Peter Bergman Theater Reviews

"A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens, adapted by Eric Hill. Directed by Eric Hill and E. Gray Simons, III, at Berkshire Theatre Festival.

"Marley was dead ... to begin with," the opening line of Dickens' most famous tale of two cities (London real and London imagined) is also the opening line of Dickens’ most theatrical of stories. It is entirely fitting, therefore, that the story itself is told by Mr. Dickens in the adaptation on stage at the Berkshire Theatre Festival’s Unicorn Theater.
In this adaptation by director/actor Eric Hill the tale is begun and ended by the narrative voice of the author. In between, the story is both acted and mimed by the large cast as Dickens leads us, lovingly and for his own particular enjoyment, through the classic yarn.

Scrooge is a nasty old man. He likes no one and no one, except his nephew and his sole employee, thinks much of him. In spite of his despicable treatment of them, nephew Fred and Bob Cratchitt cannot prevent themselves from toasting him, treating him like a person of interest, even praising him. In the end, it turns out, they were right to have faith in this despicable old skinflint because he’s really a nice guy who has buried himself inside the facade of meanness until even he believes himself to be unlovable and unloving. What saves Scrooge from a horrible fate in the afterlife is the intervention of three spirits sent by his long-dead ex-partner Jacob Marley who unfortunately had no one to intervene for him.
On a beautiful, musical comedy style set designed by Carl Sprague, bedecked in the elegant and richly prepared costumes designed by Jessica Risser-Milne, lit to a moody perfection by Matthew E. Adelson, director Eric Hill has moved his large cast of 27 actors playing 41 roles expertly. The stage is always in motion it seems, providing a sense of the pre-Victorian metropolis that is the center of the play. London is the villain, it seems, over-crowded, unfeeling, unseeing in many ways. London ignores the gifts implied in the youthful Ebenezer Scrooge’s lust for life. The city’s responsibility to nurture is left unexplored and Scrooge’s lust turns from humanity to gold at humanity’s expense. Few in the surge of mankind pay much attention to Ebenezer’s twisted sensibilities until it is too late for him to turn back. And the city on stage continues to bustle and hustle and move.
That fluidity is distracting. It sometimes replaces character development in this presentation. An actor with great potential, Robert Serrell, plays Cratchitt in a distracted and off-hand manner, making him less sympathetic than he might otherwise become. Lindsey McWhorter as Cratchitt’s wife makes a much stronger impression, though not necessarily a fine one, in her stilted presentation of the woman, but still it is a more sympathetic one in spite of her curious vocal phrasings. Andrew Belcher as Fred, the boisterous nephew, is a much finer characterization. E. Gray Simons III is an equally boisterous Fezziwig, Scrooge’s first major influence and employer.
Matthew Crider makes a fine Jacob Marley. He is both terrifying and sympathetic in his seemingly reduced portrayal. As Old Joe, the pawnbroker, he does an equally excellent job. Youngsters Rider Staunton as Ignorance and Hallie Novak as Want make a major impression.
The three ghosts are fascinating. Ramona L. Alexander is superb as Christmas Past, both beautiful and surreal as she motions, beckons, moves and alerts Scrooge to his own history. Travis G. Daly makes Christmas Future into a looming presence with haunting hands. Anthony Mark Stockard, in a very reduced role as Christmas Present, is right on target and could have used a few additional minutes to great effect.
The two men who hold center stage in this edition of the novella-on-stage are Hill himself as Ebenezer Scrooge and Joshua Davis as Charles Dickens, storyteller and actor (two roles the man himself played throughout his lengthy 19th century career). Davis is only slightly short of brilliant. He handles straightforward narration with class and style, poise and perception. He knows where and how to emphasize a word to make a point. His economy of movement and gesture is picture perfect for the period portrayed on stage. He could, frankly, tell the tale from start to finish and probably captivate an audience.
At the other end of the spectrum is Hill’s understated Scrooge. He is more hateful, in part, for his reticence to temperament in Hill’s interpretation, than many have been in their obvious and deep-seated anger. Hill takes the most oft-quoted line "Bah. Humbug!" and gives it new resonance as these words escape his Scrooge rather than form him. His attitudes, both physical and vocal, are unique. He shows us right from the beginning that there is a man under the facade of monster. His reclamation, his redemption, seems inevitable here and not the challenge that others have made it. While I liked this version, I wasn’t completely taken in by it. I admit I prefer my Scrooge hard as nails, and Hill’s is much more a picture-wire Scrooge, malleable and twisted.
In the one hour and 25-minute production (including intermission), Hill and company please an audience of all ages with this lovely and loving production of "A Christmas Carol." You don’t have to be a lover of theater or of this story to have a wonderful time. You just have to sit there and let London and its people surge around you and take you into the center of its life.
That’s the message of this show — let yourself go into the center and enjoy yourself.

"A Christmas Carol plays at Berkshire Theatre Festival's Unicorn Theater in Stockbridge MA through Dec. 30. For full schedule or to purchase tickets, priced from $20-$45, call the box office at 413-298-5536 or visit berkshiretheatre.org.

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Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill by Lanie Robertson. Production supervised by Julianne Boyd; originally directed by Rob Ruggiero

Gail Nelson becomes Billie Holiday. That’s it in a nutshell. Gail Nelson becomes Billie Holiday.
Nelson’s voice is sweeter, lighter, lovelier than Holiday’s voice. She is prettier than Billie. She is somehow more complete, but on the stage, in front of a microphone, wearing a gardenia in her hair and singing the old familiar Holiday songs, she simply transforms into the Lady who sings the blues.
But forget Lady Sings the Blues, the movie about Billie Holiday. Forget that character named Billie and listen to the real inside story from the real Billie as you find her at Barrington Stage Company this week. Here is the real low-down on the life of a heavy little girl from Baltimore who did some transforming all her own.

Playwright Lanie Robertson has drawn a different sort of picture of the singer and her life and we get to know how difficult that life was for a misfit of a girl who wanted to be a combination of Louie Armstrong and Bessie Smith.
Nelson manages to bring both the joy of Holiday’s performances and the horror of getting through them into this two hour, one woman play. We experience the extraordinary high of a singer’s use of her voice and the equally perilous high that alcohol abuse can bring a person. From a woman in control of herself to a woman totally out of control, Holiday in her capable hands is a riveting, rotating star who is clearly on an unstoppable descent through a Hell all of her own making.
Danny Holgate plays her accompanist and friend Jimmy Powers. He not only plays piano but he plays his role in Holiday’s life and performance with a subtle humor that may surprise some people. How much is real between these two characters is speculative, but one thing is clear about Jimmy: he is her lifeline at this nightclub engagement in Philadelphia. Without Jimmy, she cannot be herself, do her songs, get through the night. Holgate is a reassuring presence in the role, one that is never in the limelight without being just outside its perimeter.
The third member of the troupe is bass player David Jackson. An able musician who reinforces the work of the other two musicians in this show, he gets a solo now and then and lets it rip.
As for production values, there’s a table and two chairs, a wall, a piano and a dress with long, fingerless opera gloves. Lights make the moods that uphold the images within the songs Holiday sings or support the emotions behind the stories she reveals. Jeff Davis is the designer of this lighting and he clearly understands the play, the songs and the woman who lives at the center of them. The show’s warmth is held within its lighting, while its truth is exposed there in the performance of its shimmering star. I think the shimmer is split equally between the designer’s work and the Nelson’s own particular sheen.
If you are a fan of Billie Holiday’s music, not all of it blues but much of it peppered with rhythm and up-tempo riffs, this is an evening that you will not ever forget. There are only five performances of this show, total, so waste no time in getting into Pittsfield and seeing what could be the final turn of Miss Billie Holiday, as played by Gail Nelson, at that sweet Philly club owned by Mr. Emerson himself.
Like the lucky few who may have seen the historic singer in that engagement, you won’t forget the night.

Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill plays through Dec. 9. Tickets are $25-$35. Call the box office at 413-236-8888 for tickets.

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Rabbit Hole by David Lindsay-Abaire, directed by Joshua Bishoff, at Main Street Stage, North Adams.

It is right to assume that when a play receives the Pulitzer Prize it is a very good play. It is also right to assume that this is due to the play itself and not the people in it or the production values of its principal presentation; it is the play.
David Lindsay-Abaire’s Pulitzer Prize winner, the 2006 “Rabbit Hole” is not quite what one assumes it to be. It is definitely a departure from his earlier works like “Fuddy Meers,” or “Wonder of the World,” vapid pieces that left me completely cold when I saw them. Here is a play that deals with a difficult, human problem: the loss of a child. It is certainly a topic that should be prize-worthy if it is addressed with sensitivity and clarity.
Lindsay-Abaire addresses the sensitivity in his characters, but somewhere along the way loses the clarity.

In its current regional production at Main Street Stage in North Adams by the community theater-producing organization Mill City Productions, the odd disparities emerge in the characters with a bump and whistle. The play unfolds slowly, the information we need to know emerging in a natural, normal conversational way. There is nothing artificial here, and that works well.
Two sisters — Izzy, a hard-living fey young woman played by Amelia Wood, and Becca, the sorrowful, overly controlled housewife played by Liz Urban — are conversing at the kitchen table while Becca does laundry chores. The chatter is convivial if strained, which tells us a great deal about their relationship. The style of playing is natural, non-acted, normal; we are literally the flies the on the wall in a real-life situation. The only problem with this style is the lack of real relationship between the women; as one line ends, there’s a pause, and there’s another line recited from memory. The stagnation only calls into question the process these women use to communicate. Too much naturalism makes for very little theater.
Becca’s husband Howie, played by Chad Therrien, is equally low-key about conversation, and it isn’t until Nat, the mother of the two girls, fires up the flaring charcoal of this dark comedy with her wit and superb timing — in the hands of actress Jackie DiGiorgis — that the story begins to truly take hold on both participants and audience. The tragedy in the lives of Becca and Howie finally takes center stage and the rest of the play revolves around it.
However — and this is a big playwright however — in the final scene of the first act we discover that the sensitive, strong and seemingly snowball of a husband is actually the angry grieving partner who has lost his grip on reality. This sudden turnabout in character is where the clarity begins to falter and the play becomes a semi-maudlin exercise, certainly not — to my mind — Pulitzer material unless the concept of self-deception and its influence on the people around the self-deluded is really the play’s intended target as a subject.
As if to make that the real point, there is also a young high school student, responsible for the accidental death of the child, who grabs attention through the emotionally riveting performance of Trevor Foehl. His Jason becomes a focal point in a monologue in act one and two brief scenes in act two. If Therrien could have found and played the heat in the emotional writing given him for his meeting with the boy, things might have felt much more dynamic and real than they did on opening night.
As directed by Bishoff, this company gives us extraordinary moments and scenes but not a fully realized consistent show. He has used the awkward space at Main Street well, utilizing a second level upstage for a different location and splitting the forestage into two discreet playing areas. He has clearly given much attention to the character of Jason, but has not brought together the interplay between Izzy and Becca. He could easily cut six or seven minutes off the running time of the play by tightening their conversational style. He does allow each character the laughs that come with Lindsay-Abaire’s lines, though, and that is a relief in a play with such a dark subject to investigate.
The look of the show is consistent with its writing and its locale. The lighting was a bit off, but that can happen on opening night and a few touch-ups will solve those problems easily.
What is best in this production are the three performances that emotionally bind the audience to the characters: the mother as DiGiorgis plays her, the boy in the talented hands of Foehr and the vain and foolish sister who knows more than she realizes about life as portrayed by Wood.
Urban and Therrien are very good together but do not play well with others. Perhaps that is part of the message here about a child who’s life is cut short through accidental neglect: “I’ll see what I can dig up on eBay” Becca says at one point. Less eBay and more active involvement, I say.
This is an interesting play with a whole host of messages. It’s not an easy play. It doesn’t seem to me to be the best play of the year, but it certainly isn’t the worst one — far from it. What it is, right now, is an antidote to Thanksgiving turkey and Christmas shopping. although it will help you to appreciate, even more, what is good in your own life, your own relationships.

“Rabbit Hole,” a Mill City Productions presentation, plays at Main Street Stage in North Adams on Friday and Saturday nights at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. through Dec. 16. Tickets are $8 for adults and $6 for students and seniors. Info: 413-663-3211 or millcityproductions.org.

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