April may not be the cruelest month, as T.S. Eliot once declared, but it has brought us some disappointing theater.
Steel Magnolias — Boca Raton’s Wick Theatre has filled its inaugural season with mainstream commercial musicals. So you would think its only divergence from that menu would have to be a pretty sure-fire, high-quality, audience-friendly play.
Well, no. Sandwiched between The Full Monty and Ain’t Misbehavin’ is the mawkish Steel Magnolias, a manipulative, tearjerker wrapped around a sitcom.
Written by former actor Robert Harling as a tribute to his late sister, the play has a successful track record. It ran for years off-Broadway in the 1980s, spawned a national tour and eventually was adapted into a star-studded 1989 movie version. So it must strike a chord with a lot of people, even if it consists mainly of wrong notes.
This saga takes place inside a Louisiana beauty salon built from the carport of big-haired Truvy Jones (Patti Eyler), who presides over a Saturday morning ritual of washes, cuts, styles and gossip among a handful of local regulars. In the opening scene, Truvy hires a new assistant, a young, secretive girl named Annelle (Linda Farmer), whose hair color and religious zeal will both evolve over time.
It is also the wedding day of Shelby Eatenton (Alison McCartan), a seizure-prone diabetic whose medical crises are the spine of the play’s plot. Eventually, she will become pregnant against the advice of her doctor which leads to kidney failure, dialysis and a risky transplant operation. As dire as much of this is, Steel Magnolias is never far from a snappy comic one-liner.
Like the suspects in an Agatha Christie mystery, the characters arrive at regular intervals. There’s Clairee Belcher (Sally Bondi), the wisecracking, wealthy widow of the town’s former mayor, M’Lynn Eatonton (Aaron Bower), Shelby’s overprotective mom, and Ouiser Boudreaux (Robin Proett Olson), a resolute sourpuss.
Norb Joerder (The Wick’s acclaimed 42nd Street) gets the unenviable assignment of making this artifice seem credible, but he does little to mute the broad humor. He brings back Bower, the sidelined diva of 42nd Street, who makes the most of a histrionic monologue in the play’s waning moments. Sean McClelland provides an attractive beauty parlor set, the first scenic design the Wick has produced locally.
It will be interesting to see whether the Wick audience accepts or rejects this artificial claptrap and, if the latter, whether the company will shy away from plays in the future. Its recently announced second season is wall-to-wall musicals.
STEEL MAGNOLIAS, The Wick Theatre, 7901 N. Federal Highway, Boca Raton. Through Sunday, April 20. Tickets: $58. Call: (561) 995-2333.
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Chess — Slow Burn Theatre Co., also in Boca, also sticks closely to a diet of musicals, but makes much edgier choices than The Wick. The territory it has mapped out for itself consists of less familiar shows that, for one reason or another, did not gain much success initially in New York.
With such musicals as Side Show, Parade or Assassins, that often means such offbeat subject matter that failed to attract sufficient audience at Broadway prices. What’s more, Slow Burn’s resident director-choreographer Patrick Fitzwater often devises a staging that brings new clarity and emotional punch to the material.
But not always. Consider the company’s current production, Chess, a politics-and-romance saga which stems from the Cold War era of the 1980s. It flopped quickly on Broadway, but its score by the Swedish pop-rock group ABBA’s Bjorn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson has so many standout power ballads that the script has gone through several revisions in search of a timely framework. Now, with events in Crimea suddenly heating up East-West tensions, Chess has unexpected immediacy, but the storyline about an international chess tournament between a petulant American and a defection-prone Russian remains less than compelling.
Compounding the show’s problems is Fitzwater’s direction, which only makes matters murkier. His ensemble becomes the chess pieces in the game, an interesting idea but the choreographic results are laughable. Guy Haubrich’s sound design seems fine, but the cast has been encouraged to yell its lyrics, American Idol-style, which rendered a lot of the words incomprehensible.
Fitzwater reverts to the show’s London script, which minimizes the involvement of American chess master Freddie in the second act. That’s too bad, because Rick Pena comes on like a rock star, particularly on “Pity the Child,” a solo explanation of his formative years.
Matthew Korinko displays a rich, resonant voice as his brooding Russian opponent Anatoly, and the two of them vie for the affections of Freddie’s trainer Florence (recent Carbonell Award winner Amy Miller Brennan), who gets plenty of opportunities to show off her vocal power.
The busy Sean McClelland provides a striking unit set, dominated by a faux-onyx raked chess board stage, with abstract black-and-white cubes and chess piece-like columns. Lance Blank uses laser effects and computerized, mobile lighting instruments for rock concert effects and Pena again doubles as costume designer, emphasizing black leather, but the lines are not always flattering to the female cast members.
Chess was another ambitious selection for Slow Burn, but this time Fitzwater and company learned why the show has rarely succeeded.
CHESS, Slow Burn Theatre Company at Aventura Arts & Culture Center, 3385 N.E. 188th St., Aventura. When: Thursday through Sunday. Tickets: $34.50 – $39.50. Call: (877) 311-7469.
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Dirty Blonde — Biographical plays are so often fact-packed recitations of a celebrated life, interesting for the information imparted, but not particularly dramatic.
Then there is Claudia Shear’s Dirty Blonde, a celebration of that great Brooklyn-born sexual icon Mae West, as seen largely through the reflected light of two of her most obsessed fans. It is no easy trick to put the fascinating West onstage at various points in her life, then have her upstaged by two fictional nobodies.
The play earned five Tony nominations in 2000, gaining enough recognition to mount a national tour back when plays still toured. Now Manalapan’s Plaza Theatre offers its own home-grown production with a worthy local cast. Dirty Blonde can be quite touching, but here the results are about a quart low in the work’s inherent poignancy.
Zaftig Margot Moreland is a natural as West, particularly in the character’s younger, vampier days. She nails the actress/playwright/sexual boundaries-pusher’s come-hither, sing-song cadences, and is very persuasive visually when she dons a facsimile of the star’s “Diamond Lil” costume and chapeau. What’s more, Moreland manages to slip in and out of character with ease as she bounces back and forth between West and her mousy, insecure devoted fan Jo, a study in extremes.
Early on, Jo meets Charlie, a rotund, soft-spoken film geek (Ken Clement), at West’s grave site in Queens on their idol’s birthday. Tossing some of West’s famous and obscure one-liners to each other, they recognize themselves as kindred spirits. While Charlie’s fascination with West’s wardrobe leads Jo to conclude that he is gay, these two misfits grow close, suggesting that romance could become a possibility.
Completing the cast is Terry M. Cain, playing more than a half dozen supporting roles, including West’s only husband Frank Wallace and her loyal factotum Joe Frisco. He also plays the piano or at least he fakes it to recorded accompaniment, a poor substitute for the musical component of the show.
Thanks to Frisco, Charlie is invited to meet West, late in her life, in her dark, dingy California apartment. Due to a few ill-advised self-parodies of her former seductress persona, she has become as reclusive as Sunset Boulevard’s Norma Desmond — a screen role she refuses when director Billy Wilder offers it to her. Clad in a satin dressing gown, hunched over and mumbling, Moreland evokes the epitome of a has-been.
She makes us care about West, far more than about Jo and Charlie, which means that the play is only partly effective. We should be moved by their awkward attempts at forging a relationship, but director Beverly Blanchette emphasizes the lighter side of this story.
Peter Lovello’s costumes and wigs lend the production a sufficient visual authenticity. It looks good and has a trio of hard-working, versatile performers. What it lacks is that abiding sadness that is the root of Dirty Blonde.
DIRTY BLONDE, The Plaza Theatre, 262 S. Ocean Blvd., Manalapan. Through Sunday. Tickets: $45. Call: (561) 588-1820.
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Mr. Marmalade — Even in a group of disappointing, partially realized productions, one must sink to the bottom. That show is Outré Theatre Company’s patience-tester, Mr. Marmalade. This relatively new Boca troupe gravitates towards unconventional material, which is fine with me, but it is hard to fathom what drew it to this juvenile, empty evening of theater.
Written by Noah Haidle, whose screenplay for a 2012 geriatric caper flick, Stand Up Guys, did show a comic flair, here he focuses on a 4-year-old tot named Lucy and her imaginary friend, a cocaine-addicted adult who totes around a briefcase full of sex toys. According to the program, the effect is intended to be outrageous and offensive, but it is neither. More on-target descriptive adjectives would be “numbing” and “repetitive,” though perhaps it is a subjective matter.
Surely Haidle believes he has something profound in little Lucy, a screwed-up child so under the influence of contemporary media that she invents an entirely inappropriate pal. That said, he fills the time with Lucy’s hyper antics, Mr. Marmalade’s polar behaviors of benign and abusive, and such surreal touches as a talking giant cactus and a sunflower.
Raised by her divorced, neglectful, mother preoccupied by sex, Lucy is left one evening in the care of a randy teen babysitter who also pays little attention to her young charge. Filling out the cast is Mr. Marmalade’s preppy assistant and molester-in-training, Bradley (Christopher Mitchell), and a 5-year-old playmate for Lucy who has already attempted suicide, Larry (Alvaro D’Amico).
As Lucy, Laura Ruchala gives a high-energy performance, all but bouncing off walls as she scurries about, clad in a ballet tutu and patterned leggings. Jim Gibbons’s (Mr. Marmalade) gravelly voice and indifferent demeanor helps make him an unlikely friend to little Lucy, imaginary or otherwise. His button-down, no-nonsense manner suggests she watches too many TV cop shows.
Director Skye Whitcomb could have kept a tighter rein on the cutesy bits, but it is hard to fathom making this material palatable. Or interesting.
MR. MARMALADE, Outré Theatre Company, Mizner Park Studio Theatre, 201 Plaza Real, Boca Raton. Through Sunday.. Tickets: $20-$30. Call: (866) 811-4111.