Local theatre was...

July 20, 2008 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall.

The basic idea behind Richard Greenberg’s The Violet Hour now playing at the Berkshire Stage Company is a fascinating one.

The action of the play takes place in the incredibly messy office of John (Austin Lysy) just back from WWI (that war they thought would end all wars); the time is April 1919. John’s father is going to back him, minimally, to become a publisher with enough to publish one book. He has advertised for scripts and been deluged with them, stacks and stacks of manuscripts lie everywhere.

Set designer Wilson Chin has not only gone all out on cluttered office, he has created the illusion that the dingy office is high up in a Manhattan loft with the back wall a great slant of windows that look out on the a lofty hotel (the Plaza?) across the street, all giving the feeling of being high above the city.

We soon learn that the deluge of scripts is not what John needs or wants. He already has two scripts he is eager to print. Both are memoirs.

The first is huge, (filling great boxes and obviously far longer than War and Peace.) Its author is Denny, (Brian Avers) best friend from his Princeton days, desperate to have it published because only his success can win for him the woman he loves, the beautiful Rosamund (Heidi Armbruster), a woman whose unusual laugh haunts him.

The second script is a much shorter one, written (she claims without ghostwriter) by the enchanting femme fatale Jesse (Opal Alladin), a gorgeous, mature, black singer with whom John is having an affair. At first glance one would think the play could evolve into a hilarious retake of Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemma in which only one of two dying patients can be chosen for the treatment.

However the play is much more complex than that.

The fifth character Gidger (Nat DeWolf) is first aware that something much more significant than John’s difficult choice is going on. Gidger is only the put-upon office menial, but it is he who ultimately alerts John to the dreadful machine that, coming from nowhere, has landed in the outer office and is spewing out typed pages at an alarming rate. This awesome machine is brilliantly brought on-stage by the set, sound, and lighting crew who present it as great shadowed spinning wheels beyond the office door.

This situation and the five characters, all talented and winning actors, wonderfully garbed in 1919 regalia by Jessica Ford, spin about the stage in the first act, one written with witty dialog, strong character roles and a laugh a minute. We learn much about them which will become significantly important in the second act. The play seems to be an hilarious comedy and all is still joyous at intermission. Although put-upon, slighted Gidger is the only one to be sensing danger.

Act two, a longish one, is still to come and in it the hilarity vanishes. That great machine is printing out the future decades, the ways in which these five characters will be remembered in 1990, and the comic tone is gone from the play. The laughs are few or ironic (Gidger’s dog, a marvelous off-stage character who appears only at the beginning of act one, is the subject of many, wrongly attributed, typed pages.)

Thus, the whole tone of the play shifts to darkness – that comes after the violet hour? One becomes confused in this act as to the playwright’s intent. The future is not pretty. Gidger finds himself valiantly singing “Que Sera, sera” and wondering where the song comes from.

The future is not what was planned, not understood by future writers of this 1919 present.

The five actors, still trapped on stage in 1919 but having to face what the century will make of them, could give up, but they don’t. In the end, they are trooping off to see a 1919 play, the lost tickets for which the play began; a play in which they will know the ending when the play begins with the maid coming in to put flowers on the coffee table, but determined to enjoy it anyway.

And they hurry off not to miss the curtain. Herein probably lies the play’s theme.

This has been a difficult play to describe, the mood and tone shift from act one to act two having jolted, as probably the author intended. However, for me, the second act was too cluttered, needing streamlining. The author is talented, having written such moving scripts as Three Days of Rain, and director Barry Edelstein has seen that his actors present the play with grace, agility, even poignancy, as well as all the hilarity.

But the play in the second act tries to give us too much, a bit like the character Denny with his enormous script.

However, it is well worth seeing for its talented cast and excellent staging, but it is not an easy play to untangle despite all the talent that has gone into its making.

July 17, 2008 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

… be assured that The Three Sisters at Williamstown is a haunting experience you may never forget. Theatre can’t get any better than that!

Anton Chekhov is undeniably unique and the four masterpieces (five if one includes Ivanov) he composed during his brief life have inspired the course of contemporary theatre for more than a century.

His plays are beautiful ones, comedies he called them, but poignant, full of love and yearning, orchestrated by subtle recurring themes that weave through their four act structure.

Birch trees are almost their signature. And they are large cast plays of a dozen actors. But ideally with no “stars.” Each is part of an ensemble and has a fully developed off-stage life—one full of memories, dreams, hope and fears And each too, no matter the size of his role has a “moment,” a time in which one can identify with the angst of the buried life.

Because the plays are so uniquely crafted, although they are frequently produced, the true Chekhov spirit must be in the bones of the director.

It is therefore absolutely joyous to announce that Michael Greif’s production of Chekhov’s The Three Sisters now playing on the Williamstown Theatre Festival stage is magnificently cast, intuitive, compassionate and deeply moving.

There is so much to praise in this production that a brief review cannot adequately cover all, that makes (as is evident) “where to begin” a problem.

But even there the director has helped us, adding no new words to Paul Schmidt’s excellent translation, but a wordless musical prologue in which for the only time in the play we are clearly in the yearned for Moscow of years ago and the three young girls in white dresses whirl briefly among the dancers and uniformed soldiers. A brief glimpse of innocent delight and joy. In Moscow.

Moscow. The word threads the play. In the first act (set in the dull provincial town) the word is evoked more than a dozen times. (It will weave through all the acts, its use diminishing as hope diminishes until in the final act only Ferapont, (Peter Maloney) the deaf old servant, who has never been there will mention the place, one in his mind confused with St Petersburg, another place about which he knows nothing.

As the first act opens, the sun is shining. It is the name day of Irina, (Aya Cash) youngest of the sisters, only 20 and having spent the last eleven years of her life in the provincial town. Wearing white, she is radiant with the hope that after a year of mourning for the brigade commander father whose career appointment has exiled them from their beloved former home, they can now go back.

Surely now brother Andrei (Manoel Felciano) better educated than even Irina and her sisters who all know German, English and French, with she even knowing some Italian as well) can become a professor and take them all to Moscow.

Masha, (Rosemarie DeWitt) unfortunately married a pedantic local teacher and whose sense of defeat is present in her black dress, will spend weeks visiting them. And Olga, (Jessica Hunt) beautifully cast as one who at 29, feeling spinsterhood, is still young of body, beautiful of face, and full of love for her two sisters.

It is in this great bonding of the sisters that another thread of this production weaves through the play, the closeness that three motherless girls, not widely separated by age, have always had. That will be so vividly present as they navigate the troubled acts of the play in which hope diminishes. That breaks the heart as, their arms around each other, they “accept” and even hope (for others) in the final act.

Meanwhile, in the first act, the scene is bright as other characters assemble for the name day celebration. Cherbutykin (Michael Cristofer) the old doctor, who once loved the sisters’ mother appears with his costly inappropriate gift of a silver samovar.

Vershinin, (Stevie Ray Dallimore) the new battery commander, not only is brought to be introduced but his having recently come from Moscow, and his engaging talk about his unfortunate wife and children, etc suddenly waken the brooding Masha who announces, “I’ll stay to dinner.” And sets in motion the Vershinin/ Masha theme that will weave, with whistling, and melody the words that haunt Masha, “A green oak grows by a curving stone. And on that oak hangs a gold chain.”

So the dinner party grows as more young cadets are added to the party Tuzenback (Keith Nobbs) and Solyony (Stephen Kulken) two rivals for Irina’s love; and a couple of young soldiers bringing childish toys and a camera for a group photo.

The moment is the happiest the play can reach. For just at the end of the first act enters the woman who will doom any happiness – Natasha (Cassie Beck), a vulgar, uneducated local girl who, enamering Andrei will eventually devour all before her.

The casting of all in the play is superb. Natasha is, as she should be, taller, broader, coarser looking, annoyingly speaking. The sisters, despite disappointments, are ever supple and, though wounded, charming and loving.

Having introduced his characters in the first act, Chekov lets them play their hearts out in the scenes that follow. Although probably most in the audience know the plot, I save it unspoiled for those few who may experience its unwinding for the first time.

Each will take home a moment he/she can never forget be it only Irina in Act 3 suddenly exclaiming, “I have forgotten the Italian for window and ceiling!” Or Masha’s pedantic but well-meaning husband telling her she is a good girl. Or Olga and Irina on twin cots shoved from their room by space for “Bobik” or “Sophia.”

The beautiful home designed by Allen Moyer will have been gobbled up by Natasha by the play’s end and she cannot wait to get at the trees. However in Chekhov, life goes on it … and does.

After-note: If you are haunted by Andrei and that baby carriage in the final scene of the play, you might want to know that so was Brian Friel, the Irish playwright who has adapted several Chekhov plays for the theatres in Dublin. His affinity for Chekhov is strong and in 2002 he wrote and produced Afterplay in which one can meet Andrei 20 years later, finally in Moscow. It too will break your heart, but it is a lovely two-character play.

Published by the Gallery Press (in Ireland) in a volume called Three Plays After but also obtainable on our side of the Atlantic. I picked up my copy at the bookstore of the Shaw Festival, read it flying home, and keep it next to The Three Sisters on my Chekhov shelf.

Meanwhile, be assured that The Three Sisters at Williamstown is a haunting experience you may never forget. Theatre can’t get any better than that!

July 11, 2008 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall.

If the bland title of playwright Karen Zacarias’ The Book Club Play now gracing the Berkshire Theatre Festival stage leads one to expect a predictable comedy concerning the motley types who inhabit the ubiquitous book clubs that seem to exist everywhere, think again.

While the play begins innocently enough with the members of this club being filmed for a documentary concerning books—why they read or how their first encounter with Pat the Bunny or Tarzan or Heathcliff changed their lives, that is deceptive at best.

Very quickly the little comedy becomes more as the five club members (soon to be come a sixth over whom acceptance rules fuel the plot) seem to forget they are on camera and their real feelings about the others, about themselves, and especially about the angst within them become entangled in confrontations and conflict.

All this is presented in rapid-fire, hysterical dialog with smashing comic thrusts that keeps the audience a-roar.

But there is more. This play keeps us aware of technology and film for the great pale multilevel set (that includes the living room where the club meets and indulgences in the food of the evening, a big item to some who bring and some who devour) but is also at times filming space of the events, planned and unplanned that get disastrously out of hand.

We in the audience experience this technology as great titles, author names, etc. are projected on the soaring white walls, pulling us into the documentary itself. It is an ambitious undertaking and works most of the time, although time itself gets a bit jangled even though projected titles of dates help keep one on track.

Thus the multipex interweaving of real life, documentary life and projections—to say nothing about the one-shot laugh lines that pepper the script, make this an ambitious play involving a great deal more than the title can suggest.

… an astonishing, hilarious, and at times moving play, one difficult to describe but rewarding to see.

And there is one other added element—a 7th character, The Expert/Pundit. This role actually becomes half a dozen more roles as she/he (for so skillfully does Sarah Marshall inhabit this role that it is hard to believe one woman is all the commentators) suddenly breaks into what plot there is, to appear now down right, legless, in a wheel chair or up center ready to leap into space. It is a virtuoso role. Absolutely brilliant.

Brilliant too are the very individual inhabitants of the book club. Leading the pack is the leader of the club Ana (Keira Naughton) who not only decrees, brings intimidating refreshments, vetoes new members, but also would be a writer herself and keeps a disastrous diary. Her marvelous hysteria, provoked by her losing authority over the group at a trying moment brings on a tirade (death wish) that sets the humorous plot whirling with angst. And brings out the most dramatic acting and skills of the other five group members.

The pivotal moment is triggered when Jen (Anne Louise Zachry) the youngest member of the club, whose journalistic hopes are still confined to writing obit columns, brings to a monthly meeting Alex (Bhavesh Patel) whom she has encountered in her apartment building’s laundry room reading War and Peace.

Patel is brilliantly funny adding a colorful and dynamic twist to any scene he inhabits. (He really was reading the book although his garb and antics would not suggest it.) But it is his suggested inclusion in the group that sends Ana into her tail-spin that involves all.

Including her husband Rob (C. J. Wilson) whose greatest interest in the club seems to be the refreshments and fond memories of Tarzan. Although even his laid back attitude to Ana and literature can be animated beyond devouring twinkies.

Lily, Cherise Boothe, remembered for a fine performance in Blues for an Alabama Sky, remains calm in the fray and handles some of the funniest one-liners in the play with aplomb. She can express concern without hysteria and probably not only read but understood the books on the club list.

Tom Story, BTF veteran and creator of very different roles here plays Will, the gay-man-out, in the group. Full of angst and oh so sensitive. His winter garb seems not only his attempts at hiding from the inclement weather but from the reality of a situation itself.

These six club members (or in Patel’s case, possible member) and the ingenious Pundit whose presence adds the seeming half a dozen more to the cast, make this an astonishing, hilarious, and at times moving play, one difficult to describe but rewarding to see.

Director Nick Olcott has somehow held together all the interwoven mechanics of the convoluted script and created an atmosphere in which the seven actors could each have a chance to play their souls out.

The play has been developing for a couple of years and still could be clearer at times. But it is an exhilarating evening in theatre and the stage is awash with first-rate talent.

And although the characters and technical gimmicks overshadow Ahab and Tolstoy and even that Bunny that got patted, ultimately the play is about books – words – communication and the obscuring and sharing of it. A fairly hefty topic for a summer comedy.

And yet it whirls along as zanily as our world of 2008 seems to be whirling.

June 26, 2008 performance reviewed by Edward McDonnell.

There are wonderful things inside Chris Van Allsburg’s head. Originally trained as a sculptor, he began illustrating and writing books. Since the 1979 release of The Garden of Abdul Gasazi, he has created fifteen others, including Jumanji, Ben’s Dream, The Wreck of the Zephyr, and The Polar Express. He has received numerous awards, including the Caldecott Honor Medal and the National Book Award.

The Mysteries of Harris Burdick appeared in 1984. It consists of fourteen different drawings – moody, compelling, disturbing, shadowy – well, you decide: as countless middle school students and teachers can tell you, The Solutions of the Harris Burdicks are to be found inside the beholder’s head. The story goes: a man named Harris Burdicks brought these drawings to a publisher, then promised to return the following day with the stories that accompany them. He never came back. He was never seen again.

As presented in the Barrington Stage Company production, under the direction of Joe Calarco, these beguiling puzzles seize and hold the audience immediately. The pictures are brought to light one at a time along with fragments of stories spoken and sung by neighborhood residents. The first is that of an empty, massive hulk of a house and the night the light in the top floor went on. The mood is lightly suspenseful, foreboding, with music to match. There is no “horror” in the picture or the story; more of a campfire tone. Halloween is even mentioned.

Then the house flies away.

With the introduction of a supernatural element into what had been merely the beginnings of a shivery atmosphere, the play begins to move.

A boy skipping stones into a pond stands wondering as the pond skips a stone back to him.

A boy meets a wonderful girl and they raise a child, a wonderful happy boy named Archie.

Then, while the innocuous piano continues throughout, and we begin to feel acquainted with the decent but unremarkable side of these lives, the real horror comes, quietly, in the daytime, as real horror can when it wants to: just as we begin to know his uniqueness and childish zest for life, twelve-year-old Archie disappears.

In the neighborhood there is regret, suspicion, unspeakable pain.

The father of Archie’s playmate, overcome with paranoia and obsessively protective, lashes out at others, condemns himself.

We all eyeball the furtive loner, even as we enjoy his quirky song about the exterminator life.

There is a poignant scene where Molly, the little girl who knew Archie, plays with caterpillars alone and notes that “nobody smiles anymore.”

In scenes that follow, we have some hope for Archie, we watch some developments that bring up more mysteries, and reality continues to stretch, open and close. As whimsical and fantastic unfold alongside aching tragedy, a primary question might be, “Maurice Sendak meets Ted Bundy? Can they do this? Is this going to work?”

Suffice it to say that director Calarco, working at a perfect pace to maintain and intensify curiosity and allowing us to trust this peculiar material, does succeed.

His actors are all effective, individually and (more important) as a tight team. If there were a standout it might be Catherine Porter as the mother wrestling with the greatest loss imaginable, or Romain Fruge as the father who responds to it with emptiness.

Burdick is a one of a kind experience and very well worthwhile.

The Mysteries of Harris Burdick was developed in the BSC workshop a year ago.

July 5, 2008 performance (matinee) reviewed by Frances Benn Hall.

Williamstown Theatre’s new Artistic Director, Nicholas Martin, has opened the summer season on the Main stage with a knock-out production of She Loves Me that puts into play the absolutely marvelous stage-house of the theatre and all its equipment.

The vast height of the stage makes possible an on- stage orchestra up above the action taking place below. The revolving stage makes effortlessly possible the shifting setting of the numerous scnes especially that of the a perfume boutique in Budapest in 1934, (including exterior, interior (with front shop area, back shop area) while the rigging, far up in the fly area, supplies time changes from June to December as Fall leaves rain down or winter flurries fly.

And that is only the beginning. Windows descend from the fly area, partially masking the orchestra, but only putting them behind glass, for outdoor boutique scenes. And that revolving stage can also whirl in a night club. Other one-shot small scenes such as a hospital room (DR) or the heroine’s bedroom (in which of the funniest scenes of the play occurs) can erupt briefly from the wings before the revolving stage whirls us back to the boutique.

All these scenes are marvelously decorated and appointed by set designer James Noone, magnificently lit by Kenneth Rosenberg and Philip Rosenberg, and inhabited by a talented cast, joyously performing a little gem of a play.

She Loves Me is musical theatre at its best. And the actors, singers and dancers on the Williamtown stage for this performance are so perfectly cast, so buoyantly joyful in their production that a standing ovation at its ending seems scarcely adequate.

The plot seems on description harmlessly familiar and is deceptively so. The time is 1934 in Budapest (making it possible for Robert Morgan costume designer, on seemingly unlimited budget) to shine. Boutiques equate with richly garbed female customers expecting to be wooed by fawning clerks.

Among the fawning clerks are the shows leads, and their own concerns. Head clerk George Nowack (Brooks Ashmanskas , and new employee Amanda (Kate Baldwin) can’t stand each other in the flesh. However t hey are hopeful correspondents in an anonymous pen-pal venture.

This may sound like a familiar plot, but the antics that involve their non-meeting, disillusionment and eventual compatibility are anything but .

Their “romance” works itself out in a marvelously antic duet, “Where’s my Shoe” and culminates in George’s solo “She Loves Me” alone on a vast empty stage that he fills with wild action and dance interwoven with romantically gentle song. A bravo performance.

Jessica Stone as Ilona, head female clerk., is perhaps second female lead but vies as first with amazing solos in both acts. The store’s owner, Mr. Maraczek (Dick Latessa) and the wonderful bike-riding Arpad (Jeremy Berck) who rises from delivery boy to junior clerk Both inhabit their costumes and their roles with conviction. Jason Babinsky has a delightful solo as head waiter in a zany café scene in which too much occurs to be described but all of it choreographed .to perfection.

And then there are the five creatively inventive females who double in roles (and costumes) in and out of the entire play as customers and as femmes fatale in the café.

Musically the show provides solos, duets, quartets and big ensemble numbers. The one ending the second act includes the zaniest take off on the frantic activities of customers concerning the twelve days before Christmas, that is so delightful one wishes they could instantly repeat it so one could roar at it again.

Nicholas Martin, not only taking on the artistic director mantle this summer, has also found time to direct this delightful play. All in all a happy homecoming that bodes well for the summer of ’08 in Williamstown.

(Photo credit: T. Charles Erickson; used by permission of WTF.)

June 27, 2008 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

Once again the intrepid Tina Packer has shown her ingenuity and originality in dealing with the Bard’s plays, and her staging of All’s Well That Ends Well now playing in repertory through August 31 at the Shakespeare and Co.’s Founders’ Theatre, Lenox, MA, has turned an ugly duckling into a swinging, singing swan.

(L-R) Virginia Ness,Peter Davenport, Grace Trull, Douglas Seldin, Brittany Morgan

All’s Well That Ends Well is one of Shakespeare’s problem plays in which the plot (as written) is a weak one, based on a saying that is ambivalent, at best. The audience is left to decide whether or not the marriage of the warring lovers can possibly “end well.” This production, through the skillful casting and playing of the two lovers, leaves no doubts.

Packer achieves her effects, not only by the skillful casting of all the talented members that make up her large cast, but by choosing to open the play in troubadour France. As written, the play has only one song, she and composer Bill Barclay have added fourteen more musical numbers performed by a five piece onstage orchestra, cast members, and often danced to choreography by Susan Dibble.

What is playing on stage at the Founders’ is indeed a musical version of a play by William Shakespeare.

The plot involves an unlikely pair of lovers. Helena (Kristin Villanueva) is a poor orphan living on the bounty of the Countess of Rossillion (Elizabeth Ingram) and secretly in love with the Countess’s son Bertram (Jason Asprey), who is socially far above her. However, she is determined, and when Bertram goes off to Paris and is welcomed into the court of the dying King (Timothy Douglas) Helena, who has learned medical lore from her recently deceased father, goes to Paris, cures the King and is offered one wish.

Of course the wish is for a husband. All the gallant blades of the French court are lined up for her choice, and she traverses the line (in couplets, otherwise rarely used in this play) politely rejecting all, until Bertram, accidentally in line, is chosen.

Bertram objects violently but is unable to convince the King to change his promise to Helena. An off stage wedding ensues. However, Bertram enters announcing his rejection of the match with words that will echo down through the events that make up the (improbable) events in the second half of the play.

Bertram will recognize the marriage only

“When thou canst get the ring upon my finger, which never shall come off, and show me a child begotten of thy body that I am father to, then call me husband: but in such a ‘then’ I write ‘never.’ “

He then takes off for war in Florence and poor Helena returns to the Countess in the south of France.

However, Helena is determined, if temporarily saddened and almost defeated. She dons the ragged garb of beggar and goes off to Florence. There, aided and abetted by a group of local women, she accomplishes the seemingly impossible feats Bertram has insisted upon, and the play can end gaily, happily, jubilantly, and musically.

The cast is star studded with the handsome talented Asprey slipping easily in a role so different from his villainous but memorable one in “Much Ado About Nothing” or his recent brio one as Hamlet.

Ingram is convincing in her central and compassionate role, every gesture or vocal nuance so right. Villanueva, petite but feisty, is engaging as the loving but determined Helena, especially appealing in her vocal delivery and her dogged determination. Timothy Douglas as an ailing King of France, feebly sinking to a chair is, touchingly central.

In a large supporting role, that of Parolles, the cowardly foppish villain of the play, Kevin O”Donnell delights whenever on stage. While Brittany Morgan is appealing and graceful as Diana, playing the chief role of the women in Italy who come to Helena’s defense.

And then there is LAVACHE, (Nigel Gore) in a role that in Shakespeare was that of a clown in the Countess’ court. In Packer’s version, he is a world weary troubadour and present on stage much of the time, a key figure singing a plaintive solo, or boisterously performing in group numbers, the music mixing folk songs recalling Bob Dylan or Pete Seeger or energetically employing the rest of the talented musicians in the on stage band. The music of varied moods accompanies original pieces moving the plot along as well of poems and lines from other Shakespeare plays.

Jacqueline Firkin’s countless costumes are color coordinated (everyone in black and white for a mourning time in the countess’s court; all rustic among the peasant women). Many cast members play several roles, and each dons several costumes. What a flurry that must cause backstage; during one song Asprey leaves the stage and keeps returning with suitable costume additions, all charming and delightful as are so many of the touches in this charming and captivating play.

The three different locales for the action are ably provided by Susan Zeeman Rogers towering flats that flip swiftly from the white walls and flowing curtains of the Countess country home to the elegance of the King of France’s throne room in Paris or the helter-skelter vivid colors of the Florence scenes.

What with Bertram escaping to the wars, much elegant sword play is in effect thanks to Ryan Winkles.

Everybody, including all those engaged in this saucy and surprising All’s Well deserves praise including names unmentioned but whose skills made it flourish so delightfully.

Tina Packer, Bill Barclay and all the rest have convincingly proved that All’s Well That Ends Well ends very well at the Founders’. Shakespeare should be pleased.