Flagging Spirit

Kathy St. George reaches out to the unknown in Blithe Spirit. Photos by Mark S. Howard.

The spirit is willing in the Lyric Stage's new production of Blithe Spirit (which plays through June 5); and you can't say the flesh is weak - indeed, everyone is obviously putting their shoulder to the wheel in this earthbound version of Noel Coward's famous 40's farce.

But maybe that's the problem - here, the flesh is too strong; everyone's so strenuously trying to put the show over that it never achieves the sense of sophisticated ease that was Coward's ideal. In a word, you can't be "blithe" when you're breaking a sweat. And everyone's trying so hard because, I think, deep down they're all aware (old pros that they are) that nobody's quite right for what they're doing.

Now when it comes to small theatre, we're all used to the approximate - and no doubt Rex Harrison wasn't available for this production. And can you really complain when a local cast includes Paula Plum, Anne Gottlieb, Richard Snee, Kathy St. George and Sarah deLima, all of them dragging a veritable litany of awards or nominations behind them? No, I suppose you can't.

Still, Coward only thrives when it's precise. And precise in an amusingly off-hand manner - a manner that's not director Spiro Veloudos's strong suit, to be honest. Veloudos is a clever comic director, but you'd never accuse him of too light a touch; he likes to nail things down, whereas Coward affected such indifference that he actually advised actors to keep delivering their lines straight through their laughs. Something tells me that didn't actually happen often in Coward's productions, of course, but it gives you an idea of the atmosphere he was trying to conjure: since he dashed the play off in just half an hour, darling, he couldn't possibly wait for you to finish laughing as there was a yacht waiting for him bound for the Riviera!

To be fair, the Lyric cast does win those laughs; Kathy St. George in particular practically wrestles them out of the audience. But there's little sense of elegant sheen to the evening, and the pace is often stumbling, and to be honest, even the theme of the play feels obscure. Just about all of Coward's best scripts depend on the same plot: the duel between old sex and new sex. Usually old sex wins out (Private Lives, Present Laughter); sometimes no sex wins out (Blithe Spirit); and sometimes there's a hard-won tie (Design for Living). (New sex almost always loses, which may be why conservatives always adored Coward, even as he toyed with bisexuality and various forms of ménage right before their eyes.)


Paula Plum and Richard Snee ponder some astral bigamy.

But director Veloudos - and alas, star Richard Snee - seem never to have awoken to the importance of the emotional backbone of the play. As Coward factotum "Charles Condomine" (a reference to "condominium" or "condiment"? You decide!) Snee does a heterosexual version of debonair pretty well - probably better than Coward did - but he seems to have confused "debonair" with "disinterested," and thus appears bored with both new and old sex. That is, in either controlling second wife Ruth (Anne Gottlieb), or impetuous late wife Elvira (Paula Plum), whose blithe spirit has been accidentally summoned from the beyond by the eccentric Madame Arcati (St. George). To be blunt, the arc for this "astral bigamist" should be the typical Coward one of delight in the return of romantic excitement, followed by frustration as that excitement devolves into petty egotism. But here that arc never happens.

Even though, as Elvira, Paula Plum does her best to strike a romantic spark. The smart, sensible Plum doesn't naturally have the touch of exoticism we expect from Elvira, but she compensates with a really wonderful sense of romantic swoon (plus she looks great in costumer Charles Schoonmaker's Lily-Munster get-up). Likewise St. George, who usually plays sprites, is simply miscast as Madame Arcati - the joke here is that the medium is more a British bloodhound (albeit with an unexpected mystical talent) than a flibbertigibbet. But St. George doesn't take no for an answer, and slowly she wins the audience over through sheer enthusiasm. Alas, as the slightly-brittle Ruth, Anne Gottlieb doesn't really get the same chance; Veloudos has directed her too obviously (her control issues should creep up on us, not be declared in the first scene), and for once Schoonmaker has gone wrong by costuming her in the same vampy style he has given Elvira.

All this isn't enough to actually sink the show - it just keeps it from soaring. There are nice touches here and there, and Brynna Bloomfield's set gets the job done (although it doesn't blow apart with nearly the poltergeistic brio of the wittier Trinity Rep version last spring). And after the cast settles in (there were a few dropped lines on opening), a smoother rhythm may develop for Coward's banter. In short, it may simply take some time for this soufflé to rise; for certainly these talented folks have the spirit in them to be blithe.

Too much Schütz?

David Hoose conducts. Photo by Michael J. Lutch.

The German composer Heinrich Schütz (1585-1672) may be an acquired taste. Or at least that's my conclusion after sitting through “Schwanengesang’’ ("Swan Song") his acknowledged masterpiece, and the last thing he ever wrote. Also, I think, the longest thing he ever wrote. Actually, at times it seems like the longest thing anyone ever wrote. This dying swan takes almost two hours, in fact, to finally give up the ghost.

Oops - did I say that out loud? I didn't mean to. I'm all about re-discovering the neglected works of the past, you know, but sometimes - well, some works have been neglected for good reason. And alas, “Schwanengesang’’ may be one of them.

It is of historical interest, of course; Schütz is considered the greatest German composer prior to Bach, and the thirteen motets of “Schwanengesang’’ give one a sense of why: their style is limpid yet austere, subtle yet humbly expressive. And as with the work of the great Johann Sebastian (and Schütz's contemporary, Monteverdi), the piece resounds with an undeniable piety and faith - qualities which are rarely heard in serious music today, more's the pity.

Perhaps, then, the two hours of “Schwanengesang’’ count as simply too much of a good thing. Or perhaps the trouble with the work lies in its central text - the enormous Psalm 119, both the longest psalm and the longest chapter in the Bible. It's essentially an ecstatic hymn to following the prescripts of the Torah, and thus is embedded in Jewish observances (several verses are read prior to the blowing of the Shofar on Rosh Hashanah) as well as, interestingly enough, Eastern Orthodox ritual. The psalm is of further intrigue in that it's an acrostic - each of its stanzas begins with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet; indeed, legend has it that King David taught Solomon to read via Psalm 119.

But ripped from a liturgical context, its limits as musical text become clear fairly quickly. Here's a chunk of an early stanza:

I rejoice in following your statutes
as one rejoices in great riches.

I meditate on your precepts
and consider your ways.

I delight in your decrees;
I will not neglect your word.

Now a later stanza:

Teach me, O Lord, to follow your decrees;
then I will keep them to the end.

Give me understanding, and I will keep your law
and obey it with all my heart.

Direct me in the path of your commands,
for there I find delight.

And even later:

Your decrees are the theme of my song
wherever I lodge.

In the night I remember your name, O Lord,
and I will keep your law.

This has been my practice:
I obey your precepts.

Got the idea yet? Well, it goes on like this for (count 'em) 176 verses.

When you combine this rhetorical repetition (through so many very similar stanzas) with an austere, subtle style, you get . . . well, I think most non-believers like me will agree on what you get. Nevertheless, David Hoose, music director of the Cantata Singers, has fallen in love with the stuff, and so last Friday night we got the whole thing. And I mean the whooole thing. Which, since Hoose didn't exactly keep his foot on the gas pedal, clocked in not at the promised 80 minutes but at 110 - not including the closing Psalm 100 and Magnificat (which suddenly perked things up considerably and were lovely). Clearly Schütz in shorter doses - or perhaps merely with more emotionally compelling texts - can be wonderful. And I suppose "Schwanenesang" does logically cap a season which has been dedicated to this composer. But if Hoose thought he was demonstrating in this concert that the work deserves a place in the modern repertory, I'm afraid he instead proved just the opposite.

Hoose did capture, I think, the appropriate tone of gentle humility. And the concert never grew maddening - just mildly, sweetly numbing. The Cantata Singers, for their part, soldiered on with admirable commitment. Still, the group was hardly focused enough to deliver the kind of pin-point singing required to convey the subtle musical differences Hoose insists are latent in these verses. Then again, “Schwanengesang’’ would challenge the resources of Boston's best professional choruses. The Cantata Singers have announced that Ralph Vaughan Williams will be the focus of their programming next year; one hopes there's not a "swan song" lurking in his back catalogue, too.

Please don't

Amanda Peet shops around for bourgeois morality in Please Give.

Please Give, the new film by Nicole Holofcener, has been met with almost universal praise, but it's hard to see why. I don't mean that it's a disaster on the scale of Greenberg or Shutter Island (both of which were greeted with plenty of bizarre hosannas). To be honest, I don't even mean that it's bad. It's mildly entertaining, actually. But only mildly. What's most memorable about Please Give, in fact, is the sense we get of how far it stubbornly remains from achieving its true potential; Holofcener's writing (she scripted the movie) is wickedly acute, but her direction is always gently, delicately deflating; she somehow manages to constantly undermine her own best material.

Of course encountering even a mature premise makes many film critics do back-flips, and understandably enough. If I spent the year sitting through Iron Man 2 and Kick-Ass, I'm sure Please Give would look like King Lear to me, too. Instead, of course, I spend the season in live performance, so when that winds down, and I'm forced back into pop culture for a spell, it takes me awhile to adjust to the sandbox, or to the critical voices chattering therein. To be honest, reading, say, A.O. Scott after watching a mainstream (or even an arthouse) film is rather like watching one of those Look Who's Talking movies; the words seem to be being uttered by an adult, but the sensibility we perceive behind them has long since gone infantile.

But back to Please Give, which follows the parallel paths - and somewhat-parallel moral choices - of several upscale New Yorkers. Heavy lie the comfortable heads of these Manhattanites, Holofcener wants us to know - or at least some of their heads lie heavy. Perhaps the heaviest-headed is Catherine Keener's Kate, a successful vintage furniture dealer who, we are expected to believe, feels there's something wrong about marking up her goods. Yes, you read that right. She's guilty about covering her costs, and even profiting from glibly trendy New Yorkers.

Right. Now to me, this itself was a hard sell, especially in a successful career woman who's clearly pushing fifty. Beyond that, even the idea that what Kate does is rapacious or something is a little hard to figure; how, exactly, is margin supposed to be a bad thing? You don't have to be a Republican - or even a libertarian - to appreciate that retail works a certain way, or to find Keener's constant sighs and furrowed brow as she goes about her lucrative business more than a little ridiculous.

To be fair, even Holofcener begins to realize this, and starts making little jokes at Keener's expense (when she returns an expensive vase to its owner, for instance, he promptly breaks it). But when it comes to the really black comedy she has conjured at the center of her movie, the director seems unable to land her own punches. What could be bugging Keener's Kate, for instance, is how precisely she gets her stock - she basically raids estate sales, picking up 50's classics from families trying to offload mom's tacky coffee table or couch, and then turns right around and resells it (at that mark-up) as Upper-West-Side "irony." Ok, so far, so amusingly vulture-like. But Kate and hubby Alex (Oliver Platt) have also bought at a discount the apartment next to theirs, in the hopes that its elderly occupant, Andra (a refreshingly bitter Ann Guilbert) will soon drop dead (so they can remodel).

Thus Kate is preying on not just the dead but the nearly-dead - yet Holofcener can't seem to bear to direct this situation as sharply as she has written it. When Kate guiltily throws Andra a birthday party, for instance - with its subtext of "Damn, too bad you're still alive!" - we sense an opportunity for some serious satire of bourgeois hypocrisy, but Holofcener has such an earnest, gentle touch that the scene goes limp, even as its lines draw blood (the joke within the joke is that Andra is a hard-boiled, loveless old bag whom everyone would like to see buy the farm). In short, Holofcener has written an Ealing Studio comedy, but she thinks she's directing a millennial women's picture - and the results are relentlessly half-baked; we almost get the feeling that Holofcener, like her main character, feels guilty about what she's doing.

Not that nothing in the picture works - it just never works as well as it should. Actually, scratch that - some things in the picture just don't work. An affair between the gorgeous Amanda Peet and the so-not-gorgeous Oliver Platt, for instance, was even harder for me to believe in than Catherine Keener's stricken conscience. And the subplots involving Andra's granddaughters (Peet and Rebecca Hall, who's better here than she was in Vicky Cristina Barcelona) were diverting, but didn't seem to really go anywhere. Some aspiration toward generational (and even spiritual) scope seemed evident in Holofcener's writing - but aspiration toward what, specifically? I really had no idea.

Still, the scenes between Kate and her spoiled (but at least self-aware) daughter packed some ironic punch; I particularly liked the stand-off in which the brat snatches away (for herself) the twenty bucks Kate is trying to give the homeless. If only Holofcernes had been able to follow through consistently on the clear-eyed POV she shows here and there, she might have made quite a movie. As it is, Please Give devolves into a weird sermon - involving a pair of $200 jeans! - on the idea that "charity begins at home," or something like that. Which only made the movie itself feel like a charity case.

Who's next at Boston Ballet

Yurika Kitano and company member Isaac Akiba in "Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux." Photo by Liza Voll.

I spent last Wednesday night at Boston Ballet's "Next Generation" program, which is a chance for students from the Ballet's many schools, north and south, to strut their stuff before an audience of relatives and friends. The "spring showcase," of course, is an annual rite of passage, but this year the kids got to perform on the stage of the Opera House itself, during the company's run of "Ultimate Balanchine," so the concert was just that much more exciting for everyone involved. There was also live music this time around, provided by the capable New England Conservatory Youth Symphony, under the direction of Steven Karidoyanes, which sounded its spirited best in the opening "Thunder and Lightning Polka," which one guessed from its polish was one of the group's showpieces.

The Opera House program was limited to the Ballet's pre-professional and trainee students, so we didn't get to see the littlest ones in the Ballet's programs. The cuteness factor was therefore kept to a manageable level (more's the pity), although the youngest girls in their toe shoes were still plenty adorable, despite their obvious aplomb (when one sweetheart took a spill, she simply carried on with remarkable self-possession - she was no baby!). I'm not sure why it's so delightful to see lines of determined young people carry off graceful moves in sequence, as was the case in the "passagework" section; it just is.

But it's worth pointing out that, perhaps because of the Opera House setting, the Ballet had clearly raised the artistic bar for the rest of the program; in fact, some of the performances of the evening would not have been out of place in its own season. Jorma Elo, the Ballet's resident choreographer, had contributed a short new work, "One Concerto," set to a chunk of Philip Glass, which the trainee students (particularly the women, Danyla Bezerra, Julia Mitchell, Amber Neff and Melanie Riffee) carried off with swiveling élan; the surprise, however, was that this punchy little number turned out to be one of Elo's better ballets. I'd like to see the professionals of the company itself do it, and I certainly hope the Ballet doesn't forget about it.

Other highlights included appearances by the members of Boston Ballet II and the company's corps, with whom the trainee students often blended seamlessly in a lovely, if somewhat long, excerpt from Bournonville's Napoli. Showing everyone how the thing is done, however, were Yurika Kitano and Isaac Akiba (both of whom rose through the Ballet's training programs) who sparkled in Balanchine's "Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux." Mr. Akiba in particular did the best dancing I've ever seen him do, with clean jumps of startling grace and power. I even thought I caught a glimpse of the trainees taking notes.

Soprano on the cutting edge

Michael Maniaci in action.

There's a spectre haunting the early music movement.

The spectre of the castrato.

Don't laugh; to some period music professionals, somehow approximating the combination of female range and male lung power typical of the notorious castrati has become a kind of musical holy grail. In a way, it's understandable; period musicians are constantly striving to replicate lost practices and instruments, the better to perform music written prior to the instrumental revolutions of the nineteenth century in the manner in which it was originally played. Their pursuit of this ideal has led to a revolution in our approach to Handel and Bach, and even Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. But the one period instrument that seems to lie permanently beyond our postmodern grasp is the voice of the castrato.

No one (so far) has actually suggested we bring back the castrati, of course, for obvious reasons. But the yearning to experience what Mozart and Handel once heard - and wrote music for - is often palpable in the early music world; indeed, it's not too much to say that a small cult of the castrato has sprung up there. The countertenor, of course, has meanwhile become ubiquitous - but even the greatest of these falsetto magicians, it must be admitted, often lack the agility, range, and power of a great soprano. The involution of their technique often mutes, or even blurs, their diction, and as they inch up toward (but usually never quite reach) coloratura territory, they tend to grow more studied and careful.

Thus, I suppose the appearance of the "male soprano" was inevitable - singers who claim that through anatomical or hormonal anomaly, they've retained their pre-pubescent voiceboxes into adulthood. Michael Maniaci (at top), who sang a program of Mozart with Boston Baroque last weekend, is one of the most successful of this rare new breed. Before you ask, the singer claims that during puberty, his vocal chords never lengthened and coarsened as is typical of the average male; aside from that, Maniaci explains, he's just like any other grown man.

How, exactly, his hormones "missed" his larynx, the singer doesn't really explain - but the proof of this kind of thing, as they say, is in the pudding, and I have to admit that at first blush, Maniaci sounds strikingly different from a countertenor. His voice blooms at the top of his range, which is, indeed, up around a coloratura high C, where he's utterly agile and free, throwing off gorgeous top notes seemingly at will. What's curious about Maniaci, however, is that his vocal production is quite uneven. The castrati had voices that smoothly slid down into a high tenor (and there is one extant recording - the last castrato died in 1922! - that hardly dazzles, but does support this claim). But Maniaci's voice weakens as it drops, and then slips off a cliff at its low end (much, to be honest, as a countertenor's does). And to be honest, his diction and phrasing sparkle on his high notes, but blur as he goes further down.

There is, however, that gorgeous top to his voice, which shone brightest in "Ah se a morir mi chiama" from Mozart's Lucio Silla (Maniaci's program was drawn from early works for castrati by the young genius), and especially the joyous "Exsultate, jubilate" (K. 165), which Maniaci sang brilliantly, and which is becoming one of his signature pieces.

Yet one wondered - was Mr. Maniaci that much stronger than a radiant soprano would be in the same parts? It was hard to argue that the timbre of his top notes was so different from those produced by a woman; and while he had power, it wasn't overwhelming power (indeed, plenty of sopranos could have flattened him). What's most striking about him, in fact, is simply that these high C's are coming out of a male body - but this effect in many ways feels cultural, or even political, in its ramifications rather than purely musical. And to me, the image of a woman in male dress, singing, say, the trousers role from Idomeneo (which was originally taken by a castrato) has much the same cultural and political edge. The only difference is that the soprano has the range for the whole role. (Indeed, Mozart wasn't happy with the castrato who first sang in Idomeneo, and rewrote the part for a tenor.)

Such questions of cultural interest vs. musical quality perhaps were top-of-mind for me because in the rest of the concert, which was given over to instrumental Mozart, Boston Baroque often acquitted itself brilliantly. The opening overture from The Impresario, another very early work, was exuberant and charming. The ensemble was less spirited in the following overture to La clemenza di Tito, but still played with warmth and feeling. The "Haffner" symphony, which closed the concert, brought back the high spirits, and seemed to surge along with an energy that was practically rollicking, with light, pointed playing from the winds. Alas, there were some wrong notes squawked by the natural horns right at the end, but somehow this seemed easy to forgive in a performance so splendid in every other respect.

Lia Cirio and Pavel Gurevich in Ultimate Balanchine. Photos by Gene Schiavone.

You still have time to catch Ultimate Balanchine, an evening which demonstrates what even the New York Times has grudgingly had to admit: Boston Ballet now has the chops to float freely between the romantic, modern and post-modern repertory. Yes, Bostonians - New York says it's ok to go the Ballet! So what are you waiting for?

Well, if what you've been waiting for is artistic challenge, you'd better hustle: Ultimate takes its last bow this weekend, and its opening pieces, "The Four Temperaments" and "Apollo," are as astringent and stripped-down as any modern classicist could want. But hang on till the end, you traditionalists - the concert wraps with "Theme and Variations," one of those jewels in which Mr. B. lovingly cut the romantic tradition to a dazzling new precision, and you can feast your eyes on all the tutus and tiaras you could possibly want.

To be honest, I did have one caveat about the program: in the first moments of "Four Temperaments," the Ballet didn't seem to be putting its best foot forward. The work represents Balanchine at his coldest - and its structure may be his most rigorous, and that's saying something; plus its movement (set to Paul Hindemith's commissioned score, which is a small classic in its own right) is unusually aggressive. With its lunges and splayed legs and thrusting pelvises, you feel as if Mr. B. is turning angrily on the vocabulary of ballet itself. Which isn't to say the piece doesn't coalesce, like all his great works, from choreographic fragments into concluding grand themes; it does. But some of the younger members of the company - who took the opening duets - didn't seem to know how to express the work's atmosphere of alienation; they weren't able to express intent without emotion, so they seemed a bit blank.

Still, Megan Gray and Paul Craig threw off some sparks, and once the principals moved in for the major variations (named for the medieval "Four Temperaments": Melancholic, Sanguinic, Phlegmatic and Choleric), the piece righted itself. It was great to see dancer John Lam back, and back in his usual sinuous form, as "Melancholic," but the surprise was how well everyone danced - Eric Cornejo and Nelson Madrigal, not dancers one associates with cool modernism, cleanly essayed "Sanguinic," Kathleen Breen Combes (returning to the stage after a recent injury) tore through "Choleric," and even the somewhat erratic Carlos Molina impressed with a loose, gangly grace in "Phlegmatic."


The opening frieze of "Apollo."

The second work on the program (although in terms of Mr. B.'s development, its earliest) was the rarely-seen "Apollo" (above) of 1928, although here presented in the reduced version Balanchine completed in 1979. Set to a score by Stravinsky, it represents the choreographer at his least layered and most narrational: the sun god summons three muses (Polyhymnia, Terpsichore, and Calliope) with whom he, well, muses, before selecting one as his consort (Terpsichore, the dancer, in case you hadn't picked up that Apollo=Mr. B.). Here the dance came off beautifully, even if its ensemble seemed slightly mismatched. Gurevich is a god, yes, but not a sunny one, and he and the bodaciously grounded Cirio didn't seem to quite connect as a couple; yet their dancing, both individually and together, was superb. As Calliope (the muse of poetry) Rie Ichikawa seemed a bit frail, but rising star Whitney Jensen made a gleamingly poised Polyhymnia (the muse of mime). Watching Jensen - who I think is only 18 or 19 - I myself mused at how unfair the gods can be. All the young women of the Ballet (including Jensen) work themselves day and night to achieve technical perfection - but Jensen simply has that little something extra that you notice (and she seems to have had it since the first time I saw her on the Ballet stage); there's a sheen of serene poise to her work that simply seems to have been bestowed by, well, maybe Apollo.


James Whiteside and Jaime Diaz soar in "Theme and Variations."

The finale, "Theme and Variations," seemed a world away from the heightened clarity of "Apollo" and "Four Temperaments," but it shared with them an underlying sense of structure and attack. The audience gasped audibly ("At last!") when the curtain parted to reveal a dazzling chandelier, swaths of gauze, and a veritable army of dancers glitteringly dressed for Tchaikovsky (whose gorgeous Suite No. 3 provided the score). But needless to say, beneath the piece's plush surface, Balanchine's talent for thematic development was just as exposed as it was in "Four Temperaments:" "Theme and Variations" builds into a kaleidoscopic formal statement by its curtain. On opening night, this development was anchored beautifully by leads Misa Kuranaga and James Whiteside, who danced together with poised sympathy, and separately with something close to perfection. The gigantic corps likewise danced with truly stunning synchronicity, the clarity of its line never admitting variation. I know many look down on ballet for its relentless pursuit of what is essentially superficial physical perfection; but when confronted by that perfection in the flesh, it's hard to deny its power - or, ironically enough, its surprising sense of depth.

Talkin' trash

Mary Callanan, Kerry A. Dowling, and Santina Umbach, the ladies of the Great American Trailer Park. Photo by Mark L. Saperstein.

I don't have too much new to say about SpeakEasy Stage's shiny production of The Great American Trailer Park Musical. But then neither does it, so we're even. After the challenges of Adding Machine, you can't really blame SpeakEasy for just kicking back with this amusing little show, which is just as much a prefab vehicle as the "manufactured homes" parked around Jenna McFarland Lord's day-glo set (yes, there are plastic palm trees and pink flamingos, too). There is, I think, a kind of dark underside to the fact that director Paul Daigneault has assembled a top-notch cast to put this piffle over; I really wish all these people were out doing better things. But hey, you know? Whatever.

And I can't deny that the crowd I saw it with last weekend loved it, in the same way that rock nerds love Amanda Palmer and Catholics love Nunsense: the product has been designed to match their needs exactly, and so they clutch it to their chests. Many in the press saw beneath the plastic surface of Trailer nuggets of character and "real warmth," as well as genuine insights. Yeah, right. To me, this valentine to white trash rings a little false in its patronizing affection; its trailer park denizens aren't organizing tea parties or packing heat in public - instead they seem harmlessly marooned in the Clinton era, with their Budweisers and black babies and strippers-with-hearts-of-gold (tellingly, when they turn on the tube, Sally Jessy Raphael's still on it). These folks are, in short, the antithesis of the gay, urban, Obama-supportin' SpeakEasy crowd, and you could see the whole production as a kind of whiteface minstrel show designed to compliment its audience and dissolve their anxieties about, you know, "The Other."

That is, if you were feeling critical, you might feel that way.

But I'm not, so I'll only note that there should be at least a few new twists or cutting-edge jokes in this Soho-by-way-of-Park-Slope pastiche, and there really aren't. Maybe the software program that wrote it didn't have that capability. Nor are the songs exactly fresh (a clone of "It's Raining Men" actually makes an appearance). But you don't really mind, because the cast is so winning. Director Daigneault has hitched the great Leigh Barrett, Mary Callanan, and Kerry A. Dowling (who's in particularly fine form) to the show, and has also discovered delightfully ditzy newcomer Santina Umbach (above, with Callanan and Dowling) who just about steals every scene out from under her high-powered co-stars. There are equally strong turns from David Benoit, Caitlin Crosbie Doonan and Grant MacDermott - in fact, the whole cast. Everyone knows exactly what they're doing, and they do it very well. That I happen to think it wasn't worth doing, at least not by Boston's premier mid-size theatre, I'm sure many will feel is beside the point. Then again, in cases like this one, criticism itself is beside the point.