Once On This Island

Once On This Island at Knock 'Em Dead Dinner Theater is a little bit of a mixed bag of a production, but it has some wonderful song and dance numbers and tells a beautiful story. The show enters its final weekend this week.

The story is sort of like a fairy tale set on an island in the French Antilles, an island divided between the upper-class descendants of settlers on the one side and the indigenous peoples and their capricious gods on the other. It follows the tale of a young orphan girl, Ti Moune (played at different ages by Eve Angelyne Seguin Du Haime and Rachel Dickerson), who falls in love with a young male aristocrat, Daniel (Daniel Greif), and nurses him back to health after he gets in a terrible car accident on her side of the island. The gods -- Asaka, Mother of the Earth (Starla Bender); Agwe, God of Water (Scot Fetters); Erzulie, Goddess of Love (Megan Tucker); and Papa Ge, Demon of Death (Ben Clegg) -- make a wager among themselves. Erzulie bets that Ti Moune's love for Daniel will survive the long trek across land and water and even defeat death. Ti Moune makes a long journey to find Daniel again, but finds social class boundaries are sometimes harder to cross than geographic ones.

It's an untraditional narrative style for a musical. Much of the time, it's more like the cast is telling you a story than acting it out for you. And when they are acting, it's often with an equally unusual style. This is most noticeable with the characters of the gods; the four actors use a lot of caricature and broad gestures to convey who they are. But overall, it works, and the actors did a fine job telling the story.

Dickerson is the lead, and she has a pretty singing voice for some of her numbers, but in others she's awfully quiet. It seems like the part she's singing on a few of her solos is a little bit out of her range. Greif seemed to run into the same problem on some of his solos. The problem areas tended to be on romantic ballads that were a little slower to begin with, and without powerful voices behind them, the songs came off as a bit dull. Fortunately, the show had many more raucous, lively numbers. My favorite was easily "Mama Will Provide," sung by Bender, who has a powerful, energetic and gorgeous voice. I also loved the dance number during "The Ball" -- it was fast-paced, high energy and well-choreographed.

Tim Schmidt did a great job on the set. The palm trees and bright leaf cutout panels helped evoke the right mood for the show.

Knock 'Em Dead typically has some of the best-costumed shows in Boise, and most of the costumes for this show were excellent -- bright, vivid island prints and flowing fabrics for the indigenous peoples and the gods; starched white trousers setting apart the aristocrats. And then there's Papa Ge, whose wearing these same island prints, plus a black leather vest and a black cowboy hat. For reals. He looks a little like he came to the island by way of a cowboy-themed gay bar. His makeup was good, though -- it made him look deathly.

I've been a little harder on the show in my review than it deserves. It's actually a really good show. It's definitely not your run-of-the-mill musical, it's got some great numbers, and it tells a great story.

Much Ado About Nothing

I enjoyed Knock 'Em Dead's production of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. But I was a little bit disappointed by how much of it seemed to borrow from the Kenneth Branagh version. I recognized the music immediately, and after that, even though I haven't seen the movie in a while, I was sure I recognized some of the blocking, particularly in the scenes with the watchmen. I even recognized the delivery of some of the lines. I could swear Matt Hansen's mocking "M'sieur Love" was an exact replica of Branagh's own delivery of the line -- and there were a few others that seemed familiar as well. Branagh's production is a fine production, but the very fact that the instantly recognizable music from his production was used invited comparison in all other aspects of the production -- and when other factors were similar, that invited further comparison. It got to the point that when I did see something that was obviously different from my memory of the movie, it really stood out. It's kind of a shame. You see, there are some extremely talented actors in Knock 'Em Dead's production, but it seems unfair to compare them to the likes of Kenneth Branagh, Emma Thompson and Denzel Washington. (Though Steve Martin might actually come out quite favorably compared to Keanu Reeves. :) I'm such a hater.) I wish the similarities hadn't been quite so ... obvious.

It was a good production all round, though. Director Kevin Kimsey has assembled a strong ensemble. In the major roles, Becky Kimsey and Matt Hansen were strong as the quick-witted, scornful Beatrice and Benedick. Steve Martin was deliciously evil as the villain Don John. Marc Militello (who I don't think I've seen before, but who I've been assured is a KED regular) was excellent as the lovelorn Claudio, and Maggie Sierra showed great emotion as Hero, Claudio's bride-to-be. Randy Webster had the audience laughing uproariously with one of the funniest running gags Shakespeare ever penned -- "masters, remember that I am an ass; though it be not written down, yet forget not that I am an ass." Those are really the primary roles, but the rest of the 18-member cast did fine, fine work. There were a couple of nitpicky things with the acting -- for instance, Becky Kimsey tends to rush her monologues when they are angry, which definitely adds intensity but sometimes loses a little in making them easy to understand, and Andy Neill (Leonato) has a hard time seeming truly furious with Don Pedro (Jeff Thompson) and Claudio since he seems to have difficulty projecting. I reiterate -- these are nitpicky. Their performances were excellent overall.

There were a few innovative things in the production -- notably, the well-designed and versatile set pieces, which could be rearranged to form low walls, archways, and even sort of a chaise. (Kudos to set builder Tim Schmidt, who also played the friar.) Also, Kevin Kimsey had told me long ago about his plans to have the actors move throughout the audience, notably in the scenes where Beatrice and Benedick eavesdrop on their friends and relatives as they play matchmaker.
It was definitely a nice touch.

Jake's Women

Not all Neil Simon shows are The Odd Couple. As obvious as that statement may seem, don't expect anything like Oscar and Felix if you go to see Jake's Women at Knock 'Em Dead.

While it has its punchlines (I could do without the dated Ed Koch jokes, but a lot of the other lines are very witty), Jake's Women is considerably heavier than most of Simon's comedies. Sometimes it seems like it's trying too hard, and trying to be too many things. (I should be clear that that's a complaint about the script, not the production.) Jake's Women is a look inside the mind of a writer named Jake who likes to imagine conversations with the important women in his life and how he wishes they'd gone, instead of what is said in real life. His wife, his late wife, his sister, his daughter (at two ages) and his analyst all show up on stage and play out the conversations taking place in his mind. The play is also about divorce (well, separation); about letting go of a dead loved one; about trying to make someone take the place of someone you've lost; about seeing children grow up; about missing children growing up; about discovering your true self instead of letting others define you; about overcoming a disfunctional childhood; about overcoming the distance in a marriage; about gender politics; about being a writer; about trying to control other people; about not being able to pull yourself away from your work. In the end, for me, I think the multiple themes got to be just a little too much.

Perhaps what I see as thematic overkill is Simon's way of exploring himself, since the play seems to be semi-autobiographical, especially since many of Jake's faults -- specifically, being self-centered, standoffish and manipulative -- are chalked up to him being a writer. (Or that he is a writer because he is those things -- chicken/egg.) But that's another thing that annoys me about the play. The goal of most writers is not to manipulate their characters -- it's to create them and then give them as much free rein as possible. When they succeed, even they don't know how their story is going to end until they've reached the end. I guess the whole premise rings a little false to me, and part of the problem is that if you take this premise through to its logical conclusion -- if writing is just a way for writers to make the world and the people in it behave the way they want them to -- what does that say about this play? [Spoiler] The ending rings false because it makes you wonder if this is just a way to write life so he gets the girl, so she comes back to him.

The rest of the script is hard to critique, since most of the dialogue and characterization goes on in Jake's head. If a line doesn't sound natural, doesn't sound like anything anyone would ever say -- well, usually it's not meant to. Jake gives the women in his head dialogue that flatters him incessantly, or makes them sound silly and foolish so he can dismiss their opinions and rob them of power, or gives them tender, supportive, sympathetic lines when he feels like being coddled. It's effective in that it supports the structure of the play -- but it also has the effect of never allowing us to have a true view of many of the characters as real people, only as Jake wants us to see them. Jake's late wife Julie, for instance, is too perfect to be human. The one exception is Maggie, Jake's current wife -- and that's because we see actual conversations between the two of them, not just the conversations in Jake's head.

That doesn't stop the actors from making the most of their roles (full disclosure -- I know about half the people in the show). Autumn Kersey does a wonderful job differentiating the real Maggie from the one in his head, who is sometimes flattering and playing along, and later toys with his mind as Jake begins to self-destruct. Director Kevin Kimsey plays Jake, and I think his best scene was in the first act when he asks Maggie if she's had an affair -- and immediately realizes what a stupid question that was to ask.

Becky Jaynes is sweet and likeable as Julie, but later shows a powerful emotional range as she interacts with her daughter and, in Jake's imagination, tries to make up for years of parenting she missed because she died young. Leisha Cook seemed a little flighty at first as his 21-year-old daughter Molly, but she too showed a great deal of depth in the scene where she interacts with Julie.

Two actors are listed for the 12-year-old version of Molly -- Madison Squires and Tayler Flowers. I'm not sure which one I saw, but both of them are new to acting according to their biographies in the program. Whichever of them I saw, I thought she did a nice job of playing a little girl who often has to be more grown-up than her dad.

Debbie Southworth was delightful as Jake's alternately kooky and sage analyst. Allison Remley plays his sister, and her line delivery underscored the "meta" nature of the play; she's very self-aware that she is a construct of his mind playing a part he's given her to play, and she gives overly dramatic reads to some of her lines, then punctuates them with an eager, "See? This is how you should write me. You should give me more lines like these." Fonda Portales plays "that Sheila woman," a girl Jake starts seeing to try to forget Maggie; while her character is written as kind of a stereotypical ditz, Portales has some nice physical comedy bits with Kersey, which they perform well. Kevin Kimsey shows are always well blocked, and the chase scene with Kersey and Portales shows it.

Kimsey used a different colored light for each of the characters that appear in Jake's mind. During the first time this happened, I thought it was a nice visual cue -- I immediately knew something was up, and little clues in the dialogue confirmed later that the woman he was talking to wasn't in the room, but in his head. For the most part, I liked this technique, but halfway through the play the limitations of this technique become apparent: In a key conversation, the audience isn't allowed to guess if the person onstage is real and the conversation is taking place, or if it's all in Jake's head. The dialogue would have given it away soon enough, but the lighting gives it away immediately. Kimsey tends to trust his audience to get these things most of the time, so it's unfortunate that by using the colored lights -- an otherwise nice touch -- he had to tip his hand.