“Yankee Tavern” Still Implodes With 9/11 Speculations

Review: Yankee Tavern at DCP’s Armour Street Theatre

By Perry Tannenbaum

Over the years, Steven Dietz has favored Charlotte with plenty of spookiness and suspense. We’ve seen his most acclaimed works in fine local productions, including God’s Country, Lonely Planet, and the oddball Becky’s New Car. On a couple of occasions, we’ve been singled out for some of the earliest transitions of Dietz’s scripts from page to stage. Most recently – and spectacularly – Children’s Theatre and Actor’s Theatre of Charlotte teamed up to commission a pair of upstairs/downstairs spookfests from Dietz, The Ghost of Splinter Cove and The Great Beyond.

Since 2009, when Actor’s Theatre presented Yankee Tavern as part of the New Play Network’s nationwide “rolling world premiere,” we really haven’t experienced how Dietz uses his surreal, supernatural, and conspiratorial toolkit to address daily American life. The current revival, directed by Matt Webster at Davidson Community Players, also gives us the opportunity to see how well Dietz’s wild theorizing still holds up three election cycles – and three US Presidents – later.

If anything, the suspense seems to work better now, since Webster’s cast, in their pedigree and their natural inclinations, comes across as less cerebral, readier to go with the flow of an action yarn liberally sprinkled with spycraft plus a pinch of the inexplicable. Confronted with two actors, Matt Cosper and Tom Scott, who might plausibly place the roles of Hamlet and Lear on their bucket lists, as Dietz’s protagonists, I can see in retrospect that I may have resisted following on the suspenseful path that Adam and Ray were designed to take us.

t’s easier to be ambivalent about Matt Stevens as Adam, the seemingly wholesome owner of the Yankee Tavern, and Bill Reilly as Ray, the crazed-or-visionary vagrant who lives in the empty hotel above the bar. Together, they take us down a rabbit hole of coincidences, suppositions, and conspiracy theories that might account for America’s total defenselessness on the morning of September 11, 2001, when airliners crashed into the Twin Towers in Lower Manhattan and both skyscrapers stunningly collapsed.

Two amazingly perfect demolitions of two fully-occupied, high-profile landmarks, presumably built to last and zealously guarded – within the space of 46 minutes. You didn’t need to be close to Ground Zero to be struck with shock and wonder.

But the closer you were to the World Trade Center or people who perished there, and the more narrowly you yourself escaped, the more you could be expected to obsess over the mountains of evidence, facts, theories, legends, and numerologies that were left to explore or were mysteriously obliterated along with the rubble. Ray, the raffish vagrant, seems to have gone overboard, a fountain of conspiratorial spew that points in multiple directions here and abroad, adding to his confusion and ours instead of clearing the fog.

Adam and his fiancée, Janet, seem to mischievously indulge Ray’s weird futility, voicing their skepticism to get the freeloader to be more passionate about his disorganized beliefs – and perhaps prodding him to spout new bullshit they haven’t heard before. The badinage gets out of hand when Janet carelessly reveals that Adam has collected Ray’s voluminous ravings into book form for his master’s thesis. Outraged by this betrayal, Ray has some secrets of his own to reveal about his betrayer.

Reilly renders Ray with such eccentric looniness that anything he says draws skepticism, beginning with his nocturnal conversations with the ghosts who haunt the boarded-up hotel rooms above, including Adam’s dad. Are these symptoms of madness or sources of insight? There are some compromising secrets that Adam is hiding from Janet. How damning these secrets are depends on how truthful you think he is in explaining his ongoing relationship with his ex-professor.

At first, Cordelia Hogan strikes us as a bit irritating as Janet with her persistent suspicions and distrust, so we tend to empathize with Stevens and his protestations of innocence as Adam. Things slowly change when the lights come up on a new scene with a quiet stranger seated at the bar, mostly facing away from us. He’s sitting with two bottles of Rolling Rock Beer perched on the bar, subtly evoking the Twin Towers, but he’ll refuse to drink one of them – leaving it full in memory of a friend that he never saw after the Towers’ collapse.

In his quiet way, Palmer is as obsessed with the mysteries of September 11 as Ray, but he has been more relentless and has roamed further, driven by the unsolved death of his close bud. When Steve Schreur breaks his silence as Palmer with a startling confession of wrongdoing at the colossal Twin Towers crime scene, a monologue that transforms his demeanor from a humble cop on the beat to a crusading zealot, the net of mystery and conspiracy widens to include Adam, his ghostly dad, and Yankee Tavern as focal points.

This may be Palmer’s first stop at the crumbling sports bar, but it isn’t his first sighting of Adam – and he also seems very well-informed about the ex-professor and her machinations. He definitely has his suspicions. Now we will reassess the mild-mannered Stevens and maybe see him as craftier, more secretive, and spy-like. You may also start wondering at this point whose side Palmer and Adam are on in this geopolitical tapestry, and you may believe there really could be a deal breaker on the horizon for Adam and Janet’s engagement.

At this point, we’re also caught up in the psychology of straining toward belief based on the devilish wisps of evidence and inference and eye-witness testimony that Dietz has doled out. The playwright, Webster, and his cast have all done their work well; the design team have created and sustained the playwright’s lazily surreal atmosphere; so the intended coupling will likely occur. Our speculations about Adam and Palmer will likely sprout fresh speculations about 9/11.

We’re built that way, which is precisely Dietz’s point, whatever the truth of history might be if it is ever untangled.

Problem is, Dietz couldn’t factor in 2016 or 2020. A US President who had lost the popular vote might conceivably orchestrate a catastrophe to rally the dubious electorate behind him. Could be worth the trouble for W. Until the Orange Marvel came along, who knew that a sitting US President could simply squat down on a toilet seat and remediate the situation by merely proclaiming, with two posable thumbs and a Twitter account, that he had actually won the lost election by a landslide?

Of course, that grim update won’t prevent the flareup of confusion and speculation we will feel when Dietz springs his ending. It’s a brutal reminder that the hotel above the action isn’t the only place that is haunted. Yankee Tavern is also spooked and so are we. Maybe more than ever before by the incurable virus of conspiracy theory.

CP’s Connor Series Signs Off With Two Powerhouse Piano Quintets

By Perry Tannenbaum

September 17, 2023, Charlotte, NC – Even before the Connor Chamber Music series began six years ago at Tate Hall, Catherine and Wilton Connor were among the strongest advocates of chamber music in the Metrolina area. They had previously helped to give the St. Peter’s Chamber Music series extra reach beyond Uptown church by hosting Living Room Concerts in their Myers Park home. Furthermore, they had opened their doors to violinist Rosemary Furniss and her chamber trio when her husband, Christopher Warren-Green, was the Charlotte Symphony’s music director.

So it was bittersweet to hear Mr. Connor announce that the latest concert on the Central Piedmont Community College campus, showcasing piano quintets by Béla Bartók and Antonín Dvořák, would be their last. Connor hastened to console us, hyping the recent and future concerts of Chamber Music for All, led by Charlotte Symphony concertmaster Calin Lupanu. And in fact, the program we were soon to hear had already been performed a week earlier at the Lancaster Cultural Arts Center, the climactic event of the inaugural Historic Lancaster Music Festival. Future CM4A concerts are already scheduled there, at Sedgefield United Methodist Church, and at the Steinway Piano Gallery.

Not nearly as renowned, recorded, or as frequently performed as his six string quartets, Bartók’s Piano Quintet in C Major is one of the composer’s earliest works, written in 1903-4, a mere 17 years after Dvořák’s quintet was premiered and 35 years before his own final string quartet. Often in its outer movements, the opening Andante and the concluding Poco Vivace, the music has an anthemic openness that you might expect from a 19th-century piece written in the shadows of Liszt, Strauss, and Brahms, before Bartók leaned more toward folk music and modernistic experimentation.

At the keyboard, Phillip Bush resisted the temptation of steering the joyousness of the piano part into stentorian jubilation, resulting in more ensemble cohesiveness and more contemplative edge. Lupanu could stay more within himself to match Bush’s fire without ever flattening the peaks and valleys of the volatile music where Bartók abruptly changed tempos and dynamics. Marcus Pyle, who had inched onto our radar earlier this year as a preview speaker for Opera Carolina’s production of Porgy and Bess, impressed almost instantly on viola with his lush tone and sleek double-bowing.

The inner movements, a Vivace-Scherzando followed by an Adagio, are more forward-looking. The Scherzando did not lack for quirkiness, but Bush could have been more provocative and eccentric in the second movement. With cellist Marlene Ballena and second violinist Monica Boboc making valuable contributions, the quartet sounds were dominant in the Adagio, though the 2019 Alpha Classics recording, captured live at the Lockenhaus Chamber Festival, dares to be more raucous and astringent. When Lupanu’s quintet surrendered more fully to the closing Vivace, they delivered more of its fire and madness.

Competition among recordings of the Dvořák Piano Quintet No. 2 in A Major not only increases exponentially compared with the sparse field of Bartók recordings, so does the name recognition of the pianists, violinists, and string quartets who have entered the fray. On the other hand, the musicians onstage at Tate Hall must have had so many more opportunities to glean master classes from this immense discography – and likely more opportunities to rehearse and perform this perennial favorite before bringing it to CPCC. The electricity and sound quality of live performance, the familiarity of the audience with the piece – particularly when it settled into the dreamy Dumka movement after the rousing Allegro opener – brought the Connor concert experience into gratifyingly close alignment with the best CDs available.

Bush played with confident élan, pliant and at ease navigating the tempo shifts of the opening movement, charming and lyrical in the gorgeously pianistic Andante passages that make the Dumka so memorable, and unbridled with the onset of the folksy interludes. Lupanu also played with loose and spontaneous abandon, slashing boldly with his bow at the quick tempos and delicately caressing the strings in the lovely soft passages. Ballena shone most with her cello as she introduced the first theme of the Allegro, and Pyle was equally convincing introducing the second. Everybody seemed to be having a jolly time as the sober ending of the Dumka gave way to the penultimate Scherzo. Lupanu and Bush mischievously frolicked on the left side of the Tate stage, answered to humorous effect by Ballena and Pyle with their suave mellowness.

Boboc had her most memorable spot in the Allegro Finale when we jumped away from the spirited interplay between Bush and Lupanu into a fugal section where Ballena and Pyle also got a taste. There were also harmonious sections that reminded me of the uniqueness of Dvořák’s string quartets. Yet it was Bush who was most dominant at the concert’s climax, trilling and ding-a-linging merrily before he ramped up the speed and intensity toward the very end. Obviously relishing the encounter, Lupanu matched him note for note as they raced to the precipice.

Follow the Yellow Brick Road to the Queens Road Barn

Review: The Wizard of Oz at Theatre Charlotte

By Perry Tannenbaum

With her rustic picnic basket, her toy dog Toto, her beribboned pigtails, and her iconic gingham dress, the 1939 movie version of L. Frank Baum’s imperishable heroine, Kansas-born Dorothy Gale, was designed to closely echo the Dorothy found on the pages of Baum’s 1900 novel. She was conceived in the lineage of Little Red Riding Hood and Lewis Carroll’s Alice as a little girl – credulous, easily surprised or disappointed.

Judy Garland was 16 years old when she began shooting The Wizard of Oz at MGM Studios. Her sub-5-foot stature bridged some of the age gap, but director Victor Fleming and the MGM braintrust didn’t stop there, trussing Garland up to hide her curves. All of this subterfuge (some would call it barbarity) was logical only because Hollywood, suspicious of fantasy and children’s fiction, wanted to reassure us that Oz, The Wizard, the Witches, the Winkies, and the ruby slippers were all nothing more than a little girl’s dream.

Noel Langley’s screenplay, revised chiefly by Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf, went to extraordinary lengths to frame Dorothy’s adventures as a dream. The celluloid version supplied the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, Glinda, the Wicked Witch, and The Wizard with Kansas counterparts she will transform into Ozians. Baum never created a Miss Gulch or a Professor Marvel. In fact, when he adapted The Wonderful Wizard of Oz for the stage in 1902, Baum actually expelled Toto and the Wicked Witch from his cast – and did not permit the Lion to speak.

Langley obviously hasn’t gotten enough credit for his contributions to Oz mythology. The whole preamble to the cyclone and Oz is his, along with the wholesome welcome home to Kansas that crowds the screen with patronizing adults. Aunt Em is the only person who greets Dorothy in the book, where the ending is dispatched in less than 75 words. Dorothy finds a new farmhouse that Uncle Henry has built to replace the old one that killed the Wicked Witch of the East. No question in Baum’s mind: Dorothy has been away to a real place in real time.

When John Kane adapted The Wizard of Oz for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1987, he went with Langley’s version of the story. Not only were the songs by Harold Arlen and the lyrics by Edgar “Yip” Harburg brought along for the ride, so was “The Jitterbug,” an Arlen-Harburg song that didn’t make the film’s final cut. If anything, Kane’s additions to the screenplay served to underscore the idea that Oz was a dream, dropping more key words and phrases that linked the magical land to Kansas. Auntie Em and Uncle Henry were added to the roster of Kansans who change costumes and join Dorothy in Oz.

That’s the version we have now as Theatre Charlotte kicks off its 96th season with a rousing trek down the familiar Yellow Brick Road. After her TC debut in 2022 at Camp North End during the company’s vagabond season, Allison Modafferi Brewster directs for the first time at the Queens Road barn. Leaning heavily on projection designs by Alison Nicole Fuehrer to navigate the geographies of Kansas and Oz, Modafferi and her cast of 40 (plus nine “Ruby” Munchkins who timeshare with the “Emerald Cast” that performed on opening night) heartily buy into the notion that Oz is a dreamland.

But in choosing Winthrop University senior Cameron Vipperman as the lead, Modafferri and costume designer Rachel Engstrom are pushing back against the idea that Dorothy must be a child. Or, to cite the range prescribed for auditions in 2006, when Central Piedmont presented this Wizard as their first summer extravaganza at the newly-built Halton Theater, between the ages of 14 and 17.

Gone are the ribbons, the pigtails, and the gingham dress, though Vipperman’s do does sport a couple of fairly subtle weaves. Nor does this energetic production go along with the notion that Miss Gulch and the Wicked Witch of the West must be gnarly old crones. Wielding her broomstick in a rather gladiatorial black outfit, Mary Lynn Bain was quite the action figure as the Wicked One. No corny cone hat for her!

Unless you’ve scouted productions down at Winthrop and Matthews Playhouse, neither of these antagonists will be a familiar name. Casting is no less adventurous for Dorothy’s Yellow Brick pickups. As the Scarecrow, Devon Ovall comes to the Queens Road barn by way of Northwest School of the Arts. Ashley Benjamin, the first female Tin Man we’ve ever seen in Charlotte, seems to be freshly arrived from Georgia in her digital bio. Only Kyle J. Britt can boast previous Queen City exploits prior to his present turn as the Cowardly Lion, having appeared at the barn in last year’s Christmas Carol as the Ghost of Christmas Present.

Noticeably younger than any Oz supplicants you’ll ever see again in an adult production – so close to Dorothy’s age that they seem to be her pals and never her protectors – this youthful trio is remarkably appealing. Ovall flops around and collapses with infectious glee as Scarecrow. Aided by strategic sound effects, Benjamin brought plenty of creaky stiffness to the Tin Man, but she often needed stronger miking.

Rachel Engstrom’s costume designs for these two weirdos are masterworks of simplicity, but her greatest triumph may be her Lion, little more than a wig gone wild and a couple of fringed sleeves. This is sufficient armament for Britt to make delicious meals of both his Cowardly highlights, blustering his “top-to-bottomous” bravado with gusto and regally rolling his r’s on “King of the Forest” – with an extra-chesty baritone.

Modafferri’s infusions of diversity and gender switching don’t stop with Benjamin. Brandie Hill brings a righteous gospel flavor to Aunt Em and especially to Glinda the Good, while D. Laverne Woods brings out the gypsy in Professor Marvel and the sass in the Wizard. Darren Spencer as Uncle Henry is a softer, more indulgent contrast to Aunt Em’s law-abiding rigor, making him the obvious choice to play the softy old Guard at Oz’s palace.

Mostly at the service of Fuehrer’s projection designs, set designer Chris Timmons’ neutral-toned slabs don’t quite allow the colors to pop until we first espy the poppy field and Emerald City beyond. The cityscape lingered a few seconds too long as we transitioned from Oz to the wicked West, my first inkling that there was more than one projector in play. The more concerning miscue on opening night was the stage crew’s failure to secure the flight of stairs leading up to the platform where the Wicked Witch makes her immortal “What a world!” exit.

Poor Bain took a nasty little tumble trying to get up there, nearly breaking her neck before she had a chance to melt, prompting Vipperman to be very careful when she climbed up after her. The wonderful reversal was still effective.

That climactic scene cannot be withheld from an adoring public, so Timmons had to choose between the complexities of using a trapdoor in the middle of his stage or building a platform. The latter solution is likely simpler, but its hazards were frightfully exposed last Friday. No doubt all the furniture moving and fastening will go better this week as the run resumes.

Technically, the Theatre Charlotte version of The Wizard is nowhere near as dazzling as the CP version of 2006, when the Witches, the Wizard, Dorothy, the Scarecrow, Miss Gulch, and a cow all flew, and Glinda floated gloriously in a bubble. Such lavishness is probably the main reason why CP shitcanned its Summer Theater programming this season – after four decades of serving as the best launching pad for emerging professional talent that Charlotte has ever seen.

Musically, the lack of a live orchestra dulls the brilliance of Herbert Stothart’s scoring, but music director Matt Primm and his talented cast rescue things nicely. After a shaky start, when Vipperman was too studiously on the beat, “Over the Rainbow” came to full bloom. Surrounded by the loosey-goosey shenanigans of Ovall and Britt, she blossomed even more in Oz. Pepper Alpern as Toto remained a wild card. Nobody knew what the mutt would do next, behaving, barking, or otherwise stealing focus.

Engstrom and choreographer Vanessa Zabari held a deck full of winning cards to counteract this earthbound production’s lack of aerial aces. Dance numbers greatly enlivened the arrivals in Oz and the Emerald City when a bevy of Munchkins, a Youth Ensemble, and an Adult Ensemble strutted their stuff, captained by Aidan Conway. Punctuating the action at key moments with assorted tumbles, somersaults, and splits, Conway was also a pro-grade soloist when he wasn’t fronting the ensembles.

Thanks to Engstrom, Emerald City was a sea of multitudinous greens, and the changes of dresses for the adorable Munchkins were more than enough to convince me anew that Oz truly is a merry old land. But for the next two months, I’d be quite content if I didn’t see another damn polka dot.

“A Soldier’s Play Recalls” the Brink of a New Era

Review: A Soldier’s Play at The Gettys Center

By Perry Tannenbaum

KKK, segregation, and Jim Crow are all in the air as Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play unfolds in 1944 at Fort Neal, a fictitious army base in Louisiana. Yet there are beacons of hope, personified by the Black privates, the corporals, and the busted sergeant we see in a humble barracks. Broadway Lights subscribers saw a deluxe revival of the 1982 Pulitzer Prize winner at Knight Theater back in January, and the current Free Reign Theater reprise down in Rock Hill – not Rural Hill, that was Free Reign’s HQ last summer – only reaffirms the script’s stature as a classic.

Fuller captures these Black military men on the brink. Any day now, these eager recruits are hoping to be deployed across the Atlantic, where they can prove themselves on the battlefield fighting the Nazis. On the home front, we learn that this platoon of baseball players, culled from the Negro Leagues, has a chance to play the New York Yankees if their team can maintain its undefeated record through the rest of the season.

Not a far-fetched dream! Just three seasons into the future, Jackie Robinson will make his breakthrough MLB debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers, win Rookie of the Year honors, pop champagne with his white teammates as he celebrates his first National League pennant, and become the first Black athlete to play in the World Series – against the New York Yankees.

Fuller accurately fine tunes his soldiers’ aspirations, but he drops a bombshell into this Deep South outpost that is equally shocking to the Black scrubs and the white officers on base. When the ballclub’s manager, Tech Sergeant Vernon C. Waters, is murdered in the middle of the night, presumably by local racists, the feds in DC send Captain Richard Davenport to investigate.

DC or not DC, Davenport is a Black lawyer. How is he going to be able to point a finger at a gang of KKK knights, dragons, or wizards and proclaim “Arrest these men!” within the borders of Louisiana? It’s as if a DC thinktank had come up with the surest way for Waters’ murderers not to be prosecuted for their crime.

Nobody on base has ever seen a Black man like this before. Captain Charles Taylor, Waters’ former commanding officer, admits his discomfort in accepting Davenport as an equal. He’s also a bit flustered by the stranger’s cool and orders him to remove those glasses, forgetting that Davenport outranks him. Adams enjoys his teaching moment with a nice nonchalance as Tim Huffman seethes, finely calibrating Taylor’s redneck tendencies with his West Point pedigree.

Whether or not they can sense the Robinson breakthrough on the horizon – or grasp the MLK dream 19 years before he proclaims it – the Black ballplaying soldiers also show that there’s a learning curve for them in dealing with Davenport’s intelligence, competence, professionalism, and objectivity. Flustered, flummoxed, or wary, the corporals and privates quickly show that they are no less thrown by this Davenport phenomenon than Taylor.

And of course, they share Taylor’s skepticism about Davenport’s ability to charge a KKK-grade racist with any crime in Louisiana and make it stick.

Everybody, then, is taken aback as Davenport ignores race altogether, seeking to interrogate both Black soldiers and white officers in search of the facts, and allowing those facts – rather than easy presumptions – to lead him to the truth. Only the busted sergeant, Andrew Roberts as Private James Wilkie, seems to realize that Davenport is seeking evidence to form his opinion of who the murderer or murderers might be rather simply bolstering the opinion he already had.

Davenport is paying attention when Wilkie upsets the KKK hypothesis with a telling observation that Fuller cleverly assigns to the one man at Fort Neal who has lost his stripes. Roberts gives us a messy mix of servility and seething resentment as Wilkie’s complex layers unfold. It was Waters, after all, who busted Wilkie, so the former sergeant will become a prime suspect in the instant that the Klan is cleared of suspicion.

Not only does Wilkie open the door to new possibilities of viewing Waters’ murder, he also opens a window into the deep tensions that lurk beneath the graceful, flawless façade of the invincible team. In flashbacks triggered by Davenport’s ongoing interrogations, we soon see that Waters’ mix of servility and resentment was far more toxic than his subordinate’s. An unforgettable debasement of a Black man at the hands of white officers that Waters witnessed in France during World War I ignited a lifelong secret crusade against the “Geechies” that he despises, Southerners whom he sees as tarnishing the image of his race and hampering their progress.

It is an absolute mania, and even the best player on the team, Private CJ Memphis, does not escape Waters’ lethal prejudice. The chin-to-chin confrontation between Justin Peoples as Waters and Dominic Weaver as Memphis, modeled after the Claggart-Budd climax in Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Foretopman, is more electric than any of the Davenport-Taylor faceoffs. In the sequel to the Waters-Memphis climax in the barracks, a jailhouse stunner where Waters berates and gloats over his latest victim, Memphis achieves a tragic stature when Weaver proceeds to channel Billy Budd’s Christ-like attributes.

Under Dr. Corlis Hayes’s beautifully judged direction, the deep Billy Budd conflict regains its dominance over the Davenport-Taylor sparring. The touring production, unlike the previous New York productions and the 1984 film adaptation, tilted our attention away from Waters toward Broadway star Norm Lewis, who took over the Davenport role on the road. Yet we still see quite vividly that the new man on base is the future.

Shining more light upon Waters’ diabolical obsession, Hayes and Peoples let us see that, in some ways, A Soldier’s Play is like a Perry Mason mystery. So many soldiers on his team detest Waters that almost every one is a legitimate suspect. Davenport’s main weapon is cross-examination – in Captain Taylor’s office, his own hastily-outfitted domain, or in front of the soldiers’ bunk beds and foot lockers.

Weaver’s performance as CJ, like a genial Willie Mays with a guitar, further focuses on the enormity of Waters’ crime. Memphis isn’t the only player who has tangled with his racist tech sergeant. PFC Melvin Peterson, a Northerner like Waters, is more offended than anyone by the sergeant’s bigotry, and Devin Clark, who shone so brightly as Brutus in Free Reign’s Julius Caesar last year, is more than up to capturing Peterson’s rage, which leads to a fight with Waters. His antagonism lingers on, flaring up again when CJ is baited by Waters and jailed.

Suspects abound, in the barracks and among the white officers. As Lieutenant Byrd, David Hensley’s defiance and antagonism toward Davenport, when he has the effrontery to question him, nicely contrasts with Hugh Loomis’s subdued pragmatism as Captain Wilcox, who realizes that his pal’s hot-headedness may have already landed them both in hot water. Hayes also has a welcome urge to expand the light and relaxed interludes Fuller built into his play, importing blues singer Big Mary from Fuller’s screen adaption, and offering Shar Marlin a chance to give us a sassy respite from the all-male action with her cameo. Nice touch.

Having seen numerous Jackie Robinson biopics and dramas over the years, we can see some pragmatism in Waters’ disciplined philosophy to the extent that it mirrors the template that the future Hall of Fame second baseman fit into when he made his debut on the big MLB stage – supplemented by some pointed advice. Waters keeps his feelings bottled up in the company of superior officers, eradicates rusticity and superstition from his actions and speech, maintains a sober low profile, and waits patiently for these quiet concessions to win him favor and advance his career.

There’s a constant tension between that approach and the tacks taken by Memphis and Peterson. Memphis likes being liked, displaying his talents, being himself, and letting his natural gifts take him where they may. Even if he does lack education and polish, Memphis is respectful, outgoing, and good, though we have to factor in the large portions of female adoration he attracts. Clark gets to be more pugnacious and far more fiercely intelligent, despising bigotry in any form, even if it comes from Waters, a superior whose orders he should obey. He will stand up strong for his beliefs at all times, even if it means taking a licking.

But the real deal, Jackie-wise, is Davenport. Adams amalgamates all the best of Waters’ calculated patience and Peterson’s egalitarian principles, with the ability to turn on some of CJ’s natural charm. Before the soldiers have shipped off to Europe, eager to prove themselves in World War II’s European theatre, Davenport is a fully-evolved marvel that people in Louisiana readily recognize and value. As we saw in the spit-and-polish version presented at Knight Theater, Adams also chafes a little at the relentless saluting and military barking that comes from Hayes’s drilling, aided by two military consultants who keep all the soldiers coming to attention.

After much seasoning and resourceful survival, Davenport arrives fully polished, ready for primetime and postwar America. He may not have the fire of Malcolm X or the towering eloquence of MLK, but we can imagine Davenport as a worthy ally for either of those pathfinders.

“Hit the Wall” Reminds Us of the Continuing Relevance of the Stonewall Riots

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Review: Hit the Wall at The Arts Factory

By Perry Tannenbaum

August 19, 2023, Charlotte, NC – On the eve of the annual Charlotte Pride Festival & Parade, a series of LGBTQ+ events spread across the city in the coming week, Queen City Concerts has chosen a perfect moment to commemorate the Stonewall Riots of 1969, a watershed moment for gay liberation and empowerment. Best known for their resourceful reductions of big musicals to a more bare-bones concert format, Queen City has previously shattered their own template with a fine script-in-hand production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Parts 1 and 2.

Three months later, after a return to form with Diana: The Musical late last month, the company has shown us that Angels wasn’t a fluke, staging the local premiere of Ike Holter’s Hit the Wall, a 2012 play with music that premiered in Holter’s hometown of Chicago before director Eric Hoff restaged his original Steppenwolf Garage production with a New York cast. That Off-Broadway production opened in the spring of 2013 at the Barrow Street Theater, not far from Christopher Park in Greenwich Village, where much of the original action went down.

Directing this concert version at The Arts Factory, J. Christopher Brown isn’t quite as resourceful or ambitious as he was with Angels in utilizing projections and costumes. Scenery and props are also less lavish, and there are no stage directions at all read aloud. With a rowdy rock trio roaring from one corner of the black box space, the experience remained richly visceral, though our awareness of where we are or who is speaking was sometimes delayed. We get an abbreviated staircase for the proverbial sidewalk stoop, where the “Snap Queen Team” of Tano and Mika hang out, and a couple of chairs occasionally appear.

Projections could have transported us inside the Stonewall Inn gay bar, but we only get the exterior, and a lamppost or a park bench could have transported us to Christopher Park more emphatically. It doesn’t take long to get the gist after scenes at these locations begin, but who is telling us in the opening tableau that “The reports of what happened next are not exactly clear”? Without a simple cop’s uniform on actor Nick Southwick, it takes a long while before we know how to digest this declaration.

Of course, a long while in a production that zipped through Holter’s script in less than 90 minutes wasn’t uncomfortably long. What Christopher continued to do extremely well was cut down on key moments when actors read from their scripts. For most of the production, actors were off-book and the booklets they clutched served as reminders of their cues rather than reading material. We were aware of the scripts onstage, but the flow of the action and the actors’ lively energy grabbed nearly all our attention. If anything, the occasional peep at a script reminded us how quickly and thoroughly this cast had mastered its essence with just a few rehearsals.

We should also understand that the sanctification of Stonewall over the past 54 years has partly happened as myth rushed in to fill in a vacuum of determined facts. It’s interesting to see the strategies Holter used to recreate Stonewall, chiefly by inventing a compacted community of fictionalized gay, lesbian, queer, and crossdressing people, from the neighborhood and from elsewhere, who gather at The Stonewall, owned by the mob but catering to this eight-person crowd.

As the Snap Queen Team, Lamar Davis as Mika and Zelena Sierra as Tano have attitudes, sometimes confrontational, about anyone who passes by. When Zachary Parham arrives as the queer Newbie, the Queens are not at all welcoming. But Holter’s style of hostility isn’t mean-streets raw or even ‘60s bohemian. Combats and putdowns come at us in the form of rap rhymes and poetry slams.

Aj White, arriving in high heels and a low-cut dress as Carson, is too much for the Snap Queens to handle despite his grieving over the recent death of Judy Garland. Yet he is visibly floored by the advances of lanky Neifert Enrique as the self-confident, draft-dodging, pot-smoking Cliff, a fatalistic drifter who assumes he will be dumped into the Viet Nam War the next time he is picked up in a raid. None of these core characters appear ripe for radicalization, though the tough Carson and roving slickster Cliff have agreed to meet at The Stonewall. Eric Martinez as the arrogant A-Gay further convinces us of the submissiveness that bonds the Newbie and the Queens. The Harvard grad lords it over all three.

Two catalysts for change are deftly stirred into the mix. Shaniya Simmons as Peg will combine with Carson in fomenting the police brutality at The Stonewall, and Valerie Thames as Roberta, an activist perpetually straining to draw a crowd, will finally be gifted with a galvanizing cause. Besides Southwick as the Cop, friction comes from Iris DeWitt as Madeline, a character who morphs from a concerned citizen to a disapproving sister. Music blasted by guitarist Daniel Hight, bassist Harley, and drummer Paul Fisher was most appropriate when we convened at The Stonewall and the bulk of our cast began to party.

Ironically, the music was most effective when it suddenly stopped as police commands triggered the raid. The music vibe and the slam poetry styling were shattered simultaneously. Soon we were in the ladies’ room watching the grim brutality. A little less riveting – but perhaps more emotionally fraught – was the climactic confrontation between the sisters after the raid.

Reports of what happened afterwards are unclear, but we do adjourn to the sidewalk stoop where the main point impacts the Queens who sit on it: there’s no turning back. Paired with Angels within three points, Hit the Wall reminds us that Kushner’s epic ended with a similar takeaway. The feeling that both dramas remain timely urgently underscores the fact that the Pride movement has more work to do.

Make the Speech and Slam the Door – Again?

Review: A Doll’s House, Part 2 at The Mint Museum

By Perry Tannenbaum

If you make a brief study of Henrik Ibsen’s original script – going beyond the Wikipedia write-up – you can get a good understanding of how playwright Lucas Hnath went about imagining his 2017 sequel, A Doll’s House, Part 2. Crack open the 1879 original, published the same year it was premiered, and you’ll find that Hnath plays fast-and-loose with the text, even before Ibsen’s characters speak. The architecture of the house is changed when Nora Helmer returns 15 years later to the place where she delivered the feminist “door slam heard around the world.” That iconic door is now emphatically displayed, rather than concealed, in Hnath’s reimagining of the scene where Nora liberated herself by simply walking out on her husband Torvald and their children.

This time, she knocks insistently rather than daintily ringing a doorbell offstage. Once she enters, received by her antique nanny Anne Marie, she notices several items are gone, including her piano, an old cuckoo clock, a cabinet with trinkets, and a portrait of Mom. But only the piano was actually there when Ibsen set the scene, and Hnath is treating Henrik’s stage directions as cavalierly as a modern stage director.

At the Mint Museum on Randolph, where Charlotte Conservatory Theatre is presenting the Queen City premiere, director Matt Cosper accurately gauges Hnath’s irreverence toward the papa of mod drama. But that doesn’t hinder Cosper from pushing the envelope a little further, by unleashing Gina Stewart to be the most skittish and hyper-fretful Anne Marie we can imagine – with a bit of hyperventilating slathered on. As the limping, desiccated nanny of yore becomes Nora’s sounding board once again, every juicy and exotic disclosure that Kellee Stall makes in the role about her tribulations and triumphs over the intervening 15 years becomes exponentially more scandalous, outre, and delicious by virtue of the old crone’s overreactions.

Cosper gives Stewart some extra business to accent her energy and curiosity, some laundry drudgery for starters as Nora is knocking on the door. Then as the wanderer opens up to her, Anne Marie is hungrily chewing on munchies or nibbling on the luxurious chocolate bonbon Nora has brought her, visibly devouring each scrap of news she hears. There’s a nibbling squirrel in both Ibsen’s Doll’s House and Hnath’s, but this time it isn’t Nora.

So exactly how has Nora thrived over these past years? For Stall arrives in a dress so resplendent, thanks to costume designer Beth Killion, that she evokes the majesty of a Macy’s Parade float or the Chrysler Building. Stretching the suspense, Nora asks Anne Marie to guess. This is fun, she remarks, bringing back more memories of Ibsen’s opening scene.

In Anne Marie’s first guess and in Nora’s subsequent revelation, we get keen glimpses into how deeply Hnath dived into Ibsen’s creation. Once you skim the Wikipedia write-up, after all, you realize that Nora is based on the marital turbulence of a writer, Laura Kieler, whom Ibsen knew well. By revealing Nora as a successful writer, Hnath is taking his cue from Ibsen, and by stealing Ibsen’s story, he exacts revenge on Kieler’s behalf, for the Norwegian novelist always resented the Norwegian playwright’s use of her story. (In real life, Mr. Kieler had his missus committed to an insane asylum.)

It’s kind of tasty.

Never guessing that her dear Nora had literary talent, Anne Marie guesses that she became an actress – a shrewd and prescient guess that will mirror Hnath’s thinking when Nora and Torvald thrash out their failed marriage. For the great fault – or fault-line – in Ibsen’s play has always been the wide gulf between the cheery and complaisant little magpie who charms Torvald in Acts 1 and 2 only to become an unbending and defiant crusader against her husband and society after the second intermission.

Famed New York Times theatre critic Walter Kerr pointed out this chasm in his analysis of the 1971 Broadway revival of the play, and he celebrated Claire Bloom’s approach to Nora as an effective way to bridge the gulf. What Kerr inferred from Bloom’s performance is pretty much what Hnath has Nora saying out loud in her final showdown with Torvald: the cheery, charming Nora that her husband remembers so fondly was largely a mix of playacting and manipulation, subterfuges that the new Nora disdains.

Shawn Halliday is as stodgy and respectable as the Torvald Helmer of old, but Hnath has given him fresh insights and self-delusions to play with – and to help Hnath in texturizing Nora a bit further. Ironically, the woman who went on to writing books that have espoused the end of marriage, inspiring other wives to walk out on their husbands, has soured Torvald on the idea of marriage simply by walking out and staying away.

“You sorta killed that for me,” he confesses.

There’s also 15 years of hurt for Halliday to harp on – and for Stall to coolly deflect. Cosper allows Halliday to play the victim card way past the brink of comedy as he turns his chair away from Stall, like a pouting child who will not speak until Nora explains why she has returned. With the exception of the elaborately decorated front door, Tom Burch’s simple set design veers as much toward hospital waiting room as it does toward a doll’s house. But when the two simple white chairs, seemingly stolen from a patio or a beach, come into the action on a matching white rug, the smallness of the Mint stage accents the husband-and-wife role reversal beautifully, especially Master Torvald’s regression.

Clearly, the best of Torvald’s grievances goes straight to her walkout. Disarmingly, he admits that Nora had made some good points before she left, but if they really hadn’t had a serious conversation on a serious subject during their whole marriage, it should have been imperative for them both to attempt to have an adult conversation right then, on the spot, aimed at building the marriage that should have been.

Nora doesn’t wish to have the what-about-the-kids conversation, but Hnath doesn’t let her off the hook. The passage of time allows him to bring Emma Helmer, Nora’s daughter, to maturity as essentially a fresh creation. It’s another plum role, and Laura Scott Cary makes a scintillating debut in it, offering Nora the most devastating pushback she gets all evening.

When Emma claims she bears no ill will toward her mom, Cary is so intelligent, poised, and tastefully dressed that we can’t be sure if she’s telling the truth. A wee bit doll-like? It would be easy to presume that Emma has been molded by the strictures Anne Marie and Torvald live by, perhaps processed through the smarts and spirit she inherited from Nora. Yet Cary lets us see with steely clarity that she is not intimidated by her notorious mom. Better yet, she lets Nora see that her absence, more than anything else, has cemented her daughter’s belief in the benefits of marriage and family.

Poof, Nora’s claim that marriage will be an extinct institution within 30 to 40 years, which instantly draws laughs from the audience as Hnath leverages history, now deflates before Nora’s eyes in the confines of her old doll’s house. Quite a supreme irony for someone who has picked up a torch on a mission to change society.

Every time somebody onstage lets loose with an f-bomb, we’re reminded that Hnath’s historical perspective fuels this dramatic comedy. Ibsen denied that he intended A Doll’s House as a feminist play, but Hnath hardly needs to bother making this claim. If anything, he might need to defend himself against the charge that, as exemplified by Anne Marie and Nora, he’s telling us that women don’t know what they want. No, you will not find the answer to why Nora returns in this review. The best way to find out what is driving Nora – and to experience all the shocks she delivers and receives – is to watch how Hnath’s rewarding sequel unfolds at the Mint Museum Randolph. Perhaps the better question to ask, after seeing this beautifully balanced Charlotte Conservatory Theatre production, is whether Nora will ever take yes for an answer

Hurry, Hurry, See “The Chinese Lady” for 50¢

Review: The Chinese Lady at The Arts Factory

By Perry Tannenbaum

Somewhere in China, either forgotten in the innards of a few cellphones and computer hard drives or hanging up proudly framed on living room walls, are photos of my wife Sue and me taken in front of the fabled Great Wall, posing with a couple of families who had never seen Westerners before. For a few fleeting moments during our 2016 travels, we could have empathized – a little – with Afong Moy, the teenager imported from Canton City in 1834 by traders Nathaniel and Frederick Carne and put on display. “To be stared at, for half a dollar a head,” according to a disapproving New York Mirror editorial.

But we hadn’t heard of Afong Moy, and our ignorance remained intact until last Friday evening when Lloyd Suh’s The Chinese Lady had its local premiere at The Arts Factory in an affecting Three Bone Theatre production. Directed by Three Bone co-founder Robin Tynes-Miller and starring Amy Wada, Suh’s 2018 script repeatedly reminds us that we’re merely witnessing a performance – not really hearing Moy’s voice or even her words and not really seeing her body.

For in the great tradition of American aggrandizement, the original Moy’s body wasn’t her own, either. It was purportedly on loan to the Carne Brothers from Moy’s dad for two years, a deal that the Americans found easy enough to break, setting the precedent for Madame Butterfly and other dealings Uncle Sam and her upright citizens have had with the Far East. As for the absurdity of it all, we can easily perceive sweet revenge for Moy as Wada introduces us to such exotic fundamentals as brewing tea, holding chopsticks, and actually managing to walk with her tiny bound feet.

We can almost hear that lusty voice of P.T. Barnum himself proclaiming, “Ladies and Gentlemen, you are being patronized!” Yes, after the novelty began to wear off, the exhibition at Peale’s Museum in Philadelphia and an ensuing national tour having run their course, Moy becomes a sideshow at Barnum’s traveling circus. Running parallel to that deepening degradation, Stephen West-Rogers is Atung, Afong’s translator. Since Moy never speaks a word of Cantonese to us, the modern surrogates for The Chinese Lady’s actual audiences, Atung is stoically aware of his irrelevance from the start.

West-Rogers bickers with Wada when he isn’t serving her or bossing her, no need for his translation services except in one climactic scene. At the height of her celebrity, Moy gets to see “America’s emperor,” President Andrew Jackson, at the White House. Suddenly, Atung is the only person in the room who can tell us everything that was said. It’s a feast for West-Rogers who gets to play the lascivious Old Hickory with a thick cowboy drawl only to spring out of his regal easy chair to portray Atung cunningly and diplomatically mistranslating key parts of the conversation – if that’s the proper word.

Wada plays a more nuanced set of multiple roles. At times, she’s channeling Moy and at other moments she has become Suh’s mouthpiece, for Moy is merely Exhibit A in an extensive list of atrocities, prohibitions, and indignities inflicted by Americans upon Asians since she arrived here as a tender 14-year-old – and the playwright is not letting them slide. Nor should he, since our widespread ignorance of Chinese and Asian travails in the US goes far beyond not knowing about Afong Moy.

More than likely, the players who deliver Suh’s sad drama are also learning and digesting some of this history. There’s still another dimension to Afong in her early years here, for her purposes were not strictly educational. The Carne Brothers had merch to sell to their captivated audiences via their exotic spokeswoman: maybe the chopsticks Moy was eating with for starters, maybe the quaint tea sets and trays that Atung officiously carries in from the wings.

Afong is surrounded, of course, by decorative furnishings, vases, fabrics, draperies, and – at the whim of set designer Chip Davis – an elegant wooden birdcage that may have been unloaded from the same ship she sailed in on. Our Chinese Lady simply models many of these items without saying a word, the Carne Brothers merely scripting her actions. But at other times, Moy was an actress dutifully mouthing words that were not her own, words of gratitude to her benefactors and words directing our attention to the Carne Brothers’ merch on sale nearby.

It’s bittersweet, then, when Barnum has relieved her of her commercial obligations and transformed her into one of many sideshow attractions. As she becomes more authentically herself and gradually learns the language of her new homeland, Afong becomes less unique, less celebrated, less valuable to her employer, and more degraded and disposable.

Just one altercation between Afong and Atung, when he attempts to draw the curtain closed around her little performing space, is enough to remind us that her comings and goings are not voluntary. Each closing of the curtain propels the action at last a year closer to our time. While Suh doesn’t spend much effort in dramatizing Moy’s increased mastery of her second language during those years – and partial forgetting of her first – he diligently opens her eyes to how we proceeded to exploit the influx of Chinese immigrants that came after her.

It wouldn’t have been a pretty sight even if Moy had lived past 1850, when history loses track of her. The first great wave of Chinese immigration was triggered by the California Gold Rush of 1849. By the time the Golden Spike completed Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, there were 12,000 Chinese in the construction crew that completed its western leg, working for the Central Pacific Railroad.

Sketching our great nation’s appreciation for Chinese labor, Suh’s Afong catalogs a few of the hideous slaughters of miners and laborers that Asians were treated to. Then in 1882, our US House of Representatives had their first opportunity to express their gratitude to the immigrants by voting down the Chinese Exclusion Act, which would stop immigration in its tracks for the next 10 years. But guess what. Our Congress passed the heinous restrictions overwhelmingly, the first such action Congress had taken against any nation, and 10 years later, they passed an extension of the Exclusion Act for another 10 years.

Then in 1902, our wise and magnanimous Congress said enough is enough. This time, they made the law permanent.

Now I can’t recall learning any of this back in my school days, no doubt a comfort to many framers of school curricula today who worry so devoutly about disturbing their fragile offspring. Lucky for them, The Chinese Lady was written before the COVID-19 pandemic rekindled widespread hatred and violence toward Asians. Tynes-Miller refrains from layering on any additional references to the re-emergence of this ugly bigotry, a kindness that was not granted by last year’s New York revival at the Public Theatre.

Still, Suh’s play won’t appeal to the haters or the educational censors who redline uncomfortable highlights of American history. Big green light, though, for those of you who feel like we should all know our history as fully and fairly as possible. You will be rewarded with new insights and an extraordinary pair of performances by both Wada and West-Rogers.

Walls and Borders Lurk Invisibly in “how to make an American Son”

Review: how to make an American Son at Barber Theatre

By Perry Tannenbaum

Beyond the first two capital letters ever used by playwright christopher oscar peña in any of his titles, peña injects a joke or two into his newest, how to make an American Son. Within a few minutes, we learn that Mando, the father of the title character, Orlando, doesn’t have the slightest interest in parenting. Mentoring or shaping Orlando as he journeys from childhood to adulthood seem to have been forgotten, replaced by a compulsion to provide him with the best that money can buy.

And then by setting limits on what the kid buys on Dad’s credit. Not so easy when you haven’t been concerned with parenting or tough love for the past 16 years.

We also learn that Mando, the founder/CEO of a successful janitorial firm, is a Honduran immigrant and his son was born in the US. So Orlando is an American! In the crudest sense, the fabrication of our young antihero was successfully consummated in dimly-lit intimacy.

Clearly, peña is working with a more nuanced definition of what an American truly is, pursuing a more nuanced answer on how one is made. Orlando is gay, piling fresh levels of challenge and difficulty on his quest to reach a feeling of belonging while making that quest more widely relatable to any member of a family with someone who has come out. Mom and Dad, to their credit, have accepted their son’s sexuality, though Mom (never seen) prefers that Orlando date Latinos.

Whether or not he has been bolstered by his parents’ liberal leanings, Orlando is fairly strong-willed. Yet he also has that second-generation softness of suburban children who take their money and privilege for granted, never needing to stoop or get down on his knees to clean a toilet at home or at work. We get different perspectives as new characters take us from Mando’s office to Orlando’s elite school, the interior of a schoolmate’s car, and the lobby of Mando’s most valuable client.

Toss in a careful, diligently hard-working immigrant, who reflects Mando’s work ethic more faithfully than his son, and you can see why peña’s piece appeals so strongly to Common Thread Theatre Collective. Formed last summer by theatre faculty at Davidson College and North Carolina A&T University, the nation’s largest HBCU, Common Thread pushes back against the top-down power dynamic of most professional companies. The Collective seeks to include rather than exclude perspectives of women, LGBTQ+ artists, and artists of color while highlighting today’s most critical issues.

At Barber Theatre, on Davidson’s liberal arts college campus, it’s safe to say that immigration, class divisions, and homophobia fit the bill. White folks aren’t banned from this conversation, but they comprise only one-third of peña’s cast and get an even smaller cut of the stage time. There’s a breezy lightheartedness at the core of Mando’s attempts to check Orlando’s extravagances – a new leather bag for school, tickets to a Madonna concert, and an impulse purchase of Rage Against the Machine tickets to impress the white schoolmate he’s hoping to date.

Comedy lurks in the details because Orlando can run circles around his dad with his tech savvy while he remains so self-centered and immature. A native Honduran who has assimilated more thoroughly than Mando, Rigo Nova brings a streetwise authenticity to this gruff businessman even though has chosen a more urbane path for himself. He makes Mando a juicy target for his son’s slights and barbs, only adding more to the impact of his own thrusts with his scarcely filtered vulgarity.

Directing this play in her Metrolina debut, Holly Nañes calls for a nicely calibrated mix of shock, resentment, curiosity, and cool from Nicolas Zuluaga as Orlando when his dad finally sheds his customary benevolence and test-drives the idea of punishment. There are no onsets of diligence, penitence, or heightened seriousness in Zuluaga’s demeanor as he dons a janitorial uniform for the first time in his life. Nor is there any childish pouting or seething resentment as he’s paired up with Rafael, the lowly immigrant.

That breeziness while playing with fire sometimes reminded me of Athol Fugard’s Master Harold in his insouciant superiority; at other times, when seducing Rafael, Curley’s wife from John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men came to mind – an undertow of foreboding as Orlando’s differences with Rafael mirror those he has with his dad. Zuluaga’s almost slothful dominance is nicely complemented by Richard Calderon’s wary and subdued debut as Rafael. He isn’t busting his butt either as he engages Orlando, but he’s working rather than slacking. We can see what Rafael has been through and that he knows the drill.

Striving to get over on Sean, the school jock and Rage Against fanatic, Orlando instinctively drops his cool superiority. We surely see that Logan Pavia as Sean is playing him, ruthlessly confident that he can get what he wants. Maybe Pavia’s audacity shocks you anyhow. The same sort of flipflop happens when Mando shows up Dick’s office, hoping his most-valued client will renew his contract.

We don’t see Rob Addison as Dick until late in the action, and it might have helped a little if we’d gotten to know the white plutocrat better. For this is Addison’s only scene, arguably the most explosive scene of the night as two generations of whites and Hispanics square off. A second blowup afterwards, registering somewhat less on the Richter scale, happens when Mando peeps in on his son and Rafael at precisely the wrong moment.

Stacy Fernandez as Mercedes, newly promoted to become Mando’s general manager, doesn’t witness either of these blowups – or Orlando’s humiliation in Sean’s car. That’s a double humiliation for Orlando because his dad has paused his promise to buy him a car. Without these contexts, Mercedes has a radically different perspective on how to make an American son than the one taking shape for Orlando and his dad. Fernandez gets the opportunity to express this bitter viewpoint in a blowup of her own, and she does not misfire – what she sees, we must acknowledge, is no less valid than what the men see.

Slick and antiseptic, Harlan D. Penn’s glassy set design thoroughly purges Mando’s office of any color, artifact, or furniture that might be regarded as ethnic. Even the bookcases are vacuously neutral, populated with trophies, plaques, correspondence, business records, and binders. As the script swiftly underscores, no books. One shelf is entirely devoted to cleaning liquids, always at the ready in case a fingerprint sprouts up on a glass window or a door.

We may yearn occasionally for less polished flooring to separate us from Mando’s desk and the full-size Honduran flag that hangs vertically behind him. The frequently mopped surfaces evoke a sterile lab or an ER lobby where dirt comes to die. Or with that flag perennially in the distance, we might view that empty space as the desert that Latinx immigrants have crossed to get here. Or the spanking clean desert they found when they arrived.

Peppered with a contemptuous sneer, what Mercedes would tell you in answer to peña’s prompt is that both father and son have effortlessly become Americans without even trying. The answer Mando and Orlando would give you is grimmer than that.

By the end of the evening, thanks to peña’s deft plotting, there are battle scars supporting both points of view. The Donald’s wall across our southern border is the worst by far, but peña methodically shows us that it isn’t the only one.

ILA Summer Fest Overachieves With Semi-Staged “Tales of Hoffmann”

Review: The Tales of Hoffmann at the International Lyric Academy Festival

By Perry Tannenbaum

July 5, 2023, Charlotte, NC – Maybe Charlotte’s best-kept cultural secret ever, the 29th International Lyric Academy Summer Festival was officially announced by its partner, Opera Carolina, two days after it had actually begun! From as far away as Cape Town and Seoul, around 150 singers, teachers, accompanists, and conductors had converged on the Central Piedmont Community College to begin a transcontinental five-week program in the Queen City.

The Charlotte segment of this intensive training for young and emerging artists hopscotched from classrooms and rehearsal halls behind-the-scenes during ILA’s first week to CP’s grandest stage, the Dale F. Halton Theater, for the public performances marking the second week. Amid the hullabaloo, two of the College’s venues were discarded from the original festival announcement and poster art, Tate Recital Hall and the new Parr Center, adding to the impression of hurry, indecision, and feverish excitement during the ILA Festival’s opening nights.

Yet the performances I’ve seen have gone marvelously well, showcasing a wide-range of vocal talent and experience, affording us tantalizing glimpses of youngsters taking the stage for the first time and emerging artists well-poised to embark on professional careers. The opening holiday weekend featured two Florilegium concerts offering a potpourri of solo arias; a Mozart Marathon that provided arias from Don Giovanni, Cosi fan Tutte, The Magic, and generous foretastes of La Nozze di Figaro; and a sampling of opera scenes, often spotlighting multiple singers and occasionally venturing into the realm of Broadway musical theatre. Of course, as the middle week unfolded, we could look at the pocket-sized Festival Program and piece together where the singers who were performing in concert would fit into the lineups for the two opera productions that would highlight the final week of this Festival’s US premiere, a semi-staged The Tales of Hoffmann bookending a pair of fully-staged presentations of The Marriage of Figaro.

As the veil lifted from the quality of talent we would witness in the ILA Festival’s climactic week of opera productions, an aura of mystery still lingered over what the upcoming “semi-staged” Tales of Hoffmann might look like. Would it borrow the scenery from Figaro, which is taking over the Halton for the next two nights? Would there be any props, costumes, or furnishings onstage? Will the main singers be holding scripts for the dialogue or scores for the music? Reading stage productions by Charlotte’s theatre companies, I know very well, have taken many shapes over the years, sometimes as austere as actors dressed devoutly in black-and-white, delivering their lines behind music stands. Directors who stick to that format are heartless brutes in my eyes.

Opera lovers across the Metrolina area – and across the Carolinas – can rest assured that the ILA Summer Festival is for real, dispenses with scripts and scores, and delivers the goods. James Meena, Opera Carolina’s artistic director, has revealed that the process of advertising, taking applications, and auditioning for spots at the festival – in six different cities – began last July. However new the template was to Meena and the US, it has obviously proved tried-and-true in Rome, where ILA was founded, and in Vicenza where it resides today.

With Meena in the orchestra pit directing an ensemble of at least 20 musicians, and Peter Boon Koh stage directing a cast of 25 actors and choristers, the production looked very polished and not at all bare-boned. Koh deftly had most of the players in modern dress, many of them sporting cellphones in the crowd scenes in Acts 1 and 3. When Olympia winds down, soprano Amber Romero as the life-size automaton who enchants Hoffmann droops forward as usual, but instead of winding her back up with a conspicuous key, tenor Ethan Stinson as dollmaker Spallanzani simply waves a remote control at her while seated behind his garish cut-rate harp.

Meena and Koh have trimmed the opera, which runs between 130 and 140 minutes on recordings, to a sleek 90 minutes, cutting the Prologue and thus depriving South African tenor Luvo Maranti as Hoffmann of his most winsome aria, detailing the legend of Kleinzach, the hunchbacked court jester. We go straight into his misadventures with three iconic sopranos, Huiying Chen as the frail Antonia following Romero, and Ruijing Guo bringing ruination to Hoffmann as femme-fatale courtesan Giulietta. All of these voices exceeded expectations, but the most astonishing were Maranti, Romero, and baritone Zhenpang Zhang who slithered across the stage in three demonic roles as Hoffman’s perennial nemesis, mad scientist Coppelius, quack Doctor Miracle, and – most menacingly – the sorcerer Dappertutto.

The excellence did not stop there, for as Stinson was performing his comical exploits as the devious dollmaker, tenor Jonathan White was beginning his medley of comical turns as his servant Cochenille, culminating in his Act 2 showstopper as Frantz, the cruel and possessive Crespel’s blissfully deaf old servant. The skeletal scenery borrowed from Figaro has a winding staircase leading gracefully upwards to a balcony level, where the portrait of Antonia’s mother can come to life and the temptress Giulietta can begin her imperious and bewitching descent. Supertitles are shown on TV monitors flanking the stage, amply sized so your neck gets a good workout keeping up with the French.

With ticket prices topping out at $35, productions like this and the upcoming Figaro are as accessible as they are irresistible. The US festival concludes on Saturday night with the encore performance of the Offenbach after two consecutive nights of fully-staged Mozart at the same prices. For those who prefer the Broadway style, there’s a Saturday matinee, With a Song in My Heart, paying tribute to Richard Rodgers. Then ILA 29 takes flight to Vicenza, near Venice and Verona, for an additional two weeks of training and performances. Surely, Halton will be more crammed with young and old operagoers in years to come as the ILA Summer Festival continues to grow and word-of-mouth proclaims its high quality. Like Spoleto Festival USA, it’s another great coup for the Carolinas.

Charlotte Bach Fest Opens With Christmas-in-June Verve and Plenty of Brass

Review: Christmas Oratorio at Charlotte Bach Festival

By Perry Tannenbaum

June 10, 2023, Charlotte, NC – When Bach Akademie Charlotte artistic director Scott Allen Jarrett explains the oddity, it makes perfect sense. Nothing that Johann Sebastian Bach wrote is more perfectly suited for presentation at the Charlotte Bach Festival than his Christmas Oratorio, even though the Akademie’s festival is celebrated in June. Bach never intended this oratorio to be performed annually on just one occasion. No, each of the six parts of the Oratorio was to be performed on a different day of an extended Christmas celebration, extending to the Feast of Epiphany on January 6 and including New Year’s Day festivities on January 1, marking the Feast of the Circumcision and Naming of Jesus.

Similarly, Jarrett is dicing the six parts of the oratorio into four concerts, two evenings at Myers Park Presbyterian Church and two Bach Experience matinees at Myers Park United Methodist, spreading out Oratorio performances over a period of four days. Interspersed with these choral events, a harp recital at the Olde Mecklenburg Brewery, an Uptown organ recital at St. Peter’s Episcopal, and a vocal fellows recital give the five-day fest extra variety and reach.

Recordings of the complete Oratorio range in length from 2:15 to 2:45, and the timings listed in the wonderfully informative Festival Program Guide add up to 2:28, just below the median. If 148 minutes of music divvied into four concerts sounds like small portions, never fear. Each of the Oratorio concerts is fortified with at least one other Bach piece, and each concert is illuminated by a Jarrett intro or lecture, with demonstrations at the lunchtime Experiences. The opening concert at Myers Park Presbyterian began the cycle with Parts 1 and 2 of the Oratorio, “The Birth of Jesus” and “The Annunciation of the Shepherds.” These delights were followed after intermission by one of two Sanctus settings that will be presented at this year’s Festival, and a “Cantata for Christmas Day,” Christen, ätzet diesen Tag.

The opening Chorus of “The Birth,” with pounding timpani and three baroque trumpets triggering the ensemble’s proclamation of “this Day of Salvation,” brought back ancient memories. My first encounter with the Oratorio was in the late ‘80s when I borrowed it on a set of CDs from the Mecklenburg Public Library. There was a brilliant flash of familiarity moments after I pressed the play button, for I had previously dubbed a marvelous recording, by tenor/conductor Peter Schreier and soprano Edith Mathis, of two earlier Cantatas by Bach, BWV 213, and 214, both written to celebrate auspicious birthdays. It was the opening of the latter Cantata, written for the nobody less than the Queen of Poland, that leaped to mind as soon as the Christmas Oratorio began because the music and scoring are exactly the same. Only the text is changed. As Brett Kostrzewski’s program notes meticulously chronicle, both of the Cantatas on the Schreier recording (with the Berlin Chamber Orchestra) figure prominently in the first four parts of this Oratorio.

Looking up the recording on Spotify, you’ll find that the opening chorus of BWV 214 is by far the most popular track on the album, racking up more plays than the other eight sections of that Cantata combined. So Bach chose well, and the three baroque trumpets played live at Myers Park Presbyterian were far more thrilling than any recording can convey – and that’s before the éclat of the chorus layered on. When the 16 voices are trumpeting “this Day of Salvation,” they’re singing music that Bach previously set to “trumpets resound!” It was nothing short of thunder where I sat.

Tenor Gene Stenger was the Evangelist in both Parts 1 and 2, a warm and authoritative narrator. For anyone who hadn’t experienced the solo voices in the Bach Festival Chorus before, alto Sylvia Leith quickly established that they would be topnotch, with a creamy rendition of the “Prepare thyself, Zion” aria, preceded by a stirring recitative. Edmund Milly, singing the bass solos in the penultimate pair of movements before the concluding Chorale and the return of the trumpets, kindled and rekindled a dignified fire. There are full texts and translations in the Program Guide, so the German can be followed word by word and understood, but if you were simply satisfied with the translations, they were alertly – and legibly – projected on both sides of the stage for even more comfort amid the sonic excitement.

Though the trumpets temporarily retired, Part 2 was not at all anticlimactic, unfolding more gradually with a Sinfonia and another Evangelist pronouncement from Stenger before the onset of the full chorus. Stenger parleyed briefly with soprano Arwen Myers, portraying the Angel, who announced the birth of a savior, in the City of David, to the shepherds. Milly reappeared almost as much in Recitative as Stenger the Evangelist, with new voices taking on the Arias. “Happy shepherds” was a special treat as tenor Patrick Muehleise joined in a jocund duet with principal flutist Colin St-Martin.

After the intermission and the brief setting of the Sanctus (which has a very special place in the Jewish liturgy as well), we had to be impressed when Jarrett told us that Christen, ätzet diesen Tag was the only Bach piece he knew of that was scored for as many as four trumpets. Co-principals Josh Cohen and Perry Sutton, mainstays at Charlotte Bach since 2018 and 2019 respectively, were joined this year by Dillon Parker and a Charlotte Symphony recruit, principal trumpet Alex Wilborn, usually seen with a modern valved horn. Written a full 20 years before the Christmas Oratorio, the Cantata for Christmas Day showed off different colors and vocal configurations, and Jarrett chose vocal and instrumental soloists who hadn’t been featured before the break, adding to the freshness of the performance.

The heavy brass-and-drums artillery in the opening and closing sections of the earlier Cantata was as thumping as the bookends of the Christmas Day suite in Part 1of the Oratorio. Thank you, Jonathan Hess, for your verve on the timpani. No Evangelist or storyline appeared here, for this earlier Bach work was more prayerful and preachy in its celebration. Laura Atkinson sang the long alto recitative, stressing how the birth of Jesus is the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy. After tenor Corey Shotwell extolled the newborn as a relief from the fear and sorrow that “poor Israel had been oppressed [with] unduly,” Atkinson joined him in a superb “Come and bring your prayers to heaven” duet.They were only slightly upstaged by the more leisurely paced duet that preceded them, “Lord how blest is thine ordaining,” the true centerpiece between the brassy bookends of the Cantata. Surely this was one of the highpoints of the evening. Principal oboist Margaret Owens shone in accompanying soprano MaryRuth Miller and bass Craig Juricka, ably embroidering the intervals between their vocals. The repose of this song beautifully combined the spirits of Christmas and thanksgiving.