The Found Weekend

Ow.

My brain hurts. 

 I love seeing and reviewing plays. I am constantly delighted at the sheer volume of talent on South Jersey stages. So I insouciantly take  two shows to review in a weekend with willingness and zeal.

Ow.

I reviewed 2 plays this weekend: Friday night I saw next to normal at Haddonfield Plays and Players. Pretty darned good! Today, I saw The Wedding Singer at Burlington County Footlighters. Pretty darned good! The question which makes my brain hurt is how on earth these two shows can possibly be described using exactly the same words?

Try to find a conceptual framework more specific than “well, they were both on stage and they  both had music” which ties next to normal and The Wedding Singer into a single, cohesive weekend’s entertainment package.  I feel like I’ve just eaten kimchi  on cream cheese logs liberally covered in pizza sauce dotted with butternut squash and topped with sprinkles and a cherry. My head doesn’t know what to do with this combination. No other body part has any clearer take on it, either.

From bi-polar disorder on the edge of full psychotic break and a suicide attempt in music as discordant and sweet as the manic cycle itself to a schlub getting both the girl and the best of a sexist jerk in songs with lyrics sent in by Mrs. Grady’s second grade class after its first lesson on those special words we call ‘rhyming words’ which sound alike.

And both truly excellent.  

Ow.

I would sincerely like to thank Stage Magazine for giving me one of the most interesting emotional weekends of my life. 

Inspired in Haddonfield

The Price of Normal: next to normal speaks raw, honest truth 

Expressionist theatre gives us a stage rigged to show the world of the play as the main character sees it. The central metaphor of the character’s life is actualized before us. If the character is bitterly convinced that reality is melting before him, the set will liquefy and run off, the lighting suggest dripping and drooping.

When the main character of the play is the bi-polar wife of a large, boring man whom she once loved and the mother of an astonishingly talented teenage girl whom she can’t stand as well as a teenage son whom she obviously loves dearly, we can expect the world of the stage to take on the lurching, spasmodic, bright-to-dark, tortured fish-flopping which is the lot of the manic-depressive. It does all that and more on the stage in Haddonfield.

Next to Normal is the story of Diana Goodman’s struggle to keep a normal family as she battles bi-polar disorder triggered by the accidental death of a child. Given to us forcefully by Sarah DuVall Pearson, the play presents her struggles with the disease, with medications, with time flow, and with the wrenching fantasies to which she is prey as staged from her point of view inside the illness. Lights now scream in dazzling color, now plunge into drab shadow. People she encounters become fantasy figures in flash transformations then flash back to their normal selves.

I need to cite Ms. Pearson for an amazing talent. She has a voice so pure and expressive that at times I simply wanted to close my eyes and listen to her. Her voice alone is worth the price of admission. The yearning of her bewildered outcries in music drives through the notes and grabs the heart. Thank you for that treat, Ms. Pearson.

Pat DeFusco is a fine Dan Goodman, Diana’s bone-weary, hound-dog faithful husband desperately stretching to keep hold of a quickly retreating normal life until his own mind is nearly dislocated by the overreach. Perfectly understated, he flashes passion with pinpoint precision then subsides back into “normalcy”. We see surprising intensity as he insists things will be fine, will be normal. We wonder a little about this until we discover that he is also prey to the same spirit of discontent which haunts his wife, although with less intensity.  

With a strong, tenor range, Mr. DeFusco navigated this emotional maze with elegance, clarity and honesty. His turn near the final curtain when he realizes he needs help to get through the turmoil is believable and moving to the extent that it brought me a tear.  Thank you, Mr. DeFusco, for an excellent performance.

Matt Reher plays all the doctors in the show. Remember, this is from the patient’s point of view. After a while they blur into each other. He provides marvelous comic moments droning on in a calm, medical voice about medications and combination and side effect while Diane sings out her agonizing confusion above and around his voice. As this progresses, it takes a moment to realize that Mr. Reher has done mumbling about medical things and is now instructing us how to exit an airplane in case of emergencies. From the patient’s point of view, it’s all nonsense.

So profoundly are we wrapped in Diana’s struggles that it takes nearly half the play to realize that there is something very peculiar about the son, Gabe, whom she loves so much. Gabe is presented with supernal smokiness and innocent mystery by Frankie Rowles. Here and gone, gone and here, Mr. Rowles gives us a very fine rendering of a character half in, half out of a very odd circumstance. One thing which clues us into his peculiarity: even though he is most tender and loving for a teenage son, no one but his mother seems glad to see him.

The play is built with tandem sub-plots: the tumultuous relationship between Dan and Diane is reflected in parallel by the stormy, budding relationship between Natalie Goodman, daughter of the house, and her boyfriend, Henry, played with loving intensity by Brian Mackalonis. Mr. Mackalonis delivers unmotivated, unconditional love with complete believability and a most engaging style. He has a strong performance voice and range, delivering excellent solo performance and choral blending to this moving  tale.

I have saved what I consider the true jewel of this gem-studded cast for last. There is not a single moment from curtain to curtain when I doubt that Colleen Murphy as Natalie Goodman is anything but the tormented teenage daughter of a bi-polar mother. When she sings, when she talks, when she blinks her eyes, she is real and present with an emotional onstage range which is almost scary. And she is 16 years old.

She is a teenager playing a teenager. Not a big stretch. But it is a dead-on wonder to me that someone of such tender years would have the craft not only to define but also fulfill such an emotional roller coaster of a role so completely not only in dialogue but in song. Brava, Ms. Murphy. I look forward to seeing you work again.

It is not a perfect production. Two things stand out. Where the 6-piece band is magnificent in accompaniment, the audio balance had them a shade too loud. The accompaniment overpowered the strong singing, particularly during, but not limited to, a crescendo rendered by the full band supporting a solo voice.

Second: where the lights are designed to reflect the highs and lows of the bi-polar world and thus alternate between hot spots and shadows, the blocking often has the principles standing with their faces in shadow. I found myself often wishing the actor would simply take a step forward as I grew weary of watching his knees. That went for everyone in the cast at one point or another. This would be the only circumstance in which I’d encourage all actors to go into the light.

But these things are not significant in the balance. They are forgiven as soon as they subside.  This play presents such an unusual and compelling blend of music, character and theme that a glitch would have to be much larger to be daunting.

For instance, the audience does not leave the theatre humming any anthem or snapping to any catchy tune lingering in the mind. What lingers is the message to the extent that I almost forgot to mention that there are 18 songs in act I and 19 in act II. The music doesn’t stop. At times bright and harmonious, at times garish and discordant, it is wholly subservient to the theme. And that works with beauty and force in this offering. I rode the elevator with the family. I cried and raged with them. At one point, I sorely wanted to shout out to Diane not to sign the form, don’t sign the form! So engaged was I in the flow.

What is the price of normal? If you think you know, get to Haddonfield and see this timely mix of spectacle and theme delivered in stark power by a fine cast at Haddonfield Plays and Players tonight.

Next to Normal

Book and lyrics by Brian Yorkey

Music by Tom Kitt

Directed by Ed Doyle and Jenn Kopesky

Haddonfield Plays and Players

957 E. Atlantic Ave.

Hddonfield, NJ

856-429-8139

http://www.haddonfieldplayers.com/

My reviews are written for Stage Magazine, the Delaware Valley's longest running, full-service theatre publication. Please take a look.

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Cats at the Ritz

Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats: the mystic heart of the universe revealed 

T.S. Eliot’s assumed name, Old Possum, never made it into the 1981 musical adaptation of his whimsical work, but more of his original draft characters made it onto the stage than into the published volume, and for this we are thankful. Grizabella the Glamour Cat was cut from the book of verse but revived in the musical. Lucky for us. She is the one who delivers the now classic “Memories”, the masterfully stirring anthem of faded glory and the most well-known song of the show.

So let us start with her. As Grizabella on the Ritz stage, Colleen McGinnis provides two of the most beautiful and compelling of the production’s elegant panoply of high points with the delivery and reprise of that song. Both, superbly acted as well as sung, grabbed then melted every heart in the place.

But it is not for her substantial talent that Ms. McGinnis gets first notice here. The measure of the cast is that she is very strong but not a stand-out. They’re all charismatic singers and dancers. She gets mention because she has the only two numbers in the show which spotlight solo talents so singularly. The others are ensemble. And, if this production shines anywhere, it shines most brightly in its ensemble work.

I may have heard some to match, but I cannot now recall a more heavenly and transporting sound than the full company of Jellicle cats in four-part choral glory singing with the wholly engaged orchestral music on that stage in that production that night. I don’t know that I’ve ever cited a vocal director in a review before. Clint Williams offers me a first. Thank you, Mr. Williams. Truly magnificent blending.

Uplifted by sensuously acrobatic dances arranged by choreographer/ director Dann Dunn as well as mysterious, half-shadow night alley lighting by Chris Miller, the effect is  to pull the audience into the souls of these beautiful creatures being presented on stage. You become a cat draped on a warm window sill raptly listening to and gazing at the stage whereupon resides the mystic heart of the universe. It is a remarkable show.   

The show is music and dance. To an unbroken sound track of orchestral music, we hear Eliot’s words sung as we are introduced to a series of dynamically quirky cats known, as a group, as the Jellicles. The term “Jellicles”, by the way, is Eliot’s version of a distortion in dialect of the phrase “dear little cats”. It is not a breed.

We hear their world-view, their  triumphs, their disappointments, their memories, their rituals. And when the stirring song comes to its natural end, the movement naturally begins and the pure, joyous physicality of the cat soul is revealed in the dance.

There is no dialogue, character development or clear plot line. We meet the Jellicles gathered for their yearly ball. There is a sub-story about the abduction and restoration of the Old Deuteronomy, the Jellicle’s leader--sung and given fine physical nobility, strength and grace by David M. Rooney. There is the ascendant transformation of Grizabella’s passing into another Jessicle life.

But story isn’t important in this play, introductions are. The heart of the play is in learning about Skimbleshanks and watching the train he lives on reproduced in trash by the cats rolling around the stage in the second act. It’s watching Lindsy Mauck as Jennyanydots bust a dynamite number with a chorus of tap-dancing cockroaches.  It’s Corey Wade Hundorf’s Rum Tum Tugger strutting and stretching his absolute, arbitrary contrariness. And it is Ryan Blackson’s magically blinking Mistoffelees  producing the missing Old Deuteronomy just like he “pulled seven kittens out of a hat,” as the song says.

The revealed heart of the tale is the personality and society of the cats, and this is served to us with style and clarity by a very talented cast and crew.

It isn’t a perfect production. I consistently found the digital music too loud, sometimes obscuring the singers. And the dark, mysterious lighting was at times too dark and mysterious. I occasionally wished for more light on the principals. But these shortfalls are minor in comparison to the joy and power assembled on the stage. They are insufficient to deny the trim fitness and triumph of this work.

CATS marks the opening of the Ritz Theatre’s 27^th season in Oaklyn, N.J. A success story by any measure, the Ritz is the best sort of community theatre in that it is rooted in and heavily integrated into the community it serves. The number of it’s outreach and educational programs is inspiring. It leads the way in consideration of handicapped theatre patrons. It is an outstanding manifestation of the artistic strength and depth of South Jersey.

And, happily for us, it insists on a high  standard of performance technique from its young actors, almost all of whom are on their way into the theatre world. The spirit of the place is palpable on entrance. These folks are happy to be together, happy to be working in theatre, happy to be at the Ritz. They are happy about what they do, it shows, and we’re all better for it.

Interestingly, Ritz founder and Artistic Director Bruce Curless never intended to open a theatre in Oaklyn. In fact, he had another site in the bag for the arts center he envisioned. It fell through due to a less than noble zoning decision. Dejected, Mr. Curless happened to pass the closed Ritz property and, on an inspired whim, looked into it.  

The Ritz had originally been a vaudeville/movie theater. It played that fare until 1947. But by the 1980s, fallen into disrepair, it was a porn house. When Bruce Curless proposed reopening the theatre, the owners were ecstatic until they learned he didn’t want to show porn there. Then they weren’t so sure. Innovative change was not their strong suit.

Luckily for us, Mr. Curless and crew talked them into it. Twenty seven years later we have a South Jersey theatrical institution and a testament to an unrelenting commitment to make art work for everyone.

My reviews are written for Stage Magazine, the Delaware Valley's oldest and proudest full resource for patrons and players alike.

To see all my work in Stage, click here.

Connecting to the Root

Growing the Patron Base

However you size up the state of contemporary theatre, one thing is painfully clear. The money base is too small. Theatre companies squabble over what they see as a tiny bit of cheese. They are often necessarily stingy and closed-hearted about their resources and support bases.

There is a long-term, fully satisfying escape form this finger-puzzle: grow the patron base. Convince potential viewers to step inside theatre doors. Easy as pie. Half the work is already done. The theatre doors are wide open. That last bit is facetious and yet oddly true.

The task looks uncomfortably formidable. How to get more people into the theatres. Give tickets away free? But that cheapens the work. And half the people you give free tickets to don’t show. How good can it be if it’s free?

Theatres often feel trapped by circumstance, caught between the rock of art and the hard place of public taste. It may seem to some that things have always been this way. It turns out this is not so.

Over the past hundred and fifty years, theatre has been turned inside-out and back again. Once the main source of popular entertainments with brilliant spectacle and sentiment, it lost momentum, heart and its hold on the public imagination to the electronic onslaught. Folks wondered if it had a future.

Theatre turned to patronage. It took the path of painting and portraiture. Outdone by new gadgets in its primary purposes, it settled into a well-heeled niche reserved for the cultured, the refined and the wealthy.

As in any patronage system, there was an urgent survival need amongst practitioners of the art to establish that talent was a very limited commodity which only some few possessed in full measure. Those few deserved full patronage. The rest did not. And thus was the genre of “Community Theatre” born. That last part is facetious and yet oddly true.

Common wisdom defines “Community Theatre” as a pejorative term meaning, “expect to run out in two hours mourning the loss of 15  bucks and 120 minutes”. It’s a picnic softball game:  bearable to be in, okay to see if your kid’s in it but otherwise murder to watch without a beer or something stronger in your veins.  

There is no purpose in arguing that this conclusion is not rampant amongst those in theatre. I hear it chronically on my reviewing rounds. There is an almost obligatory apology for not being professional as well as a reluctant and painful acceptance of the empty houses. It’s only community theatre. You can’t expect people to want to see it.  

Community theatre folks didn’t invent this attitude, nor do they wear it happily. I’m certain they heard many people mouth it, some quite acidly, before ever thinking to it pick it up and use it on themselves.

My problem is, I’ve seen them on stage. This creates a pungent, cognitive dissonance—somewhat like standing inside the cone of a bell as it is struck—when the reality I encounter on community stages collides with the evaluation of Community Theatre given me by popular wisdom. This is supposed to suck. People say it sucks. People act like it sucks. It doesn’t suck. My brain hurts.

If I had the power to make a single law for community theatre it would be: you may no longer look down upon yourselves. Community theatre people caught in self-denigration will recite all the Shakespearean prologues backwards from memory. You may still not think well of yourself as a theatre artist, but you will definitely have something to be proud of. Played right, you’ll also have a happy bevy of bar bets. This last bit is facetious and yet also oddly. . .

Having reviewed professional performances which made me wish for a smaller bladder and community performances which did not, I cannot accept the term “community theatre” as a reliable measure of quality. Community theatre is not bad theatre. It is, simply, theatre rooted in a community.

The term “professional theatre” is more predictably a measure of union status. In a recent production which mixed Equity and non-Equity players, it was the Equity lead who destroyed the punch and pace of the performance. The community performers were spot on.

Professional is no guarantee of quality. Community is no guarantee of shoddiness. The extent to which these unforgiving judgments are  embraced by the public heart is the measure of theatre’s challenge. And its own hearts, as well as those of its neighbors, comprise the public heart.

The first place to flush out the old code is at home. Remember the law of Terry, for it is a Stern pronouncement: no one may denigrate himself as an artist. Everyone on any level of theatre deserves her talent acknowledged. And for every talent which exists on the planet there is at least one situation under which it can and will blossom into full, astonishing beauty. Talent must find its place. And so what?

So what if we feel great about ourselves, understand the full worth of our product and acknowledge the depth of all our talents? So we feel wonderful, the walls between professional and amateur are shattered and the seats are still empty. Exactly how does pride serve to fill them? How does it grow the patron base?

I’m glad you asked!

Changing the home team perception of community theatre work is the first part of changing the entire public perception of it. That’s where theatre has to go. If there is serious intent to grow the patron base, unless the theatre community wants to start having theatre babies at an alarming rate, the only place more patrons can come from is the great pool of people who now never consider crossing the threshold of a theatre. Welcome to the hoi polloi.

Current theatre wisdom mistrusts the hoi polloi. They’re the ones who abandoned theatre for flash gadgets to begin with. Theatre can survive without them. Theatre has courted real money.

But, in the process, theatre has made its standards so precious as to exclude a great deal of its best talent. Practitioners promoted a big lie with great energy so that a fortunate few could get through a rough time. This was a brilliant adaptation back then. Now it wears like a choker on a happy, bouncy puppy.

There is an opportunity at present. The electronic visual pop is 1) old hat and 2) a great deal more expensive than it used to be. Folks in community theatre can now offer an evening’s entertainment for less than a movie ticket with popcorn. Theatre gets a second wind. There is the opportunity now to grow the patron base as it hasn’t been grown in over a century.

The job is simple: embrace the hoi polloi. And, oh yes, we are the hoi polloi. We have found the patron base and he is us. She is the people in our neighborhood. They’re the people that we meet as we’re walking down the street, yes the people . . .The people theatre has been frantically separating itself from for more than fifty years. So how does it close the gap it’s worked so hard to create?

Let’s remember the origins of the art is in temples, not royal courts. How about thinking of theatre as the people’s art it is?  It’s job now, as it was at the start, is to instruct and delight. Whatever else happens in a play, the audience should walk out with at least a slightly different perspective than it held going in. And it should be uplifted and delighted in the process.

An argument I hear all the time: instructing and delighting the people in our own communities means reaching them where they are. That’s pedagogy 101. Go from the known to the unknown. That means stooping to the lowest common denominator in the production of art. That’s not acceptable.

Nor should it be. There are theatres which will and should continue to perform art for art’s sake. But community theatres can and should perform art for community’s sake. Raising the consciousness and refining the tastes of community audiences pays great returns in more patrons for both community and pure art theatres. And community houses, once full, will be able to stay full even as programmed offerings become edgier.    

First, community theatre should embrace its communities. It ought to take the art to where they are and entertain them as they wish to be entertained (“they” includes us). It should say to its communities, “we are you.”  

It has to believe that it deserves audiences. Without that belief, there won’t be any. But perhaps more importantly, it should know that the audiences of its community need and deserve its work. Maintaining the disconnect and allowing the present culture gap to continue impoverishes everyone. And there’s no one in a better position to address and fix this imbalance culture-wide than the people of Community Theatre.

Having laid that heavy burden upon your broad, artistic shoulders, I will tell you where to start: whenever you’re in public, always make sure to remember to pretend that being in community theatre is as much fun as it actually is. That last bit is not facetious and nothing I have ever written has been truer.

 

 

Let South Jersey Theatre Rise

The Right Things To Do, Part 1:  Know Thyself

I began reviewing South Jersey theatre only a short while ago. But it doesn’t take long for a dispassionate but friendly eye to spot odd places of timidity, rigidity, confusion and inelegance. This is particularly true since these things do not show up on the stages so much as in the houses of the companies I review. Except for a precious few, they are universally ill-attended. That’s fact number one.

Fact two: where is The McCarter Theatre?

The McCarter, in Princeton, is the single, most active regional theatre in the United States. It is the grand dame of  central-south Jersey theatres with a soaring proscenium, traps, flies and a lighting grid which makes the heavens jealous on cloudy nights. It has a full, elegant staff of first-rate talent in every aspect of the craft. It presents, all in all, the best argument it is possible to make for the value of live theatre.

And I got lost getting there. Less than a mile from the door, we stop  at a pizza place. Excuse me, The McCarter Theatre? Blank stares, a shrug and gone.

Down the street, a gas station. Again, excuse me, The McCarter?

“That’s that movie theater, right?”

I was taken aback. So close to this national treasure and the people working around it have never heard of it. This represents a disjuncture between art and life which I find painful. I fully expected everyone living and working around McCarter to know at least what it was if not how to find it. Even the pizza drivers drew a blank? That’s absurd. And that’s fact number two.

Knowing that you live near arguably the best American theatre would be a great point of pride in a rational world. That it’s not speaks barrel loads, and those barrels are not full of fine wine.

How come they don’t know? Why doesn’t the level of McCarter match more broadly with the level of  daily life?  We can take a guess that the superlative nature of McCarter’s fare puts it off the common radar. But that answer is not completely satisfying. And it begs the question, if they’re not aware of it for its artistic accomplishments, how about just because it’s famous? is all theatre too fine to be reckoned in the common field of notice?

Not at all. Staples clerks, school secretaries, even pizza drivers are the stuff of which community theatre is built. Community theatre is folk art of the highest sort. It is well within the notice of folks in pizza parlors and gas stations.

And yet we have Collingswood, NJ, a town with a fabulous theatre, an arts center, galleries and bistros. A lot of artistic stuff happens in Collingswood. Now, scoot along Haddon Avenue in Collingswood on a breezy, summer’s day and ask folks at random if there isn’t a community theatre around there somewhere. In fact, there are two. But if you find one person in ten who knows that’s true and, of those ones in tens, one in ten who can name one of the two theatre companies, you’ll have done better than I did.

This unnatural chasm between great art and real life is rationally preposterous. All arts, particularly theatre, grow from things every human does as a child.

What does an actor do? An actor stands in front of witnesses and says things with great conviction which could not possibly be true. Acting is the art form of lying. If that sounds harsh, think “fibbing”.

What is a fort made of sofa cushions other than a stage set? And the little one inside calling out, “I’m a soldier, Mommy!” is an actor developing his craft. You clearly make out her vocal characterizations and interpretations as the show goes on.

The skills of the art are so innately bound with human development and growth and yet the art itself is so oddly ripped away from it. This makes my brain hurt.

But an idea came to me as I pondered facts one and two. Who is in the best position to repair this injury to our cultural psyche? Community theatre is! The big theatres try, but there aren’t enough of them. There are a whole lot of community theatres, and they’re all over the place!

I hear the groan building even before anyone has read this. It’s the over-worked core groups of community theatres telling me they will snap if they’re given more work than is already on their plates. Not to worry. This is intended to relieve exactly that stress by working together and doing a couple of fun, gutsy things.

There’s a stopper, of course, or this would have been done long ago. I don’t exactly know what’s in the way, but I have a message for the South Jersey theatre community to understand with perfect clarity:

You are a very, very talented group of people.

I have seen you on stage. I have seen others on stage. I have reviewed you. I have reviewed professional theatre. You are not professional theatres. But there is not a single performance I have seen where there has not been sufficient talent, if not training and production values, to fill any stage anywhere.

The industry as a whole seems to believe that it benefits from the interesting assertion that talent is a rare commodity and, therefore, valuable in a free market sense.  So there are places where all the “real talent” gathers and flexes itself. And then there is Everywhere-Else. We in Everywhere-Else must rightly pay the real talent great sums of money to flex for us because, without them, we have nothing to inspire us.

Okay, two thing: first, this myth of the scarcity of talent is complete rubbish, and, second, it does not benefit the art or the industry in any but a very unimaginative, short-sighted way. In the end, it leads to the cultural schizophrenia we have now. Talent is not a rare commodity. It is a human birthright. To say it is rare is to lie. Ah, theatre!

So I start here: you folks in community theatre don’t know how talented you are. If you knew how talented you are, if you knew how good your product is, none of this would be a problem. Why do I think that?

Because if you knew yourselves to be as talented as I, having seen you on stage, know you to be, you would be beating brass drums down the streets of your towns getting notice. You would be unable to be less proud of your products than that. You are that damned good.

So I challenge South Jersey community theatres: meet with me. Let’s figure a place to get together on Saturday, January 7, have a cup of tea and chat about a common strategy.  I’ve heard a number of strong ideas on my rounds, and I’m certain there are more amongst such a creative group. Let’s raise public awareness of theatre to the point where every adult in South Jersey will know the name of her/his own community theatre group and everyone on two legs within ten miles of Princeton will at least be able to point with pride in the direction to The McCarter, acknowledging the cultural high ground that it is.

On the way, together, we can accomplish the 4 Cheeks Project: four cheeks for every seat of every house of every performance of every community theatre production playing in South Jersey. I’m tired of sitting alone in the dark. Let’s get me some company watching your very good work. 

Where shall we meet? Let me hear from you.

Terry Stern

sjreviewer@yahoo.com  

(856) 240-0890

At McCarter Theatre in Princeton

A Christmas Carol: Why Live Theatre Will Never Cease

If there is a single story in the English language which embodies today’s heart of Christmas, it is A Christmas Carol. Begun as a political pamphlet about the plight of poor children in early 1843, Dickens withheld its publication, revised it, and published it later in the year under its present title.

It was written at a time when the Christmas tree and card were first being introduced to English culture. The story, in its many incarnations and iterations, is credited with bringing joy and song back to the celebration of the holiday after a period of somber sobriety and keeping it there for over 150 years unto the present day.

Nearly everyone I know, Christian or not, was raised on this beautiful, early Victorian cautionary tale. So, Charles Dickens and Alastair Sim notwithstanding, A Christmas Carol is definitely an American classic.

It is most fitting, then, that it should be staged with such elegantly magical depth, grit and splash by the crown jewel of New Jersey theatres, The McCarter Theatre of Princeton. Venerable and rightfully venerated, the McCarter is the  Everest of regional theatres and has been nearly since its opening in 1930.

Endowed with a proud history and a technical staff of 30, there is no end to the riveting beauty, clarity and delight of the stage pictures it presents in its productions, particularly this one. Wigglingly exciting images, sounds and animations from the hair-raising door knocker to the blaze of the flaming headstone with a  giant, eerily animated puppet of death filling a quarter of the stage from floor to proscenium arch directing the climax. The spectacle dazzles earnestly and seamlessly from start to finish in a manner most satisfyingly matched by the performances it supports.

Graeme Malcome gives us a twisted wick of a Scrooge, hauntingly gaunt, crabby and spare atop the mountain of his success, presented in a towering, unsettlingly off-center set by designer Ming Cho Lee. Mr. Malome rants, snarls and forcefully fulfills the deliciously evil character we hate so much it makes us laugh.

Agile and with fine timing and form, he makes an entrance you do not want to miss to open the second act. You may wish to avert your gaze if you are acrophobic, but you will be yanking on the sleeve of the person sitting next to you demanding to know what’s going on. His is the show’s deep, steady anchor.

The Ghost of Christmas Present is styled by Ronica Reddick with the quirky flair of  a slightly over-caffeinated interior designer insouciantly arranging and rearranging a room. Except her room is Scrooge. She bears a twinkling, sprinkling, chiming wand and gleefully wreaks havoc on Scrooge’s equilibrium, not to mention the audience’s. She is an elegant, comic delight.

Piper Goodeye and Michele Tauber, two most versatile actresses playing multiple supporting parts, most notably and hysterically as Mrs. Bonds and Mrs. Stocks, the two solicitresses who come seeking respite for the poor at this season of the year. As their names so clearly attest, one cannot do without the other. They fill in each other’s words and finish each other’s sentences, bustling about like fairy godmothers who’ve had more than the recommended amount of cocoa for one day.  

The young actors in this performance delight and amaze. Danny Hallowell gives us a Peter Cratchit which embodies the yeoman’s spirit of optimistic youth, taking the stage as if mastering a mountain peak and crying out gleefully in triumph to us below. Matthew Kuene is a wonderful, harried delivery boy straining under a burden which looks nearly as large as he is and drawing strong laughs with his impatience at the unbelieving fools looking their gift horse in the mouth.

Which brings us to the ghosts of Christmas past. This role is brilliantly given to Annika Goldman, Kate Fahey and Samantha Johnson, three young actors who show stamina and talent, dancing, leaping, and laughing in innocent enjoyment of their spirit selves and who provide the perfect, non-threatening bridge to introduce Scrooge to the spirit world.

The cast deserves more praise than I can give here. The Cratchits and Fezziwigs deserve mention, the char woman, laundress and undertaker demand a word as does Old Joe, There is no one I would omit from a fair review with unlimited space and a readership of infinite patience. But I would like to cite the director, Michael Unger. 

This is Mr. Unger’s 14^th year directing the McCarter’s holiday offering, and the vision he brings to the stage carves its own, spacious niche amongst the myriad of productions, performances and renditions of this story. At once comfortingly familiar and surprisingly its own, Mr. Unger’s offering is as sweet as they ever come. Thank you so much, Mr. Unger, not only for this tasty, Christmas treat, but for giving us an incontrovertible argument proving live theatre will never die. It provides spectacle more amazing than movies and more intelligent than circuses.

 I would encourage everyone to get to see this blazing spectacle of hope and transformation. It will not be the cheapest ticket you ever bought, but it will be the most wisely-spent money you ever laid down for a seat.

And that would do it except for a final observation. This is some of the best, full-range theatre appearing on any stage anywhere in the world. Yet, when we got a bit turned round on our way there and stopped to ask less than a mile from the curtain, no one had any idea what we were talking about. “Is that a movie theater,” asked one?

Places like The McCarter gamely address this painful disjuncture between art and daily life, collecting for local charities and food banks at the end of the performance. But they are not nearly enough. It will take a full-blown, cooperative effort on the part of the theatre world, community theatre in particular, to make a dent. Community theatre must not be timid in leading the way on this.   

Take this in the joyous and grateful spirit in which it is offered: I saw a beautiful confluence of experienced craft, honed talent, elegant space and first-rate equipment, materials and supplies on the McCarter stage. It is an assemblage which cannot easily be elsewhere matched.

But there are a number of actors I’ve seen on smaller, less elegant community stages whose talents would fill out a production such as this quite nicely. And this does not in the least diminish the respect and high regard in which I hold the fine actors at McCarter. I saw huge talent there, and I saw no talent I haven’t seen matched many times on community stages.

Training isn’t cheap, and the courage to trust in your own talent is hard to come by. But talent is universal. We’ve got it, every one. Let’s join with excellent theatres like The McCarter to get theatre rooted into real life. Everyone within ten miles of the place should know exactly where it is and what fine things take place there.

My reviews are written for Stage Magazine, a primary live theatre resource for the Delaware Valley. It is a useful and attractive site. Click here totake a look.

You may also be interested in reading some of my other reviews which have appeared in Stage. Click here toread some.

This two-part series on theatre for young children in Camden also appeared in Stage. People tell me the second one made them cry. Click here and get a hankie.

STAGES at Camden County College

School for Wives: rip-snorting classical hoot!

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin was a very funny man. Living a short but  successful life from January 15, 1622 to February 17, 1673, we know him better by his pen name, Moliere. School for Wives was his 1662 return to a theme which had won him great favor the previous year with his School for Husbands: the folly of jealousy in love.

Moliere’s comedy is strongly influenced by his great love of commedia dell’arte,  the late Italian Renaissance comic theatre style. He is a master of comic types. Arnolphe is the pompous middle-aged fool so wrapped up in his own peculiar logic that he is totally bewildered when his contrivances unravel as they collide with the real world.

Stephen Bonnell gives us a classic old fool with a twist: he steps tantalizingly close to cattiness. This allows him a pleasing pantheon of sneers with which to delight us as the plot unfolds. There is his lovely smug sneer, his warm-beer bewildered sneer, and his liver-and-marshmallows defeated sneer to name but a few. He has choral sneers with his friend, Chrysalde. Thank you, Mr. Bonnell, for a fine anchor to this furiously funny production.

Agnes is the sweet young thing. Played to a grand comic shine by Melissa Rittman, she snaps across the stage with energetic, bawdy innocence. Sheltered from an early age by her guardian, Arnolphe, she has been purposely kept in total ignorance of anything not related to the cloistered, distaff existence  he has planned for her. Ms. Rittmann is a perfect Penelope Trueheart, the ripe peach striving to stay on the tree as she’s told but yearning for the picker’s pluck and not willing to wait, no matter what they said at the convent.

In steps Horace, given to us as the perfect youth by Ian Taylor. Heroically smiling in confident self-satisfaction, Mr. Taylor gives us a Horace who is always nobly running somewhere. At first sight, Horace and Agnes are in love and undergo great pains to be together, none of which you want to miss. You certainly do not want to miss Mr. Taylor’s dying twice for love. He was not the only one on the floor at that point. Half the audience was there, too, holding our sides. The other half was laughing too hard to fall down.

Filling out the farce are the rascally servants, Alain and Georgette, played by Tim Rinehart and Maria Panvini like a top-billed Vaudeville comedy team. Rinehart & Panvini give us comic timing like championship mixed doubles, knocking their play about with total commitment to every whacky choice they make.

And then there are more minor characters like Chrysalde, Arnolphe’s long-time friend who warns the jealous guardian against his folly. Chryslde is given to us with snide urbanity by Tim Rinehart.

Tim Rinehart? The one who is fabulous as Alain? Yes, he doubles as Chrysalde and plays such distinct characters that the only clue there was to his double role was that Chrysalde was wearing knee pads but was doing no falling. Then I realized that Alain and Chrysalde were of very similar build. Then I checked the program.

Mr. Bonnell and Mr. Rinehart are at their sneering, condescending  best in their common scenes, bouncing the subject of cuckoldry back and forth like a tired mouse just wishing for the end already. Boastful condescension abounds in elegant sufficiency. These two elevate the sneer to the art it was always meant to be.

The actors not mentioned by name here are omitted for want of space, not praiseworthy performances. Each deserves a paragraph. The entire cast is to be roundly appreciated for its fine comic timing, its ability to play physical comedy and its mastery of classic French comic style, flowing, posing and mugging about the set in full extension. Vocal and physical interpretations are energetic, whimsically stylized and comically insouciant.

And many, many thanks for the ability to render a play written in rhymed couplets as something other than a series of literary speed bumps. Rhyme is harder to play than you might think, and all of them can play it.

The set is beautiful, simple and versatile. The costumes show marvelous detail. Sets and costumes are stand-outs, but, happily, are combined with such stand-out performances and staging that, well, they don't. Stand out. They support the motion and build of the play seamlessly and with eminent skill.

It is not a perfect production. Opening night takes its toll in glitches and lines suddenly just a little beyond memory’s reach. And the acoustics are slightly hot in the theatre. There’s an echo which actually makes it harder to understand an actor the more he or she projects and enunciates. For those reasons, I might have missed a major plot point regarding Arnolphe’s double identity had I not known it was coming.

And for those reasons, the production takes a single strike, by which I mean that the unmitigated appreciation and enjoyment the director, cast and crew deserved for their fine work was dulled one strike’s worth by an audience sometimes not fully at ease and wondering if everything were going right.

But I can guarantee that by the time you see it, most of these things will have worked their way out. You will see a better performance than I did, and I’d see this one again any time. This production makes classic French farce an accessible commodity and gives the belly quite a workout. Do not see this show if you’re trying to stay angry. But if you’re not, get down to Lincoln Hall and see this remarkable fulfillment of comic vision.

Moliere’s death is as legendary as his plays. Having contracted what was likely tuberculosis in his younger years, he was, ironically, playing in The Imaginary Invalid at the age of 52 when he collapsed in a fit of bloody coughing on the stage. Recovering, he insisted upon finishing the performance. When curtain rang down, he collapsed in another fit, went into a coma and never regained consciousness. Not quite comic, but definitely an actor’s exit.

School for Wives, many say, was his finest. Stages at Camden County College struts it proudly , sneering and wooing us with promise of precision into elegantly riotous and most welcome satisfaction. It is an intimate theatre. See the show. Buy tickets in advance.

My reviews are written for Stage Magazine, a primary resource for the Delaware Valley theatre community. Click here to Take a look at the Stage Magazine web site.


If you enjoyed this review, you may like to see my other work in Stage. Click here to take a look.


This link is to a series of two articles about theatre and social change covering performances of children's theatre for young students in five Camden schools. People tell me the second article made them cry. Click here to read them.