Curtain Up
Now that the curtain has come down on the performance art event known as Southern Decadence, it’s time to return indoors, most of the time, for more traditional (most of the time) theatrical events.
In Ms. Holmes and Ms. Watson, Apt. 2B, playwright Kate Hamill transforms Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s iconic detective duo into a pair of modern-day, female roommates navigating a post-pandemic world. Sherlock Holmes—brilliant, eccentric, and emotionally aloof—teams up with the pragmatic and empathetic Joan Watson. Together, they form a deeply codependent, quasi-dysfunctional “Odd Couple”, solving crimes and confronting villains who always seem one step ahead.
Crescent City Stage is giving this darkly comic re-imagining its local premiere at Loyola’s Marquette Theatre. Lorene Chesley and Brittany Chandler star as Holmes and Watson, respectively, with Sarah Colbert Cutrer and Jarrod Smith playing an assortment of other roles. Elizabeth Newcomer directs. Whodunnit? Find out before performances end on September 14. (https://www.crescentcitystage.com/ms-holmes)
In Tennessee Williams’ Out Cry: The Two-Character Play, Felice, a playwright/actor, and his sister Clare, an actress, find themselves abandoned by their troupe while on tour. To satisfy their expected audience, the siblings prepare to perform a two-character play that Felice has written. Reality and illusion, however, quickly blur. Felice’s play apparently reflects their own possibly violent past, involving the death of their parents, but, as they rehearse, they discover that the script can be altered whenever one or both of them cannot accept its truth (or remember the words).
The Tennessee Williams Theatre Company of New Orleans concludes its tenth season with this seldom seen work at Loyola’s Lower Depths Theatre September 10-21 in a production directed by Beau Bratcher. Tracey E. Collins and Kyle Daigrepont star in Williams’ desperate yet tender cri du cœur. (https://ci.ovationtix.com/35398/production/1216007)
The Broadway hit Waitress comes to the Jefferson Performing Arts Center September 12-21. Inspired by the late Adrienne Shelly’s charmingly bittersweet 2007 film, Waitress tells the story of Jenna, a waitress and expert pie maker, who dreams of a way out of her small town and loveless marriage. A baking contest in a nearby county (and the town’s new doctor) may offer her a chance at a fresh start. But Jenna first must summon the strength and courage to confront and then rebuild her own life.
Whitney Mixon, Meredith Owens, and Chase Kamata in Waitress
Waitress features original music & lyrics by Grammy-winner Sara Bareilles. Directed by Broadway veteran Leslie Castay, it features Whitney Mixon, Chase Kamata, and Meredith Owens as Jenna. Yum. (https://www.jpas.org/performance/waitress/)
Critical Mass, a dark and caustic comedy by Deb Margolin that’s all about the critical impulse, from its most elegant to its most petty, is slated to receive its regional debut September 19-29 at The Marigny Opera House as part of Intramural Theater‘s residency there. When the play premiered off-Broadway in 1997, The New York Times called it “an artful and insightful work about our compulsion to inflict opinions on one another, and beyond that, a treatise on how we smother our loneliness with words.”
The cast of Critical Mass
Tricia Anderson directs a cast that includes Pam Roberts, Dontez Banks, Joe Signorelli, Mary Davis, Roney Jones, Josh Tierney as “The Critic” the first weekend, and yours truly as “The Critic” the second weekend. When Margolin appeared in JPA’s True West earlier this year as Lee & Austin’s mom, I wrote that she “scored a bull’s-eye.” I hope she’ll feel the same way about my performance in her play. (https://intramuraltheater.ticketspice.com/criticalmass)
The weekend before Critical Mass opens, Intramural presents The 6th Annual 25-Hour Play Festival! also at the Marigny Opera House. It begins on the night of Saturday, Sept. 13, when a bevy of New Orleans locals will gather and be randomly grouped into five teams each made up of a playwright, a director, and a cast’s worth of actors. The teams will be given a few prompts — a line that all scripts must incorporate, a prop, etc.– and then they’ll have just 25 hours to create a 10-minute play. On the night of Sunday, Sept. 14, audiences will then see the shows be performed for the first (and perhaps only) time. Intramural promises “moments of transcendence, serendipity, and, of course…confusion.” (https://intramuraltheater.ticketspice.com/25-hour-play-festival)
If The 25-Hour Play Festival! promises theatrical magic, should you prefer mind-bending illusions, absurd antics, and ridiculous comedy magic, head to Big Couch for It’s Just Magic!, Calvin Kai Ku’s solo magic show. Making his New Orleans debut, Ku offers passion, empathy and a li’l wacky humor for three nights only, September 23-25. (https://www.eventbrite.com/e/its-just-magic-with-calvin-kai-ku-tickets-1553367717659?aff=oddtdtcreator)
It’s Just Magic!‘s Calvin Kai Ku
Speaking of wacky humor and absurd antics, Aqua Mob, New Orleans’ first and only community-based water ballet ensemble, returns to The Midtown Hotel with Wendy, Darling: An Aquatic Retelling of The Shining. For their 8th production, Aquamob dives into uncharted waters as a hotel breathes, the water remembers, and neither will let the Torrance family go.
(l.-r.) Rebecca Poole & Riley Elise and Cody Keech in Wendy, Darling: An Aquatic Retelling of The Shining (photos by Javier Hernandez)
Written & directed by Lizzy Collins and featuring live music from The Bomb Pulse and bloody dance moves in the deep end,Aqua Mob describes Wendy, Darling as “a fever dream of rage, survival, and watery revenge.” It runs September 25-October 11. I can’t wait to see it. (https://www.eventbrite.com/e/wendy-darling-tickets-1555048123799?aff=oddtdtcreator)
If The Shining is a modern horror classic, The NOLA Project opens its 21st season with a classic horror classic, Frankenstein. Pete McElligott, whose Dracula won last year’s Critics’ Choice Gay Appreciation Award, returns with a world-premiere adaptation of the Mary Shelley novel. Frankenstein, directed by Leslie Claverie, will lumber forth at the Station at Lafitte Greenway October 2-17. (https://www.nolaproject.com/frankenstein)
At Le Petit, The Lehman Trilogy kicks off the 109th season of this French Quarter institution, October 2-19. Stefano Massini’s Tony Award-winning play charts the rise and fall of the Lehman banking dynasty from the arrival of the original three brothers from Bavaria in the U.S. in the mid-1800s to the spectacular 2008 collapse of the company they founded. Seen in London in 2019, I liked it, but didn’t love it. Starring Ryan Hayes, David Lind, and Leslie Nipkow as multiple generations of Lehmans, I’m hoping the Le Petit production will deliver a better return. (https://www.lepetittheatre.com/events/the-lehman-trilogy)
I loved Kimberly Akimbo when I saw it off-Broadway and Broadway, too, where it won the 2023 Tony Award for Best Musical. Based on David Lindsay-Abaire’s dramedy of the same name about a teenage girl who has a rare disease that causes her to age rapidly and prematurely, the musical version retains the play’s quirky humor which, for some reason, seems more plausible in a musical, and adds four geeky high school classmates of Kimberly’s to winning effect. If I wish that there were just one (or two) truly memorable songs in Jeanine Tesori’s score, that doesn’t take away from its emotional vibrancy. Catch it at the Saenger Theatre October 7-12. (https://www.saengernola.com/events/kimberly-akimbo/)
If I’m looking forward to seeing Kimberly Akimbo again, I’m also looking forward to seeing Exhausted Paint again when Fat Squirrel presents Justin Maxwell’s play about Vincent Van Gogh at Big Couch October 8-18. Only I won’t really be seeing it again even though I saw it in 2022 at UNO. Huh? That’s because, other than its beginning and ending passages, its twelve inner sections are done in a different order at each performance, their sequence determined by randomly chosen audience members before the start of the show. Drew Stroud returns as Van Gogh with “his dazzling portrait of an artist as a youngish man.” (https://fatsquirrelnola.square.site/product/exhausted-paint/VWYUHBAU7AV34D2YW3VD5XLC?cs=true&cst=custom)
Drew Stroud in Exhausted Paint
I always look forward to seeing Varla Jean Merman who’ll be returning to Café Istanbul on October 17 and 18 with her newest show, The Drowsy Chappell Roan. Apparently, after spending a year tagging herself on thousands of photos on Instagram, the international drag chanteuse recently discovered that she had confused herself with Grammy Award-winning pop sensation Chappell Roan. So, despite her overall lethargy and low blood sugar, Varla shall set out to reheat the recent hits of Chappell Roan, Dua Lipa, Sabrina Carpenter, Billie Eilish and Miley Cyrus.(https://varlajean.com/)
That other wonderful chanteuse, Anaïs St. John, brings her cabaret show about Josephine Baker back to the World War II Museum’s Stage Door Canteen, October 17-19. Josephine Baker: From Creole Goddess to Siren of the Resistance uses song and spoken word to celebrate Josephine Baker’s extraordinary journey from humble beginnings in East St. Louis to the stages of Jazz Age Paris, her wartime service in France & North Africa, and her speech at the 1963 Freedom March in Washington, D.C. at the Lincoln Memorial. (https://www.nationalww2museum.org/programs/josephine-baker-creole-goddess-siren-resistance)
Anaïs St. John in Josephine Baker: From Creole Goddess to Siren of the Resistance
All you friends of Dorothy on the Northshore should follow the yellow brick road to the Slidell Little Theatre for The Wizard of Oz, a stage adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s tale, featuring the classic score from the MGM film. Originally done by the Royal Shakespeare Company (classy, eh?), this version includes the songs Over the Rainbow, Munchkinland (Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead), If I Only Had a Brain/a Heart/the Nerve, We’re Off to See the Wizard (Follow the Yellow Brick Road), and more. Scott Sauber directs this production which runs through September 7. (https://www.slidelllittletheatre.org/home#)
Following The Wizard of Oz, will be Robert Harling’s Steel Magnolias (Oct. 10-19), which is set in Truvy’s beauty salon in northern Louisiana. If you haven’t seen it by now, where ya been, sugar? (https://www.slidelllittletheatre.org/tickets/steel-magnolias-331977#buy)
Also on the Northshore, Playmakers Theater of Covington kicks off its new season with Don’t Dress for Dinner.In Robin Hawdon’s adaptation of Marc Camoletti’s French farce, Bernard is planning a romantic weekend with his chic Parisian mistress in his charming French farmhouse, whilst his wife is away. He has arranged for a cordon bleu cook to prepare gourmet delights, and has invited his best friend, Robert, along to provide the alibi. It’s foolproof; what could go wrong? You can see for yourself September 6-21. (https://bontempstix.com/events/dont-dress-for-dinner)
Swamplight Theatre, the home of the Kay Butler Performing Arts Project in Ponchatoula, will offer Every Brilliant Thing September 12-20. Richard Beaugh stars in this one-person show by Duncan MacMillan with Jonny Donahoe that explores grief and how one family deals with it. Based on true (and untrue) stories, Every Brilliant Thing details how the Narrator began a list when he was 7 years old and his Dad picked him up from school to take him to a hospital after his Mom had attempted suicide. He wanted everything on the list to be “genuine, brilliant and life-affirming.” As the Narrator ages from 7 to 17 and then goes off to college and enters the real world, MacMillan and Donahoe provide insight and empathy without hitting you over the head. (https://www.swamplight.org/everybrilliantthing)
Mandeville’s 30 by Ninety Theatre presents Tuesdays with Morrie (Sept. 12–21), the autobiographical story of Mitch Albom, an accomplished journalist driven solely by his career, and Morrie Schwartz, his former college professor. Sixteen years after graduation, Mitch happens to catch Morrie’s appearance on a television news program and learns that his old professor is battling Lou Gehrig’s Disease. Mitch is reunited with Morrie, and what starts as a simple visit turns into a weekly pilgrimage and a last class in the meaning of life. Jason Leader directs Lance Nelson (Mitch) and Chris Aberle (Morrie). (https://30byninety.com/shows/tuesdays-with-morrie/)
Next at 30 by Ninety will be Beth Henley’s The Miss Firecracker Contest (Oct. 11-26) set in the small Mississippi town of Brookhaven, a few days before the Fourth of July, as its six charmingly eccentric characters search for love, happiness, and acceptance. (https://30byninety.com/shows/the-miss-firecracker-contest/)
And one last treat just in time for Halloween–The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the longest-running theatrical release in film history, returns to New Orleans on October 29 to the Mahalia Jackson Theater to celebrate its 50th anniversary. Fans will be able to meet and chat with Nell Campbell, who starred as “Columbia” in this cult classic, in person.
Audiences will also have an opportunity to participate in a costume contest and interact with a live performance by the local Shadow Cast. They will be acting out scenes from the movie “live” on stage while the full, unedited film is shown behind them.
“I never would have thought all these years later we’d be touring our little ol’ film,” said Campbell. “I’m so thrilled to get back on the road and to meet several generations of fans. Looking forward to a lot of fun just like it always was!”
Nell Campbell as “Columbia” in The Rocky Horror Picture Show
The Rocky Horror Picture Show also stars Tim Curry as the devious and fabulous Frank-N-Furter; Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon as the ultimate nerdy couple, Brad and Janet; Meatloaf as ex-delivery boy Eddie; and Patricia Quinn as Magenta, servant to Riff Raff who is played by the show’s creator, Richard O’Brien. So, come up to the lab and see what’s on the slab! (https://www.mahaliajacksontheater.com/events/rocky-horror-picture-show/)
Happy Fall! Happy Theatergoing!! Let’s do the Time Warp!!!
