Jack L. B. Gohn - Page 12

These are small-timers, and what makes their souls as small as their business, I think, is America itself, a place where there is no state religion nor any religion or code of ethics at all which anyone is required to internalize. Here you are free to be a scheming psychopath while talking a blue streak; no one will stop you. And while Mamet is clearly pointing out how amusing people who do this can be, I do not see much evidence he thinks we can learn much from them; the encounter is all. Fortunately, it is enough

The big reason for the audience's enjoyment, however, is the performance of Nigel Reed as Barrymore, who absolutely inhabits the legendary old ham's persona, grandiose and gross and catty and orotund. A strong physical resemblance to the man does not hurt either.

Olga is resigned to the fact that the individual niceness of herself and her sisters, and the somewhat more nuanced niceness of their father the Tsar, will have nothing to do with the outcomes at this point. The tides of history are flowing, and the Romanovs are about to be swept out to sea.

Four long acts long, with casting challenges, bedeviled by attitudes modern audiences likely will not share, and, it must be said, self-indulgent as regards some of O'Neill's great weaknesses, Moon for the Misbegotten requires more than most companies and audiences can summon to put it across successfully. I say "successfully" but perhaps "successfully as possible" might be the more accurate phrase. Washington's Heritage-O'Neill Theatre Company's current production partly but not fully meets these challenges.

Put on your most cynical mood, the one in which you laugh at the predictable folly, venality and dishonesty of the human race, mix it with your ear for Jazz Age syncopation and great singing, get your buzz on for chorines flouncing athletically and with rhythmic precision in their undies, and go!

Who is she really? What are her parents up to? What is the manservant doing breaking into and rifling through a locked desk? Why is the maidservant bringing the young woman gloves that were supposed to have been hers, but are clearly too large? Who is the blackmailer who turns up in the dead of night? And why all the references to the treacherous path along the top of the cliff, and the darkness of the sea below at night?

This clever entwinement of the characters' lives is so self-consciously contrived that it cannot serve as the subject of speculations about causation; everything happens because the author has willed it, not because the characters made it happen, because God made it happen, or because of some dynamic in the collective.

Fortunately, Toby's has the right Kira in Heather Marie Beck. In her game willingness to clown rather than just be pretty and sound lovely, she reminds me a bit of Cameron Diaz. I will long treasure the memory of her staggering along, one skate on and one skate off, as she doggedly makes her escape from a too-importunate Sonny. Beck may know, and we may know, that the character looks ridiculous, but the character doesn't know; that's real comedy.

In an era when Waller had to enter some of the places he played by a side door, it would have been inhuman to resist completely the allure of white privilege. It's all on view in his song LOUNGIN' AT THE WALDORF, which contrasts the kind of freedom and looseness he could enjoy performing in Harlem with the stiffer, whiter milieu of the Waldorf Astoria. Nevertheless: "Ain't it swell doin' swell with the swells in the swellest hotel of them all? One of the strengths of the show is that it doesn't whitewash (if I may use that word here) this part of Waller's legacy.

I'm reminded of the old joke: It's only funny till someone gets hurt; then it's hilarious. Jacobean audiences liked the stage littered with corpses at the end; we settle for one or two corpses and people's lives shattered. And that this show certainly delivers. There may not be much depth to it, much in the way of a philosophical point, but it's absorbing to see.

I like a theater of ideas as much as the next reviewer, but found that, in this somewhat trackless waste of a play, the ideas were either inarticulately expressed, trite, or both. The Strand Theater Company, dedicated to providing opportunities for female artists, writers, designers and directors, certainly fills a need. I only wish I could recommend this offering.

The effect is a bit like opening a sampler of candies; while enjoying one treat, you're looking forward to the next, and the next, and the next …

The Spotlighters' performance space is an interesting and often frustrating challenge - a theater-in-the-round (or really in the square) with four columns supporting the ceiling and interfering with sight-lines. But it is actually an excellent space for a chamber musical. The singers can be extremely close to each other, playing off each other rather than each other's amplified voices, as well as right on top of the audience, and when, as here, they're on pitch and on fire, even the most trivial musical fluff can get pretty intense.

The ground rules each year: three short one-act plays in which the parts for college-age actresses predominate, with female antagonists and female protagonists. My hat is tipped to a fine part of a cutting-edge program.

There is always a reason a warhorse gets to become a warhorse. Here, the fun stems from some reversals, a couple of sucker-punches to the expectations of both the characters and the audience, and the ebb and flow of the alliances and enmities around the jury-table. There are five logical set-pieces as well, each devoted to one evidentiary question. For each, further discussion reveals surprising aspects. These traits explain why the play continues to draw audiences the world over, for all the old-fashioned drawbacks.

Contrast that with the loving attention to the stamps. Playwright Rebeck tells us all about the stamps, educates us, in fact, as the play goes on. And the pinnacle of the play, as a dramatic experience, is the moment Sterling gets to see them, after an enormous buildup. The payoff is worth it. Sterling gasps, staggers, a tough man momentarily reduced to helpless wonderment. To like effect is the moment shortly afterwards where the suitcase full of money intended to buy the stamps is unzipped; the bundles of cash literally glow, and Jackie hovers above them, almost inhaling the smell of the money. These objects, then, are presented with so much elaboration that the chiaroscuro handling of the characters is all the more puzzling.

These songs were great pop art that stirred up deep emotions and were taken seriously by their initial listeners.

Director Michael Carleton has envisioned Richard as the prototype of the amoral modern politician who will stop at nothing to achieve power. While professing the purest and most altruistic of motives, he holds no allegiance but to himself; he is the master of media and manipulator of appearances. To drive the point home, Carleton has Richard's famous opening monologue delivered in part as if it were a victory speech after a political campaign, shows some of the events being broadcast on CNN, and invests much of the proceedings with a Georgetown-y air. And by golly, he's right. The effect is not much different from that of Fair Game, the movie about l'affaire Valerie Plame now playing in the local bijou.

The chaos around the microphones completely belies the smoothness of the product going out over the airwaves. Welles, standing on a podium, presides over the process with a cocky young man's assurance that this madness will work.