Tag: Playhouse on the Square

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For “A Delicate Balance,” the mixed-media installation in the ArtLab at the Art Museum of the University of Memphis, Colin Kidder and John Morgan turn toy balloons into fine art. They bend, twist, wrap, and blow rubber balloons into amalgams of vegetable and animal life as they explore what happens when nature’s delicate balance is poisoned, globally warmed, and irradiated almost to extinction.

The only recognizable creatures in their post-apocalyptic jungle are the hummingbirds Kidder and Morgan have sculpted from Polymer clay. While the birds’ tufted bodies and wing feathers are still intact, their beaks are now pointed metal darts sharp enough to pierce the rubbery hides.

And it looks like they’ll be needing them as they hover and dart just beyond the reach of the hundreds of deep-purple, opalescent-orange, and electric-blue tentacles that reach out from the walls or scurry across ArtLab’s floor dragging what look like smooth pink intestines — turned inside out — behind them. Their bellies are stretched to the point of bursting as these phosphorescent, toxic creatures allure and then poison unsuspecting prey.

As edgy as they are instructive, Kidder and Morgan’s original, beautiful, and topical mutants make “A Delicate Affair” a must-see exhibition.

Through February 27th

In Pinkney Herbert’s four large pastel drawings at Playhouse on the Square, energy builds, coalesces into increasingly complex shapes, and culminates in a 100-by-125-inch pastel titled Alpha, one of the most inventive works of Herbert’s career.

A softly glowing, sable shadow, hovering in the background, sucks us in as we are swept across the surface by a spinning serpent. Something more profound is suggested by the serpent’s huge, hinged mouth, its deeply furrowed green forehead crowned with tufts of feathers or leaves, and the threadlike umbilical chord that loosely ties the free-floating shadow (womb? black hole?) to the creature’s belly where large black spermatozoa gestate. Herbert has assembled characters from several creation stories including Mesoamerica’s Quetzalcoatl, the British Isles’ Green Man, and the male and female principles of Shiva, the Hindu god dancing the world into existence.

Mounted in Playhouse on the Square’s impressive new performance and gallery space, Alpha can be read as metaphor for all artists (playwrights, actors, musicians) attempting to shape new ideas and new art forms out of the primordial stew.

Through February 22nd

Christian Brothers University’s current exhibition “Raw Silk” provides viewers with the opportunity to see the collages and silk paintings of two accomplished fabric artists working at the top of their form.

It’s late autumn in Japanese Torii, Contance Grayson’s most evocative collage, in which hundreds of pieces of kimono and Japanese money, stamps, advertising flyers, and vintage postcards are layered and stitched into a deeply textured tapestry of the gardens, sea coast, mountains, and Shinto shrines of Japan. Grayson take us through the gate of a shrine into the courtyard beyond where a tiny figure (the only human presence in the piece) meditates in the garden.

Phyllis Boger’s dyes and resist on silk include crisp, colorful, child-like geometries of Italian hill towns and translucent mosaics. But Boger’s most moving and strikingly beautiful work is Procession.

A weathered copper roof tops a sagging, deep-red facade. Three hooded figures, completely in shadow, stand on mottled royal-blue and teal tiles. One of the figures raises his cloaked arms and gives thanks for the tiny windows of light, umber woods, and rolling fields that border his town. Deep-green and raw-sienna shadows swirling inside the penitent suggest that, instead of merely going through the motions, he deeply feels the ritual he performs.

Through March 11th

Elisha Gold is best known for his metal sculpture, such as the nine-foot sunflower planted at Memphis Botanic Garden whose face is covered with 700 rounds of ammunition instead of seeds.

For Gallery Fifty Six’s current show “Forgive Your Enemies,” Gold has mounted a series of paintings that are as sardonic, socially conscious, and politically astute as his sculpture. 

Replete with Ben-Day dots and comic-book-inspired scenes of military battle and beautiful women, Gold’s slick and crisp-edged enamel paintings are, in part, homage to Roy Lichtenstein. In Gold’s particularly chilling portrait of cynicism and presumed superiority, a socialite raises her glass of champagne and toasts the viewer with the work’s title, It’s True. The Bigger the Lie, the More Believe.

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News

“The Producers” Not So Shocking

Times certainly do change. When Mel Brooks’ smash, multiple Tony award-winning musical adaptation of his satirical 1968 film, The Producers opened on Broadway in 2001 it was gobbled up whole by critics who, in euphoric spasms, described it as nourishing comic manna from old-school showbusiness heaven. The slobbering reception, if a bit sycophantic, had to at least be sweet vindication for Brooks, a master parodist who won a best screenplay Oscar for the original film only after watching it stink up the box office amid angry, nearly universal critical outrage. Even the drug-taking, lovemaking, rock-and-roll revolutionaries of ’68 rejected Brooks’ iconoclasm and his evenhanded mockery of both the ossified establishment and the self-important counterculture. It probably goes without saying that a scant two decades after the end of WWII, mainstream America still wasn’t quite prepared for the satirical story of two Jewish swindlers (brilliantly and manically played by Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder) who concoct a plan to bilk millions from investors in a glitzy Broadway show called Springtime For Hitler, a musical celebrating in song and dance the glorious achievements of a handsome young fuhrer and his hip, hypersexualized Nazi Party.

For all of its naughty words and bad intentions the retooled Producers musical is never all that shocking to anyone except perhaps the militantly prudish and gay activists who might be offended by how long Brooks tries to drag out the same “laugh-at-the-funny-homos” gag. And that’s a bit of a problem. We should, at the very least, be joyously grossed out by these revolting creatures of pure avarice, just as we were by Mostel and Wilder’s original takes on the repulsive Bialystock and his compulsive partner Bloom. But just like it’s equally groundbreaking movie-to-musical cousins Hairspray and Monty Python’s The Holy Grail, The Producers loses a more than it gains in its translation to the stage. Like The Holy Grail, in particular, it becomes a fetish object for fans who can’t wait to stroke their programs while silently mouthing their favorite lines along with the cast. And at Playhouse on the Square’s final preview there were more than a few people in the crowd vibrating in their seats, anticipating such famous quips as, “Blue Blanket!” and “I’m in pain, I’m wet, AND I’M STILL HYSTERICAL!”

Playhouse heavy-hitter Dave Landis seems like he should be able to settle fairly easily into the slippery shoes of the greedy, grossly libidinous Broadway producer Max Bialystock. That’s not the case, however, as Landis, the exceptional director of Compleat Female Stage Beauty, plays the role too close to his vest allowing his equally gifted costar Michael Detroit to upstage him at every turn in the role of Bloom, a sputtering nebbish.

Ken Zimmerman, Playhouse on the Square’s original artistic director, who put audiences in the aisles with his portrayal of a wicked, if pragmatic capitalist in last season’s Urinetown, engages in some expert scenery-chewing as the flamboyantly homosexual (not to mention completely thick) Broadway director Roger De Bris. He obviously (and rightfully) derives a tremendous amount of pleasure knowing just how much his sparkling, silver dress makes him resemble the Chrysler building. David Foster, last seen as a mildly effective Johnny Depp wannabe in Pirates of Penzance is no less delightful as Carmin Ghia, Zimmerman’s houseboy and partner in fabulousness. It’s a true shame that Foster’s only given one threadbare joke to stretch over the entire show, though he swishes through it with zany aplomb.

Bruce Bergner’s scenic design, a mix of painted drops and practical furniture on wagons, is almost as flat and uninspired as Ben Wheeler’s lights and Jay Berkow’s bloodless choreography. To that end The Producers is the perfect opposite of Theatre Memphis’ West Side Story where extraordinary design and tight dancing make up for an unevenness among actors and vocalists. In this case, bland design and washed out lighting leaves Landis, Detroit, and a talented cast of professionals looking like well-intentioned community theater performers.

Showgirls wearing giant pretzels, Volkswagens, weiners, and German Shepherds on their heads will always by funny. But once you get past the awesome headgear, Rebecca Powell’s costumes for the “Springtime for Hitler” sequence are just plain boring. Brooks’ design team took appropriately the look to extremes of sexual fetishism and anything short of that is going to be a letdown. As cute as dancing girls in too-short liederhozen may be, they just can’t compete with the sadomasochist connotations of stormtroopers in tight leather hipboots.

To do justice to The Producers a director must push beyond the boundaries of good taste to see if Brooks’ time-proven material can still make audiences squirm with guilty delight. It’s an exercise in excess irreverence given a minimal, overly reverent treatment in its Memphis premiere.

by Chris Davis

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Theater Theater Feature

Leftover Tuna

Some people (and for reasons that boggle the mind) can’t get enough of A Tuna Christmas. Take, for example, the young lady who sat behind me at Playhouse on the Square Sunday night. She said all the punchlines moments before the actors could deliver them, then repeated particularly funny lines, laughed until she snorted, and laughed again at her own snorting. She wasn’t the only person having a good time, though she was certainly the most obnoxious.

A Tuna Christmas is a small-town and smaller-stakes soap opera built on the unfortunately accurate premise that an audience will always laugh at chubby men in dresses and pee their pants at the mere mention of a Frito-pie.

Yes indeed, it is a treat to watch gifted character actors Andrew Moore and Michael Gravois transform before our very eyes into all the oddball inhabitants of Texas’ third-smallest town. True enough, the actors have an infectious good time showing off their mighty arsenal of silly, whistling voices and strange, spit-laden dialects. But in spite of their populist appeal, all three of the Tuna plays (Greater Tuna, A Tuna Christmas, and the Independence Day thigh-slapper Red, White, and Tuna) are snarlingly superior and steadfastly middle-brow. What these protracted skits about big-hearted half-wits from hicktown lack in mere humanity, they more than make up for in sight gags, gross sentiment, and casual racism. (Midget Mexicans, anyone?)

The Tuna plays are all about making fun of culturally and economically challenged peckerwoods with big butts, bad hair, and tacky outfits. And they’re also about getting misty when these poor inbred fashion disasters find sloppy love over a bottle of whiskey and a Floyd Cramer tune.

Oh well. After the box-office disappointment of Jerry Springer — the Opera (a far more daring take on the trailer-park set), Playhouse deserves a few full houses. It’s been a blissful five years since POTS’ last visit to Tuna, the dysfunctional trailer-park community where the locals tune into radio station WKKK (hyuck!) for up-to-the-minute reports on the annual holiday lawn-display contest. (Yeehaw!) Playhouse could drag out this crowd-pleasing garbage every year but doesn’t. Astonishing! Praiseworthy, even.

Through January 6th

While Playhouse on the Square is busy dishing out the old and familiar, Hattiloo Theatre is attempting box-office suicide by presenting a monstrously depressing original script during the one time of the year when most of the city’s theaters can actually fill seats and stock their treasure chests.

Written and directed by Hattiloo’s artistic director Ekundayo Bandele, Forget Me Not Christmas is Sophocles’ Antigone reimagined and set in the poorest place imaginable. It tells the story of recently freed slaves grieving over a monstrous tragedy, shaking off their ghosts, and sacrificing their identity to please the gods of their former captors.

Bandele is an exceptional writer, though sometimes he can go on like a politician in love with the sound of his own voice. At this point in his promising play’s development, every line hangs heavy with dark matters and thundering self-importance.

Never let it be said that Bandele doesn’t have a gift for developing epic metaphors. In the center of his set (and at the heart of his play), there is a massive wood-burning furnace that saved an entire community one particularly nasty winter. Sixteen members of that community were subsequently burned in the furnace when the original owner took his revenge for the theft, and the survivors are forced to decide if the man who stole the furnace was a Christ figure or a common thief who brought a curse down on his people.

Bandele’s direction lacks the crispness his wordy play needs to move it along at a tolerable clip, and the actors often seem uncertain of their lines and blocking. Still, its flaws and overeager nods to playwrights like August Wilson and Suzan Lori Parks aside, there is something to it all.

Repetitive and seemingly unfinished, Forget Me Not Christmas is a holiday downer that needs someone other than the playwright to edit and stage it. That said, there is no reason to believe that Bandele’s writing won’t astound us all some day.

Through December 23rd

Categories
Letters To The Editor Opinion

Letters to the Editor

The MLGW Cover

Getting to the supermarket, DVD store, or Peanut Shoppe to get my copy of the Flyer is a weekly priority. Seeing the cover of the March 8th issue? Priceless!

S.G. Long

Memphis

Edmund Ford

City councilman Edmund Ford, awaiting trial on numerous charges brought forth by the FBI — not to mention his MLGW problems — berated every city councilperson and the media in a committee meeting two weeks ago (“Power Play,” March 8th issue). He pointed fingers and threatened some by name. And like a kennel of whipped puppies, they were laid to rest by the “undertaker.”

Ford says the MLGW charges are false and the bills are not entirely his. So what is the connection between Willie Herenton, Joe Lee, and Edmund Ford? Try this on for size: When Herenton nominated Lee to be president of MLGW, Ford praised him for his choice. And why shouldn’t he? According to his own statements, Ford is the one who married Joe Lee to his wife Mona!

Joe Mercer

Memphis

Let Them Eat a Stadium?

In 1789, a crowd of poor women marched into the Palace of Versailles and tried to petition their king for a fairer form of government. They were shouting that they had no bread and were hungry. To this, Marie Antoinette famously replied: “Let them eat cake.”

This is similar to the issue of a new football stadium raised by Mayor Herenton. Instead of educating our children or hiring enough probation officers to monitor sex offenders or dealing with our many other problems, we are told to “eat cake,” in the form of a new football stadium.

Frank M. Boone

Memphis

General Pace

Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General Peter Pace recently offered his opinion that homosexuality was “immoral.” I would first like to thank him for at least being honest and clear about his beliefs. However, I am one of the millions of “immoral” individuals he has insulted. I will not try to explain the natural connections and the human emotions involved. It is said best in biblical terms: After God created the earth and looked at what he had done, he saw that it was good. He said nothing about perfect.

So let us no longer pass judgment on one another but rather decide never to put a stumbling block or hindrance in the way of a brother. You are okay; I am okay — which means we’re both okay.

Gregory Vassar

Memphis

Agrees With Blackburn

I have finally found something about which I agree with my congresswoman. Representative Marsha Blackburn is right on when she targets banks that issue credit cards to those who are in our country illegally. This is a serious example of American business interests being put above our national security.

I encourage Congress to adopt Blackburn’s idea and make it the law of the land. I also encourage Blackburn to review her support for all those bank and credit-card fees and the sky-high interest rates banks have been allowed to charge. 

Only the payday loan companies are allowed to charge higher rates, and they have been like sharks in targeting our stressed military families. The last Congress passed some relief but not enough to provide help to those who are sacrificing the most.

Jack Bishop

Cordova

Playhouse Kudos

I’m a young actor, and I made my first trip to Memphis for the Southeast Theatre Conference auditions. Playhouse on the Square was the host, and I had the chance to see its production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Whatever that theater is doing, it is doing right! The actors were top-notch, and the production values exquisite. Who needs to pay the prices of Broadway, when great theater is happening right there in Memphis!

Charles Milton

Watertown, Massachusetts

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Theater Theater Feature

Cats and Cradles

In the second act of Tennessee Williams’ 1955 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Big Daddy Pollitt, a rich Delta planter deceived by his family into believing he’s not dying of cancer, tries to have an honest conversation with his alcoholic son Brick, who stopped sleeping with his wife Maggie and crawled into a bottle shortly after the death of his best friend Skipper. The coarse old man tells rambling stories of his days sleeping in hobo jungles, talks about the time he spent working as an overseer for “that old pair of sissies” Jack Straw and Peter Ochello, and tells his favorite, presumably gay son about the one thing you can grow on 28,000 acres that’s more valuable than cotton: tolerance. Hoping to keep Brick from following his friend into an early grave, he says he’s seen too much of the world to be shocked by a little same-sex loving and loosely suggests that he might have even known a bit of it himself.

It’s a strange sentiment to come pouring from the mouth of a character Williams describes as a “Mississippi redneck,” and Brick, a former football star and the epitome of 1950s masculinity, is revolted by the ease with which his father addresses the forbidden topic. The painful confrontation causes the younger Pollitt to take a kind of revenge by telling the truth about his father’s condition. It’s the play’s most brutal scene, and 52 years after Cat‘s Broadway premiere, Williams’ poeticized language still rings true, even when the actors delivering the dialogue are a little wooden.

Joneal Joplin is an effective, functional Big Daddy, though he brings nothing new to a role originally defined by folk singer Burl Ives. Joplin strides about the stage cursing in a booming radio announcer’s voice burdened with an aristocratic drawl. Like so many Big Daddys before him, Joplin ignores the character’s rough, impoverished back-story and makes him into a foul-mouthed Foghorn Leghorn. The clichéd Southern affectations are particularly glaring compared to Joe Murphy’s understated but occasionally electrifying Brick.

Brian Mott and Dana Terle both do excellent work as Gooper and Mae, a pair of grotesques representing “the breeders” among us. Wordlessly, the couple fill the room with lies using little more than a glance or a hand signal. Irene Crist is an equally understated Big Mama, finding strength and sass where other actresses usually resort to cheap tears.

Maggie the Cat, Brick’s ambitious, sexually frustrated wife, is one of Williams’ most celebrated heroines, but in the wrong hands her endless monologues can be shrill and annoying. Joy Marr finds little of the character’s inherent sex appeal but accomplishes her goals well enough. One gets the sense that she’s no more interested in sex than Brick but determined to get her rightful share of the family inheritance.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is easily Williams’ most classically themed play, borrowing hugely from Shakespeare’s King Lear and the collected work of Russian realist Anton Chekhov. The dialogue is intricate, entrancing, and loaded with iconic imagery of the American South. The action seems right at home on Larry Brown’s beautifully realized set, which subtly uses at least one unsubtle image: The tree branch hanging over the veranda immediately conjures up visions of Gone with the Wind. It’s a kitschy element but an effective one in a play that reminds us that tomorrow is indeed another day for those lucky enough to make it through the long, dark night.

When Drew Fracher visits Playhouse on the Square to direct a classic, it usually means Memphis theatergoers are in for a pleasant surprise. Under his supervision, Macbeth was expertly transformed into a visually staggering rock-and-roll nightmare about sex, power, and addiction. His expressionistic vision for Of Mice and Men placed Steinbeck’s migrant workers in a world turned, quite literally, on its side. Compared to these two efforts, Fracher’s Cat seems uninspired — good, but not great.

Through February 25th

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

Everywang

I’ve heard rumors and rumblings that Playhouse on the Square is planning a bold, controversial season for 2007-’08. If my sources can be trusted, there’s a real chance Memphis’ only resident professional troupe will perform an entire season’s worth of plays and musicals with all of their clothes on! That’s right, folks, you heard it here first: The rapidly expanding theatrical company, which most recently showcased MILF boobs in the Mid-South premiere of The Graduate and an all-you-care to-watch buffet of wet, soapy willies in the gay baseball play Take Me Out, will act on stage for a whole 365 days without the benefit of nipples, nads, or derrieres!

Actually, none of that’s true. I just made it up. But it does seem as though the Playhouse family of theaters has been particularly raw over the past several seasons, offering up a skinful array of tasteful titillations and artistic nudes accompanied by steady doses of good old-fashioned burlesque. And now for the next few weeks, Playhouse continues in that naked tradition by treating audiences to The Full Monty, a heartfelt musical about real guys with real problems climaxing with the full exposure of a half-dozen swinging ding-a-lings representing every wrinkled facet of the ordinary average Joe. It shouldn’t be a pretty sight, but thanks to the skillful, upbeat direction of Dave Landis and some exceptional lighting by Ken Friedhoff, it is.

Tony Award-winning playwright Terrence McNally’s two-and-a-half hour musical adaptation of The Full Monty is no improvement over the original 90-minute film, which was a surprise hit in 1997. If anything, the stereotypical characters have become even more cartoonish and the storyline more brazenly motivational. Both the film’s brevity and its nuanced character development have been sacrificed in order to make room for a dozen witty, well-crafted show tunes that are so self-consciously blue-collar you’d swear Larry the Cable Guy was called in as a script consultant. Most troubling, McNally, who has distinguished himself as an honest, myth-shattering chronicler of the modern gay experience, has written a homosexual subplot into The Full Monty that’s so clichéd he might as well have specified that both characters wear a dress. Let’s face it: When two men bond over their mothers and their mutual love of The Sound of Music at their first dance rehearsal, you don’t need Nostradamus to tell you where things are going. And for all of this silliness, The Full Monty is still a winner and a reasonably successful attempt to explore the tropes of masculinity using hackneyed plot devices stolen from a vast canon of chick flicks.

Though the action of the story has been moved from working-class Wales to Buffalo, The Full Monty‘s plot has been kept intact: The steel mill closes, and the menfolk are emasculated, forced to choose between the domestic drudgery of a housewife or working at Wal-Mart. At the center of the story is Jerry Lukowski, a poor slob with a criminal record, a pile of debt, and a son he’s going to lose if he can’t come up with his child-support payments.

Daniel Zakarija, Aaron Lamb, and Greg Pragel.

Inspired by a troupe of male strippers and certain he can make 50-G in one night, Jerry assembles Hot Metal, a troupe of exotic dancers composed of old guys, fat guys, skinny guys, geeks, and dudes. Think Rocky but with G-strings instead of boxing trunks, and you’ve pretty much got the picture.

Aaron Lamb is an energetic charmer as Jerry, although he has trouble establishing believable relationships with his ex-wife Pam (played by Claire Hayner) and his son Nathan (played by William Thornton-Leonard). It’s impossible to imagine what these characters would ever talk about if they didn’t have a script to go by, and it’s difficult to imagine that they could have ever been a family, dysfunctional or otherwise. But that’s okay because this feel-good musical is propped up by an extraordinary supporting cast, including Ostrander winners George Dudley, David Foster, and Irene Crist at her cranky best. It also showcases the soulful talent of Five Guys Named Moe vet Rod O’Neal and Dan Zakarija, who nearly stops the show by singing a bittersweet love song to his sagging gut.

Playhouse has been on a roll lately with innovative musicals like Urinetown and edgy thrillers like Frozen. All of these shows have succeeded thanks to the actors’ fearless performances. The Full Monty follows in that fine tradition. It’s not perfect, but it’s balls-out.