Life Could Be a Dream

Writer-creator Roger Bean’s Life Could Be a Dream, a musical about young hopefuls aiming high, aims ironically low. Uninterested in being confined to a single artist or composer, but also unwilling to bend song selections to the complexities of plot or character, this jukebox musical uses a hackneyed high school–level problem as a thinly veiled excuse to lob close to two dozen 1960s hits at its audience. Now in its Michigan premiere at Meadow Brook Theatre, director Travis W. Walter’s catchy nostalgia vehicle answers Bean’s empty vessel for harmless, escapist entertainment the only way it can: with dueling pep and banality.

The show takes place where so many dreams begin: Mom’s basement. Recent high school grad Denny (Lucas Wells) is resisting all demands to get a job, instead scheming for stardom. His big break appears to be an upcoming local contest with a recording contract as the prize, but since singing groups are the trend, he needs help from reluctant Eugene (Mathew Schwartz) and goody-two-shoes Wally (Joe Lehman) to be saleable. The instant trio of “loser doozer” nerds, in need of sponsorship, reaches out to a local auto garage, which brings heartthrob mechanic/ringer Skip (Sam Perwin) and the boss’s daughter, Lois (Allison Hunt), into the story’s orbit. The introduction of A Girl means that only one type of plot can follow, and indeed, an early lopsided love pentagon gives way to a standard wrong-side-of-the-tracks tale of woe. If only the guys can reunite in time for the big contest, which the show never doubts they’ll win, despite their inexperience, insufficient rehearsal time, and incessant quibbling over who should have the most solos.

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Pookie Goes Grenading

It was announced that playwright JC Lee’s Pookie Goes Grenading would be the swan song of The New Theatre Project, which for three seasons has been bringing brash, brave programming to Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti venues with guerrilla flair. It’s tempting to dissect the final production in this context, as the culmination of continuous evolution and the final vehicle for the company’s mission. But frankly, Pookie Goes Grenading is so funny that I don’t care what else it is. Director Emilie C. Samuelson catapults a savagely ebullient script into the kind of all-in production that could teach hyperbole a thing or two, and the result is as wildly hilarious as it is charmingly insane.

The play is marked by an all-consuming energy and conviction, qualities that are endemic of adolescence, which explains the mini-gymatorium evoked by the painted floor of the Mix Studio Theatre stage. Indeed, protagonist Pookie (Luna Alexander) is a high school student, with a dream of making a movie. And not just any movie — an action movie, starring Pookie, in which she exacts explosive metaphorical revenge against a psychopathic baker. Deterrents like having no equipment, budget, staff, or experience and the threatened wrath of school administrators are no match for Pookie’s intensely concentrated zeal; instead, she channels her vision into other forms of expression, with catastrophic results that elevate her status to that of vigilante artist and legitimate outlaw.

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The Maids

It's all in how you play the game, reproduced with permission from EncoreMichigan.com.

Lamentably postponed and long anticipated, Magenta Giraffe Theatre's production of "The Maids" (by Jean Genet, translated by Bernard Frechtman) is categorically worth the wait. Closing the season with a daring ideological text that harkens back to the company's initial production of Sartre's "No Exit," director Frannie Shepherd-Bates use cresting tension and the crucial force of opposites to dabble in a dangerous game and see it through to mind-bending ends.

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35MM

AKT musical is all about image, reproduced with permission from EncoreMichigan.com.

A photograph may be a fixed likeness, but it's the product of a lot of moving parts. When studying a photo as a work of art, the technique – composition, exposure, use or absence of color, processing methods, and the like – can be just as important to consider as the subject. Sometimes in fact, the content is beside the point.

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A Thousand Circlets

At its heart, A Thousand Circlets is a story of dementia. Playwright Theroun D’Arcy Patterson’s ambitious work also seeks to examine the ripple effects felt throughout the lives touched by the disease. True to this phenomenon referenced in the title, the Midwest-premiere production by Detroit Repertory Theatre, under director Leah Smith, is profoundly affecting at its sensory epicenter, with emotional resonance that regresses as it radiates choppily outward.

It starts with something innocuous: Earl (Harold Hogan), a celebrated architect, stares in the mirror, unable to remember the series of movements that will let him tie his necktie. His wife, Liz (Connie Cowper), downplays and masks the occurrence with panicked dismissals that are at least as telling as his confusion. Something is clearly wrong with Earl — even as he approaches the ultimate career milestone, a commissioned skyscraper design, his mind and memory are becoming increasingly unreliable, which is brought into stark relief by Burr Huntington’s instructively dissonant sound design. Together with slippery light cues by designer Thomas Schraeder, the concept patterns past and present stories at cross purposes with a deliberate randomness that conveys the confusion and helplessness of the encroaching malady with blatant efficacy. Rather than merely watch Earl deteriorate, the viewer is pointed directly through his obscured and distorted lens, a palpable force that proves to be the production’s greatest strength.

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