Author: Jackie Davies

Show: “The Rose Tattoo”

Company: Shattered Globe Theatre

Venue: Theater Wit

Die Roll: 3

I usually approach Tennessee Williams shows with a mixture of hope and dread. Hope, because for all his melodrama, the man was a fantastic writer. Dread, because so very many productions of his works go nuts with overwrought acting, and forget that the characters are meant to be real people, even in a heightened sense. Well, “The Rose Tattoo” has plenty of wailing, but it’s also chock-full of believable relationships, a small-town’s worth of characters, and – wonder of wonders! – humor. Lots of it. As in, I guffawed more than once (and it was intentional).

To sum up: in 1951, Serafina Delle Rose (played with mercurial aplomb by Eileen Niccolai) trumpets her love and pride for her husband, Rosario, to the neighborhood. She praises his virtues and fidelity. He’s a man on the rise – once he finishes this last banana delivery, he’ll have saved up enough to go into business for himself. Unfortunately, Rosario is shortly killed in a truck accident (this is Williams, after all). Tragedy! Despair! The neighborhood, an enclave of Sicilian immigrants, rush both to console Serafina but also to behold her sudden fall from self-proclaimed “baroness” to widow. At the same time, rumors arise that Rosario was not altogether faithful to Serafina, a fact that Serafina refuses to acknowledge. Instead, she retreats into her house,  and rarely leaves it for the next few years.  She refuses to dress, and gradually grows unhealthily overprotective toward her daughter, Rosa (Daniela Colucci). She has only her moderately successful dressmaking business to distract herself.

Fast forward three years. On her daughter’s high school graduation day, Serafina, driven slightly bonkers in her solitude, has locked away Rosa’s clothes so that she can’t leave the house. Last minute intervention by one of Rosa’s teachers gets the girl into clothes and on her way to her graduation, there to cross the threshold into adulthood, not only by leaving school, but also in advancing her relationship with her new beau, sailor Jack Hunter (Drew Schad). Histrionics ensue as the ladies of the block gently pry Rosa out of her Serafina’s hands and out the door, but the incident finally wakes Serafina to the notion that her world is changing. If she wants to have a relationship with her daughter, she’s going to need to come out of her fugue.

Into this mix lands Alvaro Mangiacavallo (Nic Grelli), a young driver for the same fruit company as Serafina’s deceased husband. He initially rescues Serafina from the unwanted attentions of a sleazy door-to-door salesman. In return for his kindness, Serafina offers to repair his torn jacket. A lovely relationship begins to unfold from there, with the younger Alvaro charming and wooing Serafina in spite of herself.

“The Rose Tattoo” is something of a departure for Williams. In this one play, it seems as if where he would normally turn a highly charged dramatic moment towards a tragic decision, he has instead found the humor and ridiculousness of a given situation.  While there are flawed characters a-plenty who make poor decisions, for once those choices don’t automatically ruin these characters’ lives. Instead, even the missteps have the potential for hope and optimism.

Eileen Niccolai is simply fantastic at giving Serafina depth. On the one hand, Serafina is a broad character, given to passionate displays of emotion; on the other, she’s uncertain and defensive and unexpectedly sweet. Somehow, Niccolai finds a lovely balance between the extremes,  and every shift in Serafina’s state grows organically from the situation at hand. What could have been a shrill, one-dimensional, self-pitying shrew is rather a complex and nuanced woman who hides nothing from the world.

As Rosa, Daniela Collucci is well-matched with her on-stage mother: calm when Serafina goes off the rails, loving, impatient, and strong-willed.  It’s easy to see the two women as mother and daughter in their sallies around the living room; even more so in Rosa’s relationship with Jack, out from under Serafina’s watchful gaze.

Nic Grelli delights as Alvaro, bringing a sweet daffiness to a performance that in clumsier hands might have come off as overbearing. He’s all heart, and between the wooing, cajoling, seducing and joy he brings into Serafina’s house, it’s not hard to believe that the recalcitrant widow might find in him a soulmate.

Director Greg Vinkler has done a marvelous job with the whole ensemble in building a believable corner of Louisiana populated with all types. There are snooty upper class customers that Serafina sews for, her fellow Sicilian house-wives, a pair of off-kilter goatherd neighbors forever chasing a stray goat, and myriad others who mostly form the world outside Serafina’s house via little scene-lets and cross-overs. Still, each character exists with purpose, and these small details provide a tremendous world in this very excellent production.

TEN WORD SUMMARY: Richly told, wonderfully inhabited – all the drama with laughter besides!

Dice Rating: d12= “Heckuva Good Show”

 

Show: “Mr Burns, A Post Electric Play”

Company: Theater Wit

Venue: Theater Wit

Die Roll: 83 (on a d%)

This is not a show about “The Simpsons”.

No, seriously.

It’s mind-bending, terrifying, hilarious, and moving, but it is most definitely not about Bart, Lisa, Homer, Maggie, and Marge. “Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play” has a much more interesting story to tell.

The show begins the moment you walk into the theater and are confronted with an old-school proscenium arch hung with a closed velvet curtain. Instead of elaborate gilding, this arch is decorated with an odd array of half-wrecked lighting fixtures, which perfectly sets the tone for what will follow. When the curtain rises, it reveals a lightless wood somewhere in the north, and a group of people gathered around a softly-glowing brazier. They sit on a sofa and pass bottles of Budweiser. While it could be any gathering of folk out on a camping trip (well, maybe without the couch), it soon becomes clear that something Very Bad has happened in America. It might be nuclear, or some kind of plague that led to the power grid failing and nuclear plants overloading. Whatever happened, our company in the woods turns out to be new acquaintances trying to figure out to do next.

To distract themselves, they work their way through a “Simpsons” episode, intent on recalling it as exactly as possible, with all the best lines intact and rendered via some pretty good impressions. “The Simpsons” is so ubiquitous that it serves as a point of commonality, something to grab onto as the old world goes dark.

The play comprises three acts with two intermissions. Each act opens on a different time and place, and things just get weirder each time the curtain rises. And by weird, I mean wonderful.  I’m not going to spoil the story for you, but let it be known that there are some outstanding music and dance numbers and the third act has to be seen to be believed.

Of course, having Anne Washburn’s excellent script is only a part of the puzzle. Bringing it to life is an ensemble of eight versatile actors under the deft direction of Theatre Wit’s Artistic Director Jeremy Wechsler.

Each actor has a stand-out moment, and they are equally strong as a group. In Act One, we’re introduced to survivors Matt (Daniel Desmarais), Colleen (Hannah Gomez), Maria (Christina Hall), Sam (Andrew Jessop), Gibson (Jeff Trainor), and Jenny (Leah Urzendowski). Quincy (Leslie Ann Sheppard) joins the troupe in Act Two, and Kelley Abell rounds out the crew in Act Three playing a character called Ms. Krabapel.  Trainor lets his magnificent voice fly in a couple of places, while Urzendowski shows off the same mix of intensity and grace that she lent to aerialist Nellie Bly in the extremely physical “Burning Bluebeard” last month. Jessop’s soft-spoken Sam has a couple of jaw-dropping moments when the gang busts out their moves in the second act, and in the third…

Well. Spoilers, sweetie. Suffice it to say that the entire cast will stun you when  you return from the second intermission.

Credit is also due to the talented design team. Joe Schermoly’s sets perfectly capture the descent from one world into another, as do the costumes by Mara Blumenfeld and Mieka Van Der Ploeg. Christopher Kriz’s sound design is exquisite, and meshes well with Andra Velis Simon’s musical direction.

Seriously, this show has it all, and it’s using all of the tools of modern theatre to do it – not big technical splashes, but clever designs, good acting, the right mixture of stillness and explosions. Go have your mind blown with some damn fine theatre.

TEN WORD SUMMARY: A dark, funny, moving, scary, tremendously weird end of days.

Dice Rating: d12 – “Heckuva Good Show”

Show: “Top Girls”

Company: The Arc Theatre

Venue: The Den Theatre

Die Roll: 54 (on a d%)

This is the second Caryl Churchill play I’ve seen in the past four-ish months, and, while I applaud the complexity of her scripts, I also think they are extremely difficult to perform, and that they are a product of their time of writing.  “Top Girls” is a collection of scenes loosely tied around a few days in the life of Marlene, a woman who has just achieved a directorship position at her employment agency,”Top Girls”.

It begins with a dream sequence – a rowdy dinner party hosted by Marlene that features famous historical female figures.  This was by far the most interesting part of the show, anchored by the excellent Pamela Mae Davis as Pope Joan. A puzzling choice of casting was of  a non-Asian actor to play a famous Japanese concubine, Lady Nijo. The Japanese dialect spoken by Lana Smithner, while probably accurate, was so at odds with her appearance that it the whole character came perilously close to charicature.

Another troubling aspect of this scene was the “talking over one another”conceit, presumably employed by the script, but which produced mixed results. Sometimes the volumes of various small conversations would ebb and flow naturally to highlight different topics around the table so the audience could float from character to character; but mostly it sounded like people shouting across the table, trying to top one another. Davis as Pope Joan was about the only one who could take and give control of the various conversations naturally.

The rest of the play happens in the “real world”, either at the employment agency or at the home of Marlene’s sister, Joyce. It becomes a rather domestic tale of a woman who has decided to choose between conventional wife-motherhood, or a successful career. Remember, it was written in the 1980s, and some of its assumptions betray its age.

Ultimately, the problem is that none of the characters are all that sympathetic. In fact, some of the women perpetuate negative female stereotypes without addressing their underlying sources. At the time of its writing, “Top Girls” was bringing to light issues that women face in the workplace that had long been swept under the carpet, but in 2015, it doesn’t go far enough. The issues women face today are similar, but there’s a lot more nuance and variety in how we face these challenges than you’ll see in “Top Girls”.

The actors are all adequate to their tasks, and I especially liked that they turned transitions into some kind of business-chic catwalk routine to bass-heavy trance music, but all in all, the show just doesn’t seem quite relevant. Of all of the various relationships hinted at in the play, the strongest and most believable was between Natalie Sallee as Joyce and Patricia Lavery as Marlene. The first time the play really came alive was in the final scene between the two sisters as they gradually reveal through their conversation how events came to be.

“Top Girls” presents its age and its structure as tall obstacles to a producing company. The Arc Theatre comes close, but can’t quite overcome them in this show.

 

TEN WORD SUMMARY:  A complex, dated script about women’s challenges hinders solid performances.

d8 = Not Bad, Not Great

Show: “Cookie Play”

Company: Trap Door Theatre

Venue: Trap Door Theatre

Die Roll: 4

Cookie Play is a world-premiere play created by long-time Trap Door collaborators, writer Ken Prestininizi and director Kate Hendrickson, that presents as a paranoid conspiracy theorist’s wet-dream. Two Men-In-Black agents of an unnamed American intelligence agency convince a suburban-Detroit middle-class couple (Harriet and Jim Penini) to turn their basement into a “black site” in order to interrogate the couple’s son, Tommy. The MIBs have been holding Tommy on suspicion of attempting to spill state secrets, a là Edward Snowden, but have managed to obtain no information from him. Harriet agrees, following some twisted maternal logic that by having her son under her roof, she will be better able to protect him. Insanity ensues as the MIBs torture Tommy in the basement, while at the same time maintaining an oddly childlike relationship with the Peninis upstairs. Jim (Chris Popio), resistant to this odd turn of events, is shuffled out the door rather quickly to a “golf vacation” paid for by Uncle Sam. This leaves Harriet on her own to ply the MIBs with a never-ending selection of fresh-baked cookies and to deal with the situation she has created for herself.

It’s an interesting premise: How do you protect your child when your child is accused of betraying your country’s secrets? The play also questions the concepts of authority, religious faith, and the strength of relationships under duress, and does so with a broad absurdist bent. I don’t object to this in the slightest – it’s one of the more interesting ways to provoke an audience to think about abstract ideas that they take for granted or don’t consider at all. The problem is that neither the script nor the production goes far enough.

This is a play that can’t decide what it wants to be, and so the characters come off as very one-dimensional. Harriet (Lyndsay Rose Kane) is one step away from hyperventilating at any given moment. Playwright Prestininzi has given her little room to try other tactics as her involvement with Agents Frank and Frank devolves. She has three settings: frustrated and trying to cover for her husband; lost in a fairy-tale past concerning her son; and a desperate purveyor of cookies to two off-kilter secret agents. Said agents Frank (Mike Steele and Carl Wisniewski) have the most room to play, yo-yoing from uptight caricatures of G-men to explosive three-year-olds trapped in adult bodies. They’re also the most fun to watch as they ricochet (physically and otherwise) through the show.

Oddly, Gage Wallace as Tommy Pernini gives the most riveting of all the performances – odd because he has much less in the way of lines, and while he’s physically present during much of the play, his character has much less focus until the end. Wallace has an excellent physical vocabulary that startles the audience into a harsh reality after the boffo interactions between Harriet and the agents. Wherever the other characters live, Tommy is in the here and now, and it’s hell.

There is a really startling 45-minute show in here that unfortunately has been stretched beyond its limits into a 90-minute, uneven bumper car ride. It is, however, an interesting experiment in physical and absurdist theatre not often seen in Chicago, and for that reason alone, it’s worth a look.

TEN WORD SUMMARY: Not-quite-absurdist-enough Cookie Play crumbles in the end.

RATING: d8 – “Not Bad, Not Great”

Show: Burning Bluebeard

Company: The Ruffians

Venue: Theater Wit

Die Roll: 18

Burning Bluebeard is a beautiful fantasia  –  TREAT YOURSELF – GET THEE TO THEATER WIT AND SEE IT!!!

Go! Scoot!

Still here? Well, then, I’ll tell you a bit about Burning Bluebeard. 

It starts in the lobby. The Ruffians choose to allow access into the theatre all at once right before the show starts, which requires a bit of patience as things can get crowded; but trust me, breathe deep and get to know your neighbor. There is a careful design to every moment of the audience experience.

When they open the doors and you make it through, you’ll find yourself 100 years in the past. The Ruffians have transformed the theatre into an glorious, scorched version of the Iroquois Theater, which once stood where the Oriental theatre is today in the Loop. Designed by Dan Broberg, it’s at once beautiful and sad, and frames the style of the ensuing performance perfectly.

Once the actors emerge, they immediately set the tone. This is pure clowning at its finest – a complex mix of physical comedy, vaudeville and performance art that defies simple categorization. It is an immersive performance, and the actors have no use for the barrier of a fourth wall. They regularly engage audience members and by doing so, draw us into the dream with them.

The show is, in a sense, a memory poem. Six performers gather in the ruins of the Iroquois to attempt to finally complete their Christmas pantomime  Mr. Bluebeard. Their one goal is to reach the happy ending they had hoped to give their audience, but that was cut short by disaster. The actors approach their task with overwhelming joy  – they’re so in love with their audience, so excited to share their play that they burst into dance.

Tempering their enthusiasm, however, is the ever-present threat of the fire and its devastation.  Casting a sly pall over the rest of her companions is the Fancy Clown (Pam Chermansky), a character who appears to encourage the others in their efforts while pushing her own agenda. Countering her is the sweet but unnerving Fairie Queen (Molly Plunk), who never speaks a word (that we can understand), but whose protective magic guides the company through both Mr. Bluebeard and Burning Bluebeard.

Four of the actors play real-life theatre-folk who were onstage the day of the fire, and the most heartbreaking performance of them all is a toss-up between Leah Urzendowski as Nellie Reed and Ryan Walters as Eddie Foy. Urzendowski is a phenomenal physical actress with perfect timing and a brilliant, disarming persona as aerialist Reed.  Walters as famous comedian Eddie Foy also stuns with a transformation late in the show. Anthony Courser as Henry Guilfoil seems a bit underused until they launch into the performance of Mr. Bluebeard, where he takes a hilarious turn as the villain.

Jay Torrence, who plays stage manager Robert Murray, also wrote the show and clearly serves as captain of the ship at times. The play evolved out of a workshop process initiated at The Neo-Futurists, and taking the time to explore the story via clown play pays off wonderfully – there isn’t a false note in a perfectly-paced 90 minute show.

Each actor is superbly cast and has a discrete relationship to each other and to their part of history. This group has developed a into true ensemble, with each member giving and taking in service of the story as needed.

Burning Bluebeard engages not only your eyes and ears, but your heart and your mind. It’s equal parts whimsy and heartbreak, and the fact that, in the end, it’s a Chicago story is icing on the cake. It’s a not-Christmas Christmas play, and a wonderful foil to conventional holiday-themed shows: at its heart, it espouses the spirit of giving and love that Christmas is supposed to evoke.  Go. Be moved.

 

TEN WORD SUMMARY:  A memory love-song brought to life by incredible performances.

RATING:  d20 = “One Of The Best”

Show: Hellcab

Company: Profiles Theatre

Venue: Profiles Theatre Main Stage

Die Roll: 10

For those of you who don’t know the history of this show (I didn’t), Hellcab is a Chicago institution that ran for almost nine years in its first iteration, produced by the now-defunct Famous Door Theatre.  It started out as a short-term late-night show that blew up into a sensation, and Profiles Theater’s remount hearkens back to the show’s roots. Even at 8pm, it feels like a late-night show: a little grungy, a little shadowy, a little dangerous.

Instead of following one main plot, the piece is actually a series of vignettes set over about twenty hours on Christmas Eve, 1992. A cast of thousands – all right, thirty-three – play the various denizens of Chicago-land, while Richard Cotovsky (the Driver) acts as our proxy as he ferries a wild variety of folks on $4 (!)  rides across the city.

We get glimpses of the Driver’s personality as he endures his fares’ oddities. This is a play of small, everyday dramas – slices of all kinds of lives. Some of these slices play better than others; the main issue of the less-effective segments was time. Putting my director hat on – Actors, don’t rush through the beats. You’ve got a four-to-five minute scene, max: allow yourself to live in it.  Director hat off.

There are some lovely moments in the show. One involves our hapless Driver, who really does grow on you as the day wears on. At a couple of different points in the play, he grapples with the decision to interpose himself into an event at hand. In one instance, he has to talk himself into it, and the resulting encounter is wonderfully awkward and beautiful. In another, he doesn’t hesitate to offer what comfort he can to a woman who has just endured a terrible crime.

There’s a lot to like about this show. For one thing, it’s about our Chicago, not some relic of the past, or a one-dimensional city of big shoulders, or what have you. Walk out your front door, go wait for a bus, and you’ill see most of these folks. It’s refreshing to see such familiarity onstage, since so often contemporary plays are set in other regions of the country. This is here, now. Well, maybe not right now – when was the last time you could take a cab anywhere for $4? – but close enough to feel contemporary.

At first, I was put off by the shortness of each scene and the sheer number of actors playing unique parts, but within about ten minutes I started to find characters to identify with.  And with the evolution of the Driver from neutral witness to a living, breathing human, I had a guide in this crazy play to latch onto. Add into that some truly hilarious and heartbreaking vignettes, and there’s plenty of substance to dive into.

If you like your holiday entertainment with a dash of darkness, this is a good choice.  There aren’t any singing elves or warm and fuzzy endings. This is just life – the whole kit and kaboodle. And that’s okay.

TEN WORD SUMMARY:  Chicago cabbie ferries all kinds one long Christmas Eve day.

RATING:  d10 ” Worth Going To”

Show: Holmes and Watson

Company: CityLit Theater Company

Venue: CityLit Theater

Die Roll: 10

In the past five years, we’ve experienced quite the surge of interest in Sherlock Holmes and his adventures, with two movies and two competing television series, all of which the American public eagerly laps up. I admit that I’m in the Cumberbatch camp, but I do like me some RDJ as well. That said, I’d forgotten how far these entertaining versions of the character stray from the original source characters. I’d also forgotten how very interesting both Holmes and Watson are because I’ve seen them all sexied-and-actioned up by Messrs. Downey, Cumberbatch, Miller, Law, Freeman, and Ms. Liu.

Holmes and Watson brings us back to the wellspring. The play is actually two of the most famous of the Holmes short fictions: “A Scandal in Bohemia” and “The Final Problem”. The first act centers upon the machinations of Miss Irene Adler (Adrienne Matzen), while the second tells of the ultimate meeting between Holmes and his nemesis, Professor Moriarty.

What’s so lovely about this piece is its simplicity: three actors, two stories, wonderful chemistry. James Sparling presents us with a most excellent hybrid Holmes – not the hyperactive overthinking man of action, nor the dreadfully staid and omniscient version played by Basil Rathbone. No, Mr. Sparling’s Holmes is alive with curiosity and relishes discovery more than having answers for every question. It doesn’t hurt that he has a fantastic Watson (Adam Bitterman) to play against. Watson is our narrator, and in so doing also becomes other characters in the play. This includes a hilarious turn as the King of Bohemia and a host of minor passersby – all impeccably distinct, one from another.

Director and adaptor Terry McCabe has chosen both the source material and his actors well, and crafted a fast-moving narrative spun out as a sort of psychological drama for Holmes. In both stories, Holmes is confronted with an intellectual equal who manages to outmaneuver him. With Irene, it’s something of benign experience; with Moriarty, decidedly less so. I wish Adrienne Matzen’s Irene Adler had more presence in the story – but alas, Sir Arthur gave her only a large cameo. Ms. Matzen is charming and bright as Irene, and serves as an able opponent to Master Holmes.

James Sparling takes a master turn in the second act, morphing into Moriarty as he recounts to Watson the encounter between Holmes and Moriarty. My only grouse is that the lights went so dim during this sequence that I could barely make out Mr. Sparling’s extremely mobile face. Fortunately, the acting saved the day.

Go and see Holmes and Watson. Its fast-paced storytelling and excellent acting make it totally worth your while.

TEN WORD SUMMARY: Versatile acting shines in a nimble, fast-paced adaptation. Elementary!

d12 – “Heckuva Good Show”

 

Show: A Bright Room Called Day

Company: Spartan Theatre Company

Venue: CIC Theatre

Die Roll: 9

A Bright Room Called Day is one of the earlier works of Tony Kushner, who is probably best known for his epic meditation on AIDS and its impact in Angels in America Parts I & II. As in Angels, this play juxtaposes a real-time storyline with interruptive commentary  – this time in the form of a paranoid young American woman in 1982 who finds herself living in the same apartment inhabited by the characters of the earlier time. And thus, the plot:

In 1932 Berlin, Agnes (Amanda de la Guardia) and her bohemian friends watch as Hitler and the Nazi party move to take over the country. All of them have a strong, left-leaning opposition to the Nazis, but they seems to spend more time arguing the merits of their various ideologies than actively resisting the Nazi takeover. Added into the mix are Die Alt, a ghostly figure that challenges Agnes to confront one possible future; a pair of communists who commission Agnes to come up with a pro-Red puppet show that denounces Hitler; the Devil; and lastly, the ’80s American.

First off, it’s a talky, talky show. Whenever the gang is all gathered, you can be sure that at least two of them will take turns expostulating on their chosen politics to the group. While it’s interesting in its own right – you can’t fault Kushner as a writer, he knows how to turn a phrase – it’s also tends to bring the show to a screeching halt. These are highly complex arguments, and, unfortunately, the poor actors saddled with this rhetoric are pretty much overwhelmed by it. This includes Zillah (Jaci Kleinfeld), our paranoid young lady in 1982, who somehow draws parallels between the rise of Reagan and the rise of Hitler…and this is where the show lost me. I just don’t see the connection.  Hence,  Zillah devolved into a wackjob conspiracy theorist, and I ended up enduring her rants rather than listening to them.  Mr. Kushner also has to take “credit”for this – although I do commend him for his attempt. It just doesn’t work. At all.

There were some enjoyable moments, a lot of them due to an engaging performance by Amanda de la Guardia as Agnes, our protagonist. Agnes is possibly the only sympathetic character in the play – an effervescent actress only interested in politics insofar as it can earn her her next gig. She decides to help out the local communist sect by creating a hilarious puppet show depicting the triumph of communism over Hitler – a great little detour of cheeky rebellion. But, as with most of her friends, Agnes is willing to talk the talk but not walk the walk. In fact, she doesn’t make decisions at all – except perhaps the decision to wait out the Nazi regime.

Some of her coterie do make choices – Paulinka (Alexandra Gonzalez), a fellow actress, catches the Nazi propaganda machine’s eye and quickly rises to the top of her career – which she suddenly abandons at the end of the play to take refuge in Moscow. Other characters get beat up or chased out of town, until suddenly, Agnes is alone – exactly the thing she feared.

I like that Spartan espouses minimalist theatre, and this show works all right in CIC Theatre’s space. The play is wholly set in Agnes’s living room: a sofa, a wardrobe, a table and four chairs, and a side table. The actors fill the space without overcrowding it. Entrances and exits used the door leading into the theater and a curtained-off backstage area. Transitions were covered by the projection of silent-movie-style slides of various tidbits of history onto a screen above the window in the corner of the set.  The transitions themselves, unfortunately, were needlessly long and clunky. This is a show that benefits from instant switches between scenes; in this instance, the concern seemed to be more about covering changes in the dark.

While I can’t recommend this particular production, I give props Spartan Theatre Company for not shying away from a difficult script. They’ve got ambition and they have talent. I’ll be interested to see what they do next.

TEN WORD SUMMARY: Biting commentary on pre-war Berlin is buried in there, somewhere.

RATING:  d6 – “Has Some Merit”

Show: Titanic

Company: Griffin Theatre Company

Venue: Theatre Wit

Die Roll: 17

 

On Friday, I decided to take a cruise. Some might call it ill-fated; I thought it was darn interesting.  Griffin Theatre Company is producing Titanic at Theatre Wit in a scaled-down chamber version especially created for smaller theatres. This production is the Titanic’s Midwest premiere.

The first thing you should know is that this show has absolutely nothing to do with the James Cameron film. Titanic, The Musical explores life in 1912, and focuses specifically on the divides between social classes. Everyone on the ship has a place and they are expected to maintain that place. Those who aim higher are viewed with suspicion. At the same time, people of the working and middle classes are beginning to question why there is such a divide between them and the posh upper class, and why such divisions are necessary. The book highlights the relationships within the classes without actually allowing characters between classes to mix to any great degree, which is very representative of the late Edwardian.

A major theme of the show, believe it or not, is hope. Everyone from the Captain on down is astonished by the ship on which they sail, the most advanced of its time, and it seems to represent all of the hope mankind has for the possibilities of the twentieth century. This is a time before there were world wars, when technology was advancing in leaps and bounds within a generation; when a new-fangled Marconi machine could transmit a message all the way around the world with a few taps of a key. Titanic is a symbol of the modern age, and all aboard her are sure they’re going to sail into the future right along with her.

There are two main groups onboard – the passengers and the crew. With the exception of the steward Mr. Etches (the delightfully stuffy John Keating) and the bellboy (the sweetly doofy Nick Graffagna), the crew only interact with each other and Bruce Ismay (Scott Allen Luke), the overbearing Cunard owner. The same goes for the passengers, divided into third-class, second-class, and first-class. Interestingly, the first-class passengers (aside from the Strausses), are mostly present as set pieces. The real story unspools on the lowest decks with the three Kates (Kelley Abell, the outstanding Courtney Jones, and Christine Mayland Perkins) and Jim Farrell (Kevin Strangler). They’re contrasted in the second class with the upwardly mobile Mrs. Alice Beane (Neala Barron) and her hapless husband Edgar (Jake Mahler), and lovers-on-the-run Lady Caroline Neville (Laura McClain) and Charles Clarke (Matt Edmonds).

There are too many clever bits to recount, but one of the earliest is a fun introduction of all of the first class passengers who pose for photographs as they board the ship, in which Emily Grayson embodies at least 6 different women, via hat, in about 2 minutes. It’s hilarious, and deftly done. Ms. Grayson goes on to play Ida Strauss as her main role, and the chemistry between her and Sean Thomas as Isador Strauss is just lovely.

Another standout in the show is Justin Adair as Fred Barret, one of the ship’s stokers, who only wants to get home to propose to his girl. And Courtney Jones as the forthright but vulnerable Kate McGowan will charm you.

The question most in my mind, though, was how the hell you could scale down a huge production that included a full-size ship sinking into an intimate piece that could fit into Theatre Wit’s theatre 3? No fly space, no wings, and more or less a 99-seater with a decent sized playing area – how was this going to work?

Well, it works the way good theatre design always works – with representation in place of verisimilitude.

Instead of a cast of thousands (or 45), the chamber version features 20 talented actors in multiple roles.  The set is bi-level, with an upper deck and two wheeled staircases that end up in so many different configurations that it’s hard to believe there are no major set changes. A cunningly painted drop represents the interior and exterior of the ship at various times, including portals that light up. The arrangement of simple wooden chairs can indicate a ship, a deck, and a lifeboat. Simple coats and hats in addition to skilled acting makes you believe that there must be more actors in the cast than are there.

Best of all is the honest-to-god live pit orchestra, led by music director Elizabeth Doran. The orchestration, redone by  Ian Weinberger specifically to include instruments that might have been played on Titanic, loses none of the charm of the original version, and supports a smaller cast very well.

I swear, after years of suffering  through miked singing accompanied by thoroughly digitized backing tracks, it was such a treat to hear live music non-amplified. OK, there were area mikes above the bridge (because otherwise you’d never hear the singers up there), and some of the orchestrations were played against a recording, but still. And to see a musical where I can actually make eye contact with the actors and hear their unamplified voices, and not have to peer disgustedly through binoculars from the nose-bleed seats? This might change my mind about musical theatre altogether.

For all that this is a very good production, there was still some polish missing from the performance as a whole, and it wasn’t to do with  attending a preview. Part of it may do with the youth of the cast, especially those actors playing second and third class passengers. The full embodiment (har, har) of those roles includes how the characters move, and many of the actors did not incorporate the upright body language associated with Society, especially Society Ladies who are stuck in girdles. You can’t be floppy in a longline corset. Believe me, I’ve tried.

Yes, it’s a musical, but it’s a period musical, and thanks to Downton Abbey, the audience has expectations of how the landed class should look, talk, and move. I’m admit that I’m a bit of a movement fiend, and matching body language to a character is simply another level of storytelling I seek in a complete acting experience.

Overall, though, this new-ish Titanic was a delight to see. Kudos to Griffin Theatre Company for tackling a difficult piece with aplomb!

TEN WORD SUMMARY: The optimism of the early twentieth, tempered by class divides.

RATING: d10 “Worth Going To”