Much Ado About Nothing

Director Matthew Earnest understands the importance of making Shakespeare feel interesting and fresh to an audience. Still, his Much Ado About Nothing at the Hilberry Theatre may not give the Bard quite enough credit. There’s no questioning the company’s playful mastery of the fussy and ultimately harmless love stories at the base of this comedy, but on the other side of the coin, the director deliberately inserts major obstacles into his interpretation, about which the best that can be said is that the production largely survives them.

Few couples in Shakespeare are as dynamic and fun as fierce combatants Beatrice and Signor Benedick, and Vanessa Sawson and Dave Toomey easily do them justice. The pair is tactically exhaustive, just as likely to wield calculated dismissiveness as a snarling retort; their variation leaves room for fruitful exploration when the characters are duped — or, more accurately, nudged — into falling hard for each other. Love’s more traditional course finds footing in the affably dumbfounded Signor Claudio (Christopher Ellis) and unfailingly good Hero (Carollette Phillips), who manage to broadcast they are meant for each other without confining the characters to their numbingly pure affection.

Click to read more ...

A Day in Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine

The danger in presenting a double bill is that the format encourages comparison of one half with another. This is borne out in a big way in the Hilberry Theatre production of A Day in Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine (book and lyrics by Dick Vosburgh; music by Frank Lazarus): as directed by Michael J. Barnes, the show’s second half is a madcap comedy that plays to the performers’ strengths. There’s also an hour of song and dance.

The greater of the two is A Night in the Ukraine, the second act. An homage to the Marx Brothers’ comedy legacy in film, the story takes Chekhov’s The Bear and, to no one’s surprise, runs roughshod over it. The supporting performances are notable, in particular the young Nina (Danielle Cochrane) and Constantine (Alec Barbour), who fall in love at first sight, suffer a divisive misunderstanding, and reconcile in record time and without a smidgen of awareness of their staggering cliché. Loreli Sturm’s Mrs. Pavlenko is a willing, padding-stuffed butt of jokes by characters more wily than she — which is most of them. However, the starring Marx approximators deserve the greatest accolades: Dave Toomey is a steadfast lost-in-translation Gino; unmistakably greasepainted Andrew Papa puts his own wisecracking spin on the exhausting semantic gymnastics of Serge B. Samovar; and Carollette Phillips excels without uttering a syllable as the intent, obfuscating, hilariously vacant-faced Carlo. Moments of lull stand out only because the pacing generally gambols, and the combination of word play and physical/visual spectacle keeps the comedy rolling through a deliberately unimportant and improbable plot.

Click to read more ...

The Cider House Rules (Parts 1 and 2)

For its final production(s) of the season, Hilberry Theatre goes what can only be described as “full throttle.” The Cider House Rules is a massive undertaking, a play so long the writers divided it into two still-long parts, which the company rehearsed in tandem (under the dual direction of Blair Anderson and Lavinia Hart), premiered on consecutive nights, and performs on alternating days. Conceived by Tom Hulce, Jane Jones, and Peter Parnell, and adapted by Parnell, the play is less a dramatization of John Irving’s novel of the same name, and more the book itself brought directly to the stage. With liberal use of shared, overlapping narration, the literary feel of the story translates well to this expansive following of numerous lives over several decades. The result is a powerful, dogmatic drama concerning the evolution of moral character and its application in the face of real life’s never-planned developments.

The plot of the stage play differs substantially from the 1999 film The Cider House Rules, despite their originating from the same source. This script is precisely faithful to the intricate text, which — in addition to better fleshing out nearly every character and relationship and fully formed motivation — can be shockingly frank about the issue of abortion. Set in the early to middle twentieth century, in a Maine orphanage/hospital where Dr. Wilbur Larch delivers unwanted babies for which he must find homes and also secretly and illegally terminates unwanted pregnancies, the show does not shy away from describing abortions gone awry and related medical procedures. However difficult it may be to hear (and see, using pantomime behind sheet-draped women on gurneys), the perspective is extremely relevant and necessary in order for the viewer to understand how Dr. Larch has come to believe that providing safe and medically sound abortions is the Lord’s work. Irving’s writing leaves little room to question; the alternative to safe abortion by a medical professional is made gruesomely clear. Indeed, the narrative never deviates from its support of the good doctor: even when his protégé, Homer Wells, doubts that he can personally perform an abortion, Homer clearly states that he has no problem with Larch continuing the practice. Among other stories and themes, this major one dovetails with young Homer’s lifelong aim to be “of use”; the story elegantly illustrates the gap between personal moral qualms and the needs of others —when no one else can or will help them, which prevails?

Click to read more ...

The Misanthrope

Molière’s The Misanthrope is a vicious comedy on every front. The superior title character shoots from the hip, letting fly with his every scathing criticism; even among the “polite” members of society, gossip and back-biting abounds. Yet the blithely two-faced practices of seventeenth-century French aristocracy are well tolerated by its practitioners: in a world where as many as four men can pursue the same woman simultaneously — in the same room, even — without batting an eye, certain social niceties do seem to be useful. In the Hilberry Theatre’s current production of the Timothy Mooney translation, directed by Jesse Merz, whether unflinching honesty or perpetual facetiousness is the better tactic is not definitively answered, but it’s quite obvious which side has more fun.

The misanthrope is Alceste, played here by Andrew Papa as a brilliant but sour boil on the derriere of his social circle. He’s a special breed of imperious boor who offends people so thoroughly, they sue him for the injury, as prompted by a delightful scene with foppish supplicant Oronte (Alan Ball). In fact, Alceste might willingly withdraw from humankind altogether, were it not for his inconvenient adoration of the coquettish, popular Célimène (Vanessa Sawson), who strings him along as readily as she does her numerous other suitors. The discourse among these players and their contemporaries is so artificial, they’re able to converse frankly about the role disingenuousness serves in social convention; it appears to be among their favorite pastimes after complimenting each other disingenuously. In contrast to the practiced airs and flourishes of the others, Papa’s Alceste sulks and frowns, sometimes enjoying lording his opinion over others, but more frequently miserable.

Click to read more ...

Richard III

Director Alison C. Vesely's concept for Richard III at the Hilberry Theatre is curious. Granted, this is hardly the first time a production has gone the self-aware theater-qua-theater route, and the initial beats featuring a crew member voicing cues and the decidedly pre-show performers filing in and preparing for the spectacle are both well-executed and thought-provoking. (One potential instigator for the choice is the double-, triple-, and quadruple-casting required of a script with a body count higher than the Hilberry's student roster, and costume designer Christa Koerner adds a nod to the artifice by clothing each actor in a base layer of black, over which other elements are swapped in.) What's curious about this carefully detailed backstage perspective is that it largely disappears after the first scene. Fortunately, the show beneath the concept, helmed by a powerhouse lead performance, succeeds without any added layers.

Shakespeare's history of England's King Richard III follows a physically deformed member of the royal lineage bent on grabbing his family's power with both hands and at any measure, primarily by bumping off everyone whose claim to the throne might threaten his own dubious one. In the title role, Edmund Alyn Jones is a fascinating villain, full of energy and conniving, eager to level with the audience that even he can hardly believe his successes. Showing both physical and emotional mastery of the role, Jones's Richard is a dragging, smirking, frighteningly intelligent monster, somehow as appealing as he is contemptible. His desperate hunger for power, and his even more desperate need to keep his tenuous power once obtained, makes for a satisfying arc and buoys a long two acts.

Click to read more ...