Reviews 2015
Reviews 2015
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music and lyrics by Michael John LaChiusa, book by Michael John LaChiusa & George C. Wolfe, directed by Robert McQueen
Acting Up Stage Company with Obsidian Theatre Company, Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs, Toronto
February 23-March 8, 2015
“Some love is fire: some love is rust:
But the fiercest, cleanest love is lust.” (JM March, The Wild Party, Ch. 9)
The Wild Party, Michael John LaChiusa’s expertly crafted musical from 2000, is an exposé of the dark side of the Roaring Twenties that seems uncannily modern. LaChiusa’s score with its rhythmic complexity is clearly of the present even though it is clearly inspired by the jazz, blues and dance music of the 1920s. The production is filled with outstanding performances from its 15-member cast and creates an energy almost too large for its awkward acting space.
One reason The Wild Party seems so modern is that it is based on the narrative poem of the same name by Joseph Moncure March (1899-1977) that was banned when it first appeared in 1928. Its satiric description of substance abuse and a range of sexual proclivities may have seemed shocking in its day but now seems more like an accurate, if jaded, survey of human behaviour. A life of excess in the 1920s in not much different from a life of excess now except that more of the activities Moncure portrayed were illegal then than they are today. When the poem was rediscovered in 1994, it was recognized as a classic. The party Moncure depicts is not a gathering of Long Island aristocrats as in The Great Gatsby, but a carousal of downtown show people and their satellites. The main difference is that Fitzgerald’s partiers are wealthy while Moncure’s are not, and Moncure goes into more detail concerning his characters’ vices than Fitzgerald ever does.
The poem and the musical focus on two vaudevillians, the showgirl Queenie (Cara Ricketts) and the comedian Burrs (Daren A. Herbert). To distract themselves from their growing irritation with each other, they decide to throw a party and invite all their old friends. The guests arrive in various groups. There is the once-famous black boxer Eddie (Sterling Jarvis), his white wife Mae (Rebecca Auerbach) and her 14-year-old sister Nadine (Sarite Harris), who hopes one day to become a star. There are the black song-and-dance duo the D’Armano Brothers, Phil and Oscar (J. Cameron Barnett and David Lopez), who are a romantic couple off-stage. The “almost famous” stripper Madelaine (Lisa Horner) and Sally (Eden Richmond), her catatonic girlfriend of two days make up a second same-sex couple.
The arrival of two producers Gold and Goldberg (Josh Epstein and Larry Mannell), who are looking to move operations uptown, makes everyone wonder who they are planning to take with them. The aging star Dolores Montoya (Susan Gilmour) isn’t going to allow chance to have anything to do with it and seduces them both. Meanwhile, cocaine-user and supplier, the “ambisextrous” Jackie (Stephen Patterson), first flirts with Phil, goes farther with Oscar and ends up trying to seduce Nadine.
The riskiest invitee is Queenie’s best friend/worst enemy Kate (Sara-Jeanne Hosie) who brings her gigolo boyfriend Black (Dan Chameroy) along. It isn’t long before Kate starts making a play for Eddie, causing strife between husband and wife. But then Black, immediately struck with Queenie’s beauty, finds he can’t use his professional charms on her because he’s in love and she is responsive. With this, the show’s tone shifts from satire to tragedy.
The concept of the musical is that it starts in the theatre where Queenie and Burrs perform and then moves to Queenie and Burrs’ apartment where the arriving guests are presented as vaudeville acts. The title for this section is shown on the onstage curtain as “Promenade of the Guests”. If there is a problem with this scheme it is that book authors LaChiusa and George C. Wolfe abandon it soon after the “promenade”. It would, after all, make The Wild Party rather too much like Cabaret if a series of vaudeville acts reflected the reality of the performer’s personal lives.
Director Robert McQueen tires to solve this problem by having Michael Gianfrancesco’s proscenium for the vaudeville theatre remain on stage even when the scene has shifted to the apartment. This solution, however, creates a different problem. The playing area at the Berkley Street Theatre Downstairs is wide and shallow. McQueen already has the band on stage to help us view the musical as theatre. The presence of the proscenium reinforces this idea but it also effectively narrows the central performing area by half making much of the action, especially the dance numbers, look too crowded toward the front. When he uses both the extreme left and right of the stage, watching the action involves the same sort of neck-turning as watching a tennis match.
The main difficulty with the production is the use of mics. First, in a theatre holding only 240, mics shouldn’t be necessary. Second, in a show where most of the cast is on stage most of the time, the use of mics makes it hard to tell who is singing when since mics relocate the source of the sound from the singer to the speakers. When McQueen put Sally up in a balcony overlooking the stage, I looked all over the stage several times before I noticed, almost too late, where the voice was coming from. This was not an isolated incident.
As Burrs, Deren A. Herbert is electrifying in what may be his finest performance ever. His minstrel act in blackface is frightening not only because of the humiliation Burrs must feel as a black man playing a caricature of a black man but because Burrs’ acidic delivery no longer makes his comedy funny. Off stage Herbert shows Burrs as so intensely wound up, he could explode at any second. He conveys a complex mixture of menace and hurt in the nuanced way he sings his songs and when he spies on Queenie with Black, he radiates danger without saying a word. The conflict of love and pain is palpable in his rendition of Burr’s song about Queenie “How Many Women in the World?”
Sara-Jeanne Hosie’s Kate comes across as cool, hard and mean, while Dan Chameroy’s Black is superficially slick with a soft side he tries to hide. One of the many great scenes in the show is when Black tries out his “mooch” on Queenie and it fails. Chameroy and Ricketts make their moving duet of loneliness and love, “People Like Us”, the emblem of the entire show.
The two performers who best capture the vaudevillian nature of the piece are J. Cameron Barnett and David Lopez. They show that the D’Armano Brothers are professionals to can play happy on cue no matter whatever their private strife. Because of Jackie, both characters have to suffer in silence yet both Barnett and Lopez fully convey their characters’ pain. Lopez sings his only solo song “Tabu” in a sweet voice brimming with eroticism. But the song you will likely go out humming is the duo’s zippy number “Uptown”.
Among the many other fine performance there are notable standouts. Susan Gilmour, uncannily channelling Chita Rivera, makes Dolores the vamp to outvamp all vamps. With her black helmet of hair she is out to get whatever she wants no matter the cost. She exits with a wonderfully snarling, world-weary song “When It Ends”.
Sterling Jarvis gives a powerful performance of “Golden Boy”, the song most overtly about racism. Jarvis fills the song with barely controlled anger as Eddie sings about being acclaimed as a “king” in the boxing ring and then being told to use the back entrance at a restaurant. Jarvis makes it tragically clear how a frustrated, physical man like Eddie could step over the line and knock out his own wife in an argument.
Lisa Horner creates a fine portrait of willful ignorance as Madelaine, who comically and sadly attributes a positive meaning to the whatever her morphine-addicted girlfriend does. As Jews who are trying to erase the Jewishness of their names, Josh Epstein and Larry Mannell help to make the producers Gold and Goldberg the most obvious embodiments of the paradox facing all the characters. They all spend so much energy creating an image of themselves for the public that they have lost their real identities including any clear sense of what is or is not real in world. All the sex, sin and violence at the party is about trying to feel something authentic for a change, though all the gin consumed means they will never reach that goal.
Because of this theme The Wild Party seems more relevant now than it was in 2000. People are more aware now that the problems of creating false personae can belong to anyone, not just show people. The party that descends from diversion to chaos is not a new metaphor, but by choosing a foresighted 1920s poem as a source, LaChiusa and Wolfe make that metaphor for the decline of civilization to savagery feel new, immediate and frightening. Compared to the dark worldview in The Wild Party, Kander and Ebb’s Chicago (1975) seems like light entertainment. The Wild Party is a complex, important musical and we have to be grateful to Acting Up Stage and Obsidian for finally bringing it to Toronto.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: Cara Ricketts and Daren A. Herbert; Eden Richmond, Stephen Patterson, Lisa Horner, Rebecca Auerbach, J. Cameron Barnett, David Lopez, Sterling Jarvis and Sarite Harris; Cara Ricketts and Daren A. Herbert. ©2015 Racheal McCaig.
For tickets, visit http://actingupstage.com.
2015-02-26
The Wild Party