IRIS FANGER

Body politic

IRIS FANGER — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:37:56 GMT

Interview: Anna Deavere Smith contains multitudes
Anna Deavere Smith is a writer/actor/activist who listens.

Anna Deavere Smith appears in Let Me Down Easy at the Loeb Drama Center September 12–October 11

Anna Deavere Smith is a writer/actor/activist who listens. She builds her award-winning one-woman, multi-character shows by conducting hundreds of interviews, then melding them into one devastating kaleidoscope of the causes and effects of a particular cultural trend or event. (Said events have included the race riots in Crown Heights and Los Angeles.) She seems to inhale the diverse personalities of her interviewees whole, their words, their gestures, their postures, their gut feelings, exhaling them in a collage that is revelatory as both social commentary and human portraiture.

After teaching for a decade at Stanford University, Smith left California in 2000 for a dual appointment at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and its law school. The accolades for Fires in the Mirror, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, and House Arrest have included a MacArthur Fellowship, two Tony nominations, two Obie Awards, 17 honorary degrees, and being shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize. But she’s probably best known for her role as Michael Douglas’s press secretary in Rob Reiner’s The American President and her subsequent television turn on NBC’s American President–influenced The West Wing. Next year she’ll be seen in Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married. Here’s what she had to say about her latest one-woman show, Let Me Down Easy, which the American Repertory Theatre is hosting starting next Friday.

Tell us something about this project.
I did the show at Yale, but I’ve changed it. My work always changes until I shut it down, so this is part of the process. I’ve been on a journey; it started in 2000 at the Yale School of Medicine, where I was invited to look at doctor-patient relationships, and I was so fascinated about how the patients spoke to me. I guess when you’re uncomfortable, or have had a bad experience, you want to talk. Basically, for my work in theater, I’m looking for people who want to talk. Now it’s really dealing with mortality, and about how we are with other human beings. I see it as a search for grace in a sometimes distressing world, and in the face of our inevitable mortality. I went to Rwanda to do research 10 years after the genocide; I went to the north of Uganda and talked to child soldiers and sex slaves. I went to South Africa to do research on AIDS, at a time when the president of the country was not acknowledging the disease; I went to the army hospital where they bring the soldiers who have been injured in Iraq. And I went to Katrina and spent time at a cancer center in Houston. It’s been a very long journey. What you won’t see but was in the show in New Haven was that I spent a lot of time talking to people who have no physical problems, who in fact make a living with their bodies: Lance Armstrong, supermodel Veronica Moss, Lauren Hutton, a boxer, a bull rider. The sports people are not in this version. I decided to focus more on spiritual than physical things.

Kosher comic

IRIS FANGER — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 21:38:43 GMT

Judy Gold answers some questions for a Jewish mother
Judy Gold sashays into a press conference with a white apron over her jeans and a tray of rugelach in her hand.

Judy Gold

Judy Gold, playwright, performer, and star of 25 Questions for a Jewish Mother, sashays into a press conference with a white apron over her jeans and a tray of rugelach, the flaky rolled pastries, in her hand. But that’s where the stereotype ends. A Jewish mother herself, who often talks about her own Jewish mother, Gold is a 6’3” gay woman who carried one son and adopted the child of her former partner.

On a five-year odyssey around the United States with co-playwright Kate Moira Ryan to interview the subjects portrayed in her one-woman show about Jewish mothers, Gold did not find any mirror images. The show, which debuted at New York’s Ars Nova Theatre in 2006 and won a Drama Desk Award nomination and a 2007 GLAAD Award, will be presented by the Huntington Theatre Company at the Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts starting this Tuesday.

A host of HBO’s At the Multiplex with Judy Gold, recurring host on ABC’s The View, two-time Emmy Award winner (as writer/producer on The Rosie O’Donnell Show), and headliner on Comedy Central, Gold is the youngest of three siblings, who include an older brother she calls “the first-born male, so his name is Jesus.” She’s been a stand-up comic since discovering her talent while in college at Rutgers. Fast on the quips, she is also engaged in the subjects of motherhood and her status as a gay Jewish woman who’s a mom. “I keep kosher; I have two children; I’m gay; I’m a comic, so I don’t even have a real job. If I were married to a guy, I would have had my own TV sit-com 15 years ago.”

25 Questions for a Jewish Mother | Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA, 527 Tremont St, Boston | December 18-31 | $15-$50 | 617.266.0800

The interviews with 50 women across the country were scheduled between Gold’s touring bookings. “We started with Orthodox Jewish women in Queens and played Jewish geography to meet the others. I was scared of the Orthodox women because I’m gay. But they were great — maybe because I’m not their daughter.” She says she found all of the women “fascinating. One time, the husband was listening in the hall and sometimes the children. They were learning about their mothers as persons for the first time.”

The common themes were food — no surprise there — and the fact that the women talked to their children every day. “Whenever we came to one of their houses, there was always a plate of rugelach,” Gold says of the culinary connection. And of the need to be in touch with their children: “I suppose because the Jews have been kicked out of every country since the beginning of time, it was important to know that they were safe.” Another bond among the women was the wish that their grandchildren be raised as Jews, even if their children had married outside the faith.

Christmas in Croatia

IRIS FANGER — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 13:37:05 GMT

Revels heads for the Balkans
“If there are 1100 people in the audience,” Swanson reminds me, “around 600-700 of them will dance out into the Sanders lobby at intermission.”

David Coffin and the Revels chorus

Christmas Revels | Sanders Theatre, Memorial Hall, Harvard University, 45 Quincy St, Cambridge | December 14-30 | $25$47; $15-$37 children under 12 | 617.496.2222

In the endearing spirit of “it takes a village” — rather than a shopping mall — to celebrate the holiday season, the 37th annual Christmas Revels will mirror the village traditions of the Balkans in its music and dancing. Led by the women’s world-music group Libana and the folk-dance troupe Mladost, this year’s cast will make Sanders Theatre reverberate with the unfamiliar sounds of the gaida (bagpipe) and the gudulka (a bowed folk fiddle with unusual stringing) as they accompany the guest performers and the Revels chorus of 40 adults and 18 children.

“Just about everything is different in this year’s Revels,” says Patrick Swanson, long-time director of the annual extravaganza. “We’re taking on the Balkans, a word that’s come to mean breaking into little bits. As political frontiers change, the cultural borders remain the same.”

The Revels chorus has been coached by Sue Robbins, founder and artistic director of Libana, in the high, whining pitches and close harmony of the songs culled from Bulgaria, Macedonia, Slovenia, Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia, all in arrangements by musical director George Emlen. After asking this reporter to hold the phone away from her ear, Robbins sang a phrase of a fluid, piercing song. “A lot of the musical scales are different, with uneven meters to the rhythms — 5/8, 9/8, rather than 4/4,” she points out. Another difference is the presence of a “drone note, similar to a bagpipe. This one constant note is sounded, with the melody over it — it’s found in some but not all of the music of the region.”

The challenging rhythmic count is also crucial to the complex steps of the folk dances. Petar Petrov — a professional dancer with Rodhopa, the Bulgarian National Dance Company, from 1988 to 1995 — has taught portions of the folk repertory to Mladost, whose members, ages 16-20 (“maldost” means “youth”), are alums of past Revels children’s choruses. “The footwork in Bulgarian folk dancing, he explains, “is similar to Irish dancing — quick steps — but the Bulgarian dances have lots of upper body movement. The rhythms are difficult: 7/8 or 11/16 or even 7/16 + 7/16 + 11/16, sometimes with combinations between two of them at the same time.”

After Godot

IRIS FANGER — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 15:55:44 GMT

Harvard to celebrate Beckett at 100
It’s fitting that Alvin Epstein should be cast in Beckett at 100 , since the venerable actor has been associated with the Nobel laureate’s plays for more than 50 years.

Alvin Epstein

It’s fitting that Alvin Epstein should be cast in Beckett at 100, the centennial tribute to Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) that’s coming to Harvard next Thursday, since the venerable actor has been associated with the Nobel laureate’s plays for more than 50 years. Epstein and Mickey Solis will appear in three short plays that have been linked by director Robert Scanlan, professor of the Practice of Theatre in Harvard’s English Department. Martin Pearlman, founder and musical director of Boston Baroque, composed the score for the evening, which originated last year at New York’s 92nd Street Y Poets’ Theatre. The music is played live by violinist Gil Morgenstern, co–artistic director of Nine Circles Chamber Theater, which co-commissioned it.

Scanlan, who became Beckett’s friend for the last nine years of his life, explains, “Words and Music and Cascando are radio plays; . . . but the clouds . . . was written for television. No one but Beckett experts knows these plays at all. They are talking about the enormously difficult task of making art.”

Epstein, now 82, was cast as the hapless Lucky in the 1956 American premiere of Waiting for Godot that also starred Bert Lahr, E.G. Marshall, and Kurt Kasznar. He took the same role in a 1961 television movie, then moved on to play Estragon, opposite Jeremy Geidt’s Vladimir, in the memorable 1995 staging of the work by the American Repertory Theatre. Epstein was a member of the ART ensemble from 1980 (he directed the first production) until 2004.

Recalling the 1956 Godot, he says, “The run was extended for 11 weeks, because people kept coming.” Brooks Atkinson’s New York Times review can’t have hurt: he famously called the opaque work “a mystery wrapped in an enigma.” “We only closed because summer was coming, and Bert refused to continue without air-conditioning the theater. No one could afford to do that.” Epstein went on to play Clov in the first American production of Endgame, eventually adding two more of that work’s four roles to his résumé. He never met Beckett, but when he directed an Endgame, he did speak by phone with the playwright in Paris. “He wanted to know what I would do with the play.”

Epstein says it’s hard to put the meaning of Beckett’s plays into words without resorting to clichés. “I think Beckett has an uninterrupted channel into the soul of modern man, the joys, the sorrows, the hopes, the dreams of everybody in the Western world. The plays are terribly instinctive, terribly true. We all live in expectation of things that will never happen.”

Theater of war

IRIS FANGER — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 20:59:21 GMT

The Huntington revives Streamers
Director Scott Ellis doesn’t call David Rabe’s Streamers a play about war.

Scott Ellis

Director Scott Ellis doesn’t call David Rabe’s Streamers a play about war. “But it’s certainly the reason why the characters react the way they do. Four strangers are thrown into this room, which otherwise would not have happened.”

War is, in any case, a subject of the play that grew out of Rabe’s tour of duty in a medical hospital in Vietnam. The experience of seeing first-hand the suffering and dying of young wounded men led him to write the trilogy of which the 1976 Streamers is the final work. The first, 1971’s The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, ran at Boston’s Charles Playhouse with Al Pacino before The Godfather made him a star. Sticks and Bones had its premiere in New York a year later and won the 1972 Tony for Best Play. The production that’s opening at the Huntington Theatre Company next Friday, with Ellis directing, is, he says, the first major revival of Streamers in 30 years.

The play is set in 1965 at an Army barracks in Virginia, where a disparate group of young men are completing basic training before being shipped off to Vietnam. There’s a middle-class black man, a wealthy New Yorker uncertain about his sexual preferences, a kid from Wisconsin, and another boy driven to extremes by fear of being sent off to combat. Their passions are roiled by two sergeants in their 50s, one a war-weary veteran, the other eager to return to the fight. The play’s title refers to parachutes that do not open when men are dropped onto the battlefield, an occurrence described by the sergeants to terrify the men.

Ellis thinks the play is about the relationships among the soldiers. “They are grabbing onto each other. Their lives are going to change. It’s about racism, sexuality. There are so many layers in this piece, plus the war.” As for current parallels, “I find it remarkable. If you look at Vietnam and Iraq and substitute Communism for terrorism, it feels pretty similar to me.”

Rabbit food

IRIS FANGER — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 19:39:10 GMT

Donnie Darko takes to the stage
Though he believes in the spiritual quality of Donnie’s quest, he doesn’t want to tie the play to any one religion, or to religion at all.

Dynasty

IRIS FANGER — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 15:30:05 GMT

Small troupes take on The Kentucky Cycle
What would induce a tiny fringe contingent to take on the six hours of Robert Schenkkan’s 1992 Pulitzer-winning spectacle, The Kentucky Cycle ?

The Kentucky Cycle

In the absence of an incendiary subject like the AIDS epidemic, which inspired Angels in America, or the resources of the Royal Shakespeare Company, which brought Nicholas Nickleby to Broadway, what would induce a tiny fringe contingent like Zeitgeist Stage Company and Way Theater Artists to take on the six hours of Robert Schenkkan’s 1992 Pulitzer-winning spectacle, The Kentucky Cycle? Zeitgeist’s artistic director, David J. Miller, who is staging the Boston-area premiere of the historical extravaganza, admits that there’s “a fine line between chutzpah and madness. We balance there every day.”

The Kentucky Cycle, which is being presented in two parts, follows the fortunes of three families over seven generations, 1775–1975. The first of the nine plays begins when Michael Rowan lays claim to Indian land and then kidnaps and rapes a Cherokee woman, Morning Star, to found his dynasty. The bloodline continues through Jesse Biggs, a Rowan family slave, and his descendants and the Talberts, who are connected to the Rowans by an 18th-century marriage — and a murder. Seen on Broadway in 1993, following its premiere in Seattle, the show packed the insights of Ken Burns’s Americana with the violent wallop of High Noon. “I’m hoping the epic quality of the show will attract audiences,” says Miller. “People either glaze over or say, ‘Oh my God, I have to see that.’ ”

Drawing on skills he learned at his day job as a vice-president at Putnam Investments, Miller created an Excel spread sheet to keep track of the 23 actors he chose to play 120 roles. More than 180 local thespians showed up at auditions for the non-Equity cast, which has been rehearsing nightly in the downstairs social hall of St. John the Baptist Greek Orthodox Church in the South End. To watch them run through a scene from the part of the cycle set in the 1920s, about a strike in the coal mines, is to follow dialogue mixed with choreographed fights and punctuated by folk songs accompanied on varied instruments.

Julie Levene, artistic director of Way Theater Artists and assistant director/dramaturg for The Kentucky Cycle, observes that the play “touches on the treatment of the Indians, the indentured servants, and the African slaves. It’s about the lust for land, but the deeper theme is the desire to be independent, the lord of your own domain.”

Impossible dreamer

IRIS FANGER — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 14:32:17 GMT

The Lyric Stage resurrects Man of La Mancha
If it’s “The Impossible Dream” you’ve come for, you’ll hit paydirt.

Man of la Mancha

If it’s “The Impossible Dream” you’ve come for, and you can sit through more than an hour’s worth of the disparate adventures of the once-and-future Knight of the Woeful Countenance before Christopher Chew finally blasts out the anthem, you’ll hit paydirt. But the Lyric Stage Company of Boston revival of the 1965 Broadway juggernaut Man of La Mancha (through October 13) will please mostly the diehards who hold close to their hearts the memory of the sentimental musical about a foolish old man who believes in what might be rather than in what is.

In case you’ve forgotten, book writer Dale Wasserman imagines the classic novel as a play within a play whose curtain rises when its author, Miguel de Cervantes, and his manservant are imprisoned by the dreaded Inquisition for daring to tax a monastery. (Cervantes actually worked for a time as a tax collector.) To keep his fellow inmates at bay and to protect his manuscript from being burned, Cervantes spins out the tale of Don Quixote de la Mancha in dramatic form, asking the prisoners to costume themselves from bits in his trunk and assume all the roles. Cervantes (Chew) himself plays Don Quixote, and his manservant (Robert Saoud) plays Sancho Panza. Man of La Mancha won five 1966 Tony Awards, including Best Composer and Lyricist for Mitch Leigh and Joe Darion, but it turns out that Wasserman wrote the lyrics of “The Impossible Dream.” Perhaps that explains why the words to many of the other songs seem so simplistic, despite the appealing lilt of the Spanish rhythms.

Under the direction of Spiro Veloudos, who’s celebrating his 10th year as artistic director of Lyric Stage, the macho qualities of the story are emphasized by the male chorus of muleteers, particularly in Timothy John Smith’s whip-cracking, testosterone-charged portrayal of Pedro. Caroline deLima, as Aldonza, whom Don Quixote envisions as his Lady Dulcinea, has the acting chops to portray a realistic tavern whore but not the vocal ability to match Chew. She does come through near the end of act two in her bitterly sung-spoken renunciation of Don Quixote’s vision.

Janie E. Howland has designed a huge staircase that drops down into the all-purpose dungeon for entrances and exits, adding to the cramped feel of the staging. Rafael Jaen’s Goya-image-based costume designs work better at making the period spring to life. Ilyse Robbins’s choreography is too abbreviated, particularly for the rape scene that serves as the major dance number, and the pelvis-grinding Gypsy dance is a cliché-driven embarrassment. Musical director and keyboardist Jonathan Goldberg, expert as always, and five more musicians are hidden backstage.

Bard in the bar

IRIS FANGER — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 15:57:52 GMT

Shakespeare navigates Brustein’s English Channel
Will Shakespeare is holed up in the Mermaid Tavern, where he’s writing sonnets rather than plays because it’s 1593 and the London theaters are shut against the raging plague.

Robert Brustein

Will Shakespeare, the 29-year-old playwright and actor, is holed up in the Mermaid Tavern, where he’s writing sonnets rather than plays because it’s 1593 and the London theaters are shut against the raging plague. His rival, Christopher Marlowe, drops by, along with the Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare’s 19-year-old patron. Another frequent visitor is the luscious Emilia Lanier, who tumbles into Shakespeare’s bed but spreads her bounty around, sparking fits of jealousy.

The intrigues among this crew are stuff dreamed up (and researched) by founding American Repertory Theatre artistic director, professor, critic, and playwright Robert Brustein and stuffed into a new drama, The English Channel, which gets its first outing next week at Suffolk University’s newly renovated C. Walsh Theatre. The run there (September 6-15) is followed by one at the Vineyard Playhouse on Martha’s Vineyard. Harvard colleague Stephen Greenblatt’s book Will in the World, which Brustein calls “largely speculation but a beautiful biography,” provided the inspiration for the play. “I was very taken by Steve’s reflections on the evolution of the sonnets and Shakespeare’s relationship to Southampton and the Dark Lady. I saw a play in that.”

The English Channel | Suffolk University’s C. Walsh Theatre, 55 Temple St, Boston | September 6-15 | $30; $15 seniors, students | 866.811.4111

Brustein identifies Lanier as the Dark Lady of the sonnets. “It’s irrefutable, if you think of the coincidences that surround Shakespeare. She was the mistress of Lord Hunsdon, patron of the Globe Theatre, where Shakespeare worked; she was dark and beautiful and a published poet herself.” In the play, Brustein invents a plot line involving a handkerchief given by Shakespeare to Lanier that she claims to have lost, as if to foreshadow the complications of Othello. Shakespeare doesn’t murder Lanier, but he is unforgiving — a trait explored by Brustein in a book in progress, Shakespeare’s Prejudices (Yale University Press). According to the author, the new tome is about what the Bard “had in common with his own time. I’m tracing the misogyny in the plays and especially in the sonnets.”

Brustein calls Shakespeare “a big ear,” always copying down snatches of conversation to be used later in his plays. As if in homage to the Bard’s practice of lifting from other sources, Brustein has borrowed from director Andrei Serban’s ART production of Twelfth Night, in which Shakespeare was added as an eavesdropping character, for The English Channel. Brustein believes this image of Shakespeare is “ true of most artists. They don’t have lives of their own. They are sopping up everyone else’s lives like a sponge. You can’t find his personality. He is in his plays, that’s where he lives.”

Wake-up call

IRIS FANGER — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 21:37:25 GMT

What Then dreams up a better world
Life is but a dream — or so Rinne Groff would have us believe.

Amanda Collins and Cait Langstaff

Life is but a dream — or so Rinne Groff’s What Then (at Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater Harbor Stage through September 2) would have us believe. In this enigmatic work, the author of The Ruby Sunrise gives a sci-fi treatment to the ecologically blighted environment of our future in which a solution is snoozed into being. Or perhaps, given the desolation to be wrought by climate change, the compounding toxicity of the air and the water, and the even more extreme dysfunction of family, Groff means to suggest that the dream state will one day be the only place on the planet safe for human habitation.

Under the smart direction of Rand Foerster, What Then has opened at the old waterfront home of Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater — now called the Harbor Stage to distinguish it from the new Julie Harris Stage. Set in a sleek beige, black, and stainless-steel suburban kitchen designed by Jackie Levinson, the play is focused on Diane, an accountant who has just quit her job, and her husband, Tom, a corporate executive with a locked black briefcase that hides the damning doings of his malevolent-sounding company. The mess that civilization has made lies outside the kitchen window, where nothing green grows in a barren landscape under a sunless sky. Tom is skeptical of Diane’s change of profession — she’s engaged in a sort of architecture that requires her to work at home, in her pajamas. It seems she’s constructing a beautiful new development, complete with gardens of tomatoes to leach the poison from dead soil, but her work progresses only when she’s sleeping, sometimes 14 hours at a stretch.

Enter Sallie, Tom’s daughter from his first marriage, who demands every kind of help, from drug rehab to a safe place to live. And then Sallie’s boyfriend, an immigrant drug dealer and jack-of-all-trades named Tomashevsky, falls for Diane, with her vision of a restored earth and her sexually provocative manner of mouthing cannoli. (Think porn film shot at Mike’s Pastry on Hanover Street.) The needs of these characters collide and then ricochet off one another’s psyches, resolving in the lyrics of a stand-up karaoke number that enlivens but does not explain the melodramatic ending.

Conquering Cleopatra

IRIS FANGER — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 16:23:37 GMT

Shakespeare + Company’s Tina Packer boards the barge
Packer returns to Shakespeare’s far-flung tragedy as Cleopatra.

Twenty years ago, Tina Packer directed Antony and Cleopatra for the outdoor playing space at Lenox-based Shakespeare & Company. “With a cast of 50 and marching Roman armies,” she recalls. “What I discovered was that it would be better to do a production in a smaller space and concentrate on what people are saying. If you get obsessed with who’s saying what about whom, you lose your way — like the case of President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.”

This time Packer returns to Shakespeare’s far-flung tragedy as Cleopatra, with Nigel Gore as her Antony. Michael Hammond directs the staging — in which 12 actors play all of the characters — in the company’s indoor Founders’ Theater. “Cleopatra is an incredible role,” says Packer. “As soon as I realized I wanted to get back on stage before it was too late, I wanted to be an all-out woman, not someone’s granny. Shakespeare has definitely written a play about middle-aged lovers.” If so, and if 60+ is indeed the new 40, Packer fits the Bard’s intention.

Co-founder and artistic director of Shakespeare & Company since 1978, the British-born Packer had for years cut back on her acting to direct. Then last summer she appeared at S&C in Hamlet, playing Gertrude to her son Jason Asprey’s melancholy Dane. It was a return to her roots. Trained in London at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Packer appeared in numerous productions in London’s West End, at the Royal Shakespeare Company, and for the BBC before coming to the United States in the 1970s.

According to Packer, Shakespeare takes the historical facts about Roman general Marc Antony and Cleopatra, the last pharaoh of Egypt, and fashions a “heavily political” play in which the conflict between Antony and Octavius Caesar for control of the Roman Empire is wrapped into the legendary affair of “Antony and Cleopatra, two deeply flawed people.”

The off-set scandal surrounding the 1963 Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton film is just one reminder of the continuing fascination with Cleopatra more than 2000 years after she committed suicide by taking a viper to bed. “There are these questions about Cleopatra,” Packer says. “Did she do away with her brother [her consort on the throne]? Did she rule with her father as well? She has this reputation of being a great seductress, but she had only two or three lovers: Julius Caesar and Antony, who was more promiscuous than she was. We do know that Augustus [Octavius] Caesar had his house historian write after their deaths that she had seduced the upright Roman general. Shakespeare is saying that love is stronger than power and the desire for power.”

Dream team

IRIS FANGER — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 21:45:18 GMT

Bringing the Bard to Boston Common
The fairies are creeping on their bellies along the carpet of the Wang Theatre rehearsal-hall floor.

Johnny Lee Davenport

The fairies are creeping on their bellies along the carpet of the Wang Theatre rehearsal-hall floor as director Steven Maler and choreographer Anna Myer watch. Under their instruction, the band of sprites break from a circle into more compelling patterns. Antonio Edwards-Suarez’s Puck howls like a wolf to rally his minions behind him. One week before Commonwealth Shakespeare Company’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream brings the Bard’s fairyland to a stage near the Parkman Bandstand for the annual offering of free Shakespeare on Boston Common, the final scene is beginning to jell.

Founded by Maler 11 years ago and eventually taken under the wing of the Wang Performing Arts Center (now the Citi Performing Arts Center), Commonwealth Shakespeare Company presented the Bard’s Dream as its first production, on Copley Square, to an unplanned soundscore of cars whizzing by and airplanes overhead. “I’ve never directed the same play twice,” says Maler. “It’s like I’ve been in this room before.”

The director’s idea is that the play’s two worlds — that of the Athenian court and the surrounding woods — “collide, intersect, cross-pollinate.” So he’s cast New York–based actress Mimi Bilinski as both Amazon queen Hippolyta and fairy queen Titania and distinguished Shakespeare & Company vet Johnny Lee Davenport as the Athenian duke and the fairy king. Davenport is a veteran of 28 previous Shakespeare productions; he most recently appeared in Actors’ Shakespeare Project’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, and he’s played Oberon three times already. Yet it’s not the same, he says. “Everything changes. There’s so much about the immediacy of the production that it’s all about the new relationships. Oberon is hearing, seeing, feeling: the senses. Theseus is the opposite: about intellect. This is the first time Dream is how I imagine it — putting it into the forest of balloons.”

The major changes for Shakespeare on the Common this year are its move from the Parade Ground back to Parkman Bandstand, because of a reconstruction project, and a sharp reduction in the number of performances. Josiah Spaulding, president and CEO of Citi Performing Arts Center, says, “It’s part of our new strategic vision to make sure the core programs of the Wang Center are fully funded each year to make the programs sustainable.”

Party animals

IRIS FANGER — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 16:33:10 GMT

ART celebrates Noël Coward
Sir Noël Coward remains one of the most bankable of dramatists.

Remo, Thomas, Karen, and Will

A Marvelous Party! The Noël Coward Celebration | American Repertory Theatre, Zero Arrow Theatre, Mass Ave + Arrow St | July 13-29 | $45 table seating; $25 stool seating; $10 senior discount; $15 students | 617.547.8300

It’s a Noël Coward season, what with Present Laughter recently closed at the Huntington Theatre Company, Blithe Spirit set to open at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, and American Repertory Theatre gearing up to throw A Marvelous Party! The Noël Coward Celebration, a revue of the British playwright’s songs and scenes, at Zero Arrow Theatre. For the show, Zero Arrow will be turned back into the mirrored nightclub of The Onion Cellar, with a cash bar serving up drinks to accompany the entertainment.

Sir Noël Coward remains one of the most bankable of dramatists, as the frequent revivals of Hay Fever and Private Lives attest. But in his heyday, between World War I and World War II, Coward flourished not just as a playwright but also as a performer, a composer of popular songs, and a bon vivant. An unlikely late success was his Las Vegas act; it was recorded for posterity and is still available on CD.

Among the catalogue of 500 songs Coward turned out are some that remain cabaret standards: “I’ll See You Again,” “Mad Dogs and Englishmen,” “If Love Were All.” Then there are the droll novelty numbers, among them “Mrs. Worthington” and “The Stately Homes of England.” Marvelous Party is the first revue to be authorized by Coward’s estate since his death, in 1973; ART is mounting it “to showcase the musical talents of the resident actors, because there are so many story songs and acting moments,” says Elliot Norton Award–winning director Scott Edmiston, who helms the proceedings. “I selected the songs they would sing. It’s a chance to see how silly these actors are, to see some of their whimsical sides.”

Long-time fans of ART have had only glimpses of the musical smarts of the cast: Remo Airaldi, Thomas Derrah, Will LeBow, and Karen MacDonald. Airaldi, who is new to the Coward repertory, says, “I thought some of the quips were throw-aways, but there are moments that break your heart.” And just wait till you see Derrah in a soft-shoe number, complete with hat and cane, accompanied at the piano by musical director Will McGarrahan.

Feels like teen spirit

IRIS FANGER — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 17:51:52 GMT

Disney's High School Musical graduates to the stage
Forget Tony and Maria, or Danny Zuko and Sandy Dumbrowski.

David Nathan Perlow and Addi McDaniel

Forget Tony and Maria, or Danny Zuko and Sandy Dumbrowski. The couple of choice for the current adolescent population are Troy and Gabriella, who find true love at the drama-club auditions. Played out in the classrooms, the gym, and the lunch room of East High, their romance forms the plot of High School Musical, the Disney Channel original movie and teen phenomenon that has now been retooled for the stage. The North Shore Music Theatre production opens this Tuesday, and the demand for tickets has been so high that five performances have been added.

Barry Ivan, choreographer and director of the NSMT production, flew to Atlanta for the musical’s stage premiere; “I was astonished at the audience’s reaction,” he days. Ivan, who two weeks ago was named to succeed Jon Kimbell as NSMT’s artistic director and executive producer, is on familiar territory: he’s directed more than 20 musicals at NSMT, he coached Danny, Sandy, and 96 other singer-dancers in a Kansas City production of Grease last summer, and he’s set Tony and Maria singing in a revival of West Side Story at the Deutsche Staatsoper.

In its stage incarnation, High School Musical centers on Troy and Gabriella, the basketball star and the academic whiz kid, who pair off cute over their shared yen to sing. In an attempt to break out of their respective stereotypes, they audition together for the school musical. Written by a fellow student, the musical revises Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, allowing the star-crossed lovers to live, move to Albuquerque, and set up housekeeping. “The film is inclusive of all the subdivisions of high school — the jocks, the cheerleaders, and the brainiacs,” says Ivan. “There’s a bit of competition between these groups, like the Sharks and the Jets.”

Fourteen-year-old Samantha Goober, from Burlington, and 16-year-old Nick Christopher, of Winchester, are among the 11 local high-school students in the 38-member NSMT cast. Christopher points out, “A lot of kids my age, especially living in Massachusetts, don’t see musicals on stage, so they haven’t seen Grease or West Side Story. Everyone watches the Disney Channel.” “It’s scary,” adds Goober.

One refreshing aspect of the movie is the color-blind casting, which also applies to the stage. Goober explains, “That’s how high school is now — we don’t even notice it. Everyone is just together.”

Build it and they will come

IRIS FANGER — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 21:05:10 GMT

WHAT opens its new Julie Harris Stage
The drive out Route 6 past the Orleans rotary gets ever more twee as the landscape changes to the scrubby pine and sandy margins of outer Cape Cod.

Jeff Zinn and Julie Harris

The drive out Route 6 past the Orleans rotary gets ever more twee as the landscape changes to the scrubby pine and sandy margins of outer Cape Cod. So it’s even more of a jolt — as you pass the clam-roll stands, 1950s motels, and souvenir shops — to come upon the behemoth building adjacent to the local post office that’s the new home of Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater. “It’s pretty rare that you have an opportunity to build a new theater on an empty piece of land,” says Jeff Zinn, WHAT’s artistic director. “We’ve built the theater we wanted to work in.”

Founded in 1985 by six actor-director-aspiring playwrights, WHAT has prospered by presenting edgy dramas rather than the usual summer-stock fare of musicals and Neil Simon. The shows were mounted in an unheated, storm-gray shack at the edge of Wellfleet Harbor that holds just 90 persons. Patrons in the front row could rest their toes on the stage, and when it rains, the toilets overflowed into the lobby.

But under Zinn’s leadership (co–artistic director Gip Hoppe resigned last year but returns to direct this season), WHAT has raised almost $7 million to build a new theater — a leap of faith for a village that numbers 3000 souls come winter. Named the Julie Harris Stage in honor of the 81-year-old actress and Chatham neighbor who has served as sometime WHAT performer, honorary board chair, and avid fan, the space opens next Thursday with Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House, which Trinity Repertory company just presented in Providence.

Zinn is positively gleeful as he leads a hard-hat tour of every cranny of the almost-finished space — and that includes the ladies’ room. Designed by architect John Freeman, the theater connects by bridge to administrative offices on the second floor above the post office. In the performing space itself, 200 seats will be installed on two small balconies and a half-circle-shaped incline stretching up from a stage that’s 33 feet wide by 36 feet deep, with 20-foot wings on either side. Carpeting covers the concrete floors, and the lighting and sound systems will be state-of-the-art. “We don’t have all the toys we want,” says Zinn, “but we have enough to have fun.”

Daddy’s girl

IRIS FANGER — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 21:44:40 GMT

Mabou Mines looks into James Joyce’s daughter
Repressed, talented women lurk in the background of Western cultural history.

Ruth Maleczech as Lucia Joyce

Repressed, talented women lurk in the background of Western cultural history — think of Alice James and Fanny Mendelssohn. But in the case of Lucia Joyce, the difficult daughter of James Joyce, the circumstances turned darker. At age 28, artist and dancer Lucia (1907–1982) was incarcerated in a mental institution. She remained there for the rest of her life.

Next weekend, Charlestown Working Theater hosts Mabou Mines, the acclaimed New York experimental theater company, in Lucia’s Chapters of Coming Forth by Day, which explores the ties between Joyce and his daughter. Melrose High and Emerson College grad Sharon Fogarty wrote the script and directs; founding co-artistic director and three-time Obie winner Ruth Maleczech plays Lucia. “Lucia was an independent spirit,” says Maleczech, “but there was something awry there. Had she lived now, she probably would have been out in the world. We have better drugs.”

“We wrestled with the question of what her father really felt about her,” says Fogarty. “James and his wife, Nora, were ill-equipped to be parents. James neglected the family, yet he used them in his imagination in his works.”

The first version of Fogarty’s script, the 2003 Cara Lucia, had a trio of actresses alternating as Lucia. Explains Maleczech, “One actress played her as a young woman and a dancer; the second as Issy, a character from Finnegans Wake. I played her later in life, after she had been institutionalized for many years. She was an inspiration for her father when he was writing Finnegans Wake. She had a peculiar way of writing and speaking, using ‘portmanteau’ words — words that are coupled together but don’t belong together — to make one word. We think she was instrumental in exposing Joyce to that and inspirational in terms of his affection for her.”

In the piece, Lucia is confined to a chair; Joyce is personified as a dark shadow, hanging over most of the play before he comes on at the end. “In our story, she’s already dead, trying to move into the hereafter,” says Fogarty. “Her father helps her to move into the light.”

Maleczech adds, “She’s in an imprisoned place. That speaks to people of an unnatural isolation, [but it’s] true to her life. And it was true for Joyce, but for different reasons. When Joyce took Lucia to Jung, in hopes of curing her, Jung said, ‘It’s like they both are sinking to the bottom, only he is diving and she is drowning.’ The implication being that Joyce knew how to surface. And it’s what ties them together, in the water going down, down, down.”

‘Rainbow’ tour

IRIS FANGER — Tue, 29 May 2007 16:18:56 GMT

Kathy St. George channels Judy Garland
Kathy St. George bends close to the piano, as if hoping to absorb the rhythms into her body while she concentrates on perfecting the song.

Kathy St. George channels Judy Garland

Kathy St. George bends close to the piano, as if hoping to absorb the rhythms into her body while she concentrates on perfecting the song. As she uncoils to belt out the lyrics, her hands open like unfolding flowers, reaching up to frame her face. And when she gets the emotionally charged ending right — the tears nearly spilling from her eyes, the famous vibrato in her voice — she throws her head back in triumph, or in ecstasy.

It’s a rainy day in late May, and St. George is preparing for the title role in And Now Ladies and Gentlemen, Miss Judy Garland, which will have its world premiere next Friday at the Lyric Stage Company’s theater. And there’s at least one thing the two women have in common, as St. George points out: “Judy Garland was 4’11”; I’m 4’11”.

Garland died in 1969, at age 47, after a 45-year career: vaudeville, radio, film (The Wizard of Oz and all those memorable MGM musicals), recordings, her legendary sold-out concert appearances, and her own TV series. Along the way, the travails of her private life helped build an adoring fan base that today seems undiminished. St. George, a former second-grade teacher in Stoneham, is one of the Boston theater/cabaret scene’s most popular stars; her triumphs include Johnny Guitar (in which she channeled Joan Crawford), Menopause the Musical, and I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change. She says she’s been doing “bits of Judy” for years. She even created a 10-minute version of The Wizard of Oz for a cabaret act before undertaking this project.

Producer/director Tony McLean put together the script, which includes transcriptions from the famed 1964 Judy Speaks tapes that Garland recorded as a basis for an autobiography she hoped would alleviate her debts. (It never materialized.) A former vice-president of Disney Theatrical Productions and the director of the Elliot Norton Award–winning On the Twentieth Century, McLean has constructed this show in two parts, with Garland speaking in the first act and giving a concert performance of her signature hits in the second.

“We get to know the private Judy,” St. George explains. “She’s very funny and very angry. On the tapes she does run the gamut of emotions.” And St. George’s singing style has evolved from her study of Garland’s films and TV shows. “Every night when I come home from rehearsal, I watch another DVD, over and over again. The songs in the show are my list of favorites. We had to stop at one point. I’d like to sing them all.”

Lynch pin

IRIS FANGER — Tue, 08 May 2007 22:35:18 GMT

Parade pushes the musical-theater envelope
The tragedy of Leo Frank seems an uneasy fit for a musical.

Jason Robert Brown

The tragedy of Leo Frank, the Brooklyn-born Jewish businessman who was lynched in 1913 by a Southern mob for a murder he denied committing, seems an uneasy fit for a musical. And though Parade, which is based on the case, won 1999 Tony Awards for Alfred (Driving Miss Daisy) Uhry’s book and Jason Robert Brown’s score, it lasted only three months on Broadway. Since then, Parade has had nearly 200 revivals; that includes an eight-month national tour that Brown conducted. This Saturday, Speakeasy Stage Company opens its production, the largest in its history, with a cast of 29 actors and nine musicians.

“Parade is a show that speaks its own language,” says Brown by phone from Los Angeles, where he teaches in the theater department at the University of Southern California. “It’s not a show like Hello, Dolly! I think it has its own vernacular, especially in the way it moves. What we built into the show was a cinematic quality. We wanted you to feel cornered, like the clock was ticking. I think that’s what some of the negative reviews referred to. Some of the critics thought, ‘This is a musical. Why do you have to punish me?’ ”

The Leo Frank case remains unresolved because the murderer was never found. Frank was a college-educated Jew who had moved to Atlanta to run a pencil factory. When the body of a 13-year-old girl who had worked in the shop was found, he was accused, put on trial, and sentenced to hang. The governor spared his life after two years of appeals, but within weeks Frank was dragged from prison by a mob and lynched, doubtless the victim of Southern resentment of Northerners and anti-Semitism. The visual metaphor of the musical’s title, a Memorial Day Parade, refers to the South’s continued pride in its history.

Uhry and Brown set act one at the time of the crime and the trial; act two covers the two-year appeals process, during which the marriage of Leo and Lucille Frank is strengthened in the face of adversity. Director Paul Daigneault has cast Boston Conservatory graduates Brendan McNab and Elliot Norton Award winner Bridget Beirne as the Franks.

Land ahoy

IRIS FANGER — Thu, 03 May 2007 15:56:43 GMT

Vintage Pinter takes the ART stage
Unlike The Birthday Party and The Homecoming , now staples of the repertory, this play by the 2005 Nobel laureate is seldom mounted.

Paul Benedict, David Wheeler, Max Wright

Max Wright, who’s cast as Spooner in the American Repertory Theatre revival of Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land that opens a week from Saturday, remembers seeing the 1975 premiere, which starred John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson. “I thought it was a masterpiece. It was tremendously funny, extremely scary, very much food for conversation. The ambiguities are apparent, but the impact is enormous: the tension, humor, wonderful flights of language.”

Unlike The Birthday Party and The Homecoming, now staples of the repertory, this play by the 2005 Nobel laureate is seldom mounted. (In conjunction with this production, the Harvard Film Archive is screening nine Pinter-scripted films plus a bio-documentary in the series “Harold Pinter: Stage to Screen,” May 13-30; Michael Atkinson’s review will appear in next week’s Phoenix.) Paul Benedict (Waiting for Guffman, TV’s The Jeffersons), who plays Hirst, says of stepping into the shoes of Gielgud and Richardson, “People are afraid, perhaps in the way that batters were afraid for a long time to follow Babe Ruth.”

The action is simple, though the undercurrents are not. The curtain rises on the two elderly men sharing whiskey and conversation in Hirst’s comfortable living room. Hirst has invited Spooner home for a nightcap. Although Spooner claims to be a poet and Hirst is an established writer, nothing is certain about the pair’s past lives. The first act ends when two young men — servants, perhaps, or relatives — burst in and take control.

Act two takes place the next morning, when the confrontations become even more enigmatic. “The suggestion of homosexuality floats throughout the play,” says veteran director David Wheeler, who helms the ART revival. “You don’t have to arrive at a general consensus about what’s happening. That’s the nature of living. It’s a totally artificial game in the theater, when in five minutes a character comes on stage and you know everything about him.”

Wheeler lobbied hard for ART to produce No Man’s Land with this particular cast. Wright (an early ART member, better known as Willie Tanner on TV’s Alf) isn’t sure about everything Spooner says. “It’s like the Talmudic tradition. There are two possibilities. Either he’s telling the truth or he’s not. And if he’s not telling the truth, there are two possibilities. It’s not just because Pinter is Jewish. What can you believe of anything in a world where you only have language to convince someone who you are and what’s important?”

Mounting the Nian

IRIS FANGER — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 19:06:51 GMT

The Theatre Offensive unveils an award winner
If you’re 23 years old and about to premiere your first full-length musical, you probably don’t mind the climb up five steep flights of stairs to the rehearsal hall.