Something From Nothing

Go! Review

Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival ends its season on a magical note with an impressive rendition of the Bard’s final play, “The Tempest.”

Bruce Cromer leads the way as Prospero, the former Duke of Milan who has been stranded on an island for 12 years, raising his daughter, Miranda, and taking control over the spirits and creatures that inhabit the island.

He uses his power to force a shipwreck that would bring those who betrayed him back in the day to his new home so that he can seek his revenge.

The rest of the cast rises to the occasion, as well. Giles Davis does amazing things with his body and voice as the monster Caliban, making him reminiscent, although in a less sneering way, as Gollum in the “Lord of the Rings” films. Chris Guthrie and Jeremy Dubin provide excellent comedic relief as the drunkards Stephano and Trinculo, and Bill Hartnett wheezes and bristles his way through as the old man Gonzalo.

Corinne Mohlenhoff, completely covered in black, uses a simple piece of ribbon to convey the spirit of Ariel, while the other spirits use puppetry and satire to carry the weight.

The CSF stage almost literally becomes the island during the production as designer Will Turbine has placed a pond — deep enough for Caliban to dive into — around a turntable, which director Drew Fracher uses with great imagination to convey the magical qualities of the story.

The magical elements, one imagines, serve as a metaphor for the magic of theater as many of the characters seem to be aware that they are in a play and address the audience directly.

It would seem there’s something for everyone in “The Tempest,” a romance, political intrigue, revenge, monsters and magic, and a clown show that includes fart jokes and an elaborate spit-take.

how to go
WHAT: “The Tempest”
WHERE: Cincinnati Shakespeare Company, 719 Race St., Cincinnati
WHEN: Through May 27
COST: $18-$24
MORE INFO: (513) 381-2273; cincyshakes.com
 

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Go! Feature 

When Karie-Lee Sutherland was first starting out as a singer, her teachers told her to listen to Rosemary Clooney.

“They said that I could learn a lot from her in terms of style, phrasing and timing,” she said. “We hear a lot about her because she’s a hometown girl, but she was also one of the greats.

“When they talk about the great singers of the 20th century, after Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald, Rosemary Clooney is right up there.”

Next week, Sutherland can show how much she learned as the director and one of the performers in “A Dash of Rosemary,” a biographical revue opening at the Showboat Majestic.

“It’s mostly a tribute,” she said. “We don’t impersonate Rosemary Clooney, but the show tells a story from her life and then follows with a song that might be in the right mood or from the right time of her life.”

Also performing are Ty Yadzinski and Leslie Jo Bissett.

Clooney was born in Maysville, Ky., then moved to Cincinnati with her family as a teenager and graduated from Western Hills High School.

When the Tony Paster Orchestra passed through town, she signed on and sang with that outfit from 1946-49. In 1951, she recorded her first and biggest hit, “Come On-a My House.”

The show includes 35 songs, including “Our Love is Here to Stay,” “Tenderly,” “Hey There” and “Sisters.”

“We save ‘Mambo Italiano’ for later in the show because it’s one of the big productions,” Sutherland said. “But with so many songs, you can think of your favorite Rosemary Clooney tune and I’m sure we’ll be doing it.”

how to go
WHAT: “A Dash of Rosemary.”
WHERE: Showboat Majestic, Cincinnati Public Landing, Cincinnati.
WHEN: May 16-June 3.
COST: $17 adults; $16 seniors/students.
MORE INFO: (513) 241-6550;
cincinnatilandmarkproductions.com.

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Heather Turner and Katie Wefer knew each other for 10 years, first at Highlands High School in Northern Kentucky, then at the University of Kentucky, but it was music that turned them into sisters.

Neither had even started playing guitar until late in their college days when unbeknownst to each other, both started learning to play at around the same time. Turner picked up an old guitar that had belonged to her grandfather and mother, while Wefer learned a few chords from a cousin on a $20 garage-sale purchase. Both were hard guitars to play and keep in tune, but something they couldn’t quite put a name to kept them going.

But it wasn’t until they both suffered heart-breaking splits with the men they presumed to marry that they latched onto each other and started playing out their sorrow.

They learned about five songs to start out, but it was the Cranberries’ “Linger” that made them discover they could harmonize, so when they’d go to a campus party together, they’d play it over and over again.

“Then all these guys who played guitar would come around and show us stuff,” Wefer said, and the learning continued.

They entered a few talent shows, and even won $100 in Austin, but it was about two years ago that they had their first big gig.

“My boyfriend’s band had a gig in Lexington and they let me play a couple of songs,” Turner said. “I started talking to the bartender and he asked me if I was in a band, and I said I was, so he booked us for a whole night.”

Although they packed the place and everyone seemed to enjoy it, they realized that they needed to work things out better — learn parts on the guitar rather than just both play the same thing.

While Wefer was on a trip to London two summers ago, Turner visited Ashville, N.C., and fell in love with a restaurant called Tupelo Honey.

“It was just one of the cutest places I’d ever been in,” she said. “They served flowers with every dish.”

And because they liked the Van Morrison song of the same name, they adopted it as the name of their developing act. They started writing music together in addition to playing the cover songs and decided to put together a band.

Things really started coming together for them last fall when they took two weeks off their day jobs to visit a friend in Dallas. They went through Memphis, took the tour of Graceland, then decided to go to Tupelo, Miss., Elvis’ hometown, to get a picture of themselves under a “Welcome to Tupelo” sign.

While doing that, a group of young men stopped and asked them if they were in a band, so they not only serenaded them under the “Welcome to Tupelo” sign and even played at a party for them that night.

“That was a great trip,” Wefer said. “When we got back, we started getting everybody together.”

With the release of a seven-song CD — two by Turner, two by Wefer and three written together — Tupelo Honey is ready to play, and plan to do a lot of it this summer.

how to go
WHAT: Tupelo Honey CD release party with guests Lauren Houston, Wojo, Kelly Thomas and The Fabulous Pickupsm and Pete Dressman.
WHERE: Southgate House, 24 E. Third St., Newport, Ky.
WHEN: 8 p.m. Saturday.
COST: $5.
MORE INFO: (859) 431-2201; southgatehouse.com.
 

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Bebe Neuwirth said she knew she was going to be a dancer even before she could dance.

“I was 5 years old when I knew, and I never considered doing anything less with my life other than dancing,” she said in a phone interview from New York. “I’ve been on stage since I was 7, dancing, because that’s where dancers belong.”

She began with ballet in her hometown of Princeton, N.J., but at age 15, she saw the original version of “Chicago” on Broadway and was taken with Bob Fosse’s choreography.

That changed her focus.

“I decided then that I wanted to dance on Broadway and to do Bob Fosse shows,” she said. “I recognized the choreography as something that lived inside me.”

Not only has she lived out her dream, but she’s done it twice over, having performed both lead female roles in “Chicago,” a Tony-winning turn as Velma Kelly in the 1996 revival using the original Fosse choreography and later as the hapless gold-digger Roxie Hart for the 10th anniversary of the revival.

“It was a very exciting, very interesting experience,” she said, but not as unusual an undertaking as it seems on the surface. “Understudies do it all the time.”

Her film credits include “Liberty Heights,” “Summer of Sam,” “Celebrity,” “Jumanji,” “Green Card,” “The Paint Job,” “Bugsy” and “Tadpole.t for the 10th anniversary of the revival.

She also received a Tony Award for her role as Nickie in “Sweet Charity,” and has performed on Broadway in “Fosse,” “Damn Yankees,” “Dancin’,” “Little Me” and “A Chorus Line.”

On television she is well known for her role as Lilith Sternin on “Cheers,” for which she won two Emmy Awards. ”

She’ll revive some of the songs from “Chicago” this weekend as Neuwirth performs with Erich Kunzel and the Cincinnati Pops,, where a fair dose of John Kander and Fred Ebb — composers of “Cabaret,” which she’s never performed in (yet) as well as “Chicago” — along with a slection of songs by Kurt Weill and Kander.

“It’s all music that I love,” she said. “They are all great songs for different reasons and they hang together very well.”

She said that outside of the context of the show the song has been written for, each song has a story of its own.

“In addition to the narrative thread, there’s an emotional thread that can link the songs, not necessarily literally, but in some kind of emotional way.

“So I’m not telling the story of ‘Chicago’ (in concert), but exploring how the songs speak to each other,” she said. “It’s interesting, for instance, to sing ‘Razzle Dazzle’ and then ‘Class’ right after it.

“The show is exquisite and the songs are so brilliant they can live even outside the show.”

 
how to go
WHAT: Bebe Neuwirth with the Cincinnati Pops.
WHERE: Music Hall, 1241 Elm St., Cincinnati.
WHEN: 8 p.m. tonight and Saturday; 2 p.m. Sunday.
COST: $24-$66.
MORE INFO: (513) 381-3300; CincinnatiPops.org

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Go! review

In spite of it’s brilliance, Edward Albee’s “The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?” is not a play that’s going to appeal to everyone.

First off, it’s a play about a man who falls in love with a goat and seems, on the surface at least, to honor his choice of companion. So those who are squeamish about sexual issues in general, or issues of bestiality in particular, are likely to be put off from the outset.

But in confronting Martin Gray’s love for Sylvia the goat leads us into an interesting, if unsettling, exploration of human passion.

Plus, the level of language in the dialog is Albee, a man who owns three Pulitzer Prizes, at his finest: Witty, disconcerting, sometimes hilarious and horrifying in the same mom ent.

“The Goat” begins with a vague unease as Martin, an award-winning architect about to celebrate his 50th birthday, enters the room looking for something, feeling out of sorts, distracted. His wife Stevie notices a peculiar smell about him and jokingly asks him if he’s having an affair. They put on a kind of faux-repartee in which he dramatically declares that he is having an affair with a goat, to which Stevie laughs and makes a joke about going off to the feed store.

Later, when he confesses to his best friend that he is, indeed, having an affair with a goat, we can’t help but laugh again.

The first half of the 90-minute intermissionless piece plays like that: A parlor comedy.

But the deeper the characters go to unravel Martin’s, um, affliction of affection, the darker and the less funny it becomes. In the end, we must question all of our ideas and attitudes about love and sex, and that is more to the point than a defense of bestiality.

Brian Isaac Phillips turns in one of his finest performances as Martin. Even though he is at least 15 years younger than the character he portrays, it doesn’t matter. He plays the right notes and helps us understand the conflict and the commitment that Martin has for his affection.

Likewise, Amy Warner as Stevie and Chris Conner as their gay son, Billy, portray a realistic horror as they try to understand how a man who loves them could also have a sexual and romantic attachment to an animal.

New Stage Collective deserves kudos for having the courage to stage such a controversial and important work (although Albee didn’t get the Pulitzer for this, it did receive the Tony Award for best new play in 2000) to open its new home on Main Street.

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