It Had To Be You – 8/11/08

For box office information, click on the title of this review.

Finally.

Since I began posting these reviews last month, I’ve seen some really good things, some really bad things and some mediocre things. I’ve never had the occasion to give a full out rave. Until now:

Carla Mutone and Jack Smith are comedic gods and if you don’t order tickets for It Had To Be You at the Village Theater Guild in Glen Ellyn right now, you’re a masochistic theatrical fool who would rather see thirty people do a big name musical passibly than watch two people in a little name show blow the roof off the joint.

Let’s get this out of the way: Directing, lights, sound, set design & decoration, costumes (love the psychedelic boots) and all other backstage aspects are top notch and provide a terrific framework for the acting. Now:

It Had to Be You by Renee Taylor and Joseph Bologna concerns Theda Blau, an actress/writer wannabe who traps TV commercial producer/director Vito Pignoli in her apartment on Christmas Eve and attempts to seduce him in every conceivable way known to mankind, if a hurricane can be called seductive.

That’s it. That’s the plot. So as opposed to something like Noises Off, which depends mainly on physical math and geometry, It Had to Be You lives or dies on the character work.

Jack Smith is the perfect straight man for this type of show. He’s warm, personable and funny. Completely believable as a fairly laid-back commercial success who likes everybody but himself. Vito comes across as really decent guy who wouldn’t hurt anybody – even a borderline-psychotic screwball who effectively kidnaps him. Smith’s timing is impeccable and his acting in the more serious moments is right on target.

Carla Mutone’s voice has the slight rasp of the mid 1960s Lucille Ball – and that’s not the only comparison (assuming Lucy wanted to fuck Mr. Mooney). She is a fireball of energy, clearly understands every last itsy bitsy nuance of the part, has a radiant lovability that keeps you from wanting to smack Theda and delivers one of the greatest comic performances you are ever going to see. Mutone completely sells the idea that the wackiness isn’t just sitcom zaniness, but is backed by desperation and misery.

However, it takes two to tango. The work of Mutone and Smith is more than the sum of its parts. One of my prime complaints, as you may have surmised last week, is when actors don’t connect with each other onstage. There is never a moment when Mutone or Smith is in a private little world, showing us How Well They Emote. They are completely in sync at all times and operate like a well-oiled machine (although considering some Theda’s persuasive methods, “well-oiled” is not the most delicate phrasing.) This is teamwork of the highest caliber. Community theatre hasn’t been awful lately, so it isn’t as if this is a diamond in a shit pile. But It Had to Be You is a diamond just laying there waiting to be picked up. The ticket price is only $10. Pick up the goddamned diamond.

Twelfth Night - 7/18/08

For box office information, click on the title of this review.

To those of you who think that all Shakespeare’s comedies are masterpieces just because he wrote them, I wish you a happy life seeing nothing but All’s Well That Ends Well, Love’s Labours Lost and Troilus and Cressida.

Twelfth Night, however, is one of Shakespeare’s comic masterpieces. The girl-disguised-as-a-boy routine comes into full flowering (or deflowering, as the case may be) here. Viola is shipwrecked on the shores of Illyria. Her twin brother Sebastian has supposedly drowned and Viola, living by her wits, disguises herself as a boy and goes to work for Orsino, a nobleman in love with the Countess Olivia, who disdains him. Viola falls in love with Orsino, who is in love with Olivia, who is in love with Cesario, who is Viola in disguise. Hilarity ensues. The subplot involves the gulling of pompous ass Malvolio by Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Maria and Feste the Fool.

Let me state at the outset that as far as the audience reaction at the end was concerned, Midsummer Theatre Troupe’s Twelfth Night (directed by Toni Hix) was the cat’s pajamas. And the audience was huge. Apparently, there is an audience out there so starved for Shakespeare that they go nuts over imperfect productions. Play reading committees take note.

Probably the best thing I can say about this production is that I liked it better than Arsenic and Old Lace. There were a lot of good people in this. A lot. And 90% of the time: they knew what they were saying. They communicated the meaning to the audience. But they weren’t funny. The audience, while applauding heartily at the finish, did not laugh very much. The problem is one of direction. There wasn't any. It appeared to be a traffic cop situation. People were told how to get on and off stage. Once up there, whatever they did was up to them. I’ve rarely seen as much meandering back and forth in a comedy.

I’m not going to comment on the acting, except to say that I’ve seen most of these people before in better performances; and the people who were new to me seemed to have great potential. Standouts were Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, Maria, Viola and the Fool. Malvolio was a good actor, but miscast. He was too young and (at least from the back of the crowd) better looking than Orsino or Viola – there was no reason for Olivia NOT to fall for him.

It is not what the actors are providing, but what the director does with it that creates the three major problems.

Anachronism: Orsino sings a couple of songs: All By Myself and I’m a Believer. But the show is done in period costume and there are no other updates of any kind. It’s just jarring and unfunny.

Consistency: There is pronunciation issue. “Maria” in the show is pronounced MaRIa. The other possible interpretation is MaREEa. Everyone in the show calls her MaREEa except Malvolio, who calls her MaRIa. When this same company did “Taming of the Shrew”, half the company said PetROOCHeeo and the other half said PetROOKeeo. Is the director just plain not listening? Either one is fine, just make a goddamn decision.

Similarly, Feste (a man) in this production becomes Festa (a woman). Fine. Great. That absolutely works. Now make sure that ALL the cast changes lines with “he” and “him” to “she” and “her”. Some people did, some people didn’t. It’s not that hard to do. Directing, like the devil, is in the details.

Humor: There isn’t much. Focus was on clearly spitting out the lines, which is very important, but getting laughs would help. There was no physical comedy at all. One of the funniest moments I’ve seen was when the luminous Kyra Sedgwick (Olivia) seized Helen Hunt (Viola) and gave her a kiss hot enough to melt steel. “But that’s professional theatre!” I hear you cry.

All right – one of the other funniest things I’ve ever seen was in the first community production of Twelfth Night I attended. On Malvolio’s line, “I will smile!” there was a full thirty second break while the actor playing Malvolio gradually broke down his facial muscles into a smile, since it was something he had never done before. It was like watching Hercules trying to lift a boulder, which he finally thrusts triumphantly above his head.

The comedic possibilities are a deep forest which went unexplored by a company sticking cautiously to the main road.

However, there are some really good actors in here and most of the venues are free. Go take a look and let me know how strongly you disagree with me.

Arsenic and Old Lace – 7/17/08

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As I left the performance of Arsenic and Old Lace at Naperville Central High School, one very elderly lady said to her companion, “Weren’t the performances superb?” And I wanted to bang my head on the wall. An Arsenic and Old Lace where the sharpest comic timing onstage belongs to the ingénue is a troubled production.

Arsenic and Old Lace concerns two elderly women who poison lonely old men and bury them in the cellar. Their nephew Mortimer, a drama critic, finds out about their hobby and desperately tries to (A) put a stop to it and (B) protect them while keeping his fiancée Elaine from finding out what’s going on. Complicating things are his brothers: Teddy, who firmly believes himself to be Teddy Roosevelt and Jonathan, a homicidal maniac who looks like Boris Karloff, thanks to his inebriated plastic surgeon/sidekick Dr. Einstein.

I have seen Lisa Barber (Elaine) in a couple of shows. The state of women’s roles in community theatre being what it is, she is continually being wasted in ingénue roles when she should be getting Carol Burnett parts. The woman is funny and when it comes to timing, she has a clue. Will somebody please hand her Noises Off and get it over with? Put her in a farce part with some teeth in it – she’ll tear the place apart. She has the best comic timing in this production.

The aunts are played by Deanna Norman (Aunt Abby) and Marianne Bowles (Aunt Martha). They take some getting used to because they have been told to speak in annoying “old lady voices”. But both women are very talented and, especially when playing off of each other, they’re pretty funny. They have a good chemistry together. Bowles in particular gets a wonderful gleam in her eye at the thought of poisoning a guest.

Officer O’Hara (George McArdle) is funny and very energetic. He should have had a larger role. As one of the nephews.

Jonathan (James Turano) is problematic. Jonathan’s menace is quiet and extremely scary. He dominates by force of personality – he doesn’t get physical. It is (duh) a Boris Karloff part, not Edward G. Robinson. Turano, who gave a brilliant performance as Salieri in Amadeus a couple of years ago, plays the part like a pitbull locked in a pantry. Wearing a distracting fake limp and some of the worst makeup in theatrical history, he puts his friendly arms around the aunts, crunching them a bit, then knocks Aunt Abby out of his way when breaking the pose. Sorry, but that sucks. It’s too much. He’s a big guy – he doesn’t have to get physical with people. We know he’s dangerous.

Larry Lipskie as Dr. Einstein is pretty good. The actor playing Teddy is not. Teddy is written to be played over the top. This Teddy looks at the floor a lot.

Mortimer. Sigh. Mortimer is the engine that drives the play; and it’s a thankless job. He has to race through the show at top energy, hit every gag on the head and set up shots for the other team members. This Mortimer is (to put it delicately) delicate. He has no force of personality and no clue on how to deliver jokes. His comedic engine won’t go over 30 mph. Basic projection is a problem.

Bradley Bankemper, playing Lieutenant Rooney, is a pretty good actor, but nobody told him that he’s supposed to be an older cop in the early 1940s. The fringy red beard he wears (A) was not seen in that period except on Egyptian spies in Peter Lorre movies and (B) made him look like a hairy twelve year old.

Pet peeve: mispronounced slang. From one of the cops: “Look at that pus. He looks like Boris Karloff!” Not “pus.” “Puss.” Meaning “face”, not “thick bodily fluid”.

And we’re getting to the two most unfortunate aspects of the production. Scott Bishop’s direction showed no sense of pace whatsoever. His idea of pace is to have actors step on laughs to keep things moving. When saying exit lines, instead of being at the door and exiting as the line ends, actors are ten feet away, say the line, then the next actor has to wait while the first actor crosses and exits. Lines that are meant to be slam-dunked with window seat slams are completely mistimed.

• Bishop blocks people to stand or sit directly behind the person they are talking to, although they have miles of room onstage.
• The bit with Mr. Spinalzo’s shoe is dropped.
• When Teddy blows the bugle, Einstein and Jonathan don’t spill their drinks – so there’s no reason for them not to drink them later.
• Jonathan opens Einstein’s medical bag to show Mortimer how he’s going to be tortured. First thing out of the bag? A cat o’nine tails whip – the latest in medical equipment. Then a turkey baster; my, how horrifying. You’re supposed to be setting up real suspense at that point. Get a clue.
• This is typical pacing in this production:

JONATHAN: That’s easily taken care of. All I need is one more. Just one more.

(Door opens.)

(Mortimer saunters in.)

(Shuts door.)

(Slowly turns to the others.)

MORTIMER: Well, here I am!

(Lights out)

“Here I am” indeed. Jesus Christ. It’s the scene closer – get the timing right:

JONATHAN: (as Mortimer enters) Just one more.

MORTIMER: Well, here I am!

(Door shuts during the laugh. Lights out)

Last but least: the set designer is uncredited in the program, which was a smart move. Many theatres cannot afford elaborate sets and so you give them a break for ingenuity. Or a show doesn’t require a realistic set, so imagination is employed. Arsenic and Old Lace requires a dead-real Victorian house. And Summer Place can afford that. Instead, they built the ugliest, cheapest and all around worst set for a comedy I have seen in my three centuries of playgoing. The doors aren’t strong enough to slam or even knock on solidly. There is a railing leading up to the landing, but no railing around it. There are giant picture frames hanging all over the place with nothing in them. It doesn’t look expressionistic – it looks retarded. They are hanging by wires in the air, so every time a door closes, the frames are gone with the wind.

But worst of all are the stairs: giant stairs bisect the main playing area into two levels – always a wonderful idea when most of the show consists of people having to dash across the room, right? Or when two of the leads are older women in long dresses and heels? The stairs chop any cross-stage dashes in two. It is the dumbest fucking idea for a comedy since Rob Schneider was put on a payroll. Normally I try to give community theatres a break – but there are theatre companies that would give their corporate eye-teeth for the kind of facilities Summer Place has access to. Wasting them in this manner is criminal.

If you have to see this, see it for Lisa Barber, Marianne Bowles, Deanna Norman and George McArdle. If you have to.

Creating ARThur – 7/16/08

For box office information, click on the title of this review.

Not many theatres around here have the balls to premiere a new script. A show that hasn’t already gone through a dozen previews and a New York run, so that the more basic imperfections are already ironed out? Heavens. Wheaton Drama has enough self confidence to try it and apparently their audience is buying into it, at least judging by the size of the house I saw last weekend. Good for them.

Creating ARThur is a comedy by Bill Ball (and “associate writers” Wendy Ball and Jodie Klassen, as designated in the bios. If they wrote part of the show, their names should be in the byline. Fair’s fair.) The plot concerns middle-aged brothers Alex and Andy Burns, whose older brother Arthur has just died. Alex, a schemer whose success rate makes Ralph Kramden look like Donald Trump, talks Andy into a hare-brained plan to have one of Arthur’s paintings hung in a museum. This involves scamming art auctioneers and museum owners into recognizing the late, great “De La Byrnes”. A phony biography is cooked up, deceptions are perpetrated, the brothers’ wives become suspicious and all we need is a belligerent cop snapping, “Why, I oughta…!”

Anyhoo – hilarity ensues. For the most part.

Annie Walker-Bright’s direction is focused and farcical. And, combined with set designer Don Dumper’s work, she does something innovative and brilliant – the opening scene switches between the brothers talking in one room and their wives talking in another. Instead of going the normal route and placing them at opposite ends of the stage, with lights going up and down as the occasion demands, there is a huge, blank painter’s canvas at centerstage. It’s on a pivot and is used as a revolving door. Husbands are talking, scene’s over, they pivot the canvas to reveal the wives while the husbands disappear. It makes for instant scene changes. Really nice work. Walker-Bright is also adept at moving a large amount of people (for a non-musical) in the background without having them be either distracting or static.

Dennis Brown (as Alex) and Chris Williams (Andy) work their asses off to put the material over. Both men are very funny and, when the material is up to their level, as in a mini “Who’s on First” about which phony name Andy is to use that day, they nail it. They have nice chemistry together.

Susan Carr (Alex’s wife Lorraine) and Dawn Herbst (Andy’s wife Esther) have similar chemistry and talent. They are enormously likable and funny; the script needed to give them more than exposition and suspicion.

One problem with the script is that this is a situation comedy that wants to be a farce. I mention this now because there are only two truly farcical characters in the show, which points up the sitcomicality (Hooray! New word!) of the rest of the show. Angelicque Cate as a raucous, chatty, anyhooing waitress who turns up EVERYWHERE, steals Act One. Act Two is stolen by Steven Merkel as a screaming queen (Hooray! Non-PC comedy!) art salesman. My biggest suggestion for the script is to have them come through the last scene as a couple. Both performances were broad and bigger than life – thank god.

The rest of the ensemble was extremely good – valid characters when necessary and unobtrusive in the background for crowd scenes.

On the whole, a funny show, due at this point more to the cast and direction than to the script. Let’s talk about that for a minute. Since, as screenwriter William Goldman says, everybody thinks they can improve scripts, there’s no reason for me to be any different. So; to the playwright(s):

The script could lose twenty minutes without any perceptible damage. It is one-third action and two-thirds talking about what they’re going to do. The chatter goes on FOREVER. A scene between the wives goes on and on and on making the same point – their husbands are acting weird. Instead of being straight-women – long-suffering sitcom wives – it would have been far more interesting to see them with actual personalities & quirks of their own. They are standard-issue “What are those goofballs up to?” characters whose dialogue is there just to give them equal stage time rather than something interesting to do with it. Carr and Herbst were obviously capable of much more than they were given.

As for Andy and Alex – both characters are too frantic. For me, it would have been more of a contrast to have Alex be insanely, groundlessly confident. The best scheming teams (Zero Mostel & Gene Wilder in The Producers, Peter Falk & Alan Arkin in The In-Laws, Bing Crosby & Bob Hope in the Road movies) have a friendly, confident sheepdog leading a terrified sheep into a saloon full of wolves. Having both characters sputter doesn’t work.

Start ruthlessly attacking your own logic, or wait for reviewers to do so. Banks do NOT take as long to process checks as they did twenty years ago. Why are NONE of the art dealers wondering why there is no mention of the famous De La Byrnes anywhere on the internet? I could Google information like that in two minutes – why wouldn’t they? Why don’t the gallery salespeople fight like hell when a sale is threatened in that very, very, very long scene in Act Two? Until the art dealers and wives show up, there’s no comedic escalation.

Lastly, you need to think visually. For a show about painting, 70% of this is a radio show. Place scenes in locations where the characters have to DO something while they talk. The director did a fabulous job fleshing it out; give her some help.

But away from the playwright and back to the casual review reader: is it worth it to buy a ticket? Yes. The cast is fabulous, some of the performances are gems and there are enough laughs. If you’re tired of sitting through Godspell (not that I ever would) and Steel Magnolias, get out and support the idea of trying new shows. Hooray, Wheaton Drama! Anyhoo...