Author: jay-kardan

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It would be hard to choose a better introduction to opera than Puccini’s tragicomic celebration of young love in poverty, with its accessible music, direct dialogue and realistic scenario. I’d find it almost as hard to imagine a better introduction to La Bohème than this production, sung in witty English verse by skilled and attractive actor-vocalists who are really about the age of the lovable starving artists they represent. Add the informality of Ash Lawn’s outdoor theater, the beautiful views and the tradition of pre-curtain picnicking on the grounds, and you have the perfect occasion for easing a neophyte into the grandest of dramatic genres. Those who need a pop-culture toehold will recognize the source of the musical Rent and (one hopes) acknowledge its superiority to the knock-off.

Ash Lawn Opera translated a chilly Christmas in Paris to a balmy summer night at James Madison’s digs in La Bohème.

But this Bohème is more than an initiation for the opera-deprived. Even if you know the work well, don’t be surprised if you come away newly charmed by its artistry and sheer good-heartedness. An August evening outdoors in Virginia may seem an unlikely setting for a Parisian tale in which cold, winter and Christmas play such prominent roles. But stage director Patrick Hansen makes the illusion work, despite the rudimentary technical resources at the disposal of the designers and cast (not to mention the distractions of humidity, thunder, lightning, cicadas, crickets and bats).

Indeed, Ash Lawn’s limitations rather suit this story of want and illness, establishing an intimacy between cast and audience impossible in larger theaters. Even on the strictly musical level, the tiny orchestra (under the baton of Brian DeMaris) may reveal details of Puccini’s score less audible to listeners in an opera house.

All four principal singers deliver satisfying performances. Daniel Holmes and Gregory Gerbrandt are vocally and dramatically strong as the poet Rodolfo and the painter Marcello; the sweet-voiced Carelle Flores is a convincingly shy and consumptive Mimi; Kate Mangiameli sparkles as the coloratura gold-digger with the heart of—well, gold. Of the other bohemians, Ross Benoliel is the life of comic scenes with his elfish portrayal of the musician Schaunard, and basso Matt Boehler does full justice to Colline’s two-minute farewell to his overcoat near the end of Act IV. The ensemble singers of Act II, including the children’s chorus, are as well prepared and lively as one could hope.

Ash Lawn Opera is especially to be commended for eschewing the electric amplification that is increasingly common in American opera, indoors and out—thus preserving one of the chief "wow" factors capable of attracting new fans: the unaided volume and projection of classically trained voices.

stage One measure of a dramatic production is its success in bringing out qualities not apparent to a reader. On seeing director Francine Smith’s Old Times, I realized I had overlooked much of the play’s humor amid the ominous stares, pregnant silences and coded commonplaces that were expected features of Harold Pinter’s 1971 script. Such are the perils of preconception and the humbling pleasures of having it overturned: I went to see Pinterian “theater of menace” and ended up enjoying a wacky absurdist comedy.

The best of times: Daria Okugawa, Chris Baumer and Boomie Pedersen get their stories straight in Harold Pinter’s Old Times at Live Arts.

The most obvious laughs are sparked by Deeley, the patronizing husband played by Chris Baumer as an off-center (Deeley’s own term) representative of pompous English conventionality. Behind a screen of platitudes spoken in what Kingsley Amis would call an RAF officer-class accent, he fights an obscure war for the soul of his wife, Kate (Daria Okugawa), against the friend of her youth, Anna (Boomie Pedersen), who is visiting the couple at their seaside farmhouse. The weapons on both sides are recited memories—shifting, suspect, always unverifiable—of the trio’s first acquaintance 20 years before. Did Anna share with Kate a bohemian London life for which marriage to Deeley was poor compensation? Did Deeley, as he insists, know Anna in those years from a pub called the Wayfarer’s Tavern and a party at which he stared up her skirt? Was she wearing Kate’s underpants at the time? And who knows best how Kate should dry herself after a bath? The rival claims and counter-claims encircle Kate like the nets (part of the set design) that hang between stage and audience, until Kate herself slashes at both sets of pretensions with a story of her own.

Whatever all of this may “mean”—and Pinter has always resisted interpretations of his work—the subtle authority of both acting and directing make Smith’s production a spectacle of technical mastery. I hesitate to pick a favorite from such a strong cast, but Pedersen’s dominance seems attributable to more than the richness of her part. Sly, precise and deliberately stagey, her beautiful delivery reminds us (along with the multiple pourings of beverages) that Old Times, in one of its oddly angled aspects, is a parody of English drawing-room drama.

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Let me start with a confession. No matter how often I read or see it, I can’t find much depth in this 60-year-old classic of the American stage. Its conflict between the wayward-but-vulnerable Southern belle Blanche DuBois and her meat-slinging, wife-beating caveman of a brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski, strikes me as a collision of gothic caricatures, and I’m unconvinced by the naive exaltation of animal sexuality as a force sufficient to sustain Kowalski’s marriage. I’d go so far as to suggest that Williams’s “masterpiece” owes its continued popularity less to the value of its script than to echoes of the original production (perpetuated by the 1951 movie) that marked the advent of Kazan, Brando and their then-radical style of theater. But this is not the place to defend such heresies. How does Live Arts handle one of the most frequently staged American plays?

Live Arts audiences can depend on the brutality, the mania and the kindness of strangers in the current production of A Streetcar Named Desire.

Ronda Hewitt holds our attention throughout as a high-strung, sometimes frenetic Blanche, her fragility matched by a manipulative cunning that first confounds and then enrages the blunter Kowalski. In the latter role, Mark Valahovic alternates between stiff calm and violent outburst, lacking the constant edge of menace that would make the transition convincing. Priya Curtis is a suitably uncomplicated Madonna as Stella, Blanche’s blissfully wedded, bedded, battered and impregnated younger sister. But Don Gaylord, though an impressive physical presence, seems miscast as Stanley’s friend Mitch, giving the part a coarseness that makes him a less-than-likely target of Blanche’s matrimonial designs—the man she marks out as “superior to the others,” with “a sort of sensitive look.”

Lighting, costumes and impressionistic set design combine to create a period atmosphere, aided by supernumerary actors who suggest New Orleans street life and serve as a kind of silent chorus in a balcony above the stage. A similarly picturesque touch is the decision to have the thematically-important incidental music played by live performers in an upstage alcove, rather than from the customary taped track.

Playgoers may be interested to know that their support of local theater, in this case, will also support much-needed charitable work in the Gulf Coast region. Proceeds from the production benefit the Building Goodness Foundation in its ongoing efforts to repair damage done by Hurricane Katrina.

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A production of Cyrano at the Blackfriars adds some twists to the question of appropriate theatrical technique. The play is set in the French 17th century, when staging practices were similar to those which the American Shakespeare Center seeks to reproduce. Indeed, the first act of Cyrano unfolds in a small theater much like the original London Blackfriars of Shakespeare’s day. But this is a play within a play, a stage upon a much more elaborate stage—Rostand’s drama dates from 1897, and its detailed directions assume the fullest technical resources of fin-de-siècle Parisian theater: special lighting, numerous props, a deep proscenium stage with sets and backdrops allowing realistic depiction of a cookshop, a battlefield, a convent garden. Can Cyrano survive the minimalist Blackfriars treatment?

What’s the easiest way to true love? Follow your nose! Tyler Moss as titular character Cyrano de Bergerac and Anna Marie Sell as Roxane at Blackfriars Playhouse.

In fact, one hardly misses the material contrivances of Rostand’s era. As in Blackfriars productions of Shakespeare, the players are in a garden when they say they are; Cyrano and Roxane are invisible to each other on a stage darkened only by their words; the imagination demanded of the audience by the Chorus in Henry V works as readily at the siege of Arras as on the field of Agincourt. Only in the difficult ensemble scene that opens Act I, with its mélange of line-fragments thrown from all corners of the stage, would scenery have been very helpful in establishing the setting.

That scene and others might also have benefited from a subtler, more generously paced approach. ASC’s broad interpretations seem better suited to Shakespeare than to this belle-époque pastiche of the equally refined reign of Louis XIV. Though Tyler Moss sustains the title role with energy and verve, he just misses the aristocratic grace that should mark Cyrano as a Gallic nobleman, if a rustic and impoverished one. He and fellow cast members are sometimes too loud, too strained, too hurried in delivering lines that were conceived in the original as stately alexandrine verse (perhaps inadequately rendered by the colloquial and rather British translation by Anthony Burgess). An instructive contrast is the less frenetic acting of Anna Marie Sell as Roxane and of Joseph Langham as De Guiche, the elegant semi-villain who is Cyrano’s necessary foil. Langham in particular shows how restraint and weight of presence can nearly steal the show from noisier, busier actors.

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Despite its status as an archetypal Western tragedy, Sophocles’ tale of revealed parricide and incest still poses the problems that vex all Greek drama in modern production: the handling of the chorus, the question of music, the long and sometimes stilted-sounding exchanges of single lines (stichomythia). UVA director Betsy Tucker and her cast of undergraduates and MFA candidates meet these challenges with general success, aided by
the lucid recent translation by Peter Meineck and Paul Woodruff.

Greek tragedy is partly a song-and-dance act, but its original balletic and musical details are largely unknown. This staging presents the choral odes as a mixture of nonmelodic unison chanting and lines spoken by individual choristers. The overall effect is a clear and moving expression of civic feeling, despite the sometimes distracting choreography. (Greek choruses certainly danced, but probably did not roll on the ground and kick their legs in the air.) Matt Wyatt’s selective musical accompaniment, performed from a gallery on various instruments, adds atmosphere and emphasis but does not serve as a score for the lyrics.

The UVA Drama Department’s production of Oedipus Tyrannus is proof that ignorance is bliss. Lovely, nonhomicidal, nonincestuous bliss.

The merits of the Meineck-Woodruff rendering are especially evident in the dialogue among the characters, spoken with a precision that tempers the rhetoric of Sophocles’ text by complementing rather than fighting it. The rich-voiced Will Gatlin portrays Oedipus as a vigorous and overconfident young ruler whose defensive anger yields gradually to an unflinching determination to know the truth. In a pleasing economy of resources, other parts are taken by members of the chorus who discreetly leave the stage and return in costumes that distinguish them from their sexless, anonymous choral roles. J. Hernandez is particularly effective as the cantankerous blind seer Tiresias, racked with an all-too-infallible knowledge of past and future.

Inexplicably, a portion of Tiresias’ longest speech (lines 408-428 in the original) is delivered in Spanish—a choice perhaps prompted by a wish to veil the information it contains, and no doubt facilitated by the availability of a bilingual actor. But premature disclosure is an element of the poet’s technique here, emphasizing Oedipus’ blindness to what the audience already sees. The linguistic stunt contributes nothing but mystification and misrepresents the passage as written: in pure Attic Greek, like the other nonlyric parts of the play.

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Ben Jonson’s comedies, conceived in the crabbed spirit of Roman satire, can be difficult for modern audiences. Largely lacking the lyricism of Shakespeare, and filled with the now-obscure allusions to urban society that came naturally to a lifelong Londoner who was a bricklayer and repeat-offender felon as well as an actor and playwright, they have not aged as well as the more abstract fantasies of his contemporary from Stratford. It is a tribute to the current Blackfriars production of The Devil is an Ass, Jonson’s 1616 assault on greed and folly, that it bridges the distance between his time and ours with an intelligibly funny play.

Susan Heyward turns idle hands into the devil’s playthings during The Devil is an Ass, at Blackfriars Playhouse.

Part of the company’s third “Actors’ Renaissance Season” using Jacobean theatrical techniques, this Devil impresses less by any apparent lack of “directors, designers, and months of group rehearsals” than by the trademark Blackfriars clarity of action and diction, aided by judicious cuts of Jonson’s most impenetrable topicalities. The devil of the title is Pug (acted by the versatile and athletic Susan Heyward), an ambitious junior fiend based on stock figures of medieval religious drama. Sent from hell to vex Londoners, he attaches himself as manservant to the dupe Fitzdottrel, a social-climbing skinflint who all but sells his wife’s virtue for a cloak and his lands for an illusory chance at a dukedom. Christopher Seiler’s appropriately broad realization of this latter role is balanced by the smooth swindler Meerecraft, to whom actor John Harrell—in the production’s subtlest performance—gives a winning plausibility. Several well-acted subsidiary characters, ranging from a shady businesswoman to a tight-fisted City jeweler, serve to complicate an imbroglio of fraud and counter-fraud that leaves Pug gasping at the superior wickedness of mankind. “The devil is an ass” by comparison, he concludes. “All my days in hell were holidays to this!”

Like other ASC productions, this Blackfriars experience includes the now-familiar authenticities of transsexual and doubled casting, ambient lighting, refreshments hawked from the stage, and “music” (to describe it generously) performed by the cast during intermissions. The equally-authentic theater itself remains a visual and acoustic delight, in some ways the chief attraction of everything produced in it.

stage It’s April 1, 1919, and John Pace Seavering has a problem. This idealistic young member of the Lost Generation has used his share of the family fortune to set up a publishing firm in Manhattan (think James Laughlin of New Directions Press), and finds his office crammed with manuscripts. His less privileged Princeton classmate, the talented but diffuse Denny McCleary, has written a sprawling novel that fills three crates in typescript—think Scott Fitzgerald in desperate need of pruning by Maxwell Perkins. Only if Seavering prints it can McCleary marry his Zelda, the beef industry heiress Rosamund Plinth. But Jessie Brewster, the “Colored” chanteuse who is Seavering’s secret lover, has submitted a more polished and concise memoir of her rise from poverty to fame. Seavering can afford to publish only one book; which will it be?

Matt Fletcher and Richelle Claiborne enliven a storybook romance—albeit one with too many darned pages—in Richard Greenberg’s The Violet Hour, playing at Live Arts.

Such is the premise of The Violet Hour, Live Arts’ (www.livearts.org) current offering from playwright Richard Greenberg, prolific author of such recent Broadway hits as The Dazzle and Take Me Out. But the straightforward dilemma is skewed by the arrival of a deus ex machina—almost literally. A mysterious machine is delivered anonymously to the publisher’s office and begins spewing pages printed with future history, including the fates of Seavering and his friends. This sci-fi twist adds layers (or should I say sheets?) of moral choice and cultural commentary to an already compelling dramatic base.

Live Arts’ production succeeds by solid casting. Matt Fletcher is convincingly aristocratic and Scott Keith full of Celtic passion in the respective roles of Seavering and McCleary, two types of callow-yet-lovable ex-Ivy Leaguers. The more mature Jessie Brewster is played with worldly languor by Richelle Claiborne, a standout in Live Arts’ Ain’t Misbehavin’ last December, who proves her acting skills are equal to her singing voice and regal stage presence. Perhaps the hardest-working member of the cast, Jude Silveira provides comic relief as the overqualified office assistant Gidger, fussily lamenting his insignificance.

stage “Do you like magic?” Thom Pain asks the audience on three occasions during Will Eno’s dramatic monologue, now playing in Charlottesville one year after the close of its first New York run. The question is emblematic of the play, for Thom Pain (based on nothing) is all about magic, in the sense of a conjurer’s manipulation of his audience.

Through the meandering course of two arguably intertwined stories—the sad childhood of a lonely boy and the doomed love affair of “grown-up” Thom—the dull-suited narrator repeatedly arouses emotions only to subvert them, sends us down blind alleys of interest and sympathy that end in an insult, a paradox, an inconsequential shift of tone. His promises to hold a ticket raffle and to “make someone else suffer” by plucking a subject from the audience are only the most transparently questionable of his statements. In retrospect, we doubt even the sincerity of his tales, whose themes—the death of a pet, a lost love—seem chosen for their conventional sentimentality.

There is much wry humor in all of this, as well as considerable pathos, since one side of Thom’s ambiguity is the chance that his clowning and self-pity stand for something more universal. How seriously should we take his portentous claim to represent “the modern mind,” encapsulated for Thom by the expletive “whatever”? Is he Everyman or a nobody, punk or poet, spokesman for us all or parodist of all we hold dear? That we can entertain these multiple possibilities is a compliment to Eno’s mercurial writing, admirably realized by actor Bill LeSueur and director Cristan Keighley (who, in their day jobs, are C-VILLE’s art director and a graphic designer, respectively). Together they have crafted a 90-minute continuum that leaps from the tragic to the absurd, the coarse to the tender, with unfaltering energy and focus.

“Based on nothing”? Don’t believe it. A rich awareness of theatrical and literary history informs this complex play. Overt allusions to Shakespeare, Byron, and Dr. Seuss aside, Beckett’s Krapp is a near ancestor of Thom, and there are also reminders of Albee’s Zoo Story, the self-contradictions of Willy Loman, the deliberate bathos in Chekhov, the “nonsense” of Lewis Carroll. Each playgoer is sure to bring different memories with which to convict the subtitle of the irony that marks Thom Pain as a whole.

Or whatever.