165 (2019-2020): Review: DRACULA (seen February 12, 2020)

"Fangs for the Memory"

For my review of Dracula please click on THEATER PIZZAZZ.

164 (2019-2020): Review: THE SABBATH GIRL (seen February 15,2020)

"When Shabbos Goy Meets Yarmulke Boy"

 

For my review of The Sabbath Girl please click on THEATER PIZZAZZ.

Guest Review 21 (2019-2020): THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL

"Baby, It's Cold Outside"

By Elyse Orecchio (guest reviewer)



On the subway ride over to St. Luke’s Theatre, my nine-year-old lil’ buddy Veronica and I read the 1846 Hans Christian Andersen fairytale on my phone to prep for a musical adaptation of The Little Match Girl. 

All photos: Michael Blase.

 If you’re unfamiliar with the tale, as I was, spoiler alert: there is no happily ever after. We wondered if the production we were about to see would change the ending on par with other dark Andersen tales that have been Disneyfied, like The Little Mermaid and The Snow Queen. 

Happily, as promised in its promo, Yaya Kids Theater and Ting Wang’s production of The Little Match Girl stayed true to the story and, to my surprise, ended in the sad tableau of a little girl who had frozen to death. The audience was sprinkled with young theatregoers like my date, and I could feel the shock in the room. “Did she just die?” the girl to my right asked her father and started to cry.

But wait. I don’t mean to give you the impression that The Little Match Girl is strictly dark and depressing. There are, after all, charming, swirling musical numbers and tapping geese. Director Greg Ganakas offers a well-rounded story of heartache and hope uplifted by magical realism as the Little Match Girl is drawn in and out of fantasy. The staging offers beautiful visuals such as esoteric ensemble dancing with matches (L.E.D.-lit—good move) that fade out along with the actors. 

The cast is led by the impressive young Aisling Fiona Fagan, playing a little girl in rags who feebly attempts to sell matches to support her family. Unable to sell even a single match, she’s sent back on the freezing streets by her angry, drunken father (the rich-voiced Tony Mowatt) on New Year’s Eve. There, her shoes are stolen and she’s shunned by the townsfolk. Cold and exhausted, she falls into despair. 

Desperate for warmth, she dips into her wares and decides to strike a match. With each match she lights, she enters a new realm in her imagination. At first, she conjures images of a joyful Christmas with happy parents, where food is bountiful (this is where the fabulous tap dancing geese come in) and she basks in her grandmother’s love. With the strike of another match, she recalls when her family fell apart: as her mother (sweet soprano Elizabeth Flanagan) fell sick, her father spent the money she earned selling matches on liquor instead of medicine. As her husband cradled a wine bottle, her mother reproached him: “When was the last time you held our little girl like that?”

When she runs out of matches, the little girl’s fantasies end and she freezes to death. The townspeople regret having ignored her on the streets. And yes, it’s as sad as it sounds. However, the production ends on an uplifting note as the little girl is reunited with her late grandmother (Dayna Grayber). 

Joshua Warner’s glorious set, along with Zack Lobel’s mystical lighting, lend a good deal to the enchantment of the piece. A sphere hanging at center stage becomes a moon, a clock, or a window thanks to Lobel’s projections as the actors move about on wheeled cubes that double as cafe seats and street ornaments. Gail Baldoni’s lovely costume designs complete the picturesque puzzle. 

“Just around the Corner,” terrifically sung by Fagan, is a standout song by Alastair William King and Jeff Edmond, and a very talented ensemble delivers the rest of the lively score, all the more enhanced when Yanni Mextaxes strums his fiddle.

I’m always in favor of a TYA production that respects children enough to trust that they’re capable of handling emotional complexity. My young companion, wise beyond her years, said she was glad they didn’t change the ending because the Little Match Girl goes to a happier place. With the show running only an hour, there’s time after the curtain call to take your child to a happier place, like an ice cream shop.

The Little Match Girl
St. Luke's Theatre

308 W. 46^th St., NYC

Through February 23, 2020

Elyse Orecchio studied musical theatre at Emerson College, acting at CUNY Brooklyn College, and English Linguistics & Rhetoric at CUNY Hunter College. She has worked in nonprofit communications for more than a decade and lives in Sunnyside, Queens. eorecchio@gmail.com IG: @elyseorecchio

163 (2019-2020): Review: HAMLET (seen February 11, 2020)

"What a Piece of Work Is a Woman"

Ruth Negga, an outstanding Irish-Ethiopian actress, is currently earning major props for her performance of the title role in Hamlet, in South African director Yaël Farber’s widely acclaimed production at St. Ann’s Warehouse, following its premiere at Dublin’s Gate Theatre. See, for example, the encomiums heaped upon her in Ben Brantley’s New York Times review.  

Ruth Negga. All photos: Teddy Wolff.

Negga, 38, is an exceptional talent, and she performs with as much stirring intelligence and passion as any equally gifted male actor. If one may be so bold, however, the question must be raised as to whether that’s enough to justify her being cast as the Prince of Denmark.

A little history: gender-bending productions of Shakespeare are as old as the plays themselves, of course, since young men played the women’s parts in the theatre of his day. But, since the Restoration period, the convention of males playing males and females playing females became standard. Then, in the late 18th century, the great British actress Sarah Siddons began experimenting with male roles, most importantly that of Hamlet, which she played only in the provinces. Subsequently, a number of actresses brought their interpretations of Hamlet to audiences in London (Elizabeth Powell, 1796), New York (Sarah Bartley, 1820), and elsewhere, not only in English-language theatre. Last season, for example, we were reminded of 19th-century French actress Sarah Bernhardt’s Dane in Bernhardt/Hamlet.

Ruth Negga.

Although still an only occasional gambit, it’s no longer unusual for an actress—both stars and lesser lights—to tackle Hamlet, as well as other iconic Shakespearean males, like Lear, playing them as men, not women, although that’s what Kathryn Hunter did for her portrayal of Timon in recently closed TFNA revival of Timon of Athens. This is a big subject, fraught with debatable issues, so I’ll simply state that, in most cases involving the great male roles, my preference is to see them played by gender-appropriate and not gender-bending actors.

I say this not because I believe no actress can believably embody the psychological, intellectual, and emotional qualities of a role like Hamlet, but because theatre is a visual and aural medium in which we see and hear the performance right in front of us. And, while some female actors may have all the technical and physical, including athletic, requirements to convincingly portray a heroic male role—which Hamlet definitely is—such a package is rare.

Ruth Negga, for example, is 5’ 3” and probably weighs close to 100 pounds. As costumed by the redoubtable Susan Hilferty in this modern dress production—which offers few garments anyone attending modern dress Shakespeare hasn’t seen before—she mostly wears a closefitting black jacket, a white shirt, and skinny black pants. For much of the time, she wears just the shirt and slacks, making her resemble a harried busboy.

Her diminutive presence among the hulking, substantially larger male actors, creates nothing like the impression we get from Ophelia’s words:

The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword,

Th' expectancy and rose of the fair state,

The glass of fashion and the mould of form,

Th' observed of all observers, quite, quite down!

Instead, we see a slight, androgynous physique, whose female breasts are clearly apparent, especially when Hamlet returns from England dressed in a formfitting black sweater (and even tighter pants). We are thus forced to constantly remind ourselves—including those moments when Hamlet and Ophelia have their smooch fests—that we must willingly suspend our disbelief to accept the character on Shakespeare’s terms.

Ruth Negga, Fiona Bell.

Nor does Negga’s voice, rich and potent as it is, alter our perception of her femininity. Her speeches, filled with incisive readings—tragic, contemplative, and witty—remain rooted in her womanly expressivity. I could go on but the point is that Negga—like other actresses I’ve seen as Hamlet, including Dame Judith Anderson—gives a perfectly fine performance that never makes you actually accept her as a man. It’s much like watching a 300 pound diva singing Cho-Cho-San and forcing yourself to believe she’s a delicate Japanese maiden.

Aiofe Duffin, Gavin Drea.

The arguments pro and con regarding Hamlet’s masculinity versus his femininity—some even have theorized he’s actually a woman—go on and on, as in this Times piece by Leslie Bennetts, but the notion that he’s more feminine than butch has always rung false with me. All the more so for having seen the thrilling, unforgettable performance of Donald Madden for the Phoenix Theatre in 1961, still the best I’ve ever witnessed.

Negga’s Hamlet, for all its thoughtfulness and sensitivity, works hard to convey a sense of manly purpose, with outbursts of virulent anger balanced by rapier-like satiric thrusts, rather than enervated philosophizing. Farber’s production, while subject to dull spots, is generally energetic, performed on Hilferty’s bleak set showing 16 doors along the upstage area and down the sides, reminiscent of Meyerhold’s famous set for his 1926 The Government Inspector. John Torres’s ominous lighting, making much use of fog effects, fills all the nooks and crannies with mood-enhancing effects, made even broodier by Tom Lane’s sound and music creations.

Ruth Negga.

The script—despite occupying nearly three and a half-hours—is filled with emendations, cuts, rearrangements, and the like. The alterations are both minor, like changing “bodkin” to “blade,” and major, like eliminating all the Fortinbras business and bringing the action to a close with “The rest is silence.” No one jumps in Ophelia’s (Aoife Duffin) grave, by the way, and the gravediggers’ lines are divvied up among three, not two shovel-toting men (Will Irvine, Ger Kelly, Gerard Walsh). And those “gravemakers,” as the program calls them, wearing bowler hats reminiscent of the three blind men in Durrenmatt’s The Visit, serve throughout as a sort of silent chorus when death is imminent, even assigned the task of rolling corpses about on gurneys.

Steve Hartland, Ruth Negga.

Within this gloomy world, Farber mingles straightforwardly traditional staging with her own theatrical innovations. Considerable use is made of the auditorium for action set along the aisles, including locations along the side walls. The Ghost (Steve Hartland) seems to find such places congenial. If you’re seated in Row H, which is separated by a metal bar from a cross-over aisle, you’ll be fortunate enough (as was I) to be only inches from actors placed there on a couple of occasions. One includes Horatio (Mark Huberman), Claudius (Owen Roe), Gertrude (Fiona Bell), Polonius (Nick Dunning), and others taking their seats to watch the Players enact the play-within-the-play designed “to catch the conscience of the king.” Roe's thinning scalp being right beneath my nose, I could have counted all its hairs.

Directorial coups include a billowing, translucent plastic curtain that descends for ghostly effects, and a bright red curtain that drops suddenly to represent the arras hiding Polonius in Gertrude’s closet. The final duel (directed by Donal O’Farrell) is, thankfully, with traditional fencing swords, both Laertes (Gavin Drea) and Hamlet wearing protective masks. No furniture is present for this climactic scene, however, so bodies are strewn around on the floor, supplemented by a cloudy upstage tableau in which all the play’s dead characters appear to emphasize just how many victims there are in Hamlet, almost as if in recognition of the coronavirus.

Solidly acted, directorially imaginative without being excessively gimmicky, and attractively designed, this Hamlet is praiseworthy if unexceptional. But since its heart is in the hands of a Hamlet who, regardless of her talent, never for a moment convinced me she was anything but a gifted artist playing a role she understood but could never fully inhabit, I was unable to give her my own heart. To paraphrase the Bard: what a piece of work is a woman. Being Hamlet, though, is something else entirely.

Hamlet

St. Ann’s Warehouse

45 Water St., Brooklyn

Through March 8

162 (2019-2020): Review: STEW (seen February 10, 2020)

"Stirring the Pot"

In life, they say, the best way to someone’s heart is through their stomach. Judging from all the plays about food-making (recent examples being Seared and Richard Nelson’s Apple Family series), some writers think it’s also the best way to an audience’s heart.  Even if we don’t get to eat anything (which does sometimes happen!), just watching a meal being prepared can be fulfilling.

Nikkole Salter (rear), Portia. All photos: Jeremy Daniel.

Add to the recipe tasty characters, season it with spicy dialogue, wash it down with a satisfying narrative, and top it off with a superb ensemble and you have Stew, Zora Howard’s zesty dramedy, in what Michelin might rate a three-star production, at Tribeca’s Walkerspace.

Kristin Dodson.

                                                                                               

Even the best meals sometimes have a little gristle, however, and Stew has a bit of its own. Everything else is so appetizing, though, that few theatregoers are going to leave this 90-minute repast with growling stomachs.

Toni Lachelle Pollitt, Portia, Kristin Dodson, Nikkole Salter.

The main dish being prepared is the eponymous one, created as we watch by a lower-middle-class black family, the Tuckers, in Mount Vernon, New York. Ruled by the imperious matriarch, Mama (Portia), the feisty Tuckers include Mama’s two daughters, the mid-30s Lillian (Nikkole Salter) and the not-yet-18-year-old Nelly (Tony Lachelle Pollitt), along with Lillian’s 14-year-old daughter, Lil’ Mama (Kristin Dodson).

Toni Lachelle Pollitt, Nikkole Salter, Kristin Dodson.

Lawrence E. Moten III’s realistically detailed set places us in Mama’s kitchen, which has a small upstage staircase leading to the upstairs bedrooms. It’s early in the morning and Mama, dressed in a turban-like headscarf and a floor-length house dress (costumes by Dominique Fawn Hill), is tending to the stew she’s preparing for the 50 people who’ll be attending an unspecified church event. Suddenly, a loud pop is heard outside, but Mama dismisses as probably from a tire blowout. 

Toni Lachelle Pollitt, Kristin Dodson, Nikkole Salter, Portia.

The noise brings into view Mama’s sleepy family, each wearing a similar headscarf, who soon enough begin to contribute to helping—with different levels of enthusiasm and ability—prepare the meal, while bickering mightily with one another. Personal details seep out slowly, many instigated by conversations on the wall phone, the time being in the pre-cellphone days.

Toni Lachelle Pollitt.

Mama’s having dizziness issues: “It’s nothing. It comes and goes.” Lillian’s in a difficult relationship with her husband, J.R. Her young son, Junior, is hanging out with a neighbor whose mother, claims the disgusted Mama, once opened her bag to offer her a mint only for roaches to come crawling out. Nelly is going hot and heavy with a boy she calls her “man,” not her boyfriend: “A boyfriend is temporary. A man is forever.” Lil’ Mama is auditioning for a school production of Richard III.

Toni Lachelle Pollitt, Nikkole Salter.

This last inspires a memorable scene, since each family member has participated in local theatricals. Mama, in fact, never tires of reminding everyone that she was “the founder and director emeritus of the Mt. Vernon High Dramatic League as well as the lead soprano at the Greater Centennial A.M.E. Zion Church.” Lil’ Mama becomes the reluctant subject of Mama’s coaching her in a speech mistakenly attributed to Queen Elizabeth, when it’s actually Queen Margaret who speaks it. It's surprising no one's caught this.

Portia.

The speech, in which a mother refers to her baby’s death, is used for comic effect but will later reverberate within the play’s thematic stew, like much of what we’re watching. Stew may seem like a conventional family sitcom—even with its outbursts of interfamilial vituperation—but it’s actually much darker, as represented by Avi Amon’s unsettling inter-scene music, and the hints dropped (too) subtly throughout, suggesting that perhaps the drama, for all its external specificity, is more metaphorical than naturalistic.

Portia.

One senses this in the way the characters all seem to be reflections of one another, sometimes expressing themselves with phrases we’ve heard someone else use, the ways their personal stories mirror those of others, or even how their names intersect, as if they’re part of an unending cycle.

Unusually for a play about contemporary black characters, racial issues are not overtly foregrounded, but are embedded in the dialogue’s DNA. Everyone speaks in black dialect, even the self-aware Mama who nevertheless assumes grammar police authority when others misuse the language, such as saying “lay” when it should be “lie.”

On the other hand, her own words can be as colloquially ungrammatical as anyone else’s: “Lil’ Mama, that hair ain’t coming out them pins by itself.” So it’s sure to come as a surprise when, to cap the Shakespearean coaching scene, she delivers the speech in question with the piercing intelligence and sensitivity you’d expect from a seasoned classical actor. 

Most surprising, though, is the play’s ending, which subverts what we’ve been watching into a playwright’s head game. To say more would probably be unfair but this viewer was forced to return to the script to search for the clues that led to Howard’s conclusion.

Putting that stringy morsel aside, Stew offers an exceptional group of actors whose contributions are stirred by the masterful direction of Colette Robert. Taking full advantage of Zora Howard’s deliciously articulated sequences of overlapping speeches and simultaneous conversations, she has cooked up one of the season’s most nourishing thespian concoctions.

Portia, with a voice that could bring any stew to a boil, simmers with maternal power, compassion, sarcasm, and vulnerability as Mama. Pollitt’s salty Nelly, Salter’s bitter Lillian, and Dodson’s sweet Lil’ Mama are scrumptious portraits that, combined, create as close to an authentic family feeling as you’re likely to see on any local stage. You might want to taste this one while it’s still on the stove.

Stew

Walkerspace

46 Walker St., NYC

Through February 22

161 (2019-2020): Review: CHEKHOV/TOLSTOY: LOVE STORIES (seen February 5, 2020)

"From Russia with Love"

For my review of Chekhov/Tolstoy: Love Stories please click on THEATER LIFE.

160 (2019-2020): Review: BOB & CAROL & TED & ALICE (seen February 7, 2020)

“Sex, Drugs, but No Rock and Roll”

Nineteen sixty-nine. Woodstock. The Miracle Mets. The first artificial heart implant. Barbara Streisand ties Katharine Hepburn for the Academy Award. The Stonewall riots. Ted Kennedy and Chappaquiddick. Apollo 11. My Lai. “Abbey Road.” Path-breaking Hollywood films like Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider, and one, nominated for four Academy Awards, in which two married couples test the boundaries of friendship and love by jumping into bed together. Its name: Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (hereafter BCTA).

Jennifer Damiano, Jose Perez. All photos: Monique Carboni.

Once considered daring, but, half-a-century later, a dated reflection of then rapidly evolving social mores, BCTA, for some reason, has been adapted by book writer Jonathan Marc Sherman, composer Duncan Sheik, and lyricists Sheik and Amanda Green into a sluggish, uninspired, unevenly cast, insufficiently funny, chamber musical. Scott Elliott has staged it smoothly for the New Group at the Pershing Square Signature Center, with “musical staging” (the choreography being very limited) by Kelly Devine. 

Jose Perez, Jennifer Damiano.

Like those other events of 1969, BCTA, written by Paul Mazursky and Larry Tucker, and directed by the former, was pretty hot news in the swinging 60s, when all sorts of conventional sexual, cultural, scientific, and political borders were boldly being crossed. Its titillating publicity shot of four attractive Hollywood actors—left to right, Elliot Gould as Ted, Natalie Wood as Carol, Robert Culp as Bob, and Dyan Cannon as Alice—sitting up in bed, ambivalence writ large across their faces, was about as representative of the time as was, for instance, the album cover of “Abbey Road.”

Ana Noguieria, Michael Zegen.

In 1973, a bowdlerized TV sitcom adaptation of BCTA—mildly racy but too timid to dive into the film’s raunchy territory of group sex, spouse swapping, and open marriage—came and went in a heartbeat. Mazursky, who died in 2014, was reportedly excited about the notion of making a musical from the material. I suspect he would have been less thrilled if he’d lived long enough to see it. 

Jennifer Damiano, Jose Perez, Ana Nogueria, Michael Zegen.

When a musical is made from a movie blessed with a score by someone like Quincy Jones and an evergreen tune like Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “What the World Needs Now Is Love” the composer has to bring his A game. However, the prolific, Grammy-winning Sheik (Spring Awakening) offers a series of only passably pleasing, easy-listening, jazz-inflected pastiches, none of them showstoppers or anywhere nearly as memorable as the Bacharach-David song. Oddly, given the great rock and roll of the period, you won’t hear anything like it in Sheik’s mild-mannered compositions.

Ana Nogueria, Jennifer Damiano.

As woven into the plot, the songs almost seem afterthoughts—whaddaya say we put one in here?—rather than organic expressions of thoughts and emotions. For most of them, one or more characters will simply lift a hand mic or use a standing one, delivering the songs as songs, not as necessary outgrowths of dynamic confrontations.

Jennifer Damiano.

Elliot’s concept, in fact, suggests that the script is being enacted in a nightclub, Derek McLane’s set—surrounded by the audience on three sides—being little more than a sort of crushed velvet, sectional sofa. Uniquely adaptable to multiple configurations, including a bed, it morphs into each new one with the aid of the actors. 

Upstage, where the four-piece band of keyboard (Jason Hart), guitars/sitar/bass (Simon Kafka), reeds (Noelle Rueschman), and bass/drums (Jamie Mohamdein) is lined up, the space is dominated by two-layers of glittering bead curtains, basking prettily in the colorations of lighting designer Jeff Croiter.

Ana Nogueira, Suzanne Vega.

Furthering the nightclub ambience is the presence of a sort of compere, the Band Leader, well-played with low-key sophistication by folksy singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega. Without changing her simple outfit of black slacks and blouse, she sings, narrates, and portrays minor roles. Going one step further in this life-is-a-cabaret conception is the occasional bringing onstage of ringside spectators, who may actually dance or briefly converse with the stars. I mentally thanked the press rep who arranged my tickets for not having given me a front-row seat.

Suzanne Vega. 

Sherman’s book essentializes the film script, about a documentary filmmaker, Bob (Joél Pérez), who goes with his wife, Carol (Jennifer Damiano), to an Esalen-like retreat in California, where, as per the touchy-feely, New Age, consciousness-raising practices of the day, the couple learns to put their feelings before their intellects. So open does Bob feel that he confesses to having had sex with another woman, explaining that it was only physical, not emotional. Carol is cool with it, even revealing it to their more conservative friends, Ted (Michael Zegen) and Alice (Ana Noguera), who are uncomfortable with Bob and Carol’s newfound liberation. Ted, though, declares to Bob that he’s struggled with similar inclinations.

Jose Perez, Ana Nogueira, Jennifer Damiano, Michael Zegen.

Eventually, Bob finds Carol having sex with a man. After an initial outbreak of double standardism, he accepts her behavior. One thing leads to another, Ted and Alice board the sexual liberation train, and the couples awkwardly attempt an orgy (the kind of thing that now often calls for an “intimacy consultant,” although none is credited) before realizing it may not be what the world needs now. 

Michael Zegen, Jennifer Damiano, Jose Perez, Ana Nogueiro.

Although everyone gets down to their undies, and these are removed from beneath the covers, no full nudity is exposed. Despite what we’re supposed to imagine under the sheets, the cast does  the usual contortions to hide their privates from both us and each other. Such propriety, of course, only underlines the ersatz puerility driving the action in this sexually flaccid sex comedy. 

Ersatz, in fact, defines much of the 90-minute, intermissionless show, from its pseudo-period music to its clichéd pot smoking scene, to designer Jeff Mahshie’s costume missteps for Ted (Elliot Gould’s clothes were classier), to the disparity between the movie’s charismatic male stars and those on view here. If I never again have to see José Pérez endlessly cavort in his BVDS, I promise to be a much better person.

Jose Perez, Jennifer Damiano.

I was pleasantly surprised to hear how nicely Zegen (Joel Maisel on “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”) sings, and enjoyed the work of all three women. But, despite the show’s occasional pluses, it fails to sustain interest, to convincingly convey its period, or to satisfactorily justify its existence. As years go, 1969 was a great one. It’s too bad Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice didn’t stay there.

Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice

Pershing Square Signature Center/Linney Courtyard Theatre

480 W. 42^nd St., NYC

Through March 22