Guys and Dolls at Le Petit through March 29
I’ll wager you’ll leave Le Petit humming one of the songs from its current production of Guys and Dolls. Or many songs. Take Back Your Mink. If I Were a Bell. Luck Be a Lady. The title song. And more. All classics.
After enduring such recent Broadway touring productions as Back to the Future: The Musical and Hell’s Kitchen (not counting Alicia Keys’ recycled Top Ten hits) and Water for Elephants, each chock-full with forgettable number after forgettable number, what a pleasure it was to hear Frank Loesser’s glorious score with its witty lyrics and tunes magnificently crafted to fit those words perfectly. As they say, they don’t write’em like that anymore.
The book by Abe Burrows and Jo Swerling, based on a story and characters by Damon Runyon, equals Loesser’s songs. Brimming with wit and heart, it’s filled with vivid characters you come to care about, keeping you on the metaphorical edge of your seat as you wait to see how all the strands of this “Musical Fable of Broadway” will turn out.
I may have had some doubts as to why Le Petit decided to present this oft-done chestnut, but they had pretty much evaporated by the time I exited the theater.
In fact, they disappeared the moment Leslie Claverie entered the stage as Miss Adelaide. For this is a performance to be cherished, to be admired, to be savored. Just as she did with her roles in Anything Goes and Once Upon a Mattress and Little Shop of Horrors, Claverie eschews mere cartoonish caricature. Rather, as she did with those other iconic characters, she embodies the long-affianced nightclub singer with such precision that an audience can’t help but empathize with the somewhat ditsy, but decent and utterly loveable Adelaide.
That Claverie has a clarion voice, anyone who’s seen her before knows. In the classic Adelaide’s Lament, not only does she sound like a million–natch–but every move she makes has been perfectly calibrated with the lyrics. Even better, somehow she makes it seem as though this tightly choreographed showstopper just happens naturally. I hope Claverie’s version of this canonical number is filmed for future Adelaides to study.
And it’s not just her singing. Listen how Claverie tosses off a line about the kitchen–“It’s the only room I haven’t been in.”–with a casual, yet knowing, brilliance that captures Adelaide’s innocence and epitomizes why she’s so adorable.
There are other gems in the cast. Small of stature, Rahim Glaspy may not be your typical Big Jule (the boxer Jake LaMotta portrayed him in a 1960s revival), but with his huge talent, he dominates the stage as the (comically) menacing gangster from Chicago who’s looking for a craps game. As the missionary Arvide Abernathy, Bob Edes, Jr. sings his big number, More I Cannot Wish You, with sincere, simple tenderness, while, later, he threatens to expose gambler Sky Masterson as a welsher, if he doesn’t make good on his marker, with sly glee.
Michael Paternostro, Rahim Glaspy, Leslie Claverie, and the cast of Guys and Dolls (photo by Brittney Werner)
And Keith Claverie, Leslie’s real-life spouse, is almost unrecognizable as Nicely-Nicely Johnson, always stuffing some sort of food in his mouth and leading the company in an uproarious version of Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat.
If the rest of Le Petit’s G&D is not quite at the level of the aforementioned folks, it’s still highly enjoyable.
Co- Directors A.J. Allegra and Jauné Buisson have each done phenomenal work in the past. Here, the staging, pacing, and other basics all function well, but the overall picture could’ve been a bit sharper; I wonder if the production might’ve benefitted from a single directorial vision.
Stephanie Abry makes a winsome Sarah Brown, the leader of the Save-a-Soul Mission; if the upper reaches of her voice were a little thin, it could’ve been because I saw the show at the end of its opening week. As Masterson, Donald Jones, Jr., has a silky smooth voice; in this admittedly somewhat bland role, he’s a little unfocused at first but comes into his own in the second act when the stakes Masterson faces are higher.
Together, they make a believable couple; if there could’ve been a little more chemistry between them, perhaps it’s because, as they sing, they’ve “never been in love before.”
Michael Paternostro, as the marriage averse, craps game organizer Nathan Detroit, leans a little too hard at first into the character’s comic nature, pushing the jokes instead of letting them land easily; as the story goes along, tho, he relaxes into Nathan’s neurotic prickliness for an ultimately winning performance.
Music Director Max Dovale conducts the orchestra with panache, but takes some of the tempi a bit too fast; that may be okay for the diegetic numbers like A Bushel and a Peck, but even if that’s how they’re marked in the score, I wish he had taken a more leisurely pace with, say, Marry the Man Today. It’s one of the most beautiful songs ever written and here it went by much too fast.
And am I getting old or did Nathan’s gambling krewe look oh-so-young, or at least a little more innocent than one would expect from a bunch of legality-challenged New Yawkers? (I’d also question the use of drag for two of the chorines in the Hot Box Club numbers. While the performers, Jorden Brue Majeau and Daniel Rigamer, are both highly capable, drag simply isn’t part of Runyon’s milieu.)
These are relatively minor quibbles, however. It’s a sure bet you’ll head out of Le Petit after seeing Guys and Dolls feeling like a million.
[For tickets and more information, go to https://www.lepetittheatre.com/events/guys-and-dolls]
Small Craft Warnings at Loyola’s Lower Depths Theatre through March 29
I’m of two minds when it comes to The Tennessee Williams Theatre Company of New Orleans’ (TWTC) current presentation of Small Craft Warnings, running through March 29.
First, the production itself is admirable (with one exception–more on that later). This is the second time TWTC has essayed Small Craft, the first being just over ten years ago at Mag’s 940, an Elysian Fields bar on the edge of the Marigny Triangle. I usually enjoy site-specific shows–Warnings itself takes place in a bar–but that version just didn’t click, hampered, in part, by challenging sightlines and a cramped playing area.
Augustin J Correro again directs Williams’ 1972 script but this time, at Loyola’s more spacious Lower Depths Theatre, his staging clearly defines the characters’ various relationships, and makes full use of Nathan Arthur’s suitably scruffy set with nicely balanced visuals, fluid movements, and a keen sense of pacing. Williams’ late-arriving intermission has been moved a bit forward to give the evening a better proportioned feel to satisfying effect.
Among the cast, Benjamin Dougherty, almost unrecognizable behind a bushy beard adorning his face, submerges himself into the sad sack Steve, a short order cook, who puts up with the messy Violet with pitiful resignation. Dougherty takes his time, with excellent results, to say a line, to cross the stage, to, simply, exist as he inhabits this woeful man with bone-deep commitment. He reminded me of Ian Hoch’s award-winning 2012 performance in Balm in Gilead, both finely etched, empathetic portrayals of society’s marginalia.
Likewise, Leon Contavesprie depicts Quentin, a jaded, older gay man, with telling details–darting eyes, a bent wrist, a catch in the throat–to add up to a rending portrait of bitter self-hate. Aptly costumed by Baylee Robertson, as she has the entire cast, with ’70s sport coat, open collared dress shirt & neckerchief, Contavesprie vividly creates an image of a homosexual who has, sadly, built a wall around himself. As the twink bicycling from Iowa to Mexico whom Quentin has picked up, Quinn Lapeyrouse is adorable as he exudes just the right amount of sweetness and innocence.
Returning from the 2015 production LaKesha Glover, Robert Alan Mitchell, and James Howard Wright are all in top form.
Glover represents the beautician Leona as a force of nature, a lusty tornado you don’t want to get in the path of. She wisely doesn’t overplay the sentimentality of Leona’s continual playing of Tchaikovsky’s Sérénade mélancolique on the jukebox (a jukebox in a dive bar with classical music on it? Hmmm…) in memory of her deceased gay brother and smoothly shifts gears between the maternal and volcanic aspects of Leona’s personality. A cousin to Night of the Iguana’s Maxine, Glover’s innate affability takes some of the edge off Leona, a good thing as otherwise you might tire of her abrasiveness after a while.
Wright brings an appealing avuncular presence to Monk, the bar’s owner, while Mitchell, as an alcoholic doctor who lost his license to practice medicine but still does so with tragic results, gives us understated drunkenness, judiciously refraining from any histrionics.
Kevin Wheatley smartly soft-pedals the arrogance and brutishness of Bill, a fading gigolo who’s currently ensconced in Leona’s trailer as her beaux, a coarser and more low-life version of Streetcar’s Stanley.
The cast of Small Craft Warnings (photo by Brittney Werner)
Only Kelley Holcomb as the down-on-her-luck Violet, always begging for money and quick to give an under-the-table hand job, misfires. Making her New Orleans stage debut, unlike the rest of the cast, one is always conscious of Holcomb “acting” whether she’s singing badly or crying. In fact, I couldn’t tell if her Violet was faking teariness or if Holcomb was trying to cry but didn’t have the acting chops to do so; either way she didn’t mesh with the rest of the cast, all NOLA stage veterans, who epitomize a New Orleans style of acting that’s grounded in the warmth of authentic emotions.
Sound Designer Nick Shackleford provided appropriate period songs for the sound track while Diane K. Baas’ lighting fittingly established the bar’s mood and defined playing spaces, including spotlighting the actors as they launched into occasional monologs. And I appreciated the comic, almost slapstick, business Correro & Co. sprinkled throughout the proceedings to leaven the drama with some smiles.
All that said, however, one has to question why this play was done. Small Craft Warnings is second rate Williams, at times seeming like a parody of his richer works. At best, we get a recycling of Williams’ recurrent themes of love and loneliness and vulnerability with no new great additional insights. Those aforementioned monologs, at times, unnecessarily spell things out; characters repetitively tell us about something that we’ve just seen occur.
The self-loathing Quentin especially comes off as a cliche, Williams’ portrayal of a homosexual almost quaint given all that’s happened in the last 50+ years.
Prior to the performance, as well as in the program, Correro and Shackleford, the TWTC’s Co-Artistic Directors, spoke of challenging funding cuts. While I can appreciate their mission to keep Williams’ full oeuvre in the public eye, why not give audiences worthier, more artistically fulfilling works? For example, Lanford Wilson is a spiritual heir to Williams; his The Hot l Baltimore is similar to Small Craft, its characters gathered in a fading hotel lobby rather than a bar, and not only is it a far more compelling, award-winning work, which ran off-Broadway for nearly three years, but it hasn’t been done here in decades.
Let’s hope as The Tennessee Williams Theatre Company moves into its second decade, it expands its goals to include notable offerings by other, “Williams-adjacent” playwrights. I think Tennessee would approve.
[For more information, including tickets, about Small Craft Warnings, go to https://ci.ovationtix.com/35398/production/1255721
