The Summer Hubbies 2013

Yes, it's that time again, when we look back in a slight daze at roughly a quarter-year of the city's theatrical life, find some hot picture of a male model, and put together our personal list of the best of the local scene.

So without further ado -

Best Acting Ensembles

House and Garden - Trinity Rep; Angela Brazil, Mary C. Davis, Janice Duclos, Catherine Dupont, Steven Jaehnert, Phyllis Kay, Barbara Meek, Ted Moller, Barry M. Press, Bridget Saracino, Anne Scurria, Fred Sullivan, Jr., Stephen Thorne, Joe Wilson, Jr., directed by Brian McEleny

Rapture, Blister Burn - Huntington Theatre; Nancy E. Carroll, Shannon Esper, Annie McNamara, Kate Shindle, Timothy John Smith, directed by Peter DuBois

Social Creatures - Trinity Rep; Darien Battle, Timothy Crowe, D'Arcy Dersham, Janice Duclos,Rebecca Gibel, Alexander Platt, Nance Williamson, directed by Curt Columbus

Glengarry Glen Ross - Merrimack Rep; David Adkins,  Joel Colodner, Charlie Kevin, Will LeBow, Todd Licea, Jim Ortlieb, Jeremiah Wiggins, directed by Charles Towers

Lebensraum - Hub Theatre Company; Jaime Carillo, Lauren Elias, Kevin Paquette, directed by John Geoffrion

David Adkins and Will LeBow in Merrimack Rep's Glengarry Glen Ross.  Photo: Meghan Moore.

Best Individual Performances

Colin Hamell - Jimmy Titanic, New Rep

Lisa O'Hare, David Andrew MacDonald, James Beaman, Jacquelynn Fontaine, Andrew Tighe - The Sound of Music, North Shore Music Theatre

Karen MacDonald - M, Huntington Theatre

Paula Plum, Marvelyn McFarlane, Michael Kaye, DeLance Minefee - Clybourne Park, SpeakEasy Stage

Lindsay Allyn Cox, Terrell Donnell Sledge, Kris Sidberry, Gregory Balla - By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, Lyric Stage

Gabriel Graetz, Beth Pearson, William Schuller - Little Giants, Imaginary Beasts

Tim Spears, Russell Garret, Paula Langton, Jeffries Thais, Paul Farwell - Amadeus, New Rep

Bobbie Steinbach, Paula Plum - Pericles, Actors' Shakespeare Project

Daniel Jones - From Denmark with Love, Vaquero Playground

Lorne Batman, Sam Tilles - The Skin of Our Teeth, Boston University

Aimee Doherty, Phil Tayler, Michele A. DeLuca, J.T. Turner, Lauren Gemelli, Sarah deLima - On the Town, Lyric Stage

The set, costumes, and lighting of Amadeus at the New Rep. Photo: Andrew Brilliant

Best Direction

Brian McEleny, House and Garden, Trinity Rep

Curt Columbus, Social Creatures, Trinity Rep

Charles Towers, Glengarry Glen Ross, Merrimack Rep

And now - see you at the beach!

Best (New) Plays 

House and Garden, Alan Ayckbourn - Trinity Rep

Social Creatures, Jackie Sibblies Drury - Trinity Rep


Best Design

Courtney Nelson (set), Chelsea Kerl (costumes), Katy Atwell (lighting), and Yi-Chun Hung (sound) - The Skin of Our Teeth, Boston University

Cristina Todesco (set), Frances Nelson McSherry (costumes), and Mary Ellen Stebbins (lighting) - Amadeus, New Rep

Seághan McKay, projections - On the Town, New Rep

Johnathan Carr, film production - By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, Lyric Stage

Bill Clarke, set - Glengarry Glen Ross, Merrimack Rep

Cotton Talbot-Minkin, Jill Rogati, and Matthew Woods - Little Giants, Imaginary Beasts

Round and round Ayckbourn's Garden with Trinity Rep

Phyllis Kay and Fred Sullivan, Jr. - Ayckbourn's would-be Pyramus and Thisbe.  Photos: Mark Turek.

As Hub Review readers may recall, I left Trinity Rep's production of Alan Ayckbourn's House hungry to see his Garden (they both close this weekend, so hurry). House had been riddled with curious lacunae, and actually climaxed with a scene that seemed like the culmination of Garden; so I imagined that once I'd seen both sides of this dramatic diptych (which is meant to be played simultaneously, on adjacent stages), the two scripts would click together thematically like hand in glove.

Silly me. Garden is certainly worth seeing, but as things turn out, it's quite different from House - thematically, structurally, tonally - indeed, in almost every way possible. The scripts do share that climactic hinge, but aside from that, Garden doesn't re-inforce its sister play's structure so much as sprawl away from it in new directions.

This is perhaps bad for the unity of this dramatic double feature. But oddly, it may be good for Alan Ayckbourn; it's certainly intriguing to see the playwright experimenting at this stage of his career (he's 74, and has penned 70 plays), particularly given he's probing loaded questions around incest and drug use - not to mention the fading illusions of the commercial artiste. If some of what he attempts here doesn't quite come off, or seems to undermine the very structure he so ably set up in House - well, I found such sins easy to forgive, because the play stays clever to the end - and it's worth noting that together House and Garden count for a full five hours of dramatic construction (that's more than three full plays from any of our millennial playwrights). What's more, the forking paths of Garden seem to connect to the arc of Ayckbourn's output in oddly resonant ways; indeed, sometimes the script seems to be sending de-stabilizing roots down beneath his entire sex-comedy oeuvre.

Of course if all that sounds a little heady, or heavy, you can always ignore the deep end of Ayckbourn's themes and just enjoy the superficial garnishes of the form, which he's still happy to serve up. Yes, people actually "do it" in the Edenic bushes in Garden (as the flora sways above them, and old Adam himself wanders by with a mower) - and yes, that's still funny. Likewise the dry fountain at the center of Eugene Lee's overgrown set inevitably spurts in a highly phallic way. (Yuk-yuk.) But in the background of this slapstick, one character goes steadily mad; another escapes her domineering husband by hitching a ride with a possible sex criminal; and another world-weary lover is led off against her will to rehab. One marriage collapses just as the adultery that destroyed it collapses, too - and even as we watch another, faithful marriage grow more and more suffocating by the second. Ayckbourn has always worked in a surprisingly dark vein (remember the homemaker who keeps trying to commit suicide in Absurd Person Singular?) - but this time he lets the personal devastation all but run riot.

Steven Jaehnert and Bridget Saracino make remarkable acting debuts.

He even turns the dramatic knife on himself, believe it or not. The thematic climax of Garden is a long, improbably charming scene between Ayckbourn's aging lothario, Teddy (Fred Sullivan, Jr.) and a visiting French film star, Lucille (Phyllis Kay, both at top).  Teddy speaks no French, and Lucille has little English, but they embark on a fling anyway - and their "communication" in two separate tongues floats effortlessly between barbed satire and comic rue (it helps if you can at least follow along roughly in French). Lucille understands her own moral position far better than Teddy does, but at the same time she still hangs on to some sense of romantic possibility. She knows she's only a B-level star - one who dreamed of being a classical actress but who is now paid well to be offed by terrorists in the first reel. She has even been convicted of drug trafficking (an interesting metaphor for what commercial actors do in an artistic sense?), and faces a grueling cold-turkey treatment at the local clinic. But still she rhapsodizes about Pyramus and Thisbe, and Baucis and Philemon, all in French - while Teddy can only mumble "I don't know who any of those people are . . ."

Kay is peerless through all this, while Sullivan is his usual confidently comic self (although his Teddy isn't very far from a lot of other Fred Sullivan, Jr. performances). Kay is matched by a sterling turn from Anne Scurria as Teddy's long-suffering (and fed-up) wife, and a subtly tragic one from Stephen Thorne as his cuckolded best friend. Alas, the usually-reliable Angela Brazil only brings mania, rather than true melt-down, to Teddy's psychologically unstable paramour, and somehow the talented trio of Janice Duclos, Catherine Dupont, and Barry Press didn't quite make their Edenic ménage come off believably. But this double production did conceal a double acting surprise, in the performances of newcomers Steven Jaehnert and Bridget Saracino. In the roles of the children of the adulterers, who are feeling their own way toward romance, these two were highly compelling throughout - and Jaehnert in particular was remarkable. It seems clear that under the direction of company vet Brian McEleny, Trinity has mounted another acting-ensemble-of-the-year contender. And they have demonstrated that even after 70 plays, Alan Ayckbourn is still a vital dramatic force.

A Titanic performance at the New Rep

Colin Hamell in Jimmy Titanic - photo: Michael and Suz Karchmer.

We live, it seems, in an age of theatrical vehicles. Playwrights are short on vision these days, and the culture is far from coherent; but actors still need work - hence Jimmy Titanic, at the New Rep through this weekend, a bemused and bemusing one-man show, starring the versatile Colin Hamell, as a lost passenger on that famous ocean liner (another vehicle!) that vanished beneath the waves one night to remember in 1912.

Yes, you read that right - this is a light comedy about the sinking of the Titanic; something rather improbable about the supposedly unsinkable. And no, Jimmy didn't survive - the play is (mostly) a wry reminiscence from the heights of Heaven - sometimes leavened with moments of true pathos.  That the evening comes off as comedy at all (and it does come off) is a testament to the skills of both actor Hamell and the script's author, Bernard McMullan. I can't pretend that the play is more than a mildly entertaining way to while away about an hour and a half of your life. But these days - maybe that ain't bad.

Mr. McMullan basically keeps Jimmy Titanic afloat by throwing out all sorts of dramatic material, and then seeing what sticks (at least for a while). And luckily, it turns out he is a skillful sketch writer - there are all sorts of good ideas bobbing around on the surface of his script; but mostly they're all tip, no iceberg. You could argue the playwright thus cannily avoids capsizing his wry tone - but as we watch seemingly a dozen good dramatic ideas drift by, a certain sense of thematic vacuum sets in, and we wonder at the long-term wisdom of his seeming stance.

Still, many of McMullan's gambits are beguiling. He conjures a heaven that's a bit like a down-and-out neighborhood in Belfast (Jimmy's hometown); the Archangel Gabriel shakes down new arrivals for spare change, and the Almighty himself is a grizzled old chain-smoker; there's even a disco (and sex, apparently). This shanty paradise struck me as quite a good idea - but it didn't really lead anywhere. Likewise, the playwright crafts a striking scene in which Jimmy spends his last moments on earth drinking with the Astors, as the water rises around them - another inspired gambit, but we never meet these avatars of the upper crust on the "other side," and indeed the whole question of how heaven might level the social differences that meant so much on earth (and determined who lived and died on the Titanic) never really surfaces.

Other themes can be glimpsed on the edges of the script, passing like strangers in the night. Why did God command that iceberg to drift into the Titanic's path? And what role did human error - or dishonesty - play in the tragedy?  Jimmy himself was one of the laborers who innocently built the flawed vessel - but he never wrestles with his own role in its creation. And what does it mean for those who caused the disaster to be in heaven along with their victims? In many plays, we sense the playwright groping for a compelling theme; here, we feel McMullan all but pushing them aside in the quest for his next one-liner.

Still, if you're in the mood for a light evening that dips occasionally into rueful recollection, shot through with Irish feeling - or if you like pointed little skits that never sharpen their points too far - then Jimmy Titanic is all but guaranteed to please you. Certainly this production, which originated with the Tir Na theatre company, and has already toured extensively, has been buffed to a high sheen by director Carmel O'Reilly (who seems to specialize these days in light reiterations of older, deeper Irish drama). I'd even argue McMullan could be a talent to watch, if he can harness his skills to some larger artistic purpose. And Hamell's performance is surely a focused, precise tour de force - buoyantly secure and skillful - unsinkable, even.

Orchestral manoeuvres at BEMF

Robert Mealy leads the BEMF Orchestra. Photo: Kathy Wittman

Sorry for the delay, but I still have remaining thoughts about a few performances from last week's Boston Early Music Festival (perhaps two posts' worth!).

One of the more intriguing concerts I caught during that busy week was "The Birth of the Orchestra," which featured the remarkable BEMF Orchestra, under the direction of concertmaster Robert Mealy (above). As I've said before, this ensemble is a conclave of superstars (Miloš Valent and Cynthia Roberts on violin, Laura Jeppesen on viola, Phoebe Carrai on violoncello, Gonzalo X. Ruiz on oboe, Avi Stein on harpsichord and organ . . . the list goes on), and the program promised a kind of curated comparison between the two musical centers (Paris, under Lully, and Rome, under Corelli) where that marvelous invention we call "the orchestra" first coalesced.  

The word "orchestra" itself derives from the Greek for the spot in which the chorus performed in ancient amphitheatres - orkhestra is literally "the space in front of the stage," but its etymological taproot is the verb "to dance," orkheisthai.  Given this etymology, it's appropriate that dance figured in this concert (and indeed, courtly dance, which eventually evolved into ballet, was key to the orchestra's early life in France).

So far, so good; and much of the concert proved transporting. But some conceptual disarray - the programming felt more like a potluck than a progression - and occasional passages that weren't as crisp as these stars' best work, often distracted me between the high points of the performance.

From the top, Mealy announced that the ensemble was tuned not to the modern "A" (440 Hz), but instead to a kind of "historical" A, at 392 Hz - a full step lower than we're used to, and the equivalent of the modern "G." Mealy commented that this tuning had been of great help to the singers in Almira, BEMF's main event, so he was hanging onto it - but I didn't really find that argument convincing. To be blunt - there were no singers in this concert, so any argument for a low tuning had to have some other justification. (Singers are always happier with a low tuning, as it lowers the strain on their vocal chords - in fact the seeming march to high tunings over time has often been slowed by battles between singers and instrumentalists.)  

Then there was the question of why this tuning was quite so low. There's a consensus that historical tunings were in general lower than they are today; many scholars cite 415 Hz, a half-step lower than modern A, as a rough guide to "the baroque A." But some evidence contradicts this - indeed, there simply was no standard "A" during the baroque period as there is today, and I've found references for the pitch (from tuning forks and organ pipes of the period) that range as high as A=457, or even A=465 (a half-step higher than the modern A).

Now a concert contrasting orchestral development in Rome and Paris might, you'd think, explore the likely fact that "A" was pitched at very different frequencies between those two locales.  (Indeed, you could make the larger claim that the general movement toward pitch coherence in historic performance is actually anti-historic.) But then again, re-tuning period strings is a tricky business, as for all their beauty these instruments can be recalcitrant; they yearn to return to their habitual tunings, and given variations in humidity and temperature, they sometimes decide to inch out of tune anyway. And this was a slight problem for  the BEMF Orchestra - some re-tuning went on during the performance, but I sometimes felt a few string players were no longer quite in synch with the ensemble.

Some slight gaps in cohesion were felt as well - amusingly so, since Corelli was noted for his nearly obsessive insistence on orchestral unity (legend has it he broke a violin over the back of one unruly player). It's not that these players were unruly, of course - but a few of these stars didn't always seem to be on precisely the same page; although as some were being called to contribute to multiple programs over the course of the week, the occasional gap in focus was almost inevitable.

And there were certainly abundant pleasures here, beginning with the spirited opening of Handel's overture to Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disingonno. Given Corelli's importance in the actual gestation of the orchestra, I was surprised we didn't hear more from him, but his one appearance, with the Concerto Grosso in D Major, Op. 6, No. 1, came off well (particularly the mournful, stately Largo).

One clear argument for a low tuning, of course, would be that it allows for a more darkly shaded and complex sound - I wish that Mealy had said that, for if this was his strategy, it paid off in Handel's overture to Agrippina and Georg Muffat's haunting Dulce Somnium (particularly its fascinatingly labyrinthine Passacaglia). It was intriguing to compare this somewhat-anxious Agrippina to the brighter modern sound Boston Lyric Opera gave it two years ago - here it felt far more mottled, tragic, and well, antique, for lack of a better word. (It's slightly amusing to ponder that early music could itself have conjured a sense of even earlier music.)

Elsewhere the program often focused on dance and dramatic action. While Corelli got short shrift, Mealy lavished his attention on Lully, particularly the dance music.  Here the BEMF Dance Ensemble - Caroline Copeland, Carlos Fittante, Karin Modigh, and Mickael Bouffard - got to strut their stuff in a series of courtly dances in full costume, which I felt was an inspired idea, but only highlighted that the dance component of BEMF is still playing catch-up, I'm afraid, to its musical achievement.

This question is a vexing one, though. There were no "professional" dancers in Lully's day - technically speaking. But the truth is that courtiers devoted much of their lives to dance training, as in the court of the Sun King, himself an avid dancer, favor often fell on the fleet of foot. The BEMF dancers are certainly stylish - Ms. Copeland seems the most accomplished - but they're hamstrung, if you'll pardon the pun, by choreography that can sometimes seem repetitive. Again, there's an argument for limiting their movement to the boundaries of existing documentation (which emphasizes the hands, feet, and floor patterns) - but there are other arguments as well, I'd say, for experimentation and more clearly personal artistic statements. Given that dance and the orchestra were so closely tied at their birth (remember that Greek derivation of the word "orchestra"?), I wish BEMF could provide a deeper focus on dance in future, with perhaps whole concerts given over to dance and dancers.

That's a longer argument, of course, for another day. I'd be remiss, however, if I didn't mention the charming performances of selections from John Blow's opera Venus and Adonis (particularly the lively percussion from Ben Grossman), and an intriguing take on Philipp Heinrich Erlebach's Orchestral Suite No. 1 (a piece with which I was unacquainted). The subtlety of the Erlebach argued strongly for more attention being paid to this composer; the closing Chaconne in particular was a tender marvel. So sometimes you can be lucky in potluck - it can, in the end, yield something truly delicious. 

The awesome beauty of bad weather

As another weather warning was just issued this afternoon, it seems appropriate to post this frightening, majestic video of the kind of Old-Testament-style cloud Yahweh might have spoken out of -  a supercell near Booker, Texas photographed by Mike Olbinski and posted on Vimeo.

Music by Kevin MacLeod - http://incompetech.com. Go full-screen on this one.

Vocal highs and lows at BEMF

Dame Emma Kirkby

I looked at my partner about halfway through Dame Emma Kirkby's concert at the Boston Early Music Festival last week and had to deadpan, "Are we sad yet?"

He could only chuckle; for rarely has an artist risked a set as downbeat as this one - devoted in its entirety to the lachrymose John Dowland, and what's more, skirting for the most part his early, lively stuff.  To be fair, we knew what we were getting into - Dowland is notorious for his dolor; his motto was actually "Semper Dowland, semer dolens" ("Always Dowland, always grieving") - and I don't think he was being ironic.

The composer, a close contemporary of Shakespeare, never achieved a post in Elizabeth I's court (he was Catholic, somewhat on the down low - and even a sometime spy), but his wildly popular music played heavily to the unique taste of the Elizabethan moment: the worship of virginity was at its height when he published his "First Book of Songs," and Elizabeth's subsequent death soon brought even a deeper note of mourning to the cult of love denied.  Dowland's output likewise tilted toward the funereal; his early lyrics hoped that his tears might "sweetly weepe into my Ladies brest"; but later songs command Time to actually stop, so that he may be "bedded to my Tombe;" centuries before Wagner's Liebestod, Dowland was obsessed with the idea of "Love-death."

It goes without saying that Kirkby, a beloved doyenne of the early music scene, at this point in her career can program anything she likes - and so virtually a full house showed up to hear a concert all but designed to make you want to open a vein (or at least live forever with the knife poised over your wrist).  The draw, of course, was the hand-in-glove fit between her voice and this material.  Kirkby doesn't boast a large sound, nor is she a particularly agile vocalist (in fact I believe she never trained to be a professional singer), but in its vibrato-free purity, her voice comes close to the early-music ideal, and her stage presence is open, frank, and sweetly appealing.

She approached the Dowland songbook as a source of comfort and solace - which worked quite well at first; Kirkby was moving, but never maudlin, in the heart-breaking "Flow my tears," and brought a rush of sweet immediacy to the imploring "Wilt thou unkind thus reave me."  And interspersed among her vocal selections were peerless lute solos (including the famous, foundational "Lachrimae") rendered delicately by Paul O'Dette.

Still, a program this repetitious demands some sense of exploration - or explication - but Kirkby didn't supply either; the first lament sounded much like the last. And perhaps there's a touch of stylistic naïveté to an approach that holds back from the underside of Dowland's obsessive erotic melancholy - that takes him at his own weepy word over and over and over again. His lyrics may not quite be Shakespearean sonnets, but their poetry has its own subtexts and intrigues, that purity alone cannot limn. Still, the concert did end on a paired note of devastatingly simple beauty, in Kirkby's take on "Thou mighty God," Dowland's heartfelt prayer for deliverance, and O'Dette's tender rendition of the haunting "Farewell."

The Hilliard Ensemble.

Another mainstay of the early music scene also made a visit to BEMF this year - but with far less satisfactory results.  Indeed, I confess I hesitated before writing anything at all about the Hilliard Ensemble (at left), as their performance at Emmanuel Church on Friday night was among the weakest I have ever heard on a professional stage. Given the group's illustrious history, this of course was startling; at first I couldn't quite believe my ears, in fact. Were they under-prepared? Were they exhausted? Ill? Energy and volume were low, intonation was insecure (countertenor David James missed some pitches completely), phrasing was tentative - as one acquaintance put it during intermission, it sounded more like a first rehearsal than a full performance.

This was really too bad, because the program was certainly of interest - it opened with a suite of obscure songs inspired by Petrarch's poems to the famous Laura, then segued into hymns to the Virgin Mary (an interesting curatorial idea).  Things did move slightly uphill as the concert progressed - a later set of songs by Pisano more or less hung together, and after intermission (during which the audience was audibly restive), the Hilliards came back with more power, at least, on three hymns by St. Godric of Finchale which are among the oldest surviving scores of vocal music.  These proved compelling, and there were further sparks of feeling, and some coherence, in the English song "Ah! Gentle Jesu," as well as "Otche nasch," an anonymous rendering of the Lord's Prayer.  Alas, things did begin to drift once more, even though a set of Armenian hymns, or "Sharakans," was quite intriguing harmonically; the final piece, however, Perotin's "Viderunt omnes" proved a disappointment.  Sigh. An encore by Arvo Pärt, written specially for the Ensemble some years ago, only gave a reminder of how high a profile they once enjoyed; but again, the music intrigued, the performance did not.

After these two concerts it was hard for me not to ponder the profound shift in professionalism, and the concomitant expansion in artistic scope, which the early music scene has enjoyed over the past few decades. Today the replication of a period style is not nearly enough to pass muster - and academic indulgence of inconsistent skill is completely a thing of a past. Indeed, the high points of the Boston Early Music Festival, such as Gilbert Blin's double bill of Charpentier, made fresh intellectual points about the music in question (and its period) while maintaining the highest technical standards in terms of performance.  Is it enough to say that "early music" has itself left its "early" phase?  These concerts made me think that might be the case.

If you haven't seen the amazing video "Paper City" . . .

Paper City from Maciek Janicki on Vimeo.

Here is your chance to take a breather from BEMF and check it out.

Mozart on original instruments. THE original instruments.

Mozart's viola.

It's the rare man or woman who is indifferent to the holy relic. Indeed, you could argue the cult of authenticity underpinning our entire system of cultural value finds its apotheosis in the reliquary. The "Mona Lisa" is priceless (while her digital image is free) because her lips were kissed by Leonardo's own brush. The value of everything from the Magna Carta to a signed baseball depends on its physical connection to the great figures of the past.

So you can imagine the atmosphere of anticipation in Jordan Hall earlier this week, as the crowd at BEMF waited to view (and hear) what in the early music world counts as something close to the True Cross: the actual violin and viola that once belonged to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the instruments that the man himself played, and from which his genius first sounded.

That both instruments, when they arrived onstage (courtesy of the Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg), appeared absolutely ordinary, only added in a way to their poignant mystery. These humble tools gave birth to some of the greatest music ever written. Perhaps they weren't so much like the True Cross as the manger in Bethlehem.

Of course Mozart wasn't wealthy enough, or lucky enough, to own a Stradivarius - and frankly, his viola (at left) is something of a ruin (it was cut down after his death from a somewhat larger size, which may have flattened its tone). The violin's sound proved more beguiling, as it boasted a light, sweet middle register (but you can judge both for yourself when WCRB broadcasts the concert on June 16 at 3 pm).

Even given the instruments' somewhat compromised voices, however, the concert succeeded purely through the skill of its musicians. Two superb performers stood in for Mozart himself - Amandine Beyer consistently coaxed a lyrical richness from the violin, while Miloš Valent occasionally found a resonant sweet spot in the viola. They were often joined by the brilliant Kristian Bezuidenhout on fortepiano and Eric Hoeprich on baroque clarinet; and the lively ensemble between these early music stars conjured a kind of musical séance: Mozart's spirit seemed palpable onstage as the players induced in our minds something like the ghost of a concert that might once have been (indeed, the premiere of the "Kegelstatt" clarinet trio, essayed vibrantly by Valent, Bezuidenhout, and Hoeprich, may well have been played by Amadeus himself on this very viola).

We also heard a dazzling solo (the Prelude and Fugue for Piano in C Major, K. 394) from Bezuidenhout, whose touch is superbly calibrated to the fortepiano, and whose seemingly spontaneous interpretations always fascinate. Together Beyer and Valent took the Duo for Piano and Viola in G Major (K.423) at a spirited clip, but still found in it springs of startling emotion; Beyer triumphed again in the opening Sonata for Violin and Piano in C Major (K.303), particularly in its closing minuet, against a sparkling turn from Bezuidenhout.  One left the concert with the cherished memory of coming as close to Mozart the man as is possible these days in not one, but two different ways: through contact with these remarkable talismans of his life, and the musicianship of the great performers who are devoted to his legacy.

BEMF makes musical history

Ulrike Hofbauer as Princess Almira.  Photos: Kathy Wittman.

Classical music buffs think they know Handel.

But do they?

The official story goes that the great German composer, who already had two operas under his belt by age twenty, was musically transformed by a visit to Italy in 1706 - a sojourn which opened the tap on a stream of masterpieces, and inspired a style which would inform much, if not most, of his oeuvre.

Hence Handel's first two operas have been widely ignored - one has been lost, and the other, Almira, dismissed as juvenilia by the academic establishment.

But by the end of the Boston Early Musical Festival production of Almira,  composed in Hamburg in 1705, that conventional wisdom lies in ruins, and the professors look a little nervous. Indeed, as the curtain falls, you realize that everything you thought you knew about this genius is wrong - and that it's time for us all to get a new handle on Handel.

For Almira is hardly juvenilia, even if its libretto is risible (but as the 19-year-old composer was jobbed in, and inherited  its book, this has nothing to do with his own development). What counts, and is immediately apparent about the opera, is the stunning beauty, maturity, and endless invention of its music. Indeed, the riches in Almira are almost unbelievable - and they keep pouring forth for almost four hours (yes, like many a 19-year-old, Handel can keep performing well after those of us who have reached middle age could use a break!).  No wonder it was a hit back in 1705 - and without a doubt it belongs in the repertory today.

So what the Boston Early Music Festival has achieved in this production (which is dazzling on its own terms) is something like the gold standard of period performance. The Festival has not only unearthed a masterpiece, but a masterpiece which puts a new spin on our understanding of one of the greatest composers who ever lived.  In short, BEMF has made - or at least re-made - music history. Handel's Italian sojourn must now be re-contextualized as a stylistic gloss on a genius which had already arrived, almost fully-formed, like Venus on the half-shell, by the end of his German adolescence; and the proof positive is that Almira is studded with musical material which one immediately recognizes from re-appearances in the later operas (even the melody of "Lascia chi'o pianga" from Rinaldo, probably Handel's biggest current hit, is first heard here).

This alone is enough to make Almira an event; but as if sensing the import of the opera itself, BEMF seems to have kicked their whole game up a notch, and delivered their strongest festival production since L'incoronazione di Poppea - and perhaps their strongest production ever. This time, everything in director Gilbert Blin's vision (and I've been singing his praises for years) is superbly integrated, and the physical design reaches a new peak of sumptuousness; even the dancers and clowns feel more assured and motivated (largely thanks to a hearty comic turn by local star Jason McStoots).  And the convoluted libretto actually has its curious compensations; as the opera nears its fourth hour, we begin to understand the seductions of its start-and-stop, variety-show structure; director  Blin conjures a seamless flow of action, but seems to understand that during the recitatives, much of the original audience might have been on the move (only to return for the next ravishing aria).  In short, if you want to understand the atmosphere of early popular opera, look no further than Almira.

The ladies of Almira's court (orchestra below).

As we have come to expect of BEMF, musically the production holds to the highest standards. Soprano Ulrike Hofbauer actually replaced another singer in the title role of Princess Almira, but you wouldn't have guessed it; she sang with a poignant purity, and brought a particularly moving intensity to her heartbroken aria "Geloso tormento." Hofbauer was outshone dramatically, however, by local favorite Amanda Forsythe, who as always proved virtuosic vocally, and also happens to be one of the best actresses on the operatic stage; Forsythe tore through the furious “Der Himmel wird straffen" with such force, in fact, that she all but brought down the house.

Now I'm worried this review is going to get a little boring, because it's all repetitive praise; there were really no weak links in this cast. Tenor Colin Blazer brought a rich, subtle tone and an intelligent sensitivity to the role of Fernando, whom Almira loves but cannot marry, as he's a foundling with no title (only guess what is discovered, after literally hours of improbable complications?).  Meanwhile Zachary Wilder sang with crisp warmth - and acted with fearless comic aplomb - as the foppish Osman (a smooth operator who eventually gets his comeuppance), while baritone Christian Immler brought gravitas inflected with wit to the role of his benighted father, the prince Consalvo. I was likewise taken with the rich, erotically charged color of Tyler Duncan's Raymondo, and the sparkle of soprano Valerie Vinzant's vixenish Bellante (if you can't tell, I was basically taken with everybody).

Down in the pit, the music-making was just as exemplary: the BEMF orchestra was cohesive and expressive, shifting from the grand to the gossamer at will - all while maintaining a palpable sense of ensemble with the vocal action onstage. But then this orchestra is almost a conclave of early music superstars; particularly dazzling passages were supplied by baroque harpist Maxine Eilander, concertmaster Robert Mealy, and of course the resident geniuses at BEMF, music directors Paul O'Dette and Stephen Stubbs, on theorbo and baroque guitar.

One last bouquet must go to the design team. The director himself conceived the gorgeous, ever-shifting set, whose palette costume designer Anna Watkins brilliantly harnessed in what amounted to a Velázquez come to life (Almira's setting is Castile). Lenore Doxsee's lighting picked up on the same hues, and sometimes seemed to bathe the entire theatre in an amber glow. There's a sense that design decisions have run deep this time around; swordplay figured as a subtle motif throughout the piece, for instance - perhaps because Handel himself dodged injury in a duel during the period of Almira's composition (one character even sports an eyepatch - perhaps because she wasn't as lucky as Handel, we wonder?). Sigh. This kind of achievement leaves one wishing Boston could see this team try its hand at any number of operas (the gambols of McStoots brought The Magic Flute inevitably to mind); Blin is surrounded now by dazzling talent on all sides (on stage, in the pit, and backstage as well) -  indeed, sometimes I felt this triumphant production was almost as much his monument as it was Handel's.

Rapture, blister . . . yawn . . .

A toast to feminist theory - and Kate Shindle, Nancy E. Carroll, and Shannon Esper. Photos: T. Charles Erickson.

It's hard to get excited about Gina Gionfriddo's Rapture, Blister, Burn (through June 30) despite the obvious skill of the Huntington production because, well . . . basically, we've heard everything this playwright has to say many times before. Indeed, the play's predictability is what makes the slickness of director Peter DuBois' packaging possible - as every idea in the script is basically set in cultural stone, it can all be tweaked and polished to a high gloss. This conventionality is also what will make the show a hit with - well, the Huntington crowd, for lack of a better word; the play seems to exist almost as a vehicle for its marketing.

I think criticism is sort of beside the point in cases like this. I mean, there's nothing here to explain, and somewhere deep inside, the audience for Rapture, Blister, Burn knows that everything in it is sentimental, and politically pretty much beside the point - but they like it anyway, and that's that; part of their identity is bound up in liking it. The play is a product of the Paula Vogel playwriting factory, which once operated at Brown, but has outsourced production to Yale - and which has long had its finger on the pulse of liberal (and liberal-artsy) angst. (Gionfriddo and DuBois both got on Vogel's assembly line back in her days at Brown, btw.)

Now Vogel has unleashed a lot of bad playwriting on the world - but I had hopes that Gionfriddo might break her mentor's mold; her earlier script, Becky Shaw, seemed to subvert the pieties of the Brown assembly line, and evinced at least some sympathy with its male anti-hero.  Alas, in Rapture, Gionfriddo retreats back into the yada-yada sisterhood - it's largely a literal post-feminist coffee klatch; and though it still makes a few faux stabs at the bleeding heart of liberalism, it doesn't draw nearly as much blood as Becky Shaw did.  Still, the playwright gets off plenty of witty quips - so if you're not in a demanding mood, and like to shout "Woo-hoo!" when you agree with something a character has said, then this could be for you, even if in the end the play comes off as sitcom (it's certainly not drama, and certainly not comedy); and not even top-drawer sitcom, at that (30 Rock was consistently better than this).

The essence of the sitcom, of course, is its situation (hence situation-comedy), which must hold constant through repeated episodes of seeming variation, ensuing discussion, and final return to the mean (basically, in drama and comedy, things can change; in sitcom, they can't).  Gionfriddo hews closely (if a bit awkwardly) to this blueprint - so closely she can even work in jokes about Disney movies she's cribbing from.

Her theme is that perennial post-feminist question, "Why can't I have it all?" (Note that no male hero, and I mean none, has ever asked, "Why can't I have it all?") But Gionfriddo's heroine, an awesomely-Camille-Paglia-like (but heterosexual!) academic named Catherine Croll (Kate Shindle) is prone to saying that kind of thing a lot, particularly as she's having second thoughts about her super-successful, but lonely, life - ever since her awesomely-Estelle-Getty-like mother (our own Nancy E. Carroll), with whom she shares her one-and-only functioning relationship, just had her first heart attack.

You're not much, but you're all I've got.  Timothy John Smith and Kate Shindle in Rapture, Blister, Burn.

What happens next requires several suspensions of disbelief, and is very slow in coming anyhow: Catherine all but moves in with mom, and settles in to teach a summer seminar at a nearby college where a former flame, Don (Timothy John Smith) is a dean.  Don's wife, Gwen (Annie McNamara), is also a former friend - who years ago stole Don from Catherine, and traded in her career plans for what she hoped would be domestic bliss. So before you can say Freaky Friday, the two are plotting a wacky husband-swap - while downing martinis sent in specially from Sex in the City - just to see if the grass is really greener on the other side of the fence.

If that all sounds pre-determined and overly schematic - well, it is.  But Gionfriddo spends so much time in Croll's third-wave-feminist seminar, she hardly has the stage time to construct a plausible plot. Still, the gaps in her dramatic logic loom: Don is portrayed as a pot- and porn-addicted schlub; yet somehow Catherine thinks he's her only romantic option; and conveniently, the only people who show up at her seminar are, believe it or not, Gwen and her babysitter (so the personal can literally become the political).  And as for that babysitter - wouldn't any restless, forty-something pothead run off with the au pair before he'd even look at the middle-aged woman who dropped him twenty years ago?

But I digress . . . into something like real life, but never mind . . . all of these sitcom shenanigans (at the Huntington, scene changes are even punctuated by Saved-by-the-Bell-like guitar riffs) only exist as a scaffold on which Gionfriddo can drape a mildly pointed discussion of Phyllis Schlafly and other post-feminist reactionaries.  And you know what - it turns out Phyllis had a point; she knew the old dispensation was largely constructed to contain the male id, and provide for stable families against long odds. And now that we're some fifty years into the feminist revolution, men are waiting longer and longer to tie the knot, the objectification and abuse of women in porn has gone off the charts, and mothers commonly have their first child well before they're married.

And okay, maybe all this fall-out is the fault of men. (I'm not saying it isn't.) But what Gionfriddo can't, or won't, address in her drama is that these debits on the feminist ledger are often falling across the class divide. Privileged, college-educated women have benefited from feminism's gains enormously - but for lower-class, under-educated women, child-rearing and domesticity now exist almost in a state of siege. So tellingly, Gionfriddo keeps all her characters safely middle-class (and safely white), and turns the children embroiled in the break-up (and subsequent make-up) of Gwen and Don's marriage into faceless abstractions; we never even see them. Apparently all this consciousness-raising must occur in a post-adolescent vacuum - otherwise it might prove less than emotionally convincing.

Still, within the limits of the feminist echo chamber, Gionfriddo proves witty, and the production is always mildly entertaining (and never actually irritating) thanks to the spot-on performances of a highly capable cast.  Kate Shindle somehow keeps Catherine sympathetic even when she's coolly toying with the idea of breaking up a marriage, while Annie McNamara hints at complicated reserves of damaged emotion within the sphinx-like Gwen (by far the most interesting, and under-written, character in the play).  The reliable Timothy John Smith likewise makes the smut-addicted, reefer-mad Don never less than, well, likable (we're quite glad when he saves himself from Catherine's driven clutches), and Shannon Esper puts a confident, innocent spin on the libertarian cant of the millennial babysitter. Meanwhile Nancy E. Carroll, bless her heart, seems to embody and satirize the Estelle Getty role at the same time.  Director DuBois' touch is light, but firm, and Alexander Dodge's set design is elegant, even if it hints at an ironic concept the script doesn't quite support.  All these talented people almost managed to convince me that this was a play worth doing, rather than just a chunk of high-quality Huntington product.  So here's to them.  Woo-hoo.

Sex, knowledge, and Alan Ayckbourn - or, can the climax of one play really be from another play?

A double dose of the author and his favorite subject.

This morning I'm pondering the first "half," if you will, of the regional premiere (at Providence's Trinity Rep) of Alan Ayckbourn's House and Garden, two companion plays that once more, in Ayckbourn's familiar fashion, contemplate adultery, the class system, the conventions of dinner theatre, and - well, epistemology in general.

Why "epistemology?"  Well, the "gimmick" of House and Garden is that the two halves of its diptych are meant to be performed simultaneously by the same cast - no, not on the same actual stage, but in adjacent theatres. Trinity is one of the few New England houses where this is even possible, so it's good news that their production (at least of House, I'll see Garden next week) has been placed in the capable hands of company vet Brian McEleny (who delivered a superb Absurd Person Singular a while back) and so is quite strong; yes, you should definitely make the trip down to Providence to see it (after a few missteps earlier this season, Trinity has come roaring back with this and their previous offering, Social Creatures).

Now Ayckbourn has long been intrigued by the problem of synchronicity in theatre, and particularly farce (I know it sounds hilarious to be using all these SAT words when discussing a sex comedy, but that's actually part of the joke). In The Norman Conquests, he gave us a trilogy of plays revealing every single facet of a serial adulterer - and all occurring on a single "dirty week-end;" in How the Other Half Loves, he combined two disastrous dinner parties, occurring on two different nights, but all in the same theatrical space.

You could argue (many have) that this only betrays the playwright's pleasure in his own cleverness. But I disagree; in his own way, Ayckbourn has been exploring troubling questions in his series of theatrical Rubik's cubes. And in House and Garden, I think he may have pulled off his most brazen conceptual coup yet.  It has been widely said (it's even part of Trinity's marketing) that each half of House and Garden can stand on its own two feet.  But that's only half-true (appropriately enough); indeed, to be honest, on the deepest level it's absolutely false. House and Garden are actually conjoined theatrical twins - they don't "orbit" each other, like the Norman plays; they are concretely and literally connected, like puzzle pieces.

In fact, in one particularly daring gambit, Ayckbourn actually replaces the climax of House with what I took to be the climax of Garden.  In the very spot where one would expect, in the structure of a "well-made" play, for the leads to have their face-off, or for some transformative revelation to drop, Ayckbourn instead drags on a set of supporting players, whom we guess have been going at it in the downstairs theatre, and we watch the climax of their drama instead. Which is not only barely interpretable (we've seen almost none of its building action, and indeed only glimpsed its central player), but stunningly weird: carving knives are brandished, murder seems to be in the air, incest is mentioned - the play's dinner-theatre conceits are dropped utterly and completely, and briefly chaos reigns onstage; in fact, even the more-familiar characters scream to each other, "What is going on?"

After something like a resolution, or even a reunion (?), this whole plot is packed off again to Garden (and House awkwardly resumes). But the resonance of its interpolation into the action lingers like an echo - and hence my musings on epistemology, or the study of what we can truly know - and whether we can truly know it. Looking back, it's clear that one of the deepest themes of Ayckbourn's oeuvre has been ignorance - perhaps because delusion and deceit are at the core of sex comedy. But Ayckbourn has consistently treated issues of ignorance in a complex manner that recalls the theatre of the absurd more than the dinner theatre - even if in his earlier works, he rarely left the audience as deeply in the dark as his benighted characters.

But with House and Garden (or at least in House, perhaps all the veils are lifted in Garden), the playwright has contrived to leave us as blind as his heroes and heroines.  Indeed, over and over again in House he constructs related comedies of isolation, misrepresentation, and miscommunication.  In one hilarious scene, everyone suddenly begins to speak French; in another, everyone decides (for various reasons) to utterly ignore a single character. Indeed, throughout most of the length of House, the leading lady pays no attention to her husband whatsoever, as payback for his adultery; she simply acts as if he isn't there - an ironic reflection of the fact that their marriage is only possible as long as she pretends his adultery isn't there. Which is likewise an intriguing epistemological mirror of the fact that we can't know why he betrayed her, or what that betrayal means ( because he never gets a chance to explain himself): for all we know, her version of events - sympathetic as it seems - may constitute its own form of betrayal.

Indeed, I've rarely been as struck as I was while watching House by what I didn't understand about what was going on; the awareness that a second, simultaneous version of events is unfolding elsewhere hangs over the action like a great, Pinteresque question mark.  Of course this is a trick played by other playwrights  (remember Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead?) but something about the tenor of Ayckbourn's conceptual conceits gets under your skin more than Stoppard ever did (after all, we know the plot of Hamlet) - and there's even an unusual hint of Pinterian menace to a few of his characters as well (a slimy political sociopath slithers repeatedly through the action, for instance).

Of course these epistemological questions may, in the end, only be a commercial trick - one certainly leaves House intrigued enough to cough up the bucks for a second ticket to Garden.  Then again, maybe the double nature of that gambit is part of Ayckbourn's theme, too (and of course it's worth remembering that the heady questions raised by House may only be deflated by its companion play).

The good news, though, is that however the playwright resolves the deeper questions of his diptych, he hasn't lost his flair for sex comedy (even if most of the whoopie, appropriately enough, happens in the garden, not the house).  Indeed, when Ayckbourn defiantly brought out a sexy housemaid, and had her bend over to do the vacuuming (revealing an almost hilariously alluring backside), I all but sighed there in my seat; the whole moment was like slipping into a warm, welcome bath of sexist nostalgia.  Ah, the thing itself, without apology - or irony! Trinity is still able to be frank about sex in a way we've lost sight of further north. For the theatre has gotten so damn feminized up here in Boston; I've seen almost every male actor I know in the nude on stage (even the playwrights are starting to show their junk!), and frankly, gay as I am, I'm actually getting bored with this particular politically-correct rite of passage (and sorry, but the "empowered," pseudo-dirty striptease of the new burlesque is hardly the real thing). To see a brilliant, heterosexual male cast a gimlet eye on feminine allure - God, it's like spotting a unicorn!  So all I can say is, yeah, baby, yeah - bring on the horn, Mr. Ayckbourn!  (And I'll see you in the Garden next week.)

Hats off to On the Town

Phil Tayler, Zach Eisenstat and John Ambrosino go  . .. well, On the Town.  Photos: Mark S. Howard

The original musical On the Town has been so overshadowed by its 1949 film treatment (an Oscar-winner that starred Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Ann Miller and Vera-Ellen) that the current Lyric Stage production (through this weekend only) almost feels like a discovery. The movie is a monument in Hollywood history (not only was it the first musical shot on location, but it also marks the first time Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen co-directed a full film); but the MGM suits yanked most of Leonard Bernstein's subtler songs (they found them "complex" and "operatic"), and replaced them with broader numbers by producer Roger Edens - a talented mainstay of the Freed Unit, but there's a reason why you've never heard of him.

Happily, however, Bernstein's original melodies survive in the score of the stage show, which was a spin-off of Jerome Robbins' ballet Fancy Free (which Boston Ballet staged just last year) - itself a spin-off of Paul Cadmus's sardonically homo-erotic The Fleet's In! (below- a WPA commission, believe it or not, that caught the eye of the closeted choreographer).

In Fancy Free, Robbins largely dropped Cadmus's gay subtext (let alone the suggestion of marijuana use), but still conjured a surprisingly dark look at a trio of sailors on leave, whose lonely, frustrated aggression eventually thwarts their sexual impulses (their girls wind up fleeing their brawling). The musical sweetened things even further, keeping the sex but deep-sixing the violence; and just as the jump from Robbins to Bernstein marked another step into the closet, so On the Town all but reversed the content of the original Cadmus source (as often happens in the long arcs that cultural material charts through the pop firmament).

Paul Cadmus' The Fleet's In! of 1934 - the source inspiration for On the Town

Indeed, in the musical version, it's the women who are most often amusingly on the make: one of the leading ladies, for instance, primly explains that she gets "carried away" with prime specimens of homo erectus (her words, not mine), while another simply suggests to sailors, "Why don't we go up to my place?," and the third, we learn, earns her living as an exotic dancer (even though she has won the title of "Miss Turnstiles").  Meanwhile the sailors, though horny, hardly seem worldly - indeed, one of them is probably a virgin, while another dreams of finding true love during a 24-hour leave; only one of them has his eye on the main chance, and even he's a softie.

So don't worry, On the Town reliably diverts its erotic undercurrents into proper romantic yearnings - but only barely; make no mistake, it's about sex, and in a refreshingly honest way. But then it bloomed during a brief period (roughly the war years) in which nice girls were allowed to have sex lives onstage, at least with virginal servicemen; and of course its lyrics and book were penned by Adolph Green and the irrepressible Betty Comden (née Basya Cohen), who more than anyone since Fanny Brice imprinted our musical theatre with the perspective of the smart, snappy Jewish-American girl who has been around the block and seen a thing or two.

Not that Comden, Green and Bernstein (who once were a variety act!) ignored the emotional subtexts of their story - indeed, the loneliness of Fancy Free haunts On the Town - it's essentially what the Freed Unit left out of their happy, back-slapping slab of Americana. At the Lyric, however, the piece's wistfulness often comes center stage, in such forgotten Bernstein classics as "Lonely Town" and particularly the poignant "Some Other Time," which has always seemed to hover on the verge of becoming a standard (which it deserves to be).

Michele A. DeLuca knows where she'd like to take Phil Tayler.

Of course balancing these winsome touches are the bold strokes of "Carried Away," "I Can Cook, Too," (lyrics by Bernstein himself) and the classic "New York, New York" - surely one of the catchiest numbers ever concocted. The Lyric version actually gives full  weight to both sides of the musical's emotional coin - although I have to say that on opening night, it hadn't quite coalesced.  I have a hunch it has found its groove by now - this is one of those cases in which artistic director Spiro Veloudos has attempted to shoehorn a big show into an intimate space, and while I can't really fault him for that (who doesn't have a soft spot for On the Town?) a few of the dance numbers feel slightly cramped, and some of his stars are pushed beyond their musical comfort zone (one untrained singer, for instance, often lands about a quarter-step south of where he should be when he's singing harmony).

None of these flaws prove fatal, however, and if a few performers seemed to be operating on technical cues  - well, again,  I'm guessing the emotional essence of what they're doing has sunk in by now. The standouts of the cast are Aimee Doherty and Phil Tayler, by now Boston's go-to duo for musical theatre; Doherty as usual looks like a million bucks, and sounds like a million more; she actually doesn't have too much chemistry with her assigned sailor, the effervescent Zach Eisenstat (who  in general feels like a force of nature, and can pull off a mean back flip to boot), but maybe she doesn't have to when she's got the comic timing she displays here (intriguingly, Doherty actually connects more with the fiancé she throws over in the script, a highly amusing J.T. Turner).  Tayler, like Doherty, was born to do musical comedy, and nails all his bits, even if (again) he hadn't quite found his inner shrinking violet on opening night, nor learned how to open up to the demanding advances of the talented Michele A. DeLuca, whom we really don't see enough of on our local stages, and who brought some real fire to "I Can Cook, Too."

But wait, there's more.  Sometimes local light John Ambrosino strikes me as a little distant, but here his melancholy worked well for the lovestruck Gabey (and his vocal chops were quite welcome on numbers like "Lonely Town"), while radiant newcomer Lauren Gemelli made me forget all about silly old Vera-Ellen as Miss Turnstiles. Local legend Sarah deLima likewise eclipsed the Hollywood incarnation of her character, a daffy artiste who keeps the plot (such as it is) in motion. 

There was even more talent around the edges of the production - Maurice Emmanuel Parent, usually a headliner, essayed a number of supporting and dance-oriented roles, while bass baritone Rishi Basu brought a welcome heft to the vocal lines. Choreographer Ilyse Robbins had clearly studied the dance style of that other Robbins, and often triumphed against the limits of the Lyric's space; Kathleen Doyle's costume design was period-perfect; and Seághan McKay's projections went a long way toward giving the show something of the film version's fluidity and scope (particularly when a subway rumbled by).  All in all, Veloudos has assembled a startling array of talent on the Lyric stage, and we're unlikely to see any local cast do better by the full emotional range of On the Town.