Author: Tom Williams

Eclipse Theatre Company, whose 2013 season will feature the work of English dramatist Alan Ayckbourn, opened this week with the 1985 black comedy, Woman in Mind. The story of a middle class English hausfrau’s descent into madness, the play features Ayckbourn’s characteristic wit and bold flair for experimentation in theatrical form. Still, though director Steve Scott has delivered a successfully atmospheric production, featuring some delightfully cheeky performances by its non-Equity cast, something nonetheless feels lost in translation.

No, Hunter thankfully has more respect for his audience, and he doesn’t shirk from showing how Charlie’s gross obesity is emulative of something equally pained within. Rather than making a martyr or a saint of Charlie (Dale Calandra), suffering at the hands of a society which has tragically failed to understand him—as in the vein of Bernard Pomerance’s 1977 play The Elephant Man—Hunter has wisely opted to pit Charlie against himself and to make of him his own worst enemy.

… the success of this transition is highly dependent on the performance of McCraney’s leading lady. Thankfully, Cheryl Lynn Bruce as the widowed matriarch Shelah is a revelation, keeping well apace with the broad emotional and spiritual arcs that McCraney sets her on over the course of the play and delivering one of the most inspired acts of self-healing you are likely to see on stage. And Tina Landau’s deeply sensitive direction successfully is well-paced and attuned to the unique formal challenges posed by McCraney’s play. And David Gallo and Collette Pollard’s scenic design—which includes the remarkable onstage collapse of Shelah’s home—is as technically dazzling as it is emotionally resonant.

The sustained popularity of Oliver!—loosely based on the classic novel by Charles Dickens (or more likely, David Lean’s 1948 film version)—is largely derived from the virtuosic talents of its composer and lyricist, Lionel Bart, who peppers the rise of Dickens’s iconic workhouse foundling with a rousing score of Old English folk songs, hymns, chorales and dances. From the stirring opening number “Food Glorious Food” to the hauntingly plaintive “Who Will Buy” to the insufferably catchy “Consider Yourself,” Bart’s spirited music continues to move each successive generation of theatergoers fifty years later.