Legally Blonde: the Musical - UMD Theatre

Legally Blonde is a Hoot

Paul Brissett

December  4, 2014 

UMD Theater’s Legally Blonde: The Musical is simply a buffet of fun.

The show, which opened Thursday in the Marshall Performing Arts Center, is about the UCLA sorority girl who follows a man to Harvard Law School and is another demonstration of director Anne Aiko Bergeron’s impeccable eye for the entertaining and skill with performers.

In the lead role of Elle, Elise Benson not only sings and dances with panache, she rides her preposterous, wisely ditzy character with grace, balance and a dazzling smile.

Even if you don’t know the story, you recognize from the moment he enters that Pascal Pastrana’s character of Warner will ultimately reveal himself as shallow and ambitious.

Jayson Speters’ Emmett is in contrast immediately recognizable as good, decent and solid.

And Colleen Lafeber stands out in the role of Paulette, the beautician who sings a hilarious, rousing song about Ireland and later is featured in a delightful production number about the female attention-getting technique of “Bend and Snap.”

Bergeron makes maximum use of a cast of 32 (plus two adorable dogs) in fresh, beautifully polished production numbers that are just one delight after another.

One of the more impressive opens Act II. “Whipped Into Shape” has dancers jumping rope while singing and performing other feats of athleticism and aerobic fitness. Interestingly, the leader is played by Katelin DeLorenzo, whose character is about as far away as one could get from her just-previous role as the repressed and depressed Nora in UMD’s production of A Doll’s House.

When Bergeron puts up a show, not only the performers dazzle. In Legally Blonde: The Musical, Kathleen Martin’s costumes are an integral part of the story, as when Elle sits radiantly in pink amid fellow students in somber tones. Ashley Wereley’s set and Jim Eischen’s lighting are so tightly integrated into the action, the effect is more than the sum of its parts.

Fractured Love - UMD Stage 2

Young UMD Playwrights Explore Rocky Landscape of Emotions in Fractured Love

Lawrance Bernabo, Duluth News Tribune 

November 20, 2014 

 Fractured Love, the title given to the collection of original short works that opened Thursday night at the Dudley Experimental Theatre, is something of a misnomer. That is because more often than not the point where the particular love on display was fractured is in the rear-view mirror and fading fast. Ultimately, the unifying factor here is not the theme of the works, but rather the efforts of the young playwrights grappling with their craft.

A company of eight student actors performed a series of what were advertised as 10-minute plays by UMD students and alumni, all directed by senior Joe Cramer. It turned out the evening’s roster consisted of eight dialogues and five brief monologues. True, Aeschylus never needed more than two actors on stage and everybody remembers him, but it was a tad odd that nobody got to at least a third on-stage character.

The arrangement of the pieces worked well. The evening began with the funniest piece, and ended with the most touching moment. The opening piece by Bailey Boots was titled John, basically because there was one on either side of a locked bathroom door (although neither has a line). A lot of the humor in the piece came from Kyliah Thompson’s facial expressions, which included some good old fashion mugging, as Kelly, who is horrified to discover an engagement ring on her finger.

The Third Date by Jared Walz finds James (Jacob Fazzio) waking up tied to a chair by Anna (Anna Gwaltney), and then things start getting weird. Alex Goebel’s Mine has Olivia Blake’s bartender trying to get the drunken Courtney (Gwaltney) out of the bar so she can close up and go home. In Elephant in the Car by Joshua Stenvick, a couple have run out of gas in a blizzard and find their relationship is in a similar state.

Things turned decidedly more serious after intermission. Erik Meixelsperger’s Fish Bowl has Thomas Matthes and Cassie Liebercowski as grieving parents about to bury a child after an unspecified tragedy that has clearly gone viral. This one explores an aspect of enabling that we have never really seen in these all-too-frequent stories. However, the drama took a turn toward humor; it was not that the moment rang false as much as it seemed to come too soon in a piece this short. I would like to see how better Meixelsperger could pull this off if this piece was lengthened to at least a one act.

All Fun and Games by Wesley Erickson starts during the final moves of a brutal game of Candyland being played by two teenage boys (Ryan Cooper and Ryan Richardson) that serves as an impetus for long simmering issues to come to a head. Russell Habermann’s Burning Eden is about a pair of siblings conflicted over putting their mother in a nursing home. This was the one piece where I thought the performances could have gotten a lot more out of the material, but both roles were done with a narrow range of vocal shadings and pitched rather low.

The last piece, Waltzing with Eli by Carla Weideman, offered another pair of siblings meeting on a park bench, with the sister discovering the title character is off of his meds. Cooper’s performance as Eli did a nice job of avoiding caricature with such a character, and created a rather moving moment in less than ten minutes that served as a fitting note on which to end the evening.

It there was a recurring tendency in these pieces it was to go for comedy rather than drama, and by this I do not mean simply that they were going to laughs, but that over the dramatic construction of going from A to B to C, they like to go from A to 6. However, it should be noted that very few of the situations presented, whether dramatic or comedic, were commonplace ones readily within the life experiences of most college students. So there is something to be said for going outside the usual stricture of “writing what you know.”

As the monologues, Cassie Liebercowsk’s Wrists Are Sexy was the one that best provided a glimpse at a character whose past and future I was instantly interested in finding out more about. But as for her Baby Killer piece, my immediate reaction was that if you are going to go there, then you have to come up with something more than this.

I heard a film director say today that a monologue means either the other person has stopped listening or you are talking too fast. Harold Remarc’s Taped Glasses, about the ironies of incompatible nerd love, was the piece where I most wanted to meet the unseen listener. There might be something more than a “Big Bang Theory” episode here that could be explored further.

Stenvick’s Until Tomorrow created a nice little moment that I thought was a fitting endnote, but it turned out that was only the halfway point and the real ending ended up paling in comparison. He’ll Get It Eventually by Susan Lynn offers a quick glimpse at a quirky character, again making me curious as to what more might be out there.

Such short pieces are clearly unconventional drama. Self-contained and consisting of a beginning, middle, and end, while at the same time suggesting more to the characters and their conflicts outside of the limited time limit. With most of these dialogues there was a point where you could see where it was that they needed to go, while with the monologues you were usually left wondering where they could have gone next. Within all of these works there are such … possibilities.

And Baby Makes Seven - UMD Theatre

And Baby Makes Seven Makes for a Fun Fantasy

Paul Brissett, Duluth News Tribune

Oct 30, 2014 

And Baby Makes Seven, which opened Thursday at UMD’s Marshall Performing Arts Center’s Dudley Experimental Theater, is Paula Vogel’s ingeniously whimsical look at parenthood.

Written in 1974, the script employs the then-radical — if not outrageous — prism of homosexuality in her examination.  Ruth and Anna are a lesbian couple who have had their gay friend Peter impregnate Anna, with the idea that the four of them will become a family. But the women already have three little boys — fantasies in which Ruth can become either Henri or Orphan and Anna takes the role of Cecil. Conflict arises when Peter suggests that the three have to go, that their presence would not make for a wholesome atmosphere in which to raise the new baby.

The play opens with children’s voices offstage arguing over how babies are made.  “Henri,” with a broad French accent, and “Orphan,” who we soon learn was raised by dogs, stoutly aver that they came from eggplants. But brainiac “Cecil” provides a detailed, clinical description of intercourse, gestation and birth.  Critics in New York and Chicago have panned recent revivals as trite and pointless, but UMD director Kate Ufema and her cast of three have created two hours of comedy, pathos and some mental gymnastics.

Although occasionally overplaying the childishness of Henri, Stephanie Stine (Ruth), shifts smoothly but unmistakably into either the little Frenchman or the feral “Orphan.”  Her enactment of “Orphan’s” death from rabies has her flicking instantly from grotesque to comic and back again, snarling, uttering dying lines from Shakespeare and singing snatches of song.

Koki Sabates gets her own chance to chew the scenery as Anna, in a hormonal blowup at the start of Act II. “I just want to see my knees again,” she wails. And she creates a moving moment as “Cecil,” being informed by Peter that his “brothers” are gone. 

Vogel’s conceit becomes something of a mental challenge when “Henri” tries to assure his safety (continued existence) by threatening Anna that she will disclose to Peter that he (Henri) is actually the expected baby’s father. 

And Phillip Hoelscher covers the range from the scene with Cecil to a comic practice of holding and bathing a baby.  All three actors play the fantasy — and their multiple roles — with credibility.

The tone of each of the short scenes is set by music chosen by sound designer Alex Flinner and punctuated by lighting by designer Wesley Darton.

A Doll's House - UMD Theatre

Doll’s House Well Done, but Some Roles too Deep for Young Actors

Paul Brissett, Duluth News Tribune

October 2, 2014 

It’s said that by the time an actress understands Romeo’s Juliet, she’s too old to play the part.  That is to say, Shakespeare’s tragic heroine is an impossible fiction, worldly beyond her years.  Something similar could be said of Henrik Ibsen’s Nora, the central character in his play A Doll’s House, a production of which opened Thursday in UMD’s Marshall Performing Arts Center.

Katelin Delorenzo gives a perfectly burnished performance in the role, but a 20ish college student simply lacks the gravitas to portray a woman eight years into a demeaning marriage who’s a chronic liar and holder of a dark secret.  Delorenzo’s portrayal of Nora’s bubbly, playful demeanor in Act I is utterly without undertones.  And her Act III confrontation with Torvald, when she tells him “our home’s been nothing but a doll house (and) I’ve been your doll wife,” lacks the intensity of long-held resentment bursting forth.

Granted, a willing suspension of disbelief is the essential requirement of the playgoer.  And student theater rarely has much choice in the age of performers.  But the circumstances of Nora’s life, and how they’ve shaped her personality, are so essential to Ibsen’s story that they simply must be portrayed with more credibility than this production can manage.  

If Delorenzo was born too late for her part, so too was Jayson Speters, who turns in a technically impeccable performance but can’t muster the dismissiveness with which Torvald Helmer sees his wife.  Born late in the 20th century and reared in a world that has never been without feminism, he delivers Torvald’s belittling endearments — squirrel, songbird, etc. — without a hint of sugary patronization.  Similarly, his (today) outrageously paternalistic and sexist statements in Act III are delivered with all the conviction he might bring to reading a fairy tale aloud. How could it be otherwise; he’s likely never heard them uttered seriously in real life.  It is only in the play’s final, heartbreaking scene that Delorenzo and Speters generate a thoroughly affecting dynamic.

The blameless deficiencies of the two lead actors notwithstanding, UMD’s production is excellent theater.  Director Tom Isbell has taken William Archer’s translation, which significantly tightened and brightened Ibsen’s original script, and added moments of laugh-out-loud humor.  He also has demanded a brisk, crisp performance of a play that can sometimes seem stodgy and old-fashioned.  Curtis Phillips’ 19th century Norwegian living room, complete with tiled stove, is lighted by Solveig Bloomquist to capture the effect of pre-electricity illumination.  Patricia Dennis’ costumes are carefully correct, in period terms, down to Thorvald’s ankle-height lace-up shoes.

Isbell’s supporting cast is strong, none of them burdened by their unavoidable youth.  Particularly striking is Erik Meixelsperger as Krogstad, who threatens to disclose Nora’s secret unless she prevails upon Torvald to keep Krogstad in his job at the bank.  Meixelsperger has a perfect villain’s sneer and conveys a palpable desperation when demanding Nora’s aid.

Red Light Winter - UMD Stage 2