Tag Archives: Raven Monroe

Ensley and Schroeder Check All the Beautiful Boxes in Matthews

Review: Beautiful The Carol King Musical at Matthews Playhouse

By Perry Tannenbaum

When you think of singer/songwriter Carole King and Broadway musicals, there’s an instant disconnect: the humble simplicity of King’s Tapestry album cover clashing with the glitz and blare of the Great White Way. So a Broadway musical about King’s career is more of a stylistic stretch than a biomusical about most rock stars, pop stars, or jazz & blues divas. Everyone involved behind the scenes of the original 2014 production of Beautiful The Carol King Musical seemed keenly aware of the dichotomy, including director Marc Bruni, orchestrator/arranger Steve Sidwell, and scriptwriter Douglas McGrath.

Their idea of coping with the problem was by leaning into it. Not too subtly, they conspired to make the early stages of King’s career seem crass and commercial, as if she were trapped in the dog-eat-dog maw of the pop music industry. King and her writing partner, lyricist Gerry Goffin, write the songs while producer Don Kirshner finds the singers and the groups who will cut the singles – the likes of Bobby Vee, Little Eva, The Drifters, and The Shirelles. Yet somehow the hierarchy is flipped in the famed Brill Building in NYC.

Carole and Gerry are slaving for Kirshner, a genial industry mogul and taskmaster, and the couple’s best early music loses a lot of its luster when it’s farmed out, especially when “Up on the Roof” falls into the hands of The Drifters and “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” is butchered by The Shirelles, thanks to excessively ornate Sidwell arrangements that would be more at home on Broadway or Vegas than Motown. These excesses helped Jessie Mueller to shine all the more brightly in the original cast – and for her sister, Abby Mueller, to shine equally when the touring version hit the QC in April 2016.

So a downsized production, like the one currently running at Matthews Playhouse, actually has the potential to be better than the Broadway and touring versions – with the right personnel and sufficient pizzazz. With Billy Ensley directing and Lindsey Schroeder leading a heavyweight cast, both those boxes are checked. The Broadway ensemble sheds two of its three keyboards nestling into Matthews, one its two guitars, and one of its percussionists. The slimming helps. No longer smothered by their orchestrations, Neil Sedaka’s “Oh! Carol,” Gene Vincent’s “Be Bop a Lula,” and Little Eva’s “Loco-Motion” sound more like rock music and less like mockeries.

Ensley targets the megahit by the King-Goffin duo’s friendly rivals, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, for his most farcical treatment. Not only is the arrangement of “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” garishly distorted, amped up from the swampy-echoey-churchy vibe of the original single, but the gulf between the bass and tenor voices of the Righteous Brothers is greatly emphasized, exaggerated, and comically exploited by Johnny Hohenstein and Zach Linick.

McGrath’s book is most affecting when it deals directly with King, though there’s bold poetic license in his voodoo, historically speaking. Pressured by Kirshner to come up with a new hit overnight for The Shirelles (in real life, they only had one hit record so far), King writes the music and goes to bed with Goffin. Perfect setup. Wouldn’t you like to wake up in the morning and find the handwritten lyrics for “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” perched on your piano – and be the first person on Earth to read and sing them?

No disrespect to the great Bobby Vee, but we’ve suddenly ascended more than a few notches above “Take Good Care of My Baby.” This moment still grabs me, but there are more moments like this after intermission, when “You’ve Got a Friend” and “A Natural Woman” are unveiled, that choke me up even more – as King breaks away from the Brill Building and starts to do her own thing. Schroeder replicates the sandy sound of Carole’s voice from the beginning, but as she transforms from a demo singer behind an upright piano to a chart-topping performer, watch out.

Schroeder can not only belt – she can tear your heart out.

McGrath’s dramatization heightens the magic most memorably when “You’ve Got a Friend” is reframed as a not-quite-farewell song, when King embarks for her solo career in LA with Kirshner’s blessing, and both Barry and Cynthia gather round the old upright with her to sing this newborn masterpiece. The song didn’t really come out until her second album, but who’s counting, right?

Nick Southwick as Barry and Sophie Lanser as Cynthia (get that woman a more reliable mic!) deliver polished performances all evening long, but they also grow more gravitas after intermission. Lanser sheds the frivolity of a “Happy Days Are Here Again” parody and “He’s Sure the Boy I Love” and joins Southwick – previously mired in the silliness of “Who Put the Bomp” and the wrong-key version of “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ – in a heartfelt “Walking in the Rain” duet.

Then if you haven’t started weeping with Schroeder’s “It’s Too Late,” you’re at the mercy of “You’ve Got a Friend” when Lanser and Southwick join in on the quivering-lip goodbyes. After playing Kirshner with avuncular savvy throughout King’s formative years, Ryan Dunn sprinkles some welcome laughter into this maudlin scene with a (purposely) bad attempt at vocalizing.

I’d forgotten that Carole had Aretha’s 1967 hit in her hip pocket when she cut Tapestry out on the Left Coast in 1971, so I found myself suddenly suppressing sobs when “A Natural Woman” began. Here it felt very right that Sidwell’s arrangement brought added vocalists and brass to beef up the simplicity of King’s version – and freed Schroeder to narrow the gap between Carole and the Queen of Soul with some fervent belting.

Marty Wolff’s simple two-story set design, with four wide strips of stained-glass paneling running vertically upstage in front of the eight-piece band led by Ellen Robison from the keyboard, needs only JP Woodey’s lighting to give it a rockin’ modernistic zing. Lisa Blanton’s choreography is devout doo-wop, most praiseworthy for how well the groups stay in sync, and Chelsea Retalic likely cranked out between 75 and 100 costumes for this large cast – all of them, from the sleekest to the grungiest, on point.

And the wigs! The only misfire here, among dozens of triumphant coifs – several for Schroeder – was the oceanic profusion of waves that perched on Joe McCourt’s head as Gerry Goffin, making him virtually unrecognizable. McCourt, a musical mainstay in the QC since his debut in 2008 as the lead in Godspell, has suavity to spare to spare and, in contrast with Southwick’s quirky neuroses as Barry, gets a nice and bumpy character curve as the only troubled soul we see.

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As for the Afro-American doo-woppers… my, oh my! By bringing Nehemiah Lawson aboard to take over “Some Kind of Wonderful” from Schroeder and McCourt and then to bring him back again and again to sing “Up on the Roof” and “On Broadway,” the latter one of Weil & Mann’s best, Ensley and Robison signal that they have no plans of dissing The Drifters. Meanwhile, two lead singers are embedded among Ensley’s Shirelles. As Janelle Woods, the Shirelle who denigrates “Will You Still Love Me” as “too country” before fronting the breakthrough single (first Billboard #1 for an African-American girls’ group), Brianna Mayo gets a chance to show that her acting chops are as strong as her singing skills.

Shortly afterwards, Raven Monroe emerges from the backup Shirelles to become Little Eva and ignite “The Loco-Motion.” Until then, she moonlights as King’s babysitter during the leading lady’s brief marriage to the restless Goffin.

There’s a formulaic circle to McGrath’s storytelling that’s not at all displeasing, starting and ending with King as a star behind a grand piano singing a song from Tapestry. We flash back to her youth in Brooklyn and eventually touch down at Carnegie Hall, surely a kind of Jerusalem for a humble Jewish girl. Alongside her at the beginning and at the end is Carol Weiner as Genie Klein, King’s mother. Both were abandoned by her no-good father, steeled by adversity. Along the way to Carnegie, Weiner peeps in with a couple of overprotective warnings, a few salty quips, and a proud Mama’s lie.

If McGrath can embellish a good story, why shouldn’t she

UNC Charlotte Drops a Russian Clown into the Cogs of Heiner Müller’s “Hamletmachine”

By Perry Tannenbaum

March 19, 2016, Charlotte, NC – More than with most scripts, it’s difficult to say what exactly Heiner Müller had in mind when he wrote Hamletmachine in 1977. Performances of Müller’s plays were banned in East Germany until the fall of the Berlin Wall, so the 1979 world premiere was presented – in translation – in Paris, and when Müller himself finally directed the piece for the first time in his homeland, it was as the play-within-a-play in a far larger 1990 production of Hamlet, presumably in his own translation since that what was what he had completed before embarking on his own.

Looking at this script, which occupies just three pages in The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama (4^th ed.), I’d have to say it’s presumptuous to call it a play at all, for it doesn’t offer a list of characters and doesn’t actually assign any dialogue to anyone until the second of its five parts. We can hardly greet that as a clarifying moment when Müller writes, “Ophelia (Chorus/Hamlet): I am Ophelia.” Nor is the custom of attribution religiously observed afterwards in a text that often resembles T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in its stream-of-consciousness style and allusiveness. We should not be surprised that the current production at UNC Charlotte’s Robinson Hall, presented by the College of Arts + Architecture at the Anne R. Belk Theater, not only boasts three directors but also three Ophelias and four Hamlets in a production that clocked in at just under 38 minutes.

A wide latitude of interpretation is built into the text, which explains the fact that one Japanese production lasted 12 hours. That surely isn’t the outer limit, for Müller decrees “Snow. Ice Age,” after the executions of Marx, Lenin, and Mao at the end of Part IV. Yet I must say that the UNC Charlotte production follows the text far more closely – and recognizably – than the previous production I saw in Charlotte, presented by Off-Tryon Theatre Company as part of a double bill with Rosencrantz and Guilderstern Are Dead in 2005. Leading the all-female directing team, UNCC assistant professor Robin Witt has eliminated (among other things) the appearances of King Claudius, the striptease by Ophelia, and the gravestones or lecterns that should be the university of the dead in Part III. A whole motif involving Hamlet’s armor and his axe is altered beyond recognition, and the executions of the Communist trinity, which should have been done by Hamlet with that axe, are now done bloodlessly by hanging.

I’m not sure whether there was a malfunction in Benjamin J. Stickels’ sound design, but I never discerned the voices of Lenin, Mao, and Marx, though three are listed for them in the program booklet. Similarly, the men and women dressed in white by costume designer Beth Killion are all designated as Chorus in the playbill, so I wasn’t aware until later, when I’d revisited the script, that the segment choreographed by Alex Baesen was a ballet of the dead women. It looked more like a dance of angels to me, though the woman with the little stove around her head should have told me that she was a suicide or a Holocaust victim.

There are also additions to the script by Witt and her team, including Marc Smith as a German Speaker and, most conspicuously, Kineh N’Gaojia as a Russian Clown who beautifully sings Leon Russell’s “A Song for You” for no particular reason. Before her concluding monologue as Ophelia Wheelchair, Raven Monroe inserts Todd Rundgren’s “Can We Still Be Friends.” Of course, when she begins her monologue declaring, “This is Electra speaking,” and ends by vaguely alluding to the Manson Family and Sqeaky Fromme, it’s hard to be sure who Monroe is as the lights go down on her in her wheelchair.

The sinew of Müller’s text is given when Hamlet Flag (née The Actor Playing Hamlet) has his long monologue in Part IV, “Pest in Buda / Battle for Greenland.” I’d say that the upshot of this ramble, ably delivered by Matt Miller, is that the revolutionaries who had ushered in the triumph of Communism in Eastern Europe had succeeded so well that they had rendered the possibility of current and future revolutions extinct. Looking frankly at himself, the Actor Playing Hamlet asserts that the Hamlet who once was, the brooding assassin who engineered a coup d’état, no longer exists and can no longer exist. The executions that follow are merely wishful thinking – by a populace of Hamlets who remained too indecisive too long.

Jamie Gonzalez was my favorite among the Ophelias. Her heart is not visibly a clock as the text demands. Instead, she is wheeled onstage as Ophelia Bed to deliver her lurid monologue, giving her a kinship with the Ophelia Wheelchair to come. No such connections are attempted among the Hamlets, since all four of them parade in front of us at the outset. Noah Tepper seems like he will be dominant as Hamlet Skull, conversing with a puppet Horatio (Brittany White), but he is succeeded by Tykiique Cuthkelvin as Hamlet Book and Jennifer Huddleston as Hamlet Axe before Miller’s Flag takes over. The gender bending in Witt’s casting becomes plausible enough when Miller’s Hamlet announces, “I want to be a woman.” He gets his wish when the Chorus surrounds him and dresses him up as Ophelia, but he’s back in tacky 1970s leisure wear by the time he launches into his big monologue.

While the thrust of Müller’s script is unmistakably an outcry against living under totalitarianism, its production at UNCC paradoxically affirms the benefits of dictatorship. It’s not a total coincidence that the most admired production of this piece, the 1986 revival directed by Robert Wilson (even Müller preferred it to his own), was presented at another university, NYU. Not only can university professors ignore commercial viability when deciding what they present on their stages, they can lavish resources upon each project that leave the prudential considerations of capitalism deeper in the dust.

That is the true wonder to behold when comparing the staging at Robinson Hall to the Off-Tryon version I saw in 2005. Tom Burch’s scenic design lifts this production to a frightful level of gritty German expressionism that is simply phenomenal, mirrored by the imaginative artistry of the props and costumes. Primitive stairways lead up to a platform where the mutilated German Speaker can babble, and the wall behind that platform is large enough to project the titles of each of the five parts we’re watching. When the script alludes to a television, Burch can deploy four of them, each one broadcasting nothing more than white noise.

The obvious reward of such excess is a Hamletmachine that is vivid and engaging – but no less mystifying than it is on the page. No doubt the post-performance discussion following the Saturday evening performance was helpful for amazed and baffled audience members who remained afterwards, and another discussion is scheduled with the cast and designers after the March 21 performance. Otherwise, there’s plenty to be gleaned from dramaturg Jeanmarie Higgins’ program note and the handy Tumblr website she and her dramaturgy students have established online.