Theatre Droppings: A Re-enactment

Well, I finally got back to Wayside Theatre this week, to attend a matinee of their current offering. I am deeply disappointed in myself that I did not get out there for their previous production, The Gin Game, which starred two of my favorite actors of...um... mature years, James Laster and Faith Potts. I lost track of their run, and missed the whole thing. I like The Gin Game (I saw stage legend Julie Harris and stage ham Charles Durning play it years ago), and I see that cranky male role in my future.

Anyhoo, I did not want to miss Wayside's current show, which carries the informative title of Robert E. Lee and John Brown: Lighting the Fuse. Well, that gives us some of the exposition right there: we know going in that we will be getting some Civil War history. Actually, pre-Civil War history, but that's just nitpicking. The play details the abolitionist raid perpetrated by Brown on the little town of Harpers Ferry, VA, just a few years before some Confederate rebels fired cannon balls onto Fort Sumter and ignited the Civil War.

The playwright here is Warner Crocker, who is also Wayside's artistic director; he directs the vast majority of the theatre's shows, and hires all the actors. He has written the best play in the English language, better than Hamlet and even The Odd Couple. Do you doubt my sincerity? Anyway, Warner makes a good case that the raid he is dramatizing lights the fuse which will soon explode into the War Between the States. I don't remember studying this event, which is odd for a number of reasons. I spent all but one year of my public schooling in Georgia, whose curriculum included substantial emphasis on the history of the Civil War. Maybe I was out sick the day we covered the John Brown Raid, who knows? But my lack of background knowledge actually enhanced my interest in this story, which is told effectively by a cast of men who play about a hundred characters.

The stars of the show are two very talented actors, John Alcott and John Dow (except they really aren't the stars; the ensemble surrounding them tells more of the story). Alcott is a Chicago based actor who has appeared at Wayside many times over the years. We spent a bit of social time together quite a while ago, when he claims I passed out at a party, from too many martinis. Not true, I was just resting my eyes. I particularly remember John's lovely, low-keyed work as Uncle Adolf in Last Night of the Ballyhoo, in which he dominated the stage from his easy chair. In this current offering, he dominates the stage with passionate fanaticism and lots of facial hair.

I don't know John Alcott very well, but he was quite complementary of my work in Man of La Mancha, so of course he is now my best friend.

John Dow, who is playing Robert E. Lee, is one of my DC compatriots. We have done many staged readings together, in addition to appearing in full productions of Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men (where we shared an interest in frozen grapes) and Lee Blessing's Thief River (in which he played me, twenty years later. Never mind, it's too difficult to explain...).

These two Johns are very effective as John Brown and Robert E. Lee, and their lone scene together is the linchpin of the play. The production is peopled with a wide range of folks, including one who may be the most famous American slave in history. No, I don't mean Toby from Roots or Mammy from Gone With the Wind, I mean Frederick Douglass, who escaped from slavery and became a high-profile abolitionist. Stephen Seales plays the role here, and his well-reasoned arguments with the hot-headed John Brown create lots of dramatic fire.

But as I mentioned, there are hundreds and hundreds of other characters in this play, from raiders to soldiers to militiamen to politicians to slaves (even the president shows up). They are all played by Wayside's intern company, plus a local hire or two. These actors are refugees from La Mancha, so I had some fun watching these familiar faces put their own particular spin on each character. A special shout-out has to go to Vaughn Irving (I've written about this kid before), who delivers a whole lot of words while he's dying, and is pretty cute in a 4-second role as the President's Clerk. Vaughn has worked long and hard at Wayside and elsewhere, and must be feeling proud that this show's program is the first in which his name appears with an asterisk. (It denotes his new Equity status; welcome to the profession, Vaughn, now get out your checkbook, your dues are due.)

This show has particular resonance in the Wayside territory, as the raid happened nearby, and this part of the Shenandoah Valley is lousy with Civil War re-enactors. I confess I don't understand this phenomenon, but who am I to judge? There are many folks out there who enjoy dressing up in Civil War garb (I was warned to call it "attire," rather than "costumes"), and some of them have been coming to see the show all decked out (did I hear some even brought their guns? I hope they checked them at the box office). Throughout the year, this area of Virginia hosts actual re-enactments of the various local battles, with otherwise normal people dressing up in their "attire" and pretending to fight the battles again. At my matinee, there was one tall teenager dressed in the gray hat and coat of the Confederate Army (his pants must have been at the cleaners, as he was wearing sweatpants. But they were gray...).

As I confessed, I don't quite understand the region's giddy celebration of such a bitter period of their history. I don't know if there is any kind of an African-American population in the area, but if there is, I doubt they spend much time dressing up in slave garb and walking Main Street with chains around their ankles.

Well, Lighting the Fuse is being revived at Wayside to coincide with the John Brown Raid's sesquicentennial, which is a word I cannot pronounce but I know it means 150th anniversary. Brown does not look like much of a hero to me, though his motive to end slavery was pure. Today we would call him a terrorist, or at least an insurgent. Warner does a nice job of humanizing both John Brown and Robert E. Lee, who was summoned to clean up the mess Brown caused. Brown was executed (spoiler alert!), but the encounter helped Lee decide to lead the Confederate forces in the war which was sparked by this brief event.

Our Ladies

I had my dear friend Claudia with me for most of the last week. She is my oldest friend; we met in high school back in the middle ages. When I left Los Angeles to attend grad school, she flew out to visit me several times, and has continued that routine since I landed in DC. Usually, she can hook it into a business trip (she works in the health insurance industry, but we don't spread that around, as we don't want her attacked on the street).


We always have a terrific time together, and this week was no exception. She had to work during the day, but we had plenty of private time in which to catch up. We sat front row center at Dirty Blonde one night (I wrote about that show here), and we caught a Saturday matinee of A Piece of My Heart at American Century Theatre. We were quite caught up in that story of the women who served in the Vietnamese War. We also had time for a movie (Julie and Julia, which we loved. I enjoyed pointing out DC's own Helen Carey in one of the supporting roles) and we indulged in our favorite pastime, eating, with several meals out, several meals in, and much grazing in between.



Claudia and I have always had an easy relationship, dating back to our first meeting in our high school drama class. She was a topnotch stage clown back then, but ultimately gave up acting to, you know, have a life. I doubt she regrets that decision, but I may have detected a little bit of wistfulness, a little bit of wondering "what if...?" while we watched an old video of one of her stage successes.



Claudia's visit started me thinking about how lucky I have been with the ladies in my life. With rare exception, the best friends I have had over the years have been women, and always straight women at that. This is not an unusual occurrence with men in my tribe. I imagine if you asked any gay man, of almost any age, to list ten life-long friends, the majority would be straight women. I've been so lucky to have my ladies in my life; a few, like Claudia and Judy (I wrote more about our history here) have remained constant influences, while others may have drifted away over the years. But I am thankful to them all: to Janie, who helped me through the first years of college, to Mindi, who helped me through the first years of grad school, to Jenny, who shared my post-collegiate years, to Bobbi, who awakened my artistic life, and to Barbara and Deborah, who remain with me today.



I'm not the first one to notice the phenomenon of the gay man's close friendship with the straight woman. Whole books have been written about it. I bet Michelangelo and Da Vinci had their gal pals, and any thought of Noel Coward will soon be followed by a thought of Gertrude Lawrence. These are intensely important relationships to the gay man, which makes it doubly grotesque that a nasty nickname was given to our ladies back in the 70s. I have never used the epithet, and won't repeat it here (it rhymes with Flag Tag), and I find it astonishing that the very men who depend so much on their straight female friends would demean them with this ugly label.



Thankfully, you don't hear the term much these days. But the tradition of the gay male-straight female friendship remains in full force. The younger gents in my tribe continue to enjoy such relationships. I wish I knew how to upload and share a video of my Claud, perhaps the song with which she stole the video we watched last week. But I don't. I have, though, run across a very sweet little video posted by one of the young actors with whom I worked this summer. Dave is working at Wayside Theatre this season, and on one of his days off, he reunited with one of his great friends. On a lark, they made this stop-action video together; it perfectly sums up the way I feel about my ladies. I have a hunch we all feel the same.

Where would we be without them?

Theatre Droppings: A Dirty Blonde, and a Dirtier Gray

My friend Claudia was visiting last week, and I took her out to Signature to see their hit production of Dirty Blonde. This script has been around a while, and the original production visited the Kennedy Center years ago, with its author, Claudia Shear, in the title role. At the Sig, Emily Skinner is playing the dual roles of Mae West and Jo, a struggling actress who has an obsession with her. I enjoyed Skinner immensely several years ago, when she costarred in The Witches of Eastwick, and allowed herself to be harnessed and hoisted over the audience in a pretty nifty bit of stagecraft.

In Dirty Blonde, all the stagecraft comes organically, directly from the actors, and is even more impressive. Skinner is spectacular in her impersonation of West; she takes her bigger-than-life personality through decades of the star's career, and is particularly poignant in the sequences in which Mae is in her 80s. She is supported by two of the busiest character actors in DC, J. Fred Shiffman and Hugh Nees, both of whom are terrific in a variety of roles. I've admired Shiffman's work for years, and Hugh, who is a slight acquaintance of mine, has been equally enjoyable in theatres all over town. In particular, Fred is effective as West's abandoned husband, and Hugh gets the challenge of playing a lonely librarian with a pretty unique fetish. I bet Hugh does not get the chance to play the romantic lead very often, but in Dirty Blonde, he gets to meet, woo, and win the girl. And wear a Hello, Dolly gown while doing it.

The show is directed by Jeremy Skidmore, with whom I worked in Thief River (he was a member of that cast; nowadays, he is one of the most in-demand directors in town). This play is pleasantly skitzo, moving swiftly between the biographical tale of Mae West's rise (and decline), and the lovely story of an actress's modern-day struggles. It was fun to learn more about West, whom I recall only from her bizarre Sextette years (did you know she was offered the role of Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard? She was offended, insisting she was too young!). But I really enjoyed the present day scenes in which our two unlikely lovebirds begin their offbeat romance. Not that there is a moment of sentimentality in this script, there isn't. Skinner is outstanding in these tentative love scenes, but she may be most memorable playing the octogenarian Mae, wobbly on her feet and shaky of voice, refusing to accept the limitations of her advanced age.

Up at Round House Theatre in Bethesda, there is another character who is dealing with advancing age. He looks better than Mae West, but is a good bit creepier. The Picture of Dorian Gray is Oscar Wilde's story of narcissism and obsession with youth. At Round House, it has become Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa's story of pathological evil and obsession with low body fat (seriously, I doubt leading man Roderick Hill could pinch his skin with a pair of pliers).

This adaptation has moved the action to the 1980s and beyond, and I found it engrossing and yes, a bit titillating, too. Hey, if you had a leading actor who was built like that, wouldn't you put him in various stages of undress throughout the play? Playwright Aguirre-Sacasa has taken the subtle homoerotic undertone of the original, and...um...enhanced it. Director Blake Robison is using my buddy Clinton Brandhagen (above) as the tortured artist obsessed with our hero (well, he's not really a hero, is he? Anti-hero?). Clinton was one of my Mikeys in my last engagement with Shear Madness a year or so ago, and as such, gives a dynamite performance here (I feel very proprietary about everyone I ever worked with in Shear Madness; what's that about?).


In keeping with the phenomenon mentioned in these pages many times (that my friends are always standouts in their shows), it comes as no surprise to me that Joel Ganz (who was an intern in South Carolina the season I did several shows down there) nails two key characters. And looks great in those tighty whities, too. Also, Tim Pabon does a nice job with a variety of ancillary characters (Tim was a student of mine in a movement workshop years ago; I take no credit for his acting ability, which is considerable).

But you know who else does a great job? Sean Dugan, a man I have never met nor even seen before, playing Dorian Gray's best friend. I enjoyed his work in every scene, including his awkwardly written death. Yes, I have to go back to the playwright here. As I said, I was thoroughly engrossed in the story for about two thirds of the show. However, the final third descended into melodrama (and not the good kind) with a gruesome dollop of grand guignol (and not the grand kind). The quick series of murders and suicides during this last sequence pulled me out of the play, and when the ghosts all came back in a hugely graphic way, well, I was done. And that was a shame. The actors never gave up, and played the final scenes of the play with full commitment, which is to be commended. But there is only so much you can do with a play which starts out as an intense psychological thriller but turns into a bloody slasher flick. And I wish that portrait would have continued to subtly reflect the immorality of its subject, rather than becoming a maniacal caricature (the Post's critic, who disliked this show from start to finish, called that portrait the Bride of Chucky).

I hope Aguirre-Sacasa revisits the final 40 minutes or so of his adaptation, because, at least from my seat, it derailed a really promising production. And it reminds the viewer that the playwright's day job is writing comic books.

Friday Dance Party: "Put Your Lips Together and Blow"

The clip below is pretty campy by today's standards, but let's deal with that in a moment. The star of this week's Dance Party is Lauren Bacall, one of the last superstars of the Golden Age of the Studio System left standing. Along with so many others from her milieu, she found her film career drying up once the studios lost creative power and independent productions took hold. Film stars like Bacall were known for their very specific personas; I can't think of very many who were actually versatile actors. As such, they became irrelevant to the filmmakers of the late 60s and 70s; nobody wanted an actor to overshadow their project with a larger-than-life reputation. So, those dinosaurs were relegated to television appearances (remember Fred Astaire as Richard Wagner's dad in It Takes a Thief? Charming!) or the occasional big-budget disaster epic which required recognizable names to buoy the ludicrous plots (remember Fred Astaire in Towering Inferno? Charming!)

Bacall was one of the youngest of the stars of the Golden Age (she was a tender 19 when she debuted in To Have and Have Not), and once her film opportunities shrank, she chose a different path for her career: Broadway. Her performance in Cactus Flower was well-received, then her unlikely performances in two subsequent shows cemented her reputation as a musical theatre diva. In 1980, she headlined the Kander and Ebb musical Woman of the Year, adapted from the old Hepburn/Tracy movie, and won a Tony for her work. It was no surprise at that point that Bacall could carry a big musical, as 9 years earlier, she had turned a fair-to-middlin' musical into a smash with her starry performance.

Applause was also based on a well-loved film, the Bette Davis starrer, All About Eve. The flamboyant role of Margo Channing became an iconic one in Davis's hands, and this central role in the musical required a personality equally outsized. Bacall provided that personality, and by the sheer force of that dynamism, turned in a memorable performance. The woman can barely carry a tune, but she carried the score with panache. That score, and the book surrounding it, are pretty standard fare (the music team of Strause and Adams provided a much brighter effort with their earlier smash, Bye Bye Birdie), and without a personality as strong as Bacall's, the musical falls a bit flat. For that reason, attempts to revive the thing have been stymied. In a neat bit of stunt casting, Ann Baxter, who had played the two-faced Eve Harrington in the original film, took over the central role from Bacall in the original production of Applause. There was no national tour, though the Encores series in New York presented a concert version in 2008, with the terrific Christine Ebersole in the lead. An effort for a major revival starring Stephanie Powers toured the country in 1996, but failed to make it to Broadway.

I'm not sure there is a star out there today with the over-the-top panache necessary to make Applause work. The music, as I said, is serviceable at best (you can judge for yourself in the clip below), though Strause and Adams provided one huge show stopper in the title number. That song, introduced by Bonnie Franklin, became a show business anthem.

The clip below shows off Bacall's strengths and weaknesses. She is clearly no singer, though her pitch problems don't seem to matter. At the age of almost 50, she flings herself into this dance number in a pretty abandoned way. This is from a television production of Applause which aired a year or so after the stage show closed. As a network program, some adjustments were made (TV star Larry Hagman replaced original stage star Len Cariou, for example). The sequence here takes place in a gay bar, though there is no direct mention of the fact. One wonders if Mr and Mrs America even noticed that it's filled only with men, and pretty flamboyant ones at that. All notice of homosexuality was sanitized for the television audience, including the over-the-top antics of Margo's dresser Duane, who is a larger presence in the stage version. The scenic designers slipped one past the censors: the neon letters which form the backdrop of the bar seem to be random, but actually spell out "Gay Power."

For this week's dance party, please enjoy Lauren Bacall hamming it up in the campy clip:
 

Lauren Bacall is still going strong, for her age, and continues to work. She has won many prestige awards throughout her long career, including Lifetime Achievement Awards in Scandinavia, the National Book Award for her memoir, and a Kennedy Center Honor in 1997. Surprisingly, she has earned only one Oscar nomination, also in 1997, for The Mirror Has Two Faces; she lost the award to Juliet Binoche in that snorefest The English Patient. More recently, she played herself in a wicked send-up of Hollywood excess, when she was mugged by one of The Sopranos. Bacall turned 85 on Wednesday, and will be receiving an honorary Oscar during next year's awards.

Mary Travers

1936-2009

She was born in Kentucky but raised in Greenwich Village, where she acquired her taste for folk music. In her early career, she worked as back-up singer for various folk groups, including the Song Swappers, with folk legend Pete Seeger (he lived in her parents' building). She recorded an album with Seeger, and appeared at Carnegie Hall with him as well. She made an unlikely Broadway appearance as part of a folk troop in The Next President, starring Mort Sahl, in 1958. By 1961, Travers had joined with Peter Yarrow and Noel Paul Stookey, and her career took off.

Peter, Paul, and Mary provided numerous folk hits throughout the 60s, and helped launch Bob Dylan's career when they recorded his "Blowin' in the Wind." The song became an anthem for the civil rights movement, a cause in which Travers strongly believed; she marched with Martin Luther King in Selma, and performed during the 1963 March on Washington.

The group's hits included "Lemon Tree," "If I Had a Hammer," and "Puff, the Magic Dragon" (the belief that the latter song is about marijuana has long-since been debunked by the group). Peter, Paul, and Mary continued to record successfully once the folk-rock movement began (a genre which Travers in particular despised). Their hit "I Dig Rock and Roll Music" was a parody of the reigning royalty of folk-rock at the time, The Mamas and the Papas. In 1969, they recorded a song written by John Denver, one which has always held significance in my life. More on that in a mo'.

Once Peter, Paul, and Mary broke up, each striking out on their own, Mary dabbled a bit with acting. Cabaret artist Ken Page tells the story of his young internship with a summer stock group in St. Louis, in a production of South Pacific starring Mary Travers. He admits she was not much of an actress, but the biggest problem was her hair. She was adamant that she would not cut her signature long, straight hair (with bangs); her refusal caused a whole lot of trouble with "I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair." Her character actually washes her hair during the number, which was logistically impossible with Travers's very long locks. Page remembers that the song became too funny to watch, as Mary plopped a few shampoo suds on the very top of her head and called it a day.

Anyway, back to my favorite P,P,& M tune. "Leaving on a Jet Plane" has been recorded countless times, but the Peter, Paul, and Mary version remains my favorite. It was that version which haunted me the spring and summer of 1973, when my family moved from Georgia to California. It was the summer between my junior and senior year in high school, and I was miserable. My Atlanta classmates and I had gone on a European trip at the end of our junior year (in fact, we planned it for at least a year in advance), and during the three weeks I was abroad, my family relocated from East to West. When our group changed planes in New York on the way home, I had to say goodbye to the friends with whom I had grown up, and get on a plane to Los Angeles alone. (This was the moment I met George Carlin; I wrote about that incident here.)

"Leaving on a Jet Plane" was just too perfectly sad and sentimental for me to forget at the time, and the song became one of my all-time favorite pieces of music. There's a swell clip out there of Cass Elliot and John Denver singing it, but because this page is about Mary Travers (and me), please enjoy this one instead. It shows why I think Peter, Paul, and Mary's interpretation of the song remains the best:

Mary Travers died this week after a long battle with leukemia. She was 72.