Drama Queen

Building a better Mousetrap

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 13:07:47 +0000

The Mousetrap
Silver Spring Stage
Through July 26

by Gina Guglielmo

Silver Spring Stage is currently mounting a production of Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, a work which holds the world record for longest-running show: it opened in London in 1952 and has clocked over 23,000 performances since beginning in the West End. Its perennial appeal derives from its ingenious plotting and surprise ending, but one must wonder: Is its staying power dwindling as the Twenty-First Century moves into its second decade?

Et in Arcadia ego

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 21:32:27 +0000

Arcadia
Folger Theatre
through June 21
www.folger.edu

by Gina Guglielmo

Tom Stoppard used the irony in the above Latin epigram as a major motif of his play, Arcadia. The phrase, which is not attributable to any ancient author, means "Even in Arcadia, I exist" the "I" being "death" who dwells even in the most idyllic lives.

The same phrase was used by Nietzsche; Evelyn Waugh used the motto for the heading of Book I of Brideshead Revisited; it was misquoted by William Faulkner, and was appropriated by Goethe in a memoir. W.H. Auden appropriated the saying for poem title; Walter Pater alludes to it in his essay on the philosopher, Winklemann; it even appeared recently as a line in a song by the band, Killing Joke. Painters too found the idea arresting. Poussin created two canvases depicting the idea, but Guercino's picture is worth a whole library of words.

Summer Drama-go-round

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 20:44:39 +0000

Now that the monsoon has abated and "somer Is icumin in," Takomans and Silver Springers can seriously take up the work of enjoying the variety of June-September entertainments which DC offers. The drama carousel is a splendid and colorful one and, while some of its horses are already out of the gate, Drama Queen would like to invite you to hop onto the merry-go-round and, as the Wurlitzer band organ begins to play, take your pick of what look to be sure winners.

Half-Looped, Dahlings

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 13:48:39 +0000

Looped
Arena Stage at the Lincoln Theatre

by Gina Guglielmo

Valerie Harper is undoubtedly a fine actress as her appearances as Rhoda Morgestern on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" in the 70's and in her spin-off hit, "Rhoda," attest. In this era of actors channeling the famous viz. Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, Etta James, even Richard M. Nixon, it is no biggie that Tallulah Bankhead should join the list: I mean, the woman was notorious for her brash candor and train wreck lifestyle.

Harper's resemblance to the fog-horn voiced star of screen and stage was, with the help of makeup and a perfect wig, uncanny. The walk, the voice, the obscenity of her idiom are all faithfully replicated in this comedy by Matthew Lombardo which recreates an episode late in Tallulah's life during a rerecording (or looping) of a single sentence from the film "Die, Die, My Darling in a LA recording studio. So unfocused was the actress, it took eight hours for her to drawl, "And so Patricia, as I was saying . . ."

Why the prolonged agony? Well the majority of theater goers come to the play to witness Bankhead's epic boozing, drug addiction and erratic/ erotic behavior. Indeed the pun is legitimate: she smokes, swills Scotch and even snorts cocaine throughout the play, goes off on all sorts of wild tangents: hence a looped lady doing a looping.

She is beyond outrageous: Madonna is a postulant in a convent compared to this southern belle turned foul-mouthed virago. May I state for the record that Drama Queen's last name is not Victoria, which gives some idea of her venomous but rather creative diatribes. The audience howled appreciatively at each shockeroo.

Born in Huntsville, Alabama into a prestigious political family (her father was Speaker of the House; her grandfather was a Senator),Tallulah's life started out tragically. Her mother died three months after delivering her second daughter, and according to Tallulah, her father blamed her brutally. At first a homely, pudgy child, she blossomed into a beauty but discovered drugs and promiscuous sex in her teens. Despite this baggage, she broke into Broadway and then Hollywood making dozens of movies. The best of the lot was her portrayal of a famous actress in "Lifeboat". She also spent eight very successful years on the London Stage and even hosted her own radio show.

As Looped begins, a film editor named Danny Miller (Jay Goede) bursts into the sound studio looking for the missing actress. Eventually she stumbles in while giving the verbal finger to the entire L.A. area. Her patter is shocking not because we never hear this language but because La Bankhead's vocabulary was as salacious well before George Carlin, South Park and Jon Stewart made potty talk rather ho-hum. She used her prurient put-downs to insult, attack, and demean this Danny whom she had barely met, coming across as a miserable human being who never found or learned to like herself. Somehow, Harper evokes pity for her too.

Some of the anecdotes that fill out her non-stop barrage are shocking but likely true: Gary Cooper, good ole' Coop of High Noon, gave her the clap which nearly killed her and rendered her barren. Douglas Fairbanks was a sexual lightweight and so was his wife, Joan Crawford. Oh, she spares no one: Tennessee Williams, Jessica Tandy, her equally bizarre sister, Eugenia, and everyone from Harpo Marx to her hotel doorman who wants to "have it on" with her.

Cutting to the chase, Valerie Harper is a good actress; she did a fabulous imitation of Tallulah, the harridan, as she torments Danny into a tearful revelation about his homosexuality. It was at this point that the play finally fell off the cliff. First of all, drunk as she is throughout, according to the Post review, Tallulah did not abuse alcohol; she was a world-class drug addict and chain smoker, so I feel the playwright distorted the facts to make his character more infamous. Neither was she a great actress. She was, how well we know this type today: a Celebrity. Like Norma Desmond in Sunset Blvd., her tragedy is not based on the reality of a flawed genius. When Harper does Blanche Dubois for Danny to prove she could really act, she made a rotten Blanche. It's unclear if the director Rob Ruggiero called for that, or was it that Harper could not muster her gifts to show Tallulah being great in this role? She is after all a comic actress and there is not a single funny bone in Blanche Dubois' body.

The whole idea of Danny jumping out of the closet after knowing Bankhead for half a day is preposterous. Why would this tormented man who had married and fathered a child and kept his deep, dark secret for his whole life confide in this sad broken-down shell of a woman, who morphs suddenly into a motivational speaker urging him to be free and express himself.

So "Looped" gets a B. The actors followed the script, but the play missed the "Lifeboat."

Looped runs through June 28 at the Lincoln Theatre, 1215 U St., NW, Washington. Tickets are $25 to $74. Call 202-488-3300 or go to arenastage.org.

Lumina Studio went BIG with "Little Dorrit"

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 18:00:08 +0000

photo by Linda Parker

by Sandy Moore

There was nothing "little" about Lumina Studio's production of Charles Dickens' "Little Dorrit," staged at Silver Spring's Round House Theatre on May 16-20. The book was BIG (850 pages, which playwright David Minton pared down to a 67-page script), the cast was BIG (88 actors in total, split between two casts), as was the staging (59 scene changes).

The music was BIG too, with the actors singing original melodies created for the show by local composer Mark Haag. And the costumes, including dresses with hoop skirts made from heavy drapery were--BIG.

A good "Bad Friend"

Sun, 01 Mar 2009 15:05:55 +0000

by Gina Guglielmo

Jules Feiffer! What a blast from the DQ's past! Feiffer was so New York, so late 20th Century, and his sophisticated cartoons were everywhere: The Village Voice, The New Yorker, Esquire, and The New York Times. In 1986 Feiffer won the Pulitzer Prize for his political cartoons, and he was the ubiquitous and witty guest on talk shows in the early days of black and white TV.

But an author? Who knew? After a quick dip into Wikipedia, Feiffer's equally stellar career as a writer was made clear. He wrote the stage play for Little Murders as well as the screenplays for Mike Nichols' Carnal Knowledge and Robert Altman's Popeye. His book, The Great Comic Book Heroes was alluded to in the recent Kill Bill, and he was inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2004. Not surprisingly, his whimsical humor lent itself to many children's books including The Man in the Ceiling.

Silver Spring Stage is currently offering Feiffer's little-known play,

A Bad Friend, a bittersweet comedy which takes place in the paranoia-rich atmosphere of the McCarthy era and makes it worth a serious look post 9/11. The plot of A Bad Friend is pretty straightforward: a family swept up by its fervor for Communism as embodied in Stalinist Russia is torn by internal conflicts; it is threatened and nearly destroyed by external ones.

The cast is small: the parents, Naomi and Shelly; teenage-daughter Rose; Hollywood screenwriter, Uncle Morty: a snooping reporter, Fallon; and an enigmatic stranger Rose befriends named Emil. Rose is the focus of the swirling energies provided by her ultra "progressive" parents who read The Daily Worker religiously and blindly and defend their good friend, Joseph Stalin, for his noble actions. Despite this grim scenario, there is a great deal of humorous dialogue in the play. Fieffer's definition of a liberal is a gem although surely a self-deprecating one: a liberal is a person whose feet are planted solidly in mid air. However, the life of this close-knit family, for all their ardent faith in a new world, ends only in sadness and disillusion.

The production (handled by Seth and Brenda Ghitelman), is creative and fast-paced due to the fact that there are no clear cut scenes or acts but a series of vignettes, twenty or more. Watching them actually resembles reading a book of cartoons. One scene segues into the next accompanied by snatches of apropos music ranging from The Depression songs of Guthrie to those of Fred Astaire. The role of Rose is played by Lauren Uberman who captures all the nuances of the teenage spectrum: outrage, innocence, deep commitment and vulnerability. She also does a drop-dead perfect Brooklyn accent, not an easy accomplishment for those not born and bred in Coney Island or Flatbush. The entire cast was polished and gave strong performances notably Sally Cusenza as the perennial Jewish Mamma and Craig Miller as Emil, the mystery man who Rose befriends on the esplanade of Brooklyn Heights.

Lauren Liberman (Rose), Gordon Adams (Shelly) and Sally Cusenza (Naomi).

A drawback to resurrecting this play might be its wealth of allusions to the witch-hunt mentality of the forties and fifties. The program notes provide information on once prominent names like John Garfield, Clifford Odets, and Emma Goldman. Most of the audience was likely familiar with The Rosenbergs and Zero Mostel, but I fear this play would go totally sopra la testa of anyone under 50. Even DQ had never heard the wild accusation that High Noon was a metaphor for an isolated and beleaguered comrade forsaken by a whole town of craven, unenlightened cowards.

And just who are the bad guys in this play? That is the question. Well, Joseph Stalin is certainly up for a prize. Late in the play, Shelley puts together some information which implies that Uncle Joe was behind the pogroms. Naomi rages against such disloyal ideas. However, locating the villain or villains of the piece goes beyond the obvious Soviet leader. Uncle Morty (in a strong performance by Brian Turley) is Rose's idol, but he quickly throws off old loyalties to his sister and her family, and to his own Commie roots when his writing career is at stake. The reporter who stalks Rose throughout the play would appear to be a bad friend but may possibly be a good one since he desires to enlighten Rose about her misled family.

Emil is likewise a very ambiguous character since he genuinely likes Rose for her unspoiled self, but then gives her Dreiser's An American Tragedy to read. Dreiser was a Party member and his novel pointed out the rotten underbelly of our capitalistic nation. It eventually comes out that Rose's dear friend Emil is an undercover Soviet spy, the notorious Colonel Abel.

Maybe the Bad Friend term is a metaphor for all the clouds of suspicion and betrayal that hung over Americans during that era. Silver Spring Stage should be applauded for reviving this play which underlines the values of civil rights and individual freedom for contemporary audiences. As the Director succinctly puts it in his opening notes: "When we betray those values, we are a bad friend to the world."

A Bad Friend continues at the Silver Spring Stage at 10145 Colesville Road, Woodmont Center in Silver Spring on March 6, 7 and March 13, 14 and 15 (m). 301-593-6036.

Religulous: Not that Mahervelous

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 21:39:47 +0000

by Gina Guglielmo

This is a warning for people belonging to any of the following groups:

•   Worshippers at roadside trucker's chapels
•   Fundamentalists who believe every word of The Bible
•   Jews for Jesus who now own religious articles store
•   Muslims - especially those who stole the Temple Mount
•   Scientologists with names like Cruise and Travolta
•   Cannabis worshippers
•   Mormons from Joseph Smith down to Salt Lake City security guards
•   Born-again gays who think they can "get over it

You probably will not find Bill Maher's documentary Religulous amusing.

I agree with The Washington Post's capsule review of the film which states that Maher's satire is flawed because he lacks sufficient knowledge about his topic to denigrate it effectively. Neither does he grasp the high purpose of satire. Chaucer, for the most part a gentle satirist, pokes fun at the foibles of his fellow man; Maher sneers at them. He also lacks the "righteous indignation" displayed by Jonathan Swift, a "harsh satirist," who rages against hypocrites and tyrants; Maher is just plain mean-spirited and patronizing.

His unrelenting pomposity is worsened by a careless and jokey treatment of facts. For example while comparing the synchronous religions that sprang up around the Mediterranean in the First Century, he implies, using day-glo graphics, that lots of gods were also born on Dec. 25th, walked on water and rose from the dead. His interviewees are often set up to look like fools such as the curmudgeon priest he accosts in front of St. Peter's Basilica; the giddy woman who cannot wait to ride a white horse back to earth after "the rapture; or the rabbi who comically keeps shouting "Let me finish" meaning not a joke but his defense of agreeing with Ahmadinijad about The Holocaust.. Trying to squeeze out as many laughs as possible, Maher travels to Bibleland, a religious theme park where he can score a double whammy mocking both the simple faith of the performers and the customers.

Basically he makes a critical error between the concepts, Childish and Childlike, and in this he is consistent. Childish denotes immature, willfully naïve, petulant behavior ; child-like is something else. A very intelligent person can be child-like in his world view demonstrating a simplicity of belief and life style. Obviously, in his thirteen years as a Catholic before his father withdrew the family en masse, he sadly was not touched by the beauty and simplicity of the gospel stories. Cut off from this tradition, he also could not later use his obvious intelligence to examine the teachings of his father's Christianity or his mother's Judaism as he grew into maturity. In his criticism he harped continuously on the talking snake in the Garden of Eden and the Virgin Birth but did not seem to have a clue about the metaphorical nature of mythology by which Christians, Jews, Muslims and other believers can reconcile religious texts with modern scientific thinking.

Nonetheless, the film does have merits. Maher interviews a few people who are not dwelling on the fringes. The inclusion of scenes with his mother and sister, which were ironically filmed before stain-glass windows, were attempts to shine more light on Maher's religious development. Some of his jokes even displayed an ecumenical bent:   "Being a Christian and a Jew had advantages. When I went to Confession, I brought my lawyer: 'Bless me Father for I have sinned; you know Harry Cohen?'"   One cameo appearance by a theologian actually offered a rebuttal to his anti-religious harangues with a clear explanation of Teilhard de Jardin's reconciliation of The Bible with Evolutionary theories. But then the curtain dropped again.

Yet Maher did proclaim two messages: one at the beginning, one at the end. While dunning the simple faith of the worshippers at the Trucker Chapel in an early part of the film, he said he was peddling defiant doubt on every street corner. This is a far cry from Tennyson's, "There is more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds."   At the conclusion, after many clips of suicide bombings and other atrocities, Maher infers that the evils of the world might stem from imbecilic religious worship. However, instead of putting the blame on demagogues who have distorted the messages of most major creeds and in fact used religion to seize power even in exalted places like the U.S. Presidency, Maher blames the ignorant sheep. If we want to avoid Armageddon, according to the Gospel of Bill, we have to "Grow up!"

Actually, it is amazing this incendiary movie found producers. Maher may have had crusading intentions as well in taking on this epic theme, but as far as leading us into a better place, he really missed the Ark.

Launching Drama Queen Blog

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 22:42:36 +0000

Now, that's what I call BOLD print!

Okay, now that I finally found the Takoma Park Voice, I am atypically speechless. It's a matter of so many blogs, so little time. My HOME blog is ginarosa.com with archives of photos, travel articles, movie reviews from 10 years ago, and my favorite "absurdities" a catch-all title for well, the funny events I fall upon in my life.

A bit of bio for DQ aka Gina Guglielmo. I was born eons ago in New York City where I wallowed in all the wonderful offerings of that city: food, opera, museums, wonderfully bizarre people. College was St. Joseph's College for Women. Cute, eh? Naturally I was an English Major. Marriage occured in 1962 and an MA and Motherhood in Spring of 1963. Motherhood followed quite a bit until the magic number of five was achieved. Husband Anthony Mario and I moved around a bit before settling in Brookeville Maryland. We lived in New Britain and Middletown CT for six year. Next was LA. Quite a dramatic difference there. After that two-year party, we did a short term in Mobile, Alabama, enough to see the high points and visit New Orleans, and then on to Maryland and DC. After 30 years of suburbia, some suitable reward was due me, so six years ago we bought a Co-op in Glover Park. What a great neighborhood....view of The National Cathedral and all that culture and food opportunity.

However, la famiglia is very big now.....all kids have mated and some have reproduced: two from son #1, 2 from son #2 and 3 simultaneously from daughter #2. We needed a big dining room and table that had three leaves and a spacious back yard to play Nana and Pappa to this crowd, which brought us to Takoma Park, DC. We love our lovely bungalow and plan to spend many happy years in this "electric" company.

Tune in: now that my feet are wet, you'll be hearing from me again.