rebecca Costas, busily changing costumes and characters throughout the show. Maybe her most comical turn is as the Doctor who says she’ll return so nervously that you can be absolutely sure she won’t, but she’s also pretty funny as Hunch-Hag, dispensing some fairly toxic marital insight to audience members.

Costas also gets a couple of serious cameos, first as the mysterious and malevolent Countess, Carmilla’s aunt. More urgent — and earnest — is Aunt Jean as the action comes to a boil.

Since her stint as she-devil Abigail Williams in CPCC Theatre’s 2001 production of The Crucible, Costas has only emerged briefly and intermittently on the local scene. It’s a kick to see her shining 15 years later in such a versatile performance, her devilish fire not only intact but several degrees hotter.

Charlotte Symphony’s 85th season is off to an exciting start, and Mary A. Deissler, the new president and CEO, is already making her impact. She has things to say, both onstage at Belk Theater when the orchestra plays and in the CSO program booklet, which isn’t as staid and stagnant as it used to be. Sitting down to last week’s Beethoven Symphony No. 2 concert, I found new artwork, festooned with pumpkins, on the cover.

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The two artworks I’ve seen on the booklet covers, through two 2016-17 Classics concerts, already doubles the number I’ve seen in previous seasons. More importantly, Deissler has kept an inside page, opposite the page where you find tonight’s composers and compositions listed, reserved for herself. So instead of some generic remarks designed to linger more or more inanely as the season wore on, Deissler did a reset on page 17A.

The Welcome Page addressed the divisiveness that has fractured our community in recent weeks, the unifying power of music, and Deissler’s gratitude that we were back at a time when healing is needed. Rang true.

Switching from music director Christopher Warren-Green to guest conductor Michael Christie, the Beethoven offerings were more varied and adventurous than the All-Tchaikovsky season opener, veering off into Franz Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and his Totentanz before we jackknifed into György Ligeti’s folksier and funkier Concert Românesc.

Guest soloist Benedetto Lupo and the CSO brass were a bit overeager and brutish in the opening section of the concerto, but after the pianist navigated through his first softer, lyrical passages, everyone seemed to settle into a more relaxed groove. A fresh production wrinkle further enlivened the concert: a projection screen descended over the Belk stage so an overhead camera could transmit a bird’s eye view of the hurtin’ that Lupo was delivering to a defenseless Steinway Model D.

Van Cliburn himself might have winced.

“1776” Still Preaches Compromise to a Skeptical Electorate

Musical Review: 1776 The Musical

By Perry Tannenbaum

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Firebrand and future president John Adams couldn’t declare independence by himself. Not only did he need to recruit Thomas Jefferson to write our foundational document, he needed to get all 13 colonies represented at the Continental Congress – including his own Massachusetts – to come over to his side. As 1776 The Musical, currently running at Central Piedmont Community College, reminds us, Adams was too headstrong, combative, irritating, and off-putting to sow the seeds that would blossom into our republic.

With George Washington and his army further north, already engaging the British Crown on the battlefield, Adams couldn’t even count on his staunchest sympathizers, Jefferson from Virginia and Ben Franklin from Pennsylvania, to deliver their states’ votes. In fact, it would be an uphill battle for Adams to even get the matter of independence considered at the Congress in Philadelphia – over a year after the first shots had been fired at Lexington and Concord.

So in a climate and an election year where cooperation, compromise, and consensus are so widely despised, 1776 comes along propitiously to remind us how fundamental these things were in forming our national DNA and how essential they remain if we are to make big changes in our democracy. With inevitable sacrifices to detail and accuracy, Peter Stone‘s book presents the story with surprising nuance, depth, and even tragedy.

For a musical clocking in at 2:35 plus intermission, 1776 also has a surprisingly spare songlist, perhaps because composer Sherman Edwards had the original concept. There is also a gratifying self-awareness we can detect in the storytelling at Pease Auditorium in this CPCC Theatre production. We’re not seeing all white men all the time.

Edwards gracefully works in Adams’ wife Abigail through an ongoing exchange of letters that twice become duets. At a clandestine location away from the Congressional Hall, we peep in on an episode that Franklin has contrived to help Jefferson in his struggles to craft the Declaration, sending for Jefferson’s wife Martha. It’s already a conjugal visit by the time Franklin and Adams come calling.

CP director Tom Hollis stirs the pot a little more with a modest infusion of colorblind casting, while costume designers Robert Croghan and Jamey Varnadore offer us what diversity they can, making the chasm between a New Jersey reverend and a South Carolina plantation owner as wide as possible.

Adams is rather lonely and hopeless before Franklin helps him form a cogent strategy to get things rolling. They send Richard Henry Lee of Virginia back home to convince his state legislature to back an initiative for independence. The jubilation of concocting this stratagem is celebrated by Adams, Franklin, and Lee in “The Lees of Virginia,” a song whose toxicity extends beyond its jaw-dropping silliness. I can only hope that its parade of dopey adverbs doesn’t lodge in your memory as an earworm.

Once we’ve crossed that jingling Delaware, we sail smoothly and convincingly through the labors that culminated in our nation’s birth. Virginia’s support leads to a majority vote approving consideration of an independence initiative, the formation of a committee to articulate the reasons and objectives for this action, with the proviso that the vote for adoption of this initiative must be unanimous. Every colony had veto power over the move for independence, adding tension to a drama whose outcome we already know, and leading to the compromise that stands as the Original Sin of our nation.

At the conclusion of his grievances against Britain, Jefferson penned two blistering paragraphs excoriating the Crown’s cultivation of the slave trade and – conveniently omitted from Stone’s book – their incitement of those slaves to rise up against their masters. After a devastating attack on Yankee hypocrisy in “Molasses to Rum,” future South Carolina governor Edward Rutledge demands that the section on slavery, effectively abolishing the institution, be stricken from the Declaration and walks out on the Continental Congress until he gets his way.

There is certainly no trivialization of that haunting but necessary compromise, and the hauteur of Josh Logsdon as Rutledge, along with his resounding singing voice, are among the chief reasons why 1776 will linger in your thoughts. Eric Johnston really is nettlesome and curmudgeonly as Adams, biting in his patriotic vocals yet petulantly tender when he’s interacting with his dear Abigail. Exorcising the clownish look that bedeviled Franklin in Theatre Charlotte’s 1995 production, James K. Flynn plausibly takes on America’s fount of aphorisms and brilliantly balances his avuncular practicality with his comical tendency to doze off.

Depicted as quiet, contemplative, and artistic, Jefferson is a romantic lead in Stone’s narrative who has almost been demoted to a supporting role. While George DeMott isn’t nearly the dreamboat Patrick Ratchford was when he sang the role in 1995, there comes a time when we’re supposed to be wondering what his sex appeal actually is. In giving weight to that question, DeMott is very appropriate. Nor could you hope for a more charming answer than “He Plays the Violin” from Emily Witte as Martha.

Witte is so graceful and charming that I could hardly imagine omitting her “Violin” when this musical was last revived on Broadway in 1997, more than 28 years after its original premiere. By coincidence, it is omitted from the songlists of 1776 on both the IBDB.com listing for the 1997 revival and in CP’s playbill. But Amazon assures me that it’s still on the 1997 cast album.

In real life there was an age difference of 29 years between John and AbiGail Adams, but Hollis dispenses with that gulf in casting Megan Postle as AbiGail Adams. As you’ll find, it’s a very unique role since Hollis insists on preserving the Adamses’ separation when they converse by mail, yet Postle warms wonderfully to the task. At the comical end of the spectrum, Alan Morgan can be commended for delivering the deadly Lee with all his giddy gleefulness, while choreographer Ron Chisholm doesn’t stint on the energy and dopiness of our Founding Fathers’ dances, fearlessly risking the charge of sacrilege.

Conspicuously missing from the Philadelphia deliberations is General Washington, but we periodically get gloomy dispatches from him in the field, delivered by Trey Thomason as the Courier. After a few of these, lights dim unexpectedly on Thomason, who sings grimly to us in “Mama, Look Sharp” about the realities of fighting and dying for your country.

Sobering moments like that are why 1776 remains relevant nearly 50 years after its original Broadway opening. Recounting how we reached our landmark July Fourth, this lively evening occasionally packs the power to explode our drum-and-fife expectations.

“First Date” Gets a Second Chance

Reviews:  First Date, Breakin’ Convention, A Year With Frog & Toad, Charlotte Symphony

By Perry Tannenbaum

When it hit Broadway three years ago, First Date wasn’t exactly a critical or box office triumph. Starring Zachary Levi (TV’s Chuck) and Krysta Rodriguez (from Smash), the pocket-sized musical — six actors and 90 minutes — drew jaundiced eyes from the theater press. Though the critics generally liked what they saw from Levi and Rodriguez, they focused far less charitably on the script by Austin Winsberg and the score by Alan Zachary and Michael Weiner. The most positive reviews conceded that mediocrity was in sight for the sitcom script and the pop rock score, yet when a few of those jaundiced eyes deigned to look around and observe others in the house, they had to admit that the audience was having a rollicking time. After the notices came out, attendance began to tumble, never to recover until the announced closing week less than five months later.

To give First Date a second chance on the road, its creators needed to think makeover. In a new Blumenthal Performing Arts presentation, now at Booth Playhouse through Nov. 20, it’s obvious that Charlotte’s backers and new director/choreographer Dan Knechtges have sparked a lot of rethinking.

Aaron is still a buttoned-down, slightly nerdy, risk-averse guy who is in a steady job without any self-fulfillment on the horizon. Mutual friends have set him up with Casey, an artsy Bohemian who keeps good guys like Aaron at arm’s length. Her weakness for bad boys has littered her past with a string of relationships that never worked out.

At the point where those bad boys come into play, Zachary and Weiner have gone to work on their songlist. Edgy British Guy and Edgy Rocker Guy are replaced by British Artist and Stoner Guy while their song, “Can’t Help but Love Me,” is similarly altered. Before that, we have a revamp of “Forever Online,” a song that was cut from the Broadway production soon after the opening. Now a new character, Google Girl, joins Casey and Aaron for “The World Wide Web Is Forever,” and this song — about Googling prospective dates before you meet them — may be the freshest, most delicious segment that First Date has to offer.

Transplanting the show from the 1100-seat Longacre Theatre in New York to the 434-seat Booth, Knechtges has implemented far more fundamental changes. Not only has he reduced the cast from six to five, he has brought members of the audience onstage, seating them around the bar and at tables at the restaurant where Aaron and Casey meet. These customers don’t sit around idly during the action.

Katerina Papacostas and Matthew Schatz in First Date. - DANIEL COSTON

 

Critics reviewing this remake can’t ignore the audience because they’re part of it. The main responsibility for getting patrons involved falls to Paul Ianniello as our Bartender/Waiter. Though we’ve relocated from Manhattan to Uptown Charlotte, this Waiter fits the New York stereotype of waiters biding their time until that magical day when they nail an audition. He’s super gregarious, marking Aaron as a dude on a blind date as soon as he enters, telling him to lose the tie and unbutton the shirt if he plans to reach first base.

He’ll also chat up the diners and drinkers, prevail upon them to switch tables, move to the bar, or even kick up their heels. Or he might reappear on the roof of the building or re-enter the restaurant from the street. Most memorable among his thought-cloud characters, Ianniello dons a tallit and enters as Aaron’s disapproving grandfather when he discovers that Casey is a shiksa.

Gretchen Wylder is Grandma Ida in this Jewish guignol number inspired by the Fruma-Sarah haunting from Fiddler on the Roof, getting the cheap laugh when she sings “I will break your matzo balls.” Tapering off just a smidge on her madcap energy, she also pops up at odd moments from behind the bar as Aaron’s former bipolar fiancée. Wielding a cocktail glass or a frying pan out in the box seats, Wylder is also Casey’s older and wiser sister, Lauren, reminding the prodigal that her biological clock is ticking or — more to the point — busting her on her self-defeating defensiveness with good guys.

As you’ve already divined, Aaron and Casey’s first date is littered with real and imagined interventions. In multiple incarnations, Kevin Zak as Man #2 completes the unholy trinity. Wearing a Luke Kuechly jersey and toting a “brewski,” Zak is most often Aaron’s best bud Gabe, telling the newbie to blind dating whether or not he’s straying from the golden path to Fuck County. Or he might change costumes and resurface from behind the bar as Reggie, a dimwitted ex-boyfriend who gets enraged when Casey doesn’t answer his repeated bailout calls to her cellphone.

At the eye of this cyclone of eccentricity, Matthew Schatz can be fairly nebbishy as Aaron without coming close to relinquishing his hold on comparative wholesomeness. Likewise, Katerina Papacostas doesn’t need to softpeddle Casey’s practical joking and hostility to sustain her desirability. Together, they rock “First Impressions” almost immediately after they meet, building up a pile of appeal they can squander.

Schatz’s take on Aaron makes him somewhat less cartoonish than Brad in Rocky Horror, while Papacostas’ Casey is slightly more wholesome than the most mainstream member of The Addams Family. Oh, wait a second: Rodriguez was Wednesday Addams, originating that role on Broadway before originating Casey. Pure coincidence, I’m sure.

Papacostas’ foxiness drew extra play on press night when our Waiter asked a customer to move over to the bar so Casey and Aaron could be seated. The audience member shot back a counterproposal, suggesting that Casey be seated right there next to him!

In this more informal format, it becomes more obvious that the very idea of first dates is a powerful draw for audiences, stirring up old memories, tingling feelings of anticipation, and long-dormant hormones. Perhaps the best alteration Winsberg has made to his script is making sure that some of the comedy at every performance will be unscripted.

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Proximity of last week’s openings in Charlotte to the police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott — and its tumultuous aftermath — seemed to tamp down turnout at Booth Playhouse on Thursday. Crowds outside for Friday evening’s Breakin’ Convention pre-shows, the spoken word slammers outdoors on the Levine Center for the Arts Plaza and the b-boys working the cypher in the Knight Theater lobby, were about the same anemic size as last year, when bad weather curtailed attendance.

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But when the sun shone so brightly and beautifully on Saturday afternoon, I could tell just by driving past the Spirit Square parking lot that Breakin’ Convention’s all-day Street Jam was bigger and better. Around the corner on 7th Street, another robust crowd of parents and kids were lapping up the Children’s Theatre of Charlotte revival of A Year With Frog & Toad, which is every bit as delightful as the 2008 version at ImaginOn — and more completely polished.

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Charlotte Symphony subscribers kept the good vibe going on Saturday night, thronging to the All Tchaikovsky concert at Belk Theater. Guest soloist  gave them more than ample artistry with her fire, precision, and honeyed tone in the Violin Concerto, drawing a standing ovation after the opening movement. Music director Christopher Warren-Green and the orchestra were vibrant and dynamic in their accompaniment, so I had no qualms about joining the cheers and the ovation when Yoo’s performance reached its triumphant end.

“Dirty Dancing” Turns up the Heat on Tour — but Not the Singing

Theater Review:  Dirty Dancing

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By Perry Tannenbaum

Last year, when I passed up my first opportunity to see Dirty Dancing at Belk Theater, I had this naïve idea that it would be a musical adaptation of the 1987 film starring Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey. With the return of the national tour Charlotte, this time at cavernous Ovens Auditorium, I persisted in my folly long after the curtain rose. Silly me, I overlooked the fine print in my playbill under the florid romance novel italics of the Dirty Dancing logo: “the classic story on stage.”

So as the action unfolded, with a live eight-piece band perched above the scene at a Catskills country club, months before the JFK assassination, I was expecting Bronwyn Reed and Christopher Tierney to sing. Reed is “Baby” Houseman, a privileged lass on vacation with her parents and sister. The eponymous club owner of Kellerman’s wants to match Baby up with his grandson, Neil, who professes to have activist sympathies that are in tune with hers. Nevertheless, it is Tierney as Johnny Castle, the dance star of the Kellerman’s floorshows, who dazzles her.

All of the women – including some of the wives – are drooling over Johnny, but he seems to be the property of his dance partner, Penny. Not so. What clears the way for Baby to get closer to Johnny is a Penny catastrophe. As a result of a recent indiscretion – and the clandestine surgery required to fix it – Baby has three days to replace Penny as Johnny’s partner for a gig at a nearby hotel.

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So there are opportunities here for plenty of music and singing as Baby trespasses into the world of the déclassé entertainment staffers, empathizes with Penny’s plight, and endures the grind of intensive rehearsals with Johnny, maybe the hardest honest work of her whole life. Body heat is amped up on the live stage to a level that celluloid can’t compete with as Johnny and Baby slither closer and closer, inevitably intertwining, and music from up in the bandstand is more constantly in the background. But despite the heat and the beat, these dancers never sing.

I expected Reed to sing because the curly Jennifer Grey hairdo (or wig) wasn’t especially becoming for her and her dancing, which is supposed to be stiff and tentative at the start, never evolved to spectacular, lingering at merely proficient. Why cast this Baby if she couldn’t belt?

Yet I was far more eager to hear Tierney. Not only does he have a rugged, muscular, sensitive, and sensual stage presence, his speaking voice has the rich, deep grain of a finely polished briar pipe, promising a liquescent baritone. Instead of our leads, Jordan Edwin André as Billy, an incidental character, shares the live singing chores with Chante Carmel as Elizabeth, an add-on character.

Less awkward than these musical shifts are Eleanor Bergstein‘s dramatic add-ons to her screenplay. Her stage adaptation inserts some friction by between Baby’s dad (Jon Edward Powell), the physician who actually saves Penny from the quack, and her mom (Hannah Jane McMurray), who sees similarities between Johnny and her husband that the good doctor misses. The resolution of that conflict enriches the reconciliation at the end.

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So does watching it live. The sequence, first on a log and later on a lake, where Johnny spends their last day of rehearsal teaching Baby their lifts, pales on stage in front of some clunky projections compared to location shots crafted on film. But when they finally achieve those lifts, center stage and live without retakes or a net, it was not only breathtaking but also unexpectedly moving, wiping out the bathos of those earlier projections.

Yet it has to be said that part of why the closing scene is so surprisingly moving is the absence of any comparable emotional peak before then – the kind of peaks that heartfelt singing duets can help to create. The best comic relief comes from Alyssa Brizzi as the younger sister, giving us a heftier chunk of her cheesy Hawaiian number at the final soiree. Otherwise, the only other standout was Jennifer Mealani Jones as Penny. It hardly takes five seconds to realize that she’s an ace dancer.