After a pandemic-prompted hiatus, Quark Theatre is back and ready to start its fourth season with Wakey, Wakey by Will Eno.
This is not the first time Quark is putting on Wakey, Wakey, having performed it back in October 2019, but, as Quark co-founder Adam Remsen says, “A lot of it seems a lot more personally relevant. It’s such a layered script. And counting both of the productions we’ve done, I’ve probably gone through that script a hundred times now, and I continue to find new things that I have not noticed before.”
The play opens with a presumably terminally ill Guy, rousing from a nap and asking, “Is it now? I thought I had more time.” For the next hour of the play, Remsen, who will reprise his part as the protagonist, explains, “It’s this sort of meandering monologue, where he talks about all different things — a lot about love and life and death. Though, that makes it sounds very serious, and it’s a very funny play. For something that deals with such heavy subjects, I’m always amazed at how lightly it keeps moving along. It’s so well-written.”
Interestingly, the playwright Will Eno went beyond providing the script, Remsen says. “When we did the show for the first time, we applied for the rights and we got them and got an email that Will likes to be personally involved in productions of his play.” So the group emailed with Eno, asking questions and receiving long, detailed, and personable responses. “It’s unheard of. I have literally never heard of another playwright doing that,” Remsen continues. “There were some points in the play that were confusing, and it helped us kind of figure out what was going on with those and what we were going to do. He was also very clear … that he understands that every production is different and the goal is to make this your production.
“It’s such a personal play, and it actually specifies in the script that when the play ends that in the lobby there are food and snacks and drinks provided and everyone should come out in the lobby including the cast and have a little small reception or party.” This intimacy, Remsen adds, will also be afforded in the size of the space being lent by Germantown Community Theatre. “It’s a small theater; it’s a hundred seats. … We want people to be as close as possible to the stage.”
As such, this play is within Quark’s affinity for simple, nuanced performances. “[Co-founder and director Tony Isbell] and I enjoy theater that takes out anything extraneous,” Remsen says, “where it’s just the actors, a script, and an audience. … We stick to fairly small shows, fairly new shows usually, and the kind of shows that we do are the kind no one is going to do in Memphis if we don’t do them.”
Wakey, Wakey will run through July 17th, Thursday-Sunday, but Quark isn’t stopping there this season. Unlike seasons past, this season will have four productions, not two. Up next is What Happens to Hope at the End of the Evening, which Quark put on in March 2020, having to cancel its run after two performances.
Wakey, Wakey, Germantown Community Theatre, 3037 Forest Hill Irene Road, opens July 7, 8 p.m., $20.
Plenty to do and see this weekend, from openings to closings.
Opening Friday is Between Riverside and Crazy at Hattiloo Theatre. The 2015 Pulitzer Prize winning play throws the old against the new as a retired police officer is faced with eviction from his rent-controlled apartment in New York City. Directed by Ekundayo Bandele. For info, go here.
Lend us your ears: Tennessee Shakespeare is staging Julius Caesar. Directed by Dan McCleary, the classic about political dysfunction, pride, and consequences runs through October 6th. Grab your toga and go here for info.
Think you can handle the truth? This is the final week for Theatre Memphis’ production of A Few Good Men, the powerful Aaron Sorkin play about a court martial and a coverup. Seating is limited this weekend, but a performance has been added tonight, September 25th. Go here for ticket information.
It’s also the final weekend for Germantown Community Theatre’s Barefoot in the Park, the Neil Simon love letter to young lovers. Get tickets here.
Quark Theatre’s slogan is “small plays about big ideas,” to which fans will readily concur. If you go and are not provoked in some way, if you don’t squirm, if you don’t talk about it afterward with your companion, then you probably weren’t there.
Quark’s next show is Wakey, Wakey by Will Eno, an acclaimed playwright and Pulitzer Prize finalist. Tony Isbell, one of Quark’s founders, directs Adam Remsen (another Quark founder) and Sarah Solarez. Sound design is by Eric Sefton, with original music by Eileen Kuo, and lighting design by Louisa Koeppel (also a Quark founder).
The play runs 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, and 2 p.m. Sundays through October 6th. It’s at TheatreSouth, 1000 Cooper St., southwest corner of the building. Tickets are $20. Here’s the website.
Isbell spoke to us about Quark’s philosophy and the production:
Quark’s plays aren’t particularly traditional. I suppose that’s true with Wakey, Wakey?
Sometimes I call it an experience because it’s not really a typical play in some ways. It’s kind of like an eccentric TED talk. It involves the use of quite a few projections and recorded sound while the protagonist talks directly to the audience. There is an aspect that’s more a traditional play with another character, but there’s a good bit of it that’s a direct address to the audience.
You’ve had the rare experience of talking with the playwright as you were putting this together, right?
When we applied for the rights to this show last year, we got an email from the company that handles the rights. It said that Will likes to be involved in local productions of his plays and here’s his email. So, when we started to work on it, we contacted him. I thought that was pretty cool since he’d been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for drama for a previous work. He replied within 20 minutes and we’ve emailed back and forth a few times and each time, he answered right back.
He seems to be as super nice human. We talked about our approach and our limitations because we have basically zero budget for our show. He was fine with that and much of our approach. Sometimes he’d suggest we try something instead, but never been anything less than enthusiastic and supportive and friendly.
So that must have given you confidence going in?
Yeah, because this is different. All of his plays might be described as eccentric. He’s previously been described as the Samuel Beckett for the millennial generation or something like that. He’s really not, that’s really not quite accurate, but I can certainly see it in him and his writing. This play in particular is what you might call a miniature or a chamber piece.
There isn’t a whole lot of plot. There are two characters, one a man named Guy and a young woman named Lisa. Guy spends part of the show talking directly to the audience. He talks about matters of life and death, and how to deal with life when you are facing extreme situations and it’s very funny and kinda out of left field. But it’s also very moving.
I’ve seen it dozens of times and I still tear up at certain places because it just captures the humor and the joy and the sorrow of being alive. And it reminds me, in some ways, of Our Town though it’s not in any way similar to what’s happened in Grover’s Corners. You kind of get that we all just try to do the best we can and we’re all here together and shouldn’t we all be doing our best to make things easier for other people instead of more difficult? It’s a play that I think has kind of a therapeutic or healing dimension to it. I think people will come out of this show feeling very uplifted and very centered. It ranges from goofy to profound.
How do you choose the scripts that you produce?
Adam and I have tried to produce things that haven’t been done in Memphis, or that Memphis isn’t going to produce because they don’t really fit the mold of what other theaters might want to produce. We deliberately look for things that are challenging and thought provoking, whether that’s the intent of the script or the manner in which it’s produced. Secondary factors: that they are one-act shows that can be produced without big, detailed sets or costumes. This show is our biggest exception to that because it does require a great deal of video and still images and the sound and projection.
Barefoot in the Park at GCT
Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park is playing at Germantown Community Theatre (GCT) through September 29th. The rom-com has fun with newlyweds (he’s uptight, she’s a free spirit) in their 5th-floor walkup apartment as they deal with neighbors, relatives, stairs, and Manhattan. Get tickets here.
On Golden Pond at Playhouse on the Square
Opening Friday at Playhouse on the Square is On Golden Pond, which is kind of like a geriatric Barefoot in the Park: Couple in love working out their differences while family members and people from the neighborhood keep showing up. In this one, Norman and Ethel Thayer are at the family lake house instead of Manhattan. Through October 6th. (And there’s one more connection: Jane Fonda was in both movie versions). Score your tickets here.
You know what? As long as John Maness wins something, I don’t care about anything else this year. If the Ostrander committee misses all the rest by miles and miles, I’ll be satisfied for the ounce of justice done. Because … holy crap! After this season, the O-committee should consider a “John Maness hardest-working-person in Memphis Theater” trophy. With a roll-up-your-sleeves work ethic married to the soul of a magician and escape artist, he hammers out one unique character after another and vanishes inside them. I mean, who the hell does this guy think he is, Erin Shelton?
Nevertheless, the time has come, once again, for shade to be cast and predictions made in regard to this year’s crop of nominees and nominees that might have been if only the universe wasn’t so frequently unfair. It’s the season when the Intermission Impossible team wonders what it is our tireless, too human Ostrander judges might be smoking. When we ask the one question on every right-thinking thespian’s mind — “WHO GOT ROBBED?”
I want to see J. David Galloway take home the set design for New Moon’s lovely, immersive, and necessarily inventive design for Eurydice. I’ve been frustrated in the past by designers who quote or wink at surrealism when what’s needed is something approaching the real thing. Not every aspect of Galloway’s design was as dreamy as it might have been, but the microbudget masterpiece engaged imaginations, enabling the kind of stage magic money can’t buy.
[pullquote-1] That said, bigger, better-funded companies still have advantages in design categories and I suspect the judges may prefer Jack Yates’ outstanding work on The Drowsy Chaperone or the ordinary otherworldliness of Tim McMath’s design for Fun Home at Playhouse on the Square.
But what about the eye-candy that was An Act of God (also Yates)? What about 12 Angry Jurors, an environment so real yet another confounded patron tried to use the onstage bathroom (also Yates)? If it sounds like I’m arguing for more Jack Yates nominations, maybe I am. But I’m also making a case that there’s been some good design this season, and given a different set of sensibilities, this category might have swung another direction entirely. There might have been nods for the elegant emptiness of Bryce Cutler’s Once, at Playhouse on the Square, or the grubby, unfussy realism of Phillip Hughen’s design for The Flick at Circuit Playhouse. I look forward to seeing how this category evolves as New Moon continues to mature, and smaller Memphis’ companies leverage thoughtfulness against more tangible resources.
Falsettos.
It’s wrong that Mandy Heath wasn’t nominated for lighting Falsettos but I can live with the slight as long as she wins the prize for Eurydice. That’s really all I have to say about that.
Once is a stunt musical — and what a terrific stunt! It’s part concert, part narrative drama, with the actors doubling down as their own orchestra. The three-chord score’s not Sondheim but casting players who are also, well… players isn’t easy. And pulling off a piece musical theater where the songs feel more like barroom romps than show tunes, requires a different kind of sophistication. I suspect the thrice-nominated Nathan McHenry will take this prize. He should take it for Once.
Who got robbed? Maybe nobody this year.
For excellence in sound design there are a few nominees, but really only one choice. Joe Johnson’s dreamy original score for Eurydice didn’t enhance the designed environment. It completed it.
I was happy to see choreographers Ellen Inghram and Jared Johnson nominated for the wit and wisdom permeating their work on Falsettos. It would be nice to see them win over the flashier entries in this category. No robberies here.
When it comes to the non-musicals, best female lead and supporting roles are almost always the toughest category to call because year after year they are overstuffed with contenders. While Kim Sanders was her usual perfect self in both A Perfect ArrangementandLaughter on the 23rd Floor, the double nomination in the supporting category may not double her odds against commanding, emotionally wrenching turns by Jessica “Jai” Johnson inRuined and Erin Shelton in All Saints in the Old Colony. Kell Christie was the best Emelia I’ve ever seen and a perfect match for John Maness’ woman-hating Iago in New Moon’s Othello.Any other year Christie would be my #1 pick. She’s a longshot compared to Shelton and Johnson and I’m hard pressed to say who’s more deserving of the honor.
Opera 901 Showcase
Who got robbed? Although FEMMEemphis’ productions aren’t under consideration, basically the entire cast of Collective Rage. Quark’s similarly out of the running but in the young company’s very adult production of The Nether, young Molly McFarland stood shoulder to shoulder with grownup co-stars and delivered a brave, polished performance. As the youngest of the Weston daughters in Theatre Memphis’ tepid August: Osage County, Emily F. Chateau was damn near perfect — as fragile as Laura Wingfield’s glass unicorn and as likely to cut you if broken. ROBBED AS HELL!
Anne Marie Caskey does consistently professional work but she seemed miscast in Theatre Memphis’ not altogether successful production of August: Osage County. Ostrander loves Caskey (as do I) and her inclusion here might seem less bewildering if not for the absence of Michelle Miklosey’s pitch perfect Eurydice Tracy Hansom’s good old fashioned curtain chew inStage Kiss. Were I one of these two ladies, I’d take The Oblivains strong advice and call the police. Because, ROBBED! OMG ROBBED!
Some of the best female leads this season did their thing just outside Ostrander’s natural reach. Jillian Baron and Julia Baltz were equally badass in FEMMEmphis’ Desdemona: A Play About a Handkerchief. But let’s be real. All this talk of robbery is purely academic because each of these fantastic performances paled next to to Maya Geri Robinson’s larger-than-life depiction of a Congolese Mother Courage in Ruined at Hattiloo. And Robinson’s performance may have only been the season’s second best. I can’t say with any confidence that I’ve ever seen an actor own a show like Morgan Watson owned Sunset Baby, also at Hattiloo.
Emily F. Chateau. The F stands for F-ing ROBBED!
The list for Best Supporting Actor is strong. It’s so strong I’m picking Bertram Williams for Ruined even though I started this column cheering for John Maness in anything. The list of nominees might also have included nods to Jeff Kirwan for his performances in New Moon’s Buried Child, Eurydice or both. It’s worth noting (yet again) that every performance in All Saints in the Old Colony approached a personal best and Marques Brown was ROBBED!
I don’t know what the theater judges had against Buried Child but James Dale Green’s Dodge is a glaring best actor omission. So is Emmanuel McKinney, who gave a knockout performance as Muhammad Ali in the uneven Fetch Clay, Make Man. Both of these men should post on Nextdoor.com right away to let everybody know they were ROBBED! Once that’s been done, can we please all agree to give this year’s prize to John Maness? And can we go ahead make it for everything he touched this season? I say this with deep appreciation for and apologies to All Saints’ Greg Boller and Jitney’s Lawrence Blackwell who both delivered special, award-worthy performances in a season where the competition happened to be a little stiffer than usual.
I take it from the sheer number of nominations in the category of Best Supporting Actress in a Musical, the Ostrander judges liked Fun Home. Me too. But maybe not enough to give any category a near sweep. Especially when it might be appropriate to co-nominate Fun Home’s small and medium Alison in order to make room for Falsettos’ Jaclyn Suffel and/or Christina Hernandez who were both ROBBED!
Ostranders 2018: Picks, Pans, and ‘Who Got ROBBED?!?!’
A taste of Once‘s pre-show jam. Like I said, Ostrander very clearly likes Fun Home this year with the odd exception of adult Alison, Joy Brooke-Fairfield. So, individual nominations aside, I’m predicting a joint win for the two Alisons. Of course Annie Freres was a force of nature as the title character in The Drowsy Chaperone. All else being equal, she was probably the most outstanding nominee in a field of outstanding nominees.
Best Female Lead in a Musical is a heartbreaker category because everybody nominated is ridiculously talented. Nobody in town has pipes like Dreamgirls’ Breyannah Tillman, who’s also proving to be a formidable actor. But Emily F. Chateau also had an amazing year and may have been better in Falsettos than she was in August: Osage County. Gia Welch is a precocious powerhouse. She was great in Chaperone, but might also have been nominated for work on 42nd Street or Heathers. Meanwhile, Once’s Lizzy Hinton and Shrek’s Lynden Lewis occupy opposite corners of this playing field. The former helped build a complete world out of song and mirrors.The later was almost buried in spectacle but made heart and soul so much more important than green makeup and ogre costumes.
Let me let you in on a secret: Like Lena Younger’s striving son Walter, Patricia Smith was ROBBED! She should have gotten a nod for her work in the musical adaptation of A Raisin in the Sun. I’m gonna talk about Raisin later on in this seemingly endless column, but frankly, that whole cast might want to call a personal injury attorney because they were dealt a disservice up front then ripped off by out appraisers!
Given all of Fun Home’s nominations in other categories, the omission of Joy Brooke-Fairfield feels oddly pointed. Fun Home’s a show that might challenge traditional gender divisions in these kinds of awards and when I didn’t see the older Alison included in this category, I so I double checked the whole list to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. But there was no Joy to be found anywhere, and that sentence is every bit as sad as it sounds. ROBBED!
I’d like to see Joshua Pierce win the Best Supporting Actor in a Musical category for Theatre Memphis’ superlative take on Falsettos. But I missed First Date and Dreamgirls this season and, truth be told, I don’t understand Shrek’s appeal. Too disoriented by this category to make a fair call. That almost never happens. Y’all tell me.
Best Leading Actor in a Musical is yet another heartbreaker category. Shrek’s never going to be my thing, but it’s very clearly Justin Asher’s, and he was a mighty fine ogre, loving every second of big green stage time. Stephen Huff was so at home in Fun Home it’s now almost impossible for me to imagine anybody else in his role. And I kinda feel the same about Jason Spitzer’s near definitive take on The Drowsy Chaperone’s Man in Chair. But I’ve gotta say, having been underwhelmed by his pitchy turn in Heathers, I was most impressed by Conor Finnerty-Esmonde’s take on the hard-luck musician in Once. But when I filter out personal taste in music and storytelling and just let myself focus on the difficulty and potency of the performances represented here, one actor’s work really stands out. Villains are fun to play but nothing’s harder than a complex character who’s hard-to-like but can’t be allowed to become a villain. Cary Vaughn, in his finest of many fine performances, plowed through Falsettos like a steamroller. Still standing. Still applauding this entire cast.
Eurydice — Awfully good looking.
But what about Kortland Whalum? Where is his name? I’ll be the first to admit, Raisin was tragically underproduced. The scenic environment felt unfinished, and in an intimate space like Hattiloo, nothing sucks the soul from musical performances like warm bodies performing to cold tracks. But somehow, in spite of everything the actors had working against them, Raisin’s cast collectively overcame. I can’t blame the Ostrander for not rewarding the production, but when you factor in the odds against, no cast was more ROBBED than this one. I’ll brook zero argument: No actor deserves to this category half as much as Whalum. Folks are welcome to disagree on this point, but folks who do are flat wrong. ROBBED!
If Jamel “JS” Tate doesn’t win Best Featured Performer in a Drama for Jittny I’m personally calling in the FBI. Annie Freres is likely to win Best Featured in a musical for her flashy roll-on as the Dragon in Shrek. Or maybe it will go to Breyannah Tillman, who stuck the landing in her role as The Drowsy Chaperone’s show-stopping aviatrix. But James Dale Green stopped time with nothing but his weatherbeaten tenor, a strummed mandolin, and a compelling story to tell. That sounds like a winner to me. Who got Robbed? Once’s Chris Cotton, that’s who.
I’m totally happy if the Ensemble award goes to All Saints in the Old Colony, Falsettos, Fun Home, Jitney, or A Perfect Arrangement. All are deserving, though Jitney may be just a little bit more deserving than all the rest. But how in the blankety-blankblanblank did Once not make this list? The cast doesn’t just act together, they also make music together — acoustic music. Music largely unaided by electronics and amplification. Music so thoroughly human it connects past and future like a time machine made of skin, bone, wood and string. I’m happy if the award goes to any of the fantastic nominees, but no matter who wins the judges lose on this account. Once was the season’s ultimate ensemble show, and POTS’s ensemble crushed it. The pre-show hoedown was worth the price of admission. BOO!
As long as I’m complaining about the judges, OMG! Why is Tony Isbell nominated for excellence in direction of a drama for Death of a Streetcar Named Virginia Woolf? Don’t misunderstand, I come to praise this year’s lifetime achievement honoree, not to dis him. Isbell absolutely should have been nominated in this category, but for his work on The Nether (not eligible). Or his work on Years to the Day (also not eligible). Or maybe even his work on Stage Kiss (eligible and solid but fuck-you ignored). I’d go so far as to say he got ROBBED! in spite of bing nominated. This insubstantial work is a jarring inclusion next to Dr. Shondrika Moss-Bouldin’s unflinching approach to Ruined and the inventiveness of Jamie Boller’s Eurydice. Not to mention the hyper-detailed character development, and ensemble work Jeff Posson oversaw for All Saints in the Old Colony and the flawless world-building of Steve Broadnax’s Jitney. I’m calling this one for Posson, but it could go in almost any direction.
Best production of a drama? I like Jitney, though I’ve not pegged it as a winner in many other categories. Sometimes the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and that’s the case here, though the parts were also quite good. Should All Saints in the Old Colony win, it’s every bit as deserving and, being a new script and the underdog here, maybe even more deserving.
I’m betting the darkhorse for excellence in Direction of a Musical and calling this one for Jerry Chipman and Falsettos. Everything else was bigger or flashier or more current in some way or another, even the stripped down Once. But life’s about balance, and Chipman’s production had nary a hair out of place that wasn’t supposed to be out of place.
Ostranders 2018: Picks, Pans, and ‘Who Got ROBBED?!?!’ (2)
Looking at the nominee spread, my gut tells me Fun Home was the judges’ favorite musical this season, and why wouldn’t it be? It was flawlessly cast, and beautifully performed. But this wasn’t the best work I’ve seen from director Dave Landis. I saw the performance with two companions. One wept openly, responding to the story and the characters. The other complained all the way home about the musical’s almost complete lack of action and visual/physical dynamics. I became the most unpopular person in the car when I said I thought they were both 100-percent right to feel the way they felt. Up to this point I’ve been #TeamFalsettos but I’m calling this one for Once. The other shows were great, but they were shows. Once was an event.
“Theaters not actively engaged in creating new material are passively engaged in their own obsolescence.” — Me.
Yeah, I totally quoted myself, but there’s not much I believe more than that. It’s one of the reasons I think the Ostrander Awards for Best Original Script and Best Production of an Original Script, may be more important than nice. In the future, judges might even consider beating the bushes a little on this front, and looking beyond the usual qualifying companies. All Saints in the Old Colony is a fantastic new script. It will win these categories, and it will know productions and awards beyond Memphis. But now would be a good time for all the folks who contributed words and music to Opera Memphis’ all-original 901 Opera Festival to cancel their credit cards because they have been ROBBED! OM might not be under consideration, but if we’re looking for superlatives, I can’t recall a more impressive example of new musical theater in the 901. Not
Tony Isbell in ‘Red’
since OM’s 2014 production of Ghosts of Crosstown heralded the rebirth of a neighborhood.
That may not cover every category, but it’s all I’ve got for now. Who did I forget?
Also, stay tuned for a Q&A with lifetime achievement honoree Tony Isbell.
Daylight saving time may have sprung us forward Sunday, but even so, it’s getting darker out there all the time. Almost every production on stage in Memphis right now toys in some way with concepts of ugliness, scars, and deformity. In Lord of the Flies, schoolboys turn into murderous beasts when they’re marooned on an island. Violet’s about a girl whose face was scarred by an axe. Based on the true story of the conjoined Hilton twins, Side Show tells a circus story populated by a cast of “human oddities.” Blackbird‘s a tiny piece of chamber theater subjecting audiences to 90 painfully awkward real-time minutes as a victim of child sexual abuse confronts her abuser at his workplace. Everything’s ugly, and beautifully done.
There are moments in Playhouse on the Square’s chillingly austere take on William Golding’s classic Lord of the Flies when the story’s opposing gangs threaten to stage a Pat Benatar video or square off in a Jets vs. Sharks dance-off. The sequences — impressive as they are — create tonal inconsistencies in a strong show. It works but never as cohesively as it might.
Lord of the Flies is the definition of an ensemble show. Director Jordan Nichols brought together an age-appropriate cast of (mostly) teens, capable of addressing the story’s heart and its horror. Golding’s violent parable of tribalism and unraveling democracy is encumbered by a bit of post-colonial savage vs. civilization bias, but its story of marooned British schoolboys playing naked dominance politics rings as true as ever. The kids nail it.
In one of the evening’s more effective movement numbers, the cast becomes a living, breathing evolution chart going one way first, then full on reverse. It’s too brutal and too beautiful and probably too on the nose. It’s also a perfect bullseye.
Lord of the Flies at Playhouse on the Square through March 26th
Violet‘s the best Tony-nominated musical nobody’s ever heard of. Based on Doris Betts’ short story The Ugliest Pilgrim and buoyed by a collage of authentic Americana sounds, Violet tells the story of a hardened young woman who’s pinned her hopes and dreams on a Tulsa faith healer. It’s a road trip story prominently featuring one hot, transformative night in Memphis. In a short-feeling 90 minutes, Violet tackles big ideas about race, class, beauty, and faith with none of the usual “put it on Jesus” cliches. Germantown Community Theatre’s production of Violet boasts some extraordinary voices and some not-so-extraordinary voices, but it’s all honesty and heart. Nichol Pritchard’s Violet is someone everybody knows. Hers is a standout performance.
Violet composer Jeanine Tesori (Fun Home, Caroline, or Change) dove deep into American roots music and delivered an unpretentious country-, blues-, and bluegrass-laden score, where Bo Diddley beats meet big Broadway ballads.
Violet at Germantown Community Theatre through March 26th
If you like good acting, go see Blackbird. If you like stories that are so overloaded with emotional twists, you’ll spend the rest of the night unpacking it all, go see Blackbird. This first production by Memphis’ Quark Theatre is one hell of an introduction. Tony Isbell and Fiona Battersby play Ray and Una — a sexual predator and his one known victim. Their unexpected reunion in Ray’s workplace keeps audiences squirming, cringing, and trying very hard to look away (and failing) for 90 intense minutes.
Blackbird at TheatreSouth through March 26th
Side Show‘s got it all — great voices, great design, and a great story to tell. It doesn’t really capture the hell conjoined twins Violet and Daisy Hilton lived through and only hints at a life where every relationship is abusive, reducing a horrible existence to so much irony and failed romance, but for all of its missed opportunities, this circus musical cuts to the core of everyday insecurity. Who hasn’t felt like everybody was staring at them and asked “Who will love me as I am?”
With the simplest gestures, Theatre Memphis’ designers have turned the entire main stage space into a big top. The effect brings everybody into the same big tent for the show’s duration.
On Saturday night, Germantown Community Theatre hosted a successful fund-raising gala and made some difficult, if hopeful announcements. Although the big party was well attended, GCT — the initials are a familiar shorthand for the old one-room schoolhouse-turned-playhouse on Forest Hill Irene — is running dangerously low on funds.
This latest round of dire circumstances are, in part, related to being a smallish arts organization with big ambitions. But board members are also owning up to the theater’s own, more preventable failures — misplaced priorities, a too passive board, and an inability to attract sponsors and cultivate audiences. There were poor leadership decisions, too, and failures to respond rapidly or appropriately to multiple early warnings when things were just beginning to spiral out of control.
To push back against adversity, GCT announced a $300,000 capital campaign designed to target three basic things: debt service, hiring a new executive director, and growing the company’s successful educational programming. The campaign announcement might be less awkward if GCT hadn’t announced a similar fund-raising effort just one year ago, shortly after the hire of now-departed executive director Michael Miles.
According to current board president Bo Adams, that last expansion effort “never really got off the ground.” Money raised for specific things was used to cover day-to-day expenses and payrolls that weren’t always met on time. Debt went unpaid, and the theater struggled.
GCT produces theater at a relatively high level, given the community playhouse’s limited physical resources. Board member Justin Entzminger brags — rightfully so — about multiple Ostrander Awards and the critical and popular success of shows like A Streetcar Named Desire. Those individual achievements haven’t always translated to a consistently strong box office. During the 2016 holiday season, when Theatre Memphis and Playhouse on the Square were packing houses with sugar plumb treats and family spectacles like A Christmas Carol and Peter Pan, GCT’s dark, notably austere production of the 1929 thriller Rope played to empty rooms.
The thing that makes GCT unique — its intimate 110-seat capacity — can also make it something of a tough sell for sponsors whose interests aren’t always purely philanthropic. The small theater has to sell out its entire weekend to do the kind of numbers the Memphis area’s larger playhouses can turn on a better night.
“We’re never going to be able to say we attract in a night or even in a weekend the audience that Theatre Memphis or Playhouse has,” Entzminger says. “But we have a strong relationship with audiences in East Memphis, Collierville, and Cordova. So we can’t speak to quantity but can speak to community and loyalty.”
Entzminger says GCT is serious about its desire to grow audiences, mend tattered relationships, and show a commitment to responsible arts programming and management. “We used a cost reduction strategy for next season,” he says. One slot has been cut from the season entirely, and instead of staging lavish musicals, the company is hoping to find quality low-royalty and royalty-free material. To hedge against future crises, a new committee has been formed to respond to the specific needs of whistleblower situations. To grow its audience and its appeal to sponsors, Entzminger hopes GCT can reimagine its identity and its role within the community.
The aim, Entzminger explains, is to use all of GCT — inside and out — and develop it, not just as a place where residents may choose to see a show or two a year, but as a cultural hub where people gather regularly for art openings, food, and musical events. “We have to find opportunities for programming that aren’t going to get in the way of what we already do with theater,” he says. “We’ve got to figure out how to engage more people.”
Actor and board member Brian Everson interrupts. “We had great success with the Johnny Cash musical Ring of Fire,” he says, suggesting a possible symbiotic relationship between the kinds of live music GCT might host and the kinds of musicals GCT may stage in the future.
“We know there’s work to do to repair some relationships,” Entzminger says. “But we’re serious about getting the work done. We want to be thought of as a place that’s trusted and as a place where, when you’re with us, you’re supported.”
The term “chamber theater” is usually reserved for stage adaptations of literary work that rely on much of the author’s original text. And even with that stricter definition in mind, I think it’s fair to apply that term to the kind of work Tennessee Shakespeare does when the company goes indoors at the Dixon Gallery & Gardens to perform epic plays in a room where plays were never meant to be performed. In a review of All’s Well That Ends Well, I said the cast’s performance style was less like ensemble acting than group storytelling. The same holds true for the company’s charmingly intimate Much Ado About Nothing, which feels like a show created for living room performances. If anything, Dan McCleary, who also directed Much Ado, has gone out of his way to amplify the show’s narrative quality.
Using the simple convention of talking to the audience, McCleary invites ticket-holders into the play and treats them like guests at a series of staged parties and public events. In Much Ado, which revolves around victory parties and weddings, it only makes sense.
Carey Urban and Tony Molina Jr. spar convincingly as Beatrice and Benedick. Their humane performances stand out in a tight, tiny ensemble of quality clowns and top shelf actors.
The Dixon’s Winegardner Auditorium isn’t the most changeable or accommodating theater space, so scenic design and lighting have been smartly de-emphasized in ways that frame the company’s biggest asset — its actors.
Much Ado is as fine example of how Shakespeare can surprise us with his modernity. Although the romantic comedy is best known for its witty banter, Urban very nearly stops the show with Beatrice’s clear-eyed assessment of gender inequality — “I cannot be a man with wishing, therefore I will die a woman, with grieving.”
Much Ado About Nothing through December 18th
First, I’d like to do something I almost never do and start this review with a standing ovation. Hooray for Germantown Community Theatre. Hooray for being brave and doing things differently during the holidays when nobody ever does anything especially brave or very different. While other playhouses pull out beloved Christmas classics and reel in customers who attend theatrical performances somewhere between once a year and once a lifetime, it makes good sense for a clever company to cash in on regulars looking to escape all the Bah humbugs and God bless us every ones.
There’s a problem, though. From its violent beginning through a long, somber curtain call (set to the loping tune of Alfred Hitchcock’s TV theme), Germantown’s Rope never feels like a gift of any kind.
Rope‘s a funny fish to begin with. Modern audiences may be familiar with the show by way of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1938 film starring Jimmy Stewart as a morally ambiguous college professor coming to terms with a pair of decadent students who’ve misunderstood Nietzsche and done something awful. It’s based on Patrick Hamilton’s chatty, 1929 play, which tells the same story. Set in the period of original production, and loosely based on the Leopold and Loeb murder case, Rope was Hamilton’s portrait of a dangerous and narcissistic class, happy to make games out of sex and murder. It also functions a kind of platonic dialogue on nihilism. Think of it as a gay American Psycho set in post-WWI Britain with an au courant ideology standing in for watermarked business cards.
GCT’s production is well-intentioned but short on color. The lust for a life less ordinary that drives this hot chiller is largely desexualzed and less compelling than it might be.
James Dale Green holds his own in the pivotal role Rupert Cadell, an irascible, hard-drinking poet shaped by the original war to end all wars. But for a man full of drinks and dangerous ideas, he’s never allowed to be more than a scamp. Nor is anybody else, regardless of whom they may not have killed, or why.
As Hitchcock once noted, the best films are made from mediocre source material. Rope‘s no real exception.
What a piece of work is Hamlet. How evergreen. How ripe for appropriation and parody. Aye, there’s the rub. Will Memphis theater audiences be over Shakespeare’s original man in black when the curtain rises on New Moon Theatre’s February production? That may not be the question, but given all the Hamlet-related shows we’re seeing this season, it’s one worth asking. Or will productions of shows like The Compleat Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) and One Ham Manlet whet appetites for the real, complete thing?
Paul Rudnick’s light comedy I Hate Hamlet is Germantown Community Theatre’s contribution to Hamletpalooza, and it sure is a mixed fardel. Rudnick’s script is a bumpy muddle of real-estate gags, sitcom hijinks, and splendid set pieces about celebrity, passion, immortality, and tight pants. An uncommonly engaging cast pulls it all together and keeps spirits high, even when the writing threatens to let everybody down.
So, who hates Hamlet? Andrew Rally, that’s who. He’s the smoking-hot hunk star of a recently cancelled TV show called L.A. Medical. He also co-stars with a sock puppet in a heavy-rotation commercial for some sugary breakfast cereal with more calories than lard. But is he an actor?
To answer that question, Rally moves from the Left Coast to a New York brownstone formerly occupied by a famous actor from Hollywood’s golden age. He’s tentatively accepted the title role in a free Shakespeare in the Park production of Hamlet, and boy, does he regret every bit of it. Enter the drunken glory-obsessed ghost of John Barrymore, lush, womanizer, hot mess, and the greatest Hamlet of his generation. What follows is a quirky mashup of Blithe Spirit and My Favorite Year, and watching Rally and Barrymore fence and fuss their way through a mutual identity crisis is great fun. It might be even more fun without all the melodramatic subplots, each one worthy of the trash Barrymore played on Broadway, back when he was a big-time matinee idol.
Enter the stock players. Deirdre is Rally’s girlfriend. She’s a 29-year-old virgin who’s saving herself for both the right man and the right moment. She also has an Ophelia fetish that’s weird and not very believable. Rally’s main super-bro Gary is a self-motivated “writer-producer-director” who thinks Shakespeare’s “like algebra on stage.” He has a big career opportunity in the works because, of course, he always does. Lillian, Rally’s agent, is an elderly German immigrant who lost a hairpin while having an ill-advised fling with Barrymore, back when she was young and he was loaded and lost. Felicia’s the clairvoyant real-estate agent who sets the old-fashioned farce in motion.
Ashley Trevathan is terrific as Felicia. In her own, self-parodying words, she “wins.” She’s not alone, either. Evan McCarley is deliciously shallow and smarmy as Gary. With eyes that bat and roll like a siren of the silent screen, Rae Boller’s Deidre charms her way through the play’s clunkiest lines, while Louise Levin makes Lillian’s last dance — aka the show’s most contrived moment — into something incredibly human and almost sexy. But I Hate Hamlet only ever soars when Gabe Beutel-Gunn and John Moore are on stage together as Rally and Barrymore. It’s their show, and both actors just go for it.
I’ve never seen Moore as alive as he is when he’s inhabiting the drunk, horny, undead corpse of John Barrymore. Moore stumbles across the stage with great determination and bounds through the air, saber in hand, playing to the cheap seats every chance he gets. His character may talk about the value of filling out the tights, but Moore’s performance is a lesson in filling the room. As Rally, Beutel-Gunn plays the straight man and earns his ridiculous bow.
It seems silly to write it down, but tastes have changed quite a bit since John Barrymore’s days on the Great White Way. There’s not much room in the modern theater for the kind of disposable material I Hate Hamlet aspires to. Jokes fall flat. Characters annoy. But just when it feels like the play’s about to devolve into a live action version Three’s Company, Rudnick’s comedy — aided by director John Maness and a terrific ensemble — taps into something genuinely Shakespearian.
It’s the day of dress rehearsal, and John Moore, who plays the ghost of actor John Barrymore in Paul Rudnick’s comedy I Hate Hamlet, is about to get his tights. “Ah yes, the tights,” he says. “You know, they don’t hide a lot. Like Barrymore says, ‘This is the history of Prince Hamlet. Tight pants. That’s what Hamlet‘s about. A young man full of vigor.”
This year marks the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, and the Bard, whose work is always in heavy rotation, is getting a little extra love. In addition to producing his plays, Memphis companies are also staging works inspired by Shakespeare. As was the case with Theatre Memphis’ very funny production of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged), one doesn’t have to know all that much about Elizabethan theater to get the jokes in I Hate Hamlet, though some familiarity will make for a better experience.
Hamlet — a man in tight pants
“It’s like being in the live studio audience for a sitcom,” Moore says. It’s a good description, too.
I Hate Hamlet tells the story of Hollywood actor Andrew Rally, the popular star of a TV show that’s just been cancelled. The good news, he’s been offered the title role in Shakespeare in the Park’s production of Hamlet. The not-so-good news: He’s not a fan. The weird news: He’s living in John Barrymore’s old apartment, and the actor’s martini-swilling spectre keeps showing up to offer acting and life advice.
“He’s called a ham,” Moore says of Barrymore, who swills, swaggers, staggers, and sword fights his way through the play. “So I’m playing him like he’s always on.”
It’s difficult to watch a revival of Company and really understand just how different and risky this Seinfeld-like musical was in its day. It’s not about much, really. Not much more than doing things with your friends and the condition of “being alive,” and relatively average. The scaled down show launched into pop consciousness at a time when musicals were still mostly big over-the-top fantasies. For those without a scorecard, Company’s day was 1970, not that anyone could peg its vintage watching Germantown Community Theatre’s uncomfortably modernized production. The costumes, hairstyles, and cityscapes are uniformly of the moment— this moment. But the characters are locked away in another time, and defined by another ethos. They continue to embody retro gender types they once butted up against. When characters talk about a “generation gap” they do it in terms of the 1960’s-era counterculture.
Company even has its very own ditzy stewardess/sex-fantasy stereotype that could have walked right out of last season’s GCT production of the chauvinistic romp, Boeing Boeing (vintage 1960).
Contemporizing modern plays is a hazardous endeavor and almost always ill-advised. When language and character functions aren’t archaic, there’s really no point in deploying concept to meet audiences halfway. Imagine, for example, Arthur Miller’s post WWII drama All My Sons set in 1992 in the wake of Operation Desert Storm. It could work, I suppose, but it would be strained and more than a little ridiculous. And that’s more or less the result with GCT’s Company, where, to borrow from Pat Benatar, bedrooms are the battlefield in question. GCT’s tech-forward update might be a complete disaster if not for heroic efforts by an honest, unassuming and unpretentious cast that almost makes up for conceptual choices that are nothing like any adjectives in the first half of this sentence.
Company boasts many of Stephen Sondheim’s finest songs and a nearly plotless book by George Furth. The show revolves around Robert, a single man who’s turning 35, dating three different women, and keeping company with his old married, almost married, and happily divorced (but living together) friends. Everybody wants poor, single Bobby (“baby, boobie” etc.) to be happy. That means being like them, of course. It’s a mess in the best possible way, playing out like a typical (if tuneful) day in the life of the American bourgeoisie.
Lee Gilliland’s Robert is something of a cypher. We never really get to know who he is, but he seems like a nice enough guy and we like him all the same as we watch him flirt harmlessly (mostly) with friends while fumbling other relationships. The supporting cast is fleshed out by a roster of proven character actors like Sally Stover, Stuart Turner, Renee Davis Brame, Brian Everson, Cary Vaughn, and Jaclyn Suffel. Everybody has a moment to shine, though nobody quite as brightly as Brame who takes “Getting Married Today,” a serio-comic bit depicting a bride coming down with a case of cold feet, and turns it into the most memorable number in the show, soaring past certifiable hits like “Marry Me a Little,” “Side By Side,” “The Ladies Who Lunch,” and even the soaring, climactic “Being Alive.”
I once overheard an overly-candid director tell an uptight actor that he needed to spend an afternoon rolling around naked on stage. It was a figurative statement, but one that came to mind watching Brame perform. She remains clothed throughout. But what she does both physically and emotionally looks like the physical embodiment of that long ago advice. Funny to boot. And sometimes a little disturbing.
Although all of the actors do manage to connect emotionally to their characters and to one another, their relationships never grow or deepen as they might. This is exacerbated by a technological gimmick that must have sounded great when it was being pitched, but wrecks things in practice. There are three “windows” on set that double as screens for video projection. Characters that might have appeared live on stage often appear instead as video clips, leaving the actors who don’t have business alone on stage to either ignore the video apparitions, or gaze like they were watching TV, or to wait frozen in the moment, till the singing video stops to say the next line. Things stop when videos start. Human connections are lost, and that’s all that really counts in this show. The offstage sound is so poor by comparison, it’s almost as if the actors have been imprisoned between enchanted panes of glass. The ultimate effect is similar to ghostly portraits hanging in the walls of Hogwarts Academy in the Harry Potter movies. A little creepy, and a little silly.
Projection is a useful, and versatile tool. I’ve seen it used well both interactively and scenically. But we simply don’t go to the theater to watch YouTube, we go to see actors performing live, in three fleshy, sweaty dimensions, projecting their real (sometimes amplified) voices and spit to the back wall. We call prerecorded music “canned music.” This Company was full of canned people. SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE!
But seriously folks, Soylent Green, it’s made of people. And the video projection in GCT’s Company makes the show a bumpy, tonally inconsistent ride, and not nearly as full-sounding or fun as it might have been with inventive human-centric staging, more thoughtfully-imagined choreography, and consistently excellent musical performances. To give credit where due, the videos do look nice as a moving backdrop for the song, “Another Hundred People,” a love letter to anonymity and the banalities of life among strangers in a city that never sleeps. But they look good in a way that reminded me of what a lousy idea they were in the first place.
People give a lot of lip service to the “magic of theater,” but have you ever stopped to ask what that line really means? I usually describe it to people like this. If you promise to show me an elephant and then you show me an elephant that’s impressive as hell. But if you show me an apple and make me believe it’s an elephant, that’s theater. And that’s the “magic” of theater. All of Company’s projected streetscapes filled with real New York people rushing to work, or playing some B-ball on the graffiti-tagged playground are so cool. But I didn’t go to the theatre to see the same old glamor shots or clips of what director Teddy Eck did on his summer vacation. I came to see (the very good) Carly Crawford, and a seasoned company of gifted performers and designers paint a more impressionistic, more magical, and more lingering image of New York in my mind.
Even when they are performed fully live most songs sound like they could have used a more rehearsal. It gives the musical numbers a strangely humanizing quality that is appealing, at least. It may underwhelm Sondheim fans looking for fireworks. Or polish, even.
Director Eck also helmed Grace a true highlight of The Circuit Playhouse’s 2013-14 theater season. It’s fairly obvious that he’s an artist who likes bold choices and isn’t afraid to experiment. That’s a good thing with a real downside. The thing about experimentation: Unfavorable outcomes are a natural part of the process.
GCT’s performance space is about to get a facelift. It’s exciting news and it will be interesting to see what kind of difference a new, lower stage will make in terms of production quality. The old converted schoolhouse can be a difficult space to design for and direct in. That’s never stopped the theater from producing an ambitious slate of musicals, comedies and dramas though. Historically directors have found inventive theatrical (read: human) solutions to challenges created by a small space with a less than adequate light grid and limited options for entrances and exits. Technological solutions certainly should be explored if they can be deployed in creative ways that don’t distract or otherwise detract from the overall quality of a production. Company is a fine example of how not to do that. And it’s a shame. There is a thoroughly charming production of this show bottled up like a genie inside the canned performance clips.
