Powered by Google
Home
Listings
Editors' Picks
News
Music
Movies
Food
Life
Arts + Books
Rec Room
Moonsigns
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Personals
Adult Personals
Classifieds
Adult Classifieds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
stuff@night
FNX Radio
Band Guide
MassWeb Printing
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About Us
Contact Us
Advertise With Us
Work For Us
Newsletter
RSS Feeds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Webmaster
Archives



sponsored links
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
PassionShop.com
Sex Toys - Adult  DVDs - Sexy  Lingerie


   
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend

Rare treats?
Follies at Barrington, The Father at Berkshire
BY STEVE VINEBERG

Both Barrington Stage and Berkshire Theatre Festival’s smaller venue, the Unicorn, chose to open their seasons with plays that are rarely mounted. Stephen Sondheim’s 1971 Follies (at Barrington Stage through July 16) is an elaborate musical drama about a reunion of showgirls at the theater — which is set to be junked — where they once performed, in an annual extravaganza known as the Weismann Follies. (Ziegfeld’s inspired it, of course, but in book writer James Goldman’s version, the show continued way past the era of such revues, vanishing only with the beginning of World War II.) This is a musical about confronting the past and accepting middle age, and its cast includes not only the surviving performers and their significant others but the ghosts of their younger selves, who hover in the corners of the dilapidated playhouse. The Father (at Berkshire Theater Festival through July 16) is seldom mounted for different reasons. Strindberg’s most scathing — and, I’d say, most brilliant — examination of marital acrimony and the imbalance of power between the sexes (in Strindberg’s view, the woman wins hands down) is perilously difficult to perform. It’s presented as a piece of realism, but its poisonous couple, the Captain and Laura, are scrutinized so relentlessly under the playwright’s microscope that the results may seem as distorted as the sequences in Strindberg’s later dream plays.

The trick in The Father is to find the right style. Some years back, the ART attempted a wildly expressionistic production with Christopher Lloyd as the Captain, and it was a spectacular failure. Anders Cato at BTF has taken a more modest approach that focuses on Strindberg’s compelling text, and played at a clip, without intermissions, the play comes through. Cato is listed as adapter as well as director, but though he may have pared down the script somewhat, it’s very close to the translations I’ve read. He’s made one addition — a spirit (played by Gus Solomons Jr.) who haunts the upper reaches of Karl Eigsti’s set, smiling cryptically and turning his head slowly from side to side like one of the live faces in the décor of the enchanted castle in Jean Cocteau’s La belle et la bête. Whatever Cato’s idea here might have been, it doesn’t come through.

The virtue of the BTF production is that its intimacy and intensity minimize some of the obstacles between the audience and the play. The problem is that the acting style, which is rather odd and tricky to describe, creates new obstacles. The acting is theatrical but not flamboyant, self-conscious though not self-indulgent. It’s clear that the actors are committed to the material, but Cato seems to have encouraged them — particularly Eric Hill as the Captain, Charlotte Maier as Laura, David Adkins as the doctor, and Anthony Newfield as the pastor — to bring a contemplative, almost academic element into the performance. Maier manages the most successful blend of realism and that peculiar stylization, mostly by underplaying. At the other end of the spectrum, neither Lenka Peterson as the old nanny, Margret, nor Jill Renee Baker as the adolescent daughter over whose education the Captain and his wife clash is plausible. (Baker gives it the old college try but she seems a decade too old for Bertha.)

Over the nearly three and a half decades since Harold Prince staged it on Broadway, Follies has acquired legendary status, though perhaps those of us who saw it in 1971 (I was an undergraduate when it came through on its Boston tryout) are surprised when it doesn’t work on stage. And it never seems to, though the set-up appears magical. When the aging Weismann girls, pennants slung across their chests proclaiming the year they entered the Follies, parade down the staircase to the strains of "Hats off, here they come, those beautiful girls," you hold your breath in anticipation. And then the two central couples, Phyllis and Ben, Sally and Buddy, recall the days when the two young men, law students and best buddies, squired their two chorus girls, in a song, "Waiting for the Girls Upstairs," that balances wonder and melancholy, and suddenly they’re sharing the stage with their twentysomething counterparts — and you think the show is going to be a triumph. (This is one of the finest numbers Sondheim has ever written.) But then the banality of Goldman’s script sets in, and the emotional apocalypse the reunion takes the two couples through feels phony, inflated. Sondheim gets to show his range in the score — there’s way too much of it, but that’s less a problem than the discrepancy between the huge, promising concept and the incredible shrinking characters.

Julianne Boyd’s production at Barrington Stage has a lot of feeling, and "Waiting for the Girls Upstairs" has the requisite emotional effect. But much as you might admire her for taking on a show of this magnitude, BSC’s resources just aren’t up to it — except when it comes to the music, which, typical of BSC productions, is handled expertly. (Darren Cohen is the musical director.) When only eight showgirls take the stairs in "Beautiful Girls," the delight of producer Weismann (Gordon Stanley) that "so many of you showed up" sounds ironic, and you wonder why he didn’t just book a private room at Sardi’s. Michael Anania’s set looks evocative, but once the actors start milling around, you notice that it doesn’t have enough nooks and crannies to provide variations in the staging, so though the show is underpopulated, it seems cluttered. Scott Pinkney and D. Benjamin Courtney do some clever things with the lighting, but Alejo Vietti’s costumes aren’t attractive, and Lara Teeter’s choreography lacks distinction.

Teeter also plays Buddy, the eager-to-please salesman who knows that for 30 years he’s been competing for Sally’s love with her romanticized memories of Ben (Jeff McCarthy), who slept with her but married her best friend, Phyllis (Leslie Denniston). It’s often the case in Follies productions that the bitter, bantering, high-comedy couple, author/diplomat Ben and his disenchanted spouse, are less appealing than desperate, dreamy Sally and Buddy, who has tried to deal with the disappointments of marriage by acquiring an out-of-town girlfriend but whose heart belongs to his wife. And that’s true here. Although their singing can’t be faulted, McCarthy gives a slick but not terribly convincing performance while Denniston struggles with the limitations of her role. (She has noble precursors — Blythe Danner struggled too, in the 2001 Broadway revival.) But Teeter and Kim Crosby as Sally are affecting, both in their songs and in their dialogue scenes. Teeter’s second-act solo, "The Right Girl," is one of the show’s highlights, though for some reason the final verse has been cut, snipping off Buddy’s revelation: "I don’t love the right girl." (It was cut four years ago on Broadway, too.)

One of Follies’ draws is the chance to see comeback performers in the supporting showgirl roles. This production has Hollywood’s most famous musical-comedy dubber, Marni Nixon (Audrey Hepburn’s singing "voice" in My Fair Lady, among others’), as the Viennese operetta queen, Heidi Schiller, and she brings genuine sweetness to "One More Kiss." The coup de grâce was landing Donna McKechnie, A Chorus Line’s original Cassie (and the dance lead in Company, the show that preceded Follies in Sondheim’s career). Wearing too much make-up, McKechnie essays that overwritten survivor’s anthem, "I’m Still Here," and the audience goes wild — though she might do better to play against its brass-plated sentimentality. Both Diane Houghton (on "Broadway Baby") and Joy Franz (on "Ah, Paris!") go right for the show-biz jugular and get the applause they’ve worked so hard for. But the vocalist who performs best on these show-within-a-show numbers is Diane J. Findlay, whose Stella Deems seems to be discovering the meaning of "Who’s That Woman?" for the first time all these years later. That is, of course, the idea of the song and the show — that the past becomes a mirror for the characters’ present lives. Only occasionally does the play, and the production, pull it off.


Issue Date: July 8 - 14, 2005
Back to the Theater table of contents
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend
 









about the phoenix |  advertising info |  Webmaster |  work for us
Copyright © 2005 Phoenix Media/Communications Group