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May 2007
Weekend pick: ‘Metamorphoses’ @ Georgia Shakes
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Like earth separating from water, the myths of Ovid have settled into themselves with an ethereal, timeless beauty at Georgia Shakespeare.
Mary Zimmerman’s “Metamorphoses” — first presented last summer in an acclaimed production that won five coveted Suzi Bass Awards — has been reprised for a quick swim in set designer Tim Conley’s luminous 24-foot, onstage pool.
The intermissionless, 90-minute play is a one-of-a-kind evening that pours the ocean-size tales of the ancient gods into a human-scale vessel dripping with love, desire and death. Sometimes all those passions converge into a single image, as when the grieving Queen Alcyone (Park Krausen) and the drowned King Ceyx (Daniel May) are transformed into the birds of the Halycon Days.
This year, actor Brandon J. Dirden has been replaced by Brik Berkes, a marvelous addition to this company of polished, articulate and physically striking performers. In particular, Berkes is terrific as the all-devouring King Erysichthon. Chris Kayser is delightful as the languorous and lugubrious Sleep. And Courtney Patterson makes an awe-inspiring transformation from a regal queen in one scene to a lurching and cadaverous Hunger in the next.
Though there are funny moments to be sure, director Richard Garner’s tone seems more subtle, hushed and melancholy than it did on the first outing. As one character says, “Time can only move in one direction.” In helping us reflect on the joy and despair of the journey, “Metamorphoses” is the most ennobling and evocative show in town. It would be a shame to miss it.
THE 411: Through June 3. $15-$35. Contains nudity and adult situations. Georgia Shakespeare, Conant Performing Arts Center, Oglethorpe University, 4484 Peachtree Road N.E., Atlanta. 404-264-0020, www.gashakespeare.org.
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‘Mount Pleasant Homecoming’ @ Theatre in the Square
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
THEATER REVIEW. Grade: B +
Evening, folks. How y’all doing tonight? Glad y’all could come. With Mervin heading out to pastor in Texas and June expecting her firstborn, this here promises to be a right special night at Mount Pleasant Baptist Church —- ‘specially since the Sanders Family has scooted in to sang for us.
If Mervin would stop boohooing over any mention of his late Mama, if Denise could just make little Eldon and Weldon behave themselves, we might be able to have us a real nice homecoming. We shore do have a lot to discuss, since Dennis is back from the war, Burl has done bought the homeplace and Mervin is bidding adieu to his job at the pickle plant.
If you know Alan Bailey and Connie Ray’s “Smoke on the Mountain” or “Sanders Family Christmas, ” the screwball Southern church group known as the Sanders Family needs no introduction. Regular visitors at Marietta’s Theatre in the Square for years now, these hee-hawing hallelujah nitwits are back with the world premiere of “Mount Pleasant Homecoming, ” a delightful gospel hootenanny that packs enough hillbilly nonsense to guarantee a baptism by laughter.
Bailey and Ray have mastered the rhythm of their corn-pone brand of storytelling, which operates in the time-tested tradition of Sunday morning worship: pithy, hayseed testimonials, followed by giddy and infectious hymn singing, which is almost always a cue to deploy a handy arsenal of impromptu percussive devices and props. These crackpot comedic scribes know how to circle back again and again to the same gag —- be it pickle punditry, Scripture slams or the Sanders gals’ propensity for producing twins.
Doubling as director and set designer, Dex Edwards creates a beautifully authentic country-church interior, then fills the quiet sanctuary with a ruckus. His hammy ensemble exploits the ’40s-era material chapter and verse.
Chief among the buffoons are Alan Kilpatrick as the overwrought Rev. Mervin Oglethorpe and Jennifer Akin as his unexcitable wife, June, elder daughter of the Sanders clans. Whereas Kilpatrick excels in outsize, foot-in-mouth physicality, Akin is a delightful practitioner of understatement, as when her character struggles to conceal a creeping case of nausea. Blech.
Laura Floyd’s Denise Sanders Culpepper has a lovely soprano voice and a Scarlett O’Hara silhouette and becomes hysterically unglued when her demonic offstage twins wreak havoc in the parking lot. Poor thing.
At 2 1/2 hours, 16 songs and two extended medleys, “Mount Pleasant Homecoming” feels 15 minutes longer than necessary; as every character shares his or her spiritual epiphany, time drags.
But who am I to quibble? Theatre in the Square’s audience is eating it up. The house, according to managing director Raye Varney, is “sold to the rafters, ” and after the show closes June 10, the whole kit and caboodle is moving to the newly renovated Dallas Theatre in nearby Dallas, Ga.
A foolproof family entertainment that already feels like a classic, “Mount Pleasant Homecoming” appears to be “leaning on the everlasting arms” of a grateful and spirited community.
THE 411: 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays; 2:30 and 7 p.m. Sundays. Through June 10. $22-$33. Theatre in the Square, 11 Whitlock Ave., Marietta. 770-422-8369, www.theatreinthesquare.com. June 22-July 8 at the Dallas Theatre in Dallas, Ga. Call Theatre in the Square for details and tickets.
THE VERDICT: Reserve a pew.
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‘Stick Fly’ @ True Colors
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
THEATER REVIEW. Grade: D+
The LeVays seem to have it all. The men are rich and good-looking. They have Ivy League educations and a house on Martha’s Vineyard. They have servants. Oh, and by the way, the LeVays are black.
In a perfect world, skin tone wouldn’t make any difference. But playwright Lydia R. Diamond’s “Stick Fly” is a domestic powder keg that derives its tension and heat by stirring together elements of race, adultery, hypocrisy and family dysfunction.
At first glance, this True Colors Theatre production looks like a sendup of the African-American middle class, which, based on the evidence here, seems to be as shallow and materialistic as its white counterpart. But what Diamond has in mind is far more than just a gentle poke at the brand-consciousness and navel-gazing of the elite.
The trouble in this seaside paradise doesn’t begin when the elder son (Javon Johnson) brings home a white girlfriend (Elizabeth Wells Berkes), but when the sensitive younger son (Jahi Kearse) introduces his fiancee (Je Nie Fleming), whose abandonment issues ultimately reveal her to have a good deal in common with the daughter of the family maid (Ayesha Ngaujah).
If you’ve watched a daytime soap, you won’t have any trouble predicting where the story of imperious patriarch Joe LeVay (GregAlan Williams) is going —- particularly since Diamond drops plenty of hints. Though director Derrick Sanders keeps the drama on track, “Stick Fly” is a tedious, derivative and virtually humorless train wreck of a play overstuffed with issues, status jokes and gratuitous, lukewarm sex.
Novel-writing son Kent (Kearse) is vintage Tennessee Williams. His strident girlfriend Taylor (Fleming) is pure Lorraine Hansberry. Joe is an upscale version of August Wilson’s Troy Maxon. And so on. Though you understand how True Colors wants to identify emerging voices, this choice is a befuddlement. Men are pigs. Women and children suffer. Tell us something new.
THE 411: 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays; 2:30 p.m. Saturdays; 7:30 p.m. Sundays. Through June 3. $20. True Colors Theatre, Balzer Theater at Herren’s, 84 Luckie St., Atlanta. 768-528-1500, truecolorstheatrecompany.com.
THE VERDICT: A big mess.
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IKAM’s ‘Crowns’ @ 14th Street Playhouse
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
THEATER REVIEW. Grade: B-
Regina Taylor’s “Crowns” is holding up well. Four years after the Alliance Theatre introduced these oral history-based lessons in “hattitude,” the play has been taken out of its box and paraded again at the 14th Street Playhouse.
While the IKAM Productions version can’t boast the opulent design and high-caliber artistry of the piece Taylor directed at the Alliance in 2003, it is a wholly welcome second look that feels like a family reunion steeped in memory, celebration and no small amount of feathers, fringe and fur.
Directed by Andrea Frye and starring the inimitable Bernardine Mitchell as the matriarchal Mother Shaw, “Crowns” seems destined to become a burnished and beloved classic in the tradition of Alvin Ailey’s “Revelations” or Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” last year’s inaugural show from IKAM.
Based on photographer Michael Cunningham and author Craig Marberry’s coffee-table book, “Crowns” mines those real-life testimonials for their inherent theatricality. In this case, choreographer Charles Bullock adds joyful and vivid dance moves, and musical director S. Renee Clark imbues the gospel score with percussive zest and soulful reverence. Frye has done a nice job of pairing newcomers Dawn Bynoe (Wanda) and Lauren Jones (Jeanette) with such old hands as Deidre N. Henry (Mabel) and Marguerite Hannah-Middleton (Velma).
My problem with “Crowns” is the same as it ever was: Taylor’s unoriginal and uninspired dramatic framework. Marberry, who also published the interviews on which the Alliance’s recent “Cuttin’ Up” was based, seems to have done most of the serious work. Taylor simply layers on traditional music and introduces the character of Yolanda (Naima J. Carter), a rebellious, rap-spouting young Brooklynite who gets an education in culture and fashion from her Southern grandmother — and her elder relative’s circle of church-going hat queens.
Though there’s a point in Act 2 where you feel like there’s nothing much happening but a lot of hats getting pushed around, the piece redeems itself with comedy and sass. In this telling of “Crowns,” the more funereal aspects don’t work as well as the insistent one-liners. “I’d lend my children before I’d lend my hats,” says one especially ardent fashion maven. “I know my children would find their way home. My hats might not.”
Among the performers, Jones is delightfully plucky; Clinton “HU” Harris is wonderfully expressive in all the male roles; and Mitchell, whether warbling “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” or playing a character who integrated a hoity-toity department store, is sublime.
While Darryl L. Harris’ hat designs aren’t always as posh as they could be, the final number — with all the ladies in all-white hats and gowns — is a dazzler. Whatever this “Crowns” lacks in millinery grandness, it makes up for in heart and soul. “Crowns” is an authentic slice of African-American culture, whipped into a frothy, delectable and crowd-pleasing entertainment.
Long live the queens.
THE 411: 8 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays. 1 p.m. Saturdays. 7 p.m. Sundays. Through June 10. IKAM Productions, 14th Street Playhouse, 173 14th St., Midtown. 404-733-4754; www.woodruffcenter.org/14thstplayhouse
THE VERDICT: Soulful and fun.
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Alliance wins Tony: What do you think?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
After 39 years as the resident theater of the Woodruff Arts Center, Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre has won the 2007 Tony Award for outstanding regional theater. What about the Alliance merits this recognition? Check out the full story and visit ajc.com for continued coverage.
It’s Tony time
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Will Tony love Atlanta this year?
Yeah, baby. When the nominees for the 2007 Tony Awards are announced this morning in New York, you can bet that a few kisses will be blown our way.
Here’s a quick look at some of the ways Atlanta may figure in this year’s Tony nominations. (Awards will be handed out June 10.)
Kenny Leon. It’s highly likely that August Wilson’s final drama, “Radio Golf,” will be nominated in some categories, including best new play. But will Atlanta director Leon score his first directing nomination? Leon’s first Broadway effort, 2004’s “A Raisin in the Sun,” won two Tonys, and “Gem of the Ocean,” the Wilson play that Leon took to Broadway in 2005, was nominated for five. But Leon himself has never been nominated.
Alfred Uhry. The “Driving Miss Daisy” author is back on Broadway with “LoveMusik,” a new musical suggested by the love letters of German composer Kurt Weill and his wife, Lotte Lenya. Uhry is a virtual shoo-in for his book, which frames the musical around the songs of Weill.
Outstanding Regional Theater. Each year, the League of American Theatres and Producers awards a Tony to a regional playhouse. Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre has never won. Could this be the year?
ON AJC.COM: Go online this morning for complete coverage of the 2007 Tony nominees.
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‘Hank Kimmel’s Shorts’ @ Jewish Theatre
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
THEATER REVIEW. Grade: C -
At the end of “Hank Kimmel’s Shorts,” just when the actors should be taking their bows, the ensemble erupts into a standing ovation — for the audience.
Like much of the material that makes up Atlanta playwright Hank Kimmel’s evening of sketch comedy, the gesture isn’t nearly as clever as the creative team seems to think that it is, though anyone who sits through this overstretched, frequently amateurish 2¸-hour program deserves an expression of gratitude from Jewish Theatre of the South.
Taking his cues from Woody Allen, David Sedaris and “Saturday Night Live,” Kimmel is preoccupied with the ironies of contemporary urban life, as seen through the Coke-bottle lens of his perpetually fretful alter ego and narrator (Andrew Benator). Soccer moms, football widows, constipated senior citizens, nervous travelers and agitated airport security officers are the subjects of Kimmel’s gentle ironies, which focus on the umbrella themes of domestic life, community, the workplace and the holidays. Spiked with up-to-the-minute jibes about Don Imus and Rosie O’Donnell, the four segments are bracketed by self-conscious little monologues about the author’s insecurity. Will the audience like it? Will folks come back after intermission? Does anyone really care?
With equal parts affection and anxiety, Kimmel comes across as such a kindhearted observer of human nature that his musings rarely have much bite. What this apologetic playwright desperately needs is an editor to trim his self-referential ramblings down to a reasonable 90 minutes. Director Mira Hirsch is apparently not up to the challenge.
“The Name Game” and “Early Morning Appointment” are built on single jokes stretched to the breaking point, and most of the “On the Job” section fails to make much of an impression at all, the one exception being “My Little Trip to the Airport,” a send-up of the hazards of post-9/11 travel. Kimmel finds more truth in the way two soccer moms (played by Megan Hayes and Marcie Millard) undergo a kind of courtship, or the alcoholic despair of a wife (Millard) who’s been tuned out by her Super Bowl-watching husband (Benator). “Love you, love you, baby,” says the armchair quarterback to the jocks on TV.
Perhaps the funniest playlet is “Your Local Pharmacy,” about a microphone-wielding druggist (Enoch King) who makes loud bloopers about his senior shoppers’ quest for condoms, marijuana and bowel relief. (Potty humor seems to be Kimmel’s métier.) Also nice is the nonverbal shtick of “Neighborhood Dance,” which flows like a silent film.
Whatever the shortcomings of these shorts, it must be said that all of the performers are good — particularly newcomer Benator; the underused King and Millard; and precocious Chamblee Middle School student Benjamin Appley-Epstein. Too bad that set designer Travis George’s replicas of picket fences and American homesteads are as shaky and wafer-thin as the script. All in all, “Hank Kimmel’s Shorts” feels too much like community theater. Is there a dramaturge in the house?
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August Wilson’s ‘Radio Golf’ on Broadway
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
THEATER REVIEW. Grade: B
New York — Old Glory hangs like an elegy over August Wilson’s final play, “Radio Golf,” which was to open Tuesday night on Broadway, the final chapter of an unprecedented 10-play chronicle of African-American life in the 20th century.
The flag hovers like a dream and a disappointment over the life of central character Harmond Wilks, a middle-class golden boy determined to become the first black mayor of Pittsburgh. Wilks tells his wife, Mame, that he wants the Stars and Stripes blazed across his campaign posters. But when he thinks about his twin brother, Raymond, who came home from Vietnam in a coffin, he sobs at the thought of the flag.
“Radio Golf” — the last word from playwright Wilson, who died of cancer in 2005 — sends a mixed signal about a democracy that promises everyone an equal chance, yet often fails to honor the bargain. As Wilks and his arrogant business partner, Roosevelt Hicks, forge ahead with plans to redevelop the blighted Hill District of Pittsburgh — and put a Barnes & Noble, a Starbucks and a Whole Foods over an ancient house at 1839 Wylie Ave. — their ill-considered scheme comes to a halt in a blaze of hubris, betrayal and last-minute redemption.
Directed by Atlanta’s Kenny Leon, this 1990s coda to Wilson’s decade-by-decade Century Cycle of plays may not have the fecund poetic sweep of his late masterpieces, the magnificent “Gem of the Ocean” and the Aeschylean “King Hedley II.” But it is a warm and vital celebration of the will of the common man to stare down the monolith of progress and honor the past.
Wilks (Harry Lennix) and Hicks (James A. Williams) might well have achieved their vision were it not for the arrival of Old Joe Barlow (Anthony Chisholm), who owns the mansion once occupied by Aunt Ester, and Sterling Johnson (John Earl Jelks), who has fond memories of sitting at her knee. Followers of Wilsonian mythology will recognize Aunt Ester as the 287-year-old matriarch and healer from “Gem of the Ocean,” which was set in her living room at 1839 Wylie.
As the past collides with the present, Wilks undergoes a reversal of fortune that is also a harbinger of his awakening. Mame (Tonya Pinkins) is trying to get a job as the governor’s press secretary, and Hicks, a bank vice president and ardent golfer, buys a radio station, which becomes the pulpit for his program, “Radio Golf.” While Wilks and Hicks make a Faustian bargain that will erase their old neighborhood, Old Joe and Sterling remember the Hill’s glory days, when folks used to line up for Miss Harriet’s fried chicken.
Lennix and Pinkins give smartly polished, almost effortless-looking performances, and Williams’ take on the smug, self-aggrandizing Hicks is virtually pitch-perfect. But the real blood and guts of this production are Chisholm’s gritty, spittle-spouting street prophet and Jelks’ fiercely eloquent house painter, who leads a kind of insurrection to stop the bulldozers.
“A perfect day is the saddest day,” Old Joe says. “You know why? ’Cause it has to come to an end. I’ve had many perfect days. I thought they were going to last forever. But they all come to an end.” When the hardscrabble philosopher utters those words, written by Wilson just before his death, you can almost hear a pin drop in the theater.
That said, “Radio Golf” is probably more important as a historic occasion than a work of art.
Though there are moments of Wilson’s majestic poetry, the deceptively simply drama is not flawless. Ebbing and flowing with humor and static, the loose ends feel hastily and self-consciously tied up — an easy out. The titular metaphors of golf and radio often seem more truncated and extraneous than organic, as when Roosevelt suddenly puts a Tiger Woods poster on the wall of Bedford Hills Redevelopment, the storefront setting of the play. Pinkins is a major Broadway star, but the character of Mame is slight and perfunctory, her journey never fully explored.
On the design side, David Gallo’s exploded set is a clue that this playwright is preoccupied with the accumulated strata of a vanishing culture and the battle scars of the soul. Adjoining the threadbare but functional real estate office are the burned-out remains of the community’s gathering spots: an old barbershop and a watering hole. Though Susan Hilferty’s unremarkable costumes are appropriate to the characters’ social standing, Donald Holder’s economical lighting never accentuates the scenery’s rough outer edges.
After 23 years, two Pulitzer Prizes (“Fences,” “The Piano Lesson”) and numerous other awards, the cycle that began with “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” is finally complete. An up-to-the-minute argument on race, class and the importance of remembering where you came from, “Radio Golf” ends with a loud, thumping offstage party and a message for the ages. The human heart is prone to error and corruption. Common sense is scarce. But in the final analysis, decency and goodness will prevail.
THE 411: Open-ended engagement. $31.25-$96.25. Cort Theatre, 138 W. 48th St., New York City. 1-800-432-7250, telecharge.com.
THE VERDICT: Wilson issues a call to honor the past.
wbrock@ajc.com
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‘Violet Hour’ @ 7 Stages
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
THEATER REVIEW. Grade: B-
Now and always, for the living and the dead, time piles up like pages of some endless encyclopedia. But what if we had a chance to flip ahead and see how the story ended?
Richard Greenberg’s “The Violet Hour” plays around with ideas about the dewy promise of youth, the meaning of friendship and the messy complications of history, all in the space of a single day in 1919.
A meditation on responsibility and regret, written in the effervescent prattle of Jazz Age cocktail hours, Greenberg’s play is a haunting evening of theater —- even in the uneven, bewilderingly cast new production directed by Joe Gfaller at 7 Stages.
Spun from gaiety and melancholy, this finely crafted conceit from the Tony Award-winning author of “Take Me Out” ponders the heart of a young publisher named John Pace Seavering as he decides whether to put out the voluminous first novel of his Princeton chum —- or the memoirs of his coy older mistress, a ululating peacock who seems modeled on Josephine Baker.
The stakes are raised for Seavering (Bobby Labartino) when a mysterious machine arrives at his office —- and proceeds to sputter reams of documents that are like telegrams from the future. As the century presses forward, it seems that Seavering’s circle will become grist for the mill of literary gossip and biography.
In describing the courtship of novelist Denis McCleary (Brian Crawford) and the beautiful and eccentric Rosamund Plinth (Heather Starkel), Greenberg appears inspired by the mythology of F. Scott Fitzgerald and his troubled wife, Zelda. Seavering recalls Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins, who nurtured such dysfunctional writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe.
“The Violet Hour” draws its name from Denis’ first novel. As he explains to Seavering: “It’s that time —- that wonderful New York hour when the evening’s about to reward you for the day. The violet light you walk between that hastens you places.”
Crawford and Starkel make for a lovely Denis and Rosamund, so young and tender at first, so sad and tormented down the road. As Seavering’s ageless assistant, Gidger, Doyle Reynolds can’t seem to muster much in the way of laughter in those crucial opening moments, which are intended to run like the clockwork banter of Wilde and Coward. As written in uppercase bursts by Greenberg, Gidger’s dialogue has its own affected rhythm, but Reynolds’ pacing feels off, leaving you to wish he had formulated his own speed of attack.
As the moral center of the story, Labartino is a bland straight man who doesn’t have the vigor to carry the weight of this elegantly penned comedy. The performance grows on you, but it also makes you wonder what a better actor might have done with the role. As Seavering’s lover, the music doyenne Jessie Brewster, Yvonne Singh is an odd choice. Singh is a mature and commanding presence, yet she doesn’t exude the kind of smoldering sensuality that might have ignited the passion of a man half her age.
In the end, thanks to the exquisitely tailored handiwork of Crawford and Starkel, Denis and Rosamund become the shimmering and luminous core of the play.
“The Violet Hour” has been described as a time-travel story, which is not exactly accurate since characters and events don’t skip forward or backward through time. Instead, the future becomes a lens through which Seavering can see the folly and the futility of his choices. He can neither influence nor alter the outcome of providence, but in the course of an afternoon, he is forced to reckon with the turmoil and the falsehoods to come. It’s an odd puzzlement of a play, and one that gets richer in the afterglow.
Twilight, of course, is a metaphor for the consequences of youth. In the hourglass bloom of the play’s opening and closing, everyone twitters gaily while tragedy laps at the surface. As the paper-sputtering machine informs us, things will end badly. But for now, let there be cocktails and laughter and purple light and nights at the theater.
THE 411: 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays; 5 p.m. Sundays; 2 p.m. Saturday; 6 p.m. May 9 and May 16. Through May 20. $20-$25. 7 Stages, 1005 Euclid Ave., Little Five Points. 404-523-7647, 7stages.org.
THE VERDICT: A better play than a production, but haunting nonetheless.
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‘Twelfth Night’ — or 6 reasons to Shake at the Lake
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
They came with picnic baskets, blankets and purple armbands — and fanned out in the sunken garden beside Lake Clara Meer at Piedmont Park.
While ducks bobbed in the water, Georgia Shakespeare transformed the waterside venue into the magical isle of Illyria for Wednesday night’s opening of “Twelfth Night.” The clouds were meek, but the jesters were not.
Now in its fourth year at Piedmont Park, Shake at the Lake has found its groove. Here are six reasons why I love this al fresco production of the play Shakespeare called “Twelfth Night, or What You Will.”
Boffo buffoonery. Director Karen Robinson’s new cast members are delicious enhancements to last summer’s hit show at Oglethorpe University. Allan Edward’s Sir Toby Belch looks ike an over-served Captain Kangaroo, and David Howard’s Feste is delightfully nimble fool.
Ideal location. Only 900 tickets are available for each performance, and the action is gated inside the lakeside bower. Thankfully, there’s no frisbee, no drunken revelers, no space-gobbling lawn chairs. The atmosphere is informal and the focus in on the story. If you prefer to get horizontal and count the stars, you have permission.
Accessible material. You don’t need any fancy schooling to understand this tale of mistaken identity and romantic confusion. Twins Viola (Courtney Patterson) and Sebastian (Joe Knezevich) are lost at sea. When Viola disguises herself as a boy, things get a little wonky.
Noshing is sacred. The topic of eating and toping comes up again and again in the play, so a snack is essential. There’s plenty of takeout in the neighborhood, but we recommend a lamb sandwich and chocolate chip-and-pecan cookie from Alon’s on North Highland Avenue. Or Popeye’s fried chicken and sweet tea.
Chris Kayser. In a hysterical performance, his supercilious Malvolio gets duped into thinking that Olivia (Crystal Dickinson) is in love with him — and makes a perfect fool of himself in a yellow kilt and harlequin stockings.
No charge and a sense of accomplishment. Tickets at Georgia Shakespeare are normally $15-$40. But this event is free. Wrist bands are available on the day of the show at the Piedmont Park Visitors Center (near the 12th Street and Piedmont Avenue entrance) or the Georgia Shakespeare box office at Oglethorpe (4484 Peachtree Road, Atlanta). You may have to wait in line a few minutes, but the payoff is worth it.
The basics: Lawn seating begins at 6 p.m.; performances at 7:30 p.m. tonight-Sunday. Lake Clara Meer Dock, behind Piedmont Park Visitors Center, Atlanta. 404-264-0020, www.shakeatthelake.com.
Manos takes Manhattan, talks about upcoming Tonys
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Broadway got a taste of the Chris Manos charm the other day.
In New York City for the League of American Theatres and Producers’ spring powwow, the Theatre of the Stars chief picked up the league’s Distinguished Lifetime Service Award for his 47 years in showbiz. Manos, 76, has presented more than 700 shows during his Atlanta career.
Joking about receiving the award at his age, he said, “If you stumble going down the stairs, they say, ‘Hurry, we better do something.’ ” (Two years ago, he received the Atlanta Coalition of Performing Arts’ first Georgia Arts & Entertainment Legacy Award at the Fox Theatre, and Broadway diva Jennifer Holliday flew in to belt her trademark song “And I’m Telling You I’m Not Going” from “Dreamgirls.”)
The award from Broadway’s national trade group would have been a surprise, Manos said, but he knew something was cooking when his three children showed up. His new crystal-star sculpture with the league logo is “pretty,” he said, but he was especially thrilled to get to try out his legendary arsenal of jokes on a fresh crowd.
“My baseball stuff went over big,” said the unsinkable Braves fan. Previous recipients include “Hello, Dolly!” author Jerry Herman, Carol Channing and “Chicago” producers Barry and Fran Weissler. That, quipped Manos, is “high cotton.”
A big part of Manos’ job is scouting Broadway for shows he’d like to produce in Atlanta and doing his Tony homework. He’s a voter for the Tony Awards, which will be handed out on June 10, following nominations on May 15.
Manos had nice things to say about “Grey Gardens,” “Legally Blonde” and “Spring Awakening.” He said he’d be back to Manhattan soon to see Atlanta-born playwright Alfred Uhry’s “LoveMusik,” based on the love letters of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya.
Manos said he was asked if he would like to produce rock composer Duncan Sheik’s “Spring Awakening.” And though the show contains simulated sex, nudity, a teen pregnancy, a suicide and a rousing song about masturbation, he didn’t give it a second thought. The producer said he’d do it in a minute, and even though the material is racy by commercial standards, he says it has a good shot at Tony’s big enchilada, the slot for best new musical.
Manos may be 76, but he’s hipper than we thought.
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