Dave Read

Sylvia at Berkshire Theatre Festival

July 16, 2011 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall.

Sitting in audience of the Fitzpatrick stage at the Berkshire Theatre Festival for the opening of A. R. Gurney’s Sylvia, I found myself remembering an evening many years ago when Gurney a yet untried playwright came to see what our little play-reading group would do in a staged reading of one of his plays in our little black-box theatre off Main Street. Our group was founded by Bill Gibson and carried on by Jane Mooney.

In the forty or more years that have elapsed since that eventful night, details have gone hazy. Gurney was unknown to any of us. He was was an affable and not condescending young man, scarcely middle-aged, who drove in from Boston with a family play, perhaps about the Buffalo area. Gurney viewed our production, listened to suggestions and praises, then drove off into the night. A young man, knowing where he wanted to go.

How brilliantly he has gotten there!

Silvia is a gem; one of the many gems he has created over the years!

The plot centers around a family crisis. Greg (David Adkins) and Kate (Jurian Hughes) are empty nesters with their kids off to college and the couple settled in a NY apartment where Greg’s career is winding down and Kate’s is picking up.

And into their life Greg brings Sylvia, another woman whom he has picked up in Central Park and whom he expects Kate to welcome into a ménage a trois, further complicated by the fact that Sylvia is an enormous bouncy stray dog, dog tag bearing only her name, her breed a mix, seemingly, of Lab and Poodle, and a great deal of bounce and pounce, and audacity.

Sylvia not only pees on Kate’s rug, she ASSUMES she could sit on Kate’s couch. Marriage in jeopardy. A serious situation for Kate and Greg but an absolutely hilarious one for the audience with laugh lines coming so fast one misses a few. And it is not only the dialog that is hilarious. The uneasy trio members all have to be athletes, very often not on their feet and being dragged in directions they don’t want to go.

Director Andres Cato’s guiding hand has rung every possible variation on the production—timing and pace, scenes flowing seamlessly after each other, moods shifting from hilarious to touching, or “naughty,” or unexpected.

Sylvia, (Rachel Ray Jones) and her costumes, from bedraggled in the park to preeningly wooing when in heat she meets Buster in the park, are gloriously seductive. And she knows it. Jones seems to have literally climbed into Sylvia by donning her clothes, Her bite is usually restrained but her bark is utterly remarkable.

Adkins is convincingly unaware of the sacrifice he is asking of his wife. His sudden love for Sylvia, giving a meaning to his days in a time when he has lost meaning and confidence, seems to him reasonable.

Hughes as the wife, expected to accept without a struggle her husband’s aberrations, is sympathetic, resourceful and willing eventually to bend but not break. It is she that at a strategic moment finds and tosses the red ball.

The versatile Walter Hudson plays three supporting roles, necessary in plot development in the park or the psychiatrist’s office, each with panache.

The New York skyline set, assisted by lighting affects in evoking the park on the apron, and changing color for mood changes in plot, is effective.

All this adds up to asserting that over the years Gurney has continued to write play after play, success after success.

Sylvia is an especially delightful one.

As for the rest of those long ago hopefuls performing in the black box theatre, I haven’t a clue. But it’s nice to remember that we performed early Gurney, and in Stockbridge!

Berkshire Theatre Festival 2011 schedule.

James Taylor, Amy Grant, Vince Gill at Tanglewood

July 3 & 4, 2011 concerts reviewed by Dave Read.

Independence Day weekend 2011 is bound to be remembered as the Dawn of the New Millennium of Peace & Understanding because that was when James Taylor leapt across the cultural divide into the arms of Amy Grant and Vince Gill, in front of back-to-back sold-out audiences at Tanglewood. This was a big surprise; we don’t do country at Tanglewood.

(Photo: Scott Caltron )

They tried it Fourth of July 2006 with LeAnn Rimes – really good concert, but half-empty Shed. That experience may have factored in to the secrecy leading up to these shows and the fact that the guest performers weren’t announced until the day before the show, well after they had been sold out, even though the date had been made months earlier.

Here’s the shocking news: the two shows were seamless; there were no jolts, nothing at all abrupt in the transitions between the several numbers each of the guests did in the midst of Taylor’s concert routine. It’s all pop entertainment, people, despite the machinations of merchandisers and principalities such as the CMA and the Grammys.

Furthermore, any dissimilarity between and among songs of James Taylor, Amy Grant, and Vince Gill were washed away by the sameness of self-deprecating adulation each evinced for the other headliners on stage.

Amy Grant is a knock-out, plain and simple, wholesomely pretty appearing toward the end of the first set in sexy summer dress with shawl that got lost for the second set both nights as did her shoes! She did her 20 year old Baby Baby to everybody’s delight.

Vince Gill too looked right at home in the Koussevitsky Music Shed, wearing grey slacks and jacket with a black collarless shirt – rather metropolitan. His song Pretty Little Adriana was a highlight of his mini-sets, especially his deft, searing blues guitar playing. No wonder Gill is a regular at Eric Clapton’s Crossroads festival.

James Taylor was no less good, and effusive as always in his regard for his band with whom he worked up a fresh sampling from his ouvre for these shows. Our favorite both nights was Steamroller, delivered in about half the time but with maybe double the oomph of earlier Tanglewood performances. Two or three minutes into it, ace sideman Larry Goldings took the lead on the Hammond B3, then it segued neatly back to Walt Fowler on muted trumpet, before coming front and center for James Taylor and Vince Gill’s guitars. Very cool.

Another highlight for us was some jazzy singing by Taylor – several little riffs that were like the vocal equivalents of guitar solos. They emphasize the joy he takes in his work and make it feel as is he is truly into the current presentation of the song and bringing it to life rather than merely involved in yet another recitation of it.

We sensed that, in his patter this week, Taylor has given additional prominence to his 1968 anointing by the Beatles. As grateful as we are to him for introducing Amy and Vince to us this year, perhaps he’ll be more Beatle-esque next summer and invite to Tanglewood some mixed-up homesick youngster at the dawn of a startling career?

As You Like It at Shakespeare and Company

July 10, 2011 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall.

The glorious thing about As You Like It that is now playing at Shakespeare and Company’s Founders Theatre is that it will be with us in repertory through September 4th. Meanwhile, ten days after its opening, rave reviews and word of mouth have made it the hit of the season. Deservedly.

Tony Simotes has assembled a dedicated, all-star cast of actors who have been playing Shakespeare leads with the Company for years, many of them even in earlier productions of As You Like It but in a different role from that played in this production. Kudos to the entire cast!

As for sets, lights, original music, dance and costuming, again the departments have been headed by experienced and innovative masters of their trades. More kudos. (Simotes choreographed the acrobatic wrestling scene himself.)

So, rather than try to out-rave the raves in another review, this reviewer will deal with only the epilog, delivered by Rosalind, as directed in Shakespeare’s manuscript. Its significance is that it brings layers and layers of meaning into the cross-dressing, androgonouus theme that were there all along, from that first mad dancing of the Charleston at the play’s opening and the even madder dancing at its end.

Simotes knew what he was doing when the set the play in Gay Paree shortly after the first world war, and the costume designer knew what he was doing when he dressed his dancing actors as silent film stars of the day.

As Rosalind, Merritt Janson has the most wonderful role in the play and handily steals the show (abetted by her surrounding cast) carrying it gracefully to the heights that would have had Shakespeare himself clapping in the wings.

One would feel she had ascended the heights. But no. She has out-staged herself, carrying the whole cast into the highest complexity and joyous abandonment, slightly naughty but never quite over the top.

She gets the epilogue! Stands and delivers it in her virginal white wedding gown. Every inch a woman. And in Shakespeare’s day the prologs and epilogs belong to the men. Indeed she would in his day have been a male, a young boy pretending to be a girl who in the play, dressed as a boy, would be wooed by another boy, dressed as a boy whom she suggested pretend that she was a girl, despite her garments, and kiss her and the mirror images of boy/girl would ambigiously envelop the whole play and all the hysterical misunderstandings and promises and surprises.

Shakespeare must have had great fun writing this play – so full of possibilities and impossibilities and mistakes and near-mistakes. All whirling around this one character as she/he bids us goodnight and urges kindnesses and understandings worth listening to.

BSO opens 2011 Tanglewood season

The Boston Symphony’s summer residency at Tanglewood in the Berkshires got underway July 8th with a all-Italian program under the direction of guest conductor Charles Dutoit. Here is a video clip from the opening night performance, showing Angela Meade singing an excerpt from Bellini’s opera Norma.

James Taylor with the Boston Pops and John Williams at Tanglewood

July 1, 2011 concert reviewed by Dave Read.

The Boston Pops tuned up for their annual 4th of July concert for hundreds of thousands on the Esplanade in Boston by sharing the bill at Tanglewood on July 1 with James Taylor for a relatively intimate gathering of eighteen thousand souls. Led by laureate conductor John Williams, the Pops had the Koussevitsky Shed stage to themselves for the first half of the program and fairly thrilled the audience with a suite of excerpts from Williams compositions, opening with a fanfare for the city of Boston called Jubilee 350, and including pieces from the movies Far and Away, Cath Me If You Can, and Superman.

The Pops got to display their jazz chops for the Escapades from Catch Me If You Can, which featured an ad hoc sax, vibes, and bass trio that the crowd applauded loudly, especially the solo bass coda that allowed simple notes to reverberate through the Shed with the same force, but maybe more eloquence, as a multi-instrument finale.

After intermission, James Taylor appeared, looking like a tycoon in suit and tie but seeming somewhat like a tyro – displaying an unusual nervousness. Undaunted, he began with an ironic choice in his chosen hometown, Getting to Know You, even whistling some.

But just a few tunes into the set, by the time keyboardist Larry Goldings had taken the lead on Mean Old Man, Taylor seemed completely at ease. Perhaps it took the involvement of his sidemen, Goldings plus Jimmie Johnson and Chad Wackerman on bass and drums, for him to achieve work mode? Whereas the artist named James Taylor is an individual, there’s a performer with the same name who’s hardly ever alone, and who is most comfortable while plying his trade amid peers.

It was an earlier James Taylor Boston Pops John Williams triple bill that set an attendance record of 24,470 which resulted in such traffic snarls that the BSO promised the towns of Lenox and Stockbridge to cap ticket sales at 18,000.

Three Hotels at Williamstown Theatre Festival

July 2, 2011 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall.

WTF artistic director Jenny Gersten’s bold decision to substitute Jon Robin Baitz Three Hotels for the previously scheduled and well-known comedy You Can’t Take it With You may have come as a surprise to a few season ticket holders, but for most, once they adjust to the drastic change of subject matter and dramatic technique, it should come as a welcome opportunity to explore a somewhat experimental play, opulently mounted on Williams Theatre Festival’s main stage.

The play is an eighty minute series of three monologs, performed without intermission but with scene shifts from one hotel to the next.

The plot concerns Ken Hoyle (Steven Weber), an ambitious and unscrupulous hatchet man for a baby food manufacturer who sells defective formula to credulous African mothers in developing countries.

He and his wife Barbara (Maura Tierney) had started as dedicated and idealistic Peace Corps volunteers twenty years before, but have sold out along the way. Although not as culpable as Ken, she has sold her own soul as she advises other young wives on how to live life in the third world.

The monologs are delivered, not so much as confessions to the audience, but rather Ken in the first and third, and Barbara in the connecting one, confront their own inner thoughts of personal lapses, marital discord, and corporate misdeeds searching for answers and possible forgiveness.

But this is more than just a two character play, for me at least, the three hotels, each so different and significantly so, tell the tale as vividly as do the actors. Set designer Thomas Lynch has had that magnificent 70 foot proscenium to fill and has done it with taste, opulence when called for, and an instinctive feel for mood and scene content.

For Ken’s first monolog, set in a posh hotel in Tangier, Morocco, the entire width of the stage becomes an enormous living room in which Ken can, moving restlessly from one area to another, keep drinking his martinis, keep defending his actions, at time becoming even ruefully funny. His subject matter is his real sins, reminding us of dialog in a play like Arthur Miller’s All My Sons (and the father who sold defective airplane parts).

But as he fights himself and his past, he at times can sting, himself and us, with a wry and sharp comment on himself. But he is still unforgiven and unforgiving.

We see him again in the third monolog The Day of the Dead Oaxaaca, Mexico. And a far different hotel. The room is small. It is on the second floor. The heat is intolerable. He is a guest. He could, and tells himself, he could call for a bottle of water to be brought up to him. But he does not call for it. He remembers that the old man who would have to climb to his room is lame. And one remembers the opulence of the hotel in Morocco and the man in that room with his martinis, unwilling to see himself.

The monolog between these two by Ken is movingly played in bright brilliant white sunlight in a hotel in St Thomas, Virgin Islands as his wife Barbara thinks back through where she started and what has happened along the way, ending with she herself becoming the whistle blower on her own husband, as at a scheduled luncheon to the young upcoming corporate wives, she has found herself telling them how it really was and is. What they will find themselves becoming. And most movingly trying to deal with the death of her own fifteen year old son.

This is a production not only rewarding to see, but one that would seem to invite audience discussion, at least for certain, advertised performances. Although set in 1991, the plight of the characters as they make worse the world in which they live, is still one very much with us.

Both actors are well cast and every the inch the characters they play. Their skills are there in the tiny touches – Tierney putting on her shoes as she finishes her monolog – or Weber lighting the candle near the end of his.

With so many plays on so many Berkshires stages, this is one I would like to have time to see again, and of course will not. But I have the feeling it would rewarding. Meanwhile I have tried to suggest enough of what it concerns to send you off to see it for me.