St. Louis Eats and Drinks

Exit, Pursued by a Bear

Woman in pursuit of a goal.

Stand back; author Lauren Gunderson is going to tell you all about it. In Exit, Pursued by a Bear she offers a tale of a young blue-collar couple in an exurb of Atlanta one Fourth of July. Gunderson’s the one who gave us Christmas at Pemberley Manor, the Jane Austen take the Rep did several years ago, but this is a waaay different sort of drawing room comedy. Drawing? Nan Carter is married to Kyle. She’s interested in drawing bears. Not sketching them, but luring them by means of fresh meat. Kyle, it seems, is one mean guy, especially when he’s been drinking, which seems to happen with considerable frequency. Nan is pretty tired of it, and intends to get out.

She started to realize she could when she got to know Sweetheart, a local amateur actor who moonlights at one of the “men’s clubs” that ring Atlanta, dancing as Miss Peaches. Somehow, it’s not surprising that they met at Subway. Sweetheart lent Lauren her copy of Shakespeare’s complete works. One thinks perhaps she also brought up George Bernard Shaw who said, “I dream things that never were and say why not?” Sweetheart’s dreams aim for Los Angeles and an acting career; Nan has begun to realize there’s a world out there that she’s really, really missing out on, and her marriage is an epic fail.

What to do, what to do…. Our first clue may be the many bear-shaped squeeze bottles that populate the set, which is the Carter home. Our second clue is that when we meet Kyle, he’s duct-taped to the recliner. Then there’s Simon, Nan’s BFF for years, who arrives for the fun wearing a Georgia Bulldogs cheerleader costume, complete with flippy little skirt.

Lexa Wroniak plays a very believable Nan, full of disillusioned innocence and able to quote Jimmy Carter, who, she admits, is no kin, at the drop of a noun. Sweetheart, aka Miss Peaches, is Tara Ernst, an absolute delight, making the character bigger-than-life – metaphorically speaking. Ethan Isaac’s Simon flounces, pompons and all, with the greatest of ease, making sure his bestie’s new pal is really acting (ahem) in her best interest. It’s hard to emote when you’re restrained in an overstuffed chair, but Alex Fyles, as Kyle, even manages to enunciate some fairly understandable words from behind the tape usually covering his mouth.

Teresa Doggett directed this romp with lighting design from Amy Ruprecht and sound design from Kareem Deanes. Lots of fun.

Who needs reality when you can have all this?

 

Exit, Pursued by a Bear

through February 17

West End Players Guild

Union Avenue Christian Church

733 Union Blvd. (enter on Enright Avenue)

www.westendplayers.org

Milk Like Sugar

Milk Like Sugar is the disquieting story of three young women, high school students who decide, when one announces she’s pregnant, they should all have babies together. “You can dress them up, and they’ll love you,” explains one. Also, people have to buy you what you want, like Coach diaper bags and tiny Air Jordans.

Yes, they are very young – we meet them in a tattoo parlor as Annie (Brandi Threatts) is about to turn 16 – so young that one of their ways of assessing a potential father is what kind of cell phones he has. (The play is set about 15 years ago, more or less when a similar pact was discovered among young women at a Massachusetts school.) Margie (Camille Sharp) is the one who’s pregnant. The high-energy queen bee Talisha (Tyler White) has an older boyfriend who actually has his own place. Birthday girl Annie will be the one auditioning potential baby daddies.

Annie’s clearly the only one even vaguely pondering other alternatives in her life, but she has no idea what. She sort of feels a spark with the tattoo artist (Brian McKinley). A senior, Malik (Dwayne McCowan), who’s heard she thinks he’s cute, wants to meet her in a park. Both of the young men talk, in different ways, about things they’re passionate about, encouraging her. Keera (Jillian Franks), a girl at school that Talisha has bullied into writing a paper for her and whom the girls disdainfully refer to as Holly Hobbie, the rustic cartoon/toy character, talks about how her loving father and her religion have given her happiness, but Annie has neither of those to identify with.

It’s really not until Annie is talking to her mom (Michelle Dillard) that we get a full sense of how much she wants something and how tough it’s going to be for her to get there. Mom cleans offices at night and writes stories in the daytime. Pregnant as a teenager, raising three children alone, she’s tired and angry. Now she hears her only daughter dreamily explain that “Babies aren’t real work.” More than reality rears its ugly head.

This is indeed real life. It’s not cute, it’s not contrived. It’s hard, it’s frustrating and it’s a problem that art can’t solve.

The young women actors are a delight. Threatts carries off the not-always-easy appearance of adolescent subtlety just as well as she does the excitement of the birthday. As Margie, Sharp is convinced she knows pretty much everything she needs to know, and her disdain when a nurse wearing a glove tries to hand her prenatal information is beyond scathing. Then there’s White’s Talisha, who is totally supercharged except when she’s talking about her boyfriend; then, somehow, she becomes distant. The off-key Keera from Franks is a wonderful puzzlement, so different that it’s hard to take one’s eyes off her.

Still, it’s mom that leads the way. Michelle Dillard pretty much owns that role, mopping up the floor with her daughter. Malik, the boy with an idea of the outside world, is hesitant and interested at the same time in Dwayne McCowan’s hands; Brian McKinley’s young tattoist opens up at last and lets us see the self-assurance isn’t all it seems.

Nicole Brewer directed, pulling it all together with verve. The fascinating scenic design is by Rama, the lights from Sean Savoie, and the interesting sound from Kareem Deanes. As to the script – I’ve heard the argument that the opening is too Over The Top. I’ve heard that the ending is too weak. Both are wrong. The opening is accurate, however grating adolescent women can be, and the exposition is spot-on. The ending...this isn’t an after-school special, to be sure. But in between, there’s a strong story about real life and some fascinating character development, and that’s the best of all.

No intermission, and it’s working in the black box at the Edison Theatre in Washington University’s Mallinkrodt Center – at the west end of the building.

 

Milk Like Sugar

through March 3

The Black Rep

A. E. Hotchner Studio Theatre

Washington University in St. Louis

www.theblackrep.org

 

Big news from the Muny

St. Louis times 2! The Muny has just announced that their production of "Matilda" will be "inspired by" our own Mary Engelbreit. She's collaborating on the look and feel of the show. A great combination, for sure!

Farragut North

Farragut North is a Metro stop in Washington, DC, just off K Street, NW, the home of big-time lobbyists, law firms and other consultant-type outfits. Farragut North, the current show at St. Louis Actors’ Studio, however, is about an Iowa presidential caucus season in 2008, although it isn’t specifically about that particular contest.

Stephen Bellamy (Spencer Sickmann) is a hot-shot media guru for a candidate who seems to have a pretty good lead with less than two weeks before the caucuses. He’s 27, a fast-rising star with a great track record. His boss, campaign manager Paul Zara (David Wassilak), thinks highly of him and is pleased with his work. The two of them, plus a very young guy (Joshua Parrack) working for Bellamy and a New York Times reporter (Shannon Nara) are having a drink in a hotel bar when the play opens. The reporter has just finished research for a profile of the candidate while she’s covering him for the Times, but is oozing charm, hoping to draw out any heretofore-secret tidbits from the staff.

Peter Mayer is the chairman of the main rival in the election, and he admires Bellamy’s work. Would Bellamy be interested…? There’s a cute intern (Hollyn Gale) that’s come out from the campaign’s national headquarters. Would Bellamy be interested…?

The almost snake-charmer-like feel draws us into what’s going on and how this works. Sickmann is smooth and adroit, only occasionally reminding us of a used-car salesman, working alongside the experienced likes of Wassilak and Mayer and holding his own with each of them, good as they are. For Wassilak in particular, Paul is a different sort of role, calm, urbane, controlled. It works well on him.

Wayne Salomon directed, giving us excellent, tight pacing, and did the sound design – some really excellent music, by the way. Campaigns are very money conscious, which explains the particularly sleazy-looking hotel bar furniture and rooms coming from Patrick Huber; think Motel Six two weeks before a full refurbishment.

Speaking of full refurbishment, yes, the West End Bar and Grill, which abuts the theater is closed, but the bar is open for before, during and after shows, so arrive early, thaw out, and have a glass of something.

Some uncomfortable behavior and reminders of what happens behind the scenes of a campaign in a very watchable play.

 

Farragut North

through February 24

St. Louis Actors’ Studio

Gaslight Theater

360 N. Boyle

314-458-2978

stlas.org

Oslo

Most of us seldom think any more of the Oslo Peace Accords, even if we’re the sort of people who really keep up with world events. The results of those talks have been...well, modest compared to what many people had hoped for. Nevertheless, it was a momentous thing for the government of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization to officially acknowledge the other’s existence and enter into formal agreements.

That all sounds very distant from what works in a play. But how the accord came to be is a fascinating and very human story about how individuals can make a difference in the world. A Norwegian couple, he a researcher and she a civil servant, thought perhaps there might be a way to get Israel and the Palestinians talking to each other if it were out of the public eye and done by people who weren’t public officials. The play Oslo, the Tony winner for Best Play in 2017, is an adapted version, written by J.T. Rogers, of what happened. (Here’s a link to how it went in real life.) Directed by retiring artistic director Steve Woolf, it’s just opened at the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis.

 

We meet Terje Rod-Larsen (Jim Poulos) and his wife Mona Juul (Kathleen Wise). They tell her boss, Johan Jorgen Holst (Jonathan Gillard Daly), who’s the minister of foreign affairs for Norway, and his wife Marianne Heiberg (Michelle Hand), and discussions begin about how to do this.

The talks begin with two Israelis, Yair Hirschfeld (John Rensenhouse) and Ron Pundak (Michael James Reed), interacting to two Palestinians, Ahmed Qaurie (Rajesh Bose) and Jassan Asfour). This proves to be a wonderful tag team match. Over the course of the play, watching them spar and carouse is almost as much of a high point as the message of the drama, which is that sometimes you have to try the impossible. As the world knows, the talks progressed and a formal signing was held at the White House in September of 1993, but even at that point, there was posturing going on. Bill Clinton tells of worrying about handshakes between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat and what to do if Arafat leaned forward to kiss Rabin, the traditional Arab greeting, at the signing of the Oslo Accord that day. A number of people here play multiple roles, often to the point where they’re hard to recognize.

It’s a fascinating play, well written and surprisingly funny. There are even food jokes. The hostess at the estate where the talks begin has planned a nice dinner with the main course roast pork. And do not be surprised at the appearance of waffles, vafler. Waffles are very Norwegian. The Norway bureau of the Pollacks remind me they’re not a breakfast food, they’re a snack. I’ve seen them offered – waffle iron, pitcher of batter, tub of sour cream and some jam – in a hotel bar in dark late afternoons in December. Parents’ clubs sell waffles to raise money at football games and such. So when the waffles come out, you know this is all the real thing.

Michael Ganio’s scenic design works really well, with fine use of Nathan W. Scheuer’s projections. I muttered for a while about Dorothy Marshall Englis’ choice to use ties on all the Israeli government officials, but by this period in time, except for highly formal occasions, at least half the members of the Knesset appear to have worn them, a change from the original tradition.

A very successful show, with fine acting and a good story line. It’s sad that things have not gone as well as they hoped, but that’s another point of the whole thing. To use Jesse Jackson’s trademark phrase, keep hope alive, keep hope alive.

 

Oslo

through March 3

Repertory Theatre St. Louis

Loretto-Hilton Center for the Performing Arts

130 Edgar Rd., Webster Groves

repstl.org

The Crucible

Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible, a play about the Salem witch trials of the late 1600’s, as a sort of allegory about the McCarthy hearings. Miller himself had been subpoenaed, testified and was held in contempt of Congress for refusing to identify other people at meetings he attended.

Seeing it in the current production by Stray Dog Theatre in the stage of American political thought we’re enduring now, one cannot help but look for parallels, of course. One can, and I’m sure many people have, argued that things were different then. Still, human behavior does repeat itself..

This, of course, was more than eighty years before the American Revolution when Massachusetts Bay Colony was still a part of England,, so English common law was in force. And when the daughter of the widowed Reverend Samuel Parris (Ben Ritchie) lies unresponsive after being found with her friends by her father dancing – oh, the horror of it – her father, and the rest of the small town, wonder if witchcraft was being practiced. The ripples, yea, waves from this extend widely, as evidenced by the size of the cast, 21 people, perhaps the largest SDT has ever used.

Not only is it a large cast, it’s a long show by the standards of today, four acts running over three hours. The plot is relatively complex when trying to explain what happens, other than this is the reason the phrase “witch hunt” has entered the American vocabulary, and who the characters are. Nevertheless, it’s clear that John Proctor (Graham Emmons), a local farmer, and his wife Elizabeth (Cynthia Pohlson), will be pivotal. Reverend Mr. Parris’ orphaned niece Abigail (Alison Linderer), who’d been hired as a maid by the Proctors, and then fired because she and John Proctor had become sexually involved, was one of the girls found dancing, and, we discover, was trying to evoke a curse on Mrs. Proctor, so she could marry him. Arrests begin on charges of witchcraft and the number mushrooms almost overnight as the hysteria spreads. There are trials. The penalty for being found guilty is death; if a defendant pleads guilty of being a witch, then there’s jail time and a ruined life – in this deeply, vigorously religious colony of Puritans.

It’s a carefully assembled cast, but some folks stand out, Ritchie, for instance, is so smug and pious it’s hard not to rush onstage and smack him. Emmons hits a good balance between being strong-willed on many things and deeply contrite toward his wife; opposite him, Pohlson is as stalwart as we imagine a loving-but-Puritan wife to be. Linderer’s Abigail tries hard to be seductive, but she’s really pretty bland, not surprising in that context.

Abraham Shaw gives a substantial Reverend John Hale, the visiting witchcraft authority from Andover, whose character evolves through the process. The redoubtable Rebecca Nurse, called Goody Nurse, using a title common in the era, short for “good wife”, is a fine, strong performance from Suzanne Greenwald. Deputy-Governor Danforth, who is presiding over the trials, comes courtesy of Joe Hanrahan, sometimes snarling, sometimes soothing, always satisfying.

Beyond considering any parallels to modern society, it also brings to mind stories of some Middle Eastern courts. It’s what happens when church and state are intertwined and how dangerous that is.

Especially for those who haven’t seen this classic of American theatre, it’s worth the commitment of time.

 

The Crucible

through February 23

Stray Dog Theatre

2336 Tennessee Ave.

314-865-1995

www.straydogtheatre.org

KNEAD Bakehouse & Provisions

Do not head into KNEAD Bakehouse & Provisions thinking this is your standard bakery, much less the old-fashioned south St. Louis vaguely Germanic kind. No gooey butter cake, no dinner rolls and no diner-style coffee made eight hours earlier, the kind that manages to be both weak and sour.

Speaking of sour, where the quality does belong is in sourdough bread, and that’s one of the stars in KNEAD’s crown. AJ and Kirsten Brown began offering his bread at farmer’s markets. A little over a year ago, they opened the small bricks-and-mortar store where Salume Beddu once was.

Most of their business, though – and perhaps it’s different early in the morning; they open at 7.30 Tuesday through Friday, at 8 on the weekend – is eating in, for casual breakfasts and lunches. Seating is at a counter looking out the windows, or at tables, mostly 6-tops, that are shared. Order at the counter after glomming the wondrous contents of the case, pick up a menu on one of the clipboards hanging from a rail just below the glass of the case, and order at the counter. They’ll bring it out to you and bus your table, too; kudos for that graceful touch.

After both a couple of breakfasts and a lunch, it’s mostly very recommendable. As noted above, the deep experience here is in bread rather than pastry, and it shows. Not surprisingly, toasts with various toppings are an all-day item, as is bread and butter. Is $7 a lot of money for that? Thick slices of toasted sourdough come with butter sprinkled with crunchy, coarse salt and parsley, the sort of bread that demands attention and time to eat. Two thick slices are enough for two eaters, so go for it. The other great basic here is coffee, from Blueprint. It’s good, whether it comes with what the spaghetti board calls MO MILK (it’s the equivalent of a latte, and all their milk comes from Ozark Mountain Creamery, down in Mountain Grove, MO) or adding your own after it’s served, but the service is strangely quirky. Once I was the only person whose coffee wasn’t served with the crisp, wafer-thin cookie others got. Another time, I got it without the requested milk. A (large) glass of orange juice tasted like it was squeezed to order. The batch I had was so tart it seemed vaguely grapefruit-like, but that can vary immensely by type of orange and terroir; the orange juice-finicky, like me, can be happy with this.

The food? Oh, yes. The food, for sure. Breakfast sandwiches come on housemade sourdough brioche rolls, not the sweet, fragile things that mess up a sandwich, but rich, savory ones, the expected egg/cheese with or without bacon or sausage, plus a griddled take on a Monte Cristo. The sausage version was moist and rich, a slice of decent tomato and a couple of leaves of tender lettuce laid on. Still, it was a sandwich one might expect, as good as it was. The surprise was the porridge, described as oats, wheatberries, toasted granola and jam. The texture was amazing, as smooth and airy as a zabaglione, the wheatberries and granola giving variation. A couple of slices of ripe pear sat atop for yet more contrast. Spoonful after spoonful, it was shockingly good.

Indeed, for a bakery, this is a great place for spoonable happiness. The mushrooms soup is killer. Note the plural of the fungi; they’re using at least three kinds in the totally vegan soup, along with some onion and garlic, although they’re secondary to the wondrous woodsiness of the main ingredients. This, too, comes with a slice of that bread, making it a whole-lunch dish. The aforementioned brioche also was the holder for a brie-and-porchetta sandwich, the pork being rich and tender, a good partner to the cheese. The side was some chips, and housemade pickles, a dill-ish spear and a slice of pickled green tomato. Good, but not as good as that soup.

The pastries and savory buns are priced like desserts or first courses, not their mass-market equivalents, so don’t be surprised at that. I found a mixed bag on the pastries. A doughnut’s combination of the begamot oil found in Earl Gray tea, which is from a kind of citrus, and some orange, worked well together. But the doughnut was tough, not stale but chewier than expected, with too much gluten development compared to what’s usual. Not so much sticky sweetness in the generously-sized cinnamon roll, which has received much attention, and, whether deliberate or not, the occasional hit of salt – but it had been in the oven a tad too long, affecting the moisture and texture, not burnt, but overdone externally. Yet, on another visit a maple-bacon doughnut was remarkably tender, topped with lardons, not crumbles, of bacon and carrying a hard-to-identify tang that seemed vaguely Asian. Again, all these were generously sized.

Restaurants, says Pollack’s First Law, set their standards by the way they price themselves. I emphasize the costs in order to prepare visitors, not to warn them away. Except for the couple of untoward sweets on one visit, it’s a spot that rewards the hungry and the curious.

 

 

KNEAD Bakehouse & Provisions

3467 Hampton Ave.

314-376-4361

kneadbakehouse.com

Breakfast & Lunch Tuesday-Sunday

Credit cards: Yes

Wheelchair access: Snug

Sandwiches & Entrees: $8-$13

Not Exactly a Recipe....

Is this a recipe? Sort of. The New York Times food section’s newsletters often talk about no-recipe “recipes”, making suggestions about putting things together and encouraging folks to use their experience, even if it’s limited, and instinct to put together food. (To quote the late Benjamin Spock, MD, “You know more than you think you do.”) And so this is one of those semi-recipes, requiring shopping skills, perhaps, but not much in terms of measuring and technique. I made this for another of the trivia contests and it was more of a hit than a fancier dip I’d done another night.

This uses labna, the Middle Eastern spreadable yogurt cheese that is spelled and pronounced several different ways. I was going to make it myself by lining a sieve or colander with cheesecloth or a very clean cotton dishtowel and letting Greek yogurt drain overnight or even a couple of days. There are lots of recipes for this online, including one that suggests using a clean t-shirt to hold the yogurt, but I’d advise against that unless you want a dish tasting faintly of Bounce. (I don’t use fabric softener on dishtowels, finding they absorb water faster when they’re hung up to dry naturally) But there the labna was in Global Foods refrigerator case against the south wall, saving me time and not any more expensive than Fage, my preferred brand of Greek yogurt.

I was at Global to pick up some zatar, the Middle Eastern seasoning mix. I found at least three brands. If I were truly dedicated, I would have bought and tasted all of them. I didn’t. I’ve used Sadaf products before and been happy, so here’s what that looks like. The mixture traditionally includes thyme, sumac and sesame seeds; some variations have other things added. Sumac is slightly tart; this brand also has a little salt in it.

When I got home, I stirred the labna to loosen it a little and spread about half of it in the serving container – in this case, an elegant Tupperware box. I sprinkled some of the zatar over it. How much? Maybe ¾ of a teaspoon – just be sure to not dump it all in the middle, season the edges, too, so when people scoop there, they’ll have some. Spread the remainder of the labna on top. Swirl it elegantly, and sprinkle more of the zatar over this – maybe a little less than you used on the lower layer, but use your judgement. I dribbled over it some good olive oil I’d brought back from California on my last trip, closed the container and refrigerated it until I needed it.

That’s it. The reason I layered it is so that the dried herbs can pick up some moisture from the labna – it could be done at the last minute, but this was easier for me because of time, and that worked out well. I offered pita chips with it, but it would work well with vegetables, too.

It was delicious. The Potato Queen was eating it with a spoon.

The Hundred Dresses

A fast tip of the hat – and a swoosh of the petticoats as well – in the direction of Metro Theater Company, St. Louis’ long-lived children’s theatre group. Their current offering, The Hundred Dresses, gives audiences the eternal question of dealing with The Other – a person or persons who are different from those around them. Taken from Eleanor Estes’ 1944 children’s novel of the same name, based on her own experience when a refugee began attending her school, it looks at how we view and what we do when faced with Others.

In an elementary class taught by Mr. Mason (Phillip C. Dixon), the students include Maddie, our narrator (Alicia Reve Like), the exuberant Tommy (Jacob Cange) and Peggy (Hailey Medrano), who swans about in true queen bee style, long before the phrase was coined. They’ve obviously been classmates before. Wanda Petronski (Sophie Murk) joins the class, and the giggles start with her last name. Then they notice she only wears the same dress every day, and her lunch is very simple. The metaphorical knives come out.

Artistic director Julia Flood directed this story of how a girl with one dress talks about a hundred dresses. David Blake designed the sets and the costumes, complete with what would have been at the time (which seems rather Fifties) called “can-can slips” come to us courtesy of Lou Bird. Medrano makes good use of the can-cans for her character’s superior preening and flouncing. Like‘s confusion over what to do about the conflict between the two other girls is carefully played but not overdone. And Murk’s Wanda is quite excellent, her hesitation and confusion weighing on her as she forges on.

Running time is about 55 minutes, no intermission. A worthwhile experience for the young and those who want to open their worlds wider.

 

The Hundred Dresses

through February 25

metroplays.org

Metro Theater Company

Grandel Theatre

3610 Grandel Square

Avenue Q

Does the whole world know by now that Avenue Q is a puppet show that definitely isn’t for kids? One would hope so, but just in case….

The version that’s currently at the Playhouse @ Westport Plaza seems even rowdier than the first version I saw. I didn’t find it offensive, and neither, apparently, did the people around me to judge from their responses, but I wouldn’t take my prudish Uncle Ralph to it.

The concept is that there are live actors who play some of the characters, and there are other characters who are puppets handled by actors who voice them. Sometimes necessity causes one puppet to be handled by two people, sometimes it causes a puppet to be handled by a different person than originally, although this is pretty brief. But each puppet’s voice is done by the same person. It’s pretty amazing how easy it is for the brain to assume that it’s the puppet speaking and not realize for a little while it’s a different human handling them.

This Avenue Q is locally cast, with some newcomers to the area, as well. I’m impressed with how well our folks are rocking the puppet handling and voicing. Lee Ann Matthews directs the crowd with a steady hand. The avenue itself seems to be in the Bronx, and we meet the neighbors, a la Sesame Street. Princeton is fresh out of college and ready to start his adult life, figuring out how just that works. His neighbors Brian (Brett Ambler) and Christmas Eve (Tori Manisco, subbing for Grace Langford for the performance I saw), Kate Monster, Rod and Nicky, Trekkie Monster and Gary Coleman (Illeana Kirven), who’s the super for his building, form a supportive community even though each of them have things they’re dealing with, too – just like real life.

This all sounds pretty innocuous, but you don’t have to wait long for truth to appear. Brian’s lost his day job; he wants to be a comedian. Christmas Eve, his girlfriend, is a therapist with no clients and is impatient with Brian’s lack of employment. Kate Monster is a minority, and as Princeton finds out quickly, not related to Trekkie Monster. Rod’s a slacker and Nicky, the uptight banker can’t admit his same-sex attraction. Gary Coleman’s life is a terrible comedown from having been a child star. One of the first songs is, “It Sucks To Be Me”, giving a hint of what’s to come. That’s followed by songs like “I’m Not Wearing Underwear Today” and “Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist”.

On the puppet side, Jennifer Theby-Quinn handles Kate Monster, and others, Kevin O’Brien handles Nicky, Trekkie Monster and others, and April Strelinger works multiple puppets that are secondary characters. The coordination is just remarkable.

This is running until early March. It’s a show that works as a date night, although maybe not a first date. (But on the other hand, it might prove a valuable assessment tool.) Very funny, very bawdy, fine work from the whole cast.

More local ties? Charlie Mueller is the musical director, Ben Nordstrom choreographed, Dunsi Dai did the scenic design, and Michael Sullivan the lighting. And director Matthews is ours, too. Nice to see the Playhouse utilizing our fine local talent pool.

 

Avenue Q

through March 3

Playhouse @ Westport Plaza

www.PlayhouseAtWestport.com

Classic Mystery Game

Classic Mystery Game is, as often happens with SATE Ensemble Theatre, rather a romp. Written and directed by Katy Keating, it’s a take on the board game Clue. It’s an Agatha Christie-ish murder in an English country house bringing together a bunch of strangers – strange strangers, in this case – to address some rather awkward business they turn out to have in common.

A video opens the show, making full use of The Chapel’s Oxonian architecture as though we were entering the aforesaid almost manor-sized house. The butler Wadsworth, Michael Cassidy Flynn, begins to welcome the guests who arrive mostly one at a time so we can learn about them. But why is this disparate group being assembled? What do they have in common?

To be sure, it’s an amusing group. Carl Overly, Jr., is the redoubtable Colonel Mustard, Ellie Schwetye the stylish widow Mrs. White, and Rachel Tibbetts plays Mrs. Peacock, the mutton-dressed-as-lamb wife of a senator. Mr. Green is Will Bonfiglio, the research scientist Professor Plum, Paul Cereghino, and femme fatale-slash-madam is Maggie Conroy. Mr. Boddy, who arrives late, is Reginald Pierre.

It’s a brave move for SATE to stage the show in a setting with known problems with acoustics and then choose to have so much of the dialogue delivered rapid fire. Between Flynn’s English accent and the speed of his delivery, which eases only slightly as the show progresses, quite a lot of details seemed to fly by the ear without landing comfortably. Others were affected as well, especially at first, but because he carried the majority of the lines, it fell primarily on Flynn.

There’s some very funny stuff here, to be sure, and the cast carries it off very well, diving into the play without chewing the scenery. Schwetye’s Mrs. White never seems to be without her carefully posed arm and upturned chin; Conroy slinks expertly as Miss Scarlett, never missing an opportunity for a double entendre. Cereghino slithers quietly about so well we scarcely realize he’s avoiding attention, and Tibbets’ barely-up-from-dowdiness is remarkable. Overly, as Mustard, is a worldly, wise chap without the puff and bluster the character is often given, and as Boddy, Pierre offers us marvelous menace. Kristem Strom is the French maid, and Marcy Ann Wiegert and Bess Moynihan play several roles, the former with much changing of chapeaux.

The pacing is sometimes as slam-bang as the delivery of those lines, although far less disconcerting – watching the group move through the “house” is pretty amusing, and the adjustment of Bess Moynihan’s set at times becomes part of the fun. Liz Henning’s costumes delineate the characters very well, especially for Mrs. White.

The show runs about 90 minutes including the intermission – it’d be improved by adding another 10 or 15 minutes so we could understand the dialogue more completely.

 

Classic Mystery

through February 10

SATE Ensemble Theatre

http://slightlyoff.org/

The Chapel

6239 Alexander (off Skinker)

Fiddler on the Roof

Fiddler on the Roof has become one of the standard American musicals. It’s popular with all kinds of groups, from schools to monster-sized professional theaters like the Muny. The show’s been seen in tiny 50-seat black boxes, school gymnasiums, under canvas. Residents of Anatevka, the village where it’s set, have been portrayed by actors from 5 to 85, of all persuasions. Many theater-goers have seen it multiple times, finding different versions of the village, of the costumes, of the fiddler himself – who is not, if you haven’t seen the show, the main character.

It opened Tuesday night (January 29, 2019) at the Fox. If you’ve seen it before and liked it, or even if you just “liked it okay” - you need to see this. This. Is. A. Broadway. Musical.

It’s not just the size of the stage and of the cast. It starts out big, really big, with “Tradition” almost bringing down the house. The orchestrations are large and joyously brassy. Eye-catching choreography pulls us in. This show is bigger, far bigger than Anatevka.

This revival of Fiddler is from Bartlett Sher, who’s given us some very impressive work in the past, like the revival of The King and I, seen here in November of 2017. (He also directed Oslo, a play that’s upcoming at the Rep.) He obviously likes to work in sweeping strokes when dealing with classics like this, and it’s to the benefit of both the show and the audience. There’s no single right way to stage these shows, and while there’s benefits to intimacy, a venue like the Fox is perfect for them.

Yehezkel Lazarov, our impressive-sounding Tevye, is from Israel, where he also directs and does lots of other theatrical things. His Tevye doesn’t carry the weight of the world quite so heavily on his shoulders as some, giving more of an impression of strength. As Golde, Tevye’s long-suffering wife who’s anything but a silent partner, Maite Uzal is merely extremely impatient and not seemingly permanent enraged, another change of style that benefits things – she’s often portrayed as the next worst thing to the Czar’s government. One of the drawbacks, though, of these huge venues is that it’s difficult to discern the subtleties of how a character is played, and that means that Tevye’s five daughters aren’t shown to full advantage. Mel Weyn, Ruthy Froch, and Natalie Powers, playing the three eldest girls, are charming but subdued, appropriate historically but seldom as vivid as their swains, the taylor, the scholar and the non-Jew.

The secondary, comedic roles are a lot of fun here, Motel the Taylor, played by Jesse Weil manages the physical comedy as well as the dialogue with shaking precision, just as demanded. Carol Beaugard, as Yente the matchmaker, roars through her job wheedling and suggesting and not taking no for an answer, with verve.

Michael Yeargan gives us a seemingly simple set with adaptation and additional work from Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams, and lighting from Donald Holder. The Fox sound system is in fine fettle, using Scott Lehrer and Alexander Neumann’s sound design. That amazing choreography has a long lineage, beginning with Jerome Robbins’ winning a Tony for the original show. This version explains that it’s original choreography by Hofesh Schechter, recreated by Christopher Evans, who’s worked extensively with Schechter. (Yes, the bottle dance is still there.)

It’s delightful that a show of this age can still be so full of excitement.

 

Fiddler on the Roof

through February 10

Fox Theatre

527 N. Grand

fabulousfox.com/

On the Road: LC's in Kansas City

I was just on 107.3, Radio Arts Foundation, talking about food, and I mentioned that I had been in Kansas City earlier this week. This is my favorite hole in the wall there, although, as I admit, I have a soft spot for the lamb ribs at Jack’s Stack – the place whose name I forgot. You can read about those here.

I found rib tips, not so common in Kansas City, at LC’s Bar-B-Q. It’s not far from I-435 south of its intersection with I-70, a simple, old-style spot. They were great, a generous serving with a sweet-hot tomato-ish sauce cooked until it darkened.

The fries are hand-cut, in the traditional KC style, the fried okra was good, and I’m ready to go back to try the spicy green beans. The gentleman in the photo who was tending the pit, said he had family hereabouts, and had lived here for a while. He also pointed out that if you don’t go for the texture of the rib tips, the burnt ends, which LC’s does as pork as well as beef, are solid meat.

 

Open Monday-Saturday for lunch and dinner. The website has Sundays listed as “Royals holidays” and “Chiefs holidays” with varying hours – so I’d call to make sure they’re open, not knowing what constitutes a holiday.

 

LC’s Bar-B-Q

5800 Blue Parkway, Kansas City, MO

816-923-4484

http://www.lcsbarbq.com/