The Band's Visit: National Tour at Cleveland's Playhouse Square

THEATER REVIEW: “The Band’s Visit” @ Playhouse Square by Laura Kennelly

Through Sun 11/24

Once upon a time in Israel, the Egyptian Ceremonial Police Orchestra musicians took the wrong bus. Is this true? Who cares? An intriguing “What happened next” forms the heart of The Band’s Visit now at Playhouse Square’s Connor Palace. This Broadway Series show directed by David Cromer, with music and lyrics by David Yazbek and book by Itamar Moses, won the Tony Awards’ Best Musical (not to mention nine other awards in other categories).

 It deserves it.

Eight band members, led by Tewfiq (Sasson Gabay), have a gig in urban Petah Tikvah, but language difficulties cause them to go to the wrong city and so they are stranded overnight in Bet Hatikvah, a sleepy desert village. In the opening song, everyone in Bet Hatikvah sings, “Waiting,” which is what they are doing: Waiting for something, anything to happen. (If you’ve ever driven through small towns in West Texas, New Mexico or Arizona, you know what they mean.)

When local café owner Dina (Chilina Kennedy) sees that the band needs help, she finds them places to spend the night — some with her, some with friends. Like Come From Away, the story shows strangers finding welcome.

The cast makes everything believable. Gabay’s Tewfik vacillates appealingly between confidence and awkwardness as he and Dina become friends.

Kennedy’s charming, mesmerizing stage presence is such that when she looks out into the audience to talk or sing, it’s easy to feel she sees you, cares about you and wants to charm you. She does, especially with “It Is What It Is” and (in delightful tribute to romance) “Omar Sharif.”

We see two workers in Dina’s café — the awkward Papi (Adam Gabay) and Itzik (Pomme Koch) — discover that the strangers give their lives new (and welcome) perspective. Gabay’s young character learns to court a girl and Koch’s learns to negotiate his marriage and extended family.

For the show’s first 60 minutes, recent Baldwin Wallace graduate Mike Cefalo seems to be merely furniture. He’s the poor “Telephone Guy” who stands throughout the show next to the town’s only telephone. His girlfriend in the United States promised to call. He waits and waits. Then, in one of the show’s joyous closing moments, he sings the moving “Answer Me,” and it becomes an anthem for everyone.

There’s more, of course, lots more. Some includes going out at night to party (and roller skate), some involves drinking and looking at the stars, and some brings heart-to-heart sharing and honestly. The result? People discover commonality and the bus comes in the next morning. Nothing changes and everything changes.

Other ensemble cast members include Jennifer Apple as Anna, Marc Ginsburg as Sammy, Kendal Hartse as Iris, Joe Joseph as Haled, Sara Kapner as Julia, Ronnie Malley as Camal, James Rana as Simon, Or Schraiber as Zelger, and David Studwell as Avrum.

The production’s choreography by Patrick McCollum and set design by Scott Pask create an outstanding use of the rotating center stage. It’s a house, a café, a bar, a skating rink, a bus stop. Whatever is needed suddenly appears.

And how about the music? Some members of the Egyptian Police Band seem to play their instruments, others convincingly fake it. The appealing original Tony-winning score sounds authentically Middle Eastern.  Conductor/keyboard player Rick Bertone leads the “real band” (Tony Bird, George Crotty, Evan Francis, Roger Kashou and Ronnie Malley) from a veiled, raised platform above the stage.

BOTTOM LINE: Tonic for the mind and soul. Watching it is like watching a tale from the Thousand and One Nights come to life. Moonlight, romance, music, and longing combine to weave a subtle musical magic in only 90 minutes.

[Written by Laura Kennelly]

Pipeline at the Cleveland Play House

THEATER REVIEW: “Pipeline” @ Cleveland Play House by Laura Kennelly

Photos by Roger Mastroianni

Through Sun 11/3

Dominique Morisseau’s Pipeline, now at the Cleveland Play House’s Outcalt Theatre, looks at today’s world and doesn’t like what it sees. Director Steve H. Broadnax III and an outstanding cast show a quick-changing social scene propelled by a clash between ideals and the fragile humans who must live up to them.

The strong-willed Nya (Suzette Azariah Gunn) teaches in the inner city. It’s a dangerous place to work, one where students attack each other and their teachers. Early on we see just how dangerous when we meet Nya’s fellow teacher, the fragile and dedicated Laurie (Rachel Harker). Laurie has just returned to teaching after being seriously injured during an outbreak of in-school violence.

Her friend Nya feels she’s needed in the school, but refuses to send her son Omari (a conflicted Kadeem Ali Harris) there and insists he go to an exclusive upstate boarding school. It’s a place foreign to him. He resents that others there assume things about him just because he’s African-American. Despite the consideration and kindness shown to him by fellow student, Jasmine (a winning Jade Radford), he’s depressed and very angry.

Now, add to that mix the men in Nya’s life. She and Omari’s father Xavier (a commandingly distinguished and very angry Bjorn DuPaty) live apart. We see her spurn fellow worker Dun (Eric Robinson) so it seems that whatever might have happened between them that made Xavier jealous is in the past.

When Omari pushes a teacher  in boarding school, Nya feels overwhelmed with fear (and guilt). She worries that her son is doomed, like so many others his age, to move into the “pipeline” that funnels young black men into reform school and then serious crime and then prison.

It’s a strangely paced production, with monologues and dramatic exchanges (sometimes with long pauses) on the set interspersed with videos of chaos in school hallway shown on a large screen behind the stage. Often, what should be intimate — the talk between loved ones — moves too quickly from one trauma to another. The stage’s rising center platform doesn’t always retract fast enough, so we have, for example,  a bed in the middle of the stage slowly sinking while a new scene set elsewhere begins.

BOTTOM LINE: Despite a good effort by the talented Cleveland Play House team, it’s not enough to smooth over distracting dramatic elements inherent in the play itself. Pipeline tries to cover too many important social topics — public and private education, divorce, single parents, social reform — all at once. It takes a village to make a mess? I don’t think that’s what the playwright had in mind, but that seems to be what she shows us. Morisseau, a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant awardee for 2018, offers 90 minutes of pain about marriage, schools, responsibility and assumptions.

[Written by Laura Kennelly]

THEATER REVIEW: “The Member of the Wedding” @ Beck Center by Laura Kennelly

Through Sun 11/3

Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding, now at the Beck Center, builds slowly, scene by scene, to give a true and tender glimpse of lives intersecting in a small southern town. Director Eric Schmiedl and an excellent cast make everything they do to bring us into their world seem simple and easy (it is not) as we slip into August 1945 and a welcome post-war era.

The set, designed by Walter Boswell, boasts an ice box refrigerator, a basic kitchen sink, and a stove (with oven) as well as a kitchen table — all suitable to the era. It’s the space where pre-teen Frances (Frankie) Addams (Ellie Ritterbusch) finds food and comfort. And yes, there’s a screened-in porch just off to the side, a necessity of life where the summers are long, hot and mosquito-filled.

Almost everyone ends up in that kitchen because that’s where Bernice Sadie Brown (Lisa Louise Langford), dispenses love and support. As the Southern family’s African-American housekeeper, Langford seems completely at ease, just the way Bernice herself would have been. Langford, recently seen in the Beck’s King Lear as Regan, Lear’s fire-breathing dragon daughter, plays an entirely different sort of woman, a woman whose wisdom, love and charity offers a refuge. It’s a challenge to show goodness, but Langford’s Bernice does so in an impressive performance.

As Frankie, the growing-up livewire little tomboy who hasn’t yet reconciled herself to being a girl, Ritterbusch is captivating. She makes us see the chatterbox who shares every thought that comes into her mind, the energetic and (yes) bossy preteen, and the little girl who misses the mother who died giving birth to her.

As John Henry West, Frankie’s one real friend, the six-year-old cousin she tells what to do, Chase Oberhaus is absolutely convincing. He’s the sort of likeable little kid that you don’t know how much you will miss until he’s gone.

Other cast members include David Dolansky, Baird Bracken, Fred Gloor, Peter Lawson Jones, Corin B. Self, Audrey McNulty, Audrey Morrison and Madelyn Voltz.

BOTTOM LINE: The Beck Center’s The Member of the Wedding presents a nuanced and finely-acted portrait of the struggles and joys of growing up. Maybe you don’t need a reminder of that time in your life, but maybe you do. If you let it, this tender show will win your heart.

[Written by Laura Kennelly]

THEATER REVIEW: “Julius Caesar” @ Great Lakes Theater by Laura Kennelly

Photos by Roger Mastroianni

Through Sun 11/3

Sarah Bruner, director of Julius Caesar now at Great Lakes Theater, brings grim reality (and a bit of modernity) to Shakespeare’s classic tale about politics, changing rulers, and trusting sycophants.

Nothing good happens to Caesar.

The cuts were well-done (Shakespeare always must be cut unless it’s a mini-series), but the pace was so brisk that if one didn’t know the plot (but likely most do), one might wonder why the killers of Caesar turned on each other so quickly.

The night I was there, Shelby Griswold stepped in at the last minute as Caesar because regular player Carole Healey was unable to perform the role. Griswold’s Caesar proved as regal as they come and seemed quite comfortable as Rome’s possible dictator-in-waiting. When Caesar ignored the  soothsayer (an eerie and creepy Jodi Dominick), as we knew he would, it was clear that pride blinded him.

The simple set by Russell Metheny employed scaffolding with a shaded second story where shadows and characters drifted past cutout windows. It was a practical solution that allowed us to imagine Rome’s close columns and public areas. Leah Piehl’s costumes seemed dark, as if togas were uniformly grubby. (Who knows? Maybe they were.) One iffy costume touch was the red ribbons that were pulled out as characters were stabbed. They were supposed to represent blood, but at times they turned bizarrely comic.

One unexpected highlight turned out to be when Caesar’s false friend Brutus (played as indecisive, yet forceful by Lynn Robert Berg) and his partner-in-crime Cassius (shown as facile and properly conniving by Laura Welsh Berg) disagreed about the need for murder and later how to cope with the fallout of the assassination. They seemed to echo mannerisms married couples (as the Bergs are) might recognize when Brutus and Cassius argued and when they agreed. It’s quite possible that close political allies might indeed have such a co-dependent relationship and the Bergs made that point.

As Mark Anthony, an engaging Nick Steen, barely disguised his character’s duplicitous nature. It’s amazing that Brutus and the others trusted him to speak at Caesar’s funeral. As Brutus’ wife Portia Jillian Kates shines, but briefly, since no one heeds her warnings.

The mob scenes provided a terrific demonstration of how easily crowds may be swayed by a good “spin.” Anyone who knows about social media knows how that works, but it was darkly amusing to see characters dashing about the stage as they turned quickly from one emotion to its opposite.

OK. Now to the elephant in the room. Gender-blind casting is not surprising anymore (is it?), and the actors in this Great Lakes production carried it off beautifully. What did seem patronizing and unnecessary was changing Shakespeare’s pronouns to fit the gender of the actor playing the character. At times it threw the rhythm of the speeches off. And it was inconsistent too — how could there be worry that Caesar wanted to be “King” as they said? Why wasn’t that changed to “Queen?” Let Shakespeare be Shakespeare and damn the consequences.

BOTTOM LINE: A well-acted timely and tidy summing up by an excellent Great Lakes cast of one of Shakespeare’s great tragedies.

[Written by Laura Kennelly]

Summer: The Donna Summer Musical at Playhouse Square

THEATER REVIEW: “Summer: The Donna Summer Musical @ Playhouse Square by Laura Kennelly

Photo by Matthew Murphy

Through Sun 10/27

This song-packed show at Playhouse Square’s Connor Theatre is designed to combine a tribute to Donna Summer, the “Disco Queen,” and the music she created. It delivers on the music. Anyone who grew up to the disco beat and the pop rock that followed might enjoy remembering “back in the day.” Certainly some in the audience opening night seemed to enjoy sharing smiles — perhaps remembering times past.

Directed by Des McAnuff, the musical features over 20 hit songs from disco and pop rock, strung together by a superficial bio of the superstar. An icon for decades, Summer died at age 63 in 2012. She was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame the next year, so Cleveland seems a fitting location for the official media preview of the 2018 Broadway show’s national tour.

Bright lights and a pulsing beat, glittering costumes, and an impassioned team of dancers highlight the show. Three actress/vocalists convincingly portray Donna Summer and sing up a storm. There’s Dan’yelle Williamson, as the world-famous Diva Donna (when she’s not putting on a shawl and being Mary Gaines, Donna’s mother); Alex Hairston as the younger on-her-way-up-in-the-world Disco Donna; and Olivia Elease Hardy as Duckling Donna, the choir girl who learns about life the hard way. All three sing like angels — well, sexy angels in some cases, as when Summer records her first big hit, “Love to Love You Baby”). Other familiar songs include “Hot Stuff,”  “Bad Girls” and “She Works Hard for her Money.”

But all that is not enough to make Summer anything more than a paper-doll cut-out puppet display featuring old hits and young dancers. Donna Summer must have been a complex woman, but this book by Colman Domingo, Robert Cary and Des McAnuff only offers a Cliff’s Notes version of her resilience and talent. It’s not enough.

The sets were minimal (scenic design by Robert Brill) and the glittery costumes (by Paul Tazewell) usually outshone them. The three Donnas almost always wore blue so they were easy to spot. (Sorry to criticize the color, but Summer’s quoted in an interview for her 2008 album, Crayons, as saying that her favorite color is green. It would have looked better than the rather tired old basic primary color blue used in the show.) Sound design by Gareth Owen featured an appropriately throbbing bass (and wasn’t too loud — a big plus). I’m not sure whether it was sound design or real life, but early on cheers from the balcony sounded pre-recorded (and the diva’s response to them seemed rehearsed). No problem, just interesting.

BOTTOM LINE: It’s light as a feather (despite lip service to women’s rights and equal pay) compared to biographical musicals such as Funny Girl or Gypsy that make us care about their subject. However those who really enjoyed Jersey Boys or Motown may find themselves loving it and dancing. (BTW: There’s a party next door to the theater after every show.)

Review of The Music Man at Great Lakes Theater

THEATER REVIEW: “The Music Man” @ Great Lakes Theater by Laura Kennelly

Through Sun 11/10

How many ways to say “wonderful?” Meredith Willson’s beloved classic, The Music Man, now at Playhouse Square’s Hanna Theatre inspires a search for fresh adjectives to describe this lively look at small town life in 1912. Director Victoria Bussert and her cohorts make every minute engaging, from overture to triumphant finale.

The Music Man won Best Musical at the 1957 Tony Awards. In the right hands (and this Great Lakes production is), it’s still easy to see why: terrific score, romantic storyline, and engaging, loveable characters (even the villains turn loveable despite their villainy). It’s just fun to imagine living in 1912 River City, Iowa (at least in the Disneyfied version of Willson’s River City we see here).

Costumes by Tracy Christensen reflect turn-of-the-century small-town style with strait-laced, corseted (one imagines) ladies, gentlemen wearing fedoras, and kids with caps. A simple storefront scene (plus a tiny house porch and a bridge added when needed) designed by Jeff Herrmann is set off by lighting designer Jesse Klug.

To begin this nostalgic story, young Winthrop Paroo (Ian McLaughlin) walks onstage, sees a tiny xylophone, and with fewer than ten notes begins to play “Seventy-Six Trombones.” Hidden under the stage, a compact orchestra, attentively conducted by Nancy Maier (who also played keyboard), immediately picks up the theme and we’re off. Children skip around the stage as the music flows and  townspeople start their day. This brilliant opening kept the audience quiet during the overture. (OK, yes, talking during the overture is a pet peeve, so I appreciated the clever use of dancing children to snap our attention to the show.)

Then suddenly, some men set down suitcases, sit on them, and boom! We’re on a bouncy train listening to the pattering “Rock Island,” as suit-clad salesmen (plus a conductor) travel across the Midwest. When the train stops at River City, Iowa, a certain Harold Hill (Alex Syiek) steps off. He’s heard the men’s gossip and believes Iowa City is the perfect spot for his usual swindle. When he runs across his old friend Marcellus Washburn (Marcus Martin), he’s sure of it. Washburn agrees to come in on the scheme to sell music lessons, band uniforms and instruments to the townspeople and then skip with their money. Later, another salesman on the train, Charlie Cowell (Lynn Robert Berg), returns to try to stop Hill. Berg nicely conveys comic frustration when he’s not believed.

A charismatic charmer, Harold Hill convinces the townspeople that they need to save their children from the dangers of the new pool hall (“Ya Got Trouble”). He promises to save by teaching them to play band instruments.

The only real obstacle to his scheme is the town music teacher, Miss Marian Paroo (Jillian Kates), who will know he’s a fake. We learn a lot about both Marian and her mother, Mrs. Paroo (played by Carole Healey with perfect “mom speak”), while Marian teaches a lackluster student how to play note by note (“Piano Lesson”). Mother wants Marian to marry and does her best to encourage her teacherly daughter to look for a man in “If You Don’t Mind My Saying So.”

Yes, Hill and Marian fall for each other, but gradually and believably. As Hill, Syiek successfully portrays a con man surprised by genuine feeling for another. The chemistry between Syiek and Kates works to make us believe that Marian, who is no fool and soon realizes Hill is a phony, can reform Hill now that he has found joy in River City. When Kates’ lovely Marian sings “Till There Was You” and Syiek’s Hill joins in, we cross our fingers that what they dream of can come true. (Never mind that a real Harold Hill would get bored in River City in short order and that love can’t “fix” a person — that’s a different musical world, not Meredith Willson’s 1950s world.)

The constantly frustrated Mayor Shinn (a comic David Anthony Smith), owner of the ranted-about pool hall, keeps trying to get the city to check out Hill. Hill’s clever scheme to introduce the four civic authorities (Elijah Dawson, Enrique Miguel, Mack Sharilla and Boe Wank) to the joys of barbershop quartets distracts them. It also gives us a chance to hear “Lida Rose” and other classics. These gentlemen can’t stop singing, and we’re glad.

There’s fun too in River City that’s generated by the ladies, especially Jodi Dominick’s hapless, talentless Mayor’s wife Eulalie Shinn. Joining her in creating well-intended but comic classical “tableaux” and lots of gossip (“Pick-a-Little, Talk-a-Little”) are her enthusiastic lady friends (Shelby Griswold, Laura Welsh Berg, Jessie Cope Miller, and Erin Niebuhr).

The ladies and gentlemen also enjoy letting their hair down when Martin’s Washburn teaches them the “Shi-poo-pi.” Martin’s enthusiasm for “the latest dance” carries everyone along as he cavorts adroitly around the stage.

Aled Davies as the ineffectual Constable Locke who chases Hill brings laughs. Other ensemble members include Jahir Hipps who, along with Berg, Dawson, Miguel, Shirilla, Smith and Wank, plays one of the train-bounced salesmen in the first scene. (The music’s rhythm and their example had most of the audience rocking along with them.)

Children play a large role in The Music Man, especially Marian’s little brother, Winthrop, who gains confidence and loses his stutter when he sings “Gary, Indiana.” His belief in Hill’s “Think Method” does the trick. Other cute River City kids includes Marlowe Miller, Owen Mills, Avery Pyo, Brenna Sherman, August Sumlin, Sun-Hee Smith and Chase Christopher Zadd. Dressed in their new band uniforms, they have almost the last word with a rousing “Seventy-Six Trombones.” (Their parents think the squawks and blats they make sound wonderful. (Ah, yes. Parents.)

The show is packed with favorite and hummable tunes not mentioned above, such as “Good Night, My Someone” (Kates’ gorgeous soprano seems a perfect fit for this wistful wishing song) and “The Sadder-but-Wiser Girl” (Syiek’s eye rolls work well here as Hill promises he’s not looking for a “good girl”).

BOTTOM LINE: How to describe this show? It seems “wonderful” will just have to do. It offers something for every generation, so be sure to consider taking your child (or your parents) to see it. As an opening song “Iowa Stubborn,”  advises, “You really ought to give Iowa a try” — most especially this Great Lakes Iowa.

greatlakestheater

Review: Come From Away @ Playhouse Square

Come From Away @ Playhouse Square, July 10, 2019
Laura Kennelly (for Cool Cleveland)

Set in Newfoundland, Come from Away, now at Playhouse Square, explores what happened in one corner of the world after the  September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Most of us can remember where we were and what we were doing when we heard the news on the day we now call “9/11.”

This engrossing, clever and mesmerizing production is every bit as good as the one I saw in New York two years ago. Written by Irene Sankoff and David Hein, it tells the 9/11 story from the viewpoint of those in Gander, Newfoundland, when air traffic was shut down for several days. No flying in or out of the United States stranded thousands.

Among those affected were nearly 7,000 people via 38 planes diverted to Gander (population 10,000). Come From Away, directed by Christopher Ashley, with  music supervision by Ian Eisendrath, creates a narrative based on true stories collected by Sankoff and Hein.

Packed with Gaelic tunes, rhythmic narrative, bar tunes and more, all delightful, it highlights hospitality offered by townspeople used to living “on the edge of the world on an island in the sea.” Love and unlove, strangers meeting and parting, all play a role as we are swept into this “side effect” that no one could have imagined or planned. It’s not sappy “feel-good junk songs either — but it did leave most of us feeling hopeful (even joyous) as we left the theater. (If I had more space I’d tell you about the lost cell phone returned by strangers after the show and all the good will it showed.)

As the opening song, “Welcome to the Rock,” reveals, one reason the Newfoundlanders managed the sudden population increase so well is that in addition to being used to hardships,  they also shared a great sense of humor. This came in handy when they buckled down to offer emergency housing and meals for thousands of (by now) crabby and scared passengers.

Why was so much help needed? Well, for one thing, all passenger baggage was locked inside the grounded planes, so ordinary necessities — think baby food, diapers, tampons, medicine (please never check necessary medicines) — had to be found. The people of Gander rallied and found space and provisions for the people (and even for the animals confined to the hold).

Brilliant musical staging (by Kelly Devine) and a functionally beautiful set (by Beowulf Boritt) add mightily to the show’s impact and wit as the cast swiftly moves chairs, tables, etc. when the story shifts from inside the planes to local bars, school gyms, and so on.  Thanks to this, it’s easy to see what’s happening no matter where you sit (seats in the top balcony, where I was in NYC) and in the front rows (where I was in the Connor Palace) are equally good.

The excellent onstage band, led by conductor Cynthia Kortman Westphal (who played keyboard, accordion, and harmonium), included whistles, Irish flute, Uilleann pipes (Isaac Alderson), a fiddle (Kiana June Weber), guitars (Adam Stoler, Matt Wong, Max Calkin), and percussion (Steve Holloway and Ben Morrow).

Twelve fine actors play airline crew, passengers and townspeople. They switch roles and accents with such flawless precision I had to check my program later to be sure there were only twelve. They included Kevin Carolan, Harter Clingman, Nick Duckart, Chamblee Ferguson, Becky Gulsvig, Julie Johnson, Christine Toy Johnson, James Earl Jones II, Megan McGinnis, Andrew Samonsky, Danielle K. Thomas, Emily Walton, Marika Aubrey, Jane Bunting, Michael Brian Dunn, Julie Garnyé, Adam Halpin and Aaron Michael Ray.

BOTTOM LINE: Come From Away may even be perfect for skeptics who say they hate musicals because they judge them fake or too sentimental or too satirical or whatever. It’s none of those things. An unlikely subject for a musical? Probably, and yet, it’s a perfect mix of story and song that doesn’t wallow in tragedy or negative emotion. If you only go to one show this year, let it be this one.