Category: Reviews

Two monologists to round out the festival.

Kevin Kling, storyteller from Minnesota, brings a bundle of endearing material to the Marinoff stage. His stories, sometimes equally harrowing and goofy (being struck by lightning, riding shotgun in a small plane with his father flying into a fog bank), are supported by multi-instrumentalist Robertson Witmer. The set by David M. Barber puts Kling in a Joseph Cornell box, deep cosmic blue, angel’s wings, painted portraits.

Kling has an extensive back catalog on NPR, from back in the days when we could spare six or seven minutes for a unique voice.

Cody Leroy Wilson, Asian American son of a Vietnamese mother and a West Virginia farmer, gives a voice and a face to the Vietnamese family that he can never know. His mother, adopted from an orphanage during the Vietnam War (some of us do remember the horror, whether at home or deployed), has no memory of her parents, that is, Wilson’s grandparents. What might have happened? Well, the title of the piece gives it all away.

• Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, W. Va.
• Kevin Kling: Unraveled, by Kevin Kling, with music by Robertson Witmer, directed by Steven Dietz
• Did My Grandfather Kill My Grandfather?, by Cody Leroy Wilson, directed by Victor Malana Maog

In Magdalene, Mark St. Germain, continuing to mine the vein of real-life people who have become clouded in mythology, gives us an imagined meeting between Simon Peter, soon to become first in the line of Catholic popes, and the titular Mary, soon to be sidelined as an important figure in the Christian faith. The work probes the uncomfortable inconsistencies across the various accounts in the century following Jesus’s death;¹ asks why there are no women priests in Catholicism; and challenges the notion that a physical church is necessary for practice of the Christ’s worship.² As St. Germain notes in his playwright interview, “it’s not something that could play in the Kennedy Center right now.” What does a parable mean? Wherein lies a miracle? These are the play’s questions.

Something I can’t unhear: the idea that when speaking of Peter, never the sharpest tool in the shed, Jesus meant Matthew 16:18 as a joke.

The festival has backed up the production with a sturdy dramaturgical note and many links for additional reading.

¹How much would you trust a strictly oral account, handed down by his advisers and their successors, of what Warren Harding did and said?

²St. Germain’s Mary reminds Peter that Jesus did not say, “Blessed are the landlords.”

• Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, W. Va.
• Magdalene, by Mark St. Germain, directed by Elena Araoz

Side Effects May Include… is not a play so much as it is a dramatized version of a previously published memoir of Loomer’s struggles with her son’s akathisia, a debilitating, somewhat mysterious movement disorder linked to both genetics and medication. This is not to take away from solid ensemble work by Sophie Zmorrod, Susan Lynskey, and Jimmy Kieffer.

Happy Fall: A Queer Stunt Spectacular is, in a sense, a nostalgic return to 1980, when it wasn’t safe to be out, and before AIDS replaced one scourge for another—before CGI, green screens, and all that jazz. It’s a love story between two stuntmen, an aging Tom Cruise type and a young upstart with some serious Eve Harrington vibes. We do see some fancy fights (my teachers call fight choreography “ballet with dangerous props”) and wire work, and a practice dummy takes some of the lines, but we don’t really learn that much about stunt work.

Do the multiple framing devices get in the way? I’m not sure. The trope of the 8-week movie shoot that runs over to 9 months, however, is a little forced.

Credit is due to Stefania Bulbarella’s projection design; Se Hyun Oh’s set is packed with scrims and TV monitors.

• Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, W. Va.
• Side Effects May Include…, by Lisa Loomer, directed by Meredith McDonough
• Happy Fall: A Queer Stunt Spectacular, by Lisa Sanaye Dring, with Rogue Artists Ensemble, directed by Ralph B. Peña

A follow-up to my notes on the Lincoln Center Floyd Collins: the new production lightens the tone a bit, and gives Floyd more music. The discordant, clashing music for “I Landed on Him” is shortened, now being just an underscoring of Skeets’ tale. Floyd now has the songs “And She’d Have Blue Eyes” and “It Moves.”

As the drop curtain flies out, the first thing we see is a pair of black patent leather wingtips belonging to Ewen Montagu (Natasha Hodgson, possessor of a righteous growl), arrogantly propped up on a desk. A little over the top, you say? Oh, just wait. This fizzy poly-character musical comedy, based on the true story of a misinformation operation designed to mislead German defenders of Sicily in World War II, hardly gives one time to breathe—the patter songs are that fast, the glitz has glitter all over it, the physical schtick goes to extremes, the character switches flash by in an eyeblink. The show doesn’t just effervesce, it hypervesces.

I’ll call out Jean Leslie’s (Claire-Marie Hall) Beyonce-level song, “All the Ladies,” and Hester Legatt’s (Jak Malone) quiet “Letter to Bill.” Hester is fabricating a letter from home to a British flier (in order to build up the subterfuge), and her heartbroken subtext elicits some snuffles in the audience. Malone also appears as an American pilot, with all the Yankee doodles.

Highly recommended.

• Operation Mincemeat, book, music, and lyrics by David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson, and Zoë Roberts, orchestrations by Steve Sidwell, directed by Robert Hastie, John Golden Theatre, New York

See Brian Selbert’s piece for the Times for a peek at the backstage magic.

The new production at Lincoln Center is a luminous reading of Adam Guettel’s Floyd Collins, a musical inspired by the true story of the titular Kentucky caver who found himself trapped, while a media circus sprang up above ground. Lighting by Scott Zielinksi catches Floyd in follow spots as he spelunks; backlighting sharply delineates townspeople in silhouette tableaux against the cyc.

Guetell’s twisty music likewise follows Floyd up, under, over, and around during “The Call” sequence. When Floyd (Jeremy Jordan) is joined by his younger brother Homer (Jason Gotay) for the duets “Daybreak” and “The Riddle Song,” the results crackle with electricity. The Reporters’ patter song “Is That Remarkable” is all one could wish for.

Floyd’s set contrivance on which he spends much of his time supine has perhaps been modified: it doesn’t quite resemble the lounge chair that bothered some critics. Maybe a lounger as designed by Gerrit Reitveld.

Monochrome costumes (Anita Yavich) and props for “The Dream” foretell Floyd’s demise.

• Floyd Collins, music and lyrics by Adam Guettel, book and additional lyrics by Tina Landau, orchestrations by Bruce Coughlin, directed by Tina Landau, Lincoln Center Theater at the Vivian Beaumont, New York

TK: Notes on differences in the performed music from the recorded original cast album.

Rollicking is a word perhaps falling out of use, but it’s a good one for Dead Outlaw, an ensemble and country rock band comic musical about the preposterously improbable life and afterlife of Elmer McCurdy, feckless bank robber of the early 1900s whose mummified corpse was a sideshow attraction into the 1940s. Oh, and promotional device for 1930s exploitation filmmaker Dwain Esper.

The show-stopper song is “Up in the Stars,” sung and swung by Thom Sesma as Los Angeles County Cornoner Noguchi, a medical professional who’s seen a thing or two. Ring-a-ding-ding! Andrew Durand is McCurdy: it’s the only time that you’ll read “stiff” as complement for an actor. Carrying the narrative ball of wax through time and space is good ole boy Jeb Brown as narrator and Bandleader.

Props to the technical crew, who manage to bring a loaded concrete mixer onstage for Elmer’s final rest, and to deftly turn the quick striking of a set piece into a sight gag.

• Dead Outlaw, music and lyrics by David Yazbek and Eric Della Penna, book by Itmar Moses, orchestrations by Della Penna, Dean Sharenow, and Yazbek, directed by David Cromer, Longacre Theatre, New York

Jeff Whitty and James Magruder’s free adaptation of Sir Philip Sidney’s 16th-century Arcadia, with songs from The Go-Go’s and places nearby, is a great wakeup for a drowsy Sunday afternoon. Amping up the cross-dressing plots of Sidney’s original material, Head Over Heels upends gender norms and is, in the words of a program note, “a celebration of queer joy in all its forms.” The text, a blend of Elizabethan English, florid “Eclogue” spoken by the shepherd Musidorus, and 21st-century language, is a language lover’s delight. “Ventilate the belfry of thy mind,” one character says. Wait, what?

Worthy of note are very fine ensemble choreography by Maurice Johnson, Stephen Russell Murray’s subclinically hysterical worrywart courtier Dametas, and Julia Link’s Pamela, delivering a righteous rock and roll belt.

It wouldn’t be a Constellation show without puppets by Matthew Pauli, including an enormous snake puppet on rods and a singing chorus of sheep (“Mad about You”).

• Head Over Heels, songs by The Go-Go’s,* based on The Arcadia by Sir Philip Sidney, conceived and original book by Jeff Whitty, adapted by James Magruder, directed by Allison Arkell Stockman, music direction by Walter “Bobby” McCoy, Constellation Theatre Company, Washington

*and others

This is be Constellation’s last production at the (perhaps snakebit venue) Source Theatre.

This Irish/American production of Beckett’s cornerstone work splits the difference in pronunciation, some characters saying GAWD-oh and some saying go-DOUGH. Joseph McGucken layers a slice of vaudeville on to his Vladmir. As Estragon, Barry McEvoy summons a touching sequence of grunts and sighs to end each sequence of “We’re waiting for Godot./Ah!”

• Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett, directed by Robert McNamara, Scena Theatre, Washington

Perhaps influenced by my recent reading, I was struck by the reverberations of Wittgenstein’s “builders” (“Slab!”, “Block!”) with Pozzo’s commands to Lucky (“On! Back!”).

Masterful work by Drew Sharpe as Jason and Tyrone, the child’s hand and rod puppet that spirals from Lou Costello’s side of the “Who’s on First?” routine into an Audrey II.

• Hand to God, by Robert Askins, directed by Josh Stricklin, Keegan Theatre, Washington

David Auburn’s Summer, 1976 is a gleaming little gem of a two-hander for D.C. fan favorites Kate Eastwood Norris (as Diana) and Holly Twyford (as Alice). Auburn returns to life in the academic sphere, as explored by his Proof, this time with Alice as a visibly bored faculty wife and Diana as an artist, visibly blocked but not so visibly frustrated and self-defeating. These two unhappy women connect, through their six-year-old daughters, for a life’s moment in the titular summer.

The story unfolds largely in narration directly to the audience, Alice and Diana speaking in turn (and also jumping into the roles of their daughters and Alice’s husband from time to time). The effect is that the speaker gives us a window into what she’s thinking without the need to unspool a full dialogue scene—at least when she’s not describing a dream or fantasy to be abruptly yanked out from under us, or when she hasn’t deceived herself. And it allows her to speculate/presume what her partner is thinking and feeling—likewise not always a reliable read.

All that said, the play is a comedy, with betrayals and reversals and reveals—and a reunion with a wasp’s stinger of a coda.

• Summer, 1976, by David Auburn, directed by Vivienne Benesch, Studio Theatre Milton Theatre, Washington

Matthew Broderick leads a successful, if not always faithful, adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’s Jazz age satire. The framing device of ensemble members reading The Very Book in a public library of today, backed up by the dramaturg’s note, encourages audiences to engage with this hundred-year-old masterpiece, and that’s to the good.

While George Babbitt’s journey—from Republican conformity to soft-core rebellion, returning to the arms of the Good Citizens League (strong hints of It Can’t Happen Here in this adaptation)—is preserved, the dialogue is modernized, stripping out nearly all of the jargon and colloquialisms of the 1920s. This sweetening is probably also a good idea, as some of Lewis’s passages would be incomprehensible as spoken word today.¹ Babbitt does retain an occasional “Zowie!” or “That’s the stuff!”

Any adaptation must condense, consolidate, and excise, but I do miss the excursion to the realtors’ (S.A.R.E.B.) convention in Monarch. The unmitigated, vacant boosterism of George Babbitt and his clan is what makes him so endearing, or insufferable, as you will.

In the final break with Tanis, the roles are reversed from the book to the stage, for some reason.

Broderick brings a nice physicality to the role. In the first act, his George is so buttoned-up that his wildest gestures wouldn’t collide with the walls of a telephone booth.² Encouraged to sit on a floor cushion in Tanis’s flat, George makes heavy weather of getting down. Don’t worry, George loosens up and even cuts a rug in the second act. Vocally, Broderick has chosen a dweeby squeak somewhere in the neighborhood of Wally Cox. It’s funny, but blustering George needs a rumbly baritone.

First among the ensemble of seven is Matt McGrath, handling the equally odious Charley McKelvey and his antagonist Seneca Doane.

¹Check out the parody (?) Prince Albert Tobacco ad from Chapter VIII, spoken of with reverence by poetaster Chum Frink.

²Remember those?

• Babbitt, by Joe DiPietro, adapted from the novel by Sinclair Lewis, directed by Christopher Ashley, Shakespeare Theatre Company, Harman Hall, Washington

File this note under ICYMI, as the show closed last weekend.

INSeries’s captures some of the gist of the original, improvised presentation of Marc Bltizstein’s juicy, polemical The Cradle Will Rock, with a solo upright piano on stage and actors singing from the aisles of the house for a couple of numbers. Headgear is important here: the eight members of the liberty committee chorus are achieved with four singers, each wearing a hat on their hands; Mr. Mister (Rob McGinness, doubling Reverend Salvation) has a tiny silver top hat attached to the side of his head—maybe it was liberated from a Monopoly set?

Lighting in the Baltimore Theatre Project on Thursday’s opening night was dodgy, with dark spots and flickers that were unlikely to be expressionist choices.

• The Cradle Will Rock, text and music by Marc Blitzstein, directed by Shanara Gabrielle, music direction by Emily Baltzer, INSeries, Baltimore Theatre Project, Baltimore

Some news can be made to order. —Mr. Mister

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ new play The Comeuppance is a bit too topical, a bit too on-the-nose, and one wonders how well it will age. Set in 2022, the text name-checks nearly every conflagration that has beset the United States in the past 20 years, from 9/11 to 1/6, without engaging too deeply with any of them—burgeoning gun violence perhaps being the exception. It takes place on the front porch of Ursula, one of five friends and enemies meeting up before their twentieth high school reunion, the porch well realized by a minimal set designed by Jian Jung. The show is heavily expository in roughly its first half; call it, maybe, a multi-ethnic Return of the Secaucus 5.

Jacobs-Jenkins, himself approaching middle age, confronts the prospect of death head on with this work. The turning-40s is the age when many of us realize that we’re not actually going to live forever. He brings Death on stage by a tidy maneuver, one easier done than described. The (what—spirit? mojo? voice?) quintessence of Death passes among the five players, who each from time to time break character and address the audience directly as Death—starting with Emilio (expressive Jordan Bellow), who may serve as the playwright’s voice. Emilio is a conceptual/sound/installation artist working in Berlin; he has abandoned his early work in photography, saying that he had become “tired of mimesis.”

Emerging from the high-energy agita and decades-old recriminations, Kristina (TayshaMarie Canales) has a lovely monologue in which she questions the turns that her life has taken.

The title of the play is a bit of a tease, or perhaps a misdirection, or maybe a suspension.

• The Comeuppance, by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, directed by Morgan Green, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in association with Wilma Theater, Washington