At one end of Palm Beach County, at the Maltz Jupiter Theatre, we are told that “Life is a cabaret, old chum.” At the other end, at Boca Raton’s Caldwell Theatre, it turns out that life is actually more like professional wrestling.
The latter news flash comes from Kristoffer Diaz’s The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, a 2010 Pulitzer Prize finalist that examines the scripted “sport” for what it has to say about contemporary America.
Of course there are winners and losers, as in every sport, but pro wrestling has athletes who make their living as fall guys. And not necessarily because they are less skilled, but because they have been cast as the loser to satisfy the blood-thirsty, xenophobic and often racist tendencies of the fans.
Diaz focuses on one such perpetual loser. No, not the title character, who represents all that is triumphant, if hollow, about America. Instead the play is narrated by the guy paid to make Chad Deity look good, a Bronx-born Puerto Rican named Macedonio Guerra — a/k/a Mace — a guy so destined for defeat that he doesn’t even rate an entrance, elaborate or otherwise, into the ring.
At the bone-crunching, brawny area premiere production at the Caldwell, Mace is played by Brandon Morris, who handles most of the substantial verbal chores and, almost as importantly, is quick with an ad-lib comeback to theatergoers, who are encouraged to talk back to the cast. By the first Saturday night of the run, Morris and the cast were not getting much response from the crowd to play off, though they soldiered on gamely nevertheless.
The play takes place on and around a Tim Bennett-designed wrestling ring, which is flanked by two giant-sized video monitors, on which are often projected closed-circuit live images of the matches produced and promoted by THE Wrestling, the dominant sports media circus in Chad’s world. Presiding over the ring is Everett K. Olson, owner and orchestrator of THE Wrestling, a man well attuned to the public’s hunger for ethnic stereotypes.
There Mace introduces a new fall guy, a Brooklynite of Indian extraction, turned into a cross-cultural villain known simply as The Fundamentalist. He too will know the faux-wrath of Chad Deity’s signature wrestling move, the “power bomb,” a slam to the mat from Chad’s shoulders. (Actors do have good hazard insurance, don’t they?)
As Chad, Donte Bonner gets by on his winning smile, offhanded manner and buff physique. Gregg Weiner oozes slime as Olson and Adam Bashian amuses as the Indian, whose career in wrestling seems doomed by his unfortunate habit of freezing up — in the ring.
Ultimately, The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity is not as profound as its Pulitzer attention would suggest, but it is rock-’em-sock-’em theatrical and on target to gain the Caldwell a new younger audience.
THE ELABORATE ENTRANCE OF CHAD DEITY, Caldwell Theatre Co., 7901 N. Federal Highway, Boca Raton. Through Sunday, Feb. 12. Tickets: $38-$50. Call: (561) 241-7432 or (877) 245-7432.
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Chad Deity oozes originality, while the production of Cabaret at the Maltz Jupiter feels like what it is — a recreation of a revival from almost 14 years ago.
It was a very effective reconsideration of the great John Kander-Fred Ebb-Joe Masteroff show about decadent pre-World War II Berlin, but virtually nothing has been added now by director BT McNicholls, who has staged this version many times over the years.
Perhaps that should not matter, particularly to theatergoers who have never seen Cabaret or never seen this darker, more chilling take on the material — originally devised by Sam Mendes — but such a cloned production hardly seems in keeping with the homegrown work on which this theater prides itself.
That impression is only compounded by the casting of a few key performers who are veterans of that Mendes revival. Kate Shindle played unstable, apolitical Kit Kat Club headliner Sally Bowles on Broadway, and Christopher Sloan has played the smarmy, androgynous Emcee on tour. She is quite good at the Maltz and he is even better, but if you have the impression that you are watching one more stop of a newly assembled road company, you are not alone.
More so than in other productions, the Emcee is at the center of the show, insinuates himself into most of the musical numbers, at least tangentially, acting as much stage manager as showman and fuzzing the line between onstage and off.
Even the conventional story numbers — as opposed to the presentational club songs — are often given a post-modern spin. Cabaret broke a lot of barriers originally, but the scenes between Sally and American would-be novelist Cliff Bradshaw, and especially those between Cliff’s landlady Fraulein Schneider and her beau, Jewish fruit seller Herr Schultz, still smack of musical theater formula. But that does not stop them from having deep emotional impact.
The score is quintessential Kander and Ebb — tuneful, but usually with a knife twist. The opening number, Wilkommen, is sung here with as much aggressive anger as any mood-setting opening number in musical theater. Tomorrow Belongs to Me begins as an anthem of optimism, but ultimately portent of world domination. And the title tune sounds like an upbeat embrace of life, but is delivered with a diametrically opposite subtext.
Shindle handles that number powerfully, delineating Sally’s emotional breakdown, and she also grabs us by the throat with a simple, aching rendition of Maybe This Time. She succeeds in the role, though she comes off as too assured to be fully convincing as rudderless Sally. Instead the evening belongs to leering Sloan, whose seductive, crotch-grabbing edginess defines the production.
This is not the Cabaret that first took Broadway in 1966, but nor does it fully belong to the Maltz Jupiter Theatre.
CABARET, Maltz Jupiter Theatre, 1001 E. Indiantown Road, Jupiter. Through Sunday, Jan. 29. Tickets: $43-$60. Call: (561) 575-2223.