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Friday, April 15, 2005
‘Shear’ silliness on Alliance Hertz stage
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
THEATER REVIEW: “Shear Madness.” Through May 15.
The verdict: The audience picks the killer in this farcical whodunit. Roll with it.
We interrupt this newspaper story for breaking fluff —- I mean news —- from Buckhead.
A classical pianist on the comeback trail has been discovered brutally murdered in her home by a savage perpetrator who remains at large. Police are questioning four suspects in the upscale unisex hair salon located below the victim’s residence.
All of them have a potential motive in the bloody slaying of concert queen Isabel Czerny.
Although no weapons were found at the scene, authorities refuse to rule out the possibility that the virtuoso was struck dead by some of the god-awful jokes in “Shear Madness,” the record-setting farce unfolding on the Alliance Theatre’s Hertz Stage.
Say what you will about Atlanta’s flagship theater at the Woodruff Arts Center: It doesn’t often get a chance to be really silly. Relentlessly. Unabashedly. Take-the-money-and-run-with-scissors silly.
This is it.
If your hair needs letting down —- or you simply miss “Peachtree Battle” —- you may want to call ahead for an appointment.
An ingratiating whodunit that’s at once eye-rollingly lame and pretty darn irresistible, “Shear Madness” is a proven audience-pleaser that blithely revels in its irrelevance, squirts out gags older than Dippity-do (the Village People) and banks on a formula that employs those twin delights of onstage gimmickry: local jokes and audience participation.
It seems to work: The Boston production has played more than 25 years and is listed in the Guinness Book of Records.
Downstairs at the Alliance, the first act introduces us to the main characters on Kat Conley’s smashing lavender swirl of a set (sumptuously equipped salon, froufrou wallpaper, purple-and-beige checkerboard floor, chrome telephones).
During a hilarious workaday warm-up —- a wordless physical-comedy riff begun before the last audience members take their seats —- we meet salon owner Tony (irrepressibly swishy George Contini) and his tough-cookie hairdresser (Katie Kneeland). Next come two clients, a shifty-eyed antiques dealer (Maurice Ralston) and an arrogant socialite (Barbara Bradshaw), who may or may not be lovers.
When the unseen piano-playing landlady upstairs gets whacked, two undercover police officers (Jim Korinke, Jack Dillon) conduct an investigation that relies on the observational powers of the audience.
By following the action —- a rapid series of entrances and exits, in traditional madcap style —- theatergoers are asked to determine the identity of the killer.
Hmm, it could be just about anybody. Go figure.
One complaint with the Alliance production is that the writers strive for a local connection that feels cursory and forced. The Georgia punch lines inserted into the script can be tired (Lester Maddox, Zell Miller) and obvious (the Hawks, funny-sounding Snellville). You wish they had more edge, more attitude, more smarts. Maybe they will evolve. (Then again, one character’s aggressive defense of the Braves is pretty funny.)
Happily, the cast smooths over the show’s please-like-me air of desperation with veteran ease, generously ad-libbing, and threatening, the crowd. They also target a few ticketholders, quite unmercifully, for laughs. So watch what you say.
After the shave and haircut, you may get carved to bits.
THE 411: 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays; 2:30 and 8 p.m Saturdays; 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Sundays. Through May 15. $25-$30. Alliance Theatre, Hertz Stage, 1280 Peachtree St. N.E., Atlanta. 404-733-5000, www.alliancetheatre.org.
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Atlanta Opera’s ‘Fidelio’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
OPERA REVIEW
Beethoven’s “Fidelio.” The Atlanta Opera. Thursday evening at the Boisfeuillet Jones Atlanta Civic Center. Repeats Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. www.atlantaopera.org.
Early in Beethoven’s jailhouse opera, “Fidelio,” four characters sing about love in the quartet “Mir ist so wunderbar” (“So strange I feel”).
It gets complicated. Rocco, who is the jailer but also a decent guy, hopes to marry off his daughter, Marzelline, to one of his assistants, a young lad named Fidelio. Trouble is, Fidelio is really the cross-dressing Leonore. She is trying to free her husband, a political prisoner. The fourth voice in the quartet, Jaquino, another assistant, hopes to finally win Marzelline’s fickle heart. Everyone feels anxious about their future. Meanwhile, silent prisoners, rotting in their cells, watch them from all sides.
William Fred Scott, who is ending his 20-year artistic directorship of the Atlanta Opera, conducted the quartet with the aching sadness we usually associate with the Mozart Requiem or a Mahler adagio.
Frozen in time, it was the outstanding moment of this stark new production, which opened Thursday evening at the Boisfeuillet Jones Atlanta Civic Center.
The Atlanta Opera, recovering from several years of artistic and financial turmoil, needs to cut costs. To keep the budget balanced this season, the opera shelved plans to rent a fancy “Fidelio” set. Instead, four levels of bare scaffolding serve as the prison cells, with a courtyard in the middle.
In scene after scene, Ken Yunker’s effective lighting turns the intimidating edifice into a ghostly hell. As soldier march along, their faces remain in shadow, even as the scaffolding metal throws a harsh glare. We see the darkest dungeon through a chain-link fence, projected onto the scrim.
The costumes are the only way to date the events. The street-wear styles evoke a bleak 1950s East Germany, or maybe the retro-nerdy fashion of today.
Although Lorna Haywood’s “director’s notes,” inserted in the program, finds parallels between “Fidelio” and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq, her stage direction was thankfully free of pantomimed torture.
Still, she put the evil/goodness and dark/light dichotomies in context. Thus the playful domestic scenes at the beginning — complete with Beethoven’s sunny music — properly contrasted with the heroic life-and-death struggles at the opera’s climax.
On this last point Scott ran into trouble. His conducting had a sameness throughout. In addition, while the orchestra can play with spunk and polish, one sensed that this Beethoven (as with Wagner) was beyond their collective abilities.
Happily, the singers, an appealing bunch individually, meshed well in ensemble numbers. As Marzelline, soprano Angela Turner Wilson created the most three-dimensional persona on stage, coquettish, inquisitive, vulnerable. With a pleasing, bright voice, she made you pay attention to her, right to the end. How would she, above all, react to Fidelio’s unmasking? (Haywood’s direction contributed to Marzelline’s personal soap opera.)
As Rocco, bass Kurt Link was a terrific character actor-type. His “money buys happiness” aria was believable, comic, at once rough but tender. Tenor George Dyer sang a fine Jaquino, as a likable drip with a standard-issue voice. (That’s why he is still single.)
With a black leather trench coat and patent leather motorcycle boots, Donnie Ray Albert’s Don Pizarro came straight from Central Casting, villain division. His baritone was dark and firm but small for the cavernous civic center. The orchestra often overwhelmed him in his comic-book “Vengeance” aria. Ryan Smith had good presence as the First Prisoner. The chorus of prisoners sang with such freshness and nuance — prepared by chorus master Walter Huff — one couldn’t believe these convicts had endured any hardships whatsoever.
Clifton Forbis sang Florestan, Leonore’s husband, in powerful declarations, with the confidence of an innocent man. Bitterness in his timbre seemed appropriate for a man kept in isolation for two years.
The moral climax of the opera comes when Leonore/Fidelio sees a decrepit prisoner of unknown identity. He might be her husband, but she pledges to save his life no matter who he is. At that small moment, her heroism magnifies from the individual to the universal, from saving one man to saving all mankind. Here Leonore, like Brunnhilde in Wagner’s “Ring,” becomes a female Christ figure.
Beethoven doesn’t make this universal moment the crux of his opera — top billing goes to Leonore holding Pizarro at gunpoint, with Judgement Day trumpets blaring — but her selfless decision best captures his humanist world view.
Dramatic soprano Frances Ginzer clearly believes in the importance of the role. In her famous act one aria, “Komm, Hoffnung, lass den letzten Stern” (“Come, Hope, Let the last star”), she offered so much — vocal power, theatrical presence, interpretive maturity, a range up to a high B — that it seems ungrateful to complain of the wobble, the strident tone and, as the evening progressed, the shrieking. (For the Saturday performance, soprano Aimee Willis, who sang the Atlanta Opera’s Salome in 2003, replaces Ginzer.)
One final note. With Scott’s farewell at hand, many of his fans were expecting a special event. Before the music began, Scott accepted a conductor’s tradtional pre-performance applause from the audience. More energized than usual, the ovation prompted a few people to stand in appreciation. But Scott cut short any limelight basking by turning to conduct the overture. According to opera management, the official goodbyes will come after Sunday’s performance.
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