Musical time travel

A musical that laughs at itself

By Alec Clayton

Published in the Weekly Volcano, March 24, 2019

The cast of The Drowsy Chaperone, photo by Kat Dollarhide

Tacoma Musical Playhouse is revising the tongue-in-cheek musical The Drowsy Chaperone from their 2010-2011 season with four of the actors from that earlier production: Mauro Bozzo as Robert Martin, John Miller as Mr. Feldzieg, John B. Cooper as Aldolpho, Nancy Hebert Bach as Chaperone and TMP Artistic Director Jon Douglas Rake at Man in the Chair.

With book by Bob Martin and Don McKellar and music and lyrics by Lisa Lambert and Greg Morrison, The Drowsy Chaperone won five Tony Awards and seven Drama Desk Awards. And looking back over my files, I see that I gave it a rousing review in 2011. Now I can’t imagine why. Adjectives such as clever, entertaining, and sweet certainly apply, but I can’t now see that it deserved all those awards or the rave review I gave it. Could be I’ve become less easily pleased after reviewing a play or two a week for more than 15 years?

Chaperone is a send-up of 1920s musicals and, for that matter, all musicals. The narrator, billed as simply Man in the Chair, invites the audience into his apartment where he plays a cast album of a 1920s musical and talks about it and about musicals in general as the cast reenacts scenes that are playing on his turntable. The ironic humor resides in the fact that the musical does everything Man in the Chair makes fun of musicals for doing, and this is the play’s strongest merit as well as its greatest downfall. The sad thing is it’s practically impossible to make fun of a bad musical by performing a bad musical without it being bad, as Rake and company prove in this one — at least in part. Some of the musical numbers are outstanding, and others are over-the-top ridiculous, and the same is true for a lot of the comedic bits and for a lot of the acting.

The first thing Man in the Chair says is that actors should stay out of the aisles and not break the fourth wall, and then the fourth wall is shattered in just about every scene, even to the absurd point of having dancers in a “Chinese” dragon costume swoosh down the aisle.

In the play-within-a-play, it's the day of the wedding of Robert Martin and Broadway star Janet Van De Graaff (Emma DeLoye). She is going to give up her career for marriage, which doesn’t sit too well with her producer, Mr. Feldzieg, who desperately wants to stop the wedding. A couple of gangsters absurdly disguised as bakers (Sam Barker and Peter Knickerbocker) also want to stop the wedding, and a ludicrous Latin lover named Aldolpho is hired to put the kibosh on the wedding by seducing the bride. But he mistakenly seduces Chaperone — who is willingly seduced.

The silliness is beyond the pale, but is redeemed, somewhat, by the musical numbers. Besides, Man in the Chair points out that most scenes in musicals exist only as a means of getting from one musical number to another.

Rake is outstanding as Man in the Chair. It has been said that what an actor does when other actors have the stage is a sure indicator of how good an actor is. Rake’s physical reactions to what the other actors are doing while he sits and watches are precisely what such a character would do in such situations. He is so natural in the role you’d think it really is his story.

Bozzo as the groom-to-be and Josh Wingerter as his best man are both good actors and singers, and they play off each other well. Their tap dancing on “Cold Feets” is one of the highlights of the evening.

The best comedy skit is when Aldolpho tries to seduce Chaperone. This scene starts out with both of them chewing the scenery and then becomes so much more over the top it is hilarious, the operating principle seemingly being if you’re going to be silly, be really, really silly.

Bach has the strongest voice of anyone on stage. Her singing on “As We Stumble Along” is beautiful, as is Deloye’s on “Bride’s Lament.”

The Drowsy Chaperone is lighthearted and lightweight entertainment with a slew of inside jokes for theater aficionados. Despite Man in the Chair’s admonition that plays shouldn’t run over two hours, this one runs about two and a half, including a 15-minute intermission.

No one is listed as director, but Rake is credited as artistic director and choreographer.

The Drowsy Chaperone, 7:30 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday through April 14, 31, $29 military, senior and students, $22 children 12 and younger, Tacoma Musical Playhouse at The Narrows Theatre, 7116 Sixth Ave., Tacoma, 253.565.6867, http://www.tmp.org

Pick of the crop

Juror’s idea of ‘Best of the Best’

By Alec Clayton

Published in the Weekly Volcano, March 24, 2019

"Full Intersection With the Here and Now," encaustic by Teri Bevelacqua, courtesy the artist

by definition, the Juror’s Invitational at South Puget Sound Community College should be an exhibition of the best of the best. Featured are works from the award-winning artists from the 2018 Southwest Washington Juried Exhibition, selected by juror Asia Tail. Absolutely, she did choose some outstanding artists, but she also picked a few whose work, while admirable, is not so stellar as to be considered the cherry on top of the sundae.

Included in the show are: Susan Aurand, Teri Bevelacqua, Judith Hochman, Lisa Kinoshita, Carrie Larson, Spencer McDowell, Patsy Surh O’Connell, Vladimir Shakov, Jason Sobottka, and Chris Wooten.

“Adventures Through the Anthropocene,” painting by Jason Sobottka, photo by Alec Clayton

Wooten’s fairy-like wire sculptures of dancing women are the first thing to greet the viewer upon entering the gallery, and these jewels are a delight to behold. Standing in a group on sculpture stands are seven small figures of women in acrobatic positions made of twisted wire, glass and beads. They are sparkling and joyful. Hanging above them is an almost life-size figure of another dancing women, this one suspended upside-down from the ceiling and fairly dripping with smaller figures that hang from her arms. The entire configuration is a wonderland of cavorting Tinkerbells that dazzles by the light of its glitter.

Among the most striking works in the show are a suite of nine encaustic and mixed-media paintings by Bevelacqua. In these paintings, Bevelacqua capitalizes on the ability to create deep transparencies with encaustic to creating stunning, multi-layered images of hell on earth — urban scenes and scenes of war with drawing and collage elements such as dollar bills, a United States flag, city buildings and a statue of a woman borrowed from classical art. Viewers should take the time to take in first the overall grouping, and then each individual painting, and search out the many images and think about how they reflect the world we live in today. 

Kinoshita’s “Dumb Love” is a funny and striking piece of found art. It is the shiny chrome bumper of a Hummer. Written on the wall above it in pink script is the word “Dumb.” Such a simple statement so blatantly presented. Kinoshita uses found and manipulated objects to comment on society and on history and the natural world, often with quirky humor. I take this piece to be a commentary on machismo.

Among the most striking works in the show are Hochman’s four mixed-media drawings of cold-black shapes that look like charcoal or ink prints taken from lace doilies. I do not know what the specific media is; it was listed only as mixed, but the imagery is strong and gritty, and the possible interpretations are many — from pure abstract forms with no outside reference to images of smoke and fire — delicate and precious personal items such as hand-crafted doilies reduced to ash, a metaphor for loss.

Highly impressive are O’Connell’s four ink with tea-finish drawings of leaves and ducks and something in one that looks like eggs sparkling with electrical current. These drawings are on scrolls that are approximately six feet tall. The drawing is precise, delicate and smooth; the imagery conveys a deep love of nature.

Also included are a number of funny and enticing little paintings from Sobottka’s “Adventures Through the Anthropocene” series that includes strange creatures and cartoon figures and bombastic color and form.

2019 Juror’s Invitational, noon to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday, through April 19, South Puget Sound Community College, Kenneth J Minnaert Center for the Arts Gallery, 2011 Mottman Rd. SW. Olympia, https://spscc.edu/gallery

The astonishing art of Kathy Gore Fuss

Idyllic but real landscapes and dystopian now

By Alec Clayton

Published in the Weekly Volcano, March 21, 2019

study for “Joyce’s Ravine,” oil on paper, by Kathy Gore Fuss, photo courtesy the artist

Digital photo by Kathy Gore Fuss in collaboration with Carl Chew

I thought the art of landscape painting had reached an unstoppable point of redundancy at which original landscapes were no longer possible, and then Olympia artist Kathy Gore Fuss started painting in nature in all sorts of weather amongst the trees in Priest Point Park and the industrial business of the Port of Olympia. Her landscapes are not bombastic or gimmicky; they are realistic, straightforward interpretations of what she sees in nature. And yet they are as unique as anything painted from nature since Wayne Thiebaud started painting the hills of San Francisco.  

Lately, Gore Fuss has expanded her artistic repertoire to digital photos, including drone photos, that are manipulated by her collaborators, John Carlton and Carl Chew. The resulting exhibition of paintings, drawings and digital photographs at University of Puget Sound’s Kittredge Gallery weds styles that go back hundreds of years to those that reach into the future to display the artist’s love or nature and concern over what is happening in our world today.

The most stunning thing in the gallery has to be the huge landscape painting “Joyce’s Ravine,” 6-by-9 feet, that is suspended from the ceiling in front of the back wall. This painting is the first thing to hit the viewers’ eyes when entering the gallery, and it cannot be ignored. It pictures the depths of the forest in bright, sunlit colors with a rich tangle of leaves and vines and tree trunks with a fallen tree trunk front and center. Stylistically it is somewhat like paintings by Paul Cezanne, which is not to say it is simply a takeoff on his manner or painting.

There is a group of soft charcoal drawings with marvelous details of leaves and vines that sparkle with light despite their lack of color, due in large part to Gore Fuss’s manner of outlining the shapes of leaves in sharp black lines and leaving the flat faces of the leaves the white of the paper.

A suite of 11 small drawings in walnut ink explore the spatial depths of forests in sepia tones with whites that sparkle like gems and an incredible tangle of leaves and vines.

One wall is filled with digital prints done in collaboration with Carlton that picture

familiar Olympia scenes with crowded with oil derricks of the kind that can only exist in deep water. There’s a massive, intrusive derrick in front of the capitol dome, behind which billow clouds of black smoke; there’s one next to Olympia’s City Hall, and others by Sylvester Park and Heritage Park — all of these sites being well inland and uphill from any location where such behemoths could possibly exist. These disturbing dystopian scenes are beautifully photographed and digitally put together so skillfully as to appear that they exist together in reality.

And finally, there are the photographs taken with a drone and digitally manipulated by Chew. In one we see the artist standing in a shallow stream holding in her hand the control for the drone with which the photo was taken. And there are many of her receding in the distance. In another we see an aerial view of Gore Fuss’s house with its garden repeated and mirroring itself to become a kind of enclave surrounded by hedges that protectively seal it from the outer world. In reference to this one, she spoke of the invasive nature of modern technology — laughing at herself for invading her own privacy with a drone.

This exhibition is filled with beautiful, thought-provoking and technically skillful works of art.

Kathy Gore Fuss, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday-Friday; noon-5 p.m., Saturday, through April 20, Kittredge Gallery at University of Puget Sound, 1500 N. Warner St., Tacoma, 253.879.

Palace intrigue

A family in revolt at Yelm’s Triad Theater

By Alec Clayton

Published in the Weekly Volcano, March 14, 2019

from left: Will Champagne as King Phillip, Jesse Geray as Richard, Dawn Wadsworth as Queen Eleanor, Dave Champagne as King Henry II, Daniel Wyman as Geoffrey, Victoria Ashley as Alais and Travis Martinez as John. Photocourtesy Standing Room Only.

The Lion in Winter by James Goldman is a riveting comic drama about King Henry II; his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine; his young ward, Alais (sometimes spelled Alys and sometimes Alice); and his three surviving sons: Richard, Geoffrey and John (the eldest, Young Henry, was killed when he and his brothers revolted against their father the king), and King Phillip of France. It is now being performed by Standing Room Only at Yelm’s Triad Theater.

The historical facts are confusing and colored with speculation and rumor. Eleanor, whom Henry II married when he was 18, was one of the most powerful women in Europe. She had previously been married to Louis VII of France and was later imprisoned for 10 years by Henry who then controlled all of England and half of France.

Alias was eight years old when first sent to Henry, who signed a contract of marriage between her and his son Richard, later to be called the Lionheart. Both Henry and Eleanor were reputed to have had many affairs. She was even reputed to have had an affair with Henry’s father.

Alais (Victoria Ashley) and Henry (Dave Champagne)

In the play, Alais (Victoria Ashley) and Henry (Dave Champagne) are lovers, which Eleanor (Dawn Wadsworth) knows. She thinks of Alais as both a rival and a daughter. To further complicate the plot, Alais is promised with a dowry to marry Richard (Jesse Geray), who is accused of having had a homosexual affair with King Phillip of France (Will Champagne), and all three sons are fighting over who is to be the next King of England. These juicy and complicated palace intrigues and family feuds are brought to light during a weekend in the palace at Christmas when Henry lets Eleanor come home for a holiday visit.

The plot is complicated but clear. The acting by the principles: Ashley, Dave Champagne and Wadsworth, is outstanding. Champagne plays King Henry as sly, devious and volatile; Wadsworth is imperial in demeanor as the powerful Eleanor; and as Alais, Ashley comes across as, at first, innocent and loving but eventually strong and clever enough to hold her own with the back-stabbing royal family. It is a joy to watch these three at work.

Actors portraying the three sons and King Phillip are not as compelling. All four seemed stiff and uncomfortable in their roles at first but become much stronger in the second act.

The most entertaining scene in the play is the first scene of the second act in which Henry and Eleanor have the stage alone and engage in a convoluted battle of wit, and creative invective. This entire scene is an acting and writing tour de force. It’s like George and Martha from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf transported back to the 12^th century. It’s a scene that could stand alone as a one-act. And it is a warm-up to the bombast to follow when wife and sons plot to murder the king.

The massive set is one of the play’s biggest assets and biggest burdens. It consists of various rooms in the castle with heavy stone walls and marvelous props, ornately carved furniture, lamps, swords, carpets and massive wine bottles — a much larger and more impressive set than is usually seen in small community theaters. The downside to that is that set changes are long, cumbersome and distracting.

The play runs approximately two and one-half hours including intermission.

The Lion in Winter, 7:30 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday through March 30, $20, $17 military and seniors, $10 students, Triad Theater, 102 E. Yelm Ave., Yelm, 360.458.3140, http://www.srotheater.org/

T

A show called She

Robin Annette Jordan at the PCAF Gallery

Published in the Weekly Volcano, March 14, 2019

by Alec Clayton

untitled acrylic painting by Robin Annette Jordan, courtesy PCAF.

Pierce County AIDS Foundation has set aside a part of their offices as an art gallery, and for the month of March is showing a group of paintings by Robin Annette Jordan called She to bring attention to National Women and Girls HIV/AIDS Awareness Day.

Every year throughout the month of March local, state, federal, and national organizations come together to shed light on the impact of HIV and AIDS on women and girls and show support for those at risk of and living with HIV.

This year marks the 14th annual observance of National Women and Girls HIV/AIDS Awareness Day.

Progress against HIV and AIDS has been made, but many are still vulnerable to infection, especially Black or African-American and Hispanic women.

A release from PCAF explains that the show “organically embodies identity, presence, and ownership of eloquence and strength” and further reminds us that HIV and AIDS “are still widespread public health issues, and women remain particularly impacted by the virus. Today, nearly one in four people who are diagnosed with HIV are women.”

Jordan’s work “challenges us to move towards improving the wellbeing of women through policy, education, and innovative programs.”

Jordan’s acrylic paintings picture faceless women of color in various situations or environments. They are all about the same size (approximately 16-by-12 inches) and each piece is displayed in a recycled frame.

The drawing of the figures is unpolished and more decorative than detailed, with mostly flat figures with no shading or modeling. Most of the paintings are of single women, though there is one of two women dancing in colorful costumes and two similar paintings with a group of nine or more dancing women in identical dresses with black bodies and black hair streaked with white. These figures look like dolls and are starkly dramatic. Most of the women depicted in the other paintings have brown skin — the same uniform dark brown in each painting. The dresses worn by the two dancing women mentioned above look like dresses seen on women at Carnival in Rio de Janeiro or at Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

The backgrounds and clothing in Jordan’s pictures are painted in intense colors, and although the faces are featureless, they are of particular people. In a printed statement, the artist says she expresses her love of color “through my faceless artwork by telling stories about things I have done and seen, about family and friends, and watching National Geographic. Why faceless? It makes the artwork more interesting for an individual person to understand what the artwork is perhaps saying to him or her.”

What it says to me is that women of color have for too long been invisible — left out of history, left out of art, and relegated to minor roles in film and literature.

Since the women are faceless, the visual beauty resides in the vibrancy of the colors and shapes in the dresses and the background, which for a self-taught artist display an exciting sense of design and color usage.  

She, Robin Annette Jordan, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday, through March 31, PCAF Gallery, 3009 S 40th St., Tacoma, 253.383.2565 ext. 7201

Pug Bujeaud helms an astonishingly delightful comedy at Olympia Little Theatre

‘Bunbury: A Serious Play for Trivial People’ Rides through literary history

by Alec Clayton

Dale Sharp as Jack, Stephani Hemness as Gwendolyn, Meghan Goodman as Lady Bracknell, Ethan Bujeaud as Algernon, Katelyn May as Cecily, and Rodman Bolek as Bunbury. Photos by Toni Holm.

I had never heard of Bunbury before Olympia Little Theatre announced they were doing it; so I went to see it with mild expectations, trusting that since Pug Bujeaud was directing it, it had to be good.

I just never expected it to be as good as it is. From the dazzling script by Tom Jacobson to the beautiful set (no set designer listed in the program), to Edith Campbell’s lighting, to an outstanding cast let by Rodman Bolek as Bunbury and Shannon Agostinelli as Rosaline, every aspect of this literary comedy comes together perfectly.

Rodman Bolek as Bunbury.

Bunbury is a fictional character invented by Algernon in The Importance of Being Earnest. In Jacobson’s play he is a living being. The play opens with Bunbury reclining indolently on a settee with a glass of wine ruminating about literature to his butler Hartley (Drew Doyle), saying there is nothing new literature can say and all we can do is rearrange words already written. He muses about Rosaline from Romeo and Juliette. "If he (Romeo) had kept mooning over Rosaline, he'd be alive today.” But Rosaline never existed, never appeared onstage. “She's less than fiction," he argues. "She's subfictional." 

And then Rosaline shows up speaking in iambic pentameter, and when they insert themselves in a scene from Romeo and Juliette, their arrival changes the story; they deduce that since literature influences life, they can change the world for the better by changing literature. So they set off together through the literature of the ages creating happy endings for dramas from Shakespeare to Chekhov to Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee, changing the endings of their plays.

It is an intelligent and witty homage to the great literature of the ages, filled with quotes from great writers—quotes with modern comical twists.

The set is a textbook example of how to create million dollar sets on a few hundred dollars (or less) budgets. At the back of the stage is a stage front with a plush red curtain and above it the play title in an elegant script. When the action begins, the title fades, replaced by still-image projections indicating various locations and events. Needed props are brought in and out through the curtain on a moving platform.

The costumes by Barb Matthews are terrific, as is the makeup on various characters: from making Michael Christopher look a convincing 96 as Old Algernon; to making it almost impossible to tell the same actor, Meghan Goodman, portrays Lady Bracknell, Old Cecily and Irina; to Dale Sharp’s pencil mustache to his drag makeup as Juliette.

Bolek throws himself into the role of Bunbury with passion, vigor and sly wit. Agostinelli is so loveable and funny as Rosaline she makes you wonder how Romeo could have thrown her over for the wan and simpering Juliette. Sharp, in his OLT debut, is a comic genius. With a rubbery face reminiscent of great comics from Jerry Lewis to Jim Carry, he doesn’t have to say a word to elicit laughter; his facial expressions do the trick. Ethan Bujeaud, who Olympians have been watching on stage since he was eight years old, is at his mature best (so far) as Algernon and Allan. And Christopher is as masterful as ever as an unnamed “Lawyer” reciting Poe’s most famous poem and then as a radically different character as Old Algernon.

Without giving away too much of the ending, in the final scene the primary characters watch a moon landing on television while listening to a speech by a president who could only be president because Bunbury and Rosaline have changed literature and thus history.

Bunbury is simply wonderful. I can’t recommend it highly enough nor congratulate the cast and crew more heartily.

Bunbury

7:25 p.m. Thursday- Saturday and 1:55 p.m. Sunday through March 24

$11-$15, $2 student discount

Olympia Little Theatre, 1925 Miller Ave. NE, Olympia, (360) 786-9484, http://www.olympialittletheater.org

The Revolutionists One Night Only

Lauren Gunderson’s, The Revolutionists will be performed one night only as the next show in Tacoma Little Theatre's Off the Shelf program.

The play is directed by Jennifer York and features “four beautiful, badass women” in an irreverent, girl-powered comedy set during the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror. Playwright Olympe de Gouges, assassin Charlotte Corday, former queen (and fan of ribbons) Marie Antoinette, and Haitian rebel Marianne Angelle hang out, murder Marat, and try to beat back the extremist insanity in 1793 Paris.

The Revolutionists features Angela Parisotto as Olympe de Gouges, Kristen Natalia as Marianne Angelle, Cassie Jo Fastabend as Charlotte Corday, and Deya Ozburn as Marie Antoinette.

Thursday, March 14, 2019, 7:30 p.m.

$10, free to TLT members

Tacoma Little Theatre, 210 North I Street, Tacoma

www.tacomalittletheatre.com, (253) 272-2281