Peter Bergman Theater Reviews

“Hair Loom! Rapunzel and Rumplestiltskin in Dis-Tress,” by Judy Staber and the Loons, directed by Tom Detwiler, at the Ghent Playhouse.

When Columbia County’s PantaLoons get going, they really charge up on all cylinders.
This season, in their three-week run at the Ghent Playhouse, they are taking on two classics of the Grimm Brother output — Rapunzel with her long golden hair and Rumplestiltskin with his straw into gold routine — and combining them into one immodestly political, comic romp.
Using herb and garden references in so many ways, they have managed to create a new tale, one of two sisters lost to each other through the intervention of the garden witch next door, who are reunited under the oddest of circumstances, three mothers’ lies.

“Fairy tales can come true, it can happen to you, if you’re young at heart,” would seem to the watch-cry of this troup of players, none of whom are anything other than young at heart. The cleverly inserted references to “Shrub” and his illegal war, to various Washington and Albany political luminaries and their private and personal needs and issues, and their incorporation into the plot-heavy storyline of “Hair Loom” are evidence of the richness of local and national material, as well as of the cleverness of Judy Staber, who oversees the process of creation here. Surely as the political scene exposes new information some of it will make its way into the play, so there’s no point in quoting lines which may disappear as the show continues its holiday run. Instead, the characters and their portrayers should take precedence.
It should be noted here that in classic British fashion the cast is primarily cross-dressing — men playing women, women playing men. As peculiar as you may think this, it is traditional and this company has a roaring good time with this, as usual. Each member of the company has chosen an alter-ego (see below) who takes on a role in this all-principal, no chorus musical.
Miss Allanious plays Rapunzel Gardener, first-born child of Rosemary and Rue Gardener (Rosemary is the lone parent on view, played by Herbacea Sprig). Miss Allanious, in real life, is Ron Harrington. His Rapunzel is a singer whose voice inspires love in young Prince Basil, played by Basil Alfredo (or Sally McCarthy), another sweet singer. The two make beautiful music together.
Rapunzel’s sister Ranuncula is played by Little Ricky Rows Well (or Rick Rowsell) whose dancing feet and pert smile similarly inspire love in Prince Basil’s older brother, King Borage (played by Anita Mandalay-Pronto, born Cathy Lee-Vischer). These two also duet nicely.
Tamara Snotherday (a k a Tom Detwiler) plays the boy’s mother, Dowager Queen Belladonna whose sister, missing all these years, is actually Dame Ragweed, a witch, as portrayed by Oliver Gaylord Camp (otherwise known as Johnna Murray — the only cast member not actually playing a member of the opposite sex).
Witch Ragweed has usurped Rapunzel from Rosemary (played in reality by Paul Murphy) to replace the son she lost to her wizarding husband. That long-lost son, Rumplestiltskin, is played by Polly (Apollonius) Feemus (or Judy Staber, herself). Filling out the cast is the Palace servant, Thrift, undertaken by Jolly Jumper (or Joanne Maurer).
With all this confusion going on, the company plays out their story, retells it and lets the audience participate with appropriate boos, hisses and cheers. Basically, a good time is had by all and the songs, all 20 of them, are parodies of songs you know, or should know if you’re a musical comedy fan. The whole affair consumes 94 minutes in a single act and the actions is unrelenting and definitely funny.
Opening nights of material of this sort can by trying as the cast begins to understand where the laughs are, and how long they may last. Often moments are mis-timed and good jokes, both verbal and physical, may fall flat. This bunch of madcaps, however, should never be daunted by something not receiving the reaction they assume is their own. Each audience will undoubtedly bring different perspectives to what they see and hear, but hopefully none will be daunted by the opposite sexism of the casting.
In fact, Murray, cast as a woman in this year’s event, pulls off the almost impossible here: She acts like a man acting like a woman and in her very own Victor/Victoria experience manages to be among the finest players in this show. Everything she does, or says, or sings, is expert and funny and charming. Detwiler who usually gets the heaviest laugh lines in this plays is almost an incidental player here. Still, he and his gown and wig get the laughs allotted to him.
Rowsell’s Ranuncula emerges as the quintessential ingenue, all smiles and grace and charm. Harrington’s Rapunzel, on the other hand, has guts and drive and hairdos to contend with and he pulls it all off with extraordinary flair. His ballad, taken from the current Broadway hit, The Drowsy Chaperone, allows him to exhibit a variety of emotions and to do so very well.
The two brothers are excellent. Lee-Vischer as the king is strong and handsome and sings with lovely tones, while her brother, in the hands and voice of McCarthy, emerges from the bunch as the most lyrical voice on the stage. Her tenor is superb.
Murphy is all tenderness and awkwardness as the pregnant Rosemary and he is very funny indeed trying to clutch low-lying plants in the show’s opening scene. Staber, as the villainous, ugly old man of the play, steals applause in the boos and hisses accorded her and in her musical numbers is at her finest, particularly her ten o’clock song “They Can’t Know My Name.”
Maurer is also the costume designer for this romp about Ramps and Rumps. If the lines don’t get you, the costumes certainly will for they are colorful, funny and perfect for their characters. One costume that needs to be remarked upon is that of Campanula (the accompanist/musical director/interlocutor played by Bert deBlues, or Paul Leyden). Donning two hats and sometimes playing the piano with no hands, he is ideal for his role here.
Rick Rowsell also designed the fairy-tale set for this show and Ian Gulliver has brightened the affair with his lighting.
And, not to spill too many of Jack’s beans (he’s not in this show), there is a pre-show show with puppets created by Maurer and Rowsell. If I have one qualm about this production, it is the difficulty in getting the puppets’ voice truly audible through the too, too solid flesh of the set, and this goes for the music as well.
Treat yourself to a holiday musical that has no ghosts, no Scrooge and not one Tiny Tim reference. Get to the Ghent Playhouse while there’s still a seat left to purchase (opening night was completely sold out). You’ll never regret the effort!

“Hair Loom! plays at the Ghent Playhouse in Ghent, N.Y., through Dec. 9, with performances on Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. Tickets are $8-$15. Info: 518-392-6264.

J. Peter Bergman sleeps in Pittsfield, but spends his days with poet Edna St. Vincent Millay in Austerlitz. For more of his reviews, check out advocateweekly.com or his own Web site, berkshirebrightfocus.com.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 4:36 PM | Permalink

“Fully Committed,” by Becky Mode, directed by Andrew Volkoff, at Barrington Stage Company

“Under Attack, I’m being taken; about to crack, defenses breakin’/won’t somebody please have a heart/Come and rescue me now, ‘cause I’m falling apart ...” goes the lyric to the ABBA song featured on Broadway in “Mamma Mia!” It completely describes the way Sam Peliczowski feels about mid-way through the one hour and 17-minute one-act play that Barrington Stage Company is presenting for the second time.

Sam is a reservationist, working in the basement of a fancy, highly successful restaurant in Manhattan. The place is an international hit, a sensation, and he’s been abandoned by his two co-workers on this fateful day, left to handle the phones, the reservation books, the outraged customers and the staff upstairs who are working the lunch shift.
Sam is, as so many restaurant workers are these days, an out-of-work actor. He’s just had a callback for a new play at Lincoln Center and he’s hoping for a final call-back; actors no longer crave the job the way they do that final callback. He’s from the midwest and there are family problems to deal with, possibly more than he realizes. He aches to go home for Christmas, but his schedule won’t permit it. He is a man with a lot of longings: family, work, sexual gratification, even just a date. But the phones ring and ring and there’s no help. He’s being assigned hideous duties that don’t fall under his job description; he’s being threatened on all sides.
He is, literally and figuratively, under attack.
In the course of playing this role, actor Vince Gatton is left to play a quartet alone: one actor and three telephones. On the other end of the lines are about 40 different people, all verbalized and physicalized by Gatton as he plays both sides of the conversation for us. He is Sam and he is every caller.
Initially, this is a bit startling, even confusing. The first two calls are odd ones and his assumption of the personalities at the other end of the line is a non-reality in a very realistic setting. It’s tough. (This time around, Gatton brings the odd reality of his many characters into focus quicker and better. That confusion felt in February is gone in November.) However, as soon as you catch the playwright’s drift here, it makes little difference that this thickly populated play is represented by a single entity in view. Partly this is the result of an actor’s remarkable ability to keep 41 voices and attitudes completely straight and honest. We never mistake one character for another; he won’t let us. Gatton plays brilliantly in a dialogue that requires different vocal qualities, with many of them repeating. By the end of the show we actually know each character just by their tone of voice, requiring no names uttered by the callers.
But none of this manipulation of voice and body, this high-speed, non-stop mania would matter if the play had no storyline. It does, thank goodness. Goals are established, achieved and out-distanced here. There is satisfaction for the man on stage, the folks in the audience. For anyone who has ever manned a switchboard of any kind, there is the added pleasure in watching a master of message-taking making life-changing decisions through his work.
Director Andrew Volkoff has used the set designed by Brian Prather effectively, although there are so many spaces where a paranoid person could hide that remain obviously avoided here. No matter how undone Sam becomes, Volkoff never lets him go wild. He restrains Sam and keeps him real, sympathetic and likeable.
Early in the play, Sam describes the cuisine of this restaurant to a curious patron: “The chef calls it Global Fusion,” he says aptly describing the menu of callers as well. Covering for his absent boss, Bob, there ultimately comes a moment when that one-syllable name becomes a cry of triumph and release for Sam, a moment that sets the audience on its ear with laughter and jubilation.
The play, funny and brittle, provides a brilliant exercise in character, characterization and cartoon playing for a talented interpreter. Volkoff and Gatton make the most of their talents and abilities in pulling all that credibly together. (They are aided by a fine production team and a stronger sense of theater in the uptown venue than might have been expected. And this time around, the play reveals its subtleties as well as its more blatant points.) To quote another ABBA song that seems pertinent to the undertaking on stage in Pittsfield, “The game is on again ... a big thing or a small/The winner takes it all/ The winner takes it all.”
There are winners here and this is one show not to be missed.

“Fully Committed” played at the Berkshire Museum in February. It is now playing at Barrington Stage Company’s downtown Pittsfield theater on Union Street (just off of North Street) through Nov. 18, with shows Thursday at 7 p.m. and Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., with matinees Saturday at 4 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. Info: barringtonstageco.org.

J. Peter Bergman sleeps in Pittsfield, but spends his days with poet Edna St. Vincent Millay in Austerlitz. For more of his reviews, check out advocateweekly.com or his own Web site, berkshirebrightfocus.com.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 4:07 PM | Permalink

“The Mystery of Irma Vep,” a penny dreadful by Charles Ludlam, directed by Wendy Walraven at the Main Street Stage

A penny dreadful is a story written to tantalize and frighten, often published on cheap paper with second-rate illustrations, available at newsstands for a penny in the Victorian age. The idea was to provide cheap thrills to lower-class readers. They were extremely popular.
Likewise the horror genre of the early 1930s in Hollywood provided a similar experience with stories of mummies, werewolves and vampires that could be inexpensively produced without star names and sell tickets across a Depression-era countryside. These were also very popular.

Playwright Charles Ludlam, in 1984, combined both concepts into a play that provides a third gimmick, one that had been just as popular on stage in the period that spanned the Victorian to the Depression, that of the quick-change artist who could play many roles in one scene and do it without a break in dialogue or dramatic development. To all of this he added Daphne DuMaurier’s classic novel and film, “Rebecca,” as well as Alfred Hitchcock’s take on the play “Angel Street” which became the film “Gaslight” and created “The Mystery of Irma Vep.” Oddly enough, Irma herself is almost a non-existent character in the play, rather like Rebecca in the DuMaurier. Without a flashback, her two appearances are of paramount importance to the plot, such as it is, and without a personal reality, she is a dramatic force that completes the cycle of horror and intimidation.
Obviously this play has something for everyone and, as in all of Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theater Company plays, there is a great deal of comedy to the proceedings. This one is filled with laughs and even the one musical moment, a dulcimer played vocal duet, is borderline hilarious. In this production the sweetness of the moment almost overwhelms the piece, but that may be because the two actresses playing the eight roles in the show at Main Street Stage in North Adams are sisters and their vocal blending suddenly is what the show is about. That only lasts a minute.
Justina Trova opens the play in the role of Jane Twisden, the housekeeper at Mandecrest, an ancient home on the moors. Her angular face and her broad accent provide just enough drama to keep us on the edge of our seats. Clearly, as she moves about the room, admiring the portrait of poor, dead Irma Vep, she is a creature fabricated from the elements of another time and place. Her fellow servant, the wooden-legged Nicodemus Underwood, played by Alexia Trainor, is a romantic figure, a servant who would lay down his life for his master and the lady of the house.
Trainor next appears as Lady Enid, the new wife of Lord Edgar. Busty and blonde, a former “actress,” Lady Enid is not as convincing a character as Nicodemus. Trova, on the other hand, as the wolf-hunting husband, is right on and most believable. Later, in an act set in the tombs of Egypt, Trainor becomes the guide, Alcazar, and again wins us over to her darker side.
Both women manage the near-impossible, playing scenes with themselves, as well as with one another, changing wigs, hats, facial expressions and voices expertly and quickly. Sometimes there are full costume changes in a blink of an eye. They are aided in this by an off-stage crew of female stage hands who also dance a delicious scene change in a minute and a half as Egypt is struck and Mandecrest comes back for a final act. Under the guiding hand and eye of director Wendy Walraven, this is all handled with finesse.
No one will ever claim that the Ludlam play is a masterwork. It is a bit of nonsense calling up in our memories so many of the old movies we know. This was Ludlam’s art. What he has given us, in this play, is a wonderful way to wile away two hours without worrying about deep meaning or understanding humanity. He just wants us to have fun, and in this production that is exactly what we have — fun.
“You don’t hate me, but you don’t like me,” Lady Enid says at one point. That may sum up the experience of this show. This is the fifth production I’ve seen, including the 1984 original, and the first one in which the roles have been played by two women. Men can often parody women with a strange sensibility that works, but women have a much more difficult time bringing off the male characters they assume. In the case of this production Trova does very well as Lord Edgar and Trainor manages to make Nicodemus believable in spite of a costume that shows off her ample bosom. It is with their women characters where they have more difficulty, particularly Trainor’s Lady Enid. I didn’t hate her, but I didn’t like her either. This was the one bad portrait in the play, for me. Somehow I couldn’t believe in her, except during that lovely dulcimer duet of “The Last Rose of Summer.”
The set, design uncredited, is perfect for the play. Walraven’s costumes work very well (except for the Nicodemus shirt) and the lighting by Frank LaFrazia is moody and appropriate. Kelli Newby’s props are as funny as anything else in the play, particularly the mummy case, the dead wolf and the limp body of the assaulted Lady Enid.
What you get in North Adams is a deliciously inane evening of mild thrills and funny lines, quirky characters and the endless nostalgia for the horror films of bygone days. The laughter rarely ceases and the mystery of Irma Vep (think anagrams for a moment) is revealed, solved and resolved before you leave the theater. What could be better than that during this Halloween season!

“The Mystery of Irma Vep” continues at 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays through Nov. 10 . Tickets and info: 413-663-3240 or mainstreetstage.org.

J. Peter Bergman sleeps in Pittsfield, but spends his days with poet Edna St. Vincent Millay in Austerlitz. For more of his reviews, check out advocateweekly.com or his own Web site, berkshirebrightfocus.com.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 10:30 AM | Permalink