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Woody Guthrie is a beloved American folk icon. Born in 1912, almost 100 years ago, we may know his songs, but Woody Sez tells us about the man, often in his own words and through his music. He is part of a generation that experienced such tumultuous times as the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression, and World War II. What is wonderful is that the audience can experience a sense of the history of those times through this show, while being thoroughly entertained.
The most salient quality that comes across is Woody’s affable and hopeful nature despite the tragedies in his own life. He is presented as deeply committed to the everyday man, of which he saw himself as one. Yet, his talent for music, and especially lyrics and other writing, set him apart as a spokesperson for the downtrodden who just wanted to make a fair living and feed their families. As performed by the multi-talented David M. Lutken, who also helped create the show, we are taken on a moving American journey. Woody believed in music’s power to effect social change, and Mr. Lutken includes many references to Woody’s political sensibilities, including affixing a sticker on his beat-up guitar saying “This machine kills fascists”. Woody traveled the country singing his way from coast to coast. Though that hobo life is often romanticized in literature, there were most certainly many nights of hunger and desperation for men traveling the rails or simply walking across America to find work and a better life.
Mr. Lutken is joined on stage by three gifted actors/singers/performers who play multiple instruments and multiple roles: Darcie Deaville, Helen J. Russell, and Andy Teirstein. There are no microphones or amplifiers in keeping with the spirit of the show, and there is no problem hearing the words or music.
With David Lutken’s distinctive voice, expert guitar and the accompaniment of the other performers, we are taken on a musical tour through Woody’s life. While Woody composed literally thousands of songs, the show includes a selection that adequately represents the body of his work and the breadth of his life. “This Train is Bound for Glory” opens the show, and following are many of Woody’s classics, including “This Land is Your Land”, “Mule Skinner Blues”, “The Ballad of Tom Joad”, and “Dust Storm Disaster”.
As musicians, each performer is given his or her moment to shine. Darcie Deaville plays a mandolin on most songs, but also shows her talents on other instruments, including fiddle, guitar and resonator guitar. Helen Russell, who also plays several instruments, is featured on the bass fiddle. Perhaps the most versatile, however, is Dr. Andy Teirstein who manages to display a wide range of talent on no less than a half dozen instruments, including fiddle, guitar, banjo, autoharp, harmonica and, yes, even the spoons. The show includes the performers in all combinations, from solos to duets to four-piece bluegrass band, where their well-blended harmonies are on display.
Center stage, of course, is David Lutken’s embodiment of Woody as he makes his way from childhood to troubadour. Songs cover a variety of emotions, from the touching “Curly Headed Baby” to the comic “So Long It’s Been Good to Know Yuh” and “Groundhog”. The song “Pastures of Plenty” demonstrates how Woody says he found his voice. “Talking Merchant Marine” speaks to his life at sea during the war years. His support for workers is displayed in “Union Maid” and “Vigilante Man”. And his life meets tragedy again when “Driving in My Car”, a song composed for his daughter, becomes her last words.
This would be a good show for young people, too, who are often interested in their grandparents or great-grandparents lives. The performers also extended an invitation for the audience to bring their voices and instruments to a good ol’ hootenanny in the lobby after each Sunday’s matinee performance.
Most poignant of all is that Huntington’s Disease, inherited from his mother, took Woody in 1967; at the end of his life, this wandering minstrel, this singer/songwriter of hard times and simple pleasures was confined to a hospital unable to speak, yet the joyful music and spirit of Woody Guthrie lives on. Review by Ann Marie Oliva
Ann Marie Oliva is a local playwright and freelance writer. She is the producer/editor of ARTS à la Mode and a judge for the National Youth Theatre Awards. Ann Marie is a member of the Dramatists Guild.
Youthful rebellion. It's something we all experience, to some degree, especially in our teenage years—and maybe fear later on. This award-winning Broadway musical takes us back a century with its setting and characters, based on a scandalous German play from 1891 (banned in its time and later). But it also creates ties to today's youth, through language, rhythms, music, and gestures, combining nostalgia for sexual innocence with the passions of its loss.
Some in the Belk Theatre audience sit on chairs with actors at the sides of the stage. Some of those actors are dressed in 19th century costumes and become characters onstage, but others wear today's clothes, remain with the audience there, and yet stand at times to sing in the chorus. A small rock band is positioned at the back of the stage. And a large brick wall with pointed church-like archways looms over them all. Many photos and antique objects hang from the wall. Colored lights also appear there (or a full orange moon) at various points in the show, like Christmas decorations giving hope toward a spring awakening for the children, despite the austereness of teachers, parents, and preachers.
Humor helps make the oppression entertaining at times, as when Wendla, her head on her Mama's lap, does not get an answer to how "it happens" because Mama is too embarrassed to say and then covers her daughter with her apron. Eventually, however, Wendla suffers from such delayed knowledge—when she demands a beating from her boyfriend Melchior, so she can feel something from him. Later, she also experiences "it" with him for the first time (in a bare-breasted love-making scene, on both sides of the show's intermission), becomes pregnant, and suffers again when her Mama forces her to have an abortion.
Caricatures of the Latin and music teachers provide humor for the audience and paradigms for the teens' sexual fantasies—with punishment sticks and piano fingers. Two actors play all the adult roles, male and female. While shown two-dimensionally at first, as foolish or fierce, the adults' hypocrisy gradually reveals some poignant dilemmas. Yet, the music, songs, and plot show much more of the teens' fearful, confused, and transgressive views.
The musical has its shocking points. Wendla's beating by Melchior, their lovemaking, boys kissing on the lips, and male masturbation scenes turn explicit sexuality into reinvented ritual and farcical song. (The masturbation is done with gestures under the costumes, but still creates theatrical tension and comic relief.) Ironically, the show may comment on the hollowness of our current youth-idolizing culture more than on the oppressions of the past. As teen males take wireless microphones out of their dark blue school uniforms to sing about their wet dreams and the "bitch of living," or as girls swoon while talking about Melchior's daring atheistic ideas, spectators might wonder why we have to go back a century or more, yet use today's terms, for such liberating moments.
Repeated love songs speak to the dark side: "I'm gonna bruise you" and "be your wound." Such tragic temptations are also shown when Ilse tells Moritz about her free-love experiences in a Bohemian artists' colony with older men, yet says she'll end up on the "trash heap." He rejects her offer to reconnect, as two lost souls that might save each other, and then ends up shooting himself, due to shame at his failure in school. Yet his ghost and Wendla's eventually return to help Melchior not repeat the same mistake—making this an ultimately moral tale about immoral rebellion against the "parentocracy." While some of the plot becomes predictable, the jarring mix of rock and punk music with period costumes, of the F-word and middle finger with quaint situations, plus spastic insect-like gestures during dance numbers, provides many moving and mindful edges for audience members, young and old, to piece together with their own desires, memories, and reflections. Maybe we do have to go back in time to making meaning out of our youthful confusion, nostalgic passions, and hollow idols today. Review by Mark Pizzato
Mark Pizzato is Professor of Theatre at UNC-Charlotte and author of Ghosts of Theatre and Cinema in the Brain and Theatres of Human Sacrifice. His plays have been published by Aran Press and his screenplays, produced as short films, have won New York Film Festival and Minnesota Community Television awards.
Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing by Judy Bloom has been a perennial favorite of young readers since it was first published in 1972. It’s easy to see why. Ms. Bloom knows children, and more importantly, she knows how they feel and is able to convey that to her readers. The same can be said for this stage adaptation directed by Nicia Carla. The warmth, honesty, gentle charm, and humor of the book are on display at Children’s Theatre. At times the tone of the show feels a bit too understated yet is (thankfully) without any heavy issues laid on top to weigh it down. Energy builds as the story progresses, though, and the show keeps the audience's attention throughout.
The tales center on Peter Hatcher (Ashby Blakely), a fourth grader, who feels put upon by his cute but mischievous and attention-getting younger brother, nicknamed Fudge (Jon Parker Douglas). Peter narrates often and his musings are both funny and on target as any older sibling will know immediately. The audience also gets to know the parents, frazzled Mom (Barbi VanSchaick), and hard-working Dad (Matthew Keffer). This is a regular family trying to negotiate modern life with career hazards, sibling rivalry, limited time, homework catastrophes, and occasional trips to the emergency room.
Fudge is a toddler and innocently annoys Peter at every turn especially by taking up his parents’ time and attention. Peter resents Fudge believing that he wrecks everything for him, even messing with his beloved turtle Dribble, but sometimes resents his mother even more thinking she favors Fudge. There’s only so much maturity a fourth grader can be expected to have and the audience’s laughter and sympathy grows along with Peter’s irritation.
Part of the fun of the play is reliving your own childhood memories or your family’s through the Hatcher family episodes. Fudge even turns three during the course of events and his birthday party, with other unmanageable three year olds (as Mom is the only adult handling the party), is one of the highlights of the show .
Ashby Blakely and Jon Parker Douglas are appealing and convincing as the Hatcher siblings. How many actors can believably play children and toddlers? Many moms will relate to Barbi VanSchaick. Though she can lose her cool, she projects warmth and patience with her children. Matthew Keffer’s role as the dad is limited, but he gets a chance to add to the fun in the party scene. Mark Sutton and Amy Van Looy play multiple roles and do each of them justice.
Ryan Wineinger’s set design of a New York City apartment is functional and inspired, though the black wires on the tall buildings behind the apartment are a distraction at first; the costumes by Courtney Burt Scott are well done, especially for Peter, Fudge and the other children.
Two young boys sitting in front of me, who looked like they could be in fourth grade, were having a great time talking back to the characters on stage, but adults will have fun, too, with this charming show. Review by Ann Marie Oliva
Ann Marie Oliva is a local playwright and freelance writer. She is the producer/editor of ARTS à la Mode and a judge for the National Youth Theatre Awards. Ann Marie is a member of the Dramatists Guild.
With this show, as soon as spectators open the door of CAST, they experience uptown Manhattan. The box office window is a fare booth with maps, posters, and a turnstile. In the lobby, spectators can light a candle at the Virgin Mary's statue to participate in Sister Rose's funeral or join others at the bar—with parallels to the main settings in the show. There is also a grocery and deli selling "fresh meat," with graffiti painted on the metal scroll covering its shop window, an entrance to a Chinese restaurant, a phone booth, the edge of a construction site, and a video of a New York street.
Inside the "boxagon," a dozen actors populate the play. Brief, sitcom-like scenes give glimpses of the many lives affected by Sister Rose as a Catholic school teacher. Victor (Jim Esposito) rages around her coffin, because her body and his pants have been stolen. Rooftop (Sidney Horton), a black radio show host, begins a circuitous 30-year confession to Father Lux (Bill McNeff), who lost his legs in Korea. Flip and Gail (Jonavan Adams and Robert Haulbrook), a lawyer and actor from Wisconsin, discuss how gay to appear when meeting with old school friends at the funeral and wake. A detective with dark secrets, Balthazar (John Cunningham), questions a hardened streetwise Hispanic woman, Norca (Carmen Thwaites), about where the missing corpse might be. A mentally challenged but cheerful man, Pinky (Robert Lee Simmons), distracts his brother Edwin (J.R. Adduci) from writing the nun's eulogy. In the bar, a stunning black woman in a red dress, Inez (Ife Moore), trades stories with Norca, who then erupts with anger at the preppie Sonia from Connecticut (Stephanie O'Neill), perhaps mistaking her for a different white girl who shamed her as a child at school. And the nun's niece, Marcia (Lauren Crozier), expresses both affection and aggression toward Edwin.
All of these characters are avoiding mourning, yet it leaks out in various acts and emotions. There is no through-line to the tragicomedy, except the mystery of Sister's stolen corpse, which is never resolved (though Victor does get his pants back). In the second act, scenes dig a bit deeper with Balthazar, Rooftop, and Flip (who masks his homosexuality) getting drunk together in the bar and recalling other funerals in their lives. Father Lux, legless in his wheelchair, catches up with Rooftop and provokes him back into prayer, reflection on his sins, and honesty about his continued feelings for Inez. Edwin yells at Pinky for being out of contact for 16 hours, showing his own guilt for having accidentally damaged his brother's brain and yet resentment at the job of caring for him. He also confesses to Marcia that she's beautiful, but chooses to follow his brother instead of being with her.
Such an ensemble show, with glimpses of present conflicts and reflections on the past, is fitting for a reunion play (like The Big Chill, a 1983 film). It provides a showcase for many fine performances and intriguing video images between scenes. But some in the audience may be frustrated with the skeletal nature of this script. Perhaps it shows the spirit of Sister Rose continuing in the lives of others, even with her body lost. Or it reveals how clergy get glimpses of many twisted lives, which cannot be untangled into a complete providential narrative. Either way, this show leaves the ultimate design to the minds in the audience, as spirits visiting Our Lady's wake on 121st Street. Review by Mark Pizzato
Mark Pizzato is Professor of Theatre at UNC-Charlotte and author of Ghosts of Theatre and Cinema in the Brain and Theatres of Human Sacrifice. His plays have been published by Aran Press and his screenplays, produced as short films, have won New York Film Festival and Minnesota Community Television awards.