Guys on Ice

Playwright Fred Alley and composer James Kaplan must have known the only way I'd agree to hole up in an ice shanty with two fellas and their thick Wisconsin accents would be if the whole experience was set to music. Their Guys on Ice, at Tipping Point Theatre with direction by Joseph Albright, is a delightful, climate-controlled, melodic escape to a sportsman's paradise in the frozen north.

This light production is home to perhaps a dozen playful ditties about catching and consuming fish, cold-weather wear, drinking beer, and more ethereal topics. The songs' various styles and tones are unified by their exhaustive lexicon of fishing euphemisms; some lyrical repetition is allayed by James R. Kuhl's goofy, exuberant choreography. In addition to main characters Lloyd (Brian Sage) and Marvin (Matthew Gwynn) whiling away a day on the lake together, regrettable acquaintance Ernie the Mooch (Andy Orscheln) keeps turning up like a bad penny, ukulele at the ready, to inflict his commendably terrible singing on the pair. Musically, this trio of accomplished performances is universally strong; the comedic moments invite rolling laughter.

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Last of the Red Hot Lovers

How does a decades-married man throw off the mantle of fidelity and cut loose for a one-off steamy love affair? If Last of the Red Hod Lovers is any indication, the answer is: ineptly, awkwardly, uproariously. Tipping Point Theatre and director James Kuhl tackle Neil Simon's comic tale of one man's quest to get extramarital, backing up Benny Hill levels of silliness with fine character work and subtlety.

At first sight, Barney Cashman (Dave Davies) seems like an unlikely Lothario. Spend a few minutes with him and the conviction just gets stronger — he's a painstakingly responsible owner of a fish restaurant, a husband and father, who's always followed the rules. Now approaching age fifty, he wants to do something ribald before it's too late, and so he invites an acquaintance (Sandra Birch) to his mother's empty apartment, with soaring expectations of one afternoon of perfect emotional and sexual connection. When he unsurprisingly fails to woo the chain-smoking, no-nonsense, storming-out firebrand, Barney goes back for more, changing tactics but not expectations (and certainly not venue), with two different women. 

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Season In Review — Tipping Point Theatre

Northville's Tipping Point Theatre built itself a home with an eye for ground-up design. Entrances at all corners, a high ceiling with far-reaching lighting grid, and movable riser seats keep its returning patrons guessing. This tabula-rasa space, in which designers elect not only whether and where to erect the walls but how to arrange the seating, celebrates the exciting theatrical possibility of an empty room. To supplement the theater's usual seats-on-three-sides approach, this season the company made its first — and then its second — foray into the round. The resulting productions packed the intimate feel of a black-box theater with thoughtful staging and substantial polish.

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Southern Comforts

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a widowed man of a certain age, must be in want of a honey-drawled woman to penetrate his harmlessly cantankerous exterior. On the face of it, there is Kathleen Clark's Southern Comforts in a nutshell. Yet there's something more to the play, especially in this Tipping Point production directed by Joseph Albright: a real relationship.

Actors Thomas D. Mahard and Ruth Crawford are superbly cast; from the first meeting between Gus of New Jersey and Amanda of Tennessee, they have an instant rapport. Theirs never feels like an unlikely partnership — even as Gus grumbles about something or they find themselves in disagreement, it’s apparent that these aren’t two lonely people settling for each other’s companionship. Indeed, a scene at the end of the first act makes it clear how many more obstacles are in place for two seniors combining their filled-out lives than exist for young people just starting out together. Long-established preferences, deep-seated unwavering opinions, and especially a lifetime’s worth of possessions and furniture do not happily commingle; to willingly weather the strain, they must be in love.

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The Smell of the Kill

Had I been given a choice of shows to see a second time, The Smell of the Kill would have made the short list, so I was giddy for another viewing of this co-production, now at the Tipping Point Theatre. I found myself initially preoccupied with the demands of re-review: Were my thoughts too harsh? Was I noticing the wrong things? Could I make valid assessments without simply comparing the current performance with the prior one? Turns out there was nothing to fear: after very little time reunited with Nicky, Debra, and Molly, I was hooked. Again. Those three wives and their devilishly indecorous story hooked me twice.

The busy first beats seem to rattle in the space as the women handle dishes, leftovers, and exposition. Their never-seen husbands yuk it up while setting up a game of golf in the dining room and are an occasional harmless nuisance, but the gossip the women trade in Nicky's kitchen tells a more nefarious tale: these are deeply unhappy women, whose chief source of unhappiness is their husbands. Playwright Michele Lowe quickly gets to the meat (so to speak) of the plot: when the husbands are discovered to be trapped in the walk-in basement freezer, a darkly comic immorality surfaces when one wife stops her rescue efforts to muse, "How long does it take to make ice?"

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