The Little Mermaid is a Visual Treat at The Ordway

The Little Mermaid is a musical based on the 1989 Disney animated film of the same name. When the animated film came out it ushered in a second golden age of animation for Walt Disney Studios which had been floundering for over a decade. It also introduced the the musical form to a new generation, suddenly there was an animated film that had great songs. It was like a Broadway musical, but in animated form. It’s no surprise that it would be adapted into a Broadway musical years later. The strange thing is that Universal turned Wicked into a two part movie the first part running as long as the stage musical, and it works great. Disney has taken the reverse route and turned an 83 minute film into a two and a half hour stage musical, and it’s too much. The show would be really good at 90 minutes, and would be perfect for it’s target audience. At well over two hours even without the intermission time, it’s padded with songs that just are nowhere near as good as the originals by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman. Am I saying skip it? No I’m not, I just want you to go in with the correct expectations. What works, works great. Those original songs are still great. And the production design, specifically all of the stage magic employed to create a world under the sea is fantastic. You will believe a Mermaid can fly.

The cast is game, they are doing their best to sell those new songs. Leianna Weaver as Ariel has a wonderful voice, which is a good thing given that the Prince has fallen in love with the voice. My other favorite in the cast was Dana Orange as the crab Sebastian, partly because my two favorite songs from the show are “Under the Sea” and “Kiss the Girl”, which are very Sebastian centric. Orange captures that calypso voice I loved from the film perfectly. By the way, if you don’t know the plot of The Little Mermaid by now, and need a synopsis to help you decide whether or not to go. This isn’t the show for you. If you loved the movie and those songs, you’ll have a really nice time with this. I attended with a ten year old girl and a twelve year old boy, neither of whom had seen the movie, and they both enjoyed it, the young lady more than the young man, but it still elicited a thumbs up from both. So take your kids they will be amazed at all of the visual tricks and special effects. But this doesn’t transcend and become a crossover show. This is not The Lion King. But hats off to the design team and cast for making it worth the extended run time.

The Little Mermaid runs through December 29th at The Ordway Center for Performing Arts in St. Paul. For More information and to purchase tickets go to https://ordway.org/events/disneys-little-mermaid/

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The Best Christmas Pageant Ever! Is a Great Holiday Show For Families at Park Square Theatre

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever! may not be all that, but it’s pretty good, and for about three minutes towards the end it achieves greatness. Those three minutes alone are worth the time and price of admission. You’ll know when the moment is if you go because a character will tell another that someone is crying. Which is when I realized I was as well. The moment belongs to River Clementson and is so unexpected that it felt like a Christmas miracle. In what is a fairly entertaining if slightly underwritten comedy from playwright Barbara Robinson, there is a moment of clarity and beauty. I’m not sure where Miss Clementson came from but I’m excited to see where she goes from here. The story is about the staging of the annual church Christmas Pageant, only this year the woman who usually runs it is in the hospital. It’s up to Gabe Bradley, one of the fathers of the narrator of the story, young Beth Bradley, to take over the Christmas Pageant. It’s the same every year so it should be impossible to mess up and it would be, except for the Herdman kids. Six kids who have never been to church and have a reputation around town that would make Scut Farkus and Grover Dill run for cover. They get the idea that they want to be in the pageant, chaos and humor insue.

One thing that is special about this production is that of the 21 cast members there are only 3 adults. Don’t let that scare you, this isn’t like going to the Christmas Pageant at church. While yes, the acting ability is uneven, the vast majority are quite good, and no one is bad. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a Christmas Pageant, I have, I’d almost forgotten that until I saw this show. I think I was a Shepard, but I may have just been a donkey, still I’d rather be a donkey than an elephant any day and twice on Sunday. If you’ve ever been in one or had to sit through one, you’ll know they are, more or less, the same. You’ll probably also mirror the sentiment of one of the fathers in the show who is always asking if they have to go to it. Thankfully that is a joke in the show but not the reality of this show. Typically, I try not review the performances of children, so aside from singling out River Clementson’s show stealing performance, I’ll restrict myself to the adults. Berto Borroto plays Gabe and Nathan Tylutki plays his husband Ned. While the roles are not written incredibly deep they bring to it a casual, give and take that feels genuine. Beth Gilleland plays basically all of the other adult roles, most of them Church ladies talking on the phone. She does a nice job changing voices and carrying on conversations with herself. I’m glad they went the route of just having one actor play all those roles, it added a nice sprinkling of humor.

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever! runs through December 22nd at Park Square Theatre. A great family show it runs a little under 80 minutes with no intermission. For more information and to purchase tickets go to https://bit.ly/49ITRAZ

Clue is Suspiciously Familiar But Devilishly Fun Running Through March 3rd At the Orpheum.

The Cast of Clue Photo by Evan Zimmerman

Any self respecting mystery fan matched their wits against their friends and family growing up over Parker Brothers Clue board game, I am no exception. Having grown up in the 80’s I saw the film version in the theater when it came out in 1985. With a mystery I generally try and askew any research so as not to be inadvertently tipped off to any of the surprises in store. I took the advertising “A New Comedy” at face value, I was shocked, not by the solution to the murders but upon realizing early on that I’d seen this script performed out at Lakeshore Players, which is a community theater company in White Bear Lake, two years ago. So if you’ve seen a stage play version of Clue previously, this is probably that script. You may be wondering if you should see this production if you’ve seen others. Well that would depend on how much you enjoyed the other production. I gave the Lakeshore Players production a positive review, this production dwarfs that one in every possible way. So if you haven’t seen a production of Clue before, or did and really enjoyed it, I’d enthusiastically recommend this one. The two primary reasons are the cast and the production design, both of which are of the highest calibre. Yes, this is probably the kind of show that elicits a review full of Dad jokes and silly word play, you’ve been warned.

I don’t really want to take a stab at running down the entire plot of the show, it is based on the 1985 film, and follows that plot more or less as I recall. For those who haven’t seen the film the set up is a dark and stormy night in a secluded mansion near a washed out bridge, six strangers are invited to dinner. The guests are each given a code name and told not to reveal their true identities. They have been gathered by Mr. Boddy who has been blackmailing each of the guests and now has gathered them together for an unknown reason, dinner is served, murder and mayhem follow in the study over coffee and brandy. This isn’t really a traditional whodunnit so much as a straight up comedy set among the trappings of the mystery genre. The scripts authorial lineage is almost a joke in itself, based on the screenplay by Jonathan Lynn, written by Sandy Rustin with additional material by Hunter Foster and Eric Price, based on the Paramount Pictures motion picture, based on the Hasbro board game Clue. Which of course at the time when the film was made, it was actually the Parker Brothers board game Clue, as Hasbro didn’t purchase Parker Brothers until the early 1990’s. Which is my way of dishing out some red herrings of my own so as not to give any more of the plot away than I have already.

Having seen the script performed before I was struck by how much the performances really affected the comedy. I thought the cast was solid out at Lakeshore in 2022 but this cast knew how to ring twice as many laughs out of the script. There isn’t a weak performance but there were a couple that really stood out as exceptional examples of physical comedy. Mark Price as the Butler Wadsworth is fantastic following in the shoes of the great Tim Curry from the film version. Price’s dry wit in the opening as he greets the guests alerts the audience from the outset to listen for double meanings and word play. His recap of what has happened so far before everyone attempts to guess the killer is a manic tour de force. John Shartzer takes the physical comedy up a notch as Mr Green, there is a scene with a chandelier that doesn’t seem like it should be physically possible. Watching Price and Shartzer square off towards the end in a series of inventive comedic touches that add laughs that simply wouldn’t exist if played by any other actors. The other element that simply cannot be matched on a smaller budget is the set design by Lee Savage. The set features rooms that open like drawers from the wings, walls that drop from the ceiling, including one with a wall safe behind a portrait that gave us an unplanned intermission when some technical difficulties arose. Important to note that Minneapolis is the launch of this National touring production, so the odd hiccup can occur as it isn’t yet the well oiled machine it will undoubtedly become. It was a short delay and oddly added to the fun of the whole evening, and the cast picked up right where they were and carried it off like pros. Assisting in bringing the whole affair to wonderful visual life was the lighting design by Ryan O’Gara which in a really fun touch included flickering the house lights at the start to emulate the lighting effects.

Clue is running through March 3rd at Hennepin Theatre Trusts Orpheum Theatre in Downtown Minneapolis as part of the 2023-2024 Bank of America Broadway on Hennepin season. It’s a great looking production filled with laughs and fun appropriate for anyone 12 and older, a great trip to theater for young teenagers as it’s got a nice blend of creativity visually and overflows with humor. For more information and to purchase tickets go to https://hennepintheatretrust.org/events/clue-orpheum-theatre-minneapolis-mn-2024/

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Hells Canyon a Horror Play With a Brain, Has World Premiere by Theater Mu at Jungle Theater in MPLS

Ryan Colbert, Becca Claire Hart, Kaitlyn Cheng, Gregory Yang Photo by Rich Ryan

Hells Canyon, the new play by Keiko Green uses the horror genre to explore race, generational trauma, and the complexity of gender and a woman’s body. The first two it deals with fairly head on, the last is more subtextual and requires the audience to think about the play, the characters, their race, and the ways in which woman have been sublimated and exploited historically. If that sounds a bit serious, reflect on the long tradition of works in genres such as Science Fiction, Horror, Westerns or any number of others, to tackle important issues through the use of entertainment and distance from their real world equivalents. Hells Canyon never loses sight that it is a Horror play, its thrilling, scary, and entertaining, all that is required from the genre. But, like the best examples of any genre it’s richer because it isn’t just about the genre trappings, getting the blood pumping and the goosebumps to break out, at its core are ideas which engage the mind as well as the emotions. This is an impressively mounted production and one that any horror fan should be sure to check out. My planned plus one for the show was my wife, when I was preparing before the show I realized it was in the horror genre, not something she really enjoys, so we erred on the side of caution and she hung back. I don’t think that was necessary, I think she could have handled it so if the themes of this sound interesting but you are not a horror person, I’d say take a chance. This is recommended for ages 16+ and I’m linking here to content Warning page from Theater Mu.

The story involves 5 friends with complex relational ties as they prepare to spend a weekend at a cabin in the woods. The cabin is near the location of the Snake River Massacre, where in 1887 seven white men murdered 34 Chinese miners for their gold, they were never prosecuted, this is a true event from history. The characters are Ariel played by Kaitlyn Cheng who is pregnant, her brother Tommy played by Gregory Yang, who is part of a band with Doug played by Ryan Colbert, Ben played by Matt Lytle, and Claire, who is also Ben’s wife played by Becca Hart. Ariel is a surrogate for Ben and Claire due to a heart condition Claire has and also used to date Doug. These are old friends who have some tensions floating around about band business and the pregnancy, when things start to happen that put a scare into the group, the underlying tensions and true feeling begin to bubble to the surface. Cheng and Colbert give the best performances as they seem grounded and natural. Hart is also very good, unfortunately her character is rather unlikeable and most likely to benefit from a mirror in which she could see her own behavior reflected back. A challenging acting bit to play the person who is trying to say the right things and seem caring but is only really concerned with herself. Lytle and Yang are OK, but there is an over the top bor vibe from their performances that keep them from feeling real, particularly in the first act of the play.

Green’s script is excellent even if a little overstuffed with ideas, there are a lot of different themes vying for attention, they all work but there is a sense it might have played a little stronger with a more focused approach. There is an epilogue which adds some shocking information and motivations for a character, but in the final analysis it feels unnecessary and robs the play of a more memorable ending. The direction from Katie Bradley excels in most elements of the production. In the tradition of the great film Director Howard Hawks Green’s use of overlapping dialogue is intended to add an element of realism to a genre work. From a performance standpoint it’s a tricky thing to do and Bradley hasn’t successfully gotten her actors to the point where they seem natural but all the key lines of dialogue are clearly conveyed. These are minimal issues and primarily only occur in that first act. Technically, Bradley handles the production with the skill of a veteran Director. This is a larger scale production with a lot of elements to bring together and she demonstrates how quickly and confidently she’s grown into the role, I’m excited to see what she Directs next, though I hope she hasn’t given up performing for good. It’s a beautifully designed set by Erik Paulson giving us a look at the entire cabin with doors and beams giving us an clear understanding of where walls are meant to be. The Projections by Peter Morrow and Ryan Stopera are effectively used to show us what is happening outside the windows of the cabin, they are used judiciously and create some truly eerie effects. Likewise the lighting design by Karin Olson and sound design by Katherine Horowitz help to make this an effective and at times genuinely scary experience.

Theater Mu’s production of Hells Canyon runs through March 17th at the Jungle Theater. For more information and to purchase tickets go to https://www.theatermu.org/hells-canyon