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July 2007
Wendell’s ($15) weekend pick: ‘Emergen-SEE!’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
For the final weekend of the National Black Arts Festival, True Colors Theatre has brought back Daniel Beaty’s amazing one-man performance piece, “Emergen-SEE!” — which imagines a mind-blowing New York day in which a slave ship magically appears in front of the Statue of Liberty.
A fantastical voyage that exposes the personal and political baggage of a young African-American slam poet, it’s a tour-de-force evening of theater. In the tradition of Anna Deavere Smith, Beaty’s virtuosic performance style requires him to re-invent himself with split-second timing — playing an entire family, a neighborhood and all the eyewitnesses to an apocalyptic event that will ultimately be as healing as it is tumultuous.
Beaty’s main character, Rodney, is trying to make it to a poetry competition when he realizes his father has climbed to the top of the ship. Uh-oh. Time to call in the troops.
Soon we meet Rodney’s gay brother; his brother’s transvestite hustler friend; neighborhood denizens; talking heads and so on. Like a really dexterous deejay, Beaty keeps several turntables revolving at once: seguing back and forth between the poetry slam and the news story unfolding in the harbor.
Referencing everything from Shakespeare to the City of Bones in August Wilson’s “Gem of the Ocean,” Beaty’s characters explain how African-Americans remain stigmatized, inwardly and socially, some two centuries after the Middle Passage. “You can have a Ph.D. and a six-figure income and still be a slave,” says one character.
Another describes those rare, fleeting moments when he’s not defined by skin color. “I’m not thinking about being black. I’m just thinking about being me,” he says, painting an image of a perfect day in the park or afternoon at the mall. “But it seems like somebody always remembers.” At Thursday night’s opening, I heard audience members gasp in recognition of such an experience.
As the story twists on, we are told that Rodney’s Shakespearean scholar-father hasn’t been the same since the young man’s mother was murdered by a drug addict. While The Rev. Al Sharpton demands that the slave ship be turned into a kind of memorial-museum, Oprah calls the event a “full-circle a-ha moment,” and Rodney’s family is born again through a soul-cleansing emotional baptism.
Whew! There’s a lot going on here.
But if Beaty sometimes gets lost in the sweeping urban tapestry that he conjures, he still manages to acquit himself as a supremely talented playwright and performer. Directed by Kenny Leon and first seen at New York’s Public Theater, “Emergen-SEE!” is an astonishing work of art that’s as funny and entertaining as it is smart and socially relevant.
Don’t let the National Black Arts Festival sail away before you can see it.
Through Sunday. $15. True Colors Theatre production at the Alliance Theatre. 404-733-5000. woodruffcentertickets.org/center/calendar/nbaf.aspx
Wanna be a Suzi judge?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Suzi Bass Awards, Atlanta’s professional theater honors, is looking for volunteer judges. You’ll need to be a theater professional to qualify. But if you get picked, you’ll get to see shows for free, and participate in the nominating process.
(If you don’t know about the Suzis, they are Atlanta’s answer to the Tonys, and as far as I’m concerned, the program is one of the best things to happen on the local theater scene in a long time.)
According to Suzi official Deadra Moore, applicants should have experience in the theater (as an artist, playwright, administrator or long-term audience member); a degree in theater or a related field; a positon as a theater educator, or some combination of the above.
No slackers allowed. It’s a yearlong commitment. Three years max. And you need to hurry. Judges are needed for the new term starting Aug. 1.
Nominations for this year’s Suzi Awards will be announced Sept. 10. The Suzis will be handed out Nov. 5.
Meanwhile, you can support the Suzis by buying a $20 raffle ticket to win two first-class Delta tickets for international travel. It’s a $6,000 value, and Suzi is ready when you are.
For information, go to suziawards.org
Or, to inquire about being a Suzi judge, send an email to SuziAwards@comcast.net.
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Kenny Leon goes on for ailing actor
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
One minute Kenny Leon is in New York striking a deal for his next Broadway show, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.”
The next minute he’s back in Atlanta going on for an ailing actor.
According to True Colors Theatre publicist Jenny Costantino, Leon stepped in as Blue Haven for E. Roger Mitchell in “Ceremonies in Dark Old Men” on Friday night. The Broadway director and True Colors artistic chief will also perform at the Saturday matinee, and possibly Saturday night. Costantino said that Mayor Shirley Franklin was on the front row and was thrilled by Leon’s pinch-hitting.
If you haven’t seen “Ceremonies,” you should. Glynn Turman, who played Travis in the original 1959 cast of Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun,” gives one of the year’s best performances. Turman was 12 when he made his Broadway debut in “Raisin.” He’s since worked on TV in “A Different World” and plays Mayor Clarence Royce on the HBO cult hit “The Wire.”
You’ll be reading more about him in the AJC next week.
Here’s my ranking of the top NBAF shows:
1) “Dreamgirls”
2) “Ceremonies in Dark Old Men”
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‘Dreamgirls’ will give you goosebumps
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
THEATER REVIEW “Dreamgirls” Grade: A Through July 29. 20-$69. Theater of the Stars, Fox Theatre, 660 Peachtree St. N.E., Midtown. 404-817-8700; www.ticketmaster.com. The verdict: A powerhouse performance by Holliday.
You’re going to love her.
In a triumphant return, Jennifer Holliday is back at the Fox Theatre in the bouffant wigs and flowing chiffon of “Dreamgirls” — playing Effie White — the put upon, cheated on, self-sacrificing leader of a Motown girl group.
Winner of a Tony Award for her dynamic performance in Michael Bennett’s 1981 musical, Holliday has maintained an inseparable, highly public and — by her own admission — not always healthy relationship with the notoriously prickly, supremely talented Effie.
While many an actress would have simply gotten too tired or too old for the role, the 46-year-old diva has clung to the fictional character as if she were her own personal property, making no bones about her dissatisfaction with the movie that won an Academy Award for “new Effie” Jennifer Hudson earlier this year.
But to see Holliday reclaim her ownership of this emotional juggernaut in this first-rate new Theatre of the Stars production is to understand why she and Effie share the same blood and the same mind.
To hear her belt and bulldoze her way through her signature anthem, “And I Am Telling You I Am Not Going,” is a theatrical experience of the highest order. This is one for the history books, folks, a moment that stops time like Ethel Merman doing “Rose’s Turn” or Judy Garland singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”
This is not to say that Effie’s meltdown is the sole virtue of director Rajendra Ramoon Maharaj’s production, which opened Friday night as part of the National Black Arts Festival. Nor that everything about the three-hour show is as spiffy as a new Cadillac car.
Some of the performances take a while to pay off, while others — like Eugene Fleming’s scorching take on egomaniacal lady’s man James Thunder Early — strike gold immediately. Fleming’s voice can sizzle and scratch like James Brown’s, then dip, comically, to the lowest end of the bass register (“Steppin’ to the Bad Side”). The actor is also an agile comedian; check out the way his James has to struggle to suppress his bawdy mannerisms when the Dreamettes make their Miami debut.
So what about the other Dreamgirls?
Well, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a more glamorous Deena than former EnVogue member Cindy Herron-Braggs, or a more likeable and entertaining Lorrell than Brandi Chavonne Massey. (Deena is the one who replaces Effie, both as the Dreamettes’ lead singer and manager Curtis’ love interest; Lorrell is the woman who finds herself increasingly uncomfortable as James’ mistress.)
In Act II’s Vogue magazine shoot, Herron-Braggs strikes a slinky, white-gloved pose worthy of Diana Ross — dressed to the nines in designer Theoni V. Aldredge’s ‘70s silhouettes and sophisticated hats. (Robin Wagner’s sets, by the way, are clean and inobstrusive facsimiles of the originals, and when they are reduced to simple curtains of fabric, Ken Billington’s lighting turns them into pure luminescent magic.)
As for the men in Effie’s life, brother C.C. (Destan Owens) has a soft, creamy voice and a presence that becomes more affecting as the night moves on. But David Jennings’ take on Curtis is stiff and unwieldy, even though the actor (last seen inAtlanta in the Alliance Theatre’s “Sister Act”) has an impeccable sound (“When I First Saw You”).
Some will say that Holliday looks gawky and uncomfortable at times. Her posture is poor, yes, but she’s creating a new Effie who takes time to find her voice and her place in the politics of the group. By the time Effie re-emerges with her new song, “One Night Only,” she’s become a stylized cabaret chanteuse who enunciates every syllable with authority. Here’s a woman who refuses to remain in the background, or be shunted aside by the competition.
In a world that too often judges by physical appearance and rewards sexual attractiveness over raw talent, Effie remains an enduring symbol of survival. Productions of Tom Eyen and Henry Krieger’s modern classic will come and go, but Jennifer Holliday will remain the definitive Effie.
‘The Bluest Eye’ @ Horizon
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
THEATER REVIEW “The Bluest Eye” Grade: B- 8 p.m. Wednesdays-Fridays. 8:30 p.m. Saturdays. 5 p.m. Fridays. Through Sept. 2. $20-$25. Horizon Theatre, 1083 Austin Ave., Little Five Points. 404-584-7450, horizontheatre.com.
The verdict: Morrison classic makes a respectable transition from page to stage.
Pecola Breedlove is a memorable character, as anyone who has read Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” will tell you. Her essential tragedy is her persistent belief in her own ugliness, a condition that causes her to wish for a kind of genetic intervention.
“Each night, without fail, she prayed for blue eyes,” Morrison writes of the 11-year-old girl, who is the subject of scorn and abuse from nearly everyone she encounters, including her own parents.
Among the problems with Morrison’s lush and poetic first novel is that it has three beginnings. It also gives away the ending right from the start.
Just in time for the National Black Arts Festival, playwright Lydia R. Diamond’s fastidiously faithful stage treatment of the Nobel Prize winner’s beloved little book has arrived at Horizon Theatre, and no one seems to mind that Diamond has failed to tidy up the novel’s ever-shifting point of view or capitalize on Morrison’s nakedly dancing dialogue.
It would be unfair to say that director Thomas W. Jones II’s staging is poorly done. It’s not. But the heavily populated show is busy, and the contemporary music is all wrong for a story set in the 1940s. This, however, is not grounds for dismissal. For Morrison’s characters are so indelibly sculpted here, their stories such a whirlwind of sadness and music, that the show somehow manages to ring true.
Truly, bluely.
Like raindrops falling on a scorching hot roof, Morrison’s feverish language almost evaporates in a cloud of plot and personalities. Jones seems determined to make this show clock in at two hours, and by Jove he makes it at warp speed.
Here is the set. It is very spare. Here are the actresses. They are very pretty. Here is Pecola’s Mommy and Daddy. They are not very nice. Here are her friends. Aren’t they cute? Play, everyone, play. Is it time to go home yet? Yes, it is time.
The good news is that 11-year-old Pecola is played by Joaquina Kalukango, a mesmerizing young actress who recently graduated Tri-Cities High School and is headed to the Juilliard School. Keep your eyes peeled for Kalukango. She’s the real deal.
Carol Mitchell-Leon and Neal Hazard are quite acceptable as Pecola’s parents, Cholly and Polly. Their fight scene — which Morrison so exactingly choreographs in the novel — is a classic. Hazard’s interpretation of Cholly is so incisive that his horrific crime becomes understandable: The man is numb with self-loathing.
As the Mama of Pecola’s friends Claudia (Bobbi Lynne Scott) and Frieda (Jessica Frances Dukes), Veronica Byrd gives a deliciously sassy approximation of a high-strutting, feather-ruffling mother hen. This is the one character who can be fully over-the-top and still authentic. Her comedic presence is mandatory.
In the end, here’s what matters: Diamond could have done better by “The Bluest Eye.” But Horizon probably could not have done much better by Diamond. “The Bluest Eye” is flawed, but even under the bright lights of theater, it’s still a gem. The National Black Arts Festival should be proud to wear it.
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Just browsing: Essential Theatre Festival
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Year after year, Peter Hardy’s Essential Theatre Festival keeps plugging along. Hardy’s mission is to produce three new-to-Atlanta plays, including a world premiere selected from a competition open only to Georgia writers.
The 2007 winner is Jean Sterrett’s “Fix Me So I Can Stand,” featuring Spencer Stephens as an African-American man who is wrongly blamed for a double murder during the 1970s. Happily, one of last year’s honorees, Larry Larson and Eddie Levi Lee’s “Charm School,” recently got a well-received production at Horizon Theatre.
The festival itself is a sweet idea, more admirable in design, generally, than execution. So when the director’s cell phone rings during his curtain speech, you can’t help but twitter when he says: “Essential Theatre. No, we didn’t win the regional Tony Award. That was the Alliance.”
Good one.
Cheap shots aside, Hardy sometimes picks screamers that no one else in town will touch. “Betty’s Summer Vacation” by Christopher Durang. David and Amy Sedaris’ “The Book of Liz.” Karen Wurl’s backstage farce “Miss Macbeth.”
Too bad, then, that this year’s funny play — a “Christmas Carol” send-up by Durang called “Mrs. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge”— is possessed of so little brilliance. Hardy’s flimsy, stand-and-mug staging makes the Dickens parody feel like community theater, although this approach may be intentional, given that the source material is often treated as such.
Durang’s riff is that Mrs. Cratchit is more a Gladys Kravitz-meets-Leona Helmsley than a dutifully invisible 19th century hausfrau. Johanna Linden nails the vitriolic boil of this overburdened mother, and Jeffrey C. Zwartjes’ Mr. Cratchit is a wonderfully chirpy foil.
Alex Van’s lispy Scrooge debunks preconceptions of the character’s irascibility, but his performance is a dud. What redeems here are the outlandish transformations of Topher Payne and Bobby Labartino, particularly the latter’s riotous take on Mr. Fezziwig, as an over-the-top, falling-down-drunk clown in a carrot-top wig.
For another festival entry called “Night Travels,” Hardy has conceived an evening of one-act meditations on love and loss, dreams and journeys. The four pieces are wildly uneven, the choreography hokey, but the experience is likely to stick with you like an unsolved mystery or a partly remembered dream.
Karen Wurl’s “Movies,” a nervous confessional by a country woman who is seduced by a video-store cashier, comes alive through the terrific acting of Laurie Beasley, who pops up again in Charlotte Fleck’s haunting final story, “Night Travels.”
Fleck’s poetry is rough around the edges. But the playwright has a gift for capturing the blurry space between consciousness and sleep. By train, plane and boat, three women move across time and space. But their souls seem to pull them in other directions, as if they are following their own maps, charting their own internal navigations. With memories of their mothers as beacons, the characters glide over disturbances and bumps toward a new morning.
This is a project that deserves further development.
Through Sunday. $10-$40. 7 Stages, 1005 Euclid Ave., Little Five Points. 404-523-7647; essentialtheatre.com
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NEWS: Kenny Leon to direct ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner’ on Broadway
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Atlanta director Kenny Leon has scored another Broadway show.
This time, it’s a new adaptation of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” based on the 1967 film starring Sidney Poitier, Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in his final performance.
At Leon’s suggestion, producer Jeffrey Finn (“On Golden Pond”), has tapped Todd Kreidler, August Wilson’s dramaturg and protege, to adapt the screenplay for the stage.
The show is expected to open in fall 2008.
Leon said it was too early to talk about casting. But “I think it lends itself to a couple of major stars’ being involved,” he said. “I think people will be pretty excited about who we line up.”
“I’ve got about two months to put a first draft together,” Kreidler said. Leon’s associate artistic director at Atlanta-based True Colors Theatre, Kreidler was Wilson’s dramaturg on the master dramatist’s final three plays on Broadway: “King Hedley II,” “Gem of the Ocean” and “Radio Golf.”
Leon’s previous Broadway credits include “Raisin in the Sun,” “Gem” and “Radio Golf.” He recently dropped out of another Broadway endeavor, an African-American version of Tennessee Williams’ “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” because of creative differences with the producer.
“Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” is the story of an affluent young white woman who brings her fiance home to meet her parents in San Francisco. Because her love interest is African-American, the movie was controversial in its time.
Hepburn and Rose won Oscars for their work, which was released after Tracy’s death.
Kreidler said the piece will resonate with audiences at a time when gay marriage is part of the national debate and marrying across some cultures is still a hot topic. He said his job is to preserve the film’s iconic, shoe-dropping moments.
NEWS: Sean Daniels lands in Louisville
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sean Daniels has entered the ATL.
No, no. Not That. The ambitious co-founder of Dad’s Garage, the outlandish comedy concern in Inman Park, hasn’t taken up residence again in Atlanta, the city that claimed him and his beer buckets from 1995-2004.
After three seasons at the California Shakespeare Theatre outside San Francisco, the 34-year-old director has been scooped by Actors Theatre of Louisville (ATL), where he will work as associate artistic director for head honcho Marc Masterson.
“I think I just knew my heart wasn’t into doing Shakespeare for every show all season long for the rest of my life,” Daniels said, taking a gentle dig at his old home theater’s classical repertory.
“Actors is one of the great theaters in the country, and if you want to do new plays, there’s really nothing like the Humana Festival.”
Can’t argue with that.
Founded by Jon Jory in 1976, the Humana Festival of New American Plays has produced more than 300 new scripts, won a slew of awards (including three Pulitzer Prizes) and is the theater world’s equivalent of the Sundance Film Festival.
At the 2007 fest, for example, Alliance Theatre artistic chief Susan V. Booth directed Atlanta playwright Ken Weitzman’s “The As If Body Loop,” and Bill Fennelly (late of Actor’s Express) was so hot for Carlos Murillo’s “dark play or stories for boys” and Sherry Kramer’s “When Something Wonderful Ends” that he programmed ‘em both.
Daniels says that Masterson was a “big fan” of Dad’s Garage and has been a big-brother-like mentor for four years. “He knows exactly what he is getting,” Daniels quips.
At Cal Shakes, Daniels co-directed the two-part musical “The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby,” which won the Bay Area Critics Circle Award for best direction and production of the 2005 season. He says the Dickens classics were the best attended shows in the theater’s history.
His personal interest at Actors Theatre, he says, will be comedy. No surprise, considering he’s the man who staged “Cannibal! The Musical” and “Carrie White: The Musical” at Dad’s.
“Nobody writes the funny anymore for the American theater,” Daniels says. And if they do, they get hired by TV.
Daniels cites Rolin Jones — a Yale School of Drama graduate whose “The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow” was a 2006 Pulitzer Prize finalist — as an example.
Jones, who penned Dad’s Garage’s recent roller-derby play “The Jammer,” has been hired to write for Showtime’s “Weeds.”
“We’d love to get him to do more things here [at Humana],” Daniels says. “Now with ‘Weeds,’ that’s just not going to happen.”
Meanwhile, Daniels says he’s liking Louisville, even though he left his heart in San Francisco. (His wife, Madeleine Oldham, is literary manager of prestigious Berkeley Repertory Theatre.)
“It reminds me a lot of Atlanta because it has that same feeling of a small blue city in a big red state.”
“In the Bay Area, people can be so boring because everyone agrees. It’s just a matter of who can be more liberal than who.”
“Nobody does anything funny and nobody makes any good barbecue.”
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WENDELL’S WEEKEND PICK
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
THEATER REVIEW “Ceremonies in Dark Old Men” Grade: A-
8 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays; 2:30 p.m. Sundays; 2:30 p.m. July 21, 28. Extended through Aug. 19. $25-$29. True Colors Theatre, Balzer Theater at Herren’s, 84 Luckie St. N.W.. 678-528-1500, truecolorstheatrecompany.com.
The verdict: A first-rate revival of a classic.
Set in a Harlem barbershop in the 1950s, Lonne Elder III’s “Ceremonies in Dark Old Men” cuts like a razor and stings like a shot of corn whiskey rolling over the back of the throat.
And you thought this was just a nostalgia-soaked tale about a couple of old geezers with nothing better to do than play checkers and reminisce about their youthful exploits.
Though Elder’s 1969 play follows an essentially comic path, the story of former vaudevillian Russell B. Parker and his failed barbershop is really a bristling study of the collapse of the American dream, as evidenced by one particularly dysfunctional family. When Parker’s bossy, hard-working daughter threatens to pull the plug on her father and two unemployed brothers, the menfolk cook up a money-making scheme that will end in tragedy.
First produced by New York’s legendary Negro Ensemble Company, “Ceremonies” is getting a stunning revival by Kenny Leon’s True Colors Theatre for the National Black Arts Festival. Marvelously performed and beautifully designed, the production reaffirms the 5-year-old company’s mission to produce masterpieces of black literature — and demonstrates why Leon has become one of the most vital directors on the American landscape.
Led by the superb Glynn Turman as Parker, the production is a glorious showcase of acting detail, pitch-perfect humor and devastating emotional consequences — all set in designer Rochelle Barker’s fastidiously appointed vintage barbershop.
While Parker and his exhausted daughter Adele (Karan Kendrick) seem to have grown old before their time, sons Theopolis and Bobby (real-life brothers Brandon J. and Jason Dirden) abdicate adult responsibilities and succumb to a life of moonshining and thievery.
Striking a deal with the ominously seductive gangster Blue Haven (E. Roger Mitchell), they convert the former checker-playing parlor into a den of decadence and destruction. As his sons sink deeper into trouble, Parker embarks on an ill-fated dance of womanizing and wastrelsy — adolescence in reverse.
Portraying Parker’s crony William Jenkins, Eugene Lee gives a solid supporting performance. But the first act really belongs to Brandon J. Dirden’s disaffected and disappointed Theopolis.
Dirden, who recently made his Broadway debut in “Prelude to a Kiss,” delivers a sizzling, physically demanding account of his character. Making his Atlanta debut, Jason Dirden, on the other hand, makes for a sweetly lost and tender Bobby.
Stuttering and unsure of himself, Bobby seems to look to his elders for cues on how to respond to the minute-by-minute decisions of life, which turns out to be a pretty bum decision.
Kendrick is also excellent, though in a much smaller role. And Mitchell’s account of Haven’s cold brutality is mesmerizing; Haven’s violent showdown with Theopolis lasts just a few brief moments, but the scene is chilling and unforgettable.
A gripping and lushly written domestic drama, “Ceremonies in Dark Old Men” picks up where Lorraine Hansberry left off and laid the foundation for the works of August Wilson. Still resonant nearly 40 years after its arrival, it’s a withering and necessary look at the way the cards have been stacked against African-American males for decades.
‘Pericles’ @ Georgia Shakes
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
THEATER REVIEW “Pericles” Grade: B
8 p.m. Saturday and continuing through July 27 in rotating repertory with “The Servant of Two Masters.” $15-$40. Conant Performing Arts Center, Oglethorpe University, 4484 Peachtree Road N.E., Atlanta. 404-264-0020; gashakespeare.org.
The verdict: Pimp my “Pericles.”
The word on Shakespeare’s “Pericles” is that the bard did not write the first couple of acts. Maybe that’s why the storytelling is often as choppy as the titular prince’s storm-tossed journey from Antioch to Mytilene and points in between.
With that essential flaw in mind, Georgia Shakespeare has installed an elegant new production that takes the emphasis off the clumsy narrative and transforms the romance into an exotic fairy tale which plays like a travelog of the ancient world.
Always eager to exploit his design tool kit, director Richard Garner places the tale of the erstwhile prince in what looks like the hull of a magnificent ship, gleefully alternating stunning costumes with nifty stage tricks and a couple of clever in-jokes for regular patrons. (Cowboys and ’70s glam-trash are de rigueur this season.) Another major plus: Composer Klimchak’s ambient score, which he performs live, is an appropriately loopy pastiche of Theremin-stoked creepiness and pulsating club noise.
Like “The Tempest” and “The Winter’s Tale,” “Pericles” is a magical meditation on suffering, loss and redemption.
Job-like Pericles (Joe Knezevich) loses his wife (Park Krausen) and daughter (Amelia Hammond), only to be united with them in the end. Along the way, we see hapless knights battling for a wife in a clever slo-mo sequence. Pagan priestesses resurrecting a corpse-bride like something out of a vintage horror flick. And a young virgin outsmarting assassins, pirates and a brothel full of degenerates.
While Knezevich gives a sturdy account of Pericles’ descent from vigorous youth to grief-stricken old man, the fun is in watching the terrific ensemble members transform themselves from moment to moment.
One minute, Crystal Dickinson is a healer in the Temple of Diana (with requisite crystal ball and magic herbs); the next she’s a brothel mistress with a leopard coat, glitter-encrusted platform shoes, a mouthful of blackened teeth and a lowly Cockney accent. Ditto Brad Sherrill, as an incestuous king who appears to have stepped out of an Old Masters painting and, later, plays a freaky brothel lackey in a purple-streaked raccoon wig, yin-yang T-shirt and ridiculous trousers. Chris Kayers gets to wear a kilt — and a gangsta-style fur.
Sydney Roberts is responsible for the outrageous fashion, a United Nations parade that takes us from Ethiopia to the Ottoman Empire to Sex Pistols-era London. Kat Conley contributes the set pieces, which resemble upended shelf brackets or the ribs of a ship. Liz Lee furnishes the sumptuous lighting. And Garner brings it all together with panache.
Using fabric to approximate the rippling contours of the sea may not be newest idea, but never has the device looked so pretty. And if you find yourself scratching your head over Conley’s bare-bones design, you’ll be rewarded in the final glorious seconds of the show.
If Garner gets a little carried away pimping an uneven story that is already overloaded with theatricality, his intentions are good.
“Libraries have been written on the personality of Hamlet,” critic Harold Boom writes, “but Pericles has none whatsoever.”
Let us be grateful, then, to Georgia Shakes for giving this little-known play such a swashbuckling and irresistible reading.
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