The Rake Magazine

There are two things that need to be done, I think, when adapting a Shakespeare play. First, respects must be paid to the language — the actors must own their lines, the director must choose the emphases that suit his/her interpretation best. And second, the cast must act as translators, using their bodies to re-interpret the script and make it relatable for the modern audience, so that thumb-biting, say, can actually be perceived as an offense. For the most part, Four Humors Theater's staging of Romeo and Juliet, showing this weekend and next at the Bedlam Theater, accomplishes these tasks.

It's a minimal production. Romeo (Jason Bohon) wears jeans and a hoodie; Juliet (Elise Langer) is in a jersey dress. (Both sport ergonomically designed Puma sneakers.) Aside from a tire swing and a couple moveable screen doors, the set is mostly bare, which is nice — there's no gimmickry.

Director Jason Ballweber has taken obvious pains to make this an intimate performance. When Romeo wanders into the crowd and begins to direct his speech to audience members, there's a genuine feel to it; it seems he's actually speaking to the theatergoers, not just reciting his lines in one's personal space. Throughout, Bohon sustains his role well. He plays a thoughtful Romeo, humanizing the character's rather absurd (rather pubescent) passions and moods — he's gloomy, sure, but never becomes melodramatically morose.

Likewise, Langer adds a good bit of levity to Juliet's character. She delivers her speeches like a fourteen-year-old girl talking to her friend on the phone — a sort of rapid-fire, valley-esque style that makes one believe she has butterflies fluttering in her head. At first it's a bit hard to get used to — she's rushing through the lines and it's difficult to catch the meaning of the bard's words — but after a scene or two, when the audience is able to settle in, it's actually delightful. Impressive, even.

Finally, Kimberly Richardson turns out a fantastic performance as Juliet's nurse. Ballweber has invested a particular amount of weight in this role, turning the nurse into one of Shakespeare's ‘fool' characters, as from Twelfth Night or Puck from A Midsummer Night's Dream. Dressed something like Mrs. Doubtfire, she's the wise old lady with her fingers in everyone's business, her ward's interests closest to her heart. Maybe the most effective scene of the play is late in the second act when Juliet and her nurse meet in the Capulets' orchard. The nurse has just come from the friar's with news of Juliet's wedding, and Juliet has to wring it out from her. The nurse paces up and down the bowling-lane-like stage, feigning woe, avoiding Juliet's questions, causing her to go into something like hysteria. And then, just as the audience is beginning to wonder how serious she is, Richardson flashes a quick smile to the crowd, letting us in on her joke, before she goes on tormenting the young lover.

It's a good, light approach to the play — typical of the Four Humors style that has won them so much praise in the last few years. When the minstrels begin to sing a medieval rendition of "Gin and Juice," one is reminded of the 4HT production of Bards, wherein the chorus de-modified the Wu-Tang Clan's "C.R.E.A.M."

At times, though — especially in the first few acts — the staging sacrifices feeling for humor. The balcony scene is where we first get a real look at Juliet's flighty character, and here she seems a bit too concerned with making sure the audience knows how cute she is than with her connection to Romeo. Also, though a Shakespeare play isn't a Shakespeare play without a little cross-dressing, casting choices make the exchanges between Mercutio and Benvolio often seem ripped from an episode of Will and Grace.

That said, the airy first half makes the darkness of the second half that much more clear. When the tragedy begins to unfold, we haven't been so bogged down by melancholy that we can't stomach anymore. Rather, we're ready for the sadness when it comes, and as tragicomedies go, it is all the more poignant.

In the 1972 Bob Fosse film Cabaret, an American Sally Bowles, played by Liza Minnelli, falls in love with a rambunctious Englishman who is — as she is — having an affair with her bisexual boss. Whereas in the 1966 stage play Cabaret, it was Sally who was English, her boyfriend who was American, and there was a wholesome subtextual storyline about their elderly landlady's romance with a Jewish fruit merchant.

In the Ordway's current production of Cabaret, there's a little bit of each mixed in.

Putatively, this Cabaret is the stage play of '66, with an English Sally and a regal German landlady (played by the absolutely magnificent Suzy Hunt). But it also alludes to the male-on-male dalliances of its hero, the American writer Cliff Bradshaw, which is confusing because the complications here are completely ignored. In fact, other than the single reference to his cruising days, Bradshaw, as played by Louis Hobson, comes off as a well-scrubbed prude. And when Sally turns up pregnant with a baby she claims could be anyone's, he immediately volunteers — no qualms about her decided female-ness — to make her his wife.

In between there are dance numbers introduced by the "emcee" (Nick Garrison), a shiny-headed bald man wearing lipstick with an impossible loud and grating voice. He's impossible to love at first, as he descends from the ceiling in the Cabaret sign's "C," but by intermission he is impossible not to. A feat that Garrison effects by being alternately funny, self-deprecating, clownish, and sad.

There is also that strident back story about the Nazis: they are infiltrating the club through the person of Ernst Ludwig, Bradshaw's patron and friend. Ludwig is a tall, ebony-haired Aryan who somehow riles the entire club into raising their arms to the Third Reich. The fall-out comes first when gentle Herr Schultz, the fruit seller, has a brick hurled through his window. And then when Bradshaw, the stalwart American, gets beaten because he refuses to put up with all that Gestapo guff.

I wish I could say that I loved this play. I do love the Ordway; I think it's as stately a theater as the Twin Cities has. The set was amazing: morphing from nightclub to modest rooming house with the twitch of a few items, by evening's end lit with colored bulbs that gave it a festive, garish air.

There were some truly outstanding performances — the best by far by Ms. Hunt who infused her Fraulein Schneider with imperious yet tentatively regal carriage. Her voice was pure starch and honey. I could have listened to her all night. Unfortunately, though, most of the songs were sung by Tari Kelly who played Sally Bowles. And while she was a dead ringer for Minnelli (at least from Row S) her theory seemed to be that sheer volume would make up for feeling or finesse.

The dancers were lovely and scantily-clad in a pleasing, authentically bawdy 1930's Berliner sort of way; God knows, I like hot pants and fishnets and sequined bras as much as the next red-blooded American girl. There's even a very charming moment during Money Makes the World Go Round when Monopoly money drifted from the rafters and into the audience, twirling in the twinkling lights.

But in the end, as the curtain came down, I felt as if all the brilliant parts of the Ordway's Cabaret had not quite added up to something as whole and extraordinary as I would have liked. True, they missed the mark by a very small margin — and this may be fixed by Tuesday, the official opening night — but as it is there are uneven edges. The first act was too long; the second felt incredibly rushed.

More important, the story was not consistent. I wanted either a playboy love interest or a wide-eyed gee golly one, not a weird mish-mash of the two. And without that, the production fell just short of what it should.

Not that you would have known to see the audience at the end. I know. . . .I've been beating this drum for years. But NOTHING to my mind marks Minnesotans as more universally ignorant than the standing ovation, which is obligatory at every single concert, opera, comedy routine, and play. I am sick and tired of going to shows that are good but not great and watching everyone around me jump out of their seats like so many obsequious, brainless cows.

Yes, I feel strongly about this. But to my mind, it's like over praising a child for efforts that fall short. How is a toddler to learn if you keep showering kisses down because he or she piddled almost in the potty? By doing this, you simply reinforce the puddle on the floor.

And so it is with the stage, where standing ovations for performances that are almost but not quite extraordinary, like Cabaret, lower the bar. Which given the talent and resources and venues we have here in town is a goddamn shame.

Although it was one of the last plays he wrote, Gem of the Ocean falls first chronologically in August Wilson's 10 plays about the black experience in 20th century America. It's not his best — Fences and The Piano Lesson both won Pulitzers — but Penumbra Theatre puts on a solid interpretation at the Guthrie.

Wilson typically keeps the action contained in one location: the setting for Gem of the Ocean is the parlor of a 285-year-old "soul cleanser," Aunt Ester (Marvette Knight), in 1904 Pittsburgh. Aunt Ester imparts the wisdom of a woman who has experienced almost 250 years of slavery and survived the Civil War. At the play's climax, Ester's parlor is transformed — through blue lighting, stark shadows, and befitting sound — into a slave ship, the Gem of the Ocean. She leads a young man, Citizen Barlow (Cedric Mays), through a mystical experience to the City of Bones, where he confronts slavery, the man who died for his own crime, and, ultimately, freedom. The scene reflects the play's theme as articulated by Ester: "What use do we make of our freedom?"

Unfortunately, the journey to the City of Bones has nearly as much gimmick as it does depth. Mays is convincing as he is shackled supernaturally to the slave deck of the Gem of the Ocean and as he faces the consequences of his past crime. But the device of this magical voyage accomplishes little that could not have been achieved in "reality."

Wilson is a master at using more realistic, and more convincing, devices as the central conflict of a narrative. In The Piano Lesson, it's a piano, co-owned by a brother and sister, carved with the faces of two ancestors. The sister never wants to depart with the piano, and her brother, eager to buy land, wants to sell it — a conflict of preservation of history versus moving on. In the first scene of Fences, a character tries to conceal a watermelon, a device that Wilson uses to reverse the racist connotation of the watermelon-loving minstrel. The Gem of the Ocean does not approach this level of subtle but powerful symbolism.

Director Lou Bellamy, founder and artistic director of Penumbra Theatre, is well positioned to bring Gem of the Ocean to the
stage. He won an Obie Award in 2007 for directing Wilson's Two Trains
Running in New York City, and he directed Penumbra's production of The Piano Lesson earlier this year. His comprehensive understanding of Wilson's work is apparent on the stage. The characters are eccentric without going over the top, and the conversations they have in Aunt Ester's parlor are truly engaging.

Black Mary (Austene Van), who lives with Aunt Ester, is a jilted woman who nevertheless remains compassionate. Eli (Abdul Salaam el Razzac), who also lives with Ester, is agitated with Citizen in the first scene, but he eventually employs him to build a wall. Eli remains calm and relaxed throughout the rest of the show, saying, "This is a peaceful home," when people stop by to visit. He has frequent, long conversations with Solly Two Kings (James Craven), a man who once helped with the Underground Railroad and now sells dog poop as fuel, about the black community's difficult adaptation from slavery to free society.

Black Mary's brother, Caeser (T. Mychael Rambo), is an Uncle Tom character who one can't help but be angry with (and even sympathize with him a bit) for his deplorable decisions as an enforcer of the law. The only remaining character, Rutherford Selig (Terry Hempleman), is a white salesperson who fills only a minor role in the plot.

Knight plays a lively almost-300-year-old, but because Ester is such a
mystical figure, and because Wilson reveals in King Hedley II that she
lives to be 366 — hence she has almost a century of life remaining in Gem of the Ocean — her youthful portrayal of an elderly woman is not distracting.

Citizen's transformation from a nervous young man in the first act to a
confident man who confronts his demons could have been more delicate, but this lies more in how the play is written than how the character was acted.

The play, about personal redemption, justice and the law, and the meaning of freedom, is not a must-see, but it is a strong production.

Performances will run through May 18 on the McGuire Proscenium Stage at the Guthrie. There will be post-play discussions following the May 3 & May 14 matinees.

"Where is Brad Zellar?" you might ask, as his hiatus from The Rake has created quite a void. Happily, he's been busy promoting his new book, Suburban World: The Norling Photos, from Borealis Books.

Zellar discovered Irwin Norling in 2002, when he unearthed Norling's neglected negatives from the Bloomington Historical Society archives. Struck by the breadth and depth of the subject matter — everything from family portraits, Shriners, and donkey baseball games, to car crashes, drug busts, and murder scenes — and by the "astonishing and remarkably comprehensive record of life in one American community," Zellar unknowingly began his quest to compile his first book. The result is an extraordinary photo essay book featuring Bloomington, MN, from the late 1940s through the '70s — and the beautiful irony of a veteran journalist exposing an amateur photographer who expertly documented an era.

Brad Zellar is an accomplished journalist, a brilliant writer, and an incredible human being. Some might call him a "character" even. And they wouldn't be wrong. So, here we have a great character, and a great storyteller, who happens to run into another character — or at least his work — and gets blown away by it. Why? Probably because he's just as much a character, because he's just a good a storyteller, and because he has a similarly bleak underbelly. If you've been following Zellar's Yo, Ivanhoe! blog, you should know that underbelly quite well by now.

Norling wasn't your typical photographer. He was just a guy — a guy who took photos, a guy who was clearly obsessed with documenting life in some form, and a guy who sat for hours at his police radio waiting for calls to come in so he could run out and photograph the latest accident, the latest murder scene, or any other major event, no matter how bleak.

Seems to me he and Zellar would have made a mighty pair.

That said, the book itself is quite an accomplishment. While it looks like your typical coffee table book at first glance — something you can impress your guests with perhaps, but that might serve no purpose beyond that — this is certainly not the case. Suburban World: The Norling Photos will keep you enthralled from start to finish.

The forward, written by professional photographer Alec Soth, presents a most honest and provocative perspective on the art of photography. "Most great pictures aren't about artistry," writes Soth, as he goes on to explain how professional photographers have to get over themselves and avoid pretense in order to take good photos. In the end, his argument extols the virtues of amateur photography — a most controversial idea coming from a professional photographer.

Following Soth's forward, Zellar steps in with his master story-telling skills. But what story is he telling? Norling's? His own? Bloomington's? All of the above. Zellar weaves together a story that takes us across generations and paints a picture of the picture of the picture, and more. And, frankly, it's engaging at every level. Framed in his own story of discovery, Zellar tells us Norling's story, and shares with us a fuller picture of Bloomington than Norling's photos alone could ever tell.

And then come the photos. Beginning with his first accident photo in 1941 and ending with the opening of the Interstate Highway 35W (which is actually one of very few photos placed out of chronological sequence), the photos document the development of a city and its people over a twenty year span. The beauty, however, is in the juxtaposition of sweet everyday images and grotesque realities — the local hardware store followed by an autopsy photo, a tea-pouring housewife followed by a fatal accident, a wedding followed by a BPO training and an electrocution. While it may seem an odd mix of photos, the collection offers an unusually panoptic glimpse at the past. And the photos of accidents and violence lend a telling air of disrupted placidity — the clash of old and new, the perils of change, and the backlash of progress.

You don't need to be Bloomington obsessed — or Zellar obsessed, for that matter — to enjoy this one. And to top it off, the Minnesota Historical Society is kicking off the book release with an exhibit featuring Norling's photos and a recreation of his darkroom. Don't miss out.

Reception and book signing on April 1, from 5 to 8 p.m.; author presentation on April 8th at 7 p.m.; Minnesota History Center.

April 9, at 7:30 p.m., Richfield Borders Books and Music.

April 16th at 7:30 p.m., Magers & Quinn Booksellers.

 

I've spent the last year or so lauding the Dakota at every chance I get, but I have to admit that, until this week, I had never just gone there on faith, without first checking to see who was playing. The beauty of the Dakota, though, is its consistency. Go there any night, for any show, and while you might not be as fortunate as I was this past Wednesday, you won't be disappointed.

As luck would have it, I caught the Irvin Mayfield Quartet from New Orleans, now among the best jazz shows I've seen here in the Twin Cities.

Not having started in the best mood for an evening out — and struggling to get comfortable in a small semi-circular booth directly in front of the stage — I have little to say about the show's opening. It was pleasant, but perhaps lacked the energy required to jolt me back into my own skin after a most discomforting day.

We ordered a bottle of Cava — a Dakota ritual at this point — and a lineup of the Chef's features from the kitchen in hopes that this would help set the mood and ensure the fabulous evening we have come to expect from the Dakota. But, to be honest, the first course — Chicken Fried Quail — did nothing to the effect. I still wonder who would betray the delicate nature of the quail by cooking it with the clumsy boorishness of a chicken fried steak. But let me not dwell on one minor infraction that did little to taint a most excellent evening.

As I pushed the quail aside, Irvin Mayfield presented the next number, from Miles Davis's Kind of Blue. Ok. You have my attention. Now, please, oh please, let it be... Yes! "So What." Unbelievable!

And unbelievable it was indeed. Carlos Hennriquez was exquisite on bass. And Mayfield's trumpet echoed with Miles-ian coolness. I'm in!

When they were done with that number, Mayfield joked about his bassist. "He just learned to play it last week," said Mayfield, "at the public library." This was the first of many jokes about the greatness of the New Orleans public library and their 25-year plan to rebuild New Orleans. It was also the start of the jokester jazz to follow — you know the kind, the kind where they actually have fun on stage.

By the time our Surf & Turf got to the table — a lobster tail, a gloriously tender steak atop a risotto cake, and a few pieces of perfectly cooked asparagus with what I can only guess was a delightful béarnaise sauce — the band had picked up steam and the energy in the room was soaring. A perfect time to introduce the guest artist.

Leon "Chocolate" Brown took the stage, with trumpet in hand, and after only a few notes of accompaniment to Mayfield's intro, made his way to the mic to sing "Down on Burbon Street" with the beautifully melodic voice of a young Nat King Cole. Yeah! Now, we're talking.

After this, they started the real jam, and the real joking. Each musician took his turn, and each tried to top the previous one, while the others cried out in amazement, amusement, and wonder. "Oh, put your elbow into it," chided Mayfield as drummer Jaz Sawyer delivered his schtick, placing his elbow on the drum to hone the sound most masterfully. Sawyer stayed serious as he played, but broke out in laughter as soon as he passed the buck.

"Let's fly down, upside down, to New Orleans." Brown took the mic once more, bringing it back full swing as the audience roared.

When trombonist Vince Gardner came back in, I confess, my hair stood on end (the hair on my arms, that is, which is plentiful) — a sure sign of sheer perfection, as far as I'm concerned.

Then Mayfield and Brown put in the finishing touches, still smiling as they blew their final notes.

These guys were having fun. And, man, were they good!

From here you might say the show degenerated in the most perfect way. Or you might say this is where the show took root and really took off — into a true jazz show, in true New Orleans style.

Mayfield took the mic to sing this time, a FEMA song, no less. The FEMA blues. "It cost us 650 million to rebuild," sang Mayfield, " then the government acts like we did something wrong." Brown chimed in for the second verse — about water, of course. And back and forth they went starting with FEMA, the flood, New Orleans, the library; ending with "your sister," who is really "your brother," who is really "your governor," who is really "your daddy" named Sarah. What an unholy mess! A most beautiful unholy mess! This is what jazz is all about.

Finally, the two singers came together for a final chorus: "Meet me. Meet me. Meet me with your black drawers on. Meet me. Meet me. Meet me with your library card." Take it away trombone man!

"You better pay your dues," cried Mayfield. And I couldn't help but think about our own libraries here in Minnesota — about the shift from Minneapolis Public Libraries to Hennepin County Libraries, about the chaos, about the closed libraries and reduced hours, about the presentation I'm moderating tonight at the Central Library. "You better pay your dues." Yeah, I'll swing by on Monday.

I took the last bite of asparagus — still trying to figure out how exactly they managed to cook it to such perfection — and the drummer went mad. Holy shit! Never had I seen arms move so fast and with such precision. Beautiful. Most beautiful sound.

Jaz "the animal" Sawyer, Mayfield calls him. "He won't date you unless you have a library card."

"Get up. Get on up." They went off on their next number, their last, and the horns came down into the audience as I got teary eyed. I'm lame like that, I admit. But when I'm moved my eyes inevitably water.

As the horns made their way through the audience, everybody on their feet, clapping along, I realized that I had somehow lost my discomfort, that the table was no longer the wrong shape or size, and that the uneaten quail was worth every penny.

The Dakota had done it again.

Look for the Mayfield Quartet's new album (which I purchased that night and haven't stopped listening to since), available on April 1st.