Review of Altar Boyz at the Media Theatre

I didn’t need to go to church this weekend to get my religious fix. Instead of hearing a dry sermon and music struggling through creaky organ pipes, the Media Theatre’s production of Gary Adler’s and Michael Patrick Walker’s concert musical Altar Boyz spread the word of God in a fist-pumping, Bible-thumping good time (that like, totally kicked it, yo!).

Often billed as a “satirical look at both boy-bands and Christian-themed music,” the show opens on the last stop of the Altar Boyz national “Raise the Praise” tour. Here, five young singers—Matthew (Phillip Drennen), Mark (Michael Jennings Mahoney), Luke (Lee Markham), Juan (Adrian Gonzalez), and Abraham (Joey Contreras)—have descended on Media, wearing “bling for the King” and pledging to save souls through the glory of pop music.

Using the technology of the Sony Soul Sensor, a multimedia screen displays the number of audience members still burdened by sin. To bring that number down to zero, this Catholic quintet sings a message of staying pure (no matter how Mary Magdilicious she may be!), becoming the person you’re supposed to be, and living your life as a shout-out to G-O-D.

Of course, it’s silly, and I don’t know how their songs or lyrics would appeal to anyone, even true believers. But while I wouldn’t listen to the Back Street Boys for more than five minutes, the music and skits of this 90 minute performance put a smile on my face from the start.

It helps that the Media cast five incredibly talented performers, who not only each sing and harmonize beautifully, but also make Samuel Reyes constantly changing music-video choreography look easy. Even if the disciples had played music (and as the Son of God, Christ would’ve sung with perfect pitch), they wouldn’t have sounded this good. Mahoney finds his praise-voice with a rousing gospel-driven number, and late in the show, Markham drives home a weirdly entertaining rap song about Jesus’ miracles.

Their clean-cut looks outdo the Jonas Brothers, and costume designer Lauren Perigard only forgot to add the promise rings when dressing the group in super-skinny jeans and cargo pants, died t-shirts and vests, with plenty of the Lord’s bling (crosses) hanging from their necks. Adam Riggar’s set looks like the interior of a metallic cathedral, with arches and faux windows peering in on the band (Samuel Heifetz’s ability to shift seamlessly from musical theatre to urban pop amazes), and Kelly Michelle Leight’s lighting accentuates the concert feel.

But don’t worry, there’s enough humor and dark elements to strip the sheen from the sugar-coated pop and Jesus-saved-my-life anecdotes. Luke munches on communion wafers while discussing his stay in a “rejuvenation center,” Mark might be gay, and Juan suffers a personal tragedy about the parent’s who abandoned him.

Peter Reynolds' direction plays every note right, maximizing enjoyment through the boys tremendous musicality, lingering just long enough on the jokes, and not heavy-handing the satire (with a skit like “Cruci-funktion,” a disco account of The Passion, he doesn’t need to). The songs are cheesy, but the performers act so sincere that when the soul meter finally counted down to zero, the audience burst into spontaneous applause. But unlike church, the relief we felt didn’t come because the sermon had ended, but because we all felt a little bit saved by the power of theatre.

Review of Oliver! at the Media Theatre

First published in Edge Philadelphia, 12-15-2008:

In addition to the pageant of George Balanchine’s "The Nutcracker," one holiday tradition dominates Philly stages each December: the theatrical cash-cow of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. But according to Media Theatre Artistic Director Jesse Cline, Lionel Bart’s musical Oliver! proves that there’s another Dickens’ story worth seeing during the holidays.

In our current economic climate, Cline’s insight hits home; even the toy sales dropped on Black Friday and shoppers left the malls without that "must-buy" item for their kids. But it’s a safe bet that no child in America would trade places with Dickens’ Oliver (Tovi Wayne) and face the dreary childhood he experienced in Victorian England. Orphaned since birth, he grows up eating nothing but gruel in a miserable orphanage run by the corrupt Mr. Bumble (Nicholas F. Saverine), a penny-pincher who sells Oliver for five pounds when the boy has the cheek to ask for another helping of food.

But his life gets no better working for a funeral director (Jim Ludovici as Mr. Sowerberry), and Oliver escapes into the clutches of The Artful Dodger (Will Porter) and Fagin (Bev Appleton), a pair that turns lonely runaways into an organized gang of pickpockets. His once chance at rescue and redemption lies in the warmth of a street-worker who befriends him (Elisa Matthews as Nancy), and the wealthy Mr. Brownlow (Stephen Bonnell), who believes that Oliver might be his grandson.

Kelly Michelle Leight’s dreary, gun-metal colored set serves as a miserable reminder of the workhouse conditions and pollution that coated London in grime during the height of the Industrial Revolution, and her harsh lighting doubly reminds of that bleak period. Costume designer Mary Ann Swords-Greene dresses the cast to reflect a divided society with which we’re too familiar, as the prim, well-kept appearance of those with position contrasts sharply against the Victorian-era underclass, who, like the chimney sweeps of that age, look perpetually covered in soot.

Policemen don’t hesitate to shoot a man on sight or even punch children in the face, and this "Oliver!" makes it clear that 100 years ago in England, society’s throwaway class suffered horribly. But rather than let the production’s atmosphere serve as the backdrop for a gripping Dickensian story of good versus evil and compassionate hope pitted against cynical greed, Cline’s lackluster staging deprives this production of energy. The chorus of ten-year-old orphans and pickpockets mostly stand around even during the uplifting numbers, and Tim Haney’s shoddy choreography doesn’t even give the adults anything interesting to do.

Cline’s staging would even had me doubt that some excitable and rambunctious 10-year-old ever existed to inspire Dickens title character, as Wayne sits or stands in almost passive acceptance of what happens to him, wondering "where is love?" in a world that offers him little kindness. This makes the production a double shame, as Oliver’s compelling story of hope becomes something dreary, rather than uplifting, and the spectacular singing seems out of place.

Saverine’s gorgeous, opera-quality singing fits right in with a cast that offers so much talent. In anyone else’s production, even these flower girls could play the female lead, and only the extraordinary Matthews, in her beautifully sung and inspired portrayal as Nancy, can outshine them. And by itself Wayne’s bright and richly colored paid for the plane ticket that brought him from California to play the title role.

So anyone looking for incredible voices can skip even the Academy of Music’s "Messiah" this year and head to Media to hear Oliver!, where the comparison to a choral work is unfortunately even more apt in the staging. But as for finding the Holiday spirit? The level of energy in the production leaves me doubting that anyone could walk out of the theatre and think of Tiny Tim saying "God bless us, every one."

Oliver!, at the Media Theatre, 104 E. State Street, Media PA, until January 4, 2009. Tickets and more information available at the theater’s website.

Review of "Miss Saigon" at the Media Theatre, published in Edge Philadelphia

People pick the worst times to fall in love. Take Chris (Christopher deProphetis), an embassy guard in Saigon. A few weeks from his redeployment home, he used to “love getting stoned and waking up with some whore,” but now he feels only disgust over the life he’s led in country. Then he meets Kim (Michelle Liu Coughlin), on the night of her first “deployment” in a brothel, and quickly falls in love—as she represents all the innocence that this do-gooder felt when he first arrived in Vietnam.

It’s bad enough when you’re forced to admit to friends, “this is the guy I met while trolling on Craigslist,” but imagine the story he’d have to tell… Such is the plot of the smash musical Miss Saigon, now in production at the Media Theater. Or rather, it would’ve been the plot, if NVC’s hadn’t overrun the embassy in 1975, forcing Chris to flee on the last helicopter, abandoning the woman now pregnant with his child.

Back in the states, Chris has (re)married—Kim believes they had wed after a village ceremony—and only returns to Southeast Asia after a visit from his old army buddy John (Jonathon Lee Iverson) informs him that he has a son, now living in Bangkok with Kim. Chris and the new wife Ellen (Jessica Edwards), though realizing that they could provide a much better life for the child in America, struggle over what to do with the child, causing some conflict, (if they had only asked themselves “What Would Angelina Do?”), before Kim preempts their decision with one of her own at the musical’s end.

My insensitive jokes aside, Miss Saigon stands as both a powerful love story, a tale of a mother’s love, and the failure of good intentions that too often lead to tragedy, set to emotionally powerful (some would say manipulatively so) music and lyrics by Claude-Michel Schonberg and Alain Boublil—the same pair that wrote Les Mis—with additional lyrics by Richard Maltby, Jr.

Under Jesse Cline’s direction, the Media’s production focuses mostly on the love story, but in what’s quickly becoming his signature style, Cline took a story of drunk, roughhousing GI’s, Vietnamese prostitutes and violent pimps, and a war ravaged country, and made it even lewder. After watching this production, I felt like I needed to take a bath.

Which is to this production’s credit, as Kim is no “hooker with a heart of gold,”—a character for whom prostitution is romanticized in everything from Madame Butterfly to Pretty Woman—but a farm girl who watched her family butchered, her village burnt to the ground, and found that her only escape from both the atrocities of war and a prearranged marriage to a violent cousin (Anton Briones) lay in (literally) prostitution. There’s nothing romantic in this—and Cline (rightly) doesn’t treat it that way. Instead, he intensifies the drama by letting her remaining innocence become the last battlement in her psyche to fall victim to this onslaught.

Cline also managed to assemble a stellar cast to sing the 30-plus songs this musical contains. As Chris, deProphetis seems chosen as much for his physique—one that equals his rich voice—and for his earnest, American-boy appeal, that he conveys well in his innocent, though bumbling manner. Coughlin adds her own charm, delighting as Kim, so long as she’s not forced to belt unendingly under Steve Ertelt’s musical direction (that also requires this of most of the cast). Moreover, she plays her role to great effect—shy and demure enough throughout that she devastates when she cries, “you don’t know what I’ve done to be here.”

But the supporting cast nearly runs away with the show. Briones gorgeous voice sparkles vocally in the darkest role, and Iverson’s and Edwards’ compelling solo numbers emotionally anchor their conflicting interests. John Haggerty’s engineer—the comedic undercurrent and embodiment of seediness—sings and entertains wildly, even if not quite nasty enough to convince that he’s capable of the violence that colors his daily life as a pimp.

The production values run high overall—though inconsistently in the minor details, which put Michelob Ultra bottles and German Luger pistols into a show set in 1975’s Vietnam—glitches which offset the impressive onstage appearances of a helicopter and a vintage Harley. And while Joshua Schulman’s lighting brought nightclubs, dream sequences, and gate-crashed embassies powerfully to life, the poor sound design and technical problems made the choral numbers mostly incomprehensible.

Like in Vietnam, the lengthy musical is one long set up for the events in the plot to tragically devastate Kim’s innocence at the end. Cline doesn’t ignore these political implications either—though to his credit, he touched upon this without resorting to heavy-handedness, deftly incorporating History Channel footage from that era into the songs to show the effects of a war-torn country—showing the general suffering that mirrors the individual tragedy in Kim’s story.

It’s hard to imagine a similar story today. Prostitution’s better monitored in Iraq, and more stringently enforced against in Islam, though I’m sure it won’t stop composers twenty years from competing to write the first drafts of Miss Bagdad. And while it’s tough to imagine anyone romanticizing current events in the Mideast at any time, I’m glad that this fall we had Cline’s production of Miss Saigon: a tragic, spectacularly performed story of love and devastation brought to life on the Media stage.

Review of "Pump Boys and Dinettes" at Media Theater, published in the News of Delaware County, 3-14-07

A friend and I sat at a bar one night, nursing drinks (not really) while the jukebox played mostly country music. Ever the wit, my friend remarked upon the simplicity and content of the lyrics, saying that he could easily pen a better country song; all he had to do was include references to his dog, engine blocks, life on the farm, and the girl who got away.

Well, it turns out, that in both our arrogance and condescension, we were extremely self-deluded. Country musicians really sing lyrics about catfish, farmer’s tans, drunken night fishing, and of course, the girl who got away (in this case, Dolly Parton). At least that’s what I learned at the Media Theater’s most recent production, a musical review fittingly called “Pump Boys and Dinettes.”

However, like any style of music, fantastic performers can make even the mundane memorable. And Media has assembled an incredibly talented cast of six singer-musician-actors that do just that.

The action (I can’t say plot) takes place in two spectacularly reproduced settings, a roadside diner and gas station, separated on stage by a stretch of Highway 57. Here we meet the four Pump Boys: Ed (Chris Blisset), Jim (Blake Braswell), Jackson (Seth Morgan), and LM (Brad Simmons), and the two waitresses of the title, Prudie (Sarah Gliko) and Rhetta Cupp (Meaghan Kyle).

In a series of skits and vignettes, the review follows them through the course of a day (it’s not really clear) from the introductory “Highway 57” to “Closing Time.” Along the way, we hear highlights like Simmons soulful “Serve Yourself” (with his own clever piano improvisations), Gliko’s heartfelt “The Best Man” (where she serenades a lucky audience member), and the consistently beautiful harmonizing of the four men—whether singing a capella or with the instruments (that they’re also playing). As banal as the lyrics may be (there really is a song about catfish), I couldn’t help tapping my feet, the energy of the cast was that infectious.

The show only loses the humor of what little script does exist, as director Tim Haney foregoes a straightforward presentation of the musical in favor of racier substitutions. This is most evident in how he openly plays the double entendres (“boys at the gas station can’t get enough of my pie”), and doesn’t do enough to make songs like “Farmer’s Tan” and “The Night Dolly Parton Was Almost Mine” ridiculous enough. And some of the jokes get completely lost, as in Braswell’s story of milking a cow that inadvertently ate their marijuana plants, which is glossed over in between numbers. While Blisset’s dorky gas station attendant sneaks some laughs back in, the persistent lack of humor creates a number of dead spots in the show.

Otherwise, the set, rock-concert lighting, and costumes (think shirts with names stitched on front), all contribute to a highly energetic production of a play that is not without a certain charm. If you like country music even a little, this remarkable cast will make your entire evening worthwhile, even if they are only singing about fixing a Winnebago in time to date that girl from the Woolworth’s across the way. And no, those aren’t the lyrics my friend and I wrote; we’re not quite so clever as that.