Building foundations of song and story, reproduced with permission from EncoreMichigan.com.
Times are always changing; old is always begrudgingly giving way to new. The tools of today's digitally driven music industry might be unrecognizable to the brick-and-mortar establishments of 50-some years ago, but upon closer inspection, the building blocks of craft and collaboration are well intact.
Part 'Tidings,' but all 'Plaid', reproduced with permission from EncoreMichigan.com.
Ushering in the holiday season, The Encore Musical Theatre Company once again turns to the celestial sphere, following its 2011 production of "Forever Plaid" with the holiday-edition sequel, "Plaid Tidings" (by Stuart Ross; original "Forever Plaid" arrangements by James Raitt; current arrangements by Raitt, Brad Ellis, Raymond Berg, and David Snyder). Presented with a jumbled grab bag of a retread-revue, director/choreographer Barbara F. Cullen and company create a merrily comical excursion in which the show's glut of musical achievements far outstrips its moderate Christmas mirth.
Take a pulpy young-adult novel made famous for its taboo subject matter, and turn up the dial on the salacious stuff until it breaks. That’s the simple, winning recipe used by Marke Sobolewski and Joe Bailey to cook up Flowers Up Her Attic, a wickedly comic distillation of the similarly titled 1979 V.C. Andrews book. Now in its world premiere under Bailey’s direction, the Ringwald Theatre rocks with storybook scandal even as it keeps viewers rolling in the aisles.
In Flowers in the Attic, both the book and the 1987 movie adaptation, a group of siblings frantically languishes in the top room of their grandparents’ house, indefinitely trapped and neglected for unknown reasons, with inappropriately racy results. This show follows in the same melodramatic mold, from Traci Jo Rizzo’s forgotten storage-room set to Joe Plambeck’s Amityville-style devil lights and thriller score. Costumes by Vince Kelley double down on the horror show of circa-1980s fashions with a horror show of fakey-fake blond wigs as far as the eye can see. It’s just the right tone for the kind of campy homage that reveres its source material with feats of soaring irreverence.
Comedy prowess yields collaborative payoff in 'Laughter', reproduced with permission from EncoreMichigan.com.
Playwright Neil Simon wrote the semiautobiographical "Laughter on the 23rd Floor" about his work in the golden age of television when he found himself working among the ranks of some of the most formidable forces in comedy. Now at the Jewish Ensemble Theatre, director Lynnae Lehfeldt and a crack cast of nine has crafted his reverent recollection into a show about the miracle of a peerless creative team.
Simon based the play on his time spent as a junior writer on Sid Caesar's "Your Show of Shows"; accordingly, the entire comedy is confined to the writer's room of a fictitious NBC variety program. The workplace is peopled with an extraordinary assembly of characters, including wizened Kenny (Ron Williams), philandering Milt (David Meese), upward climber Brian (Andrew Huff), token lady-writer Carol (Allie McCaw), and wheezing hypochondriac Ira (Rob Pantano), under the barking profanity of thickly accented head writer Val (Wayne David Parker). This fertile array of personalities is bookended by star Max Prince (Joseph Albright), whose manifold roles as talent, producer, and primary buffer between staff and corporate brass has left him hyperactively paranoid, and saucer-eyed secretary Helen (Julia Gray), whose literal-minded subservience grounds the galloping creative types. Completing the roman a clef feel are confessional asides by Lucas (Matthew Turner Shelton), representing Simon himself as a daunted newbie desperate to prove worthy among these comedy kings.
Sometimes planets align, sometimes worlds collide. Fate and probability conspire to set countless events into motion, which precisely interact to generate a one-in-a-million phenomenon. I’m referring, of course, to the compelling singularity that is Williamston Theatre’s exceptional boom. With unwavering direction by Tony Caselli and top-shelf talent in all corners, this apocalyptic comedy by playwright Peter Sinn Nachtrieb is a delight of inexplicable proportions.
The play begins just like every other “girl meets boy in underground bomb shelter turned laboratory for no-strings Internet tryst” story. Journalism student Jo (Alissa Nordmoe) charges into the realm of marine biology grad student Jules (Aral Gribble) with a thirst for liquor and a hunger for contact, but there are ulterior motives at play on both sides. The incessantly chronicling Jo’s expectations arise from a class assignment that has her stumped, whereas Jules, the last scion in a long line of profoundly unlucky individuals, appears to finally be ahead of the eight ball — he’s predicted a meteor strike sufficient to wipe out nearly all life on Earth. And it’s happening tonight.
January 19, 2013