Tag Archives: Davidson Community Players

Evita’s “New Argentina” Suddenly Reeks of MAGA USA

Review: Evita at Duke Performance Hall

By Perry Tannenbaum

As women and as films, Evita and Melania will never be viewed as two of a kind. Yet in recent years, as Ms. Trump’s husband becomes more ceremonial, militaristic, and authoritarian, a mild kinship and a certain sisterhood have emerged between the two first ladies. There are only a few moments when the current Davidson Community Players’ production of the revered Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, directed with surprising ferocity by Steve Kaliski, seems to reference that kinship.

But there are many more instances when Eva Perón’s “New Argentina” brings present-day USA to mind in all its vulgar MAGA glory. Those happen whenever fervent religious enthusiasm is misdirected. Or when working-class people are talked up so they can be more easily exploited.

By juxtaposing Evita’s glamor, pragmatism, and humble origins with the mixture of street-smart cynicism, working-class empathy, and grudging admiration for homegrown “star quality” that we hear from Che, our narrator, Tim Rice’s libretto has always radiated a reasoned objectivity.

So Kaliski and his principals, Melissa Lozada and Neifert Enrique, aren’t reversing the political lean of Evita. They’re giving the music, the recitative, and the main characters a firm shove in a more malevolent direction.

Enrique is particularly startling, easily the most dominant Che we’ve had in the QC. This is a rock tenor who can produce piercingly strong falsetto treble and, minutes later, invade the bass clef so deeply that you wonder where that voice is coming from – and Enrique never makes the mistake of yielding to Lloyd Webber’s singsong to the extent that it dulls Che’s subversive edge.

In sum, Enrique is often powerful enough to make us see the charismatic Evita through his eyes. If you wanted to see the icon as a calculating seductress, who may or may not have gotten religion through her good fortune or failing health, Whitney Drury was perfection in Queen City Theatre Company’s 2010 production, both in the sexual predation that catapulted Evita to celebrity and in her terminal suffering.

On the other hand, if you wanted to be fascinated by an enigmatic Evita, one gifted with so much natural charm and regality that she refuted the whole concept of aristocracy, Lucia Stetson was ideal at Central Piedmont in 2018 – with no shortage of Evita vanity.

At Duke Performance Hall, on the Davidson College campus, Lozada is simply the meanest and most malignant Eva Perón you’ll likely ever see. Even her “star quality” has a punkish edge as she never quite sheds her peasant roots. There’s a somewhat ghoulish tinge that lingers softly on her final prideful declaration that she has brought her people closer “to the heart of Perón,” her autocratic husband, the nation’s president.

In that moment especially, our clueless Melania pales next to her. We must revert to the golden-haired Trump for a parallel.

Of course, if you saw Lozada in the title role of Electricidad last August, you may already be altering your plans for the final weekend of Evita.Or, if you witnessed Enrique in his most recent title-role triumph down in Matthews as The Prince of Egypt, you may be astonished to hear that his Che is as potent as his Moses.

They aren’t the only reasons why word-of-mouth touting Evita is spreading like a Lake Norman wildfire. Kaliski’s design team has also risen to the challenge of creating a spectacle to match the dimensions of the Duke. Most notable of these are costume designer Sarah Deutsch, lighting designer Kaylin Gess, choreographer Tod A. Kubo, and – perched high in the stratosphere behind the stage’s second scrim – the 10-piece band directed by Matthew Primm.

Upstaging and outsizing them all are the projections designed by Caleb Sigmon, beginning with what may be an actual Eva Perón film! Rice and Lloyd Webber wanted to simulate us all being gathered at a movie theater at the start of their musical when the flick is suddenly interrupted by the announcement of the beloved Evita’s death.

For the first time, this opening scene with its operatic choral requiem seemed prophetic, previewing the wailing and grief that is sure to engulf our streets, churches, and national monuments when 45/47’s number is up. The Amazing Tangerine tries so hard to alienate and disillusion his cult following. In vain, it seems.

Victimized by the wayward Halton Theater sound system when he portrayed Che in 2018, Ron Turner Diaz ages gracefully in the role of the militantly urbane Perón. Effortlessly, he conjures up the personality of a chieftain who will either succumb to Evita’s charm and chutzpah or slay her instantly. There’s a nice tension to their “I’d Be Surprisingly Good for You,” spiced with a tango tang of violence.

Lastly – except for dozens of aristocrats, lovers, family, military, children, and the citizen ensemble – there’s Tristan Nogueira, rounding out an all-Latino cast of major characters, conclusively answering the question of whether we have enough Hispanic talent in Charlotte to deliver a truly authentic Evita. If you saw Nogueira as the surprisingly skeptical Aaron in The Prince of Egypt, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by his transformation from the future High Priest into lounge lizard Agustin Magaldi, Evita’s first discard.

Extra bonus: Lindsay Litka-Montes sings “Another Suitcase in Another Hall” with a quiet, simmering bitterness as Juan’ s discarded Mistress.

More significant extra bonus: due to popular demand, an extra performance of Evita has been added to its closing weekend. This coming Sunday at 7pm.

Beginning at the Beginning at Cunningham Theatre Center

Before the news broke about the extra Evita performance, we returned to the Wildcats campus to usher in the summer – and celebrate Father’s Day – with Common Thread Theatre Company’s Beginning at the Beginning. Staged at the Cunningham Theatre Center, B @ the B was a miniature new play festival showcasing two works-in-progress with an intermission in between and a talkback with playwrights Brian Daye and David Scheonfeld afterwards.

This time, the trip up I-77 wasn’t quite as rewarding. Daye’s one-act, The Race, directed by Eric J. Little, was the better of the two pieces: more compelling action, fuller characterizations, and high-energy performances. Shawn Halliday portrayed the overtly racist Lavell Anderson, on death row as a convicted murderer awaiting execution, while Vanecia Boone was cast as his eleventh-hour appeals attorney, African American cub lawyer Cory Williams, understandably reluctant to take the case.

The two shrunken timeframes, the impending execution and the brevity of Daye’s script, short-circuited any racial animosities that may have clouded the budding attorney-client relationship between Cory and Lavell. He had undergone a religious transformation, and she, with even greater speed, is convinced of his innocence.

Worse, the case against Lavell, whether 19 years or three months old, is so laughably flimsy that it should never have been brought to court – unless the charge had been armed robbery. Lavell maintains that his accomplice, Vern McCluskey, was the trigger man and that he never fired his gun. Criminology or Forensics 101 are not prerequisites to knowing how Lavell’s assertion can be confirmed: anyone who has read a Perry Mason novel – the series began over 90 years ago – is aware of scientific tests that match a bullet with a gun and determine whether a person has recently used a firearm.

Open and shut. We also liked Isaac Hampton as the big, bigoted prison guard.

Scheonfeld’s Massage Group Therapy was even less fully developed and, consequently, less satisfying. Aside from a creep named John who bedevils at least half of the four masseuses, none of the playwright’s people were sufficiently fleshed out. It was a little awkward to see Justin Peoples as John upstaging the exploited women we’re intended to care about.

Even if Scheonfeld had made his massage parlor workers more distinctive, there would have been another tall obstacle to overcome for me. Switching roles from female lead to director, Boone did not insist that her players – or the dude reading stage directions – speak loudly enough to be heard.

B @ the B hits the road for its concluding weekend, resurfacing at North Carolina A&T University on June 27 and 28, up in Winston-Salem. For the time being, the more rewarding trip is to Davidson for the resumption of the Community Players’ Evita.

As for Winston, best to wait for the International Black Theatre Festival, July 27 through August 1. Charlotte’s own BNS Productions will be among the many fine Black companies there, presenting four performances of August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, afternoons and evenings on July 31 and August 1.

“Yankee Tavern” Still Implodes With 9/11 Speculations

Review: Yankee Tavern at DCP’s Armour Street Theatre

By Perry Tannenbaum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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