Town Criers
Because its themes of life, love and death don’t offend anyone and because it has sixteen speaking parts, a production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town is staged at some point in nearly every high schooler’s academic career. There’s a juicy ingenue role in Emily, a role for the jock with acting chops in George, and a menagerie of townies from eight to eighty years old, so even the geekiest thespian stands a chance of stage time. It’s an all-purpose booking play — the Pam of dramatic literature.
What Mind’s Eye Theatre does with the play is novel, though, and occasionally moving. With chutzpah and no small talent for how to stage a scene, director Christopher King takes Wilder’s portrait of a typical small, rural town — Grover’s Corners — and makes it newly relevant. He’s updated the action from 1901 to 1981, and that gives the play something approaching plastic surgery. Now it’s a Kennedy who is said to have spoken on the steps of City Hall, not some powdered-wigged dinosaur, and Mr. Webb, the town newspaper editor, cuts his hand slicing a bagel. If the contemporary references weren’t so effortlessly incorporated, you’d want to laugh the cast off the stage and hoot Mr. King out of town.
But the play’s classic arc and archetypes — the life cycle of a town with a village drunk, a kindly doctor, saintly mothers, et. al. — haven’t gone out of style just because the play was written sixty years ago. Grover’s Corners is still in New Hampshire but is also, as King explains in the grammatically choppy program notes, one of those rural enclaves that might go to its death fighting Wal-Mart’s world domination. Pop culture gets there about two years after the fact, and the kids who go away to college tend to come back, as made obvious by a seventeenth-century town cemetery whose headstones are etched with last names that still show up in the twice-weekly Sentinel.
King opens the show with a balladeer, J.D. Wright, who has written three original pieces and continues to strum in a corner throughout the show. (He closes out his solo spots in the tragic third act with John Prine’s “Humidity Killed the Snowman.”) We meet the editor’s family, including Emily Webb (Jennifer Coville), and the Gibbs family next door, where George (Aaron Couser) pines away for Emily’s Juliet to his Romeo. Our Town has something similar to and just as charming as that play’s balcony scene: the scene in which Emily and George climb ladders to imaginary upstairs bedrooms and speak lovingly across their lawns in the flattering moonlight.
It helps that Coville and Couser are decent actors, and they are matched by the elementary-school-aged Caroline Bell as George’s sister (she’s the perfect little pest),and Adrian Alexander as Mr. Webb (the only actor who even halfway succeeds at a New Hampshire accent). Doug Thompson is charismatic as Officer Warren, and the town’s matriarchs are well played by Juju Johnson and Angela Elliot. The production suffers an equal number of misfires, though — especially in Judy Brewster’s grotesquely flirty Professor Willard (she nearly does a strip tease as she relates the town’s geological strata) and Tyler Heavey’s overly pickled choir director.
King’s staging, however, is something to be seen. In the funeral scene, the town’s dead converse while sitting barefoot in black-draped chairs. When Emily and George first declare their love in the town malt shop, they start with his fingers barely touching her knee and end with arms entwined and foreheads magnetically welded together. And when George abruptly pulls away, Coville places her palms on her stomach — you can almost feel her butterflies. A moment like this can freshen up all of a play’s chipped paint.
Lullabies of Broadway: Turn east onto 10th Street from Broadway and you’ll find On Broadway, the highly palatable season opener in J. Kent Barnhart’s cabaret series at Quality Hill Playhouse. By focusing on shows currently on Broadway (or ones about to open, as in the case of Assassins, or the recently shuttered, such as Annie, Get Your Gun), Barnhart and company have an amazing repertoire to choose from. You can’t go too wrong opening with five Cole Porter songs from Kiss Me, Kate and closing with three from Mel Brooks’ The Producers (the last being “Goodbye,” which says to the house, Ta-ta, auf wiedersehen … get out).
If you can’t imagine hearing Rent‘s “Seasons of Love” followed by 42nd Street‘s “Lullaby of Broadway,” then you’re not as clever as Barnhart or as talented at transitions as James Wright, Blanche Boone and Nancy Nail, none of whom hits a wrong note. The second act opens with three scenes from The Phantom of the Opera, and even out of context they could be the best renditions you’ll hear at the Playhouse. The show is a big valentine to the idea of Broadway, which is always criticized for wallowing in revivals yet ever ready with its defense: great songs wonderfully done.
