On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage VOUDON ECONOMICS By Stefan Kanfer Most singers undergo a long apprenticeship in their climb to the top, but Andra McDonald arrived as a star. She won a Tony award for her debut in...
...The pugnacious tomboy becomes a tender, loving woman—until she learns that her seducer has no intention of hanging around for more...
...He wants to be off before the sun has reached its zenith...
...But the greatest of sorrows is not stated—LaChiusa's inability to write memorable arias, or to create a "through line" in his drama...
...Dante is all too willing to go along and get along...
...For the old man regarded his three children as little more than servants...
...they are unashamed exploiters, out to use their late father's treasure for indulgences they have desired since childhood...
...The white man is used to getting his own way...
...There is not a letdown in the cast...
...One of them is acholeric farmer, Sam O'Hara(G.W...
...Like everyone in the audience, he is in the presence of a supernova...
...She needs all the help she can get, and she receives it from lean, evocative sets by Christopher Barreca, phosphorescent lighting by Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer, and flattering 19th century costumes by Toni-Leslie James...
...still, within the small scope of the off-Broadway Riverside Stage the author has created a work far more moving than that overpraised piece of Irish kitsch, The Weir, that ran on Broadway last season...
...He was ably assisted by Mary Beth Griffith's choreography, which makes lovely use of Irish clog dancing...
...In Donegal and Dublin the talk is about the future for a change, instead of the mythic past...
...Would that the same could be said for the show...
...Reed...
...Her mother (Vivian Reed) is an aristocratic Creole who taught her the secrets of "voudon," the local version of Haitian voodoo...
...Although none of this is particularly new, Schulenberg has made each of his characters distinct and individual...
...In Act Two her world comes apart...
...If she doesn't win a fourth for the title role of Marie Christine there is no justice on the Rialto...
...He is at his most expressive when McDonald makes her entrances...
...He eyes Marie Christine and with an amalgam of charm and assertiveness sweeps her off to Chicago, his hometown...
...2) Although the light-skinned boys can stay, their real mother must get out of town where no prying journalist can find her...
...The scene is Mullin's Pub in Donegal, where Bridget Mullin (Mary Jo McConnell) tries to keep up appearances in the face of encroachingpoverty...
...En route he has explored the subject of race as well as the traditional ones of jealousy and revenge...
...This brilliant drummer makes percussive statements on everything that happens below...
...But she has not been given enough melody, or for that matter, enough rationale to justify her actions...
...For this demiopera Michael John LaChiusa has taken Euripides' story of Medea and transplanted it to postbellum New Orleans...
...For the first time in decades the Irish economy is booming...
...The group palaver with each other, alternately quarreling and making up, challenging and backing down, until the entrance of Turlough O'Lochlainn (Norman Allen...
...Their talk is not the usual mix of clichés covered with a Barry Fitzgerald brogue...
...For the most part, the catastrophes occur offstage (while they did in ancient times as well, stagecraft has come a long way in 5,000 years...
...Blackout...
...Another is the village idiot, Inny (Stephen Guarino), who sweeps up around the place...
...The only things she has to do is quit the scene and relinquish her children...
...This middle-aged man is someone out of Yeats' poetry, a figure who has "made his song a coat covered with embroideries/out of old mythologies/from heel to throat...
...In that case, the names of Yeats and Synge and O'Casey and Joyce are as vigorous today as they were two generations ago...
...Dante leaves the vicissitudes of the sea for the rough-and-tumble of Windy City politics...
...Or so it would appear...
...passion is the cause of Man's worst crimes...
...Testa is affecting and sometimes hilarious...
...As LaChiusa tells it, the exotic Marie Christine is no ordinary African American...
...She and her two brothers, Jean (Keith Lee Grant) and Paris (Darius de Haas), grew up blessed by Southern luxury...
...Magdalena desperately wants a child of her own, and she is unable to conceive...
...Finally the boss himself wades in, offering an even bigger jackpot...
...We never see Dante go from shipboard to the hustings...
...Gwenyfar is a conflicted woman who must return to the husband she has abandoned out of fright and ignorance...
...Another Tony came with her second appearance, in Master Class, where she demonstrated the ability to act as well as sing...
...Wounded, she seeks to block him from going...
...Above all, in every sense of the word, is the work of Chaka (David Pleasant), who hovers some 20 feet over the action...
...She won a Tony award for her debut in a revival of Carousel...
...Like all pubs, this one has a group of permanent hangers-on, folks who would rather drink than work, rather complain than try to improve their lots...
...Anyone who has seen or read the original Medea knows what comes next...
...Her husband soon learns of the terrible Euripidean math: one rejection equals three lives...
...The wailing and the keening, the Little People and the blarney have all been packed away, to be trotted out for tourists...
...He argues that their brief affair has no future, that it is nothing more than a way of releasing Carrin from her emotional bonds—just as he has released the others from theirs...
...The retro tragedy has been directed with firmness and delicacy by Brian Feehan...
...The faults are in the composition, not the performances...
...He roughs up Marie Christine in the process, leaving no doubt that he and his minions will stop at nothing, including murder, to achieve their ends...
...When she indignantly refuses, Dante sends emissaries to offer more money and a place to hide...
...The third was given for her work in Ragtime...
...Terrified, Marie Christine accepts the bargain...
...I) The candidate must jettison his racial baggage and take a white wife...
...When important people dropped by, the young folks tended to the needs of the "white quality...
...her antagonists are largely attitudes in period costume...
...In the original, Medea comments on her own deeds: "I recognize what evil I am about to do, but my thymos (my passion) is stronger than my counsels...
...A local ward boss (Shawn Elliott) plans to groom him for national office—but not until he agrees to a couple of conditions...
...One of the most recent playwrights to use an Irish theme, W August Schulenburg, does not have a name that conjures up the Emerald Isle...
...The protagonist is a complicated woman...
...Is there a potion, a blessing, something that might bring fertility to the barren...
...A surrogate is sent to work out the details...
...Nonetheless, the American writer has come up with Carrin Beginning, a poignant bar play that might have been written back in 1927, when it takes place...
...There, in self-deceiving bliss, she bears him two children (Powers Pleasant and Zachary Thornton...
...Into this unstable mix comes a ship's captain, Dante Keyes (a role most often played by Anthony Crivello, but filled by Brent Black on the night I attended...
...But that luxury was also their curse...
...Furious, she reverts to her old battling persona with fatal results...
...The playwright/composer/lyricist is to be commended for his audacity and for his remarkable cast...
...Magdalena makes the arrangements, and in a series of climaxes Marie Christine first kills Dante's new wife by poisoning her...
...Moreover, the plot is told largely through a series of "back stories": We never see Marie Christine's father, we are only told about him...
...Most important, Carrin is a woman who covers her sensitivity with a hard carapace of insult and challenge...
...He obediently selects his bride, then confronts Marie Christine and offers her a fee to disappear...
...To judge by the news and business sections of the papers, Ireland alters every day...
...by Rick Belzer's expansive lighting...
...He makes no attempt at modernization...
...In particular...
...Jean and Paris have no doubt about their identities...
...The price is cheap: an opportunity to give a wedding present to the new bride, and to see the boys one last time...
...Whatever McDonald sings is granted a golden glow, and her stagecraft is astonishing for a woman who has yet to reach the age of 30...
...There is...
...when the lights go up in Act Two he has been transformed into an office-seeker hustling for the Main Chance...
...de Haas provides a unique combination of insecurity and fatal ambition...
...Of all the changes Turlough effects, none is so startling as Carrin's double turnabout...
...and Jennifer Leigh Warren, Andrea FriersonToney and Mary Bond Davis make a powerful Greek chorus, remarking on the multiplication of sorrows...
...It is the absence of thymos that keeps Marie Christine from being more than a showpiece for the decade's most memorable voice...
...And why not...
...Led by McDonald, the performers have almost no flaws whatsoever...
...As the lights go up at the Vivian Beaumont Theater in Lincoln Center, Marie Christine has become a beautiful young woman, uncertain of her location in society...
...and by Jennifer Collins' deceptively simple, evocative set design...
...Others include Carrin (Katrina Ferguson), a brawling young woman who starts—and finishes—fights in pubs all across the country...
...and Nora Reilly (Dawn Denvir) and her unruly brother Marc (Liam Christopher O' Brien...
...Let the investors prate about mergers, profit margins and bottom lines...
...The writers have older fish to fry...
...Unless, of course, the Hibernian speaker is a poet or a playwright...
...Prodding, joking, chanting ballads, he convinces his listeners to follow their stars, and, in the case of Carrin, persuades a woman that he is the answer to her dreams, at least for one night...
...The enticements grow larger, but the answer is always no...
...Gwenyfar (Cara Stoner), a painfully shy, mysterious figure who has come in out of the storm...
...her father was a wealthy French émigr...
...Magdalena (Mary Testa) is one tough-talking saloon keeper, but under Marie Christine's glare she soon breaks down and confesses that she has no heart for this bargain...
...As fine as everyone is, however, the star of the production remains the playwright, who has not only composed dialogue worth speaking but songs worth hearing...
...She has heard that Marie Christine knows voudon magic...
...The truth is that she is the one in need of a favor...
...Afterward she takes the children in hand and murderously leads them away...
...Marc is a youth who must go to sea or become one more local boozer wailing about circumstance...
...to judge from the arts section, the country's literary traditions are as enduring as Guinness Stout and the Book of Kells...
...The result is a list of forgettable tunes, brilliantly arranged by Jonathan Tunick, and a series of dark, confusingly written scenes, fluidly directed and choreographed by Graciela Daniele...
...O'Hara is a brute, but made that way by the failure of his farm, and the fatal, withering illness of his wife...
Vol. 82 • December 1999 • No. 15
