The two assistants to Miss Murphy as editor-in-chief are a hoot. She is not so flummoxed that she doesn’t give him a gentle shove and move on smartly.Īs Jimmy Ray Dobbs, the other half of the star-crossed lovers, Joshua Nettinga brings earnestness and authenticity to the role of a young man who is determined to do the right thing by the woman he loves, but who is also stymied by his father and social custom. Her performance as the older Alice is pretty near perfect.Īudrey Landau Townsend plays Margo, the town bookseller, and she gives a witty performance of a young woman who loves books with a passion and is flummoxed by an admirer. As the heroine, Alice Murphy, Maura Lacy does an excellent job at portraying the young, besotted Alice, as well as the college-educated, editor-in-chief of a Southern literary journal 20 years later. There are some standout performances among the cast. But the songs are sprightly and the scenes are short, so the show moves along briskly. It is so sprawling that the characters are fairly broadly drawn with not a lot of nuance given all the themes. There is parental interference, attempted murder, classism, misogyny, redemption, and forgiveness. Jumping back in forth in time from 1923-46 in North Carolina, it’s a tale about a pair of young lovers who court, have a child out of wedlock, are separated, and meet 20 years later. ‘Bright Star’ is handsomely produced, nicely sung, and there’s some excellent acting. Given that the show also has a total cast of 27, the stage is packed, which is terrific for the dance scenes. As an added treat, this run includes a nine-piece bluegrass band on stage.
It’s a big-hearted story with the music, book, and story by Steve Martin and Edie Brickell.
The Little Theatre of Alexandria’s (LTA) production of “Bright Star”‘ is a sprawling, Southern Gothic that is inspired by a true story. Sunday, Sept.Maura Lacy as Alice Murphy and Joshua Nettinga as Jimmy Ray Dobbs. There is a slightly different and quite satisfying ending to the play.ħ:25 p.m. In real life, Rothko broke his agreement and never delivered the paintings. Throughout the play, the two look at and talk about paintings the audience can’t see, but finally they hang up a blank canvas and the two of them together prime it with bright red paint in choreographed movement as a Mozart sonata plays on Rothko’s turntable. There is brilliant dialogue that will ring true to anyone who knows the history of modern art, such as the scene wherein Ken berates Rothko for his disdain to the new, young artists, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, saying that just as Rothko’s generation had been the dogs that respected and admired Matisse and Picasso but had to kill them off, Stella and his contemporaries were the new dogs that were killing off Rothko and the Abstract Expressionists. Rothko did commit suicide a decade later in 1970. As per example, at one point in the play, Rothko talks about Jackson Pollock’s suicide as a heroic act and he inadvertently slips in a word about his own pending suicide, which he quickly backtracks, insisting he didn’t say it and Ken must have misheard. They believed in and perpetuated the myth of the artist as a troubled genius. To the Abstract Expressionists, art was a baring of one’s soul. As he paces the studio making sometimes outlandish pronouncements about art and life, the audience gets a peek into the inner workings of this complex and troubled artist’s mind. Valcho portrays the artist as pompous, grandiloquent, autocratic, proud and abusive. Tuttle displays subtle acting skills as he portrays the young man’s gradual transformation from a fearful idol worshiper to a man with a mind of his own - and strong opinions about art that clash with Rothko’s ideas. The audience sees him cowering, afraid to speak, but gradually he becomes stronger, surer of himself and he confronts the volatile artist. As Tuttle-Gates portrays him, Ken is at first enamored of Rothko, a hero of the Abstract Expressionist movement. It is a tour de force for actors Christopher Valcho as the painter Mark Rothko and John Tuttle-Gates as his studio assistant, Ken, and for director Jim Patrick.Īt an hour and a half with no intermission, this verbal sparring match between Rothko and Ken takes place entirely in Rothko’s painting studio over a period of two years as the painter works on the largest commission of his career, 600 square feet of paintings for the Four Seasons Restaurant in New York. John Logan’s dramatic two-man show Red at Olympia Little Theatre is engaging, intelligent and highly intense.