Love, Loss, and What I Wore

Broadway in Detroit opens up its soul — and its closet — at the Gem Theatre. A credit to the art of storytelling, Love, Loss, and What I Wore (by Nora Ephron and Delia Ephron, based on the book by Ilene Beckerman) takes a near-universal hook and uses understated camaraderie to make its expected material fresh. Director Karen Carpenter plays into, not against, the form, delivering a humorous and poignant reverie on the clothes that make the woman.

Every aspect of the production is simplicity done with panache. Jo Winiarski’s scenic design lets five tall chairs stand out on a bare stage, upon which Jeff Croiter’s delicious lighting scheme throws morphing hues and practical spotlight focus. Costumer Ren LaDassor demonstrates why the little black dress is a girl’s best friend, using the staple to unify five distinctly flattering looks. Excepting the solid microphone work, sound design by Walter Trarbach is relegated to bookends of the ninety-minute production, but makes an impression with peppy wardrobe-themed hits. Other than calculated gestures and timing, the staging is essentially nil; the cast sits in a static line and reads from binders. Yet this implies some deficit on the part of the production, when the choice actually reveals itself to be a strength, focusing on the stories themselves as much as the people telling them, and emphasizing the representative nature of these tales in the grand shopping-borrowing-buying-making-critiquing-outgrowing-ruining-resenting-discarding experience.

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Returning productions — Holiday season 2011

Novemer and December in the theater world signals the return of favorite Christmas productions for all ages. As the Rogue has her hands overfull with new plays, holiday and otherwise, here’s a round-up of shows that played to audience and critical acclaim in previous years and return in 2011 to delight audiences anew.

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The All Night Strut Holiday Show

After reopening the historic theater two decades ago with The All Night Strut!, the Gem Theatre proudly comes full circle, celebrating its twentieth season and concurrently spreading holiday cheer in The All Night Strut Holiday Show (conceived and originally directed by Fran Charnas; musical arrangements by Tom Fitt, Gil Lieb, and Dick Schermesser, with additional orchestrations by Corey Allen). This production, recreated by Gary Thompson, fashions a revue of equal parts retread and sentiment that, beyond its seasonal appeal, promises to scratch the viewer’s every musical itch.

The show’s premise lies in its simplicity: revisiting beloved tunes circa the 1930s and ‘40s. Borrowing heavily from the original show, the first act finds performers Lianne Marie Dobbs, Marja Harmon, Jared Joseph, and Denis Lambert working their way through sparkling, peppy tunes with a hefty helping of wartime odes. For the second act, costume designer Mark Mariani turns the cheer up to eleven with dazzling plush ensembles as the score leaps headlong into Christmas songs (plus an extraneous bit of tokenism in a single Hanukkah number). A largely empty set is given dimension in Dana White’s cool lighting scheme, which puts the focus on the singers but also highlights the swinging three-piece band behind them (Ralphie Armstrong, Rob Emanuel, and music director Sven Anderson).

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Daddy Long Legs

The Gem Theatre, in partnership with a handful of companies and producers nationwide, presents Daddy Long Legs (book by John Caird, music and lyrics by Paul Gordon) as its first offering of the season. With direction by Caird, the result is a gorgeous musical about a young woman who writes her life out in letters, and the man who is taken with her words in spite of himself. Her effect on him is no parlor trick: with so much lovely prose set to music, backed by strong character work in sterling performances, the viewer is likely to be just as taken with the delightful protagonists and their intriguing tale.

Based on a 1912 novel by Jean Webster, the story is another entry in the popular orphan-against-all-odds literary canon; here, late-teens Jerusha (Christy Altomare) is rescued from her hated orphanage by an anonymous benefactor, who sends her to college on the grounds that she write him letters and never expect any in return. Through her effusive and detailed monthly correspondence over the course of four years of school, the viewer learns about the foundling’s development as well as the identity of her sponsor, Jervis (Kevin Earley), who only wishes he could be as detached as his postal stonewalling suggests. Caird’s staging maximizes the lack of intersection between the characters: Jerusha lives downstage, facing life — and the audience — head on, whereas Jervis starts out a spectator from his upstage study. With much of the text coming from one-way written conversation, the youthful and appealingly petulant Earley makes capable character work out of reading someone else’s words, which is no small feat. Even so, Altomare’s wonderful, plucky Jerusha is a force to be reckoned with, exhausted by her own exponential development and with an untamed edge to her sweet singing voice. Beyond gaining ground academically and socially, Jerusha desperately wants to feel she knows the man behind the pseudonym “Mr. Smith,” in whom she confides completely; his height is the only detail she has and the basis for the pet name that gives the show its title.

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Freud's Last Session

Playwright Mark St. Germain’s lofty Freud’s Last Session delivers on its promise of an academic clash of the literary-analytic-scientific titans. Indeed, the Century Theatre’s production, directed by Tyler Marchant, crackles with discourse on matters religious and ethical. Underneath its idealized principles, however, the play ultimately succeeds by virtue of its vulnerable human realities, explored deftly by two passionately respectful performances.

Under warplane-crossed London skies in September 1939, C.S. Lewis (Cory Krebsbach) answers a summons for an audience with venerated Sigmund Freud (Mitch Greenberg); although this is their first meeting, each man is aware of the other’s work and principles, and they could not seem more different. The young novelist has not yet written the fantasy series for which he will be best known; the neuroscientist is near death of a belligerent oral cancer that plagues his thoughts and faculties. Any awkwardness stemming from the fact that the former skewered the latter in his first novel is addressed and dispatched. No, what the doctor wants to know is how such intelligence and such pure faith can coexist in one person, when his calculating mind knows better than to believe in a higher power.

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