Category Archives: Theater

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

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Funny Thing, Two River

David Josefsberg, Michael Urie, Christopher Fitzgerald, & Kevin Isola in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

Probably most families have movies and plays that are an immediate source of hilarity in the collective memory. My family does, and one of them is this 1962 musical currently re-mounted at Two River Theater in Red Bank, New Jersey, one of the Garden State’s fine regional theaters. With the book by Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart (M*A*S*H) and music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, it’s exuberant, ridiculous farce from beginning to end. (The team of Shevelove and Gelbart is responsible for one of our other faves, too, the movie The Wrong Box.)

This was Sondheim’s early days, when his songs were more tuneful, and there are lovely duets (“Lovely”; “The Echo Song”) and showstopping ensemble numbers (“Everybody Ought to Have a Maid”; “Comedy Tonight”). Well, the last-mentioned would be a show-stopper if it weren’t the show-starter, and in the Two River production you know from that first moment, when the eight-member orchestra takes off, that you’re in for an exciting ride!

This production of A Funny Thing, directed by Jessica Stone, uses an all-male cast. She first tried this concept at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in 2010 to great acclaim, and it works well, injecting an extra layer of absurdity. This casting choice is historically accurate, actually, as the original comedies of the Roman playwright Plautus (c. 254-184 BCE)—A Funny Thing is very loosely based on one of them—relied on all-male casts. As in Shakespeare’s day, women weren’t allowed to play on stage. Plautus’s works included a number of stock characters, including the clever slave, the dumb beauty, the lustful old man, the braggart soldier—all of whom appear in A Funny Thing.

Except for the hero of the story—the extremely clever slave Pseudolus—cast members play multiple parts and appear to be having as much fun as the audience. They do a great job, and after such antic and energetic performances, they must need a serious nap or perhaps chiropracty. Christopher Fitzgerald is an irrepressible Pseudolus, Graham Rowat a superior Miles Gloriosus (“I am my ideal”), and I’ve never seen a better Philia than David Turner’s, as a young woman lightly touched with the awareness she’s a dimwit.

If you want some pure fun, don’t miss it! On stage until December 13.

Too far from New Jersey? Netflix (or try your local library) has the movie version, featuring Zero Mostel, Jack Gilford, Phil Silvers, and a very young Michael Crawford (who achieved super-stardom many years later as the lead in Phantom of the Opera), or order it below.

A Comedy of Tenors

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A Comedy of Tenors, Paris

Antoinette LaVecchia (Maria) and Bradley Dean (Tito)(photo: Roger Mastroianni. Courtesy, Cleveland Play House)

Ken Ludwig’s new play, A Comedy of Tenors is a good old-fashioned theatrical farce. “Three tenors. Three egos. One stage. What can possibly go wrong?” said the Cleveland Play House promotion. You may remember Ludwig’s big hit of 26 years ago—Lend Me a Tenor—and this one, too, involves amorous shenanigans with high-voltage opera stars, most of them the same characters who appeared in the earlier play.

A Comedy of Tenors premiered at the Cleveland Play House in September then moved to Princeton’s McCarter Theatre, which co-produced it and where it was on stage through November 1. The entire cast of seven moved with it, as did director Stephen Wadsworth, who has masterminded numerous notable McCarter plays over the past two decades. Wadsworth is well acquainted with the operatic temperament through his work with opera companies across Europe, at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and as director of Opera Studies at the Julliard School. He doubtless has a natural affinity for this comedic material.

Set in 1930s Paris, the story centers on the final hours before a “three tenors”-style concert. But impresario Henry Saunders can’t seem to get his three singers in the same place at the same time. First, a Swedish tenor drops out altogether, but the biggest star of the bunch—Tito “Il Stupendo” Merelli—objects to the replacement Saunders is lucky to find. He’s a much younger man whose popularity is soaring, and Merelli is beginning to feel his age. Making matters worse are several romantic mixups that only a deft hand with comedy can carry off. The three singers finally come together, then fall apart again, and it appears the only man who can save Saunders’s concert is a bellhop with a golden voice.

The strikingly gorgeous set used in Cleveland—a luxury hotel suite—also made the trip to Princeton. As set designer Charlie Corcoran said in the program notes, “There’s one very specific need in all farces, and that is doors.” Doors to enter, doors to exit, and doors to slam. Lead actor Bradley Dean makes good use of those doors, as he plays both Merelli and the bellhop, and must exit the stage left door as Tito, dash around backstage (changing costume en route) and enter the door stage right as the bellhop. Watching him switch roles, costumes, and personae is one of the play’s great charms.

Ludwig’s Lend Me a Tenor is still playing all over the United States, and for theatergoers who love a romantic farce, his new play is something to watch for!

Song for the Disappeared

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Song for the Disappeared

Vivia Font & Christina Nieves in “Song for the Disappeared”

This new 90-minute play promised to dramatize several of my painful reads of the past year regarding the vulnerability of people caught, often through no fault of their own, in the ultra-violent wars of the Mexican narco-cartels. These issues have been painfully explored in both fiction (The Cartel) and non-fiction (Down by the River) exposés reviewed here.

Song for the Disappeared, by Tanya Saracho, probes the problem of fractured loyalties and the inability of even the wealthy to distance themselves from the consequences of operating within a totally broken system. The family patriarch is an honorable man, apparently, but his uprightness provides him and his family no protection; his recently returned daughter has pursued her literary aims, but only her naiveté allowed her to believe her novel about a narcotraficante family would be regarded as fiction; her ex-fiancé, now the father’s only trusted aide, has turned to religion for protection; and the father’s young wife, viewed by the others as a complete airhead, has her own demons.

When the play begins, the family heir Javier has disappeared. The family reunites at its remote Texas ranch, where everyone’s vulnerabilities are exposed, and no one is sure how to proceed or what will come next. Their struggles are symbolized in the actions of the younger daughter, slightly deranged and struggling to save the smallest and most vulnerable creatures she finds. Meanwhile, the wild dogs circle every more closely.

The all-Latino cast in the Passage Theatre production does a fine job. Even in Passage’s tiny venue, it is an engaging theatrical event, directed by Alex Correia. On stage until October 25.

Equivocation

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GunpowderPlot, quills

(artwork: Scott McKowen for STNJ)

Regrettably, this review comes after the run of Equivocation by award-winning playwright Bill Cain has ended at the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey. Still, I hope you’ll watch for this sharply witty and thought-provoking play locally or, if you’re from the NJ-NY region, will take a good look at STNJ’s future offerings. They’re having a terrific season.

It’s 1606, King James I is on the English throne (one of the country’s Scottish kings), and he has written a story. Powerful Prime Minister Sir Robert Cecil asks Shag (Shakespeare) to turn the king’s story into a play, with the promise of considerable reward to the Globe theater company if he is successful, and, if he is not, well . . . best not dwell on the details.

The story deals with the very recent event known as The Gunpowder Plot, in which a group of Catholic men tunneled under Parliament, smuggled in 36 barrels of gunpowder, and would have blown up the king, his family, many notables, and the whole House of Lords on Parliament’s opening day. A mysterious letter alerts the king, and the plot is foiled. A man named Guy Fawkes is caught, and the plotters, whose names are gradually extracted via torture, are hideously murdered. Cecil knows a dramatization by Shag will fix the treasonous details about the powder plot in the memory of history.

While the theater company is overjoyed by the prospect of a royal commission, Shag resists writing about current-day events, especially as he comes to doubt the truth of the official version. The risks of being truthful are grimly evident, yet he won’t write a lie.

But what is a lie? The arrest of Father Henry Garnet, a Jesuit who wrote a book called Equivocation, brings this question to light. The priest asks his inquisitor, “If the king were in your house, and his enemies came to your door asking if he were there, would you say ‘yes’—and betray him—or would you say ‘no’—a lie?” Equivocation, the priest tells Shag, allows you to look at the question behind the question. And the real question in this instance is, “May I come in and kill the king?” And the answer is “no.” This is the key to resolving Shag’s struggle with the king’s powder plot story, too.

Cain’s play is deeply interesting historically, politically, religiously, theatricallly, and, as director Paul Mullins said in a post-show discussion, if you want to see it as current-day political allegory, “that’s OK, too.” At the same time it’s fast-moving, full of action, humor, and clever ripostes. Only six cast members play all the parts—many of them taking on 10 or more roles—and yet the staging was so expertly managed and so well acted that who they were playing was perfectly clear, moment to moment. This production had some shocking special effects too.

STNJ newcomers this year Matthew Stucky as Sharpe (a player, the King, plotter Wintour, etc.) and Dominic Comperatore as Nate (a player, Cecil, etc.), and long-time company utility infielder Kevin Isola as Armin (a player, a witch, states’ attorney, Lady Macbeth, etc.) deserve special mention, though all performances were strong.

Regarding The Gunpowder Plot, the program notes say, “The only thing we know with certainty about the event itself is that it could not possibly have occurred in the way the government claimed.” Accepted at face value for centuries, the government’s story has elicited more recent doubts, and even Parliament’s official website suggests the plot might have been the work of agents-provocateurs who wanted to discredit the Jesuits and cement the Protestant religion in the land.

Baby Doll–McCarter Theatre’s Season Opener

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Baby Doll, Tennessee Williams, McCarter Theatre

Hoffman and McDermott in Baby Doll

Perhaps Tennessee Williams and comedy don’t usually share your same mind-space, but here is a comedy-drama rather neglected in the back of his vast repository of work. Princeton’s McCarter Theatre (link includes a behind the scenes video) has found it, resurrected it, and mounted it in an exciting production on view through October 11.

The play, Baby Doll, was always a mashup. It began with two one-acts (“27 Wagons Full of Cotton” and one with a title something like “The Dinner Nobody Wanted”). It was turned into a script for a 1956 Elia Kazan movie starring Caroll Baker, Karl Malden, an Elie Wallach in his first movie role. That version went through many Kazan-initiated revisions and excited much Church opposition for its racy content—tame today compared to prime time tv. Williams later wrote a full-length stage play based on the screenplay, Tiger Tail, that had a short Broadway run in 1999. But generally, the project lay neglected.

Recently, it was retranslated and revived in France by Pierre Laville, and when McCarter’s Emily Mann read Laville’s version, she saw great potential. She and Laville share “adapted for the stage” credits, as further work had to be done by Mann to reflect American perspectives, particularly regarding race relations in Mississippi in the early 1950s. Miraculously, two weeks before rehearsals began, Mann discovered in Princeton University’s Firestone Library the original movie script by Williams, as he wrote it before Kazan’s “help.” More revisions ensued.

“Baby Doll” is a 19-year-old beauty, married to a much older man, Archie Lee Meighan and living in a falling-apart plantation house (handsome stage set). Baby Doll thought she was not “ready for marriage” at age 18. Although the wedding took place then, it is yet to be consummated (she still sleeps in her crib), according to the deal she, Archie Lee, and her father made before his death. The waiting—which is to end in two more days when Baby Doll turns 20—is driving Archie crazy. He both loves and lusts after her, feelings she does not return.

Archie Lee is nearly destitute, having lost his cotton gin business to the nearby Syndicate plantation, and Baby Doll is furious that the house’s furniture is repossessed. When the Syndicate’s gin is destroyed in a not-so-mysterious fire, the young plant manager, handsome Silva Vacarro, pays the Meighans a visit, bringing with him 27 wagons full of cotton for Archie’s gin. When Archie leaves to take care of the cotton, Silva—an Italian and exotic in those parts—tries to trick Baby Doll into revealing her husband’s role in the fire, and, as New York Times reviewer Charles Isherwood says, “we can practically see her little mind clicking along a few beats behind her tongue.”

The comedy in the play comes not from Neil Simon-style one-liners, but out of the human absurdities of normal, everyday action and impulse. In a post-show discussion, the actors said Mann insists they play their lines straight; playing for laughs would cheapen the effect. That earnestness is what makes the four characters—Baby Doll (Susannah Hoffman), Archie Lee (Robert Joy), Silva (Dylan McDermott), and Baby Doll’s Aunt Rose Comfort (Patricia Conolly)—so believable. While you’re chuckling, your heart is twisting. The play ends on a bit of a Scarlett O’Hara moment, with Baby Doll’s resolution to let tomorrow take care of itself.

Veteran actor Patricia Conolly talked about some of the similarities between the elderly, half-deaf, semi-oblivious maiden aunt she plays here and other Williams characters she’s portrayed. Such women live on the edges of family and society, and they must make enormous effort to “get along,” even with the most demanding hosts (“I have always depended on the kindness of strangers,” Blanche DuBois says.) Otherwise, as Aunt Rose Comfort puts the problem, they “have no place to go.” (Aunt Rose is a secondary character who manages to put a monkey wrench in situations fairly often, being where she shouldn’t be or not being where she should be. And, if you’ve ever had an elderly relative who’s become hard-of-hearing, you’ll know Williams got it right: she hears what she wants to hear!)

At only 90 minutes, Baby Doll is not as complex as Williams’s Big 3: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Streetcar Named Desire, and The Glass Menagerie, but it’s well worth adding to your Williams experience.

Misalliance

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Ames Adamson, Misalliance, George Bernard Shaw

Ames Adamson as John Tarleton in Misalliance

This George Bernard Shaw play at the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey (through August 30) provides some timely commentary for a work first produced 105 years ago. The feminist characters and viewpoints typical of Shaw don’t shock viewers today, as they did in an England just emerging from the Victorian era. But unexpectedly apt was Shaw’s skeptical take on the role of law enforcement. The play’s character Lord Summerhays, reflecting on his time as governor of Jenghiskahn, says:

Justice was not my business. . . . Men are not governed by justice, but by law or persuasion . . . by force or fraud, or both. . . . It is as well that you should know this, my young friend; so that you may recognize in time that anarchism is a game at which the police can beat you.

In a talk-back after the show with STNJ artistic director Bonnie Monte and members of the cast, we learned the play was not well received in its 1910 debut and not produced again for several decades. One critic called it “a debating society of a lunatic asylum,” but it has proved more popular in recent years, perhaps because its structure seems less radical today. Audience members who’d seen other productions commented that this one is lighter and livelier. Farce isn’t the first word that comes to mind when thinking of Shaw, but this version of the play had a great many laugh lines, expertly delivered by the outstanding cast.

The story takes place over the course of a single afternoon in the country house conservatory of wealthy underwear magnate John Tarleton. His son Johnny is a bore, and his daughter Hypatia is engaged to a very unlikely fellow, son of dignified Lord Summerhays. Mrs. Tarleton seems a bit dim, but perhaps there are things she finds it more convenient not to see.

This loosely jelled assemblage is turned upside down by the sudden appearance of an airplane [!], flying low, that crashes into the family greenhouse. From the wreckage emerge the dashing pilot and his last-minute passenger, whom he assumes is another gentleman but who, when the leather cap and goggles come off, turns out to be a Polish woman, both dare-devil and fitness devotee. All relationships are up for grabs from that moment forward.

Numerous proposals of marriage (or less permanent liaisons) ensue, and some of them would rank high in misalliance potential. The pilot quotes one of his three stepfathers, an Anglican priest, with perhaps the play’s most famous line: “If marriages were made by putting all the men’s names into one sack and the women’s names into another, and having them taken out by a blind-folded child like lottery numbers, there would be just as high a percentage of happy marriages as we have now.”

Other misalliances emerge between parents and children, and about that relationship, Shaw says elsewhere, “If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson (which is not at all necessary), hold yourself up as a warning and not as an example.” This is advice amply illustrated by poor Mr. Tarleton and his daughter. “Depend on it,” he tells Lord Summerhays, “in a thousand years it’ll be considered bad form to know who your father and mother are.”

As always, the cast and production values are terrific, with special mention of Ames Adamson as John Tarleton and Erika Rolfsrud as his wife. At some point, a portable Turkish bath proves it’s more than an ornament.

Weekend Double-Play

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The Guardsman

Jon Barker, Victoria Mack, The Guardsman, Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey

Jon Barker & Victoria Mack in STNJ’s The Guardsman

The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey (STNJ) continues its 2015 season—a celebration of Bonnie J. Monte’s 25th season as artistic director—with another play about actors, this one The Guardsman, by Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnár. In it, a young actor begins to suspect his wife is tiring of him and pretends to be a member of the Royal Guard—he can do wigs and costumes after all—to see whether she’ll be tempted. At the end, it seems he’s learned more about himself than he has about her constancy.

The play has many laugh-out-loud moments as the actor struggles to maintain two personas at the same time. Should he be flattered that the actress seems attracted to the dashing guardsman, or offended? He’s both, alternatingly. Talented company regular Jon Barker conveys every bit of this confusion with his expressive body language. Victoria Mack as his wife plays a more opaque character, and in the talk-back at the end, the audience was divided about whether she saw through his disguise. Brent Harris was excellent as the Critic, who is the foil to both actors’ longings.

The play has been mounted several times in English, and is usually played as romantic farce, but Monte believes its frivolous exterior has obscured darker messages at its heart. To pursue this line of thought, she obtained a new literal translation by the playwright’s great-grandson and used that for her adaptation. She found it has “an extraordinary provocative, ground-breaking, heart-breaking, and disturbing inner core” that provokes gales of laughter at the same time it “questions identity, reality, perception and what it takes to validate our existence.”

Love’s Labour’s Lost

On Sunday, we saw Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, one of his many comedies about romantic confusion, this year’s outdoor stage production by the STNJ. Excellent comedic performances by the entire cast. I had both my sun and rain umbrellas with me, though the threatened rain never materialized. These productions are always a highlight of the summer, and the cast manages not to faint in the heat, despite their elaborate costumes and the play’s lively staging, including running up the stairs of the amphitheater at the College of St. Elizabeth.

outdoor theater, STNJ

Set for the outdoor production of Love’s Labour’s Lost, STNJ

Coming Up Next

Yesterday was the last performance for both these plays, a successful continuance of this anniversary season. Next up: Shaw’s Misalliance, August 5 – 30, in which Shaw “gleefully exposes and dismantles the idiosyncrasies of the British classes and their various ‘family values.’”

Also, some critics believe The Guardsman inspired Harold Pinter’s The Lover, whose similar plot likewise melds comedy and drama and has been played both ways. STNJ will have a reading of The Lover on Monday evening, August 17, to explore those possibilities.

Novelist as Theater Director

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theater, stage

(photo: wikimedia)

A thrilling weekend in Williamstown and Lenox, Massachusetts, with a group of serious theater lovers—four plays in three days and rich presentations in-between. Unexpectedly, one of these presentations—a detailed review of the steps of play production—mirrored many of the challenges an author faces in preparing a work of fiction. Let me explain.

Once a theater company decides to produce a particular play its first step is to hire a director who will create the theatrical production. The director {the “author,” in this analogy and here you have to bear with me} helps build the creative team and find the cast {characters}, blocks the play and decides who does what when {plot}, and guides the aesthetic process of the production {editing}.

A large creative design team is needed to help put the play together. These designers take on various tasks, in keeping with the director’s vision for the play and what this specific production is to convey. While of course a director starts with a script, just as an author begins with a more or less firm idea, the way a play emerges in its staging is unique to each production. Literary critics have decided there are only about a half-dozen basic plots, which suggests much of what differentiates the tens of thousands of novels published each year results from loosely analogous attention to the same creative elements a play director must consider.

In theater, set design establishes the physical world of the play; costumes, makeup, and props help define characters. In novels, authors must use description of the scene, and the appearance and clothing of the characters for exactly the same purpose. Lighting and sound design help create a play’s mood and tell the audience “where to look,” just as authors establish mood and focus attention—or, in the case of a mysteries, misdirect it—on key information. Dialect coaches make sure the words come out the way a character of a given era, nationality, and class would say them, and on the page, dialog has to ring true, too.

Choreographers and fight directors design the more complex or risky stage action. Stage-fights have to be both safe and realistic. (Realistic is easy, we were told, safe is hard.) Fiction has similar problems. A battle between two people or a hundred has to seem dangerous—even when it involves a continuing character who we know will survive to appear in the next book. At the same time, heroes must escape in a plausible way. They can’t get off too easily. A recent thriller I read had a confusing scene near the end, in which it wasn’t clear which shooters were inside their cars, in the street, along the wall, or wherever. I couldn’t visualize it, even after three re-reads. In my writing group, we call this a problem in choreography.

While the theater director has a whole team to take care of these essential component parts, the novelist works solo.

In casting a play, a director thinks about the skills and personalities of potential actors, and whether they can fill their roles. The author likewise must decide what type of person to create for the role they will play in the novel. How much can people such as those they describe believably stretch when facing the demands the plot places on them? How are other characters likely to react to them? At the same time, they must avoid creating stereotypes and “stock characters,” who would move through the novel like cardboard cutouts.

The whole process of rehearsing a play—from the initial read-through, to the blocking, through final rehearsals—echoes the editing process. Plays aren’t rehearsed just once; it takes time and myriad adjustments and refinements for all the creative parts to mesh together. Similarly, thinking of a novel draft as similar to a theater production, it’s easy to see the kinds of editing an author must do: tuning up all aspects of design/description, focus, realism, choreography, and character development to best serve the ultimate product—that best-selling, award-winning novel taking shape in the theater of the author’s mind.

The Summer Theater Season Begins!

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The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey

The F.M. Kirby Shakespeare Theatre, Madison, NJ

Two current comedies made for a lively weekend. The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey opened its 2015 season with that George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber classic about a theatrical family, the Cavendishes. The Royal Family is a “grand, exuberant ode to the American theatre, and the wonderful tribe that ‘struts and frets’ upon our stages,” said Bonnie Monte in the director’s notes. You’ll recall that it is a play about three generations of a theater family, based loosely on the Barrymores, and all the aspects of the actor’s life that both attract and repel them (the Know-the-Show audience guide includes more about the play and the scandalous Barrymores, available here). They are never acting more fervently than when the claim they are going to give it up. Beautiful set and costumes (1920’s), and wonderful performances, especially, by Roxanna Hope (Julie Cavendish), Elizabeth Shepherd (Fanny Cavendish), and Samantha Bruce (Gwen Cavendish). Benjamin Sterling as Tony Cavendish is a fireball. On stage until June 21.

The Princeton Festival, an annual performing arts extravaganza that brings a year’s worth of vocal and orchestral concerts, theatrical productions, and related lectures to venues around Princeton in the space of about three weeks, puts on the musical The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee this year. It was a high-energy performance, with catchy songs and engaging characters, well played (music and lyrics: William Finn; book: Rachel Sheinkin). One (unnecessary) song keeps it from being a production suitable for children, with a number of good messages. For adults, it’s all fun. In the Mathews Acting Studio with a live orchestra, performances continue through June 28.

Five Mile Lake

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lake, dock

(photo: Greg Seitz, Creative Commons license)

McCarter Theatre’s final production of the season, Rachel Bonds’s new play, Five Mile Lake, explores the differences and similarities between two pairs of young people. Brother Rufus makes a surprise visit to the “small, somewhat desolate town near Scranton,” bringing his Manhattan girlfriend (Peta) with him. His brother Jamie works in a coffee-and-muffin shop and talks about hockey to his co-worker Mary, whom he is obviously desperate to talk love to. The small town and the lake and the old house he’s fixing up are his world, but Mary just wants to get away. All of them, on the cusp of full adulthood, are settling into their lives, and, looking at what’s ahead, they’re filled with satisfaction or horror.

As in life, everything is not as it seems. The brother who “got out” is facing an abyss of failure on all fronts. His supposedly successful girlfriend also feels the loss of possibilities. The young coffee shop worker who wants to leave believes she’s held back by her brother, but her own shrinking ambitions hem her in. All the characters except Peta have known each other essentially all their lives, and the dynamics among them spring in many directions.

Bonds’s dialog is modern and witty and totally believable. Totally. It’s delivered with precision and heart by a super cast. Kristen Bush, who was outstanding in McCarter’s recent production of Proof, is Mary; Tobias Segal is a moving Jamie, saying much with every body posture—the polar opposite of the constrained Octavius Caesar he portrayed in McCarter’s season-opener, Antony and Cleopatra. Nathan Darrow’s Rufus breezes in from the big city reeking of success that soon becomes the stink of something else. Mahira Kakkar is the girlfriend, desperate to talk about her real situation, and finally, Jason Babinsky is Mary’s PTSD-afflicted brother Danny, manic and wheedling. On stage until May 31. Watch for this play in your area—90 minutes of excellent drama.

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