Occasionally a production of a familiar show can completely change how that it is perceived and performed. Such was Joseph Papp’s 1980 Central Park production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance, in which Kevin Kline reinvented the role of the Pirate King as an athletic, comic swashbuckler. Coming at a time when the venerable D’Oyly Carte company was on its last legs, artistically as well as financially (having seen some of their touring productions here in 1976 and 1978, I can testify to the former), Papp’s production reinvigorated Pirates for late 20th century audiences.

Like any innovation, however, a groundbreaking production of a show can evolve into old hat. For most of 30 years, directors of Pirates productions seemed to feel compelled to replicate the Papp production, even those parts of it — like its hyper-vaudevillian approach to the Sergeant and his policemen — that never worked well. Fortunately, with the passage of time, productions have begun to find their own footing once again. I saw a very competent traditional take on Pirates by the Madison (Wisconsin) Savoyards two summers ago, and the current Victorian Lyric Opera Company (VLOC) production in Rockville is a very lively effort both the musical and staging aspects of which succeed delightfully.

Director Felicity Ann Brown (who is also part of the choreography team, along with Helen Aberger and Amanda Jones) makes the show move fluidly. Not for this Pirates the dreaded “G&S two-step,” which has passed for movement in too many productions. The choreographic highlight is a production number version of the Pirates’ “Come friends who plow the sea” in the second act, which with its two planned encores — including brief Fiddler and Chorus Line moments and a variety of kick lines — earned the loud approval of the near-capacity Saturday night crowd.

Brown made other creative choices that worked beautifully. Among the female chorus members were four older ladies, who played chaperones to the younger women. When Frederic is singing “Oh is there not one maiden breast…,” the chaperones do their best to contain their charges’ enthusiasm, causing the maidens’ “Oh no, not one” to make the most theatrical sense that I have ever seen.

Even by standards of Gilbert’s topsy-turvy world, the Major-General’s second act number “Sighing softly to the river” makes remarkably little sense. Brown wisely upstaged the Major-General’s gyrations and uber-silly lyrics by having two tree set pieces moved about by Pirates, while befuddled policemen tried to keep pace with them. Shortly afterward, Brown tops this with a smoothly executed rope trick, in which the Pirates’ capture of the girls morphs into their capture of the police.

Musically, music director Joseph Sorge’s full orchestra performed with excellent attention to tone, dynamics, and tempi: Gwen Earle on oboe and percussionist George Hutlin had particularly nice moments. Sorge conducted a lovely rendition of the a capella “Hail poetry,” with the cast in an appropriately choral formation. The quality of the choral singing, by both the men’s and women’s ensembles, was high throughout, even in those numbers involving substantial movement.

Jeffrey Gates, as the Pirate King, was far and away the outstanding soloist. With a robust, yet subtle, baritone voice, as well as a dynamic stage presence, Gates commanded his scenes, whether in a solo number like “I am a pirate king” or playing well with others in “A paradox.” For “Poor wandering one,” a Mabel needs to have the same sort of coloratura chops as Cunegonde in Candide’s Glitter and Be Gay. Keely Borland passed that test. (Courtney Kalbacker plays this role in alternate performances.) Stevie Miller, Amanda Jones, and Rachel Ackerman nicely supported Mabel as the three female chorus leads.

In any Pirates, an important challenge faces Mabel and Frederic in the second act. Having been typically silly G&S characters throughout, their exaggerated romantic and duty-bound natures, respectively, driving their comic excess, they must suddenly and credibly handle the score’s sweetest moment, the touching duet “Ah leave me not to pine.” Borland was able to generate the requisite emotion, physically as well as vocally. As Frederic, Timothy Ziese was as fresh-faced, enthusiastic, and guilelessly dutiful as one could ask for, also contributing a pleasant tenor voice to the proceedings. He might have connected more solidly with scene partners at times. In “Ah leave me not to pine,” though, while Mabel focused on him and her relationship with him, Ziese was oriented straight out to the audience, diminishing some of the feeling the song can convey.

Wendy Stengel as Ruth and George Willis as Major General Stanley were not as strong vocally as the other principals. Stengel had a rather thin sound. G&S patter baritones are not expected to be pure singers, of course, but Willis struggled noticeably with pitch at times. While not the most graceful actor ever to assay the role, Willis had great fun with an encore to the “I am the very model of a modern major-general” that spoofed current pop music. Stengel had excellent energy and moved well in the “A paradox” scene.

Ruth is Exhibit A for Gilbert’s chronic disdain for middle-aged women (47 years old: the horror). Sometime it would be fun for a director to reimagine her as a relatively hot, toned 40-something in pursuit of a cute young thing. Think “How Stella Got Her Groove Back” visits Penzance. But that would be a different production.

Samuel is a supporting role that can often disappear. To his credit, Rick DuPuy made his character’s presence felt, and he handled his solos in “Pour, oh pour the pirate sherry” and “Come friends who plow the sea” creditably. As the Sergeant of Police, Tom Goode was vocally adequate and brought an appropriately schlumpy presence as the hapless leader of as decrepit a bunch of bobbies as one could imagine.

Denise Young’s costume deigns for the women accented the director’s contrast between the younger and older chorus women, with the younger women in variously colored pastels while the chaperones were in uniform, subdued grayish dresses with thin stripes. As the lead, Mabel wore white. Generally, the ladies’ and pirates’ costumes were colorful and flattering to the actors, with the Pirate King and Major General being in different sorts of striking red uniforms. The combination of the Major General’s 50s sitcom-style pajamas and his plumed military hat in the second act was humorously effective. Only Ruth’s costume was ill-conceived, giving her an unnecessarily awkward look. The costumes for the policemen were baggy, which, intentionally or not, suited the way they were played.

The production sported some nice prop moments. Carl and Jane Mayott provided dolls and teddy bears for the young women in the opening scene of act two and newspapers with a period look for the young women to appear to read during “How beautifully blue the sky.” My favorite, however, was a large, multi-hued parrot hand puppet that one of the pirates carried throughout, manipulated to look as if it were joining the singing. My only regret is that the bird did not get an individual bow in the curtain call.

Director Brown also designed the set, which, despite some quirks, functioned well in facilitating interesting and balanced stage pictures and movement. Among the quirks was, in act two, a model house the style of which was more Virginia colonial than Cornwall. On the stage left side of the cyc was a drawing of a large 18th century-style man-o-war, hardly the sort of ship that Victorian-era pirates (had there been such) would have chosen. The second act set included grave markers for “Porter” and “Murgatroyd.” Brown correctly gauged that G&S fans — especially of a show the libretto of which cites “that infernal nonsense Pinafore” — would find a cross-reference or two irresistible.

VLOC was the area’s second G&S-centered group to be formed, starting life in the late 1970s as a splinter group of the older Montgomery (later Washington) Savoyards. With the apparent demise of the Savoyards — a casualty not only of economic troubles but also of considerable muddle concerning its niche in the local theater scene — VLOC stands as the only local company specializing in operetta. The success of this Pirates, both artistically and in terms of drawing an audience, is a hopeful sign that VLOC can continue to prosper by maintaining its focus and quality.

Director’s Note

Earlier this year, I heard actor John Lithgow speak at The University of Maryland. He told a story of an orchestra that had been playing a particular piece in rep all season, and was getting bored with it, and it showed in their rehearsal. Just before a performance, the conductor addressed the orchestra, and told him that he understood their frustration, but he wanted them to go out and play for two specific people in the audience: The person who is hearing the piece for the very first time, and the person who is hearing it for the very last.

In directing this show, I’ve tried to keep that perspective in mind. There are those of you who were probably brought here by a friend or a parent or grandparent and are hearing Sullivan’s music and Gilbert’s jokes for the very first time today, and then those of you who have seen countless productions of Pirates in your lifetime and are bound to make comparisons between this and all of the other productions you’ve seen. My hope is that we will provide something for everyone in this audience, providing entertainment for you no matter what your level of Pirates expertise.

Pirates is the first Gilbert &Sullivan show I ever saw. I was a student at Westtown School, a Friends school in Pennsylvania, and our class was taken to see the middle school’s production. I thought it was a very fun and silly show, but I did not retain much of the plot. Still, my grandmother, upon hearing I had seen the show, impressed upon me that this was something very important. She herself had played Ruth in a production at the very same Quaker school in the 1930′s. A family legend stands that my great-grandfather had started the G&S tradition when he came there as a teacher in the 1920′s, as a way to sneak some music into the rigid curriculum at a time when Quakers were not quite sure if music and theatre were appropriate uses of student time. I’m sure that Gilbert’s cleverness with words, Sullivan’s history of writing music for the church, and the rigidness of Victorian values displayed in the G&S canon helped to grease the wheels needed for approval.

This family tradition carried on to me when I first graced the stage as a sailor, complete with stipple-brushed beard, in H.M.S. Pinafore at age twelve. I got involved with building sets for the first time, helping to hoist a giant mast and rigging on stage, I climbed up into the catwalk to focus lights, I cut off pants and glued ribbons on hats to make sailor costumes, and was fully enveloped by full range of the magic of theatre for the first time. To this day, I remain that involved, even when my primary duty is as director, because I love that feeling of creation of every little piece of the magic.

After that first production of Pinafore, the music and words were permanently engraved into my mind. I didn’t realize the significance of this until a few months later, when I was watching the cartoon Animaniacs and the segment “H.M.S. Yakko” came on and I realized I had been let in on this incredible extended inside-joke specifically for Gilbert & Sullivan fans. Sure the cartoon was goofy and full of slapstick that any child would be amused by, but I could identify all of the score as pieces of H.M.S. Pinafore and Pirates, and I understood that “I am the very model of a cartoon individual” wasn’t just something from a kids show…this was an exclusive club I had been allowed into…a shared culture of the performing arts. This membership lets people in on the G&S allusions that are seen in The Simpsons, Pretty Woman, West Wing, Family Guy, Star Trek: Insurrection, and far too many more to list. Gilbert & Sullivan is part of our cultural literacy that warrants passing on to future generations. Thank you for being here today, and keep passing it on.

Cast

• Frederic: Timothy Ziese
• The Pirate King: Jeffrey Gates
• Samuel: Rick DuPuy
• Ruth: Wendy Stengel
• Major General Stanley: George Willis
• Mabel: Keely Borland (Courtney Kalbacker in alternate performances)
• Edith: Rachel Ackerman
• Kate: Amanda Jones
• Isabel: Stevie Miller
• Sergeant of Police: Tom Goode
• Young Frederic: Gabriella Jones
• Chorus of Pirates, Police, and General Stanley’s Wards and their governesses:
• Helen Aberger, Brian Beard, Densie Cross, Kayla Cummings, Kris Devine, Tara Hockensmith, Chuck Howell, Rand Huntzinger, Ralph Johnson, Joanna Jones, Josh Katz, Erik Kreil, Lauren Lentini, Carl Maryott, Jane Maryott, Josh Milton, Rowyn Peel, Brian Polk, Bill Rogers, Kevin Schellhase, Sarah Seider, Barbara Semiatin, Ed Vilade, Maria Wilson, Kent Woods

Orchestra

• Violin 1: Steve Natrella (CM), Bonnie Barrows, Peter Mignerey, Irv Berner
• Violin 2: Martin Brown, Edwin Schneider, Cassie Conley
• Viola: Amanda Laudwein, Stephanie Cross
• Percussion: George Hutlin
• Bass: Pete Gallanis
• Flute: Jackie Miller, Louise Hill
• Oboe: Gwen Earle
• Clarinet: Laura Langbein, Laura Bornhoeft
• Bassoon: Steve Weschler, Betsy Haanes
• Horn: Joe Cross, Lora Katz, Gail Hixenbaugh
• Trumpet: Curt Anstine, Rick Pasciuto, Tom Gleason
• Trombone: Steve Ward, Frank Eliot, Al Potter
• Cello: Michael Stein, Sheryl Friedlander, Andrew Nixon

Production Staff

• Producer: Denise Young
• Director: Felicity Ann Brown
• Music Director: Joseph Sorge
• Assistant Music Director: Jenny Craley Bland
• Assistant to the Director: Helen Aberger
• Stage Manager: Douglas Maryott
• Choreography: Amanda Jones, Felicity Ann Brown, Helen Aberger
• Scenic Designer: Felicity Ann Brown
• Costume Designer: Denise Young
• Lighting Designer: Noam Lautman
• Rehearsal Pianists: Jenny Craley Bland, Joanna Jones
• Light Board Operator: Noam Lautman
• Makeup/Hair Designer: Renee Silverstone
• Master Carpenter: Devin Work
• Set Crew/Painters: Helen Aberger, Felicity Ann Brown, Rober Dennis, Kris Devine,
• Ben Dransfield, Alice Drew, Tony Dwyer, Blair Eig, Dean Fiala, Rand
• Huntzinger, William Kolodrubetz, Sarah Martin, Douglas Maryott, Anna Polk, Brian Polk, Bill Rogers, Sarah Seider, Scott Tennent, Ed Vilade, Kent Wood, Timothy Ziese
• Costume Construction: Denise Cross, Stephanie Cross, Rebecca Meyerson, Stevie
• Miller, Felicity Brown, Sarah Martin, Maria Wilson, Lauren Lentini, Kathie
• Rogers, Barbara Miller
• Props: Carl & Jane Maryott
• Photography: Harvey Lavine
• Audition Pianist: Jenny Craley Bland
• Program: Courtney Kalbacker, Denise Young
• Surtitles: Douglas Maryott, Annie Gribben
• Cover & Poster Art: Erika White Abrams
• Publicity: Courtney Kalbacker, Ed Vilade, Felicity Ann Brown
• House Management: Denise Young, Cassandra Stevens
• Set and Costume Storage: Rockville Civic Center

Disclaimer: Victorian Lyric Opera Company provided two complimentary media tickets to ShowBizRadio for this review.

Throughout American Century Theater’s production of Abby Mann’s Judgment at Nuremberg, ensemble members portraying Nazis and their victims act as silent witnesses — ghosts, if you like — whose presence provides context for the legal proceeding at its heart. But these are not the only ghosts haunting any production of this powerful script: the memory of the Stanley Kramer’s 1961 film, with a brilliant cast including Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Maximilian Schell (who won an Oscar for his performance), Richard Widmark, Montgomery Clift, Judy Garland, Marlene Dietrich, and even the then young and pretty William Shatner is hard to keep out of one’s mind when viewing the stage version of Mann’s story.

At the center of the play is retired American judge Dan Haywood (Craig Miller), brought to Germany to preside over the 1947-48 trial of German judges who had collaborated, or actively participated, in Nazi-era injustices. The headline-grabbing war crimes trials, convicting Goering and other leading Nazi figures, were already complete, and the looming threat of a Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union was leading many to believe gaining support from a revived German nation was more important that pursuing justice against smaller fish.

Haywood is the very figure of what we would want an American judge to be: low-key; kind; seeking the intellectual, historical, and cultural background of the case; understanding of the complexity of human motives; and focused entirely on justice, notwithstanding considerations of realpolitik. Miller is utterly believable in the role, never showy, always inhabiting the character. Some of his best moments are those in which he expresses uncertainty — “I don’t know what to think,” he says more than once. Even when delivering the sternest of judgments, he does do in a compassionate tone. Without attempting to channel Spencer Tracy, Miller makes Haywood a memorable and admirable figure.

In what is the play’s showiest role, defense attorney Oscar Rolfe, Steve Lebens does, to an extent, channel Maximilian Schell’s take on the role. A brilliant advocate, adept at devastating cross-examination, he acknowledges the horrors of the Nazi regime while, as a German patriot, he insists that it is not right to brand the entire German nation as criminal, something he sees as the inevitable implication of the trial. As he questions witnesses who were treated brutally in the defendants’ courtrooms, trying to show that there may have been a legally sound basis for executions and sterilizations, he knowingly reopens their emotional wounds. Lebens is at is best when facing the moral compromises of his own position, attacking people he knows to have been victims on behalf of persons who he knows acted unjustly, not only in the cause of his lawyer’s obligation to zealously defend his clients but in the cause of defending the honor and future of his nation.

The tragic principal defendant, Ernst Janning (Michael Replogle), was a leading jurist and legal scholar before and after the Nazis took power. He gave credibility to the Nazi legal system, and he personally and knowingly made unjust decisions on behalf of that system. As Haywood comments toward the end of the play, Janning loathed the evil he did, yet still chose to do it. In the film, Burt Lancaster gave Janning a commanding presence, dominating even those scenes in which he had no lines, proud even in taking responsibility for his crimes. Replogle takes the role in a quite different direction, displaying less gravitas while giving Janning a somewhat diffident, almost academic air, with an overlay of humility, more willing to admit, in his voice and body, that his choices in life have defeated him.

The approach Replogle takes to Janning is echoed, in one important respect, by Karen Rosnizeck’s Mrs. Bertholt. Both members of the pre-Nazi elite, they hated Hitler and his followers not so much for their evil as for their middle-class grossness. Mrs. Bertholt recounts a story in which Janning told Hitler to his face that he was too “bourgeois,” and Janning himself recoils at sharing prison quarters with his fellow prisoners, who in addition to their corruption were not the sort of people with whom he would ever have shared time and space. Mrs. Bertholt is the widow of a Wehrmacht general hanged for his part in the Malmedy massacre (the murder of 84 American POWs during the Battle of the Bulge). Aristocrats both, they despised the Nazis but supported the war as patriotic Germans defending their country. This class division among the Germans, and Hitler’s success in co-opting the old elites despite their disdain for him, are sometime-forgotten aspects of the period’s history that Mann illuminates in the script.

Rosnizeck’s Mrs. Bertholt is a gracious, civilized figure whose expropriated house provides quarters for Judge Haywood. Rosnizek’s portrayal emphasizes Mrs. Bertholt’s bitterness over her husband’s execution and over the entire war crimes trial enterprise — she stalks out of the final court session after the guilty verdict is announced — but could have benefitted from an additional touch of world-weariness. Rosnizeck also served as the production’s accent coach, and she and the actors playing German characters deserve credit for very credible German accents.

Colonel Ted Lawson (Bruce Alan Rauscher), his memory seared by the sight of the Dachau concentration camp, is appropriately aggressive as the prosecutor, seeking to punish as harshly as possible anyone associated with the Nazi regime. Frequently over-matched by Rolfe as a trial tactician (apparently to the point of neglecting to cross-examine one defense witness), Lawson sometimes gives way to his frustration, yet has the overwhelming moral force of responding to Nazi atrocities on his side (he shows films of the death camps at one point in the trial). A stronger sense of the overwhelming anger eating away at Lawson’s soul would have been a welcome added dimension to Rauscher’s portrayal.

Mann’s script is filled with short character roles, all of which were played successfully. Christopher Henley, as Rudolph Peterson, a now-timorous and nervous victim of sterilization, and Mary Beth Luckenbaugh, as Maria Wallner, a victim of a show trial that resulted in the execution of an elderly Jewish friend, stood out. Luckenbaugh chose to make the character angrier, and less destroyed, than the equivalent character in the movie, played by Judy Garland. The choice worked.

This was one of American Century’s more ambitious shows technically. Sean Allan Doyle’s complex sound design included such items as excerpts from Hitler’s speeches, Nazi marches, snippets of Wagner, bird sounds in the prison courtyard, and a clang when a prison sequence began. They all fit the occasion and were cued impeccably. The production made extensive use of projections (credited to Patrick Lord and Shayne Weyker), for settings (e.g., the courtroom, the prison, scenes of the city, though not any of Nuremberg in its late-40s bombed-out state) and for the films of the carnage of the concentration camps. These were shown at one end of the oblong playing area, with a distracting but probably unavoidable cutout around the defendants’ dock. In the playing area, with audience seating on either side, Patrick Lord’s set design featured the defendant’s area at one end, the judges’ elevated bench at the other, set dressing pieces in between. The set worked effectively for the courtroom scenes but was less evocative for some other settings, such as the Judge Haywood’s residence, a bar, or the venue of a concert that Judge Haywood attended with Mrs. Bertholt.

Rip Classen’s costumes were appropriate to the period and the characters. Particular blessings upon him for getting the right color for U.S. Army uniform jackets of the era, something I have seen done wrong in more productions than I care to think about. The most notable, and very effective, feature of Marc Allan Wright’s lighting design were the four large fluorescent ceiling fixtures, which provided harsh illumination in the courtroom scenes, especially when they came on quickly following a scene with lower lighting.

Along with the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, American Century consistently produces the best and most interesting dramaturgical material in the area. The Audience Guide for Judgment at Nuremberg is one of the most valuable the group has produced, containing fascinating history of the events portrayed in the play as well as thought-provoking discussions of the legal and ethical issues raised by the war crimes trials. Even if you don’t pick up a copy — and I recommend doing so — this is a play to see not only as well-produced and acted theater, but as a springboard for thought and discussion about matters that have a great deal of contemporary resonance.

Director’s Notes

Judgment at Nuremberg deals with the Allied war-crimes trials held just after World War II, in which significant players in the Nazi regime were made to answer for their actions between 1933 and 1945. Specifically, it treats the portion of the trials that dealt with judges who decided cases during the Third Reich that sent defendants to grisly fates, often on trumped-up charges. (Names have been changed in Abby Mann’s play, but the characters are based quite closely on real historical figures and actual trials.)

Much as the play deals with a particular slice of modern history, it sadly remains relevant today, as war-crimes, genocides, imperialist invasions, and politically-motivated kangaroo courts fill the daily news-stream. Mann told his story first as a life television play, then as a star-studded Hollywood motion picture, and finally as a Broadway play — keeping much of the material intact from medium to medium. We’re presenting the Broadway script, adding selected material from the film, and introducing a framing device that brings “ghosts” from Hitler-era Nuremberg into a silent dialogue with Mann’s eloquent writing.

In the published edition of Mann’s Broadway play, there is an optional narration that starts the action. I felt it would make more sense to print it here rather than including the device of a theatrical narrator in the staging. The playwright starts with a telling point about the continuing legacy of the Nuremberg trials and gives us a concise bit of context for the events you will see unfolding on the stage. Mann, in his “narration” writes:

On January 1, 2001, then President Clinton signed the Rome Treaty for an International Criminal Court. He said, “In taking this action, we reaffirm or support for international accountability and for bringing to justice perpetrators of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity based on our involvement in the Nuremberg tribunals that brought Nazi war criminals to justice.” Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina called Mr. Clinton’s decision “as outrageous as it is inexplicable. I have a message for the outgoing President. This decision will not stand.” Many others echoed Helms’ objections, including President Bush. Their reason was it could inhibit the ability of the United States to use its military to meet alliance obligations and participate in multinational operations.

The first of the Nuremberg trials were concluded on October 1, 1946. Herman Goering, Reichsmarshall. Charged with conspiracy, crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity. The verdict: guilty on all accounts. The sentence: death by hanging. Rudolph Hess, Deputy Fuhrer. Verdict: guilty on two counts. Sentence: life imprisonment. Joachim von Ribbentrop, Reich Minister for Foreign Affairs. Verdict: guilty on all counts. Sentence: death by hanging.

Nuremberg, Germany. October 1, 1946. The conclusion of the trial of 22 top Nazis accused of war crimes. Twelve were sentenced to death. Three were acquitted. Seven received prison sentences ranging from ten years to life.

October 16, 1946. The sentences of death were carried out. Julius Streicher. Von Ribbentrop. Wilhelm Keitel. Ernst Kaltenbrunner. All except Herman Goering who cheated the hangman by taking his own life.

The first of the Nuremberg trials were over. Still to come were twelve more trials of 177 diplomats, generals, SS officers, high Nazi officials, doctors, judges, directors of IG Farben, leading German business and professional men, whose cooperation was essential to the success of the Nazi conspiracy.

We hope you find the play as compelling as the actors and I did while working on it.

Photo Gallery

Ellie Nicoll as Mrs. Halbestadt. Background: Jean Miller as ghost	Christopher Henley as Rudolph Peterson. Background: Tel Monks as Judge Ives
Michael Replogle as Ernst Janning, Kim Curtis as Emil Hahn, Victor Gold as Werner Lammpe, Tom Fuller as Frederick Hoffstetter.	Mary Beth Luckenbaugh as Maria Wallner. Background: Tel Monks as Judge Ives.
Bruce A. Rauscher as Colonel Lawson. Background: Kim Curtis as Emil Hahn, Tom Fuller as Frederick Hoffstetter.	Karin Rosnizeck as Frau Bertholt, Craig Miller as Judge Haywood.
Paul Klingenberg as Judge Norris, Craig Miller as Judge Haywood, Tel Monks as Judge Ives.	Michael Replogle as Ernst Janning, Craig Miller as Judge Haywood.
Steve Lebens as Oscar Rolfe, Michael Replogle as Ernst Janning.

Photos by Johannes Markus

Cast

• Colonel Lawson: Bruce Alan Rauscher
• General Merrin: Lyle Blake Smythers
• Judge Haywood: Craig Miller
• Captain Byers: Jorge A. Silva
• Judge Ives: Tel Monks
• Judge Norris: Paul J. Klingenberg
• Emil Hahn: Kim Kurtis
• Frederick Hoffstetter: Tom Fuller
• Werner Lammpe: Victor Gold
• Ernst Janning: Michael Replogle
• Oscar Rolfe: Steve Lebens
• Dr. Wickert: Ron Sarro
• Mrs. Halbestadt: Ellie Nicoll
• Frau Bertholt: Karin Rosnizeck
• Rudolph Peterson: Christopher Henley
• Dr. Gueter: Larry Kolp
• Maria Wallner: Mary Beth Luckenbaugh
• Elsa Lindnow: Vanessa Bradchulis
• Feldenstien: Jay Delehanty
• Ensemble: Alan Diaz, Paul Alan Hogan, Colin Martin, Jean H. Miller, Lynley Peoples, Gray West

Production Staff

• Director: Joe Banno
• Production Manager: Ed Moser
• Stage Manager: Lindsey E. Moore
• Set Design/Projections Design: Patrick Lord
• Projections Research: Patrick Lord
• Costume Design: Rip Claassen
• Lighting Design: Marc Allan Wright
• Sound Design: Sean Allan Doyle
• Assistant Stage Manager/Board Operator: Chris Beatley
• Master Carpenter: Michael Salmi
• Scenic Painter: Stephanie Chu
• Assistant Carpenter/Scenic Painting: Alex Kellogg
• Master Electrician: Juan Ramirez-Cortes
• Wardrobe Assistant: Cathering Casino
• Publicist: Emily Morrison
• Photography: Johannes Markus
• Program Design: Michael Sherman
• House Manager: Joli Provost
• Outreach Coordinator: Maia Falconi-Sachs

Disclaimer: American Century Theater provided two complimentary media tickets to ShowBizRadio for this review.

How do you avoid cheesy lines in praise of Faction of Fools’ current production of Titus Andronicus? Things like “Bloody good time!” or “Give those actors a hand.” Oh, why try? In this intentionally, violently silly production of what could justly be regarded as Shakespeare’s worst play, the mayhem and over-the-top shtick make far more sense than an attempt at a straightforward production. And, by the way, the play may not even be Shakespeare’s at all. There is a centuries-old, probably unresolvable, controversy about whether Shakespeare actually wrote the thing, or at least whether he may have had a forgettable collaborator. It’s an interesting question whether, absent its debatable connection to Shakespeare, anyone would bother looking at this early 1590s mess of a revenge tragedy outside the depths of university literature departments.

Well, Faction of Fools (FoF) might, because the script, full as it is of scheming, beheading, behanding, stabbing, strangling, spearing, and meat pie-baking, and rape, is perfect fodder for the troupe’s comedia-influenced, high-speed, slapstick, ironically knowing, approach to its material. The play uses an ensemble cast, with no preeminent lead, but the FoF production does have a star: stage blood. It’s everywhere. Sometimes it’s a fountain. Sometimes it shoots forth in rhythm, to musical accompaniment. Sometimes it lies on stage for a while, waiting for use by a character. Sometimes you just turn a faucet and there it is. The sanguinary permutations seem endless, and much credit goes to fight choreographer Casey Kaleba for the design and execution of the effects. If there were a Helen Hayes Award for blood, he’d be the front-runner.

Whether non-Shakespeare or semi-Shakespeare or simply bad Shakespeare, the play does not teem with fully realized characters an audience comes to care about, which makes it easier to accept their usually bloody demise. There is one major exception, Lavinia, the daughter of Titus, who is raped, then has her tongue pulled out and her hands cut off to keep her silent. The role is played by Miranda Medugno, a Galludet theater graduate who signs the lines she has before she is mutilated. (The perpetrators have a chilling moment where their realization that she communicates by signing motivates them to remove her hands.) After the graphic horror of the attack on her, she becomes a rather still, almost stoic figure, most notably in a scene where three other characters loudly wail and wallow in bathos on seeing her condition, while she remains seemingly unmoved.

In this style, and given the absence of memorable language in the script, verbal nuance is not a priority. For the most part, actors declaim their lines loudly and rather melodramatically. Titus (Nello DeBlasio) is a prime example of this tendency, which could be fatal to a portrayal in a “straight” production of this or any play but which does not make much difference here. There’s one nice exception to this trend, when Marcus (Toby Mulford) quietly and tenderly helps Lavinia offstage after she is attacked.

Nor is the play itself, or the FoF style in performing it, a place to look for subtle shadings of character. Take the two villains, Tamora (Christina Marie Frank) and Aaron (Manu Kumasi). Tamora is the deadliest of femme fatales, waving her arms about, blatantly exercising her feminine wiles to the hilt, and scheming to hurt her enemy Titus by any means available, the crueler the better. Aaron, Tamora’s servant and lover, simply enjoys his villainy — seldom has evil been so cheerful, as when he notes that he has made his mistress his mistress. Kumasi moves extremely well, making his evil graceful as well as cheerful. Megduno’s Lavinia aside, this pair of malefactors make the most pronounced individual impressions of any of the cast’s members.

There is also an interesting racial angle to the villains’ relationship. While the moral makeup of the characters could not be more different, Aaron, like Othello, is a “Moor” (i.e., is black), while Tamora, like Desdemona, is white. Together, they produce a mixed-race baby (the doll representing the baby is outfitted with its own miniature mask), which quite scandalizes the ancient Rome seen through 16th-century British eyes. Unlike many a production of Othello, the FoF production does not seek interesting ways of exploring the contemporary resonance of this portion of the script, seemingly being content to take this aspect of the play at face value.

The production’s hallmark is choreographed comic movement. Director Matthew R. Wilson and Kaleba keep the cast in nearly constant, sometimes frenetic, motion, with one sight gag after another, even when the blood is not flowing. The cast is strongly committed to the style, and they carry it out with verve and precision.

There is a serious point behind all the lunacy, and that point is also made visually. Ethan Sinnott’s set and Denise Umland’s costumes are white, as are the actors’ comedia makeup and Aaron Cromie’s well-executed masks. As the production proceeds, everything white becomes covered — saturated is not too strong a term — with the free-flowing gore, as the production displays the craziness of unrestrained violence to the audience in vivid red-on-white. Director Wilson’s program note underlines the point, when he says “There is nothing funny about murder or rape but there is something absurd about the culture of violence and patriarchy that produces these atrocities.”

FoF turns a problematic script into a stylistic and darkly funny triumph. Far be it from a critic to skewer the company’s efforts.

(Editor’s Note: Due to a scheduling mixup, ShowBizRadio sent two reviewers to cover this production. See David Siegel’s review for another view of the show.)

Director’s Notes

I have always been fascinated by the aesthetic of violence. Conflict, collision, and combat — although sources of pain — can also bring moments of beauty. Consider the virtuosity of the martial artist, the elegant sheen of a blood spatter, or even the breathtaking splendor of an exploding supernova.
 
For this bloody play, all the world’s a canvas, and we witness, not only acts of violence, but their aftermath as well. Our Rome is a pristine, gleaming empire that inflicts brutality on other cultures while maintaining a capital city that is sanitary, safe, and spotless. All that changes when Titus returns triumphant and the bloodstains start to accumulate.
 
The bloodshed in Titus is senseless; it is spectacular; and, yes, sometimes it is downright silly. But Shakespeare and his contemporaries already knew that.
 
During the Renaissance, Seneca’s grisly Roman tragedies came back into vogue, and Commedia dell’Arte players presented their own violent delights as part of their repertoire of traveling plays. These “tragic” Commedia pieces were known under the genre of opera reggia, the “royal works” featuring nobles behaving badly — very badly indeed…

Shakespeare knew of this genre both from Seneca’s classical writings and from the contemporary performances of itinerant Italian players. He clearly had these in mind when penning Titus Andronicus, his own contribution to the genre of Renaissance horror story. The play is not meant to be a joke, but it is too absurd to stomach as a straight drama. It is the sixteenth-century’s version of Saw or Hostel.
 
In our darkly comic adaptation, something wicked becomes something wickedly delightful. We see the senselessness of violence — whether in warfare, sibling rivalries, or revenge — and we see the egocentric callousness with which people ignore survivors because they are too consumed with their own grief. There is nothing funny about murder or rape, but there is something absurd about the culture of violence and patriarchy that produces these atrocities. If we laugh at perpetuators of violence, it is only because we know that they don’t deserve to be taken seriously. Or maybe it is because, as Titus says, we “have no tears left to shed.”

Photo Gallery

Nello DeBlasio (Titus), Matthew Pauli (Lucius), Miranda Medugno (Lavinia), Toby Mulford (Marcus)	Matthew Pauli (Lucius), Miranda Medugno (Lavinia), Toby Mulford (Marcus)
Nello DeBlasio (Titus), Miranda Medugno (Lavinia)	Toby Mulford (Marcus), Miranda Medugno (Lavinia), Nello DeBlasio (Titus)

Photos by Teresa Wood

Cast

• Titus Andronicus: Nello DeBlasio
• Demetrius: Charlie Ainsworth
• Bassianus/Publius/Goth Soldier/Quintus: Chema Pineda-Fernandez
• Young Lucius/Mutius/Nurse/Aemilius: Cori Dioquino
• Saturninus: Daniel Flint
• Tamora: Christina Marie Frank
• Chiron/Martius: Tyler Herman
• Aaron: Manu Kumasi
• Lavinia: Miranda Medugno
• Marcus Andronicus/Alarbus: Toby Mulford
• Lucius: Matthew Pauli

Artistic and Design Team

• Written by William Shakespeare
• Adapted and Directed and Co-Choreographer: Matthew R. Wilson
• Production Manager/Stage Manager: Sarah Conte
• Scenic Design: Ethan Sinnott
• Costume Design: Denise Umland
• Lighting Design: Michael Barnett
• Sound Design & Music Composition: Thomas Sowers
• Fight Direction: Casey Kaleba & Matthew R. Wilson
• Co-Choreographer and Blood Effects: Casey Kaleba
• Properties Design & Assistant Blood Effects: Kristen Pilgrim
• Mask Designer and Fabricator: Aaron Cromie
• Assistant Stage Manager: Kathryn Dooley
• Assistant Director: Rachel Spicknall Mulford
• Dramaturg: Natalie Tenner
• ASL Consultant/Interpreter: Dr. Lindsey D. Snyder

Disclaimer: Faction of Fools provided a complimentary media ticket to ShowBizRadio for this review.

Some advertisements and reviews of past productions of Peter Ackerman’s 1999 comedy of post-coital misunderstanding, Things You Shouldn’t Say Past Midnight, currently playing at the Keegan Theatre, have described it as a “bedroom farce,” bringing to mind one of those contraptions with seven doors, disguises, mistaken identities, multiple quick entrances and exits, and cardboard characters, in which, despite scripts stuffed with coy sexual innuendo, no one actually winds up in bed with anyone. Michael Frayn sent up the genre brilliantly in Noises Off.

Fortunately, that description does not actually apply to Things You Shouldn’t Say Past Midnight. True, it does take place mostly in bedrooms — three of them, in fact — in which Ackerman’s quirky sextet of characters does get to enjoy a good deal of horizontal recreation. The ensemble cast delivers not only one well-conceived laugh line after another but also highly satisfying character development along the way. Each of the actors creates a vivid, individual portrait.

The play begins with Nancy (Caroline Wolfson), in the throes of passion, uttering an intentionally indistinct bit of ethnic inappropriateness (the sort of thing, notwithstanding the play’s title, that might well be problematic at any time of day). Her boyfriend of six months, Ben (Michael Innocenti, who also designed the set), an earnest Jewish grad student, can’t resist teasing out her exact words and cross-examining her as to what she intended or implied by them. This results in a spat that spins out of control when Ben notes that since one can never be fully sure of the truth of someone’s self-representation, it is possible — just hypothetically — that a seemingly straight man might actually be gay. Ultimately, this sends Nancy, an immigrant from relatively sheltered world of small town Oregon, fleeing into the wilds of the Big City at 3 a.m., where she seeks refuge at the apartment of her best friend, Grace (Allison Corke).

Grace, a free-spirited, and unsurprisingly unemployed, art history major, has just one thing in mind: sex with her latest hook-up (though they have hooked up for five nights in a row, a seemingly long winning streak for such an arrangement). She is turned on by the fact that Gene (Peter Finnegan) is an older, working-class guy who has never been to college and is yet well-established in his career, that of a hit man for some minor league mobsters. Ackerman has fun with the role reversal here, as Grace’s laser focus on simply getting it on in the sack contrasts with the fastidious, rather kindly, professional killer’s desire for a bit of conversation, perhaps augmented with a snuggle, along the way. Gene even wants to hear something about art history, which Grace testily obliges with a riff about how bad shoes can become art objects.

Grace rings up her friend Mark (Kevin Hasser), a gay psychotherapist who is also Gene’s younger brother, to advise Nancy on her worries about Ben’s sexual orientation, only to reach Mark as he is enjoying the bedtime company of his much older companion, Mr. Abramson (Timothy J. Lynch), a carpet merchant. This leads to the show’s primary set-piece, a verbal circus of a three-way call involving Grace, Gene, and Nancy in one bedroom, Mark and Mr. Abramson in another, and Ben in the third.

Each of the three pairs of actors creates a believable couple dynamic and all succeed in the key task of being funny by ensuring that their characters take themselves perfectly seriously. The actors and director Colin Smith keep the rapid-fire lines fluid and perfectly timed, never letting the comic momentum flag. The only point at which matters slow a bit is toward the end of the show, as Ackerman’s script has the characters perhaps too readily learning their lessons of acceptance and compromise, which Ackerman follows up with a brief coda as the three couples — after the lights have gone down — once more make good use of their beds.

Innocenti’s set is simplicity itself, as befits a show that began life off-Broadway: three bedrooms, spaced across the stage at slightly different height levels. Allen Sean Weeks’ lighting design provides the area lighting necessary for the transitions from one bedroom to another. Kelly Peacock’s costumes fit the time of night and the varying moods resident in three bedrooms, with the contrast between Gene’s conservative pajamas and Grace’s racier nightwear being especially fun.

A number of reviews of previous productions of Things You Shouldn’t Say Past Midnight in other cities criticized the play for being too facile, going for easy laughs in sitcom-like fashion. (Indeed, DirecTV has announced that, beginning this month, it is producing a 10-episode show based on the play.) It may possibly be that some other productions of the play simply were not as skillfully executed as Keegan’s. The present production is an overwhelmingly funny rendering of Ackerman’s script: I cannot remember such a constantly uproarious audience reaction since the last good production of Noises Off I saw. But there is something more not far under the surface of the laughs, as the comedy springs from the emotional distress produced when people exalt categories (e.g., Jewish/non-Jewish, gay/straight) above the individuality of others in their lives. Both in terms of its humor and the underlying emotions, the Keegan production far exceeds the impact one would expect from a sitcom.

The Cast

• Nancy: Caroline Wolfson
• Grace: Allison Corke
• Ben: Michael Innocenti
• Gene: Peter Finnegan
• Mark: Kevin Hasser
• Mr. Abramson: Timothy Hayes Lynch

The Production Team

• Director: Colin Smith
• Assistant Director: Brianna Letourneau
• Scenic Design: Michael Innocenti/Colin Smith
• Lighting Design: Allan Weeks
• Costume Design: Kelly Peacock
• Sound Design: Dan Deiter
• Properties Designer and Set Dressing: Carol Hood Baker
• Hair and Makeup Design: Craig Miller
• Stage Manager: Megan Thrift

Disclaimer: Keegan Theatre provided two complimentary media tickets to ShowBizRadio for this review.

In Volume 2 of the Broadway musical satire series Forbidden Broadway appears a song called “Into the Words,” kidding Stephen Sondheim’s propensity for verbal gymnastics. I don’t know whether NextStop theatre company’s director and scenic designer (Evan Hoffman and Steven Royal, respectively) for Sondheim’s Into the Woods ever heard the spoof song, but they’ve done it more than one better. Entering the Industrial Strength Theater, the audience is greeted by an entire two-level library, complete with a metal spiral staircase between the levels, calling to mind Henry Higgins’ study in My Fair Lady. Only a few bare trees in the foreground suggest the presence of literal woods. For anyone familiar with the traditional staging of the show, the effect is startling: looks cool, but what are they going to do with it?

Literalism is, of course, not the point of Into the Woods, as it blends Sondheim’s and James Lapine’s takes on several traditional fairy tales; a made-up story about a baker, his wife, and a witch; and a darker story about what happens to the characters after the “happy ever after” ending of the first act. In his comments on the show in his book “Finishing the Hat,” Sondheim recounts an incident in which a group of patrons left the theater after Act 1, believing the show was over. Something similar appeared to happen on a smaller scale at NextStop Sunday afternoon. Suffice to say, much of the development of the show’s major themes — relationships between parents and children, community responsibility — as well as the most inventive and creative uses of the library set, occur after intermission.

Into the Woods is very much an ensemble show, a feeling emphasized by the fluid and sometimes intricate movement of the cast in the larger numbers. NextStop’s actors admirably filled both the larger and smaller roles. As the Witch, Priscilla Cuellar was possessive of her child, Rapunzel; vindictive toward the Baker, his father and his wife; and generally angry at the world. Cuellar gives her role a destructive energy but also has moving moments of sadness and loss concerning her child, singing tenderly in songs like “Stay With Me” and the “Witch’s Lament.” She belts in “The Last Midnight” and is more reflective in the “Children Will Listen” portion of the Act Two Finale. (Interestingly, the NextStop production omits the optional duet for the Witch and Rapunzel, “Our Little World,” Sondheim’s attempt at filling in the mother-daughter relationship.) Cuellar hits whatever emotional tone a given scene or song requires, and she manages well her physical transition from old crone to voluptuous glamour queen.

John Loughney and Katie McManus stand out in the key roles of the Baker and his wife. Sondheim comments in “Finishing the Hat” that he and Lapine intended these characters to represent the feelings and concerns of a modern urban American couple who just want a family and a peaceful life, but who find themselves in a fanciful medieval setting involving witches, giants, and princes. “I’m in the wrong story,” the Baker’s Wife comments in Act 2.

McManus makes the wife’s story one of the most gripping in the play, as she transforms from a wife longing for a baby to a full partner in the couple’s quest to someone who finds a balance between the “or” and the “and” in life, between the reality of daily life with her family in the village and living in the moment in the woods. McManus makes the song in which the Baker’s Wife articulates that transition, “Moments in the Woods,” the highlight solo of the production, not only with her strong, clear voice but with her face and body registering her character’s rapid changes of thought and emotion as the song proceeds.

Loughney teams well with McManus in “It Takes Two,” as the Baker discovers that his previous assumptions about his marriage don’t work so well in the woods. As his character deals with confusion and loss in Act 2, Loughney’s characterization gains depth, and his rendering of “No More” is superb, not only vocally but in showing his exhaustion and near-despair. Despite his own grief, he helps Jack, Cinderella, and Little Red form a new community to deal with a marauding giant and the changed world the characters now inhabit, in the beautifully sung “No One is Alone.” When the original production of Into the Woods opened in 1987, there was some criticism of this song as simply being a reworking of “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” written by Sondheim’s mentor, Oscar Hammerstein. While both involve giving comfort in painful situations, “No One is Alone” is a far more complex lyric, emphasizing the need for, and inevitability of, community, notwithstanding loss and error. It also includes a note of warning: “Careful, no one is alone.”

Jack (Sean McComas), the adventurous boy who climbs a beanstalk and kills a giant, does not have as great an opportunity for character growth as many of the others. He remains a boy who arouses the protective instincts of others, even when the Witch wants to feed him to a vengeful giant. McComas nails his exuberant first act song, “Giants in the Sky,” moving quickly from one side of the second level of the set to the other, and then on down to the playing area floor.

Cinderella (Brittany Martz) does get a longer character arc, from an oppressed girl to the dazzled wife of a prince to a courageous fighter in the war against the giant to disappointment in her wandering husband to becoming a nurturing member of the renewed community, taking on the care of the Baker’s baby. Martz traverses the arc with nary a misstep. Her songs, including “A Very Nice Prince,” “On the Steps of the Palace” (which reveals that this Cinderella is a very smart girl, deliberately leaving her shoe behind so that the Prince can decide whether to pursue her), and her portion of “No One is Alone” are performed as well as anyone could ask for, both in terms of sound and character.

Nora Palka is a very talented singer and actor, and she gives an excellent performance as Little Red Riding Hood. This was a point, however, at which I question director Hoffman’s choices. Palka’s Little Red comes off as a young adult rather than a precocious early adolescent, in consequence losing some of the nuances that make the character a delight. Her first act number with the Wolf (Scott Gaines), “Hello Little Girl,” is more explicitly about sex than usual — no subtext here. The Wolf is a hottie, and Little Red isn’t far into the number before she is running her fingers down his abdominal six-pack. Gaines sings his part of the number in an appropriately ravenous way.

Gaines also plays Cinderella’s prince, which gives him the most delicious comic line of the show: “I was brought up to be charming, not sincere.” He and Scott Harrison, who plays Rapunzel’s prince, team up tunefully in “Agony” and its reprise. Hoffman’s direction calls for them to act out their stylized masculinity in near-melodrama fashion, and their mirror-image blocking adds to the song’s comic effect.

Hoffman made the Narrator (Ryan Manning) a much more active part of the proceedings than in many productions, moving from one portion of the set to another, interacting with and reacting to the characters at multiple points, handing them props etc. In general, he was a much more noticeable and relevant Narrator than one sometimes sees. Danny Trippel was a fey, excuse-making bureaucrat of a Steward. The only relatively weak link in the cast was Blakeman Brophy as The Mysterious Man, whose performance was flat and not all that mysterious. He also suffered from being given an unfortunate wig.

The clarity of the performances permits an appreciation of some of the subtleties of Sondheim’s lyrics. For example, there’s “nice,” used in contrast to “good” by three female characters. Cinderella, as she is being mistreated by her mean girl sisters, recalls that while her mother told her to be good, her father told her to be nice. She comments later that “princes are nice” and has an entire song about “A Very Nice Prince.” Little Red notes that the Wolf seemed nice and that “nice is different than good.” In “The Last Midnight,” the Witch has the last word on the subject: “You’re so nice. You’re not good, you’re not bad, you’re just nice. I’m not good, I’m not nice, I’m just right.” While it wouldn’t be fair to say that Sondheim has an overtly feminist agenda, this language acts to emphasize that niceness — as a feminine trait valued by men in the patriarchal society of these folk takes — may well limit the ability of women to be independent moral actors. And being responsible on one’s own for moral choices is of supreme importance to Sondheim in Into the Woods.

Franklin Coleman’s lighting design made extensive use of tightly focused area lighting, with often rapid cuing as characters moved about the set. There was a nice gobo effect of leaves projected onto the floor, an ominous red light from off stage left during the wolf scene, and a bright green light off stage right on the second level for the Witch’s exit at the end of “The Last Midnight.” Kathy Dunlap’s costumes were a visual treat: among others, lovely ball gowns for Cinderella and her sisters; a jacquard look for the princes; dark enveloping swirls of cloth for the Witch when we first see her (augmented by a suitably hideous upper face mask), then a low-cut black sparkly gown with a cape to match after she makes her transformation; a nice wolf fur stole for Little Red; a maroon velvet outfit for the Steward. Props, from all the books in the library (collecting which must have been a prodigious chore) to the very similar scepters of the Steward and Witch to items like Little Red’s goodies and her intimidating knife, are well-chosen.

Eric Kritzler’s sound design was a tale of the good and the bad. The good was in the well-chosen and well-timed effects, whether giant footsteps, a character getting squished, the cow electronically dying, baby cries, or twittering birds. The bad was the volume level of the amplification for the Elisa Rosman’s top-notch orchestra and the actors. It was LOUD, hardly necessary in a house where no one sits more than eight rows from the stage. Note to NextStop: a prudent audience member brings earplugs to a heavy metal concert. At a performance of a Broadway musical, thoughts of needing ear protection should not occur.

And what lovely things the production does with that library. The Narrator takes a book from the shelves to begin telling the story. Cinderella’s birds are books that are lowered from the ceiling area and flap open. Even Jack’s cow, often a two-dimensional cutout, becomes a book cart. In the second act, books fall out of the shelves as the giant attacks the village (the technical accomplishment of shaking the books loose on cue is impressive). The tree that topples to kill the Baker’s wife becomes a bookcase partly falling over and dumping its load of books. Actors have to make their entrances stepping over piles of fallen books, the debris of war. At the end of the second act, cast members come on stage and replace the fallen books on the shelves, as order is restored to their world, and most of the cast picks up a book to read until they must come downstage to sing their part of the finale.

It’s all compelling visual theater, and a very refreshing approach to staging the show, but it succeeds in being a good deal more than that. It says, to me at least, that the sum of our culture is contained in the stories we tell, and that the stories we tell — whether or not contained in physical books — make us who we are. Those stories are what we pass to our listening children. These themes are implicit in the writing of the show; NextStop’s production has found a very innovative way of making the themes tangible.

Into the Woods is arguably Sondheim’s most accessible show, one that has greater depth than a first viewing may reveal. I’ve seen the show many times, from the original Broadway cast through professional and community theater efforts of greater or lesser success. The excellence of the performances and thoughtful design elements make this production one I will remember.

Cast

• The Narrator: Ryan Manning
• Cinderella: Brittany Martz
• Jack: Sean Mccomas
• The Baker: John Loughney
• The Baker’s Wife: Katie McManus
• Cinderella’s Stepmother: Jennifer Lambert
• Florinda: Laura Fontaine
• Lucinda: Jaclyn Young
• Little Red Riding Hood: Nora Palka
• Jack’s Mother: Lynn Audrey Neal
• The Witch: Priscilla Cuellar
• Cinderella’s Father/Mysterious Man: Blakeman Brophy
• Cinderella’s Mother/Granny: Allizon Reggioli
• The Wolf/Cinderella’s Prince: Scott Gains
• Rapunzel: Suzanne Stanley
• Rapunzel’s Prince: Scott Harrison
• The Steward: Danny Tippett
• The Giant’s Wife: Kathie Lee Gifford

Production Team

• Director: Evan Hoffmann
• Music Director: Elisa Rosman
• Choreographer: Lorraine Magee
• Assistant Director: Kristen Pilgrim
• Production Stage Manager: Joan Lada
• Assistant Stage Manager: Laura Moody
• Scenic Designer: Steven Royal
• Scenic Associate: Adam Koch
• Costume Designer: Kathy Dunlap
• Costume Associate: Sue Gattoni
• Lighting Designer: Franklin C. Coleman
• Properties Designer: Sierra Banack
• Master Electrician: Brian Stefaniak
• Sound Designer: Eric Kritzler
• Sound Engineer: Stan Harris
• Scenic Painter: Michelle Urcuyo
• Make-up Designer: Kara Hogarty
• Co-Hair Designers: Sue Pinkman, Kat Brais, Laura Fontaine, Jaclyn Young
• Stage Combat: Kristen Pilgrim, Steve Lada
• Electronics Crew: AnnMarie Castrigno, Michael O’Connor, Max Frost
• Master Carpenter: William Gautney
• Carpenters: Jeff Boatright, Kevin Hunter, Ian Brown, James Finley
• Crew: Barbara Maltseva
• Season Artwork: J. Noah Rubin, Jason Pepping

Disclaimer: NextStop Theatre Company provided two complimentary media tickets to ShowBizRadio for this review.

Silence = Death. The famous slogan of the AIDS activist group ACT UP could serve as an epigraph for Timberlake Wertenbaker’s The Love of the Nightingale, given a terrifyingly beautiful performance by the Constellation Theatre Company. Based on a tragedy by Sophocles, of which only fragments have survived, and a treatment by Ovid in his Metamorphoses, Wertenbaker’s 1988 play considers the role of voluntary and coerced silence in enabling cruelty and oppression and, ultimately, in leading to further atrocity.

The play begins and ends in violence. Soldiers fight to the death in the opening scene, the fight choreography by Matthew Wilson bringing to mind the combat scenes of “The Illiad.” Tereus (Matthew Schleigh), King of Thrace, receives as the reward of his victory the hand of Procne (Dorea Schmidt), daughter of the King of Athens. Schmidt’s deer-in-the-headlights shock as she dutifully submits to a political marriage is the first of many silences that mark the play.

After five years and a baby in what seem to her the lonely cultural wasteland of Thrace, Procne longs for the company of her younger sister Philomele (Meagan Dominy), and Tereus goes to Athens to fetch her. They view a performance of the Phaedra story, with the actors skillfully wearing beautiful and intricate theatrical masks. They touch, Philomele innocently and Tereus with what he recognizes as desire. On the voyage back to Thrace, Tereus delays the ship’s arrival; when Philomele rejects his advances, he kills the captain (Ashley Ivey), who Philomele has begun to love, and carries off the girl and rapes her. He is the King and has the power do all he wants.

The ship’s crewmembers are aware of all this: Tereus’s lust for Philomele, the murder of their captain, the abduction and rape. But they say nothing and pretend to see nothing. Their job is to follow orders, nothing more. When Tereus stonewalls their tentative questions, they meekly comply. Meanwhile, Philomele’s servant, Niobe (Rena Cherry Brown), an older woman who laments her loss of allure, speaks with cynical despair of the powerlessness of women. Philomele must accept the rape and, perhaps, try to gain what advantage she can from the situation. She must keep silent in the face of Tereus’ power; certainly she must not protest.

But Philomele will not remain silent. She ridicules the King to his face about his weakness and promises to proclaim to the world what a fool he is. At first, Tereus repeats what must be a familiar refrain to victims of sexual violence everywhere: why speak up, when no one will believe you against my words? When she continues to speak, he takes action to silence her voice once and for all, cutting out her tongue in one of the most horrifying scenes one is likely to see on stage. It is commonplace to talk of actors being committed to a role or a scene: the commitment of Schleigh and Dominy to the brutality of this scene is well beyond what most actors are ever asked to do.

What is to become of the speechless girl? She languishes in Thrace (Tereus has told Procne that her sister died on the voyage) for years. Wishing to contact Procne and convince her of her husband’s crimes, she seizes on the mechanism of a puppet play (the puppets, designed and choreographed by Don Becker and Eric Brooks, respectively, are a marvel), reenacting her rape and mutilation. In the midst of a drunken festival, Procne sees and, after some initial reluctance, believes. The two women take a Medea-like revenge on Tereus. Again, members of the ensemble observe a killing but resolve to say nothing and deny seeing anything.

The quality of the acting is extraordinary throughout. Schleigh’s King is a shallow, unthinking creature who typifies the arrogance of power, unable to face those he has wronged. Schmidt’s Procne tries, but never quite succeeds, to assimilate to the foreign world of Thrace, and when her illusions about her husband and her life with him are shattered, responds with an extreme of violence. Brown’s Niobe proclaims her hard-earned wisdom as a woman who knows what the world is like, but becomes instead a collaborator in the silence that imprisons Philomele and herself, almost satisfied to see Philomele punished the transgression Niobe had warned her against. Dominy’s Philomele has the longest and hardest journey, from innocent girl to adventurer to lover to rape victim (seldom has the nature of rape as a crime of power been portrayed more clearly) to dissident to sufferer of a horror to cruel avenger. Every step on her path is utterly convincing. In smaller roles, Ivey as the warm captain and Henry Niepoetter as Tereus’ unpleasant apprentice warrior of a son make their mark as well.

The ensemble, whether as soldiers, sailors, women of the court, or revelers at a festival, play their parts with flair, moving smartly to Kelly King’s choreography, above all in the bacchanal scene, as merriment mixes with the dread created by Philomele’s puppet show. To an extent, they play the traditional role of the Greek chorus, but they more importantly portray members of a society who, by choosing not to notice and speak, become accomplices in the crimes of the powerful.

The gold-colored foil-covered walls of scenic designer A.J. Guban’s set, which largely surrounds the oblong playing area, create a glittery world of splendor, the world that those in power wish society to see and be dazzled by. Augmented by Joseph Wall’s lighting design, which features many reds, the floor — shiny black planks with red spaces in between — evokes the dark and bloody underpinnings of a society based on the arbitrary exercise of power.

Kendra Rai’s costumes for the ensemble convey the multiple roles that its members play: those for the revelers in the festival scene, white costumes seemingly doused in wine, were especially colorful. Without attempting to be fixed in a given historical period, the costumes for the principals as well as those for the ensemble create the impression of characters living in the distant past of classical myth while confronting very contemporary issues.

Constellation, which makes something of a specialty of plays based on classical and world myths (their Metamorphoses a few years ago was noticeably superior to Arena Stage’s larger subsequent production, for example), has developed a fruitful relationship with musician Tom Teasley. Teasley provides the soundscape for Nightingale, with percussion and wind instrumentation helping to create the impression of the mythical world while responding to the emotions of each scene.

Without losing its roots in classical myth, the play has even greater resonance today than when it opened in 1988. What, after all, do the powerful seek? To do their will, with the role of the rest of society being quiet compliance. When torture, assassination, and sweeping collection of private information become state policy, treat those who publicize official conduct as criminals. When there is widespread criticism of a government on the internet and social media, censor or shut down electronic communications (the Turkish government’s recent attempt to pull to plug on Twitter comes to mind). In a more private sphere, silence is golden to those in positions of family or institutional power who sexually abuse children. Speaking up is dangerous, but what other choice is there but complicity? Not easy choices, but issues made vivid in this stunning production.

Director’s Note

I welcome you on this voyage to a foreign land in an unspecified time that feels at once ancient and modern. I have loved this play from the first time I read it over a decade ago. With opportunities for singing and dancing, romance and violence, sacrifice and transcendence, there are moments all over the emotional spectrum. A classical story created first by Sophocles, and then transformed by Ovid in Metamorphoses, is re-imagined by the brilliant Olivier Award-winning playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker.
 
This myth is a vehicle for us to express and process the darkest desires of the human heart. It is a complex world in which both love and violence are beautiful and terrifying. Tereus, the King of Thrace, is a war hero who has liberated Athens by conquering the invading army. His physical prowess and steely courage are celebrated, but when violent tendencies emerge later we find ourselves condemning the warrior we once adored. Wertenbaker gives us glimmering moments of love, both familial and romantic. The strength of the sisters’ bond drives the play. The romance between Philomele and the Captain allows them to feel “the gods within us.” Yet, the god of love can also be cruel, even merciless, fueling a fiery passion that can be all-consuming.
 
The women in this play are vivid and varied; they are all survivors finding their way in a world dominated by men. Philomele’s quest to know the world, to gain experiences, to embrace her inner longings, and to bravely ask questions is both inspirational and dangerous. We watch Procne evolve from a frightened young woman to a brave and decisive queen. Niobe, a lowly servant, offers years of wisdom and advice that is both shrewd and disturbing. Classical tales so often revolve around men; it is riveting to gain the perspective of a female playwright and all the women she has brought to life.
 
The Love of the Nightingale celebrates the power of the performing arts to transform lives and to communicate through image, movement and music as well as words. The King of Athens tells us, “I find plays help me think. You catch a phrase, recognize a character.” Wertenbaker gives us a ceremonial court drama as well as a freewheeling puppet show. The collective energy of a large ensemble is harnessed with the chorus. Magical transformations allow for redemption and forgiveness in a way that is uniquely theatrical. This play allows us to tap into the imagination of the ancients, yet it also calls on us to see the reflection of the action in our own world today.
 
I hope you will enjoy the story before you and that you will return to Constellation next year as a subscriber. Our 2014-2015 Season offers an exciting selection of plays from Italy, Ireland, and India. Come with us as we embark on our vibrant exhilarating journey!

Photo Gallery

Photos by Stan Barouh

Cast

• People of Athens
  • Philomele: Megan Dominy
  • Procne: Dorea Schmidt
  • King Pandion: Edward Christian
  • Queen: Vanessa Brandchulis
  • Niobe: Rena Cherry Brown
  • Athenian Soldier: Bru Ajueyitsi
• The Enemy
  • Barbarian Soldier: Daniel Corey
• People of Thrace
  • King Tereus: Matthew Schleigh
  • Itys: Henry Niepoetter
  • Captain: Ashley Ivey
  • Sailors/Soldiers: Bru Ajueyitsi, Edward Christian, Daniel Corey
  • Hero: Jennifer J. Hopkins
  • Iris: Emma Jackson
  • June: Vanessa Bradchulis
  • Helen: Neelam Patel
  • Servant: Edward Christian
• Actors in the Hippolytus Play
  • Aphrodite: Jennifer J. Hopkins
  • King Theseus: Daniel Corey
  • Phaedra: Neelam Patel
  • Hippolytus: Bru Ajueyitsi
  • Nurse: Emma Jackson
  • Chorus: Daniel Corey, Jennifer J. Hopkins, Ashley Ivey, Emma Jackson

Production Staff

• Director: Allison Arkell Stockman
• Scenic Designer: A.J. Guban
• Musician and Composer: Tom Teasley
• Costume Designer: Kendra Rai
• Assistant Costume Designer: Courtney Wood
• Lighting Designer: Joseph R. Walls
• Fight Director: Matthew R. Wilson
• Dance & Movement Choreographer: Kelly King
• Associate Sound Designer: Adam W. Johnson
• Props Designer: Angela Plante
• Puppet Designer: Don Becker
• Puppet Choreographer: Eric Brooks
• Stage Manager: Cheryl Ann Gnerlich
• Assistant Stage Managers: Brett Steven Abelman, Daniel Mori
• Production Assistant: James Brown
• Assistant Director: Gwen Grastorf
• Second Costume Assistant: Sara Jane Palmer
• Stitcher: Sandy Smoker
• Mask Builder and Intern: Sara Tomaszewski
• Costume Crafts: Chris Hall
• Dramaturg: Maddie Gaw
• Technical Director: Jason Krznarich
• Assistant Technical Director: William Klemt
• Charge Artist: Pallas Bane
• Carpenters: Walter Berry, Leanne Bock
• Master Electrician: Alex Keen
• Electricians: Paul Callaghan, Jeny Hall, Molly Scrivens, Gordon Nimno Smith, J. Cody Whitfield
• Sound Engineer: Jim Robeson
• Sound Board Operator: Alec Henneberger
• Associate Lighting Designer: Lesley Boeckman
• Audience Services Manager: Lindsey Ruehl
• House Managers: Erin Gifford, Ginny Page

Disclaimer: Constellation Theatre Company provided two complimentary media tickets to ShowBizRadio for this review.

Starting with the 1964 Roald Dahl children’s book and the 1971 movie adaptation starring Gene Wilder, Willy Wonka has been beloved by dentists for five decades now, celebrating as it does the compulsive consumption of cavity-creating confections. The uneven Vienna Theatre Company (VTC) production of the stage musical version retains considerable charm.

The title character, played by Sedrick Moody, is a misanthropic, mysterious candy magnate. Singing winningly and moving beautifully, Moody makes Wonka something of a song and dance man. The device motivating the plot is Wonka’s desire to retire and turn the factory’s operations over to some deserving child. Moody’s Wonka seems rather young to be contemplating retirement, but he nonetheless sets in motion a scheme to put coupons in five candy bars the finders of which will get a free tour of the factory — which otherwise is as closed to outsiders as, say, CIA headquarters — plus a lifetime supply of chocolate. This proves a brilliant marketing ploy, sending sales of his products skyrocketing.

The first four coupons find their way into the hands of a quartet of obnoxious children: Mike Teavee (Tashi Poe), joined at the hip to his electronic devices; Augustus Gloop (Erik Payton, ironically the smallest, slimmest child in the cast), who never stops eating; Violet Beauregarde (Kaia Griggs), a Georgia rich kid addicted to chewing gum; and Veruca Salt (Amelia Lindsey), the most spoiled brat of the lot. Each has a solo acting and/or singing moment to shine, most notably Lindsey in “I Want it Now,” in which she displays a promising belt voice.

The final coupon is found, at the last moment, by the show’s child lead, Charlie Bucket (Adam LeKang). Charlie, a classic “good kid,” lives with his unemployed parents (Alex Graur and Toby Nelson) and highly sedentary grandparents (Emily Franks, Nora Zanger, Joseph LeBlanc, and Bob Maurer) who appear never to leave the cramped bed they share. LeKang sings well, especially in his second act duet with Maurer (“Flying/Burping Song”), and is he able to move (he even taps a bit).

The show runs only two hours, but the pace frequently feels slow. Much of this is built into the structure of the show. When the four grandparents never move from their bed, with other characters sandwiched in behind them, it is hard to avoid their book scenes becoming tediously static. Moreover, the script seems to revel in repetition. LeBlanc’s character is hard-of-hearing, a trait LeBlanc handles very well, with fine energy and timing. But the audience must endure one similar hard-of-hearing joke after another for lengthy stretches of the first act. Likewise, in the second act, the Oompa-Loompas, Wonka’s factory workers (Melissa Handel, Hannah Hess, Mia Parnaby, Faith Skeen, and Kyla Poe), sing essentially the same chorus five times. The Oompa-Loompas’ singing and dancing are well performed. Here, as in other portions of the play, choreographer Rosslyn Fernandez creates movement that the children in the cast can execute but that keeps matters reasonably lively. By the third, fourth, or fifth time through, however, it’s hard to shake a feeling of “been there, done that.”

Generally, the show’s musical score is lackluster. With the exception of the lively “The Candy Man,” well sung by Daniel Marin, the songs, however capably performed by the cast, are readily forgettable. The production’s “musical village” accompanies the singers successfully.

The production makes extensive use of projections (designed by Jon Roberts) and videos. The videos, featuring breathless TV newsman Phineous Trout (Wayne Jacques) interviewing the four obnoxious contest winners and their equally annoying mothers, are among the funniest moments in the show. In the second act, projections representing the interior of the candy factory (picturing moving bubbles and various tinker toy-like pipes for the ingredients, for example) are inventive and effective, though the first act projection of a working-class neighborhood street is often too dim to be seen clearly. Tom Epps’ lighting design is inconsistent, at some points illuminating the action well but at others leaving characters (especially Wonka himself) in overly dim light or partially washing out the projections.

The biggest technical fault of the day involved sound operation. While having the occasional strong moment — the burping for Charlie and his grandfather in act two comes to mind — the soundscape was regularly marred by inconsistent mike levels, late execution of sound cues (Charlie’s father was a noticeable victim of this problem in parts of the first act), distortion, and feedback. Hopefully these problems can be fixed for the production’s final weekend.

The first act set (designed by Leta Fitzhugh) is dominated by a drab room where the Bucket family resides, with one flat that various actors move forward or backward to mark scene changes. The second act set, representing the factory, is appropriately more colorful and fun, featuring a multicolored plastic conduit and see-saw like pieces that Charlie and his grandfather use in “Flying.” A similar point can be made about the costumes (designed by Judy Whelihan, Kati Andersen, and Michael Panganiban). In the first act, the costumes are mostly drab and uninteresting; many of the children appear to be wearing their own clothes, for one thing. In the second act, things become more colorful, with the variously hued Oompa-Loompas (whose costumes appear to be fitted around hula hoops) being a visual high point. Wonka wears a black tux-like outfit and looks good in it.

As a show featuring young actors and based on a well-known children’s book, Willy Wonka is obviously designed to appeal to kids. The children in the audience reacted enthusiastically to much of the show, which is a principal mark of success for such a production.

Director’s Note

Since you are reading the Director’s Note, you wondered why this program has “See Director’s Note” on the “Music Director” line in the Production Team list and has another indication for a “Music Village” with names following it. I’ll explain. For reasons there is no need to get into, the person who was to be the music director for this show let us know that he would be unable to fulfill that commitment the day before auditions for the show. My dear friend, Larry Zimmerman, and Scott Richards, a new friend I made in the course of the previous VTC Show, This, got us through auditions. Larry agreed to continue with the show but he would not be able to take on the full responsibility of music director since he would be unavailable for rehearsals for about a month. We were ready to replace this show with a non-musical or cancel the VTC spring show entirely. Then, my indefatigable producer, Jocelyn Steiner, announced that we WOULD do the show even if it “took a village” to put the music together. My indomitable stage manager, Colleen Stock, reinforced Jocelyn’s vision. I got caught up in their commitment and enthusiasm. The entire design team jumped aboard the “village” bandwagon and we vowed that we would bring this show to the stage. We asked all of the music directors we knew-and some we didn’t know-if anyone could step in. But it was a very last minute request and music directors are booked at least a year in advance. Everyone was already involved in a show or exhausted from a show just completed. Beth Atkins, a fine music director in her own right, had been on board to help with Willy Wonka from the beginning and agreed to continue with the show but was unable to take on the full job of music director. Francine Krasowska, another great music director, also agreed to help out. Led by these three stars, the cast, crew and design team became the village that has indeed brought life to Willy Wonka. It has been an extraordinary experience and is a testament to commitment, creativity and plain, old hard work on everyone’s part. Enjoy the show-it has taken a village of dedicated people to make the magic happen!

Photo Gallery

Bob Maurer as Grandpa Joe, Toby Nelson as Mrs. Bucket, Nora Zanger as Grandma Josephine, Emily Franks as Grandma Georgina, Adam LeKang as Charlie Bucket, and Joseph LeBlanc as Grandpa George	Melissa Handel, Faith Skeen and Mia Parnaby as Oompa-Loompas and Sedrick Moody as Willy Wonka

Photos by Jessica Sperlongano

The Cast

• Augustus Gloop: Erik Peyton
• Candy Man: Daniel Marin
• Charlie Bucket: Adam LeKang
• Grandma Georgina: Emily Franks
• Grandma Josephine: Nora Zanger
• Grandpa George: Joseph LeBlanc
• Grandpa Joe: Bob Maurer
• Mike Teavee: Tashi Poe
• Mr. Bucket: Alex Graur
• Mrs. Salt: Toby Nelson
• Mrs. Beauregarde: Emily Franks
• Mrs. Bucket: Toby Nelson
• Mrs. Gloop: Kimberly Baker
• Ms. Teavee: Nora Zanger
• Oompa-Loompa: Melissa Handel
• Oompa-Loompa: Hannah Hess
• Oompa-Loompa: Mia Parnaby
• Oompa-Loompa: Kyla Poe
• Oompa-Loompa: Faith Skeen
• Oompa-Loompa: Kathryn Skeen
• Phineous Trout: Wayne Jacques
• Veruca Salt: Amelia Lindsey
• Violet Beauregarde: Kaia Griggs
• Willy Wonka: Sedrick Moody

Production Team

• Producer: Jocelyn Steiner
• Director: Jessie Roberts
• Choreographer: Rosslyn Fernandez
• Assistant Stage Manager: Jay Stein
• Lighting Designer: Tom Epps
• Sound Designer: Jon Roberts
• Music Director: See Director’s Note
• Music Village
  • Keyboard: Larry Zimmerman, Francine Krasowska, Beth Atkins
  • Violinist: Kristina Westernik
  • Percussionist: Abel Ruiz
• Vocal Coach: Janice Zucker
• Projection Designer: Jon Roberts
• Graphic Designer: Michael Philip Panganiban
• Set Designer/Scenic Artist: Leta Fitzhugh
• Construction Coordinator: John Vasko
• Properties: Suzanne Maloney
• Set Dressing: Jocelyn Steiner
• Costume Designers: Judy Whelihan, Katie Andresen
• Hair and Make-up: Erica Longshore
• Set Construction Crew: John Vasko, Jon Roberts, Jessie Roberts, Samantha Poe, Jocelyn Steiner, Kaia Griggs, Hannah Hess, Diane Hess, Tracey Todd, Mikala Baker, Jay Stein
• Lighting Crew: Tom Epps, Kimberly Crago
• Costume Crew: Francoise Davis
• Set Painting Crew: Leta Fitzhugh, Mikala Baker, Hannah Hess, Diane Hess, Samantha Poe, Kaia Griggs, Anna Balch, Wayne Jacques, Denise Perrino, Vanessa Peyton, Kyla Poe
• Photographers: Jessica Sperlongano, Vanessa Peyton
• Program Design: Mary Ann Hall
• Light Board Operators: Kimberly Crago, Eric Stork, Kieth Flores
• Stage Crew: Mikala Baker

Disclaimer: Vienna Theatre Company provided two complimentary media tickets to ShowBizRadio for this review. VTC also purchased advertising on the ShowBizRadio web site, which did not influence this review.

Though it was not the first, Tom Jones’ and Harvey Schmidt’s The Fantasticks was the prototypical, and certainly the most frequently performed, off-Broadway musical. Among other things, the original 1960 production was the breakthrough role for Broadway and television great Jerry Orbach. With a small cast, a single accompanist, and modest technical requirements, the innovative show demonstrated that limited resources, creatively deployed, could produce theatrically and emotionally rewarding work.

Pandemonium Theatrical Productions, using a performing space in Lorton’s Workhouse Arts Center, provides a generally satisfying rendition of this familiar show. The story centers around young lovers Matt (Jonathan Litalien) and Luisa (Mary Anne Furey), as they are manipulated by their fathers (Jason Krage and John Hollinger, respectively), and the narrator/bandit El Gallo (Michael Sharp).

Luisa begins as a self-dramatizing teenage princess, and in her early songs (“Much More” and “Metaphor”) director Jeffrey Davis gives Furey license to take the drama a bit far. By the time she and Litalien get to the innocently sensual “Soon It’s Gonna Rain” and, even more so, the tender “They Were You” (staged simply with the actors sitting on the stage floor in each other’s arms), their characters have grown and their portrayals have become more controlled. Both sing beautifully, especially in the quieter portions of their numbers, and the feelings conveyed, especially in “They Were You,” are genuinely touching. (The latter number is a close thematic and emotional cousin of the superb finale of Candide, “Make Our Garden Grow.”)

Their fathers, in a successful attempt to ensure that Matt and Luisa fall in love, pretend to feud and construct a Pyramus and Thisbe-style wall between their back yards. Passionate gardeners both, albeit with contrasting horticultural philosophies, they boast of their manipulative prowess over their offspring in “Never Say No” and ruefully reflect on the unpredictability of kids in “Plant a Radish.” Hollinger and Krage both sing effectively, while projecting genially rustic, but canny, characters. Like Litalien and Furey, Hollinger and Krage have good stage chemistry together.

El Gallo is a sort of life force character, who must be dashing and charismatic while administering harsh life lessons to Matt and Luisa in order to move them to a more mature understanding of their love. Sharp’s performance was short on dash, sometimes seeming more stolid than charismatic, and the life force felt wan at times. Sharp had inconsistent success in trying to remember the lyrics of “Try to Remember,” the show’s famous opening number. Indeed, he was noticeably fighting for lines at several points throughout the evening. Probably his strongest moment was “I Can See It,” his stirring second act duet with Matt.

The Fantasticks includes two amusing small character roles, Henry and Mortimer, a forgetful old actor and a make-believe Indian who does (or rather overdoes) death scenes. Davis did not give Mortimer (Casey Fero) death scenes quite as elaborate as in many productions, and Fero’s vigorous portrayal belied the wear and tear that would likely result from 40+ years of dying. I find myself in strong disagreement with the director’s choice to cast a younger actor (Amy Wolf) to play Henry. Wolf’s big, brassy portrayal completely missed the poignance of the elderly trouper, who mixes up his Shakespeare lines but never surrenders, only wishing to be seen under light. The contrast between Henry’s age and frailty and the youthful innocence of Matt and Luisa is an important overtone in the show, and it’s a pity to lose that nuance. Since a woman is playing the part, the old actor is identified in the program as “Henrietta,” which does not affect the other characters, who go right on calling her “Henry.”

On the other hand, Davis and choreographer Mary Payne Omohundro built up the role of The Mute (Kathleen McCormack) considerably compared to many productions, with outstanding success. McCormack’s mute is not a relatively passive mime, but a combination stage manager, silent Greek chorus, and dance soloist, who interacts frequently and charmingly with the other characters. Her reactions to the goings-on around her are always on point, and she is a disciplined enough performer to avoid stealing scenes that were hers for the taking.

In addition to McCormack’s fine work, the movement in the production is strong throughout, especially in ensemble numbers like “This Plum is Too Ripe” and “Round and Round.” Davis also deserves credit for keeping the original version of “It Depends on What You Pay” rather than succumbing to use of the more politically correct substitute that has been employed in some productions in recent years.

Musical director/pianist Brandon Heishman provides excellent and, as far as I could tell, note-perfect accompaniment. To his and the actors’ credit, every song in the show was sung at least adequately and often highly effectively. The program did not list credits for most of the technical categories. This is an active props show, however, and whoever assembled the foam swords, garden supplies, fruit, a small jewel box (a particularly nice touch, into which El Gallo deposits Luisa’s tear), and other items did his or her job well.

Like Candide, which preceded it by four years, The Fantasticks is in a sense a socially conservative story. In both shows, two young people have unrealistic ideals, set out to find adventure, are chastened by reality, and return content to live conventional, if comfortable and comforting, lives. Matt and Luisa are children of the 50s, not of the rebellious and rule-breaking 60s, more likely to find fulfillment behind a white picket fence than on a picket line. (Go see a production of Hair if you want the update.) It’s interesting to speculate about whether this reassuring theme has contributed to the continuing popularity of the show, through all the turmoil and wrenching changes of the last 54 years.

Cast

• The Narrator (El Gallo): Michael Sharp
• The Boy (Matt): Jonathan Litalien
• The Girl (Luisa): Mary Ann Furey
• The Boy’s Father (Hucklebee): Jason Krage
• The Girl’s Father (Bellomy): John Hollinger
• The Mute: Kathleen McCormack
• The Old Actor (Henrietta): Amy Wolf
• The Man Who Dies (Mortimer): Casey Fero
• Pianist: Brandon Heishman

Creative

• Director: Jeffrey Davis
• Costumes/Choreography: Mary Payne Omohundro
• Musical Direction: Brandon Heishman
• Produced by: Mary Payne Omohundro and Jeffrey Davis

Disclaimer: Pandemonium Theatrical Productions provided two complimentary media tickets to ShowBizRadio for this review.

In The American Century Theater (TACT) audience guide for Arthur Kopit’s 1960 Oh Dad…, Artistic Director Jack Marshall lists 23 reasons why otherwise interesting plays drop out of sight and end up being produced by TACT. Oh Dad… scores in eight of Marshall’s 23 categories (e.g., unfortunate titles, a bias against older plays, bad movie versions, difficult technical challenges). TACT’s production, capably directed by Tyler Herman, is an inspired bit of theatrical archeology, bringing strong acting and excellent production values to a show that has lost none of its weirdness in the intervening 54 years.

The weirdness inheres in the principal characters: Madame Rosepettle (Robin Reck), a domineering monster of a mother; Jonathan (Tony Strowd), her cowed and hapless son; and Rosalie (Emily Erin), a seeming ingénue turning ravenous. And yes, dad — or at least a taxidermist’s preservation of his remains — does hang in the closet, though, truth to tell, none of the characters appear to feel particularly sad about it. It’s just part of the abnormal normal of the Rosepettle world.

TACT holds opening the house until a relatively brief time before the performance. Then the five members of the chatty bellboy crew usher patrons to their seats. The bellboys work for the Hotel Libre in post-revolutionary but pre-embargo Havana. Madame Rosepettle is their guest from hell, peremptorily ordering them about as they bring her varied belongings into the suite. There are suitcases to be sure, but most travelers to Caribbean destinations do not arrive with a pair of Venus Fly Traps who play guitar and percussion (Steve Przybylski and Vaughn Irving) or a Siamese kitten-munching fish named Rosalinda (Anna Lynch).

In 1943, Phillip Wylie (a writer best known previously for co-authoring the science fiction classic “When Worlds Collide”) wrote “Generation of Vipers,” a curmudgeonly whack against almost everything American, most famously mothers and “momism.” Wylie would have loved Madame R., who dominates Kopit’s script almost as much as she dominates her son. Bossy, cynical, ready to disdain and devour anything in her path, Reck’s Madame R. can use her womanly wiles to entrap males (traveling with Venus Fly Traps is surely no accident), for whom she feels only contempt. Her feelings about sex are close to hate; her favorite hobby seems to be strolling the beach at night harassing couples making out on the sand. Madame R. has a lengthy monologue in the second half of the script in which she makes her feelings and motives extremely, scarily clear. It goes on too long, becoming somewhat tedious, which I ascribe far more to Kopit’s writing (he wrote the piece quickly as part of university playwriting competition) than Reck’s acting, which never flags in energy and specificity. It’s quite a tour de force of absurdity, which Reck pulls off by taking her character fully seriously.

Jonathan — who Madame R. insists on calling by a series of names not his own — is a mass of neuroses and dysfunctions, including obsessive attachments to his stamp and coin collections and a homemade telescope, a nearly total lack of social skills, and a timorousness bordering on the pathological. With his tense, hunched-over stance; his thin, squeezed voice he is almost afraid to hear; and the predominance through most of the play of his flight response; Strowd creates a vivid physical character. Change for Jonathan arrives not with a characteristic whimper but a destructive bang, unfortunately for vegetable, animal, and human characters in proximity to his sudden rage. Strowd makes the rapid transition thoroughly credible.

When we first see Erin’s Rosalie, she looks every bit the dewey-eyed girl next door, denying Madame R.’s accusation of seamier activities while charming the easily-spooked Jonathan. Later, however, in her younger, more sexual way, she is revealed as a female predator in her own right, a worthy potential successor to Madame R. in Jonathan’s life. What Erin’s performance makes clear is that Rosalie hasn’t changed between her earlier and later scenes; rather, Erin reveals more and more of what Rosalie has been all along. She plays Rosalie’s final attempt to seduce Jonathan as a near-rape seizure of power over him, making his resulting panic attack understandable.

While I found plenty of reasons to admire the three principal performances, I must confess that my favorite character was the fish. Named after Dad’s mistress, Lynch’s Rosalinda was apparently pre-set under a cloth-covered table, emerging only when the bellboys bring on a large aquarium in which she then pops up, her face in orange makeup and wearing an orange headpiece suggesting fins. Lynch, while maintaining an undulating underwater-like motion, is gleefully attentive and responsive to everything and everyone on stage. Rosalinda has no intelligible spoken lines, and Lynch forms her character completely physically, with only her head and neck visible during most of the show, until a final choreographed moment that appears to illustrate (or perhaps to have inspired) Marshall’s program note comment that “freer can mean dead.” If it was impossible to take one’s eyes off Rosalind, no matter what else was going on, it wasn’t just because the aquarium was center stage.

The bellboys (Jorge A. Silva, Brian David Clarke, Andrew Quilpa, Chema Pineda-Fernandez, and Manolo Santalla), in addition to their prop-moving chores, act as a sort of chorus to the demented goings-on. They move and respond delightfully as they deal with people even more unusual than the general run of touristas. Silva also stands in for Dad as Madame R. describes the course of her marriage, and Santalla doubles as Commodore Roseabove, an elderly yachtsman who Madame R. tries to snare and who somewhat improbably becomes the closest thing in the play to a sane character.

Oh Dad… was one of the more prop-intensive shows I have seen recently, and Kevin Laughon’s collection — including a dictaphone, jury-rigged telescope, a coffin, stamps, coins, suitcases, wooden boxes, and many others — added greatly to the look of the show. The set (Kaite Wertz) consists of blue panels forming the angled walls of the hotel suite, with an alcove on stage left for the musicians/Venus Fly Traps. For the final scenes, the panels swing around to become the pink walls of Madame R.’s master bedroom, decorated with miscellaneous objects from her presumed travels. A bed unit rolls out, tilted high to make the action readily visible as Rosalie tries to bed Jonathan. In a particularly creepy effect, various hands, alien-like, ripple the pink sheets under Rosalie as she works at enticing her prey.

Most of the sound track of the show is provided by the two costumed musicians, who play a variety of Latin sounds for atmosphere as well as providing some precisely timed effects. Sound designer Thomas Sowers also provides occasional ambient sound, such as buzzing flies or an overflying airplane. Costumer Jacy Barber put the bellboys in blue jackets and caps, while Rosalie is in a print dress emphasizing the surface of her character and nicely concealing the predator beneath. When Madame R. is attempting her seduction of Commodore Roseabove, she wears a low-cut black outfit, while Jonathan is in a sports shirt and tie with shorts, emphasizing his enforced childhood status (not out of short pants at 20). Aside from the aforementioned headpiece, Rosalinda is in a fetching orange and cream body suit, while the musicians inevitably don green and yellow Venus Fly Trap getups. In all these respects, TACT’s Oh Dad… is a production that never fails to look good.

What does it all mean? Madame R. asks the question at the show’s conclusion, and Marshall’s answer is that the play is “the scream of the Fifties begging to be let out of its sterile, gray, restrictive, black and white room into the psychedelic and violent Sixties to come,” even though the playwright couldn’t be aware of it at the time he wrote the script. That, I suppose, depends on one’s view and experience of those decades. From my perspective, the comment may not do justice to the 50s, a much more interesting and dynamic decade than it is often given credit for. Given its acting and technical virtues, however, the TACT production is not simply a piece of historical and cultural commentary but a lively, highly engaging theatrical experience.

Director’s Notes

A leap of faith. It’s when you know you have to get to the other side, but you can’t for the life of you figure out how you’ll get there, so you take the plunge anyway. As a senior at Harvard when writing the play, Kopit was smart, probably very frustrated, not knowing what the real world would hold. American culture was straining to break out of the ’50s and into…anything else. We now know that the ’60s yielded space exploration, the shattered romantic notions of the post-war peace, and the broken boundaries of sexual, pharmacological, and racial tolerance.

I find this play strikingly relevant. Conversations with my peers constantly swirl around finding independence and autonomy under a tired government and stringent career hierarchies. Gone are the days of playing with model airplanes and Legos, of building forts with my grandmother’s couch cushions. What will be my place in the time to come? And what tricks does my mind play to scare me away from the less comfortable possibilities?

My mother tells the story of holding my oldest brother in her arms, days after giving birth, laughing out loud and saying to him, in words he could not understand, “Why do you trust me to hold you? You have no idea that this is my first time, too.” At its heart, I see Oh Dad as the story of a mother who has no idea how to parent her child and tries to love him with the only things she knows — protection and power. We see this through the eyes of her son, who also has no idea how to live life and tries to experience it by whatever means available. The dark comedy comes out as Jonathan succeeds and fails. He reminds us of the faces we all make when we realize there’s no net to catch our fall.

We all go through big life changes with unknown outcomes. Whether it’s puberty or parenting, political revolutions or personal resolutions, breaking the norms or pushing comfort zones, everyone fears what will come. But that doesn’t stop us from taking a leap of faith. And sometimes it takes a little song in our hearts to push us that extra mile.

Photo Gallery

Bellboys: Chema Pineda-Fernandez, Brian David Clarke, Jorge A. Silva, and Andrew Quilpa	Manolo Santalla as Commodore Roseabove and Robin Reck as Madam Rosepettle
Emery Erin as Rosalie, Tony Strowd as Jonathan	Tony Strowd as Jonathan. In back Steve Przbylski (guitar) and Vaughn Irving (drums) as Musical Venus Flytraps
Emery Erin as Rosalie, Anna Lynch as Rosalinda the Fish and Tony Strowd as Jonathan	Tony Strowd as Jonathan
Tony Strowd as Jonathan, Manolo Santalla and Jorge A. Silva as bellboys and Robin Reck as Madam Rosepettle

Photos by Johannes Markus

Cast

• Madame Rosepettle: Robin Reck
• Jonathon (her son): Tony Strowd
• Rosalinda (her fish): Anna Lynch
• Rosalie: Emery Erin
• Commodore Roseabove: Manolo Santalla
• Bellboys: Jorge A. Silva, Brian David Clarke, Andrew Quilpa, Chema Pineda-Fernandez, Manolo Santalla
• Musicians/Composers/SuperFly Traps: Steve Przybylski, Vaughn Irving

Production Staff

• Director: Tyler Herman
• Production Manager: Ed Moser
• Stage Manager: Sarah Kamins
• Assistant Director: Annalisa Dias
• Assistant Stage Manager: Lindsey E Moore
• Set Design/Scenic Artist: Katie Wertz
• Costume Design: Jacy Barber
• Lighting Design: Jason Aufdem-Brinke
• Sound Design: Thomas Sowers
• Properties Design: Kevin Laughon
• Master Carpenter: Michael Salmi
• Master Electrician: Jorge A. Silva
• Seamstress: Sandy Smoker
• Publicist: Emily Morrison
• Photography: Johannes Markus
• Program Layout: Michael Sherman

Disclaimer: American Century Theater provided two complimentary media tickets to ShowBizRadio for this review.

It’s not math but fraught interpersonal dynamics that make the world of Proof go ’round. David Auburn’s play, winner of both a Pulitzer and a Tony in its initial Broadway run, does not cause an audience to care about mathematics in a way parallel, say, to the way that Copenhagen does for physics or the film “The Race for the Double Helix” does for genetics. The play’s between-scenes recitations of arcane mathematical matters, accompanied by chamber music, serve mostly just as atmospherics: the real meat of the script concerns how people deal with death, mental illness, ambition, intellectual excitement, and difficult family relationships.

The Little Theater of Alexandria (LTA) production of the piece is close to perfect. Each of the four characters is clearly drawn and acted by the cast with passion and commitment. The central character, 25-year old Catherine (Anna Fagan), herself a gifted, though uncredentialed, mathematician, has cared for her father through years of an unspecified but thoroughly disabling mental illness, culminating in his death.

Catherine’s emotional journey through the play is less an arc than a roller-coaster, and Fagan captures her depression, anger, pride, fear, dedication, hope, sporadic irrationality, resentment, and sometimes surprising strength. It is one of the oldest theater clichés to say that an actor is supposed to be “in the moment,” but anyone playing this role has to manage very rapid, believable transitions from one feeling to the next, and Fagan is more than up to the task.

Her father, Robert (Chuck Leonard), had been a giant in his field. Seen only retrospectively, through flashbacks or dreams, Robert was an emotionally as well as intellectual powerful figure, simultaneously supporting and intimidating his daughters and his students. In Leonard’s portrayal, Robert is someone who has an extra portion of the life force coursing through him, when he is lucid but even when he is at his maddest.

Auburn gives Robert a delicious monologue about students browsing in bookstores, which Leonard delivers lyrically, as well as a scene in which Robert, full of vitality toward the end of a remission from his illness, believes he has broken through and is creating again as he did in his prime. Catherine picks up his notebook and reads it to him; Leonard conveys the terror Robert feels as he realizes he is once again descending into incoherence.

Catherine’s pragmatic older sister Claire (Elizabeth Keith) arrives to take charge of the arrangements for Robert’s funeral and, not incidentally, to take charge of Catherine’s life. Skeptical of Catherine’s ability to live on her own and manage her affairs, Claire proceeds to insist on making decisions for her sibling, such as selling the family home and prodding Catherine to move to New York. Well-meaning — while having left the heavy lifting for her father’s care to Catherine, she has financially supported her sister and father through their father’s illness — Claire is well short of being a villain.

Still, in Keith’s take on the character, she is domineering, all to quick to deny Catherine the chance to make her own decisions about her life, and disrespectful, all too quick to disbelieve Catherine’s mathematical prowess. No sooner has Catherine been relieved of the burden of caring for her father than she must fight for her autonomy from Claire. Keith makes Claire an antagonist, someone against whom Catherine must struggle to find her way. I only wish that Keith might have found more opportunities to illuminate Claire’s interior landscape, so that we might better understand her as more than a somewhat unpleasant foil for Catherine.

The fourth member of the quartet is Hal (Josh Goldman), a former student of Robert’s, now a university faculty member who feels his career is stagnating. As written, Hal has chronically mixed and uncertain motives. By turns cute, sneaky, ambitious, caring, callous, cautious and waffling, and intellectually engaged, Hal is a character difficult for an actor or an audience to make full sense of. By play’s end, it is harder to get a solid understanding of Hal than of any of the other characters, a result more attributable to Auburn’s writing than Goldman’s choices as an actor. Goldman makes him appealing (except, perhaps, when his sexism comes to the fore when he doubts Catherine’s authorship of a potentially groundbreaking paper) but never quite trustworthy.

The action takes place on the rear patio of Catherine’s and Robert’s house. Show in and show out, LTA probably does realistic sets better than any other community theater company in the area, and Dan Remmer’s design for Proof is no exception. The weathered clapboards, older curtains and blinds, doors and outdoor stairs that haven’t been painted in a while, all testify to the deferred maintenance of an ordinary urban house during Robert’s long illness. The set pays attention to even minor details, like a hose compatible in color with the brick portion of a house wall.

One sees spectacular, showy lighting designs in some strong community theater shows. Franklin C. Coleman’s design for this production isn’t one of them. What it is instead is a thing of delicate beauty, as subtle shades of color delineate and create the mood for the play’s differing seasons and times of day. The initial night scene, for example, is in low-intensity blues; a summer afternoon is in brighter yellows; a late fall scene is in paler tones, with shadows of bare tree branches projected onto the house. Additional touches include a red revolving light for a police car and various porch and window lights, all fitting their scenes without calling attention to themselves. The only minor problem seemed to be a pretty consistent cold spot down left center.

Susan Devine’s direction kept the pace consistent and the emotions and interactions of the characters real and believable throughout. Even the bigger passages, like Robert’s monologues or the arguments between Catherine and Hal or Claire, were character moments rather than actor moments. Thanks to her and the cast, LTA’s production never loses sight of the key point that Proof is a play about emotions, not equations.

Director’s Notes

Proof explores the mind of a young woman who may be a brilliant mathematician and who also may be mentally ill. Math is the perfect metaphor for mental illness, representing its complexity, and that makes it difficult for most of us to understand. Proof also uses math to express the relationships among the play’s four characters by linking those with mathematical ability while alienating others. Or does the mental illness create the links and alienation?

A generous woman came to one of our rehearsals and told her story about taking care of someone she loves who is mentally ill. She also said she thinks the arts, and plays such as Proof, will educate communities about mental illness and help remove the stigma, the way the arts helped homosexuality in the 1980s. It is with this sense of responsibility that we present Proof.

Photo Gallery

Chuck Leonard (Robert) and Anna Fagan (Catherine)	Anna Fagan (Catherine) and Josh Goldman (Hal)
Elizabeth Keith (Claire) and Anna Fagan (Catherine)	Anna Fagan (Catherine) and Elizabeth Keith (Claire)
Anna Fagan (Catherine)	Josh Goldman (Hal) and Anna Fagan (Catherine)
Chuck Leonard (Robert)	Anna Fagan (Catherine) and Chuck Leonard (Robert)

Photos by Matt Liptak

Cast

• Robert: Chuck Leonard
• Catherine: Anna Fagan
• Hal: Josh Goldman
• Claire: Elizabeth Keith

The Crew

• Producers: Lynn O’Connell, Kevin O’Dowd, Sharon Field, Bobbie Herbst, Rance Willis
• Director: Susan Devine
• Stage Managers: Mary Beth Smith-Toomey, Kira Hogan
• Set Design: Dan Remmers
• Set Constuction: Dan Remmers
• Assisted by: Chris Feldman, Daniel Froggett, Jeff Gathers, Jim Hutzler, Ben Norcross, JanaLee Sponberg
• Lighting Design: Franklin C. Coleman
• Costume Design: Hadley Armstrong
• Sound Design: David Correia
• Assisted by: Sean Doyle, Margaret Evans-Joyce, David Hale, David Rampy, Janice Rivera, Gene Warner
• Set Painting: Kevin O’Dowd
• Assisted by: Jamie Blake, Scott Daugherty, Bobby Herbst, Leslie Reed
• Set Decoration: Russell Wyland
• Master Electrician: Jennifer Lyman
• Assisted by: Jeff Auerbach, Marzanne Claiborne, Pamela Leonowich, Doug Olmsted, Nancy Owens, Becky Patton, Dick Schwab, Sherry Singer, Joanne Tompkins, Donna Reynolds
• Property Design: Leslie Reed
• Assisted by: Emma Baskir, Jean Coyle, Betty Dolan, Carlyn Lightfoot, Jack Rollins, Rebecca Sheehy, Adrian Steel, with Art Snow assisting for “Special Effects”
• Wardrobe: Margaret Aiken Snow
• Assisted by: Alisa Beyninson, Jamie Blake, Patty Greksouk, Barbara Helsing, Bobbie Herbst
• Rigging: Russell Wyland
• Photographers: Josh Goldman, Matt Liptak
• Audition Table: Maria Ciarrocchi
• Assisted by: Jay Cohen, Phylis Gruber, Barbara Helsing, Patty Lord, Eddy Roger Parker
• Double Tech Dinner: Cyndi Martin
• Opening Night Party: Carole Steele, Jim Palumbo
• Assisted by: Robert Kraus, Valerie Larkin, Shirley Lord-Cooper, Harriet Mathews, Iolaire McFadden, Susan McFadden

Disclaimer: Little Theatre of Alexandria provided two complimentary media tickets to ShowBizRadio for this review.