Anthony J. Mangini 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.
In brief, Korder’s In a Garden is a sophisticated and frequently moving play on the oppressive nature of the state and our often quixotic efforts to be free from it. A lyrical tragedy in the guise of a social drama, theatergoers will be delighted at Korder’s ability to counter our expectations and to keep us on our toes.
Maria/Stuart’stitle is a pun on the rhetorical tragedy Maria Stuart written in 1800 by Friedrich Schiller (whose bust features conspicuously in Grote’s play). Though beyond perhaps slight similarities to the Strum and Drang school, I’m afraid the reference is lost on me. A more apt precursor here would be the family romances of Sam Shepard, most clearly his Fool for Love. Shepard’s own interests in the incestuous family romance, his uses of magical realism, and the ways in which his plays descend from sadness in a menacing uncertainty foreground much of what Grote seems to be gesturing toward.
In short, A Midlife Something captures many of the emotional frustrations of living listlessly young and broke in today’s America, even as it suffers from an ill-paced narrative and too narrow a sphere of activity. Cardiff’s story obviously means something very personal to him, and that investment is palpable in A Midlife Something’s big heart. Now if only the story might be as equally big.
Audiences of The Artistic Home’s recent staging of Iguana may keep this in mind, if only because the struggle of its central character, Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon, so closely intimates the one Williams himself would be forced to undergo in the years following. Shannon (played here by the incomparable John Mossman), is a man on the edge. He is “cracked up” and “at the end of [his] rope,”
If The Building Stage’s current production of Dawn, Quixote feels undergirded by a pervasive—even wistful—sadness, it’s not hard to understand why. For following the show’s completed run on April 27th, The Building Stage will be shuttering its doors for good. Thankfully founder and artistic director Blake Montgomery’s recent adaptation of Cervantes’s classic is a final act truly worthy of remembrance.
Yet I suppose its luridly overdone production design is the closest Priscilla comes to actual camp. Like a drag queen who genuinely believes her own tinsel-laden illusions, Priscilla is more often than not only “playing” a good time. Desperate to keep you from noticing the wrinkled clichés beneath all the makeup or how its only ever lip-syncing someone else’s tunes, Priscilla blinds you with tasteless spectacle, gaudy costumes and enough bitchy “shade” throwing for an episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race.
But Priscilla isn’t fooling anyone. Dress it up however you like. It still doesn’t sing…
Thus with a remarkable eye for Shakespeare’s darker tonalities, Falls’ Measure for Measure is wickedly smart even as it seemingly pulls our inner moral compasses all which ways. As beautifully constructed as it is intellectually evocative, it comes highly recommended.