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Susan Granger’s review of “A Delicate Balance” (Berkshire Theatre Festival 2010)
“Creativity is magic. Don’t examine it too closely.”
American playwright Edward Albee
Like his best known play, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Edward Albee’s “A Delicate Balance” is another relevant examination of relationships, particularly marriage.
Living in upper middle-class suburbia, Agnes (Maureen Anderman) and Tobias (Jonathan Hogan) have been married for many years. Now in their late fifties, they occupy separate bedrooms, as Agnes struggles to maintain not only their stability but her sanity which is severely strained by the constant presence of her audacious, unmarried, alcoholic sister Claire (Lisa Emery). Agnes’ tenuous equilibrium is further tested by the unexpected arrival of their closest friends, Edna (Mia Dillon) and Harry (Keir Dullea), who are inexplicably “frightened” and beg to spend the night. Ordinarily, that would not be difficult since their grown daughter Julia’s bedroom is empty, but Agnes and Tobias have just heard that volatile, petulant Julia (Mia Barron) has left her fourth husband and is en route home. Then, as Albee, so succinctly puts it, “The shit hits the fan.”
Seething with unspoken anger and repressed resentment, Maureen Anderman elegantly embodies the conflicting emotions that propel Agnes, the character who epitomizes Edward Albee’s ferocious vitriol. Director David Auburn (who wrote “Proof”) has assembled an exemplary cast that deliciously delves into the precarious, sniping dysfunction that’s engendered by family and close friends. R. Michael Miller’s set is gracefully evocative of ‘60s WASP society, enhanced by Dan Kotlowitz’ lighting.
A beacon of quality theater, “A Delicate Balance” is on the Main Stage of the Berkshire Theatre Festival in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, thru Sept. 4th …tickets available at 413-298-5576 and online at: www.berkshiretheatre.org. It’s a must-see.
Susan Granger’s review: “I Do, I Do” at the Westport Country Playhouse (2010-2011 season)
As Peter De Vries put it, “The bonds of matrimony are like any other bonds – they mature slowly.” And that bittersweet note is reflected by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt in “I Do, I Do,” based on Jan de Hartog’s 1940s play “The Fourposter.”
Beginning with their wedding in 1898, “I Do, I Do” chronicles the joys and pains, trials and tribulations of the marriage between Agnes and Michael for the next 50 years, as they warble gentle, tell-tale songs like “I Love My Wife,” “Together Forever,” “The Honeymoon is Over,” “Nobody’s Perfect,” “Love Isn’t Everything,” “When the Kids Get Married,” “Someone Needs Me” and the poignant standard, “My Cup Runneth Over.”
When this two-character musical opened on Broadway in 1966, it was propelled by the star power of Robert Preston and Mary Martin, producer David Merrick and director Gower Champion. Which explain why this current production, starring Kate Baldwin and Lewis Cleale as the archetypal couple, is more of charming trifle. Yet it still has the same kind of frothy, endearing, light-hearted innocence that’s made Jones and Schmidt’s other musical, “The Fantasticks,” into the longest-running production on the American stage.
Acknowledged by a Tony Award nomination, along with the Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle, for her enchanting performance in the recent revival of “Finian’s Rainbow,” Kate Baldwin is sensational, which may explain why Lewis Cleale has a tough time keeping up with her, although his credentials are also impressive. Director Susan H. Schulman keeps the pace lively, centered around the large four-poster bed that occupies center stage on Wilson Chin’s simple, intimate set – with accolades to Devon Painter’s period costumes, Philip Rosenberg’s lighting and Domonic Sack’s sound.
“I Do, I Do” will run at the Westport Country Playhouse through Sept. 4th. For information, go to www.westportplayhouse.org or call 203-227-4177.
Susan Granger’s review of DEFENDING THE CAVEMAN (Long Wharf Theater: 2010-2011 season)
Looking for laughter? There’s plenty to be found in this thoroughly engaging, delightfully entertaining monologue comedy exploring the difference between the sexes.
Comedian Rob Becker developed the insightful concept in 1987, delving into psychology, sociology and pre-history. Originally opening in San Francisco, he toured the country with it and performed two and a half years at the Helen Hayes Theater in New York, becoming the longest running solo play in Broadway history.
After 12 years, Becker has now turned the one-man show over to Arkansas-native, Chicago-honed actor Paul Perroni, whose likeable, easy-going, charming manner enchants the audience immediately. His gestures, mimicking the masculine personality are evocative, particularly in the segment about two men going fishing together, followed by a father and son sharing the fishing experience. Perroni’s rich, resonant vocal range is admirable, and his Second City ‘improv’ training is obvious in the way he genially banters with the more vocal audience members during the more raucous segments.
The spare stage is decorated with an all-important television set, chair and two wall hangings – one depicting a man with a bison and the second a goddess carving – along with a small statue derived from the Venus of Willendorf, dating back to 25,000 B.C.
An ideal ‘date night’ for people in relationships, DEFENDING THE CAVEMAN plays Wednesday through Sunday at the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven through Aug. 22nd and there’s more ticket and show-time information at www.longwharf.org.
Susan Granger’s review of “Happy Days” at the Westport Country Playhouse
It’s understandable why the poetic works of Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, who won a Nobel Prize for “Waiting for Godot,” have never been presented before at the Westport Country Playhouse. With their enigmatic, oblique, obscure dialogue and minimalist style, they’re dense and difficult to understand, open to individual interpretation. Certainly not the usual ‘summer stock’ fare. Which is probably why artistic director Mark Lamos decided to take a risk, make a leap of faith and aim for the emotional essence of theater.
In the beginning, Winnie (Dana Ivey), a plump, middle-aged housewife, is buried to her bosom in the center of a huge pile of rocks in a barren landscape with the sun blazing down. Within her reach are a parasol and a huge black handbag, from which she removes various items, including a brush, cosmetics and a revolver. While it’s her cheerful, optimism-infused chatter that we hear, her husband, Willie (Jack Wetherall), is perched on the other side of the rocks with only the back of his head showing. He’s reading a newspaper, grunting occasionally. The incessant clanging of a bell marks a change of time. While there is no intermission, the curtain comes down and up again quickly for the second act, which finds Winnie sunk up to her neck and formally dressed Willie crawling over to her side, attempting – in vain – to scale the rocks.
Initially incomprehensible, the play is a haunting, existential allegory about the human condition. Within its rueful ramblings and repetitions, silences and precise movements is a compassionate commentary on life, relationships, loneliness and mortality. “So little to say, so little to do, and the fear is so great.” Beckett doesn’t make it easy for the audience to figure out; it takes thought. There’s wry humor and allusions to Shakespeare, Dante, Aristotle and the Anglican Litugy, among others, along with the “Merry Widow” waltz.
With a silly, little feathered hat atop her head, exuberant, ever resilient Dana Ivey uses her face and voice – with a soft Irish brogue – to animate a remarkable range of emotions, delivering a brilliant, inventive, bewitching tour-de-force performance. “Happy Days” is at the Westport Country Playhouse through July 24.
Susan Granger’s review of “Dinner With Friends” (Westport Country Playhouse)
Associate artistic director David Kennedy has turned Donald Margulies’ perceptive Pulitzer Prize-winning play about the fragility of marital relationships and the ephemeral nature of friendship into a strident, sit-com version of a summer stock comedy.
Basically, the plot revolves around two 40-something Connecticut couples. There’s happily married Karen (Jenna Stern) and Gabe (Steven Skybell) and their unhappily-splitting best friends, Beth (Mary Bacon) and Tom (David Aaron Baker) The first act takes place one snowy night, while the second contains a flashback to 12 years earlier, when Karen and Gabe introduced Beth to Tom at their seaside cottage on Martha’s Vineyard, before settling into what’s happening with all four members of the quartet during the summer following that fateful winter’s night.
Deception, betrayal and infidelity are the themes, as Karen poignantly muses, “You spend your entire life with someone and it turns out that person, the one person you completely entrusted your fate to, is an impostor.”
Unfortunately, either through casting choices or off-key direction, the foursome fails to establish an affecting connection which means the audience is never fully emotionally engaged about the outcome. Without dynamic energy and proper timing, the pace tends to drag, despite Margulies’ crisp dialogue that’s distinguished by insightful honesty and inherent humor. On the plus side are Lee Savage’s smoothly rotating sets, Matthew Richards’ inventive lighting and Emily Rebholz’ costumes. And if the title sounds familiar, it was a far-more-effective 2001 made-for-TV movie with impressive performances by Dennis Quaid, Andie MacDowell, Toni Collette and Greg Kinnear.
“Dinner With Friends” plays in Westport through June 19. For further information and tickets, go to www.westportcountryplayhouse.org or call 203-227-4177.
Susan Granger’s review of “Enron” (Broadhurst Theater 2009-2010 season)
Quick – before it closes…Oops! You missed it. After being snubbed for most major awards, including the Tony, and perhaps because many critics were not given access, Lucy Prebble’s satirical show about the collapse of the infamous Texas-based energy conglomerate posted its closing notice after only 15 performances – and a $4 million loss.
When the curtain goes up, three allegorical blind mice are center-stage, ready to relate the story of four people. There’s Enron’s religious, courtly CEO Kenneth Lay (Gregory Itzin from “24”); his ambitious protégée Claudia Roe (Marin Mazzie); arrogant, avaricious company president Jeffrey Skilling (Norbert Leo Butz from “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels”); and numbers-crunching chief financial officer, smarmy Andy Fastow (Stephen Kunken). And testosterone-fueled greed is what propels the play.
Intellectually stimulating playwright Prebble cleverly delineates several complicated financial concepts, like “mark to market,” while director Rupert Goold cleverly alternates between naturalism and the highly stylized caricatures, though he’s often far from subtle. And their use of ravenous, debt-eating, “Jurassic Park” ‘raptor’ dinosaurs is fiendishly brilliant, offering a corollary with Greece’s current financial disaster. For an even more incisive explanation, rent the dvd “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” (2005).
Highlighting Anthony Ward’s smart corporate set and flashy, flamboyant costumes is Jon Driscoll’s perceptive, multimedia video/projection with Mark Henderson’s incisive lighting, Adam Cork’s sound and Scott Ambler’s fast-paced ‘Light Saber’ choreography. Memorable as Enron’s employee ‘victims’ are Lusia Strus and Brandon J. Dirden.
Since commercial success is not always synonymous with artistic merit, it does not necessarily mean that a “hit” – like “The Addams Family” – is a good show, while a “flop” is a bad show. Often, it just comes down to economics. And while nobody loves a loser, this provocative, inventive musical concept from Britain deserved a better fate.
Susan Granger’s review of “Sondheim on Sondheim” (Roundabout’s Studio 54: 2009/2010 season)
The 80th birthday of Broadway’s most influential living composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim is celebrated by this dazzling autobiographical revue, a multimedia musical portrait covering six decades and 20 shows, conceived/directed by Sondheim’s longtime collaborator James Lapine (“Sunday in the Park With George,” “Into the Woods”).
While Barbara Cook, Vanessa Williams and Tom Wopat sing familiar and obscure Sondheim songs, witty, insightful video reminiscences and wry, informative observations from the composer himself about his life and work serve as the highlight. There are photographs showing how, as a child, Sondheim was integrated into lyricist Oscar Hammerstein’s family after his parents’ marriage disintegrated, along with glimpses of the décor of Sondheim’s Manhattan office, including his memorabilia. And the biggest laugh comes from his anecdote about Ethel Merman’s encounter with Loretta Young.
Making her first Broadway appearance since the early ‘70s, the exquisite 82 year-old chanteuse Barbara Cook, along with Vanessa Williams and Tom Wopat, tops the talented, energetic ensemble – that includes Euan Morton, Leslie Kritzer, Norm Lewis, Erin Mackey and Matthew Scott – as they romp through an uneven succession of songs and stories, including how the opening number of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” evolved, along with the development of “Follies” and “Company.” There’s barely a dry eye in the house after Sondheim relates how – when he was in his 40s – his mother cruelly told him her greatest regret in life was giving birth to him; after which, the cast performs the deeply touching “Children Will Listen” from “Into the Woods.”
While Peter Flaherty’s projections are stunning, Beowulf Boritt’s modular set is inventive and Ken Billington’s lighting is evocative, Susan Hilferty’s costumes lack flair. And amid other 80th birthday tributes, the nonprofit Roundabout Theater is renaming a Broadway theater (the Henry Miller) for Stephen Sondheim.
Susan Granger’s review of “She Loves Me” (Westport Country Playhouse, 2010)
Launching its 80th anniversary season, the Westport Country Playhouse has already extended this deliciously exquisite production thru May 15th, proving what they say, “Give the public what they want and they’ll turn out for it.”
Set in Budapest in the 1930s, the breezy plot revolves around interlocking stories emanating from Maraczek’s Parfumerie, where lovelorn Georg Nowack (Jeremy Peter Johnson) has been conducting an intimate pen-pal relationship with a woman through a personals ad. Since he doesn’t even know her name, he certainly doesn’t suspect she’s outspoken Amalia Balash (Jessica Grove) with whom he constantly bickers at work. Meanwhile, smarmy Steven Kodaly (Douglas Sills) is romancing gullible Ilona Ritter (Nancy Anderson), among others, the delivery boy (Christopher Shin) is yearning for a promotion and Mr. Maraczek (Lenny Wolpe) is having marital troubles at home.
Based on a 1937 Hungarian stage comedy by Miklos Lazlo, it spawned Ernst Lubitsch’s classic 1940 comedy “The Shop Around the Corner” with James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan, Judy Garland’s 1949 movie musical “In the Good Old Summertime,” this Broadway musical (which first opened in 1963, starring Barbara Cook, Jack Cassidy, and Daniel Massey), and the Meg Ryan/Tom Hanks 1998 movie “You’ve Got Mail.” In each incarnation, a man and a woman carry on an anonymous correspondence, not realizing that they actually know – and dislike – each other in person.
Westport’s perceptive artistic director Mark Lamos weaves timeless magic, adroitly capturing the subtle, whimsical, innocent mood and lilting, unabashedly romantic concept created by Joe Masteroff, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick – and his casting is impeccable, as is the expertly crafted production with fluid sets by Riccardo Hernandez, period costumes by Candice Donnelly, lighting by Rui Rita, sound by Domonic Sack and music conducted by Wayne Barker. Now is the time to treat yourself to delightful, heartwarming theater that leaves you with a tear in your eye and a smile on your face.
Susan Granger’s review of “I Never Sang for My Father” (Clurman Theater 2009-2010 season)
“Death ends a life…but it does not end a relationship, which struggles on in the survivor’s mind…toward some resolution, which it never finds.”
And so begins and ends the off-Broadway revival of Robert Anderson’s absorbing, provocative and disturbing 1968 play about the timeless universality of the complicated, angst-ridden father/son relationship.
Middle-aged widower Gene Garrison (Matt Servitto) is still trying to forge an emotional connection with his stubborn, selfish father, Tom (Keir Dullea) whose health is failing. Dividing his time between Florida and Westchester County, where he once served as the town’s Mayor, truculent, loquacious Tom has dominated not only vulnerable Gene but also his ailing wife, Margaret (Marsha Mason), and Gene’s older sister Alice (Rose Courtney), who moved to Chicago when she was banished for marrying a Jewish man.
Sensitively and perceptively directed by Jonathan Silverstein, the somber, intimate drama about guilt and responsibility recreates vignettes from Gene’s memories that illustrate the contentious awkwardness that always existed between father and son, enhanced by Bill Clarke’s spare set, Josh Bradford’s evocative lighting and Theresa Squire’s period costumes. The acting ensemble is extraordinary. At the top of his game, Keir Dullea delivers a crusty, pugnacious, powerhouse performance, while Matt Servitto exudes a seemingly effortless naturalism, a remarkable combination of lived-in face, warmly modulated voice and subtly calibrated expression and Marsha Mason’s nervously anxious cheerfulness and tender compassion is pitch-perfect – with congenial Melissa Miller and Hal Robinson adroitly covering various supporting roles.
For people who really care about first-class, quality, intelligent theater, merging seamless playwriting, directing and acting, “I Never Sang for My Father” is at Theatre Row’s Clurman Theater through May 1.
Susan Granger’s review of “Million Dollar Quartet” (Nederlander Theater 2009-2010 season)
What a clever idea! On Dec. 4, 1956, in Memphis, there was a legendary recording session featuring Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and newcomer-on-the-scene Jerry Lee Lewis. With a book by rock historian Colin Escott and Floyd Mutrux and directed by Eric Schaeffer from a fictionalized concept by Mutrux, it revolves around this impromptu afternoon jam session, arranged by Sun Records owner/producer Sam Phillips (Hunter Foster), who ‘discovered’ them all, along with Ray Orbison and others.
Fresh off his sensational appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and signing with RCA Records, Presley (Eddie Clendening) is in town to visit his parents with Dyanne (Elizabeth Stanley), a singer/girlfriend, in tow. Desperately eager for a new hit, Carl Perkins (Robert Britton Lyons) is still miffed that – because of an accident – it was Presley who became famous for the song he wrote called “Blue Suede Shoes.” Having reached the end of his Sun Records contract, Johnny Cash (Lance Guest) drops by, intending to tell Phillips he’s decided to sign with Columbia Records so that he can record more hymns. And aggressive, loquacious Jerry Lee Lewis (Levi Kreis) is just looking to pick up some extra bucks by pounding the piano.
Together, they – along with bassist Corey Kaiser and drummer Larry Lelli – blast through 22 jukebox numbers, including “Brown Eyed Handsome Man,” “Down By the Riverside” and “Peace in the Valley.” Lance Guest’s renditions of “Folsom Prison Blues,” “Sixteen Tons,” “I Walk the Line” and “Riders in the Sky” are sensational, while Levi Kreis nails Lewis’ signature “Great Balls of Fire,” among several other songs. Since the actor/rockers were chosen primarily for their impersonations, their line readings of the occasionally portentous dialogue are barely adequate. Basically, it’s a stroll down rock ‘n’ roll memory lane – and, for that, Derek McLane’s ramshackle set is spare and economical, Jane Greenwood’s costumes are authentic, but the sound could better.
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