www.stonehamtheatre.org

By Jenna Scherer
Monday, April 12, 2010 – Added 4d 15h ago
E-mail Print (0) Comments Text size Share Buzz up!
There’s no such thing as too much “My Fair Lady.” Lerner and Loewe’s 1956 masterpiece is the perfect blend of beautiful music, rich characters and superlative script.

Trevor Nunn’s acclaimed London production came through town only two years ago, and Norwood’s Fiddlehead Theatre took it on a few months before that. Now the Stoneham Theatre is taking “My Fair Lady” for yet another turn around the ballroom.

There isn’t anything transcendent about Caitlin Lowans’ production, but it’s still got plenty of charm. She sets it as a romance, ramping up the heat between Henry and Eliza and framing the production around their battle of wills.

A bit of history: “My Fair Lady” is based on “Pygmalion,” George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play about a conceited phonetics professor who sets out to transform a cockney flower girl into a societylady. It, in turn, is an adaptation of a Greek myth, about asculptor who falls in love with his own statue. The story is repeated in modern rom-coms like “Pretty Woman” and “She’s All That.”

“My Fair Lady” is a pretty straight adaptation of Shaw’s play, albeit with a drastically repurposed ending. You’ve got Henry Higgins (Timothy Smith) and his crony Colonel Pickering (Russell Garrett), two upper-class bachelors who pluck the working-class Eliza Doolittle (Robyn Lee) from the gutters of London’s Covent Garden. Higgins makes a bet with Pickering that by teaching Eliza proper speech and manners, he can pass her off as a duchess within six months.

Smith isn’t your typical Higgins. He’s much younger and much more physically imposing than your Rex Harrison type, and plays the professor’s brutal arrogance to its utmost. Lowans often places him in a high framed arch upstage, lording himself over the action. When he’s finally brought low, Smith sells us on the transformation.

It’s too bad Eliza is something of a shrinking violet. Lee has a nice soprano voice, but she too easily allows the character to fade into the background. It doesn’t help that costume designer Stacey Stephens dresses her in a various unflattering gowns.

Lowans’ production features an excellent chorus, whose harmonies shine in songs like “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly” and “Get Me to the Church on Time.” Paul Farwell seems to have been made for the role of Alfie, Eliza’s boozehound father, but Michael Buckley’s Freddy botches the show’s most beautiful number, “On the Street Where You Live.”

Stoneham’s “My Fair Lady” isn’t one for the ages, but it’s still got plenty to recommend itself. Just please – let’s never make Eliza wear yellow to the Ascot Opening Day ever again.

By Amanda Mantone/Correspondent
Stoneham Sun
Posted Apr 15, 2010 @ 09:00 AM
Stoneham —
Purists will be pleased and newcomers enchanted by Stoneham Theatre’s rendering of the classic Lerner and Loewe musical, “My Fair Lady.”

With a creative costume concept and a score that’s chockablock with recognizable songs, the production is both visually appealing and easy to sing along with.

Robyn Elizabeth Lee plays an endearing Eliza Doolittle, the cockneyed curbside flower-seller who convinces high-society Henry Higgins to school her in the ways of being a proper English lady. Timothy John Smith, as Henry Higgins, pays homage to the beloved Rex Harrison who originated the role of Higgins on Broadway and in film.

Lee, as Eliza Dolittle, crafts a winning performance and makes the role — made iconic by Julie Andrews on stage and Audrey Hepburn in film — distinctly her own. Yet neither Lee nor Smith outright mimics Harrison, Andrews and Hepburn, giving Stoneham’s production a fresh flair all its own.

Traditionalists — of which there are many when it comes to this show — won’t be disappointed, and first-time “My Fair Lady” audiences will find this production to be an accessible and charming entrée in the classic tale, an adaptation of playwright George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion.”

The show has been called “the perfect musical,” telling the story of self-obsessed phonetics professor Henry Higgins and his wager to make a proper lady out of lower-class Londoner Eliza Doolittle. Under direction by Caitlin Lowans (“Dinosaur Musical,” “Picnic”), the pair create a complicated relationship that undergoes an unexpected transformation by show’s end.

“‘My Fair Lady’ is a story of transformations, plural,” says Director Caitlin Lowans in her program notes. “Not only that of (Eliza), but also of the professor, converted by her mettle into a better man.”

“My Fair Lady,” with book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and music by Frederick Loewe, is rife with tunes most audiences will know, such as “I Could Have Danced All Night,” “Wouldn’t it be Loverly?” “On the Street Where You Live,” and “Get Me to the Church on Time.”

Lee and Smith offer solid performances as the spunky Eliza and gruff Henry, but it’s the supporting roles that really make this show thrum. Russell Garrett turns in an outstanding performance as the droll Pickering, and Paul Farwell earns the laughs as Eliza’s scrappy father, Alfred P. Doolittle. Rounded out by an excellent ensemble, this show spins through more than two hours at a bustling clip, leaving the best stories and songs of musical theatre in its wake.

Dillian Arrick as Emily takes flight (Source:Stoneham Theatre)
Email Print Share Buzz up!
Just when you think you’ve seen everything that live theatre has to offer along comes a play that is so cleverly staged and imaginatively presented that it could very well make you rethink everything you know about theatrical productions. The Sparrow is that play and if you want to see one of the best live stage performances to ever hit Boston then you need to get over to the Stoneham Theatre before November 8 to see its East Coast premiere. (It was developed and first produced at The House Theatre of Chicago under the direction of the company’s founder Nathan Allen.)

From the opening scene – a bus ride – the staging is ingeniously simple and makes abundantly clear that Allen is a major talent to watch.

The story is a mix of a Stephen King Carrie-like teen tragedy stirred together with a good dose of High School Musical fun. It concerns Emily, an orphaned girl, returning to her small hometown after an absence of a few years. Something of a misfit, her difficulties lie in the fact that she is harboring some couple major secrets, one of which is that she can fly. She can also do a lot of other amazing feats by generating and manipulating energy to her will. The townsfolk try to welcome her back with open arms, but when Emily’s other big secret (something to do with her involvement in a car crash that filled both her family and classmates), gets revealed, they turns against her,.

It’s an interesting story that could very well have been yet another fun, low budget production if writers Chris Mathews and Jake Minton weren’t lucky to Allen at the helm. He turns their play into a cinematic, visually fascinating tour-de-force. With only a few chairs and minimal set pieces Allan creates Emily’s real and fantasy worlds with projected collages, videos, audio and lighting that makes for an utterly unique and richly textured experience. Any play that can segue a classroom scene with kids dissecting baby pigs into a musical song and dance production sequence is not going to settle for the normal way of staging anything. The sequences that have Emily flying are unique in that they don’t use the usual harness and wire trick but instead rely on the dancing skills of actress Dillan Arrick and some clever lighting effects to beautifully show the joy and freedom the character feels in flight.

The cast of this production gets to play multiple characters often changing costumes and roles in mid-sentence right on stage as the scenes roll along. Many of the Stoneham’s versatile and talented repertoire company make appearances including stand-out performances by Steve Gagliastro, Stephen LaMonica and Jonathan Popp. Special notice goes to Ilyse Robbins in multiple roles for her inspired comic/tragic turn as Emily’s new host mother then turning on a dime and changing into a bouncy school cheerleader.

If you are a fan of live theatre and you want to give yourself a real treat make time in your schedule to see this show. The Sparrow offers a lively mix of fantasy, comedy, drama, music, and dance that you will not soon forget.

The Sparrow, which closes this weekend at the Stoneham Theatre, posits an interesting problem for a critic. First things first: it’s brilliantly staged; scene after scene takes sudden wing, with basketball games and even literal flight beautifully and simply evoked via simple props, clever choreography, and looming projections. And at a deeper level the production seems to provide an answer to the aesthetic question that has stumped many a Boston theatre (as evidenced by the ART’s Donnie Darkoor the Huntington’s 39 Steps): how to actually translate the formal structure of film into the theatre?

For make no mistake, watching The Sparrow is quite literally likewatching a movie on stage; pulling off that complicated feat is pretty much its raison d’être. (There’s solid acting work in it, from lead Dillian Arrick as well as supporting players Jonathan Popp, Ilyse Robbins and Elizabeth Erwin, but the individual actors are overwhelmed by the staging.) When you add to that the interesting fact that the show began in the world of Chicago community theatre (at director Nathan Allen’s House Theatre), an awareness dawns that this is a case in which an audience has set out to build, and succeeded in building, its own new theatrical model – entirely without the professors or the avant garde! So hurray for the good people of Chicago community theatre!

But then you’re faced with the fact that what “the people” chose to build was a musical episode of Heroes . . .

. . . and you kind of go, “Hmmmm.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with Heroes, my young friends! Nor is there anything “wrong” with Carrie or The Fury, or High School Musical, or any of The Sparrow’s other obvious sources (among which we must include, bizarrely enough, Russell Banks’s The Sweet Hereafter).

But you see the trouble is that even as The Sparrow soars, it’s running smack into an interesting aesthetic wall, indeed one that’s central to what the theatre is all about.

But let’s back up a minute. The Sparrow centers on Emily Book (Dillian Arrick, at left), who surprisingly enough is bookish, and like so many bookish teens, has awesome superpowers. Only not just in her own mind, or in Second Life; noooo – Emily actually sports a mean telekinetic backhand, and can also fly, and, we learn eventually, even raise the dead! So mooove over, Jesus, Emily Book rocks!

Now for most teens, you’d think, rad superpowers would lead to some truly awesome partying. But not with poor Emily! You see, there’s this small matter of her sending the entire second grade to their deaths in a schoolbus a few years back, before she had all her telekinetic shit under control. (Don’t you hate when that happens?) So now our heroine’s literally doubled over with self-consciousness, and self-doubt, and other stuff that starts with self-, which means we should feel totally sorry for her 24/7, even though she’s not doing serious time in juvenile detention.

And that’s where I felt like picking up the remote and channel-surfing onThe Sparrow’s brilliantly-staged ass. Only oops – this was live theatre, so there was no remote, and I realized I was stuck inside the weepy narcissism of the average teen (yours truly included) writ large, as social statement, for two hours. Thus, since there was no real emotional or moral development in the script, I wound up pondering the differences between stage and screen at my leisure.

And what occurred to me was this: movies and theatre are different in ways that short-circuit, rather than expand, their respective forms. (And yes, I know, there are exceptions to every rule, but work with me here, okay?) A film like Carrie (or The 39 Steps) succeeds because of the famous powers of subjectivity latent in cinema: a great director (with the help of his cinematographer, designer and composer) can easily draw us into a dream-like identification with the main character’s state of mind (indeed, if you ponder your own dreams, you’ll soon realize they’re hardly rendered POV; you can usually “see” yourself framed in scenic perspective, just like in the movies). In short, when we’re in the hands of, say, Alfred Hitchcock, it’s only a small psychological step to “believing” that we ourselves are actually dangling from a window, or dashing away from a plane, like Jimmy Stewart or Cary Grant.

But can the stage simulate “subjectivity” in precisely the same way? I’d argue no. Sure, theatre is capable of ravishing flights of fantasy, and intense outpourings of emotion – but sooner or later, theatre almost inevitably “frames” that content, and complicates, or even undermines, its characters’ emotional claims through the evocation of a larger cultural space. We observe, and of course sympathize, but don’t simply identify. Indeed, the Huntington’s 39 Steps became a long goof on precisely this aesthetic gap; it conjured just about every chase and narrow escape of Hitchcock’s movie, only the whole thing became an ironic lark in the process, because the aesthetic means of the escapades were always completely visible, and slightly risible.

What’s different about The Sparrow is that its actors simply refuse to admit any self-awareness into the proceedings (and they’re helped in this by the cinematic, gigantically literal projections). And we sense that we’d better not do so, either. The cast utterly commits to the idea, for instance, that their story-theatre solution to the problem of a cliff-hanging rescue is as gripping as the climax of North by Northwest. When of course it’s not. We admire the ingenuity of the staging, yes, but we’re hardly thrilled when the poor maiden supposedly dangling from the roof of the gym is saved, thank God. Because we were never actually nervous for her at all. Yet while it seems odd that in our ironic age this silly teen-wolf-style script should be treated so reverently, that seems to be what’s going on, and so we play along.

And why? If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say the answer simply lies in the marketing of the piece, and our sense that this serves some larger social motion. One blogger associated with the Stoneham made this case directly, in fact – to all you kids who aren’t interested in theatre, he said, this one’s for you. And of course he was right; The Sparrow is for teens of all ages who aren’t really interested in context or critique, or the social functions of theatre in general, but who are wondering instead how its conventions might be bent to their will.

Now again, as I said before, to each his (or her) own; but I have to point out as a critic that as a result of this positioning, The Sparrow is really neither fish nor fowl. It’s “thrills” don’t really thrill, except as a simulation of another art form’s specialty; and the kind of truths we might expect from a genuine theatrical structure, such as some dawning sense of responsibility from our superheroine, never seem to be on the table; indeed, they are of really no interest.

Of course there’s also no reason why the techniques of The Sparrowcouldn’t be applied to “genuine” theatre – but would the kids still come? I’m not sure, but it seems that many of these projections and effects could add a marvelous dimension to the “cinematic” aspects of a Shakespeare history, or Peer Gynt. (We’ve already seen them applied locally to opera.) But then again, in such cases said techniques would extend theatre, rather than subvert it. And I’m not sure that would be a selling point.

http://stonehamtheatre.org/thesparrow.html

The Sparrow is a collaborative effort created over months by the House Theatre in Chicago. It reminds me of the theater and performance studies work that we created at Northwestern when I was there. It is unlike anything Boston has seen. It is the piece I have been waiting twenty years to work on.

Nathan is a director who directs with love and kindness. He collaborates. He makes you feel like the most gifted and loved person in the world. He makes you feel that you are contributing and that you are as big a part of the project as each and every other person. He plays games. He builds community. He gave us a gift. Not just one, but many. He gave us the gift of this show, the gift of friendship, the gift of each other.

Tommy is Nate’s other half. He teaches with patience and care. His movement is integral to the piece. He gives a note as if it is the first time, even if you have been doing something wrong for days. He is joy.

Our cast has become a family. A day without them is a day with a hole in it. It is unbelievable to me that we have only six performances left.

Come fly with us.