The hundredyearspacetrip review, and six Yale Cabaret shows you haven’t missed yet

Posted on September 27, 2011 by Christopher Arnott

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.

Categories: Reviews of Shows, Uncategorized, Yale Cabaret | Leave a comment

The Three Sisters Review

Posted on September 24, 2011 by Christopher Arnott

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.

Categories: Reviews of Shows, Uncategorized, Yale Repertory Theatre | 12 Comments

Sinthea Starr Shines on Westville’s Lyric Hall: An Interview with Her Muse Joel Vig

Posted on September 23, 2011 by Christopher Arnott

Sinthea Starr (right) and her dear friend, the late Patricia Neal. Starr performs Saturday and Sunday at Lyric Hall in Westville. Photo courtesy of Bernie Kaufman.

“I first met Sinthea Starr aboard the Theatre Guild ship when Joy Behar was supposed to join us but got snowed in in New York. We had 25 minutes, but needed to get 55 ready, while sailing.
“Sinthea Starr had performed before, a single number. So I had seen her perform at that time. Since then, she’s done a limited run at the Metropolitan Room in New York.”

That’s Joel Vig, whose complicated relationship with a pouty diva resembles that of Barry Humphries and Dame Edna, or Lily Tomlin and Tommy Velour, describing his long and twisted times with the celebrated diva Sinthea Starr.

What does Sinthea Starr do, exactly? She sings a bit, and talks a lot, for about 80 minutes all told, with no intermission. Live piano accompaniment is provided by Chris Muller. “It’s like what Marlene Dietrich did late in life, that sort of autobiographical show, that style of monodeclamation,” Vig riffs.

Starr also dresses spectacularly. “She loves the classic Hollywood look,” her closest friend Vig dishes. “Her favorite designers would be people like Bob Mackie, William Ivey Long. I don’t know what she’ll be wearing in New haven. She’ll be coming there directly from doing an Italian film. She’s flying in early Saturday.” For Vig, it’s a mere train ride from his New York home base.

You can experience the Starr quality for yourself this weekend, when Ms. Starr overruns the lovely Lyric Hall theater on Whalley Ave. in New Haven’s Westville neighborhood for four performances, Saturday and Sunday Sept. 24 & 25 at 5 & 8 p.m. Tickets are $20 in advance—call (203) 361-8089—or $25 at the door.

Sinthea Starr’s Lyric Hall engagement came about after the event’s producer, Bernie Kaufman, saw the diva at a National Arts Club gala. Starr somehow stood out in the midst of a crowd that included Celeste Holm (whom Vig is hopeful will attend one of this weekend’s performances), Tammy Grimes, Gena Rowlands, Anne Jackson, Elizabeth Wilson (an old friend of Vig’s), Rosemary Harris and Anita Gillette—to name only the females there.

Vig (and Starr) have trod the boards in New Haven before. Vig directed a couple of dinner theater shows for Consiglio’s on Wooster Street, and has fond memories of attending try-out runs of Broadway shows at the Shubert Theater back in the ‘60s. He even worked as a technician on a tour of Jesus Christ Superstar which came to the Shubert decades ago.

Starr’s rising star is entwined with the careers of celebrities from the golden age of American stage and film. The Theatre Guild cruises, which the noted New York theater society started in the 1970s, gave fresh and interesting new work opportunities to a host of aging thespians. Vig and Starr became particularly close friends of a frequent Theatre Guild cruise voyager Patricia Neal, who died earlier last August. Vig helped Neal achieve the overdue honor of her own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Sinthea Starr has yet to get her own star, but she’s had brushes with plenty. It was while visiting the Edward Albee Theater Conference in Alaska with Neal in 2005 that Starr performed for that “Land of the Midnight Sun” state’s governor—no, not THAT one; we’re talking about Frank Murkowski, who served from 2002-2006. Starr does have a comment on Palin, however: “We wear the same size, but have slightly different tastes.”

Vig’s had fame on shore as well as at sea and in the icy 48th state. He was in the original cast of the Broadway musical Hairspray, nightly juggling the roles of the TV studio head, the high school principal, the dress shop owner, a security guard, and the flasher from the opening song. He also understudied several of the other roles. While he never had to go on as Edna Turnblad—both Harvey Feirstein and Michael McKean never missed a performance, he did play Wilbur Turnblad for a few weeks.

So Vig never got to wear the dress in Hairspray. He’ll be living vicariously, then, through Sinthea Starr’s antics this weekend.

Categories: Previews, Stand-Up Comedy, Uncategorized, Vaudeville | 1 Comment

The Norman Conquests on DVD: Ayckbourn with camera angles

Posted on September 23, 2011 by Christopher Arnott


A BBC radio documentary found online this week (Ayckbourn in Action, on Radio 4) shows a side of Alan Ayckoborn not often considered by the prolific playwright’s more casual fans—namely that he’s also a prolific director. Indeed, Ayckbourn is quoted in the program saying he considers himself a director first and a writer second

The Norman Conquests. 3-DVD set from Acorn Media.

The common labeling of Alan Ayckbourn as “the British Neil Simon” isn’t entirely unfair. Both Ayckbourn and Simon are astoundingly prolific. I thought that Ayckbourn’s output had dropped off in the 21st century, but I find that he’s continued to premiere a new show every year. He also runs his own theater and directs regularly. Which puts in a whole other world than Neil Simon, who may have a Broadway venue named for him but who originally came out of television, and who did as much work in movies as he did on the stage, from the mid-‘60s onwards. Ayckbourn remains much more a man of the theater.

Yet Ayckbourn has had his TV and movie moments as well—happily for his American fans, who don’t have nearly the opportunity to follow his work that the British do. Late last year, Acorn Media released a 3-DVD set of the TV version of Ayckbourn’s The Norman Conquests, broadcast on PBS in the 1977 and not seen since.

As with Neil Simon or Woody Allen, Ayckbourn gets his pick of top comedy acting talent for his film projects. This one stars Tom Conti, who was kind of the British Elliot Gould, in the title role of Norman, and features Good Neighbors sitcom co-stars Richard Briers (also renowned for Doctor in the House and other series) and Penelope Keith (also famed for To the Manor Born) in supporting role, with the estimable Penelope Wilton, Fiona Walker and David Troughton also on hand. They’re all meaty roles, since Conquests consists of three interlocking plays which play out virtually simultaneously and take place in different areas of a British country house. When a character walks through a door out of one scene, he’s often walking into a scene in a separate play.

Ayckbourn had great commercial and critical success with this maze-like gambit and used it again when he wrote House and Garden in 1999. (Where The Norman Conquests’ trilogy simply correspond to each other, and are generally performed on alternate nights with the same cast in the same theater, House and Garden’s two parts are actually designed to be performed at the same time, before two different audiences).

You can quibble about how well he accomplishes the multi-platform idea but dismissing it as a gimmick would be ridiculous. Being able to convincingly shift dramatic perspectives is an aspiration of all playwrights; it’s the basis of Greek choruses and Shakespearean soliloquies. Ayckbourn merely allows set designers and continuity-conscious dramaturgs and stage managers to be a part of that process.

You’re aware of the device, but not so much that it distracts from the characters or dialogue. You know that the playwright has set himself a writing challenge, and you don’t mind watching him work out this puzzle.

I only wish that, besides giving his blessing to the TV version (of which Penelope Keith is the only cast member who was in the original stage production), the Ayckbourn had directed it. Herbert Wise is an accomplished TV director —with two Derek Jacoby series on his resume, I Claudius and Cadfael—and is especially adept at directing his wife, Fiona Walker, who plays Ruth. But it’s a TV sensibility rather than a theater one, with conventional shot-reverse-shots and close-ups which confine a series of plays distinctive for their interactive openess. With The Norman Conquests so seldom done due to its threefold logistics, a “stagier” version would be much more instructive to theater jerks such as myself.
What we have here instead is simply an extremely entertaining comedy. Ayckbourn is bolder and bawdier than sitcoms. He makes fun of adultery, marriage, family needs and just about every other intimate social interaction. His characters range from the insanely self-involved to the utterly clueless. This is a colorful, breezy production with the added oomph of naughtier subject on par with American soap operas.
Where The Norman Conquests does get deliriously theatrical is in its characters outsized reactions to each other in scenes where they are hiding secrets or withholding opinions. They go into laughing fits, or get falling-down drunk. It’s also not a dated or simplistic series, not a TV show in play form. I have quite sharp memories of seeing it over 30 years ago—watching Ayckbourn for three nights in a row on public television was quite an event—and it holds up wonderfully.
Now somebody revive the plays already. They’re ripe for reinterpretation.

Categories: European Theater, Film, Television, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Ukulele Faustus: Chris Arnott plays tonight

Posted on September 22, 2011 by Christopher Arnott

I have a ukulele gig tonight (Thursday, Sept. 22) at the New Haven club Café Nine. I mention it because, as part of what I laughingly call my “act,” I perform a ukulele variation on the incantation speech from Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Just the one scene so far, but I’m working on more.

My father performed Dr. Faustus with marionettes. I do it with a ukulele. That play can withstand anything.

Here’s a video I made of the bit a couple of years ago, when testing out a new Flip camera. Friendly note to those alarmed by facial imperfections: I will be wearing my fake front tooth for tonight’s performance.

Most of my other material is not as theatrical as the Faustus thing, though if theater freaks come and call out for “Comes Once in a Lifetime” from Subways Are For Sleeping, gosh, I’ll try to play it.

Categories: Previews, Rock Theater, Uncategorized, Vaudeville | Leave a comment

Conan Doyle or Doyly Carte?

Posted on September 22, 2011 by Christopher Arnott

Sherlock Holmes and the Ghosts of Bly and Other New Adventures of the Great Detective

By Donald Thomas (Pegasus Books, New York). Thomas is such an accomplished hand at writing Sherlock Holmes yarns that he overwrites and overindulgesd, lulling you into complete credulity. When he writes at length about a late-19th century actor-manager named Caradoc Price, he provides such extensive tangential detail that I had to stop reading to go Google the character and see if he actually existed. Thomas is exceeding good at scene-setting. A whole chunk of this new collection of his original Holmes novellas and short stories bears the title “Sherlock Holmes the Actor,” and Thomas not only provides a ripping adventure set in the Victorian theater realm but a 12-page introduction to that story labeled “A Fragment of Biography” which elaborates on Sherlock Holmes’ brief career as a professional actor before he began dabbling in crime detection. He (or rather the usual narrative presence of Dr. John H. Watson) describes roles Holmes played and posits that, based just on the costumed improvisations he developed in his detective work, “he would have encountered little competition on the London stage—except perhaps from Irving and possibly from Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree. But that was all.”

It doesn’t have the sheer theatrical splendor of an earlier Sherlock Holmes pastiche, Nicholas Meyer’s The West End Horror, but Thomas adds a scholarly severity which is hard to shake.

Categories: Books & Magazines, European Theater, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

A Broken Umbrella Strikes Westville Again

Posted on September 22, 2011 by Christopher Arnott

A Broken Umbrella Theatre Company delights in site-specific productions that bring to light darkened corners of New Haven history. Last Halloween they staged a creepy new play Vaudevillain, about an actual Westville murder case from the early 20th century, for which they led audiences around and through the newly renovated Lyric Hall in present-day Westville.

With the ghostly holiday coming up again, ABUTC is bringing a different sort of heat this time. Play With Matches, slated for a three-weekend, 15-performance run Oct. 21-23 and 28-30 and Nov. 4-6, concerns mid-19th century New Haven-based inventor Ebenezer Beecher, developer of a machine that made wooden matches. His home in Westville (which morphed into the Mitchell branch of New Haven Public Library) had secret panels and trap doors built into it, according to an inspiring account in Colin M. Caplan’s book Westville: Tales from a Connecticut Hamlet.

Play With Matches is not being performed in the library, however. The company has found an abandoned factory space ideal for the endeavor: the old Greist Manufacturing Plantat 446A Blake Street.

Reservations are already being accepted here. Performances will be Fridays at 8 p.m., Saturdays and Sundays at both 3 & 8 p.m. Advance tickets are $20; day-of-show tix are available one hour before each performance for $15 ($10 for students and those under 17); and Sunday matinees are pay-what-you-can.

Categories: Previews, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

The YSD Three

Posted on September 22, 2011 by Christopher Arnott

The news has gotten around in other ways, but I just received the official press release for the three Yale School of Drama productions this season. These are the thesis projects for the three students in the School’s directing program. They also serve as showcase for the directors’ classmates in the acting, design and management programs. The directors choose the scripts they wish to direct, with their professors’ approval mainly hinging on whether the necessary resources are available. Usually they are—these are grand-scale, well-funded productions that often provide the launching points for careers. It’s a good place for students to try their dream projects, scripts they may never get a chance to stage at other theaters.

Casting hasn’t been announced yet, but the directors this year should provide their own surge of interest. This has been a particularly creative, experimentally minded clas, as evidenced by the works these directors have done at the Yale Cabaret in recent semesters.

Here’s the line-up:

Oct. 25-29: Gertrude Stein’s Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz. Actually the libretto for an uncomposed opera, Stein’s 1938 script is generally presented as a stand-alone play. Connecticut was special place for Stein: her Four Saints in Three Acts had a spectacular world premiere at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford; her good friend Thornton Wilder lived in Hamden; and (encouraged by Wilder and by the novelist/critic Carl Van Vechten) donated her papers to Yale in the 1940s.

Lileana Blain-Cruz is the ensemble-friendly director behind one of my favorite Yale Cabaret shows of the past few seasons, a multi-media deconstruction of Oscar Wilde’s Salome.

Dec. 10-16: Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, directed by Louisa Proske. How often do you get to see a Cymbeline? Proske did a better-known, and funnier, though no less romantic, play of the bard’s—As You Like It—this past summer for the Yale Summer Cabaret.

Jan. 24-28: Chekhov’s The Seagull, directed by Alexandru Mihail. Again, Yale Cabaret audiences have already gotten a taste of what they might expect from a Yale School of Drama production. Mihail did the extraordinary, audience-interactive expansion of Chekhov’s one-act The Wedding Reception at the Cabaret last spring. As with The Wedding Reception, for his Seagull Mihail’s using a translation by the late great Paul Schmidt, who not channeled the voice of Chekhov like few others ever could, but had his own history of working with open-minded experimental companies and directors.

The Drama School’s had Chekhovs aplenty, but no Seagull is like another, and with all the play’s theater in-jokes, students flock to it like, well, birds.

Tickets for the Yale School of Drama shows are already on sale at drama.yale.edu, or at (203) 432-1234, and even at the Yale Rep box office.

Categories: European Theater, Uncategorized, Yale School of Drama | 3 Comments

Two Newish Mystery Novels About Antiquing and Community Theater

Posted on September 20, 2011 by Christopher Arnott

“Cozy” mysteries are all the rage—or all the lack of rage, since they tend to be about settled, elderly folks solving mysteries in quaint rural communities. Naturally, in such adventures, community theater comes up.

Backstage Stuff—A Jane Wheel Mystery

By Sharon Fiffer (Minotaur Books, 2011)

She hates the script, but private investigator and antiques enthusiast Jane Wheel goes to work on a community theater production of a newly discovered—and clearly cursed—old melodrama. One reason she takes the gig—she gets a $500 stipend to design the show and run props. In community theater, that’s big money!

The contrivances continue beyond the concept of money as a motivation to do community shows with friends. For an ostensibly light read, there’s an awful lot of explaining and agonizing over the most bizarre theories.

Nellie now backed away from the rinse tanks, wiping her hands on her apron. “Lowry’s got you working on the Kendell house while he’s doing that silly play then? That’s okay. You probably got the better job. That theater thing…

Nellie pronounced theater the-a-t0r—long e, long a, long o, and with as much disgust as she could muster.

Antiques Knock-Off—A Trash ‘n’ Treasures Mystery

By Barbara Allan (Kensington Books, 2011)

Barbara Allan is the joint pseudonym of married writers Max Allan Collins and Barbara Collins. Both are accomplished novelists in their own right who seem to have special fun writing together. Their 2005 Cold War thriller Bombshell is a pop culture bonanza. The Collinses throw themselves into the Barbara Allan series with even more glee, merrily interrupting the story with recipes and antiquing tips. The series is hysterically entertaining, and the mystery elements don’t bog down.

The community theater references here are a recurring feature, courtesy of central character Vivian, drama-queen mother of her partner in crimesolving Brandy. While Brandy is the steadier presence, Vivian often gets ahold of the narrative voice herself:

Brandy looked appalled. “Happy? How can you be happy? You’re in prison, Mother!”

All my years of preaching to be a “do bee,” not a “don’t bee, had never quite stuck with the girl.

I said patiently, “It’s not prison, it’s jail, darling.And I’m happy because there’s so much I can accomplish ‘on the inside.’”

“Like what?”

“Like starting a theater club among the women. We’ll perform one-acts to begin with, then, eventually, complete three-act plays. And, who knows, maybe one day we’ll be ready to tackle the Bard of Avon himself! ‘Once more into the breach, dear friends!’… Dear, a gaping mouth is not an attractive look at any age.”

“You can’t be serious…”

“When am I ever not serious, dear? Why, we could take our production on the road, performing at other prisons—state-wide at first—Anamosa, Fort Dodge, Newton.” I raised a finger to make my point. “But then comes the big-time,. Folsom, Leavenworth, San Quentin—and the Broadway of prisons…Sing Sing!” I frowned. “Too bad Alcatraz is closed—how I would have loved to play there!”

Categories: Books & Magazines, Uncategorized | 3 Comments

One Knows, Don’t One?

Posted on September 20, 2011 by Christopher Arnott

Debra Walton and Eugene Barry-Hill as they appeared in Ain't Misbehavin' two years ago at the Ahmanson Theater in Los Angeles. They and two of their castmates from that production will be in a new production at the Long Wharf next months that attempts to bring the show back to its smaller-venue roots. Photo by Craig Schwartz.

The cast and creative team of the impending Long Wharf Theatre production of Ain’t Misbehavin’ (Oct. 26-Nov. 20) has been announced, and every member has been involved in some previous production of the same show.

Which is appropriate, since this isn’t one of those Long Wharf musicals which seeks to reinterpret large-cast classics for a more intimate stage, openly questioning traditional takes on the material.

Nope, in the case of Ain’t Misbehavin’, it’s the show that got bigger.This production is a sort of regional retrofitting, restoring the five-person, 31-song revue of Fats Waller songs to the Off Broadway scale in which it began—not to mention the Harlem nightclub dimensions of Waller’s own career.

Richard Maltby, who co-conceived (with Murray Horwitz) and directed Ain’t Misbehavin’s first production over 30 years ago, is reclaiming the director responsibilities, joined by the show’s original choreography/musical stager Arthur Faria (who’s directed numerous productions of Ain’t Misbehavin’ himself) and original set designer John Lee Beatty (who did a bunch of sets for the Long Wharf in the 1980s and ‘90s, but nothing lately).

The music director for this production, Philip Hall, has done eight previous Ain’t Misbehavin’s. Costume designer Gail Baldoni worked on the show’s 30th anniversary tour and its current European tour. Lighting designer Pat Collins lit Ain’t Misbehavin’ on Broadway and in London. Only stage manager Bonnie Brady appears to be newbie.

As for the cast, Eugene Barry-Hill (in the “Andre” role, the guy who gets to croon pot songs like “Viper’s Drag” and “Reefer”), Doug Eskew (“Ken,” the Waller manqué who does “Honeysuckle Rose” in the master’s playful style), Cynthia Thomas (“Armelia,” of “Squeeze Me” fame) and Deb Walton (“Charmayne,” who does “Yacht Club Swing”) all appeared in a 30th anniversary Los Angeles production of Ain’t Misbehavin’ in 2009. Kecia Lewis-Evans (Nell, who establishes herself right away in the opening medley of Lookin’ Good But Feelin’ Bad, Ain’t Nobody’s Bizness and the show’s title song) was the standby for Nell Carter (the best-known veteran of the show) in the 1989 Broadway revival, and has done the show in L.A. in many regional theaters, including the Hartford Stage’s SummerStage production in 2005. Cynthia Thomas, who grew up in New Haven (an ECA grad!) and Bethany, was part of the 1995 Ain’t Misbehavin’ revival which was reformatted to star The Pointer Sisters.

Given Ain’t Misbehavin’’s extraordinary decades-long success, with non-stop regional productions and regular New York revivals, it’s probably harder to find performers who HAVEN’T been in it than those who have.

Charmingly, the enduring stage names of the characters in the show are a tribute to Ain’t Misbehavin’’s original Broadway cast: Andre DeShields, Ken Page, Nell Carter, Armelia McQueen and Charlayne Woodard. In that spirit, music director Philip Hall ought to be dubbed “Luther” in honor of the Ain’t Misbehavin’ original pianiast/arranger, Luther Henderson.

The Long Wharf production, in any case, is about scale. I asked Long Wharf artistic director Gordon Edelstein about it just last week.

“One thing you can point to during my time here is the consistent production of great American musicals. I love musicals. Each time we’ve done one, we’ve retooled them for our theater. Richard Maltby heard I was tooling around with it, and he called me.” Maltby wanted to know if Edelstein was to play around with the staging and arrangements of the show, the way the Long Wharf had with The Fantasticks, Guys and Dolls and two co-productions with Chicago’s Court Theatre, Man of La Mancha and Carousel. “I know him,” Edelstein says of Maltby, “and we talked about it. Then he called me back and says, “If you want, I’ll do it for you. Even more fun!”

Edelstein saw Ain’t Misbehavin’ pre-Broadway, when it was a club-sized cabaret show at Manhattan Theatre Club. The Long Wharf’s goal is to restore it to that dimension. It will indeed to be fun to see if the show’s creators remember how.

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