Jordan Wright
February 22, 2013
Special to The Alexandria Times
 Morgan played by Elliott Bales, Angus by Paul Tamney and Miles by Daniel Westbrook – Photo Credit Michael deBlois Michael Healey’s The Drawer Boy, performed by Port City Playhouse is by turns a darkly funny and deeply poignant piece of theater that examines the bonds of friendship and the deeds that define altruism. It’s the summer of 1972 in rural Ontario, Canada when Miles (Daniel G. Westbrook), an aspiring young playwright looking for material for his drama class at a nearby college, arrives at the door of a rundown farmhouse offering to lend a hand in exchange for a glimpse of farm life. What follows is a tightly crafted piece of theater that reveals two men bound together by tragedy and loss, and another whose observations and willingness to listen afford a kind of healing. The powerful tragicomedy is reminiscent of the Rain Man and George and Lennie’s relationship in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.
Morgan (Elliott Bales) and Angus (P. Spencer Tamney) were boyhood friends who served together in London during World War II. One night in a bombing raid, Angus was hit by an explosive resulting in his inability to remember anything for more than a short time. “All he knows is right now!” Morgan tells Miles, though Angus’s mathematical calculations are as skillful as a savant. Still Morgan strives to keep day-to-day life unchallenging to avoid provoking Angus’s migraine-inducing memories.
With his notebook at the ready, Miles records the pair’s every word searching for insights along with farming wisdom. Angus is eager to recount what little he remembers of his life before the accident, but Morgan, who discusses the price of eggs with the same intensity as he pulls the wool over Mile’s eyes, tries to keep the dramatist at arm’s length, telling him to rise at three a.m. to rotate the crops from one field to another, “You break it up into pieces no bigger than you,” he teases the visiting rube, while instructing him to pick corn kernels out of cow puddles with a serving fork.
 The Drawer Boy – Angus & Morgan – Photo Credit Michael deBlois It is only when Miles looking for a deeper understanding of their lives begins to extract Angus’s long hidden emotions that the men’s painful story is revealed and the tragedy of their lives unfolds.
Michael Healey’s drama comes out of a true story of a group of actors who in the 1970’s visited the heartland of Canadian farms interviewing farmers and their families and learning their stories. Nearly a quarter of a century later, after meeting with the same people whose stories were used in the project, Healey was inspired to write The Drawer Boy as a tribute. [Reviewer’s note: In the interest of clarification, Angus is the “drawer boy”, a reference to his skill at rendering architectural plans. Though until this fact was revealed in the second act, I had been nervously awaiting a small child to emerge from a drawer.]
Jennifer Lyman directs this unforgettable play produced by Carol Strachan and Alan Wray. It’s the perfect cast and the perfect piece for Port City Playhouse’s continuing season of thought-provoking socially relevant theater.
At The Lab at Convergence, 1819 North Quaker Lane, Alexandria, VA 22302. Performances are on the following dates – February 22nd, 23rd, and March 1st, 2nd, 5th, 8th and 9th at 8pm and matinees on March 2nd and 9th at 2pm. For tickets and information visit www.portcityplayhouse.org.
Jordan Wright
February 25, 2013
Special to The Alexandria Times
 Richard Isaacs (Tony Wendice) and Jerry Hoffman (Captain Lesgate)- Photo credit Heather Norcross Had they updated the title to the more technologically correct “Press “M” For Murder” or perhaps “Text “M” For Murder”, we would have no less a delicious whodunit as the one currently playing at The Little Theatre of Alexandria. That we no longer spin a dial to place a call, does not by one scintilla alter the pulse-stopping suspense of Dial “M” For Murder, Frederick Knott’s nifty psychological thriller.
Let’s start with the corpse, or rather not, it won’t factor in for a good bit, and it won’t be the corpse you thought it might be. Perhaps we should name the killer, or maybe not, it won’t be who you’d expected either, even though once the action commences you’ll be in on the plot. But that’s the fun part, knowing who did it when the police captain and the inspector clearly don’t have a clue.
Meet the Wendices. A couple of bourgeois Londoners, he a former tennis pro with failing fortunes, she an unblinkingly beautiful heiress. Tony (Richard Isaacs) has a plan and Margot (Jenni Patton) has a boyfriend, or rather ex, but why split pretty blonde hairs? Isaacs plays Tony with just the right amount of smarmy snap while Patton, as the cool and clueless Margot embodies British reserve.
 Jenni Patton (Margot Wendice) – Photo credit Heather Norcross To delve into the plot in this review would most assuredly give away the clever twists and turns, and edge-of-your-seat sense of bearing witness to a murder when no one on stage, save the murderer, can guess how the bloody hell it was done and if the killer will get his due, and I won’t be the spoiler. Suffice it to say that I heard the proverbial pin drop, so riveted was the audience.
Actor James Meyers, coming off his success in last fall’s Cantorial at LTA, gives a smooth performance as the American crime writer boyfriend, Max Halliday, and John Henderson is as sure-footed as a stalking tiger in the role of the gumshoe Inspector Hubbard. But it is Jerry Hoffman’s stunning entrance and sly manner as the seemingly bumbling Captain Lesgate (Ah, fond memories of Columbo!), that will make you sit up a tad straighter in your chair. A bouquet of kudos are in order for Dialogue Coach, Jane Waldrop, a true Londoner who trained at the British Old Vic Theatre School, for coloring their accents with the staccato patter of the British upper crust.
 John Henderson (Inspector Hubbard) and James Myers (Max Halliday) – Photo Credit Heather Norcross Even if you’ve seen Alfred Hitchcock’s film version starring matinee idols Ray Milland and Grace Kelly, a mere slip of a girl at twenty four when she made this film, and the mild-mannered Robert Cummings, you will be no less impressed with this tidy package of blackmail and red herrings.
Through March 16th at The Little Theatre of Alexandria, 600 Wolfe Street. For tickets and information call the box office at 703 683-0496 or visit www.thelittletheatre.com
Jordan Wright
Feb 25, 2013
Special to The Alexandria Times
 Cast of The Tempest; photo by Johnny Shryock There is only one way to grok Synetic’s ‘Silent Shakespeare’ productions and that is to give your self over, heart, mind and soul, to the fantasy unfolding upon the stage. Because like a steamy love affair, Synetic’s style of theatre is a paean to passion with no holds barred. It’s total surrender without a net. There is neither map nor compass, nor sheet music nor gyroscope, to guide you – even for The Tempest, a tale you thought you knew. But in the time it takes one thunderous lightning bolt to reach earth, Synetic has entered your brain space and there is no turning back.
The play opens to a breathtaking set designed by Anastasia Rurikov Simes. The entire stage is an island of 2,500 gallons of six-inch deep water. As Artistic Director, Paata Tsikurishvili, announced on opening night, “This set is extremely dangerous and extremely difficult to perform on,” further evidence that Synetic’s alternate universe, filled to overflowing with technological wizardry, is a perilous experiment. In 2010 Synetic employed this same technique in its production of King Arthur and people have been raving about it ever since.
We enter this watery world with the appearance of Prospero (Phillip Fletcher) cutting an elegant swath through the mist – the backdrop lit by the swirling amorphous shapes of a ferocious storm and draped with diaphanous torn sails of a ship run aground. Ocean waves crash cacophonously against the island’s cliffs and eerie electronic music swells in the distance. A piano sits off to the side, its keyboard a waterfall under which Caliban retreats. A light box held by Prospero to reference his precious books, pulses in shades of red and pink.
Soon the two meet and lock in a ferocious battle as sprays of water spew across the stage and onto the first three rows known as the “splash zone”. No worries. Courtesy ponchos are graciously provided.
 Ryan Tumulty as Alonso and Philip Fletcher as Prospero; Irina Kavsadze as Miranda and Scott Brown as Ferdinand (in background) photo by Johnny Shryock Dan Istrate, one of the leading luminaries of Russian theatre, guest stars in his role as the pop-locking Ariel, clad in an anime-inspired costume deserving of the Silver Surfer, and designed by, yes, Simes again, who does triple duty with set, costumes and properties. Irakli Kavadze is outstanding as Stephano, the drunken captain, as are the sensuous sylph-like Irina Kavsadze as Miranda, and Vato Tsikurishvili as the brutish Caliban.
An overall sense of magic and mysticism pervades every riveting aspect of this production where dizzying acrobatics, flips, somersaults and ballet combine with the elements of water, sound and light to give the audience an electrifying rendition of Shakespeare without words, an unparalleled near-psychedelic experience, dotted with Gangnam style, Latin salsa and waltz, including a synchronized nod to Busby Berkeley.
Highly recommended.
Through March 24th at Synetic Theater, 1800 South Bell Street, Arlington in Crystal City. For tickets and information call 1 800 494-8497 or visit www.synetictheater.org.
Jordan Wright
February 11, 2013
Special to The Alexandria Times
 A tight-knit band of boarding school students (from left: Alex Mills, Joel David Santner, Jefferson Farber, and Rex Daugherty) uncover a secret copy of the banned play “Romeo and Juliet” in “Shakespeare’s R&J,” Photo: Teresa Wood. If you had in mind a romantic tale about two star-crossed lovers, the beautiful Juliet and her thwarted Romeo, only part of your fantasy will be realized…that would be the part about the star-crossed lovers. In Adaptor/Director Joe Calarco’s Shakespeare’s R & J, a modernist reinvention of Shakespeare’s classic drama, four young men who live by the strict rules and regulations of a boy’s Catholic boarding school, play all of the characters.
His edgy version of the tale has the rambunctious blue-blazered preppies asJuliet, Nurse, Lady Capulet, Lord Montague, Romeo, Tybalt et alia in an interpretation that will blow your breeches off, if you get my drift. The play begins when the students discover an illicit copy of Romeo and Juliet that they agree to act out amongst themselves. Calarco has woven some contemporary bits of dialogue into the original. But the play’s still the thing, if not the players.
Set designer James Kronzer’s simple coffered ceiling-surround frames the rigorous, near militaristic, life of bells and classes, prayers and confessions against the Ten Commandments and Latin conjugations. In this isolated social laboratory the young men recite cautionary homilies describing the differences between the sexes. It is only after dark, when they extricate the book from its cache beneath the floorboards and take on the character’s roles, that their individual personae emerge, freed from the discipline of the institution. At first they revel in Shakespeare’s double entendres, the sexual references scattered amid the romantic prose, and play those to the hilt – four schoolboys displaying their childish glee is predictable. But then their individual characters come into focus and we begin to see a clearer definition of their hidden frustrations and yearnings.
There is whooping and hollering, nipple tweaks, roughhousing and campy high-voiced interpretations of some female characters – these are boys after all. And then there are the love scenes – most assuredly not for the prudish.
 Two students (Alex Mills, left, and Joel David Santner) get caught up in their reading of “Romeo and Juliet” ,” Photo: Teresa Wood. The production starts out slowly, perhaps too slowly, but becomes rivetingly alluring, though there is a certain constant wide-eyed emotiveness to the delivery of the lines that lacks interstitial relief. It is in-your-face Shakespeare forsooth. But therein lies the rub. It’s actually exciting to see a Juliet that is assertive, aggressive and demanding of her lover; a Romeo that is muscular, passionate and sexual; and a production that is tremendously physical. One wonders how they will keep up such dizzying athleticism throughout the run.
Yet be assured that tempus fugit when you’re condensing an entire play in one fell swoop. There is no nudity, but the imagination does what the imagination does, and a few buff bare-chested men and a silky red 15-foot length of cloth can create a world of gender-bending fantasy encompassing both violence and love.
Presenting Shakespeare is a first for Signature Theatre and this one makes for an explosive debut. Chris Lee has created magnificently atmospheric lighting, once dropping down a framework with hundreds of candles to border the stage, in another scene creating a prison wall of pin lights to pair with sound designer Matt Rowe’s often eerie sometimes thunderous sound concepts.
 One of a tight-knit band of boarding school students (Alex Mills) attempts to express himself through poetry Photo: Teresa Wood. Actor Alex Mills, who performs regularly at Synetic Theater, where their silent Shakespeare series affords him few lines, is outstanding. Along with Joel David Santner, Rex Daugherty and Jefferson Farber they make up the compact but spectacular cast.
Through March 3th 2013 at Signature Theatre (Shirlington Village), 4200 Campbell Avenue, Arlington, VA 22206. For tickets and information call 703 820-9771 or visit www.signature-theatre.org.
Jordan Wright
January 28, 2013
Special to The Alexandria Times
 Lori Williams, Anthony Manough, Yvette Spears, Sandy Bainum, Roz White Photo credit: Christopher Banks The pioneering influence that Charlie “Yardbird” Parker made on the world of jazz, blues and bebop in the mid-twentieth century is the most inextricable part of his legacy. Blowing new sounds from his alto saxophone, he crafted a sound so original and so addictive that fans would do anything to “chase the music…just to hear what Bird heard”. Every hall of fame jazzman and jazz singer of the era brought their craft to Birdland, the eponymously named club in the heart of Manhattan, where they could marvel at Parker’s signature technique of playing the higher intervals of a chord for the melody, then backing it up with double- and triple-time extensions.
Jazz legends Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Earl “Fatha” Hines, Stan Getz and Billy Eckstine played the club with Bird in those golden days along with the divine divas, “The First Lady of Jazz” Ella Fitzgerald, Billie “Lady Day” Holiday, Sarah “Sassy” Vaughan and Peggy Lee, each bringing the music to new heights with their unique vocal interpretations. Within the span of a decade Parker brought forth a sound so captivating, so under your skin and bones, that it galvanized American music and helped break down racial barriers as white celebrities from Frank Sinatra to Marilyn Monroe and Beat Generation author, Jack Kerouac, became regular denizens of the iconic club.
In the world premiere musical “Ladies Swing the Blues – A Jazz Fable” at MetroStage, Author, Director and Lyricist Thomas W. Jones ll in partnership with Composer, Arranger, Pianist and Musical Director William Knowles, who co-wrote five of the show’s original numbers have, through their divine collaboration, crystallized the essence of that era by portraying both the on-stage and behind-the-scenes lives of Birdland’s leading musicians from those heady days.
 Sandy Bainum, Yvette Spears, Roz White and Lori Williams – Photo Credit Christopher Banks Set in New York City the story features four female singers – Roz White as Lady, Lori Williams as Ella, Yvette Spears as Sassy, Sandy Bainum as Peggy, and Anthony Manough as Parker, better known by the nickname “Bird”, who are backed up by a sizzling hot five-piece band.
The story begins with Parker’s untimely but not unpredicted death at the age of thirty at the Stanhope Hotel apartment of his friend the Baroness “Nica”, scion of the Rothschild family. Parker had been living on the edge battling addictions throughout much of his career. He’s got the “junkie monkey” the ladies declare, trying to pinpoint what killed him. “All jazzmen die a mystery,” insists Ella.
As his ghost visits the women, they sing his memory through stories and song. If you like classics like Fever, Thelonius Monk’s Round Midnight, George Shearing’s Lullaby of Birdland plus twenty-three more evocative jazz numbers performed up close and personal, this show is for you. If there is mo betta’ singing in one show, I have yet to hear it. The vocals are mad crazy and the band with its ripping solos could uncurl an Afro.
To single out any of the performers as less than brilliant would be criminal. But it would be unconscionable not to spotlight Lori Williams, whose scattin’ Ella blew the roof off the theatre, and Anthony Manough’s Bird, whose octave-bending vocal range knows no boundaries. And who used his velvet voice to carve out a piece of the world, which, for all I know, he still owns.
Highly recommended.
At MetroStage through March 17th – 1201 North Royal Street, Alexandria, 22314. For tickets and information visit www.metrostage.org.
Jordan Wright
January 15, 2013
Special to The Alexandria Times
 Marcus Fisk (Reg), Michael Gale (Malcolm), Rene Keith Flores (Marty), Ben Norcross (Ensemble), Dan Deisz (Teddy), Christopher Harris (Dave), and Michael Bagwell (Tony) – Photo credit to Shane Canfield One of the most astonishing things about Alexandria’s Little Theatre is their ability to mount a production as complex and energetic as The Full Monty, a strapping show with book by Terrence McNally and score by David Yazbek. No less than twenty-nine performers backed by a stellar sixteen-piece orchestra are in full throttle to give audiences fourteen great numbers for a terrific evening of theater.
Rachel Alberts and Carolyn Winters are back on board producing this sizzling hot musical comedy, as is Director Frank Shutts, a WATCH Award-winner who has directed 18 productions at The Little Theatre. Pair them with choreographer, Ivan Davila (kudos on his “Michael Jordan’s Ball” number), who won two WATCH awards for his work on Hairspray last year at the Little Theatre;the award-winning team of lighting designers, Ken and Patti Crowley; and costume designers, Jean Schlichting and Kit Sibley, and you have a powerhouse pack of theatrical pros.
 James Hotsko (Jerry), Daniel McKay (Buddy) and fans, Christopher Harris (Dave), Michael Gale (Malcolm), and James Hotsko (Jerry) – Photo credit to Shane Canfield For those unfamiliar with this British import, which was also a successful film, the American version is set in Buffalo and is a story of out-of-work, out-of-options mill workers and their wives. The fun-loving wives, who are still employed, spend their girl’s-night-out dollars at a local Chippendales strip club.
One night best friends Jerry and Dave sneak into a bathroom window at the nightclub only to overhear their wives talk about the lack of spark in their marriages and the sexy strippers. “All those men. All those meat!” Dave’s wife Georgie exclaims. Defeated and deflated, the guys decide that they too have the goods as well as any other man and agree to join forces to stage their own show. Fifty thousand dollars is the take for the night, enough to pay off Jerry’s child support and Dave’s bills. They confab with the evening’s talent, a gay man who goes by “Buddy”, to divine some tips. They decide it’s all just bump-and-grind and manly attitude.
The sports-loving, butt-scratching couch potatoes decide to audition a few other guys to fill out their act and hire the ex-plant manager slash dance hall teacher Harold Nichols to teach them some sexy moves. “Do you know what a pelvic thrust is?” Jerry asks the sensitive rail-thin Malcolm. A more motley group of out-of-shape candidates could not be imagined. “First we gave the world Buffalo wings. Now we’re gonna give ‘em Buffalo wieners!” they concur. The plan is for them to take it all off, right down to the “business”.
 Michael Gale (Malcolm) and Mary Lou Bruno (Molly) – Photo credit to Shane Canfield Malcolm Lee plays a memorable Noah “Horse” T. Simmons. In the “Big Black Man” he transforms himself from a cane-carrying geezer who does the Monkey, the Mashed Potatoes and the Moonwalk to garner a part in their revue. “What’s the use of a big bundle,” he crows, “if you need a walker to carry it around!”
First rate performances by this gifted cast – James Hotsko as Jerry Lukowski; Annie Ermlick as the Latin firecracker Vicki Nichols who tears up the stage in “Love That Man”; Christopher Harris as the lovable loser Dave Bukatinsky; Jack Stein as Harold Nichols; Jennifer Strand as Jeanette Burmeister, the street savvy ex-actress; Keith Miller as Ethan Girard; Michael Gale as Malcolm MacGregor; Cara Giambrone as Georgie Bukatinsky; Amy Conley as the sassy Pam Lukowski; and Colin Cech as Jerry’s kid Nathan Lukowski.
The music in this show is fabulous – the ballads and duets, tender tearjerkers – the showstoppers, big and brassy. Leave your delicate sensibilities at home. This “Monty” is a rip-roaring naughty riot.
Highly recommended.
Through February 2nd at The Little Theatre of Alexandria, 600 Wolfe Street. For tickets and information call the box office at 703 683-0496 or visit www.thelittletheatre.com
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