Cinderella  

Music by Richard Rodgers and Book and Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II

Produced by Olney Theatre Center

Reviewed by Tim Treanor

I am going to give you this straight up, without frou-frou or folderol.  If your kids have not yet become cynical, or worse, analytical, you should take them to this show.  I know it’s a little pricey.  So’s college, but there you are, going over your money-market accounts trying to figure out a way for young (eg.) Priscilla to enroll in (eg.) Yale in (eg.) 2019.  All I’m saying is, before you send her off to conquer the world, let her see a few good shows.

Oh – and before you take her, explain what “aerate your compost” means.  Seventy kids asking that question at once can be pretty annoying.

Cinderella  is minor Rogers and Hammerstein.  They originally wrote it as a television production in 1957, and the low-fidelity, black-and-white limitations of the medium may have hampered the scope of their musical ambition.  (The dialogue seems to have been modernized. A particularly witty bit involving the Secret Service seems new.) This is not one of those clever modern shows which are pitched on one level to adults and on another to youngsters.  This show is for the kiddies.

Olney plays the heck out of it nonetheless.  Erin Driscoll in the title role is superb – a sweet, powerful voice which manages never to be cloying.  Will Ray matches her note for note and gift for gift, as the Prince.  The scene in which they first gaze at each other – their faces and bodies saying, mutely but plainly, oh, there you are – is priceless.  These are immensely talented young performers who will satisfy audiences – I hope here, but certainly somewhere – for years to come.

An amiable exuberant cast backs them up.  Particularly notable are Jenna Sokolowski and Michele Tauber as stepsisters who are less wicked than ridiculous; Karlah Hamilton as a deliciously evil stepmother; Deb G. Girdler as the blasé fairy godmother; and Christopher Flint as a King who was also a (this coincidence is almost too good to be true) skinflint.

Best of all is the truly magical moment when Girdler decides at last to transform Cinderella’s life.  Before our eyes, a pumpkin turns into a coach, mice turn into horses – and Driscoll, in the blink of an eye, trades her patched rags for an $8000 Dior original, and acquires a head of hair that looks like the product of eighty minutes in the makeup room.  How do they do it?  Ask the kid sitting next to you, after she picks her jaw up off the floor.   

One of the pieces of magic that didn’t work last night was when Ray, frustrated, tossed the glass slipper in the air.  Girdler was supposed to field it in her dress, but she lost it in the lights and it smacked her in the face.  That’s live theater, baby!  Girdler gamely chased it down and gave us all the thumb’s-up sign before taking her exit, amidst cheers.

Afterwards, Cinderella and the Prince patiently signed autographs for a line of kids.  Should Driscoll have signed autographs in character after she finished playing her last role?  Absolutely!  Signature Theatre would have had a line a mile long waiting to get Squeaky Fromm’s autograph!  Old too soon, smart too late, I suppose.

Look, this is a show for kids, not aging lawyers.  Don’t ask me, ask them.  My dear bride interviewed a gaggle of them and these are the results she got – the real dctheatrereviews take on Olney’s Cinderella.

Elana Harris, age 9:  “the magic was very exciting. And it was funny.”

Erica Garagiola, age 5, who was seeing a play for the first time:  “It was cool that it was alive.” 

Her sister Elissa, age 6, said that kids should come to see if they can figure out how they make the magic work.

Isabella Colbin, age 10, particularly liked the king and the funny things he said about being married. 

Caitlin Deerin, age 7, who was also seeing a play for the first time, loved the wedding scene.  “I have two Disney movies of Cinderella and I like this much better.” 

So there you are.  The experts have spoken.

Cinderella  plays at Olney Theatre Center on Tuesdays through Sundays until December 31.  Tuesdays are at 7.30; all other shows are at 8 pm.  Saturday and Sunday matinees are at 2 pm.  Purchase tickets through the website: www.olneytheatre.org or by calling the Olney box office at 301.924.3200.  Tickets range from $39 to $44.  Children under 18 are half price.

Produced by Quotidian Theatre Company

Reviewed by Debbie Minter Jackson

Quotidian’s production of Tomorrow does justice to the quiet, deliberate tone of Horton Foote’s adaptation of a short story written by William Faulkner.  Set in a dreary Mississippi farm town in the early 1900’s, the play tells the back story about a sole dissenter on a jury trying to indict a young killer on trial.   While the premise is as simple as the set’s basic old rustic cabin, and little action seems to occur, the piece has a way of sneaking up on you, and leaves you wondering why you’re still thinking about it days later.  That’s because of a winning combination of Faulkner and Foote, Jack Sbarbori’s direction and excellent casting.

The steady and reliable Steve LaRocque serves as the narrator, ably explaining the story’s straggling bits and pieces.   John Collins portrays Fentry, a simple farm worker, intent on returning home to be with his ailing father over Christmas as soon as he finishes his meal.  He eats his bowl of hominy grits with the intensity of a man who has known hunger, scraping the bowl with a rough finger.  He even moves with a hunkered gait like he’s still walking behind a plow and a mule when he takes the dishes outside to clean up, his last chore before heading home.

Collins plays the backwoods mill worker with an old farmhand’s sense of daily routine, no expectations or sense of entitlement to an additional ounce of coffee in his sturdy cup or a biscuit with the meal.  That’s what makes his metamorphosis so poignant when his life changes after walking out the door.  Faulkner’s message seems to be that you never know what you’ll find along your routine, or as we would say today, life comes at you fast.   Fentry was a stone’s throw from saddling up and being on his way.  Instead, he stumbled on a life-changing experience with a pregnant Sarah whom he finds moaning on his woodpile.

Michele Osherow’s Sarah has a quiet and engaging energy, an effective complement to Collin’s Fentry.  My only quibble is that she doesn’t relay the sense of vulnerability or urgency of a nearly frozen, desperate woman stretched out behind the shed, and instead smiles sweetly and converses in the howling wind like she’s reclining comfortably on a park bench.  Once she gets inside the cabin though, her demeanor fits her condition – not hang-dogged or mealy mouthed, just bone weary from the inside out.

The rest of the play shows their growing comfort level with each other as the days turn into weeks and months to delivery, requiring the services of the midwife played by Stephanie Mumford.  Sharbori’s handiwork is seen in all the solid performances—each character deals with life’s hardships with a stoic acceptance, straight out of a 1900’s playbook.  Whether the nurse is informing Fentry of Sarah’s eminent death, “she’s just played out,” or the awkward marriage proposal, or the touching sickbed wedding ceremony, nothing is over the top, life just keeps going on.  Collin’s wordless reaction to hearing about his new bride’s death is one of the most moving scenes I’ve witnessed all year.  He’s facing upstage, back to the audience in semi-profile, but his grief is nearly palpable in intensity and reaches to the back of the house—it’s quite a remarkable performance, along with his resolve to raise the newborn as his own.  The narrator fills in what happens over the course of life’s turns that connect these events to Fentry’s actions on that jury many years later.  It’s a melancholy tale told with grace and dignity.  From the set and sound design, also by the remarkable Sharbori, to Don Slater’s lighting, the production respects the earnest perseverance of simple folk who just wanted the basics of the next tomorrow.  It is solid storytelling with hints of questions about nature versus nurture that will stick with you like hominy grits long after the show is over. 

Tomorrow runs Fridays and Saturdays at 8 pm, Sunday matinee at 2 pm, through December 10^th with a post-show discussion after the November 18^th show.  Tickets range from $15 to $20 and may be obtained at 301-816-1023 or http://www.quotidiantheatre.org/.

Martha, Josie and the Chinese Elvis

by Charlotte Jones

Produced by Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company

Reviewed by Tim Treanor

At Christmastide, hope floats from the heavens like snow and cloaks us in a robe of optimism and cheer.  We pray for, or fantasize about, a peaceful world where people are free and bellies are full.  We imagine the year ahead of us full of personal fulfillment, for ourselves and those we love.

In a small home in Bolton, England, hope is more specific but no less improbable.  Martha (Sarah Marshall), a cleaning woman with a monster obsessive-compulsive disorder, imagines that by counting to five she can protect herself from the demons which control her universe.  Josie (Beth Hylton), the dominatrix who heads the household, hopes one day to be cryogenically frozen, so that she can be reanimated to relive her life without the mistakes she has irreversibly made this time around.  Lionel (David Bryan Jackson), her client, hopes that a moment on all fours in a maid’s dress will give him the satisfaction which his pinched life denies him.  And Brenda-Marie (Kimberly Gilbert), an adult woman with a child’s mind, dreams of the day when she and her dead twin sister ice-dance their way to Olympic glory before a cheering throng.

And in another part of town, Timothy Wong (Tony Nam), a Vietnamese immigrant with little discernable aptitude, imagines a life of wealth and ease – at least more wealth and ease than he has had so far – once his career as an Elvis impersonator takes off.

If at first you are put off by Woolly Mammoth’s production of Martha, Josie and the Chinese Elvis, I strongly recommend that you hold your judgment and wait for the wonders to come.  Playwright Charlotte Jones has chosen unusual people in extreme situations as her subject, and she takes the short way in.  What may appear to be stereotypical or even cruel depictions of people with enormous afflictions is simply Jones’ matter-of-fact treatment of them in everyday life.  Thanks to the persistence of Jones’ vision, and the quality of the cast, these afflictions become endearing tics by the middle of the first scene.

It is the Feast of the Epiphany, and Josie is turning forty.  Forlorn in her squeaky suit and cat-o-nine-tails, she is an actor who has played the same role all her adult life.  Her client and friend, Lionel, who appears to be into the D/S thing principally so that he can wear women’s clothes, resolves to dispel her funk by throwing her a birthday party.  This party features a disturbingly green cocktail of Lionel’s own devise – he calls it, aptly, a “catastrophe” – and the one ingredient necessary for anybody’s happy birthday, an Elvis impersonator.

In truth, now nearly thirty years dead, the King has come closer to becoming a redemptive figure than any of his contemporaries.  Many people imagine their lives to be a movie scored by Elvis, and an astonishing number of folks, having lived through real catastrophe and devastating loneliness, point to the Memphis crooner’s eerily self-confident voice as the only thing which pulled them through their personal Gethsemenes.  But Timothy Wong’s Elvis is a different matter entirely.  Accompanied by a karaoke machine, his blues are tinged by dialect, and he forgets the lyrics.  He uses cue cards.  Interrupt him, and he must start over, much like the obsessive Martha.

What unfolds, accordingly, seems like the world’s worst birthday party until something happens which makes matters incomparably worse, and weirder.  It turns the laughter to tears, and the tears back to laughter again, and the laughter back to tears again, and makes hope in all its absurd manifestations come down from the sky, until we’ve pretty much seen the best damn Christmas show that’s come to local stages in many years.

The cast, including Tiffany Fillmore as the dead sister Louise, is superb but even amongst such skilled performers, Kimberly Gilbert is a revelation.  Brenda-Marie is a startlingly original character, with a child’s incapacity for guile but a woman’s store of information.  She blurts out her observations without a moment’s nod to tact, but her broad embrace of the human experience makes her accept without judgment that which is shameful to others.  Thus, for example, Lionel’s turn under the whip is nothing but a game he likes, no different than her complex ice-dancing fantasies.  This is an extraordinarily complex character who must at every moment appear simple; Gilbert nails every one of the contradictory elements.

Each one of the actors sells who he is with facility and grace.  Marshall manages to make her horrifying tics tolerable, then understandable, then amusing – her life-toughened character sharing in the laugh.  Hylton’s Josie, bewildered by her own life, pulls on a cloak of toughness wearily, like an aging boxer reluctantly defending a championship belt.  With absolute verisimilitude, Jackson plays a man at peace with his kinks, and resolved to tear away at his limitation.  Fillmore’s precise admixture of rage and vulnerability makes her character totally authentic.  And Nam as the “Chinese Elvis” is absolutely hilarious. 

Dan Conway’s elaborate gingerbread set and Colin K. Bills’ subtle lighting are an exception to Woolly Mammoth’s customary minimalism, but they serve this play well, giving it a cozy feeling which makes it easier to accept and acknowledge this unusual family, so like our own.

Martha, Josie and the Chinese Elvis will continue to play on Wednesdays through Sundays until December 10.  Sunday shows are at 2 and 7; all other shows at 8.  No show on Thanksgiving.  Post-show discussions on the 15^th and 30^th of November, and after the matinee show on November 19.  Tickets range from $32 to $52 (there are discounts available) and may be obtained at 202.393.3939, or www.wollymammoth.net.

Communion and Bulletins from Fatland

by Debbie Minter Jackson 

There’s something to be said about being “the nation’s oldest continuing women’s theater”– that’s a lot of keeping power.  Horizons Theatre celebrates its thirtieth season with “Still Going Solo,” a collage of solo pieces reflecting the company’s distinctive mission, talent, and innovative perspective.  The two intriguing pieces that I saw, Communion and Bulletins from Fatland, reflect the company’s keeping power at its finest, and I’m looking forward to the other two shows shown in repertory –Deep Thoughts and Dark Chocolate by Terri Allen, and Frida Vice-Versa co-written by Marian Licha and R. Dennis Green.

Vanessa Thomas depicts various women dealing with aspects of love, spirituality and sexuality in Communion, that she co-wrote with Kumani Gantt.  From her floating graceful  entrance from the back of the house to her sensual movements throughout, Thomas is a mesmerizing and enchantingly natural goddess of life and love. “I’ve loved you between the shadow and my soul” she intones in poetry that undulates and captivates as much as she does.  While it starts off with an atmospheric, coffee-house “spoken word,” kind of style, it quickly veers into solid theater territory through its clear depiction of character and precise direction by Leslie Jacobson.  The vignettes blend humor and sensuality but also contain their share of artistry and depth.  Along with a recurring image of being cut “from breast to bone,” the piece describes a harrowing passage of violence against a woman while referring to various perpetrators in one flowing sequence-Nazis, Contras, Tutsis-all listed as part of one event with chilling effect.  The communion ritual using water and actual fragrant rose petals becomes the calming and even healing conclusion.

Caron Anton is the draw for Bulletins from Fatlands by Shelley Herman Gillon.  Just when you thought you couldn’t deal with yet another image depraved portrayal of women, (I’m still recuperating from Neil Labute’s Fat Pig at Studio), here comes an eclectic collection delivered with fun, enthusiasm, and a twinkle in her eye by the one and only Ms. Anton.  It’s been far too long since I’ve seen her take the stage, and watching her inhabit the various characters in the intimate Warehouse space is a treat.  Designer Valerie St. Pierce Smith, who also designed the sensual Communion outfit, orchestrated the visuals, where an item for each character hangs along the back wall for Ms. Anton’s selection– from a Sister’s habit to cell phone case to, yes, a sumo wrestler’s belt.  Caron Anton has a quiet, effortless approach to her characters, and what might be missed in a range of temperament is balanced by an undergirding of solid control and unwavering commitment to the character beneath the surface.  She is simply believable whether portraying a young nun effusively describing the voluptuous female form, an English commoner with visions of being a crossing guard, a novice yogi, or a well-heeled mother with steely determination who guides her chubby daughter on how to purge.

Admittedly, the company has a special fondness in my heart.  I remember being drawn to its mission and focus when I moved here in the early 1990′s and seeing A, My Name is Alice, along with creative compilations of historical women interacting and sharing experiences.  Little did I know that we would both still be here these years later.  Opening the season with a series of solo performances reflects the company’s ongoing evolution in showcasing women’s experiences.  Leslie Jacobson, founder and artistic director says it best in her notes, “in addition to being a deeply personal artistic endeavor for the performer, a solo performance … brings the audience into her world by directly addressing and connecting with them…We couldn’t think of a stronger way to start our fourth decade of bringing truly creative works from a woman’s perspective o the stage.”

The upcoming season includes And the Rest is Silence which explores the inner thoughts and emotions of some of Shakespeare’s women characters who remain silent at critical moments, and a world premiere of The Mother/Daughter Project.  What a line-up to what hopefully is a successful launching of the next thirty years for Horizons Theatre.

Still Going Solo runs in repertory November 3- December 3^rd  at The Warehouse Theater, 1021 7^th Street, Washington, DC  Tickets:  $20, or a 2 show package for $35.. For the schedule and box office, go to www.horizonstheatre.org.  (703) 391-2929

Equus

by Peter Shaffer

Produced by the Washington Shakespeare Company

Reviewed by Tim Treanor

Consider the horse.  I am looking at one right now in my neighbor’s yard.  He is an enormous gelding, six and a quarter feet high at the withers and weighing well over a thousand pounds.  Retired from an indifferent career in the racing profession, he takes his ease, naked except for his shoes.  Approach him unawares, though, and he flinches, as though anticipating the bit, the bridle and the saddle.

Or:  consider God, in the Christian iteration.  We encounter Him most frequently on the cross, where His bit and bridle are a crown of thorns and the spikes driven through His wrists.  We saddle Him up for our own crusades, whether to drive Moslems out of their homes in the holy land, or castigate men having sex with each other, or for a minimum wage increase, against SUVs – whatever.

Or – and this is most difficult of all – consider Alan Stang (Jay Hardee), a teenager so full of rage, regret, and a dozen other twisted emotions that all he can do is sing commercial lyrics (Double your pleasure, double your fun) in his grating, off-key voice.  Alan, a stableboy who seemed to love his charges, has just blinded six horses with an instrument designed to clean their hooves – a crime so astonishingly violent that the Magistrate (Adrienne Nelson) begs the area’s top child psychiatrist, Martin Dysart (Christopher Henley), to take Alan on before a lynch-mob mentality takes hold and sends him to prison for life. 

What crucifix did Alan climb off of?  What crucifix is Martin on, even as we see him?  In director Lee Mikeska Gardner’s searingly intense version of Shaffer’s groundbreaking play, Dysart comes to see Alan’s passion, as crippling as it is, as a form of art, and envies it even as he sets about to cure it.

The act which impelled Alan’s assault on the horses was a horrifying secret when the play first opened in 1973; today it is neither horrifying nor secret, but the subject of hundreds of TV commercials.  It does not matter.  The true horror in this play is the relentless force of socialization which separates us from our passions, makes us love only that which is prescribed for us, and requires us to embrace the conventional thinking in the conventional way.  Martin recognizes and denounces that force, even as he is its servant.

Alan is the son of two exceptionally rigid parents – Dora (Cam Magee), a fiercely religious schoolteacher who encouraged Alan’s early fascination with Christianity, and Frank (Bruce Alan Rauscher), a stubborn atheist committed to a relentless regimen of self-improvement, for himself and others.  Eventually, Alan came to substitute a love of horses for his earlier love of the crucified Christ; and came to love those horses with the same power which a flagellant loves his God. 

This is very heady stuff, and Gardner does not lose an opportunity to make the force of Alan’s passion as overwhelming to us as it is to him.  We sit in a square around the stage, like viewers at a horse show.  An oleaginous fog rises. Metal horse’s heads hang suspended over the stage.  Occasionally one – the head of the great Nugget, a/k/a Equus will lower onto the head of actor (Joe Tippett), and Alan will talk to it, as man talks to God whenever He comes to earth.  When the horses talk to Alan – and it is his fantasy that they do, all the time – it is in deep whispering voices, which come from everywhere on the stage at once.  (David Crandall’s sound design was superb).  Whether we are in Dysart’s hospital, Alan’s home, the stable or the moviehouse where a cheery young woman who has taken an interest in Alan (elisha efua bartels) has taken him, it always seems to be night.  Everyone is in pain.  Indeed, the first act ended in such an explosion of rage, grief, and misery that the audience sat stunned as the actors filed out in darkness.

Gardner is helped in her singleminded task by a cast of strong actors who bought into her concept one hundred percent.  I was particularly impressed with Magee and Rauscher, who could easily have played Alan’s parents as intolerable twits but who instead gave nuanced interpretations which helped us to see them as victims, rather than villains.  Christopher Henley acquitted himself well in the enormous role of Dysart, who he imbues with a wise man’s hesitations.  Aware of everything, Henley’s Dysart is capable of nothing, as I believe Shaffer intended.  Henley, who appeared to be battling a bad head cold, managed to incorporate his snuffling and coughing into Dysart’s persona, somehow making him even more British than the normal Hopkins/Burton treatment.  (Dialect Coach Christine Hirrel did good work on this play, judging from the results).  Hardee’s fury seemed a little over the top in the first moments but then he settled in nicely; the last moments, when he re-enacted the blindings, were profoundly and genuinely moving.  Over-the-top anger may have been Gardner’s objective; I thought the stablemaster (Kim Curtis) came into his scene far too angry to be able to handle the emotional changes which Shaffer puts his character through.  Curtis also helped out with the choreography, which was excellent.

Although most of Gardner’s choices were spot-on, I think it was a mistake to have Dysart and the Magistrate be lovers.  Since most of Dysart’s confessions of alienation, lovelessness and meaninglessness in his own life are made to the Magistrate, he ends up appearing to be oblivious and she ends up looking like a fool.

Look, let me say this straight out.  This ain’t a musical comedy.  This is in-your-teeth drama, where difficult and unpleasant truths are revealed in ways that are not subtle or gentle.  If this is your cup of tea – and it is mine, and how! – this is a show for you to see.

Equus is in the Clarke Street Playhouse Thursdays through Saturdays until November 26.  Thursdays through Saturdays at 8; Saturdays and Sundays at 2.  No performance on Thanksgiving.  Extra 8 p.m. performance on Sunday, November 26.  Thursday shows are $25; Friday and Sunday shows are $30, except that the price for the 8 p.m. show on November 26 is not posted.  Saturday matinees are pay-what-you-can and evening shows are $35.  You may purchase tickets at 1.800.494.8497 or online at www.washingtonshakespeare.org.