REVIEWS ...
Monday, January 6, 2003
Brassy 'Dirty Blonde' dazzles onstage
By Christine Dolen
cdolen@herald.com
Mae West, that mistress of the double entendre, was illuminated for new generations when actress Claudia Shear wrote herself a great role in a dandy little play that she titled, with Westian dual meaning, Dirty Blonde.
Now it's Carbonell Award-winner Margot Moreland's turn to do the illuminating, and she does it with bawdy megawatt style in GableStage's brassy new production of Shear's play-with-music.
In tackling his theater's second musical, director Joseph Adler proves that the company's best musical Carbonell Award (and his own directing honor) for last season's James Joyce's The Dead was no fluke. Adler's best work, marked by character-defining intelligence, dramatic intensity and comedic flair, is just as effective in the right kind of musical piece as it is in the edgy dramas and dark comedies that are his trademark.
Here's one piece of evidence: Shear's play flips back and forth from the story of Jo (Moreland) and Charlie (Ian Hersey), two present-day fans obsessed with West, to scenes featuring West (Moreland again) and various lovers and/or collaborators (Hersey and David Kwiat) at different stages of a career that spanned much of the 20th Century. Adler and company keep every moment clear, true and effective.
Here's another: From Kwiat, a veteran actor and teacher at Miami's New World School of the Arts, Adler has coaxed an array of exquisitely differentiated characters (including West's oft-cuckolded husband, a stogie-smoking former fighter, a self-aggrandizing man of the theater and a wry gay pal) that add up to the strongest work the actor has ever done here.
But everyone involved in this production -- Adler, the three actors, set designer Rich Simone, costume designer Anne Toewe, lighting designer Jeff Quinn, musical director Michael J. Hoffmann and choreographer Ron Headrick -- deserves a slice of the glory for this wickedly funny, moving production.
The zaftig dyed-blonde Moreland, whose gifts as a musical theater belter can make you forget about her subtle skills as an actress, draws upon all her talents to play both the eager fan and the icon who eventually became a self-parody.
CONTROLS IMAGE
Her Jo is a woman both friendly and lonely. Her young Mae is a self-confident, proudly sexual self-promoter, a woman only too happy to flash a breast (lightning fast, yet the moment isn't tawdry) if she feels the crowd's attention waning. Moreland's elderly Mae, stooped yet resolutely (in her own mind) seductive, is amusing yet still as fiercely controlling of her life and image as ever.
Like Kwiat, Hersey runs with the chance to display his versatility. As Charlie, the fan who idolizes West and finds a kindred spirit in Jo, he's shy and vulnerable, and finally stronger as he risks everything -- for he has come to care deeply for Jo -- to reveal his secret way of connecting with the star he adores.
FLAMBOYANT MATCH
Hersey is also Kwiat's flamboyant match in a gay revue, a tough Irish lawyer who dismisses West's sad-sack spouse as easily as she does, and a vocally uncanny W.C. Fields -- when he's doing Fields in a brief scene opposite Moreland's West, it sounds as though the long-dead stars have left the spirit world for a fleeting gig at GableStage.
Set designer Simone, conquering the challenges of GableStage's wide but shallow space, provides everything from a barren vaudeville stage to the fading elegance of West's late-in-life apartment. Toewe's costumes, artful and character-revealing, give the small show added visual dazzle, especially when she provides a double dose of West as Diamond Lil.
In a movie moment evoked in the show, West famously invited a young Cary Grant to come up sometime and see her. Thanks to a terrific Dirty Blonde, we can all take her up on the invitation. And should.
Christine Dolen is The Herald's theater critic.
Wednesday, January 8, 2003
'Dirty Blonde' exuberantly entertaining
By Bill Hirschman, Staff Writer
The unbridled joy of living, especially the enjoyment of sex, was the touchstone of the carefully constructed 24/7 performance that platinum bombshell Mae West called her life.
And that evangelism overflows GableStage's exultant production of Dirty Blonde, which interlaces West's biography with its liberating effect on two modern fans. When the actors first appear on the vaudeville stage to the accompanying stride of a honky-tonk piano, the audience happily accepts their warm invitation to join the party.
Claudia Shear's script veers from shallow and distant to insightful and affecting. But any flaws are lost in the blinding incandescence of three shape-shifting actors under Joe Adler's direction.
Local veterans Margot Moreland and David Kwiat and Florida newcomer Ian Hersey provide a gallery of distinctive characters.
Moreland, who has raised the quality of more than one mediocrity with her talent, has another vehicle worthy of her. Her Mae West incarnation is solid, down to the come-hither body language and an insolent voice that purrs and meows.
Moreland's real accomplishment is depicting the vulnerability and subtle shadings of Jo, the modern fan who is gingerly feeling her way through an emerging relationship with another West devotee, Charlie.
Hersey earns the best role in the show. After turns as a tough Irish politico and a flashy song-and-dance man, his creation of Charlie, the nebbishy librarian buttoned down in a bland windbreaker, is all the more amazing for not being a caricature, but a real person whose many facets are slowly revealed.
Kwiat provides an entire cast list all by himself: a second-rate vaudevillian, a cigar-chomping Hollywood has-been and a flamboyant "companion" among others. His vitality, imagination and commitment provide a textbook in how a skilled character actor keeps a supporting role from being a second-rate one.
Shear has written some touching moments for the Jo and Charlie scenes, and if the biographical flashbacks aren't intrinsically compelling, she has sprinkled them with Mae West's still-devastating repartee, glittering humor strung like diamonds on a necklace.
"I feel like a million," she tells the audience, then puts up her hand. "But one at a time."
Or when a judge asks, "Are you trying to show contempt for this court?" she answers, "I was doin' my best to hide it."
The only stumble comes at the end when the two fans perform their heroine's routines. The two are supposed to have taken West's lessons to heart and revel in their liberation from fears that rob us of fulfilling human relationships. But they simply seem to be fans trading West's greatest hits.
Still, Dirty Blonde is an exuberantly entertaining evening.
Bill Hirschman can be reached at 954-356-4513 or bhirschman@sun-sentinel.com.
