June 10, 2010 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

Women of Will, at Shakespeare and Co. is aptly referred to as WOW!!!! by those present at one of the performances. On a bare stage containing one chair and a couple of little black boxes, without costume changes except for one huge red cape and with a couple of hand props, two skilled actors, Tina Packer and Nigel Gore, in less than three hours bring alive in daring performances, nine of Shakespeare’s women, each a woman of will, (depending on the amount and kind of “will” that she could assert given the period in which Shakespeare wrote the play in which she appears.)

During the first act scenes are from early plays such as The Shrew and the marvelously fighting women in the historical plays of the War of the Roses—Margaret who Ms. Packer confesses is one of her favorite characters and Elizabeth who battled the men for her kin to rule England. The act ends with one of the loveliest balcony scenes of Juliet, sans balcony…the chair will do, in which Ms. Packer is the most haunting Juliet I have ever seen and one the most aware of what her words really mean.

In the second act, the duo of actors interweave characters and scenes from two plays—and Rosalind and Orlando slip into Desdemona and Othello and then back into the first two in the Forest of Arden, where Ms. Packer as a swaggering Rosalind in male attire and sporting a Nottingham accent brings her will against that of Orlando. This tour de force Scene interplay is hard to describe but mesmerizing to watch.

It is followed by all the Lady Macbeth/Macbeth scenes from the play of that name. Brilliant and terriying. The act then ends with the maturity of Shakespeare (as author) and the characters using woman’s will to being Pericles’ daughter to the salvation of her father in a scene that brings tears to the eyes. (In the full, three night performance thirty seven plays will be included in the five categories presenting women’s changing use of will, and other daughters in the late plays of Shakespeare, the romances, will also appear).

Some how, even in this brief series of selections from the gradually developing of Shakespeare as author, and the changing of attitudes two women, all this weaves into a beautiful evening, each segment woven into the next by Ms. Packer briefly speaking to the audience, cueing us in to where we are going as she and her partner become just actors for a moment, moving a box for the next scene. Needing only two theatrical assists, wonderful lighting and occasional background music or sounds such as a bird call, this evening is theatre, lecture and a lesson how great acting can fill an empty stage. Ms. Packer’s depth of knowledge of the plays, and her deep passion for her subject, combined with her years of theatre experience combine into a unique whole.

As for the two actors, they are a magnificent duo, capable of great variety in roles and delightfully informal with each other in the setting up of scenes and their brief sallies to the audience.

A coda brings the evening formally to a close with the civil wars behind and Cramer blessing the infant Elizabeth I, the Queen for whom Shakespeare wrote so much. And the lovely final touch—the red robe that sometimes donned one of the characters, is rolled into an oblong blanket, the infant being blessed.

The audience at the performance this reviewer attended felt so blessed by the whole stunning evening that after a moment of stunned silence almost as one rose to standing applause.

Aug. 16, 2009 matinee performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

The plot of Simon Gray’s Quartermaine’s Terms, now playing at Williamstown Theatre Festival is a very simple one, at least on the surface. All of the action, covering a period of three years in 1960’s, takes place in the staff room of the Cull-Loomis School of English for Foreigners, Cambridge, England.
[Read more…] about Quartermaine’s Terms at Williamstown Theatre Festival

July 26, 2009 performance reviewed by Ed McDonnell

Andrew Wyke, central character in Sleuth, loves games, and that’s good. He makes a living as a mystery writer and his enormous enthusiasm has paid off. His pride in his English manor house, all the nice things in it and his efforts to live in a gentlemanly style, as he interprets it, are evident with the curtain’s rise. The busy set at Barrington Stage Company (David Barber) is as promising and evocative as a campfire for a story such as this, is in fact the first character we see.

Wyke’s zeal not only sustains itself in his career, it has spilled over into his private life. Wyke (Charles Shaughnessy) has invited his wife’s lover, Milo (Jeremy Bobb), over to have a bit of a chat. The talents of Bobb and Shaughnessy being more than adequate for the verbal match that follows, and their dead-on rhythms working together make for a natural, well-paced and witty exchange, such that even the sound of the play is a thorough pleasure.

This, though, is the foundation for much more: a string of schemes and daring notions, revelations of razor-edged contempt and resentment, and the staging of an audacious crime in disguise, so hilarious as to almost derail one’s concentration (thank you Clint Ramos for this subtle stroke). Not only playwright Anthony Shaffer and the players but director Jesse Berger should be recognized for balancing this daunting production.

Its unevenness is a good thing, essential to its brightness, but it IS uneven. Berger appreciates that and manages it, and exploits the good circus-act fun therein. He avoids numerous moments that could be tedious in lesser hands. By intermission the plot has been put together, heated up, thickened and overturned onto the floor.

The atmosphere is dense with malice, glee, and danger; the police inspector’s visit hints a note of actual menace, and within minutes we are dragged in another direction. A new color is added when an entire police team descends on the house. Doppler, Taurant, and Higgs, played respectively by Sean McNulty, Robert E. Lawson, and Vincent Marks, in a casting coup, establish the “command presence” of the law officer so well known to all of us.

Theater can inspire, and instruct, and much more. We are fortunate to have it all in this part of the country, all year round. Theater that entertains is as valuable and essential, at times more so, than the other kinds. A show like Sleuth is valuable indeed.

2009 Barrington Stage Co. reviews and schedule:

• Barrington Stage Co. schedule 2009 season
• Carosel – June 21, 2009
• Underneath the Lintel – July12, 2009

July 31, 2009 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall.

Shakespeare and Company’s production of Twelfth Night, or What You Will, one of the William Shakespeare’s most delightful and convoluted comedies, is zesty, well-cast, and fast-paced.

The play is set in Illyria, one of those charming “anywhere places” that allows a director to choose any period and romantic locale for its complicated and hysterically funny events to unfold.

Here the period is magnificently evoked and clad by Govane Gohbauer in early Elizabethan grandeur, and Illyria is nearby a sea where a shipwreck can separate family members who believe each other dead, a plot often employed by Shakespeare.

In this play, the plot is complicated by having the lost ones be identical twins, save for sex, Viola (Merritt Janson) and Sebastian (Jake Waid), but having Viola dress as a young man to gain employment in the household of Duke Orsino (Duane Allen Robinson).

The Duke is pining with love (and rejection) for a wealthy neighbor, the young and beautiful Olivia (Elizabeth Raetz) who has gone into seven years mourning for the death of a brother, but who very quickly is roused out of her grief when Viola is sent, as a young page with a love message from the Duke

Viola bravely resists Olivia’s very physical, and hysterically funny attempts at seduction; indeed poor Viola, still grieving for her lost twin, has meanwhile fallen in love with the Duke, her employer.

Meanwhile, in Olivia’s household, a comical subplot unfolds as her riotous sponging and drunken uncle, Sir Toby Belch (Nigel Gore) with his friend Sir Andrew Aguecheek (Ryan Winkles) who is more of a clowning fool than the house-fool Feste (Robert Biggs) who tends to rational wit, vagrancy and wonderful singing, and Sir Toby is also helped by the witty housemaid Maria (Corinna May) to entrap Olivia’s piously bigoted steward Malvolio ( Ken Cheeseman) who imposes his Puritanical ways on all, in a situation that will undo his wits.

With so many characters entwined in plots that would seem impossible to unravel, especially when both twins weave among its strands, but never at the same time and thus always being mistaken for the other, all the hysteria leading to duels and an unlikely marriage and even another sub plot involving Antonio (Johnny Lee Davenport) a sea-caption who befriends Sebastian.

However, by the last scene in Act V, with all the characters on stage, everything is happily resolved with three sets of happy lovers united and Viola finally “unmasked” but still clad in her boy’s clothes, and only the unloved (by anyone) Malvolio wheeled away.

The play is threaded by music, that of Shakespeare’s verse and songs within the play itself. The melodies have been composed by Robert Biggs, Bill Barclay and Alexander Sovronsky and are mainly sung by Biggs whose ability to get the whole audience joining in singing along with him is the better part of his role (official clown) which in this production seemed usurped by Sir Andrew in his foppish attire.

I found the production delightful and rewarding. Director Jonathan Croy has led his cast well, and also found time to design the suitable, elegant, and flexible scenery.

Viola has the best part and deserved it with her fine acting. Her scenes with Olivia were my favorite ones in the play. But each actor deserves kudos.

This play begins with music and ends with it and we the audience are all glad we have been there and been a part of it. Even the weather cooperated and failed to produce a drop of rain on press night when dire events were again predicted. How lucky we can sometimes get in the Berkshires!

• Shakespeare & Co. 2009 schedule
• Review: Measure for Measure – July 22, 2009
• Review: Hamlet – June 26, 2009
• Review: Pinter’s Mirror – June 14, 2009
• Review: Golda’s Balcony – June 17, 2009
• Review: Bad Dates – Feb. 1, 2009

July 25, 2009 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

Berkshire Theatre Festival’s production of the Neil Simon play, The Prisoner of Second Avenue, is a hilarious comedy that at times spills over into farce in the incredible number of disasters that befall the middle-aged couple inhabiting a 14th floor apartment in Manhattan. It is a play that surprisingly has moments of poignancy, as well.

The action all takes place in the apartment of Mel and Edna Edison (Stephen DeRosa and Veanne Cox). When the play opens on a heat wave, with aromas from the city garbage strike wafting in through the windows, with the air conditioning malfunctioning, and with riotous neighbors voices and music disturbing the peace, the final straw is that Mel, now 47 has just been fired from the only job he knows how to do.

Mel is worrying himself into a nervous breakdown, and Edna tries to be helpful and supportive as long as she can. But things get worse when she, having lost her key, goes out for a few minutes leaving time for the apartment to burglarized, down to their last ice cube, and Mel has a nervous breakdown.

At this point, the family assembles from out of town and Mel’s brother Harry and three sisters, in descending ages, Pauline (Jeanne Paulsen), Jessie (Denny Dillion), and Pearl (Alice Playton), appear on the scene. Harry, as family head, attempts to explain to the “girls” how if each were to contribute “x” amount to the situation, things can be worked out. Not an easy task with their interruptions and interpretations, and one shattered temporarily by Edna arriving with a totally different idea.

It is in the tricky family love that poignancy moves in on the play despite the fact that all the scenes are hilarious. And there is a solution, be it slow to arrive in the lives of Mel and Edna, but a solution nonetheless.

The six characters each inhabit their characters meticulously. The dialog is rich and quickly paced, fluent and funny, bewildered and understanding.

As Edna, Cox varies her role nicely from patient support of Mel’s ranting, through attempts to help and encourage, until her own desperate need to literally rend her garments in her need for a hot bath in an apartment with the water turned off.

DeRosa’s Mel brings to his growing desperation moods that vary from a whining desperation to defiant ones of screaming on the balcony at the upstairs neighbors who seem to be having no trouble with their water. Yet he has in him a quality that others love and seek to help. An unsympathetic/sympathetic character able to provoke the strong love (and even envy) of a third leading character in the play, Harry’s final scene with Mel, played strongly by Julian Gamble.

Each of the three supporting roles of the sisters are played by actors with star quality, and each creating a carefully crafted character in the family pecking order.

Warner Shook directed; Scott Bradley designed the great prison-wall front that opens on his intricate set (with almost as many doors and areas as a farce; and they get slammed) and Laurie Churba Kohn’s costumes put us into that 1970s era. Plot lines in script also clue us in in: Erma could be shocked at the high cost of psychiatrist, $40 an hour! Scott Killian was responsible for the sound which included radio sound bites that separated scenes.

The play runs around two hours and seems shorter. Enjoy.

Berkshire Theatre Festival 2009 schedule and reviews.