Newspapers / Daily Tar Heel (Chapel … / Dec. 4, 1989, edition 1 / Page 5
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The Daily Tar HeelMonday, December 4, 19895 Sootilisht PlayMakers ushers in the season with The Nutcracker7 - O S3 w ill 'N Susanna Rinehart, right, and Lynn Passarella in 'The Nutcracker' Lab play enjoyable despite minor flaws Christmas is coming soon, but at PlayMakers Repertory Company, the holiday has already arrived, and to celebrate the season, the company is giving a wonderful gift: absolute joy. A holiday play is always a challenge, and after PlayMakers staged "A Child's Christmas in Wales" for the last two seasons, many people wondered if they could top it. They have. "The Nutcracker: A Play," which runs through Dec. 23, is a jubilant pro duction that, despite its excessiveness, is one of the most charming and heart warming plays the company has pro duced in recent memory. The story breaks away from the tra ditional ballet and provides new dra matic form to the fairy tale by E.T.A. Hoffman. The action unfolds through a party at the home of the Stahlbaums, a poor but loving family, on Christmas Eve. At the party, an adolescent girl, Marie, is surrounded by various real life elements that transform into magic beings during her later fantasy. Her godfather, Drosselmeier, supposedly a judge in a far-off land, has come for the Christmas celebration. He has brought Marie and her brother Franz a seemingly ordinary nutcracker that soon comes to life. Christian, once a gifted swordsman in the royal army, was transformed into the nutcracker by a turn of events precipitated by the evil Mouserinks. Marie, Franz and Dros selmeier, who also is a powerful magi cian, go on a quest to help Christian break his curse before midnight of Christmas, else he again turn into the doll for another hundred years. The beauty of the play lies in its ability as a fairy tale to speak to a theater filled with adults. The story itself is not particularly out of the ordi nary as far as fairy tales go. Good conquers evil, love reigns true, and everybody lives happily ever after. But in addition to its childlike appeal, the PlayMakers production has a powerful psychological richness to it. Eric Rosen Theater The underlying plot is of Marie's inner journey toward adulthood. Through the course of the play, the audience watches a child become an adult, and this is the real magic. The wizard comes into her life seeking her pure heart and gives her the capacity to love. In her quest for maturity, there is something almost tragic in her loss of innocence. The whole fantasy can be viewed as a facet of Marie's imagination. Her archetypes of Love, Courage and Evil are larger than life, and her imaginative fulfillment is beyond the realm of intel lectual reality. Her story comes from a pure heart and speaks to the heart of the adult, which comprehends beyond an intellectual level. We cheer with Marie in the hope of her fulfillment, as we remember our own need to be fulfilled. We cry at her disillusionment as we recognize our lost innocence. And we feel joy when she succeeds in finding happiness, as we are always searching for the happy ending. This play speaks to the child within us, and lets that child free for 90 minutes to run about in our own psy che. The members of the audience leave happy, refreshed and euphoric, their own senses of life affirmed. The major flaw of this production is its tendency to hit the audience on the head with the action. Specifically, there is a point in the middle of the show where evil appears to be winning. Every two seconds, something bad happens to our heroes, and every two seconds, there is an explosive blast of "melo drama music" that indicates that, in deed, what is happening is really hor rific. After five minutes of this, interest in new developments is lost. A fairy tale is going to have a happy ending, so we know that while the heroes may be having a rough time, they're going to be OK. The overkill is unnecessary. Performances are extremely good. The stakes are high and call for a height ened sense of spectacle from the actors, and, without exception, they rise to the challenge. Lynn Passarella, who plays Marie, portrays her character with enough realism to make us realize that the child is not too sweet to handle but is a real and honest human being with whom we can identify. Matthew Ryan is excellent in the role of the enchanted nutcracker. His fight scenes, especially the first, send chills down the spine. He is suitably endearing and dashingly courageous as he battles evil and wins our hearts. Drosselmeie, played by Ray Dooley, is enchanting and touching. He is the eccentric relative we all love, and he is the source of ultimate good for which we all search. Dooley mixes skill and talent in a memorable performance. Special congratulations go to Susanna Rinehart, as Mouserinks, for making us believe that a true incarna tion of evil can exist. Her physical acting is only surpassed by her vocali zations, as she shrieks and writhes in pure archetypal wickedness. Rinehart loses herself in the role, expending an enormous amount of energy that comes across fluently. The technical aspects are at an all time high for PlayMakers. The music used, except for the noted exception, is appropriate and fluent. Craig Turner's fight scenes are imaginative and breath taking, as the whole piece moves about with precise and clever choreography. The set design and effects are equally spectacular. McCay Coble's costume design is absolutely the best work she has done for the company; the fantasy wardrobe created an aura so distinct the audience applauded character entrances for their costumes. ; Director David Hammond earns a standing ovation. This play, which could have been a schmaltzy nightmare and a technical fiasco, is pure entertainment. Exams are coming, and there may be no better solution to studying Itilues than this exciting and lavish fairjjiale. After all, a story about true love; magic and happy endings may help us affirm that there is life after finals. Despite a few minor mud puddles, the Lab Theatre's production of Frank Wedekind's "Pandora's Box" is worth wading through because, in creating an atmosphere conducive to translation of the author's ideas, the theatre kept a majority of his poetry on dry ground. This wasn't a minor accomplishment, as the dialogue and images of the play that contain that poetry were not de rived from an objective reality but rather from the subjective eye of an artist who foreshadowed the expressionist and absurdist movements. For the meaning of such a play to survive, the eye of the artist must be integrated with the eye of the audience. The Lab Theatre's production, which will continue through Dec. 5 at Graham Memorial Hall, had just the sense of poetry required by such a play. The production began with a self styled invitation for symbolic interpre tation. Dressed in a fairy-like, multi colored gown, sophomore Jennifer Davis, who played Lulu (Wedekind's Pandora), performed a dreamy and seductive dance while toying with a box which she revealed to contain a globe. Music by Kate Bush also lent an ethereal quality to this poetic prologue. Contrasting slides of an adult and child female nude, lighting effects and an epilogue also helped create the oth erworldly atmosphere this expression istic play demanded. But despite special, atmospheric effects, the sounds of poetry rang most memorably from the mouth of senior Quince Marcum, who played Aiwa. The often philosophical lines of his character might have sounded queer and out of place, had not Marcum inter nalized them so thoroughly. The broken and consciously medita tive pace of his delivery, along with the brooding expressions of his face and gestures, gave his lines, which are some of the most important lines, a genuine feeling of truth and human tragedy. The greatest difficulty plaguing both the actors and the audience was the demanding necessity for each of the six actors to play several parts. Though slight changes in costume helped iden tify new characters, the changes in char acterization were often slight as well. Sophomore John Freshley seemed particularly burdened. Though he con vincingly played the principal part of Roderigo, a dim-witted womanizer and muscle man, his minor parts were less well-defined, especially his portrayal of the murderous Jack, which was more soporific than sinister. . On the other hand, sophomore Chris Patrick proved that while an actor's portrayal of several different charac ters can confuse and bore an audience when done poorly, it can also be an attention-grabber when done well. His portrayal of Cast-Piani, a sleazy pimp, was so effective with his silver-smooth speech, he seems to drip with slime. Patrick's portrayal of Bob, a 15-year-old, came off comrly because of his stomping, eye-rolling and other teenager-ish affectations. Though Wedekind described the play as a tragedy, the presentation of its heroine, Countess Geschwitz, by jun ior Kristine Watt was of pathetic rather than tragic proportion. When Lulu said the Countess once begged for a kick in the face, the audi ence believed her because Watt never D'Ann Pletcher Theater furnished them with evidence to the contrary. Her Countess was a whiny, pitiful woman with no self-pride. The pathos of Watt's Countess de tracted from any moral transcendence the audience might have experienced through the social statement attempted in the production's appended epilogue, which showed Lulu and the Countess united as lovers in the hereafter. If the production failed to fully de velop every character, it at least clearly portrayed Wedekind's modern idea that a subjective view of reality can be just as truthful as an objective view. mffiffim f I D.W.I. On Franklin Street? Still Speeding on 1-40? Rear-ended in Carrboro? Too Much Holiday Cheer? Protect your legal rights & insurance premiums Call Orrin Bobbins, Attorney at Law 968-1885 WffiEDMESHDAY WOMUM'S BASKETS AILIL VS. 1FUJKMAM 7:30 IPM (DsMnmeflnaell AmoEL iU i i-w - .m -- - - HAVE AN URGENT IB FOR CAS. i3L5 Mew Bimirs 0t J Use this coupon to J receive 1 5 on your first donation. IS You must present coupon. LS HS SERA-TEC B.0L0S1CAIS 109 V2 E. FRANKLIN ST. 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Daily Tar Heel (Chapel Hill, N.C.)
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Dec. 4, 1989, edition 1
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