Category Archives: Theatre

“Mojada” Gives the QC a Flaming Taste of Euripides

**Review: Mojada: A Medea in Los Angeles at The Arts Factory**

By Perry Tannenbaum

When Euripides took first place for the first time at the Dionysia Festival, Athens’ five-day playwrights showdown celebrating Dionysius, it was so long ago that theatre scholars aren’t sure whether he won an ivy wreath or a goat. Ten years later, when his Medea took third place, we can’t say what the Greek master took home as a reward. It wasn’t gold or bronze, but Olympic champions and runners-up back then didn’t win medals, either. Nor can anyone remember the titles of the tragedies that finished ahead of Euripides’ masterwork.

Now that Luis Alfaro’s Mojada: A Medea in Los Angeles has premiered in an excellent Three Bone Theatre production at the Arts Factory, we can say – 2455 years and five months later – that we are a giant step closer to seeing a premiere of Euripides’ white-hot spectacle in Charlotte. Until now, the closest approach of the charismatic adventurer Jason and his sorceress consort Medea to the Queen City was a 2004 Gardner-Webb U production in Boiling Springs.

That production, one might presume, came in the wake of the sensational 2003 Broadway revival of Medea starring Fiona Shaw. But was there also a connection between that Media and Alfaro’s?

Could be! For the Broadway sizzler also transported Euripides’ hellcat to Los Angeles. But there’s also a huge difference: Shaw’s Medea was a Hollywood superstar who capriciously craved a Garbo-like solitude. Alfaro’s is a mojada, or wetback, who needs to lay low because she’s an illegal – and mostly because, during their treacherous migration from Mexico, she suffered far more severe trauma than the rest of her family and their longtime viejita, Tita, who is always seething over the indignity of being considered a “housekeeper” in America.

She considers herself a curandera, a healer, so she tracks with the Nurse in Euripides’ tragedy. After winning the 1948 Tony Award for Medea – and recreating the role for a 1959 TV movie – Judith Anderson was content in 1982 to take on the role of the Nurse in another Broadway revival, earning a second Tony Award nomination with the same Robinson Jeffers adaptation.

So you can expect Banu Valladares as Tita, Christian Serna as Hason, and Sonia Rosales McLoed as Medea all to have potent roles to play in Alfaro’s explosive retelling. Unlike Euripides, Alfaro flashes back to the treacherous journey that brought Hason and Medea to the Rio Grande, with enough hardships, suffering, and trauma to suggest a parallel to the Middle Passage from Africa. And of course, Medea’s barrio lifestyle also tracks with Langston Hughes’ “dream deferred” in Harlem – both of them pulsating toward an explosion.

Alfaro shakes up Euripides’ cast as well, replacing both kings, Creon and Aegeus – and the unnamed, offstage daughter Creon expects Jason to marry – with the sassy, bossy Armida, Hason’s employer and benefactor. We might also say that Alfaro has replaced the Euripides’ Chorus of Corinthian Women with Josefina, a bread-peddling gossip making her daily rounds.

Confronted with a rich mixture of Spanish and English, spoken with authentic Hispanic accents by an all-Latine cast, we may feel as disoriented in this Chicano world as Hason’s family are in LA. Seeing a quiet Medea, burdened by an oppressive workload and timidly tethering herself to her sewing machine, we further struggle to connect Alfaro’s protagonist with Euripides’. Back in Corinth, the royal Medea was outraged, suicidal, and wildly vengeful from the moment she first appeared, a volatile dynamo of shifting, fiery emotions.

Since we come into Alfaro’s story a little earlier, it will take a little while for his tragedy to overlap the Greek’s, even if you read it the night before. And if, like me, it’s been over 20 years since you’ve seen the work live or read a translation, you may miss some of what Alfaro has preserved from Euripides’ telling. For Euripides, it wasn’t such a big deal that Jason and Medea were immigrants, but they were. For me, I hardly noticed that Jason and Medea weren’t legally married, but they weren’t.

For Alfaro, these are central plot points. Just don’t think he’s changing those parts of the story. It’s really brilliant how they’re elevated to top-of-mind when we watch Mojada at the Arts Factory. Complementing their all-Latine cast, most of whom are making their first appearances with Three Bone, are directors Carlosalexis Cruz and Michelle Medina Villalon, also in their Three Bone debuts. They don’t always listen to their players with helpful Yankee or Dixie ears, but they deftly quicken the heartbeat of this drama as it climaxes.

More importantly, when they reach the spectacular ending, what they concoct – with Jennifer Obando Carter’s most unforgettable costume design – hits the spot. We could feel that viscerally on opening night.

Obviously, Latine theatre wants to happen in the Queen City. With Three Bone committed to producing Alfaro’s complete Greek Trilogy, Electricidad next August and Oedipus El Rey slated for 2026, it’shappening.

Because Alfaro is messing with both the story and Euripides’ character, those who know the Medea myth can experience the suspense at nearly the same high intensity as audience members who have never come across this Mom-of-the-century before, in Greece or in this LA rewrite. Over and over, as memories of the Euripides’ came flooding on me from past encounters with the live Shaw, the TV Anderson, and the text, I found myself wondering, Is he really going all the way?

After all, part of the reason Euripides’ Medea hasn’t played in Charlotte for at least the 37 years that I’ve been on the beat could be that Queen City theatre companies were protecting us from its full barbaric force. Could be some blowback in Bank Town.

Thanks in large measure to the harrowing flashback sequence, McLoed is able to traverse the wide gulf between the semi-catatonic Medea we confronted at the beginning of the evening and the flaming red raptor we see at the end. That’s Medea!? I found myself wondering during Scene 1, so the development arc from there is nothing less than astonishing. There’s a haunting connection between the catatonia we see at the beginning and the vengeful glare that comes some 90 minutes later. She’s actually relatable most of the time!

Precisely because this LA Medea lacks the fire and wicked glamour of her Corinthian counterpart in the early scenes, we can effortlessly empathize with Serna’s ambitious Hason as he pursues the American Dream. She won’t leave the house! Family outings with their son cannot happen, she’s too traumatized for sex even when she’s in the mood, and. He wants to get ahead while his Medea is a poster girl for inertia.

And considering the huge difference between an immigrant’s status in modern-day America and his relative safety in ancient Corinth, Hason has many pragmatic reasons to accept the predatory Armida’s business and marriage proposals, no matter how much he may still love Medea. Giving us earlier access to the story – before the breakup – not only allows Alfaro to add fuel to the drama, it allows him to show us that there is fault on both sides.

Serna’s performance isn’t quite as wide-ranging as McLoed’s, but it is no less nuanced, for he is navigating this new American world and trying to provide for his family’s future. We see that he’s a far better parent to his son, Acan, than Medea, and it’s not just because he kicks a soccer ball around with him in the front yard. Citizenship for him, no matter how heartlessly he betrays Medea, will mean citizenship for the boy.

In her venomous cameo, delivered with a wondrous mix of elegance and malignity, Marianna Corrales is magnificently resistible as Armida, Hasan’s childless employer and Medea’s implacable landlord. Hard to say whether Armida wants Acan as a son more than she wants Hasan as a husband, but with knowledge of Medea’s immigrant and marital status, she knows she is invincible and will have her way. Corrales is cool. Ice.

Alfaro not only gives Leo Torres more to say and do in his story as Acan than any of Jason’s children have ever had before, he makes him a key part of the tale. Torres will not only tell his mom about visiting Armida’s swank house with Dad, he will also – huge new dramatic irony – suggest that she make the rich lady a dress.

Further igniting Medea’s suspicions and jealousy is Isabella Gonzalez as Josefina, bringing her signature vitality along with her cartful of bread as she shares gossip with Tita. Yet she is also eager to make friends with Medea, especially if a certain amount of freebie loaves will convince the artful seamstress to make her a smashing new outfit. So it makes sense, out of friendship, that she tells Medea what the buzz is around town about Hason and Armida.

We never learn how long Hason has actually been married – or how far custody proceedings have gone – when Medea gets the newsflash. This point in Alfaro’s LA comes late in the drama, but in Corinth all this has happened before we first see the sorceress. No wonder the rest of the evening was such a feverish whirl.

In hindsight, after dipping back into the original 431 B.C. playscript, methinks it was far crueller that Alfaro’s Medea sends Tita – instead of Jason and the child – to deliver her bridal gift. Cruel as it is to make the viejita a witness, it gives Valladares a monologue that even Judith Anderson would have loved to sink her teeth into. As the eternally griping Tita, Valladares seems to hate everybody, beginning with us, whom she addresses directly after Alfaro’s incantatory opening.

But she has crossed rivers, faced outlaws and starvation, because of her loyalty to Medea, the one person she adores. And now Medea sends her off with a giftbox to Armida and tells her that she herself is a second gift for Hason’s benefactor. Discarded like an old rag!

Plenty of steam to work with. Valladares does not misfire. Nor does McLoed, though we hear an ominous helicopter overhead.

“Ripcord” Brings Mortal Combat to Senior Living

**Review: Ripcord at Davidson College**

By Perry Tannenbaum

We’ve had more than a couple of engaging David Lindsay-Abaire moments in the Charlotte metro over the years, beginning with the Actor’s Theatre production of Fuddy Meers in 2002. Wonder of the World continued the company’s love affair with Lindsay-Abaire in 2004, and when the playwright’s Rabbit Hole took the 2006 Tony Award and the 2007 Pulitzer, Actor’s Theatre took full custody for the 2008 Charlotte premiere.

Since then, the edgy Lindsay-Abaire has largely disappeared, along with – not coincidentally, I’d contend – Actor’s Theatre of Charlotte. The exception proved the rule when Carolina Actor’s Studio Theatre mounted a fine production of L-A’s Good People in 2013, for CAST made its exit years before ATC’s demise.

Tiding us over until the current run of Ripcord in a Davidson Community Players productionat Duke Family Performance Hall, Lindsay-Abaire has graced us with numerous softer, cuddlier visitations. For he wrote the book for the musicals that brought the animated Shrek to life in a trinity of darling fluff, beginning with Shrek the Musical before hatching its twin afterbirths, Shrek Jr. and Shrek TYA. A full-length revival was staged at ImaginOn by Children’s Theatre as recently as 2022.

With the touring edition of Lindsay-Abaire’s newest Tony Award winner, Kimberly Akimbo,due for a Knight Theater rendezvous next April, many Charlotte theatergoers may rightly feel that the time is ripe for catching up with this notably successful writer. They will find a very fine production at the Duke, nestled inside the Davidson College student center, although Ripcord isn’t Lindsay-Abaire at his edgiest.

On the other hand, Ripcord isn’t nearly as humdrum as its main locale, Bristol Place Senior Living in New Jersey, would lead you to presume. That’s because roommates Abby and Marilyn have radically clashing temperaments, turning the apartment into a tinderbox. Fundamentally, Abby is misanthropic grouch who treasures her privacy – but instead of forking out the extra cash that would put her in a private apartment, she has pragmatically made herself impossible to live with.

Sunny, cheerful, and chatty, Marilyn is totally averse to the quiet and solitude Abby thrives on, breezing into the suite in a jogging outfit while her sedentary counterpart vegetates on an easy chair. She doesn’t see Abby as a mortal enemy. She’s oblivious to most of the insults that Abby hurls at her and impervious to the rest. Marilyn needs to play with others and blithely treats Abby’s hostility as playful banter.

Such insouciance totally flabbergasts and infuriates Abby, opening avenues to comedy and drama. Lindsay-Abaire slyly chooses both. So do director Matt Webster and his cast, decidedly tipping the scales toward comedy. You can easily despise both Pat Langille as the Pollyanna senior Marilyn and Karen Lico as her adversary.

Abby’s inability to dim Marilyn’s sunniness is frustrating enough for her to enlist the assistance of eager-to-please Scotty, the resident aide who cares most about the women. You can definitely empathize with Scotty when Abby confides in him and keeps pestering him to get Marilyn transferred to a single apartment that has become vacant downstairs.

Strangely enough, Scotty’s patience isn’t as boundless as the saintly Marilyn’s, which gives Lowell Lark some leverage to work with in the role. As a peacemaker, he gently informs Abby that she likes it upstairs, where it’s sunnier and there’s a nice view of the nearby park. As a dealmaker, he won’t commit to speaking to management on Abby’s behalf about moving out her roomie, but he could get in a word for her about serving up some chicken and dumplings – instead of the usual tasteless gruel – if she’ll buy a ticket and come to a show he’s acting in.

Actually, “Beelzebub’s Den” is a haunted house, liberating us from the ladies’ institutional humdrum bedroom and bath on an excursion to the first of three breakaway scenes, two of them obliging set designer Kaylin Gess to create living quarters that quickly stow away in the Duke’s commodious wings. Lots of work for the seven-person set crew. Doubling as DCP’s lighting designer, Gess gets to supply the phantasmagoria at Beelzebub’s while Beth Killion provides the outré costume designs. Technical director Shawn Halliday also gets in on the fun, here and in the signature skydiving scene.

There’s fun for us watching the haunted house antics, but Abby is neither impressed with Scotty’s acting nor scared by any of the spookiness. Abby matter-of-factly tells that she doesn’t scare. Period.

Enjoy the fun, then, but the prime takeaway from Beelzebub’s is Abby’s pride in her fearlessness. In the very next scene back at assisted living, Marilyn will insist with equal certitude that nothing Abby can do will make her angry. Resistant to all the previous bets her quirky roomie has proposed, including whether she can balance a slipper on her head, Abby sees a betting opportunity here. If Abby can make Marilyn angry, she wins. If Marilyn can scare Abby, victory!

The high stakes are predictable: if Abby wins, Marilyn leaves; if Abby loses, Marilyn gets to take over the coveted bed near the window. Game on!

And no holds barred. Lico and Langille aren’t at the high end of Lindsay-Abaire’s specified age range for their roles, so the patina of seeing ancient biddies acting like kiddies isn’t happening in Davidson. But it is definitely the playwright’s intent for Langille to exceed expectations with her imaginativeness and for Lico to shock us with her meanness and cruelty.

With stakes set this high, this is war, and the warfare escalates each time an attack fails. Bombarding your roomie with phone calls and fake messages or drugging your roomie are not out of bounds as the battles begin. Enlisting your relatives and pranking your opponents’ kin are also legit strategies as the Abby-Marilyn War escalates. The avenues of comedy and drama widen along the way.

Langille and Lico obviously revel in hatching their devilish schemes and flouting our presumptions of senior citizens’ dignity and decorum. So the Odd Couple comedy, seasoned with a half century of aging, works well. But there’s also a theme of bonding that Lindsay-Abaire plants deeply in his script from the moment his antagonists strike their bet. Reviews of the 2015 Manhattan Theatre Club premiere indicate that director David Hyde Pearce missed it with his sitcom reading, and Webster also misses some of the early hints.

Yeah, Scotty the peacemaker and dealmaker subtly evolves into the common enemy – inevitably, the uniter, if both women survive! – when Abby and Marilyn solemnly agree to keep their bet a secret from him. Lark has his best moments when he suddenly appears at an inopportune time, threatening to blow the renegade gamblers’ cover.

The deeper mojo is in the bond formed between the two combatants, a literary staple stretching past Robin Hood and Little John all the way back to the Homeric epics. We’ve all seen two boxers sincerely hugging one another after pummeling each other for 12 or even 15 rounds. That’s genuine emotion, the rawest kind, not ritual or fakery. It comes from a gradually growing appreciation of your opponents’ gifts and grit as the battle grinds on. At its keenest, the upswell of emotion also comes from the realization that your mortal enemy has pushed you to a level that you never believed possible – and that part of extra specialness of your opponents’ performance comes partly from you.

So there are many fine moments that Lico and Langille have once the game is on, though digging into them would disclose too many comical and dramatic spoilers. Equal to any one of them is the spot where, the bet having been won, the combatants begin praising each other for their devilish deeds. At that point, Webster, Lico, and Langille are all catching Lindsay-Abaire’s drift.

Supporting actors are also a treat, starting with Rigo Nova as the Zombie Butler, our host at Beelzebub’s. Transforming into Derek, Marilyn’s son-in-law, Nova is almost as surreal in his geniality and self-doubt. Victimized by one of Marilyn’s pranks, John Pace wears his victimhood well as Abby’s drifter son after donning a clown suit back at the haunted house.

Kimberly Saunders is also spectacularly silent at Beelzebub’s as the Woman in White, but her surprise appearance as Colleen, Marilyn’s daughter, is an immediate joy – for she is foiling Abby’s first wicked prank just by walking through the doorway. Soon she’ll be rubbing her hands with glee at the prospect of joining her Mom in some awesome payback. Mischief is more fun when the whole family is in on the plot.

Can “Back to the Future” Fly as a Musical?

**Review: Back to the Future The Musical at Belk Theater**

By Perry Tannenbaum

The stars aligned – and Hollywood’s star system functioned flawlessly – when Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd, both proven TV commodities, came together in 1985 to star in the year’s top-grossing blockbuster, Back to the Future. You could easily “see” Fox as Marty McFly if you tuned into Family Ties, where the diminutive 23-year-old was already starring as a son who was more grounded, pragmatic, and strait-laced than his hippy dad. Likewise, the lean and bony Lloyd was perpetually disheveled and long-haired enough on Taxi to ace an audition for the pivotal role of Doc Brown, the eccentric nuclear physicist who unlocks the secret of time travel.

Doc and Marty live in Hill Valley, a town that is perfectly rigged to enable time travel back-and-forth from 1985 to 1955, according to the unique formula concocted by screenwriters Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale The writing/directing team clearly liked wheels: they put Marty on a skateboard and put wheels into time travel – in a customized DeLorean that was as fuel hungry as a space rocket. No less than the force of an atomic bomb was required to achieve lift-off at the magical speed of 88mph.

Anybody remember Oldsmobiles?

Stolen plutonium fuels the DeLorean in its maiden flight to 1985, but if you don’t already know, it’s Hill Valley and its highest, most visible landmark that powers the kooky, suspenseful journey back. More than 30 years after the box office smash – and a franchise that includes two film sequels, video games, amusement park rides, and a lunchbox – Gale wasn’t going to hand over his story to anyone else when the time was ripe for Back to the Future The Musical.

As fans of the film will soon discover at Belk Theater, Gale’s parental care for his brainchild hasn’t prevented him from tinkering extensively with its workings. Doc’s DeLorean is now equipped with voice recognition, with a smart-ass voice that tells McFly he can no longer change its settings. In other vehicular news, Marty’s grandpa will no longer run into him with his jalopy and the lad’s skateboard usage will be seriously curtailed. Nor is there any traffic onstage from Libyan terrorists, so Marty’s letter to Doc, to be acted upon 30 years later, now has a different safety warning.

The magical family snapshot that Marty carries along with him to 1955, providing useful updates on whether he and his sibs still exist in 1985, is gracefully finessed. No, we can’t see closeups of the photo at the Belk like we could on a big screen, but Doc’s lab is thoughtfully outfitted with an overhead projector so we can track changes on a smaller pulldown screen.

While the telltale snapshot is upscaled, so is the buffoonery of Marty’s dad, George McFly. A conspicuous loser in both time slots, carrying over a Jerry Lewis gawkiness into each, Burke Swanson feasts on George’s timid nerdiness, threatening to steal the show whenever he appears. Next to her clownish husband, Zan Berube suffers some shrinkage in 1985 as Lorraine, Marty’s long-suffering mom, but she conspicuously flowers as the younger teen in 1955, evidently the queen bee of Hill Valley High.

There she is glamorous as the ideal of both George and his nemesis, Biff Tannen*, the town bully – and she is dangerous because she fancies Marty, a mortal threat to the space-time continuum and his existence. Aided by a bodacious Campbell Young Associates wig, Ethan Rogers makes for wonderfully cartoonish Biff, looking like a monstrously morphed Archie Andrews, with flecks of Bluto, Curly from Oklahoma, and The Donald. This Biff ought to be the toast of the town in New York.

With so many delicious distractions – and so many, many, many songs by Alan Silvestri and Glen Ballard – Don Stephenson as Doc and Caden Brauch as Marty struggle to stay at the forefront throughout Act 1, where pacing reaches cruising speed but never really sustains it. We pine, we ache for the DeLorean whenever it’s parked out of sight.

But the payoff for the increased development of Mom and Dad, before and after marriage, lands nicely as Act 2 accelerates to its finale. We’re not assailed with frantic jumpcuts or chases, but so many difficulties and complications remain to be resolved as 10:04pm inches closer at the fateful courthouse clock tower. Before the lightning strikes, hopefully lavishing its gigawatts on the DeLorean at its magical speed, Biff must be thwarted, Mom and Dad – with nothing to build on yet in their relationship – must consummate their first kiss, and Marty must take fond leave of all the key people in his life.

Preferably, with his own survival assured. Then all he needs to do, in the dark of night in a high wind driving his DeLorean at 88mph, is thread a needle at precisely the right moment. Piece of cake.

It’s easy to forget the emotional weight of the film’s relationships and time-traveling farewells 35 or more years after savoring its pulsating adventure, so they all came back forcefully for me on opening night. Although they aren’t Rodgers & Hammerstein, the songs by Silvestri & Ballard mystically magnified that weight – even if I sometimes wished the revving-up sounds of the DeLorean might drown them out.

While his headgear and goggles still brand him as a mad scientist, Stephenson as Doc veers more toward personifying the physicist as a visionary. His vision of the “21^st Century” impacts comically as cockeyed optimism rather than eccentricity, and his “For the Dreamers,” an anthem for losers, resonates rather poignantly with the sorry loser futures faced by George and his present-but-unborn son.

Fox’s fidgety acting style, his three little jumps before making an exit – or simply moving – have become avatars for seemingly every leading man on tour or on Broadway in a musical. Those hiccups are intact in Brauch’s embodiment of Marty McFly, punctuated with all his skateboard and DeLorean business, but he also recaptures Michael J’s anguish and urgency as he counsels his own dad on how to be a man. Yes, that’s the knack that Fox brought to movies from his stint on Family Ties, but here the stakes are immensely higher – as high as they can be – in a cosmic comedy!

At times, the time traveling intervention with Dad is cringeworthy. Marty is basically telling Dad how to bed his mom so he can be born. But with music, Brauch can heighten his role from advisor to motivator. Brauch’s powers of inspiration are magnified when he plants idea of running for mayor in the mind of the kid sweeping the floor at the diner where Marty first encounters his dad-to-be (a fine “Gotta Start Somewhere” cameo for Cartreze Tucker as Goldie Wilson).

When he sings “Put Your Mind to It” to Dad in Act 2, Marty must skirt the Scylla and Charybdis of phoniness or peppiness. We don’t want him sounding like huckster Max Bialystock singing “We Can Do It” in The Producers or evoking a Richard Simmons workout session.

So yeah, besides those hops, Brauch also needs to have that youthful brashness we associate with Fox and McFly. Elevating a shallow and tepid rock song into a motivating “We Can Do It” mantra, Brauch pours on all the energy and earnestness needed to make Marty take flight.

Nor does it hurt when the DeLorean levitates.

*No relation

“Young Frankenstein” Delivers Excess, Glitz, and Glorious Shtick

Review: Young Frankenstein at Matthews Playhouse

By Perry Tannenbaum

July 12, 2024, Matthews, NC – Just turned 98, Mel Brooks has overachieved in every way possible, including longevity. Yes, he wrote the music and lyrics in adapting his own Oscar-winning script, The Producers, into a Broadway musical. If that 2001 megahit was the most prodigious and successful transformation of his career – already past 50 years as a writer, comedian, and actor – then his 2007 follow-up, Young Frankenstein, was the most natural.

Mel had already stolen Irving Berlin’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz” and Victor Herbert’s “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life” to gild two of the most shining moments of the original film, shot in retro black-and-white. Composing his musical adaptation, Brooks stole some more, changing the ardent lyrics of “One Song” from Disney’s Snow White into a deliciously salacious “Deep Love” after the Broadway edition’s third coital climax.

There are some rather filthy connotations strewn throughout our horrific romp through Transylvania, enough for Matthews Playhouse to caution parents against bringing youngsters under 13 to the current production. But stage director Jill Bloede presents each granule of this glorious filth with bawdy, bodacious, and childish glee at Fullwood Theater. Scenic designer Marty Wolff, costume designer Yvette Moten, lighting designer Jeffrey Childs, and choreographer Emily Hunter are all let loose to fashion fresh layers of excess and glitz.

A whole second stage opens up behind the teeming downtown Transylvania downstage when we reach Victor Frankenstein’s secret laboratory hidden behind the mad scientist’s library – an installation that permits special effects designer Roy Schumacher to make the moments of creation and coition inside the lab more spectacular.

Brooks’s venerated comedy reputation and Bloede’s every-shtick-in-the-book approach have drawn a bounty of professional grade talent to this cast. Wearing a frizzy Gene Wilder hairdo, Neifert Enrique cements his elite credentials as Dr. Frederick Frankenstein, grandson of Mary Shelley’s “Modern Prometheus,” bringing a youthful wonderment to the role that makes all the lead women’s roles a little plumier. If you missed Nick Culp’s outdoor exploits as Columbia in The Rocky Horror Picture Show during the pandemic, one of Actor’s Theatre’s valedictory efforts, his Matthews debut as Igor will likely come as a revelation, though he looked way closer to Fester Addams than to a hump-backed Marty Feldman. Lungs of steel and a wicked comedy flair.

With Mary Lynn Bain as noli-me-tangere New York socialite Elizabeth Benning and Gabriella Gonzalez as Inga, the cheery and buxom Transylvania peasant, the contrast between “Please Don’t Touch Me” and “Roll in the Hay” is as radical as any horny Frankenstein could wish. Bridging this chasm is The Monster, endowed by Brooks with a super-virility that surely would have drawn a polite giggle from Ms. Shelley. Hulking Matthew Corbett, roaring and bellowing with the best, makes Elizabeth’s deflowering a special joy, for while he is melting Bain’s ice maiden inhibitions, Brooks cooly has him overcoming his fear of fire.

Now we easily can find on YouTube that Peter Boyle actually danced in the Hollywood version, but the “Ritz” extravaganza concocted by Hunter is arguably more demanding, with Moten outfitting a good chunk of the Transylvanian peasantry in white tuxes. Top hats and canes for all the gents! We can’t call him Bojangles just yet, but Corbett contributes handsomely to the tap segments.

With leading roles in The Producers, La Cage aux Folles, Cabaret, and Ruthless! over the past 30 years, the charismatic Steve Bryan is a bit of overkill for his cameo as the Hermit. Decked out like a medieval monk, with a wig worthy of Joan Crawford in her dotage, Bryan is perfection as The Monster’s blind and bumbling host, not a trace of a smirk as he scalds his starving guest with soup – a comical affirmation of the beast’s docility as we delight in Corbett’s bellowing. Typical of his elegance, Bryan didn’t milk the last drop of deathless pathos out “Please Send Me Someone” before Corbett’s on-cue arrival answered his lonely prayers. True, Bryan got down on his knees begging, but he never once cried out for his mammy. Maybe next week.

Wavering Loyalty to the Bard in “Fat Ham”

**Review: Common Thread Theatre’s Fat Ham @ Davidson College**

By Perry Tannenbaum

Thanks to the inclusion of fat-shaming in our officially accepted roster of politically correct taboos, we have all evolved far beyond the days of Fats Domino, Fats Waller, and good old Fatty Arbuckle. So you may wonder how award-winning playwright James Ijames manages to avoid explicitly calling the hero of his Fat Ham by that unholy adjective. Well, Ijames’s latter-day Hamlet, Juicy, is never called that word by any of the modern-day nobles who gather in his backyard to celebrate his mom Tedra’s marriage to Uncle Rev at a good old-fashioned barbecue.

As you’ll soon see in the Common Thread Theatre Collective production up in Davidson, Rev is roasting a piglet on his barbecue spit, providing Juicy with extra cover. Even in his script, Ijames describes his leading man as “thicc, 20-21, Black. He’s beautiful. He is lonely. He is smart. A kind of Hamlet.”

If you remember Hamlet, then you’ll understand that Mom marrying his uncle a week after Dad’s death rubs Juicy the wrong way. Now Juicy’s dad wasn’t as worthy a dude as Prince Hamlet’s: Pap was murdered in prison, where he was serving a sentence for… murder. Boogie, the victim, apparently had bad breath. That was enough.

We begin pondering the differences between Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Ijames’s Juicy as soon as Pap returns as a ghost – not on the battlements of the royal castle in Elsinore to Hamlet and Horatio but to Juicy and his cousin Tio (“A kind of Horatio”) from underneath the back porch, likely somewhere up in Caldwell County. With a Casper the Ghost bedsheet over his head before we see Pap’s orange prison suit.

Of course, if you’re not torn and ambivalent, you’re not really doing Hamlet, so Ijames would allow his neo-tragedy to occur in Virginia or Tennessee, across the border, or even Maryland. But not Alabama, Mississippi, or Florida. Different Southern vibe. And although Tio is watching porn on his cellphone when we first see him, Juicy’s world sits vaguely between the ‘60s and ‘80s “aesthetically.”

King Hamlet and Pap are also alike in getting briefed on the pertinent details as they transition into ghostliness. That’s how Pap knows that Brother Rev ordered the hit, though he may have been on his guard. Shakespeare’s king needed the info more, since he was offed in his sleep.

Do Tio and Juicy believe in ghosts – particularly when Ijames has Pap “doing ghost shit” in broad daylight instead of past midnight? Apparently, they do, for Tio divines with the same perceptiveness of Horatio that Pap’s ghost is silent towards him because he wishes to speak only with his son.

Ambivalence goes beyond Shakespeare when it comes to the key father-son relationship, for Pap abused both Juicy and his mom when he could lay his hands on them. In his current incorporeal state, abusing Juicy is no longer possible, so he can taunt Dad’s powerlessness all he wants – over what is obliquely a fat-shaming issue, for Pap tries to get his son to drop his candy bar. We likely join Juicy in his gleeful emancipation as he stokes Pap’s anger. He can still yell like hell, that’s for sure.

Even though Pap is calling for him to avenge his murder on a man who disgusts and bullies him, Juicy pushes back. Dad’s track record not only includes cruel abuse but also the tendency to show up on the front doorstep at odd intervals when he needs to ask a favor. Offing your brother is a pretty big ask, particularly when you yourself have served jail time for murder.

And Pap just might have a credibility problem. Even after Rev bullies him and punches him in the gut, Juicy wavers. The ocean of difference between King Hamlet and King Claudius is shrunk to less than a millimeter, for Ijames has decreed that the same actor will portray both Pap and Rev.

As it was in Elsinore, so it must be in humble Caldwell County: the play’s the thing to catch Rev’s conscience. Since Juicy doesn’t have the budget to hire a theatre troupe to perform a play – in fact, Mom just pulled his tuition money from the online university where he’s enrolled for a Human Resources degree – Juicy will play a game of charades with the newlyweds and their wedding guests specially concocted to grab Rev’s attention.

Naturally, the guests at Tedra and Rev’s backyard wedding reception are all “kind of” Hamlet characters, namely Tio and the revamped Polonius family. The two sibs, Ophelia and Laertes, are now Opal and Larry, their sententious dad is usurped by Rabby, a sententious mom. There are also episodes that further parallel Shakespeare, including one where Juicy must refrain in all good conscience from killing Rev while he’s saying grace, a soliloquy or five here and a nod to Yorick there. Other episodes curiously twist the original, most notably Juicy’s strife with Larry. It’s not about Opal at all.

While Ijames dodges and weaves in landing his punches and playing his games, he drops savvy references throughout his dialogue offering sharp reminders that he knows what he’s about. Telling Juicy how to cope with his new situation, Tio references Oedipus before we’ve even met the folks. Not only does this reference aptly describe Juicy’s feelings toward his dear mum and daddy, it subtly evokes the model that Aristotle uses in his Poetics in laying out his famed doctrine of the unities in tragic drama.

Yes, there are episodes in Fat Ham, not scenes.Ijames succeeds in reinventing his Hamlet by compressing it into a single day of action in seemingly real time, fulfilling the grand Aristotelian formula. The Bard, in typically five-act form, stretched his tragedy over at least five months, maybe nine. Ijames even works in three costume changes, two of them startling and one of them absolutely unbelievable. He will bend reality his way if he wants.

Each of the roles Ijames has lampooned is a plum, especially for Shabaza Vaird as Juicy and Brandon Johnson as Pap/Rev. Teaming with costume designer Gregory J. Horton, director Xulee Vanecia J makes this Juicy more gender-fluid than the playwright probably imagined, with Vaird amply going with the flow. There’s a wonderful tenderness to him, yet none of the defiance is missing from Vaird’s portrayal of a man who insists on wearing black to his mom’s wedding.

Johnson certainly feasts on both brothers’ vileness, not without some comical moments, and works well with fight choreographer Garrad Alex Taylor to spice up the action and ratchet up the dramatic tension. Both of him have the look of ex-cons, but Rev also has the swagger, complacency, and greed of a true snake. Completing the Oedipal trio, Mya Brown sparkles and effervesces as Tedra, flirting or subtly pouting, depending on whether she gets her way, with enough high energy for Juicy to wonder whether she’s actually happy.

In its third summer, Common Thread is an innovative and inspiring partnership between the theatre departments at Davidson College and North Carolina A&T University. Since it embraces both students and faculty in its productions, the company is perfectly constructed to deliver on a script like Fat Ham, which could easily be tainted by seasoned actors bending over backwards to simulate confused teens.

That doesn’t happen in this all-Black marvel, and it’s heartening that Thread’s best effort to date will also run up in Greensboro for the first time on the NCA&T campus. It could be a painful to experience an effortful attempt at what Kaia Michelle and Jeremiah Dennis accomplish so naturally in projecting the awkwardness and insecurity of Rabby’s spawn, Opal and Larry. Michelle is bold yet apprehensive in proclaiming Opal’s sexual orientation, while Dennis is somehow proud and sheepish in his military uniform. That will miraculously change.

Meanwhile, let’s not omit the exploits of La’Tanya Wiley as Rabby. Unlike Polonius, she isn’t channeling Cicero or Marcus Aurelius. Good lord, it’s all about Jesus.

Certainly all involved were consumed with making the epigraph on the front page of the program come hilariously to life. “What a piece of work is a man!” As the Nigga-Negro taunts at the top of the play faded from memory, Fat Ham delighted me – and concerned me – more and more. Why was Ijames doing what he was doing, and why must all these people be Black? What should the differences between Shakespeare’s noble Danes and Ijames’s common folk be saying to us?

I’m not sure I would have come up with any conjecture during the long ride home if my wife Sue and I hadn’t seen the superb US Premiere of Dark Noon at Spoleto Festival two weeks earlier. The Danish fix+foxy company uses a mostly Black cast – South African actors pointedly putting on “white face” makeup – to tell the mighty tale of western migration and the white man’s racist conquest of our native population.

Ah, but this time it was from the viewpoint of the victims. Among many other revelations, including our shameless greed for land and gold, the show helped me understand the intimate connection between the White America’s racism, their sense of superiority and entitlement, and their worship of the gun.

Such a sardonic view of whites doesn’t fully surface in Fat Ham. But please pay special attention from the moment Juicy looks at us and then at all who are left standing on the Barber Theatre stage, saying, “You know what they think ‘bout to happen right?” A few seconds later, he hammers it home: “We tragic.”

Can these contemporary North Carolinians truly commit to that?

Down at Spoleto USA, the Vibe Is Shifting

Review: Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston

By Perry Tannenbaum

‘Song of Rome’ at Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston. (Photo by William Struhs)

Looking down benignly at his Dock Street Theater audience, the newly anointed host of Spoleto Festival USA’s chamber music series, Paul Wiancko, gave us a slight ceremonial nod. “You have chosen wisely,” he said sagely.

But he wasn’t exactly speaking to me, since this was already the fifth program in the noonday series – the backbone of Spoleto – that I was attending this year. Nor was he speaking to the “eleven-ers” in the audience who were signed up for the complete set of programs down in Charleston through June 9.

He was speaking directly to those in the audience who would only attend one of the concerts. Today. And he would go on to ask us all to participate in making the experience special and unforgettable.

It would be very special – beginning with a Beethoven piano trio that showcased Amy Wang at the keyboard, Benjamin Beilman on violin, and Raman Ramakrishnan on cello. How’s that for diversity? My love affair with Wang’s artistry and demeanor had begun just two hours earlier when she played the Schumann Violin Sonata, teamed up with the Slavically expressive Alexi Kenney.

Enough to mightily crown most concerts, the Beethoven was merely a satisfying appetizer. For Wiancko had cooked up a powerful combo, calling upon two living composers that I was barely familiar with, Jonathan Dove (b. 1959) and Valentin Silvestrov (b. 1937).

Our contribution to the magic would be to withhold our applause between the two pieces. It was easy enough to maintain stunned silence after In Damascus, Dove’s heartfelt setting of Syrian poet Ali Safar’s grieving – and aggrieved – reaction to a senseless car-bombing in his nation’s war-torn capital.

The prose poems were achingly and angrily sung by tenor Karim Sulayman, perhaps most indelibly after an extended instrumental interlude, turbulently delivered by a string quartet that included Kenney, Beilman, Wiancko (on cello), and violist Masumi Per Rostad.

“We will be free,” Sulayman sang in Anne-Marie McManus’s ardent translation, “of our faces and our souls – or our faces and our souls will be free of us. And the happy world won’t have to listen to our clamor anymore, we who have ruined the peace of this little patch of Earth and angered a sea of joy.”

Sulayman was visibly in tears as the lights went down on In Damascus and pianist Pedja Mužijević entered with his iPad and sat down at the Steinway. In the dimness, Mužijević played Silvestrov’s Lullaby, an appropriate coda to a song sequence that began with the children of the Zuhur neighborhood in Damascus who would never wake from their sleep – or survive a bogus “holiday truce” – and ended with the evocation of mothers and loved ones who would always await their return.

Amazingly enough, this isn’t the only instance where Sulayman is singing about children caught in the web of brutal war and barbaric terror, for his wondrous voice also figures at Spoleto in the world premiere of Ruinous Gods, a new opera with exotic music by Layale Chaker and libretto by Lisa Schlesinger.

Co-commissioned by Spoleto, Nederlandse Reisopera, and Opera Wuppertal, Ruinous Gods is a fantastical deep dive into the mindworld of Uppgivenhetssyndrome, a rare traumatic response to living in the limbo of displacement. It was first observed in children detained in Sweden, but the syndrome has now been observed in refugee camps around the world. Hopeless children simply go to sleep in reaction to their endlessly unresolved status. Some die, others lapse into coma – sustained only by a feeding tube.

Encased in a surreal bubble over a grassy bed from scenic designer Joelle Aoun, that is how we find our sleeping-beauty protagonist, Teryn Kuzma as H’ala, when the opera begins. Mezzo-soprano Taylor-Alexis DuPont as her mom, Hannah, is stressing and blaming herself while two doctors, Overcast and Undertow, hover over their patient, unsympathetic researchers hoping to analyze and classify the disease.

Meanwhile, Sulayman is decked out in a feathery all-black outfit as Crow, the mentor who, like Dante’s Virgil, guides all these comatose children from around the globe into a common underworld dreamscape where all are free. Is that a spaghetti rainbow dropping down across the Sottile Theatre stage from the fly loft as the imprisoning globule lifts off H’ala, or is there an unfathomably large jellyfish floating above?

Sinuous, jazzy, and sensuously obsessive, Chaker’s music resurfaced in the jazz sector of Spoleto 2024 – at Charleston Music Hall, a venue never used by the festival before. Bigger than Spoleto’s customary hall for chamber jazz (and eccentric modern music), the Emmett Robinson at the College of Charleston, the Music Hall was an acoustic revelation and a welcome escape from the Robinson’s clean-room sterility. Bonus points for the stars that lit up on the black backdrop.

Attendance was astonishing, more than could ever be seated at the Robinson, as Chaker, leading her Sarafand quintet on violin – with an occasional vocal – delved into her two most recent albums, Radio Afloat (2024) and Inner Rhyme (2019). Having worked with Daniel Barenboim and his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, Chaker has created a jazz equivalent in Sarafand with Phillip Golub on keyboards, Jake Charkey on cello, John Hadfield on drums, and Sam Minaie behind the bass.

Compared to her opera, Chaker’s jazz and her Sarafand personnel made subtler political points. But this wasn’t the only jazz gig that came loaded with extra cargo. Terri Lyne Carrington returned to Cistern Yard for a pointedly themed concert under the moon and the live oaks – with political firebrand diva (and NEA Jazz Master) Dianne Reeves as her special guest.

Carrington’s cargo was collected into her Grammy-winning album of 2022, New Standards, Vol. 1, the first studio sprouting of her pathfinding songbook collection, New Standards: 101 Lead Sheets by Women Composers. So without much preaching, her set was a celebration of Geri Allen, Gretchen Parlato, Eliane Elias, and – at a high summit where Reeves duetted for the first time with Christie Dashiell – the great Abbey Lincoln and her mesmerizing “Throw It Away.”

All these greats joined together again on Allen’s “Unconditional Love,” with Kris Davis on piano, Matthew Stevens on guitar, and trumpeter Etienne Charles all getting in their licks, plus spoken and dance stints from Christiana Hunte. Wow.

Theatre at Spoleto this season is densely messaged. Or not. The Song of Rome was deeply immersed in issues of immigration and sexism, with an overarching interest in the fate of republics, in ancient day Rome and 21^st century USA. Cassette Roulette, on the other hand, was pure frivolity, barely deeper than its title and whole lot bawdier.

After starring in An Iliad last season, Denis O’Hare could be logically expected to follow up that one-man conquest with An Odyssey. Well, he has, sort of. O’Hare co-wrote A Song of Rome with Lisa Peterson, his Iliad writing partner, but this time he doesn’t appear onstage, handing over the acting chores to Rachel Christopher and Hadi Tabbal.

Christopher is Sheree in modern times, a grad student striving to learn Latin, and Octavia, Emperor Augustus’s sister at the dawn of the Roman Empire. Tabbal is Azem in present day, Sheree’s immigrant Latin tutor – and our overall storyteller – and the poet Virgil during the reign of Augustus.

So O’Hare is skipping over the rest of Homer to engage with Rome’s great epic, The Aeneid, knowing full well that Virgil based the first six books of his masterwork on The Odyssey and the last six on The Iliad. As a thematic bonus, O’Hare and Peterson discovered during their research for this world premiere that Virgil himself was a refugee, forced out of his ancestral home in Northern Italy by Roman avengers of Julius Caesar who got Dad’s estate for their prize.

Although Virgil’s epic was likely commissioned by Emperor Augustus, aka Octavian, doubt remains whether The Aeneid is a work of propaganda justifying the Roman Empire as divinely ordained – tracing Octavian’s ancestry back to Aeneas and Venus as meticulously as the New Testament traces Jesus back to King David, son of Jesse – or a subversive work by an immigrant genius settling a score. While getting handsomely paid to do it.

Octavia and Virgil go back and forth on this point because the Emperor’s sister is both an admirer and a keen reader, but both are critical of Octavian, who is hell-bent on buttressing the legitimacy of Rome while closing off its path back to a glorious Republic.

“The Republic is over,” they agree. And how about ours?

While Sheree is learning about the Roman issue that comes up as Virgil delivers more and more manuscript pages to Octavia over the years, Sheree must face the issue in American terms when Azem receives a deportation notice. Does she instantly jump to his defense and rescue, or does she immediately suspect him of criminal activity?

Meanwhile, Sheree is reading The Aeneid differently from Azem and Octavia. Why is Octavia left out of literary history if she played such a key role? Why are Virgil’s women, particularly Dido and Lavinia, so passive and pathetic while the strong woman, Camilla, is a she-devil?

Finding this insidious neglect and defamation rampant in literary history and beyond, Sheree comes up with a radical, shocking solution that she announces on her podcast. She will pour fuel over every single book piled on the Dock Street stage and burn them all.

When will all this vicious animosity end? Citing the end of Virgil’s epic, where Aeneas, the immigrant from far-off Troy, killed the vanquished Turnus instead of offering peace, conciliation, and mercy, Sheree answers us curtly lighting the flame: it won’t. Opting for chaos, she almost says it aloud – to hell with the immigrants. (Or give it to the immigrants, if you’ve heard of the Goths.)

Moments like that land hard at Spoleto. Deep in Trump Country, at the Sunday matinee of Ruinous Gods, there was a loud boo among all the lusty cheering as the singers took their bows. Good. The nurturing point of the opera, gushing with empathy toward immigrants worldwide, had hit home, no matter how you feel about it.

Depending on whether you were attuned to John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch cache, or whether you resonated with Amber Martin’s worship of Reba McIntyre, Bette Midler, and Stevie Nicks, Cassette Roulette was hit-and-miss, redeemed or further cheapened by Martin’s bawdiness. Nicks’ “Rhiannon” was the crowd fave and mine on the night I attended, getting a far more epic performance that you’ll hear on AM radio or an elevator. But neither David Bowie nor Midler got much of a rise. The diet of ‘70s and ‘80s hits didn’t draw much of a youth crowd to Festival Hall, which was made over to a quasi-cabaret setup.

Trombone Shorty slayed far more decisively at TD Arena, where his outdoor revels with Orleans Avenue were abruptly moved when rain threatened. At the height of the indoor bacchanale, Shorty paraded through the audience at the home of College of Charleston basketball with key members of the band (none of whom were named in Spoleto’s fabled program book). They slashed up the rear aisle of the stadium, swung around to the side of the gym and came down along the side.

Snaking through the stadium, Shorty & Orleans reigned over the reigning pandemonium. The prohibition against photography was washed out to sea in a riptide of glowing cellphones.

Shoot, the band was taking selfies! And through it all, the sound remained perfect, Shorty and his brass perfectly aligned with the rhythm section on the TD stage, absolutely distortion-free. Sure, a few dissenters and defectors also trickled through the aisles, accompanied by true believers seeking and returning with beverage.

The most pathetic sufferer sat right across the aisle from my wife Sue and me, hunched over, elbows on kness, with his hands tightly cupped over his ears. Probably needed a ride to escape. Maybe he would have fared better in the open air, where at least some of the sound could have escaped skyward through the live oaks of Cistern Yard.

Final week highlights: Bank on it, the Bank of America Chamber Music series has four more different programs to offer – and a dozen performances – before Spoleto wraps up on Sunday. The Wells Fargo Jazz lineup continues strong, with an all-star Latin twist. Puerto Rican saxophonist Miguel Zenón and Venezuelan pianist Luis Perdomo bring their Grammy-nominated El Arte Del Bolero albums to life at the Dock Street Theatre in a three-day, five-performance engagement (June 6-8) while Cuban percussionist extraordinaire Pedrito Martinez lights up Cistern Yard with an Afro-Cuban stewpot of infectious rhythm, Echoes of Africa (June 7).

After distinguishing themselves in Mahler’s Fifth, the Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra returns to Gaillard Center with Beethoven’s Third (June 5), plus a Rachmaninoff concerto for piano + trumpet and composer-in-residence Reena Esmail’s “Testament” for tabla and orchestra. Upstaged by a visitation from the Charles Lloyd Sky Quartet this past weekend, the Spoleto Festival USA Chorus rebounds with a two-performance run of The Heart Starts Singing (June 6-7), sporting another Esmail piece that will feature Wiancko’s cello – and an eclectic mix of works by Tomás Luis de Victoria, Rachmaninoff, Irving Berlin, and more.

The Festival Finale of yore is gone this year, but there’s more folk, funk, Americana, and alt-country in this year’s Spoleto lineup. Still to come are Andrew Marlin and Emily Frantz’s latest partnering, Watchhouse (June 5), with their own band-backed experiments in folk-rock playing at Cistern Yard; Grammy Award winner Aiofe O’Donovan (June 7) returns with the SFUSA Orchestra to Sottile Theatre; and Jason Isbell (June 8-9) headlines the final weekend with a two-night stint at the Cistern.

Theatre continued during Spoleto’s second weekend with sharply contrasting shows, the wholesome Ugly Duckling from Lightwire Theater and the savagely satirical send-up of the American West, Dark Noon, from the Danish fit + foxy company in its US Premiere. A similar dichotomy prevails this week as Australian company Casus Creations takes over Festival Hall with Apricity (June 6-9), a family-friendly mix of aerial and acrobatic astonishment, with sprinklings of comic shtick and moody music.

On the edgy side, RuPaul’s Drag Race fans can rejoice greatly as Season 9 champion Sasha Velour deigns to bring her presence to Gaillard Center with The Big Reveal Live Show! (June 6). Is Charleston’s big house big enough for drag’s Queen of Queens? The Holy City and Spoleto haven’t been so sensationally desecrated since Taylor Mac ruled the festival.

“Thoughts of a Colored Man” Lauds Three Strong Women

**Review: Thoughts of a Colored Man at the Arts Factory**

By Perry Tannenbaum

So Lust and Passion walk into a bar… You can imagine how fervently I’ve longed to lead off a review with a line like that for close to 40 years. Well, now that Keenan Scott II’s Thoughts of a Colored Man has almost provided that opportunity, you can see that I’ve pulled the trigger. Jumped the gun. For in multiple scenes of Scott’s 2021 script, we can find Love, Lust, Depression, Passion, and Happiness all congregated in a Brooklyn barbershop run by Wisdom and Anger.

Scott gives us more than a hint that Colored Man was written as a companion piece of Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. That 1976 “choreopoem” had seven women with similarly abstract names, corresponding with the colors of the rainbow, and it is similarly studded with monologues and poetry. Scott’s newer piece at the Arts Factory, flawlessly cast by director Sidney Horton for Three Bone Theatre and imbued with just the right sizzle and raw edge, comes at us evolved into SLAM poetry rants rather than incantatory spells.

Less obviously, Scott’s form is modeled on “Four Women,” one of Nina Simone’s signature songs. Simone gives us the names of her women after she has told their stories, but we’re usually not in suspense for appreciably more than a minute as the complete sequence clocks in at under five. Unless you’ve paid close attention to your playbill before the lights dim, this playwright will make you wait nearly the full intermission-less 90 minutes until, one by one, we get the group reveal.

Thankfully, plenty of names pop up in various scenes. At the barbershop, Kobe, LeBron, and MJ are upheld as the GOAT by bickering customers and kibitzers, moving right along to a similarly lightweight comparison of rap giants past and present. Equally memorable, and no less intense, there’s a lengthy dispute about the best basketball sneakers of all time as the group stands in line for a latenight release of the newest Jordans carrying the legendary Jumpman logo.

Wisdom welcomes us to Joe’s Barbershop, but it becomes clearer as the meandering chatter proceeds that old Joe has retired or passed away, leaving him in charge. Nor does anybody identify Depression as he’s bagging groceries, retrieving carts, or stocking shelves at Whole Foods, though he relays boss’s orders to an offstage Timmy. So as Scott veers and swerves on his path of SLAM poetry and raw prose, with some rhythmic prose bridging the gap, he is also at play with raw specifics and unspoken generalities.

The opening question that Depression poses, “Who is the Colored Man? Is he a king… or is he a slave?” invites that kind of approach. Or evasion. Ironically, only Depression will introduce himself well before the evening is over – at a little past 7:30 PM. One of the ways Scott has of stringing out his opposing tracks is by offering signposts in his stage directions that tell us what time of day it is, steadily moving us forward. Horton has these projected on the upstage wall perfectly on cue.

And whether you’re Love or Lust, Depression or Happiness, you have a personal story. Depression, for example, fumbled an opportunity to break away from Brooklyn and attend MIT on a full scholarship. Giving that up by taking care of his mom – without a moment’s hesitation – he settled for the ongoing indignity of Whole Foods.

On the other hand, Happiness is a stranger in town, living with his fiancé. He grew up in the South, his parents were the first in his family to earn six figures, and that’s why he was shunned by the relatives back home. Up in Brooklyn, he feels no less alienated, because he is prosperous and because he is gay.

Scott is pulling hard here against answering his own opening question. The reason that such fascinating hostility flares up between Depression and Happiness in an aisle at Whole Foods is that neither one can answer “Who is the Colored Man?” when they meet one. Both pointedly tell each other “you don’t know me” – which is what any of Scott’s characters could have shouted at us at the beginning if the playwright were less designing and discreet. Or if he hadn’t been aware that Colored Men themselves cannot answer any better than by telling us, one by one, who they are.

It’s hard for me to resist applying the same observation more widely to the whole Black theatre scene in Charlotte these days. Having sampled Penumbra in Minneapolis presenting August Wilson, Black Ensemble in Chicago celebrating Marvin Gaye, and a multitude of companies from across the US bringing their best to the National Black Theatre Festival in Winston-Salem in even numbered years – ahem, the International Black Theatre Festival for 2024 (July 29-August 3) – I’m always telling people that the Black performers, directors, and theatercraftsmen that we have in the QC are second to none.

Catch is: not only doesn’t the Charlotte theatergoing public seem to realize the bounty in our midst. The artists themselves seem to be sleeping on it. To a greater degree now than ever before, when we were merely equals.

Lesser performers and directors might struggle with the challenge of portraying Anger, Passion, or Wisdom and real people at the same time. Horton and his able cast wisely let it slide. When he’s not shaving, shearing, and trimming at Joe’s, Devin Clark as Anger trains and does drills with highly-ranked basketball players who aspire to the big-name colleges, the NBA draft, and huge commercial endorsements. Now they’re possible in college! Or he drifts into nostalgic recollections of his peak playing days when he was “nice.” He earned his scholarship back in the day, so he’s worried about how today’s NIL generation will maintain their dedication – and their grades, if b-ball doesn’t pan out.

Jonovan Adams, another mainstay on the local scene, also assumes a mentor’s role as Passion, a seasoned teacher of 26 students – plus cameo roles as social worker, psychiatrist, and surrogate parent, depending on the kid and his or her homelife. Neither Passion nor Anger is likely to strike you as particularly tough: more likely, Clark and Adams will come across as personable and authentic as ever.

It is well that Passion invokes the OGs of yesteryear who helped him growing up, hanging around the hood and doling out free advice. He wants to be one of those old heads now, a street scholar. That’s what cool, easygoing-yet-stern Graham Williams personifies at his shop as Wisdom, conscientiously doling out sharp cuts and implacably demanding a buck for the swear jar each time a customer – or Anger – curses or breaches decorum.

Dionte Darko as Lust is the most-often-fined in the group, a youngblood with repeat offenses in swearing, misogyny, and homophobia in and out of the barbershop. With his undimmed geniality, Darko is so useful to have around. Aside from needing to apologize to Wisdom for his multiple trespasses, he also riles up the romantic Daylon Jones as Love, so vulnerably poetic in his amatory feelings that he has not yet dared to approach his beloved – while Lust will instantly harass any skirt that walks by, previously known or not.

With similar boorishness, Lust also runs afoul of Nehemiah Lawson as Happiness. Renowned as the Minstrel of Something Rotten and Leading Player of Pippin at Theatre Charlotte, lead Drifter in Beautiful at Matthews Playhouse, and _thesingingdentist on Instagram, Lawson has more than sufficient urbanity and polish for portraying a relatively mundane financial director, so it’s interesting to see him in a performance that discards stage magic in favor of wariness, loneliness, and a touch of anxiety.

Maybe Scott would have preferred someone older than Lawson in Happiness’s encounters with Lust and Depression, but in the Whole Foods scene especially, Horton’s calculus paid off for me though it changed the chemistry. If there was any bullying flavor intended in the hostility between Lust and Happiness, that is gone.

Marvin King bookends the show as Depression and, with a long white tunic that echoes the twin white fires of his flowing beard, sanctifies it with a mystic, ceremonial aura that the more worldly SLAM poetry and prose never dispels. King’s mighty presence certainly endures when he descends to the degradation of a Whole Foods grocery drudge, and the reason why he discloses his name before anyone else will become clear enough if we’ve watched closely. In this cityscape of living, breathing, struggling abstractions, Depression is probably the one who best encompasses them all. By that time, Scott has fastened upon a fresh muse, supplanting Shange’s Colored Girls and Simone’s “Four Women.” This third inspiration is Lorraine Hansberry’s Raisin, handed down from Langston Hughes, and the effects of the sun are still the same as they were at the height of the Harlem Renaissance

“Next to Normal” Is Alive at the Barn!

**Review: Next to Normal at Theatre Charlotte**

By Perry Tannenbaum

July 4, December 7, September 11, and October 7 are all dates we remember for their historic meaning to the nation and the world. A similar earthshaking significance can descend on a single day in the life of a relationship, a marriage, or a family that can reverberate for generations – whether you were at the event or even alive at the time.

That’s essentially what we’re watching in Brian Yorkey’s Next to Normal with music by Tom Kitt, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2010 after winning Tony Awards for Best Musical, Best Book, and Best Orchestrations the previous year. Instead of doing things the traditional way, setting up the location and the situation in a big opening number that stages or recaps the prime catastrophe, Yorkey fast-forwards us more than 17 years, when the original hurt in the Goodman family has marinated and metastasized – a fissionable maelstrom that will soon explode.

With a fresh set of seismic events.

Diana is at the vortex of the mushrooming crises, so it’s both interesting and wickedly deceptive that Yorkey brings us into her drugged and delusional mind for much of the opening action. We still see the basic outlines of the family turmoil clearly enough. Her husband, Dan, keeps trying to go with the flow of Diana’s bi-polar mood swings. She navigates a series of therapists, looking for either a therapeutic epiphany or the perfectly calibrated cocktail of meds.

Meanwhile, Diana’s teen daughter Natalie feels neglected and unappreciated, living in the shadow of Mom’s obsessive devotion to her older brother Gabe. Warily, Natalie navigates her self-worth issues as schoolmate Henry tries to get closer and establish a relationship. When Natalie overcomes her shame and allows Henry, after much hesitation, to meet her family, we seem to have arrived at a breakthrough.

It’s a brave move and all goes swimmingly at the Goodman dinner table between Natalie and Henry until Diana walks in with a birthday cake, all smiles, candles lit. Yorkey’s sleight-of-hand has worked so beautifully that we wonder which of the two teens is the target of the birthday surprise. Suddenly things are going downhill – off a high cliff.

Like we’ve been overdosing on the meds so far.

Yorkey is very good at these slow build-ups where we see budding new hopes dashed by a sudden disappointment and fresh Diana relapses. After portraying Dan, the long-suffering husband in Queen City Theatre Company’s fine production in 2013, Billy Ensley takes the reins at Theatre Charlotte’s slightly slicker version. His suffering, grimly stoical, was very different from Johnny Hohenstein’s unfiltered and uncontrolled anguish. It’s easier to breathe at the old Queens Road barn when emotions get a space to release.

On the other hand, the Broadway edition starring Alice Ripley in 2009 (which toured here with Ripley in 2011) took a dimmer, more skeptical view of psychiatry and pharmacology, giving those productions directed by Michael Greif a darker, satirical, mad scientist edge. Around the corner from a cluster of medical centers and hospitals, Josh Webb’s set design on Queens Road is easily the brightest and most antiseptic I’ve seen. The usual two-story scaffolding that adorns rock operas is outfitted with colorful fluorescent lighting, though some flickering occasionally marred the serene pastels (intentionally?) inside the translucent fixtures.

So in transit to Charlotte, the emphasis continues to shift more emphatically away from the quackery to the suffering. Hohenstein’s broadened performance now rivals Melissa Cook’s bipolarity as Diana, for he’s still a domesticated dad to Natalie and a cheerful host to Henry between bouts of stressing and losing it in private and with his wife. In its fits and starts, Hohenstein helps us to balance the toll mental illness takes on its victims and on their loved ones. Easily the best of Hohenstein that I’ve seen and the most intensely consistent performance of the night.

Cook’s performance as Diana is as genuine and riveting as any I’ve seen in Charlotte or on Broadway – except when it isn’t. Whether you call it resistance or retreat, there are whole songs where she is suddenly no longer a cri-de-coeur rock singer and becomes a more traditional Broadway belter: sweeter voice with noticeably less emotion and intelligibility. Suddenly, it isn’t about how sensationally Cook is acting but about the singing, likely more in her comfort zone.

I can’t say for certain that the duality was there from the start, but there should be no turning back after the big birthday reveal.

And the words here are important – I could almost hear Ensley stressing this at rehearsals – for we get the best sound in a musical production, local or touring company, since MJ stormed the Belk last September at the beginning of the season. Kudos to Ensley for his pertinacity and, if there was any acoustic work or equipment upgrades in the mojo, glory to the staffers involved in the push, beginning with artistic director Chris Timmons and managing director Scot P J MacDonald. The old barn is sounding better than ever.

It needed to. In contrast with Spirit Square’s more intimate Duke Energy Theatre, where Glenn Griffin directed Normal, a musical on Queens Road requires ample decibels to reach the back of the house. Keeping with Theatre Charlotte wisdom, music director Ellen Robison trims her rock band to six musicians while placing them behind the singers.

Instinctively, Ensley finds a perfect pathway for his cast to turn up the volume. As if inspired by grand opera, he dials up the melodrama past suburban proportions so that most of the characters are wearing their hearts on their sleeves. Craig Allen as Drs. Madden and Fine, allows himself to be callous and ghoulish for the blink of an eye when the script absolutely demands it. Otherwise, he is the throbbing soul of earnest concern – moonlighting as a rock star in Diana’s delusions.

As Natalie, the only lonely daughter, I found Cornelia Barnwell to be more shut-down and compulsive than Abby Corrigan was on her express route to stardom in 2013. Barnwell’s voice is purest rock, piercing as a poignard with no blade. She seems to be the studious type in her scenes at school or alone with Henry. But she can flip and go rogue as soon as she sings. Very appropriate for Natalie, so anti-meds at the beginning because she has seen the wreck of her mom – before following in her footsteps. At the same upstairs medicine cabinet.

If a stoner-slacker can be seen as an oasis of calm, then that’s how Zach Linick will appear as Henry, faithfully devoted, non-judgmental, discreetly giving Natalie her space. There aren’t too many laugh-out-loud moments on this bumpy road to tentative stability, but when Natalie, resistant at first to Henry’s weed, leapfrogs him into wanton pill popping, Linick’s reaction bears watching.

Melodramatic or not, Ensley’s read on Next to Normal is more in tune with our chaotic times than the 2013 original, when Yorkey likely turned to the mad laboratory aspects of pharmacology and electroshock therapy to provide a counterweight to the suffering and gloom. Everybody is wronged here as if the world were all MAGA malcontents, but the uplift and electricity of Kitt’s score have always been there to supply lightning, spirit, and zest. Ensley relies on Robison’s band to deliver and their chemistry with all the suffering Goodmans is fire.

It’s especially white-hot in the stunning performance of Joey Rising as the disembodied Gabe. What a wonderful nuisance he is, impervious to all who ignore him! Over and over, he quashes the best hopes of his mom and dad, and he’s hardly less devastating to our own. If you find it hard to imagine a mad-scientist horror movie strain in this musical, the chill of hearing Rising’s defiant, jubilant “I’m Alive” will convince you that Yorkey believes devoutly in melodrama after all.

We in audience become like the frenzied villagers in Frankenstein, collectively yearning for Gabe’s destruction while wondering at Rising’s fire. But after he beats a full retreat, he returns, fierier than before. And then he multiplies!

“Hadestown” Makes a Merry, Satiric Tragedy

**Review: Hadestown at Belk Theater**

By Perry Tannenbaum

The last time HADESTOWN sauntered into town with its jazzy swagger was almost exactly 18 months ago, Election Day 2022. Perfect timing. When Matthew Patrick Quinn as King Hades brought down the Act 1 curtain with “Why We Build the Wall,” the thrust was so hideously Donald-like that two MAGA maniacs sitting in front of us, clearly offended, huffed out of Belk Theater and didn’t return after intermission.

Well, Quinn and his tectonic shelf-shaking bass baritone voice are back in the title role – the chief reason why my wife Sue would return to see Hadestown a third time if he and the Anaïs Mitchell musical should come back yet again. Yeah, he is that good. And even though The Wall is a bit in the rearview mirror as a national topic of conversation, the satanic aura of Hades still adheres to the corrupt kingpin of the GOP.

Maybe in a different way this time. More than Hades’ striking xenophobia, a strange attitude for a king of Hell, my lingering distaste was for the god’s rabble-rousing dictatorial strut. #MeToo was probably past its fullest bloom in 2022, though it still weighed on the elections, but in 2024, I couldn’t help paying closer attention to Hades’ “Hey, Little Songbird” propositioning of Eurydice.

When she eventually followed the slick monarch to the Netherworld and climbed the stairs to his boudoir, where she would sign away her soul behind closed doors… Yeah, Eurydice’s slow assenting ascent turned my thoughts northward to Stormy Daniels testifying in a Manhattan courtroom earlier that day in the hush money trial. Another little songbird.

To dwell on how deeply Hadestown resonates with the American political scene is to ignore that it first workshopped in New York before the master of Trump Tower declared his candidacy. It also disrespects how well Mitchell retold the story before it developed its adhesive powers. We see Quinn as Hades soon enough, but he doesn’t assert himself until he becomes impatient for Persephone’s annual return to the underworld after she has brought on spring and summer here above.

Until then, Lana Gordon as Persephone and Will Mann as our host/narrator Hermes are the prime charismatics. Next to their flamboyance, Orpheus and Eurydice are rather tame, despite J. Antonio Rodriguez’s pure high tenor and Amaya Braganza’s street-urchin perkiness. Musically, Mitchell lavishes her best invention on Hades and Orpheus, which makes sense since Orpheus has always represented the power of music while Hades, alias Pluto, has always stood for mindless greed.

Gordon and Mann are expected to light up the stage with their outsized personalities, their pizzaz, and eye-popping color – costume designer Michael Krass’s best – chief reasons why Hadestown rolls along so grandly, backed up less brashly by Braganza’s kooky charm and Rodriguez’s botanical magic.

But Mitchell’s book is also provocative, darkly portraying the world above as stricken by an apocalyptic nuclear winter or irreversible climate change, needing Orpheus’s musical magic to set things right and Eurydice to supply him with inspiration and encouragement to finish his cosmic song. The core of this world-changing song, appropriately enough, is wordless. Mitchell gives us a nice touch of the universal here.

Mitchell herself was the original Eurydice when her show first surfaced in New England in 2007. For me, that explains the most annoying, least enduring traits of Hadestown: its devout unpretentiousness and its dogged determination never to proceed too far without undercutting itself and reminding us that this is merely theatre. We’re having a party, y’all! Have a drink!

All the musicians are perennially onstage with the actors, particularly the ponytailed Emily Frederickson, who occasionally sashays among the cast with her trombone when called upon for her tastiest licks. For backup vocals, three more angels are engaged as the Fates – Marla Loussaint, Lizzie Markson, and Hannah Schreer – all of whom pick up various instruments during the evening. Could we have Orpheus trudging out of Hades, a fearful but trusting Eurydice behind him, without being tracked by a backup group?

Mitchell and director/developer Rachel Chavkin apparently didn’t think so. Maybe they’ve never experienced Christof Glück’s Orfeo ed Euridice at the Met’s Lincoln Center production, where the legendary newlyweds walk up a long, steep, irregular staircase splayed against the upstage wall, carrying torches to light up the tunnel.

Or perhaps they had seen that opera and realized that youngsters in the audience, not knowing how Vergil and Ovid told the tale, would be bummed by the tragedy if Glück hadn’t appended a happy ending. The whole evening seems cushioned by Chavkin and Mitchell’s worry that they might lose a key demographic along the way if the seriousness of the tragedy remained undiluted by mirth, merriment, and David Neuman’s most festive choreography.

Not to worry, when the Fates take their toll, the hearty, genial, and avuncular Hermes will be there to console Orpheus and all his bummed fans. Along with a big brassy jazz band. Raise another glass!

Shakespeare, Airplanes, and Jazz in CP’s “Twelfth Night”

**Review: Twelfth Night at the Parr Center**

By Perry Tannenbaum

Shakespeare’s best comedies are bursting with multiple plots, and two of the most perfect – A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night – are the most dizzying and delightful. It is quite likely that the latter, later work was first performed on Twelfth Night of 1601 to celebrate the newborn century on January 5 (with a singing clown suggestively named Feste). Yet time, scholarship, and heavy-handed dramaturgy have tended to darken many modern-day productions.

That’s why the current Central Piedmont Theatre version at the Parr Center, adapted and directed by Elizabeth Sickerman, is so refreshing. Twelfth Night has at least four main plots: Viola’s separation and reunion with her twin brother Sebastian, Duke Orsino’s unrequited love for the widowed Countess Olivia (seconded by Sir Andrew Aguecheek), Viola’s crush on Orsino while disguised as his manservant, and the wicked prank concocted by Aguecheek, Sir Toby Belch, Feste, and Maria to send Olivia’s ambitious and party-pooping steward, Malvolio, to the madhouse.

Of these, the most dominant plot should be the Viola-Orsino mess, for it sprouts so many delicious complications. Acting as Caesario, Orsino’s servant, Viola is dispatched to to Countess Olivia’s manor to plead on behalf of the Duke – only to have the Countess fall in love with her. Olivia’s inclinations toward Viola/Caesario not only enflame Orsino’s jealousy, they also lead to an absurd duel with fellow coward Sir Andrew. Meanwhile, she encounters Sebastian’s close friend, Antonio, who puts all his money in Viola’s care, mistaking her for her twin. You can easily imagine what happens when Sir Andrew makes the same mistake.

Ultimately, the mistaken identities reach the giddy point where Olivia cannot recognize her own husband just hours after their marriage. Ah, a honeymoon to remember.

So to tip the balance toward empathizing with Malvolio, simply because he is incidentally berated as “a kind of puritan,” is rather perverse. Elsewhere, I’ve seen the steward outfitted with a Puritan’s hat. Far more stupidly, I’ve heard a theatre sage say Malvolio was modeled on Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, born in 1599. Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex (1485-1540), instrumental in the English Reformation, is a more feasible candidate. Sickerman not only discards such nonsense, she transports the action from ancient Illyria, at the heel of Italy’s boot, to a coastal town immersed in the Jazz Age.

Costume designer Emily McCurdy certainly goes with the Roaring 20’s flow. Orsino and Olivia could easily pass for the recently reprised Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan on Broadway, surrounded by flappers and jazzy gallants galore. The moving pieces and projections of Jennifer O’Kelly’s scenery, more evocative of summer than winter, have enough classic detailing for Viola to sit at the foot of an Ionian pillar when describing herself sitting like “Patience on a monument.”

Nor does the music veer from the vintage of Prohibition days. Montavious Blocker has choice cuts of Duke Ellington and Sidney Bechet in his soundtrack, and just a few bars of music arranger Matt Postle’s chart for “Come Away, Death,” transformed from a lover’s lament into a jivey jump tune, are enough to conclusively vanquish melancholy, injecting Feste’s song for the lovesick Orsino with catchy mischief. The debris downstage suggests an Amelia Earhart plane crash rather than Shakespeare’s original shipwreck, and Charles Lindbergh could have inspired Sebastian and Viola’s matching outfits. Except for the tacky slacks.

If you’ve seen Twelfth Night before, Sickerman cordially adds to the Bard’s dizzying layers of identity, cutting some expositional text and casting females in key roles. Not one of them is a Chickspeare alum. Saskia Lewis as Feste, Rhianon Chandler as Antonio, and Kameal Brown as the recklessly unknighted Dame Toby Belch are all QC newcomers to me. If only Aryana Mitchell, portraying Viola, had an identical twin sister to take on Sebastian!

We are centuries away from the Protestant Reformation or the English Restoration, although Sickerman seems to beach the sibs closer to the Pilgrims’ beloved Plymouth Rock than to the Adriatic coast. Such oceanic distancing frees Malvolio from a dungeon of scorn when Central Piedmont’s plotters and nobles plunk their preening steward into a humble barrel to punish his prudery.

He isn’t the clown among the comical group, but Sickerman allows Truman Grant as Malvolio to loosen up, so that his usual rigidity is now almost elegance, mockable now as uppity pretense. Another sign of Sickerman’s lighthearted touch: her pick for the incredulous Sebastian is Timothy Snyder, who is at least a foot taller than his “twin.”

The disparity was so great, that I didn’t catch on at first. Brown’s outfit as Dame Toby, more like Miss Marple than a Falstaffian drunkard, compounded my early confusion, making me feel like newbie to the comedy while I got oriented. Struggling to remember a single instance when the euthanized CPCC Summer Theatre ever presented such a challenging comedy, I stumbled upon another reason why this excellent production was so refreshing.

All the cast was youthful, like the summer college grads who swarmed to Charlotte during CP summers to launch their pro careers. Not one old-timer in the bunch!

As a result of coping with all the period, costume, and gender changes, my disorientation was dispelled at the same time that I was learning to trust the youngbloods performing at CP’s New Theater, which has thankfully replaced panoramic Pease Auditorium but lamentably failed to showcase nearly as much CP talent. The mental training wheels that I had doled out to all these student efforts quickly flew away.

But along with a lightened, more secular and decadent Malvolio, there was newfound pleasure in the other creatures onstage who no longer needed to orbit around the self-absorbed steward. The Malvolio miasma that I’d felt since my first encounter with Twelfth Night in a college Shakespeare seminar, taught by a professor victimized by the prevailing obsession with the “puritan,” finally evaporated.

Twelfth Night, or What You Will has always been an awesome comedy for me. Now it was fun. I’d barely appreciated the bounty of fascinating character sketches that the Bard serves up here.

Now Viola is the patient, softspoken eye of the storm, and Mitchell is keenly sensitive, alternately anguished and bemused by all the passion and folly that surround her. Mitchell’s discreet takes, shared with us, make her a sort of co-emcee with Feste, though Sickerman asks too many eyerolls from her. Fitz Fitzpatrick is only slightly over-the-top with the lovesick gushings of Orsino, chiming well with a lounging Duke or a mob boss. Yes, that sleek robe has a Godfather aura before we see Fitz in the Gatsby threads.

As Olivia, Arianna Zappley does not yield at all to Fitzpatrick in regal dopiness. The two are as perfect a matching pair as the twins, made for each other, yet both are insanely lucky to land one of the sibs. Rounding out the symmetry of the two couples as Sebastian is the disproportioned Snyder, who does manage to nearly equal the calm of his diminutive twin – even though the Illyrians mistake him for her over and over. Playing Sebastian’s closest friend, the wrongly arrested Antonio, Chandler helps the prisoner to emerge as a neat counterweight to Malvolio, who is rightfully chastised for his presumption, though the penalty is too harsh.

There’s a little more slapstick flavor to the motley crew who bedevil Malvolio – and a bit more spice. Evelyn Ovall as Olivia’s waiting-gentlewoman Marie, who forges her mistress’s handwriting in the billet-doux that entraps the detested steward, is destined to marry Brown as Dame Toby. I’d like to think Ellington and his orchestra would have consented to play at the wedding reception, but I’m not sure.

Dopiest of the conspirators and clearly the least self-aware is Salim Muhammad as Sir Andrew, usually exiting with an absurdly military goosestep. In his challenge to Caesario/Viola, Muhammad now dons boxing gloves instead grabbing a sword, magnifying his ineffectuality with his effeminate pawing as he briefly combats the well-matched Mitchell.

Lewis effortlessly steals nearly every scene she appears in as Feste, convincing me along the way that this clown was intended to upstage all others. Not only does Feste sing lyrically and wittily – compared to the other lovers who barely stammer their effusions – she proves to be a better actress than the leading lady, Viola. Visiting Malvolio at the mouth of a barrel he believes is dark hell, Feste gives bravura performances as Sir Topas, a parson supposedly sent to determine how mad this lunatic is, interspersed with imitations of a sincere jester. Lewis cackles and coos this cruel vaudeville as bewitchingly as she swings death, ranging further than anyone else.

Photos by Perry Tannenbaum

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Category Archives: Theatre

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**Review: Twelfth Night at the Parr Center**

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**Review: Mojada: A Medea in Los Angeles at The Arts Factory**

**Review: Ripcord at Davidson College**

**Review: Back to the Future The Musical at Belk Theater**

**Review: Common Thread Theatre’s Fat Ham @ Davidson College**

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**Review: Twelfth Night at the Parr Center**