A Seasonal Treat Until Epiphany

Fiasco Theater is playing Shakespeare’s great comedy Twelfth Night at Classic Stage Company (136 East 13^th Street) until Saturday January 6, 2018.  Run don’t walk to catch this exciting, funny, musical, lyrical, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, pastoral-romantic comedy best suited to this season. 

Twelfth Night is often described as a perfect comedy and it may well be so.  But for that twin thing.  The romance is restrained (what with people in disguise), the comedy is not.  And in this production, the cast is superlative.  May I present:

Andy Grotelueschen as Sir Toby Belch

Jessie Austrian as Olivia

Emily Young as Viola/Cesario

Noah Brody as Orsino (also co-directed)

Ben Steinfeld as Feste (also co-directed)

Tina Chilip as Maria

Paul L. Coffey as Malvolio

Paco Tolson as Sir Andrew Aguecheek (among others)

Javier Ignacio as Sebastian (among others)

David Samuel as Antonio (among others)

 

Fiasco Theater at CSC (Photo by Joan Marcus)

John Doyle’s scenic design is flexible and creative, as is costume design by Emily Rebholz. 

Andy Grotelueschen’s Sir Toby may well be the best funniest and most consistently alive I’ve seen, with a real relationship between him and Tina Chilip’s happily hilarious Maria.

Ben Steinfeld as Feste shows himself as a fine comedic actor and musician and singer, quite romantic, and apparently a good director, since he and Noah Brody directed this production.

Noah Brody is a well-developed and believable Orsino (although I will always remember the delicious Orsino of Paul Rudd at Lincoln Center).

Jessie Austrian’s Olivia is a sex-starved delight.

Emily Young’s Cesario/Viola is witty, strong and quite marvelous.

As is their custom, when not actively onstage, the members of the Fiasco Theater sit or stand on the sidelines watching their colleagues and laughing along.  And accompanying one another on musical instruments and vocals, which makes for a funny, musical, delightful evening.

As always, the twins bit in the last scene goes on too long — how dense are these people — but that’s just a momentary annoyance that may only happen to people (like me) who’ve seen the play many times.

So go to 13^th Street, go online, get a ticket, celebrate a well-over-200-year-old play.  Just because it’s done all the time doesn’t mean it’s always done as well as this.  Trust Fiasco Theater.  Go!

http://www.classicstage.org/

~ Molly Matera, signing off to go bake Christmas Cookies....

An Enchanting Evening of Song and Dance at City Center

Last Spring I bought tickets to a "City Center Encore” of Frederick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner’s Brigadoon. City Center typically does “concert” stagings — that is minimal staging, some costuming, broad stroke choreography.  After all, these shows run less than a week and don’t have much time for rehearsal. Stage actor union rules for staged readings were stated in the program — performers might have “scripts in hand.”  

Not this time. This production was put together for a Gala on the Wednesday, so what I saw that Thursday night was highly polished.

A wonderful scrim separated the onstage orchestra from the action (sometimes down, sometimes not) on which projections showed NYC, Scotland, heather on the hills, a forest, all in watercolor softness, with soft or bold colors depending on the scene.  Each scene was gorgeous, naturalistic without being in the slightest bit photographic.  A steep rounded staircase representing any number of hills separated the onstage orchestra from the action (except when the conductor handed a branch of heather to Fiona).

Kelli O’Hara as Fiona has the voice of an angel but doesn’t leave it at that. She breathes life into her character — her Fiona is real and warm and alive.

Choreographer and director Christopher Wheeldon was respectful of the original Agnes DeMille choreography, which even I could recognize (women’s hands), but enhanced, streamlined, and strengthened it.  The women dancers were delightful, and the men … Oh my....

Men in kilts. Dancing. Leaping. Twirling. Gasp.

Robert Fairchild (formerly of the NYC Ballet, who danced American in Paris, which I now regret not seeing just to have watched his performance) played the sad and angry “villain” of the piece, Harry Beaton, who is a much more interesting character than the Americans from the 20^th century. Ballet dancers have played Harry in the past on stage, as well as in the film. Fairchild was magnificent, every movement sublime.  He has not yet developed much vocal guts as an actor, but his body does it all.

As the second romantic lead, Charlie Dalrymple, Ross Lekites sings smoothly and sweetly.  He sang two of my favorite songs, “Go Home With Bonnie Jean” and “Come to me, bend to me,” breaking my heart in the process and moving his fiancée Jean (Sara Esty) and her friends into their lyrical dance.  Ms. Esty is not much a vocal presence, but that hardly matters. She was totally present and graceful, telling her love story with the lines of her body, giving Charlie and us her heart.

Stephanie J. Block was a big vocal presence as Meg Brockie, singing the hilariously tongue-twisting “Me Mother’s Wedding Day.”  Once the Americans came to Brigadoon, Meg pined after Jeff, the sad-sack drunken friend of the leading man, Tommy.  Aasif Mandvi played Jeff with wit and warm sarcasm. As the object of Meg’s affection/lust, Mandvi totally embodied this potentially depressing character all the way to his last moments onstage.

Patrick Wilson was Tommy, the romantic lead opposite Kelli O’Hara. I’m not a Wilson fan, I’m afraid. Whenever I’ve seen him he’s perfectly competent, he just doesn’t interest me.  He did his job well here; a strong singer, performing fine duets with Fiona, and he actually did more than justice to the overly expository songs of the second act.  I always enjoyed Gene Kelly’s depiction of Tommy in the movie, but then I always enjoy Gene Kelly.  Perhaps the role is just poorly written.

Dakin Matthews was excellent as Mr. Lundie, who explains the (utterly absurd but who cares) premise of the play.  Patricia Delgado was expressive as the woman who clearly wanted Harry Beaton and danced the thrilling funeral dance.  This was far from morose, rather full of passion and very beautiful.

It was a truly joyous evening at the beautiful City Center.

~ Molly Matera, signing off still hearing the lovely music and thrilling to Robert Fairchild dancing in my dreams.

Midnight at the Oasis, or Bewitching Omar Sharif

The Band’s Visit, lovingly directed by the wonderful David Cromer, is a beautiful piece of theatre with delicious music and characters in a handsomely constructed evening.

Based on the Israeli film of the same name, the play’s book is by Itamar Moses with music and lyrics by David Yazbek, music that soared and made us dance in our seats and our souls. Music and love, that’s what The Band’s Visit is about. It is seductive and charming, sweet but not treacly.

Patrick McCollum’s delightful and elegant choreography grows from the characters’ movements and feelings, easily making its way around Scott Pask’s imaginative scenic design.

While its music put me in mind of the brilliant Indecent earlier this year [http://mollyismusing.blogspot.com/2017/08/], The Band’s Visit is much simpler, a snippet — more of a short story than the full novel Indecent resembled. Nonetheless, The Band’s Visit gives deep satisfaction with interesting characters we can identify with in ordinary and extraordinary social situations. A small town visited by unexpected strangers, foreigners. In a small American town, would these foreigners have been taken in and enjoyed? I may be grumpy and downright depressed about the state of our nation, but I’m very much afraid not.

The basic story is simple. An Egyptian band is invited to visit an Arab Cultural Center in an Israeli city to play a concert of traditional music. There are two towns in Israel with names that sound, to non-Israelis, extremely similar. The city expecting the band is Petah Tikva. The aforementioned Egyptian band gets on the wrong bus to the wrong town — Bet Hatikva. According to its residents, said wrong town not only has no Cultural Center but no culture at all, although it does have a roller skating rink. It’s a dusty desert town with people who are terribly bored and hopeless, yet somehow the best humans you could hope for. The greeting the lost band received was musical and hilarious led by the thrilling Katrina Lenk, as a local café owner named Dina. A taste: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzcHlnJ4c1Q   Dina and the Egyptian bandleader, Tewfiq, charmingly played by Tony Shalhoub, explore one another as they while away the evening, gently discovering each other’s past and present.

The cast is sublime, featuring actors who are musicians, actors who dance or skate, music everywhere. There’s John Cariani as a young father learning to be a husband and Etai Benson as a lonely young man who befriends a sax player with a passion for Chet Baker. Unlikely friendships form, and music arises from them all. A running theme of what appears to be a hopeless long-distance romance gives us Adam Kantor staring at a pay phone for hours, awaiting a call from his girlfriend. When that young man sings, he breaks hearts.

Tony Shalhoub, Ari’el Stachel and Katrina Lenk (Photo Sara Krulwich)

The Band’s Visit is a seductive musical evening, an exquisite short story with far-reaching themes to which we’d be wise to pay attention.

~ Molly Matera, signing off and offering this:  If you have lost faith or hope, go to The Band’s Visit, then share the joy.