This show is excellent, and the performances are outstanding. You won’t see as good without leaving town, and maybe not then. Not so much a tale as an excuse to poke fun at politics, commerce, and The Musical, while singing and dancing in a musical, the basic idea is that a 20 year drought has resulted in a company town that requires its citizens must pay to pee. But though commerce and politics are skewered for corruption, the idealism of the hero and heroine, Bobby Strong (played with compact skilled energy by Colin James Cook) and Hope Cladwell (the marvelous Maggie Stahl) is as savagely mocked. This is satire that doesn’t close Saturday night because it’s neither mean-spirited nor one-sided.
Starting from Larry Goodpaster in a prison suit being escorted across the stage twice to get to his piano behind a lock-down fence with his similarly-dressed orchestra, Karen Langenwalter, Kevin Wenner, Kevin Aylward, and Keith Mausser, this show is a good time, and not least because the orchestra is finally visible in this presentation at the Beck. The musicians are clearly having easily as much fun as the actors.
Matthew Wright as Officer Lockstock demonstrates his range by being almost unrecognizably different from his excellent, and much more nuanced, work as Argan in “The Imaginary Invalid” last season at The Beck. But this role doesn’t call for nuance, and Wright recognizes that with a vocal and gestural gusto that justly dominates the stage when he’s on it.
Betsy Kahl as Little Sally is a charming child but doesn’t let the role get in the way of an excellently adult voice. Penelope Pennywise is wonderfully acted by Lenne Jacobs-Snively, who infuses real emotion into a character that a lesser actor would have played for a fool. And she can not just sing, she can really sing. Wow.
Gregory Violand is superb as Caldwell B Cladwell – it’s worth going to the show just to see him do “Don’t Be The Bunny”, but he catches just the right mix of hard-nosed business believability and lounge-singer smarm to illuminate the show.
Poor Officer Barrel! He can’t catch a break, and Patrick Carroll achieves an uncanny level of human connection with the audience in the midst of the jolly savagery of the satire.
Zac Hudak stands out as Hot Blades Harry for his dancing, and John Polk does everything with Senator Fipp that he did not do as The Man in The Beck’s “Raisin in the Sun” – he is magnificently pompous here where he understatedly played an opaque bigot there.
The rest of the cast is energetic, enthused, in time and on key.
You may have missed the champagne reception after the standing ovation on opening night, but the show runs through October 9, 2005.
It’s a cool thing.
From Cool Cleveland contributor Marcus Bales marcusATdesignerglass.com
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