Souvenir

It’s been a long road to the Buffalo opening of Souvenir. Stephen Temperley’s two-character play had been on BUA producer Javier Bustillos radar from the time he saw the off-Broadway production at the York Theatre during the 2004-2005 season. He was so keen to see the show mounted in Buffalo that he called actress Mary Kate O’Connell during the intermission to tell her he’d found a perfect vehicle for her, and even promised to direct the production himself if she’d do the show. Sight unseen, she agreed.

The two would have to wait a few years to see the project come to fruition.

Rights became unavailable when Souvenir transferred to Broadway with Judy Kaye, the original star as Florence Foster Jenkins, a Manhattan society woman of the 1930s and 1940s who mistakenly thought she possessed an exquisite operatic singing voice. Kaye picked up a Tony nomination for her performance and proceeded to tour in the role.

Meanwhile, the Kavinoky Theatre in Buffalo found another script about Jenkins, Glorious, a more farcical telling of her story. That theater, too, thought of O’Connell for the role of Florence Foster Jenkins, and in an ironic twist of fate, hired Bustillos to direct her. The actress picked up an Artie Award as Outstanding Actress of the 2007-2008 season for her effort.

Finally, four years later, Bustillos and O’Connell are able to collaborate on the original project and Souvenir: A Fantasia on the Life of Florence Foster Jenkins, opens this week at the Alleyway Theatre. This time, actor Gregory Gjurich will play Cosmé McMoon, Jenkins’ piano accompanist.

The real-life voice of Florence Foster Jenkins, whose career included a sold-out performance at Carnegie Hall, was recorded and can be found on the internet. Don’t be alarmed by the dissonant squawk. The lady herself took great joy from her singing and felt that she lived a marvelous life. That’s the point of Souvenir.

The “new” Mark Twain Comedy

Mark Twain’s play, Is He Dead?, the current offering at the Kavinoky Theatre, was supposed to have been produced during Mark Twain’s lifetime—simultaneously in London and New York, in fact. Simultaneous productions were a common way to protect the copyright in both England and the United States. In an equally common show-business turn of events, however, the productions fell apart, and the script landed in a drawer, not to be heard of again for over a hundred years.

What is unusual about Is He Dead?, however, is that it did not remain dead. Thanks to Twain’s enduring fame as the greatest humorist ever produced in this country, when scholar Shelly Fisher Fishkin found the abandoned manuscript among the Mark Twain Papers at the University of California Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, he realized that he was reading a vibrant and potentially producible play.

Rather long and unwieldy as originally written, playwright David Ives was enlisted to streamline the plot and reduce the number of characters. The result was a fast-paced farce that managed to become a modest Broadway hit last year.

The play is a fictional account of French painter Jean François Millet, whose friends concoct a scheme to increase the value of his work when a potential collector decides not to buy because the artist is not dead yet. Millet fakes first a prolonged illness, followed by his own death, and then returns to the scene, masquerading as his own twin sister. The prices for his paintings skyrocket, and needless to say, complications ensue.

There is nothing sophisticated about this comedy, which basically amounts to a prolonged drag joke. The Kavinoky production is populated by an appealing cast, and has been handsomely produced with costumes by Dixon Reynolds and sets by David King.

John Warren, who specializes in deranged characters returns to Buffalo to play the central role. Paul Todaro directs.

The script provides a highly satisfying entertainment, heavy on the absurd high jinx, and light on anything substantial.

Norman Sham, David Lundry, and Joseph Wiens play Millet’s friends, Chicago, Dutchy, and O’Shaughnessy—each a variation on a comic ethnic type, popular among theater goers of the latter 19th century. Kate LoConti and Beth Donahue are delightful as the Leroux sisters, the guileless and suspicious beloveds of Millet and Chicago. Jim Maloy is hilarious as their father, a man whose libido is restored along with his fortune. Tim Newell adds yet another masterful comic nasty to his repertoire as the ruthless and unscrupulous art dealer, Bastien André. Ellen Horst and Barbara Link LaRou add marvelously oddball humor to the mix as Madame Bathilde and Madame Caron, Millet’s all too understanding landladies. Tom Zindle has a grand old time as art buyers Basil Thorpe and Claude Rivière, the butler Charlie, and the King of France—what a range!

John Warren gives a wonderful performance, lending appealingly comical physicality to Millet—and his less than bereaved sister.

The performances are sure to evolve with playing, but the funny bones are in place and the talent is unmistakable. Is He Dead? is fast-paced fun.

American Rhapsody

Randy Kramer at the piano with the late Tim White, in American Rhapsody

[NOTE: Sadly, subsequent to submitting this review, Tim White, the popular Buffalo actor and radio personality who is one of the stars of the show, died. His passing, due to complications from dialysis treatment, was a shock to everyone, and is certainly a heavy burden for the other members of the American Rhapsody company. Performances are likely to continue with another actor, script in hand. Tim was well-liked across the theater community and will be dearly missed. While my first impulse was to cancel the review, mutual friends and colleagues have urged us to run the piece as written in tribute to Tim’s consummate professionalism. With heavy heart, we are doing so. Click here for a remembrance of Tim White. Tim was a wonderful guy, and one of a kind. —anthony chase]

MusicalFare has reached a stage of maturity in which it can lavish talent on even the most shakily conceived of projects. Such is the situation with the hastily conjured American Rhapsody, a well-intentioned eleventh hour replacement for the cancelled 2 Pianos 4 Hands. With American Rhapsody, we are treated to an evening full of marvelous performances that serve to disguise the dubious underpinnings of the piece as a whole. Here, the piano virtuosity of Randall Kramer is presented alongside the comic talents of character actor Tim White, and the formidable talents of John Fredo and Loraine O’Donnell, who certainly rank among the top rung of the region’s musical theater performers. Furthermore, the show offers a litany of great American songs.

The evening was clearly concocted in the euphoric afterglow of the recent presidential election, an event that is referenced a number of times over the course of the evening. The conceit of the play, however, is rather disingenuous. A classically trained musician, played by Kramer, has a passion for Gershwin, but stumbles in his interpretation of one piece, Rhapsody in Blue. To unlock the mystery of his dilemma, he begins to haunt a club where African American musicians reign, and hits on the proprietor, played by White, to help him understand Gershwin’s music.

As the play begins, “The Old Piano Player” (Mr. White) instructs “The Pianist” (Mr. Kramer) to play the piece. Two notes into the rhapsody and wham! We’re hit with a gigantic image of Frederick Douglas projected onto an upstage screen, followed quickly by an image of Abraham Lincoln. Other iconic images follow, including Al Jolson in blackface. Heavy-handed? Oh, maybe a tad.

I recognize an academic lecture when I see one—even when it’s disguised as a musical entertainment. Perhaps I’ve attended more lecture-demonstrations than your average person, but having a slide with the definition of the word “rhapsody” up on a screen as the audience enters would be a clue to what’s afoot. The Old Piano Player improbably manages both to quote and to cite one of Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration speeches, and as the lesson gets laid on thicker, he simply doles out the quotations without the citations. Tim White is gifted with the comic timing and inflection for this awkward task, and manages to pull it off—though his pretend piano playing is rather too animated to be believable.

Outside of the most Politically Correct (with a capital P.C.) circles, much of the show’s posturing is unearned, and the racial dynamics of the concept—naive white guy, savvy black guy—could be seen as condescending and naïve. Luckily, it simply comes across as hokey, rather than obnoxious, and in an achingly well-meaning way.

Had Kramer not both directed and starred in the show, in addition to writing it, perhaps he could have afforded himself the aesthetic distance to refine his concept. One can imagine the same musical material being presented in any of a number of more genuine packages. This particular package seems forced.

It is commonplace to cite African-American influences on Gershwin, especially as related to Porgy and Bess, which he composed a decade after Rhapsody in Blue. He lifted “Porgy’s Theme” directly from W.C. Handy (represented in this show by “Beale Street Blues” and “St. Louis Blues”), and his first national recording hit was the Southern-oriented “Swanee,” performed by Jolson.

But African-American influence is common to virtually all American popular musicians of the 19th and early to mid 20th centuries, from minstrel classics, to ragtime, to jazz, to rock and roll. Consider Caucasian songwriter Stephen Foster—composer of such minstrel classics as “Camp Town Races,” “Oh Susanna” and “Beautiful Dreamer,” all performed in this show. Foster was a native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He never lived in the South and only visited there once in his lifetime. Christy’s Minstrels, the famed all-white blackface troupe with which Foster had an exclusive contract, was not formed in the South either, but in Buffalo, New York.

Moreover, there is a gigantic amount of scholarship on the topic of such influences in Gershwin—including articles written during the composer’s short lifetime—making the conceit that a classically trained Gershwin enthusiast would need to be educated about African-American influences in his music in order to play one of his signature compositions all the more implausible. This history is imbedded in the very fiber of American music.

But I digress into lecture myself.

It’s been years since MusicalFare has ventured into such excessively ham-fisted territory—the sort that inspires an audience to congratulate itself for its own liberal pretensions in the face of a real contemporary moral conundrum. Luckily, this time out, there is plenty else to occupy the imagination. The playful repartee between Kramer and White is clever and amusing. The dancers, Jennifer Huffman and Immanuel Naylor, are lithe, expressive, and enthusiastic. Fredo and O’Donnell are marvelous in a litany of seminal American popular songs from “Oh Susanna” to Irving Berlin’s “I Love a Piano.” O’Donnell slays the audience with her fabulous rendition of “St. Louis Blues.” Fredo proves his mastery of the Jolson material. And boy oh boy can Kramer play the piano!

If we are honest, this is not a play about a classically trained musician learning how to interpret George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue at all. It is a play about a classically trained musician teaching an audience how to listen to George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. On that level it is very enjoyable. Indeed, the journey through the history of American popular song, leading up to the culminating moment, when Kramer sits down to the piano and plays Rhapsody in Blue full-throttle and in its entirety is thrilling.

Would that the show just let that moment happen! But no. American Rhapsody cannot trust its own trajectory. As if fearful that the audience lacks the attention span to listen to one perfect musical composition, the stage is quickly cluttered with extraneous dance, and the performance is interrupted with vocal effusions. This could be changed easily, allowing us to enjoy hearing the piece—pure, unfettered, and enriched by what we have learned over the course of the evening.