David Patrick Stearns
By David Patrick Stearns
INQUIRER CULTURE CRITIC
PRINCETON - "Is this professional or volunteer?" asked one of the younger audience members at Into the Woods, now playing at the McCarter Theatre Center in a production by the Fiasco Theater. Good question.
Before the show began on Saturday afternoon, the scrupulously casual actors loitered around the stage, greeting friends in the audience, slowly coalescing into the intricate web of fairy tales retold by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine with a wisdom that grows deeper with repeated exposure.
With its makeshift look and low-tech manner, the Fiasco production relies almost exclusively on the theatrical wiles of the acting, singing, and directing, and has enough revelatory moments to be worth a drive to Princeton. But the production isn't quite as charming as it thinks it is.
An ensemble theater that grew out of Brown University's Trinity Rep MFA acting program, Fiasco has enjoyed success with problematic plays such as Cymbeline. Here, it follows a trend toward stripped-down Sondheim with plainclothes actors who accompany each other on guitar, toy piano, etc.
Molly Eichel
Benj Pasek, who grew up in Ardmore, is having a really good day. The 2003 Friends Central grad is nominated for a Tony, along with writing partner Justin Paul, for Best Original Score (Music and/or Lyrics) Written for the Theatre for their work on "A Christmas Story," the musical adaptation of the beloved holiday flick. "A Christmas Story" was also nominated for Best Book and Best Musical.
David Patrick Stearns
By David Patrick Stearns
INQUIRER CULTURAL CRITIC
Upon encountering Thomas Gibbons' play Permanent Collection by InterAct Theatre Company, you're likely to think: "Didn't this play start here?" "Didn't we live this drama?" "Do we have to go through it again?"
The answers are yes, certainly, and indeed. The play premiered at InterAct in 2003 and went on to tell the world about the Barnes Foundation's agonized journey into the real world, focusing not on the move from Merion to Philadelphia but on the first stages of undoing Albert C. Barnes' wishes by Richard Glanton, the foundation's African American president in the 1990s. The main issues are overt and covert racism directed at the man enacting what Philadelphians hate most: change.
The twist in this new production is that director Seth Rozin, in collaboration with the playwright, sets the play in contemporary times. Newspapers are read on iPads, conversations are recorded on iPhones, and an African American U.S. president is referred to. Thus, the play's issues can't be viewed from a safe distance. And in the intimate confines of the Adrienne Theater, this play is, rightly, uncomfortable and provocative with zingers that crystalize rather than diminish the argument.
Plays can say things journalists can't, and from moment one, the racial issues are out in the open. While driving to his first day of work, Sterling North (the stage version of Glanton) is pulled over by a cop for DWB (driving while black), described in searing detail, dissecting the power dynamics between a police officer who believes the driver has stolen the Jaguar and a driver who has earned every bit of it the hard way.
By Wendy Rosenfield
FOR THE INQUIRER
Only heaven and producer Whoopi Goldberg know why Sister Act — the 1992 film featuring Goldberg as Deloris Van Cartier, a soul singer who spies a murder committed by her gangster boyfriend and gets witness protection in a San Francisco convent — deserves its own musical in 2013.
It was cute, sure, but not exactly the type of flick people walk around quoting. Maybe changing its setting to 1970s Philly and rooting its tunes among TSOP and Philadelphia International Records-style slow jams is an appeal to the changing demographics of the Great White Way. Maybe Goldberg just really, really liked that movie; Broadway works in mysterious ways.
There’s about as much resonance in Cheri and Bill Steinkellner and Douglas Carter Beane's book as there is in, say, Mamma Mia!, another cheery populist confection (though in-jokes about Market St. misses vs. Rittenhouse Square matrons are always appreciated). But unlike that jukebox musical, Alan Menken’s original tunes and Glenn Slater’s lyrics add street-level grit to Sister Act.
Bad guy Curtis Jackson (Kingsley Leggs) and his henchmen sing an old school O’Jays-style ode to Deloris in “When I Find My Baby,” except inside the crooning and synchronized dance moves are lyrics such as these: “Ain’t gonna let that girl get away! No way! Because when I find that girl... I’m gonna kill that girl!”
“That girl” just happens to be a real-life Philly homegirl, Ta’rea Campbell. And whether it’s due to all this hometown flavor, Campbell’s exuberant, big-voiced performance, or all those glitter-habited South Philly nuns making a truly joyful noise, the whole thing works, and works in a way that combines sincerity, fun and good old rafter-rattling.
Veteran Broadway director Jerry Zaks knows which buttons his audience want pushed. Thus, Hollis Resnik’s Mother Superior — Deloris’ strait-laced nemesis — channels a world-weary Elaine Stritch (circa “I’m Still Here”) in “Haven’t Got a Prayer,” and Deloris’ sass carries not a little of Little Shop of Horrors’ girl-group gusto.
So, no, Sister Act isn’t a particularly cutting-edge, or even very relevant evening of musical theater. However, it is a surprisingly good time that celebrates another very good time in this city’s musical history.
Toby Zinman
By Toby Zinman
For the Inquirer
Edie Falco is the big draw for The Madrid, a play by a little-known author who also happens to be a producer on Nurse Jackie, an enormously popular TV series starring Emmy-winning Falco in the title role. Falco’s fame was firmly established as Carmen Soprano in The Sopranos, for which she won three Emmys, two Golden Globes and two SAG awards. The Madrid has none of the magnetic characters or the quotable dialogue of either of those shows.
The plot centers on Martha (Falco), a kindergarten teacher who one day mysteriously vanishes. She leaves her loving husband (John Ellison Conlee) and daughter (Phoebe Strole), her job, her ailing mother (Frances Sternhagen) and her meddlesome but concerned neighbors (Christopher Evan Welch and Heidi Schreck) without a word. Oddly, nobody worries that she is harmed or dead. Months later she reappears in a Starbuck’s where Sarah, her college-graduate daughter works, having foregone both a trip to Guatemala and an interview for a teaching job to stay home with her heartbroken father. Martha makes Sarah promise not to tell her father that she is living in a sleazy apartment building called the Madrid not far from the family home. Sarah agrees because she is so desperate to keep her mother in her life.
Toby Zinman
By Toby Zinman
For the Inquirer
It’s like going to a great party with lots of Champagne: Priscilla Queen of the Desert The Musical is so much fun, so spectacular to look at, with so many danceable songs, that we all just bounced out of the Academy of Music on Tuesday night.
Based on the 1994 Australian movie The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert, the musical follows three friends, all drag queens, from Sydney to Alice Springs where, among other things, they finally climb Ayer’s Rock. Priscilla is the name of the jalopy of a bus that takes Tick to see the wife and son nobody knew he had. The show is not only a blinged-up razzle-dazzler full of feathers and sparkles , but it’s also full of heart and important lessons about tolerance and love and friendship.
Toby Zinman
By Toby Zinman
FOR THE INQUIRER
It’s like watching a novel: all the intimacy, all the language, all the complexity of character, without having to turn a page. Nicholas Wright’s engrossing, prize-winning play about the young van Gogh, Vincent in Brixton, is receiving a just-about-perfect production at the Walnut’s Independence Studio under Kate Galvin’s direction.
Before he became the painter he became, Vincent van Gogh (Brian Cowden, who manages to sound Dutch and crazy and profoundly sweet all at once) lived for a short while in a London boardinghouse. The drama of his landlady (Mary Martello, going from triumph to triumph — this is every bit as fine as her recent performance in Lantern’s Beauty Queen of Leenane), her daughter (Clare Mahoney), her daughter’s boyfriend (John Jarboe), and Vincent’s awful sister Anna (Liz Filios) is Wright’s fictionalized biographical chapter in a life that would change painting forever.
Molly Eichel
The Philly DoGooder Awards, held tonight at the University of the Arts to fete the best in non-profit video storytelling, announced that they would be doling out awards to Philly.com's own Leah Kauffman for Innovation in Storytelling and City Representative Desiree Peterkin-Bell for Innovation in Urban Mechanics. But the third award, for Innovation in Community Building, went unannounced.
Wendy Rosenfield
FOR THE INQUIRER
When last we saw Phileas Fogg traveling Around the World in 80 Days, he landed in Delaware Theatre Company’s big, spare, delightfully imaginative, Barrymore Award-winning mainstage show. Now, a few seasons later, he’s back visiting the Walnut Street Theatre’s tiny Studio 3 in an equally delightful, up-close version of that same Mark Brown adaptation of Jules Verne’s 1873 novel.
Where the earlier production used the power of suggestion to evoke Fogg’s global adventures, here director Bill Van Horn and set designer Andrew Thompson present his journey from within and all around a Victorian cabinet of curiosities: a wood-paneled wall whose recesses pop out, slide or swivel open to reveal a ship’s captain, angry Indian priests, or a dryer vent-cum-elephant’s trunk.
This cast, which includes Van Horn, John Zak, Damon Bonetti and Sarah Gliko in multiple roles, embraces Van Horn’s madcap pace. Whether it’s Zak rolling Marty Feldman eyes as hapless Fogg-chasing Detective Fix or Bonetti’s Inspector Clouseau-style verbal contortions as Fogg’s valet Passepartout, compressed in this space, with everyone occasionally hopping aboard a shape-shifting platform hand truck, the fun multiplies.
