Florida Agenda

By Warren Day

Stephen Schwartz has had an illustrious career as the composer of musicals for the stage (“Wicked,” “Pippin,” “Godspell”), and also for animated musicals produced by Walt Disney (he’s the winner of three Oscars for Best Song). The one musical that didn’t seem to work so well seems to have stuck in his craw, however. “Working” opened on Broadway in 1978, but closed after just 23 performances. After nearly 35 years, Schwartz has recently revamped the show, adding two new songs, cutting others, and updating the book. This new version is experiencing one of its first productions now through April 1 at the Caldwell Theater in Boca Raton. And as usual for this company, it’s a first-rate production.

Based on a non-fiction book by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Studs Terkel, the musical tells–through a series of vignettes—stories about the everyday experiences of a variety of working people: a fireman, a cleaning lady, a teacher, a trucker, a housewife, a money manager, a receptionist, an iron worker, a fast food clerk, a prostitute, and even a retiree, whose time is spent talking about not working. Rather than a traditional book musical with a main storyline, it’s a kind of staged cantata devoted to the poignant, unexpected, and funny experiences of the workplace, providing insights into the dreams and disappointments of people who are often otherwise invisible to us.

The workplace has seldom been the focus of a musical. Offhand, I can think of only two others among the hundreds of musicals in the Broadway canon: “The Pajama Game” and “How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying.”

It’s strange that the workplace should be so ignored since we spend far more of our waking life at our labors than we do anyplace else. At least 70% of our time awake is spent either at work, or traveling to and from–much less preparing for or thinking about it. It’s estimated that the average American worker spends 100,000 hours of his lifespan in full or part-time jobs. (If that cold fact isn’t excuse for an instant mid-life crisis, what is?) So it’s refreshing when a musical finds the workplace as its rhyme and reason, particularly one that’s as well directed and well performed as this one. Clive Cholerton, the Artistic Director for the Caldwell Theater Company, has personally directed and given the production a creative and energetic flow that makes the evening pass quickly. The cast of six professional and highly talented actors play various roles, and succeed in making you both laugh and cry. Particular notice should be given to Laura Hodos, who sings a show-stopper of a song about what a waitress does to turn her job into art.

Schwartz is the creative force behind the show, but the songs are not only his alone: six others, including five-time Grammy winner and Rock & Roll Hall of Famer James Taylor, and Mary Rodgers, daughter of legendary “Great American Songbook” composer Richard Rogers, contribute to the libretto.

In the end, “Working” does what good theater has always done: help you see the life and choices of another person in a new and clearer light.

The Caldwell Theatre Company is located at 7901 N. Federal Highway, Boca Raton, FL 33487.

Performances at 8 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday, and 2 p.m. on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays.

Call 561-241-7432 or visit caldwelltheatre.com.

By Warren Day

Whether it’s on Broadway or at a local community theater, putting on a successful play is a crapshoot. In Douglas Carter Beane’s comedy “As Bees in Honey Drown,” the Rising Action Theater in Fort Lauderdale has produced one of their best productions and given us one of the best reasons to see current live theater in south Florida. For that to happen, many different variables have to come together in just the right way.

First of all is the play itself. You want it to be a really good play, but not one that has been widely available to local theater- goers before or made into a film that can be easily seen on cable or DVD. The Obie winning “As Bees in Honey Drown” certainly fits the bill, providing a sparkling evening of laughs, wise observations, and fascinating characters, a frothy mixture about the dangers of frothy mixtures. It is that rare play where the second act is stronger than the first.

Secondly, you want the production to enhance the script, not encumber it. The director Avi Hoffman has an impressive list of credits, giving the play a professional pace and polish, and makes the best utilization of the theater’s space at Sunshine Cathedral that I’ve seen. The set is also imaginative, with a clever use of ever-changing panels that resemble a honeycomb.

Finally, the overall acting is quite good. Four of the six actors play various denizens of Manhattan, and seldom has a local ensemble added so much to the final result. The most effective acting from the beginning to the end belongs to Andrew Wind who plays the young naïve gay writer with a well-received first novel, but who hasn’t set the world on fire, something he desperately wants to do. It’s what he does in small moments that make his acting so memorable, such as the scene where he’s trying on his first expensive suit at Saks. When he stares out into the audience, but is supposed to be gazing into a mirror, you genuinely believe he’s seeing his reflective image.

The central character around which the whole story revolves is a daunting figure with the daunting name of Alexa Vere de Vere, a life-force of a woman who’s one part Audrey Hepburn in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” one part Liza Minnelli in “Cabaret,” and a big hunk of Rosalind Russell in “Auntie Mame.” She’s a glittering con-artist who has the uncanny ability to tell you the very things about yourself that you so desperately want to believe. She perfectly understands that so many of us have become fame whores, either in seeking it for ourselves or by being fascinated by those who have it.

Some of the wittiest lines in the play belong to Alexa: “Art is eternal, but eternal isn’t as long as it used to be.” “In England everyone is gay, so when you say ‘Queen’ you have to specify.” And what is almost the mantra of the play: “You’re not the person you were born. Who wonderful is? You’re the person you were meant to be.”

This Queen Bee is played by Actor’s Equity member Amy McKenna, who often approaches this larger-than-life role with an over-the- top consonance that lacks the nuance and variety

to carry the evening. We reviewers usually see a play in its first or second public performance, so the highly-experienced Ms. McKenna will probably settle into the proper zone for Alexa by the time you see it.

It’s part of the richness of Mr. Beane’s delightful comedy that he takes a somewhat familiar character, the Auntie- Mame type, and shows how destructive such divas can be. From afar, they can be quite entertaining, just the answer to a bland life. But up close they can mess you up in ways that last a long time.

And the gullible gay writer is ripe for such manipulation, because he buys into our celebrity-mad culture, and nothing is as vain as the love of fame.

It used to be that fame was the indirect result of doing something exceptionally well. But now, it’s often the means and the end, becoming so fashionable that there are those who eagerly buy it even when it’s a rip-off of the real thing, thus confusing being widely-known with being wildly-successful. Kim Kardasian is one. Meryl Streep is the other.

And in this play, the playwright suggests that when fame becomes the wherewithal of our existence (or culture), we can be destroyed by the very thing we have made… or to put it another way, as bees in honey drown.

Plays through October 9, Fri. and Sat. at
8 p.m., Sun. at 7 p.m. Tickets are $35
at www.risingactiontheatre.tix.com
or call 1-800-595-4849. Rising Action
Theatre is located at Sunshine
Cathedral, 1840 SW 9th Ave, Fort
Lauderdale 33313.

Send any comments or questions you have to AgendaReviews@aol.com.

Theatre Is Alive and Well In Boca Raton

by Warren Day

Sometimes you want a burger.  Sometimes you want a steak. And this is also true when we attend live theater or the movies.
On occasion, we just want an evening of diversion, a fast meal of entertainment where the goal is simply to relax.  And yet, too many of those evenings can have the same effect on our minds and souls as fast food does on our bodies.

The wonderful and highly professional Caldwell Theatre Company in Boca Raton is offering us the chance to have both, a brisk comedy that gives us some substance to chew on and leaves us with some nutrition for the effort.

Yasmina Reza’s 2009 Tony winning play, “God of Carnage,” is, if you will allow me to torture this metaphor a bit more, a kind of Beef Wellington. On the surface it can seem to be just pastry, but inside there is real meat.

As one of the world’s most acclaimed playwrights working today, Ms. Reza’s particular gift is to find so much comedy and drama within everyday events.  Whereas other writers might need a salesman who is dying or an indecisive prince avenging the murder of his father, Reza brings her characters together for an ordinary reason and allows them, while leaving us laughing, to reveal extraordinary things about us human beings.

In her earlier play “Art,” which was also an international hit, the plot was simply one man inviting two of his
closest friends over to see something he had purchased and was very proud of.

In that case, it was an abstract painting, but in their reactions to this work of art, Reza explores the meaning of friendship and how our different tastes in art, music, politics or whatever can simultaneously draw us together and drive us apart.

In “God of Carnage,” two couples meet to discuss a schoolyard incident where one of their boys has struck the other with a stick.

The comedy comes from their wildly different reactions to this simple and commonplace event, but Ms. Reza uses it to explore how people who pride themselves on their civilized behavior can rather quickly become primeval in their reactions to others and themselves. Even beneath a veneer of what passes as quite successful lives (great careers, big salaries, some envy-inspiring possessions), most people, as Henry David Thoreau famously said, “lead lives of quiet desperation,” except this foursome is anything but quiet.

And in a brilliant set designed by Tim Bennett, the living room in which all this takes place suggests a sandbox, which underlines how we grownups may have left childhood, but not its childish responses.

Now if you think a comedy about two straight couples fighting over their children has nothing to do with you, just imagine it involves two beloved and pampered dogs, and then you can see how such things can divulge our true and universal human nature.
The Caldwell Theatre Company is an Actors Equity playhouse, which means its cast has earned, by training and experience, their union cards, and that means you can see a production equal to a Broadway touring show. From the building itself and the work on its stage, there is nothing “little theater” about them. And they don’t present mummified productions of Neil Simon plays or the umpteenth revival of some 1950s musical, either.

Directed by Kenneth Kay, “God of Carnage” is live theater that truly lives up to that claim.

“God of Carnage” plays until May 15.  For showtimes and ticket prices go to www.caldwelltheatre.com or call
561-241-7432. The theater is located at 7901 N. Federal Highway, Boca Raton, FL