Tag: Playhouse on the Square

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Theater Theater Feature

Let’s Dance: “Hairspray” at Playhouse on the Square

Playhouse on the Square’s fantastic revival of Hairspray couldn’t have been more perfectly timed. John Waters’ trashy ’60s-era love letter to big women, bigger hair, and rhythm and blues, tells the story of accidental integrationist Tracy Turnblad, a plus-sized white girl who wants every day to be “Negro Day,” on the Corny Collins Show, a Baltimore-based dance program for teenagers, similar to American Bandstand. The musical is classic Waters, but the message about being the change you want to see in the world is pure Broadway, and all too relevant in Memphis, where race continues to play such a strong role in our civic narrative. I was especially happy to catch Hairspray on the night of the Hattiloo Theatre’s grand opening party, welcoming all of Memphis out to visit the city’s first public arts institution built from the ground up to showcase African-American artists. The Hattiloo is just across the street from Playhouse and next door to Circuit and TheatreWorks in the very heart of a rapidly expanding theater and entertainment district.

After the curtain calls ended, I left Playhouse with three African-American ladies who were exuberant and trying to place Hairspray‘s trashed up cast members from other shows they’d seen at Playhouse. When they told me they were on their way to check out the Hattiloo, I told them I’d been by already and voiced my approval. And in that moment I was also reminded of the many times Ekundayo Bandele, the Hattiloo’s founding director, has been asked to explain the need for a strong black theater company in what is clearly an increasingly diverse performing arts scene. Bandele usually answered that in a majority black city like Memphis, Afrocentric content should be available to performers and audiences year-round. He could just as easily have compared the rest of Memphis to the Corny Collins Show, where improved diversity — a once-a-month “Negro Day” for Corny — says less about how far we’ve come than how far we’ve still got to go. Although it’s set in Baltimore, Hairspray is way more Memphis than the similarly themed Memphis the Musical, and the energetic musical, with fantastic choreography by Travis Bradley and Jordan Nichols, makes for a loving “welcome to the neighborhood.”

Hairspray, was a huge hit for Playhouse in 2010. The show marked the company’s artistic arrival in its new facility and could have run for another month if scheduling allowed. The fact that the current revival is already mostly sold out suggests that it’s still in demand.

Several members of the original Playhouse cast have returned, and their performances are even better this time around. Courtney Oliver is a radiant powerhouse as Tracy, the full-figured rebel who loves to shimmy to the hits and thinks segregation is dumb. Oliver lost her voice early in the run and was still hoarse on Saturday night but in good form.

Nichols returns as Tracy’s love interest Link Larkin, a would-be teen idol and featured dancer on the Corny Collins Show. Hip and confident, David Foster is a perfect fit for Collins, the Dick Clark of Baltimore, and Mike Detroit fully transforms himself into the nerdy Wilbur Turnblad. The duet Detroit’s Turnblad sings with his ample wife (a divine Ken Zimmerman in drag) is the show’s sweetest — and possibly most subversive — moment.

Napoleon Douglas and Caroline Simpson are as adorable as they are funny as Seaweed and Penny, whose blossoming interracial romance sends Kim Sanders’ female authority figure into apoplectic fits.

Tickets for the remainder of the run are scarce. If you want to dance the Madison with Tracy and the cool kids and haven’t already reserved tickets, you may be too late.

At Playhouse on the Square through July 13th.

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Cover Feature News

Overton Square’s New Hattiloo Theatre is Ready for a Spotlight

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

Most Memphians probably won’t recognize the name cut into the wall over the door leading to the new Hattiloo Theatre’s smaller black box theater. It’s not one of the corporate donors or lifetime philanthropists whose names tend to appear in such places. Katori Hall is a 33-year-old Craigmont High graduate and an internationally acclaimed playwright, whose provocative work is often set in parts of Memphis that most local theatergoers have only seen at a distance, if at all.

It was a steamy afternoon in June 2010, when I first met Katori Hall at the Little Pie Shop in Hell’s Kitchen. Memphis had invaded New York that summer. Broadway was buzzing with news about Joe DiPietro and David Bryan’s Memphis, which had won the Tony for best new musical only a week before. Around the corner, at the Nederlander Theater, Million Dollar Quartet introduced audiences to Sun Studio founder Sam Phillips, who shared his spotlight with Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Elvis Presley. Off Broadway, in Manhattan’s Garment District, Sister Myotis’ Bible Camp, a Steve Swift/Voices of the South creation, enjoyed full and appreciative houses at the Abingdon Theatre. And there I was in the middle of it all, having pie with Hall, who didn’t have a play in New York at the moment but was keeping busy. Her play The Mountaintop had just won London’s Olivier Award for best new work, and Hall was gearing up for its 2011 Broadway launch, with Samuel Jackson and Angela Bassett in leading roles.

“When I was growing up, I didn’t think I would be a playwright,” Hall said, listing school trips to see regional staples like Ballet Memphis’ The Nutcracker and Circuit Playhouse’s production of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe among her few brushes with live performance outside of church.

“The unfortunate thing about Memphis is that there wasn’t a lot of new theater being done,” Hall continued. “Most regional theaters need a stamp of approval to say that a play is good, even if the play has nothing to do with that community’s experience.” Hall said she’d love to bring new plays home to workshop, but she didn’t know where she could take them.

When I asked if she knew about the Hattiloo Theatre and its ambitious founding director, Ekundayo Bandele, Hall twisted her face into a mask of skepticism.  

“That guy’s not from Memphis. He’s from Brooklyn,” she said, not so much dismissing Bandele as she was dismissing the idea that any New York poser had half a chance in her hometown.

That was then.

Justin Fox Burks

of the Hattiloo Theatre

In the years since, Bandele’s Hattiloo Theatre has produced The Mountaintop, in conjunction with Circuit Playhouse, and resurrected an infamous Memphis housing project for the landmark production of Hall’s ensemble drama, Hurt Village. When Bandele’s new 10,000-square-foot facility opens its doors in Overton Square later this month, the young playwright’s name will be there, just spitting distance from Circuit Playhouse, where Hall once handed out programs in order to see A Tuna Christmas for free.

“She’s giving back,” says Bandele, thrilled to have Hall participating in such a meaningful way.

Over the years, the Hattiloo’s founding executive director, who grew up splitting time between Brooklyn and North Memphis, has insisted that he doesn’t only want to produce plays that have a preexisting stamp of approval. He doesn’t want the next August Wilson or Lorraine Hansberry to fall between the cracks, and he doesn’t want another Katori Hall to graduate high school in Memphis having only been exposed to A Tuna Christmas and other plays that have nothing to do with her experience.

“She is making some serious waves in the theater world, and she’s going to be a writer in residence,” Bandele says of Hall. “In 2015, we’re going to do a play called Saturday Night/Sunday Morning.”

Bandele describes that production as a world premiere, although an earlier version of the show was produced in Chicago. 

Set in a Memphis beauty parlor, Saturday Night/Sunday Morning is a period drama telling the story of a group of young African-American women during the last days of WWII.

Bandele has always wanted emerging work to be a strong part of the Hattiloo’s mix alongside classics of the African-American canon and popular favorites such as Once on This Island, the calypso-inspired musical chosen to open the new theater. To that end, the theater has rolled out a rotating playwright in residence program, with a $6,000 stipend for the chosen artist.

“Imagine coming to a place where you see shows about Memphis,” Bandele says, ticking off possible subjects that include Tom Lee, the hero of the M.E. Norman disaster, and Robert Church, the city’s first black millionaire.

“In the past, we were dedicated to development,” he says. “We didn’t have many black actors, directors, or designers when I started this, so we found some and we developed them. Now that we’ve got some, I think we have to be dedicated to excellence.”

“Conservative” and “modern” are the words Bandele uses to describe his new theater, with its open, fluid, public spaces, designed by Memphis’ Archimania architecture firm. The walls will feature important African-American theater artists in portraits created by local African-American artists.

To give visitors a sense of how much larger the new Hattiloo facility is, Bandele has developed a nifty trick. He gives detailed virtual tours of the old Marshall Avenue location without leaving the new facility’s black box theater.

“We’d be walking past the bar now,” he says, running his fingers along the invisible curves of an imaginary counter. He walks past the “box office window,” drawing it in the air, before pointing to where the men’s room would be.

“You could fit the entire [former] Hattiloo into just this one space,” Bandele marvels. But the increased size doesn’t mean decreased intimacy. The larger space seats 150 people and is never more than four rows deep when configured for a thrust stage, as it will be for the opening musical, Once on This Island. It’s only nine rows deep when configured for a standard proscenium, as it will be for the second show, Stick Fly.

The old theater was noted for bringing spectators close to the action, but it seated half as many people, was fairly inflexible, and 11 rows deep, counting the balcony.

The new space offers a cozy green room for performers to use and multiple dressing rooms. “That means we can do shows with up to 22 performers easily, without having actors piled on top of each other,” Bandele says. “We’ve got enough room to run two shows at a time.” He plans to eventually do just that.

Justin Fox Burks

A portion of the new Hattiloo’s donor wall

Bandele’s regular players won’t be the only artists on hand at the Hattiloo’s public grand opening on June 28th. Memphis’ emerging bilingual theater troupe, Cazateatro, is scheduled to perform, as are Ballet Memphis and Opera Memphis, two area institutions the Hattiloo has worked with in the past. Bandele says he hopes to forge similar community partnerships with other organizations, including the Indie Memphis Film Festival, which will also have representatives in attendance to screen short films and offer a brief sample of things to come.

“Indie Memphis will show films at the Hattiloo during their festival this year,” Bandele says. The deal was struck with one request: All films screened at the new venue will be related in some way to people and communities of color. It’s a challenge that excites Indie Memphis executive director Erik Jambor.

“Adding the Hattiloo makes our festival more festive,” Jambor says, delighted to have so many screens within a three-block pedestrian-friendly radius. In recent years, Indie Memphis has screened films at Playhouse on the Square, Circuit Playhouse, and Studio on the Square. Hattiloo will be the growing festival’s fourth location, and Jambor says he hopes the organizations can both benefit by introducing their audiences to one another.

“I keep saying, it’s like the Neshoba experiment,” Bandele says, comparing Overton Square’s future to a 19th-century commune near present-day Germantown. It’s a difficult analogy, considering that Neshoba was founded as a means for slaves to earn their emancipation through labor while preparing for the colonization of Liberia and Haiti.

Acknowledging that except for Beale Street and FedExForum, Memphis remains mostly culturally segregated, Bandele speaks more to Neshoba’s never-achieved goal of becoming an interracial, egalitarian utopia. It’s an idea he’s been floating in some form or another since he first announced in 2010 that the Hattiloo would be moving to Midtown.

At that time, in a short but memorable address at Playhouse on the Square, Bandele asked everyone to try and imagine a new kind of entertainment district, one with a sparkling new parking garage where crowded elevators buzzed with the mingled conversations of black and white theatergoers on their way to grab a pre-show bite to eat.

“That’s the Memphis we all want to see,” he said.

Tony Horne, the director and educator who co-founded the Memphis Black Repertory Theatre at TheatreWorks, describes Bandele as a “strong visionary” who doesn’t see obstacles. “He just doesn’t,” Horne says. “Ekundayo sees possibilities. That’s who he is.”

Horne describes the Hattiloo’s new home in Overton Square as the culmination of a slow but steady movement that begins with efforts like the Beale Street Repertory Company, Blues City Cultural Center, Erma Clanton’s Evening of Soul performances, and his own work in Overton Square with the Black Rep.

“We’ve always had tremendous talent and leadership,” Horne says. “But there’s something about Ekundayo and the timing of where we are in the history of this city. Because of all these early efforts, there was this thing that was ready to come to the fore. But it was Ekundayo’s time to take that energy and grow it — to really make it into something.”

Horne’s multi-award-winning staging of The Color Purple at Playhouse on the Square featured numerous performers who cut their teeth at the Hattiloo. He was an obvious choice to helm Once on This Island, which opens July 18th.

Horne, who also directed The Wiz at Hattiloo, thinks the theater has done a good job with its musicals in the past but can’t wait for audiences to see what a difference the new space will make. “We’re gonna show off a little bit,” he says.

“Once on This Island isn’t a regional premiere, but that’s okay because it’s so beloved,” Horne says. “It’s a fairy tale about the enduring power of love with a lot of color and music. It’s really going to showcase the new space and all the talent we have here.”

Meet Hatti and Loo

Ekundayo Bandele stands at the entrance of his new Overton Square theater and stares up at the name on the wall: Hattiloo. “This is probably what I look at the most,” he says, as work crews prepare to lay the lobby carpet and install sprung floors in the venue’s two black box theaters.

Justin Fox Burks

of the Hattiloo Theatre

“Theatre Memphis and Playhouse on the Square are named for where they’re located,” Bandele says proudly, reflecting on his decision to name the theater after his daughters Hatshepsut (Hatti), a visual artist, and Oluremi (Loo), who was born with cerebral palsy, loves musicals, and works at the Hattiloo with her dad.  

But what do Hatshepsut and Oluremi Bandele think about lending their names to such a big project?

Memphis Flyer: So who are Hatti and Loo?

Hatshepsut: I see myself as a visual artist. It started my junior year in high school. I was drawn to mixed media and had a serious relationship with it until my dad introduced me to photography. I took a course in it at the U of M and was stubborn, thinking I wasn’t going to like it. But I fell in love. I like portraits. Usually I focus on African-American culture, combined with African culture like face painting. I want more than a pretty picture.

Oluremi: I work at the Hattiloo. I like to help people. That’s just me. I like to go out with my friends and eat. I like camp. I like the musicals. Dad did Annie for me because it’s my favorite. And I like Crowns, the dancing and the music.

Are either of you actors? Or directors? Or playwrights?

Hatshepsut: I was in one play when I was 13, and I enjoyed it. But I get so nervous performing. So I tried it. But that’s not me.

Oluremi: My dad started me working [at Hattiloo] when I was 16 or so. He asked me if I’d like to work there and I said, “yes, sir.” Helping at Hattiloo makes me happy. It’s a part of my life.

Is it weird having this thing that’s named for you? Is it a responsibility?

Hatshepsut: I remember hearing my parents talking about it. I was young. We were at a lake visiting my parents’ friends. And I heard them say “Hattiloo.” It wasn’t a responsibility, it was just beautiful. But then going to the theater on Marshall and seeing the name on the building, it wasn’t just my sister and me. It was something that will always and forever grow. I remember in the beginning on Marshall it looked almost like a haunted house. You didn’t want to be there at night. We had those dinners and auctions to raise money to get the walls up. And you didn’t see the dust or that the walls hadn’t been built yet. You saw the passion and the unity it was creating in Memphis.

Oluremi: Me and my father, we’re like a team. We work together to make things happen. I tell him to write his grants. When it rains, I tell him to remember his hat. I don’t know where he’d be if he hadn’t hired me.

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Theater Theater Feature

Gypsy at Playhouse on the Square

Gypsy is an epic musical. Like Shakespeare vs. Brecht vs. Godzilla epic. Mama Rose (Carla McDonald) is the show-tune-singing King Lear of stage moms and a pragmatic Mother Courage tirelessly stomping across the gooey battlefields we call love and show business. Set mostly against a background of the Great Depression, the Jule Styne/Stephen Sondheim/Arthur Laurents musical walks a fine line between high drama and high camp, serving up gritty object lessons about survival, obsession, and terrible parenting skills. It does all that to the fanfare of cheeky trumpets and the growl of lewd trombones. When Gypsy cooks, it’s a hot ticket. Even Playhouse on the Square’s sturdy if somewhat soulless revival has moments when it’s a little bit epic too.

Gypsy is an origin story, as blunt and deliberate as you’ll find in any comic book. Super-stripper Gypsy Rose Lee (Leah Beth Bolton) gets her full powers when she finally stands up to Mama Rose, who pushed her daughter into vaudeville first and then into the seedy bump-and-grind world of burlesque.

“Nobody laughs at me,” Lee says with the cool, disquieting confidence of a young woman who has been looked at under a spotlight for her entire life but who was never really seen, let alone appreciated, by anybody, least of all her mother, until she finally showed a little skin.

“I laugh [at me] first,” she further asserts, girding herself against any further hurt. “Me, from Seattle! Me, with no education! Me, with no talent, as you kept reminding me my whole life! Well, Mama, look at me now! I’m a star!”

And boy was she. But as big as Gypsy Rose Lee may have been on the Minsky strip circuit, this isn’t really her show. Gypsy belongs to the unsinkable Mama Rose, a role that musical-theater performers measure themselves against like dramatic actors do with Hamlet.

McDonald is an extraordinary vocalist and a gifted actor with a knack for taking on characters that are larger than life, but she never seems completely comfortable as Gypsy‘s infamous “stage mother from hell.” Although she’s more than adequate in the role and fully in her element belting out showstoppers like “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” and “Rose’s Turn,” she never fully makes the part her own, and you don’t have to listen all that closely to hear bits of Ethel Merman and Tyne Daly bubbling up here and there in McDonald’s phrasing.

Bolton and Caroline Simpson are similarly fine as Gypsy Rose and her sibling rival, Dainty June. The always-solid Barclay Roberts is typically affable and effective as Herbie, the failed father figure and would-be suitor to Mama Rose. But once you move beyond the chorus where Dave Landis, David Foster, and Kim Sanders do some fantastic character work, none of the emotions ever seem big enough, and few of the relationships are as complex as they could be.

Jordan Nichols has proven himself repeatedly as a director, and his recent production of the relentlessly dark rock musical Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson at Rhodes College was a season highlight. But Nichols’ Gypsy, unfolding on Mark Guirguis’ unmemorable set and washed out by John Horan’s atypically flat lighting, can be as bleak and colorless as depression. Horan is usually Playhouse on the Square’s secret weapon, executing sumptuous, color-saturated lighting designs that frame scenes perfectly, smoothing over a world of imperfections, and improving everything he touches.

An excellent band, assembled and led with brass and sass by Renee Kemper, is prominently featured onstage but never really allowed to live inside the world of the play.

Even if the production was too colorless and restrained for my taste, Playhouse on the Square does earn bonus points for scheduling Gypsy to open on Mother’s Day weekend.

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Cover Feature News

Bon Appétit!

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

Opera Memphis’ Ned Canty wants to change the way you think about opera.

“I don’t want anybody to think I’m saying they’re wrong about opera,” he says. “But not every movie is a Hollywood movie. And when we talk about popular music, we might be talking about Beyoncé, Adele, or your favorite local garage band. It should be the same when we talk about opera. I only want to make a case that there’s a whole lot more to opera than most people have ever realized.”

Canty is making his best case yet for opera’s depth, breadth, and versatility this week. He’s closing his second season as general director for Opera Memphis with the first-ever Midtown Opera Festival, an ambitious new event at Playhouse on the Square.

Canty knows his work is cut out for him. He knows opera purists who aren’t interested in arias that aren’t sung in Italian and understands that, among the broader population, opinions about opera tend to be based more on the visual stylings of Bugs Bunny animator Chuck Jones than the musical compositions of Georges Bizet.

The festival features more singers than Opera Memphis has ever before imported at one time. It’s staged entirely by Canty — with music direction by Steven Osgood — and is built around a strong trio of modern chamber operas.

Lucretia, Child, and Eggleston

The Rape of Lucretia, by British composer Benjamin Britten, opens the weekend. It’s followed by an evening of quirky one-acts by American composer Lee Hoiby: This Is the Rill Speaking and Bon Appétit!, the Julia Child opera.

The three showcase pieces will be performed alongside a variety of smaller works, ranging from a children’s opera to a deliriously off-color and extremely adult new monodrama written specifically for the festival and inspired by Memphis’ iconic photographer William Eggleston.

Eggleston and Child won’t be the only atypical opera inspirations brought to life onstage over the weekend. There will be drunken, fornicating Etruscans, a nameless woman who’s in love with her van, fictional teenagers learning to masturbate, and a real American hero.

Britten and Hoiby are lyrically inclined 20th-century composers working in an era when dissonant and atonal compositions were in fashion. Admired for their technical skills, both men were largely underrated for making music considered by some as old-fashioned and out of step with modernity. In retrospect, “timeless” seems like the more appropriate adjective.

Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia, described by the composer as a “chamber opera,” was written immediately following WWII. There wasn’t much money for opera production, so the composer challenged himself to create a work for 13 instruments and a streamlined cast that could tour cheaply and still deliver the emotional payload of a traditional opera. Set in the period just prior to the founding of the Roman Republic, it tells stories of men behaving badly at war, of women behaving badly on the homefront, and of Lucretia, a woman whose rare chastity and abiding love for her husband became so famous it attracted the unwanted attention of an envious prince.

It’s kind of like there’s this war that’s always there,” says Abby Fischer, the contralto singing the role of Lucretia. “The sets are a little bit 500 B.C., which is when The Rape of Lucretia takes place. But it’s also kind of set in 1946, when Britten wrote the opera. And it’s also kind of right now, in the time we’re performing the opera. That’s what Ned’s going for as the director. It’s what the costume shop and scene shop are going for. And it’s really what Britten’s going for too, I think.”

“The Rape of Lucretia makes Tosca look like a Disney film,” Canty says, comparing his festival’s grim opening act to Puccini’s popular tragedy, with its famous depictions of torture, murder, and suicide. “It’s an intense piece, although it’s not graphic at all,” Canty says. “Everything that’s horrific happens offstage.”

Festival conductor Osgood advises listeners to pay attention to how Britten develops the instrumental voices in his limited orchestra like characters in the drama. “Every single player in the pit has a specific personality,” Osgood says. “Each one has a unique and distinctive sound that Britten deploys consistently to comment on the action.”

When asked why there are two Lee Hoiby pieces on the menu, Canty answers without hesitation: “Because I think Hoiby is the greatest American opera composer, and he’s not recognized.

“The music of Bon Appétit! is very much in line with the sounds of grand opera,” Canty says. “But it’s all about Julia Child making a chocolate cake and showing us how to make a chocolate cake. What makes it funny is the wonderful tension between the music and what’s happening onstage.”

Jamie Barton, the mezzo-soprano singing the role of Julia Child in Bon Appétit!, also thinks that Hoiby, a student of Gian Carlo Menotti, isn’t better known because he wrote pretty melodies during a time when pretty melodies weren’t taken very seriously.

“You’ve got this group of atonal composers,” Barton says. “The scholars love them, and they love themselves, and a lot of composers were shunned if they were more accessible.”

This Is the Rill Speaking is based on an early play by American playwright Lanford Wilson. Like a cross between Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood and Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, Rill weaves together many threads of small-town life hoping to capture the soul of community.

“This Is the Rill Speaking has a 1950s Americana feel,” says soprano Jamie-Rose Guarrine, who plays one of the opera’s everyday folks. “You hear a lot of jazz and ’50s pop in it.

“So many times, I’m playing a goddess or a witch or an 18th-century maid all tied up in a corset. It’s rare to be in an opera that’s nearer to my actual frame of reference and memory.”

Magnanimous, a world-premiere piece created specifically for the festival, is most assuredly not in Italian. Created by composer Zach Redler and lyricist Sara Cooper and inspired by a William Eggleston photo, Magnanimous tells the story of a woman who has fallen in love with a $400 van that doesn’t run. “Let’s fuck,” it begins directly, without apology or too much in the way of explanation.

“We tend to write very strong characters,” Redler says. “We were writing six monodramas about unstable individuals and unrequited love.”

“I just saw this photo, and the way the woman is bent over washing her van seemed so submissive,” Cooper says.

Magnanimous, created in conjunction with American Opera Projects of Brooklyn, will be performed in the cafe space at Playhouse on the Square, which will also be used to present cabaret performances and other new works by American opera composers.

“Magnanimous is great, because you don’t know if the woman washing her van is really crazy or if she’s speaking metaphorically or what,” Canty says.

According to Osgood, the thing that pervades all of the smaller pieces, attracting both performers and listeners, is that, without exception, they are reactions to a specific time, place, and emotional attitude.

“So often, opera as an art form, however great, is still removed from all of us by 50, 80, 100, 200 years, and that’s not the case with any of these ancillary pieces,” Osgood says. “To be able to walk into an opera and be spoken to so directly is a unique and wonderful opportunity.”

Redler and Cooper have backgrounds in musical theater, and that’s evident in Magnanimous, which, for all of its frankness, should appeal to a wide audience, including fans of ’80s ballads and theatrical rock acts like the Dresden Dolls.

A “Film Festival” Atmosphere

Canty believes that the secret to a good arts-related event is density. “If there’s something not to your taste, you should be able to go across the street and see something just as good,” he says, allowing that it will probably take a few years to reach that “film festival” level of density.

“But that’s the goal,” Canty says. “Will there be enough this year for opera geeks to geek out over all weekend? Absolutely. Or, if you only want to bring your kids to the children’s opera, you can do that too.”

Canty is always looking for ways to expand opera’s audience. He thinks Overton Square’s redevelopment as a theater district will allow for unique opportunities as his festival grows. Already, a handful of Overton Square vendors have partnered with Opera Memphis to set the stage for an event that, like any good festival, spills out of the theater and into the neighborhood. Boscos will add an opera-inspired Vanilla Porter to its beer menu for the weekend, and YoLo will offer a custom gelato flavor in honor of Julia Child’s chocolate cake. For Canty, the more interesting festival opportunities will be apparent when the Hattiloo Theatre launches in Overton Square next year and when more bars and restaurants open, bringing more potential indoor and outdoor performance spaces.

“We really couldn’t have imagined anything quite like this before [Overton Square became a theater district],” Canty says. He has already doubled down on next season’s festival, expanding it to two full weekends. The second festival will also feature the world premiere of Ghosts of Crosstown, an original opera inspired by stories from the Sears Crosstown building.

“One of the things opera does is to make the personal universal,” Canty says, explaining his approach to the Ghosts of Crosstown project.

“I’ve been in the public library, looking through copies of an old newsletter called The Conveyor. And I’ve found some really wonderful stuff,” Canty says. He is developing the libretto with Memphis playwright Jerre Dye. Canty’s research has yielded stories that range from a mischievous clerk making intentional mistakes so he can visit his crush in shipping to a woman who lost the diamond from her engagement ring when it fell from its setting into a letter she sent to Sears and how employees searched through discarded envelopes until they found it.

Memphians interested in uncovering a lost gem or two will want to drop in on the Midtown Opera Festival at Playhouse on the Square this weekend. Although the Britten and Hoiby works are ticketed events, many performances in the cabaret space are free.

The Rape of Lucretia will be performed at Playhouse on the Square on April 4th and 6th at 7:30 p.m. Bon Appétit! and This Is the Rill Speaking will be performed on April 5th at 7:30 p.m. and on April 7th at 2 p.m. For tickets and additional schedule information, visit operamemphis.org.

Piece of Cake

Jamie Barton makes Julia Child sing in Lee Hoiby’s comic opera Bon Appétit!. Barton — the mezzo-soprano Opera News described as a “rising star” with a “sumptuous voice” — says she’s looking forward to coming to Memphis to reconnect with Ned Canty, a director she describes as the Quentin Tarantino of comic operas. As a foodie, cook, and singer who delights in character work, she is especially excited to take on the role of Julia Child in Hoiby’s 20-minute opera based on an episode of Child’s PBS television show, The French Chef, in which Child teaches viewers how to make a proper chocolate cake. Here’s what Barton had to say about Child, chocolate, and the cold hard facts of life as a mezzo.

Memphis Flyer: Bon Appétit! has a classical sound, but it’s not at all what people think of when they think about opera.

Jamie Barton: I’ve been craving to do it for years. In part, it’s because, if I could have any other career, I would probably be a chef. I absolutely love cooking. If the television is on, it’s probably the Food Network. Because that kind of thing is near and dear to my heart, Julia Child is near and dear to my heart.

This is an especially choice role for a mezzo-soprano, isn’t it?

The prospect of a 20-minute piece written for a mezzo-soprano is just something that doesn’t come along every day. Sopranos and tenors get good stuff all the time. But mezzos … we get to play the maid parts. We’re the witches, britches, whores, and bitches. When you combine all that with the cooking aspect, yeah, it’s way too good to pass up.

Julia Child has been memorably played by Meryl Streep and Dan Aykroyd. Following them has to be daunting.

I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t daunting. She is such an opera character in real life, and bringing gourmet cooking into the home was her entire mission. What I’m finding challenging is trying to stay away from the other interpretations of her. The broad caricature, which can be hilarious, isn’t right for me. I found the TV episode the opera is based on and made extensive notes. Because just getting her persona is enough. You don’t have to do too much to it to make it anymore entertaining than it already is.

Her speaking voice is so distinctive.

Lee Hoiby has added all of this into the score. For me, it’s very much like singing Mozart in a way. You don’t have to give too much emotion to it. You just follow what’s written. It’s all there for you already.

How much of a method performer are you?

What do you mean?

Have you made the cake?

Oh, yes. I made it yesterday. It went well, but my cake pans were the wrong size, so it ended up being very short and a little wide. That being said, I had a friend over last night, and I and my friend and my husband went to town on that short, wide cake. It was fantastic. I tried to stick exactly to her recipe, paying special attention to the little instructions. I had my iPod on and was listening to the Hoiby tracks as I was baking. And I made a huge mess.

For the singer, performing Bon Appétit! looks like it could either be like eating a big piece of chocolate cake or climbing Mt. Everest. Which is it?

I’m going to go to Mt. Everest. It sounds like it should be quite easy to learn musically, but it’s not. And on top of that, you’re making a cake onstage. You have exactly six beats to separate the eggs. And there are four eggs. There’s a lot of timing things that are going to be really interesting.

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

Mountaintops

Many good things happen at the Hattiloo Theatre. Lighting, I’m sorry to say, usually isn’t one of them. From the day it opened, lighting, the one element that determines more than any other how we see a play on stage, has consistently been treated as an afterthought. Once again, clunky design choices married to sloppy, uncertain execution has chopped a perfectly good play to pieces visually and rhythmically. In this case the victim is Two Trains Running, August Wilson’s wordy snapshot of Pittsburgh’s Hill District in the 1960s.

The cultural upheavals of the 1960s continue to define American culture, even as we sink deeper into the second decade of the 21st century. But Wilson’s study of the African-American experience in the ’60s barely acknowledges the existence of the civil rights movement, presidents Kennedy or Johnson. Martin Luther King Jr. is mentioned in passing. Malcolm X’s name is bandied around more but only to contextualize a spirit of unity moving through people who, unable to find employment, had taken to the streets, making Pittsburgh’s less affluent neighborhoods look “like Hong Kong.” There’s no mention of riots in Detroit or Watts, or of Woodstock. Instead, Wilson takes a more difficult, and a more interesting path, building his loose narrative around the everyday problems of regular customers at a neighborhood diner, a kind of anti-Cheers where patrons can always get a bowl of beans and not much else.

Two Trains doesn’t tell one cohesive story but is instead a play about storytelling. A colorful assembly of workers, businessmen, petty crooks, and lost souls gather in a diner, owned by a character named Memphis, to talk about family, friends, enemies, charlatan preachers, dishonest businesses, taxes, and the tyrannizing notion that some glad day every darkie in America can pick cotton on their white God’s happy sky plantation. No punches are pulled. Two Trains is a rambling noisy mess of a play that evolves over the course of three hours into a nuanced exploration of the social and civic dynamics that will tear America’s inner cities apart in the years to come.

Tony Anderson and Tony Wright stand out from the rest of the cast as an aging laborer with lots to say and a wealthy funeral-home director whose daily encounters with death have given him a unique perspective on life. Stephen Dowdy and Jose C. Joiner are also excellent as the determined diner owner and an ex-con with big ideas and limited means. But everything about this show needs to tighten up considerably. Smoother, less invasive lighting changes would be a good place to start.

Through February 26th

Next to Normal at Playhouse on the Square breaks all the rules. It’s a musical with limited choreography and nothing that could really be described as dancing. There are some laughs along the way but nothing that could really be described as a joke. Instead of taking audiences back to the Candyland world where most musicals unfold, Next to Normal takes a nakedly emotional plunge into the lives of a family torn apart by mental illness. This acclaimed experiment is also about the culture of health care and all kinds of drugs.

Valley of the Dolls doesn’t have anything on “I Miss the Mountains,” a folky power ballad about absolute sensation and the manic peaks that are crushed along with all the bad things under the weight of antidepressants. It’s one of the best things about Leah Bray Nichols’ raw-nerve performance as Diana Goodman, a wife and mother ripped apart with grief over the loss of a child.

Nichols and David Foster are both detail-oriented actors and gutsy singers, perfectly suited for their roles as Next to Normal‘s unraveling couple. But the story is very nearly turned upside down by the charm and crumbling innocence of Kelsey Hopkins who plays Goodman’s bright but fragile daughter and Corbin Williams as the stoner boyfriend who decides to hold on no matter what.

Gary John La Rosa keeps the staging simple, and Renee Kemper’s musical direction is right on time.

Through February 12th

Categories
Intermission Impossible Theater

Girls will be boys at THE CLUB

The Club at TheatreWorks

  • The Club at TheatreWorks

“A gentleman is any man who wouldn’t hit a woman… with his hat on.”— From The Club‎

Ann Marie Hall doesn’t mince words.

“We’re not just sexist, we’re racist too,” she says archly doting on her production of The Club, a slyly insightful if somewhat obscure musical review compiled by poet Eve Merriam with choreography by Courtney Oliver and Jackie Nichols. The title of the show refers literally to Gentlemen’s clubs at the turn of the 20th-Century where certain privileged males of Anglo extraction could escape family obligations to gamble, drink, and conduct private business. More broadly it also alludes to the white male privilege exemplified in period songs like, “String of Pearls,” “The Juice of the Grape,” and “Following in Father’s Footsteps.”


Sights and sounds from The Club, 2012

This isn’t Hall’s first encounter with The Club, which showcases an ensemble of female performers impersonating men of means. In 1980 she played Freddy in the show’s regional premier at Circuit Playhouse and revived the role a year later for Playhouse on the Square.

Ann Marie Hall directing The Club, 2012

  • Ann Marie Hall directing The Club, 2012

Hall sings Miranda in The Club, 1980

  • Hall sings “Miranda” in The Club, 1980

“It was very popular,” she says.

Categories
Opinion

Updated: City Council Approves Overton Square

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The Overton Square redevelopment proposal from Loeb Properties was approved by the City Council Tuesday.

Cheered on by a largely Midtown crowd of spectators, the Council approved funding for a parking garage and floodwater detention basin that will enable Loeb Properties to go ahead with its plans to spend $19 million redeveloping Overton Square.

The two-hour meeting Tuesday was interrupted several times by applause for Loeb Properties’ plans for a theater district including a relocated Hattiloo Theater, a black repertory company.

Approval came over the objections of council members Wanda Halbert, Joe Brown, and Harold Collins, who tried to delay the vote until next year. But supporters said the delay would effectively have killed the projects. Collins did, however, win verbal assurances that Elvis Presley Boulevard would get moved to the top of the list for capital improvements next year.

The Overton Square project includes $16 million in city and federal funds for flood control and a parking garage that will be owned by the city. The flooding problem in Midtown comes from Lick Creek, which is just west of Overton Square.

Robert Loeb said his company will spend $19 million as follows: $8.5 million for property acquisition, $5 million for rehabilitation of existing buildings, $5 million for new construction, and $500,000 to cover operating losses during construction. Hattiloo Theater will try to raise an additional $4 million and the owners of the abandoned French Quarter Inn plan to replace it with a new $10 million hotel. And Loeb said that if a grocery store were to be in the mix “then our investment would go up.”

The resolution was sponsored by councilmen Shea Flinn and Jim Strickland, who had the support of the Wharton administration and a majority of their colleagues. But it was not a slam dunk. Councilman Ed Ford Jr. said he was taking “a leap of faith” that the council would make good on promises to tend to other flooded parts of the city. Councilman Janice Fullilove did not vote on the motion to approve the project, but did get enough votes to defeat her nemesis, Chairman Myron Lowery, on a procedural vote that led up to it. And Collins was not appeased.

“I’m going to be a little bit cynical today,” he said, before showing pictures of Elvis Presley Boulevard in what he took to be a deteriorated state. “This street has needed repairs and redevelopment for decades.”

The Lick Creek flooding affects homes in a swath of Midtown from the fairgrounds to Chelsea Avenue, but the number of homes is not known. Strickland conceded that the 4,400 homes estimate that has been published several times is not in the engineering study and he doesn’t know where it came from.

An online petition supporting the project had 2025 signatures by Tuesday afternoon, and a separate show of support for Hattiloo Theater could muster more than 100 theater fans.

Hattiloo, located on the edge of downtown, hopes to become part of a Midtown theater district at Overton Square, joining Playhouse on the Square and smaller venues.

NOTE: This post has been rewritten. An earlier version incorrectly said that Councilwoman Fullilove voted for the project. (JB)

Categories
Music Music Features

Something Old, Something New

The Civil Wars are not Civil War buffs. Especially with the sesquicentennial of that bloody North-South conflagration, it’s natural to assume that Joy Williams and John Paul White chose their stage name as a nod to that tumultuous, brother-versus-brother period in American history. Their music, despite its modern-day production sheen, is certainly steeped in old traditions whose roots extend well into the 19th century — modest country laments, fervent gospel harmonies, elegant waltz-time hymns.

Williams, however, is quick to puncture that assumption. “It doesn’t have anything to do with the events of the Civil War,” she says. “It’s really about the battles that we have within ourselves or with other people. It doesn’t have to be the person standing next to you. It could be with someone you’ve known for years or somebody who’s long since passed, or it could be with addiction or God or lack of God. That conflict is in the fiber of our music.”

White and Williams met serendipitously at a songwriting session in Nashville when they were both struggling solo artists. They gelled naturally and immediately, although the idea of forming a duo didn’t occur to them until later. “I’ve never been a part of something that clicked like this musically, so we just followed it like moths to a flame,” White says. “It felt good to do it, so we tried it again to see if it still worked. It just grew from there to become the Civil Wars.”

Williams and White are married — but not to each other. Razzing each other in interviews and intertwining their vocals in a familial embrace, they act more like siblings, which Williams suggests is the key to their chemistry: “With John Paul and I not being in a romantic relationship, we’re able to bring the yin and the yang, the male and the female, and our own unique stories to the table and create out of that without any fear that the band might not be sustainable. It’s a benefit to us not being an actual couple.”

The gregarious Williams and the reserved White are something of a mismatched pair, especially in the musical influences. “I grew up in the Bay Area, so I was listening to the Beach Boys, San Francisco rock, and the Carpenters,” Williams says. “When I got my license, it was Top 40 and rap. John Paul grew up in Alabama listening to country and bluegrass, so I think we have a lot of varied influences that have seeped into our psyche and therefore into the way we write.”

Their songs thrive on contradiction and contrast: Their most popular song, “Poison & Wine,” hinges on the logic-puzzle chorus, “I don’t love you but I always will.”

“Writing together is one of the easiest and most organic things that I’ve ever experienced,” she says. “We walk away with songs that we’re really proud of, and I’m knocking on wood as I’m saying this now.”

Thanks to a Gray’s Anatomy placement and an endorsement from Taylor Swift, the Civil Wars have become one of the biggest acts in Nashville, their rise in popularity coinciding with the Avett Brothers, Mumford & Sons, and other artists lumped into the New Americana movement.

“We’re more than happy to be mentioned in the same breath as those artists,” says White, who embraces rather than dismisses attempts to categorize the Civil Wars. “We don’t shy away from any sort of label — indie folk, folk rock, folk country. We’ve had it all tagged, and we’re happy about that because we would just as soon straddle genres than fit neatly into a box. We’re always surprised by the types of people who gravitate to what we do, from metalheads to country fans.”

The New Americana movement, however, is extremely suspect, as upstart bands like the Brits Mumford & Sons and Seattle’s the Head and the Heart tend to use old styles as easy shorthand for meaning. It’s superficial authenticity — something the Civil Wars skirt easily. Like the Felice Brothers and Abigail Washburn, two of the most adventurous acts associated with that trend, White and Williams integrate their time-tested influences into something new, a distinctive sound that ranges from the strident acoustic blues of “Barton Hollow” to the subdued carnival spiral of “The Girl with the Red Balloon” and the country strut of “Forget Me Not.”

Their range comes through in their live shows as well, which are even more barebones than their studio recordings. “We control every bit of sound that comes off the stage,” says White, who plays a variety of guitars while Williams plays keyboard, piano, and concertina. “We don’t want people to say that was good for one or two people. We want them to walk away feeling like they got the full experience.

“It’s an emotional thing to sing these songs, and I hope it will always be that way,” Williams says. “Being on stage and making music shouldn’t be a passive thing. You have to bleed a little when you create. There’s no greater joy than walking off stage feeling like you’ve connected with a lot of people. You have that after-Thanksgiving turkey-dinner feeling — tired but happy and content about it.”

The Civil Wars

Playhouse on the Square

Wednesday, July 6th, 8 p.m.

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

Danceapalooza

If dance is your thing, this is your week.

Critically appreciated and wildly popular Ballet Grand Prix is a classical dance supergroup featuring the winners of international competitions performing alongside the alumni winners of those same competitions who now appear as soloists for companies like American Ballet Theatre, Paris Opera, and Royal Ballet. The group’s performance of new and traditional work at the Germantown Performing Arts Centre on Saturday promises to be a celebration of virtuosity with all the pop appeal of Dancing with the Stars.

But maybe you’d prefer to see some homegrown dance? Or something with a little more grit and gray matter behind it? That is also possible.

Ballet Memphis’ latest installment of AbunDANCE returns to a theme the company first employed almost 10 years ago. In Where the Girls Are 2, a group of female choreographers, employing the music of classic girl groups and soulful singers, will use dance to examine how women perceive themselves and shape their world. Pieces include “I Will Follow Him: A Brief History” and a response to Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening.

Or how about something political and modern? “I think you will like the work by Peter Carpenter,” says Project: Motion’s Jay Rapp. Carpenter, an associate professor of dance at Columbia College Chicago, does theatrical dance, and a solo he’s performing for the latest installment of Project: Motion’s Axis series is a memory of the Reagan era and America’s response to AIDS.

Ballet Grand Prix at Germantown Performing Arts Centre, Saturday, February 19th, 8 p.m. $30-$50.

Ballet Memphis’ AbunDANCE “Where the Girls Are 2” at Playhouse on the Square, February 19th-27th. $10-$72.

Project: Motion’s Axis Series at Evergreen Theatre, Friday-Sunday, February 18th-20th. $15-$20

Categories
Intermission Impossible Theater

2010-11 Playhouse on the Square Season

Playhouse on the Square’s 2020-11 season is an interesting blend of regional debuts and revivals. I’ll write more about the shows later but for now this is what the season looks like.