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On the Edge: Fringe Festival Returns

It’s sometimes helpful to remember how so much of what’s mainstream now was once edgy and shocking. Filmmaker John Waters built his reputation as cinema’s king of trash and bad taste, but this week, his hit musical Hairspray opens on the often-family-friendly main stage at Theatre Memphis. Meanwhile, at Circuit Playhouse, The Legend of Georgia McBride provides something more provocative, with the story of an Elvis impersonator turned drag superstar.

While these shows represent a mix of style and substance, if you’re interested in what’s next — and what our area innovators are up to — Voices of the South’s annual Memphis Fringe Festival is a chance to sample work by artists in physical, experimental, and traditional theater forms, the kind of work being done just outside the mainstream. Last year’s offerings ranged from a high school production of The Laramie Project to a show about the alleged healing powers of John Cusack movies.

This year’s programming will showcase 50 performances over two weeks. New works include The Earthworm by Quark Theatre co-founder Adam Remsen and Professor Myz N. Szenikals Profundikal Pedagogikal Spectakle, a collaboration between Weightless Ariel and Homemade Theatre. Rhodes College professor Joy Brooke Fairfield’s contemporary performance series will feature a trio of artists working in the creative traditions of postmodern drag, dance, and hip-hop/spoken word. And that’s just a taste of what you’ll see at this eclectic event featuring music, comedy, plays, poetry, and dance.

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Intermission Impossible Theater

Neighborhood Threat! “Raisin” Is a Great Musical, and an Important Story

From a technical standpoint I could pick Hattiloo’s Raisin to pieces. The set doesn’t look down at heel, it looks slapped together. The presence of living actors insures that the show’s minimal, thoughtful choreography, will sometimes be under-supported by otherwise well-made recordings of a horn-driven, 70’s-era soul-inspired score built to jump off the stage and get up in your life choices. Tracks get the job done though, and, as always, so much of any show’s success depends on material strength and a cast’s ability to leverage it. In this regard everything about Raisin delivers. Music and dancing never undermine the message in this faithfully adapted retelling of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. This story of the Younger family and their struggle to buy an affordable home and possibly start a family business is a subtle, almost generous look at how America and its wealth became segregated. It is a deeply felt family drama that ends with a devastating loss barely tempered with dignity and determination.

Raisin won the Tony Award for best new musical in 1973, and promptly fell off the face of the Earth. A best musical win doesn’t ensure immortality or heavy rotation, but ever since Kiss Me Kate picked up the first best musical trophy in 1949, a win has typically meant Broadway tours, lavish revivals, and some longevity on the regional circuit. Raisin, — a musical described by New York Times writer Clive Barnes as being, “perhaps even better than the [Tony nominated] play” —  just went away. Why?

To answer that question we probably have to go down to the crossroads of real estate and money. It surprises people when I suggest that, for all the edgy content that marches across our stages, our regional theaters are still relatively conservative spaces shaped more by donor/subscriber communities than the broader communities they inhabit.  There’s only been so much room for black programming in these spaces and while a gut-wrencher like Raisin or Caroline or Change might get produced once in a while we’re more likely to see upbeat revivals of pop-culture touchstones like The Color Purple or sparkly showbiz epics like Dreamgirls. If one must return to the musty old stories, Hansberry’s original drama is accepted canon, and always less expensive to produce than a musical on your second stage.

Thing is, there’s nothing musty about the original, if you pay attention to the whole text, not just the big “amen” lines about not capitulating to people who don’t think you’re fit to share the Earth.

It’s probably fair to say that most folks, liberal and conservative alike, have bought, in some measure, the big lies about segregation and how it continues to exist because people self-select. It’s always been malarkey. Contemporary segregation and urban slums were created by single family housing/industrial zoning, by the Federal government’s refusal to insure mortgages to African-Americans, and the inability of African-Americans to obtain credit via the usual channels. It was advanced by public housing back when public housing was nice and park-like and not for poor people, but for exclusively white workers priced out of areas close to job centers. It was further maintained by restrictive covenants insuring that certain properties could only be sold to white buyers. When courts turned on the covenants Neighborhood associations were created. To buy in you had to belong. To belong you had to be white.

As more and more Americans moved out of apartments and into single family homes, the limited amount of property made available to African Americans was typically far more expensive than property being offered to whites. Absent credit, it was sold via a contract system that eliminated equity. One missed payment could result in eviction, with nothing to show for your effort. Families with little discretionary income for upkeep, did sometimes crowd into substandard housing, but decay was always the result of a cruel, deliberately exploitive system backed by customary business practices and law. Though these circumstances are alluded to rather than expressly stated, this is the legal, social and economic environment in which Raisin unfolds, and to get the most out of the musical experience, it’s helpful to divorce ourselves from political myths, and open ourselves to a more complete history.
[pullquote-1] Raisin isn’t about integration or white flight from the urban core. It’s about a family’s struggle to create legacy inside a system designed to prevent it. The family patriarch has died leaving $10,000 in life insurance. Lena, the surviving matriarch wants to sink most of the money into an affordable home in a white neighborhood, not because of the demographics, but because “It was the best [she] could do for the money.” Her son Walter Lee’s a chauffeur who wants to invest the money in a family business — a liquor store. Her daughter, pressing against both race and gender norms, has exchanged faith for science and wants to go to medical school. Glimpsing a bigger world she may choose to get out entirely and move to Africa with her foreign-born boyfriend. In the absence of credit or anything more than sustenance income, all these dreams hinge on one pot of insurance money representing the sum total of one man’s difficult life. Add to this dynamic a white representative of Clybourne Park’s progressive neighborhood association who’s arrived to negotiate a kinder, gentler way to keep blacks out, and you have all the ingredients necessary for an emotionally honest and devastating primer in how everything went wrong.

Raisin‘s story is famously inspired by the poetry of Langston Hughes. More crucially it’s informed by the Hansberry family’s personal experience in court, fighting the restrictive legal covenants and members only neighborhood associations. Hers is a deeply sad but open-hearted critique of the American Dream, a Depression-era fiction embraced by President Herbert Hoover to sell the advantages of single family home zoning where ethnic groups were excluded, over crowded apartment-based urban living where anybody might move across the street.

Hattiloo has told this story before, and told it well. Stagecraft notwithstanding, the musical tops it, if only because it gives great source material a beat and sticks it to your brain like a bubblegum hit on the radio.

At the top of the show I plunged my face into my hands — I couldn’t look. Committed, vibrant performances were at odds with cool, canned music. It just looked silly and I was sure I was in for a night of deadly theater. But the commitment was real. It was relentless. It overcame and the result was so much more memorable than I ever could have ever imagined during those cringe-worthy opening moments.

Raisin’s Lena became an almost instantaneous theatrical archetype. George C. Wolfe brilliantly lampooned that archteype in The Colored Museum’s  “Last Black Mama on the Couch” sketch. Hattiloo stalwart Patricia Smith never sits on a couch or plays to type. Her Lena shifts from thoughtful, nurturing and wise, to superstitious, impulsive and tyrannical. She struggles to create security for her family without realizing how restrictive security can be — or how tenuous. Smith exudes maternal virtue, but her’s is a nuanced, warts-and-all take on a part the veteran performer could have easily phoned in.

Director Mark Allan Davis gets top shelf performances from an ensemble cast that includes Rashideh Gardner, Samantha Lynn, Aaron Isaiah Walker, and Gordon Ginsberg. But Kortland Whalum’s leave it all on stage take on Walter Lee Younger is really something to see. Whalum feels nothing lightly and his words and songs land like punches — some weak, flailing and ineffectual, some like haymakers. It’s as rich a performance as I’ve seen in ages, just at the edge of too much but never tipping over.

Walter Lee gets swindled, of course. I don’t think that’s a spoiler given the shopworn material. He’s one more casualty of unstable alternative economies created when people are isolated and shut out of the regular economy. The Youngers may be moving into a Chicago neighborhood but in this moment Walter Lee becomes the embodiment of Hughes’ “Harlem,” and the “dream deferred.” Maybe this gifted, young, imperfect black man who’s trying to do all the things he’s supposed to do but still can’t get ahead, will finally dry up like a raisin in the sun. Maybe he’ll fester like a sore or stink like rotten meat or sag like a heavy load. Maybe he’ll explode. In a beautifully manicured interpretation, Whalum gives you the sense it’s all on the table all the time.

Short take: This Raisin has some real problems. Telling one helluva strong story isn’t one of them.

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Intermission Impossible Theater

Drama Club: Reviews of Othello, Annapurna, and Fun Home

New Moon’s Othello

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to
you, trippingly on the tongue: but if you mouth it,
as many of your players do, I had as lief the
town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air
too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently;
for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say,
the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget
a temperance that may give it smoothness.— Hamlet‘s speech to players. 

130 years before #metoo, the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen wrote, fairly succinctly, that “a woman cannot be herself in modern society.” Ibsen, an artist often regarded as a father of modernism, explained that, inside a male-manufactured reality, a woman’s identity is bent, in every case, by “laws made by men with prosecutors and judges who assess feminine conduct from a masculine standpoint.” This same fragile male projection is at the jealousy-twisted heart of Othello, and 274 years before Ibsen modernized the theater with A Doll’s House, Emilia, a supporting character in Shakespeare’s Venetian tragedy, appeared before audiences for the first time with a similar message.
[slideshow-1] “I do think it is their husbands’ faults if wives do fall,” Emilia says, describing a toxic combination of male promiscuity followed by peevish jealousies and physical abuse (a recipe repeated in Fun Home, which is currently on stage just around the block at Playhouse on the Square). “Let husbands know their wives have sense like them,” Emilia continues, asserting her basic humanness and frailty. “They see, and smell, and have their palates both for sweet and sour, as husbands have… Else let them know, the ills we do, their ills instruct us so.”

Emilia’s ability to identify her circumstance is no inoculation against a tragic end. She’s as infected and wrecked as the play’s title character by her husband Iago’s deceptions and Kell Christie’s clear articulation of Emilia’s wisdom and loss elevates New Moon Theatre Company‘s uneven production of Othello.

John Maness threatens a similarly notable Iago. The dependable foot-soldier-turned-villain’s ever-shifting motivations brilliantly dissolve into projection and petty excuse-making in the shadow of naked misogyny and the unforced homoeroticism that hangs in the close, hypermasculine air of war and sport. Trouble is, neither Maness nor anybody else is given much action to suit to their words.

Willis Green follows his driven, King Lear-like turn as Troy Maxson in August Wilson’s Fences, with a less assured take on Shakespeare’s great general — a man whose uncommon worth is notable in racist Venice and linked to achievements in the field. A soldier’s work is never done and the play affords opportunities to create business illustrating our famously jealous warrior’s journey from national asset to wild, passion-driven liability. Given none to work, Willis does the only thing he can do. He talks. And he speaks. And he pronounces, violating several rules laid down in Hamlet’s famous speech to the players.

Like New Moon, Cloud9 is a little company with big ambition. And like Othello, Cloud9’s current production of Annapurna is a thoughtfully produced but plodding enterprise that needs focus, better pacing, and higher stakes. On the other hand, when it comes to pale middle-aged dude-bootie, this show delivers an abundance. And that’s not nothing!

I kid, but hats off to actor Gordon Ginsberg for plunging butt-first into a role that would be difficult enough fully clothed. And for doing so without a whiff of self consciousness. Or anything else for that matter — don’t let those skid-marks on the set fool you. 

Sharr White’s one-act drama introduces audiences to Ulysses and his ex-wife Emma (Susan Howe). He’s a former academic and recovering alcoholic living out his last, sick, lonely, mostly naked days, in a revolting, bug-infested trailer. She had a second husband and a life but never got over the first and has come to visit with news that the former couple’s adult son wants to reunite the father he doesn’t remember.

Annapurna’s a character study — the kind of  faintly grotesque show you really only want to produce as a stunt because you’ve got a pair of daredevil actors who are prepared and able to crush the material like a couple of Kaiju stomping down Tokyo. Cloud9 has two very good actors doing brave but fuzzy work with little urgency, and a severe need to reach for higher peaks, and sink (or drive each other!) into deeper, sadder valleys.

Warts and all this Annapurna‘s still novel, if never quite as polished or compelling as the company’s terrific production of Marjorie Prime.

I’ve got to admit, my mind wandered all over the place while watching Playhouse on the Square’s perfectly fine production of Fun Home. First, I started thinking about the last show I saw at POTS, which was Neil Simon’s comedy Laughter on the 23rd Floor because, like Fun Home, Laughter also employs a narrator to set tone and lead the audience through the story. Then I thought about how sad it was that every human being working as a director today wasn’t required, at some point, to take classes in narrative theater-making with retired University of Memphis professor Gloria Baxter. She never seemed to care for isolated, inactive narrators who simply stood up and said their piece or were pushed off to the side. Narrators could engage with the action, change it, and be changed by it. So she pushed students to identify a narrator’s point of view and express that his or her physical relationship with the story being told. Laughter and Fun Home are both cases where a less-than-imaginative use of pivotal narration has made otherwise finely acted shows less dynamic than they might be.

Fun Home isn’t a place where a fun family lives. It’s the family business — a diminutive version of the “Funeral Home” where Bruce, the show’s troubled father figure, sometimes works when he’s not teaching high school English or trying to have relationships with with underaged boys. Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori’s Tony-winning memory-musical takes place in a rarely (but sweetly) fun world where death’s always near, and love is something you sift for like an archaeologist working through the rubble of generations.

A strong and convincing ensemble cast sells a production where the stage pictures can want more life than the graphic fiction that inspired them — comic book images that should always be part of the Fun Home experience, somehow. Still, the cast gets to the heart of a show that actor Stephen Huff described as being about a, “fragmented self that’s searching for some kind of wholeness.” Like Huff said, in an interview with The Flyer, “At the end of the show, you finally have all three of the Alisons together, singing in unison and harmony. It’s this self-integration that’s so gorgeous and fulfilling.”

There’s really nothing I can add to that. It’s everything.

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Intermission Impossible Theater

Graceland Launches a Performing Arts Camp

Graceland

A performing arts camp at Graceland where kids “follow in the footsteps of Elvis”?

Sounds good to me.

The Presley home and museum has been in an expansionist phase, evolving the mission, and reshaping the popular tourist destination’s identity. This July families with kids between the ages of 6 and 15 can be among the first to take part in Graceland’s new, “immersive performing arts experience.”


From the media release:

Participants will learn from local and Broadway professionals as they explore their creativity in workshops at the Graceland Soundstage, on stage at The Guest House at Graceland™ Theater and on actual production sets featured in the acclaimed “Sun Records” TV series. Over the four days of activities, everyone will develop their own showcase, culminating in an evening of performances on stage at The Guest House Theater for family and friends. 

The camp experience includes four nights at The Guest House hotel and availability is limited.

More information’s available here.

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Cover Feature News

Memphis 2017: The Year to Come

Business and Development …

Memphis ought to be used to crazy, impossible blockbusters by now.

For example, it may be tough to remember that the Pyramid was once a dim, vacant, hopeless reminder of good times gone by instead of a game-changing outdoor retailer, hotel, restaurant, bowling alley, shooting range, and gator pit with the best view in town. Weird, right? Who saw that coming?

The coming year promises a ton of similar projects, the kind of projects that make you marvel that someone could imagine the thing in the first place — and that teams of people had the guts and determination (and money) to pull it off.

But taking something old and making it new again is just how we do. You can call it “adaptive re-use” if you want. We’re just going to call it the Memphis Way, something that sets us apart from, ahem, other cities of music.

Crosstown Concourse

This is without a doubt the blockbuster-est of 2017 blockbusters. Crosstown is a $200 million renovation project for 1.1 million square feet, about 17 football fields spread across 10 floors. The mammoth structure closed in 1993 and sat dormant, vacant, and hopeless for years, until energy formed around the project, beginning with the formation of the nonprofit Crosstown Arts in 2010. More money was raised, tenants were signed, and work crews have mobbed the place since 2014.

Crosstown will officially open on May 13th, with a day-long celebration of music, food, speeches, and all the rest. But residents of Parcels at Crosstown, the apartments inside the building, will begin moving in on January 2nd, according to Todd Richardson, project leader for the Crosstown Development project.

Crosstown Concourse

Business tenants, including Tech901, Memphis Teacher Residency, the Poplar Foundation, Pyramid Peak Foundation, and Church Health Center will start moving in next month, as well. Richardson expects all of the 31 business tenants, except Crosstown High and the American Lebanese Syrian Associated Charities (ALSAC), to be moved in by May.

“We have a healthy panic about us, in terms of shifting from construction to operations,” Richardson said. “I always say once we finish construction we’re about 50 percent done.” The other 50 percent, Richardson said, is the “magic” of Crosstown, the people, the programming, and the activity of the place.

Expect construction inside the building to last at Crosstown for a full year and a half after the celebration — on tenant projects and the high school. Construction of the new, 425-seat performing arts theater will begin next month and continue through June of 2018.

Here’s a list of all the other tenants expected to move into Crosstown: A Step Ahead Foundation; Daniel Bird, DDS; the YMCA; Christian Brothers University; City Leadership; The Curb Market; Crosstown Arts; Crosstown Back and Pain Institute; FedEx Office; French Truck Coffee; G4S; Hope Credit Union; Juice Bar; Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare; Mama Gaia; Madison Pharmacy; nexAir; the Kitchen Next Door; So Nuts and Confections; St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital; Tanenbaum Dermatology Center; Teach for America; and Teacher Town.

Trader Joe’s

“Coming 2017” is all the Trader Joe’s website offers Memphians about its plans for a store here. However, a building permit was pulled this month for a $2.5 million renovation of the former Kroger store on Exeter in Germantown. The project has been on again and off again since officials announced the move here in 2015. So, Two-Buck-Chuck fans, keep your fingers crossed for news in 2017.

Poplar Commons

That old Sears building close to Laurelwood has been razed to make way for a new $15.5 million, 135,000 square-foot shopping center called Poplar Commons, to be anchored by Nordstrom Rack. Store officials said to expect Nordstorm Rack to be open by “fall of 2017.”
Ulta, the beauty products retailer, has also signed on as a tenant at Poplar Commons. Nordstrom officials said the center will include “national retailers, specialty retail, and several well-known restaurants.”

Wiseacre Brewing

Will they or won’t they? Wiseacre Brewing officials have until early 2017 to tell Memphis City Council members if they will convert the long-vacant Mid-South Coliseum into a brewery, tasting room, event space, and retail location.

The idea was floated to the council this summer by brewery co-founder Frank Smith. The council approved the lease terms for the Coliseum, and Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland lauded the deal.

But Wiseacre would have to bring the 104,000 square-foot building up to code. They’d also have to retrofit it for their uses. It all comes with a price tag of about $12 million, brewery officials said earlier this year.

ServiceMaster

Crews have been hard at work converting the former Peabody Place mall into a new headquarters for Memphis-based ServiceMaster, parent company of Terminix, American Home Shield, Merry Maids, and more. The company says about 1,200 employees will be moved to the new location by the end of 2017.

The transformation will bring light and life to a long-darkened corner of Peabody Place in downtown Memphis. The company, which reported $160 million in profits for 2015, received about $24 million in taxpayer-supported incentives.

South City

Demolition will begin on the Foote Homes housing complex sometime early next year, said Marcia Lewis, executive director of the Memphis Housing Authority. When it’s gone, the massive, $210-million South City project will revitalize the area, which is a stone’s throw from Beale Street and South Main.

Only 40 Foote Homes residents were still living in the complex in mid-December, Lewis said. Those residents all have housing vouchers, are looking for new housing, and will all have moved out by early 2017. Once it’s gone, there will be no more “projects” in Memphis.

Foote Homes will be replaced with an apartment complex, to be filled with tenants of mixed incomes. The apartment campus will have green space, retail, and on-site education centers. Developers and government officials hope the new apartment will spur further economic growth in the area.

Lewis said no solid timeline for construction exists, since some federal government approvals are still being sought.

Tennessee Brewery

Work continues at the former Tennessee Brewery site, and the project’s developers say the brewery — slated to become an “urban apartment home community” — will be “re-established in 2017.”

Tennessee Brewery

Construction crews have spruced up the old brewery, completed the parking garage across the street, and have raised the bones for the two other new apartment buildings that will complete the project.

The brewery building was saved from the wrecking ball in 2014, when developers bought it for $825,000. The planned mixed-use development will cost about $28 million.

Central Station

The 100-year-old train station at Main and G.E. Patterson is getting a major, $55-million makeover, and parts of that project will become visible in the new year. Construction of the new Malco movie theater on G.E. Patterson will begin in January as will the major improvements at the Memphis Farmers Market, including the construction of a more-permanent market plaza area that will front Front.

Work is in full swing on the new South Line apartment buildings on Front, which are expected to be completed in February. Design work has begun on the concourse area around Central Station, which will connect trolleys, buses, bike riders, and pedestrians with Central Station from Main Street, the South End, and Big River Crossing. Dirt should move on these projects in the next few months.

ALSAC/St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital & the Pinch District

No formal plans have been revealed for the St. Jude/ALSAC hospital campus or the long-dormant Pinch District. But one thing is clear, the plans are really big.

ALSAC/St. Jude officials say they are investing between $7 billion and $9 billion to expand the organizations’ facilities and operations. Leaders there say the newly expanded ALSAC/St. Jude will bring an annual $3.5 billion economic impact to the city.

The expansion is expected to bring about 1,000 new jobs, more beds for more patients, and officials hope to double the amount of patients in the hospital’s clinical trials.

The Pinch got $12 million in state funds this year. City leaders have promised to invest $25 million in the area with funds from the already-approved Tourist Development Zone. Again, no final plans for these infrastructure investments have been made public. City leaders wrapped up a series of public meetings on Pinch development last month.

Also Upcoming for 2017

The Hampline should break ground on a project to connect Broad and Tillman.

New plans for the skyline-changing One Beale project are expected to be revealed to city leaders.

Plans for upgrades at the Cook Convention Center should come into focus.

Work on a new luxury boutique hotel called Teller (with a rooftop bar called Errors and Omissions) on Madison should be finished.

Construction should begin on a new Hilton Garden Inn Downtown at the former Greyhound bus station site on Union.

The fully-restored Memphis Grand Carousel is expected to open at the Children’s Museum of Memphis.

The Memphis Bike Share program will launch with a networked system of 60 stations throughout Memphis — and about 600 bikes. — Toby Sells

Theater and Dance …

Prediction #1: You will see a lot more dance in 2017, even if you never go to the theater. All you have to do is go to the Overton Square area.

For years, Ballet Memphis has been hidden away on Trinity Road in Cordova where “street life” is limited to cars zipping by. “Transparency” was the word most frequently used by architect Todd Walker on a late November media tour of the construction site for Ballet Memphis’ new Midtown home on Overton Square, one of the city’s most heavily pedestrian areas. The 38,000 square-foot building will literally bring dance to the corner of Madison and Cooper.

Ballet Memphis

The Ballet’s new, glass-walled home has five studios, all linked together by a series of courtyards. It will house business offices, conference rooms, a physical therapy room, and an egg-shaped cafe. Dancers rehearsing in Studio A will be visible from the street.

There’s also limited retractable seating in Studio A, and an observation area. This brings the number of available stages in Memphis’ growing theater district to six. Eight if you include the Overton Square amphitheater and Circuit Playhouse’s cabaret space. Ballet Memphis has a long history of scheduling public rehearsals in places where they are accessible to pedestrians. This takes that idea a little further.

Prediction #2: You’ll see a lot more of everything else. Memphis’ performing arts community has been experiencing a growth spurt, and that trend promises to continue. The Hattiloo Theatre, which moved to its Overton Square facility in 2014, will complete its first expansion in 2017, creating additional rehearsal and office space. A little further to the west, Crosstown Arts will begin construction on a new, versatile 450-seat theater in the Crosstown Concourse community.

Byhalia, Mississippi, which co-premiered in Memphis last year, went on to become one of the best reviewed and most talked about new American plays of 2016. Memphis continues to cultivate its reputation as a fertile environment for new work with Playhouse on the Square’s January 6th world premiere of Other People’s Happiness, a family drama by Adam Seidel. Haint, a spooky rural noir by Memphis playwright Justin Asher gets its second production at Germantown Community Theatre starting January 27th.

Although she will continue to direct, Memphis’ Irene Crist will retire from the stage in June, following her performance in David Lindsay-Abaire’s comedy, Ripcord. — Chris Davis

Politics …

The year 2017 will be an off year as far as elections go, and the politics that really counts may happen in our state capital. The venerable (if indelicate) political adage that “money talks and bullshit walks” may come in for an overhaul in Nashville in 2017. The second term in that expression may, in fact, be on as firm a footing as the first.

For the second year in a row, the State Funding Board in Nashville is projecting a sizable budget windfall — stemming from an increase of almost $900 million in revenue growth for 2017-18. And for the second year in a row, the forecast of extra money is actually complicating, rather than facilitating, some overdue state projects — the most vulnerable of these being overdue infrastructure work on increasingly inadequate and dilapidated state roadways. 

Governor Bill Haslam, who, with state transportation director John Schroer, went on a fruitless statewide tour in 2015 trying to drum up support for a state gasoline-tax increase, is almost certain to raise the idea of upping the gas tax when the General Assembly reconvenes in January. 

But the projected revenue windfall may actually undercut his hopes. Not only does all the windfall talk create a difficult atmosphere to talk about new taxes. There are also indications that the governor’s Republican party-mates in the GOP legislative super-majority see the dawning surplus as an excuse to dream up new tax cuts and eliminate existing ones — a double whammy that would sop up such financial gain as actually materializes.  

Democratic legislators (five in the 33-member state Senate and 25 in the 99-strong state House of Representatives) are too few in number to do much about the matter, and even some members of the Republican majority are troubled. State Representative Ron Lollar (R-Bartlett) touched on the problem at a recent forum of the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB) in Memphis, when he lamented that the ongoing elimination of the state’s Hall tax on interest and dividends — slated for staged reductions and final abolition over a five-year period — will mean the ultimate loss to financially struggling local governments of the fairly significant portion of the Hall tax proceeds that they are accustomed to getting annually.

At that same NFIB meeting, state Senator Lee Harris of Memphis, leader of the Democratic minority in his chamber, pointed out another fiscally related conundrum that he thinks has escaped the consciousness of the GOP super-majority. 

In their categorical rejection of Haslam’s “Insure Tennessee” proposal to permit state acceptance of federal funding of as much as $1.5 billion annually for Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), Republican leaders like retiring state Lieutenant Governor Ron Ramsey always said their attitudes would likely be different under a Republican president, who would surely reapportion such funds as block grants for the states to dispose as they saw fit. 

Harris maintains that the new block grants would be converted from the previous A.C.A. outlays and could be extended only to those states that had already opted for the federal funding. The truth could be even harsher; with congressional Republicans and President-elect Donald Trump both having sworn to “repeal and replace Obamacare” as a first order of business in 2017, it is uncertain just how much federal bounty — if any at all — would actually be available for the states, in whatever form.

Money is at the root of another pressing issue sure to be vented in the General Assembly. At the very moment that the state’s short-changed urban school districts, including the Shelby County Schools system, are entertaining a variety of legal actions to force the state to honor full-funding commitments to them under the Basic Education Program (BEP), word is that enough steam may have finally gathered among legislators to allow passage of long-deferred school voucher legislation that would re-route a significant proportion of the state education budget toward private institutions and out of public schools altogether. 

Under the circumstances, even a rumored bipartisan willingness among legislators to at least begin the consideration of medical-marijuana legislation may not be enough to ease such doldrums as continue to afflict the state’s population. — Jackson Baker

Food and Dining …

Old Dominick

For those keeping your eye on the Old Dominick Distillery, Alex Canale tells us, “We’re 100 percent, well, 99 percent, sure we’ll be open by late spring. We’ll definitely be open in 2017.”

Old Dominick

Old Dominick will sell bourbon, a nod to forebear Dominico Canale. There will be a tasting room, and the distillery will be open for tours. Construction is currently wrapping up, and all licenses have been secured. Shipments of grain and malt are currently on the way. Bourbon takes a few years to age, so Old Dominick will be selling vodka at first. They hope to have stock ready to sell by the spring.

Sunrise

The breakfast concept by Sweet Grass’ Ryan Trimm and Central BBQ’s Craig Blondis and Roger Sapp now has a name: Sunrise. They hope to have both places — one on Central, one on Jefferson — up and running by January or February. The Central location will serve breakfast from 5 to 11 a.m. and then switch to a Central BBQ to-go. The Jefferson location will open at 5 a.m. as well and will serve lunch.

Trimm says the coffee program they’ve come up with is particularly impressive. Cold-pressed and nitro will be on the menu, as well as “normal hot coffee.”

“The biscuit sandwiches will be more interesting than your typical sausage and egg biscuit,” says Trimm. Think bologna and house-cured meats and house-made sausage.

The lunch at Jefferson will offer hometown cooking and large sandwiches piled high with house-cured meats. The meats will also be available for purchase.

Crosstown Concourse

The Crosstown Concourse will be one of the biggest food stories of the upcoming year. The revitalized Sears building already has a stellar list of food and drink venues: I Love Juice Bar, Next Door, Mama Gaia, French Truck Coffee, Curb Market, Crosstown Cafe, and Crosstown Brewing Company.

“Our vision was to curate a really great mix of offerings to add to the food scene,” says Crosstown’s Todd Richardson. Richardson says that about 65 percent of the retail space has been rented. He’s in talks with what he calls a “really great ice cream concept” and a pizzeria.

With all that plus a bank and barber and apartments, it seems like there would never be a reason to leave the Concourse. Richardson says that’s not the goal at all. “We’re not trying to create a city within a city. We want something that draws interest and has the greatest impact on the neighborhood.”

South Main Market

Shooting for a summer opening is the South Main Market. Rebecca Dyer has been busy converting the building at 409 S. Main into an event venue. Once she has the third floor ready, she’ll then re-renovate the first floor into the market. (“If I survive,” she says.)

The market will feature 12 to 15 kitchens. Think Boston’s Faneuil Hall. Dyer says she’s already got 11 chefs signed on, all local. “It’s going to be very varied,” says Dyer. That means each kitchen will serve a distinct cuisine — no three cupcake spots or duplicate falafel shops.

“We don’t want our chefs to compete with each other,” Dyer says. “We want to give our customers the best opportunity for dining.”
The Liquor Store
Lisa Toro, who owns City & State with her husband Luis, estimates that 50 percent of the businesses on Broad Avenue are owned by women. In that ladies-doing-for-themselves can-do spirit, Toro helped form an all-woman angel investment group. Their first investment is the Toros’ latest project The Liquor Store.

Toro describes it as a modern take on a diner. There will be blue-plate specials but with cured meats and fresh vegetables. There will be a bar as well, offering boozy milkshakes and soda fountain cocktails. The diner is being carved out of an old liquor store space. Floors are being ripped up, electrical and plumbing added.

The Toros hope to be open by early spring. — Susan Ellis

Film …

It’s safe to say that 2016 was a less than stellar year in the world of film. Will 2017 be better? Early signs point to probably not. The slate of announced films for the year so far is more of the same: Franchises, sequels, reboots nobody but a branding specialist could possibly want, and superheroes, superheroes, superheroes.

In January, a few 2016 films currently in limited release will make it to Memphis, such as Hidden Figures, starring Taraji P. Henson and Janelle Monáe as unsung black women engineers and mathematicians who helped America land on the moon, and A Monster Calls, a modern Irish fairy tale about loss and grieving. Then there’s Monster Trucks, a big-budget film so bad Paramount took a preemptive $100 million write-down on their earnings report. I have to see it, but there’s no reason you should.

In February, the pop S&M sequel Fifty Shades Darker is sure to both light up the box office and contribute to this reviewer’s depression. Hopefully The Lego Batman Movie will cheer me up. If that doesn’t work, there’s the Oxford Film Festival, which just announced a stellar lineup, and Indie Memphis’ new Indie Wednesday series, which will bring in quality arthouse and indie films from all over the world to Studio on the Square, Malco Ridgeway, and Crosstown Arts.

March brings Logan, Hugh Jackman’s final turn as X-Man Wolverine; Kong: Skull Island, a King Kong spinoff with an all-star cast; and the controversially Scarlett Johansen-led anime adaptation Ghost in the Shell. In May, the Marvel drought ends with Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, which will be answered in June by DC’s Wonder Woman movie. Pixar’s weakest series, Cars, gets a third installment before Marvel fires back with Spider-Man: Homecoming, which looks promising in previews. Later that month, I’m looking forward to War for the Planet of the Apes, which concludes the underrated Planet of the Apes reboot trilogy, and the Stephen King epic The Dark Tower.

All I know about August’s Baby Driver is that Edgar Wright of Scott Pilgrim fame is directing, but that’s enough to get me excited. September looks bleak except for the unexpected remake of the ’90s cult film, Flatliners, and the only oasis in the wasteland of October is Denis Villeneuve directing Harrison Ford in Blade Runner 2049.

November will kick off with the Indie Memphis Film Festival, before Marvel and DC go at it again with Thor: Ragnarok and Justice League. The holidays will bring the as yet untitled Star Wars: Episode VIII, directed by Breaking Bad badass Rian Johnson, and Mark Wahlberg going bionic in The Six Billion Dollar Man.

Basically, the year in film will be like everything else in 2017: Hope for the best, cherish the bright spots, but expect the worst. — Chris McCoy

Music …

As productive as this year was for Memphis music, you can expect 2017 to be just as fruitful for the local scene. From where to be to who to watch, here are some early tips for following Memphis music in 2017.

What to Buy and Why:

Valerie June will be releasing her new album, The Order of Time, on January 27th, her third full-length and first for Concord Music Group. June recently toured with Sturgill Simpson and Norah Jones, but she’ll come back home for a show at the Hi-Tone on Friday, February 17th. As for her new album, the song “Astral Plane” is already being heralded by NPR, which is a good indication that the three years that have passed since Valerie June released an album weren’t in vain. Expect big things in 2017 from one of our city’s most intriguing songwriters.

Another band with a considerable amount of hype behind them that’s releasing a record in 2017 is Aquarian Blood. The band’s debut effort will be released through Goner and is expected to be out in February. Aquarian Blood has released singles on Goner and New Orleans label Pelican Pow Wow, but their first LP has been months in the making, and should showcase the Midtown supergroup and musical freak show.
Southern Avenue is also set to release a new record in 2017, after burning up the Midtown bar circuit with their take on modern Memphis soul. Their debut record is coming from the fine folks at Stax. Being promoted as the first Memphis band to be signed to Stax since the ’70s, you can expect Southern Avenue to kill it in 2017, but don’t count on the band being in town very often.

Where to Be

The FedExForum has an impressive lineup early next year, including the Red Hot Chili Peppers on January 12th and Garth Brooks doing an entire weekend February 2nd-4th . Minglewood also continues to impress, with Lil Boosie, Juicy J, and Ben Folds all scheduled to play in the first few months of the new year. You can also expect shows to start cropping up at both the Galloway House and the Clayborn Temple downtown, and don’t forget about the excellent River Series at the Maria Montessori School; the laid-back, all-ages shows are becoming a staple for live music enthusiasts. And you can always catch a good mix of local and traveling talent at Overton Square and on Beale Street.

Memphis music will be well represented at the largest music festival on planet Earth — South by Southwest — this year. Music Export Memphis will host the Memphis Picnic at SXSW on March 14th in Brush Square Park. The lineup is still being finalized — expect an announcement around mid-January — but the event promises a totally Memphis experience, complete with the Amurica photo trailer booth and Gus’s Fried Chicken on site. — Chris Shaw

Categories
Intermission Impossible Theater

“All the Way” Comes Up Short at Playhouse on the Square

All the Way isn’t nearly as straightforward as it seems. It’s not a piece of naturalistic theater you can just stage. It’s not a musical either, but with grand themes, leitmotifs  of venality and an orchestra-sized cast, this overstuffed sausage-grinder about Lyndon Johnson’s first 11-months in the White House needs to be conducted like a tense modern symphony full of explosive tragedy and punctuated by brassy squawks, and soaring metaphoric strings. If careful attention isn’t paid to the show’s desperate melodies, and ever-shifting time signatures All the Way turns bloodless, like Disney World’s Hall of Presidents without the Morgan Freeman gravitas. Playhouse on the Square has transformed the show into a fashion parade of gorgeous vintage suits, and unconvincing wigs on a pink (marbled?) set that looks for all the world like it was wrapped in prosciutto. It’s a remarkable showcase of extraordinary talent grinding its wheels in a low-stakes historical pageant. When actors as sharp as Delvyn Brown and George Dudley can’t make historically large characters like Martin Luther King and Lyndon Johnson interesting, there’s something powerfully wrong with the mix.

I’m a fan of director Stephen Hancock, but have noted occasions where concept muddled clarity. The opposite is true this time around. Kennedy’s assassination can’t be treated like melancholy Camelot nostalgia. All the Way may open with a funeral march, but it needs to be bathed in horror and bubbling over with chaos that threatens to grow worse as the play progresses. The Gulf of Tonkin incident isn’t an aside, it’s an explosion. Every provision cut from the 1964 Civil Rights bill in order to get some version of the legislation passed before the election has to bleed real blood and stink of the strangest fruit.

George Dudley is a pleasure to watch. He’s whip-smart, and even when he’s badly used the man’s a damn powerhouse. But everything is different this time around. He’s not surefooted like he usually is. Like so many of the actors in All the Way, Dudley seems unfocused, and not entirely in control of his lines. Still, you can’t act height and vertical advantages aside, he’s still the only actor in Memphis I can imagine capturing Johnson’s crude and conflicted brand of Texas idealism. And when he’s on, he’s on fire.

‘All the Way’ Comes Up Short at Playhouse on the Square

For all of its shortcomings, All the Way is something of a landmark. I can’t recall when I’ve seen such a gifted assemblage of swinging D plopped down on a single stage. With a handful of exceptions, every noteworthy Memphis actor has been called on to do his patriotic duty, and most have answered with gusto. Curtis C. Jackson and John Maness stand out as NAACP leader Roy Wilkins and FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover. Greg Boller relishes his time inside the skin of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. Michael Detroit makes a sympathetic, if never entirely convincing, Hubert Humphrey and John Hemphill, Sam Weakly, and John Moore all do some fine character work. The women of the 60’are finely represented by Claire Kolheim, Irene Crist and Kim Sanders, but they are outnumbered, outgunned, out shouted, and pushed to the edge of the picture. It’s an historically appropriate dynamic, of course, but it could stand crisper translation to the stage.

Regretfully, Robert Schenkkan’s script requires more than quality acting.

All the Way is a fourth wall breaker. At the end of the show Dudley asks the audience if anybody was made to feel uncomfortable about by the things they witnessed as ideation becomes legislation, slaw, then law. He asks if we wanted to hide our faces or look away. That moment should be the key to reverse engineering an American “teaching play” that lists ever so slightly toward German Lehrstücke. It should make us want to look away. Not because of the sad black and white photographs projected on enormous screens behind the actors, but because when politicians “make the sausage” people are the meat in the grinder.

And it’s always the same people in the grinder.

There’s a frequently repeated line in All the Way about how Johnson is the most, “sympathetic president since Lincoln [to African Americans].” It’s ordinary sloganeering, of course, and an uncomfortable truth when considered from even a relatively short distance. It’s also a helpful line for considering how easily mimesis fails this kind of play where dynamic interpretation makes the difference between horrorshow and hagiography.

Face full of Johnson. Michael Detroit and George Dudley in All the Way at Playhouse on the Square.

All the Way isn’t bad, it’s worse than that. It’s boring. It’s a play that should make us see that soldiers are blown up in boardrooms not on battlefields, and how even progressive politics can play out like a slow motion lynching. It should make us flinch and look away often. But it never does.

It’s an election year, of course — in case anybody out there in Flyer-land hasn’t noticed. I suspect there’s a certain crowd caught up in the pageantry who are in the perfect mood for a three-hour reminder of the “good old” “bad old” days when even an oil-funded politician as crude and bullying as Donald Trump could dream of a “more perfect union” and get elected. Once, anyway.

Even political junkies and policy wonks may wish to spend cocktail hour chugging coffee. 

Categories
Intermission Impossible Theater

King of Fools: New Moon tackles Lear

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Flattery will get you nowhere.

That seems to be a running theme for The New Moon Theatre Company. The scrappy indie staged a fantastic production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman last season and followed it up this spring with a competent and mostly compelling production of Shakespeare’s King Lear. Both plays revolve around characters that are studies in arrested development, brutal portraits of men who grew old but never wise. Shakespeare’s monarch and Miller’s “low man” have even more in common. Both have a weakness for material things and are easily confused by superficial praise and popularity. The two plays are classic tragedies with tragically modern implications.

The story of Lear in brief: an ancient king of ancient Britain, looking to insure a stable path to succession, announces his retirement and also his intention to divide the kingdom equally among three daughters, Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia, his favorite. Before gifting the lands he asks his daughters to say how much they love him. The elder two shower down praise while Cordelia, who feels much but speaks only according to her needs, says she loves him only as much as a daughter should love her father. Lear misunderstands Cordelia’s modesty and the not altogether subtle criticism of her lying sisters. Furiously and foolishly he disowns the “thankless child.”

As any generous father might Lear assumes he’ll be able to spend his twilight years living with his two loving daughters and their happy families. He asks only for 100 attendent knights. He’s denied everything, and turned out to fend for himself in the wilderness. War begins to rumble through the land.

In Act IV the homeless, ragged, angry Lear encounters Gloucester, a nobleman betrayed by his bastard son, then blinded and banished. Gloucester is lead by his legitimate son Edgar, disguised as poor Tom, the mad beggar who’s even more ragged than the king.

“Through tattered clothes small vices do appear,” Lear says of Poor Tom. “Robes and furred gowns hide all.”

Wisdom arrives too late. In one unassuming line the old blustery King summarizes the moment his life fell apart, offers searing commentary on a sheltered, hypocritical ruling class, and describes, quite clearly, a remarkable modern dilemma. Read any comment thread regarding the Memphis and Shelby County school muddle to and be amazed by the language of blind privilege and pretty ideas used to disguise age-old biases.

New Moon’s stylized modern dress production opens strong and finishes strong but loses some momentum along the way.

Bill Baker, who founded the Our Own Voice Theatre Company and works with Playback Memphis is an animated and elfish Lear. Baker is accustomed to working in a more experimental vein, but it’s always nice to see him tackle something a bit more straightforward. The broad physical work he’s championed over the years serves him well here. The old king’s horse-voiced tantrums are childlike and explosive but the language is always crystal clear.

Director Anita “Jo” Lenhart has assembled a strong supporting cast. Kell Christie and Christina Wellford Scott as Regan and Goneril (both powerhouses, both excellent), the always effective Bennett Wood plays Gloucester, and Greg Boller, who played the titular character in Theatre Memphis’ interesting if weirdly misguided Richard III, does some of his most nuanced work yet as Kent, who believes in Lear and remains loyal even after his banishment.

Lear is, among many things, a play about fools and the various meanings of foolishness. Cordelia (an understated Heather Malone) plays the part at times as does Kent, Edgar (Michael Bolinski), and even Lear himself. But nobody out-fools Lear’s court fool played here by,James Dale Green, a versatile character actor who, as a youngster, played Puck in the celebrated Theatre Memphis production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, staged by Ellis Rabb. Green’s Fool is a sad-faced clown in the spirit of Emmett Kelly, and his delivery couldn’t be simpler or more effective. “I’d rather be anything than a fool,” he says to Lear. “But I would not be you, nuncle.” And there’s no doubt that the little tramp means it.

It’s been 50-years since a theater in Memphis last mounted a full run of King Lear. Why that’s the case is a real head-scratcher, all things considered. The show may be more didactic and less nuanced than Othello or Hamlet but, as George Bernard Shaw once noted, one would be hard pressed to craft a more perfect tragedy. This unassuming, if occasionally shocking production may not be perfect, but it’s often very good, and scarcity makes it absolutely precious. Catch it while you can.

Heather Malone and Bill Baker

  • Heather Malone and Bill Baker

At TheatreWorks through April 22. 484-3467

Categories
Cover Feature News

Stage Night

Chris Ellis will be in Memphis on August 24th to host the 25th installment of the Ostrander Awards, ArtsMemphis’ and Contemporary Media’s annual party honoring the best of Memphis Theatre. The Frayser-born character actor, famous for playing Deke Slayton in Apollo 13 and for getting into a comic brawl with Joe Pesci in My Cousin Vinnie, has mixed emotions about the engagement. He could be in Denver that night for a screening of Gospel Hill, a film he worked on with Danny Glover and Angela Bassett that’s scheduled to roll opposite the Ossies. (Ellis says there’s a small chance that Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama might attend the screening before the Democratic convention gets under way.) He says he’d love to be there for that. But Memphis is home. Or it was home.

Ellis’ mother recently passed away, and there are loose ends that need tending to on the north side of town. That’s changed the tone of his visit a bit, though he’s been looking forward to the Ostranders and the opportunity to reconnect with a theater scene he holds in high regard.

“I just play my usual ‘Cracker von Peckerwood’ character,” Ellis says, dismissing his performance in Gospel Hill as more of the same. As a spirited fixture on Memphis stages throughout the 1970s and ’80s and as a regular in front of, behind, and occasionally under the bar at Midtown’s P&H Café, Ellis thinks it’s a hoot that he usually portrays Republicans, rednecks, and gruff authoritarian figures.

“When I think of my time as an actor in Memphis, there’s a lot of tenderness,” he says, sitting on a park bench somewhere in rural Maine for a telephone interview. “Tenderness is the best way I can describe it.”

Memphis Flyer: So what’s on your mind?

Chris Ellis: I need to get the roomers out of my mother’s house as soon as possible. The window units are running, I’m told, and all the windows are open. When my mother first came to Memphis from North Mississippi, she took in roomers to make ends meet, and she completed that circle toward the end of her life. And let me tell you about some of the roomers she’s taken on. These are the kinds of people who operate rides at carnivals, get paid in amphetamines, and don’t have many teeth by the time they’re 30.

When did you start doing theater in Memphis?

The first time I was asked to leave Circuit Playhouse was in 1970. I’ve been asked to leave a lot of places since then, including Graceland, Hearst Castle, and the Museum of Tolerance, but I was first asked to leave Circuit in 1970. The story behind that is involved, uninteresting, and complicated.

You worked at other regional theaters as well, not just at Circuit.

I did. But Circuit Playhouse was my entrance to the community of theater in Memphis. It was new. It was closer to where I lived than Theatre Memphis, and it wasn’t as intimidating. Although I’m sure all of this was just in my mind, Theatre Memphis didn’t seem as available back then. There was an “us versus them” attitude. It was [Playhouse on the Square founder] Jackie Nichols versus this much more established company. My heart has always been with Jackie and Playhouse on the Square, because he’s this tap dancer from Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour who started a significant theater company that has consistently done good work. It’s one of those miraculous finishes — one of those last-minute victories that the human race seems to adore.

In various bios I’ve seen, you always cite Memphis as the place where you learned your business.

What I was able to do here as a very young person just out of college was incredible. That was my training and my education. A friend once said if you want to learn to be an actor there are two things you can do: You can study at Juilliard or you can work in the theater with seasoned professionals and watch them as they do their work on stage. And that’s what I did. I watched Memphis actors like Walter Smith, Jay Ehrlicher, Alan Mullican, and Joanne Malin.

When I first went to New York I had something everybody else my age lacked: I’d played significant roles in a couple dozen plays. I don’t know. Maybe nobody cared that I played Rosencrantz in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead or Milo in Sleuth, but that really was my education.

Do you take much of that education into your film roles?

Not really. It’s a very different thing. I didn’t work for 10 years when I lived in New York. I was living in bone-crushing poverty. My hairline was going, and my waistline was growing. My agent said if I’d quit playing [Shakespeare’s] Mercutio and start sounding like a good old boy, I could get work on TV and in film. And so that’s what I did. And I feel so lucky.

You’re also one of those miraculous last-minute finishes. Your career started rolling at 40. That’s about the time most people might think about giving up and moving on to something else. What kept you going?

All I ever wanted to do was to be able to write “actor” on my tax returns — which I didn’t even file for close to a decade when I was so poor. It’s all I ever wanted to do since I was a kid and dreamed that someday I might be able to stand in the same room as Annette Funicello.

I remember doing a show at Circuit with Alan Mullican, a wonderful actor who didn’t make his living in the theater. He made his living as some kind of civil servant working for the state, which wasn’t very fulfilling, and he did theater at night. One time he was very exhausted and I asked, “If you’re so tired, why do you do so much theater?” He looked at me like he didn’t understand and said, “This is what I do.”

Self-portrait by Chris Ellis, holding an Ostrander award.

You did everything here from performing Shakespeare with Ellis Rabb to playing Lee in Sam Shepard’s True West. Does any role stand out as a high point for you?

Playing Christopher Marlowe in The Passionate Shepherd. Jo Malin directed, and I remember her telling me I was emotionally predisposed to the character but that my voice was my own worst enemy.

I’ll never forget Edwin Howard, the Press-Scimitar‘s theater critic, writing about that show and “Chris Ellis’ new, deeply modulated voice.”

At what point did you realize you were going to have a career in Hollywood?

Probably after the second film, My Cousin Vinnie. That film surprised everybody, because nobody expected it to be a big movie. Before that, I’d worked for 16 weeks on Days of Thunder with Tom Cruise, but I was invisible in that film.

I didn’t really feel like I was in the club until Apollo 13. That’s when I stopped feeling intimidated — when I was made to feel included by the director. Lots of stars are bullies, and lots of producers and directors treat actors like expired goods. That’s not true of Ron Howard and Tom Hanks.

I don’t have any expectations or sense of entitlement. When you’re an actor, you never get the memo that says your career is over. Mine could have been over yesterday. It’s a hard business, especially when your hair starts turning gray. And it’s especially cruel to women. Go to the Internet Movie Data Base and go back 20 years. Find movies by A-list stars like Stallone, Tom Cruise, or Bruce Willis. Look for the names of the leading ladies in these films. Most of the time these will be names you won’t recognize.

Among the Memphis stage productions nominated for this year’s Ostrander Awards: The Pirates of Penzance (Playhouse on the Square)

What’s next on the horizon for Cracker von Peckerwood?

He’s just finished the second of what he hopes will be a reoccurring role on the TV series Burn Notice. And I worked on a film called G-Force that’s scheduled to be released in 2009. Given the kind of roles I usually play, you might think that G-Force has something to do with aeronautics, but it doesn’t. It’s about gerbils.

Gerbils, really? As in …

No! No. Oh no. It’s animated. I don’t think Richard Gere had anything to do with this movie.

I have to ask, because I remember playing a drinking game at the P&H back in the ’80s called “I Never.” Somebody says, “I never [fill in the blank],” and anybody who’s done that particular thing has to drink …

Ha! Well, there’s nothing I never did.

Yes, the most popular part of that game was when someone would say, “I never [fill in the blank] with Chris Ellis.” Half the table always had to drink.

I once printed up a bunch of T-shirts that said, “I Never Slept With Chris Ellis.” [Actress] Deborah Harrison printed one that said, “I Did. It Wasn’t That Great.”

And the Winner Is …

Twenty-five years ago,
Memphis presented its first theater awards.

by Michael Finger

The men and women who jammed into the Old Daisy that June evening in 1984 were restless. Many glasses of wine tend to have that effect on people, and the various members of the Memphis theater community were rarely known for being anything less than boisterous at parties.

But they quieted down a bit when Barbara Cason stepped to the podium. Cason was the former Front Street Theatre actress who had found success in Hollywood playing bit parts in hit shows like The Waltons and Remington Steele, and she had come home to host a brand-new event in town. In the time-honored tradition of the Oscars, she opened an envelope to announce, “For best dramatic production, the winner is … Amadeus, at Theatre Memphis.”

The Night of the Iguana (Theatre Memphis)

And so it went at the first Memphis Theatre Awards, an event sponsored by Memphis magazine that has honored the best and brightest in the local theater community for 25 years.

Memories are a bit foggy — did we mention all that wine? — but Kenneth Neill, now publisher and CEO of Contemporary Media, the company that produces the Flyer, Memphis magazine, and Memphis Parent, recalls that the local theater community wasn’t entirely happy with the coverage they were receiving from our city’s two daily newspapers.

“Back in the 1980s, Robert Jennings was The Commercial Appeal theater critic, and over at the Press-Scimitar it was Edwin Howard, and they just didn’t get along,” Neill says. “It was Sally Thomason, president of the Memphis Arts Council, who mentioned to me one day that it would be nice if they would just cooperate and do something together.”

One thing led to another, and Bob Towery and Neill, publisher and editor of Memphis magazine, respectively, met with Thomason and came up with the idea of an annual competition.

“I think it was a good decision to get the Arts Council involved,” Thomason says. “Ken wanted to give it a community base — something that would lend it a kind of legitimacy that would take it beyond just a magazine project. And I will say this: If it weren’t for Memphis magazine, it would not have happened, and it wouldn’t be here today.” The first year wasn’t easy.

“When we started talking about this, I’m not sure we really had any idea how to proceed,” Thomason says. “We eventually came up with this idea to have a panel of judges, and it was delightful that everyone who got involved was very conscientious.”

The judges for the first Theatre Awards included Walter Armstrong, Gene Crain, Amy Dietrich, Levi Frazier, Stephen Haley, Emily Ruch, C. Lamar Wallis, and Miriam DeCosta Willis.

“We looked for people who were involved in the theater, so they would have some kind of deep knowledge of what they were watching,” Thomason says. “And getting attorney Walter Armstrong was our key, because he seemed to go to everything. I remember he said, ‘I’m tired of raising money for the arts, but this is something I can really put my heart into.'”

Ruch had been involved with the local theater community since 1954, performing on stage and serving on the play selection committee for the old Memphis Little Theatre. She took her judging responsibilities quite seriously.

“I wouldn’t even have a glass of wine before I went to a play,” she says, “and I would take notes in my program and go home and write up what I thought, right away, while it was still fresh.”

Ruch adds that the various judges weren’t even supposed to talk to each other during the year.

“We could not go to a play together, because we didn’t want to be influenced by the other person,” she says. The judges met at Armstrong’s house at the end of the season to select the winners.

“We met all day and all night,” says Ruch, “and we really followed the rules. We were very honest about it. We wanted to acknowledge all theaters, but we didn’t give an award to a theater just because they hadn’t gotten one.”

The winners that first year included:

• Best dramatic production:

Amadeus, Theatre Memphis

• Best performance by an actor:

Jay Ehrlicher, Amadeus

• Best performance by an actress:

Pamela Poletti, The Miracle Worker,

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Circuit Playhouse)

Playhouse on the Square

• Best musical production:

Handy, Theatre Memphis’ Little Theatre

• Best set design:

The Dresser, Circuit Playhouse.

A special award for “service to Memphis theater that spans generations” went to Eugart Yerian, director of the Memphis Little Theatre from 1929 to 1961. (The following year, the award itself was named the Eugart Yerian Award.)

“We won quite a few awards that evening,” says Jackie Nichols, executive producer of Playhouse on the Square and Circuit Playhouse. “It was kind of small that year, and after the first glass of wine, or two, you don’t remember much about it. But it was Memphis magazine’s way of honoring the theatrical tradition that has always been so awesome in Memphis. And I don’t want to speak for him, but I guess it was Ken’s way of wanting to give something back to the community, and the art form he chose to honor was theater.”

The theater awards grew and prospered, especially when Janie McCrary, who was then working at the Arts Council, took over the judging.

“Memphis magazine would produce the event, and the Arts Council would get the judges together,” McCrary says. “At first it was, let’s just see what we can do here. But then we came up with more rules, more criteria, and after the first few years it became a bit more structured.” The awards themselves are now called the Ostranders, named in honor of Jim Ostrander, one of the city’s most popular actors, who died of cancer in 2002.

Ruch, who served as a judge for the first three years, remembers her colleagues felt a keen responsibility to do it right back in 1984.

“We were very aware that we were the first,” she says. “And we were very aware that we were doing something that would be deliberately continued or deliberately not continued, so I don’t think I’ve ever seen such dedicated people.” That dedication has clearly paid off.

Looking back to that first competition, Ruch remembers, “We took ourselves very seriously, but it was fun, fun, fun.”

Jerry Springer: The Opera (Playhouse on the Square)

25th Annual Ostrander Awards

Sunday, August 24th

Memphis Botanic Garden

Cocktails: 6 p.m.; awards: 7:30 p.m.

Tickets: $5, $6 at the door

. . . . . . . . . .

Talks to Angels …

Arts patron Dorothy Kirsch
is honored for lifetime achievement.

by Chris Davis

By all accounts, Dorothy Orgill Kirsch, the winner of this year’s Eugart Yerian award for lifetime achievement in Memphis theater, is the single most caring, genuine, funny, energetic, and loving person who ever patronized the arts or loved animals way too much.

Kirsch isn’t an actress, though she’s been on stage once or twice. Kirsch is a volunteer and a philanthropist, the kind of person theater folks rightly call an angel. She’s supported an array of artists, filmmakers, and institutions, ranging from Ballet Memphis and the Hattiloo Theare to Voices of the South.

Whitney Jo, Playhouse on the Square’s managing director, says Kirsch has a critical edge as well. “There have been a couple of occasions where she’s seen a show and was very vocal about everything that was wrong with it.” Jo says the criticism goes down easier when it comes from somebody who sponsors productions and gives to capital campaigns.

“Dorothy has believed in the work of Voices of the South from the get-go,” says Jenny Odle Madden, the group’s executive director. “She loves our adaptations of Southern stories. There is not another arts patron like her.”

Memphis Flyer: Most people think of you as an arts enthusiast, but you’ve been on stage a time or two, haven’t you? I remember seeing your name in the program for A Streetcar Named Desire at Theatre Memphis. Were you Stella? Blanche?

Kirsch: HA! I was a bag lady.

Describe yourself in a million words or less.

Lucky enough to do the things I love.

When did you decide that theater was your thing?

Well, I was very fortunate, and as a pre-teenager back in the Dark Ages, I would go to the theater whenever the family went to New York. I also remember going to shows in Memphis at the Front Street Theatre when it was in the basement of the King Cotton Hotel.

What pleases you the most?

I love dance. I love good comedy. The great thing about theater is that you can go back to see the same show, and it’s different every time. I think I saw Nunsense five times.

Do you have an all-time favorite show?

Uncle Vanya with Ken Zimmerman and Jim Ostrander. And Theatre Memphis’ Cats.

For a list of Ostrander Award nominees (and next week’s winners, once they’re announced), go to memphisflyer.com and search “Ostrander.”

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Theater Theater Feature

Of Mice & Menace

Poor Kenneth Tynan. Some might say the famously acerbic theater critic never truly recognized the genius of Harold Pinter. In 1988, following a remounting of The Birthday Party, Pinter’s landmark experiment in tension, black comedy, and creeping menace, the long-dead journalist was smacked around by New York Times scribe Mel Gussow for having originally dismissed the play as “a clever fragment grown dropsical with symbolic content.” The only problem with Gussow’s fawning assessment of Pinter’s best-known work was that Tynan’s initial criticisms were entirely correct.

Like it or not, most of Pinter’s work — The Birthday Party, in particular — is laden (some might say overburdened) with dangling symbols and shot through with deliberately fragmentary passages that require audiences (willing and un-) to fill in the blanks. Like most great scripts, The Birthday Party can never be complete until actors have spoken the lines in a room full of eyewitnesses. Besides, if Gussow ever had witnessed an incarnation as imbalanced as the one currently on stage at TheatreWorks, he might have had a little more respect for Tynan’s critical point of view, because in production, Pinter’s writing, as tightly wound as it may be, is never able to stand on its own. And that, as counterintuitive as it may seem, is the playwright’s true genius.

There is much good in the New Moon Theatre Company’s take on The Birthday Party. David Newsome’s keyboard-heavy sound design is especially engaging as it swings back and forth between tense discord and whimsical vaudeville runs. The cast’s collective ability to use a foreign accent is not one of the production’s stronger points, and much of their generally good acting is subverted by bad diction. TheatreWorks veteran Mark Rutledge is appropriately mundane as Petey, a mousy presence whose boring daily rituals transform themselves into absurd comedy, but his weird pronunciations get in the way of otherwise honest work. The same might be said for Sylvia Wilson’s interpretation of Meg, Petey’s talkative, sweetly twisted wife whose utter simplicity, even during the play’s more perverse moments, is ultimately winning, even if she sounds a bit like Dick Van Dyke on a combination of helium and lithium.

Whatever good work the actors may have done on opening night was ultimately undone by the play’s three-act structure, a pair of 10-minute intermissions that made the evening feel interminable, and a rude group of wine-swilling patrons who commented inappropriately throughout the show. Act 1 survived the onslaught, and act 2 got over in spite of numerous missteps and the cast’s complete inability to physically commit to the play’s darker themes. Act 3, however, was unfocused and threatened to turn into gibberish.

The Birthday Party, which has no plot in the traditional sense, revolves around Stanley (Carl Walters), a mysterious fellow who may or may not have been a piano player before becoming the only lodger at Petey and Meg’s seedy seaside rooming house. The scruffy young man becomes tense when he hears of the imminent arrival of Goldberg (Jeff Corrigan) and McCann (Christopher Hulett), a pair of gangster-like characters who verbally deconstruct Stanley, until there’s nothing left of him but a confused muttering husk.

Hulett delivers the evening’s most satisfying performance, making McCann into a short-tempered Irish bear and a truly intimidating stage presence. He makes the ridiculous interrogation that begins The Birthday Party‘s second act as unnerving as it is hysterical. It is a perfect scene in a fragmented production that needs more time to develop.

Through August 17th at TheatreWorks

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

Joyeux Noël

Here are three basic kinds of Christmas shows. First, there are the grownup specials, which are usually comedies like A Tuna Christmas or The Santaland Diaries. These shows lean heavily toward the naughty side of Santa’s checklist. Second, there’s the sophisticated children’s show intended to be “fun for the whole family.” These shows, which are often acted by adults, may or may not be Christmas-themed. The topnotch A Year with Frog and Toad at Circuit Playhouse has but one Christmas-related scene and is an excellent example of this second kind of holiday extravaganza.

The third type of Christmas show is, of course, the classic children’s pageant, which features a large cast of kids whose moms, dads, grams, uncles, cousins, school chums, and crushes fork over the full price of admission in order to see little Suzy say her piece.

This third category is well represented by Germantown Community Theatre’s generally competent and occasionally surprising production of Madeline’s Christmas, a rambling one-act musical kinda-sorta based on Ludwig Bemelmans’ beloved children’s books. The theater’s happy little skit is exactly the type of production guaranteed to make family members bust their buttons with pride while having something of the opposite effect on unrelated ticketholders.

It’s hard to understand why anybody would choose to adapt Madeline’s Christmas for the stage … well, except for the time-proven bankability of the title character, of course. The convoluted story wasn’t originally published as a freestanding book but as an insert in McCall’s magazine, and the story of Madeline’s Christmas Eve encounter with an exotic wizard is generally regarded as an odd and certainly minor addition to Bemelmans’ series. Unlike most holiday tales, it has nothing to do with Santa, reindeer, or the birth of the Christian messiah. And unlike all the other Madeline stories, it doesn’t even rhyme. Stranger still, for a tale set in a convent school, Madeline’s Christmas is chock full of good old-fashioned pagan magic.

The story — if you can call it a story — begins with a wintertime visit to the zoo, where Sister Clavel and all of her young charges catch a nasty cold that prevents them from traveling home for Christmas. Only the precocious, adventurous Madeline is immune to the bug. On Christmas Eve, a creepy old man named Harsha uses his magic powers to heal the sick children and sells them magic carpets for flying home. And although it doesn’t end there exactly, that’s about all there is to Madeline’s Christmas.

Chandler Keen is appropriately spunky as the little redheaded girl in the round yellow hat, and her prematurely husky voice is well suited to the (unfortunately prerecorded) music.

Bo List and Kerry Strahm’s set design reflects the color and line of Bemelmans’ illustrations, but it also looks as though it might have been produced on a budget of just under $7. There’s nothing wrong with a simple, well-conceived performance space, but this particular set pushes the boundaries of acceptable.

Madeline’s Christmas isn’t without merit. The show’s centerpiece finds Madeline and her 11 schoolmates flying over Paris on magic carpets. This bit of stage magic is accomplished using a backlight and simple but effective puppets.

Veteran actress Irene Crist has a reputation for playing strong, sassy, and brassy women. She’s not particularly well known as a director, and Madeline’s Christmas is unlikely to change that. Nevertheless, it’s good to see an artist of Crist’s caliber taking a chance working way out east.

In 1939, the original Madeline series began with the line “In an old house in Paris all covered in vines, lived 12 little girls in two straight lines.” Almost 70 years later, Crist pays homage to that first line and revels in the chaotic symmetry of Bemelmans’ wonderfully yellow illustrations. But with a script this weak, there’s only so much you can do.

Through December 23rd at Germantown Community Theatre