LONG TAKE REVIEW By Beverly Creasey Exquisite Suffering

You know from the play’s title that it won’t be a walk in the park but James Wilkinson’s flawless production of HANG (at the Arlington Masonic Temple through Sept. 30^th) will be one of the best plays about pain and retribution you’ll see this fall. The playwright, Debbie Tucker Green, is British and her subject matter for HANG plays out in real time all over the globe.

Our news outlets cover all Trump all the time so we don’t hear much about the rest of the world but BBC radio (on NPR in the wee hours of the A.M.) plunges you into world news, with first hand accounts of horrors and atrocities (some perpetrated by our drones). You hear news from the World Court in The Hague, trying to work out (imperfect, impossible) solutions to redress wrongs. You hear about “truth and reconciliation” panels where perpetrators face their victims and admit to their actions. Miraculous stories, like Mandela forgiving the Afrikaners, like Tutsis and Hutus forgiving each other. It’s war inventing a new aftermath for itself.

All this and more floods your consciousness as you take in the play. You feel the blood rushing to your brain to absorb it all, as you try to figure out what has happened to the witness sitting so uncomfortably in a spare government office. Here’s the extraordinary craft and craftiness of the playwright: Green doesn’t tell us much at all. What isn’t said in Green’s play is what lurks in the Pinteresque pauses: The alchemy in her writing makes those powerful silences fairly scream in our souls. The three women in the play speak an economy of words because no one wants to dredge up the pain the witness has suffered. We have to fill in the gaps. We have to imagine the crime.

We think we know. Certainly the title gives us a clue but just who will or has been hanged? My brain is working in overdrive trying to figure out what countries sanction hanging so I know where these women are. But do I need to know where they are? I know Nigeria hangs dissidents because playwright Ken Saro-Wiwa was hanged for merely writing his ideas. (I can barely keep it together writing this review. It’s no picnic having to tap these memories of atrocities I store in my brain.) Green gives us another hint, about the children who survived the crime. Their childhood has been stolen, she tells us. Green says the children are now “hollow” and “mute.” And my brain rushes to the Mexican border where three thousand children have been separated from their parents, and are now living in cages in Texas, sleeping on a floor, muted, covered with silver sheets of mylar.

Exiled Theatre specializes in tough scripts. Somebody has to. I’m a firm believer in the change that words can make. Exiled is committed to “visceral” work which “fosters conversation,” it says in their mission statement. So far, and I’ve been to most of their plays, they do that. Here, director Wilkinson deftly molds the silences in HANG down to the millisecond. The three actresses working so feverishly NOT to say what has happened, do the impossible. They tell us in a shudder. In a helpless shrug, In a clenched jaw. In a forced kindness.

Angela Gunn and Angele Maraj portray the infuriating, supercilious bureaucrats trying so hard not to offend. Thankfully, they supply a (very) small window of humor, as they try, stumbling over each other, to coax a “decision” from the witness. They’re quite wonderful, placing their collective feet into their own mouths.

Imani Powell in a tour de force as the victim/witness (?), physically conveys how difficult it is, not only to testify about this crime, but how difficult it is to live with the crime still coursing through her veins. She sits like someone whose body has been restored to her but nothing in the restoration helps. Perhaps her organs, including her brain, have been returned to her but in the wrong order. She looks whole but inside she’s a jumble. When her patience with the bureaucrats runs out, we’re delighted that she can tell them off in no uncertain terms, that their proffered “concern” won’t do anything for her.  The point of the play, I think, is to ask can anything help after an atrocity?

INTERVIEW with Composer Steven Bergman The Long Awaited Studio Recording of “Jack the Ripper: The Whitechapel Musical” By Beverly Creasey

JACK THE RIPPER, THE WHITECHAPEL MUSICAL by Steven Bergman and Christopher-Michael DiGrazia is a Gothic juggernaut, driven by Bergman’s dark, hypnotic score. If you missed it on stage, the premiere Studio Recording is now available on CDBaby, Amazon and iTunes, where you can discover what makes this retelling of the tale shockingly unique.

You’ll find, surprisingly, that it’s the women of the story who interested Bergman and DiGrazia. “We’ve given voice to the victims,” Bergman emphasizes. “[The story] is told from their perspective… the tale is such juicy fodder for a musical. [It has] all the elements… a great story, an unsolved mystery… It gave Christopher and I the opportunity to take an actual piece of history, and (figuratively, of course) flesh out what was missing in an attempt to give audiences an engaging story.”

Right from the get-go, the sinister, foreboding Story of the Century carries us into the heart of tabloid journalism. Bergman tells, “The Jack the Ripper murders were one of the first instances of sensationalism in the press, and we strove to make sure the listener makes the connection between this case, and the ‘fake news’ we have to endure today.” We then meet Jack (Matt Phillipps), as he gives us insight into his contorted perspective with the chilling Finger of God.  The scenes shifts to the Brittania pub, where we meet the women who, DiGrazia writes in the intro, “become immortal at the edge of a knife.” The Likes of Us (featuring Lori L’Italien and Agatha Babbitt) and Here and Now (performed by Maryann Zschau, Kathryn Howell, and Broadway’s Cristin J. Miller) are just two of the powerful songs which allow the humanity of these victims to seep through their sad souls. Other powerful performances on this recording include Cilla (Michael Levesque as the conflicted Inspector Abberline), and Walls Closing In (Holly Jennings as the young prostitute, Mary Kelly).

Most Ripper vehicles sensationalize the murders, concentrating on the Ripper’s ghoulish exploits, his victims merely a footnote to history. Speculation for more than a century has fueled theories which link the Ripper to the royal family… Queen Victoria’s son drew attention at the time for carousing from night ‘til dawn, often with ladies of the evening. One theory about why the murders abruptly ceased sent the Ripper to America! “Precisely because the murders are unsolved,” Bergman explains, “we were afforded dramatic license to fill in the pieces.” From Johnny Depp in From Hell, to Jack Palance’s terrifying performance in the 1953 Man in the Attic, there has been no shortage of conjecture as to the identity of the killer.  Sherlock Holmes’ help has been enlisted in several films and an Italian-Spanish entry into the horror genre even depicts the Ripper as a cannibal… but my favorite is Peter O’Toole’s wild and wooly performance in The Ruling Class.

I’ve seen two versions of the Bergman/DiGrazia musical, years apart, with major revisions built into the current one. (The music is Bergman’s. DiGrazia wrote the book but they both shared in the lyrics.) The new recording represents for Bergman “the way I heard [the songs] in my imagination.” After a 25-year creative process, he cites Smarter Than You, a humorous face-off between Abberline and the Gentlemen of the Press as to who knows more about the best method for capturing the slayer, among his favorite songs on this recording. “I wrote this piece while on a national tour over twenty years ago.  We had stopped in Indiana for the night, and there was a piano in the lobby, so I sat down to give it a play, and came up with the opening accompaniment.”

Several of the songs have benefitted from the passage of time. Mary’s Reminder is one of the last songs to have been written for the show. Placed near the end of the show, it features the ghosts of all the women and allows Bergman and DiGrazia one final opportunity to reinforce and gruesome nature of the killings.

Bergman hopes this recording of “Jack the Ripper: The Whitechapel Musical,” will entice perspective producers into bringing Jack to the stage for years to come.  In the meantime, listeners can enjoy the premiere of a new musical through the digital outlets mentioned above.

 

MUSICAL REVIEW By Beverly Creasey Rapturous RAGTIME

Sometimes—and it doesn’t happen very often—theater can move you like nothing else. It can lift you up, fill you with joy and despair, take you out of yourself and transform you with its ephemeral power. It can do all this in an instant, with a moment, with a turn of a phrase, the sound of a note, the unison voice of forty singers… the soaring beauty of a musical like RAGTIME.

Company Theatre’s radiant production of the Ahrens & Flaherty masterpiece (book by Terrence McNally from the sprawling E. L. Doctorow novel) moved a whole audience as if we were one being—with its rousing promise of opportunity at the turn of the century. (WWII lies ahead but only one character in RAGTIME knows that.) Alas, RAGTIME, at this time in this century, resonates for quite another (horrifying) reason.

The musical contrasts three segments of society to represent the colliding, coalescing forces in the newly prosperous industrial nation: Immigrants arriving, as the Emma Lazarus inscription pledges, to a welcoming nation; African-Americans moving to America’s cities and prospering, despite the indelible legacy of slavery; and the affluent whites, becoming richer as the working class becomes poorer.

When McNally/Ahrens/Flaherty wrote RAGTIME, they of course had no idea that their portrait of an optimistic America would have us gasping at a line about separating children from their parents, or interpreting a depiction of police beating a woman to death as “living,” not “past” history, or seeing the elated RAGTIME immigrants arriving on our shores, knowing that in 2018, they’d be turned away, reviled.

The beauty of directors Zoe Bradford and Jordie Saucerman’s spirited production is that it contains this terrible resonance, yet it pulls us through it to experience RAGTIME’s magnanimous story of hope and despair. Every character stands out in relief in their production, punctuating the (many) throughlines. (The Doctorow tome is four inches thick so McNally’s distillation proves quite a feat.)

Sally Ashton Forrest’s choreography is a marvel of gestural intricacy: The dancers become cogs in Henry Ford’s assembly line and they become the syncopation within the bars of the ragtime rhythm. (Kudos to music director Steve Bass for elevating the importance of the gorgeous score. Sometimes it’s lost in the maelstrom.)

I’m recalling so many remarkable performances. I wish I could highlight them all. First and foremost is Davron S. Monroe in a tour de force as the ragtime pianist at the center of the musical. Next and foremost is Paula Markowicz as the privileged but caring Mother. You expect the big production numbers to wow but Markowicz brings down the house with her solo(s), especially the song about not being able to go “Back to Before.”

You can’t have RAGTIME’s coping mother without a blustering father and Peter S Adams captures the essence of a man who knows he’s lost and can’t go backward in this burgeoning new world. (You don’t often see a three-dimensional Father in other productions.) And you can’t have Monroe’s righteous Coalhouse without his Sarah. Arielle Rogers as his true love, carries us with her in her journey from shy, naïf to committed mother in the exquisite solo she sings to her newborn boy. (The directors smartly cast singers with operatic voices...which enhances the characterizations and makes the choral numbers sublime.)

More standouts: Sarah Kelly as a “real” character not just a cipher (as the Girl on the Velvet Swing); the same with James Fernandes as Houdini; Melissa Carubia, too, makes Emma Goldman a necessary part of the story. Todd McNeel, Jr. is a strong Booker T. Washington; Mildred E. Walker’s grieving soprano rises in flight over the mourners; Owen Veith, a fourth grader no less, can hold his own with the pros as the “little boy” who warns us that war is coming. Jeffrey Sewell gets the best line in the script and Hannah Dwyer charms us as the frail daughter of Michael Hammond’s immigrant father.

Sometimes, and it doesn’t happen very often, you see a one-of-a-kind, transcendent version of a favorite work and you realize that it can’t be frozen (in film or smart phone video) or ever repeated with the same cast. That’s the fleeting, magical nature of theater. You want to see it again. You will see it again in your mind, over and over but you want others to see it and feel the alchemy. Sadly, it’s gone. If only I hadn’t seen the very last performance.

QUICK TAKE REVIEW By Beverly Creasey The Piper Pays Him!

He’s so slick that folks don’t even know they’ve been had, ‘til he’s on the train fifty miles away, about to swindle the townspeople at the next stop. He’s Harold Hill, THE MUSIC MAN, temporarily in residence (through August 12^th) at the Reagle Music Theatre—celebrating their fiftieth anniversary this summer.

Meredith Wilson’s hit musical has won a slew of prizes, including five Tony awards… and Reagle’s many productions over the years have been recognized by the local critics. So how do you make this MUSIC MAN stand out above the others we reviewers have seen at Reagle? You get Susan Chebookjian to restage the original Broadway and film choreography and make it look like a million bucks. Nothing can compete with a top flight chorus of fifty professional hoofers.

Director/choreographer Chebookjian kicks up the comedy as well as those heels—but without stinting on the charm and romance: After all, the quintessential traveling salesman meets his match in River City’s Marian the Librarian and the clinches have to touch our hearts. (They do and I have the wrinkled hankie in my purse to prove it.) You might think casting for corn would be a gamble but this is Iowa for heaven sakes. I found Mark Linehan’s jaunty music man absolutely refreshing. He knocks ‘em dead from the get-go with a snappy, rousing “Ya Got Trouble.” Then he does it again, with “Seventy Six Trombones.”

Jennifer Ellis’ Marion the Librarian doesn’t just “fall” in love; she plays a willing participant, all the while keeping her petticoats starched and proper, not an easy trick to pull off. No saccharine bookworm, she. Ellis’ wry smile tells us that she might just enjoy the mayhem erupting on top of the reading tables!

Reagle has music director Dan Rodriguez at the helm so you know the singing is first rate, even from the childen (Jonathan Tillan and Cate Galanti). Many of the performers in the secondary roles often have principal roles in other shows, so even the smallest of gestures adds to the whole. Reagle favorite Harold “Jerry” Walker returns in top form as the wonderfully clueless River City Mayor. Lori L’Italien, too, scores laughs as the Mayor’s over-enthusiastic wife. I could go on: The always willing, easily distracted barbershop quartet… the gossiping ladies, singing counterpoint… the spectacular, syncopated opening number: I had forgotten what a lovely, genuinely funny show THE MUSIC MAN is. Don’t miss the train.

QUICK TAKE REVIEWS By Beverly Creasey OPERA MAKES A COMEBACK

Local professional opera companies like Boston Midsummer Opera, Opera Hub, MetroWest Opera (and others) are on to something: They’ve performed recently in theater venues at Boston Center for the Arts and at Mosesian Center for the Arts in Watertown, where New Repertory Theatre makes its home. And they’ve hired theater directors with new ideas and a fresh perspective on the art. The result is that their productions are hip and innovative without destroying the charm or integrity of a “traditional” opera.

What’s more, they’ve attracted (younger) theater audiences who are used to theater venues. Several women in line for the ladies room (yes, we become fast friends in those interminable lines) revealed this was their first opera! They came because of a poster up at a familiar theater company. Theater reviewers, too, are crossing over to cover these productions. Maybe opera isn’t doomed after all.

Boston Midsummer Opera just sold out their Watertown run with a crackerjack production of Rossini’s THE BARBER OF SEVILLE. Their delightful take on the classic amped up the comedy, sending the singers flying into the aisles, in director Antonio Ocampo Guzman’s freestyle romp. Music director Susan Davenny Wyner won the day in two ways: Her orchestra never overpowered the singers (something that happens A LOT) and her singers were encouraged to go to town with the ornamented roulades—which were breathtaking, hilarious and most importantly, executed without microphones!

Robert Balonek as Figaro stood out in high relief: Duets with Balonek made all the other singers shine even brighter. As the lovers, Theo Lebow and Alisa Jordheim shared sweet harmonies and treacherous high notes but the secondary comic roles made the evening. Jason Budd fumed and blustered as the foolish old doctor who planned to wed the heroine (not a chance) and David Cushing ran away with the evening in his showstopper about the thunderous power of slander.

Opera, even more than theater, can elevate a supporting role so that it lingers on in the memory. Case in point is local soprano, Abigail Whitney Smith, who appeared in two separate productions I saw, one at Metro West (THE BEAUTIFUL BRIDEGROOM) and one at Opera Hub (DIVAS). She was surrounded by extraordinary voices in both operas but it’s her performances that I remember in vivid detail: one wildly comic and one, truly heartbreaking. Opera, for me, is theater on a high wire. All your senses, your emotions, and your intellect are enthralled.

 

 

 

QUICK TAKE REVIEW By Beverly Creasey More Squirrels, Less Frenzy

I’m a fan of playwright Lauren Gunderson. Her SILENT SKY (about the unsung women of Harvard Observatory) won lots of local awards, not to mention her quirky, ursine filled EXIT, PURSUED BY A BEAR, which got a crackerjack outing at Theatre on Fire. Her THE TAMING (@ Hub Theatre through July 28^th) however, has absolutely nothing to do with the Shakespeare version except for part of the title and several mentions of an endangered pygmy panda squirrel, misidentified as a “shrew.” And everyone knows, you can’t tame wild animals.

The thinnest of plots swirls around three females, an intense Beauty Queen (imagine Norma Desmond’s “close-up” gaze), a ruthless Republican operative, and a wacky left leaning activist dedicated to animal rights. So, from the get-go you know where I stand. My ears perk up whenever squirrels are mentioned. And my eyes glaze when humans start to winge. What’s more, I couldn’t make out a good portion of the dialogue because most of it is delivered at fever pitch and maximal volume.

The scary Beauty Pageant contestant (Sarah J. Mann) somehow (I have no clue) traps the Rep (Lauren Elias) and the Dem (Katie Grindland) in a hotel room without their pants but with a scheme to rewrite the Constitution. Warning: They remain pant-less through the play, regardless of century. Yes, they start in the present, then visit the past, then return… which results in one very funny line about the course of time: “In the future everyone will be gay.”

The remainder of the play, I’m very sorry to say, was lost on me, except for one section which inexplicably morphed (without the singing) into the musical, 1776: “It’s hot as hell in Philadelphia… Why doesn’t someone open up a window,” with the South Carolina indictment of Northerners, “Molasses to Rum to Slaves,” right on its heels. There I was, humming 1776 lyrics (thank heaven, to myself) for the rest of the show. I didn’t get the time travel or for that matter, how a beauty queen could possess magical powers. Then again, I’ve never been one, have I!

QUICK TAKE REVIEW By Beverly Creasey Ghosts in the Machines

The only things Michael Crichton didn’t envision in 1973 with his dark, sci-fi take on Disney (Frontier/Tomorrow Land) were the internet and virtual reality. WESTWORLD introduced us to a violent theme park with a gun slinging cyborg behind every swinging saloon door. Unfortunately, malfunctions turned the robots against the paying “cowboy” customers… not unlike the velociraptors in JURASIC PARK.

The 2017-18 television version of WESTWORLD blurs the distinctions between humans and androids, so much so that villains can be either. Jennifer Haley’s THE NETHER (@ Flat Earth through June 23^rd) explores the “deep world,” as in “deep state,” at the thinner edges of the internet (known in centuries to come as the nether). These are secret realms most internet users don’t know even exist.

Like WESTWORLD, Haley’s “hideaway” locale allows customers to indulge their vilest fantasies without consequence, and in person. Haley offers up “Papa’s Realm,” where guests (we observe only men) pay to meet, fondle, even murder a precocious little girl (no little boys) who looks like Alice in Wonderland… an apt choice as Charles Dodgson, A.K.A. Lewis Carroll, loved to surround himself with little girls, taking pictures of them, reading stories to them. Evidently Papa caters only to men. Not to worry, the child tells them, she reanimates immediately after she’s hacked to bits.

In addition to toying with this child, one can, if one is weary of this world, reincarnate (without the carnal component), that is, cross over and take over the little girl’s spirit, thereby existing forever. This is where the police come in. They’d like to eliminate Papa and his malignant operation. Director Sarah Gazdowicz has a first rate cast, led by Regine Vital as the sharp detective who dogs Papa and his customers. Bob Mussett is frighteningly creepy as the cold, elegant, Victorian Papa who glibly confesses he is cursed with “both an obsession and insight.” Julia Talbot plays the child just unaware enough to be innocent and knowing at the same time.

Jeff Gill plays the spent man with the weight of the world on his shoulders, ready to sign on with Papa no matter the consequences, a character we can (sort of) identify with. Arthur Gomez plays an under cover cop who may be enjoying the dark side too much. I couldn’t say because I ran out of steam, trying to put this all together when I really didn’t want any part of it. I know children are abused. Plays that tell us about abuse are preaching to the converted. The abusers aren’t going to the theater. And if they are, they are not being transformed. WESTWORLD is the same as THE NETHER or PILLOWMAN to me.

We’re watching it play out on the nightly news, for heaven’s sake. Our government is kidnapping thousands of children, ripping them away from loving parents, and all we do is protest at the State House and march ourselves to Washington. It’s not enough.