PLAY TIME

posted by James Reel

    I heartily approve of both productions I review in the latest Tucson Weekly. And yes, I very much like the performances in She Loves Me at the UA, even though the score is, regrettably, forgettable:

    She Loves Me was the last middling success (only 303 performances--not a spectacular run) of composer Jerry Bock and lyricist Sheldon Harnick before they endeared themselves to audiences forever with Fiddler on the Roof. Now, Fiddler was an anomaly for Bock; that show was full of generously lyrical, instantly memorable songs, most of which drew explicitly from Jewish folk music. Nothing Bock wrote before or after that was nearly so compelling.
    And that includes She Loves Me, a beguiling show full of charming characters and abounding in pleasant music that does what it needs to do quite ably until the houselights come up, whereupon the melodies evaporate from your mind before you've gotten through the lobby. It's as if Bock had reached into a trunk labeled "showtunes," sprinkled them with a little paprika (the story is set in Budapest) and left it at that without putting his soul into the work.

    I even more heartily recommend the new offering at Live Theatre Workshop, even though it may start past your bedtime (curtain is at 10:30 p.m.). It’s a crisp, intense, short three-character play called Tape, and first among many good things about this production is one of the two male leads:

    Now it's official: Christopher Johnson is one of this city's finest young actors.
    Over the past few seasons, he's grown a little with each role he's taken on, and in the past year-and-a-half, he's done some remarkable, harrowing things on stage: taking on two conflicting characters in one, simultaneously, in Titus Andronicus, and playing a gay (but not camp) Jesus in Corpus Christi. Now he has his best role yet, not as flamboyant as those others, but far more real, and demanding a greater emotional range.

    Read the rest here.