Jordan Wright
May 21, 2012
Special to The Alexandria Times
 Sonny (Charlie Brady, center) goes 1980’s glam rock. Mark Chandler (left) and Nickolas Vaughan. "Xanadu" Virginia’s Signature Theatre. Photo: Scott Suchman Dial back to the ‘80’s and Venice Beach, Cali. It’s the days before auto-tuned singers and earbuds, a simpler time when listening to music meant cassette tapes and a boombox the size of carry-on luggage. Scrunch a pair of leg warmers over your roller skates (in-lines had yet to be invented) and channel your inner Olivia Newton-John or John Travolta. Remember that now much maligned era of disco fever and mirrored balls – when dancing to Donna Summer fast tracked your life? Well, it’s back with the pop musical Xanadu to the tune of fourteen huge hits like I’m Alive, Evil Woman, Strange Magic, Suddenly and Have You Never Been Mellow.
 Erin Weaver (center, as Kira) with her Greek Muses (from left to right) Nickolas Vaughan, Kellee Knighten Hough, Nova Y. Payton, Sherri L. Edelen, Mark Chandler, and Jamie Eacker. The musical comedy "Xanadu". Photo: Scott Suchman In a mix and match of muses, roller disco and a World War II female quartet, Sonny and Kira fall in love. That’s the easy part. Plot-wise the musical tosses in everything but the kitchen sink and throws out more wacky punch lines than Laugh-In. But it’s the electrifying, feel-good musical score by composers Jeff Lynne and John Farrar that provides the Krazy Glue that holds it all together when mythical gods and goddesses conspire and partyers in silver Lurex and platform heels camp it up on a stage designed to send skaters sailing straight through the aisles. In Misha Kachman’sset, complete with soaring catwalk and palm trees silhouetted against an amber sunset, there’s a bigger-than-life backdrop to this eponymously titled send-up of the 1980 cult classic film.
 Kira (Erin Weaver) goes weak in the knees in the arms of Sonny Malone (Charlie Brady). Photo: Scott Suchman Sonny is an untalented sidewalk chalk artist who can’t even conjure a compelling suicide note. In the midst of his desperation he meets Kira, a Grecian muse, aka Clio, on the Santa Monica Pier. She vows to help the disconsolate Sonny become successful. But following her father Zeus’s edict to all muses, she must not fall in love with a mortal. Bummer, right? In all of the great Greek tragedies the infighting muses have an axe to grind – and this one’s got Kira’s name written all over it.
 Harry A. Winter (as Danny Maguire) and Erin Weaver (as Kira) sing “Whenever You’re Away From Me”. Photo: Scott Suchman 
As in the original Broadway production a cast of nine handles, what by quick count appears to be, an astonishing 25 different roles. Are they up to it? “True dat!” as the slang-prone muses say. Credit Costume Designer Kathleen Geldard and a wardrobe mistress as speedy as Mercury who manage some lightning quick wardrobe changes as the cast goes from diaphanous togas to skintight spandex and back again.
Hunky actor Charlie Brady plays the hapless Sonny Malone to adorable Erin Weaver’s Kira. Weaver is utterly winsome and creates a force field all her own, breathing mega-energy into the familiar show.
The script has plenty of audience-conscious lines. When Kira asks her former boyfriend, now real estate tycoon Danny Maguire (played by Harry A. Winter), to let them turn his old theater into a roller disco, he agrees telling her, “Nothing turns around a crappy neighborhood like the Arts.” Knowing laughs from the Shirlington audience who remember when the theater was in an auto shop. But the line of the night goes to Hermes, played with perfect comedic timing by Nickolas Vaughan who when Kira asks him, “Why does Zeus accuse me?” – he cracks, “Bitch, I don’t know your life!”
Sherri Edelen (Calliope/Aphrodite) who recently appeared in Signature’s multi-awarded Hairspray is a riot as is Nova Y. Payton (Melpomene/Medusa) whose rich voice and sass put the show in the “Memorable Evening” category.
Through July 1st 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
April 23, 2012
Special to The Alexandria Times
 Michael (Andy Brownstein, far right) makes a stand as Alan (Paul Morella), Veronica (Naomi Jacobson) and Annette (Vanessa Lock) look on. "God of Carnage" plays at Virginia’s Signature Theatre through June 24, 2012. www.signature-theatre.org. In the 2009 Tony award-winning play God of Carnage, French playwright and social satirist Yasmina Reza introduces us to two upwardly mobile New York couples whose rowdy sons have gotten into a scrap in the neighborhood park. At a meeting in the bourgeois book-filled apartment of the victim’s parents to discuss the incident, the couples seem to present a united front while exchanging pleasantries over coffee and Veronica’s home made pear clafouti.
 Andy Brownstein (Michael Novak) and Naomi Jacobson (Veronica Novak) make a strong alliance.  Veronica Novak (Naomi Jacobson) laughs as she may have had one too many, as Alan Raleigh (Paul Morella) looks on. Initially the well-mannered grownups appear to take responsibility for their children’s actions resolving to discipline the boys and urge them to make up. Veronica, a writer on atrocities in African culture, has high-minded principles and futilely attempts to steer her husband Michael into laying the blame on Annette and Alan’s son. “It could have been the other way around,” admits Michael, “Our son is a savage,” he adds trumping Veronica’s well-orchestrated plans.
Annette on the other hand is a straight-laced suit working in wealth management and married to Alan an attorney/spinmeister who’s more wedded to his business than his wife. Between persistent cell phone calls he tries to keep pace with the mounting diatribes. “People struggle until they are dead,” Alan philosophizes.
Initially Annette tries to stay above the fray, pleading with her husband to back off, but as she sits on the sofa leafing through some well-placed coffee table books she picks up a book on existentialist painter Francis Bacon, “Cruelty, majesty, chaos and balance,” she offers and with that small remark the play’s tone is set.
Soon all decorum is tossed aside as the confab turns into a verbal slugfest with the couples pushing each other’s emotional buttons and the parents quickly devolving from respectable middle class professionals into screaming, name-calling kids on a playground. “You can’t control the things that control you,” Michael offers.
 Michael (Andy Brownstein, left) and Alan (Paul Morella) happily finding some common ground in "God of Carnage".  Vanessa Lock (left, as Annette) and Naomi Jacobson (as Veronica) share a laugh and a drink. After Michael confesses to tossing his daughter’s hamster out into the street, his credibility as the nice guy flies out the window and the women bond in their anger against him. Soothing his bruised ego he shares a bottle of his “well-aged Antiguan rum” and with that all the white gloves come off. Soon allegiances shift and the women gang up against their husbands as the men proudly profess to be Neanderthals. “Is alcohol bad for you?” Annette ponders.
Reza wields humor with a surgeon’s scalpel. Her observations of couples’ conflicts, and their ability to emotionally destroy each another, are just as incisive. And our laughter at their infantile antics is a universal response to the belief that we are all born into a culture of violence. “The God of Carnage has ruled since the beginning of time,” Alan reminds them.
 The Raleighs and the Novaks in a heated war of words in "God of Carnage". From left to right: Vanessa Lock, Paul Morella, Naomi Jacobson, Andy Brownstein. Award-winning director Joe Calarco does a yeoman’s job of molding actors Andy Brownstein (Michael), Naomi Jacobson (Veronica), Vanessa Lock (Annette) and Paul Morella (Alan) into a cohesive unit of controlled stage mayhem.
Through June 24th 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.
March 19th, 2012
Jordan Wright
Special to The Alexandria Times
 John Lescault as the enthusiastically delirious “Brother Russia”. Brother Russia is a great big full-out rock opera – of that there is no quibbling. With music by Dana Rowe and book and lyrics by John Dempsey – collaborators on the Witches of Eastwick and The Fix – its world premiere at Signature Theatre presents twenty-seven full-throated emotional numbers sung by eleven cast members – most doing double duty in multiple roles – in a tightly directed show with lots of romance, razzle-dazzle, a dash of gender bending and a soupcon of Slavic philosophy. But the play-within-a-play has me conflicted.
It opens with a ragtag group of touring actors, whose impresario translates as more Svengali than the purported mystic Rasputin the playwright would like you to believe. “Tonight’s story is the most Russian of all stories. It is my story!” he declares. And so the wheelchair-bound modern-day megalomaniac who calls himself Brother Russia rewrites history to suit his vanity and his second-rate cast.
 Natascia Diaz, as Anastasia, the Tsar’s daughter, sings "Crush Me" in the world premiere of "Brother Russia".  Rachel Zampelli (as the Witch) discovers young Grigori (Doug Kreeger), a “Child of the Wood” in "Brother Russia". John Lescault is tremendous in his portrayal of Brother Russia. He is the glue that holds the overly wrought piece together. Doug Kreeger plays his alter egos, both Sasha and Grigori. Kreeger is vocally and emotionally commanding, in a role that keeps him onstage through his rise from a lowly Siberian village to the luxurious Winter Palace in St. Petersburg and the massacres of the Russian Revolution. I hate to be a spoiler but he dies three times, twice by poisoning, but also stabbed, shot and other niceties to please the Brother Russia’s whimsical story telling. It is dizzying the amount of times he is brought back to life. “Compare an hour of life to death’s eternity,” he oddly proclaims.
In a tale of love and war, the show takes elements from the days of Czar Nicholas as well as classic Russian folk tales and convolutes them into total fiction. Is that good or bad? In any case it’s got plenty of the required murder, mayhem and sex wrapped up in royalty and peasants. If only it were told straight.
My issue with the show is that it swings in and out of quasi-history and into sheer fiction, batting about the audience’s emotions like a tennis ball in perpetual motion. No sooner are you invested in the characters and cozily enjoying a sweeping period piece, than they are lobbed back at you with sarcastic asides provided by the blustery and capricious Brother Russia and his disgruntled cast members including Nicholas played by the captivating Russell Sunday who is fierce in red patent leather platform heels.
 Grigori (Doug Kreeger, holding basket) is happily greeted by a group of strangers for his healing powers. Pictured left to right: Stephen Gregory Smith, Erin Driscoll, Russell Sunday, Rachel Zampelli. But don’t toss the baby out with the bathwater yet. The music is terrific and memorable, especially “The Spirit and the Truth”, “Elsewhere”, “I Belong to You” sung by Anastasia and Grigori and the show stopping “I Serve No Man” sung by Grigori.
Just don’t expect it to follow any semblance of Russian textbook history. This musical comes across as a mash-up of Mel Brooks Springtime for Hitler, Dale Wasserman’s Man of La Mancha and the Broadway version of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. And if you like those shows – and who doesn’t? – that’s not all bad. It’s certainly got all the boxes-checked requirements of a hit Broadway show, yet one that is suffering from an identity complex. One can only hope for some editing of this meandering two and a half hour show before it is considered a fait accompli.
Through April 15th 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
February 14, 2012
Special to The Alexandria Times
Playwright Paul Downs Colaizzo wants his audiences to know that his play was inspired by three seminal moments in his young life. The first was seeing Doubt, a play by John Patrick Shanley that filled him with both excitement and dread. Excitement that “Theatre could be amazing,” and dread that it, “operates on very few rules and offers no guarantees.”
His second aha moment was, “…the unfolding of an investigation concerning several college students’ involvement in a brutal crime in the months before my graduation from NYU.” – an event that challenged the senior to rethink his own relationships and the questionable character of his peers.
The book by Jean Twenge, Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled – And More Miserable Than Ever Before was another influence. “I thought of myself as an obvious exception, when in reality, that mentality alone made me the prototype,” he reveals with a refreshing honesty.
It’s difficult to be patient with the Generation Me college students in Really Really because they are depicted as crass, self-indulgent wannabes, utterly lacking in personal responsibility, while living in a bubble of entitlement and lax morals. Sound familiar? But Colaizzio wants us to take them as they are, “members of what the older generation have created,” as he describes it. That’s a hard pill to swallow, but fodder for reflection.
The world premiere play, an X-rated production oddly reminiscent of the long-running sitcom, Friends, shows Colaizzo’s formidable talent as a comedy writer. Yet aside from the clever comic relief, we are still faced with the dilemma of caring about a self-serving, scurrilous, homophobic, sexist and conniving group of students with paper-thin allegiances – quite a poisonous brew that’s compounded by binge drinking and interminable attempts to hook up and share the deets.
 (from left to right) Danny Gavigan (as Jimmy), Paul James (as Johnson) and Evan Casey (as Cooper) talking about last night’s big party in "Really Really". Photo: Scott Suchman. Grace (Lauren Culpepper) and Leigh (Bethany Anne Lind) are roomies. Their male counterparts Johnson (Paul James), Davis (Jake Odmark), and Cooper (Evan Casey) are on the rugby teammates sharing a frat house-style apartment replete with the requisite beer refrigerator and video games. Jimmy (Danny Gavigan), Leigh’s conflicted boyfriend and son of the college’s dean, comes by regularly for booty calls, much to Grace’s dismay. Smooth scene transitions are accomplished by Misha Kachman’s set design, which places their two apartments side-by-side on the Ark’s long yet narrow stage.
The play opens as Grace and Leigh stagger home laughing hysterically after attending the boys’ annual blowout kegger. The following morning Grace leaves town to deliver a speech to the Future Leaders of America and we begin to sense the morality theme of the play. Hoping to inspire her young attendees to take personal responsibility for their actions, she prophetically warns, “A great part of the formula for success is the ability to say ‘no’,” and notes ironically that all the personal communications devices used by the Me Generation start with the letter “I”.
After an accusation and follow-up investigation of the party’s activities, the friends are forced to face the consequences of their reckless lifestyle and betrayals rise to surface like fresh beer suds, as battle lines are drawn between the sexes and lies of convenience are held out as barter. But memories of the fateful night are clouded. Was there a date rape? Or was it a fantasy? Everyone’s too drunk to remember, or are they?
 Bethany Anne Lind (as Leigh) returning home from an on-campus party in "Really Really". Photo: Scott Suchman. Really Really is a cautionary tale with a familiar ring – that of the headline-grabbing Virginia trial of privileged college scion George Huguely V in the ongoing Yardley Love case, where similar patterns of alcohol, parties, hook ups and violence are a familiar campus way of life.
Fine performances from the ensemble cast, with Lind in the lead crafting a nuanced portrait of the sociopathic coed, Leigh. Wait for the entrance in the second act by Kim Rosen, as Leigh’s feisty sister Haley, who is memorable as the prep outsider conjuring up Snooki from MTV’s Jersey Shore.
Through March 25th at Signature Theatre (at Shirlington Village), 4200 Campbell Avenue, Arlington, VA 22206. For tickets and information call 703 820-9771 or visit www.signature-theatre.org.
Jordan Wright
November 28, 2011
Special to The Alexandria Times
 Dan (Brian Sutherland) and Jenna (Diane Sutherland) both admiring a Rothko painting at the Museum of Modern Art in "A Second Chance". At Virginia’s Signature Theatre through December 11, 2011. www.signature-theatre.org. Photo: Christopher Mueller. Not only is this delicious show a world premiere, but it also marks the auspicious debut of a new talent, Ted Shen, a businessman and arts patron that might better qualify for full retirement. That he is celebrating the opening of his first show as writer, composer and lyricist, is rather astounding, unless you notice that his bio reveals he is a Taiwanese financier educated at the posh
Phillips Exeter Academy and Yale University and foundation president and board member for both Yale University and the Art Commission of the City of New York. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Shen’s foundation has also provided funding support for major productions by Stephen Sondheim, who happens to be Mr. Shen’s musical theatre hero. But whatever his curriculum vitae or his tony connections his breakthrough musical, A Second Chance, can more than stand on its own two legs.
Billed as a lyrical duet the musical is a modern love affair as much for its characters as its audience. Two top-drawer Broadway stars, Brian and Diane Sutherland, sing rather than speak their parts. Both have the most exquisitely controlled, pitch perfect voices that gently express the emotional dynamics of a budding relationship. Jenna, coming off a divorce, gives voice to her demons in “Damaged Goods”. She is broken and unsure of their new love, especially since Dan is a recent widower and photos of his late wife fill his apartment. Dan is still communicating telepathically with his dearly departed, seeking approval to pursue his new life and love of Jenna. In an effort to break with the past he sings, “Tell Me When.”
A simple stage set with clear plexiglass chairs and tables allow the audience to mesh with each scene change while following the
progression of the mid-life couple’s personal evolution. Projected black and white photos of New York’s Central Park, his brownstone and her therapist’s office, afford a simple sense of place. And that’s enough because it’s all about the music here – lush atmospheric songs by an astonishing songwriter whose elegant stylings borrow from the Sondheim tradition with shades of Judy
Collins and The Fantasticks. Top notch musicians capture the mood for a New York evening as familiar as a martini served straight up while basking at The Oak Room at The Plaza or listening to Bobby Short at the Café Carlyle.
Enchantingly sophisticated and emotionally aware.
Through December 11th at Signature Theatre – 4200 Campbell Avenue, Arlington, VA in the Shirlington neighborhood. For tickets and information call 703 820-9771 or visit www.signature-theatre.org.
Jordan Wright
September 29, 2011
Special to The Alexandria Times
Signature Theatre kicks off its new seasons series, “Sex, Drama and Rock n’ Roll,” with “Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South.” In this 90-minute non-stop monologue, dramatist, actor, writer and Northwestern University professor E. Patrick Johnson offers a primer on gay black men growing up in the South. It’s a powerful, unadulterated expression of pain, humor and pathos.
Johnson, an archivist, takes us to his hometown of Hickory, N.C., the “furniture capital of the world,” and into the dark past of the Deep South, interviewing more than 70 black gay men, ages 19 to 93, in a quest to explore his roots and challenge the definition of the stereotypical gay black male.
The play has evolved from his book of the same name, penned after a conversation in 1995 at a black HIV / AIDS gathering in Washington, DC, where he heard the voices of older black men.
As a child Johnson suffered his share of bullying, with playmates calling him “a mean little sissy.” Growing up in a small town divided by railroad tracks — blacks on the south side, whites to the north — he became the first African American from his town to earn a Ph.D.
“It just came on,” Johnson says of his homosexuality. One day his mother prompts him to explain it. He asks her, “Was there ever a time when you were attracted to another woman? Well, neither was I.”
Acting out his stories in vignettes, Johnson channels 14 characters with vastly different experiences, from hairdressers and transgenders to drag queens and preachers on the down low. He is a supreme mimic and muscular actor who minces, gavottes and genuflects to tell a story.
In a scene revealing the hypocrisy of the church, he becomes Jerome, a minister with questionable sexuality. Jerome doesn’t have a wife because, as he says, “I believe in the Bible.”
Adding his experiences to the mix, Johnson testifies to the “sway that lulls church babies into a gospel coma.” There were a lot of knowing “A-mens!” from the I’m-hip-to-that audience.
Scenic designer Kylph Sanford evocatively sets the piece on a southern front porch, adding a rocking chair, tree stump, trellises, wispy Spanish moss and an old tire swing that Johnson uses to great effect. It opens with Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” playing gently in the background, and a teacart with a pitcher of iced sweet tea becomes a stunning metaphor for the conflicting social traditions of the genteel South. Old black spirituals, disco music from the “Hotlanta” gay scene of the ’70s, soul music from the ’60s and gospel tunes from the hallelujah chorus tie the fast-paced cameos together.
Johnson is raw, honest and candid about himself and his subject. “Sweet Tea” is a high-voltage, frank sex talk — a fiery social commentary by a skilled mimic and performer who shares the struggles, triumphs and vulnerabilities of a rarely so deeply explored minority.
At Signature Theatre, 4200 Campbell Ave., in Arlington through October 9. For tickets and information, visit www.signature-theatre.org or call 703 820-9771.
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