Tag: theatre

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Intermission Impossible Theater

New Moon Keeps On Being Creepy

A scene from "Shockheaded Peter" at New Moon Theatre Company (Photo by Gene Elliott).

Ten years ago, New Moon Theatre Company started its annual foray into producing thrills and chills for the Halloween season.

“Everybody involved with the company just loved Halloween,” says Gene Elliott, executive producer at New Moon. Look Away (A Civil War Zombie Tragedy) by Memphis playwrights Zac Cunningham and Stephen Briner had been staged by New Moon a couple of times before the 2011 production that started the annual scare fare.

Elliott says they company has been on the watch for something both odd and beautiful. A mix of plays from creepy to screamy were staged in subsequent years, including Bug, Frankenstein, The Woman in Black, Titus Andronicus, Cuddles, Buried Child, Lizzie the Musical, and The Pillowman.

This year offers, if you can imagine, one of the weirdest yet.
Shockheaded Peter (runs tonight through November 14th) is a musical version of an 1845 German children’s book of short stories and poetry about the consequences of misbehavior. The program describes it as a “tale of a childless couple that has their fondest wish granted in the most delightfully dreadful way imaginable, accompanied by songs, puppetry, and vignettes in which the hilariously horrible fates that befall naughty children everywhere are brought to darkly comedic life.”

Elliott, who has been involved in all the productions, says when he first encountered it, “I was kind of gobsmacked just watching what videos were available. And I read about it, everything I could. And it was just so wonderfully bizarre and just asking for no forgiveness.”

In other words, perfectly weird.

“It’s not an overly long play,” he says, “but it has so many moving parts. There’s little vignettes — it’s a vaudeville-feeling show. There’s little scenes that happen, but there’s puppets and people doing quick changes into bizarre costumes and it’s just nonstop. There’s 15 people in the show and every one of them are running backstage. It’s chaos and I just kinda sit back and laugh and watch them just running in circles. It’s so cool.”

But if it’s dark and weird, is it OK for children or not?

“It’s kind of like watching Bugs Bunny or the Road Runner,” he says. “Those are just cartoons. We have puppets. The violence is absurd and we’ve had a couple of older children watch it and they were laughing their heads off.”

Get tickets here.

Categories
Intermission Impossible Theater

Quark Theatre Gets Daring (Again) With ‘Wakey, Wakey,’ GCT goes ‘Barefoot,’ ‘Pond’ at POTS

Adam Remsen and Sarah Solarez in Wakey, Wakey.

Quark Theatre’s slogan is “small plays about big ideas,” to which fans will readily concur.   If you go and are not provoked in some way, if you don’t squirm, if you don’t talk about it afterward with your companion, then you probably weren’t there.

Quark’s next show is Wakey, Wakey by Will Eno, an acclaimed playwright and Pulitzer Prize finalist. Tony Isbell, one of Quark’s founders, directs Adam Remsen (another Quark founder) and Sarah Solarez. Sound design is by Eric Sefton, with original music by Eileen Kuo, and lighting design by Louisa Koeppel (also a Quark founder).

The play runs 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, and 2 p.m. Sundays through October 6th. It’s at TheatreSouth, 1000 Cooper St., southwest corner of the building. Tickets are $20. Here’s the website.

Isbell spoke to us about Quark’s philosophy and the production:

Quark’s plays aren’t particularly traditional. I suppose that’s true with Wakey, Wakey?

Sometimes I call it an experience because it’s not really a typical play in some ways. It’s kind of like an eccentric TED talk. It involves the use of quite a few projections and recorded sound while the protagonist talks directly to the audience. There is an aspect that’s more a traditional play with another character, but there’s a good bit of it that’s a direct address to the audience.

You’ve had the rare experience of talking with the playwright as you were putting this together, right?

When we applied for the rights to this show last year, we got an email from the company that handles the rights. It said that Will likes to be involved in local productions of his plays and here’s his email. So, when we started to work on it, we contacted him. I thought that was pretty cool since he’d been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for drama for a previous work. He replied within 20 minutes and we’ve emailed back and forth a few times and each time, he answered right back.

He seems to be as super nice human. We talked about our approach and our limitations because we have basically zero budget for our show. He was fine with that and much of our approach. Sometimes he’d suggest we try something instead, but never been anything less than enthusiastic and supportive and friendly.

So that must have given you confidence going in?

Yeah, because this is different. All of his plays might be described as eccentric. He’s previously been described as the Samuel Beckett for the millennial generation or something like that. He’s really not, that’s really not quite accurate, but I can certainly see it in him and his writing. This play in particular is what you might call a miniature or a chamber piece.

There isn’t a whole lot of plot. There are two characters, one a man named Guy and a young woman named Lisa. Guy spends part of the show talking directly to the audience. He talks about matters of life and death, and how to deal with life when you are facing extreme situations and it’s very funny and kinda out of left field. But it’s also very moving.

I’ve seen it dozens of times and I still tear up at certain places because it just captures the humor and the joy and the sorrow of being alive. And it reminds me, in some ways, of Our Town though it’s not in any way similar to what’s happened in Grover’s Corners. You kind of get that we all just try to do the best we can and we’re all here together and shouldn’t we all be doing our best to make things easier for other people instead of more difficult? It’s a play that I think has kind of a therapeutic or healing dimension to it. I think people will come out of this show feeling very uplifted and very centered. It ranges from goofy to profound.

How do you choose the scripts that you produce?

Adam and I have tried to produce things that haven’t been done in Memphis, or that Memphis isn’t going to produce because they don’t really fit the mold of what other theaters might want to produce. We deliberately look for things that are challenging and thought provoking, whether that’s the intent of the script or the manner in which it’s produced. Secondary factors: that they are one-act shows that can be produced without big, detailed sets or costumes. This show is our biggest exception to that because it does require a great deal of video and still images and the sound and projection.

Barefoot in the Park at GCT

Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park is playing at Germantown Community Theatre (GCT) through September 29th. The rom-com has fun with newlyweds (he’s uptight, she’s a free spirit) in their 5th-floor walkup apartment as they deal with neighbors, relatives, stairs, and Manhattan. Get tickets here.

On Golden Pond at Playhouse on the Square

Opening Friday at Playhouse on the Square is On Golden Pond, which is kind of like a geriatric Barefoot in the Park: Couple in love working out their differences while family members and people from the neighborhood keep showing up. In this one, Norman and Ethel Thayer are at the family lake house instead of Manhattan. Through October 6th. (And there’s one more connection: Jane Fonda was in both movie versions). Score your tickets here. 

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

Spilling Blood

Every so often, a fallacious e-mail goes around describing the horrible fate of a teenage girl who made the mistake of scarfing down a fast-food burrito full of beans, mystery meat, and spider eggs. The story usually ends with millions of baby spiders chewing a painful hole through the unsuspecting diner’s face. The fear of unsuspectingly eating something truly horrible runs strong, and it’s not at all surprising that the macabre tale of Sweeney Todd, a London barber who shaves his clients too closely, robs their pockets, and delivers the remains to his neighbor the cook, has been so popular for so long. Even Theatre Memphis’ sanitized staging of Stephen Sondheim’s blood-soaked musical is good for a few Halloween chills.

Sweeney Todd, like the aforementioned legend, is an urban story — the product of claustrophobia, xenophobia, and a general mistrust of both government and businesses that seem to be too successful. All of this is lost in Christopher McCollum’s modern set design, which uses shimmering screens and white tiled surfaces that may be intended to evoke images of a modern-day mental institution but look more like bits and pieces of some sprawling public restroom. It’s a fantastic visual creation that, unfortunately, does nothing to evoke the filthy, overcrowded streets of a recently industrialized London or to set the tone for one the most enduring horror stories of the past two centuries. It’s the production’s first, and its most significant, undoing.

In his earliest literary incarnations, Sweeney was simply a monster driven by greed, but by the time of Sondheim’s adaptation, the barber had been provided with a sympathetic back-story. George Dudley, an actor of considerable skill and subtlety, has perhaps bought too deeply into Sweeney’s softer side, all but eliminating the character’s demonic edge. His smoldering, nuanced performance doesn’t travel well past the first few rows of seating, especially compared to Kim Justis’ deliciously over-the-top take on Mrs. Lovett, Todd’s revolting paramour and pie-baking partner in crime.

Barclay Roberts and Randal Cooper relish their roles as the musical’s two chief villains, Judge Turpin and Beadle Bamford. It’s too bad that what should be Roberts’ finest moment, where he flogs himself for harboring unclean thoughts about his ward Johanna, is rendered somewhat foolish by the fact that he never takes his white shirt off.

Director Pam Hurley’s decision to cast actors who sing rather than singers who act pays off during the big solos but backfires elsewhere. Missed harmonies cause more cringing in this Sweeney Todd than all the grisly murders and casual cannibalism.

Through November 2nd

Dude Looks Like A Wolf-lady

Longtime Memphis theatergoers should be familiar with Mandacrest, the stately home of antiquarian adventurer Lord Edgar and his second wife Lady Enid, as well as Jane their duty-bound maid, Nicodemus, the stinky, one-legged stable boy, and a variety of bloodsucking fiends.

Circuit Playhouse staged a memorable, hugely successful production of Charles Ludlam’s zany, gender-bending The Mystery of Irma Vep in 1989, then revived the show with the same cast in the mid-1990s. Germantown Community Theatre’s current staging of the show isn’t nearly as energized or as finely acted as its predecessors, but it’s still great fun with laughs to spare.

Jenny Smith excels in the roles of flinty Jane and the eccentric egyptologist Lord Edgar, whose mustache swings about like a mad pendulum in search of a pit. Her acting partner Chris Tracy has many fine moments, though his accent constantly wanders from Yorkshire to Nutbush. He excels when the show calls for self-conscious comedy but can’t fully connect with the role of Nicodemus, an ultimately sympathetic character that infuses the play’s final moments with some genuine humanity.

Irma Vep borrows its setting and tone from Hitchcock’s gothic romance Rebecca and parodies all the tropes of classic horror and suspense. The greatest suspense, however, comes from wondering whether or not the actors will be able to make all of their impossibly quick costume changes successfully. This cast and crew of backstage dressers occasionally leave the audience waiting too long, but in the end it’s always worth it.

Through November 2nd

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.”

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

Dead Can Dance

Now that Tim Burton, the cinematic master of all things macabre, has brought Stephen Sondheim’s gore-soaked musical Sweeney Todd to the screen, perhaps he should turn his attention to classical dance. He’d be hard-pressed to find subject matter more suited to his dark, comic-book romanticism than Giselle, which the St. Petersburg Ballet Theatre is bringing to the Germantown Performing Arts Centre on Sunday, January 6th.

By the end of Act 1, the ballet’s title character, a poor seamstress cut to the quick by a wealthy, duplicitous lover, already has gone mad and committed suicide. Giselle returns as a lovesick ghost in Act 2, however, to save her bad-boy boyfriend from a bunch of female vampires who were betrayed by their lovers in life and have chosen to spend eternity in a frenzy of bloody revenge.

Violent death? Supernatural evil? Transcendent love reaching out from beyond the grave? Who could ask for anything more?

If your curiosity has been pricked by any of this, GPAC, in conjunction with the St. Petersburg Ballet Theatre, is offering a free class on the history and meaning of Giselle on Thursday, January 3rd.

“Giselle,” 3 p.m., Sunday, January 6th, at the Germantown Performing Arts Centre. $30-$50. The “Giselle” Dance Education Class is 7-9 p.m., Thursday, January 3rd, at GPAC. The class is free.

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

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

Lullaby

In only three short years, Debbie Litch, Theatre Memphis’ feisty executive producer, appears to have reversed the storied East Memphis theater’s ruinous and seemingly unstoppable slide. The leaky roof has been patched, the tattered carpets have been replaced, threadbare seats have been recovered, and paint has been liberally applied. One only needs to look at the huge modern wood and glass sconces that now line the walls of the Lohrey Stage to understand that Theatre Memphis is back and better than ever.

Well, the building is better than ever, anyway. Although production quality has improved and Theatre Memphis has staged a handful of superlative shows, productions at the newly restored playhouse have shown a decided lack of consistency. Director Stephen Hancock’s interpretation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is currently running on the Lohrey Stage, is a prime example. Although the set and costume design rival anything one might find on any professional stage, the cast is woefully uneven, with actors who simply cannot handle the material cast in several key roles.

The completeness of Hancock’s dreamscape vision for A Midsummer Night’s Dream is extraordinary. The soundtrack, which seems to include every great song written about the moon in the 20th century, should be on sale in the lobby. The sets are beautifully realized. Hancock is almost completely successful in reinventing Shakespeare’s famous romp in the woods by turning it into a swanky post-modern sex farce, filled with slapstick and slamming doors. He’s encouraged his set and costume designers to reach out and conjure real magic. But Hancock has made grave errors in both his casting and his staging. His extensive cutting and rewording of what is already the bard’s most accessible comedy boggles the mind.

Purists would certainly disagree (as purists will), but there’s no crime in cutting Shakespeare deeply or altering a word here and there to help modern audiences through a minefield of dead idioms. But Hancock’s edit is condescending and intrusive for more Shakespear-ienced observers who can recite passages of the text line by line. Why change a richly descriptive word like “wanton” (still in current use) into “woman,” which is blander and less musical without the added benefit of being synonymous? Why change the colorful adjective “bully” to “jolly,” and then only half the time? Why do anything more than what absolutely needs to be done?

For all of its beauty, there are numerous problems with the design. To avoid sight-line issues, the play is best observed from the upper level. The garishly conceived fairy costumes marry absurd period designs, ridiculous glitter-rock makeup, and clownish, hideously colored antenna-adorned fright wigs. Nausea is assured.

The mask design for Bottom’s ass head — a defining element in any production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream — is beautifully realized. At a distance it looks like the rat cage placed on Winston Smith’s face in the film version of 1984, but up close, it is very nice.

The play’s climactic play-within-a play ends not in riotous laughter but in silence, followed by the sound of Ashley Bugg Brown as Egea (one of the show’s true highlights) noisily sucking the last of her drink through a straw. It’s one of this Dream‘s funniest moments, and certainly its most spontaneous. It’s also telling that for all the famous words, it took a tacked-on gag to bring Shakespeare’s funniest scene to life.

Brown’s antics are joy to watch, as is the comical wooing of Marques Brown who, as Duke Theseus, handcuffs himself to his bride. Melissa Harkness and Jade Hobbs, likewise, display superb comic skills as Hermia and Helena, two Athenian virgins with man trouble. But no matter how much momentum and comic potential these actors build, all action comes grinding to a halt whenever Ian Hunter (Demetrius) somnambulates through his lines.

Hunter isn’t the only actor sleepwalking through his role. Most of the fairies move and speak like the heavily medicated, and Jacob Rickert’s Puck is no exception.

Puck, a knavish prankster sprite who delights in creating chaos, is one of those roles every actor longs to play. The joy he takes in making mischief is one of A Midsummer Night’s Dream‘s greatest delights. But Rickert mouths his lines and shuffles through his stage directions with the energy of a tree sloth.

It’s good that Theatre Memphis is back and showing the potential to produce visionary — even world class — work. But all the packaging is useless if the performers can’t get the job done.

Categories
News News Feature

Sing to the Hand

Bob Hetherington, the good-humored chair of the University of Memphis’ theater department, arrives late for his interview.

“I’m so sorry that I’m running behind,” he says breathlessly. “I was at Sears trying to see if they’d give me a dead battery I could use to shock Jerry Springer’s balls.” (It should go without saying that his apology was accepted without question.)

Hetherington minces no words in his description of Jerry Springer: The Opera. “If it doesn’t offend you on some level, then there is probably something wrong with you,” he says. Hetherington, the man behind Playhouse on the Square’s multi-award-winning production of Urinetown: The Musical, is currently putting the finishing touches on Jerry Springer, which opens at Playhouse this weekend. He also describes the show as “a real coup for Memphis” and “a real feather in Playhouse’s cap.”

Offensive to everyone and a coup? As Shakespeare once wrote, that is “hot ice and wondrous strange snow.” It’s also quite true.

“Just think about this,” Hetherington says, marveling at the risk Playhouse is taking by bringing Jerry Springer to Memphis. “Jackie Nichols is raising money to build a new theater and making a final push to raise the last couple of million dollars. At the same time, he’s embarking on this incredible piece of new theater that could potentially upset a lot of people.”

Jerry Springer: The Opera, by British comedian Stewart Lee and composer Richard Thomas, was originally staged as a part of Edinburgh, Scotland’s famous Fringe Festival. It officially opened at London’s National Theatre in 2003 to critical acclaim and public derision. After it was broadcast on BBC television, 55,000 people called in to voice their displeasure. It won an Olivier Award but failed to land a Broadway contract.

“Jackie saw this in London and got excited,” Hetherington says. “He got me a copy of the CD and said you’ve got to listen to this outrageous stuff. And when I heard it, I loved it right away, but I said this will never play in New York, and there’s no way it’s going to play in Memphis.”

A year and a half after Nichols introduced Hetherington to Jerry Springer, there was still no American production in the works. Productions in New York and San Francisco had been announced but had apparently fallen through. Nichols was still interested, but he couldn’t even figure out whom to call to secure the rights.

“I told Jackie, ‘I’ll find out who has the rights, but if I do it, you’ve got to let me direct it,'” Hetherington says. Within a week of that conversation, Playhouse on the Square became the first theater in the United States to license Jerry Springer: The Opera.

“When we discovered that the license holder really represented mostly standup comics, Jackie put together this Letterman-style top-10 list explaining why Memphis was the perfect place for Jerry Springer. Within a day we were told, ‘You’ll have the rights to this.'”

Nichols’ list, which noted Memphis’ proximity to both Graceland and actual trailer communities, was only a contributing factor to Playhouse being granted the first license.

“There was a lot of frustration that there was no U.S. production,” Hetherington explains. “Maybe it couldn’t be produced because of the religious right and the censorious climate of the time. Or, since money is always a consideration, maybe it’s because the show requires 24 to 30 actors and isn’t a cheap piece to produce.”

Jerry Springer: The Opera is very much like an uncensored episode of Jerry Springer’s television show, where humanity’s dregs air their putrid laundry in a public forum. It’s profane, scatological, and violent, with numerous references to infidelity, incest, and kink of all kinds. Each string of profanity is set to music that grooves to a modern beat with loving nods to Handel, Mozart, and Verdi.

“When we held auditions in New York, we had this book that said, ‘If you can’t sing these words, don’t audition,'” Hetherington says. “There was one word on every page, and it was kind of like Dante’s levels of hell. You begin with some common Anglo-Saxon four-letter words, and by the time you get to the end, there’s some real kinky stuff. We’d get letters from agents saying, ‘We’re sorry. Our client isn’t interested in the material.'”

According to Hetherington, it’s not the bad language that makes people nervous about Jerry Springer. Nor is it the violence and perversion. It’s the show’s blasphemous blend of Christian and pagan iconography that just doesn’t sit well with some people, he says.

“If you can make it through to the end, it’s really an incredibly satisfying and moving piece,” Hetherington insists. He also worries that some may hear a man in a diaper singing “poop your effing pants” and leave before the message gets across.

“It’s outrageous,” he says. “The best I can hope is that we get a good blend of regular theater people and people who are fans of Springer’s show.”

Hetherington wasn’t allowd to buy a dead car battery with which to “shock Jerry Springer’s balls.” The salesperson explained that even a dead battery might have enough juice to change the actor playing Jerry from a rooster to a hen. Instead, he was supplied with a gutless dummy battery that the store used as a floor model.

“It says ‘Die Hard’ on it,” Hetherington explains, beaming. “I love that.”

At Playhouse on the Square through September 9th

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

Twain Wreck

Scott Ferguson, Playhouse on the Square’s frequent guest director from Chicago, knows how to turn our cultural detritus into comic gold. Over the years, Ferguson, the founder of the Windy City’s Theatrebarn and creator of Schoolhouse Rock Live, has served up deliciously trashy productions of The Mystery of Irma Vep, Saucy Jack & the Space Vixens, Bat Boy: The Musical, The Rocky Horror Show, and Return to the Forbidden Planet. No doubt about it, the man knows his kitsch from his camp and he knows how to milk the funny from all of it. Unfortunately, in spite of the broadly comic characters and a spot of cross-dressing, Big River, the sprawling musical adaptation of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is neither kitsch nor camp, and the gifted Ferguson seems out of his element. Why?

Okay, so it’s not completely fair to pigeonhole Ferguson as a kitsch specialist. Sure, he once staged Xena the Warrior Princess Live!, but he also directed Circuit Playhouse’s thoughtful production of Floyd Collins, an American folk musical about a deadly cave-in and the ensuing media circus. With its convincing country score by honky-tonk wit Roger Miller and a heady collection of intertwining themes about extraordinary friendships and man’s predictably inhumane treatment of his fellow man, Big River is certainly a comic ancestor of the more seriously conceived Floyd Collins. But instead of diving into Twain’s unsentimental world where childhood innocence meets moral ambiguity, Ferguson tries to knock us out with a one-two punch of silliness and sentiment. Mr. Clemens is surely spinning in his grave.

Former POTS company member Andrew Weir has a strong tenor voice and a winning personality, but he can’t seem to unleash enough of his inner rapscallion to make the legendary Huck Finn breathe onstage. Unlike the grubby river rat, who revels in the fact that a low life can lead to high times, the well-scrubbed Weir looks like you couldn’t make dirt stick to him with Super Glue. He most definitely doesn’t come across as the kind of person who might fake his own murder by killing a hog and dumping its blood all around the room. The internal conflict Huck faces as he chooses between his friendship with the runaway slave Jim and his conscience telling him its against the law to relieve others of their property is never much of a conflict at all. This Huck just has to pause sometimes before doing the right thing … even when the right thing is wrong.

Huck Finn is a juvenile Hamlet, and Twain wasn’t too subtle indicating as much. But in this Big River, he’s just a fun, spontaneous guy whose luck is often better than his judgment.

Ernest Hemingway once cautioned readers to stop reading Huckleberry Finn at the point where “Nigger Jim” is sold back into slavery for a mere $40. “All the rest is cheating,” Hemingway wrote. And Pappy wasn’t the first critic to charge Twain with losing his nerve in the book’s closing chapters. It’s almost like the misanthropic author of both Tom Sawyer and the heretical Letter From Earth looked deep into the future, figured somebody was going to turn his novel into a musical with a contrived happy ending, and decided to save all would-be adapters the trouble of ruining his masterpiece by ruining it in advance. If there is true kitsch to be mined, it’s probably from these last scenes, which play out like a mockery of all things romantic. Conversely, these are the moments Ferguson has chosen to play straight.

Keith Patrick McCoy’s Jim is a simple, easily wounded creation, whose boundless sweetness might lead one to wonder if the poor man was ever the victim of a bad brain injury. He’s allowed his moments of heroism, but he’s never allowed to be a man.

Each scene in Big River is set up like a Hee Haw skit and played out on a brown-on-brown set that is visually unappealing without the benefit of being particularly functional. As was always the case with Hee Haw, the artificiality of the characters and their performances is heightened to the level of burlesque. Only the Duke and King, a pair of con men and arguably the story’s most artificial characters, achieve any level of dimension. In these roles, Jeremy Garrett and John Hemphill excel. From their mangled Shakespeare to their larcenous schemes, they never fail to amuse or to revolt.

Is Big River a wild romp with a couple of well-known literary characters? Sure it is, and a thoroughly enjoyable one at that. But it could be much, much more.

At Playhouse on the Square through July 22nd

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

Bleak House

Over the past decade, David Lindsay-Abaire has distinguished himself as one of the American theater’s most original, insightful, and satisfying playwrights. Like Angels in America author Tony Kushner, he understands that realism is best suited to television and film and theaters do their best work when they give over to intrinsically theatrical conventions, which free the audience’s imagination and turn the live medium’s weaknesses into strengths.

Inspired by absurdist writers such as Eugene Ionesco and screwball filmmakers such as Preston Sturgis, Lindsay-Abaire has excelled at black comedy. Plays like Fuddy Meers and Kimberly Akimbo hold a fun-house mirror up to nature, finding truths in every distortion and laughter amid the tears. His characters often suffer from extreme mental or physical disorders that result in farcical horror shows and epic quests to reclaim their true identities. So what went wrong with Lindsay-Abaire’s 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Rabbit Hole? All the author’s inventive wordplay and effortless poetry are gone, as is most of his celebrated whimsy. What’s left is a bleak story, bleakly told, and if you’re a weeper, tissues are strongly advised.

Anyone who knows Lindsay-Abaire’s history of wrenching logic from illogic might assume that Rabbit Hole pays homage to Lewis Carroll. That would certainly be a good guess but incorrect.

The drama, strongly acted at Circuit Playhouse, focuses on the life of Howie and Becca, two successful suburbanites who were living in a beige American paradise until their young son was accidentally killed when he chased the family dog into the street. Now the couple is living in a beige suburban hell, desperately searching for a means of escape. All the usual suspects are on display: denial, anger, blame games. Although the playwright stops short of self-help advocacy, his plot points might have been taken from any book about grief management. His story rings true from start to finish, but it also unfolds as predictably as a made-for-television movie.

Director Dave Landis has been on a roll of late, turning in stunning productions of The Wild Party and Kushner’s undersung musical Caroline, or Change. By any standard, his work on Rabbit Hole is no less impressive. Kim Justis Eikner and Michael Gravois, two of Memphis’ most celebrated performers, turn in a pair of quietly explosive performances as Becca and Howie. As Becca’s mother, Irene Crist shows the same balance of flinty determination and vulnerability that has made her a regular fixture on the Playhouse stage. Teenage actor Ed Porter charms and chills as the young man who may or may not have been going a little over the speed limit when he tragically swerved to avoid hitting a dog. Only Sheana Tobey comes up short in her too-grounded portrayal of Izzy, Becca’s irresponsible sister who has just found out she’s pregnant.

Each character’s grief prevents them from recognizing their own selfishness, and the selfishness prevents them from dealing with the grief.

“Does [the hurting] ever go away?” Becca asks. Unsurprisingly, the answer is no. The grief, we are told, changes. It becomes a kind of surrogate for the missing loved one and something of a comfort.

It is probably unfair to write Rabbit Hole off as a simple domestic tragedy. Even amid all the claptrap, Lindsay-Abaire is better than that. He measures his silences like a Pinter or a Mamet, and in the end, Rabbit Hole probably has less to do with grief than with the many roadblocks — real and artificial — that prevent us from communicating with one another. It’s a play without easily identified heroes and villains and where no good intention goes unpunished. But all of these masterful subtleties are lost in the silence, the shouting, and the constant reminder that a child is dead and nobody can be blamed.

Of course, Rabbit Hole did win Lindsay-Abaire his Pulitzer. And there are reasons why TV networks make so many unoriginal movies about people surviving all manner of domestic crises. People do relate to these stories, no matter how maudlin or self-indulgent. As a culture, it would seem, we like to pull out the hankies and bawl. To that end, Rabbit Hole delivers. And it’s probably unfair to expect even an inventive writer to be inventive at every turn.