Mark Morris Dance Group

Presented by the International Festival of Arts & Ideas. June 21 & 22 at the Shubert, 247 College St., New Haven. (203) 562-5666, www.artidea.org.

Choreographed and conducted by Mark Morris. Sung by Yale Choral Artists (Jeffrey Douma, director). Played by Yale Collegium Players (Robert Mealy, director). Danced by Chelsea Lynn Acree, Samuel Black, Rita Donahue, Domingo Estrada Jr., Lesley Garrison, Lauren Grant, John Heginbotham, Brian Lawson, Aaron Loux, Laurel Lynch, Stacy Martorana, Dallas McMurray, Amber Star Merkens, Maile Okamura, Spencer Ramirez, William Smith III, Noah Vinson, Jenn Weddel and Michelle Yard.

Mark Morris' "Jesu, meine Freunde." Photo by Nan Melville.

You can’t ignore the religious majesty of the three dances performed this weekend by the Mark Morris Dance Company. The orchestra, the chorale and two of the composers, Bach and Vivaldi won’t let you.

But while the evening conjures up images of genuflection and awe, it’s also earthy and frolicsome in the best tradition of Mark Morris. As a choreographer, he always balances a sense of fun and adventures with the more pristine and somber tableaux. And he eschews anything obvious. Yes, he acknowledges that Bach’s “Jesu, meine Freude” is a sacred work, but Morris clothes his dancers in loose white flowing nightgowns and pants and has them do mystical movements that are more Middle Eastern than European.

These repertory works—A Lake and Jesu, meine Freude dating back to the early ‘90s, and Gloria a decade earlier than that—have been presented on various bills over the years. At the Mostly Mozart Festival eight years ago, A Lake and Jesu were joined with I Don’t Want to Love (which is set to seven Monteverdi madrigals) and Marble Halls (scored with a Bach concerto), which must have suggested a more mortal, romantic theme than this evening’s nature-loving, heavenly arrangement. “A Lake” is now considered a Mark Morris Dance Company piece, but its world premiere 20 years ago was as part of the inaugural season of the White Oak Dance Project which Morris co-founded with Mikhail Baryshnikov.

These three works were done together just last month in Seattle, with that city’s symphony orchestra and the Seattle Tudor Choir. I expect it plays very differently in New Haven, where Morris conducting the Yale Collegium Players and Yale Choral Artists ensembles. The choreographer/conductor/auteur has a knack for bringing a special complexion to each presentation he’s a part of.

The art of ballet is often wrongly thought of as idealized and pure and thus presumably impervious to regional variations and strong individual interpretations. Morris has always danced in the face of such wrongheaded views. When you dance for Mark Morris, you’re allowed to use your own body and not conform to some ancient physical ideal. Turns out that Morris expects the same realness and energy from his musicians. He whisks through Vivaldi’s “Gloria” at about the fastest pace you may have ever heard it. The dancers respond to the pop-music pacing by flailing deliriously about the stage, pulling their bodies across like they’re evolving from lizards into birds.

“A Lake” is the opening piece, and carries no lofty God baggage. The dancers are garbed similarly to how they’ll be in “Gloria”: white and light-blue summer fun clothes. They’re doing trademark Morris moves—nothing angular, only arched and rounded—but they look like the chorus from a tour of Oklahoma!

Mark Morris Dance Group's "The Lake." Photo by Scott Suchman.

This is everything you want a June dance concert to be: grand and tightly rehearsal, yet frisky and sweetly sweaty. Respectful and informed and classical yet open-hearted and open-minded. There’s a move in “Gloria” where a woman spreads her legs akimbo, like a cowgirl, and pivots in a manner that’s both silly and as difficult to do well as a pirouette. That move said it all for me.

Grace and beauty are overrated. Mark Morris’ work is sprightly and pretty, which is much harder to pull off and much more of a joy to watch.

The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart

Presented by the International Festival of Arts & Ideas.

Created by David Greig (writer) and Wils Wilson (director) for the National Theatre of Scotland. Designed by Georgia McGuinness. Composer/Musical Director: Alasdair Macrae. Movement Director: Janice Parker. Casting Director: Anne Henderson. Srage Manager: Gary Morgan.

Text-based but intently physicalized, The Stange Undoing of Prudencia Hart fills the Wicked Wolf Tavern with thought-provoking palaver and spirited fun. Photo by Drew Farrell.

With just the right mix of storytelling savvy, sinuous musicianship and insouciance, five actors from the National Theatre of Scotland take over the large back room of the Wicked Wolf Tavern (formerly the Playwright) and spin a tale of romance, snowfall, soullessness and honor. They take their time—millennia of it—and let you relax in a pub while pondering all this mortality and magic.

The plot threads of the expansive folk tale can unravel quickly if you’re not paying attention. It’s easy to lose your place (especially with the loud air conditioning system competing with the actors’ unmicrophoned voices in certain parts of the room), until you realize that this is essentially Doctor Faustus (right down to the protagonist being a disenchanted scholar, albeit a woman this time) with a little of the Eurydice or Persephone myth thrown in at the end. The cast keeps it lively—moving about the room, climbing on tables, tinging water glasses to keep your attention. You follow willingly.

The supposed novelty of the piece, however, was somewhat lost on me—and on the hundreds of other theatergoers in town who regularly attend shows at the Yale Cabaret. Like the Wicked Wolf this week, the Cabaret serves food and drink and offers environmentally astute entertainments that are frequently narrative-based and often acknowledge the audience. The Cabaret, which has been doing this for nearly half a century, makes some of the National Theatre of Scotland audience-baiting tricks seem superficial. It’s interesting to note that the Cabaret’s entire summer season this year is, like The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart, an exploration of storytelling and folklore and modern attitudes towards those things. The Cabaret’s three shows opened this week, and won’t be open to critics for a couple of weeks yet. It’ll be interesting to see the contrast.

So the National Theatre of Scotland isn’t one of those artistic visits which opens our eyes to new performance possibilities. It’s more like “Oh, they do that there too.” And it must be said that they do with assuredness and verve, easing into the long bout of collective traded-off narration (most of it rhymed and declaratory) with a set of upbeat songs played on fiddle, guitar, bohran and other folk instruments. Full musical numbers enter the main show as well, augmented with ukuleles and tin whistles and even a piano accordion.

It’s the music that makes you lose yourself in the pub atmosphere, and which makes you think Scottish despite the Wicked Wolf’s Irish trappings. The audience-interactive stuff is not as crucial a mood-setter. It’s far from a Tony & Tina’s Wedding improv, yet does wisely insist on keeping its dark tale of deviltry light and funny. Ultimately, it’s not too far from a Tarell Alvin McCraney play—steeped in cultural tradition, lively, but acted out, told to you. It’s a conscious choice to indulge in verbose patter and storytelling suspense, a choice that in The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart is underlined by a focus on Robert Burns and literary theory. It may have the traditional feel of Greek drama and epic poetry, but the play pushes a contemporary posture, dropping references to Facebook and Jackie Chan and Samuel Jackson and apps.

Utlimately, The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart isn’t as dangerous and risk-taking as its live interactive situation might suggest. It’s interactive only when it wants to be, plucking out a couple of audience members for poking and prodding and inviting everyone to toss ripped-napkin confetti in the air to create a snowstorm. At one point, a cast member notes a “Pause… desultory applause,” and the crowd instinctively understands that they are to clap halfheartedly at that moment. The “spontaneity” is similiarly orchestrated throughout the piece, and isn’t the point of the exercise. What is? The central beguiling story of a woman who’s losing her sense of self, who doesn’t know what to believe in. The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart is  wonderfully uplifting in how it whisks us into dark places but tickles us out of them. It’s got aspects of a Halloween tale, but it never forgets that it’s summer and that the National Theatre of Scotland has come to town to entertain us while they enlighten us.

The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart at the Wicked Wolf Tavern, via the International Festival of Arts & Ideas. Photo by Drew Farrell.

Rachelle Rafailedes (in forefront) in Abraham.In.Motion's The Radio Show, through June 22 at the International Festival of Arts & Ideas. Photo by Steven Schreiber.

The Radio Show

Presented by the International Festival of Arts & Ideas through June 22 at the Iseman Theater, 1156 Chapel St., New Haven. http://artidea.org/

Dance created by Kyle Abraham and Abraham.In.Motion.  Costume design by Sarah Cubbage. Lighting design by Dan Scully. Lighting Supervisor/Technical Director: Michael Jarrett. Performed by Kyle Abraham, Brittanie Brown, Rena Butler, Chalvar Monteiro, Elyse Morris, Rachelle Rafailedes and Maleek Washington.

The Radio Show, which has rapidly become a signature piece for the ever-climbing choreographer Kyle Abraham, has dual inspirations: the demise of a Pittsburgh radio station, WAMO, which had served that city’s African-American community for decades on both the AM & FM bands; and the choreographer’s father, who had Alzheimer’s and aphasia.

These are not contradictory or jarring impulses. You realize even before the show has formally begun, when old black pop hits blare on the PA while Abraham wanders the auditorium silently mimicking the gestures of a stroke victim. The Radio Show is about losing the power to audibly communicate, and about how much we communicate when we’re not even thinking about how important our “voice” is.

But The Radio Show is a much grander statement event than that. It’s about dance itself. The Abraham.In.Motion ensemble can boogie to the beat with the best of them, but they also dance to radio static, and to silence, and to the cacaphonic sampling which occurs when you twist the radio dial. The show is further structured by being divided into sections: “Preshow,” “AM860” and “106.7FM,” each with their own overall pacings and textures.

This isn’t about dancing to music. It’s about the very nature of performance, and about how we simplify dance as something you do to records.

The Radio Show delivers a balletic duet to the soul classic “Reunited.” There’s a solo to a slow-building Aretha Franklin live concert track. There’s audience interaction, not just with that anguished pre-show image of the stricken Kyle Abraham but in a highly comic mode mid-show when a call-in DJ show allows audience members (via a working telephone, brought to their seats) to actually make “Make it or break it!” decisions about programming choices.

Personally speaking, The Radio Show had me from the get-go, spinning to one of my all-time favorite girl-group singles, The Velvelette’s “Needle in a Haystack.” The song choices, which number in the dozens and range from seconds-long samples to whole verses and choruses, veer deliciously from obscure to ubiquitous. But in all cases, Abraham.In.Motion’s relation to the sound at hand is unique. There are no obvious choices here. It’s a genuine exploration of how we listen, react and move.

The dancers dress identically, in dress slacks and backless loose tank tops. Four of them are women, three are men, and one of the seven (thin, blonde Rachelle  Rafailedes) is white. As with the soundtrack, there’s a uniformity and a sense of expectation to this set-up, but one which has been conjured in order to be subverted. We get an immediate sense of the differences among these dancers—what makes them relate, what unites them, and what sets them apart. There are gender-evident confrontations, competitions, mind-melding and deep connections.

At the Q&A after the opening night performance, a situation ripe for generalities, a lot of the questions were instead focused on specifics of technique and process. How, for instance, do the dancers synchronize movements so expertly yet maintain individuality? (One possible explanation: they prefer not to work with mirrors.)

The company of The Radio Show, showing off their symmetry. (Not all the dancers are the same in the current Arts & Ideas rendition.) Photo by Steven Schreiber.

What I personally marveled at was, in a show with a lot of abrupt transitions, how the company moved fluidly from bit to bit and didn’t brashly change up. It’s a subtle distinction, but one which is really impressive when you notice it. They move from jumpy to poised to relaxed to blissed-out in the blink of an eye, but you can feel that change. When they start up again, they may be in a different work phase but they’ve maintained the same spark and spirit and inner identity.

Abraham was awarded the 2012 Jacob’s Pillow prize earlier this month, and it’s easy to see why. He brings things out of dancers that add an aura and resonance to the entire work. He challenges modern dance conventions which you didn’t even realize WERE conventions, or challengeable.

The Radio Show gives new expression to the phrase “Turn on your radio.”

Several national publications have done “whatever happened to…” stories this month about composer/entertainer Paul Williams, suggesting that many thought he was either dead (Entertainment Weekly’s conjecture, in the June 15 issue) or, as USA Today put it in a June 6 feature, “hiding out for more than two decades.”

They could have asked Goodspeed Opera House, which in the past few years has:

• adapted Paul Williams’ score for the TV special Emmet Otter’s Jugband Christmas into a stage musical which ran for two winters at the theater.

• workshopped a musical by Williams and Garry Marshall based on the Happy Days TV series.

• awarded Williams the theater’s Goodspeed Award at a gala fundraiser.

These weren’t exactly secrets. Happy Days also had a run in L.A. and toured nationally. Williams has toured too—he did a FIVE-night stint at Mohegan Sun Casino in 2005, for instance.

You know who else knew he was around? Fans of The Larry Sanders Show, Late Night With Jimmy Fallon and Yo Gabba Gabba. Those who watched a more recent Muppet Christmas special, Letters to Santa, in 2008, or the movies The Rules of Attraction (2002), Princess Diaries 2 (2004), Georgia Rule (2007) or another Garry Marshall project, Valentine’s Day (2010).

Honestly, he hasn’t been that hard to find, or admire. And he’s 71 years old—how much more active would you have him be?

The idea that he was “dead” can be blamed on the new documentary Paul Williams Still Alive, which has all these publications buying into the myth that he vanished. Well, he did have a drug problem—which he appears to resolved in the late 1980s.

In any case, it’s nice to think of the Goodspeed as the home of live, vital composers and not just the revival house of dead ones. The live theater can teach a thing or two to the canned medium of film: it’s rude to deem a guy dead just because you maybe haven’t seen him in a Smokey & the Bandit movie lately.

…or perhaps because Williams died so well in Phantom of the Paradise. Hey, Goodspeed! Make a stage musical out of that!

There’s been a slew of new works on local stages in recent weeks, which I been happily attending but can’t (won’t) be able to discuss in detail. That’s because the time-honored process of workshops and try-outs is alive and well in New Haven, and I won’t mess with that delicate procedure.

Currently, Jim Dale is at Long Wharf Stage II with his autobiographical show Just Jim Dale (through June 24). The Yale Institute of Music Theater had staged readings of two new musicals this weekend.

Among other recent workshops that I didn’t catch personally was Goodspeed Musicals’ premiere of Amazing Grace, which closed at the Norma Terris Theater June 10; the Goodspeed’s got two more new works at the Norma Terris this season,T The Bikinis (Aug. 9-Sept. 2) and The Great American Mousical (beginning Nov. 8).

The city  with a great legacy of preparing and shaking-down new shows

Jim Dale (standing) as he appeared at Long Wharf Stage II in the mid-1990s in Giles Havergal's adaptation of Graham Greene's Travels With My Aunt (co-starring Brian Bedford, seated). Dale is back at Long Wharf Stage II through June 24 in his one-man show Just Jim Dale. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

Just Jim Dale

Workshop production of a new one-man show. Through June 24 at Long Wharf Stage II, 222 Sargent Dr., New Haven. (203) 787-4282, www.longwharf.org. $30. Starring Jim Dale, accompanied on piano by Mark York.

Jim Dale—whose career spans over a dozen of the saucy British “Carry On…” films, a slew of Disney family flicks in the 1970s, the film version of Spike Milligan’s sardonic Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall and Tony Richardson’s Joseph Andrews—once told me that he saw movies as something he did in between finding great stage roles.

Dale said this to me when he was at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven in 1994 for a pre-New York run of Travels With My Aunt, in which he played the titular Aunt Augusta in Graham Greene’s outrageous coming-of-middle-age adventure. His stage glories have included the original Broadway production of Barnum (for which he won a Tony), Fagin in one of the best revivals of Oliver! and a 2003 revival of Trevor Griffiths’ tragicomedy The Comedians. This year he appeared in a New York revival of Athol Fugard’s The Road to Mecca, directed by Long Wharf Artistic Director Gordon Edelstein.

He repeated the same expression when I interviewed him on the phone earlier this month, in anticipation of Just Jim Dale, the one-man (plus piano accompanist) autobiographical revue he’s workshopping at Long Wharf through June 24.

Even considering the length and breadth of his 60-year career, it’s extraordinary what Dale says he’s had to leave out in order to maintain a fluid 90-minute show.

Basically ignored in Just Jim Dale: all his films. He’s made 30.

“I never wished to be a film or TV star,” Jim Dale says. “My one joy is theater.

But even some of his theater triumphs get short shrift. He also won’t have a chance to mention his previous Long Wharf appearances—not just Travels With My Aunt but Peter Nichols’ Privates on Parades; both shows transferred from New Haven to New York. He will do material from Barnum!, which won him a Tony for Best Actor in a Musical. And he’ll do comedy bits from his music hall days, some of them a bit saucy. He adds, however, “I was not a dirty comic. I was not a blue comic. I was not even a comic.” He did a few years of music hall as a youngster, morphed into a pop star, penned the lyrics to the movie song “Georgy Girl,” joined the esteemed ranks of the Carry On low-brow film comedy ensemble, was invited by Laurence Olivier himself to join the National Theatre Company, worked with groundbreaking playwrights such as Peter Nichols (A Day in the Death of Joe Egg) and wowed Broadway in the crowdpleasers Barnum! and Me and My Girl.

Yet “I never went to an acting class,” Jim Dale says. “I took my experience from Music Hall.” It’s that formative work which ends up providing the main throughline for a life which includes stints as a song-and-dance man, a TV pop star, member of the Carry On film ensemble, lyricist of the chart-topping movie song “Georgy Girl,” member of the National Theatre (invited in by Laurence Olivier himself), actor in tragicomedies by cutting-edge British playwrights of the 1970s, Tony-winning star of crowdpleasing Broadway musicals, guest star in quirky cable dramedies and voice of the Harry Potter books.

For him, live theater continues to trump all the other media he’s explored. Earning an audience’s respect, and especially their laughter, is what continues to keep him returning to the stage, and makes Just Jim Dale an ideal project for this point in his career.

“You’re on your own up there. That’s the joy. I don’t do anything unless it’s a challenge.” A few moments later, he was taking an opposite viewpoint to arrive at the same feeling: “I was just saying to my wife yesterday, being on the stage with this show is like being in the comfort of my own room, with my favorite people.”

Whether it’s a challenge or a comfort, the stage is where Jim Dale belongs. He tells me a story–an anecdote you can’t believe didn’t make the cut for Just Jim Dale—about performing Scapino. Dale co-adapted and starred in the acclaimed slapstick adaptation of Moliere’s Scapino, which was produced in both London and New York in the early 1970s. “I was meant to swing out on this rope over the stage. One night, I went for the rope, and I missed it. I landed in the audience and broke my foot.” He continues to tell the story, which to him is about how he had to quickly reblock the second half of the show because he could no longer do the acrobatics. But what I’m thinking as he tells it is: He BROKE HIS FOOT and he still went on AFTER AN INTERMISSION and finished the show.

Dale isn’t taking the easy way with his one-man show either, though his limbs are so far intact. He anchors the night, he says, with songs and dances. “I’m always tweaking it. I can’t do the same moment-by-moment thing every night. It’s like an amoeba growing.” He’d be excused, I suspect, if he were to take it easier. He’s 77, and by his own admission gets “winded playing chess these days.” Prior to the ten-day Long Wharf run, which opened June 14 and won’t be open to critics, he’d performed Just Jim Dale “about 18 times,” including at the National Cabaret Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center last summer and for neighbors in New York’s Putnam County, where he has a home. At one point, as the show was up to an unwieldy two-hour running time and needed some shaping, Dale ran into Richard Maltby Jr., the producer/director/lyricist known whose Ain’t Misbehavin’ is one of the most deftly assembled revues in musical theater history. (Maltby’s zillions of other credits include rejiggering Miss Saigon and Song & Dance for Broadway consumption, writing lyrics for the musicals Baby, Big and The Pirate Queen, and setting cryptic crosswords for Harper’s Magazine.)

Maltby oversaw the splashy revival of Ain’t Misbehavin’ which opened the 2011-12 Long Wharf season. A few months later, Jim Dale was working with Gordon Edelstein on Road to Mecca. No wonder Long Wharf got the honor of hosting Just Jim Dale’s out-of-town try-out. The show is likely to be the only one at Long Wharf this summer, after several packed summer seasons in recent years. The theater is focused on its mainstage renovations, which will take until fall.

These days, Jim Dale is as well known for his audiobook recitations of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books as for anything else on his extensive resume. He says he got that gig from his Long Wharf appearance in Travels With My Aunt. The audiobook producers figured if he was the star of a show in which only four actors played dozens of roles among them, he should be able to get a handle on the Potter universe—not realizing that Dale had only two parts (namely the two title roles) in the sprawling Travels With My Aunt. The Potter patter he puts in Just Jim Dale is based on his experiences on his first day in the recording studio.

If you see Just Jim Dale, you’ll likely be pining for the stories behind the stories, for all the amazing encounters and experiences he was unable to shoehorn into his show. That may not seem just. But Jim Dale knows what he’s doing. Isn’t this the greatest Music Hall advice of all?: Always leave your audience wanting more.

Super-big edition for Memorial Day, and because I haven’t blogged much lately and got backlogged. This feature would not exist if not for two excellent online comic strip repositories, Daily Ink and GoComics. I’ve been a stalwart subscriber to both sites for years.
Notes:
1. Mime jokes never go out of style.
2. “Ventriloquism for Dummies” is already an old standard gag. The Non Sequitur strip is far from the first to use it.
3. You may not think of the Big Top strip as theatrical, but I do. It’s set at a circus, and the punchline to this one is “Paul Giamatti,” whom I personally first became of a fan of when he was a stage actor at the Yale School of Drama; Giamatti will return to New Haven next theater season to play Hamlet at the Yale Repertory Theatre.
4. Look closely at The Dinette Set strip. What’s on TV: the soap opera “As the World Sits,” starring… Godot! I put The Dinette Set in the same category as Zippy the Pinhead: when there do happen to be punchlines, they’re forced and obvious. The glory is in the details.
5. Both the Family Tree strip by Signe Wilkinson and Maintaining by Nate Creekmore had extended storylines about being in a school play. The Family Tree one is just wrapping up now, and has been going on for weeks.
6. Can’t figure out why Bucky Katt in Get Fuzzy wants Hamlet to be a story and not a play. On the other hand, the dog—Satchel Pooch—does bear a strong resemblance to Paul Giamatti.

Sorry for not posting much lately at Theater Jerk. You can chalk it up to Spring Fever—the debilitating allergies kind.

I’ll catch up in the coming weeks. Apologies to those I was unable to preview or review in a timely manner.

Today my daughters and I are indulging in another of our monthly Play in a Day projects, 2-5 p.m. Monday, May 28 at Never Ending Books, 810 State St., New Haven.

Details of Play in a Day, and videos of past productions, are here.

Since it’s Memorial Day, we might try to do something with pageantry and ceremony. Or maybe we’ll just do some Moliere, since Moliere sounds a little like Memorial.

Above is a rehearsal extract from last month’s Play in a Day, Calderon’s Phantom Lady.

L-R: Nik Walker (Cinderella’s Prince), Jenny Latimer (Cinderella), Jeffry Denman (Narrator), Danielle Ferland (Baker’s Wife) and Erik Liberman (The Baker) in the Westport Country Playhouse production of Into the Woods,directed by Mark Lamos. Photo by T. Charles Erickson

Into the Woods

Through May 26 at the Westport Country Playhouse, 25 Powers Court, Westport.

http://www.westportplayhouse.org/

Music & Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. Book by james Lapine. Directed by Mark Lamos. Scenic Design: Allen Moyer. Costume design: Candice Donnelly. Lighting design: Robert Wierzel. Sound design: Zachary Williamson. Fight director: Micharl Rossmy. Casting: Tara Rubin Casting. Production stage manager: Matthew Melchiorre. Musical director: Wayne Barker. Musical staging/choreographer: Sean Curran. Cast: Jeffrey Denman (Narrator), Jenny Latimer (Cinderella), Justin Scott Brown (Jack), Erik Liberman (The Baker), Danielle Ferland (The Baker’s Wife), Alma Cuervo (Cinderella’s Stepmother/Granny/Voice of the Giant), Nikka Graff Lanzarone (Florinda), Eleni Delopoulos (Lucinda), Cheryl Stern (Jack’s Mother), Dana Steingold (Little Red Ridinghood), Lauren Kennedy (Witch), Robert Lenzi (Cinderella’s Father/Rapunzel’s Prince), Britney Coleman (Cinderella’s Mother), Jeremy Lawrence (Mysterious Man/Steward), Nik Walker (Cinderella’s Prince/Wolf),

Even if you’re really into Stephen Sondheim, and share the composer’s fixed ideas (laid out in his recent books Finishing the Hat and Look, I Made a Hat) about how his work should best be presented, Into the Woods is a special case.

It’s the Sondheim musical which the creator seems most lenient about, the one which has been licensed so that school groups can do just the (lighter) first act and call it a show. The 2002 Broadway revival allowed for considerable changes, considering how crowdpleasing and well-constructed it already was.

Then there’s Wicked, the Fables comic book series, the recent Snow White films and the Once Upon a Time and Grimm TV series, which seriously skew the cultural context for this original fable-buster. Does anyone tell these tales straight anymore? Does Freud ever not hover above? Into the Woods may have been among the first mainstream entertainments to have go into these particular woods, but the forest has since been settled, chopped to bits and gentrified. It remains to be seen how the impending Public Theater’s Central Park staging (which opens in July) and a rumored film version (directed by Rob Marshall) will deal with this.

At Westport, director Mark Lamos and especially set designer Allen Moyer lay a major psychological concept over the already hyper-analyzed fairy tales retold in this throbbing-heart musical of hopes, dreams and communal disasters. This production has the narrator (Jeffry Denman) literally pulling invisible strings attached to the characters, working them like marionettes. He looks and acts like an evil magician, arranging the show for his own amusement, creating no end of obstacles for the poor questing mortals.

This would be a wonderful concept for a lot of contrived dramas, but it’s awkward in a show which is attempting to explore the psychological and emotional needs of its main players: what lengths will the Baker and his wife go to so they can conceive a child? What’s Jacks motivation in climbing the beanstalk? Do we sense some trepidation in how Cinderella allows herself to be courted by a prince?

Jenny Latimer and Dana Steingold in Into the Woods at Westport Country Playhouse. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

Into the Woods’ entire second act brings in irony, stark reality and human disputes which match the malevolence of giants. This is where the show’s cast traditionally soars, bringing depth and feeling to archetypes which have been been given cartoonized and confounded up to the intermission. The players are uniformly fine, broadcasting the basics, allowing for credible character-based complications later on, and above all working well together. The harmonies and repeated choral themes, of which there are many, are done with concert-choir precision, reminding us of Mark Lamos’ skill in directing operas. He knows when the music must be in the foreground, and can hold the action appropriately. This benefits the singers, some of whom have exhausting physical shtick elsewhere in the show and could use a rest. Stand-out performances include Jenny Latimer’s discreetly distraught Cinderella, Dana Steingold’s amusingly annoying Little Red Ridinghood and Cheryl Stern as Jack’s Mother, turning from gruff to anxious. Danielle Ferland, who played Little Red in Into the Woods’ original Broadway production, now plays The Baker’s Wife, and blends beautifully into the ensemble despite Westport’s version having a distinctly different tone and pace than the original. There’s some intriguing double-casting as well: one of the princes also plays the Wolf. Alma Cuervo does triple duty as not just the accustomed coupling of Cinderella’s Mother and the voice of the female giant but also as Little Red’s Granny. Some minor roles disappear altogether. Most interestingly, the Narrator and the Mysterious Man—roles originally played by the same actor—are separately cast.

Jeremy Lawrence as The Mysterious Man and Erik Liberman as The Baker in Into the Woods at Westport Country Playhouse. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

That tone is not only guided by the string-pulling magician, but by the constant blending of dark and light in a show in which the shadows often gather more gradually. In the first act, when Little Red escapes the wolf, the scene is of course played for big laughs—except for the repellent smears of blood all over the sheets and nightclothes. Making the show most fluid and less jarring also kills the spectacle of Lauren Kennedy’s transformation from an old-school wart-nosed black-hatted monstrosity into a more recognizable modern variety of witch.

Blurring some clearly drawn aesthetic lines, on top of suggesting that the characters are puppets, that they have no free will, undercuts the theme of the show: that these ostensible storybook creations are humans with human needs, that their actions are not whims of magicians but passionate responses to extraordinary challenges.

As beautiful and as clever as some of the images may be, playing up the toy-like and dreamlike and childlike nature of the show does a disservice to what Stephen Sondheim and writer James Lapine intended as full-bodied characters. The directorial and scenic vision here is also remarkably consistent for a show which usually operates as a light first half and a dark second half.

This may be my own psychological issue, dealing with unexpected obstacles in a show which I thought I understood. I’m no stickler for things being done a certain way—I absolutely love and crave radical rethinkings of classics. But I can’t make this approach make sense to myself. A line from Cinderella’s prince’s keeps coming back to me: “I was raised to be charming, not sincere.”

Lauren Kennedy as The Witch in Into the Woods at Westport Country Playhouse. Photo by T. Charles Erickson

The main event for months now in the syndicated Amazing Spider-Man comic strip (available online at Daily Ink) has been the casting of Peter Parker’s actress wife Mary Jane Parker in a Broadway play. A little other-realm scuffle with The Mighty Thor (who mistook Ms. Parker for a goddess he wished to be betrothed to) was just an awkward interruption in what has otherwise been a chronicle of New York theater contract negotiations, casting demands and—the past two weeks—a co-star going psychotic onstage and (gasp!) improvising his own lines.

You know that they’re some unnatural force at work here, and that a theater-set battle is imminent. All so much more exciting than Turn Off the Dark.

Here’s a recent sampling, and I strongly recommend you start following the Spidey stage saga at DailyInk.

John Watson as Old Man Strong, Steve Scarpa as Officer Barrel and Jeremy Funke as Office Lockstock in the New Haven Theatre Company production of Urinetown.

Urinetown the Musical

Presented by New Haven Theatre Company through May 19 at 118 Court St., New Haven. http://www.newhaventheatercompany.com/

Music asnd lyrics by Mark Hollman. Book and lyrics by Greg Kotis. Directed by Hallie Martenson. Produced by Steve Scarpa. Musical Director: Megan Keith Chenot. Choreographer: Jenny Schuck. Stage Manager: Jeannette McDunnah. Assistant Stage Manager: Ben Michalak. Cast: Peter Chenot (Bobby Strong), Megan Chenot (Hope Cladwell), Jeremy Funke (Officer Lockstock), Sabrina Kershaw (Penelope Pennywise), Hillary Brown (Little Sally), George Kulp (Caldwell B. Cladwell), Erich Greene (Senator Fipp), Ralph Buonocore (Mr. McQueen), Officer Barrel (Steve Scarpa), Ben Michaelak (Tiny Tom), Bryuan Kearny (Robby the Stockfish/Cop), Catie Pacileo (Soupy Sue/Cop), James Leaf (Hot Blades Harry), Jessica Meyers (Little Becky Two-Shoes), John Watson (Old Man Strong), Margaret Mann (Josephine Strong), Josie Kulp (Miss Millennium/Cop).

Nice to see how neatly Urinetown has trickled down (to coin a phrase) from the arch, grandiose Brechtian staging of its original New York production—and the even grander archness of its first national tour, one of the oddest fits ever attempted at the Oakdale Theatre’s old Broadway series—to bare spaces, calmer voices and unbrassy arrangements. New Haven Theatre Company, a company I admire for its ensemble ability to take on new challenges whilst still acknowledging its natural limitations—has never done a musical (at least in this configuration of the company, which stretches back close to 20 years and several distinct regimes); given that they haven’t, it’s rather incredible how well the troupe’s familiar key members all can sing.

Married actors Peter and Megan Chenot, co-star as Bobby Strong (the activist who fights for public rest rooms to be free, after his father is sent to the fabled Urinetown for inability to pay to pee) and Hope Cladwell (rebellious, if still sweet-natured, daughter of the ruthless industrialist Caldwell B. Cladwell). They are believably in love, and harmonize neatly. As Hope’s dirtbag dad, George Kulp nails his charmingly cruel patter songs. Every member of the cast mines special details about the characters and exploits them. There’s a richness here that removes Urinetown from its political-cartoon origins and proves its worth as a well-rounded theater piece.

Peter Chenot, Megan Chenot and George Kulp in Urinetown.

The company falls into the form as comfortably as they did for the agitprop drama Waiting for Lefty (a jumping-off point stylistically for this equally strident, if less earnest current project) or the more modernist Glengarry Glen Ross or the differently madcapped Steve Martin comedy Picasso in the Lapin Agile.

What connects all these shows is NHTC’s antic ensemble energy. Unlike a lot of community-based theaters, New Haven Theatre Company doesn’t try to ape a show’s best-known style; the show’s carefully rethought for the available talents and resources. Thus Glengarry became atypically brisk and comic, Picasso less filmic and declaratory, Waiting for Lefty less… lefty?

“When you’re doing theater in a space as intimate as 118 Court Street,” Urinetown’s director Hallie Martenson told me, “it’s going to change.” Almost nobody in the company, including Martenson, had seen Urinetown before, and indeed the show’s had something of a lull since a spate of regional productions following its 001 Broadway acclaim, and an even bigger burst of productions when the rights trickled down to colleges eight or nine years ago.

“The great thing about this play,” Martenson says, “is that it’s not just rich people and poor people. Everybody has a name. You can make a character yours. We’re having a lot of fun.”

This Urinetown is more personal, more personable, than a lot of productions which play on the faceless alienist dramatic Brechtian pastiche of the show. NHTC doesn’t lose that theme—though a two-man band keyboard-and-drum orchestra, however good, can’t bring the brass and pomp which is part and parcel of the Weill style being parodied in the score. The company just allows itself more to play with. Political theater is mocked (and honored—Martenson refused to double-cast anyone playing a rich person as a poor one and vice versa, subliminally underscoring the class divides in the piece), but so is overemotional melodrama and American Idol overkill (courtesy of the impressive pipes of Penelope Pennywise, given flash and verve by the dynamic Sabrina Kershaw) and improv-sketch frivolity.

Little Sally (Hillary Brown, left) and other poor folks of Urinetown kidnap Hope Cladwell (Megan Chenot).

In any case, it’s crucial that, as Martenson puts it, the show “just cooks along. This is not a play that gives itself to lengthy exposition.” Quite the contrary—the narrator figure, Officer Lockstock, continually dashes hopes for a conventional plot by explaining the conventions more than he does the plot. Jeremy Funke gives the role nonchalant menace, loosening the tightly wound, angular and inhuman style associated with Jeff McCarthy, who originated the role (or Tom Hewitt, or continued that style on tour).

I’ve always admired Urinetown for having the courage of its comic convictions. It lampoons its own format, yet respects the need for a longform musical to HAVE a format. It stays funny from beginning to end yet allows for the sort of gentle coming-together tune (“I See a River”) the audience begins to crave. In that respect, it’s like Hair—chaotic and brutal, yet not afraid to be beautiful.

This is a Urinetown which gets ALL the jokes, and scales them to where they’re funny to intimate audiences. It’s one where the closing full-cast cry of “Hail Malthus!” is clearly hard, and makes you want to go home and read up on Robert Thomas Malthus’ theories of population growth and economic/environmental stability. It’s one which lives up to the concept that freedom is scary.

Quirky rather than a boisterous, a hipster joke rather than a political cartoon, raw in all the best ways (from the unpredictability of the performances to the natural echo of the big bare 118 Court Street storefront), this is a Urinetown for New Haven. You can see why New Haven Theatre Company was moved to settle there.