Les Misérables

Scaled-down 'Les Mis' a different kind of battle, reproduced with permission from EncoreMichigan.com.

Think "Les Miserables," and a word that springs immediately to mind is "enormity." Created by Alain Boublil, Claude-Michel Schonberg, and numerous collaborators, the show is a huge vocal and technical undertaking, in two tremendous acts, that covers sprawling narrative, geographic and chronologic ground as it ambitiously reenacts the equally huge Victor Hugo novel on which it is based. Yet enormity is not the purview of The Encore Musical Theatre Company, a repurposed building in Downtown Dexter turned overgrown-black-box performance space; an industry-convention "Les Mis" would overload it. The current production, with direction by Daniel C. Cooney and staging by Barbara Cullen, pulls back the throttle on excesses to fill a smaller stage. And although the company faithfully replicates the epic tale, framed by a righteous historical skirmish between revolutionaries and the French government, this production's true showdown appears to be a more personal one: that between the live players and the pre-recorded score.

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Becky Shaw

If everybody else is selfish and self serving, then you should be, too. The world of Becky Shaw (by Gina Gionfriddo) is eminently jaded, full of people chasing their own best interests at the expense of others. For this ethically sticky summer production, Performance Network Theatre gamely turns up the heat: director Phil Powers delivers acid comedy and repellent intrigue throughout a rudderless moral sojourn.

The initial scene contains multitudes, with the inclusive feel of a short play. Months after her father’s death, graduate student Suzanna (Sarab Kamoo) is still listlessly mourning, when she isn’t condemning her infirm mother (Dorry Peltyn) for shamelessly cavorting with a much younger man. They’ve both been summoned to a New York City hotel by Max (David Wolber), Suzanna’s unofficial brother (it’s complicated). A rampantly successful financial manager, Max has taken stock of the family’s precarious financial position and needs to tighten the purse strings. The long and creeping scene allows contentiously bickering Kamoo and Wolber to establish their lifelong codependence and cement their voluntary bond in a development that has the sly feeling of something coming full circle.

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Miles & Ellie

Comic meditation on gawky first love, reproduced with permission from EncoreMichigan.com.

The central character of playwright Don Zolidis' newest work would have you believe, "This is not a love story." But from the joint he-and-she title, to the saccharine meet-cute tropes, to the carefully cresting hopes and expectations, "Miles & Ellie" actively beats back this assertion at every turn. Indeed, under the direction of Guy Sanville, The Purple Rose Theatre Company's world premiere production handily captures the sweet ungainliness of childhood's fumbling first love; yet this delectably sweet and tart comedy also excels by more complicated maneuvers regarding storytelling, memory and misguided protagonists.

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Roaming Charges

“A poem should not mean/But be.” This succinct closing couplet of Archibald MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica” could double as the thesis statement for the fluid Roaming Charges by Ralph Accardo, now in its world premiere at Detroit Repertory Theatre. Although this carefully constructed fable of poets and poetry raises its share of compelling issues, these occupy a largely thematic space in director Charlotte Leisinger’s interpretation, which seeks above all to approvingly draw out the lyricism in a voluble, very-free-verse text.

The play begins with a conversation between an older white woman, Kate (Leah Smith), and a young black teen, Lacey (Kristin Dawn-Dumas), when the latter comes over to use the former’s backyard swings. The two are by turns open and secretive as they get to know each other’s wounds and boundaries — Kate’s empty nest, Lacey’s dissatisfying home life, and the unspeakable terminal illnesses that touch both. But they are closest bound by the childhood activities that the younger teaches the elder, like the proper form for swinging and jumping rope, and by the poems about Kate that Lacey produces, which are preternaturally sophisticated for a girl her age. As their relationship strengthens, encouragement and praise begins to take on a tenor of surrogate parenting, in which Dawn-Dumas’s precocious open-endedness has an intriguing manipulative undertone, and Smith is believably swept up against all better angels as a salve against the hollowness of her grief. Meanwhile, elsewhere in space and time, a published black poet and academic (Chevonne M. Wilson) strives alone against unseen forces — within and without — to recapture the voice that once made her a prodigy and to get hired for better reasons than infuriating tokenism.

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Next to Normal

Two Muses ups the ante with taboo issues, contemporary melodies, reproduced with permission from EncoreMichigan.com.

In terms of both subject matter and medium, the rock musical "Next to Normal" (music by Tom Kitt, book and lyrics by Brian Yorkey) easily ranks as Two Muses Theatre's most raw offering to date. The company's first-ever musical examines the tribulations of a woman whose chronic mental illness threatens her own well-being as well as that of her family with nonlinear flair and savage candor. Under the leadership of co-directors and producers Diane Hill and Barbie Weisserman, this production reins in the explosive sounds and pulsing sentiments of an often unrestrained genre, instead letting the Pulitzer Prize-winning words and story take the fore.

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