Cape Disappointment

Reviewed for Theatermania.

Hillary: A Modern Greek Tragedy With a (Somewhat) Happy Ending

Photo/Jim Baldassare

If you think about it--not a lot, but a little--Hillary Rodham Clinton's life somewhat resembles a Greek tragedy. She's undone by the very things she required to get where she was, almost as if she were caught in a battle between the unyielding warrior, Athena, and the free-love queen, Aphrodite. Such is the thought behind Wendy Weiner's Hillary: A Modern Greek Tragedy With a (Somewhat) Happy Ending, which leaps to its own conclusions, knowing full well that the task itself isn't as important as the lesson learned (or the laughs earned). Director Julie Kramer dodges the double-edged sword of the gimmicky premise by indulging in camp, and the mock history lesson gets by on clever usurpations of classic myths. Which part of Bill Clinton do you think his mother forgot to dip into the sacred spring? Where else would the gate to the underworld be but Newt Gingrich's cellar? What's striking is that while Darren Pettie's Bill and the four-person Chorus all go for laughs, we can watch Mia Barron (Hillary) struggle, time and time again, between ambition and humanity, emotion and success. That she fails and may still succeed is a heartfelt gift from the gods.

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Catch-22

Photo/Richard Termine

It's no surprise to find a company trying to adapt Catch-22 for the stage: the Iraq War--for all its paradoxes (e.g., fighting for peace), selfish capitalism, and military glory over individual rights--might as well be a sequel to Joseph Heller's brilliant novel. But it's not easy to adapt a jerky book like Catch-22, so it is a pleasant to surprise to find that Aquila Theatre Company is more than crazy enough--director Peter Meinecke might as well be wearing a straightjacket--to make the necessary cuts while still capturing the essence of the conflict. Theatrical paradoxes establish the mood--with projected backdrops of pure propaganda and low-budget illusions for sets--while the manic, triple-cast ensemble gives life to a wide variety of stock characters that flavor the central character, Yossarian, and his plight. In this role, John Lavelle manages to play both sane and insane, and this enables the show to do more than simply satirize warfare.

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On The Town

photo: Joan Marcus

Guys in crisp white sailor suits are leaping through the air once more and New York New York is once again a helluva town. This Encores! production is an effervescent shot of music-theatre bliss, thanks to its full lush orchestra playing that flawless score, and a just-about-perfect cast having a ball with that sparkling book and dancing those tremendously expressive Robbins dances (supplemented here by Warren Carlyle). Is it possible to love old-school musical comedy and not be smitten with this production of On The Town? I doubt it. I don't know of a performer right now who is more suited to play lovesick romantic leading man Gabey than Tony Yazbeck, who sings and dances like a dream and whose "Lonely Town" is as heartfelt and evocative as I have ever heard. Also standing out, in a thoroughly outstanding cast, are Christian Borle and Jennifer Laura Thompson, whose comic chemistry together is the kind that slaps a smile on your face just to look at them, and Andrea Martin, who mugs and hams with such delicious shamelessness as a boozing voice teacher that she has an aerial view of over-the-top. Now for the bad news: the unusual staging, which puts the orchestra dead center dividing the playing area between the book scenes downstage and the dance scenes upstage on an elevation, is a smashing success downstairs but apparently a huge sightline nightmare from the Gallery, where even in the best of circumstances one longs for a seatbelt for fear of tumbling to one's death.

Love Dr. Mueller

Baltimore bad girl, Haight-Ashbury hippie, punk-era downtown scene-maker: the chapters in Cookie Mueller's life may be varied and colorful but they're all evidence of an adventurer who lived by her own rules. One of the shrewdest ideas in this new play, directed and co-adapted from Mueller's writings by Kareem Fahmy, is to break the rules and have the three actresses in the cast of six take turns playing her in successive scenes. Each brings a distinct characterization, and yet each is valid: the conceit makes the show less about who Cookie Mueller was, and more about what her life was about. Most of the episodes are both era-evoking and funny - the snappiest one freezes the goings-on in a seedy Jersey strip club while Mueller deadpans her mixed feelings to us about doing "floor work" - and even the weaker ones - such as the too-brief peek behind the scenes of John Waters' underground cult classic Pink Flamingos - are entertaining.

Streamers

photo: Joan Marcus

David Rabe's excellent 1976 play, in which Vietnam-era soldiers just out of Basic Training are thrown into intense, escalating social conflict with each other while holed up in their barracks, seems to have been revived for, and directed with a focus on, its gays-in-the-military content. On that score, the production is engaging as a time-capsule that invites contemplation about what has and has not changed. Unfortunately the play's other themes are shortchanged, which drains the production of dramatic tension. Two of the actors seem to have been misdirected: Ato Essandoh disastrously so as Carlyle - the character comes off as a psycho the minute he bounds through the door, so the audience isn't forced to sit with the discomforting suspicion that racial stereotyping is behind the hostility he gets from most of the other guys. Brad Fleischer, as Billy, is asked to play so unimpeachably straight that there's no sexual tension with Richie, whose longing for him now looks masochistic. Still, it's great to hear Rabe's dialogue again, and two of the performances - by Hale Appelman and J.D. Williams - are exactly right.