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Georgetown Palace Theatre
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This holiday season’s production of Annie at the Georgetown Palace is an enormous undertaking. Most principal roles are triple-cast, with actors assigned to Mango, Kiwi or Plum casts. Ensemble roles are double cast, with actors assigned to Strawberry or Blueberry casts. Palace management is proud that 106 actors appear on their stage during the course of 28 presentations, many of those shows outside the Friday-Saturday-Sunday schedule usual at 810 S. Austin Avenue in Georgetown.
Running a musical comedy that way is quite a feat of theatrical logistics. Such extensive involvement builds and reinforces the community of artists and arts supporters that enables the Palace to run its vigorous and well attended season.
Anyone writing a review for you has to advise you from the first, however, that the show that unrolled before him that evening might differ from the one that you’ll see there some other evening. Codes for my Saturday night experience on November 21 were Mango and Strawberry, suggesting an interesting dessert.
Over a six-week run three Annies share those red curly wigs and two bald-pated Oliver Warbucks will be setting the Depression-era United States to rights. Two FDRs will in turn occupy that wheelchair and the three villains are embodied by six actors. Your endearing opening chorus of orphan girls could well be different from the one that introduced us to Annie's bleak orphanage.
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The Georgetown Palace production of Man of La Mancha starts out moody, atmospheric and harsh, and it comes surging beautifully through that dark, difficult second act.
The Inquisition is awaiting in the darkness above, and Cervantes is storytelling to save his life and possessions from the thieves and murderers who surround him. In Cervantes' fantastical tale of the deranged Alonso Quijana, the Knight of the Woeful Countenance has lost it. The knight's beloved Dulcinea--Aldonza the prostitute and scullery maid--has been gang raped, and he doesn't know it.
Dulcinea curses Quijana for his foolishness and his misguided belief that life contains any hope at all.
Then, in the filth and stink of the prison despite the misadventures of his quest, Joe Penrod as Cervantes/Quijana/Quijote replies with The Impossible Dream: To dream the impossible dream;
To fight the unbeatable foe;
To bear with unbearable sorrow,
To run where the brave dare not go.
To right the unrightable wrong;
To be better far than you are;
To try when your arms are too weary
To reach the unreachable star . . . .
It's an exalting and inspired moment, one that squeezes the heart and puts into you the dizzy hope of beauty, meaning and peace.
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You Can't Do That, Dan Moody! offers spectators some cracking drama, particularly in the second half, with riveting re-enactments of brutality by the Ku Klux Klan and of the 1923 trial at the Georgetown courthouse in which district prosecutor Dan Moody became the first in the nation to convince a jury to convict and jail Klansmen.
But in intention and form this production is directly in line with the epic origins of theatre.
An epic, taken from the Greek epikos, is a poem or song of heroes. The Oxford English dictionary comments, "The typical epics, the Homeric poems, the Niebelungenlied, etc., have often been regarded as embodying a nation's conception of its own past, or of the events in that history that it finds most worthy of remembrance. Hence by some writers the term national epic has been applied to any imaginative work (whatever its form) which is considered to fulfill this function."
You Can't Do That, Dan Moody! was prepared for the 1998 celebration of Georgetown's sesquicentennial. The Palace's artistic director at that time, Tom Swift, worked with attorney Ken Anderson and his account of Moody's success against the Klan and subsequent political and civic career, including service as governor of Texas.
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Driving Miss Daisy is about nostalgia and trust, but it is also about entropy.
Fortunate or not in this material life, we can all expect to age, to slow, and to become feeble. We may dislike growing old, but we shun the obvious alternative.
That major theme should be mirrored in the dynamic of these familiar characters and in the rhythm of the production.
We meet dowager Miss Daisy at a peak of annoyance. Momentarily confused a few days before at the wheel of her three-week-old Packard, she characteristically jammed down the accelerator instead of the brake. Now no sane insurance company will provide coverage for her driving. Her son Boolie has to deal with Mama's hornet's nest of feelings, has to set up transportation for her and has to continue dealing with his own demanding business affairs.
The play begins in crisis, annoyance, stress and rejection. Energy should be sparking in every direction. |
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Touchstone themes for the Georgetown Palace Theatre are "fun" and "familiar." Probably the most affectionately remembered piece of Neil Simon's 40-year career, The Odd Couple fits both themes exactly.
Slobby Oscar Madison and meticulous Felix Ungar are seated firmly in the American consciousness. Simon's play opened on Broadway in 1965 and appeared as a film in 1968. It ran for five years as a television show, 1970-1975. ABC cancelled it at the end of every season but then brought it back because of the high Nielsen ratings for the summer reruns. Simon rewrote the play for a female cast in 1985 and in 2004 he produced an updated version, Oscar and Felix: A New Look at the Odd Couple.
The Georgetown version is the original script, set in the mid-60s. You can tell that immediately when the guys talk about prices. A New York cab ride is $1.30. A pack of cigarettes is 38 cents. The butcher's bill for London broil for four persons is $9.64. And Felix's half of the monthly rent for the eight-room apartment in metropolitan New York City is $120 (rent-controlled, for sure, but still!).
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