REVIEWS

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.

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

When playwright David Rogers got permission to use any of the hundreds of TV show episodes from Paul Henning, a stage comedy emerged and when Rogers (with help from his daughter upon his death) decided to create a musical version of The Beverly Hillbillies, they turned to an expert musical composer, Chicagoan Gregg Opelka who has penned many smart, tuneful musicals including Sour Du Jour and the Singing Cowboy.
This collaboration resulted in a slick, fun, and, of course, tuneful Broadway musical. This is not a country or bluegrass musical but rather a character driven musical that does feature country-ish tunes depiciting the Ozark hillbillies – the Clampets but it also contains songs about the Beverly Hills characters. The banker, his wife, the secretary and the folks who run the private school as well as the grifters who try to extort money from the Clampett’s all get their songs.