Our Review of HGO’s New ‘La Boheme’

By JOHN DeMERS 

The irony is clear: the more magnificent the production of Puccini’s La Boheme, the more agonizing it is to watch the story approach its inevitable conclusion. When it comes to the heartbreak and, yes, agony of acclaimed British director John Caird’s new production opening Houston Grand Opera’s season, the whole thing ought to be against some kind of law. 

Given a taut, believable story built on characters we actually care about, Caird seems to enjoy every delicious collision of the raucous and the tragic – which Puccini piles into each of his youthful opera’s four acts. In fact, I doubt the funny parts of La Boheme – starving artists in Paris in the late 1800s cavorting, eating and drinking when they get a little money, ducking the landlord looking for rent – have ever seemed funnier. By pulling that off, Caird manages to focus the spotlight even more intensely on the doomed love at the narrative’s core. La Boheme lacks the layers of character, incident and emotion that this director handled so masterfully in launching Les Miserables on an unsuspecting world back in 1985; you might say he brings this new Boheme layers to spare. 

In his dramatic mission, Caird gets extraordinary support from the set design by David Farley and the lighting by Michael James Clark, which take the art being created by these very same “bohemians” in Paris at the time to heart. The entire set seems a series of paintings on canvas, some that remain stationary as frames for the action, some that turn in place to evoke scene changes, and others that drop in or fly off on cables to complete each desired picture. You might say it’s all painterly or even “pixolated,” which in a sense it is. It gives fresh meaning to the appropriate notion of “cubism,” and is breathtakingly lovely to look at too. 

Vocally, the opera belongs to American soprano Katie Van Kooten, who took on the role of doomed Mimi at London’s Covent Garden last year. At times, Van Kooten’s voice is almost too big to emanate from the usually small and preternaturally fragile Mimi – as though her swelling, hall-filling notes found their way into La Boheme from some other opera. Her portrayal works nonetheless, perhaps pointing out to me for the first time that while Mimi’s days on earth are numbered, she herself says her love is “immense as the sea.” From the center of her weakness and disease-stricken palor, we hear and we sense, in a fresh way, her boundless love. 

As Rodolfo, Dimitri Pittas’ well-modulated and graceful tenor occasionally gets lost when it runs into Van Kooten’s firepower, as it has to in some of Boheme’s most memorable romantic moments. But Pittas delivers when it counts, such as in Act I’s signature aria “Che gelida manina” or in his wrenching duet with Mimi in a snow-drifting dawn in Act III. No one seeing the unrelenting believability of this encounter could doubt the viability of musical drama, even when elsewhere it might seem silly and senseless. In a lifetime of Boheme-going, I suspect this version of Act III is the most powerful I’ll live to see. 

The rest of the cast, led by painter Marcello and his buddies Schaunard and Colline, is nothing short of amazing. Their ensemble work is terrific, the comic touches especially, which (as with the larger production) serve to underline Marcello’s jealous rages at his love Musetta and, of course, Colline’s justifiably famous farewell to his beloved overcoat, sold too late to buy medicine and other care for Mimi. Joshua Hopkins, Vuyani Mlinde and Michael Sumuel deserve high praise as these high-spirited buddies, as does HGO alum Heidi Stober as the flirt-with-a-heart-of-gold Musetta. Her “Musetta’s Waltz” in the middle of the Latin Quarter on Christmas Eve is here, as it ought to be, an audience favorite. The HGO orchestra, conducted by former HGO Studio artist Evan Rogister, finds its way to the heart of the story in ways that make La Boheme one of the most eternally affecting operas in the repertoire.

Photos for HGO by Felix Sanchez

Our Review of TUTS ‘Jekyll & Hyde’

By JOHN DeMERS

In more ways than one, each generation gets the musical it deserves. And in the case of better, more successful musicals that take on a certain iconic status, that could mean a fall from grace, for a while or forever. For a wandering, never-quite-there musical like Frank Wildhorn’s Jekyll & Hyde, however, that might mean showing up as one thing the first time and coming back later as something else.

Thus we have the latest edition, built around handsome American Idol runner-up Constantine Maroulis, now on display at the Hobby Center via Theatre Under The Stars. “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” by Robert Louis Stevenson may be one of the greatest stories ever told. But this is far, far from one of the greatest musicals ever heard.  

Yes, the show has two significant female roles – the strumpet Lucy played by Deborah Cox and the nice girl Emma played by Teal Wicks (yet another duality!) – but the evening belongs to Maroulis. After all, he gets to sing the best song, “This Is the Moment,” and he gets to have the most fun running, jumping, swaggering and snarling. His acting, in fact, is quite persuasive as the now-famous dual sides of a single personality. Maroulis plays the soft-spoken London doctor perfectly well, but then does even better as the leering Troy Polamalu of a big-hair Mr. Hyde.

The trouble with this role, however, is the trouble with the entire show: it’s one breathy showstopper after another, except that some of Wildhorn’s songs couldn’t stop a Slinky. Nothing is merely pretty, nothing is merely funny, nothing is merely useful; each time Maroulis opens his mouth, he’s screaming and shouting for the top of the Hit Parade. With his high-pitched, high-volume rock voice, the whole thing ends up being “Guy Songs” by somebody like Andrew Lloyd Webber, as sung by somebody like Aerosmith’s Stephen Tyler. 

Sadly, the girls have it even worse. Any one of their songs could be a hit – and indeed several have been, in the distant past, for the original Lucy, Linda Eder. Songs like “Someone Like You,” “Once Upon a Dream,” “In His Eyes” and “A New Life” are all cut from the same cloth as “Defying Gravity” in Wicked – big and belty, with a huge finish full of loud drums. Truth is, in a good show, there’s only room for one “Defying Gravity,” and it had better be at the end of Act I. Despite the efforts of Cox and Wicks, Jekyll & Hyde ends up being an album of different people singing pretty much the same song.

Like everything else by Wildhorn, this “new concept” of the show is eternally on its way to Broadway, and it does have some things to recommend it. There are plenty of projections, for instance; and while they may remind some of this composer’s awful Civil War that played the Alley (scruffy boys in blue and gray singing for hours in front of a Mathew Brady slide show), they are often quite effective. Stage director Jeff Calhoun – who did such a great job with Deaf West’s production of Big River – has an impressive set and much stage business to be proud of. In the end, however, this generation’s Jekyll & Hyde is another episode of American Idol. It’s cocky, contrived and conceited, every song pretending it’s the greatest moment of them all.

Photo: Deborah Cox and Co. sing ‘Bring on the Men’

Our Review of ‘Disney’s Beauty and the Beast’

By JOHN DeMERS

Anybody likely to cast cynically commercial aspersions at Disney’s efforts to turn its most profitable films into stage shows – indeed to turn once-tawdry Times Square and most of Broadway into a family-friendly Disney theme park – should hustle over to the Hobby Center and see Beauty  and the Beast. That’s Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, naturally. Onstage, this musical is what happens on those rare occasions that the conglomerate Uncle Walt left behind leads with its heart instead of its cash register. 

Don’t get me wrong: there’s still a ton of merchandizing involved, not to mention little girls in the lobby dressed for the evening in “Belle costumes” from Beauty’s straight-to-DVD sequels. I suppose we can’t deny children their own space in their own time, and the delights to be mined therein. But what’s most striking here happens in the theater, not in the lobby, where a typically young touring-company cast actually teaches us something important about the meaning of love. 

Like virtually all Disney projects, Beauty and the Beast travels a series of unlikely roads from the original source material. Female empowerment remains a focus-grouped big deal here, as it is for Ariel in The Little Mermaid and even for that swipe from real life who lends her name to Pocahontas.   Belle, living her book-crazed “provincial life” in rural France, longs for so much more than she has any right to expect – and of course, through smarts and pluck and undying optimism that’s far more American than French, she’s gonna have it all. Still, what’s most touching about Disney’s spin on the ancient legend of “Belle et Bete” is what is tells us about the transformative power of love, not to mention the power of that love to see the beauty we all carry within. In this, the animated film and the musical both get it right. 

Now, I’ve heard that some people complain about the “sexual politics” of Beauty and the Beast, that somehow this updated storyline encourages women to stay with their abusive spouses and boyfriends in the false hope of changing them. There is a name for such people, though, and I believe that name is “idiots.” I mean, have they never been in love? Have they never felt love take hold of their lives, “apprehend” them from their familiar paths (yes, borrowing from St. Paul, writing about a different form of love) and make them into who and what they were meant to be all along? This part is no legend. This part  happens all the time. And seldom, in story and particularly in song, is it rendered any better than this Beauty does on the Hobby Center stage. 

I’m semi-famous for hating to be “entertained,” preferring to be shocked, shaken, frightened and/or moved to tears. I’m a bit Wagnerian in that sense. So I despise production numbers full of fun, and Beauty and the Beast gives me a fair amount to despise. A host of “fun” songs, from the over-the-top “Be Our Guest” on down, seem to move things along in high spirits for everybody except me, as does the tireless vaudeville-meets-Three-Stooges schtick among the secondary characters. With the high-kicking francophilian makeover everything gets here, this stage Beauty is sometimes reminiscent of another bit of French-accented mindlessness that should be retired yesterday, La Cage aux Folles. It is not a pleasant reminder. 

What matters here, though, is the efforts the Disney team goes to locate and live fully within the heart of the story – as opposed to The Lion King, in which the goal must be to lose and abuse the story’s heart. Most Disney movies taken onstage feature a few great songs from the original, padded out with Tin Pan Alley cheap tricks to give the show enough running time to justify the towering ticket price. Though Beauty had several excellent songs already, brilliant composer Alan Mencken was pressed back into service with equally brilliant lyricist Tim Rice, since Mencken’s original writing partner Howard Ashman had passed away. The result both deepens and defines character, from Belle’s lovely refrain called “Home” to the Beast’s heartrending Act I finale “If I Can’t Love Her.” 

In an exact flip on the movie “Grease,” if anyone at Disney ever animated Beauty and the Beast again, they’d be suicidal not to incorporate these dazzling new showstoppers. They dazzle not just because they’re damn good songs but because they speak to us from within the story, teach us something we didn’t know. As with the love they reflect and proclaim, in their best moments, they transform us.

Photos by Joan Marcus: (top) Hilary Maiberger and Darick Pead; (bottom) Matt Farcher and cast.

Behind the Pink Door at Main Street

By HOLLY BERETTO 

When I look in the mirror, I know I’m a girl. Woman. Whatever. But I don’t spend much time thinking about what it means to be one. The gatherers with their hunters. The virgins and sinners. The road traveled by suffragettes and glass-ceiling smashers. The experiences girls share.

As the smart, big-glasses-wearing geeky one for much of my girlhood, I didn’t share many experiences with other girls: Barbies and boyfriends, lipstick and spin the bottle. I was the girl who wrote in my diary not so much about the flutter of sadness that Steven rejected my invitation to the ninth-grade dance because he was taking Amy (true story, by the way, and shrugged off about half an hour after it happened), but lots and lots about how I admired the language of Emerson and Thoreau (also true, and one of the reasons I later studied writing. Possibly also the reason I didn’t have a serious boyfriend till college, but that’s a whole other story).

So, I thoroughly expected to find Girls Only: The Secret Comedy of Women (playing through Oct. 14) to be a sticky ooze of pink, estrogen-laden squealing, yet another opportunity for me to feel something wasn’t quite clicking with my XX chromosome pairing, setting me further apart from every other woman on the planet. I mean, I love my shoes and handbags, but I love my books much more. And I’ll never understand the whole thing about saying everything’s “fine” when it’s so clearly not.

What a thrilling surprise to discover it’s a delightfully fresh and clever celebration of all those ridiculous, awkward moments of girlhood and womanhood, told through a breezy series of sketch comedy routines, audience-participation improvisations, oddball videos and the occasional shadow puppet show.

Brought to Main Street Theater’s Chelsea Market Space through the sponsorship of I.W. Marks Jewelers, the two-woman comedy caused a minor sensation in Denver, before meandering across the Midwest. Written by Barbara Gehring and Linda Klien, the piece is a loose look at everything girly, from unrequited love to turning your whites pink in the washing machine to those inane and embarrassing puberty presentations you have in the fifth grade. But the writing is so humorously poignant, so welcoming and performers Tracy Ahern and Keri Henson so good naturedly goofy that it’s easy to feel you’re sharing your entire life with some newfound best friend.

Make no mistake: Girls Only is girly. To the max. From the teenage-bedroom inspired set designed by Claire A. Jac Jones, strewn with David and Shaun Cassidy posters, a series of Little House books and paintings of horses to the background music of South Pacific’s “There’s Nothing Like a Dame” and Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna have Fun,” to the Technicolor costumes by Mercy Perrone, the production radiates sheer cuteness. What saves it from being overly sentimental is its sheer force of personality.

 When we first meet Ahern and Henson, they’re propped up on the set’s duvet-covered bed, in the middle of a sleepover, delivering rapid-fire commentary on the airbrushed models in the Victoria’s Secret catalogue, vamping in their own bras and panties about how insane the whole fashion industry is. Throughout the evening, they move on to reminiscences of stuffed animals saved loving in a “memory box” and throw an impromptu shower for a lady plucked out of the audience. There’s also a marvelous bit where they riff on what you learn about women from their purses, but you have to see it to believe it. Ahern and Henson really do it up right, mastering endless amounts of dialogue, silly song lyrics, a crafting session guaranteeing you’ll never think the same way about feminine protection products, and pulling of an elaborate “Ballet of the Pantyhoes.”

What’s so utterly wonderful is that it’s not a show about Barbies and boyfriends, lipstick and spin the bottle. It’s about those moments where you wonder, “Am I really all right just as I am? “ (Answer: yes.) or “Wouldn’t it be so great if he happened to like me the way I like him?” (Answer: also, yes, but you won’t die if he doesn’t.) It’s about knowing it’s just as ok to have the poster of Star Wars on your wall as it is to drool over the heartthrob. And it’s about growing into yourself, realizing that there’s definitely more than one way to be a girl.

As you might expect, it’s a female-heavy audience, although we did see one or two guys, brave souls, gamely along for the ride. And what a funny, quirky, endearing ride it is. As my gal pal Pam so wonderfully summed up: “It’s darling!”

Photo: Tracy Ahern and Keri Henson

Our Review of ‘Lion King’ at Hobby Center

By HOLLY BERETTO

When the curtain came down on Disney’s The Lion King at the Hobby Center for the Performing Arts, the applause and catcalls nearly took the roof off the building. But then, consider what came before that moment. 

What is possibly the best opening number ever started the evening, the procession of animals – in this case, actors and dancers with puppet extensions of birds, rhinos and giraffes – parading down the aisles and up onto the stage, singing tribute to the “Circle of Life” that celebrates the birth and anointing of Simba, the newborn lion king. This is director/costume designer and mask/puppet co-designer Julie Taymor’s big moment, and the striking stylization of people-as-animals, up against impressive lighting (Donald Holder) and scenic (Richard Hudson) design is what makes the show something worth seeing and sharing. 

Anyone with children under 10 (or who had children under 10 in 1994, when the animated feature hit movie theaters across the world) knows the story: Wise Lion King Mufasa and his wife Sarabi have a son, Simba, who will inherit the kingdom of Pride Rock. Mufasa’s younger brother Scar, who was second in the line of succession, finds himself pushed to the side in favor of the new prince, and schemes with a pack of hyenas to kill his brother and nephew, taking over the kingdom. He manages to kill Mufasa, convinces the young Simba to run away and assumes the throne. What was once an idyllic kingdom goes downhill, and only through Simba’s painful coming-of-age and return can balance be restored. Anyone familiar with Shakespeare will recognize this. 

Onstage, what was a cute feature film takes on impressive scope and vision. The African tribal music, which the movie always treated as beautiful background and accent, here rises to carry the show along, the chants and choreography both celebratory and mournful by turns. Understudy Ntomb’khona Dlamini’s Rafiki, a wise shaman of a baboon, leads the pack here, her vocalizing rising to the rafters. She’s backed by a fantastic chorus that offer incredible harmonies on the show’s big theme, “The Circle of Life” and act two’s reprise of “He Lives in You,” a new song composed for the stage. 

All the favorite numbers from the movie make an appearance: “I Just Can’t Wait to be King,” Young Simba’s fantasy of all he’ll do when he’s in charge, and “Hakuna Matata,” that celebration of no worries and a problem-free existence; “Be Prepared,” Scar’s dark and dangerous layout of his power grab, and “Can You Feel the Love Tonight,” the lion love theme.  And they all mostly work. The newer additions are hit or miss. “Shadowland,” sung by Nala, Simba’s gal pal-cum-girlfriend, is an almost operatic piece of hope and questing, and Nokubonga Khuzwayo knocks it out of the park. The trio of hyenas (Banzai, Shenzi and Ed) offer up “Chow Down,” which is mostly unnecessary, and “They Live in You,” Mufasa’s teaching moment to his son in act one is soaring and symbolic. 

It’s difficult, of course, to convince yourself that you’re watching something entirely new here. The book, written by Irene Mecchi, keeps nearly all of the film’s dialogue and story progression, and the additions either work tremendously well (see above with the “They Live in You” scene) or feel like killing time till the next production number. On the other hand, some of the most beautiful things about the film were those quiet moments of transition under which Hans Zimmer’s score moved the story along so seamlessly. And those are remarkably preserved here, thanks to the stunning lighting that really feels like an African savanna and brilliant puppetry. 

The cast does a terrific job of manipulating wild animal limbs and masks in addition to singing and dancing. J. Anthony Crane’s Scar is appropriately creepy, the pairing of Nick Cordileone and Ben Lipitz as Timon and Pumbaa, the meerkat and warthog who befriend the exiled Young Simba, are over-the-top funny and Dionne Randolph’s Mufasa is strong and strident. 

The original music by Elton John and lyrics by Tim Rice are crowd pleasers, and the newer numbers, with music and lyrics by the team of Lebo M., Mark Mancina, Jay Rifkin, Julie Taymor and Hans Zimmer, giving the piece some further scope. 

The bottom line, though, is that The Lion King is gorgeous to watch. Things that were campy and bordering on ridiculous in the film aren’t rendered sudden masterpieces here. Some of the campier moments (“Hakuna Matata” and “I Just Can’t Wait to be King” in particular) seem almost out of place amid the abstract styling of the larger whole. The characters aren’t any more developed here than they were on screen. 

But you’ll forgive all of that amid the enveloping beauty. For this is a show that surrounds you, from the opening parade to the drummers in the theater boxes to the ensemble members in the balconies waving poles portraying birds in flight. It’s an explosion of color, of art come alive. Which is truly why the audience nearly takes the roof off the building at the end. When you’ve made that journey, too, I defy you to stay seated.

Photos by Joan Marcus

Hello Darkness, My Old Friends

THE FALLEN ANGEL by Daniel Silva.  

For several years now, I’ve traded the traditional light reading of summertime (remember books for the beach house, if we were lucky enough to afford either or both?) for the darkness that enters any room with Gabriel Allon. Along with other characters described below, Allon is the opposite of light, in any typical sense of the word. He’s a masterful restorer of Italian art who also happens to work as a spy and, in most cases, an avenging killer for the Israeli secret service. 

Over the years, in book after book, former foreign correspondent Daniel Silva has aimed Allon at several phases of the Arab assault on Israel, beginning with the murders of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics and passing toward the present through intifada, global terrorism and nuclear threat. Allon has also dealt with problems at the Vatican, problems with the oligarchs of post-Soviet Russia and, perhaps most heartbreakingly, problems that still haunt Europe (and Gabriel himself) from the Holocaust.   

In addition to beloved parts of any Allon yarn, including patriarch Ari Shamron may he never rest in peace, there are old friends and old enemies in The Fallen Angel. There’s the Vatican and some very colorful corners of Europe, all culminating in a plot involving what must be the world’s most sacred piece of real estate. There are serious lessons about the past, the present and the future tucked away among these feverishly must-turn pages. As both Allon and his creator know well, it’s not for nothing that words like Armageddon came into our vocabulary from Israel in the first place. 

CREOLE BELLE by James Lee Burke 

It’s interesting when a phrase like “his best book yet” seems immaterial, even a little bit shallow and silly. That’s the way it feels with the 19^th of James Lee Burke’s novels set in New Iberia, New Orleans and the rest of south Louisiana featuring Dave Robicheaux. Creole Belle is the deepest, darkest look behind the curtain of mortality that this Vietnam vet, disgraced NOPD cop, Iberia Parish detective and ever-recovering alcoholic has dared. Or has been forced  to dare. 

The world in which the action takes place is familiar, even beyond the Gulf Coast culture into which Burke was born in Houston in 1936. It is a world of oil rigs and sportsman’s paradises, existing side by side for what seemed would be forever. It is a world of family and longtime friends, including Dave’s wife (a former activist nun named Molly), his daughter Alafair, the quirky pets who share their rough-hewn house on Bayou Teche, and especially his overeating, overdrinking, terminally haunted sidekick Clete Purcel. From Saigon to the French Quarter, Dave and Clete have cheated death more times than they or we can count, forging a relationship/partnership/brotherhood that’s truly one for the record books. 

In Creole Belle, everything we love about the Dave Robicheaux series is served up like boiled crawfish on newspaper, even as the Gulf that Dave knows and loves is destroyed inch by inch by a mammoth rig explosion and oil spill. If James Lee Burke ever longed for his ultimate metaphor – for the way greed, lust, ego and violence spread out from their sources to empower monsters to harm and enslave the powerless – he finds it here, in the too-real headlines as well as the breathtakingly eloquent pages of Creole Belle. 

STOLEN PREY by John Sandford 

So many things have come and gone  during John Sandford’s long and wildly successful series that began with Rules of Prey. For one thing, there are 22 books that didn’t exist before this Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper reporter first imagined a classy cop hero named Lucas Davenport. And as with James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux, one of the biggest changes concerns how much the hero has to lose. 

In the beginning, Davenport was single, and that was part of his womanizing roguish charm. Now that some of that role has been transferred to another character named Virgil Flowers (who appears as a sidekick in the Davenport novels as well as in a series of his own), Davenport has much to brood about as his puts his life on the line in book after book. He has a wife and daughter to think about, and although he hates to admit it as much as the next guy, he’s getting older as well. 

In Stolen Prey, Sandford’s once-sealed-off world of Minnesota joins the rest of the country in facing the measureless cruelty of the Mexican drug cartels. Minnesota, in truth, is very far from the Mexican border, yet the amounts of money involved in this smuggling, murder and corruption end up mirrored in the amounts of American landscape involved. The killers have found their way onto Lucas Davenport’s turf, and by the end of this book they won’t be happy they did. 

BEASTLY THINGS by Donna Leon

At a cursory glance, few figures in American popular fiction could be farther removed from the fast-talking, tough-fisted noir detective than Commissario Guido Brunetti. As featured in 21 novels by an American writer who’s lived in Venice more than three decades, Brunetti has done his work as chief investigator using far more brain than brawn – and, in true Italian fashion, nearly always halting the darkest, most frightening encounters long enough to go home for lunch with his wife and two children. Many fans of Donna Leon’s series would agree… Lunch with the Brunettis, priceless! 

Though Leon presumably has opinions, possibly even political ones, the ideas that form and inform her intelligent books are the ideas doing the same in modern Europe. There are hints here of struggles with finances in the eurozone, and perhaps more on that subject is to come in future Brunetti books. More prominent now are issues involving the environment (in addition to its much-reported flooding, Venice is battling industrial pollution on a scale few other places could imagine), struggling with too many immigrants from Eastern Europe and Africa, and even debating within itself about genetically modified foods and meat-vs.-meatlessness. 

In short, even as Brunetti embarks on another horrific case – involving a deformed man’s body washed ashore with no wallet and only one shoe – there’s no shortage of fascinating things for people to talk about. Conversations with the inspector’s dense bosses at the Questura, with Vianello and other minions on the force, with the computer-savvy Signorina Elletra, and even with his own family light Brunetti’s path, as always with Donna Leon, into death, deception and the darkest corners of the human spirit.

CHASING MIDNIGHT by Randy Wayne White 

What seems an impossibly long time ago, there was a guy named Travis McGee. He lived on a houseboat in Fort Lauderdale, had a sidekick and many friends (most of whom were women who seemed to sleep with him occasionally), turned a tough but vulnerable gaze upon an immoral world, and by the end of each book saved someone from a very unpleasant fate. We don’t have Travis McGee anymore, except in the small paperbacks John D. MacDonald left behind. But we do have Doc Ford, living in a house on stilts near a marina on the opposite side of Florida. 

Honestly, every time I read a new Doc Ford book set on and around Sanibel Island, I feel it’s time for a Florida vacation. Like MacDonald before him, and even like Carl Hiaasen now, former fishing guide Randy Wayne White delves into the corruption and violence beneath the facade of America’s tropical paradise. Yet few popular fiction writers (other than James Lee Burke on south Louisiana) understand better the natural beauty that keeps their heroes anchored in one place. 

In many ways, Chasing Midnight is a movie waiting to happen – or perhaps a movie that’s happened more than once already. Doc Ford and his thin, longhaired, drugged-up aging hippie sidekick named Tomlinson face a host of very dangerous people here, from foreign caviar tycoons to an apocalyptic neo-Christian sect with a bomb set to a timer. Tick tock. That alone keeps the pages turning, but (as with Travis McGee) it’s the scenery and the narrator’s calm, slightly sad, almost inadvertently courageous voice that keeps us coming back book after book.

Review of Catastrophic’s ‘American Falls’

By JOHN DeMERS 

The Catastrophic Theatre, Diverse Works through June 9

According to playwright Miki Johnson, she from a place called Green, Ohio, but now based in Houston, Middle America is a bleak, unfriendly place. More distressingly, the Middle America she portrays in American Falls (now on view thanks to Catastrophic Theatre) might not be limited to geographic Middle America at all. It might be the bleak, unfriendly place we all wander through, or perhaps the one we carry deep within our hearts. 

Of course, if you haven’t seen any show lately that’s profound, dark, disturbing and thought-provoking, then you haven’t been to anything produced by Catastrophic. It’s what this company does, and it has been since it rose from the ashes of Infernal Bridegroom Productions, Houston’s long-iconic house of weird and wonderful pain. As so many local theater companies grow tamer, discovering as though for the first time that lighthearted, brain-dead entertainment fills seats, Catastrophic seems to fill enough seats with the absolute opposite. 

American Falls is a place, presumably in Idaho since Pocatello is nearby, and in it is something that looks like a house. And within this house (or several houses, or dimensions, or whatever), there are people who talk to each other. Or more importantly, they talk as though to the universe, which might or might not be us. There is a story inside this house, and it involves oddness, violence, infidelity, love, hate and suicide, at least some of which have already happened. 

Though there is no “whodunit” at the core of American Falls, its truth unfolds like a mystery novel, with each layer pulling away to reveal a deeper, ever-darker layer inside. And in the course of the play’s hour-plus single act, we come to realize that five separate vignettes all connect, not placing the final piece in the puzzle until the final seconds. There is considerable adolescent “talking dirty” along the way, plus a lot of laughter at the quirkier aspects of our human condition, all spread over with a brooding poetry that borrows from Samuel Beckett. 

With Catastrophic artistic director Jason Nodler at the helm, the cast of familiars does remarkable work delivering and, in most cases, living the tale Johnson has set down. This experience varies from three young adults drinking and telling stories at a table (Troy Schulze, Karina Pal Montano-Bowers and John DeLoach) to an older woman swilling beer and recalling the many failures of her life (Carolyn Houston Boone) to a spirit, ghost or soul of a young woman recalling the events that pushed her to suicide (Jessica Janes). Two especially remarkable performances are delivered in American Falls by Ricky Welch as a spiritual-tending Native American named Billy Mound of Clouds who senses bad things coming, and especially by company stalwart Kyle Sturdivant. To say too much about Sturdivant’s character in this plot is to, well, say too much, but his is a touching, believable and, in the end, heartbreaking turn. 

The set and lighting by Laura Fine Hawkes and Kirk Markley take what so often at Diverse Works seems a mere “black box” and suggests a realistic small town in the middle of nowhere – except that realistic it isn’t.  By the end, with Billy’s odd-angled but beautiful notion of all the suffering in the world going up to the moon and then sifting back down as pure white light, we know that’s virtually a children’s book talking to us at bedtime. The lives we watch in American Falls are definitely what happens after we whisper “Goodnight, Moon.”

Photo by Anthony Rathbun

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.