Scott
Edmiston’s lovely, light, fresh and inspired MY FAIR LADY for Lyric Stage
amazes with Catherine Stornetta’s three piece orchestra and Edmiston’s
delightful humorous touches (not to worry, they’re so sweetly comic purists
wouldn’t mind). I adore laughing in places where I never saw the humor before
(like Pickering’s
pacing while calling out Higgins for it). Christopher Chew sings the score: A
revelation to discover the actual tunes! Jennifer Ellis is a charmer… And David
Connolly’s choreography, especially for J. T. Turner and company, is sheer joy.
The
Poet’s Theatre is back in fine form with BECKETT WOMEN: Ceremonies of
Departure. It’s not easy staging Beckett (for his enigmatic dialogue, to say
nothing of Beckett’s insistence on no sets and no context). Director Robert
Scanlon, set designer David R. Gammons and lighting designer Jeffrey Adelberg
have indeed invented an ingenious context for these (mostly) monologues.
Beckett has passed on and one hopes he doesn’t fret about such matters
anymore. Each is being filmed by the Grim Reaper who kindly offers a hand
now and again if one of the women has to climb up on a riser. What’s
extraordinary about each actress is that she can create subtext for the words
which don’t string together to form any obvious intent… and she can do this
without inflection. It may seem on the surface that Beckett’s words (delivered
in almost a monotone) have no obvious meaning but “Little girl” and “She”
floods us with our own memories about being a little girl picking berries. We
supply the meaning. We supply the emotions. We’re the little girl in Amanda
Gamm’s monologue. Then we’re the beleaguered caretaker in Sarah Newhouse’s
dialogue with her aging mother. Then we’ve grown old and we imagine our own
death in Carmel O’Reilly’s heartbreaking departure. Lovely work all around!
My
apologies if I have misnamed anyone. They ran out of programs at my
performance.
North
Shore Music Theatre’s BILLY ELLIOT is a rousing tribute to the miners in Great Britain
who stood up to Margaret Thatcher in the ‘80s. (You may remember on this side
of the pond when Thatcher’s buddy, President Reagan broke the back of the air
controllers’ union—but there’s
no musical about that.) The musical is fiercely political, hilariously funny
and sweetly sentimental at the same time. Based on the movie by the same
writer, Billy (Brooks Landegger and Nicholas Dantes share the role) is an
eleven year old son of a Newcastle
miner who discovers happiness when he’s thrown into a dance class by mistake. Boston actress Sarah
deLima lifts the humor to sublime heartache as the boy’s grandma (who passes
her love of dancing to Billy in her DNA, something I never realized before this
production). Lee Hall and Elton John’s valentine to working class heroes gets a
crackerjack outing at NSMT. Don’t miss it.
