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August 2006
‘Putnam County Spelling Bee’ @ Alliance
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
THEATER REVIEW. Through Sept. 16. Grade: A.
One contestant needs a decongestant. Another makes his own clothes, likes to toss his hair and is convinced that he’s not that smart. Last year’s winner has a protuberance so exuberant he has trouble standing up.
These are some of the kids at “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” composer William Finn and librettist Rachel Sheinkin’s refreshingly smart musical comedy about the joys and jitters of being a 21st-century word nerd. Opening the Alliance Theatre’s season Wednesday night, “Spelling Bee” takes the trophy for the most adorable show of the year and proves there’s not a loser in the ensemble of this first national tour, which camps out in Atlanta for the next two weeks.
One of the more quirky and original Broadway musicals in years, director James Lapine’s double Tony winner appears to be growing up in all the right ways. While the original cast will always be remembered for its indelible comedic portraits, this group finds new layers of tenderness in a story about the awkwardness of overachieving.
Winning is easy. Growing up is not. And that’s the real sting of “the bee.”
“Life is pandemonium,” the group sings. And indeed, the luck is in the random draw of the word. But while the inclusion of four audience volunteers and the quipping of bee emcees Rona Lisa Peretti (Jennifer Simard) and Douglas Panch (James Kall) give the piece an improvisational feel, it operates on a clear trajectory: elimination. Though the show is tightly choreographed, the atmosphere is live and uncensored, thanks to the warp-speed comments that Simard and Kall throw at their nightly guests.
Unapologetically un-P.C., “Spelling Bee” revels in stereotypes but never offends. Marcy Park (Katie Boren), the token Asian-American, speaks six languages, twirls the baton, is an all-American hockey player and has mastered martial arts, among numerous other talents. Mitch Mahoney (Alan H. Green), the event’s “comfort counselor,” is an African-American guy doing community service for his run-in with the law. What Mitch has over the youngsters is life experience —- he knows that using the wrong word can get you killed.
Miguel Cervantes (the sexually rattled Chip Tolentino), Sarah Stiles (lisping liberal Logainne Schwartzandgrubenierre), Michael Zahler (doofus self-doubter Leaf Coneybear) and Lauren Worsham (abandoned waif Olive Ostrovsky) are winners all, as is the athletically vigorous Boren.
Though Zahler’s attempt to imitate the tremors of original cast member Jesse Tyler Ferguson seems a little shaky at first, he wins us over with his character’s sweetness, his lovely voice and his heartbreaking response to the downbeat ding of the loser’s bell.
As the first contestant to go down, Cervantes’ Chip belts out a lament worthy of Mama Rose. He’s hawking candy and popcorn to the crowd, and he’s mad as hell about it. “Chip’s Turn,” anyone?
Doubling as Olive’s mother, channeling in from a religious retreat in India, Simard gives the evening’s most moving vocal moment, “The I Love You Song.” Beginning as a solo, the piece turns into a duet (with Worsham) and then a trio (with Green). It’s guaranteed to give you goose bumps.
Another grace note is the romantic connection between Olive and the adenoidally challenged William Barfee, the contest’s resident jerk (Eric Petersen). When William tells Olive not to think that he’s smitten by her pretty eyes and hair, we see that he protests too much. He’s got the look of love, and their pas de deux is a hoot.
The problem with Petersen’s take on William is that it’s not snarky or unattractive enough. “Spelling Bee” has plenty of soft touches —- and thus needs a fat, mean-spirited William to give it bite. Petersen is talented all right, but his hangdog looks and easy charm work to undermine his character’s edge. William is supposed to grow up to be “incredibly handsome,” but Petersen sort of is already —- give or take a few pounds.
Though designer Beowulf Boritt’s set is supposed to look like a high school gym, the Alliance’s cup-and-saucer configuration doesn’t do much to create the illusion of a rectangle, not to mention intimacy. Each one of Jennifer Caprio’s costumes tells us something about the characters —- from Leaf’s poignant patchwork to Chip’s Boy Scout uniform to Logainne’s boyish blue blazer. (By the way, notice Logainne’s knowing smirk when she says that Olive is pro-choice but still a virgin.)
In the end, this evening-long one act, which weaves in references to Atlanta celebs and schools, is a near-perfect gem. Unlike so many popular musicals of the day, it refrains from self-referential theater jokes, it wasn’t based on a movie, and there’s not a jukebox tune in the score. Any way you spell it, it’s a bee-yoo-ti-ful achievement.
THE 411: 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays; 2:30 p.m. Saturdays-Sundays; 7:30 p.m. Sundays. Through Sept. 16. $35-$65. Alliance Theatre, Woodruff Arts Center, 1280 Peachtree St. N.E., Midtown. 404-733-5000, alliancetheatre.org.
THE VERDICT: The buzz of the city.
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‘Turned Funny’ @ Theatre in the Square
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
THEATER REVIEW. Grade: A. Through Sept. 24.
Unlike so many writers working today, Celestine Sibley had the good sense to keep the messy complications of her personal life out of public view. Though she is remembered as a homespun Atlanta Constitution columnist who waxed prosaic about seeds and sunsets, a new play based on her memoirs suggests an emotionally rich inner life marked by struggle and near-constant abandonment.
Phillip DePoy’s “Turned Funny,” which had its world premiere Wednesday night at Marietta’s Theatre in the Square, is a wise, wonderful and refreshingly honest account of the pioneering reporter and single mother of three who wrote for The Atlanta Constitution for nearly six decades. Sibley died in 1999, at 85, after a long struggle with cancer.
Even colleagues who worked alongside Sibley for years may be surprised to know that her first husband drank himself to death at 45 and that her mother (“Muv”) was an amateur vaudevillian who once played a singing cowgirl. Muv was also a bigamist who never divorced Sibley’s father.
In a smart conceit, DePoy and director Fred Chappell have a single actress (Linda Stephens) play Sibley from age 7 onward. When Muv (Jill Jane Clements) makes her young daughter call her “Miss Evelyn” in front of the suitor who will eventually rescue them, Sibley learns that life can be a deceitful and sketchy affair. Dressed in Sibley’s trademark frumpy cardigan and sensible shoes, we see how this little girl was somehow forced into being an old woman at a tender age.
No wonder she refused to traffic in anything but facts for the rest of her life.
The play opens with Sibley, a self-taught journalist who fell in love with the craft as a high-school student in Creola, Ala., reading her own obituary — and taking issue with it. When she gets to the part about the readers who sent letters of “undying affection,” she says, “Well, that’s a lie right there!”
Fortunately, Stephens doesn’t try to mimic the inimitable Sibley’s old-lady voice. But she gets the body language and mannerisms down pat — the owlish glasses, the skirt pulled over the bulky and unwieldy legs, the essential kindness and generosity. It’s a performance that creeps up on you, and eventually breaks your heart.
When Sibley’s first husband dies a shattered and broken alcoholic, she confesses that she worried for years that he might kill her. (The play ends when Sibley finally agrees to marry her second husband, Jack Strong, a man 12 years her junior, after a long and happy courtship.)
When she goes to Memphis with her mentor, Constitution editor Ralph McGill, to cover the trial of James Earl Ray, she tells us that “it turned out to be a significant journey.” Ray was quickly convicted of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and gets a life sentence, and McGill, who prophesied that King’s death was an epochal event, died before the trial was over. “I cried all that day and the next,” says Sibley, who found herself abandoned again.
Stephens’ terrific performance is bolstered by the redoubtable Clements, who plays all the other women in the story, and Ric Reitz, who approximates all the men in Sibley’s life. Reitz is quite good, and Clements — possibly the city’s best over-40 actress — is superb. DePoy’s original music — folk tunes and blues of the sort that Sibley relished at her Sweet Apple cabin — helps build transitions and allows for moments of reflection.
Again and again, “Turned Funny” redeems itself with truth. You go into the theater expecting a sweet Valentine about an eccentric old woman in a rocking chair — and leave feeling moved by the strength and vitality of this large and unadorned life.
In her twilight years, Sibley may have concealed her losses under a veneer of sentimentality and nostalgia. But she never wallowed in self-pity or vanity. As she says at the beginning and end of this drama, she was “first and foremost a newspaper reporter.” With ink in her blood, she used words to transform lives and celebrate the commonplace. In this day and age, that’s rare and noble stuff.
THE 411: 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays. 2:30 p.m. and 7 p.m. Sundays. Through Sept. 24. $22-$33. Theater in the Square, Marietta. 770-422-8369; theatreinthesquare.com
THE VERDICT: A remarkable life in all its foibles and a fantastic season opener for 25-year-old Theatre in the Square.
‘Bombay Dreams’ @ The Fox
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
THEATER REVIEW. Through Aug. 13.
“Shakalaka, baby!�
“Bombay Dreams,� which opened Tuesday at the Fox, is a musical theater version of a Bollywood movie, the wildly popular and somewhat ridiculous Indian cinema style that marries lavish, extravagant dance numbers and gorgeous costumes with silly plotting and characters straight out of summer-stock melodrama. Bollywood (a portmanteau of Bombay and Hollywood) is pure eye-and-ear candy, heavy on the sucrose, and if you have a problem with that, surely there’s a Eugene O’Neill Festival starting somewhere.
The musical is set up like a Bollywood movie about the making of a Bollywood movie, or something like that; consistency is one of those nuisances that gets trampled whenever a couple dozen dancers get to stomping out rhythms in elaborate choreography, which happens a lot, quite happily. As always, there’s the hero, Akaash (Sachin Bhatt), a “slum-boy� who wants to be a movie star, and of course, gets his wish, only to find that’s not what makes him happy. There’s the good girl, Priya (Reshma Shetty), and the shallow, but superficially more attractive, girl, Rani (Sandra Allen).
If you think you know where it’s going, of course you do; there are Disney cartoons that push back stronger against our expectations.
But that’s Bollywood, and “Bombay Dreams� plays it up and winks at it simultaneously. “This could only happen in a dream,� exclaims Akaash during his improbable ascendancy. “Or in the far-fetched script of a Bollywood musical,� snips his friend, Sweetie (Aneesh Sheth). Oh, about Sweetie. He’s a eunuch, and although Sheth has a great voice and some memorable scenes near the end, for much of the musical he has to drag out every tired, mincing gay stereotype imaginable in what’s meant to be comic relief.
Such are the conventions of Bollywood. But the biggest convention of all is the wet sari scene. Because there is no sex, not even kissing, and very little skin in family-friendy Bollywood flicks, it’s become traditional to have a scene where the dancing girls find themselves in a fountain, getting drenched, but still heavily swathed. “Bombay Dreams� pulls off its own wet sari scene, complete with towering, gushing fountain set up center stage, followed by half a dozen crew members pushing squeegees and mops afterward. It’s sort of the falling chandelier of “Bombay Dreams.�
Speaking of falling chandeliers, the show was produced, but not scored, by Andrew Lloyd Webber, who hired real Bollywood talent to assemble it. It played London in 2002 and Broadway in 2004, never to much critical success or popular demand. Now it’s out on the road, turning the Fox into the Taj Y’All for a week.
‘Metamorphoses’ at Georgia Shakes
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
THEATER REVIEW. Through Aug. 20. Grade: B -
In Mary Zimmerman’s “Metamorphoses,” scale is everything.
Instead of thunderbolt and lightning and the clash of titans, the stories of ancient mythology are reduced to their human essence. The workings of man come across like a little play that the gods put on for their own entertainment.
That’s certainly the effect of watching Georgia Shakespeare’s sometimes overtly comic take on the Chicago playwright’s Tony Award-winning adaptation of the tales of Ovid.
Director Richard Garner’s approach may lack the gossamer delicacy of Zimmerman’s seminal New York production. But in these stories of Zeus, Midas, Orpheus, Aphrodite and numerous others, Georgia Shakespeare’s 10-member ensemble manages to stir up its own brand of aquatic alchemy.
As you may have heard by now, the 90-minute mythological cycle occurs in a 25-foot-long reflecting pool. And while the exercise requires a good measure of watery flailing and frolicking, the most effective moments are the quiet ones.
Hunger (Courtney Patterson) consumes King Erysichthon (Brandon J. Dirden) in an orgy of gluttony. Hoping to seduce Pomona (Park Krausen), Vertumnus (Joe Knezevich) slips into a drag disguise reminiscent of a Monty Python skit. King Ceyx (Daniel May) battles the henchman of the underworld in a fight sequence that would make White Water’s lifeguards cringe.
But the most heartbreaking images are those of Orpheus (May) turning around to look at Eurydice (Crystal Dickinson); Cinyras (Chris Kayser) removing his blindfold to realize that he’s been in congress with his daughter (Kelley Ristow); and Alcyone (Krausen) and Ceyx being transformed into seabirds that mate during the halcyon days.
Designer Tim Conley has done a first-class job of constructing the pool, a black trapezoid framed by a purple-blue backdrop of shimmering stars and an Olympus-like peak. Christine Turbitt’s costumes are lovely to look at, though the queenly wigs and gowns sometimes seem a bit Evita-ish for this elemental staging. And lighting designers Liz Lee and Mike Post bathe the whole affair with a mixture of murky luminescence and crystalline clarity.
All that said, you sometimes sense that the cost of this highly technical process came at the expense of precision and detail. Songs have been added when spoken language would suffice, and the scene in which Orpheus performs a vocal number while being sprayed with a shower of water from above seems especially superflous. Finally, the whispering of lines at the end of the show is downright hokey.
While the acting is generally good, a few performances rise to the top. Knezevich continues to hand in the best work of his Atlanta career, and he’s particularly fine as Midas. Chris Ensweiler finds the perfect tone as the spoiled-rotten Phaeton. And though May is required to flit around in the nude with a pair of white-feathered wings attached to his back, he does it without the least bit of preciousness.
Theater-goers who arrive expecting a carbon copy of Zimmerman’s staging may be disappointed. But newcomers are certain to be captivated —- by the pool, yes, but also by the primal urgency of the stories. Again and again, love conquers death, and sorrow is subsumed by the undertow of time.
THE 411: 8 p.m Tuesdays-Sundays; 2 p.m. Sundays. Through Aug. 20. $15-$40. Contains nudity and adult situations. Presented by Georgia Shakespeare. Conant Performing Arts Center, Oglethorpe University, 4484 Peachtree Road N.E., Atlanta. 404-264-0020, www.gashakespeare.org.
The verdict: Doesn’t quite hit it, but often comes close.
