SpeakEasy's "Xanadu": A-Muse-ment Rocks, and Rolls

Something’s definitely out of this world these days at the Calderwood Pavilion’s Roberts Studio Theater, which Speakeasy Stage Company calls home. Their current production of the 2007 Tony-nominated stage musical “Xanadu”, based on the 1980 movie, in turn based on an old Rita Hayworth film, “Down to Earth”, has just rolled in. (Literally, but more about this later). As those of us unlucky enough to have seen the original “Xanadu” film may have difficulty suppressing, its story of a heavenly muse who descends to earth to help a guy fulfill his dream of owning a nightclub is generally credited with almost singlehandedly causing the death of the major movie musical (until “Chicago” in 2002). Starring Olivia Newton-John and Gene Kelly (his final role due to his subsequent death, not the death of his career, though this film could have done it), it was nominated for the first Razzie Award as Worst Movie of the Year; in fact, it was one of the finalists for the Razzie as Worst Musical in 25 Years. The only creative elements were its snazzy segues or dissolves between scenes, the last one being the best, as it meant “THE END”. Given its absurdly dumb threadbare plot, jaw-droppingly awful acting, terrible (and terribly shot) choreography, ugly motley costumes and deadly dull sets, if this movie had had any life in it, it would’ve barked.

Thus it took a lot of chutzpah for the creators of the stage musical version to propose resuscitating or resurrecting this godly mess. Douglas Carter Beane (who wrote the hilarious “Little Dog Laughed”, “Sister Act” and the recent “Lysistrata Jones”) provided a book that changes the hero’s dream pursuit of a nightclub into a roller disco. The score compiled by Jeff Lynne and John Farrar was a pastiche of original songs, songs written for the film, as well as from other sources. It featured future stars belter Kerry Butler and heartthrob Cheyenne Jackson, and old trouper Tony Roberts. At awards time, it not only garnered four Tony nominations (in a season that boasted “In the Heights” and “Passing Strange”, as well as the instantly forgotten “Cry Baby”, another work based on a movie), but won a Drama Desk Award for Beane’s book. It also earned the Outer Critics Circle award as Best Musical (shared with “Young Frankenstein”). Perhaps it was, after all, not so much creative chutzpah as divine intervention.

And speaking of divine, Director Paul Daigneault and Choreographer David Connolly have together helmed a musical miracle. Daigneault has pulled out all the stops for this shamelessly pun-packed spoof of a trunk full of theatrical clichés, and Connolly has the cast on their toes and in their skates with depth-defying precision. This cast includes McCaela Donovan as Clio/Kira (with a marvelously dead-on deadpan take on Olivia Newton-John) once again showing her comic chops (is there nothing this woman can’t do?), Ryan Overberg as Sonny the perfectly wonderful male bimbo (who has had much productive time in the gym), Robert Saoud as Danny Maguire and Zeus (sublimely riotous in both roles), Kathy St. George as Calliope and Aphrodite (scene-stealingly hilarious) and Shana Dirik, menacingly funny as Melpomene/ Medusa. The Scenic Design by Crystal Tiala, Costume Design by Gail Astrid Buckley and Lighting Design by Karen Perlow are all tongue-in-cheekly wonderful, especially with the entrance of the “War Horse”, Pegasus. (And Julie Taymor, eat your heart out).

Ironically, since this is a musical, the disco score is easily the least inspirational element of the show. What makes this show much more enjoyable than it has any right to be is the hysterically hip and sharp dialogue by Beane. At one point, a muse muses that since she’s the demi-goddess of inspiration, what in heaven is she doing in a theater? At another point, Zeus decrees that mortals will have the nerve to take old movie songs and string them together to make a stage musical. It’s just this sort of loving self-mocking attitude that sends an audience into convulsions of stomach-aching laughter.

The original mythical Xanadu was Kubla Khan’s pleasure palace, and the Calderwood Pavilion becomes just that for the ninety minutes of this intermission-less romp. It turns out after all that somebody up there likes us.

New Rep's "Little Shop": A Tale of Two Tendrils

Attend the tale of Audrey II. She’s green and mean, this cousin of the Venus fly trap. A true pistil-packing momma with a profoundly bass voice, she’s the horticultural star of New Rep’s final production of the season, “Little Shop of Horrors”. This off-Broadway hit of the 1982 season (with a five year run, winning the New York Drama Critics and Outer Circle Critics Best Musical Awards) is based on a much-beloved, campy cult black and white 1960 film by Director Roger Corman (the king of the low-budget B movies) and Screenwriter Charles Griffith. It ultimately became a 1986 film musical, and was revived on Broadway in 2003. Most prophetically, it was the first mega success of novice creators Alan Menken (score) and the late Howard Ashman (book and lyrics), who would go on to such efforts as “The Little Mermaid” and “Beauty and the Beast”. Perhaps you’ve heard of them.

“Little Shop”, only their second work together, was a loving tribute in farce to the horror movie genre, spoofing 60’s rock and roll, doo-wop, and Motown sound, television sitcoms, and several other targets. Ashman’s book and lyrics were filled with intentionally outrageous puns (for example, referring to the character of a sadistic dentist as the “leader of the plaque”). Some of his other references (“Father Knows Best”, “The Donna Reed Show”, “December Bride” and even “Howdy Doody”) may not resonate with younger audience members today, but most of their fang-in-cheek humor is timeless, if treated with affection and in the right hands.

And this production is certainly in the right hands. Attention must be paid to the direction and choreography by Russell Garrett in his New Rep debut. His respect for this work, which he has described, quite accurately, as true “musical comedy heaven”, shows in his faithful treatment, balanced with a considerable number of original and imaginative touches. Attention must also be paid to the often underappreciated Music Direction by Todd C. Gordon, credited with work on literally dozens of New Rep musicals. As usual, technical credits are superb, never more important than in this particular work. Peter Colao, Scenic Designer for New Rep as far back as “Sweeney Todd” and responsible for constructing all of the company’s sets for the last decade, has captured just the right tone with an amazingly complex set. Costume Designer Frances Nelson McSherry, who was Assistant Costume Designer on the original off-Broadway production, obviously had a ball with the Skid Row outfits, which one character describes as at least not “cheap and tasteless” (but they are, they are, and deliciously so). Paul Perry’s Sound Design was a bit unbalanced at times, and the Lighting Design by Franklin Meissner, Jr. missed a few cues, but these were minor glitches, easily adjusted, and understandable given that the cast covers a lot of stage territory.

Ah, and that cast. Blake Pfeil as Seymour, in his New Rep debut, is the ultimate nerd working in a struggling Skid Row flower shop; his innocent mimicking of his co-worker Audrey’s accent (as living in “the guttah”) alone is worth the price of admission. Susan Molloy plays Audrey (the part played so memorably by Ellen Greene in both the original production and the film musical) with the perfect tone of the clueless bimbo. Bill Mootos stands out as her boyfriend, Orin the Dentist, and several other roles, reminiscent of his recent work in “Hound of the Baskervilles” at Central Square Theater (another multi-role effort requiring many quick costume changes). Another standout was Lovely Hoffman as Crystal, one of the Greek chorus trio that included fine performances by Jennifer Fogarty as Chiffon and Ceit McCaleb Zweil as Ronnette. Paul D. Farwell as Mr. Mushnik, the owner of the flower shop, seemed to be growing in the role. And then there were Timothy John Smith as the voice of Audrey II and Timothy P. Hoover as her “manipulator” or puppeteer. Together they make one unforgettable villain’s cry, “Feed me!”, providing, oxymoronically, a hysterically hammy plant. How Audrey II miraculously appears, unites Seymour and Audrey, grows, and forever changes the lives of most of the cast, is best left for audience members to discover for themselves.

In a season that included the very memorable “Long Day’s Journey Into Night”, this is arguably the highlight. A disclaimer might be in order here: “Little Shop” is one of this reviewer’s all-time favorite shows. Thus it was a relief to find it recreated and refreshed by such trust in the material, which truly pays off. Those familiar only with the film musical version will note some differences; here there is no masochistic dental patient (as in both film versions), and, most significantly, a darker ending. Audrey II is about to take over the world. As one character puts it earlier in the show, “you’re not in Kansas anymore”. One piece of sage advice sung at the end of the show and worth repeating: “Don’t feed the plants!”

SpeakEasy's "Next to Normal": Poles Apart from the Norm

“Next to Normal”, the 2009 Broadway musical about a damaged woman suffering from what was once called manic-depressive mental illness, defies classification just as it (almost) defies description. In its defiantly through-composed form it is undeniably operatic, but its story is intimate and immediate. Its music (deservedly honored with Tony awards for both score and orchestration) is modern but not really rock, powerful and memorable. Yet, even with some three dozen musical numbers, it yields not a single stand-alone standard. While it has moments of humor, mostly in the form of irony, it is decidedly not a musical comedy; rather, it’s the theater’s first truly bipolar musical, in more ways than two.

It is also one of the few musicals ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama, a feat matched only three times in the last three decades, the others being “Rent” and “Sunday in the Park with George”, and only eight times in the entire history of the Pulitzer. Nominated for eleven Tony Awards, it won only three, including Best Actress Alice Ripley, in a performance that was truly legendary. It was the year of “Billy Elliot” (which shared the award for orchestration with “Next to Normal”) which had fifteen Tony nominations and won ten of them. Nonetheless, “Next to Normal” was a bona fide hit, both critically and commercially. Thus the news that it would be part of SpeakEasy’s season this year was met with high expectations.

As in other aspects of life, nothing succeeds like exceeding expectations. This current version is all a serious theatergoer could reasonably hope for in a regional production, and then some. Not only is it among the finest in a long history of unforgettable SpeakEasy performances, but in at least one significant aspect, it actually betters the original. Director Paul Daigneault outdoes himself (and with musicals this is no small feat), managing to broaden the focus from an individual crisis to a shared family one, which is a truer depiction of the communal influence of the disease than was conveyed on Broadway. Kerry A. Dowling as Diana, the bipolar wife and mother, is better than we’ve ever seen her (also no small feat), but generously shares the stage with an incredibly talented ensemble. In this version, we truly feel the pain shared by the whole family as they deal with her inability to cope, to think, to feel. Above all, “Next to Normal” is about being there for one another. Michael Tacconi as her treasured son Gabe, whom she insists must be there for her, Sarah Drake as Natalie, her almost invisible daughter, craving the attention that her mother completely sucks out of the atmosphere, and Michael Levesque as Henry, Natalie’s unflaggingly sweet boyfriend, are amazing, especially given that they are all current or recent college graduates. Chris Caron ably fills the roles of two of Diana’s practitioners. Then there is Christopher Chew as Dan, the faithful husband and father, whose survival depends on repression, what he calls a “slower suicide”; as he also sings, “who’s crazy, the one who can’t cope or maybe the one who’ll still hope?”. Chew’s acting here is a revelation.

It’s truly gratifying to see such a wonderful work presented in this astonishing production. The music by Tom Kitt and book and lyrics by Brian Yorkey are perfectly served by Music Director Nicholas James Connell, Lighting Designer Jeff Adelberg and Sound Designer Aaron Mack. The Scenic Design by Eric Levenson, as well as the Projection Design by Seaghan McKay are brilliant, even if occasionally distracting (as they were on Broadway, so perhaps this is part of the care plan).

This is no romanticized view of mental illness and the stigma with which society often views it, but a balanced presentation of the complexity of treatments (including what used to be referred to as electric shock therapy) for bipolar disease, ironically most often experienced by women and treated by men. Medications are a trade-off, what with their frequent side effects, requiring intelligent choices. As Diana puts it when she is medicated to the point of not feeling anything, she misses the mountains, the magic of the manic days, as well as the pain. (Her therapist’s response to her lack of feeling: “patient stable”). She wonders “what happens if the cut, the burn, the break was never in my brain or in my blood but in my soul?”

Toward the end of the play, Diana, still wounded but hopeful, comes to a decision that rather than have chance take her, she’ll take a chance. Earlier she had said that she had “seen this movie, and I walked out”. As she carries out her decision, she sings that “the price of love is loss, but still we pay…the darkest sky will someday see the sun”. As Natalie put it, one doesn’t “need a life that’s normal, but something next to normal would be okay”. Though some hurt never heals, and some ghosts are never gone, in the end “there will be light”. In this production, the precise term would be incandescence.

SpeakEasy's "Red": The Gripes of Rothko

“Red”, Speakeasy Stage Company’s latest offering about painter Mark Rothko, was the winner of six 2010 Tonys including best play, by John Logan. This author is no stranger to “sacred monsters”, having dealt in the past with the likes of Leopold and Loeb, Howard Hughes and Sweeney Todd. This play, like Rothko’s work, requires that an audience meet and be part of the creation. There are tragedy and drama in both. It is the story of a self-destructive, self-taught genius who in 1958, at the age of 55 (the same age at which his father died), was commissioned by former bootlegger Samuel Bronfman to provide a series of paintings for the proposed Four Seasons Restaurant in his Seagram’s Building, for the then-considerable sum of $35,000. Rothko was ambivalent from the beginning, preferring his panels to be experienced in a sort of wayside chapel, (as some of his panels would eventually be, in a spectacular installation in Houston); he hoped at least to “ruin the appetites of every SOB who ever eats in that room”, putting rich patrons in his created place, the viewers trapped.

The play, in a taut one hundred minutes, portrays this ambivalence as the painter and his newly-hired assistant begin the process, all the while commenting on the nature of art and bemoaning the approaches to painting by his contemporaries. While he hated and rejected labels, Rothko was a part of the Abstract Expressionist movement that supplanted cubism. Part of his anger lies in the knowledge that he too will eventually be supplanted. Given his self-confessed obsessive preoccupation with death (“the first ingredient in my art”) and the fact that he was to commit suicide a decade later, this could have been heavy slogging. The genius of the playwright lies in how he manages to make this reenactment of the creative process so full of caustic wit, memorable dialogue (much of it directly quoted) and mesmerizing detail, all of which Director David R. Gammons captures on his theatrical canvas. The audience is presented with a genuine train wreck of an artist, and we simply can’t take our eyes off him.

It helps that the role of the artist is in the capable hands of an actor like Thomas Derrah. His Rothko is pompous, controlling, manipulative, and opinionated in the extreme, bombastic one moment, in the next breath declaring that, in art, “silence is so accurate”. He declaims to his new assistant (played by Karl Baker Olson) that he intends to be neither his father or mentor, but before long becomes exactly that. It also helps that Olson, in the much more challenging role, is equal to the task of evolving (over a two year period) from a starstruck novice to a more assured combatant. Together these actors stretch canvases, speedily apply glaze, and paint while verbally sparring about the nature of art and the value of their contemporaries in the art world. It’s sheer joy for a theatergoer to listen to the pacing of the speech of these theatrical artists and watch them inhabit the former Bowery YMCA gym that has been transformed into Rothko’s studio (superbly rendered by Scenic Designer Cristina Todesco). The lighting by Jeff Adelberg and sound by Bill Barclay are also perfect for the piece.

This production is every bit as moving and unforgettable as the original import from London, perhaps even more so in the more intimate venue of the Wimberly Theater. The miracle of the play and its presentation here is that it never seems pedantic or pedestrian, as it might easily have become, like watching paint dry. Instead, it’s amazingly dynamic. It’s poetic justice that this work confronts, challenges and involves the audience just as Rothko’s art does.

SpeakEasy's "The Divine Sister": And Then There Were None

It is a dark and stormy night. It is Pittsburgh in 1966, and the venerable Convent of Saint Veronica is in imminent danger of crumbling into ruins. If this were Ibsen, this might be perceived as a metaphorical tiger at the gates, but this is Charles Busch, and his “The Divine Sister” has no such pretensions of satirizing any religious icons but instead the long harrowed, if not hallowed, history of Hollywood stereotypes. One by one, in inevitable Agatha Christie mode, Busch manages to roast a goodly, if not godly, number of these memorable madams, from Julie Andrews to Ingrid Bergman, and, more darkly, the whole coven of “Black Narcissus”, until there‘s not a single nun left unskewered. It’s not the author’s theological baggage that’s on display here, as he freely admits to no such upbringing, but an obvious affection for these historical and hysterical ladies.

That’s not to say that Mother Superior (and she is unmistakably that) is some clueless cardboard creation. While she’s hilariously funny in the quite capable hands of Jeffery Roberson (aka Varla Jean Merman, for those of you in the habit of keeping score), she’s no dope and not easily duped. As she explains it all for you at the beginning of the play, the good sisters are “living in a time of great social change; we must do everything in our power to stop it”.

How Mother Superior, aka Susan (don’t ask) manages to triumph over the course of a fast-paced uninterrupted one hundred minutes is best left to a theatergoer to discover entirely on her or his own. The fun of the work is in the multitude of backstories, with enough subplots and sub-subplots to fill several evenings at the theater. Suffice it to say that “The Divine Sister” is like Gilbert and Sullivan on speed.

In lesser earthly hands, this could be over-the-top camp, and it comes perilously close at times, but the writing, the direction (by Larry Coen) and especially the fang-in-cheek acting by the aforementioned Jeffery/Varla Jean and the entire cast (six in all, most performing more than one role) save us from such a penance. In the nunnery, there are Sasha Castroverde’s Agnes (of God?) who is no stranger to the sound of music, Kathy St. George’s Sister Walburga, seemingly living out some code other than DiVinci, and Paula Plum’s Sister Acacius, whose street-wise sister is an amalgam of so many allusions and illusions that she encapsulates generations of the celluloid-ly saintly. Add to the mix Ellen Colton’s atheistic Mrs. Levinson (yes, no religious faiths were omitted in the making of this “movie”) and Christopher Michael Brophy’s Brother Venerius, not to mention the other roles they play which will go unmentioned here lest what plot threads there are be prematurely unraveled. There’s not a clinker in the bunch. The same can be said for the set (by Christina Todesco), lighting (by Daniel H. Jentzen), costumes (by Charles Schoonmaker) and sound (by Arshan Gailus), none of which would be out of place in your basic B movie. It’s all so perfectly pitched.

To mistake this for just another drag show or an exercise in low comedy could be sinful for any mortal. For any serious theatergoer, there can be but one exhortation. Get thee to a funnery.

SpeakEasy's "Next Fall": Full of Grace

SpeakEasy Stage Company’s production of “Next Fall”, the Tony-nominated play by Goeffrey Nauffts, is a truly manipulative piece of theater; what starts out as a comedy gradually transforms into a serious examination of some significant contemporary issues. It manages to navigate a very tricky balance among a cast of six characters who one minute crack wise and the next minute find themselves facing what first seems like an unbreachable divide as the play explores current expressions of faith and disbelief. On one level, it can be seen as yet another tale, full of wit and fury, of coming out of the closet. On its more profound level, it’s really about accepting the beliefs of others rather than demonizing them. The challenge for an audience is to accept the fact that faith, rather than being discarded like the proverbial baby with the bath water, is dealt with and dueled with, in a fundamentally personal manner. One has to believe that Luke (Dan Roach), one of the two main characters, has somehow managed to keep his deeply felt evangelical Christian beliefs while living with his older atheist lover, intensely hypochondriacal Adam (Will McGarrahan). Theirs is a truly odd coupling indeed, separated by age as well as value systems. What’s harder to accept, in 2011, is that, not only has a grown man like Luke been unable to come out to his parents, but that he is conflicted about the incongruity of his faith and his lifestyle and unable to reach a mature resolution.

When first encountered by this reviewer in its Broadway form, with the exact same text, this leap of faith was not entirely successful, though extremely moving. This time, in the hands of director Scott Edmiston and a very believable cast, it feels more natural. Among its many surprises is just how much funnier it seems. After the cutest of meetings, where Luke, an actor working as a waiter, gives Adam the Heimlich maneuver rather than a pickup line, it’s no time before the two have moved in together despite some immediate danger signals. Adam has no problem being completely out; Luke declaims that “we’re all sinners, it’s human nature; but as long as you’ve accepted Christ”, everything will be alright in the end. Enter Adam’s boss and friend Holly (Deb Martin) who notes that Adam is guilty of “self-loathing by association”, and Luke’s former buddy Brandon (Kevin Kaine), also an evangelical Christian and also attracted to men, who can live with same-gender attraction but draws the line at love. Then we meet Luke’s parents from Florida, divorced for twenty years, Arlene (Amelia Broome) and Butch (Robert Walsh), who finally meet Adam as a result of a tragic event in Luke’s life. It’s significant that Nauffts chose not AIDS but a traffic accident as a crisis, thus emphasizing the universality of random tragedy. Now the larger dilemmas are, whose place is it to tell the parents about Luke’s lifestyle, and who gets to make life or death decisions on his behalf.

In such a small ensemble of extraordinary actors, it’s difficult to single anyone out, but it should be noted that Will McGarrahan and Amelia Broome have never been better, and their communication proves the most memorable moments. They’re aided by the clever lighting shifts by Karen Perlow and simple but effective scenery by Janie E. Howland. As the character Arlene puts it when remembering Luke’s performance in “Our Town”, “there wasn’t much in the way of scenery”, but somehow they made it effective, even if she’d forgotten the point of it. As Holly responds, it was about “how precious life is even while they’re living it”. Both could equally be said of “Next Fall”, especially in Edmiston’s capable hands.

By the end of the play, Luke’s opening line (“we shall all be changed”) proves quite prophetic, as all of the characters have changed, in varying degrees. Adam says to Butch: “Luke wasn’t afraid”, he had certainty. “He looked at me…..finally, I believed”. In what, the audience is left to debate. In the very last line, Adam’s deceptively simple response to a call from Luke’s half brother Ben is profoundly simple: “This is…..My name is Adam”. The brilliance of the work is that the audience can anticipate what the balance of their conversation will be like. Nauffts has stated that his play is about everyone grasping for grace. This production is life-affirmingly, unquestionably, full of grace.