Rene Grayre Theatre reviews blog

Macbeth - The Seeing Place Theatre

12/15/2016

See it if
you'd appreciate an up close, modern & wonderfully staged and realized production of the Scottish Play, with fine if uneven performances.
Don't see it if
you need period costumes, sets & prosceniums, don't like actors too close to you or like your Shakespeare with needless British accents.

Remarkably well staged & directed by its founders, The Seeing Place Theatre's Macbeth Is proof of how much can be accomplished with little more than bodies, light & space, in this case a very intimate space which never feels tight. With gorgeous lighting by Duane Pagano that helps propel the action, great design & even signage, it's the essence of how theatre can transport and engage. There's even something of Grotowski's Poor Theatre here; not the intense physicality, but in the attempt of stripping away all surface to truth.

That said, the company might consider Grotowski's exploration of voice & projection. Shakespeare is too often exclamatory & rushed rather than conversational, so that meaning gets lost. The production is well cast, and the warhorse speeches (Spot/Tomorrow) seem underplayed to avoid cliché; interesting choices, but they lose their punch.

The 100 minute run time is a great goal, but the pre-battle McDuff/Malcom speeches should be trimmed for a restless audience.

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The Encounter

12/14/2016

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See it if
You're open to experience & a piece of theatre that might be transcendent but for its length despite an intense tour de force performance.
Don't see it if
You like neither technology nor radio theatre or expect any sort of traditional linear play or simple minded entertainment.

Too long by a third, it can be easy to dismiss this show as mere spectacle, or reduce it to a technical, state-of-the-art Wow, a very sophisticated bag of audio tricks. Each member of the audience wearing earphones, it’s actually pretty thrilling to have a real-time demonstration of how sound affects the brain—specifically, your brain—& how much our senses of place, time & reality depend on & are affected by sound.

McBurney’s a charming, engaging host with no curtain to hide behind, guiding the audience through the different acoustic means that will create the evening’s story and reality. There’s a collective intake of breath when he says that he’ll blow in your left ear & you’ll feel the warmth of breath — and you do.

Within this setup, The Encounter dives quickly into questions of existence, truth, & place; of our sense of living in an arguably mistaken or false reality of time & objects & of individual self. Earphones on, disoriented from sounds all around, it all instinctively makes sense; but the brain stops just short of transcendence as the Story begins and we're transported to the Amazon.

It's an amazing, impressive performance; were it only a bit shorter.

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Sweet Charity - The New Group

12/13/2016

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See it if
you can deal with musical theatre stripped down to its essentials: terrific material, a talented cast & Sutton's pitch perfect technique.

Don't see it if
You're expecting Fosse or his Rich Man's Frug, a large orchestra or the usual bells and whistles that so often make the Bway musical go.

The New Group’s Sweet Charity is a big show in an intimate space with a big sound amazingly played by an all female band of only six musicians placed high above the stage facing the audience.

A lot has been made of this being a stripped down version of the show, but there's nothing stripped down when talent is paired with good material. While the space may be intimate, the performances are full on, leaving the impression of what it might feel like to be sitting on the stage of the Winter Garden watching the show. The actors are that close.

Considering source & subject, Sweet Charity has always been bittersweet, & Sutton Foster's Charity is an earthier, goofier, darker Charity, perfect for the darker times we live in. Her incredible timing and performing technique combine with an infectious joy shared by the terrific cast of singers & dancers.

The new choreography would be fine if not for the Fosse factor, but the excellent dancers shine with what they have.

All in all, go; it's a fun evening.

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Curiousities

12/8/2016

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Entertaining
Fun
Clever
Quirky
Sexy

See it if
you have or can keep an open mind and just go with the experience; it really will take you out of Manhattan for an amusing 2 hours.

Don’t see it if
you're looking for a traditional play, clear storyline, structure or anything linear; if you can't just be in the moment.

Sure, there’s always an element of costumed recreation when an audience is surrounded by actors in costume and character, but there’s a sweetness to this show, whose main aim seems to be to simply to take you out of your reality for awhile.

The evening is all pretty tongue in cheek, the attractive cast friendly and charming, the house jazz band playing non-stop, setting the mood as does the available bar. Steffen Shorten is a fine and funny MC who also strips and juggles unexpectedly; Carolina McQuaig is a lovely songbird whose What’ll I Do? is touching; Phoebe Dunn is stunning as the faded star; and Mary Cyn and Minnie D’Moocha contribute a sexy bit of good-natured skin and burlesque.

While characters and their relationships could be played up a bit more, and certainly gunshots could be louder and clearer, paying attention to goings on in and around the room pretty much tell all.

To be sure, it’s light entertainment, but entertaining it is, and fun. Go with the flow and see for yourself.

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The Trial of Martin Luther

12/7/2016

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See it if
You're Lutheran. Or Catholic; it might help sitting through a philosophical discourse disguised as a play about faith vs. religion.
Don't see it if
You've no interest in discussion plays or religion, expect three-dimensional characters or object to Satan as the most sympathetic character.

Certainly there's rich material in the trials & actual trial of Martin Luther for an effective drama, Jean Anouilh's Becket or Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons providing fine examples of the genre.
This play, however, produced by Fellowship for Performing Arts, whose mission is presenting theatre from a Christian worldview, is more discourse than drama. Less about Luther's inner moral or emotional struggles with his actions than it is about the historical worldwide effects of Lutheranism, it also parallels his split from the Church with Lucifer's split with God and his subsequent fall from grace.
Lucifer of course is the prosecutor in this Trial, wonderfully realized by Paul Scoeffler, who fully inhabits and presents the only 3 dimensional character of the evening with wit and intelligence. Kersti Bryan gives depth & empathy to Luther's wife while Fletcher McTaggart's Luther is unfortunately mostly frowned caricature. Costumes are rich if uneven, the set too cute by half, the lighting & effects overdone.

Not for the unconverted.

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Hamlet (A.N.O.N. Productions)

12/4/2016

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See it if
You'd like an interesting fresh take on Hamlet, genders switched. Uneven cast and direction, but Griffin is quite compelling.

Don't see it it
You like your Hamlet straight, not reimagined.

There are problems with this A.N.O.N. Production: an uneven cast; unnecessary Brit accents that shouldn’t have been attempted; an amphetamine-pace that often left the actors sounding like hummingbirds. In addition, the political questions raised in the program description of this "gender-bending" take on Hamlet seem beside the point in practice, and almost describe a different, more militant production.

Still, what this production does manage to do is give this all-too-familiar script a fresh hearing and reading. Presenting Hamlet as a woman raised as a man, and Ophelia for the most part as a fey, anger-suppressed milquetoast is a surprisingly effective choice that sheds new light & life into this classic work.

Ashley Griffin, who also directed, plays Hamlet with verve, conviction & commitment, and is the heart of this show, discovering heretofore unrealized layers and terrific physicality in the text. The “too, too solid flesh” Hamlet considers as she unbinds her breasts in frustration and anger jolts, and “Frailty, thy name is woman!” suddenly makes very real sense for a change.

In truth, this Hamlet only comes alive when she’s onstage. The scenes with Ryan Clardy’s Ophelia are the best, the most interesting choices and simultaneous layers of anger, love and frustration wonderfully played with arresting bits of physical business. The Nunnery scene especially, but likewise her playfulness during “Shall I lie in your lap?” and also the Fishmonger scene with James Luse’s terrific Polonius. For his part, Clardy manages to pull off his Ophelia’s listless weakness without falling into caricature.

There are rough spots to be sure, Ms. Griffin’s occasional dropped ends of sentences, mumbled or tossed away lines, drops in vocal projection. Her advice to the Players rushed by, as well as “To be or not to be,” and her direction generally seemed intent on brisk action.

Additionally, there’s some initial confusion as to the male Ophelia’s love for the publicly male Hamlet; the questions of gender equality/identity issues melding into possible same-sex LGBT issues brought up by Polonius’ advice are never quite resolved, and Ms. Griffin’s easy masculinity contrasting with her very female, driven sexuality in the kissing scenes add to the questions.

But this is all to the good. Ms. Griffin’s work here brings to mind a young Lisa Wolpe, whose exhilarating Shakespeare and the Alchemy of Gender appeared for too short a run this last summer. In this case, Griffin’s actual gender preference or orientation is irrelevant and unknown — she does both with such conviction — but that there's such ambiguity is a testament to her talent and potential as an actress.

This Hamlet isn’t for everyone but, problems aside, it’s a memorable one with much potential.

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Poison

12/1/2016

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A truthful requiem

See it if
You're ready to watch two very fine actors work through pain, loss, and the truthful cathartic avowel of life, grief and change.

Don't see it if
You want simple entertainment; you've neither the patience nor desire to see a deep meditation on grief & acceptance, or existential dramas.

A great intense and very long silence permeates the opening of Lot Vekemans’ Poison, housed, appropriately enough, at the Beckett Theatre. The cold bare set — an offset white tiled marble floor, long white bench, and cold-drink vending machine — is, not unlike the play's characters, an island floating in a sea of black.

The audience enters as a man stands waiting and very still onstage. The quiet intensifies with the energy of anticipation, and the stillness and silence soar past the stage and into the auditorium like air in a cathedral.

This is only right as Poison is a requiem: for the spirit of the lost child; for the Woman's grief; for the relationship between the Man & the Woman that died with that death.

There's a bit of Beckett and of Pinter in Lot Vekemans' fine, deceptively simple script, which is filled with silence, long pauses, depth and the well observed details of everyday life, from the “click of the lock in the door” as He left her, to the pinwheels and chocolates He remembered She loved. At the same time, the slow reveal of exposition and history at times just thud in the air, each bit of information a check off the list of expectations.

Erwin Maas’s direction is lean and focused, allowing the wonderful Birgit Huppuch and Michael Laurence the space to so accurately portray the range of pain and anguish; the poison of Her grief, Her arias of grief, through to some version of acceptance of life. The realization that the present moment is all, that it just is, things just are; no better no worse, no right or wrong. And that can be enough, can be ok. It's a delicate line, a risky balancing act both actors pull off touchingly.

The literal arias, however, beautifully sung by young Jordan Rutte, Stauss's "Morgen!" ("Tomorrow!") — "And tomorrow the sun will shine again" — are problematic without translation and so seem oddly imposed on the realistic action onstage; it likely made more sense in Dutch.

Poison is not for everyone, an intense, slowly paced 90 minutes of totally naturalistic and transcendent acting and performance at times painful to watch, but very worth the experience.

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Vietgone

12/1/2016

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See it if
you're up for a wildly fresh & funny take on the Asian immigrant experience — language, change, war, loss & love as seen from that side.

Don't See it if
you're easily confused by nonlinear plays, don't like needlessly vulgar rap, asians, immigrants or have writ in stone opinions about Vietnam.

Every family has stories; some are more colorful or epic, others more tragic or funny. Just the fact of parents, too, everyone's parents, are stories just waiting to be dug out and passed on; along the way, someone always says, "Someone should write this down." Nguyen has done just that, and then some.

Using the raw material of how his parents met in a US camp after the Vietnam War, Nguyen's constructed a pinball machine of a play, colorfully bouncing back & forth across time, culture & language. Disorienting from the immigrants' POV, they speak perfectly as the Americans speak pidgin and nonsense. It's all wonderfully well observed and very funny.

The ensemble cast is near-perfect and terrific, the last scene touching and quite moving & real.

The rap songs however are mostly weak & repetitive, though a great idea & well delivered; but is rap by definition that vulgar? The profanity seems gratuitous, at times out of character.

Still, it's a fun, unique & fresh ride; go see it.

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Macbeth - The Seeing Place Theatre

The Encounter

Sweet Charity - The New Group

Curiousities

The Trial of Martin Luther

Hamlet (A.N.O.N. Productions)

Poison

Vietgone

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