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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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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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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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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Next to Normal

Meadow Brook rocks and shocks in polemical Michigan premiere, reproduced with permission from EncoreMichigan.com.

With a rollicking sound (music by Tom Kitt) and a plot centered on the foe and friend that is one woman's mental illness (book and lyrics by Brian Yorkey), "Next to Normal" is by no means a conventional musical. For the Michigan premiere at Meadow Brook Theatre, directed by Travis W. Walter, the viewer is rewarded for obliging the production's audacious and startling choices, which not only do emotional justice to an astonishing, illuminating, Pulitzer Prize–winning text, but also proves to be musically splendid.

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