Spoon River - UMD Theatre

Dead Men Do Tell Tales

Sheryl Jensen

Duluth News Tribune

October  1, 2015 

 

A play adaptation based on a 100-year-old poetry collection of 244 epitaphs shouldn’t be quite so much fun. Yet, the opening night audience members for Spoon River Anthology at the University of Minnesota Duluth clearly were finding not only moments to ponder life’s eternal mysteries but also opportunities to laugh and to clap along with the music.
Contrary to the old saying, dead men (and women) indeed do tell tales in director Tom Isbell’s adaptation of Edgar Lee Masters’ 1915 poetry collection Spoon River Anthology. The crisp, 90-minute production (performed without an intermission) flies by with its mix of comedy, pathos, music and dance.

In stories of murder, lust, greed, jealousy, pride, and any number of other human vices, Masters’ voices from the grave tells the provocative secrets and revelations and the mostly unfulfilled hopes and dreams of those “sleeping on the hill” in the town cemetery of the mythical town of Spoon River.

Isbell’s research from his pilgrimage this past summer to Masters’ home turf in Lewistown and Petersburg, Ill., is on glorious display, not only in his selection of which poems to choose and how to arrange them in ever fascinating configurations but also in the projections, with the beautiful, the ugly and the comic in images of American life gone by.

Scenic designer Jenna Mady’s elegant set includes a simple rake of wooden planks, nine mismatched chairs, a small bandstand, a few stacked boxes and frames for the projections. Wesley Darton’s lighting design is appropriately atmospheric without being dark or oppressive. Heather Olson’s costumes are evocative of the period, with simple but effective changes made in progress by adding aprons, shawls, hats and coats.

The ensemble of five men and four women tackle nearly 60 of the poems in earnest direct address to the audience. While the monologues don’t all ring with the same levels of conviction and clarity, each of the cast members has a chance to connect in moments that are brutally honest, delightfully comic and frequently sarcastic.

Because each cast member is called upon to play several characters, it is important for them to distinguish each clearly with style, energy, dialect, projection and expression. Some of the ensemble members succeed at this more universally than others.

The evening’s most effective comic highlights are provided by Brian Saice as a fiddler and a diminutive judge and Phil Hoelscher as the ever-beleaguered husband.  On the tragic side of the ledger, Lauren Schulke resonates with her portrayals of a rape victim, a prostitute and the brutalized town poetess.

While it truly is an ensemble show, Ryan James Fargo brings a special maturity and confidence to his various personas. Fargo’s energy is electric and his understanding of how to take command of the stage and how to set each character apart make him the most compelling to watch.

Music Director Andy Kust (who also worked with Isbell on the adaptation) is the onstage “band,” playing piano and percussion. While the show is not a musical, the use of music in hymns, period songs and underscore helps to evoke mood and to provide another slant on the show’s themes.

The full-company vocals on “Blessed Assurance” and, most particularly, “This Little Light of Mine” are stunning. One of the evening’s other standout musical moments is a lively full-company square dance, choreographed by Rebecca Katz Harwood.

The cast shows an obvious reverence for the poems and the songs throughout, most particularly with the closing hymn, “I Feel Like Traveling On.” The song underscores projections of people in the community who sent in photos of themselves and their loved ones, reminding us all how fleeting such moments are.

The English teacher part of my soul hopes that UMD’s production will spark interest in audience members going back to the original source material, to do their own detective work of how intricately these characters connect in a masterwork that reads like a kaleidoscopic mosaic of the human experience.

Speech & Debate - UMD Stage 2

Street Scene - UMD Theatre

Street Scene Opera is Performed Well at UMD

 Lawrance Bernabo 

April 30, 2015 

Bringing together different artistic companies has become a recurrent theme this season, and UMD jumped on the bandwagon with the Departments of Music and Theatre combining to present the American Opera Street Scene on Thursday night. Adapted from Elmer Rice’s play of the same name with music by Kurt Weill and lyrics by Langston Hughes this is an ambitious work, well executed.

Rice’s setting is an apartment building in Hell’s Kitchen, where the accents run the gamut from Betty Boop to Bowery Boys with an ethnic smorgasbord in between. What starts off like just another day in the life of this East Side tenement ends up encompassing birth and death. Those expecting something similar to The Threepenny Opera will find elements of that, especially with “Lullaby,” which opens the final scene. But early on Weill is more into exploring jazz idioms, reminiscent of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, while at other times the music is more evocative of Puccini. Then we get to “Wrapped in a Ribbon” and suddenly Weill is producing songs that could have been popular songs at the turn of the century from an Edison cylinder.

In a musical, characters sporadically burst into song. In Street Scene what happens is more like shifting into a higher gear. That is what happens when Amanda Bush’s Anna Maurrant launches into “Somehow I Never Could Believe.” Singing of an optimistic belief in a future that seems doomed to be crushed before the final curtain falls, Bush provided a textbook example of what a dramatic soprano can do with a powerful aria.

 Something similar happens when Zach Winkler as Sam Kaplan begins singing “Lonely House.” Winkler has a nice tone in his lower register that grounds his character’s pathos to the grim realities of his situation.

Sam wants to be more than friends with Anna’s daughter, Rose. Anna Torgerson’s “What Good Would the Moon Be?” speaks to the limitation of romantic dreams in the face of reality. The reprise of this number could be more poignant with some darker shadings given what happens in between because it really is not the same song at that point.

 Everything comes full circle in the end of Street Scene and life goes on in one way or another. One thing I admired about this show is how much time it devotes to the aftermath of the tragedy that unfolds. Usually in an opera that is the final scene, but this show is more ambitious.

 There are even more musicians in the pit under the baton of conductor Jean R. Perrault than there are running around on stage. That big of an orchestra combined with the acoustics of the Mainstage Theatre sounds wonderful, and the sound mix with the singers also was excellent for most of the evening.

 There is a recurring comic thread throughout, personified by “The Ice Cream Sextet,” which was done with seven people on stage and one of the chief examples of the ways director Alice Pierce worked humor into the proceedings.  There are lots of little fun bits sprinkled throughout the show, most of which I liked far better than the running gag with the dog, which really cut against the grain of the tragic dramas played out in this opera.

Detestable Madness - UMD Theatre

Detestable Madness Shines Spotlight on Problems in Society

Paul Brissett

Duluth News Tribune 

March 12, 2015 

Detestable Madness is two 1,000-year-old scripts retooled to cast a harsh light on two issues, one ancient, the other modern.  Jenna Soleo-Shanks, UMD assistant professor of theater, has adapted two plays about women by a woman known today only as Hrotsvit, who lived in a 10th century religious cloister and wrote plays to not only entertain but enlighten.  In the production that opened Thursday at UMD’s Marshall Performing Arts Center, she addresses violence against women in Act I and the objectification of women in Act II. The acts have different characters but played by the same excellent cast of 10.

Curtis Phillips’ spare but dramatic set adapts to either story: a set of black-framed hollow cubes and scarlet drapes hanging at each corner of the in-the-round space.  Act I opens with a party, music from the movie “Saturday Night Fever” playing.  In antique language, punctuated by the occasional vulgarity, Callimachus (played with consummate malevolence by Erik Meixelsperger) tells his friends of his love for Drusiana (Mikaela Kurpierz).  But when — abandoning the old-fashioned speech — he approaches her, she rebuffs him harshly.

As the night wears on, she becomes drunk and he slips from obsession to lustful rage until, after she’s passed out, he rapes her as a friend videotapes the assault and lurid Twitter messages about an actual rape in Ohio in 2012 scroll on the drapes.  Soleo-Shanks uses more sheets of red to dramatize the action throughout both acts, but they’re especially effective in the rape scene, which is shocking without being graphic.

In Act II, Sapientia (played by Colleen Lafeber as a force of nature) storms into a corporate meeting to demand that her three daughters, all of whom have “IT,” be turned into celebrities ala Honey Boo Boo and the Kardashian sisters.  She sings of “capitalistic exploitation, patriarchal standards” to the tune of “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” from the movie “Mary Poppins.”

The act opens funnier than Act I, but slides steadily to a heartbroken mother’s lament for her lost children.  Much of the credit for the effectiveness of the descent goes to sound designer Nick Mrozek, who layers a spooky, echo-y version of “My Favorite Things” with the beeps of a heart monitor during a scene of mock cosmetic surgery.

Soleo-Shanks’ creativity in accomplishing what Hrotsvit says in her introduction is her goal — to shine a spotlight on the problems of her society — is equaled only by the grace with which she deploys modern music and technology to help do so 10 centuries later.  Detestable Madness is a play with a message, one unfortunately that probably will not be heard by those who most need to hear it, people — mostly but not exclusively men — who are likelier to be found in the crowd at a dog fight than in the audience at the theater.

Go, Dog. Go! - UMD Theatre

Go, Dog. Go! at UMD Delights its Target Audience

Paul Brissett, Duluth News Tribune

February 5, 2015 

You COULD cut corners on a theatrical production for kids; they’re easily amused.

But the actors, designers and technicians involved in staging Go, Dog. Go! at UMD didn’t. They were mindful not only of their audience but also their instructors, who  would be evaluating, in addition to technical expertise, their professionalism.

The result is a delightful adaptation by Allison Gregory and Steven Dietz of P.D. Eastman’s classic book for preschoolers, directed by Rebecca Katz Harwood.

With a 6:30 p.m. curtain and 75-minute running time to accommodate their target audience’s bedtimes, it’s a riot of color, movement, sight gags and silliness that had the audience giggling from the get-go when it opened Thursday at UMD’s Marshall Performing Arts Center. The production even offered special children’s playbills that included silly riddles about dogs: “What dog is the best at telling time?” “A watchdog.”

The show opened with Joe Cramer as MC Dog performing a silent routine that was almost Chaplinesque as he struggled with a spring-loaded chair and fumbled with a cap found on-stage until a young audience member called out “It’s a cap!” “Got it before I did,” Cramer ad libbed.

Soon the set, simple but splashed with polka-dots in primary colors, designed by Jenna Mady, was swarming with dogs: Red Dog, Yellow Dog, Green Dog, Blue Dog and Spotted Dog.

They worked. They played. They snuck flashlights under the covers at night. They performed a dance to percussion by bubble wrap.

Virtually the entire play was in broad pantomime, with a lot of sight gags, and actors creating sound effects with their voices.

The show has a light and lively musical score by Michael Koerner, performed onstage by Music Director Andy Kust. Unfortunately, Kust’s keyboard was amplified and the actors’ voices were not, rendering recitations of the book’s text and lyrics of the songs hard to understand.

Costumer Designer Heather Olson’s approach was “less is more.” Each dog’s costume was a primary color, but the only canine features were floppy ears and (impressively wag-able) tails.

The show sacrifices the “instructional” elements of the book, which carefully contrasts concepts such as “in/out,” “over/under” and “work/play,” but offers laughter and music instead. The 40 percent or so of Thursday’s audience at whom the show was really aimed seemed to have no complaint.

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.