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by George Patterson
NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA

The Heidi Chronicles

Nestegg Productions, in conjunction with the Contemporary Arts Center's Performance and Support Program are the producers of Wendy Wasserstein's Pulitzer Prize winning comedy about one woman's liberation from Woman's Liberation, The Heidi Chronicles, currently residing in the CAC's Bank One Theatre.

This play is a good fit for the CAC, dealing, as it does, with a female art historian who, during the course of the episodic retelling of Heidi's adult life, presents the audience with two lectures on Women in Art, complete with color slides. Serendipitously, the art show that is currently occupying the lobby exhibit space-works by local architects entitled "Art & Architecture"-is head and shoulders above the center's usual displays of inner city art. It is just as intellectually oriented as this play, which derives most of its humor from witty, erudite repartee.

Kimberly Patterson, making her directorial debut, has cast the play adequately and has directed her charges fluidly; however, the play's scene-heavy structure [the play jumps all over the place, movie-like, in eleven scenes] and a lack of finesse in staging these shifts in semi-darkness, destroys the pace and adds unnecessary time, keeping the play from soaring in some of its most theatrical sequences.

Nevertheless, Kathy Taafe makes an ideal Heidi, who takes us from her teen aged years in the 60s through the Me Generation of the 70s and into her mature 40s in the 80s with a newly adopted daughter. Her only regret seems to be that she didn't burn her bra-and she did shave her legs! Along the way we meet the two men in her life: Peter Patrone, with whom she is initially smitten as a wall-flower teenager, who, unfortunately for her, becomes a Gay pediatrician (Michael P. Cahill plays this character deftly and has fun mining its irony); and, Scoop Rosenbaum, a swift-talking journalist womanizer who rejects Heidi because she's too perfect, portrayed energetically by Jack Long. Her many women friends are played by Jennifer Pagan, Wendy LeBlanc, Rebecca Lovett and Tracy Hernandez, the last three playing a total of ten different women. These ladies are right on the mark-their scenes are the highlight of the play, most notably a hilarious 70's consciousness raising group session and a rather unorthodox baby shower. Royd Anderson stands in for a number of male walk ons.

Sean Stewart designed the simple unit set (but should have worked more closely with the director on those problematic furniture/prop changes) and Nyko DeDreu managed to light the actors while leaving the audience in the dark.

Dark Of The Moon

Another site-specific production recently graced the redpine "boards" of Anne Rice's enormous home/museum/art gallery on Napoleon Ave., St. Elizabeth's (specifically, the Green Velvet Ballroom), where Jefferson Parish teachers Susan Muth and Ferne Kistner presented Dark Of The Moon, a play from the 40s written by Howard Richardson and William Berney, based on the folk ballad Barbara Allen about the ill-fated marriage between a sweet, simple hill billy lassie and a mountain witch, a theme that fits snuggly with Ms. Rice's own devilish writings.

Working with an enormous cast of young people, both college and high school age, and a huge room that had to be turned into a theatre at one end, where Kelli Cummins and Jennifer Smith designed an appropriately spooky unit set, and Nick Kidder lit the whole affair with free-standing lights, the directors pulled this enormous undertaking off with a great deal of panache and style.

Led by Sam Shanks as John, the witch boy who is so smitten with Brandi Bates' Barbara Allen that he submits to be made normal only to have the spell broken, others in the large cast who stood out from the pack were Grant Williams' old, irascible Uncle Smelicue, Keith Yancy's Conjur Man, Nicole Simoneaux and Stephannie Thomas as the Dark Witch and Fair Witch, respectively, Isabel Theriot and Will Pontious as Barbara's hard scrabble parents, Michael Rowan as the obsequious Preacher Haggler and Keven Songy as Barbara's younger brother, Floyd, who was the spitting image of Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer-the operative word here is "charming."

Ms. Rice must be proud of this singular undertaking. Not only did a gaggle of young people get an opportunity to stretch their theatrical wings, but her architectural folly had its own artistic "wings" stretched as well. I have now experienced a concert in the chapel and a full-length play in the ballroom, to say nothing of Stan Rice's artwork which adorns the endless hall walls. Seance anyone?

Meet Me In St. Louis

The final offering of the '98 Summer Lyric Theatre series at Tulane, Meet Me In St. Louis, was not this reviewer's cup of treacle. My cohort and I left at the intermission after enduring this charmless, ugly reconstruction of one of Louis B. Mayer's major wet dreams and one of Judy Garland's most transcendant celluloid performances.

Reworked by librettist Hugh Wheeler from Sally Benson's original movie script, and retaining all the block-buster songs ("The Trolley Song", "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas", "The Boy Next Door", "Under The Bamboo Tree", and the title song) interspersed with other, more inferior numbers by songwriters Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane (and one folk song-"Skip To My Lou"-here key-changed into an overlong production number), Meet Me In St. Louis was not a critical success when it opened on Broadway in 1989. No matter. The idea was to market the product to the hinterlands with a Broadway imprimateur and, of course, it worked. The show is constantly being staged by high schools, colleges and little theatres.

There is very little book. Girl meets boy next door and falls in love with him and eventually wins him after family finally decides to stay in St. Louis for the big World's Fair before moving to New York. Wow.

No amount of canvas and paint could possibly substitute for the MGM backlot which is emblazoned in our minds. No one could possibly replace the irreplaceable Garland, although Jennifer Douglas Gray tried. Her big belting voice pushed out the songs effortlessly, but her zaftig stature made her look old enough to be the boy next door's mother-and he was played by Joel David Gray, her real life husband!!

Elizabeth S. Parent's turn of the century costumes were so summery they made one long for a lemonade, but set against Rick Paul's ghastly full-stage interior setting, they became just so much mulch-like the dregs of a banana split.

Director Jim Miller permitted Conductor/Musical Director Pamela Legendre too many choral voices-the better to render the hell out of the music which, after all, is the only selling point of this enterprise-and was saddled with too many bodies and not enough space, so they were marshalled up the aisles and on a peculiar walk-way that encircled the orchestra pit and was meant to serve as the street: this traffic cop suffered from too much traffic.

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