Curtain calls

1998: The year in theater

by Bill Rodriguez

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

As though awakened by the city's revitalization, this year the Providence theater scene has really come alive. With bells on. A company that had been the best Off-Trinity theater before it died has come back to life. Another such mainstay got a financial infusion and a new name. A theater that had been trying for the past two years to schedule a full slate of musical offerings finally premiered a full season. A new African-American theater postponed an announced full schedule, but not before staging a promising production that indicated next month's opening season is something to look forward to.

The late, the great 2nd Story Theatre is back! Same name, same tight directing by co-founder Pat Hegnauer. (Ed Shea, now in the Trinity Rep company, used to be her creative partner.) Now located at St. Andrew's School, in Barrington, the resurrection was fittingly heralded by a snappy production of 2^nd Story's patented evenings of Short Attention Span Theatre playlettes, each nailed like a Dominique Moceanu dismount.

Speaking of such reincarnations . . . Alias Stage is dead, long live Alias Stage -- uh, I mean long live the Sandra Feinstein-Gamm, oh hell, the SFGT. (Perhaps in the tradition of giving RI directions we can simply call it the place that used to be Alias Stage.) But it was not only the name purchase -- reportedly $100,000 -- that rejuvenated the theater. Its new co-artistic directors, actors Kate Lohman and Nigel Gore, have brought fresh energy to an already pretty vital company.

Where to start with this year's SFGT stunners? It was a director's year, which is to say a year for satisfying ensemble work. People are still talking about Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Under Lohman's direction, we all but smelled blood as the two couples battled. As the simpering Honey, Molly Lloyd was more dimensional than was Sandy Dennis in the film, just as the ever-skillful Joanne Gentille out-brayed Elizabeth Taylor, but with finesse. The air was also electric during my favorite dramatic pas de deux of the year, as a gruff Gore and a reluctantly vulnerable Jeanine Kane ended Act I of David Hare's Skylight with a quietly stunning reconciliation. And as with the previous year's perfectly cast Hamlet at Alias, with Anthony Estrella, so too the formidable Lear, with Sam Babbit was pitch-perfect. Both were directed by Trinity's Fred Sullivan.

From Trinity Repertory Company we expect the best, and this time around they delivered the goods as usual. Fred Sullivan Jr. was their man of the year, what with his raucous title roles in Peer Gynt and The Music Man. But certainly the production of the year was Saint Joan, dynamically and inventively directed by Amanda Dehnert, Oskar Eustis protégé and rising star. From Jennifer Mudge Tucker as Joan to Trinity regulars in multiple roles, Dehnert pulled some of the best work in memory out of the entire ensemble.

Theater at Brown University, both main season and summer, customarily impresses. Standout performances included a captivating Shana Harvey as the brightly malevolent Mrs. Lovett in Stephen Sondheim's macabre Sweeney Todd, and McCaleb Burnett in The Glass Menagerie. In the latter, director John Warren refreshed a stalwart classic, and Burnett accomplished a tiny miracle: he turned the Gentleman Caller, who usually comes across as a puffed-up simpleton, into the earnest and damaged naïf that Tennessee Williams intended.

Another old war-horse, Molière's The Miser, galloped out to hilarious effect at URI Theatre, whipped to a lather by director Anne Brady. But the hit of the year there was the recent production of The Wiz, with the magnificent voice of Angela Williams powering a sassy cast directed by Paula McGlasson.

Every theater had at least one production with the kind of staying power that keeps it talked about at year's end.

At Perishable Theatre it was One Flea Spare, the London hit by Naomi Wallace that drew on that city's plague years for menace and arc. Under Rebecca Patterson's direction, Elizabeth Ricardo was riveting as the 12-year-old survivor and keen-eyed narrator. At NewGate Theatre it was The Servant of Two Masters, the 18^th-century Italian farce that new artistic director Brien Lang directed with three-ring-circus intensity. One particular delight was an amorous aspirant, the character Silvio, that Terrence Shea propelled so over the top that it never came down to earth again.

Down in South County, Grease was the highlight of the summer Theatre-By-the-Sea season, with great puppy-dog chemistry between Sandy and Danny, played by off-stage couple Sarah Uriarte Berry and Michael Berry. Farther south, Ricardo Pitts-Wiley found nuance as well as rage as the murderous moor in Othello. And up the street, Colonial Theatre mainstay Nikki Bruno gave the performance of her career in Driving Miss Daisy, in the masterful accomplishment of bonding dread to fury.

Touring shows are in their own category, and in a year of choice visits that included The Phantom of the Opera and Rent, my personal best time was with Camelot. Between a voice as comforting as a velvet Barcalounger and a charm as sincere as Aunt Em, Robert Goulet's King Arthur earned my fealty.

And I certainly don't want to forget a couple of terrific independent productions. Anne Mulhall's Relatively Speaking, which she staged in full at Perishable and abridged at SFGT, was a hoot. Mulhall brazenly channeled eight disparate characters, but went for the humanity beneath their quirky or obnoxious fronts. In another one-person show, Marilyn Meardon wrote and performed In Her Own Words, touring libraries around the state as Queen Elizabeth I. Fascinating. Even in the follow-up questions from the audiences, Meardon stayed in vivid and contentious character, as imposing as a Tudor fortress.

Imposing increasingly describes our theater scene on the whole. Local audiences are expecting and certainly are getting a lot of talent and professionalism for their ticket prices these days.