5.6.08: Cabaret at Ordway Center

Taken on its own terms, Ordway Center’s production of Cabaret is dazzling. The full resources of the theater, both financial and technical, are on vivid display in the physical production, from the Emcee’s first entrance, descending on an illuminated sign, to his swinging out over the audience with a gorilla.

But I couldn’t get past the persistently nagging feeling that all this glitz and glamour was, in reality, antithetical to the original story. In 1930s Berlin, Sally Bowles, a singer at the Kit Kat Club, romances American writer Cliff Bradshaw on the verge of the Nazi takeover of Germany. From its beginnings in Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories and the play I Am a Camera by John van Druten, the story has emphasized the seedy decadence of Weimar Germany. Kander and Ebb's musical version maintains the dark sleaziness of the original source material, but that tawdriness is nowhere to be seen on the Ordway stage.

Ordway producing artistic director James Rocco makes the case for the production’s historical accuracy by referencing University of Minnesota professor Eric D. Weitz’s New York Times bestseller, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy. According to Rocco, “What this research reveals is that the look and feel of Weimar Berlin cabarets and nightclubs were not all that different from night spots in New York, London, and Paris during the same period.” The Ordway’s production focuses on the glittering cabarets that Hitler kept open to fool an unknowing nation of citizens who continued to party while Berlin was burning. Such high-class establishments obviously existed. But would a garish character, such as Sally Bowles, have worked in one? And if she did, wouldn’t she have earned enough to pay for her own lodgings rather than having to crash with Cliff pleading poverty?

The production team seems to have overlooked these logical flaws in their zeal to create a magnificently opulent set. And, frankly, all such concerns are swept aside by the strong energy and staging of this show.

The revisions to Joe Masteroff’s original book go uncredited, but they are delicious. Adding the conceit of Brechtian conventions is smart and helpful in the staging while also being an appropriate evocation of the period. The emphasis on homosexuality further evokes the liberated attitudes of that age and hearkens back to the Isherwood original.

Bill Berry’s direction is glitzy, but it’s glitz with substance. He finds the abundant humanity as well as the horror in this dark show, especially as the Nazi influence becomes increasingly omnipresent. And there are plenty of clever bits and touches that will surprise even those who have seen several other versions of Cabaret. For example, the “girls” of the orchestra are played by men in elaborate hag drag, and Bob Richard’s choreography in the dancing chorus is splendidly fresh and energetic. 

There is nothing subtle about the staging; it is a broad, no-holds-barred spectacle from beginning to end, including the portrayals of the individual characters. That over-the-top mania works perfectly for the Emcee (Nick Garrison), who is outrageous but pulls it off by capturing the period’s decadence. Tari Kelly’s Sally is somewhat less successful. Her performance is too loud and brassy and would have benefited from a little delicacy here and there. That said, her performance of “Maybe This Time” rivaled even Liza’s from the film.

Next to the Emcee, the strongest performance is Suzy Hunt as Fräulein Schneider, Cliff and Sally’s landlady. She became the emotional heart of the production and made the most of her two songs (cut from the film), “So What,” a statement of her fatalistic philosophy, and “What Would You Do?” a painful justification of her decision to break off her engagement to the Jewish Herr Schultz. Her lacerating performance truly raised the show to the level of tragedy. Allen Fitzpatrick’s Schultz was not in her league, but his sweet naiveté proved endearing.

In that company, Louis Hobson, as the very “nice” Cliff, made little impression. He is ostensibly the lead character, but the role is so pallid and underwritten that it’s not his fault that he receded into the background. He is at his best when singing and has a strong baritone that enlivened even his mediocre songs.

One of the most exciting elements of this production is that it is a coproduction of the Ordway, Seattle’s 5th Avenue Theatre, and the American Musical Theatre of San Jose. Opera companies discovered years ago that coproductions are essential for survival, but it’s a relatively new concept for nonprofit theaters. More such coproductions are in the works, which speaks to the Ordway’s excellent stewardship of its resources.

Cabaret continues at Ordway Center through May 18.

5.2.08: Jesus Christ Superstar at the Orpheum

So if you’re going to have a black guy play Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar, it better be Corey Glover. If you’re a guilty white person like me, you still might squirm a little bit when you see Glover take his forty pieces of silver to hand over Ted Neeley’s J. C. I mean, the historical Christ probably looked more like Osama bin Laden than Barry Gibb with Jennifer Aniston hair extensions, right? So having a black man betray a white Jesus with a kiss in front of a predominantly white audience at the Orpheum could be interpreted as an irresponsible move. But the casting is defensible on two prongs: (1) If you’re going to do a rock 'n' roll passion play, you need rock stars—and Corey Glover was the only African American to front a big rock band (Living Colour) in the forty years between Jimi Hendrix and that dude from Bloc Party. (2) If anybody can illicit sympathy for having issues with Jesus, the guy that sang the Grammy-winning 1988 hit “Cult of Personality” can.

Neeley, of course, is reprising the role he transubstantiated in the original 1973 movie version of Superstar—and even though he’s now way past thirty-three years old, if you’re sitting back far enough, he still looks good in the robes (even the crucifixion diaper, actually). And he can still sing: He comes close to bona fide Axl Rose range, going from a warm Seger baritone to what Chuck Klosterman once referred to as Rose’s “crazy devil woman” voice.

Actually, Neeley’s Christ—or should I say Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Christ— is a very specific cultural interpretation that has a lot in common with Axl W. Rose. First of all, they both love the Elton John/Queen, almost operatic hard rock, with gigantic guitars, strings, and over-the-top vocals. They both were country boys living in the big city amongst groupies and sinners—Indiana Axl had his Michelle, and Jesus of Nazareth had his Mary Magdalene; they both were hella judgmental towards the people in their new homes (Axl penning Hollywood-is-a-New-Sodom ditties like “Welcome to the Jungle” and “One in a Million,” Christ using his own crazy devil woman voice to kick the merchants out of the temple). And they both had insane martyr complexes—Axl with the "November Rain"/"Don’t Cry"/"Estranged" video cycle, where he imagines himself dying alone repeatedly, and Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane , asking first, plaintively, “Will no one stay awake with me, Peter, John, James? Will no one wait with me, Peter, John, James?” and then, in devil woman voice, “Whyyyyyyyyyyyy, whyyyyyyyyyy should I die?!?”

In a way, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s J. C. is, like Axl, the paradigm for the perfect rock star. Maybe even a painful reminder to people like me, who actually miss rock stars. Some people don’t—and you guys can have Weezer and Deerhoof and Stephen Malkmus. But I miss my rock stars. And outside of nostalgic video games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band, do we have any contemporary musical messiahs? After Axl, we had a few reluctant prophets: Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder had J. C.’s sensitive side down, but they were reluctant Superstars. The post-grunge guys, Chris Martin and Thom Yorke, are both holier-than-thou enough, but they seem so proggy, and hidden behind technology, so English. The Strokes are more like a cool clique of apostles than The Second Coming. I dunno, Jack White? Isn’t he a little too wan? And some people see Mary Magdalene in Meg, but I really don’t. I guess there’s always Bono—but have you ever really seen Bono angry? Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Christ gets angry, and he sort of has a sexy girlfriend, and he’s full of angst about his position in the world. You could make the argument that hip hop has cornered the market on superstars—remember P. Diddy and Nas rapping up on twin crosses on “Do You Hate Me Now?” But most of the superstar rappers, like Jay-Z, who actually refers to himself as J-HOVA, or “God MC,” have the persecution complex down, but lack the element of introspection, the “Why me, Lord?” that comes with the responsibility of trying to do the right thing.

Which brings me to an old Yoda quote: “No. There is another.” Like Axl and J. C., I also would rather hang with the sinners than cry with the saints, so with that in mind, my sex columnist friend, Alexis, is always asking me, “What do you white boys love so much about Kanye West?” This is the perfect opportunity to give her a definitive answer.

O Kanye, how great Thou art. On one of his first big hits, “Jesus Walks,” off his debut album The College Dropout, he raps about the responsibility of being the voice of his generation (after surviving a serious car accident, no less). “God show me the way because the devil tryin’ to break me down/the only thing that I pray is my feet don’t fail me now.” He grew up with his single mother in the Midwest, before going on to become a success in the biggest media transmitter cities in the world. He cultivates a martyr complex, on topics both great—“George Bush doesn’t care about black people!”—and small—the Grammys. On songs like “Heard ‘Em Say,” and “Diamonds from Sierra Leone” he’s not afraid to examine his own petty obsessions, nor the larger system that produces those obsessions. He’s always doubting himself and then finding strength in his faith (“Stronger”), in that angsty, petulant, Andrew Lloyd Webber Christ way.

And he does it all with fresher beats, and a much fresher haircut.

4.12.08: Rusalka at Ordway Center

I hate the way Minnesota Opera is marketing its current production of Antonin Dvorak’s Rusalka. Billing it as “The Little Mermaid without the happy ending” is condescending to the audience, to the opera, and to Hans Christian Andersen’s original story. Must everything in our culture end up being Disney-fied?

Rusalka follows the plot of the Andersen fairy tale fairly closely—until the end, where it veers in the opposite direction from the Disney cartoon. A water nymph, Rusalka, having fallen in love with a mortal Prince, desires to become human. Against the advice of her father, a water gnome, she takes the potion of the Witch Jezibaba and becomes human, despite the potentially tragic consequences. When the Prince betrays her, those consequences unfurl—the Prince dies. But that fate would be too easy for Rusalka: She is also cursed to spend eternity alone.

There is much that is mythic in fairy tales. In the language of children, they reveal some of humanity’s most profound truths. Dvorak’s romantic score hints at these deeper realities, conjuring the unconscious realms that Freud was contemporaneously exploring. But director Eric Simonson didn’t seem able to hear or exploit them.

On the most basic level, Simonson seemed unwilling or incapable of creating a sense of magic onstage. This is a fatal flaw in an opera about a water nymph. The results were ultimately enervating. If I hadn’t had the professional responsibility of reviewing it, I would not have stayed through the end.

Simonson staged the supernatural figures of Rusalka’s father, the water gnome, and the witch Jezibaba like Russian peasants. There was little fantastic or otherworldly about them. Robert Pomakov lumbered about the stage, barely showing much interest in what was going on around him. More disastrously, Dorothy Byrne’s Jezibaba came off like a comic character. She wasn’t dangerous or frightening, even when she conjured the horrifying consequences of Rusalka’s request.

Given Simonson’s earthbound direction, it should not be surprising that it was Alison Bates’ devious Foreign Princess, who seduced the Prince away from Rusalka, that came off as the most fully realized character in the production.

Kelly Kaduce, who made such a splash as Rosasharon in last season’s The Grapes of Wrath, was less successful as Rusalka. She never seemed able to inhabit her part. I never felt either her great longing to become human or her great despair at the tragic results. Her "Song to the Moon" in the first act, the opera’s most famous number, was beautifully vocalized, but little more. And her plaintive aria in Act III left me unmoved.

Likewise, the Prince of Brandon Jovanovich was little more than a stock operatic tenor. At his first entrance, for example, he sang of feeling sad, but there wasn’t much sadness in his performance—though he did redeem himself somewhat with a fine death scene.

It was the work of projections designer Wendall K. Harrington and lighting designer Robert Wierzel that generated the real magic. They created the underwater realm and then, in an instant, transformed it into a forest. And the forest that was idyllic in Act I became nightmarish in Act III. There was something mythic in their succession of images, but it is unfortunate that the essence of Dvorak's opera resided only in the visuals.

Rusalka continues at the Ordway Center through April 20.

4.11.08: Exit Strategy at Mixed Blood Theatre

As more and more people are discovering every day, growing old in the United States of America isn’t as much fun as the brochures suggest. But that doesn’t mean plays about aging can’t be fun; and if Exit Strategy at Mixed Blood Theatre is any indication, the more miserable we are in our dotage, the funnier those plays are going to be.

Bickering is the key. There’s nothing more entertaining than watching two people who’ve known each other forever snipe and argue over the same little annoyances they’ve been complaining about for decades. I mean, it’s funny to watch a mom scold her teenage son for not putting the toilet seat down, but it’s much funnier to watch an eighty-year-old woman nag an old man for the same infraction of bathroom etiquette, because you can’t help but think, “My god, she’s been harping on that same topic for fifty years, and hasn’t learned that the nagging men about their bathroom habits is a waste of time, or that the best defense against a raised seat is simply to check it before you sit down!”

At any rate, I think it’s funny—but maybe that’s because I’m a man on whom such nagging is lost. Granted, the woman nagging me might not find the humor in it, but after seeing Exit Strategy, I now feel certain I can assure my wife that although she may not find my irritating habits funny now, all she has to do is wait thirty years—then they’re going to be hilarious.

Co-written by ex-Pioneer Press music and theater critic Roy Close and Bill Semans, who also plays Alex the visitor in the play, Exit Strategy is an old-fashioned play in the sense that it doesn’t try to do too much, and what it does attempt, it gets just right. The press teasers for Exit Strategy suggest that it’s a sort of Bucket List for the stage, but the play is less about some old people who refuse to stop going for the gusto than it is a vehicle for some high-quality bickering and a great deal of trenchant but amusing conversation on the nature of sex, death, aging, and various aspects of bodily health.

Set in a tenement hotel that’s going to be shut down in a month, the play revolves around three characters in their seventies and eighties: May, the seventy-something manager of the hotel; James, a gay, eighty-two-year-old ex-actor and resident of the hotel; and Alex, a visitor who enlists them in a caper that ends up forcing May and James to reassess the way they are going to live the rest of their lives.

Though May and James aren’t married, they certainly bicker like they are—and that’s half the fun of the show. James is an aging queen who just wants a warm place to sit and a cigarette every now and then, and May seems determined to make sure he doesn’t get them. Charles Nolte delivers a tremendous performance as James, and as May, Shirley Jean Venard is wonderfully acerbic, lacing all of her comments with an acidic, world-weary cynicism. Both have exquisite comic timing, and they have been gifted with a script that gives them plenty of great dialogue to play with, all steeped in the uncomfortable truth that growing old is a slow process of continual loss—of dignity, independence, love, respect, passion and, eventually, life itself.

In the press kit for Exit Strategy, it’s noted that the people involved in the production of this play have a combined age of over 500, and together they have logged more than 300 years in theater. This may help explain why there’s such a gentle, knowing quality to this play—a willingness to discuss some of the brutal truths about aging combined with the courage and wisdom to laugh at them. For example, James and Alex discuss bowel movements they way teenagers talk about sex: Whereas Alex prefers to stay regular by making sure that he eats enough fiber, James replies, “I use a stool softener. It’s quite lovely.”

That “quite lovely” hints at a private aesthetic experience that anyone over sixty in the audience will recognize. Likewise, May’s matter-of-fact pragmatism is the by-product of a life that didn’t turn out quite the way she planned, of dreams deferred and detoured. So when Alex the visitor proposes the theory that a nap a day can “add years to your life,” she snaps back, “You say that as if it’s a good thing.”

The great thing about Exit Strategy is that it strikes such an entertaining balance between tragedy and comedy, ultimately providing a sense of reassurance that life isn’t over until it’s over, and until the lights go out, interesting things can still happen. And even if they don’t, all those tedious things you’ve been doing for the past forty years are eventually going to be hilarious, given the time and perspective to make them so.

Exit Strategy continues at Mixed Blood Theater through May 4.

4.01.08: High School Musical at the State Theatre

As an awkward, skinny, bespectacled sixth grader, I always dreamed that high school would be like it was on the stage at the State Theatre Tuesday night—a place where the geeks and the jocks would intermingle, where the basketball team never lost a game, and where you’d find true love sitting next to you in chemistry class. Of course, the real deal is nothing like it was on the stage last night. Diversity was disparaged, cliques never mingled, and true love was generally found at the bottom of a beer keg.

High School Musical originated as a made-for-TV Disney movie, and it remains a typical Disney-style spectacle. Inside the four walls of East High, Jocks, Brainiacs, Thespians, and Skater Dudes start off the show by keeping to their cliques (relevant song: “Stick to the Status Quo”) and end the show by all coming together for the good of society, belting out “We’re All in This Together.”

In between, the show features plenty of feel-good bromides (“you can be anything you want to be”) and high-school clichés—the popular yet obnoxious blonde drama queen and her queer best friend; the big-man-on-campus jock who falls for the exotic Brainiac new girl; and an animated, artfully dressed, liberal-minded drama teacher—all played for as many laughs as possible. And, predictably, the show is strongest when the company dances and sings—which is good, because the strong vocals make up for the fact that the acting seems a bit forced at times.

On the surface, High School Musical may seem like nothing more than a typical Disney product, complete with saccharine sentiments, stolen kisses, and a feel-good ending, but the story is laced with thoughts that challenge the same ideas the songs seem to be championing. In “Stick to the Status Quo,” for example, the song is about staying in your clique and knowing where you belong, yet the jock solos about his love for baking crème brulee, and the overweight science geek breaks out into her favorite hip-hop jam. Also included are life lessons about teamwork, loyalty, and friendship, all of which are refreshingly sensible, no matter what your age.

And while most of the kids in the theater probably don’t even know what “the status quo” is, HSM gives parents a convenient vehicle for discussing the real-life issues alluded to in the show. It can also help remind parents about the perennial conflicts and challenges of high school, and offer some helpful guidance about how things have changed—and how they have stayed so very much the same.

Disney’s High School Musical continues at the State Theatre through April 6,.

03.28.08: 42nd Street at Chanhassen Dinner Theatres

Leave it to director Michael Brindisi to breathe new life into an old chestnut like 42^nd Street. He treats this quintessential show biz musical like it’s real drama and ends up giving it a dark core, reminiscent of the 1933 movie on which it’s based, which was itself keenly reflective of the despair of the Depression.

The show follows the plot of the movie. Director Julian Marsh has been wiped out by the Stock Market Crash and is desperate that the new musical he’s mounting be a success to restore his fortunes. When his star, Dorothy Brock, breaks her ankle, it looks like the jig is up, until neophyte chorus girl, Peggy Sawyer, steps in and saves the day.

The book of the stage version, which premiered on Broadway in 1980, is amazingly sharp and smart, full of wit and more than its share of bitchy dialogue. It pokes gentle fun at the genre while still celebrating every cliché.

Brindisi’s clever staging expands on that premise, managing to be both satire and homage at the same time. That is an incredibly difficult line to walk, but Brindisi’s version does it expertly and, as a result, he creates a show that is both sardonic and full off heart, hilariously funny and genuinely moving.

It’s not hard to see Marsh, the aging director in search of a hit, as a stand-in for Brindisi himself. This is clearly very personal for him. Through Marsh, Brindisi focuses the silly show on the struggle of the artist, the act of creativity that gets the show up by sheer force of will. And this is reflected in David Anthony Brinkley’s performance. He played Marsh twelve years ago in Chanhassen’s last staging, but this time he creates a far richer character, darker and more wretched, who seems to unravel under the pressure. His rendition of “Lullaby of Broadway” has a palpable, inspiring passion.

Michelle Barber's Brock has that same passion and even a greater degree of humanity. She is every inch the bitchy temperamental diva, but as the character who really transforms over the course of the evening, she adds an emotional depth to the proceedings and carries much of the show. She demonstrated her acting chops earlier this year in Pen at the Guthrie, and they are on display here as well. She also gives a master class in how to belt out a ballad.

As Peggy Sawyer, Jodi Carmeli proves that she is anything but a neophyte, especially in her performance of the title song, which she makes into a real star turn. She is a diva in the making herself. Earlier, she manages to make the character’s innocence fresh, fully embracing the sentimentality of the role without ever becoming cloying.

It’s hard to imagine a stronger dancing chorus anywhere in the country, even on 42^nd Street. And choreographer Tamara Kangas puts them through their paces. From the first curtain, she challenges them with dances that are at once appropriately familiar and yet full of surprises. Her inventiveness keeps the eye captivated at every turn.

The show also demonstrates an amazing depth of talent in its strong supporting cast, which is full of Chanhassen regulars. Tony Vierling is charming as the juvenile, both in his spectacular dancing and in his ability to invest the implausible love story with real believability.

It’s up to Janet Hayes-Trow and Jay Albright, as the second bananas, the married writers of the show, to add an extra level of jocularity. Their performances in “Shuffle Off to Buffalo” are priceless. No one can mug or do the sad-sack shtick better than Albright. And Hayes-Trow’s wisecracking, tough-as-nails dame is a perfect foil.

Nayna Ramey’s set is not one of her more successful efforts. It is functional and efficient, but not particularly eye-catching. But it does provide an effective canvas for Sue Ellen Berger’s dazzling lighting effects. The pride of place for design elements, however, goes to Rich Hamson’s stunning costumes, particularly the flower gowns he creates for a faux-Ziegfeld Follies number.

This is not your grandfather’s 42^nd Street. It’s as silly as any old-fashioned musical should be, and yet carries with it an extra level of seriousness that leavens the foolishness and turns this into a very special celebration of the theatre.

42nd Street continues at Chanhassen Dinner Theatres through July 26.

3.20.08: Jersey Boys at The Orpheum

I took my mom to  Jersey Boys last night. She really wanted to go. She graduated from Robbinsdale in ’65, and used to go see local quartets exactly like Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons—four dudes with greasy hair and loud sport coats trying to sing like girls—at a dance hall on University called The Prom. You know, deeeeep in the past.

I know the show is critically acclaimed; It’s been an impossible ticket ever since in opened on Broadway in ’05. And I’ve heard there’s even an effenheimer cool factor—it’s set in Jersey, so they use tough guy Sopranos–type language (my mom dutifully parroted KSTP’s Rusty Gatenby geeky line about how “you hear a lot of f-words, and I don’t mean    fun.”). But really, how good could a musical about Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons be? “Sherry Baby”? “Big Girls Don’t Cry”? I mean, those songs were good in Stand by Me, I guess. But it just seemed like the sort of show more suited to the cheesy stuff they used to have at the old Hey City Theater down the block rather than the Orpheum. It seemed like I was headed for bad dinner theater. And I was missing March Madness on top of everything else.

Did I make you wait long enough?

I loved it.

Best musical ever?

I mean, it’s a show about four duck-tailed Itals growing up in late ’50s New Jersey. Everybody was dressed like the opening third of Goodfellas, and they talked musical-speak, where every line is either a set-up or a punch line, but the story felt risky—it reminded me of The Wire season two, where a black show goes white. Like that Obama speech this week, when he talked about all the resentful white people who are bummed about affirmative action and inter-district busing and stuff. Well, I grew up on the pale elysian fields of White Bear Lake, so I’m not sure exactly what he was talking about—but after seeing Jersey Boys, I got it.

These four guys, the Jersey Beatles—Frankie Valli, Tommy DeVito, Nick Massi, and Bobby “The Genius” Gaudio—all came from a place in the country where there weren’t that many prospects. As Tommy DeVito (played with the perfect amount of sharpie smirk by Erik Bates) says early on, “You didn’t have many choices. You either joined the army, got mobbed up, or became a star.”

I mean, how is that different than Notorious B.I.G.’s hip-hop lyric from thirty years later: “Streets is a short stop/either you slingin’ crack rock/or you got a wicked jump shot”?

These Italians were fighting for the same scraps Biggie was fighting for in Brooklyn. In and out of jail for running card games or whatever other smalltime grift. Doing anything it takes to avoid working a straight job. Singing their Catholic asses off under street lamps, breaking into churches to practice on the organ, stealing moves from “the colored acts,” dropping out of trade school to write songs, and trying to convince some Jewish guy in Manhattan to record them and get them on American Bandstand.

The dirty history of rock ‘n’ roll is all there in this show—these guys were as big as the Beatles in the ’60s. They sold 175 million records. They cheated on their wives on the road. And fell apart over bad debt, not wussy, British-type “creative differences.” And their four outsized personalities—Frankie the Saint, Tommy the Hood, Bobby the Genius, and Nicky the Lazy Bum—are each distinctly drawn.

And yeah, those songs? “Sherry Baby”? “Big Girls Don’t Cry”? “Walk Like a Man”? “Who Loves You”? Way better than I remembered. I think the whole crowd—filled with a lot of people of my mom’s age and stage—morphed into one collective teenage girl on the strength of the Four Seasons’ harmonic voice meld. I’m sure this show can bring out the teenage girl in anybody, actually. The Four Seasons’ songbook is American opera—mass produced, gender-bending, and filled with off-the-dork hooks. If you don’t try hitting one Frankie Valli falsetto walking out of the theater . . .

Well, you’re a bigger man than I.

Jersey Boys runs through April 20 at the Orpheum Theatre.

3.18.08: The Drowsy Chaperone at Ordway Center

How many times has a Fringe show ended up on the stage of the Ordway? Well, at least once. Following its origins as a bachelor party entertainment , the musical The Drowsy Chaperone had an early incarnation as part of the Toronto Fringe Festival. The show betrays its Fringe roots in its general irreverence and outrageousness, but is now clothed in the guise of a big Broadway production.

This is a completely original show. “Original” is not a word you often hear applied to Broadway musicals these days, not in this era of movie adaptations and bloated Disney extravaganzas. But The Drowsy Chaperone is fresh and innovative, even though it trades heavily on 1920s nostalgia.

When the curtain rises, a musical comedy queen, identified only as Man in Chair, is sitting in his armchair, contemplating his old, original cast recording of the 1928 musical The Drowsy Chaperone. It’s a two-disc set of the entire show. (He enthusiastically shows off the jacket to the audience.) When he puts it on the turntable, the show comes to life right there in his kitchen.

The record is one of the running gags of the show. When the phone rings and he lifts the needle, the actors freeze. When the disc skips or repeats, it is reflected in the action. And when he puts the wrong record on, well, to tell would be to spoil it. Suffice it to say, it’s one of the highlights in a show full of highlights. The physical comedy is all carried off with great flair.

Man in Chair enthusiastically shares his arcane knowledge of the show, filling in all the background, reviewing the performances as they are happening, even giving us the warped performance histories of all the actors. Was there ever a more ingenious means of deconstructing a genre? His reflections might be obsessive, but they are also expressions of genuine love and bona fide wit.

The show itself is total fluff—as musicals of that period (with the very real exception of Showboat) absolutely were. Who can remember the plots of Gershwin or Porter shows? They were interchangeable. This one is the story of a wedding that almost doesn’t happen, but of course it does—along with a number of other romantic entanglements. But Bob Martin and Don McKellar’s book is full of enough really good gags, puns, and double entendres to carry it along.

It’s the songs that were the heart of those period shows, and the ones here by Lisa Lambert and Greg Morrison are tuneful and charming, a perfect evocation of the eras—from the tap number, where the dancers actually set the stage on fire, to the romantic ballads, to a tango number. The stage effects accompanying these numbers are not only spectacular, they are also quite inventive. The way they suggest an airplane taking off is a delight.

For all the spectacle of the show within a show, it is Jonathan Crombie, as Man in Chair, who walks away with the evening. Amidst all the artifice, he is a human being, wonderfully funny, but even more wonderfully real. His touching performance hits all the right notes. When he moved into the playing area and began mimicking the performer, I almost wept. How else can a true musical comedy aficionado enjoy an original cast album except by playing along? In his wide-eyed eagerness and enthusiasm, he was completely endearing.

The rest of the cast was also quite strong, creating an effective ensemble. A real treat was seeing Georgia Engel, playing the same role (Ted’s girlfriend, Georgette) that she did on The Mary Tyler Moore Show thirty years ago. The standouts were Andrea Chamberlain and Mark Ledbetter as the ingénue and juvenile—along with Nancy Opel, who was delightful as the title character.

The Drowsy Chaperone won Tony Awards for Best Book and Best Score, but not for Best Musical. Even hypothetically, that’s hard to understand. I mean, how can you have the best script and best songs, but not be the best show? It’s even more perplexing after you’ve seen the show. The Drowsy Chaperone is the most clever, most joyful—and, thanks to Crombie, sweetest—musical to come from Broadway in quite some time.

The Drowsy Chaperone continues at the Ordway through March 30.

3.15.08: Frozen at Park Square Theatre

When you pry open the mind of a serial killer, what do you get? It’s a question people never seem to tire of asking, one that provides fodder for endless movie and TV plots, fills twenty-four hour news cycles, and provides fuel for the eternal debate over the morality and efficacy of capital punishment. It also happens to be one of the questions at the center of Byrony Lavery’s Frozen, currently receiving a solid but problematic staging at Park Square Theatre.

Maybe it’s Patty Wetterling fatigue. Or one too many Jon Benet Ramsey cases. Or the fact that Frozen was written ten years ago, Byrony Lavery is British, and England doesn’t yet have pedophiles lurking around every corner waiting to snatch little children and do unspeakable things to them in order to satisfy their deviant desires. Whatever it is, it makes Frozen feel less like a play than a starter script for a television show that was rejected on the grounds that it didn’t have enough action, the characters talked about themselves too much, and the killer himself didn’t seem evil enough.

The play revolves around three people: a serial killer named Ralph (played by Terry Hempleman), a psychologist who is researching a thesis called “Serial Killing: A Forgivable Act?” (Linda Kelsey), and a woman (played by Karen Landry) whose seven-year-old daughter was abducted, raped, and killed by Ralph.

The gist of Agnetha the psychologist’s thesis is that most serial killers are victims themselves—of mental deficiencies, brain injuries, physical and emotional abuse, or all of the above—and are therefore not responsible for their actions. “The difference between a crime of evil and a crime of illness is the difference between a sin and a symptom,” she says. The mother whose daughter Ralph killed doesn’t see it that way, of course—at least not in the beginning—and she would prefer to watch him fry in an electric chair than explain away his crimes as symptoms of a disease rather than the acts of a sadistic monster.

The play is acted well, especially by Terry Hempleman, who does a brilliant job of portraying a character who is creepy but charming, likeable on the surface but rotten underneath. Both Linda Kelsey and Karen Landry turn in polished performances as well. It’s just a shame that this ensemble didn’t have a more powerful script to work with. The issues at the heart of Frozen have been explored so thoroughly in American popular culture that it renders the play almost charmingly naïve. And in the end, what does one make of a play that tries to tackle issues that any number of TV shows—Criminal Minds, Numbers, Law and Order, Cold Case, Medium, take your pick—all treat in more interesting, sophisticated ways? The writers of these shows have been wracking their brains for years trying to come up with ever more bizarre pathologies for killers, and in the process they have created a kind of sociopath-entertainment complex. Psychological deviance is the entertainment industry’s biggest cash cow; if it weren’t, there would be no such thing as Saw 4.

At the center of all these dramas is the essential question: Why did he do it? For the most part, the entertainment industry likes sick, twisted, easy-to-hate killers who are obvious wackos. That way, people don’t go to bed confused about who the bad guy is. The best thing about Frozen is that it doesn’t serve up an easy answer. It implies that Ralph was an abused child and that a bump on his head may have somehow damaged his brain, and that these somehow caused him to ultimately become a child molester/murderer—but it leaves the core question open. Ralph did horrible things for which he isn’t very sorry, so it’s up to everyone else to figure out what to make of him. The trouble is, if society digs too deeply and actually answers the why? question of serial killers—e.g., that they all have a cortisone deficiency hindering the development of the pre-frontal lobe in their cerebral cortex—then we as a society have to re-examine how we apply the ideas of right and wrong, as well as crime and punishment.

These are the sorts of questions Frozen asks but cannot answer (the title refers to the emotional core of a serial killer’s brain), and this is both its strength as a dialectic on criminality, as well as its deficiency in the area of drama and storytelling. The set is framed by pieces scratched, cloudy plexiglass patched together into a wall of sorts, suggesting that this is not an issue we as a society see very clearly. You won’t see it any clearer after watching Frozen, but if you’re TV is on the fritz and you need a psycho-pathology fix, Park Square will happily sell you a ticket.

Frozen continues at Park Square through March 30, parksquaretheatre.org

03.07.08: 9 Parts at the Guthrie

Before 9 Parts of Desire last night, I stopped off for a drink in the Target Lounge, the tight little bar tucked back beneath the Endless Bridge. There are three specialty cocktails on the menu this March, this Women’s History Month, each honoring one of the three female leads performing on the three Guthrie stages. I ordered the astonishing jack and coke: simple, just Jack Daniels and Coca Cola over ice, garnished with—wait for it—nine maraschino cherries. One wet, red cherry for each character lead actress Kate Eifrig portrays in the one-woman show. By the end of the drink, I had nine stems jumbled in front of me on my cocktail napkin.

Overkill? Sure, but 9 Parts of Desire begins with a similarly heavy handed metaphor. Eifrig comes out to play in a gigantic sandbox, with only a few props strewn about: some charred books, empty picture frames and a portrait of Saddam Hussein, a large washbasin and a Persian rug. Her character, an Arab woman swathed in a jet-black burka, obscuring everything but the angular planes of her face, is carrying a basket of blackened shoes. In halting English, with a strong Iraqi accent, the woman explains that she has come to the ancient banks of this river to wash the soles of these shoes.

Soles, souls. Get it?

Ambitious in its austerity—written by the American-Iraqi playwright Heather Raffo—9 Parts gets much better after that first scene. And it must be a dream role for Eifrig. She gets to go Eddie Murphy in Coming to America on it, using only her physical and verbal gifts and what seems to be one of those wrap dresses that come with their own wear-it-101-ways! DVDs. She portrays a downright Churchillian ex-pat watching the war from London, chewing scenery in a regal Kathleen Hepburn accent. She does a tweenaged Iraqi girl that can distinguish between the sound of a RPG and a bomb dropped from a plane as easily as two different boy band singles. A hunched over old woman who takes us through a bomb shelter where her family was gruesomely boiled within, Slaughterhouse Five-style, by a Gulf War I incendiary bomb. An American woman trying to connect to her relatives in the middle of a firefight. And a decadent, bourgeoisie Iraqi artiste whose flamboyant Cruella De Ville cackle belies her humiliation by the government officials she sleeps with in order to keep painting her nudes.

There are some thrilling moments for Eifrig, and it must be incredibly rewarding to stretch as an actress in this way. That is what we love about one-woman plays, right? The volatile emotional hurly-burly, with an incredibly talented, Joan Allen-beautiful woman like Eifrig going to the wall for the audience. At a great one woman show, I feel like Marcello in 8 ½, when all of his ex-girlfriends are collected in one room (this is every man’s fantasy, deep down). A great one-woman play is an intoxicating experience.

But let’s not get carried away. Shakespeare asked, “Can we desire too much of a good thing?” and 9 Parts might be just that. It’s definitely timely (even though this news cycle, the war isn’t polling as well as the economy), and it has some compelling perspectives. For instance, the children wearing bullets jacketed with depleted uranium around their necks, leading to the despair of an Iraqi doctor overwhelmed by a steady flow of cancer and genetic mutations. Or that sultry bourgeoisie painter who chides us for injecting ourselves in an ancient dispute, who heckles the audience for our naivete, for daring to “Love like an Iraqi woman--to love like you can’t even breathe!” 9 Parts submerses you in facts and anecdotes told by a virtuoso performer, but at times, you feel talked at. For despite the multi-layered, po-mo collage of a story, there is no great unifying aesthetic experience. If you pay attention—and granted, most of us are no longer paying attention, so getting all these POVs in an hour and a half has a certain value—but if you do pay attention, you can get all of this stuff from the fog of multimedia available to us 24/7. It’s fine if you’re going to divide this war into pieces in an attempt to comprehend it, but you should leave us with something.

03.01.08: The Fortunes of King Croesus at the Ordway

I need to eat my words—or at least choke on them a little. In the current edition of Mpls.St.Paul magazine, I questioned Minnesota Opera’s decision to stage the American premiere of Reinhard Keiser’s The Fortunes of King Croesus. It’s an obscure opera, I argued, hardly a great work, the music isn’t particularly sophisticated, and there are probably some good reasons why it’s been relegated to the dustbin of operatic history. But in performance, the work turns out to be unexpectedly engaging, if not exactly a masterpiece.

When the final version of Croesus premiered in 1730, Keiser was a major figure of the early German Baroque. He was an influence on the young Handel. But he was provincial, writing for the opera house in Hamburg, which had its own style. He did not subscribe to the developing international style of opera seria that Handel championed. So in the sweep of history, he was forgotten, somewhat unfairly as it turns out.

Ostensibly, the story is that of the myth of Croesus, King of Lydia, a wealthy and arrogant ruler who is defeated in battle by Cyrus, the King of Persia, and humbled. The primary focus, though, is on his son Atis and the love pentagon that surrounds him. This labyrinthine plot is typical of Baroque opera: Atis and Elmira love each other, but she is pursued by Orsanes, who later tries to stage a coup. He is loved by Clerida, who is in turn loved by Eliates, who Croesus leaves in charge when he goes off to war. As is typical of the Baroque, everything ends on a happy note, however implausibly.

This is certainly pleasant music, full of many clever and interesting moments. But while sounding Handelian, Keiser was not the musical dramatist that Handel was and the work suffers as a result, with long stretches proving tedious. The score has been significantly cut, but it could have been tightened even further.

The performances made as strong a case as possible for the opera. The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra was in the pit, rather than the Minnesota Opera’s usual pick-up orchestra, and it made a difference. SPCO played the intricate score with clarity and precision, not to mention a real sense of the period style. Conductor Harry Bicket led masterfully.

Of the singers, the Elmira of Susanna Phillips was the standout. She had an attractive soprano and a dazzling facility for coloratura. She was also a powerful actress, becoming the emotional center of the opera and giving the frequently superficial music real heart.

The novelty of the opera is that Atis is mute for much of the first act, until the shock of seeing his father captured restores his voice. Vale Rideout was a strong actor throughout, a convincingly ardent lover. When he sang, he revealed a warm and romantic tenor.

As Orsanes, baritone Brian Leehuber was also quite compelling, following up his highly praised performance as Tom Joad in last season's world premiere of The Grapes of Wrath. Once again, he commanded the stage, both vocally and dramatically.

For being the title character, Croesus had remarkably little stage time. But tenor Paul Nilon made the most of it. He convincingly portrayed the character’s transformation, making his emerging humanity truly moving.

The secondary romantic couple was less successful. As Clerida, soprano Jamie-Rose Guarrine proved musically faceless, unable to bring the music to life. And tenor Christian Reinhart had neither the voice nor the bearing to be convincing as the man Croesus would leave in charge in his absence.

As the stock comic servants, Dan Dressen and Andrea Coleman played the cynical, worldly-wise pair with tongue-in-cheek delight. They were underused.

This production was a big hit when it first premiered at Opera North in England, but to my eyes, it let the singers down. Director Tim Albery created individual moments that were quite effective, but he didn’t seem to have any overall dramatic concept to tie all those moments together. Too often, the singers were left stranded in long static stretches. And the truly dramatic moment of Atis finding his voice was completely passed over.

The production seemed to be set in the 1930s, with the Persians as the fascists and Cyrus costumed as Mussolini, which was problematic when it came to the happy ending. That speaks to the lack of visual as well as dramatic coherence. Leslie Travers’s costumes were spectacular, but seemed more interested in spectacle than in conveying dramatic meaning. (Elmira’s outfit was particularly ineffective, making her look more dowdy and matronly than a romantic heroine should.) His sets were likewise striking, but impractical. Strewing the stage with the fuselage of Croesus’s downed airplane created an obstacle course for the singers.

There were plenty of cheers, but this was the first Minnesota Opera production I can recall that did not get a standing ovation. That is, I think, telling of the audience’s reaction to this operatic novelty, and it matches my reaction. The experience was, at best, a qualified success.

2.29.08: My Favorite Kind of Pretty at the Southern Theater

Jon Ferguson’s latest physical-theater work, the love-fable My Favorite Kind of Pretty, takes place in a pretty, quirky pastel world inspired by the artwork of Minneapolis’s Jennifer Davis. Ferguson and his design collaborators—stage designer Erica Zaffarano, composer Pablo, and prop master Jim Hibbeler—recreate the way Davis unfolds her constantly surprising world in one small panel after another yet keeps a consistent overall feel. The bright clothes of the heroine–her fuchsia cable-knit bathrobe, her anklet socks—make her the perfect inhabitant for a miniature house with an even smaller white picket fence. A rainbow path leads to her door, and her closest friend is a pink songbird. But the cuteness has its ragged edge: a weather-balloon moon with a frowny side, a toothy monster-head out of a child’s picture book, a trio of rabbits with darling English accents who keep meeting horrible fates, and the songbird itself, which, when launched into “flight” by the heroine, simply lands with a thud on stage.

This milieu of sweetness and dark is matched by the onstage action, a mix of the metaphorical, the absurd, and the real. The hero gets jealous of the heroine’s previous relationship with the moon (it doesn’t help that the moon claims they slept together “five times a day”) and takes a toy train to get away, but his emotion is real enough. When he finally slays the green demon of his jealousy and brings its paper-bag head back to the heroine, she cries out, “You’re back! And you brought groceries!”

Ferguson’s characteristic directing style pays off handsomely here: the characters play to the house as well as to each other, reacting to stage props (wine glasses glued to a table for easier transportation, for example) with mild astonishment. But they are also completely, pathetically absorbed in their emotions (smiling beatifically during a love montage dotted with tissue paper hearts tossed by visible stagehands). Sara Richardson and Ferguson, as the hero and heroine, win the audience’s affection, but Jason Ballweber’s mercurial Fate steals the show with (among other things) his condor impersonation.

I wish Pretty had been showing around Valentine’s Day: The show seems made to give new life to that sticky sweet holiday. Somehow, Ferguson pulls off the trick of keeping us laughing at the characters without ever introducing contempt for them, with the wonderful result that Pretty plays like the love child of Monty Python, Jane Austen, and The Princess Bride. However, I would recommend Pretty not as a first date show but as a date-night show for couples, because its subject is not that pixie-stick rush of crush, but rather the stranger territory of long-term love.

One montage is a pitch-perfect encapsulation of marital tensions—their silliness as well as their tenacity. When the hero and heroine overcome their troubles and set sail on the roof of their little house, love-flag flying, you’ll want to overcome the argument about who does the dishes and kiss your spouse. And if the show ends with a completely unexpected baby arriving via USPS, it’s easy to forgive Ferguson for the non sequitur: by that time, his own new baby (with versatile performer Megan Odell) was sleeping soundly in the back row of the house.

Jon Ferguson’s My Favorite Kind of Pretty continues at the Southern Theater through March 9

2.23.08: Parade at the History Theater

Admittedly, the idea of a Jewish businessman being lynched for a murder he didn’t commit doesn’t immediately make people want to break out in song. (It takes a while.) But with Parade, a joint production of the Minnesota Jewish Theater Company and Theater Latté Da, you can have your murder and sing about it, too.

Theater purists have long argued that the musical is a maligned art form that has been all but destroyed by Andrew Lloyd Webber and the theater of saccharine spectacle. To those who still believe in it, musical theater has the potential to be a form of storytelling more akin to opera (but with less vibrato), capable of driving a powerful narrative while simultaneously mining a deeper emotional palette through music and song. In theory, the bigger the themes are, the better suited a story is for musical theater done right. 

Well, themes don’t get much bigger than the ones in Parade, and fortunately, Theater Latté Da artistic director Peter Rothstein is a true believer. He founded Latté Da as an incubator for the possibilities of musical theater, and time after time—and again in Parade—, he’s proven that musicals don’t have to be all sentiment and schmaltz; they can be complex, persuasive, and compelling on their own terms, even if sales of the soundtrack CD might come up a little short.

Originally produced in 1998 in New York at the Lincoln Center Theater, Parade is based on the true story of Leo Frank, a Jewish business manager from Brooklyn who, in 1913, was accused of, tried, and eventually lynched for the murder of a teenage girl who worked in the factory he managed in Atlanta, Georgia. Frank was innocent, but he got swept up in an inexorable tide of corruption, politics, bigotry, and blood thirst. Besides being a Jew from New York, he was a Yankee, he was smart, he was successful, and he was quite literally a pencil-necked geek (he ran a pencil factory).

Although the singing and music in Parade are first rate, the interesting thing about it is how well the songs dig beneath layer after layer of Southern pretense to expose the true motives behind the efficient scapegoating of Leo Frank. Frank, played by Dieter Bierbrauer, is clearly trapped in a culture he doesn’t understand. The kangaroo court that tries him is a mockery, and the evidence against him false, but the governor, district attorney, a newspaper publisher, and sleazy reporter all want him to be guilty—therefore, as they say in the South, “He done it.”

Parade is an enormous undertaking involving twenty-five actors, a six-piece orchestra, and a great deal of technical support, so pooling resources with the Minnesota Jewish Theatre Company makes both thematic and practical sense. Director Rothstein has wisely cast equity talent in the key singing roles, so—with only a few minor exceptions—the actual music part of this show is eminently listenable. Ann Michels, as Leo Frank’s wife, and Shawn Hamilton, as a duplicitous factory worker, are both outstanding. And sound designer Montana Johnson deserves special recognition for miking this thing better than most professional Broadway road shows that come through town.

But the reason you should go see Parade, especially if you’re not the type of person who hates musicals, is to see what the art form is capable of in hands as deft as Peter Rothstein’s. I won’t lie to you—there are a few numbers that get the needle on the schmaltz-meter jumping—but for the most part, Parade is a courageous, ambitious undertaking that succeeds on far more levels than anyone has a right to expect outside of Broadway. It may be one of the worst-named shows in history, but pulling it off this well is a great achievement.

2.20.08: My Fair Lady at the Orpheum

The acclaimed West End revival of My Fair Lady opened at the Orpheum last night. It’s been called “the perfect musical,” and sure, this production was great--the stage sets were gigantic and impressive and they moved around seamlessly, the costumes were pretty, Dane DeLisa’s Eliza Doolittle hit almost all the notes on “Wouldn’t It be Loverly,” and Tim Jerome stole the show as Eliza’s drunken daddy during both “With a Little Bit O’ Luck” and “Get Me to the Church on Time.”

Blah, blah, blah. Of course it was great, it’s a billion dollar bash produced by Lerner and Loewe and directed by Trevor Nunn (who directed King Lear and The Seagull at the Guthrie earlier this year), with dance numbers choreographed by Matthew Bourne (who choreographed Swan Lake at the State a couple of years ago). The classiest imports in theater, ladies and gentlemen.

By now, everybody knows the My Fair Lady story by heart, right? Upper-crust gentleman trains unwashed hussy in his upper-crust ways but in the end, the unwashed hussy turns out to be the true classy broad. Even if you don’t, you’ve seen it a million times, because Hollywood loves it: there are direct adaptations such as Richard Gere as Professor Higgins and Julia Roberts as Eliza Doolittle in Pretty Woman and Freddie Prinze Jr. as Higgins and Rachel Leigh Cook as Eliza in She’s All That. And there are movies that just borrow from the Pygmilion myth, such as Trading Places with Don Ameche as Higgins and Eddie Murphy as Liza.

Do you see, I’m fairly well versed in culture both high (Ovid, Shaw) and low (Marshall, Landis). I work hard on my own life of the mind, and I believe that at this point, somebody has to stick up for a kindred spirit, poor vilified Professor Higgins.

I mean, what’s Liza’s problem? For a few shillings—a charitable sliding scale for one of London’s most sought after phonetic professors—Higgins takes this flower girl into his own home, buys her a bunch of couture and jewelry, turns her on to Milton and Keats, helps make her dropped h’s stand up for themselves, and brings her to Buckingham Palace. And she gets upset because he takes the credit for her warm reception at the ball?

Look, I realize that my Morning After readership is 90% female, but ladies, hear me out. When did this male fantasy—generously helping a woman to define and achieve her goals—become perceived as boorish?

I mean, why isn’t Liza considered the boor? When she walks out on Higgins in a pique, she runs into Freddy Eynsford-Hill, a hopeless romantic who’s been waiting outside her window for days on end, and immediately starts berating him. First, she tears up a poem he’s written and then starts singing:

Words! Words! Words! I'm so sick of words!
I get words all day through;
First from him, now from you!
Is that all you blighters can do?

It sounds like a Hillary speech, and we all know how well that’s going over. (Maybe if she set it to an orchestra, and brought in Julie Andrews to sing it, she could’ve won in Wisconsin.)

Higgins gets a raw deal because he was written by a Commie in the first place. George Bernard Shaw took a decent, well-educated man, regarded as a bit of a maverick by The Establishment, and made him a sexist, capitalist pig. And then Alan Jay Werner made him sing songs like “A Hymn to Him,” with lyrics such as:

Why can't a woman be more like a man?
Men are so honest, so thoroughly square;
Eternally noble, historic'ly fair;
Who, when you win, will always give your back a pat.
Well, why can't a woman be like that?

When you put it like that, it sounds insensitive, even dastardly—dismissive of man’s capacity for evil. But we all know what he’s saying—why can’t a woman act like a gentleman? Why is Liza so prideful, so quick to resent help? Why doesn’t poor Higgins get the benefit of the doubt? Michelle Obama gets the benefit of the doubt (we all know she doesn’t really hate America), but she’s not a big mean dude with a London accent, evidently.

Higgins’ mission is not very different than say, Cher Horowitz’s mission in Clueless. Sure, maybe his pet project was chosen partly for self-aggrandizement, but his heart was always in the right place. And just like Jane Austen’s Emma, in the end, we know Higgins just really wanted to be loved, just not by, well, as he says, “a heartless guttersnipe.” In fact, Higgins almost a third wave feminist: intent on making Eliza an independent woman, who wouldn’t need the help of any man, including him. Higgins realizes that the depravity of the street can erode the values of anybody, of any gender. At heart, he’s just a good liberal. And we’re supposed to deride his motives because he picked a cute girl to clean up?

Anyway, forget the traditional Marxist, Feminist and Hollywood Populist readings of My Fair Lady. Instead, read this, dear reader, and give the good Professor a chance.

My Fair Lady plays through March 2 at the Orpheum.

2.15.08: Chek It, Baby at Bryant-Lake Bowl

Reviewing theater on The Morning After is ruining my life.

Saturday night, I saw Jade Esteban Estrada in Chek It, Baby, a one-man gay cabaret which fancifully interprets the great Russian playwright Anton Chekhov’s four masterpieces, The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard, through the lens of a one-man gay cabaret.

It was the second weekend of the Chekhov Festival, a heroic little theater weekend at the Byrant-Lake Bowl, featuring sixteen theater companies “breathing new life into the work of Anton Chekhov through inspired interpretations, inventive adaptations and original multi-disciplinary performance.” I’m not going to fib: it was cold out, and the prospect of reviewing experimental theater inspired by Chekhov seemed a little Theater Geek 101. I was dreading it, really, dreading a dual interpretation of Chekhov’s monologue On the Harmful Effects of Tobacco, one a straight monologue, the other a libretto (possibly with puppets). But I did the honorable thing—I dug into my couch, and waited to leave my apartment until the very last second. Flipping through the channels, landing on Tootsie on TCM for a little while, watching some coverage of the election, and then, unbelievably, yet somehow appropriately, discovering my ex-girlfriend Bonnie was premiering her new stand-up special on Comedy Central. My decision was made for me, right? (Isn’t it always, when you leave it to the whim of the remote?) I decided to blow off Tobacco and watch my own personal Trigorin do a half-hour on her new baby.

I am the seagull, dude.

I haven’t dated Bonnie in years, but it was a huge bummer: Bonnie on Comedy Central; me, sentenced to reviewing the Chekhov Festival at the Bryant-Lake Bowl.

But I made it to the late show dammit, because, to paraphrase Nina, “I am a writer!”

Yeah—probably a mistake.

Okay, I really don’t have anything against Estrada, whom the Topeka Capitol-Journal calls “one of the finest American solo theatre artists of the twenty-first century.” And I don’t have anything against the eleven other lonely souls sitting in the Bryant-Lake Bowl’s theater space, all of whom, based on where and when they laughed during the show, must have been huge Chekhov freaks, and most of whom, based on my extensive eavesdropping, spoke fluent Russian. No, I’m just feeling sorry for myself. And not for going solo right after watching an ex-girlfriend do jokes about her new baby on Comedy Central; no, more for going to experimental gay cabaret with millions of inside Chekhov jokes—and getting most of them.

What the hell is happening to me? Estrada came out to this techno music, making these surreal hand gestures, with his hair waxed into four dramatic spikes, a face full of clown makeup, flashing this gigantic grin. It was like somebody crushed a handful of Adderall into John Leguizamo’s applesauce. Terrifying. He started out by doing a skit that re-set Chekhov’s Three Sisters on a Maury-esque daytime talk show. I laughed at Natasha as an entitled lower-class striver because people like her are actually on Maury all the time. Answering Maury’s inquisition about her cuckolding of Andrei with that specific brand of daytime defiance, “Well, if my husband doesn’t care, I don’t see how it’s any of your business.” It was genuinely funny. I didn’t laugh very much when Estrada flipped on a bouffant wig, squeezed into a tight, short lime green dress and clambered on top a piano to sing a camp torch song inspired by Uncle Vanya, but his evangelical interpretation of The Cherry Orchard had its moments. And his coup de grace, in which he casts extras for a Hollywood version of The Seagull (starring Charo as Nena: “I am a seagull. Coochie, coochie!”), well, it was ridiculous and funny (if not ridiculously funny).

So yeah, I think I enjoyed Chek It, Baby. And I am profoundly disturbed by this.

It’s pretty clear there is nobody with whom I will ever really share a po-mo appreciation of Chekhov. I refuse to go combat boot, pierce-my-face, theater-class-loony like half the crowd in there, and unlike the other half, I’m not ready for my wild old Rooskie phase yet, either. I mean, I get it. Chekhov doesn’t have the appeal of an indie band. Or an Oscar-nominated movie. Or a great new restaurant. I am going to end up deranged, laughing maniacally to myself at John McCain-as-Lopakhin during late-night experimental theater festivals.

One tear.

But, wait a minute. Check it out: of all the great nineteenth-century Russian writers,  Chekhov is the most relatable to somebody that saw There Will Be Blood, just bought the new Vampire Weekend, and loves the cauliflower fritters at the 112. Because Chekhov still works in a world where you can run across your ex-girlfriend on Comedy Central. He’s been there before. He would’ve laughed at me—because he laughed at himself, even when it sucked. He wrote about dating artists, and he wrote about lazy writers, not to mention selfish mothers, jackass supervisors, and absentminded siblings, all people who surround us still. His characters are real—realer than Shakespeare’s by far—and ready for today’s stage, even if it’s late-night, one-man gay cabaret at the Bryant-Lake Bowl.

So please don’t keep making me do this by myself. Chek is worth it. Please.

The Chekhov Festival continues at Bryant-Lake Bowl through March 1, chekhovfestival.org

[1] She only did the first ten minutes on her new baby. Needless to say, the second twenty minutes of her set were much funnier.

2.15.08: The Stones at the Children's Theatre Co.

If you have a teenager, especially a teenage boy, I cannot recommend emphatically enough that you unplug them from the XBox for a few hours and cart their story-starved souls over to the Children’s Theatre to see The Stones.

Written and performed by two veteran actors from Australia’s Zeal Theatre, Tom Lycos and Stefo Nantsou, The Stones is based on the true story of two teenagers in Australia who were put on trial for manslaughter after kicking a rock off a freeway overpass, after t he stone smashed through the windshield of a car and killed the driver. From the raw material of this unfortunate incident, Lycos and Nantsou have created a brilliant two-person play that’s a refreshing departure from the didactic, feel-good theater so often seen on the CTC Stage.

The Stones takes audiences inside the minds of two teenagers (an unsavory prospect right off the bat) who have nothing better to do than goof off and goad each other into doing things neither one of them would probably do on their own. Though Lycos and Nantsou are middle-aged actors, they both do a fantastic (and hilarious) job of capturing the mindless instinct for trouble that plagues kids who have nothing better to do. Before the boys make their fatal mistake, they try out one stupid idea after another, any one of which could either kill them or cause massive property damage. When the consequences of their thoughtlessness finally catches up with them and the police investigation begins, Lycos and Nantsou become the police officers as well, switching seamlessly back and forth between stern, no-nonsense adults and the frightened, clueless kids.

What’s truly great about The Stones is that it doesn’t take sides. Rather, it presents the situation in such a way that there is no black and white, opening up a spirited debate about whether the boys are truly guilty of manslaughter and should be sent to jail, or whether they are merely guilty of a great deal of teenage stupidity and big steaming heap of bad luck. The boys themselves aren’t choirboys—each of them is clearly perched on that cusp of life where they could go either way, and the oldest doesn’t have much remorse for the killing—but the larger question is what society should do with these boys, and at what point do we expect people to take full responsibility for their own actions.

Plays that appeal to kids over the age of twelve don’t come to the Children’s Theatre very often, so don’t miss this opportunity. The Stones is smart, funny, tragic, and thought-provoking—and, as a special bonus for teens, features lots of loud electric guitar music played live by the actors themselves. Another concession to the ADD generation is that the show only an hour long, so your brooding teen can be back in front of their XBox in no time, wreaking the sort of electronic mayhem that would, in the real world, get them into a heap of trouble.

The Stones continues at the Children’s Theatre through March 9.

2.2.08: The Syringa Tree at The Jungle Theater

I am not a crier. So don’t let the fact that I did not shed a tear at the end of The Syringa Tree color your decision to see it. In 2001, when it debuted in New York, people were supposedly so overcome with emotion that they sobbed all the way out into the street. Then again, New Yorkers are not known for their ability to contain their feelings. We Minnesotans, though—well, if you want us to cry, it better be something worth crying about. 

At the end of Saturday night’s performance I could hear people sniffling, and one woman a few rows in front of me dabbed her eye a couple of times, but the waterworks were pretty much over by the time people got to the dessert buffet. Once the wine was poured and people started chatting, all the talk was about what a magnificent actor Sarah Agnew is, and what a tremendous display of her acting talents the play is, and how even the most supremely talented of artists would think twice about taking on such a profoundly awesome professional challenge.

Indeed, if acting were ice skating, Pamela Gien’s The Syringa Tree would be an inverted quadruple toe loop with a triple sow-cow sit spin: about six hundred of them, back to back, with no rest, for an hour and a half. Everything about the play seems designed to ratchet up the level of difficulty. One actor playing more than twenty characters—check (twenty-two). Ridiculously broad age range—check (newborn to eighty-three). Multiple accents—check. White girl playing large, black nanny—check. White girl playing a black man—check (quite a few of them, actually).

Sarah Agnew has been lighting up the stage at Theatre de la Jeune Lune and the Guthrie for years now, but there is something about her decision to do this play that smacks of an actress throwing down the professional gauntlet: “You know I’m good, but I bet you didn’t know I was this good!”

Now we know. She is good, very good, though five or six of the characters in the play seem like they were tossed in just to impress the judges. Agnew is at her best while playing six-year-old Lizzie Grace, the daughter of a white doctor and his wife in 1960s South Africa who seem to have a whole house full of black folks working for them. I am not going to spoil the plot for you (because, honestly, I did not entirely follow the plot). Suffice it to say that there is a lot of tension between the whites and blacks, the police do a lot of sniffing around for an illegitimate baby that the doctor family is hiding, and everyone gets nervous whenever they come around—and for good reason, it turns out.

That’s all I’m going to say, except that holy multiple-personality disorder, that Sarah Agnew can act! It’s astonishing to watch her transition from character to character with such seamless ease. And the fact that she can sustain a conversation between five different characters in a room all by herself is a profound testament to her skills. Back and forth she goes, from a six-year-old nuisance to an annoyed mother to a black nanny to a menacing police officer to an aging grandmother. It’s a clinic. Watch and take notes.

One more thing: If the Ivey Awards are looking for someone to give an award to, lighting designer Barry Browning deserves one for The Syringa Tree. All the scene changes in this play—day, night, sunset, inside, outside—are done entirely with light. The craftsmanship is exquisite, because other than an oversized swing there is nothing to look at onstage but a textured background and Browning’s luminous artistry. It’s beautiful work—so beautiful that it might bring a tear to my eye if I were the sort of person who cried about things like that, which I’m not.

But go see the play anyway.

The Syringa Tree continues at The Jungle Theater through March 9. 

1.25.08: Well at Park Square Theatre

Sometimes good plays happen to good artists who simply don’t understand what they’re doing or why, which makes everyone—the playwright, the actors, the designers—look bad. It’s a shame, because the production of Well at Park Square Theatre has an all-star lineup that, by anyone’s estimation, should have resulted in great theater. What has formed instead is a sorely misdirected interpretation of a play that requires far more than anyone involved was able to give it.

Playwright Lisa Kron is a performance artist whose oeuvre is challenging the area between theater, performance art and—in the case of Well, memoir—as valid theatrical performance. Kron has created a kind of metatheatricality that pokes fun at itself. It’s a lovely convention, but Park Square’s production doesn’t do it much justice.

Well is essentially a play about the relationship Kron has with her chronically ill mother, Ann. That through-line is important, as Well does not have a conventional narrative. Thanks to Michael Dixon’s confused direction, it barely has a narrative at all. (It should be noted that Dixon is an imminently talented director. His repeated missteps here are, to be metatheatrical about it, out of character.)

Lisa, played by Christina Baldwin, talks directly to the audience with personable, funny monologues. Baldwin begins strongly, but falters when the play requires honesty and emotional depth. Baldwin is a talented actor with a wide range, but she doesn’t show it here, and the demonstrative catharsis feels like a cop-out. In the Broadway production, Kron played herself, which undoubtedly worked much better.

Kron’s mother is played with benign, little-old-lady syndrome by Barbara June Patterson, who gets plenty of laughs but fails to capture the guts of the woman slumped in the La-Z-Boy. Ann was, according to Lisa’s recollections, a vanguard in their Lansing, Michigan neighborhood. A progressive, Ann moved the family into a neighborhood where they were the only whites and the only Jews, back when racial integration was crazy talk. That sly chutzpah, in addition to her chronic fatigue, is not apparent in Patterson’s interpretation. The most glaring problem is Baldwin and Patterson’s age difference. The character of Lisa (just like the real-life Lisa) should be in her mid-forties. Baldwin is too young. Instead of a charged mother-daughter relationship, we get something like a sputtering grandmother-granddaughter conversation, one that Lisa can back out of at any time.

There are other characters in Well, played with varying degrees of success by Faye M. Price, Heidi Bakke, Edwin Strout, and Emil Herrera. Their talents, like Baldwin and Patterson’s, are wasted. Every time the foursome enters to play people in Lisa’s past, the bottom drops out. When the actors rebel and walk offstage because the play makes no sense, one is tempted to go with them.

Well runs through February 10 at Park Square Theatre.

1.19.08: Peer Gynt at The Guthrie

Disclaimer: If she were running, I would totally vote for Jane Fonda. So it doesn’t necessarily mean that I hate women just because I love Robert Bly, whose new translation of Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt opened at the Guthrie last night.

In tenth grade, I read Iron John, Bly’s seminal book about how men should use fairy tale and myth to recreate the hero’s journey in our own lives. I admit, for a fifteen-year-old completely mystified by The Ladies, early exposure to a how-to book about illuminating your soul by celebrating your inner warrior was probably problematic. Back then, I would read passages to my girlfriends (tragically, anti-heroically, never ever girlfriends) to their disgust. You didn’t have to be Susan Faludi, it seems, to recognize Bly’s PBS–poetic, back-to-the-earth chauvinism for what it is—you know, chauvinism.

Since, I’ve (sort of) learned that it’s not cool to use fairy tales, or HBO series, or epic myth—or even the bible—as either a guide or justification for acting like a prick. But I do recognize the ongoing benefit of gathering around the campfire and trying to figure out what’s going on with us dudes, singularly and collectively. And last night, after braving the twenty-six below wind-chill, turning my back to the arctic void, and huddling around the thrust stage with my bearded, Norwegian sweater–wearing comrades (I really don’t know if it was my imagination, but I was overwhelmed by the wintergreen fragrance of snus, Norwegian chewing tobacco, throughout the performance), it seems to me there’s still no storyteller better equipped or more willing to grapple with the dude issues than Bly.

Because Peer Gynt is a total dude. The play starts with Gynt as a fifty-year-old, successful businessman being surprised to death at his birthday party by his coworkers. From there we travel back through his unconscious to his adolescence, when he was living with his mom in Norway. In an incredible performance that holds together what becomes a surreal, at times completely incoherent journey, Peer is portrayed by the English actor Mark Rylance. Rylance lends Peer a sort of Bill Murray–esque sangfroid, even though he intentionally mangles his vowels with a backwoods, hick from Fon-du-Lac, Kevin Kling accent. It’s a heroic performance, and an entirely necessary one: It wouldn’t be fair to say that “Rylance saves Peer Gynt,” because any dense, nearly impenetrable work needs a singular point that us mere mortals can concentrate on: Barbarella needed Jane Fonda, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex needed Woody Allen, and Peer Gynt needs Rylance.

The Rylance likeability factor has to be high because Gynt is the town’s wild and crazy guy, an immature trickster and womanizer constantly regaling anybody willing to listen with tall tales about tackling reindeer and flying through the fjords with eagles or trapping the devil in a walnut and tricking the town’s blacksmith into pounding him on an anvil. All the old Joe Campbell/Robert Bly/Star Wars elements are there: Peer’s storytelling ability serves as sort of his magical power, simultaneously elevating him above and casting him out of the hoi polloi (it’s how he seduces girls); he loves his mammy, who raised him herself, but he’s never known his famous father or grandfather; he hasn’t found his innocent-as-the-Oslo-snow one true love, but he knows she’s out there, somewhere (and to hell with the tramps that he takes advantage of in the meanwhile, right?); and he hasn’t yet learned to focus his unique abilities so he can grow up and fulfill his destiny.

Look, even though Ibsen wrote Peer Gynt in 1867, it’s basically a comic book story, so you kind of know what’s going to happen. But I won’t ruin it for you, so from here on out, I’ll use disclaimers. Evidently, Ibsen wrote the original in rhymed couplets, which, I know, sounds like a major drag. But in his translation, Bly [SPOILER ALERT!!! SPOILER ALERT!!!] doesn’t start in with the rhymed couplets until well into Act II, (the sneaky bastard), and by that time it sort of works because: a) you’re invested in the character, and b) Peer is confronting the Troll king after making out with his smoking hot Troll daughter (played by the sexy Tracey Maloney) [END OF SPOILER ALERT].

Peer’s attitude towards women is going to be difficult for audiences to deal with. His behavior is reprehensible—he takes advantage of women sexually and then casts them aside, refusing to deal with the consequences. Frustratingly, it’s hard to say if Peer ever really does suffer any tragic consequences, or if he even really learns anything at all. After intermission, when things get really bizarre, there’s a crazy dream sequence at a German insane asylum where the point is made that you have to act like a sociopath if society acts insane. Throughout, there’s a lot of talk about “being true to yourself,” and it’s not really clear if that’s a good thing or a bad thing or if our hero or anybody else is really capable of attaining that goal. (Faludi would probably hammer this thing.)

So are we all acting like trolls? Should we? What does this have to do with nationalized health care? All are themes explored in Peer Gynt. I’m not kidding. At the end of the play, Rylance took a bow, and then asked the audience to stay for a second. He stopped the ovation, and made a little thank you speech about how all of us men are on a path and sometimes we need our elders to look back and wave at us in order to help us figure it out (“Which some of you,” Rylance joked, “are no doubt trying to do with this play right now.”). He turned our attention to Bly, the old poet with the white, wild Iron John shock of hair, sitting in the back of the theater with his wife, Ruth. Here was the dude who just translated Ibsen from the original Norwegian rhymed couplets and made it sort of interesting. I mean, I didn’t necessarily get it, and maybe I never will, but Bly is a hero just for telling the story. 

1.17.08: The Poetry of Pizza at Mixed Blood Theatre

Mixed Blood Theatre’s The Poetry of Pizza is easy on the drama and heavy on light comedy. That said, it’s not the most original of stories. Playwright Deborah Brevoort’s persistent quirkiness results in an overlong play about what is essentially A Midsummer Night’s Dream,