Tag Archives: Beau Stroupe

“Angels” and QC Concerts Are Aiming High

**Preview: Angels in America at the Georgia Tucker Fine Arts Hall**

By Perry Tannenbaum

We’ve had historic productions of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America here before, most famously the Charlotte Rep bombshell of 1996, which blew up into a culture-war disgrace that shamed the Queen City nationwide. Rep’s greatest hit – in attendance and critical esteem – sowed the festering seeds of the regional company’s eventual demise in 2005.

Nor did Carolina Actors Studio Theatre (CAST) have any better success in 2014 when, following in Rep’s footsteps, they also staged both Part 1 and Part 2 of Angels: Kushner’s Millennium Approaches, which won the Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1993; and Perestroika, which repeated for the 1994 Tony, Drama Desk, and Olivier awards in 1994. After just one more production, CAST folded.

By even contemplating an Angels revival, QC Concerts and music director/founder Zachary Tarlton are obviously tempting fate. More than that, they’re smashing their own musical template and flouting the company’s brand – by airlifting their upcoming production to Matthews and the new Georgia Tucker Fine Arts Hall.

QC Concerts has happened by accident, beginning like Angels with the onset of an unheard-of disease. In Tarlton’s case, the plague was COVID-19 rather than HIV AIDS.

The company started small. Smack in the middle of preparing to spearhead an Actor’s Theatre of Charlotte fundraiser at Middle C Jazz, Tarlton was faced with the suddenness of the pandemic shutdown and the uncertainty of what would follow. He didn’t want to sit around idly by his keyboard.

“So I launched kind of an online streaming platform,” Tarlton recalls. “We were then known as QC Quarantine Concerts – a bit of a play on words. What we did was we modeled ourselves after a program in New York that Seth Rudetsky [and his husband, James Wesley] from Sirius XM started called Stars in the House, where he was running these broadcasts at the same time that shows would have been running.”

Thursdays through Sundays, for a 10-week run extending from mid-March through June of 2020, Tarlton’s piano room became a streamcasting studio. To create these mini-concerts, Theatre Charlotte’s go-to music director networked with Matthews Playhouse, Davidson Community Players, and Children’s Theatre of Charlotte, as well as Actor’s Theatre.

Tracks recorded in the Tarlton piano room also went beyond the QC to contacts who became singing collaborators in Chicago, New York, and musical performers who had been left in the lurch by stalled national tours.

“It was a good opportunity to kind of bring the arts together at a time when that was not really possible and people were kind of starving for the arts. And it gave us a chance to really get to know and meet and work with a lot of really, really wonderful people.”

That sweet taste of collaboration – and that newly-forged network of musical artists – seemed like a shame to waste. When live theatre began to return late in the summer of 2021, Tarlton dropped the Quarantine from his brand, fired up his network, and launched the live programming of QC Concerts, season one. Angels will mark the end of season two, detouring from a cavalcade of musicals that has included Titanic, Kinky Boots, Head Over Heels, and Cruel Intentions.

Season three scheduling was unveiled last month, and the all-musical lineup will include Diana The Musical, Hit the Wall, Local Singles, Merrily We Roll Along, Parade, and Sunset Boulevard. Late in July, the season kicks off with Diana at Free Will Craft + Vine, a favorite NoDa haunt where Tarlton staged Kinky Boots. The season reaches its pinnacle in November, when Sunset Boulevard opens Uptown at Booth Playhouse – backed by a 40-piece orchestra.

The emphasis, except when Angels are flown in, is always on the music.

“We do concert stage productions of shows,” Tarlton explains. “So we do them with the full orchestra, whatever the complement is that the show is written for. A lot of our musicians are Symphony subs that play all the Broadway national tours, and their schedules fill up super quickly. So to get those folks willing to come on board and play Titanic [boasting a 22-piece orchestra] for one weekend with two rehearsals is astounding.”

Dramatic presentation continues to evolve, though Tarlton has no plans to move beyond the concert format. In the beginning, it was a fairly straightforward reading-stage layout, with the singers at music stands behind a row of mics and the orchestra lurking upstage. At Free Will in NoDa, they built a drag-show style runway and the audience surrounded the players.

Prodded by imaginative guest directors, Tarlton kept pushing the envelope, adding light costumes, some props, and moving his leading men and women away from their scripts for the key musical numbers. While guest director J. Christopher Brown won’t be crashing ceilings or flying angels when QC Concerts travels to the Georgia Tucker, he will be using projections and sound design to clarify the narrative and amp up the key moments.

That will put the traditional reading-stage setup on steroids. Written for an eight-person ensemble, Angels could be expected to add on a narrator for the script-in-hand format to read the scene settings and stage directions. Brown is expanding his cast to 18, using multiple narrators and cutting down on actors playing two or more roles. There are 21 roles in Millennium Approaches and 25 in the stupendous Perestroika.

Only one cast member doesn’t double, the actor who portrays protagonist Prior Walter. It’s an epic role that single-handedly justifies Kushner’s audacious Angels subtitle, A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Not the kind of role you plunge into if you’re accustomed to singing “The Surrey With the Fringe on Top” or “Marian the Librarian.”

Casts from previous QC Concerts productions fill only four of the 18 slots for the company’s first nonmusical foray. Most notorious among these usual suspects will be Beau Stroupe as Roy Cohn, the demonic counterpart of the angelic Prior. Both of these powerhouse characters are AIDS victims, and another QC mainstay, Lamar Davis as Belize, is the link between the two – he’s the registered nurse who cares for the hospitalized Cohn, and he’s Prior’s prior lover.

The other major roles came from outside QC’s musical circle, a daring outreach since Brown didn’t bring a wealth of local experience to the table.

“It was 100% a leap into the void,” Tarlton admits. “I hoped that [Angels] was a title that would catch people’s eyes and they’d be like, ‘I might never get the chance to do this again.’ Foundational to the work we do is that idea of creating a home for everybody and really doing a lot of diverse work to challenge the way we think about and view the world. We’re not a company with a 95-year history – I’m totally out there to push the envelope and to bring something new and exciting and fresh, and if it makes people mad, it makes people mad. If people love it, people love it.”

Tarlton’s zest for challenging himself evidently goes beyond founding a theatre company unlike any we’ve seen before in Charlotte. Although he hadn’t appeared onstage since he was “in college a million years ago,” he auditioned for Angels after telling Brown not to use him if he sucked.

He’ll be playing Louis Ironson, the self-pitying nebbish and seducer who connects Prior with a third plotline. Too weak to stand by Prior in his AIDS sufferings, he abandons him in favor of his Mormon co-worker, Joe Pitt, luring him away from his religious principles and from his flaky, pill-popping wife, Harper Pitt. While Angels on high are recruiting Prior to redeem America, Harper is taking flight to a narcotic dreamworld and Roy Cohn is haunted by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg. Enter Hannah Pitt, flying in from Salt Lake City to save her dear son Joe from the mortal sin of sodomy.

Yeah, it’s a lot.

Additionally, Tarlton is glad that two married couples, neither of whom have appeared with QC before – or at Theatre Charlotte – have become core players in Concerts’ Angels.

Rachel and Brandon Dawson, both faculty members at Winthrop University, are making their Charlotte debuts, Rachel as the confused, jilted, and somewhat spacey Harper and Brandon as our gay visionary Prior Walter. The scene they will have together is among the most incredible of the entire epic. Scott and Robin Tynes-Miller, on the other hand, have been mainstays on the Charlotte theatre scene for the last decade, ever since Robin founded Three Bone Theatre in 2013.

She is also the one solid link between the current QC Concerts Angels and the CAST production, shifting from the role of Harper Pitt in 2014 to the more elevated role The Angel. Rehearsal photos repeatedly depict Robin rising above ground level, even if she doesn’t fly. Scott figures to be more earthbound as the straight-arrow Joe Pitt.

While Actor’s Theatre of Charlotte provided the platform for QC Quarantine’s launch at their website, Theatre Charlotte deserves credit as the more significant source of inspiration for Tarlton’s unique enterprise – and its true birthplace. At about the same time that Tynes-Miller was piloting her first Three Bone production in 2013, the old Queens Road barn began hosting a series of annual fundraising concerts, Grand Nights for Singing, showcasing showtunes.

Tarlton was a fixture at the keyboard for these concerts. That’s where he started to become the only theaterperson in Charlotte to be connected with two different Tony Kushner works. Instead of the customary medley format, focusing on a particular era (like pre-1965) and highlights from a signature show (like Funny Girl), Tarlton approached executive director Ron Law with the idea of doing a full show.

So on February 26, 2016, the new concert musical concept took wing in the lobby of Theatre Charlotte with Caroline, or Change – music by Jeanine Tesori, book and lyrics by Kushner.

“Caroline, or Change was one of those shows that I just felt like it was the right time, the right group of people in Charlotte to be able to pull something like that off. It was an incredible experience,” Tarlton says.

He caught the return of that musical to Broadway in 2021 as well as the Nathan Lane Angels in 2018. Taking his first leaps away from musicals with Angels – as a producer and as an actor – was pretty much a no-brainer.

“There’s no better show to do than something that means so much to me and the community.”

Publicity photos for the Georgia Tucker Fine Arts Hall are delicious, showing a 145-seat black box with ample projection and soundbooth resources for a knockout Angels. As the new fringe theatre movement continues to gain momentum around town, the Tucker becomes another tempting place for it to hang out.

The runs of QC Concerts’ shows remain tantalizingly short, a limitation Tarlton hopes to address in the coming years. This week’s Angels run, four performances from May 18-21, offer only two opportunities for us to see both parts of Kushner’s masterwork. Then it’s gone.

For Tarlton, that ephemerality is part of QC Concerts’ attraction. Like New York City Encores or the Broadway Center Stage Program at Kennedy Center in DC, the concept might be stretched to a full week. Maybe the sweet spot for ticket sales, publicity, reviews, and word-of-mouth will be found in that discreet degree of expansion.

“The idea is that these shows live and breathe in one specific moment in time,” Tarlton insists. “Our goal is to become a fully professional company in the next five years so we’re able to kind of pay everybody along the way.”

CP Gets Its Act Together for Summer 2017

Preview: CPCC Summer Theatre 2017

Fiddler on the Roof Promos

By Perry Tannenbaum

Entering its 44^th season, Central Piedmont Community College Summer Theatre would be hard-pressed to surpass the lineup of shows they presented last year – Annie, Chicago, Sleuth, and Sister Act. But there are good reasons for the folks on Elizabeth Avenue to be super-confident that 2017 will be even more successful at the box office.

Yes, the family-friendly mix of popular Broadway musicals, adult comedy, and an AM kiddie show will provide the perfect refuge from a slapstick presidency that hasn’t managed to derail our strong economy (yet). And yes, after 10 years of random screeches, thumps, and bumps in the night, technicians were able to exorcise the demons that had previously haunted the Halton Theater sound system. Throughout the 2016 season, CP had its act completely together and gremlin-free.

Three beloved Broadway hits are coming to the Halton to keep the good thing going, beginning with Fiddler on the Roof (June 2-10) and followed by A Chorus Line (June 16-24) before CPCC Summer Theatre makes its exit with the pop ABBA jukeboxer, Mamma Mia! (July 14-22). In between the last two Broadway extravaganzas, the summer’s kiddie musical, James and the Giant Peach (June 28-July 8) takes over the Halton by day while the nighttime action scoots across Elizabeth Avenue to Pease Auditorium with A Comedy of Tenors (June 30-July 9).

Oh yeah, one more reliable predictor of success: “We have had record season ticket sales so far,” says Tom Hollis, the CP Theatre Department chair who runs the show and will direct Fiddler and Mamma Mia!

The process of selecting CP’s summer lineup, says Hollis, is ongoing throughout the year with suggestions from audience, from members of the creative team, and consultation with other theater companies. CP wants the lowdown on what others are programming and how well tickets are selling. Radar is also aimed at what Broadway producers are making freshly available from their inventory.

“There used to be a rule of thumb that said you should wait four or five years before you do a show that had toured through,” Hollis recalls. “But that no longer seems to hold true. Our experience with Les Miz and Phantom showed that proximity to the tours actually increased sales.”

It might be assumed that tours of these perennials and Mamma Mia! – which has touched down in Charlotte no less than six times since 2002 – would spark interest in enthusiasts to see them again. Yet Hollis cites trade publication data indicating that audiences across the country who attend Broadway Lights series like those offered here by Blumenthal Performing Arts don’t ordinarily attend local theatre.

“Maybe they have spent all their money on those tickets and can’t afford to attend more,” Hollis speculates. “What we are seeing is that the combination of our more competitive pricing in comparison with the touring houses and the quality of our product makes it possible for people who love theatre but can’t afford the tour prices to see the show in our theater and bring the entire family when they do it.”

Fiddler on the Roof Promos

On the other hand, CP allows absence to make their subscribers’ hearts grow fonder of shows they’ve previously presented. Both Fiddler and Chorus Line have been done before on campus but never at the Halton, which became the home for CP’s big musicals in the fall of 2005. Budgetary considerations also go into the lineup formula, so comparatively barebones productions like Chorus Line and Chicago help to rein in the bottom line.

Additional economies are available through casting, when an actor can take on multiple roles, navigating a labyrinth of rehearsals and performances to appear in as many as four of the five shows that CP Summer mounts in an eight-week span. It takes eagerness, enthusiasm, and plenty of stamina to go through such a demanding grind, which is why the Summer acting company always skews so young.

In seasons when CP is planning shows like Annie or Oliver, they’ll hold separate auditions in February for kids on top of the cattle calls for local actors and aspiring high school interns. Then in early March, directors will trek to the Southeastern Theatre Conference for regional auditions, where collegians and recent grads come in search of summer work. CP signed up six budding pros at this year’s auditions in Lexington, KY. Look for some of this new blood in A Chorus Line, where young triple threats belong.

Perhaps the optics of overly youthful casts have grown stale for Hollis and his colleagues as the years roll by, or maybe budgetary purse strings are loosening, but we’re recognizing more veteran locals who are returning annually to the Halton and to Pease for CP’s summer rites.

Jerry Colbert, whose CP credits date back to 1974 and took the Laurence Olivier role in last summer’s Sleuth, returns as one of the over-the-hill candidates who might be the father of the bride-to-be in Mamma Mia! Alongside Colbert, Dan Brunson and Kathryn Stamas will be familiar to more recent subscribers. James K. Flynn, fatherly enough to play Tevye when CP last presented Fiddler, moves into A Comedy of Tenors along with two other familiars, Craig Estep and Caroline Renfro.

For the second successive summer, Susan Cherin Gundersheim is teamed with Beau Stroupe. Last year, she was Daddy Warbucks factotum Grace Farrell in Annie. Now in Fiddler, she gets to variously torment Tevye – or emote to his fake dream – as Golde, the mother of his five daughters.

CPCC_SummerTheatre_0008

Stroupe has walked a rocky road to Anatevka and the iconic role of the Scripture-fracturing dairyman. Photos of Stroupe as Daddy Warbucks show him with scarcely less hair than he had when he was finishing chemotherapy in late 2013 – more than a year after a grapefruit-sized malignancy was found in his intestine. A rather hostile divorce compounded his woes, so his role as the predatory Chauvelin in The Scarlet Pimpernel during the next summer seemed to chime with his embattled temperament.

The road from chemo to Anatevka led through Cherry Tree Lane, where Stroupe was George Banks, the starchy and clueless father who was transformed – along with his unruly children – in Mary Poppins through the magical nanny. A role he neither knew nor cared about until he began rehearsing, Banks awakened in Stroupe a new affection for father roles.

Warbucks pointed him in the same direction. “Again, the journey of a seemingly rigid and even detached businessman to one of tender-hearted father figure,” says Stroupe.

“I certainly relate to the journey of a father with my own four children through the difficulty of divorce and the slow healing process. It’s easy to understand the juggling act of breadwinner, patriarch, husband, father and visible member of the community. When Tevye is saying goodbye to Hodel at the train station, it takes very little effort for me to feel what any true father feels when letting his child go to live a life of their own choosing.”

New directions will be running amok when CP opens A Comedy of Tenors, Ken Ludwig’s sequel to Lend Me a Tenor, a CP Summer hit way back in 1996. No matter what its pedigree is, Ludwig’s operatic farce – think three tenors misbehaving in Paris – is the newest show CP has ever done, from farm to fork after its New Jersey world premiere in less than two years. Unheard of, as Tevye would say.

And Renfro, CP’s go-to action heroine in Dial M for Murder and Wait Until Dark, tackles a comedy – with a Russian accent! As sexy diva Tatiana Racon, Renfro will have her sights set on a very married tenor, but her seduction will farcically misfire.

“There will definitely be some good old-fashioned vamping,” Renfro promises. “I am so psyched about doing the accent. And so freaked out about it. At this point in my career, the thing that appeals to me most about a role is doing something I’ve never done before, especially if it scares me.”

Can’t Get Enough of Your Nun, Babe

Reviews of Sister Act and Killing Women

By Perry Tannenbaum

Maybe Ophelia should have followed Hamlet’s advice. Julie Andrews — or was that Carrie Underwood? — checked into a nunnery in The Sound of Music and, in spite of some serious compatibility issues, wound up with a husband and a singing group. The same thing happened to Whoopi Goldberg in Sister Act when she hid from a Las Vegas gangster at a San Francisco convent and wound up leading a choir of nuns in a command performance for the Pope.

Sister Act runs through July 23 at CPCC’s Halton Theater. (Photo by Chris Record)

(Photo by Chris Record)

The musical version, transplanted to Philly and currently completing a very successful summer season at CPCC, makes it a little clearer that lounge singer Deloris Van Cartier gets her man. Some might say that Sweaty Eddie, the shy and timid police desk sergeant who whisks Deloris into hiding, mans up at just the right moment and gets his woman. No matter, there’s plenty of righteous jubilation at the end.

Relationships with Deloris tend to be turbulent. She disdains the timid Eddie even though she knows he has a crush on her. Yet she submits to the indignity of being gangster Curtis Jackson’s piece-on-the-side, because he might soften up and get her a record deal. That relationship sours when Curtis gives Deloris one of his wife’s hand-me-down coats for Christmas — a rather noxious blue number — but before we can see whether she’ll follow through on her resolve to walk out on him, she witnesses Curtis killing off one of his henchmen.

So that relationship is also on the rocks.

It’s only when Eddie puts her in the witness protection program at Queen of Angels Cathedral that we arrive at the relationship that gives Sister Act its true spark. Eddie and Curtis merely represent the diverging paths Deloris might take in life. Mother Superior is her polar opposite, disciplined, dignified, god-fearing, ascetic, and tradition-bound. Comical shockwaves fly in both directions when they meet — as soon as Mother Superior espies Deloris’s glittery scanty attire, and as soon as Deloris whips out a cig.

What elevates this script, adapted by Cheri and Bill Steinkellner from Joseph Howard’s screenplay, is the attention it gives to the Mother Superior’s spiritual crisis as Deloris’s leadership of the choir brings crass commercial success to the struggling Cathedral. The stinging line she nails Deloris with, “God sent you here for a purpose — take the hint,” gets flung right back in Mother Superior’s face.

CP and director Corey Mitchell are so fortunate to have Paula Baldwin for their top nun. While Baldwin gets great comedy mileage out of Mother Superior’s discomfiture, she also delves deeply enough into the Mother’s spiritual anguish for us to empathize, even if we can’t climb aboard. It would be an overstatement to say that Baldwin can’t sing a note, but there are some notes Mitchell and music director Drina Keen should have advised her not to sing. Speaking some of “I Haven’t Got a Prayer” would have helped, but it remains one of the evening’s highlights.

Conversely, singing rather than acting is Jessica Rebecca’s strong suit as Deloris. She’s a fair substitute for the infallible Whoopi in the comical moments, but she’s an absolute force of nature when she breaks into song. I’m not sure that Rebecca even needs a mic when she’s belting at Halton Theater, but she was certainly overmiked for most of opening night.

I only began to feel raw emotion from Rebecca at Eddie’s apartment when she sang “Fabulous, Baby!” her second pass at proclaiming her aspirations. So it was especially devastating when she suddenly grew soft segueing into the title song, where she realizes the love, sisterhood, responsibility, and growth she has experienced at Queen of Angels. A goose-bump moment, for sure.

Rebecca towers over Christian Deon Williams, making it all the easier for him to simulate Eddie’s timidity, but the richness in his lower range as he sings his aspirational “I Could Be That Guy” tips us off to his manliness too soon. Big as he is, Stephen Stamps could stand to be raunchier — and older — as Curtis to get the full comical menace out of “When I Find My Baby,” a doo-wop love song with murderous intent, but his Barry White shtick later on is workin’, Babe.

Curtis’s backup thugs have a nice ethnic diversity, Justin Miller as Joey, Alex Aguilar as Pablo, and Justin Rivers as TJ, all of them getting prime spots in “Lady in a Long Black Dress.” More individuality is lavished upon Monsignor O’Hara and three of the nuns. It’s Beau Stroupe as O’Hara who prevails upon Mother Superior to offer refuge to Deloris and is then surprised — and surprisingly enthused — about the rock and gospel Deloris infuses into Sunday services.

Megan Postle is preternaturally welcoming and upbeat as Sister Mary Patrick, exactly the quality needed to maximize the comedy of “It’s Good to Be a Nun.” Caroline Chisholm is the conflicted postulant, Mary Robert, instantly drawn to Deloris’s worldliness. She has some prodigious high notes lurking within her, but Chisholm maintains her innocence even after Deloris helps set them free. As the usurped choir director, Sister Mary Lazarus, Kathryn Stamas is the most surprising of the nuns. Not only can she kick aside a piano stool with a flair that would make Jerry Lee Lewis proud, she can kick her left foot as high as her ear, kicking sideways.

Unless you truly expected the Halton’s stage to be transformed into a cathedral worthy of a Pope’s visit, you’ll be impressed by Jennifer O’Kelly’s set designs — and by how slickly one scene melts into another. Except for the glittery getups worn by Deloris and her backup duo, costume designer Theresa Bush reins it in, but the papal finale is pretty fab.

Alan Menken’s “Here Within These Walls” echoes his own “Beauty and the Beast,” a letdown where there should be uplift. But his “Sunday Morning Fever” — and a couple of his other songs here — will waken disco memories of Travolta, the Bee Gees, and their Saturday Night Fever, a trashy touch that somehow adds to the fun.

A shot from Killing Women. (Photo courtesy of Stephen Seay)

(Photo courtesy of Stephen Seay)

A similar vein of humor runs through Killing Women, a black comedy presented by Stephen Seay Productions at UpStage. Gwen is involuntarily recruited into a ring of hired killers, a profession totally inimical to motherhood. Forget about spiritual uplift as two other pistol packers, vulgar Abby and elegant Lucy, pitch in with the childcare.

Gwen earns one of the most hilarious character descriptions I’ve ever heard, rightly labeled a “do-it-yourself widow” by Abby. The action really revolves around Abby, for after Lucy splatters her hitman husband’s brains on their living room wall, Abby’s callous boss, Ramone, decrees that she must knock the mother off. What passes for Abby’s heart shines through here, for she sells Ramone on the notion of grooming Lucy to replace her dead husband at the firm — but only gets one week to deliver.

Turns out that Gwen has considerable aptitude: she’s a crack shot and more than one hitman is smitten by her, though her body disposal skills need work. Luci Wilson carries the show as Gwen, no less rough-around-the-edges now than when I first saw her in 2008 with the Robot Johnson sketch comedy group. That’s a good thing, and when we finally see all her tattoos, we’re not even slightly surprised.

A less confident, more wired performer, Elizabeth Simpson seems to know Gwen from the inside, and Seay casts two blue-chippers, Lesley Ann Giles and Christopher Jones, to fill out his front-liners as Lucy and Ramone. Cameos are quirky as everything else in Marisa Wegrzyn’s script, Matthew Schantz and Field Cantey handling them quite well.