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| Ashley Blasland as Young Vi and Lara Hayhurst as Violet |
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The Theater Barn in New Lebanon is presenting their second obscure contemporary musical in a row, Violet, a quest, or journey, show about a young woman, disfigured as a child, who pursues her dream of a cure at the miraculous hands of a televangelist. Her cross-country trip from North Carolina to Oklahoma brings her into contact, for the first time, with strangers including an old lady and two soldiers, one of them black, who make the journeying forward into something quite different. With her miracle secure in her mind, she heads home only to find that home is not what, or where, she remembered, and that her miracle was not the miracle she perceived.
If any of this sounds familiar, I suggest you watch the old movie, "The Enchanted Cottage," which takes this theme to an extreme, but provides many of the same surprise turns, and visually in a much more rewarding way, than can be achieved on the stage here. Violet’s disfigurement is the result of an accident with an axe which has split her face from her nose to her neck. It should be required that we see, somehow, the horror that Violet sees when she looks in her mirror. In this production, and perhaps in the play itself, we only see a cracked mirror and not one we can hold up to better understand Violet’s life and its trauma.
Violet won the Kleban Award and prior to the Playwrights Horizons production in 1997, and on its behalf, Violet was given the Richard Rodgers Musical Production Award and an AT&T OnStage Award. Afterwards, besides a Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Musical, Violet received the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Musical over all the year's Broadway offerings, which included Titanic, Steel Pier, The Life and Play On. The off-Broadway production was praised by the press and plans were made to move to a more commercial venue until a bad review in the all -powerful New York Times scuttled the transfer.
The country-music flavored score by Jeanine Tesori, the woman who wrote the stage version of Thoroughly Modern Millie and the Broadway hit Caroline, or Change, presents a collection of gospel, rockabilly and straight country songs along with a beautiful and moving song, "That’s What I Could Do" for Violet’s father and a hauntingly strong duet for Violet and her younger self, "Look At Me." Sadly, for all of the emotional outpourings in the score and even in the situation, the show is rather unengaging.
It isn’t the cast that doesn’t make this a better evening. They are all talented. Lara Hayhurst as Violet is lovely to look at, and her acting is fine. Her singing could be a bit more forward, louder perhaps. That could help, but not enough to make her character enthralling. When she encounters her miracle man and loses her mind for a while in the miracle itself she loses us completely. The director should have found another way to present his actresses mental conversion. She clearly needed a bit more work on this essential moment.
As her younger self, Ashley Blasland does a fine job with her scenes and her songs. She is a bright young talent and she could use better material. Matthew Daly as Father is wonderful. He creates and maintains a viable character here and sings like a man possessed. It’s a terrific performance vacillating from native charm to intense guilt.
Trey Compton is Monty and John Edwards is Flick, the two soldiers who befriend, violate and love Violet on her quest. Edwards is the better singer, Compton the better actor. Both are young and pleasant and attractive. Both make the most of the material they are given, but Edwards could goose up the acting a bit and Compton could take a voice lesson or two.
Joseph Breen has a fine old time as the Preacher who rehearses his miracles. Kristyl Dawn Tift is impressive as Lula and Jerielle Morwitz plays the Old Lady on the bus with verve and delicacy. the rest of the cast handle their multiple roles expertly.
Igor Goldin has choreographed movement for his players that keeps the show flowing, but his work with the characters should have been given equal grace. There’s a way to go, yet, that hasn’t been pursued, but in summer stock that’s what you get sometimes and this piece of theater probably requires a longer rehearsal period to find the ways to play these people.
Michael McAssey and his band of four play the music very well. Abe Phelps set is a utilitarian and works to the advantage of the play. Jonathan Knipscher has executed the period costumes well and Robert Eberle’s lighting is the making of the show.
Violet, the Musical is a hard play but there are bright moments and fine work contained on the stage in New Lebanon. Something new is always worth exploring, but take along your imagination in order to realize all those things that this production hasn’t been able to accomplish.
◊08/11/2007◊
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