Perry Tannenbaum - Page 8

Nearly 50 years after it first played Broadway, 1776 still confounds our drum-and-fife expectations.

Last year, when I passed up my first opportunity to see DIRTY DANCING at Belk Theater, I had this naive idea that it would be a musical adaptation of the 1987 film starring Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey. With the return of the national tour Charlotte, this time at cavernous Ovens Auditorium, I persisted in my folly long after the curtain rose. Silly me, I overlooked the fine print in my playbill under the florid romance novel italics of the DIRTY DANCING logo: 'the classic story on stage.'

With two Broadway-calibre voices hitting the hits out of the park, BEAUTIFUL THE CAROLE KING MUSICAL is pure gold

REALISH HOUSEWIVES OF CHARLOTTE takes aim at Bravo reality TV, with a disgraced local mayor as a sidedish

BOOK OF MORMON, the musical that exorcised Charlotte's Angels in America stigma, returns more energetically than ever

TWO ROOMS is more topically urgent than Lee Blessing's more familiar works, dealing with terrorism and hostage situations that still plague us 25 years after it was written, questioning the roles that our government and our press corps should play when terrorists use their captives as political pawns and bargaining chips.

Who's really good and bad in Joshua Harmon's BAD JEWS is a far more complex issue than which of the warring Feygenbaum grandchildren thinks they are

Moving around from one venue to another, indoors and out Citizens of the Universe has frequently been prone to tech glitches as they become acclimated. Fortunately, the glitches that plague NOSFERATU at Salvaged Beauty aren't nearly as debilitating as the Rocky Horror debacle earlier this year.

Prefacing his 1990 playscript for SPUNK, a musical amalgam of three saucy Zora Neale Hurston short stories, George C. Wolfe warned that there was a thin line between Zora and the minstrelsy of Amos and Andy. On Q Performing Arts director Jermaine Nakia Lee fearlessly tramples on that line, giving us the opportunity to appreciate and critically examine Hurston's understated feminism in a richly ambivalent production.

THE TRIP TO BOUNTIFUL is a rather bland tale that challenges a director to perk up the drama, which threatens to vanish once we must pull away from the close-ups on its elderly protagonist, Carrie Watts, that TV and movies so readily provide. In the current CPCC Theatre production at Pease Auditorium, Charles LaBorde has a more satisfying way with the script than Michael Wilson did in the recent Broadway revival.

Theatre Charlotte's revival of LA CAGE AUX FOLLES allows us to catch up with its true meaning as director Dennis Delamar sets his star, Steve Bryan, free to add uproarious blandishments of shtick and impersonation.

With authentic Midwest flavoring, Amy and David Sedaris, lightly satirize ascetic religious communities like the Amish and the Amanas. Then as their heroine breaks free and explores the outside world, we watch how zany and insular the people are on our side of the fence, viewed through the lens of Liz's inner purity. Directed by Glynnis O'Donoghue for Donna Scott Productions, the nuttiness of this cheese ball comedy keeps us from taking the satire too seriously.

Fighting to keep his job - and keep up his alimony - Thomas enters the arena lacking Isobel's looks and Tony's clout. To make matters worse, his two rivals have sabotaged his preparation for the big meeting with the corporate downsizer. Are you doubting Thomas has a chance?

Robert Aguirre-Sacasa's adaptation of Oscar Wilde's novel drops the original's epigrammatic wit, lovingly shaking up the story, adding violence and sex, and landing Dorian in modern-day Hollywood.