Bloglander

Crazy for You, How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and the perennial show The Sound of Music — just drive 190 miles west of Spokane, and you can see all three shows this weekend at Leavenworth Summer Theatre. Their season continues through Aug. 29.

"Run, Freedom, Run!" "The Art of the Possible." "Warts and All." They're songs that appear in which three musicals? You'll know the answers after Sunday at 7:30 pm, which brings the season preview at Lake City Playhouse, 1320 E. Garden Ave. in Coeur d'Alene. For just $10, you can get a glimpse of what things will be like under new artistic director George Green, with performances of songs from Evita, A Taffeta Christmas, Urinetown, And the World Goes 'Round and Honk! Call (208) 667-1323.

And if you've always wanted to see a plus-size transvestite stomp on bigots with his high heels, this weekend's your last chance. CdA Summer Theatre's Hairspray has performances tonight, Friday and Saturday at 7:30 pm on the North Idaho College campus.

Poof up your bouffant at Coeur d'Alene's Hairspray Performances of the kitsch hit run this weekend in Boswell Hall on the North Idaho College campus: Thursday-Saturday at 7:30 pm and Sunday at 2 pm. Tickets top out at $39 (plus tax). Hairspray closes on Aug. 21. Event Info

Here are seven reasons to go check this out:

1.  In the opening number, "Good Morning, Baltimore," watch for what the advancing chorus does to the wino. And whoever's standing in the wings and driving the remote-control rat has serious Formula One driving skills.

2.  The allusions to Chicago's "Cell Block Tango" in the second-act opener, "The Big Dollhouse." (Everybody's in jail. Roger Welch's Edna Turnblad flexes his/her muscles at song's end.)

3.  In the title tune, hysterical bobby-soxers clinging to a heartthrob's ankles.

4.  Krista Kubicek's "crab move" during her Velma Von Tussle's recollection of her glory days in "(The Legend of) Miss Baltimore Crabs." (Later, when she's atop a kind of parade float, a wailing Kubicek gets swirled offstage by chorus members, as if she's some kind of wicked, dying witch.)

5.  When our heroine boldly decides to audition for The Corny Collins Show, Kasey Nusbickel's mousey delivery of Penny Pingleton's "I'll watch you audition

6.  Jessica Ray's costume designs: a purple-sequined tux for Corny; elaborate hairspray capes with hoods; pastel tuxes and flared taffeta swing dresses for the chorus.

7.  Tamara Schupman's butch P.E. teacher offering extra credit to any of the girls who'd like to take a shower today; Reed McColm's mix of humor and creepiness as Mr. Pinky, couturier of plus-sized girls, when he contemplates getting his hands on Edna's 54EEE bosoms. 

Irritable dwarves, a witch on a diet and magic-resistant mice: They're all in The Four Princes, Spokane Civic Theatre's summer show, which plays on Thursdays-Fridays, Aug. 12-13 and Aug. 19-20, at 7 pm at 1020 N. Howard St. The Four Princes has been written and directed by Jean Hardie, who recently won the Civic's Lifetime Achievement Award and who will probably herd her student actors through a little sarcastic undercutting of the usual fairy-tale idealism. Event Info

Meanwhile, CdA Summer Theatre has also announced three-quarters of its 2011 season: The Sound of Music, A Little Night Music and The Wizard of Oz.

The hills have been alive recently in Spokane (in 2003 at what was then the Opera House, and in 2007 at the Civic), but it's always tuneful and fun watching Maria and a bunch of little kids outwit those stupid Nazis.

Oz is a big deal because the rights have been hard to acquire and because of production requirements. (All that yellow paint, all those short people.)

The 1973 Sondheim musical is based on Ingmar Bergman's 1955 Swedish comic film, Smiles of a Summer Night (which was also the basis for Woody Allen's A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy). It's full of ripe-for-correction lovers: the arrogant husband, the virginal wife, the repressed but horny young man, the down-on-her-luck but joyfully adulterous actress, and so on. (And it has Sondheim's only hit song, "Send in the Clowns.")

As always, for even more theater talk, visit stagethrust.blogspot.com. 

Kid vs. conflagration. Starting Sunday, Sixth Street Melodrama in Wallace will have two shows running: "Voices of the Big Burn," commemorating the huge fire that wiped out most of the town a century ago this month, along with Rustlers on the Ranch, in which a coupla cowpokes make matters worse for our poor, beleaguered ranch family.

Wipe the barbecue sauce off yer face. The Cowboy Supper Shows continue, Thursdays-Saturdays at 6 pm, out at the Rockin' B Ranch (I-90 and Exit 299 at Stateline), on through Sept. 25, along with Pat McManus shows and more.

Anything you can sing (in the shower), the cast of Annie Get Your Gun can (probably) sing better.

You can't get a man with a gun, but at least there's no business like show business. The best things in life involve doin' what comes natur'lly, 'cause we got the sun in the mornin' and the moon at night.

You get the idea: The 1946 musical (revised in 1999) has more than a few recognizable Irving Berlin tunes. 

At Spokane Civic Theater, director Yvonne A.K. Johnson's production (May 21-June 20) has a cast of more than 40 and features Tami Knoell as Annie Oakley, Patrick McHenry-Kroetch as Frank Butler, Doug Dawson as Buffalo Bill, Paul Villabrille as Sitting Bull, and Gary Pierce as Charlie Davenport.

For more information, visit the April 19 and May 19 posts at Stage Thrust.

Well, its better than the TV show. Remember how Michael Landon would do that little chin-dip and grin, signifying that tonights moral lesson had been learned?

Director Francesca Zambellos production of the Little House musical mostly avoids that kind of preachment, with comic snipes undercutting most of the saccharine moments. (When the Ingalls first gapes at all their new treeless and grassy acreage, the littlest daughter deadpans, Theres nothing there.) Even better, Zambello practically conducts a clinic in imaginative staging, instant scene changes and the creation of sudden crowd energy onstage.

While the headliners are Steven Blanchard as Pa Ingalls (whos macho and kind all at once, bestriding his homestead in a variety of dirtied boots) and Melissa Gilbert as Ma (absent for the Spokane shows due to minor back surgery) and while Gilberts understudy replacement, Meredith Inglesby, brings grace and a strong voice to the role the fact is that Ma isnt that big a role. (The fact that the roles usually played by Inglesby, who is Blanchards real-life wife, include a schoolmarm and a seriously depressed housewife stuck on a treeless, frozen prairie suggests the kind of range that Inglesby has. The show holds a moment after Mas first entrance, anticipating the applause that no doubt usually greets Gilberts first entrance; but Spokane theatergoers shouldnt avoid this affecting and imaginative show just because Gilberts not appearing in it.)

The real standouts in this production, however, are the three young actors who play the central coming-of-age role, Laura; Lauras beau and eventual husband, Almanzo Wilder; and Lauras conceited rival, Nellie Oleson.

As Laura, Kara Lindsay is hampered by an opening solo, Thunder, thats meant to express the eventual authors youthful exuberance and wanderlust but which doesnt have as much energy as the assembly of hopeful homesteaders in the following number, Up Ahead. For comic scenes, Lindsay projects a squeaky-mischievous voice that complements her impish charm.

It isnt the ring curls, knee dips and proferred wrists that define Kate Loprests coquettish and haughty Nellie. Loprest has the shows most expressive soprano voice and best comedic gestures. In Without an Enemy, a second-act bedroom number, Loprest slumps and jumps and hops all over her bed, all in contrast to Laura, working by candlelight behind a scrim, in darkness. And Loprest can wring Lucille Ball comedy out of simply climbing up and over a wooden fence, with hilarious effect.

As Lauras love interest, Almanzo, Kevin Massey has the athleticism that explains why he got to understudy Tarzan in the Disney musical on Broadway. In Faster, Zambello directs Massey and Lindsay to use a simple device reins hooked to the stage floor, coordinated with riding-in-a-buggy movements that transmute into a kind of love duet thats tentative, then feisty. Throughout, Massey has a jaunty confidence that marks him as an able horseman.

Blanchards best moment, meanwhile, arrives early, in a tribute to natural beauty (The Prairie Moves), sung against a starry background.

Zambello, who has extensive experience in directing opera, repeatedly appeals to the audiences imagination: We are there in constructing all those clapboard houses. Its like wish fulfillment: Imagine a schoolhouse, a snowed-in shack, a dusty horse race and suddenly its there, with viewers picking up just enough clues to share in the vision.

Certainly her staging outweighs Rachel Portmans music: Only one or two of the shows tunes linger in the mind.

The Ill Be Your Eyes sequence that closes Act One, moreover, reverts to the sentimental excesses of the TV show. Lauras sister Mary (Alessa Neeck) undergoes a misfortune, and Lauras character suddenly goes in for self-sacrifice and acting Good in ways that she had specifically repudiated just minutes before.

The shows co-originator with Zambello back at the Guthrie in Minneapolis in July 2008, Adrianne Lobel, keeps her scenic designs cyc alive with a succession of cloud formations and prairie sunsets; Mark McCulloughs lighting brought a high-noon glare to the upbeat townspeople scenes while remaining suitably gloomy for all the adversity that the Ingalls family confronts.

Jess Goldsteins costume designs kept tomboy Laura in drab prairie homespuns while at one point bedecking her nemesis, that snooty Oleson girl, in a flashy pink gown complete with wispy parasol.

The dance designs of Michael Dansicker and Eric Sean Fogel are at their most inventive in Fire in the Kitchen, when the Ingalls familys hand-rubbing and foot-stomping morph into a jig: double-clap, lift your skirts, waggle heads, go arm-in-arm.

Richard Carseys orchestra contributed, among many other effects, an ominous clarinet for the onset of sickness and a lively fiddle for the familys happier moments.

At the INB Center through Sunday, April 11

[ photo: from the original production at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, July 2008 ]

Few local productions have been more deserving of a bigger budget than Amadeus. With a powerful performance by Damon Abdallah as Antonio Salieri (the accomplished composer who is nonetheless outshone by Mozart’s brilliance) and several features that distinguish it from what you think you know (from the 1984 movie) about the script, director Jhon Goodwin’s production accomplishes much with minimal resources.

--- 

Barren set. The Vienna court nobles, not in powdered wigs and silks, but running around in shirts and ties like so many middle managers or insurance salesmen. Mozart’s wife, Salieri’s prize pupil, and the two Venticelli (here played by two women) displaying cleavage in corsets atop long skirts — plenty of sex appeal, but a contemporary look instead of 18th-century elegance.

The payoff in making such a virtue of (financially constrained) necessity was in Eric Paine’s hipster Mozart, a Hollywood producer type in floppy sleeves and jeans, way cooler and more rebellious than his aristocratic Viennese patrons. Here, the contemporary touch worked: At a glance, you could see who’s uptight and who isn’t.

Playwright Peter Shaffer has revised his script repeatedly, pointedly making room in the conclusion for greater historical accuracy (or at least less self-assurance about the circumstances of the Requiem and Mozart’s death at age 35). That, the de-emphasis of spectacle and underscoring of the language here, Paine’s unself-consciousness about the fact of Mozart’s genius, and the energy provided by the Venticelli are all reasons to take in this show (and not assume that you’re good because once, long ago, you saw the movie).

As Salieri’s gossip-mongerers and hangers-on, Marnie Rorholm and Ariel Cansino emphasize seductiveness over energy. The suggestion that poor repressed, conservative, married Salieri has beautiful admirers sets up his manipulative seduction of Mozart’s wife Constanze (Janelle Frisque, sultry) nicely, but the energy of rapid-fire news-gathering seemed to be missing. The Venticelli, however, allow Shaffer to move the plot along and provide Salieri some allies, so he’s not quite so alone.

Abdallah — at first hunched over as an elderly man in a wheelchair, later the hands-crossed-in-submission schemer at court — delivers one of the best local performances in memory. He achieves great intensity in the Act One-closing sequence, Salieri’s impassioned rejection of any God who would choose vulgar Wolfy instead of dignified Antonio to be the vessel of divine musical brilliance. (“What use is man, if not to teach God a lesson?” – Yikes, I could feel the blasphemy and feared the oncoming thunderbolt.)

Shaffer’s much-reworked plot and some laggard pacing, however, worked against the effect: at two and a half hours, some of Shaffer’s urgings about Salieri as mediocre talent, the resentment of Mozart’s childish behavior, his ravings against God — all seemed over-extended. Goodwin might’ve trimmed here and there — and in the blocking, he sometimes allowed five-person-wide static groupings of actors to impede the onstage progress.

Paine, a talented comedic actor, was engaging in the early going, with his high-pitched giggles and calm self-persuasion that yes, I am just about the greatest composer who has ever lived. (You have to admire a guy who commuted weekly, 800 miles roundtrip from Marysville, for the sake of a volunteer acting gig; and he was memorable in Lend Me a Tenor at the Civic in 2002). But the final, tragic sequence seemed beyond Paine’s grasp: the loss of his art and his Constanze still had a kind of bemusement about it, when the script calls for tragedy and despair.

Random notes: Abdallah’s dismissive gesture on “the voice of God in an obscene child” was powerful. Paine looked authentic in plinking away at the “harpsichord.” Paine’s mockery of Italian composing as unimaginative (“tonic and dominant, on and on”) was self-assured. Words like “breeches,” Idomeneo and “seraglio” were mispronounced. Frisque was reluctantly seductive and Abdallah was nervous and awkward — both, just as the script calls for — in their seduction scene. Paine needs more weight in his remorse over the (retold) death of Mozart’s father, Leopold — and more horror and guilt near the play’s end.

Despite flaws, however, Goodwin has presented a meaningful drama that reconceptualizes some of what it means to go on in life, as we all do, knowing that we aren’t the best at what we do. Not even near it. And yet on we trudge.

Salieri, a mediocrity, speaks for and to us. And some of those moments under Bryan Durbin’s light design — Abdallah’s upturned, anguished face; Paine’s quizzical chortling — are moments that will live in your memory. If you get out to CdA this weekend.

Amadeus runs at Lake City Playhouse through Sunday (April 1-3 at 7:30 pm)

Coming up at Lake City Playhouse:  Jekyll & Hyde (the musical), May 1-2, 6-9, 13-16, 20-23

Effective today, George Green has been appointed as executive artistic director of Lake City Playhouse in Coeur d'Alene. 

The current artistic director at Lake City, Brian Doig, will stay on through June as an artistic consultant to Green (and to help Green, as Doig says, "figure out where the staples are").

Green's already engaged in marketing for CdA's community theater: He has announced that tickets for the final three performances of Amadeus (April 1-3) will be sold on a buy one, get one free basis. Visit lakecityplayhouse.org or call (208) 667-1323.

Due to a back injury that will require minor surgery, Melissa Gilbert will not perform in Little House on the Prairie (at the INB Center, April 8-11). 

Unfortunately for local musical theater fans, Gilbert will miss only the Spokane week of the national tour. After surgery in Los Angeles, she'll return to the show when it arrives in Sacramento on April 14.

Gilbert has been playing Ma Ingalls opposite Steve Blanchard as Pa; for the Spokane performances, the part of Ma will be performed by Blanchard's real-life wife, Meredith Inglesby. 

Visit bestofbroadwayspokane.com or littlehousethemusical.com or call (800) 325-SEAT. 

At last, we're "Popular."

Fourteen months from  now, Wicked will be "Defying Gravity" and then landing in Spokane. Those two weeks in May 2011, along with a single night next winter that marks the arrival of Spring Awakening, are the highlights of the Best of Broadway Spokane season announced yesterday.  Here's the line-up:

Oct. 6-9, 2010:  South Pacific

Oct. 18:  Liza Minnelli

Oct. 27:  The Capitol Steps

Nov. 5:  Stomp

Dec. 1:  Spring Awakening

Feb. 10-13, 2011:  Legally Blonde: The Musical

March 24-27, 2011:  9 to 5: The Musical

April 22-23, 2011:  Cats

May 15-29, 2011:  Wicked

Ten-to-1: That's the ratio of mainstream thinking to nonconformity here, apparently (given the number of performance days given over to the February-March-April shows to that solitary day in December).

And we're pretty sure they got the date and venue wrong for Liza Minnelli, because a couple of weeks from now at the Arena is that "Walking With Dinosaurs" thing. 

You’re feeling depressed. You need comforting. You seek out a friend.

Your friend consoles you, but she also keeps calling attention to how kind she is for doing it. She even keeps reminding you of how she's doing it — this memory here, that joke there, the shared memory that always makes you smile. (Remember?)

Pretty soon, you don't feel consoled anymore. Your friend is taking more pride in her own counseling skills than in actually comforting you. You feel a mix of uplift and manipulation.

That's what watching The Spitfire Grill is like.

Director Marianne McLaughlin's production of the 2001 musical (downstairs at Spokane Civic Theater through April 11) offers highlights: David Baker's cozy backwoods set, three compelling performances, several lovely musical moments, the inspiration of seeing regular folks overcoming adversities. But vocal weakness, a score and lyrics that are serviceable but usually not memorable, and too many emotional crises undermine this rendition of the popular musical.

---

The three standouts are Manuela Peters (as Percy, the outcast who reinvigorates these small-town folks and teases out their secrets), Brian Gunn (as her love interest, the local sheriff), and Liberty Harris as Shelby (the domineered housewife who asserts herself and forges a friendship with Percy).

Peters has a tour de force in "Out of the Frying Pan," when she sings expressively and cooks ineptly, all at the same time. (Baker's working diner pays attention to detail.) Harris rises to the show's vocal peak in the following song, "When Hope Goes," a lament for a small-town hero. With affecting simplicity — just a few economical movements — Harris conveys a parade passing by; for the song's conclusion, Harris made "We are waiting still" convey all the disappointment of hopes that have been smashed. Peters and Harris together generated lots of girlish excitement in "The Colors of Paradise" and in the whole flurry over the future of the Grill. (Despite some quavering in her unaccompanied show-opening solo, Peters demonstrates that she can hit the high and joyous notes.)

Gunn looks more like a choir boy than a sheriff, but he has the knack of acting while singing: In a couple of songs about the forests looming outside this small Wisconsin town, he switched from skepticism to appreciation. (Percy, we're supposed to think, has that kind of magical effect on everyone.)

None of the rest of the cast, however, is vocally strong. They were in earnest, but their emotions sometimes got splattered by flatted and off-key notes.

Aaron Waltman avoided cliche by tempering the grouchy, controlling husband's grouchiness and control issues. But his singing has projection and pitch problems.

As the elderly owner of the diner, Judi Pratt was too grandmotherly from the outset: More aloofness and distrust would better suit her few tight-lipped lines in the early going and, in addition, set up an emphatic contrast with the rejuvenated woman she becomes. Sallie Christensen found the comedy as the local gossip-monger.

At the keyboard, music director Janet Robel leads cello and mandolin in musical accents that support the action, right down to the plink-plink of a telephone being dialed.

McLaughlin's direction is best in its simplicity: stand-and-deliver solo moments, a nice three-part madrigal for the passage of winter into spring that underscored the townspeople's hopes and disappointments.

On opening night, part of the sound system went out. Lighting cues were slow, and actors sometimes strolled into dark dead spots (and remained in them). But those technical difficulties will soon be fixed.

What won't find a remedy is the show's herky-jerk sentimentality, in which characters' emotional sore spots and long-withheld secrets, barely hinted at, are suddenly broached in one song and smoothed over in the next -- so we might as well wipe our hands on our aprons and move on to the next emotional crisis, because thank God, that one's taken care of. Peters, for example, packs emotional wallop into Percy's big second-act revelation, but then a redemptive song like "Wild Bird" soon follows, and that's all sorted out, then. Fred Alley's lyrics over-rely on repetition, and they tend to literalize their metaphors -- again, over-emphasizing the symbolism and yanking on our heartstrings.

In the show's least believable redemption, Percy reintroduces a fellow outcast to society in "Shine." McLaughlin and Peters deserve much credit for the beauty of this testimonial song, with the actress extending two hands toward a heavenly light and pleading, it becomes clear, for her own and everyone's redemption. But I couldn't shake off the feeling, while watching, that a deeply entrenched problem stretching over several years had just been solved in the space of a few minutes.

Puppy dogs and the National Anthem -- they make me tear up every time. But when you stuff a two-hour musical with the distrust of outsiders, prodigal sons and daughters, controlling spouses, long-held resentments, the protection of family secrets, sinners in need of redemption, touching complaints about hard times, unlikely romance, marriages busted and mended, busybodies and small-town American values, by gum, it all gets too frothy. There's too much insistence on the audience's fellow-feeling.

In just nine years, Spitfire has been produced hundreds of times, all over the country and even internationally. Problems are overcome, lives are redeemed, the value of community is affirmed. The show obviously appeals to plenty of folks.

I had high hopes for this production, and it has its moments. But mostly, I was disappointed. Spitfire's flame shines brightly at times, but mostly it's weak and flickering.

The Spitfire Grill continues at the Civic’s Studio Theater through April 11