Peter Bergman Theater Reviews

"I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change," music by Jimmy Roberts, Book and Lyrics by Joe DiPietro. Directed by Trey Compton. At the Theater Barn in New Lebanon, N.Y.

A long time ago someone invented the musical revue. It was a show where a group of people performed songs and sketches all related to a single topic: Tourists in Paris; Tourists in Rome; Tourists in New York ± three typical revues by talents like Cole Porter, Cole Porter or Cole Porter/Irving Berlin. The songs were witty. The sketches equally so. Then things changed into the best hits of rock singers, or Belgian chanteurs, or ... I don't know.
In "I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change" the subject is loving. The concept is something fascinating, you'd suppose: It's all in the title's final phrase, "Now Change." Oddly nowhere in this show is the idea of changing for the one you love prevalent. One sketch about new parents indicates the need for a valued friend to alter his being for them. One sketch is about a resentful husband and father who drives too fast to please his family. So change already. But oddly the show isn't really about its title.

This show is much broader-based than that. It's really about love expressed throughout our lives, from first dates to blind dates, to marriage to old age. There, and only there, is there change in this show, a gradual movement into the benign places, or so we might believe.
The truth about this show, currently on stage at the Theater Barn in New Lebanon, N.Y., is that it is often very funny. Whether we have two people skipping various stages of dating so they can get to the breaking up quicker or two people attending a funeral finding a new interest in the continuation of life we find ourselves giggling, chortling or just simply laughing out loud. We don't go home with new insights. We don't go out the door humming all the hit tunes. We don't even leave the theater thinking we've gotten our moneys-worth tonight, by cracky! We just go out feeling fine, having enjoyed a reasonable evening.
This show is now the second longest-running off-Broadway musical in history having racked up 5,023 performances before in closed in 2008. It only has a limited engagement here. Four marvelous performers are on hand to give their all for the team and give they do. There is no let-up in director Trey Compton's energetic production. The band, keyboard/conductor Adam Jones and violinist Christine Orio, provides just the right touch to the show with its lightly, classically perfect accompaniment for every necessary moment. And, in a bright and discreetly dim enhancement, Allen Phelps perfectly marvelous cabaret lighting gives each scene the touch of humanity that may be lacking in the sometimes too slick lyrics of Joe DiPietro.
Tall Tom Garruto (tall is not his first name) is a delight in sketch after sketch. "Tear Jerk" is set in a movie house and just gets funnier and funnier in his hands, as does the "Marriage Tango" and his turn as a long-term Attica-based single man in "Scared Straight."
He shares the tango with Rachel Keimach who early shines in a sketch about speed dating, and who later is a marvel relating her bridesmaid experiences. She is also a hilarious wife faced with a maniac/driver and an especially elderly woman at a wake.
Lara Hayhurst, all blonde and perky on the outside delivers some wallop punches in her second act monologue dictating a video dating confession and also in the elation of a call from a former date when he said he would call.
Ryan Halsaver readily accepts the challenges of his many incarnations in this show particularly as a television pitchman for a law firm that contractually guarantees love relationships and as an old man determined to achieve one more pickup before he cashes it all in.
Abe Phelps silly set creates a certain tone for the show and the material falls in with the large heart-shaped unit that frames the band so perfectly. The songs are humorous, singable but not memorable in any way. The sketches are pointed, harmless and provide genuine yocks along with gentle titters. The show, as a whole, is innocuous, pleasant and will never be a threat to those large Cole Porter or Irving Berlin extravaganzas. As for this show, well the title paraphrased sums it up: "I loved you, you're just fine, stay as sweet as you are."

"I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change" plays at the Theater Barn located at 654 Route 20, New Lebanon, N.Y., through Aug. 7. For information and tickets, call the box office at 518-794-8989.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 6:17 PM | Permalink

"She Stoops To Conquer" by Oliver Goldsmith. Directed by Nicholas Martin.

Making its London debut at Covent Garden in 1773, Oliver Goldsmith's comedy "She Stoops To Conquer" came complete with a dedication to Dr. Samuel Johnson that read, in part, "The undertaking a comedy not merely sentimental was very dangerous ..." and in the prologue to the play, recited and written by David Garrick, was added this comment: "The Comic Muse, long sick, is now a-dying!" What followed in the play subtitled "The Mistakes of a Night" was a delicious play with laughs a-plenty that skewered the expectations of a theater-loving nation.
We have a paradoxically witty dullard calling the shots, a man named Tony Lumpkin. In classic tradition, the characters in this play bear the descriptive names that would make Goldsmith's successor, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, an enormous success. Lumpkin, however, would be the defining character for a century to come for an odd-fellow who incidentally leads the action.
Goldsmith only wrote two plays and he died before he could come up with a successor to this hit play, dead at the early age of 45. As Mrs. Hardcastle says early in Act One, "Is there a creature in the whole country, but ourselves, that does not take a trip to town now and then, to rub off the rust a little?" She is talking not just of herself and her stodgy husband, but of us as well and here is the principal strength of such a play - it talks of us, of our foibles and failures and our need to feed on what is best in the big towns. We all need that refreshing change of air and what Goldsmith produced with his somewhat subtle farce-comedy was just that - a change of air, from stale to fresh, from rusty to polished.

On the main stage at the Williamstown Theatre Festival they have dusted off this old warhorse, a staple of college theaters everywhere, and used it to open a tightly sealed set of windows, letting in something oddly fresh in the trappings of this centuries-old comedy. Under Nicholas Martin's perfect direction, in a concept that is both lovely and lively, a corps of actors bring it to life in a production that simply shines with originality dressed in old-style values.
Brooks Ashmanskas is Tony Lumpkin and there is never a dull moment when he is on stage, his darkly common West Riding accent a triumph of country ways. He is a tormentor without being dark, an instigator of problems and a solver of emotional turmoils. And he is funny. He is deliciously funny.
So is Kristine Nielsen as his mother, Mrs. Hardcastle, Dorothy to her husband, and Old Wife to him as well as to her chagrin. Nielsen, in candy-hued paniered gowns that fill the stage when she, in her pink wig, takes center or stage left or up-stairs, is a marvelous delight. Like the cotton candy she resembles, she is sticky and sweet and dangerously addictive. You want more and more of her but the playwright wisely withholds her until he needs her. So we have to wait as well.
Paxton Whitehead disports himself as her husband, the host of the house in which the play takes place and he seems to have been born for this role, so perfect is he in it. He looks and sounds befuddled when it is the thing to do. He is forthright and honest when that is the character he is playing. It's a case of never those twain shall meet and yet without a middle ground he is a sound and understandable Hardcastle.
Mia Barron is Miss Hardcastle, the heroine who ultimately spouts the title. She is brilliant. She pokes light fun at the things that need it. She romantically seduces her seducer. He is played nicely by Jon Patrick Walker who turns confusion into humor and derision into comedy. His father is the truly wonderful Richard Easton. What more need be said there?
Jeremy Webb has a marvelous time as the lover, George Hastings, cutting a very romantic figure and at the same time delivering a sense of morality to the proceedings. Holley Fain, as Miss Neville, his beloved, does a perfectly wonderful job in her role. Not as showy as Miss Hardcastle, she is nevertheless a precious cog in the Goldsmith machine.
Michael Wieser is an excellent Jeremy, Emily Ryder Simoness does nicely with Pimple and Elyse Steingold makes a lot out of a walk-on role, the barmaid Bet Bouncer.
While it pains me to praise the set designer (after his unthought-out set for this company's "A Doll's House" last week), David Korins has created a wonderful set for this show, its moving parts as much fun as its solid walls and doors. Ben Stanton has lighted the show with flair, and though I didn't understand the area light following on Mia Barron in the second act, everything else seemed to be flawless. Gabriel Berry has outdone himself with the costumes for this show as has Charles LaPointe with his wigs.
I never expected to be recommending an 18th century comedy to summer audiences, but here I go doing just that. "She Stoops To Conquer" will have you laughing through the hottest nights, the lack of electricity in your homes, the aftermath of racial tension drama in another town. It will help you forget the national debt ceiling crisis for a few hours, and that wouldn't hurt, would it?

"She Stoops To Conquer" plays on the mainstage for the Williamstown Theatre Festival at the '62 Center for Theatre and Dance on Main Street in Williamstown through Aug. 7. For information and tickets, call the box office at 413-597-3400.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 8:19 PM | Permalink

"The Best of Enemies" by Mark St. Germain, based on the book by Osha
Gray Davidson. Directed by Julianne Boyd. At Barrington Stage Company.

Black and white has been the issue of the season. This is the third
play in a series and, like the other two, it presents issues of the
mind, soul and heart to be experienced, witnessed and examined. Like
the other two it is a premiere of sorts, this time a world premiere.
And more so then ever before this summer, the topic of "gray" is the
subject at hand.
Luckily Julianne Boyd is adept at this shade of human experience. At
Barrington Stage, she has brought other shades of gray into luminous
being in the past: "Tea" was one such event; "West Side Story"
another; "Follies" even more brilliant than we had ever seen it
before. With "The Best of Enemies," she transforms the gray
neighborhood of southern race relations into precious silver. This
true story, brought dramatically to life by playwright Mark St.
Germain, is one that touches our senses of liberalism and tolerance
and decency, steals them from us and returns them in edible,
bite-sized pieces reconceived as hope, faith and humanity.

The story is simple: a hateful white man in Durham, N.C. -- C.P.
Ellis, grand cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan -- is confronted by Ann
Atwater, an uneducated, militant black woman on the issue of
desegregation of the Durham schools. She is mean; he is mean. He is
intolerant to the point of demanding a black man clean the knob of
his radio with an oil-soaked cloth just because he touched it. She is
intolerant in that no white man's opinion is to be considered, no
white man's touch is to be tolerated. He mouths off; so does she. She
threatens; he does likewise. He prefers an automatic weapon and she
has her shiv.
In about 98 minutes covering about three years in time plus an
epilogue closer to the present, these two people travel a vast amount
of space and time, a relative few inches, but they are as impressive
a journey as if they traveled a hundred million light years. It's a
remarkable journey piloted by a talented director with an engagingly
talented playwright co-pilot. With the aid of four remarkably good
actors, some music and a talented design team, this brief look at a
portion of our national history turns into moving drama evoking
sympathy, tears and just a few giant personal steps toward the
recognition of a single human race. In the words of Howard Dietz,
"that's entertainment."
Aisha Hinds plays Ann Atwater. In her hands, Ann is so very much a
living presence that Hinds' smiles at the curtain calls rendered her
virtually a stranger. In movement, stance, accent, posturing and
attitude, she was so very much a living breathing entity that it
really was hard to envision the woman in any other form. Hinds is a
stunning actress, a personage with the ability to completely inhabit
another body and mind. Her monologues and her scenes had equal
strength and credulity. Her stage accent never wavered or altered.
Only once, in a tender scene played in a hospital visiting room, did
her character become a more standard southern black mammy and then
only with a rationale beyond explaining: There was a need for Ann to
be something other than who she was and Hinds found her way into this
transition. Brilliant acting.
As C.P. Ellis, John Bedford Lloyd is easily the equal of his co-star
Hinds. Put an asterisk next to each descriptive accolade above, along
with an asterisk right here, and you have an honest appraisal of his
performance. Additionally, his scenes with the lovely Mary Ellis of
actress Susan Wands were touched with an unexpected tenderness. His
drunk scene and its ugly result were played with an undeconstructed
honesty that had an audience horrifyingly enthralled. Their
combination hush and gasp told the story. Lloyd also shares Hinds
ability to maintain a difficult accent without wavering and that
makes him so much more believable throughout.
As for Wands, her role has been underwritten. We see things and know
more about them much later. We hear things and the responses don't
echo any knowledge we've gotten and so they drift away. She is the
only supporting character in this play and we need more of her to
expect more from her.
On the other hand, Bill Riddick, an antagonizer/organizer played
wonderfully by Clifton Duncan, is a major character, not the
odd-man-out corner of a three-way relationship. He has come to Durham
to start the process of integration. He inadvertently turns into the
catalyst for a relationship that has no basis in reality. Duncan acts
with an ingenuousness that just suits his character to a tee. His
only weakness is his transition into old age in the final sequence.
Visually the production is a technical shoulder shrug: things keeps
moving and imagery is used to give historical and geographical
context to the scenes on panels that change their locations on the
stage. This design work is the step-child of David M. Barber, who
created the scenic look, and Scott Pinkney whose lighting design has
allowed everything to be visible as needed. Kristina Lucka's costumes
are an interesting collection of period clothing and recycled
curtains. Brad Berridge has done a remarkable job with his sound
design work, a theatrical show in itself.
It is Boyd, the director, who works all of this raw material -
script, designers, actors - into a seamless whole. She moves her
people through the mud of special effects to produce a powerful
relationship that no marriage can supercede, that no critical urge
can falter, no cynic disparage. This may well be her finest work to
date.

"The Best of Enemies" plays on the Mainstage at Barrington Stage
Company at the Union Street Theatre, just west of North Street in
Pittsfield through Aug. 6. For information and tickets call the box
office at 413-236-8888.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 8:53 PM | Permalink

"Dutch Masters" by Greg Keller. Directed by Brian Roff. At Berkshire Theatre Festival.

Are there never to be plays with endings any longer? In its world premiere (not counting workshop performances in NYC at LAByrinth Theater Company) Greg Keller's one hour and ten minute play "Dutch Masters" presents a rather unique situation and, like Chekhov or Strindberg, he sets up places along the way where possible endings are indicated. In true Chekhovian style there is playtime with a gun. Later the gun figures significantly into the plot. Ultimately the plot loses its forceful way and ignores the possibilities that the gun allows for many different endings.
Other props, including a pair of trousers, provide the perfect solution, but instead the author and director have let the play lie there, playing dead as it were, without using anything definitive, decisive or even deluding to bring to a momentary conclusion the strained circumstances of the two players.
Blackout. Pause. Applause.

We applaud the actors for their excellent work in this short, intense drama. We applaud the creators for their ineffable expressions of conflicting emotions. There is much here to praise and enjoy even if the event ends without event. It just seems a shame to let so many fine classic clues go to waste, especially when so many improbables have been played out and blithely accepted by most of the viewers.
Eric, a young black man discovers Steve, a young white man on the uptown subway in New York. He accosts Steve, draws him into an unwanted and uneasy relationship and finally reveals secrets, including the hidden gun, that jar Steve's world beyond the normal scope of things. If some of these seem improbable and unlikely, well, they are. Still, New York is not like other places and in the city of 8 million subway riders things like the events in this play could well take place. In Eric's apartment shocking revelations about their long-standing relationship come to the fore. Some things that cannot happen are shown to us : Eric knows who Steve has been on the phone with even though he is outside a double re-enforced metal door. How? Eric locks the door with just his hand but later, opening it, he needs to take a key out of his pocket. Why? Eric takes nearly ten minutes to roll and seal a joint. Is that possible? Really? It's been a long time since I did it, or saw someone do it, and it never took more than a minute or two, tops. How can this be?
We can excuse things like these. That's easy to do. It's that ending that doesn't really exist, that not knowing how Eric feels about the events of the evening that leaves us dead-ended. It's a shame, because there is some wonderful writing here. There is some dynamic stage business as well. It just doesn't add up to as much as it should.
Amari Cheathom plays Eric. His early scenes are difficult as his black-speak is dense and thick with only the occasional word resonating. Once he gets into the relationship with Eric, though, Cheathom gives us a much more understandable character. He is quite charming at times and at others exhibits an honest volatility that is shaking. It's a constantly fascinating performance. He is left high and dry, though, by his director and author as he falls into his final moments alone and unaided by them.
Christian Coulson plays Steve and in his hands this young man becomes consistently younger and younger until he literally picks up his toys and runs home. It is fascinating to watch the "Harry Potter" actor on stage and see a character slowly emerge from a handsome image. His very good looks become secondary as his face and body begin to relate contrasting and ever altering emotions. Knowing he played Tom Riddle (the student Voldemort) drifts out of our minds as his American WASP with the cleaning lady fixation takes over. I even felt badly about his having to struggle his way through Harlem in an attempt to find his way home again.
Jason Simms has given us a set that sets us in places and leaves their images indelibly printed on our minds. Japhy Weidemen aids them in their correctness with lighting effects that provide an additional layer of reality which is abetted, to an extreme, by the sound design work of Bray Poor. Laurie Churba Kohn has given both men the costumes they deserve.
It falls back to Brian Roff, the director, to take the liabilities and the abilities of this production on his shoulders. He has done very good work here, but he hasn't pushed this play into a final form. At least I hope that's the case. One more step would mean so much.
This is an evening that will ask you to stretch. Stretch your belief in coincidence, your belief in fate. It will keep you on your toes as the violence, the imparted sense of violence and the sincerity of love blend uneasily with the history and the memories of these two men. Not everything jells and the affectionate moment is surrounded by anger and disappointment and it never actually happens. That's a pity, too.

"Dutch Masters" plays at the Unicorn Theater on the Berkshire Theatre Festival campus on Route 7 in Stockbridge through Aug. 6. For information and tickets call the box office at 413-298-5576.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 11:14 PM | Permalink

"A Doll's House" by Henrik Ibsen, translated by Paul Walsh. Directed by Sam Gold. At Williamstown Theatre Festival.

Disaster! It strikes a marriage. It strikes a relationship. It strikes a theatrical production. The first instance is in the play by Henrik Ibsen now on stage at the Nikos Stage, the second theater at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. The second occurrence may be expressed as my give and take with the press office at that same organization while the third is, quite simply, the barrage of theatrical errors that confound this production.
Ibsen's play about a marriage threatened by an error in judgement, a mistake made by a trophy wife attempting to save her husband's life, is one of the great classics of all time, often credited with beginning the movement of modernism. Its final scene so startled the world at the time that the ultimate resonance of a heavy door clanging shut has remained the clarifying moment in the transition from romanticism to realism. Ibsen's portrait of the collapse of the marriage is still intact, but in this production the impact of the final moment is lost in a mess of a realization that alters the focus of the play from the newly found strength and determination of the wife to the narcissism of a vain husband who only has the resource of violence to express his frustration at someone else discovering and disclosing who and what he has been.

The strain in my relationship with this theatre has to do with the foolishness of placing a critic on the side of the theater where nearly 30 percent of the play cannot be seen or heard. It would seem to be the job of the press department to walk the theater, see the result of faulty design and try to compensate for that in the placement of people whose jobs consist of reporting to a waiting public what they saw and heard.
That, in brief, brings me to the failure of this production, the multiple failures, actually. Scenic Designer David Korins has created a set for this play that does just about everything possible wrong. Downstage right is a fireplace unit and a bookcase that lead to two handsome pocket doors that open onto another room, presumably the study or office (in this instance possibly the dining room) of Torvald Helmer. The angle of the set's line from the proscenium takes the wall upstage and out of view of people sitting in the house left boxes and even, to some extent from people on the left aisle. Major scenes are played in this space and voices are muffled, actors cannot be seen, action is missed and involvement is destroyed.
Similarly, when the doors are open and the audience should see the inner set, and - as it turns out - the set behind that set, nothing is visible to almost half the audience. Stage left (or house right) is a double staircase unit that is mostly hidden from the audience members on the house right side of the stage. Once again, major moments take place there and a good deal of the audience is unable to see it. I stood in the back of the house for the third act, hoping to see everything. I still couldn't, but what I saw included stagehands walking around backstage between the window units and the lights and a line of light leaking out between the proscenium and the house wall which gave me insight into the entrances of each and every actor and extra coming down the stairs I could no longer see.
This is just poor design work. It is a black mark against a director who clearly never checked the sightlines before staging key scenes. It is an extremely poor introduction to a new producer who is really responsible for what appears on her stages. She has the right, and the responsibility, to veto production elements that clearly diminish the impact of any play she produces. For all involved this is just sloppy production, something I don't expect to get even in a high school show. 
As Nora, Lily Rabe gives about one half a performance. From the outset she is all nerves, exposed ends flaring. She is hyper for two and a half acts and finally settles in for a conversation with her husband that ends with decisions that we should understand. She makes this difficult by swallowing final phrases of sentences, by dropping final letters of words, by rushing her lines to the point of making me wonder when her train is scheduled to depart. It is a very disappointing performance of a career-making role.
By contrast, as her friend, Kristine, the remarkable Lily Turner gives the finest performance of the evening. She exudes subtleties and nuance. She is an enigma from first to last, her true intentions never really clear, but her effect on the final outcome is deliciously brought to bear. It is a rendition of a secondary role that is almost stellar.
Josh Hamilton plays all the worst of Torvald Helmer, Nora's husband, to the best of his ability. This character is a sexist, emotional abuser who has kept his wife an adored doll, her feelings and her needs never examined by him. Hamilton makes this all appear natural and easy. He often delivers lines that should make us cringe from their lack of sensitivity with so much honesty that we can buy into the lies he is creating for himself. It's good work from this actor.
Adam Rothenberg, as Nils Krogstad, brings real menace into the proceedings although often without verbal clarity. Handsome, dark and visually overpowering, he loses impact through this oddity of speech, not a mush-mouth but somehow without getting his lines across the gap from the stage to the audience.
Matthew Maher does the difficult job of playing the confidante who will not live to see the outcome of the heroine's heroism. He does it as well as he can; it's a thankless role and he seems almost too young for it. Zainab Jah played Anne-Marie, Nora's ex-nanny and now her maid, with "island" zest and a good sense of the role. Sol and Rose Sutter are Nora's children and they are quite good, as is Tashi, playing Tashi. No dog should ever be the highlight of a drama like this one, but Tashi actually is.
Sam Gold proves his inexperience directing this play. With what appears to have been very little control over the production design, seemingly no control over the performers, and obfuscation the outcome of his apparent lack of understanding of the play's effect on world drama, his production of this play ranks among the worst productions of anything that I have ever seen. Kay Voyce's costumes are a mixed bag of time, place and correctness. Ben Stanton's lighting gives a new meaning to "What? Who? Where? Huh?" and Jane Shaw's sound design work is at its nagging worst in the lack of the all-important slamming of a door at the end of Act Three. And that's at the end of the act, Mr. Gold, not three minutes later before Mr. Stanton's final fade out.
Did I say disaster? I meant outright murder! Good riddance to this production.

"A Doll's House" plays on the Nikos Stage of the Williamstown Theatre Festival at the '62 Center for Theatre and Dance, located at 1000 Main Street in Wiliamstown through July 31. For information and tickets, call the box office at 413-597-3400.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 11:06 PM | Permalink

"Mormons, Mothers and Monsters," book and lyrics by Sam Salmond, music by Will Aronson. Directed and choreographed by Adrienne Campbell-Holt. At Barrington Stage Company.

New musicals need work. It is very rare that they don't. The first new musical to emerge this season from Barrington Stage Company's Musical Theatre Lab, run by playwright/composer William Finn, "Mormons, Mothers and Monsters," definitely needs more work. What's there is good, but to be really, really good, viable and good, producing good, the authors need to carefully scrutinize what they've already written, then tighten the 93 minutes, cut a few things, add a few thoughts and cap this one-act show at about 80 minutes. Then they need a second act.
There are some laughs here. There are a few heart-skipping moments. There's even a plot. What's missing is what good writers of fiction do with those moments of memoir that sneak into their work: refine, reuse, replace and rewrite. The main character of this show is referred to in the program as simply "Me" and me means me as we find out when "Me" gets his third father and changes his name to Samuel Liam Salmand and discovers that he is gay. Hard to miss that autobiographical reference, isn't it?

Here's where non-fiction theater criticism reverts to memoir, to confessional (and why not when the principal character does the very same thing in this show): in my early twenties I had a lover who was a Mormon. I'd never met a man who had more potential or carried more guilt. He disappeared after I knew him for a year and I later heard that he had been pulled back into the religious world of Utah by his predatory mother. Somehow I pray that this show (and it's creator's life) won't take that same route.
In the role of predatory Mom on the Stage Two platform right now we have Jill Abramovitz who takes the role of mother about as far as it can go without being a revival of "Gypsy." The character marries and marries and when her attempts to create a true family fail her she blames her teen-age son. Abramovitz is sometimes shrill, sometimes over the top and sometimes just about as right in the role as I imagine my friend's mother must have been. Her final scene is touching yet it holds us at arm's length and is ultimately unsatisfying. Not the fault of the actress, but the writing. She does the best she can with the material she is given and she has a lot of singing to do; she has a lot of scene work to handle as well. Abramovitz has an appealing personality, a Carol Burnett crossed with Alix Korey sort of style. She is an able support to the two men playing the roles of the guys that surround her.
As the Monster Adam Monley gets to be not just the monster under the bed, a pet peeve for so many people, but all of the men who marry "Me's" mom. He ultimately plays five different people and he plays them superbly. As the first (ex) husband he is brash and strong and unfeeling toward his infant son who doesn't measure up to expectation. As the second husband he is meek and mild-mannered and closeted gay. As the third he has a violent streak that emerges from the loving-care facade he hides behind. As the fourth he is obviously disturbed and easily perturbed. His actual monster is a miracle of language, body language and double intent. Monley gets all of them just right.
Taylor Trensch is the Mormon, "Me" as a child growing up. We follow him from pre-kindergarten to college student and we see the mistakes he sees and takes on as his own personal failures. Trensch does a lovely job playing piety but doesn't handle the role of sinner with the same grace. As an actor he handles fear and disgust, self-loathing and confusion with more style and reality than he portrays happiness. That latter emotion seems more difficult for him. There's a fair amount of all of this going on, and quickly, so it almost doesn't matter and later he remarks that he never knew happiness after all. That could be true, but if so then the writing must bear that out; right now it doesn't for the young boy certainly seems happy and says so.
Finally, on stage without a momentary break is Stanley Bahorek as "Me" or Sam. This is the more adult version of the Trensch young man. He has been with us from the outset and the concept here is that this together, sensible, personally in charge of his own well-being young man has managed to pull himself out of the mire of a life that is liberally conservative and miserably false. Bahorek is a fine actor and a good singer and he makes the most of his moments here.
He, like the others, manipulates his way through a remarkably inventive single set, designed by Brian Prather. Paloma Young has managed some interesting moments with her costumes and Grant Yeager does well with his lighting design. Ryan Peavey needs a few more performances in order to balance the show's sound.
Vadim Feichtner is once again musical directing and playing the piano. He does very well even though he sometimes overpowers his singers (a problem for Peavey to solve).
Adrienne Campbell-Holt uses the small space and cluttered stage very well and her use of lighting and motion often presents an impossible picture of reminiscence. Her choreography is just rudimentary and not worthy of comment, but the fight choreography by Ryan Winkles of Shakespeare & Company is just fine.
Let's see this show in another year, when the gay themes and characters, when the marriage issue and the after-life issues are more thoroughly integrated, when the second act is written and we have a viable ending instead of the unsatisfying one we're left with in this incarnation. Let's see how the guilt-ridden, but happily released from personal Hell "Sam" fares. He is the anonymous "Me" in the first act that exists now. To become Sam would be a wonderful alternative, a fascinating turn for the story to take. I really want this show to go somewhere, and I mean that in the nicest way. There is more to this story and it needs to be told.

"Mormons, Mothers and Monsters" plays at Barrington Stage Company's Stage Two, located at 36 Linden St., Pittsfield, through July 31. For information and tickets, call the box office at 413-236-8888.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 11:01 PM | Permalink

"Capitol Steps: Desperate Housemembers," with lyrics by Elaina Newport, Mark Eaton and the cast. At Cranwell Resort in Lenox.

History lessons aren't always easy to learn, but when you're face to face (or as it might be said in the Capitol Steps Lirty Dies monologue - face to face) with the ugly truths of contemporary history presented in a little quirky song, you learn quickly how our biggest mistakes can be our finest cabaret fodder. You learn that an election isn't just a universal choice as much as it is a pathway to double entendre. You find out that a disgraced politician has a life to lead on the west coast doing day work in a mini-spa and making penetrating in-roads with romantic cleaning women. You discover that, once and for all, our leaders never die, they just go on book-signing tours where they sometimes (God Forbid!) read from their oeuvre.
You learn much more than all this at a performance of Capitol Steps, appearing again this summer, nightly except for Tuesdays, at Cranwell Resort in Lenox. From 8:05 until 9:35 p.m. each evening you laugh until you agree to change political parties. I laughed so hard and so often that I forgot to write anything down and had to buy the album just to write this review. These are funny people in educationally amusing material, changing costumes, looks, voices, makeup and even - it seemed to me - eye colors in the twinkle of one of those eyes. If you've seen this act before you may recognize a few of their older pieces, although it seems to me that even those undergo alterations to bring them into the most current point of view. In fact, a few of them are so universal they appear to be new and current even without a changed word or phrase.

The cast I saw on Sunday night will probably not be the cast you see when you go, but I've never seen or heard a performance from this group that wasn't top-notch so there's little to worry about. I will name names in this review, but you enjoy whomever you get to see.
Corey Harris not only is a devastating President Obama he makes the most of his other roles as well. In Hotel Arizona he plays a racially stereotyped individual with a historic right to his space. It is a funny sight-gag that clues in one of the best lyrics of the night.
Kevin Corbett is just a funny man with a way with words. His perfect take on Bill Clinton is matched by his perfect take-off on Donald Trump. His delivery is solid and sly at the same time and his wife, Jenny Corbett is his match in every way. Whether playing Judge Sotomayor, Christine O'Donnell or any number of oddly amusing women including a marine recruit in the number "Ballad of the Queen Berets."
Jack Rowles is the heart-throb of the company playing an hysterically funny everybody else in the world of politics. His performance of "Memoirs" the book-tour advert for former President George W. Bush's collection of stories from the oval office is hilarious. Unlike the real G.W., you just don't want him to leave the platform.
One of the funniest sketches in the show has Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsberg on line for the only ladies room in the area of the supreme court. Bari Biern plays Ginsberg and she is unbelievably brilliant in the robes and the role. She and Jenny Corbett make the work as memorable as Biern's take on Sarah Palin makes that woman so very inevitable. Better than Tina Fey, Biern's Palin is a remarkable tour-de-force.
Getting tickets for this show can be like registering to vote - it must be done no matter what it takes. You don't want to miss an opportunity to let your laugh be heard, to make it count.

"Capitol Steps" will be playing at Cranwell Resort on Route 20 at the Lenox and Lee border through Sept. 3. For information and tickets call the box office at 413-881-1636.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 8:40 PM | Permalink

"Souvenir: A Fantasia on the Life of Florence Foster Jenkins," by Stephen Temperley. Directed by Tim Fort. At the Weston Playhouse in Weston, Vt.

Genuine talent is not always of the obvious kind. Florence Foster Jenkins began her singing career in 1912 and sang her final concert, her only one at Carnegie Hall in New York City, in 1944, a 32-year-long career which is exceptional for a classical singer. The fact that she was tone-deaf, rhythm-challenged, language-stultified and generally non-musical made no difference to her or to her fans. She always sold out her performances, most of which were for charities that needed her help.
Her true talent, it would seem from this delicious play, was in believing wholeheartedly in her ability to provide quality entertainment when it was required; she passed this strength of purpose in belief along to her accompanist. She never heard the laughter that surrounded her performances as derisive, merely as joyful. According to the play she honestly felt that her singing was uplifting people's spirits, was providing them with finest coloratura available at the time, was educating and enthralling them at the same time. Her accompanist, Cosme McMoon, did not agree we are told but he stayed with her from the mid-1920s until her death in 1944 so some of her belief system vigor must have infiltrated his heart and his brain.
In Stephen Temperley's play "Souvenir," now on stage at the Weston Playhouse's second stage, the subject may be roses and their giver Ms. Jenkins, but the play belongs to Cosme at the piano. This was clear to me when I saw the premiere of the show at the Berkshire Theatre Festival in 2005 and it is even clearer to me now after seeing this show again. He tells the story but it isn't her story.  We never learn much about her before he meets her and we never learn anything about her life during the years they work together. She is the principal of a story untold. We do learn about him and his responses to life and work and the unpleasant reality that she is the level at which he will always be perceived and remembered.
         

Luckily in this production Cosme is played by a very handsome and talented man and as such we truly feel his pain each time he has to attempt to correct the uncorrectable. Jonas Cohen plays the piano well, sings nicely and acts with a reality-based technique that is sometimes nearly stultifying. His honesty is overwhelming. His charm is slightly forced. His transition from sceptic and scoffer to heroic champion is wonderful to watch. The remorse he exhibits in the telling of his story about a love/hate relationship with Jenkins is tear-jerking. I think I would pay to watch him nightly in this play. He's that good.
          His Florence Foster Jenkins, Madame Flo, is a remarkably talented woman named Georga Osborne. She has a wonderfully expressive face reminiscent of Edna May Oliver and her hands flutter like Margaret Dumont's hands. Her body appears to be a dead-ringer for that of Mrs. Jenkins and her vocal production in the arias and lieder is just about as unbearable as that of her role-model. "I am known for my ear!" she says at one point and we have to ask ourselves exactly what does that mean. Certainly it can't refer to her musical ear and its uncanny understanding of placement. Perhaps it just means her shell-like ear. Either way it is one of those very funny lines in its moment and in Osborne's voice and like her singing makes little sense in the greater scheme of things.
          Blair Mielnik has created a lovely set and Tracey Christensen some superb costumes, both elegant and outlandish as needed. Travis McHale does all right with his lighting and Jeff Human seems to have balanced sound nicely in this odd and elongated space in which the play is performed.
          Tim Fort has wrung every conceivable laugh out of his actors and this script. He has also managed to bring us to tears near the end of the play, extracting from his actors and his audience an irrefutable response to the basic tenets of this play. His actors are using period physical gestures naturally. They are in their moment and that is a tribute to all three of them.
          This is one of those plays that must be described as gems. Not flawless - for so much is left out of the story here - and yet hardly flawed at all, Souvenir in Weston, Vermont is just about the perfect piece of theatrical summertime fun. I wouldn't have missed it for anything.

"Souvenir" plays at the Weston Rod & Gun Club, second stage for the Weston Playhouse Theatre Company, just 1.5 miles north of the Weston Playhouse on Route 100 in Vermont through July 31. For information and tickets call the box office at 802-824-5288.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 8:37 PM | Permalink

"Sylvia" by A.R. Gurney. Directed by Anders Cato. At Berkshire Theatre Festival.

"Sylvia" is a play about a dog, a man and their wife. Greg finds Sylvia, a stray dog, probably a mixed breed consisting of part golden labrador and part poodle. He brings her back to his New York City apartment, where she cavorts around like a street kid released in a candy store, or a mistress allowed to see her lover's wife's rooms. Kate, Greg's wife returns home and the story grows tense. Over the course of the next few months everything changes for this trio as Sylvia become more and more the reason for tension between Greg and Kate and Sylvia also begins to grow into the final stages of her puppydom, achieving her first heat and all that follows. Kate becomes increasingly hostile to both her mate and the mutt.
Those are the seeds of a hilarious comedy on the Main Stage at Berkshire Theatre Festival. This play is not your usual Gurney WASP play about family and responsibility and such. This is a play about your family, or my family. It's a comedy about what happens when a reasonably responsible man, whose children are grown and living away, reacts emotionally, responds with his heart rather than his head, to an adorable and adoring pet. Everything changes.

In Anders Cato's vision the dog makes even more of a difference than usual. The director keeps his Sylvia in constant motion, even when standing still. Her movement may be canine, but her more wanton ways of expressing anything even remotely sexual are definitely trash, tramp and street-corner pick-up. Cato's Sylvia is much more feline than canine and yet no one who has had a female dog would ever deny that things are too much different from this Sylvia. His best comic moments, as a director, come from the other three actors on stage, but his specifically controlled dog-actress is always the impetus for the others' physical quirks, right down to the twitches experienced by the Society woman, Phyllis, from Vassar.
Cato is fortunate to have a superb cast willing to comply with his directorial needs. Jurian Hughes is a wonderful Kate. As the left-out, over-powered, wingless wife she struggles with Sylvia, both with her influence on her husband's behavior and with the dog herself. Slender, with sharp features, she manages to hold her own in all of her scenes. Like her husband she can carry on a reasonable conversation now and then with Sylvia and when she does there is something oddly choked up about it. The overtones of a wife begging a mistress to release her husband cannot be missed in Hughes' performance. We see this situation at times through her eyes and she does see things in exactly this way.
David Adkins plays Greg, the man who is a God, if not THE God, to Sylvia. Here is an actor who can downplay and at the same time play-up this aspect of being the object of hero-worship. The subtleties in his work in this role are remarkable. A smile, a raised eye-brow, a shift of point of view all add up to immense and sometimes over-riding reactions. Adkins makes much ado about adoration. When Sylvia announces "You saved my life," and begins to sing "Nearer my God to thee..." it is Adkins who makes this funny through his body language and tone of voice.
The actor Walter Hudson plays the triple roles of Tom (owner of a large dog who "violates" Sylvia late in the play), Phyllis (the Vassar Girl grown WASPish), and Leslie (a gender-challenged therapist). He plays all three of them spectacularly. He, on opening night, received an ovation on his final exit and that was as it should have been. His work, complete with palate-challenged pwonounciation, got an ovation. His work deserved it.
The role of Sylvia has been taken by Rachel Bay Jones. Vulnerable and human she creates a character who is perfectly canine in movement, reaction and rest time. She is vulgar without being offensive, rude without being disparaging. She can crawl into a vagrant lap with the same ease that she uses in sprawling on the floor or trashing the sofa. If you've ever owned a dog, you know that the dog really owns you and that is exactly what happens when Ms. Jones meets Sylvia.
There's too much fun, too much laughter and too much pathos in this silly little comedy and too much of all that is too pertinent to the storyline to be given away here. Though for me the scene where Sylvia's last days are revealed was too close to my own recent experience with my pet dog, it was sensibly and sensitively played even if it is a departure in style and breaks the flow of an otherwise well-made play.
You don't have to love dogs to enjoy this play, but you should have some personal attitude about them for all that.  So, pack up your dog hostility and leash it and bring it along to this theater's excellent home season opening play.

"Sylvia" plays at the Berkshire Theatre Festival in Stockbridge through July 30. For information and tickets call the box office at 413-298-5576.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 12:00 PM | Permalink

"Romeo and Juliet" by William Shakespeare. Directed by Daniela Varon. At Shakespeare & Company.

Juliet Capulet, age 12 or thereabouts, falls in love with Romeo Montague, age near 16, and the two of them are wed by her confessor, his confessor. This man, Friar Laurence, is one of the very few things they have in common. Their families are long-standing enemies, though why they are such we never learn. What we know about them is this: they hate, they fight, they hate some more, so when their children marry it should be the beginning of the long-awaited cure for their ills. Instead, tragically, death continues to draw downward the fates of these two clans.
Long considered one of the greatest love stories of all time, the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet is being given a clean, black and white production at Shakespeare and Company in Lenox. Like the finest black-and-white movies of the early days of Talkies, there is a technicolor sequence. It is the masquerade ball for which every member of the company is decked out in full color and the show takes on a magical, mythical quality. It is during this sequence, and the love scene that follows it, that Juliet finds her one true love in youthfully romantic Romeo. As costumed by Kiki Smith it is easy to understand the attraction and the wonderment of new emotions.
This classic of the English-speaking theater has inspired so many other plays, books and movies that the story has become somewhat trite, less moving than it must have been in its first century. To consider seeing another production of it also feels less moving, less motivating. Even so, when a clever director and a lovely cast bring to life a version of the story that is perhaps as true to Shakespeare's original intent as is humanly possibly, it is worth the effort to see what the play is all about.

Daniela Varon has done her job brilliantly. With a contemporary look that becomes almost a timeless vision of these people and with a cast of actors who manage to be the ages their roles demand the play loses itself into a timeless abyss and the story's universal qualities emerge into the dramatic lighting designed by Les Dickert. This isn't ancient Verona any longer; it isn't Lenox in the 21st century; it's not the west side of New York in the racially smattered 1950s. We are in that limbo of time where all stories are replayed constantly and our vision of reality is just that: a vision of reality. Thus the words of the play come to us as a new language we have been born to comprehend and the play works on every conceivable level.
Juliet is a tomboy in the hands of Susannah Millonzi. She duels, she runs, she dances and she loves with every fiber of her being. She is the embodiment of passion. She is as much the aggressor as the Romeo of David Gelles. In love with the fair Rosaline, he transfers his youthful desires to another at first glance. Lust is transformed instantly to love in Gelles' playing and we can see the difference. Their "balcony" scene involving a Shaker chair moves the reality of the play into that limbotic space where legend and tale become relevant to our own lives and to the timeless space of our neighborhood.
Kevin O'Donnell's Mercutio is an adorable, drunken fool whose antics and erratic behavior is both endearing and frightening. Wolfe Coleman's Paris is almost too attractive not to be loved and accepted by Juliet who spurns him into the grave. Sam Parrott brings a sweet sense of humanity to Benvolio and Equiano Mosieri is a seriously dangerous Tybalt.
As the elders of the community, Malcolm Ingram shines as Lord Capulet, a loving man who will sacrifice his only child to a loveless marriage. His scenes are gracious and charming and yet when his daughter denies him this "connection" wish, he shows a violent side that is totally unanticipated. As his wife, Kelley Curran brings to Lady Capulet a very honest quality, one in which it is plain that she resents her own child's influence on her husband. The playing is subtle and yet clear. Johnny Lee Davenport is a powerhouse as Romeo's father and his final scene shows how a strong man can be deeply affected by losses.
As Nurse to Juliet, Starla Benford broadens the eternal quality of the play, her normally humorous role becoming one of impact, one of foolish romanticism. Walton Wilson finds more drama in the part of Friar Laurence than is normal. He plays the dramatic mentor with terrific force and is, thereby, less of a frail, failure of a guiding hand than usual.
Here is a case where an old story - a familiar one, so familiar that we can say the lines whether or not we have seen the play before, sing the songs created for the moments, tell the story before the play begins - becomes new. A production of Romeo and Juliet that is both inspired and inspiring, enthralled and enthralling, detailed and derailing, it almost does what so many people have dreamed of for years: it almost has a happy ending. Luckily no one took that extra "dibble-dance" step of bringing the protagonists to a happier place, even with the final, Jewish Wedding dance visual impression. This is the production you will want to tell your grandchildren about.
 
"Romeo and Juliet" plays in repertory on the Founders Theatre Stage at Shakespeare and Company, 70 Kemble St., in Lenox through Sept. 3. For information, schedules and tickets call the box office at 413-637-3353.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 9:32 PM | Permalink

Agatha Christie's "The Hollow" by Agatha Christie. Directed by Allen Phelps. At the Theater Barn in New Lebanon, N.Y.

The hardest part of playing a stereotype is playing it right. In Agatha Christie's play "The Hollow" the hardest part to play of all is the outsider. Five of the eleven characters in the version now on stage at the Theater Barn in New Lebanon, NY are cousins. As such there are some bizarre similarities among them and yet each one has his or her own quirks. With those quirks come the spottable foibles that families often share. Only some of that is observable in this production and the outsiders are so outside that at times they don't seem to belong in the same play.

Sir Henry and Lady Lucy Angkatell are elderly, somewhat dotty, husband and wife cousins. Their younger, live-in, cousin Henrietta is a sculptor. Her cousin Edward is the inheritor of the historic family manse and a somewhat simple soul. Their half-cousin Midge is a poorer working girl with a longing for the full family connection. These people are so tied together that they often weekend as a group at "The Hollow" Sir Henry and Lady Lucy's country estate just 18 miles from London.
Their other guests for this particular weekend are Dr. & Mrs. John Cristow. While neither one is a relative, it almost seems as though Mrs. Cristow might be related - she shares a certain vagueness with Lady Lucy while the doctor seems to share the passionate sensibilities of Henrietta and Midge. A temporary neighbor who keeps dropping by, Veronica Craye, is a Hollywood star with a passion for married men, particularly Dr. C. By the end of the first act one of these people is dead and the quest for the murderer is underway.
That brings in a creation of Christie's who was not in the original version of this story. She had tired of Hercule Poirot by the early 1950s and she replaced him with Inspector Colquhoun and his assistant in crime-solving, Detective Sergeant Penny.
Photographs of Christie in this period show her, a very wealthy woman, usually dressed in the shabby cast-offs of someone like Eleanor Roosevelt. Bundles for Britain were still the thing in this post WWII era and in the clothing designed for this production there is certainly an air of such largesse on display in the costume designs of Alyssa Couturier. These clothes help in that stereotype identification.  On Abe Phelps usual, fine set the play is played out in an inexorable fashion as 1953 Britain appears to be just like 1948 Philadelphia.
John Trainor and Joan Coombs are the Lord and Lady of "The Hollow." He duck waddles and she prates. The silliness of her stream-of-conscious dialogue includes bon mots such as "Now where have I laid my eggs?" while his automatic responses include "I should come along and act as her interpreter." The truth is he must. Both of these actors are splendidly natural in their roles, comfortable in their bodies and left-over clothing. They each have at least one lovely, sentimental moment about their ancestry and their home. They make a lovely couple and excellent hosts in spite of forgetting who is coming and why.
Melissa Macleod Herion is Henrietta, the sculptress. She plays at keeping secrets and she plays at having emotions and she plays convincingly enough for a character whose depths are shallows. She is so busy being Henrietta that she sometimes jumps right over that character to become another character whose emotional base is very deep indeed. It is both disconcerting and very revealing for we never truly get to know how deep-seated Henrietta's personal deceptions might be. We only know that she regrets her life as it is being lived while at the same time finding excuses for herself. A fascinating realization of Christie's complex heroine.
Dominick Varney does well by Edward and Vanessa Dunleavy is an excellent Midge. Sky Vogel as the butler, Gudgeon, does just what's he's supposed to do and he does it nicely.
Brian Edelman is the young Inspector. He gets through all of his lines and seems unperturbed by the murder and the juxtaposition of the murderer. He serves his function barely and is abetted with the humorous take on Sergeant Penny brought to life by Ben Katagiri. His is a womanizing copper with a sly take on taking a statement. The two work well together in these roles.
Veronica Craye is the unfortunate victim of the accent-challenged Kathleen Boddington. She tells her ex-lover that if she can't have him then the other woman in his life "cahn't HALVE you." She later admits that she "ahsked him to COMB over." Maybe it's just me but no one in Britain would say such things with a straight face and not expect someone to notice.
The Cristows are being portrayed by Patrick White and Kathleen M. Carey. White does a fine job until the end of Act One when he suddenly seemed to fall apart as a character. I don't know if there was a backstage glitch, but he suddenly floundered in his role, lost his accent and generally undid his wonderful impact on everyone earlier in the act. His performance was so good, in fact, that other actors lesser work was becoming excusable.
Carey, on the other hand, is a perfectly consistent delight all the way through her performance as Gerda Craye. This actress brings so much reality to her role that it becomes easy to forget that she is an actress in a role. It is almost as though Gerda came through to tell her stories, play out her part in the mystery, show and not tell. In the second act Carey plays a romantically crazy duet with the study's sofa, a lovely partner in a fine set designed by Abe Phelps. She certainly has my vote for character actress perfecting her character as she goes.
This is not the best of Christie, but it does keep you guessing right up to the end and with a touch of romance, a touch of larceny and a touch of murder going for it, the play's two hours and fifteen minutes glide by like a trolley car with rags on its wheels. This theater has a history of doing Christie proud and with this play they do all that they can to maintain that record.

"The Hollow" plays at the Theater Barn on Route 20 just west of New Lebanon, NY through July 24. For information and tickets call the box office at 518-794-8989.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 9:14 AM | Permalink

"The Hollow Crown" by John Barton. Directed by Jonathan Epstein. At Shakespeare & Company.

In 1961 the academic John Barton joined the newly created Royal Shakespeare Company to devise an entertainment he would call "The Hollow Crown." The play, originally intended for a quartet of actors (one a woman), chronicled the human beings who happened to be the kings and queens of England and their relationships. Parents, wives, ministers, advisors, lovers and mistresses each have their say in the course of the piece and the sources range from the sublime to the ridiculous.
The resultant stage work has hardly ever been off the stage somewhere in the world ever since. Currently it is being performed at Shakespeare & Company's Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre by the same company of actors who are appearing in "The Memory of Water" by Shelagh Stephenson.

Pick a monarch from Arthur through Victoria and you'll probably hit on a moment in this show. Done as a staged concert reading, its normal presentation style, it is as engaging a history lesson as you are ever likely to have in your lifetime. Never tedious, often funny, sometimes touching, genuinely inventive, this production brings to life momentarily some of the most intriguing people in the British monarchy.
Henry the Eighth and Anne Boleyn are here. Mary Tudor puts in an appearance. Charles the First stands trial and argues his rightful position with his accusers. William the Conqueror shares the stage with half a dozen royal mistresses. A fifteen year old Jane Austen writes her own, very special and personal, "Partial, Prejudiced and Ignorant History of England." Shakespeare's words share the same stage with Austen's and with the Holingshead Chronicles that inspired his own plays. The mix is almost ideal, practically perfect. In two hours you get more information in a most entertaining way than you are ever likely to receive anywhere ever again.
The company consists of Nigel Gore, Corinna May, Kristin Wold, Annette Miller and Jason Asprey. The men are in black tie, the women in gorgeous evening gowns (lusciously created by Govane Lohbauer). The seem to float through a set comprised of a mixed bag of theatrical memorabilia (designed by Patrick Brennan) and lighting designer Stephen Ball helps them to appear and disappear at will.
On stage with the actors is music director Bill Barclay who accompanies scenes and does transitions and who, with mandolin or guitar or squeezebox, manages to bring historic song into the mix. While the songs add a measure of fun to the work, they do point up the sad fact that there are NO singers in this group of actors. Still it's fun to watch them make a stab at song.
Miller is the best of the women in this group, morphing into and out of her characters with alacrity. At one point in the second act she actually seems to alter the shape of her head. She also wears a gown that defies description, her arms seemingly attached to her fanny.
Gore is the better of the men, devising voices and accents that bring his characters to vivid life. Asprey often seemed a bit at sea, loosely marginal in his page turns and readings, sometimes mis-reading a word, a phrase, and reacting to his own errors poorly.
May is lush and lovely and, like Miller, manages to become each of her characters briefly but thoroughly. She has wonderful moments as the newly wed Portuguese princess and the vaguely interested Elinor of Aquitaine. Wold does a lovely job as Jane Austen and Anne Boleyn.
Throughout the company retains a very modern sense, although they do seem to be centered in the era of this play's creation, the 1960s. It is altogether a tribute to the vision of their director, Jonathen Epstein, that this over-riding concept works so well. It is unlikely that a show like this one will make another appearance in the near future so I would get over to the Lenox-based property and take advantage of the opportunity to witness something different and new for this region, a history lesson like no other in a play like none other. What else can I say!

"A Hollow Crown" runs in repertory at the Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox through July 24. There aren't many opportunities to see this, so check their website at www.shakespeare.org for schedules and call the box office at 413-637-3353 quickly.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 10:45 AM | Permalink

"The Who's Tommy," music and lyrics by Pete Townsend, book by Pete Townsend and Des McAnuff, with additional music and lyrics by John Entwhistle and Keith Moon. Directed by Eric Hill. At The Colonial staged by Berkshire Theatre Festival.

"The Who's Tommy," way back in 1969, was the first rock opera. It originally made its impression on the world in a two-record stereo LP set in a double flap open box that seemed like it was designed by M.C. Escher. It was blue and so was the music and so was the story it told...with just a bit of lavender on the side. Tommy, the pinball wizard, deaf, dumb and blind but a master at the game, a celebrity, a star. The opera held so much promise for people, young people, baby boomers so-called, that it's cult was as wide as the world, its impact overwhelming.
Later it became a Canadian ballet, then a Broadway show, then a Ken Russell film, and each time there was the same sort of conviction laid down for new audiences: this show, this opera, is for you, just you. You can be free, you can be reborn in your own image, an image of your own making.
"See me, Feel me, Touch me, Heal me" it screams and you know the show is talking to you.
No other rock opera has ever touched this one in terms of its direct relationship with its admirers. "Evita" is political nonsense and "Jesus Christ, Superstar" just so much religious pap. "Tommy" is us, was us, will be us. That is what makes it what it is.
In Pittsfield, at The Colonial, the Berkshire Theatre Festival is presenting its second edition of "Tommy" and this one is the real one.

I remember enjoying the production at the company's Unicorn Theatre a few years ago, even though I had reservations about the director's concepts. I always remember enjoying this show. But, as I said, this one is the real one. This one achieves greatness in spite of some overwhelming obstacles.
At the Unicorn it was an intimate and frightening experience. In the small town vastness of this current space the show becomes a spectacular, special effects masterpiece. This is due in part to its cast, not a clinker among them.
First and foremost there is Tommy himself, played by Randy Harrison. The "Queer as Folk" star has made a home on the Berkshire stages in such diverse works as "Equus," "Amadeus," and "Waiting for Godot." Now he takes on this major musical role and simply blows out the back of our heads with his strength, lyrical abilities and good looks combined. He is in full command of his character's silent quirks and final abilities to rouse passions and genuine love. If we gave out awards in these parts for performances he would be a likely contender such an accolade.
Right behind him in line for a "Berky" would be James Barry as Captain Walker, Tommy's father. This is a return to the role for Barry, who played it here the last time. He is dynamite, darkly handsome and threatening and overwhelmingly in love with his damaged son. It is a moving realization of the role.
Jenny Powers plays Mrs. Walker. Her voice is magnificent, her diction superb and her acting vibratingly real. It is almost as though she had been playing this part her entire life. When she and Barry sing the duet "I Believe My Own Eyes" you can feel the tension, feel the love, feel the need they share.
Similarly the Acid Queen Gypsy, sung by Angela Robinson was terrific. Clad in David Murin's acid green gown she is a shimmering, frighteningly attractive vixen with danger pervading her being. Christopher Gurr's Uncle Ernie is decent realization if slightly less dangerous than he ought to be while Ben Rosenblatt is a smarmy and obviously two-faced Cousin Kevin. 
The two ensemble players who portray Tommy as a youngster were, I hope, Paige Scott and Connor McNinch. These two very capable players are not properly listed in the program - an oversight for which they are owed big time apologies - and they should be for they added greatly to the texture of the show from start to finish.
Eric Hill and choreographer Gerry McIntyre have moved this show in and out of the rock concert, rock opera and Broadway musical genres with alacrity. There is never a moment that seems out of step, out of place or out of its mind. The seamlessness of their work is part of the power of the show. Likewise the projections designed by Shawn E. Boyle add so much to the picture that it is a shame not to be able to spend more time with them, but the show on stage compels your attention.
One objection and only one: the sound levels, in a full house, were just too much. Once you take the gain up on the band, a rock sextet that played wonderfully, you have to add more sound for the singers and the end result is sometimes chaos for the ears and mind. In this opera you want to hear the words, need to hear them. Riding the levels so high doesn't increase the enjoyment, it only defeats the purpose of Tommy, exposing too much at too great a level. And this production doesn't need volume to impress, it has that value going for it in its entire production.

"The Who's Tommy" plays at The Colonial on South Street in Pittsfield through July 16. For information and tickets call the box office at 413-298-5576.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 10:41 AM | Permalink

"Dial 'M' For Murder" by Frederick Knott. Directed by Giovanna Sardelli. At Dorset Theatre Festival in Dorset, Vt.

Tony Wendice, the hero/villain of Frederick Knott's classic thriller "Dial 'M' For Murder" believes that with enough superficial evidence the authorities will assume whatever it is planned for them to believe about a murder. He is clever, ruthless, almost to the verge of madness, and when things don't go exactly as he planned them he has the good grace to rearrange the world he is left with to compensate adequately for the inadequacies of others. His wife and her friend Max have some of the same plucky qualities and that makes for a two hour and twenty minutes game of 'who's on first?' for this trio of luckless lovers.
It takes a policeman, Inspector Hubbard, to trip up the mastermind and prove conclusive innocence and guilt. In the process more than just lives are at stake. Our interest and boredom levels are also caught in the mix.

At the Dorset Theatre Festival in Dorset, Vt., director Giovanna Sardelli has crafted a lively version of the 1950s play and 1954 Alfred Hitchcock film. She has a handsome and youthful company of players and something different happens in this production: we empathize with everyone. It isn't just the beleaguered heroine who gets our sympathy, or the besmirched anti-hero who wants to love her. We feel something for Tony, too.
Sardelli manipulates us through the casting and through the subtleties within her direction. Tony gazes at Margot now and then with love in his eyes. He touches her gently and lovingly while plotting her downfall. There is a real sense of loss as he gazes at her in the final scene. This minor alteration in the direction of the play and the relationship's presentation makes a world of difference. We can find, in spite of the dialogue's crispness between Tony and Captain Lesgate as the murder is planned, a certain uncertainty in the strengths of Tony's minor speeches.
The young company includes Janie Brookshire as Margot Wendice. Brookshire is sure and capable at all times, and in the fight sequence, very nicely staged by David Anzuelo, she has so much life and strength she feels remarkable. There is a sincerity in her pain as she tries to be tidy. She manages some genuine angst when Swann, aka Lesgate - a beautiful and modulated performance from Carter Jackson in the role - comes after her with his scarf strained taut between his hands.
Ian Holcomb plays Tony with a ticklish worldliness that he cannot suppress. His solid good looks go far in making Tony a catch for any girl. For this Margot, attractive and openly vulnerable, he is her lord and master. Holcomb is tall and gestures are affirmative. He commands attention easily.
Dion Mucciacito is an unanticipated Max Halliday, the American "lover" whose letters have brought about the tension in the Wendice marriage. Not classically handsome his swarthiness is part of his charm. Mucciacito allows us inside his emotions without ever sacrificing manliness. It's a tough row this character hoes. The actor in the character is one of the hardest things to get right for actor as the character. Mucciacito seems to display this part of Max effortlessly. He is a man caught in a trap as assuredly as Margot is tripped up by the same expert mechanism.
John Fitzgibbon plays Inspector Hubbard with a charm and humor reminiscent of the best of Agatha Christie's writing. He adds a touch of laughter, an inflection of psychological attraction and a definite resoluteness that provides a complete, modern character to emerge. Never as stodgy as some of his predecessors, he is a British Columbo, an Anglican personality with a touch of devilment.
Carter Jackson plays Captain Lesgate very well. A bad man trapped into becoming a worse man, he never gives us a sense of remorse or regret in his actions. We don't like him from his first entrance to his final exit. Lesgate in Jackson's hands is an inhuman human being, a black and white stranger with no shades of gray in his being.
Sardelli makes familiar and unfamiliar stage pictures with her company. On Lee Savage's classic set, dressed in Barbara A. Bell's discreetly suggestive-of-period costumes displayed under the very natural and realistic lighting of Michael Giannitti, the director paints rather than sculpts this show. If something, now and then, seems rushed it never feels forced. Instinctively she moves this cast from point G to point Z (A through F have been played out before the curtain goes up) without anything feeling directed, and that's an art.
Join the Maida Vale residents for a few months of murder while you can. This production has a limited run - it is summer theater after all - and this company brings so much to the work it is really one not to be missed.

"Dial 'M' For Murder" plays at the Dorset Playhouse on Cheney Road in Dorset, Vt., through July 23. For tickets and information call the box office at 802-867-2223.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 3:54 PM | Permalink

"Jekyll & Hyde," music by Frank Wildhorn, book and Lyrics by Leslie Bricusse. Directed by John Saunders. At the Mac-Haydn Theatre in Chatham, N.Y.

The musical "Jekyll and Hyde" took nearly nine years to write and rewrite before it became a hit on Broadway. "Showboat" took its authors seven months and "Carousel" was on the creative block for about a year. The question, always, is "was it worth the time?" In the case of the current production of this sci-fi/horror musical, I have always felt that the score is very good, the story unbeatable and the end-result of the combination questionable. It is a show that, unlike the other two mentioned above, requires a company of players who can truly grab hold of it and force it into being, as Edward Hyde is forced into being. This new production at the Mac-Haydn Theatre in Chatham, N.Y., is less successful.

For anyone who doesn't know the story, Dr. Henry Jekyll believes that every human being is made up of personalities both good and evil and that it should be possible to separate and identify these personalities. He manages to do so by experimenting, against all warnings and precautions by the medical community, on himself. The resultant split personality wreaks havoc on London and the inevitable conclusion is, well, inevitable.
Musically this company tackles the score by Frank Wildhorn and Leslie Bricusse with gusto and style. The chorus players in particular get into the threatening narratives of "Facade" and "Murder, Murder" with an admirable intensity. As denizens of the lower depths of London they almost succeed in being creepy and untouchable.
Alison Drew as Emma Carew, the young society woman engaged to Henry Jekyll, does beautifully in her role and her songs. She is particularly moving in her duet with the East End soubrette Lucy, "In His Eyes" and the solo that precedes it, "Once Upon a Dream" as she confronts the realities of her beloved's new life that have taken him from her.
The Lucy of Carman Napier is good, but not as good. Her voice tended to drift off-pitch more than once and though she is a gutsy and vibrant performer this tendency in one so young is not a good thing. She did build a solid, recognizable character, but with a show so through-sung it is regrettable that her tone was not solid enough to carry her along without these key shifts.
Kevin Kelly was a fine John Utterson, best friend to the Doctor. His narrative moments and his plotted one alike were well played. Lauren French made a despicable Lady Beaconsfield reek of snobbishness. Scott Wasserman was almost funny as Simon Stride. Joshua Phan-Gruber could have taken Spider one step lower on the web's rung for my tastes.
As Sir Danvers Carew, Emma's father, Franco Spoto was weaker than anticipated. Vocally not as secure and strong as the music requires he was also a bit shallow in the role, never as protective of his daughter as he might have been, nor as critical of Jekyll as the story requires.
However, no one was as disappointing as the actor who played both the title roles. James Benjamin Rodgers, winner of the Joy in Singing and Lotte Lenya competitions, held so much promise. His voice is lovely, a lyrical tenor that was fine to listen to in songs like "Lost in the Darkness" and "Take Me As I Am" but without the interpretive skills to chill our blood with "This is the Moment" and "Alive." He had the pleasant looks of a Jekyll but never the anguished, tormented physiognomy of Hyde. He never in face, voice or movement was a threatening soul. The incredible duet between his two selves truly required Andrew Gmoser's lighting to identify between the two halves of his nature as his singing was unable to make the distinctions clear. It may well be that he is just not ready to take on such a role. Or it may be that he is limited by his vocal production and a technique that is clean, sweet and just to careful. Hyde's voice might be one of those things that threatens the career of a young singer. I credit him with caring for his future, but I am sorry that this concern might have ruined his chances in this special role.
John Saunders commands the stage with his ensemble but loses the race with his principals. He has done a nice job of staging a difficult work, but he falls short on the social identities of his chorus people, this in spite of fine costumes by Dale DiBernardo. Gmoser's set and lights work well, but I found his fire effects sorely wanting, although others in different sections of the theater seemed to be quite enamored of it.
This difficult musical may not be the dynamic draw of the company's previous show, "The King and I" but it still has rewards to the musical fan. The rewards are small, but with singer-actors like Alison Drew and Kevin Kelly they are worth pursuing.

"Jekyll & Hyde" plays at the Mac-Haydn Theater on Route 203 north of Chatham, NY through July 17. For information and tickets call the box office at 518-392-9292.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 3:51 PM | Permalink

"One Slight Hitch" by Lewis Black. Directed by Joe Grifasi. At Williamstown Theatre Festival.

Lewis Black's play, "One Slight Hitch" is filling the Nikos Stage at the Williamstown Theatre Festival and rocking its theater with laughter. There are two hours of very funny lines, very silly situations and very good actors. This 1982 play, set in 1981, has never truly been a success and this excellent production won't really change all that. Funny as it is, it really isn't a very good play. It's like a weak-tea version of a good, not great, Neal Simon play; it sets you up to laugh even when the situation is darkest and leaves you a bit worn out from the frivolity and not one iota healthier, wealthier or wiser for the experience.

Funny lines abound in this 1960's style television situation comedy that lasts for just over two hours. Black and his director Joe Grifasi have had the very good luck to have their show presented with talented people playing all of the roles. However, one thing is very clear by the end of the show, the classic farce that we are led to believe - through its visual design - will ensue is not there, not now and probably not never.
The cleverly jokey set by Robin Vest sets us up to expect farce - there are four doors and two archways in this play. The broad playing of the leads, Poppa and Momma Coleman, Doc and Delia, by Mark Linn-Baker and Lizbeth MacKay often makes us think we're in a farce about to start. But farce is not the elemental aspect of this show. Here there are romantics who get confused (just like Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream), there are sisters who cannot be satisfied with things as they are (just like Chekhov's The Three Sisters), there are a husband and wife who depend too much on alcohol to get through the routine of their days (think Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf) and yet all of these elements still do not make for an original play. Instead bits and pieces of all three and a dozen more seem to have been shuffled for laughs.
          In addition to the two actors already mentioned there are some delicious performances by the younger members of the company. Megan Ketch plays Courtney, the bride-to-be, as a hard-pressed Kate the Accursed (courtesy of Shakespeare's "Taming of the Shrew"). She is resolute, strong, definitive in her pronouncement and still has one of the funniest cross-overs I've seen in years in Act Two involving something to drink and a practical implement. She has a multi-layered dress that matches her triple level wedding cake, and it is one of Susan Hilferty's most delightful costumes. Jeanna Phillips as youngest sister P.B. has a dynamo of an opening monologue with some delectable physical comedy seemingly flown in from another country as she reveals her personal world and its two principal attractions. She handles the odd maturity of her role with great aplomb. Clea Alsip plays Melanie, the middle sister. She has a dry delivery of her most amusing lines, wears costumes that make statements but never reveal who or what she is and she makes each of her most amusing lines truly count.
Rounding out the cast are the bridegroom, Hunter, played with an accent left over from the previous occupant of this space, "A Streetcar Named Desire" and an overly pleasant manner that makes one immediately suspect a wife-beater in the making, by Ben Cole. He is too cool to be smarmy and yet there is an odd element in his playing that makes you think "Uh-Oh" pretty quickly.
Justin Long plays Ryan, the former boy-friend Courtney would rather forget. Long is wonderful in a role that calls for him to practically cross-dress, philosophize while making Delia into a madwoman, and ultimately "bond" with Cole's Hunter in a way that makes a homosexual seduction seem practically possible in every way (thank you, Mary Poppins).
Maybe some of the physical humor and physical awkwardness can be attributed to the director, to Joe Grifasi. Maybe it is in the writing. Whatever may be the case, the cast is superb and their comic attacks are delicious. MacKay ends Act One with a vocal sound-effect that sets off gales of laughter. Linn-Baker and Long make a one-act play out of a cigarette. Cole tells a tale of accidental arrests like vaudeville trouper.
Rui Rita lights some of the offstage areas with instruments that bleed through the lightly painted scrim of the sets, breaking us away from the reality of the play.
No matter what is said or written about this show, the primary fact is that it is funny. It is predictable, a sitcom, but it is funny. It reeks of its time period but it makes you laugh and it is entertaining. Sometimes that can be enough. Laughter. Entertainment. We forget how valuable these commodities are and Williamstown is letting us in on the secret that talent can bring out these elements. Don't waste your time on the underlying social drama of this play when the laughter can be so much more enjoyable.
 
"One Slight Hitch" plays on the Nikos Stage in the Williamstown Theatre Festival's '62 Center for Theatre and Dance on Main Street in Williamstown Mass through July 17. For tickets and information call the box office at 413-597-3400.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 3:47 PM | Permalink

"Moonchildren" by Michael Weller. Directed by Karen Allen. At Berkshire Theatre Festival.

I cannot believe how many short-run shows I have seen. Michael Weller's "Moonchildren" opened in New York City at the Royale Theater and, with its previews, lasted only 28 performances. It was directed by Alan Schneider and was produced by David Merrick. If those credentials weren't enough the cast included Maureen Anderman as Ruth, Stephen Collins as Dick, Kevin Conway as Mike, Cara Duff-MacCormick as Shelly, Jill Eikenberry as Kathy, Christopher Guest as Norman, Edward Hermann as Cootie (Mel), Robert Prosky as Mr. Willis, James Woods as Bob Rettie (Job), and Louis Zorich as Police Officer Bream. It's a veritable A-list of future stars. Three of these actors won Theatre World Awards, Cara Duff-MacCormick was nominated for a Tony Award and Michael Weller won the 1972 Drama Desk Award for Most Promising Playwright.
     What I remember about the play, back in 1972, was how many of the characters I recognized as close friends. Seeing it now, at the Berkshire Theatre Festival's Unicorn Theatre, those characters still emerge as people I once knew, but with the realization that I don't really care about them any longer. It makes me wonder if I ever really did.
 

    There is a very talented cast at work here. Cast as much for type, I suspect, as for talent they each seem to "fit the bill." Carter Gill is a fragile, frail Norman, a compulsive who acts without thinking of consequences. Hale Appleman is a tall, quirky, overly sensitive yet reluctantly communicative Bob. Aaron Costa Ganis is an aggressive and relentlessly rude Dick. Joe Paulik and Matt R. Harrington are the overly compatible, loose-living and comfortable with each other's changeable moods Mike and Mel (Cootie) while Norma Kuhling is a perfectly reasonable yet utterly charming Kathy and Miriam Silverman is a charmingly clinging Ruth. Have I heard anything of them before, no, but then neither had I heard, in 1972, of any of the cast of the play. All I can surmise here is that the "who" matters much less than the "how" and the "when." This new ensemble works well, as though its participants had actually been rooming together for three years already.
     Samantha Richert is a dangerously endearing Shelly. While the play is ostensibly set in an apartment building somewhere in the vicinity of Brandeis University, Jesse Hinson has come from there to play the dual roles of the encyclopedia salesman Ralph and then the stupid cop Effing.
     One of the problems within the structure of Weller's play is the way all the characters not living together in this apartment are presented as caricatures. The Landlord, the neighbor (a gruff and weird Jeff Kent), the cops and the salesman, the uncle and the father are all presented as broad-stroke settlers of the mid-west, the plains-state-people. They are not truly essential to the piece and so they don't help.
     Director Karen Allen has not gotten the help for this show that she needs. It is supposedly set in 1965 and yet nothing about these people reflects that period other than their artwork, protest signs and a principal garment. Everything else, including the girls' makeup, and their clothing is totally out of period. Ditto the men's hair and clothes as well. This is the director's first show and she exhibits a good eye for details such as stage pictures. When the company is in full swing she has seemingly guided them into their postures and poses and she does not ever confuse us with a faulty eye. Nevertheless as they begin to move and to talk and walk they take on more of their own identities.
     This a very good production of a play that never quite delivered on its promises, or premises, and it still doesn't do so. There are mistakes in the writing that no directing, no acting can ever fix. Go see the play but don't expect to come away feeling you've gotten your moneysworth. You will have an interesting time, but like living on bubble gum would be, you won't be satisfied at the end of the day.

"Moonchildren" plays at the Unicorn Theatre on Route 7 in Stockbridge, MA through July 16. For information and tickets contact the box office at 413-298-5576.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 4:20 PM | Permalink

"As You Like It" by William Shakespeare. Directed by Tony Simotes. At Shakespeare & Company.

Shakespeare's English, especially in his brittle and fast-paced comedies, can be somewhat akin to a foreign language. Set in France and in a pastoral forest, "As You Like It" a bit more romantic than brittle, might well be in an exotic tongue; it is certainly involved with an erotic one. At Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, MA this summer there is a keynote production of this play with a cast that truly gets the director's concepts, the playwright's intent and the audiences' need. It's wrapped up in a package that delivers on its promises; as its gilt foil paper and its bright silk ribbons are stripped away the present inside becomes all the more precious.
 

Set in the 1920s, with World War I just a few years gone, the battles between brothers still rage. Though there is frivolity and partying going on at court, all is not well. One Duke has usurped another banishing the rightful, lawful man from his Paris home. In another house of nobility, a younger brother has been raised among the farmhands while his elder has enjoyed all that money and position can offer. Naturally the older man, Oliver, resents his baby sibling, Orlando, and sets out to destroy him once and for all. Since this is a comedy the dark setups for these folks are soon being blown downhill by the gusts of lusty windbags and by the end of the three hour evening, all is right with the world once again. People are restored to their natural places. Lovers are united in matrimony. Fools are offered succor. Happy ending.
 This information shouldn't spoil a moment of the fun for anyone, even those who know nothing about the play. Just a bit more information and then, you're on your own: people masquerade in this play for all sorts of reasons and one character has been physically transformed into a transgendered state. The reasons behind this are never clear except that pessimism in our eyes may well sit better in the semi-political position of a woman in a man's apparel.
 Tony Roach plays the romantic lead in this show. His Orlando is youthful, handsome, virile, viable. His manly beauty is unsurpassed on this show's stage even though his brother Oliver is played handsomely by Josh Aaron McCabe. Both men handle their complicated lines and their difficult relationship beautifully.
 The woman in the case, Rosalind, is played with verve, vigor and a vivacious quality by Merritt Janson who really makes this role her own personal creation. She is lovely to watch as a woman, charming to observe when disguised as a man. She handles the language as though she was born talking this way. There is never an unsure moment in her performance.
 Her equals are two: Jonathan Epstein as Touchstone and Tod Randolph as Jacques, or Madame Jacques...it's never truly made clear. Both Shakespeare & Company veterans perform with surety and style, their steps certain and their dialects perfected. We never miss a single word or a single meaning in their mouths. If all the world could be as clear as these two manage to be, in an ancient language, there would no longer be politics as we know it.  
 Ryan Winkles is a much more charming than usual Silvius as he pursues the elusive Phebe, played by a slyly flirtatious, yet downright determined Dana Harrison. Malcolm Ingram is a hilariously fragile Adam, servant to Orlando, who manages to fall into all sorts of states and arms in the course of the evening. Jonathan Croy as the shepherd Corin gives a tenderly controlled performance and Kelley Curran is a perfectly lovely Celia, cousin to Rosalind.
 Johnny Lee Davenport does double duty as both of the brothers Duke. He is mean and hard as Celia's father and charmingly observant and almost obsequious as Rosalind's long-lost dad. A surprise is the performance of Jennie M. Jadow as the shepherdess Audrey. In the role she manages every kind of physical pratfall and manipulation and in the "Lover and His Lass" number proves herself as artful a "scat" artist as Ella Fitzgerald.
 As part of this show's update concept there are new musical settings for Shakespeare's song lyrics composed by Alexander Sovronsky. He has managed, with the exception of the above mentioned song, to provide plenty of 1920's sounding music. For this number he jumps twenty years or more into the future with a wonderful jazz/scat setting that keeps Jadow, Epstein and three other cast members - Sam Parrott, Wolfe Colman and Ross Bennett Hurwitz - hopping and lindy-hopping with amazing clarity.
 Simotes knows how to keep the body of a show up in the air. His fight choreography and his love scenes are equally energetic in their own ways. His use of the long thrust stage and the second level crossover are mutually engaging. The set by Sandra Goldmark is reminiscent of the Belgian Opera production of "The Coronation of Poppeia" which played at U-Mass Amherst several years ago, the principal set pieces in both shows being miniatures of major buildings in the cities in which the shows are set. It worked very well here.
 Arthur Oliver's costumes smack periods over their heads and combine three hundred years of styles into one cohesive costume rhetoric. Women's dresses in the city are smack-dab in the 1920's, Charleston-dancing era. Everyone else is wearing what best suits them and their position in life. As lit by Les Dickert all of this is lovely to look at.
 As You Like It was the first Shakespeare show I knew, performed by my fifth grade class at the Carmen Road School in Massapequa, New York. The Shakespeare & Company production available to everyone now is just as good, probably better and much more fun to watch and to want to be in. I saw the next to last preview and it was so good that I can't imagine what could be altered or improved. Luckily the company has all summer to keep us laughing.

"As You Like It" plays in the Founders Theatre at Shakespeare & Company, 70 Kemble Street in Lenox through September 4. For scheduled, information and tickets call the box office at 413-637-3353.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 9:59 PM | Permalink

"Boeing-Boeing" by Marc Camoletti, translated by Beverley Cross & Francis Evans. Directed by Phil Rice. At the Theater Barn in New Lebanon, N.Y.

Somehow in 1965 with only 23 total performances I managed to see the first Broadway production of this comedy. I don't remember it being funny; in fact I remember that it wasn't. When it was revived in 2008 and received amazingly good notices I didn't feel obliged to see it again when I knew it wasn't funny. Apparently the transition, abetted by a second adaptor/translator, one Francis Evans, brought true humor into play and the current production at the Theater Barn in New Lebanon, New York is very funny indeed.
 Stretched somewhere between a situation comedy and a French farce with the classic seven doors, this production is the perfect example of summer fare: a light confection with just enough substance to it to keep you engaged while you're being amused. The play is helped along by the presence of a handsome and hilariously funny cast of characters, wonderfully played by an ensemble of deliciously manic actors. Multiple accents (French, Italian, German, American Southern), pretty bodies, handsome faces and supple, and an ability to simultaneously slam doors that creates a single sound all go a long way in the presentation here. Director Phil Rice is a master of control when it comes to these matters and he proves once again that almost no one working regionally is better at this mixed marriage of miraculous metaphors.
 In brief: Bernard, in his Paris apartment, has three airline stewardess mistresses. None of them know about the others. An old school chum, an American who has never has a mistress, comes for a surprise visit and finds himself the first of several surprises as all three women end up coming "home" to the apartment on the same night. The classic elements of farce comedy are in place but this isn't just farcical, it is comic on a wide variety of levels.
 

Vanessa Dunleavy plays Gloria, the American girlfriend. She is pert, southern, shrill, and determined to win any situation in which she finds herself. Dunleavy plays her very well. Kathleen Boddington is the Italian girl, Gabriella. She is fire and force. She is determined and maniacally focused. Boddington plays her like Gina Lollobrigida and it works. Melissa MacLeod Herion plays the German girl Gretchen and she plays her like a wet Romy Schneider. She is cool and determined, brittle and dangerous. All three women manage wonderful realizations of their stews, bringing national characteristics to the fore and playing against one another leaving no stone unturned in their determination to the "one" girl in Bernard's life.
 Meg Dooley plays the fourth woman in the apartment, Bertha the maid. Awkwardly wearing a stage French accent, she is hilarious as the only person who knows what is going on most of the time but who cannot deal with it rationally. She is very funny indeed, sometimes funnier than anyone else with one exception: Robert.
Robert is played by the human rubberband, Dominick Varney. His body is so supple, his face so easily contorted, his reactions so broad and his verbal communication so slithery that he never stops amusing the audience. Nothing he does is anticipated nor is it telegraphed. He is a constant set of surprises. His realization of this character is unusually fine and as a result he garners both laughter and applause.
 As his friend, and troublemaking lover-man, Matthew Daly returns to the "Barn" to play Bernard with a wicked look in his eye and a mischievous smile on his lips. We are happy when he overplays a moment here and there, and happier still when he nails a reaction or drops a funny line on his compatriots' laps. Long a favorite performer at the Theater Barn newcomers and old-timers alike will enjoy his deep immersion into the role. He feels like Bernard, looks and smells like him. He joyously surrounds his space with his own presence, doubling in size periodically just by smiling or announcing an impelled conclusion to a problem. It is great to have him back on the local scene once again.
 Abe Phelps has designed one of his best sets for this play. An almost oval garden of a room fills the stage its seven doors reaching into depths we can only imagine. Alyssa Couturier provides costumes that are just enough indicative of the timeset of the play.
 A perfect Friday night laugh-fest, this play was a deserved flop in 1965 and today emerges as a Tony Award winning comedy revival, one with almost 300 performances on Broadway. Here at last is a show to go back to again and again, if there was time and there was money enough to do so.

"Boeing-Boing" plays through July 10 at the Theater Barn, 654 Route 20, New Lebanon, NY. For information and tickets call the box office at 518-794-8989.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 9:58 PM | Permalink

"Three Hotels" by Jon Robin Baitz. Directed by Robert Falls. At Williamstown Theatre Festival.

"I came of age in hotels," says Kenneth Hoyle, a young middle-aged executive for a baby food company who is relating the story of his life with them and with his wife Barbara in Jon Robin Baitz's 1992 play "Three Hotels" which is gracing the main stage of the Williamstown Theatre Festival to open its season. As the senior executive empowered to fire people he has started his narrative monologue in Tangier, Morocco in a glorious hotel suite designed by Thomas Lynch. The setting actually threatens to overwhelm the man it contains, but Steven Weber is a very good actor and he holds the stage in his thrall, rather than the other way around.
This one act, three-part, play, taking just one hour and nineteen minutes, shows us Ken and his wife, Barbara, in three very different settings, jewels held fast in first the white gold magnificence of the middle east, then the molded plastic of St. Thomas, Virgin Islands and finally the grazed stucco and wood of Oaxaca, Mexico. Ken inhabits the first and last and Barbara the second but both live in all of them for their stories are so intertwined that they are inseparable.
 

I should be clear. I do not like monologue plays. I feel robbed, beaten over the head and left for dead by assailants unknown. I get to hear what happened but never to experience it. When attending a performance of a play involving more than one human being, I want to see the story play out. I want to meet the characters involved. I don't just want to hear about them from a character who has trouble being aloof from and independent of his own story. I don't want dispassionate reportage; I want drama.
 Jon Robin Baitz is a curiously good writer. In the three monologues I learn a great deal about the Hoyles and the people around them and I don't seem to miss much. Perhaps this is due to the skill of an author who can write livid pictures and mercurial reactions into his lengthy solo speeches. Or, perhaps this is due to the performances of its two stars: Maura Tierney and Steven Weber.
 Tierney gets the least stage time and she is easy to listen to and easy to watch. She is a much more expressive actress than one might believe from her TV appearances in ER and Rescue Me. She shows her utter and complete joy in demoralizing a group of women while taking down her sculpted husband, hoisting him upward in life as she knocks over his white marble plinth of position. She makes simplicity into a complex thing in this role. Her only slip as a wife becomes a tale of joyful woe. Her acceptance of the death of her only son is as heart-wrenching as it would be were we to witness the story rather than hear about it.
Kenneth Hoyle is brought to vivid life by Weber. He is hard to like and hard to dislike all at the same time, and yet that is what the script asks of the audience. Weber walks the line on this one. He literally dances into our affections while alienating us with his cold-blooded attitude toward destroying other men's careers. Weber's likeability began with the TV show Wings and has slowly but surely been altered into something more sinister and dangerous in his roles. Here he brings his early years into play while taking up that hidden more adult cudgel with which to smash apart everything in sight.
 The sadness here is that these two never get to interact, to play together, to be seen and heard in conversation. We never get to witness the relationship, but only to hear about it from one point of view and then another. The director, Robert Falls, has done his best to infuse the missing Hoyle into the existing Hoyle's scene. The third part, in Mexico, is where he succeeds the best in this effort. We are constantly aware of the door and the cloth-barrier closet door and we keep expecting Barbara to emerge through one or the other. So sure is Ken that Barbara is with him that we can almost see him and then, suddenly, as the lights begin to dim we have her, and we hope that Kenneth has her also. This is wonderful directing; this is insightful and romantic and realistic and mythic.
 Susan Hilferty adds another dimension of reality with perfect costumes while James F. Ingalls stretches us back into the world of theater. His lighting design is tender and constantly shifting. He does this so well that we don't notice a change until the change is almost complete.
 Three Hotels is a strangely wonderful experience, too short because there aren't roles to be played by others, yet just right for the nature of its narrative. Originally created in 1990 for a TV movie with Richard Johnson, its 1992/93 productions won Ron Rifkin a 1994 Lucille Lortel Award.
 Over my personal doubts about monologues being theater, I would recommend this experience as a good one, perhaps a better than good one. The actors are terrific and Baitz writes a good old-fashioned story,  just not a script. The production has excellent values and the show is short enough to not feel you've wasted your time on people jabbering endlessly. And you will be taken to three very different hotels in places you might not reach in any other way.

"Three Hotels" plays on the Main Stage at the '62 Center for Theatre and Dance at Williams College through July 24. For information and tickets call the box office at 413-597-3400.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 9:56 PM | Permalink

"Ludwig Live!" At the Seven Hills Cabaret. Written and Directed by Nancy Holson. At Seven Hills Cabaret.

 There is a funny thing called 'humor' which now and then rears its peculiar head, not ugly, just peculiar, and sets off ripples of uncontrollable laughter. People who may not even know what they're laughing at fall into the soup or cocktail of delirium and only emerge now and then to breathe in enough air to expel in giggles or chortles or guffaws. This was the case for many people at the first performance of "Ludwig Live!" at the Seven Hills Cabaret in Lenox, MA on Monday night. It was a preview. It was the first time the cast had played to a packed house. It was probably the first time that some people walked out at intermission only to miss one of the funniest second acts in the region. Quick to judge, quick to lose out on some of the best bits of the season.
 According to the author, this show will be even funnier when the cast gets all of the lines she wrote onto the stage in a single performance. Hopefully, by now, they've achieved that goal and subsequent audiences have had an even better time than I had. Frankly, I had a wonderful time, laughing, nearly crying at times from the pain of the body-shaking expulsions of laughter.

 What's this all about? It's hard to explain, but here goes. Ludwig van Beethoven did not die. Instead he has survived all these years and is now doing a combination of stand-up comedy and sit-down musical satire in the Berkshires. His notorious short-temper (he was a short guy) has cost him a large cast of supporting players, including the aerialist and the synchronized swimmers, and he is left alone on stage with only his ever-faithful stage manager to take on the understudy chores.
 Beethoven relates the incidents of his life (as we've known it) and his subsequent influence on popular music in a manner that Charles Dickens would approve: I am born. . .he tells us and the story grows in wonder from there. Did you know, for example, that Beethoven's opera, "Fidelio" was not a hit in 1805 but won the 1814 Tony Award for best revival? If you find that even the slightest bit funny, just a smile's worth of humorous, you're likely to enjoy the rest of the show.
Charles Lindberg - no, not the flyer and Nazi-influenced politician - plays Ludwig. He also plays the piano and from memory does two hours of music including the "best hits" canon of Beethoven, John Philip Sousa, Johann Strauss, Joseph Haydn, and Barry Manilow. He does this all with a graceless charm that seems right for the character. He sings, he acts, he dances on his piano bench. He is the superstar of the rock-solid romantic school of music. He has a sibilance problem, but you can overcome that if you consider it an affectation, character driven. But it isn't his acting you admire anyway, it is his pianistic skill and his ability to play and sing a mash-up of very different musical styles.
 The Stage Manager is the incredible Katherine Pecevich. This woman can take a grey day and turn it into pure sunshine. She sings everything from Wagner to country music and even turns in a more than reasonable impression of Janis Joplin. As a character actress she plays Ludwig's Yiddishe Momma, all of the loves of his life including his nephew Carl, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Papa Haydn. Her Napoleon is probably the finest since Charles Boyer played the role, maybe even since Brando. Her talents have never been put to more frenetic use and her ability to switch characters on a dime, or something smaller, is sure and fine and continually baffles and mystifies while amusing and amusing and amusing.
 Robin Gerson Wong, the proprietor of the Seven Hills Inn, plays the role of the Innkeeper and does a surprise solo act at the top of Act Two. She's probably worth the price of admission.
 This isn't the finest evening of theater I've ever seen, but it was funny enough to have me choke and gag with laughter. On a warm or wet or cold Berkshire night, I'd choose it over just another Beethoven Symphony down the road in that big park with the bigger parking lot. If I had another night, I'd see it again, just to find out what got missed on Preview One's performance. It can't be anything funnier than the show I saw.
 
"Ludwig Live!" plays at Seven Hills Inn Cabaret at 40 Plunkett Street, Lenox, MA  through August 30. For information and tickets call 866-811-4111.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 9:54 PM | Permalink

Going to St. Ives by Lee Blessing. Directed by Tyler Marchant. At Barrington Stage Company.

The power-punch of great Greek tragedy pervades the second act of Lee Blessing's play "Going to St. Ives." Once inhabiting the imperial palace of a small central African nation, May N'Kame is now under house arrest in a small home there, surrounded by rough-hewn benches and slat-covered windows. Her one fine dress, the only one left to her, hangs on a clothesline while she wanders about in a simple, hemp-colored frock made of rough wool. Her tea service is all mis-matched pieces. She awaits her fate.
When she is confronted in this situation May's demeanor and attitude are bright and brittle, much more friendly than during her visit to Cora Gage's home in St. Ives, Cambridge, England six months and one act earlier. However, when she opens up her heart and confesses her life to her visitor that sense of ancient theater starts its build and you sit, riveted to your seat as the actress in the character, or perhaps the character in the actress, captures the stage, its edge, and the audience in the darkness beyond in the spell of her monologue. This is great acting in great writing and it digs its falcon-talons deep within your heart and threatens never to let go.

Myra Lucretia Taylor plays May N'Kame in the Barrington Stage Company production of Blessing's play currently inhabiting Stage 2 in Pittsfield. Taylor is the essence of the absence of soul in the first act and its inverse in the second act. Her character goes from imperious and demanding to defeated and rejoicing in this play. She runs the gamut from British outcast child to Clytemnestra in under two hours and she does it with a naturalness that is sometimes startling. Watching her journey through the deep valleys and highest hills is an extraordinary event. She goes from unpleasant in Act One (don't leave at intermission) to enthralling in Act Two.
She is accompanied in this transitory event by Gretchen Egolf in the role of Dr. Cora Gage. Cora is superbly English, brittle and affected, harboring secrets that will not come to the fore. She is a gracious hostess, an honored physician, a perfect wife. Egolf embodies all of this easily in Act One. In the second half of the show, six months later, she is a wildcat, a virago in the making. She has developed passion, lost her purity and her sense of the divine, and comes on the scene with a sense of mission holding her in its grasp. Egolf is brilliant in both ends of Cora's world. Described by May as colorless, she is actually a million colors spinning too fast to be anything other than beige. Yet under that simplicity there is complexity and the actress has found her way into this and brought out the secret maroons and chartreuses, the primary and secondary colors.
Tyler Marchant has controlled his actresses beautifully giving them each their head when needed and guiding them into the private spaces each of the characters requires at times. His staging is superb, physical only when absolutely necessary, primarily intellectual and devoted to each one's cultural habits. In the second act when Cora's desperation becomes evident he allows the women to connect in many ways, including physical, and the alteration in their relationship dictates all that follows. This is a sensitive eye and ear leading the blind, deaf and dumb into an I-Max theater for the ride of their lives.
Brian Prather's inventive set is evocative without being overwhelming, working for both environments perfectly. Kristina Sneshkoff has created costumes that perfectly define the women. Scott Pinkney has displayed subtle alterations to highlight mood and sensibilities with his fine lighting work here. Allison Smartt's sound design work aids and abets the theatrical settings well.
You're not necessarily going to love this play, but you will never forget the impact of the tragic traditions in a modern setting. Mothers and their sons are the theme in this play, perfectly classical, and women at the point of guns, providing their own sort of poisonous weapons in defense of their own honest futures provide the plot-drivers. One thing is certain, "Going to St. Ives" is not a children's poem you are likely to want to recite ever again...not without a grin and a grimace.

"Going to St. Ives" plays at Barrington Stage Company's Stage 2, located at 36 Linden Street, Pittsfield, MA through July 9. For tickets and information call the box office at 413-236-8888.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 9:51 PM | Permalink

"Guys and Dolls," book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows; music and lyrics by Frank Loesser. Directed by John Rando with choreography by Joshua Bergasse. At Barrington Stage Company.

Having said, once recently and in print, that I never need to see the musical "Guys and Dolls" ever again, I sit in front of my computer screen needing to write about just that, the show I have just seen for perhaps the 15th time in my life, a show I know so well that I could say half of the dialogue along with the cast of Barrington Stage Company's superb revival. I find myself incapable of writing a single contraction as I comment on what I have just experienced. Exactly as the Damon Runyon characters speak, so must I write, so palpable is the influence of one of the most perfectly constructed shows ever to grace the stages of the nation.
          Surely there is not one person who has not witnessed the two romances portrayed in this Broadway fable. Miss Adelaide, after fourteen years engaged to Nathan Detroit, has a seemingly incurable list of upper respiratory symptoms. Nathan is ever on the lookout for a new location for his Oldest Established Permanent Floating Crap Game (in New York). Miss Sarah Brown leads her uniformed companions on the Lord's mission to save sinners in the heart of the sinningest city in the world. Sky Masterson will take the unusual bet and always emerge a winner for his Luck is a Lady.

         Loesser's songs are a string of hits-become-standards, the sort of songs you could hear Sammy Davis, Jr., Frank Sinatra, Della Reese, Barbara Cook and just about everyone else sing for years on the radio, in elevators, in restaurants. Eight of them, at least, are inescapable. So much familiarity should leave an experienced theater-goer deflated and bored, but the cast in Pittsfield, MA do such a wonderful job of reinventing the unreinventable that boredom loses its potential and the mind and heart inflate with joy at the timelessness of what is being presented.
           Enough accolades already! On to the real hard stuff: the tangible conferring of approval!
Michael Thomas Holmes is a perfect Nathan Detroit, as good as, if not better than, Sam Levene, Walter Matthau, Alan King, Robert Guillaume, Nathan Lane and much better than Oliver Platt. Holmes is a short charmer with a lovely voice and a hyper personality, a truly, as indicated, perfect Nathan.
          Leslie Kritzer shines as Miss Adelaide, shines as brightly as Vivian Blaine, Helen Gallagher, Sheila MacRae, Faith Prince. Her touching performance in the duet with Nathan, "Sue Me" is a tear-inducer; you cry through your laughter.
          Morgan James is a strong contender as Sgt. Sarah Brown of the Salvation Army, as good as Isabel Bigley, Leila Martin, Anita Gillette, or anyone else including Jean Simmons in the film. Her voice is lyrical and her body a symphony of sharps and flats. It is easy to believe that her resolute reactions to the sinners around her are genuine and so is her love when she chooses to give it.
          Matthew Risch plays Sky Masterson as seductively as Robert Alda, Jerry Orbach, or Peter Gallagher. His looks are not glamorous or pretty, but his effect on women, in this role, is devastating both on-stage and off.
          These four principals are joined by a company of players who manage to eclipse many of my memories of the earlier productions I've seen. While no one can surpass the original Nicely-Nicely Johnson as played by Stubby Kaye, or even Ken Page in the all-black revival in 1976, Daniel Marcus turns in a glorious performance in this current production and his rendition of "Sit Down, You're Rockin' the Boat" is up there with the greatest.
          Tommy Bracco is fun as Harry the Horse, Michael Nichols is a classic Big Jule, Timothy Shew is a wonderful Benny Southstreet, Correy West an excellent Rusty Charlie, Gordon Stanley a perfect Arvide Abernathy, and Peggy Pharr Wilson a very nearly soignee General Cartwright.
          The ensemble are a remarkably versatile group singing, dancing, portraying characters of all types. There are more back flips in this show than there are in any five others that I can think of.
          Choreographer Joshua Bergasse shows his talents off well in the two lengthy ballets as well as in the opening ensemble number and working hand-in-hand with the director John Rando has orchestrated with bodies what is lacking in Darren Cohen's limited orchestra pit. The eight musicians deliver nicely but the richness of the score is slightly undermined by the limitations of the musical collaboration. The stage pictures, though, are so distracting that the music seems to drift up from some mythical subway line running underneath the streets of the city itself.
          That city is richly served up in the sets designed by Alexander Dodge. Alejo Vietti's costumes are so good that the period of the show is never truly established which lends a certain credence to the timelessness of the work itself. Rui Rita provides the finest lighting plot of the season thus far managing to capture our attention on one part of the stage while ultimately impressive changes are being made to the settings. Even the ugly microphones drift into an embargoed oblivion in the fine sound design work of Ed Chapman.
          Here's a show I didn't want to see and now won't have the chance to see again which wouldn't be a bad thing if I could manage it. You have an opportunity here to meet face-to-face one of the greatest shows ever written and produced in a production that shows you why it has had five Broadway revivals when other very good shows haven't even had one. This show helped fire up the careers of Peter Gennaro, Onna White, Scott Merrill, Gretchen Wyler and a host of other talented performers. A lot of the people at Barrington Stage, I bet, will be on your radar screens in years to come and you can see them now, before the rest of the world has that opportunity.

Guys and Dolls plays at Barrington Stage Company's downtown theater located at 30 Union Street in Pittsfield, MA through July 16. For information on performance schedules or to buy tickets call the box office at 413-236-8888 or go to their website at www.barringtonstageco.org.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 9:50 PM | Permalink

"The Memory of Water" by Shelagh Stephenson. Directed by Kevin G. Coleman. At Shakespeare & Company.

"I'm just sayin'. . . people die. . .you can't avoid it." With a simple sentence about the inevitability of death and the need to deal with it, playwright Shelagh Stephenson sums up her play, "The Memory of Water," gracing the Elayne P. Bernstein stage this summer at Shakespeare and Co. in Lenox, Massachusetts. Three sisters, Mary, Theresa and Catherine come together to deal with the funeral of their mother, Vi, a woman whose sense of self has infused each of her daughters with a major lack of the same. Not that their individual egos aren't exposed to the fullest during this ordeal; in fact those egos are actually stretched to the breaking point before the funeral can finally begin. Each sister has her story and those stories are told, played out, and then retold in the more than two and a half hours it takes to complete the journey from "welcome home" to "bon voyage, Mama!"

Set, most likely, in the northeast coastal town of Tynemouth where the playwright was born, the regional performance contains a mixture of accents that scream everything from Dublin, Ireland to the East Anglia margins of Ripton in Cambridgeshire. This actually works, for the three sisters, basically estranged, live in remote locations and their menfolk do the same. In Lenox, the company of players bring much to the realizations of these obscure lives and while a day and a half in their darkest hours doesn't seem like an eternity, it does stretch into a nearness of that concept.
          Thankfully, this play about death is devilishly funny. A tragi-comedy about loss and more loss without hope of redemption, the play is no less perfect than its southern American cousin, with three sisters convening to avert a tragedy, "Crimes of the Heart." It is a trifle too long, but not for this company's playing which is sharp, quick and insightful. Still, it feels a bit long. I suspect that even the film version of this Olivier Award winner for Best Comedy, a Julie Walters starrer entitled "Before You Go" feels a bit long as well.
          Corinna May plays Mary, the sister who lives away, probably in Ripton, where she is a successful doctor, too successful to devote much time to her ailing mother who lives 74 miles away on the coast. She has the greatest degree of sophistication and the smartest sense of style even though she wears nothing stylish and shows less pretense than her siblings. She presents us with a woman who can carry off a tiara and bath towel look as easily as her stretch pants pajamas. Her relationship with her mother, played masterfully in three scenes by Annette Miller, is at the core of the play and hands what would otherwise be an ensemble piece over to her character as a singular play about internal growth.
          Miller is grandeur incarnate. In her own way she steals each of her scenes from her partner, permitting May's Mary to be a constant foil. For the playwright Vi serves as a stimulus to provoke change in this daughter who, on the surface, needs the least but in reality needs the most. Together the two women are incredible.
          Kristin Wold plays the practical, managing sister Teresa. She is sharp, insightful, vindictive, relentless and often unnecessarily cruel. She mistreats both of her sisters, Mary's lover Mike, and her own husband Frank. In Wold's performance there is a tinge of candor as she riles up one after another of the characters around her. She throws stones that might be bones expecting reactions that might be fractions of emotions. Wold knows how badly her Teresa longs for subtlety and she shows us how impossible it is for Teresa to achieve such a goal.
          Catherine, the youngest sister, is played with physical ferocity by Elizabeth Aspenlieder. Chalk this up to another terrific interpretation by this actress. Aspenlieder can play ditsy with purpose and purpose with irrationality better than anyone and make it all honest and believable. Catherine is Baby Doll; Catherine is Marilyn; Catherine is Kate the Shrew and Cleopatra rolled into one. What Catherine is not, however, is very likeable but somehow with her talents hammering away at this woman, this particular Catherine arouses our sympathies. Aspenlieder digs deep inside this woman and comes up with the reality of adult orphanage.
          As Mike, the married doctor in love with Mary, Nigel Gore turns in a very realistic, funny and sympathetic performance. His is the least showy character, unless you count his almost nude scene. Gore handles Mike with kid gloves and that makes sense for this play really belongs to its women. Stephenson gives him a bad final scene and Gore makes what he can of it, but even Coleman's usually eloquent direction can't save the man or the character.
          Frank, the husband of Teresa, is well played by Jason Asprey who proves once again that he is best at contemporary roles. He is totally believable and even rather charming as the man who persists in his life's track in spite of himself. He never has a bad moment in this role and as a result deserves a proper accolade.
          Coleman truly gets the necessity of an open-space arena and he has taken advantage of the space to provide room for each character to grow and persist in Vi's bedroom. He has clearly taken a major role in the interpretation of each character. The three women, for example - the three sisters, are very different from one another and yet seem to belong in a group, a living example for the see/hear/speak no evil monkeys. He has given his two men opportunities but held them in check so that they can never outshine their women. Small touches and comic physical actions, particularly in the drunk scenes and the clothes packing scene as played by Aspenlieder, are gems.
          Patrick Brennan's set is sturdy and undistinguished which works for Tynemouth. Stephen Ball's lighting is just fine and Kara D. Midlam's costumes are just perfect, even those not worn by Vi in the performance. Congratulations and best wishes to Zachary Krohn, the stage manager and his intrepid staff who have to deal with perhaps a thousand props in each performance.
          Long, but intriguing, joyful but dark, death-engaged but life-engaging, this play is an unusual experience deposited into the hands of a talented crew of players and technicians. It plays through the season and probably won't get any better than it was on opening night, but with any luck and a little help from the stage manager it will never be anything less than what it already is, a delicious romp on the way to the grave.

"The Memory of Water" plays at the Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre at Shakespeare & Company at 70 Kemble Street in Lenox, MA, through September 4. For schedules, tickets prices and purchases, contact the box office at 413-637-3353.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 9:49 PM | Permalink

"A Streetcar Named Desire" by Tennessee Williams. Directed by David Cromer. At Williamstown Theatre Festival.

When madness overtakes the strong, the reaction is often strong. But when it grabs hold of the soft people, there is an animal wildness to it that often far exceeds any reasonable expectation.
In the Williamstown Theatre Festival's new production of Tennessee Williams' examination of the depth of madness in a woman who is soft but has never been perceived as such, "A Streetcar Named Desire," Blanche DuBois takes down into those depths all of the people close to her. Or she should. That's what the playwright wrote.
David Cromer's current production provides ample opportunity for such a disruption of reality. The Blanche he has helped create in the intimate space on the Nikos Theatre stage is obviously fragile from her first entrance. She is not merely repulsed by the atmosphere of her sister's home, she is convulsed by it. In the five months of the play, or the more than three hours of its playing time, this Blanche does not have far to go. Her eyes, her body, her demeanor all shriek, "Fake! Phony! Liar! Cheat!" although her lines tell a slightly different story. And unlike some of her predecessors, the Williamstown Blanche may destroy some faith, but she doesn't take down her companions.

There is a major weakness in the playing of this edition of the play. Mississippi accents coached by Stephen Gabis that scream of "Po' White" instead of "Educated White" defeat the effected reality of Blanche and her sister. Blanche comes in well-dressed but spouting a trashiness that gives her facade away too soon. Her sister, Stella, mirrors her in movement and sound. Stella's husband, Stanley, hasn't the looks or the charisma to captivate either of their imaginations, and his level of violence never truly communicates either. There are too many mistakes already to make this play truly resonate with the honesty that Williams demands.
On the plus side, the Blanche of Jessica Hecht is a much more knowing human being than many I've seen. This one really sees Stanley Kowalski for who and what he is, and when she calls a spade a spade, we can see she has honestly assessed the man and knows whereof she speaks. However, Hecht manages to make Blanche into a middle-aged frump when we should see Blanche as she sees herself, at least for a while. We never have the chance to imagine the beauty she finds within her soul. She has taken the plain Jane road for her Blanche, and that risk doesn't pay off too well.
Ana Reeder has taken sister Stella, "Stella for Star," in the opposite direction, her beaten-down ramshackle housewife never believable as the younger sister of the Belle Reve plantation. It is impossible to imagine her as elegantly attractive; she has taken too easily to the lower middle class lifestyle. Reeder and Hecht both have good moments together, but they never seem to jell as sisters or friends.
Sam Rockwell is both powerful and violent but there is no underlying dream of a man who thinks that love's demands must be met. He has no charm, no style, no appeal, really. He gives us the common man without even a hint of the uncommon. I could see no reason for Stella to be compelled to be with him. I could find no reason for Blanche to defy him and no safe haven for his child left alone with him. Rockwell's Stanley will undoubtedly batter the baby to death one day.
Mitch, Stanley's friend and Blanche's part-time suitor, is played without pity by Daniel Stewart Sherman. A native New Orleans man, Mitch in this show is not so much a moral man defeated by lies as a vulgar man whose baser nature is set off by truths. Mitch is a man who admires truth, asks for it, but here he is a man who cannot bear the message or the messenger or the subject of his conjecture. We feel no sympathy for him at all as he plunges from mistake to mistake.
Michael Bradley Cohen does all right as the young collector who is almost seduced by a drunken, distraught Blanche, and he might have pulled of his scene if Blanche had been even the slightest bit seductive. Jennifer Engstrom is a fine Eunice. Kirby Ward is wasted as the doctor who cannot speak above a hush and is a vaguely drawn figure on this stage.
The stage is open on three sides, and the audience is ranged upstage and in the usual position. I recommend that you ask for a stage seat, stage left only, if you want to see the play, as the sightlines for both the normal audience and the stage right seats come complete with blocked viewing.
This show requires many things, and the play cannot be done without them. The set designed by Collette Pollard is an interesting, if cluttered, one for the Nikos Stage, and it makes it hard to see the play (my seat -- SC6 -- was almost perfect, but not many others, apparently, were).
It is a hard set to light, and Heather Gilbert does a remarkably good job considering the obstacles. Still, playing an entire scene with a single candle robs the audience of reactions and nuances that are so important in this Williams play in which madness grows slowly and steadily -- you want to see the transitions. Janice Pytel's costumes are perfect for the characters and for the year of 1947, but somehow they don't always work. I think some makeup on Blanche would have been appropriate, but Hecht remained blank-faced most of the time.
It is a tribute to the playwright that with so much working against the success of this production, one where good talent seems to have been squandered on director's concept, that the famous final scene in which Blanche DuBois lives up to her name and is escorted away by a kind stranger is a moving, almost riveting, one. It's a long wait for something that touches the heart but worthwhile when it happens. You just have to provide the fortitude to experience one wrong decision after another for that two-hankie payoff.

"A Streetcar Named Desire" plays at the Nikos Stage of the Williamstown Theatre Festival at the '62 Center for Theatre and Dance at Williams College in Williamstown through July 3. For information and tickets, contact the box office at 413-597-3400 or visit wtfestival.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 website, berkshirebrightfocus.com.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 9:44 PM | Permalink

"The King and I," book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, music by Richard Rodgers; based on the book "Anna and the King of Siam" by Margaret Landon. Directed by Karla Shook. At the Mac-Haydn Theatre in Chatham, N.Y.

The 1950-51 Broadway season was extraordinary. Two of its opposite anchors are playing in the region right now: November 1950's "Guys and Dolls" by Frank Loesser is in a brilliant revival at Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield and now March 1951's "The King and I," which is proving to be a miracle of revival staging in the round at the Mac-Haydn Theatre in Chatham, N.Y. It makes you stop and wonder what came about during the months between them.
Well, here's a basic rundown: Irving Berlin's Ethel Merman smash hit "Call Me Madam" and Cole Porter's next to last stage show "Out of This World." Lerner and Loewe's "Paint Your Wagon" was waiting in the wings, along with Arthur Schwartz and Dorothy Fields' "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn." Leonard Bernstein's "Peter Pan" completes the snapshot. Not a bad season, and those were just the big hits.
Where "Guys and Dolls" gives us Broadway cartoon characters brilliantly defined in movement, lyrics and tunes, the same three elements are at work in the dramatic "King and I" as truly different cultures clash, morality is challenged on every level, and romance never rears its cartoon head unless you believe that a barbarian king with 77 children (he hasn't been married very long) could fall in love, a concept he doesn't grasp, with a middle-aged Welsh widow. In just under three hours, these two people play out a love story that has very little sex in it but instead presents a picture of adults coming to grips with differences and learning to love one another for those qualities that breed understanding instead of kids 78 through 90.

The Mac-Haydn production is beautiful, with superb costumes by Jimm Halliday, colorful and evocative lighting by Andrew Gmoser and lushly precise choreography by director Karla Shook. Shook shines in the "Shall We Dance" polka and the choreographed movement of young lovers Lun Tha and Tuptim, played to perfection by Joshua Phan-Gruber and Kelsey Self. Even without a wall of shadows in which to hide, they create that sense of furtive romanticism that excites the blood. Mario Martinez has beautifully choreographed the "Small House of Uncle Thomas" ballet.
Colleen Gallagher takes on the difficult role of Anna Leonowens, the teacher imported to westernize the King's children and educate them. She sings beautifully, presents a complex emotional character with directness and transforms into a lush and sensual woman by the end of the show. Tall and imposing, she handles everything but the comedy to perfection. She could almost not be better.
The King of Siam is played by traveling "King of Siam" portrayer Andrew Hasegawa. Since completing 20 years as a dentist, this actor has made the role of The King his personal possession, apparently, even performing it at this theater in 2004. He plays the part very well. He should.
Lady Thiang, the number one wife, is brought to life by the acting and singing of Lisa Franklin, who helps tear out your heart with her sensitive portrait of a wife who loves in the Western way without knowing how to do so. As her son, Prince Chulalungkorn, Joey LaBrasca is a pure delight, his reactions to bad news as real as his boyish charm. Louis Leonowens was played by George Franklin, and he was believable as a good kid. Jelani Alladin played The Kralahome, the King's major domo, very straight and hard, and he pulled off an interesting characterization doing just that.
Scott Wasserman was fine as Sir Edward Ramsey, and Andy Geary handled his chores as Captain Orton without a hitch.
Shook, as director and choreographer, exhibited an excellent eye for detail and a nice sense of clean lines of visibility, a major step over her work in years past. She shows herself in this production to have a fine future on the other side of the footlights bringing large shows into harbor safely and securely. Her dancers in the H.B. Stowe ballet, quite naturally, assisted her ably in bringing off this clever, funny and very touching piece. Particularly notable were Amanda Myers as Eliza, Corey Masklee as Uncle Thomas and Andy Geary as George/the Angel.
This show actually had me in tears for a good part of the second act -- by far, the best work by the company and the director takes place in the second act. Rodgers and Hammerstein's finest work may be found in this show; not one lyric or piece of music is "pure Broadway" or poorly constructed in any way. Each piece is perfect for its moment. Not as integrated a score as Frank Loesser's is for "Guys and Dolls," it is still wonderful to watch a show in which the songs do their thing and do it well, and the book scenes take care of the rest.

"The King and I" plays at the Mac-Haydn Theatre on Route 203 north of Chatham, N.Y., through July 3. For tickets and information, call the box office at 518-392-9292.
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 website, berkshirebrightfocus.com.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 9:41 PM | Permalink

"Superior Donuts" by Tracy Letts. Directed by Paul Mullins. At Dorset Theatre Festival, Dorset, Vt.

Tracy Letts' lengthy play, set in a small donut shop in Chicago's uptown neighborhood in December 2009, tells the story of two new friendships that intrude on the shop's owner, Arthur Przybyszewski. The first is his growing interest in a female beat cop he meets when his store is cannibalized. The second emerges from his proffered friendship for a young black man who comes to work for him. Both relationships are genuine and heartfelt, and the small moments in this play, 
"Superior Donuts," now on-stage at Dorset Theatre Festival, tell the back story and enforce the larger moments that rivet us to our seats.
Without knowing details, Arthur ultimately puts himself in harm's way to both protect and defend his friend Franco. He stands up for what is right, as he sees it, and for what he believes one friend would do for another. Coming late in the evening, it is a chilling exercise in coordinated fight choreography. As performed by Stephen Payne (Arthur), and Charlie Kevin, who plays Luther, the fight wavers between obviously stagey and curiously realistic. Considering Arthur's background and his relentlessly old-age hippy demeanor, the combination feels even more genuine than it might under other circumstances.
Before this entanglement, Payne stammers and meanders his way through an almost setup for a date with the cop, Randy Osteen, played by Jennifer Rohn with both the character's strengths and weaknesses apparent. Their scenes together have a crackle that is nice, and when she finally gets fed up with his impossible behavior, the effect is staggering.

Director Paul Mullins has a fine cast to work with in this play. Rohn and Payne each have qualities that seem so very right for the people they portray. She comes at her role with a directness that is obviously ingrained in her own nature. Randy is practically tackled into positions by her creator. We feel Jennifer Rohn tightly grab and tackle the part with gusto; she seems unlimited by her professional police demeanor and available to fly into something between a rage and a giggle. Rohn's Randy has police flirtation down to a science.
Payne, on the other hand, is as floppy as his outsized pants and shirts. His Arthur loves to tell stories to an unseen listener, us naturally, except that we are not there. This light-change monologue technique is the one place where the play ceases to work for me, even though Payne handles Arthur's ramblings very well. It is easier to do an internal monologue, Mr. Letts, than it is to integrate this information into a scene, but that's what the play needs you to do. Release Arthur from his reticence to open up to others. Let Stephen Payne play the scenes and not recite the litany of personal history, even though he does effectively. His job is to act, not recite.
James Smith III creates a lovely and charming Franco Wicks. Like everyone else in the play, Franco harbors personal secrets that need to be shared. His reluctance to embark on a trip of total honesty lands him in a hospital and prompts a major act of sacrifice and friendship from Payne's Arthur. Their friendship is the true center of the play, and the final moment, while an almost inevitable ending, seems a bit imposed and forced. I think that mistake is in the writing and not in the playing.
Janis Young is a perfect Lady Boyle, a street-woman who wheels her few possessions around with her. Gregor Paslawsky plays the Russian neighbor Max to a tee. Lindsay Smiling is a reasonable policeman. Nic Grelli plays a thug perfectly, and Jakob von Eichel is believable as Kiril Ivakin, a young Russian counterpart to Grelli's character.
Mullins has done a fine job on a realistic and sturdy set designed by Debra Booth. Kate Turner-Walker's costumes suit the characters well, and Michael Giannitti has designed lighting that effectively mirrors the moments. David Anzuelo has done a spotty job with the fight choreography; sometimes it feels right, and sometimes it doesn't.
This play was a hit in New York City, and this production won't take away from that in any way. It is an excellent presentation of a long and difficult play, one for which the author might just go and search out a better ending, one a little bit less trite. Dorset gives its audiences a chance, however, to see what could become a modern classic.

"Superior Donuts" plays at the Dorset Theatre Festival in downtown Dorset, Vt., through July 3. For tickets and information, call the box office at 802-867-2223.
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 website, berkshirebrightfocus.com.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 9:40 PM | Permalink