Reviews
Theater review: ‘Our Town’ at the Garden Theatre
posted on March, 16 2009
By Elizabeth Maupin
Sentinel Theater Critic
When Our Town meets Winter Garden, it may be hard to tell what’s real and what’s theater.
Playwright Thornton Wilder’s description of Grover’s Corners, N.H., sounds an awful lot like Winter Garden, Fla., from the railroad station to the churches to the post office and the row of stores. When somebody speaks of looking up at the stars, you can look up and see the little lights twinkling in the Garden Theatre’s ceiling. And when you hear the sound of the rain on the theater roof, you find yourself wondering: Is it really raining? Or is that just another lifelike theatrical touch?
All of which adds to the feeling of well-being you get from this staging of Our Town, produced by Beth Marshall and directed by David Lee. Performed on the Garden’s high stage, this version is less intimate than others I’ve seen, and every once in a while the acting leans toward the histrionic. Yet the relaxed, genial presence of Christopher Lee Gibson as the Stage Manager sets the tone for an Our Town that reaches out and draws you in.
Nearly everybody of a certain age has seen Our Town, or had to read it in school, and thinks of it as a stale relic of niceness from another time. That’s far from fair to Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, which broke the theater’s metaphorical fourth wall in startling ways and still has more serious things on its mind than sand-lot baseball and strawberry sodas. Despite the color-blind casting, which works perfectly well, Lee’s production doesn’t try to force you to look at Our Town anew. It’s just Our Town, in all its lovely simplicity.
Such simplicity extends to the play’s famous lack of a set, which reads here as a ghost light and a dozen or more mismatched wooden chairs on an empty stage. Recognizable sound effects (by John Valines) alert you to the presence of a horse or a ballgame, and only a malfunctioning center light at one performance last weekend kept you from seeing the play in its elegant plainness.
That’s too bad because the cast is replete with fine actors who couldn’t entirely be seen, and the best of them — Joe Swanberg as Dr. Gibbs, Jamie Middleton as Mrs. Gibbs, Jesse Lenoir as George and Trenell Mooring as Rebecca — find ways to make their characters seem authentic by paring them back. Jennifer Bonner comes across as a little over-dramatic as Emily (who is, granted, pretty over-dramatic), and Lee allows Lenoir a theatrical touch at play’s end that runs counter to the behavior of a stoic New Englander.
But it’s a pleasure to see George and Emily call to each other from the Garden’s Romeo-and-Juliet balconies, and it’s a pleasure to make this journey with the charismatic Gibson, who brings both authority and a kind of low-key wisdom to his role. There’s little New Hampshire shtick here, and no old-timey sweetness. With Our Town, it’s enough that it’s Our Town. Doing it in Winter Garden is just the cherry on the sundae.
Theater review: ‘Crimes of the Heart’ in Winter Garden
posted on November, 17 2009
Here’s my review of Beth Marshall Presents’ Crimes of the Heart, at the Garden Theatre in Winter Garden:
The temptation is to go all southern gothic with Crimes of the Heart, Beth Henley’s dark 1979 comedy about the three MaGrath sisters of Hazlehurst, Miss., whose mother hanged herself some years earlier because she was having “a real bad day.”
But director Aradhana Tiwari has resisted the urge to turn the MaGraths into caricatures, and her take on Crimes of the Heart is all the better for it.
Certainly Henley’s three sisters have their idiosyncrasies. Lenny has turned herself into an old maid because of what she calls a shrunken ovary. Meg has gone off seeking fame and fortune in Hollywood and wound up clerking in a dog-food factory. Babe has just shot her fancy-lawyer husband in the stomach, and the only reason she’ll give is she “just didn’t like his looks.”
Still, Henley’s play is more than southern gothic because her MaGrath sisters are real people, with real foibles and real fears. And it’s when producer Beth Marshall’s revival gets to the heart of those characters that it comes off the best.
The play gets a handsome setting at the Garden Theatre in Winter Garden, where Tom Mangieri’s kitchen set is just homely enough and John Valines’ country music has just the right touch of brass. That brass may have seeped into Marshall’s performance as the MaGraths’ shameless cousin Chick, a woman who talks about her high-toned upbringing while she’s adjusting her underwear.
But Chick is the only larger-than-life character in a household where sadness rules — in Jennifer Bonner’s frank, sexy, disappointed Meg; in Britni Leslie’s dim, pretty Babe, a woman who’s all at sea; and most of all in Meggin Weaver’s anxious, endearing Lenny, a tender woman whose every emotion flickers across her face.
Leslie can be shrill, and not as quirky or otherworldly as others who have played that part. But the sorrow that has shaped the MaGraths shows itself in the minor characters, too — in Jason Horne’s sweetly serious Barnette Lloyd, Babe’s adoring lawyer, and in William Hagaman’s down-home Doc Porter, a onetime suitor of Meg’s with quiet mischief in his eye.
The show’s accents are all over the place, and the two intermissions are one too many. But Tawari and her cast members show a lovely sensitivity to a story that would be heartbreaking if it weren’t very, very funny. You don’t have to be having a real bad day to see the MaGrath women as sisters under the skin.
Theater review: ‘A Christmas Carol’ in Winter Garden
Posted on December 9, 2010 by Elizabeth Maupin
By Elizabeth Maupin
Ebenezer Scrooge’s housekeeper, the forbidding Mrs. Dilber, doesn’t often show up in the opening scene of Charles Dickens’ famous Christmas tale.
But in A Christmas Carol: A Ghost Story of Christmas, Michael Wilson’s adaptation of the Dickens classic, Mrs. Dilber not only makes an appearance at the start of Christmas Eve, but she utters a pointed warning.
“Best take an umbrella,” she tells her employer darkly. “It’s going to be an uglyday.”
Movie-lovers in the audience will be forgiven if the image that springs to mind is Bette Davis and her warning of an oncoming bumpy night. It turns out that Davis isn’t much of a stretch for this Christmas Carol, which goes to great lengths to set itself apart from other tellings of the tale but also leaves a lot of Dickens on the cutting-room floor.
Producer Beth Marshall has said she chose Wilson’s adaptation for its emphasis on the four ghosts who keep Scrooge running throughout an action-packed night before Christmas. But even the ghosts get short shrift in director John DiDonna’s 100-minute production, which skims quickly over many of the story’s best-known sequences, dawdles over some others and paints almost all of it in tones so dark that it’s sometimes hard to know what’s going on.
The result is a show that, with its elaborate sound design (by John Valines) and its ensemble of cute but awkward children, teeters uncomfortably between professional and amateur. For many in the Winter Garden community, it’s probably a welcome glimpse of the season. But most of the theater people involved here have done far better work.
Begin with Wilson’s adaption, which he created in the 1990s as an associate director at Houston’s Alley Theatre. (Wilson went on to become artistic director at Hartford Stage, a job he’s leaving at the end of this season, and to stage Horton Foote’s critically acclaimedOrphans’ Home Cycle in New York.) HisChristmas Carol begins in an unorthodox manner – with Scrooge in bed on Christmas Eve morning – and carries on in the same way, skittering over Fan, Belle, the Fezziwigs and even the Cratchits but fixing on a trio of peddlers who add little to the story.
In this production the stage seems crowded with all those characters (and with seven small children). Partly that’s because scenic designer Tom Mangieri’s set is dwarfed by a large raked platform that serves as Scrooge’s bed but goes unused most of the rest of the time. But it’s also because the show never lingers long enough with anyone to get much sense of who they are.
And the show’s lighting (Amy Hadley was the designer) is so deliberately murky that key elements are often in the shadows. Of course it’s nighttime and the effect is supposed to be ghostly. But it would help the audience mightily if it could see Scrooge’s name on his gravestone – and, even more so, see his face.
DiDonna has filled his cast with gifted actors, as he often does, and it’s a pleasure to see many of them turn up even in smallish roles. But most of them have all too little to do. Joe Swanberg makes a frightening apparition as Marley’s Ghost, but he’s not around for long; neither is Samantha O’Hare as a pre-Raphaelite-looking Ghost of Christmas Past.
David Almeida brings some needed warmth to the production as Scrooge’s nephew Fred; so does Mike Lane as a weary Bob Cratchit. Jamie Middleton is a forceful Mrs. Cratchit, and little Jason Zavitz does heighten the cuteness factor with the way he says “Mr. Scwooge.”
But the Cratchit family is simply not visible enough to provide the show with the heart it needs. And Dennis Neal, one of the finest actors around, makes a Scrooge who comes across as cowed and confused much of the time. There’s little sense of how the night’s events are affecting his character: The production doesn’t take the time to notice.
Only when morning comes and Scrooge has had his epiphany does Neal break loose, and, as he fills his character with a giddy glee, you see the benevolent man Scrooge has become. But the man he was is still way too much of a mystery – just as much of a mystery as those all-too-fleeting ghosts.
Marshall wins John Goring award
Posted on November 9, 2010 by Elizabeth Maupin
Beth Marshall, producing artistic director of the Orlando Fringe, will receive the first John Goring Memorial Lifetime Achievement Award, to be given out in conjunction with Playwrights’ Round Table’s John Goring Memorial One-Act Festival.She’ll be given the award Sunday afternoon Nov. 14 at the Lowndes Shakespeare Center.
John Goring, of course, was a playwright and the tireless president of PRT. He died in 2009, at the age of 56, after suffering a stroke the year before.
Congratulations to Beth, who has been a major advocate for new plays in Orlando.
Here’s the full story from PRT’s Erik Morris:
Playwrights’ Round Table, Orlando’s year-round source for original theater since 1997, is proud to announce the winner of the first ever John Goring Memorial Lifetime Achievement Award: Beth Marshall. Known to many throughout Orlando, Beth has been the driving force for the Orlando International Fringe Festival and her own production company Beth Marshall Presents. As a writer, producer and director, Beth Marshall has been a key figure in the development of not just her own original productions but original productions from around the world, including a large number which have originated throughout Central Florida.
The John Goring Memorial Lifetime Achievement Award will be presented as part of Playwrights’ Round Table’s Goring Festival Awards show on Sunday, November 14 at 3pm at the John and Rita Lowndes Shakespeare Center, at 812 E. Rollins Street. Tickets are $10 at the door; cash sales only please.
The Goring Festival continues Wednesday, November 10th with PRT’s $10 Industry Night. For full festival schedule and show details, please visit playwrightsroundtable.org or visit Playwrights’ Round Table’s Facebook group page: PRT – Playwrights’ Round Table.
The Goring Festival honors John Goring, PRT’s former President. A prolific playwright and director, John passed away in 2009 due to complications from a stroke suffered soon after his last PRT production. At the culmination of this festival on November 14, PRT will award its first ever John Goring Lifetime Achievement Award to Beth Marshall, who has shown a similar lifelong dedication to both the arts in Central Florida and to the development of new plays, playwrights and productions – both of which were important driving forces with John Goring’s involvement and leadership of Playwrights’ Round Table.
Theater Mini-Review: Beth Marshall Presents Paul Strickland’s “Add Songs, Stir” at Shakes
JANUARY 20, 2012
BY SETH KUBERSKY
Paul Strickland appears in “Add Songs, Stir” this weekend at Orlando Shakes.
Last night, Beth Marshall Presents kicked off the 2012 leg of their company’s current season at Orlando Shakes with Paul Strickland’s new one-man show Add Songs, Stir. If you go expecting more of the clever observational stand-up comedy that made Paul’s Orlando Fringe shows A Brighter Shade of Blue and Any Title That Works big hits, you are in for a surprise. Strickland’s latest work has an eerie, ambiguous tone completely unlike his earlier shows, which left me admiring his talents but oddly unsettled.
A lakeless town builds a glass-bottom boat, then creates a flooded fake city filled with moving mannequins for tourists to float above. A man unintentionally commits suicide while trying to tear out his own beard. A woman falls desperately in love with her living room window. These, and a handful of equally unconventional anecdotes, swirl around together in a fragmentary stew of tangentially-related topics. Between monologues, Strickland is plagued by a ghostly recording of his own words, which he dispels by playing a half-dozen songs – 3 of which are witty originals – displaying dexterous fingering and an unexpectedly fine high tenor (though the falsetto sometimes starts to slip away from him).
At one point, Paul references “an evening of seemingly meaningful words,” and while the literal intent of this work can be difficult to tease out, the meaningfulness of his intensity is unmistakable. It’s clearly a work-in-progress that could stand some shaping (there needs to be a clearer climax to the emotional arc) but it’s exciting to see Strickland stretch beyond his comedy comfort zone into a more personal space.
