Artery

• photo by Lauren Kennedy
• The cast of Hot Summer Nights / Theatre Raleigh's AVENUE Q

It’s hard enough being one character on stage in a musical.

In Hot Summer Nights / Theater Raleigh’s lively production of AVENUE Q, Heather Maggs, Adam Poole and Erik and Annie Floor play ten.

They’re the heroic puppeteers animating, speaking and singing the roles of the self-described “people of fur” (and fuzz) who occupy this slightly scuzzy neighborhood well beyond the city’s high-rent district. And since their characters weave in and out of the various scenes—and some of the puppets require two of the four actors to animate—the logistics and quick-changes are pretty intense at times.

So credit them—and director Richard Roland—that you couldn’t tell by looking on the opening night. But after a performance that was never less than smooth and assured in Fletcher Opera House, why did I still leave this show feeling somewhat bemused?

As many readers already know, the titled tract of real estate in this comic musical is something of an urban staging ground, a pre-professional purgatory for a group of relatively disaffected Generation Y’ers like central character Princeton (Erik Floor), recently out of college and now facing lives in the world as adults.

None of them are all that ready. Princeton has a grubstake from his parents that he’s burning through on beer, but zilch for employment prospects with a B.A. in English. Lucy Monster (Annie Floor) is a kindergarten teaching assistant with no romantic prospects; she dreams of having her own “Monsterssori School,” but is making no headway toward it. Rod (Erik Floor) is a type-A (and robin’s egg-blue) Republican banker who secretly wants his slacker roomie and long-time friend, Nicky (Poole)—but he’ll never, ever come out of the closet to pursue him. Meanwhile, Trekkie Monster (Poole) stays holed up in his apartment, addicted to Internet porn.

Catherine, the bright, bewildered daughter of a deceased mathematical genius, isn’t the only one with something to prove in this current production of David Auburn’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama. A new director at the helm of a new theater group is having to present a few bona fides as well.

This production marks the maiden voyage for director Jason Sharp’s company, Exit Through Eden. Sharp has achieved notice in a series of supporting roles in shows including Violet at Hot Summer Nights and Raleigh Ensemble Players’ Distracted, and this recombinant production largely relies on colleagues he’s worked with on stage in recent years.

For the most part, that’s a pretty good move. Betsy Henderson, a distinguished mid-career Raleigh actor, convinces here as the edgy, aching and alienated Catherine. An equally accomplished Ryan Brock ingratiates here as Hal, an unapologetic math geek and possible romantic interest. And it should shock no one that Page Purgar’s supporting work is solid as Catherine’s disbelieving older sister, Claire.

But at first Eric Hale appears to be acting more for the camera than the stage, in what initially translated into an almost deadpan, is-he-even-acting take on Robert, Catherine’s prickly father. Things improved considerably during both characters’ rewarding, dramatic argument at the start of the second act, but Hale’s later negotiation of Robert’s reversals leaves me still with questions about his range.

In such nacent independent companies, a skeleton crew is par for the course. In this show, director Sharp’s set design conveys the grungy backyard of an aging Chicago house. His lighting design, however, left us squinting at a noticeably dimmer backdoor area where several key scenes take place.

But if Sharp largely relied on the comforts of the known in casting this production, I should caution him against the same when it comes to script selection. This production marks the fifth time PROOF has been produced in the region in the past decade. For that reason alone I hesitated before committing to see the show—and I imagine some portion of this company’s potential audience did so as well.

The same point should be considered—carefully—by all artistic directors in the region now planning their fall season. Twelfth Night’s been done. Ditto for A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

And, in this credible opening bid by Exit Through Eden, so has Proof.

• Deen van Meer
• At the Barricade: Jeremy Hays, Max Quinlan and Chasten Harmon in LES MISERABLES

There’s a certain contradiction when a production celebrates the 25th anniversary of a world-wide musical theater phenomenon by completely discarding the original’s landmark production concept—and then cutting, according to reports, somewhere between 20 and 40 minutes from the show. That, however, is the outcome with the 25th Anniversary Tour of LES MISERABLES which stops at Raleigh Memorial Auditorium this week.

The odd result is a historical production (in more than one sense of the term) that seems entirely focused on the new instead. In addition to new orchestrations and new costumes, an entirely new set design, abetted by a new stage technology, has mandated equally new blocking as well.

Apparently producers Cameron Mackintosh and NETworks Presentations have aimed here for a LES MIS for a new generation. At least, let’s hope so: Those who remember the superlative strengths of the original (whose Raleigh performance we reviewed in Nov. 1997) are unlikely to be convinced that this brisk—or, actually, brusque—version is an improvement.

It’s amazing to consider how much a single element of technical design can influence an entire production. But then, the original version of LES MIS was amazing by almost any measure. Directors John Caird and Trevor Nunn’s brilliant use of scenic designer John Napier’s stage-length turntable repeatedly swept us along with the flow of history. It nimbly threaded us through the veritable urban mazes that the central character, the condemned Jean Valjean, negotiated to elude his nemesis, the implacable Inspector Javert.

Cinematically, that rotating set disclosed the horrors of warfare when it displayed one side of the barricade where the student revolutionaries in the Paris Uprising of 1839 made their last doomed stand—before turning, inexorably, to reveal all that had been laid to waste beyond it. In the midst of these, a number of other scenes shifted, quite literally, from one character’s point of view to another’s. In instance after instance, the show's original design added significant kinetic dimensions to the story.