Tag Archives: Nicole Cunningham

“Laugh ‘Til You Die” Dares to Be Spooktacular

**Review: Laugh ‘Til You Die at The VAPA Center**

By Perry Tannenbaum

A vampire visits a comely maiden dressed bewitchingly in black for Halloween. A werewolf goes to a special summer camp for monsters. A strange woman with a cloven head conspires with a mouse to murder an angel. These are among the seasonal dainties served up by Concord-based Post Mortem Players in Laugh ‘Til You Die, their second annual invasion of the QC, continuing at The VAPA Center through October 12.

Subtitled “A Night of Spooky Sketches & Songs,” this Charlotte’s Off-Broadway production is even more freewheeling and fragmented than last month’s Meet and Greet medley of one-acts at the VAPA Black Box. Eleven sketches and songs paraded across the cramped stage on opening night, but that number figures to fluctuate as the second weekend of the run rolls in.

That’s because the musical chores are handled by a revolving roster of guest artists. Last weekend, these included Cole Thannisch, Myles Arnold, and cast members from Post Mortem’s upcoming production of The Rocky Horror Show. Rocky, Magenta, Frank-N-Furter, Columbia, and Riff Raff will all be on hand to torment Brad and Janet up yonder in Concord, when the full Rocky premieres on October 23 at the Old Courthouse Theatre’s new Wilson Family Black Box.

Meanwhile, enough of the gang showed up in full costume to fill the VAPA stage for two of the ghoulish musical’s signature numbers, the dreamy “Science Fiction Double Feature” and the imperishable “Time Warp” dance orgy. The young lions and lionesses will return for two of the three remaining Charlotte performances. More adventurous and exhibitionistic theatergoers will likely opt for the Rocky visitation at the Saturday night special, which amps up the macabre mischief with a costume contest.

Most lamentably revolving out of the guest rotation will be Arnold’s rousing rendition of the “Oogie Boogie Song” from The Nightmare Before Christmas, a charming amalgam of Cab Calloway, Fats Waller, and The Grinch. Thannisch yielded nothing to Arnold’s exploits in terms of charisma, smoothest and most urbane in his golden jacket as the evening’s first vampire.

Director Alli B. Graham mostly had Thannisch and Arnold singing to members of her sketch cast, so the shuttling back and forth between sketch and song flowed quite naturally. Because Nicole Cunningham wrote three of the five Laugh ‘Til You Die blackouts – each of the three a screwball parody – there was a stylistic consistency as well.

After serving as a very willing recipient for Thannisch’s vampire advances, staged far too chastely by Graham for a Charlotte audience, Cunningham cunningly continued as a witch named Laura in “Cry Witch,” strewn with references and quotes from Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Laura seemed to be a Halloween witch rather than the real thing, married to Ryan: Dalton Norman dressed up as a fiery red devil.

The hellish secret they share is a piña colada-flavored pair of edible panties that was very unfortunately misplaced. Christine Hull, skilled at overacting in the grand Saturday Night Live manner, is the community’s moral watchdog and grand inquisitor, sending Norman and Cunningham into a nicely frothed panic. So refreshing to see a genuine witch hunt, isn’t it?

In a nicely gauged solo, Cunningham – in a costume that reminds us of an airline stewardess – welcomes us aboard a cruise along the River Styx with wonderfully plastic cheer in “Onboarding.” Since Gretchen isn’t getting off at Hades like the rest of us, maybe because she’s been there and back, she allows herself a certain amount of smug superiority mixed with her peppiness toward those of us who will stay the course. The rest of us, she serenely predicts, will jump ship. Not a preferable option.

Zaniest of all, Cunningham has penned the surreal “Cilantro and Old Lace,” where we encounter Hull once again as a cutesy mouse named Michelle and the creepy Bobbi Hawk as the cloven June, a somehow embittered woman with a meat cleaver embedded across her head. Whether or not it has anything to do with the blood-spattered cleaver, June holds some kind of grudge against the angel (or fairy?) Rhea, a precious and catty Norman in drag.

Yes, Rhea is irritating, but maybe not to the extent that she should fall victim to the deranged June taking advantage of her nemesis’s cilantro allergy. Cilantro doesn’t exactly replace the arsenic in the familiar – and similarly off-kilter – Arsenic and Old Lace. Cunningham serves the more iconic poison as a side dish.

The remaining skits are written by Andrew Pippin and Mortem marketing manager Kimberly Saunders. “Final Girl” by Saunders has arguably the least Halloween aroma of all the Laugh ‘Til You Die segments, though its ends with a fairly creepy twist. Dave Gilpin is both boss and job interviewer as Mr. Smith, eventually allowing himself to be coaxed into giving his own assistant – Hull already in her mousey mode – a crack at the opening.

Neither Cunningham as Candidate 1 nor Steve Harper as Candidate 2 earns an on-the-spot job offer from Mr. Smith before Hull gets her chance to shine in the spotlight. Harper charmed me more as the also-ran, so efficiently toting his portfolio and handing Mr. Smith his résumé. Graham must have been equally charmed in her director’s chair, for she brought Harper back for an encore immediately afterwards, clutching his portfolio for dear life as Arnold slayed in his Oogie Boogeyman showstopper.

Pippin’s “Camp Amamonsta” has as much Halloween seasoning as “Cry Witch,” with a pinch more plotting, swift pacing, and a delicious ending, though Graham’s staging is a bit stagnant. Hull is at her most fulsome as Kate, the camp counselor welcoming all her monster campers to their first day – fulsome enough for us in the audience to feel included in the welcome.

The opening day lineup includes Hawk as Vampire Bella, Norman as Jackula III, Marcella Pansini in the thankless sheet-over-her-head role as a banshee ghost, and the wondrous Harper as Harry the Werewolf, though you might perceive a lick of Cowardly Lion. Into this idyllic bliss, a scorned outsider will intrude: Gilpin as Dave. A human being!

Hull retains an all-you-kids-play-nicely airiness amid the hullabaloo as Kate when it turns out that Bella is carrying on a forbidden romance with Dave. Like the rest of us, Dave is confident that his beloved merely has cosplay friends rather than fearsome monsters. Truth is, the bully among the campers, Jackula seems more likely to chugalug a beer than gobble up Dave. Harry? He’ll probably follow Jack’s lead. Whatever.

To avoid all these threats, Bella manages to talk Dave into pretending he’s a new camper rather than an outsider. Dave, however, doesn’t discard his insouciance, playing along rather than realizing he’s in peril. Yes, Pippin’s playlet actually has a setup that he could extend as long as he wishes.

At present, that isn’t too long, though we encourage Pippin to have second thoughts. Meanwhile, there’s a nifty ending in his hip pocket.

If you put the full Concord production of Rocky Horror on your calendar, you will be treated to multiple helpings of the leggy Lindsey Litka-Montes as the Popcorn Usherette and Magenta. She vamped me pretty good in “Science Fiction Double Feature,” camping next to me in the front row before making her rounds among the paying customers.

I confess to finding her even more tempting than the popcorn.

Laugh Your Butt Off at “Meet & Greet”

**Review: Meet and Greet at The VAPA Center**

By Perry Tannenbaum

Auditions are a kind of interview, and interviews are a kind of audition. You enter, drop a résumé on somebody’s desk, and minutes or hours later, you exit elated or deflated. Instant drama. Singularly human. A paradigm of life.

At the VAPA Center, auditions and interviews are the entire evening for three weekends in Meet & Greet, a themed set of three one-act comedies produced by Charlotte’s Off-Broadway in the COB Black Box. Yeah, from the outside looking in on aspirants and applicants who have stressed for weeks preparing, strategizing, dressing, and grooming for the big moment or trial by ordeal, the denouement can be quite entertaining.

We can laugh our heads off at these overinvested humans and empathize at the same time. Imagining we were them or grateful that we are not.

Of course, there are perils for playwrights working within these familiar templates. Skirting predictability is the keenest, particularly if your audience has been exposed to sketch comedy over and over.

You can rest assured that each of the playwrights featured at VAPA contrives to make the familiar ritual different from what we expect, concealing at least one twist and surprise. Neither Susan Lambert Hatem’s Hamilton Audition nor Don Zolidis’s The Job Interview far exceeds the length of a typical TV sketch, so opinions will likely vary on whether they transcend the streaming standard.

Both of them have yummy roles for multiple players, so transcendence becomes less of a factor if you’re seeking comedy simply for escape in these dark days. The incontestable headliner of the evening is the finale, Meet & Greet by Stan Zimmerman and Christian McLaughlin – in terms of length, number of histrionic roles, and prestige. Zimmerman’s fame rests chiefly upon his extensive writing credits, most notably the beloved Gilmore Girls and The Golden Girls.

Meet & Greet clocks in at more than twice the length of most sitcom episodes. Between laughs or afterwards, you may catch yourself pondering why.

COB’s producing artistic director – and VAPA Center co-founder – Anne Lambert has her energetic hands all over this one-act hodgepodge, starring as The Director in her sister’s Hamilton Audition and (what else?) stage directing all that follows.

There may be an inside joke here. Do you really audition for the role of The Director in the play you have programmed by your sister at your own theatre? Do you think director Anna Montgomerie invited Lambert to play the role, or was the inviting done in the opposite… direction? Wouldn’t Lambert, not the shyest person on the Charlotte theatre scene, have leveraged some of her status – and experience – in determining how her character should be written and played?

We’ll never know, unless the saga of putting Hamilton Audition on its feet spawns another script. In the present instance, Lambert has invited the most prodigious voice in town to audition for the lead role in an all-female production of Hamilton, and the diva who has graciously consented is apparently the only person on the planet who has never heard of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s megahit.

More likely, people who come to see Hamilton Audition will not realize that Lambert was a co-founder of Chickspeare, which pioneered all-female productions of Shakespeare in the QC. It is not at all far-fetched to say that Lambert inspired the role she is playing as well as the play her sister has written. Posters on the rear wall touting fictional Chickspeare productions practically shout this in-joke out loud.

From appearances, you might conclude that Lambert is more out of her element directing a hip-hop musical than Nasha Shandri as Shondra Graves is auditioning for the role of Aaron Burr. Just you wait. Although she looks perfect for her dashing Founding Father role, Shondra gives a more atrocious hip-hop reading than you would dare to expect from The Director.

Comedy gold.

Amazingly, Shandri is supposed to be no less ignorant about rap than she is of Hamilton! Suddenly, the whole idea of a pioneering all-female version seems like a certain disaster… with fallout for females and minorities. It’s at this point that Graves and The Director probe the sexism that already lurks in the original gendered Hamilton. So yes, Hatem has put some meat on her hambone dialogue.

Whether or not Zolidis replicates that feat in The Job Interview is more open to question. The bio in the digital program, summoned by your QR code reader, states that Zolidis is one of the most prolific and produced playwrights in the world. Maybe the thuddingly generic blandness of this title explains why Zolidis was so previously unknown to me nonetheless.

Fortunately, his Job Interview playscript proves to be livelier and more imaginative. The basic premise, we will soon find, ensures that the sparks will fly. Both of the applicants waiting to be called into T.J.’s office, Chloe Shade as Marigold and Marla Brown as Emily, will be interviewed at the same time, adding the elements of confrontation and fierce female competition to the drama. For Emily, it’s already life-or-death.

If you’ve inferred that T.J. is eccentric and perhaps sadistic, you’re on the right track. Rahman Williams as T.J. doesn’t ask his applicants a scripted set of questions – or even the same questions. Deepening his aggression and moving us abruptly from interview to audition, he challenges Marigold and Emily to show him how they would handle specific on-the-job situations.

Not only might we say that the difficulty of the questions and roleplay challenges seems to be tipping the scales of fairness way off kilter, but we can also discern radical differences in the temperaments and preparedness of the two candidates. It would be impossible to find an aspect of Emily’s performance where she outscores her rival… aside from how desperately she needs this.

Now anybody interviewing for a job knows that he or she is already facing steep odds, but knowing that you’re outclassed during the interview is a special torture, one that permits Brown to go totally nuclear as Emily. On the other hand, Shade can play with the absurd and ballooning insult that Marigold, in all her perfection, is obliged to keep competing with this loser – and that the outcome still lies in the hands of this outrageous interviewer.

Rahman, in the meantime, gets to play with the disconnect between T.J.’s spit-and-polish military background and his high-level position at Build-a-Bear Toys. Three tasty roles, all well-done. During the run, Nicole Cunningham shares Shade’s chores.

Contrary to what you may be thinking while it plays out, Zimmerman & McLaughlin have aptly named their Meet & Greet. Take it in the same way that the four auditioning actresses do and ride the rollercoaster. To make it all tastier, two of the four have a history together, co-starring long ago during better days on a hit sitcom, Lane Morris as the embittered psycho Belinda and Stephanie DiPaolo as the bimbo Teri.

For my generation, I was thinking Joyce DeWitt and Suzanne Sommers from Three’s Company, but you might hear different echoes. Teri is the airhead who tends to spoil everything, or she is deeply misunderstood and cruelly typecast. Bubbling and pouting seem to be her main forms of expression. Also in the room before Teri’s majestic entrance is Marsha Perry as Desiree White, with some sort of acting experience as the star of the “Real Housekeepers of Palm Beach” reality show.

Contrasting nicely with Desiree and her leopard-skin bodysuit is Joanna Gerdy as the splendiferously monochromatic Margo Jane Mardsden, who has fallen from her regal perch as living Broadway legend due to a combo of drink and disgrace. Being among this gaggle, especially the déclassé Desiree, is already a devastating humiliation.

Yet as we can hear as they emerge from their auditions, both Desiree and Margo are spectacularly successful in their auditions for the role of Andrea, the leading lady of an upcoming series pilot. Leopard Skin draws uproarious laughter from the sanctum within before Diva Nun draws a thunderous ovation. Which one do the showrunners, producers, and writers inside actually prefer?

Every word that Tommy Prudenti utters as the Casting Assistant is a tantalizing clue to what the show and Angela will be, and there is a girlish coyness about him… and a deceptive servility. All through this epic catfight showdown, Zimmerman’s Golden Girls pedigree is on display in a blizzard of quips, taunts, and one-liners. We shall only divulge the maestro’s recipe for “sidewalk pizza” here: you jump out the window of a tall city building.