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REVIEW: "Cabaret" at the Ghent Playhouse

REVIEW: “Cabaret” at the Ghent Playhouse

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ALBANY, NY (November 6, 2018)-Last Thursday night, 11/1, a crowd of 50 leapt to their feet after the FREE Preview of Gloria at Albany Civic Theater and took to Social Media to sing the praises of the “heart stopping” play they had just witnessed. This continued all weekend long!   “Excellent,” “Exceptional” and “Shockingly Thought Provoking” were a few of the comments. More than 30 audience members comments can be found collected on the event’s and the Theater’s Facebook pages.

“I’d been excited about this one for too long to wait any longer (and I know from experience how nice it is to have a friendly preview audience!) Branden Jacob-Jenkins’ show is beautifully written – intelligent, witty and shocking – and Patrick’s direction is, as always, careful, crisp and precise (with his traditional gorgeously choreographed scene changes – oh, how I love those.) The wonderful Sara gets better and better every time she’s on stage, and her work in this piece will blow you away. The rest of the cast is perfection – fully-formed characters doing amazing work in a very difficult piece that could easily go wrong, but never does. Oh, and the set? Wonderful work. I had a million thoughts while watching, but I kept coming back to the fact that I’m so, so lucky to no longer work in a cubicle farm. The setting and the atmosphere hit me in all the right places in all the right ways.Congratulations to everyone involved: cast, crew, and Albany Civic for taking the risk and bringing this Capital Region premiere to the stage. You’ve got until November 18 to see this one, and I highly recommend you do so. It is such an experience, and one you need to have.”-Amy Durant

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“Saw the preview of ‘Gloria’ tonight. I loved this play!! What a wonderful night of theater—- and what a tremendous amount of emotions I am sitting with as a result of this show. Bravo to Patrick White, Sara Paupini, Vivian Wilson-Hwang, JR Richards, John Sutton and everyone else in the stellar cast and crew. Break legs tomorrow night —- and for the rest of you – see the show and be kind.” – Joanna Palladino Resnick

“‘Gloria’ is a contemporary examination of Thoreau’s observation that most of us lead lives of quiet desperation.  Except that, in our time, the quiet can suddenly erupt.  Sometimes the eruptions are small, as when playful banter morphs into humbling ridicule.  Sometimes—perhaps influenced by a mindset akin to Howard Beale’s exhortation in ‘Network’ to scream ‘I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this any longer!’—the  eruptions are catastrophic.  Excellent actors, like those in ‘Gloria’, can realistically mix humor and despair, anger and insight to produce a compelling production.” – Eric Washburn

 “This play makes us look in the mirror in many ways, and that’s a good thing.” Paul Lamar/The Daily Gazette joining in the chorus.

The show has 6 performances left with Friday and Saturday performances at 7:30 thru Sunday afternoon November 18, 2018 at 3 pm. Albany Civic Theater is presenting the Capital Region premiere of Gloria by the acclaimed Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. The production is directed by Patrick White and is the theater and director’s second Capital Region premiere of Jacobs-Jenkins work after Appropriate in May and will feature a diverse cast of six mostly new to Albany Civic Theater. Tickets are $18. For adults and $10. For students with ID and are available thru ACT’s website www.albanycivictheater.org or by calling 518-462-1297. There will be a free pay-what-you-will preview Thursday night, November 1, 2018 at 7:30.

Gloria is the critically acclaimed (Finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize, New York Times Critic’s Pick) dramatic comedy by the gifted and heralded Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (MacArthur Fellow, Two Time Obie Award winner for 2014 Best Play, Two Time Pulitzer Prize Finalist). This funny, trenchant and powerful new play follows an ambitious group of editorial assistants at a notorious Manhattan magazine, each of whom hopes for a starry life of letters and a book deal before they turn thirty. But when an ordinary humdrum workday becomes anything but, the stakes for who will get to tell their own story become higher than ever. Developed at The Vineyard Theatre during Jacobs-Jenkins’ residency, having won the theatre’s Paula Vogel Playwriting Award.

Gloria is Albany Civic Theater’s second Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Capital Region premiere this year after having introduced him to area stages with their May production of Appropriate also directed by Patrick White. Mr. White was struck by the fiercely, funny, original writing and the young people in the play who are extremely witty and creative yet are consigned to toil in obscurity and felt there was a real kinship between the magazine workers and the incredibly talented actors and creatives he knew creating community theater in the Capital Region.  As Branden Jacobs-Jenkins said “New York is a city that basically runs on ambition. That’s why an assistant is willing to work for like, $26,000 a year, in a city in which that is definitely the poverty line. People make such sacrifices to work in fields that mostly fulfill some very strange emotional or psychological need that they may not even be fully aware of — needs which may not even be healthy at the end of the day. I’ve also met people who just seem to be ambitious for the sake of ambition — they’re just addicted to the feeling of moving up and ahead in life. In any case, I was interested in the ways that this kind of relationship to the idea of work affects the compromises you make with yourself and your morals.”

Patrick White elaborates, “I thought this play was an extraordinary opportunity to look at young people and their career options in today’s economy and what some are driven to as far as what they would do to get ahead or get their foot in the door. And it’s just brilliant theater. Every play of Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins absolutely galvanizes me with his inventions and none more than this one. I turned the page and my jaw literally dropped. I don’t think Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins is capable of writing an uninteresting character, situation or line, frankly. The play is laugh out loud funny, shocking and moving all within moments of each other and sometimes simultaneously. It’s a brilliant play by one of our greatest dramatists…and he’s only 33!”

Press reactions to their introduction to Appropriate at ACT included Peter Bergman’s comment on Berkshire Bright Focus that “Patrick White-fast becoming one of my favorite regional directors through his tireless concentration on the under-dog play” and Amy Durant in The Alt said “Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is one of the hottest playwrights going: two of his plays have been nominated for Pulitzers, he was named a MacArthur Fellow, and has won Obies and other awards almost too numerous to count. Luckily, we have Albany Civic and director Patrick White to stage one of his shows so we can see his work in action here in the Capital Region-and what work it is.” And “Go experience this show to immerse yourself in Jacobs-Jenkins words; I’m predicting in 20 years, we’re going to be talking about him like we talk about Albee, Williams, Miller and O’Neill, and how lucky are we to be able to say we saw his work on his way up.”

Another one of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ gifts in creating unforgettable theater is his structure and this play gives its actors the opportunity to play multiple roles. The new play also has the distinct advantage of introducing five diverse actors new to the Albany Civic Theater stage-Sara Paupini as Gloria/Nan, JR Richards as Miles/Shaun/Rashaad, Bethany Geiger as Ani/Sasha/Callie, Brendan O’Dwyer as Dean/Devin, James Alexander as Lorin and returning to ACT having appeared last season in Hedda Gabler, Vivian Wilson-Hwang as Kendra/Jenna.

The play will be held at Albany Civic Theater (235 Second Ave, Albany, NY 12209) on Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30 pm and Sundays at 3 pm from Friday November 2-Sunday, November 18. There will be a free pay-what-you-will preview Thursday, November 1 at 7:30 pm.  Tickets are $18. For Adults and $10. For Students with I.D. and can be purchased on Albany Civic Theater’s website www.albanycivictheater.org or by calling the theater at 518-462-1297.

AT A GLANCE

November 2- November 18, 2018

Gloria

by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

Directed by Patrick White

At Albany Civic Theater, 235 Second Ave, Albany, NY 12209

Admission $18. Adults, $10. Students with I.D.

About the playwright:

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is an American playwright. He won the 2014 Obie Award for Best New American Play, for his plays Appropriate and An Octoroon. His plays Gloria and Everybody were finalists for the 2016 and 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Drama respectively. He was named a MacArthur Fellow for 2016. 

His plays are Neighbors (Off-Broadway, 2010), War (Yale Repertory Theatre, 2014), Appropriate (Off-Broadway, 2014), An Octoroon (Off-Off Broadway,2014), Gloria (Off-Broadway, 2015) and Everybody (Off-Broadway, 2017) From his MacArthur Fellow citation:

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is a playwright drawing from a range of contemporary and historical theatrical genres to engage frankly with complicated issues around identity, family, class, and race. Many of Jacobs-Jenkins’s plays use a historical lens to satirize and comment on modern culture, particularly the ways in which race and class are negotiated in both private and public settings. Although the provocation of his audience is purposeful, Jacobs-Jenkins’s creation of unsettling, shocking, often confrontational moments is not gratuitous; these elements are of a piece with the world he has established on stage and in the service of the story he is telling.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins received a B.A. (2006) from Princeton University and an M.A. (2007) from New York University, and he is a graduate (2014) of the Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program at Juilliard. His plays have been performed at such venues as Lincoln Center Theatre/LCT3, Soho Rep, the Public Theatre, Yale Repertory Theatre, Actors Theater of Louisville, and Center Theatre Group, among many others. Jacobs-Jenkins is currently a Residency Five playwright at Signature Theatre and master-artist-in-residence in the Playwriting MFA program ofHunter College, City University of New York.

About the director:

Patrick White is a Capital Region actor/director/teacher whose association with ACT goes back to his lead performance in Prelude to a Kiss in 1997. Other notable roles at ACT came in productions of Love! Valour! Compassion! , Gross Indency, Good, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, The Andersonville Trial, The Cripple of Inishmaan, Big Maggie and Night of the Iguana. His previous directing credits at ACT include Appropriate, Grand Concourse, Suddenly, Last Summer & The Pope & the Witch. Other directing credits include MEN ON BOATS with his Acting Class at SLCA, The Importance of Being Earnest, Living on Love & Clever Little Lies at CCT, An Inspector Calls & Rapture, Blister, Burn at SCP, John Ball’s In the Heat of the Night at SLCA, True West at TGP, The Foreigner at HMT and The Glass Menagerie at OOPs.

Praise for his work includes Amy Durant in The Alt saying “Director Patrick White has created a work of art with his production of An Inspector Calls at Schenectady Civic Players… White’s stage pictures, as always, are perfection-I’m always a fan, but I think this is the first time they’ve taken my breath away. Additionally, the flashback scenes are pure poetry.” And Barbara Waldinger said in Berkshire On Stage- “…there are times when a directorial concept is so powerful that it transforms the way we see a play. Patrick White’s smashing yet minimalist directorial debut of John Ball’s In the Heat of the Night at Sand Lake Center for the Arts is one of those times…Patrick White’s coup de theatre at the end of the play serves to confirm his role as the brilliant mastermind of this production.” Steve Barnes in The Times Union said “Director Patrick White and his four-member cast deliver some of the biggest laughs of the summer during Clever Little Lies running through August 1 at Curtain Call Theatre…It’s a pleasure to see such rapport among the cast, their mostly seamless uniformity of performance gaining strength as the play progresses. …While watching the production, you could mentally check off nearly all the boxes for well-made theater, That it’s terrifically funny, too, makes it even better.”

Albany Civic Theater Overwhelmed by Audience Reaction to “Gloria” ALBANY, NY (November 6, 2018)-Last Thursday night, 11/1, a crowd of 50 leapt to their feet after the FREE Preview of Gloria at…

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A Snapshot of the Weimar Republic

by Barbara Waldinger

The classic Kander and Ebb musical CABARET portrays sexual depravity as a metaphor for the decadence of 1931 Germany, where the Nazis were poised on the cusp of power.  At least that was director Sam Mendes’s concept when he reimagined the show for the Roundabout Theatre Company in 1998. This conceit has been adopted by Matthew Teicher in his powerful staging of CABARET at the Ghent Playhouse, where it runs through April 1, 2018.

The Tony-award winning musical opened in November 1966  with music and lyrics by John Kander and Fred Ebb, directed by Harold Prince, and starring Joel Grey as the Emcee or Master of  Ceremonies of the seedy Kit Kat Klub. The book, by Joe Masteroff, was based on John Van Druten’s 1951 play I AM A CAMERA, which in turn had been adapted from Christopher Isherwood’s short novel GOODBYE TO BERLIN.  In 1972 a film version, directed by Bob Fosse and starring Joel Grey and Liza Minnelli, won multiple awards but differed radically from the stage play.  The 1998 Roundabout revival starred Natasha Richardson and Alan Cumming in Tony-winning performances.

CABARET splits its attention between the degeneracy of the Kit Kat Klub and the attempts at respectability by Fraulein Schneider, a decent woman who runs a nearby boarding house, on the other.  The plot revolves around the romance of two of Fraulein Schneider’s tenants– Clifford Bradshaw, an aspiring writer from Pennsylvania (Alex Benson) and the young English singer Sally Bowles (Nicole Mecca), a featured performer at the Kit Kat Klub.  Their rocky relationship contrasts with the deep but star-crossed attachment between the older Fraulein Schneider (Sally McCarthy) and her adoring lodger Herr Schultz (Monk Schane-Lydon).

It is the boundless energy of the Emcee (Brian McBride Land) who drives the action, inviting us to come into his nightclub, where “life is beautiful” (an obvious untruth), shocking us with his outrageously in-your-face sexual behavior.  The debauchery is enhanced by the thrust of the stage apron, built out to provide a platform where the various sexual positions and grinding bodies of the Emcee and his six member female chorus can land in the audience’s lap (sometimes quite literally).  Whereas in the original production, Joel Gray’s Emcee was  described  as “a ventriloquist’s dummy come to life,” wearing formal attire, white makeup, colorful lips and red cheeks in garish surroundings, Lamb (following Alan Cumming) struts and dances in black leather and a basically bare chest in a Kit Kat Klub that is raunchy, ugly and masochistic.

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If the script does not provide us with fully-developed flesh-and- blood characters, perhaps that is because the audience is meant to be kept at a distance.  At the Roundabout, Sam Mendes tried to modify that aspect by encouraging Cumming and Richardson (as Sally Bowles), to show us their underside, their vulnerability.  Lamb, with all his vigor and hyperactive libido, does not meet this challenge.  His Emcee hardly changes from beginning to end:  his disintegration remains invisible, with the single exception of the eleventh-hour backstage song:  “I Don’t Care Much,” which leads to the shocking ending.  Lamb is a multi-talented performer but he does not reveal the human soul hiding beneath his glitzy exterior.  This is often the case with Mecca’s Sally Bowles, apolitical, promiscuous, and determinedly carefree, who spends a good part of Act I casually seducing the bisexual Clifford Bradshaw.  But in her final scene with Benson, followed by a moving rendition of the title song (no Liza Minnelli triumphalism here), she expresses her fear and desperation.

Benson depicts a passive character who mainly reacts to the unraveling political situation around him.  However, he comes to life forcefully in his later confrontations with Sally and with his “friend,” the Nazi Ernst Ludwig.

While all of the major performers are blessed with strong voices, it is Mike Meier, playing Ludwig, who stands out.  His  first-act finale rendition of “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” in which he is joined by Emily Spateholts as the prostitute Fraulein Kost, is operatic and chilling, a highlight of the production.  In the course of the play, Meier portrays both the charm and the fierce cruelty of Ludwig.

But it is McCarthy and Schane-Lydon as the older couple who provide us with the heart of the musical, the only chance for love to show its fragile face in this hideous world.  Their scenes and songs are unforgettable and heartbreaking as they attempt to connect, impending doom looming over them.  The increasing popularity of extremism in 1930s Germany is a phenomenon all too familiar to us today in the twenty-first century.

Teichner, the director, keeps the action moving at a brisk pace.  He uses his female chorus ingeniously, as set changers and prop holders, connecting them to the action both within and outside of the Kit Kat Klub.  Sometimes they pose like frozen observers strewn around the stage; at other times they climb acrobatically on the upstage scaffolding (a technique Teichner employed successfully in his recent production of THE ROCKY HORROR SHOW).  He makes use of the whole theatre, as his performers enter and exit the stage from the aisles, the wings and an upstage door with a window (not to mention the restrooms).  They are encouraged to interact with the audience, to sometimes unnerving effect.

Choreographer Meaghan Rogers demands perfect timing and difficult steps from her dancers, including a Rockettes-style kick line that metamorphoses into goose-stepping soldiers.  They  are up to the task–even Bobby the Chorus Boy (Dove Frishkoff) and Land in drag.  But the overuse of sexual postures and pelvic thrusting quickly becomes mind-numbing.

Set Designer Cathy Lee-Visscher wisely keeps the set to a minimum.  The apron serves as a platform for nightclub tables,  behind which are narrow entrances and exits, and tied-back red curtains on either side of the proscenium, allowing a porous border for the scenes to bleed into each other.  Lighting Designer Izzy Filkins illuminates the proscenium with light bulbs and deploys ten footlights to indicate the edge of the nightclub stage.  Costume Designer Joanne Maurer’s work adds to the atmosphere of the place and time.

There are no live musicians:  the instrumental score is pre-recorded and played over the sound system.  This works surprisingly well except on the occasions when one wishes the key of a song might be lowered to accommodate a singer’s range.

All in all, CABARET, two hours and forty minutes in length, is enjoyable, energetic and exciting.

Cabaret, book by Joe Masteroff (based on the play “I Am a Camera” by John VanDruten and the Berlin Stories of Christopher Isherwood), Lyrics by Fred Ebb, Music by John Kander. Directed by Matthew Teichner; Choreography by Meaghan Rogers; Set Designer Cathy Lee-Visscher; Lighting Designer Izzy Filkins;  Costume Designer Joanne Maurer. CAST: Brian McBride Land as the Emcee, Nicole Mecca as Sally Bowles, Alex Benson as Clifford Bradshaw, Sally McCarthy as Fraulein Schneiderr, Mark “Monk” Schane-Lydon as Herr Schultz, Emily Spateholts as Fraulein Kost, Mike Meier as Ernst Ludwig, Dove Frishkoff as Bobby, Max, et a.,The Kit Kat Girls: Nicole Molinski , Mae Rogers, Bethany Geiger, Chloe Vader, Kathleen Rembish, and Meaghan Rogers.

Cabaret runs March 16-April 1, 2018, at the Ghent Playhouse, 6 Town Hall Place, Ghent, NY through April 1. For information and tickets go to ghentplayhouse.org or call 518-392-6264.

REVIEW: “Cabaret” at the Ghent Playhouse A Snapshot of the Weimar Republic by Barbara Waldinger The classic Kander and Ebb musical CABARET portrays sexual depravity as a metaphor for the decadence of 1931 Germany, where the Nazis were poised on the cusp of power.