Entertainment :: Theatre
EDGE Best of 2005 :: Theatre by Robert Nesti
EDGE National Arts & Entertainment EditorSunday Dec 25, 2005
2005 may be remembered as the year that the Wilbur Theatre closed its doors forever; not a happy way to remember the year, but one that indicates the changing nature of the economic dynamics of the city scenes with its emphasis on either touring mega-productions in venues like the Opera House and the Wang Center, or the work of the smaller companies in town in performing spaces that run the gamut from the sleek Calderwood Pavilion to the delightfully funky Ramrod Center for the Performing Arts. EDGE critics went to all of them, shirked from the worst, muddled through everything in-between, and thrilled to the best, which are listed below.
Foreign Aids
Reviewed by David Foucher
(American Repertory Theatre, January)
For nearly two hours, Pieter-Dirk Uys stands on a simply-crafted stage in a bare black room and astounds two hundred strangers with his tremendous compassion for his people, who face the greatest threat to their lives in the form of AIDS. His two most potent weapons – farce and political satire – take the stage with him, along with fictitious characters (Evita Bezuidenhout and her sister Bambi Kellerman), a host of famous imitations, and a bevy of prophylactics. You might call Foreign AIDS performance art, or comedy, or even drag… but to squeeze Uys into a genre would be to deny that which makes him great. This is not theatre, it is a mission of urgent need, delivering at once the prognosis and the cure for today’s unbearable culture of fear… What’s truly surprising is that the American Repertory Theatre’s Zero Arrow Theatre, which opens with Uys’ show, is half a world away from South Africa… and yet in the fact of the eminently human frustration we all have for this pandemic, regardless of our socio-economic status, more than twenty years and countless deaths into the struggle, Uys makes his audience realize that the need for knowledge and laughter is yet as real as the need for a cure. Until we have the latter, the former are our truest weapons.
Thrill Me
Reviewed by Robert Nesti
(Stoneham Theatre, January)
Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett. Velma Kelley and Roxie Hart. Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde. Now to this choice list of the musical theater’s murderous rogues gallery add Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, the 1920’s “thrill killers” whose exploits have been put to music in Thrill Me: the Leopold and Loeb Story. Their story’s been told before, most noticeably on film in the courtroom drama “Compulsion” and the gay deconstruction “Swoon;” but never before in such an intriguing fashion as in this two-character musical being given a tight production at the Stoneham Theatre … It may make a few missteps, but Stephen Dolginoff’s ingenious reworking of the familiar story never loses its grip on its audience.
Dido, Queen of Carthage
Reviewed by David Foucher
(American Repertory Theatre, February)
Thomas Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage is a retelling of the Cathaginian Queen’s story in which heroic Aeneas takes shelter in Dido’s court following the destruction of Troy; the two become lovers, but when Aeneas is called by the Gods to sail for Italy (where he later founds Rome), Dido curses him and then, bereft, commits suicide. . . .In the capable hands of director Neil Bartlett, the story unfolds smartly, energetically, sensually and vibrantly upon the ART’s bare stage. . . . Between the dalliances of the gods lie the hapless humans – Aeneas (Colin Lane), Dido (Diane D’Aquila), Dido’s sister Anna (Karen MacDonald) and Iarbas (Gregory Simmons). These performances of these principals are near unnerving in their ability to collide and consummate theatrically, their four emotional trajectories impacting not merely their own fates, but the lives of the kingdoms around them. . . . And much must be said of the presence of John Kelly as well – for if there is a Greek Chorus in Bartlett’s “Dido” it is in the non-verbal tones of Cupid. Kelly proves unnervingly pliant, twisting a song from innocent joy to devilish mockery with a sneer or a flip of his hand. His dramatics are fey – for sure – but he’s playful, and by the end of the show Cupid has stolen a place in the hearts of the audience.
Measure For Measure
Reviewed by Sandy MacDonald
(Actors’ Shakespeare Project, March)
Bare-bones Shakespeare in unconventional venues – sounds like a snorer, no? But it’s clear from the get-go that, like the Actors’ Shakespeare Project’s inaugural outing, "Richard III" (set in the stark Old South Meeting House), ASP’s Measure for Measure will be anything but soporific. A church nave-turned-nightclub, awash in a devilish magenta glow, pulses to a popping synthesizer beat as louche types – ‘50s-style bad boys, girls in streetwalker get-up – schmooze with onlookers at cafe tables clustered around a bare platform stage… A mere nine actors – extraordinary actors, all – assume a total of seventeen roles… As if these colorful impersonations weren’t reward enough, the actors assuming the central roles are riveting. … Sparkling text, energetic pacing, psychological subtlety – apparently, under Robert Walsh’s direction, you can have it all… Leave your schoolroom notions of Shakespeare behind, as artistic director Benjamin Evett’s brilliant ensemble has done, and you’ll find yourself sitting on the edge of your seat.
Take Me Out
Reviewed by Robert Nesti
(SpeakEasy Stage Company, Boston TheatreWorks, and Broadway in Boston, May)
In Take Me Out, Richard Greenberg’s gay-themed baseball play, mighty Casey comes out. Not the famous slugger from the grade school poem, but his contemporary equivalent: Darren Lemming, a hunky and extraordinarily gifted center fielder from the New York Empires (read Yankees) who puts his teammate on edge with his revelation… That Greenberg explores them with scenes set in a locker room (replete on-stage showers and full-frontal nudity) only added to the play’s voyeuristic appeal when it appeared on Broadway two seasons ago where it won a Tony Award for Best Play. Yet there’s much more to the play than beefcake. Now its Boston premiere, “Take Me Out” is a smart, often very funny look at the topic of homosexuality and professional sports, baseball in particular… Paul Daigneault’s staging has a simplicity and elegance in perfect pitch with the contours of Greenberg’s narrative… Eric Levenson’s stylized ballpark set is decked out the summer colors of blue and green. Best of all he seamlessly integrates the working showers onto the stage to allow the two shower scenes -- and the celebrated nudity -- to take center stage. These scenes will likely sell many tickets, which makes for good news for the creative team who put together this first-rate production of Greenberg’s sharply observed and pertinent play.
The Homecoming
Reviewed by Sandy MacDonald
(Merrimack Repertory Company, May)
Brilliant play (a perverse classic), brilliant cast – definitely worth the trek... Harold Pinter’s 1965 masterpiece, The Homecoming, is enjoying an optimal revival at the Merrimack Repertory Theatre in Lowell – a bit of a haul from the city, but well worth a journey. The company’s artistic director, Charles Towers, who every so often himself directs a favorite work, has assembled an ideal cast and is utterly faithful to this quirky, unnerving study of twisted family ties… What might not come across on the page, and is salient in performance, is how sly and funny the work is. What at first glance might seem misogynistic is more of an absurdist take on the primal needs that drive us all… As for humanity as a whole, it’s not a pretty picture – but it certainly is vivid, especially as captured in this 100 percent perfect production.
Follies
Reviewed by Robert Nesti
(Barrington Stage Company, June)
In the program of the Barrington Stage’s production of Follies there’s the famous photo of Gloria Swanson standing in the rubble of the freshly demolished Roxy Theatre – Hollywood glamour amongst the ruins. The photo became a metaphorical image for director Harold Prince in his creation of “Follies,” a backstage musical in which the past collides with the present. Prince’s initial production, lavishly produced in 1971, was considered either the greatest musical ever written, or a long-winded exercise in marital discord tacked on Stephen Sondheim’s expansive and reverential score… Yet it’s Sondheim’s evocation of the great musical-comedy writers of the past (Kern, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Gershwin, Porter) that keeps “Follies” in the public eye either in the infrequent revival or the concert version, … but that approach is not “Follies.” To fully appreciate the show’s invigorating concept requires a full production where the songs and James Goldman’s sharply-etched libretto build to a surrealistic finale, one-part Ziegfeld, one-part Fellini. … Barrington Stage Company, under the direction of its artistic director Julianne Boyd, is providing such an opportunity … Boyd has pulled of a spectacular coup – a shrewdly thought, emotionally involving production that serves the musical’s many virtues. This may not be that original “Follies,” but what could be that? Instead it’s a first-rate revival that gets virtually everything right.
Arcadia
Reviewed by Jennifer Bubriski
(Publick Theatre, July)
You may not think that learning about iterative equations, English picturesque landscaping and potentially obscure works of the poet Byron would be a fun way to pass a summer evening. Well, bucko, you’d be dead wrong because the Publick Theater’s production of Arcadia offers all that in one enormously entertaining package. It’s a production that makes what’s brainy what’s sexy, and it’s a celebration of a great playwright and great acting that’s not to be missed… To start things off in the right direction, the Publick Theater is blessed with Tom Stoppard’s brilliant script. Stoppard (“Shakespeare in Love”, “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead”) has a gift for language, and it’s a joy to hear his crisply witty dialogue given free reign, with acting parrying with each other with dripping sarcasm and complex ideas the same way boxers dance around a ring… The Publick’s outdoor setting is the perfect backdrop for the simple set, and director Diego Arciniegas effectively integrates the lush banks of the Charles River into the playing space. There are some flaws, but we’ll chalk the occasional muffed line or lost accent to actors still hitting their stride.
Hamlet
Reviewed by Robert Nesti
(Commonwealth Shakespeare Company, July)
An Abercrombie Hamlet? That’s one way to look at this arresting production that features a fiery performance from hunky Jeffrey Donovan as the most troubled of Shakespearean heroes… . He is, of course, “Hamlet,” the troubled prince at the center of Shakespeare’s daunting revenge melodrama where (to quote a famous Howard Dietz lyric) “a ghost and a prince meet/And everyone ends in mincemeat.” The ghost is that of Hamlet’s father who appears like an apparition out of Tim Burton’s “Sleepy Hollow,” a towering gaunt figure with a white face smeared with blood and a booming, amplified voice that could raise the dead. His appearance is one of the many touches that make it apparent that this isn’t going to be a typical, painted-by-the-numbers “Hamlet.” Not that director Steven Maler alters the text in any way – there are a few cuts, but at nearly 3 hours, this is pretty much the full play. What he does is give it a compelling vision. First by casting it in a contemporary setting that resembles an Ellsinore as imagined by Frank Gehry… To this high style Maler adds substance in the person of actor Jeffrey Donovan, who may look as if he strolled out of ad on MTV, but brings to the role such a petulant attitude that he puts a new spin on the most misunderstood of young monarchs.
King Lear
Reviewed by Sandy MacDonald
(Actors’ Shakespeare Project, October)
You know the minute you walk into the space – the BU College of Fine Art’s Studio 102 – that something primal is going to happen. The hall, with its stone fireplace and pair of massive pillars, looks as if some artistically inclined frat boys had had their way with it: British tricolor splashed across the vaulted ceiling, a couple of muscular fight scenes daubed on the walls, the floor littered with dirt-dark compost. Lined up on either side like spectators at a jousting match, we’re gazing down at an arena, a real one. Clearly, this will be no ordinary King Lear… In the hands of the brash and inventive Actors’ Shakespeare Project, it definitely is not. Did you ever imagine that "Lear" could be funny? As the irascible semi-retired king, antic – and astoundingly fit – 80-year-old Alvin Epstein makes it so… That Epstein, who enjoys national renown (he appeared in the American premieres of both "Waiting for Godot" and "Endgame," and played the Fool to Orson Welles’s Lear) should have had to wait until age eighty for this heaven-sent role seems perverse – as is the fact that he’s gifting it, nightly, to an audience of only several score. But how lucky we are to have him, up close and in such good company.
Cinderella Rocks!
Reviewed by David Foucher
(Gold Dust Orphans, October)
Ryan Landry and the Gold Dust Orphans are fresh off the boat from Provincetown with this summer’s outlandish, hysterical hit, Cinderella Rocks! Retooled for the more intimate surroundings of the “Ramrod Center for the Performing Arts,” this earnest production takes on a few new actors and a more three-dimensional set, actually notching the show upward from its campy roots on the Cape. A vehicle for ultra-serious theatre it is nevertheless not – but it’s probably the funniest show you’ll see this fall, and I stand by my assertion that “Cinderella” is an instant classic, the type of show that will be talked about for years… Still, it’s the music that truly makes “Cinderella” rock. Thrash punk, Broadway ballads, country and pop have been organically, even carelessly, thrown together with thoughtful – and usually hysterical – lyrics… To have “Cinderella” in Boston is a joy – not merely because it’s tremendous fun, but also because the highbrow theatre scene here desperately needs to reestablish a connection with this type of low-budget, high-flying, crowd-pleasing work… Landry and the Orphans have their ups and downs; but they know their audience, and their craft, well. “Cinderella” lives right up to its title: it totally rocks.
The Kvetching Continues
Reviewed by Robert Nesti
(Theater Offensive, October)
“I’m a child hater in a family musical!” berates comic character actress Jackie Hoffman early in The Kvetching Continues, her brilliantly funny, self-effacing solo turn at the Theater Offensive through Sunday. You have to imagine Hoffman as a fish-out-of-water in anything she does: with her rubber face expressions and booming voice she suggests a cross between Amy Sedaris and Carol Burnett. . . . In “Kvetching,” she tells the story of being a D-list Broadway diva, the kind of performer Rosie O’Donnell points to backstage and tells a child to look at the funny lady . . . Throughout the 70-minute show she characterizes herself as a cynical, Jewish New Yorker that always find something to bitch about, such as achieving her childhood dream of being in a long-running Broadway musical. “When did my life’s dream become like temping?” she wonders. Hoffman is at her funniest when she takes on such sacred cows as children (“I called a 5 year old child a fucking whore and had no regrets about it”) and her oversized personality. (“You know what a lousy actress I am? John Waters told me my acting is too big.”) But with equal amounts of sass and wit, Hoffman turns bitterness into delirium.
Kiss of the Spider Woman
Reviewed by Robert Nesti
(SpeakEasy Stage Company, October)
If you think Kander and Ebb as simply mainstream Broadway tunesmiths specializing in flashy vehicles for stars like Lauren Bacall and Liza Minnelli, think again: both “Cabaret” and “Chicago” blazed new trails; and Kiss of the Spider Woman, their musical adaptation of the Manuel Puig novel and popular film adaptation, used the vernacular of the musical theater in daring and provocative ways. . . . (The) SpeakEasy Stage Company manages the near impossible: presenting a chamber-styled version of the show that is thrilling in its theatricality and rigorous in its purpose, beginning with its visual conception. Director Paul Daigneault and his set designer Eric Levenson create an environment that seamlessly moves between the sordid prison and Molina’s dream world with breathtaking simplicity. . . . Casting is also a key to its success. As Molina, John King is splendid, creating an impeccably distinctive characterization that avoids the effeminate caricature he’s been reduced to in the past. . . . “Kiss of the Spider Woman” is unusual musical theater: campy and serious, personal and political, spectacular and grim – a heady mix of show biz conventions and harrowing human drama that takes its audiences to that rare place only inspired musicals can go.
True West
Reviewed by Jennifer Bubriski
(New Repertory Theatre, November)
Boys will be boys. Sam Shepard’s script for True West proves that nobody pushes a boy’s buttons like his brother, no matter how grown up the boys supposedly are. The New Repertory Theatre’s production of the play proves that you can’t keep a good wolf down. Todd Alan Johnson, who played the Wolf/Cinderella’s Prince in the New Rep’s “Into the Woods”, is deliciously lupine as the bad brother Lee, all crazy-eyed cunning and sweat-stained magnetism. It’s a bravura performance, only made possible by the rock-steady comic support of John Kuntz as responsible brother Austin. All in all, “True West” is an acting feast served up with relish and, well, toast.
White Christmas
Reviewed by David Foucher
(Wang Center, December)
In today’s modern theatre sensibility, where avant garde is equated with art and even sprawling technical productions such as “Wicked” specialize in wizardry designed to keep audiences off-balance, it’s remarkable that the lush, enchanting production of Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” was bankrolled. Based on the 1954 film of the same name, it’s an unapologetically vintage show, filled with restful scenery and dependable performances – along with sensibilities that harken back at least a few decades. For the theatrical nouveau aficionado, the show might feel old-fashioned. But for the rest of us, it’s a charming return to a time where life was certainly simpler, and perhaps more picturesque for it. “Count your blessings,” the show suggests. Will do: White Christmas is one of them.
As for theater outside of Boston, the most notable was The Mystery of Edwin Drood served up in a delightfully cheeky manner by the Trinity Repertory Company in September; McReele, Stephen Belger’s perceptive and pertinent play about race and politics served up in an immaculate production by Wellfleet Harbor Actors’ Theatre, also in September; and Tammy Faye Starlite in Born Again, Again, whose Red-State country singer (played by Tammy Lang) charmed Provincetown audiences with her Blue State attitudes.
Robert Nesti can be reached at rnesti@edgepublications.com.
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