For this entry in my award-coveting Midweek Madness series, I could not resist a look back at an actress currently lighting up Baltimore's cultural life.

The wonderful Linda Thorson stars in Everyman Theatre's production of Tracy Letts' "August: Osage County," the first presentation in the company's spiffy new home.

The Canadian-born Thorson plays the pill-popping matriarch of a severely complicated family in Oklahoma, where crisis after crisis comes “sweepin' down the plain.”

I think it's cool to salute a past chapter in Thorson's life, her appearance on the popular TV show "The Avengers." She replaced Diana Rigg as Patrick Macnee's collaborator in this bright spy-fi series in 1968.

To mark Thorson's debut on the show, a promo was released -- and what a promo it is.

If you've seen, or plan to see, the Everyman production, you will enjoy this blast from the past all the more. If you don't, you should still find this little video a fun example of '60s style (which reminds me, when is "Mad Men" coming back?):

Continue reading "Midweek Madness takes a look back at the avenging Linda Thorson " »

Posted by Tim Smith at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Drama Queens, Everyman Theatre
        

That’s just one of the life’s painful little lessons conveyed to searing effect in “August: Osage County,” the 2008 Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning play by Tracy Letts receiving its Baltimore premiere under the happiest of circumstances -- the inauguration of the much-anticipated Everyman Theatre on West Fayette Street.

The vibrant production provides a fitting display for the handsome new facility, where the Empire, Palace and Town theaters once operated. (On opening night, a hum, apparently from the lighting grid overhead, proved a minor distraction.)

The most substantial asset of the venue is a proper stage, capable of handling the three-level set required by “August,” a set that would have been impossible at the company’s previous, low-ceilinged venue.

Resident scenic designer Daniel Ettinger has taken full advantage of the opportunity, deftly evoking the aging home 60 miles from Tulsa, where the three-hour-plus saga of the Weston Family can unfold seamlessly. And what a saga.

Letts conjures up a nightmare of family troubles -- suicide, infidelity, alcoholism, drug addiction, dirty middle-aged men, smoldering grudges. As one of the members observes: "Thank God we can't tell the future. We'd never get out of bed."

The Westons put the “diss” and the “shun” in dysfunction, but, in a weird way, they put the "fun" in it, too. You end up laughing through some pretty rough clawing and carping, thanks to the playwright’s brilliant flair for dark comedy.

But you walk away with some awfully sobering, conflicted thoughts. With each twist of a phrase or turn in a conversation, Letts keeps the audience constantly off-balance, so that, in the end, we have as little to hold onto as the characters do.

The play requires a ...

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Categories: Drama Queens, Everyman Theatre
        

The show will go back on at Everyman Theatre.

Wednesday's performance of the endearing comedy "Heroes" had to be canceled because of the dastardly water main break on Charles Street, but Thursday's will take place as scheduled.

And just to make up for the inconvenience of continued street closures in the neighborhood, the company is offering half-off tickets to six performances, Thursday through Sunday.

As for access to Everyman while Charles Street is shut down, the theater recommends using the Central Parking Lot on Lanvale Street.

PHOTO BY STAN BAROUH

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Categories: Drama Queens, Everyman Theatre
        

Due to the water main break on Charles Street, Wednesday's 7:30 PM performance of "Heroes" has been cancelled. The company will contact ticket holders about exchanges as soon as the box office can re-open.

Posted by Tim Smith at 4:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Drama Queens, Everyman Theatre
        

The three veterans in “Heroes,” Tom Stoppard’s adaptation of a wry comedy by Gerald Sibleyras, cling to their little terrace at the old soldiers’ home in France as fiercely as they once held their ground against the Germans during World War I.

This is their domain, where they can avoid the glance of the facility’s head nun, and, more importantly, where they can see the promise of a better world — just beyond the poplars on a distant ridge.

“Heroes,” perfectly cast and sensitively directed by Donald Hicken, makes an apt choice for Everyman Theatre’s final production at its longtime Charles Street venue before moving to new digs downtown. Themes of memory and adventure run through the piece.

James Fouchard’s simple set conveys ...

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Posted by Tim Smith at 6:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Drama Queens, Everyman Theatre
        

The storm-related cancellations continue to roll in.

Center Stage will not present "The Completely Fictional—Utterly True—Final Strange Tale of Edgar Allan Poe" Tuesday night, but will resume normal scheduling Wednesday. Tuesday's ticket holders will be contacted by the Center Stage box office to arrange for exchanges.

Everyman Theatre has also canceled Tuesday's scheduled performance of "Heroes." In this case, too, ticket holders will be contacted by the box office to make exchanges.

PHOTO BY RICHARD ANDERSON

Posted by Tim Smith at 1:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Center Stage, Drama Queens, Everyman Theatre
        

Single Carrot Theatre has found a venue solution for the remainder of its 2012-2013 season.

As you will recall, the surprise closing of Load of Fun Gallery, where the company made its home (along with several other artistic tenants), left Single Carrot scrambling for a place to present its productions.

MICA came to the rescue for this weekend's season-opener, Caryl Churchill's "Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?"

For the remainder of the company's sixth season, Single Carrot will occupy the Charles Street home of Everyman Theatre, which is heading across town this winter to a newly restored space on Fayette Street.

"We're looking to start our move in January to what we're referring to as the soon-to-be-former Everyman Theatre," said Single Carrot artistic director Nathan Cooper. "We'll be moving our entire operations there. This is a nice way to keep a performance venue in Station North, which I think is good for the whole neighborhood. We're calling it ...

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Posted by Tim Smith at 9:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Drama Queens, Everyman Theatre, Single Carrot Theatre
        

The Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance has organized "Free Night of Theater Baltimore" in October, in conjunction with Free Fall Baltimore, the annual project of the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts.

Several area theaters are setting aside tickets that will be awarded through a registration process. Events at Center Stage, Everyman Theatre, Iron Crow Theatre, Chesapeake Shakespeare Company, Audrey Herman Spotlighter’s Theatre and Baltimore Performance Kitchen are included in the give-away. More groups and performances may be added.

When you register for the drawing, you can select up to five performances that you are most interested in; winners may receive up to five pairs of tickets. The contest is "intended to give audiences an opportunity to experience new arts organizations," so registrants are being asked to sample the work of companies they haven't visited in the past year.

To have a crack at the freebies, register by Friday (Sept. 28). Winners will be notified via email by Oct. 1.

Posted by Tim Smith at 9:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Center Stage, Drama Queens, Everyman Theatre
        

Sarah, the tough and gifted photographer at the center of the Donald Margulies 2010 play "Time Stands Still," has seen so much of the world through a lens that she can't always focus on what's just outside the frame in her own life.

The camera is as much a crutch for her as the cane she needs to maneuver around her Brooklyn apartment since returning from Iraq, badly wounded by a roadside bomb.

The healing process will be only partly physical. Sarah's internal injuries, so to speak -- those to the heart, to her value system -- are every bit as complex and acute, just as hard to treat.

Sarah's struggles with herself and the people closest to her generate an incisive drama about issues large and small in "Times Stands Still," which has inspired a taut, stylish production from Everyman Theatre.

The big questions about the human toll of war and the role of journalists chronicling it seem even more important to ask now, given how little attention Americans have paid to the supposedly ended conflict in Iraq, the possibly endless one in Afghanistan.

The other major concern in the play provides ...

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Posted by Tim Smith at 7:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Drama Queens, Everyman Theatre
        

In the wake of the Great Recession, "You Can't Take It With You" still hits home and still provokes a lot of good laughs, a point reiterated by Everyman Theatre's revival of the 1936 George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart comedy.

Come to think of it, the piece might be even more relevant, given how so many of today's one-percenters act like they truly believe they can take it with them.

There remains something deliciously radical about the characters who inhabit the New York home of the elderly Martin Vanderhof, he of the whatever-makes-you-happy school of philosophy. They all do what most of us can only fantasize about -- quit jobs, plunge into hobbies (even making fireworks in the basement), get all communal with friends and quickly friended strangers, talk back to the IRS, not give a hoot what other people think.

Of course, life can't really be like this, right? The subtly subversive power of the play comes from the way it keeps making you doubt that, keeps shifting the parameters of normality.

In the much-extended Vanderhof household, time doesn't matter as much as how you fill it. And the way they fill it is fundamentally, blissfully selfish, yet, somehow, within a caring environment. How cool is that?

The Everyman production, directed by Vincent Lancisi, comes in ...

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Categories: Drama Queens, Everyman Theatre
        

There’s no mistaking a strong new voice in theater, someone who surprises and challenges, who creates fresh ways to examine familiar issues.

Tarell Alvin McCraney emerged a few years ago as such a voice when, still in his 20s, he unveiled a trilogy of plays set in the Louisiana bayou and loosely based on Yoruban mythology of West Africa.

The second of these pieces, “The Brothers Size” from 2007, has been particularly well-received in stagings across the country and abroad. It is now at Everyman Theatre in a searing production that hits you with a double, equal force — the imagination of the writing, and the power of the performers.

At its heart, the play is about the bonds of family, how they can go much deeper than we will ever know until they are threatened. Sibling attachments are hardly unexplored in drama. What McCraney does so well is ...

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Categories: Drama Queens, Everyman Theatre
        

Michael Weller’s recent drama “Fifty Words” focuses unflinchingly on a married couple, Jan and Adam, who have to face something formidable in their Brooklyn brownstone — a night entirely alone.

It’s the first such night since their son was born nine years earlier; the boy, having finally made a friend, is away on a sleep-over. This leaves the parents with a lot of time, if not each other, to kill.

Adam, a moderately successful architect, decides an amorous romp with his wife is in order, before he has to leave for another business trip in the morning. But Jan seems terribly preoccupied, both with left-over work related to her start-up business and with her absent child, who has developed a distinctive way of hiding under his own troubles.

Before long, the spring-loaded spouses uncover any number of suspicions, resentments and long-avoided truths.

“It’ll sting; I can’t help that,” Adam says to Jan at one point, treating a fresh cut on her foot after one of their rounds.

That’s nothing compared to the emotional wounds inflicted on both people before the night is over, more wounds than could ever properly heal. Recalling earlier conflicts, Adam tells his wife: “We were just learning how to hurt each other back then. We were amateurs.”

They are professionals now.

Everyone knows some seemingly incompatible mates who are nonetheless bound together. Marriages can be complex, as theater-goers already know well from Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” In that drama, George and Martha reveal an uncanny ability to goad and ensnare each other. Their weapon — or refuge — of choice is booze, so much easier than sex.

For Adam and Jan, physical intimacy is the trap, and has been from the day they met. They have developed ...

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Posted by Tim Smith at 9:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Drama Queens, Everyman Theatre
        

The latest proof: Center Stage will present free public readings of two Martin McDonagh plays featuring members of Everyman Theatre and Single Carrot Theatre and other local actors.

How's that for collaboration within the arts community? Pretty cool.

The project provides a neat way for Center Stage to promote its production of one of McDonagh's "A Skull in Connemara," which opens next week.

The readings will focus on ...

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Categories: Center Stage, Drama Queens, Everyman Theatre, Single Carrot Theatre
        

Everyman Theatre provides an opportunity to get better acquainted with the lyricist in its winter concert presentation, “Keep on the Sunny Side of the Street: A Tribute to Dorothy Fields,” which opens this week.

The cast includes Nancy Dolliver, James Gardiner, Katie Nigsch-Fairfax and Delores King Williams. Howard Breitbart is musical director.

Gardiner, the engaging singer and actor who has appeared in Everyman’s Irving Berlin celebration a few seasons ago, wrote the book for this year’s salute.

“When I tell people I’m doing a show about Dorothy Fields, they go ‘Dorothy who?’ But mention ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street,’ and they go, ‘Oh, yeah,’” Gardiner said. “She doesn’t have the name recognition of Ira Gershwin or Irving Berlin, but she definitely was one of the best lyricists in the 20th century.”

Born in 1904 in New Jersey, Fields enjoyed a long career that produced more than 400 songs, from such standards as “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love” in 1928 to “Big Spender” from the hit musical “Sweet Charity” in 1966. She collaborated with a who’s-who of composers, from Harold Arlen and Jerome Kern to Cy Coleman and Quincy Jones.

That Fields could start in the business when she did says a lot.

“She was a female in what was kind of an all-boys club,” Gardiner said. “Her father even said to her, ...

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Posted by Tim Smith at 9:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Clef Notes, Drama Queens, Everyman Theatre
        

So Noel Coward reminds us in “Private Lives.” An antic revival of this 1930 comedy of bad manners is currently ripping up the boards at Everyman Theatre.

In a fast-paced three acts, Coward generates a clever, witty whirl from a simple set-up. At a seaside French hotel, Amanda and Elyot, now divorced, collide on their honeymoons with fresh spouses. It turns out that the old emotional bonds between the two were not as neatly severed as the legal ones.

The playwright, who often seems to be channeling Oscar Wilde in the quip department, skewers notions of romance, fidelity, compromise, sensitivity — you name it.

“Let’s be superficial and … enjoy the party as much as we can.” Elyot tells Amanda. Forget being sensible or serious. That’s “just what they want,” all those “futile moralists who try to make life unbearable.”

The more Elyot and Amanda thwart conventionality, ...

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Posted by Tim Smith at 9:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Drama Queens, Everyman Theatre
        

Everyman Theatre's revival of Noel Coward's "Private Lives" opens this week, an event that made me think of the playwright himself as a perfect source for the latest Midweek Madness installment.

So here's dear Noel and one of his ever so witty songs as only he could deliver it, complete with impeccable diction and some divine gestures:

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Posted by Tim Smith at 3:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Drama Queens, Everyman Theatre
        

Less than a year ago, Everyman Theatre presented a revival of a great American play, Arthur Miller's "All My Sons," with a tightly cohesive, exceptionally affecting cast and a note-perfect physical production to match.

Over the weekend, the company unveiled another revival of a great American play, Lorraine Hansberry's "A Raisin in the Sun," with a tightly cohesive, exceptionally affecting cast and a note-perfect physical production to match.

Drawing upon all-too-real experiences in her own life, Hansberry fashioned a compelling drama of a family trying to fulfill personal dreams, as well as that elusive panacea known as the American dream.

The difference, an acute difference when "A Raisin in the Sun" premiered on Broadway in 1959, is that this family is black.

There is nothing remotely dated about the play. There is nothing manipulative about it, either. Half a century later, it feels fresh and real, still asks questions that sting, still refuses to provide pat answers.

Hansberry opens a window into the African American world with one hand, holds up a mirror to all of us with the other.

There are inevitable conflicts among family members over how the money should be spent. Things turn deeper and more unsettling when Lena, the recently widowed matriarch, introduces the prospect of a move into a home in a white neighborhood called Clybourne Park. (That's also the name of the recent, Pulitzer Prize-winning Bruce Norris play, a kind of sequel to the Hansberry classic. Perhaps that work will turn up before too long at Everyman.)

Why Lena makes her choice, and the way the family is affected by the turn of events, is the stuff of arresting drama, heightened by ...

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Posted by Tim Smith at 9:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Drama Queens, Everyman Theatre
        

Funny how that notion was still so ingrained centuries later that George Bernard Shaw could have a gleefully evil time skewering it in his 1912 play "Pygmalion."

Here, the clash of classes creates a collision that shatters egos as brusquely as social barriers, all the while generating zingers, a la Oscar Wilde. This venerable comedy gets a brisk workout in a handsome production that brings down the curtain on Everyman Theatre's 20th anniversary season.

With a dash of Cinderella and a smidgen of Svengali, the plot of "Pygmalion" works on one level merely as an imaginative take-off on the ancient Greek tale of a sculptor falling in love with a statue that comes to life.

But there's also quite an undercoating to the play, where Shaw's socialist leanings can be detected, along with what might be thought of as at least almost-feminist viewpoints.

A lot gets said in "Pygmalion"; a lot is left unsaid. Most famously, there's the question of how much romantic spark, if any, is generated over the course of the action between phonetics professor Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle, the Cockney flower girl he turns into a faux-princess on a whim and a bet.

Thanks to "My Fair Lady," the decidedly romanticized musical version of the play, many folks ...

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Posted by Tim Smith at 6:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Drama Queens, Everyman Theatre
        

Fittingly, that farewell to the old building will come in May/June 2012 with a staging of the George S. Kaufman/Moss Hart comic classic of family, society and politics,"You Can't Take It With You."

The season will open in September with a classic that strikes a very different note ...

Continue reading "Everyman Theatre plans diverse last season before moving to new venue" »

Posted by Tim Smith at 7:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Drama Queens, Everyman Theatre
        

I've been ever so feverishly trying to finish writing various other things today, but I didn't want you to think the blog had been turned off. So, while you're waiting for something brilliant to be posted here (no one has that much time, I know), feel free to check out my review of "Shooting Star" at Everyman Theatre.

If you happen to attend tonight's performance, you might well experience a rare case of nature imitating art -- snowfall is very much a part of the plot, and very much a visual element in this finely-acted production.

Posted by Tim Smith at 3:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Drama Queens, Everyman Theatre
        

Everyman's staging of Arthur Miller's "All My Sons," originally scheduled to close Dec. 12, will now go through Dec. 18.

Vincent Lancisi directs an exceptional cast in an illuminating production of this still-potent American play, providing quite a lesson in ensemble acting and subtly atmospheric scenic design. I can't recommend this highly enough.

Arena Stage is celebrating its appealingly renovated facility with a vibrant revival of the venerable Rodgers and Hammerstein musical "Oklahoma." The production was to have closed Dec. 26, but

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Posted by Tim Smith at 10:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Drama Queens, Everyman Theatre
        

Keller, grippingly portrayed by Carl Schurr in Everyman Theatre’s sterling production of this still-searing work from 1947, is supremely confident he can explain how defective aircraft parts left his factory and led to loss of life. Besides, he was officially exonerated.

He has lived his lie so boldly and thoroughly that it doesn’t really occur to him that the truth could ever emerge. Why should it? The war is over; so is the guilt. Everybody did things they shouldn’t have during those dark years, didn’t they?

Set in an unspecified American town, the play has hardly lost its relevance, certainly not in the age of Halliburton and BP, and its ability to touch the senses remains undiminished. Even those who know this work well may find themselves startled anew by how much of a gut-punch this tragedy can still deliver.

Miller keenly understood what brings families together, what drives them apart, and why it all matters. Everyman artistic director Vincent Lancisi Director is very much at home dealing with such familial issues, and his unforced, insightful directorial touch draws from the cast — most of them from the company's own family of resident artists — performances fully alive with nuance.

Schurr’s sureness as an actor enables him to reveal every facet of Keller’s volatile character as the center of gravity keeps shifting beneath him — the actor’s eyes convey as much as any of his lines. Most importantly, Schurr also finds in Keller the ruggedly appealing qualities that help to explain the loyalty of the man’s family, the affection of a neighborhood kid.

As Chris, the son who came back from the war and joined his father’s business, Clinton Brandhagen reveals

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Posted by Tim Smith at 11:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Drama Queens, Everyman Theatre