More evidence that Gaga may go the distance

Yes, I admit to having been a Lady Gaga fan since that video in which she came out of the pool between the Great Danes with a chunk of stucco on her head. So I've been glad as the evidence accumulated that yes, she really wrote her songs, and yes, she could really sing and play piano. This latest video - bootlegged from a cell, I think, hence the lousy audio, during a recent benefit hosted by Elton John - may actually showcase one of her best songs yet (at least to my mind). No, it's not an original chord progression, but somehow it just kicks ass. Let's hope it finds a way onto an album or a single.

[Sorry - the record company suits have pulled the video! I guess even they could tell it was a great song.]

I'm late with my opinion on the new Shalin Liu Performance Center in Rockport (above). But that's because, I admit, I've been thinking about it quite seriously, and for some time.

Which is what it deserves. The new hall is an obvious game-changer for the Rockport Music Festival, although that's not really one of my famous "predictions;" the game has, in fact, already changed - the Festival seems to have vaulted from the regional to the national stage, attracting performers like Garrick Ohlsson and Midori. Moreover, every single performance in the new hall this summer has already sold out.

Which makes criticism a bit superfluous doesn't it. Still, it's easy to see why the hall has been such a smashing success: its interior is both subtle and stunning, with a stage "wall" that's actually a huge window onto the open harbor - a masterstroke in and of itself - that's only the centerpiece of a lovely interior beautifully appointed in walnut and Douglas fir.

And it's easy to hear why, too: the hall has a transparently clean acoustic unlike anything else in Boston. I'm not sure I've ever heard, in fact, a hall with as sparkling a top and as rumbling a bottom - this building gives great bass, guys.

What's also remarkable is the connection the Shalin Liu somehow makes across the "footlights;" something about the rake of the seating and the carefully calibrated height of the stage seems to dissolve the distance between performer and listener. There's no "proscenium" in the Shalin Liu; perhaps not even a "stage." The hall is intimate in the most literal sense: you feel as if you were rubbing elbows with the musicians.

This, however, leads to the one catch in acoustician R. Lawrence Kirkegaard's design; the space doesn't blend or cast a warm "halo" over the sound; at least on the floor, the hall seems to be simply transmitting the sonic data with unparalleled accuracy to the listener. But what that means is that when a large ensemble is playing (I heard Boston Musica Viva), you hear the music with something like the same balance issues that the actual performers experience onstage.

I'm sure that with soloists and quartets there'd be no problem - and alas, I'm not sure how, precisely, larger groups could address the issue. And to be honest, in any hall, when you sit in the first few rows, you're in a similar situation; Symphony Hall doesn't really sound like Symphony Hall until you're almost halfway back in the first section of the orchestra. So my advice is: if you're hearing a large ensemble at the Shalin Liu, think about the balcony.

Trust me, you won't mind sitting there - the view from above may be even more gorgeous than it is on the floor. Who thought of that giant glass aperture onto Rockport Harbor? Whoever did deserves a Pritzker. (I assume it was architect Alan Joslin, who worked on Seiji Ozawa Hall, but actually surpasses it here.)

Just don't let the Pritzker committee see the hall's exterior. Here a raft of good intentions have pretty much paved a road to you-know-where. The town of Rockport didn't want some chilly chunk of modernism louring over its lovely village square, so it insisted on a neo-nineteenth-century façade - much like what stood on the site before. But the results look a little Disneyfied, à la "Main Street U.S.A.," as this kind of thing often does. My only thought is that the maroon accents of the paint job don't help matters - while a subtler palette could.

Inside, however, things almost couldn't be more subtle. Indeed, the whole thing is to die for, my friends, from the chipped-granite sea-cliffs making up the opposing walls to the lovely, rippling panels that roll into place before the back window. (Don't do that, though (please), unless the glare from the sunset is really too intense!) The circulation is squeezed a bit here and there, I suppose, but at least it always makes sense (and if you're used to Jordan Hall, you'll think it's spacious!). Overall, the hall is a dazzling achievement - and not merely a new venue, but a new standard of what a local venue can be.

Oh, yeah - what about the concert? Well, I heard Boston Musica Viva do a set of early-modern to contemporary works - everything from Ives to Cage to Gunther Schuller, who was there to offer some opening remarks - but I'm afraid this venerable ensemble wasn't really ready for prime time with this particular program.

The concert opened smoothly enough, with Michael Gandolfi's Grooved Surfaces, a set of nearly-whimsical rhythmic aperitifs that the group brought off with panache. It may have been merely standard academic post-minimalism, but it was nice to listen to. Things began to slide a bit, however, with John Cage's Credo in US, a dance score for then-closeted boyfriend Merce Cunningham, which I'd never heard before, actually, but somehow sensed wasn't going too well even though much of it consisted of people literally banging on tin cans.

Composed in 1942, the piece includes not just that canny percussion but also a pre-recorded sound loop - here a scrap of Dvořák's From the New World that seemed to be being broadcast from the surface of Mars. Which was a pretty witty meta-comment on the piece, if you ask me, by Boston Musica Viva (Cage merely asked for "something like Beethoven or Shostakovich"). After all, the work's cheeky conceit is that as European high culture collapsed in World War II, anarchic American force would triumph - by literally banging on cans. Actually, this is a little dumb - a lot of Cage, beneath the music-of-chance smoke and mirrors, is a little dumb. And alas, sometimes conductor Pittman seemed to be cueing effects that just didn't happen - the "radio" operator often looked a bit lost, and the pianist, slightly panicked. Then again, if a Cage piece is played "incorrectly," does it really matter? At any rate, the percussionists generally seemed to know what they were doing, and stayed in synch, and said pianist, Geoffrey Burleson, soldiered on heroically, kind of like the Russians at Stalingrad.

But alas, if Charles Ives is played incorrectly, you can tell, and if anything, the Ives "Five Street Songs" that followed were more ragged than the Cage. I've been lucky enough to hear these performed by the likes of Dawn Upshaw, so maybe my expectations for the performance were a little unrealistic. But mezzo Pamela Dellal simply didn't have the power to cut through the ensemble, particularly when conductor Richard Pittman exacerbated the hall's balance issues by playing the opening number from the aisles. And at any rate, when you could hear her, she couldn't project Ives's distinctive blend of bitterness, rue, and longing. Nor could the rest of the group, actually. At their deepest level, these songs are about the facets of disillusion, but while Pittman had re-ordered them to possibly interesting dramatic effect, he seemed content to coast on their raucous surface. And his players were happy to ham everything up, too. Oh, well.

Next came the Schuller, "Four Vignettes," with titles like "Atmospherics" and "Found Objects," and the usual reliance on such formal devices as complicated rhythms and prettily alienated effects. At least it was short and sweet - although in his remarks, Schuller mentioned he had composed the piece with Liszt in mind. Which only made me wonder what he'd been smoking at the time (I'd like some of it). Fortunately the instrumentalists recovered their composure here, although there still seemed to be a missed cue here and there.

Finally came "Boston Fancies," from Steven Stucky (a favorite of BMV) who's even more of a formalist, and even more in love with "miniatures" - this time of two types, called "Ritornelli" and "Fancies," which were supposed to be strikingly different, but weren't really. Then again, this piece too was short and sweet - and you got the impression Stucky would be doing another one just like it in six months' time. The concert closed with a witty postscript from Bernard Hoffer’s Ma Goose (a work commissioned by BMV for its family programs) which conflated Old King Cole and Nat King Cole to amusing effect. It was probably the most ingratiating performance of the evening, and closed the concert on a high note. But to tell true, the audience left singing the praises of the hall, not the program.

Say it ain't so, Joe: Dan Shaughnessy and dramatic license

Now I'm no fan of Johnny Baseball, but I couldn't help but feel a little twinge of sympathy for it when I read the complaints from Dan Shaughnessy (at left) about it in the Boston Globe.

Shaughnessy is a long-time sportswriter at the daily, and thus a long-time observer of the Red Sox, and so I was interested in his perspective on the musical (which posits that racism, not Babe Ruth, was at the root of the team's long inability to win the World Series). For the record, Shaughnessy also has his own theory about the same period, and even his own book - The Curse of the Bambino, which some construe Johnny Baseball as debunking. Still, Shaughnessy's response to the show as entertainment was positive - although he also wrote:

". . . I walked out of the theater bothered by the unnecessary blending of fact and fiction. I fear that most of the ART patrons now believe that Mays tried out for the Red Sox at Fenway in 1948 and was sent packing by a racist general manager named Joe Cronin.

It never happened. Robinson and two other black players did try out at Fenway in 1945. It was a sham. That episode is mentioned in “Johnny Baseball,’’ but the scene we see has Mays at Fenway in 1948, and a posse of Yawkey’s drunken “baseball men’’ turning him away."

Shaughnessy seems to feel this is a smear on Cronin (who was a player for, and then a manager of, the Sox). He sighs that "Cronin passed away in 1984 and can’t defend himself, and family members who still live in New England are saddled with this unflattering portrait."

But does Shaughnessy have a valid point, or is he merely quibbling? It's true that Mays never tried out at Fenway - he was, instead, passed over by Red Sox scouts; but the A.R.T. says so in a program note, which reads: “Willie Mays did not try out at Fenway Park in 1948 or ever. . . . For dramatic purposes we have Willie Mays trying out at Fenway Park in 1948.’’ Shaughnessy cites book writer Richard Dresser as admitting: "“We knew it was one of the liberties one takes to make things clear in a dramatic story . . . We felt that the truth of the situation was that the Red Sox passed on Willie Mays. That was the larger point we wanted to make. We compressed those things in the service of telling the story.’’

Shaughnessy's response? "Sorry. That's not ok."

Dresser's excuse, I admit, is a little weaselly. On the other hand, Shaughnessy's point would be much stronger if he could say that if Cronin had indeed been at that fictional Mays tryout, he would have signed him - or at least fought Tom Yawkey's bigotry and tried to sign him.

But that also seems unlikely. In fact, in his article Shaughnessy plays a little narrative sleight-of-hand of his own. For Joe Cronin was manager of the Sox during that notorious "sham" tryout of Jackie Robinson in 1945 - a scene in which another Globe writer (Clif Keane) later claimed there were shouts of "Get those niggers off the field!" There's also the unflattering fact that as long as Cronin remained manager, the Sox remained white as the driven snow; in fact, it was just months after he retired that the Sox hired their first black player (they were the last major league team to do so). Coincidence?

I don't know. But why doesn't Shaughnessy make those points clear? I'm likewise not sure. He's on firmer ground, though, when he notes that the Sox were still only a few years behind the times - the first major league team integrated in 1947, the Sox, in 1959. That still leaves about 74 years of "the Curse" unaccounted for.

Which leads me to a longer, deeper critique of the silly Johnny Baseball than I really want to write - but it looks like I'm going to have to. Right now I'll simply say - since when was racism wrong because it prevented you from winning the World Series? Are those really the values of Red Sox Nation?

Actually, don't answer that. I don't want to know.

How good is Alan Ayckbourn, anyway?

The sardonically seductive author.

Gloucester Stage's new production of Alan Ayckbourn's Table Manners is remarkably strong; so strong, in fact, that it bumps up against the inevitable question about this prolific British playwright:

Just how good is Alan Ayckbourn, anyway?

But first, there's really no question that Table Manners, the "first" part of the stage triptych The Norman Conquests, is an effective entertainment. There's likewise no question it's a startling achievement in stagecraft: the sexual conquests of the eponymous Norman orbit each other across three separate scripts but a single time frame; in fact each comedy takes place in a separate room of the same country house over the same weekend. And the scenes in the separate plays all click together like a dramatic Rubik's cube; given a turntable set, they could be acted together in interconnected sequence - and indeed, a full, seven-hour version recently played (in the round) in New York to rave reviews. This interest in teasing apart and pasting back together what used to be called "dramatic unity" is typical of Ayckbourn - How the Other Half Loves, for instance, brilliantly stitches together two separate times in the same place.

But if Ayckbourn expands the structure of dramatic possibility in one way, he seems to almost shrink it in another. For there's also no question that embedded in his modest farces are echoes of truly great dramatic literature - Table Manners sometimes mimics The Cherry Orchard, in fact, and Chekhov in general seems to hover over much of Ayckbourn's oeuvre like an ancestral ghost. The only problem is that the Russian master haunts the playwright's achievement as well as his characters.

For if Chekhov's great theme was 'weakness,' then Ayckbourn's, to be honest, is simply 'smallness.' It's not that his characters fail in their passions - it's that they don't really have passions to begin with. There's no grand manner in Ayckbourn, and no grand manor, either, as there's no gentry left, just the bourgeoisie: and they live in apartments, hotel rooms, and cramped little houses, where the only manners on display are "table manners," i.e., codes of consumption. And the playwright is pretty rigorous in his diminished expectations - in play after play, the food isn't very tasty (in Table Manners, it all comes out of tins - and a "salad" is a single lettuce leaf); the furniture is second-hand, and even the romantic getaways are to places like "East Grinstead."

Of course there's no romance anymore, either, just sex - so no "romantic getaways," just "dirty weekends." And as in life, so in drama: Cyrano de Bergerac has given way to No Sex Please, We're British. In a way, Ayckbourn is the poet, or perhaps the critic, of that decline - only he never really leaves the sex farce behind; instead, he beautifully limns its limits. Designed for the theatres in which he once worked, his scripts remodel their repertory staple without ever altering its basic floor plan; the new additions and wings operate as just more apartments and hotel rooms, nestled above, under, and within each other like so many nesting Russian dolls. The structure gets bigger, but the scale remains the same.

This sense of trivial iteration makes it easy to dismiss Ayckbourn as "the British Neil Simon." But that quip is problematic for several reasons. The first is that Simon, too, could be quite good, in plays like Lost in Yonkers - more telling is the fact that while Simon occasionally summoned the seriousness for something more than a sitcom, Ayckbourn has been remarkably consistent over the years; his work may be repetitive, but it's generally of the same pretty-high quality. Which means Ayckbourn regularly achieves a sense of real drama - the characters are drawn deeply and sympathetically enough that we understand everyone's point of view, and realize that no one is entirely in the right; at several points in The Norman Conquests, for instance, we can feel whole systems of feeling, and maybe even philosophy, pivoting on trivia.

Ayckbourn also has a subtle political dimension that's both liberating and reactionary - something which Simon relentlessly eschews (more on that later). And he's completely happy with unhappy endings - Table Manners, like most of his "farces," ends with a stab at freedom that feels somehow like a downer, because we know its promise can't be real. And that may be the gist of Ayckbourn - in his world, passion and hope and liberty and even art are all false dreams that he and we know can't be realized. Seen that way, his very smallness is of a piece with his aesthetic; form and function are as one in Ayckbourn. And isn't that supposed to be a good thing?

Like many a critic, I'm not completely convinced by my own argument - but something tugs at me about Ayckbourn; he can't really be dismissed just because he's limited and dispiriting, and just because he insinuates that the dinner theatres are right and Shakespeare and Chekhov are wrong. How you feel about him may reflect how you feel about Reg, one of the characters in Table Manners who's obsessed with building balsa-wood models of airplanes. Intricate and beautiful, they're obviously metaphors for the plays themselves, and smart, sardonic Reg is probably a factotum for Ayckbourn, too (tellingly, he's cuckolded - seemingly - at play's end). One feels the defeat implicit in Reg's pastime - why doesn't he try to work on a real plane? But at the same time, balsa wood models are beautiful when perfectly rendered - and who hasn't peered at a perfect one in admiration?


The talented cast of Table Manners. (Eric Levenson)

Up at Gloucester Stage, Table Manners is pretty nearly perfectly rendered, too. Or at least its imperfections hardly matter. Several members of its solid cast - Steven Barkhimer, Sarah Newhouse, Richard Snee, and Jennie Israel in particular - are doing their best work in recent memory, and director Eric C. Engel has drawn from them, and from his whole ensemble, a beautiful sense of - you know, ensemble. Here and there I wished for a bit more shading on this or that aspect of this or that character - I loved Barkhimer's impish wit as Norman, for instance, but wondered if there shouldn't be a slightly stronger twist of bitters beneath it. Meanwhile Barlow Adamson is perhaps slightly too credible as a possible beau for another disappointed character. And one actor, Lindsay Crouse, is miscast, but covers for it with an impeccably detailed performance that almost convinces you she's got the character's inner conflict goin' on, too.

I had a few other quibbles - the set, in which everything was at the wrong angle, worked as a kind of obstacle course for the actors (which is very Ayckbournian), but its metaphor was a bit obvious - and one poor audience member actually took a spill over it, too. And though Engel rendered the surface of the script beautifully, he didn't quite pull off - in part because of Ms. Crouse's miscasting - whatever emotional resonance can be wrung from its big twist, when its most sexually-judgmental character suddenly succumbs to Norman's rather-resistible charms. There's more pathos to be found there, or perhaps more punch - at any rate more something.

But what gave the evening real resonance was, oddly enough, what a friend of mine summed up with the comment, "This play feels dated now - and that's what's interesting." I couldn't have agreed more. Ayckbourn's whole conception of Norman - immature and irresponsible and innocently selfish, but still fighting for spontaneity and life - recalls a masculine ethos that today has been utterly crushed; nowadays, masculinity is defined by either power or pathology, but not by poetry. And maybe more's the pity. Norman's seductions (of even his wife's sister!) do seem contemptible, until we meet his wife Ruth, one of Ayckbourn's most brilliant creations: Ruth is sympathetic and strong, and calmly competent and utterly suffocating. To her, romance is faintly ridiculous in and of itself. And if a play can be construed as a reflection of a pitched cultural battle, then there's no denying that since the debut of Table Manners, the Ruths of this world have won. Indeed, when I perused Louise Kennedy's review in the Globe, I felt a weird frisson of recognition: this was Ruth talking. But can any artist actually predict his critics? Perhaps in his next Rubik's-cube-style script, Ayckbourn might consider including the audience, too.

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.

Lady with All the Answers doesn't really offer any

Stephanie Clayman as Ann Landers. Photo by Elizabeth Stewart.

The Nora Theatre Co.'s The Lady with All the Answers, at the Central Square Theater through June 26, purports to be a biography of "Ann Landers," the pseudonym for Esther Pauline ("Eppie") Lederer, the Chicago sage who via her ubiquitous advice column led an ongoing national salon in the pages of the press for 47 years.

Lederer's long success in the role of "Ann" (she was so popular that identical-twin-sister "Popo" soon carved out a competing chunk of turf as "Dear Abby") wasn't much of a mystery. She may have been no student of the human soul, but Eppie had a keen eye for the emotional (and moral) bottom line - you couldn't pull one over on her; and of course she had an army of experts on call who could advise on the technicalities of virtually any topic. She also had a style - a punchy, wiseacre chirp with an ethnic lilt that had somehow been drained of all ethnicity, and was spiced instead with her own brand of 40's slang: "Bub, you've got a geranium in your cranium!" was a typical line.

Did anyone ever actually talk like that? I mean besides "Ann"? Well, apparently Eppie did; or so playwright Rambo would have us believe. He doesn't really try to crack the veneer of Lederer's linguistic vim and vigor, but does a pretty good job of capturing its cadence, and making it sound roughly like conversation. Although in The Lady with All the Answers, Eppie's the only one talking; the play's conceit is that she's holding court in her plush Chicago apartment (perfectly rendered in Louis Quinze and Chagalls by designer Brynna Bloomfield) as if it were a talk show set, chatting across the fourth wall to the audience about this or that famous letter or opinion. But at the same time, she's trying to crank out her most famous (and most personal) column - the one that announced her divorce from Budget Rent-a-Car bigwig Jules Lederer, her husband of 36 years. Yes, public face and private heartbreak. Sexual betrayal - and how to hang the toilet paper! This double device is unwieldy at times - intermission arrives because Eppie declares she needs a bubble bath - but to be honest, it does kind of capture the column's funny yin-yang tension between tragedy and trivia.

But the playwright treads so lightly in Eppie's private life that we actually learn none of her secrets. The script's raison d'être would seem to be to get behind that famous column - but Rambo steadfastly refuses to do so. We learn hubby Jules was having an affair "with a woman younger than his daughter" (that daughter would be Margo Howard, who kept the advice dynasty going with "Dear Prudence"), which meant the marriage was over. But we do wonder why, exactly - Eppie was constantly advising other couples to go through counseling, patch things up for the sake of the children, try to learn to trust each other again and see the marriage through. So why couldn't she take her own advice?

Likewise her famous (and utterly understandable) feud with "Dear Abby" is acknowledged, but given the comic brush-off (after a reported five-year silence, the two did reconcile, below). We do learn a few things about Eppie that hint at a powerful, and possibly mercurial, personality - such as the fact that she dropped a standing fiancé to marry the handsome Jules (whom she met while shopping for her wedding veil!). Perhaps Eppie was more demanding and pampered (all those bubble baths!) than she, or Rambo - or perhaps Margo Howard, whose protective presence seems to hover over the play - lets on.


"Eppie" and "Popo" - a.k.a. "Ann Landers" and "Dear Abby."

On the plus side, we also get a sense of Lederer's considerable political energy (she was a liberal Democratic operative, and her connections to many of her experts came from her friendship with Hubert Humphrey), which you'd think could open up for us a whole new perspective on "Ann Landers." After all, Eppie was hardly politically mainstream; she was progressive, and Jewish, and pretty much a proto-feminist, all while insisting she was a "square" with a WASP name out of Leave it to Beaver. Playwright Rambo doesn't really limn these contradictions, but does perhaps his best work while detailing Lederer's frustrating campaign against the Vietnam war. Her change of heart over, and eventual championing of, gay and lesbian issues is likewise quite touching. Eppie was certainly on the right side of most of our political struggles, even if her commercial connections and general social M.O. left many progressives and feminists sneering.

Some of the edge of this material is lost, however, in the smooth bubble bath of nostalgia at the Central Square Theater, where Daniel Gidron has directed the play as a light crowdpleaser - which is probably precisely how it was intended. And it is entertaining - and even moving in its more-political segments. I just think it could have been a little bit more. As Eppie, actress Stephanie Clayman is certainly likeable and full of pep - she earns the right to wear that famous perm. And she nails a Midwest accent so eccentric something tells me it's drawn from recordings of Lederer herself. But Clayman doesn't really push the envelope when it comes to the deeper feelings that must have tugged at Eppie while writing that fateful column; she pauses and sighs a lot, it's true, but once the column's done, and read aloud to daughter Margo, Clayman hardly seems emotionally exhausted; instead, she actually lets out a great big yawn. Oh, well, so much for Jules, off to bed!! This probably squares with the expectations of the audience - which really wants just one more Ann Landers column, rather than an investigation of the whole phenomenon. But anyone who thinks The Lady with All the Answers has answered any of the open questions about Eppie Lederer has a geranium in his - or her - cranium.

Boston Globe print edition reaches out to its three remaining readers

Does the Onion read my blog? Possibly. God knows this parody of the Globe's audience profiling could have been lifted directly from the Hub Review's pages! Although just btw, I've actually changed my mind about the long-predicted demise of dead-tree media like the Globe. With the iPad and other devices becoming so popular, the transition from print to - well, not the Web, but some sort of app-driven, licensed "cloud," with a valid revenue model attached - seems a lot more possible than it once did.