Peter Bergman Theater Reviews

"Phantom," music and lyrics by Maury Yeston, book by Arthur Kopit, based on Gaston Leroux’s novel "The Phantom of the Opera." Directed by Doug Hodge. At the Mac-Haydn Theatre.

In this 16-year-old musical, the refrain "Melodie, melodie, melodie, melodie..." is sung so often that you actually think there is a tune or two in this two-and-three-quarter-hour show written by the team that gave us "Nine." This show has never made it to Broadway but has seemingly played every whistlestop in America since 1992, blocked from the mainstem by the Andrew Lloyd Webber version, which beat the Americans to the punch. Now it is on stage in Chatham, N.Y., at the Mac-Haydn Theatre. And you certainly remember how to sing that refrain beginning "melodie..."
With a sprightly young cast, peppered with a few more seasoned troupers, the summer theater in the round is delivering a fine-looking production with sumptuous costumes, a turntable set and more furniture than there is in a department store. There is so much, in fact, that the nimble double Kurzweil orchestra has to play themes over and over to fill the much needed time to change the sets, and there are 16 scenes in Act One with seven more in Act Two.

Kopit and Yeston did not provide an easy show to produce. They did, however, produce a script that is different from any other version and songs that make you want to run right out and by a CD of something else. The first duet between the Phantom and Christine, "Home," is lovely but not hummable, and the second act duet between the Phantom and Carriere, "You are my Own," is also a lovely song, just hard to remember.
Monica M. Wemitt as Carlotta and John Saunders as her husband, Cholet, are quite lovely as the couple who purchase the opera house in Paris so that she will always have a place to sing. The pros really work hard to bring the level up to a higher professional standard, even when Saunders is mugging his way through a kissing scene or Wemitt is turning a tad too diabolical (read the witch in "Snow White") in her plotting against the younger soprano about to make her debut. There is still something vital and real in their performances.
Crystal Mosser is Christine. A lovely girl, she moves beautifully and sings more then just passably, but she really has all of the most difficult music and not enough "melodie, melodie..." which she also sings at least twice if not more. She is being wooed, in this version, by the Count de Chandon — a champagne champion — played here by Robert Teasdale in quite a winning way.
As the former owner of the opera house, Carriere, the company has cast Johnnie Moore, a strikingly handsome man who has the elegance to pull off this role perfectly. His former paramour, Belladova, is played by Katerina Papacostas, who can surely sing the notes, but not the interpretation of her songs. She proves that reaching the notes is not enough if the quality of the voice is thin, reedy and unformed.
The Phantom is played by Ben Jacoby who was recently seen as Corny Collins in "Hairspray" on this stage. He has a good voice, though he should learn to warm up before a performance. His quirky part, a mistreated, misshapen youth raised by an indulgent and loving mother in the sewer system in this version, gives him ample opportunity to emote, both in scene and song and he takes every opportunity to do so.
Jimm Halliday has designed sumptuous and heavy costumes festooned brilliantly for this show, visually dazzling with his cloth constructions on a the big and technically fabulous sets by Bud Clark. Once again, Andrew Gmoser provides the right lights for this show. There are several special effects in the show, like the chandelier crash, which work very well, but on Saturday night two of the company took major spills, which may say something about overdressing your set.
Hodge has executed the perfect production of this complex show in the available space he has to work with at the Mac. People and props come from all directions in this show and even with two accidents, the company works well under Hodge’s direction. Choreography by Kelly Shook was perfectly appropriate.
As a non-fan of the Webber version of this show, I cannot wholeheartedly recommend its rival, the Yeston. The show is flawed with too much unmemorable music, too few memorable lyrics and a constant push of "Melodie, melodie, melodie, melodie..." until you just want to shout, "Enough already!"

"Phantom" plays at the Mac-Haydn Theater on Route 203 in Chatham, N.Y., through Aug. 3. For tickets, contact the box office at 518-392-9292.

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“A Man For All Seasons” by Robert Bolt. Directed by Richard Corley. At Berkshire Theatre Festival.

Episodic, Brechtian-style theater can be very engaging. When I first saw "A Man For All Seasons" back in 1965, I was an Eric Bentley Brechtian, intent on seeing the engagement of alienation techniques. This play, with its fascinating character known as The Common Man, gave me everything I expected in such a performance genre.
Bolt, the playwright, forged a split-level drama with the slightly forced story of Sir Thomas More who won’t give an inch in his principles to satisfy the needs of his king at the upper level and the progress of a common man from servant to executioner with stops along the way to become cleric and pre-judging jury of his betters. Bolt, like Brecht, wanted his audience to understand how the classes can communicate through action. Bolt provided his audience, principally the wealthier patrons in the front rows, with a series of ugly images of mankind, both physical and moral leaving us, in the cheap seats at the back of the balcony, smugly aware of how disquieting it was for front-row "ambassadors" to be caught directly in the vision of such unfeeling humanity.
When I went to see the movie, which starred the brilliant stage More — Paul Scofield — I was sorely disappointed that the playwright, as screenwriter, had removed the element of alienation completely, discarding the Common Man for a series of handsome, young actors playing the "roles" assumed by that character in the play. Gone was the contrast between the common and uncommon man. Gone was the tension of watching the lower elements get the best of the betters. Gone was the angst of the final moments of the play.
I never thought anyone could do that to me again, but in this new production at the Berkshire Theatre Festival they pulled a fast one and deprived me of that chill the final speech of the play sent through me by taking away the punch line from the man with the one-two punch at his beck and call. I do not know whose decision it was to make this totally egregious choice. After three hours and 10 minutes of dynamic theater, it is a lousy act, a criminal act in fact, to change the impact of a line written in simplicity yet warning the front-row patrons that the masses are out there behind them, in the balcony seats, in the parking lots, in the world.

In the script we have this description: "THE COMMON MAN: Late middle age. He wears from head to foot black tights which delineate his pot-bellied figure. His face is crafty, loosely benevolent, its best expression that of base humor." On stage we have Walter Hudson, tall, lithe, slender, half-naked in beige leather pants. Oddly, considering the change to the final lines, he still says in his opening appearance: "Is this a costume? Does this say anything? It barely covers one man's nakedness! A bit of black material to reduce Old Adam to the Common Man." Here the blatantly different aural and visual image makes no sense and is startlingly hard to understand. Surely if the final lines can be irresponsibly altered, the word black can become beige without hampering the play or the author’s intent. In its current form it merely confuses.
Hudson does a wonderful job with the character. He knows when to directly confront the audience and how to make that pay. He knows how to play the misunderstandings of his servant-self and the deeper comprehension of the conniving going on that motivates him later. Where we really go astray with his performance is at the final moments of the drama, the beheading of the leading character. He has not been given the motion, nor the sound effect, to be truly on target, and then there’s that mistake of line appropriation — oh, well, Mr. Hudson, you could have been the man Bolt is describing as a "man for all seasons," for surely that applies more to this character than to Sir Thomas who is a man for one season only.
More is played by Eric Hill in a larger than life, slightly pompous, deeply moving portrayal of a man who can only act on legal grounds to protect his moral rights. When he gives himself over to the words of the play and allows himself to play the scenes with wife, with friends, with king, he is absolutely brilliant, but all too often he pulls back from this to play the moral of the show and there he loses us a bit. Hill has the ability to be brilliant in this part and instead he chooses only to be very good. He has the good fortune to play some of his best scenes opposite Diane Prusha as his wife Alice. Prusha takes her into every deep emotion the character possesses and comes out at the end as the best of wives, the finest of human spirits even though the acts that precede this final change would have us dislike her for her lack of humanity, her disdain for her husband’s decisions. Prusha has the gift and uses it well in this role to create a more sympathetic woman than Bolt may have wished.
Tara Franklin shines with her simplicity in playing More’s daughter Margaret. Past editions of the show have made their relationship suspect, but here she is just a daughter, loving and sweet and understanding of her father’s worst decisions. Her lover, then husband, is played nicely by Greg Keller.
The Duke of Norfolk, More’s best friend and last ally, is played by James Lloyd Reynolds who manages to hold the Duke in check so that he never seems quite the ninny he is made out to be, particularly by Thomas Cromwell, neatly recreated by David Chandler. Chandler is almost too slimy at times, but his character never falters. He brings a true sense of power to the part, as does Andrew Belcher as Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury.
Gareth Saxe has impact in his one scene as Henry VIII. Peter Kybart is a sinister Cardinal Wolsey. Allison Vanouse has two very good small scenes as "the Woman."
A goodly portion of the play belongs to Tommy Schrider in the role of Richard Rich, who begins as an impoverished gentleman who befriends More, uses him to climb the social ladder through employment and who ends up as the lying, cheating, avaricious Lord Chamberlain who ultimately brings about the demise of More. Schrider’s consistency in the part is fascinating as we see him alter visibly, yet never find him different no matter which rung of ladder he clings to on his constant climb upward.
Richard Corley moves his characters beautifully through a wonderfully flexible set designed by Joseph Varga through the moody and elemental lighting designed by Matthew E. Adelson. Murell Horton’s costumes are principally just right for the 16-th century period. Scott Killian’s music is often too loud.
More, toward the end of his days, says, "I do none harm, I say none harm, I think none harm." It would seem to be the message of the play, but not so. That message has been left to the man who begins the tale and, in the script at any rate, ends it. The Common Man is supposed to say "...if you must make trouble, make the sort of trouble that's expected. Well, I don't need to tell you that. Good night. If we should bump into one another, recognize me." Considering the path he has taken and the changes it has brought him to, that final sentence is a warning, not a plea for recognition, a warning that no matter how important you may be, or think you may be, the Common Man is always there, always available to take on the unpleasant jobs, always at your back, a man for any and all seasons, for any and all reasons.
That message is lost in Stockbridge. Without it you do not have this play, no matter how good a job everyone has done. And for the most part they have all done a brilliant job. They just missed the point. And who has appropriated this most important line? I cannot even begin to tell you, for I do not know. And I don’t want to guess.

“A Man For All Seasons” plays at the Berkshire Theatre Festival on Route 7 in Stockbridge through Aug. 9. For tickets, which range from $23 to $68, call the box office at 413-298-5576.

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“The Musical of Musicals, The Musical,” book by Eric Rockwell and Joanne Bogart, lyrics by Joanne Bogart, music by Eric Rockwell. Directed by Bert Bernardi. At the Theater Barn

It’s a standard plot, traditional in show business: a beautiful young girl can’t pay the rent, or the mortgage, and the wily old landlord, usually ugly, always mean, will marry the girl instead. In the knick of time, the handsome, if somewhat diffident, hero comes to save the day, pay the geezer off and marry the girl himself.
As old as time, that story. Used in some form by just about everyone in the modern theater: from the melodramas of old, with oleo song stylings between the scenes, to “Oklahoma!” by Rodgers and Hammerstein. “The Musical of Musicals, The Musical” takes R&H to a new place and then does them one, no two, no three, no four times better using the same basic story concept in a total of five musical theater styles: Sondheim, Jerry Herman, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Kander and Ebb and, of course, Rodgers and Hammerstein.

’m not giving away much here, because the laughs are so fast and furious it is hard, in the dark, to write much down with clarity. The first half of this revuesical at the Theater Barn is devoted to three of the stage’s finest musical authors and the second act to two more, with a third thrown in for good measure at the end. The plot never varies, but the stories do. The characters always have the basic same names and the pianist on stage gives stage directions so you never get lost.
Dressed in basic black and dragging chairs into place, this show’s foursome is marvelously directed by Bert Bernardi who knows how to parody the work he has been doing for years. Guided by some of the funniest lyrics and silliest dialogue ever heard on the Theater Barn stage, Bernardi keeps this show moving and his actors keep grimacing, grinning and glowing with graceful glee as they play every cliche for its full value, every witticism for its impact and every style the memory can muster for more than mere merriment.
In "Corn," the Rodgers and Hammerstein parody, June, played by Megan Rozak, is indeed busting out all over. She continues to do so throughout the evening ultimately manhandling herself in the Kander and Ebb shot at this plot, titled "Speakeasy," set in a lusty cabaret in Chicago. Rozak has a beautiful and powerful singing voice, a distinctive delivery of very bad lines, and a face that never stops acting, reacting and redacting; in fact she seems to be revising her roles as she plays them ... in perfect Broadway fashion.
Daniel Moser as Willie is tall, funny with a rubbery face and a wonderful voice, and handsomely handy as a hero. In the Webber parody, "Aspects of Junita" he makes all other Webber heroes seem false and underplayed, especially in "Phantom of the Opera." An excellent dancer, he and Rozak truly shine in Corn’s dream ballet.
Jerielle Morwitz as Abby plays every form of Abby from Mother Abby (think "The Sound of Music’) in "Corn" to the star of that perennial Jerry Herman revival "Dear Abby!" in which she is the slightly over-the-hill, non-singing, non-dancing musical star of a show about how good she really is at being the star. In "A Little Complex," the Stephen Sondheim version of the tale, she delivers a "Ladies Who Lunch" send-up of Elaine Stritch to "Die!" for.
Rounding out the quartet, in all the villain roles — all named Jitter — is James Anthony Fernandes. He uses his tenor qualities well in the bad-guy roles, from a quasi-Sweeney Todd in the Sondheim, to the phantom character in "Aspects of Junita," (singing the praises of his character, his creator Webber and his undying lack of alliance to the music of Puccini) to the very gay M.C. in "Speakeasy." It is hard to know in which of these roles he might be the funniest, but I think it will be a toss-up based on the makeup of the audience from show to show.
The 90-minute show rolls by all too quickly in this lovely mid-summer hit for the Barn. Every aspect of the production has its own values and they all work together to make this first musical entry of their season a guaranteed best-seller for the company. The one variable will be that audience. On opening night it seemed as though the rear of the theater was getting every joke, every "take" on the classics being spoofed while the front half of the theater sat in stony, tight-lipped silence. In truth, the more you know about the actual works by these men of the musicals the funnier you will find the parody writing here. For example: in the Rodgers and Hammerstein piece, the ballet is described by one of the foursome as being "run of DeMille." If you don’t get that, you won’t get much of the humor. And when Adam Jones, the wonderful pianist and musical director, gets directly involved in the action, you hopefully will find you just have to laugh and no mistake about it.
I cannot say this show is for everyone. You have to like the musical theater to get what these people are doing, saying and creating internally. But if you get it you’ll want to get it again and again. The most outrageous jokes, here, are worth saying and even when Abby tells one of my old jokes in "Speakeasy" it has its payoff for someone like me who knows what’s coming. That moment actually got an almost full theater guffaw.
So guffaw the season is over, get off yaw seats and make a reservation for this show. You won’t have much more fun anywhere this summer, not even at the nude beach — if you can find it.

“The Musical of Musicals, The Musical” plays at the Theater Barn on Route 20 in New Lebanon, NY through August 3. For tickets and information, call 518-794-8989.

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“The Violet Hour” by Richard Greenberg. Directed by Barry Edelstein. At Barrington Stage Company.

When you combine science fiction with romance, gloss it over with a smattering of history and toss in the slightest degree of homosexuality looming in the immediate distance you — sort of — have Richard Greenberg’s “The Violet Hour,” now on stage at Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield.
This five-character play about a young publisher struggling to decide between two books, both written by people with whom he is intimate, is a quirky, sometimes delicious, often bizarre, eventually fascinating and ultimately unrewarding experience.

One book is a memoir by an older woman with whom he is having an affair. The other is by a college chum whose need to publish is strengthened by his love for an heiress who cannot go to her powerful father with a “genius” who is mad and also unrecognized. Both authors have strong ties to the young publisher; both have their methods of persuasion and both of them include a sexual element that may or may not be appealing to this man.
Greenberg, the author of the multiaward winning play “Take me Out” and the recently revived “Three Days of Rain,” is an oddity in the playwriting game. “Three Days of Rain,” for example, presented its generational story backward, letting the audience guess at the antecedents of its principle relationships. This play jumps in the other direction when a machine is delivered to the publisher’s office one day that begins to print out books written more than half a century later, all of them about the people with whom he is involved at that very moment. It’s a fascinating gimmick, coming at the very end of the first act and turning Act Two into a weirdly frenetic tour-de-force for all five players.
John Pace Seavering, the upper-class gent turned fledgling publisher, is played by Austin Lysy. His easy, handsome looks are quickly overcome by his earnestness in the role. His warmth, his convictions, his breezy manner with his subordinate are all a part of the character’s charm, and Lysy gets them right at every turn. When he begins to make love to his mistress, his ardor is all that matters to him as Lysy plays him. When he is resolute in not being seduced by a wealthy young woman, Lysy is more masculine than at any other moment in the play. Lysy manages to move easily among this man’s various sides and this naturalness in his playing brings John vividly to life.
Opal Alladin plays John’s mistress, a black singer 14 years his elder, named Jessie Brewster. She is worldly and controlling and she does a fine job with John. As Alladin portrays her, she is also sensual and seductive, adult yet still childlike when confronted about her past and her habits. Her breakdown in Act Two is fabulous theater and Alladin handles every nuance with panache.
Rosamund Plinth, the heiress, is played by Heidi Armbruster. Her character is much quirkier than Jessie. She is moody, potentially suicidal, yet strong enough to resist the temptations that take people to that extreme. Armbruster gives this character a manly stride, a feisty side and a peculiar sensuality that works well in the second act. She is always driving her character’s bus, it seems, and never sitting in the back as a passenger pulled along by the writing. She forges her character with a strong sense of steel.
Brian Avers is Denny, Denis McCleary, a fellow graduate of John’s college and an avid fan. He is also the author of the other book under consideration. This character’s belief in self is pushed to the outer limits by Avers, who climbs furniture, mounts walls and windows, kisses his best friend with a passion that is so over-the-top that sexual assumptions are evident and expressed. Avers plays with a true sense of self, making Denny into a seductive child with aspirations.
The fifth wheel in this uncovered wagon of a play is simply called Gidger. Not a first name, or a last name, just Gidger. He is another college chum, working as an assistant to John, although what he actually does is never clear. What is clear in the performance by Nat DeWolf is that Gidger is the most closeted homosexual in downtown New York. As fey as possible is how DeWolf portrays this man. When, in the second act, it becomes clear that the word “gay” has been transformed at a future time into something other than “festive in the face of reality,” Gidger is unable to stop using the word in its earlier context. Each time he expresses the word, it takes on its later connotations because even though the play is set in 1919, Gidger is a man of the future, even if he has been eliminated from the history books except as a vague reference in terms of a “woman assistant.”
DeWolf is hilarious in this characterization. The title could almost be “Gidger Gets a Ticket,” as so much focus has been turned onto this character. Off stage a good deal of the time, each of DeWolf’s entrances is a startling joy.
Barry Edelstein has seemingly brought this play to life, rather than just directing it. Dealing with a “miracle” machine as it does, he has managed to make the reactive life of John and Gidger in the office into something other than philosophical framework for an argument about fate and history and truth. These two men take on a life-force. They become the most extraordinary couple dealing with the present as they begin to understand the future. Edelstein has allowed all five characters, in fact, to live the moments to follow their paths and their revised paths as John edits them into what he hopes is a better understanding of themselves. The second miracle of the play Edelstein almost lets go without using the elements of theatrical magic that could salvage the turn-around.
All of this takes place on a set that would seem to be located in the narrow end of New York City’s Flatiron Building, designed by Wilson Chin. Jessica Ford has provided perfectly wonderful costumes and Chris Lee almost has made the lighting work perfectly for the two miracles. He’s got the first one nailed, but the second one could bump us back to reality with a real jolt instead of a concept mystery.
I am always a great believer in the “happy ending” and this play offers one, but in this case I don’t think it’s the right ending, and I honestly believe that this has, and will, keep this play from ever becoming one of the great ones. It’s a good play and a good evening of entertainment even if it is a bit too talky at times.
Perhaps there is no better way to finish off this show, but I wish there was an alternative ending from which to choose. I think I’d go another way.

“The Violet Hour” plays on the mainstage of Barrington Stage Company at 30 Union St. in Pittsfield through Aug. 2. Tickets are $36-$56. There is a pay-what-you-can performance on July 25 for people 35 and under. For more information or to book tickets, call 413-236-8888 or visit 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.

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"Three Sisters" by Anton Chekhov, translated by Paul Schmidt. Directed by Michael Greif. At the Williamstown Theatre Festival.

The children of General Prozorov, three girls and one boy, have dreams that will die each dawn, unrealized dreams of their own futures both bright and bleak. Adults, orphaned, living in a provincial village far away from the Moscow of their childhood, they long to make a move back to the city with its rich resources and high-tension lifestyles.
Masha, beautiful, married, bored, is trapped in the village through her marriage to a stuffy, simpleton school teacher. Olga, a teacher herself, has the longest of longings for another life, but her attachment to the people around her grounds her. Irina, just 20 in the first act, has the brightest future, the boldest opportunities ahead and her desire for work, for achievements of importance seem to make all things possible.
Their brother, Andrei, a philosophical scientist and violinist, is the lynchpin to whom they tie their hopes, but he is ineffectual, socially inept and frightened of life.
Or so it seems on stage at the Williamstown Theatre Festival where this well-loved play, in a neat, vernacular translation by Paul Schmidt, is making its current appearance.

Surrounding this quartet are the usual suspects in a Chekhov play. We have an aging military doctor who is a drunkard, who rents a room in the Prozorov household. We have a nobleman without good looks, who is uninspiring but who loves with a simple straightforward manner. We have an angular, angry, hostile young man who displays his adoration with brilliant wit and evil manners. We have an older soldier trapped in a loveless marriage to a woman who is both suicidal and controlling. We have a peasant-bred woman with aspirations. There are the usual servants who provide advice, solace and frustration to their "betters."  And in this production we have at least 30 more people to present a semblance of townspeople, soldiers, and probably even an American tourist or two.
This is Chekhov country. Birch trees dominate the landscape. Furniture is solid and large. Spaces are filled with rich colors, splashes of stark white, deep black mourning. Everything is in place on the stage at the ‘62 Center in Williamstown for a first-rate production of this play. Essentially, they do not disappoint. Even so, there are a few things that just don’t play properly.
The complete depth, height and width of the stage is in use here. There are no limits to the playing area and that dwarfs the people, makes them smaller then they ultimately realize they have become. Allen Moyer, the set designer, has enlarged the world to its extreme and kept the people inside like tiny figures in a snow-globe. This isolation works, to a degree, in highlighting the frustration of the three sisters, but it also swallows voices so that actors cannot be easily heard. It creates a void that is in constant battle with the players on so many levels.
He also has designed his rooms in a way that instantly upstages actors, placing people on couches set at right angled to the front of the stage, so that the person upstage cannot be seen or heard by at least half the audience. Why a director would want this, or a producer would allow it, I cannot say. It is a monumental error in design, making fully understanding the play harder than it ought to be.
The company on stage is brilliant. Rosemarie DeWitt’s Masha is the most beautiful, the most bored, the most effulgent human being imaginable. Her voice is lush. Her face well-balanced and bright, her body modern and yet not so very modern. When she falls in love, all of these qualities merge into a candle-flare so keen that one squints at her rather than seeing her clearly.
Aya Cash’s Irina, on the other hand, is more than merely pretty. She is blonde and brazen. She attracts men, is adored and protected by her sisters in just the right proportions. Her performance in the role matches every descriptive applied to the character by Chekhov and his characters. Cash moves back and forth between the honesty and the pathos in this character’s makeup. Though still mourning her father, she is the first of the girls to give up black for white, to return to the fullness of life. In Cash’s performance this makes sense, for black would not set off her beauty in the way that white does.
As Maasha’s husband Kulygin, Jonathan Fried turns in a quirky, fey performance that brings up as many questions about his suitability as a husband as it does his correctness as a teacher. He has taken the oddness in this man’s dialogue and philosophy and transformed that into the physical. A wonderful character has become a marvelous one in Fried’s hands. Baron Tuzenbach, Irina’s principle suitor, is played for all the verve a young man can bring to a role by Keith Nobbs.
His rival for her affection, Captain Solyony, is played with an unusual amount of nastiness by Stephen Kunken. The odd friendship these two men share is brought vividly to life in the Nobbs and Kunken’s portrayals and the eventual emotional separation of the two seems even more natural here.
Roberta Maxwell is the ancient servant, Anfisa, and she has a wonderful scene in the second act where fear and understanding come together in her. Cassie Beck, as Natasha, the wife of the Prozorov son, is beautifully diabolical. She brings a full-bodied sensuality to the role. Michael Cristofer does what he can with the aging doctor, but all too often his voice fell below the level of the background noise and music and his motivations were lost to most of us. Manoel Felciano brings the boyish Andrei to life and we watch that life slowly sap out of him. It’s a wonderful trick played by a talented actor. His final appearance in the garden shows us how truly lifeless a married man may be when he understands what has happened to him through his own desire to love and be loved by a wonderful woman.
Colonel Alexander Vershinin, a new old friend for the three sisters, is played with majestic beauty and lusty power by Stevie Ray Dallimore. He completely understand the Russian heroic figure damned by circumstances. As the romantic center of the piece he handles well all of the peculiarity in Chekhov’s writing of him: although he loves Màsha deeply he can only speak of his crazy wife and neglected daughters in her presence. There is in his performance every aspect of the pitiable man with pride and power and an attractiveness that is inescapable.
The unmarried, unmarryable it seems, Olga, who also falls for Vershinin just a bit, and Kulygin just a bit, and her own brother just a bit, is played by Jessica Hecht. Hecht carries much of the weight of this play on her shoulders, opening and closing it with monologues that speak volumes in lines that are weighted with historical importance, romantic information and the heartbreak of frustrated ambitions. She has created a tone for her character, however, that gives the impression that her solitary existence in a crowded family and a crowded home is of her own making. It would seem that she is accustomed to addressing herself as if she was a crowd. We are instantly compelled to be her friend, to listen to her rants, to solace her grief and support her hopes. Among the best, she is the best. This production rides into glory on her shoulders.
Michael Greif, who has directed all of this, has pulled of the nearly impossible. He has made Chekhov’s classic into something new. He has fostered images that overcome old memories and created a play on stage that is less "slice-of-life" than life itself. If there is too much background sound, there are also lights by Kenneth Posner that expose interiors and still spot the birch tree surrounds, costumes by Clint Ramos that fit characters like their own skin and music by Michael Friedman that sings the Russian spirit. Greif, supposedly, has coordinated all of these elements in this overlarge space and done wonders.
If only we could hear every word, see every character and love the future for these three women it would be a perfect experience. But, like life, nothing is perfect. It is only just this close.

"Three Sisters" plays at the Williamstown Theater Festival through July 26. For schedules and ticket information, call the box office at 413-597-3400 or visit wtfestival.org.

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"Almost, Maine" by John Cariani. Directed by Chuck Hudson. At the Chester Theatre Company.

In the winter, at 9 in the evening, as the northern lights make their magical appearance, couples discover, or rediscover, the magical powers of love. It can excite, or it can illuminate, or it can bifurcate or eliminate possibilities for the occupants of an area on the Maine map too small to be an actual town or village or hamlet. Well, perhaps not too small, but too uninterested in making the effort.
A woman camps on the lawn of the town’s repairman without permission; she has come to see the lights and to pay homage to the departing soul of the husband she believes she has killed. A man who has mistakenly tattooed his arm with a misspelled declaration of his own villainy finds an unexpected miracle in the back room of a small bar. A couple who have grown apart over the years ask for a miracle, and lo, the other show drops and everything is different.
These are three of the nine stories that make up this mockumentary play which is adorning the stage of the Chester Theatre Company at the moment.

The most touching piece is a framework tale, divided in three parts but still the shortest of these short stories, all of which are taking place simultaneously. A man, Pete, and a woman, Ginette, sitting on two benches to watch the lights, declare their love for each other, and that declaration tears them asunder as Pete explains his theory of the world and its effect on closeness. As his tale moves her away from him, he declares that she is getting closer to him. Then, when all seems lost, she returns transformed by his tale. It is touching, sweet and absurd. It is also beautifully played by two of the four actors in this show, a foursome who perform 20 unique roles.
Pete and Ginette are played by Jim Beaudin and Manon Halliburton. He is a round-faced imp with a shocking smile and a tendency to slight gestures. His movements are emphatic, the way a dancer’s movements can be when they complete a combination. He finishes what he starts before moving on to the next moment. She is a more fluid creature, constantly altering the shape of her body in relation to his. They play together well. And not just in this story. At a later moment in the show she becomes the object of his unanticipated desire as she, with an angularity in her performance, becomes the stuff that dreams are made of.
The second couple of players, Paden Fallis and Tracy Liz Miller, are quite different. Both tall and slender, they complement one another in any scene they have together, although not all of their loves scenes are shared. for this script and its director easily integrate this four some for different stories. He has an angular face which is very expressive with a voice and hands to match that angularity. Holding a bottle of beer, or a woman, his hands seem to be the focus of things. Watching a stranger on his lawn, his face is all that matters. Discussing the newest discovery of a lifetime of searching for affection, his voice carries all the meaning in the world as his body becomes a literal dishrag of solidity.
Miller is another story entirely. Her carriage is stiff and upright and her face carries a chill in it that, when it melts, parodies love. Her unusually cynical outlook on love works brilliantly with this physical bearing and then, when we think we know the actress, she alters herself and struggles through the only heartbreaker in the collection of short stories that is this play. As a woman returning to a lost love she never quite rejected, she struggles with all of her possessions, with all she has left and never truly recognizes the man she realizes she worships. Of all the tales in this tiny evening’s entertainment, this is the saddest of them all. And even the visual joke that makes it work cannot touch the depth of emotional control Miller exercises in its performance.
The open, barren plain that is this corner of the most extreme state in the union is portrayed nicely by a door, some snow and a table, a bench, a skydrop filled with orange stars. Craig Milne has made this all work nicely. Heather Crocker Aulenback has costumed her cast appropriately for each of their characters and Lara Dubin has helped them illuminate their stories with lighting designed for each space. Tom Shread makes the scene transitions work with appropriate music.
Chuck Hudson, directing all of this, has created both comic and touching moments for his cast to work through as they develop each small mystery. Chad and Randy’s woeful emergence as a couple, already considered a couple by some of the others who cite them as a pair even though these two don’t know it about themselves, is typical of Hudson’s work in this play. Here two individuals reveal the worst of their relationships with others in a playful, physical way and slowly come to realize that they are each other’s dream of companionship. When that form of friendship suddenly blossoms into something more, each of them find they cannot control their combination of lust and disgust and their bodies literally dissolve on the stage before us. Hudson guides his players through this scene, and so much more, with a delicacy and a wonderful craftiness that allows this duet to become a concerto. It’s a brilliant job of taking characters to new places. He has managed this sort of thing, so differently in each case, with all of the pairings in the play and the show has a new strength because of it.
In the difficult, short runs that Chester provides, it is essential that you book tickets early, so get to it. A winter night in northern Maine with a group of people discovering what love is all about is just the right thing for a hot summer evening in the Berkshires. You’ll leave the non-town of Almost, Maine, refreshed.

"Almost, Maine" plays at the Chester Theater through July 27. For schedules and tickets, call 413-354-7771 or visit chestertheatre.org.

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“The Light in the Piazza,” book by Craig Lucas, music and lyrics by Adam Guettel, based on the novella by Elizabeth Spencer. Directed by Steve Stettler. At Weston (Vt.) Playhouse Theatre Company.

Through a veil of romantic music, out of arched spaces made remote and foreign by their size and placement, emerge two women, one young and one not so young. The younger of the two asks, “Mother? What happened here?”
The older woman replies, “What did happen here? I played a tricky game in a foreign country.”
This is the perfect setup for a memory play, flashback play, a story retold by the mother, or held back, hidden from the daughter as a protective measure. We are set up, in those first few moments, for a storybook drama with songs.
We are lied to. The authors have provided a gimmick that has no pay-off.
If we don’t fall into this trap of the opening moments, the authors have provided a very straight-forward, onward-proceeding narrative. However, if we are haunted, as I was, by that very clearly created opening, then what follows — especially the ending of this very engaging show — makes little sense.

Clara, a lovely young girl, and her mother, Margaret, are touring Italy in 1953. In Florence they meet a handsome young man who becomes instantly smitten with the beauty and innocence of Clara. He, Fabrizio Naccarelli, is equally beautiful and almost as innocent. The two youngsters fall in love, fight with his family, her mother, his family, and ultimately march down the aisle of the Catholic church to marry.
This simple story is complicated by a number of things: Margaret’s almost loveless marriage clouds things for Clara; Fabrizio’s father is overly protective of his younger son’s honorable intentions when he discovers one of Clara’s secrets; Clara’s biggest secret is the reason for her childlike, innocent qualities. Margaret, torn between the potential happiness of her child and protecting that child from the traumas that may lie ahead of her, keeps her secrets close to her heart and out of her mouth for as long as possible.
If we could believe the opening sequence and the slow revelations about Clara, then we would have to assume that trauma presents itself early in the marriage and the result is what we hear and see at the top of the show. If the final moments of the play reveal Margaret’s desire to let go of her child, her control of that child, then her exit works against that exquisite song, “Fable.” If the final moment as staged shows that there is more to come, then perhaps our assumptions at the top are correct and this is a memory play. It’s just too hard to be sure of much, here, about the writing, the direction and the story itself for this to be a completely satisfying experience. And then, there are the songs, and the performances.
The show, and this production of it, has delicate charm. The music jumps from the ethereal to the earthy with Verdi parodies and Richard Rodgers waltzes, from the shimmering tones of a harp to the amassed strings and percussive piano of ’50s jazz. Composer Adam Guettel has created a score with a range that proves he is capable of delivering the old-fashioned values of a musical with an insight in lyrics of the modern trend to over-rationalize in shows. It’s a compelling blend of styles that really works in this particular play, but still produces no instantly singable songs.
Guettel has reduced his orchestration from 15 players (mostly strings) to five musicians for a chamber music effect. Likewise in this production there is no ensemble, their music being sung by the eight principals instead. I can find no fault with the ensemble singing, but a second violinist would certainly help the romantic, lush quality of the score. Mr. G — one more musician, if you please.
The setting by Russell Metheny, costumes by Mara Blumenfeld and lighting by Kendall Smith aid in the imaging created by Director Steve Stettler. He has managed to create indoor and outdoor spaces with the help of his designers and a swiveling archway. We are never in doubt as to where we are in this production. What Stettler has not managed to do is make the ending and the beginning match up. There is still that gap in the perfect circle where the opposite ends appear to never be able to meet, coming in at different angles, or depths. This is my first exposure to this show on a stage, and perhaps that is a universal problem. I don’t know.
Stettler and his casting people have come up with a wonderful company of players. The entire Naccarelli family are so handsome, so beautiful, that I can believe everyone in the audience leaves this show with a cell phone turned on, a call placed to their travel agent, a trip being booked to Florence, Italy. Michelle Rios and David Bonanno are the parents. Jonathan Raviv and Sarah Uriarte Berry are Fabrizio’s brother and his wife. Fabrizio is played by Kevin Worley. Raviv and Berry have appeared before in these roles, Raviv in Chicago and Berry in the original Lincoln Center Production. Bonanno was in the ensemble in New York when this show was first mounted and here he succeeds to the important role of the father.
It is hard to know if having people with previous experience in this show helped or hindered the director in finding his own pathway through the vagueness of concept and writing. However, the family dynamic as played by this trio and the two new players is utterly real and fabulous to watch. The family traumas over Clara are crystal in the playing. Their interpersonal relationships are equally clear and understandable, even when they speak, and sing, in Italian without subtitles.  
As Clara’s father, a telephone figure, we have Michael Berry who plays the part with stylish awareness of the difficulties in his relationships with his two women. He, in the writing and his performance of it, betrays more of an interest in Clara than might be realized in Margaret’s dialogue about him. The man he presents is a man of power, with that power being held in check, limited by his wife’s need to control things.
Clara is played by Lauren Worsham, a young actress with a truly beautiful singing voice who also masterfully manages the slightly childlike cadences of speech so necessary for Clara’s character. What she doesn’t have is the delicate, childlike blondness of previous Claras. It is hard to understand what in her face and form so instantly captivates the romantic spirit of the 20-year-old Fabrizio. Her acting, particularly in the scenes of anger and despair that rattle her self-control and threaten to give away her secret, is riveting. “Hysteria” and “Clara’s Tirade” are highlights on the musical acting side, and her duet at the end of Act One was transforming.
Margaret, the teller of the tale, the center of the storm, is played with magnificent force and exquisite subtlety by Theresa McCarthy. While the obvious story focus is on Clara and Fabrizio, it is really Margaret’s own story that truly drives this show, and McCarthy makes you realize it almost from the first scene as she weaves the stories of ancient Florence into the mix with her own tale. She devotes her energies to taking attention off herself and onto the others, but her voice, stage presence and her position as the keeper of the secrets gives her strengths that the others don’t have. McCarthy uses it all perfectly. If her final solo, “Fable,” which ends the show with less than discreet observations about love, could give her the perfect exit, then the show would be honestly her own. As it is, we are still left wanting more, and wanting it from her, both the actress and the role.
Weston Playhouse has a winner with this show. It certainly gets its audience talking and talking about it at the end. If we could just as easily emerge singing a song from the show, it could have been a perfect, rather than merely enthralling, evening.

“The Light in the Piazza” plays at the Weston (Vt.) Playhouse Theatre Company through Saturday, July 26. Tickets range from $29-$55. Info: 802-824-5288 or westonplayhouse.com.

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“The Mousetrap,” by Agatha Christie. Directed by Tony Capone. At the Theater Barn in New Lebanon, N.Y.

How could a simple murder mystery play run in London for 56 unbroken years? How could more than 6 million theatergoers buy tickets for a simple murder mystery play? How could more than 200 actors play on stage in London in roles so old and in a play where the mystery is no longer mysterious?
And honestly ... for this request season, how could Theater Barn audiences choose this same murder mystery play out of all the mysteries that have been done there in years past? Simple. It’s the best of the best. How could they not?
The new production of the Theater Barn’s favorite play is selling out, as it should. It’s a well-mounted, finely directed and neatly played performance. There is an excellent cast of players, each bringing quirky sensibilities to their roles which aptly suit their characters. Abe Phelps and Michael Marotta have made the set lovely, livable and with six entrances, including the window from “Night Must Fall” — another British murder mystery, that time by Emlyn Williams — have fashioned just enough farcical possibilities to make the question of “whodunit” fun to contemplate.

If you haven’t seen this play, ever, then get down to New Lebanon quickly and buy a ticket. There are surprises galore for you. If you have seen it, rush out anyway, because it may be a while before it gets back on the local boards again. And the final moments of the play, the revelations of the killer, and in Christie’s usual manner, the equally odd revelations about other characters in the play, are amazingly clever. Christie knew that everyone possesses at least one big secret, and the fun in her work is discovering not just those secrets but how they are revealed (HINT: Not by me!).
The play is set in a country bed and breakfast just opening for business. Mollie and Giles Ralston are keeping secrets from one another as they prepare to greet their first guests, four people who have booked separately but who seem to form a peculiarly phobic society. They are joined by an unanticipated guest, a stranger with a foreign accent and no car — he claims it overturned down the road. Later another guest, arriving on skis, joins the crowd. The difference between him and the others is a simple one: He’s a police detective seeking the killer of a woman in another historic home not far away. The killer, he tells the assembled throng, is one of them.
In short order, there is a second murder, and things begin to heat up when it is revealed that a third victim is anticipated, the third of the “three blind mice,” a tune that has been heard on the radio, on the piano and hummed in the darkness already. Terrific possibilities abound here as each member of the household, snowed in by a sudden blizzard, begins to suspect the others.
The Ralstons are nicely played here by Amanda McCallum and Joseph Dal Porto. He was a bit on the quiet side, hard to hear at times. His English accent was the least successful in this troupe, but his acting, when you could finally hear it, was wonderful. He has a knack for doing melodrama with subtlety, not an easy task. She is delightful, all brisk British business. Her accent, like her walk, is crisp and precise but very natural. Her scene with the killer is chilling.
Detective Sgt. Trotter is played by James Stover, who also knows how to pull off the accent and the action. He is a clever actor with a charming manner. The other uninvited guest is Mr. Paravicini, played with gusto by Aaron S. Holbritter. You might think he is the murderer. I won’t tell you in this report if he is or if he is not. I’ll only tell you that he kills in this role.
The guests are a fascinating quartet. Carol Charigna is Mrs. Boyle, a nasty old woman whose glaring eyes could probably shoot deadly darts if she’d let them. If there’s someone in this show to hate, it is Charigna’s Mrs. Boyle. She reveals not one pleasant bone in her body. Megan Rozak is the aggressively butch Miss Casewell. Authoritative, commanding and dangerous, Rozak creates this character in the mode of the matronly characters in the best British film comedies of this period. It’s a wonderful choice.
John Trainor is dapper, lightweight and thoroughly confusing as Maj. Metcalf. Ellis J. Wells is the odd-duck Christopher Wren, a man who has altered his name and changed his identity. As the ideal suspect, he does the best job of the bunch. Nothing about him rings true, but like Mrs. Ralston, we find ourselves sympathizing with Christopher.
Capone has done a perfectly wonderful job shoveling this show out of its past and into the present. He seems to like the present. He makes us a present of the play.
Costumes by Michelle Blanchard fit these characters like a missing glove containing a ticket to a London bus. The lighting, even in mid-day with the ceiling strip of sunlight intruding on the proceedings, made the mystery into just what it needed to be. It was designed by Allen Phelps.
If you can get a ticket, get it. If you can’t, start the write-in campaign for an extra week of this show at the end of the season. Christie knew what she was doing when she wrote this little hit, and 56 years later it’s still making that point — loud and clear.

The Mousetrap runs at the Theater Barn on Route 20 in New Lebanon, N.Y., through Sunday, July 20. Tickets are $20-$22. Info: theaterbarn.com or 518-794-8989.

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.

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“Capitol Steps: Campaign and Suffering.” Written mostly by Bill Strauss, Elaina Newport and Mark Eaton with the cast. Directed by Bill Strauss. At Cranwell Resort, Spa and Golf Club.

Take five talented performers — Bari Biern, Mike Carruthers, Ann Johnson, Jack Rowles and Mike Thornton — add in the musical abilities of Howard Breitbart, toss in song parodies, political jokes, stand-up abilities, incisive material, cutting edge humor, insider information and constantly updated material and you have Capitol Steps.
All of the participants have had some personal professional contract in Washington, D.C., working for a senator or a representative. Each of them is able to bring a degree of insight into their performances. The result is a knock-out 90 minute show that whizzes by in the wink of an eye.

This company will play their ever-changing laugh-fest at Cranwell in Lenox through the summer; if you attend more than once, chances are you’ll see how such a pertinent parody revue grows with the season, especially in a presidential election year.
This edition has some highlights that, hopefully, will stay fixed in their repertoire for the season. The Dubya sketches are hilarious and timeless. His song “The Brain-Mouth Connection” is absolutely right on, whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican. As the president attempts to confront the relationship between what he thinks and how he expresses it, you could die from side-splitting laughter. George W. Bush is a specialty of Mike Thornton, who also takes a very good crack at Bill Clinton.
In a sketch in which Bill C. tries to encourage a political marriage between Hilary and Obama, Thornton is constantly distracted by a woman in the audience who ends up being the actual object of his intentions.
When I saw this show, Thornton could not make it through his last sketch playing Bush. Mike Carruthers, playing a Chinese minister, broke up Thornton with his excessive and hilarious physical comedy, which also took down Jack Rowles as their interpreter. Carruthers also won points with his senile Supreme Court judge and a variety of other roles as well. Rowles played a wide variety of hilarious people, but was charming in a John Denver moment.
Ann Johnson shone often and Bari Biern was especially funny as Hilary Clinton, particularly when she and Obama sang their jazz duet “Ebony and Ovary.”
There were other highlights, but not even the Rudy Guiliani bit needs to be singled out. The show has a seamless quality with the threads constructed of humor and the pattern a crazy quilt of assaults on the plays for power.
Tickets for this show are not cheap, and there isn’t even a cabaret setting, just chairs in a meeting room facing a cordoned off corner for the temporary stage. Even so, I think the show justifies the cost. No one in the audience seemed to feel anything else, judging by the wild applause that followed the consistent laughter.

Capitol Steps plays nightly, except for Tuesday, through Aug. 31 at Cranwell Resort, Spa and Golf Club in Lenox. Tickets are $49. Info: capsteps.com or 413-881-1636.

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.

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‘The Book Club’ Play by Karen Zacarias. Directed by Nick Olcott. At the Berkshire Theatre Festival.

Thank God for talented people. They can perform extraordinary surgery. They can inspire us to learn. They can remove our pain with a gallant sweep of a hand. Sometimes they can even turn the mediocre into the marvelous.
A talented crew of seven superb players is performing that latter miracle at the Berkshire Theatre Festival where a new play, "The Book Club Play," is gracing the main stage for a few weeks.
This is a play that has had only one previous production, also directed by Nick Olcott, who has been a part of this show’s history since at least its first development stage at the Theater of the First Amendment in Fairfax, Va., in March, 2005. He has hardly missed a single stage of the work required to hone and sharpen the playwright’s vision, and it is possible he has spent too much time too close to the project. Even with a remarkable cast, as this production has, a fresh perspective could have made the difference between an acceptable, amusing evening and a truly wonderful stage work.

There are laughs in this play. There is a bit of melodrama, too. At the end of the two hours, however, neither of those elements leaves an audience truly satisfied. The laughs have been sporadic and rarely more than chuckles. The melodrama hasn’t been broad enough to make us snicker, or sinister enough to make us smirk; it has only left us wondering where the honest drama might be hiding. And the problem isn’t the talent pool, it’s the swimming hole they’re caught in without the necessary inner tube to use for a flotation device.
Here are five people, a book club that meets monthly to discuss an agreed-upon book. Three are old friends, friends since college and two of them are married. A young woman who has much in common with this trio has been a member for a while and a new, younger woman, a black woman, a woman of color, has been added to the group. Everyone in this group tries to remain civil and politically correct, but it’s hard when there are three old friends, a core, and two satellites who try not to collide. They are all being "best behavior" candidates because they have agreed to be filmed for a documentary on the book club phenomenon. They try to maintain an almost inhuman dignity for the camera, but they are too entrenched in one another’s lives to make that work for long.
Styled as a cut version of the documentary, the show veers out of scenes for "talking heads" sequences spotlighting the members of this group, an interloper among them, and eight "stand-ups" or people who have been interviewed for comments on the group dynamic, or on books, or on reading - these are unfocused interviews. The principal difficulty with this technique is that it isn’t truly used in the visual sense. While a total blackout of the bright, white and beige set, its inhabitants and its props with a talking head isolated in a tight light would simulate the look of a documentary, this never happens in the show. Instead we soft focus on one or another player with everyone else, and everything else, fully visible, at least in the production I saw the, the night before opening night. This deprives us of the playwright’s visual intention. In this presentation there is no proper introduction of the premise of the documentary, a dissertation project by and for unseen grad students, so we are dropped into the first full scene which addresses the camera idea without explanation or understanding. Not a good idea.
Like a few other ideas, including deep discussions about literature and the proper food to accompany the right book, this documentary concept goes pretty much unaddressed. Instead it takes the opportunity to introduce us to a host of wonderful, minor characters, all played by one delightful actress, Sarah Marshall, whose range includes a Williams College co-ed, an aging Wal-Mart male employee and an octogenarian retired librarian sky-diver. Marshall seems to have no character role limitations and she manages to pull them all off brilliantly. Many of the funniest, most memorable moments in this play are hers, and hers alone. In retrospect the lines she delivers are not as funny as their delivery, not as memorable as the voice that pronounces them.
Keira Naughton has the thankless role of Ana, the leader of the pack, who fears the loss of control over things in her life. She reaches into the deepest places in her heart and mind for ways to hold on to old friends and the club she needs for a certain personal fulfillment. She even plays the death card to try to instill loyalty in her very loyal compatriots. Ana goes too far and Naughton, with her talent intact, tries to make it work, but not even a genius could ultimately make Ana as likeable as she believes she truly is already.
Her husband, Rob, is played by the handsome and muscular, particularly his chest development, C. J. Wilson. Wilson has the thankless role of a book club member who doesn’t read. Try to play that with much heart! Wilson pulls it off brilliantly, with a look, a sigh, a shrug. He’s the real McCoy in the acting world, a man who makes manliness inoffensive.
Their best friend, Will, is played by Tom Story, a BTF favorite. Story’s Will is a pathetic man with oddly comic sensibilities. We want to sympathize with him, but cannot because he is such an ass, and then we fall for his shortcomings, pity him and want to comfort him. Story leads us through these changes with a simple ease that makes the character of Will into a dearly beloved fool.
Jen, the slightly dopey, never-in-charge friend, is given a vigorous shot of life by Anne Louise Zachry. As the object of much affection in this play, Zachry moves her Jen in circles and lets her grip furniture, grip books tighter, and miss the arms of people entirely when she is in need of support. She has the loveliest voice and she manages to turn it into a spewing machine, now and then, without the slightest need of a breath. She gives new life to the concept of the monologue.
Bhavesh Patel plays Alex, a neighbor who is roped into the club, kicked out of the club and restored on sufferance. He brackets his honest moments with the closest thing this show has to slapstick. He is a knee-slapper comic without a proper punch-line, and like the other characters in this play, he is more a caricature, a type, than he is a character with a human side, failings, desires, skills. He plays the man beautifully, but what Alex can never be is THE man. Patel manages to get all of these subtleties into an exquisite performance.
Topping the charts in this show, barring Marshall’s show-stopping versatility, is Cherise Boothe as Lily, the younger, blacker woman. Boothe is the outsider, let in and loving it. Whether she is a snob about this or a sufferance I cannot tell, because the play is never clear about it. She is another of Ana’s friends and compatriots, but she is never made to feel a true profit-sharer in this profitless experience. Boothe can load a line for impact with the best of them, and she can also register the required emotional looks and gestures. She does it all with a naturalness that would be perfection in a play about anything natural, but we have the dysfunctional, and sketchy and caricature stylings of the author to deal with in this case and even Lily cannot escape that sense of being incomplete, a bit shallow and a bit compensated for in the playing.
There are projections which help to form the visual concept of a documentary film. In their current placement on R. Michael Miller’s stark white set they can be easily missed by audience members concentrating on the actors. Some of them are funny enough to get their own laughs; others are helpful. There is even a credit role at the end which should be speeded up substantially.
Laurie Churba’s costumes seem to get each character well-defined, but these people are painted in such thin layes of watercolor that their costumes could be even more aggressive in creating that definition.
Zacarias has good ideas but she has not allowed her cast of characters to live, only to be painted in their comic strip panels. She has imposed a device that is hard to make work and if we, the audience, try to ignore it we are jerked to one side for a monologue out of scene by one of the group or a monologue by a total stranger whom, we realize in short order, we’ll never see again so why care about this person. It would seem that the author has a lot to say but only says it in some sort of encoded shorthand. A new director might be able to pull some of that into the show and make it truly worthy of such a beautiful production and such superb actors. In this edition we simply have Saturday Night Live skits played over and over by the same actors in the same roles: not the stuff of stellar comedy or stellar drama either.
This show’s shortcomings deprive it of true greatness.

“The Book Club Play” performs on the Main Stage of the Berkshire Theater Festival on Route 7 in Stockbridge through July 19. Tickets range form $46-$80 but students with valid Ids may receive a 50% discount. For schedules and tickets, call the box office at 413-298-5576.

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“Pageant Play” by Matthew Wilkas and Mark Setlock. Directed by Martha Banta. At the Berkshire Theatre Festival.

What are we doing to our children? This summer’s theater experience is emphasizing the competitive spirit in our youth with musicals and non-musicals, it seems. Whether forced into spelling bee competitions, child rape or child beauty pageants, there is an odd symmetry to the focus our best theater companies are presenting.
Open now, and running through July 26 at the Unicorn Theatre at the Berkshire Theatre Festival in Stockbridge, is the latest excursion into the Hell that parents enter with their infant daughters. The world premiere of “Pageant Play” by two men who also appear in the show presents an unforgettable, somewhat regrettable, journey.

Pinky is the mother of a winner, a daughter named Chevrolet (“It’s French. It means ‘goat-like’ or ‘like a goat.’”). Marge, whose real name is Bobbi-Jo, is the mother of a contender named Puddle. They become friendly rivals when Puddle beats Chevrolet in a small-town beauty competition. Pinky, in a friendly gesture, introduces Marge to the coaches who have brought her own daughter to prominence with their philosophy of S.H.I.E.T (pronounced in Texas, where the show is placed, exactly as you might expect). Smile. Hair. Eyes. Illusion. And, if you still need it to win, Talent. The mothers become deadly competitors for their daughter’s triumph and ultimate win as “Supreme Queen National.” That’s the basic plot.
Bobby and Bob, partners in the coaching business, are played by authors Mark Setlock and Matthew Wilkas. These two talented men also double as the spouses of Pinky (Wilkas) and Bobbi-Jo (Setlock). As the husbands they are mildly amusing, and as the coaches they are flagrantly, almost ridiculously, gay and funny. Or should that be funny and GAY?
The two children are played by small spangled and tulled gowns. The way these dresses are handled tells you all you need to know about the two mothers, one protective, one abusive. Pinky, it seems, has been an abused competition child herself and her drive to succeed is based on her own mother’s drive for the same things. There’s been enough in the news these past several years about these children being abused, kidnapped, sexually molested, murdered and so on to make it clear that the characters in this new play are more real than they would seem to be, less humorous and funny than they come off as in their lines and more clearly represented when they are seen using their children as toys, instruments of torture or just as objects. The play makes these points well, but often in ways that abuse the audience as well.
It brings a question or two to the fore: Are our theater audiences the same audiences who clamor for children masquerading as mini-adults? Are sophisticated city folk, and sophisticated country folk as well, eager to see mini-moppets made up like Marilyn Monroe, sporting tiny breast implants and dyed-blonde wigs? Are these children ever able to overcome the stigma of losing these competitions and the abuse enforced when they do lose?
One thinks of stories of the Hollywood children of the 1930s, the Shirley Temples and Judy Garlands, taken advantage of by studio heads and money-stealing parents and guardians. Is this beauty pageant world so very different from that one? We shake our heads over the drug use of a Garland or the lawsuits against parents of a Jackie Coogan. How do we react to the current rash of lost girls under the age of 10 if not with the same sense of disgust and distrust of the adults involved?
Curiously, this play includes two kidnappings, one with visibly dire results. The comedy here becomes near-tragedy and it is an uncomfortable experience at best. It is uncomfortable to laugh at the loss of innocence, but all right to laugh at the antics of two gay men in denial. We are tossed back and forth between these two visual elements in this play and at the end, while we applaud the hard work of the four players, we are appalled that we do so. At the end of the play, we are not happy at having been there at all.
Wilkas is the funniest of the two men. His character, also an abused creature, is a genuinely touching human being lost in the soulless business he has helped to create. We can laugh with him, as he goes through a series of self-discoveries, because he allows us to do so. Setlock’s Bobby, the controlling, yet willing partner of a devious and evil competition mother, is very funny to watch but far too pathetic a human being to like. He also plays Bobbi-Joe’s husband, a wife-beater, with dark qualities that are genuinely terrifying. Both men are obviously talented performers. None of their characters are really sympathetic.
Daiva Deupree is Marge, the mother of Puddle. She has charm and style and a stage presence that is unmistakably sweet. As the only partially sympathetic character, and thus the heroine of the show, she comes off well. It is a bit hard to comprehend her completely. Her motives are bizarre, protecting a child she is also exploiting, but there is a back-story about Marge and Puddle, the Bobbi-Jo story, that helps her along.
Pinky is played by Jenn Harris. This woman would be pure evil if she wasn’t driven to accomplish her own mother’s goals in another generation. Pinky’s motives are selfish, nothing more. She covets the crown that was never her own. She believes in the game of these pageants as less a game and more a battle. She makes things warlike as she attempts to control every aspect of this situation. Harris plays her to the hilt. She displays passion but not love, eagerness but not enthusiasm, hostility but not anger. All of Harris’s interpretations of Pinky’s motives are played at the highest level (or the lowest if you’d rather), a white-hot intensity marking each move, each line, each gesture. It’s a hell of a performance, but Pinky is not someone you want to go home with, and for that intensity, Harris falls into the same sort personal image. Even her curtain call bow leaves her indistinguishable from Pinky. Unlike the other three players, she seems to inhabit her role, or has allowed it to inhabit her.
Martha Banta has obviously taken the play seriously and given it every ounce of energy that can be mustered. In her “notes” in the program she is clear: “...we are not exaggerating,” she writes. She and the authors have put the focus in this topic where it belongs, on the parents and other adults who make the worst in our natures possible. That she has been able to wrench humor out of set changes is miraculous. At least it gives us a chance at going home feeling something other than disgust that the human race can consistently produce such monstrous adults.
The production values in the Unicorn are fine with a simple and functional set by Luke Hegel-Cantarella, appropriate costumes by Jessica Risser-Milne and fine lighting by Thom Weaver. Isadora Wolfe has provided some very silly dance movements that actually lighten up some darker moments of the play.
Whether your interest is in spelling bees, infant beauty pageants or any other highly competitive childhood sport, this play paints the darker picture. Bring along a handkerchief to stick in your mouth and clench your teeth upon. You’ll need something.

Pageant Play runs through July 26 at the Unicorn Theatre at the Berkshire Theater Festival on Route 7 in Stockbridge. Prices range between $19.50 and $44. For ticket information, call the box office at 413-298-5576.

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“Hairspray,” book by Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan, lyrics by Scott Wittman and Marc Shaiman, Music by Marc Shaiman. Directed by Joe Abraham and Christine Negherbon. At the Mac-Haydn Theatre in Chatham, N.Y.

As contemporary rock musicals go, this is one of the best. The characters are caricatures; the plot is straightforward and would make a great animated short; the songs are memorable and remarkably similar to old songs of the period. What it has going for it is a terrific sense of humor in the writing, reflecting positively on its source material, the film by John Waters. It also has verve, and empathy and sympathy and, when cast right, fabulous singing and dancing.
This new production at the Mac-Haydn Theatre in Chatham, N.Y., has wonderful performers who can do both of those things and still act the thinnest characters in the world while extolling the beautiful virtues of being fat.

Surely there is no one left who hasn’t heard, or seen, something to do with “Hairspray.” Hopefully it won’t be giving away any top secrets to inform you that the role of the protagonist’s mother is played by a man. That’s been part of the joke since the original movie when a Baltimore drag queen named Divine took on the pivotal role of Edna Turnblad, the mother of teenage Tracy, a fatty who clearly has the genes her mother gave her. In this instance the role is taken by a popular favorite in Chatham, John Saunders. He does a wonderful turn as Edna, transforming from a frumpy housewife who takes in laundry to a glamorous superstar of the media in sequins and satin. In the number “Welcome to the Sixties” the first transformation occurs and it leaves you breathless. Saunders singing voice here leaves a lot to be desired, deep and gravely and almost non-musical. His dancing, however, is a joy to behold.
As her mother’s daughter, Elizabeth Froio takes charge of Tracy Turnblad. The show opens with her early morning ablutions and she is clearly talented, but ... and here I must be honest, I could not hear her for much of the first act and then for a portion of the second act. This was true for most of the company, even for the loud and specific Karla Shook, who can usually be heard in the next town. There was a problem with the amplification, and whether technical or human error was involved it diminished the enjoyment of the show.
Tracy is almost never off-stage, and as a result we expect a lot of the actress playing her. Froio worked the show for all it was worth, but on Sunday afternoon it wasn’t worth as much as it should be because of this sound problem. Froio is not as physical as her predecessors, at least the ones I’ve seen, in this role. She is not quite as limber as she might be, not quite the spectacular dancer she needs to be and not quite the singer, at least where volume is concerned, as she needed to be.
Her boyfriend, Link, was played nicely by Christopher Rice, and the role of dance-show host Corny Collins was taken by Ben Jacoby who was absolute perfection. Even better was Christian White as Seaweed J. Stubbs, the black dancer who romances Tracy’s best girlfriend, Penny Pingleton. Penny was the sweet and later beautiful Katarina Papacostas.
The villains of the play, the Van Tussle women, were played by Brittany Leslie (Amber, the daughter) and Karla Shook (Velma, the mother). Leslie seemed to swallow a lot of her lines and Shook was the best at playing the worst.
The not-so-surprise sensation of the company, though, was Yvette Clark as Motormouth Maybelle, the black DJ who nearly stopped the show twice with her numbers. She can carry you away without a mike, without accompaniment I’d bet. She has a powerful instrument and she can handle the funny lines also.
The direction of this show is a bit messy, not aided by the choreography, some of which was deliciously humorous. Costumes were fine, if a bit sketchy for Tracy, who could have changed clothing on a “day-to-day’ basis, a fact lost here with a girl who wears the same clothing day after day after day.
This isn’t the best “Hairspray” I’ve ever seen, but it won’t be the worst one either. Saunders and Colin Pritchard as Edna’s husband Wilbur almost stopped the show with their very funny love duet “You’re Timeless to Me.”
Is it worth your time: always. If the sound problems are fixed, always plus one. Will you ever go back if they don’t fix it, well, the lady with me has avoided this particular theater for seven years and she had a good enough time with “Hairspray” to banish her ban. She’ll be back. So will I.

“Hairspray” plays at the Mac-Haydn Theatre on Route 203 in Chatham, N.Y., through July 20. For information and tickets, call the box office at 518-392-9292.

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A little 12-year-old girl with “suspiciously adult yearnings” and a lonely man of 41 meet, fall in lust and have an affair that scars them both internally for life. That happens 15 years before the lights come up on them in David Harrower’s scathing and bitter drama, “Blackbird,” currently on stage at the Chester Theater Company’s stage in Chester.
For 93 minutes, in a lunch room in a medical manufacturing plant somewhere else, not here, these two former lovers have a reunion of sorts and try to sort out all of the dirty laundry and sundry garbage that surround their lives. The angst and the emotional turmoil is what this play is about and the people, ultimately, don’t matter. What matters is the hurt they bring with them, the hurt allowed to explode before us, and then the hurt left behind them.

Playwright Harrower won an Olivier Award with this one-act event. If that was due to the essence of being a fly on the wall — one that is trapped inside a mason jar perhaps and unable to fly away no matter how hard he tries — then bravo for the jar. I had the privilege, and I cannot stress that word enough, of being allowed to see the first public performance of this new production on the outskirts of the Berkshires.
Steve Hendrickson, so well remembered and admired for his work at this theater last season in “Mercy of a Storm,” took on the difficult role of Ray, aka Peter, with only four days rehearsal. His first night performance was a revelation. He could have made 100 errors; I wouldn’t know — wouldn’t care. His performance of this role is completely and utterly sensational.
He stammers and staggers and falls to pieces and pulls himself together, and loves, and hates, and lusts and relates his story his way and lies and lies again and tells the truth only to have it fall on deaf ears. He takes us to the highest and lowest places in the human psyche, all the while reviling himself in the big picture and lauding his own praises in the minutia.
Hendrickson inhabits the part. Ray, the seducer of a child, the abductor of that child, having served a short but horrific time in prison, has taken on a new identity, forged a new, better life, but he stands to lose it all when the girl shows up unexpectedly. He is shaken to the roots of his soul and that soul is instantly exposed in the hands of this actor. It doesn’t really matter if an actor has two years to prepare or 10 minutes, it seems, when the part is so clearly and unmistakably written and the actor is such a good, instinctive player. Worth twice the price of a ticket is this stellar turn by a consummate professional.
Playing opposite him with all the fury and fire and dispassionate understanding that can be mustered in a single player is actress Rebecca Brooksher as Una. Dressed to kill — or to seduce — this young woman enters a room and can never leave it. Her presence leaves marks everywhere, impressions that cannot be wiped away easily. That is Una. She is a physical convoy of sexual magma, a molten mess of perfume, lace and leather boots. Brooksher can play the sweetness, the anger and the physical passion with equal aplomb. She handles quixotic changes in mood with alacrity. Just watching her non-stop high-end portrayal is exhausting; I cannot imagine what it would be like to be her playing this role.
Regina Garcia’s simple set is most effective and the costumes by Charles Schoonmaker are just right for these characters. There is a long wait in too much music designed by Tom Shread at the beginning of the play, but that could change.
Director Sheila Siragusa has given her two players the most natural and honest of direction in this piece. There was only one instance when I saw the director’s hand, and that one ended quickly as the actress clambered down off a bench against a wall. It’s a bench that really doesn’t belong in this room, and now, in memory, seems only to have been placed there for the incident in the play. It doesn’t work or seem necessary otherwise.
Without having much time with the actor (four days is nothing, even in summer theater) Siragusa has led him into a memory play with no scenes, but just the memories, that call up all of the worst in a human being. In this case that “worst” is inextricably tied to the boldest and most loving of human emotions. So intertwined are they that the director and actor have had to bind them together with hard, harsh, personal gestures for Ray to use whenever he tells truths, half-truths or near-lies about himself. It’s a brilliant touch.
For Brooksher’s Una, the director has gone in an opposite direction, providing her with every opportunity to use the grand gesture that seems wrong, but is indeed just right. The actress has taken these specially directed moments and lets them set the air around them aflame. Several times I found myself blinking away the harsh electric light of such a gesture.
But Harrower has left us with an inconclusive stopping point. Wracking my brain for a better ending, I could not come up with one, and perhaps there’s a message in that: “Some things never end.”
In a season that has already mixed heavy drama (“The Caretaker”), light drama (“Candida”), quirky drama (“The Atheist”) and lack-o-drama (“Spelling Bee”) into the theatrical arena, we now have to add high drama with “Blackbird.” This is not an easy play to sit through, I warn you, but you won’t see such skilled performances in anything like this again this season — especially now that “Virginia Woolf” (Richard Chamberlain? Really?) has been canceled, at any rate.

“Blackbird” plays at the Chester Theater through July 13. Tickets are $24.50-$29.50. For schedules and tickets, call the box office at 413-354-7771 or visit chestertheatre.org. This theater has a new policy: Buy a ticket and if you want to see the show again, you can have another ticket free. The idea behind this is that actors change and grow and an audience might want to see how the characters develop over the course of a run.

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“She Loves Me,” book by Joe Masteroff, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, music by Jerry Bock, based on a play by Miklos Laszlo. Directed by Nicholas Martin. At Williamstown Theatre Festival.

It’s been a decade or more since I’ve seen a production of the 1963 musical "She Loves Me" and I’ve missed it. I saw the original on Broadway with Barbara Cook, Daniel Massey, Jack Cassidy and Barbara Baxley and I loved it. I saw it in summer stock twice and never got around to the New York revival a few years back.
But having lost track of this show, I now feel firmly back on the right track and have discovered that the show is funnier than I remembered, less sentimental and more romantic, more musically intricate and, on stage at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, even more singable. Perhaps I’m just older and feeling that loss of youth that George Nowack, the show’s hero, feels in this edition. Perhaps not.

Brooks Ashmanskas is not the hero type. His hairline is receding, his chin is developing a little friend, his body has the shape of a bosc pear with a belly. The romantic hero, the delectable young man is not evident in his person or his performance, but his delicious thrill at discovering love is done with the exuberance of restored youth and vigor and, coming midway through the second act in the title song, is almost delectable enough to be considered silly in such a mature man. It isn’t silly, however; it’s perfect.
Sometimes considered a "Christmas" musical because it ends on Christmas eve, this is not just a holiday confection. It covers six months in the lives of George and Amalia Balash, the new clerk in the shop he manages, a parfumerie in Budapest in 1934. They meet in June, unaware that they already know a great deal about one another. They spark and the heat they generate engulfs them in all the wrong ways. It takes until early December for that fire to subside and for the true warmth engendered by that deeper recognition to begin to emerge.
At the same time two other fires, two passions, are consuming other members of the staff at the shop: Ilona Ritter and her lover Steven Kodaly are engaged in a struggle over their relationship and Mr. Maraczek is losing his grip on the love of his life. All three stories become mixed and confused and not even the first-rate assistance of Ladislav Sipos, a fine clerk with a special pacifist’s philosophy can set things easily aright.
The original play had been successfully filmed twice before this show emerged: "The Shop Around the Corner" with Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullivan in the 1930s and "In the Good Old Summertime" with Judy Garland and Van Johnson in the 1940's. There was no special need for a stage musical, but when this show opened, there was a great need for a sentimental throwback to former days. The country was engaged in the final struggles of the Vietnam war; the communist threat was at our doorway again; people were concerned about the future as they hadn’t been since the end of World War II. There was a need for sentiment and heart and humanity finding its core, locating the belief that love could set things in motion for good. That was the strength of this show, and even though it did not collect the audience it needed to be a great success, it found its place and created its cult. It opened during a newspaper strike and very few reviews, or ads, could ever be found for it. It was defeated by its era, but it still maintains its optimism and its sense of that importance of love. It is right on target for today.
The new production boasts the funniest staging of a musical number’s dance break I have ever seen and choreographer Denis Jones is to be lauded for his work here in the "Romantic Atmosphere" number near the end of Act One. It was brilliant. Even though the number that should follow it was cut down to the musical response, and I obviously missed it, the dance is almost enough to compensate for this one small indiscretion.
As Amalia Balash, director Nicholas Martin has cast a very tall woman named Kate Baldwin. She has a remarkable voice and a face that can be pretty, can be frightening, can be many things expressive. Her performance is refreshing. Like Ashmanskas, she is not the traditional romantic heroine, yet she manages to make us love her and root for her on her quest to find the man she’ll love for the rest of her life.
Mark Nelson is a wonderful Sipos, charming and angular in his appearance and movements. While trying not to stand out, he inevitably does. His solo, "Perspective," says everything about him and he makes it seem as though the words are his very own. His young friend and compatriot, Arpad is played with enormous physical mirth by Jeremy Beck who truly shines in the second act opening number. Kodaly, the handsome cad, is played by Troy Britton Johnson. He makes an impression instantly and really comes into his own at his exit from the show with a number that he makes his personal possession.
Jessica Stone is a sensational Ilona. Whether exposing a shapely body under a Klimt pattern dress, or singing one of several comic songs with verve and vitality, she is a focus point on the large stage in Williamstown. Even in ensemble musical numbers she is where you look. Like many more contemporary musicals (like "Spelling Bee") where a recurring musical theme is repeated many times, this show has its credo piece and she is always a performer in that piece. Whether a quintet, quartet or trio, Ilona is the one you watch in this little song. So, to Stone I say "Thank you, Madame, please call again..." Here is an actress whose work I hope to see again, and often.
Mark Victor and Jason Babinsky provide the heartiest laughs in their number at the Café Imperiale and in this era of no encores it pains me to say there is only one shot at watching them perform together. Dick Latessa brings both charm and experience to Maraczek and does what the role suggests. He might have been darker in spots, which would have been all right, too.
Nicholas Martin has found all sorts of nuances and points of interest in this play and he has given the show a new sense of itself. Subsequent years, including 1963 with the first production of Kander and Ebb’s "Cabaret" have given to the early 1930s in Europe the overwhelming sense of the growth of National Socialism and its aftermath - the Nazi takeover of that portion of the world. In this show we have the final vestige of the beauty, grace and waltzing times in central Europe before the Nazi’s removed sentiment, love and beauty from the horizon. Martin has carefully avoided all of the bad things that could so easily be inserted into this show, the tiny hints that could mark it, set its sentiment into direct conflict with political changes. He has opted for the grace of this period before its coming autumn. He leads us through summer, fall and early winter, providing only satisfying conclusions to all problems.
He has done it with the aid of a candy-box set by Jim Noone, costumes that reek of the romance of days gone by designed by Robert Morgan and subtle lighting by Kenneth Posner and Philip Rosenberg.
Charlie Alterman leads a theater orchestra of thirteen players through the intricacies of this deceptive score. There is little here that is as simple as it seems. Bock and Harnick created a jewel in this almost through-composed piece with its counterpoints and its tuneful songs.
Go for the love that is here. Go for the humor. Go because you must see what a true classic of the American musical theater can be when it is handled with insight, with respect and with the perspective, as Sipos would say, of distance. If I could, I’d go back and see it again. In a way, I just did.

“She Loves Me” plays on the Main Stage of the Williamstown Theatre Festival only through July 12. For ticket information, call the box office at 413-597-3400 or visit wtfestival.org.

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“All’s Well That Ends Well” by William Shakespeare. Directed by Tina Packer, at Shakespeare & Company.

As has been pointed out in numerous articles published about this production, the new version presented by Shakespeare & Company might have been titled “All’s Well That Ends Well, The Musical.”
It is my guess that this endeavor to cover up the minor aspects of this little-known Shakespeare play was done with somewhat less confidence than is usually placed on the musical versions of plays. The lyrics have been assembled from a variety of period sources, including three with lyrics by Will S. and others from sources that include King Henry III and historical troubadour songs, according to the lyric sheets. The new music is by Bill Barclay, the resident composer for this company, who also provides the incidental music. With 10 songs and 13 musical moments using them, this show has as much of a score as any traditional show. Having so much musical diversion does alter the play a great deal.

The story here is a slight one: Bertram and Helena have been raised together, and she is in love with her foster brother. He is noble and she is not. After saving the life of the King of France, Helena is granted the opportunity to select a husband and she chooses Bertram. He marries her, in duty to his king, but refuses to bed her, leaving her a virgin and going off to Italy to fight for the Duke of Florence. She becomes a humble pilgrim and heads for the Holy Land. En route, she stops off in Florence, where she hatches a plot to fool her husband into sleeping with her and getting her “with child,” thereby entrapping him into marriage. Oddly, it does sound like the perfect plot for a musical comedy.
The score Barclay has created is a rock score, and the featured singer is actor Nigel Gore, whose English accent and unshaven appearance does give him a late Rolling Stones persona. His voice, amplified through an old-fashioned mic, takes on all of the gravel of the road between Florence and Rossillion, the province in France from which Bertram hails. He is accompanied by wonderful instrumentalists, many of whom also play roles in the production. Gore, as Lavache, also supplies much of the verbal comedy for which this playwright is rightfully famous, using puns and side-of-mouth delivery.
Gore is surrounded by extremely talented people. On the comedy side there is a wonderful performance by Kevin O’Donnell as Parolles. He is over-the-top most of the time and deservedly so, for the character is such a selfish, ridiculous person that he makes Shakespeare’s other big-time “warrior,” Sir John Falstaff, seem to be a reasonable sort of guy. O’Donnell late in the show returns with his ego and his reputation destroyed and turns in a most sensitive portrayal of the man who cannot live up to his own bluster and fame. Douglas Seldin, as his drummer boy, is wonderful to watch.
Elizabeth Ingram as Bertram’s mother, the Countess of Rossillion, is lovely, graceful, entrancing and endearing. Her belief in her son’s inherent goodness never lags, and her devotion to her step-daughter/daughter-in-law is wonderful. As her friend, Reynalda, and even more so as Widow Capilet, Ginya Ness turns in touching performances. Brittany Morgan as the widow’s virginal daughter has a tougher task portraying the exuberant and willing girl who ultimately turns loyal and trusting in aiding Helena’s plot. She does very well in this role, even when