Song of Norway

Okay, Collegiate Chorale, you spoiled us with The Mikado, and raised the bar far too high. Then along comes Song of Norway, an okay presentation of an unimpressive show. It doesn't help that the sound was spotty, and that Jim Dale, as the narrator, and David Garrison, as a French impressario, were about 97% unintelligible.

Danieley, Silber, Fontana
Photo: Erin Baiano

The story of Song of Norway is silly and predictable. Composer Edvard Grieg is part of a trio of friends, one of whom he partners with to write, the other of whom he marries. But fame goes to his head, blah, blah, blah.

But there were highlights: Judy Kaye, wonderful as always and clear as a bell (though often blocked from view by her own music stand); Jason Danieley, adorable as always and giving it his all; Santino Fontana, singing beautifully (but not quite bothering to give a peformance); Alexandra Silber, singing and acting the heck out of her role; and Anita Gillette, extraordinarily likeable. And while the Collegiate Chorale itself was splendid, I wish it had had more to do.


(press ticket, orchestra, side, ~14 rows back)

Sans Merci

In Sans Merci, written by Johnna Adams and directed by Heather Cohn, two young women, Kelly (the awkwardly, impressively real Rachael Hip-Flores) and Tracy (the lovely and intense Alisha Spielmann), fall in love and decide to try to save the world, starting with a small mountain in Colombia. Their plans go terribly, fatally, wrong. Some years later, Tracy's mother Elizabeth (the wry, subtle, and heartbreaking Susan Ferrara) shows up at Kelly's home, seeking information, Tracy's belongings, and ownership of Tracy's memory. She does not seek closure; in fact, she and Kelly both cherish their grief. 

Susan Ferrara, Rachael Hip-Flores
Photo: Titus Winters

Elizabeth and Kelly go on to spar a bit, but with a strong underlying connection. Elizabeth may be a Republican who wishes that her daughter had never met Kelly, and she may be there to take some of Kelly's treasured keepsakes of Tracy, but both recognize their unshakeable connection: they, and only they, understand the true, deep horror of losing Tracy.

Sans Merci is mesmerizing, heartbreaking, grueling, and, yes, merciless. It is also damn good. Johnna Adams gives us three-dimensional characters in all their messy glory, and Heather Cohn provides her usual clean and smartly paced direction. The scenery by Charles Murdock Lucas supplies a strong sense of who lives there, and the lighting by Kia Rogers and the sound by Janie Bullard contribute a vivid emotional landscape. It's another excellent production from the Flux Theatre Ensemble.

(The title, by the way, references Keats' poem, "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," which was/is loved by both Tracy and Elizabeth and which was instrumental in Tracy and Kelly's becoming friends. The poem is about being left behind after a deep love, and it is echoed in the play in ways both metaphorical and concrete.)

[spoilers]
There are points where the edginess of Sans Merci tips over into creepiness. While it is difficult to experience some of these moments, they are also some of the play's strengths.

For example: Kelly lays out the clothing that was torn from Tracy before she was murdered, and Elizabeth finds this a comforting sight, feeling that it partially makes up for having been unable to see her daughter's body. She explores the remnants of Tracy's suffering with something like a sense of wonder.

For example: When the show starts, Kelly is lying on the couch, listening to her iPod, her hand in her pants. She seems more to be comforting herself, holding on to herself, than touching herself. We later find out that she is listening to Tracy's accidentally-taped tirade against her murderers. This tirade is Tracy's declaration of independence: with her clothing, dignity, future, and (she thinks) her lover stripped away, she banishes her fears and panic attacks and spews out her emotions. Her outburst (which, injured and nude, she screams at the audience) ends with the bullet that ends her life. It is an excruciating moment and a very successful piece of theater, even though the tirade itself goes on too long (it becomes repetitive, and the murderers would have shot her much sooner; with her nudity, it almost tips over into suffering porn).

Elizabeth also listens to the tape, once. After Kelly tells her it exists, she can't resist hearing it. In a way it is a gift, providing her with a hysterical catharsis that she desperately needs. However, when Kelly then offers her a copy (a moment that was greeted with understandable nervous laughter the night I saw the show), Elizabeth says no (which seems a sane answer).

But we're left with the question: why does Kelly listen to Tracy's dying words over and over? I think listening to the tape is Kelly's penance and comfort both. She feels responsible for Tracy's death (with some justification), and listening to her murder over and over again is brutal. On the other hand, Tracy goes in a blaze of glory, during which she declares her love and respect for Kelly at the top of her lungs. It is a testimonial to their relationship; it is proof that Tracy did not blame her; it is a pure, uncensored version of the woman Kelly loved.

And why is Kelly's hand in her pants? I think she is holding herself together. Because she and Tracy were being physical when they were attacked--because Kelly had practically badgered Tracy into having sex at that moment--Kelly's sexual life may well be over, destroyed by guilt and memories. But listening to the tape is unquestionably, if weirdly, intimate. Does she feel any arousal? Maybe, maybe not. I'm not sure I'd want to know.

Grief is not pretty, or sane, and Adams is willing to wrestle with that.

[end of spoilers]
I'm find I'm still thinking about Sans Merci. I try to figure out the characters' motivations--and the playwright's. I become more aware of its flaws and more aware of its strengths. It is a brave play--braver sometimes in its quiet moments than in its showy ones--and, in its own way, beautiful.

(third row on the aisle, press ticket) 

The Drawer Boy

At the beginning of Michael Healey’s play, The Drawer Boy, a young actor/director named Miles (Alex Fast) shows up uninvited at the door of a farmhouse, hoping to carry out research on farming for a play he wants to write. The farmhouse is inhabited by two middle-aged men, the slow and halting Angus (the superb William Laney) and the bright and articulate Morgan (Brad Fryman).

Alex Fast, William Laney, Brad Fryman
Photo: Alexander Dinelaris

Little by little we learn that Morgan has been caring for Angus since the latter suffered a brain injury in World War II. Angus is not able to create new memories, so he lives in an eternal present. When the play begins, in 1972, the two men have lived on this farm in the middle of nowhere for three decades. It seems likely that each of the thousands of days they have spent together was much like the others.

Miles is fascinated by Angus, and starts questioning and even challenging him, soon throwing off the largely serene and changeless cycle of days that has constituted Angus and Miles' lives and causing the layers of their assumptions and stories to rupture and peel away.

This three-hander is well-written and entertaining. It doesn't reach brilliance, but solid, involving, insightful excellence is nothing to sneeze at; I certainly found it superior to Orphans (also a three-hander), which is currently running on Broadway. What keeps The Drawer Boy from reaching its potential is the unevenness of the acting. Brad Fryman is quite good, and Alex Fast is not bad, but neither equals William Laney in subtlety, complexity, and that extra undefinable something that raises a performance to the highest levels. Director Alexander Dinelaris keeps the evening moving along nicely, but it's hard not to wonder what might have been.

Ultimately, however, it seems churlish to complain about an evening in the theatre this satisfying.  The Drawer Boy has much to offer, and its B-plus level puts it well above many other dramas of this past season.

(third row center; press ticket)

Pippin

Photo: Michael J. Lutch

 

Allow me to cut right to the chase: Diane Paulus's revival of Pippin, which opens Thursday, is sublime. At the risk of sounding cliched, there are just not enough superlatives to describe how excellent, brilliant, wonderful, warm, engaging, astonishing, entertaining and just plain delicious it is. I might need to start making adjectives up for this one. It's been a long time since I saw a show that was so tightly directed, so gleefully and brilliantly performed, so genuinely and ecstatically received by its audience--so very, very good.

Some of this is, of course, the source material. Pippin is a great show, if also a quirky one. It has a consistently strong, memorable score that was released on Motown Records, and that most people of my generation thus grew up listening to and loving, even if most of us never saw the show or knew what it was about. It had an innovative, fringe-influenced book that reflects the darkening moods and growing inwardness of the 1970s and yet refuses to relinquish the dogged optimism and communal spirit of the 1960s. It has been indelibly marked by the brilliant and complicated Bob Fosse, whose trademark jazz hands, bowler hats, swiveling pelvises, and skin-tight costumes helped make the original Broadway production a huge hit that practically bellowed his name at every turn. Fosse's shadow looms so large, in fact, that it's no wonder the show hasn't been revived on Broadway before. I can imagine that the task was daunting, but Diane Paulus's production manages to keep the show squarely in Fosse territory, and yet to radically reinvent it at the same time.

I've long admired Diane Paulus's productions. She strikes me as the best kind of postmodernist: she regularly tries to to simultaneously reinvent and pay homage, to wildly different ends. The Donkey Show was not only hilarious and weird and unlike anything I'd ever seen, but it also tapped directly into the Off Off Broadway experimentalism that was hot during the 1960s, and that she has long been influenced by: theater as communal celebration and ritual, theater as sociopolitical commentary, theater as a bonding force between performer and spectator. I loved it, and remember it fondly as another high point in my life as a theatergoer. Yet some of her more recent productions haven't quite managed the same kind of delicate balance. Don't get me wrong: I saw her revival of Hair twice. But I've studied the original production a great deal, and aside from a slight shift away from its more aggressively masculine tone, I was never convinced that her revival was so terribly radical a departure. Similarly, for all the hype around her Porgy and Bess, I wasn't convinced that the changes Stephen Sondheim got all pissy about were all that big a deal in performance, either.

But her Pippin nails the landing, and then some. As noted, purists need not fret: The show remains strongly committed to Fosse, to whom it pays homage in multiple ways: the costumes, the postures, the dances, the splayed fingers, the leering faces, the bobbling pelvises, even much of the casting.

Yet at the same time, Paulus modernizes the production with a number of choices that threaten to come off as gimmicky or superficial, but never, ever do. Set in a circus bigtop, and featuring players drawn from the Montreal-based troupe, Les 7 Doigts de la Main, this Pippin has a strongman, trapeze artists, contortionists, jugglers, acrobats, and guys who balance on impossibly precarious contraptions for our viewing pleasure. On the surface, this all sounds perfectly nice, but what it does in performance is drive home Fosse's fascination with powerful, twisting, sensual bodies, while dazzling audiences in brand new ways.

Casting Patina Miller in the role of the Leading Player--a character that Ben Vereen has pretty much trademarked--also sounds a little gimmicky: "Oh, a female Leading Player? Cool, whatever." But again, in performance, the choice shifts the dynamic dramatically: the supportive, headstrong, ultimately petulant Leading Player is as sharp and sexy and sneering as Vereen was, but now also touches, in the most subtle and fleeting of ways, on just about every aspect of contemporary feminist philosophy. And she totally rocks her jaunty, frighteningly angular bowler hat.

Then there's the rest of the company. Terrence Mann is perfectly cast, and perfectly pitched, as Charles, Pippin's goofily distracted, blithely bloodthirsty father. Mann's rendition of "War Is a Science," with its slipping, speeding tempos, made sense to me for the first time, ever; it and "Glory" do well, also, to carefully reflect what is eerily seductive--beautiful, even--about blood and gore and violent death. Mann can ride a unicycle, to boot--who knew? Charlotte D'Amboise plays up the ridiculous stereotype that is Fastrada, while dancing up a storm. Rachel Bay Jones adds nuance, dimension, and a touch of pain to the bubbly Catherine in the show's quieter and yet endlessly compelling second act. And Matthew James Thomas is a winning, scruffy Pippin, whose desperate search for meaning sets him off from the rest of the ensemble. Thomas is not as intensely physical as the rest of the cast, which works, surprisingly, to the show's advantage: as a lost everyman, his Pippin is just as blown away as we are by the taut, beautiful, powerful bodies surrounding him.

And then there's Andrea Martin, whose Berthe brings the house down with an absolutely brilliant blend of grandmotherly warmth and matronly bite. It's a rare, beautiful thing to see a single performer so thoroughly charm an enormous audience as quickly as she does here. I remember once seeing Neil Young address a screaming arena of thousands by grunting "hey," at them, as if they were all hanging out in his living room with him, languidly sipping cheap, lukewarm beer. Martin can do this too, and it's awesome. Within moments of "No Time at All," she had the entire house singing along with her--loudly and happily--as the lyrics were projected onto the backdrop. The communal spirit she musters in this scene is, again, a nod to Paulus' admiration of the 1960s Off Off Broadway scene: I suspect that if Martin had asked us to run out into the street and take our clothes off, we totally might've. But then, the stunts Martin accomplishes on the trapeze later in the scene--and no, I'm not joking--are something fresh, new, and unbelievably wonderful.

Which makes sense, really, since all the superlatives I've ended up using in this writeup apply to every single minute of this fresh, new, unbelievably wonderful revival.
 

Richard III: Born With Teeth

The Epic Theatre's version of Shakespeare's Richard III (here called Richard III: Born With Teeth) aims for immediacy, edge, and individuality, and it largely succeeds. With a strong cast led by the able James Wallert as an occasionally charming, always scheming Richard, and cleanly directed by Ron Russell, this is a solid production.

It can be a bit gimmicky, however. The audience is treated to white rose punch; cast members chat with the audience, one on one, in character; the setting is contemporary for no particular reason. This is all entertaining but adds little to the play.

[spoiler below]

There is one conceptual gambit that is not a gimmick, however: the treatment of Richard's body. This Richard seemingly suffers from relatively minor handicaps--a useless hand, a slight limp. He is physically imperfect, but not hideous. Then, late in the play, when he is readying himself for battle, he takes off his civilian clothing and reveals the metal and leather corset that keeps his misshapen body erect and helps him to hide his weakness from his enemies; it is unseen armor. His servant removes the corset, and Richard's body folds up. We see a man who is in constant pain, and for a brief moment, this villain becomes a sympathetic human being. Putting the corset back on, along with military armor, is excruciating to him, but also rebuilds the Richard he chooses to present to the world. This is so much more interesting--and psychologically complex--than the usual heavy-handed conflation of twisted body and twisted mind. And in becoming more human, this Richard also becomes more villainous. It's a brilliant idea, beautifully carried out, and it raises this production from just another Richard III to one with something new to say.

(fifth row center; press ticket)

Dance of Death

Thrilled to have an audience, George and Martha--no, woops, Edgar and Alice--strut their hated and acid barbs with the eagerness of a three-year-old saying, "Mommy, did you see that? Mommy, did you see that?" It's August Strindberg's Dance of Death, and the audience, Alice's cousin Gustav, is no happier watching them than are Nick and Honey watching George and Martha in Edward Albee's similar but much superior Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

Daniel David, Laila Robins
Photo: Carol Rosegg

Edgar and Alice have been married 25 dreadful years. They live on an isolated island where Edgar is a captain in the military and has alienated their few neighbors. They're broke, their children avoid them, and Edgar is probably dying. Their sole recreational activity is sniping at one another. It gets boring for Gustave and it gets boring for us, but it never gets boring for them.

Albee's brilliance in Virginia Woolf is to force Nick and Honey, particularly Nick, to become part of George and Martha's game, requiring George and Martha to make some different moves and try some different strategies. Edgar and Alice, in contrast, are stuck on "repeat," and their ostensible rapprochement at the end is completely unconvincing, in contrast to George and Martha's heartbreaking detente.

The Red Bull Theater's current production of Dance at Death at the Lucille Lortel theater is anchored by a moving performance by Daniel Davis, who vividly depicts the headstrong life force of a dying man who will leave behind nothing he cherishes but nevertheless refuses to go. Laila Robins is not the equal sparring partner the play requires; her voice and presence are too small. (I kept wishing I was watching Colleen Dewhurst.) Derek Smith is unable to do anything interesting with the supporting role of Gustave, but that is probably the role's fault.

The adaptation, by Mike Poulton, shortens the play without successfully streamlining it but provides energetic and evocative language. The direction, by Joseph Hardy, moves the play along efficiently. The set (Beowulf Boritt), costumes (Alejo Vietti), and lighting (Clifton Taylor) are effective. 

(third row on the aisle, press ticket)