Church Basement Ladies: Dancing, Yet Stationary

By Dan Hagen

You wouldn’t expect much to happen in a story about Lutheran lady cooks in some small-town 1960s church — and it doesn’t.

But I suppose that’s the secret of the success of Church Basement Ladies, a musical directed by Therese S. Kincade now closing out the 2019 summer season at Sullivan’s Little Theatre.

It’s part of that increasingly popular trend that might be called “innocuous theatre,” of which the 1985 musical Nunsense is the prime example. An audience can rest assured that not one of its comfortable assumptions will be challenged in these shows, and many audiences find them greatly enjoyable for that very reason.

But the nuns in Nunsense actually, accidentally and rather cheerfully killed a bunch of people, as you may recall (Sister Julia, Child of God, offed 52 poor souls with her tainted vichyssoise). Lutherans would never get up to anything so showy, however.

When the dramatic era of a show includes the year 1968, you know it’s going to be at least in part about “change,” because 1968 was an American watershed in terms of civil rights, war-making, trust in government, you name it.

What’s surprising about Church Basement Ladies is that while tide and time are referenced here, they never actually manage to wash ashore in the tiny Minnesota town where the story is set. The musical is finally about a fear of change that turns out to be completely unfounded (beyond the regrettable replacement of the black hymnals for red ones, of course).

The naturalistic set by Michael Mason works well, with its period fridge, ovens and freezer, and a prominently displayed cookbook called The Joy of Butter. The cabinets are all a homey color my friend Bart Rettberg calls “country blue.”

Into this slice of vintage Americana slides a tight cast of five whose talent overtakes the material without breaking a sweat.

The minister is Rory Dunn, the ingénue is Brittany Ambler, her mom is Equity actress Heather J. Beck, their funny friend is Bonner Church (who must enjoy sharing her name with the show) and the beneficent battleaxe Mrs. Lars (Vivian) Snustad is played by Equity actress April Woodall.

The plot, thin at best, gets pulled like taffy before a particularly implausible scene wraps up the show. In fact, having run out of funny things to say about Lutherans per se, the show falls back on a number comparing Lutherans to Catholics (who are, let’s face it, funnier).

But forget all that. The comedy here is at its best when it’s at its broadest, a Carol Burnett skit level of funny. And that makes the audience roar with a satisfactory frequency.

The ladies warm up with a song about the glorious blandness of their cuisine, Pale Food Polka (“People might take offense if your table’s too intense… Keep it light! Keep it gray! Keep paprika far away!”). But they really hit their stride with a big band-type number spearheaded by Beck being brassy, Get Down to Business (“Rattle the roaster! Bang on the bowls! Tell ’em the Tupperware’s set at a supper where we can redeem some hungry souls!).

Ambler shines in a number about the change that never happens, Sing a New Song. Church wows ’em with a song about menopause, My Own Personal Island, although that medical term is never used (And “Fargo” is rhymed with “Key Largo”). Church also has a darkly funny running bit about her husband’s slow dismemberment in farm accidents.

But I confess that that old stick in the Minnesota spring mud Woodall is my favorite in this production. Imagine Thelma Ritter strutting her stuff in a chorus line, and you’ve got something of the effect.

Woodall’s best number — and the funniest in the show, for me — is The Cities, her baleful warning about those Sodoms and Gomorrahs of the Midwest, Minneapolis and St. Paul.

Kincade has conjured herself another crowd pleaser here.

Incidental Intelligence: This musical, which premiered in 2005, has a book by Jim Stowell and Jessica Zuehlke and music and lyrics by Drew Jansen. The show was inspired by the 1997 book Growing Up Lutheran, written by Janet Letnes Martin and Suzann Nelson.

The musical has spawned no less than six sequels: Church Basement Ladies 2: A Second Helping; Away in the Basement: A Church Basement Ladies Christmas; The Church Basement Ladies in A Mighty Fortress Is Our Basement; The Church Basement Ladies in The Last (Potluck) Supper; The Church Basement Ladies in Rise Up, O Men and The Church Basement Ladies in You Smell Barn (which premiered last year).

This production has costuming by Pippen Calame, lighting by Noel Rennerfeldt, musical direction by Kevin Long and choreography by Mandy Modic. It runs through Aug. 25.

The Full Monty: All Kinds of Exposure

Everybody knows the secret

They all know what their life should be

And they move like a river

Everybody knows except for me…

— Breeze Off the River

By Dan Hagen

This production opens with a Chippendales performance by the agreeable Lars Kristian Hafell — that alone is enough to put the audience in a pretty sunny disposition for the balance of the show.

Imagine Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland saying, “Hey, kids, let’s put on a show — with male strippers!” That’s clearly one source of inspiration for The Full Monty, but the show also swims in darker cultural currents than MGM musicals ever explored.

Corey John Hafner in “The Full Monty.”

Sullivan’s Little Theatre has staged The Full Monty twice before that I know of, always successfully.

Nearly a decade ago, I wrote, “If there’s a 20th century story that captures the dampened spirit of 21st century America in song, it’s probably The Full Monty, the musical now playing at the Little Theatre.

“Based on the 1997 British comedy film, it’s about the psychological ramifications of unemployment, and a regular guy from Buffalo named Jerry who is trying to keep his spirits buoyed in a world that seems determined — with a cold, corporate, industrial-strength efficiency — to grind him right down to a fine powder and scatter him to the four winds.”

Times do change, and that aforementioned American spirit feels even soggier. The men’s seething sense of entitlement to good union jobs seems almost quaint now, two decades on into the cold indifference of the “gig economy,” with its disposable attitude toward labor.

You find yourself thinking that it’s too bad American men’s resulting rage couldn’t actually be bled off into some sexy, self-liberating dance performance. Instead, it gets channeled into the election campaign of Donald Trump.

This production is ably directed and choreographed by Jordan Cyphert, and benefits from the return of musicians in the pit (who went missing for Newsies). A key scene is played in a removable restroom with realistic graffiti on the walls — well done, scenic designer Jonathan Sabo.

John McAvaney is Jerry’s fat, funny and plaintive pal Dave, a role he has played before and can sell with ease. His flat, emphatic delivery of comedy lines is a crowd-pleaser.

Jerry is Trevor Vanderzee, the actor who perfectly embodied Curly in this season’s Oklahoma. Now he no longer expects beautiful mornings, only bleak ones.

Mandy Modic, playing Jerry’s estranged wife Pam, elevates the proceedings another notch with her naturalistic performance, convincingly showing us that she cares deeply about Jerry but is fed up with his self-pity and wants to see him save himself. No lamebrain fairy-tale romance this.

To explore the benefits of killing oneself in song, McAvaney and Vanderzee team up with none other than the Little Theatre’s executive producer, John Stephens. As the prissy, depressed mama’s boy Malcolm, Stephens adopts an amusing and convincing voice completely unlike his own.

The trio’s number, about helpfully crushing a friend’s head with a Big Ass Rock, is always one of my favorites.  With this and Oklahoma, Vanderzee always seems to be singing people into suicide this summer.

The show’s best dance number, Big Black Man, is supplied by Jaimar Brown as Horse. Although he’s credibly aged by makeup, Brown’s limber locomotion betrays his show-stopping youth and stamina.

Kevin Sosamon, playing Jerry’s son Nathan, works that same acting trick in reverse. He’s actually quite young, but seems older because his character is in certain ways more mature than his own father.

I’ve seen Marty Harbaugh many times on the Little Theatre stage, but never better than in this. His awkward, halting attempt at a striptease manages to be both humorous and poignant in the same moment.

Actor Nicholas Carroll, who played Jud Fry so perfectly in Oklahoma, is effective here in the nervously restrained role of Harold, the executive who’s afraid to tell his free-spending wife that he, too, has gotten the proverbial ax. Equity actress Heather J. Beck does a quick star turn as his wife, the brassy belt-it-out lady who somewhat inexplicably adores her Life With Harold.

I see one of my favorite Little Theatre actors, Corey John Hafner, has gone Equity. Congrats. Here, he’s Ethan, a guy who gamely keeps trying to run up walls like Donald O’Connor in Singin' in the Rain and who offers the men’s strip show his, erm, “hidden assets.”

The show reaches its full Glory when … I wonder how many times reviewers have used that pun? But it’s true.

Equity actor Glory Kissel pegs the feel-good meter with her portrayal of the elderly fireball Jeanette Burmeister, a never-say-die Vegas trouper who shows up to rehearse the men. It’s a role she’s played before, always irrepressibly. The audience loses some of the words in her big song, but Kissel dominates all her scenes with her uninhibited, Carol Burnett-like clownishness.

She belts out, “I've played for hoofers who can't hoof. I've played for tone-deaf singers. And once, when I insulted Frank, I played with broken fingers.”

This musical touches on interesting ideas about emasculation and self-worth that it can’t really stop to explore. But it gets points merely for raising them in the context of such audience-alluring salacious fun.

“Never allow yourself to be made a victim,” the playwright Harvey Fierstein once said. “Accept no one’s definition of your life, but define yourself.”

In The Full Monty, Jerry, Dave and the rest of the boys learn just what he meant.

Incidental intelligence:  The Full Monty runs through Aug. 11. For tickets, call The Little Theatre On The Square Box Office at 217-728-7375.

Musical direction is by Kevin Long, with lighting design by Zach Pizza.

The talented cast includes Kate Turner, Brittany Ambler, Bonner Church, Emily Bacino Althaus, Tyler Pirrung and James Garrett Hill.

Extra! Extra! Read All About 'Newsies!'

By Dan Hagen

Child labor hasn’t been this much fun since Annie.

The Little Theatre’s current production is the first time I’ve seen Newsies in any form. And a labor-based musical, however fanciful, is an occurrence rare enough to deserve some consideration. Bart Rettberg reminded me about the 1954 Broadway musical The Pajama Game, but no others spring readily to mind.

The real-life New York City Newsboys Strike of 1899 inspired this confection, which was a 1992 Disney movie before it moved to the stage.

The show’s setting is remote enough in time not to raise any eyebrows for siding with the literally unwashed masses against capital. But it also retains an afterglow of urgency from the fact that none of these issues has ever really gone away. The fight for a living wage is still a live wire here.

The opening songs focus on that that staple theme of American entertainment, good old feel-good poverty. It isn’t until Joseph Pulitzer (Gus Gordon) cuts the newsboys’ meager wages, sparking an impromptu strike, that the story really engages our interest.

Teddy Roosevelt (Marty Harbaugh) serves precisely the same role here that his fifth cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt did in Annie — the powerful, benevolent deus ex machina that neatly ties up the package by siding with the underdogs. The show taught me some history. I did not know, for example, that a teenager’s drawings caused Teddy Roosevelt to clean up the New York State penal system.

Director Peter Marinaro’s production cannot completely mute the factory whistle of manufactured merriment that is so often built in to a Disney show. The music by Alan Menken, Jack Feldman and Harvey Fierstein is not immortal, but it is serviceable.

Alexander Capeneka’s moveable set, backed by a projection screen, skillfully suggests elevated train tracks and city rooftops.

And while this production may be short on spectacle, it is long on talent.

A Little Theatre veteran, Gordon gives an assured performance as the newspaper magnate Pulitzer, perfectly puffed up with his own power.

Garret Griffin is Crutchie, the Tiny Tim of the piece, whose job it is to be a buoyantly optimistic boy because he’s the one nearest to drowning. That’s a role that could easily be cloying, but Griffin gives it heart.

Ironically, Equity actress Alex Kidder is Katherine, the Lois Lane of this show. Plucky and pretty, she’s an aspiring reporter who gives as good as she gets.

Equity actress Heather Beck is Medda Larkin, the Ethel Merman/Reno Sweeney of this show. She pulls in the audience by belting out That’s Rich, a saucy song that is one of the production’s best numbers (“I live in a mansion on/Long Island sound. I pulled up a weed, they/Found oil in the ground./But you telling me you don't/Want me around — Now, honey, that's rich.”)

Tyler Pirrung plays Davey, the newsboy who’s relatively wealthy only because his impoverished parents are still alive. His best turn comes in Seize the Day, a stompy strike dance with helicoptering legs that shows off Joey Dippel’s choreography to good effect.

One of my favorite performers, Corey John Hafner, is the streetwise newsboy Race. He shines in the look-at-me number King of New York, and it’s not every actor who can make an audience roar merely by pronouncing the word “oyster.”

New York actor Bradley Cashman, as the newsboys’ champion Jack Kelly, has the requisite roguish charm, and his feisty romance with Kidder is more credible than most. Cashman impresses the audience at the curtain of the first act with his soaring tribute to his Shangri-La, Santa Fe.

Funny to think that if Jack had ever realized his young man’s dream of going west, he might have run into Curly, Laurey, Jud, Will and Ado Annie, the characters from the Little Theatre’s previous production, Oklahoma!, which is dramatically contemporary to Newsies.

They might have looked oddly familiar to him.

Incidental intelligence:  Newsies runs through July 28. For tickets, call The Little Theatre On The Square Box Office at 217-728-7375.

Musical direction is by Kevin Long, with lighting design by Mitchell Ost.

The talented cast includes Cian Lynch, Jordan Cyphert, Trevor Vanderzee, Nicholas Wilson, Nicholas Carroll, Emily Long, Emily Bacino Althaus, Kate Turner, Mandy Modic, Brittany Ambler, Madilyn Keller, Bradyn Wambach, Jaimar Brown, Lars Kristian Hafell, James Garrett Hill, Izzy Miller, Madeline Cohoon and Grace Lynch.

An 'Oklahoma!' for the 21st Century

By Dan Hagen

Ordinarily, I don’t give standing ovations. I think they should be reserved only for rarities, for extraordinary, dazzling performances. Yet last night, I rose to my feet, applauding.

I’ve seen several productions of the musical Oklahoma!, but the one now playing at the Little Theatre in Sullivan is the best of them.

Over seven decades, this show has become encrusted with so much cheese that it might as well be called Wisconsin! But this production is vibrant and vivacious, and finally gives me a hint of what all the fuss was about when this Rodgers and Hammerstein musical first wowed Broadway in 1943.

And the credit is due to two things, I think. One is the fact that director Peter Marinaro has managed to add a subtle and persistently dark chord to this sometimes saccharine musical.

In many productions, the American future that stretches ahead of these settlers comes off as confident and assured. But here, their All Er Nothin’ gamble on the barren prairie seems just as likely to leave them empty-handed. The marginality and sketchiness of these settlers’ lives is somehow suggested, along with the note of nervousness that underlies all their bravado.

Kincade and Cyphert as Aunt Eller and Will

As veteran actress Therese Kincade says in her best scene: “Oh, lots of things happen to folks. Sickness, er bein’ pore and hungry even — bein’ old and a-feared to die. That’s the way it is, cradle to grave. And you can stand it. They’s one way. You gotta be hearty, you got to be. You cain’t deserve the sweet and tender in life less’n you’re tough.”

Corny? Not when Kincade says the words. She gives the speech reality, making it both chilling and bracing. That IS the way things are, and the audience knows it — whether it’s 1906 or 1943 or 2019.

And that’s the other big advantage of this production — top talent in all the principal roles.

Kincade could play the irascible-but-wise-and-lovable Aunt Eller in her sleep, but keeps the audience awake with her verve, as when she fires off a gun to halt a brawl and booms, “They ain’t nobody goin’ to slug out any thin’! This here’s a PARTY!”

As the peddler Ali Hakim, the angular Tyler Pirrung is as sharp in his retorts as he is in his business practices.

Ambler and Cyphert as Ado Annie and Will

I’ve seen how easily Equity actor Jordan Cyphert can play smooth and debonair. But here, as cowboy Will Parker, he’s convincingly dim-witted, yet still as bright as them newfangled electric streetlights over to Kansas City.

Will Parker’s pert and promiscuous lady love, Ado Annie, is played with flawless comedic flourishes by Brittany Ambler, an actress who never wastes a gesture, never fails to reward the audience’s wandering eye.

The young cowboy hero Curly McLaine is required to sell you on his love of life in the first moments of the show, and this one, Trevor Vanderzee, does the trick. The handsome actor even seems to have the glint of that morning sun he’s singing about in his eye.

Turner and Vanderzee as Laurey and Curly

Vanderzee’s performance suggested something of what might have been missing in all those other Curlys I’ve seen. For example, when Curly is selling his “kinda nice horse, gentle and well broke” Dun to prove his love for Laurey, Vanderzee makes his sadness about that necessity quietly palpable.

But Kate Turner, as Laurey Williams, is worth it. What Turner brings to the proceedings is an Ellen Burstyn-like recognizable reality.

For most of this musical, Curly and Laurey act like the silly, self-defeating teenagers they are, full of pride and prejudice. But Turner makes her character so emotionally real in her hopes and hurts that you simply have to root for the young couple.

Over the decades, I have surprised myself by realizing that my favorite of the show’s several hit songs is now Many a New Day, Laurey’s breezy, fancy-free, proto-feminist anthem (check out Daryl Sherman’s jazzy version for a treat).

The heavy darkness of Jud Fry, the psychopathic farm hand who is obsessed with Laurey, is the anchor that stabilizes the show, giving it gravitas and freeing it from the silliness of some productions I’ve seen.

Alhough Jud’s loneliness and agony are sometimes poignant, actor Nicholas Carroll never lets us forget how rattlesnake-dangerous this insular, increasingly deranged predator is.

The funny business of Poor Jud Is Daid seems almost out of place with this Jud Fry. He’s just too menacing and too tortured a man to laugh at.

Glancing at the sweeping, impressionistic prairie landscape behind the actors, you’re impressed. And then you’re more impressed when you notice that the clouds are moving. Noel Rennerfeldt’s impressive set is frequently filled with the whirling exuberance of Kristen Brooks Sandler’s choreography, including the dream sequence with dancers all in white.

When this cast sings the familiar, rousing title tune, you believe they really do love the land in this, the most American of musicals.

Once, this show resonated with the economic optimism and conformity of postwar America. Now, in expert hands like these, it can be made to reflect the vast landscape of hard facts that is on the 21^st century American horizon.

I always knew Oklahoma! could entertain. But I never knew it could grow.

Incidental intelligence:  Oklahoma! runs through July 14. For tickets, call The Little Theatre On The Square Box Office at 217-728-7375.

Musical direction is by Kevin Long, with lighting design by Zach Pizza and costumes by Jana Henry Funderburk.

The talented cast includes Rich Beans, Emily Bacino Althaus, Mandy Modic, James Garrett Hill, Jaimar Brown, Corey John Hafner, Lars Kristian Hafell, Garrett Griffin, Mason Phipps, Heather J. Beck, Emily Long, Emily Miller-Amato and Madilyn Keller.

'Angels in America' and Perfection in London

Russell Tovey (Joseph) and James McArdle (Louis)

Paul, Matt, Cameron, Bart, Jeff and I went to Champaign to see the live cinemacast of Tony Kushner’s epic play Angels in America from London, and I found it breathtaking.

Russell Tovey, Nathan Lane and particularly Andrew Garfield gave bravura performances that were in turns funny, searing and simply thrilling.

Garfield was almost hypnotic in his brave and angry dance with death. “One wants to move through life with elegance and grace, blossoming infrequently but with exquisite taste, and perfect timing, like a rare bloom, a zebra orchid,” he says. “One wants... But one so seldom gets what one wants, does one?”

In the close-up shots, you could see the vulnerability and fear hidden behind Tovey’s eyes, and the grinning, hellish rage that shines out of Lane’s. Lane plays Donald Trump’s monstrous mentor, Roy Cohn.

“Yeah, you heard of Ethel Rosenberg,” Lane says, “Maybe even read about her in the history books. Well, if it wasn't for me, Joe, Ethel Rosenberg would be alive today, writing some personal-advice column for Ms. Magazine. She isn’t. Because, during the trial, Joe, I was on the phone every day talking with the judge. Every day, doing what I do best — talking on the telephone. Making sure that that timid Yid nebbish on the bench did his duty to America, to history. That sweet, unprepossessing woman, two kids, boo-hoo-hoo, reminded us all of our little Jewish mamas. She came this close to getting life. I pleaded till I wept to put her in the chair. Me, I did that. I’d have fucking pulled the switch if they let me. Why? Because I fucking hate traitors. Because I fucking hate communists. Was it legal? Fuck legal! Am I a nice man? Fuck nice! They say terrible things about me in The Nation? Fuck The Nation! You want to be nice or you want to be effective?! You want to make the law, or be subject to it? Choose!”

What an experience.

The Long Road to "Driving Miss Daisy"

By Dan Hagen

How appropriate that the play Driving Miss Daisy should cap the 2015 summer season here, because the venerable Little Theatre is the venue that integrated the town of Sullivan.

“The first African American actor Guy Little hired was an Equity actor from New York, Michael Wright, who, ironically, was from Shelbyville, a somewhat larger town 20 miles southeast of Sullivan,” wrote Beth Conway Shervey in her book, The Little Theatre on the Square: Four Decades of a Small-Town Equity Theatre.

“Collective memories of people in Sullivan in 1961 recalled either a sunset law on the books or an unspoken rule that no black man would be caught in Sullivan after the sun went down, much less spend the night,” Shervey wrote. Wright did, of course, staying with a local couple. “Rumor also had select area residents threatening to blow up the theatre or close it down for good. Not only did nothing like this happen, it never rose above gossip.”

Jibby Florini — the owner of Jibby’s restaurant, once the “Sardi’s of Sullivan” — headed off any racial confrontations. “(Wright) came in here, and I had to stop a couple guys from going over and challenging him,” Florini said. “They wanted him thrown out and so on.”

Little went right on hiring not only black actors but black stars to appear at the Little Theatre — Butterfly McQueen, who appeared in 1967’s Showboat, and Isabel Sanford, who appeared in 1977’s And Mama Makes Three.

“Since the demise of the star system, the theatre has continued to hire African American Equity actors, apprentices and techies,” Shervey noted.

And that tradition continues today with Little Theatre newcomer Bryant Bentley, an Equity actor playing chauffeur Hoke Colburn to Little Theatre veteran Glory Kissel’s Miss Daisy Werthan.

The 1987 play, directed by David Caldwell, is the first and most famous of Alfred Uhry’s Atlanta Trilogy, dramas focused on white Jewish Georgia citizens in the early 20th century.

After a fast-paced season of flashing feet in five musicals, it’s a nice change of pace to relax with a straightforward drama. This is solid material, both comedic and poignant, and the three Equity actors in the show know how to mine it for full value.

Most people are familiar with the story from the movie version starring Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman. In 1948, a 72-year-old wealthy Jewish widow — a woman who thinks she isn’t racially prejudiced, but is — can no longer drive but wants no help from the black chauffeur her son has hired for her.

The play covers their personal history from 1948 to 1973, with national history as a backdrop, while the help she didn’t want becomes the friend she can’t do without.

Kudos to scene designer Ryan Zirngibl for the subtly evocative set — two backdrops framing large open oval entranceways, one of faded flowered wallpaper peppered by picture frames, the next suggesting lace or a gazebo. And more plaudits for sound designer Ryan Hopper. The incidental violin and cello music that links the swiftly shifting scenes was especially effective. Timmy Valentine’s costumes were varied and tasteful, managing the tricky task of being eye-catching without being distracting.

Jesse Sharp — superb as Gomez in The Addams Family — has the fairly thankless expository role of Daisy’s son Boolie, and seems to play it as gratefully as any leading part in a musical. Sharp is funny and always genuine here, so much so that we may even feel a little sorry for him. His mother loves him, but treats him in an offhanded manner that would hurt a less devoted child.

Because Daisy’s best friend, finally, is not her son but Hoke. Bentley plays the role with less deliberate slowness than Freeman, but a comparable likeability. Watch him mime starting a fine automobile, and you’ll recognize the enjoyment lighting his eyes.

This is that rare dramatic story in which all three principals are quite decent people, brought into conflict only through cultural misunderstanding and personal blindness.

Miss Daisy mistakenly accuses Hoke of the theft of a can of salmon and won’t allow him to stop the car to answer the call of nature until he finally stands up for himself. She perhaps hurts him most when she refuses to recognize the connection between the bombing of her Jewish temple and the lynchings Hoke has seen. The attackers are always the same people, as Hoke tells her.

He sees through her, tolerates her and cares for her until she can allow herself enough perspective to see him as a man and her best friend. The best parts of the show spotlight their teasing companionship.

“Did you have the air-conditioning checked?” Miss Daisy nags. “I told you to have the air-conditioning checked.”

“I had the air-conditioning checked,” Hoke replies. “I don't know what for. You never allow me to turn it on.”

“Hush up!”

The much-loved Kissel gets a star turn here, conveying utter vulnerability as she sits frightened in that car amid the night sounds, waiting for Hoke to return. Kissel ages into fragile, halting senility before your eyes, then bounds on stage for her curtain call. Acting, baby!

Incidental intelligence: “Driving Miss Daisy” runs through Aug. 23, and has lighting design by Chris Benefiel and production stage management by Jeremy Phillips. For tickets, call The Little Theatre On The Square Box Office at 217-728-7375.

'Addams Family:' Making the Most of the Macabre

Pictured in “The Addams Family” are, l-r, Lexie Dorsett Sharp as Grandma, Gideon Johnson as Pugsley, Jesse Sharp as Gomez, Josh Houghton as Lurch, Emmy Burns as Wednesday, Colleen Johnson as Morticia and Tommy Lucas as Uncle Fester. Photos by Keith Stewart for a News-Progress.

By Dan Hagen

Truth is not only stranger than fiction, but stranger even than the Addams Family.

The New Yorker magazine cartoonist Charles Addams once dated a widow named Jacqueline Kennedy, and even proposed marriage to her.

“No,” Jackie replied, adding drily, “What would we talk about? Cartoons?”

Broadway has never shared Jackie’s condescending attitude on that subject. Both comic strips and Broadway musicals are American inventions, and both display the brash energy and optimism that are part of the national spirit.

L’il Abner, Little Orphan Annie, Peanuts, Doonesbury, Superman and Spider-Man all went from four colors to footlights, and so did Addams’ series of humorously macabre New Yorker cartoons collectively referred to as the Addams family.

Colleen Johnson as Mortica and Jesse Sharp as Gomez

And rarely has that transition been more seamlessly successful than in director Therese Kincade’s production of The Addams Family, the best show of a strong summer season at the Little Theatre.

The Addams’ fogbound, cobwebbed mansion in the middle of Central Park is suggested by scene designer Noel Rennerfeldt’s series of shifting cartoonish panels under a looming moon, and the cutely creepy costumes by Jana Henry are picture perfect.

Tyler Mosier’s makeup is dramatically effective, turning the dancing boys and girls we’ve seen all season into almost unrecognizable ghosts from the Addams family crypt.

Emmy Burns is Wednesday Addams (who, come to think of it, must have been the original Goth girl). She’s in love with a boy from the Midwest (Collin Sanderson). When her parents meet his (played by husband and wife Richard and Ann Borders), it’s a marital mess mismatch as epic as the one in La Cage Aux Folles.

Ann Borders as Alice and Tommy Lucas as Fester

The proceedings are overseen by Tommy Lucas as Uncle Fester, in this case a more benevolent version of the bizarre Emcee from Cabaret. Lucas’ gliding asides to the audience are delivered with a secure stage presence.

“You're probably thinking: what could a fat bald person of no specific sexuality know about love?” Lucas asks, teasing the audience with, “So will love triumph, or will everyone go home vaguely depressed?”

Burns’ deadpanned lines hit the right comic note, and Ann Borders gets to turn her Dr. Suessical Pollyanna of a character into a wildcat after being slipped a Mr. Hyde potion. Her table-hopping lament of sexual frustration, Waiting, is a high point.

Top marks to Josh Houghton as Lurch, now the zombified opposite of the loose-limbed Scarecrow he just played in The Wizard of Oz. His precisely controlled movements and facial expressions pull and please the eye for maximum effect in a minimalist role.

Young Gideon Johnson, as Pugsley, has a showstopping song in What If? What a voice that boy has, wondering aloud who will be left to torture him to his satisfaction when his sister weds.

Colleen Johnson has played the crowd-pleasing roles of Mary Poppins and the Wicked Witch of the West already this summer, but her Morticia Addams is her best, cool and cocky and compelling, with clockwork comic timing.

A husband and wife team who are just off the 2014 Addams national tour bring a sleek assurance to this stage. Lexie Dorsett Sharp is terrific as Grandma, stooped halfway to the floor at 102 but still a cougar on the prowl for some 90-year-old hotties.

“ One sip of this will turn Mary Poppins into Madea,” Grandma says to Pugsley of her potion.

“I don't understand your references!” he complains.

“Then stop the damn texting and pick up a book once in a while!”

As the choreographer, Sharp is also responsible for a great deal of the success of the production. The dance moves are angular, exaggerated, sharp and compelling to the eye. Like much of the rest of the show, the dance moves could easily have been either overblown or underwhelming, yet they are not. They’re perfect, and you can see them just pulling the smiles from the audience. The big tango at the end is a particular delight.

Her husband, Equity actor Jesse Sharp, IS Gomez — manic, charming, passionate and witty, his every gesture weirdly and gracefully beguiling.

“Do you have a little girls’ room?” Borders asks him.

“We did once, but we let them all go,” he replies with a shy, sly smile.

Though the first act moves a little more briskly than the second, I must emphasize how sensational this production is as a whole. It’s the kind of a show that makes audience members just turn and grin at each other. The Little Theatre has done a hell of a job with the macabre.

Incidental intelligence: “The Addams Family” — a musical comedy with music and lyrics by Andrew Lippa and a book by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice that debuted on Broadway in 2010 — will run here through Aug. 9.

The show has lighting design by Michael Cole, stage management by Jeremy Phillips and musical direction by Kevin Long. The performers include Corbin Williams, Sara Reinecke, Jordan Cyphert, Chloe Kounadis, Emily Bacino, Althaus, Brady Miller, Danielle Davila, Daniel Gold, Harrison Austin and Timmy Valentine (as the form and voice of Cousin Itt, respectively).

For tickets, call The Little Theatre On The Square Box Office at 217-728-7375.

The Little Theatre on the Yellow Brick Road

Colleen Johnson, Compo and Danielle Davila in "The Wizard of Oz" (News-Progress photos by Keith Stewart)

By Dan Hagen

The Little Theatre’s family-focused season, which began with Mary Poppins, continues today with The Wizard of Oz.

And yes, it’s THAT Wizard of Oz, the 1939 MGM film version with which the world is most familiar, slightly expanded and extended with a song by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice.

Fantasy is a much simpler sell on film, of course, and there’s a moment or two when the capable performers could use a little extra special effects help. Mollyanne Nunn, for example, tries valiantly to be ethereal as Glinda the Good Witch, but could use a boost from something shiny, at least a pin spot.

But what director John Stephens may lose in movie magic, he more than makes up for in the magic of immediacy. All the familiar characters are there, right in front of you, sustained by the performers’ belief in them, something you can see in their eyes. You may be surprised at how well a very strong cast can keep this Baum ticking.

Marty Harbaugh turns in the best performance of his career as Uncle Henry and the Emerald City gatekeeper. And the talents of Little Theatre veterans Glory Kissel and Jack Milo lend weight to Aunt Em and the Wizard.

The instrumental music is recorded, with full orchestration, but the singing voices are live, and deliver all the Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg songs audiences would demand to hear from the film.

Josh Houghton and Danielle Davila

But that doesn’t mean that the stage can’t provide some enhancements of its own. The Scarecrow’s If I Only Had a Brain theme, for example, is enlivened by the presence of three unimpressed dancing crows (Collin Sanderson, Corbin Williams and Brady Miller).

The weight of the show rests on six principal characters, five of them played by humans. Toto is played by Compo, a ringer for the dog in the movie who has sweet shoe-button eyes. He behaves well on stage, even during magical whiz-bangs that cause the canine only a slight nervous tremble.

Colleen Johnson as the Wicked Witch of the West and Danielle Davila as Dorothy, particularly, have the tricky task of emulating Margaret Hamilton and Judy Garland without parodying them, and both deftly thread that needle.

Johnson — green-faced, red-eyed — delights in delivering those devilish threats that have frightened small children for 76 years now. The fact that the witch shares with many women a passion for fashionable footwear springboards us into the show’s one original song, Red Shoe Blues.

Davila has the necessary sincerity for the role of Dorothy, and can put it across to the audience without being cloying, no mean feat. Much of this production’s success rests on this avoidance of missteps, and there are many opportunities to trip up here. Too close to the movie and the show’s a bore. Too much deviation from the movie and the audience leaves dissatisfied. These are dramatic troubles that don’t melt like lemon drops, and yet they are not in evidence here. The overall impression that the show leaves you is one of great charm.

And perhaps the most charming of the lot are the three companions. Jordan Cyphert, who radiates good cheer on stage, is a natural fit for the tin man, the most compassionate of these characters. His makeup, like that of all three companions, is a true treat for the eye. Tommy Lucas is terrific as the cowardly lion, the funniest figure in the show. Lucas has considerable stage presence, but no more than Josh Houghton as the Scarecrow. This actor shares many of the best qualities of Ray Bolger. In fact — let’s just admit it — Bolger was no better in this role than the pliable, likeable, loose-limbed Houghton is here.

You expect wonders in Oz, but the most wonderful part of this show comes as a surprise — it’s Jitterbug, a lively dance number that was cut from the movie. In the witch’s haunted forest, the spooked companions sing, “Oh, the bats and the bees and the breeze in the trees have a terrible, horrible buzz. ... So, be careful of that rascal/Keep away from the Jitterbug.” The companions are forced into a frantic dance by actual Jitterbugs — goggle-eyed, floppy-antenna-ed insect people (endearingly suited up by costumer Jana Henry). The number, Wiki notes, was “…both a jazzy development of the plot and a nod to the then-popular bobby-soxer dance craze.” And, as staged by choreographer Megan Farley, it offers enough sure-fire fun here to frighten any scarecrow.

So if you can’t get over the rainbow, get over here.

Incidental intelligence: The Wizard of Oz continues through July 26. The show has scene design by Noel Rennerfeldt, lighting design by Michael Cole, stage management by Jeremy Phillips and musical direction by Kevin Long. The performers include Daniel Gold, Emily Long, Emmy Burns, Chloe Kounadis and Sara Reinecke.

The Munchkins, poppies and flying monkeys are played by children — Madison Brummer, Rudy Haegen, Emily Long, Grace Lynch, Piper Countryman, Andalyn Hodge, Cian Lynch, Izzy Miller, Liz Owens, Ava Shiver, Wesley Standerfer, Lance Richardson, Callie Standerfer and Kiley Will.

For tickets, call The Little Theatre On The Square Box Office at 217-728-7375. 

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P.S. Seeing the dress rehearsal last night reminded me of just how much that 1939 movie scared me during its annual airing on CBS when I was, what, 3 years old? Even in black and white, that witch was terrifying to a small child who can conceive of nothing worse than a malevolent, omnipotent “Bad Mommy” bent on his destruction.

I also admire the clever way in which the story plays with, and slightly subverts yet reinforces, the mythic pattern of the hero quest. The young hero is supposed to meet a powerful sage — a Merlin or an Obi-Wan Kenobi — who can supply him with gifts to meet the challenges that loom ahead. Instead, in this story, the supposed sage is an impotent fraud, and the quest is a con. The mythic Trickster figure has secretly supplanted the Sage. The heroine and her companions are thrown helpless against the witch but emerge unscathed by accident, only to find that the fraudulent sage does have gifts for them after all. But, as befits a con artist (or a master psychologist?), the gifts are placebos that serve to trick the protagonists into realizing that they should learn to value what was already within them.