Saturday Night in Park Slope: Piper Theatre presents "The Island of Doctor Moreau" outdoors at the Old Stone House in Washington Park

Tonight we were mesmerized by a stunning performance of an innovative, visceral, and commanding adaptation of H.G. Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau conceived and executed by the amazing Piper Theatre outside the Old Stone House in Park Slope's Washington Park.

Frankly, a novel like Wells' Doctor Moreau is extremely difficult to adapt successfully to the stage. Its fast-moving plot probably works a lot better on the screen.

 

 Last season we saw a not entirely successfully outdoor production of an adaptation of Wells' War of the Worlds, which both tried to update the century-old fiction and follow too much of literally But Wells' material was handled much more astutely here.

Piper Theatre's highly stylized adaptation avoids both of those problems, freely turning what is both an early work of science fiction -- of the mad scientist/technology run amok variety -- and a sophisticated novel of ideas and passions -- into more a general "work of the theater" than a "play."

Indeed, the choreography involved in this production -- so expertly timed and astoundingly apt to the actions depicted --

made it all the more impressive when director and Piper Theatre artistic director John P. McEneny (Mollie Lief was assistant director on this play as well as the wonderful Xanadu) came on after the show and curtain call, on this, the last night of the troupe's public performances here, and mentioned that there had been only nine rehearsals. Wow, we thought, the cast is even more impressive than we thought.

The credits read only "devised and directed by the Piper Collaborative" and then list, in alphabetical order: Chris Cariker, Vasile Flutur, Zoë Frazer, Nicholas Guastella, Mollie Lief, Matthew Luceno, John P. McEneny, Aaron Novak, Lucas Syed, Chinaza Uche.

The story was narrated pretty much by the book's narrator, Pendrick, an upper-class shipwrecked scientist who, rescued by an alcoholic physician, Montgomery, comes upon the island of the title, where Dr. Moreau practices vivisection and creates horrific half-human, half-animal hybrids.

But at least three of the six performers took the role of Prendrick, passing it off expertly, as the character addresses the audience, using some of the Wells' narrative, modified and tightened.

The pivotal role of Stevenson, the weak but sympathetic doctor who brings Prendrick to Dr. Moreau's island, was played consistently by Chinaza Uche, who managed to create a coherent character.

Yet although Prendrick was played by several actors, including the wonderful actress Zoë Frazer, there was a consistent "voice" in his character as well as the narrative. And the handoffs between the actors were as close to seamless as possible in this kind of production.

We wish we had a more specific guide as to which actors played each parts -- the role of Dr. Moreau was played consistently, we think, by an actor who managed to be chilling, charismatic, and at least half-crazy.

And we think it was Lucas Syed who not only provided the crucial musical accompaniment but also offered narrative as a full member of the ensemble.

But what's most wonderful about this production is the shape-shifting and role-shifting, and the portrayal of the Beast Folk, from the most characterized (and human) one, Montgomery's half-man, half-bear servant M'ling, to the horrifying Leopard Man and other bizarre creations.

We hope this won't be the last performance of the Piper Theatre's Island of Doctor Moreau. A truly excellent theatrical work like this deserves a wider audience -- and more educated and informed praise than we can offer. We're very grateful we got to see it.

Thursday Night in Park Slope: Piper Theatre presents "Xanadu" outdoors at the Old Stone House in Washington Park

Tonight we sat out back of the Old Stone House in Park Slope for the opening night of Piper Theatre's majestically silly, irresistible ball of fluff of a musical, Xanadu, which recreates the 2007 Broadway reworking/sendup of the laughably abysmal 1980 roller-disco-of-the-gods movie starring Olivia Newton-John.

As one of the over-the-top characters exclaims, "This is like children’s theater for 40-year-old gay people!” -- a pretty good match for the large and enthusiastic Park Slope audience sitting on blankets in the renovated Washington Park.

(This being Park Slope, there were lots of kids, from well-behaved babies and toddlers through the teens and tweens, many of whom are part of Piper Theatre's summer program for young actors. We're pretty sure the play's references to things like Brut, To Live and Die in L.A., and Parker Stevenson (where is he now?) went two stories over their heads.)

In its twelfth season of productions -- it's been at Old Stone House since 2005 -- Piper Theatre made an offbeat but wise choice in selecting this campy, self-parodying delight, directed with dynamism by Piper Theatre founder/artistic director John P. McEneny, with choreography by Karen Curlee and musical direction by Megan Jonynas.

This Equity showcase production featured a fun-loving, energetic, and musically talented cast who look good in ancient Greek attire, gym shorts and knee socks, or : Alissa Laderer (Kira), Jamie Roach (Sonny Malone), M.X. Soto (Danny McGuire/Zeus), Kelly Blaze (Calliope/Aphrodite), MaryAnne Piccolo (Melpomene/Medusa), Jake Mendes (Talia), Ricky Dain Jones (Terpischore), Matthew McGloin (Hermes/Dance Captain),

Jennifer Somers Kipley (Euterpe/Thetis), Linnea Larsdotter (Erato/Hera),

Emily Bodkin (Thalia), and Arielle Vullo (Urania).

Sarah Edkins’ scenery design recreates the Venice Beach of the late ’70s, paying homage to the street art and visual style emblematic to that place and time, a West Coast counterpart to New York City’s more famous underground art scene, only with more pastels.

We also loved the appearance of the winged horse Pegasus in act two; he proved a lot funnier than Joey in War Horse.

There was also a wonderful band who played the show's bouncy music expertly.

We were a bit skeptical about Xanadu at first, but the show is so winningly self-deprecating, so filled with irreverence and charm, with plenty of tasty 70s and 80s musical numbers,

so it didn't take long to win us over. It's quite a delightful production, and it made us forget all about the heat and humidity.

We were very impressed by the choreography of the muses and the deftness with which cast members Alissa Laderer (Kira) and Jamie Roach (Sonny Malone) were able to move around on roller skates. They had a good deal of chemistry and also sang with a lot of verve.

The songs, reminiscent of the disco era, are quite nice, though for us the highlight was the comic duo of MaryAnne Piccolo (the funniest cast member, reminiscent of great comic musical actors, as the acid-tongues Melpomene) and her sister in intrigue, Kelly Blaze (as Calliope) singing "Evil Woman."

“I’m Alive,” “Suddenly” and “All Over the World,” three hits from the original soundtrack by John Farrar, the song-writing powerhouse behind Newton-John, and ELO’s Jeff Lynne, also were lively.

The charm and fun of this wonderful show should have you bopping and lip-synching and enjoying a mythical (in more than one sense of the word) excursion into the not-so-halcyon days of the disco era (we can tell you that we had a lot of fun, but Park Slope in 1980 was a lot less bouncy than Xanadu's reimagining of Venice Beach (itself not as much fun back then, either).

We're really grateful we got to see Xanadu and advise you to get to the Old Stone House to see it while it's still playing.

Friday Night in Park Slope: Piper Theatre presents "The Miser" outdoors at the Old Stone House

Tonight in Park Slope, we saw a phenomenal and extraordinarily professional production of Molière's The Miser put on by the Piper Theatre outside the Old Stone House. Cleverly adapted and directed by Welker White, this was a remarkably funny and relevant version of this classic farce, updating the satiric comedy to the 21st century.

We see a lot of outdoor theater in parks around the city (avoiding the big productions at Central Park's Delacorte Theatre, which we know are great, due to our allergy to waiting on line). Most have to begin early because they have no artificial lighting and you want the audience to be able to see the action. The Piper Theatre's high production values gave them the advantage of professional lighting, so tonight's performance didn't begin until after 8:30 p.m. (making our dumbphone camera kind of useless).

The lighting was only one example of the top-notch production values on display tonight: a highly effective sound system, a real inside-theater set, and the effect of watching a play indoors. While this takes away some of the fun of having the action going around all around you, it's closer to the experience of being in a real theater.

Welker White, the director, has worked as a film, stage and TV actress with some of the top directors and although she only last year received her MFA in Directing from Brooklyn College, we're pretty sure this belated academic credential was didn't mean she could have taught some of the graduate courses she'd taken at BC. Tonight's production was evidence that she's already an experienced and accomplished director.

Particularly brilliant was her choice, in adapting Molière, to combine both contemporary elements (Clèante's iPod and addiction to fashion blogs are just two examples) and those from the play's 1668 debut (when the playwright himself played the title character, Harpagon) -- and then adding just a soupçon of funny fourth-wall-breaking references, like Harpagon's inveighing against the noisy gangsta teens in the playground and the pampered Park Slope tots "and their lesbian mothers." If it sounds like it wouldn't cohere, you're wrong: everything worked perfectly in this well-oiled machine.

Which is not to say that the play felt slick. Still, this felt like one of the few outdoor plays we've seen that was seamlessly ready for prime-time. For one thing, the lead actor, Damian Young (Harpagon), was utterly in control all the time. The role is a tricky one; despite his almost inhuman greed and utter disregard for the feelings of his son and daughter, much less anyone else, he's got to appear simultaneously a ridiculous buffoon, an instrument of real (if banal) evil, and at least somewhat sympathetic, if not endearing. In his modulated virtuoso performance, Young strikes all the right notes.

He's helped by a very strong supporting cast, especially stage veteran Jan Leslie Harding as Frosine, the matchmaker -- here played as a combination of the unctuous real estate broker and the kind of artsy older woman who puts a pencil in her hairbun -- who serves as Harpagon's foil, enabler, ally and manipulator. The unfortunate kids of the miser who are being kept from their true loves by his plans for mercenary marriages for the entire family are played with wonderful flair by Todd C. Bartels as the trend-obsessed Clèante and Hannah Jane McMurray as the hapless, romantic Elise.

David Bachman probably gets the most laughs as LaFleche and especially as Jacques, the miser's coachman cum cook. With the exaggerated French accent of a children's cartoon character, he is such an adept physical comedian that he comes close to stealing his scenes. But the other actors do manage to match him, and the laughs keep coming quickly, the key to a high-functioning farce.

But all the actors here were memorable: Gilbert Cruz as both Simon and a comic-"Law and Order" style police commissioner; Zac Hoogendyk as an earnest yet sarcastic Valere; Alice Winslow as the sweet but distracted Mariane; Tom Tammi as a hearty and jovial Anselme, and the younger actors playing the miser's put-upon, despondent, passive-aggressive servants.

The Piper Theatre production of The Miser is not just a highly entertaining, very funny farce, but it also kept us thinking about our present economic situation, like the line that asks who's worse: the borrowers who take out enormous loans they can't possibly pay back or the greedy lenders who give them the money with the complete awareness that these people will default?

In the end, the old curmudgeonly miser here and his children and their loves and everyone else get a joyously happy ending, made more even upbeat by the cast's boisterous final musical number. If only the greed of the past decades would end so happily! We're grateful to the Piper Theatre and the Old Stone House for giving us this wonderful evening in the theater.

Friday Night in Park Slope: The Piper Theatre's "Hamlet" in Washington Park

Last evening, we went over to Washington Park (it's hard for those of us who grew up with J.J. Byrne Park to get used to the new name, but at least it's not called Washington Mutual Park) for this summer's production by the Piper Theatre of Hamlet.

Last year we enjoyed their A Midsummer's Night Dream, a comedy just perfect for warm-weather outdoor performances, as are most of Shakespeare's comedies. Pretty much everyone knows that Hamlet ends with the stage crawling with corpses, so we were wondering how this would play in the park.

The crowd seemed somewhat smaller than last year. It was an extraordinarily cool night, yet the wind seemed to add to the drama as the sky, and the plot, darkened. The staging under director John P. McEneny was fairly ingenious, accommodating the less-than-perfect conditions for theater at the park.

The actors have to compete with screaming kids in the playground not that far from the stage, passersby with no interest in the show who go on talking, not infrequent ambulance sirens, more occasional police sirens, motorcycles revving, car alarms going off, etc. It ain't the secluded location of the Delacorte Theatre or the Prospect Park Bandshell; at Washington Park, the city in all its energy and messiness surrounds you.

Anyway, the actors, wearing what looked to us like mid-19th-century garb, did a great job. The production gathered strength as the night wore on, and by Act IV, the pace became fast and the momentum unstoppable. We don't have a cast list, but the actor playing Hamlet did a good job, with some interesting business at points. The "to be or not to be" soliloquy was played atop a ladder in the middle of the audience, and it worked, as did some really strong scenes between Hamlet and Ophelia and Hamlet and his mother. Some bits, like Ophelia's use of yarn both before and after madness strikes, were wonderful.

The cast seemed uniformly more than competent, with especially nice turns by the actors playing Polonius, Horatio (a female), Laertes and others. Even small parts, like Osric and a woman playing what seemed like a lady in waiting to Gertrude, who mostly had to stand in the background and react, were handled with skill.

Because of the setup of the small stage in the park, the actors are often seen walking around offstage, and yet that was less distracting than enlightened as they stayed in character and were unobtrusive. The cuts made in the play were judicious, particularly in getting rid of Fortinbras, and ending the play in innovative fashion.

The time flew by for us, so we were surprised to see how late it was when we checked our cell phone as we walked down Fourth Avenue to get the G train home. The Piper Theatre production of Hamlet was a great summer night of Shakespeare.

Friday Night at J.J. Byrne Park: The Piper Theatre's "A Midsummer Night's Dream"

What revels are in hand? Is there no play,
To ease the anguish of a torturing hour?

After leaving Desert Island's comic book nirvana last evening, we made our way to the recently-unveiled chrome-and-glass Kellogg's Diner Redux and walked down to our wonderfully reliable weekend G train to get to J.J. Byrne Park for the Piper Theatre's amazing production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Thanks to the MTA's scheduling, we barely had time to glance at the sardonically-changed subway advertisements (our favorite so far was when some benign wit changed the tagline for the [very funny] film Forgetting Sarah Marshall's rather cruel tag line YOU DO LOOK FAT IN THOSE JEANS to YOU DO LOOK GREAT IN THOSE JEANS) or stand on the Smith St.-Ninth St. platform contemplating the lambent sky before we were approaching the park where we, more than thirty years ago, used to drive by with our friend's younger brother to purchase nickel bags and take them back to the brownstone on Ninth Street where our friends and rolling papers were waiting.

We were motivated to head for the park by Louise Crawford's this glowing report at Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn (from which we also purloined one of Hugh Crawford's excellent photographs of the performance by Hugh Crawford):

A rollicking, frolicking Midsummer Night's Dream delighted a large opening night crowd on the green in JJ Byrne Park on Thursday night.

And what a night it was. The weather was glorious, the sky clear, the half moon luminous and bright.

Directed by John P. McEneny, who teaches drama at MS 51 and runs the Piper Theater, this version of MSND takes place in 1908 Coney Island, a natural setting for the play. "The parks at Coney Island symbolized a reachable escape, a place where almost anyone could go for a day and get lost in the crowd. It was a place where everyone was searching for fun and often found it in the exotic displays or seemingly death-defying rides," write Rosa Schneider, Piper's dramaturg.

Indeed, Shakespeare's popular play is all about magic, escape, identity, and the fantastical. What better way to bring it home to a Brooklyn audience then to set it in our very own urban dreamland.

There were many highpoints in last night's show, which will run this weekend and next in the park located at Fifth Avenue and Third Street in Park Slope, but the cast's high energy, high octane performance of the play surely gave it the kind of bigger than life impact that works wonders in an outdoor show.

Still, the fairy dances were gently rendered even as airplanes passed overhead. A strong cast really packed a wollop in a production that was alternately bawdy, poetic, magical, sexy, acrobatic and really fun in all the right ways.

Owen Campbell, a 14-year-old professional actor was notable in the role of Puck. But all the actors brought great energy and joie de vivre to Piper's memorable version of the play. The lovely set by Lila Trenkova, complete with life guard chairs and twinkling lights, transformed the park. Costumes by Deirdre Cavanaugh were also a treat, as was the sound design by Andy Christian.

Louise pretty much describes the joyous experience we had, though we'd add that we were really impressed by Owen Campbell, too, as well as Sean Phillips as one of the best Oberons we'd ever seen. And we didn't hear any airplanes (perhaps the major carriers all went bankrupt today?).

This wasn't the first time we'd seen A Midsummer Night's Dream in a park. Back on Thursday evening, July 23, 1970 [this is why you should keep a diary too] we saw the fondly-remembered BACA Repertory doing the play in Prospect Park at Wollman Rink, very intimate and informal, with teens and twentysomethings making magic, though without the kind of advanced production values the Piper Theatre's got going on now.

We took two young members of our household, 9yo Jonny and 6yo Jeanette, to that show,

and the kids were as enchanted and quiet as nearly all the many kids sitting on the lawn at J.J. Byrne Park last night. (And the next week, at Riis Park's Bay 1, we got to put our beach blanket next to the blanket of the boy playing Oberon!)

Back when Robert Wagner was mayor and Abe Stark borough president, we Brooklyn kids were introduced to Shakespeare early.

Our fantastic eighth-grade English teacher at Meyer Levin Junior High, Mr. Neil Berger, had us read Twelfth Night in preparation for viewing a production at Grady Technical High School in Sheepshead Bay that we still remember. (In the summer of 1990 we went to a star-studded production of Twelfth Night at Central Park -- it featured Michelle Pfeiffer, Jeff Goldblum, Gregory Hines, Mary Elizabeth Mastrontonio, Stephen Collins, Fisher Stevens, John Ames, et al. -- and our 8SPE2 classmate, author/literary agent Linda Konner, with us that night along with her boyfriend, longtime Newark Star-Ledger theater critic Peter Felicia, agreed that the version we'd seen in a Brooklyn high school in 1964 was superior.)

In ninth grade, Mrs. Hazel Sanjour had us read Julius Caesar. We each memorized and delivered a soliloquy, put out a Roman newspaper, saw the 1950s film version at the Eighth Street Playhouse and learned a lot more about Mrs. Sanjour's favorite writer, "the inimitable Bard," as she called him.

And in our senior year at Midwood, we took a fall-semester Shakespeare course with the legendary teacher Mr. Joseph Grebanier. We sat up front and center and can still picture Mr. G in front of us reading the parts of everyone from Polonius to Prince Hal to Sir Toby Belch with enthusiasm. (He told us Polonius's famous advice to Laertes was fatuous: "Why should you never a borrower or a lender be? And plenty of people who are true to themselves who constantly lie to others!") Can we be wrong in thinking we read 24 Shakespeare plays in the fall of 1967?

We miss Mr. Grebanier, but we still have our Brooklyn College 1973 Ottilie Grebanier Drama Award, received for the best play by an undergrad, in honor of the mother of Mr. Grebanier and his less-nice BC English professor brother (their French-sounding family name came from Reinberg, only backwards).

Now we are lucky enough to get to teach Shakespeare to college students. And still go to see great crepuscular productions like Piper Theatre's Midsummer Night's Dream. Catch the magic at J.J. Byrne Park this weekend or next. Thy love ne'er alter till thy sweet life end!