Divas and Decapitation

[March 12th, 2008]

Landscape of the Body (Profile Theatre)

I don’t think John Guare reads his own plays. His rambling, name-dropping dramas are funny and ambitious and grapple with really interesting subject matter, but they don’t tend to make a whole lot of sense. A Few Stout Individuals, the previous installment in Profile Theatre’s survey of Guare’s career, was an inscrutable mess. While this play, inspired by the story of Alice Crimmins, the cocktail waitress from Queens who was convicted in 1968 of murdering her two children, isn’t nearly that bad, it’s far from coherent.

In Guare’s version of events, Alice is Betty (Kelly Marchant), a pleasant single mother from Maine who comes to New York with her 14-year-old son, Bert (Derek Herman), to ask her no-good sister Rosalie (Jami Chatalas Blanchard) to come home. When Rosalie is killed by a careless cyclist (a truly hilarious cameo by a spandex-clad Danny Bruno), Betty takes over her apartment and her job at a fraudulent travel agency, and lives happily for a while—until her son is found floating headless in the Hudson River.

It’s a grisly premise, and Guare treats it with his usual mix of flippant whimsy and grim misanthropy: Betty’s boss is a fast-talking Cuban (played with an unwelcome taste of Borat by Jason Maniccia) who wears an evening gown over his suit because that’s how he assumed all Americans dressed when he was a child; Bert makes a hobby of luring johns up to his mother’s apartment so his friend Donny (A.J. LeSarge) can brain them with a monkey wrench. The schizophrenic tone works in Six Degrees of Separation, but here it feels like overkill.

But here’s the real problem: We are told that Betty sleeps around, that she’s made a career in porn, that she is, all told, quite the wild thing. But never once do her words or actions reveal that side of her personality. As far as the audience can tell, Betty’s nice and humble as can be. It would be easy to blame the confusion on Marchant’s portrayal. It would also be incorrect—Marchant does fine, but the words just aren’t there.

Although Jane Ungar’s production has some good performances, especially from Herman and LeSarge, sorting out Guare’s conflicting ideas of just what the hell is going on is a tiresome exercise, and the play starts to drag well before intermission. The only real moments of interest here are peripheral: Bruno’s campy bit parts, Maniccia’s hard-sell telemarketing and Rosalie’s ghostly torch-songs, beautifully scored by Rodolfo Ortega.

Dreamgirls (Stumptown Stages)

It’s surprising, given the general mediocrity of musical theater in this town, that anyone would try to mount a local production of this show hot on the heels of the 2006 film. I am thrilled that Kirk Mouser was crazy enough to try, and ecstatic that he’s succeeded.

In case you’ve been living in a cave for the past two years, Dreamgirls is a 1981 musical by Henry Krieger and Tom Eyen that’s loosely based on the story of Diana Ross and the Supremes. It’s a big, difficult show. Here it has a cast of 20. Enough said.

I’ve been harshly critical of Mouser’s work at Stumptown Stages over the past two years, so I hope you understand that I am entirely serious when I say Julianne Johnson-Weiss’ delivery of “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” is the most affecting musical performance of the season, period. She sings with enough emotional force to bring even the most reptilian critic to tears. The woman has the kind of voice that fills stadiums, and it’s actually a little frightening to sit just 10 feet away while she brings down the house without breaking a sweat.

Johnson-Weiss is in good company here: Joann Coleman gives a manic, aggressive performance as Deena, and towering Eugene Blackmon (Jimmy Early), sporting a James Brown wig and a succession of silly suits, pulls comic-relief duty while showing off his remarkable stylistic range.

Are there problems? Oh, hell yeah. The chintzy set places the six-part band at center, but squeezes most of the non-nightclub action into a four-foot alleyway at the front of the stage. Acting is passable at best and wooden at worst—besides Blackmon and Johnson-Weiss, none of the cast seem comfortable in their parts once the music stops. But who cares? With singing this good, everything else is parsley.