Looking ahead…
Ah, Spring. The days get longer, the gray snow slowly melts into the gutters, birds chirp, trees bud, and spirits get a little lighter. It makes you remember that, in the words of Samuel Beckett, “We are born astride a grave,” doesn’t it? Actually, I think Sammy would appreciate a production of his Endgame coming at the end of a brutal winter. For all his bleak fatalism, he does have a great sense of humor. Seriously! The Milwaukee Rep’s production of Endgame features a fabulous cast of Rep actors, and is directed by former Abbey Theatre Artistic Director Ben Barnes, a man who knows his way around the bleak Irish landscape.
If you’re more up for a night of sweeping storytelling, you couldn’t do better than Milwaukee Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, a play that has had its ups and downs in the Shakespeare canon. That old romantic, John Keats, said it was one of his favorites, but others have argued it was a sort of “inside joke” that Shakespeare wrote to amuse himself. A great cast will help you decide for yourself: Jonathan Smoots, Deborah Clifton, Wayne T. Carr and Sarah Sokolovic, among others.
And it’s hard to know what to expect at what might be the concert event of the year. Kathleen Battle, appearing at the Pabst Theater, has been called one of the world’s great voices, without qualification. But she’s also a bit of a diva, and since being shown the door at the Metropolitan Opera in the 1990s, has left a legacy of damaged accompanists and interesting stories. Still, there is talk of a comeback; Battle recently opened China’s new performing arts center in Beijing. Her program includes everything from Purcell to Faure to some spirituals.
Looking Back…
As the 1940s anti-diva Florence Foster Jenkins, Linda Stephens is a little bit Margaret Dumont, a little bit James Lipton, and a whole lot of fun. Jenkins was a New York socialite who became notorious for her recitals – orgies of bad intonation and excess emotion. Stephen Temerly’s charming, often hilarious play, Souvenir, playing at the Skylight until March 30, wants us to see the spirit behind her determination to “live inside the music.”
When Stephens channels Jenkins, singing “Rigoletto” (Gilda’s aria “Cara Nome”) she’s a sight to behold. She sings with her shoulders, with her jaw, and her hips. And her forearms, flinging them forward as if the notes need a little extra push to get to the audience. Holding one long, uneasy note, her body palpitates like a skein of limp fettuccini, eventually deflating as she moves down a long, slow glissando that sounds a little like a Cessna coming in to land.
Richard Carsey, playing Cosme McMoon (one of the greatest names, I would venture, in all of opera), is a personable companion on the play’s journey, which is framed as a reminiscence fueled by a tumbler of scotch. McMoon’s story takes us from the pair’s first meeting (she hired him to coach her for a series of recitals at The Ritz) to her legendary Carnegie Hall concert, in which she changed clothes for every number, eventually donning a pair of angel wings to sing Gounod’s “Ave Maria.” Carsey sometimes asks for the laughs a bit too much, but his piano-side narration is so winningly casual that it takes you right into that smoky little lounge.
Other than the occasional overplaying, Bill Theisen’s direction is breezy and sure. He’s particularly good at shifting gears as the play moves into its truly poignant moments. The tones you hear might not be that pleasant, but Souvenir is nonetheless a lovely little tone poem to the glories of music and song.
Some plays are vexing, intellectual puzzles, posing questions that can be pondered long after the lights go down. Others are nearly pure expressions of heart. Charles Randolph-Wright’s The Night Is a Child is a play of the heart, but one that deals with such a toweringly ominous event that it lands deep in the soul.
The event is nearly unfathomable, but still familiar – a mass shooting in the vein of Columbine or Virginia Tech. At the outset of the play, we know that Michael has died. His sister, Jane, deals with the trauma through willful ignorance. His twin brother, Brian, drowns his sorrows in alcohol. Only his mother, Harriet, acts, flying off to the country that has obsessed her since childhood: Brazil.
Randolph-Wright wrote the play after he found himself in Brazil during the anniversary of the Columbine shootings, and he wondered about the juxtaposition of that country’s spiritual and celebratory culture and the unbearable pain surrounding such a tragedy. Harriet’s journey is both uneasy and brave. She’s lived a sheltered life in the Boston suburbs, experiencing her dreamland mostly through music and longing.
When she first arrives, the play starts to seem like it was produced by the Brazil’s Department of Tourism. Randolph-Wright obviously loves Brazil, and wants us to love it, too. Bouncing back and forth between Harriet’s family and her tentative steps into the culture of Rio de Janeiro, Randolph-Wright sketches characters with quick, broad strokes. There’s just enough there to advance the story and sketch in the basic dynamics of the relationships.
In other words, this is no Long Days Journey into Night; there’s no deep probing of the human psyche or long cathartic monologs. Still, there is something about the play’s immediacy – the familiarity of its subject – and its sensual, visceral style that makes it a powerful experience.
Part of this is due to Timothy Douglas’s deft direction. Douglas and his designers (Tony Cisek, sets; Tracy Dorman, costumes; Michael Gilliam, lights; and Ray Nardelli, sound) have turned Harriet’s Brazil into a space of mystery and redemption. Simone Ferro’s choreography, which saturates the space of the play from beginning to end, captures the healing spirit of the dance. Like the words and music of great blues singers, Ferro’s movement holds pain in an embrace in order to transcend it.
And Douglas has two great performances at the heart of the play to capture this spirit. Lanise Antoine Shelly, playing Bia, Harriet’s companion on her journey through Rio, is the pure spirit of the samba – elegant and jubilantly rhapsodic. She embodies the transcendence of Brazilian culture with every gesture, cascading across the tiled stage or simply settling herself into a patio chair. As Harriet, Elizabeth Norment is everything Bia is not: awkward, hesitant, pushing herself clumsily into her voyage of discovery. Anyone who’s seen Norment before (in The Rep’s A Delicate Balance or Wit) knows she is an actor of exceptional intelligence and elegance. But here she captures the arc of Harriet’s flowering without ever losing the trappings of Harriet’s modest suburban history – the slumped shoulders and the jittery way she moves in the world. It’s a radiant transformation from within that finds an answer – however troubled and tentative – to some of life’s darkest and most painful questions.
