Actor’s Theatre had to fill two key roles in their current production of Charles Randolph-Wright’s Blue — including the vocalist who plays the title role and sings all the music — early last week as the show was just days from opening. Yet aside from the occasional stammer, hardly distinguishable from the usual Critics’ Night jitters, last Thursday’s opening had the customary Stonewall Street grace.
Lesson: when a superlative cast, resourcefully directed, digs into a superlative script, mountainous obstacles become molehills. Marcus Sherman, the original Blue Williams, sang the Nona Hendryx songs directly to us — and the women he bewitches in the drama — wearing only his costume and a moody spotlight. But when Quentin Talley took over, he would have to sight-read the music. So director Sidney Horton made a virtue of necessity, turning Blue’s corner of the stage into a recording studio throughout the show, sitting Talley down behind a music stand.
Replacing Samuel Clark Jr., family patriarch and founder of the Clark Funeral Home in fictional Kent, S.C., was a more formidable challenge for Horton. He’s doing that himself.
Now please don’t be offended that I’ve mentioned Mr. Sherman in an unflattering context. The young actor, remembered for his roles in Side Show and Gem of the Ocean, has passed away. According to the latest info from Actor’s Theatre artistic director Chip Decker, a memorial service is scheduled for this Saturday, location to be announced.
So are the Clarks from Kent all supermen and superwomen? Not at all, unless you’re saddled with the notion that blacks in the Palmetto State are all poor and uneducated. Only Peggy Clark, Clark Jr.’s imported spouse from Chicago, wishes to stress — and maintain — the difference between the affluent funeral barons and the Carolina riffraff wheeled through their parlors. Perpetually dressed in red, Peg is every inch a drama queen, source of most of the family’s strife and keeper of its biggest secret. For most of the evening, her redeeming graces are her outrageousness, her sense of style, and her adoration of Blue. Except for an import that surfaces deep into Act 2, she has everything Blue has ever recorded and, to the chagrin of everyone else in the household, plays his albums incessantly.
If she’s the iron heart of this drama, then her younger son, trumpeter Reuben Clark, is the gilded soul. He shares mom’s aversion to the funeral biz and is clearly her favorite over Sam III, but her imperious pushiness, her histrionics, and her prejudices are all trials for Reuben in his youth. Two actors, Sterling Frierson and Jeremy DeCarlos, are required to span Reuben’s journey from childhood to manhood — and Randolph-Wright decrees that both are often onstage simultaneously. DeCarlos, as the adult Reuben, narrates during Act 1 and parleys with his younger self when he’s frustrated with his mom. Fair enough, but I’m not sure I’m aboard in Act 2 when the roles flip-flop and the child chides the man.
After her stunning Charlotte debut last season in Gem of the Ocean as Aunt Ester, it would be hyperbole to say Karen Abercrombie surpasses herself, but she’s not too far from equaling that majesty. I’m more tempted go hyperbolic with Jeremy DeCarlos — even though fine performances in Topdog/Underdog, Take Me Out, Natural Selection, and Gem are already logged in his local dossier. Watching the range of this performance, both with the spotlight on him or as he observes from the periphery, will be time well-spent by aspiring performers. “Damn!” I could almost hear the playwright saying of his autobiographical double as he sat in the audience last Thursday, “I wish I was that cool, charming, and sensitive.”
There’s a lot of richness and humor in the other characters who revolve around the Reuben-Peggy-Blue axis. As Sam III, Jonavan Adams enters with an Afro doo large enough to make Billy Preston roll his eyes, not the likeliest successor in the Clarks’ funereal dynasty. Grandma Tillie is always good for some comical friction, staunchly opposing Peggy’s snobbery, giving Sam Jr. grief for putting up with it, and reliably taking Reuben’s side. Cassandra Lowe Williams feasts on the role with such zest you wonder whether she can bear to take off her Sunday-best costume.
Kim Watson Brooks rounds out the cast, deftly personifying the twists and turns of the serpentine plot. At first, she’s Sam III’s girlfriend, emblematic of his youthful defiance of his mom. But she evolves into Peggy’s personal protegee before leaving with Blue to Chicago as his paramour. She returns to Kent as an outcast unwed mother — with Peggy’s secret up her declasse sleeve.
Bring a hanky or two for the denouement. You won’t believe how much these uppity, dignified Clarks really love each other.
While the Actor’s Lab invasion continues in SouthEnd, another issues-oriented guerilla presentation has struck at the Great Aunt Stella Center, triggered by Anne Lambert and her Charlotte’s Off-Broadway. Lisa Loomer’s Living Out comes to us cleverly billed as “A Contemporary Comic Drama about Mommies and Nannies.” But with Ana and her two nanny chums all hailing from Latin America, the comedy and the drama are cross-cultural as well.
Go to Aunt Stella, a truly gorgeous venue, and you’ll face a steady stream of ethnic, gender, and social issues. Yes, there are occasionally lines that sound half-digested from a pamphlet or an editorial, but Loomis is admirably objective dealing with questions of immigration, parenting, having it all, employee-worker relationships, and Women’s Roles. Guys can safely leave their flak jackets behind when considering Living Out as a date-night destination, because Loomis is concerned with exposing problems, not pointing fingers.
Most sympathetic of the three nannies we encounter is Ana, who’s depending on husband Bobby to navigate the rocky path to naturalization while working for Nancy. In an opening sequence of job interviews with three americanas, we see how Ana progressively learns to lie about having a young child in the States after rebuffs from Wallace and Linda.
Bringing an elegant balance to her design, Loomis makes the three women who interview Ana into a second set of chummy females. Among these suburbanite moms, Nancy is as much the ingenue employer as Ana is the ingenue, and the scuttlebutt is venomous whether the nannies gather their strollers at the park or the moms get together over coffee. Mistrust is a two-way street, and that’s where much of the comedy comes from.
You may find a deeper level of comedy in the fundamental absurdity of it all — how Nancy has to lie to her law firm to fulfill her parental responsibilities while Ana is lying to her, and how neither of these caring mothers is caring for her own children. With so much to reflect on as Living Out unwinds, I found myself fixating on the excellence of the four Hispanic performers, wishing we could see more of them in Charlotte.
Cristina Layana, whom we have seen before in Limbo last year, has the juiciest opportunity as Ana. She makes all three of her roles vivid: nanny in a stranger’s home, wife and mother in her own home, and one of the girls among her chums. Her Hispanic cronies get more of the comical jibes, and both Delia Rabah as Sandra and Nury Antomarchy as Zoila are delightful. Without a program, you’ll be hard-pressed to pick which of them is making her stage debut.
Lambert has her nannies accentuating their earthiness ever so slightly and applies the same light touch to starching and tailoring the career-woman employers. We can readily see why neither Ana nor Nancy would particularly like Wallace in Carly Howard’s prim, acid portrayal, while there’s a nervous malaise to Kim Lanphear’s take on Linda that is nearly as off-putting.
Donna Scott makes Nancy an interesting study of a woman who wants to deal compassionately with Ana while combating suspicions that she’s being taken advantage of. Layered onto this ambivalence is an attachment to her Jenna which is slightly blind to the letting-go that must take place if her commitment to career is genuine.
In fact, neither of the husbands, Richard and Bobby, expects his wife to do it all in the parenting sphere. Their rational attitudes, in contrast to the emotionalism we occasionally see from Nancy, aren’t far-removed from what we see from the supporting actresses — and definitely to the warm side of Wallace. Salvador Garcia is Bobby in an impressive debut, nice stable family guy and beer-guzzling macho pig in equal measure. Richard, Nancy’s spouse, may be the most sensible of Loomis’ characters, having the audacity to suggest that he’d be willing to live in a humbler house if she wished to discard her career goals. Glenn Hutchinson, author of the aforementioned Limbo, is well-attuned to Richard’s virtues, but a frayed edginess saves him from righteousness.
Thoughtful, provocative stuff.
The Christof Perick era isn’t over at the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra just yet. It only sounded that way during the first half of last week’s Beethoven’s Fifth concert. We had to go through Brahms’ Symphony #2 to arrive at the tantalizing treat that lured a full house to Belk Theater.
All that was missing from the CSO’s slog through the Brahms was urgency, drive, and orchestral beauty. Until the concluding Allegro con spirito, spirit was conspicuously missing — along with the slightest conviction from the ensemble that this was truly great music. The winds blended nicely enough, and the fault for the lackadaisical effort certainly can’t be placed at the feet of Frank Portone. The principal French hornist was on his best form during his solos in the first two movements. It was as if there was already a vacancy at the podium. The concluding trumpets sounded like rescuing cavalry when they finally arrived.
But Perick & Co. returned with inspired ferocity to take the Fifth. The familiar opening was a little ragged as the beast arose from its slumber, but Perick didn’t rein the animal in. We were quickly assaulted by an orchestral thrust that was thrilling. The horn section and oboist Hollis Ulaky were rock solid, trumpets sparkled in the ensuing andante, and clarinetist Eugene Kavadlo floated a simple line over the warm cellos. All of Ludwig’s pieces fit together exquisitely, and you could believe that this was the most perfect symphony ever written. If you thought all would be anticlimactic after the fateful V-themed opening, the final two allegros — electrically welded together — would have ejected you from your seat.
“I wish I had more tickets to sell,” CSO prez Jonathan Martin exclaimed as we filed out of the grand tier. I only wish that Perick and his mighty players had brought more music for us to hear.
Aside from Miss Julie, you don’t find much Strindberg performed in America. So when an opportunity presented itself to make a pilgrimage to Davidson College to see The Ghost Sonata, I didn’t hesitate. Besides, the Cunningham Arts Center had been renovated since our last visit, and I was overdue for a look at the new Barber Theatre.
Well, the Barber is easily the most impressive black box studio theater that I’ve seen in the Metrolina area — and the Davidson makeover, now the Cunningham Theatre Center, is fairly awesome. There’s a real box office when you enter now, not just a tollbooth.
The production, directed by Theatre major Stephen Foglia, had a fine technical polish, particularly in Josh Pecko’s two-storey set design and Mario Silva’s original music. Acting succeeded in making the fantastical drama hop off the page, even if it didn’t quite leap. Foglia and his cast captured some visual elements of the script with unexpected vividness, but some of the fundamental thematics didn’t emerge sharply enough.
As it turns out, the new studio theater is a reduction of the former Cunningham auditorium rather than a makeover of the old studio. So while the intimacy of Boy Gets Girl will not happen again in the new space, there are plenty of new toys to play with for students and wonders to behold for audience. Theater enthusiasts and professionals owe themselves a visit.
This article appears in Feb 24 – Mar 3, 2009.
