SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION • Stray Dog Theatre

Stray Dog Theatre really seems to be on a roll.  In the past couple of seasons, they've handsomely produced everything from Psycho Beach Party to The Who's Tommy to Spring Awakening and the epic Angels in America.  In celebration of Stray Dog's 10th anniversary season, they're going back to their roots, producing the first play the company presented, John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation.  This 1990 Pulitzer Prize nominated play was inspired by a true story and popularized by the 1993 film bearing the same name.  The six degrees of separation theory asserts that everyone is connected to everyone else on the planet by a succession of six or fewer people.  This play is less about the theory though, and more about how you manage the realities within your own circle.

We begin in the posh Fifth Avenue apartment of art dealer Flanders and his wife Ouisa Kittredge (Gerry Love and Sarajane Alverson).  They’re snooty high society types but are always trying to angle their way up to higher rungs on the social ladder.  They're preparing to entertain their wealthy friend Geoffrey (Robert Ashton) in hopes of talking him into parting with $2 million for a Cezanne painting.  The schmoozing is interrupted when a young black guy named Paul (Greg Fenner) is let in by the doorman.  Paul is bleeding from a knife wound he got during an attempted mugging and claims to have ended up at their home because he attends Harvard with the Kittredges' children.

THE CHERRY SISTERS REVISITED • R-S Theatrics

R-S begins its season with Dan O’Brien's The Cherry Sisters Revisited.  The play, inspired by the real-life Cherry Sisters, was part of the 34th Humana Festival of New American Plays in 2010.  These five Iowa farm girls formed a vaudeville act in the 1890's and eventually became renown.  For being completely talentless.  Once the Cherry sisters took their show on the road, it gained a reputation for being an absolute train wreck.  This propelled the sisters, schadenfreude style, to the Olympia Theatre on Broadway where they were greeted with jeers, catcalls and "truck-garden bouquets" of thrown vegetables.

The Cherry sisters included Effie (Rachel Tibbetts), our narrator and the biggest dreamer of the five, Lizzie (Mollie Amburgey), the pretty one, Addie (Beth Wickenhauser), the witty one who wrote most of the act, Jessie (Ellie Schwetye) the tightly wound but caring mother figure and Ella (Nicole Angeli), the mentally addled one.  There's also Pops (B. Weller), the drunken patriarch of the Cherry family who, though found dead at the beginning of the play, makes appearances to insult his daughters throughout.  In fact, the opening lines from Effie are, "Do you believe in ghosts?  You in the audience?  Because you’re looking at one".  This line sets an almost eerie tone from the get go, but then quickly plunges into Effie's recollections of her peculiar family.

CHAPTER TWO • Insight Theatre Company

Insight Theatre kicks off its season with a play that, like many Neil Simon plays, is largely autobiographical.  Chapter Two, premiering in 1977, chronicles the grief Simon suffered after the death of his first wife, and his struggle to start a new life with his second wife, Marsha Mason (who btw will be in town tomorrow, June 9).

We begin with novelist George Schneider (John Pierson) returning to his NYC apartment after a month-long European vacation -- a failed attempt to work through his grief.  His brother Leo (Jerry Russo), a good natured fast-talking press agent, is determined to lift him out of his doldrums with a blind date or two, but George insists that he's got his writing to keep him occupied.  He's not ready yet.  Across town, actress Jennie Malone (Katy Tibbets) is also in no mood for cheering up, no matter how hard her saucy friend Faye (Jenni Ryan), tries.  Jennie is still nursing wounds from her recent divorce from a football player, so she's not ready either.

BUKOWSICAL • New Line Theatre

New Line closes its 22nd season with Bukowsical, another wonderfully executed regional premiere.  Charles Bukowski, an American German-born poet, short story writer and novelist, was considered the "godfather" of a North American literary movement called Dirty Realism – a style that described in plain language the seedy lives of ordinary people and the drudgery of the everyday.  He wrote for the dispossessed.  Railing against the social conventions of the time, he gained some notoriety in the 70's for the profanity-laden honesty in his autobiographical fiction.  Bukowski didn't shy away from odious topics like whoring, boozing, gambling and violence.  That was his world, and he held nothing back.  He achieved cult figure status for awhile and was dubbed a "laureate of American lowlife" by Time magazine.  The Sacred Fools Theatre in Bukowski’s hometown of Los Angeles gave Bukowsical its first showing in 2006.

THE WIZ • The Black Rep

The Black Rep concludes its 36th season with The Wiz (full title -- The Wiz: The Super Soul Musical "Wonderful Wizard of Oz"), adapted from L. Frank Baum's classic children’s novel and patterned after the indelible 1939 film.  The Wiz made a lasting impression when it premiered in 1975.  Featuring a score of 1970's R&B, rock and gospel, it was the first Broadway musical to feature an all-black cast, and dazzled mainstream audiences racking up seven Tony Awards, including Best Original Score, Best Direction and Best Musical.  It also inspired the commercially unsuccessful and altogether bizarre 1978 film, featuring Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow and Diana Ross as Dorothy, among many others.

The familiar songs from "The Wizard of Oz" like, "We're Off to See the Wizard" and "If I Only Had a Heart", are molded into an urban frame of reference and replaced with "Ease On Down the Road", and "Slide Some Oil to Me".  The basics are the same -- after a tornado drops Dorothy (Sarah Stephens), into a strange land, she teams up with the Scarecrow (Ian Coulter-Buford), the Tin Man (Keith Tyrone), and the Lion (Herman Gordon), all headed for the Emerald City in search of The Wiz (Cedric Neal) for brains, a heart, courage, and a way back home.  There are also good and bad witches, monkeys, a pair of glittery shoes, some poignant life lessons, along with some plot detours from the film.  These detours yield some great songs and new scenes, but also some disconnects.  I suppose I'm used to the Wicked Witch of the West making her appearance earlier on, but in The Wiz, we're given a tasty little morsel of her wickedness, and then poof!  She's gone soon after with very little development leading up to it.  And why does the Wiz show himself so early?  Kind of takes the punch out of the reveal that he's just an ordinary guy, however stylish.

AN ILIAD • Upstream Theater

Lisa Peterson and Denis O'Hare adapted An Iliad from Homer's epic poem, The Iliad, but the director's notes mention that the two shouldn't be confused.  In this powerful production from Upstream Theater, and under Patrick Siler's excellent direction, the retelling of this ancient story of the Trojan War is told with a contemporary voice that mourns the losses, cheers the heroics, curses the gods and wonders if man will ever evolve beyond the cycle of ruthless, bloody conflict.

  

After walking down the aisle and up onto the stage, The Poet (a remarkable Jerry Vogel) puts down his suitcase, opens a wooden box, takes out a couple of candles and incense, and asks for inspiration from the Muses, and his accompanying musician (Farshid Soltanshahi), to give him the strength to tell his tale.  He says he's been telling it for ages.

MRS. MANNERLY • Max & Louie Productions

Playwright Jeffrey Hatcher's two-actor, one-act play was inspired by memories of an etiquette class he took as a child.  You get a taste of that right off the top during the pre-show announcement as Mrs. Mannerly advises us to mind our P’s and Q’s.

The play centers around Jeffrey (Charlie Ingram) reliving his time spent with Helen Anderson Kirk, better known as, "Mrs. Mannerly" (Donna Weinsting) in 1967.  For over thirty years she'd been running her locally acclaimed classes to try and restore some sense of decorum to the young residents of Steubenville, Ohio.  Jeffrey was never the athletic type.  He says that while other kids had play clothes, he had "reading clothes".  He loved "Ironside", "F-Troop" and wanted to be Bert Parks, and he was also innately polite.  He was admitted into Mrs. Mannerly’s manners class and while he may not have been thrilled about it at first, he was hungry for an opportunity to engage in anything where he could excel.  In addition to playing an adult and 10 year old Jeffrey, Ingram also portrays his fellow classmates -- ass-kissing Charles, runny-nosed Ralph, and two female students, Jaime and Kim.  In these classes, held in a second floor gym of the YMCA, Emily Post's etiquette book was the bible, good posture was a must, and any student who said "what" instead of, "I beg your pardon" was fined 25 cents.  The language of the kids does stray off into the profane, especially when imitating their families' typical dinner conversation.  Though she may be devoted to the development of social graces, Mrs. Mannerly also manages to elicit laughter with her unexpectedly salty one-liners.

TALKING HEADS • St. Louis Actors' Studio

Talking Heads was originally a series of several monologues, written by British playwright Alan Bennett, for the BBC beginning in 1988.  The series was adapted for the stage in 1991 and premiered at the Chichester Festival Theatre in Sussex, England.  The selected monologues for this engrossing presentation by STLAS include, "Nights in the Gardens of Spain", "A Chip in the Sugar", and "Bed Among the Lentils".  This trio of monologues, while laced with humor, also share common threads of repression and isolation.

"Nights in the Gardens of Spain" features Elizabeth Ann Townsend as Rosemary, a gardening enthusiast who immediately sucks us in as she relates the events surrounding a shooting that took place in her quiet suburb.  The murderer was her neighbor, Fran, who shot her abusive husband.  Stuck in a passionless marriage with a man who ignores her, Rosemary becomes friends with Fran, and confides in us the story of Fran's trial, conviction, and prison time, where she visited her as often as she could.  While Rosemary's husband's primary concern is his determination to move them both to Spain, Rosemary and Fran's friendship deepens, and Rosemary learns more about the truth of Fran's marriage, as well as the proclivities of her own husband.

SHLEMIEL THE FIRST • New Jewish Theatre

NJT's final show of its season is unique.  It's a musical adaptation of Isaac B. Singer's Chelm stories -- traditional, typically self-deprecating Jewish folk tales that involve foolish wisdom, where problems are solved the long way around with ill-conceived logic.  In Shlemiel the First, these tales are set to the tuneful, spirited, instantly recognizable klezmer music of Eastern European Jews.

Naturally, the story takes place in Chelm, a town believed to be occupied by fools.  It begins with Shlemiel (Terry Meddows) dozing away, while his wife, Tryna Ritza (Emily Baker), tries to wake him up.  She's got to get a move on to get out and sell her radishes, which brings in more for the family than Shlemiel's job as a beadle does.  In a number called, "We're Talking Chelm", the six wise men of the town (well, three people and three sock-puppets played by Mike Dowdy, Anna Skidis and Keith Thompson) exalt their brand of wisdom, while being guided by their leader, Gronam Ox (Todd Schaefer).  There's also Gronam's wife, Yenta Pesha (Johanna Elkana-Hale), who bemoans the fact that her blintzes aren't doing it for him anymore in a great turn by Elkana-Hale called, “Yenta’s Blintzes”.  Gronam has the idea, with the help of his wise men, to send Shlemiel out into the countryside to spread word of his esteem.  Mrs. Shlemiel comes to realize that she will miss him while he's gone, as will his children, Gittel and Mottel (Taylor Pietz and Mike Dowdy), but determined, and armed with his trusty dreidel, (adorned on one end with a radish), Shlemiel heads off.

MAPLE AND VINE • HotCity Theatre

Contemporary life can be smothering sometimes, right?  With many of us spending our days tethered to our cellphones and laptops, wouldn't it be nice to live during a time where we weren't bombarded with constant stimulation?  Or would it?  HotCity explores these possibilities in its current offering, Jordan Harrison's Maple and Vine.

It's night as the lights come up on Katha (Shanara Gabrielle) and Ryu's (Alan C. David) NYC apartment.  Katha can't sleep.  Not only do they have noisy, inconsiderate neighbors, but Katha can't seem to get work out of her head.  She's completely burned out at her publishing job, and the everyday grind is complicated by the fact that she's having a difficult time dealing with a miscarriage she suffered six months earlier.  Her husband makes a nice living as a plastic surgeon, but Ryu's long hours at work have become unfulfilling for him as well.  One day, after impulsively quitting her job, Katha meets a man named Dean (Chad Morris).  He's unassumingly debonair in his suit, tie and hat, and has a friendliness about him that strikes Katha as a little unusual.

SMASH/HIT! • The Black Rep

Receiving its world premiere at the Black Rep, Smash/Hit!, written by Steve Broadnax and Michael S. Bordner, centers around "Money" (Ronald L. Conner), and his aspirations of making it big on the hip-hop scene along with his childhood friend, Chance (Matthew Galbreath).  The play also touches on other subjects -- the plight of poverty, post-traumatic stress disorder, father/son dynamics and homophobia in the black community.  It tries to cover a lot of ground.  Maybe too much.

WAITING FOR GODOT • St. Louis Actors' Studio

Played out on a minimal set with a couple of stones, a leafless tree, and a backdrop of a blue cloudy sky, Waiting for Godot, as the title suggests, is about these two guys, Vladimir (Gary Wayne Barker) and Estragon (Terry Meddows), who are waiting for someone called Godot.  The men admit they don't remember how they know Godot, or if they even really know him at all.  Just about the only thing they do know is that when Godot shows up, everything will be better.  Hmm…  But what to do in the meantime…?

Samuel Beckett's tragicomedy (here pronounced GOD-oh, the way Beckett intended) that debuted in a small Paris theatre in 1953 has long been hailed as a classic example of the "Theatre of the Absurd".  It's practically devoid of dramatic conventions.  There's no solid plot.  Instead it's populated with the mundane details of what happens amidst the waiting.  The exchanges between Vladimir and Estragon (or Didi and Gogo -- their familiar names for each other), are where the wolfish, deeper themes of the play lay disguised (or in plain sight) as lamb's clothing.  This play presents the everydayness of life.  Whether they're bickering, eating carrots, trying to remember what day it is, or trading off hats and quick banter like Abbott and Costello or Laurel and Hardy, the dialogue between Didi and Gogo is where the overall landscape of the bleak, comic, repetitive and uncertain nature of the human condition is cleverly cloaked.

GYPSY: A MUSICAL FABLE • Stray Dog Theatre

Stray Dog continues its trend of not backing away from ambitious shows with its current production, Gypsy -- one of the most highly regarded book musicals in the canon of musical theatre.  Loosely based on the memoirs of famed striptease performer, Gypsy Rose Lee, there are many reasons this musical that premiered in 1959 about the stage mother of all stage mothers is regarded in such high esteem.  With a deeply-layered book by Arthur Laurents, clever lyrics by my hero, Stephen Sondheim and splendid, intricate music by Jule Styne, Gypsy not only has a reverence for "showbiz" itself and more than a few classic numbers (beginning with an old-school overture that you should definitely keep your pie hole shut for), but also, it centers around the complicated character, Mama Rose, who roots for and alienates those close to her.  It also has not one, but two major character arcs, where at the start there's a strong one and a weak one, and by the end, the strongest has become the weakest, and the weakest becomes the strongest.  Love…

CONVICTION • New Jewish Theatre

This engrossing one-act, one-man show covers a lot of ground.  Adapted from the novel “Confession” by Yonatan Ben Nachum, it's based on a true story centering around Andrés Gonzalez, a fifteenth century priest during the time of the Spanish Inquisition.

It begins at the Spanish National Archives in the 1960's, where an interrogation is taking place.  There's been some Inquisition files concerning Gonzalez -- trying to be smuggled out by a man who had been working on a Spanish genealogy project.  We never see who is being interrogated, only the interrogator (Ami Dayan), the manager of the National Archives.

CHILDCARE • OnSite Theatre Company

OnSite Theatre Company, like the name suggests, specializes in site-specific theatre -- very cool and quite exceptional in the local area.  Their latest offering is a world premiere that takes place at the Downtown Children's Center.

We start out meeting Joy (Maggie Conroy) and her aunt Roz (Elizabeth Townsend), who runs a daycare facility that's in need of more clients.  Roz is desperate to beef up the enrollment because the daycare's board has been on her about bringing in more revenue.  Her niece has been taking early childhood education classes and would love a shot at handling a class or two, but Roz insists she needs Joy at the front desk handling the secretarial duties.  Joy has also had some trouble in the boyfriend department, and is trying to keep the details from Roz because she doesn't want any information passed along to her mother.