Review: Head Over Heels at Duke Family Performance Hall by Davidson Community Players

By Perry Tannenbaum

Heaven, Elysium, Utopia, Paradise, and Arcadia are all perfect places in our minds, too placid and static to be considered as settings for comedy, thrilling action, or drama. If you were in search of a perfect backdrop for the music of The Go-Go’s, you would more likely pick a city on the California coast, Las Vegas, or even Indianapolis than opting for heaven or the Elysian Fields.

That’s not how Jeff Whitty saw it when he conceived Head Over Heels. You get the idea that, after birthing Avenue Q, Whitty almost had free rein from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival to do anything he pleased. Whether he was inspired by the Elizabethan aura of OSF’s outdoor and indoor stages in greeny Ashland, Oregon – or bound to play up to them – Whitty reached back to The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia by Sir Philip Sidney, first published by the Countess in 1593.

Whitty had absolutely no intention of bridging the two eras – or smoothing the discordance between Elizabethan and Go-Go’s English. Whitty does tone it down a bit when Philoclea, the younger daughter of Arcadia’s King Basilius, tells her ardent admirer Musidorus to “Speak English, not Eclogue” when the shepherd boy begins his wooings.

At about the time that Head Over Heels premiered at OSF in 2015, Something Rotten!, with Will Shakespeare as its rockstar, was premiering on Broadway. That might explain the lukewarm reception that greeted Whitty’s show when it had its NYC premiere in 2018, for its Broadway run fizzled out in less than six months.

You can judge for yourself at spacious Duke Family Performance Hall as Davidson Community Playhouse rather splendidly presents its summer musical in nearly all of its gender bending glory. For this Metrolina premiere, projection designer Caleb Sigmon, scenic designer Ryan Maloney, and costume designer Yvette Moten fill the Broadway-sized stage on the Davidson College campus with eye-popping color and Hellenic style.

With the disclaimer that I’d never heard a single bar of Go-Go’s music before Head Over Heels came to our region, I can say that I delved into The Go-Go’s greatest hits afterwards on Spotify and listened to the original Broadway cast album. From the opening “We Got the Beat” onwards, the two generations of singers up at Exit 30 on I-77 beat them both.

Word of DCP’s excellence has extended its reach, and director Chris Patton and music director Matthew Primm have reaped the benefits. Belting the Go-Go’s “Beautiful” to her own mirror, Jassi Bynum is the vain elder sister, Pamela (a name apparently invented by Sir Philip). No less capable of letting loose, Kiearra Gary is the obedient “Good Girl” sister, Philoclea. And the well-established powerhouse, Nonye Obichere, is Mopsa, who seems for awhile to be a third sister until we learn that she is actually the daughter of the King’s steward, Dametas.

When Mopsa’s heart is broken, she will flee to Lesbos (wink, wink) and sing “Vacation.” Obichere slays at least as convincingly as the sisters.

It’s easy enough to get confused by the parents because they’re all white folk who fit nicely into Sidney’s Grecian mold but look nothing like their offspring. Yet Lisa Schacher, not seen hereabouts in a truly breakout musical role since the early days of QC Concerts, keeps her where-have-you-been-all-my-life belting capabilities under wraps until after intermission as Gynecia, the Arcadian queen. We’re not just talking Judy Garland belting, for Schacher crosses over the borderline to Whitney Houston territory along with Bynum, Gary, and Obichere.

Once whatever was clogging Tommy Foster’s larynx in the first moments of Saturday night’s performance as Dametas was expelled, the longtime veteran reminded us that he could also wail. Saddled with a more earthbound voice, Rob Addison brings a nicely grizzled dignity to King Basilius that is forceful enough for the lead vocal of “Get Up and Go” and his climactic king-and-queen duet with Schacher, “This Old Feeling.”

Kel Wright, whose pronouns are Kel and I in her coy bio, is the gender-fluid complication roiling the eternal placidity of Arcadia. She is the ardent shepherd boy Musidorus, Philoclea’s bestie since her tomboy days, who must disguise himself as an Amazon warrior, Cleophila, after he’s banished from Arcadia in order to regain access to his lady love.

Everybody seems to be attracted to Cleophila, though they come to all the possible conclusions about the Amazon’s true gender. It’s a mess – a hormonal thundershower that afflicts the King, the Queen, and their daughters. All of them scurry about in a mad passion that comes off with all the innocent merriment of a musical comedy. Adding to all of this hilarity is the disconnect between Wright’s tinniness and the Amazon’s virility, so feverishly irresistible to Pamela and her mom.

All of this mad pursuit, however, happens under the cloud of a prophesy that threatens Arcadia’s doom. A snake sent by Pythio, the Delphic Oracle, lets loose of a letter summoning King Basilius to the temple to hear the Oracle’s oracle. In Sidney’s original manuscript, not recovered until 1908, the prophecy is given concisely in verse at the end of the novel’s opening paragraph.

Thy elder care shall from thy careful face

By princely mean be stolen and yet not lost;

Thy younger shall with nature’s bliss embrace

An uncouth love, which nature hateth most.

Thou with thy wife adult’ry shalt commit,

And in thy throne a foreign state shall sit.

All this on thee this fatal year shall hit.

Whitty actually retains the adultery line – with its apostrophe! – but flips the plotlines of the elder and younger daughters. In Arcadia, Basilius is seeking to preserve his family and kingdom, but in Head Over Heels, he’s also battling to ward off the mass extinction of Arcadians. Forget about the “fatal year”: Each time one of the four prophecies is fulfilled, a flag will fall. If Basilius fails to confound the Delphic Oracle’s prophecy and the fourth flag falls… game over. If he succeeds in thwarting the prophecy even once, Arcadia is saved.

The roadblock to all this heroic questing and defying taking hold at Duke Family is the sensational Treyveon Purvis as the glittery Pythio, who describes themselves as a “non-binary plural.” No, that isn’t verbatim from Arcadia. We don’t need to understand every word of “Vision of Nowness” instantly as Pythio bodaciously belts it. If you don’t catch a phrase the first time or Purvis slurs it, you’ll get a second chance. Besides, the Go-Go’s lyrics are of little consequence once the song is done.

But the four prophecies and the fluttery flag drops are the whole damn evening, so when Purvis garbled every one of Pythio’s pronouncements – and the flag bit as well – much of what followed became equally incomprehensible. Why were those flags falling again? Was Foster wildly excited when he caught those falling flags, or was his Dametas frantically panicked?

Never could get a read on all these things until I sorted them out later at home. A few other gems had eluded me when I perused the script. For example, when Wright is lavishing her outsized voice on Musidorus’s “Mad About You,” the shepherd’s backup group are his sheep, altering the Go-Go’s deathless lyric to “Ma-ad about ewe.” Bleating as they sang? I don’t remember.

Nor did it quite register that Pythio’s backup were all snakes. So there was little chance for me to savor Purvis’s best line of the night: “Snakelettes, slither hither!” They are only named that one time, so catch it if you can.

Arguably, the main historic aspect of Head Over Heels was that it offered Peppermint, as Pythio, the opportunity to be the first openly trans actor taking on a major role on Broadway. There’s summery breeziness to this show and a cozy ending, not nearly as biting as Avenue Q. Maybe if the Broadway production had had the chance to run for a full summer, it might have found its legs instead of perishing in the dead of winter.

It’s the Go-Go’s, after all. Just don’t go in expecting the usual Jack-shall-have-Jill windup. Whitty remains a bit queer.