Tag Archives: Kyle J. Britt

THE FLICK Flip-Flops Audience and Stage

Theatre, , , , ,

Review: The Flick at Theatre Charlotte and Independent Picture House

By Perry Tannenbaum

From time to time, it’s nice to see Theatre Charlotte showing greater confidence in its audience and extra audacity in its programming. Recent seasons have seen increased excursions beyond bankable fare, such as A Christmas Carol, Misery, Murder on the Orient Express, and Rumors, to more daring and provocative frontiers such as Violet, Every Brilliant Thing, I and You, and Detroit ’67.

God of Carnage is on deck for next month.

Now we’re in the midst of a run that’s even more daring and experimental than their 2016 concert version of Caroline, or Change, which was staged out in the lobby of the Queens Road barn. The current production of Annie Baker’s THE FLICK, directed by Kyle J. Britt, goes even further out on a limb.

It’s very high-concept, for now we go past the theater doors leading to the front and rear of the orchestra, entering instead through the stage door. Instead of heading backstage, we hang a right – and take our seats onstage, looking out into the orchestra where we usually sit and the light booth beyond.

Tonight, that orchestra is the stage and the light booth is a projection room aiming blinding light at us, for Baker’s notorious Pulitzer Prize winner takes place in a movie theater, one of the last in America that still shows movies made on 35mm celluloid. Famed for its epic length, sustained pauses, and glacial pace, The Flick had premiered Off-Broadway in 2013 at Playwrights Horizons and revived, with the original cast, at the Barrow Street Theatre, where I reviewed it in 2015. Avenging myself on that production at my computer turned torture into a bit of a picnic.

Without that mischievous consolation, I presumed that my wife Sue was sufficiently traumatized not to wish to see this faithful sketch of the quotidian a second time. Wrong. Until midway into the second act, she had totally forgotten The Flick.

Nightmare City. Properly braced for the epic slog, I found myself charmed by the Theatre Charlotte version, for Britt goes the extra mile – recalling the greatest Carolina Actors Studio Theatre forays into experiential theatre – in making The Flick a moviegoing adventure. An elegant ramp bordered by chrome railing is slung over the couple of humble steps that normally lead you backstage at the Old Barn.

The new entranceway is draped in black curtains and discreetly spotlit, duplicating the ambiance at a multiplex when you leave its indoor boulevard and plunge into the darkness of one of the theaters. If you’ve seen the movie posters promoting this special Theatre Charlotte presentation, you’ll already be impressed by Britt’s ability to capture the deathless noir flavor of the Pulp Fiction movie poster.

Seeing this sly Tarantino homage, perfectly sized and displayed in that spotlit alleyway, adds a wonderful frisson to the evening. For those who weren’t as thoroughly braced as I was for the inaction and inertia to come – or less advantageously seated than we were – that evening grew very long. In the heart of Greenwich Village in the summer of 2015, I troubled to time the show: playing time clocked in at 2:54 plus a 19-minute intermission.

We can further admire Britt for speeding up the action to narrowly beat those Off-Broadway timings. He’s actually bucking the odds.

Brilliant concepts can start to crumble when they collide with reality. When David Zinn designed the set for the legendary Barrow Street, he could take liberties. His theater could be four rows and achieve reasonable verisimilitude, but Britt must play the hands he is dealt. That’s 13 rows of seats at the Queens Road barn, and if you want your actors within reasonable proximity of the stage, you’ll need them to traverse seven or eight rows to replicate the same intimacy we had at Barrow Street.

Each exit between Baker’s many scenes must traverse that extra distance, threatening to further lengthen our playing time. When we first see Aedan Coughlin, as Sam, schooling John Felipe, as Avery, in the finer points of cleaning up theater trash between ushering stints, Britt wisely spaces them at opposite sides of the aisle. So it’s plausible that both men must raise their voices to be heard.

Even so, Coughlan, as the disgruntled senior usher, is the more consistently audible, showing the newbie the ropes and schmoozing with Felipe. That gap didn’t narrow significantly as Sam continued his chattering and coaching toward the front seats. Avery does seem to emphasize the names of Hollywood stars, compared to the relatively garbled names of the films they were linked to when showing off his cinema geekiness.

Otherwise a bit shy and withdrawn, Avery boasts that he can connect any two Hollywood stars you name in six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon style. For all of Sam’s repeated efforts, Avery always makes good on his boasts. While it is likely that Sam begrudges Avery his more substantial education and his more promising future, that’s not where the friction between them peaks.

Enter Destiney Wolfe as Rose: younger, savvier, and sexier than any of her co-workers. So sexy that Sam tells Avery that she’s a lesbian – to clear his lane to Rose. If he ever summons up sufficient courage to make a move. Wolfe isn’t full of herself as Rose, but she’s coolly self-assured. After getting passed over while Rose snagged the promotion to projectionist, Sam may rightly believe that this talented young lady is out of his league.

To look at Coughlin, you would not instantly agree. While not as erudite as Avery – or as snobbish – Sam can propose numerous worthy candidates when the college guy boldly declares that Pulp Fiction (1994) was the last great American film.

Among those candidates, Avatar (2009) draws the most scorn from Avery and is one of Felipe’s best moments before intermission. Thematically, the comparison between classic noir celluloid and digital fantasy gets us to the heart of Baker’s yarn. The Flick, doubling as the name of Baker’s movie house, is an endangered species, treasured by Avery as an analog monument, one of the last-standing rear guards against the onrush of digitality that isn’t film at all.

Surrendering, we shall see, without a fight.

The location of this landmark is in Worcester County, Mass., allowing Coughlan to add on another layer of excellence, intermittently capturing the Southie brand of a Boston accent. As the scholar in the group, Felipe is hardly obligated to attempt the working-class accent, but Wolfe doesn’t even try.

At least, I don’t think she does. Hearing anything she says without her calling across the theater was a pretty rare experience. What really crash-burned Britt’s concept, beyond the usual acoustic difficulties we’re familiar with at the Old Barn, were the problematic sightlines of the temp seating onstage. Further back than a couple of rows, there was no way to hear or see all the action. The lip of the Theatre Charlotte stage got in the way when the actors moved all the way up front because of the problematic sightlines.

Since so much was so hard to take in before the lights came up for intermission, I felt obligated to issue a spoiler to my companions, telling them there was drama on the near horizon. Shit will begin to hit the fan – not at a blinding velocity – when Sam returns from attending his brother’s wedding and discovers that Rose has taught Avery how to work the projector, a favor (not the only one) that Sam has been denied.

Other members of the opening night audience simply defected.

Now the show, fully chastened, continues its run at the Independent Picture House this weekend. Prospects are better at Raleigh Street for fuller enjoyment. None of the movie theaters there has more than 12 rows, almost all are considerably narrower, and none are saddled by an overhanging stage compromising an audience’s sightlines.

One of these houses even allows actors to slickly enter the space behind the fourth row of seats. The express route!

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.

Follow the Yellow Brick Road to the Queens Road Barn

Review: The Wizard of Oz at Theatre Charlotte

By Perry Tannenbaum

With her rustic picnic basket, her toy dog Toto, her beribboned pigtails, and her iconic gingham dress, the 1939 movie version of L. Frank Baum’s imperishable heroine, Kansas-born Dorothy Gale, was designed to closely echo the Dorothy found on the pages of Baum’s 1900 novel. She was conceived in the lineage of Little Red Riding Hood and Lewis Carroll’s Alice as a little girl – credulous, easily surprised or disappointed.

Judy Garland was 16 years old when she began shooting The Wizard of Oz at MGM Studios. Her sub-5-foot stature bridged some of the age gap, but director Victor Fleming and the MGM braintrust didn’t stop there, trussing Garland up to hide her curves. All of this subterfuge (some would call it barbarity) was logical only because Hollywood, suspicious of fantasy and children’s fiction, wanted to reassure us that Oz, The Wizard, the Witches, the Winkies, and the ruby slippers were all nothing more than a little girl’s dream.

Noel Langley’s screenplay, revised chiefly by Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf, went to extraordinary lengths to frame Dorothy’s adventures as a dream. The celluloid version supplied the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, Glinda, the Wicked Witch, and The Wizard with Kansas counterparts she will transform into Ozians. Baum never created a Miss Gulch or a Professor Marvel. In fact, when he adapted The Wonderful Wizard of Oz for the stage in 1902, Baum actually expelled Toto and the Wicked Witch from his cast – and did not permit the Lion to speak.

Langley obviously hasn’t gotten enough credit for his contributions to Oz mythology. The whole preamble to the cyclone and Oz is his, along with the wholesome welcome home to Kansas that crowds the screen with patronizing adults. Aunt Em is the only person who greets Dorothy in the book, where the ending is dispatched in less than 75 words. Dorothy finds a new farmhouse that Uncle Henry has built to replace the old one that killed the Wicked Witch of the East. No question in Baum’s mind: Dorothy has been away to a real place in real time.

When John Kane adapted The Wizard of Oz for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1987, he went with Langley’s version of the story. Not only were the songs by Harold Arlen and the lyrics by Edgar “Yip” Harburg brought along for the ride, so was “The Jitterbug,” an Arlen-Harburg song that didn’t make the film’s final cut. If anything, Kane’s additions to the screenplay served to underscore the idea that Oz was a dream, dropping more key words and phrases that linked the magical land to Kansas. Auntie Em and Uncle Henry were added to the roster of Kansans who change costumes and join Dorothy in Oz.

That’s the version we have now as Theatre Charlotte kicks off its 96th season with a rousing trek down the familiar Yellow Brick Road. After her TC debut in 2022 at Camp North End during the company’s vagabond season, Allison Modafferi Brewster directs for the first time at the Queens Road barn. Leaning heavily on projection designs by Alison Nicole Fuehrer to navigate the geographies of Kansas and Oz, Modafferi and her cast of 40 (plus nine “Ruby” Munchkins who timeshare with the “Emerald Cast” that performed on opening night) heartily buy into the notion that Oz is a dreamland.

But in choosing Winthrop University senior Cameron Vipperman as the lead, Modafferri and costume designer Rachel Engstrom are pushing back against the idea that Dorothy must be a child. Or, to cite the range prescribed for auditions in 2006, when Central Piedmont presented this Wizard as their first summer extravaganza at the newly-built Halton Theater, between the ages of 14 and 17.

Gone are the ribbons, the pigtails, and the gingham dress, though Vipperman’s do does sport a couple of fairly subtle weaves. Nor does this energetic production go along with the notion that Miss Gulch and the Wicked Witch of the West must be gnarly old crones. Wielding her broomstick in a rather gladiatorial black outfit, Mary Lynn Bain was quite the action figure as the Wicked One. No corny cone hat for her!

Unless you’ve scouted productions down at Winthrop and Matthews Playhouse, neither of these antagonists will be a familiar name. Casting is no less adventurous for Dorothy’s Yellow Brick pickups. As the Scarecrow, Devon Ovall comes to the Queens Road barn by way of Northwest School of the Arts. Ashley Benjamin, the first female Tin Man we’ve ever seen in Charlotte, seems to be freshly arrived from Georgia in her digital bio. Only Kyle J. Britt can boast previous Queen City exploits prior to his present turn as the Cowardly Lion, having appeared at the barn in last year’s Christmas Carol as the Ghost of Christmas Present.

Noticeably younger than any Oz supplicants you’ll ever see again in an adult production – so close to Dorothy’s age that they seem to be her pals and never her protectors – this youthful trio is remarkably appealing. Ovall flops around and collapses with infectious glee as Scarecrow. Aided by strategic sound effects, Benjamin brought plenty of creaky stiffness to the Tin Man, but she often needed stronger miking.

Rachel Engstrom’s costume designs for these two weirdos are masterworks of simplicity, but her greatest triumph may be her Lion, little more than a wig gone wild and a couple of fringed sleeves. This is sufficient armament for Britt to make delicious meals of both his Cowardly highlights, blustering his “top-to-bottomous” bravado with gusto and regally rolling his r’s on “King of the Forest” – with an extra-chesty baritone.

Modafferri’s infusions of diversity and gender switching don’t stop with Benjamin. Brandie Hill brings a righteous gospel flavor to Aunt Em and especially to Glinda the Good, while D. Laverne Woods brings out the gypsy in Professor Marvel and the sass in the Wizard. Darren Spencer as Uncle Henry is a softer, more indulgent contrast to Aunt Em’s law-abiding rigor, making him the obvious choice to play the softy old Guard at Oz’s palace.

Mostly at the service of Fuehrer’s projection designs, set designer Chris Timmons’ neutral-toned slabs don’t quite allow the colors to pop until we first espy the poppy field and Emerald City beyond. The cityscape lingered a few seconds too long as we transitioned from Oz to the wicked West, my first inkling that there was more than one projector in play. The more concerning miscue on opening night was the stage crew’s failure to secure the flight of stairs leading up to the platform where the Wicked Witch makes her immortal “What a world!” exit.

Poor Bain took a nasty little tumble trying to get up there, nearly breaking her neck before she had a chance to melt, prompting Vipperman to be very careful when she climbed up after her. The wonderful reversal was still effective.

That climactic scene cannot be withheld from an adoring public, so Timmons had to choose between the complexities of using a trapdoor in the middle of his stage or building a platform. The latter solution is likely simpler, but its hazards were frightfully exposed last Friday. No doubt all the furniture moving and fastening will go better this week as the run resumes.

Technically, the Theatre Charlotte version of The Wizard is nowhere near as dazzling as the CP version of 2006, when the Witches, the Wizard, Dorothy, the Scarecrow, Miss Gulch, and a cow all flew, and Glinda floated gloriously in a bubble. Such lavishness is probably the main reason why CP shitcanned its Summer Theater programming this season – after four decades of serving as the best launching pad for emerging professional talent that Charlotte has ever seen.

Musically, the lack of a live orchestra dulls the brilliance of Herbert Stothart’s scoring, but music director Matt Primm and his talented cast rescue things nicely. After a shaky start, when Vipperman was too studiously on the beat, “Over the Rainbow” came to full bloom. Surrounded by the loosey-goosey shenanigans of Ovall and Britt, she blossomed even more in Oz. Pepper Alpern as Toto remained a wild card. Nobody knew what the mutt would do next, behaving, barking, or otherwise stealing focus.

Engstrom and choreographer Vanessa Zabari held a deck full of winning cards to counteract this earthbound production’s lack of aerial aces. Dance numbers greatly enlivened the arrivals in Oz and the Emerald City when a bevy of Munchkins, a Youth Ensemble, and an Adult Ensemble strutted their stuff, captained by Aidan Conway. Punctuating the action at key moments with assorted tumbles, somersaults, and splits, Conway was also a pro-grade soloist when he wasn’t fronting the ensembles.

Thanks to Engstrom, Emerald City was a sea of multitudinous greens, and the changes of dresses for the adorable Munchkins were more than enough to convince me anew that Oz truly is a merry old land. But for the next two months, I’d be quite content if I didn’t see another damn polka dot.