Mash-ups from Heart & Dagger Productions are always a
hoot: Cross dressing performers skewer popular musicals without mercy, so I
assumed they would be sending up SWEENEY TODD with the usual suspects. Not so!
SWEENEY—which, alas, ends this
weekend—is their first legit
musical with a professional orchestra AND they put it all together for a song.
When you don’t have a lot of money to throw at a project, you rely heavily on
invention and imagination. You don’t need bells and whistles. (Well, you do
need that bone chilling whistle, I grant you that.)
Mind you, Heart & Dagger still has a few tricks up their
collective sleeves (like an actress playing the bloodthirsty Sweeney). The
story is well told, extremely well sung and the toddler swing set (with slide),
it turns out, is all you need to set up a barber shop. Just to be clear, Kiki
Samko doesn’t make Sweeney female. She sports a male costume, fluffy sideburns
like the caricature on the Broadway playbill, and she’s lowered her voice an
octave (which is mighty hard on the tonsils). Even though I knew from the press
release that it was Samko, it took me a few seconds to wrap my mind around the
absolutely male character in front of me. It was she, almost completely
unrecognizable.
Director Joey C. Pelletier is fortunate to have singers with
wide ranging capabilities, like James Sims who can carry off the high soprano
role (Johanna) as well as the tenor part (Anthony) and this being Heart &
Dagger, they have him sing both, sharing the gender bending with Meghan Edge
since Johanna and Anthony have a bunch of duets. Wigs are the big indicator in
this production.
Music Director Michael Amaral has a modest five piece
ensemble (and a nifty kettle drum which does double duty when Mrs. Lovett rolls
out her piecrust on it) sounding like a whole orchestra. Best of all, H&D
has Melissa Barker as the purveyor of “the worst pies in London.” I’m still amazed that they pulled
off one of Sondheim’s most difficult and dissonant musicals with sheer will and
an abundance of talent.
When you do have the money for a lavish musical like MAME,
(playing @ Stoneham Theatre through Dec. 23rd), you can afford to
throw a dozen Equity performers at it. Director/choreographer Ilyse Robbins has
rounded up a passel of Boston’s
best character actors to punch up the creaky Jerry Herman musical: We’re
supposed to be scandalized when an innocent child is handed over to his boozy,
bohemian aunt. And we’re supposed to be shocked when the boy’s nanny throws
caution to the wind and winds up pregnant, (gasp) out of wedlock but it’s
pretty hard to shock an audience nowadays, when marihuana has been legalized
for recreational use.
What makes Stoneham’s MAME tick despite the dated story, are
the familiar songs (Kathy St. George as Mame and Mary Callanan as Vera sing the
heck out of “Bosom Buddies” and St. George delivers a lovely “If He Walked into
My Life”) AND the familiar stock characters, chiefly Ceit Zweil as the frumpy
nanny and Margaret Ann Brady as the ferocious, prospective mother-in-law. Will
McGarrahan, especially, adds warmth to the production as the Southern gent
smitten by St. George.
Robbins and music director Matthew Stern get fine work, too,
from Cameron Levesque as the little boy who comes to live with and love his
Auntie Mame. Having seen the ten year old give stellar performances in several
musicals of late, I can say without reserve that he’s an actor who’s going
places. As they say, children and animals always steal any scene they’re in so
I have to mention a little fox who manages to escape the hunt and wag his tail
as the humans set about to ride to the hounds. (I haven’t been so amused by a
fox since THE RULING CLASS!)
