Theater Review: 'The Game's Afoot' 

Date: April 3, 2013
by: Paula Atwell | Theater Critic

More Photos

Elizabeth King-Hall, Brittany Proia, Bryan Torfeh, Eric Hissom, Peggy Roeder and Joseph McGranaghan in 'The Game's Afoot.' Photo by Barbara Banks.

The premiere of Asolo Rep’s latest play was to die for, loaded with laughter and applause. The opening-night audience applauded the set, the costumes and the special effects, as well as the actors. Watching Ken Ludwig’s farcical, witty mystery was like spending an evening savoring bonbons and brie: decadent, deadly and delicious.

The production’s unabashed celebration of drollery and farce delights the palate with sheer over-the-top indulgence. For starters, its richly detailed set, which Judy Gailen designed, echoes William Gillette’s magnificent, idiosyncratic medieval castle in Connecticut. The story is based on the real-life character of Gillette, who made a fortune over 35 years as lead actor and playwright of “Sherlock Holmes — A Drama in Four Acts,” in the early 20th century.

The costumes, by Eduardo Sicangco, are emblematic of the glamour of the period. Each one is its own piece of perfection, from Holmesian wool houndstooth to a red velvet full-length, divinely draped wrap, whipped off to reveal daring pale palazzo pants — just kill me now. Both the lighting, by Mary Louise Geiger, and the sound design, by Fabian Obispo, are highly worthy of note.

Greg Leaming’s direction gives the actors all they need to flaunt their stuff to full effect. The stunning cast plays the theatrical characters to the hilt, reveling in their attention-seeking egos, spouting Shakespeare at every turn, just like a party in the Hollywood Hills. 

Brian Torfeh, who is delightfully magnetic as Gillette, makes me think of an elegant Tom Hanks — and who doesn’t want more Tom Hanks? Gail Rastorfer literally throws her beautiful body into the dark soul of Daria Chase, a theater critic everyone loves to hate. Peggy Roeder plays Gillette’s mother, Martha, with a sweetly winning blend of grace and befuddlement. Carolyn Michel is charmingly quirky as a Connecticut Detective, dressed and accented as if she’d just stepped in from a walk on the moors. Eric Hissom, as Gillette’s close friend Felix, and his wife, Madge, played by Elizabeth King-Hall, are lively additions to the ensemble, and Brittany Proia, as Aggie Wheeler, and Joseph McGranaghan, as Simon Bright, play their parts most convincingly.

Gilty Pleasure, Cherubic Kids, Flying Sleighs, A Unicorn And A Live Poodle Make For A Visually Dazzling Nutcracker.

December 29, 1992 By KRISTY MONTEE, Dance Writer, Sun Sentinel

For 100 years now, The Nutcracker has endured, transcending all attempts to turn it into something more than it is -- a delightfully hokey farrago of dance and nonsensical fairy tale.

In the hands of revisionists, it has been turned into a space-age techno-pop extravaganza, a Freudian adolescent dream, and lately by Mark Morris, an absurdist domestic melodrama. Faced with the task of making The Nutcracker look fresh, it seems few choreographers can resist major facelifts or at least gobs of makeup.

For her new Nutcracker for Ballet Florida, artistic director Marie Hale has chosen the latter course, creating a visually dazzling production, chockful of cherubic kids, flying sleighs and angels, a unicorn and a live poodle and enough gilt to recoat Versailles.

As for the staging and choreography, Hale does tinker, and the results are both very good and not-so-good. In trying to create some narrative sense (an impossible task given how this ballet has come down to us from the original 1892 Maryinsky version), Hale has gleaned a subplot from the E.T.A. Hoffmann fairy tale upon which the ballet is very loosely based.

She opens the ballet with a prologue in the magician Drosselmeyer`s workshop, where a portrait of his nephew dominates. (Program notes tell that the beloved nephew has been imprisoned inside the nutcracker doll by the wicked Queen of Mice and that only the love of a young girl can break the spell). The ballet proceeds through the traditional party scene and Clara`s dream-journey to the Land of Snow and the castle of the Sugar Plum Fairy (Hale eschews the Land of Sweets for a romantic Disneyesque setting.) An epilogue returns us to the workshop where Drosselmeyer discovers his nephew, released from the spell. The point is neatly underscored by a lighting trick in which the nephew`s portrait changes into a nutcracker.

This is a clever, highly entertaining staging that not only creates coherence but also lends a satisfying sense of closure to a story that usually leaves Clara stranded in her dreams.

Although Hales scatters children throughout as adornment, this is an adult performance. To validate the love angle, she makes Clara, Fritz and their friends teens, and it`s believable until we catch Fritz gushing over his hobby-horse gift one minute then flirting like a Victorian dandy the next.

Where Hale comes up short, however, is in the choreography itself. While the staging of the mice battle scene is lively, the party dances are perfunctory. The second-act variations -- Spanish, Chinese, Arabian and Trepak (in lieu of Candy Canes) -- are glib rather than virtuosic. And the ensemble dances of the Snowflakes and the Flowers, which should act as flowing rivers of movement upon which all the variations skim, are surprisingly unmusical and grounded, each failing to capture the sweetly melancholic impulse of Tchaikovsky`s waltzes.

Hale has more success in the pas de deux she creates for three couples. Taking a cue from the Paris Opera production, she adds a Snow Queen and Prince to anchor the Land of Snow. She also gives Dew Drop a cavalier, which has the negative effects of detracting from what is normally a glittering solo and also making the later appearance of the Sugar Plum Fairy and her swain anticlimatic. (The fact that Dew Drop`s sugar-spun white tutu is prettier than Sugar Plum`s gaudy magenta one doesn`t help matters). Wisely, Hale makes the Sugar Plum grand pas de deux classic Petipa; you can almost smell Aurora`s perfume.

Still, as thousands of Nutcrackers have proven, razzle-dazzle and the benevolent holiday audience can compensate for lack of imaginative dance. And this $1 million production is the most visually stunning one I`ve seen.

The real star of the show is New York scenic designer Eduardo Sicangco, whose Broadway and opera credits show up here in lushly detailed sets that through the use of a grand staircase in the first act and revolving platforms and rococo gilt gazebos in the second, creates a wonderful three-dimensional effect. Sicangco also uses numerous scrims to great effect as the ballet zips effortlessly through an amazing 12 scene changes.

That Sicangco (and costume designer A. Christina Giannini) places the Silberhaus family in a French Empire-style mansion rather than bourgeois circa-1840 German home is forgivable given the sheer beauty of it all.

Aerial special effect whizzes, the Foy Brothers of New York, who sent Mary Martin airborn in Peter Pan, make silver swan sleighs, angels, a menacing giant owl and a few Chinamen fly. With all this, the usual growing Christmas tree is kid`s stuff.

The 22-member company was supplemented with students from Hale`s school and a few guesting Ballet Florida alums. Consequently, the corps, while energetic, did not have the unity one would hope for.



Ariadne auf Naxos

LENOX, MA

Tanglewood Festival

8/4/10

For the third and final performance (Aug. 4) of Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos presented by the Tanglewood Music Center Vocal Fellows and the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, rising young Japanese conductor Keitaro Harada, a student in the TMC program, got his turn to lead the forces prepared by Christoph von Dohnányi. Harada's command of the score was total, from the uncommonly beautiful legato and sweep of the opening orchestral phrases, hinting at the inspired, ecstatic melodies created by the character known as the Composer, to the carefully controlled climaxes of the final duet, in which Ariadne and Bacchus join in uncomprehending ecstasy.

Eduardo Sicangco's sets and costumes featured a basement corridor that doubled as dressing-room area and wine storage, with a circular stairway and various levels affording plenty of playing space for the backstage hustle of the Prologue. Ariadne's island cave, an elegant faux-marble neo-Grecian salon with a pool vista and chic nautical art, was invaded by the quartet of comedians wearing Hawaiian shirts, grass skirts and surfer jams, sporting snorkels and beach toys. Matthew McCarthy's lighting design featured hypnotic underwater effects and a stunning play of silver and gold, with adorable fireworks, as stipulated all along by the rich patron, for the finale.

Director Ira Siff shepherded his young cast carefully in difficult roles, always mindful of stage placement and musical needs. Still, the performance seemed constrained by the unseen presence of a squadron of voice teachers, with nearly all the singers unwilling to pounce on the music and go beyond "correct," well-schooled vocalism. In the title role, Emalie Savoy displayed the requisite gleam for such moments as the great aria "Es gibt ein Reich" and sang elegantly all night. In her black gown and purple cape, cradling Theseus's battle helmet, the abandoned and tense Ariadne opened up into sensuality in the final scene, and Savoy's singing blossomed and grew magnificently.

As Bacchus, Ta'u Pupu'a showed no discomfort with the high, heroic writing, but his musical insecurities, especially his rhythmic imprecision, marred every phrase and stood in the way of any theatrical credibility. Audrey Elizabeth Luna's Zerbinetta was securely sung but lacked real dramatic specificity, in spite of hyper-cutesy choreography for "Grossmachtige Prinzessin" that involved lots of wiggling, primping and lying on the floor. Cecelia Hall's Composer was beautifully sung but underplayed, a sort of "gentle soul" not entirely consistent with Strauss's intensely passionate musical characterization; Hall's offhand stage presence held the audience's focus only with difficulty.

Elliott Madore took a star turn as the Music Master, stooping in his tweedy jacket like an old, tenured philosophy professor but singing with ringing, rounded tone. Later, Madore brought unusual nuance to Harlekin's little serenade. Guest artist Hans Pieter Herman was excellent as the officious Major-Domo, while Patrick Jang brought musical-theater style and immediacy to the role of the Dancing Master and Emily Duncan-Brown was impressive vocally as Echo.  

JUDITH MALAFRONTE

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Tanglewood Music Center

‘Don Giovanni'

Heavens meet their match

By Andrew L. Pincus, Special to the Eagle

Updated:07/30/2009 06:29:56 AM EDT

Thursday, July 30

LENOX -- "Don Giovanni" has survived directors' updatings and other creative onslaughts. In the Tanglewood Theater on Monday night, it survived a direct lightning strike. Midway through Leporello's Catalog Aria, a bolt hurtled through the hall with a mighty crack.

At the height of one of the summer's most savage storms, which turned the parking lots into lagoons, nobody, except in the audience, flinched. It was left for the staging to furnish its own crack of doom at the end: the statue of the murdered Commendatore triumphant atop a majestic pedestal.

If you're of a certain mind, the symbolism seemed inescapable. The heavens were jealous of the electricity created onstage by conductor James Levine, director Ira Siff and the talented singers and instrumentalists of the Tanglewood Music Center.

We'll never know why Levine replaced Rossini's light comedy "L'Italiana in Algeri" with Mozart's dark comedy as this year's all-student production, especially since he conducted "Don Giovanni" in the Shed only three years ago. Maybe the right singers didn't come along.

But Mozart's "dramma giocoso" is perhaps the quintessential opera, combining in perfect balance the conflicting elements promised in that subtitle. At its center is a hollow man, all seduction, around whom all-too-human characters circle and collide. Upper and lower classes mingle uneasily until all can rejoice over the downfall of a villain.

“Don Giovanni" is also a good teaching tool for young musicians, and that must have figured in Levine's thinking. Indeed, he devoted a sizable part of his first Tanglewood summer, 2005, to a fruitful series of master classes on the opera. If you can do Mozart, you're on your way to doing anything.

The Monday performance was the second in the run. Levine also conducted, lightning-free, on Sunday, and conducting fellow Christoph Altstaedt takes over in the pit for tonight's finale.

The strengths of the imaginative production begin in Siff's staging and Eduardo Sicangco's set and costumes. We're in Seville -- the vaguely Moorish architecture suggests that -- but it's a Seville that hovers between then and now.

The soft tones of the wooden set and sliding panels create an atmosphere of light and air, even while the steep palace walls of a revolving set lend a sense of foreboding. The costumes are a mix of modern and old, sometimes verging on the dangerously garish.

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Giovanni's modish Armani black stamps him as both cool and sinister. Anna wears black widow's weeds that make her look Victorian; Ottavio, her would-be husband, in black frock coat, also seems to have stepped out of a Victorian time warp. Elvira alternates between bridal white and angry red.

The action is highly physical. There is real sword play between Giovanni and the Commendatore, real horse play between Giovanni and Leporello. The erotic elements are played up -- yes, there is some groping -- without ever being leered over.

Fog envelopes the graveyard scene and the statue of the Commendatore when he shows up for dinner. Chandeliers illuminate Giovanni's party, and an ominous giant moon hangs over the graveyard.

The Giovanni, Elliot Madore, experienced in the role, seems born to it. Black of voice and character, he oozes sensuality and menace in his every move. His champagne aria, expertly rendered, is chilling as it sparkles in the summons to a party.

Also outstanding is Mark Van Arsdale as Ottavio, the eternal jerk, unable to pull the trigger on his pistol. He handles his two big arias with aplomb and makes you root for Anna to send him packing while she goes into mourning for a year.

Some of the other voices seemed either to need further ripening or to tire on singing the taxing roles two nights in a row, especially amid inhospitable weather. But each singer makes his or her character vivid and sympathetic: Evan Hughes as Leporello, Layla Claire as Anna, Devon Guthrie as Elvira, Elizabeth Reiter as Zerlina and Michael Weyandt as Masetto. The great Act I quartet is beautifully done.

Morris Robinson, a veteran Commendatore, was brought in from the outside to lend his stentorian voice and ominous presence to the role.

Levine, as always, presides knowingly in the pit, and the student orchestra responds with force and sensitivity to his direction. The orchestra's cry of agony when Anna realizes Giovanni is her father's murderer tells you exactly her state of mind even before she speaks. Members of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus assist as peasants, servants and demons.

n

There are a few questionable details: Elvira is so much the madwoman that her vulnerable side scarcely appears, and Giovanni lacks a mandolin for his serenade. But when Leporello, who has been cowering under the dinner table a few minutes before, brings out a round of champagne for all hands during the final ensemble's celebration, it is a perfect crowning touch. In this production, the heavens met their match.

The Elixir of Love
Virginia Opera 1997 Season
Review excerpts:

“Stage director Worth Gardner and set designer Eduardo Sicangco have decorated Donizetti’s light comedy with a huge gilt frame that emphasizes the fairy-tale nature of this peasant story. And to show that love is everywhere, they’ve added a hunky Cupid played by Michael Pappa, who flies through the air like an amorous Peter Pan. It’s clever and giddy, one of the most enjoyable productions from this company in some time...Worth and Sicangco scored one surprise after another with their whimsical set. The giant frame made the ensemble numbers look like scenes from a painting. Several backdrops taken from Italian masterworks completed the lusty, spirited look of this production.”

*Daily Press,Sunday, November 16, 1997

“Eduardo Sicangco’s gold-frame set and costumes complemented the musical performance perfectly, allowing the principals to have center stage for their comings and goings.”

*The Virginian Pilot, Sunday, November 16, 1997

“It is filled with lovely melodies and it is a visual treat, one of the most beautiful of our productions,” Mark said. Set designer Eduardo Sicangco depicts rich scenery of the village and the countryside within a huge golden frame bracketing the stage, so that when the action freezes an instant on a throng of villages, peasants and soldiers, it appears to be a giant canvas done by Peter Breughl.”

*The Virginian Pilot, Sunday, November 16, 1997

“A velveteen coat-of-many-colors shrouds the proscenium of Norfolk’s Harrison Opera House, puddling off the edge of the stage and into the orchestra pit. It looks old enough to be the curtain that graced the Milanese stage where Donizetti’s “The Elixir of Love” premiered May 12, 1882. But the enigmatic curtain only hints of an imaginative odyssey that is about to commmence. While waiting, some audience members speculate about what stage director Worth Gardner has in store this time. His 1994 “The Not Mikado” was a bizarre flight of Gilbert and Sullivan parody. Some like it as much as others hated it...Concurrently, Gardner’s opening pantomime warns that while this production might not go over the top, it will be unique. Eduardo Sicangco’s sets are like a period print awakened, spilling pathos-spiced comedy copiously upon the audience...in the proper setting, all gems can sparkile, and this multifaced Virginia Opera production of Donizetti’s most enduring opera is dazzling!”

*Port Folio Weekly,, November 18 - 24, 1997

Unusual set, Cupid character spice ‘Elixir’

“Controversy isn’t a necessity in an artistic production, but a little bit of it never hurts.
The Virginia Opera knew it wasn’t getting a standard set design when it hired director Worth Gardner and designer Eduardo Sicangco to create its new production of “The Elixir of Love”. Neither of these talented artists was interested in designing the familiar farmhouse that’s often a part of this Doninzetti opera set in an Italian village.
Instead, they hung a huge gilt picture frame in the middle of the stage and set the action inside it. But the more unusual addition to this production was a Cupid character played by actor Michael Pappa, who actually flies through the air during the opera.
When the opera opens, he’s snoozing on a grape vine wound around one side of the picture frame. When he’s not sailing through the air, this Cupid teases the other characters or acts as a kind of unseen presence that moves the story forward.
I found the idea refreshing, though there were times when his antics got a little annoying. Other people I talked to either loved him or felt he called attention away from the singers. There wasn’t any middle ground here.
Gardner and Sicangco created more of an uproar when they teamed up in 1993 for the opera’s production of “The Not Mikado.” Truthfully, the rock-pop score and the foul language upset people more than their punk costumes and high-tech set.
Whether you like their current approach or not, the opera company brought them back because they are talented artists who produce a good product.
Gardner doesn’t mind the controversy. “In this business, you’re either a player or a scary commodity,” he says.

*Daily Press, Nove. 23, 1997

“The look of Virginia Opera’s “The Elixir of Love” is the major talking point of the company’s new prodcution. No, the staging doesn’t upstage the music, but it provides a neat postmodern distance from which audiences can appreciate the silliness of Donizetti’s two-week wonder of an opera. And it is eye-catching: Stage director Worth Gardner and set designer Eduardo Sicangco have framed the stage - quite literally- in a gold picture frame.
“It is covered with 6,000 pieces of gold foil,” confirms Virginia Opera’s general and artistic director, Peter Mark. The frame provides the ironic discontinuity (“It’s the opera, stupid!”) necessary for modern audiences to enjoys this slight opera comica, with its sweet, mismatched lovers and opera buffa stock figures of the self-important soldier and quack doctor. And if we didn’t get the point, there’s a further design innovation: draped across the frame, from the first scene, is a live cupid who flies about to aid the lovers and highlight the foibles of other characters.”

*Style Weekly, November 25, 1997

“Combine a cast of singers with excellent voices who are also first-rate actors, superb direction and stage action, a stunning set and costumes, a standout orchestra, a master conductor , and what do you have?
You have Virginia Opera’s prodcution of Gaetano Donizetti’s “The Elixir of Love,”...Stage director Worth Gardner kept the action lively and interesting, while Edurdo Sicangco’s sets and costumes were a feast for the eye...It is hard to imagine a performance of “The Elixir of Love” than can match, much less top, this one.”

*Richmond Times Dispatch, Friday November 25,1997

The Gilbert and Sullivan Newsletter Archive

GILBERTIAN GOSSIP

No 45 Autumn 1997 Edited by Michael Walters

THE NOT MIKADO

The following review from The Michigan Daily of Monday, 4 April 1994, was kindly sent by Ralph MacPhail.

Zesty "Not Mikado" butchers pop culture, by Robert Yoon.

With the glamour of a rock concert and the glitz of a Las Vegas revue, the Birmingham Theatre presented Saturday night "The Not Mikado: A Hip-Hopperetta", a satirical and very funny musical loosely based on Gilbert and Sullivan's 1885 opera, "The Mikado". Conceived and directed by Worth Gardner, "The Not Mikado" provided zesty commentary on the complexity and absurdity of today's pop culture. It was very similar to the original "Mikado" in that both were stage productions performed by carbon-based life forms. The similarities generally ended there. Gardner took the original Gilbert and Sullivan storyline and infused it with more pop culture references than you'll find in both "Wayne's World" movies and a week's worth of "Entertainment Tonight". The setting was still Titipu, Japan, where the emperor - the Mikado - made flirting a crime punishable by death, but the characters, the sassy dialogue, and the variety of musical styles, ranging from country-western to calypso, had a distinctly '90s feel. The story centered on Nanki-Poo (David Gunderman), a leather-clad, punk-rockin', Paulie Shore clone on roller blades. Complications arose, however, when his love interest, Yum-Yum (Courtenay Collins), became slated to be married to Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner (Kurt Johns). One of the musical highlights from Act 1 as "Behold the Lord High Executioner," where Ko-Ko sings merrily about the people he'd like to whack. Included in his list are Snoop Doggy Dog, Howard Stern, drama critics and Barney. As a Responsible Drama Critic, I have to say that it is a sad, sad day when actors must resort to making jokes about decapitating loveable, purple dinosaurs for a few cheap yucks. As a product of '70s and '80s popular culture, however, I say bring on the cleaver.

"The Not Mikado" could have succeeded on the quality of the dialogue and the lively dance numbers alone, but what made this a memorable show was the strong performances by the nine cast members. Particularly noteworthy were Kurt Johns, as the malaprop-prone Ko-Ko, whose New York accent was a mixture of a young Marlon Brando and a cranky Archie Bunker, and Howard Kaye, as the excessively stuffy Poo[h]-Bah. Equally entertaining but under-used were Wendy Perelman and Rececca Hirsch, as the mall-talking duo, Peep-Bo and Pitti-Sing. Not only did they take time out at the beginning of Act II to recap the events of Act I, but they also gave a complete update of Andrea's wedding on "90210", in case any of you missed that episode. Eduardo Sicangco's costume designs were the perfect mix of feudal Japan and Cindy Crawford's "House of Style". The street-talking, crotch-grabbing, CD-clad Mikado (David Earl Hart) wore 10-inch platform shoes and had a hairdo that would make Patti Labelle sit up and take notice. No description of the "Not Mikado" could top that of Pitti-Sing's at the end of the second act. "It's like when you go to the orthodontist and get your braces off and run your tongue across your teeth for the first time. Mmmm!"

 
The New York Times
THEATER REVIEW; Lorelei Lee Returns, Dizzy and Savvy as Ever

By DAVID RICHARDS,
Published: November 25, 1994, Friday
Whatever the feminist thinking on the subject, there is, frankly, no blonde like a dumb blonde.
The altogether snappy revival of "Gentleman Prefer Blondes" at the Goodspeed Opera House here makes a strong case that she deserves her place of honor not just in the annals of gold digging, but in those of show business, as well. The wisecracking musical by Anita Loos and Joseph Fields with a brash and brassy score by Jule Styne and Leo Robin may belong to another era (1949, to be precise), but Lorelei Lee, the girl diamonds are the best friend of, remains mint-fresh and as convulsively funny as ever.
"Gentleman Prefer Blondes" recounts her trip to "Europe, France" (yes), where her friend Dorothy, la danseuse Americaine, is to appear at the Club Cocteau. On the ship over, Lorelei can't help attracting men of all sizes and fortunes. She responds enthusiastically to Paris, a city she finds rich in historical names: "Chanel, Cartier, Van Cleef & Arpels." Back in New York, she marries a button tycoon after winning over his obdurate father with the candor in her saucerlike eyes and an unexpected display of business acumen.
The story couldn't be dopier. But no one at the Goodspeed is letting on -- not Charles Repole, the savvy director; not Michael Lichtefeld, who has provided some wonderfully slap-happy choreography, and certainly not K. T. Sullivan, the actress and cabaret singer who plays Lorelei.
The role made Carol Channing a star, and even at this late date it's hard to hear "I'm Just a Little Girl From Little Rock" or "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" without also hearing Ms. Channing growling and baby-talking them simultaneously. Ms. Sullivan, who brings a sweet soprano to the songs and a voluptuous spaciness to the character, proves a delight in her own fashion, however.
She looks like pink cotton candy with false eyelashes. Trotting about the stage on tippy-toes, her delicate hands extended at right angles from her curvy hips, she somehow gives the impression she is traveling by miniature pogo stick. Innocence clings to her, like a sheath; not even compromising positions compromise her. As she explains, absolving herself of all blame -- past, present and future -- "Fate is something that keeps happening to me." Who could resist, as she puts it, "a girl like I"?
Or a production like this, which is one of the Goodspeed's least formulaic efforts in several seasons. The period is the 1920's, so the set and costume designer, Eduardo Sicangco, matches Art Deco splendor with ersatz French elegance (Louis Glitz?) to come up with a stylish look for the show and its inhabitants. More miraculously, he has made the minuscule Goodspeed stage look large. We're not talking Radio City Music Hall, of course. But when Mr. Lichtefeld gets the dancing ensemble bouncing orange beach balls on the deck of the Ile de France, can-can kicking in the streets of Paris or flapping their knees and knocking their elbows in the Central Park Casino, the space actually seems to expand. It's just an illusion, helped along by Kirk Bookman's lighting, but not one that the Goodspeed pulls off often.
If there are no show-stopping performances here (Ms. Sullivan comes close), there are nonetheless excellent performances everywhere. Karen Prunczik, as Dorothy, looks swell wrapped in a blue boa, tosses off her lines smartly and taps dances energetically enough to impress Paris, if not take it by storm. As a stuffy Philadelphia millionaire, George Dvorsky comes across as a nebbish. Then he whips off his glasses, lets down his hair (metaphorically) and sings a romantic ballad ("Just a Kiss Apart") and he's an instantly attractive leading man. (Plain secretaries used to accomplish a similar trick in the movies all the time.)
The temptation to turn vintage musicals into cartoons is enormous, and even the Goodspeed, which handles them more lovingly than most companies, has not always resisted it in the past. Mr. Repole knows just where to draw the line, so that the ridiculousness of the plot and the dizziness of the characters never pass over into stupidity. Allen Fitzpatrick as the button tycoon, Jamie Ross as a jaunty health food nut and walking advertisement for the virtues of "rough, rough roughage," and David Ponting, as a randy British aristocrat, are all lively and funny. When a musical is happily mindless, as this one is, only one person has to be smart: the director.
The score, which ranges from the lilting "Bye, Bye, Baby" to the peppery "It's Delightful Down in Chile," is a Styne-way: show business with class. The original book has been pruned by a quarter of an hour or so, which keeps the numbskull plot twisting and the quips coming at a brisk pace. I'm assuming, however, that Lorelei's wit and wisdom are intact.
After all, any woman who reminds us that "possession is twelve-tenths of the law" should be allowed to talk all she wants. GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES Music by Jule Styne; lyrics by Leo Robin; book by Joseph Fields and Anita Loos; adapted from the novel by Ms. Loos; directed by Charles Repole; choreography by Michael Lichtefeld; musical direction by Andrew Wilder; sets and costumes by Eduardo Sicangco; light by Kirk Bookman; orchestrations by Doug Besterman; musical supervision and vocal arrangements by Michael O'Flaherty; dance music by G. Harrell; production coordinator, Todd Little; stage manager, Donna Cooper Hilton; artistic associate, John Pike; associate producer, Sue Frost. Produced for the Goodspeed Opera House by Michael P. Price. At East Haddam, Conn. WITH: K. T. Sullivan (Lorelei Lee), Karen Prunczik (Dorothy Shaw), Allen Fitzpatrick (Gus Esmond), Carol Swarbrick (Lady Phyllis Beekman), David Ponting (Sir Francis Beekman), Susan Rush (Mrs. Ella Spofford), George Dvorsky (Henry Spofford) and Jamie Ross (Josephus Gage).

Manon
Sacramento Opera
Review excerpt

“Sacramento Opera finds Gallic charm in ‘Manon’

“Sets, designed by Eduardo Sicangco, were sturdy, handsome affairs, full of brick and stone-work and trees that fairly shouted of the period (early 18th-century France). The bare stage used for the final act, with only a series of decreasing rectangles on the horizon, briliantly captured the mood for Manon’s final moments.”

*by Robert A. Masullo
Bee Reviewer

Babes In Toyland, Houston Grand Opera
*Review excerpts:

“From the melodious sound of the score to Babes in Toyland and the delightfully spectacular visual production with which Houston Grand Opera has revived Victor Herbert’s beloved old operetta, it looks as though the company has a nice, though lengthy, yuletide hit.
Fridays’ opening performance in Wortham Center’s Cullen Theater revealed an elaborate, gorgeous series of settings created by designer Eduardo Sicangco.
During the opera’s two long acts, Sicangco leads his audience from a quaintly wrinkled, well-worn, shoe house for the Widow Piper and her 10 children through a very spooky forest swamp, full of gnarled, creaking tree trunks, hungry green spiders and a quaint, motherly old singing moth who flies in and out of the wings.
The second act opens on a toy-filled factory full of animated dolls, model trains and shiny, lacquered wooden oldiers doing a spectacular close-order drill.”

*by Carl Cunningham, The Houston Post
Monday, December 2, 1991

“Without being agressively Christmassy, there are enough references to the specifics of the season to make this the perfect family outing. Spectacular production numbers,entrancing scenery and costumes, imaginative dance sequences and Victor Herbert’s easy listening score - what more could anyone want for December festivities?”
“The production is lusciously Victorian, all curlicues and frills and folderols. Mother Gooseland is straight from the pages of whatever nursery rhyme book you care to open. The forest is magical, tangled and cobwebby. Toyland, preparing for Christmas, is clockworky with overtones of a mad scientiest’s lair, littered with playthings and prancing wooden solders. The chirpy ‘March of the Toy Solders’ accompanies their parade; the audience sways to the dreamy ‘Toyland Toyland
‘ waltz; golden oldies but goodies cast their spell and all’s well with the world - be it ever so briefly.”

*by Ann Thompson, The Opera, December 1991

“Much entertainment also comes from Eduardo Sicangco’s wonderful sets: Widow Piper’s shoe-house with the worn-out toe, the gobliny trees that moved and sang a la barbershop in the forest, and the candy-coated sets for Toyland.”

*by Charles Ward, Houseton Chronicle, Nov. 12, 1991

She's mean, she's vain, and she's very, very funny. She's Suzanne Grodner, who as Cinderella's nasty stepmother almost steals the show from the 20 other cleverly re-imagined characters in this treat of a musical, The Plexiglass Slipper. Whether barking at Cinderella, egging on her two preferred daughters or reasoning that she, too, ought to have a chance to marry the Prince, Grodner is a caricature come alive -- a scheming, steaming matriarch who's part Joan Crawford, part Cruella De Vil, and part Angela Lansbury in The Manchurian Candidate. So what if fortune has stuck her with two vulgar and ugly daughters (played for optimum silliness by men): They're young and marriageable, and if she has anything to say about it, they'll provide her with a free ticket to the easy life at the palace.

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Pacific Opera’s Viva Verdi! Festival closes this month with the opening of La Traviata, Verdi’s epic tale of love, betrayal and the shocking price of holiday rentals. Robert Mitchell, our man on the aisle was there, and now he’s here with his review.

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IT was the kind of evening you'd expect if you left a pastel pink tweenage princess in charge of the family's viewing for the night - and said that she could do it with her ice skates on. Zipping around a frozen stage were every little girl's favourite Disney characters, accompanied by the kind of pomp, ceremony and supporting cast you'd expect of the fairytale conglomerate.

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Camp, once largely the province of gay men and the women who loved them, has been sure-footedly working its way into the mainstream over the last several decades. John Waters movies can be seen at local malls; "Twin Peaks" was, however briefly, a television hit, and aging starlets like Joan Collins have translated the sensibility into flourishing second careers.

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Sisters, sisters: What's a poor woman to do when her sister serves her rat for dinner? If you answered, "Break into hysterics," you haven't seen the world premiere musical What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? What made Joan Crawford shriek in horror and zoom madly about in her wheelchair in the 1962 movie of Baby Jane causes the stage version of Blanche Hudson to break into song -- and a pretty, life-affirming ballad at that.

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Just as Gerard Alessandrini changes audience perspective on any show he spoofs in "Forbidden Broadway," so do Jim Luigs and Scott Warrender with "The Plexiglass Slipper," their modernist revision of the Cinderella story. Audiences who see it may never look at the old girl with quite the same innocent eyes. The creators, who scored a success with their 1993 "Ring" cycle parody "Das Barbecu," look at the centuries-old myth with a new spirit, giving it a contempo flair without losing that fairytale feeling.

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Sometimes, being glamorous, witty and divinely attired just isn't enough for a woman, or, for that matter, a man dressed as a woman. Even if the restless soul happens to be as absurdly glamorous and sublimely witty as Charles Busch has been in the succession of Hollywood-inspired drag performances that have made his name on the New York stage.

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