A look at first-run shows in a rainbow of flavors (surreal, gothic, funny, cheeky, tragic) coming to town this month
By Joe Pollack
Theatergoers know that March wasn’t a very good month for Julius Caesar—but it’s an exciting one for us. A configuration of planets, as they say in the astrology biz, or perhaps just a serendipitous meeting of the minds of local producers? A spring flood is about to inundate us with musicals and dramas that are mostly St. Louis premieres.
The big guys at the Fox have booked a dance musical, a nonspeaking version of Tim Burton’s 1990 movie Edward Scissorhands that builds on the film score by Danny Elfman. Don’t look for Johnny Depp, who attained big-screen stardom as the unhappy king of topiary. It’s another blurring of the ever-fainter line between musical theater and dance, and, like so many musicals that have become American classics, it opened in London, at Sadler’s Wells, the legendary dance theater. Meanwhile, the little guys like the Avalon Theatre Company, Joe Hanrahan’s Midnight Company and the Rep’s Studio Theatre have their own plans. Hanrahan, an imaginative actor always seeking new challenges, is onstage in a one-man show, Cul-de-Sac, a self-described “suburban Gothic” drama in which he portrays a dozen-or-so people. Another one-person show, Woman Before a Glass, comes to the Rep Studio with Glynis Bell as the legendary Peggy Guggenheim. Bell, who can often be seen on one or another of the Law & Order shows, has been at the Rep many times and recently did Woman in Hartford, Conn.
Closer Than Ever, a show that debuted off-Broadway, receives its St. Louis premiere courtesy of the Avalon Theatre Company, with Ron Gibbs directing and a cast—make that a quartet—of Michele Burdette Elmore, Larry Mabrey, Tom O’Brien and Angela Shultz. This witty musical revue actually tells a story, albeit a quiet one: how people survive middle age despite divorce, death, disappointment—and elevator music (“The Sound of Muzak”).
Then we get serious with the New Jewish Theatre’s production of Women’s Minyan, by Naomi Ragen, with 10 women in a drama that attacks religious zealotry. The play is based on the true story of a rabbi’s wife whose 12 children were forcibly taken from her by a religious court. The author says it demonstrates that “the pattern of abuse toward women emanating from the fundamentalist religious sects of all religions—all of whom profess to serve a just and compassionate God—is frighteningly similar all over the world.”
