Jack L. B. Gohn - Page 11

What really puts the show across, however, is the songs. The wealth of black pop of the mid-70s is on display here, including power-pop ballads (THE FEELING WE ONCE HAD) and disco (EMERALD CITY BALLET), with definite echoes of the Shaft Theme in the TORNADO BALLET. And here this great music is put across by pros.

Fiddler traffics in the safest kind of nostalgia, reminiscences of a world no one would want to return to. It's a lovely flirtation with a way of life that is safely dead. The only real question is whether it is done well. And I'm pleased to say that it's done very well by Toby's.

In every other interpretation of Tom Wingfield that I have ever seen, Tom is always played to show tenderness and solicitude at times for his mother and sister, and a fundamental understanding of their plight, even as he chafes at their dysfunction and lashes out at them. When, at the end, he says he is haunted by his sister even in his flight, this is not just about being unable to spit a bad taste out of his mouth. Yet Matt Lee's Tom gives just that impression.

Here in Baltimore, it seems to be Bus Stop season. It's been less than a month since I reviewed the Spotlighters' community theater production of the William Inge 1955 classic; now it's Center Stage's turn. And of course Center Stage (or is it Centerstage these days?) gives it a full-dress professional staging. The difference is surprisingly great.

The Ephrons seem to have set out to make the point that on some profound level, women's clothes are themselves, and that women's very lives are bound up with their clothes and vice versa. But the case is not well-documented. And little of it bears the stamp of the Ephron wit. But the performances are fine.

The flaws I've mentioned are real, but are far from detracting altogether from the enjoyment Bus Stop has to offer. Inge not only speaks up for crazy love, but for rustics who in their own ways are crazy like foxes in their pursuit of it. Crazy like a fox is usually good, especially when presented by as fine an ensemble as The Spotlighters have assembled here.

On the evidence of the book, and as echoed in the show, Alice Walker finds permanence and monogamy rarer than more fluid arrangements. I mentioned forgiveness, and it plays large here; the characters find, in various ways, that they must accept that their loved ones love them back only with divided hearts.

Almost everyone in this world is married or willing to go out on public dates with women to camouflage his real social life. Few of them can visualize, even to themselves, what it would be like to regard the gay halves of their lives as normal, continuous, and public. It is both touching and interesting to watch.

A show that gets liberal audiences to cheer for someone who at first blush would seem like a future Ann Romney is doing something pretty canny.

For a dark heist play, like a dark heist movie, to work, you need to populate it with hard male actors. Those are the rules. You need reservoir dogs, not reservoir show dogs.

The portrayal of Edna by Lawrence B. Munsey is outstanding; more than any other Edna I've seen, Munsey brings out the femininity and vulnerability of the character without sacrificing her drag queen strut at appropriate moments.

I was intrigued as soon as I heard that Director Eve Muson was bringing the show to a professional company. My sense was that Muson felt she could build a better product on the same platform of stars, costume and set. She was right. The end product is a modern historical tragedy that obviously speaks directly to contemporary racial and gender issues but also past them to the human condition, as all great tragedy does.

The monastery must now meet the demand for an "incorruptible," a corpse that never decomposes, the Rolls-Royce of relics. Marie seems ready to be pressed into service over what may be her dead body. And only a bona fide miracle will save the day.

The folklore passed on from parents to children under the deceptively superficial name of fairy tales is profound. The kitchen drudge who yearns to become a princess, the little girl vanquishing a wolf encountered on the way to grandmother's house, the simpleton who sells the family cow for a handful of magic beans, and their kindred, are archetypes of each of us, at various moments in the trajectories of our lives.

In a play in which morally acceptable and unacceptable stances are hopelessly intertwined and might turn an audience off, there are two things that will draw us to the play anyway: Portia and Shylock. If they are right, the play will succeed, despite all its difficulties. They are right as can be in this staging.

There is anger at the way men perceive women - and abuse, rape, belittle and objectify them. Owen's woman-hating fantasy may not reflect reality, but that doesn't make it harmless. That point can make the show hard to watch at moments, as it wends its way through scenes of imagined rape and murder. But it wouldn't do to look away. There's painful humor at every painful turn.

The songbook of Jerry Leiber (1933-2011) and Mike Stoller (1933- ) is a natural for jukebox musical treatment, because it encompasses such variety that it requires little by way of setting to stay interesting. You don't need a plot, you don't need performers to talk or act, all you need is a band, some choreography and costumes, and some great singer/dancers, and you're there.

A youthful cast, showcasing a number of talents from Morgan State University, brings out Waller's exuberance and his ambivalence.

Rodgers and Hammerstein designed the ending to reduce you to tears, and they knew what they were doing. Resist, even at this excellent revival,and think about the conundrums of race, class and gender that that lie just beneath the surface.

As playwright Michael Weller intelligently conveys, except in the most empty marriages, no matter what the parties may have done to each other, there are still ties of love holding them together. In living through these crises, then, both forces, the centripetal and the centrifugal, must have a part. To the observer, it might seem laughably incoherent, but actually it is just the way things are at such moments.