Peter Bergman Theater Reviews

"The Fantasticks." Book and lyrics by Tom Jones, music by Harvey Schmidt, loosely based on "The Romancers," a play by Edmond Rostand. Directed by Andrew Volkoff.

Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones wrote their first major musical for a summer theater at Barnard College in New York. It later opened off-Broadway at the Sullivan Street Theatre in 1960. It almost never has seen the sunset of an eternal long-run. Somewhere someone is always putting it back onto the stage.
It is an engaging piece, complete with hit songs like "Try to Remember," "Soon It's Gonna Rain" and "Plant a Radish." It transforms the traditional boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl concept into just the barest extension of that rudimentary plot by adding two scheming fathers, a bandit-for-hire and two ancient actors who quote Shakespeare and die effectively. There is also a wall, played by a Mute who also becomes a tree and a variety of weather, as needed.
Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield has extended its season into autumn by presenting the tiny musical on its large Main Stage for a short run. This sweet, expressionistic show - the "Urinetown" of its day - is bizarrely not dated. Its conceptual sensibility never has altered, and the reality of young love and the realizations that come to young lovers about themselves and one another have never changed. Neither has the popularity of this musical.
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here are some odd things happening at the theater on Union Street, however, and most of them have nothing to do with the show itself. As with so many shows these days, the ultimate version of the play lies with the sound engineer, in this case, Tristan Wilson. While the theater is distinguished by its access to the stage from any seat in the house, there is a whole lot of major miking going on, much of it probably unnecessary. Steve Wilson, who plays El Gallo - the narrator/bandit - is so over-miked that in his first number, "Try to Remember," it is as though he was singing a capella, without accompaniment, rather than with a grand piano and a full-sized harp. (Note to the program author: This is a harp and not a harpsichord, which is a keyboard instrument). In fact for most of the evening, the harp might as well not exist and the piano might well be in another building. The balance of sound is so way off base.
Wilson, who is the principal player in this show, gets to show off his talents in many ways. He sings, dances, acts, narrates, makes modest love and maximum fun with his flexible body, face and voice. He is a major asset to this show. If his voice is small, there is no way to tell with the overly loud amplification of his voice, which also was overwhelmed by occasional reverberation and noises that caused the theater to unplug their assisted hearing devices. Wilson turns in an excellent performance in spite of the technical overhaul of his ability and personality.
As the young man, Matt, the romantic lead of the play, Cory Michael Smith does a very nice job. He is personable and attractive and a good singer to boot. I was especially delighted with his scene of disillusionment, a strong and definitive representation of all that goes with the return of the prodigal son.
His Luisa, the 16-year-old girl-next-door-friend, was played by Dana DeLisa, whose singing was often wonderful, but occasionally off-pitch and shrill. She plays very young very well, however, and can be forgiven an occasional ramble into some other key. Together she and Smith make a charming duo.
Their two fathers are played with delicious differences by Darin DePaul as the boy's dad and John-Charles Kelly as the girl's. Their three numbers are definitely highlights of the show, but those numbers often are. DePaul has a nice way with the nasty streak in Hucklebee, while Kelly takes his few shots in anger with a soft relish that is both charming and delicate.
Bob Sorenson does nice work with Mortimer, the English actor who delights in death scenes, and Gordon Stanley is at his very best as Henry, the Old Actor. Breaking into Shakespeare at the drop of a hatpin, Stanley makes the most of every opportunity and he is wonderfully funny.
The Mute is played by Jonathan Karp, and his work, almost non-stop in this show, is a joy.
The show has been cleaned up in the years since it first appeared with the "Rape Ballet" transformed into the "Abduction Ballet" and the word "rape" written out of every lyric and dialogue passage, save one, in an effort to make the show politically correct. I know it may not be the accepted thing to laugh at the concept of rape, but the show's slight edge has been diminished by the unnecessary alteration.
The physical production has a cheery, traditional look to it, even though it belongs in the company's smaller, more intimate Stage II. The best costumes are those belonging to Henry and Mortimer, the finest set piece is the painted backdrop which lighting designer Jeff Davis uses beautifully to create mood, establish time of day or night and highlight the musical moments brilliantly while never distracting from the forestage action.
There's not much time to see the most-seen musical ever. There's nothing that would disturb a child, or an adult or a senior adult, contained in this show. That is the nature of the play. Director Andrew Volkoff has delivered on the promise of "The Fantasticks." He brings to life an era from the end of the century before last in last century's garb with a perfect placement in our own time. He has made timelessness its own pleasure, leaving us with the feeling that Schmidt and Jones wrote the show for this year's Barnard College festivities: a contemporary college, summer theater show with a theatrical score that makes it just so much better than that.

"The Fantasticks" runs through Oct. 18 at Barrington Stage Company's Main Stage on Union Street in Pittsfield. For information and tickets, call the box office at 413-236-8888.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 3:47 PM | Permalink

"Belles: A Play in Two Acts or 45 Phone Calls" by Mark Dunn. Directed by Nancy Wilder. At the Ghent Playhouse.

Comedy can be tragic when very little is amusing. Similarly, drama can be silly when everything is trivial. "Belles," a play by Mark Dunn that opens the 35th season of the Ghent Playhouse, is neither trivial nor tragic even though it is barely amusing and only a minor drama. It is, one might say, a mistake that this company has made, one of the few in my memory after 16 seasons of reviewing them, and that can be forgiven when you weigh the prior years and the bulk of their community opportunity. This company has nurtured actors -- Stephanie Tanaka comes to mind -- who bring little experience but a true conviction that acting is to be pursued. It has folded into its season a British holiday pantomime tradition, completely foreign to this region, and made it a hard-ticket item. It has brought national figures -- Serpico comes to mind -- into their seasons past and showcased them ensemble-style and made audiences nearly beg for more such appearances. This company has even taken technical theatricians under its wing and turned them back into the public eye as remarkable performers.
This opener for the new season provides at least four company debuts, including the director, and does what good community theater should do: bringing new blood onto the local stage and developing new audiences for the product they produce. It is just that this vehicle is inferior, the performances not up to snuff, and the direction sloppy and muddled. That is not a great result from a terrific intention.

"Belles" tells a brief story -- only four consecutive days are portrayed -- about the six Walker sisters who live in six states, scattered from their Tennessee roots to Philadelphia, Atlanta, Austin, and towns in Mississippi and Washington State. Their only means of communication with one another is the telephone and in "two act or 45 phone calls" (I actually counted 51, but maybe I shouldn't have included the answering machine and responses as actual calls) the Walker girls manage to alter their lives just a tiny bit. One loses a husband; one loses her self-delusions; one takes a step into relationships; one spews her anger into the ethos; one experiences a sexual revitalization; one manages to move her empathy onto a road called apathy.
The greatest alterations are delivered by a Ghent regular, Cathy Lee-Visscher playing Roseanne, and a newcomer, Jackie DeGiorgis as Aneece. The most minor changes in their lives are experienced by actresses Leanne Wilensky as Paige and Denise Rubio as Dust. Eileen Johnson's Audrey and Sally Dodge's Peggy are caught in the playwright's lustreless limbo.
The biggest problem seems to be the inept handling of a difficult set, designed by Tom Detwiler, by director Nancy Wilder, who has helmed another production of this play in the dim past -- 15 years ago. There are lengthy stage waits while actresses clamber on and/or off the set in silence. There are lengthy stage waits while actresses in ghost-light perform dumb dumb-show that merely reinforces the difficulty of maneuvering in the space. There are long periods when music plays and actors stand still waiting for the much-needed fade-out while lights are coming up so they can begin a scene. The disconcerting emotional dissonance serves only to disillusion the audience, turning their emotional attention into Spam (the meat product, not Internet junk) and their appreciation of all that is good here into simple rejection of the play.
Lee-Visscher's role is not dissimilar to others she has taken on at this and other regional community theaters. She handles Roseanne's disappointments beautifully and her destruction of ketchup is classic. As a distracted mother, always in a "fishbowl" of critical attention, she creates a sympathetic character. She is a woman scorned and betrayed. She is a needy soul who cannot pour out her heart without finding herself in a puddle. Roseanne makes a miraculous recovery, and Lee-Visscher knows just how to make us believe it possible. More and more, the actress is better and better in every part she plays. Roseanne is the one character whose life seems real from 8:10 to 10:20.
She is almost matched by DeGiorgis. Aneece is single, sharp, hard-edged, an alcoholic like her reprehensible father. She is self-tortured because of a childhood in which torture was love and love was withheld. Her need for a mother to hold her while being upbraided becomes so important that a second act monologue comes close to approaching pathos. DeGiorgis makes her second act appearances so much better than they might have been, based on her heavy-drawling, Memphis-impressed first act moments. She finishes the play with a personally triumphant scene that keeps the play alive, more alive than it has been for nearly two hours.
Leanne Wilensky is young and has a long way to go before she can tackle a complex role like Paige successfully. At this point, unlike DeGiorgis and Lee-Visscher, we can see her acting. The next steps take careful work and excellent guidance.
Denise Rubio plays Dust, or whatever her name is, with gusto and enthusiasm, yet we never really get close to the woman she is or the child she once was. The lines are there, but the heart and soul of the woman is lost in movement, outfits and a sexual sensibility that is both funny and unreal at the same time. Her character is lost in characterization, easy answers for a young actress.
Youth, in fact, is the one element that defeats this production. The age range of these six sisters is so great that the off-stage, much referred to, Mother would have to be nearly 100 for any reality to set in here. One problem with community theater has always been the availability of actors who are right for the roles. In this case, we seem to cover a spectrum of 20 to 60 (or more). For any woman to have conceived and raised these girls together in one house is visually impossible.
Sally Dodge is a decent actress burdened with a role that seems, in her hands, more hired nurse, a live-in, for a shut-in around her own age. Mama must have started breeding when she was 11. Dodge, who is placed downstage center, is presented as the central character through this physical placement. In reality, it is Aneece whose emotional journey covers the most ground, but it is Peggy, or Dodge, whose time on stage is central to all the activity. Dodge does what she can under the spotty guidance of her director, but she cannot save the play, not with her long stage entrances and exits. They preclude the buttoning of a scene; come to think of it, the director hasn't really managed a button with direction or lights or sound for any moment in the play.
Similarly, Johnson's Audrey is somewhere out in left field. She is really the only sister who seems to have spent her formative years as trailer-park trash. Her obsession with bar performances as a ventriloquist while waiting dutifully at home for her backwoods hunter husband is so out-of-keeping with the rest of her siblings that she is almost an intrusion, something out of another play. This is the playwright's doing, and not Johnson's, but she is stuck with it. She has most of the humorous lines and bits and her physical presence is splendiferous. She is just too "out there" to provide a proper family semblance to this ensemble.
Too much to achieve too little is the final call here. Talent wasted on third-rate materials does not make for enjoyable theater. I look forward to what's next; I think you should do the same. Things will get better at the Ghent Playhouse, and soon. I'm sure of it.

"Belles" plays through Oct. 25 at the Ghent Playhouse on Route 66, just west of Chatham, N.Y. For schedules and tickets, call the box office at 518-392-6264.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 8:47 PM | Permalink

Third by Wendy Wasserstein. Directed by Eric Peterson. At Oldcastle Theatre Company.

The influence of one state over all others. That's the topic of Wendy Wasserstein's final play, now ending the main stage season of the Oldcastle Theatre Company's 2009 season in Bennington, Vt. A bright and illuminating play, given a sterling and moving production, it is only on hand for a little bit more than a week. That's too short a time for this production.
Wasserstein died in 2005, just at the time this play opened at Lincoln Center for an all-too brief run. It seems that Oldcastle must cut short the life of this play in our region just as Wasserstein's life was cut short four years ago. The original production starred Dianne Wiesst, Charles Durning, Amy Aquino and Jason Ritter. Who would have thought a cast like that could be bettered, but Oldcastle may well have them beat. The quintet on stage at the Bennington Center for the Arts delivers every bit of influence that the script gives them with just a bit more in the visual department to help them deliver the playwright's message.

Christine Decker plays Laurie Jameson, a professor of literature at a small New England college. Jameson believes her teaching methods are illuminating, opening the minds of the brightest to other possibilities. She does not believe in the value of impressing minds to a single concept. Decker has the strength and the directness of Jameson's character down perfectly and yet, when she is seen in scenes at home with her daughter or with her father, she becomes a totally different person. The darkness lifts and underneath is a person whose radiance is impossible to conceal. Here she is Laurie, loving and restrained, and not Professor Jameson, all fire and passion.
The two sides of her personality, however, become crossed when she confronts a student who defies her belief in her own sense of judgement and approvals. Decker is a shrewd actress. She crosses these lines deftly and with a seamlessness that brings Jameson alive on stage. She fades into the background and only Laurie Jameson exists. It's a triumphant performance that magically transforms us as we watch her dance with her Alzheimer-ridden dad, as we see her destroy her oldest friendship with intolerance, as she destroys her relationship with her daughter. We can even buy her apologetic and remorseful self in the final scenes because she has refused to allow her one major mistake of hegemony to destroy the person she has always managed to be in her life.
"I still know what I know," she states at the end of Act One and by the time she reaches the end of Act Two this fact is still a prime factor in her existence, but it has taken her to new places she never assumed she would find.
As the student who inspires her wrath, Loren Dunn turns in a stellar performance. He is nuanced and subtle, strong when silent and stronger when speaking. He brings a fully fleshed out characterization to the stage as he is confronted with a charge of plagiarism and counters it with a reality that comes unexpectedly to the bitter fore with his off-school job as a bartender.
Jenny Strassberg plays Emily, daughter of Laurie Jameson, student and demi-radical who would rather love a man who believes in himself than become a replica of her mother, whose concerns with the human condition sometimes obliterate her love for her own child. Strassberg delivers nicely in this role. When she leaves the domestic and academic situations behind we are almost relieved and yet there is a chill to it, partly based on what we have seen that Emily has not in her mother's relationship with her own aged father. That chill is the recognition in her resolve that may preclude her own caregiving to a mother who may one day need her.
Paula Mann plays the friend, another professor whose cancer has caused her to leave her favorite class to Jameson, who betrays her trust -- not professionally but personally -- and removes herself from the friendship that had saved her more than once. Again, the influence of one state over all others drives a wedge between the two and Nancy (Mann's character) cannot support Jameson's groundless allegations. The final scene between the two of them, awkward, distant and difficult, is a moving realization of 25 years having become almost meaningless under the stresses of the present. Mann knows just which buttons to push in this scene and she makes the most of every chance.
In two scenes, Carleton Carpenter as Laurie Jameson's ailing dad tears out the hearts of every audience member and replaces them with bits of his own. I cannot believe there is a person able to withstand the emotional sweetness of half-remembered relationships, recognition difficulties and Glenn Miller's music. Carpenter delivers a frail human being with a strong image and a cultured sensibility. In every sentence, we see and hear the younger Jack Jameson and in every action we see and appreciate the remains of a human soul. The musical moment between him and his daughter, a dancing moment, is one that will stay with me, and with most people I am certain, for a very long time.
Eric Peterson has delivered a beautiful baby in "Third." It should be every person's duty to pay a visit to Oldcastle this week to see what he and Wendy Wasserstein have produced as a gift to an unexpectant public. It's as simple as that: one influence over all others. Attend the play.

"Third" plays at the Oldcastle Theatre Company's Bennington Center for the Arts stage through Oct. 11. For schedules and tickets call 802-447-0564.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 8:43 PM | Permalink