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UPDATE:YouTube video of Jose Villareal's number Magic Foot added, below, October 28
UPDATE: Zach announces Spelling Bee will be held over through November 8
This show is a charmer. It has the zing of a small scale musical, the familiarity of all those school auditoriums you endured while growing up, the uncertainties of a tournament, the highs of competition, the quips and laughs of improv comedy, and -- unexpectedly -- a second act that resonates with drama and tenderness.
Michael Raiford's set is bright, functional and simple, using the Kleberg Stage's thrust stage as a "cafetorium" in an anonymous middle school in the equally anonymous Putnam County. The unobtrusive recorded background music before the opening and at the interval dates back mostly to the 50's and 60's. Musicians for the show are tucked back in the center alcove and the stage is provided with the appropriately sparse furnishing of folding tables and folding chairs.
The lights don't go down when the show starts. Instead, Jill Blackwood as Rona Lisa Peretti strides around with her impossibly angelic smile and authoritatively friendly manner, speaking in turn to various sections of the audience. We are part of this spectacle. This is a spelling bee finale and we are the friends, family and supporters of a collection of six bright or simply lucky kids. They all have the smarts or at least the unusual mental wiring to be spelling whizzes.
Yes, in the first half of the show four or five audience members will be recruited as contestants to sit with the kids and spell against them. But don't worry -- they've volunteered for the job. You won't be pulled out of your seat and into the spotlight without your consent. Jill Blackwood gives a chirpy introduction each time a speller comes forward and the audience volunteers are subjected to some gentle razzing ("Bill is devoted to the concept that casual Fridays really should be casual!").
We go to the theatre to be delighted or to be moved.
On rare occasions we are both delighted and moved. And on even rarer occasions, an artist of exceptional intelligence and ability delights, moves and educates us. This evening with Anna Deavere Smith, intimate and often amusing, reaches deep into the common humanity of Americans.
Her performance is a portrait album, recreating for us conversations or interviews with individuals as widely different as super model Lauren Hutton and a 16-year-old girl in small town Texas struck with cancer. Some of the names we recognize -- theatre historian and critic John Lahr, for example, and Lance Armstrong, and former Texas governor Ann Richards, a portrayal that galvanized and delighted the audience. Some stories are wildly comic, such as that of the choreographer who recalls messing up a spectacular trick with flames. Other subjects are remarkable for their unusual stories or for their solemnly informative observations about American society, particularly about medicine and health care.
A brooding orange light dominates the empty central space at the Zach Theatre's Kleberg Stage. A haze roils fitfully against a panorama of emptiness. A man in overalls, wearing a slouch cap and heavy work boots, holds a saw between his knees. He gently applies a bow to it, bends the saw, and an eerie, keening melody begins The Grapes of Wrath.
John Steinbeck's story follows the Joad family from the 1930s Oklahoma Dustbowl, driven by implacable weather and unforgiving bankers to abandon everything except a grim hope of finding work and land in California.
Steven Dietz's latest world premiere is a wistful two-character piece aimed directly at the soft heart of the baby boomer generation.
These two were lovers in their early twenties in Madison, Wisconsin, sometime in the 1970s but they've long been out of touch, getting on with their lives. By chance they find themselves -- and one another -- in a snowed-in airport somewhere in the Midwest (think, maybe, Midway in Chicago).
It's a situation ripe for dramatic exploitation. A wave of the playwright's magic wand and lo! we have characters with a deep knowledge of one another and a sense of their ideals and mutual potential -- thirty years out of date. They have decades of change and adventure to explore, as well as the delicate business of defining just who they are for each other right now, in ignorance of their subsequent histories.
Shooting Star trades on a fascination similar to that mined by www.classmates.com. What ever happened to. . . .? Do you really, really want to know? Do you want that person to know what has happened to you and how you have changed?
UPDATE: Zach announces Spelling Bee will be held over through November 8
John Steinbeck's story follows the Joad family from the 1930s Oklahoma Dustbowl, driven by implacable weather and unforgiving bankers to abandon everything except a grim hope of finding work and land in California.
