Rave and Pan

At-TEN-tion Span, Cleveland Public Theatre

2012-01-22T12:23:00.002-05:00

(Darius Stubbs and Faye Hargate in "Alibi," conceived and directed by Chris Seibert, one of the twelve ten-minute plays in At-TEN-tion Span.

When towering Abraham Lincoln was asked how long a man’s legs should be, he responded “Long enough to reach the ground.” Good one, Abe.

Fortunately, no one ever asked the first stretch Lincoln how long a play should be, because he’d probably have had another smartass answer.

But if you were to ask the folks at Cleveland Public Theatre that question now, they might suggest ten minutes as the ideal length.

That’s because their most recent version of At-TEN-tion Span is now on the boards. This collection of a dozen ten-minute plays, or movements, or poetry is a grab bag of styles and tones that defies easy categorization.

Clearly, there is plenty of both inspiration and pretension in these conceived pieces, but it’s safe to say you’ve never seen anything like this before. And there are enough high points to recommend a look-see.

There are some notable works among the ten-minute theatrical tidbits. In one, “To Fasten Your Seatbelts,” conceived and directed by Renee Schilling, a new flight attendant is being tested by airline staffers, with hilarious results. And Jeremy Paul stands out in an understated comedy gem as a smolderingly sexy gay male flight attendant.

While that piece is quite traditional and linear in form, there are others that occupy the other end of the spectrum, such as “Crash Project,” conceived and directed by Pandora Robertson, and a couple different (very different) offerings by Chris Seibert.

Then there are four works conceived and directed by CPT artistic director Raymond Bobgan. Among them are two dance/movement interludes, closing the first act and opening the second act, that are enthrallingly hypnotic with hardly any words ever being said.

Note that the audience is required to move around a bit inside CPT’s main theater space, sometimes with chair in hand, so that new audience and stage configurations can be created. This also contributes to the visually varied experience that Span provides.

Other conceiver/directors include the aforementioned Paul, Simone Barros, Douglas H. Snyder and Darius Stubbs.

Of course, there are dull spots and a couple pieces that seem interminable even at ten minutes. But you’ll walk out from At-TEN-tion Span with your senses tweaked and your perspectives altered. And that ain’t bad at all.

At-TEN-tion Span

Through February 4 at Cleveland Public Theatre, 6415 Detroit Avenue, 216-631-2727.

Ten Chimneys, Cleveland Play House

2012-01-20T11:22:00.002-05:00

(Jordan Baker as Lynn Fontanne and Donald Carrier as Alfred Lunt.)

Actors love playing actors, since it is world of artifice they know all too well. Trouble is, there aren’t many plays outside of Coward of Chekhov that provide both the opportunity to have fun with the thespian mindset while still offering deeper insights.

Happily, that is exactly the package that is delivered, in spades, in Ten Chimneys by Jeffrey Hatcher, now at the Cleveland Play House. Channeling both of the aforementioned playwrights, Hatcher strafes the stage with witty patter while constructing some complex and multifaceted characters.

The result, thanks to a splendid cast and pitch-perfect direction by CPH artistic director Michael Bloom, is a production that is deeply satisfying in many levels. Spanning the years immediately before and after World War II, this show feels spot on.

The actors being portrayed are Alfred Lunt and his wife Lynn Fontanne, the king and queen of mid-20^th century theater. They are in residence at their summer digs in Wisconsin, called Ten Chimneys, and have invited the famed Sydney Greenstreet and a teenaged Uta Hagen to visit them.

The purpose of the get-together is to get a head start on their upcoming production of The Seagull, but this is no placid rehearsal process. Echoing the complications of that Chekhov play, a triangle develops among Lunt, Fontanne and Hagen. Meanwhile further ripples are created by Alfred’s sharp-tongued mother Hattie, his half-sister and part-time de facto servant Louise, and his half-brother Carl (Jeremy Kendall).

As Lunt and Fontanne, Donald Carrier and Jordan Baker are a joy to behold. Carrier balances Lunt’s mommy fixation deftly with his casually scathing bon mots. And Baker is both regal and devastatingly withering. When Lunt follows after his mother at one point, she murmurs, “Has anyone seen my copy of Oedipus?”

Carrier and Baker are particularly fine when batting lines from The Seagull back and forth, often at high speed, as they try to find their characters and their beats. This is done even as they try to do the same thing in their real life.

As good as they are, Mariette Hartley almost steals the show as Hattie, displaying nanosecond timing and imbuing this stereotypical overbearing mother-in-law from hell with a fresh sense of maternal martyrdom. Also excellent is Gail Rastorfer as frumpy, put-upon Louise.

Michael McCarty carries the heft of Greenstreet well and evolves into something unexpected and quite touching when a side story about his wife is revealed. Playing Hagen, Kelli Ruttle does nicely in conveying the young woman’s insecurity in the presence of these iconic actors. But she doesn’t quite manage to show why Lunt would be attracted to her, which undercuts the budding love triangle.

Even with a dead spot in the second act, when Fontanne and Hagen find themselves in a meandering conversational cul-de-sac, the pacing director Bloom establishes is beautifully suited to the script, the characters and the time. And the costuming by David Kay Mickelsen is detailed down to the last nit, including Louise’s sadly wrinkled stockings.

An additional pleasure is the venue itself, since this is the first play in CPH’s new Second Stage theater. This flexible space is arranged in arena seating for this production, with the audience walking down the steeply raked seats to find their place. Once seated, every audience member has a clean, close and unobstructed perch.

From every perspective, Ten Chimneys is a must-see, and one more positive sign that the Cleveland Play House is on a serious roll in their new and glorious home at PlayhouseSquare.

Ten Chimneys

Through February 5, at the Cleveland Play House, PlayhouseSquare,1407 Euclid Avenue, 216-241-6000.

Hair, PlayhouseSquare

2012-01-18T10:37:00.002-05:00

(Steel Burkhardt at the center of the tribe.)

Steven Wright has a joke about coming home one night and discovering that everything he owned had been replaced with exact replicas.

That’s the kind of feeling last night’s opening of Hair at PlayhouseSquare exuded: everything seemed in place but something seemed amiss. That something was the go-for-broke, spontaneous urgency an irreverent show like this needs to fire up an audience and leave them wilted but happy at the end.

Sure, all the dance moves and the excursions into the audience were there, along with the gloriously messy tribal interactions of these hippies from another place and time. But many of the moves were rounded off, the edges of the songs often dulled, and more than a few dramatic beats muffled in the bustle of large cast dynamics.

The happy news is that, since all the elements are in place from director Diane Paulus and choreographer Karole Armitage, the show can snap back to its senses with the next performance. But someone will have to convince the cast that they need to shake off the touring show, road warrior funk and get back to creating, rather than trying to re-create, indelible moments on stage.

When that happens, this production will have a lot to offer. Steel Burkhardt, a Baldwin Wallace College grad, is refreshingly up front physically as Berger—accosting and bumping against tribe and audience members alike in his leather loincloth.

As Claude, understudy Marshal Kennedy Carolan (who will play the role throughout the Cleveland engagement) has pleasing moments. But his voice is a bit too weak to make some of his songs take flight, such as the Act One closer “Where Do I Go?”

In the key role of Sheila, Sara King sings powerfully but seemed to be pushing to hard from the outset, perhaps in an attempt to goose the flagging energy level of the overall production. As Hud, Mike Evariste handles his duties well although burdened with a voluminous Afro wig that looked like it had been sitting folded in a suitcase too long.

The tribe members (which include Kent State University graduate John Moauro) are nicely decked out by costume designer Michael McDonald. And they contribute plenty of volume but don’t find as many moments as they could to shine individually, even for a nanosecond or two.

Things picked up in the second act, especially during Claude’s hallucinogenic dream sequence when Abe Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth make an appearance.

But Hair is a show that needs to go balls-to-the-wall from start to finish, otherwise it’s a betrayal of the full commitment of those rebels they’re portraying. Here’s hoping the remaining performances at the Palace demonstrate that all-or-nothing approach.

Hair

Through January 29 at the Palace Theatre, PlayhouseSquare, 1518 Euclid Avenue, 216-241-6000.

A Song For Coretta, Ensemble Theatre

2012-01-14T11:44:00.002-05:00

(Top, from left: Angela Gillespie Winborn and Camille Trammell. Bottom, from left: Alecia Henderson, Sonia Bishop and Neda Spears)

Plays are like children. Some explode with realized potential and become fascinating and irresistible, while others only show glimmers of what might have been.

Unfortunately, A Song For Coretta by Pearl Cleage, now at Ensemble Theatre, fits into the latter category, although the largely talented cast is not to blame.

Cleage has constructed a 75-minute piece with five interesting women and some clever twists and then given these promising characters nowhere to go. No doubt sensing that gap, Cleage then tacks on an ending that is so over-the-top that it literally swamps everything that has come before.

Things don’t start off all that well, either. In order to get her characters talking, Cleage drags out the clunky device of a young wannabe radio reporter named Zora (Alecia Henderson) interviewing people lined up to pay their respects to Coretta Scott King, widow of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. They are huddled outside Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, waiting to be allowed inside.

Thus, each of the four women who show up are put on tape: Helen (Angela Gillespie Winborn), an older woman who met Coretta decades before; Mona Lisa, a street artist up from New Orleans; Keisha, a surly high school sophomore (twice held back) who is saddled with a pretend baby for a class project; and Gwendolyn, a soldier just back from Iraq.

Despite the forced situation, Cleage and director Margaret Ford Taylor manage to create a couple believable characters and some captivating interchanges. This is helped immensely by Neda Spears, who brings a downplayed realism to Mona Lisa and Camille Trammell’s pouting presence as Keisha.

However, just when we’re getting to know these women and beginning to see how their relationship to Coretta’s life and memory might influence their lives, the whole enterprise goes off the rails.

Suddenly, Mona Lisa and the newly arrived Gwendolyn (Sonia Bishop) are captured in pin spots, relating atrocities they were involved in during Hurricane Katrina and in Iraq. These stories are so out of place, and staged with such oppressive obviousness, that one might laugh if the content were not so horrific.

Then, the lights come up and the cast exits singing an optimistic spiritual. That leaves the audience to piece together the strands of these wildly varied lives and intriguing experiences that the playwright never bothered to knit together. Consider it a theatrical DIY project.

A Song For Coretta

Through January 29 at the Ensemble Theatre, 2843 Washington Blvd., Cleveland Hts., ensemble-theatre.org

The Santaland Diaries and The Loush Sisters: Making the Yuletide Gay (We’ll Pass on the Fruitcake), PlayhouseSquare

2011-12-15T10:54:00.003-05:00

(Kevin Joseph Kelly as Crumpet)

The Santaland Diaries is the most accidental of Christmas traditions. The author of the original material, renowned essayist and humorist David Sedaris, never wanted his words to be rejiggered for the stage. Still, it happened, with Joe Mantello doing the adaptation, and the rest is history.

That history is now being revisited once more at PlayhouseSquare in the 14^th Street Theatre. This time around, Santaland is sharing the stage with The Loush Sisters as a second act treat, both directed by Elizabeth Wood and produced by Raymond Bobgan and the Cleveland Public Theatre..

In Santaland, Sedaris writes about his tenure as a paid elf named Crumpet at Macy’s during the holiday season. This is not a happy elf, mind you, but an elf that wallows in all the excesses and absurdities of his job dealing with aggressive parents. vomiting kids, and an array of dysfunctional Santas.

There have been several iterations of Crumpet the Elf in these parts, but nobody has come close to matching the elfin-voiced charm and subversive edge that Curtis Proctor brought to the role more than ten years ago.

Nobody, that is, until Kevin Joseph Kelly, who is the sole performer in this production. Even though Kelly is large both physically and vocally, not exactly typecasting, he works from the neurotic characteristics of the narrator to create this cynical, acid-tongued gnome from hell. And he’s frequently hilarious.

From the initial job interview process to his final “Christmas miracle” moment of insight, Kelly smoothly delivers these gaily-wrapped goods (emphasis on the “gay”). When not pining after his co-elf heartthrob Snowball (plus a couple gentlemen in the audience), Kelly’s Crumpet is on target. And he deftly handles all the choppy moments in a script that sounds more like a real diary than a polished monologue.

After intermission, The Loush Sisters arrive in the persons of Liz Conway and Sheffia Randall Dooley. This fast-paced half-hour of mangled Christmas carols, weirdly appropriate pop songs and snappy dialogue is a nice follow-up to Kelly’s one-man show.

Written by Conway, Wood and musical director Michael Seevers, Jr., this is essentially a throwaway piece of holiday hoo-hah. But Conway and Dooley make you glad they throw it your way.

The two performers adopt a hybrid version of the overlapping conversation style made famous by the two SNL ladies in the NPR cooking show parody “The Delicious Dish.” (Here’s their famous holiday time “Schweddy Balls” skit.) But they amp it up to 10,000 rpm as they strafe the audience with rapid-fire song medleys and a fractured storyline about their mom (the aforementioned Kelly, now in drag).

It all makes no sense whatsoever but it works because Conway is a hot-wired, surefire presence on stage—probably funnier right now that any other woman in the current SNL cast except for Kristen Wiig. And Dooley holds her own, generating chuckles and using her better singing voice to anchor the duets.

All in all, it’s a blast of an evening that should become its own tradition.

The Santaland Diaries and The Loush Sisters: Making the Yuletide Gay (We’ll Pass on the Fruitcake)

Through December 17 at PlayhouseSquare, the 14^th Street Theatre, 2067 E. 14^th St., Cleveland, 216-241-6000

Conni’s Avant Garde Restaurant, Cleveland Public Theatre

2011-12-02T11:34:00.003-05:00

(Mrs. Robinson, about to do things with an electric mixer that would make Betty Crocker faint face-first into her apple cobbler.)

Yes, it has landed again: the weirdest, tastiest and most depraved group dining experience since Caligula stopped serving piping hot virgins to his dinner guests.

Conni’s Avant Garde Restaurant, now at Cleveland Public Theatre, is back for its second year of elegantly calibrated insanity. It’s a show accompanied by a five-course dinner served by nine actors, but that doesn’t come close to describing the overall impact of this experience.

This year there are a couple new personnel additions to the Conni cabal. But clearly, no one among the returning cast has mellowed in the past 12 months. And that's a good thing.

The New York City-based performing company comes in to provide this crazed concoction, presenting a volley of set pieces interspersed with continuous interaction with the audience.

If you like up close and personal theater, this is just the ticket. On opening night, Mrs. Robinson (a male British rocker) swapped pants with a female patron. And that probably isn’t the most intimate exchange between audience and cast that took place. (What happens in Conni’s Restaurant, yadda yadda…)

No actors are identified by their actual names in the program, and every audience member is invited to choose a fake name-tag (ie. “Not-So-Tiny Tim,” etc.) that protects their identity as well. With anonymity firmly in place, everyone can just relax and plug into the subversive energy of this four hour wack-fest.

Songs are performed, sung particularly well by the exotic-looking Mr. X and restaurant general manager Sue James (probably not her real name, but who knows?). She also does a mean "dance of the seven kitchen utensils."

Each course of food is introduced via one form of hilarious mock-pageantry or another, then served family-style at long tables. The grub itself, cooked on the premises, ranges from wonderful (curried butternut squash soup) to filling (thick slabs of turkey with cranberry compote). Also served are foccacia appetizers topped with ricotta, honey and pumpkin seeds; a roasted brussels sprouts salad; side dishes of mashed potatoes and sugared carrots; and a drunken chocolate bundt cake for dessert.

In between the noshing, a pregnancy is transferred from one young woman to another, a pants-less doctor and his volley of nurses provide questionable medical assistance, and a good ol’ boy bartender runs a “Bus Your Table” contest where customers compete to win a champagne-drenched “palate cleansing” interlude. Yeah, don't ask.

Frankly, there are far too many elements in this borderline psychotic extravaganza to enumerate here. Suffice to say you have never experienced anything like it. You will laugh, except when your jaw is hanging agape in amazement. And you will not leave hungry--for food (taking seconds are encouraged), or for wine (three bottles allocated for each ten-person table), or for an ample quota of certifiable strangeness.

And once you do attend, you will pine for the return of CAGR next year like a three-year-old waiting for Santa Claus.

Conni’s Avant Garde Restaurant

Through December 18 at Cleveland Public Theatre, 6415 Detroit Avenue, 216-631-2727

Daddy Long Legs, Cleveland Play House

2011-10-27T08:32:00.003-04:00

There’s a full-tilt, nail-down-the-furniture charm offensive going on at the Cleveland Play House, and woe betide anyone who dares say no. Daddy Long Legs, a recent musical adaptation of a popular century-old play (not to mention a renowned Fred Astaire film), is so darn winning it makes your molars throb.

Sure, the music is repetitive, the characters are often just two-ply and it all goes on about 40 minutes too long. But Paul Gordon (music and lyrics) and John Caird (who wrote the book and directs this two-hander) simply will not take no for an answer.

Based on a 1912 novel by Jean Webster and set at that time, the story is as simple as a silent film script. An orphan girl, Jerusha, is befriended by what she believes is a tall, aged, anonymous benefactor (she glimpsed him once from afar) who puts her through college. He only requests that, in return, she send him letters detailing her life.

But the academic sugar daddy, named Jervis, turns out to be a wealthy, cosmopolitan young man who eventually visits the college and meets up with Jerusha without revealing who he is. After that, she continues to send letters to her benefactor, sharing personal thoughts about this young man she met, without realizing they are the same person.

At this point, you can hear the anguished screams of all the young women who have had their secret diaries and love letters read by others. But this play saves that confrontation for the end.

Meanwhile, the play meanders from the college to Jerusha’s summer farm retreat and then off to the big city. Along the way, there is very little conflict, hardly any eye contact between the two actors on stage, and many treacly references to meadows ‘n’ frogs ‘n’ the moon rising over yonder. It feels sort of like a musical version of The Waltons—without John-boy’s edgy, hell-for-leather rebellious streak.

There are couple dozen sweetly descriptive songs that are mostly taken from Jerusha’s letters, sung by both characters, that sound vaguely similar in pace and tone. While pleasant to the ear and often sporting some witty lyrics, the tunes begin to drone as this almost 2½ hour show (with intermission) progresses.

In the role of Jerusha, Megan McGinnis is a treasure, as she employs her simple good looks and crinkly-cute expressions to fashion a young woman it’s easy to care about. She’s feisty, but still laboring within the tight social confines of the era. And McGinnis has such a bright, clear voice, she brings surprising depth to a number of fairly pedestrian songs.

As Jervis, Robert Adelman Hancock has some amusing moments, venting his frustration when Jerusha won’t dance to his tune. And he blends his crisp tenor voice nicely with McGinnis during their duets. But he is never able to give Jervis any interesting facets that would allow us to see why he is compelled to play this essentially awful trick on the young woman.

And that is why the conclusion of this soft-focus musical, a touring production with an eye on making it to Broadway or its environs, rings so hollow. Honest emotions on both sides are steamrolled by the happy ending everyone knows is coming. So you might as well give up and enjoy it. Resistance is futile.

Daddy Long Legs

Through Nov. 13 at the Cleveland Play House, Allen Theatre, 1407 Euclid Avenue, 216-241-6000

Cabaret, Great Lakes Theater Festival

2011-10-10T13:16:00.002-04:00

First, we need to establish a couple facts. Great Lakes Theater Festival is an enormously talented company of theater professionals that has produced many fine shows, especially in recent years under the artistic direction of Charles Fee. And Victoria Bussert is a splendid director, the equal of anyone in this region.

Okay, now remember that first paragraph as we delve into their current production of Cabaret. Because for some reason known only to the cruel theater gods, those gifted people are staging a production that is so sublimely flawed, it almost beggars description. But describe it we will.

This Kander and Ebb musical, with a book by Joe Masteroff, is a gem that takes place in decadent Berlin just as Hitler is rising to power. Focusing on Sally Bowles, a goodtime gal and Kit Kat Klub star, the show is meant to show the tension of a society being torn apart, along with the lives of those caught in its unforgiving machinery. From the iconic title song to the slyly mercenary “Money,” this should be a sexy romp with a sobering kick of impending doom.

Instead, this production is dark, confusing and mostly unpleasant—but not unpleasant in the way the authors intended. The problems start with Jeff Hermann’s fixed set, featuring a five-piece band installed on a platform above a wall with three doors, sort of like a shrunken version of Let’s Make a Deal, but without Monty Hall out front and a Cadillac Eldorado behind door #3. These simple doors are evidently meant to designate different locations, with a light above each door that glows when the action takes place in that setting. At least, I think that’s the idea.

Strangely, a gaily-illuminated curtain of shiny Mylar strips is partly visible when those doors are open. This comes perilously close to making sense when the setting is the Klub, although why the performers aren’t doing their act in front of that curtain instead of three doors is anyone’s guess. But when the glistening curtain is glimpsed outside the door to Sally’s rundown room, one is only left to imagine a misguided but secretly festive boardinghouse owner who mounted a super-fabulous wall treatment in his scummy hallway.

(Okay, go back and read the first paragraph before continuing. I know I am.)

Musically and otherwise, the show revolves around Sally and the Master of Ceremonies at the nightclub. The MC should personify the sleazy sexuality and distorted morals of Germany, but Eduardo Placer takes very few chances and makes no interesting choices. Sure, he wears makeup and dresses scandalously, but so does your average weekend crossdresser and no one is paying money to see him. Unfortunately the costume is the most interesting element in Placer’s characterization, as he continually purses his lips and flings his arms skyward in an attempt to seem debauched.

The MC works with the Kit Kat Girls who are dressed unaccountably in a riot of monochromatic beige (and later black) panties and bras that look like they were snatched out of their respective grandmothers’ bureaus. If this is sexy Weimar Germany, give me the Golden Girls.

As Sally, the fiery performer Jodi Dominick is woefully miscast. Her singing ability ranges from serviceable to disastrous (especially in the final, sadly butchered rendition of “Cabaret”). Meanwhile, sharp-edged Dominick can’t come close to capturing the impish, fun-loving spirit of Sally that is necessary to make the whole show click. Instead, she seems a little pissed off that she has to pretend to be flighty and whimsical.

(Please revisit the first paragraph, one more time.)

The choreography by Gregory Daniels is a collection of improbable poses interspersed with faux-Fosse steps, executed with intermittent synchronicity.

Remarkably, even the entr’act music is screwed up by (you guessed it) audience participation, in which Placer brings up a man and a woman separately from the audience to dance with him. This cheap gimmick, a fixture of the corny stage productions at every theme park in the world, feels pitiful in this show. And it’s made even worse since Placer, breaking the almost non-existent character he’s created, cracks the same lame jokes with both people.

Director Bussert does not manage to squeeze one believable moment out of the interactions between Sally and fellow boarder, the clueless bisexual American Cliff (played by a bland Neil Brookshire).

The only time real emotion shows is when Laura Perrotta, occasionally overacting as Fraulein Schneider, falls in love and croons sweetly along with old Herr Schultz (a basically non-descript John Woodson).

Ultimately, in a last-minute bid for gravitas, the surprise ending reaches for a level of tragic resonance that the production up to then has not earned. So it feels forced and a tiny bit embarrassing.

To sum up, when Schneider and Schultz are the flawed highlight of Cabaret, it’s time to pack up your garter belts and run for the border.

Cabaret

Through October 30, produced by the Great Lakes Theater Festival at the Hanna Theatre, 2067 E. 14^th Street, 216-241-6000

With Love and Respect: An Evening to Celebrate the Naming of the Donald A. Bianchi Theatre

2011-10-01T14:13:00.002-04:00

On October 2, 2011, Dobama Theatre will name the theatre space after its beloved founder, Donald A. Bianchi.

6:30 p.m. - Wine and hors d’oeuvres reception

7:30 p.m. – Presentation and naming of the theatre space

8:00 p.m. - A special production of VARICOSE VANITIES

Written by Mr. Donald A. Bianchi

Directed by Ms. Joyce Casey

Starring Jeanne Task and Tim Tavcar

9:00 p.m. - A tribute to Dobama Theatre’s Artistic Director

Tickets for the event are $50 ($25 tax-deductible).

Please click here to purchase tickets online, or call (216) 932-3396.

The proceeds from the evening will be directed to Dobama Theatre’s new Endowment Fund. This will mark the beginning of the fund and this contribution will be in Don’s name.

For more information or if you have any questions, please call Dobama Theatre at 216-932-3396.

Richard III, Ohio Shakespeare Festival

2011-08-02T10:30:00.002-04:00

(The multi-tasking Terry Burgler)

It’s always fascinating to see how a director and actor approach the title role in Richard III. This bent and misshapen man is so fully evil and malevolent, he can conjure interpretations that echo Nazi Germany (such as in the Royal National Theatre’s production starring Ian McKellen that then became a movie). Under artistic director Terry Burgler, the Ohio Shakespeare Festival doesn’t fiddle with such contemporary spins and pirouettes, and that hewing to original time and place is to their credit.

But in this production, Terry Burgler is also the person playing Richard. And as an accomplished actor, he should be picketing outside Stan Hywet Hall, protesting the fact that his director never once watched him do a single scene in rehearsal. Perhaps this demonstration would shake the resolve of that immensely talented director, Terry Burgler.

While many productions opt for making Richard a gleeful and even charming psychopath, Burgler swings the other way with Richard underplaying many of his speeches and scenes. It is rather bold choice to portray the banality of evil, if that is his aim. Of course, this choice runs the risk of simply delineating the banality of banality. The second level of banality might have been eliminated had Burgler not been directing himself.

That said, Burgler the actor adopts a fine, dark look for his menacing character, with his shoulder hump firmly in place. And some scenes register with chilling overtones, as when Richard verbally seduces Lady Anne (played by Tess Burgler, Terry’s daughter, the pair thus executing a Freudian/thespian double back flip with aplomb).

But Burgler’s casual and at times off-handed demeanor blunts the edge of other scenes, while much of the violence is also soft-pedaled. As a result, this Richard doesn’t slice so much as shove and buffet—resulting in a kinder, gentler rendition that is interesting but not compelling.

Excellent performances are turned in by several individuals in the large cast. Anne McEvoy brings her riveting stage presence to the role of Margaret, who has been pushed aside following the death of her husband. If you ever want to cuss somebody out but don’t want to do it yourself, definitely give Ms. McEvoy a call.

Derrick Winger seems entirely at ease as Hastings, which makes his later fate ,when he joins the pile of off-stage bodies, even more affecting. Robert Hawkes is deliciously craven as Buckingham, Richard’s doomed flack, conning the populace and the court as his boss machetes his way to power. And Lara Knox simmers and snarls with style as Queen Elizabeth.

By making Richard defiantly non-charismatic, Burgler the director takes a big chance. Unfortunately, Burgler the actor does not have the wise counsel of a director who is observing these dynamics during rehearsals and then suggesting different and possibly more rewarding attacks on this juicy material.

Richard III

Through August 14, produced by the Ohio Shakespeare Festival at Stan Hywet Hall and Gardens, 714 North Portage Path, Akron, 330-673-8761

Dr. Dolittle, Mercury Summer Stock

2011-06-17T10:32:00.003-04:00

(Pierre-Jacques Brault as Dr. Dolittle, with non-puppet versions of his on-stage pals)

Although most pet owners already fancy themselves capable of engaging their domestic creatures in conversation, talking to animals has always been troublesome beyond the basic statements: “Sit,” “Fetch,” and “Oh, God, not my cashmere sweater!”

That’s why the Dr. Dolittle story, originally written in a series of children’s books by Hugh Lofting, has the ability to entertain youngsters and all the rest of us still in touch with our childlike selves. And this production by Mercury Summer Stock has plenty of fun in store for the little ones, although it may be a tougher slog for those who have advanced past puberty.

The musical features book, compositions and lyrics by Leslie Bricusse, the renowned collaborator with Anthony Newley on The Roar of the Greasepaint—the Smell of the Crowd and Stop the World—I Want to Get Off. But aside from the famous “Talk to the Animals” there are precious few toe-tappers. Indeed, some of the melodies seem strained and a bit random.

Still, the fun here resides with the animals and the presentation, in the form of hand puppets and a two-person costume (the Pushmi-pullyu), is charmingly simple. This makes the animals less a technological marvel, as in The Lion King, and more accessible for the kids.

As for the slim plot, Dr. D is brought up on charges of murdering a woman by throwing her off a cliff into the sea. He claims it was a seal and he was just following the seal’s clearly stated wish to rejoin her seal hubby in the waters up north. Of course, the judge is less than accepting of this explanation, and soon most of the animals in town, from plow horses to mice, enlist in Dolittle’s efforts to free himself.

Mercury artistic director Pierre-Jacques Brault plays the title role, which turns out to be a mixed blessing. Brault exudes great charm on stage and sings well enough. But since Brault and Brian Marshall (who plays Matthew Mugg) share staging duties, some directorial details go unattended.

Brault never quite builds the good, animal-whispering doc into a full-blown character. Instead of the befuddled goodness this man should embody, we sense in Brault’s Dolittle an unfocused distraction. This is shown at various times when Brault is smiling at moments when his character should be registering another expression entirely.

As Mugg, Marshall shows off his singing chops but seems to be playing himself more than the rough and tumble, hard-drinking Irish palooka that his character name implies. Dolittle’s love-hate relationship with a local lady goes well, thanks to Jennifer Myor’s crisp, well-sung portrayal of Emma Fairfax.

The puppets, provided by PJ’s Puppets, are mostly adorable in their unaffected construction, and a couple are quite funny (an enthusiastic dog, a pig gifted with super olfactory senses). One exception is Polynesia, the 200-year-old parrot who is doc’s animal linguistics coach. This puppet is virtually expressionless and barely opens its mouth, problems that may stem from the puppet or from the puppeteer.

Dan DiCello and Neely Gevaart nibble freely on the scenery in their stint as circus owners who fall head(s) over heels for the Pushmi-pullyu. And Kelvette Beacham shines in the second act as Straight Arrow, the surprisingly erudite inhabitant of a floating island where an on-the-run Dolittle eventually lands. Her song, “Save the Animals,” is a huge highlight and one only wishes Beacham had a much bigger role.

While some musicals do fine with only piano accompaniment, this production feels quite threadbare musically, even with music director Ryan Neal’s best efforts.

In all, this is a doctor visit the kids are sure to enjoy. As for the adults, watching the kids’ faces light up is a treat in itself.

Dr. Dolittle

Through July 2, produced by Mercury Summer Stock at the Brooks Theatre, Cleveland Play House, 8500 Euclid Avenue, 216-771-5862

Next to Normal, PlayhouseSquare

2011-06-09T11:06:00.003-04:00

(Alice Ripley as Diana.)

Her voice at first has the smooth gloss of a Broadway star. But it isn’t long before another vocal quality becomes apparent. This voice sounds as if it’s been extruded, pushed through the remorseless calendar-die cross-sections of daily life. A voice both blessed and tortured. And the finished product housing that voice, although polished to look at, is brittle and liable to shatter under stress.

This is Diana as played by the magnificent Alice Ripley, who won a Tony for her performance in the original Broadway production of Next to Normal, now at PlayhouseSquare. It is a portrayal that cuts through a bold rock music score to plant an indelible impression of bipolar trauma. With a pounding and exuberant score by Tom Kitt, and book and lyrics by Brian Yorkey, this is a production that dives feet first into a delicate subject area and emerges triumphant, although simultaneously downbeat.

Diana is a suburban mom in every jot and tittle, except for the fact that she has a not-easy-to-diagnose mental disturbance. Showing aspects of manic depression and obsessive-compulsive behavior, Diana is a trial to her loving family: husband Dan and children Natalie and Gabe.

Following a familiar pattern, Diana decides to stop taking her pills, encounters a talk therapist, and then spirals down into more serious issues and more extreme outcomes. And, as we learn the trigger for Diana’s troubles, more layers are added to this intense family drama.

If all that sounds like heavy lifting for the audience, fear not. This muscular production directed by Michael Greif is thoroughly captivating from start to finish.

In addition to Ripley’s tour-de-force performance, she is abetted by actors who sing powerfully and contribute clear and convincing characters. Asa Somers as Dan holds his own as the supportive spouse who is entirely out of his depth. Emma Hunton manages a nice mix of empathy, frustration and scorn as she deals with a mother who is rarely there for her. And Curt Hansen’s Gabe floats through the proceedings, always jabbing Diana with his inescapable presence.

In smaller roles, Preston Sadleir is amusing as Natalie’s improv piano playing boyfriend and Jeremy Kushnier renders both doctors with style.

Indeed, the often-enervated casts of the last two Broadway Series productions (especially West Side Story) should sit in this audience and observe how a touring company should perform: with passion and immediacy.

Adding to the powerful overall effect is the set by Mark Wendland that features an industrial three-tiered structure where the rock musicians and the actors do their thing. Accented by projections of house’s bland siding, and a woman’s face, the many lights on the spare crossbeams gleam and are extinguished like the uncertain synapses in Diana’s brain.

And on top of all that, there are trenchant thoughts that glitter amidst the dark turbulence of Diana’s struggles. Such as, “Most people who think they’re happy just haven’t thought about it long enough.” And, “The price of love is loss, but still we pay.”

If the subject matter gives you qualms, overcome them. There’s a reason why Next to Normal won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama plus a Tony for the original score. This is a complete theatrical treat, stimulating and profound, and it is not to be missed.

Next to Normal

Through June 19 at the Palace Theatre, PlayhouseSquare, 1518 Euclid Avenue, 216-241-6000

West Side Story, PlayhouseSquare

2011-05-04T11:42:00.004-04:00

(Michelle Aravena as Anita and Ali Ewoldt as Maria in their dazzling duet)

Some ideas just never outlive their original power. And when it comes to West Side Story, we can happily report that the juice is still worth the squeeze.

Now at PlayhouseSquare, this is the touring production of the 2009 Broadway revival that was directed by original book-writer Arthur Laurents. The story of the Sharks and the Jets is well known, as is the retelling of Romeo and Juliet from the perspective of two gangs on the mean streets of 1950s New York City. But with music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, this is one piece of theater that will likely live forever.

While much of the staging and dance moves are the same, one new twist is the partly bi-lingual presentation: Some dialog and lyrics are delivered in Spanish by the Puerto Rican Sharks. This works beautifully, since many in the audience will be able to translate these very familiar words in real time.

Even if you can’t, the meaning behind the scenes is never obscured. And there is a resulting credibility that lends a raw energy to this street conflict between two cultures.

The one soft spot in this staging centers around the two leads. The touring company apparently has three women and three men who respectively share the roles of Maria and Tony. On opening night, Ali Ewoldt fashioned a girlish and pert Maria, and applied her muscular soprano to her songs. Indeed, this is a voice that could cut steel ingots like butter.

But her Tony for that evening, Cary Tedder, was virtually trampled by her vocal chops. Looking more like a grown-up Opie than a street-tough kid, Tedder also seemed tentative in his singing, not coloring his held notes and failing to fully act his lyrics. As a result, the chemistry between the two never developed.

Although she’s no Chita Rivera (and who is?), Michelle Aravena provides plenty of laughs and sparks as Anita, and her duet "A Boy Like That/I Have a Love" with Ewoldt in the second act soared. Also, the "almost rape" scene in Doc’s candy store, where Anita is cornered, still chills to the bone. As Riff, Joseph J. Simeone has a good look but his voice sounded tired in places.

Action (Drew Foster) and the Jets have fun with “Gee, Officer Krupke,” and the Shark gals dance up a storm in “America,” even though their words at times were hard to understand over the orchestra.

The biggest visual treat is when the stage transforms to the under-the-highway site of the pivotal rumble, with the highway descending and a chain link fence lowered to cover the entire proscenium. The symbolism of these kids trapped in the cage of their own tangled destinies is vital and memorable.

With a stronger love match between Tony and Maria, this show could be marvelous. As it may be, at times, during the remainder of the run.

West Side Story

Through May 15 at the Palace Theatre, PlayhouseSquare, 1518 Euclid Avenue, 216-241-6000

Underneath the Lintel, Chagrin Valley Little Theatre

2011-05-02T13:32:00.002-04:00

If you have a mystery to solve, who’s the first person you call? A librarian, of course! Well, maybe not. But the librarian in Underneath the Lintel, now at the Chagrin Valley Little Theatre, turns out to be a super sleuth who tracks his prey all the way back to the crucifixion.

This play by Glen Berger is loaded with a dense thicket of clues about the borrower of a library book that is 113 years overdue, a density that could defeat lesser actors. But Robert Hawkes is nearly flawless in this one-man performance, playing the script and his audience like a virtuoso.

Our hero is a Dutch librarian who is addressing a gathering in a rented hall, a man afflicted with all the petty concerns the stereotype of his occupation suggests. He has issues with his co-workers, especially when they mooch some of his lunch. But he saves his ultimate scorn for those who drop off books without paying their dues. So you can imagine his feelings when he finds a book past due by more than a century.

Pursuing the slimmest of clues, including a laundry ticket, he relates how he pursued this scofflaw from China to Germany and from the United States to Australia. Ultimately, he entertains the theory that the person he’s hunting is actually the Wandering Jew of legend, who was doomed to walk the Earth until the second coming of Christ.

Hawkes unfolds this intricate story with immense patience while keeping the audience riveted at every moment through deft pacing changes and thrown-away laugh lines. Whether we believe the librarian's story, or if we decide he's just imagining it all, the impact is the same. He and director Susan Soltis develop a character beset not just with obsessions but with a desire to explore the meaning of life beyond daily rituals and, yes, the Dewey Decimal System.

After watching this production, you may want to discuss the ideas lurking behind the simple expression “I was here.” But whether you do or not, you will know you were in the presence of an actor functioning, gloriously, at the peak of his craft. And that’s worth a good deal more than the price of this ticket.

Underneath the Lintel

Through May 14 at the Chagrin Valley Little Theatre, River Street Playhouse, 56 River Street, Chagrin Falls, 440-247-8955

Circle Mirror Transformation, Dobama Theatre

2011-04-24T11:28:00.001-04:00

For my review, go to: clevelandheights.patch.com

Thanks!

Two Gentlemen of Verona, Great Lakes Theater Festival

2011-04-12T11:14:00.003-04:00

While love and friendship are two very desirable conditions, when they conflict with each other the participants can get seriously bent out of shape. That’s what happens to the four principals in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, now at the Great Lakes Theater Festival.

This early play by Shakespeare is a fairly slight affair, as young Will was still trying out the dramatic techniques he would use later in his career with such skill. Therefore, either the staging or the performances have to fill some gaps to make this play soar. And even though this GLTF production has some pleasant moments, it never really catches fire.

The two gents in question, Valentine and Proteus, fall in love with Silvia, with Proteus leaving his former gal Julia in the lurch. But Julia decides to disguise herself as a page and is assigned by Proteus to woo Silvia on his behalf. Of course, there are more complications intertwined until the happy and strangely abrupt conclusion.

Lacking much of the dense beauty found in other Shakespeare plays, this piece begs for imaginative staging or actors who can bring something extra to their roles.

Initially, it seems that director Charles Fee is on the right track with a clean and modernistic set designed by Russell Metheny. Plus, Fee utilizes two singers and a small combo to introduce scenes with snatches of indie music, such as the haunting tunes of Nick Drake, the moody “bleak” rocker circa 1970.

As it turns out, however, that faint window dressing can’t make up for a staging that feels flat and perfunctory. Fee approaches the material as if it requires deep respect, not as a loose and spirited comic romp. Although Fee has been chided in the past for taking too many liberties, here he errs in the opposite direction.

The situation isn’t helped by individual performances that range from bland to capable. Neil Brookshire is a handsome cipher as Valentine and Paul Hurley neatly skates around many opportunities to turn Proteus into something more than a pain-in-the-butt grind.

As Silvia, Nica Ericson exudes a dark and threatening sexuality but never builds that into anything interesting. Only Lee Stark as Julia, among the four leads, ever generates any sparks, especially in her cross-dressed moments when she interacts with Silvia..

Reliably, David Anthony Smith comes riding to the rescue as Proteus’ servant Launce. His scenes with his faithful mutt Crab are funny and endearing, perhaps even more so in this arid landscape. And Sara M. Bruner, Jodi Dominick and Robert Williams add some fun as the second act outlaws.

Overall, however, these Two Gentlemen are much too mannerly to make this play crackle with anything approaching comedy delight.

The Two Gentlemen of Verona

Through April 23, produced by the Great Lakes Theater Festival at PlayhouseSquare, the Hanna Theatre, 2067 East 14^th Street, 216-241-6000

The Excavation, Theater Ninjas

2011-04-11T13:21:00.002-04:00

It seems that if you were buried under many feet of volcanic ash, it would be a mystifying and horrific event. And that’s one reason why The Excavation, now being produced by Theater Ninjas, is such an absorbing, if almost indescribable, experience.

By exploring the burial and subsequent excavation of Pompeii, this original work of theater is actually an ambulatory encounter. The audience breaks into smaller groups and then reassembles, as various guides and Pompeian “experts” expound on the tragedy that befell that Italian city back when years had just two numbers.

It starts off with three different lectures that take place simultaneously and are repeated twice. In one, the female presenter is analyzing the erotic art of Pompeii while riffing on her personal relationship that just went south. Another lecturer offers nonsensical descriptions of non-artifacts from Pompeii, including a plastic water bottle.

But you don’t have time to see all three, a process of fragmentation that only accelerates until the final gathering around a floor map of the doomed city. This means that everyone encounters this play in a different way, visiting rooms and observing “scenes” that another audience member doesn’t.

Serious musings (about the meaning of life, the sudden permanence of death) mix helter-skelter with low comedy of all sorts (human statues with enlarged genitalia, a raucous puppet show, and a lab manned by two horny scientists).

Some of the broad humor is forced and a tad juvenile, and you may find yourself trapped in one room while you hear people laughing in another, wishing you were over there. But these moments don’t last long and there is always something else coming your way, literally around the next bend.

During the 90-minute piece, you cover quite a bit of territory on the second floor of this factory/loft building, sometimes pausing to sit or stand, depending on the material being presented. I could tell you all the things I witnessed, but then you might not ever see them.

Directed and devised by Ninja honcho Jeremy Paul, The Excavation is something you need to immerse yourself in, even if you won’t be quite sure what it was after it’s over. And in that way, I suppose, we can say it’s kind of like life itself.

The Excavation

Through April 23, produced by Theater Ninjas at the 78^th Street Studios, 1300 W. 78^th St., Cleveland, 216-245-3514

An Evening with Lucille Ball: Thank You for Asking, PlayhouseSquare

2011-04-07T12:33:00.002-04:00

One-person shows built around impressions of famous people (such as Mark Twain, Harry Truman, the list goes on) are always popular entertainments. After all, we like to get a little peek into the real lives of celebrities who have a body of work we respect and cherish—and no, Charlie Sheen, we’re not talking about you.

These elements would seem to be aligned perfectly for a solo riff on Lucille Ball, the much-adored movie and TV comedy queen of comedy from the 1930s to the 80s. Unfortunately, the script for An Evening with Lucille Ball: Thank You for Asking, now at PlayhouseSquare, is a hot mess. As co-written by the performer Suzanne LaRusch and Lucy’s daughter (and the play’s director) Lucie Arnaz, this monologue brings a whole new meaning to the term tepid.

It’s as if Reader’s Digest and the AARP got together to write a show, and then had it buffed to rose-tinted shine by Ned Flanders.

It starts out with a labored introduction that tries to establish that the performer will not be recreating Lucy’s famous bits—the chocolate candy assembly line, the Vitametavegamin schtick, etc. Then, once “Lucy” takes the stage, she actually does do versions of those skits.

Awkwardly arranged as a fake Q&A with the audience (all the questions are pre-recorded by actors, no questions are taken from live patrons), the show lumbers from one anecdote to another, assisted occasionally by still photos and home movies. While certain Lucy devotees may appreciate LaRusch’s physical similarity to the older Lucy, and her ability to replicate a couple of the star’s mannerisms, the gap between the two performers is enormous.

Nowhere is this seen more clearly than when a short clip of the real Lucy doing the Vitametavegamin pitch is shown. Lucille Ball was a comic genius, which is shown as she gets hammered, first sipping a spoonful and then tipping the bottle and draining the inebriating concoction.

For some reason, the script performed by LaRusch focuses on the actual bad taste of the elixir, with “Lucy” making the extraordinary comment that she was glad it tasted awful so she didn’t have to act(!). Even if the real Lucy did say that at some time, it totally misses the point, as does the attempt to teach the audience how to correctly pronounce the V-word. The fun, as the real Lucy knew, was in woozily mispronouncing that jumble of letters.

At another moment, “Lucy” talks about the importance to an actor of learning pantomime, then does a long and fairly boring mime of sewing up a rip in a pair of slacks (the real Lucy could have made this hilarious). At another juncture, LaRusch even stuffs her mouth with chocolate candies, echoing that famous episode, but manages to do it in a perfunctory and remarkably unfunny way since there’s no context.

Topics not touched on are Lucy’s stormy relationship with husband Desi Arnaz (all we hear is that he was “the love of her life”), her brush with the House Un-American Activities Committee in the early 50s, and any bumps or failures in her long career.

It’s understandable that Lucie Arnaz would want to paint her mom and dad in the most glowing colors, but that doesn’t make for a very interesting production. Especially when the sole performer is far less talented than the woman she is portraying. If you love Lucy, look up the real thing on You Tube.

An Evening with Lucille Ball: Thank You for Asking

Through April 17 at the 14^th Street Theatre, PlayhouseSquare, 216-241-6000

Les Miserables, PlayhouseSquare

2011-04-06T11:02:00.002-04:00

(Andrew Varela as Javert)

Once again, the epic musical Les Miserables has landed at PlayhouseSquare, this time in a much-ballyhooed new production directed by Laurence Connor and James Powell. This 25^th Anniversary tour of the Cameron Mackintosh blockbuster should be cause for rejoicing, but not so fast.

First of all, the story doesn’t change. Frenchman Jean Valjean, freed from the slammer for heisting a loaf of bread, decides to become a thief but is snatched from that life by the kindness of a bishop who gives him cover. Changing his name, Valjean becomes a wealthy business owner and mayor of a town.

After saving the prostitute Fantine from the streets, and watching her die in his care, he wrests the woman’s daughter Cosette from the clutches of two scummy innkeepers and raises her as his own. As time passes, Cosette falls in love with Marius, a leader in the June Rebellion, while Inspector Javert hunts down Valjean with an obsessive fervor.

Instead of the well-known rotating turntable, a mainstay of past productions, the new staging features projections of some of original author Victor Hugo’s paintings on a screen at the rear of the stage. This I know from the production’s souvenir program, since I didn’t see it in person.

From my perspective in a seat at the extreme left end of the second row, roughly 20% of the stage was blocked by a hefty light tower, one of two stationed at the corners of the proscenium. As a result, I saw nothing that happened far stage right and could only glimpse a sliver of the screen where the projections were shown.

Sadly, then, I cannot report on some of the more telling moments in Les Miz. I don’t know whether the young boy Gavroche dies on stage or off; I certainly didn’t see it happen. I didn’t see Valjean carry Marius through the sewers of Paris. And while I saw Inspector Javert jump from the bridge in his suicide scene, he then quickly disappeared behind the light tower. (I assume he died, like all the times before.)

Although denied the visual sweep of the show, I can say that many other scenes were fully visible, and all of it was easily heard. And that turns out to be a mixed blessing.

While the cast nails all the money notes—the quiet finishes of some songs and the boisterous full-chorus anthems—many songs are performed with less resonance and precision than one might expect.

As Fantine, Betsy Morgan struggles with the lovely “I Dreamed a Dream,” becoming a bit shrill at times. And Jenny Latimer, playing the grown-up Cosette, goes thin with some of her songs before nailing pitch perfect endings.

But beyond singing glitches, the company displays a bigger problem. I wouldn’t say the cast mailed it in, but it would be fair to say they copied us on a previous e-mail that they sent to someone else, hoping we wouldn’t notice.

When actors perform by relying on memory and technique, instead of creating their characters fresh every night, you get what was on the stage at the Palace opening night: Lots of big gestures and bravado without a real core inside. And that broad approach does no favors to a show that is already florid and melodramatic.

As Jean Valjean, Ron Sharpe (who has replaced the originally cast African-American actor Lawrence Clayton) has a fine set of pipes, but he never seems to engage fully with his character’s plight. Andrew Varela, as Valjean's tormentor Javert, hits all the marks vocally and burns with an intensity that would register more fully in a better ensemble performance. Together, they do not create the antipathy, the anti-chemistry, which must fuel the play’s trajectory.

In her solo "On My Own," Chasten Harmon as love-starved Eponine actually sniffles when she sings "I love him," helpfully cueing us to the fact that she's, um, sad. The comic duo of M. Thenardier (John Rapson) and his wife (Shawna M. Hamic) push their nasty innkeeper roles to the brink, coming across as more cartoonish than vile and threatening. And that, oddly enough, makes them less engaging in the context of the show.

One hopes that the touring assistant director will get the actors back on the ball, so that ensuing performances have the immediacy and depth this magnificent show deserves. And if you end up in one of the far outside seats near the stage, remember to buy the souvenir program. In those pages, it certainly appears to be a very handsome production.

Les Miserables

Through April 17 at the Palace Theatre, PlayhouseSquare, 1519 Euclid Avenue, 216-241-6000

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Chagrin Valley Little Theatre

2011-04-04T10:53:00.003-04:00

(Rob Albrecht as Lawrence and Trey Gilpin as Freddy)

The plus side of being a dyed-in-the-wool pessimist is that life often presents you with happy surprises. And one of those nuggets of joy reside in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels now at CVLT, where two actors in the leads make this con artist musical come to hilarious life.

The performances of Rob Albrecht and Trey Gilpin as the competitive con men Lawrence and Freddy, on the make in the south of France, bring out all the fun of this show. With clever lyrics (and often forgettable music) by David Yazbek and a fairly predictable book by Jeffrey Lane, Scoundrels is a piece yearning for just the right people in the two major roles.

Director Martin Friedman hits the comedy target almost perfectly with his duo. Albrecht plays the dapper grifter Lawrence with smooth condescension and a handy grab bag of Euro accents. Plus, he uses his rich baritone voice to excellent effect in his songs, particularly the second act “Love Sneaks In.”

But the featured role is Freddy, the common, two-bit hustler who first is tutored by Lawrence and then competes with him to see who can fleece the supposed American heiress Christine Colgate. Gilpin slides into this character with enormous physical ease, then proceeds to craft a few laugh-out-loud set pieces, including a stint as Lawrence’s offensive “brother” Ruprecht.

Although relying a bit too often on the gag of pulling or emitting various unpleasantries from different bodily orifices, the rumpled Gilpin can throw away a laugh line with the best of them. And that results in a performance that consistently delights from start to finish.

Playing the mark Christine, Heather Hersh has a gawky and gangly innocence that works well for her character, although she wrestles with her songs—losing three out of four falls in the process.

Sharon Lloyd as the rich Muriel Eubanks and Eric Oswald as the malleable local gendarme Andre have fun with their tryst in the second act, especially in their ditty “Like Zis-Like Zat.” And Libby Merriman kicks up some laughter in her musical tribute to Oklahoma: “Not a tree or a Jew/To block the lovely view.”

While the production feels a bit arthritic in the larger scenes where the ensemble is called upon to perform, this Scoundrels soars on the wings of its two leads. And that makes for an often giddy ride.

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

Through April 16 at Chagrin Valley Little Theatre, 40 River St., Chagrin Falls, 440-247-8955

Present Laughter, CWRU at the Cleveland Play House

2011-03-25T09:33:00.002-04:00

(Dan Hendrock as Garry and Kelli Ruttle as Liz)

If Present Laughter is the last full production to occupy the venerable Brooks Theatre stage at the Cleveland Play House, consider it a blessing. The Brooks’ intimate brick-walled, wood-floored space has been home to countless shows. And this crisp and thoroughly delightful work mounted by the Case Western Reserve University MFA program comes across as a love letter both to the Brooks and to the Play House in general.

The self-deprecatory romp authored by Noel Coward is a heaping serving of luscious, urbane and oh-so-witty dialog. And the young performers from CWRU handle it all with sophistication and dexterity under the finely-tuned direction of Jerrold Scott. Although not perfect (and what, my dears, is?), this is an evening not to be missed by anyone who hungers for something suave without the unpleasant Sheen often evident in our current crass culture.

The play revolves totally around a Coward avatar named Garry Essendrine, a renowned British actor of romantic comedies who has just crossed the 40-year-old threshold. That milestone gives this bountifully theatrical person one more reason to flagrantly lament his cosseted existence and throw fey insults at anything that moves.

And there are plenty of people orbiting around Garry’s self-fueled and, um, flaming sun. His ex-wife Liz (a wonderfully wry Kelli Ruttle) is happy to be living separately but still loves the guy and runs interference for him. And since Garry is planning a six-week tour of Africa, there’s a lot going on.

Some of that activity involves the young actresses who “lose their latchkeys” and wind up at Garry’s door for succor. First, there’s Daphne (Caroline Santa) and later the aggressively amorous Joanna (Eva Gil). Joanna is intimately acquainted with Garry’s professional pals Morris (Yan Tual) and Hugo (Michael Herbert), and they all figure in one of the tangled subplots that send Garry reeling (although it doesn’t take much).

Among Garry’s household staff, Kim Krane as his secretary Monica is a deadpan treat, delivering each of her putdowns with acerbic bite and a nice twist of the knife. And always without ever changing her expression. In a broader bit of buffoonery, Erin Bunting turns the sour Miss Erikson into a chain-smoking apparition who shuffles about in her own cigarette haze.

Although he has few lines, TJ Gainley manages to make Fred the valet a sweet and sympathetic person as he faithfully attends to everyone’s needs. And many laughs are generated by Andrew Gorell who plays an offensive young playwright Roland Maule who won’t take “No!” or “Get out!” as useful directives.

In the key role of Garry, Dan Hendrock is amusing in all the right ways, dropping his character’s acidic bon mots with deft assurance and prowling his environs like a silk-clad jaguar. However, there are moments, particularly in the first act, when he seems trapped into speed-reading some long speeches. These are juicy soliloquies that should be milked rather than rushed.

There’s also a rather sad subtext to Garry’s character that goes largely unexplored: the actor who is so often “on” that he has no way to turn himself off.

That said, this production is delicious—from the lush set designed by Jill Davis to Kristine L. Davies’ elegant costumes. The Brooks is going away, theater lovers, and this show is a very fond and hilarious farewell.

Present Laughter

Through April 2 at the Brooks Theatre, Cleveland Play House, 8500 Euclid Avenue, 216-795-7000

My Name Is Asher Lev, Cleveland Play House

2011-03-10T10:43:00.003-05:00

(Noel Joseph Allain as Asher Lev)

As is true with the production of Congressional laws and sausages, making art—especially challenging and transgressive art—isn’t easy to watch. Feelings can get badly bent when visions of morality, religion and art collide. (Just consider the “piss Christ” brouhaha in 1989.)

The collision of art and religion is the core conflict in My Name Is Asher Lev, now at the Cleveland Play House. Adapted from the eponymous Chaim Potok novel and directed by Laura Kepley, this play has wonderful moments, thanks to three talented actors, when one feels the bone-deep passion of various characters. But the structure of the piece works against a more thorough exploration, leaving the whole entity less than satisfying.

Adaptor Aaron Posner attempts to encapsulate, in 90 minutes, Potok’s themes that also involve artistic honesty, self identity, community acceptance, and religious rigidity. And that’s just the short list. Clearly, no play can cover all that ground in the ways a novel can.

Asher Lev is a young man who, although a self-proclaimed observant Jew, is also a committed visual artist. His desire to capture his world, whether it be the rainy streets of his Brooklyn home or the fire in his father’s eyes, drives him to draw and paint as others are compelled to breathe.

His father is a sophisticated and worldly man who travels often in his work for the local Rebbe, but dad still doesn’t understand the lure of art that grips his son. As for Asher’s mother, she is caught between her two men and tries to placate both.

Posner’s script establishes Asher as the narrator, and while this helps move the play along its back-and-forth timeline, it ends up telling us more than it should. For instance, Asher comes out on stage at the start and pretty much profiles his entire character without allowing the audience the pleasure of discovery. This insistence on over-telling is consistent throughout the show.

Even so, the actors manage to carve out some effective scenes. As Asher, Noel Joseph Allain is focused and a bit monomaniacal in the way great artists are. But the fact that we never see his art, which we are told is superb, leaves something of a vacuum at the center. In a book it’s no big deal, but theater is largely a visual medium.

Tom Alan Robbins plays all the other male roles, crafting a stern but sensible father, a joyful Uncle, and artist Jacob Kahn, a wise mentor to Asher. Kahn spouts profundities about art at regular intervals: “You cannot lie,” “You are only responsible to your art.” These terse teachings lead Asher to the ultimate confrontation with his parents over his masterpiece, the Brooklyn Crucifixions.

Playing all the women, including an art dealer and a nude model, Elizabeth Raetz is more than capable. Unfortunately, she is hampered by the script that mostly gives mom repetitive words to say and not much to do other than a lot of mournful gazing out the window.

Placed in the wonderfully adaptable Baxter Stage space, the spare and clean set design by Antje Ellerman is a model of efficiency as a window, overhead lamps and an artist’s easel appear and disappear smoothly from above and below.

But the entire look of the stage feels too neat and ordered. As Asher says more than once, “The world isn’t pretty,” and that’s how he wants to paint it. Some of that messiness, on stage, would have reflected the tumult in Asher’s mind, as well as the disturbance ignited in his religious community once his art is seen by all.

At the conclusion, Posner finally opts for understatement and it works perfectly. If only he had tried that restraint in the previous 85 minutes.

My Name Is Asher Lev

Through April 3 at the Cleveland Play House, 8500 Euclid Avenue, 216-795-7000

Shrek The Musical, PlayhouseSquare

2011-03-02T12:54:00.002-05:00

(Alan Mingo, Jr. as the Donkey encounters an amorous dragon)

Usually, if you were to say that there is nothing particularly special about the story, the music, or the performances in a musical, it would be reason enough to scratch that play off your list. But that’s not the case with Shrek The Musical, now at PlayhouseSquare.

Indeed, there are reasons aplenty to grab a ticket to this production, but most of them involve the visual feast that awaits. The Palace Theatre stage is filled with jaw-dropping gorgeous sets, plus a proscenium-long love-sick dragon, operated by four hard-working puppeteers. These elements contribute to whiz-bang staging that overwhelms (in all the best ways) even as it delights.

As for the storyline, it hews closely to the animated movie from which it sprung, along with carefully copied characters down to a faux Eddie Murphy as the wisecracking donkey friend of the ogre Shrek. Not really a Beauty and the Beast rip-off, Shrek is more "Beast and the Beast," as the eternally rejected Shrek finally meets his match in the diurnally lovely (but nocturnally “monstrous”) princess Fiona.

Shrek and Fiona’s love bond is forged in an ogre fart-off that will delight every 11-year-old in the audience, as well as the furtive pre-teens who lurk inside most of the adults in attendance.

Piling on a series of references to other shows (The Lion King among them) and clever cultural tweaks, the book and lyrics by David Lindsay-Abaire generate many smiles and a few guffaws. But the music by Jeanine Tesori never reaches the heights and is instead determinedly workmanlike.

As Shrek, Eric Petersen labors mightily inside the green prosthetic head that he wears, and manages to deliver some well-phrased tunes. But Holly Ann Butler (an understudy) never quite encompasses Fiona’s darker side, an aspect that would give many of her scenes a sharper comic angle.

Alan Mingo, Jr. does an acceptable Murphy as the Donkey, but doesn’t cut loose when the opportunities present themselves. In a similar way, David E.M. Vaughn has fun, on his knees, as the vertically diminutive Lord Farquaad, but again few chances are taken.

Indeed, it seems that the visual grandeur of this show serves to minimize the performers, or perhaps they are restrained by Dreamworks’ corporate guidelines. Whatever the case, the main characters never seem any more developed that the phalanx of storybook characters who are driven from their homes, only to inhabit Shrek’s swamp—much to his dismay.

Still, this is the kind of Broadway extravaganza that can only be seen in this area on the a PlayhouseSquare stage. So if you love eye candy, your truckload of chocolates has just arrived.

Shrek The Musical

Through March 13 at the Palace Theatre, PlayhouseSquare, 1516 Euclid Avenue, 216-241-6000

A Steady Rain, Dobama Theatre

2011-02-26T12:00:00.001-05:00

For my review of A Steady Rain, please go to Cleveland Heights Patch:

http://clevelandheights.patch.com/articles/theater-review-a-steady-rain

La Boheme and Rent, Baldwin Wallace College

2011-02-20T12:48:00.006-05:00

(Chris McCarrell and Jon White as Mark and Roger in Rent.)

Big events don’t happen all that frequently on the local theater scene, but one is most definitely in progress in Berea, Ohio. That’s where Baldwin-Wallace is mounting, in repertory, the Tony-award winning rock opera Rent and the classical opera that inspired it, La Boheme. This is the first time this has ever happened, anywhere, since Rent opened off-Broadway in 1996.

Under the direction of Victoria Bussert, director of music theater at B-W, these two productions not only soar individually, they create a wonderful symbiosis when you see them on succeeding days.

Or even on the same day, as I did. Let’s put it this way: there aren’t a lot more engrossing and thrilling ways to spend a Saturday or Sunday—at least with your clothes on.

La Boheme

This work by Giacomo Puccini is one of the most performed operas in the world, and small wonder. In a fairly short span it encompasses the hopefulness and unfettered joy of youth along with unspeakable tragedy.

Marcello the painter and Rodolfo the poet are shivering in their loft, pursuing their respective arts and, more importantly, trying to stay warm. After Marcello leaves with a couple of their buddies, Schaunard and Colline, Rodolfo meets up with sickly neighbor Mimi (she has TB, and a conveniently non-functioning candle), sparking the love story and the ultimate tragic ending.

Puccini’s glorious music is delivered beautifully by a 38-piece orchestra under the baton of guest conductor Constantine Kitsopoulos (who also conducted a Broadway version of La Boheme).

In the two leading male roles, B-W conservatory of music graduates James Dickason and Jared Leal give Rodolfo and Marcello powerful yet nicely-nuanced vocal presences. And they have plenty of fun in the lighter scenes, dancing and pratfalling with their buddies. This provides a telling contrast when events turn dark.

Four of the key roles—Mimi, Schaunard, Colline as well as the flirty and risqué Musetta—are double cast with student performers taking turns. In this day’s staging, Jessica Waddle created a fragile and evocative Mimi while Lindsay Espinosa brought out the feisty spirit (and eventual heart of gold) of Musetta.

Rent

There are many similarities between this show and La Boheme as it swings an emotional arc from a celebration of youthful exuberance to the ravages of a disease (in this case, it’s AIDS, not TB).

Set in the lower east side slums of New York City in the late 1980s, instead of Paris in the 1800s, the music and lyrics by Jonathan Larson kick the La Boheme story into a contemporary context with the pair of male artists, Mark and Roger, now being a guitarist-songwriter and a video documentarian.

The love stories are a bit more complex here, as Mark’s ex-girlfriend, the performance artist Maureen, is now in a relationship with her on-the-fly producer Joanne. Meanwhile, just like in La Boheme, Roger meets up with a candle-challenged Mimi. In a third romantic subplot, Roger and Mark’s pal Tom Collins meets up with the fierce, crossdressing Angel.

This show is also double cast in key roles which included, at this matinee showing, Chris McCarrell and Jon White as Mark and Roger. As Mimi, Jillian Kates Bumpas sizzled as the pole dancer and junkie who falls for HIV-positive Roger. Kyra Kennedy and Andrea Leach also ignited love-hate sparks as Joanne and Maureen.

In two of the permanent roles, Antwuan Holley is a magnetic (if sometimes less than melodic) Angel, while Jason Samuel as Tom Collins nails his tender and hopeful song “Santa Fe.”

Shared Thoughts

Since the two plays are directed by one person, Ms. Bussert, there are similar strengths that make these productions stand out.

One is specificity. In addition to the rotating leads, each play has a large supporting cast, and each person on stage is remarkably adept at finding clear, exact ways to be involved in each scene. For instance, in a crowd scene in Rent, a young woman junkie far off to the side of the stage is inspecting the festering red wound on her arm, the site of her injections. Even though she is a small cog, she clearly has a back story that is quickly implied.

This kind of telling detail happens across the stage in both plays, giving the entire production a credibility and resonance that doesn’t happen when crowds on stage just gather together and mimic each other.

Another clear strength is commitment. Not a commitment to a character, which is fairly easy to achieve, but a commitment to each moment. By not looking ahead and allowing each ensuing event to happen fresh, the cast members enable these plays to grab the audience by the lapels and bring them into that time and place.

Other invaluable assets at work in Berea are a magnificent metal superstructure set and subtly flexible lighting by Jeff Herrmann, entrancing period costumes by Charlotte M. Yetman, and muscular and inventive choreography (especially in Rent) by Gregory Daniels. All the above are professors at B-W, which makes one want to be a college freshman in theater arts all over again.

La Boheme and Rent

Through February 27 at Baldwin-Wallace College, Kleist Center, 95 E. Bagley Road, Berea, 440-826-2240

Jerry Springer: The Opera, Beck Center

2011-02-19T11:49:00.003-05:00

(Gilgamesh Taggett as Satan, lording it over Matthew Wright as Jerry Springer)

Most of us have known people who use variations of the word “fuck” not just as a verb or a noun, but also as an adjective, adverb, preposition and conjunction. However, for those who swim in a slightly more elevated gene pool, you can get a crash course in fuckology from Jerry Springer: The Opera, now at the Beck Center.

But obscenities are just the tip of sleazy iceberg that lurks just below. Replicating the odious TV talk-show-cum-wrestling-match run by the former mayor of Cincinnati, there is a predictable parade of disturbed cultural outliers—from chicks with dicks to the KKK and from pole dancers to a hefty dude in a diaper.

This extravaganza of deviance, all sung-through as an opera with arias and such, is raucously hilarious early on. But it ultimately tries to wrench out some life truths through a pointed hazing of religious hypocrisies, and that’s a difficult pearl to rescue from the steaming pile of excreta that’s come before. While you may not buy the forced moralizing, you will experience an exhilarating ride through the underbelly of our society, accompanied by a few excellent performances and voices.

This wildly ambitious endeavor features a fulsome operatic score by Richard Thomas, with book and lyrics by Thomas and Stewart Lee. Thomas, by the way, is the librettist for another culture-vulture opera, Anna Nicole, that is now playing the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden.

If you’ve ever seen The Jerry Springer Show, you know that the audience is a major part of the turmoil. And so it is here as an on-stage scrum of trailer park bottom-feeders yell out insults, taunts and random iterations of “fuck you” to anyone who appears on stage. And as for hand gestures, there are more flipped birds on stage than at a winner-take-all chicken burn-off.

In the second act, the action turns more religious and symbolic as Jerry, after being attacked earlier, is forced by Satan to do a hellfire version of his show so Satan and "little-bit-gay" Jesus can Springer-ize their dicey relationship. (Note: This is the part of the production that inspired the pissed-off Christian demonstrators who were picketing the theater before the curtain.)

Happily, there are trained singers in the cast who turn Thomas’s music into some lovely moments. That is, if you can believe it’s lovely when diaper man Montel (Darryl Lewis) sings lilting lyrics such as: “Some like to eat their lunch off a whore’s beaver/I just like to shit my pants.”

In two substantial roles of Peaches (a cheated-upon wife) and Baby Jane (a female counterpart to Montel), Diana Farrell employs her well-trained pipes to beautiful effect. Also excellent vocally are Leslie Andrews as Zanda and Mary (yes, that Mary), and Shelley Thorpe as Andrea and Archangel Michael.

Other members of this large 23-person cast have some bright moments, while the rest basically hang on for dear life. Only Joanna May Hunkins as pole-dancer Shawntel and Eve (yes, that Eve) finds herself in vocal areas she should probably avoid.

As the ringmaster Jerry Springer, Matthew Wright brings a sense of slightly baffled bewilderment to the role. And that feels spot-on, since the real Jerry never knows what any show’s topic or guests are until he shows up on stage. Wright is balanced perfectly by Gilgamesh Taggett as both Jerry’s lickspittle warm-up man and later as a devilishly intense, red-suited Satan.

Director Scott Spence and choreographer Martin Cespedes forge a tight ensemble production that ripples with energy. That spark keeps things burning when the on-going tsunami of swear words and strange behavior threatens to extinguish the bonfire ignited in the first act.

Jerry Springer: The Opera

Through March 27 at the Beck Center, 17801 Detroit Avenue, Lakewood, 216-521-2540

The Trip to Bountiful, Cleveland Play House

2011-02-11T10:33:00.003-05:00

(Lizan Mitchell as Carrie Watts)

Home is where the heart is. Unless it also happens to be down the road a piece and it looks like you can’t get back there from here. We all have attachments to the place we grew up. And whether those memories are pleasant or not, they often color our daily lives.

In The Trip to Bountiful, now at the Cleveland Play House, playwright Horton Foote uses everyday language and mundane events to explore the mystical pull the idea of “home” can exert on a person. And while this production isn’t stellar in all ways, it connects frequently enough to make one reflect on these very personal issues.

Set in the 1940s, Carrie Watts is an elderly lady who wants more than anything to return to Bountiful, the bug-sized Texas town where she was reared. However, she’s stuck in Houston in a small apartment with her protective son Ludie and his brittle and imperious wife Jessie Mae.

We learn that Ludie and Jessie Mae have to keep retrieving Carrie from train and bus stations, to keep her from journeying back home. This aspect of the play has heightened tension in this staging, since the largely African-American cast brings in potential conflicts (a black woman traveling alone in the south) that aren’t present in the original film version.

However, Carrie manages to live out her dream, and that journey and her ultimate realization are what make this play so resonant.

In the lead role of Carrie (for which Gerladine Page won an Oscar in 1985), Lizan Mitchell is a compelling and occasionally amusing presence. Whether sitting stolidly on her rocker in Ludie’s home or quick-stepping through the hallway, Mitchell creates a Carrie we care about.

As the trip unfolds, however, there is less of a cohesive build in Carrie’s character. And some of the extended dialog scenes (particularly a bus ride with new friend Thelma, played by Jessica Frances Dukes) tend to cruise blandly rather than drive towards the ultimate destination.

As Ludie, Howard W. Overshown exudes tenderness towards his mother and a cringing sort of deference to his strong wife. Chinai Hardy has some effective moments as Jessie Mae, but by rushing a number of beats early on, she misses the opportunity to truly flesh out this conflicted woman.

Director Timothy Douglas fits Foote’s lovely and gentle script easily into an African-American context. The result is a production that, while not entirely gripping throughout, finishes strong and serves up a substantial helping of Horton Foote's unique theatrical magic.

The Trip to Bountiful

Through February 27 at the Cleveland Play House, 8500 Euclid Avenue, 216-795-7000

Assassins, Lakeland Civic Theatre

2011-02-07T09:37:00.002-05:00

In the history of slogans, the U.S. Army’s misbegotten “Army of One” tagline never really caught on, at least with the military. But it was quickly co-opted by domestic terrorists after Timothy McVeigh set off his truck bomb in Oklahoma City. Echoing that thought, presidential assassins seek to be an “Electoral Majority of One” when they take down our country’s leaders.

In the mordant musical Assassins, now at the Lakeland Civic Theater, Stephen Sondheim (music and lyrics) and John Weidman (book) attempt to dissect the mentality and cultural significance of nine very different historical lunatics. Even though the material itself is flawed in multiple ways, this production directed by Martin Friedman makes it all work remarkably well, with several spot-on performances.

Friedman and scenic designer Trad A Burns decide to eschew the original carnival shooting gallery setting, opting instead for a wide concrete stairway that evokes the U.S. Capitol building. This monolith of gray seem initially oppressive and limiting, but as it turns out it allows Friedman to move his players vertically as well as horizontally, giving the production a unique visual style.

The play itself is a jumble of scenes, some spoken and some sung, that jump back and forth in time as we encounter famous killers (John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald) and wannabes (John Hinckley, Sara Jane Moore, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, Guiseppe Zangara, and Samuel Byck). Less well known assassins include Charles Guiteau (he killed James A. Garfield) and Leon Czolgosz (he offed William McKinley).

However, without any serviceable dramatic through line, the script continually has to re-start itself with each scene, and that becomes tedious. But thanks to some deft acting work, the whole 90-minute one-act hangs together surprisingly well.

After an ironically up-tempo opening song “Everybody Has a Right (to Be Happy),” the lineup starts appropriately enough with assassin #1, John Wilkes Booth. Scott Esposito brings an appropriate veneer of arrogance to his character, and he sings well in “The Ballad of Booth.”

After that, the leapfrogging begins and it’s hard to find any rhyme or reason why the scenes are arranged as they are. Still, Neely Gevaart and Amiee Collier (would-be Gerald Ford assassins)combine to fashion an amusing pas de deux in their scene, with Collier finding just the right mix of middle class blandness and bone-deep psychosis. As Guiteau, Kevin Joseph Kelly is nicely controlled as he manages to trigger laughs without losing his character’s troubled essence.

Kevin Becker is properly spooky as the loner Hinckley while Trey Gilpin as Zangara and Brian Altman as Czolgosz have a couple incisive moments. But the most affecting performance is turned in by Brint Learned as Byck (this wacko dreamed of flying a 747 into Nixon’s White House). Dressed in a homeless man’s Santa suit, Learned crafts a clearly deranged loser who is still close enough to reality to send a chill up anyone’s spine.

JFK’s assassination concludes the play, as Oswald (a fairly non-descript Curt Arnold) is talked into shooting the Prez by the entire rogues’ gallery. This is the one scene where Friedman doesn’t use the stairs to the script’s advantage, as Oswald moves all over the staircase instead of inexorably towards his deadly perch. Thus, the tension that should build towards this final act of insanity is dissipated.

The authors try to tie this all together with a balladeer, a thankless role handled by Aaron Elersich with as much élan as he can summon. Also an afterthought, in this staging, is the Proprietor (James J. Jarrell). Since there is no shooting gallery to be the proprietor of, he is relegated to peddling his guns out of a suitcase.

As uneven as the script is, Friedman and his actors create a substantial evening of theater. One that rings with particular poignance given the recent tragedy in Tucson, Arizona.

Assassins

Through February 20, produced by the Lakeland Community College Arts and Humanities Division, at the Lakeland Civic Theatre, 7700 Clocktower Drive, Kirtland, 440-525-7526

South Pacific, PlayhouseSquare

2011-02-03T11:23:00.003-05:00

There are some singing voices you hear and others you listen to intently. But it’s rare in a Broadway musical to encounter a voice you can almost literally bathe in, a voice so deep and warm that you feel you have to check your fingertips for wrinkling after emerging from its embrace.

Such is the voice of David Pittsinger, who plays Emile de Becque in PlayhouseSquare’s sensational revival of South Pacific. From the first syllable of “Some Enchanted Evening,” Pittsinger weaves emotional clarity throughout Rogers and Hammerstein’s classic love song. And he nearly tops himself in “This Nearly Was Mine” later in the second act.

In between, the show directed by Bartlett Sher manages to bring a new sense of energy and discovery to this reliable old war horse. Set in the South Seas on a Naval base, the book by Oscar Hammerstein II and Joshua Logan (based on a James A. Michener novel) deals in two ways with the issue of racial prejudice. The thrust of that story, although still relevant in these times, has lost some of its controversial punch.

But you will rarely hear this iconic score performed any better than this. Backed by a 25-piece orchestra, all the songs feel rich and luscious to the ear. And in the role of Nellie Forbush, Emile’s heartthrob, Carmen Cusack is refreshingly realistic.

Eschewing the paranormal perkiness that Mary Martin exhibited in the original, Cusack feels more like a genuine product of Little Rock, Arkansas—in both good and bad ways--which is as it should be. Cusack holds her own with Pittsinger in their duets and has plenty of fun with her featured songs “A Cockeyed Optimist” and “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair.”

In supporting roles, Anderson Davis mixes macho and arrogance nicely as Lt. Cable, the Philadelphia mainliner who falls for a native girl, Liat ((Sumie Maeda), the daughter of the redoubtable Bloody Mary. Their doomed romance echoes the difficulties Nellie has with the two little children Emile had with his former wife, a Polynesian woman.

While music is the undeniable star of this touring show, the comic moments don’t work quite as well. As the resident conniver Luther Billis, Timothy Gulan works hard but never seems to catch the vibe of a military huckster on the prowl (Sgt. Bilko he ain’t). And Jodi Kimura’s Bloody Mary feels more of a cipher than a tropical earth mother with a deep vein of corruption. And the staging of “There Is Nothin’ Like A Dame” comes off more like calisthenics than a sweaty ode to sexual deprivation.

But those are small quibbles given this production’s lush, postcard sets by Michael Yeargan, and the songs that will melt even the coldest, deep-frozen Cleveland heart.

South Pacific

Through February 13 at the Palace Theatre, Playhouse Square, 1516 Euclid Avenue, 216-241-6000

Scenery, Cleveland Shakespeare Festival

2011-01-22T11:58:00.002-05:00

(Anne McEvoy and Robert Hawkes)

There’s a certain attraction to being let in on what happens behind the scenes, whether the subject is Hollywood (The Player), real estate sales (Glengarry, Glen Ross), or professional theater. The cloistered world of the latter is addressed in Scenery, a production intended to raise funds for the Cleveland Shakespeare Festival, which is now being performed at the Cleveland Play House.

If you enjoy turning yourself over to a couple excellent actors who know a little something about comic timing, you should bundle up, start your poor frozen vehicle, and treat yourself to an entirely likeable couple of hours.

The play by Ed Dixon, a veteran actor on Broadway and elsewhere (he played Matthew Harrison Brady in the fine Play House production of Inherit the Wind in 2009), drops us into the dressing room of the Crains, Richard and Marion, who are experienced thespians in the third act of their careers. They are opening something called “The Anniversary Wake” at the Belasco Theatre in New York City, a play they consider pure tripe but which will allow them to pay some bills.

Dixon uses his background to explore the inner workings of actors before, during intermission and after their performance. In addition to revealing some of the superstitions that abound in theater dressing rooms (no mention of Macbeth without a cleansing spin-spit-“fuck!” ritual), we learn that the Crains have a fairly dicey personal relationship.

They each share a fondness for male sexual companionship and, while Richard and Marion haven’t had sex with each other for eight years, they still clearly love each other. This comes through even as they argue and bicker with each other, occasionally joining forces to dump on the lowest of the low (critics and audience members who open candy wrappers during a performance).

As Marion and Richard, Anne McEvoy and Robert Hawkes conjure a believable, semi-platonic chemistry while delivering Dixon’s punch lines with off-handed dexterity. McEvoy is both aggravating and sympathetic as she battles with her self-image as an aging actor. Playing gay Richard with remarkable restraint, Hawkes avoids obvious limp-wristed characterizations but, at the same time, sacrifices some fey fun he might have had with this juicy role.

Director Tyson Douglas Rand keeps the two-acts moving briskly, even through a forced conclusion that threatens to throw it all off the tracks. But these two proven performers stick the landing, and it is hoped many people brave the elements to enjoy this charming inside-theater treat.

Scenery

Through January 30, produced by the Cleveland Shakespeare Festival, at the Brooks Theatre, Cleveland Play House, 8500 Euclid Avenue, www.cleveshakes.org.

Altar Boyz, Beck Center at PlayhouseSquare

2011-01-16T09:30:00.002-05:00

(The Boyz. Dan Grgic in foreground with, l. to r.:Connor O'Brien, Josh Rhett Noble, Matthew Ryan Thompson, and Ryan Jagru)

There aren’t many cottage industries in professional theater, but it seems that Josh Rhett Noble has a pretty good thing going with Altar Boyz, now playing the Hanna Theatre at PlayhouseSquare. After playing lead singer Matthew at Beck Center a couple years ago, and at TrueNorth Theatre last autumn, here he goes again.

It’s all about five guys in a Christian rock band who talk their way through a concert as they try to save all the souls in attendance. This process is tallied by the Sony Soul Sensor, a pile of electronics that can detect when a soul has been cleansed of its various flaws and defects. (Perhaps they can ship it over to Fox News once the show is over.)

This production on the Great Lakes Theater Festival stage is essentially a redo of the former Beck production, with four of the five cast members and most of the production people reprising their work. And that’s not such a bad thing, since this energetic romp directed by Scott Spence is a feel-good 90 minutes. It also works because it praises the Lord without being nasty or divisive; it’s welcoming for just about anyone.

The band is a motley crew, with the pretty straight (in all ways) Matthew joined by fey Mark (an adorable Matthew Ryan Thompson), streetwise punk Luke (Dan Grgic), the Latino Juan (Ryan Jagru), and their Jewish lyricist Abraham (Connor O’Brien). The Boyz attack the songs by Gary Adler and Michael Patrick Walker with unflagging gusto, and have plenty of fun with the sub-storylines in Kevin Del Aguila’s book.

Unfortunately on opening night, there were problems with sound balance so that quite a few of the clever lyrics were swamped by Larry Goodpaster’s band. And the Soul Sensor suffered from digital constipation, at times throwing off the soul countdown.

One must assume those glitches will be fixed, allowing this reborn fab five to sing, rock and jam their way into a very satisfying run.

Altar Boyz

Through January 30 at the Hanna Theatre, PlayhouseSquare, 2067 E. 14^th St., 216-241-6000

Backwards in High Heels: The Ginger Musical, Cleveland Play House

2011-01-13T10:39:00.002-05:00

(Matthew LaBanca as Fred and Anna Aimee White as Ginger)

When staging a show of any kind, it’s a good idea to know what your “money shot” is. That’s the moment that everyone has come to see, the scene for which they have the highest expectations. And woe to you if you don’t deliver it.

When the title of your evening is Backwards in High Heels: The Ginger Musical, you have to know that the audience is drooling for a live recreation of the magic Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire displayed on the ballroom floor. Instead, what this production at the Cleveland Play House provides is a tiresome, cliché-ridden trudge through Ginger’s career, starting at birth (her mother felt her daughter’s toes dancing in the womb!) to Roger’s Oscar for her dramatic role in Kitty Foyle.

Christopher McGovern, who is the author of everything on stage, including four original songs, would have had a middling career in Hollywood about 80 years ago, grinding out minor musicals loaded with stock characters. His dialog is flat, obvious and entirely predictable. Yes, someone actually says “Hollywood’s a mean place and it’s a hard world.” Just in case you hadn’t ever heard that before.

McGovern weaves various old standards into this banal storyline. For instance, Ginger’s multiple marriages are dispensed with in a cutesy version of Irving Berlin’s “Change Partners (and Dance).” Never mind that there might have been some emotional baggage attached to those matrimonial arrivals and departures.

To be frank, Ginger Rogers was a tough, sexy broad who esaayed a brilliant career, but she comes off in this show as a dancing doll with domineering mother issues. Issues that are resolved, as is everything else, with laughable ease.

Played on an essentially bare stage with some flats rolled on for specific scenes, it seems as if the director Scott Schwartz and scenic designer Walt Spangler are setting us up for a glorious surprise. Surely, when Fred and Ginger finally are allowed to dance together, the stage will be transformed into a ballroom dreamscape.

But no, the money shot in this show just turns out to be loose change, as Fred and Ginger dance in their familiar duds, but minus any staging that would transform the moment into something truly memorable. Perhaps this would have been the best time to strike up the tune “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off.”

As Ginger, Anna Aimee White dances well and sings serviceably, but McGovern’s determinedly hollow libretto never allows her to turn Ginger into a fully dimensional woman. Matthew LaBanca has a bit of the Fred look, but comes nowhere near the genius’s fluid moves and quirky singing voice. Heather Lee, as Ginger’s mother Lela, plays a down-market stage mom who often states facts (“Ginger was willful and headstrong”) that would be better off inferred.

Playing multiple roles, Christianne Tisdale, Benjie Randall and James Patterson are humorous at times, but are only cringe-inducing when they attempt to impersonate Hollywood stars attending one of Ginger’s parties. Where is Rich Little when you need him?

This production, done in partnership with three other theater companies, is making the rounds across the country. At least they’re sharing the pain.

Backwards in High Heels: The Ginger Musical

Through January 30 at the Cleveland Play House, 8500 Euclid Avenue, 216-795-7000

Black Nativity, Karamu

2010-12-16T09:49:00.003-05:00

For my review of Black Nativity at Karamu, follow the link below to The Plain Dealer.

http://www.cleveland.com/arts/index.ssf/2010/12/black_nativity_gets_a_makover.html

Cirque Dreams Holidaze, PlayhouseSquare

2010-12-15T12:20:00.003-05:00

There’s a good chance that Cirque Dreams Holidaze, now at PlayhouseSquare, will delight most younger kids, since they don’t get a chance to see circus acts every day of the year. And the costumes are certainly dazzling. But if you’re older and have a few circuses under your belt, most of this show will feel achingly familiar and sometimes even a tad boring.

To be clear, this Cirque isn’t part of the Cirque de Soleil franchise that has earned much praise over the years. This is a touring show produced by Cirque Productions, created and directed by Neil Goldberg, and it doesn’t have quite the pizzazz of the other, more famous troupe.

Most of the acts, which include a lot of handstands and jumping and prancing, are performed with skill. They just don’t dazzle. Indeed, some of the routines recall some old bits on The Ed Sullivan Show (yes, there’s a spinning-plates-on-poles routine; yes, there’s a guy building a tower of chairs, and yes, there’s a roller skating couple doing their thing on a small round platform). That’s some pretty ancient material to be dredging up.

Other acts just never go anywhere. The tightrope walker has only one trick: bouncing from his butt to his feet (over and over again) and doing maybe one or two flips. Some other folks jump a big multi-colored rope. But, hey, they’re just jumping rope.

This is supposedly tied together by three performers who do all the solo singing. Unfortunately, one of them (Jared Troilo) has about a two-note range while the other two (Kelly Pekar and Emily Matheson) have at least a couple okay moments. As for the music, the few familiar Christmas tunes are droned repetitively while the lesser known ditties are a bit strange melodically and only occasionally interesting lyrically.

As is true with most circuses, the aerial acts are the stars and so they are here, with the aerialists creating some lovely movement as they spin on straps, a rope and flowing fabric. And a clever act featuring two matched contortionists (Bing Long and Jun Long) has some spark.

It all happens on a static set filled with large inflatable toys that never really changes. So if you know some little ones who haven’t seen many circuses, this is can be a treat. For others, this show is pretty much Cirquelling the drain.

Cirque Dreams Holidaze

Through January 19 at the Palace Theatre,

PlayhouseSquare, 1615 Euclid Avenue, 218-795-7000

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Beck Center

2010-12-07T12:10:00.003-05:00

(Connor O'Brien as Joseph)

First, a small confession: I have Dreamcoat fatigue. This is a debilitating condition that builds slowly over time, with repeated exposures to this Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice musical. And, I assure you, the exposures are repeated—ad infinitum—by practically anyone with a stray Klieg light and some unused pancake makeup.

So I approached this latest iteration by at the Beck Center with all the enthusiasm and glee of a snail approaching an escargot factory. But, surprise, surprise! This production is infused with energy and spirit. And thanks go a couple great voices in the leads, this Dreamcoat is a kick, for kids and adults, from start to finish.

As directed by Scott Spence, this sung-through show pulses with youthful passion, as the biblical story of Joseph and his coat of many colors is laid out. It is all aided immeasurably by Trad A Burns’ spare set and richly complicated light show. Indeed, the stage is awash in so many colors, Burns’ Amazing Technicolor Lightshow makes you feel as if you’re face-planting into a huge bowl of neon gumballs (but in a good way).

The show is anchored in dazzling fashion by the supple voice of Tricia Tanguy, who plays the narrator. Her efforts are matched by Connor O’Brien as Joseph, who gives each of his songs a distinctive spin, especially “Close Every Door.” Josh Rhett Noble, Beck’s go-to guy for arrogant, testosterone-riddled dudes, has fun with Pharaoh/Elvis, and Zac Hudak as one of Joe’s brothers, Levi, adds some most-appreciated smiles in “One More Angel in Heaven.”

Spence keeps the large cast, which apparently numbers in the thousands, on track and involved. No one in the cast is mailing it in as they execute Martin Cespedes eye-catching choreography, and that generates its own particular zing.

In short, this Dreamcoat will fit you just fine. No alterations required.

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat

Through January 2 at the Beck Center, 17801 Detroit Avenue,

216-521-2540

Aporkalypse, convergence-continuum

2010-12-07T10:29:00.002-05:00

(From left: Geoffrey Hoffman as Karol, Michael Regnier as Pappaw, Scott Gorbach as JP, Marcia Mandell as Mammaw, and Tom Kondilas as one of the Pork Corp. executives)

On the competitive cooking show Top Chef, one of the more frequent criticisms of the dishes is that the cooks in question did not edit their recipes sufficiently. This usually results in a concoction that has way too many colliding flavors and textures.

Such is the case with the vaguely food-themed Aporkalypse!, a world premiere now at convergence-continuum. In it, local playwright Christopher Johnston starts with an appealing if not exactly mouth-watering premise: the awful offenses to both animals, people and the environment caused by industrial pig farming operations. But then he loads so many other ingredients onto the plate that the whole serving collapses into a muddled, tasteless mess.

Following the “let’s shoot fish in the barrel” approach to comedy, we are plopped down in the squalid southern farm house of a backwoods clan whose ratty acerage is lusted after by the local Pork Corp. But aside from the inhabitants being easy-to-mock rural yokels (the elderly parents are helpfully named Pappaw and Mammaw), there are other issues afoot. One grown son, Karol, is an ex-soldier suffering from PTSD, while his brother JP, a chaplain in the Marines, has just come home with mental problems of his own.

These are serious issues. But the playwright just uses them for sport, so that the two young men can cavort crazily, waving guns and touching off explosives at random. Okay, that would be fair enough, as long as the script turns this dark comedy into something other than theatrical exercises.

But Johnston just keeps layering on the absurdities. A couple accordion-playing (haw, haw) neighbors show up, only so they can get blowed up. And there’s a long and nonsensical scene between Karol and his suspiciously touchy-feely social worker (who later doubles as Astarte (the goddess of sexuality and war, get it?) in one of Karol’s PTSD-fueled fantasies.

Amidst all the scuzziness, as addled old Pappaw takes his dumps in the living room wastebasket, any thought of satire or relevant commentary on the supposed theme goes out the set’s plastic-sheeted window. Plus, Johnston’s incessant usage of “fuck” and “shit” displays more of a leering, adolescent fixation rather than the symphonic application of vulgarities by, say, David Mamet.

Virtually none of the blame goes to the actors, since they all do what they can with this tattered material. But director/set designer Clyde Simon appears as tone deaf as the playwright. This bottom-rung, stench-ridden hovel incongruously features a security system with multiple cameras scanning the barren property, visible on two monitors stacked by the door, along with a weirdly pristine settee placed in the middle of the room. Simon also enables some of his actors’ bad habits (Geoffrey Hoffman as Karol once again indulges his passion for spastic jumping, running into things and falling down).

One wishes Johnston would have focused more on the Pork Corp., as embodied by three identical executives, played by Tom Kondilas, who visit the farm with purchase papers in hand. Therein lies a play, and a rich vein of dark humor, if only all the other ingredients could stay on the shelf.

Aporkalypse!

Through December 19 at convergence-continuum,

2438 Scranton Road, 216-687-0074

Conni’s Avant Garde Restaurant: Feast of Miracles, Cleveland Public Theatre

2010-12-04T12:52:00.003-05:00

(Another subtle moment at the Restaurant)

Okay. let’s try explaining Conni's Avant Garde Restaurant: Feast of Miracles, now at Cleveland Public Theatre, this way: It’s just like having dinner at mom’s, if your mom was a really good cook but intensely weird, and had a bunch of strung-out friends dressed (and undressed) in all manner of thrift store garb who serve you a five-course meal while dancing, playing instruments, singing, and acting out bizarre little micro-dramas along with a couple dazzling spectacles.

No, that doesn’t work. Let’s try this: There’s a male bee with an English accent who’s called Mrs. Robinson, a bear that dances, a young woman named Goodi Two-Shoes who gets pregnant by a god, a doctor with no pants, a semi-threatening dude named MyStroh who often carries an ever-attentive duck, Silver3 (the 3 is silent) who is the sparkly hostess and who plays the violin and also gets pregnant, a guy named Hunter who will pour you wine before the show even though he prefers beer, General Manager Sue James who keeps all of this chaos semi-organized, and Personal Jesus who is the cook and plays a recorder.

Missed again. How about: The script (such as it is) touches on holiday traditions such as It’s A Wonderful Life and incorporates some music and dance from The Nutcracker. It also features a guy pouring heavy cream and Wild Turkey into his mouth while abusing himself with an electric mixer, orgasms played backwards, belly dancing with kitchen utensils, one girl rogering another girl roundly, and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer being shot to death and then coming back to life before being de-antlered.

Crap, that doesn’t work. Try: The audience is seated at tables for ten, each table with three bottles of wine (part of the admission price, extra bottles can be purchased), the actors mill around and do mini-improvs at each table when they’re not serving or doing scenes, and they hold a ”Bus That Table” contest where one patron from each table competes to see how fast they can clear the dishes and silverware. Then they compete in a quiz show.

Forget that, let’s talk about the food. The curried butternut squash soup is delish, and there’s enough for seconds and maybe thirds. Artisanal bread is ripped off in hunks. An herbed apple and fennel salad is tasty, as are the brown-buttered radishes and sage-roasted sweet potatoes that accompany the smoked ham entree (which is OK, not great). And the drunken chocolate bundt cake is moist and luscious.

The bottom line: Whatever it is, it lasts for about three hours, it happens all around you and comes at you from every angle, you are amply provided with food and drink, and thoroughly entertained with more surprises than you can possibly imagine (Did I mention that they serve Pez candies during the salad course? Or that you get a fistful of salad dropped onto your plate from a performer’s hand wearing a surgical glove?). This show, which has landed here from another place (and perhaps another planet) is not dinner theater. What it is is anyone’s guess. But it’s wonderful. Energizing. Hilarious. Filling. Maybe brilliant.

Conni’s Avant Garde Restaurant is already partially sold out, so if you want to experience it you’d better hustle. Here’s a guarantee: You have never experienced anything like it. Unless, of course, your mom is a top chef and certifiably insane.

Conni’s Avant Garde Restaurant: Feast of Miracles

through December 19 at Cleveland Public Theatre,

6415 Detroit Avenue, 216-631-2727

Personals Uncut: The New York Edition, Kennedy’s Theatre

2010-12-04T09:39:00.003-05:00

(One of the 18 who are looking for love.)

We all know that cyber-personals, those online dating profiles, usually provide tiny nuggets of truth wrapped in fantasies and outright lies. That's why they all sound the same. This is understandable from the perspective of one who wants to hook up--hey, anything is fair in love and war--but it poses a problem for a play that attempts to wring chuckles and poignancy out of those ads, as does Personals Uncut: The New York Edition, now at Kennedy’s Theatre.

Written, directed and produced by Jennifer Griffin, a local woman who once lived and worked in Gotham, the show features a fairly diverse cast of 18. And that pretty much sums up the positive aspects of the evening.

These certainly appear to be good-hearted folks, and I am not particularly interested in clubbing baby seals to death. But let’s face it: obvious, repetitive and unfunny is no way to go through life, and it's an especially unfortunate approach for a supposedly comedic play.

With the exception of a couple tepid dialogue skits, each of the mostly disconnected and static blackout segments features a lovelorn person droning descriptions of themselves and their desires to the audience. Griffin’s writing, which occasionally has a glimmer of an amusing thought or a new perspective, is continually defeated by her determined parade of dating stereotypes.

Here comes the slob, the ditzy new-age gal, the dork in grandma’s basement, the gold-digger, the pot-head, the chilly intellectual bitch. And on and on. To make it even more clunky, this avalanche of familiarity is divided into two gender-specific acts, like Seventh Grade boys and girls on opposite sides of the gym at the annual dance. On the rare occasion when something unpredictable happens within a sketch, the turn isn’t supported believably in the script.

Also, there is little of the New York vibe, outside of the subtitle and some thrown-in location references. Shockingly, it seems that gays, lesbians, bisexuals and people of other more exotic dating interests don’t even exist in this bizzaro New York. Yes, one woman has a gal-crush on Rachel Ray (?), and one guy is interested in getting simultaneously and platonically naked with a female (gasp!). But everything else is standard-issue hets in heat.

Although a small handful of the performers exhibit some nascent acting chops, most of the people on stage have many scene studies ahead of them before they should attempt to again approach professional footlights.

Personals is apparently scheduled to have a longer run next year in the PlayhouseSquare complex. One can only hope that, by then, Ms. Griffin decides to divest herself of a couple of her production roles, chop away all the cookie-cutter characters, find more real actors, and focus on just a few hopeful daters with whom the audience could laugh and empathize.

Personals Uncut: The New York Edition

Through December 11, produced by Jennifer Griffin

at Kennedy’s Theatre, PlayhouseSquare,

!615 Eucild Avenue, 216-241-6000

From Breast Cancer to Broadway, Karamu House

2010-11-02T08:53:00.003-04:00

(Brenda Adrine in "From Misery to a Ministry" by Lenice Bozeman one of 11 short plays in this production)

There are two kinds of people who should definitely see this show: people who have been diagnosed with breast cancer and feel alone in the world and, even more importantly, women who avoid having mammograms for whatever reason. For the latter, this production could save your bacon.

As far as everyone else is concerned, From Breast Cancer to Broadway, now at Karamu House, is less a theatrical experience than an educational seminar wrapped in quick-mix emotion. Written by eleven African-American women who are breast cancer survivors, the micro-plays eschew believable character development for fast snapshots of people who could only become fully three-dimensional given more time on stage and more skillful playwriting chops.

This is not to minimize in any way what the authors have accomplished: they aren’t professional playwrights, nor do they choose to be. They are simply conveying their heartfelt thoughts on how breast cancer can affect those afflicted, as well as their friends and family. Many of the vignettes touch on the power of religion to help people find a path out of the darkness. And that is to be respected in full.

The plays are written by Kim Sadler, Lenice Bozeman, Loretta Embry, Cheryl Williams, Rose Dukes, DeVonna White, Sabrina Heath, Bernadette Scruggs, Cordi Stokes, Linda Wood-Wims, and Denise Richmond-Kelley. Script supervisor Bridgette Wimberly has brought the pieces together, after they were written as part of playwriting therapy at The Gathering Place, a breast cancer support group. And clearly, each of the playwrights has something important to communicate.

However, theater is not Western Union (or texting). And being hammered with messages for a couple hours, even necessary and valuable messages, can eventually lose its appeal.

Director Terrence Spivey helps some of his performers achieve nice moments. Stephanie Stovall appears as the same character in three different sketches, and she is a treat. Alternately fierce and funny, she makes her scenes click. Joyce M. Meadows is lovely as an Alzheimer’s patient, and Saidah Mitchell is also effective in the final playlet. But most of the actors are stuck in one-dimensional roles that are structured to teach, which is not the usual task of characters in a play.

So if you’re in the target groups mentioned above, by all means see this collection of deeply felt short works. Hey, it just might save your life, or the life of someone you love.

From Breast Cancer to Broadway

Through November 21 at the Karamu House,

2355 East 89^th St., 216-795-7077

An Orchard, Cleveland Play House/Case Western Reserve University

2010-10-28T13:39:00.003-04:00

(Kelli Ruttle as Ranyevskaya and Eva Gil as Varya)

If people were like trees, we’d never forget a single thing. That is a beauty of nature: no matter the storms it endures, it continually replicates itself in every detail, even as it grows. Meanwhile, humans are destined to get older and bigger but misremember important occurrences from the past, be tortured by others, and just flat out forget still more. From that standpoint, compared to nature we’re not even qualified to be a respectable weed.

In The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekhov marries those thoughts in, what for him, was a comical play verging on farce. It’s the story of an aristocratic but now penniless Russian family whose vast estate, with its fabulous orchard of cherry trees, will be auctioned off to pay their debts. While being stabbed with piercing moments of clarity about their pasts, and the hurts that reside there, they must deal with the present—and with glorious natural surroundings that seem to mock their meager attempts at coping.

In a modest bow to the many interpretations of this play, this Cleveland Play House production in association with Case Western Reserve University is simply called An Orchard. As it turns out, that is apt since the shortened title is mirrored by the fact that the number of characters has been substantially pruned, while also trimming some of the emotional wallop that this story can generate.

Director Mark Alan Gordon, who compiled the adaptation along with the graduate ensemble of 2012, helps his cast find much of the humor in Chekhov’s words. But the young actors miss a number of the nuances that should lift this tale above the ordinary.

When Lubov Andreyenva Ranyevskaya, nicknamed Lovey, returns to her family’s estate, along with her brother Gaev and her grown daughter Anya, the atmosphere is bittersweet. Gathering in the child’s nursery, a memory-inducing setting if there ever was one, Lovey is confronted with the ugly current reality by Lopakhin, a merchant who formerly worked as a servant on the grounds of the estate. He urges Lovey to divide the estate into small parcels, to sell as plots for vacation homes.

But Lovey is a woman caught between forces she doesn’t understand. Spending freely and irresponsibly has been her way of life, and now that change has arrived she can’t bend with the wind. As a result she, her family and friends, and even servants are ripe for destruction.

In the complex role of Ranyevskaya, Kelli Ruttle hits a variety of separate notes with great style, and her rendition of "When the World Was Young" at the start of Act Two is affecting. But there isn’t enough subtext to convey this woman’s full and often contrary persona. Flamboyant and haunted, generous and controlling, Lovey is really a piece of work, which is only glimpsed here in part.

As Lopakhin, Dan Hendrock has energy to burn as this driven and aspiring man. And his delivery feels a bit stilted and considered, as it would for a man who feels somewhat out of his element. But in his climactic scene, when he announces his purchase of the estate, there is joy and amazement but not enough anger borne of his rage at his humble history in that place.

Andrew Gorell, in the role of Gaev, enjoyably trumpets his wordy flourishes, but he doesn’t quite capture the childish arrogance of a man who has never fully grown up. Michael Herbert essays the “eternal student” Trofimov with a rumpled sort of idealism, and the adopted daughter/estate manager Varya is played by Eva Gil with repressed anger. But she could do more with the moment when she throws her house keys down in disgust, before she is about to be thrown out the door. Yan Tual triggers some chuckles as Firs, the nearly deaf manservant, but his shuffling old man schtick, although a nice homage to Tim Conway, gets a little tired.

At first glance, the set design by Jill Davis is stunning, with audience seating arranged in a circle, in a tall space draped with heavy curtains and lighted with chandeliers. There are also several birch tree trunks that extend from floor to ceiling, bringing the essence of nature into these living quarters.

Upon reflection, however, the set is less appealing since it does not suggest a nursery in any significant way. And the trees, while amazing to look at, seem firm and stalwart—just the opposite of cherry blossoms that are fragile and easily destroyed, which is part of the playwright’s central metaphor.

An Orchard is just that, one more take on The Cherry Orchard that is delightful in places, but that feels a bit too condensed to be thoroughly satisfying.

An Orchard

Through November 6 at the Cleveland Play House,

produced in association with Case Western Reserve

University, 8500 Euclid Avenue, 216-795-7000

Kill Will, Cleveland Public Theatre

2010-10-19T10:04:00.003-04:00

(Josh Brown and Kelly Elliott)

Chances are, if you brought a Shakespeare devotee together with a young person hooked on movies such as Slaughtered Vomit Dolls and Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS, the conversation might not go swimmingly. But oddly enough, they each occupy common ground in their entertainment passions when it comes to one thing: violence.

It's no news that there is ample gore in the works of The Bard, and those skewerings, beheadings and poisonings are the sum total of what appears in Kill Will, directed by Alison Garrigan, now at the Cleveland Public Theatre.

Show creators and sole performers Josh Brown and Kelly Elliott gather some of the more gruesome moments from Shakespeare’s plays, spin them with a froth of contemporary cultural references, and then act them out using their talents as fight choreographers. The hour-long result, depending how you look at it, is either a very amusing gym class or a less than absorbing but mildly entertaining theatrical event.

With a video screen announcing the plays from which bloody scenes are lifted, Brown and Elliott toss each other onto the (padded) floor, bounce their faces off walls and columns, and generally create mayhem. As they abuse each other, they work in modern allusions to movies such as Star Wars and self-defense equipment (Desdemona brandishes pepper spray).

Some of the bits are inspired, such as a video game sequence with Macbeth done as Mortal Kombat as we watch the game characters on the screen do each other in, complete with spurting blood. And Titus Andronicus is awash in sparkly red plasma.

Other scenes are yawners, including a battle with poles, “armed” with pillows on each end, which turns out to be about as fearsome as it sounds. And an attempt to do Richard III with stuffed animals is promising until it becomes clear there is no further wit at work other than the concept itself.

Actually, the script for Kill Will has a number of clever, inside references to Shakespeare and his works. But it could use more of those, which could hlep this piece rise, more often than it does, above a silly sort of calisthenics.

As you might imagine, the show also includes audience participation. But clench not thy teeth: it actually works. Indeed, on this night a couple things the audience members improvised to portray Shakespearean suicides were funnier than what the performers thought up.

The actors themselves (who are married to each other) are an odd fit. Brown has an agreeable affect, with a sly smile never far away, that makes him easy to like. But Elliott relies too much on yelling for projection, and on a grimace for facial expression. It’s not clear if she’s supposed to be the “bad guy” or she just comes across that way. In any case, the combination feels slightly off-center. There is also a subtle marital subtext to all of this, but it doesn't work and just gets in the way.

Anyhow, if you’re in the mood for a non-demanding evening, with tons of non-violent violence, then Kill Will should do the trick.

Kill Will

Through October 30 at Cleveland Public Theatre,

6415 Detroit Avenue, 216-631-2727

Don’t Call Me Fat, Cleveland Public Theatre

2010-10-14T09:02:00.003-04:00

(From left: Lissy Gulick, Kevin S. Charnas, and Lew Wallace)

First, let’s get one thing straight. I am not capable in any way of attempting to write a satire of Turkish culture, in their language, and have it ring true to people in Ankara. Hell, I couldn’t even get one sentence written. So I stand in awed respect for anyone who can try to accomplish a similar daunting task.

That said, the issue around Don’t Call Me Fat, a play by visiting Turkish playwright Ozen Yula now receiving its world premiere at Cleveland Public Theatre, is whether this send-up of America’s gluttonous ways works. And sadly, it doesn’t. Sure, it’s excessively long, but the problem isn’t that the play is wordy. It’s that the words consistently fail to amuse, entertain, or enlighten.

Oh, there are some momentary shocks, to be sure. Since the morbidly obese John Doe (really? John Doe?) spends all his first act time in a hospital bed, his crazy relative Jane Doe (Lissy Gulick) blisters him with a litany of f-bombs and fat-boy insults. And those can generate some nervous laughter, simply from their frontal outrageousness.

But obesity is a subject that’s been chewed over in the U.S. damn near constantly for many decades, and it’s hard to find a new way to satirize it. Playwright and director Yula attempts this in part by giving John (Kevin S. Charnas) an invisible friend—a young woman, Joanne (Faye Hargate), dressed as a Playboy bunny on a swing above him. Joanne is prone to drift off into little stories that delight corpulent John but which are less than enthralling for the audience. There are also predictable parodies of the "helping" professions such as psychologists and physicians.

Many of the jumbled references in the play seem as dated as the Playboy bunny riff. In the second act, John has been magically transformed into a lean stud, and a craven TV producer (Lew Wallace) is trying to make buff John the hot new folk hero in America. Problem is, the play tries to do this by lampooning a clunky TV show style that went out with This Is Your Life more than 50 years ago, bringing on guests from John’s past including his drunken and deluded mother. Clumsy and nearly unintelligible video clips, which are half-obscured by the set, don't help. Neither does the shaggy dog ending.

There are multiple elements in this show that might, conceivably, work together given some rigorous editing and rewriting. But the playwright is heading back to Turkey soon, so that seems unlikely.

Word has it that Yula’s visit has been edifying for those who have interacted with him. Let’s hope that is true, because the seven on-stage cast members give their all for his play. But the flabby Don’t Call Me Fat is suffering from advanced theatrical arteriosclerosis, and the prognosis isn’t promising.

Don’t Call Me Fat

Through October 30 at the Cleveland

Public Theatre, 6415 Detroit Avenue,

216-631-2727

An Ideal Husband, Lakeland Civic Theatre

2010-09-27T11:45:00.002-04:00

( Katherine DeBoer as Mabel and Diane Mull as Lady Chiltern)

If you prefer your Oscar Wilde with a whiff of social relevance, then An Ideal Husband might be your cup of tea. It deals with an instance of political intrigue that ignites a blackmail plot, which is a lot of heavy lifting for a playwright whose wealthy characters usually just indulge in trivial and insanely witty banter while munching cucumber sandwiches.

And if this is your kind of play, you have two chances to see it. The Great Lakes Theater Festival opens their version on Saturday, October 2, and the Lakeland Civic Theatre’s production is up and running now. While the Lakeland effort struggles to find its pace in the rather lengthy first act, things perk up after intermission and a Wildean good time is had by (almost) all.

Sir Robert Chiltern, an apparent paragon of virtue, is waylaid at a party by Mrs. Cheveley, a snarky woman who knows a secret in Chiltern’s past. It seems Chiltern sold a state secret for the money that continues to finance his luxurious lifestyle. For her own financial reasons, she forces Chiltern to reverse his negative report on the Suez Canal, lest she release the proof of his previous indiscretion.

Meanwhile, Chiltern’s best pal, Viscount Goring, goes meandering about as an air-headed dandy, the scourge of his father, the Earl of Caversham (Michael Rogan). Goring has most of the best lines, structured in the familiar tempo Wilde uses. As he observes: “To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.”

As Chiltern and Cheveley battle it out, Chiltern’s wife (a steely yet loving Diane Mull) stands by her man, until facts, intercede, and Goring tries to woo Chiltern’s lovely sister Mabel.

The Lakeland cast battles to a draw with the first half of the play, as the actors try to find their footing. In the central role of Sir Robert, Jeffery Grover provides a solid presence. But his fencing with Mrs. Cheveley doesn’t spark as it should, because Jennifer Davies, as Cheveley, delivers many of her lines with an unchanging tempo and a single facial expression trapped somewhere between a sneer and a wince. Playing a nasty person should be a lark, but here it seems a chore.

On the other hand, Katherine DeBoer as Mabel is a delight, capturing the frivolous essence of Wilde’s words. In the smaller role of Lady Markby, Maria Thomas Lister also has a fine time with her few speeches, tossing them off with just the right upper-crust attitude.

In the juicy part of Goring, who is really a thinly disguised Wilde, Doug Kusak labors (under a wig as thick as a beaver pelt) to find his character, failing to take enough chances with shape and texture in delivering the clever wordplay. But Kusak comes out of his shell after intermission, cranking up the energy and turning Goring into an impish cad with a heart of gold.

Even though the play, at more than 2 ½ hours, is a good deal longer than it should be, director Martin Friedman keeps everyone on point so that the laughs Wilde is due eventually come through.

An Ideal Husband

Through October 10 at Lakeland Civic Theatre,

Lakeland Community College, 7700 Clocktower Drive,

Kirtland, 440-525-7526

Closure, Karamu House

2010-09-20T10:38:00.003-04:00

(Shambrion Treadwell)

A single line from this production sums up the trauma of losing one’s home to the ravenous forces of our financial meltdown: “Foreclosure papers shredded, left on the lawn.” You can feel the frustration and anger that throbs in those few words.

That is just one of many telling thoughts in Closure by Mary Weems, now at Karamu House. This collection of poems—performed alongside and weaved into snatches of music, dance, singing and yodeling (!)—is an intriguing production. Most of the short poems are written in the voices of a variety of inanimate objects, the things that people leave behind when forced to abandon their homes.

This is a challenging format to sustain, since there are no characters to follow and no way to build tension. But under the direction of Terrence Spivey, aided by fluid choreography by Dianne McIntyre and evocative photographs by R.A. Washington, the 80-minute performance (with an essentially unnecessary intermission) manages to sustain interest for much of the time.

Plenty of objects have thoughts they want to share, including a drawer, a hairbrush, a light bulb, a hallway, and many more. Since the poems are fairly brief, these snapshot observations go down easily. On the flip side, the bite-sized bits (there are 27 of them) begin to get repetitive and you start to long for some interaction with the real people who were affected.

The six-person ensemble includes Rodney Freeman, Cameron Dashiell, Amanda Lanier, Saidah Mitchell, Shambrion Treadwell and Kyle Carthens. Each has featured moments and they all perform seamlessly as a group, lending the evening a sense of unity the material itself doesn’t supply.

Ultimately, the clever premise devours itself, since objects can’t grow, change or rage against these sad situations. And that drains a lot of passion from the proceedings. Still, the production is often enthralling, lovely to look at, and even quite amusing. And that ain’t half bad.

Closure

Through October 10 at Karamu House,

2355 East 89^th Street, 216-795-7077

Altar Boyz, True North at French Creek

2010-09-17T09:52:00.003-04:00

(The Boyz from left: Colin Bigley, Matthew Ryan Thompson, Josh Rhett Noble, Eric Fancher, and Alex Arroyo)

Even though the whole “make a word plural with a z” thing is totally played, the up-beat musical Altar Boyz, now being produced by True North at French Creek, can still generate a lot of grinz. This tuneful romp about five diverse young dudes in a Christian rock band oozes with charm, mixing sincere God talk with enough wry asides and winks so that even agnostics and atheists in the audience can find a foothold.

The music and lyrics by Gary Adler and Michael Patrick Walker dominate, since the whole show is presented as a concert in progress. The differentiating gimmick is that there’s a computerized, glowing cross that shows how many audience souls have been saved from the clutches of Satan. If you feel a cringe coming on, relax. It’s all executed with boyish verve and none of the fundamentalist fervor that can get downright scary.

Four of the five chaps are named Matthew, Mark, Luke and Juan (you’ll never guess, he’s Hispanic!). And they are joined by Abraham, a wandering Jew who stumbles upon the group and is taken in because he knows how to write lyrics. These personalities, as written by book author Kevin Del Aguila, are one-dimensional, and it’s up to the performers to shake that shallowness and make these guys come alive. In this task, the True North cast is only partly successful.

The group is led by the (supposedly) pure-of-spirit Matthew, played by Josh Rhett Noble who is reprising a role he played at Beck Center a couple years ago. Noble sings well in a gentle, lyrical way—his “Something About You” solo is a tender highlight—and he establishes a firm center for the other players. Matthew Ryan Thompson makes the most of Mark, a juicy role since he’s the token gay boy who’s smitten with a non-comprehending Matthew. Thompson is always on point with his characterization, and he gives his star turn, double-meaning song “Epiphany” a rockin’ good feeling.

As Juan, Alex Arroyo starts off a bit heavy handed, making too much of the guttural “j” sounds as he teeters on caricature. But he gradually loosens up and turns an emotional event in the second act into a surprisingly affecting moment.

Eric Fancher plays Luke, the “bad boy,” but he never takes enough risks and one never senses the real rough side of this potentially interesting character. Luke should be generating constant friction with the other “do-gooders,” but that tension never develops. And Colin Bigley is largely transparent as Abraham, failing to find a through line for his character. Since he is a linchpin in the play’s climax, where the boys face a tough decision, this concluding moment fails to resonate.

Although the individual performances vary in quality, the boys are sharp when doing their group numbers. The voices blend pleasingly and they execute director/choreographer Sarah Clare’s often inventive dance moves with energy and precision. They are supported in fine fashion by music director Jordan Cooper’s tight four-member band.

Performed in a spacious theater/gallery in a handsome nature center facility, this show wears it’s belief openly and proudly. And it’s often quite a blast, even if you are a heathen.

Altar Boyz

Produced by True North Cultural Arts

at the French Creek Nature Center,

4530 Colorado Ave., Sheffield Village,

440-949-5200

Say You Love Satan, convergence-continuum

2010-09-04T11:24:00.002-04:00

(Lukas Roberts as Jack and Scott Gorbach as Andrew)

If falling for a “bad boy” is compellingly attractive to many women and gay men, then being swept away by the son of Satan himself would have to qualify as the ultimate hard-on. Especially if that hellacious offspring was hot, smart, and able to chill a bottle of beer with a wave of his hand.

This is the situation that forms the core of Say You Love Satan by Roberto Aguirre-Sacassa, now at convergence-continuum. And while the play revolves around a contemporary incarnation of beelzebub, it never comes to grip in any significant way with a number of heavy issues raised on the periphery. Instead, the focus here is on laughs, and the con-con crew delivers plenty of those thanks to fine performances and deft timing.

Andrew is a kind of nebbishy gay guy who is between relationships (with nice Jarrod and egomaniacal Chad), and re-reading The Brothers Karamozov in a laundromat. In steps Jack, who proceeds to strip to the waist and starts doing pushups while waiting for his clothes to cycle. Andrew is instantly smitten by Jack’s other-worldly gorgeousness, and soon they are spending the evenings together.

This new relationship shunts wonderful Jarrod (he volunteers at an orphanage where he holds babies that have been neglected) off to the side. But Andrew is a bit bothered by Jack’s “666” tattoo in his hairline, and his difficulty in walking when the sun’s about to rise.

As Andrew and Jack grow closer, things heat up in unforeseen ways and Andrew’s gal pal Bernadette is called upon to help save her buddy from the fires of the damned. And further assistance comes winging in from a most unexpected source.

The playwright sprinkles plenty of punch lines throughout the script (Jack: “Are you Russian?” Andrew: “No, I’m just sullen.”), and even when the gags are predictable, they manage to click. This is due in large part to Scott Gorbach, who invests Andrew with just enough earnest naivete to make his character endearing and relatable. For instance, Andrew insists on keeping his eyes open during a kiss, which becomes hilarious during his frequent lip-locks with Jack.

As Jack, Lukas Roberts has a sizzling bod and a matching manner that will steam your glasses (and if you don't wear specs, he'll fog up your corneas). He’s a passionate, sexy handful, and when his amorous smoldering turns into flames of anger, you can feel the raging heat. Ultimately, when Jack’s real identity is revealed, Roberts has the acting chops to make it feel real.

Zac Hudak, double cast as the preening Chad and surprise visitor Raphael, is spot-on in both roles, while Stuart Hoffman is wistfully charming as angelic Jarrod. Lauren B. Smith garners a number of laughs as the put upon Bernadette, although her high decibel rants become a bit wearying.

The script works hard to develop a thematic connection between the patricide-centered plot of the Dostoyevsky novel that Andrew lugs around and Jack’s supposed conflict with his dad, but this juxtaposition never quite jells. This makes Andrew’s frequent mini-lectures on The Brothers Karamozov a bit of a bore.

And ironically, for a play that makes fun of Disney musicals (Jack admits there’s a special place in Hell for people in those productions), Aguirre-Sacassa tacks on a pat, smiley-face ending that doesn’t really feel true to the characters he’s created. Indeed, it’s a conclusion the Disney studios might have dreamt up.

Director Clyde Simon once again reshapes his small playing area to maximum effect, and keeps the pace brisk and amusing. However, con-con's obsession with using video in all their plays is once again a loser, as the video segments are either unnecessary (people dancing in a bar while live actors dance in a bar) or tedious (watching Jack and Andrew exit a car and walk across a street, watching laundry tumble).

Still, there are giggles aplenty in this piece. And that makes it easy for anyone to love this particular six-packed, stone cold sexy Satan.

Say You Love Satan

Through September 25, produced by convergence-

continuum at The Liminis, 2438 Scranton Road,

216-687-0074

Song of the Seekers, Cleveland Public Theatre’s Student Theatre Enrichment Program (STEP)

2010-07-30T12:26:00.003-04:00

STEP right up, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, and stop by a Cleveland city park for a galvanizing performance of Song of the Seekers by 27 talented teenagers. Working with director Chris Seibert and other Cleveland Public Theatre teaching artists, these students have adapted an ancient Indian text and made it compelling and contemporary.

This is free family theater, presented by the students in CPT’s STEP Program, and their hard work has culminated in an entertaining hour-long show. Employing a variety of musical formats from beat boxing to “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend,” the show follows a group of poets and a troupe of entertainers as they merge, flare up against each other, and eventually explore what it means to be an artist as well as an individual of worth.

This large cast has a lot on its plate, but it handles the often stylized movement with the energy and precision this kind of presentation requires. Plus, the actors enunciate clearly so that very few words are lost, even when nearby trains or trucks rumble past (one of the challenges of open-air productions).

Among the Poets, David Lewis Jr. as Ares and Michael McNairy as Leachim handle most of the heavy lifting as the story unspools, and soon we are introduced to Christopher Dooms as the arrogant and charismatic King Palaka (or “King P,” as he prefers). The King’s singers and dancers, dubbed KPEC for King Palaka’s Entertainment Company, have a new star, the beautiful Vasa, played with a nice mix of strength and vulnerability by Janette Patterson.

Trouble is, there are two guys with their eyes on Vasa: the poet Charudat (an engaging Dionte Sawyer) and the King’s bro Roofis (Marcus Howard in an amusingly boastful performance). Charudat is shadowed by his best friend Maitreya, rendered with comical goofiness (and irrepressible hunger) by Malcolm Keenon.

Amongst the songs and dances, other performers make themselves known. Isaiah Cancel is loose and limber as the gambler Lewie, who can predict the future with his dice, and Shalese Thornton exhibits excellent concentration, never breaking character as she sings and cavorts as a “court jester.”

Biana Carr is effective as Vasa’s best friend Sookie, and Bianca Carr registers the right amount of authority as Vasa’s mother Yaya. Kalim Hill skulks with the best of them as the thief Bartimus and Chatiana Moore is a powerful presence as Shanda, Charudat’s sister.

The rest of the exciting company includes Jocelyn Newkirt, Brianna Larkins, Jawan Rustin, Sean Eafford, Darryle Barnes, Olivia Winsteard, Nate Woodland, Dawon Taylor, Matthew McNeal, Tyisha George, Jasmine Harris, Christian McGinnis, Essence Flores and Syeed Selmon.

These performances are free and easily accessible, so stop by, bring a blanket or lawn chair, and see what an outstanding group of young people have been doing with their summer. You’ll be delighted!

Song of the Seekers

Produced by the CPT STEP Program.

Through August 8, free, at local parks.

Visit here for the schedule and locations.

Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feeling so Sad, CSU Summer Stages

2010-07-23T12:43:00.002-04:00

(Eric Perusek as Jonathan and Everett Quinton as Madame Rosepettle)

First of all, no, the title isn’t a metaphor. It’s actually one of the strange things that happen, quite literally, in Arthur Kopit’s psycho-absurdist farce. First performed about 50 years ago, this play is a parody of Freudian psychology and all its extenuating effects on sex, family and relationships. And this production at CSU Summer Stages, although overcooked in parts, triggers much of this work’s dark comedy that still retains its punch.

The domineering and despicable Madame Rosepettle is traveling through the Caribbean with her neurotic, stuttering and barely functional grown son Jonathan in tow. She constantly refers to him using one of her dead husband’s several names while dad himself is never far away—stuffed and hanging in the closet when he isn’t tucked into his traveling coffin.

By keeping sonny under lock and key, and then allowing him some restricted face time with the mysterious and sensuous Rosalie, mommy attempts to protect Jonathan from the evil world—inside her head. Seeking companionship of her own, she wines and dines Commodore Roseabove, an older gentleman who is first smitten and then repulsed as Madame reveals herself.

As Rosepettle, Everett Quinton handles his cross-gender task with teeth-clenching intensity. This approach feels a bit over-torqued in the first act, as mom and boy set up housekeeping with her vicious menagerie: a piranha and two Venus flytraps, each played by actors. Similarly, Eric Perusek as Jonathan is working his Aspergers-like mannerisms so hard early on that we can’t glimpse the character underneath.

However, both performers ease up a little in the second act and the gears of the farce start to engage. Rosepettle’s scene with Roseabove, works exceptionally well, thanks to Quinton’s hypnotically malevolent monolog about Madame’s first hubby, and George Roth, who gives the Commodore a sweet innocence that wilts under Rosepettle’s onslaught.

Perusek feels much more genuinely vulnerable in the second act as he reaches a climax (not the kind you might expect) with Rosalie. As Rosalie, Jillian Bumpas plays it all a bit too straight, not allowing us to see any of this woman’s shadows until her last scene.

Director Scott Spence keeps the pace brisk (helpful, since the play is overwritten in parts) and uses a clever playlist of florid tunes (Bolero, all during the intermission) to highlight the weird unreality of these goings-on. If you’re in the mood for some good old 1960’s style absurdist fun, this might just be your ticket.

Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feeling so Sad

July 30 and August 6, CSU Summer Stages,

CSU Factory Theatre, Chester Ave. and E. 23 St.,

216-687-2109

Hunter Gatherers, convergence-continuum

2010-07-19T08:35:00.002-04:00

(From left: Lauren B. Smith, Geoffrey Hoffman, and Tom Kondilas)

There’s a paper-thin veneer that separates us civilized folks from the more base and primitive selves that lurk just below the surface. Don’t believe it? Just have the power grid go down for a couple weeks and see how you and your neighbors start behaving.

In Hunter Gatherers by Peter Sinn Nachtrieb, now being staged by convergence-continuum, the playwright throws two couples together at their annual wedding anniversary dinner. And it quickly turns into a raucously funny, highly sexualized farce that's played with loopily unhinged brio by the con-con cast.

Richard & Pam and Tom & Wendy shared a double wedding some years ago and now, in their mid-30s, they pursue apparently conventional urban lifestyles. Except that, from the first moment of the play at Richard and Pam's home, we realize the civilizing veneer has been lifted. Richard has brought home a live lamb, which remains unseen in a tall box, and proceeds to slit the animal’s throat so he can turn it into an entree.

From that point on, all bets are off as we are presented these characters’ true natures without any of the usual filtering. Wendy arrives by herself, since her physician husband is searching for a parking space, and we know within moments that their marriage is kaput, sexually and in every other way. Indeed, Wendy is hot for Richard and quickly tries to maneuver herself into his clutches.

Once Tom arrives, Richard wrestles him to the ground, symbolically pissing on him to claim his turf. And so it goes, abetted by the playwright’s clever and incisive dialog, until there is more than just psychological carnage, and a surprising survivor stumbles away to live another day in the jungle we call life.

The performances are both broad and subtle, and are divided evenly among the cast. On the broad side, Geoffrey Hoffman makes Richard a hyper-masculine stud-on-steroids, ready to fuck, kill or cook anything in sight. A putative artist, he soon decides his real art centers on crotch-related activities. Laurel Johnson’s Wendy is his female equivalent, swinging from manic highs to desperate lows, and only seeking to pork Richard at the first opportunity.

Those two hunters are married, as luck would have it, to a couple gatherers. As Tom, Tom Kondilas is sensible and restrained until a bedroom scene with Pam unleashes his submissive side, with unfortunate consequences. And Lauren B. Smith simmers effectively as Pam until all hell breaks loose in the second act.

Directed by Clyde Simon, Hunter Gatherers challenges our view of civilized behavior while making us laugh at our own artificial social constructs. And you leave the theater musing on how little it might take for any of us to be reduced to our more primitive instincts.

Hunter Gatherers

Through August 14, produced by convergence-continuum

at The Liminis, 2438 Scranton Road, 216-687-0074

The Elephant Man, CSU Summer Stages

2010-07-17T12:43:00.002-04:00

(From left: Eric Perusek as Merrick, Geoff Knox as Treves, and Ursula Cataan as Mrs. Kendall)

In a perfect world, our external appearance would be shaped by the goodness we have inside. That would make it a lot easier to spot the real monsters in our midst. But then, who’s to decide what “goodness” is; Tea Partiers and devotees of Daily Kos might disagree mightily.

In a similar way, there are many layers at work in The Elephant Man by Bernard Pomerance, now at CSU Summer Stages. This is the story of John (real name Joseph) Merrick, a man burdened with morbid physical deformities but possessing a gentle and intelligent mind. And this CSU production under the direction of Everett Quinton gets virtually everything right, fashioning a drama that raises questions both simple and profound.

We first meet Merrick in the 1880s as a sideshow freak, and that’s where Dr. Frederick Treves finds him and takes the confused, misshapen man into his care at the London Hospital. Few can access Merrick’s beautiful side since his handicap prevents him from speaking clearly, and few would even have the nerve to come close enough to hear him.

Stage directions indicate that Merrick is to be played without elaborate makeup, as was done in the movie version, so the task of conveying Merrick’s extreme physical distress is left to the actor. Eric Perusek does an admirable job of contorting his body and face, allowing Merrick’s enormous and weighty head (it was ballooned out by bony growths and fleshy sacs) to loll to one side, then struggling to bring it upright again. Although these contortions aren’t entirely consistent throughout the play, Perusek does a splendid job of crafting a flawed yet empathetic character.

He is well supported by Geoff Knox, who plays Treves with a polished air of self-entitlement, a young physician on the make who has stumbled on a grotesque medical treasure. But his adherence to Victorian rules and behaviors are assailed, and Knox deftly reveals the conflicts besetting Treves.

In order to help humanize Merrick, Treves introduces Merrick to the beauteous actress Mrs. Kendall (a pitch-perfect and riveting Ursula Cataan). After perusing photos of the naked Merrick provided by the doc, she first notices that Merrick’s junk is in fine shape. And later, she shares a glimpse of some of her secondary sexual characteristics, much to Merrick’s delight and Treves’ outrage. Also excellent are Tom Woodward as the sideshow manager Ross, Derek Davidson as the Bishop, and George Roth as Carr Gomm, the head of the hospital.

Although there are a couple small glitches—the supposed moronic trio of pinheads seem more like three gals in a ladies golf league costumed for an outing—the tone of the production is strong and consistent. This is aided by the moody, between-scenes cello music performed by Maake Harding.

As Merrick insinuates himself into society, being gifted and visited by the upper crust, we see hypocrites and celebrity suck-ups for what they are. And it makes us wonder about how we perceive beauty and the real value of other human beings. That’s a lot for any play to deliver, and this CSU Summer Stages production does it with well-modulated passion.

The Elephant Man

Through August 15 at CSU Summer Stages,

CSU Factory Theatre, corner of Chester and E. 23 St.,

216-687-2109

Li’l Abner, Mercury Summer Stock

2010-07-16T11:28:00.003-04:00

(left to right: Jennifer Myor as Moonbeam McSwine, Christopher Aldrich as Earthquake McGoon, Annie Hickey as Daisy Mae, Jason Leupold as Abner, and Tim Allen as Available Jones)

Ignorant rubes in hick towns seem to be endlessly amusing to us city folk, and that’s what drove Al Capp’s Li’l Abner comic strip to unprecedented success: 43 years in syndication. About 20 years after it began, the strip was turned into a Broadway musical that opened in 1956, and ran for almost 700 performances.

Now, Mercury Summer Stock is presenting Li’l Abner in all its cartoonish glory, and the production is a sublime example of how to turn over-the-top characters into a fast and funny theatrical romp. Even though the singing voices in the leads vary in quality from good to somewhat challenged, Pierre Brault’s energetic and witty direction and choreography keep the play as intoxicating as a jug of Kickapoo Joy Juice.

The shit-kickers who reside in Dogpatch, Kentucky are all a few DNA strands short of functional, but they are possessed of an inherent honesty and goodness (at least, in Al Capp’s world). In the book by Norman Panama and Melvin Frank, these yokels are being evacuated by the US Guv’ment since their burg has been confiscated, identified as the least necessary place in the country and a likely target for atom bomb tests.

As the residents deal with that threat (or is it a compliment?), local hunk Abner is being pursued by the luscious Daisy Mae, a process overseen by Abner’s dotingly dense parents Mammy and Pappy Yokum. Meanwhile, Mammy’s secret elixir, which turns an ordinary man into an Adonis, is fought over by a government scientist (Ryan Bergeron in a fright wig) and the evil corporate titan General Bullmoose (a blustering James Mango).

Not since Dickens has any writer come up with more telling names for his characters, and this musical has them in spades—from Senator Jack S. Phogbound (run the first name and middle initial together when you say it) to Earthquake McGoon (a doltish Daisy Mae suitor), and from Evil Eye Fleagle to Appasionata von Climax (no descriptions necessary).

Although Abner’s supposed to be as dumb as a wet log, Jason Leupold plays him as a slightly distracted frat boy. But he sings well and has the physique to carry off the part. As Daisy Mae, Annie Hickey is plenty attractive and handles her musical chores with style. Though there could be more confused sexual chemistry between the two, you still root for their eventual bonding.

Much of the production’s entertainment value comes from Mammy and Pappy, who are played with exuberant foolishness by Kelvette Beacham and Brian Marshall. Beacham is far from the short and scrawny Mammy of the strip, but she swings her weight like a sledgehammer as she whips her family into line. And Marshall, constantly bent at the waist, motors around the stage like the Energizer bunny on crack.

In the central role of Marryin’ Sam, the preacher who deals in $2 weddings, Dan DiCello nails a number of laugh lines. And he leads the company in a rousing anthem to the incompetence of town founder, “Jubilation T. Cornpone.” But he struggles with some songs, particularly his duet with Daisy Mae, “I’m Past My Prime.”

A number of smaller roles sparkle, such as understudy Ryan Thompson as Eagle Eye Fleagle—pitter-pattering across the stage in a stoop-shouldered posture, he actually seems animated. Sarah Saddler is voluptuous as Appasionata, and Tim Allen masters a variety of comic strip stances as Available Jones. Indeed, the large cast is either quite good or exceptional from top to bottom.

Director Brault never lets the timing flag, which is critical in such a wildly exaggerated piece. And the production is augmented by Margaret Ruble’s costumes, a glorious mélange of hick chic.

If you’re longing for a funny evening that won’t tax your brain, take a slug of Li’l Abner and wait for the giggles to start.

Li’l Abner

Through July 24, produced by Mercury Summer Stock

at the Cleveland Play House, 8500 Euclid Avenue,

216-771-5862

Curtains, CSU Summer Stages

2010-07-12T11:55:00.003-04:00

There have been so many musicals that spoof musicals in recent years (Spamalot being the premiere example) that one occasionally longs for a musical that’s just a musical. Still, Curtains, now at CSU Summer Stages, has a promising premise. But this leaden production, weighted down by an egregious orchestra, never takes flight as it should.

On the cusp of the 1960s, a professional theater company is running the cowboy musical through its pre-Broadway Boston run. But during the curtain call, the no-talent star dies suddenly. Soon, detective Cioffi shows up to interrogate the cast, since it has been determined the woman’s demise was no accident. And he quarantines the cast in the theater until the case can be solved. Of course, he has a secondary agenda since he loves musicals and wants to get involved with the show.

With everyone looking at everyone else, suspicions run rampant as Carmen, the producer, tries to persuade lyricist Georgia to take over the lead, since Georgia was formerly a performer. This puts composer Aaron in a snit, since he was busy trying to hook up again with Georgia, his former honey.

There are all the usual theater people: the egotistic director Belling, the perky but overlooked understudy Niki, the romantic lead Bobby, and Carmen’s surly husband and co-producer Sid (a mugging Mark Seven).

With music and lyrics by the revered team of John Kander and Fred Ebb, there is certainly enough raw material to construct a sprightly evening. But director Michael Mauldin, a man possessing exquisite theatrical talents, here misses the boat.

The pace is agonizingly slow, with actors continually clomping up to punch lines with dread intent, leaning on each gag, and then waiting for laughs that often don’t come. Sure, the book by Rupert Holmes features a string of really hoary jokes, but they could work if handled more deftly. Over-the-top acting is fine when it’s done with a brisk and light touch, but it dies when squeezed in the iron grip of trying too hard

In the starring role, Tom Woodward has a nice, deferential style as Cioffi, but we never really feel his bone-deep passion for musicals. And his singing voice has a narrow bandwidth. Ursula Cataan does what she can as Georgia, gamely working her way through the pleasant ballad “Thinking of Him.” As Carmen, Jean Kauffman has the perfect look and the ideal sneer/pout of a producer, but she strangles most of her laugh lines to death.

George Roth survives as Belling by doing a vocal mash-up of Mr. Darling and Captain Hook from Peter Pan, and Derek Davidson’s Aaron is mild but believable. Nick Pancuk and Jessica Dyer also acquit themselves well as, respectively, Bobby and Niki.

If there’s one rule for musicals, it is that the orchestra—like umpires in baseball—should never make their presence known. But the well-attired musicians under the direction of John Krol are all too omnipresent. Laboring to land on the right notes, they butcher more than one tune. And Krol pounds a fuzzy-sounding piano that has the audio clarity of a Playskool keyboard that was left out in the rain. And then run over by a truck. Sympathies go out to all the singers.

At a running time approaching three hours, with intermission, Curtains is a long and only fitfully enjoyable journey to a tongue-in-cheek murder mystery solution.

Curtains

Through August 8 at Cleveland State University

Summer Stages, CSU Factory Theatre, corner of

Chester and E. 23^rd St., 216-687-2113

The Merry Wives of Windsor, Cleveland Shakespeare Festival

2010-06-27T12:35:00.003-04:00

(Falstaff, Jim McCormack, surrounded by taunting fairies at the conclusion of Merry Wives.)

There could hardly be a more appropriate Shakespeare choice than The Merry Wives of Windsor for the outdoor venues of the Cleveland Shakespeare Festival. Light and frothy, Wives is filled with fanciful seductions and mistaken identities, all ending happily with a suitable moral to boot.

Running in repertory with the dark and violent Titus Andronicus, this play of clever deceits and colliding lovers is a sure balm for a summer evening. And CleveShakes does a handy job with the material, given its budget restraints and tight rehearsal timetable.

Built around the ample framework of Falstaff as a lover of some repute, the play gives all the smarts to the two wives, Mrs. Page and Mrs. Ford, who are pursued by this man of gargantuan appetites. Hip to his come on (duplicate love letters sent to each woman), the gals plan to teach him several humiliating lessons. Meanwhile, three other men are panting after Mrs. Page’s daughter Anne: the French physician Dr. Caius, the gentleman Fenton (an earnest Tyler Babcock) and Slender, the cousin of country pastor Robert Shallow.

Although some character nuances are never really explored, director Tyson Douglas Rand finds many of the broad notes, and plays them with gusto. As Shallow, John Lynch makes his presence known immediately and anchors the opening of the show. Trailing behind, Stuart Hoffman is delightful as Slender, a young man so consumed by love for Mistress Anne he can’t even stand up straight.

As one of Anne’s other paramours, Will Luchin does Dr, Caius as a taller and more macho Inspector Clouseau, wringing every laugh from his butchered accent. At one point, he refers to his competitors by observing: “As they shall be one and two, I shall make a turd.” His act is augmented by Allen Branstein as his servant Jack Rugby, a cowering and most amusing sidekick.

The conniving wives, played by Carli Taylor Miluk and Carrie Williams, plot with gay mischievousness. As Mr. Ford, Aaron Elersich scores as both the cuckold and the disguised Mr. Brook. In the much less juicy part of Mr. Page, Jonathan McCleery handles his duties with panache.

The central role of Falstaff is taken by Jim McCormack, who deftly handles his many lines. But there is a lustiness missing in his character, a sexual vibrancy that would make his repeated comeuppances much more satisfying and entertaining.

The CleveShakes Festival is a lovely free gift to the region, and it can turn an ordinary balmy evening into an unexpected pleasure. So bring a folding chair and check out a performance near (or even far) from you.

The Merry Wives of Windsor

Through August 8, free of charge, produced by

the Cleveland Shakespeare Festival,

at various outdoor locations, check schedule at

cleveshakes.org

Where Are The Reviews?

2010-05-10T12:30:00.003-04:00

If you're looking for my reviews, you should check out the weekly pages of Cleveland Scene, plus their Web site: clevescene.com.

Any of my reviews not published in Scene will appear here on my Rave and Pan blog.

As always, thanks for your interest in live theater!

Christine

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Great Lakes Theater Festival

2010-05-05T11:43:00.002-04:00

(Eduardo Placer as Puck rides the flowery VW)

For those of us who lived through the 1960s, the decade seems like an ever-appealing amalgam of innocence, drugs, and The Beatles. But for others, it probably just seems like an over-indulged period populated by overly self-centered boomers. That’s why the Great Lakes Theater Festival production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream can feel a bit too familiar and dog-eared.

The problem is not that this company did practically the same show (on the same set) seven years ago, nor is it because the Beatles’ songs don’t fit the dizzy romantic frolics in this light Shakespeare comedy. But once again rolling out the painted VW, the granny glasses and the short skirts just seems a tired attempt at freshening a show that can be plenty zesty all by itself.

Filled with fairies, love potions, and mistakenly mismatched lovers, Midsummer is a lively romp. And some of the right elements are in place here. Kevin Crouch swaggers with attitude as Lysander, who is in love with Hermia (an engaging Gisela Chipe). Dudley Swetland leads his band of rowdy craftsmen with punch and panache, and Aled Davies is just wry enough as Oberon, King of the Fairies.

But there are problems, most of which seem to stem from actors trying too hard to camp it up to please director Charles Fee. The usually reliable David Anthony Smith is an over-the-top caricature of a wacky amateur thespian as Bottom, the weaver who fancies himself a prodigious acting talent. And Eduardo Placer works his role as Puck so hard, channeling the intensity of Jim Morrison into this quick-witted elf, that he turns Puck into more of an OCD drone than an amusing and fun-filled sprite.

Meanwhile, Lina Chambers as Helena and Dane Agostinis as Demetrius never register sharp characters, floating through their scenes rather anonymously.

Even so, this play has suffered worse treatments and emerged victorious, and it does so here. Once the mechanicals take the stage in Act Two and present their play within a play, one can look past the Sgt. Pepper band outfits (yawn) and enjoy the evergreen genius of Shakespeare’s inspired discourse on love and magic.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Through May 15 at the Great Lakes

Theater Festival, Hanna Theater,

2067 E. 14^th Street, 216-241-6000

A Soldier’s Tale, Cleveland Play House

2010-04-23T11:09:00.005-04:00

(Robert Ellis, center, as the General)

Sometimes, a hearty stew tastes like mush because all the individual flavors have melded together into one incomprehensible blob. Then again, there's zesty fare like A Soldier’s Tale, now part of Fusion Fest at the Cleveland Play House.

Employing a challenging and intriguing composition by Igor Stravinsky, based on a Russian folk tale, a septet from the Cleveland Orchestra conducted by Tito Munoz sets the musical stage. Then, four actors share the Baxter Theater space with dancers from GroundWorks DanceTheater as they fashion a compelling story of a real soldier from World War II, Private Eddie Slovik, who was executed for desertion.

This historic collaboration of three honored local arts institutions is reason enough to see this remarkable production. But there are even more delights in store than superbly rendered music and dance. The libretto written by Kurt Vonnegut is wonderfully playful, featuring an impish use of rhyme, but is also brutal and often profane in places. This is more than appropriate for a wartime scenario that also involves a “ballet with lice” as the dancers and actors, in uniform, itch as they hoof.

Under the direction of Seth Gordon, this engrossing mélange also leverages some interesting and amusing projections, including a WWII pin-up gal and a violin-playing devil (a reference to the original tale of a soldier who loses his soul to the devil in trade for his fiddle).

Justin Tatum is engaging as Slovik, but almost pushes his character’s devil-may-care goofiness a bit too far (after all, Slovik didn't want to die and eventually pleaded for clemency, a fact not conveyed in this piece). Robert Ellis is nicely conflicted as the General and Lindsay Iuen, steams things up as a sexy Red Cross gal.

In the preceding work, Catch and Release by Esa-Pekka Salonen, the dancers (Amy Miller, Felise Bagley, Kelly Brunk, Damien Highfield and Sarah Perrett) perform to music that in many ways echoes Stravinsky’s piece. Ranging from lighthearted—there are faint flickers of Gershwin now and then—to more somber, this 20-minute composition is accompanied by lighting effects and videos thrown onto the dance floor.

As the only American soldier to be executed by the U.S. military since the Civil War, Slovik has been condemned for cowardice by some and honored for his courage by others. And so goes humanity’s eternal struggle with just one of the many horrors of war.

A Soldier’s Tale

Through April 25 as part of Fusion Fest,

at the Cleveland Play House,

8500 Euclid Avenue, 216-795-7000

Eat (It’s not about food.), Fairmount Performing Arts Conservatory

2010-04-18T15:02:00.005-04:00

(From left, Alexis Floyd, Doug Kusak and Nina Domingue)

In theater, as in life, the road to hell is sometimes paved with good intentions. And to be honest, the good intentions at work in this 70-minute play are profound and deeply felt. But the resulting production is about as subtle as taking a shovel to the back of the head, and roughly as entertaining.

Penned by Linda Daugherty, and performed by about a dozen young people, along with a handful of adult actors (some of whom have distinguished performing credentials), Eat, now being produced by the Fairmount Performing Arts Conservatory, is an indigestible lump of statistics, lecturing and half-hearted storytelling. And that’s too bad, because the subject of eating disorders is certainly important and deserves a better treatment.

Drenched with earnestness, Daugherty’s script often sounds like bullet points about anorexia and bulimia gleaned from Wikipedia. In a series of fragmented scenes, kids and adults act out a couple poignant moments (Juliette Regnier as a crippled ex-ballet dancer is one). But mostly, these are curiously isolated glimpses from the lives of those beset by eating disorders, along with their underlying psychological issues such as anger, low self esteem, etc.

All the actors play multiple roles, with so many multiples in play that it’s hard to ever develop a bond with any of them. The one exception is Amy, a teenager who is first complimented by her friends for her sleek figure, but who then spirals down. Alexis Floyd does what she can with this barely two-dimensional character, while Nina Domingue and Doug Kusak seem at sea as her woefully underwritten parents.

There isn’t sufficient character development or dramatic tension to sustain even a production this short. And that disconnect lessens the impact when sad or tragic things happen. This problem was exacerbated on opening night by some technical glitches (music drowning out dialogue, other recorded inserts too faint to hear) caused by a computer malfunction.

This well-meaning production, directed by Fred Sternfeld, is sponsored by several medical centers involved in treating eating disorders. And one hopes that those who attend will gain insights from some of the facts in the show, as well as from the talk-backs scheduled after each performance.

But solely viewed as theatrical fare, this dish needs to be sent back to the kitchen.

Eat (It’s not about food.)

Through May 2, produced by the Fairmount

Performing Arts Conservatory, at the Mayfield

Village Civic Center, corner of SOM Center

and Wilson Mills Blvd, Mayfield Village

August: Osage County, PlayhouseSquare

2010-04-14T14:01:00.003-04:00

(Estelle Parsons as Violet, standing, and the rest of the clan.)

Her delivery is as dry as a dust cloud sweeping across an Oklahoma plain—gritty and coarse and dangerous. And if you don’t treat yourself to the experience of seeing Estelle Parsons as the redoubtable Violet Weston in August: Osage County, now at PlayhouseSquare, then there really isn’t much hope for you.

This monumental play about family carnage, written by Tracy Letts, has won most awards in sight, including the Tony and the Pulitzer. But that’s less important than the journey it takes each audience member on, as Violet orchestrates a family gathering into a cacophonous collapse that is laugh-out-loud hilarious, consistently obscene and emotionally devastating, all at the same time.

After an opening scene in which the family patriarch and Vi’s hubby, Beverly, declares his love for alcohol and literature (in that order), he disappears from the family’s stately home outside Tulsa. After some days go by, Violet pushes through her pill-induced haze to convene her sister Mattie Fae, her three grown daughters, and their assorted immediate kin to come offer support.

And that’s when the fun begins, as each of these Westonites begin to reveal their weaknesses and vulnerabilities, under the scouring gaze and brutal—no, let’s make that abusive—honesty of Mama Violet. Letts and director Anna D. Shapiro craft incisive portraits of each of the 11 family members, and one never quite knows whether to stop laughing and start crying, or vice versa.

Swallowing an unending stream of muscle relaxants and downers, Parsons’ Violet is a five-foot-tall black hole of familial devastation. At 82 years of age, Parson has the bearing and energy of four 20–year-olds put together, but with the benefit of acting chops one only gathers over decades. She throws away pungent lines to remarkable effect, making Violet’s snark seem even more treacherous, as it is delivered with an off-handed casualness.

Parsons (yes, she won the Oscar for playing Blanche Barrow in Bonnie and Clyde) is ably backed up by actors in the other parts, and some are superb. As Violet’s eldest daughter Barbara, Shannon Cochran elicits many rueful chuckles as she battles with her now-separated husband Bill (an excellent Jeff Still) and her two siblings. At one point, she complains about the "greatest generation" noting: "They were poor and hated Nazis. Who didn't hate the Nazis?" As daughter Karen, Amy Warren is believably, goofily sweet, dragging along her fiancé Steve, who is played to the clammily uncomfortable hilt by Laurence Lau.

The third daughter is Ivy, and while Angelica Torn handles the task well, she appears younger than her character’s 44 years which throws off different vibes, especially as she begins to fall for her young first cousin “Little” Charles (Steve Key). Libby George and Paul Vincent O’Connor create a functionally dysfunctional couple as Mattie Fae and Charlie Allen. And Emily Kinney is properly distracted and whiny as Bill and Barbara’s 14-year-old pothead daughter Jean.

But oddly, one of the best scenes is the first, when Beverly, played with exhausted nobility by Jon DeVries, interviews a young Cheyenne woman, Johnna, to be hired as cook and housekeeper. In those few minutes, DeVries allows the audience to internalize the sad desperation Beverly feels, and he remains a part of the show even though he never again appears.

In any show this expansive (it runs 3 ½ hours with two intermissions), there are bound to be some missteps. As Johnna, DeLanna Studi often seems awkward or forced, especially in a strange moment when she swings a frying pan at Steve, making it look like she’s playing badminton, badly. And Marcus Nelson as the Sherriff brings a new level of stiffness to the role of a flatfoot.

But performance pleasures abound on Todd Rosenthal’s glorious three-story set, making August: Osage County a primary destination for anyone who gives a damn about great theater.

August: Osage County

Through April 25 at the Palace Theatre,

PlayhouseSquare, 1615 Euclid Avenue,

216-241-6000