Millbrook: "Independence Day at Happy Meadows"

Laura King's sillier-by-the-moment Independence Day at Happy Meadows is playing in Millbrook, garnering plenty of laughs for its six character ensemble in a 90-minute romp. Though it could benefit from additional energetic movement, the posturing of the four geriatric women living in Happy Meadows retirement home manage to keep the action moving at a good pace.

Beset by the tedium of the retirement home, and face to face daily with recognizable personality syndromes marking advanced age, Holly [Angie Mitchell] gets a message from her ten-year-old grandson asking her to visit him on the Fourth of July; though it seems impossible, Holly and her cohorts -- spunky and outspoken Betty [Carol Majors], wheelchair bound "forgetful" Shirley [Ginger Collum], and overly polite Mary [Nancy Power] -- plan to breakout of the "home", basing their plan on the movie "The Great Escape".

Of course, there are obstacles to their plan, the most difficult is in the person of Nancy [Rae Ann Collier], the nasty and devious nurse/director of Happy Meadows, who is expecting an inspector that day who she is out to impress with the perfection of her establishment, no matter how it is actually run.

When delivery man and Nancy's sometime lover Gus [John Collier] arrives with food for a picnic Nancy has planned to influence the inspector, he gets caught up in the ladies' escape plot.

Well, there is a lot of confusion, fireworks, a can of corn, a length of rope, and other incredible comic bits that punctuate the on-stage antics; and the time passes quickly. -- The acting company [their various eccentricities and personality quirks notwithstanding] are both familiar and sympathetic. We recognize them and enjoy being in their company.

Scene changes need to be quicker to keep audience attention, but as a happy ending guarantees a temporary independence for the women, and the dialogue and characterizations so spot on, the evening spent in their company is a good one.

Wetumpka Depot: "Bright Star"

In a busy week for River Region theatres, the Wetumpka Depot opened a buoyant Bluegrass musical by Steve Martin and Edie Brickell; under the direction of Kristy Meanor and musical direction of Randy Foster, Bright Star has a cast of 19 and a terrific 7-piece orchestra (some of whom are in the cast) who transport audiences to the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina in 1945, and with flashback sequences to 1923.

Alice Murphy [Adrian Lee Borden] intrigues us at the start with "If You Knew My Story", leading to a saga of love and loss, forgiveness and reconciliation.

It's 1945 when Billy Cane [Brandtley McDonald] returns from serving in World War II to his home in the mountains where his childhood friend and would-be sweetheart Margo Crawford [Brittney Johnston] has edited several stories he has sent her and encourages him to publish them ("Bright Star"). -- He goes to Asheville where he meets Alice, the editor of The Asheville Southern Journal, who eventually gives him a chance to find his own voice as a writer. -- Reminiscing on her younger days, the play flashes back to 1923, where a budding romance between her younger self and Jimmy Ray [Alex Freeman] is thwarted by his tyrannical father Mayor Dobbs [Scott Page] who will do anything to stop their romance ("A Man's Gotta Do"), especially when Alice becomes pregnant and the Mayor forbids their marriage and insists she put her baby up for adoption.

Complications ensue as the two stories get more and more intertwined. Over the two acts, secrets are kept for good or ill, loyalties are tested, atrocities are revealed; yet love will ultimately reconcile the central characters.

Production values are all top notch:  Ms. Meanor's composite rustic set,  Cherry Jones's lovely period costumes, and Matthew Oliver's striking wigs are enhanced by Tom Salter's effectively atmospheric lighting and Jackson Dean's evocative sound design.

But it is the acting and music that carries the day. Each of the likable principal and supporting actors is gifted with a strong singing voice that interprets the lyrics and carries without amplification; and they make us care about their individual concerns. The ensemble actors in supporting roles embellish the story with important plot details and help develop the major characters' relationships. And even Mr. Page's portrayal of the heinous Mayor is admirable as the one man we are supposed to despise.

Mr. Foster's admirable on-stage orchestra playing an assortment of traditional Bluegrass instruments carries the action from moment to moment with ballads, rousing dance numbers effectively choreographed by Daniel Harms, anthems, plaintive reminiscences, and hopeful winsomeness with instrumentation that supports the actors and augments their behavior and relationships.

This production of Bright Star has all the markings of yet another hit for the Wetumpka Depot.

Cloverdale Playhouse: "Flyin' West"

The shelf-life of any play is at best uncertain, but it is no surprise that Atlanta based playwright Pearl Cleage's popular 1994 Flyin' West is marking its 25th Anniversary with several productions around the country, the latest of which opened Thursday night at The Cloverdale Playhouse; it was the country's "most produced play" shortly after its composition, and from the resounding reception it received this week, its staying power is secure.

Based on actual events during the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era, when thousands of former slaves fled the South to settle in Nicodemus, Kansas, Ms. Cleage's play is both a history lesson and an anthem to the stalwart women whose identity and strength of character reflect the Biblical Nicodemus as a model of their rebirth in casting off the bonds of slavery to secure their new-found freedom.

Flyin' West shows four Homesteading women who join forces in their attempts to overcome the social stigma of being both Black and female, with unseen whites buying up the land around them, and racial prejudices within their own family. -- Miss Leah [Georgette Norman] is a feisty matriarchal ex-slave who birthed 15 children who were all sold into slavery, and whose yarns both entertain and instruct. She is in company with three sisters: the eldest, Sophie [Kourtney Ellis] is a determined rifle-toting activist in the movement to keep her family's land secure; middle sister Fannie [Jamila Turner] tries her best to hold the family together despite inner strife, while being courted by the mild-mannered Will [La'Brandon Milbry-Tyer]; and on the arrival of pregnant youngest sister Minnie [Amy May], who makes excuses for her abusively loathsome mulatto husband Frank [Clyde Hancock], family conflicts intertwine with the challenges of surviving in the 1898 Kansas plains.

Mike Winkelman designed a minimalist multi-leveled set surrounded by a painted panorama of the Great Plains that evokes the endless possibilities awaiting a people eager to fulfill the American Dream of "freedom, equality, and opportunity" to be secured through land ownership.

Directed by local actress and director Sarah Adkins, Flyin' West takes on a profound significance for contemporary audiences. Ms. Adkins offers a slow and deliberate pace to target Ms. Cleage's themes with humor and poignancy, and effortlessly skewers the danger and hypocrisy of racist ideas and behavior both within and without the African American community.

The ensemble actors grapple with these themes in consistently nuanced performances that delineate their roles without resorting to stereotype. And there are moments that rivet audience attention because of the actors' credible connections to one another, their respect for Ms. Cleage's words and the powerful ideas they communicate about self-determination, human dignity against the odds, and even some wicked fun at resolving their problems.

ASF Fellows Touring Company: "As You Like It"

On April 23rd, a balmy evening and the 455th Birthday of William Shakespeare, audience members lounged on blankets and chairs, sipped cool drinks, and nibbled on snacks in the Garden at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival while being entertained by the ASF Fellows Touring Company's abridged version of As You Like It, one of the Bard's most popular plays.

Honed down to a mere 75-minutes, the 8-member acting ensemble gave an energetic and sometimes rambunctious entertainment that is geared to make Shakespeare accessible to young student audiences on their tour; make no mistake, this shortened version appeals to the adults and purists as well because Associate Artistic Director Greta Lambert's assured hand is fully in charge.

Ms. Lambert has been directing these shortened versions for several years, and her signature is all over this production: creative casting of eight actors to cover all the roles, adroit staging, inventive humor, the ability to connect a 400-year-old play to contemporary audiences, and most of all a respect for Shakespeare's words in her finely edited script..

After a brief purposefully written Prologue that introduces the company and the various roles they play, this As You Like It dives right in to a story about love, forgiveness, and justice. Central to the plot is Rosalind [Katrina Clark], who falls in love with Orlando [Tyshon Boone] after he defeats the wrestler Charles [Tony Pelligrino] in front of Duke Frederick [Chris Marth], and his daughter (who is also Rosalind's best friend) Celia [Sigrid Wise]. -- The Duke had usurped and banished his own brother; Orlando's brother Oliver [Eduardo Ruiz] tried to have him killed; the Duke banishes Rosalind, so she disguises herself as a man called Ganymede and together with Celia in the guise of a simple maid Aliena, and the fool Touchstone [Dane McMichael] decides to go to the Forest of Arden, where Orlando has also fled on the advice of LeBeau [Toreee Alexandre], and by coincidence the wronged Duke Senior [also Mr. Marth] also lives in pastoral comfort in company with the melancholy Jaques [Mr. Pellegrino again].

Pretty much everyone winds up in the forest, and when Orlando is caught pinning love poems to Rosalind on the trees for everyone to see, Ganymede offers to cure Orlando of his lovesickness by "impersonating" Rosalind and having him practice wooing her; and when local shepherd Silvius [Mr. Marth] is rejected by Phebe [Ms. Alexandre], and she falls desperately for Ganymede, and Touchstone falls for the lusty Audrey [Mr. Ruiz in outrageous drag], "Ganymede" tutors them all in the appropriate ways of love and courtship.

A lot to sort out in just 75 minutes, but this extraordinary ensemble of actors is up to the task, keeping plots and subplots clear, delineating each of their several roles so well that audiences could imagine a much larger cast than eight actors, maintaining Shakespeare's wit, while affording the more serious themes to come to the fore, especially Jaques' "Seven ages of man" speech. -- This talented company create a palpable chemistry on stage that infects the audience with a joyful spirit.

It is a comedy, so most everyone is happy at the end: brothers are reunited in harmony, forgiveness is given with dignity, all the couples are united in marriages, and the play ends with singing and dancing.

ASF: "Into the Breeches"

The Alabama Shakespeare Festival just added George Brant's infectiously delightful comedy-drama Into the Breeches into its repertory season. -- Our Town and Romeo and Juliet have been playing for a while, with Steel Magnolias a recent addition. -- Into the Breeches, directed assuredly by Shana Gozansky, has the six "steel magnolias" joined by two men from the Our Town cast, taking the Octagon Stage by storm and earning laugh-out-loud moments, exit applause, tearfully moving episodes, bristling indignation, and a long spontaneous standing ovation.

Set during World War II in Montgomery, AL [the location changes depending on where the play is produced] at the fictitious Oberon Theatre [Scott C. Neale created the evocative set], where Ellsworth Snow [James Judy] threatens to cancel their season of Shakespeare's Henry plays because the men are away at the war. -- Undaunted, Maggie Dalton [Greta Lambert], the wife of the absent artistic director, is determined that "the show must go on" with an all-female cast she promises to recruit and direct. When she conscripts Ellsworth's wife Winifred [Marcy McGuigan], the first battle is won; but there are a lot more obstacles in her way.

Winifred wants to help but is a terrible actor; middle-aged diva Celeste [Allison Briner Dardenne] assumes she will play the lead role of Prince Hal, though she is clearly too-long-in-the-tooth for the part; auditions day supplies only two inexperienced young women -- eager Grace [Sarah Walker Thornton] and timid June [Gracie Winchester], whose husbands are also away fighting; and the group's African American costume designer Ida [Tracy Conyer Lee] and gay stage manager Stuart [Grant Chapman] will eventually complete the rag-tag performance troupe.

The challenges of learning lines and impersonating men, and interpolating Groucho Marx into a characterization of Falstaff [a couple of hilariously funny moments that threatened to stop the show], are balanced by the pathos of the women's concern for their men in battle, and their bonds of inclusiveness in the face of racism and homophobia.

With famous English actress Glenda Jackson currently playing King Lear on Broadway at the age of 82 as a model, there should be no doubt that the women of Into the Breeches are up to the challenge. -- Brant's script affords each character specific moments of attention at which these actors shine, yet no one is the show's star; as the script dictates, we watch them develop acting skills and the self-confidence to make Shakespeare's words resonate both for the 1940s and today.

They are an ensemble of the first order, becoming the "band of brothers" made famous in Henry V's "St. Crispin's Day speech" that was used by Laurence Olivier to raise the spirits of the British during World War II, and rendered here most powerfully. We laugh with them as they learn to trust themselves and one another, we cry with them in their distressful separation from their spouses, we support them in overcoming social prejudices -- in short, we invest in their lives. And they emerge triumphant.

Into the Breeches, with its aforementioned set, stunning costumes by Olivera Gajic, effective wigs by Matthew Reeves Oliver, glorious soundscape of period songs from Pornchanok Kanchanabanca, inspired lighting by Annie Wiegand, and flawless acting, is bright and witty, often boisterously funny, and an ultimately moving piece of theatre that ought to be seen.

Theatre AUM: "Arcadia"

When Tom Stoppard wrote Arcadia in 1993, he had garnered a reputation for audacious intellectual wordplay, an amusing playfulness, and a penchant for including esoteric subjects in his comedies. Starting with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) that made him an overnight success, he continues to this day to impress theatregoers with verbal dexterity and complicated plots.

Arcadia not only has two interconnected stories alternately playing on the same set in two different time periods, it is concerned with such subjects as thermodynamics, chaos theory, landscape gardening, history, and literary scholarship. All in pursuit of figuring out how the past and the present serve to bring order out of disorder.

An ambitious undertaking for Theatre AUM. Director Mike Winkelman has a fine ensemble of actors at his disposal (AUM undergraduates, alumni, and faculty) in a production that opened on Thursday night to a large responsive audience.

The setting is a garden room in an English country estate called Sidley Park, and the time alternates between 1809 and 1995; and Stoppard centers a large table that serves both time periods where most of the action occurs.

In 1809, precocious young Thomasina Coverly [Grace Moore] is being tutored by Septimus Hodge [Jacob Holmberg], and though her insights into algebra, physics, and the natural world are far more sophisticated than her years, she is also curious about the sexual goings-on at the estate among the adults: especially Septimus and family guests -- the unsuccessful poet Ezra Chater [Tony George], his cuckolding never on-stage wife, and also unseen Lord Byron. Thomasina's stern yet flirtatious  mother Lady Croom [Alex Ricard] and her officious brother Captain Brice [Jay Russell] rule the roost so-to-speak, while bumbling gardener Richard Noakes [Cushing Phillips] convinces Lady Croom to allow him to transform the old-fashioned estate from the classical Arcadian to the then popular Gothic style. Thomasina's younger brother Augustus [Sam Penn] is a bit of a troublemaker, while manservant Jellaby [Sam Wallace] importantly is a go-between, delivering letters among the various sets of lovers.

In 1995, descendants of the 1809 Coverlys -- math student Valentine [Kodi Robertson], his younger sister Chloe [Karisn Warrington], and young brother Gus [Sam Penn again, who Stoppard has passing important props from oner time period to the next] -- host Hannah Jarvis [Brittany Vallely], a best-selling author of a book about Byron's mistress Lady Caroline Lamb, and is researching a book about the "hermit" of Sidley Park. When university professor Bernard Nightingale [Michael Krek] shows up hoping to collaborate with her, but with his own agenda; he has letters found in books that give evidence of the earlier times' characters' relationships: those letters seen earlier as delivered by Jellaby.

Lots of plot elements to keep straight, especially as so much of it hinges on the sexual relationships among the characters both past and present. No further spoilers here; there are a lot of plot twists and revelations that connect the time periods. -- And Mr. Winkelman keeps all the balls in the air with a fast paced comic delivery from his actors. This is a tight ensemble, and while the audience may be perplexed at first from Stoppard's multi-layered script, and the challenges of following his themes, the actors inform each character with precise traits that are both entertaining and impressively truthful. There are some articulation issues, but for the most part, the company tell a complex story clearly.

At two and a half hours, Arcadia makes the audience work, but the rewards are worth it.