June 21, 2009 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

Barrington Stage Company has opened its main stage season with a flamboyant production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel. The sets are amazingly detailed, especially for the opening number with the entire large cast on stage as ingeniously designed horses circle the merry-go-round.

And the cast is a huge one of close to thirty actors, singers and dancers (including thirteen equity actors) who robustly perform the much-loved songs, doubling at times, all magnificently costumed (down to their period shoes) as they populate the various settings of a New England fishing village, circa 1900.

It is a daring achievement in this summer of our shattered economy when black box, small cast, must of necessity be more in evidence. Fortunately a grant of $20,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts has helped make this production possible.

And the delight of the audience in the production proves the opulence worth it, not to mention the trickle-down effect in the employment of so many equity actors.

This is a splendid production of one of the great American musicals, adapted from Hungarian Ferenc Molnar’s greatest play, Liliom, the plot of the musical closely followed with adaptations to transfer it to its New England setting, and be-jeweled with song and dance.

That basic plot centers around a poignant, and at times brutal, love affair between Billy Biglow (Aaron Ramey) and Julie Jordon (Patricia Noonan). He is a rough, crass barker at an amusement park, who expresses the frustration of his twisted soul through violence when he means love. She is a simple housemaid, a village girl, willing to give up all of her meager security for life with Billy.

Somehow, both inarticulate, they express their love beneath the falling leaves of an acacia tree, both sacrificing their jobs in the bargain and not caring.

Their marriage turns out to be far different from the conventional one that Julie’s best friend and confident, Carrie (Sara Jean Ford) makes, and Julie is left pregnant, to cope alone before any of Carrie’s nine children are born.

The love of Billy and Julie is beautiful and touching. Julie’s last line to her daughter at the play’s end sums up Billy’s brutal love and her mute understanding of it:

“It is possible, dear, that someone may beat you and beat you and beat you, and not hurt you at all.”

Although the play is basically realistic, with scenes whirling through the activities of the fishing village and including a seafood picnic, it also includes expressionistic scenes in which a man can steal a star from heaven itself, in a skillful blending of the two very different theatrical modes.

While the play is basically Billy’s (in Molnar’s version his name was the title), Julie has good scenes and songs, well presented.

As do several others in this star studded cast. Leslie Becker as Mrs. Mullin, owner of the amusement park for all her vulgarity (and burgeoning breasts) loves Billy in a moving way. Christopher Innvar, as Jigger, radiates evil and lures Billy toward destruction. Indeed many in this well–cast show deserve cheers for their singing, dancing and gusto. The whole production is buoyant and every actor in it, down to the delightful children, radiated delight in their participation.

Economics, despite that generous grant, reduced the music accompaniment to two pianos in a small pit stage-left; a bit strident if one is seated near them, but capably played, with dexterity, by two musicians who share in the praise

As do the energetic dancers in the rousing dances that Joshua Bergasse choreographed from Agnes de Mille’s original Broadway ones; Holly Caine designed the costumes, and Robert Mark Morgan the sets. Darren Cohen directed the music.

Julianne Boyd, a lady who is fairly busy around Barrington Stage, and who has spent fifteen years getting it to a production such as this one, directed this show that brings so much joy to Pittsfield.

• Barrington Stage Company schedule 2009 season

June 20, 2009 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

Broadway by the Year, now playing at the Berkshire Theatre Festival is much more than the average musical review. An ensemble of talented singers/actors, Christiane Noll, Kerry O’Malley, and Scott Coulter, with musical director Ross Patterson at the grand piano, and host/writer Scott Siegel at a down left lectern, involve us in far more than a trip down memory lane.

On a stage, bare except for a grand piano and lectern, but with a wonderful backdrop that changes colors, dancing stars and even briefly a Manhattan skyline, they bring alive songs from two, widely separated decades of Broadway musicals.

In Act I, the time is 1930s and the musicals from which the songs come are forgotten but not the names of their, then young, composers, the Gershwins, Cole Porter, Rogers and Hart, and others.

But if the musicals themselves did not endure, songs did, and they are linked together by rapid fire narration, friendly and informative with brief insightful comments by host Seigel.

The songs we all recognize are presented as solos, trios, and duets. The singers are costumed in garb of the period. Delightful too is the fact that the marvelous piano accompaniment gives time for openings that lead into the songs, and that the actors use the stage area in multiple ways, whether it is assembling around the piano, being isolated in a duet far down right and left, or hamming it up in a rousing trio or draping atop a piano.

In the second act of this two hour show, the host takes us into a period 37 years later. We are in 1964, the Beatles aren’t quite number one yet and not included. But the shows can include successes such as Hello, Dolly!, Fiddler on the Roof, Funny Girl, Anyone Can Whistle, and High Spirits.

The costumes are now those of the late 60’s and the mood lighter. Staging and lighting again contributing to the songs themselves, not the “Ten Cents a Dance” of the Great Depression period.

Songs this reviewer enjoyed most, though far more pleased as well, were O’Malley’s “Home Sweet Heaven,” delivered from piano top by the returned spirit in the musical of Noel Coward’s play. Beautifully sung. “Anyone Can Whistle” high spot for Coulter,
and “Love for Sale” a haunting duet by the two sopranos in marvelous staging, at first a solo for the talented Noll, destitute and alone and on the street, to be joined and made a duet by O’Malley at the far left corner, joining her in the song, but both isolated in their dreary profession. Unforgettable moment.

Even the deluge that greeted audience members exiting the theatre did not dampen the gala in the tent once the countless umbrellas were furled again. Among the evening’s song had been a delightful “Don’t Rain on My Parade” and, if literally it tried to, metaphorically it didn’t. So director Scott Coulter could be pleased with his production.

June 17, 2009 performance, reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

Seven years ago, in the limited playing area of Shakespeare and Co’s small drawing-room theatre, three talented theatre artists—playwright William Gibson, director Daniel Gidron, and actor Annette Miller, created what as reviewer I described as “miracle” in the world premier of Golda’s Balcony. (Read review of  May 8, 2002 opening performance.) Strong language for a ninety-five minute play; but two weeks later when I returned to see it again, the miracle was still there.

It is thus a joy to report that the miracle is again to be seen in its original form on the Bernstein Stage at Shakespeare and Company.

Annette Miller steps into Golda’s kutzy shoes—all the ‘realism” she needs to become the character. On stage is a desk, a lectern, a map and an easy chair area, and we are with her in Israel in 1973 on a night in which our own world, no matter who we are, could have possibly changed forever.

For Golda has two balconies, the one outside her apartment that overlooks the sea, and a second balcony, underground from which she can look down upon the one fatal rocket that she could launch, if the phone on the desk does not finally produce Henry Kissinger’s voice with the promise that America will immediately send replacements for the planes and other war gear already destroyed by Egypt and Syria. Knowing she was altering the world forever, with a bomb on which was written, “Never again.”

The time of the acting takes in the 95 minutes of Golda’s waiting. It is, between attempts to rouse Washington, filled with un-chronological memories—of her childhood as a Jewish child in Russia, of the girlhood in Milwaukee from which she launched her first trip to Israel, to her failed marriage as she tries to save children dying on Cyprus and cosset her own children as well. With setbacks and victories. With Israel’s statehood in 1948. With begging for money and help. And finally in 1973 with war planes overhead.

Miller’s acting is absolutely marvelous—vocally she can be strong, decisive, blatant, or rueful and gentle as holding an enormous (invisible) pink lampshade—so impossibly wrong for their humble home, bought and brought by the husband who means so well but cannot understand why she struggles for Israel as she is driven to do, high-lights the personal sacrifices she has been forced to make.

Other characters in her past (family and political) are evoked and slide in an out of her memories. When she pulled a bunchy white paper flower from a desk drawer, I remembered what was coming and relived with her the Cyprus child who had given it to her “because we don’t have real ones.” One of the thousands she fought to save, one of the victories. Because her life was a see-saw of misfortune and triumph. And seeing the play in 2009, the current unrest in the middle-East has special resonance.

As Golda concludes, “I don’t know the answer, but seveny five years ago my father nailed up boards across the door to keep out the pogrom, and after seventy five years, we come from that place to this place here where we can live … with all people including our neighbors, including our neighbors, including our neighbors…”

The curtain call was, appropriately, a standing ovation.

See also: 2002 interview with William Gibson.

June 13, 2009 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

Pinter’s Mirror, now gracing the “easily anywhere” of the Bernstein Theatre at Shakespeare and Co., is a brilliant glittering gem in which three talented actors, Malcolm Ingram, Elizabeth Ingram, long-time company veterans, plus new-comer Stephen Pilkington, and a few mismatched chairs capture the slippery ambiguity, menace, and constant humor of that theatre style so unique that “pinteresque” has become a lower-case word to describe a style otherwise impossible to pin down.

But ambiguous as Pinter’s plays are, full of dark humor, domestic settings riddled with angst and yearnings behind the pauses, gradually the menace builds in plots that are impossible to summarize, but tantalizing in their very obscurity and sudden surprises. All three plays in the evening’s program are set in England in the 1950s but their concerns for us in the audience are still very much with us in the over-complexities of today’s world.

In the opening play, A Slight Ache, the two Ingrams, Brits themselves, bring the the exact tone and accent of the aging couple where tea on the terrace (with a wasp in the marmalade) gradually escalates when a match-seller at the end of the lane brings out in the husband hostilities and in the wife suppressed erotic urges. The gradual menace mounts as we eventually and agonizingly slowly see the match-seller, though never his face. The faces, speeches, and actions of the other two are varied minutely; acting at its subtle best by both.

In “Family Voices,” Pilkington as young wayward naïve son is on one telephone (and all over the stage taking on scenes and characters he describes naively) while his aging mother (Elizabeth Ingram) frets, scolds, advises, and cannot reach him. She is the mother one loves, but hates and avoids. And Malcolm Ingram plays the dead father reclining but commenting. All of this again with the typical Pinter ambiguity and menace and surprise and, when needed, agility.

“Victoria Station” is never reached in the small play that ends the evening. The two men, Pilkington and Ingram, are cab driver and his controller, on telephones, each in his spot of light. In this brief coda play, the driver doesn’t know where he is, let alone where the station is, but never mind, the dialog along with the pauses and ambiguities are all there and has the right tone. The characters, each far different from those played earlier, are clearly limned, if preposterous, and the humor is more blatant and less menacing.

The whole evening is pure Printer as I, limitedly, understand him. And it is delightful. Printer would never explain what the plays “meant.” Sometimes we do try to explain them, though. They are full of the banalities of contemporary life, non-realistic, but real in their own way. No clear message is intended.

So go. Director Eric Tucker can be proud of this production and of the zest and skill with which his three actors bring their varied roles to rollicking, suspenseful life.

May 23, 2009 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

Sitting in the audience that filled every seat at the press opening of Brian Friel’s Faith Healer at the Berkshire Theatre Festival’s Unicorn Theatre, I found myself envying those who knew little or nothing about the play and for whom it would be a daunting experience.

And just as strongly I rejoiced that I was one of those who had come, knowing the play and feeling sure that under Eric Hill’s mesmerizing direction, it would unfold dazzlingly in its subtle, but all so Irish, experience and weave gradually to its shattering ending.

For any future audience members to whom the play is unknown, I will tread lightly on plot and offer a few suggestions as to what to expect. For the Friel enthusiasts, I’ll attempt to describe the play’s “Irishness,” based as it is on the old tradition of seanachie, and how Friel employs it, blending metaphor into his theme and how this production reveals it.

The play is composed of four consecutive monologs delivered by three actors, each alone on the stage, in a minimal but beautifully lit set, each telling his story from his own point of view.

Frank Hardy (Colin Lane) opens the play and his second monolog closes it. Frank is the Faith Healer who has found significance in his very initials which seem to have bestowed on him an art over which he feels he has a strange talent, but one not under his control. He can, occasionally, heal, but at other times it is impossible. And usually he is aware of what the outcome will be. Yet his untaught talent drives him.

From Frank we learn also what he chooses to tell us of the long twenty years of touring the little fringe towns of Wales and Scotland (where he expects subjects to be more gullible). He can be charming and persuasive, but there are topics he avoids. His memory of scenes sharply differs from that of his two companions, and does so in significant and self-protecting ways. Lane gives us a conflicted character – endearing, but also hurtful and self protecting. His final monolog is beautifully and sympathetically rendered. For all his weaknesses, he still gains our compassion. A strong portrayal.

Keira Naughton as Grace brings grief and courage to her role as wife? (Frank at times seems to deny her this honor) and fellow-traveler of twenty years in the van. She too shares scenes Frank has told us of, but from a different angle, and we see her later through the eyes of the third character, Teddy, in a setting that forces her into assuming a bravery for which she has not the strength.

Her role demands the skilled actor that she is, aware of subtle nuance and the character’s conflicted emotions concerning her twenty year association with Frank. She gives us a woman we can admire. And later, when Teddy speaks, we can understand with even greater sympathy the flowing woman she once was who at one brief moment of sheer happiness could sing of “endearing young charms.” A carefully crafted performance.

Teddy (David Adkins) brings he first bursts of humor, music and song into the play as he almost avoiding material that involves his love and devotion to Frank, and especially to Grace. His accounts of his life before he joined them on their twenty year trek of the hinterlands is hilarious.

And he finally, bravely, confronts the sites that recur in the incantations and haunt all three in the group. He is Frank’s manager. His speech is broad Cockney and his formal education probably slight, far less than that of Grace and the career she abandoned.
“Manager” is a rather glorious title for the role he plays as van driver, but is too humble a word for other actions he has been on hand to perform. Adkins gives us a character we can love, one who supported the others in time of need, and who remembers the “big” moments differently and movingly. A sympathetic character, warmly created.

Frank delivers the final monolog, and finally, buttoned into his shabby coat, knows why he came back to Ireland.

Since in the monologs each character brings us only the way he/she remembers it, facts differ wildly. Still Friel keeps us on keel. Gradually, especially if we are new to the play we realize that not only do themes recur, but so certain names of the incanted villages. And the name Kinlockberbie, that small town in the far north of Scotland is often not only named, but repeated. With what happened described differently.

Even more significantly, two sentences, seemingly harmless description will, somewhere in each of the three’s monologs be introduced.

“So on the last day we crossed from Strenraer to Larne and drove through the
night to County Donegal. And there we got lodging in a pub, a lounge bar really,
outside a village called Ballybeg, not far from Donegal Town.”

These are some of the moments to listen for. Much of each story sheds light upon the fates of the others and on the basic theme that seems to me to be a metaphor referring to all artists, who feel someway “chosen” (at times almost reluctantly) to use an inborn gift. One that they embrace as if “called” to it, but one of which they are at times fearful. It can fail them. But even knowing they will fail, they must face the challenge and go on. Accept. In this play Frank “knew.”

Sadly, those living in the shadow of such artists often suffer too. But loving, they support, carry on, as long as they can.

Despite the sadness, this is not a depressing play. The characters are real and moving and each admirable in his or her own way. Although an early Friel, many would list it among his best, as perfect in its own way as Translations or
Molly Sweeney with its similar format of three, appearing fifteen years later.

Eric Hill and his team of actors, technicians have brought to the BTF’s Unicorn Stage a beautiful, sympathetic and dynamic production of an important play. What a lovely way to start the summer season in the Berkshires!