It’s Greek to Them

You’ve got to really love the theater — a lot — to sit through the Aquila Theatre Company’s production of Agamemnon. It’s supposed to be good for you, like taking medicine; but except for the first 15 minutes, which is somewhat sugar-coated, the show is a bitter pill that simply refuses to be swallowed.

Aquila has developed a reputation for taking potentially dry, off-putting material and giving it a modern spin in order to make it more palatable to today’s audiences. Last season the company made the mistake of trying to enliven Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest — as if Wilde needed such treatment. In contrast, Aquile hasn’t gone far enough with Agamemnon. The production begins strongly with Marco Barricelli’s thunderous opening monologue that gives us the dark and bloody history of the House of Atreus. This is good, gruesome stuff — all about chopping up a rival’s children, cooking their limbs in a stew, and then feeding them to their father. In this speech, Aeschylus beats Edgar Allen Poe hands (and feet) down, not to mention the National Enquirer. The horrifying feast is acted out in a dark pantomime as Barricelli tells the sordid tale.

Now that we’ve got the back story, we know that the House of Atreus must be punished for serving what you might describe as the polar opposite of a Happy Meal. So the story moves forward in time to the night before Agamemnon’s return from Troy, victorious after laying siege to the city for 10 years until, finally, someone came up with the wooden horse trick. Louis Butelli plays the Watchman who sits (and tries to sleep) in a precarious contraption suspended above the roof of Agamemnon’s house. This funny, engaging scene is played with a sense of humanity by Butelli; it leads to the Watchman’s sighting of the signal fires that tell of the Greek victory and Agamemnon’s imminent return.

But then co-directors Peter Meineck and Robert Richmond allow boredom to set in. The members of the Greek Chorus, a bunch of guys in trenchcoats and fedoras, talk and talk and talk until Olympia Dukakis as Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemmestra, emerges and tells them the news of her hubby’s victory. Then they talk a lot more. Agamemnon (Louis Zorich, speaking in a style that screams “ACTOR!”) returns and is met by his wife, who gives a witheringly powerful speech. It’s the high point of the play but it’s unsupported by any other theatricality that gives the production punch, other than a couple more murders (but even they take place off stage). The ending of the show is literally a stab in the dark, and it doesn’t work.

The Greeks were really ahead of their time. They could have made a killing, so to speak, if they had only lasted into the era of true crime television movies. And you can be sure that the TV folks would have jazzed up the story even more than Meineck and Richmond!

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Patti Can!

Encores! has been so spectacularly successful that it’s easy for audiences (and critics) to forget its mission. While it’s terrific that two of the series’ productions (Chicago and Wonderful Town) moved to Broadway, the presentation of shows strong enough to be revived for an extended run on the Great White Way is not what the City Center series was originally supposed to be about. But shows like Cole Porter’s Can-Can, presented by Encores! this past weekend for five performances, are exactly the sort of thing that the series should be doing.

This is a perfectly charming example of an early 1950s musical comedy. Abe Burrows’s book is serviceable but sketchy; the characters move through their paces without great provocation. The plot is merely an excuse for the songs. And that’s why Encores! exists: to give us great music in less-than-great musicals. Consider the hits that came out of Can-Can, among them “I Love Paris,” “C’est Magnifique,” and “It’s All Right With Me.” And the rest of the score isn’t too shabby, either! The opportunity to hear these songs sung in their original contexts is not only historically fascinating but also artistically rewarding.

Encores! also gives some of today’s great musical theater stars the chance to (briefly) leave their mark on these great scores. In Can-Can, Patti LuPone was exquisite as La Mome Pistache — as earthy as Piaf and as vocally exciting as, well, LuPone. She made a showstopper of everything she sang. So, too, Charlotte d’Amboise gave one the strongest performances of her Encores! career (she has been in a lot of these) as Claudine, the role that made Gwen Verdon famous. Reg Rogers, as a self-important artist, provided delightful comic relief. Less effective was Michael Nouri as LuPone’s love interest; his acting was pleasant enough but he butchered his one solo, “It’s All Right With Me.” (It was a revelation to learn that the song was originally sung to a streetwalker who otherwise has no significant role in the musical.) Oh, and Eli Wallach as a French judge was a bit of a stretch; he sounded like he was from the Left Bank of the East River.

Speaking of which, director Lonny Price probably erred in asking the actors to put on phony French accents for a production that had so little rehearsal time. The accents were all over the place. It might have been better to have done the show in American English and reserve the accent for Reg Rogers’s Bulgarian artist. This is, however, a small point; Can-Can was tightly directed and kinetically choreographed. And as a star vehicle for Patti LuPone, it was right on target.

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It’s High Time You Heard Soprano Anna Bergman

Soprano Anna Bergman is performing a show titledA Crowded Room at the Stanhope Hotel on Fifth Avenue at 81st Street. The program is loaded with love songs but, to Bergman’s credit, she also pokes considerable fun at the idea of love. A versatile and attractive performer who can really sing the classical stuff and then surprise you with her musical comedy chops, Bergman is just the right person to headline a show in a classy, upscale nightspot like the one at the Stanhope.

When she sings, she’s delightful — but her patter sounds more written than natural. Bergman has a tendency to overstate rather than understate. She should either speak less or simply throw her script away and talk to the audience as if talking to a friend — or a lover. The audience loves her for her singing, so all she needs is some good patter to consummate the relationship.

Bergman continues at the Stanhope on February 27 & 28, and March 5, 6, 12, & 13 at 8:30pm. By the way, the Stanhope has the most attentive service of any of the swankier rooms in town.

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[To contact the Siegels directly, e-mail them at siegelentertainment@msn.com.]