Reviews by Anthony Chase
Sweeney Todd; Dames at Sea; The Haunting of Hooverton Hotel; and The Last Yiddish Speaker
MusicalFare Serves Up a Ravishing “Sweeney Todd”
By Anthony Chase
I savor the memory of seeing the original Broadway production of “Sweeney Todd” in 1979, with Len Cariou and Angela Lansbury leading the original cast. I have seen the show many times since, including twice with Buffalo’s own Christine Baranski as Mrs. Lovett, once at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles and once at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. That is a lot of meat pies. It is a measure of MusicalFare’s achievement that its new production, directed by Randall Kramer at Shea’s 710 Theatre, feels both faithful to Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s musical thriller and genuinely exciting on its own terms.
Steve Copps, dead behind the eyes on this occasion, gives Sweeney a terrifying intensity. This barber is hollowed out by injustice and refilled with a single purpose, and Copps never lets that purpose slacken. He also finds the dry humor beneath the horror, and toward that end is paired divinely with Amy Jakiel as Mrs. Lovett.
Jakiel finds the comedy in Lovett’s pragmatism without ever letting us forget her complicity in unmitigated evil. In “By the Sea,” for instance, her daydream of middle-class seaside respectability, she punctuates her exuberance by letting her voice break into the squawk of a seagull, a delicious touch that betrays, for an instant, that this chick is off her rocker. There’s also a lot of Mary Poppins to Jakiel’s Mrs. Lovett. This is a practical woman who knows exactly what she wants and pursues it with the efficiency of a shopkeeper balancing her books. I half expected her to prod Toby along with the signature “Spit spot” of England’s most famed nanny.
Together, Copps and Jakiel make a comic feast of the macabre, giving a tour de force performance of “A Little Priest,” the show’s most famous number.
Some familiar Buffalo actors are so fully transformed in this production that I needed to check my program to recognize them. Michael J. Galante is a most Victorian Beadle, pompous and oily, looking as if he had stepped out of a George Cruikshank illustration. Philip Farugia is the smarmiest and scariest Judge Turpin I have ever seen. His menace is unmistakably sexual in its perversity, and I am still wondering about that thing he was doing with his tongue (though I try not to dwell on it).
The rest of the company clicks into their character types winningly. Ryan Butler is an endearing, eager Toby, and his “Not While I’m Around” lands with aching sincerity. I adore the little kick in the air he gives during Sondheim’s musical flourishes. Austin Marshall brings an open-hearted ardor to Anthony, and Solange Gosselin is a luminous Johanna, her “Green Finch and Linnet Bird” sweetly yearning. Bob Mazierski is gloriously odious as the preening Pirelli. Emily Yancey makes the ubiquitous Beggar Woman both pitiable and haunting, which pays off handsomely when the show reveals its final secrets.
The design is a study in brutal austerity. Chris Cavanagh’s set and lighting, Kari Drozd’s costumes, and Susan Drozd’s hair, wigs, and ghoulish makeup render the world in black, white, and gray, punctuated from time to time by red: Pirelli’s purse, Mrs. Lovett’s hair, and, of course, blood. The effect is graphic and pointed. Michael Oliver-Walline’s choreography keeps the action moving briskly while maintaining the irreverently morbid tone.
The production sounds terrific. Music director Joe Isgar, at the piano, leads a six-piece band of Aneris River-Wagner, Amie Vredenburg, Conor Sullivan, Brandon Burgess, and Dan Isgar through one of Sondheim’s most demanding scores with clarity and drive. The ensemble, including Christopher Andreana, Taylor Carlson, Chris Cummings, Julia Pitarresi, Emory Redfearn, Brandin Smalls, and Michael Wells, delivers the score with chilling relish, beginning with the menacing “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd.”
After all these years and all those productions, I was delighted to discover that “Sweeney Todd” can still make me sit up and lean in. Take my advice. Attend the tale.
Sweeney Todd continues through November 8 at Shea’s 710 Theatre, 710 Main Street. For tickets, call 716-839-8540 or visit musicalfare.com.
Dames at Sea
The Kenan Center, Lockport
Review by Anthony Chase
Dames at Sea at the Kenan Center in Lockport is a first-rate production, boasting a stellar cast and superior stagecraft. With direction and choreography by Kevin Leary, this is a fast-paced evening of urbane fun. Every twist of the intentionally clichéd plot is crisp and stylish. Leary and company have trusted the tried-and-true material, and the material has rewarded that trust. This is a production that never pushes, unless pushing will get a bigger laugh; then it’s damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!
George Haimsohn and Robin Miller wrote the book and lyrics of Dames at Sea, and Jim Wise composed the score, for a show that began in 1966 at the Caffe Cino, a tiny Greenwich Village coffeehouse that was a cradle of Off-Off-Broadway, before moving Off-Broadway in 1968. The idea is simple and still delicious: compress every 1930s Warner Bros. extravaganza, the ones with a hundred chorines on a staircase, into a cast of six and a couple of pianos. A Broadway show is about to open, the theater is about to be torn down, and the whole operation relocates to the deck of a Navy battleship.
Naturally, the understudy is obliged to go on. It’s her first day in New York.
Bethany Moore is fabulous as Mona Kent, the stage diva with an ego as big as the ocean. A leggy redhead with a Broadway pedigree, Moore somehow channels Gwen Verdon, Ann Miller, and Joan Crawford simultaneously: the angular Verdon wit in the body, the Miller wattage in the smile, and the Crawford steel behind the eyes. When she launches into “Wall Street” at the top of the evening, she announces both the character and the style of the production. Her seduction of the Captain in “The Beguine” is a small comic masterpiece of mock grandeur. Her cougar-esque advances on Dick (that’s actually the guy’s name) remind us of her turn last year as Tanya, singing “Does Your Mother Know?” in Mamma Mia! for Second Generation Theatre at Shea’s 710.
Ruby is that inevitable girl just off the bus from Utah who is going to be a star, the girl from every Broadway backstage play and film ever made. The role made Bernadette Peters a star in 1968, and here, Audree Woods is a standout as she steps into those tireless tap shoes. Projecting both the absurd innocence and the superhuman talent of this guileless creature, Woods understands that the joke only works if she plays it without a wink. Her “Raining in My Heart” is sweetly ridiculous, and her night-and-day transition from insecurity and despair to the aggressively self-confident “Star Tar” is sublime.
The dancing is excellent and particularly notable. There is lots of tap, and the numbers for the two sailors carry echoes of the sailors in Jerome Robbins’ Fancy Free. Andrew Kowalczewski as Dick and Eric Rivas as Lucky make a Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor pairing, and Kowalczewski’s athletic build is reminiscent of Harold Lang, who danced in the original Fancy Free in 1944. The show offers delicious character roles, and these two divide the sailor types neatly. Dick is the innocent romantic, wooing Ruby with “It’s You” and “There’s Something About You.” Lucky is the more mischievous goofball, paired with hard-boiled, working-class Joan, played by Rebecca Bradford.
Appropriately, Bradford plays the character in the mold of Joan Blondell, which brings to mind an old joke. In what Hollywood classic did Joan Blondell first play the ingenue? Answer: Joan Blondell never played an ingenue in her life! The ingenue here is Ruby, and Bradford happily takes the wisecracks instead, sharing “Choo-Choo Honeymoon” with Rivas and leading the company in the Act One closer, “Good Times Are Here to Stay.” Robert Zimmerman sings strongly and is marvelously funny as a pair of blustering mature men, the producer Hennesey and the Captain.
Jenna Damberger’s costumes are gorgeous, with lots of Bob Mackie glamour and show business glitz. Lynne Koscielniak’s handsome set provides an expansive dance space and a Busby Berkeley vibe, complete with an upstage battleship whose big guns are trained squarely on the audience. Chris George’s lighting and Nick Stroczkowski’s sound provide a polished frame. Music director Patrick Towey, at the first piano, is joined by Claudia Andres on the second and Colin Sperrazza on percussion, and the trio supplies all the brass and razzle the score requires.
Dames at Sea is a valentine to a style of entertainment that has been gone for ninety years but never gets old. Happily, the team at the Kenan Center seems to love the style as much as its authors did. This is a silly yet sophisticated evening of pure pleasure.
The production runs in the Taylor Theatre at the Kenan Center, 33 Locust Street Lockport, through November 8th. https://kenancenter.org/events/dames-at-sea/
Foolish Fun, Hanna-Barbera Style, at Alleyway
The Haunting of Hooverton Hotel is a live-action Saturday morning cartoon
By Anthony Chase
There is a particular kind of foolishness that only works when everyone involved takes it seriously. The Haunting of Hooverton Hotel, a world-premiere comedy by Buffalo playwrights Jacob Albarella and Jason Kaiser now at Alleyway Theatre, belongs in that category. It is foolish fun, and I mean that as a compliment.
Albarella and Kaiser modeled their show on Hanna-Barbera’s Scooby-Doo cartoons of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Four college students from Mystery University are stranded on a dark and stormy night when their van breaks down outside a creepy hotel that appears on no map. Here they encounter the inevitable secret passages, a power failure, a resident ghost, and, of course, a lobby full of suspects, each more absurdly suspicious than the last.
Director Daniel F. Lendzian, who bills himself in the program as “Artistic Instigator,” cheerfully acknowledges the debt in his director’s note. The characters are original, but the four sleuths line up neatly with Fred, Velma, Daphne, and Shaggy from the animated show.
Ayden Herreid’s Johnny is the athletic, take-charge Fred.
Janaé Leonard’s Rosemary is the brainy Velma.
Gabrielys Rosa Lozada’s Daisy is Daphne updated for an age in which she cannot put down her phone. Ever.
Ryan Okun’s Skeeter is the clueless, snack-loving Shaggy.
All four give charmingly innocent and earnest performances, giving themselves over to the physical comedy and to the most delightfully inane buffoonery. They commit to their one-dimensional characters in a way that fuels the comedy when they run into complex situations, for The Haunting of Hooverton Hotel departs from the Scooby-Doo model in that the playwrights bring an adult perspective to their childhood obsession. These four university students have the libidos of university students. The “adults” are shallow and despicable.
You don’t need to know Scooby-Doo to get the joke. The pattern is all too familiar: stock character types in a plot that exists mainly to set up the next chase, but now viewed through the lens of adulthood and 21st-century values.
The aesthetic owes a lot to The Monkees, which ended its NBC run the year before Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! premiered on CBS in 1969. The Monkees had pioneered the “romp,” in which the action breaks into a catchy pop song and a montage of frantic chasing, and Hanna-Barbera made the bubblegum chase song a franchise staple. This was “hip for kids” television, and Hooverton wears it proudly. The playwrights go so far as to create an opening film, an episode introduction, and original songs by Zak Ward and Kevin Sampson.
The story is appropriately hokey. The late Mr. Hooverton’s will is missing, and the bank, represented by malevolent attorney Ms. Deborah Chisel, is scheming to seize the property from his widow. Our heroes arrive just in time to intervene.
Caitlin Coleman’s Widow Hooverton may have lost her husband but certainly not her lust for life; she is widowed, not dead, and she is especially eager for Ayden Herreid’s Johnny to know it. VerNia Sharisse Garvin is the scheming, over-the-top attorney Deborah Chisel. Kerrick Woyshner blusters through as Big Boss Holiday, the brash Texas land developer with his eye on the property.
Scott Borish, as the long-winded groundskeeper Buck Buckington, channels a whole lineage of crusty rural old-timers who shuffled through 1940s Hollywood westerns and comedies. Zachary Kushner’s Victor Spoils is the spooky hotel concierge, all looming and lugubrious welcome, with a delightful tendency to appear and disappear straight from the floor. Connor McGuire rounds out the suspects as a drifter with a flair for the dramatic... but who is he really?
Is any of it profound? Not for a minute. But Lendzian and his company understand that silliness is a craft. They imbue the cartoon on stage with timing, commitment, and a willingness to look ridiculous. (And oh, do they succeed at looking ridiculous.) Bring the kids, or bring the kid you used to be, the one eating cereal in front of the television on Saturday morning.
The Haunting of Hooverton Hotel continues at Alleyway Theatre, 1 Curtain Up Alley, through November 14. Running time is about one hour and 50 minutes, including a 15-minute intermission. Recommended for ages 8 and up. Tickets: 716-852-2600.
The Last Yiddish Speaker
Jewish Repertory Theatre of Western New York
Review by Anthony Chase
In the kitchen of an old house in the fictional upstate town of Granville, a stars-and-stripes-themed crucifix hangs on the wall. The year is 2029. In Deborah Zoe Laufer’s imagined America, the January 6th insurrection succeeded, a white supremacist regime holds power, and anyone who is not white and Christian has either fled the country or been “disappeared.” Paul and his teenage daughter, Sarah, have escaped New York City and are living as Paul and Mary Tate, churchgoing Christians who keep their heads down and their mouths shut. They have nearly made it through their first year.
Then, late one night, an elderly woman is left on their doorstep with a note informing them that she’s their Aunt Chava and it’s their turn to hide her: “Good luck.” They don’t remember having an Aunt Chava. The woman, of decidedly indeterminate age, ominously speaks Yiddish, the language of a past Paul has worked very hard to bury. With her arrival, the careful fiction of the Tates begins to unravel.
The Last Yiddish Speaker won the National Jewish Playwriting Contest of the Jewish Plays Project in 2024 and has been making its way across the country as a National New Play Network Rolling World Premiere.
At the Jewish Repertory Theatre of Western New York, the acting and direction are excellent. Kyle LoConti stages the play with clarity and control, keeping its 90 minutes taut. Following the playwright’s lead, she lets the suspense accumulate without crowding out the comedy, and gives each of the four actors room to build a fully realized person.
Christian Brandjes is pragmatic and worn down as Paul, a widower and father who has made survival his full-time occupation. He has paid for it dearly, losing everything he loved except his beloved, if recalcitrant, daughter. Brandjes lets us see the exhaustion of a man for whom every knock at the door is a potential catastrophe, and the stubborn love that keeps him going.
As Sarah, Sam Prezioso endearingly captures both the volatility of being a teenager and the genuine moral clarity that sometimes comes with it. Is her rage a sign of immaturity, or is she simply right? Exuberant and painfully disillusioned in equal measure, Prezioso creates a rebellious adolescent who chafes against the lie that has been imposed on her.
Devin Klumpp plays John, Sarah’s right-wing friend. He is, in fact, her only friend in this oppressive town. Woefully inexperienced, but dedicated to the repressive ideals he has been taught, he is doing his best to navigate the only reality he has ever known. Like Rolf in The Sound of Music, John has been charged with policing the family of the very girl he loves, and like Rolf, he will face a test of duty and morality. Klumpp plays him with great sweetness, taking on his duty with the earnestness of a Boy Scout, even though the stakes are life and death. His angelic face makes this suspenseful journey all the more harrowing for the audience.
The ever-delightful Arin Lee Dandes is adorable as the endlessly cheerful Chava, the mysterious Yiddish-speaking aunt, dumped off by some schmendrik. Her appearance plays like a kind of magical visitation. This is a woman who carries an entire vanished world with her, and who is oddly unafraid of the one she has landed in. Dandes brings warmth and mischief to the character. This is a woman who, at a moment of particular danger, chirps, “Somebody tell a joke!” Inappropriate but wise, she is a sort of Yiddish Yoda, lakhn mit yashtsherkes: literally, laughing with lizards.
Laufer has written a play that is at once a thriller, a family comedy, and an homage to a language. This production honors all three, while wading into the sadly contemporary issue of antisemitism, a theme that JRT has, unsurprisingly, been visiting with great regularity. It is a timely and humane evening of theater, and a fine opening for the JRT season.
The Last Yiddish Speaker continues through November 22 in the Maxine and Robert Seller Theatre at the Benderson Family Building of the Jewish Community Center, 2640 North Forest Road, Amherst. Running time is 90 minutes with no intermission. For tickets, call (716) 650-7626 or visit jccbuffalo.org.
