Anna: How does a modern woman interact with a classic

How does a modern woman interact with a classic? Even if the actress can throw herself into the role, can the audience ever see her without adding a modern sensibility to how she is perceived?

Collen Corcoran as Anna and the ensemble
(Photo by Dave Sarrafian)

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy is one of those stories I know well, but I don’t know whether I have really read the novel or not. It is one of the formative tales of my coming of age, teaching me life lessons and cautioning me to beware of railway stations.

Between Tolstoy’s Anna and Flaubert’s Emma Bovary (Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert), I was predisposed to find marriage boring. and romance, while inevitably tragic, to be one way for a woman to express her individuality. Yet, both novels warn, the lover is not to be trusted, and the good man who waits for you at home is to be admired even if he would stifle your very essence. Perhaps Anna and Emma were the precursors to Thelma and Louise, warning women that too much freedom is a dangerous thing.

A newly conceived production of Anna at EgoPo Classic Theater company is helmed by writer/director Brenna Geffers, whose work always provokes me to reconsider how I view women’s roles on, and thus off, stage. This Anna, played commandingly by Colleen Corcoran, is strong enough to endure anything but boredom and betrayal, although she herself is a betrayer. Her husband, Count Alexei Karenin (Carlo Campbell) is controlling and whining, while her lover Count Alexei Vronsky (Andrew Carroll) is all youthful charm, baring his body even if he can’t quite bare his soul.

Hans Brinker and The Silver Skates: Lessons about life for young people

Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates shows how young people can cope with making hard choices and standing up to their peers and their parents. It is also a very egalitarian play in which boys and girls are treated as equals in their abilities to persevere and to succeed.

Lauren Hirte as Gretel, Ciji Prosser as Heidi, Steven A. Wright as
Carl, Matteo Scammell as Peter, and Brian Ratcliffe as Hans.
Photo by Mark Garvin. 

I remember Hans Brinker; or, the Silver Skates from my childhood. The book held a special place in my library, not because I liked the story, but because the book itself had a special cover that differentiated it from most of the other books I owned. While I could tell you the story of almost all the other books I read from that time, I really didn’t remember more about Hans Brinker than that it had to do with a race along the canals in Holland.

The production of Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates at the Arden Children’s Theatre brings the story to life in a enchanting way that makes me think I had never fully appreciated the original. The ice-blue scenery with windmill blades rotating in the background and a floor that serves as an ice rink (Scenic Designer David P Gordon) makes us feel the cold of the Dutch Canals in winter. The cast members, in period costumes (Rosemarie E. McKelvey), glide across the specially-treated stage on “skates” (shoes with felt and rubber soles) so effortlessly that we believe we are watching them skate on ice.  

Lauren Hirte as Gretel. 

Photo by Mark Garvin. 

Set in Holland, the story is about Hans Brinker (Brian Ratcliffe) and his sister Gretel (Lauren Hirte) who have grown up in poverty because their father Raff (Ed Swidey) fell off a scaffolding while trying to repair the dykes during a storm ten years earlier. Since that time he has been “a living man with the mind of a dead man,” who needs to be taken care of by his wife Dame Brinker (Rachel Camp). Now, there is a to be race on the canals with the prize of a pair of silver skates. Hans and Gretel would like to participate, but they only have wooden skates, carved by Hans, to wear on the ice. They don’t stand a chance against the rich kids who regard them as “rag pickers.”

However, Heidi van Gleck (Ciji Prosser) and her friend Peter von Holp (Matteo Scammell) are moved by their story and try to help them by giving them old skates in return for Hans’ carved necklaces. After some persuasion by Hans, grumpy Doctor Boekman (Steven A Wright) agrees to operate on their father as much for his ego as a matter of charity.

NextMove: Complexions Contemporary Ballet: Classical Athleticism

Andrew Brader and Ashley Mayeux in Amazing Grace; 

Photo by Bill Hebert

Dance Affiliates presents NextMove opened their new season at their new home, The Prince Theater in Philadelphia, with Complexions Contemporary Ballet, the company founded by former Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater dancers Dwight Rhoden and Desmond Richardson. 

It was an evening of diverse dance styles that both honored and challenged traditional forms. The music traveled from Bach and Vivaldi to Metallica, with stops along the way by Odetta, Prince, Jimmy Scott, and the traditional “Amazing Grace.” By the end of the evening the audience was thrilled and almost as exhausted as the dancers.

The evening begins with Ballad Unto... in which seven couples swirl across the stage in pairs and triplets. The Balanchine influence is apparent, classical line and movements, and yet it is so not Balanchine, a total awareness of the dancer’s body as anatomical sketch—all muscle and sinew and strength. The bare chested men preen, the ballerinas primp, as they come together and part. This is classical ballet and yet it isn’t. An awkward knee, a slight twist interrupts the smooth flow and makes us pay attention.

While the first act is classical, the second explores a variety of forms beginning with the modern athleticism of Gone (dancers: Kelly Marsh IV, Greg Blackmon, and Timothy Stickney) set to Odetta’s “He Had a Long Chain On.” The mood turns sultry in Cryin’ to Cry Out (dancers: Melissa Anduiza, Nehemiah Spencer, Jillian David, and YoungSil Kim) to Jimmy Scott’s vocals, followed by Choke (dancers: Doug Baum and Addison Ector) set to Vivaldi, then Terk Lewis Waters, who towers over the other dancers when he is with the company, here, dressed in red, undulates across the stage to a ballad by Prince. The act ends with an excerpt from Testament, a dance of passionate longing set to “Amazing Grace.”

Group image from Strum; Photo by: Bill Hebert

For the last act, Strum, the dancers, clad in metallic silver, move mechanistically across the stage as Timothy Stickney struts and stumbles around and through them to the seemingly endless music of the heavy metal band Metallica. Whenever there is a lull, a darkness with silence, the audience claps not realizing there is more to come. It’s a compelling performance that leaves the dancers almost as breathless as the dancers.

What makes this program additionally special was that it marks the inaugural season for Dance Affiliates in their new home. Founded in 1979 by Randy Swartz, Dance Affiliates started out at the Walnut Street Theater, then, in 1983 moved to the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, and now after 32 years it has relocated again to Center City Philadelphia.

Hooked!: It all depends on how you look at it

We tell stories so that we can justify our actions. Even two people who lived through the same event, can see it differently. When we hear all sides of the story, we can begin to piece together something approximating the truth.

Rachel Brodeur and Corinna Burns
Photo by Katie Reing.

Inis Nua Theatre Company, which presents “Contemporary theatre from Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales,” has found a charming play about small town secrets and invites us into a pub to hear the participants tell their sides of the story. It’s filled with a hint of violence and lots of unfulfilled sexuality, and goes perfectly with a pint of whatever you’re drinking.

Mary (Corinna Burns) and Tom (Charlie DelMarcelle) are married, although they seem happier apart. Even their daughter, a never seen Jessie, has moved away. Meanwhile Lydia (Rachel Brodeur), whose husband has left her and taken their child with him, moves into the house next door, a house that once belonged to an old woman that Mary considered a witch, and the potential for misunderstandings and a hint of French farce ensue.

Tom and Lydia are plagued by secrets which Mary is determined to uncover, whether by spying on her neighbor from her kitchen counter, or badgering Tom until he just can’t take it anymore.

Mothers and Sons: How long does anger last?

Michael Learned, Hugh Kennedy, Jacob Wilner, and James Lloyd Reynolds
Photo Credit: Mark Garvin

Homosexuality was not only forbidden it was dangerous. How long does it take for those wounds to heal?

Mothers and Sons. By Terrence McNally; Wendy C. Goldberg directed. Philadelphia Theatre Company production through March 8, 2015 at Suzanne Roberts Theatre, 480 S. Broad St. (at Lombard), Philadelphia. 215-985-0420 or www.philadelphiatheatrecompany.org.

Drama shows us both our better and worse selves. Sometimes it shows us how heroic we might be, imagining ourselves as superheroes who can save the world. Sometime, as in several recent works, it shows us how dreadfully we have behaved in the not too distant past. Selma reminds us how we treated blacks in this country, The Imitation Game and Oscar remind us of how we have treated homosexuals.

Watching these semi-historical stories I am amazed at the progress we have made and yet how those same prejudices are still with us. We still have segregation; we still struggle with homosexuality, although now the discussion, in this country at least, focuses on gay marriage, while in other places, such as Russia, it’s still a crime to be gay; we still don’t have gender equality; in Europe anti-Semitism has re-emerged. And now we have someone new to hate, the Muslim population is something to be feared and demonized.

NMAJH and Martha Graham Cracker Explore Jewish Music Together

She pronounces it “Namaaajjh,” like a French perfume, but’s it’s really the National Museum of American Jewish History (initials NMAJH), and she is Martha Graham Cracker, local performance artist who, as artist in residence, created and performed a cabaret based on her encounters with the museum exhibits.

For a few nights this week, the fifth floor exhibit space of NMAJH was transformed into Martha’s cabaret. Scattered on table tops were items from her personal collection—rubber bands, a sausage, an oversized powder puff. Many are used or explained during the performance as Martha brings us into her skewed world in which she had encounters with famous Jewish composers through history, particularly Leonard Bernstein, with whom she had “a limited engagement.”

Starting last year the museum created an artist in residence program, OPEN for Interpretation, inviting local cutting-edge artists to, as Martha’s collaborator and Musical Director Andrew Nelson put it, “run amok in the museum.” The intention was to give visitors a new way of looking at the exhibits. After all, museum exhibits are static, it’s what the visitor brings to them that makes an impact. 

“Our goal was to invite creative thinkers into the museum to produce creative work,” says Emily August, Director of Public Programs. “The artists’ job is to find something that resonates with them in the Museum and bring it to life for our visitors in new and perhaps unexpected ways through their unique artistic lens. The content is inherently Jewish, although the artists may not be.”

The (Curious Case of the Watson Intelligence): Do We All Need a Watson in Our Lives?

Who do you think of when you think of Watson? Sherlock Holmes’ faithful companion and publicist, the computer (named for Thomas J. Watson, Sr., who ran IBM from 1914-1956) that beat Jeopardy’s biggest winners in 2011, or Alexander Graham Bell’s assistant, the man who received the first ever phone call.

Whichever it is, they are all present, along with a modern robot and a charming young man both also named Watson, in Madeleine George’s play, The (Curious Case of the) Watson Intelligence, that just finished its run at the Azuka Theatre. In a time-bending script that requires each of the actors to play multiple roles across the last century or so, Watson, played in all his guises by Griffin Stanton-Ameisen, is the force that ties them all together.

When Edison, from a darkened doorway, repeatedly calls out “Watson, come here, I want to see you”—or was it, as that Watson insisted, “Watson, come here, I want you”?—is he, perhaps, expressing a need we all have to have someone, something, at our beck and call. Eliza (Corinna Burns), a modern entrepreneur, who has left her husband and her job and is starting her own company called Digital Fist, has created her own Watson, a charming barefoot robot who rarely looks at her but says just what she wants him to. Phrases like, “I just want to give you what you want.” And who wouldn't want to hear that?

By You That Made Me, Frankenstein: Do We Create Our Own Monsters?

By You That Made Me, Frankenstein is a show about monsters. It asks the question whether those who create monsters aren’t monsters themselves. While the opera, performed and created by Philly Opera Collective and Brenna Geffers tells the story of how Mary Shelley (Kristy Joe Slough) came to write Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus within a circle of brilliant men and women who seem to have no moral compass, it is also relevant to the current discussion of how we have made monsters out of our current heroes - football players, rap singers, politicians - whose fame and power have turned them into monsters as well.

The opera is set in a rainy summer weekend in 1816 when Mary Shelley, her half-sister Claire Crystal Charles), the poets Percy Bysshe Shelley (Joseph Cianciulli)  - whom Mary eventually marries - and George Gordon, Lord Byron (Brendan Norton), as well as doctor John Polidori (William McGlone) are confined by the rain to a villa in Switzerland. During this weekend, Claire says, she watched “the first two poets of England become monsters.”

After reading a story in Fantasmagoriana, a collection of German tales that had been translated into French, Byron proposed a challenge. They would each write their own story. Apparently it was a successful challenge - out of it grew the monster Frankenstein as well as the precursor of Dracula, by the lesser known Shelley and Polidori, as well as poetry by the poets. So not only were the characters monstrous in their treatment of each other - sex and children were tokens in a game of power that called itself love - the two innocents among them took that behavior and turned it into monsters that the world could see.

The Cat in the Hat: Wanting to Keep the Magic Alive

Do we need to understand everything? Why can’t children be allowed to wonder anymore?

I've an urge to write this in some sort of rhyme, but I haven’t the knack and I haven’t the time, I do want to say that the Cat in the Hat is an adorable show even if you don’t have a grandkid in tow. The kids were appropriately shocked and amazed, and the Cat was an acrobat who left us all dazed.

There’s a moment in The Cat in the Hat at the Arden Theater when the Cat (Doug Hara) stands precariously on a big yellow ball balancing, as in the book, a fish in a bowl on a rake and a book and a cup and a cake on his hat and a bowl full of milk and a kite in his tail and whatever else Dr. Seuss has listed in his popular children’s book.

It’s one thing to see a picture in a book, another to watch an actual person propel himself around the stage on what seemed to be a large exercise ball.  It was a truly remarkable feat, and we, myself along with all the children in the audience, held our collective breath waiting for something or everything to fall—while the young man next to me kept saying, “Oh, my,” and “My gosh”—until it all came crashing down—only not before our eyes. Just a lot of clattering and shuddering and shocked expressions.

And that was the fun of the piece. Part of going to the theater is the magic—not knowing quite how they’re doing what they do. It’s not the same as the movies, where we know that a bunch of experts worked with technology to create what are called “special effects.” The magic happens elsewhere in the movies. In the theater it all has to happen right in front of us leaving us wondering and amazed.

But what happens when that wonder is explained away? Does it diminish the effect and take away the magic when we know that it’s merely a trick?

Mark Nadler: A Cabaret about Cabaret

What makes a Cabaret a Cabaret? Is it drinks and music, or is it spending time with a performer who invites you into his world? Mark Nadler tells us a story about his world and the dark past of cabaret in Weimar Germany. 

The word cabaret  conjures up for me a dark room with people crowded around uncomfortably small tables only half listening to a singer who tries to hold their attention while waiters serve and diners drink and dine. Some of my favorite singers are strongly associated with the smell of smoke and the clink of glasses in a dimly lit space with poor ventilation. The word also brings to mind the dark, daring world of the film Cabaret where a struggling young singer tries to survive in a Germany fast being taken over by the Nazis. 

What happens when the two experiences combine, the intimate setting around food and drink, and an audience watching a performance from the distance of a stage? That was the challenge facing Mark Nadler in his recent show I’m A Stranger Here Myself at the Prince Music Theater in Philadelphia—how to make the audience sitting in a large theater space feel that they are a part of the show as well as observers of it—and with no food or drink to distract or engage us.

What draws us into the cabaret or nightclub instead of a traditional show is precisely that intimacy. We want a nice dinner out with friends and don’t want to have to go to the theater afterwards, or we want to hear a particular singer, or the club is known for the kind of musicians who perform there, and we’ll go no matter what.

Kun Yang Lin / Dancers. Be / Longing: Light / Shadow

Photo by Bill Herbert

With so many dance troupes, both local and touring, appearing in the Philadelphia area, what sets Kun Yang Lin/Dancers apart is their emphasis on humanity and connection to the audience.  

Before there is the dance, there is the sound. Entering the theater, one is instantly enveloped by the sound of waves. There is no way to escape, it fills the room, chattering subsides, and we are lulled into silence.

A questionnaire on bright red paper challenges us to identify who we think we are. Not just our professions, but all the labels we and others have placed on us – cat lover, poet, Eagles fan, philosopher. We toss it off with a laugh, but it lingers. Who do I think I am? Who is this me that has come to watch the dance?

Arsenic and Old Lace: Farce Still Works

Jane Ridley, Laurent Giroux, Mary Martello and Dan Olmstead
Photo by J. Urdaneta Photography

Death isn't really funny, but when the good guys succeed and the bad ones get their just desserts, who minds a corpse or twelve in the basement, when we have so many worse skeletons in the closet.

Sometimes going to the theater can be just plain fun. That’s how I felt about the Walnut Street Theatre's production of Arsenic and Old Lace. A lot of familiar Philadelphia actors (Mary Martello and Jane Ridley as the Brewster sisters, Ben Dibble as Teddy Brewster, Damon Bonetti and Jennie Eisenhower as Mortimer Brewster and Elaine Harper, Peter Schmitz in two character roles)—I’ve only been here a little over a year and most were already familiar to me, along with a well-crafted script, resulted in a delightful farce—and I’m not one who uses adjectives like that lightly.

As the two elderly Brewster sisters, Martello and Ridley were alternately batty and serious, competent and absurd. In my quest to find satisfying roles for mature performers—more on that at another time—it’s nice to see that material does exist for them in which they are not distraught, alcoholic, or verging on dementia—although some may question the sanity of these two ladies, it’s more their thought processes that are in question, not their ability to think.

TED Comes to Philadelphia

I've always wanted to go to a TED Conference but didn't know it was possible. Then a little blurb in the local paper said TED was coming to Philadelphia (TEDxPhiladelphia 2014: The New Workshop of the World, March 28, 2014 at Temple Performing Arts Center). I was one of the first to sign up, and over a thousand more people quickly followed. And there we were, in Temple University’s Performing Arts Center, hunkered down with water and snacks for a day of talks about Philadelphia, its history and its possibilities.

For those who haven’t encountered one of TED’s short video talks (usually less than 18 minutes), TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design, is a non-profit organization that organizes conferences around the world on topics that have to do with the technology, entertainment and design, as well as education, business, global issues and more. Local spin-offs, referred to as TEDx, cover topics of interest to local communities or centered around a particular issue.  

Don Juan Comes Home from Iraq: A Wounded Hero and the Fierceness of his Victims

The hero of Don Juan Comes Home from Iraq, a new play developed in a two-year collaboration between award-winning playwright Paula Vogel and Wilma Artistic Director Blanka Ziska, is a difficult hero to like. He’s a womanizer who uses women to fulfill his own needs with little regard for theirs. We are, I think, supposed to care for him, but that’s a challenge despite the excellent performance by Keith Conallen in the title role.

The play is structured around the journey of Capt. Don Juan (Conallen), a Marine who comes home from war with PTSD and TBI (traumatic brain injury) to search for Cressida (Kate Czajkowski), his missing lover. He claims to have changed, but he’s in such pain, which he desperately self-medicates, that it’s hard to trust his promises of reform.

See rest of the article in Broad Street Review

New Stars Shine in Tribes Production

One of the delights of the recent production of Tribes, by Nina Raine, directed by Stuart Carden, which played recently at the Philadelphia Theatre Company at the Suzanne Roberts Theatre, was  the introduction of two young actors at the very start of their careers. 

The more seasoned performers did their parts well, but it was Tad Cooley, who just last year moved to the area from Texas to attend the NY Conservatory of Dramatic Arts, and Amanda Kearns, who graduated from University of the Arts in 2012, who made us care about their characters in a very authentic way. Cooley played Billy, a boy who has been deaf since birth but is just discovering sign language, and Kearns played Sylvia, a girl with deaf parents who is losing her hearing and figuring out how to cope with that.  .

Cooley, who, like his character, has just recently learned to sign, was raised in Vanderbilt, TX where “football was practically a religion.” With a partial hearing loss from an infection that is growing worse, early on he “learned to manage around it,” playing football and appearing in high school productions. The choice to drop football for theater was an easy one for him.  “I've always been a cheerful kid,” he says, “but I never felt so accomplished and happy with what I've done as when I’m on stage.”

See article on the show at: Broad Street Review

Fear of Flying Acrobats

A magnificently toned body soars overhead attached to red silk cloths that flare out like wings while the Philadelphia Orchestra plays a Tchaikovsky Waltz from Swan Lake. 

A man dangles suspended overhead holding on to a large circle only by his feet. A woman sparkling in white does contortions while standing on two stools. A juggler juggles, a woman changes costumes in seconds within a silken tube, two muscular men perform an impossible balancing act, a man does impossible things with only a rope.

I should be loving this, but I’m not. I’m fascinated. I can’t look, but I can’t look away. The audience applauds, cheering them on. And I’m closing my eyes because I can’t stand the tension. This is the Philadelphia Orchestra Cirque de la Symphonie program at the Kimmel Center. The Orchestra, conducted by associate conductor Cristian Mǎcelaru, plays short pieces to accompany the acts. Mǎcelaru, dressed in a red shirt and black vest, jokes with the performers, makes occasional comments, and touches his hair a lot.

I’m aware that I’ve just taken a pill to ease the pain in my back and leg and meanwhile there are all these people doing things that I could never even contemplate on a good day. Their feet touch their heads, they support each other by counterbalancing their weight, they do handstands on one arm, they fearlessly soar overhead, and they keep on smiling. It’s Cirque de Soleil without the lighting and special effects, so we’re very aware of the muscles it takes to perform these feats while making it seem effortless.

The Drama of a Dress

Some Thoughts After Seeing Love, Loss and What I Wore

We complain when the media focuses on what a woman wears, instead of on what she says We probably know more about Hilary Clinton’s choice of pant suits than about her specific political positions. Yet we flock to see a show that is about the clothes we wear and have worn through out our lives.

That’s what Love, Loss and What I Wore, described as an intimate collection of stories by Nora Ephron and Delia Ephron , based on the book by Ilene Beckerman, which closed recently after a successful run at the Philadelphia Theater Company at the Suzanne Roberts Theatre in Philadelphia is about. The play, staged like a reading - five women seated on stools with only a few drawings on an easel to illustrate some of the fashions mentioned - manages nevertheless to evoke memories in the audience composed mostly of women, even on a Friday evening, of our own experiences with fashion over the years. 

Where Do New Plays Come From?

PlayPenn the new play development conference at the Adrianne Theatre just put out a new call for scripts for next summer’s conference and that got me thinking about where art comes from, particularly what we regard as new art. And what is that anyway?

Does new art break free of the constraints of the old and familiar art forms, tackle new subjects, force us to see ourselves in new ways? Or is it simply a subtle reworking of what we already know with just a bit more technical razzmatazz? In talking about plays, in particular, does it break new ground covering topics formerly taboo, or does it dazzle us with stagecraft that we've never seen before, engaging the audience in the experience. And does new work come from traditional theater sources, from regional theaters, from Fringe festivals, or is it right here in our own backyard?