The uses of entertainment

Cinderella (McCaela Donovan) ventures "into the woods."

I suppose Into the Woods isn't quite top-drawer Sondheim; that is, it's not in the magic circle of Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, and Sweeney Todd. It's slightly less virtuosic, slightly less ground-breaking.

But it's also produced more often than the "Big Four" - I think we've seen three different productions in the last few years here in Boston, in fact. Why? Perhaps because it's not too challenging, and not too dark - like Goldilocks's porridge (to borrow a fairy-tale metaphor), in terms of challenge, it's just right. Plus it's studded with some of the master's loveliest melodies, including "No One is Alone" and "Children Will Listen," as well as the happy, mindless march that powers the title tune.

So I was happy to welcome yet another Into the Woods into the woods around Waltham - and happier still to find the recently re-christened "Reagle Music Theatre of Greater Boston" (I think we'll shorten that to "Reagle Music Theatre") has mounted a moving and sophisticated (if not flawless) version. It's powered by two knock-out performances, from Broadway vet Rachel York (below left, as the Witch) and relative-newcomer McCaela Donovan (above, as Cinderella), and boasts a nearly-as-strong supporting cast. At the same time, the company seems to have made a jump in its production values, too: the set, by Janie Howland, is more sophisticated and conceptual than was typical for the glitzy, but literal-minded "Reagle Players" (although the design has a few problems, more on that later), and the orchestra, led by musical director Charles Peltz, sounded much cleaner and more cohesive than it has in times past; in fact, in one leap, Reagle has landed in the landscape of a typical SpeakEasy, Lyric, or New Rep musical.

Okay, back to the show itself. Just in case you're a Sondheim virgin, Into the Woods was inspired by Bruno Bettelheim's 1976 blockbuster The Uses of Enchantment, which analyzed the tales of the Brothers Grimm in terms of child psychology - in a word, how the stories allowed kids to grapple with subconscious desires and fears at one remove. With librettist James Lapine, Sondheim set about producing a similar set of fairy tales for grown-ups, in which adult issues could be dealt with via a similar code.

Just after the success of Into the Woods, of course, Bettelheim committed suicide, and soon his reputation endured blow after blow. Still, the common-sense basis of The Uses of Enchantment remains a cultural touchstone, perhaps due in no small part to Sondheim - and the way he and Lapine wittily extended the fairy tale into a more complex moral universe. In their show's first half, four famous stories (Cinderella, Rapunzel, Jack and the Beanstalk, and Little Red Riding Hood) are braided together via the device of the Baker and his Wife, who are seeking talismans to lift a curse of sterility visited on them by a wicked Witch. All the figures of the various stories intersect and interact in those eponymous "woods" - a metaphorical site of fear and desire, of moral uncertainty and fraught encounter, in which circumstances and even identity are constantly shifting.

The twist in Into the Woods is that once these fairy tales are "finished" - and everyone has achieved their wish - the story goes on: all that self-actualization has resulted in a new catastrophe, in which a vengeful giantess (widely interpreted as a personification of the AIDS crisis) appears to mow down the population. Thus as it makes the leap from the 70's to the 80's, Into the Woods likewise limns the transition from adolescence to maturity, and from individual to community - and of course, the awareness of the multiple moral perspectives that transition entails.

If that sounds like a lot to swallow in an evening's entertainment, rest assured that Sondheim and Lapine make the morals go down easy. I'm sure plenty of people have enjoyed Into the Woods without pondering any of this. What's memorable about the Reagle version, however, is how it subtly grows in scale and power as it proceeds: by the finale, largely thanks to McCaela Donovan's delicately devastating version of "No One is Alone," I confess my heart was in my throat - right where Sondheim and Lapine intended it to be.

Prior to that, there were a few bumps on the path to grandmother's house. The first act of Woods is famously intricate, with a book that starts and stops repeatedly as librettist Lapine weaves together his separate tales with Sondheim's many songs. At Reagle, at least on opening weekend, all this didn't quite cohere - subtle gaps and beats kept slowing things down, and at the same time the advance of the "First" and "Second" Midnights didn't quite register. The set - a striking statement in which trees would descend onto the pages of an open book - didn't seem to help things; several actors tripped over its steps, and it seemed to subtly frustrate director Stacey Stephens's attempts at flow. Still, in the more simply-structured second act, things improved, and the assembled ensemble shown all the brighter.

Chief among these many lights was Rachel York, a Broadway vet (and Reagle regular) without a real peer in Boston in terms of musical theatre ability. She won the IRNE for last summer's Hello, Dolly!, and something tells me she'll be back in contention next spring for her work here; her Witch is both hilariously broad and yet - amazingly - deeply touching; her rendition of "Stay with Me" was the most wrenching I've ever heard, in fact. Damn, this gal has chops.


The surviving - I mean supporting - cast of this grim fairy tale - Gregory Isaac Stone, McCaela Donovan, Doug Jabara and Allison Russell.

Barely a step behind York, however - despite those glass slippers - was local star McCaela Donovan as Cinderella. Donovan recently impressed as Yum-Yum in the New Rep's Hot Mikado, and she carried on - after a slightly-subdued start - at the same high level here; as noted, I'll never forget her take on "No One is Alone;" with any justice, it would become the standard version.

The supporting cast likewise glittered - I particularly savored the subtle acting and rich singing voices of Shannon Lee Jones and Doug Jabara as the Baker and his Wife, as well as Allison Russell's satisfied sense of happy appetite as the obnoxious Little Red Riding Hood. Alas, Ayal Miodovnik was somewhat hampered as the Big Bad Wolf by a cumbersome mask, but he was a lot of fun as the fatuously swaggering Prince, and newcomers Gregory Isaac Stone and Brennan Roach impressed as Jack and Rapunzel's Prince, respectively.

There were a few gaps in the ensemble - Catherine Lee Christie contributed a fine singing voice but not much more as Jack's mother, and in the part of the Narrator, local TV personality Scott Wahle came off as - well, a local TV personality (his costume of anchorman-suit-and-tie didn't help things); to be fair, Wahle was better, but hardly outstanding, as the script's "mysterious old man."

These missteps were forgotten, however, amid the production's many pleasures. In fact, I'd say the other theatres in town should watch their backs; as I predicted last summer, Reagle seems to see an opening for a jump from a "merely" community-based theatre into a full-fledged regional presence, and with Into the Woods, they're putting their best foot forward.

A glittering La Cage

It's a little weird shifting gears from the homophobic oeuvre of Quentin Tarantino to the glitzy, too-gay world of Jerry Herman, but I owe Reagle Players a quick look back at their La Cage aux Folles, which closed last weekend.

Reagle has had something of a rollercoaster ride this summer, with the local press paying more attention than usual now that the North Shore Music Theatre, the only other bastion of the American musical in the area, has gone belly-up. The season was given over to a celebration of Herman's three biggest hits - Hello, Dolly!, Mame, and La Cage, all of them solid showcases for Reagle's nostalgic formula of professional leads, community support, and the budget to "recreate" the scale and flash of the original productions. Alas, the press spotlight shown most intensely on Reagle's Mame, a generally solid production that was hobbled by its star.

With La Cage, the company bounced back - with, sadly enough, not many in the press paying much attention. Even more ironically, the show's success (like Mame's failure) was largely due to the talents of its star, David Engel (at left), who was just about everything you'd want in both a leading man and lady. Engel is a serious triple threat - he can act, sing, and dance; only make that a sextuple threat, because he can do all of those in heels and a boa, too. He's also a looker, and a seriously glamorous presence in pants - which actually probably isn't quite right for Zaza, who is often portrayed as a bit of a frump offstage (while hubby Georges is the suave glamourpuss). But that hardly mattered when Engel tore into a take-no-prisoners version of "I Am What I Am," which probably counted as the most powerful vocal performance of the year so far.

Engel towered over the production, although he received solid backup from Broadway vet Jamie Ross, who immediately established an easy rapport with the audience as Georges (Ross had played the role against George Hearn in the original Broadway run). Still, in terms of sheer performance energy, Ross couldn't quite keep up, and though the couple easily pulled off the surface emotion of Herman's beautifully schmaltzy love scenes, their underlying emotional connection remained, well, elusive.

The audience didn't seem to mind, though - indeed, they ate the show up, as straight crowds of a certain age always do. This is because Herman (and book writer Harvey Fierstein) have smoothed away any stray strands of controversy from the original farce (the hints of drug use, the parody of domestic violence) and poured on the long-term-couple-nostalgia, complete with French love songs on accordions and sugary old stars glittering in the twilit sky. The cynic in me has to mention, of course, that even though Georges and Albin are both male, the gender roles in their relationship are completely "traditional"; thus if one of them is a drag queen, why should a good Republican mind? After all, don't a lot of Republican wives begin to look like drag queens anyway? (Oh stop it, you know I'm right.) Two gay tops thrashing out a relationship would be quite a different musical, I'm afraid, but in the meantime you could almost hear all the straight couples in the crowd singing along with "Song on the Sand." No wonder this show was a hit.

Of course that hit status was also largely due to the "Cagelles," the famous high-kicking chorus in which the girls might be girls, or might not! In the original Broadway production, the gender line was, indeed, tantalizingly indeterminate. This was perhaps less true at Reagle, but again, it hardly mattered - those boys (and girls) could kick and do splits better than the best Rockette (and here they re-appeared at the curtain call in their gender-specific street clothes, which was a nice, we're-all-just-folks touch). Indeed, the first act's long show-within-a-show was probably the highlight of the Reagle production; the costumes were smashing, the glittering backdrop just right, the Cagelles tossed off back-flips, and Engel held court in high, campy style - the whole thing made me nostalgic for the lost world of classy after-midnight entertainment that existed before drag began to go the way of pro wrestling. Sigh. Forget about romance - even being gay isn't what it used to be!

But back to La Cage. Director David Scala did a solid job with the show, and was credited with "recreating" the "entire original production" in the program - but I began to wonder at the wisdom of this idea. Reagle simply doesn't have the resources, in the Waltham High auditorium, to "recreate" the sets of a Broadway house (the costumes are a different story), and the resulting realizations, though they went through some miraculous transformations given their confines, looked a little threadbare; the show was most dazzling when it relied on simple, but effectively glamorous, backdrops and drapes. Perhaps a general trend toward simple-but-elegant could benefit Reagle in the set department. With so much being done well in these shows, it would be nice to see their physical settings truly sparkle as well.

Reagle Players step onto a larger stage

I'm sure you've heard the news by now: Lee Meriwether can't really coax the blues right out of the horn as Mame, at the Reagle Players through July 25. I'm not here to argue differently, although I still found Ms. Meriwether appealing (but not compelling) in the role. The old gal still has plenty of stage presence, looks smashing in gold lamé and fake fur (at left), and all but beams with a bemused warmth that elegantly solves what's usually thought of as the complicating aspect of the part: how to make this boozing glamour hound's attachment to her nephew believable. It's the other half of the role that gives Meriwether trouble - the brassy, grab-life-by-the-bugle dame that everybody is shocked, but then charmed, by. Plus, it's true, the top end of her singing voice has gone wobbly, and an understandable lack of stamina (she's seventy-something) led to her coasting through a few dance routines (she even admitted in a recent interview that "it’s the singing and dancing where I’m in trouble," which makes you wonder why she took the role).

So if you were expecting Angela Lansbury on the stage of the Waltham High School (or even Rachel York, who seems to have lit up Reagle's recent Hello, Dolly!), then you're going to be disappointed. But I have to confess that I wasn't really all that disappointed; the show sort of bobs along at an amusing level, and it never got stoopid or irritating the way the Huntington's high-powered Pirates! often did. And the packed house - most of whom were in Meriwether's age range - seemed to feel they'd gotten their money's worth, and even gave the star an affectionate standing "o."

And the whole Reagle phenomenon struck me as intriguing. I'd never made it out to the wilds of Waltham to catch them before, but felt I had to begin to now that the North Shore has gone under, and there's no fully professional local outfit dedicated to the tradition of the American musical. Reagle is, instead, a unique amalgam of community and professional forces - and with the sudden disappearance of the NSMT, they clearly sense an opportunity for themselves in the local theatre scene. The company operates out of Waltham High (where they run education programs during the school year), and generally hire in faded stars of stage and screen to topline, along with a core of other professionals (some with Broadway experience) for the supporting leads. Smaller roles go to community types (some of whom, as is often the case with community theatre, definitely have some chops), who I imagine work for little, or for free.

This means that the chorus and singing ensemble can be enormous - indeed, often in Mame there were close to fifty people singing and dancing on stage. But they're all impeccably turned out, in costumes and sets that are billed as a "recreation" of the original staging - a claim that I find roughly credible. Indeed, part of the interest of Mame was how it felt like a kind of time capsule (with even its original audience watching from the gallery!). It's obvious that this is a theatre company in the nostalgia business, openly disinterested in "new forms," that would never in a million years proclaim there should be "no more masterpieces." The masterpieces are just fine by Reagle - and by me, too.

Not that Mame is a masterpiece - but like many Jerry Herman shows, it's schmaltzily entertaining, and can claim its own place in Broadway, and even American, history. It's no secret, of course, that Herman is gay; he's been battling AIDS for years (kind of like Angel in Rent, dontchaknow), and his longtime lover died of the disease. Add to that the fact that he's a self-taught Jewish kid from Jersey City (rather than from Columbia by way of MOMA), and you can sense immediately how he all but personifies that naïve, lower-bourgeois faith in the "classy," "glamorous" "magic of theatre" that I personally hope never deserts the stage, but that causes the lips of lefty intellectuals to reflexively curl in contempt.

Now it's true I'd never have invited Antonin Artaud to a revival of Mame (although it might have done him good; he was, after all, a kind of drag queen). But I can't ignore its touchingly serious content. All of "Jerry's girls" were, essentially, middle-aged gay men in drag, and you can sense an arc from Hello, Dolly! to La Cage aux Folles that ends with the leading lady finally revealed as, yes, literally a middle-aged gay man in drag, preening in a happy paradise of bourgeois adorability: she/he is both a wild bohemian and a loving mother and wife who just wants to live a little, dammit!

That Mame fits in almost the exact center of this arc makes it fascinating; with it, Herman seems to take his first half-step out of the closet. By turns he hints that his title character is a lesbian (although her sexual allegiances shift at will), a some-time nudist, and maybe a Communist, as well as an obvious alcoholic, and the script flirts with such then-edgy material as unwed mothers and the occasional bit of "blue" language. We slowly realize that Mame is meant as a free-living fantasy figure - a bohemian kaleidoscope of such charisma that even the bigoted crackers of the deep South and the country-club Republicans of Connecticut (Herman sets her up against both) cannot withstand her fabulousness. Needless to say, Herman never actually brings any African-Americans (or any other minorities) onstage during these bizarre red state/blue state love-ins, so they can hardly be taken as genuinely progressive statements. But they still exude a strange wistfulness; they're like a dream of Caucasian co-existence without all the attendant political baggage.

And much of that dream does, in fact, come true over at Reagle, due to the skill of the supporting cast, and the generally sensitive, if not quite crisp, direction of Frank Roberts. There's a broad but crack comic turn from Maureen Brennan, who has played on Broadway (and currently teaches at Boston Conservatory), as well as an archly acid one from Maryann Zschau as Mame's "bosom buddy," Vera Charles (Zschau even gamely leads Meriwether through a softshoe). As Patrick Dennis, the innocent nephew who falls into Mame's distracted care, young Troy Costa is absolutely adorable (and poised as an old pro), while Curly Glynn brings a beautifully expressively singing voice to the all-grown-up Patrick (Mr. Glynn hasn't quite found the key to the acting side of the role, however - as an adult, Patrick should seem more internally torn about his snobby Connecticut bride). There's more impressive singing from R. Glen Michell as Mame's Southern beau, and in general the chorus came off well (particularly in their rich, resonant version of the title tune), as did the "core" corps of trained dancers. (Sometimes the promenades and kicks of everybody else got a little tiresome, though.)

So there you have it - Reagle could be on the verge of a new phase of importance locally, but this particular production stumbles, largely due to its star. The real news, however, may be the curious community/professional balance that Reagle seems to have perfected. Right now, I'd argue that the company may, indeed, be too committed to a nostalgic, "time capsule" aesthetic. But at the same time, the group clearly has a deep bond of trust with its community - in part because members of that community are also right up there on its stage. So can Reagle grow aesthetically without betraying that trust, or that commitment? Could its unique business model even become a template for preserving the tradition of the American musical? Perhaps - but it will require brighter star turns than the one shining in Mame.