Ruffles and Flourishes

Asheville Community Theatre
The Producers
Book by Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan; Music and Lyrics by Mel Brooks
Through September 10, 2017
Asheville Community Theatre, 35 E. Walnut St. Asheville, NC 28801


Max Bialystock is a flamboyant but failing Broadway producer whose latest disaster, Funny Boy, a musical based on Hamlet, closes the night it opens. The next day, a nebisshy accountant, Leo Bloom, comes to audit his books and makes an offhand remark. Financial discrepancies on Broadway, he says, are less likely to be discovered with a failure than a success.

Inspired, Max concocts a cockamamie scheme.  Find a play guaranteed to flop after one night.  Lure investors to put up more money than needed. Instead of returning the overage, the new team of Bialystock and Bloom will abscond to Rio with the cash.

But the plan backfires when their show, a tasteless musical called Springtime for Hitler, is a hit.  The duo end up in prison, where they’re at it again, producing another tasteless musical with the inmates, Prisoners of Love.

That was the zany premise of Mel Brooks’s The Producers, his 1967 cult classic film with Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder. Brooks later took the zaniness to inflatio-ad-ridiculum proportions in the  2001 Broadway musical, also The Producers, with Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick.

Now Asheville Community Theatre is inaugurating its renovated auditorium with its homegrown version of The Producers through September 17. It’s a spanking start for its snazzy new space.

Sticking pins

Brooks’s writing strategy with The Producers was to impale every convention of the Broadway musical as he did with his movie genre satires Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein.

And he would stick giant comedy pins in the biggest voodoo doll of all time, Adolph Hitler.

The show was giddy with Broadway musical clichés.  Fast-talking con man, dirty old ladies, blonde bombshell secretary, the worm who turns to wolf, comic partners-in-crime, mincing theatre director, mincing chorus boys, butch lady techie, overbearing capitalist boss, beaten-down worker cogs-in-the-machine, Irish cops. 

And enough Jewish jokes to reopen Grossingers.

The entire package was wrapped in a lascivious leer of such exuberance that it attained an innocent charm. “The Stripper” played by harp, celeste, and kazoo. 

The staging strategy of his Broadway crew—director, designers, choreographer—was likewise over the top.  The production’s motto was clearly Oscar Wilde’s “Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.”

The characterizations, sets, costumes, and dances were Macy’s Thanksgiving Day inflatables blown so tight they could either explode in confetti and fireworks or break loose from earthly ropes and float to heaven.  On Broadway, they sometimes did both.

The creative team crammed in so many allusions to Broadway and Hollywood it would take a theatre historian a week to footnote them all:  Follies, Gypsy, Auntie Mame, Fiddler on the Roof, A Chorus Line, Cabaret, 42 Street, The Music Man, Busby Berkeley, the June Taylor Dancers, the Ziegfield Follies, Hellzappopin’, Olsen and Johnson, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, Judy Garland, vaudeville, burlesque, all the way back to The Black Crook.

A-team ensemble

Without a Broadway-size house and a Broadway budget, ACT and the director of The Producers, Asheville’s formidable musicals maven Jerry Crouch, had to be selective in what he stowed in the overhead compartment. He couldn’t pack, or unpack, all the inside gags that Brooks stuffed into his script. Fortunately Crouch had an A-team of comics, singers, and dancers to take onboard.

Crouch, his choreographers, Shari Azar and Tina Pisano-Poor, and his music director, Lynda Shuler, meld this cast of twenty-seven community theatre veterans, professionals, and professionals-in-training into a tight, bright ensemble. This is one of the best talent-and-experience mixes I’ve seen at ACT.  Like artists blending paint, Crouch and collaborators let the company’s verve feather out individual rough edges.

Shuler gets a big Broadway sound from her ten-person orchestra. It’s a shame we don’t see them. They were out of sight in a covered pit. I first thought we were hearing a recording. What’s the point of live theatre, if we don’t see the performers live? This is a place where those awkward side-stages could have been used to some advantage. Otherwise, they’re a neck-craning nuisance.   

It doesn’t help that ACT’s new sound system still hasn’t solved the problem of tracking the performers' locations on the stage. 

There were some stand-outs in this energetic group (not all of whom are well identified in the program). Alix Likens is a gangbusters Ulla, the sexpot Swedish showgirl-secretary, who manages to paint Bialystock and Bloom’s shabby office completely white during a long intermission. Jeff Stone is übertrieben as Franz Liebkind, the pigeon-raising, gun-totin’, accident-prone German immigrant playwright who has written the love-letter to Hitler that B&B aim to produce.  (He claims never to have been a Nazi: “I vos only following orders,” he tells them, “I didn't even know there vos a vor on. Ve lived in the back, right across from Schvitzerland.“)

With some solid show-biz background, Likens and Stone radiate polish and pizzazz.  Cord Scott as the shamelessly camp Carmen Ghia, “common-law assistant” to the just as shameless Roger de Bris (Corey Link), the Springtime for Hitler director, gets to show off his accomplished jetés.  And Frank Salvo, as an uncredited secretary to the head of Leo’s accounting firm, should get jail time for serious scene-stealing.

Matthew Harper, a theatre student at Warren Wilson College making his ACT debut, sweetly embodies Leo Bloom’s ingratiating schlemiel. He makes us yearn for him to go full out as a comic performer and a song-and-dance man when Bloom blossoms into a producer and Ulla’s beau. As Max might have sung, “He can do it.”  

Zacary Landolt as Max appears to be channeling Grouch Marx.  I hope as the production moves along (I saw it the second night), the dialogue coach, Carole Saich, can help him get the mush out of his mouth so we can understand his words. The costume designer, Carina Lopez, can also help by figuring out how to keep his pants up and his shirt tucked in. 

Despite this and a few other easily corrected  lapses in costume technique, Lopez’s wardrobe has a finely-tuned palette and snappy silhouettes. She gets the big costume picture of subtly coordinating colors, patterns, and textures. If her Springtime for Hitler chorines don’t have the outrageousness of North Carolina native William Ivey Long’s showgirls on Broadway, whose could?  (Ida Bostian, on the costume construction crew, knows Long from the honorary degree awarded to him by UNC Asheville, Lopez’s alma mater. She might have given Lopez some hints about ramping up the ridiculous.)

Another UNC Asheville alum, Jill Summers, ACT’s accomplished technical director, deftly maneuvers eleven locales on and off ACT’s shallow stage. Despite the renovation, the stage hasn’t been given a better configuration and still appears to operate without much in the way of wings and flies.  Will this be a continual hindrance to a theatre which plans to dedicate its main platform to musicals? 

As Summers gets accustomed to her new stage, her college mentors, Rob Berls and Rob Bowen (the lighting designer for The Producers) may encourage her to think beyond travelers and painted flats strung out along that long horizontal.

In the end, however, audiences will rightly overlook these fluffs and focus on the flourishes. This Producers flourishes indeed. It is an ACT triumph that will have theatregoers, as it did me, sitting back and beaming.

Arnold Wengrow is the author of The Designs of Santo Loquasto, a chronicle of the set and costume designer's work on Broadway, Off Broadway, for dance, opera, and the movies, including thirty films by Woody Allen.

Info at http://ashevilletheatre.org/
Photograph by MISHA Photography

Motley Crew
 

Mike Coghlan, Julia Cunningham, Lisa M. Smith, Jamie Knox, Christine Eide, and Jeff Messer in Six Knots

The Magnetic Theatre
Six Knots by Travis Lowe
Through August 19, 2017, at Magnetic 375, 375 Depot Street, River Arts District

Confine a cast of unsavory characters in a enclosed space.  Raise the stakes for escape. Wait to see whose primitive survival instincts kick in first. 

It’s a classic thriller formula with many variations to charge up a writer’s imagination.  And lots of opportunities to probe dark places of the soul. 

Jean-Paul Sartre may have given this storytelling device its ultimate expression in the 1944 one-act No Exit, with its famously bleak conclusion, “Hell is other people.” Alfred Hitchcock’s 1944 movie Lifeboat probably gave the formula its best known adrift-at-sea setting.

Now Asheville actor and fledgling playwright Travis Lowe is offering a contemporary take with Six Knots, premiering at the Magnetic Theatre through August 19. Lowe isolates a crew of six sailors, two men and their wives and two women who are about to be married, on a luxury sailboat moving slowly off the British Virgin Islands.  He gives all but one of them seriously sinister intentions.

Lowe may be as slow as his drifting vessel to unmask their unsettling plans or even make us suspect they have them. But he brings his knotted plotlines together in a walloping second act of comic mayhem.

About to go under

The boat belongs to Randy Lowell, the owner of a company that operates prisons under contract for state governments.  He and his wife are entertaining Randy’s former software developer, Todd Reynard, and his wife, Kyra, who still works for the company as bookkeeper.  Todd now runs his own software company.

Arriving by dinghy will be Deborah Fulton, who owns an investment firm. With her is her fiancée, Dyan Grove, known as Pippi, a writer of pop fiction.

Neither Todd nor Randy know that each other’s company is about to go under. Randy needs new software to run his prisons with fewer guards and less paperwork, and he wants Randy to come back to work for him. For his part, Todd hasn’t come up with a successful new software package to replace one he sold to another company.
                               
Randy also wants to lure Deborah into injecting new capital into his company. Todd and Kyra, we learn in the second act, have their own financial bailout plan.  It isn’t pretty.

After Deborah hauls herself up over the boat’s gunwale, she is soon revealing to Todd that she aims to buy a controlling interest in Randy’s company. She will have Randy fired, strip the company of its assets, and move on for the next kill.

Pippi, meanwhile, quickly confides to Randy that she isn’t a very good writer. She doesn’t mind if Deborah has other fiancées in other cities, as long as the food is good and the booze is plentiful and she can get on with her writing.

In fact, all the people are more hasty in explaining their motives to strangers than such devious characters probably would be.

The playwright spends the first act setting up his characters’ backstories. We don’t get the hints we need to keep us in suspense about where his story might be going.  When Todd, played engagingly by Mike Coghlan, denounces Randy for running his for-profit prisons on the backs of his inmates’ slave labor, we might wonder if we’re in for an Ibsenite drama on the evils of capitalism.

Gleeful villainy

Randy is a vulgar, sexist blowhard.  As played by Jeff Messer, he is also curiously mild-mannered. He readily acknowledges he’s an asshole. He claims to have hurt feelings being called a slave owner.  But his little pangs of conscience don’t make this unpleasant character appealing.  Either the actor or the playwright hasn’t applied the Drama 101 lesson: the more villainous the villain, the more we like him.

On the other hand, playwright and actor perfectly capture the gleeful villainy of the vulture capitalist Deborah. From the moment she appears over the side of the boat, hoisting a sack of belongings, a bag of limes, and her partner with her, Deborah, as played by the irrepressible Julia Cunningham, has us in tow as well. By the time she reveals her plan, we’re rooting for her to succeed.

Nautical wild bunch

Cunningham is well matched by Lisa M. Smith as Pippi.  With her shapely shaved head, languid beauty, liquid dark eyes, and throaty voice, this actor could have been in the playwright’s mind when he has Deborah describe her lust-at-first sight. It was at a bookstore, and Pippi made her sweat so much she soaked the book she was holding to have signed. 

It’s a vivid bit of imagery at which this playwright excels.  He's also deft with some witty repartee. There's fun with the state of Georgia and illegal lesbians.

Later, Lowe gives Pippi a monologue suggesting what this nautical wild bunch is all about. “I find the fishes jumping particularly fascinating,” she says, gazing into the horizon. “I mean, why do they do that?”

It's one of two things, she surmises. “Either they are being pursued, or they are doing the pursuing. But one can't be the predator forever. There's always a bigger fish. Down there, under the surface, something horrible.” 

But there's a third option. “Maybe some just do it for fun. Most fish live their lives down in the silent grey, where the colors drop away in feet. Where the sound is everywhere, but hollow, like nothingness.”

So  we’re all one of three fishes, Lowe is saying. One is happily lost in “life’s haze of coral beauty.”  Another is “wary, uncontent,” constantly aware of “dull death creeping 'round your fins.” A third is “an oddball, a freak, bent and irregular, curious or bizarre. You don't care for drifting, and you have little need for fear. You jump for fun. In triumphant revelry of your, perhaps short, fishy life.”

Pippi is a better writer that she gives herself credit for.

This overt statement of a play’s theme could have come across as fine writing, but Lowe pulls it off by staying metaphorical.  He’s aided by Smith’s hypnotic delivery. 

Things don’t work out so well a little later, however, when Kyra denounces Randy and his wife for treating people like numbers.  Jamie Knox is properly passionate, but here Lowe argues literally rather than poetically. 


Figuring out the recipe

Part of the fascination of the Magnetic Theatre’s mission of bringing new plays to the stage is watching new, and not so new, playwrights at work.  Most producers give embryo scripts a process of development, with workshops, feedback, and revision.  Even more-stage-ready products often undergo lengthy previews.  Tales of late-night post-performance rewriting before a morning rehearsal followed by frenzied memorizing before that evening’s performance are theatrical legend.

The Magnetic’s indefatigable producing artistic director, Steven Samuels, sometimes brings his audiences into the kitchen while the chef may still be figuring out the recipe.  It’s a daring choice.  For theatrical gourmets, the meal may not always be perfectly cooked, but when the playwright is as promising as Travis Lowe, it’s worth looking over his shoulder as he learns to wield his utensils.   


Arnold Wengrow is the author of The Designs of Santo Loquasto, a chronicle of the set and costume designer's work on Broadway, Off Broadway, for dance, opera, and the movies, including thirty films by Woody Allen.
Info at www.themagnetictheatre.org/