By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Theater troupes in the area are finally breaking out of their pandemic cocoons.
For the reviewer that means a week full of evenings at the show.
Both the Perrysburg Musical Theatre and the Waterville Playshop will be on the boards this weekend.
‘A New Brain’
Perrysburg Musical Theatre got back into the swing with their “Hello Dolly” show early last summer. Now the troupe returns with its smaller scale fall show presented at St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church.
“A New Brain,” directed by Julie Bermudez with musical direction by Allison Rader, is a good match for the venue. The space allows the audience to fit inside a hospital room and head of our lead protagonist Gordon (Collin Smith).
Gordon is a disgruntled songwriter. We find him laboring over a new spring song for Mr. Bungee (Adam Nolan), the frog star of a children’s show, who is a bully behind a disturbingly cheery mask. Nothing is springing to life for Gordon, the lyrics are labored in that amusing way only a skilled songwriter can mimic.
Doing this work, he sings – because everything worth saying in this musical is worth putting melody under – that this hack work is keeping him from unleashing the great songs trapped inside his brain.
He vents to his friend and agent Rhonda (Brittany Kupresanin) over lunch as their waitress (Mara Connor) tells them about the “fish” special, calamari.
Gordon collapses. He ends up in the hospital with what is diagnosed as arteriovenous malformation.
This brings out his mother Mimi (Beth Geller) who insists on looking at the bright side. “You just can’t smile everything away,” Gordon tells her.
Now it’s not hack work that stands in the way of all those waiting-to-be-composed masterpieces. Now it’s a sense of impending mortality. An operation could heal him, or kill him. It’s a tossup.
Instead of spending the night before the operation with his lover Roger (Jordan Benavente), he decides to churn out one more happy song for Mr. Bungee.
Winding her way through the action is a homeless woman, Lisa (Elicia Kinder). She wants, demands, change – when Gordon hands her a bill, she throws it back, she wants change!
The musical is the brainchild of William Finn who wrote the lyrics, music and collaborated on the book with James Lapine (with whom he collaborated on “Falsettos”). The story is modeled on his own experience suffering from the brain disease.
Looking at the program with its 35 songs I imagine that having survived, Finn released everything he had packed inside into this score. The spoken word serves as minimal patching between songs where the emotional work is done.
Roger sings of his love of sailing, and Gordon sings as he’s getting an MRI of his ambivalence about his lover’s passion for sailing.
Mimi explodes in “Throw It Out” as she discards her son’s library. “Books made his head explode,” she sings.
And the rest of the cast (D. Ward Ensign, Craig Cousino, Chuck Kickaddon and Hannah Felver) , sitting at the back of the stage, always seem ready to step up to add dance moves and harmony.
This constant outpouring of song, even when it’s a dark tango about being brain dead, has the real power to heal, leading to an upbeat and life affirming ending.
***
“A New Brain” is being will be staged tonight (Oct. 21), Friday and Saturday at 7p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. at St. Timothy’s Church, 871 E. Broadway, Perrysburg. The show is limited to 80 seats per show and masks are required for audiences. Visit https://www.perrysburgmusicaltheatre.org.
‘Matilda’
Talking about tuneful, Tim Minchin, who wrote the songs for “Matilda the Musical,” knows more than a little about writing a melody. In his career he’s made some biting commentary sing. That edge is softened a bit in the family friendly “Matilda.” Not that the script by Dennis Kelly based on the Roald Dahl novel, doesn’t have its share of social commentary.
The musical, directed by Shauna Newbold with music direction by Matt Zwyer, opens with a chorus of children singing about how they are all “little miracles.” This serves as a backdrop for the birth of Matilda to a pair of crass self-absorbed parents, the Wormwoods. The father (Bart Soeder) is a shifty used car salesman with outlandish ambition and the mother (Sarah Stierman) has her own delusional ambitions as a competitive ballroom dancer. The arrival of Matilda is hardly a miracle, though it takes them by surprise. The mother is upset that she missed a competition and the father is upset Matilda is a girl. Throughout he insists on calling her “boy.”
The parents are oversized and cartoonish. The mother celebrates their life in “Loud” and the father in his ode to the television, “Telly.”
And as Matilda blossoms into a child anyone would expect to be proud of, her parents deride her for her love of reading. She is precocious, magically so, reading Shakespeare and Dickens, at age five.
But unlike the submissive princesses of fairy tales, she has a rebellious streak. You have to write your own story, she sings, and that means sometimes you have to be naughty.
This establishes both the character’s feisty spirit, and the young actress’ command of the role.
Matilda has a way with a story and has the local librarian (Marsha Cochran) enraptured with a continuing take that she weaves about an escapologist (Michael Stierman) and his acrobat wife (Maria Hiltner). She leaves Mr. Phelps hanging from a thread after each development. The story eludes the happy ending the listener wants.
Matilda’s troubles, though, are just beginning. She’s sent to a school taught by Miss Honey (Jennifer Braun), who loves children and lives up to her name, and run by the sadistic head mistress Miss Trunchbull (Annelise Clifton).
Clifton’s Trunchbull takes delight in being horrid. Braun’s Miss Honey is good-hearted, but well aware of her timidity in the face of Trunchbull’s bullying. She trembles before the head mistress until Matilda gives Miss Honey and her schoolmates strength.
In the end the “revolting” children are revolting.
Finally, we get that happy ending.
***
“Matilda the Musical” is being staged Friday (Oct. 22) and Saturday at 8 p.m., and Sunday, at 2:30 p.m. at the Maumee Indoor Theatre. Tickets are on sale at www.watervilleplayshop.org. They will also be available at the door.
