Reviews 2012
Reviews 2012
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music by Alan Menken, lyrics by Glenn Slater, book by Cherie and Bill Steinkellner, directed by Jerry Zaks
Mirvish Productions, Ed Mirvish Theatre, Toronto
October 4-November 4, 2012
“Disco Nunsense”
Sister Act is a purely commercial entertainment. Its sole reason for existence is the promise distracting an audience with nothing to think about for two and a half hours. For many people that’s enough reason to go to a show. But, slick as it is, Sister Act trades entirely in clichés and stereotypes. Even if you haven’t seen the 1992 movie on which it’s based, the show already feels familiar from beginning to end. The creators and director deliberately seem to avoid making a single original or creative choice. And Alan Menken’s music imitates 1970s disco so successfully that it doesn’t sound newly composed at all. The curious result is that even though the musical is new it already seems stale.
Toronto is the staring point for the North American tour of Sister Act, so the version we see is that one that premiered on Broadway in 2011, not the British version of 2009. The Broadway version begins on Christmas Eve in 1977 with wannabe disco diva Deloris Van Cartier (Ta’Rea Campbell) auditioning for her married boyfriend, gangster and nightclub-owner Curtis Shank (Kingsley Leggs). Curtis tells her that she’s not good enough yet to perform in his club and for a Christmas present gives her one of his wife’s used fur coats. From this she deduces that she’s been wasting her affection on him. When she goes to break up with him and return the coat, she walks in just when he executes a man he suspects of squealing to the police about his operations.
Deloris rushes to the police herself relating what she saw and willing to testify against Curtis. The policeman in charge of her case happens to be Eddie (E. Clayton Cornelious), a guy who had had a crush on her in high school (and still does). He arranges to hide Deloris in a convent. The Mother Superior (Hollis Resnik) and Deloris take an immediate dislike to one another. From this point on the main source of humour is Deloris complete ignorance of anything religious – of nuns’ lives and even of how to pray. This might work except that Deloris had objected to Eddie’s plan earlier by saying that she had been taught by nuns in a Catholic school. Obviously, the writers are not concerned with consistency.
Eventually the Mother Superior puts Deloris in charge of the pathetically tone-deaf church choir. The choir, however, is only tone-deaf when they are singing church songs because just before Deloris’s first session with them, the nuns had managed to sing quite well a song of heavy-handy irony “It’s Good to Be a Nun”. Deloris music lesson is a bit of fantasy because she manages to teach the nuns (newly returned to being tone-deaf) to be great singers not through any practical advice but by simple exhortation. At least in The Sound of Music, Maria passes on real information to the Trapp children. But here Deloris’s admonitions of “sing out!” and “You can do it!” are enough not only to improve everyone’s voice but to get them to sing in four-part harmony. Not only that, in the same session she uses the same encouragements to get the severely rhythm-challenged nuns to learn syncopation and swing. In no time the church’s masses are a hit, the pews are full and so are the offering plates. The money-strapped order no longer has to fear dissolution and the nuns are tapped to sing for the Pope’s coming visit.
Act 1 is so filled with plot that it leaves little to happen in Act 2, except for Curtis to find Deloris, a task made easy by all the publicity her choir has received. To fill out the show, the creators gives all the main characters songs that repeat sentiments they’ve already expressed in Act 1. Given the success of the choir, the saving of the order and the enthusiastic approval of the Monsignor (Richard Pruitt), the Mother Superior’s song of defeat “I Haven’t Got a Prayer” doesn’t really make sense. There are two new additions. In one the creators try to interest us in the postulate Sister Mary Robert (Lael Van Keuren), who has entered the convent without ever having experienced the outside world. Though she has a fine song, “The Life I Never Led”, it’s rather too late to introduce us to the personal lives of the characters. In the other, Deloris, given refuge before the trial in Eddie’s apartment, experiences a fantasy where she’s torn between the egotism of being a star and the self-abnegation of being one with the nuns. If the creators had given a single hint that the non-Catholic, non-religious Deloris had more than one side to her before, this fantasy sequence might have some force. As it is, it is a transparent, last-minute ploy to try to give the central character some depth.
Howard Menken’s tunes are clear imitations of disco music of the mid-1970’s. The main difficulty here is that disco began to imitate itself even when it was at its height when music producers, to cash in on the craze, brought together backup singers to put out albums as new groups. The Constellation Orchestra was just one of many such groups with their Perfect Love Affair. Deloris’s hero is Donna Summer, but Menken never imitates Summer’s music since he never accompanies Deloris’s songs with a synth bass. Her songs like “Take Me to Heaven” are such accurate imitations of disco, or rather imitations of imitations, that they don’t sound original.
In a song like “Within These Walls” that he gives the Mother Superior, you can hear the kind of music Menken wrote for Disney, thais song especially sounding like it could be sung by Mrs. Potts in Beauty and the Beast. Otherwise, the main game you can play during the show is “Who’s he imitating now?” The songs of Curtis’s henchmen are either based on the O’Jays or the Whispers. The elderly, wisecracking Sister Mary Lazarus (Diane J. Findlay) has a rap tune inspired by Grandmaster Flash, and so forth. Curtis’s own Barry White-inspired “When I Find My Baby” shows a real lapse into bad taste with its lyrics, “And when I find that girl, I’m gonna kill that girl! I’m gonna wham! Bam! Blam! And drill that girl! Won’t rest until that girl is safe and sound six feet below – no!”
After Deloris takes over the choir, the musical becomes a one-joke show, like Dan Goggin’s Nunsense series, of nuns doing un-nunlike things like singing disco and doing sexy dance moves. Even the Monsignor gets into the act. For those raised as Catholics, this must seem hilarious. For others, all its looks like is that Deloris has brought Protestant gospel services to the Catholics. One of the major disappointments of a disco-based show is that the choreography is so bland and repetitive. You would never guess that it is done by Anthony Van Laast, the same man who made Mamma Mia! so much fun. But here, the moves you see in Deloris’s initial audition number are all you get for the entire rest of the show.
A show like this really depends on the lead and Ta’Rea Campbell is an excellent choice. She doesn’t have the richness of voice of Donna Summer nor her lung-power, but her voice is strong if not particularly individual like other singers of the time like Diana Ross, Gloria Gaynor, or Dionne Warwick or even lesser lights like Candi Staton or Thelma Houston. Campbell is much more along the lines of Sharon Redd or Vicki Sue Robinson, whose songs you might know but not the singer. Nevertheless, she has spunk, attitude and great comic timing and is always a pleasure to watch.
Hollis Resnik makes a fine Mother Superior even if the script prolongs her anger longer than is logical. E. Clayton Cornelious is quite a likeable guy, good at playing the nerd people think he is and the fantasy Billy Ocean smooth operator he’d like to be. Kingsley Leggs does a fine Barry White imitation, but it would make conceptual sense if he were a non-singing character, since who wants to applaud a song about murder?
Jerry Zaks directs most of the dialogue as if it were a sitcom. When the thugs break into the convent to catch Deloris, Zaks decides to dumb things down another notch and turn their chase scene into a slapstick farce from an old-fashioned Warner Brother cartoon. When Curtis finally catches Deloris, it is then very hard for him to switch modes from that to heroism and nobility.
As musicals go, Sister Act is like candy floss – sparkly and fluffy but no good for you and a waste of the time it takes to consume. The cast is so talented that you wish you could have seen them in a better vehicle. If, however, it’s two and a half hours of empty calories you’re looking for, Sister Act will fill the bill.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Florrie Bagel, Hollis Resnik, Richard Pruitt, Diane J. Findlay, Ta’Rea Campbell and Lael Van Keuren. ©2012 Joan Marcus.
For tickets, visit www.mirvish.com/shows/sisteract.
2012-10-06
Sister Act