pt at large

Melissa Morgan: Jazz talent needs the right touch

Q. How does an aspiring jazz singer make it from the guppy bowl to the fish tank in NYC or LA? Twenty something Melissa Morgan has talent. What else does she need besides chops and Nancy Wilson as a major influence?

A. She needs her own style.

Sitting poised and collected, surrounded by a snappy trio and a few patrons, Melissa Morgan certainly looked the part.  The raven-haired singer, her lavender silk dress a perfect complement to her tawny skin and shoulder length tresses, red pump dangling from one foot, looked like she just dropped into your living room to sing a few songs from an album she'd just completed.

During her 50-minute performance, Morgan proved she has technique that could some day approach the caliber of her major influences - Nancy Wilson and Dinah Washington. She has an exceptionally clear voice, fine elocution, and timing that grooves with the swing titles and ballads on her set list.

What she did not demonstrate this slow Monday evening was that she has a grip on a style she can begin to call her own. As she launched into each of the seven songs in the first set, I kept hoping she’d stop singing pretty and start singing with conviction. And take a chance once in a while.

Morgan surprised us with an exquisite falsetto register that climbed an octave as she made her way through two lovely ballads. She found the jazz singer she hopes to become with her final song, “Until I Met You,” a Nancy Wilson classic.

 She caressed the lyrics and seemed to forget everything except her memory of being the little girl who sat transfixed as she listened to her grandmother’s record collection and set her sights on a singing career.

This hastily booked appearance, a “showcase performance,” wasn’t on Scullers schedule and was intended to introduce her to an East Coast audience and a few booking agents in the room. Quite possibly it served as a tune up for seven shows in which Morgan opens for Spyro Gyra in the next five days in San Diego and San Francisco.

If I hadn’t bumped into the bass player as I made my way out the door, I’d never have guessed they only rehearsed for a half hour before the show. And that the bassist and drummer from Brooklyn had never met the LA guitar player until that rehearsal. Their solos were crisp and uninhibited, as if they were coaxing Morgan to let out the stops herself. The falsetto register she used to wonderful effect on "Until I Met You" could become part of her emerging signature style.

In time, her inner voice will merge with her outer talent. Or she may never see her own albums where she dreams of seeing them - a few rows away from Nancy Wilson’s in music store racks across the country.

Aurelia’s Oratorio

Two generations of the Chaplin family, steeped in the history of performing, have created Aurelia's Oratorio, now playing at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, MA. Like productions they've created in the past, Aurelia's Oratorio is a form of "cirque."

"Cirque Nouveau," new circus, is a performing arts movement that developed in the 1970s in France, Australia, and North America. It is influenced by circus history, although no animals are used, and medieval art forms.

The artist's body and face, together with elements of dance, music, theater, and acrobatics, create a mosaic that is imaginative and timeless. We've been performing for each other with narratives, dance, and music since we discovered fire. The joy from a well-imagined performance is as fascinating in the digital age as it was to us in the Stone Age.

AURELIA'S ORATORIO
Conceived and directed by Victoria Thierrée Chaplin
Lights, Laura de Bernadis and Philippe Lacombe.
Sound, Chaplin and Paolo Barcucchi.
Set, Chaplin.
Costumes, Chaplin, Jacques Perdiguez, Veronique Grand, and Monika Schwarzl.

Presented by
American Repertory Theater and ArKtype.
At: Loeb Drama Center,
Cambridge, through Jan. 3. Tickets, $25-$79.
617-547-8300, www.amrep.org

Aurelia’s Oratorio is a perfect and timely tonic for long-time patrons of Cambridge’s A.R.T. We leave the theater with a light-hearted sense of having been entertained. Unlike some of the edgy theater’s productions, one didn’t need a reviewer to explain what we were witnessing and why we should enjoy it.

In Auriela's Oratorio, the gymnastics we've often had to employ mentally to figure out the goings on are actually done physically onstage. All we have to do is sit back and enjoy the show, which as it happens, is a heady mix of mime, dance, aerial ballet, and enough sight gags to fill a Charlie Chaplin movie.

Aurelia Thierrée, the gifted artist who performs the show, is the granddaughter of Charlie Chaplin. Those Chaplin big-as-saucer eyes can telegraph reactions of surprise, fear, ennui, and everything in between all the way to the back of the house.

Thierrée’s graceful and acrobatic limbs are balletic one moment, Raggedy Ann floppish the next. And she inherited that exquisite Chaplin sense of timing in which the pause, the glance, the gesture, are extended just long enough for us to hold our collective breath to enjoy what has just happened and speculate what’s next.

The play without a plot is a sequence of about ten sketches held together loosely by a series of running sight gags. The music for each sketch seems organically embedded in the action. Nothing is said but much is intimated and that’s where the fun comes in for the audience.

It’s like viewing a Salvador Dali painting. Beautiful and playful visually, it often includes dark or disturbing imagery that suggests that beauty doesn’t exist in the absence of malice. The balance of fanciful and surreal is the dialectic that keeps the show from becoming a circus act. It would be impossible to convey this without Thierrée’s consummate aerial ballet and acrobatic skills.

The show, complete with puppets, has the feel of the kind of theater that tickled the fancies of medieval audiences and grew up to become cabaret entertainment in Europe. The A.R.T.’s vaunted heavy artillery - staging capacity, lighting, and sound - get whipped up into a full lather by Aurelia’s mother, Victoria Thierrée Chaplin, the last child of Charlie and Oona O’Neil Chaplin and the show's creator and director.

The entire 75-minute show is a meticulously layered mosaic of music she chose, movement and lighting she directed, and costumes she designed. With the imaginative twists Chaplin brought to a career of creating “cirques” for over thirty years, she even has a role for the lush ruby colored theater curtains, which can move to precociously conceal something from our view one moment and dance a rumba across the stage the next.

This play, running till January 3, 2009, is a lovely palliative to our plight as players on the larger stage these days, in which our financial security is disappearing just as mysteriously as some of the props on the stage of Aurelia’s Oratorio.

Photos courtesy of Boston Globe and American Repertory Theater

The Seafarer: SpeakEasy's Holiday Production

THE SEAFARER
Play by Conor McPherson
Directed by: Carmel O'Reilly.

Set, J. Michael Griggs.
Costumes, Rafael Jaen. Lights, John R. Malinowski. Sound, Benjamin Emerson.
Presented by: SpeakEasy Stage Company.
At: Boston Center for the Arts, Roberts Studio Theatre, through Dec. 13.
Tickets, $30-$50, 617-933-8600,
www.bostontheatrescene.com

Photo by Mike Lovett

The Seafarer, a new play by Conor McPherson, has been heralded as a bright ornament to decorate the pre-Christmas theater scene in Boston. Alas, the production seems like the Christmas dinner you’d eagerly anticipated but has gone awry.

There are some wonderful bits of acting but taken as a whole, it is disappointing. Set in a coastal settlement outside Dublin, the play’s themes, in time for the holidays, remind us that love and acceptance can flourish in the most inhospitable quarters. Granted, every Christmas season can use this message. Just not delivered with a sledgehammer.

The first 60-minute act takes place on Christmas Eve morning and afternoon. It is a humorously sodden sketch that introduces three of the main characters, Richard Harkin, his brother James “Sharky” Harkin, and their bumbling friend Ivan Curry. The tension between Richard, recently blinded in a drunken accident, and his younger brother, who has returned home to care for his brother, is omnipresent. The wonderfully bumbling Ivan is the buffer between Richard’s comical but edgy eccentricity and Sharky’s contained introversion.

There’s nothing new about the stereotype of boozy Irishmen with the gift of gab and an unbridled urge to hit the bottle. There are some funny scenes in Richard’s grimy living room, the house in which the brothers were raised, but it takes much too long to develop a sense of where the play is headed.

The story seems to be a morality play about redemption, good vs. evil, and self-loathing vs. self-acceptance, underscored by the entrance of Mr. Lockhart, who appears in the final minutes of the first act. It is here that the play goes off the rails with its heavy-handed portrayal of Lockhart, a devilish specter of a Christmas past for Sharky.

Playwright McPherson intends to conjure a Faustian atmosphere between Sharky and Mr. Lockhart, who appears in the Harkin’s living room some 25 years after a high stakes card game he played with Sharky. Lockhart seems to be recycling a Frank Langella impersonation of Dracula, complete with elocution and demeanor. Stage lights dim and a soundtrack emits a howl of wind and portentous music. Drama becomes melodrama.

The 75-minute second act exposition of Sharky’s past, the Harkin family’s dysfunctional nature, and the particulars of Sharky’s acquaintance with Lockhart all feel forced. The final resolution late Christmas Eve night is winsome but comes out of the woodwork.

Bill Meleady as Sharky, Bob Colonna as Richard, and Larry Coen as Ivan are high caliber talents, Ciaran Crawford as Nicky Gilbin (now living with Sharky’s former flame) and Derry Woodhouse as Mr. Lockhart complete the cast.

The most thoroughly realized performance is Larry Coen’s Ivan, who leavens the play with a brilliant running joke from one end of the play to the other.  Ivan seems to represent a certain Irish capacity to find melancholy humor in life often dominated by dysfunctional relationships and the drops of drink that keep them that way. Ivan’s cheerful nature, with its hangdog acceptance of his lot in life, will never be worn down.

Director Carmel O’Reilly’s touch with Irish themes and characters was terrific in her staging of several of Irish playwright Ronan Noone's work in the past few years. She assembled a fine cast for The Seafarer but the McPherson’s writing gives her too many shoals to navigate for us to enjoy a good theatrical voyage.

Mary's Wedding:

Mary’s Wedding
Play by Stephen Massicotte
Directed by: Meg Taintor. Lights, Erik Fox. Set, Emily Nichols.
Presented by Whistler in the Dark Theatre. At: Boston Center for the Arts

Rehearsal Hall A, through Nov. 29 www.bostontheatrescene.comPhoto courtesy of Meg Taintor

 “Mary’s Wedding” is a delight of a play. Mary’s well-to-do family from London has emigrated to the provinces in Canada in 1914. Impending war broods in Europe and young love is kindled in the countryside when Mary meets farm boy Charlie. The violent crashes of the thunderstorm outside the barn in which they meet in search of shelter foretell the explosions that will soon rock the European countryside.

The power of the play, aside from its ardent two actors, is the inventively non-linear way it unfolds. Playwright Stephen Massicotte arranges his play as carefully as one would a tea service on a tray, intentionally drops it to the floor, picks it up and rearranges it with no regard for chronology. The strategy works, Sometimes we’re not quite sure whether we’re watching real time or dream time. We are sure, however, that we’re watching love bloom in all its lurches and turns, exhilarations and doubts.

In a prelude, Charlie says, “It begins at the end and ends at the beginning, and there are some sad parts…” The play alternates between real time and Mary’s dreams recounting her meeting and courtship with Charlie. After a bit of a shaky start with Mary’s frenetic movements in the first storm sequence, the play hits its stride, both actors filling their roles with the awkward grace of youth and inexperience. The social divide between Mary and muddy Charlie washes away in successive meetings. Charlie’s behavior at the tea party to which Mary invites him is like watching a seal in its first encounter with a swimming pool - from uneasiness with the environment to comfort that it can survive in it.

Mary’s dream, on the eve of her wedding in July 1920, transports us from one side of the ocean to the other. War scenes with Mary reading Charlie’s letters are intertwined with Charlie’s acting out the scenes of men going ‘over the top’ and being mowed down like so many sheaves of wheat. Equally gut-wrenching is the naivety of boys going to war with no idea of the chaos into which they will be led. 

Photo by Meg Taintor

Charlie’s recounting of the first time he draws a bead on a German and kills him produces the same nausea in the audience as it does within Charlie. The later scene in 
which Charlie murderously rides through German lines and enjoys his kills is all you have to know about the demons war can unleash in the kindest and gentlest of men. And perhaps this is why, for so many years, veterans of the first two world wars never spoke of what they witnessed or did on those distant shores.

Mary and Charlie are on stage together for the production’s full ninety minutes. The shifts from bucolic Canada to muddy shell-shocked France are seamless. Massicotte’s writing deftly illustrates the permeability of the boundaries between of tenderness and barbarity in wartime - one minute a scene of reading a love letter while sitting in the mud, the next minute an order to fix bayonets.

Charlie’s increased conditioning toward mayhem and death growing in the same heart that dreams of marrying and fathering a family with Mary, and Mary’s devotion to the boy she senses turning into a man, are beautifully wrought and remain with you far into the night.

The whole is satisfyingly equal to the parts of this production. Samson Kohanski and Jennifer O’Connor play beautifully off one another. The hand of director Meg Tainor, lighting by Erik Fox, and spare set by Emily Nichols all contribute to writer Massicotte’s vision.

The senseless slaughter of war and the grief of love lost were real in 1920. They are no less real today. Somehow that news is easier to take in “Mary’s Dream” than in the headlines of today’s newspapers.