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    • Ralph Stalter
      • Sep 23, 2018
      • 4 min read

    EMAV Review: "Every Brilliant Thing" is fundamental theatre ★★★★★

    Updated: Mar 8, 2019



    ★★★★★ - Irresistible

    The origins of drama have often been attributed to simple storytelling, as when the storyteller adopts a false voice or adds characterization through movement and costume. In such terms, the art of theatre could be described at its most fundamental as the presence of an actor before an audience.

    Visceral proof of such “fundamental” theatre is on display through September 30th at the Art Square Theater. Actor Marcus Weiss and Director Jane C. Walsh have fused their inventive talents in a truly outstanding, 5 STAR, irresistible evening – bringing playwright Duncan MacMillan’s “Every Brilliant Thing” to life under the auspices of Cockroach Theatre Company.

    As a bit of background, Eric Bentley (eminent British born drama critic, playwright, editor and translator), believes that there are three elements which are essential for a theatrical performance: an actor, a character (developed by the playwright in the script), and an audience.

    This play depends on little else, though there are certain benefits to having a director along for the journey. Ms. Walsh stages “Every Brilliant Thing” with an eye for detail: as with the list of every (brilliant) thing, it’s the little things that matter in this show. It’s staged in a small space with the audience on all four sides; this approach takes an already emotional story and adds to its immediacy. She navigates the space, tempo, and script with grace and efficiency. Her design team successfully enriches the simplicity of the production without disturbing the intimacy throughout: Zac Phillips (sets), Elizabeth Kline (lighting), and John McClean (sound).

    Before the show starts, audience members are given slips of paper with numbered items written on them, and at certain points they are asked to call them out: ice cream, staying up past your bedtime, laughing so hard you shoot milk out of your nose. So, as a mother battles chronic depression, her young son begins the list that makes life worth living, the list that is the grounding theme for the entire show. As time passes, the list grows and what began as a naive attempt to deal with tragedy becomes an epic chronicle of life’s small joys. Staged in-the-round, this touching, funny and intimate play charts the lengths to which we will go for those we love.

    Plays with audience participation are often awkward. Not everyone wants to be part of a show, and it can feel like a breach of an unspoken contract between performers and audience members to rope people in and make them the focus of everybody in the room. “Every Brilliant Thing” pulls off the trick of participation by approaching audience members beforehand (so there are no surprises), and by incorporating Mr. Weiss’ sunny personality: instantly trustworthy, in control of the room and yet, when it’s called for, courageously vulnerable. He is a marvelous storyteller, and has terrific material to work with.

    Weiss is thorough and caring when connecting to each and every member of the audience, narrating the story. He’s seven years old. Mum’s in hospital. Dad says she’s “done something stupid”. She finds it hard to be happy. So, he starts a list of everything that’s brilliant about the world -- everything worth living for. He leaves it on her pillow. He knows she’s read it because she’s corrected his spelling.

    As the narrator gets older, attends university, falls in love and gets married, the list -- which eventually swells to nearly a million entries -- includes such offbeat things as “peeing in the sea and nobody knows,” “the smell of old books” and “Christopher Walken’s hair.” Meanwhile, the narrator discovers, much to his heartbreak, that the list and his best intentions are not enough to prevent tragedy.

    Weiss is an accomplished, versatile actor whose impish charm, warmth and naturalism serve him well here. A former clown, he had never set foot in Las Vegas until he was cast in Blue Man Group at the Luxor in the winter of 2000. He has also performed with the world-renowned improvisational troupe, The Second City, fine tuning his flexibility and inventiveness that come in handy as he must interact with new audience members every evening. His improv skills take the show to a higher level, allowing him to take liberties with the text without making the show run aground.

    As a play, "Every Brilliant Thing" doesn't candy-coat the subject of suicide and family survival. But it does shine gentle theatrical light on the way sweetness and sorrow are both magnified by tragedy. While this is, indeed, a solo performance piece, theatrical art demands the collaboration of actors with a director, with the various technical workers upon whom they depend for costumes, scenery, and lighting, with volunteers across many departments, and with the business people who finance, organize, advertise, and market the productions. Cockroach Theatre Company has, yet again, successfully summoned their artistic resolve and the community support necessary to embrace local artists and patrons for their 15th Anniversary Season.

    Oscar Wilde would be proud: “I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.”

    First produced by Paines Plough and Pentabus Theatre Company, “Every Brilliant Thing” was originally only ever meant to be performed twice: at Ludlow Fringe Festival and Ledbury Poetry Festival. It didn’t exactly turn out that way. It captured people’s hearts at the 2014 Edinburgh Fringe, played in New York for four months and has toured around the world. This utterly charming solo performance piece was also broadcast on HBO in December 2016.

    Playwright Duncan MacMillan, who wrote the show with stand-up comic Jonny Donahoe, deliberately created a one-actor theater piece that could readily be adapted for a male or female performer and adjusted to fit any given time and place. The universality of the play’s themes — angst, family conflict, the fear of being an inadequate spouse or partner, time’s inevitable passage, and unavoidable loss — intersect seamlessly with its democratic approach. Should you ever find yourself phoning up an old teacher late at night to seek comfort from her sock puppet, you can take heart in knowing that even then, you’re not alone.

    #Cockroach #Downtown #Theatre #Review #Stalter

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    • Review
    • Ralph Stalter
      • Sep 10, 2018
      • 3 min read

    EMAV Review: Sin City Opera's 'Penzance' is a rollicking romp ★★★★★



    ★★★★★ - Irresistible

    Get your Pirate on, matey, and join the band of swashbuckling buccaneers, bumbling British Bobbies, frolicsome Victorian maidens, and the delightfully dotty “model of a modern Major-General” for a rollicking irresistible 5 star romp over the rocky coast of Cornwall. Beloved since its premiere in 1879, The Pirates of Penzance (or The Slave of Duty) is a delightful farce of a classic that is fun for all ages, which wraps up the 2018 Super Summer Season at Spring Mountain Ranch through September 22nd.

    Sin City Opera presents this carefree, delightfully charming story of a young pirate-in-training, Frederic, who can’t wait for his 21st birthday, the day his accidental pirate apprenticeship ends….or does it? Born in a leap year, Frederic discovers he must remain with the raucous band of buccaneers and delay his future with the lovely Mabel who promises to wait, much to the chagrin of her father, the Major General. Bound by his own sense of duty and loyalty to the Pirate King, will Frederic be forced to sail away into the sunset alone or run off to fly high on the seas of love?

    Producer Ginger Land-van Buuren and Artistic Director Skip Galla Katipunan have assembled an extremely talented cast of performers that are all “triple threats” – having the ability to sing, dance and act -- and having far too much fun onstage bringing this “ingenious, clever, wonderfully funny” piece of musical theatre to local audiences. Foremost among this gifted ensemble, in leading roles, are: Rebecca Morris (Ruth), Kayla Wilkens (Mabel), Karsten Pudwill (Frederic), and James McGoff (Pirate King). Notable in supporting roles are: Susan Easter (Police Chief),Kim Glover (Kate), Bonita Hunt (Edith), Kristina Wells (Isabel), Keith Dotson (Samuel), and Stephen Rinck (Major-General Stanley).

    To that solid corps are added twenty-eight very capable chorus members – 11 swashbuckling buccaneers, 10 bumbling British Bobbies, and 7 frolicsome Victorian maidens. Under the guidance of musical director Dean Balan and choreographer Anastasia Weiss, they navigate this most riotous of comic operettas with ease, filling the Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area with their joyous harmonies and rhythmically complex dance routines, accomplished with well-clipped military precision.

    The design team has found a perfect balance in support of the overall artistic goals of the production: a simple yet flexible set (Steve Paladie); lighting which is almost imperceptible (Liz Kline), costumes (Ginger Land-van Buuren) that delightfully contrast pirates (swarthy nautical dress), police (ill-fitting, unkempt uniforms akin to Keystone Cops) with the more flamboyant and brightly colored pantaloons, petticoats and bobby socks of the Sisters.

    The Pirates of Penzance is a comic operetta in two acts, with libretto by Sir W.S. Gilbert (1836-1911), playwright and humorist, and music by Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900). Sullivan was unofficial composer laureate of England and favorite of Queen Victoria. Gilbert and Sullivan (G&S) wrote a series of fourteen comic operettas which were wildly popular in their own time and are still widely performed by amateur and professional groups today, over a hundred years after their creation.

    The operetta premiered on December 31, 1879 at the Fifth Avenue Theater in New York with Sullivan conducting -- though a single performance had been given on the previous day at the Royal Bijou Theatre, Paignton, England, to secure the British copyright. Finally, the operetta opened on April 30, 1880, at the Opéra Comique in London, where it ran for 363 performances, having already been playing successfully for over three months in New York.

    It’s hard to find fault with Sullivan’s own appraisal about the operetta upon which he was hard at work in New York on December 10, 1879. He penned in a letter to his mother: "I think it will be a great success, for it is exquisitely funny, and the music is strikingly tuneful and catching."

    True enough! The Pirates of Penzance was an immediate hit and takes its place today as one of the most popular and enduring works of musical theatre thanks to the efforts of Richard D'Oyly Carte, the impresario who turned Gilbert & Sullivan into big business, along with building the opera company and the Savoy Theatre which he built to produce them.

    Sin City Opera “Is Las Vegas' premier contemporary opera company, dedicated to bringing affordable opera and classical music to our community in fresh and exciting new ways”. It is certainly our good fortune that they have brought Gilbert and Sullivan back to town! Let’s have more of it, please.

    #sincityopera #SuperSummerTheater #Stalter #Review #Theatre #Music #Dance

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    • Review
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    • Music
    • Ralph Stalter
      • Aug 12, 2018
      • 3 min read

    EMAV Review: 'Peter Pan' brings a magical world to life



    ★★★½☆ - Satisfying

    Super Summer Theatre and Huntsman Entertainment present “Peter Pan – A Musical Adventure,” a satisfying three and a half star winner for both children and adults that brings a truly magical world to life before our eyes. Performances continue through August 18th at Spring Mountain Ranch State Park.

    “Peter Pan – A Musical Adventure,” is the 1996 version featuring a score by the British team of composer George Stiles and lyricist Anthony Drewe, and book written by Willis Hall (based on the original play by J.M. Barrie). The songs are different from those we know from the original version of “Peter Pan” but they are clever and truly add to the telling of the story -- in particular “One Big Adventure” and “Just Beyond The Stars” along with “The Cleverness of Me”. [Nothing to hum or as memorable to audiences as “I Got To Crow” or “I Won’t Grow Up”.]

    However, the essential story remains the same: Peter and his mischievous sidekick, Tinkerbell – handily portrayed by Vanessa Lopez, who uses American sign language to communicate onstage -- visit the nursery of the Darling children late one night and with a sprinkle of pixie dust begin a fantastical journey across the stars to new lands that none of them will ever forget. Wendy, John and Michael arrive in Neverland to meet up with the Lost Boys, an all-female Indian Tribe, and Pan’s nemesis Captain Hook (with his motley crew of pirates).

    The Producers (Steve and Sandra Huntsman) point out in their program notes that: “As we approached this lesser known musical adaptation of the classic story, we were inspired to think out of the box. What if Peter is a construct of the children’s imagination? Or a street urchin who listens at the window? What if the children see elements of their home and surrounding environment in Neverland? We asked these questions and so many more, then let our creative and technical teams and cast have fun, play and create!”

    These multi-talented young producers took on a few other major responsibilities in bringing this entertaining production to the stage: Steve worked as director, costume and scenic designer; Sandra served as musical director. As Barrie wrote: “All the world is made of faith, and trust, and pixie dust.” Steve and Sandra have certainly brought an abundance of these three elements into this theatrical fantasy adventure!

    We begin our journey in the Darling family nursery in London between 1900-1910. The gifted creative team then makes use of traditional “story theatre” conventions to transport the characters and audience through the streets of London, the pirate ship, into the mermaids ocean paradise and, of course, through various Neverland neighborhoods! Kudos to Jay LeDane (lighting), Katherine Gonzales (sound), Dawn Campbell (choreography).

    The capable multicultural ensemble does yeoman's work in singing and dancing while moving simple set pieces to designate new and different settings while the audience watches – even while wearing fantasy or period costumes (dressed as Neverland Natives, mermaids, or couples at a high society ball).

    The primary characters were confident and self-assured throughout and their singing was quite enjoyable: Joel Ruud (Peter Pan); Timothy Burris (Captain Hook/Mr. Darling); Gabrielle Cook (Wendy Darling); Blake Heller (John Darling); Leonidas Brown (Michael Darling); Cynthia Vodovoz (Mrs. Darling); Andrew Driovich (Mr. Smee); Kate Sirls (Storyteller), and Jaida Albanito (Tiger Lily).

    Due to technical difficulties the show started later than expected. However, as I perused the capacity audience throughout the course of the evening – even as the closing number was coming to a conclusion much later than usual – both young and old were on their feet cheering and applauding in appreciation of the amazing adventure we had just shared together!

    Stiles and Drewe are a multi award-winning musical theatre writing partnership. Their passion for new musical theatre writing is recognized via the annual Stiles and Drewe Prize for Best New Song, and their new Mentorship Award supported by Music Theatre International (Europe). They are also founding board members of Mercury Musical Developments (MMD), Associate Artists at The Watermill Theatre and patrons of the London Musical Theatre Orchestra and The Musical Theatre Academy (MTA).

    #Theatre #Review #SuperSummerTheater #HuntsmanEntertainment #Stalter

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