Tag Archives: Ellen Robison

Vox Populi Deafeningly Lauds “Little Shop” at The Barn

Review: Little Shop of Horrors at Theatre Charlotte

By Perry Tannenbaum

Sunny, frolicsome, dark, and bizarre: it’s tough to say whether the best landing spot for Little Shop of Horrors is during the spring, that fragrant time of flowering hope and romance, or the fall, that decaying season of colorful rot and the macabre. All of the Metrolina theatre companies and colleges that have taken us back to Skid Row this century have chosen one of those two seasons for reprising Howard Ashman’s 1982 adaptation of Roger Corman’s cult comedy flick.

The tally among executive directors, department heads, and boards has been decisively autumnal. Judging by the full house on opening night last week at Theatre Charlotte, which previously staged Little Shop in the spring of 2008, I’d say that the movers and shakers at the Queens Road Barn have seen the light and aligned with the popular vote.

No other explanation for the robust turnout – or the rabid response – springs to mind. There was nothing novel or pricey about TC’s prepublicity, unless Facebook and Instagram are suddenly breakthroughs. Nor is name recognition a factor when you consider the director, the lead couple, or the choreographer.

Only if they knew that Kevin Roberge would be can’t-miss as Mr. Mushnik, owner of a perishing Skid Row flower shop – or that real-life dentist Nehemiah Lawson would be don’t-miss as sadistic dentist Orin – would people be flocking to Queens Road with raised expectations. And if you hadn’t seen their award-winning collaboration in Next to Normal down at Fort Mill Community Playhouse two years ago, you wouldn’t know if it was director Scott Albert who chose Peter Liuzzo as his preternaturally nebishy Seymour or the other way around.

Sometimes you need to listen to the vox populi, and sometimes you must try to blot it out. For me on opening night of Little Shop, it was both. My Apple Watch faithfully notifies me the next morning when sound pressure levels reach or exceed 95dB at concerts, musicals, or plays attended the night before. If the noise tops 100dB, the usual number of notices is one to three.

Little Shop smashed that norm, hitting or exceeding the 100dB bar 14 times, and topping out at an astonishing 115dB. I could see it coming when Liuzzo and Gabriella Gonzalez as Audrey, his newly-won sweetheart, merged their voices in the climactic “Suddenly Seymour.” Three doo-wop vocalists emerged from a tenement apartment door, adding glitz, glamour, and sensuality to the spectacle: Olivia Greene as Ronnette, Tia Robbins as Crystal, and Jessica Milner, a trio of rookies.

Then as Seymour and Audrey responded to each other, Liuzzo dug out his coming-into-manhood voice and began belting wildly. Not to be upstaged, Gonzalez, previously confined to the sugary “Somewhere That’s Green,” let loose with her piercing pipes.

When something is this sensational in a community theatre production, I often find myself weeping or sobbing. This time, my instincts had me clamping my hands over my ears in self-defense. Didn’t do much good.

Tinted by J.P. Woody’s groovy lighting, scenic design by Gordon Olson revels in the squalor of the skids with a doo-wop funk and loving detail that reminded me of Mad Magazine comic strips devoured in my youth. The era is the prehistoric ‘50s, when teens toted transistor radios to stay in touch with the Top 40, and Alan Menken’s musical score reveres those vibes as if they are gospel.

From Seymour’s nerdy sweater vest to Orin’s biker black jacket, Rachel Engstrom’s costume designs are also onboard with the ‘50s beat, with such an outrageous variety of looks for the vocal trio that you can look at them as district goddesses. Props, including a mini press camera and various-sized potted Audrey 2’s that double as puppets, are also a treat from Lea Harkins – plus Orin’s diabolical dentist’s drill.

Besides getting the right moves from his talented cast alongside choreographer Georgie DeCosmo, Albert’s stage direction fosters all kinds of synergies that pave the way for Audrey 2 to have the sleek looks of a garish concept sports car and the voice of a rabid boar. Named after his idolized co-worker, Audrey 2, the carnivorous plant that Seymour suddenly discovers during a total eclipse of the sun, has a special cunning, speaking only to Seymour to get his way.

The voice comes lustily from Toni “Aideem” Morrison, and the movements of her leaves and tendrils come mostly from a team of three unseen puppeteers. When the side wall of Mushnik’s Skid Row Florists slides shut to hide the store, a beehive of activity with puppeteers and stagehands is dressing the interior more and more lushly with Audrey 2’s foliage as the bloodthirsty monster grows.

By the end of opening night, that side wall had been dinged with cracks and bruises, and one stagehand, in damage-control mode, was seen frantically exiting at the end of a scene change. The tech perfection extended similarly to the sound: just one brief dropout assailed Gonzalez, and that’s all. Every note from the four-piece band led by Ellen Robison from the keyboard came through undimmed.

Except when the audience broke loose.

Aside from the original Audrey, none of the main characters is burnished with virtue. Seymour’s origins, though not otherworldly, are no less mysterious than Audrey 2’s, orphaned at the flower shop’s doorstep as a babe and living there ever since. His homicidal tendencies, awakened by the arrival of Audrey 2, prove to be benign when he has to pull the trigger.

Munchnik is no less compromised. Although he has opened his door to Seymour, the lad has always slept out front under the cash register. Until he overhears Orin advising Seymour to leave Skid Row with his newfound cash cow, Mushnik never considers adopting the waif or making him his heir. In the hard times, when Mushnik is on the verge of permanently shutting down his shop, there’s not a peep from him that indicates he has given Seymour’s future so much as a thought.

Liuzzo plays his side of this relationship with gratitude, servility, and fear, while Roberge as Mushnik can load up on scorn, exploitation, and intimidation. Nebishy meets nasty. With those considerable hits to Seymour’s self-esteem, Liuzzo’s timidity can extend toward keeping his feelings for Audrey hidden, especially since she is already in Orin’s firm and abusive grasp.

Framed by the threats of an insanely sadistic dentist and a man-eating alien plant with dreams of global domination, the mundane frictions between Seymour and Mushnik can seem comical. But the best comedy contrivance, preserved by Ashman from the Charles Griffith screenplay, is the mutual non-relationship between Seymour and Audrey: both of these sweethearts have good reason to feel unworthy of the other.

It’s pretty classic how clearly Liuzzo and Gonzalez venerate one another before they connect – adding fuel to the explosive audience reaction in Act 2 when they have their “Suddenly Seymour” moment. Roberge coming up on them and taking it all in during an extended smooch is a cherry on top.

Contrasting with all this bliss and twisted domesticity are the crazed, barbecued voices of Lawson and Aideem. Since the days of silent film, dentistry has proudly perched on the knife’s edge between comedy and horror. Thanks to this delicious script, Lawson gets to sharpen that blade more keenly by adding masochism. Not to worry, after Orin nourishes Audrey 2 piecemeal, Lawson returns after intermission in a series of cameos to entice Seymour with additional money-making opportunities.

Yet it’s Aideem who endures forever as Audrey 2, aided by a wonderful tech flourish in the epilogue. His bubbly vibrato is not the deepest I’ve heard out of Audrey 2’s maw, but it’s more than sufficiently low, spirited, and spicy. Aideem’s performance will likely draw another noise notification if you’re wearing an Apple Watch. The final bows certainly will.

“Next to Normal” Is Alive at the Barn!

Review: Next to Normal at Theatre Charlotte

By Perry Tannenbaum

July 4, December 7, September 11, and October 7 are all dates we remember for their historic meaning to the nation and the world. A similar earthshaking significance can descend on a single day in the life of a relationship, a marriage, or a family that can reverberate for generations – whether you were at the event or even alive at the time.

That’s essentially what we’re watching in Brian Yorkey’s Next to Normal with music by Tom Kitt, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2010 after winning Tony Awards for Best Musical, Best Book, and Best Orchestrations the previous year. Instead of doing things the traditional way, setting up the location and the situation in a big opening number that stages or recaps the prime catastrophe, Yorkey fast-forwards us more than 17 years, when the original hurt in the Goodman family has marinated and metastasized – a fissionable maelstrom that will soon explode.

With a fresh set of seismic events.

Diana is at the vortex of the mushrooming crises, so it’s both interesting and wickedly deceptive that Yorkey brings us into her drugged and delusional mind for much of the opening action. We still see the basic outlines of the family turmoil clearly enough. Her husband, Dan, keeps trying to go with the flow of Diana’s bi-polar mood swings. She navigates a series of therapists, looking for either a therapeutic epiphany or the perfectly calibrated cocktail of meds.

Meanwhile, Diana’s teen daughter Natalie feels neglected and unappreciated, living in the shadow of Mom’s obsessive devotion to her older brother Gabe. Warily, Natalie navigates her self-worth issues as schoolmate Henry tries to get closer and establish a relationship. When Natalie overcomes her shame and allows Henry, after much hesitation, to meet her family, we seem to have arrived at a breakthrough.

It’s a brave move and all goes swimmingly at the Goodman dinner table between Natalie and Henry until Diana walks in with a birthday cake, all smiles, candles lit. Yorkey’s sleight-of-hand has worked so beautifully that we wonder which of the two teens is the target of the birthday surprise. Suddenly things are going downhill – off a high cliff.

Like we’ve been overdosing on the meds so far.

Yorkey is very good at these slow build-ups where we see budding new hopes dashed by a sudden disappointment and fresh Diana relapses. After portraying Dan, the long-suffering husband in Queen City Theatre Company’s fine production in 2013, Billy Ensley takes the reins at Theatre Charlotte’s slightly slicker version. His suffering, grimly stoical, was very different from Johnny Hohenstein’s unfiltered and uncontrolled anguish. It’s easier to breathe at the old Queens Road barn when emotions get a space to release.

On the other hand, the Broadway edition starring Alice Ripley in 2009 (which toured here with Ripley in 2011) took a dimmer, more skeptical view of psychiatry and pharmacology, giving those productions directed by Michael Greif a darker, satirical, mad scientist edge. Around the corner from a cluster of medical centers and hospitals, Josh Webb’s set design on Queens Road is easily the brightest and most antiseptic I’ve seen. The usual two-story scaffolding that adorns rock operas is outfitted with colorful fluorescent lighting, though some flickering occasionally marred the serene pastels (intentionally?) inside the translucent fixtures.

So in transit to Charlotte, the emphasis continues to shift more emphatically away from the quackery to the suffering. Hohenstein’s broadened performance now rivals Melissa Cook’s bipolarity as Diana, for he’s still a domesticated dad to Natalie and a cheerful host to Henry between bouts of stressing and losing it in private and with his wife. In its fits and starts, Hohenstein helps us to balance the toll mental illness takes on its victims and on their loved ones. Easily the best of Hohenstein that I’ve seen and the most intensely consistent performance of the night.

Cook’s performance as Diana is as genuine and riveting as any I’ve seen in Charlotte or on Broadway – except when it isn’t. Whether you call it resistance or retreat, there are whole songs where she is suddenly no longer a cri-de-coeur rock singer and becomes a more traditional Broadway belter: sweeter voice with noticeably less emotion and intelligibility. Suddenly, it isn’t about how sensationally Cook is acting but about the singing, likely more in her comfort zone.

I can’t say for certain that the duality was there from the start, but there should be no turning back after the big birthday reveal.

And the words here are important – I could almost hear Ensley stressing this at rehearsals – for we get the best sound in a musical production, local or touring company, since MJ stormed the Belk last September at the beginning of the season. Kudos to Ensley for his pertinacity and, if there was any acoustic work or equipment upgrades in the mojo, glory to the staffers involved in the push, beginning with artistic director Chris Timmons and managing director Scot P J MacDonald. The old barn is sounding better than ever.

It needed to. In contrast with Spirit Square’s more intimate Duke Energy Theatre, where Glenn Griffin directed Normal, a musical on Queens Road requires ample decibels to reach the back of the house. Keeping with Theatre Charlotte wisdom, music director Ellen Robison trims her rock band to six musicians while placing them behind the singers.

Instinctively, Ensley finds a perfect pathway for his cast to turn up the volume. As if inspired by grand opera, he dials up the melodrama past suburban proportions so that most of the characters are wearing their hearts on their sleeves. Craig Allen as Drs. Madden and Fine, allows himself to be callous and ghoulish for the blink of an eye when the script absolutely demands it. Otherwise, he is the throbbing soul of earnest concern – moonlighting as a rock star in Diana’s delusions.

As Natalie, the only lonely daughter, I found Cornelia Barnwell to be more shut-down and compulsive than Abby Corrigan was on her express route to stardom in 2013. Barnwell’s voice is purest rock, piercing as a poignard with no blade. She seems to be the studious type in her scenes at school or alone with Henry. But she can flip and go rogue as soon as she sings. Very appropriate for Natalie, so anti-meds at the beginning because she has seen the wreck of her mom – before following in her footsteps. At the same upstairs medicine cabinet.

If a stoner-slacker can be seen as an oasis of calm, then that’s how Zach Linick will appear as Henry, faithfully devoted, non-judgmental, discreetly giving Natalie her space. There aren’t too many laugh-out-loud moments on this bumpy road to tentative stability, but when Natalie, resistant at first to Henry’s weed, leapfrogs him into wanton pill popping, Linick’s reaction bears watching.

Melodramatic or not, Ensley’s read on Next to Normal is more in tune with our chaotic times than the 2013 original, when Yorkey likely turned to the mad laboratory aspects of pharmacology and electroshock therapy to provide a counterweight to the suffering and gloom. Everybody is wronged here as if the world were all MAGA malcontents, but the uplift and electricity of Kitt’s score have always been there to supply lightning, spirit, and zest. Ensley relies on Robison’s band to deliver and their chemistry with all the suffering Goodmans is fire.

It’s especially white-hot in the stunning performance of Joey Rising as the disembodied Gabe. What a wonderful nuisance he is, impervious to all who ignore him! Over and over, he quashes the best hopes of his mom and dad, and he’s hardly less devastating to our own. If you find it hard to imagine a mad-scientist horror movie strain in this musical, the chill of hearing Rising’s defiant, jubilant “I’m Alive” will convince you that Yorkey believes devoutly in melodrama after all.

We in audience become like the frenzied villagers in Frankenstein, collectively yearning for Gabe’s destruction while wondering at Rising’s fire. But after he beats a full retreat, he returns, fierier than before. And then he multiplies!

Written in the Stars

Theater Review: Fly by Night

Jerry Colbert as Narrator and Lisa Smith Bradley as Miriam in Fly by Night. (Photo by George Hendricks Photography)

By Perry Tannenbaum

Is everything pre-ordained by a higher power? Or might everything that happens simply be the inevitable outcome when the algorithms of time and space work upon the star stuff that materialized in the wake of the Big Bang? If not, might a lucky ring or a soothsayer’s gaze into a crystal ball shift the gears of an oncoming fate? These are a few of the notions that Kim Rosenstock was playing with when she conceived Fly by Night, the last musical Actor’s Theatre of Charlotte will ever stage at 650 E. Stonewall Street.

Will Connolly and composer Michael Mitnick joined Rosenstock’s writing team, producing a storyline that revolves around two South Dakota sisters who fall in love with the same New York slacker, Harold McClam, a full-time sandwich maker and songwriter. Daphne and Miriam are as radically different as sisters can be. Daphne is impatient to leave Hill City behind and become a Broadway star, while Miriam is perfectly content to stick around home and pour coffee for the townsfolk at her waitressing job.

But Miriam already is a star in the sense that, listening to her dearly departed dad, she has absorbed the notion, during fondly remembered stargazing sessions, that we all come from that star stuff they were counting in the nighttime sky. Aspirationally, there is a link between Harold and Daphne, who meet first at the clothing shop where she clerks and again across his sandwich counter. Vocationally and temperamentally, Harold has a kinship with Miriam. They spark more instantaneously, more intensely, and more lastingly. Trouble is, they meet at the Brooklyn diner where Miriam works when Harold is already engaged to marry Daphne.

Hovering over the action, as a kind of providential presence with avuncular Our Town overtones, the Narrator frequently shape-shifts into some of the orbiting characters in his tale, including both of the sisters’ parents and the eccentric soothsayer. We actually begin the main story on November 9, 1964, with the funeral of Harold’s mother – exactly one year before his dad’s abortive suicide attempt.

There will be a certain providence in Mr. McClam’s survival, to be sure, but until then, his morose appearances can be somewhat trying and tedious. Each of the three central characters is being tormented by a livelier, more interesting nemesis. Daphne has Joey, a commercially successful playwright who’s getting serious about his craft by writing a play just for her. With plenty of revisions, stretching out the rehearsal process. Harold is bedeviled by the sandwich shop owner, Crabble, a quintessentially cranky New Yorker. The only inkling we get that Crabble has a heart is his chronic hesitation to fire Harold for all his delinquencies and screw-ups.

Miriam has the most important tormentor, that kooky soothsayer who gives her the most improbable set of omens for determining her destined true love, wrapped into a prophecy that promises bliss and catastrophe. All of them begin to recur when Harold walks into her life, sending Miriam scurrying back to South Dakota when the two are on the verge of connecting.

Fleeing fate is no less futile for Miriam than it was for Macbeth or Oedipus. She holds out the hope that her doom isn’t settled until time stands still. That will happen on November 9, 1965 – twice.
Three significant events will happen on that date, only one of them anticipated: the postponed opening of Daphne’s play. Ironically, the only stars shining on Broadway that night will be those that twinkle mockingly in the sky.

With Chip Decker directing and Jerry Colbert narrating, Fly by Night moves along briskly with plenty of verve and heart. Colbert has aged gracefully into the paternal wisdom that the Narrator and Miriam’s dad deliver, yet there is comical extravagance each time he becomes the Brooklyn soothsayer or the South Dakota mom. This Narrator seems to become most personable when he stops the action to guide us into a prefatory flashback, so we appreciate Colbert more and more as these time loops proliferate.

Colbert himself loops back to his heydays, flying by night to some fairly high notes and singing with an ease we haven’t heard from him since, oh, maybe 1997 in the 1940’s Radio Hour. Perhaps he’s inspired or rejuvenated by his co-stars. The sisters, Cassandra Howley Wood as Daphne and Lisa Smith Bradley as Miriam, are aptly cast, already ablaze in their early pair of star songs. Wood repeatedly chants “I’m a star!” with Broadway conviction belting out her anthemic “Daphne’s Dream” as she begins navigating the New York rat race, and there’s a cute Avenue Q silliness to her “More Than Just a Friend” duet with Harold.

Bradley simply torches her calling card, “Stars I Trust,” creating a wider gulf between the sisters than you’ll find on the original cast album, and there’s a greater maturity to her lighter “Breakfast All Day” sequel as she settles into Brooklyn, with less of a shuffling rock beat from the three-piece band directed by Ellen Robison. So easily grooved into a humdrum rut, it’s surprising how unnerved Miriam becomes when the soothsayer sings his “Prophecy” – in two parts – and when her eyes first meet Harold’s. Bradley, Colbert, and Christopher Ryan Stamey make it all work.

Stamey cut his teeth at Actor’s Theatre as their go-to wild man in trashy treasures like Slut and The Great American Trailer Park Musical, so to watch him mellowed into the relatively colorless Harold could be jarring to those who have witnessed his vintage exploits. But he actually nails it as both the nerdy Romeo and the mistake-prone sandwich drone. Best of all, he’s the adult in the room in his ultimate showdown with Miriam, “Me With You,” tapping into who he is and what we all believe must be right in the face of implacable destiny.

FLY 4[11]

Supporting roles all draw superb performances. Stephen Seay is wonderfully hyper as Joey when he first pursues his muse Daphne in “What You Do to Me” – and still spoiled rotten, revision after revision. James K. Flynn captures the working class vulgarity of Crabble with a poifect accent, combining with Stamey in “The Rut,” a paean to workplace hopelessness and drudgery. Perpetually toting a wee record player and a vinyl recording of La Traviata in his pathological grief, Rob Addison eventually gets to break out of his stonefaced depression as Mr. McClam. Toward the end, he decides to actually go see that opera and later, when someone finally has the time to listen, he pours out his sad, sad love story, “Cecily Smith.” Which just happens to rhyme with one of the best lines of the night: “Who cares what you are listening to? It’s who you’re listening with.”

The design team, Dee Blackburn for the set and Carley Walker for the lights, give us a nice off-Broadway sense of the various locations, efficiently transporting us to Miriam’s yard and front porch in South Dakota, the seedy nightclub where Harold tries out his song, Crabble’s misspelled sandwich shop, and McClam’s bathtub.

When we get to Penn Station and Times Square, however, an SOS goes out to our imaginations. After “At Least I’ll Know I Tried,” a tasty quintet ushering in the eventful denouement, I prophesy you’ll answer that SOS willingly.

Selling Elegance, Spirit, and History for Just a Song

Theatre Reviews: I Love a Piano: The Music of Irving Berlin and The (curious case of the) Watson Intelligence

CPCCILoveAPiano6[7]

After its most lavish and extravagant production ever, last November’s The Phantom of the Opera, what was CPCC Theatre going to do to follow up? Well, since the laws of mathematics and the logic of budgets still apply on Elizabeth Avenue, the answer was simple: economize! Rolling into the parking garage, where the second story was unusually unoccupied, I was worried the audience for I Love a Piano: The Music of Irving Berlin would be as drastically reduced as CP’s expenditures.

Not to worry, I didn’t find that many more empty seats at Halton Theater last Saturday night than I saw at last February’s How to Succeed. More importantly, considering the relative merits of Berlin and Andrew Lloyd Webber, the show attracted a competitive enough turnout at auditions to yield a cast that is worthy of the music — including holdover Ryan Deal, who you may recall in the title role of The Phantom.

Like the audience, the orchestra isn’t reduced quite as much as the funding, a quintet led by music director Ellen Robison from the keyboard. They’re a busy bunch, accompanying the cast — all six of them triple threats to various degrees — through a songbook that includes 53 different titles. A few of these songs are reprised, and at one point, when Andy Faulkenberry’s “The Girl That I Marry” is juxtaposed with Corinne Littlefield’s “Old Fashioned Wedding” — while J. Michael Beech and Megan Postle are teaming up on the counterpoint of “You’re Just in Love” — there are four different vocalists onstage singing four different melodies simultaneously.

Conceived by Ray Roderick and arranger Michael Berkeley, Love a Piano never says Berlin’s name out loud. But the 11 scenes, beginning with Tin Pan Alley in 1910 and ending in a summer stock revival of Annie Get Your Gun in the late 1950’s, take us chronologically through the composer’s career. Or roughly so: “Old Fashioned Wedding” was written for the 1966 revival of Annie Get Your Gun, and you can bet the anachronisms don’t stop there.

With a generous portion of poetic license, the show sketches a musical portrait of a composer who was consistently able to mirror his times. The title tune, “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody,” and “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” take us back to a sepia-tinted era when rags roamed alongside sentimentality. As we cut from band shell to speakeasy, “Pack Up Your Sings and Go to the Devil” and “Everybody’s Doing It” evoke the wicked carefree spirit of the Roaring ’20s during Prohibition.

Two scenes are devoted to the ’30s, “Blue Skies” and “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm” offering consolation during the onset of the Great Depression. Then a suite of dance tunes, including “Top Hat, White Tie and Tails” and “Cheek to Cheek,” evokes the elegance of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Thanks to Mel Brooks, the audience failed to take “Puttin’ on the Ritz” altogether seriously.

For some reason, Roderick — or perhaps CP’s director and choreographer, Ron Chisholm — bounced the heyday of dance marathons from the 1930s to the 1940s, sketching that lugubrious phenomenon with “Say It Isn’t So” and “How Deep Is the Ocean.” When we authentically reached the World War II era, it was quite obvious that Berlin more than reflected the hopes, the pride, and the humor of the times. He simply was these things, with a flowering of songs that included “Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning,” “This Is the Army,” “Any Bonds Today,” and “Count Your Blessings Instead of Sheep.”

Even those left plenty of room to bring down the first-act curtain with two of Berlin’s most enduring songs, “White Christmas” and “God Bless America.” A more judicious dividing line would have been the beginning of WW2 toward the end of the ’30s. As it stands, Roderick drops a bunch of CARE packages on the 1950s, including “Easter Parade” from 1933 and everything attached to Berlin’s sharpshooting homage to Annie Oakley, which premiered in 1946.

I Love A Piano

Photos by Chris Record

James Duke’s scenic and lighting design, relying heavily on period slides and Berlin show posters projected onto three screens, move us gracefully from era to era. But it’s Debbie Scheu who most colorfully clinches the deal with her cavalcade of costume designs. Chisholm’s choreographic demands certainly tax his cast, with Littlefield and Faulkenberry negotiating their steps with the most apparent ease. On the other hand, while Postle and Beech looked like they might not be up to their challenges, both of them surprised me with their hoofing.

Deal and Kayla Ferguson were the remaining couple, most memorable in their “Blue Skies” duet. All six of the singers proved to be quite capable, not at all fazed by the spotlight, but Deal and Littlefield were my favorite soloists. The ensembles were often very lively and charming, but a special pinch of conflict was added in the summer stock tableau when Ferguson, Littlefield, and Postle all auditioned to be Annie opposite Faulkenberry’s Frank Butler.

“Anything You Can Do,” usually a comical face-off between Frank and Annie, is set up as an audition piece. So the comedy is reborn — as a rollicking showdown between three aspiring Annies.

Eliza and Watson 3

Time and reality bend in curious ways in The (curious case of the) Watson Intelligence, now at UpStage in NoDa through February 21. But so does playwright Madeleine George’s title, so what else would you expect?

Three rather curious Watsons that we’ve already heard of are trotted out and shuffled in Three Bone Theatre’s production, directed by Robin Tynes. The first of these is a relative, shall we say, of the Watson computer that defeated its human opponents on Jeopardy in 2011. Eliza, who collaborated with IBM on the victorious Watson, is now in her living room, working independently on a new android that sports a far more human body.

We travel back to the 19th century for the other two Watsons that we know. The first of these is the Watson summoned to Alexander Graham Bell’s side when Pa Bell invented the telephone, his assistant Thomas A. Watson. But we don’t really see him, either, on that historic day in 1876. Instead, it’s Alex repeatedly calling for him in brief blackout vignettes between other scenes. No, we must wait until 1931, when Watson goes on record at Bell Labs, insisting that what his boss really said was, “Mr. Watson — come here — I want you.”

The third or fourth Watson, depending on how you tally the computer chips, is more in control of his narrative, for this is the Dr. John H. Watson who ostensibly chronicles nearly all of the Conan Doyle adventures of Sherlock Holmes. You’ll find that Watson Intelligence is all about connections Ð personal and electrical — and vague connections between the android and Sherlock’s sidekick are established by a fifth Watson, a tech dweeb hired by Eliza’s ex-husband to spy on her.

Compounding the absurdities, Tynes has chosen a black actor, Devin Clark, to play the whitest sidekick in the history of literature. What’s more, Clark is perfection as all the Watsons, human and robotic, plus a special set of scenes where he dons Sherlock’s deerstalker cap. Chesson Kusterer-Seagroves crystallizes Watson’s role as the archetypal listener, pouring out her heart to the robot and the tech dweeb in modern times and bringing an intriguing mystery to Watson at Baker Street in Sherlock’s absence.

Ken Mitten rounds out the cast as Bell and the two Merricks who cause their Elizas so much distress. He’s a powerful stage presence, but I’m sure he’ll be even better when he’s more secure with his lines and cues.