‘War of the Worlds’ is a comedy split down the middle

By David Begelman

 

Theater Critic

In playwright Howard Koch’s imaginative—if not occasionally runaway—adaptation of H. G. Well’s “War of the Worlds,” a team of eager radio broadcasters enacts a simulated invasion on the world by Martians.

A similar scenario was dramatized in the now famous 1938 version of a Mercury Theater broadcast by a 22 year-old Orson Welles. Across the years, its aftermath took on a legendary, albeit overinflated aspect. The broadcast did not ignite a national panic, as was subsequently advertised. Only a lesser number of radio listeners who failed to hear the announcement at its end were ready to take to the hills.

In Shakespeare & Company’s current production, the setting is the “Jack Holloway Show,” a listener-friendly evening of “Song and Dance” preceding its “Mystery Theatre” presentation. This turns out to be a simulacrum of the hour-long 1938 treatment of the theme: extraterrestrials launching an attack on New Jersey.

In director Tony Simotes’s treatment of the Koch script, the First Act briskly sets the stage for news of the invasion. Before minor performers in walk-on roles can hurriedly deliver ominous bulletins to announcers during the Second Act, the show has a charm that all but dissolves in later flurries of tumult.

“War of the Worlds” opens with a lively introduction to life among backstage studio collaborators. With a garnish of audience participation, a number of very funny personages step forward to do their thing. These include radio announcers with bouncy vocal deliveries (Scott Renzoni), hilarious mimics (Josh Aaron McCabe), female vocalists who prettify the goings-on (Elizabeth Aspenlieder, Dana Harrison), flamboyant thespians doing their part-time radio gig (Jonathan Croy), the show’s host, Jack Holloway, who does a fetching rendition of the ballad, “Smile” (David Joseph), and the indispensable “Foley Artist,” a fellow in charge of sound effects (Michael Pfeiffer).

The company of players, the very best around when it comes to artfully executed farce, is a gifted group of performers with an aptitude for skillfully calibrated ensemble work. Were only the scripted Second Act up to the standards of the First!

The comedy’s ongoing conceit is that the cast is performing for an assembled radio audience. So it is not clear why they start to behave in the studio as they imagine the listening audience might, hearing their broadcast. Either one is a performer or a panicked citizen—but not both at the same time.

The Second Act is also encumbered by an overdone, kitschy enactment of the Pyramus and Thisbe interlude from “A Midsummer’s Night Dream,” a tedious final speech by McCabe as Professor Pierson, and a pious insertion of the hymn “Amazing Grace,” doubtlessly added to assure everyone of being on the right side of the Lord in the face of alien attack.

The company ends with the ditty, “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” the last line of which is “If You Believe in Me.”  Only, it may be conjectured, when you are in the First Act.

“War of the Worlds” runs through November 6 at the at the Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre of Shakespeare & Company, 70 Kemble Street, Lenox, MA 01240. Show times are 11:00 AM, 2:00 PM, and 7:30 PM. Tickets are $48 and may be purchased online at www.shakespeare.org or by calling the Box Office at (413)-637-3353.

 

 

 

 

‘The Mystery of Irma Vep’ is a boisterous, campy romp

David Begelman

If you’re looking for the highest reaches of dramatic art in the Charles Ludlam spoof “The Mystery of Irma Vep,” you’ll be disappointed. What you’ll get is hardly unforgettable playwriting, but rather a madcap pastiche of deliriously funny moments of contrivance and situational twists that tickle the funny bone to the max.

Shakespeare and Company, a group of performers that has distinguished itself for delivering such well appointed comedies as Tom Stoppard’s “The Real Inspector Hound” and “Rough Crossing,” and Georges Feydeau’s “The Ladies Man” has mounted yet another wildly funny show. The Ludlam farce, while a notch below the playwriting of those other venerable vehicles, is nonetheless a bundle of belly laughs in its own right.

Ludlam has crafted a farce in which two actors perform eight different roles. The playwright insisted that both performers should be of the same sex as a precondition of production. This ensures that cross-dressing is yet another component in this face-paced comedy of zany circumstance that has audiences in various states of hilarity —when not rolling in the aisles.

“Irma Vep” would tax the resources of any two performers. It is virtually bursting with rapid costume changes, piped-in melodramatic musical cues, sundry special effects, dialogue full of double entendres, wisecracks, props like wolf carcasses, sliding bookcases, and dialogue suddenly interspersed with words filched from—of all things—Macbeth and Hamlet.

Ludlum’s madcap comedy was first produced by the Ludlum Ridiculous Theatrical Company, and opened Off-Off Broadway in Greenwich Village in 1984. Closing almost two years later, in 1991, it became the most produced American play, and the longest running one ever produced in Brazil, South America.

The comedy opens in Mandacrest, the estate of Lord Edgar (Ryan Winkle) and Lady Enid, Edgar’s second wife (Josh Aaron McCabe). The latter, who toddles across the stage in mincing steps, lives in the shadow of Edgar’s former wife, Irma, whose portrait hangs ominously above the fireplace in the spacious parlor of the estate.

The action takes off in a series of scenes involving “ungodly nights” of fog-laced, moonlit ambience, werewolves, vampires, traduced characters who are quick to observe that they “feel the green fairy’s fang,” a portrait that begins to bleed when hit by a bullet accidentally discharged from a gun, and a household maid who elects to cheer things up by serving a sumptuous breakfast of “kippers and kidneys.” 

There is even an excursion to an Egyptian tomb where Lord Edgar hopes to unravel the mystery of Mandacrest by investigating the sarcophagus of a mummy in an unexcavated tomb—courtesy of a conniving Arab with an eye patch all too eager to cut a self-serving deal.

Winkles and McCabe tear up the scenery in episodic grandeur, to the considerable enjoyment of the audience. The dialogue is bursting with allusions to themes in Victorian novels, Agatha Christie mysteries, gothic invention, Shakespeare, horror flicks, Alfred Hitchcock, and every cliché imaginable. (McCabe as an improbable character, the hunched-over Nicodemus, has an accent that is too Boris Karloff to be accidental.)

The show is a delightful spoof of much you have seen or read about in stories that keep you young, albeit shivering at night between the sheets. Moreover, it is delivered by two seasoned troupers that are a pleasure to watch doing their breathless thing.

“The Mystery of Irma Vep” runs until March 27 at the Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre, 70 Kemble St., Lenox, Mass. Performances are Wednesdays through Saturdays at 7:00 p.m. Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2 p.m. Tickets are $12-$48, and can be purchased by calling the box office at 413-637-3353, or contacting www.shakespeare.org, 

 

 

  

‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’ is a bellyful of laughs

By David Begelman

Theater Critic

Those master performers of farce at Shakespeare & Company are at it again. I can only assume they know a good genre when they see it. Need we mention the company’s stellar productions of Tom Stoppard’s “Rough Crossing” and “The Real Inspector Hound,” George Feydeau’s “The Ladies Man,” and the Charles Ludlam spoof “The Mystery of Irma Vepp”? They were all staged with an exuberance that has more than tickled audience funny bones.

This time, it’s “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” a zany take-off on Arthur Conan Doyle’s tale spun around an adventure of the sleuth extraordinaire, Sherlock Holmes. The play was authored by Steve Canny and John Nicholson, and had its premiere at Shakespeare & Company in 2009.

It hardly matters that the script and the current production bear little resemblance to the original short story. Fidelity to literary sources is the last thing audiences will have on their mind in treating themselves to this spoof. The adaptation—outrageously derivative is its proper designation—is simply too funny to make you care one way or another.

The credit for the riotous confection goes directly to Director Tony Simotes. He displays a deft hand at creating delightful bits of situational humor and physical artifice that distinguished his work in this season’s marvelous “As You Like It.”

This time, the same three performers who starred in the 2009 production have joined hands to give audiences what the company excels at delivering. They are Jonathan Croy, Ryan Winkles, and Josh Aaron McCabe. The latter two actors tore up the scenery in episodic grandeur in “Irma Vepp,” just as they do in “Hound of the Baskervilles.” The two team up with Croy as the venerable (but usually addled) Dr. Watson.

Winkles and McCabe have the lion’s share of costume changes and switching characters—often hilariously. McCabe is wildly funny, whether as a sedate Holmes, a suspicious character bulleting across the stage on a crutch, a diminutive and bearded troll-like creature who seems barely three feet high, or a seductive Spanish temptress who wields two noisy fans to emphasize her dramatic, but scarcely consequential remarks.

Winkles likewise draws a hugely appreciative audience response as a cowering coachman whose frayed nerves are evident in the vibrating horsewhip he holds while being intimidated, as Sir Henry Baskerville being taken aback by the sudden disappearance of his trousers, or being framed in a devilish portrait of himself beaming with self-satisfaction.     

The humor in this show is pretty much divided between the dialogue and the situations characters find themselves embroiled in—or ditzy combinations of both.

In the character of Holmes, McCabe radiates the smugness of the famous sleuth. When queried by his sidekick what school it was in which all the students were found poisoned, you can see the answer coming from a mile away: “elementary, my dear Watson!”

“The Hound of the Baskervilles” runs through September 4 at Founders’ Theatre, Shakespeare & Company, 70 Kemble Street, Lenox, Mass. Performances are Wednesday, Friday and Saturday 7:30 p.m., Sunday matinees 2 p.m. Tickets are $21.60-$48 and may be purchased by calling the box office at 413-637-3353 or online at www.shakespeare.org.              

 

   

‘The 39 steps’ is a hoot in Lenox

 

David Begelman, Theater Critic

If you remember the early classic Alfred Hitchcock film, “The 39 Steps,” you’ll probably also feel it can’t hold a candle to later movies directed by the master, like “Vertigo,” “Rear Window” or “The Birds.” And let’s not forget “Psycho,” that blood-curdling romp of bathtub murder laced with some pretty unnerving stuff about a killer who can’t tell the difference between himself and his mother. Murder in all its guises seems to be Hitch’s specialty, thankfully. Where can you come up with a director who can turn something so ugly into a thing of beauty?

No matter. Shakespeare & Company has mounted an innovative riff on John Buchan’s novel, adapted into a 1935 Hitchcock flick starring Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll. The company’s hilarious treatment of the book and movie is so side-splitting funny, you can dispense with what its narrative line is all about. You won’t be able to understand it, anyhow. Just sit back and enjoy the goings on, configured by director Jonathan Croy from an adaptation of the novel and film by Patrick Barlow.

And if you’re shopping around for the best theater in the tri-state area for staging farce, go no farther. It’s Shakespeare & Company all the way. I venture to say the Lenox company is better at this genre than anything else, including Shakespeare. Although artistic director Tony Simotes’ smash hit of the bard’s “As You Like It” was nothing to sneeze at on any accounting. It’s when the company goes serious, as in the recently produced “The Tempest,” its past  “A Winter’s Tale” or “Othello” that the going gets a bit rough.

In the current production, three consummately talented performers take on all the roles. Never mind the obvious cost-cutting, belt tightening measures taken to stage a worthwhile production. The plain truth is that this production is so well directed, so enjoyable, that audiences are filling the Elayne P. Berstein Theatre to the brim. This reviewer had to wend his way through overcrowded seating to find his seat—midway through the run of the comedy, to boot.

In “The 39 Steps,” as in the Hitchcock flick, Richard Hannay (Jason Asprey) is an innocent enough Brit who is attending a London music hall production. Suddenly. Shots are fired, and the rest is history. Hannay is plunged into a world of intrigue, assassination attempts and embroilment in a Nazi scheme to pilfer British military secrets during World War II.

Again, no matter. Three performers take on a bewildering variety of roles that have you at the point of hysteria in audience seats. Asprey is in one role as Richard Hannay, the bewildered hero of the comedy, whereas Elizabeth Aspenlieder appears as three separate characters (mostly vamps). David Joseph takes on 14 roles, including the buck-toothed “Mr. Memory,” not to mention a slew of other unforgettable characters.

Josh Aaron McCabe, a talent for all seasons if ever there was, plays 15 separate characters, including women, old and young. It’s the rapid costume changes and sudden alterations of character that have you riveted in merriment over the course of the two-act comedy. See it.

“The 39 Steps” runs through November 4 at the Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre, Shakespeare & Company, 70 Kemble Street, Lenox, Mass. Performances are Wednesday, Friday and Saturday 7:30 p.m., Sunday matinees 2 p.m. Tickets are $15-$50 and may be purchased by calling the box office at 413-637-3353 or online at www.shakespeare.org.