‘Zero Hour’ is a one-man tour de force

 David Begelman

Theater Critic

Jim Brochu’s life must have been changed forever when his father took him to see Zero Mostel in “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.”

It was an inspirational moment for the young Brochu. Forty years later he went on to author a monologue about the legendary star of such memorable hits as “The Producer,” “Fiddler On the Roof,” “The Rhinoceros,” and “Ulysses in Nighttown”—and  in lesser roles, like the sidekick of Jack Palance in Kazan’s 1950 film noir, “Panic in the Streets,” and 24 other films.

“Zero Hour” won a 2010 Drama desk Award, although Brochu is no stranger to traipsing the boards, having appeared on T.V. in episodes of “All My Children,” “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” and “Cheers.”  

Barrington Stage has the good fortune to be currently producing Brochu’s stunning show. It is a monologue that takes the form of an interview by a New York Times reporter who remains unseen throughout the delivery of the actor’s 90-minute performance.

That is not all. Brochu bears an uncanny resemblance to Zero, right down to the occasionally bellowed vocalization, keen sense of ethnic humor, melodramatic gesturing, and strands of hair plastered artfully on his forehead and converging just above the eyebrows.

There is more to Brochu’s spellbinding characterization than meets the eye. Any monologue that not merely holds, but rivets, audience attention for 1 ½ hours has to have another source of inspiration. In “Zero Hour,” it is the performer’s superb gift for the comedy gag line, the riposte, and the well-timed quip that springs from a wellspring of natural talent, not from the celebrity whom he is portraying.

Brochu’s in-your-face audacious humor is his very own, however a facsimile of Zero’s. And it’s not that far-fetched to assume that he would make a worthy addition to any team of gag writers delivering hilarity for a comedy series—in the manner of a Neil Simon, Larry Gelbart, or Mel Brooks.

The show has Zero alternating between puns at the expense of the Times reporter, like: “I see you have a humor bypass,” or “You look like a gentile Jackie Mason,” to more poignant life moments, like the suicide of his friend Philip Loeb because of blacklisting, or his second marriage to a Catholic girl, Kathryn. Reassuring her mother over Kathy’s match with a Jewish actor, he insisted that his uncle was Pope Leo XIII.

Zero survived his own blacklisting days, including a prison term. As a result, he harbored less than a charitable disposition toward informers, one of whom was the choreographer, Jerome Robbins.

But it was Robbins who saved Zero’s performance in “Fiddler” when then actor could not bring himself to perform the role of a father who rejected a daughter who wished to marry a gentile. The scenario reminded him too much of his own mother’s rejection of the son he had with Kathy. Talk about the wheel coming full circle.

“Zero Hour” runs through June 5 at Barrington Stage Company’s Stage 2, 36 Linden Street, Pittsfield, MASS. Performances are Tuesday to Friday at 7:30 p.m.,  Saturday at 4 p.m. and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $15-$39 Adults, $25 seniors all matinees, Under 18 and students $15 except Saturday evening and may be purchased by calling the box office at 413-236-8888, or online at www.barringtonstageco.org.       

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

 

 

‘The Crucible’ a disappointment at Barrington Stage

David Begelman, Theater Critic

There are surprises in store for anyone immersed in the history of witch panics. Arthur Miller relied on one study of an American version of the craze in crafting his powerful drama, “The Crucible.” One of his motives in writing the play was to highlight affinities between the events in Salem Village in 1692, and our national obsession with rooting out Communists during the McCarthy era.

One surprise is that the analogy goes only so far. Confessing to pacts with Satan was a product of torture, a fear of execution, or a voluntary false confession inspired by delusion. That there were Communists in our midst was hardly a fiction, although the “hysteria” of the fifties could be construed as the overreach exploding in a national epidemic of suspicion about one’s neighbors.

Another surprise is that the injunction in the King James Bible, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” may be a mistranslation of a Hebrew term referring to a person more akin to a spiritual channeler or poisoner, rather than women entering into pacts with the devil in exchange for magical powers.

Director Julianne Boyd’s production of “The Crucible” at Barrington Stage falters because it delineates characters in Miller’s drama as embodiments of good and evil. As a result, her performers emerge as caricatures of persons caught up in the hysteria, rather than as human beings grappling with events that terrify them.

The pace of the show was altogether too rapid, with characters hurtling forward in action as if a reflective attitude were somehow beyond their ability. The result was an absence of breathing time for events to simmer before building to a shattering climax.

In Miller’s play, several teenage girls, including Abigail Williams (Jessica Griffen) are discovered practicing pagan rituals with Tituba (Starla Benford), a slave originally from Barbados, but now a servant in the home of Reverend Parris (Peter Samuel). Caught in the act, the teenagers start experiencing “spells” attributed by such religious authorities as Reverend Hale (Fletcher McTaggart), Governor Danforth (Robert Zukerman), and Judge Hathorne (Edward Cating) to witchcraft. Events escalate to a point at which the entire community becomes involved in the arrest, imprisoning and hanging of alleged witches.

Miller’s drama deals with actual historical figures caught up in the hysteria, albeit with a novel spin on their relationships. In the play, Abigail, the leader of what some scholars and the playwright believe to be a conniving brat-pack, hardly a bevy of mentally disordered adolescents, contrives to implicate John Proctor (Christopher Innvar) and his wife Elizabeth (Kim Stauffer) in the cycle of accusations. The result is catastrophic for all involved.

Unfortunately, the acting in the production tended to be histrionic at crucial points in the action, with the result that the show took on a hurried, melodramatic aspect. Characters like Reverend Hale make entrances as though they were bursting on a stage in a Rossini opera. In his case, he enters in a tizzy laden down with a pile of arcane theological books.

Someone should have told him that the author of one of them, Cotton Mather, was understandably skeptical about spectral evidence—verbal disclosures by a victim that she was being invisibly assailed by a witch—relied on exclusively in sentencing the witches of Salem. So much for missed opportunities.

“The Crucible” runs until Oct. 24, at Barrington Stage Company’s Mainstage Theater, 30 Union Street, Pittsfield, MASS. Performances are Wednesday and Thursday at 7 p.m., Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. There is an additional matinee performance on Wednesday, October 20 at 2 p.m. tickets are $15-$35. Tickets may be purchased by calling the box office at 413-236-8888, or online at www.barringtonstageco.org.       

 

 

     

 

  

 

“Sweeney Todd” scores at Barrington Stage

David Begelman 

Theater Critic

begelman33@gmail.com

 

In director Julianne Boyd’s visually and vocally arresting staging of the Stephen

Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler musical thriller, “Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” human passions are depicted as though they were stretched to a breaking point. The eponymous hero (Jeff McCarthy) is a hapless victim of the lecherous and corrupt official, Judge Turpin (Ed Dixon) and his obsequious sidekick, Beadle Branford (Timothy Shew). The judge, a caricature of civic probity, has traduced Sweeney’s wife, Lucy (Christianne Tisdale) and his daughter, Johanna (Sarah Stevens). Both have survived, but only under unfortunate circumstances.

“Sweeney Todd,” while a musical, is also a revenge drama in the tradition of “The Count of Monte Cristo.” Comeuppance for the dastardly deeds of villains, however, exceeds what was envisioned in the fertile imagination of Alexander Dumas. It takes the form of cannibalism run amok, as though slashing throats and converting people to meat pies went considerably beyond the retribution Sweeney should have contrived as the lot of those responsible for his lowly plight. Many turn up as dishes relished by a growing coterie of customers flocking to sample the new treat in town. Ugh.

Sweeney’s rage converts to unbridled misanthropy. In his barber shop above a restaurant on Fleet Street, even innocent folk are dispatched with a razor, and their lifeless bodies dumped from a collapsible chair into a chamber below. The fortunate few who elude his capers include his accomplice in culinary homicide, Mrs. Lovett (Harriet Harris), the soulful Anthony Hope, (Shonn Wiley) a lad who has fallen in love with Sweeney’s daughter, Johanna, and the simple Tobias Ragg (Zachary Clause), a hanger-on who eventually comes to play an important role in Sweeney’s fate.

Barrington Stage’s current production of the popular Sondheim vehicle is enhanced by Boyd’s imaginative, and often stirring, direction of her cast, and the latter’s consistently accomplished vocal renditions of group and individual numbers. As in all Sondheim works, melodic numbers of great beauty alternate with those in which the composer’s preference for vocal polyphonies and intricate harmonies has affinities with more classical musical forms. Examples of the former are the exquisite love song, “Johanna,” (sung beautifully by Wiley), “Not While I’m Around” (managed soulfully by Clause and Harris), and “Pretty Women” (delivered skillfully by McCarthy and Dixon).

Kudos go to Harriet Harris’s bravura performance as Mrs. Lovett, while Jeff McCarthy’s Sweeney Todd provides a sturdy backbone characterization for the entire production.

Phillip S. Rosenberg’s lighting design was a thing of beauty, while Wilson Chin’s set design underscored the ominous ambience of a London beset with dark premonitions.  The acoustic properties of miked musical numbers tended to obscure the words in several songs.

In this reviewer’s opinion, a key to staging “Sweeney Todd” is striking a proper balance between an upbeat emotional tone and the murkier Tim Burton-type of treatment that bedeviled the film adaptation of the show. The darker side of things is underscored only when thrown into relief against something else. Happily, the Barrington stage production went some distance in achieving this.

‘Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street’ runs through July 17 at the Barrington Stage Company’s Mainstage Theater, 30 Union Street, Pittsfield, MA. Performances are on Tuesdays and Wednesdays at 7 p.m., Thursdays and Fridays at 8 p.m., Friday matinees at 2 p.m., and Sunday matinees at 5 p.m. there is an additional matinee performance on Wednesday, June 30 at 2 p.m. tickets are $15-$58. Seniors, $35 all matinees. Tickets may be purchased by calling the box office at 413-236-8888, or online at www.barringtonstageco.org.       

 

Riveting the audience: “Freud’s Last Session” at Barrington Stage

David Begelman

Theater Critic

begelman33@gmail.com

 

You could have fooled me. What should anyone expect about a show that is a dialogue between the professed atheist, Sigmund Freud, and an ardent believer, C. S. Lewis, author of “Chronicles of Narnia” and “The Screwtape Letters”? While the two have been lionized as spokespersons for disparate world-views, shouldn’t a drama based upon their intellectual sparring be a recipe for talky, listless dialogue? Shouldn’t it produce a prolonged yawn? Dead wrong.

“Freud’s Last Session,” the one-act drama authored by Mark St. Germain, is about as lively and stirring a show for two actors as you’re likely to see these days. And not only because of the superb portrayals by Martin Rayner (Sigmund Freud) and Mark H. Dold (C. S. Lewis). The play, produced a second time at Barrington Stage, and headed soon for new life at the Marjorie S. Deane Little Theatre in New York City, is simply one gem of a production.

Its appeal has virtually nothing to do with the loopy defenses of religion and disbelief fashioned by its principal characters. After all, Freud’s insistence that religious belief stems from a hankering for a benevolent father figure has no obvious relevance for whether God exists or not. (Freud was often guilty of confusing the truth or falsity of a belief with the motivational reasons for adopting it).

Nor does Lewis’s recitation of personal religious experience or conviction shed any philosophical light on the same issue. The compelling ingredient in the play is the way these two go at each other with passion, conviction, humor, and, although it is sometimes barely visible, mutual respect camouflaged by a veil of contentiousness.

Playwright St. Germain’s premise, that a dialogue between Freud and Lewis might have occurred, is pure wish fulfillment. It is based upon an anecdote that Freud had  contact with an unnamed Oxford student during his last days. That this was C. S. Lewis is a fanciful guess, but probably wrong. Freud was by temperament intolerant of disagreement, and a joust with someone as far removed from his take on life as Lewis was probably not in the cards during his terminal and agonizing bout with oral cancer.

In exile in London from Nazi Germany, Freud’s had his personal physician administer a merciful overdose of morphine on September 23, 1939. In the play, C. S. Lewis admonishes Freud against taking such a step—on moral grounds. Freud’s eventual death signaled repudiation of the religion his visitor insisted had a claim on the way any of us should elect to go out.

Tyler Marchant’s direction of the show was close to flawless. Brian Prather’s scene design, with the famous carpet-covered couch of Freud’s, transported from its Viennese niche, breathed an air of verisimilitude in Freud’s realistically appointed study. Clifton Taylor’s amber-tinted lighting design did likewise.

The show is a must-see for anyone with an appetite for timeless controversies, gripping drama, and riveting performances by two consummate actors. For those of  alternative persuasion, see it anyway.

‘Freud’s Last Session’ runs until July 3 at Barrington Stage’s Stage 2, 36 Linden Street, Pittsfield, MA. Performances are Tuesday through Friday at 7:30 p.m., Saturdays at 4 p.m. and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 7:30 p.m. There is an additional performance on Thursday, july1 at 4 p.m. Tickets are $15-$45, and may be purchased by calling the box office at 413-236-8888 or online at www.barringtonstageco.org.