BACK TO THE BOARDS

posted by James Reel

    It’s Thursday, and you know the drill: Here's your chance to peruse my punditry in the Tucson Weekly. First, there’s a review of a fascinating if flawed show at Beowulf Alley:

    Fiction, indeed, is the title of the Steven Dietz play now onstage at Beowulf Alley Theatre Company. Dietz's work usually winds up at Arizona Theatre Company, where it has always made a mixed impression. His adaptations (Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, Over the Moon) draw out the more ludicrous and melodramatic elements of the source material, and they almost seem like spoofs, but spoofs without the courage to mock. His original plays (Rocket Man, Private Eyes) are more successful, but Dietz sometimes favors cleverness over content. Make no mistake, Dietz is very clever in terms of theatrical sleight of hand, but too often, he leaves his potentially rich characters straining to break out of his complicated outlines.
    Fiction is one of his most successful efforts yet produced in Tucson, but even in this 2002 work, he sometimes lets his characters down. Michael and Linda are baby boomer intellectuals who revel in their own intelligence, wit, character flaws and cultural prejudices. ("No bond is greater," says one, "than that of ecstatically shared hatreds.") In short, they are great fun to watch, but Dietz--abetted by the otherwise spot-on director Jennifer Bazzell and actors Leanne Whitewolf Charlton and Richard Ragsdale--can't summon the fortitude to make them thoroughly loathsome.

    Give Kevin Johnson a few more years, and he'll likely produce the complete works of William Finn. In the recent past, his Arizona Onstage Productions has presented Finn's musicals Falsettoland and A New Brain. There's plenty more Finn out there, including further Falsettos material and the recent hit The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. But for now, Johnson has something more modest in mind: a mere song cycle, taking as its subjects loss and life thereafter.
    Elegies--Looking Up is the almost oxymoronic title of the set, requiring five singers and a piano but, Johnson promises, no stools and nobody dressed in black, the clichés of similar plotless musical-theater revues.
    "It's a fully staged show," Johnson insists, "a combination of a song cycle and a theater piece. There's not a direct story line, but you get to know the characters in the show, and they end up interacting in the songs."

    Ken Tesoriere would like to introduce us to some women he knows. I'm not sure that he enjoys their company, but they haunt him. They are troubled women all, and perhaps too self-aware for their own good.
    Tesoriere wants us to meet them, but he doesn't necessarily want us to help them. He just craves some company as a psychological voyeur.
    Playwright and director Tesoriere has revived Coyote Ramblers Performing Artists, last seen here in the 1990s, and his first mainstage production upon his return to Tucson is called American Album, Volume One (Women on the Verge). It's an album in the sense that these are living snapshots presented for our inspection with no commentary or context beyond what we can guess from the pictures themselves. They are three short plays, each about a woman with deep, deep problems.