Pasadena Star News
Chekhov goes musical with 'Gulls'
By Michelle J. Mills, Staff Writer
Article Launched: 07/25/2008 05:55:03 PM PDT
GULLS
Opens tonight. 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays and 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, through Aug. 24
Boston Court Performing Arts Center
70 N. Mentor Ave.
Pasadena
$32
(626) 683-6883
Anton Chekhov may have thought of his plays as comedies, but most of us find them quite dark.
"The Seagull," set in 1800s Russia, is filled with drama and misery, including a suicide attempt and a dead child (both off stage). In this work, Chekhov focused on the relationships between an actress, her well-known writer lover, her son who is also a writer and a young neighbor who dreams of being an actress, along with the other people intertwined in their lives. The older generation of characters appear satisfied, but are unhappy and the younger ones are dealing with their struggles to find happiness.
Turn the pages forward to today and the West Coast premiere of "Gulls" by Nick Salamone. His "free adaptation" of Chekhov's play is set in 1959 Greenwich Village and Hollywood with the same core of characters: There's a Broadway star, her novelist/screenwriter lover, her beat poet son and a young woman whom everyone adores.
But that's not all: it's a musical.
"In the way that `West Side Story' was a serious musical, this is a serious musical that I think there's a void Advertisement for and I think it fills the void," Salamone said. "I think people will find the experience of the play very timely on several levels, I think they will find it very entertaining, also moving and, I hope, thought-provoking."
Salamone's previous works include "Hillary Agonistes" and "All Soul's Day." He has also taken inspiration from Chekhov before, looking to "The Three Sisters" for "Moscow." Adding interest, Moscow's composer, Maury McIntyre, and director, Jessica Kubzansky, are repeating their roles for "Gulls."
Salamone, also an actor, became fascinated with Chekhov and "The Seagull" after performing the play in New York.
"I was attracted by the generational aspects of the conflicts in the play, where the young people were looking to break out and the older people . . . had lots of different frustrations," Salamone said.
He began writing "Gulls" in 2002, selecting a key year, 1959, for its setting, so that he could add perspective on the past while looking at the future.
"That's sort of a tag line - the year was 1959 and we were all `gulled' into believing we were something we were not," Salamone said.
He wanted to explore the end of the Eisenhower era, when America considered itself a world leader and thought there were certain truths about its past and future. This period in time appeared to be one of conformity, but just below the surface, change was brewing, from the beat generation and hippie culture to the Civil Rights Movement and the moral implications of continued atomic bomb testing.
"I started writing the musical in 2002 and it's all of a sudden become shockingly timely because of the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama and a lot of the issues that it's bringing up," Salamone said.
Other changes have modernized the play as well, such as bringing both the suicide attempt and the mother of the dead baby confronting its father from behind the scenes to the stage.
The characters vary as well, with some bearing strong resemblances to the originals and others as composites or taking on a trait that may have been prominent in another.
Salamone sought an innovative way to present his work.
"Every time I see a production of `The Seagull,' one production tone is wildly different from the tone of the next production, and sometimes within the production, the tone is wildly divergent," Salamone said. "It makes for a really bumpy ride" for the audience.
Making it a musical controls the tone, he said. "One of the things my composing partner, Maury McIntyre, and I could accomplish by musicalizing `The Seagull' or by using it as an inspiration for a musical, is that we could control the tone better," Salamone said.
There are 31 songs in "Gulls," written to reflect the characters and how they would express themselves. There are lush over-the-top musical numbers, jazz, doo wop and even '60s folk.
Those who enjoyed "West Side Story" as well as Chekhov fans should appreciate "Gulls," Salamone said.
Yet he feels that Chekhov fans will appreciate the reverence that Salamone has given the playwright, as well as the risks and divergences born out of "The Seagull."
"We're not trying to out-Chekhov Chekhov," he said. "We're writing our own work, but if you have an interest in Chekhov's characters and themes, I think you will be interested in seeing how we play them here."
Salamone has been writing plays since the age 4. He said he would force his cousins and siblings to perform them. He graduated with degrees in theater and English from Tufts University in Massachusetts and went straight into acting.
"I am one of those people who are doing exactly what they went to college for," Salamone said.
He has also written a new play that is set entirely on an old fishing boat. Titled either "Sea Days" or "A Day Out of Time" (Salamone hasn't made up his mind yet), it will be produced in September at the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center's Lily Tomlin/Jane Wagner Cultural Arts Center. But for now, "Gulls" has him satisfied.
"A musical is hard enough, and even harder than a musical is Chekhov," Salamone said. "Doing both at the same time and getting it right is one of those things that is almost impossible. But I think the cast and the director have pulled it off."
(626) 962-8811, Ext. 2128
IN Magazine, Los Angeles
The Chekhov-inspired musical Gulls takes flight at
Boston Court
In creating Gulls, a new musical inspired by Anton Chekhov's The Seagull,writer Nick Salamone had the simple but ambitious desire to "say something about America," he shares in a conversation three days before the first preview at Pasadena's Theatre@Boston Court. Set in 1959, Gulls goes from Greenwich Village to Hollywood, following a cast of characters covering the gamut of race, age, gender and sexuality.
"What I'm trying to deal with thematically is how the '60s is about to break the country wide open, and then by the end of the play we're sort of telescoped way into the future and we're asked the question, "Have we gained anything?'" he says.
Chekhov's original was written in the mid-1890s, as industrialization was creating a growing proletariat class in the rapidly modernizing nation, sowing the seeds of the socialist revolution to come.The Seagull is marked by generational conflict, and most of the primary characters are in denial about some aspect of their reality. Chekhov's Arkadina, the highly theatrical actress,becomes Irenie in Gulls,a grand dame of the mid-20th-century Broadway stage who gets a toehold in Hollywood after naming names to the House Un-American Affairs Committee.Her son,the idealistic young playwright Constantine in the original, becomes Conrad, a Beat poet whose "artistic passion is more closely linked and,indeed,subsumed by a political passion to change the world," Salamone explains.Arkadina's younger lover, the two-bit writer, Trigorin, is Gore in Gulls, a novelist/screenwriter with a wandering eye, and the young Nina, Chekhov's ingŽnue actress,is still named Nina,but is an African-American woman who "wants to run off to Hollywood to be the new Dorothy Dandridge," the writer says.
All of the characters are overseen by a narrating ghost."He's a black,gay sailor,"Salamone shares,"and he keeps needling away at the characters.É The tag line that is oft-repeated by the ghost is,"The year was 1959 and we were all gulled into believing we were something we were not.'The theme is about how these people have fooled themselves." Maury McIntyre's score reflects the time period. "There's a lot of Beatnik jazz-type riffiness in certain numbers, and there's a certain mid-century Broadway idiom, particularly for the big numbers of the Broadway diva," Salamone says.
The writer and composer have worked together several times over the past 10-15 years,including creating the acclaimed musical Moscow, based on Chekhov's Three Sisters, giving them a creative shorthand that allows them to collaborate with trust."I feel like we're joined at the head now," Salamone says with a hearty laugh that comes easily in his thoughtful conversation.
Gulls has been workshopped at Boston Court several times, and the theater's coartistic director, Jessica Kubzansky—a longtime colloborator of Salamone's—directs. "She's just so gifted," Salamone gushes. "She knows dramatic structure so well, and how to finely tune a piece of—dare I say it?—art.
The play is not your typical musical—it's certainly a post-Sondheim musical. [Laughs] We're really trying to say something, and we're trying to turn some conventions on their head, and she's brilliant that way. She's fearless." Fearlessness should come in handy with a project that takes on issues of race and sexuality, dreams and delusions, and intergenerational divisions, all on the cusp of the sexual revolution. "It's very ambitious," Salamone says with
another big laugh. "I'm very proud of it."
Gulls runs through Aug. 24 at the Theatre@
Boston Court, 70 N. Mentor, Pasadena.
For tickets and more information, visit
bostoncourt.org.
BY
CHRISTOPHER CAPPIELLO
Los Angeles Times
A musical adaptation of
Chekhov's 'The Seagull' struggles for altitude at the Theatre @ Boston Court.
By Charles McNulty, Times Theater Critic
August 1, 2008
Points for degree of difficulty: "Gulls," which is receiving its
world premiere at the Theatre @ Boston Court <http://www.bostoncourt.com>
, sets out to transform Anton Chekhov's "The Seagull" into a musical.
Now, there's a reason the words "Chekhov" and "musical"
aren't normally conjoined: The Russian playwright's reticent world is
antithetical to brassiness and belting. And this play about artists strung out
in love, teetering as it is on the border between comedy and tragedy, is
challenging enough to pull off -- why compound the tonal elusiveness with
song-and-dance raucousness?
"Gulls" rarely takes flight, but not because Maury McIntyre's jazz
score (performed live by a small ensemble) is earthbound. Quite the contrary --
there are a couple of soaring moments, even if the fleet instrumental
accompaniment can't satisfy all the leaden demands of Nick Salamone's
cumbersome book.
The story is updated to 1959, a point that's drilled into our heads by a
superfluous narrator (Clinton Derricks-Carroll) who wants to frame the work as
a morality tale about the phony promise of America.
Initially set in Greenwich Village, where Conrad (John Keefe), the poet-son of
aging movie star Irenie (RendŽ Rae Norman), has fallen under the
countercultural influence of the Beats, the play breathlessly motors off to
sunny California as the characters chase their creative dreams and futile
passions.
Ever-economical Chekhov could contain the universe in a snow globe; Salamone
refuses to rein in his unwieldy vision, adding closeted homosexuality,
interracial romance and the McCarthy witch hunts to his undisciplined plot.
Director Jessica Kubzansky can be relied on to make everything flow as
elegantly as possible (Michelle Ney's sets and Jeremy Pivnick's lighting lend
aesthetic grace). And the cast showcases some fine talent -- Sabrina Sloan, who
plays Nina, the screen-goddess wannabe, is particularly radiant, and her
numbers with Robert Mammana's Gore, Irenie's bestselling-author beau, provide
much needed lift. But the bulky nature of this reworking grounds this oversized
bird.
Entertainment Today, 7/31/08
TICKETHOLDERS
by Travis Michael Holder
Gulls
Theatre @ Boston Court
When The Drowsy Chaperone first left the Ahmanson headed for Broadway fame and fortune, Howard Kissel wrote of it in his review for the New York Daily News: "It's full of wit and high spirits, so entertaining you can overlook the fact it came from Los Angeles." As long as that unending false impression of all things theatrical born and bred (or at least cultivated) in LA continues to offend, that kinda stuff is really beginning to pissmethefuck off. As someone who resides in both cities, I can say unequivocally much of what I see onstage created here often stands heads and shoulders above projects germinated in New York.
As I sat in the grateful and sufficiently awestruck opening night audience of Nick Salamone's Gulls at Theatre @ Boston Court, I kept thinking of ways this magnificent production could overcome the fact that it originated here in our much-maligned reclaimed desert. What a shame that has to be a consideration.
Gulls is, simply, Salamone and composer Maury McIntyre's Little Night Music, a sweeping, gently elegant, resplendently appointed musical adaptation of Chekhov's enduring masterpiece The Seagull. Here the tale is time-warped from the pre-Revolutionary Russia of the 1890s to Greenwich Village in 1959, at the height of the creative restlessness signature to the Kerouac-Ginsberg years of literary experimentation and a brave new artistic abandon. Chekhov's timeless epic, which originally explored the enormous social changes affecting ol' Anton's world during the last gasps of the 19th century, translates perfectly to America in the middle of our last, a time when people were just beginning to speak out and use their previously unacceptable public vociferousness to make significant changes in the way our culture was to evolve over the next 50 years.
The word "teamwork" is almost not enough to describe what happens when misters Chekhov, Salamone, and McIntyre collaborate with Jessica Kubzansky, one of our town's most prominent and gifted directors. This unique relationship was already established with the success of the quartet's joint effort Moscow a decade ago, another musical re-envisioning of one of the master's other great classics, The Three Sisters. That production also began here in El Lay and went on to win a handful of Garland Awards before a slew of honors were bestowed upon it at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival three years later.
Of course, the artistic cooperation of Chekhov to this process was posthumous then as it is now again, as the best theatrical wordsmith of his time shuffled off his mortal coil some 104 years ago. But if there wasn't a secret clairvoyant channeling the playwright directly in weekly sŽances at some guarded location (perhaps a nicely renovated Craftsman at the top of Melrose Hill?), something tells me Mr. C. would still be incredibly proud of what has happened to both of his illustrious plays, which have been swept into another century by Salamone's brilliant imagination and distinctive ability to show how much the two eras dealt with similar issues.
Although a couple of Salamone's characters are amalgams of The Seagull's band of dysfunctional relatives and other strangers, some of whom were a tad Bloomsbury even before Virgie and her gang began their infamously public intermingling, each of them has as least some—if not a lot—of correlation to their original Chekhovian counterparts.
There's Irenie Bennett (an alternately brassy and quietly touching performance by Rende Rae Norman), sitting in for Madame Arkadina, Chekhov's well-known Russian stage actress here transformed into a Broadway star who found fame and a considerable fortune in the Woods of Holly. Arkadina's brooding young playwright son Konstantin Treplyov becomes Conrad (an arresting turn by the źber-talented John Keefe, mentioned in print by me before as actor on rapid rise in our community), who as Gulls opens aggressively shouts his profane and shocking beat poetry to a restless gathering of dismissive family members.
Connie has the hots for Nina (a luminous Sabrina Sloan), daughter of Irenie's longtime dresser, a yearning he shares with his cousin Zelda (Grace Will), who as the character Masha in The Seagull was created somewhat before homosexuality was a subject writers easily explored. Furthering the characteristically unrequited nature of love, Zelda simultaneously spurns the doe-eyed advances of the supernerdy Morris (Will Collyer, an actor observably always there when anyone needs him take chances), while Nina manages to get herself involved romantically with Irenie's screenwriter boytoy Gore (Robert Mammana), substituting here for Chekhov's infamous Trigorin.
These Village-ers are complemented by the inclusion of miserable former Navy commander Nicky Sorinsky and his loving but equally miserable Eastern European wife Paulette (Marc Cardiff and Eileen T'Kaye), his character a fusion between Chekhov's Sorin, Madame Arkadina's sickly brother, and her estate manager and retired military officer Shamrayev. The sad side story of the Sorinskys, he a closet case too rigid to come out and she not having a clue what's gone wrong with their marriage, is made indelible by Cardiff and especially T'Kaye, who will break your heart with McIntyre's haunting, showstopping eleventh-hour duet with Will called "Some Things."
The ninth and final character here is a ghostly narrator named Jackson (a dynamic Clinton Derricks-Carroll, who instantly proves he can act and sing rings around his twin brother Cleavant), a recent suicide whose relationship with Nicky might even be more reason why he jumped off the roof of the Sorinsky's brownstone, perhaps an even thornier issue than his growing disenchantment with the lot of being African-American in the decade before civil rights made some—but still not enough—changes. While Salamone has cunningly added Jackson as an invention to the castlist of Gulls, there's more than a bit of other Seagull characters traveling through him, including qualities of Shamrayev, Dr. Dorn, and even the hardworking lower-class laborer Yakov.
But then, there's almost a 10th notable character here: McIntyre's evocative, heroic musical achievement, with songs that seem to effortlessly slip between homages to Sondheim, Ellington and Miles Davis. McIntyre's composition is so stuffed full of unforgettably poignant ballads, raucously entertaining showtunes, and smartly repeated jazz riffs, that it must have made the work of world-class musical director Greg Chun (who helped bring Eric Whitacre's Paradise Lost to splendid fruition at this same theatre last season) something that makes contributing to 99-seat theatre worth the lack of meaningful remuneration, particularly considering our current economy and gas prices to complicate anyone's drive to Pasadena.
The second act takes some of Gulls' earlier action off the Sorinsky's Village rooftop and places it, as the program proclaims, "From Sea to Shining Sea." This includes a scene cleverly set in San Francisco's legendary City Lights Bookstore, where Conrad has been asked to read his rather scratchy poetry and Zelda has become so comfortable that she's taken to calling the place's infamous proprietor "Larry," as well as Gore's Beachwood Drive pad, the pied-a-terre where he goes to escape from the gargantuan shadow of Irenie as it dominates and spreads her sense of entitlement across the entire Malibu Beach Colony.
Gulls is a major, major new musical thanks to the obvious endowments (no, now, not those endowments) of a scholarly bookwriter with his signature dark sense of humor, as well as the composer's arrestingly evocative musical compositions, the incomparable mind's eye view endemic to any project touched by Kubzansky's gifts, a cast that could not be improved upon if anyone were to try, and the incredibly first-class facilities and design elements offered to any show fortunate enough to debut at the Boston Court.
Michelle Ney's set, Jeremy Pivnik's lighting, Martin Carrillo's sound, Kitty McNamee's choreography, Becca Coffman's hair and make-up, and particularly Alex Jaeger's splendidly colorful and occasionally even chic 1950s costuming, are all to be commended as well, among every other exceptional design element and work assignment brought to this production.
I'm not sure if it was Shakespeare (or was it Pamela and Tommy Lee?) who first coined the phrase "a match made in heaven" but, after a night out getting gloriously lost in the fascinating world of Nick Salamone's Gulls, you'd swear it was a line from a Chekhov play.
Gulls plays through Aug. 24 at the Theatre @ Boston Court, 70 N. Mentor, Pasadena; for tickets, call 626.683.6883.
* * *
Out West Arts
By Brian
A lesson for the new century – Max Bialystock's downfall is not the result simply of unbridled ambition but of poor execution. In Mel Brooks' The Producers he famously stages the worst musical imaginable in the hopes of guaranteeing a flop—and his success. But things go awry when he overshoots his mark, "Springtime for Hitler" becomes a comic hit. If he wanted to ensure a financially profitable flop, he might have wanted to aim lower, say with Anton Chekhov instead. Sure it may seem that the Russian's plays scream out for musical adaptations, but they are not as easy as you might think.
Take Gulls, the world premiere musical currently on stage at The Theater at Boston Court. With book and lyrics by Nick Salamone and music by Maury McIntyre, the adaptation of Chekhov's The Seagull boldly takes a play that is thorny to begin with and replants it in 1959. A gutsy move to be sure, but more so when one considers the many transpositions and reassignments that are needed to keep this boat moving. Though to be fair, if Chekhov were writing today the interracial-gay-love-affair-between-two-US-Navy-men-during-WWII subplot might well have made the final cut of the original. Oh yes there is a lot here to chew on and, after about three hours, one's jaws are achingly tired. But at least there is a happy ending. (Though somehow not for the gay couple, but isn't that always the way in the theater?)
The music itself is jazz-influenced and often quite catchy. There are some great numbers, especially for RendŽ Rae Norman who stars as the pushy actress-mother Irenie Bennett. The whole piece works not unlike a Handel opera where all of the 9 major characters get their own arias and moments to shine in each act. The production is set on a single New York City rooftop and as is typical for Boston Court it appears that no expense was spared on the production relative to the theater's small size. That's true of the cast as well, which features the likes of such talents as Clinton Derricks-Carroll who fills an essentially unnecessary narrator role with some of the evening's liveliest moments. The ingenue role is occupied quite strikingly by Sabrina Sloan, an ex-American Idol finalist and a darn good vocalist. Director Jessica Kubzansky keeps everyone moving, which is no small task given the overly involved and complicated machinery of the story and a rather large cast.
But all is not well for a work that seems both overly explained and hopelessly confusing at the same time. So in an A for effort world, Gulls might soar, but here on earth, we are left to wonder and hope that somewhere, someone is making a killing off of this rather reaching failure.
By Vicki Smith Paluch, Correspondent
Article Launched: 07/31/2008 03:23:37 PM PDT
"Gulls," a Chekhov-inspired new musical currently playing at The
Theatre @ Boston Court, takes us on a compelling but somewhat flawed journey
into 1959 America, a time when social, cultural and political change was on the
horizon.
Playwright and lyricist Nick Salamone draws upon the themes and characters of
Anton Chekhov's "The Seagull" to delineate the struggle between those
artists who want to maintain traditional conventions and those who want "new"
art. That struggle of old versus new is then reflected back into society.
The endeavor to be an artist in "Gulls" strikes this viewer as a
revisioning of "Rent," the extremely popular musical version of
Puccini's "La Boehme," shifting the tale of starving artists from
Paris to those in Greenwich Village in the 1980s.
It is on the old ways versus the new societal front where "Gulls"
succeeds and wins this viewer's heart. Salamone's "Gulls" is nearly
encyclopedic in its painting of an era when we were "gulled" into
submission.
To guide us through the sea changes of 1959, Salamone gives us our narrator,
Jackson. Played by Clinton Derricks-Carroll, he uses his best Morgan
Freeman-esque baritone to not only guide us through the play but to provide his
own back story, as well as that of our host.
Jackson takes us to the rooftop of the Greenwich Village four-story walk up of
a retired U.S. Navy admiral, Nicky (Marc Cardiff), who was at the helm of the
U.S.S. Chester during the war andwanwhen it landed in San Francisco for V.J.
day.
The Chester was an integrated ship, but the racial strides made during World
War II failed to take hold back at home where segregation continued. Jackson,
once again an outcast as an African American, despairs. He is brought into
Nicky's home in 1951.
It is here the admiral's long-suffering, thickly-accented Russian migr wife
Paulette (Eileen T'Kaye), turns a blind eye to her husband's wanderings just to
maintain the traditional home. After all, she has a daughter, Zelda (Grace Wall),
to support and marry off.
But the daughter shares her father's wanderlust and doesn't want to settle for
a life as "the wife of" - in this case - a brilliant mathematics
post-doc at Princeton, Morris (Will Collyer) who desperately wants to marry her,
have stability and work on the next generation of hydrogen bombs.
There also is the glamorous Hollywood actress Irenie (Rende Rae Norman), her
second husband-novelist-turned-screenwriter-against-his-will, Gore (Robert
Mammana) and her son, Conrad (John Keefe), a wanna-be beat poet who desperately
yearns to see Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights in San Francisco.
Conrad's love interest is Nina (Sabrina Sloan), the beautiful daughter of
Irenie's African-American maid. She has little interest in his plan to go to
San Francisco; Nina sees her future in sunny Hollywood, where she hopes to be
an actress like Irenie.
The show, in the best Stephen Sondheim style, is mostly told through three- and
four-part songs. Salamone and composer Maury McIntyre allude to Sondheim's
early musical theater work for such shows as "West Side Story" (1957)
and "Gypsy" (1959). Salamone's lyrics deftly convey the dense
historical allusions with biting wit and insight.
The ensemble is simply remarkable. Each holds his or her own with complete
commitment to the unique characters. T'Kaye's Paulette and Sloan's Nina are
utterly heartbreaking as the traditional women who are betrayed and neglected.
Cardiff's Nicky and Mammana's Gore are cold-blooded in their self-absorption
and denial, while Keefe's Conrad explodes in his self-destructive quest to live
the beat life. Wall captures the full fire of Zelda's passionate idealism and
her courage to come out of the closet at a time when homosexuality was a crime.
Norman steals the show with her over-the-top, bourbon- swilling Hollywood
actress who turned her back on the legit stage and turned in her first husband
and others during the search for communists during the McCarthy hearings. As
repulsive as her character's character is, Norman makes Irenie's loneliness and
desperation palpable.
Director Jessica Kubzansky keeps this wide-ranging and lengthy production on
track and generally keeps our interest high and focused. However, at nearly
three hours in length, one grows weary.
As with any visit to a gathering at a dysfunctional family, the confrontations
and high jinks are amusing and enlightening to a point for the onlookers. But
when it goes on to excess, the visitor loses sympathy for all those involved in
the last scene.
Maybe Chekhov knew best.
LA Weekly
GO
Playwright Nick Salamone and composer Maurice McIntyre have loosely adapted Chekhov's The Seagull to America of the 1950s, handily transforming the Russian classic about artistic idealism and despair into an American musical about commerce and repression. It's a savvy move, translating the artistic tensions of late-19th-century Russia (doomed, high-minded symbolism versus commercial expedience) into artistic tensions of mid-20th-century America (doomed, high-minded symbolism versus commercial expedience). The American symbolism manifests itself in Beat poetry, embodied in frustrated playwright Conrad (John Keefe) and his love-hate relationship with his aging diva mother, Irenie Bennet (RendŽ Rae Norman) — who's fixated on philandering, successful screenwriter Gore Fitzwarren (Robert Mammana), a man painfully aware of his own mediocrity. The center of the storm is an African-American actress, Nina (Sabrina Sloan). After being toyed with by Gore, she flees Greenwich Village with pals Zelda (Grace Wall) and Conrad so the three can be free spirits in San Francisco. But the tug of Gore pulls her south to meet her spiritual decimation in L.A. (which is what L.A. does best). Salamone's book comes packed with pithy lines and attitudes, such as Irenie's contempt for the world being off its axis if the sun sets behind Hoboken rather than into the Pacific, where it should. Clinton Derricks-Carroll portrays a jive-poet narrator with links to both Nina and her parents (Marc Cardiff and Eileen T'Kaye) that are better left unrevealed here. McIntyre's score has a subtly abstract, dissonant flow, with smidgens of gospel and '40s swing, accentuated in Kitty McNamee's buoyant choreography. Despite Jessica Kubzansky's textured staging and wonderful performances, the event feels pro forma until it finds its emotional stride in Act 2, when it enters the Land of Disappointments. There's a heart wrench for all seasons when Gore, isolated in Beachwood Canyon to write his next screenplay, is visited by his young former muse and has nothing to offer but politeness and platitudes. The play's closing scene contains a hollow gush worthy of Gore, or Rent, but that's not worth dwelling on when there's so much good work on this stage. Theatre @ Boston Court, 70 N. Mentor Ave., Pasadena; Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.; thru Aug. 24. (626) 683-6883. (Steven Leigh Morris)
LA City Beat
All-Singing! All-Dancing!
Two new musicals jack the
classic
By Don Shirley
The idea of turning classic dramas into musicals often arouses snickering. But
consider West Side Story. It's a very loose adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, set
in a different time and place. The more thorough the changes are, the less
likely that a musical version will be considered a silly or exploitative
corruption of the original.
Two new musicals are freely adapted from classics. Gulls transplants and
updates Chekhov's The Seagull to America, 1959. DeLEARious riffs primarily on
Shakespeare's King Lear, although it also throws other odd elements into its
satirical stew.
The two shows don't have much in common, though both could use a trim. But both
are commendable theatrical adventures, especially for those who are familiar
with the sources.
Gulls is set in three cities – New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles
– instead of The Seagull's rural Russian estate. The coming-of-age
characters find plenty of cultural and intellectual stimuli at their doorstep.
When the young poet (John Keefe) performs his latest opus for his famous
actress mother (Rende Rae Norman) on the Greenwich Village rooftop over his
uncle's apartment, his manifesto isn't quite as hopeless as in the original's
corresponding scene. He doesn't abruptly halt the performance in recognition of
the audience's disdain. It helps that his poem is set to a jazzy score by Maury
McIntyre, with clever beat lyrics by Nick Salamone, who also wrote the book.
Many of the relationships retain vestiges of the original's. The poet sneers at
his mother's success and her new lover, a novelist and screenwriter (Robert
Mammana). He's head over heels for his mother's late dresser's daughter, the
aspiring actress Nina (Sabrina Sloan), whose light-skinned black heritage
probably makes her even more tempting for the young rebel.
But Salamone also invented some major departures from the original. The poet's
cousin Zelda (Grace Wall) isn't in love with him as much as she is with his
attitudes. Eventually we learn that Zelda's actual object of desire is Nina.
Meanwhile, the marriage of Zelda's retired admiral father (Marc Cardiff) and
her Eastern European mother (Eileen T'Kaye) is on the rocks for reasons that
are explained only in fits and starts. But let's just say that they involve one
of the ex-admiral's Navy colleagues (Clinton Derricks-Carroll until last weekend,
Harrison White starting this weekend) – a ghostly African American man
who doubles as the play's omniscient narrator.
This narrator feels anti-Chekhovian. He speaks directly to the audience,
sometimes repeating his ham-fisted commentaries such as the ritualistic "The
year was 1959, and we were all gulled into believing we were something we were
not." Unlike many narrators, he doesn't help elucidate the plot. The role
should be cut.
More often, the characters successfully personalize their cusp-of-change moment
in America just as Chekhov's Russians did with their own fin-de-siecle era.
This is a much bigger and less eccentric Chekhov musical than the
McIntyre/Salamone team's earlier Moscow. Jessica Kubzansky's staging and Greg
Chun's musical direction enhance all the details.
DeLEARious plays like a full-length Second City musical – its
author/director Ron West is a Second City vet whose previous collaboration with
composer Phil Swann, The People vs. Friar Laurence, had a similar tone. The
high quality of wit holds up longer than anyone might expect – even as
the plot ventures away from Lear and into such detours as the writing of the
King James Bible and auditions for this very musical. The rapid-fire pacing
seldom takes laugh breaks, so you're grateful that the laughs aren't all that
loud, because you want to hear the next line. The quicksilver actors play many
roles in three eras on a nearly bare stage – but we never lose our place.
It's, yes, the most delirious Lear you may ever see.
Gulls,
Theatre@Boston Court, Pasadena, (626) 683-6883. bostoncourt.org. Closes August
24.
DeLEARious, Open
Fist Theatre, Hollywood, (323) 882-6912. openfist.org. Closes August 29.
For more
reviews, go to lacitybeat.com, click on LA&E and Stage.
Stagehappenings.com
Shirle Gottleib
No one has more respect for playwright Nick Salamone, composer Maury McIntyre, and director Jessica Kubzansky than we do. This trio has worked together since 1995 when they collaborated on "Riffs and Credos," a cutting-edge project that introduced their many talents to the Los Angeles theater community.
Since then, each of them has earned well-deserved awards as individuals; and now they're back together with a contemporary musical loosely based on Anton Chekhov's haunting "The Seagull."
The fact that Chekhov's character-driven masterpiece has been transplanted from Russia to Greenwich Village and Hollywood--and updated from 1895 to 1959--is perfectly plausible. But choosing to present such terse material in musical form is a daunting task that poses some problems.
In spite of the challenges they face, you couldn't ask for a finer cast. All ten actors work together as a seamless ensemble of troubled souls who are desperately searching for love, meaning, and acceptance during a transitional period of history.
The dynamic opening number acts as a preamble that sets the stage for the hope and tragedy to follow. Serving as a composite stage manager/narrator/Everyman, Jackson (portrayed by Clinton Derricks-Carroll) steps out of the shadows and introduces the disparate characters, defines their dreams, hints at their inner struggles, and describes the politics of the period during its "change, change, change."
Then off we go on their tragic journey as each character has his/her dreams shot down because of fatal flaws, false pride, greed, or other defects in the human condition. As always, Kubzansky's direction is tight, well-paced, cohesive, and right in line with the playwright's intentions.
Everyone on stage has been "gulled." All of them are sea birds who have either deceived themselves or have been sold a bill of goods. Acts I and II take place on the rooftop of Nicky and Paulette Sorinsky's Greenwich Village brownstone (stunning design by Michelle Ney with fabulous lighting by Jeremy Pivnick). Act III follows their dreams to California and the end of the rainbow.
Nicky, the family patriarch, is portrayed by Marc Cardiff. A retired Navy officer, he is depressed and taciturn--a figure who lives inside himself and is non-committal. His Polish wife Paulette (the wonderful Eileen T'Kaye) has survived so much horror in her lifetime she has become a resigned fatalist.
There's Nicky's sister Irenie (Rende Rae Norman), a sad, fading beauty and over-the-hill actress who has paid her dues with a long stream of lovers. There's her out-of-wedlock son Conrad (John Keefe), an angry, vulnerable, would-be poet who is influenced by Ginsberg and the Beat Generation. And there's her current lover Gore (Robert Mammana), a screen writer who has sold his soul to Hollywood.
Conrad is desperately in love with Nina (Sabrina Sloan), the beautiful daughter of the family's black housekeeper. Nina dreams of becoming an actress, is best friends with Zelda (the Sorinsky's daughter played by Grace Wall) and is openly accepted by all of them as long as she keeps her place.
Throw in Morris (Will Collyer) who follows Zelda around like a heart- sick puppy dog, and you have an intense set of broken dreams and big ambitions that are interwoven with each other.
The problems are not in the plot (which more or less follows Chekhov's), the problem is trying to cram too much political history from the sixties into the content. The story-line is dramatic enough. Less is always more. Adding homosexuality, racial prejudice, and politics to the mix is overkill. Then trying to frame it as a morality play, and force such dire detail into musical form, is damn near impossible.
Salamone is a strong writer. There's a lot of solid theatrical stuff in "Gulls." If he would pare the excess back to the bone, the wounded birds could soar on the crest of McIntyre's music, under Kubzansky's direction, before they meet their final destiny.
"Gulls" continues at The Theatre @ Boston Court, 70 North Mentor, Pasadena through August 24. For ticket information call (626) 683-6883
By TERRY MORGAN
A Theater @ Boston Court
presentation of a musical in two acts with book and lyrics by Nick Salamone
with music by Maury McIntyre. Directed by Jessica Kubzansky. Musical direction
by Greg Chun.
Jackson - Clinton Derricks-Carroll
Nina - Sabrina Sloan
Conrad - John Keefe Irenie Bennett - Rende Rae Norman
Zelda Sorinsky - Grace Wall
Nicky Sorinsky - Marc Cardiff
Gore Fitzwarren - Robert Mammana
Paulette Sorinsky - Eileen
T'Kaye
Morris - Will Collyer
The concept of a musical based on Chekhov's "The Seagull" may seem
like the very definition of a misbegotten idea, but the world premiere of
"Gulls" at the Boston Court Performing Arts Center does not lack for
positive qualities. A lot of Nick Salamone's writing works, from poetic lyrics
to witty asides, but it also suffers from overambition, trying to encompass
everything from the Chekhov play to the Beat Generation, and throwing race
relations and homosexuality into the mix to boot. The play founders trying to
do too many things and, at almost three hours, could benefit from a substantial
edit.
Jessica Kubzansky's direction is clever and lively, and Maury McIntyre's score
is jazzy and tasteful, performed skillfully under conductor Brent Crayon.
The ghost of sailor Jackson (Clinton Derricks-Carroll) informs the audience it
is 1959 in New York City. Famed Hollywood actress Irenie Bennett (Rende Rae
Norman), her novelist boyfriend (Robert Mammana), her naval admiral brother
(Marc Cardiff), his Polish emigre wife (Eileen T'Kaye) and conservative young
Morris (Will Collyer) have just finished listening to a recitation of Irenie's
son's (John Keefe) new poem, with the assistance of Nicky's daughter (Grace
Wall) and young actress Nina (Sabrina Sloan). It's to be the group's last
moment of relative happiness, as the pursuits of true love and personal freedom
pull them apart.
Derricks-Carroll sets the stage with plenty of charisma and verbal dexterity in
"Jackson's Jive," but overall his character is underwritten and
underutilized, and he is unfortunately left to stand around a lot. Norman gets
the best lines in the show and nails them all, and she delivers
"Credo" with brassy panache. Mammana is good, but his character's
motivations are unclear as written, so the part remains a bit opaque. T'Kaye
excels, and her perfs on "Gwumpkees" and "Some Things" are
expert.
Sloan is moving as the unlucky Nina, and her singing voice is used to beautiful
effect in "I Remember Everything" and the duet "Slow Down."
Wall portrays Zelda as brash but essentially kind, and is in lovely voice for
the duet with T'Kaye, "Some Things." Keefe stays on the same note of
passionate intensity throughout the play, whether happy or angry or sad, and
his perf could use a bit of modulation. Cardiff's role is underwritten, and
Collyer's character seems frankly extraneous altogether, but both actors bring
their talents to bear on the material.
Some of Kubzansky's more effective moments include placing Jackson reclining on
cargo netting directly over the audience at one point, and a bit where Conrad
unexpectedly hugs his mother, but then leaves before she can return the
embrace, emphasizing their emotional distance and repressed desire for
closeness in one moment. Michelle Ney's spare set, composed of a few chairs and
tables in front of some gray backdrops, adds little to the proceedings. Jeremy
Pivnick 's lighting feels similarly uninspired, but Martin Carrillo's sound
design unobtrusively creates varied aural atmospheres.
Sets, Michelle Ney; costumes, Alex Jaeger; lighting, Jeremy Pivnick; sound,
Martin Carrillo; choreography, Kitty McNamee; production stage manager, Justine
Baldwin. Opened July 26, 2008. Reviewed Aug. 3. Runs through Aug. 24. Running
time: 2 HOURS, 45 MIN.
EDGE Publications
Gulls
by Trevor Thomas
Assistant National Arts and Entertainment Editor
Monday Aug 4, 2008
If you are taking a junior college course in Mid-20th Century American History and need to cram for your midterm, go see Gulls at the Boston Court Theater. If you are looking for a well-crafted musical with wonderful songs, honest human emotion and a compelling story, find something else.
This new musical (a riff on Anton Chekhov's "The Seagull") unfolds like the desultory lecture of a tenured beatnik professor, still burning with anti-establishment fervor but stuck having to explain everything to a room full of bored students fidgeting in their seats.
The year was 1959 as we are told again and again. Bop was king, Joseph McCarthy and Allen Ginsberg stood at the polar extremes of American culture, and the talk among the intelligensia was of hydrogen bombs and that damned Eisenhower. Though "Gulls" playwright and lyricist Nick Salomone seeks to expose us to the full richness of the era, in the process he forgets that theater is not a lecture hall, and the people up there aren't teaching assistants.
Every single song (and there are thousands of them) sags under the weight of endless tacked on references to Hemingway, Lana Turner, Gandhi, Khrushchev, Coney Island, Jack Warner, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Nathan's Hot Dogs, the City Lights Bookstore, Jack Kerouac and so forth. Mr. Salomone is so single minded in his drive to ornament his work with period detail that tableau becomes a substitute for drama. While he is busy at the lectern, cast members are left scurrying around behind him trying to find convincing ways to deal with scenes and musical numbers filled with over-the-top conflict expressed through emotions that flare up and vanish again like backdrafts. Nearly every song seems to end with some form of mumbling; nobody on the creative team has apparently ever heard of the classic "Ta da!"
The music itself is so much frenetic monotony. To be fair, composer Maury McIntire was forced to compose what is in essence a jazz opera constructed entirely of recitative. His music, though highly kinetic, lumbers on with repetitious modal harmonies supporting a superstructure of jazz riffs and short rhythmic bursts reminiscent of the bop stylings of Charlie Mingus or John Coltrane. That there is not an ounce of melodic greatness in the score has much to do with the fact that none was called for.
There is exactly one song in the entire dreary lot ("Photoplay," involving a trio of women ogling the latest issues of their fan magazines) that works in a perfect theatrical way. It unfolds as breezily and naturally as a Cole Porter list song. Its cultural references belong, it is funny and clever and charmingly staged by director Jessica Kubzansky. And for one brief moment, the audience gets to relax and enjoy itself before being forced back to work.
Of the plot, suffice it to say that the sexual triangles of the Chekhov classic find new expression but without the pleasant ambiance of dachas and birch forests. Anyone familiar with the original knows its story of the celebrated actress (RendŽ Rae Norman) who suffers the indignity of her lover's (Robert Mammana) involvement with a young girl (Sabrina Sloan) who in turn is being wooed by the actress's poet son (John Keefe). Not content to leave this rich vein of story theatrically half-mined, Mr. Salamone digs on and comes up with a nugget of lesbian infatuation involving a beatnik hanger-on (Grace Wall) and the ossified remains of a failed homosexual affair between characters played by Clinton Derricks-Carroll and Marc Cardiff.
Best among the cast is Ms. Norman who does everything she possibly can to craft a fully dimensioned character for herself despite the inept theatricality that short circuits her good efforts. Along with Ms. Norman, all the cast members have wonderful voices. They work their instruments like gangbusters to sell the songs they are assigned, but in a milieu so profoundly out of the moment, their exertions mostly land with great groaning thuds. In the end, all these poor "seagulls," longing to soar, are shot down like so many clay pigeons.
Boston Court Theatre, 70 N. Mentor Ave., Pasadena CA. Performances Wednesday through Saturday evenings at 8 pm, Sundays at 2 pm through August 24. No performance Wed, Aug. 20. Tickets through the box office 626-683-6883 or through the Boston Court website