Short Stage Reviews

"Sudden Pictures"
Erica Essner has been floating in the early/midcareer choreographer's nether world at least since her first full-evening program at Theater Artaud five years ago, when she was still committed to socio-political text-laden works influenced by Joe Goode. Though she's since found her forte creating musically driven pure dance works, her new full-length show, "Sudden Pictures," is unlikely to lift the Erica Essner Performance Co-op into prominence. Essner had planned the program to juxtapose the two primary strains of her career, but the promised dance-theater premiere, Snapshot, failed to materialize (there was no explanation), and the evening instead became a unified, if conspicuously brief, look at Essner's current aesthetic.

In the new solos She descends (danced by a compellingly anguished Deborah Miller) and Redoubtable Goddess (danced by a less convincing Leyva Tawil), and even in the 1999 ensemble work Ravish, Essner luxuriates in the decadent and the melodramatic, her fur-, velvet-, and satin-clad dancers fixing the audience with the accusing stares of fish just taken off the hook. When the company performed Ravish at the Cowell Theater in February the cast included one male dancer; performed by four women, this Baroque-flavored exploration of sexual teasing -- inspired by Jeanette Winterson's The Passion and set to frequent Essner collaborator Erik Ian Walker's engaging music -- loses force. Fire of my fear continues the theme of unspeakable psychic secrets as Manuelito Brag deploys Essner's favorite moves -- the rapidly crisscrossing arms and the hand pulling away from the mouth -- before scrims bearing a hodgepodge of text by Rumi, Mary Oliver, and Essner herself. Best of the program is the premiere of Kandinsky, infused with a healthy dose of lightheartedness, joy, and airborne kinetics. Unfortunately the gingham check-accented costumes evidence less inspiration than the Kandinsky paintings projected on three backdrops, and the entire program appears a bit underchoreographed and underrehearsed. Such is Essner's double bind: not enough studio time for rehearsal and artistic development without money, no new money without a well-rehearsed performance and evidence of artistic development.

Somehow some choreographers out there do make it over the hump. Essner appears to be in this for the long haul; she'll find a way too.

Ragtime
E.L. Doctorow's glorious novel suffers another misconceived adaptation. This musical isn't as much a travesty as Milos Foreman's dull, tuneless 1981 movie, but Terrence McNally's book and Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens' songs replace Doctorow's gentle, distant ironies with sentimentality and banality. The show also neatly excises all the book's sex, so Younger Brother's (Sam Samuelson) hilariously lewd meeting with Evelyn Nesbitt (Jacqueline Bayne) never happens, and none of the relationships has a sexual component. The plot and dialogue changes otherwise may seem minor, but they almost always have the effect of reducing characters and situations to cliché. In the midst of the crisis precipitated by the racist act of vandalism against Coalhouse Walker Jr., Doctorow has Father (Stephen Zinnato) upbraid himself for neglecting his son. McNally has Mother (Cathy Widner) nag Father, and thus his decision to take the boy to a ballgame seems comically idiotic, rather than the honest attempts of a man inadequate to the times and the situation. The omnipresent music also completely disrupts the rhythm of Doctorow's tumbling prose -- scenes that take two sentences in the book are given five- or seven-minute songs. Mother sings an unnecessary "I Am Woman" anthem ("Back to Before"), which could be inserted into Les Miz or Jekyll and Hyde without anyone noticing. Some of the rag numbers are nice, and there's a lovely, quiet duet between Coalhouse (Lawrence Hamilton) and Sarah (Lovena Fox) called "Sarah Brown Eyes." But there's also a lot of caterwauling and noise. Melody and syncopation are everywhere in Doctorow's tale; this musical has almost none.

Henry IV
If the first part of Shakespeare's history of Prince Hal (performed in the park) was dominated by Falstaff (which it was, and Ken Ruta was masterful), the second part, playing indoors for a shorter run at the Gershwin, is dominated by him too. But at least here some actors mount a small resistance. Tom Blair graces Part 2 as the dying king, pettish and wrathful but also delicately melancholy. When I saw him in Part 1 Blair rushed his lines, but in the crucial scenes here he's excellent. Lizzie Calogero plays a funny cockney Doll Tearsheet, the doll-like tramp who flirts with Falstaff in the tavern scenes; J.D. Nelson is a wheedling, sniveling, cackling partner to Falstaff, Justice Shallow, and Hector Correa explodes in his unincited tantrums as Pistol. (Correa also finished directing Part 2 after Albert Takazauckas died in July.) None of this is enough to make the play interesting for 2 1/2 hours; the script is too loose and the sprawling cast uneven. But Ruta's fat and flatulent Falstaff propels the show forward when all else fails. He can do every level of the blown knight's humanity, from loud tavern clowning to the plangent sorrow of his loneliness after Prince Hal ascends the throne.