Of all Shakespeare’s lovers, Much Ado About Nothing’s Benedick and Beatrice may be the most fun to watch. They verbally joust, jest and spar and, Much Ado being a comedy, end up happily, romantically coupled at the end. This play, even with its Claudio-wronging-the fair Hero subplot, should be fun from start to finish. It absolutely is at Intrepid Shakespeare Company, where Sean Yael-Cox and Shana Wride make a delightful Benedick and Beatrice, and an outstanding supporting cast that includes Ruff Yeager (as Leonato), Matt Thompson (Don Pedro), Charles Evans Jr. (Claudio) and Tom Stephenson (hapless sheriff Dogberry) justifies all the Bard’s intended ado. Director Richard Baird thoughtfully employs both recorded and live music during the proceedings, set in Sicily in 1931, and has guided a large cast with aplomb on the small theater-in-the-round at Encinitas’ Performing Arts Center at San Dieguito Academy. You’re so close to the actors that you feel directly involved in the action. You almost expect Leonato to offer you a glass of wine. Alas, he doesn’t.
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If ballet bores you, then we’ve got something in common. But don’t let the title of the year-end production at Carlsbad’s New Village Arts Theatre – The Nutcracker – throw you. This holiday show, directed by NVA’s Kristianne Kurner and running through Dec. 31, is very loosely based on the “Nutcracker” ballet libretto adapted from E.T.A. Hoffmann’s story, but its only significant dancing involves three precocious rats who speak in Cockney accents.
The Nutcracker was conceived at the House Theatre of Chicago seven years ago, with a book by Jake Minton and Phillip Klapperich and music and lyrics by Kevin O’Donnell and Minton respectively. Its forgettable ballads, sung by 12-year-old star Abby DeSpain, take a back seat to the story about a little girl and her parents coping with grief at the holidays. This may strike you as a downer for a yuletide diversion, but there’s frolicking and pratfalls galore on the way to Clara’s (DeSpain, a young actress building a solid resume) coming to terms with the loss of her older brother in combat. These take place in the child’s imagination – or, depending on your own taste for fantasy, via “magic” imparted by her visiting uncle (David Macy-Beckwith). Not only does Clara’s brother Fritz manifest as a full-size toy soldier, but her other favorite toys (played by Shaun Tuazon-Martin, Brian Butler and Jennifer Paredes) come to life in colorful costumes by Jennifer Brawn Gittings. The villains are those dancing, menacing rats, portrayed with fiendish gusto by Michael Parrott, Amanda Morrow and Justin Tuazon-Martin). Though the true villain is death, which took Fritz (Edred Utomi) from Clara and their parents (Steve Froehlich and Rin Ehlers). The Nutcracker script strains for weightiness in places and though the production lasts only two hours, getting to the universal moment of clarity at the end requires more machinations than necessary. Still, when that clarity does come, it may bring a lump to your throat or revive a memory of someone you’ve lost and miss, especially at this time of the year. That alone makes New Village Arts’ holiday offering an appealing coda to the season. Compared to her compelling In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play) or Dead Man’s Cell Phone, playwright Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House (written before the other two) is an uneven work. So is New Village Arts’ production, which has moments (most of them in the first act) of heartfelt intensity but also lapses into self-consciousness and melodramatics. Still, director Claudio Raygoza’s cast is in top form, especially Hannah Logan, playing the cleanliness-obsessed sister to the uptight doctor (Kristianne Kurner) who hires a Brazilian woman (Nadia Guevara), the play’s life force, to be her maid.
Ultimately, The Clean House is about humanity, death and dealing with the requisite messiness of our lives. These points, in spite of the production’s touching lyrical qualities, become heavy-handed in the second act. We don’t need the narrative’s significant moments literally spelled out for us via stage projections, as they are here. Reluctant maid Matilde’s belief in the power of laughter should be enough. John Barrymore, legend of stage and screen, may have died in 1942, but he’s making a comeback, at least in North County theaters. In the North Coast Repertory Theatre’s world premiere Faded Glory, Bruce Turk portrayed a young, boozing Barrymore full of mischief; now, in Intrepid Shakespeare Company’s production of Paul Rudnick’s I Hate Hamlet, stentorian voiced Ruff Yeager is playing a dead, but boozing and full of mischief Barrymore, who’s come back as a ghost to empower an insecure TV actor named Andrew Rally (Francis Gercke). In both productions, the Barrymore character commands every scene he’s in, but much more so in I Hate Hamlet, in which he is the heart and soul of the show.
Yeager has an actor’s field day (the real Barrymore had a lot of those, of course) in this production directed by Christopher Williams and co-starring Gercke, Tom Stephenson (recently so stellar in Intrepid’s far more sober All My Sons), Gerilyn Brault (as a real estate agent who sounds like a brassier Rhoda Morganstern), dignified Dagmar Fields as Andrew’s agent and winsome Brooke McCormick Paul as the avowed 29-year-old virgin who has Andrew’s frustration button blinking red. This lightweight comedy’s conflict concerns whether Andrew will forgo a mega-big TV-series deal (playing a schoolteacher with superpowers by night) or go the serious actor’s route and perform the role of Hamlet in New York’s Shakespeare in the Park. Adding to his psychological conundrum is the fact that he’s residing in the late John Barrymore’s NYC apartment – as is Barrymore’s ghost, who for some reason a few of the characters can see while others can’t. Gercke is adequate in the angst and anxiety department, but he is dwarfed (literally and figuratively) by the towering Yeager in every scene they share. Rudnick’s living-room comedy, produced on Broadway way back in ’91, does raise some questions about what it means to be an actor -- in this case, is it better to fail at Shakespeare than to succeed at hawking a snack food on TV with a puppet? Much of the time, though, it’s merely rambunctious ghost-in-the-house silliness. Could be sitcom material after all. Scott Joplin, the “King of Ragtime,” an all-too-short life -- he died, of complications resulting from syphilis, at 49. His was not an easy life, either. Far from it, as we learn in Robert Barry Fleming’s one-man show Scott Joplin’s New Rag, presented by Mo’olelo Performing Arts Company. In narrative, screen-projections, voiceovers and (not enough) music, this 90-minute production at downtown’s 10th Avenue Theatre relentlessly points out Joplin’s hardships – from the bigotry to which he was subjected, to the tragic loss of the woman he loved most, to his struggles in the cutthroat music business. Though Fleming works hard and is an imaginative performer, this show has a work-in-progress feel about it, and it’s largely a joyless affair.
Spectacle that it is and audacious in its wringing of emotions, Les Miserables is not a Broadway show you’d ever call intimate. Whether it’s the battle of wills between Jean Valjean and Inspector Javert or the tensions and violence of the Paris Uprising, Les Miz is theater on an epic scale. So what a wondrous treat to experience the current production at Lamb’s Players Theatre in Coronado.
Directed by Robert Smyth with musical direction by G. Scott Lacy, Lamb’s’ production of Claude-Michel Shonberg and Alain Boublil’s nearly 30-year-old theatrical warhorse manages to personalize the characters and the conflicts without sacrificing any of the show’s stature. The fact that it’s unfolding in a 350-seat theater in which for some the actors are practically within reach accounts for some of the intimacy. But Smyth, along with scenic designer Mike Buckley, lighting designer Nathan Peirson and sound designer Patrick Duffy, have conceived a Les Miserables that immerses audience members in the story rather than reducing theme to observers from afar, as can be the case at the cavernous Pantages in Hollywood or even the Civic Theatre in downtown San Diego. The barricades backdrop on stage – barrels, boxes, overturned chairs, et. al. – looks like Grandma’s attic gone wild, but it works so well here as a discreet seating area for the top-notch orchestra and, in some sequences, for the actors’ movements. None moves, or performs, any better than Brandon Joel Maier, whose redemption-seeking Jean Valjean has to be the highlight so far of this talented actor’s blossoming career. The dependable Randall Dodge is a worthy adversary as Javert, and Neil Dale and Deborah Gilmour Smyth sparkle wickedly as the innkeepers Thenardier. You know the story. You remember many of Les Miz’s numbers: the rhythmic “Look Down,” the mischievious “Master of the House,” the Act 1-closing “One Day More,” and Valjean’s “Bring Him Home,” which Maier sings with heart-rending plaintiveness. And in the Lamb’s space, the song of salvation, “Take My Hand,” could not be more tender. Lamb’s’ ambitious production pumps rich, reinvigorating life into a show that, even deservedly so, has been done to death. It might even make you a Francophile. To celebrate the inaugural opening night of its existence, New Fortune Theatre recruited bagpipe players in full Scottish regalia to play outside ion theatre’s BLKBOX space in Hillcrest, which at least for now will serve as the fledgling company’s home. The bagpipers were also celebrating St. Crispin’s Day, which is not only Oct. 25 (New Fortune’s opening night) but also directly connected to Henry V, the evening’s Shakespearean production. (Henry’s St. Crispin’s Day speech is one of the most famous in all the Bard’s histories).
New Fortune’s Henry V is co-directed (with Matthew Henerson) by Richard Baird, who also stars in the titular role. The accomplished, baritone-voiced actor is the new company’s artistic director. Henry V is a rambling historical vehicle rife with battlefield bloodshed and righteous orations from the English king who lusts to add France to his realm. That Baird and Henerson are able to stage a play with a cast of 14 in ion’s compact space and do so with minimalist set pieces is quite an achievement. Somehow the combat scenes, aided by booming sound effects, are plausible, and Henry’s army, which includes New Fortune associate artistic director Matt Thompson, scatter back and forth with startling precision. The play is overlong (exceeding three hours, with intermission) and the subplots anchored by comic characters Pistol (John Tessmer) and Mistress Quickly (Dana Hooley) just slow everything down. But Baird is commanding as the oft-inspirational king, in particular in Act 2 when we are treated to the moving St. Crispin’s Day “band of brothers” speech. Amanda Schaar (New Fortune’s managing director) shines in a hilarious lost-in-translation scene with Hooley (in a different role), and as the play’s recurring narrator, Jessica John is charming and, if you know John’s work around town, charismatic as ever. Even with its long-windedness, Henry V is a diverting picture of 15th-century imperialism and royal ambition, and the production is a showcase for Baird, for whom the mission of the new theater company is “world class productions of original classics.” You can’t get any more ambitious than “world-class.” Here’s hoping New Fortune finds its place on the local theater landscape. North Coast Rep in Solana Beach is presenting a curious olio of Kurt Vonnegut adaptations called Who Am I This Time? A folksier than folksy James Leaming anchors the three inter-connected tales about amour, each of them set at the fictitious North Crawford Mask & Wig Club in North Crawford, Conn. The most entertaining of the three is the middle offering, the one actually based on the Vonnegut 1961 short story “Who Am I This Time?” In it, shrinking violets Harry Nash (Jason Maddy) and Helene Shaw (Christina Flynn) comically heat up when playing Stanley Kowalski and wife Stella in a community production of A Streetcar Named Desire.
In general the lessons about love are familiar and homespun – not what one tends to associate with the man who wrote “Slaughterhouse Five.” But so it goes. The unofficial motto at the retirement home for musicians where onetime opera singers Reggie (Robert Foxworth), Jean (Elizabeth Franz), Wilfred (Roger Forbes) and Cecily (Jill Tanner) reside is “NSP,” which stands for “No Self-Pity.” Yet in Ronald Harwood’s Quartet, directed by Richard Seer at the Old Globe’s theater-in-the-round, that’s what these four spend a lot of time doing. Some more than others. Jean, who was the biggest opera star of the four, is feeling sorry for herself when she isn’t feeling hostile, and Reggie conceals his self-indulgence in brooding and ominous silences. Cecily is the merriest but the least lucid, while Wilfred is sex-obsessed, trotting out aging-horndog quips. But at least he doesn’t resort to “NSP.”
Quartet hinges on the subplot of once-married Reggie and Jean’s uneasy reunion at the English retirement home and the heady prospect of the foursome’s performing the Act 3 quartet from “Rigloletto” in celebration of Verdi’s birthday. The tension of the subplot is for the most part addressed and resolved in Quartet’s first act, while the buildup to the big performance drags for three scenes in Act 2, with character revelations made amid a rehearsal that never gets off the ground, choosing and trying on costumes and applying makeup. The pace is slow, which is undoubtedly the real-life pace of a retirement home, but too slow to appreciate what Harwood is trying to say about courage and living in the moment. The chief disappointment of the story is the “Rigoletto” sequence itself. Earlier in the play, Wilfred and then especially Reggie make the point that there is no art without feeling. And yet Reggie, Jean, Wilfred and Cecily lip-sync their performance, principally because Jean no longer has a singing voice, and because they’re all, well, old. To see the four mouthing the words rings hollow and doesn’t look as if any of them is feeling the art of Verdi or the art within themselves. This does not detract from a likable performance from the ever-dependent Foxworth, a Globe associate artist, or from Franz’s pained yet restrained Jean. Her sadly wistful remarks to Cecily about sex are as soft and surprising as Wilfred’s are loud and predictable. Beware of works of art in which a star is a metaphor. As a matter of fact, beware of anything in which a star is a metaphor. You can be sure that the beacon of light/hope springs eternal symbolism will be very obviously in play.
It certainly is in the new musical Bright Star at the Old Globe Theatre, written by Steve Martin and Edie Brickell and directed by Walter Bobbie. The Globe’s 2014-15 season opener relates a formulaic story that possesses its darker overtones, but it is by and large a sugary couple of hours of secrets predictably revealed, all set to Americana-flavored music. Two stories, unfolding in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains in the wake of World War II, converge in Bright Star. Billy Cane (A.J. Shively), fresh faced and fresh out of the service, is home again and wants nothing more than to become a famous writer. This leads him to the big city – Raleigh – and to uptight, bespectacled editor Alice Murphy (Carmen Cusack), who oversees a prestigious literary magazine, the Asheville Southern Journal. But there’s another side to Alice: her past, when as a young girl she fell in love with Jimmy Ray Dobbs (like Billy Cane, another name that sounds right out of NASCAR), had a baby by him and had it yanked away from her by Jimmy Ray’s mayor pappy (Wayne Duvall) for the sake of propriety and political expediency. The events of Billy’s dream-seeking and Alice’s tortured young womanhood are paralleled in words and song, and come together in a feel-good resolution that will take no one by surprise. Bright Star’s staging, with the talented musicians housed in a see-through cabin that’s whirled around the stage to make way for set pieces as needed, is thoroughly imaginative, and the ensemble of players is top-flight. Yet with a couple of exceptions the songs’ lyrics are shallow and too literal, simply extensions set to music of what each character might say if Bright Star was a play and not a musical. At the risk of employing that aforementioned star metaphor, Cusack shines brightly as Alice, and her and Jimmy Ray’s (Wayne Alan Wilcox) aching duet “I Had A Vision” does strike a genuine emotional chord in a show that needs many more of them. |
AuthorDavid L. Coddon is a Southern California theater critic. Archives
May 2024
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