August Wilson’s Fences at Rochester’s GeVa Theatre

Tony Todd (right) and Wiley Moore (left) as Troy Maxson and his best friend Bono.

It’s too late now to do anyone any good, because the show closed a week ago, but GeVa Theatre just put on a fabulous production of August Wilson’s Fences here in Rochester.  Unfortunately we couldn’t make it down to GeVa till the run was almost over. We would have loved to have seen it again.

The late playwright

This is surely one of the very best American plays. We say that not merely because the play (a) is set in Pittsburgh, near our boyhood home in western Pennsylvania and (b) involves baseball. No, Fences is a masterpiece because of Wilson’s gorgeous cascade of language and his sympathy for the frailties of mankind.  What happens to the soul of a good man who is blocked from fulfulling his dreams? What if he finds himself resenting the promise and potential of his own son? How can a man who loves and honors his wife nevertheless end up in bed with another woman?

Troy Maxson claimed that Dodgers star Jackie Robinson wouldn't have been good enough to play with him in the Negro Leagues

Fences is the tragedy of Troy Maxson (Tony Todd), a former star of the Negro Leagues whose career ended before baseball was integrated. Now he works on a garbage truck, bitter about missing out on the fame and money enjoyed by younger men like Jackie Robinson — who, he says, wouldn’t have been good enough to make the teams he and Josh Gibson played on.

Clemente's 1959 baseball card

What Troy refuses to see is that times are changing. He tells his best friend Bono (Wiley Moore, who nails the role) that baseball will always keep the black man down. Why else, he asks, would the Pirates be keeping Roberto Clemente on the bench? In fact, by 1957, ten years after Robinson joined the Dodgers,  Willie Mays and Hank Aaron were among the biggest stars in baseball, and Clemente had been the Pirates’ full-time right fielder since 1955.

And Troy himself has won a victory in the struggle for racial equality. When he files a formal employee grievance against the policy that only white men could drive the garbage trucks (black men had to work on the ground), he and his wife Rose (Nora Cole) worry that he’ll simply be fired. Instead, his grievance is upheld and Troy is promoted to the cab of his garbage truck.

Rose is proud of their son, Cory (Jared McNeill), who has become a high-school football star and has been offered a college scholarship.  But Troy is afraid that sports will be a dead end for Cory as it was for him.  Or so he says — is Troy really jealous that his son might achieve the success in sports that eluded him?  He refuses to sign scholarship papers for his son and insists that Cory keep working at the neighborhood grocery instead of pursuing football.

Tony Todd has an unforgettable, modulated, gravelly voice, and he was a superbly physical Troy Maxson.  He had his audience in the palm of his hand from the opening scene in which Troy drinks whiskey with his buddy Bono (Wiley Moore) and brags about his wife and their vigor as lovers. Like Troy Maxson, Todd is a master storyteller; in one of the most unforgettable scenes in this show, Troy reminisces about his abuse at the hands of his own father. Tony Todd is known for his movie roles (Candyman, The Rock), but he is a first-rate actor, and here in Rochester he left nothing of August Wilson’s script on the page.

In fact, the entire cast of this show was up to Todd’s standard, especially Nora Cole as Troy’s long-suffering wife Rose. This production richly deserves to be seen elsewhere — we thought it every bit as fine as the recent production of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone on Broadway, which we also saw and loved (see this post) — but as nearly as we can tell, it closed for good here in Rochester.

Cuddy

It was August Wilson’s general policy that his plays be directed by black directors.  We understand that GeVa Artistic Director Mark Cuddy obtained special permission from Wilson’s widow to direct Fences (which necessarily has an all-black cast) himself.

This exception for Cuddy didn’t get any particular public attention, so far as we know.  But the selection of another white man, Bartlett Sher, to direct the afore-mentioned production of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone on Broadway did stir up a fuss. The choice of Sher aroused the ire of some African-Americans — in fact, we ran across one blogger (here he is) who complained hysterically that this was yet another “openly blatant example” of “insidious and pervasive American racism.”

It didn’t seem very “blatant” to us, and personally, we didn’t think GeVa’s production of Fences was tainted by having a white director. Perhaps Mr. Cuddy can’t claim to fully appreciate African-American culture. But people are still people. Who would argue that Mr. Cuddy shouldn’t direct Chekhov because he didn’t grow up Russian?  Anyway, the themes of Fences are universal, not tied to the experience of being black in America. We don’t see why Mr. Cuddy or Mr. Sher should have been disqualified from directing two of the very finest American plays simply because of their race, and we’re glad Mr. Wilson’s estate agreed.

We also think this show succeeded so well mainly because of its superb performers, not because of Mr. Cuddy, whose direction was unobtrusive. Our guess is that Mr. Cuddy had the good sense not to interfere with veteran actors who plainly understood Wilson’s play and what to do with it.

Sweeney Todd at Rochester’s GeVa Theatre

We never saw Sweeney Todd on Broadway, nor did we get around to seeing the movie version of this musical. So our first taste of the demon barber of Fleet Street was the remarkably sharp new production currently at Rochester’s GeVa Theatre.

Stephen Tewksbury as Sweeney Todd, and Kristie Dale Sanders as the maker of the worst pies in London

Granted, there’s no such thing as a “normal” premise for a musical play. By any standard, though the premise of Sweeney Todd is outrageous. The play’s hero, the barber Sweeney Todd (Stephen Tewksbury), has returned to late-eighteenth-century London obsessed with getting revenge on a corrupt judge who, years before, abducted and ravished Sweeney’s lovely young wife. Judge Turpin (James Van Treuren) had covered up his crimes by having Todd himself transported to Australia on a trumped-up charge.

Todd sets up his barbershop above Mrs. Lovett’s meat pie shop, hoping to lure the judge into his barber’s chair so he can ply a fatal razor on the judge’s throat. In the meantime, though, he strikes up a stomach-turning relationship with the brassy, vulgar Mrs. Lovett herself (Kristie Dale Sanders); Todd slits the throats of random customers and slides their bodies down a trapdoor into her kitchen.  Mrs. Lovett incorporates the meaty parts of their corpses into meat pies and feeds to unsuspecting customers.

Here’s what you should know if you’re thinking of seeing this show:

1. The grisly business isn’t as stomach-turning as you might expect. Granted, throats are slit and customers sit at cafe tables clamoring for pastries made of human flesh. But the blood-shedding is minimal and stylized (especially compared to the oceans of blood that reportedly flowed in the movie version of Sweeney Todd). And of course the audience can’t actually smell or taste Mrs. Lovett’s meat pies.

Maybe we’re jaded and shock-proof after all the graphic violence we’ve seen on film for the last 35 years, but in any case Sweeney Todd doesn’t really press the envelope. We may be titillated, but we’re not revolted.

Stephen Tewksbury

2. It’s not as terrifying as you might expect. Sweeney Todd isn’t a thriller, and it doesn’t have nail-biting, edge-of-your-seat qualities. And the villains in the play (in fact, all the characters are scoundrels)are not played as larger-than-life sociopaths; they don’t terrify us. Director Mark Cuddy didn’t go for shock value.

3. You’ll end up enjoying the music. Of course, the music of Stephen Sondheim is a far cry from the feel-good, sing-along anthems of Oklahoma or the sentimental song in Fiddler on the Roof. Sondheim doesn’t shy aware from dissonance or from startling melodic leaps.  No hit songs came from Sweeney Todd.

But we liked the music — welcome relief from the bland, cliched numbers in popular musicals of recent years (think Wicked and Rent). Sondheim’s lyrics are perfectly fitted to the melodies, and the musical accompaniments are exquisite. We have only one real complaint. Why did Sondheim write duets in which the singers are singing different lyrics at the same time? The audience can’t understand either lyric.

Roland Rusinek played Beadle Bamford

4. It’s an good cast. Stephen Tewksbury, as Sweeney Todd, and Kristie Dale Sanders as Mrs. Lovett have fine singing voices and as a couple they are remarkably well-matched. (Their relationship is worth paying attention to; the middle-aged Mrs. Lovett has lascivious, even matrimonial, designs on Todd, but he has nothing on his mind but revenge.) We liked the singing of Daniel Bogart, who plays Todd’s friend Anthony Hope, and we especially enjoyed Roland Rusinek as the judge’s brutal strongman, Beadle Bamford.

Marissa McGowan: her lyrics were sadly unintelligible

We were disappointed only in Marissa McGowan as Todd’s daughter Johanna, whose diction was so poor that we simply couldn’t make out any of the lyrics of “Greenfinch and Linnet Bird.” We were sorry, incidentally, not to see any local actors in the cast.

We attended the last performance of Sweeney Todd before its official “opening,” and it wasn’t a good night for the sound crew. As the show opened with “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd,” the very first singer’s microphone wasn’t on (we heard him just fine anyway).  The amplified voice of the second singer came as something of a jar.

Having decided to mike the lead actors, the sound designer evidently felt he needed to mike everyone in the chorus as well — another eight or ten voices. This went badly. The vocal mix was much too loud and resulted in distortion, so we didn’t understand a lot of the lyrics sung by the ensemble. Unfortunately, the orchestra (especially the electronic keyboard) was also over-amplified at various points during the show.

But why amplify the voices at all? GeVa Theatre (550 seats) just isn’t that large. None of these talented performers would have had difficulty projecting their solo singing voices throughout the hall, and amplifying the ensemble was not only unnecessary, but deleterious to the sonic effect. We were against it.

Pride and Prejudice at Rochester’s Geva Theatre (a review)

Emsworth has no prejudices to speak of. Yet when I hear that someone has tried to adapt one of my favorite works of literature for stage or screen, I expect a failure or an abomination, and I’m usually right.

Of course there are exceptions. I think of Booth Tarkington’s Alice Adams (1936 movie starring Katharine Hepburn), Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men (1949 movie starring Broderick Crawford), Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables (1980 musical play), and (surprisingly) The Lord of the Rings (2001, 2002, and 2003 movies starring Ian McKellen).

But the list of failures is much longer. Notorious among these are Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1974 movie starring Robert Redford); Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990 movie starring Tom Hanks); and Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1997 Broadway musical; it was our misfortune to attend a performance with the unspeakably awful Sebastian Bach in the title role).

So when I saw that Geva Theatre (Rochester, New York) was planning to adapt Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice for the last show of its 2007-08 season, my expectations were low. I know and love the novel, and I didn’t feel any need to see it enacted — or worse yet, “reinterpreted” and mangled — on stage. Fortunately, the Geva show was a pleasant surprise.

Marge Betley (Geva’s resident dramaturg) and Mark Cuddy (Geva’s Artistic Director and director of this show) adapted the novel themselves, and they stuck fairly closely to Jane Austen’s story. They added no new characters or new scenes, and they used as much of Austen’s language they could. Prudently, they decided not to use a narrator.

These were smart choices, but the result was not compelling theater. For one thing, there were simply too many characters; familiar as I am with Pride and Prejudice, I still had trouble keeping track of some of them.

But all the Geva audience really wanted was to see their favorite Austen characters come to life on the stage. They were not disappointed, especially in Elizabeth Bennet, played by Meghan Wolf, a fetching brunette who gave us all the vivacity, wit, and intelligence that one could want in Austen’s heroine.

For the romantically inclined, Ms. Wolf and David Christopher Wells, who played Mr. Darcy, made a striking couple. And as director, Mr. Cuddy made sure that his audience would believe not only in Elizabeth’s improbable attraction to the ill-mannered Mr. Darcy, but also in her relationships with her sister Jane (Alyssa Rae), her best friend Charlotte Lucas (Vanessa LaFortune), and, most of all, her father. As played by Guy Paul, Mr. Bennet was a gratifyingly complex character.

Most of the actors did seem to appreciate that they were there for the purpose of entertaining us. Randy Rollison played the pompous, self-absorbed Mr. Collins to full comic effect, and Melanie Little was an audience favorite as the bookish, sanctimonious Mary Bennet.

But some cast members seemed merely to be reciting passages from the novel — most egregiously, Vanessa LaFortune as Charlotte Lucas. Moreover, to my mind, Carole Monferdini as Lady Catherine de Bourgh did not even come close to capturing the essence of Austen’s dragon lady, and her odd costume suggested one of the witches from The Wizard of Oz. Unfortunately, we were not able to understand the first lines of the play, shrilly delivered by Mrs. Bennet (Peggy Cosgrove) in an accent that continued to challenge us throughout the play.

Women have no monopoly on Jane Austen, but if this had been a movie, it would have been a chick flick. The women at Geva loved Mr. Darcy’s bungling courtship of Elizabeth Bennet. But some men were less appreciative. In the men’s room at intermission (which followed immediately after Elizabeth’s rejection of Mr. Darcy’s proposal), one man was heard commenting to a friend, “She owes me big time for this.” His friend agreed: “I’m not saying I’m holding the gun to my mouth, but close.”

Incidentally, if one must adapt someone else’s novel, it seems to me that one is better off starting with a piece of literature that is merely second-rate, rather than a masterpiece like Pride and Prejudice. It worked with Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind (1939 movie starring Vivian Leigh and Clark Gable), Edna Ferber’s Showboat (1927 musical), Stephen King’s The Shining (1980 movie also starring Nicholson), and Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men (2007 movie starring Tommy Lee Jones).