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 96^th 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

August 27, 2023TheatreAJ White, Daniel Hight, Eric Hoff, Eric Martinez, Harley, Iris DeWitt, J. Christopher Brown, Lamar Davis, Neifert Enrique, Nick Southwick, Paul Fisher, Shaniya Simmons, Steppenwolf Garage, Valerie Thames, Zachary Parham, Zelena Sierraperryt77

**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 29^th 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.

Living Legends and Young Lionesses Featured in Spoleto Festival USA Jazz Lineup

Review: Brandee Younger, Henry Threadgill Zooid, Immanuel Wilkins Quartet, and Abdullah Ibrahim & Ekaya at Spoleto Festival USA

By Perry Tannenbaum

Respect for the elders in this year’s Spoleto Festival USA jazz lineup was gracefully counterbalanced by a hearty welcome to newer generations. It only felt fleetingly like the closing of the book on a previous era when South Africa’s iconic pianist-composer Abdullah Ibrahim returned to Charleston, one of the last – if not the very last – headliners booked for the canceled 2020 festival to make his belated post-pandemic appearance.

Henry Threadgill, the NEA Jazz Master and 2016 Pulitzer Prize winner for his In for a Penny, In for a Pound, was the other esteemed elder in the lineup, making his overdue debut at Spoleto. Festival jazz curator Larry Blumenfeld, who would have interviewed Ibrahim in 2020, had no difficulty shifting his Jazz Talks events – and venues – to Threadgill at the Riviera Theatre and harpist Brandee Younger at Queen Street Playhouse, two halls that had never been in play at Spoleto before.

Younger was announced as a substitution (for Courtney Bryan) just three weeks before Spoleto opened on May 26, adding to the luster of Blumenfeld’s agility – as a producer and as an interviewer. Other young lions and lionesses in the lineup included Charleston native Quentin Baxter, Kris Davis Diatom Ribbons, and the Immanuel Wilkins Quartet.

Ibrahim, absent from the festival for an epic 25 years, may have carved the largest arc of departure and return in Spoleto history, but others in the lineup had links with past festivals. Baxter appeared with Ranky Tanky in 2018 and as a concert host in other years, Diatom Ribbons included guitarist Julian Lage (2010) and NEA Master Terri Lyne Carrington (2019), and Younger was a gleaming feature of last year’s Universal Consciousness, Ravi Coltrane’s stunning tribute to his mom, Alice Coltrane.

Rashaan Carter, Younger’s bassist, was also a holdover from Ravi’s tribute – and so, almost inevitably, were additional nods to Alice Coltrane in a well-chosen pair of compositions. The first of these, “Ghost Trane” from Coltrane’s Monastic Trio album of 1968, set a nifty precedent for the second nod to follow, “Turiya and Ramakrishna” from the imposing Ptah, The El Daoud release of 1970. Both were recorded by Coltrane on piano rather than behind her iconic harp, expelling any taint of imitation from Younger’s performances.

If you ever thought Alice couldn’t truly belong in a John Coltrane Quartet, or if you’ve thought of her strictly in terms of spirituality and ethereality, the original “Ghost Trane” track, with its groovy line and Coltrane’s finger-busting solo, will dispel your delusions. After an intro that subtly suggested the line to come, Younger made the lustrous, silky sound of her harp swing. Jumping off into her improvisations, riffing with wave after wave of invention, Younger almost dared anyone to say she is anything less than the McCoy Tyner of the harp. Yet it would be silly to pretend that any pianist could play as softly as Brandee did on her outro.

Nor would it be correct to imply that Younger allowed the sublimity of Alice Coltrane to be forgotten for long. “Love & Struggle” had a mixture of sublime Coltrane with a few flecks of soaring Carlos Santana fire, punctuated by a couple of fine Carter solos on acoustic bass. Fitfully, Younger’s harp can evoke the sound of a guitar or reverberate like a set of vibes – even within her harp timbre, she can veer away from the velvety, mesmerizing Coltrane idiom into the crisper sound Dorothy Ashby espoused.

“Unrest,” parts I and II, delivered without a pause, began with an extended meditative Younger solo before Allan Mednard, filling out the trio on drums, and Carter abruptly upshifted the tempo. Younger began comping chords behind her rhythm as Mednard steadily galloped until Carter briefly emerged as the dominant ingredient in the percolating stew, leaving space for Mednard to back away, restart, and take over with a palpitating solo. As in the previous piece, the drummer had the last word.

“Turiya and Ramakrishna” and “Spirit U Will” continued on this lofty plane. “Turiya” was the more exciting of the two because it revivified Coltrane’s piano version with virtuosic brio and it was the one title on this setlist that Younger hasn’t recorded. Taking us gracefully into a soft landing, Younger finished with two titles from her current Brand New Life release – a beautiful “If It’s Magic” solo that hushed the hall and a sweet trio version of “You’re a Girl for One Man Only” at a loping mid-tempo.

After Younger played Spoleto’s first jazz gig at the Queen Street, Threadgill turned a longtime theatre and dance venue, Sottile Theatre, back into a jazz hall for the first time since 2007, when Dino Saluzzi and Anja Lechner played there. Unluckily, Ibrahim was scheduled to reopen the Sottile to jazz in 2020, which would have been the largest jazz group to perform there since the Fred Hersch Ensemble, with Kurt Elling and Ralph Alessi, in 2004. Tyshawn Sorey put the classy old place into play at last year’s Spoleto in the capacity of a composer, when a concert of his classical works was performed at the Sottile in the wake of his jazz trio’s performance at TD Arena two nights earlier.

Acoustically, the idea worked well, as Threadgill and his oddly configured Zooid quintet played a set of six selections culled from releases stretching back to their This Brings Us To, Vol. 1 of 2009, plus a newborn to end the program. The lineup included, but did not overstress, Threadgill’s Pulitzer Prize winner, dipping more generously into his newer Poof outing with the group.

No matter how far the group hearkened back, they still looked and sounded cutting-edge, Threadgill starting out on flute for the first two compositions, “To Undertake My Corners Open” and “Beneath the Bottom,” before switching to his alto horn for “Chairmaster.” Jose Davila followed a parallel path, switching from trombone to tuba, playing the intro to “Chairmaster” over Christopher Hoffman’s cello until Threadgill entered with such rambunctiousness on alto that he briefly reminded me of Eric Dolphy. Hoffman then went into a bowed solo, further varying the sound palette.

Found more readily in a Google search than by scouring Threadgill’s discography, “Not the White Flag” was a special live treat, begun by Davila on tuba before Threadgill, Hoffman, and guitarist Liberty Ellman took a series of tasty solos. Continuing to blur the borderline between composition and improvisation, Threadgill returned with a mysteriously diffident coda.

The genial stridency of “Now and Then,” very much in an Ornette Coleman mold on Zooid’s recent Poof album, had more Hoffman cello beneath Davila’s tuba ramblings, a brief bluesy interlude in the middle, with Ellman’s guitar explorations moved to the end of the arrangement. “Off the Prompt Box” retained its astringency from the In for a Penny release with Hoffman’s bowed solo, yet it sprouted new sections before and after the cellist seized the spotlight, allowing Threadgill fresh opportunities to extemporize on alto, most notably after Chris slowed the tempo.

Threadgill’s new composition, “Fluoroscope,” was an apt closer for his Sottile set, not only affording ample space to showcase the members of the quintet but also bringing a rugged circularity to the concert. Zooid drummer Elliot Humberto Kavee, who began the concert so auspiciously with an extended solo on “Undertake My Corners” – playing his cymbals, toms, high-hat, and pedal rather than thrashing them – drew the spotlight three times in this final arrangement. Ellman and Threadgill hooked up in the final section of this impressive concert.

Starting off his five-show engagement at Queen Street, Wilkins plunged straight into a set of compositions he is readying for the studio, accessorized with some electronics that the altoist used sparingly and initially struggled with. Yet the minor difficulties never obscured the exquisite chemistry of this quartet, with Micah Thomas at the keyboard, Rick Rosato on bass, and Kweku Sumbry behind the drums. Wherever it was emanating from so softly, the synthesized vamp from Wilkins’ electronics barely intruded as he played the line and soloed on “The Big Country,” discreetly disappearing as Thomas held forth.

Detractors might have charged that the synthesized sounds interrupted the flow of music in “Apparition,” bridging the gap between the leader’s solo and the rhythm section’s takeover, while defenders might claim they personified the title. Wilkins himself seemed a bit dissatisfied, calling out to the soundbooth, and the next two numbers were acoustically sourced, mics working well though Immanuel’s monitor may have been a concern.

By shedding their electronic woes, Wilkins and the quartet reached higher altitudes with their music. Grooving into a mellow mid-tempo, “Dark Eyes Smile” was their most engaging piece so far, Wilkins introducing the line over Rosato’s bass, then sharing solo honors with Thomas before returning for the outchorus. The ascent continued to its zenith with “If That Blood Runs East,” where piano and alto harmonized on the melody before Sumbry kicked up the tempo behind the kit. Thomas mostly asserted himself afterward via a hypnotic ostinato while Wilkins soloed, ceding the spotlight back to Sumbry before re-entering for a moody landing.

“Blues Blood,” the closer, was no less exciting and even more varied, for Wilkins was emboldened to try out his electronics once more after he and Thomas had soloed. Before settling into a bluesy groove as Wilkins vamped, Thomas showed us he could swing as well, and as this winsome tune faded out, he sprinkled some gospel flavoring into his comping.

Wilkins’ engagement at Queen Street was fortuitously timed, so that he and the quartet could take in the Threadgill concert on the evening before their four-day engagement began and comfortably peep in on Ibrahim and Ekaya midway through his sojourn after his second performance. Ironically, Ibrahim’s timing turned out to be less fortunate. Bad weather prevented him from returning to Cistern Yard, one of the two festival sites where he played in 1998.

Instead, the concert was transplanted indoors to the TD Arena a couple of blocks away, where the sound is better than the lighting and the lawn seating can be faithfully replicated. Delayed by the rescheduling, Ibrahim’s arrival in the College of Charleston basketball arena was more solemn and dramatic in the dimmer light. Aside from introducing the members of Ekaya, the Zulu word for homeland, we heard little from Ibrahim, but it’s very likely that the Ekaya sextet heard – and saw – plenty of prompts from their leader.

The intricate tapestry woven by the ensemble included seven piano solos from Ibrahim, three trio performances, and six arrangements with the horns – 14 Ibrahim compositions doled out into seven music clusters – before the group returned after a feint toward the exit and covered Thelonious Monk’s “Skippy” in their encore. Most easily recognized among the Ekaya arrangements were “Tuang Guru” and “Nisa” from The Balance,the 2019 release where “Skippy” also appears.

After a trio entrance that was likely an abbreviated “Mindiff,” a chameleonic staple in Ibrahim’s discography that he has recorded in multiple forms, Cleave E. Guyton, Jr., jumped all over bassist Noah Jackson and drummer Will Terrill with his piccolo, the signature instrument of “Tuang Guru” in the studio version. Michael Pallas took a fine solo on trombone before Lance Bryant, a session mate with the rhythm section on The Balance, steered the arrangement toward solemnity with his tenor sax – and more massive scoring with the horns and piccolo.

Joshua Lee’s bodacious baritone sax solo was the most salient identifier when we segued from an Ibrahim solo, likely on “For Coltrane,” to an epic arrangement of “Nisa.” Guyton switched to flute on this piece, and there were succinct and tasty solos from Bryant and Jackson. In his ability to stamp his individuality and genius on a piece in the space of eight bars or less, Ibrahim reminded me here of Ellington in his concise regality after the tempo slowed to a stately march. Yet after the reeds and Jackson had distinguished themselves, Pallas emerged as the dominant force in this arrangement, soloing and leading the horns with his muted trombone, then opening up for a brilliant cadenza.

At age 88, Ibrahim still has impressive skills, a prodigious band, and enough venturesome spirit – and trust in his musicians – to continue tinkering with his arrangements. “Skippy” as an encore was notably different from the studio track, with Guyton switching back to flute and Jackson back to bowed cello, the weaponry they had used at the start of the concert, and without a clarinet solo from Guyton, a highlight of the 2016 Mukashi album, it was difficult to be sure where “Mississippi” occurred in the magnificent 80-minute concert.

So let’s prayerfully put it out there that four years is already too long since the most recent Ibrahim & Ekaya recording. Greedy though the request may be, we need to hear more.

Opera Carolina Takes Off on an International Flight

Preview: International Lyric Academy Summer Festival

By Perry Tannenbaum

Look up, look around, and look quick. There’s a new international music festival here in Charlotte, and it’s already in progress. Opera Carolina announced their new International Lyric Academy Summer Music Festival mid-week a week ago, two days after the 86 singers who will performing arrived in the Queen City to begin master classes and rehearsals. The first Festival event, a Florilegium concert, was staged on Wednesday night at Central Piedmont Community College.

Apparently, Charlotte was not caught by surprise. Both the Wednesday and Friday night performances of Florilegium were moved from the upstairs Tate Recital Hall in the Overcash Building to the larger Dale F. Halton Theater below, where the popular CP Summer Theatre resided in the good old days.

Founded in Rome and now based in Vicenza, Italy, the International Lyric Academy has staged 28 Summer Festivals since 1995, but the 2023 will be the program’s first festival in the US. So yeah, this is quite a coup for Opera Carolina and artistic director James Meena.

Singers in the opera program will perform two additional concert programs, a Mozart Marathon (June 29) and an Opera Scenes Program (July 3) before two operas take over the Halton stage for two performances each, a semi-staged Tales of Hoffman (July 5 and 8) and a fully-staged Marriage of Figaro (July 6-7). Meanwhile, 30 more singers are flying into Charlotte for the Broadway musical component of the ILA Summer Festival.

Before ILA’s first US festival concludes next Saturday with the evening performance of Tales of Hoffman, the musical theatre singers will sparkle on the Halton stage with a matinee tribute to Richard Rodgers, With a Song in My Heart. For the opera singers, the show will go on – to Vicenza, where they will reprise their US opera and concert performances.

“The whole company gets on a plane and we go to Italy for two weeks and do classes with different master teachers there and perform in the theater,” says Meena, who is ILA’s guest conductor in Italy. “Vicenza is between Venice and Verona. So basically, we take over the theater for two weeks. These emerging artists get to perform here, and then they actually get to perform in Italy. We’ve invited a handful of intendants [opera impresarios] from Italian theaters to come to the performances and hear the kids. So it’s an amazing opportunity for them.”

The new festival in Charlotte represents a quantum leap in Opera Carolina’s youth education program and a magnificent expansion of their resident company. Now that the pilot program has emerged from under the radar, Meena will be meeting with his board to decide whether they will authorize a complete integration of the Academy into Opera Carolina – or whether they will continue working as separate entities to produce future Summer Festivals.

Working with so many emerging artists at the same time clearly had Meena excited when we spoke. While he was in rehearsals getting ready to conduct next week’s performances of Jacques Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffman, Stefano Vignati, ILA’s artistic director and founder, was readying the full-dress version of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, a comedy masterwork that figures prominently in any serious discussion of the greatest operas ever written.

The breadth of the program is as breathtaking as its sudden arrival.

“Our education department all of a sudden becomes youth through young adults!” Meena exults. “So it’s really pretty audacious. No other company that I know of other than Chicago Lyric and the Met and San Francisco are providing professional opportunities like this for emerging artists. So it’s pretty cool. We’re pretty excited about it all.”

Advertisements to attract young artists to the program began last July, and the program already has a network of university instructors spreading the word – in Toronto, Cape Town, Seoul, LA, and other US locations. The audition process began virtually before the decisive live auditions in six different cities.

When you add up the 86 opera aspirants with the 30 musical theatre recruits, you have a youth program that begins to rival that of Spoleto Festival USA, the annual arts behemoth that takes over Charleston for 17 days. Meena doesn’t shy away from the comparison.

“If we do this well,” he says, “this can become different than Spoleto but on that scale.”

There’s certainly a niche for it, since Spoleto has never done Sweeney Todd or West Side Story – and CP Summer Theatre staged both of those Broadway classics in its long history before making a quiet exit last year. But the combination of opera and musical theatre, in programming or in pedagogy is nothing new.

“We’ve been blurring the lines between American music theater and opera for decades, really,” Meena explains, “since Beverly Sills first started the City Opera, when she did Brigadoon. So it makes sense for us to get music theater kids, teach them a bit about classical singing, which can only help their performing, and then work that curriculum, really, to add some more diversity to the performances. If we do this well, by 2024, the music theater program will be probably two weeks. The opera program would be four weeks.”

Not only a big deal but a great deal. Two of the ILA Summer Festival concerts are free, and ticket prices top out at $35 for the rest. Festival passports are also on sale.

Art on My Sleeve

PERRY TANNENBAUM >>> Covers and Critiques the Performing Arts

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Review: how to make an American Son at Barber Theatre

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

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

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

**Review: Christmas Oratorio at Charlotte Bach Festival**

Living Legends and Young Lionesses Featured in Spoleto Festival USA Jazz Lineup

Opera Carolina Takes Off on an International Flight

Review: The Wizard of Oz at Theatre Charlotte

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Review: A Soldier’s Play at The Gettys Center

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Review: Hit the Wall at The Arts Factory

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

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Review: Christmas Oratorio at Charlotte Bach Festival

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**Review: The Wizard of Oz at Theatre Charlotte**

**Review: A Soldier’s Play at The Gettys Center**

**Review: Hit the Wall at The Arts Factory**

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

**Review: The Chinese Lady at The Arts Factory**

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

**Review: Christmas Oratorio at Charlotte Bach Festival**