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Thursday, February 18, 2010
Arts / News Birdie blog
Posted By Perry Tannenbaum on Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 6:15 PM
OK, so just a few days after I’ve taken Theatre Charlotte’s production of Biloxi Blues to task for being way too professional to be categorized as true community theater, along comes Central Piedmont Community College Theatre’s Bye Bye Birdie, directed by Tom Hollis. With a mix of theater vets, greenhorns, and neophytes in its cast, this revival of the 1960 Tony Award winner for Best Musical sets up exactly the kind of onstage ecosystem that Biloxi abandoned.
Professional-grade actors, presumably nurtured some years ago in a community theater environment, get a chance to give back to the company where they started: by treating audiences to their seasoned craft while teaching less-experienced cast members by their example throughout the process, from the first rehearsal to the final performance. Smaller communities than Charlotte trust their mentoring, of course, to veterans who have retained their amateur status in the bosom of their hometown theatre companies, amassing local experience, prestige, and wisdom.
Here in Charlotte, where professional-grade theater abounds (with only a fraction of actors getting paid their true worth), the ecology has extra benefits and nuances for those who take advantage of them. When a community theater production I attend this week lacks the polish I’d expect in a typical off-Broadway show, I can see that polish next week here – at Children’s Theatre Of Charlotte, Actor’s Theatre Of Charlotte, or Carolina Actor’s Studio Theatre, to name the most prolific.
Hollis has opened the door wide in CPCC’s production of Birdie, tacking on three choruses – a total of 30 kids, teens, and adults – to a cast that already boasts 26 individual roles. Anyone who expects a production on such a huge scale to run like clockwork, when the budget for actors’ salaries is zero, is probably perfectly in tune with our community’s unenlightened attitude toward arts funding.
For long stretches of CPCC’s Birdie, amateurs predominate. So although Hollis could pride himself last Saturday night on a performance where all lines appeared to be satisfactorily remembered, all scene changes executed with reasonable alacrity, and all entrances and exits herded without catastrophic sloppiness, perfection was in the far distance. When more than three or four frontliners were carrying the dialogue forward, cue pickup grew dilatory and pace slackened. More than a couple of entrances and crosses occurred a beat or two too late. Bless its imperfect heart, community theater gives us the chance to grasp why the professional-grade product is worth paying extra for.
We get more than the occasional taste of how things should look and sound from the leads and their main support. Andy Faulkenberry as rock star Conrad Birdie’s lovably spineless agent, Albert Peterson, may actually be singing his role too well if the benchmark is Dick Van Dyke, who originated the role. But he’s got the right look and, as I mentioned when he starred as the Cat in Seussical last summer, he’s already a formidable triple threat. As Rosie, the seething cauldron of sensuality who has patiently waited eight years for Albert to grow a backbone and stand up to his mamma, Courtney Johnson has all the right moves. Neither the voice nor the Hispanic sizzle quite match Chita Rivera’s, but when Johnson invades the Shriners meeting in Sweet Apple, Rosie’s transformation from secretary to sex-sational had the appropriate spice.
Gloria King came pretty close to upstaging the leads as Mamma Peterson, stopping the show with her manipulative “A Mother Doesn’t Matter Anymore” anthem. Without much in production values behind her, King does upstage the teen leads, Micah Parker as Conrad and Christina Cook as Kim McAfee, the Birdie fan chosen to receive her idol’s farewell kiss before he’s inducted into the Army.
It doesn’t help that Jamey Varnadore’s costume designs for Birdie and his adoring bobbysoxers are jaw-droppingly tepid, and Ron Chisholm’s choreography for Conrad and Kim’s big duet, “A Lot of Livin’ to Do,” is uncommonly lackluster. Obviously, when Rosie goes on her siren rampage, Chisholm has more to work with – and in “Spanish Rose,” it shows.
But to return to my overall blogging theme with Biloxi and Birdie, there is a conspicuous chronic silence that underscores Charlotte’s uniqueness as a dysfunctional theatre community. Charlotte’s daily newspaper, which should review every CPCC Theatre production, has stubbornly refused to recognize what CPCC does as community theatre. Despite the presence of seasoned professionals in the cast – and in the instance of Birdie, teens and kids as well – The Observer cleaves to its purblind position that CPCC’s fall, winter, and spring presentations are college productions.
Laziness or lunacy? You decide.
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