Forever Plaid
By Stuart Ross
Directed and Choreographed by Scott Cook
Musical Direction by David Foust
Theatreworks at the Garden Theatre
Winter Garden, FL

Buddy Holly got a plane crash, Elvis popped only the best pills, and Mama Cass stepped out for a snack, but The Plaids went to the great Variety Show in the sky courtesy of a mishandled school bus. That was back around ’64, but tonight they get once last chance, reincarnated a generation and a half after doo-wop boy bands had their first heyday. For a quartet mangled at the crossroads, they look pretty good in white diner jackets, plaid cummerbunds, and those tux pants with the shiny strip up the leg. What IS the deal with that stripe, anyway?

The Plaids rely on personality as much as vocal fireworks and soaring harmony, so each of the boys has a deep inner personal flaw. Jinx (Rob Ross) tends to nose bleeds, Smudge (Charlie Stevens) has a Milk of Magnesia problem, Sparky (Timothy Pappas) escaped from speech therapy, and asthmatic Frankie (Kevin Kelly, with hair) holds these boys together emotionally, and it’s a worthy job. The Plaids master classical harmony from the pre-show “Testing Testing 1-2-3-4″ to boffo closer “Love is a Many Splendored Thing.” Everyone gets a standout solo but no one stands up their band mates. Not all the songs were off the Dick Clark Hot Hundred list, we heard some pleasant rarities like “Perfidia”, “Undecided”, and “Gotta Be This Or That” along with old favorites like “Sixteen Tons,” “Catch a Falling Star” and “Three Coins In a Fountain.” The first act sticks to songs and band chit-chat, while the second act opens up to broader comedy, peaking with a 3 minute parody of the Ed Sullivan show set to “Lady of Spain.” Jugglers, trained seals, fire eaters, José Jimenez and Topo Gigio all made an appearance, and when it’s all over, they boys weep a tear and fly off for a two show-a-night gig in the Restaurant At The End of the Universe.

The show maintains a studied innocence, sticking strictly to a canon of songs packed with innuendo but cleared for airplay by postwar blue stockings. The 1960s sexual revolution looms on the horizon, but that’s a revue for another evening. Tonight drips with our parent’s nostalgia, just like the recently restored Garden Theater. It also compliments downtown Winter Garden, a sort of open air museum to the joy of the small town America where the Plaids grew up. Go for the music, go for the comedy, go for the fading memory of Eisenhower prosperity and the glowing promise of suburbia, but go. These guys will only be doing their last show for three weekends, and then we’ll all fade away to second banana heaven.

For more information on The Garden Theatre, please visit http://www.myspace.com/gardentheatre or http://wgtheater.org

For other Theatreworks projects, visit www.theatreworksfl.com

Foreplay – The Improvised Musical!
Conceived and Directed by David Charles
Musical Direction By Chris Leavy
Winter Park Playhouse, Winter Park, FL

Who says it’s hard to write a musical? These guy crank out a new one every night, and not only is it funny, it’s in tune. David Charles pushes Long Form Improv to a new level with this two act musical format. It’s no series of games for the beginner, but a slick and successful frame for the advanced artist to show their stuff in a no-room-for-errors setting. The premise is straightforward – four actors play for principle characters: David Charles longs to go home and do laundry, Chelsea Dygan just got into an all girls dorm, Matt Horohoe works in marketing, and Layden Sadecky and his “lost puppy dog” look propose to his girl Kim. At intermission, we vote on who has the best storyline, and that actor becomes the star of the second act.

They open the show with “I’m Feeling A Happiness,” the sort of up-tempo number that you need to get any serious musical on its legs. The songs then alternate between the “I am” and “I want” numbers for the next two hours, working through all the variants of duets and ensembles and styles from Cole Porter to Walt Disney. While the dialog between the songs sways between brilliant and “huh?” the songs are consistent winners. A few of them really ought to so in the old song suitcase, Horohoe’s “I Can Be a Man” really left an impression. It’s the sort of number you could build a serious show around, one with copyright book and lyrics and a set that’s more involved than 4 doors and a clothing rack.

Other local improv groups will do single songs based off a suggested title and style, but this collection of predetermined melodies and off the cuff situations goes much farther and builds a real story line, and stays in the old SAK “no swearing” concept without cheap and easy sex jokes. Watching the actors and the front row audience, you could see an implied wager: one party stares with “I’ll bet you’re going to screw up” on their mind. The counterparty stares back with “You’re on.” You know who’s gonna win this one.

For more information on Winter Park Playhouse, please visit http://www.winterparkplayhouse.org

Metamorphosis
By Mary Zimmerman
Directed by Bobbie Bell
Seminole State College, Lake Mary, FL

The Greeks weren’t big on happy endings. Step out of line, and you’ll find your eyes poked out, your loved ones dead, and you’re changed into a newt and can’t get back. Then they humiliate you by painting your story on an urn as a cautionary tale. A short dozen of these morally rich tales play out on a stage featuring a thigh-deep swimming pool and large crew of dedicated actors who spend most of the show dripping wet in a nicely air-conditioned auditorium. A brief Creation Myth takes us from chaos into the ordered world, King Midas (Cory Boughton) brags about his business acumen and tells his daughter (Tempestt Halstead) to bounce her ball else where. He’s got drachmas and an attitude, but he’s not completely evil. When a drunken satyr almost drowns in his pool, he pulls him out and Bacchus (Ian White) rewards him the power to turn everything into gold. These “Gifts from the Gods” always carry a catch, and soon his daughter is 24 carat. Bacchus kindly offers him a way out – walk to the ends of the earth, and wash his hands. It’s worth a try.

The succeeding stories range form the well known “Orpheus and Eurydice” and “Phaeton” crashing the Sun into the Earth, to the obscure “Alcyone and Ceyx”. All use the water feature with varying degrees of success. King Ceyx (Cory Owens) sets sail on a business trip to visit the oracle, and his devoted wife Alcyone (Samantha Faith O’Hare) warns him that the winds will drown him. As he rows on the edge of the pool, Poseidon (White) and his henchmen pull them in and drown them, slipping off stage through the secret underwater exit. The story of Phaeton (Crosby Adams) stretches the water metaphor; his inflatable chair forms the couch for his counseling session as he works through the paradox of parental neglect and overindulgence. In “Myrrha”, the pool seems gratuitous and the cast jumps in more because “We can” rather than “We must.”

Despite this unusual prop (courtesy of set designer Stori Lauritzen), you can’t argue its theatricality and innovation in this production of “Metamorphoses.” Truly touching moments intertwine with broad comedy, and the strength of the Greeks Myths lies in their eternal stories of devotion, treachery, and the truth that The Fates, the Gods, or Statistical Mechanics all play as much a role in our happiness as anything we do intentionally. “Metamorphosis” is a bold move for the newly renamed Seminole State College, and a show you’ll brag about seeing for years. Just temper the bragging, Poseidon has a VERY nasty temper.

For more information on the Seminole State College Theater program, please visit http://www.scc-fl.edu/arts/theatre/

Love Song
By John Kolvenbach
Directed by Michael Marinaccio
Mad Cow Theatre, Orlando, FL

Most men have fantasy girl friends, but few are as needy as Beane’s (Josh Geoghagen). His sister Joan (Lauren Maleski) thinks imaginary friends are bad idea in your 30s, and he needs “professional help.” Now in my experience “professional help” means either endless whiny meetings with overtly sensitive and caring counselors, or Thorazine. I recommend he check if his insurance covers electroshock. Beane really is in a bad way, he lives in a claustrophobic New York apartment with a single flickering light bulb and walls that creep in on him, and homeless people have larger wardrobes than he. While Joan worries, she at least has the comfort of a loving yet argumentative hubby, Harry (Christian Kelty). Harry thinks she should lighten up on her interns at work, and in a spasm of total caring, he suggests they both blow off work and spend the day making out, drinking imagined bourbon, and shooting imagined junk. While this is saner than Beane’s hallucination isn’t clear. This whole family reeks of creativity, and even Beane’s imaginary girlfriend Molly (Alexis Jackson) joins the act with an imagined gift to Beane – permission to leave his mental prison and live in the real world for a while.

I’d rank this as a quirky love story with two very interesting relation. Joan and Harry bicker so they can enjoy the make up sex, while Beane and Molly cling to each other to survive the overbearing apocalyptic version of NYC they call home. Kelty and Maleski both play the cute and flirty, but Geoghagen and Jackson enter into a dreamily erotic world that suffers the indignity of reality knocking on the door just when things get good. One relation is fully realized, the other buzzes with potential, and both prove eroticism is all in your head.

Director Marinaccio crams a whole semesters worth of furniture moving onto a microscopic and cleverly designed set. Walls fold in and out, changing not only the location but the relation between location and action. Michael Plummer plays a waiter, but I suspect his real value to the show is keeping the right walls facing the right way during the scene changes and lifting the heavy end of the couch. Alan Bruun popped in for a post show talk back, and complained few modern writers are willing to right about love for loves sake, preferring the dysfunctional or the political. He’s got a valid point, yet “Love Song” proves you take the oldest story in the book and spin a new angle without getting maudlin.

For more information on Mad Cow, please visit http://www.madcowtheatre.com

Antigone
By Sophocles
Directed by John DiDonna
Starring Max Hilend, Chelsea Swearingen
Annie Russell Theatre Plaza, Winter Park FL

King Creon (Hilend) doesn’t firmly grip his ship of state’s helm. Only Toughest King On The Peninsula can control the revolts and conflicting claims to power. Today’s crisis revolves around brothers Eteocles (Mary Kate Dwyer) and Polyneices (Dustin Schwab), both holding strong claims to his throne. Fortunately they commit mutual fratricide in battle, and Creon refuses Polyneices proper burial rites, just because he can. Flaunting this social convention creates a source of manifold strife for him and all Thebes. Polyneices’ sister Antigone (Swearingen) ignores abhorrent law, asking “How can he keep me from mine?” An enraged Creon swears to kill whoever buried the corpse, or at least the poor sap of a guard who brought him the bad news. When Antigone readily confesses, he discovers he’s made a slight faux pas as she’s engaged to his son Haeman (Rob Yoho) and now everyone in town questions his authority. “Never compromise on a death sentence” thinks Creon, but he wavers and orders Antigone entombed alive, thus technically avoid the charge of murder. After meeting Creon, you’ll never complain about an elected official again.

With the Annie Russell Theatre is closed for renovation, the action moves outside to the front stairs and plaza. With the columns and balcony of this Spanish Revival theater, the effect of a Greek temple is nearly perfect, except for a few jets buzzing overhead. The show starts awkwardly early, but the timing allows the ambient lighting to fade as the full moon creeps over the building providing the symbolic special effect the ancients would love. Clothed in terra Cotta costumes and makeup, the actors wear the masks of tired old Greeks and brutal young warriors. Smoke pours from the upper balcony, lit by the fires of an ancient augerer’s grove as the actors speak slowly and loudly, emoting as if amplifiers don’t exist. All this moves the audience’s attention from individual performance to consider the force of a pride capable of flipping off Mount Olympus. Only Antigone and Creon’s costumes brighten stage, he dressed as a pre-Roman Jesus in a silver bubble pack vestment, she in a courtesan’s dress and loopy tear away blouse. The spilled blood is only spoken, never slipped in, but the cruelly and desperation are clear-cut. This engrossing and intensely theatrical show recaptures the earliest experience of Hellenic theatre, and its shame it only runs one weekend.

For more information on the Annie Russell Theatre at Rollins College, please visit http://www.rollins.edu/theatre/index.shtml