Nightly Sings the Staring Owl

The Scottish Play Chills the Boards at MLT
The Murfreesboro Little Theatre was last month home to the Shakespearean classic Macbeth. Directed by Dalton Reeves, the show was haunting, surreal and visceral. The combination was engaging and effective in spite of a few rough edges.

As this production was delivered in the round and in a black-box style with minimal set, the audience’s focus was never distracted from the performers themselves. Heightening this connection was the incredible intimacy of the venue; the actors often stood mere inches from the audience before whom they performed. The result was an intense, character-driven experience that highlighted well the pathos of the tragedy.

Andy Ford led the cast as the titular Scottish nobleman. His dominating presence filled the venue as he, with aid of Amy McManus’s Lady Macbeth, schemed for power and deceived his peers. Though these actors’ chemistry was occasionally tenuous, the two played well against each other; McManus’s steely resolve was an apt foil for Ford’s excessively overwrought performance.

The several noblemen who people this classic drama were eloquently represented by actors both veteran and new. Malcom and Macduff, portrayed by Jack Ryan Denny and Shane Lowery respectively, gave incredible heart to the performance. Lowery, in particular, delivered a most passionate and memorable turn; this was without doubt the most impressive performance I have seen from him. Also haunting were director Dalton Reeves as Banquo and Nathaniel Hooper as Fleance; the horror of Banquo’s death was a palpable blow to the audience. One also could not but be disturbed—to a previously unimagined degree—by the riveting performance of Wayman Price as the Porter; his villainous ruffian was most memorable for his ability to makes one’s skin wish to crawl off and die in one of the dim corners of the theater.

No performance of Macbeth would be complete without its famous Weird Sisters. Here the trio of Danielle Araujo, Patricia Hicks and Patti Long-Lee were splendid. They were constantly disconcerting and eerie, and their singularly white costumes created a unique and creative distinction from the remainder of the cast, all clad in solid black.

The costumes, lights and set combined to separate the world of this Macbeth from any known or established time or place. The tale seemed to exist in its own netherworld. This was, unfortunately, the one distraction of the production. As Shakespearean drama are often set in innovative locales and periods, the ambition with such non-traditional selections is to highlight either thematic elements or the characters’ relationships. In this production, however, the void in which the play was rendered specifically failed in that purpose as it provided to specific context to deepen the symbolism of Shakespeare’s play.

Overall, Macbeth was a modest success. The passionate performances elevated the show’s lacking concept to unanticipated heights. Dalton Reeves is a young director who should be followed with interest; one could easily expect great things in his future.

Ansley Adcock as Annie

Orphans Occupy the Center for the Arts
In an apparently continuing effort to force me to revisit my childhood of 1980s films, the beloved musical Annie wowed packed houses at the Center for the Arts last month. Though the production was hit-or-miss, the two casts of orphans—their direction an Herculean task embraced by Michael McGee—were adorable and splendid. The audience was universally uplifted by this production.

Riveting in her turn as the world’s most famous orphan, Ansley Adcock was beyond endearing in her performance. In addition to a spectacular vocal performance—her performances of “Maybe” and “Tomorrow” were simultaneously heart-rending and joyous—her emotions were nuanced and indicated a burgeoning talent beyond her years. In the opening scenes with her fellow orphans, Adcock and her fellow actors convinced the audience that there were years of shared history between these characters. Most memorable were Lydia McLaurin as the bully Pepper and Emma Wayne as the orphan ingénue Molly; both were fantastic and funny in their performances. When the orphans united for “Hard Knock Life,” the feelings of elation amongst the audience were irrepressible.

In a vivacious effort to endear themselves to the audience as much as their young counterparts, the adult performers were equally memorable. Chris McLaurin was splendid as Oliver “Daddy” Warbucks; watching his gruff demeanor melt away under the noodling of a precocious redhead was undeniably winsome. This was especially true with his performance of “Something Was Missing,” one of the musical’s less well-known numbers, when Chris’s beautiful voice and deeply emotive performance wowed the packed house. Further, his performance melded nicely with that of Donna Driver, who played Warbucks’s secretary Grace Farrell. It was regretful, however, that the subplot of this couple’s burgeoning romance was completely ignored in this production. As a result, there was a emotional resonance that was distinctly lacking.

As foils to all of Chris’s and Driver’s beneficent ambitions, the villainous trio of Miss Hannigan, her brother Rooster and his dame-of-the-day Lily St. Regis were spectacular. Leading the charge as the malevolent head of the orphanage, Sherry Sunday Booth was remarkable as Miss Hannigan. Her rendition of “Little Girls” was side-splitting, and the image of a distraught and overworked public servant —granted, one with a severely impaired attitude, even for the Depression—sullenly banging the head of a doll against her desk had me laughing for weeks. The miscreant duo of Rooster and Lily, played respectively by Kevin Driver and Edy Wilson, was also delightful and engaging, and when these three actors combined for “Easy Street,” the audience was swept up with their contagious abandon.

Unfortunately, while the lead performers in the production were fantastic, the adult ensemble seemed a bit adrift and uncertain. It felt as though they had simply been given insufficient direction to understand their roles in the performance. Individual moments of brilliance aside, such as Josh Ball’s scene as a ventriloquist’s dummy, the combined effort failed to rise to level of the lead actors. Perhaps doubling the number of orphans in the production—admittedly, an understandable decision in terms of community participation and ticket sales—did not allow sufficient time to round some of the harsher edges of the production. Nevertheless, with a classic like Annie, no one could leave without a smile, which is to say that everyone was indeed fully dressed.