The American Crowbar Case

The New Theatre Project partners with local band Match By Match for its first ever original musical, The American Crowbar Case. Created by band member Gray Bouchard, with a book by Jason Sebacher, the play concerns itself with one of the most famous and inexplicable brain injuries in history — the ostensibly self-lobotomized railroad worker Phineas Gage, whose baffling survival was made all the more intriguing by his before-and-after personality shift. Accordingly, Keith Paul Medelis directs a production that, like its subject, seems to be of two minds, but the parts are pleasing enough to make a satisfying whole.

The music doesn’t follow the traditional mold of the musical: Bouchard is a featured singer, but doesn’t himself play a character; lyrics are thematically relevant, but not directly applicable. For their part, Bouchard and Sebacher don’t try to force the story to meet the existing songs, but instead allow for a prevailing feeling of concept album turned concert. This is confirmed and amplified by magnificent design choices: from the up-lit circular stage (set by Medelis) to the unrealistic, high-contrast lighting scheme to the complementary projection work (both by Janine Woods Thoma), the result is a unified vision that rocks along with the music. Melissa Coppola’s music direction fills the space with expertly blended sounds — one is reminded that this is not a house band assembled just for this production, but an actual band, an acoustic trio of guitar (Bouchard), piano (Coppola), and bass (Linden McEachern), playing its own catchy indie/folk songs.

Click to read more ...

Something Wicked This Way Comes

In its Michigan premiere, Something Wicked This Way Comes is well suited for a Meadow Brook Theatre Halloween. Adapted for the stage by author Ray Bradbury from his novel of the same title, the story of two young men who encounter an otherworldly carnival has just enough surprise and intrigue to give the viewer an eerie jolt. However, as directed by Travis W. Walter, the spectacle is a mere catalyst for a recognizable coming-of-age story that is given capable depth by its pair of young leads.

The boys are Will Halloway (Ryan Lynch) and Jim Nightshade (Jacob Zeinski), next-door neighbors and polar-opposite best friends — whereas Will is on the straight and narrow, Jim has a daredevil streak and yearns to be older so his life will start in earnest. On the October approaching their fourteenth birthdays, a strange carnival is erected in town overnight and captures the fascination of the children, as well as the adults reminded of the carousing of their youth. A few nights of sneaking out, as boys are wont to do, unearth a dark underbelly of the carnival and its proprietor, Mr. Dark (Aaron H. Alpern), in particular a carousel that may have command over time itself. As creepy as the attraction is, what’s more troubling is Mr. Dark’s recruitment tactics; when he sets his sights on collaring the boys who have seen too much, they enlist Will’s sweetly doddering old father (Marty Smith) to aid them in their inevitable showdown.

Click to read more ...

The Dead Guy

Reality television is a vicious mistress: viewers cluck their tongues at premises that seem engineered solely to expose contestants to potential harms, be they physical or psychological. Yet for better or worse, episodes that promise contestant breakdowns or near-death medical emergencies are among the most publicized and talked about in the genre. (Un?)fortunately, to date, no show has ever seen a contestant perish on camera — a threshold that playwright Eric Coble shatters in his nail-biter of a satire, The Dead Guy. In Williamston Theatre’s production, part of a continuing partnership with Michigan State University Department of Theatre, director Tony Caselli dives headlong into the ethical wasteland of television entertainment, an industry that requires each new offering to be more shocking than the last to keep its ratings up.

In the world of the play, The Dead Guy is a new reality series by bottom-feeder producer Gina Yaweth (Robin Lewis-Bedz). No longer daring humans to touch savage wild animals and filming the results, Gina concocts the ultimate ratings grab of a premise: give a man a million dollars, film him spending it for a week, and then watch him die by a method of the audience’s choosing. Her subject is Eldon Phelps (Chris Korte), a small-town presence who has never been reliably employed and was just given up on for good by his girlfriend; Eldon enters into his contract with eyes open, hoping to make a difference in the world rather than pass through unnoticed. The seemingly impossible sell is made believable by a combination of Lewis-Bedz’s frightening skill for understated spin and Korte’s characterization as a guy of pendulum-swing choices, the kind who finds himself unhappy and believes that what will turn his fortunes around is a complete one-eighty to the opposite extreme. After the contract is signed in the production’s first few minutes, there is nothing else to do but see how it all plays out.

Click to read more ...

Eleemosynary

No matter how inquisitive, no matter how intellgent, no matter how pioneering a person is, this is no guarantee of success when it comes to dealing with one’s family. In Lee Blessing’s Eleemosynary, three generations of superior discourse and familial discord come into play, a triptych of fraught mother/daughter relationships and a vast inherited intelligence that isn’t enough to bind them. Yet in an honest look at human victories and shortcomings together, director Yasmin Jeffries finds plenty to smile about amid the tense and lonely landscape of this ambitious UDM Theatre Company drama.

Structurally, the story is told out of order, weaving back through several timelines at once in a sly and intelligent narrative, but chronologically, it begins with family matriarch Dorothea (Stephanie Nichols). In the true present of the play, the grandmother is comatose after suffering a stroke, but not even this can suppress her impulses to provide commentary and impart all her knowledge and recollections to anyone within range. Her adult life is defined by an eccentricity she wears like a crown, allowing her to pursue metaphysically complex research problems and keep out from under the thumb of the men who would otherwise make decisions for her. In the role, Nichols easily communicates the true wonder and vigor that propel Dorothea always to learn and teach — so fervently that she cannot see how her own dominant will is fostering similar instincts for escape in her own daughter.

Click to read more ...

Unlocking Desire

Tennessee Williams did right by his treatment of Blanche DuBois, the tragic heroine of A Streetcar Named Desire; the classic play uses nuance and inference to delicately trace (here be spoilers!) a used and broken woman’s final spiral into insanity. Now, playwright Barbara Neri seeks to revisit the character and possibly offer release in Unlocking Desire, taking those dearly extracted private truths and tossing them into the primordial soup of troubles of a mental institution. Yet at the same time, Neri seems so gun-shy to take the character in an unsanctioned direction that poor Blanche can go nowhere at all; in actuality, this Khoros Inc. production (performed at the Marlene Boll Theatre within the downtown Detroit YMCA, with direction by John Jakary) prefers exclusively to exorcise old demons in new surroundings.

The play’s premise imagines the next steps for Blanche (Linda Rabin Hammell), who was at last writing being escorted away to the booby hatch. (Although a basic familiarity with Williams’s original text — not the 1951 film, there are key differences — couldn’t hurt, the script’s overwhelming repetition of the critical plot points should get even the most unversed viewer on track.) Upon her arrival, the newest patient is introduced to a half-dozen institutionalized personalities that can all conveniently be used to reflect on the protagonist in some way. It’s very Blanche Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, especially in us-versus-them group scenes of mild to moderate rebellion. In the interest of academic discourse, each character is reduced to a cheat sheet of useful opposing convictions, rendering conversations about love and desire into so many core values being nakedly wielded at each other, with little import assigned to who originated them. However blatant, the main tenets and arguments are certainly intelligent and thought-provoking, and most every beat swells with deeper meaning.

Click to read more ...