Written by Hap Erstein | 22 May 2010

“I wish …”

They are the first two and last two words of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Into the Woods, an audacious and whimsical shuffle of lesson-laden Grimm’s fairy tales.

It has long been my wish that a South Florida theater company would take up the challenge of presenting some of Sondheim’s innovative musicals, even though they require large casts of vocally nimble performers and are rarely very popular because of the demands they make on audiences to lean in, listen carefully and think.

Earlier this month, the fledgling Slow Burn Theatre Company produced Sondheim’s Assassins, and for this weekend only, Boca Raton’s Caldwell Theatre performs a concert version of Into the Woods, the brilliant composer-lyricist’s multi-layered fable for our times. It’s the Caldwell’s second concert version in seven months of one of Sondheim’s challenging and rewarding shows – last fall, it was the Pulitzer Prize-winning Sunday in the Park with George.

Like Sunday in the Park, this scores-in-hands, performed-at-music-stands concert opened after an insanely short rehearsal period and the results are nothing less than miraculous. Into the Woods may not be the show to convince those who cannot fathom what all the fuss is about Sondheim, but those who appreciate his complex, emotionally dense work will surely enjoy what director Clive Cholerton and his cast of 15 intrepid actors are serving up.

It was Lapine’s notion to interweave several familiar fairy tales – Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Jack the Giant Killer and Rapunzel, among others – with a new story about a baker and his wife who yearn to have a child. His aim was to show that between “once upon a time” and “happily ever after” is not good and evil or right versus wrong, but a forest of moral ambiguities.

Everyone, it seems, has a wish. Cinderella wants to dress up and attend the festival at the palace. Jack wants to keep his beloved pet cow, who is destined to be sold at the market. Rapunzel wants out of that darned tower. And the baker and his wife want relief from their infertility problem.

It is not too much of a spoiler to note that their wishes all come true, at least temporarily, by intermission. But Sondheim being Sondheim, the characters’ happiness proves fleeting, and the second act turns distinctly darker as the old saw about being careful what you wish for is played out.

If the first act ends happily and neatly, it is mere preface for the second act, which takes us beyond the fairy tales into more dense thematic territory as the characters learn about death and the importance of community when they take a perilous return trip into the woods.

Sondheim is in a playful mood in the first act, tossing off a Disneyfied ditty for his title tune, his only ever rap song for a conniving witch, a seductive solo for Little Red’s wolf, a duet for two preening princes and a tongue-twister description of the palace ball by Cinderella. As much fun as they are, however, the score really hits its stride late in the second act with four message-filled, melodic numbers – Last Midnight, No More, No One Is Alone and Children Will Listen.

Heading the cast as the Witch is Laura Hodos, who puts a genuinely funny, attitude-rich spin on her dialogue and has plenty of vocal power. Many of the performers are veterans of the Sunday in the Park concert, most notably Wayne LeGette and Melissa Minyard, who were Georges Seurat and his mistress Dot, transformed now into the childless Baker and his wife, the emotional center of the show. (If Company was Sondheim’s show about marriage, a subject for which he has no firsthand knowledge, Into the Woods is his parenting musical, another topic for which he has no practical experience.)

LeGette and Minyard inhabit the most fully dimensional characters, a nebbish and his pushy spouse, the most likely targets for audience identification. Jim Ballard and Shane R. Tanner are slyly self-centered, creamy-voiced princes and Beth Dimon is back with another maternal role as Jack’s exasperated mom.

Among the new members of this informal musical theater rep company is Margery Lowe, who trills her way through the vocal demands of Cinderella. New to me, but I am eager to see more of them, are John Debkowski as mellow-voiced, but fuzzy-headed Jack and Joseph Reed as the show’s narrator and a role that is necessarily designated only as Mysterious Man.

Surely the hardest working person onstage is musical director and keyboardist Michael O’Dell, whose one-man accompaniment is superb. When the Caldwell wins the lottery, it would be great if they could spend a bit more on a couple of additional musicians and body microphones for the cast. With Sondheim, the lyrics are so crucial, and many of the overlapping nuances got lost with the stationery mikes.

Into the Woods can be a production-heavy show, but illustrator Michael McKeever showed how locations could be established with a few well-conceived slide projections.

Cholerton and company have hit upon a format that is very appealing and relatively affordable. Future concerts will surely investigate other composers, but when the Caldwell is ready for more Sondheim, it should look into presenting his latest musical, Road Show, which happens to take place in part in Boca Raton.

INTO THE WOODS, Caldwell Theatre, 7901 N. Federal Highway, Boca Raton. Through Sunday. $25-$35. Call: (561) 241-7432 or (877) 245-7432.

Written by Hap Erstein | 16 May 2010

In honor of Broadway composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim’s 80th birthday and the opening of the Caldwell Theatre’s staged reading of his Into the Woods this Friday through Sunday, May 21-23, we fiendishly present our Ultimate Sondheim Trivia Test, geared to separate the obsessive fanatics from the casual fans.

And the Caldwell has generously donated a pair of tickets to any performance of Into the Woods -- based on space availability -- to the winning entrant. Send your answers to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it by Thursday, May 20, at 6 p.m. In the case of a tie, the amount of detail and accuracy in your answers will be the deciding factors. The decision of the judges is final. (Gosh, we’ve always wanted to write that.)

Ready?

1. Many of Sondheim’s musicals are wholly original, but identify these adaptations from this list of source material authors.

A. Aristophanes

B. George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart

C. Ingmar Bergman

D. Ettore Scola

E. William Shakespeare

F. John Collier

G. Arthur Laurents

H. Christopher Bond

2. If a song does not work in the show, Sondheim writes another one, no matter how good the song being scrubbed is. Name the three songs he wrote for the opening number of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. And name the three songs he wrote for the finale of Company.

3. What is Stephen Sondheim’s middle name?

4. Sondheim at the movies: Name two movies for which he wrote least one original song, two movies for which he wrote the background score and one movie musical he wrote that was never produced.

5. Name an existing Sondheim song that was used in each of these movies.

A. Jersey Girl

B. Camp

C. Death to Smoochy

D. In & Out

E. Postcards from the Edge

6. What is the only Sondheim musical that Meryl Streep has appeared in? Where was it produced?

7. Name two non-musical Arthur Laurents plays for which Sondheim wrote the incidental music.

8. Where is the Stephen Sondheim Center for the Performing Arts located?

9. What do the following three actresses have in common:

A) Ellen Foley

B) Garn Stephens

C) Karen Black

10. Whodunit in The Last of Sheila, the 1973 murder mystery movie that Sondheim co-wrote with Anthony Perkins?

11. In the current Broadway revue, Sondheim on Sondheim, he states that he regrets spending a year and a half of his life writing one specific musical. Which one is it?

12. What is the intentional grammatical error that Sondheim wrote in the title of a song in Gypsy?

13. Organize these Sondheim musicals in order of the number of performances of their original Broadway run, from most to least.

A) Anyone Can Whistle

B) Merrily We Roll Along

C) Passion

D) Road Show

14) Name two television shows that Sondheim was on, playing a character, and one movie in which he played himself.

15) Occasionally, but only occasionally, Sondheim loses the Tony Award for best musical. What show won out over these also-rans?

A) Gypsy

B) Follies

C) Pacific Overtures

D) Sunday in the Park with George

Written by Hap Erstein | 14 May 2010

Some theater reaches for spectacle, but what the theater does best is traffic in dialogue and ideas.

Words and the emotions behind them are in the spotlight in a brief, intermissionless play at GableStage, The Quarrel, by David Brandes and Joseph Telushkin, which chronicles a chance reunion of two men who were childhood friends.

In 1948, in Montreal’s Mount Royal Park, published poet Chaim Kovler (Chaz Mena), in town for a public reading, sees Rabbi Hersh Rasseyner (Avi Hoffman) preparing to pray, and they warily embrace one another. As they catch each other up on events, they consider how their lives have spun in different directions, separated by the brutality of the Holocaust, which had a profound, opposite effect on their commitment to Judaism.

Both lost their families in the death camps, which led Kovler to a secular life and lack of faith, while Rasseyner grew even more devout. As they circle each other, both literally and verbally, they peel away layers, unraveling their pasts and the central perceived betrayal that left a gulf between them.

Fortunately, The Quarrel is more about the limits and resilience of friendship than the value of religion, and neither man is seen as wrong or right. The densely bearded Hoffman gives a performance of delicacy and authenticity, but the revelation is Mena, whose inflections and manner are on target, though more of a personal stretch. Artistic director Joseph Adler may have had a distinct effect on his performers, but the results are a simple, deft staging that is powerful, but seemingly effortless.

THE QUARREL, GableStage at the Biltmore Hotel, 1200 Anastasia Ave., Coral Gables. Continuing through May 23. Tickets: $37.50-$42.50. Call: (305) 445-1119.

* * *

It is called New Theatre, and its main focus is on developing and presenting new scripts, but lately, some of this Coral Gables company’s most effective efforts have been with such established, even classic, plays as Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie and Peter Shaffer’s Equus.

Nicky Silver’s Raised in Captivity first met audiences in 1995, and is probably too quirky to withstand comparison with those other two works, but it captures a handful of neurotic lives with a knowing comic touch and is never less than entertaining, even when its tone shifts confound some of the New Theatre cast.

At the center of Silver’s theatrical maelstrom is a pair of distant twins, unsuccessful writer Sebastian (an increasingly unhinged John Mazzelli, who bears a resemblance to Silver) and his similarly unstable sister Bernadette (comically high-strung Katherine Amadeo), married to a dentist who would rather be painting. Grief, Silver-style, strikes before the play begins when the twins’ mother is killed by a errant shower head. Add to the mix a convicted murderer (Lorenzo D. Gutierrez III) on whom Sebastian is fixated and Sebastian’s patient-but-only-to-a-point psychologist (Barbara Sloan, who flips from silent to motor-mouthed), and you have the ingredients for an odd comic stew.

Audiences are advised to take momentary pleasures from Raised in Captivity when they can, for those waiting for the play to add up to much will wait in vain. Nor is it clear from the direction by Ricky J. Martinez how we are to take the darker, more naturalistic second act, but face value does not seem a viable option. Still, those willing to strap themselves in for the ride will be rewarded with numerous comic jolts and some head-scratching twists.

RAISED IN CAPTIVITY, New Theatre, 4120 Laguna St., Coral Gables. Continuing through Sunday. Tickets: $35-$40. Call: (305) 443-5909.

Written by Hap Erstein | 04 May 2010

This season’s Tony Award nominations were announced this morning. So let the gripes and snipes begin, as well as the closing notices for the snubbed shows.

No one -- except the consistently upbeat Tonys, a marketing cheerleader for New York’s commercial theater -- is going to try and claim that this was a strong season on Broadway. But at least there were enough shows so that some worthy candidates did not make the nominations list. This was the case even if the committee had to reach back to some long-closed productions, to be able to leave off some fairly prominent, likely shoo-ins.

Unexpectedly, the new musical with the most nominations (11) was Fela!, the high-energy, political biography of Fela Anikulapo Kuti, the Nigerian composer-nightclub owner-rabble rouser. By most predictions, the front-runner was supposed to be American Idiot, the staged rock concert based on a pre-existing Green Day album, which got a paltry three nominations, including best musical. Notably snubbed was director Michael Mayer and performer John Gallagher, Jr., probably because they were both said to be channeling their work from the earlier youth-rock phenomenon, Spring Awakening.

The other two best musical nominees were Memphis and Million Dollar Quartet, neither of which was well-received critically. They elbowed out the final opening of the season, Sherie Rene Scott’s Everyday Rapture, which the New York Times at least considered a close second to the Second Coming. Also coming up short was the underappreciated Sondheim on Sondheim and the generally reviled The Addams Family, which continues to do sell-out business despite its rotten reviews.

Among revivals of musicals, a cutdown, glitz-challenged British production of La Cage aux Folles walked off with 11 nominations, including nods for both of its leading men, Douglas Hodge and Kelsey Grammer. It looks like the prohibitive favorite to win, even though a far lesser La Cage revival was victorious in this category only five years ago, in a woefully slow season for revivals.

The only other musical revival nominee still running is A Little Night Music, said to be a pale imitation of the Tony-winning original, despite the star power of Catherine Zeta-Jones and Angela Lansbury, both of whom were nominated Tuesday. Also in the running, in theory, will be Finian’s Rainbow and an admired condensed version of Ragtime, which failed to find much of an audience. Both place-holders beat out the recently opened, underwhelming revival of Promises, Promises, even though the nominating committee is urged to favor shows that are still running.

The same snubbing could be seen in the best play category, which includes Red and Next Fall, both generally acclaimed and still running, plus two long-closed productions -- In the Next Room (or “the vibrator play”) and Time Stands Still. Their nominations are more startling, since their edge out three worthy plays that are open -- Enron, A Behanding in Spokane and Race.

Enron, which arrived from London with “snob hit” written all over it, was not well-reviewed and had to settle for one performance nomination (Stephen Kunken as accounting whiz Andy Fastow), two in design categories and, strangest of all, a nomination for Adam Cork’s musical score.

On rare occasions, non-musicals have made it into the score category, but this year it happened twice. Branford Marsalis got nominated for his score to August Wilson’s Fences. In this case, there were no snubs involved, since only two new musicals had original scores, an eligibility requirement -- not that anyone can muster much enthusiasm for the songs in The Addams Family or Memphis.

Probably the most eyebrow-raising snub was to Nathan Lane, who works very hard lugging The Addams Family on his back eight times a week. The two-time Tony winner and occasional host of the Tonys can take that night off now. Chances are he was beaten out by Grammer, whose performance in La Cage is overshadowed by his flashier co-star Hodge.

The Tonys seem to like rewarding TV and movie stars who come to Broadway. Among the bold-face names on this year’s Tony nominations list are: Jude Law (Hamlet), Liev Schreiber and Scarlett Johansson (A View From the Bridge), Christopher Walken (A Behanding in Spokane), Alfred Molina (Red), Valerie Harper (Looped), Linda Lavin (Collected Stories), Laura Linney (Time Stands Still), Catherine Zeta-Jones and Angela Lansbury (A Little Night Music) and David Alan Grier (Race).

In local angles, Harper’s Looped played the now-shuttered Cuillo Centre on its way to Broadway and Marcia Milgrom Dodge, nominated director of Ragtime, has twice staged works at the Maltz Jupiter Theatre, most recently Anything Goes.

The Tony Awards will be broadcast on CBS at 8 p.m. Sunday, June 13.

Written by Hap Erstein | 04 May 2010

He has never actually been to Palm Beach Dramaworks’ West Palm Beach theater, but with five of his plays produced there, Edward Albee is the company’s unofficial resident playwright.

It might have been more in keeping with the troupe’s mission of presenting worthy, but neglected scripts had Dramaworks reached back for a less-seen Albee play like Tiny Alice or All Over, but in its continuing consideration of his work, the 1994 Pulitzer Prize-winning Three Tall Women -- the third Pulitzer for the generally acknowledged greatest living American playwright -- will certainly suffice.

In a crisply performed production that J. Barry Lewis stages with admirable clarity and simplicity, we eavesdrop as Albee paints an acid-dipped portrait of his adoptive mother. Elements of her have appeared in other plays of his, but never so directly as in this character sketch of a 92-year-old woman of privilege, consumed by bitterness, succumbing to the ravages of a stroke and ultimately accepting the release of death.

Both acts of Three Tall Women contain Albee’s exacting word choices and hyper-articulate dialogue, but are otherwise quite different. The first act is a largely naturalistic exchange among the aged matriarch (Beth Dixon), her wily, but subservient middle-aged caregiver (Angie Radosh), and a young emissary of the old woman’s lawyer (Geneva Rae). At the old woman’s affluent, austere home to help sort out some financial matters, the young underling cannot resist some verbal sniping over the client’s racial epithets and general dismissive attitude.

The act ends with the old woman’s stroke and, after intermission, she is seen lying motionless in bed while the three actresses inhabit the room, representing aspects of her at three distinct ages of her life -- 26, 52 and 92. That may take a few minutes to adjust to, but it seems to come into focus more easily than it did in the national tour of the play’s original off-Broadway production. Or maybe that is just a consequence of time and familiarity with the material.

Certainly the Dramaworks cast deserves some of the credit for the play’s current impact. Dixon plays the old woman with her hard edges intact, dominating the production in the same way that her character does. If we keep in mind that this is Albee’s recollection of his mother, he has not mellowed in his opinion of her.

As her nurse, Radosh handles the character’s duties capably, trying to placate the perpetually cranky woman and acting protectively of her against the sniping of the young visitor. Rae is a bit starchy in the early going, but comes across better in the second act as the young woman appalled that she will become the two soured souls she sees in front of her. Also in the cast is Chris Marks as a preppy young, mute stand-in for Albee, an important presence but a fairly thankless acting assignment.

Three Tall Women represents one of Albee’s several career comebacks, a late work that shows him at his full powers. Ultimately, it is full of the wisdom of age, with an emotional range from bitterness to acceptance. Unlike Seascape, it deserves its Pulitzer and its place on Albee’s top shelf, as evidenced by Dramaworks’ first-rate production.

THREE TALL WOMEN, Palm Beach Dramaworks, 322 Banyan Blvd., West Palm Beach. Through June 13. Tickets: $42-$44. Call: (561) 514-4042.