Just a decade ago in Nepal, a crown prince (presumably miffed at his mother’ s opinion of his fiancee) slew both his parents and most of the rest of the royal family, then finished the job by shooting himself. The suicide was handled more sloppily than the murders, placing the terrorist prince in a three-day coma before he died—during which time he was duly sworn in as king of Nepal.
This incredible real- life tragedy, and its attendant unbelievable example of how far a country will go to uphold a monarchy, seems organic grist for a frenzied political theater piece along the lines of Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist. Yet Rey Planta is more like one of the measured, text-driven monologues of Fo’s wife Franca Rame.
Manuela Infante’s perversely reserved, calmy provocative play is receiving an overdue US premiere at the Yale Cabaret in a brand new translation by Yale school of Drama dramaturgy student Alexandra Ripp. The staging by Michael Place is so decidedly anti-sensational that it risks being static and sterile. The glory of the translation, direction, performances and design are that they keep your eyes attracted to a show where the leading performer seldom does more than quiver.

The piece is played out as if the King-in-a-coma was on exhibition in an art gallery. A security guard sits in a corner reading the newspaper and occasionally wanders through the gallery, and a cleaning woman also makes an appearance, but that’s the entirety of the action. — is front and center onstage, but he doesn’t go out of body and start animatedly narrating the circumstances of his demise, or flashing back to livelier times, la Sunset Boulevard. He doesn’t talk. He stares deadly ahead, sometimes pitches forward, drools a little. As carefully modulated by Robert Grant, none of this coma composure is overdone or in poor taste; it fits the calm and elegant art gallery backdrop.
While his body rests, the King’s mind is active, alert and extremely loquacious. His articulate, philosophical, uncommonly self-reflective and contemplative expressions are voiced through an offstage microphone by the unseen Monique Bernadatte. Last week, Bernadette was the largely mute yet physically vital presence in Alexandru Mihail’s Cabaret adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona. She’s really got this voice/body disconnect thing down. Her interpretation of “The King’s Thought” is smooth, even-tempered, unflappable yet still passionate and resonant and rhythmic and musical, like something out of a Robert Ashley opera.

Manuela Infante is skillful at articulating the social changes of Nepal and the personal turmoil of its out-of-touch rulers. The real-life story of the country had a happy aftermath—the machinations of the man who eventually took power (the uncle of the young coma-king portrayed in Rey Planta) led to a people’s uprising which dethroned the monarch and gave way to a new democratic system of government. This play, first presented in 2006, doesn’t go there. It’s more of a reflection on how bad things had become. The fact that they’re better now seems inevitable.

While you know where the playwright’s sympathies lie, this is not a polemic. It’s a portrait of a vulnerable human whose family oversaw a vulnerable country.
Yet while keeping the tone reserved and formal, Rey Planta is nonetheless able to make royalty seem ridiculous. The Cabaret production captures all the subtleties of Infante’s carefully wrought monologue. Robert Grant looks both laughable and pitiable in his tall red scraggly crown. He is a portrait out of place with the others on the wall, yet his is by far the most fascinating.

I’m really sorry that the Yale Cabaret didn’t have photos of this immaculate, beautifully composed production that I could share with you. Given the tight, shallow confines of the stage (necessary to validate the art-gallery conceit), the clarity of Glenn Isaacs projection design and the (uncredited) lighting design adds depth, light, grandeur and layers of additional meaning to this spare, single-voiced script. The show can be slowgoing to be sure, but they couldn’t have dressed this up any finer if they were doing it in a Nepalese castle. The challenges of this unusually structured and visualized piece are clear, and just as clearly the Cabaret is up to that challenge.
In this week of international protests and open questioning of ruling capitalist powers, Rey Planta shows us that there’s more to revolution than shooting and shouting.

hundredyearspaceship last weekend at Yale Cabaret. Photo by Paul Lieber.

hundredyearspacetrip. Closed; played Sept. 22-24 at the Yale Cabaret. Created by We Buy Gold and the acting ensemble. Performed by Kate Attwell, Ryan Davis, Brenda Meaney, Nina Segal and others. Lighting design by Yi Zhao. Sound design by Brandon Curtis.

Yale Cabaret productions are shortlived by design—six performances in three days, and that’s it. It’s my intention to review this season’s offerings on this site so that they’re still up to see for a performance or two when the review runs. With a bunch of other openings around town, that wasn’t possible last week. I didn’t get to hundredyearspacetrip until its final performance on Saturday night at 11 p.m.
…which turned out to be appropriate, since hundredyearspacetrip was a musing on missed opportunities, procrastination, delayed gratification, apathy and the wish to evade making concrete life choices.
These weren’t original themes to plumb—especially at the Yale Cabaret, where the students running the joint can be flummoxed with career options and encouragements, and confounded by conflicting desires.
There was something deep and special in how this five-person cast dealt visually and spatially with the feelings of inactivity, overwhelmth and complacence.
Two female astronauts sat at one side of the stage, zoning out. Two other young women, in old-fashioned dresses and Katherine Hepburn attitudes, pranced and flung envelopes around a kitchen table, center stage but pushed back a ways. In another corner, a postman climbed a stepladder to a hanging microphone into which he recited sheets of correspondence he tucked up behind pipes in the ceiling.
The show began with long bursts of silence as the performers settled into their repetitive duties. Then the play got increasingly textual, yet still with a presentational pomp, as the players balanced and splayed and reclined themselves. As they got uncomfortable, they expressed frustrations and hesitations and justifications and regrets.
The odd, angular staging evolved into more naturalistic expression, and hundredyearspacetrip ended with reading of pre-show surveys about what audience members decided they would remember from that day. Conceptually, this was not far different from the finale of The Naked Gun, which Austin, Texas experimentalists Rude Mechs brought to Yale last year. The exercise had the same comforting effect of a shared vibe between audience and performers, that we were all listening to each other.
Space exploration was a convenient metaphor for both the at-sea nature of the insecure characters and the presumed pettiness of some of their concerns. There were astrological factoids, night-sky projections and an underscoring of pop songs such as Elton John’s “Rocket Man” (though Harry Nilsson’s “Spaceman” or Bowie’s “Space Odyssey” might’ve fit the mood better).
Hundredyearspacetrip was long for a Cabaret endeavor, but in a lovely, lulling, numbing way, darkly lit and seldom jarring. It was unpredictable right up to the finish, and also gave the useful sense of unfinished business.
No easy answers here, but a convincing depiction of quiet mental anguish, with plenty of good humor and charm. I was smitten by the lackadaisical expression of one of the two astronauts, Kate Attwell. She and her fellow space traveler, Nina Segal, are part of the troupe We Buy Gold, which are credited with a “presented by” credit on this production. Attwell’s manner paced the whole show for me. She and Segal were fun to watch even when they were playing bored and adrift. That’s a neat trick, and one worth getting out of the house for.

Kate Attwell (left) and Nina Segal of We Buy Gold space out in their hundredyearspaceship at Yale Cabaret. Photo by Paul Lieber.

No Yale Cabaret show this weekend. The remaining six shows of this semester have been finalized:

• Oct. 6-8: The previously announced adaptation of Bergman’s Persona, directed by Alexandru Mihail.
• Oct. 13-15: Chilean playwright Manuel Infante’s drama Rey Planta.
• Oct. 20-22: “Creation 2011,” which Cabaret co-Artistic Director Sunder Ganglani described to Saturday audience as “music and embarrassment.”
• Oct. 27-29: Howard Brenton’s Christie in Love, about 1940s British serial killer John Christie, directed by Katie McDerr.
• Nov. 3-5: Paul and Tim Fight a Bear.
• Nov. 10-12: Street Scenes
• Nov. 17-19: Wallace Shawn’s controversial (at least in 1970s London) and sexually charged A Thought in Three Parts.

Some of those titles need more explaining. I’m sitting down with Cabaret team later this week for just such an overview. Stay tuned. Meanwhile, you can arrange reservations, etc. here.

The three sisters themselves: Masha (Natalia Payne), Irina (Heather Wood) and Olga (Wendy Rich Stetson) in Sarah Ruhl's "new version" of Chekhov's The Three Sisters at the Yale Repertory Theatre through October 8. Photo by Joan Marcus.

Three Sisters
By Anton Chekhov. A new version by Sarah Ruhl. Based on a literal translation by Elise Thoron with Natalya Paramonova and Kristin Johnsen-Neshati. Directed by Les Waters Scenic Designer: Annie Smart. Costume Designer: Ilona Somogyi. Lighting Designer: David Budries. Dramaturg: Rachel Steinberg. Stage Manager: James Mountcastle. Performed by Natalia Payne (Masha), Wendy Rich Stetson (Olga), and Heather Wood (Irina) play the title roles. The cast also includes Josiah Bania (Rode), James Carpenter (Chebutykin), Richard Farrell (Ferapont), Emily Kitchens (Natasha), Bruce McKenzie (Vershinin), Alex Moggridge (Andrei), Barbara Oliver (Anfisa), Keith Reddin (Kulygin), Thomas Jay Ryan (Tuzenbach), Brian Wiles (Fedotik), and Sam Breslin Wright (Solyony).
Through Oct. 8 at the Yale Repertory Theatre.

When is a translation not a translation? When it’s a hot playwright doing it; then it’s a “new version.”
It’s not that Sarah Ruhl doesn’t have strong feelings about how today’s theater should access the classics. Her post-feminist adaptation of the Eurydice myth retains the conceit of a Greek chorus, and provides empowering moments for its heroine in most unlikely places. Her version of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando is robust and alive, a transgender parable made to be staged live. Her Passion Plays uses a sacred theater format, and religious and political iconography, to dramatize mortal, earthbound struggles of today.
Call Three Sisters the exception to the Ruhl. It respects the form, intent, voice, period, style and rhythm of the original.
Instead of “Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov, A New Version by Sarah Ruhl,” the credit could read “Sarah Ruhl Presents Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov.” In an essay printed in the Rep program, Ruhl uses the “t” word, and flatly announces “I came to this translation with no agenda.”
The concepts and emphases in this production come from the original script. Ruhl worked from a fresh literal translation Kristin Johnsen-Neshati further clarified with the help of New York actress/director/playwright Elise Thoron (who even writes musicals, such as Prozak and the Platypus and Green Violin) and Ruhl’s Russian-speaking sister-in-law Natalya Paramonova. But the textual changes are relatively minor, the sort of nips and tucks which directors and dramaturges work in without expecting extra credit.

Ruhl does make sure there’s humor in the play. She punches Chekhov’s jokes (including some which don’t announce themselves as jokes on the printed page) and adds a pull-my-finger fart joke, some Latin conjugation gags and some more metaphorical routines with echoes and rigidly posed photographs. But there’s nothing that seems out of place. There’s also more place not to seem out of—this Three Sisters goes the full four acts virtually uncut, clocking in at three hours. Ruhl retains far more Chekhov than expected, and rearranges almost nothing.

In this season of The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, this level of respect is positively exhiilirating. This is a thoughtful, careful, well-articulated production of a classic. But I admit that I was suckered and distracted by that “new version” credit. Ruhl altered the tale of Eurydice by inserting a silent moment of hesitation and indecision in the final act. I kept waiting for this Three Sisters to turn like that, but it doesn’t. It just talks itself to a calm, reflectve ending, as Chekhov intended, the sisters Olga, Masha and Irina having matured a bit and endured a bit and no longer prattling quite so much about how they’re “going to Moscow!!!”

Moscow means Moscow in this production. There isn’t that vague Americanization or universalism or fantasizing found in some productions. The staging feels clipped and chopped and Russian. The city is pronounced to rhyme with “Bosco” (not “Boss cow”). The long Russian names are honored and enunciated. Debts are measured in rubles.

There are nonetheless a number of Americanizations and progressive interpretations in this generally traditional “new version,” yet they tend to come from Annie Smart’s set design rather than Ruhl’s script or Les Waters’ direction. For the first act, the set is a deep sitting room, with three-step platform, lavishly decorated and detailed. Later, the back end is blocked off by a new backdrop, confining scenes to a smaller, shallower playing area. The effect is of a 19th century melodrama. A really good one, direct and easy to follow. But an old fashioned melodrama all the same.

Top Girls: Three sisters, their brother, the husbands, the soldiers and everybody else. Photo by Joan Marcus.

At the head of that cast, the three sisters Olga (sturdy, redheaded Wendy Rich Stetson), Irina (blonde, busty Heather Wood) and Masha (svelte, severe, raven-tressed Natalia Payne) look completely unrelated, which has to be a conscious casting choice. Their differing outlooks and personalities unite through focused and intelligent acting; when these dissimilar siblings muse together on their disappointments and uncertain futures late in the play, director Les Waters groups them beautifully, with one on a bed and the other two huddled on the floor, with most of the stage bare.

The supporting cast is full of “types”: Thomas Jay Ryan (the monk in the Yale Rep production of Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play a couple of seasons ago) does the barking-yet-appealing soldier thing, behaving almost like a noir gumshoe. The servants are, to quote an Edwin Sanchez play, “more peasanty.” Emily Kitchens is a prissy Natasha who could have come from a Penelope Keith sitcom. Keith Reddin, another Passion Play veteran, channels Austin Pendleton as the dogged schoolteacher Kulygin, husband to Masha. In his drunken, bearded scenes, James Carpenter (Chebutykin) is a deadringer for John Carradine. Bruce McKenzie, a co-founder of the Sledgehammer Theatre in San Diego who has a Stanley Kowalski, an Iago and a Krapp’s Last Tape on his resume, conveys an outwardly calm-seeming yet inwardly hotwired presence as Lt.-Col. Vershinin; he’s the most unpredictable of the various handsome soldiers who distract the titular sisters from their day-to-day boredom.

…unless you count a couple of relatively minor soldiers vividly enlivened by current Yale School of Drama students Josiah Bania and Brian Wiles. Having run already honed their roles and found their rhythms in at Berkeley Repertory Theatre during this Three Sisters’ premiere production this past May, most of the cast have settled into their roles as assuredly as the show’s central families have settled into their rural homes. Bania and especially Wiles—part of a crack ensemble that raced through Chekhov’s The Wedding Reception at the Yale Cabaret last year—bring a noteworthy energy to their scenes.

Josiah Bania and Brian Wiles in back, at left, watching Natalia Payne's Masha. Photo by Joan Marcus.

There are lots of neat little touches. Settings built with different types of wood, a subtle reminder of the ages and emotional varieties of the onstage community. A confessional scene in which those hearing the monologue are hidden behind dressing screens. Irina fends off unwelcome advances while sitting in a wicker chair. A post-conflagration gathering which evokes the smoke and fury of a WWI battlefield. Lines which deftly combine naturalism and theatricality: like “Well, if the tea isn’t coming, we might as well philosophize.”

Chekhov’s Three Sisters didn’t need any help from Sarah Ruhl, and she was smart enough to realize that. She brings a dogged dramaturgical sense of order and precision to the project, especially in how she respect the full four-act scope of the play and its leisurely yet carefully honed and issue-laden conversations. The virtue of this production is not how “modern” or “sensational” is it. It’s how classically Chekhovian it is. And that turns out to be just the Three Sisters we need right now.

Slaves

Through Sept. 24 at the Yale Cabaret, 217 Park St., New Haven. (203) 432-1566.

By Sunder Ganglani. Performed by Chris Henry, Jillian Taylor and Adina Verson.

I wrestle constantly with the changing nature and definition of modern theater performance. So does the Yale Cabaret. Whatever you make of Slaves, SunderGanglani’s season-opening sensory soul-search bodes well for an extension of the genre-bending experiments the Cabaret arranged last year.

You’re going to hear the dreaded i-word from the haters about this show, but I’d argue that accusations of Indulgence are unwarranted. This is a carefully structured, well-argued dialogue in which the audience is often a key, if unwilling participant. There are also long periods of meditative silence, which a lot of theatergoers generally can’t handle. I think it works here, especially in the ethereal calm of the Cabaret’s 11 p.m. late slot.

There are declamatory sensibilities in common with Peter Handke’s classic Offending the Audience, except that Slaves is the attitudinal opposite of Handke’s openly antagonistic piece. You could call this one Befriending the Audience. We are graciously and leisurely indoctrinated into the casual values of the piece by actors Chris Henry and Adina Verson, who sit calmly in folding chairs front of curtain (A curtain! At the Cabaret!), comfortable despite the noticeable bulges in the backs of their shirts, leading us through a harmless set of casual exchanges and insecure ideas. Those back bulges spout later on.

Slaves is a neat blend of technical precision and raw languor. That long curtain blocks sightlines from the Cabaret’s built-in sound booth, so the tech staff sits instead a long table stageside. The play’s unpredictability is countered by its rituals, just as its preparedness is surrounded by casualness.

It’s a play of pronouncements—“I am a power point, so you don’t need one.” A charting of powers and gifts. Then it’s a play of music and dancing. Then you pay for your meal and glide home under the stars.

Annalee Jefferies and Liv Rooth in the Westport Country Playhouse production of Suddenly Last Summer. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

Suddenly Last Summer

By Tennessee Williams. Through Sept. 10 at Westport Country Playhouse. Directed by David Kennedy. Scenic design by Narelle Sissons. Costume design: Ilona Somogyi. Lighting design: Matthew Richards. Original music/Sound design: Fitz Patton. Performed by Liv Rooth (Catharine Holly), Annalee Jefferies (Mrs. Venable), Lee Aaron Rosen (Dr. Cukrowicz), Charlotte Maier (Mrs. Holly), Ryan Garbayo (George Holly), Tina Stafford (Sister Felicity), Susan Bennett (Miss Foxhill).

What must it have been like to have seen the world premiere of Suddenly Last Summer in 1958? In winter? When it was half of a double bill with the collective title Garden District? (Its companion piece was Something Unspoken.) Before it was expanded (with the help of Gore Vidal) into a feature film? Before its title gained the comma after the “Suddenly”?

Suddenly Last Summer has become a play without an awful lot of baggage, some of it necessary in order to buttress a play that’s essentially a build-up to an extraordinary monologue.

At this point in his career, Tennessee Williams had turned out numerous equally fine, and similiarly structured, monologues, and would go on to write many more. What gives the fragile Suddenly Last Summer the cachet it has, next to the playwright’s long list of equally strong Southern-frenzy family psychodramas?

Well, it’s that ending, of course. An image so horrific that the characters onstage don’t want to consider it, but which somehow the audience accepts. Williams always knew just how far he could push a dirty little secret, how far he could pull in an audience without grossing them out.

Is there a literary term for a metaphor which is much more disturbing than the thing it is metaphorizing? Suddenly Last Summer is a simple, direct drama about a society which is unable to let itself accept certain things, a society which will race toward death and destruction before it will pause to accept certain differences in class, in character, in style, in preferences. In taste. If you don’t get the undercurrent of the seaside plot, there’s an onstage icon to concentrate on: a ten-foot Venus Flytrap plant, starving for sustenance.

The even toothier anecdotal image which climaxes the drama  after the grandest build-up allowed onstage short of a three-ring circus. The entire play is a lead-in to the massive cathartic confessional monologue by Catharine Holly, a woman who must speak truth to power. She knows how her cousin Sebastian Venable—noted poet with an interest in, ahem, sea turtles—met his untimely death. Sebastian’s mother doesn’t want to hear Catharine’s scandalous, and possibly preposterous, ravings. Unless a lid can be clamped on Catharine, Mrs. Venable’s threatening to hold up the money which Sebastian willed to Catharine (and to her mother and brother, also present in the play, to simper and beg while Catharine tries to hold her ground and her sanity).

The human element is wonderfully manic. People blurt out things, then get cagey. They rant, then shut up politely so that others might rant too. They’re controlling, then strangely permissive. This seems natural after a while. What’s unarguably contrived, especially half a century after the play was written, is the medical certainty guiding the choice about what to do with Catharine. If she is given a lobotomy, nobody will ever believe her story. If she is given a certain truth serum, people undoubtedly will.

The Greeks had their theatrical devices too, and Suddenly Last Summer is no less tragic for having to stoop to that old “truth serum” gambit. Such surety about miracle cures and human behavior gives the already shadowy and sultry Suddenly Last Summer the air of film noir. Director David Kennedy and his designers take this realization and run with it. Costume designer Ilona Somogyi dresses the men in blindingly white suits to contrast with the darkness of Matthew Richards’ lighting. Set designer Narelle Sissons confines the players within a not exactly naturalism yet not exactly expressionistic boxy stage area. It’s sound designer Fitz Patton (whose work as a Yale School of Drama student a decade ago I still vividly recall—he did a similarly haunting design for a production of Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker) who gets to play the nature card, and who gets to most fully evoke the windswept beach which is the key location of Catharine’s story.

Some difficult choices have to be made here: how much should the designers choose to illustrate Catharine’s tale? How much should they underscore her emotional unrest with swelling music and erratic lighting? How still, or how out of control, should Catharine be when telling her story? How should her audience—the blistering Mrs. Venable, her secretary, Catharine’s dopey brother and weepy mom, a nurse and an earnest young doctor—behave when hearing it?

When Suddenly Last Summer became a movie, the filmmakers simply brought Catharine’s tale to life. The theatrical vision is far different. Kennedy and the rest of the creative team do a tricky balancing job between giving this show the tight, painterly composition it asks for and letting it breathe like it should.

Annalee Jefferies, one of Connecticut’s best-known Tennessee Williams interpreters thanks to her leading roles in several installments of the decade-long Williams “marathon” at Hartford Stage, nails the insufferability and vindictive vulnerability of Mrs. Venable, a character who seems to miss her long-gone youth more than she does her dead son. Jefferies, who’s only 57 years old herself, makes Mrs. Venable look and seem ghoulishly old and crusty. It’s impossible to think that this same actress was being Blanche Dubois just 13 years go, not to mention the frilly heroine of Theresa Rebeck’s comedy Bad Dates at Hartford Stage much more recently. How did this vibrant, rosy-faced actress learn to sit still in a wheelchair and connive so convincingly?

In the crucial role of Catharine, Liv Rooth lives up to the immense introduction she’s afforded from all those folks worrying about what she might say or do. She’s like one of the figurines in The Glass Menagerie: beautiful but close to cracking, and about to be stored away for her own good.

The supporting cast, to their credit, grandstands when necessary and fades into the background otherwise. I found myself wondering, if Tennessee Williams were writing today, whether he’d go to the unnecessary expense of trotting on Catharine’s family members—until I realized that they are much-needed comic relief. Charlotte Maier and Ryan Garbayo gamely inject the jokes, before Catharine gets injected with a needle. As a caretaking nun (Tina Stafford, who could give those dictatorial Late Nite Catechism nuns a run for their rosaries) and the secretary are critical characters as well, as representative of the order of things and higher powers as is that galumphing Venus Flytrap in the corner.

Liv Rooth as Catharine Holly, backed by Charlotte Maier as her mother and Ryan Garayo as her brother, in Suddenly Last Summer at Westport Country Playhouse. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

Suddenly Last Summer is not an ensemble piece. It’s a series of solo turns with a virtuoso piece at the end.

Again, I can’t imagine what it must have been like to have seen Suddenly Last Summer as part of a bill, whether with Something Unspoken or anything else. But seeing it in this composed, modernistic, technically pristine yet lived-in production, I see how flexible and wondrous a script it is. It may be hard to swallow, but it goes down easy.

One final performance, 7 p.m. Aug. 27 at Long Wharf Stage II, 222 Sargent Dr., New Haven. (203) 787-4282, longwharf.org. Playing in repertory with the same troupe’s “Shake-It-Up Shakespeare” musical adaptation of Hamlet (7 p.m. Aug. 26).

Having seen this same Summer Youth Theatre ensemble’s rock theater rendition of Hamlet the previous night, I hied back to Long Wharf Stage II Thursday to see how they fared with an original piece (co-written by director Annie DiMartino, music director Carol Taubl and five of Taubl’s children). The stage set-up is identical—a live band at the back of the stage, a useful high platform and several lower platforms on a floor-level playing area. All the performers are high-school aged. All sing, several dance, and some join the band for the lusher string-laden songs.

Thematically, Threads of a Spider Web is a downer—more so than the group’s Hamlet, in the way that it dwells on the emotional after-effects of unthinkable family tragedies more. The songs, many monologues and much of the plot is concerned with loss and how to cope with it. As with Hamlet, the teen cast members play two generations of characters, though this time the ranks are enlivened with a young boy who plays an ill-fated five-year-old.

Where the SYT’s Hamlet let Shakespeare’s dialogue flow directly into lyrics by Queen, Eveanescence and Leonard Cohen, this show lets recitations of Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner and other famous poems prepare you for affirmative original soft-rock ballads. There’s less sonic variety than in the Hamlet, but the consistency of tone works for a show with such heavy themes. Staging-wise, Threads of a Spider Web is stylized down to the style of eyeglasses (heavy black frames) which several of the actors wear. It’s casualness and youthfulness is carefully calculated.

There are tragic circumstances involving two of the characters in particular, but all suffer in various ways. While the talk of death and heartbreak will be harrowing for some, the issues which are most relatable to audiences the same age as the teenage cast—worrying about being popular, being tormented by siblings, moving too fast into a longterm relationship—are tastefully and instructively handled. The often beautiful, neatly harmonized musical score underscores the central themes of perseverance and acceptance. The point of trusting one’s inner spirit is driven home not just through poetic muses such as Coleridge, Emily Dickson, William Wordsworth but through other spiritual muses who guide the central mortal characters through their disputes and confusions. Ultimately there are twice as many of these angel characters as there are living ones. The show gets rather crowded with all that spiritual guidance.

Given the preponderance of death and depression, Thursday’s audience was eager to lighten up when allowed, and James Taubl received big laughs for this pop-and-lock dance moves as the muse of “Matt,” played by James’ real-life twin Jeremiah. I found Anthony Rockford, an impressive Gravedigger in the Summer Youth Theatre’s Hamlet, to be an equally warm, upbeat and measured voice in Threads (the guy honestly interacts with whoever else is onstage), though he has considerably less to do than the main characters and their respective muses and/or mentors.

Threads of a Spider Web, a work in progress just getting on its feet before audiences, still shows the sort of unnecessary repetitions and overstatements which mark a lot of new work. What’s notable is the confidence and aplomb of the young cast, who flit through this dour narrative gently and knowingly, aware of its pitfalls. There are some gorgeous singing voices to be heard here, and some charming performances all around. It’s all rather Rent-like, without the Bohemianism. A key lyric for the grieving: “Today is Yesterday Tomorrow.”

Curtain call from the Aug. 20 performance of Measure for Measure by the Elm Shakespeare Company in Edgerton Park. Snapped by Christopher Arnott on his iPhone.

By William Shakespeare. Directed by James Andreassi. Set design by Vladimir Shpitalnik. Costume design by Elizabeth Bolster. Lighting Designer/Master Electrician: Jamie Burnett. Sound and Original Music: Dave Stephen Baker. Technical Director: Ellis Benjamin Baker. Choreographer: Kelly Baisden Knudsen. Stage Manager: Amanda Spooner. Performed by Mark Zeisler (Vincentio), Sarah Grace Wilson (Isabella), Matt Cohn (Claudio), Eric Martin Brown (Angelo), Tracy Griswold (Escalus), Aaron Moss (Lucio), Vanessa Soto (Mariana), Aleta Staton (Mistress Overdone), Richard Massery (Pompey/Friar Peter), Michael Peter Smith (Provost), Colin Lane (Elbow), Jeremy Funke (Barnardine), Francesca Smith (Juliet), Kerry Tattar (Clerk/Francisca), Akintunde Sogunro (Abhorson), James Beech (Froth/ensemble), Henry Ayres-Brown and Michelle Johnson (ensemble).

Now, hmmm, the problem a lot of theaters have when doing Measure for Measure is… SWEET JESUS! WILL YOU LOOK AT THAT SET?!!
It’s a gleaming castle, four or five storeys tall (depending how you count), with something like a dozen separate performing areas. The structure towering over Edgerton Park the way the Emerald City does over Oz, or Mohegan Sun does over Uncasville.
Problem play? No way. Not on this set.

Interestingly, the only other really fine Measure for Measure I’ve seen, directed by Mark Rucker at the Yale Rep in 1999, also took advantage of a multi-platformed set and a costume design that appeared to span the 20th century.

(How many Measure for Measures have I seen, you wonder? Certainly it’s still a rarity on the outdoor summer Shakespeare circuit, but Measure for Measure is only considered a rarely produced play if you happen not to live in a college town—or in London, where the Royal Shakespeare Company has done it several times a decade since the 1970s). Personally, I’ve logged something like nine.)

This is a play that demands a broad palette, not to mention real commitment from designers and actors. Nobody’s able to fall back into cliches of Shakespearean comedy or modern melodrama. Comic scenes must follow hard upon descriptions of harsh torture. The plot unwinds awkwarding, its pacing awkward. Much of the action seems based on whimsy, but if the audience doesn’t feel the threats being posed to the characters, there’s no play.

Elm Shakespeare Company founding director James Andreassi and his dozens-strong team of professional actors, skilled designers and up-for-anything student apprentices have anticipated all these obstacles and overcome them. They get it.

An ensemble feel helps. Andreassi wisely likes to invite some actors back year after year, but his company has been around long enough now (16 summers, and over 20 productions) that there’ve been several distinct ensemble phases.

By my count, of the 15 main cast members in Measure for Measure (I’m excluding the teenaged “Elm Scholars” in walk-on roles), six were in A Winter’s Tale last summer and five others have been in previous Elm Shakespeare shows. That brings a smoothness and familiarity to an enterprise that has to exist under pretty precarious conditions., especially for actors. How does the cast feel when audience members answer their cell phones, or keep their oil lanterns or citronella candles brightly lit, or luxuriate on the lawn with dogs or babies during performances (all of which I noted during last Saturday’s performance)? How do they swat bugs off their thick unsummery garments? How many miles does a key player like Mark Zeisler have to log nightly clambering up and down that multi-platformed set?

It’s great to Zeisler back in full control of his Dukely powers, following what I felt was a stumble for this fine actor in last year’s ElmShakes production of A Winter’s Tale. Having essayed rulers of the underworld and ruthless military rulers in such modern anguishes as Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice and Charles Mee’s Big Love at the Yale Rep and the Long Wharf, Zeisler gets to access the light side he revealed in the Rep’s rendition of King Stag. Of course, Duke Vincentio is a Shakespearean duke, after all, and some of his edicts appear cruel or dangerously casual even when he is professing to be beneficient. But Zeisler glides smoothly around those sticky issues, and makes the most of his time spent disguised in a Monk’s cowl.

The fact that you can’t see the cast sweat, and that they deliver Measure for Measure in such a measured, fluid, accessible manner, makes the Elm Shakespeare Company’s accomplishment all the more impressive. James Andreassi (whom I’ve known casually since he was a student of my father’s at Tufts University in the late 1970s) has not only kept an outdoor Shakespeare troupe going while many others in the country have succumbed to pressures of the current economy, he’s maintained high standards, luring Equity actors and—at least for the last few seasons—escaping the short greatest-hits list of Shakespeare plays (R&J, Hamlet, Macbeth, Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest and few others) which most summer Shakespeare companies feel they can’t move beyond without alienating audiences.

The audience I was with Saturday night went for Measure for Measure without hesitation. It helps that Andreassi always builds big comic set pieces into his productions—here, it’s Colin Lane’s bumpkin constable Elbow whacking himself incessantly with his own nightstick and several saucy bits involving Mistress Overdone (local actress of long renown Aleta Staton) and the ladies of her brothel (one of whom assails Zeisler’s friar with the ad-lib “Hey, Father, what’s under the robe?”). There’s considerable trust on both sides—cast and audience—that this will be an amiable, free-spirited night in Edgerton Park. Even if the plot revolves around imminent execution and evil governmental machinations. Eric Martin Brown, whom I remember from his time as a Yale School of Drama student, is a handsome slender man who seems fated to upstanding leading man roles, so it’s fun watching him sink his teeth into such an unrelentingly nasty part as Angelo.

Angelo is the guy who is suspected by the Duke of undermining his power. So what does the Duke do? Pretend to go on vacation and leave Angelo in complete charge of the dukedom! Whereupon Angelo makes a bunch of hypermoralistic decrees which severely impact the livelihood, not to mention the lives, of the citizenry. As a parable about unchecked authority, of absolute power corrupting absolutely, Measure for Measures works pretty well—if only Shakespeare hadn’t kept the Duke, who returns more powerful than ever, as part of the equation.

Basically, though, the play is an excuse for unfettered frivolity, high suspense and higher dudgeon. The mighty get their comeuppance and the lowly get to scrabble and swear amusingly. Aaron Moss, the antic Autolytus from last summer’s Winter’s Tale, gets another plum comic-relief role as Lucio, who unwittingly talks trash to power. The other key comic supporting role, Pompey, is played by the bearded Richard Massery (veteran of ElmShakes’ Three Musketeers, As You Like It and Much Ado) with queer affectations, but frankly just about every Pompey I’ve ever seen has done a similar gay thing, including a horrendous Michael Boyd production of Measure for Measure done by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1998 in which Pompey was made to resemble Boy George.

Arch characterizations aside, this is a multi-layered, deeply emotive show where various grieving characters—the vibrant Sarah Grace Wilson as Isabella, whose brother Claudio is marked for death; the sultry Vanessa Soto as the longsuffering Mariana; the weepy Francesca Smith, whose quasi-illicit marriage to Claudio is a cause of his arrest—keep the dramatic level high and hold their own amid the mirth. Matt Cohn as the imprisoned Claudio is able to have it both ways, getting laughs and tears for his torment.

Detail of Vladimir Shpitalnik's Measure for Measure for set, flooded with colored lights.

Again, such range and clarity simply wouldn’t be conceivable in these outdoor conditions without Vladimir Shpitalnik’s masterfully massive scenic design. An accomplished visual artist and illustrator as well as an inspired set designer, Shpitalnik’s local credits range from the interior design of the Oakdale Theatre in Wallingford to sets for chamber operas to the wooden sculptures and puppets which decorated the New Haven Green for many years as part of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas. His set here is both practical and purposefully extravagant. It has flashes of color which blend well with Elizabeth Bolster’s Edwardian-style costumes, yet is plain and clear enough to take the expressive shadows and moods projected upon it by founding Elm Shakespeare technical director (and frequent set designer himself) Jamie Burnett’s subtle lighting.

This is a fresh, perky production which makes the most of the words like “punk” and “urine” which pepper Shakespeare’s script. But this Measure for Measure also has a magnificence and elegance that befits both its Elizabethan origins and its immaculate Edgerton Park surroundings. It succeeds by any measure.

The curtain call of the first performance of Summer Youth Theatre's "Shake-It-Up Shakespeare" adaptation of Hamlet, at Long Wharf Stage II. Snapped furtively on my iPhone.

Final performance 7 p.m. Friday, Aug. 26 at Long Wharf Stage II, 222 Sargent Dr., New Haven. (203) 787-4282, longwharf.org. Playing in repertory with Threads of a Spider Web (7 p.m. Aug. 25 & 27).

Strangely, this is not the first time I’ve heard “Bohemian Rhapsody” performed live in its entirety by high school students as part of a summer theater program in Long Wharf’s Stage II space. The last time was over 15 years ago. There is nothing new under the sun.

On the other hand, it’s the first time I’ve heard “Bohemian Rhapsody” done by the Players in Hamlet, rewritten to fuel the plot thus:
Mama, I’ve just killed a man
Poured some poison in his head…

And I can categorically state that I’ve never before heard the Ghost of Hamlet’s Father intone “I Used to Rule the World” a la Coldplay. That same band’s “42” is also sung, along with a couple songs each by Evanescence and Death Cab for Cutie, the June Carter Cash/Merle Kilgore classic “Ring of Fire,” The Spice Girls’ “Wannabe” (delivered here by the young women playing Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern), the Jack’s Mannequin dirge “Dark Blue” (its sea imagery underscoring Hamlet’s fraught ship voyage to England) and Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” (which here provides a play-ending soliloquoy for Horatio).

Oh, and the stomps and claps of another Queen song (the band, I mean, not Gertrude), “We Will Rock You,” punctuate the culminating duel of Hamlet and Laertes , who snarl the “Buddy, you’re a…” lyrics while violently stabbing at each other with violin and cello bows.

I don’t mean to make The Long Wharf Theatre’s Summer Youth Theatre Series production of Hamlet sound campy or forced. The show’s played straight and somber, shadowy and sincere. The teen actors show considerable talent. What’s most impressive is how fluidly this rock-theater rendition of Hamlet plays.

Impressive, though not exactly a surprise. There’s a rich tradition of classics being studded with modern music, dating back to at least the 1960s, though I’m used to it being more of a college phenomenon than a high school one. At Harvard University in the 1980s alone, there was Bill Rauch’s Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella (which brought in country & western songs along with Rodgers & Hammerstein) in 1984 and Alek Keshishian’s Wuthering Heights (subtitled “A Pop Myth” and infused with songs by Madonna, Kate Bush, Sting and others) in 1986.

The Summer Youth Theatre’s Hamlet features complete musical theater performances, integrated into the Shakespeare text with the accompaniment of an onstage band of keyboards, percussion, electric bass and a hard-working string section. Several of the actors double as musicians.

Of the 18 kids in the cast, five were in a similarly styled Shake-It-Up Shakespeare production of Taming of the Shrew last year. Three of those five—Jack, James and Jeremiah Taubl—are offspring of the Summer Youth Theatre’s musical director, Carol Taubl. This year they’re joined by their older brother Jack, so that various Taubls handle the roles Laertes, Horatio and both Hamlets (prince and ghostly dad),. Whatever those casting decisions may lack in, say, variety (those Taubl boys all look frighteningly alike; two of them are twins) may be gained back in the sheer delight the brothers seem to have in pummeling each other in the fight scenes.

There’s the usual youth-theater complication of teens playing the parents of other teens. The universal code of how older men are supposed to look—dour expressions and business suits—is applied for Claudius (Erik Van Eck) and the Ghost (Jack Taubl). As the dead characters in the play mount up, they all go sit underneath the high platform which serves as Elsinore’s tower. To older viewers like myself, the sight of nine teens brooding in a corner resembles a detention room scenario, or perhaps the “jail” in a game of Kick the Can.

But strong examples of creative problem-solving throughout this show outweigh such understandable and unavoidable obstacles as teens happening to look their age. Mostly, what happens when you strip down the stage to black-box essentials, stick a musical ensemble at the back of it, and insert pop songs into the soliloquoies and swordfights, is that the key moments of the play are cleanly delineated and plainly pronounced. The result is simply good scenework, an honest and brisk interactions between focused actors handling the Shakespearean scansion remarkably well.

Hamlet premiered last night, and has its second and final performance Friday, Aug. 26 at 7 p.m. A whole other Summer Youth Theatre series show, Threads of a Spider Web, opens tonight (Thursday) at 7 p.m. and has its second performance Saturday. Threads utilizes the same cast, stage set-up and theater/music mix as Hamlet, this time in service of a compendium of poems by Shakespeare, Dickenson, Wordsworth and Coleridge, informing a narrative about a family coping with the loss of loved ones in a car crash.

Annie DiMartino who adapted Hamlet, created Threads of a Spider Web and directed both shows, explained to me in a phone interview last month that the Summer Youth Theatre Series is “not a class. There’s no tuition. The kids really do audition.” There’ve been 15 hours of rehearsal a week since mid-July.

DiMartino incorporated modern pop music into the plays so as to give the young actors a quick handle on their characters’ motivations, and to further their input by having more mutural reference points. “They’d say ‘Oh, I love that song,’ and explore the connections. Like last year, when we piloted this project, and this year, doing two shows, I’m just awed.”

Despite consistent themes of death and despair, DiMartino considers both showsto be “totally appropriate for a youth ensemble. In cutting Hamlet (which still runs two and a half hours, what with all those songs in there), she says she aimed to “cut out the political commentary, and made it about family: Hamlet, Gertrude and Claudius. Hamlet is very dark, with the ghost, revenge, death. Threads of a Spider Web is more hopeful. It’s a nice balance for the cast.”

A Bohemian rhapsody, if you will.

Colin Quinn in the New York production of his Long Story Short. The New York set has been downscaled a bit for his current run at the Long Wharf Theatre, which closed Aug. 21. Carol Rosegg Photo.

The quintessential Colin Quinn is the gruff- sounding yet genial and reflective persona he perfected as the Weekend Update anchor on Saturday Night Live. That gig began auspiciously, with Quinn hurriedly summoned to replace Norm Macdonald, who had just been fired by an NBC exec under the specious reasoning that Macdonald was “not funny.” the firing hadn’t even made the papers when Quinn had to naked his Update debut. He turned the awkwardness into one of the most profound and heartwarming moments in the history of Saturday Night Live, introducing the news segment with a tribute to norm Macdonald, surrounding the experience in terms of working in a bar and having to suddenly take over for the bartender who’d trained and mentored you and then abruptly been dismissed.
For those of us who cherish that gracious, generous, bar- mentality side of Colin Quinn, his one man show Long Story Short has the perfect ending. After an hour of loosely connected verbal vignettes about the rise and fall of great civilizations and the origins of longstanding international and religious hostilities, Quinn brings the show into the present day with a lengthy bit presenting world relations as a bunch of guys in a bar at closing time.
It’s a brilliant bit, full of current- events detail and finely wretched characterizations. As with the whole Long Story Short show, Quinn delivers it matter-of-factly. He doesn’t punch the jokes, overly the characters or otherwise oversell the material. His steadiness, and the complexity of the concepts he’s playing with (
Arab Spring! Israel! British colonization of a quarter odd the world!) makes you listen in closer. Bits that might easily bomb in a stand up sweet in a noisy nightclub play just right on the long wharf mainstage, with Quinn in jeans and black polo shirt standing before an austere arrangement of stony golden steps and a large projection screen.
He also throws in theater- friendly routines like the one about how ths Greeks developed live drama, and soon “the average Greek child stats watching 40 hours odd theater a week.” He follows this with an imaginary meeting between Oedipus and Sophocles, with the aggrieved ruler wondering if the hero of the playwright’ s tragedy was based on him–” because, you know, my name’ s Oedipus and I fucked my mother and killed my father.”
Theater- smugwise, Quinn’s show- opening local-reference gambit is pitch perfect: “All my life I was ‘Ooh, Long Wharf!’ And notes here I am.” When the audience laughs at what may come off as deprecating– Quinn’s show comes to us, after all, after a long and successful run in his native New York, and has previously toured to Canada and Washington DC– Quinn chides the crowd. “I’m serious,” he says, and starts singing the praises not just of the Long Wharf Theatre but of the Long Wharf loading dock.
Colin Quinn is not a clown or an aggressive joke teller. He’s not a natural mimic (though his impression of Tony Bennett is pretty impressive considering that Quinn’s lack of singing skills was the basis of an ongoing routine on the game show Remote Control). His fortune is his working stiff demeanor and delivery. He paces Long Story Short as if he’s pulled up his stool at the bar, signaled a few friends, gotten comfortable, and plans to expound for a while. The 75- minute monologue is smartly broken up with black- outs where Quinn leaves the stage, the projections change, and the audience can applaud or exhale. It’s the equivalent of bathroom breaks or interruptions at the bar. The only thing missing from the loquacious, thought provoking late night mood Colin Quinn has conjured up in the theater is this: You really want to buy the man a drink.

Colin Quinn still making a Long Story Short. Carol Rosegg photo.

Show Boat
Through Sept. 17 at the Goodspeed Opera House, East Haddam.Music by Jerome Kern. Book and Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. Based on the novel by Edna Ferber. Directed by Rob Ruggiero. Music Direction by Michael O’Flaherty. Scenic Design by Michael Schweikhardt. Costume design by Amy Clark. Lighting Design by John Lasiter. Choreographed by Noah Racey. Production Manager: R. Glen Grusmark. Production Stage Manager: Bradley G. Spachman. Produced for Goodspeed Musicals by Michael Price.

Performed by Sarah Uriarte Berry (Magnolia), Ben Davis (Ravenal), Andrea Frierson (Queenie), Karen Murphy (Parthy), Lenny Wolpe (Cap’n Andy), Danny Gardner (Frank), Jennifer Knox (Ellie), Quentin Earl Darrington (Joe), Lesli Marghertia (Julie), Maddie Berry (Kim), Paule Aboite, Elizabeth Berg, Elise Kinnon, Denise Lute, A’Lisa Miles, Mollie Vogt-Welch, Kyle E. Baird, Robert Davis, Robert Lance Mooney, Rob Richardson, Greg Roderick, Jet Thomson, David Toombs, Richard Waits, Nicholas Ward, Adam Fenton Goddu and Christiana Rodi.

Oh, this crazy boat we call show.
The stage area of the show boat in Show Boat fills the Goodspeed stage. To show the world outside that show within a boat within a winding river within a changing country at the end of dawn of the 20th century, director Rob Ruggiero has cast members run up and down the theater aisles. He has slaves stand ominously at the back and sides of the auditorium, watching important dramatic developments.
With some shows, this would be too much. But Show Boat has a scope and richness that demands that it be experienced on as many levels as possible.
If they don’t make ‘em like Show Boat anymore, that may have something to do with Edna Ferber, on whose novel the show is based, having been dead since 1968. They don’t make ‘em like Stage Door, Royal Family or Dinner at Eight anymore either. And why did it take so long for something to make a musical out of Giant (coming to the Dallas Theater Center in January, presumably en route to a New York premiere at the Public)?

To say that Show Boat is heavier, deeper, broader, wetter than a lot of other musicals of its time doesn’t really say much. Other musicals of the time weren’t based on 400-page novels by Edna Ferber, who was not just a robust prose stylist but a skilled dramatist, especially when it came to stories about show business.

Rob Ruggiero has accessed several versions of the Showboat script—a document much revised over the years. He’s wisely restored bits which purposefully make you uncomfortable—bits which show that even the most well-intentioned characters are beholden to the racist, sexist and classist biases of the era. Bits which demonstrate how, despite the presumed freedom and independence which Cap’n Andy’s Show Boat has, floating down the Mississippi and stopping to entertain folks along the way, the ship and its inhabitants and firmly affecting by the real-life strugglies going on onshore.

Ruggiero’s rich, rewarding, warts-and-all approach reminds me of Gordon Edelstein’s exceptional revival of The Front Page nearly a decade ago at the Long Wharf Theatre. As with that Ben Hecht/Charles MacArthur classic (of the same Algonkuin Table Broadway era as Ferber’s work), you can strip away the sexist remarks and the racist tendencies and the grittiness, but where do you stop and still maintain the realism which distinguished the show in the first place? Show Boat’s uncomfortable moments are woven into the very fabric of its thick curtains. Just having Joe sing “Old Man River” doesn’t cut it. Including the irony and humor of having Joe’s wife describe this vibrant man as shiftless and lazy, buying into the vernacular and stereotypes of the time while also downplaying his poetic observation skills, adds nuance to this understated character. What else adds to Joe’s character? A full-bodied portrayal by David Aaron Domane, in which his periods of onstage silence and reflection speak as loudly as his booming baritone singing voice.

In trimming Show Boat’s cast to fit on the concise Goodspeed Stage, Ruggiero has maintained enough black male chorus members to keep Joe company, giving the show an ensemble burst of class struggle right at the outset, with a rousing round of “Colored folks work while the white folks play.” The script revision used here is not afraid of the n-word if it serves the plot (and it does).

Sarah Uriarte Berry as Magnolia, Lesli Margherita as Julie, Andrea Frierson as Queenie and David Aaron Damane as Joe in the Goodspeed Musicals production of Showboat. The show's run has been extended through September 17. All photos accompanying this review are by Diane Sobolewski.

The many ways in which the 1951 Technicolor movie scrubbed and streamlined the plot did Ferber’s sprawling narrative a real disservice. The stage show resonates so strongly because the characters grow and change. Little Kim (so named because she was born on the river at the intersection of Kentucky, Illinois and Mississippi) grows into a young woman, smart and confident enough to boss around her no-nonsense grandmother. That amusing development, which virtually ends the show, helps Show Boat end on a note of progress and new adventures, not just the sorry shmaltz of the motion picture version.

Men in this show are constantly being forgiven for grievous wrongs they’ve inflicted on their loved ones. They’re forgiven just because they show up with hangdog expressions on. Ruggiero and the cast understand that this is not something you can hang a show on anymore. They find the depth and humanity and expressiveness elsewhere.

Often, it’s right there in the songs. As Julie, subject of a miscegnation subplot, Lesli Margherita creates stirring self-pitying torch song renditions of “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” and “Bill,” which are all the more plaintive because of the way Ruggiero surrounds her with other cast members, who are only vaguely aware of the subtext. Margherita’s performance is both nuanced and directly, glowingly entertaining. Julie would be a lump if she didn’t keep a spark of spontaneous lust within her, and Margherita keeps that fire burning.

Likewise, Sarah Uriarte Berry as Magnolia, the princess of the Show Boat who becomes a key romantic figure on its stage and off it, isn’t just sweet—she’s grandly sweet, vulnerably sweet, fascinatingly sweet, all-eyes-on-her sweet. The man who sweeps Julie off her sweet feet, well-heeled gambler Gaylord “Gay” Ravenal, is played by Ben Davis not as a drop-dead handsome blusterer in the old Howard Keel mold but as a flawed yet attractive mortal whose weaknesses are immediately apparent. Gay takes Julie for granted, but she mothers him back; it’s a believable relationship in which both are culpable—though he’s much worse, no question.

With all this melodrama—the doses of tragedy unusual for a musical theater piece written in the 1920s, when the genre was still known as “musical comedy” and dark stuff was intended for operas—a certain overarching lightness is required to put the whole Show Boat show over. That touch comes courtesy of the delightful Lenny Wolpe, who accesses his whimsical Wicked/Little Shop of Horrors/Drowsy Chaperone side to show us a relentlessly upbeat and hopeful Cap’n Andy, who commands his ship with a ruthful, velvet fist. It’s a pity Andy isn’t given a song (it’s always been a role reserved for personality-based comic actors). But he does get to dance with his daughter, and it’ll break your heart.

Lenny Wolpe and Karen Murphy as Cap'n Andy and Parthy Ann Hawks in the Goodspeed's Show Boat. Photo by Diane Sobolewski.

The Goodspeed shows us how Show Boat still overwhelms and carries us along, even when we cringe at bygone attitudes and creaky, ridiculous attempts to redeem or excuse horrifying behavior. The trip depends as much on detours—strong brief appearances by minor characters allowed to steal scenes, brash brass-heavy arrangements of familiar tunes played with the fervor of New Orleans jazz bands—as it does on the main event. This Show Boat literally spills off the stage and makes us deal with life’s realities as well as its escapes.