Category: Reviews

RHT brings a gentle touch to the theatrical elements of this adaption of the short novel by Saint-Exupéry, the wide-eyed fairy tale well-known to tenth-grade French students nationwide. The Snake first appears behind a scrim, then fully lit but still in pantomime, manipulated by a puppeteer, before finally appearing in the form of a human actor; the various “big men” that the Little Prince meets in his fall to earth appear in a circus wagon-sized frame.

But the text of the production is faithful to the words and drawings of the novel, at times slavishly so, as when Craig Wallace (the aviator-narrator of the story) speaks to us exactly what he’s thinking. On the other hand, something we miss from Saint-Ex is the Little Prince’s jaunty cutaway royal gown: to accommodate the exuberant physicality of Jamie Kassel’s characterization, perhaps, the Prince wears some sort of bedraggled nightshirt. Kassel fully commits herself in her playing, but two shows in a row in Bethesda that feature principals with squeaky voices is a little too much to ask of us.

In the second half, as the Fox, Wallace has more scenery to chew, and he does so endearingly. The episode of the taming of the Fox is managed as a manic dance to Jacques Brel’s “La valse à mille temps,” and it’s a show-stopper.

• The Little Prince, by Rick Cummins and John Scoullar, based on the book by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, directed by Eric Ting, Round House Theatre, Bethesda, Maryland

Woolly’s American premiere of Jones’s comedy set in Bolton, in the north of England, may not knock it for six, but the solid production does score a run. The signature Woolly Mammoth theatrical elements are present: a dominatrix mom considering retirement; her two daughters, one of them a bit thick in the head; her shiny-pated client, proprietor of a local dry-cleaning establishment; an Irish cleaning woman with OCD; a neophyte Elvis impersonator from somewhere in the Far East, who has all the singer’s looks but is still learning the words to the songs; and those all-important fur-lined handcuffs. These are enough to keep the punchlines bouncing around the two-level half-timbered set, while themes of reconciliation and costuming and concealment play out.

Sarah Marshall’s natural comic rhythms are sometimes at odds with the dialect called for by her Martha, but she has a lovely, heartfelt second-act monologue that gives her character the opportunity to explain herself.

• Martha, Josie, and the Chinese Elvis, by Charlotte Jones, directed by John Vreeke, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Catalyst Theater Company brings Bertolt Brecht’s chilling satire of the early career of Adolf Hitler to the friendly confines of the Capitol Hill Arts Workshop. Written in exile from Germany while World War II still burned, Arturo Ui imagines Hitler as a comical gangster who sets out to organize the vegetable-sellers’ rackets in Chicago. With a thick Bronx accent, Arturo Ui and his henchmen are figures of fun out of a bad Jimmy Cagney movie—at least until the death toll begins to mount and Ui invades neighboring Austria (or Cicero, as the play would have it).

Scot McKenzie’s inhabiting of Ui is at its most frightening when he pauses in a climactic monologue and just stares us down. This before launching a stunning Hitlerian tirade that swamps the black box theater and the handful of cast members who provide background applause.

The evenly-matched ensemble cast of eight executes multiple duties, serving as scene shifters, lighting operators, and a three-piece orchestra. Some of the scene shifts take longer than we would like, but most transitions are covered by slide-show projections that establish the connection between events in the play and those in 1930’s Germany. Standouts include Grady Weatherford’s sotted Fish, scapegoated for the play’s Reichstag Fire stand-in; as well as Scott McCormick and his robust baritone, placed in the service of Butcher, Giri, and other roles, and a brisk second-act opening song.

• The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, by Bertolt Brecht, directed by Christopher Gallu, Catalyst Theater Company, Washington

Plays that trade on the theme of Marilyn Monroe (Oates’s Miss Golden Dreams, Russell’s Blood Brothers) are rarely successful, though I can’t articulate why. Perhaps they mistake icon for import. Simon Bent’s adaptation of John Irving’s novel A Prayer for Owen Meany likewise fails to impress.

Despite some highly theatrical technical elements—a flying actor; basketballs dropping from the sky; and an overwhelming set piece in the third act that involves revealing the back wall of the theater, painted as the Stars and Stripes three stories high while Vietnam War dead are delivered home by forklift—Irving’s black comedy of faith leaves us wondering why this story had to be told. It is the story of diminutive Owen, a “boy with a wrecked voice” who has premonitions of his own death and a heroic sacrifice. In a setting of New England grotesques out of Thornton Wilder, and told in tightly cued overlapping scenes, preternaturally spiritual Owen takes on the role of a wise child. The trouble is that Irving, Bent, director Blake Robison, and actor Matthew Detmer have given Owen a comically squeaky voice more appropriate to Burr Tillstom and Fran Allison’s clown puppet Ollie. Owen’s pronouncements of wisdom against the tradition-bound clerics of his hometown are flat and trite; he comes off as a grating smartass more at home on Saturday morning television. Maybe the idea worked better in the book.

The play picks up some momentum in the third act with an unsettling visitation by Lenny Bruce and Owen goes off to war. Too little, too late.

• A Prayer for Owen Meany, novel by John Irving, adapted by Simon Bent, directed by Blake Robison, Round House Theatre, Bethesda, Maryland

This year’s festival includes a pair of memory plays, both of them premieres, Kim Merrill’s Sex, Death, and the Beach Baby and Keith Glover’s Jazzland. Merrill tells of a young woman haunted by a betrayal and death by drowning off the Jersey shore, while Glover riffs on the tensions between jazz and rock and roll. In Jazzland, a young jazz trumpeter, Roderigo, in recovery from an automobile accident, pieces the story of his own life back together as well as that of his father, Ram, an alto saxophonist who, following popular sentiment, began playing rock gigs. Questions of artistic integrity and faithfulness to an idiom are raised, but the play’s high-flying abstractions leave us with characters not fully realized. The most inventive material in the piece, as well as the most successful, is the recreation of the gigs played by Roderigo, Ram, and Ram’s partner Twist. Rather than demand expert musicianship from his actors, Glover gives them spoken-word pieces that they perform over a recorded-music background: the air crackles when Ram (the rich-voiced Joseph Adams) and Miles-like trumpeter Twist (the electric Scott Whitehurst) start trading eights.

Christopher Durang’s student Noah Haidle brings us the published Mr. Marmalade, a twisted comic fantasy told through the eyes of four-year-old Lucy, played by the full-grown Anne Marie Nest. Lucy’s single-parented life is rather grim, so it’s not surprising that her imaginary friend, Mr. Marmalade, is as likely to smack her around or take cellphone calls during Tea Party as he is to take her ballroom dancing or cruising to Mexico. Sara Kathryn Bakker steals her scene as Sunflower, imaginary friend or Lucy’s new real-world friend, dweeby Larry (dressed hysterically by Margaret A. McKowen).

CATF veterans Carolyn Swift, Andy Prosky, and Kaci Gober return in the best show of the festival, Richard Dresser’s new Augusta. Dresser’s latest satire of life on the fringes of the corporate world has his signature dangerous bite: imagine chewing on a live electrical cord. Prosky’s middle manager Jimmy is in charge of teams of house cleaners, including the pair formed by just-hanging-on Molly (Swift) and just-getting-started Claire (Gober). Jimmy’s glad-handing smile, so disconnected from the small-minded manipulations going on behind it, is frightening. Swift’s Molly, ever blasted by life, has a posture when she’s being chewed out by Jimmy that looks like she’s being blown through a wind tunnel without Swift moving a muscle. Shaun L. Motley’s clever three-level set serves as the mansion that Claire and Molly clean, several restaurants and hotel rooms, and Jimmy’s office. The set cantilevers beds and divans into empty space, and its half-height floors remind us of the tilted world of Being John Malkovich. At the end of this play, proposed as the first of a trilogy on happiness (?!), after he is hoist by his own petty schemes, Jimmy is philosophical: “In this line of work, you learn to take the bad with the really bad.”

• Sex, Death, and the Beach Baby, by Kim Merrill, directed by Karen Carpenter
• Mr. Marmalade, by Noah Haidle, directed by Ed Herendeen
• Jazzland, by Keith Glover, directed by Ed Herendeen
• Augusta, by Richard Dresser, directed by Lucie Tiberghien
• Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, W. Va.