‘THREE SMALL IRISH MASTERPIECES’ IS A PINT-SIZED DELIGHT

Terry Donnelly, Clare O'Malley, Adam Petherbridge, David O'Hara, Colin Lane, and Jennifer McVey

HENRY EDWARDS    New York      04/11/2018

Had there not been a fervent commitment to the development of Irish literary talent in the late 19th and early 20th century that has come to be known as the Irish Literary Revival, Charlotte Moore’s Irish Repertory Theatre probably would not exist today. And if that unfortunately were the case, audiences would have been deprived of the opportunity to see the Rep’s captivating “Three Small Irish Masterpieces.”

Under Moore’s loving hand, a dedicated six-member ensemble brings to life three concise one-acts, all written between 1903 and 1907.

The first two of three, “The Pot of Broth” by William Butler Yeats (“with an assist from Lady Gregory”) and Lady Gregory’s “The Rising of the Moon” are well worth seeing, but not so-called “masterpieces.” The evening’s closer, John Millington Synge’s “Riders to the Sea,” is an Irish Literary Revival classic and often hailed as one of the finest tragedies ever written.

A bit of history:

In 1898, W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn established the Irish Literary Theatre Society during a period of great political turmoil and violence resulting from Ireland’s demand for self-government for Ireland within the United Kingdom.

As fierce nationalists – nationalism was the dominant political force in Ireland – the founders hoped to stage plays that inspired Irish patriotism and nationalism, questioned what it means to be Irish and what it means to be a nationalist, and contributed to the establishment of an independent Irish cultural identity apart from Great Britain.

Their efforts marked the launch of the Irish cultural revival that blossomed in the first decades of the 20th century.

In 1904, Yeats and Lady Gregory transformed their theatre society into Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, home to one of most significant and enduring events in contemporary theatre history, the birth of Irish drama and the world premieres of many of the most memorable plays of all time.

“Three Small Irish Masterpieces” pays tribute to their efforts.

Launching the performance in a lighthearted way, Adam Petherbridge, accompanying himself on acoustic guitar, delivers a spirited rendition of the Irish folk song, "The Beggarman's Song," about a man content to beg for his dinner every day.

It’s the perfect overture to Yeats and Lady Gregory’s early folktale, the "peasant" farce, “The Pot of Broth.”

Yeats called for plays that were serious, intellectual and abstract; this isn’t it.

In a nutshell, the brief concoction spins the humorous and cheerful tale of a nameless, exceedingly clever beggar (David O'Hara), who waltzes into a farm house he does not own with nothing but a stone in his pocket and strolls out with a cooked chicken and a bottle of whiskey.

Credulous and notoriously stingy peasant woman, Sibby Coneelly (Clare O’Malley), on the other hand, starts out with a chicken and ends up with a stone. 

O’Hara has lots of fun as the quick-witted, shameless, fast talking scam artist. O’Malley, bossy, unpleasantly class conscious and ridiculously vain, is every inch a fitting target for his shenanigans.

The Pot of Broth” is a sketch and far as sketches go, an amusing one.

In her political play, “The Rising of the Moon,” Lady Gregory creates a pair of characters that are torn between duty and patriotism and ultimately united together as Irishmen through the folklore, myths and songs which they share as a nation.

The title comes from a ballad about insurgents who lost a battle to the British during the Irish Rebellion in 1798, but vowed to keep fighting until victory was in their grasp.

John Ford’s 1957 film version set the action to 1921, when the Black and Tan War was raging, pitting Unionists, determined to keep Ireland in the British Empire, against Republicanists, determined to free the whole country from British rule.

The Ragged Man (Petherbridge), so named because of his disheveled appearance, is an escaping political prisoner with a price on his head because of his involvement in the Irish struggle for freedom.

Convinced that the escaped rebel might head to the water's edge in order to be rescued by sea, the Sergeant (Colin Lane), an Irish police officer in the service of the occupying English government, stands guard at the harbor. He is a poor family man and badly in need of the hundred-pound reward he will receive if he captures the fugitive.

The fugitive does indeed turn up disguised as a ballad singer and engages the policeman who admits, “It’s very lonesome here with nothing but the moon.”

The nationalist’s songs arouse the Sergeant’s memories of former days when, as a young man, he had sung every patriotic ballad about the liberation of Ireland. 

Struggling with his suppressed sympathies for the rebels, the Sergeant recognizes and threatens to arrest the escapee, but the Ragged Man calls on the Sergeant's love for Ireland to keep his presence secret.

The officer almost does, turn in the Ragged Man, but something holds him back, allowing him finally to muster the courage act upon his own volition and reject a social order that tells him how to act and bribes him with rewards.

Before he heads to the rescue boat that awaits him in the harbor, the grateful escapee delivers a parting reflection.

“Maybe I’ll be able to do as much for you when the small rise up and the big fall down….when we all change places at the Rising of the Moon,” he says.

Left musing alone on the moonlit wharf, the Sergeant thinks of the lost reward and wonders if he had been a great fool.

Colin Lane and Adam Petherbridge are splendid as they transform the mysterious encounter into Lady Gregory’s compelling demonstration that patriotism is the force that unites the people of a country.

Colin Lane and Adam Petherbridge

John Millington Synge, undoubtedly the greatest dramatist of the Irish Literary Revival, wrote plays of great beauty and power and “Riders to the Sea,” which concludes the bill, ranks as his best.

The highly compressed tragedy was composed in 1902 after the playwright paid four visits to the rugged Aran Islands on the west coast of Ireland.

For Irish cultural revivalists in the 1890s, the three Aran Islands lying 30 miles off the Galway coast represented the survival of an authentically Gaelic way of life that had stayed immune from Anglicization and modernity.

The islands were inhabited by poor Irish peasants with few resources, who lived in isolation from the rest of the world and earned meager livings as farmers or fishermen. Those who took to the sea braved the crashing waves of the Atlantic Ocean in tiny, frail, self-made boats constructed of tarred canvas.

It was no wonder so many widows lived on the islands.

Having lost five of her six sons to deaths on the sea, Maurya (Terry Donnelly)) is just such a widow.

The agonized mother has spent nine days in deep mourning for her fifth son, Michael, who drowned in the sea. Half-crazy with weeping and incapable of sleeping, she has paid repeated visits to the water's edge to see whether Michael's body has been washed ashore.

To her overwhelming distress, her sixth and last son, hotheaded, impractical Bartley (Petherbridge) plans to sail to Connemara to sell a horse.

Maurya begs him not to venture to the sea, telling him that the previous night she saw an omen in the sky that served as a warning.

The islanders were devout Roman Catholics, but the ancient beliefs and superstitions of Celtic paganism permeated their thinking and Maurya is a very superstitious woman.

"It's hard set we'll see surely the day you're drowned with the rest. What way will I live and the girls with me, and I an old woman looking for the grave," she cries out.

But Bartley refuses to be deterred and sets out on his way.

“He's gone now, God spare us, and well not see him again. He's gone now, and when the black night is falling I'll have no son left me in the world," laments the mother,

Chided by her daughters for sending Bartley off with an ill word, she goes after her son. In her absence, Nora and Cathleen receive clothing from the drowned corpse, a confirmation of  Michael's death. 

Maurya returns home and claims to have seen the ghost of Michael riding behind Bartley

In an epic and heartrending speech, she recalls how she has spent her entire life watching the moods of the sea, bread-giver of her family and also her worst enemy. Despite her prayers and tears, she has proved incapable of saving any of the men in her family.

Her sons, Stephen and Shawn were lost in "the great wind," her father-in-law, husband and son, Sheamus, were lost in a dark night, fourth son, Patch, drowned when his boat overturned, and Michael was drowned nine days ago. Now only Bartley is left and she had a sign that he too will be drowned if he went to the sea that day.

At that point, villagers bring in the corpse of Bartley, who has fallen off his horse into the sea and drowned.

He is laid out on a plank, and a sail cloth, the ancient ritual of the community in the face of death, placed over him. Women mourners join Maurya as she takes up the “keen,” a traditional lament for the dead.

Maurya, a tragic hero if ever there, does not wail, moan, or faint, Resigned to her cruel fate, like a true stoic, she does not complain about the cruelty of God or Destiny. Even at the time of her worst misfortune she finds consolation in the fact that now she will not have to cry or pray for another member of her family, enabling her to have undisturbed sleep during the long winter nights.

At long last, in her contest with the sea, she has been defeated, leading to her acceptance of the law of nature that everyone who is born must die, including the members of her family.

Maurya brings the play to a conclusion with one of the best known speeches in Irish drama:

"Michael has a clean burial in the far north, by the grace of the almighty God Bartley will have a fine coffin out of the white boards, and a deep grave surely. What more can we want than that? No man at all can be living forever, we must be satisfied."

Terry Donnelly delivers a towering performance in a wrenching play that really is a masterpiece.

Before the lights come up, the entire company gathers on stage and bids farewell with a heartfelt  rendition of a traditional Irish lament.

“Three Small Irish Masterpieces” takes a mere 75 minutes to perform. It literally is pint-sized – and very special.

Terry Donnelly

Irish Rep's revival of Alan Jay Lerner and Burton Lane's "On A Clear Day You Can See Forever" begins on June 15 - For More Info, VISIT: IRISH REP

 

‘MEAN GIRLS’ – SINGING, DANCING AND BACKSTABBING ON THE GREAT WHITE WAY

Erika Henningsen and company. Photo: Joan Marcus

HENRY EDWARDS - New York - 4/15/2018

When I arrived at the August Wilson Theatre to attend “Mean Girls,” Tina Fey's musical adaptation of her 2004 big-screen comedy of the same name, it was clear the crowd was there to have the time of their lives and wasn’t shy about letting you know it.

I’m hard pressed to remember another audience dressed in tees emblazoned with favorite lines of dialogue (“You Can’t Sit with Us,” “You Go, Glen Coco!” “On Wednesdays we wear pink”) before they’d seen the show.

“Mean Girls” is such a must-see it hasn’t played to an empty seat since its first pre-Broadway performance in Washington, DC, on Oct. 31.

That’s what happens when your source material is one of the exceptionally rare movies that gains in popularity year after year.

Who could have guessed the sassy and sharp 2004 movie was destined to become a lasting cultural icon—or frankly that it was remarkable in any way?

“Mean Girls,” after all, is a fairly standard teen-angst comedy that, per usual, envisions high school as a treacherous, emotionally charged, competitive jungle. The genre dates back to the similar but much darker cult classic, “Heathers,” and the sweeter-spirited John Hughes movies, not to mention TV shows like “Freaks and Geeks” and the forgotten “Square Pegs.” And of course, there’s always “Grease.”

Facebook was founded just two months before its release, enabling the nascent Buzzfeed generation eagerly to memorialize Tina Fey’s hilarious dialogue in GIF form.

Everyone has his or her time tested favorite lines and before we go any further, here are some of mine:

“Somebody wrote in that book that I’m lying about being a virgin   because I use super jumbo tampons, but I can’t help it if I’ve got a heavy flow and a wide set vagina!”

“If you’re from Africa, why are you white?”

            “Gretchen, I’m sorry I laughed at you that time you got diarrhea at Barnes & Nobles. And         I’m sorry for telling everyone about it. And I’m sorry for repeating it now.”

            “We only carry sizes one, three and five. You could try Sears.”

            “Made out with a hot dog? Oh my God that was one time!”

            “Oh my god, Danny Devito! I love your work!”

The original fans are fourteen years older and ready and willing to pay Broadway’s steep ticket prices.  But their devotion raised an overriding question for the creators of the musical: how much dare you tamper with something so beloved?

In a nutshell, the answer is not much.

Fey’s adaptation is equipped with 18 workmanlike songs composed by her husband, three-time Emmy winner Jeff Richmond, and lyricist Nell Benjamin (“Legally Blonde”), and direction and choreography by Broadway’s reining genius, highly energized two-time Tony winner Casey Nicholaw (“The Drowsy Chaperone,” “Spamalot,” “The Book of Mormon”).

While the opportunity was at hand to dish up a wealth of theatrical surprises and riotous satire, that’s not what happened. Imagination has been replaced by slickness, resulting in a show that’s very entertaining, but hard to remember.

 Fey’s book closely follows the script of the original film with updates primarily designed to utilize social media (smartphones, selfies, Instagram) which did not exist in 2004.

That is clear from the minute you take your seat and come face to face with the dazzling onstage video wallpaper of annotated yearbook photographs representing the title characters’ “burn book” of rumors, stories, and gossip about their fellow classmates.

Cruel phrases that only can spring to life in the feverish mind of a mean girl adorn the class portraits, and they are very funny.

 My favorite? “Only made the team because his mother slept with the coach.”

The show begins with two students at microphones welcoming us to high school. We’re incoming freshmen, and know-it-all worldly seniors, Janis (Barrett Wilbert Weed) and Damian (Grey Henson), step forward to serve as our guides.

Punkish disaffected art nerd Janis and quick witted “almost too gay to function” (and gayer than ever in this version) Damian are teen misfits in the classic tradition of the misfits that inhabit virtually every high school movie (and usually portrayed by Michael Cera). Not only are they outsiders, but also proud of it.

In their opening number, "A Cautionary Tale," they inform us they plan to relate a cautionary tale about their friend Cady and “how far you would go to be popular and hot.”

The tale, says Damian, revolves around “fear and lust and pride! … Corruption and a betrayal! … And getting hit by a bus!”

Sashaying, tap dancing (and chubby) whirligig Grey Henson and deadpan Barrett Wilbert Weed are absolutely terrific from the get-go.

Scott Pask’s set consists largely of a massive wall of digital screens, providing the perfect canvas for Finn Ross and Adam Young’s breathtakingly speedy video design. In far less than the flash of an eye, their pixel art allows us to travel from a seemingly infinite series of locations, classroom, school cafeteria, classroom, gymnasium, bedroom, mall, chat room littered with tweets and Kenyan savannah, among them.

The performances and set design set the tone of the show, a blend of engagingly exaggerated stereotypes and flat, brighter than bright comic strip world.

For the benefit of anyone who has somehow missed the movie, our heroine, fresh faced, sixteen-year-old Cady Heron (fresh faced, big voiced Erika Henningsen), was raised in Kenya, home-schooled by her zoologist parents, and longs to have human friends.

To her delight, her parents have lost their funding and are moving back to suburban Chicago, allowing their daughter to transform into a typical American teen.

Upon enrolling in North Shore High School, an upper-middle-class shark tank in the Chicago suburbs, Cady is viewed an outsider and everyone ignores her. Sensing her aloneness, dedicated eccentrics Janis and Damian volunteer to be her starter friends and show her the ropes.

To the tune of the spirited “Where Do You Belong?” they introduce Cady to the school clique, oversexed band nerds, math geeks led by nerdish Mathlete captain Kevin Gnapoor (Cheech Manohar) – they are "social suicide" says Damian, jocks, and the like.

TAYLOR LOUDERMAN AS REGINA GEORGE AND THE CAST OF 'MEAN GIRLS'

Director/choreographer Nicholaw is the acknowledged master of the big Broadway musical that is celebratory and satirical with its tongue often stuck in its cheek.  His opening number, a parody of “The Lion King,” (not the most original idea), suggests a measure of confusion about whether “Mean Girls” is meant to be a somewhat tired representative of the traditional Broadway mold.  But “Where do You Belong?” and its spectacular cafeteria tray dance step shenanigans and Damian’s fearless tapping is pure joy.

“Back me up, Show Choir!” he shouts, and the cast turns Fosse, revealing Hamilton and Dear Evan Hansen T-shirts beneath their jackets or button-downs.

Nicholaw’s affection for Broadway and its particular geekiness works perfectly.

How do you top the number?

That’d when North Shore’s reigning clique, the Plastics, makes its appearance.

Don’t look at them!” Damien warns Cady as queen bee Regina (Taylor Louderman) and her minions, insecure, desperate-to-please Gretchen Wieners (Ashley Park, a delight) and dimmer-than-dim Karen Smith (Kate Rockwell, equally hilarious) take center stage.

Regina, blonde, tousle-haired, by nature a killer and (of course) lit in pink, tells one and all, she is a "massive deal. Fear me. Love me. Stand and stare at me… I am the prettiest poison you've ever seen. I never weigh more than one-fifteen."

Louderman sizzles with malicious intent as the mean girl you love to hate, Rockwell is a scream as a dimwit with a keen awareness of her empty-headedness, and Park is the perfect mix of anxiety and melancholy (“Where is my mind? Where does it end? Maybe I need to find a better friend?” she reflects).

Taking time off from their traditional exclusivity and viewing newbie Cady as the perfect plaything for her mind games, Regina condescendingly invites the newbie to sit at their cafeteria table on a probationary basis provided she adheres to the dress code.

“Take their offer,” urges Janis, who’s got an ax to grind with Regina, “and come back and tell us every stupid moron thing they said.” 

“Mean Girls” proceeds to trace Cady’s journey from tentative spy to kiss up (it turns out she has a primal desire to be popular; it seems every high school student is desperate to fit in, even by those who claim they don’t want—and even more so by those who already do).

Along the way, she falls for Regina’s ex, Aaron Samuels (a forthright Kyle Selig), who sits in front of her in calculus class. By far, math is her best subject, but that doesn’t stop her from playing dumb to get his attention. (She winds up failing math.)

"Ex-boyfriends are off-limits to friends. That's just, like, the rules of feminism," cautions Regina.

Rejecting Damian and Janis for Regina, Cady becomes a confused and corrupted very mean mean girl before eventually evolving into a chastened and mature individual capable of seeing the redeeming qualities in everyone.

Since there is little in the way of character development and the songs tend to hammer away at your consciousness, the show grows wearisome. But half way through the second act, it turns into a terrific musical that proceeds to deliver a surprisingly palatable series of life lessons about being your best real self, abandoning false values and supporting one another rather than tearing  each other down.

Cady grows up just a little, sacrifices just a little, and becomes a better person while also snagging the token hot guy at the end.

No matter their social standing, even the meanest offenders also turns out to be redeemable. Even though everyone has felt "personally victimized by Regina," most also admit to committing similar "girl-on-girl crime."

"I See Stars" brings the show to a touching conclusion without drowning it (or us) in treacle: "I see stars / You shine as bright as day / I will look out for you / We’ll light each other’s way / You’re all stars."

Nice.

“Mean Girls” is entertaining, in fact it’s often very entertaining, but not enough of it is unforgettable. A 97-minute movie has been transformed into an evening two-and-a-half hours in length, awfully long for a cartoon that gives the paying customers exactly what they want, no more, no less. 

You will love it.

ErGrey Henson, Barrett Wilbert Weed and Erika Henningsen. Photo: Joan Marcus.

“Mean Girls” is enjoying an open run at the August Wilson Theatre. For tickets, call 800-745-3000 or visit:  MEAN GIRLS ON BROADWAY