Write a play with a prominent role for actresses of an advanced age and watch it attract major award-laden performers. Certainly that is the case with My Old Lady, Israel Horovitz’s tribute to the French and their cultural differences with Americans.
In the film version released earlier this year, two-time Oscar winner Maggie Smith took on the title role of wily nonagenarian Mathilde Girard. And now at Palm Beach Dramaworks, the rueful comedy has attracted Estelle Parsons — a mere one-time Academy Award winner — to our midst.
Unlike most of Horovitz’s plays, which are set in or refer to his adopted hometown of Gloucester, Mass., My Old Lady takes place in a spacious, if poorly maintained Paris apartment. Fiftyish New Yorker Mathias Gold (Tim Altmeyer), a down-on-his-luck, failed novelist, has inherited the place from his estranged father, and as the play begins he arrives in The City of Lights hoping to make a fast sale.
Unfortunately, he had not figured on Mathilde or her daughter Chloe (Angelica Page), both of whom reside at the apartment through a curious real estate scheme, a viager, somewhat like viatical insurance or a reverse mortgage. Not only does Mathilde have control of the flat until her death, but Mathias must pay her a monthly stipend until then.
With no financial resources, Mathias moves into the apartment and quickly clashes with petulant Chloe, developing the kind of animosity that usually leads to romance, at least in plays like this. When it happens, it tests the audience’s credulity, but do what you can to buy into it.
Once past the real estate exposition, the play darkens as the three characters begin sifting through their pasts, parceling out blame for their damaged lives and discovering unexpected connections among themselves.
Parsons knows how to draw an audience to her, but her role here is rather passive, with little opportunity to flex her performance muscles. She is overshadowed by Altmeyer as the fish-out-of-water American in Paris, shell-shocked by his aggravated financial dilemma, which he addresses by taking to drink. The third leg of the triangle, Page’s Chloe, is exceedingly irate early on, in part for the contrast as she inexplicably mellows, a difficult transition for any actress.
Artistic director Bill Hayes stages his cast attractively on K. April Soroko’s sprawling, well-appointed set. There seems to be a lighter play lurking within Horovitz’s script, but at Dramaworks, the emphasis is on the dark tones.
MY OLD LADY, Palm Beach Dramaworks, 201 Clematis St., West Palm Beach. Through Jan 11. Tickets: $62. Call: 561-514-4042.
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I could go on at length about the giggle-inducing irreverence of the nine-time Tony Award winner, The Book of Mormon, and I probably will. But long before the road company of this profanity-laced musical by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the co-creators of cable television’s South Park, arrived at the Kravis Center this week, it was virtually sold out, except for the nightly discounted lottery seats.
Fans of South Park are probably prepared for the blasphemous glee with which this show takes satirical aim at the odd tenets and history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. And if they saw the feature film that Parker and Stone spun off from the series, South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, they know the affection those guys have for musicals.
Still, it remained uncertain what would come from their first assault on Broadway. As represented by the crisp, lively touring company of their 2011 hit, The Book of Mormon is great subversive fun that even Mormons with a sense of humor can embrace, and perhaps the church may pick up a few more followers from the show.
It is less likely that they will see themselves in the two main characters, a pair of naïve Mormon missionaries — self-centered Elder Price (David Larsen) and tubby, truth-stretching Elder Cunningham (standby Rob Colletti, performing all week here) — who are sent to Uganda to convert and baptize the locals.
Once there, they find that Africa is nothing like The Lion King. True, the natives do sing a bouncy, chipper ditty reminiscent of “Hakuna Matata,” but its incendiary translation is unprintable. It, like the rest of the score, has a simple, infectious lilt, the signature of co-composer and lyricist Robert Lopez, who supplied the same for Avenue Q and Disney’s Frozen.
The show’s plot may break new ground for Broadway, but the musical numbers have distinct echoes of the past. The opening doorbell-ringing song is reminiscent of Bye-Bye, Birdie’s “Telephone Hour,” Price’s 11 o’clock anthem “I Believe” is right out of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s playbook and a skit recapping the history of Mormonism by the newly converted Ugandans is right out of The King and I’s “Small House of Uncle Thomas.”
Colletti’s Arnold Cunningham is endearingly ignorant and emotionally needy, while Larsen’s Kevin Price is all gleaming smile and large-voiced earnestness. Denee Benton is a winner as a Ugandan lass who dreams of going to Salt Lake City and Daxton Bloomquist sparkles as a tap-happy gay missionary eager to deny his sexual orientation.
No, The Book of Mormon is not for everyone. Parker and Stone enjoy testing the limits of good taste and then blithely exceeding them. But the show is genuinely funny, which counts for a lot in musical comedy.
THE BOOK OF MORMON, Kravis Center Dreyfoos Hall, 701 Okeechobee Blvd., West Palm Beach. Through Sunday. Tickets: From $45 up. Call: 561-832-7469.
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If, as is statistically probable in South Florida, you are Jewish instead of Mormon, then oy, has Jason Alexander got a show for you.
And if you were around in the mid-’60s, maybe you played a comedy album from the period, When You’ve in Love, The Whole World Is Jewish. You know, the one that had Frank Gallop singing “The Ballad of Irving.”
No? Well, even so, the album has been brought back from the vinyl junk heap and adapted into a revue with music, co-written and directed by Alexander. And even if you never heard the album, chances are you’ve heard a lot of the jokes in this show, which rely more on nostalgic familiarity than comic surprise.
Old Jews Telling Jokes, currently playing at the Broward Stage Door Theatre, just gets down to the business of acting out ethnic gags. By contrast, When You’re in Love… wraps itself in a theatrical premise.
Did you ever hear the one about the young Jewish guy who asks his rabbi to educate his gentile girlfriend about the customs and quirks of Judaism? So the rabbi takes the naïve lass under his wing, offering a crash course that falls neatly into such anecdote categories as Last Wish, Shoe Repair Shop, The Genie, The Retirees and Holiday in Las Vegas.
To add variety to the intermisssionless, 90-minute evening, Alexander also penned a few songs for the evening, most notably a tribute to the groaning excesses of Jewish cuisine. While you need not know any Yiddish to follow the show, there is a brief glossary of terms in the program and the four-piece band’s conductor-keyboardist Gillian Berkowitz underscores many of the skits with musical vocabulary lessons.
Delivering the jokes is a sextet of comic performers in the Borscht Belt tradition. You get the sense that they know the material is fairly weak, but it can be elevated with broad delivery. Most notable among the company is Ellen Ratner as a string of crabby older women and Bart Braverman as a put-upon humor victim.
Also like Old Jews Telling Jokes, When You’re in Love… starts wearing out its welcome before its relatively brief running time is up. But if you know enough old jokes, you can amuse yourself by beating the cast to the punch.
WHEN YOU’RE IN LOVE, THE WHOLE WORLD IS JEWISH, Mizner Park Cultural Arts Center, 201 Plaza Real, Boca Raton. Through Sunday, Jan. 11. Tickets: $40. Call: (561) 910-7727.