The cast of Waiting for Lefty, and their right fists, from left: J. Kevin Smith, Jeremy Funke, Peter Chenot, Christian Shaboo, George Kulp, Erich Greene, Rick Bean, Brian Willetts, Hilary Brown.

New Haven Theater Company‘s spring season is upon us. It’s not the spring season that was prophesied just a few months ago. In fact, it’s a revolutionary shift.

Opening this Thursday is Clifford Odets’ up-the-workers classic Waiting for Lefty. It’s the best-known pro-union play ever, and it’s satirized at the start of the the Coen Brothers’ film Barton Fink.

The timing is just great for a grass-roots political piece in New Haven, since there are ward co-chair elections are happening around the city next Tuesday. Those co-chairs will in turn vote on a new Democratic Town Committee chairperson the following week. The play is similarly focused on normal folks jumping into the political process on the lower rungs and making a big difference.

Waiting for Lefty runs for just one weekend at 118 Court St., New Haven. The run’s short, but so is the show, which means they can squeeze two performances in on Saturday night. So you can see it at 8 p.m. Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday and either 8 or 10 p.m. on Saturday.

Waiting for Lefty’s directed by New Haven Theater Company member Steve Scarpa. You’ll recognize a lot of faces in the cast, and be amused that George Kulp—who just played corrupt senatorial royalty in Macbeth 1969 at Long Wharf, is playing another upper-class powermongering big-business type here.

George Kulp, seated, as Harry Fatt in Waiting for Lefty, with the upstanding Christian Shaboo as Phillips.

In May, NHTC will present another vaguely Brechtian political-power parable, Urinetown: The Musical. This clever modern musical, a fantasy urban nightmare where citizens have been taxed and politicked into total submission and ultimately revolt, rose up from the New York Fringe into Off Broadway and Broadway acclaim. It quickly became a college and community theater delight. It’s got a big cast, a perky score, and scads of sociopolitical skepticism—what’s not to like?

While waiting for Urinetown, there’s already:

From Diane Keaton’s memoir Then Again, here’s a letter she wrote to her mother during the Broadway run of Woody Allen’s Play It Again Sam:
February 18, 1969
Dear Mom,
It seems like you were just here. How did it go by so fast? Isn’t Woody hilarious? Did you really like the play? I couldn’t exactly tell. Woody does a lot of let’s say unusual things onstage, things you wouldn’t think a person of his stature would do. Last night, in the middle of a scene he suddenly started impersonating James Earl Jones in The Great White Hope. I tried not to laugh, but it was impossible.

I was pleased to see longtime local arts honoree Christopher Plummer get the major prize he’s long deserved, on last night’s Oscars. Connecticut theatergoers know how Plummer acted in John Houseman’s legendary Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, Ct., was involved in one of the ill-fated plans for its rebirth in the 1990s, and has had homes in Darien and Weston. Plummer’s speech was as smooth and graceful and rakish as his one-man stage turn as John Barrymore over a decade ago.

There was also, of course, Meryl Streep—celebrated Yale School of Drama grad, whose adventures at that institution were recently rehashed in Julie Salamon’s biography of Wendy Wasserstein. And the return of the Muppets (who won for best song) is reason for great rejoicing for the annual summer puppetry conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center, which has muppet money and talent all over it.

Though I lament that Spielberg’s adaptation of Tintin wasn’t even nominated, I was happy that Rango won Best Animated Feature, since its lead chameleon spouts this immortal line:
“Burn everything! Except Shakespeare!”

I’m always amused, and pleased, by how this cinematically driven evening must rely so heavily on live theater follies for the its entertainment value. Crystal’s elaborate film-spoof intros get hoots, but his ad-libby comments on the acceptance speeches do even better. The most dazzling display of the evening was Cirque du Soleil—I raced upstairs and got my daughters out of bed so they could see it.

Clutch Yr Amplified Heart Tightly and Pretend

Through Feb. 25 at the Yale Cabaret, 217 Park St., New Haven. Created and performed by Chris Henry, Jillian Taylor, Jabari Brisport, Hallie Cooper-Novack, Merlin Huff, Michael Place, Mickey Theis, Solomon Weisbard and Dustin Wills. Set by Kristin Robinson. Lights by Solomon Weisbard. Costumes by Hunter Kaczorowski. Sound by Matt Otto. Producer: Kate Ivins. Stage Manager: Geoff Boronda.

You could see one of the last two performances of Clutch Yr Amplified Heart Tightly and Pretend tonight (at 8 &11 p.m.), where Yale School of Drama students gyrate wildly to slick European dance music (Junior Senior’s “Catch My Breath,” anybody?), then indulge in moments of stark romance (to the soundtrack of Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon”) and antic mime.

Or, you could stay home and hope there’s a Les Jeunes de Paris skit on Saturday Night Live.

No, that’s totally unfair. Clutch Yr Amplified Heart Tightly and Pretend may be loose and goofy and giddy and uncentered, but it’s a celebration of live entertainment and raw theatrical impulse. It’s comically fast-paced and undeniably entertaining. It exhorts its audiences to dance, and gets them to, as assuredly as did the Yale Rep’s much more clockwork comedy The Doctor in Spite of Himself last fall.

Clutch Yr Amplified Heart Tightly and Pretend is also practically Artaudian in its energy, eroticism and excess.

It’s literally dark—some scenes are lit only by the moonlight shining through the small windows on one of the Cabaret’s basement walls. A jaunty silent-movie-style car trip routine ends in a terrible cataclysm.

The show’s long introduction may be its most daring part. It starts before you know it has, erupting from a small pre-show conversation in the audience. It becomes an anxious, near-maniacal word-association exercise. It envelops the traditional Cabaret “in case of fire” speech. It rambles to a close, then is followed by a looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong spell of silence. “Something’s going to happen soon,” we’re told, and wish.

The man who spouted the intentionally awkward and offputting introduction later returns to take place in a full-cast robot dance. (The Cabaret doesn’t offer photos of many of its productions. I thought this “Gil” comic strip by Norm Feuti, which I subscribe to on www.dailyink.com, would illustrate such youthful abandon nicely.)

This is just the latest of several recent Yale Cabaret offerings which come off as open-ended, quasi-improvisational, partially unformed. I actually look forward to such things, as look as the danger elements aren’t fake. I like to see where good performers’ bodies and minds will take them when their guards are down.

I like how, in this Clutch concoction, a guy is introduced as the lighting designer, and he is really is the lighting designer, and he later comes out and does his own lighting-designer-attempting-to-dance-like-the-actors routine. I like the ironic mime. I like the whole scary-cool mood. I was practically the only guy who the show was NOT able to get up to dance, however. My own push-back in the fascinating aesthetics of awkwardness and open experimental exuberance.

The cast of February House, the new musical premiering at the Long Wharf Theatre prior to a run at New York's Public Theatre. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

February House

World premiere production. Through March 18 at Long Wharf Stage II, 222 Sargent Dr., New Haven. (203) 787-4282.
Book by Seth Bockley. Music & lyrics by Gabriel Kahane. Directed by Davis McCallum. Choreographed by Danny Mefford. Musical Direction by Andy Broson. Orchestrations by Gabriel Kahane. Set Design by Riccardo Hernandez. Costume Design by Jess Goldstein. Lighting Design by Mark Barton. Sound Design by Leon Rothenberg. Vocal/Dialect Coach: Deborah Hecht. Production Stage Manager: Cole Bonenberger. Cast: Julian Fleischer (George Davis), Kristen Sieh (Carson McCullers), Erik Lochtefeld (W.H. Auden ), A.J. Shively

Like a lot of musical theater geeks, I am currently in the thrall of TV’s Smash, which fictionally follows the development of a new musical based on the life of Marilyn Monroe. So you have to chuckle, imagining the conversations which begat February House. If the inspiration for the show were placed in the grandiose Broadway hyperconcept realm of Smash—environs just a subway ride away from New York’s Public Theater, where February House will play once its developmental shakedown at Loong Wharf is done.
“You know what?,” a Smash character could say. “Somebody really should make a musical about W.H. Auden. I’d see that.”
“But who would play Chester Kallman?”

At the same time, February House has some uncanny things in common with Smash’s made-up Marilyn musical. It’s set in the mid-‘40s, and shows the state of the New York literary and theatrical world a decade before Marilyn came there fro the method acting and the Arthur Miller. It’s a era which is shifting from smart-set magazines and romanticism to intellectual journals and new forms of expression. February House, a boarding house in Brooklyn, becomes the gathering spot for some world-changing artists, but the communal experience plays out a lot differently than it does in, say, Rent.

February House is homey, comfortable, conversational, intent on intimacy, on knocking its real-life characters down to human size. Its first act builds a sort of fantasy around the prospect of several world-class writers and musicians sharing a home. There are high hopes amid the humorous personality clashes, and a chance for solace and contentment in a place where these artists (most of whom are homosexuals, enraptured by the prospect of a home without closets) can be themselves.

Stephanie Hayes as Erika Mann, Kristen Sieh as Carson McCullers and Erik Lochtefeld as W.H. Auden in the musical Februrary House at Long Wharf Theatre. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

The latest episode of Smash had a number about Marilyn and Joe Dimaggio just wanting a quiet marriage in an out-of-the-way location. February House provides the same theme, only the couples are poets Auden and Kallman, the composer Benjamin Britten and his muse Peter Pears, novelist Carson McCullers and her estranged husband Reeves, and seductive wild cards Erika Mann (Thomas Mann’s politicized actress daughter) and the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee (who, yes, has already had a musical done about her, and settles for supporting-character sass here).

Quite the ensemble, but the moist heartwarming (hearthwarming?) aspect of February House is how attentive it is to its title character. (The musical is inspired by a non-fiction chronicle of Feburary House, aka 7 Middagh Street in Brooklyn, publishedin 2005 by Sherill Tippins, who’s been consulting on this production.) The key ensemble scenes all have to do with boarding house exasperations such as leaky pipes, vermin, unpaid utility bills and that common annoyance of trying to write your next novel when a bunch of Brits are composing an opera based on Paul Bunyan in the parlor.

The house rules. It gives the show structure, context and an evenhandedness when juggling the lives of a host of disparate big-name writers at fascinating transitional times in their long careers. The second act delves deeper into the actual historical circumstances of the house’s inhabitants, and turns February House into a show that no longer about the ability to create and commune but the need to sustain one’s dreams and careers and passions.

W.H. Auden (in a miraculously measured portrayal by Erik Lochtefeld, bright and emotional without descending into parodic or overly grave) is defensive about how overtly political to make his poetry during the mounting international concerns of World War II; meanwhile, he’s caught in a passionate relationship to the much younger Kallman (a sparky male ingénue turn by A.J. Shively), who can’t match Auden’s commitment to their illicit marriage.

Auden’s also writing the libretto for Benjamin Britten’s misfire of a folk opera, Paul Bunyan, a project the composer (and his joined-at-the-hip lover, Peter Pears) hopes will bring some commercial cachet to his critical acclaim.

Carson McCullers is in between bouts with Reeves, and is the house’s most gushing fount of enthusiasm; tuning her outrageous Southern accent so it registers as both otherworldly and dwon-homey, Kristen Sieh singlehandedly creates a new mythology for McCullers. She’s no longer the morose Southern realist misfit; she’s a happy vacationer, ingratiating herself to the other farflung tenants. McCullers finds a special connection with Erika Mann, whom recent Yale School of Drama grad Stephanie Hayes plays as a curt German cipher who enjoys her own quirks and passions even while berating those of others. Mann becomes the conscience of the play, history-wise at least, since she’s the most consciously activist about the war. But she also handles a comic relief interloper element, at least until a certain renowned ecdysiast shows up at the end of the first act.

Kacie Sheik as Gypsy Rose Lee in February House. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

Gypsy Rose Lee, a mid-show breath of bump-and-grind courtesy of Kacie Shiek (Jeanie from the Public Theatre revival of Hair) gets to deliver a delightful literary striptease variation on Cole Porter’s “Brush Up Your Shakespeare”:

Jewelry sure won’t do the trick
Red fox fur just makes me sick
But offer me a list of your academic laurels
And soon, dear mister,
You’ll make me weak in the patella
You woo this sister
With a disquisition on Melville’s novella
Today we play a different kind of game
A fella’s gotta win his gal with a little brain.

Such lighthearted moments aren’t limited to Lee’s cooing, Mann’s imperiousness, and McCullers’ Southern charm. Britten and Pears (bespectacled Stanley Bahorek and cravat-clad Ken Barnett) are presented as a whimsical English Music Hall double act, getting their own Gilbert & Sullivan-styled patter song, “Shall We Live Here” in the first act, then a scratch-choreographed ode to odious bedbugs, and another stand-alone set piece where Chester Kallman instructs these stiff, mannered gentlemen on how to loosen up for a New York society party. If three such comic digressions, all based around the same stuffy-Brit stereotypes, seems too much, well, they’re equally funny and cutting any one of them would be callous.

Through it all, February House serves as a solace, a workspace and a shelter from the encroaching storms of world events (the time is 1940-41, when the U.S. has yet to enter the war) and the turmoil of surviving as serious artists.

Riccardo Hernandez’s ingenious set design doesn’t impose “house” on the play the way another homebound new musical which had its premiere in New Haven, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, did at Yale Rep last year. The set is open-ended—open-backed, even, with a pit at the back of the stage into which characters step when leaving for the outside world. The actors interact with props and each other rather than with whole rooms.

Julian Fleisher, Kristen Sieh, Stephanie Hayes and Erik Lochtefeld in February, filling up Riccardo Hernandez's purposefully sparse set design. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

The house is embodied not with interior design but with an upstanding, uproarious, upholstered performance by Julian Fleisher as the real-world February House’s instigator, editor George Davis. It’s a wonderful stroke of inspired casting. Fleisher’s a modern Renaissance man himself, who does cabaret acts, fronts a swing band, writes, produces records and appeared as Cat in last year’s cult-hit musical version of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline. He shares the real George Davis’ understanding of how artists are nurtured and cared for, while building a big role for himself as the promoter of all this creativity in others.

In fact, when the plot falters at all, it’s due to the presumption that we care about the next chapters in some of these storied artists’ lives more than we do about others. The show ends with a powerful solo turn by Julian Fleischer, a lament to his departing housemates eloquently titled “Foundation Breathes a Loss.” Fleisher ends it with a bittersweet flourish reminiscent of Liza Minnelli doing the title number in Cabaret. But that climactic moment is followed with a downbeat exchange between Davis and Carson McCullers, when the show’s crying out for a full-cast, full-house closing number. McCullers, especially as animated by Kristen Sieh, may indeed be the most deeply drawn and appealing of the February House tenants, but she shouldn’t trump the landlord or the house itself.

The show’s uneven, overwrought conclusion is a concern mainly in that it can alter audience’s at the last minute, perhaps making them forget what a finely tuned, carefully emotionally balanced affair most of this musical has been. Wunderkind composert Gabriel Kahane’s score, and especially the clever wordplay in his lyrics, blend seamlessly into Seth Bockley’s community-minded script. Despite often festering in their distinct personal dramas on opposite sides of the stage, February House’ characters are linked stylistically and harmonically, blending their traumas and celebrations in elaborately arranged songs. As Mann and McCullers, Hayes and Sieh begin a beautiful road song duet, “Wanderlust,” in which the agitator invites the novelist to accompany her on a speaking tour. Just a few verses in, they’re joined by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman, debating their own, less expansive dreams of escape. It’s a risky, complex four-part arrangement that ends up taking the whole housebound show to a new level of drama, at the perfect place in the first act. Director Davis McCallum matches the intricacy of the score with a staging that meshes the characters’ movements without crowding the rather small, wide playing area.

Going back to Smash-consciousness, what really needs to be said is that February House may strike some observers like a pop chamber piece, a precious work of musicalized literary biography. That’s as unfair a characterization as it would be to say Auden’s poetry can’t speak to the masses, or that Britten’s compositions are too remote and modernist (assertions the artists wrestle with within this show). Kahane has pop records on his resume, and some songs here (especially those Britten & Pears routines) leap out of left field, but this is nonetheless a steady and fluid and overpowering score, languid in its quiet metronomic repetitions and inspired in its basic yet full musical arrangements. It’s a consistent style that Britten himself could appreciate. Mirroring the minimalist needs of the creative characters being portrayed, the music is knocked down to bare essentials: just the vocalists and the two-piece onstage band of Andy Boroson (whose piano doubles as an element of the set, the grand piano brought to the house for Britten to play) and Andy Stack (whose guitar strums are weighty, but who truly distinguishes himself on banjo, making that instrument much more than convenient shorthand for Carson McCullers’ Southerness).

There’s so much that’s right about February House, and so many potential pitfalls (the sprawling environment, the jarring personalities, some appalling real-life episodes which came after the events of this show, the degree to which the war and other outside-world events should be allowed to impinge on the household). There are breakthrough performances by Julian Fleisher as George Davis, Kristen Sieh as Carson McCullers and Erik Lochtefeld as W.H. Auden, three character-actor types who seem the most unlikely of New York musical theater lead players yet command the stage as if they were, well, Marilyn Monroe and Joe Dimaggio. February House is our own little regional theater, Off Broadway, academically sound Smash.

I’m off right now to stage another of my singular Play in a Day projects at Never Ending Books TODAY (Thursday, Feb. 23) from 2-5 p.m., 810 State St., New Haven. Fee is $5 a child. No need to pre-register. Just show up.

The word has gone out to kids all over town. I see who shows up, then explain a classic piece of theater to them. Then we stage it, in time to present to their parents when they come to pick them up.

I never know what it’ll be before I meet the potential cast. We’ve done Aristophanes, Ibsen, Chekhov, Jonson, Plautus, Shaw and several others. I’ve pretty much ruled out Machiavelli’s Mandragola for today. Above is an outtake from our last production, the Victorian melodrama Under the Gaslights.

I love sharing these, and am indebted to gocomics.com for making comics scholarship so easy and shareable. This time, enjoy Cory Thomas’ Watch Your Head takes on Tyler Perry (who, lest we forget, created Madea as a stage character), a couple of episodes from a longer storyline in Preteena mocking school pageants and high school musicals simultaneously, and the triumphant return of the Vitamin Flintheart to the annals of Dick Tracy. The pill-popping, Barrymoresque actor-turned-agent Flintheart first appeared in the strip in 1944, and made comebacks in every decade since.
I’ve topped the sampling off with a couple of the random gag strips with which gocomics is so happily saturated. I feel like cartoonists have a special understanding of live theater, and no visit to gocomics.com (subscribe already!) fails to remind me of that.

Clifton Duncan, Angela Lewis, de'Adre Aziza, and Marc Damon Johnson in Tina Landau's production of Good Goods at the Yale Repertory Theatre through Feb. 25. Photo © Joan Marcus, 2012.

Through Feb. 25 at the Yale Repertory Theatre.
By Christina Anderson. Directed by Tina Landau. Scenic Designer: James Schuette. Costume designer: Toni-Leslie James. Lighting Designer: Scott Zielinski. Sound Designer: Junghoon Pi. Production Dramaturgs: Amy Boratko, Alexandra Ripp. Vocal and Dialect Coach: Jane Guyer Fujita. Fight Director: Rick Sordelet. Stage Manager: Maria Cantin.

We’ve got ourselves a trend here. Surely we’ve got ourselves a new American theater trend:
Haunted stages.
An acceptance of the supernatural. Dark suspenseful underpinnings to relationship dramas.
That sense of forboding and doom applied to standard theater subjects such as feuding families and coming-of-age adventures can be found in a slew of recent productions on regional stages, including the Yale Rep’s own premieres of Belleville and We Have Always Lived in the Castle and Bossa Nova. You could also apply this idea of eerie environmental gloom and film-score suspense chords to the Rep’s recent revivals of The Piano Lesson (which, like Good Goods, buys into the idea of real rather than metaphorical ghosts), A Delicate Balance, Autumn Sonata and Notes from Underground. There’s that despairing mood, those overwhelming sets, that sense of trapped isolation. The sense that it would take some sort of miracle, or more likely an unleashed demon, to take the characters out of their sorry existences.

Good Goods wears its traditional suspense-drama duds proudly. Its inventory consists of stock characters:
The buff, focused leading man (Clifton Duncan as Stacey, returnd to his hometown to tend his late father’s dry-goods store)
The good-natured sidekick (Marc Damon Johnson as Truth, shop assistant to Stace’s dad and now to Stace himself.)
The bitter, vivacious ex-girlfriend (De’adre Aziza as Patricia, eager to get Stace back on the road with her in their old comedy act)
The goofy younger brother (Kyle Beltran, endearing as the entrepreneurial yet wet-behind-the-ears Wire, younger brother of Sunny and confidante of everybody)
The stranger in this strange land (Angela Lewis as Sunny, a sweethearted girl escaping problems elsewhere and ingesting a few new ones)
…and, as they say on Gilligan’s Island, “the rest” (Oberon K.A. Adjepong in a succession of sudden appearances, establishing plot points but ultimately providing the show’s building-shaking climax.)

Tina Landau uses a multi-platform style, jumping the scenes from the sides to the center of the stage in a manner that comes off as filmic. Major plot points and exchanges don’t always happen center stage, and scenes are defined by tight locations. Anderson is complicit in this cinematic style by beginning her play with a character listening to a lengthy comedy routine on cassette player, the sort of audio opening which might unwind during the opening credits of a movie.

But this is a matter of directorial interpretation. This is not one of those plays which, but the way its written, imposes obstacles on those who must enliven it. The shifting scenes and set-pieces within set-pieces is a style for which Tina Landau is known, and which she also used when staging the world premiere of Paula Vogel’s A Civil War Christmas at the Long Wharf Theatre a few years ago.

Anderson’s scenes can flow more naturally. There’s been a choice here to isolate them. For one thing, it heightens the suspense in a show which is unabashedly, admirably I think, melodramatic.

Angela Lewis and Clifton Duncan in one of the sunnier, good-times scenes in Good Goods at the Yale Rep. Photo by Joan Marcus.

Christina Anderson has been hailed a fine new voice, and here’s why: her plays have ideas, her characters are articulate, but it’s not all talk. Anderson’s work—whether as elaborate as this one or as sparse as Blacktop Sky, her contribution to the Carlotta Festival last year when she was still a student at the Yale School of Drama—demands movement. It demands action.

Here, it also demands the sort of suspension of disbelief, the theatrical wonderment, which has gone out of a lot of contemporary playwriting. Inspired by a class exercise (one of Paula Vogel’s famed bake-offs) to write around the theme of “possession,” Anderson has created a gothic horror context in which to explore issues she likes to explore anyway—awkward, tentative connections between people who are different stages of their lives. Here’s it’s a young woman running away from a marriage, thrust into the fall-out from several longterm relationship, whether of the romantic or the familial sort. The open-eyed astonishment of the young woman is contrasted by jaded, longsuffering commentary among the others.
Here’s one such bringdown: “I know you live and breathe ulterior motives.” Here’s another: “You act like having a history with somebody gives you a right to hold on to ‘em.”

History is an elusive concept in this play, which is more concerned with detritus than progress. The program notes suggest that Good Goods takes place in “1961 and 1994. And everything in between. Time is layered, stacked, mixed and matched.” And it happens in “A small town/village that doesn’t appear on any map. You have to know about it to get to it. And even then you have to have to know somebody who’s from there to survive.” If that set-up seems overwritten, it’s not played that way, like some Twilight Zone void. It’s just an environment unmarked by pop culture references and the latest snazzy brandnames. It’s one of those forgotten towns way off the highway, where restless spirits must settle and simmer.

Such possessive spirits persist in this play through tense work relationships,tenser love relationships, broken family relationships and ultimately in an intense no-fooling spiritual possession brought on by an industrial accident, itself already an illustration of the old “owe my soul to company store” manner of capitalist possession.

Possession, as posited in Good Goods at the Yale Rep. Photo by Joan Marcus.

There are references among the residents of this backwater town to “The Invasion,” and such eerie comments punctuate Good Goods like spell-casting oaths. The title itself comes from a dry goods store which seems lost in time: there’s nothing to say it doesn’t exist in the present-day (in a culture that can’t afford electronic devices or is served by a newspaper), yet the products which line the shelves of Good Goods are timeless in the old-fashioned sense: Gold Bond Medicated Foot Powder, Rinso detergent, Bang bathroom cleaner, Flash Hand Cleaner…

These usefully disorienting details in scenic designer James Schuette’s counter nicely with lighting designer Scott Zielinski, costume designer designer Toni-Leslie James and director Landau’s wise decision not to exhibit a similar level of heightened reality when it comes to special effects. There is voodoo practiced in this play. There is spiritual possession and transmigration. There is blood and shock. But, especially for a school which prides itself on cutting-edge stage technology and has recently launched a program in stage projections, the underplaying of those tools here is profound. Landau may move the action around so that it occasionally undercuts momentum, but she (and the entire creative team) never forsakes the humanity and accessibility of these forlorn characters. Instead of state-of-the-art whirlwinds and ghostly intrusions, we get good old-fashioned red lights and smoke machines and sweeping hand gestures, which is just as it should be here.

Likewise, Anderson, piles on comedy routines and transparent metaphor and allegories—my favorite funny concept has nearly everybody onstage clad in shirts borrowed from the show’s most stable character, the upstanding Stacey (Clifton Duncan)—but none of those routines, or the many plot contrivances, take away from the sincere human moments she wants to explore.

The fight scenes, and the staging in general, seems willfully over the top, yet those choreographed tableaux serve to highlight, rather than wash away, the more intimate scenes. Why this doesn’t come off as an anarchic mishmash of dirty deeds and good clean melodramatic fun is simply a testament to Anderson’s fluid and flexible writing, and the effectively emotive playing of the six-person cast. Most of the characters are larger than life: entertainers by trade, or aggressively social, or flirty, or outgoing, or wide-eyed with innocence, or trying to control a rampant evil demon. But Anderson provides soft centers, and the actors dwell in them.

So you can buy into Good Goods on numerous levels—as a relationship drama, as a tale of maturity, as a leaving-home odyssey, as a microcosmic metaphor for sweeping social change around the world, as a classroom exercise on the theme of possession, or as a pleasantly alarming evening of flash and fury, too entertaining to be too disturbing.

You can’t discount that Good Goods uses classic banter and presentational tricks to sell its goods, including some methods that went out with buggy whips. But you also deny it’s got stuff worth selling.

Kate McCluggage as she appeared in the recent Long Wharf Theatre production of It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play. She magically reappears at the theater in March as the 20th century witch Gillian Holroyd in John Van Druten’s Bell, Book and Candle. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

Long Wharf Theatre and Hartford Stage have has announced who’s going to be in their co-production of Bell, Book and Candle, which comes to New Haven first, March 7-April 1, and hits Hartford just days later, April 5-29. Should be a comfortable cast. Nearly all of them have worked with director Darko Tresnjak before, one of them on this very same play.

Kate McCluggage, who stars as comely modern Greenwich village sorceress Gillian Holroyd (the role which was an acknowledged inspiration for Elizabeth Montgomery’s Samantha Stevens in the TV series Bewitched), was Violet Bick in Long Wharf’s It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play just a couple of months ago. She played Portia in Tresnjak’s production of The Merchant of Venice for Theatre for a New Audience last spring, opposite F. Murray Abraham as Shylock.

Michael Keyloun, who plays Gillian’s warlock brother Nicky, played the dual role of Dr. Mandril and Gilbert in Tresnjak’s production of City of Angels at the Goodspeed Opera House this past fall.

Ruth Williamson, the reliable character actress who’s been seen in a slew of Broadway revivals and tours, from Guys and Dolls to The Music Man to Little Me to the 2004 La Cage Aux Folles, plays the third magical family member in the play, Aunt Queenie. Williamson was in the memorable Long Wharf Stage II workshop of A.R. Gurney’s Cole Porter-scored musical Let’s Do It at in 1996. She did a Darko Tresnjak-directed revival of The Women at the Old Globe Theater in 2008.

Gregor Paslawsky (also from City of Angels, as well as Polonius in Tresnjak’s 1999 production of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead and Lenin in Gregory Boyd’s masterful production of another Stoppard play, Travesties, at Long Wharf in 2005) plays Sidney Redlitch, the writerly role played by Ernie Kovacs in the 1958 film version of Bell, Book and Candle.

Robert Eli from the recent Hartford Stage production of The 39 Steps (not to mention the same theater’s 2000 production of Macbeth) plays Shepherd Henderson. I can’t find any evidence that he’s worked with Tresnjak before, which makes him the odd man out in this hip comedy about various sorts of social ostracism.

Tresnjak directed Bell, Book and Candle at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego in the fall of 2007, and apparently is basing this production on that one. Tresnjak was the artistic director of the Old Globe’s Summer Shakespeare Festival from 2004 to 2009. After Bell, Book and Candle was already announced as part of the 2011-12 seasons at Hartford Stage and Long Wharf, Tresnjak was named the new artistic director of Hartford Stage. The 2011-12 season was already in place when he took over; the 2012-13 season will be the first to bear his imprint as a programmer.

Only one member of the California cast of Bell, Book and Candle is part of this new New Haven/Hartford rendition—Gregor Paslawsky. Another big difference is that the San Diego production was done on an arena stage, though both the Old Globe and the new Hartford Stage/Long Wharf Bell, Book and Candles will have the same scenic designer, Alexander Dodge and the same lighting designer, Matthew Richards. Neither the costume designer, Fabio Toblini, or the sound designer, Lindsay Jones, did the show in San Diego.

Gregor Paslawsky (center) in Darko Tresnjak’s production of Bell, Book and Candle at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre in 2007. Paslawsky’s the only cast member from that production to be in the play when Tresnjak remounts it at Long Wharf and Hartford Stage this spring. Photo by Craig Schwartz.

I’m looking forward to this one. Bell, Book and Candle is one of those well crafted mid-20th century plays which ruled the summer stock circuit for decades. The roles are wide open to interpretation—this is a script where the Shep and Gillian roles could be originated by Rex Harrison and Lili Palmer on Broadway, then done by the much differently styled Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak for the film. There are also interesting subtexts to plumb in a play about witchcraft in a liberal bastion of New York, written in the era of redbaiting and closeted homosexuality. It’s The Crucible of comedy.

The Bushnell in Hartford has announced six of the seven titles in its 2012-13 Broadway series, and there’s not a revival in the lot.
None of the shows dates back more than a few years, though the oldest of them—Mary Poppins, which opened five years ago on Broadway and premiered in London’s West End two years before that—has a score first written for its film version in 1964.
But while they may not be revivals, every one of the six is adapted from another medium, and in some cases several media.\

Mary Poppins (at the Bushnell Sept. 14-23, 2012) is based on the Walt Disney movie which is based on the P.L. Travers books.

Dr. Seuss’ How The Grinch Stole Christmas (Nov. 20-25, 2012, and not technically part of the Broadway subscription series) is based on the 1966 TV cartoon version of a 1957 children’s book.

The unfilled slot is in December 2012, so it might be a tour that’s already out there, or one that’s barely been announced yet. (Not to get your hopes up, but Book of Mormon, Anything Goes and a pre-Broadway tour of Frank Wildhorn’s Jekyll & Hyde will all be on the road by then. What will it be?)

Million Dollar Quartet (Jan. 8-13, 2013), which opened on Broadway in 2010, later moved Off Broadway, and has been touring since this past October, is based on famous recordings emanating from an early rock & roll summit meeting in 1956: The King, The King of Rockabilly, The Man in Black and The Killer.

American Idiot (Feb. 26-March 3, 2013) is the Michael Mayer/Tom Kitt 2010 reworking of Green Day’s 2004 comeback album.

Sister Act (April 16-21, 2013) is based on the 1992 Whoopi Goldberg comedy, which many feel swiped the idea from Dan Goggins’ popular Nunsense theater series. The musical, with a book by Cherie Steinkellner and Bill Steinkellner (added to by the ever-funny Douglas Carter Beane), lyrics by Glenn Slater and music by Alan Menken, had been tried out on regional stages for five years before hitting Broadway just last April.

Catch Me If You Can (May 28-June3, 2013) is based on the Steven Spielberg film based on professional fraud Frank W. Abagnale Jr.’s memoirs. Marc Shaiman & Scott Wittman (whose latest triumph is the Spielberg-produced TV series Smash) did the score, and the great writer of modern ensemble comedies, Terrence McNally, did the book.

Billy Elliot (June 18-23, 2013) is based on the heartwarming ballet-boy movie directed by Stephen Daldry, who also directed the musical version. (Can you imagine if they’d let John Waters or Paul Bartel or Terry Gilliam or Mel Brooks stage-direct the movies based on their movies?) The soundtrack, featuring a blistering union anthem and some lovely dance music, is by Mr. Gnomeo & Juliet himself, Elton John.

So nothing technically “original,” yet what a range! 1950s roots rock, 1960s Disney and Dr. Seuss pop, 1970s jet-set skullduggery, 1980s working class ballet rock, 1990s sacred R&B, and mainstream punk from the turn of the 21st century.

Best way to see all these show for a reasonable price in good seats, it seems, is to already be a Bushnell Broadway subscriber and simply renew your subscription. Current subscribers can renew as early as March. New subscribers can contact the Bushnell and get on a waiting list. Single tix won’t go on sale until summertime.