Season's Greetings 2011

The Rogue Critic has embarked on a year-end hiatus until early January. Until then, please enjoy this personal reflection on a Southeast Michigan theatrical institution celebrating its 30th anniversary.

"Why I cannot review A Christmas Carol at Meadow Brook Theatre"

This year has brought many amazing developments, for which I am grateful beyond measure. From a new website to a momentous Wilde achievement to the continuing bounty of the Rogue Critic Gas Card, it's been another unforgettable 365 days, 115 reviews, and 155 theatrical events. Although I'm in need of the break, I'm no less excited to do it all again.

This is Rogue P. Critic, signing off for 2011. See you in the new year!

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It's a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play

Part of HappenStance Productions’ cachet is in staging solid crowd-pleasing entertainment, but a large proportion lies in choosing projects that agree with the Andiamo Novi upstairs theater that it’s occupied for a string of productions. With the Christmas season in full swing, and most favorite holiday tales requiring expansive casts and settings, the company now takes a winning scaled-down approach to a time-tested classic. With playwright Joe Landry’s It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play, director Aaron T. Moore blends front-and-center character work with backstage magic, putting engaging new packaging on a story many viewers know by heart.

It may be 2011 in the surrounding Italian restaurant and martini lounge, but here it’s December 24, 1946, in the studio of Detroit City radio station WAND. The premise is efficiently established in a few deft strokes, as the sharply attired players welcome the audience to the live broadcast and entertain them with a handful of a cappella carols while making their last-minute preparations for the show. By the time the stage manager calls the countdown and the on-air light toggles on, it’s easy to believe the illusion, especially given the practiced professionalism of this ensemble. The broadcast itself is presented in a single block of three major acts, which are broken up by quick breaks and cute ads from laughable “sponsors.” In all, the show runs less than two hours at a single stretch, quite a bit shy of the original film's running time.

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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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Every Christmas Story Ever Told (And Then Some!)

For viewers who can’t choose just one Christmas classic, there’s Every Christmas Story Ever Told (And Then Some!) (by Michael Carleton, Jim Fitzgerald, and John K. Alvarez). As presented by young company The AKT Theatre Project, with direction by Angie Kane Ferrante, this whirlwind tour plugs directly into the mainframe of favorite Christmas culture and media, in an exhaustive visual smorgasbord of holiday greatest hits. Dwelling in lightness and peppered with self-effacing humor, the result is a hyper-manic experience that feels like all of Christmas flashing before one’s eyes.

In a quick setup/premise maneuver, traditional Jon Pigott’s insistence on yet again performing A Christmas Carol is overruled by compatriots Jeremy St. Martin and Jack Hundley, who open the floor to suggestions for favorite Christmas traditions, movies and TV specials, and stories. What follows is a cavalcade of beloved holiday classics, as well as a handful of bumpers, including descriptions of worldwide Christmas lore that clash disturbingly with America’s jolly consumer paradise. No holiday favorite is sacred, be it a copyrighted ninth reindeer or a magically animate snowman or the mathematically improbable feats of jolly old St. Nicholas himself, and it becomes clear how deeply ingrained these stories are when a single moment or visual communicates the thing as a whole, or when two of the best-known tales are mashed together in a second act lightning round. Hundley, Pigott, and St. Martin are tireless in their pursuits and entirely willing to make fools of themselves as the occasion warrants; rarely does a moment pass in which there isn’t something new and elaborately goofy to take in.

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A Jazzy Christmas

‘Tis the season for ubiquitous Christmas music, the beastly quantity and dubious quality of which is enough to wear on even the most spirited holiday shopper (and driver, and diner, and dental patient, and person on hold). Fortunately, Plowshares Theatre understands that the best cure for the unfortunate-Christmas-recordings blues is to do the tunes right. As a follow-up to its spring production, Jazz: Birth of the Cool, the company returns to Detroit’s Virgil H. Carr Cultural Center to celebrate A Jazzy Christmas with inviting warmth and seasonal style.

The large second-floor space is here configured with rows of chairs facing a temporary stage, from which the performers frequently step down and sing almost within reach of the front row. It’s an intimate, casual atmosphere that both evades a strictly concert feel and lends flexibility to performer/choreographer Brent Davin Vance’s staging of about three dozen numbers presented in two acts. LED lighting effects set the ladies’ luxe formal wear to sparkling and also wash over the blank backdrop with rich primary colors, supplemented by huge snowflake lights that keep the surroundings dynamic without being overly busy. The sound design has a similarly tech-infused feel, providing personal amplification that puts each of the five singers on even footing with the five musicians arraying the rear of the stage. Although the impressive accoutrements and close feel suggest counterintuitive purposes, the overall effect is coherent enough: a glimmering, jubilant, but highly personal experience.

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