Five Course Love

Within the first year of its inception, HappenStance Productions has found a home base at Andiamo Novi’s upstairs theater. Now the company brings its latest in a string of musicals, Five Course Love (book, music, and lyrics by Gregg Coffin), a bodice-ripper of an international buffet. Under the direction of Aaron T. Moore, this production plays up the campy, soapy humor of its premise and embraces the addictive appeal of the empty calorie, to delectably tawdry effect.

There’s rhyme and reason behind the paperback book each woman character (all played by Maren Ritter) is reading when we first meet her, but the production wisely drops the through line like a hot potato, giving each of the musical’s five distinct vignettes an agreeably self-contained feel. The scenes, all featuring a woman, a man (Patrick O’Reilly), and a facilitating waiter (Moore), tell stories of first meetings, infidelity, betrayal, and fighting for love; what they have in common is their passionate themes, their restaurant settings, and their unabashed unreality. Befitting a handful of silly capers, the actors play to the audience at every available opportunity, giving the show a cabaret feel ideally suited to the utter absurdity of these pulpy escapades.

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Will Rogers: An American Original

This isn’t the first time Stormfield Theatre has hosted a one-man show by a living American playwright about a famous dead American. However, Will Rogers: An American Original marks the first time to this critic's knowledge that the famous dead American hasn’t been storied company inspiration Mark Twain. In the current production, Artistic Director Kristine Thatcher invites playwright and performer Kevin McKillip to bring to life a plain-speaking humorist and all-around good guy who was liked — and who liked in turn — the world over.

The play is packaged as a regular stop on one of the gentleman cowboy’s national lecture tours, near the end of his accomplished and varied career. In character as Will, McKillip engages in conversation directly with the audience from in front of a self-consciously artificial backdrop. Set designer Michelle Raymond adds a few painstaking details to an empty expanse that recalls movie sets of old; Joseph Dickson’s lighting design statically keeps the focus on the performance. The only tricks possible here are Will’s lasso work (at which McKillip is impressively competent) and his word play, which seem like key components in promoting his folksy brand of philosophy.

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The Odd Couple

Not long ago, two women mused that if they wanted more and better opportunities for women in theater, they should create some. The newly formed Two Muses Theatre now presents its inaugural production, one of Neil Simon’s best-known comedies. The Odd Couple was adapted by Simon a quarter century ago to envision a pair of women in the mismatched lead roles, here played by the company’s founders. As directed by Diane Hill and Terie Spencer (and staged in a sizable space tucked in a West Bloomfield Township Barnes & Noble bookstore), this production struggles for a foothold in its iconic, traditionally male scenario, but is boosted by comprehensive design that adds confident flair to its first step onto the Southeast Michigan scene.

The setting is the disheveled apartment of Olive Madison (Barbie Amann Weisserman), a divorcee with a high threshold for grime and little patience for anything outside of her most basic needs. When the weekly ladies' Trivial Pursuit game is upended by late-arriving Florence Unger (Hill), freshly devastated by her husband’s sudden decision to divorce her, Olive finds herself saddled with the unlikeliest of mismatched roommates. Because appearances and upkeep become the hotly contested center of the conflict, the entire design team pours meticulous energy into establishing the Olive/Florence dichotomy. Set design by Bill Mandt provides a livable space, with both potential for numerous upgrades and a sense of flow into the unseen rooms; added to this are Weisserman’s properties, whose entirely modest disorder is all the more astonishing in its transition to tasteful elegance. Weisserman is also credited with the pitch-perfect costume design, which is admirably as dedicated to developing secondary characters as it is evident in every stitch of Florence’s pristinely ordered and flawlessly appropriate attire. Lighting by Lucy Meyo features lovely focal points, and themes of friendship, heartbreak, and woman power cycle through the upbeat selections of Hill’s sound design.

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Much Ado About Nothing

Director Matthew Earnest understands the importance of making Shakespeare feel interesting and fresh to an audience. Still, his Much Ado About Nothing at the Hilberry Theatre may not give the Bard quite enough credit. There’s no questioning the company’s playful mastery of the fussy and ultimately harmless love stories at the base of this comedy, but on the other side of the coin, the director deliberately inserts major obstacles into his interpretation, about which the best that can be said is that the production largely survives them.

Few couples in Shakespeare are as dynamic and fun as fierce combatants Beatrice and Signor Benedick, and Vanessa Sawson and Dave Toomey easily do them justice. The pair is tactically exhaustive, just as likely to wield calculated dismissiveness as a snarling retort; their variation leaves room for fruitful exploration when the characters are duped — or, more accurately, nudged — into falling hard for each other. Love’s more traditional course finds footing in the affably dumbfounded Signor Claudio (Christopher Ellis) and unfailingly good Hero (Carollette Phillips), who manage to broadcast they are meant for each other without confining the characters to their numbingly pure affection.

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Imagining Madoff

Man cannot be evil in a vacuum. Although the Bernie Madoff envisaged by Deborah Margolin in her unmistakably titled Imagining Madoff is sufficiently intriguing to warrant a one-man production, the show boasts all of three characters. The play’s abstract construction dilutes the viewer’s terrifying stare into the fantasia of a noted criminal’s mind, yet it provides the necessary context to demonstrate that, pathology aside, what made Madoff vile is the hurt he knowingly caused his unsuspecting clients and disgraced colleagues. Accordingly, the Jewish Ensemble Theatre’s Midwest premiere, directed by Yolanda Fleischer, features a haunting turn by B.J. Love as the real-life Ponzi-scheming villain, but the completeness of its success is in extending its reach to show the ease of his ice-cold deception at work.

The coup of the production is Love’s gripping monologues as an incarcerated Bernie, who shrugs off his own admitted soft-spoken demeanor and candidly recounts and marvels at his treachery to an unseen biographer. The actor’s matter-of-fact relationship to the material makes for a startling viewer experience, in which this man figuratively pulls back his face to reveal the cunning shark-like monster beneath. Despite some tender musing on his wife’s pleasure at being surrounded by nice things, Margolin’s Bernie created an empire of fraud less for the end than the means, the incredible high of taking and taking — indeed, of having money seemingly thrust at him — and getting away with it. The character’s twisted moral code and tendency to see sadness as some kind of personal affront are dually abhorrent and riveting; with Margolin’s text and Love’s terrific work, it’s easy and harrowing to imagine this Madoff.

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