Stone Cold Pimpin'

SUNSHINE IN YOUR CUP
March 15, 2006 12:00 AM
"The Spitfire Grill" was one of many ensemble films to appear in the '90s that featured a strong cast and a cafè as a nexus of maternal warmth and life-affirmation. Think of "Fried Green Tomatoes" and "Baghdad Cafè," both of which came earlier than Lee David Zlotoff's 1996 film.
But something in the Alison Elliot and Ellen Burstyn vehicle cried out to creators James Valcq and Fred Alley, and in 2001, "The Spitfire Grill -- The Musical" premiered.
The show opened in a post-9/11 America hungry for an extra helping of small-town Americana. Five years later, in its Santa Barbara debut at the Garvin Theater, does Spitfire Grill still offer the same pleasures?

"The Spitfire Grill," directed by Rick Mokler, has only six singing roles (and a wordless seventh character), but it's complex in its interchange of spoken word and song, backed by a powerful yet small ensemble.
The show starts off small, with Percy Talbott (Julie Anne Ruggieri) alone and in the spotlight. She's just been released from prison and in her opening song "Ring Around the Moon" finds herself in a strange new world, alighting from a bus in the town of Gilead, Wis.
Meeting her is Sheriff Joe Sutter (Rod Lathim), who is to be her parole officer and who has helped set her up in a job as waitress at the Spitfire Grill.
The grill set, which dominates the rest of the evening, then appears, gliding onto stage in a bit of old theater magic. Congratulations to scenic designer Patricia L. Frank for a cafè set that feels believable despite its cutaway walls and forced perspective.
The coffee looks real, too.
The rousing "Something's Cooking at the Spitfire Grill," for the whole company, introduces us to the rest of the characters: salty owner Hannah Ferguson (Katie Thatcher), shy waitress Shelby (Holly Ferguson), her husband (and Hannah's son) Caleb (Bill Egan), and town gossip and postmaster Effy (Margaret Prothero).
This is a town where everybody knows your business, and apart from Shelby, the townsfolk regard Percy warily.
We soon get to know Hannah -- her son Eli went off to fight in Vietnam and went MIA, and since her husband died she's been thinking of selling the cafè.
Percy and Shelby come up with the idea of a raffle: $100 and an essay earn contestants a chance at the keys to Spitfire's front doors.
Though, as Hannah explains, once the quarry shut down and the freeway was built, nobody comes through Gilead that much.
The raffle, though it does end in one of the best numbers of the evening, the rousing Act One closer "Shoot the Moon," is not really the core.
Percy's acceptance into the town (and her ability to change the people within it) is the emotional center, with Shelby's transformation from doormat to strong woman, and Hannah's from crotchety to loving, both results of Percy's intervention.
Yet Percy's crime, the one that sent her away for 10 years, eats away at her and is revealed in Act Two, with Shelby's "Wild Bird" and Percy's "Shine" bringing the musical backbone to the tale.
It's not too clear if "The Spitfire Grill" is about anything more than redemption and change, and on the page (as in the film), the character arcs are rather predictable.
It might be reaching to connect Percy's violent crime to the Vietnam War (and the truth about Eli, which audiences might guess before the intermission), but both are traumas that are, we come to understand, being remembered incorrectly.
Both Percy and Hannah chose to live with the pain, but are unaware they don't have to.
The cast is all in fine voice, and is even sweeter when harmonizing as in the Gilead-praising "The Colors of Paradise."
Bill Egan's Caleb is little more than the "mean husband" character, but is humanized with his solo number "Digging Stone."
The two main problems in "The Spitfire Grill" are its essentials: story and music.
The dark ending of the film has been cheered up for the production, but also winds up folding its numerous plots into a quick, neat package and shunting them out of the way.
In regards to the Eli storyline, the effect is to mute what should be a much bigger emotional payoff.
Secondly, the music, played by a top-shelf collection of musicians (David Potter, piano/accordion; Anne Weger, keyboards; Richard Biaggini, violin; Jeness Johnson, cell; Ramon Fermin, guitar/mandolin; conducted by Mr. Potter) is a melting pot of Broadway, folk, and Appalachia.
Yet, there is a samey quality to the songs here. It sounds wonderful in the theater; on the drive home one might be hard pressed to remember any of it.

Posted by Ted Mills at 3:26 PM in Writing |Tags:
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The twists and turns of 'Deathtrap'
March 8, 2006 12:00 AM
Ira Levin's "Deathtrap" -- the 1978 play and the 1982 film -- can be seen as the Yanks' answer to Anthony Shaffer's earlier "Sleuth" -- the 1970 play then 1972 film.
Both cast Michael Caine in the lead; both attempt to outmaneuver a clever audience wise in the ways of the typical whodunnit. Both reduce their cast to the barest minimum, fill their sets with murderous props and work out their suspense with the precision of a classic watchmaker.
"Deathtrap" remains the longest-running Broadway show in history, and it's the Virtual Theatre Company's turn to hope we've forgotten the twists and turns by now, as it stages the play through Sunday in Victoria Hall.
The company is a splinter cell of regulars from Circle Bar B Dinner Theater making their foray into the downtown theater scene and taking advantage of larger performing spaces. Victoria Hall remains an odd location for a play, with the large gulf (dance floor? orchestral pit?) between the front row and the stage. It's also a shallow but wide performing space, which can lead to odd blocking.

Director Cybele Foraker has a favorite duo in lead actors Ed Giron and Geren Piltz. She has used their age and size dynamic previously in David Mamet's "A Life in Theater," and no doubt she thought that the two would be perfect for Mr. Levin's classic thriller.
Mr. Giron plays Sidney Bruhl, a writer of stage mysteries whose earliest play made him famous. However, he's had a string of flops and feels he's lost it. How fortunate that a struggling writer, Clifford Anderson (Geren Piltz), has sent a first play called "Deathtrap" to get Sidney's blessing.
Sidney immediately sees that the play would be a smash hit if produced -- "even a gifted director couldn't hurt it," he tells his skittish wife, Myra (Kathy Marden). Sidney's mind starts to turn -- why not invite Clifford up, kill him, and take credit for the smash success? Myra doesn't know if Sidney is joking or if he's serious. Or is Sidney thinking of the plot of a new play, the very play we're watching unfold on stage?
To tell more about "Deathtrap" would be unfair to those who've never seen it. There are double and triple crosses and a plot twist that would have been shocking back in the 1970s but is no big deal now.
There's a nosy neighbor and psychic, Helga Ten Dorp (Jennifer Gimblin), who pops in to steal scenes and plant red herrings. And there's Porter Milgram (David Brainard), Sidney's attorney, who acts as a detective of sorts, unknowingly ratcheting up the tension with his questions and observations.
Mr. Levin's play aims to make us jump as well as laugh. But to do so requires a well-oiled machine, and on opening night, the Virtual Theatre Company production was still a bit rusty.
Sidney is a difficult role, as he has to fool us (and everybody else) with his true intentions, working backward from the end of the first act to the opening curtain. He must then keep us guessing in the second act to make his sudden shifts of allegiances believable. His motivations are there from the beginning, but by sleight of hand we're instead following the machinations of the plot and not of Sidney's mind.
What Mr. Giron winds up doing (and this may be Ms. Foraker's fault) is to proceed in linear fashion throughout. It's an odd feeling. We get the sense that the characters are being written as they're performing, like a cartoon character laying down track as the train they're on steams on ahead.
At the same time, Mr. Giron appears too removed from the action, too reserved and polished. His attitude explains neither the time before the first murder, nor the space that comes after it.
Mr. Piltz fares better, bringing the sort of earnest trust to his Clifford role that works both in the early scenes and later during his double-cross. Yet there's also a distance between the two actors that makes Act Two harder to pull off. To explain more would be to spoil the twist, but let's just say that Mr. Piltz never feels any more than an invited guest into the Bruhl home.
Ultimately, this "Deathtrap" is less a fine-tuned clockwork toy than an assemblage of gears and springs, unwinding slowly.

Posted by Ted Mills at 12:01 PM in Writing |Tags:
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Repetitive modern tragedy a difficult farewell for UCSB director
March 7, 2006 12:00 AM
"By the Bog of Cats" will probably go down in UCSB Theater Department history more as the last production from director Judith Olauson than for any merit of the play itself.
With 30 years of directing under her belt, Ms. Olauson has given Santa Barbara audiences some classic productions.
Even in this reviewer's comparatively short eight years viewing UCSB Theater's output, Ms. Olauson's rèsumè contains good memories: her brilliant "A Raisin in the Sun," the blood-spattered "Elektra" and the most recent "Translations."
Ms. Olauson caught the Irish playwright bug some years back -- she has directed Brian Friel's "Molly Sweeney," Sean O'Casey's "The Shadow of a Gunman" and J.M. Synge's "The Playboy of the Western World."
However, playwright Marina Carr's "By the Bog of Cats" at UCSB's Hatlen Theatre is by turns inexplicable, interminable and repetitive. During its 21/2-hour running time, there is much time to wonder why Ms. Olauson chose the play.

One possible reason is that Ms. Carr was in residence as a visiting artist for the week of the opening.
The other is the work's allusions to Euripides' "Medea." Ms. Olauson is no stranger to Greek tragedy.
But if a character is warned at the beginning that she will die on the Bog of Cats, and that very same character announces soon after that she will die on the Bog of Cats and 21/2 hours later she does indeed die on the Bog of Cats, is this really tragedy or just a strange sort of tenacity?
That character is Hester Swane (Nancy Finn), a tinker and a gypsy who lives in a house by the Bog.
For 15 years she was married to Carthage Kilbride (Zach Appelman) and had a child by him, Josie (Jessie Sherman).
Both husband and wife improved each others' lives in the limited world of their Irish village, but share a dark secret -- they killed Hester's younger brother Joseph, whose ghost (Brennan Kelleher) now haunts the bog and speaks to Hester.
But now Carthage wants to advance in the world. He left Hester some time ago and plans to marry Caroline (Amy Gumenick), the daughter of rich landowner Xavier Cassidy (Colin Deeb).
Carthage wants the land, the house and the daughter back from Hester.
Hester wants Carthage back, and if she can't have him, she wants revenge.
She also intends to take the whole village down with her, because she knows all its secrets.
Hell hath no fury, indeed.
In Greek theater, all action (especially violence) happens offstage. In Ms. Carr's update, all the plot happens before the play begins. We are instead left with pages and pages of threats, insults and yelling.
Lots of yelling.
American productions of Irish plays can so easily slip into complete blarney if a tight reign isn't kept on the accents and the histrionics -- which is why Ms. Olauson's "Translations" was such a successful production.
But "By the Bog of Cats" starts off at a high pitch and has nowhere to go but up.
Ms. Carr wants us to sympathize with Hester, but as written and as played, the heroine comes across as unhinged, vindictive and delusional.
Tender moments, when they come (for her daughter, for her ex-husband in her weaker moments) play less as insights into a broken heart, and more like the cracking of a traumatized mind.
Not that the other villagers are any better -- Josie's grandmother is cruel and spiteful, Carthage is all bellowing and stomping, and Xavier is lecherous if not incestuous.
The only light spot is a turn by Will McFadden as Father Willow and by Katie Buoye as the Catwoman (the bog's oracle of sorts).
Mr. McFadden is always reliable as a comic force, and in his brief time on stage, acts as a welcome salve to all the bluster that has come before.
Though playing "old and doddery," his lilting accent pleases the ear and his bits of business with Ms. Buoye tempt the eye.
Tal Sanders provides another beautiful and ghostly set, a titled disc bisected by crossroads and dotted with mysterious, bubbling pits emanating peat smoke and, later, the bodies of the dead.
Aided by Vickie J. Scott's lighting design, the set links the world of the ancient tragedy with the modern, and makes Ms. Carr's intents apparent.
Sad to think that this will be the last collaboration of Mr. Sanders and Ms. Olauson -- the masterful set for "Elektra" was a pure meeting of minds.
But as for the inhabitants of the village by the Bog of Cats, one is glad to be shot of the lot of them.

Posted by Ted Mills at 12:09 PM in Writing |Tags:
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