With a Riddling Program, Sphinx Virtuosi Youthfully Inspire Symphony’s Gala

Review: Sphinx Virtuosi @ Charlotte Symphony’s Annual Gala

By Perry Tannenbaum

October 9, 2024, Charlotte, NC – It’s always encouraging when an annual gala at least partially sheds its patrician aura of black ties, ball gowns, and champagne toasts. So I heartily applauded Charlotte Symphony’s musical director emeritus Christopher Warren-Green when, instead of mentioning crass sums of moneys raised or needed, he notified us that a part of tonight’s proceeds would be sent to those in dire straits in Western North Carolina in the wake of Hurricane Helene. In an even more unexpected gesture, the evening’s guests, Sphinx Virtuosi, announced that they would linger in Charlotte to play an additional concert on Friday at Charlotte Preparatory School – free if you bring a Hurricane Helene contribution.

They all worked well, together and apart, in gifting the gala audience at Belk Theater with a fine show, though not exactly what was initially planned. Or even what was listed in the printed program. Instead, a series of changes to the program were announced by email before and after the program went to press. Even then, a couple of new wrinkles emerged after the lineup seemed to be settled in the last inbox update on September 19. Maybe the plutocrats who dined and toasted earlier at the pre-concert cocktail and dinner sessions got a heads-up.

As a result of the first alteration, changing the title of LA-based composer Levi Taylor’s from American Forms to Daydreaming (A Fantasy on Scott Joplin), the opening segment of the concert became an explicitly extended tribute to Joplin. Actually, the Overture from Joplin’s only surviving opera, Treemonisha (1911), was nearly as new as Taylor’s offering and similar in length. The orchestration chosen by Warren-Green, arranged by Jannina Norpoth with Jessie Montgomery (a Sphinx Medal of Excellence winner in 2020), was premiered last year in Toronto as part of a “reimagining” of Joplin’s opera, so it didn’t quite sound like any of the handful of versions that Spotify can offer. Principal clarinetist Taylor Marino was brilliant playing the catchy recurring theme, an instrumental assignment that Norpoth reaffirms, but principal trumpeter Alex Wilborn’s spot struck me as a lively improvement upon Norpoth’s predecessors.

In a shorter, no-intermission program, it was nice to have a proper mood-setter leading into Taylor’s premiere – and Sphinx Virtuosi’s entrance – rather than a genial throwaway aperitif. Paradoxically, the Joplin overture, aimed for an opera house, was not as raggy as Taylor’s new work, an homage to the Joplin music we’re most familiar with. Personably introduced by cellist Lindsey Sharpe, the piece had an engaging solo spot for principal cellist Tommy Mesa and a refreshing jauntiness. Amazing how much more highbrow and classical the Joplin idiom sounds when you ditch the piano so justifiably associated with the “King of Ragtime.” Taylor took a well-deserved, enthusiastically applauded bow when concertmaster Alex Gonzalez pointed him out in the audience.

Sphinx’s outreach to Helene victims is quite natural when you consider its DNA. Conceived in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan in 1997, Sphinx quickly became an important of young Black and Latino talent with its annual junior and senior competitions, open to musicians up to age 26, and its Performance Academy, a competitive boot camp, where faculty members include Norpoth, Gonzalez, and second violinist Rainel Joubert – who would play in the Delights and Dances string quartet when the Michael Abels composition, commissioned by Sphinx, had its Charlotte premiere.

The full ensemble departed – all too briefly – as Warren-Green and CSO delivered a more familiar Leonard Bernstein overture to his opera, Candide. If Sphinx had lingered offstage longer, the CSO performance might have been more prudently paced. Dynamics were OK, but when piece started off too swiftly, there was little room for Symphony to speed up when the piece thundered and thrust to its climax. The whole acceleration plus crescendo effect, so exciting in multiple Rossini overtures, was never even a possibility, surely the nadir of Warren-Green’s work with CSO as far back as I can remember.

Then the listed world premiere of Curtis Stewart’s Drill went AWOL, along with guest percussionist Britton-René Collins. This surprise was less of a disaster than the lackluster Bernstein, for the Sphinx Virtuosi returned instead with Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Allegro Moderato, the opening movement from his Four Novelleten (1903) for string orchestra. So many of Coleridge-Taylor’s principal works have yet to be recorded that it’s probable that this excavation, listed as Op. 59 in Wikipedia, has yet to get a hearing outside of Sphinx’s orbit – another gladdening example of the ensemble’s vital and generous outreach.

All the remaining works were glorious, throwing the Bernstein blooper far into our rearview mirrors. It helped a little to know your Vivaldi when Sphinx moved upstage to merge with the CSO as tango king Astor Piazzola’s “Verano Porteño (Buenos Aires Summer)” movement from his Four Seasons of Buenos Aires filled the stage with violinist Adé Williams as guest soloist. For those who saw Aisslinn Nosky playing the complete Vivaldi at the Charlotte Bach Festival, the Piazzola Four Seasons evoked some pleasant nostalgia, especially since the Festival Orchestra, like the Virtuosi, often performs without a conductor.

Williams, a winner of the Sphinx Junior Division back in 2012, still played with youthful vitality and joy. Both Symphony and Warren-Green were obviously fond of her playing, her swooping glisses, and the tango twists Piazzola brought to his baroque inspiration. Controversial in Argentina for his modifications of the trad tango – cab drivers often turned him away! – this summer piece was popular enough for Piazzola to draw encouragement for him to complete his seasonal cycle. The Belk audience responded favorably as well, with their first standing O of the evening.

The Abels piece was an even longer, grander gatherum, with the string quartet arriving upstage where Williams had just stood. Joubert and CSO principal second violin were to Warren-Green’s left opposite CSO principal viola Benjamin Geller and cellist Gabriel Cabezas, the Sphinx Medal of Excellence winner in 2016. The Delights were rather delicate before the composer, who famously co-wrote the acclaimed Omar with Rhiannon Giddens, gradually ramped up to the Dances.Cabezas was more than able to eloquently launch Abel’s slow-building piece, which tacked leftward after his engaging solo with additional solo spots for the rest of the quartet members.

Nor was Abels in any hurry to layer on the orchestra, for their first contributions were background pizzicatos behind the full quartet before they picked up their bows. The piece is no less than the title work on a 2013 album recorded by the Harlem Quartet and the Chicago Sinfonietta conducted by Mei-Ann Chen. Definitely worth a listen if you missed the gala – and Abels’ Global Warming leads off the Sphinx Virtuosi’s recent Songs of Our Times release, their first album. Some rousing fiddling embroidered the loud and lively climax of Delights & Dances, easily the most epic piece of the night, programmed in exactly the right spot.

Mexican composer Arturo Márquez’s Conga del Fuego Nuevo (1996) was no less appropriately placed in the encore slot, starting up white-hot and danceable without lowering its flame. Fully recovered from his Bernstein misadventure, Warren-Green not only led the combined ensembles zestfully, he exhibited some winsome showmanship of his own, not only bidding Wilborn to stand up for his solos on muted and unmuted trumpet, but also commanding the winds and the brass to rise when moments came. How can a piece we’ve never heard before sound so familiar? Maybe via discreet borrowing and insistent repetition. No matter, CSO’s jolly encore became a curtain call at the same time – and a wonderful welcome to the 2024-25 season. Hopefully, the Coleridge-Taylor and the Abels were previews of the next Sphinx recording.

Photos by Perry Tannenbaum

“Beyond the Surface” Amazes and Parties-Down

**Review: Beyond the Surface at McBride-Bonnefoux Center**

By Perry Tannenbaum

The new Charlotte Ballet season is off to a blazing beginning. Presenting Beyond the Surface at the McBride-Bonnefoux Center for Dance through October 26, the troupe looked fresher and younger than ever. But the choreography was far, far younger: two world premiere hatchlings that emerged from their shells last Thursday from Omar Román de Jesús and Mthuthuzeli November, and a third Charlotte Ballet commission by Jennifer Archibald that had its premiere less than two years ago in the same studio.

On that auspicious occasion, Archibald’s fledgling was at the top of the Innovative Works program, sparking hopes that the pieces that followed would reach the same high level. This year, HdrM is nestled in the middle of the program – and my 2023 hopes were already realized again in 2024 with the premiere of De Jesús’s Balúm.

Yes, the first dance of the night easily merited a climactic spot in any evening of premieres: beautiful, complex, mysterious, symbolic, intricate, moving, epic, and surreal. Music by OKRAA, Ola de Luz, was relentlessly propulsive, with random noises at random intervals littered around the main core, a minimalist loop with a harp-like timbre. Once that core cleared the noisy interference, like a spiraling starship navigating through a belt of asteroids, a sudden hypnotic calm and spaciousness prevailed – and the wonder of this dance multiplied, lending it an uncanny glow.

De Jesús has indicated that he is exploring our interactions with the air that engulfs us, from the moment we are born until we take our last breaths. Or maybe that emergence from the noise field near the beginning of the piece is an expulsion from the womb, our birth after a pre-natal prelude. The Puertorriqueño choreographer also has a hand in scenic design and Branimira Ivanova’s costume designs, for she has some specific prompts to execute in fashioning the dancers’ outfits and props.

The most notable of these are black: Two umbrellas that conjure up the surrealism of René Magritte and the fearfully magnificent ambiguity worn by Rees Launer. One of the umbrellas starts upstage center, held by one of the dancers seated on a bench, and it gets passed from dancer to dancer during the action, frequently cycling back to its starting position. The other is held stolidly by a woman on a side bench who resolutely faces away from the action until the stunningly gorgeous denouement – when we get to see the air!

At various moments when Launer grips our attention, we can have different conjectures about what his stern character represents. A raging fire-and-brimstone preacher? a demon? a witch? the Angel of Death? Launer will be a member of two of the three ensembles that get to present Balúm during its current 16-performance run. Another standout in the opening weekend’s seven-member ensemble, Maurice Mouzon Jr., will be in all the performances of this piece.

The liquefied movement of the dancers – along with some robotic intertwining – was juxtaposed with no-less-idiomatic lifts that were more horizontal than vertical. Like chapter markers at the end of episodes, the ensemble would gather and swirl around the stage in an evocative oval parade. Autumn leaves swirling in the wind. Often two or three subgroups performed simultaneously before an ensemble swirl would resolve the dissonance.

What amazed me most was that synchronized entrances and overlapping actions were so precise when there were seemingly no musical cues to give the dancers a toehold. If you’ve heard music by Philip Glass, you know that minimalism is not particularly danceable music. Musicians playing it and maestros conducting it must concentrate intently on the score to keep their bearings amid the repetitiveness. I’m still gobsmacked by how this Charlotte Ballet team pulled this off.

Following Balúm, a piece so untethered from every aspect of its music except for OKRAA’s tempo, Archibald’s HdrM struck me from an altered perspective. Archibald’s ability to mesh expressive movement to a soundtrack of musical compositions by Ludwig Ronquist, Heilung, and Federico Albanese stood out more boldly than ever after the more abstract and surreal De Jesús piece – though these intimate bonds in HdrM could be broken by abrupt mechanical disconnects from the score.

Two other conflicting factors came into play. Most welcome was the opportunity to see the Canadian-born choreographer’s work reprised by three of the eight dancers who performed at the 2023 premiere, Raven Barkley, Luke Csordas, and Shaina Wire. The piece looked more natural and “lived-in” twenty months later, so its internal contrasts were sharper and its sensual moments more relaxed. Barkley, in particular, stood forth dramatically, as sensual, captivating, and devastating as we’ve ever seen her. Nor can you fail to notice the ‘do.

Here, more than in any other dance of the evening, the ensemble bought into the “Unfiltered” theme of CharBallet’s 2024-25 season with their spirited, lyrical work. My only worry was off the dance floor and in the program booklet, where Archibald’s useful explanatory remarks where no longer in print. There in 2023, she was concerned with environmental psychology and posed a pointed question: “Is there a social responsibility to humanize architecture?”

Just asking that question helps us to connect with Archibald’s struggling language of movement. It also hints at the likelihood that Kerri Martinsen’s drab costumes are intended as institutional, such as clothing worn in hospitals, prisons, or mental wards. Aside from the contrast between lithe and mechanical movement, HdrM holds our gaze with a nice balance of ensemble, individual, and pair segments that flow naturally into one another.

Like many finales we’ve seen before from CharBallet, November’s Vibes and Variations is the most celebratory and carefree piece of the night. After last year’s From Africa With Love, it’s also the second consecutive November premiere to kick off a season at the McBride-Bonnefoux Center. Where Africa was surprisingly serene and monochromatic, preoccupied with mauve-colored ostriches from his South African homeland and their exquisite fragility, Vibes seems to wander westward to South America, to samba, tango, and carnivale.

Ivanova’s costumes burst with pastel cotton-candy colors and outré pleating, what my late mom in her saltiest Yiddish would call ongepochket, crassly over-decorated. The bulges on the men’s costumes give them seahorse legs and the frilly women look like spinning tops in a color scheme that matches the men’s harlequin-like rigs. The music starts off rather quietly with Gaby Moreno singing the first vocal on the program, her cover of “Cucurrucucu Paloma” over a simple acoustic guitar accompaniment, smoldering with bossa nova intimacy and sadness.

Things intensify as the 15-person ensemble digs into the Bang on a Can All-Stars’ version of David Lang’s strangely percussive – and minimalist – “cheating, lying, stealing.” But the most intense partying launches when we arrive at beatmaker Jamie xx and MC Moose performing the brash, irresistibly mindless “Gosh.” Catching my eye most compellingly were Csordas and Fuki Takahashi, each of whom will be in two of the three rotating ensembles performing November’s piece throughout its current run.

If I have to predict who will land the title role in Carmen next spring when artistic director Alejandro Cerrudo and CharBallet unveil their Vegas-showgirl update, my guesses would be Takahashi or Barkley. Since that Charlotte premiere will be running for two weekends, both temptresses could take turns at it.

“The Humans” Is More Haunting Than Ever

**Review: The Humans @ Armour Street Theatre**

By Perry Tannenbaum

Thanksgiving in Chinatown, in the shadow of the fallen Twin Towers – Stephen Karam’s spooky, mystifying, and hilarious The Humans hands us a world teeming with paradox. For an afternoon in a creaky old two-story apartment, newly rented by Brigid Blake and her boyfriend Richard Saad, her family gathers to celebrate, the whole lot of them nursing open wounds – and their Alzheimer’s-stricken elder, “Momo” – trying to heal from recent setbacks.

First staged in the QC at Knight Theater in a 2018 touring production starring Richard Thomas as family patriarch Erik Blake, Davidson Community Players brings us a downsized reprise in the first locally-produced staging, with the venerable Hank West in the lead.

Haunted by his return to the vicinity of Ground Zero and by his recent misdeeds, tormented by a deadly mix of sleeplessness and nightmares, Erik vies with elder daughter Aimee for which of the Blakes is suffering the most. Since last Thanksgiving, Aimee has come down with ulcerative colitis and taken major hits to her love life and her career as a Philadelphia lawyer – with major surgery looming on the horizon.

Yet Erik fires a wicked one-liner at Brigid, whose gripe, like his wife Deirdre’s, barely hovers above the “suck it up” level compared with his own. “If you’re so miserable,” he asks the health food fanatic, “why are you trying to live forever?” Inside negativity, Karam can be equally trenchant and funny when Aimee philosophizes about her recent breakup: “Maybe loving someone long-term is more about deciding whether to go through life unhappy alone or unhappy with someone else.”

Only Deirdre and Erik have an agenda for the afternoon, subtly suggested in a couple of brief dialogues. We’re mostly watching Karam’s keen observations of family interactions – their bonds, their tensions, their little quirks, and their tectonic divides. These appear all the more chaotic because dialogue often overlaps and action is happening simultaneously upstairs and in the more commodious basement.

Knight Theater probably gave us an oversized impression of Brigid and Richard’s love nest, while DCP’s Armour Street can’t help look both height- and space-challenged. Remarkably, Evan Kinsley’s more cramped set design lessens the struggle of viewing multiple tracks of action and family intrigue. Yet Karam and director Glynnis O’Donoghue are still able to provide enough compelling distraction at a key moment to allow the aged Momo to disappear without our noticing.

Even without two-story height, Kinsley’s set has an alleyway leading to an elevator shaft to accommodate the wheelchair-bound Momo’s transit between the two floors. The slice of set that serves as the upstairs somehow has enough space for the front door, an entrance to a bathroom (Aimee’s frequent retreat), and the only window looking out on the city. When the apartment’s oddities need to impact, Kinsley’s set and Sarah Provencal’s sound design deliver.

The divides between the Blakes will be familiar to anyone who has grown up in a family of siblings. Although Brigid would never consider living in Philly, the geographical divide is as important here as the generational difference, for neither of the daughters would ever think of moving back to Scranton, PA – except to a summer home that Erik tells us can move towards construction once there’s a sewer system near their pristine plot.

Those anticipated PA pilgrimages will not bring either of the sibs back into the bosom of the holy church. Nor will it erase the fact that these country folks’ children are irremediably citified, one a lawyer and the other an aspiring composer. Safety, religious, and lifestyle concerns plague the homespun parents. Ahead of their Thanksgiving visit, Deirdre has sent a care package that includes a statue of the Virgin to protect Brigid’s new home. Meanwhile, Aimee can expect an email any time a lesbian commits suicide.

Karam provides plenty for the Blakes to discuss in their near and distant back histories, with a handful of stunning updates. If things get dull, he serves up a choice collection of singularly awkward moments that would instantly embed themselves in family lore ever after, lovingly and mockingly retold at holiday dinners and special celebrations.

There’s even a “pig smash” ritual unique to Blake Thanksgivings, a nice spotlight for Richard. Often the aspiring social worker serves as our ears in his role as outsider, giving the Blakes the chance to explain all that is long-known among themselves.

These moments reverberate warmly within us, but the most haunting vibes, from Erik’s dreams and experiences, touch us all, nonchalantly invoking 9/11 and Superstorm Sandy – specters of terrorism and climate change. Over and over, whether Deirdre wheels Momo around or Aimee summons an Uber with her cell, we hear an eerie, insistent whisper from the playwright emanating from his vivid, painstakingly detailed dream: this is how we live.

On Davidson’s compacted stage at Armour Street, the natural flow of The Humans, the lack of powerhouse confrontations that shake us to the core when we witness such American classics as August: Osage County, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or The Little Foxes, reminds us of Chekhov’s more placid classics. Rich and funny and touching as all the action is, we will likely struggle to discern a solid plot until Erik’s big reveal.

Inexperienced theatergoers are therefore advised to ignore any FOMO anxieties they may be experiencing and surrender themselves to the many delights, laughs, shocks, and epiphanies that West and his castmates deliver.

On the page, Karam’s script doesn’t pop out at you with the color and verve that O’Donoghue gets from this ensemble. West actually comes onstage with a couple of key advantages over Richard Thomas. We more readily accept West as an ordinary janitor-turned-equipment-manager, and he can bring out a curmudgeonly edge to Erik that I’d never noticed before.

No less surprising is the bubbly, goofball likability that Breanna Suarez brings to Brigid, though she is often the family contrarian and party-pooper in the script. The vibrant energy she exudes somehow turns pure negativity into simple immaturity, emphasizing Brigid’s spoiled qualities. As our genial hostess, Suarez tunes in on Brigid’s side hustle as a bartender, so she’s the life of the party while subtly fueling the true plot, endearingly committing a faux pas for the ages along the way.

Portraying West’s wife for the first time since 2005, when they both earned best actor honors in Coyote Ugly, Anne Lambert makes the wait worthwhile. Although Citizen Trump famously descended his escalator in June 2015, between the time that The Humans opened Off-Broadway and when it reappeared on Broadway with a completely new cast and director, Deirdre likely struck the late-2015 Broadway crowd as a MAGA maniac.

Interestingly, Karam could have taken Hillary Clinton as his model if he had written his tragicomedy 20 years earlier, but Lambert still strikes me as a MAGA nutjob even if that couldn’t have been the playwright’s intent. The religious zeal, the paranoia, and the constant moralizing are almost non-stop, so thanks to Lambert’s implacable disapproval, Deirdre winds up ennobling Erik and humanizing her daughters – just by enduring her. Yet there is an unmistakable sincerity to this steely, troubled soul.

Deirdre’s relatively spurious sufferings also brighten Aimee’s halo. Her woes are certainly the most tangible, so Alyssa Whitting has the freedom to add some hard edges to her performance, aiming her best zingers at Brigid with an assortment of barbs for the rest of the fam. Ascending and descending DCP’s imaginary staircase for extended poops, Whitting makes a pungent impression when she’s with us. She’s the slick urban professional among the Blakes, getting better reception on her cell than Dad and handling all the key calls.

Preoccupied with the cooking, Ryan Miles as Richard is also frequently on-leave from the family flow, but he’s a fine audience surrogate when we need things explained. Without fuss or bravado, Miles keys into the fact that Richard is the most laid-back, financially secure person in the room – the one lifelong New Yorker – in between Brigid’s age and Erik’s, accentuating his unique perspective.

Momo’s lines are annoyingly repetitive and approximately 85% gibberish to my ear, meticulously transcribed by Karam word-by-nonsensical-word. So if Wandy Fernandez is accurately delivering Momo’s babblings as written without considerable improvisation, she has performed one the most prodigious feats of memory in the history of theatre. There is wonderful variety in her performance with a lovely little miracle in the middle, which of course gratifies Erik and Deirdre the most. Words or not, the woman can also throw a fit.

The cryptic ending of The Humans, where the thin thread of Karam’s plot crystallizes, was clearer to me the second time around. Along the way, it’s helpful to note the circular shape of the Blakes’ history, the dream Erik divulges stage by stage, and the explanation Richard offers. Erik’s worries, sadly enough, are suddenly more topical in the Carolinas than ever before. After Sandy, the fact that Chinatown was a Zone A flood zone was fearfully real. Now that Asheville is isolated, adrift from interstate highways until next year, we can legitimately wonder what zone is not a flood zone after all the climate damage humans have done.

Richard says it succinctly, recalling a comic book he loved as a kid: “horror stories for the monsters are all about humans.”

Bearde Crosses the Border With Ziad to Sublimity

Review: Jazz @ Theatree Bechtler with Nicolas Bearde

By Perry Tannenbaum

October 4, 2024, Charlotte, NC – As a listener and a sometime vocalist, my feeling is that a jazz singer backed by a piano trio can only verge on the sublime. Until a horn is added – saxophone, trumpet, or clarinet parlaying and intertwining with the vocalist – the divine nectar never quite sparkles with maximum effervescence. So it’s always a joy when the Jazz at the Bechtler series hosts a guest vocalist, for the leader of the house band, Ziad Rabie, always carries a tenor and soprano sax with him to fortify the artillery. Before Nicolas Bearde’s appearance on Friday, I hadn’t been to one of these bacchanals since Nnenna Freelon guested in May 2022, so I was behind the curve in terms of how the experience in the Bechtler Museum of Modern Arts lobby has been enhanced.

Perhaps influenced by Middle C Jazz over on Brevard Street, the Bechtler bandstand is now framed by large video monitors displaying a live feed of the concert – that is also projected as a larger-then-life backdrop upstage of the players. The effect of the live pastel projections is electrifying, especially if your sightline differs radically from the camera’s, and the projected images are helpful if your view of one of the musicians is obscured. A music stand downstage blocked my view of drummer Rick Dior sitting behind Rabie, but when I stood up briefly to snap a photo of him, I discovered that a second music stand right at his drum kit was still blocking my view. Luckily, the live feed up above him was available to us when he took a solo.

Bearde last sang in Charlotte at the tenth anniversary celebration of the Bechtler series staged at the adjoining Knight Theater in January 2022. That was my gateway to his discography, which certainly reinforced my notion that he agreed with me on jamming with a horn. There were plenty of Nat King Cole tracks online that were delightful to discover from his recent album on Spotify, along with a few Johnny Hartman gems on past recordings. He’s been around long enough, since before the turn of the millennium, to have accumulated two Spotify artist listings that do not overlap – and he still sounded like he’s at the top of his game. The two saxophonists who have played on Bearde’s last two albums, Eric Alexander and Vincent Herring, are both self-recommending – and they both supplied a sheaf of candidates for seamless transport to the Bechtler lobby and Ziad’s capable hands.

So did two of the songs Bearde sang in 2022, his own “Falling in Love Again” and Abbey Lincoln’s “Living Room,” both of which were reprised in more extended versions. The baritone began his set with the same song that began his 2016 album, Invitation,Burton Lane and Alan Jay Lerner’s “Come Back to Me.” Where Herring had inserted his alto, Ziad now blazed with his soprano sax, with extra space in the arrangement set aside for pianist Noel Freidline’s ruminations – all with the speed and verve of the lyric’s “turn the highway to dust, break the law if you must” spirit.

With “That Sunday, That Summer,” Bearde brought us the first of two tracks selected from his Nat Cole tribute album, both of which, not at all coincidentally, featuring Alexander on tenor sax. Bearde’s way with the song is jazzier than Cole’s 1963 saccharine hit – with its lush strings, full chorus, and glinting triangle – but I can’t say I like all the added syncopation he brings to the table. Best of the covers, to me, is a Sarah Vaughan version not to be found on Spotify. That revelation is online exclusively at Apple Music on her Jimmy Rowles Quintet album from 1974.

Bearde was entirely in his groove thereafter, beginning with his cha-cha inflected Burt Bacharach hit, “Close to You,” with some fine solos by both Ziad and Freidline – and a wonderful breakaway into 4/4 tempo in the middle of the vocal reprise – with some extra Beard/Ziad jamming afterwards. Lincoln’s “Living Room” was beautifully embroidered the second time around with an introductory Freidline fantasia intro from his electric keyboard and a regal solo from bassist Ron Brendle after Ziad’s tenor sax proclamation. Most unexpected and exciting was a new song, “Si Vous Saviez,” written by Rabie with Jennifer Shea. If you’ve heard John Coltrane’s Ballads album, you can begin to imagine the lovely sound of Ziad’s creamy, buttery intro on tenor sax, and Bearde took to the longish tune like he was seriously considering recording it on his next album.

The rest of the set included songs that Bearde has already taken to the studio, starting with the moody title tune from the Invitation release, which saw a fine intro and later solo from Ziad and, notwithstanding the comparatively mellow mood, a fine chunk of work from Dior on the solo I screened. Plucked from his Nat Cole tribute, “Thou Swell” actually began life as part of Rodgers & Hart’s A Connecticut Yankee in 1927, where its archaic language was perfectly apt. Both Ziad and Freidline contributed zippy, palate cleansing solos that readied us for the finale.

Once again it was “Falling in Love Again,” with Bearde elucidating on his composition at greater length before performing it this time. Further engaging us, he encouraged us in the audience to clap out the rhythm as Freidline, chided all through concert for his snazzy (and Sinatra-like) chapeau, pounded out a genial piano intro. Everybody was in great spirits by this point, and Ziad gave us one more reason to applaud with his screaming tenor sax.

Photos by Perry Tannenbaum

“Girl from ther North Country”: A Dream Dispelled

**Review: Girl from the North Country at Belk Theater**

By Perry Tannenbaum

When it premiered in 2017 at The Old Vic in London, Girl from the North Country must have seemed like the fruition of a musical theatre dream team. The original book would be by acclaimed Irish playwright Conor McPherson, who would freely roam amidst the vast catalogue of music and lyrics by Bob Dylan, the 2016 Nobel Prize Laureate, to choose his songlist. By most surviving accounts and reviews, Girl from the North Country was must-see theatre in two successive London productions, Off-Broadway in 2018, and on Broadway in 2020.

Previous peeps at the show on the road, chronicled in regional sections of BWW, have only been slightly less enthusiastic. So opening night at Belk Theater earlier this week was a massive shock when the national tour touched down here for the 28^th of its 30 scheduled stops.

The first stunner was the sparsity of the crowd. Often sold out on opening night for brand-name shows, the Belk was less than half-filled for the Charlotte premiere. Traffic to the Uptown was no lighter than usual, and blackouts had already been a non-factor for previous events I had covered in Plaza Midwood and Davidson. Were fervid Dylan fanatics, among the most loyal anywhere, diverted by the WNBA Playoffs? Were they glued to their TV sets, watching the Walz-Vance debate?

Whatever reason the stay-aways may have had, the biggest shocker was that the no-shows were so right. The dream team is merely a mirage on the road, though the esteemed playwright is still listed as the stage director.

As much as we both love Dylan – my wife Sue and I held hands when the mighty “Hurricane” was sung – Girl from the North Country never fully connected with us. The boxer and escaped convict in McPherson’s script is Joe Scott, we’re in 1934 Duluth (three years before Rubin “Hurricane” Carter was born), and when Warren Nolan Jr.* plunges into the song, he must segue into “All Along the Watchtower” long before the tale of the framed boxer reaches its epic, cumulative power and intensity.

This is not the story of the Hurricane. Yet the connection of this suddenly anachronistic song, unlike the decisively irrelevant “Watchtower” or “Idiot Wind” that complete the medley, is stronger than nearly all the others we hear. At its worst, the beginning of Act 2 at Nick Laine’s dingy Duluth boarding house devolves into a chaotic Dylan concert with no forward-moving drama at all, the most inert and aimless musical theatre I’ve seen since Cats purred back from its intermission.

Action revolves around the innkeeper, his bipolar wife Elizabeth Laine, his alcoholic and artistic son Gene, and his adopted black daughter Marianne, five months pregnant. Curiously, Nick is the musical eye of this stormy family, the only member who never gets a solo to sing. John Schiappa is devoted to his demented wife, whom he dutifully feeds though she might slap the plate out of his hands, but he cares more for his longtime boarder, Carla Woods as Mrs. Neilsen, a possible financial lifeline if her late husband’s ever gets out of probate.

As Elizabeth, Jennifer Blood gets the most outré actions from McPherson – even when she’s brooding at an upright piano – and a royal gem from the Dylan songbook at the end of each act, “Like a Rolling Stone” followed “Forever Young.” These briefly sounded like echoes from the days of Janis Joplin reign as rock’s blues queen. Days of mad incense and love. Elizabeth has more reasons to be jealous of her admirably stable and ruggedly handsome husband than justifications for her relentless resentfulness and orneriness.

Yet even this most powerful of McPherson’s roles never quite bridges the gap between the footlights and our hearts. My most generous theories for why this was so on opening night are the sheer size of the Belk, double the seating capacities of the houses where North Country played London and New York, and the wretchedness of the sound, a chronic Blumenthal ailment.

Come back to us, MJ! – or at least send your sound crew.

Sharaé Moultrie gives a velvety smooth voice to Marianne and, despite her precarious position as an unwed mother-to-be, enough serenity for us to occasionally suspect that her conception was immaculate. She gets her share of solos, if not the choicest harvest. Dramatically, Marianne is the calm center of a vortex, with love and affection swirling around her from at least three different men.

Concerned about her future, Nick seeks to wed her to the financially secure – but elderly – Mr. Perry, portrayed by Jay Russell with humility, gentleness, and heart. Manuel as Joe is almost immediately smitten by Marianne, no doubt imagining himself as her redemption and she as his. She has reason to be impressed, for when he was challenged to a fight by her drunken brother Gene, Joe reluctantly yielded to the challenge and floored Gene with a single blow.

Prodded by Nick to get a job to help steady the Laines’ finances and avert foreclosure on the guesthouse, Aidan Wharton* as Gene sees his hopes of becoming a writer fading away. More sorrows to drown in drink are triggered by his ladylove, Chiara Trentalange as Kate Draper, when she announces that she is already engaged to be more pragmatically married. The ensuing Wharton-Trentalange duet on “I Want You” was probably the most dramatically apt of the evening.

Might have been more impactful in a smaller house with cleaner sound.

McPherson puts plenty of life onstage that never quite projects to Belk’s empty upper balconies. Aside from Mr. Perry; a wild bible salesman with a frayed clerical collar arrives with Joe, Jeremy Webb as Reverend Marlowe; and our sometime narrator, Alan Ariano as Dr. Walker, pops up periodically at the boarding house, making his rounds. Of the two, Webb as Marlowe is far more dangerous – almost dramatic – for his fugitive status and his poverty make his sales pitches aggressively hard-sell and his fingers tend to get sticky when he thinks nobody is looking.

With so many plots already brewing in Duluth, McPherson thoughtfully adds a family from the outside world that tends to add variety to the inbred local atmosphere of seediness and decay. The well-dressed Burkes are a fallen uppercrust family, as iconic during the Great Depression as the downtrodden wanderers crossing the Dust Bowl to sunny California.

Both Mr. Burke, who lost his business during the Great Crash, and Mrs. Burke, who lost a chunk of her patrician trust and self-confidence as a result, are on the lookout for new opportunities, not necessarily with each other. Both David Benoit and Jill Van Velzer, playing the elder Burkes, also sit down occasionally to play the drums, adding a new musical level to the evening while expanding the social context of North Country. Benoit gets to be more decadent, proposing to manage a ring comeback for Joe.

The couple’s son Elias has some sort of learning problem, so D’Marreon Alexander* gets a breakout moment in Act 2 – parallel to Blood’s with “Rolling Stone” in Act 1 – when Elias suddenly emerges from his cognitive cocoon with “Duquesne Whistle.” Doubly surprising for me, for “Duquesne” hurtles forward with the drive of Dylan’s best work and because I’d never heard the 2012 composition before. Wow.

I wish I could praise any of McPherson’s dramatic moments as highly. We’re not likely to experience a theatre week such as the current one for ages to come. Two living playwrights who have translated works by Anton Chekhov – and do not hesitate to use his methods – have pieces running simultaneously in Metrolina. Arguably, McPherson’s book, repeatedly stressing the consequences of inaction, has more of the Russian master’s most distinctive flavor.

But Stephen Karam’s The Humans, set in post-9/11 and post-Hurricane-Sandy Chinatown, will rock your world. Anyone torn between the two would be best-advised to bypass the Broadway Lights production at the Belk and head up Interstate 77 to Davidson, where Karam’s masterwork is playing at the Armour Street Theatre.

*Note: On opening night, Wharton, who normally portrays Elias, replaced Ben Biggers (sick all week ) as Gene. Alexander replaced Wharton as Elias and Nolan Jr. subbed for Matt Manuel.

“One Year to Die” Is a Premiere to Be Proud of in Matthews

**Review: One Year to Die at Matthews Playhouse**

By Perry Tannenbaum

September 11 has been part of LaBorde family lore much longer than for nearly all other American families. On that date in 1943, the USS Rowan was sunk in Mediterranean waters by German torpedoes after delivering an arms shipment to Italy to combat the Nazis. Local actor/director/playwright/school principal Charles Laborde’s Uncle Joe was among those aboard the Navy destroyer lost on that day, along with 201 other officers and crew. Only 71 survived the attack, rescued by the USS Bristol.

Curiously enough, the official date of Uncle Joe’s death is listed as September 12, 1944 – still a full five years before Charles was born – because none of those 202 bodies was recovered. As the Naval Officer informs Charles’s grandma Edwina with full-dress formality in LaBorde’s new play, One Year to Die, Joe was officially “missing” after the Rowan was torpedoed until one year and one day had elapsed. Then the Naval Death Certificate would be issued.

The world premiere of LaBorde’s play opened last week at Matthews Playhouse and runs through September 29 at the Fullwood Theater.

While it’s intriguing to wonder how Charles’s grandparents, Oscar and Edwina, coped with this limbo year of unofficial death – maybe holding out hopes of a miracle for a few weeks or months – it’s hardly the stuff of sustained suspense and drama. To achieve these enhancements, LaBorde applies some research, imagination, and basic math.

Time-travelling back to his grandparents’ farm in Hessmer, Louisiana, which wasn’t big enough to be incorporated until 1955, LaBorde modestly multiplies the number of local families impacted by the Rowan’s sinking. Now two moms down in Cajun country are grieving over their lost sons, Edwina and Ella Broussard, an ailing black washerwoman who takes in laundry from the richer families in the region.

Everybody seems to know everyone else around town, so when the Naval Officer shows up on Edwina’s front porch to deliver his sad news, she can point him in the right direction toward the part of town where Ella presumably lives. The fact that LaBorde has invented her makes no difference. But it’s going to take far more resourcefulness from the playwright for him to even begin exploring the racial divisions and tensions that prevailed in the little town of Hessmer when the dark days of Jim Crow hadn’t been dispelled, even after African Americans were welcomed by our military.

No, for that to happen, LaBorde had to find a compelling reason for Ella to appear at Edwina’s doorstep. Indeed, to fully engage us and win our admiration for Ella, the mission driving her to Edwina’s farmhouse had to be compelling enough for her to knock on the LaBordes’ front door. Now you have an action sufficiently outré to set a little Jim Crow town in turmoil.

What on earth could be so important for Ella to commit such an effrontery?

She has enough imagination and ambition to match her chutzpah, for she plans to pay tribute to both her son Lonnie and Edwina’s Joe – along with all the other 200 soldiers aboard the USS Rowan who perished fighting the Nazis. The tribute will be a quilt of 202 gold stars on a field of blue, with the two stars representing Lonnie and Joe conspicuously larger than the 200 others.

The project is worthy, and quilting 202 squares with 202 perfectly centered stars, along with a suitable border to frame it all, seems to be a sufficiently monumental task to occupy two women for the better part of a year – once the ladies have solved the math problem of how to symmetrically configure those 202 stars. Director Dennis Delamar certainly isn’t going to gloss over the problem of getting the math exactly right.

But that front door thing is key (even though Edwina is proud to say it’s unlocked) and obliges LaBorde’s family to be tested onstage in a manner they probably never faced in real life. To the playwright’s credit, neither of his kinfolk is perfect in receiving their surprise guest – who should, as everybody in Hessmer knows, be knocking at the back door.

That is the attitude here from both Edwina and Oscar when they first encounter this unfathomable cheek. Just to double-underline the point that the LaBordes are not perfection, Edwina rebuffs Ella twice. Yet we soon see that they are willing to evolve, uniting with Ella’s cause once they’ve heard her out. Granting her the unique privilege of entering by the front door. But what about the rest of the town? Here is where LaBorde can inject suspense, drama, and a sprinkling of terror.

Joshua Webb’s set design, with its wood-burning stove and perpetual coffee pot centerstage, has a rusticity that allows for a wisp of primal danger and violence lurking beneath its humble domesticity. Both kitchens are lovingly dressed, but sightlines are a rather dreadful problem: unless you’re seated in the center or toward the right side of the Fullwood Theater audience, you might go home never knowing that Oscar had been visible building his stone wall – hidden by the Broussard kitchen to those of us sitting on left – in defiance of stone-throwing yahoos (or KKK) repeatedly breaking the LaBordes’ windows.

Complemented by Sean Ordway’s moody lighting design, which casts a spell even before the action begins, Yvette Moten’s costume designs have the timelessness of Norman Rockwell paintings on the covers of old-timey Saturday Evening Post magazines. It’s hard to resist the visual charm of this production as Delamar frames one memorable tableau after another. From the time we first see the spirits of Young Lonnie and Joe (Aaron Scott Brown and Bennett Thurgood in rather touching non-speaking roles) to the great starry quilt reveal, Delamar lavishes a series of freeze-frames that are a memorable slideshow within the show.

Some discreet subtraction is applied to LaBorde family history that results in somewhat awkward casting for the leading ladies, Paula Baldwin and Corlis Hayes. Nowadays, we’d expect moms of strapping young military enlistees to be in their forties or fifties, not 60+ – but the real Edwina had way more offspring than two sons, so she actually was aged 60 at the time of Joe’s death.

So sitting at her kitchen table, sustaining her renown as the county’s quilting queen, and looking rather matronly, Baldwin is exactly what LaBorde envisioned as Edwina. Life on the bayou does take its toll here, so Joe will merely be the beginning of Edwina’s ennobling griefs. Baldwin endures these crucibles like so many we’ve seen from her over her distinguished QC stage career, with signature stoicism. Neither Delamar nor LaBorde had any hesitation in casting her.

As for Hayes, I first encountered her at Johnson C. Smith in 1988 when she directed for colored girls at the tender age of “24” – just guesstimating here – so she’s also perfectly cast as Ella. Maybe the most heartwarming aspect of this production is the gift LaBorde has given her with a world premiere credit in this role. Confronted by both black and white folk, Ella is a far more nuanced and varied character than we normally see Hayes portray.

We instantly see the strong spine that brings her to Edwina’s door – twice – and we see her pragmatism in backing off the first time. She seethes back home and resolves to repeat her effrontery, still knocking at the front door. Then there’s the beautiful passive aggression when Edwina belatedly agrees to allow Ella over her front threshold. Hayes pointedly hesitates, referencing the insults she has previously absorbed and the dignity she maintains.

LaBorde has obviously labored over Ella, for she has her maintaining this steely dignity when confronted by her minister, Reverend Johnson, and even when she is complimented by white churchlady Nodie Ardoin, Edwina’s nemesis. Yet there’s one more telling Easter egg to be found in LaBorde’s script, that Hayes and Delamar brilliantly emphasize. As soon as Ella gets the first clear sign from Oscar that she might not be welcome in his kitchen, we see Hayes instantly cowering, clutching her pocketbook, and readying for a quick exit.

That’s the kind of good sense Ella has, for all of her sturdy spine. We can be thankful that this rich role has finally found Hayes.

If it weren’t obvious before, One Year to Die signals that Matthews Playhouse has joined the ranks of Metrolina community theatres that consistently present pro-grade work. The standard set by Hayes and Baldwin is met by the men who portray the Hessmer clergy, Steve Price as the soulful Father Morton only slightly upstaged by the charismatic Keith Logan as Rev Johnson. LaBorde would have done better by both of these religious leaders if he had refrained from broadly hinting that Catholic and Baptist ministers follow the exact same script when upbraiding wayward lady congregants.

Aside from Oscar, the other guys we see onstage are military, so we never sample the boorishness or the toxic philosophies of the town’s window breakers. The military cameos, however, are beautifully handled by Vic Sayegh as the Naval Officer who rocks the LaBordes’ world and Brian DeDora, who appears as The Sailor after the Normandy invasion.

Possibly, LaBorde dropped the idea of including the rock-slingers onstage, for Nodie bears the same last name as one of them. Robin Conchola as Nodie is actually the more benign of the “watchin’ committee” that darkens Edwina’s doorstep to register their condemnation, a lot more conflicted than Barbara Dial Mager as Sarah Jeansonne. It’s Conchola as Nodie who has the chance to be rebuffed by Hayes. Sarah is slower to evolve, so we can despise Mager longer, if only for her horrid wig.

As Oscar, also aged 60 when Joe perished at sea, Henk Bouhuys is delightfully homespun, although there’s still enough Jim Crow ingrained in him to be shocked by the ladies’ audacity. Bouhuys continues to project ambivalence long after Oscar decides the memorial project is worth doing no matter how the rest of Hessmer may think. Once he gives Edwina his assent, his loyalty is as steadfast as his love.

Whether it was absent-mindedness or a directive from Delamar, Bouhuys only intermittently sounded Cajun on opening night – while the rest of the players hardly bothered with an accent. So it was startling when Oscar became full-out Cajun just before intermission after a cowardly attack on the LaBorde farmhouse. Out of nowhere, the accent was stunningly convincing, adding some sharp ethnic spice to the most fiery monologue of the night.

Photos by Perry Tannenbaum

“Clyde’s” Serves Up a Delicious Seize-the-Food Message

**Review: BNS Presents Clyde’s at the Parr Center**

By Perry Tannenbaum

September 13, 2024, Charlotte, NC – Over a lazy Duke Ellington piano riff that becomes indelible almost as soon as you hear it, John Coltrane layers on the melody of “In a Sentimental Mood,” recorded 62 Septembers ago. Although we’re in a kitchen at a truck stop that doesn’t look nearly that old, somewhere along the highway in Berks County PA, it’s a fitting intro to the new BNS production of Clyde’s. Along with the mean and sassy owner of this diner, Clyde, we meet her star employee, the zen-like Montrellous, also described by two-time Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Lynn Nottage as “the John Coltrane of sandwich making.”

Nottage’s newest comedy-drama originally premiered in Minneapolis as Floyd’s in 2019, less than a full year before George Floyd was killed by local police – so it was prudent to change the title before the Broadway opening in 2021. Yet a police state haze still hovers over the action, since all the employees at Clyde’s are ex-convicts or parolees, including the owner. She’s not a criminal now, but something or someone has clearly hardened her. Montrellous believes that Clyde’s could be a smashing success if it served up extraordinary sandwiches. She wants to stick to basics, lay low, keep a low profile, and lower her costs on the ingredients her drones drop between two slices of bread.

Limiting ourselves on food analogies, let’s say Clyde is one tough cookie, tightly wound to match the tight-fitting outfits costume designer Aneesah Taylor has tailored for her. You do not smile around Clyde, Montrellous warns newbie Jason, a recent parolee. He doesn’t listen. To his distress, he will learn the hard way that Clyde is the Captain Bligh or Queeg aboard this ship. Ah, but there is deeper wickedness to this boss: there is a Jezebel gene in her DNA, for Clyde is a toxic temptress. On a couple of occasions, the owner’s forays into her kitchen reminded me of Curley’s luscious wife sashaying among the farmhands in John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.

The mice here mostly get to play when the boss isn’t peeping through the pickup station, hanging a barely legible order on a little carousel, and banging a bell. Director Dee Abdullah has her kitchen staff reveling in those moments when they aren’t wrapped up in a food prep frenzy. transforms the place. For him, sandwich making should never be drudgery. It is more like a mission, a calling, a crusade, an artform…or a lifelong quest for the perfect sandwich. Suffering and anger can seep into the food you make.

This ministry is not for Montrellous exclusively. When the pace in the kitchen slackens, all four workers lean over their prep stations and take turns chanting the ingredients of sandwiches never built before, swooning collectively over their imaginary deliciousness. In these moments, the kitchen is more like a studio or a writers’ room as the creators brainstorm ideas. And when the coast is really clear, Montrellous reaches into a low cabinet upstage center and extracts his latest masterwork, placing it reverently in the exact middle of the three prep stations. Since James Dukes’ lighting design accentuates the gleam of the Saran wrap around Montrellous’ newborn brainchild, the radiance turns Clyde’s kitchen into a holy temple of sorts. Epicures looking at the three stations centerstage at the Parr Center can be excused if they’re reminded of the Last Supper by Jennifer O’Kelly’s set design.

With this sacred imagery in mind, it’s hardly surprising that Montrellous’s precepts begin to transcend food preparation as we get to know more about him and about Clyde, Jason, slicer-and-dicer Letitia, and the man with the pans at the stove, Rafael. As much as Montrellous wants to convince Clyde to be more enterprising and adventurous – and less dogmatic and stingy – the adoring and adorable Rafael wants Letitia, forever stressed by her infant and her ex, to just give him and chance. Really, this romantic subplot occupies more space and time than the overarching struggle between Clyde and Montrellous, so we don’t think we’re watching supporting players when we see Lisandro D. Caceres-Zelaya in action as Rafael propositioning and wooing Toi Aquila R.J. as Letitia.

“Not enough salt, the flavor doesn’t come out; too much salt, it’s inedible,” Montrellous pronounces. Both women, taught by their past experiences, fend off new ideas and intimacies, fearing all because they’ve had too much before. Both are skeptical that being asked out could be motivated by any other reason than sexual exploitation, whether tender or forceful. Fortifying her resistance to anything Montrellous creates, Dominica Ivey as Clyde turns down every simple invitation to give it a taste. She wields her ever-present cigarette like a dagger, and her every exit is a devastating kiss-off, somewhat comical because she’s so decisive. You begin to wonder whether Ivy has any empathy for her ex-cons: maybe Clyde hires them because they can be bought cheaply.

To be sure, Ivy can string any male along in her wanton mode, but it’s Aquila as Letitia who gives off the most bi-polar vibes. When she isn’t sullenly brooding or crazily hacking lettuce as if she were Lizzie Borden, Aquila is shaking some fine booty and boogeying, reminding us of the charisma she radiated as Eartha Kitt last September. We have no difficulty understanding what Rafael sees in her, and Caceres-Zelaya lights up the stage with his sunny energy, evoking for me the irrepressible verve of Usnavy in Lin Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights.

When he isn’t presiding over the sacrament of sandwich making – and his apostles’ efforts to reach his lofty level – Zach Humphrey as Montrellous is largely a peacemaker. He intervenes with calm authority when Clyde and Jason come close to blows, and he’s a guiding light for both Letitia and Rafael as they gravitate toward one another. “Trust your ingredients,” he sagely says more than once. Everyone is different. People’s possibilities are as infinite as the varieties of sandwiches you can imagine.

Making his professional debut, Anthony Lonzo as Jason presents special challenges that audience members might struggle with, for the tats on his face and spew barbarity and hatred. Onstage, the tats are chiefly repellent to Latitia, but since Jason doesn’t speak much at first, we also need to delve beyond skin depth to grasp what he’s all about. Nottage gives each of the kitchen workers a juicy monologue to reveal what’s inside and in their rearview mirrors, and we’ll likely remember Lonzo’s nearly as vividly as Humphrey’s. But an unspoken maxim sprung to mind as Duke’s lighting finally sanctified Clyde in her memorable epiphany. It’s a wonderful little saying from the Psalms of David that I first learned from a book title by Denise Levertov: O Taste And See. At times the lesson is merely culinary. But ultimately, the message is experiential, about adopting an empirical attitude instead of hardening our prejudices. Above all, it’s an injunction to fully live our lives.

Photos by Perry Tannenbaum

Let “The Drowsy Chaperone” Hypnotize You

**Review: The Drowsy Chaperone at Theatre Charlotte**

By Perry Tannenbaum

My advice for best enjoying The Drowsy Chaperone at Theatre Charlotte is to listen to the Man in the Chair – and yield to his pitch-dark hypnosis. Yes, before the lights even go up at the old Queens Road barn, he’s in his chair speaking to his audience and conjuring up what we should hope and pray for: “I just want to be entertained. Isn’t that the point?”

As the show unfolded, brilliantly directed by Billy Ensley with what must be the local cast of his dreams, I realized that, as a critic, I shou

ld heed that hypnotic suggestion devoutly. Discard my usual pointy critical and analytical tools. What’s more, I came to believe more and more strongly that, if actors and directors of previous Drowsy Chaperones I’d seen had followed that simple mantra, I would have fallen in love with the show long before last Friday night.

When the lights came up a few minutes deeper into the Man in Chair’s monologue, we saw him locking the front door of his humdrum apartment with four or five assorted deadbolts and chains. It’s a bit of an abrupt swerve, but we’re suddenly aware that this Broadway musical devotee is a recluse and a bit paranoid. Each time the phone rings, we’ll see that the Man in Chair fails to answer, yet another confirmation of these traits.

By the time the title character of the fictional “Drowsy Chaperone” is a few wobbly notes into her showstopping “As We Stumble Along,” we already should know that the Man in Chair is gay, which accounts for Lisa Smith Bradley delivering the song as a living fetishization of Ethel Merman and Judy Garland – Merman’s vibrato wedded to Garland’s glitter, slacks, and drug dependency.

Yet when we’re watching Kyle J. Britt as our genial host, we need not attribute his reclusiveness or paranoia to being a gay man. As a Broadway musical fanatic, this Man in Chair identifies more readily as a New Yorker with Innerborough hangups. Meanwhile, Bradley is sufficiently over-the-top as both gay icons – especially Merman – to be accused of impersonating a female impersonator.

We might say that Ensley & Co. have decided that being gay in 2024 isn’t nearly the leaden weight it was in 2006 when Drowsy Chaperone premiered in the Big Apple or in 1996 when Angels in America tore the QC apart and made us a laughingstock. Pretentiousness, solemnity, and subtlety really are inimical to this delicate relic. Britt handles it with audiophile care as removes the vinyl disc – a rare original cast recording of his favorite 1928 musical – from its LP sleeve and gives both sides a loving once-over with a Discwasher brush before lowering his treasure onto a turntable.

The same can be said of size and scale, which may also have muffled my enjoyment of productions at Belk Theater in 2007 and Halton Theater. There’s something so right about our little séance in the dark at the Old Barn on Queens Road that it cannot attain in a more modern and spacious hall where the Man in Chair must project his spell into a distant balcony. The homeliness of the Man’s urban dwelling also sits better on Queens Road than in the bowels of a bank building on Tryon Street.

To be honest, it’s Broadway Lights and the late CP Summer Theatre that should apologize for not matching the unpretentiousness of Josh Webb’s scenic design. Of course, it would be nice if Webb’s scenery could transform spectacularly into Broadway splendor when the stylus of our host’s turntable comes down – with its signature thump – onto the vinyl and the mythical “Drowsy Chaperone” comes to life. In the less-is-more world on Queens Road these days, these shortcomings are comedy assets, part of the overall charm.

On the other hand, our time travels to 1928 get a softer landing thanks to the costumes by Beth Killion, notable for their flair, their formality, and their discreet dashes of color. We’re awaiting the wedding of Robert Martin and Janet van de Graaf, so there are actually multiple levels of time travel here, for Bob Martin actually co-wrote the Drowsy Chaperone book with Don McKellar – and starred in the original Broadway production as Man in Chair – while he was married to the real-life Van de Graaf.

In fact, this originally Canadian work, which eventually layered on music and lyrics by Lisa Lambert and Greg Morrison, was gestated at Martin’s stag party in 1997, nearly 70 years after these fictional nuptials. More reasons not to view this lark as a gay cri de cœur.

Rare as his vinyl treasure may be, Britt comes across less as a scholar or a critic than as a fanboy, occasionally panting like an eager puppy as he presumes to approach his fantasy idols more and more closely. More than once, the principals will obligingly freeze for him. Nor does this Man in Chair seem to favor the men over the ladies with his adoration, only tipping the scales just before the final bows. Charmingly enough, there are overtones of scholar and critic as he dishes tasty trivia about the fictitious “Drowsy” cast members or advises us to be on the lookout for some truly dreadful lyrics.

These glamorous, theatrical, servile, and criminal characters are all blissfully ignorant of the nerd who has conjured them up, preoccupied with their conflicting efforts to carry off the planned wedding or ruin it. The bride herself, Lindsey Schroeder as Janet, seems to be grandly ambivalent about becoming Robert’s wife, sacrificing her glittery stage career and the adoration of millions, while suppressing her basic instinct to “Show Off.” Love is at comical war with vanity. Carried away by the swiftness of this whirlwind romance, Andy Faulkenberry as Robert also has his doubts.

Aside from Janet’s drunken chaperone, politely labelled as Drowsy, there are a butler Underling, an eccentric Mrs. Tottendale, and Robert’s best man George shepherding the loving lambkins to the altar. Only Zach Linick as George seems to be afflicted with any degree of competence or reliability. More importantly, he and Faulkenberry make up a formidable tapdancing duo. (Thank-yous to choreographer Lisa Blanton.) Allison Rhinehart as a frilly, bustling Tottenham and Darren Spencer as the gray and starchy Underling are no less inevitably channeled toward blithe entertainment.

Counterbalancing the fragile determination of the bride and groom, compounded by the flimsy protection of their good friends, we have an exquisite mix of bumbling baddies trying to sabotage the wedding. These are led by Joe McCourt as Broadway producer Mr. Feldzeig (Feldzeig Follies ring a bell?), under pressure from his mobster backers, who consider Janet to be the cash cow of the Feldzeig franchise. The sneering McCourt is bedeviled by Gangster 1 and Gangster 2, armed emissaries – Titus Quinn and Taylor Minich – masquerading as hired chefs to ensure a catastrophe.

Ah, but it isn’t simply muscle aimed at swaying the maiden and returning her to showbiz. Somehow, a predatory Lothario is among the wedding guests – although he has never met anyone else there. Mitchell Dudas is this egotistical Adolpho, far more arrogant than Feldzeig, a mixture of Erroll Flynn and Bela Lugosi with a thick Iberian accent. Feldzeig has no trouble at all convincing Adolpho that he was born to seduce the bride-to-be.

Equally dumb, Autumn Cravens as Kitty is a ditzy chorine, constantly nagging her boss and wedding escort Feldzeig to let her fill Janet’s shoes in his next Follies. Effortlessly, Dudas will outperform Cravens in thwarting Feldzeig’s schemes. Love conquers all, but it would be a huge spoiler to say how many times when we reach this very happy ending.

Just one more wild card is needed to tie up all the festivities. Be on the watch for Trinity Taylor as Trix the Aviatrix, who descends from the skies at just the right moment with a voice of thunder. For a few moments, she even upstages Britt and Schroeder who are so fabulous.

It would be a mistake to miss the craftmanship lavished on this plot with its stock characters by Martin and McKellar, brought out so brilliantly by Ensley and his dream cast. For instance, think how perfectly 1928 was chosen: between Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight, Babe Ruth’s 60 homers, The Jazz Singer of 1927 and the Wall Street Crash of 1929. A brief last window of bliss before global misery. In the real world, the parade of yearly Ziegfeld Follies revues would be halted after 1927 – until 1931.

“Irma Vep” Brings Giddiness to VisArt

**Review: The Mystery of Irma Vep – A Penny Dreadful at VisArt Video**

By Perry Tannenbaum

My first hints that PaperHouse Theatre’s new production of The Mystery of Irma Vep would be truly unique came when I glanced at a hidden nook of the set and saw a little half-hidden bar napkin that read “Homo Sweet Home.” Shortly before or afterwards, my first peep at the playbill revealed that there were more directors on this project than players. Two more.

Then before intermission, the aluminum loading dock closure at VisArt Video was raised by the entire cast of two, Nicia Carla and Andrea King, while we joined them on the other side, exiting through the front door to the outside alleyway – the al fresco part of the store. The final Egyptian scene was played out on a second stage, facing out to a few seats, under the shadow of a Wicked Weed Brewing sign. With a nifty little Egyptian tapestry and a fairly gaudy, full-sized sarcophagus.

What really clinched it for me was rolling pin in Act 2 – deployed for a purpose you’d never dream of. That settled it: the new Irma Vep, a Charles Ludlum gem not seen in Charlotte since 1993, is far more than a loving revival. Far more than a couple of hambone actors led by an unusually comical director.

No, this is pure out-of-this-world madness, a starburst of hysteria fueled by a team of four directors feverishly brainstorming in the merciless grip of writer’s room giddiness. Who can possibly care about a three-inch square napkin? Who would conceive of taking the one underground scene in Vep outdoors? And the rolling pin: I can barely imagine the uproarious laughter when that touch was unveiled. Perfect.

Some of the zaniest futzing could have happened spontaneously during rehearsals, since Carla and King, splitting eight roles between them, are also part of the directorial team, joined by Kevin Lorms and Chaz Pofahl. So scenic designer Kel Wright may have lavished so much attention on her precious sarcophagus that she didn’t notice when that homo napkin got slipped into the wicker basket back at Mandacrest.

That’s where theatre legend Lady Enid Hillcrest, newly married to Lord Edgar Hillcrest, will feel oddly ill-at-ease in the library as a portrait of her predecessor, Milady Irma Hillcrest, stares down at her. Greeting her as maidservant Jane Twisden, King ought to be scornful and sepulchral, since she is replicating Judith Anderson’s role as Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca opposite Carla while she resurrects the Joan Fontaine naif.

Yet by the time Lady Enid sashays into view, numerous other parodies have already been set into motion in Ludlam’s wicked mockery of the “penny dreadful” style of Victorian England. Sleuthing, sarcophagi, werewolves, vampires, witches, and a Wuthering Heights heath are all mixed into this undeadly brew. Plus the obligatory mummy. So why not give King the freedom to jubilantly shatter the Dame Judith mold, sporting a bright red wig and occasionally breaking a smile?

Anderson may never have even slightly bared her teeth before she set Hitchcock’s Manderley ablaze.

Squinting her eyes like a savvy sleuth in the opening scene, Carla as the swineherd Nicodemus quickly references the nearby heath and his determination to hunt down the werewolf suspected in the death of Lord Edgar’s son. As the action speeds up and the creepy creatures proliferate (inspiring Carla’s more outré costume designs), we need to be watchful in keeping track, not only with who’s who but with who’s what. Once the thunder stops, the full moon will have its effect, so we can be on the lookout for the kindred of Lon Chaney, Bela Lugosi, Sir Laurence Olivier, Lady Macbeth, and Edgar Allen Poe.

Ludlam wrote all the roles that Carla plays in this quick-change romp for himself and the others for Everett Quinton, his partner in the Ridiculous Theatrical Company and in life. And Ludlam also directed the 1984 premiere. Small wonder, then, that legendary actor/director Alan Poindexter was actually dissatisfied with Innovative Theatre’s storied 1993 production at the fabled Pterodactyl Club – for he merely starred in that historic riot. He told me in 1995 that he was itching to revisit the script.

Where he didn’t say, but presumably, Poindexter yearned to act and direct next time around, the dual roles that both Carla and King are fulfilling now. The fun they’re having with it was unmistakable almost from the start last Friday. Those many costume changes certainly quicken the heartbeat and release the adrenalin when these gifted players are switching outfits backstage – often speaking lines of dialogue while they do.

It’s gotta be dark back there, so in a small space where so many costumes are parked, Lorms must be especially adept as he switches hats and takes on the stage managing. If there’s an additional person hanging up the hastily discarded clothes, it must really be mayhem back there!

While Carla is shuttling between her Nicodemus and Lady Enid costumes, King is shedding her maidservant uni – and that wig – whenever the Lord Edgar returns from his various adventures. Tortured soul! After losing his ex to a vampire and his son to a werewolf, noble Edgar tasks himself with tracking down both supernatural monsters, with only Nicodemus for backup. Poor choice.

Leaving a beautiful lady alone on a lonely manor; especially near moors, heaths, mists, and hail; is never a good idea, confirmed by even a smattering of familiarity with Hollywood horror. After discovering that an Intruder has left telltale teeth marks around his beloved’s jugular, Lord Edgar proves that he has learned his lesson by immediately traipsing off to Egypt to solve this mystery. Thoughtfully, he checks Lady Enid into a sanatorium.

While Milady convalesces, Carla can transform into two Egyptians, Lord Edgar’s turbaned guide and his royal quarry, the remarkably well-preserved Princess Pev Amri. More hilarity for us; more heartbreak for Lord E.

An easier mystery for us to solve was why the Egyptian scene was moved back from the beginning of Act 2 to the end of Act 1. That sarcophagus appears on both stages, so Carla and King can rely on outside help in schlepping it. In its wake, we’re left facing a handy cantina where we can line up for refreshment during intermission.

No doubt the respite is a godsend for Carla, King, and the hidden crew as they regroup, relax, and hydrate. Action is noticeably more frenetic after the break. Masks appear more frequently, and we’re treated to cameos by vampires and various werewolf body parts, far eclipsing the wolf’s carcass tossed into Act 1. In the hurly-burly, all the mysteries and who’s-whats are solved – but you’d better be alert if you want to catch all the solutions.

By then, you may have been laughing too hard to care.

Free Reign Presents a Trim and Syndicated “Tempest”

**Review: The Tempest at The Gettys Center**

By Perry Tannenbaum

Rarely mentioned among Shakespeare’s best comedies, let alone among his best works, The Tempest maintains an enviable popularity within the Bard’s celebrated canon. The current Free Reign Theatre presentation at the The Gettys Center in Rock Hill marks the seventh local production to appear in the Charlotte metro within the past two decades – Actors from the London Stage visited with an eighth in 2011 at UNC Charlotte.

Upstairs in the Getty courtroom turns out to be a perfect backdrop for this masterwork of measured retribution. In the misty annals of Shakespearean scholarship and criticism, The Tempest has often been singled out as the Bard’s final and most perfect work. More important to most theatergoers are the notions that Shakespeare places himself in the role of Prospero and that Prospero’s renunciation of the magic arts is the playwright’s farewell to theatre at the same time.

Under the direction of David Hensley, with costumes by Gina Brafford, it often looks like the retiring Bard had a notion to syndicate his valedictory work as an ancestor of Gilligan’s Island. Though Prospero was presumably shipwrecked in the Aegean or the Mediterranean, his most distinguished guest, King Alonso of Naples, seems to be outfitted with hand-me-downs that Gilligan or The Captain will don centuries later.

Not the first to impress upon his audience that Prospero is the main architect of the action that ensues on his tropic isle, Hensley has his protagonist, played by Russell Rowe, waving a magical illuminated staff to summon up the mighty winds, rains, and seas. Now we can adjourn to Shakespeare’s opening scene as a panicking Master and Boatswain stand on a ship’s deck trying to right their way in this tempest with a ridiculously puny captain’s wheel.

Prospero’s power on his island is vast, for he holds the fairy Ariel and the deformed monster Caliban as his slaves. Since all the action we see follows Prospero’s basic design, it’s not too outlandish for Victor Hugo to have claimed that through Caliban, Prospero rules over matter, and through Ariel, over the spirit. His sovereignty certainly extends beyond his island to the seas he sets in turmoil.

With Ariel’s help, Prospero can separate the arrivals of the servants from the shipwrecked seamen and the corrupt nobility of Naples and Milan from Prospero’s chosen heir, the virtuous Prince Ferdinand of Naples. He plans to match Ferdinand with his daughter, Miranda. On hand to help Ariel keep Prospero’s fugal design flowing smoothly are Juno, Ceres, Iris, and numerous other nymphs and spirits.

But omniscience is far from Prospero’s grasp, so Shakespeare can artfully engage us with wisps of drama and suspense. Prospero cannot be sure that Miranda and Prince Ferdinand will take to one another. Furthermore, Prospero must be on guard against Ariel and Caliban, both of whom chafe under his dominion – respectively capable of escape and rebellion.

Watch carefully, and you’ll notice how Shakespeare flips these prospects for suspense and drama into comedy.

Armed with Prospero’s vatic powers and steeled with the usurped Duke’s determination to restore rightful rule in distant Milan and Naples, Russell Rowe is slightly above the action, never clownish or fully mundane. He participates in the romantic comedy by scheming to inflame Miranda’s ardor for Ferdinand by subjecting the Prince to the humiliations of enchantment and daylong labor.

Smitten by each other almost as soon they meet, Hannah Atkinson as Miranda and KJ Adams as Ferdinand convincingly demonstrate the needlessness of Prospero’s stratagems – Ferdinand is promising to make Miranda the Queen of Naples less than 75 lines after he first appears. To be frank, the old magician, for all his learning and wisdom, has nearly forgotten his own youth. So the joke in also on him! Of course, it does take a little imagination to conjure up a virginal 15-year-old who has never seen any other man than her aging father and the “mooncalf” Caliban. As a result, Atkinson gets more unique traits to distinguish herself with.

With Caliban, played by the versatile Robert Brafford, Prospero can take a more laid-back and confident attitude, relying on the weird mutant to make a fool of himself in his rebellion. Latching on with his blue paws to Bronte Anelli as the drunken jester Trinculo and Spirit Craig as the marginally more sober butler Stephano – and mooching an occasional gulp from their ample bottle of booze – Brafford wastes no opportunity to subtly reassure us that, despite his mighty grievances, Caliban is foredoomed to failure.

Ariel, the vivacious Rebecca Viscioni, does confound the help, pulling out an invisible voice imitation shtick that, to my mind, James Barrie poaches in Peter Pan. Regardless, it is curious to note that both Ariel and Peter were written for men and usually played by women.

The “airy spirit” has more urgent places to intervene after wrecking the ship and sorting its survivors. Chiefly, she is needed – seemingly more than Prospero knows – to keep things flowing properly among the shipwrecked royals. Complacent on his throne, which is now reduced to a collapsing chair with cupholders, Nathan Stowe as King Alonso seems blissfully unaware of the treachery up in Milan. Stowe’s discomfort and disorientation in Shakespearean pentameters adds a light patina of comedy to Alonso and helps us to believe that he’s oblivious to the lurking threat in his own family.

Adding very little to the comical aura of Alonso’s complacency, Ross Chandler as the King’s brother needs a bit of cajoling from Antonio, the usurping Duke of Milan, to act on his designs on the Neapolitan throne. Fortunately, David Eil has a superabundance of shiftiness and malignity, enough malignity to be noticed not only by Alonso but by every citizen from Naples to Milan. Or by satellite.

Also on board the foundering ship, fortunately enough, is Emmanuel Barbe as a rather slick Gonzalo – former councilor in service of Prospero, who supplied the usurped Duke with necessary provisions, plus the cream of his precious library, when Antonio cast him off to sea 12 years earlier. Rejoining him onshore, we see that Gonzalo now serves King Alonso, so Gonzalo is now ironically saving his own life as well as his monarch’s with those mystic books.

For Sebastian and the never-sated Antonio mean to slay them both, not with ancient sword blades drawn from waterlogged hilts but with a 9-iron and a wedge extracted from a golf bag, a bit more slapstick. Bludgeoning rather than stabbing or beheading seems to be the plan and we are in some suspense – less with golf clubs than with drawn swords – as to whether Prospero has foreseen this impromptu assassination plot.

There is one whispering considerably earlier between the rightful Duke and Ariel in the unusually detailed stage directions, so if we’ve remembered that brief moment, there’s hope that help is on the way for the feckless King and Prospero’s loyal benefactor. But as those swords/clubs are held high over the sleeping heads of Alonso and Gonzalo, suspense mounts, thanks chiefly to Eil. So if Prospero doesn’t have the smarts to anticipate what’s happening, we must trust his Ariel to save the day.

The oft-hailed perfection of The Tempest is two-fold: aside from artistic perfection acclaimed by critics, it is also Shakespeare’s most perfectly preserved script, the lead-off play in the famed 1623 First Folio collection of 36 plays, meticulously edited by the Bard’s fellow actors, Philip Heminges and Henry Condell. Hence the unusual profusion of stage directions when you encounter the text.

Hensley and his cast do a fine job in making those generous stage directions disposable, and his careful cuts in the script, though occasionally robbing us of its full lyric pleasures, are laudably protective toward the multiple storylines. Having seen The Tempest five times before and having read/studied it more than once, I’m not bowled over by the blizzard. My worries are for those plunging into The Tempest for the first time. That little prelude with Prospero is helpful, but quite a deluge of entrances ensues.

So it was disappointing not to find any roles named in the printed program on opening night, only the alphabetized names of the actors. Clicking on the QR code is helpful, pairing faces with their roles, but again in alphabetical order – without the helpful capsule descriptions Shakespeare provided. Those would be valuable at intermission for newcomers who might still be struggling to sort out Alonso, Antonio, Sebastian, Gonzalo, and their positions at court.

Fortunately, the residents of this prehistoric Neverland or Gilligan’s Island are instantly differentiated, thanks to Gina Brafford’s florid costume designs – beginning with Atkinson wholesome Oklahoma farmgirl look as Miranda. Hard to say which is more outré, the winged Viscioni evoking the gladrags of the ‘60s or Robert Brafford as Caliban, looking like he’d been freshly belched from the belly of a whale.

Maybe the flowery Ariel outfit should get the nod because she’s so sassy and blithe all evening long. So: Calling on Hensley to give Viscioni a sassier final exit. She deserves it no less than Rowe, who asks for it in the touching Epilogue.

Art on My Sleeve

PERRY TANNENBAUM >>> Covers and Critiques the Performing Arts

With a Riddling Program, Sphinx Virtuosi Youthfully Inspire Symphony’s Gala

Review: Sphinx Virtuosi @ Charlotte Symphony’s Annual Gala

By Perry Tannenbaum

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**Review: Beyond the Surface at McBride-Bonnefoux Center**

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“The Humans” Is More Haunting Than Ever

**Review: The Humans @ Armour Street Theatre**

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Bearde Crosses the Border With Ziad to Sublimity

Review: Jazz @ Theatree Bechtler with Nicolas Bearde

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“Girl from ther North Country”: A Dream Dispelled

**Review: Girl from the North Country at Belk Theater**

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“One Year to Die” Is a Premiere to Be Proud of in Matthews

**Review: One Year to Die at Matthews Playhouse**

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“Clyde’s” Serves Up a Delicious Seize-the-Food Message

**Review: BNS Presents Clyde’s at the Parr Center**

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Let “The Drowsy Chaperone” Hypnotize You

**Review: The Drowsy Chaperone at Theatre Charlotte**

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“Irma Vep” Brings Giddiness to VisArt

**Review: The Mystery of Irma Vep – A Penny Dreadful at VisArt Video**

By Perry Tannenbaum

Free Reign Presents a Trim and Syndicated “Tempest”

**Review: The Tempest at The Gettys Center**

By Perry Tannenbaum

Review: Sphinx Virtuosi @ Charlotte Symphony’s Annual Gala

By Perry Tannenbaum

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Review: Beyond the Surface at McBride-Bonnefoux Center

By Perry Tannenbaum

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Review: The Humans @ Armour Street Theatre

By Perry Tannenbaum

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Review: Jazz @ Theatree Bechtler with Nicolas Bearde

By Perry Tannenbaum

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Review: Girl from the North Country at Belk Theater

By Perry Tannenbaum

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Review: One Year to Die at Matthews Playhouse

By Perry Tannenbaum

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Review: BNS Presents Clyde’s at the Parr Center

By Perry Tannenbaum

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Review: The Drowsy Chaperone at Theatre Charlotte

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Review: The Mystery of Irma Vep – A Penny Dreadful at VisArt Video

By Perry Tannenbaum

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Review: The Tempest at The Gettys Center

By Perry Tannenbaum

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**Review: Beyond the Surface at McBride-Bonnefoux Center**

**Review: The Humans @ Armour Street Theatre**

**Review: Girl from the North Country at Belk Theater**

**Review: One Year to Die at Matthews Playhouse**

**Review: BNS Presents Clyde’s at the Parr Center**

**Review: The Drowsy Chaperone at Theatre Charlotte**

**Review: The Mystery of Irma Vep – A Penny Dreadful at VisArt Video**

**Review: The Tempest at The Gettys Center**