2008-02 Vital Source Mag – February 2008
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Even without Shakespeare’s lyrical poetry, the Milwaukee Ballet’s presentation of A Midsummer’s Night Dream is, quite literally, enchanting. Set to Mendelssohn’s melodious score amid a lush canopy of forest on stage, this full-length ballet conveys the light-hearted qualities of Shakespeare’s rhymes through classical dances and visual spectacle. The host for the magical night is a delightfully mischievous Puck (Mark Pertrocci), who presides over the performance with skill and his quick, sure steps. A complement of young stars from the Milwaukee Ballet’s School Dance Program bring tiny spirits and sprites to life, floating across the stage waving fluttering silk butterflies. Midsummer marks the Ballet’s return to the complicated techniques of the classical tradition as choreographed by Bruce Wells, who studied under the great George Balanchine. His expertise was evident in pirouettes with grande battements, elongated arabesques, and several series of grand jetes incorporated into the story’s dance. Live music is provided by Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra members, including the vocal solos of Anne Ingram and Diane Bennett from the Milwaukee Children’s Choir. As the curtain comes down for the close of the first act, they sing a mesmerizing “So, goodnight” as the Fairy Queen Titania slumbers. But the Milwaukee Ballet’s ethereal second act, when Titania (Tatiana Jourvel) and Oberon (Ryan Martin) reunite in an exquisite pas de deux, is the crowning touch. As this royal duo fades into the final scenes and the two mortal couples finally marry in a celebratory dance sequence, the measures of “The Wedding March” serenade this breathtaking reprise of the complete Ballet Company. The silvery white tutu’s, veils of chiffon and satin costumes spinning through pinks, lavenders and sunlight golds is truly a dream en pointe. As fireflies fall through a dimmed backdrop on stage, Puck hushes the gorgeous evening of ballet poetry to a softly illuminated end. Shakespeare’s fairy-tale forest of love has become one of the most exceptional performances in the company’s entire repertoire. This weekend of evening enchantment holds great promise for the Ballet’s remaining season. VS The Milwaukee Ballet has two remaining performances this season, in April at the Pabst, and at the end of May. For information and tickets: 414.902.2103 or 877.643.7677, or visit the Ballet online.
Feb 26th, 2008 by Peggy Sue Dunigan
The Cemetery Club
One is never too old to fall in love – even after the age of fifty. The Sunset Playhouse presentation of The Cemetery Club reiterates this premise as three widows, Ida, Doris, and Lucille, visit the cemetery each month to talk to and remember their deceased husbands. But two of the women feel the need to move past their spouse’s headstones to a new life. As Lucille puts it, “I want to resign. I don’t like belonging to a club where half the members are dead.” Ivan Menchell’s play – adapted for the 1993 movie of the same name – deals with the heartache and pain of losing love, along with the change and fear of starting again. Lucille’s less-than-ideal marriage shows her acute desire to begin anew and seek the love she missed through years of married life, while friends Doris and Ida mourn the end of their happy marriages. They meet widower Sam, who visits his wife’s gravesite at the cemetery, and the comedy continues as each person’s loneliness leads to rediscovering dating, romance and how they view life moving forward. The play was written with some very funny lines and scenes in a Jewish New York flavor, yet there is a missing spontaneity, and the setting appears somewhat dated. With the onset of internet matchmaking for divorced and widowed baby boomers, these three ‘girls’ appear far removed and out-of-touch with today’s 50-somethings moving on with their lives in the Big Apple, especially after the reality of 9/11. Lucille is the flirty centerpiece to the club, and actress Susan Loveridge plays it broadly.Sally Marks, as Ida, is matched to James Jonas, as Sam, but the sparks sputter instead of fly. The devoted wife is Francis Klumb as Doris, “who lives with her head in the ground, still talking to the gravestone,” constantly fighting anything new while living in her memories, upset that the club is changing when Ida and Sam start a relationship. Several poignant moments carry through the laughter, and the play has many appealing qualities, including the deft way it deals with the daily aspects of experiencing loss. A surprise event near the end emphasizes the importance of living every day and telling those significant people in life that they are loved and make a difference. But the path to love after loss, regardless of age, is filled with more magic and meaning in these contemporary confusing times than is packaged in the dialogue of this play. This entertaining and humorous evening is billed as romantic comedy, and does deliver the comedy, as the opening night audience thoroughly enjoyed the production. There could be the promise of more meaningful relationships and romantic fire in this Sunset Playhouse production, yet The Cemetery Club communicates with hope that love does indeed last even after loss, and there remains no age or time limit to finding love again. VS The Sunset Playhouse, 800 Elm Grove Road, Elm Grove, continues with the presentation of The Cemetery Club though March 15. […]
Feb 26th, 2008 by Peggy Sue Dunigan
Butterflies are Free
Love and romance are classical theatrical themes, but few productions in the greater Milwaukee area this season have trained their focus on a single, simple love story. Now through March 9, Spiral Theatre welcomes romance back to center stage with Leonard Gershe’s Butterflies are Free. The story of a young musician falling for an aspiring actress debuted on Broadway in 1969 and three years later was adapted for a film starring Goldie Hawn and Edward Albert. Clues in the dialogue pin the story squarely in New York at the end of the ‘60s, but Director Mark Hooker’s choices ensure that the period doesn’t overpower the story. Don Baker (Ryan Dance) is a blind man who has just moved out of his mother’s house and into a tiny New York apartment, much against his mother’s wishes. Mrs. Baker (Sandra Stark) is determined to get him to move back in with her, but Don longs for independence – and he’s just met Jill Tanner (Ruth Arnell), the beautiful girl next door whom he seems to be falling in love with. Don and Jill’s fragile new relationship is put to the test as Mrs. Baker stops by for a surprise visit, questioning Jill’s stability and Don’s ability to remain independent. The first half of the play lets us see Don and Jill begin to make a connection over the course of a conversation. The outside stresses come along after intermission, where things become much more complicated as more is revealed about Don and Jill. The second half doesn’t come off nearly as flawlessly, but Dance and Arnell are so good together that it hardly matters. Ryan Dance is excellent as he plays the subtleties of blindness without exaggerating them. Don’s dialogue has a cleverly sarcastic bite that Dance’s soft-spoken delivery pleasantly offsets. Arnell, recently featured in relatively flimsy roles (“The Girl” in Sunset Playhouse’s The Seven Year Itch and similar roles in a couple of different bedroom farces), is overwhelmingly magnetic and captures her role with depth. She conveys Jill’s idiosyncrasies with a casual, lived-in charm that never feels forced. Her performance is so believable that it’s actually kind of exhilarating to watch her character fall in love. There’s a familiar sense of excitement about that particular conversation that brings two strangers together, and this pair brings that excitement to the stage with vivid precision. The idiosyncrasies of Spiral Theatre’s space on West National Avenue contribute to the atmosphere of a New York City studio apartment. The characters frequently refer to the sounds bouncing through the paper-thin walls of the apartment, while in real-time, the sound of traffic from outside the theatre reverberates into the space. Not long into any evening performance of the show, the sound of mariachi music can be heard from a nearby restaurant. Spiral moves to Bucketworks for its next show, and it will mark the third venue of Spiral’s season — quite a hat trick for such a small theatre company. VS Spiral Theatre’s Production of Butterflies Are […]
Feb 25th, 2008 by Russ Bickerstaff
Catholic School Girls
By Charise Dawson Despite what you may think, Catholic School Girls is not a dark drama of how Catholic schoolgirls are horribly mistreated by nuns or a sexy story of parochial schoolgirls gone wild – for the most part. Four girls in plaid skirts and matching white blouses girls do fantasize about “doing it,” and sometimes the nuns push them around, but this humorous and tender play by Casey Kurtti is mostly about the obstacles and achievements of female classmates and friends at St. George’s Catholic grade school in Yonkers, NY. The Milwaukee premiere runs at the Boulevard Ensemble Studio Theatre in Bay View through March 16. The play offers a snapshot of 1960s history, moving from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy to “One small step for man …” The popular music of the time that plays during scenic transitions — “It’s a Beautiful Morning,” “Stop in the Name of Love” – is one of the most enjoyable artistic selections of the production. Boulevard Ensemble Studio Theatre’s founder and Artistic Director Mark Bucher directs this play, and he is in his element here. He has four characters that, on casual inspection of the script, do not seem particularly distinct: they are all the same age and gender and speak in the same generically youthful cadences. Digging into the text for subtleties and exercising faith that his actresses will pull it off, he gives each schoolgirl her unique feel and personality. The four schoolgirls of the title are well cast and charismatically performed, particularly Anne Miller in the role of Elizabeth McHugh, who undergoes the harshest spiritual crisis. The girls have a convincing chemistry as an ensemble while each actress pops at the appropriate moments with her own personal quirks and compulsions. The girls are the stars, but they are supported ably by the nuns. Stuck with the largely thankless job of saying hurtful things and potentially offending certain audience members, they make the most of their roles, ultimately delivering some of the production’s biggest laugh-lines. Good acting, skilled direction and the author’s sense of wit make for a laugh-filled evening, the only downside being an over-extended and overly sentimental ending. Catholic School Girls will run through Sunday, March 16th, 2008 at 2252 S. Kinnickinnic Ave. To reserve seating, call 414-744-5757 or visit the Boulevard Ensemble Studio Theatre online.
Feb 25th, 2008 by Vital Archives
The Lion King
Inspired by Osamu Tezuka’s Kimba the White Lion, Disney’s 1994 animated feature The Lion King was a huge success at box offices nationwide. In 1997, it debuted with ridiculous success as a Broadway musical thanks to the songwriting talents of Elton John and Tim Rice, who also scored the film. The show prowls through the Milwaukee Theatre this month in a nearly sold-out series of performances. The Lion King is engineered for families, but the musical, though based on a 90-minute animated feature, is 2 hours and 45 minutes long, an expansion so drastic that the kids who would get the most out of the show couldn’t possibly sit through the whole thing. Take a cue from our own First Stage Children’s Theatre, one of the biggest professional children’s theatre companies in the country: you can do amazing thing with a 90-minute stage musical for families. But people would probably be less inclined to pay for an extravagantly priced show if it was only as long as a feature film, and regardless, stretching out the story gives it some artistic clout. The extra 75 minutes make for the best parts of the show. The exotic traditional African folk music and dance added to the stage musical may feel out of place next to highly-produced, glossy Eton John/Tim Rice music, but they impart a new life to the story. Gugwana Dlamini, in the role of the monkey Rafiki, gives this show’s single most impressive performance. She sings around the borders of the musical’s glossiness, giving the production a beautifully jagged edge. Dlamini’s African vocals call to something very primal that is rarely heard by an audience this big. The South African vocalist’s hypnotic song elevates the musical beyond its heavily commercial identity. The production design is predictable given the size and expense of the production – a fairly crude distillation of traditional African folk art. An impressive collection of animal puppets and costumes captures some of the feel of the wild, but completing the illusion requires a great deal of imagination on the part of the audience. The perfect seats for this visual feast are somewhere in the middle of the ground floor. Get too close to the stage and it’ll look kind of ridiculous. Get too far away and it just looks like a bunch of people in a well-choreographed musical wearing strange apparatuses. But wherever you sit, and no matter how many fidgety kids are surrounding you, somewhere in the distance you can hear Dlamini’s voice resonate the same sort of primal sound that might have inspired Osamu Tezuka to sketch his first lion. VS Broadway Across America’s production of The Lion King runs through March 2 at the Milwaukee Theatre. Tickets can be purchased in advance by calling the box office at 414-273-7206 or online.
Feb 20th, 2008 by Russ Bickerstaff
Enchanted April
There’s something transcendental about Getting Away From It All. Given the right opportunity, people shed their accepted identities, move toward something less constructed and take a closer walk with their ideals. At the turn-of-the-century, Elizabeth Von Arnim’s novel Enchanted April explored the transformative nature of a vacation, a theme which becomes the single most enduring element in the stage adaptation by first-time playwright Matthew Barber. With a well-poised cast that captures a diversity of personalities, the Milwaukee Rep’s production of Enchanted April has endearingly vivid charm. In the years following World War One, Lotty Wilton (Linsey Page Morton), the housewife of a British solicitor, runs across an advertisement for a vacation at an expansive, romantic estate in Italy. Lotty, a timid dreamer longing for something more than a life of servitude to her husband, seizes the opportunity to break out of her daily life. Since the vacation would be too expensive for Lotty to afford by herself, she approaches someone she’s never formally met – Rose Arnott (Laura Gornott) – and asks if she might like to go with her and split the costs. Rose, stuck in a distant marriage to novelist Frederick Arnott (Torrey Hanson), accepts. Making her Rep debut, Chicago-based actress Linsey Page Morton brings a charming, exuberant radiance to the stage. In the role of her husband, Brian Vaughn serves as a vaguely comic counterpoint to Lotty’s cheerfulness. Vaughn strikes a clever balance, playing his character somewhere between youth and middle age, halfway between conservative businessman and excitable schoolboy. The subtlety of Laura Gordon’s comic talent really shines in her role, but once the story moves to Italy in the second act, Gordon renders delicate, genuine emotion. This is Gordon in top form in a role that isn’t really written to break out beyond the ensemble. Deborah Staples and Rose Pickering nestle perfectly into their characters as the two other women approached by Rose and Lotty to join them and further diffuse costs. Staples is perfectly poised as wealthy young socialite Caroline Bramble, who goes to Italy to get away from the stress of English high society. Rose Pickering plays Mrs. Graves, a conservative British matron with hilarious steeliness. At the beginning of the second act, Gordon and Morton draw back the curtains to transform the darkness of London to the radiance of Italy. Amidst a beautiful, empty set (by Bill Clarke) Deborah Staples gracefully lounges, reading a book. There’s real comedy in the reveal – she seems so perfectly at home in the beauty of Italy that it’s as if the entire estate was built around the image of her there, reclining and reading, at home with her purer self. VS The Milwaukee Rep’s production of Enchanted April runs through March 9th at the Stiemke Theater. Please note that Vaughn’s performance features something rarely seen onstage: brief, full-frontal nudity. Tickets can be purchased in advance by calling the box office at 414-224-9490 or online.
Feb 18th, 2008 by Russ Bickerstaff
Crime and Punishment
It’s dry. The forced perspective is harsh. Dust and plaster are piled around a dark, drab space. And there’s a man lying there in dreary, heavily worn garments. Look closely and you’ll see he’s breathing. Most people don’t seem to notice until they sit down. The lights fall into complete darkness. They rise. There are two men there. One of them faces the audience. The way he’s sitting looks very uncomfortable, but not in any earthly way. He should be uncomfortable — he’s Raskolnikov, tragic protagonist of Dostoyevsky’s shadowy, voluminous novel, played by Mic Matarrese. He’s just killed two people. Everyone in the Broadway Theatre Center’s Studio Theatre seems to know this but him. This is no mystery. He’s aware of what he’s done – he just doesn’t know what to do about it. There’s a voice. It asks Raskolnikov if he believes in the story of Lazarus: resurrection. The voice is that of Drew Brhel playing Profiry — a man investigating a pair of murders. His back is to the audience, but we get to see a great deal of him in this play: he makes up a third of the cast. The third cast member plays multiple roles. Her name is Leah Dutchin. She plays both of Raskolnikov’s victims and one of the main reasons for the murders. Dutchin brings a memorable female strength to the play. The drama runs its course as we see the layers of the murderer’s psyche gradually pulled back to reveal the complexity of his actions. Invariably, some of the complexity of the novel has been eliminated in the adaptation, but with only three central characters in the play, we get an interesting dissection of the act of murder. In a brief conversation, Director Patrick Holland compares TV’s Law & Order and the Christopher Nolan film Memento to Crime and Punishment, and while there are definite echoes of modern popular crime drama in this Milwaukee Chamber production, something infinitely classier is going on here. The knowing questioning of Drew Brhel, paired with expert lighting and the sound design, evokes Alfred Hitchcock. The concept of murder infuses every single line of the play, but it’s rarely spoken about directly. When it is – especially in Brhel’s galvanizing voice – we see more shades of Hitchcockian drama. The wicked forced perspective of Pitts’ clever set is pushed and stretched in so many places. Leah Dutchin appears in doors that once were walls. The doors are everywhere, constantly opening to remind Raskolnikov of something he desperately wants to forget. There’s an ebb and flow to the action. Moments of fragile peace are shattered every time the wall opens to reveal another door. Things don’t truly settle down until the end. The last door opens and a piercing light cuts through it all. Maybe it never seemed important until that final moment, but this is a physically dark play as well. We see things moving around in dust and shadow for the entire 90 minutes without intermission. […]
Feb 18th, 2008 by Russ Bickerstaff
Three Days of Rain
By Charise Dawson Windfall Theatre’s Three Days of Rain, the Pulitzer-Prize nominated drama, opened on Friday, February 15. The small three-person drama plays in the intimate space of Village Church Arts through March 1. The play opens with Walker (Jeremy Welter), a wandering thirty-something, crashing in the unoccupied Manhattan apartment of his late father, a famous architect. Walker talks erratically about his nearly mute and always aloof father and his crazy, out-of-touch mother. When we meet his sister Nan (Angela Beyer), it is easy to see that Walker shares many of his neurotic mother’s traits. The siblings meet to divide their father’s inheritance. Joining them is Pip (Robert W. C. Kennedy), whose late father was the architect’s design partner. When the lawyers determine that Pip is to be left with the landmark residence designed by the architects, the drama heightens and the three form theories about their parents’ lives, behaviors and choices. Walker becomes fascinated by his father’s diary, which described years at a time with emotionless, fragmented entries. The siblings brush off the first short entry, “Three days of rain,” as a weather report. The second act of the play reveals much more about those three rainy days. In Act Two, Ned, Lina and Theo appear in the same Manhattan loft, but 35 years earlier. Theo (Kennedy) is a charming and promising architect. Lina (Beyer) is a Southern-belle transplanted to the city. Ned (Welter) is an unsure and stuttering architect. All three characters are full of hope and life, but things change during three days of rain that change the paths of their lives — and the lives of the children they will someday have — forever. All three actors fill the space nicely with movement and voice in this ensemble piece.Nan and Walker (Beyer and Welter) weave together the story of a terrible night during their childhoods gracefully and brightly. Walter captures Ned fully in Act Two, using his eyes to say what his stuttering character cannot. Robert W. C. Kennedy plays both Pip and Theo with charm and flair. His characters have a knack for storytelling, and Kennedy executes the part seamlessly. Lighting designer Larry Birkett creates a simple arrangement that illuminates the stage and actors. Props and scenery are designed to suggest the same apartment in two periods: an unoccupied loft in 1995 and a tenanted loft in 1960. Both arrangements feel too pleasant for the mood that was created by the script and actors. In the second act, Lina describes Ned’s dwelling as a “dilapidated apartment,” yet the physical environment was neat and tidy. Overall, Windfall Theatre’s mission is to search for answers and provoke questions about the world we live in, an aim that Three Days of Rain appropriately meets. The play’s exploration of how the decisions of parents shape the destiny of their children charges the audience to decipher what influences each character and answer the question, “How well can one person fully know another person?” Richard Greensberg’s Three Days of Rain, presented […]
Feb 18th, 2008 by Vital Archives
The ultimate trip
Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do. I’m half crazy, all for the love of you. (from “A Bicycle Built for Two”) Recently I watched Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) for the umpteenth time, and it’s as fascinating as it was 40 years ago — perhaps more so after the 2001 unveiling of the Calatrava addition at the Milwaukee Art Museum. It’s remarkable how the architect echoes the film’s images of whiteness, light, spiraling forms, tunnel-like views and vaulted spaces punctuating long narrow halls. Kubrick’s icon arrived in the age of space exploration when the young Spanish architect was seventeen and likely exploring his own version of space. On a cloudless day when the sun floods Windhover Hall, it creates a field of blinding white, but from the first day I stepped into the area, it seemed oddly familiar. I was drifting through the film. All of this pondering about an exceptional filmmaker and equally exceptional architect made me wonder if Sensory Overload (now – October 2009) would be better if installed in the addition’s marbled halls rather than in the severe contemporary galleries in the “old section.” Perhaps, though, all the light, motion, sound and optics would battle with the Calatrava; maybe overloaded art is best sensed where there are no additional distractions. As I write at my EV730 computer, the words of HAL, a 9000 computer, bother my head the way that Stanley Landsman’s “The Magic Theatre (Walk-in Infinity Chamber)” haunted me after I sat in it in 1968 when it was first exhibited at MAM. In 1967, Stephan Antonakos shaped “White Hanging Neon,” and a decade earlier, as the United States entered the space age, Josef Albers painted “Study – Homage to the Square (Lighted from Within).” It speaks of alienation, the expansion of time, and certainly the orange-brown square centering the painting (the source of “light”) suggests something beyond the sun as it must have seemed in the era when prehistoric man both wondered about sunrise and feared the dark. Fast forward to the evolution of the tool (where would artists be without it?) and future trips into space where gravity demands Homo sapiens must learn to walk again. I re-visited Sensory Overload on a marrow-freezing February 10, passing by “Alfred Leslie” (1970), a portrait of the artist looking like Neanderthal Man. He was holding a hammer. In order to thoroughly explore Sensory Overload, visitors may need to learn to walk again, if only to view “Sir-Ris, 1957” by op artist Victor Vasarely. Two globes, suspended in time (one black, one white) defy gravity and confuse the eye. Are we being tricked by the artist, sucked into a void that defies reason? Is man the “tool” rather than the force controlling the tool? Kubrick’s film emphasizes this dilemma, as do many great works of art incorporating a push-pull of tension, but where do we fit in a global culture that’s going to need more than a screwdriver to set it right? Open the pod […]
Feb 15th, 2008 by Stella Cretek
Facing modern truths
* The art form of the modern age is photography. In the same way various schools of painting defined ages previous, the modern age is defined by the camera, and using the camera as an art form came of age during the period between the two World Wars. Foto, now at the Milwaukee Art Museum (February 9 – May 4), explores this time period in photography and photojournalism in Central Europe. It’s a sweeping show that covers almost 30 years of photography as it became a popular and accessible form of expression. All manner of subjects are represented: from photo collage to portraiture, landscape to action photography. There are abstract pieces and images that look like they could have been torn from the pages National Geographic. The work is arranged thematically, and roughly chronologically, which gives the impression that the movements which took decades to take hold in the world of paint and canvas swept through photography like a wildfire. What is most striking about the photographs included in Foto is how contemporary they feel when you stand in front of them. This show celebrates the onset of modernity, yes, but that was 60, 70, even 80 years ago from today’s perspective. You’d never know to look at the offerings on display. Photo collages assembled by cutting and pasting, tricks of exposure and development, look as if they could have been created in Photoshop. They evoke the same notion of the absurd and the surreal and create the same sorts of statements that we make digitally today – and they are just as easy to decode, if you know the language. Sometimes the code is so personal to the artist that you can only guess, or create your own language to read the message imprinted on the paper with light and chemicals. Photographers in this period played with the same social statements that photographers today attempt to make. They created the idea of the “modern woman,” strong and capable and pretty to boot, at a time when women’s liberation was still a whisper of a dream. They photographed the downtrodden and made a political call; they photographed the detritus of urban life and turned it into art. They romanticized the past in scenes of pastoral life, strangely interrupted by the onset of modernity: barefoot peasants building a railway, set against sweeping landscapes. Perhaps it is hubris that makes us think we are reaching new horizons in the art of photography with all of our fancy gadgets; perhaps it is only ignorance. Either way, standing in the Milwaukee Art Museum and looking at these faces and places and dreamscapes from the past, one comes face to face with the fact we are not, in truth, the great innovators of the photographic age. We are merely doing what’s been done by those that came first. VS Foto runs at the Milwaukee Art Museum through May 4, 2008. For gallery hours, admission prices and a complete list of supplemental programs in connection with […]
Feb 15th, 2008 by Ryan Findley
Saturday & Sunday
It’s Saturday, February 2 – Groundhog Day – and I’m at the Milwaukee Art Museum to cruise the newly configured contemporary galleries, where MAM’s Chief Curator Joe Ketner has shaped a fresh path to “seeing.” The elevator carries me upward from the heated garage (what a waste of energy!) to Windhover Hall, where preparations are underway for a late afternoon wedding. Visiting groups gather in clusters around the pretentious Dale Chihuly glass sculpture. The Calatrava addition speaks for itself and doesn’t need doo-dads, but go ahead, smile for the camera. Art Lives Here. I’m looking for Cy Twombly’s “Untitled,” missing from its regular spot on the east wall of the Flagg Gallery with another “Untitled,” a 2007 oil and acrylic painting by Jose Lerma, in its place. My first thought is, “these whirls of pastel blobs belong on a cupcake.” I hope Lerma moved on to become a pastry chef. Prior to receiving a 2001 MFA in Painting from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he studied law. The security guards chat about their personal choices and offer some tidbits. One chap admires Lichtenstein’s “Imperfect Diptych, 1983,” a 2007 gift from Rockwell Automation, and another tells me that the large Philip Pearlstein paintings (from 1966 and 1969) have switched places in the Marcus Gallery. The girl in the chair currently sits on the left; her nude friend reclines on the right. And the Twombly? Perhaps on loan to a distant place, maybe with Robert Gober’s “Untitled,” a bottomless suitcase set above a tableau under the floor. Or are the two consigned to a storage area in the bowels of MAM? The Selig Gallery now has four works by Andy Warhol on loan from the collection of Mark and Debbie Attanasio, owners of the Milwaukee Brewers. They’re mediocre examples, like underdone leftovers – a body builder, several hamburgers, and a black and white “Campbell’s Soup (Tomato, 1985)” – although they do serve as links to the artist’s fascination with the world of advertising. Two far more accomplished Warhol Soup Can paintings from the Museum’s permanent collection score. If your favorite in this gallery is Jasper Johns 1984 “Untitled,” fear not; it still reigns supreme. I return to MAM on Super Bowl Sunday yearning for the Twombly. I enter section 16, which announces “The Transition of Modern Art,” a particular interest of Joe Ketner, who used to have one of the three Manierre Dawson (1887-1969) paintings in his office, along with a great Fernand Leger. In an earlier interview he told me that having them near helped him consider the transition problem, which is not the transition to contemporary art, or even post-modern art, but, as Ketner explained in an email, the emergence of European modernism in the United States. He adds that the capital of the art world at the time was not New York but Paris, and that it was the International Exhibition of Modern Art (the Armory Show), held in New York in 1913, that brought European modernism to the nation’s […]
Feb 11th, 2008 by Stella Cretek
Faith Healer
A scene from Friel’s play Faith Healer, as perfomed by Next Act Theatre. Irish playwright Brian Friel casts a piercing glance into the heart of truth and belief in his three-part drama Faith Healer. Three characters played by three remarkably talented actors speak four conflicting monologues in a thoroughly satisfying script. Next Act Theatre stages this fascinating drama on the intimate stage of the Off-Broadway Theatre through the end of the month. Jonathan Smoots opens the play speaking arcane names of ancient villages buried in the antiquity of the British Isles, creating an air of fantasy. Smoots plays Frank, the title character — a man somewhat uneasily saddled with his profession. Smoots, until now largely relegated to supporting roles, here has presence and a great deal of flair at center stage. The charismatic actor embraces the stage lights with a deep, friendly Irish accent. He tells of his shaky journey from village to village — speaking of his mistress and his agent with sunny tones shaded by a clever uncertainty of his own capabilities. He’s right there in front of us, but even as he speaks simple words as clear as day, there’s an air of mystery about him. Smoots’ deft performance includes a spot-on Irish brogue that shifts to perfect Cockney when the character does an impression of his agent. Smoots shows a casually impressive flair for moving between accents without slowing down, dropping a line or fading out of character. The fact that any classically trained actor with two decades of local stage experience should be able to do this doesn’t make it any less impressive. The second character to take the stage is the faith healer’s mistress Grace. Mary MacDonald Kerr strikes a sharp figure in the role of the educated solicitor who somehow fell in with a man who took her away from a respectable middle-class life. Kerr shows a shrewd strength that is a lot of fun to watch. More than simply contradicting some of the details of Grace’s life with Frank, Kerr renders a completely new dimension to the character that builds on what the first monologue explored. She draws attention to Grace with an understated integrity, working out her story with every word she speaks. The final character to take the stage is Frank’s agent Teddy. Next Act Producing Artistic Director David Cecsarini plays the witty Cockney gentleman who handles Frank’s business affairs as a friend and promoter. He speaks about his experiences with Frank peppered with tales of other acts he’s managed. It’s the more heavily comic end of the play and Cecsarini handles it expertly. His third perspective adds respectable depth to the rest of what’s been said onstage, setting it for one last encounter with Frank. Smoots’ final moments on stage end in a beautiful silhouette brilliantly painted by Lighting Designer Jason Fassl. The lights fade. The applause sounds out. Faith Healer‘s themes reverberate through the evening. VS Next Act’s production of Faith Healer runs now through March 2 at […]
Feb 7th, 2008 by Russ Bickerstaff
