Ancient Rome is finished but Play On! is just beginning: Four of the 19-member cast of the new theater’s production of A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum.
stage A funny thing happened to me a few minutes into A Funny Thing Happened On the Way To the Forum. I began to enjoy myself.
Let me explain. The classic musical farce is the premiere presentation of a new Charlottesville community theater named Play On! (The “Play On” on the front cover of the program has an exclamation point, and the one on the back cover doesn’t—whether this is a sign of uncertainty on the theater’s part I don’t know. But to give them a vote of confidence, I’m going with the exclamation point.) The stage is tucked away in the back of a space in the Ix Building, and the inauspicious entrance reminded me of my dentist’s office. My teeth figuratively ached as I wondered if Charlottesville can really sustain another theater. The seating area, though hardly cramped, is cozy—a surprise for me, considering that visions of well-meaning high school productions in cavernous auditoriums were dancing in my head.
And then, after two staff members’ emotional remarks lauding the many efforts of many people to get the theater off the ground, and gentle pleas for financial assistance beyond the measly ticket price, the show began.
A Funny Thing Happened, first produced in 1962, is silliness incarnate, its only real substance composer Stephen Sondheim’s always brilliant sidestepping past Broadway musical clichés (rendered just fine by the duo of pianist Diane Tuchyner and percussionist Bruce Penner). The book by Larry Gelbart (who went on to write countless droll one-liners for the TV show “M*A*S*H”) and Burt Shevelove lampoons the slavery and sexism that was a part of the fabric of Ancient Rome. It somehow makes one feel positively giddy about dreadful human folly.
Director, vocal director, and principal choreographer (try saying that three times fast) Carole Thorpe takes the right approach. She leaps at every opportunity to add her own layers of silliness to the material, so that the audience is never witnessing a dead-in-the-water attempt to simply get through the text and the songs. She also clearly filled the 19-member cast (who knew there was so much competent acting and singing talent in Charlottesville?) with the notion that, without sufficient energy from the actors, the audience begins to feel they’ve expended all of theirs. The good time the actors were having even carried me past that point I always experience in a performance of a musical comedy when I no longer wish to be relentlessly entertained, when I itch to watch Ingmar Bergman’s Through A Glass Darkly to restore my equilibrium.
So welcome to the scene, Play On! (Exclamation point decidedly mine.)—Doug Nordfors
Pride of Baghdad
By Brian K. Vaughan and
Niko Henrichon
Vertigo, 136 pages
comics Over the past five years writer Brian K. Vaughan has taken the comics world by storm. His ongoing series, including Marvel’s Runaways, Wildstorm’s Ex Machina and Vertigo’s Y: The Last Man, have netted modest commercial (and immodest critical) success. Deservedly so, as they’re easily some of the most inventive and best-written comics currently in production. But when I heard the pitch for his latest project—a hardcover graphic novel based on the true story of four lions that escaped from the Baghdad Zoo during a 2003 U.S. military raid—I thought it must be a joke. It sounded far too cartoony, even cheesy. Well, shame on me for losing my faith in Vaughan. Pride of Baghdad is a lushly illustrated, moving story that’s about a hell of a lot more than four big cats.
With the war in Iraq as his backdrop, Vaughan uses the somewhat fanciful premise to explore the often-ignored complexities of freedom. It seems so easy: Nobody wants to be caged, to be deprived of all the liberties we Americans enjoy. But sometimes forcing our version of “freedom” on another country has unforeseen consequences, and the inevitable struggle of two cultures clashing can leave supposedly oppressed people in even more dire straits than before.
Vaughan avoids the trap that most writers fall into when writing animal characters—the cutesy route, basically—although he’s perhaps guilty of treating his core characters with a bit too much reverence. The supposedly starving lions pass up multiple opportunities to feed on lower members of the food chain. It all leads to the inevitable, crushing ending, but detracts a bit from the realism of the book.
If it sounds odd to regard a comic book about four talking lions as “realistic,” you haven’t seen Niko Henrichon’s art. The relatively unknown talent renders the animals realistically and regally. At times his lines look unfinished, which only adds to the exotic beauty. He avoids having the lions mug with facial expressions (except, perhaps, cub Ali), yet manages to convey a full range of emotions.
Precious premise aside, Pride of Baghdad is a sterling example of what graphic novels should be: the marriage of a fantastic story and evocative art, to exhilarating effect. –Eric Rezsnyak