Posts Tagged ‘Gail Burns’

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Review: “A Strange Disappearance of Bees” Has Critics Buzzing With Excitement [Berkshire on Stage]

Wednesday, May 22nd, 2013
(l to r) Jenny Strassburg and Melissa Hurst in “A Strange Disappearance of Bees” at Oldcastle Theaetre Company.

(l to r) Jenny Strassburg and Melissa Hurst in “A Strange Disappearance of Bees” at Oldcastle Theaetre Company.

Review by Gail M. Burns and Larry Murray

Gail M. Burns: Without question, “A Strange Disappearance of Bees” has to be one of the best original plays I’ve seen in a long time. By “original” I mean conceived wholly from the mind of the playwright – we see lots of adaptations, translations and historical or biographical plays, but this one is a new creation.

Larry Murray: It’s been years since a new play came out of the blue and knocked my over like a stroke of theatrical lightning.

Gail: For starters, it is clearly plotted and truly moving and engaging. These are good but imperfect people – just like you and me – and through the course of the play we come to care about them and understand why they make the choices they do.

Larry: Elena Hartwell, whom we had the pleasure of meeting – almost by accident – in the lobby before the performance began is the sort of person you just naturally fall into a conversation with. And her play is peopled with uncomplicated characters who you just can’t help liking.

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Burns and Murray Give Naches to Jonathan Epstein and New Stage for “The Jewish Jester” [Berkshire on Stage]

Thursday, May 16th, 2013
Robert D. Lohbauer (l) and Jonathan Epstein in “The Jewish Jester: A Fable With Music.”

Robert D. Lohbauer (l) and Jonathan Epstein in “The Jewish Jester: A Fable With Music.”

Review by Gail M. Burns and Larry Murray

Gail Burns: I didn’t know quite what to expect from “The Jewish Jester: A Fable With Music,” but with Jonathan Epstein in the leading role, how can you go wrong…

Larry Murray: He may be the lowly servant of the king in this play, but he’s also its star. Between Epstein and Robert Lohbauer, his co-star, it’s a pretty dynamic duo on stage, making a great evening entertainment out of a bit of a mushy play. Its advance publicity pointed out that it is a combination of Elizabethan English and Yiddish, but that is only the tip of the Word Play iceberg. It’s also puns, physical comedy and role reversals.

Gail: I was confused as the dialogue is sometimes Elizabethan, sometimes modern, sometimes in verse, sometimes in prose. I wanted to get my hands on a script to clarify playwright Daniel Klein’s rhyme and reason, but that is one of those perks the press can access that the average ticket-buyer can’t. No one should have waste time in the theater trying to figure out what the playwright is up to structurally.

Larry: As to the play itself, it’s like a sweet tsholnt, a Jewish stew that has been simmering for a long time. Some meshuggener (slightly crazy guy) named Daniel Klein put this concoction together. He’s the guy who wrote (with Thomas Cathcart) “Plato and a Platypus Walked into a Bar.” It takes a creative imagination to come up with a nudnik Jewish Jester and condemned King sharing the same jail cell, yet the whole megillah comes together at the Unicorn Theatre in Stockbridge.

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Review: Burns and Murray on Nunsenations! at Cohoes, NY Music Hall [Berkshire on Stage]

Monday, May 13th, 2013

Nunsenations!

Larry Murray: Between the two of us we have these nuns covered – I’ve lived to tell about eight years at Holy Redeemer School with its sadistic Dominican nuns, and you have seen just about every sequel to Nunsense that has come along. Is that about right or am I having to go to confession and admit I have committed two exaggerations…

Gail M. Burns: I can’t vouch for your tales of Holy Redeemer, but I do know that I have seen barely half of the currently existing shows in the Nunsense fanchise – the original Nunsense, Nuncrackers, Meshuggah-Nuns, and now Nunsensations. There are three more – Nunsense II: The Second Coming, Nunsense III: Sister Amnesia’s Country Western Jamboree, and the new Nunset Boulevard – plus a couple of spin-offs – Sister Robert Anne’s Cabaret Class and Nunsense A-Men (a drag version!)

Larry: And that’s before even mentioning the filmed episodes with Whoopi Goldberg and others having fun with the idea. But down to business. We are talking about Nunsensations in Cohoes, ably directed and choreographed by Tony Rivera, the third Nunsense production they’ve pulled off at the Cohoes Music Hall if I am not mistaken.

Gail: It is. C-R Productions mounted Meshuggah-Nuns in 2005 [Read Review] and Nuncrackers in 2008 [Read Review]. The former featured Katherine Pecevich as Mother Superior, Sister Mary Regina, and the latter Cynthia Thomas as Sister Mary Hubert, Mistress of Novices, both of whom are reprising those roles here.

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Review: Oldcastle Offers Fun-Filled “Around the World in 80 Days” in Bennington [Berkshire on Stage]

Thursday, March 28th, 2013

Around the World in 80 Days @ Oldcastle Theatre Company

Review by Gail M. Burns and Larry Murray

Larry Murray: The play Around the World in 80 Days is about as deep as a shallow puddle says its creator, Mark Brown, but it’s really fun. It’s full of life, and the actors tell the tale as a group of eight-year-olds might, one minute they are bouncing around, pretending they are riding on an elephant, the next they are fighting for their lives in the middle of a typhoon. The Oldcastle production gives those of us in the audience a chance to be young again.

Gail Burns: You know I hadn’t thought of it that way, and I’m glad you helped me see the light. I was thinking that the show was rather juvenile, but of course it’s meant to be. It is told with child-like simplicity and has the joie de vivre of children at play. It is not only a great show to take children to see, it is a great show to enjoy with child-like glee.

Larry: Jules Verne wrote his adventure novel in 1873, the middle of the Industrial Revolution, and it was an amazing time to live in. Housing conditions were improving rapidly with the invention of indoor plumbing and the ability to live a more civilized and organized life than was possible before. Among the amazing feats of the era was the completion of the Suez Canal, America’s Transcontinental Railroad and the Great India Peninsula Railroad which made it possible to travel around the world ten times faster than in the previous century. It was all recounted in Verne’s book Around the World in 80 Days which Mark Brown reworked in 1999-2001 as the basis of this play.

Gail: There were still frontiers and uncharted lands then, although Phileas Fogg and his entourage stay safely within the bounds of “modern” civilzation and travel modes during their journey. This is a story of man’s sublimation of nature.

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Review: An Exceptionally FIne Lettice and Lovage at the Ghent Playhouse [Berkshire on Stage]

Wednesday, March 27th, 2013
(l to r) Johnna Murray, Joan Coombs and Nancy Hammell in Lettice and Lovage in Ghent, NY.

(l to r) Johnna Murray, Joan Coombs and Nancy Hammell in Lettice and Lovage in Ghent, NY.

by Gail M. Burns and Larry Murray

Gail Burns: People have been talking about this wonderful community theatre production, so we just had to squeeze it in. And am I glad we did.

Larry Murray: And those who read this will be able to as well since it is playing at the Ghent (NY) Playhouse for one more week. Theatre people know about the comedy Lettice and Lovage which revolves around a deceitful docent who livens up her historic tours of yet another of England’s fusty* and dusty historic homes with tales from her own imagination. But anyone who has been held captive on a “historic” tour that is dull as dishwater will love the twists and turns that follow.

The playwright Peter Schaffer has always had a knack for picking colorful and interesting characters, from Mozart in Amadeus to the stableboy who blinded horses in Equus. Barrington Stage did his wonderful Black Comedy a couple of seasons ago, and I have to admit that Schaffer is one of my favorite playwrights.

Gail: I am not sure I’d rank him that high on my list. His plays, especially Equus, tend to be over wrought, and the plot is the thing I like the least here. When I reviewed the 2003 and 2004 Shakespeare & Company productions I wrote: “…[The play is] rather predictable and formulaic in that oh-so-wacky way television has trained us to expect. I enjoyed the laughs…but I would have enjoyed them more if they had supported a more serious purpose than another when-I’m-an-old-lady-I-shall-wear-purple-carpe-diem-you-can’t-take-it-with-you slab of silliness.” And “…playwright Peter Schaffer…has used the captivating character of Lettice Douffet as a way to hold the audience’s attention while he rails about everything from ugly British architecture to stifling work environments, and celebrates everything from Shakespeare to Tudor cuisine.”

I enjoyed it though because I saw it in the Spring Lawn Mansion, which played the role of Fustian House* exceedingly well, with Tina Packer and Diane Prusha in the title roles. But you saw the original London production starring Dame Maggie Smith and Margaret Tyzack.

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Review: “Lucky Stiff” a Musical Farce from Class Act Productions in Troy, NY [Berkshire on Stage]

Friday, March 22nd, 2013

Lucky Stiff @ Class Act Productions in Troy, NY

by Gail Burns and Larry Murray

Larry Murray: Lucky Stiff is a daring choice for Class Act Productions. From the first moment it appeared on the off-Broadway scene in 1988, just about everyone has hailed the clever lyrics of Lynn Ahrens. Who else could come up with a love song called “Nice” that starts off “It was nice hating you…” It’s little wonder she won the Richard Rodgers award for them.

Gail Burns: This is the very first musical from the Tony award-winning team of Lynn Ahrens (book and lyrics) and Stephen Flaherty (music) who went on to fame and fortune with Ragtime and Once on This Island. Ahrens and Flaherty were taking a course in musical theatre, and this was their final exam, if you will, the culmination of their work. This shows in its tight construction and brisk pace – I imagine that their assignment was to write a 90-minute musical, which this is, once intermission and the laughter of the audience is shaved off.

Larry: One of the toughest things in the world is writing musical farce, Stephen Sondheim did it with A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. That show opens with a chorus singing “Comedy Tonight” while Lucky Stiff belts out “Something Funny’s Going On” which, appropriately enough, ends with a gunshot and a corpse, setting up the whole premise of the show.

Gail: Let me see if I can give you the essence of the fun without giving too much away. Lucky Stiff, based on the British murder mystery The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo by Michael Butterworth, concerns a young British shoe salesman named Harry Witherspoon (Oliver Ord) whose lackluster life is suddenly and dramatically altered when he is left $6 million in the will of his American Uncle Anthony. But the money can only be his if he takes the corpse (Michael McDermott) on a final vacation to Monte Carlo. In hot pursuit is the rival inheritor, the Universal Dog Home of Brooklyn, represented by one uptight chick named Annabel Glick (Erin Harwood). They are in turn pursued by the legally blind Rita La Porta (Katie Hughes), Uncle Anthony’s lover who believes she is also his murderess, and her hapless optometrist brother, Vinnie DiRuzzio (Brian McBride Land). Along the way they meet a mysterious Arab (Bill Depew) and a sexy French chanteuse Dominique du Monaco (Elizabeth Sterling), along with an assortment of others (Alan Angelo, Peter Caracappa, Henry DiMaria, Maria Lally Clark, Michael O’Farrell, Melissa Pelletier, and Cait Webber). Mayhem ensues! Who will get the money? Will the fact that Harry and Annabel are escorting a corpse scuba-diving and sky-diving be discovered? And what about that heart-shaped box?

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Burns and Murray Review “Five Guys Named Moe” at Cohoes Music Hall [Berkshire on Stage]

Friday, March 15th, 2013

Review by Gail Burns and Larry Murray

Gail Burns: Looks like we pulled a theatrical double-header yesterday seeing two shows in one trip. And the first one, Five Guys Named Moe at the Cohoes Music Hall, was a musical I hadn’t seen before.

Larry Murray: The show is based on the pioneering music of Louis Jordan (1908-1975) who was known as The King of the Jukebox. While it doesn’t seem all that revolutionary today, it was the badass music of its day. It ruled its particular musical domain from the late 1930′s to the early 1950′s when rock and roll was supposedly “born.” Jordan could be considered a preemie of the genre, often topping what Billboard then called the “race” charts.

Gail: It is really sad that Louis Jordan’s recordings have fallen into semi-oblivion even after the success of this jukebox musical in London and New York in the early 1990′s. Part of the reason is undoubtedly racial. I recently enjoyed a fascinating biography of a contemporary of Jordan’s, Sister Rosetta Tharpe (1915-1973) on PBS (Click Here for Program). Like Jordan, Tharpe is credited with helping to birth rock and roll and I had never heard of her. I am pretty sure I would have grown up playing their records if they had been white.

Larry: My feet are still tapping out the great melodies from the swinging 1930′s and feeding off all that tremendous energy of five, no wait, six guys on stage. The video embedded at the very top of this page showcases the original Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five as they belt out the original song that is now the title of the show.

The show begins with just one guy on stage, Nomax (Ariel Padilla), who is down and blue over a breakup with his girlfriend, Lorraine. The raucous Five Guys Named Moe reveal themselves early on as the dissolute Nomax tries to cope with the pain of his breakup. The title song allows the quintet to introduce themselves to the audience as Big Moe (Daniel Belnavis), Little Moe (Avionace), No Moe (Sheldon Henry), Four-Eyes Moe (Daryl Stewart) and Eat Moe (Marc-Sally Saint-Fleur). They then get to work lifting Nomax’s spirits.

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Burns and Murray on Circle Theatre Players’ “Of Mice and Men” at Sand Lake Arts Center [Berkshire on Stage]

Thursday, March 14th, 2013
Playing at the Sand Lake Center for the Arts, Of Mice and Men is the tale of migrant workers, and their friendships, during the Great Depression.

Playing at the Sand Lake Center for the Arts, Of Mice and Men is the tale of migrant workers, and their friendships, during the Great Depression.

Review by Gail Burns and Larry Murray

Larry Murray: During the great depression of the 1930′s the migrant workers weren’t from Mexico, they were your neighbors, often displaced by the collapsed American economy and without a home to call their own. John Steinbeck wrote a novel about this, an unblinking view of both the society that existed at the time, and contrasted its optimistic humanity with the prejudices that was America at that time – racism, sexism and the difficulty people with disabilities faced, often with little sympathy from others. It’s a tough play, but a fair accounting of that era.

Gail Burns: The major “safety nets” for many disabled and elderly then were friends and family. Lennie Small, who is mentally disabled, has no family. He is extraordinarily lucky to have his friend George Milton. But while George is mentally much more capable, he needs Lennie to justify his existence as much as Lennie needs him for the basics of life. Lennie gives George a purpose for being, a fact that makes the ending twice as tragic.

Larry: Against the background of this unlikely friendship between two migrant workers, Lennie and George encounter other bindlestiffs in much the same situation. That word really describes their world.

Gail: The word “bindlestiff” refers to both the iconic bundle in a kerchief tied to end of a stick and to the hoboes who carry them. It was a lonely life on the road, and few men teamed up as George and Lennie do. But it was equally lonely for many on who stayed put as well. The western United States was lightly populated, and there was no highway system connecting communities.

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