After more than two decades at an alternative newsweekly, I take special pleasure in covering two non-theater events at the PAC -- both offering additional performances after my byline hits the street. Both of these efforts show our local arts organizations in top form, fine samplers of the year-round fare at Belk Theater and potent advertisements for the annual ASC fund drive, which is limping to the finish line millions beneath its goal.
Upstairs at the Booth Playhouse, North Carolina Dance Theatre is offering A Night at the Movies, a themed triptych with new choreographies based on Death Takes a Holiday (1934), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), and an Alfred Hitchcock potpourri (1958-63). The most memorable of these is Nicolo Fonte's Spellbound by Beauty -- not only because it shuffles three Hitchcock favorites, but because the master of suspense is himself part of Fonte's imagery, as a child, as an adult, and as a projected movie character.
Yes, it's a provocative touch when Justin VanWeest dances the adult Hitchcock and Norman Bates from Psycho and the borderline between the two men blurs. Nor does this Freudian overlay pounce on us without foreshadowing, since Hitchcock's mom appears in the prologue. Kara Wilkes, the dancer who mothers Young Hitchcock (the precocious Tyler Haritan), reappears as Tippi Hedren, prime victim in The Birds. In another platinum blonde wig, Traci Gilchrest is Judy/Madeleine, the woman who takes the ultimate plunge in Vertigo, and Anna Gerberich gets to wear the white blouse with hidden slashes of crimson as Marion, butchered by Bates in Psycho.
Intriguingly, we're transported back into the primeval magic of silent film over the course of the evening. This occurs gradually because, opening the program, Mark Diamond's Immortal Design overlaps clips from Death Takes a Holiday with the choreography. We really seem to be at the movies when David Ingram appears initially in the black hood and the black-and-white film is projected behind him. The device frees Diamond from telling the story, allowing him to concentrate on a series of pas de deux between Ingram -- transformed into a dashing Prince Sirki with a white tux -- and Gilchrest as Grazia, the woman who reveals to him why death is so fearsome. I'm not sure that the Brahms recording isn't older than the film.
Dwight Rhoden hasn't been particularly interested in linear narrative before, so it was fascinating to discover what he would do with Tennessee Williams in the world premiere of Dirty Truth and Pretty Lies. Like Diamond, Rhoden discards the original soundtrack, using characters from Cat to play out a series of Nina Simone torch songs and snips from the soundtrack of Gohatto. Rhoden must have had the impulse to illuminate the narrative at some point, for he resurrects Brick's football chum, Skipper, and dresses him in the uniform that symbolizes Brick's glory days as an athlete. Promising idea. But while the hot-and-cold sexual attraction between Brick and Maggie the Cat gets extensive play, Ingram and Wilkes working the thermostat, the dirty triangle -- and the family's dirty linen -- don't get the airing I hoped for.
Fonte is the best at keeping his eye on his subject -- and his ear on the original soundtracks. But all of NCDT's movie re-makers present compelling visions.
Less than seven years have elapsed since Opera Carolina last presented The Marriage of Figaro as a full-fledged grand opera with all the trimmings. The current version, adroitly directed by John Hoomes, discards the scenery and lifts the orchestra out of the pit, placing them behind the singers. That pushes nearly all of the action in front of the Belk Theater proscenium and brings the audience closer to Mozart's masterful mix of comedy, drama and romance.
Hoomes has rounded up a cast that can bring all these chemistries vividly to life, most of them newcomers at OC this season. As Figaro, Kristopher Irmiter isn't quite as commanding as he was last year in the title role of Don Giovanni, but as he's eased off the power, there's a new wiliness glittering in his eyes as he and his Susanna navigate their way around Count Almaviva's lecherous designs -- and his feudal privileges. Anne-Carolyn Bird makes a pleasing debut as Susanna, an alluring schemer who matches Figaro for cunning, jealousy and fidelity.
Somehow the center shifts gradually to the drama between Almaviva and his scorned Countess, that same Rosina he strove so cavalierly to win just six weeks ago in the Beaumarchais prequel, Rossini's The Barber of Seville. Kyle Pfortmiller as Almaviva is always dashing, dangerous and desirable even when he's cruel and unfaithful to his wife. As the Countess, soprano Ailyn Pérez seems upstaged at first by the acting abilities of the other stars, including Diane McEwen-Martin making her debut as Cherubino, the pesky boy poet with crushes on every woman in sight. But when Pérez finished her heartfelt performance of the achingly lovely "Dove sono" deep in Act 3, she had stolen the thunder from all the more familiar arias that preceded.
You won't be disappointed by the Almaviva reconciliation in the final moonlight scene, but you may be surprised by how close the Figaro-Susanna reaffirmation comes to matching it. Great music and great theater.
It's frustrating how bisexual saxophonist Wendell waits so long to tell his parents and his boyfriend that he has AIDS in Cheryl L. West's Before It Hits Home -- and infuriating that he never tells his girlfriend Simone. But somehow Sultan Omar El-Amin's magnificent performance as the dying musician helps to redeem Wendell's heinous shortcomings as a partner and a father.
Presented by the Carolinas Black Pride Movement at the Afro-Am Cultural Center, many in the Friday night crowd did not realize that director Jermaine Nakia Lee had stepped into the role of Junior, Wendell's macho brother. If they left before the talkback that followed the show, they never knew.
But while Saturday's Observer review didn't get the names right, it had a desirable effect that evening, drawing more people to the Afro-Am than the Attic Theatre can accommodate. So an encore performance has been added on March 21. Maybe by then Don Jamae Gibson will have sufficiently recovered from his emergency appendectomy to reclaim his role as Junior. Jajuana Moonie as Simone and Adeola Fearon as Mama are the other standouts.