Tag Archives: Marty Wolff

“Clue” Reaches New Heights of Silliness at Matthews Playhouse

**Review: Clue at Matthews Playhouse of the Performing Arts**

By Perry Tannenbaum

2023~Clue~18

Apparently, I didn’t have much of a clue about CLUE, a new comedy by Sandy Rustin based on the 80-year-old board game and its 1985 screen adaptation. I presumed that Matthews Playhouse would be staging the musical version that has periodically skulked around regional and community theatres after ignominiously posting its closing notice a week after it opened Off-Broadway in early December 1997.

Our playbill, listing “Original music composed by Michael Holland,” kept me in the dark a bit longer until the show began without an overture or an opening number. While we waited, we had the chance to fill out a form and predict which of the “usual suspects” would be revealed as the culprit – or culprits – at the end of the show. It’s a pretty simple form since, unlike the board game, we don’t have to sniff out where the murder takes place and which of six lethal weapons is used. Simpler than the movie, too, which was famously released with three different endings. 2023~Clue~4

After directing a nearly sublime Book of Will at Belmont Abbey College back in February, Jill Bloede shows that she and her sure comedy instincts can lift up the utterly ridiculous in Matthews. She and set designer Marty Wolff aren’t going to let us forget that Clue is a board game. With sliding wood panels for walls and cunning little swinging gates for doors, we can see three rooms at a time on each side of the stage simultaneously, with a corridor representing the Boddy Mansion’s hallway completing the symmetry – seven of the nine rooms depicted (even more primitively) by the humble game board’s overhead view.

Flimsy as those thin walls may appear sliding in and out of view, they must be sturdy enough to accommodate the workings of secret panels that either flip their graphics or open and shut widely enough for the comings and goings of arms visibly wielding weapons. If your Clue erudition has stuck with you since childhood, you’ll remember that those weapons are a candlestick, a lead pipe, a monkey wrench, a dagger, a rope, and a revolver.

It’s with the entrance of our prime suspects that the plot of Jonathan Lynn’s screenplay and Rustin’s script, mimicking the film’s plot setup, swerve from the classic simplicities of the Parker Brothers’ game. Each of the six guests who have been invited to the Boddy Mansion is given one of the aliases bestowed on the iconic game pieces. Each now has a colorful – but compromising – back story that he or she is being blackmailed for. Serious enough misdeeds lurk beneath all our guests’ respectable facades for a murder motive, and their sophisticated enough for them to apply for membership among the avatars of more evolved adult board games. 2023~Clue~19

So Colonel Mustard does have a military background, and Mrs. Peacock, a US Senator’s wife, has reason to be prideful. Mr. Green has a gay bent that could be costly as news of the McCarthy un-American hearings, circa 1954, seep through in radio broadcasts, and Miss Scarlet’s flame seems to be fueled by undercover stints as a high-priced madame. Professor Plum was apparently disgraced in another profession before finding refuge in academia, and Mrs. White… why is she dressed in black? Presumably because one or more of her late husbands could be the skeleton in her closet.

Now if you or I were anonymously blackmailing six evildoers with DC connections, you might think twice – or 700 times – before inviting even one of those cash cows for dinner, blowing your cover and, in a faraway secluded manor, endangering your own life. Ah, but the Lynn-Rustin silliness has just begun. Let’s distribute the six iconic murder weapons among the six color-schemed guests! And after all, if six possible murderers are gathered for an evening of killing and sleuthing – and dinner! – why limit the victims to just the ever-ready Mr. Boddy? 2023~Clue~10

The whole Boddy household staff might be available to boost the body count: the maid, the cook, and the butler. Maybe we could liven (or deaden?) things up with a stranded motorist, a snoopy cop, or even a singing telegram girl? Hey, it’s a party!

With Allen Andrews as the suave and mysterious butler Wadsworth greeting mutton-chopped Jeremy Cartee as the pompous Colonel Mustard, the ball gets rolling nicely as the pair let us in on the rules of the game. Andrews as Wadsworth is so slick of a host greeting all of our suspects that he manages, through sheer brass and sliminess, to cast suspicion on himself. Cartee, meanwhile, must vie with longtime local diva Paula Baldwin as Mrs. Peacock for the distinction of being the most arrogant and pretentious of the suspects. Baldwin makes up for lost time by being the most outgoing, neurotic, and loquacious guest. 2023~Clue~17

Clad in a screaming red dress, red hair garishly beribboned, and wrapped in a boa, Vanessa Davis as Miss Scarlet is the polar opposite of the cool Mary Lynn Bain as the semi-funereal Mrs. White. While Davis shoots seductive glances everywhere, Bain seems to be in perpetual mourning.

Yvette Moten’s costume designs are predictably color-coded, but they are not altogether studded with solid hues. While Andrew Pippin as the reserved Mr. Green gets to wear the most stylishly coordinated and urbane ensemble in harboring the deepest secret, Moten allows herself to go fairly wild over Johnny Hohenstein’s outfit as Mr. Plum: a cringeworthy maroon plaid jacket striped with deep purple and sky blue, a weirdly coordinated motley bowtie, and the loudest purple argyle sweater she could find.

Kathleen Cole is most notable for all the costumes – and phony eyebrows – that she wears, changing from the Cook to the Singing Telegram Girl before resurfacing as police backup. That glittery delivery girl outfit would liven any costume ball. 2023~Clue~1

Bloede obviously takes much delight in maneuvering her game pieces. Sometimes they scurry around so swiftly that we lose track of them, and at other times, Wadsworth and staff parade them from room to room with a ceremoniousness that actually does evoke silly avatars moving around the squares of a game board. Yet there wasn’t a single missed beat during all the hectic scene changes at the Saturday matinees, never a missed cue, and never a flubbed line.

We seem to all get nine different rooms with all the back-and-forth of the sliding walls, so efficiently whisked in and out of sight from the wings. But I don’t remember seeing a ballroom, so I’m sure we don’t see more than eight.

Eight is enough.

Downsizing “Sister Act” Pays Big Dividends at Matthews Playhouse

Review: Sister Act at Matthews Playhouse

By Perry Tannenbaum

A full flowering of onstage success has somehow scurried away from Iris DeWitt in recent years. Just last April, pandemic restrictions and a wretched recording rig trapped her inside a masked, malodorous production of Sense and Sensibility at Central Piedmont Community College. Patchy intelligibility also wrecked DeWitt’s previous outing in the badly-miked production of Chess in 2020. Until 2022 rolled in, you’d have to go back to 2019 if you wanted to claim to have seen DeWitt anywhere near her imposing potential, when she played prominent roles in Beehive and Little Shop of Horrors.

Neither of those CPCC Summer Theatre productions obliged DeWitt to show us much of her acting or dancing skills. Beehive was totally bereft of plot, and while Iris’s undeniable vocal power was manifest in Little Shop, no full flowering was evident there, either. We had to settle for the most memorable who-did-she-play performance in recent Charlotte history, for DeWitt was a flower in that musical, hidden in the cavernous depths of Audrey 2 in Little Shop.

This year, the script is flipping and momentum building as DeWitt has figured prominently in Ghosts of Bogota, when Actor’s Theatre returned to Queens University, and Love, Loss and What I Wore in the recent Theatre Charlotte production at Camp North End. Paula Baldwin, who directed that sloppily streamed S&S adaptation of Jane Austen last year, clearly retained enough confidence in DeWitt to see her as Deloris Van Cartier, the lead role in Sister Act. Ron Chisholm, choreographer for this Matthews Playhouse extravaganza at The Fullwood Theatre, probably also saw some potential waiting to blossom in DeWitt’s previously untested dancing feet.

We’re not so sure when we first see Deloris and her backup singers onstage. The vocals are sufficiently electric but not full voltage, while the doo-wop moves are nowhere near Supreme. I’m guessing that Baldwin and Chisholm have asked DeWitt to cool her jets on “Take Me to Heaven” because Deloris is nervous about auditioning for her paramour, Curtis, an intimidating mobster, at his club. But why on earth should Curtis, a man of highly questionable character, be even a little justified in thinking that Deloris and her crew aren’t ready for a recording contract and the bright lights?

Apparently, writers Cheri and Bill Steinkellner thought that their protagonist needed a crisis of confidence in the early stages of her spiritual journey, one that Paul Rudnick found unnecessary in his original screenplay for the 1982 movie starring Whoopi Goldberg. There, Deloris and crew had all the polish of the Supremes from the start, singing a doo-wop medley in the bowels of a Las Vegas casino owned by her mobster boyfriend, drawing two claps and a stare from a late-night audience of gamblers.

Now they’re in some undisclosed Philadelphia dive, where the only audience is Curtis, his three henchmen, and us. Curiously enough, the transfer from the glitz of Vegas to the dumps of Philly makes Sister Act more at home in a community theatre setting than on the big stages of London’s West End, Broadway, or at Ovens Auditorium – not to forget Halton Theater, where it was staged in yet another CP production back in January 2013.

As soon as Deloris and her crew began to regroup in “Fabulous, Baby!” we had our first glimpses of all that DeWitt can be onstage. My own realizations, beyond her trusty vocal powers, were split between her ability to dance – gliding disco or righteous gospel – around the stage she commanded and the thoroughly professional depth of her acting. Watch DeWitt’s reactions for a while and you eventually find it difficult to take your eyes off her until she makes an exit.

And don’t fret about any missed opportunity with “Take Me to Heaven”: DeWitt and most of the ensemble get a grand do-over at the end of Act 1.

After the additional indignity of being gifted with a garish hand-me-down fur coat previously owned by Curtis’s wife, Deloris has the misfortune of witnessing the club owner brutally gunning down a snitching henchman in cold blood. On the run from her ex, Deloris leaves Curtis in the lurch for the better part of the night as the saloon singer is placed in a witness protection program and sequestered in a midtown convent. That calls for a new counterweight for Deloris to provide the plot with some fresh friction, a call sternly answered by the convent’s Mother Superior, the role played by Maggie Smith opposite Goldberg in the film.

Oh, and by the way, Baldwin herself played that Maggie Smith role at CP in 2013, so she’s directing a show that she knows intimately from the inside. Maybe she already envisioned what I had yet to perceive in a smaller venue, that what the Steinkellners sought most earnestly in their adaptation of the movie was to make the story more character-driven and less of an action comedy. Building upon Mother Superior’s most familiar film epigram, “God sent you here for a reason – take the hint,” the Steinkellners, along with songwriter Alan Menken and lyricist Glenn Slater, team up to give greater voice to her spiritual crisis.

Both of Menken’s ballads for Mother Superior, “Here Within These Walls” and “I Haven’t Got a Prayer,” sit nicely in Carol Weiner’s vocal range and sternness is Weiner’s prime onstage métier, so she eclipses anything we’ve seen from her before, including her starchy turns in Big River, Bonnie and Clyde, and Oliver! There’s more than a hint of Menken’s “Beauty and the Beast” lurking inside of “Within These Walls,” and Weiner allows its warmth to radiate through Mother Superior’s gradual softening toward Deloris.

More personal crises are layered over the thinner movie scenario. Young apprentice nun Sister Marie Robert, beguiled in the film by the bar where Deloris finds refuge from the convent’s cheerless monotony, now questions whether she should be leaving the real world for a convent – netting Melissa Lozada two cracks at the novice’s power ballad, “The Life I Never Led.” The dreamboat cop who whisked Deloris out of town in the movie, not even letting his colleagues know where she was, is now the hesitant, self-doubting Sweaty Eddie, relegated to a desk job when he wouldn’t fire his gun out on the beat.

Saddled with a lingering crush on Deloris that goes back to high school, Eddie draws “I Could Be That Guy” to cry out his anguish, slightly more comical than Lozada’s plaints but hardly less of a showstopper for Griffin Digsby, who swoops down into Barry White territory in voicing his romantic aspirations. Also going there, surprisingly enough, is Mike Carroll as Monsignor O’Hara, who presides over Sunday services and surprisingly turns out to be a Deloris groupie when she revamps the convent’s choir.

Baldwin and Chisholm not only draw strong players down in Matthews, but they also get strong design and technical backup. Debbie Scheu’s designs for the nuns’ habits grow more spangled and outré as the convent choir grows in prestige and popularity. The glossy, reflective dress Deloris wears in her Van Cartier persona complements the stained-glass backdrop that scenic designer Marty Wolff has provided for the church. Four sets of translucent arches that inch closer together as we move upstage change colors during the glitzier scenes climaxing the action, as Jeffrey Childs’ lighting design adds excitement to Chisholm’s choreography.

Amazingly, the only scene where downsizing doesn’t work at Fullwood Theatre is the squalid bar scene. The room is simply too small for Curtis’s henchmen not to notice three nuns when they enter – or for Deloris to overlook these motley thugs for more than five seconds. Then again, Menken had worked at least three Disney musicals before attempting SISTER ACT in 2011, so he hadn’t yet mastered the Harvey Keitel gravitas we might expect from real dons and heavies (A Bronx Tale would come more than five years later).

Jamaas Britton, Ra’Saun Elliott, and Neifert Enrique play these street urchins with all the menace of the Lion King hyenas. They get a spotlight – or a lava lamp – shortly after intermission, when they spar over the best way to romance a Sister in “Lady With the Long Black Dress,” Elliott explicitly espousing the Barry White approach. Edgier than his goons, Kristopher Loretz as Curtis gets to riff sardonically, in “When I Find My Baby,” on the penitent reconciliation serenades that scamps have been wooing women with for ages, replacing the customary promises of hugs and kisses with vows of knives and guns.

All of these bottom feeders are portrayed with the same assurance as the principals, to the delight of the Sunday matinee audience, who loudly gave them all a standing O. It was likely exciting for the energized crowd to be back at Matthews Playhouse watching a musical – and maybe amazing for them to see production values as high, or perhaps higher, than ever.