Tag Archives: Destiney Wolfe

“Violet” Comes from Country in a Musical Teeming with Blues and Gospel

**Review: Violet at Theatre Charlotte**

By Perry Tannenbaum

So here’s something we’ve learned over the past month on the Charlotte theatre scene. There are two schools of thought on how to portray a horrifically scarred woman onstage. Back in late February, Carolina Actors Studio Theatre took the cinematic approach at the original Mint Museum on Randolph, painstakingly applying makeup to their leading lady, Zoe Matney, before every performance of Alabaster, down the entire left side of her body from head to ankle.

Now we have the Violet approach at Theatre Charlotte, where Destiney Wolfe stars in the title role with a hideous scar that looks more like a fine line drawn with a red ballpoint pen than a shocking horror. So it was – minus the fine red line – when Lauren Ward originated the role in 1997 on Broadway and when Sutton Foster revived it there in 2014.

Besides the risk of an Emperor’s New Clothes moment from an innocent child (“But Mommy, Violet doesn’t have any scar!”), it figures to be more effortful to watch Wolfe without the scar everybody onstage is talking about and constantly having to imagine a scar we are not seeing. That’s different from reading “The Ugliest Pilgrim” by Doris Betts, the short story that this Jeanine Tesori-Brian Crawley musical is based on.

Until the fourth page, the scar isn’t explicitly mentioned. Once the word is seen, it quickly becomes the center of the story – the reason why Violet is on a bus from Spruce Pine, NC, to Tulsa, where she ardently believes a venerated TV preacher will heal her terrible affliction. Nothing on the remaining 25 pages contradicts the image engraved in our imaginations.

Within the blissful two dimensions of a book, we don’t need to keep imagining what isn’t. Perhaps more subtly, as demonstrated by Matney’s portrayal of June in Alabaster,we can gradually get used to the disfigurement, look past it, and see the person. Along the way, we could also find plenty of relief looking at June’s unscathed side.

Notwithstanding her terrible scar and her pathetic reliance on Oral Roberts – oops, I mean the famed Oklahoma preacher – Violet is clearsighted enough to grasp her most valid reason for boarding the bus. Spruce Pine is a very small-minded town. Her elders stare at her in pity and her peers are worse, shunning her, mocking her, and pranking her.

As the saying goes, she needs to get out and meet people. Spruce Pine isn’t the place for it.

Betts had Violet saying that in a more biblical way: “Good people have nearly turned me against you, Lord. They open their mouths for the milk of human kindness and boiling oil spews out.”

Told objectively by Crawley rather than in first-person by Betts’s Violet, we see the townsfolk clearly sooner rather than judging them on a single casual quote. Scarred or not, Crawley and Betts agree on one key point: Violet is way too thin-skinned.

Meanwhile, reasons for dismissing Violet’s self-pity – and doubting her self-awareness – are multiplying. Before the bus reaches Arkansas, she has hooked up with two military men who are quickly captivated by her. Both of them, one black and one white, are eager to show their ardor on a stopover in Memphis, where they spend a night out together.

So the necessity of imagining that hideous scar becomes more urgent for us.

Thankfully, the Memphis sojourn allows Tessori to naturally widen her musical palette, welcoming us to the blues along with the Beale Street underbelly of town. Violet’s dream of healing and her actual Oklahoma encounters with the Preacher are welcome prompts for Tessori to branch out further into righteous, stomping, spirit-of-the-Lord gospel.

A five-piece band led from the keyboard by Danielle Barnes Hayes leaned into the gospel music at the Preacher’s revival meeting as lustily as the more countrified tunes that had gone before. Our eagerness to hear those gospel strains was certainly piqued and primed last Saturday when a seven-voice choir greeted us in the lobby of the old Queens Road Barn, accompanied by a wee electric keyboard, singing hymns and shouts for a half hour before showtime.

While director Stuart Spencer skimps on makeup design, he is deeply attuned to the material, having been part of the Davidson Community Players cast when Violet had its regional premiere in 2010. Was it a makeup job on Cassandra Howley Wood that gave me such a favorable impression of her local debut and the show? Or was it simply the intimacy of Armour Street Theatre, bridging the gap between first-person narrative and Broadway musical?

At the bus station where Violet embarks on her odyssey, at the Memphis music hall where Asley Benjamin belts a couple of songs, and at the Tulsa TV revival, a bigger stage is surely better. More space for more people and more decibels! More opportunities for lighting designer Gordon Olson to colorize costumer Sophie Carlick’s shiny robes for the Preacher’s hallelujah choir – and to add pizzazz to Sharlie Duncan’s choreography!

To their credit, neither of the soldier boys seriously believes that Violet will look any better after her Oral rendezvous in Tulsa when she reboards her Greyhound bus, heads back home to Spruce Pine, and stops off in Arkansas for another meet-up. With Sean Bryant as Flick and Ethan Vatske as Monty, the interracial relationship and rivalry between the soldiers occasionally becomes more compelling and suspenseful than Violet’s cosmetic quest.

Bryant gets the advantage of a more instructive interracial relationship between Flick and Violet. On the way to learning that her inner scars are more debilitating – and curable – than her outer ones, it’s necessary for her to appreciate that there are other, more serious skin problems in life. Beginning with pigment. In the Betts story, there’s one other huge hurdle in Violet’s spiritual growth that we don’t hear about onstage: her use of the N-word. More of Spruce Pine needs to be exorcized from her soul than she realizes.

On top of that, this thin-skinned Violet is stubborn, too. As dynamic as Wolfe’s vocals are, her adamant refusal to believe that anyone besides her daddy could love her is the most startling aspect of Violet we must encounter. We recognize this trait in people we’ve met, maybe in ourselves. Violet’s stubbornness goes so irrationally deep that it not only prolongs her path to enlightenment, it obliges Crawley to pile on a flashback recalling a cruel prank that was played on her by her schoolmates.

Counterbalancing Bryant’s shyness and vulnerability as Flick, Vatske draws the luxuries of being the more cocksure and aggressive Romeo. Just sitting down to play poker with Flick and Violet softens us up to Monty, and confident as he is, Vatske keeps us a little in suspense about with whether he’s playing with the lass or serious. The way Vatske is playing him, you’re not sure whether Monty is sure himself.

This upsized Violet is a special boon for Henk Bouhuys, who draws two plum roles, the sometimes surly, sometimes avuncular Bus Driver and the charismatic Preacher. Never mind that that the Preacher is surrounded by a fervid Gospel Choir, both in the TV flashback and in Tulsa, Bouhuys dominates the stage with his fiery motormouth exhortations.

It’s awesome enough to make his backstage powwows with this pilgrim unexpectedly tender and poignant – a quietly dazzling reality check – and allows Wolfe to enlarge upon Violet’s devotional and delusional traits.

Unfortunately, on a big musical stage, Bouhuys’s dazzle and the decadence of Memphis nightlife tend to cast the flashback scenes between Young Vi and her Father into comparatively dreary shadow. To put it bluntly, when Tessori worked with the multiple Allisons of Fun Home in 2015, she had a superior book and lyrics from Lisa Kron.

So Spencer, Abigail Sharpe as Young Vi, and Nick Southwick as her dad are doing the best they can with the weak hand they are dealt here. It’s heartwarming to see the widower dad teaching Young Vi how to play poker in order to jumpstart her math skills. “Luck of the Draw,” blending this flashback with Violet’s cardplaying triumph over Monty and Flick, puts Sharpe and Southwick to their best use.

But these flashbacks, before and after the catastrophic accident that scars Violet, are also the best reason why we never see that scar on the face of either protagonist. It would need to be applied to Young Vi during the show, a fearsome hurdle for a makeup artists and stage managers.

The script and the dumpy cardigan sweaters the Violets wear supply a wonderful way to differentiate between the two. When we first see Wolfe huddled at the bus station and boarding her bus, she looks more homeless than scarred. It’s only after dark in Memphis, when she’s escorted to the music hall by two strapping soldiers, that Wolfe tosses her cardigan aside and shows signs of full-blooded womanhood.

Miracle of miracles, she becomes flirty!

Christmas at Pemberley Gets a Gendered Makeover

Review: Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley @ the Cain Center

By Perry Tannenbaum

If it weren’t for all the adaptations we hear about on TV and in movies, we could say that it required supreme audacity for Lauren Gunderson and , to tread in Jane Austen’s footsteps and pen a sequel to Pride and Prejudice, her wittiest and most beloved novel. But despite the obvious commercial bent of Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley, Gunderson and Melcon have aimed to capture Austen’s essence and bring fresh life to her characters.

As you’ll find up at the Cain Center in Cornelius, no small thanks to the audacious direction of Steve Kaliski, the script sprinkles a bit of modern perspective on the Bennet sisters and their beaus – occasionally forcing us to recognize that Austen’s times are not so different from our own. Elizabeth Darcy, the heroine of the novel, still retains enough decorum not to call Fitzwilliam Darcy by his first name. Even in the privacy of their own home!

Likewise, elder sister Jane and her beloved Charles address each other as Mr. And Mrs. Bingley. “Happy Christmas” rather than “Merry Christmas” is the greeting norm, and the Christmas tree tradition has yet to take root in England in December of 1815. It’s Elizabeth’s audacity that brings this German custom to the Pemberley drawing room with its attached library.

In some ways, history has circled back. Back in college, my professor instantly drew our attention to the epistolary nature of Pride and Prejudice. The story is largely driven by letter writing. A chief turning point in the story is contained in a letter from Darcy addressed to Elizabeth, debunking her previous prejudices against him!

The prevalence of letter writing astonished us then – and felt alien. Ancient. Forty-plus years later, the sight of Mary Bennet, her sister Lydia, and Arthur de Bourgh exchanging billets-doux while under the same roof has to remind me of today’s texting, Instagramming youth, perpetually thumbing their cellphones. Buttressed by books, these youngsters can put quill to paper.

With Kitty off in London, not expected to arrive until Christmas Day with her parents, Mary is the only Miss Bennet we see and unexpectedly the leading lady. Arthur is an entirely new character, rivalling Mary in his bookishness. Resigned to spinsterhood, Mary is shocked to find that they’re hitting it off.

The forward-looking Gunderson and Melcon, proclaiming that Austen is for everyone, encourage diverse casting. But Kaliski and his Davidson Community Players go further, bringing us an all-female/non-binary cast. It’s an added semicircle backwards to Elizabethan days when only boys and men were permitted to perform onstage.

All three of these transpositions – Brooke McCarthy as Darcy, Rhianon Chandler as Bingley, and Jennifer Adams as De Bourgh – add a fresh patina of mirth and comedy. As for the playwrights, they inject plenty of wit and sparkle of their own. Speaking to Darcy before we see that Jane is seven-months pregnant, Elizabeth broadly hints she is arriving “safely and enormously.” Lizzy is more tactful when the expectant mother enters and they exchange greetings:

Lizzy: Look at you! You’re radiant.

Jane: I’m as large as a cottage.

Lizzy: And exactly as a cottage, you are warm, filled with life, and lit from within.

Although McCarthy plays him with some florid gestures, we soon see that he is richly endowed with breeding and tact. When the punctilious Mary presumes to correct Bingley, by informing him that the tree standing before them is a spruce and not a fir, Darcy pointedly intervenes. Before any dispute can begin, he proposes that he and his longtime chum exit for a brandy.

The ladies can now rebuke Mary, if they wish. They do, while gradually discovering that their younger sister has more charm and talent than previously suspected. Arthur’s admiration for her shocks them as much as it shocks Mary herself. As it turns out, Lizzy and Jane better be witty and perceptive, for Mary and Arthur are the plumiest roles. Fortunately, with the arrival of Lydia, the silly sister with the sham marriage, Lizzy and Jane can redirect their sharpest barbs.

Arthur is the heir to the nearby Rosings estate, but he is a distant nephew of the late Lady Catherine and has never lived there. There is some juicy history at that estate, left over from Pride and Prejudice,chiefly the presumption that Darcy would marry Milady’s daughter and not the comparatively lowborn Lizzy. Not to worry, Pemberley gracefully catches us up if we don’t remember Austen’s original.

What makes the role of Arthur so appealing is that he has no clue how to run an estate – and no solid experience with other men, women, or people. Adams carries a book around with her as if it were Arthur’s security blanket. Without one, Adams seems at a loss for what to do with her hands and arms, so we see Arthur almost perpetually in a scholarly or supplicating pose.

Attempting a billet-doux, Adams as Arthur reminded me of Christian in Cyrano de Bergerac, only he has nobody to help him out. When Arthur learns that his cousin Anne, after getting jilted by Darcy, now presumes she is betrothed to him, Adams’ awkwardness and shyness veer toward desperation and panic. When bliss is achieved, Adams’ glow is mesmerizing.

Crippled by a similar lack of self-esteem, Sahana Athreya as Mary is no more experienced and no less shy than Arthur – so she can range from being pedantic and irritating to heartbroken and pitiful to vivacious and adorable. Athreya can also freely gesticulate with her arms and sit down regally at the pianoforte.

The central triangle is further complicated by Destiney Wolfe as the compulsively silly Lydia. Glossing over her troubled marriage doesn’t inhibit Lydia from flirting shamelessly with Arthur, giving us extra tastes of how unaccustomed he is to such attentions. Nor does Kaliski bar Wolfe from being as irritating as Mary at her worst. On the contrary. Wolfe, when she isn’t pouncing, is often prancing.

At the center of all the overtures from Mary and Lydia – and the strict orders from Agatha Emma as the imperious Anne – Adams gets to be meaningful as well as stressed and sympathetic. For Mary and Lizzy, in the face of Arthur’s inclination to yield to Anne, are at considerable pains to remind him that he has what women don’t: a choice.

Of course, when Gunderson and Melcon wrote their merry comedy in 2016, they had no inking that “Your body, my choice” would be staging a comeback. But the playwrights are far from declaring that women were powerless. Even before her Christmas awakening, Mary is strong enough to proclaim that she would rather wed a plant than an unsuitable man.

Caring about their sisters, Lizzy and Jane sustain their relevance, Skylar Schock as Lizzy warming up to Mary and Emma Kitchin as the Jane becoming Lydia’s tactful benefactor. Christmas can even be celebrated by Emma, for it turns out that there’s kindness in Lydia beneath her silly, meddlesome surface.

Kaylen Gess’s scenic and lighting design complement each other handsomely, with Caleb Sigmon’s projections adding an extra festive luster. I’d imagine that Gunderson and Melcon would have envisioned a much larger, more intrusive tree at Pemberley. But as a Tannenbaum, I’m probably prejudiced.

The tree outside Cain Center, let me add, is big and bright enough for anyone.