Frankie And Johnny In The Clair De Lune

photo: Scott Suchman

Arena Stage's production of Terrence McNally's frank and intimate romantic drama has a terrific Johnny in Vito D'Ambrosio. As the short order cook who doggedly pursues Frankie, an emotionally scarred waitress, over the course of a night of lovemaking and soul-baring, he's endearingly like an overgrown child. He plays it as if the connection Johnny feels with Frankie reawakens something deeply innocent in him; when Johnny isn't scaring the shit out of damaged her by narrowing his eyes to insist that they belong together, he can scarcely keep a smile off his face. It's a lovely performance. What this production doesn't yet have in Kate Buddeke is a Frankie strong enough to match him. Her characterization work is spot-on - you can feel the years of disappointment and diminished expectations in her body language - but she hasn't yet found all the levels in the text and the performance is too much the same from start to finish. Give her a little time and I expect this will become every bit the dynamic two-hander it can be.

Dying City

Okay, to me, this play is about as imperceptible as the minute (but constant) rotation of the set. Just as the set is minimal (with more items actually placed off-stage in packing boxes than the couch and the television that actually sitting there), Christopher Shinn's script enjoys beating around the bush (or at times beating on Bush); it would be an understatement to say I didn't enjoy this production. Pablo Schrieber is still playing Pablo Schrieber -- at least in Mr. Marmelade, he wasn't emoting such seriousness, and at least in Manuscript and HBO's The Wire, it served him well. But his weaknesses show here: he's playing two twin brothers (the excuses to get him off-stage to change are pretty weak), and his rendition of both is pretty much the same (although everybody knows gay actors and bitter soldiers are identical). Rebecca Brooksher gets one moment of catharsis that stretches on too long, and she doesn't seem to have changed between the 2004 and 2005 scenes of this play . . . Sorry. Thumbs down from me.

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Also blogged by: [David] [Patrick] [Christopher]

Bill W. and Dr. Bob

Bill W. and Dr. Bob is a solid, even night of history. The theatricality, however, is dull (like the staging), and filled with superfluous additions, like an onstage pianist for "mood music" of the 1920s. The script itself has an abundance of too-scripted lines that the hammy leads play for laughs. But the show succeeds in relating the story of two drowning men finding salvation and support in each other and in their faith. While most of the cast rings false in their recitations and recreations of actual events (or the ones that Stephen Bergman and Janet Surrey have taken liberties with), I was very impressed with Marc Carver, who plays all the unnamed men of the show. When Bill W. first meets Dr. Bob, he gives the Reader's Digest version of his first drink. In many ways, I can't help but feel that's what this show presents: a gentle, condensed history that's been edited for content.

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Also blogged by: [Patrick]

Dying City

Christopher Shinn's plays are adult and subtle, and they kick big ideas around the landscape of the highly personal. In this two-hander, we watch a young therapist both on the night of her husband's departure for armed service in the Iraqi War (where he dies), and on the night about a year later when she is visited by his identical twin brother. The play builds slowly by inches - at first the dramatic movement is almost as hard to see with the naked eye as this production's single clockwise turn of the revolving set - and for a while the story is more interesting than engaging. But the play rewards the patience it demands: slowly the pieces begin to fall into place and we intuit Shinn's quietly devastating connections between personal and political conviction. Rebecca Brooksher is never less than immediate and believable as the therapist; Pablo Schreiber's performances as both husband and twin are layered and convincing. Although I wanted to feel more than I did before the final scenes, (I suspect that the blame goes to this production's staging on the revolving set, which prohibits a consistently intimate view of both acters' expressions from anywhere in the theatre), I left with plenty of admiration for Shinn's play and with plenty to think about.

Also blogged by: [David] [Aaron]

The Jaded Assassin

After reading David's recommendation, I knew I had to check this show out. Let me just say: I never knew disembowling could be so amusing. In any case, I'll keep this comment short and sweet (like the show): theater needs companies like this who want to not only entertain the audience but attempt a wide variety of innovative styles from the history of theater to do so. A climactic battle with fake legs provides a wonderful illusion of characters flying across the set: I haven't been that impressed while laughing in a long time.

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Mary Poppins

photo: Joan Marcus

The two stars of Mary Poppins are Gavin Lee's legs in motion; if Al Hirschfeld was still alive he'd draw them as thin and as long as matchsticks. The show's highlight is Lee's second act tapdance up the wall and then upside down from the top of the proscenium arch, a moment of winning and cheerful stage magic in a show that is otherwise short on them. In this stage version, it's hard to decide which is more depressing: that the playfully stern but loving and magical nanny has been made haughty and no fun at all, with a voice as phoney as Mrs. Doubtfire's, or that she's been rendered nearly surperfluous to the story. They could have done away with her and called the second act Bert! and the first Disney's Scenes From A Marriage.