Jack L. B. Gohn - Page 12

The monastery must now meet the demand for an "incorruptible," a corpse that never decomposes, the Rolls-Royce of relics. Marie seems ready to be pressed into service over what may be her dead body. And only a bona fide miracle will save the day.

The folklore passed on from parents to children under the deceptively superficial name of fairy tales is profound. The kitchen drudge who yearns to become a princess, the little girl vanquishing a wolf encountered on the way to grandmother's house, the simpleton who sells the family cow for a handful of magic beans, and their kindred, are archetypes of each of us, at various moments in the trajectories of our lives.

In a play in which morally acceptable and unacceptable stances are hopelessly intertwined and might turn an audience off, there are two things that will draw us to the play anyway: Portia and Shylock. If they are right, the play will succeed, despite all its difficulties. They are right as can be in this staging.

There is anger at the way men perceive women - and abuse, rape, belittle and objectify them. Owen's woman-hating fantasy may not reflect reality, but that doesn't make it harmless. That point can make the show hard to watch at moments, as it wends its way through scenes of imagined rape and murder. But it wouldn't do to look away. There's painful humor at every painful turn.

The songbook of Jerry Leiber (1933-2011) and Mike Stoller (1933- ) is a natural for jukebox musical treatment, because it encompasses such variety that it requires little by way of setting to stay interesting. You don't need a plot, you don't need performers to talk or act, all you need is a band, some choreography and costumes, and some great singer/dancers, and you're there.

A youthful cast, showcasing a number of talents from Morgan State University, brings out Waller's exuberance and his ambivalence.

Rodgers and Hammerstein designed the ending to reduce you to tears, and they knew what they were doing. Resist, even at this excellent revival,and think about the conundrums of race, class and gender that that lie just beneath the surface.

As playwright Michael Weller intelligently conveys, except in the most empty marriages, no matter what the parties may have done to each other, there are still ties of love holding them together. In living through these crises, then, both forces, the centripetal and the centrifugal, must have a part. To the observer, it might seem laughably incoherent, but actually it is just the way things are at such moments.

These are small-timers, and what makes their souls as small as their business, I think, is America itself, a place where there is no state religion nor any religion or code of ethics at all which anyone is required to internalize. Here you are free to be a scheming psychopath while talking a blue streak; no one will stop you. And while Mamet is clearly pointing out how amusing people who do this can be, I do not see much evidence he thinks we can learn much from them; the encounter is all. Fortunately, it is enough

The big reason for the audience's enjoyment, however, is the performance of Nigel Reed as Barrymore, who absolutely inhabits the legendary old ham's persona, grandiose and gross and catty and orotund. A strong physical resemblance to the man does not hurt either.

Olga is resigned to the fact that the individual niceness of herself and her sisters, and the somewhat more nuanced niceness of their father the Tsar, will have nothing to do with the outcomes at this point. The tides of history are flowing, and the Romanovs are about to be swept out to sea.

Four long acts long, with casting challenges, bedeviled by attitudes modern audiences likely will not share, and, it must be said, self-indulgent as regards some of O'Neill's great weaknesses, Moon for the Misbegotten requires more than most companies and audiences can summon to put it across successfully. I say "successfully" but perhaps "successfully as possible" might be the more accurate phrase. Washington's Heritage-O'Neill Theatre Company's current production partly but not fully meets these challenges.

Put on your most cynical mood, the one in which you laugh at the predictable folly, venality and dishonesty of the human race, mix it with your ear for Jazz Age syncopation and great singing, get your buzz on for chorines flouncing athletically and with rhythmic precision in their undies, and go!

Who is she really? What are her parents up to? What is the manservant doing breaking into and rifling through a locked desk? Why is the maidservant bringing the young woman gloves that were supposed to have been hers, but are clearly too large? Who is the blackmailer who turns up in the dead of night? And why all the references to the treacherous path along the top of the cliff, and the darkness of the sea below at night?

This clever entwinement of the characters' lives is so self-consciously contrived that it cannot serve as the subject of speculations about causation; everything happens because the author has willed it, not because the characters made it happen, because God made it happen, or because of some dynamic in the collective.

Fortunately, Toby's has the right Kira in Heather Marie Beck. In her game willingness to clown rather than just be pretty and sound lovely, she reminds me a bit of Cameron Diaz. I will long treasure the memory of her staggering along, one skate on and one skate off, as she doggedly makes her escape from a too-importunate Sonny. Beck may know, and we may know, that the character looks ridiculous, but the character doesn't know; that's real comedy.

In an era when Waller had to enter some of the places he played by a side door, it would have been inhuman to resist completely the allure of white privilege. It's all on view in his song LOUNGIN' AT THE WALDORF, which contrasts the kind of freedom and looseness he could enjoy performing in Harlem with the stiffer, whiter milieu of the Waldorf Astoria. Nevertheless: "Ain't it swell doin' swell with the swells in the swellest hotel of them all? One of the strengths of the show is that it doesn't whitewash (if I may use that word here) this part of Waller's legacy.

I'm reminded of the old joke: It's only funny till someone gets hurt; then it's hilarious. Jacobean audiences liked the stage littered with corpses at the end; we settle for one or two corpses and people's lives shattered. And that this show certainly delivers. There may not be much depth to it, much in the way of a philosophical point, but it's absorbing to see.

I like a theater of ideas as much as the next reviewer, but found that, in this somewhat trackless waste of a play, the ideas were either inarticulately expressed, trite, or both. The Strand Theater Company, dedicated to providing opportunities for female artists, writers, designers and directors, certainly fills a need. I only wish I could recommend this offering.

The effect is a bit like opening a sampler of candies; while enjoying one treat, you're looking forward to the next, and the next, and the next …