Review of Carrie Fisher’s ‘Wishful Drinking’

 

By JOHN DeMERS 

As most of the civilized (meaning tabloid-reading) world knows by now, Carrie Fisher is a mess. The daughter of “Hollywood sweethearts” Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, Fisher emblazoned her image onto pop culture as Princess Leia in the original Star Wars trilogy and then largely disappeared into a maelstrom of drink, drugs and manic-depression. Now she’s back, at our own Hobby Center, telling us all about it. And we laugh. 

Having performed the one-woman show called Wishful Drinking for several years now, Fisher is utterly at home in front of us and, seemingly, at home within her own life story. While smooth enough, and definitely scripted, the show takes time for audience questions and even calls somebody onstage for a funny bit, as a comedian might do at some down-on-its-heels mid-America resort. All the same, when she isn’t shaking her head and asking “Now where was I?”, Fisher is clearly in control of her material – whether it’s her childhood against the backdrop of her father’s leaving her mother to marry Elizabeth Taylor or her own on-again-off-again dating-marriage-dating with songwriter Paul Simon. (“If you ever get a chance to have Paul Simon write a song about you,” she deadpans, “I hope you’ll please say Yes.” 

Despite being funny for nearly all of its two acts, the show does touch on serious issues. After all, being an alcoholic and a drug addict is serious, as is being a manic-depressive, as is being in rehab or being “invited” (as she puts it) to a mental hospital. Fisher has some intelligent and hard-won truths to share about these experiences, their causes and effects, demonstrating the investment of effort that comes via solitude and no small amount of therapy. The 50-something woman with a daughter and two ex-husbands who emerges here is not specifically religious but seems spiritual enough, seeing herself not only as part of an ongoing family saga but, in some way, part of the universe. And she offers us her thoughts in small enough doses that they never grate. At one point, Fisher refers to her show as “pandering” and “people-pleasing,” but Wishful Drinking is that only as a finished product, not as an ongoing process. And, as they say, only in a good way. 

Wishful Drinking, naturally, includes dozens of smart, sarcastic bits about her turn as Princess Leia, including director George Lucas’ extravagant merchandising thereof. “George owns my image,” Fisher offers at one point, with the perfect timing of a Catskills comic. “Every time I look at myself in the mirror, I have to send him a few bucks.” And there is something of “name it and claim it” here as well, all delivered on a simple living room set with a large backdrop for projections of stills and videos from her life. 

In the end, we see a lot of ourselves in Carrie Fisher, despite her upbringing among what she jokingly refers to as “simple people of the land” and her own quasi-ridiculous life writing us Postcards from the Edge (the title of her book that became a movie) ever since. Wishful Drinking is fun and funny, sad and a little bit wise. It makes the essential crossover for any work of popular art, from “talking about me” to “talking about us.”

New/Old Spenser from a True Ace

By JOHN DeMERS

ROBERT B. PARKER’S LULLABY. A Spenser Novel by Ace Atkins. Putnam, $26.95.

When crime writer Robert B. Parker died at his desk in January 2010, many observers noted that America had lost two treasures: the writer himself and his best known creation, the smartassed, quick-fisted and profoundly moral Boston PI with only one name, Spenser. “Like the English poet,” Spenser would always explain, as the generations of villains and victims turned and nobody knew who he even meant.

Now, thanks to good old American capitalism, it seems America has lost only one treasure after all.

In the way these things work more and more, a younger crime writer named Ace Atkins (who appropriately now cites Parker as his foundational inspiration) has been hired to keep the Spenser series alive – just as Michael Brandman has been hired to push ahead with Parker’s other biggest success, starring troubled small town police chief Jesse Stone. With the publication May 1 of the new Spenser novel, I tucked into and enjoyed the new Jesse as well, Robert B. Parker’s Killing the Blues. And yes, it absolutely is amazing what they can do these days!

If at times Atkins (a successful author in his own right, based on a farm outside Oxford, Miss., a long way from Spenser’s gritty, snow-and-ice Boston) seems to be parodying the great man, it’s a loving parody. And really, in his later years, like most writing institutions from Twain to Hemingway to Updike, Parker was accused of parodying himself. There is, in fact, so much homage in all hardboiled fiction – Atkins who’s channeling Parker who was always channeling Raymond Chandler – it’s hard to say where one set of hard fists ends and the other begins. What’s important, it seems to me after reading past midnight to finish Robert B. Parker’s Lullaby in one sitting – what’s important is that The Work goes on.

And for this, Atkins’ first outing in Spenser’s shoes, everybody shows up to help us feel at home: good guys Benson and Quirk (who sometimes help the bad guys), bad guys Vinnie Morris and Tony Marcus (who sometimes help the good guys), Spenser’s analytical Jewish shrink girlfriend Susan – and yes, even Hawk, the super-sized black man who speaks hilarious black dialect till even a gumshoe named after a dead-white-guy English poet can’t help joining in. In the universe Spenser and Parker made their own – a familiar one for American noir, but simply done lots better – there are indeed absolute right and absolute wrong, there are guys who choose to devote their lives to either, and amidst chaos, corruption, confusion and sudden violence, there’s really only one man who can set things straight.

In Lullaby, the issues could not be clearer: a now-14-year-old girl who first watched her mother fade into men and drugs and finally watched her carried off to be murdered hires our hero (for a dozen doughnuts, in the city of Dunkin’, no less) to prove the guy who went to prison didn’t do it. There you have it – the failings of a system that doesn’t care, the loss of innocence of a child, a mystery in need of solving, a wrong in need of righting. As Susan is ever-quick to point out, there are layers within layers to all this, with even the happy endings having plenty of sad. Just as the Sox get rained out at Fenway in Lullaby when they’re actually about the win one, the world of Spenser is filled with dead bodies and some very wistful truths.

Whatever I think of all the “dead white guys” still writing new versions of their original bestsellers, we are lucky that Spenser – increasingly like Boston’s own Dark Knight – still drinks excellent Scotch, whips up some very quirky meals, and awaits our troubled call.

Photo: Ace Atkins. Not Robert B. Parker.

The Bard’s Final ‘Tempest’ by CTC

By JOHN DeMERS

Classical Theatre Company, Obsidian Art Space

As almost certainly William Shakespeare’s final play, The Tempest has always struck me as lovely in a wistful sort of way – and it did so even before I knew its presumed place among his works. Its central character, a displaced Italian duke now left with a remote island to rule and (not incidentally) a daughter to marry off, relies on what he memorably calls “this rough magic” to move people, places and events around. Perhaps as a ruler might. Definitely as a playwright does. 

In a lovely, measured and meaningful production directed by executive artistic director John Johnston, Houston’s only theater company devoted exclusively to the classics sets these themes before us in a way we’re likely to enjoy and carry home. At one level, The Tempest is a “typical” Shakespeare play, with considerable investment in making us laugh in between bouts of romance and deeper philosophical eloquence. The folks at Classical have no fear of slapstick, since apparently the Bard “feared it not”: at times, there’s enough screaming and running around to resemble a 1950s Three Stooges short. Yet without the budget to achieve much through special effects, the cast and crew rely on Shakespeare’s language to support plotlines and emotions more fully seen earlier in Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth and Othello – all of which were and are considered “tragedies.” 

The single largest act of interpretation here is setting the action on a real “island” formed of human disposable products, sometimes called “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” Still, if you fear somebody is hammering the Bard’s last words into a foreign shape to further the cause of environmentalism – as I initially feared – you needn’t. The Patch, in the end, is merely an interesting place to design a play. And since Classical Theatre Company is extremely faithful to the written text, the subject never actually comes up. Truth is, the Bible has far more environmentalism than the collected works of Shakespeare. 

As Prospero, the Bard stand-in who rules the island with spells learned from his beloved books, Philip Lehl is remarkable. He brings credibility to a largely incredible situation and milks the basic human emotions here for all they’re worth: an old man struggling with bitterness over wrongs done in the past, a father wishing happiness for his daughter arriving at womanhood, and yes, a ruler/creator assessing what’s right and wrong about the twin acts of ruling and creating. 

Since the two women in the cast don’t even get to play women all the time, this is basically a Guy Show. Standouts in addition to Lehl include Kregg Dailey as the ever-slithering and snarling sub-human slave Caliban and Dylan Godwin in a wildly comic turn as drunken Stephano. Xzavien Hollins brings quite a presence to the role of conspiratorial Antonio (think of him as Iago Lite) and we certainly look forward to seeing this actor with more interesting things to do. 

As for the women, Jacqui Gray shimmers convincingly as Miranda, the daughter discovering her first love, and also embraces physical comedy as Trinculo, a zany shipwrecked sailor. As Ariel, the spirit who executes Prospero’s every wish on the promise he will set her free, Blair Knowles borrows moves from Chinese opera, martial arts, classical ballet and good old American cheerleading. It’s an odd, not always convincing way to be Ariel. Yet it sits comfortably enough within this heartfelt, thought-provoking but most of all entertaining farewell from one of history’s brightest theatrical lights.

Photos by Jan Saenz: (top) Philip Lehl as Prospero; (bottom) Kregg Dailey as Caliban.

Our Review of HGO’s ‘The Bricklayer’

By JOHN DeMERS

Some years back, in one of the better self-assessments on record, Houston Grand Opera decided there really were problems with performing only works by “dead European white guys.” All kinds of problems, from the “barriers to entry” of where you perform and how much the tickets cost to what this says about millions of other lives that aren’t dead or European or white. Houston Grand Opera decided to act as though it belongs to Houston, which recently was cited as the most ethnically diverse city in America.

In addition to debuting the first-ever mariachi opera a while back, HGO moved ahead from that self-assessment to commission works that, both together and separately, reflect the many languages and skin colors of its population. To say that The Bricklayer is Iran’s “turn” is simplistic but true, since anything touching on Iran these days must reflect daily newspaper coverage of its theocratic regime, its nuclear agenda and, yes, even the youth uprisings that have attracted global attention and at least nodding support.

With music by American composer Gregory Spears and a libretto by Farnoosh Moshiri (based on her short story), The Bricklayer tells a tale that’s probably all-too-familiar among Iranian-American families. An older generation comes to Houston to live with a younger generation, which naturally enough has a still-younger generation that’s even more American. The reason: the aging parents’ son has recently been executed by firing squad as he stood against a brick wall, presumably for taking part in some act of protest. Three generations of this family have different layers and levels of suffering, and this brief (37-minute) chamber opera serves up little more than a vignette of their efforts to carry on.

Spears’ music makes only limited efforts to incorporate traditional Persian sounds into the score, at least as they connect with non-Persian ears. Occasionally, the plaintive sound of the ney makes it through, but mostly you hear familiar instruments like piano, harp and violin. What won’t be familiar to many opera-goers is the atonal, modernist quality of this music, which sidesteps ongoing melodies at any cost and sometimes seems to treat vocal line and its accompaniment as unrelated beings. Presumably they are related, at least to Spears’ way of thinking, but they don’t seem to recognize each other much.

With direction by Tara Faircloth, the story seen onstage seems merely a piece of something larger. It suggests, it evokes – but it doesn’t ever resolve. It tells you what it’s about in some often-lovely lyrics about tulips growing from the blood of young martyrs (healing from tragic loss, hope for the future, the human quest for freedom), but it doesn’t have much to say once it raises these issues.

The performances are fine, especially Christina Boosahda as Houston resident Bita, Eve Gigliotti and Jon Kolbert as her suffering parents, and Bray Wilkins as the mysterious and presumably imaginary Bricklayer who promises that someday there will be no more brick walls for children to be shot down against. But somewhere near the end of this opera’s oh-so-limited running time, we should have heard why the new generation (named Shahrzad, after ancient Persian storyteller Scheherazade) can, should and must live to preserve her family’s story of suffering and rebirth. And we might have heard that same little girl, on record early as hating to speak to her grandfather in Farsi instead of English, say something meaningful like “Grandpa, speak to me in Farsi. I don’t know why, but I love the sound of the words.”

Operas need to be more than family snapshots. So much about The Bricklayer seems to be happening before and especially after the flash.

After its HGO debut last night at the Wortham Center, the opera will be performed tonight at the Arab American Cultural & Community Center, Sunday at the Nowruz Festival at Discovery Green and Tuesday at Baker Ripley Community Center.

Our Review of ‘Red’ at the Alley

By JOHN DeMERS

As written by John Logan and directed by Jackson Gay, Red is an intense, painful and masterfully entertaining look at what in this world passes for artistic genius. By spending 90-plus minutes in the New York studio with abstract expressionist Mark Rothko as he struggles to complete the first great commission of his career, we understand a little better the costs associated (often so dramatically, in life after life) with that gift.

Red is a two-person drama that’s been a huge hit on Broadway (at the beginning, starring film veteran Alfred Molina) and the winner of most playwriting awards that exist. It is, in every sense of the term, “talky” – since relatively little happens during the show, and most of that is mixing paint, changing out pictures, stretching canvas over wooden frames, priming surfaces, the day-to-day drudgery that makes art possible. But oh what monumental talk it is.

Capsuling the two years between the first day on the job of a young assistant (who of course wants to be an artist himself) and the day he gets “fired,” Logan’s play nails this single relationship with a laser: the bursts of humor intended and otherwise, the slow warming-up to familiarity with each other’s life stories, the evolution of protege into a “human being” (one of Rothko’s favorite phrases) with his own unique vision. For all but the final scene, the artist does the bulk of this talking, to the point the script could almost be the sort of monologue actors choose for auditions. Boastful, angry, filled with conceits, delusions and occasional self-mockery (“Yes, all artists should starve. Except me.”), profoundly envious (“Pollock, Pollock, Pollock!”), Logan’s version of Rothko rings absolutely true, whether we know a thing about the artist or his work, or not.

Accomplished New York actor Scott Wentworth, who actually played Romeo at the Alley way back in 1981, makes the lead role his own, pouring in some of the tragedy he knows from doing so much Shakespeare. As this Rothko is acutely aware (some would say: too aware) of his place on the continuum of great artists, writing and acting styles rooted in the classics are right for the moment. From the instant we notice the aging Rothko sitting silently before his canvases with a drink and a cigarette as we file into the theater, we know we’re encountering an actor living in his character’s skin. For long periods of time watching Red, in fact, we forget that Wentworth isn’t Mark Rothko. Only the never-quite-forgotten fact that Rothko killed himself in 1970 keeps us rooted in the real.

Young actor Jay Sullivan is perfect as assistant Ken, he of the parents who were murdered on a snowy-white day when he was 7, he who gets things off on the totally wrong foot by answering Rothko’s inquiry about his favorite artist… “Jackson Pollock,” he who gets to grow under the gaze of Rothko as father figure – even as Rothko insists that’s precisely what he’s not. “I’m your employer,” the great man rants more than once. Every Shakespearean in the house knows what “protesting too much” sounds like.

Gay’s direction is swift and spare, accurately reflected by Takeshi Kata’s set design showing a single high-ceilinged room in which large-format art can be done, studied, redone, reconsidered, fussed over – and never quite sent forth into a world of audiences Rothko describes with clinical, often hilarious depredation. If you’re the least bit interested in 20^th century art, or any kind of art, or any kind of artist, there’s much to learn from and enjoy by watching the Alley’s production of Red.

Photos by Jann Whaley: Scott Wentworth and Jay Sullivan

Our Review of ‘Love Never Dies’ on Film

By JOHN DeMERS

I wish I could tell you to go see Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Love Never Dies on Broadway, but it never made it there. I wish I could tell you to go see the musical in London, but it closed. Really, I wish I could tell you the sequel to Phantom of the Opera is on its way to the Hobby Center, but as of now it’s not. Truth is, I’d begun to despair of ever seeing Love Never Dies – until last night.

The London production opening in 2010 was received by critics on that side of the pond (and this being Andrew Lloyd Webber and his Phantom, on this side as well), as a bunch of great songs in search of a story. A reworking or two helped mightily along the way, I’m told. And I’m persuaded that’s the case, since the show’s original narrative problems come through even on the CD filled with some of this composer’s grandest music.  Last week and again last night, a filmed version of a reworked production from Melbourne, Australia, was shown in movie theaters across America; and based on what I saw, there’s no reason on earth this show shouldn’t find the admiration it deserves.

Of course, talking about the things that happen to a musical on its way to fame and fortune are pretty much “inside baseball.” A thousand little things are tweaked – I mean, really little things – but they end up making a huge difference. In the case of Love Never Dies, the problems all related to plot and character, never to music. Yet plot and character are, for all the hit songs a composer can pour in, what make audiences fall in love.

In Love, ten years have passed since the terrible events of the original Phantom, ending with the destruction of that opera house in Paris and the death (or disappearance) of the man  behind it all. Opera star Christine has married Raoul, and the couple has a 10-year-old son named Gustave. Raoul also has a major drinking and gambling problem, which keeps the family perennially in debt. But…

On the far side of the Atlantic, at a beach destination called Coney Island, a mysterious figure known only as Mr. Y has developed an early 1900s version of the theme park, an entertainment spectacle filled with music, thrill rides, freak shows and dancing. Did I mention music? And it’s this Mr. Y who lures Christine, Raoul and Gustave across the ocean for one performance, promising the typically huge American-style payday. Is Mr. Y an opportunity to pay off all those debts and start over fresh as a family? Or is his the remembered voice of Christine’s past, her very real present and, just maybe, her future?

Interesting stuff, really. And in the Melbourne production directed by Simon Phillips with remarkable sets and costumes by Gabriela Tylesova, highly entertaining and seductive stuff as well. I’m glad Phillips and the composer decided to work together on making this film (which, happily, will be available as a DVD).

Love Never Dies is a wonderland of a musical score, arguably Andrew Lloyd Webber’s best, and that’s saying a lot. There are two classic blockbuster songs: the Phantom’s “Till I Hear You Sing” (filling in for “Music of the Night,” which admirably is not cribbed from once) and Christine’s title aria (basically Puccini on a plate). There are several other fine lyrical moments, some of which see Christine singing with her young son, which doesn’t happen in musicals much. And there are several other fun, lively production numbers evoking American popular music of the early 20^th century, clearly a fascination of any British composer who, like this one, bothers to listen.

I can’t tell you where or how Love Never Dies will turn up next. But I can promise you that as sung in Melbourne by Ben Lewis as the Phantom and Anna O’Byrne as Christine, this music deserves to be part of our shared songbook.  Yes, the original Phantom will keep on keeping on – a movie trailer last night breathlessly called it “the longest-running Broadway musical… EVER!” But Love Never Dies finally adds meaningfully to the story, deepens our understanding of the characters and profoundly touches our hearts. Starting with Andrew Lloyd Webber himself, all involved deserve plenty of credit for that.

Our Review of ‘Million Dollar Quartet’

By JOHN DeMERS

I’ve never been much for talk about reincarnation, one way or the other. But if three of rock n’ roll’s four greatest early superstars found themselves reincarnated for one night only (and then “cousin” Jerry Lee showed up, just to raise some hell), the result probably would be a lot like Million Dollar Quartet.

The raucous musical event, in which real musicians play a real concert of hits by Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis, just for us, was at the start no guaranteed hit. Broadway, we’re told, was sick of “jukebox musicals” and had turned thumbs-down on the last several to open. Still, the sheer audacity of Million Dollar won folks over night after night, presumably before the producers’ bank accounts ran dry, and now the show packs ‘em in nightly in several cities. Thanks to a national tour, that means Houston and the Hobby Center, which for a little over 90 minutes gets turned into Sun Records in Memphis on a Tuesday night shortly before Christmas 1956.

On that night, according to a small footnote to rock history, the four greatest stars to get their start from Sun’s redneck visionary Sam Phillips gathered and sang together for the first and only time. It was a sign of the times, when gas was only 25 cents of gallon, that Phillips didn’t call the impromptu house band his Billion Dollar Quartet. Each of the artists went on to bigger and better than little ole Sun Records; but they (and now we) never forgot the night they, almost by accident, honored the birth of modern American music.

Think tribute band on steroids. Think impersonators and then some. Think solid acting on the level of Michelle Williams in “My Week with Marilyn.” Think about all those things, and then let yourself get blown out of your seat by the youthful whirlwind that is this music. There’s a satisfying little plot weaving the songs together – about the night itself, about the moves each musician was making to build his career, about the sadness we now know awaited all of them – but when you’re in the theater with Million Dollar Quartet, it’s the music that matters.

Cody Slaughter may have the toughest job, being an “Elvis impersonator” in a world full of them. Still, by setting Elvis as an already-disillusioned young man visiting Memphis from Hollywood in 1956, Slaughter is able to sidestep virtually all of the older, fatter, more pathetic clichés that most impersonators build their acts around. Lee Ferris is at the other end of the spectrum as Carl Perkins (he of “Blue Suede Shoes”), since not many remember what the guy looked or acted like. In fact, his character seems to fear that will happen in the course of the show.

If it’s possible to have even more bass in a man’s voice than Johnny Cash did, Derek Keeling brings it to his singing and acting as the Man in Black. And what can you say about Martin Kaye as Jerry Lee Lewis? He’s wild? He’s crazy? He’s a tad possessed and satanic? Anything you can say about Kaye playing the role is exactly what most folks in 1956 were saying about The Killer himself. There are sly insider references to the controversy and tragedy that awaited Lewis in his personal life, and several knowing asides about the Good Book as preached by his cousin Jimmy Swaggart; but all the things we know that came later are gauzed over by the musical mists of time.

Million Dollar Quartet works because it runs on a single, simple belief: We’re born and later we die, and in between we make our music. Still, if the music we make is incredible enough, it lives on for generations after us. Trust me, the music these guys play each night is more than that incredible.

Review of Last Night’s ‘Dinner with Friends’

Stark Naked Theatre Company, Studio 101 thru March 11 

By JOHN DeMERS 

If you’ve ever been in a romantic relationship for more than 10 minutes, there’s sure to be somewhere between one and a hundred moments in Stark Naked Theatre’s Dinner with Friends that will startle you, remind you and quite possibly indict you. The two-act play by Donald Marguiles works against its innocuous title to lay bare the large and small warfares that exist at the heart of being lovers, being friends, and growing older every damn step of the way. 

Dinner with Friends is the second production by Stark Naked, founded by local actors Philip Lehl and Kim Tobin-Lehl, who happen to be a married couple themselves, following on the heels of their dark, violent, relationship-driven outing with Strindberg called Debt Collectors. Equally and perhaps more importantly, it’s the first show produced in the Studio 101 theater space within Spring Street Studios that’s now being shared by Stark Naked, Classical Theatre Company and Mildred’s Umbrella. It’s hard to imagine a spot with more talented and passionate theater people working inside it. 

Directed with precision by Kevin Holden, himself the founder of yet another company called Horse Head, Dinner with Friends delineates the loves, hates, fidelities and infidelities of two couples – as sometimes is the case, a married man and woman who twelve years earlier introduced two friends of theirs and now have to watch the demise of the marriage they helped engineer. The fact that both couples have kids who have grown up together only makes matters worse. If it accomplishes nothing else, Dinner is masterful in the way it moves the calculation of the “toll” from a marital breakup far beyond the two people actually breaking up. As someone says quite logically, divorce is “like a death.” And despite all the talk of “friends,” this one is clearly a death in the family. 

The play is organized – a tad too neatly perhaps but hey, this is theater – into a sequence of conversations, most one-on-one. We see the intrusion of The Bad News, followed by a selection of angry-sad-hopeful-resentful-boastful conversations about it. Marguiles does a convincing job of making his men and women totally different and ultimately foreign organisms, along lines that are by now all too familiar. The woman hug, kiss, resent, complain and talk about (or around) everything. The men joke, drool about sex, high-five and only seldom talk about anything meaningful at all. The gulf between those two types of lives is, of course, a major subject of the play. 

Drake Simpson and Tobin-Lehl get the bulk of the histrionics here, since they are the couple splitting open before our eyes. From the first time Beth breaks down in tears, telling her friends Karen and Gabe why her husband really isn’t at dinner, to the final scenes in which she and Tom get to gloat over their new (or maybe not so new) sexual relationships, the pair serves up an emotional rollercoaster. Their bedroom brawl in Act I, filled with screaming, cursing, pushing, slapping, punching and even spitting may prove a tad too real for those who’ve been there-done that.   

And that means that, as the “surviving” couple, Lehl and Shelley Calene-Black come off as quieter and calmer, more “married.” It’s a credit to both the brilliance of the script and the sensitivity of the performances that, quite often, they strike us as no less desperate than their warring friends. Lehl in particular gets to say some important things, a few to his wife but most to his buddy in a rare moment of finding a voice, about the sacrifices we make to make a relationship persevere till death-do-us-part. 

Dinner with Friends is frighteningly intimate, as though we in the audience are simply invisible in a very normal room with people who are more normal than we’d like to think. The fact that the Spring Street space is intimate as well only makes the experience more painful and more memorable.

Photos by Gabriella Nissen: (top) Calene-Black and Lehl; (bottom)Simpson and Tobin-Lehl.

Our Review of Chekhov’s ‘Seagull’ at the Alley

By JOHN DeMERS

It is a great truth of the theater – and of all other art forms, in one way or the other – that what was once “revolutionary” becomes “classic” if it’s good enough to stick around. And then, for the rest of its life on any stage, the piece surprises us, going as we are to see a “classic,” with bits and pieces of how “revolutionary” it actually is.

Certainly Anton Chekhov is the poster child for such notions, the Russian author active at the end of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, particularly in his four great plays for a wildly avant garde troupe called the Moscow Art Theater. Today, his comedy-drama The Seagull (now on display in Houston courtesy of the Alley Theatre) has all the costumes and mindsets of an earlier day. Yet it can still surprise us with how contemporary it is, still shake us up when it wants to.

If modern plays of this sort, for a variety of reasons starting with financial, tend to have only two or three characters, Chekhov paints with a broader brush. His plays, and The Seagull in particular, are set among larger groups. What’s more, in ways we don’t always understand, these larger groups reflect several layers of pre-revolutionary Russian society, from serfs and servants up to a forming professional class, with room for students and other “radicals” along the way. At times, you almost expect Lenin himself to stroll in, even if he’d be a 14-year-old. The voices are right, the attitudes are right, the dynamics are right in these groups – at least as best we non-Russians can tell.

The Seagull is almost entirely about love, but (with apologies to Valentine’s Day) the portrait isn’t pretty. At no point, and in no relationship, is anyone particularly happy unless they’re stupid or self-deluded, and seldom is anyone actually with the one they wish they were. There are echoes here of Chekhov’s most masterful short story, usually translated as “The Lady with the Pet Dog,” about a bored and boring family man’s life-affirming fling with a younger woman at a resort town on the Black Sea.

For this production, on the Alley’s intimate Neuhaus Stage, costumes and furniture are in place – but not the typical leafy backdrops that make some Chekhov productions feel luminous, even when they’re about loss, alcoholism, social upheaval and suicide. As such, this production feels stark, at times almost post-apocalyptic. It’s like a period piece caught on film, but with all the natural backgrounds painted out. It makes things tighter, more claustrophobic.

As directed with finesse and sensitivity for the brilliant language by Alley artistic director Gregory Boyd, the cast can be divided into two basic groups. The older characters are played by company stalwarts, and played with all the style and grace they’ve taught us to expect. James Black is perfect as famous writer Trigorin, whose careless infidelity with a sensitive younger woman dreaming of life beyond this countryside drives what plot there is, as are Jeffrey Bean as the blustery old Sorin, Josie de Guzman as Trigorin’s wife Arkadina, and Todd Waite as the local doctor named Dorn. Even when little is going on, the conversations among these characters start and stop with disconnects that prefigure Becket and Ionesco, and they are worth the price of your ticket.

And while the skill level simply isn’t as high or as uniform, there’s very much a younger generation in The Seagull, and Chekhov gives them a lot of the water to carry. These actors mostly seem up to the task: Erica Lutz as Nina who comes to identify with the title’s senselessly killed seagull, Karl Glusman as the doomed young writer Konstantin, and Rachael Tice as black-clad Masha (whom Chekhov gives one of his funniest lines ever, “I’m in mourning for my life!”).

You might take that line and argue that it’s true for many Chekhov characters, in both his plays and his short stories. Yet in this sterling Alley production, as surely in all the best ones going back to Moscow Art, these tales of “mourning” are etched with fascinating detail, clear-eyed sympathy for the human condition and plenty of raucous humor. And that will always strike us as more than a little “revolutionary.”

Photo by T. Charles Erickson: The Alley “Seagull” cast, with only one member of the younger generation.

Our Review of HGO’s ‘La Traviata’

By JOHN DeMERS

As a card-carrying member of opera’s Old Chestnuts (big thanks here to my late father, who made me invariably think of them as that), Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata has many reasons for being produced worldwide, year after year, and indeed century after century.

For starters, it’s one of the art form’s rare stories that everybody can believe and invest in. Though set in glittering Paris of the 1800s, it portrays elements of romantic love that most have experienced in their own lives. According to opera history, Verdi himself was experiencing a similar story just as he was setting Alexandre Dumas’ La Dame aux Camelias to his own brand of stirring, passionate, lyrical music. Maybe it helped. For another thing, La Traviata’s front-and-center role of courtesan Violetta Valery has a wonderful way of creating divas, the kind based on art instead of attitude.

That, more or less, is what happened last night at Houston Grand Opera’s moving (if intellectually strained) production. In that age-old showbiz tradition, Russian-born soprano Albina Shagimuratova walked onto the Wortham Center stage as a singing actress, and left it close to three hours later as a star. All members of the cast received enthusiastic applause, especially since many understood that tenor Bryan Hymel had been called in to take over the male lead something like three days earlier. But that unique Texas blend of classy “Brava!” and hootin’ and hollerin’ was reserved for Shagimuratova, who has been embraced as “local artist” since her days with HGO Studio.

Despite barriers thrown up by British director Daniel Slater, last seen here with Lohengrin in 2009, this Violetta was everything one should be, both dramatically and vocally. She seemed alternately filled with bravado and vulnerability, a woman who seems to know she’s dying more than in some productions but who reacts to this and rages against it with heartbreaking intensity. For once given coloratura fireworks that paint character rather than simply show off singing, Shagimuratova displayed an almost-breakable wonder in each and every note. Her Act I anthem, “Sempre libera,” was a showstopper. And by the end, as Violetta breathes her last in the odd manner Slater  devised, no one watching could doubt she truly loved this young man Alfredo, that she made the sacrifice she makes for him out of love, and that she prays God will thank her with the forgiveness she seeks with a checked past but a pure, penitent heart.

Born in New Orleans but a veteran of opera houses across Europe, including La Scala in Milan and Covent Garden in London, Hymel delivered a convincing presence to the role of Alfredo, his sufferings at the hands of his life’s great love very close to the surface. When, on her deathbed, Violetta prays that he will find a beautiful young girl and marry her, it was all the audience could manage not to shout “No!” right along with him. Hymel’s singing was impassioned and technically first-rate, a particular joy in his Act I “Brindisi” drinking song and his duets with Violetta. Giovanni Meoni was terrific as Alfredo’s father, Georgio Germont – though his balding head made me nostalgic for the tufts of hair sprouting from a crumpled hat that were  the late Robert Merrill’s signature in the role. Meoni took second to nobody, however, when singing his famous lyrical invitation for his son to leave a life of sin and return home, “Di Provenza il Mar.”

Now, about Slater’s direction… It’s starts out cinematic and logical enough, using the brittle sighs of Verdi’s overture (brilliantly drawn out by music director Patrick Summers) as a present frame for a past narrative. In movie terms, this opening dissolves into an extended flashback. Yet within that completely effective and non-intrusive storytelling trick, Slater intrudes again. And again. And again.

Unsatisfied with flashing back, or even giving Violetta a lookalike ghost to haunt her with approaching death and the occasional camelia, this director from time to time paints the flashback as being driven half-mad by the woman’s fevers. Her ever-celebrating friends, in this production, slink and slither around ballrooms in ways that are interesting as choreography but not helpful, and even Alfredo himself gets caught up in some kind of hallucination later on, a fantasy about matadors and bulls. At least Slater got the second part right.

By the time Violetta is due to collapse and die, she walks instead across the open room and disappears “into the light.” New Age coolness, to be sure. Yet in the process – and really, this is what’s wrong with Slater’s device – it steals precisely what we in the audience need to see and need to feel. Any production of La Traviata, even one that turns its soprano into a star, needs to end with a lover weeping over the beloved body in his arms, not with just another guy sitting alone on a couch.

Photos by Felix Sanchez: (top) Shagimuratova and Hymel; (bottom) Shagimuratova and friends.