Love, Loss, and What I Wore

Broadway in Detroit opens up its soul — and its closet — at the Gem Theatre. A credit to the art of storytelling, Love, Loss, and What I Wore (by Nora Ephron and Delia Ephron, based on the book by Ilene Beckerman) takes a near-universal hook and uses understated camaraderie to make its expected material fresh. Director Karen Carpenter plays into, not against, the form, delivering a humorous and poignant reverie on the clothes that make the woman.

Every aspect of the production is simplicity done with panache. Jo Winiarski’s scenic design lets five tall chairs stand out on a bare stage, upon which Jeff Croiter’s delicious lighting scheme throws morphing hues and practical spotlight focus. Costumer Ren LaDassor demonstrates why the little black dress is a girl’s best friend, using the staple to unify five distinctly flattering looks. Excepting the solid microphone work, sound design by Walter Trarbach is relegated to bookends of the ninety-minute production, but makes an impression with peppy wardrobe-themed hits. Other than calculated gestures and timing, the staging is essentially nil; the cast sits in a static line and reads from binders. Yet this implies some deficit on the part of the production, when the choice actually reveals itself to be a strength, focusing on the stories themselves as much as the people telling them, and emphasizing the representative nature of these tales in the grand shopping-borrowing-buying-making-critiquing-outgrowing-ruining-resenting-discarding experience.

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Burn the Red Banner: Or, Let the Rebels Have Their Fun

If ever a show were certifiably insane, the world premiere of Burn the Red Banner: Or, Let the Rebels Have Their Fun might be it. At the Abreact performance space, playwright Franco Vitella’s forty-some short comedies provide the springboard for director Frannie Shepherd-Bates’s overripe imagination. The production’s framework morphs these absurdly funny snippets into a farcical torrent of merriment, for which no swipe at humor is off limits.

Vitella’s script is what might happen if David Ives and Anton Chekhov’s respective catalogs had a litter of baby-plays. Fallaciously entrenched in mother Russia, the sketches provide mere flashes of interaction, pared-down glimpses of lives whose extreme agony and malaise are almost apologetically funny in the absence of context. The cast of four (Steve Xander Carson, Jonathan Davidson, Keith Kalinowski, and Kirsten Knisley) dons and drops characters with alacrity, finding life’s little indignities and inconsequential exchanges alike to be positively fraught with meaning. It’s the richest source of parody for this genre, and Vitella skips directly to it several dozen times. A few archetypes and recurring characters slip in for a little sense of order, but not enough to be mistaken for story continuity: there is no plot. Instead, the vignettes prey on the worst, blandest generalizations of Russian storytelling, dabbling in rebellions and thickly accented authority figures. The artifice is intentional, smartly self-aware, and written — and played — strictly for laughs, which it earns in no small measure.

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Smokey Joe's Cafe

The Encore Musical Theatre Company jumps and rocks to the hits of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller in Smokey Joe’s Cafe. The songwriting duo behind the hits “Jailhouse Rock,” “Love Potion #9,” and “Yakety Yak” were integral to the emergence of rock ‘n’ roll as well as solid contributors to the rhythm and blues catalog, as this production’s unbelievably long and memorable playlist attests. Unburdened by meddlesome plot strictures, director and choreographer Barbara F. Cullen and her ensemble cast find themselves free to dig into the jukebox for a whirlwind of reminiscence and lively celebration of 1950s sounds.

This musical revue doesn’t depend on a gimmick or hook to justify itself; its two acts are nothing more than a collection of tunes with their prolific songwriting team in common. Yet the anchor position of a nostalgic group number emphasizing togetherness and the keenly first-person perspective of the lyrics can give the impression that larger themes are going to unfold. Cullen and company wisely take a light hand with the contextual mire: the eight ensemble members suit character choices to the song and moment, never adhering to a single persona, and boys and girls pair off in combinations that avoid strict continuity. A viewer could go cross-eyed scouring the song list and background interactions for hidden meaning, but the company’s efforts are happily expended in a more rewarding pursuit: put simply, the play is the songs, and the songs are great.

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Dead Man's Shoes

Gather ‘round and witness the amazing, unbelievable tale of Injun Bill Picote, an outlaw and loner with his mind set on unlawful justice. Playwright Joseph Zettelmaier takes inspiration from a gruesomely morbid historical footnote and fashions it into Dead Man’s Shoes, a unique Western-comedy hybrid with bawd and bite. The world-premiere production, a joint offering by Williamston Theatre and Performance Network Theatre with direction by David Wolber, marries component skill and tight cohesion into a masterpiece of workmanship with entertainment value to match.

Portrayed by Drew Parker, Injun Bill is already a noted killer and ne’er-do-well by the play’s start. In a jail cell somewhere in the lawless West, he makes the inescapable acquaintance of the defiantly enthusiastic Froggy (Aral Gribble), a misfit Creole now purposeless and drunk since his employment as General Custer’s cook was, let’s say, terminated. Froggy instantly cleaves to his infamous companion, and when circumstances allow for the pair’s release, the adrift ready-made sidekick has already signed on to aid in the renegade’s quest, a mission straight out of the truth-stranger-than-fiction vault. After Injun Bill’s only friend in the world was publicly killed, an influential doctor purchased the man’s remains and made a horrific memento of his skin. Leaning on the excesses and indignities of this (totally true, and hideously documented) act, the story plainly roots for the vigilante hero to find the titular shoes and kill their contemptible possessor.

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Same Time, Next Year

The compressed journey of Same Time, Next Year invites the viewer to fall in love with illicit love, in the most benign way. The second and final production of Two Muses Theatre’s inaugural season, playwright Bernard Slade’s excursion into a committed extramarital relationship — rationed out in annual portions — delights in the escapist pleasures of two people who keep their romance unassailable by the rigors and changes of normal life. As directed by Nancy Kammer, this production (again staged in a space off the West Bloomfield Township Barnes & Noble) pairs an unconventional love story with the warm security of staying power, and the cast of two sweetly delivers on its promise.

After a brief time capsule of images establishing the year as 1951, morning-after light streams into a cozy little inn in northern California. That the man and woman waking up together are strangers to each other is as plain as their disbelieving faces; that this was infidelity on both their parts is discovered just as quickly. Gently naive housewife Doris (Diane Hill) and routinely flustered accountant George (Aaron H. Alpern) make no pretenses to each other: each is married — happily so — with children. However, because each takes the same annual trip, the captivated George and Doris realize they can carry on a relationship this way, meeting just one weekend per year. The clunky business of arriving at this incredible pact between a pair with who-knows-what in common is handled smoothly by Kammer and company; the earned closeness that grows between Hill and Alpern from the outset provides sufficient buy-in.

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