Gwilt or Innocent

Speaking of battlefields (see below). And blood and thunder. Let me introduce you to Miss Lydia Gwilt, the anti-heroine of Armadale, the Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s latest world premiere. Several years in the making (I offered my two cents to the script process when I worked at the Rep), Jeffrey Hatcher’s adaptation of Wilkie Collins’ longest novel is a remarkable bit of dramatic storytelling, filled with some of the most diabolically entertaining characters you’ll see this side of Sweeney Todd.
Charles Dickens’ dark side, Wilkie Collins was a leading proponent of the “sensation novel,” a genre in which interest in reader “engagement” was taken to new levels. Here, every pulse-quickening gasp or shudder is a literary accomplishment. And while modern audiences may not react the way Collins’ Victorian readers did, there are still loads of guilty (or perhaps Gwilty?) pleasures in this well-spun yarn. Murder, say. As well as malice, general mayhem, and yes, monkeys.
It is story theater at its best, a style made famous by the Royal Shakespeare Company’s groundbreaking Dickens marathon, The Adventures of Nicholas Nickelby. Hatcher and the Rep actors have done a great job of painting in the supporting characters with a few deft strokes. Peter Silbert, with rheumy eyes and pallid skin, changes from the bombastically priggish Reverend Brock to the simpering Bashwood with the flip of a scarf and the slapping on of a bad toupee. Jim Pickering puffs his chest as Major Milroy, Armadale’s harrumphing future father-in-law. Then caves it in, dangling his arms nervously about his groin, to become Dr. Downward, the director of a shady and nefarious surgical establishment. Rose Pickering flutters nervously as Mrs. Milroy, then pops a cleavage-revealing button or two, and sneers her way into Mrs. Oldershaw, Downward’s partner in crime.
Part of the pleasure of Armadale is watching these transformations, and seeing the story unfold on Michael Ganio’s edifice of Victorian hardware and bric-a-brac. Here, a curtain hides what goes on behind closed doors (quite a lot, as it turns out), but also become a ship’s sail. Chairs become window grates, and a center-stage fainting couch (an emblem of Victorian “sensation" if there ever was), gets enough mileage to require several oil changes and a wheel balance.
A ballad of good and evil that spans generations, Armadale gets all the iniquity it needs from Lydia Gwilt (Deborah Staples). Gwilt is the actor’s actor, transforming herself from charming governess to diabolical murderess with ease. Ozias Midwinter, with shadowy eyes and a leather coat, looks like he could open for Fall Out Boy, but Michael Gotch saturates him with the ennui suggested by his ramblings about fate and dark destiny. And Brian Vaughn, dressed as a Victorian Sun King, exudes charm and fortune feelings, embodying the naïve goodness that always prevails in such stories.
Or does it?

All You Need

Helen loves war movies—Von Ryan’s Express, The Guns of Navarrone—but during a particularly sweet bit of pillow talk in Renaissance Theatreworks' Fat Pig, she hits the TV mute button so she and her new beau, Tom, can have a quiet heart-to-heart. When the talk is over and lust again calls, she stops mid-kiss to reach for the remote. The lights fade on passionate kisses, and the sounds of rumbling Panzer tanks and exploding Howitzers.
Love has always been a battlefield for theatrical provocateur Neil LaBute, but here (sound effects aside), the most devastating moments hit you like the silent knifework of a guerilla behind enemy lines.
Helen (Tanya Saracho) is the title character, a large woman who meets Tom (Braden Moran) in the play’s first scene. He is awkward and unsure; she is girlishly bold and charming. She is obviously comfortable in her size-14 skin, and he is smitten with her unaffected warmth.
LaBute takes us through the trajectory of their romance, and follows Tom’s struggles to tell his co-workers, one of whom is a former girlfriend, about his new love. While the play has a lot to say about body image and America’s obsession with muscle tone (LaBute wrote it after his own 60-pound diet see-saw), its message isn’t nearly as one-dimensional or didactic.
Instead, LaBute’s subject is the fragility of the human spirit, the hopeful—and often hopeless—ways we bolster our egos against a world of pain and uncertainty. Tom’s attraction is obviously rooted in his own insecurity. He’s a bit of a commitment-phobe, and vague about his place in the world. His bliss with Helen is reserved for the time when that world disappears and they can be “completely honest,” a phrase from the relationship lexicon that is never as simple as it sounds.
The world that comes crashing in on Tom and Helen is a doozy. Embodied in his office mates, Carter and Jeanne, it’s a maelstrom of personal complications and social ugliness. On Sunday night, a “pay what you can” performance, the cruelty drew both laughter and pause. One of the brilliant things about LaBute’s dialogue is that he pushes comedy conventions to make you laugh one moment, and then feel guilty about it the next. Director Susan Fete’s production finds the space between those moments, and makes the experience profoundly unsettling.
Casting Wayne T. Carr as Carter is one of Fete’s bolder moves, and it pays off. To hear an African-American character give LaBute’s most “edifying” monologue adds an extra layer of irony. Tom’s romance is doomed, says Carter, because it’s best to “stick to our own kind.” Whether or not you think “weight-ism” is the new racism, the speech and the exchange that follows speaks volumes about the complications of living in America.
It doesn’t hurt that Carr is spry and funny, and has a good partner in Leah Dutchin’s Jeanne, who finds just the right balance of narcissism and women-scorned frustration.
The final scene, of course, is at the beach, where we celebrate the body beautiful. It’s here you expect the dramatic fireworks, confrontations worthy of an MTV reality show. But LaBute deftly goes out with a whisper instead of a bang. With one line—again an innocent and romantic cliché--you see a brave and beautiful soul crumble. No screams or epithets. No blood and thunder. No tears. Except, perhaps, your own.

Photo by Jean Bernstein: Braden Moran and Tanya Saracho.

Romeo & Juliet: The Real Story

Those who came to the Florentine Opera last weekend expecting a familiar story were in for a surprise. Vincenzo Bellini’s I Capuleti e I Montecchi is based on the pre-Shakespeare stories that informed the Romeo & Juliet we know so well. There’s no nurse, no balcony and when the opera begins, Mercutio is already dead. In the first act, there’s a good deal of martial posturing as the two families more toward war (here, it’s not just a Hatfield-McCoy-type squabble—my friend Anne Reed called it Verona’s equivalent of “trash talk”). The second act moves into more familiar territory--Juliet’s fake poisoning and the entombed finale--and actually contains some moments with great dramatic potential. A duel between Juliet’s bethrothed, Tebaldo, and Romeo is interrupted by her funeral cortege passing through the woods. In Bellini’s story, Juliet wakes after Romeo has taken the poison, but before he dies. So there’s time for a tragic duet, most of which Romeo sings with his head hanging upside down over the edge of the tomb’s marble futon.
Bellini’s opera is by no means standard fare, and it's rarely performed. Musically, it’s first-rate Bellini, but its sense of story and drama is hopelessly old-fashioned. My guess is that the Florentine Opera wanted to offer an example of Bel Canto, and also thought that the familiar story (it was billed as Romeo and Juliet rather than its more unfamiliar true title) would attract its own audience.
Those who showed up were exposed to a pedestrian production (Bernard Uzan was the stage director) peppered with moments of great singing. There's some nice choral writing, and here the singing was well-balanced and solid. And Joseph Rescigno's orchestra played with spritely energy when required. And soloists Todd Levy (clarinet), Scott Tisdale (cello), and William Barnewitz (horn) played some beautiful turns.
As for the soloists, Romeo is a taxing role, and Marianna Kulikova wavered a bit as she tried to fill every scene. On Sunday afternoon, the third performance in three days, her voice was musky and deep in her chest, and occasionally had a hard time rising above the orchestra. Georgia Jarman’s Juliet fared better. Her first moment, the achingly beautiful solo, “Oh Quante Volte,” was a thrill, particularly when her voice flew into the cascades that can make Bel Canto singing so breathtaking. But her soprano, too, showed some strain in the high register. The most dependable singing of the night came from Scott Piper, as Tebaldo, whose confident tenor conveyed his character’s heroic bluster.

The Rite Stuff

It’s hard to pick out a favorite moment from last weekend’s Danceworks/Present Music collaboration at the Humphrey Scottish Rite Center, so maybe I’ll just make a list.
Christal Wagner’s explosion of yellow started the concert by defiantly proclaiming that spring had arrived, regardless of recent weather patterns. Play, set to Michael Torke’s The Yellow Pages, was childlike and celebratory, lead by the puckish energy of Melissa Anderson.
Sang Shen’s gorgeous playing of Kamran Ince’s sweet melody in To Wander With brought an extra level of depth to Kim Johnson-Rockafellow’s meditative What Remains.” Johnson-Rockafellow’s focus and intensity was as passionate as Ince’s music. At one moment, she seemed to emerge from a dark pool, arms thrown back and her shoulders and face registering the shock of sun and air.
In Simone Ferro’s Blue Silence, set to music by Kevin Volans and Elena Kats-Chernin, the dancers seemed a bit crowded on the square stage, but in the last movement, the nonet erupted into a three-by-three canon, and moved with new clarity into the final haunting image.
Dani Kuepper, using a rich vocabulary of taut duets and beautifully massed conglomerations of dancers, created the best work of the evening, Lying, Cheating, Stealing. She used the space impressively, dividing it into discreet areas, each with it own style and tempo. David Lang’s music was raw and clanging (it included hubcaps as instruments), and Kuepper caught its spirit of anxiety and eventually, release. It’s the finest piece of her work I’ve seen to date. She also got to have a lot of fun with “Where the Wild Things Are,” a retelling of Maurice Sendak’s story that’s a little bit Austin Powers and a little bit Cirque du Soliel.
Jason Seed spins out long, searching melodies in Politiscapes, and Kelly Anderson matches his lines with explorations of mirror images and other symmetries spun out across the floor.
Photo by Rory Kurtz: Melissa Anderson