Steve Hendrickson as Sherlock Homes. Photo by Petronella Ytsma.

What’s the business of the Suicide Club?  “Death,” stentorily intones Mr. George (in a terrific performance by James Cada), with equal parts grinning euphoria and stern reverence.

Ah, yes.  Sherlock Holmes And The Adventure Of The Suicide Club (at Park Square Theatre through July 14) is gleefully death-haunted.  Playwright Jeffrey Hatcher explores Holmes’s conviction that Death is nipping at his Victorian heels.  This morbidity is an essential part of the Holmes gestalt; why else does he investigate crimes with such avidity, employing vicious logic and astonishingly accurate conjecture?  Why else does he play the violin so compulsively, pace his cluttered flat like a caged jungle-cat, inject himself with cocaine?  It’s Hatcher’s conceit (and his considerable accomplishment) to focus on this creepy Holmesian obsession.

In this adventure (Hatcher uses material from one of Robert Louis Stevenson’s lesser known short stories), Holmes, tired of life, tired of being “nothing but a brain,” joins the Suicide Club, whose members pay a princely £40 for the privilege of picking billiard balls out of the Club Secretary’s top hat: if they pick the black ball, they die.  If they pick the red one, they are fated to slay the chooser of the black ball.  Off they go, the killer and the killee, into the foggy London night.  “Suicide by second party.”  Fascinating.  I watched this dance of death with unflagging interest.

The actors play their parts to the macabre hilt.  Goofy and ghoulish Nathan Christopher gobbling creamuffs, arch and grinning James Cada, powerful and hulking Allen Hamilton, Bryan Porter the effete Russian nobleman, convincingly beloved of the not-quite-what-she-seems Kathryn Wind.  I was particularly taken with wheelchair bound yet light-hearted and life-loving Bruce Bohne.  At first I wondered why such a delightful person was in the Club; there turns out to be a reason which of course I am not going to share.  Nice performances are delivered by Charity Jones as the Secretary, Karen Weise-Thompson as Mrs. Hudson and Bob Davis as narrating Dr. Watson.

And of course, saving the best for last, Steve Hendrickson as Sherlock Holmes.  Tall, angular, lean and nasty, gaily predatory, Hendrickson effortlessly threads the needle between Holmes’s depressive languor and his overwhelming need to pick up the rocks of evil (they’re everywhere) and expose the foully wriggling worms beneath.  Hendrickson’s work anchors the play and provides the best reason to see it.  Perfection.

As a responsible reviewer, I must report that not all is perfection here in Hatcher’s Holmes-land.  The play grows garbled and difficult to follow.  Characters refuse to develop.  If you’re looking for the familiar zestful Holmes, exuberantly on the hunt, well, Sherlock Holmes And The Adventure Of The Suicide Club may not be for you (I would refer you to the excellent British modernization starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman).  But, imo, the fascination with Death and the excellent acting makes this piece worthwhile and then some.

David Mann‘s production is spare and focused.  He and his designers, to their credit, forgo the clutter at 221B and, using projections, smart costumes, and a few set pieces, vividly recreate turn-of-the-century London.

Like this review?  Hate it?  Have an opinion you wish to express?  Comment!

Sherlock Holmes And The Adventure Of The Suicide Club is the final play of PS’s 12-13 season.  13-14 has been announced; check out the theater’s website.

For more information about John Olive, please visit his website.

Albert and the Puppeteers in War Horse. Photo by Brinkhoff/Mogenberg.

World War One, aka the Great War.  Unrelenting sordidness, a sea of blood seeping into endless mud, no-man’s-land stretching for hundreds of miles, forty plus million human beings killed or maimed, a whole generation lost.  No heroes, no real villains.  Just horror.

No heroes, that is, until War Horse (the National Theatre of Great Britain production, playing at the Orpheum, thorough June 23).  First a novel (by Michael Morpurgo), then a widely produced (and wildly successful) play, then a major motion picture directed by golden boy Steven Spielberg.  In War Horse, the hero is an animal, Joey, a magnificent horse, a running, neighing, leaping emblem of vitality, survivor of machine gun fire, artillery, horrifying mistreatment, barbed wire.  His spirit never flags.  We identify with the find-Joey obsession of his human keeper (no one could ever own an animal like Joey), Albert.  If Joey survives, so can humanity.  Finally, a hundred years after the event, War Horse provides us with a new way of understanding the Great War.

The superstars of this show are the horses.  One hates to use the diminishing word, puppets, though I guess that this is what they are.  There are five, and they each enjoy vivid and astonishing presence.  Animals, of course, but the personalities of their human handlers (each horse has three) shine through.  Every movement is carefully choreographed – and breathtaking.

The horse puppets were designed by Adrian Kohler and Basil Jones for the Handspring Puppet Company.  They dominate.  Indeed, there is one scene when the horses are laid flat and the next scene has a jumpy edge; one half expects the horses to leap to their feet.  Marvelous.

Another luminary in War Horse is the creator of “sets, costumes and drawings,” Rae Smith.  The projections work marvelously well, drawings taking slow shape, sudden use of video, explosions given visual presence, etc.  War Horse features the scariest and most effective recreation of combat I’ve ever seen.  Bravura work.

The actors (mostly American for this tour) hold their own.  Excellent performances are turned in by Alex Morf as Albert; his obsession with saving Joey never becomes tiresome, as it easily could.  Angela Reed as Albert’s mother Rose gives the play a solid emotional anchor.  Chad Jennings excels as Lt. Nicholls; his death is truly shocking.

There are liabilities.  The sound was mushy (though loud and then some), often making the actors hard to understand.  Lighting was (inevitably, given that this is a tour) crude.  Perhaps because I had seen the film and thus knew the story, War Horse seemed long.  But most problems stemmed form the fact that the Orpheum will never be a satisfactory venue for non-musical drama – too cavernous, too echoed.  Straight plays (I dislike this term) struggle to fill it.

Still, War Horse is well worth seeing.  It will reorder your understanding of World War I.  And the work of the Handspring puppeteers is once-in-a-lifetime brilliant.

Did you like this review?  Did you not like it?  Do you have an opinion to offer?  Please, feel free to write a comment.

For more info about John Olive, please visit his website.

Officer Lockstock (Bradley Greenwald) and Little Sally (Elisa Pluhar), commenting on Urinetown as it unfolds around them. (PHOTO CREDIT: Michal Daniel)

The Jungle Theater‘s delightful, exuberant production of Urinetown is occasionally hoisted on its own humorous petard.  The show first premiered in New York over a decade ago—its brand of insider humor—commenting on the cheesy musical even as it presents us with, well, a cheesy musical—has infected our entire culture, from television comedies to blog posts.  While it’s still packed with laughter (though more chuckles than belly laughs), its own success has taken the bite out of some of its satire.  But its tale of a greedy CEO who uses a water shortage as an excuse to tyrannize a small town has become oddly prescient—both environmentally and for its sneaky “Occupy” infected politics.  And the faux-Brecht/Weil construction of the whole enterprise has an infectious giddiness that lifts it above a mere joke-machine.

For the uninitiated:  Urinetown is a musical about a small town (“any town, your town”) trapped in a grimy, post-apocalyptic world—the apocalypse in this case being a devastating water shortage, exploited by “Urine Good Company”—a chain of pay-toilets, continuously raising their rates, and wallowing in their power over the helpless poor, who will pay any price to relieve themselves.  This, uh, tension leads to a revolution—believe or not, hilarity ensues.

Most of it curtesy of Bradley Greenwald. His Officer Lockstock—narrator, lackey and keeper of the peace, anchors the show in every sense of the word.  It goes beyond Bradley’s remarkable vocal range and power.  His easy command of the show’s very specific humor— his precise delivery of the name, “Little Sally”, or his “accidental” blurting of the ugly secret behind Urinetown— shows an instinctual grasp of just how far to go with caricature—how to lace it with just enough character and skill we never dismiss him as a cartoon.  Midway through the show he even combines his two talents, holding a note so long and in such a way we’re amazed by his voice even as we’re laughing at it.

He’s joined at this high altitude by Elisa Pluhar as Little Sally, the diminuitive waif who shares a continuing dialogue with Officer Lockstock throughout the show about—the show itself.  The best thing I can say about Ms Pluhar is that I noted her performance last because, for most of the show, I thought of her as “Little Sally” rather than an actress playing a role.

Kersten Rodau’s Penelope Pennywise, ruthless mistress of Public Amenity #1—a pay-toilet on the seedy side of town—likewise achieves the perfect combination of charisma and absurdity.  She knocks “Privilege to Pee” out of the ballpark—it’s a cruel tease when she sings again later in the show—only because it’s an ensemble number and we want more of that incredible presence and voice.

Randy Schmeling and Jodi Tripp explode us into Act Two with “Snuff That Girl”, a rousingly bizarre song about the revolutionaries killing their wealthy hostage just for the hell of it.  The two manage to create a fiercely real and hilarious pair of Jacobins with very little stage time.  No small feat in this menagerie of oversized personalities.

In general, Act Two is an explosion of music and laughs from beginning to end.  Act One starts out strong, but starts to lag, almost as if director and choreographer John Command lost interest after the first big splash.  But the second acts soars, ironically because Mr Command gives us some technically impressive “musical numbers” in the traditional sense of the phrase.  Act One also tracks the burgeoning Romeo & Juliet romance between the two ingénues, Bobby Strong (Patrick Morgan), the pauper who leads the revolt against the greedy toilet magnate, and that same magnate’s naïve daughter, Hope Cladwell (Tiffany Seymour).  Mr Morgan and Ms Seymour have wonderful voices, but making a joke out of the bland ingénue subplot sometimes runs perilously close to just being a bland ingénue subplot—both actors do better in the tumult of Act Two.

As usual, the Jungle’s production team gets the job done.  The set (Bain Boehlke), Costume (Kathy Kohl), Sound (Sean Healey) and lighting design (Barry Browning) have just the right Brechtian flavor, and musical director Raymond Berg does a great job with the orchestra.  The multi-character ensemble (check your program) juggles doubling, crowd scenes and those old-style musical numbers.

In the spirit of Urinetown I’ll make you aware that this last paragraph is the wrap-up.  Traditionally, I’d bring various threads of the review together in a way that demonstrates my wisdom and cleverness.  Instead, I’ll just say:  Funny, delightful—Act Two better than Act One—“sneaky” politics ultimately conservative—a handful of amazing performances.  You should go.

Ansa Akyea and Sha Cage in Clybourne Park.  Photo by Michael Brosilow.

It is lucky that Jim Lichtscheidl gives such a rich and multi-layered performance in the first act (set in 1959) of Clybourne Park (at the Guthrie, through August 4).  His Karl is a despicable toad and playwright Bruce Norris fills his mouth with poisonous 1950s platitudes and nasty racial clichés.  Having discovered (belatedly) that Russ intends to sell his house in snowy Clybourne Park to a “colored family”, Karl first tries to buy the new family out (a plot device taken directly from Lorraine Hansberry‘s classic A Raisin In The Sun).  Failing here, he then tries to talk Russ out of the sale, waxing by turns fussy, nervous, wringing his hands; then speechifying, posing for his squeaky wife; finally turning vicious and shrill.  Lichtscheidl’s work is compulsively watchable.  It anchors the first half of the play.

Also excellent is the always-terrific Bill McCallum as Russ.  Pot-bellied and stolid, planted in his favorite chair, steadily ripping through a half gallon of ice cream, Russ’s slow burn passion takes two thirds of the act to gain steam, but when it does – look out.  “The ink,” he informs Karl, “is dry.”  To truss-wearing, sweet, greasy and cowardly Pastor Jim (great work by Peter Christian Hansen), “Go fuck yourself.”  “I won’t let you speak like that in front of wife,” Karl screeches.  “She’s deaf!”  McCallum is a hoot and a half.

Of course, Norris lets Russ off the hook by making the sale to the black family accidental (Clybourne Park would have been, in my humble opinion, rather more interesting had his decision been deliberate).  And indeed, Act 1 is largely an exercise in moral smugness: the characters argue, vociferously, an issue our society long ago settled.

Act 2 is set in the present (well, 2009) and as a result things become more relevant – and more interesting.  The now-ramshackle house is being sold by Kevin and Lena (African-American) to Steve and Lindsay (white) who intend to rip it down and build anew.  The neighborhood is being gentrified: once completely white, it became completely black.  But now the hip, white (and rich) urbanites are moving in.  The locally owned market was sold to a cheapo supermarket chain and is now a Whole Foods.  Ah, but the ghosts of Clybourne Park still live.  Will they ever disappear?

If Act 1 belongs to Jim Lichtscheidl, Act 2 is Shá Cage‘s.  Her shy and halting, quiet and passionate, deeply felt efforts to express her reverence for the history of Clybourne Park, and her profound reservations about the unstoppable economic forces altering her beloved neighborhood are a marvel.  Cage achieves an emotional intensity that no one else in this (well-acted) play approaches.  Truly lovely work.

But soon Act 2 devolves into angry shouting and a series of painfully unfunny racial jokes as Norris forces his characters to fall back on ancient and mud-puddle shallow racial attitudes.  Is this really where we are in the 21st century?  “The only cunt here,” Steve asserts, “is her.”  Yikes.  I don’t want to believe this, but Clybourne Park gives us no one to argue cogently otherwise.

Any reservations about the bleakness of the play’s message is mooted by the tiptop quality of the acting (great praise here is due helmsperson Lisa Peterson), and the energized writing; can Norris ever craft a scene.  The design work thrills (especially David Zinn‘s costumes).  The play is definitely worth a look.

Next up at the Guthrie: Pride And Prejudice, the final play of the 12-13 season, beginning July 6.

Like this review?  Don’t like it?  Have an opinion you wish to express?  Leave a comment!

For more information about John Olive, please visit his website.

Stephen Yoakam (The Poet) in the Guthrie Theater’s production of An Iliad. Photo by Aaron Fenster.

How can one actor play the size, the scope, the meaning of the Trojan War – or any war? He plays it as one man against another. He gives these men names and families. He puts them in a place in time: Ancient Troy or modern-day Ohio; a champion named Hector or a kid named Bobby.

An Iliad, which just opened in the Guthrie’s Dowling Studio, is a potent reworking of Homer’s epic poem that connects the horrors of its war – the Trojans holding off the Greeks for nine years – with our own wars, or any wars. They all come down to men — sometimes just kids, really — from towns all over the world, sent to kill each other for someone else’s transgressions. Written by Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare, the play maintains its centering in the ancient story, but the anti-war message it carries crosses the centuries.

In the tradition of storytelling, one person – in this case, The Poet, played by Stephen Yoakam – shares information, interprets what he has seen and heard, and provides commentary. Yoakam is all we need on that stage to recreate Hector’s tender moments with his wife and baby, Achilles’ hubris-infused spat with Agamemnon, Priam’s pleading for the body of his son and all the unspeakable horrors of hand-to-hand combat, one warrior against another.

The challenge for any adaptation is to make it as good at what it does as the original was good at what it did. It should illuminate something new that we may not have seen before in that same way. At this, the play succeeds, making a strong case for its writers’ pacifist views. The senselessness of war, and the capacity for men to kill one another, the play says, transcends culture, ethnicity, geography or history.

But it should also move us as the original must have moved its audience. That I doubt, in this case. In trying to connect the dots for us, the script just couldn’t let the poetry soar, instead knocking us back into our own mundane and petty grievances just as Homer’s depiction of war’s tragedies were beginning to sink in. Pieces of Homer’s poetry, recited like music, grab us and transport us– majestic as performed by one so skilled as Yoakam. It isn’t just what the words are saying, it’s the rhythm and its cadence that touches our senses in a way that straight prose can’t.

But not for long. With a flip remark, we’re reminded that this is someone else’s play, another “take” on the one ancient war everyone has at least heard of. It’s their idea and their politics and their metaphors. (Can road rage ever be comparable to battlefield slaughter? The cheap laugh just wasn’t worth it.)

The effect was to make the play hop around, then limp, then race. This was accentuated Benjamin McGovern’s directing that appeared to meddle a little too much. Yoakum is magnificent when the script and the production of it give him space; he is more than capable of filling it.

The set is intriguing, but almost too much so in the Dowling’s intimate space: bare light bulbs in our eyes, scaffolding that we could speculate (as the Poet paces around a small pool’s pathways) would be used for the ramparts at the play’s end. And the water, running from somewhere offstage into that pool – nice trick, but did it enrich the story? The Poet as Priam, removing his shoes and socks and wading in that pool seemed more an effort to convince us that, yes, there is water in it, rather than to support Priam’s achingly beautiful plea. He turns his back to us and steps out, the hems of his pants dripping. I smell an esoteric metaphor.

Still, it’s an interesting piece and honorable premise, and watching Yoakam wrangle it makes it very much worthwhile. An Iliad runs  through May 26.

Rachel York and Ensemble in Anything Goes. Photo by Joan Marcus.

Anything Goes (currently docked at the Ordway for a week, though May 12) hails from the early tradition of American musical theater, when musical plays mostly consisted of comic sketches interspersed with (often brilliant) songs.  There are a few notable exceptions – Showboat – but this is the basic m.o.; little effort was made to integrate songs and story.  (Then along came Oklahoma! in 1943 and musical theater has never been the same.)

Anything Goes maintains this convention, lurching from character to character, from bit to bit.  Set on an England-bound ocean liner, the play utilizes stock characters: the Beloveds (Reno is beloved of Billy who is beloved of Hope who is beloved of Billy but engaged to malaprop-spouting Lord Oakleigh), on-the-lam (but toothless) criminals, lecherous near-sighted drunks, gun molls, pompous ships captains, feckless stowaways, etc.  The book writers – P.G. Wodehouse & Guy Bolton, Howard Lindsay & Russell Crouse, not to mention the “new book” by Timothy Crouse & John Weidman – have all done yeoperson work, and the play does amuse and divert but, inevitably, one begins to resent the dorky story lines because they keep us from the astonishingly brilliant

Songs.  Wow.  Anything Goes features brilliant music, every number a masterpiece: “I Get A Kick Out Of You,” “De-Lovely,” “You’re The Top,” “All Though The Night,” the eponymous “Anything Goes.”  To say that composer Cole Porter was an American master is a pathetic understatement.  This production, from New York’s venerable Roundabout Theatre, delivers solid, energized readings of the music, with little of the moody “interpretation” laid on by many contemporary singers.  This cast takes an indecent delight in Porter’s brilliance and herein lies your reason to lay out the large dollars for a ticket: Porter’s songs, no matter how often you hear them, always amaze.

And he is well-served.  The wonderful Rachel York plays the lead, Reno Sweeney, like a lithe and lissome Mae West, but when she sings and lets loose her powerful voice: boffo-ness.  Starting with “I Get A Kick Out Of You” and moving into “You’re The Top” and “Anything Goes” York serves up a kick fanny performance, easily dominating the Ordway stage.  As Billy Crocker, who gets bamboozled into stowing away, Josh Franklin more than holds his own, doing bang-up renditions of “You’re The Top,” “De-Lovely,” “All Through The Night.”  Everyone is good, but I need to cite in particular Alex Finke as Hope, Jeff Brooks as the not-very-scary Moonfaced Martin and Edward Staudenmayer as Lord Oakleigh.  This is a first rate production.

Direction and energetic choreography in Anything Goes is provided by Kathleen Marshall.  The dancing works well, though it often seems right out of a 60s TV special.  In “Blow, Gabriel, Blow” Marshall does her best work; the number has genuine jazz-hot, Fosse-esque flavor.  It’s terrific.

So: go for the marvelous music.  The dancing is good, if somewhat familiar.  Don’t expect a lot from the book.  You’ll be happy.

Next at the Ordway: Buddy – The Buddy Holly Story – playing in June.

For more information about John Olive please visit his (updated) website.

Brandon Brooks as the White Rabbit

The Children’s Theatre Company returns to an old favorite with Sharon Holland’s script of Lewis Carroll’s classic fantasy, Alice in Wonderland. About ten years after Dominic Serrand directed for CTC, artistic director Peter Brosius takes a more traditional path down that famous rabbit hole, but it’s still brimming with the splendid technical virtuosity and visual gags that CTC does so well.

I especially appreciated the way that children of all ages were incorporated into the action —not as children, necessarily, but in size- and age-appropriate ways, without a trace of “small actor, small role.” The kids were charming, carrying off a dazzling assortment of roles and responsibilities that required finesse and timing.

With all these carefully orchestrated and choreographed bits, there were a few glitches: I presume the baby was not supposed to hit the floor, for example, and there were sound effects off kilter from the schtick. Generally, for an opening night, some bits were on the loose side. But there were many that did hit and delighted this audience. The clowning with the tea party chairs was circus-worthy. The smoothly choreographed ladder sequence was set up nicely by the door slapstick in a previous scene. And what child wouldn’t want to be in Dot McDonald’s and Adam Qualls’ costumes, transformed into the personal bouncy castles known as Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee.

The Dormouse puppet, in particular, was great fun, and the large puppetry for the Cheshire Cat (Jason Ballweber) and the Jabberwok was spectacular. But I got just as much of a kick out of the string of actors – wearing Crocs on their feet and hands – playing the rest of Reed Sigmund’s Caterpiller. It was one of those simple but smoothly executed theater “tricks” that the audience gets to enjoy from the inside out.  Brian Sostek as movement director deserves a solo bow.

This script is more faithful to the book than is necessary. In particular, the final scene in the Queen of Hearts’ garden seems to go on longer than is needed for a denouement (the ending device doesn’t require anything more than another of the Queen’s tirades anyway), and it seemed to me that the croquet with live hedgehogs and flamingos works better on the page. Throw in live wickets and it can get a little messy.

I would so like to see a CTC production that backs away a bit from the over-blown acting. I admit that I have an issue with this. I just don’t agree that children need to be “hit over the head” to be entertained. All the over-the-top silliness can work for some over-the-top characters, such as the Duchess, played chillingly by Mo Perry, and the Mad Hatter and Humpty Dumpty, both played masterfully by Dean Holt. But the Cheshire Cat, for example, was an opportunity to give it a rest, and why oh why direct Alice (Anna Evans)—the only character who isn’t mad—to almost shriek her lines? Evans is absolutely adorable; there’s no need to have her compete with the madness.

Alice in Wonderland runs through June 15 and is recommended for kindergarten age and older. Use discretion if you’re thinking of bringing younger children.