Tag Archives: Sierra Key

Hollywood Superstars Who Graced the QC’s Park-N-Shop

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Preview: QC Concerts’ Side Show at Booth Playhouse

By Perry Tannenbaum

When Louella Parsons, the undisputed queen of Hollywood gossip, saw the Hilton Sisters’ first movie in 1932, she proclaimed: “For pure sensationalism, Freaks tops any picture yet produced. It’s more fantastic and grotesque than any shocker ever written.” At the height of their fame, Daisy and Violet Hilton could fill a large stadium.

Or at least, they tried. On July 18, 1936, billboards all around Dallas – some as large as 60 feet tall – invited the public to the Centennial Exposition at the Texas State Fairgrounds. For just 25 cents, you could enter the Fair Park Stadium, newly rebranded as the Cotton Bowl, and attend Violet’s wedding, with twin sister Daisy as her maid of honor. Afterwards, the sibs would perform with their dance band.

How could it be otherwise? For Violet and Daisy were Siamese twins, joined at the hip. Superstars. During their careers, they performed with Bob Hope, Jack Benny, and Burns & Allen. Hope and Burns were the sisters’ most illustrious dance partners! But the Hiltons died in relative obscurity. When they hadn’t shown up for work at the Park-N-Shop on Wilkinson Boulevard for a few days, Charlotte Police found them dead in their nearby apartment on January 4, 1969 at the age 0f 60.

The Siamese twins – actually born in Brighton, England – had succumbed to the Hong Kong flu. Blame it all on the Asians, right?

There should be a soft spot in Charlotteans’ hearts for two of our own and for Bill Russell’s Side Show, the 1997 Broadway musical about the Hilton Twins’ rise to fame. But no matter how thoughtful and intriguing the original version and the revised 2014 revival were to reviewers, neither production gained box office traction in New York and neither toured here.

Until now, the only adult company to present Side Show in the Queen City was the Queen City Theatre Company at McLohon Theater in 2008. The McLohon was an ideal locale for the seedy, carnival ambiance of Side Show. Russell’s cast includes not just the Twins, after all, but also a Cannibal King, a Snake Woman, a Reptile Man, three Harem Girls, and – perhaps most monstrous of all – The Boss who employs, exploits, and abuses them.

Though pennies won’t get you into this show unless you have a huge jarful, the freaks return to Charlotte this week – with their startling welcome.

Come look at the freaks

come gape at the geeks

come examine these aberrations

their malformations

grotesque physiques

only pennies for peeks

Once again, The Boss will invite you into his “odditorium.” While the McGlohon and its Spirit Square cohort, Duke Energy Theater, remain in hibernation until 2027, undergoing their makeovers, Queen City Concerts is reviving Side Show at Booth Playhouse. It’s a more intimate Blumenthal Arts venue than the McGlohon, true enough, but not quite as creepy.

Chief chef directing this colorful cast – and leading a full orchestra playing Henry Krieger’s music in Harold Wheeler’s original orchestral arrangements – is QC founder Zachary Tarlton. Adoration of the original score is Tarlton’s specialty, but here he had the luxury of cherry-picking from two Broadway versions, maybe shuffling the songlist a little and restoring some of the 1997 tunes that had been dropped in crafting the more historically accurate 2014 revision.

“We chose to do the original 1997 Broadway version of Side Show,” says Tarlton, “because it is Side Show in its purest form. While the show closed quickly, it garnered several Tony nominations and launched the careers of its leading ladies: Alice Ripley and Emily Skinner. For those unfamiliar with the original show, the 2014 production seemed polished and pristine. For fans of the original, it was met with harsh criticism.”

Fans of the original, Tarlton will tell you, are a cult following. Whether the stars of the new QC Concerts production, Ava Smith as Daisy and Sierra Key as Violet, are members of that cult is an open question. But they are both fervid admirers of the show.

Before Tarlton saw her as his Daisy, Smith had portrayed Violet in a Teen City Stage presentation at CPCC’s Pease Auditorium in 2016 – while she was still a high schooler in Gastonia. Key was also in high school when she first met Smith in 2013, and they’ve been besties ever since their first show together.

Naturally, Key saw the 2016 show that starred her bestie. In a freakish reenactment of Side Show scheduled for later this year, Smith will be one of Key’s bridesmaids at her wedding.

“A little fun fact,” Smith adds, “people often mistake us for sisters! Just like Daisy and Violet, we have stood by each other through the good and bad times. Our connection in real life makes the necessary onstage connection come naturally.”

Russell sharply differentiates Daisy from Violet early on in his script, while they’re still slaving on the midway. Two young men, Terry Connor and Buddy Foster, secure a private audience with the sibs after their freakshow. Buddy’s idea is that he could teach the Hilton Twins how to sing and dance while Terry can get them a shot in vaudeville as their booking agent.

Both of the women would jump at the chance to escape the side show, but until now, they haven’t been offered a feasible alternative. The Boss keeps them under lock-and-key as part of his freak collection.

It’s Terry, not quite on board with the vaudeville scheme, who asks what the sisters yearn for.

“Daisy is bold, outgoing, stubborn, and determined to be famous,” Smith says. “She loves performing and knows exactly what she wants. Violet is shy, sensitive, and just wants a simpler, quieter life. But even with those differences, they share such a deep love for each other and a longing to just be ‘Like Everyone Else.’ I believe Daisy and Violet really are two halves of a whole.”

As halves or opposites, they are both keenly and perpetually aware of how laughable their aspirations are to their captors and the people who pay to peep at them. Even if they are at odds, every choice they’ve made individually has been with the tacit agreement of their twin. Yes, the fiery Daisy can aspire to vengeance against the mockers and the detractors while Violet merely hopes to prove them wrong and be rid of them.

But they must move together, whatever they do, and cannot pretend they’re the same as everyone else. Daisy aims higher, fired by the full breadth of the American dream, but it’s Violet, no less American, who is more poignant and relatable.

“What’s so powerful about Side Show,” Key declares, “is that it tells the story of people who are seen as ‘different’ simply for existing in the world as they are. As someone who is part of the LGBTQ+ community, that resonates with me deeply – especially right now, in a time where identity and visibility are still so politicized and debated. Violet’s longing for love, acceptance, and belonging is incredibly human, and that’s what I focus on.

“The physical connection with another actor may be unusual, but it’s all in service of telling a story that challenges perceptions and invites empathy.”

Going back eight or nine decades, Russell can take us beyond empathy and show us quite bluntly how the Hiltons themselves had yet to evolve. Their strongest champion before Buddy and Terry arrive as deliverers is Jake. He’s not really a Cannibal King “from the inky jungles of the darkest continent,” as The Boss would have us think, nor a poster boy for his collection of “god’s mistakes.”

He’s simply a rather strong African-American man. With a very soft spot for Violet. His inability to say no to her becomes the ticket to the Hilton Twins’ freedom.

So yes, they are also capable of prejudice and exploitation.

“One of the darkest moments in the show comes late in Act Two,” Tarlton observes, “when Jake asks Violet why she will not accept his deformities when he accepts hers, acknowledging the color of his skin while he accepts her as a conjoined twin. While that was during the Great Depression, we realize this same conversation could just as easily have been today. It is a show that is challenging at the core.”

Amen. Two of my most unforgettable moments in a Broadway theater happened on the evening when I first laid eyes on Ripley and Skinner. They didn’t instantly appear as the two Hilton sisters. They converged from opposite sides of the Richard Rodgers Theatre, facing each other as they sang and, just seconds afterwards, facing us. Then they conjoined right there, magically becoming one and moving as one – as naturally as Daisy and Violet had presumably done all their lives – for the remainder of the evening until taking their bows.

This must have been exactly as Russell envisioned it. “In the Broadway production,” he wrote in his Production Note. “Daisy and Violet’s connection was created by the two actors standing side by side. They were never literally connected by corsets, Velcro or any other costume piece. This allowed the audience to participate in creating the twins’ connection with their collective imagination and made the actors’ achievement of appearing to be joined all the more impressive.”

Even more primal and gripping was The Boss’s follow-up introduction as we were led inside his side show tent alongside the other freak seekers who had paid their dimes. “Please remain in your seats,” he told us commandingly, “to experience our premiere attraction in its most revealing display.”

A dazzling blast of backlight assaulted us as the conjoined twins, standing together with their limbs splayed out, appeared in dark silhouette. The sight was shocking, like a gigantic black spider writhing before us, twice the size of a normal person.

Fascinating. Fearsome. And yet… hauntingly beautiful.

Small Sizing Yields Big Rewards in DCP’s Fun Home

Review: Fun Home at Armour Street Theater

By Perry Tannenbaum

Across the way from the Gershwin Theatre, where Wicked has been running for over 20 years, you can find my favorite Broadway theater, Circle in the Square. At the other end of an underpass that connects the two venues – and two or three flights of stairs underground – you and 800+ plus patrons (less than half the Gershwin’s capacity) can have a theater-in-the-round experience in a space that’s like a wee oval basketball court or a hockey rink.

I’ve seen seven different productions at this underground stadium since 1999, most unforgettably the world premiere of Tennessee Williams’ Not About Nightingales that year and the visionary waterworld of Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses in 2003. Right now, two other Circle gems are playing in Metrolina revivals, Lombardi at the Lee Street Theater in Salisbury and five-time Tony Award winner Fun Home at the Armour Street Theater in Davidson.

A couple of admirable versions of Jeanine Tesori’s musical have already run in the QC, a Broadway tour at Knight Theater and an Actor’s Theatre reprise on the Queens U campus, so the current Davidson Community Players production, directed by Danielle Melendez, has big shoes to fill. What strikes me most positively about DCP’s effort, however, is how small it is. If you’re sitting in the front row, as my wife Sue and I were last Saturday evening, some of the action will be right next to you. Or behind you.

From that vantage point, DCP is better than even the 2019 Actor’s Theatre production at Queens’s Hadley Theater in replicating the intimacy of the Circle in the Square experience. Set designer Chip Decker, who stage directed the Hadley production during his years at the helm of ATC, retains his bright visual concept – a departure from the more funereal Broadway and touring versions – in depicting the Bechdel Funeral Home, allowing Alison Bechdel’s cartoons free play on the translucent windows of the parlor.

Often, they’re animated, with Bechdel’s words and drawings blooming before our eyes.

As we watch Lisa Kron’s adaptation of Bechdel’s graphic novel unfold, there’s a nice little studio perch set aside at stage right for the full-grown Alison to narrate. Sometimes as Alison, Kel Wright insinuates herself into the action, lurking in the main playing space, sketchbook in hand, as Small Allison and Middle Allison act out her vivid memories of growing up at a Pennsylvania funeral home and coming out as a lesbian at Oberlin College.

The bright visual concept tracks better with Kron’s book, because darkness only gradually seeps into the story. Alison’s dad, Bruce, seems like a bookish, excessively neat and proper mortician at first, mainly because he and his dutiful wife Helen conspire to hush up his big secrets. When Small Alison and her brothers sing “Come to the Fun Home,” a faux commercial jingle for the funeral home, the childish glee is as contagious as an early Jackson 5 hit or something fresh from little Donny Osmond and his backups.

Bruce may discourage these boisterous outbursts, but he cannot suppress them. Similarly, when Small Alison wants to go to her school party in jeans and sweater, Bruce can temporarily impose his will by shaming his daughter into wearing a dress. It’s only in retrospect that we and the full-grown Alison realize that Bruce was mostly protecting himself, shielding the truth of his own sexuality rather than upholding propriety.

Ironically, the fulcrum begins to shift for Middle Alison at Oberlin College, where she discovers her own gayness. This is jubilantly proclaimed in “Changing My Major (to Joan),” a song that equals the joy of “Fun Home” and surpasses it in exuberant sensual comedy. Tesori is at her best in these chamber sized songs with their pop flavorings and their Avenue Q spice. Even at her peak in Caroline, or Change and Kimberly Akimbo, Tesori’s other acclaimed shows, there’s a little bit of Sesame Street mischief going on.

Having coped with Bruce’s escapades for decades, Helen understandably freaks out when her daughter informs her that she has come out. Alison can only see her mom’s distress through a haze of misperception. Yet we always like Alison because she not only observes herself and her family with her sketchbook, she perseveres on her path and eventually, if still hesitantly, confronts her problems.

Despite Dad’s disdain, she continues to opt for cartooning instead of “serious” art, continues to wears jeans instead of dresses. Faced with Joan’s advances, Middle Alison retreats… temporarily. She seems to hibernate and marinate after writing home about her gay epiphany, processing Dad’s puzzling evasiveness and Mom’s distress, but she elects to bring Joan home with her when she returns from Ohio on winter break.

Darkness falls gradually, but it falls hard.

Mortician, English teacher, preservationist, and molester of underage boys – there’s a lot to unpack, even for adults in the audience, as we try to understand and judge Bruce in the context of his times. Coming off his outré antics in Vampire Lesbians of Sodom,Ashby Blakely is as varied, complex, and nuanced as we’ve ever seen him as Bruce. At times, he roars in his tyrannical moments, overpowering the small house. Like all the other players, he’s miked, but thanks to Kathryn Harding’s exemplary sound design, there’s never any distortion, clipping, or dropouts to mar the show or its music.

The one major sacrifice for theatergoing purists is the lack of a live orchestra at Armour Street. Nevertheless, Harding contrives a surround effect by channeling the prerecorded soundtrack and the amplified voices from the rear speakers. It was a pretty unique front-row experience for me, rather enjoyable.

After her exploits at Booth Playhouse as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, Alison Rhinehardt had already convinced me that she could overpower Armour without a mic. As Helen, she predictably knocks her showpiece, “Days and Days,” out of the park with diva aplomb. Until then, she’s rather wholesome and humdrum, accentuating Mom’s breakout.

Nor is there any perceptible cratering when we scrutinize the less familiar names in this cast. Recently unveiling her directing chops in the Queen City Concerts premiere of Local Singles,Wright brings an exacting intensity to Alison that always captures the drama, even when she sings. “Caption,” she keeps barking in Kron’s script, so her valuation of le mot juste always seems foremost as her castmates take care of the graphics.

As the Bechdel brothers, Aiden Honeycutt as John and Grayson Flowers as Christian help turn Small Allison’s “Fun Home” promo into an exhilarating panorama. Bailey Fischer takes flight almost from the first moment we see her as Small Alison – goodness, energy, and precocity personified until her last “Flying Away” moment. That energy is formidable when Ann Schnabel must take over as Middle Alison, especially in the intimidating context of a matriculating college freshman. In a sense, then, her “Changing My Major” is as much a rebirth as it is an affirmation.

It’s the needed embrace of the real world that will ultimately help her in coming to terms with the truth about Dad.

Criminal law is far more confident than my feelings in determining who the forbidden fruit is among the remaining cast. As the revelatory Joan, Sierra Key seems healthy enough, her seductiveness sufficiently muted for a Midwest coed. At school and visiting the funeral home, Key hits all the notes that emphasize Joan’s savoir-faire and discretion without pounding them. As the Bechdels’ handyman, Bart Copeland struts and preens enough to convince us that he’s also a consenting adult.

When he switches roles and becomes a former student that Bruce picks up on his nocturnal rambles, Copeland calls upon the naivete that made his star turn as Pippin so compelling last spring at Theatre Charlotte. Topped with a mop-top wig, you’ll see he’s also a perfect fit for Tesori’s retro pop music.

Doubling the Fun

Okay, so maybe you weren’t duly impressed that two shows are now running in Metrolina that premiered at the same Broadway theater. We can do better. Weirder. This coming weekend boasts two different shows set at a funeral parlor! Yes, as Fun Home continues for two more weekends up in Davidson, down here at Booth Playhouse, Charlotte Conservatory Theatre is bringing us the world premiere of Nan-Lynn Nelson’s Leaving Watermaine, directed by the playwright.

It opens on leap day this Thursday, at the tail-end of Black History Month, for a four-day run. By the end of Act 1, we’re greeted with a busy weave of plot threads involving undertaker Werly Mainlodge, his three daughters, and their beaus – both beloved or unwanted. Which of the three young ladies will be leaving first? Elopement or honeymoon? Will the Klan intervene on the eve of the planned departure?

Has there been a KKK lynching or a passionate murder? Or is the presumed victim still alive? Mystery, racism, colorism, and comedy peep into what seems like a tragedy, so you’ll need to stick around after intermission to learn how the dangling threads sort out. Nelson seemed to have it all calculated, incorporating her own musical soundtrack into her sound design.