With Geezers, Graves and Johnston recreate their magic in a wonderful, honest and heartfelt drama. This ambitious work is both a ‘coming-of-age’ drama and a nostalgic trip back for the ‘geezers’ living in a retirement home. One of playwright Johnston’s strengths is his ability to create well-rounded empathetic characters then put them in believable situations. He sprinkles honesty with humor, even gallows humor, together with smart, witty dialogue without resorting to sentimentality.
In short, although none of the repertoire here was completely first-rate (the Mozart overture excepted), and despite my reservations about Joshua Bell’s playing, this was a highly engaging evening of music, and the performance of the Dvořák was beyond reproach. James Conlon clearly has an exceptional rapport with this ensemble and often brings out its best; I, for one, would gladly welcome him as a frequent guest during the regular CSO season at Orchestra Hall.
This is an anthology comprised of six of Samuel Beckett’s short plays. There is no discernible plot (why would there be? It’s Beckett). Each short play shares a common theme of perception, particularly what we can and cannot see.
The opening performance of Beethoven’s Egmont Overture at the CSO concert he presided over at Ravinia on Thursday evening gave barely a glimpse of the heights to which his conducting would rise at its best over the course of the program. The orchestra played especially well for him, with clean articulation and a good deal of alertness, but the piece – part of the incidental music written to Goethe’s play of the same name, but perhaps not Beethoven at his most inspired – never quite came alive, between the at-times wooden phrasing (especially in the woodwinds) and lack of passionate abandon; the somewhat restrained tempo did not help matters, either.
Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle written to demonstrate the flight of the immigrant laborer in Chicago’s stockyards ended up getting the public to demand reforms in the food processing slaughterhouses. Adapter and director Matt Foss has mounted a moving and vividly blood curling adaptation of Sinclair’s The Jungle with emphasis on the toll and exploitation of the immigrant laborers by American society.
Most of the songs performed are, of course, hits by The Marvelettes. It begins with the aforementioned “Please Mr. Postman” and then continues on with others such as “Playboy” and “Beachwood 4-5789.” But the show ventures out and brings in a few other Motown hits to join the fun. Among these Daniel Phillips, who makes a later appearance as Jimmy Ruffin, gives an exceptional performance of “What Becomes of the Broken Hearted.”
Playwright Lynn Nottage has emerged as a master story teller with a keen instinct for developing characters. Her six characters in Intimate Apparel each warrant a play of their own but only Esther (the empathetic Kelly Owens) gets Nottage’s focus. We quickly love Esther. We become fully engaged as we meet Esther who is a thirty-five year old single African-American women living in lower Manhattan in 1905 in Mrs. Dickson’s (Frances Wilkerson’s) boarding house.
Shakespeare’s very funny comedy begins with the conniving ways of a roly-poly Sir John Falstaff (Brian McCartney) to seduce not one but two wives (Mistress Ford-Lydia Berger Gray; and Mistress Page-Patrice Egleston). The wives conspire on creative antics to see that Falstaff gets his comeuppance which offer hysterical situations. The play raises the concerns of trust, greed, deception, chaos, and love.
Almost unknown in America, Paul Abraham was the toast of Berlin in the late 1920’s – 30’s with his jazz-infused, sexy dancing operettas. He combined the classical German-styled operettas in the tradition of Franz Lehar with the contemporary jazz style popular in Weimar Germany. His whimsical musical style included rich ballads, tantalizing ‘show-stoppers,’ snappy dance numbers, tangos, as well as haunting lover songs such as the haunting love song: “Toujours l’amour.”
The Morrison clan lives in a cold water tiny flat in the East End of Glasgow in the 1930’s. Maggie (Lori Myers in a tour de force performance) is the care-worn burned-out matriarch who finds herself caring for her five children including two “wee-uns,” a teenaged boy Ernie (Michael Saguto), an adult daughter Jenny (Ellie Reed) and her oldest married son Alec (Curtis Jackson) plus Granny Morrison (Maggie Cain). Maggie is the glue that hold things together as the clan struggles to survive in the tiny flat with limited funds since John Morrison (Scot West) is out of work and on the dole