By Wendy Rosenfield
FOR THE INQUIRER
Let’s play a word association game: if I say “Mister Man,” what image comes to mind? How about “hobbling?” “Dirty birdie?” For much of the moviegoing public, these associations end at the 1990 film adaptation of Stephen King’s thriller Misery, with Kathy Bates’ deranged nurse and “number-one fan” Annie Wilkes looming over James Caan as her bedbound prisoner, romance author Paul Sheldon. Bates’ Oscar-winning performance also looms large over Bucks County Playhouse’s world premiere stage play Misery, also adapted from King’s novel, and that’s exactly the problem with this production.
It makes perfect sense to coax a story from stage to screen; you can do more visually and share it with a wider audience. It also makes sense to transform a film into a musical. But to take a film -- not some underrated indie, but one featuring an iconic character -- use the same screenwriter (William Goldman), and change almost nothing ... well, what’s the point?
By Wendy Rosenfield
For the Inquirer
In the pantheon of People’s Light and Theatre pantos, Cinderella, the company’s 2009 Barrymore Awards-sweeping vaudevillian adaptation, stands as a Jupiter of the form. While the panto, a holiday-time descendent of commedia dell’arte, includes a standard set of conventions--candy-tossing, drag-wearing, audience participation--that year’s effort was anything but conventional; innovative, even.
So, let’s call this year’s Aladdin their Juno. Coming in a close second--this is People’s Light’s ninth year of producing pantos--Aladdin again pairs composer/lyricist Michael Ogborn with director Peter Pryor, who’s also responsible, with Samantha Bellomo, for the show’s book, itself taking cues from the traditional tale, its Disney cousin, Shakespeare and Rudolph Valentino, among other influences. This winning production team also includes returning videographer Jorge Cousineau, with a hilarious tribute to silent film melodrama set aboard a flying carpet, and costumer Rosemarie McKelvey, with sight gags such as a dormer-windowed gown for Mark Lazar’s (People’s Light’s perennial dress-clad Dame) Widow Twankey-- both literally and figuratively roomy.
By Toby Zinman
For the Inquirer
It takes a brave theater critic to write a play, and a brave critic to review it—especially since Satchmo at the Waldorf is by Terry Teachout, the esteemed critic of the Wall Street Journal. So it’s both a pleasure and a relief to tell you it’s a great show.
This add-on to Wilma’s season comes from Long Wharf Theatre, directed by Gordon Edelstein. It stars John Douglas Thompson who plays Louis Armstrong, the world’s greatest trumpet player, as well as his manager, and the musicians of the next generation, Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie who think Armstrong is an Uncle Tom, a clown to entertain rich white folks. Thompson shifts impressively between personality and personality, changing his voice, his accent, his bearing.
By Toby Znman
For the Inquirer
“And now, reporting live from Lincoln Center, Aasif Mandvi,” starring in the powerful new play, Disgraced, by Ayad Akhtar. Exhausting to watch, despite its 85 minute running time, this intense drama gives Mandvi, whom most of us know as a very funny guy on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, a role to sink his teeth into, a role that is anything but funny.
By Jim Rutter
For THE INQUIRER
After seeing Montgomery Theater’s production of Sean Grennan’s Making God Laugh, I'm thinking that Biblical standards of humor have declined a bit since Job’s time.
Grennan’s play spans 30 years, beginning in Thanksgiving 1980 and progressing through Christmas 1990, New Years Y2K and Easter, circa 2010. On each of these holidays, a trio of siblings learns the painful lesson that you can't go home again. The audience, by witnessing their lives progress from youthful promise to adult discontent, gets beat over the head by Grennan’s continually insisted upon theme: if you want to make god laugh, create plans so he can delight in their frustration.
Review:
The North American debut of Rome’s Spellbound Contemporary Dance at Annenberg Center Thursday evening was Dance Celebration’s 30th anniversary gift to its loyal audiences. Aside from troupes like Grupo Corpo Brazilian Dance Theater, a Dance Celebration favorite, few companies can afford to maintain dancers of this caliber. Artistic director Mauro Astolfi manages to keep nine well-matched dancers of such chameleon-like suppleness, they were not only spellbinding, but breathtaking.
With much similarity in tone, lighting and tempo to a work Astolfi mounted on BalletX last week, the Annenberg show began and ended with Lost for Words. That is, the work was broken into two sections. One, which was created in 2011 and the second in 2012. They acted as prelude and postlude to 2009’s Downshifting.
The three Astolfi works I’ve now seen are characterized by chiaroscuro-style lighting -- the dancers work in and out of shadow -- almost in optical illusion, and an aggressive confrontational style that is body-twisting and mind-bending. As difficult as it is to apprehend any of these works’ arc, it is equally pleasurable to watch his company perform them.
By Merilyn Jackson
FOR THE INQUIRER
Wednesday night’s BalletX season opener at the Wilma Theater began as dark and stormy onstage as it was outside. But the program grew progressively lighter and more serene, and ended with its loveliest and most upbeat work, the Philadelphia premiere of Switch Phase, by BalletX co-artistic director Matthew Neenan.
By Jim Rutter
FOR THE INQUIRER
If you believe the story in Jay Berkow’s What a Glorious Feeling, mammoth egos and a treacherous love triangle almost derailed the production of Singin’ in the Rain. At Bristol Riverside Theatre, you do believe it.
Berkow’s partly fabricated script reveals the drama behind the making of the celebrated 1952 comedy: Gene Kelly (Charles Osborne) hired his young assistant director (and later, fiercest competitor) Stanley Donen (Zak Edwards) and Donen’s former wife, dancer Jeanne Coyne (Summer Broyhill) to help shoot and choreograph.
Toby Zinman's night job since 2006 is theater critic for the Inquirer. She also is a contributing writer for Variety and American Theatre magazine. Her day job: Prize-winning prof at UArts, author of four books about four playwrights (Rabe, McNally, Miller, Albee), and doer of scholarly deeds (winner of five NEH grants, Fulbright lecturer at Tel Aviv University, visiting professor in China). Her 'weekend' job as a travel writer provides adventure: dogsledding in the Yukon, ziplining in Belize, walking coast-to-coast across England, and cowboying in the Australian Outback.
Wendy Rosenfield has written freelance features and theater reviews for The Inquirer since 2006. She was theater critic for the Philadelphia Weekly from 1995 to 2001, after which she enjoyed a five-year baby-raising sabbatical. She serves on the board of the American Theatre Critics Association, was a participant in the Bennington Writer's Workshop, a 2008 NEA/USC Fellow in Theater and Musical Theater, and twice was guest critic for the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival's Region II National Critics Institute. She received her B.A. from Bennington College and her M.L.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. She also is a fiction writer, was proofreader to a swami, publications editor for the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and spends all her free time working out and driving people places. Follow her on Twitter @WendyRosenfield.
Jim Rutter has reviewed theater for The Inquirer since September, 2011. Since 2006, he covered dance, theater and opera for the Broad Street Review, and has also written for many suburban newspapers, including The Main Line Times. In 2009, the National Endowment for the Arts awarded him a Fellowship in Arts Journalism. Thames & Hudson released his updated and revised version of Ballet and Modern Dance in June, 2012. From 1998 to 2005, he taught philosophy and logic at Drexel, and then Widener University. He also coaches Olympic Weightlifting for Liberty Barbell, and has competed at the national level in that sport since 2001.
Merilyn Jackson regularly writes on dance for The Inquirer and other publications. She specializes in the arts, literature, food, travel, and Eastern European culture and politics. In 2001, she was dance critic in residence at the Festival of Contemporary Dance in Bytom, Poland; in 2005, she received an NEA Critics’ Fellowship to Duke University’s Institute for Dance Criticism. She likes to say that dance was her first love but that when she discovered writing she began to cheat on dance. Now that she writes about dance, she’s made an honest woman of herself, although she also writes poetry.
