Mini Reviews

Friday, December 14, 2007

Mini Reviews

A star (*) denotes a show recommended by our critics.

Newly Reviewed

ANTIGONE

(By Forum Theatre at H Street Playhouse through Dec. 30)

An MFA-program earnestness permeates this staging of "Antigone." Sensibly arranged on a trim Grecian set, the actors do their darnedest to channel the play's philosophizing and to give the plot's grim patterns the requisite grandeur. But their painstaking effort always looks like just that: effort. The performers never elevate the Jean Anouilh play past the nose-to-the-grindstone stage, to where the scenes might live and breathe. Admittedly, Anouilh's 1944 script is mannered to begin with, and Jeremy Sams's translation, used in this production, doesn't mellow out the formality. A revisionist take on Greek myth, the play reprises the familiar story of Antigone, Oedipus's strong-willed daughter. As many of us remember from reading Sophocles in high school, Antigone wins herself a death sentence by defying the Theban ruler, Creon, and burying her brother. But in Anouilh's ironic version of the tale, traditional notions of duty and heroism crumble: The title character turns out to be a dyspeptic self-aggrandizer, while Creon is an eminently reasonable ruler who's anxious to spare Antigone's life.

-- Celia Wren

* KAFKA'S DICK

(By Washington Shakespeare Company at Clark Street Playhouse through Jan. 13)

Once you're a celebrity, everything means something, from the cut of your suit to how much you loved your mum. And that nauseates English playwright Alan Bennett, who two decades ago wrote a wickedly funny play that lays bare our obsessive need to know. The comedy hasn't been seen much stateside -- could it be that puckish title? -- but the Washington Shakespeare Company is having a jolly run at this scattered but lively play. Bennett's intellectual farce is driven by lickety-split dialogue and the cute idea of shooting the perpetually miserable Kafka into the 1980s, where he's been completely undressed by literary biography of the most gossipy sort. Allusions and pranks run cheek by jowl as Kafka initially arrives in the modern British suburbs as a turtle and as Bennett melds literary satire with hints of bedroom farce. It's all very antic and jampacked, and not the easiest thing to perform, as actors juggle accents and the brainy punch lines that the script produces at a rapid rate. The machinery sometimes clatters more than it hums, especially come pell-mell physical business and arch asides that don't clarify and delight so much as add to the jumble. But by and large, the jumble is gleeful.

-- Nelson Pressley

TREASURE ISLAND

(At Round House Theatre through Dec. 30)

Alas, alack and shiver me timbers, this new adaptation moors too sedately in the shallows of Robert Louis Stevenson's famous pirate novel. The result is a staging that relentlessly conveys plot but stints on adventure-story dynamism. Aside from Mark Mineart's pleasingly rough-and-ready Long John Silver, the buccaneers in this version of the oft-dramatized yarn seem bland and bleached out. The little ones you've brought along may be somewhat engaged by the production's gruff customers and the let's-pretend approach to swordplay. More generally, though, the gusto-deficient evening revels only very mildly in the unfolding of dastardly betrayals and heroic rescues. Director Blake Robison's matter-of-fact presentation of this new adaptation by Ken Ludwig provides no thrills -- merely exposition. This is often a pitfall in trying to compress elaborate literary works for the stage. Narrated by the young hero, Jim Hawkins (Marybeth Fritzky), this "Treasure Island" paints in broad strokes on the expansive canvas of Stevenson's late-19th-century novel without giving us a vivid portrait of virtually any of the colorful individuals who figure in it.

-- Peter Marks

* TWICE UPON A TIME

(At Imagination Stage through Jan. 13)

They might not develop interest in the Iowa caucuses, but children 4 and older can absorb a little political consciousness -- of the gentlest and most abstract sort -- at "Twice Upon a Time: Dr. Seuss' the Lorax and the Emperor's New Clothes." This sweet and funny musical by the Tony-winning duo of Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty nods gracefully at leadership issues and environmentalism, by way of Hans Christian Andersen and the author of "The Cat in the Hat." Under the direction of Nick Olcott, a cast of five gambols through the show's civic-minded whimsy with a grace that's likely to win both the kid and parent vote. As the title indicates, this is a loosely linked double bill, the first section -- basically a long musical number -- being an outtake from Ahrens and Flaherty's 2000 "Seussical." "The Emperor's New Clothes" then retells Andersen's famous fable, but with a twist: Emperor Marcus (Danny Tippett) is a 14-year-old bookworm who's more than a little flummoxed by his royal responsibilities.

-- C.W.

Continuing

ALONE IT STANDS

(By Keegan Theatre's New Island Project at Theatre on the Run through Saturday)

For those who have a passionate interest in Irish rugby history of the 1970s, this might very well be riveting entertainment. For the vast majority of the population that does not share that obsession, however, these people are likely to find the play dull and hard to follow. Written in 1999, Irish playwright John Breen's comic drama chronicles the startling 1978 victory of the scrappy Munster Rugby Team over a rival that had seemed invincible. The production is a soup of fleeting sketches spoken in accents that seem to hail from somewhere east of Limerick and west of Wellington. Breen's play, which is reportedly an audience favorite in Ireland, depicts 62 characters, including players, fans, coaches, a taxi driver, a woman in labor and a dog. Given that no figure stays in view for long, and that the dialogue is littered with culturally rarefied remarks, American viewers might find it hard to keep track.

-- C.W.

CHRISTMAS CAROL 1941

(At Arena Stage through Dec. 30)

The hook for the uneven "Christmas Carol 1941" is the parsimony of a Washington accountant -- here called Elijah Strube -- who in the early days of World War II sees the ripening of black-market possibility in the food shortages to come. Playwright James Magruder, an accomplished translator of the works of Marivaux and Moli¿re, follows the Dickensian formula faithfully, with Strube browbeating Bob Cratchit substitute Henry Schroen and being visited not by ghosts but, more oddly, by avenging statues from around Washington. James Gale's Strube snarls and growls in such unpleasant fashion that you can't work up much enthusiasm for his redemption; Scrooge's catchphrase -- "Bah, humbug!" -- is replaced by Strube's coarser "Bullcrap!" The performance is of a piece with the rest of director Molly Smith's production, which never quite comes together in a satisfying way.

-- P.M.

A CHRISTMAS CAROL

(By Synetic Theater at Rosslyn Spectrum through Dec. 23)

Synetic's 75-minute production is executed with the company's trademark reliance on Scotch tape and muscle. The tale, with Irakli Kavsadze's brooding Scrooge at the center, is related clearly and efficiently. What the production lacks is the zing factor -- the compelling body-crafted stage pictures that director Paata Tsikurishvili and his choreographer-wife, Irina, routinely coax out of their young actors. A hardworking cast of eight dons robes and sways and swirls a lot, under a moody canopy of bare light bulbs. You get less a sense, though, of the company's winning style than of the umpteenth reprocessing of the same old story.

-- P.M.

* EDWARD II

(At Shakespeare Theatre -- Sidney Harman Hall through Jan. 6)

Among the sad stories of the death of kings, few come to a more gruesome finish than Christopher Marlowe's "Edward II," the tale of a monarch who falls savagely from grace after falling desperately for a man. The play is an Elizabethan curiosity, a work unfolding around an overt homosexual relationship in the English court. And though director Gale Edwards cannot resist indulging at times in a bit of campiness, her seductive treatment persuasively pumps up the love story, turning the dramatist's contribution to the newborn genre of English history play into an elegant document of gay martyrdom. Her decision to shift the setting to the 1920s -- Edward II ruled in the early 1300s -- not only gives the costume designer, Murell Horton, an excuse to deck the dandies out in Jazz Age finery, it also links up niftily to the undoing of another love-struck Edward, who abdicated the British throne in 1936 so that he could marry an American, Wallis Simpson, as the Duke of Windsor.

-- P.M.

FIDDLER ON THE ROOF

(At Olney Theatre Center through Jan. 6)

John Vreeke's robust, deeply serious production is boldly sung and athletically danced, and although there are flaws enough to keep it from being really thrilling, this "Fiddler" is one of the Olney's best recent forays into musical theater. The sheer vitality of the piece is indomitable, even if Vreeke's staging has a darker dramatic lining than "Fiddler" often gets. A certain amount of darkness, of course, comes with "Fiddler," the beloved 1964 musical based on the stories of Sholom Aleichem. The setting is 1905 Russia, and while the tale deals with evolving traditions as the beleaguered dairyman Tevye's daughters get married without his help, larger issues lurk as a pogrom is threatened.

-- N.P.

I LOVE YOU, YOU'RE PERFECT, NOW CHANGE

(At Bethesda Theatre through Feb. 17)

Men who don't call? Women who crave hugs? Husbands who hate to shop? Wives who can't figure out football? Finally, a show for people who fell into a crevice in Antarctica in 1957 and only recently thawed! This longish (2 1/2 -hour) musical revue arrives with the news that there are a heck of a lot of differences between guys and gals that are supposed to make the whole dating and marriage thing crack you up. The squareness is partly a function of age. The show has been running off-Broadway for 11 years. The skit-and-song show marches chronologically through the stages of male-female relationships and comes across as sexless and blandly middle-of-the-road.

-- P.M.

* THE MAIDS

(By Scena Theatre at Warehouse Theater through Sunday)

Shall the maids be played by women or men? When Jean Genet wrote this play of searing resentment and loathing in 1947, he wanted men (although he didn't get them), and that's certainly the more subversive choice. Scena Theatre, however, is making a good case for women in the company's extremely well-acted version -- a comparatively kind and gentle staging of a play that can be as harsh as a director wants to make it. It is, after all, a ferociously rebellious game of dominance and submission played by two sisters while their dreaded mistress is away. Director Gabriele Jakobi delivers this as straight class oppression, with the sisters wearing humiliating gray uniforms that look like prison garb.

-- N.P.

* THE PHANTOM TOLLBOOTH

(At Kennedy Center Family Theater through Sunday)

One might have feared it impossible to turn Norton Juster's whimsical, pun-slinging fantasy into a satisfying song-and-dance production. But a creative team that includes Juster and celebrated lyricist Sheldon Harnick evidently turned a blind eye to the odds, crafting a musical that's nearly as witty and buoyant as the 1961 book. Tim McDonald directs the 70-minute show, which boasts a richly textured score by the late Arnold Black. As millions of readers remember, "The Phantom Tollbooth" chronicles the adventures of Milo, a chronically bored lad who wanders into a weirdly edifying fairy-tale world -- a realm where mathematics and grammar lessons are distorted through funhouse mirrors, a la "Alice in Wonderland." To fit this novelistic escapade into the frame of a one-act musical, adapters Juster and Harnick had to pare away numerous subplots, as well as several of the book's most memorable figures, such as the Humbug and the Awful Dynne. But more than enough oddball characters remain, and they're delightfully interpreted by the production's cast.

-- C.W.

SEASONAL DISORDER

(At Source Theatre through Dec. 30)

As if the holiday season isn't mortifying enough, Washington Improv Theater now wants you to share your personal foibles. Walk into the lobby of the Source Theatre for a performance of "Seasonal Disorder" -- the mistletoe-themed offering of Washington Improv's founding ensemble, Onesixtyone -- and you're handed a questionnaire card that asks you to list a hobby, a family holiday tradition, a worst gift ever given or received and other potentially humiliating information about yourself. The answers on six of the cards form the basis for an ad-libbed portrait of a fictional yuletide get-together. This being a spontaneous art form, the show must differ day to day, but the hour-long opening-night production was sluggish and -- aside from a few oddball zingers -- not terribly funny. The performance noodled around with the idea of a strained family reunion, involving estranged parents (Catherine Deadman and Dan Hodapp), gawky sons (David Johnson and Colin Murchie) and the sons' significant others (Michael Bass and Molly Murchie). Few of us would dare to improvise in public, so hats must go off to the show's actors for their courage. Still, if one performance is anything to go by, the "Seasonal Disorder" artists need to put pacing and fluidity at the top of their Christmas wish lists.

-- C.W.

* SHINING CITY

(At Studio Theatre through Sunday)

Leave it to a playwright as subtle and perceptive as Conor McPherson to give us a play as troubling and mysterious as life itself. The premise is deceptively simple: A distraught Dublin man of middle age, played by the terrific Edward Gero, seeks the help of a therapist (an appealingly ill-at-ease Donald Carrier) after his wife, Mari, has been killed in a car accident. Her death has been haunting him in more ways than one, however, for as Gero's John anxiously reveals, Mari's ghost has been popping up around the house. What transpires between John and Carrier's Ian traverses some of the usual patient-doctor give-and-take. John talks (and talks and talks), discursively filling in the outlines of his tribulations. But over the course of 90 minutes, we discover that John's monologues offer more than professional grist for Ian, who shows himself as inexperienced in navigating the turbulent channels of his own life as he is in his attempts to smooth over John's.

-- P.M.

* SPUNK

(By African Continuum Theatre Company at Atlas Performing Arts Center through Dec. 23)

George C. Wolfe's 1989 adaptation of three Zora Neale Hurston tales holds the stage like the colorfully crafted, rugged piece of folklore it is. Hurston's language is slangy and vivacious, and KenYatta Rogers's cast does well by it, especially when the drama is more taut. The first tale, "Sweat," is the story of a washerwoman and her abusive husband, and the tension between Jessica Frances Dukes and Shane Taylor smolders and flares as the characters spit flamboyantly crafted hatred at one another. The roles are reversed in the mournful third tale, "The Gilded Six-Bits," with Taylor as an aggrieved husband whose wife (Dukes again) cheats with a flashy stranger. Different cadence, different mood, same magnetic storytelling and a delight for actors who don't just seize on the jazzy words but use them to cut to the characters' hearts. Real comic beauts are provided in the hustling middle fable ("Story in Harlem Slang") by Marie Schneggenberger: a snoozing gent on a bench and a floozy attached to her man at the hips and the lips.

-- N.P.

TAMBURLAINE

(At Shakespeare Theatre -- Sidney Harman Hall through Jan. 6 )

"Tamburlaine," an epic-length portrait of a Ce ntral Asian thief transformed into a godless conqueror, makes the emphatic statement that Michael Kahn's company is becoming even more adventurous in skirting the usual classical suspects. Christopher Marlowe's two-part play is here condensed for a single evening. Marlovian scholars and lovers of standard-waving pageantry will no doubt be thrilled. For the rest of us, the three-hour production constitutes something several degrees less than thrilling. Although Marlowe's poetry is recited on the honeyed tongue of Avery Brooks's Tamburlaine and on the other voices of what feels like a cast of thousands, the play is little more than a numbingly solemn march.

-- P.M.

* WAVERLY GALLERY

(By Didactic Theatre Company at D.C. Arts Center through Saturday)

The empty white frames that festoon the set of this modest but poignant offering serve a dual purpose. First, they evoke the pictures that clutter the story's primary locale, a small Greenwich Village art gallery run by an aging former lawyer named Gladys. The vacant frames, however, also signal the gathering blankness in Gladys's mind. She has Alzheimer's disease and is gradually losing the ability to recognize even her nearest relatives. Kenneth Lonergan's 1999 play chronicles the grim progress of the disease and the devastating toll it takes on Gladys's loved ones. The two-hour drama is no light entertainment, given its unflinching focus on painful conversations and emotional outbursts, as well as real-time depiction of Gladys's tendency to repeat herself, but the play is perceptive and moving.

-- C.W.