Escanaba in da Moonlight

Playwright Jeff Daniels’s Escanaba in da Moonlight has forged a legacy for itself since its world-premiere production at Purple Rose Theatre Company a decade and a half ago. Now, under the direction of Guy Sanville, the play that sparked a trilogy returns to its original home. As this actually marks the first time this reviewer has ever seen the show, I’m unable to provide any sense of comparison with other stagings. However, it’s clear from this “reloaded” offering why the Purple Rose couldn’t resist another shot: with a tale this silly, folksy, eerie, warm, and improbable all rolled into one comedy full of Michigan flavor, it’s hard to imagine staying away.

Jim Porterfield plays the curmudgeonly narrator and family patriarch, Albert Soady; although he professes little patience for the so-called fudgesuckers of Michigan’s lower peninsula, it’s hard not to be won over by his staunch Yooper pride (for the uninitiated, the label is derived from U.P. for “upper peninsula”). In point of fact, Albert has little patience for anything but hunting, including the near-constant ribbing between his two sons, Reuben (Michael Brian Ogden) and Remnar (Matthew David). When we meet them on the anticipatory night before 1989 deer season opens, Remnar is primarily occupied with taunting Reuben for never having bagged a buck of his own. In fact, the reluctantly nicknamed Buckless Yooper is about to become the oldest member of his lineage to hold that dishonor — this year is do or die for him. Ogden ably embodies the hopelessness, ambition, and failure of never measuring up, which turns his every spoken word into a vital entreaty for his family to take him seriously (which backfires by virtue of his wanting it so frantically). David’s Remnar, a creature of habit and superstitions (cheers to costume designer Suzanne Young for his clumsily preserved lucky shirt), provides an efficient foil when Reuben asks to leave aside tradition just this once. Much of the first act is concerned with bizarre, half-understood Native American rituals Reuben learned from his wife, Wolf Moon Dance (Rhiannon Ragland), blending laughed-off mumbo jumbo and pure lowest-common-denominator nastiness, the disgustingly funny stuff of spit takes (for which we have properties designer Danna Segrest to thank).

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Time Stands Still

Tolstoy’s contention about every unhappy family being unhappy in its own way is, quite possibly, not the whole story. There is indeed some universality to unforeseen disaster and private hardship: the mere fact of it. Every life is fractured, everyone has been thrown a curveball, and the emotional and personal atrocity of the experience transcends the particulars of the circumstance. Playwright Donald Marguiles’s difficult Time Stands Still is an extreme perspective; most people’s problems aren’t triggered by catastrophic injuries incurred while on assignment to document war-torn Iraq. Even so, in the production at Performance Network Theatre, director Kate Peckham recognizes the fear, resentment, and unfairness of entering uncharted territory and seizes on the commonalities.

Photojournalist Sarah (Suzi Regan) returns to her home in Brooklyn just weeks after fully half her body was ravaged by a roadside bomb. In some ways, convalescence agrees with her: she’s parlayed being unable to smoke into quitting smoking, and she is reunited with her longtime partner, James (John Lepard), himself a writer and reporter who had left Iraq separately before the incident. Forced to assume the mantle of homebodies, Sarah and James have time and perspective they didn’t allow themselves previously — to clear the air about past rifts, to compare the effects of her physical injuries to his psychological ones, to reassess and align their personal and professional needs, to ask themselves about their future together. Thanks to Margulies and Peckham both, the characters don’t seem strictly bound by a conventional narrative structure: major differences do not necessarily translate to exploding conflict at climactic points in the story, just as insignificant points snowball into desperate arguments without respect to rising action. Regan and Lepard form a phenomenal team committed to honestly conveying a supportive partnership that is no less immune to flaws and pitfalls. The evolving fate of Sarah and James is unpredictably happy, sad, and even cruel, but it’s true above all else.

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A Day in Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine

The danger in presenting a double bill is that the format encourages comparison of one half with another. This is borne out in a big way in the Hilberry Theatre production of A Day in Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine (book and lyrics by Dick Vosburgh; music by Frank Lazarus): as directed by Michael J. Barnes, the show’s second half is a madcap comedy that plays to the performers’ strengths. There’s also an hour of song and dance.

The greater of the two is A Night in the Ukraine, the second act. An homage to the Marx Brothers’ comedy legacy in film, the story takes Chekhov’s The Bear and, to no one’s surprise, runs roughshod over it. The supporting performances are notable, in particular the young Nina (Danielle Cochrane) and Constantine (Alec Barbour), who fall in love at first sight, suffer a divisive misunderstanding, and reconcile in record time and without a smidgen of awareness of their staggering cliché. Loreli Sturm’s Mrs. Pavlenko is a willing, padding-stuffed butt of jokes by characters more wily than she — which is most of them. However, the starring Marx approximators deserve the greatest accolades: Dave Toomey is a steadfast lost-in-translation Gino; unmistakably greasepainted Andrew Papa puts his own wisecracking spin on the exhausting semantic gymnastics of Serge B. Samovar; and Carollette Phillips excels without uttering a syllable as the intent, obfuscating, hilariously vacant-faced Carlo. Moments of lull stand out only because the pacing generally gambols, and the combination of word play and physical/visual spectacle keeps the comedy rolling through a deliberately unimportant and improbable plot.

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Returning production — Evil Dead: The Musical

As part of the Rogue Critic's evolving efforts to cover as much theater as possible within a large geographical area teeming with culture, this season will see the end of re-reviews. Co-productions among theaters will receive a single review, and revivals of past productions will also escape the sting of the critic's lash.

The very fact that a theater elects to revive a recent production for another run suggests a measure of commercial and critical success — in essence, such shows generally have something excellent to offer. In keeping with this logic, I will be disappointed not to take my seat at the twice-returning Evil Dead: The Musical, mounted by Who Wants Cake? and Olympia Entertainment at the City Theatre in Detroit. This site's archives already boast not one, but two reviews of Who Wants Cake?'s delectably messy slapstick-horror efforts: one from the 2010 production, also at the City Theatre, and another from the initial 2009 production at the Ringwald.

Readers should keep in mind that these are past reviews; some of the players have changed, and the show has a new director in Michelle LeRoy, who has previously designed lights and effects. (Also notable among the differences from last year's show is the price point: all tickets are general admission at a flat $22, so everything — including the heralded splatter zone — is first-come, first-serve.) But with the same venue and much of the same creative team, these reviews should give any potential viewer a sense of what can be expected in this year's production.

Evil Dead: The Musical is no longer playing.
For the latest from the Ringwald Theatre (formerly Who Wants Cake?), click here.
For the latest from City Theatre, click here.

Love Song

Narrative rules are so well established, so deeply ingrained, that it seems there can be little more satisfying than identifying a problem and neatly solving it. Playwright John Kolvenbach appears to be on board with the formula in his comedy Love Song, but then sees fit to take his quirky, character-driven story in whatever direction it aims to go, and the result is a markedly unexpected — and deftly unique — night of theater. In this Planet Ant Theatre production, director Inga Wilson fosters a sweet and light tone that balances out the gravity of a story of real mental anguish.

To say that Beane (Ty Mitchell) is quiet would be an understatement. He’s antisocial to a fault, plagued by some kind of uncertainty that he’s getting life wrong — he doesn’t get the same enjoyment from food that others seem to, for example, and thus he’s uninclined to eat. His sister, Joan (Annabelle Young), and her husband, Harry (Stephen Blackwell), feel responsible for him, worried more so. Deciding whether and how to interverene in his welfare is clearly weighing on all three, until something amazing happens: a sardonic, malicious thief (Sarah Switanowski) breaks into Beane’s apartment, then lies in wait to give him a piece of her mind. As it happens, she is captivated (yet angrily disbelieving) that he has so little in the way of possessions — her greatest thrill is to discover and destroy the impersonal objects people give treasured places in their homes and pore over the extremely personal ones they hide away, a dichotomy that only seems to grow more polarized with increasing wealth. Her name is Molly; she gets to the very center of Beane; he loves her instantly. To the playwright’s credit, the ensuing plot is not solely concerned with his potential craziness at this development, but also with his happiness, and gives equal credence to the ramifications of both.

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