The Yale Cabaret has announced its spring 2013 line-up: Ten shows, each running for five public performances (and one audience limited to the playmakers’ Yale School of Drama classmates) plus one special work-in-progress event. As has been in the case in recent years at the 45-year-old student-run experimental drama venue, some are established scripts, others are brand new and the rest are somewhere in between, but nothing is as you’d see it anywhere else.

The comments here are based on my own researches. If I get a chance, I’ll chat up the Cabaret overseers sometime in the New Year for their own comments.

The special event comes first, on Jan. 8 at 8 & 10 p.m. with two open dress rehearsals of Hamlet, Prince of Grief, by Mohammad Charmsir, directed by Mohammad Aghebati and performed by Afshin Hashemi, prior to its run at the Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival beginning the following week in NYC. The 30-minute one-man Farsi-language rendition of the Shakespeare play is accomplished with the puppet-like manipulation of  “household objects and children’s toys.” A YouTube trailer for the show is here.

Jan. 17-19: All of What You Love and None of What You Hate. By Phillip Howze, directed by Kate Tarker. Howze is an African-American playwright and director who’s worked with theater artists in Burma, Turkey and the U.S.  and is involved with the social justice arts organization freeDimensional. Kate Tarker’s a playwright herself as well as a director, who’s in the second year of her Yale School of Drama studies.

Jan. 24-26: The Island by Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona, directed by Kate Attwell. The great Fugard’s reputation in the U.S. was built upon memorable premieres of his works at Long Wharf Theatre and the Yale Rep, and augmented in recent years with premieres and revivals of a number of his plays helmed by Long Wharf artistic director Gordon Edelstein. The Island had its U.S. premiere at Long Wharf in 1974, alongside another Fugard one-act, Sizwe Banzi is Dead. The director of the Yale Cabaret revival is Kate Attwell, an open-minded theater artist whose prior Cabaret exploits include Hong Kong Dinosaur, Hundred Year Space Trip (in which she also performed) and (as a performer) Young Jean Lee’s Church.

Jan. 31-Feb. 2 and Feb. 7-9: The Cabaret is dark.

Feb. 14-16: Ermyntrude and Esmerelda: A Naughty Puppet Play, based on the Ermyntrude and Esmerelda: A Naughty Novella by Lytton Strachey, adapted and directed by Hunter Kaczorowski. Giles Lytton Strachey was a seminal member of the Bloomsbury Group and is best known as a biographer, but like his Bloomsbury comrades he dabbled in many arts. This social satire, written in 1913 but not published until 56 years later, is amusingly described by www.glbtq.com as “a semipornographic epistolary novel written as an exchange of letters between two naive seventeen-year-old girls, is a send-up of, among other matters, sodomy among the middle classes.” Director/adapator Hunter Kaczorowski just did the costumes for Ethan Heard’s Yale School of Drama thesis production of Sunday in the Park With George.

Feb. 21-23: Halfway House, created by Jackson Moran. No info on the piece, but Moran (who’s also an actor) directed the triumphant Yale Cabaret production of Sam Shepard’s Cowboy Mouth in late October.

Feb. 28 through March 2: The Bird Bath, created by its ensemble cast and directed by Monique Barbee. Another original piece. Barbee was a regular presence at the Yale Cabaret last year, in several school-year shows (including Persona and Chamber Music) and the one-person storytelling saga The K of D during the 2012 Yale Summer Cabaret season. She was one of the people enlisted to o White Rabbit, Red Rabbit at the Cabaret this season, and just played Dot in Sunday in the Park With George at the Yale School of Drama, from which she graduates next spring. Comfortable with both ensembles and solo projects, it’s nice to have her back in the Cabaret.

March 7-9: The Small Things, by Enda Walsh, directed by Emily Reilly. The Ireland-born, England-residing playwright’s disorienting and ultimately horrifying pair of interwoven monologues has, due to its themes and fantastical leanings, sometimes been compared to Caryl Churchill’s play Far Away, which the Yale Cabaret presented a couple of years back. Emily Reilly was the dramaturg for and a supporting player in Alexandru Mihail’s immaculate adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona at the Cabaret last year, and also appeared as an actress there in Trannequin!,

March 14-16: Lindbergh’s Flight, by Bertolt Brecht. No director is mentioned, and there’ll probably have to be a musical director besides. Known by two different German titles—Der Ozeanflug and Der Lindberghflug—and several English ones (The Flight Across the Ocean), it was written in 1929 as a radio play with music and was scored by Brecht’s frequent collaborator (and established composer of works for radio) Kurt Weill, with some numbers contributed by Paul Hindemith, who later became a legendary professor of music at Yale. Hindemith’s contributions were later replaced with more by Weill. Even later, when the famed transatlantic traveler revealed himself as a Nazi symphathizer, Charles Lindbergh’s name was dropped from the piece. Sections of the piece can be found here. This is hands-down the Cabaret show this semester which I am most excited about, sight unseen and creative team unknown.

March 21-23: The Cabaret is dark. Recovering from the Brecht, no doubt.

March 28-30: Pierrot Lunaire, based on Arnold Schoenberg’s Dreimal sieven Gedichte aus Albert Giraud’s ‘Pierrot lunaire’, staged by Ethan Heard. Hot on the heels of a Kurt Weill presentation is one by that composer’s contemporary, Arnold Schönberg, who set 21 poems by the symbolist poet Giraud (translated into German by Otto Hartleben) to music, with vocals in the Sprechstimme (speak-singing) style. The work, which turned 100 years old this year, is famously jarring and polarizing.

April 4-6: The Twins Would Like to Say, by Seth Bockley and Devon de Mayo, directed by Whitney Dibo and Lauren Dubowski. Bockley’s based in Chicago, but I known in New Haven for the script he wrote for the Gabriel Kahane-composed musical February House at the Long Wharf Theatre last year. Bockley works at the Goodman theater, and his co-writer here, Devon de Mayo, was the director of Chicago’s Dog & Pony Theatre Company, which specializes in new works. De Mayo’s play As Told by the Vivian Girls was developed at Dog & Pony, as was this one, The Twins Would Like to Say. It was produced in 2010 at Steppenwolf’s rather Cabaret-esque Garage space. It’s based on the true-life pact between identical twin sisters: that they would not talk to adults and agree to do everything in unison. Whitney Dibo and Lauren Dubowski were the driving forces behind the Cabaret’s reworking of Jacob Gordin’s The Yiddish King Lear last year. Like the playwrights, Dibo’s worked in theater in Chicago. This past fall, Dubowski developed the Cabaret’s “rockabilly exploration of death” Ain’t Gonna Make It.

April 11-13: The Ugly One (Der Hassliche), by Marius von Mayenburg, directed by Cole Lewis. Von Mayenburg is a 40-year-old German playwright who’s got over a dozen produced plays to his name. This one was done at London’s Royal Court Theater in 2007, was done in Canada in 2011 (video trailer is here) and only just had its New York premiere in February of this year. It’s a dark comedy with a four-person, multi-character cast, about an unattractive man who gets cosmetic surgery but finds that his beautiful new looks carry their own consequences. Cole Lewis is in the directing program at Yale School of Drama, where she was Assistant Director for Will Eno’s The Realistic Joneses at the Yale Rep. She worked with Lauren Dubowski, Nicholas Hussong and other on Ain’t Gonna Make It at the Cabaret earlier this year.

The current Yale Cabaret staff consists of Ethan Heard (Artistic Director), Jonathan Wemette (Managing Director), Benjamin Fainstein (Associate Artistic Director), Nicholas Hussong (Associate Artistic Director), Barabara Ran-Tiongco (Production Supervisor) and Stephanie Rolland (Cabaret Assistant). The Board of Artistic Associates includes Margot Bordelon (directing), Lauren Dubowski (dramaturgy), Theodore Griffith (technical design & production), Alyssa Howard (stage management), Martha Kaufman (playwriting), Jennifer Lagundino (theater management), Jack Moran (acting), Matt Otto (sound design) and Masha Tsimring (design).

The Yale Cabaret operates out of a basement space at 217 Park St., New Haven. Food and drink are served before performances, which are at 8 on Thursday and 8 & 11 p.m. on Friday and Saturday. Tickets are $15, $10 for students. A 9-ticket flex pass is $70, $50 for students. Group rates are available. http://yalecabaret.org/

Gordon Edelstein, Artistic Director of the Long Wharf Theatre, has just sent around “An Important Message,” which appears to be a new variant on the short essays he writes for the Long Wharf programs. If you’re on the Long Wharf email list, you’ve gotten it.

Basically, it’s an informative promo vehicle for upcoming Long Wharf stuff. The email asks for year-end donations to Long Wharf, and touts the theater’s next mainstage production, Sam Shepard’s The Curse of the Starving Class.

Not the cheeriest of shows to bring up during the holiday season. Edelstein describes it himself as “a dangerous work, a disturbing work,” one which depicts “lower middle-class Americans across this country struggling desperately to survive in a culture that is increasingly a conglomerate culture, a mall culture, a homogenized culture, a culture dominated by millionaires and conformity.”

Actually, balancing the checkbook this month after buying Christmas gifts puts a lot of us very much in the mood of a Sam Shepard play, which tend to be exercises in survival, and where folks have pretty much given up on saving money and are trying to save their sanity instead.

When the Yale Repertory Theatre presented Curse of the Starving Class back in 2000, that was a wintertime affair as well, opening in early Februrary as the Long Wharf’s Curse will. The Rep cast those 12 years ago starred Kristine Nielsen, Guy Boyd and Steve Mellor. The Long Wharf has announced that theirs will feature Judith Ivey, who previously graced the theater in Glass Menagerie and Shirley Valentine. Both those prior appearances were directed by Edelstein, and so shall this one be.

It’s a good time for Sam Shepard revivals in Connecticut, from community to college to regional productions. The Town Players of Newtown did the playwright’s 1978 drama Buried Child a year ago. The Yale Cabaret did a kick-ass Cowboy Mouth a couple of months back, the undergraduate Yale Dramat presented Lie of the Mind in October, and now comes Curse of the Starving Class at the Long Wharf. Adam Rapp, who teaches at the Yale School of Drama, just directed a well-reviewed revival of True West at the Actors Theatre of Louisville in Kentucky.

To cap off this little Shepardfest, here’s a thing I meant to post when Yale Cabaret did its Cowboy Mouth. Consider it a Christmas present from a Shepard (before the kings arrive).

The music in that production was so appropriate, so well-played (by Mickey Theis) that it had me rushing home to dig up a rock & roll tribute to the play which I remembered from years ago. A local rockabilly band, Gone Native, used to play it, so I contacted lead singer/guitarist Gary Mezzi, who responded:

“Bill Davis of Dash Rip Rock takes credit for that masterpiece. Dash’s drummer Fred went on to form Cowboy Mouth the band, so they obviously have some obsession with the play. In the live version, Bill makes a funny reference to it being inspired by the play.”

Dash Rip Rock played numerous times in New Haven, often with Gone Native sharing the bill. Here’s a rendition of the song by Dash Rip Rock, taped at a Chicago club gig in 1997:

And here are the lyrics. (Johnny Ace, Blaze Storm, crow and “rock & roll Jesus” are among the numerous direct references to Cowboy Mouth the play.)

Well, Johnny Ace spun the chamber of his cowboy gun,

He was tired and weathered from the beating of the Texas sun.

Didn’t even cry, stuck it in his eye,

Pulled the trigger and he said, “Bye bye.”

Just another singer damming up the waters of life.

Blaze Storm, peeled in the fury of a Vegas bar,

While the howlin’ dogs tried to take her just a little too far.

Narrow escape – ready to crow,

Told the people things they didn’t wanna know.

Just another singer damming up the waters of life.

Well the story of the young boy,

Born in the bible belt South.

Workin’ hard on dyin’ and always tryin’,

To be a rock and roll Jesus with a cowboy mouth

Here’s who’s playing all those Irish townsfolk and Hollywood cretins in the Yale Rep production of Marie Jones’ Stones in His Pockets which runs Jan.25 through Feb. 16 at the Yale Repertory Theatre:

• Fred Arsenault.

• Euan Morton.

That’s it. As is the playwright’s wont, all the dozen-plus roles are played by two male actors.

Arsenault you know from the recent Yale Rep premiere of David Adjmi’s Marie Antoinette, in which he played Joseph and Mr. Sauce. He’s clearly got a thing for the name Marie.

Euan Morton might have been seen at the Rep in the title role of the Tony Kushner/Maurice Sendak rewrite of the operetta Brundibar—he created the role at the Berkeley Rep, and also played it in New York), but in New Haven the part was played by then-Drama School student Joe Gallagher.  Morton starred on Broadway in the Boy George biomusical Taboo and was in the Roundabout production of Patrick Marber’s play Howard Katz in 2007. His regional credits are voluminous.

Evan Yionoulis directs. She is of course a professor in the Department of Acting at the Yale School of Drama as well as a resident director at the Yale Rep, where her most recent shows were Kirsten Greenidge’s Bossa Nova, Ibsen’s The Master Builder and Shakespeare’s Richard II—time for a comedy!

All the designers are current students at the Yale School of Drama—Edward T. Morris for sets and projections, Nikki Delhomme for costumes, Solomon Weisbard for lighting and Matt Otto for sound. They, and the show’s stage manager Nicole Marconi, are all third-year students, while Production Dramatur Sarah Krasnow (a Yale Cabaret instigator of the conceptually rich shows Creation 2011, Ain’t Gonna Make It and Dilemma!) is a second-year.

Personally, I’m looking forward to what Yionoulis and company might do with this admittedly mainstream piece, which was a fringe and Broadway hit in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s and frequently gets done now by community theaters. It’s a darker show than you’d at first think, given its quick-change shenanigans.

Sunday in the Park With George

Through Dec. 20 at the Yale University Theater, 222 York St., New Haven. (203) 432-1234.

Directed by Ethan Heard. Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. Book by James Lapine. Musical Director/Conductor/Orchestrator: Daniel Schlosberg. Scenic designer: Reid Thompson Costume designer: Hunter Kaczorowski. Lighting designer: Oliver Wason. Sound designer: Keri Klick. Projection designer: Nicholas Hussong. Production dramaturg: Dana Tanner-Kennedy. Stage manager: Hannah Sullivan. Performers: Mitchell Winter (Georges/George), Monique Bernadette Barbee (Dot/Marie), Carmen Zilles (Old Lady/Blair Daniels), Carly Zien (Nurse/Mrs./Harriet Pawling), Jackson Moran (Franz/Dennis), Max Roll (Jules/Bob Greenberg), Ashton Heyl (Yvonne/Naomi Eisen), Jeremy Lloyd (Louis/Lee Randolph), Dan O’Brien (Soldier/Alex), Robert Grant (Boatman/Charles Redmond), Matt McCollum (Mr./Billy Webster), Sophie von Haselberg (Frieda/Betty), Marissa Neitling (Celeste #2, Elaine), Catherine Chiocchi (Louise/Waitress) and Mariko Nakasone (Celeste 1/Photographer).

It’s rare that you see a Yale School of Drama that looks and behaves so much like a Yale Dramat spring musical.

Don’t misunderstand—by comparing a graduate school work to an undergraduate one, I intend no disrespect, no charge of amateurism. The Yale Dramat hires professional directors and designers for its musicals, and draws exceptional student talent to perform in them.

But what those shows tend to lack is soul. With rare exceptions, they are generally built from templates, skewing to how the best-known (read: Broadway) productions of those shows are known to have worked. Already subject to the pacing and tonal demands set by songs and a score, such shows tend not to color far outside the lines.

That same sensation of color-by-numbers is what you get from Ethan Heard’s production of Sunday in the Park With George, which closes tonight at the Yale University Theater. (That venue, as it happens, has been the accustomed stomping grounds of the Dramat for a century or so, and the Dramat has produced most of the Sondheim musical canon there, some of the shows several different times.)

The show is efficiently and effectively staged. For a musical produced by a drama school that has no specific musical theater training program, the singing is much better than audiences have any right to expect. The performances rise to the level of good regional theater, and make use of better resources. But it’s hard to see these students, all of whom have done sterling work in more freewheeling environments, holding back here.

Granted, that’s what James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim’s musical does in the first place. It constrains and conscripts and ultimately confounds.

In Sunday in the Park With George, identities and backstories are created for everybody inhabiting Georges Seurat’s most famous painting, Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte. On one level, I guess you could say this enlivens the painting. On another, it inhibits it, imposing a fixed interpretations on it.

I have a personal distaste for works which claim that artistic inspiration springs from real-world precedents and downplays the power of imagination. In film, that ignoble subgenre would include Shakespeare in Love and Becoming Jane. On the stage, that sort of literalism is found in Doug Wright’s Quills and Tom Stoppard’s After Magritte. Then there are the many productions which assume that the playwright has personally lived the work he is dramatizing. (New Haven audiences saw that in Gordon Edelstein’s direction of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie at Long Wharf, which had Patch Darrah looking like Williams and shadowing the other characters spectrally.)

Beyond the audacity of assuming artists can based their art only on experiences they personally observed, I think Sondheim and Lapine did a better job of fleshing out another artist’s creations in their Grimmly amusing fairy tale deconstruction Into the Woods, and (with book-writer George Furth rather than Lapine), Sondheim had much stronger points to make about artistic fame and friendship in his musical adaptation of the Kaufman & Hart play Merrily We Roll Along.

Sunday in the Park With George is a set piece about art and society, and boy is it set. Its depiction of the smarmy New York art world of the 1980s is more outdated than its stuffy take on France in the 1890s.

Sondheim and Lapine have at least chosen the right subject for their show: The French painter Georges Seurat had a pronounced a scientific bent as he did an artistic one. He developed theories of, as the song goes, “Color and Light” which translate neatly to stagecraft. There’s good reason to explore what was aesthetic and what was scientific or realistic in his work. But the musical chooses instead to delve into a less substantial “what is art?” question when it reduces the idea of artistic fame to how much one accomplishes in one’s lifetime and who one needs to be nice to in order to get noticed. The musical’s second act posits that the baby in the painting is Seurat’s illegitimate daughter, then shows her nearly a century later (in the 1980s, when the musical was written), doting on her grandson, who has become a famous artist himself and whose newfangled NASA-level artworks/inventions are getting grants and acclaim because he’s mastered the art of schmoozing at fancy parties.

You could say that portraying self-involved, anti-social characters, often ill-mannered artists such as Georges and his grandson George, and the exemplifying of paintings that hang in galleries, necessitates some distance and restraint, a cool voyeurism.

Still, for a show about the vibrant life which exists behind such art, there’s altogether too much distancing here. Mitchell Winter sings both Georges elegantly, but he plays them gloomily and inwardly, focusing on the artworks he’s creating with such intensity that it’s not that different an expression from the disdainful tone he uses with family members, lovers and passersby. Where’s the spark, the passion? Without a few glimmers of excitement over his work, he’s simply a misanthrope. Winter nails the tricky pacing of Sondheim’s lyrics (which develop a musical equivalent of pointillist painting with short, staccato expressions), but when he should be exulting in his sung soliloquoies, he sounds instead like he’s lecturing the unappreciative—and he does enough of that already.

As Georges Seurat’s somewhat-muse Dot (one of several pointillism puns in the show—a dog is similarly named Spot), Monique Bernadette Barbee is corseted both literally and figuratively. In the first act she must maneuver a bustle, and in the second (as Dot’s grandmother) a wheelchair. In shows at the Yale Cabaret and Yale Summer Cabaret in the past couple of years, I’ve seen Barbee exhibit the most extraordinary range, from earthy contemporary wall-breaking solo turns to clinical, filmic, expressionistic ensemble work. This is the first time I’ve seen her so repressed. The only moment when her character truly became alive for me when I saw the show on Tuesday night was Barbee was the victim of a wardrobe malfunction (unlike Janet Jackson, she couldn’t get back INTO her dress) and vamped some squeals and giggles while the onstage dressers untangled her and buttoned her up.

This show is always cast based on the ability of the actors to resemble iconic figures in a world-famous painting. More intriguing casting choices can’t really be made. Most members of the cast have to hang back patiently (sitting on the sidelines at the sides of the stage, a la Chicago or the Doonesbury musical or, most pointedly, Our Town) and look like they’re more interested in the goings-on than they probably are.

Ethan Heard’s staging ideas, and his creative team’s design concepts don’t precisely duplicate the original New York production, or other well-known renditions of the show, but they’re very much in the same ballpark. Act One is all about the creation of a tableaux vivant of Seurat’s masterpiece Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte, so you can’t expect much variation there. It does help that the Yale School of Drama has a program for Projection Design; Nicholas Hussong creates some fine effects to blend in with Reid Thompson’s set and Oliver Wason’s lighting, not to mention the actors.

In Act Two, instead of propping up cardboard figures of himself to decoy schmoozers at an art opening, the 20^th-century George  now has his forced-smiling image deployed on dangling TV screens. Heard, who has directed baroque operas starring Yale undergrads, and who was a Whiffenpoof in his own undergrad days (I also recall him vividly as a dancing journalist in a Yale Dramat production of Floyd Collins nearly a decade ago) certainly has a way with orderliness and mannered, prim presentations. But at key moments in the drama, chaos must ensue, and it simply doesn’t. It’s the most mannered chaos imaginable. Way too much uniformity and control. I waited in vain for actors besides Barbee to have problems with their costumes.

As for those costumes, there’s also an awkward “dress-up” quality to the production, since none of the actors are convincingly evoking the ages of the characters they are portraying, That’s a given in college musical productions, unless you’re doing West Side Story or Spring Awakening or Rent. And it may even be a directorial concept here, letting costume designer Hunter Kaczorowski’s immaculate and elaborate outfits set the characters’ demeanors rather than accents or gestures. But when the performers are already hindered in their expressiveness, layers and layers of clothing doesn’t help.

I expect more from the Yale School of Drama. I expect grand new ideas, and risks, and overreaching in order to learn, and student directors and designers taking full advantage of the largest production budgets they may ever be granted again. The only outré element of this whole production is music director Daniel Schlosberg’s new arrangements of the score for a 10-piece ensemble that’s heavy on wind instruments and doesn’t overwhelm with keyboards the way so many scaled-down musical theater orchestras do. Schlosberg and Heard worked together at the Yale Cabaret last year on a powerful song cycle entitled Basement Hades, and the composer has distinguished himself with his eclecticism and experimentation. I think that even the gifts of Daniel Schlosberg have been underrepresented here.

I certainly wasn’t crazy about this semester’s other Yale School of Drama show, Jack Tamburri’s Greek drama adaptation Iphigenia Among the Stars, but at least it wasn’t afraid to think big and fail big. There was much more to recommend it (and frankly much more to energize the actors) than I found in this studied, pristine, overprepared Sunday in the Park With George. And I’m certainly not down on the Yale School of Drama attempting musicals—Eleanor Holdridge’s exhilirating production of Brecht & Weill’s Happy End was one of my favorite YSD productions ever, and for all its structural flaws Michael McQuilken’s original rock musical Jib a couple of years ago still resonates strongly for me, and challenged its actors and designers on every level. This, by contrast, has an irritating confidence that comes from following rules, not breaking them.

If you’ve never seen a decent production of Sunday in the Park With George before, here it is. If that sounds like damning with faint praise, well, dot’s all, folks.

BBC Radio 4 is broadcasting a new Charles Paris mystery, An Amateur Corpse. Episode Two is still available as a streaming broadcast here until until tomorrow (December 19) when Episode Three appears. The fourth and final episode airs on Boxing Day. (Following its terrestrial broadcast in England, each episode lingers online for a full week as a “listen on demand” option.)

No self-disrespecting character actor—or other theater professional—who reads mystery novels backstage should be unaware of the Charles Paris books. The only excuse one might have for ignorance of the series is that Brett, while remaining disarmingly prolific with his other series (Fethering, Mrs. Pargeter, Blotto & Twinks) hasn’t turned out a new Charles Paris book since the late 1990s.

Considering the vintage of the books which started appearing in the mid-1970s, and considering that Simon Brett was a BBC Radio producer before adding novel-writing to his multi-career schedule, it’s strange that it took so long for a Charles Paris radio series to take hold. The first attempt was in the 1980s, with Francis Matthews as Paris in adaptations of the books Cast, In Order of Disappearance and So Much Blood.

Two decades or so later came the current series, starring the great Bill Nighy, who plays Paris somewhat less intensely than he did the similarly washed-up and self-deluding rock star he played in the classic Christmas film Love, Actually.

The Nighy adaptations have encompassed the same two novels that Francis Matthews already did, plus A Series of Murders, Sicken and So Die, Murder Unprompted, The Dead Side of the Mike and now An Amateur Corpse. That still leaves nearly a dozen more of Brett’s novels to go.

Each Charles Paris book is set in a different professional acting situation. In various adventures, Paris does a reality TV series, a one-man Edinburgh Fringe show, a horror flick, touring shows, and of course radio theater. An Amateur Corpse has him doing voiceover work for a college-drinking-buddy-made-good.

As much as I admire Bill Nighy, I never would think of casting him as Charles Paris. Certainly Nighy came up as a consummate character actor, with a diverse acting resume. But I’d always imagined Charles Paris as less distinctive than than the lanky, sonorous Nighy. In the books, he comes off as one of those vaguely attractive leading man types who’s interchangeable with so many other players and must therefore assert himself if he really wants the good roles. Which of course, Charles Paris never does. I’d always thought of Ann-Margret’s husband Roger Smith, or the American beach-party actor John Ashley, as kin to Charles Paris.

Well, good thing this series is on radio then, so Bill Nighy’s looks don’t work against him. The radio series adds a classic-rock score which adds some kind of contemporaneity to Brett’s stories. Suzanne Burden appears as Charles’ oft-estranged wife Frances, Jon Glover as his tiresome agent Maurice and (in this series only) Geraldine McEwan as his ailing mother Joan.

This adventure features a fun subplot, one of my favorite bits from any of the Paris books, in which Charles is asked to critique an overreaching community theater company’s production of Marat/Sade. Told not to pull his punches in his opinions, he doesn’t. I’ve been there. If you’ve ever taken theater seriously, or frivolously, anywhere, there’s a morsel in a Charles Paris mystery novel for you.

Dilemma!

Through Dec. 8 at the Yale Cabaret, 217 Park St., New Haven. (203) 432-1566, www.yalecabaret.org

Conceived and directed by Michael Bateman. Created by The Ensemble. Set, projection, and lighting design: Christopher Ash. Costume designer: Seth Bodie. Sound designer: Matt Otto. Technical Director: James Lanius. Dramaturgs: Rachel Carpman. Stage Manager/Producer: Reynaldi Lolong. Moral Guidance: Daniel Putnam. Production Consultants: Joel Abbott, Samantha Lazar, Cole Lewis and Jack Tamburri. Performed by Benjamin Fainstein (MC), Hugh Farrell and Sarah Krasnow (Avatars) and “Non-Player Characters” Rachel Carpman, Zach LeClair and Dan Perez.

You’ll notice “Moral Guidance” in the credits list of Dilemma! On the surface, the play fits in with what has been a distinctly and disarmingly playful and improvisatory semester at the Yale Cabaret. (Dilemma! is the last Cab event of the calendar year; a slate of ten fresh events, their titles not yet announced, will commence in January.) None of these shows—I would list This., Cat Club and White Rabbit Red Rabbit among them—were devoid of dark moments, and some were  defined by grief and loss, but they all cruised on informality and high spirits.

Benjamin Fainstein, one of two Associate Artistic Directors working with Artistic Dirctor Ethan Heard this academic year at the Yale Cabaret, was also a part of last week’s improv-fueled audience-acknowledging, concept-tripping goof The Cat Club. For Dilemma!, he’s not the director (Michael Bateman is) but might as well be, since he’s the guy who explains this multi-directional drama at its outset, then sticks around to shot “Dilemma!” and lead the audience through the choices which determine what the play becomes.

It’s an engaging concept, literally, and—as Fainstein declares in his introduction—is inspired as much by the old psychological/ethical conundrum The Trolley Problem (if you could switch the tracks for an out-of-control streetcar so that it kills one person instead of five, would you do it?) than it is by those “You Make the Adventure!” young-adult novels (“If you choose to jump across the lake, turn to page 98…”).

Ultimately, though, Dilemma! is more about theater than ethics. Many audience members seemed to making choices based on what would deliver a more entertaining story—fetching a street musician to help out a clubowner whose car the avatars needed to borrow, rather than just swiping the keys and ending the scene there, for instance. The fact that the actor playing the club owner couldn’t keep his mustache adhered to his face might have added to the desire to keep him around a bit longer, and is not an example typically cited in situational ethics classes.

As an audience member and as a keen reader of books such as Ethics Without God by Kai Nielsen, Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer and various novels by Aldous Huxley, I was distressed by how violent and hostile most of the situations were in this play, and how repetitive those scenarios became. If there was a higher point to this (was I meant to become desensitized?), I didn’t feel it. Essentially these were cliffhangers in the old movie-serial Perils of Pauline style, yet on a more frequent basis than even, say, Clive Cussler would allow. Adding ethical dilemma to the mix merely turns the results into post-modern melodrama, and certainly doesn’t make it any less melodramatic. Which was just fine with the audience I saw it with late Friday night; they were there to hoot and laugh and throw ideas against the wall.

I left Dilemma! confused, ultimately. At the performance I saw, the Trolley Problem was virtually dramatized at the play’s climax, with the exception that there was no clear rule stating that the imperiled single person (previously announced as the lover of the main “avatars”) and the imperiled many people (strangers) were both completely doomed—we’d been already seen a scenario where a choice had been made which worked out happily for all involved Yet the strangers, portrayed by audience members, simply accepted that they were dead, even though they hadn’t been told that expressly. I suggest that in tonight’s remaining performances, if that situation repeats itself, that the crowd improvise a Monty Python & the Holy Grail moment and scream “I’m not dead yet” and see what happens.

I’ve been asked to create a new monthly storytelling series at Café Nine, debuting December 3 and continuing on the first Monday of every month.

So the debut (“Volume One,” as I call it) is 8 p.m. TONIGHT, Monday Dec. 3, at Cafe Nine, 250 State St., New Haven.

I’m very excited by this new opportunity, and am overwhelmed by the responsibility.

I want to honor the current idea of what storytelling means—the cathartic personal anecdotes and amusing modern adventures which fuel The Moth and This American Life—but I’m also a theater guy, a history buff, a voracious reader and the son of a Classicist. So I want to open the series to monologues, myths, orations, poetry, performance art and, as they say, more.

For Get to the Point’s inaugural volume, I’ve enlisted:

• Ina Chadwick, a seasoned storyteller who’s produced events at clubs and theaters around Fairfield County.

• Poet and writer Franz Douskey

• Michael “Live Mike” Cooper, telling a story rather than fronting a band

• Chris Randall—photographer, director of New Haven Land Trust and community-builder

• Steve Scarpa of New Haven Theater Company

• The band Jellyshirts, covering a Velvet Underground story-song classic.

• others

This is a FREE event. No cover. And the start of something regular. Imagine the possibilities. Contact me at chris@scribblers.us to get involved.

Cat Club

Through Dec. 1 at the Yale Cabaret, 217 Park St., New Haven. (203) 432-1566, www.yalecabaret.org

Created by Paul Lieber, Timothy Hassler, Benjamin Fainstein, Hansol Jung and Kate Tarker. Music & lyrics by Lieber & Hassler. Directed by Fainstein. Costume Designer: K.J. Kim. Lighting Designer: Solomon Weisbard. Sound Designer: Palmer. Assistant Sound Designer/Mixer: Tyler Kieffer. Video Designer: Michael F. Bergmann. Technical Director: Matthew Groenveld. Stage Manager: Will Rucker. Producer: Caitie Hannon. Performed by Lieber (Cat) and Hassler (Cat).

When considering Cat Club at the Yale Cabaret, it’s useful to read this informative article

http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2012/11/29/cat-club-highlights-cabaret/

by Anya Grenier from Thursday’s Yale Daily News. It’s a more substantial piece about theater process than that august student publication tends to run. It mostly makes the point that the Cabaret allows the creators of its shows (which average nine per semester) a chance to develop in a manner which often runs counter to what they are being taught to do as students at the Yale School of Drama.

Back when I first started going to the Cabaret regularly, some 20 years ago, this would have been an obvious point, one not worth making. Cabaret shows were frantic and slapdash. That was their appeal. Over time as a market for fringe, cabaret, installation-based and other small-scale theater pieces developed in New York and elsewhere, Yale Cabaret shows became more and more elaborate.

So Cat Club reminds me of what the Yale Cabaret was like in the ‘90s—loosely structured, casually and ingratiatingly performed, fueled with youthful energy and frustratingly unfinished.

Being that Yale Cabaret events now are usually so carefully composed, it’s an odd feeling to see such a display as this—and I’m a cat person. Timothy Hassler plays Cat, and Paul Lieber plays Cat’s adopted brother Cat. They host a low-rent public access TV show, of which we see three episodes—one of the first, the hundredth or so, and what might be the last.

There’s absurdity, naivete and surrealist intent beyond the obvious debt to shows like Wayne’s World and Pee Wee’s Playhouse. Standing in front of a green refrigerator on which lies a bright yellow ball of yarn, The Cats teach you how to cook. When, at the Friday late show, the Hassler Cat explained that there were three ingredients in a peanut butter sandwich, the Lieber Cat listed “Hope, audacity and Mary Poppins.” Ingredients likely change for each performance. The two man/cats are clearly trying to throw occasional curves at each other. Lieber is much better at keeping a straight face when that occurs than Hassler is.

Because of its cheery demeanor and outright silliness—99 percent of this show is suitable for all ages, and the other one percent is just a little creepy—you watch it cautiously, waiting for the other shoe (paw?) to drop, thinking “It can’t ALL be this light, can it?” There’s precious little conflict (Cat doesn’t like it when Cat teases him), certainly not enough to connect the stream of entertaining moments into something grander and more meaningful.

The ending brings some darkness and doubt to the enterprise, which means you leave the show with a sour feeling when by all rights you should be buoyant. It’s not enough of a turnaround to build a message or cautionary tale around, just a way to end the play.

“Uneven” doesn’t begin to explain a show like. Neither does “unnecessarily bleak ending.” Some of the routines are inspired, and a lot of care was put into the many video segments—self-contained fake commercials for perfume or a fish emporium, background images, some live-on-camera hijinks. Some “Special Thanks” notes in the program suggest paths which could have been more overtly taken: the feline behavior manual Cat vs. Cat by Pam Johnson-Bennett, “YouTube star Leelu Cutie Special for her music and inspiration.” There are one or two full rock songs in each “episode” of Cat Club, performed on a small centrally located club stage with the Lieber Cat on guitar and the Hassler Cat (who fronted the club-band-styled cancer memoir Ain’t Gonna Make It at the Yale Cabaret earlier this semester) banging a cowbell with a metal whisk. The songs are loud and sharp and well-harmonized, and end up anchoring the endeavor more than the comedy bits do.

But when it comes down to it, this is just a showcase for a couple of likeable performers who work well together. We watch them amuse themselves, and it amuses us until it gets weird. Just like cats.