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| Photo by T. Charles Erickson |
| Kyle Fabel (Lavretsky) and Suzy Kohane (Liza) in the Guthrie Theater's production of The Primrose Path. |
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| Photo by Ariana Smart Truman |
| The company of Fondly, Collette Richland. |
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| Photo by Dan Norman |
| Brandon Brooks and Autumn Ness. |
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| Photo by Mathieu Lindquist |
| Zach Morgan |
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| Photo by Aaron Fenster |
| Stephen Yoakam as The Poet. |
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| Image courtesy the Producing House |
VH1's Pop-Up Videos was first broadcast in 1996 -- ancient history in pop-culture terms. So it does seem like the latest offering from the Producing House is a bit behind the curve. Then again, the VH1 show got a revival in 2011, so perhaps this production is just catching the nostalgia wave.
Just like its TV ancestor, Pop Up Musical presents hits mixed in with bits of trivia about the tune, the composers, and the singers. In this case, the songs are drawn from the Broadway songbook. The performers are talented locals. And the "pop ups" are decidedly low-tech: just cardstock signs held up by singers during each of the songs.
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| Photo courtesy the Old Log Theater |
For their latest effort, the Moving Company mined a rich storytelling vein: fairy tales. In the end, they weren't interested in retelling a single story, but instead grabbed characters and situations from different tales and put them into a sort of theatrical blender.
Nathan Keepers and Christina Baldwin Photo by Dominique Serrand
Out of the Pan into the Fire features the four core members of the Moving Company: co-artistic director Steven Epp and Dominique Serrand and artistic associates Nathan Keepers and Christina Baldwin. Epp and Serrand were longtime members of Theatre de la Jeune Lune, and Keepers and Baldwin worked with the company many times before it folded in 2008.
For years, actor and director Roger Rees has loved Ivan Turgenev's second novel, even though it never was all that popular outside of Russia. One issue? An awkward title that translates, at best, as "Home of the Gentry."
L-R: Roger Rees (photo by Tom Bloom), image from a promo poster, and Crispin Whittell (photo by Mike Habermann)
So when Rees teamed up with playwright Crispen Whittell to adapt the novel, they knew they needed a new title. Enter Shakespeare, and The Primrose Path.
"It is there in the 'Scottish Play' and Hamlet. It's about attractive ideas that very often lead to misery. It is a very apt title for the play. Things that look fancy may not be so good. If you eat a big piece of cake, you'll get fat," Rees says.
Lauren B. Photography Garry Geiken as James Beard, the culinary maestro
Like James Beard, the sole character in James Still's play, I love to eat. I also love to cook -- that was forged by my chef father and a childhood spent experimenting in the kitchen. I cooked my way through high school and college, and made more money in restaurants than I did at my first couple of newspaper jobs.
So I'm definitely in the market for a play about Beard, especially as his no-nonsense, "food for the people" cooking aesthetic closely matches my own. And the moments in Still's play that focus on Beard's own love affair with food are engaging and delightful. Sadly, those get muddled with a lot of extra material that may tell us more about the character, but don't show us what really made him tick.
Related stories:
Garry Geiken on playing James Beard: "I learned how progressive his ideas about people and their relationship to food was."
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