Michael Dale’s Theatre Crawl – Two Exceptional Stage Actors Portray Two Exceptional Roosevelts
Mary Bacon and Trezana Beverley in Eleanor and Alice (Photo: Russ Roland)
This week…
Eleanor and Alice at Urban Stages through April 30. Tickets $40/Student Rush $15.
Karen Finley’s COVID Vortex Anxiety Opera Kitty Kaleidoscope Disco at the Laurie Beechman Theatre, Saturday nights through May 6. Tickets $25 with $25 food/drink minimum.
The last time I saw actors portraying Alice and Eleanor Roosevelt on stage…
…it was 35 years ago at the closing performance of the underappreciated Broadway musical Teddy & Alice. Nancy Hume played the high-spirited Alice, daughter of President Teddy Roosevelt (I had also seen her understudy, Karen Ziemba, in the role) and Nancy Opel was her shy cousin Eleanor, future First Lady when her husband (and cousin) Franklin was elected.
In the musical, all they really had to talk about was cute guys, but Ellen Abrams’ two-hander, Eleanor and Alice: Conversations Between Two Remarkable Roosevelts is a lot more Bechdel Test friendly. Sure, they do talk about men for much of the play – mostly in regards to the political potential of their husbands and relatives – but the plays’ series of conversations, spanning decades, comes from the perspectives of two women of different branches of a family tree that was poised to dominate American politics for the first half of the 20th Century. One broke sexist barriers her way and achieved temporary celebrity, the other broke them another way and is regarded by history books as one of the most important world citizens of her time.
Nowadays, Alice Roosevelt is probably best remembered for the quote, “If you haven’t got anything nice to say about anybody... come sit next to me” and for inspiring her father’s quip, “I can run the country or I can control Alice, but I cannot possibly do both”, but in her day she was quite the headline-maker, ignoring societal conventions for young women with late-night partying, drinking, gambling, smoking, spending time alone with men in automobiles and even becoming a fashion trendsetter with her “Alice blue” gown. In many ways her highly publicized lifestyle was a precursor to the “new freedoms” enjoyed by women that came to greater prominence in the 1920s.
So, in the play’s first scene between the two twenty-year-olds, set in Alice’s home turf of Sagamore Hill in 1904, the new First Daughter is by all means the dominating force. Having feared that accepting the vice-presidency was the end of her father’s political career, she’s now shamelessly excited at his ascension to head of the executive branch, even if it did come as a result of President McKinley’s assassination, and foresees her side of the family as future leaders guiding the Republican Party, with her brother Teddy, Jr. eventually occupying the Oval Office and her current beau, 34-year-old Congressman Nicholas Longworth, keeping her a vital part of the social limelight.
But as the play progresses through the decades, and it’s the understated Eleanor, a Democrat, who becomes the family’s next White House occupant. Serving as First Lady for over a dozen years, during the Great Depression and most of World War II, she redefines the role – not without criticism – to become a media commentator and lecturer on political and social issues, even writing a daily syndicated newspaper column. After the war, she’s appointed by President Truman as the United States’ first Ambassador to the United Nations and heads the committee that drafts the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
With scenes shifting to Eleanor Roosevelt’s Hyde Park Office (the unit set is designed by Madeleine Burrow and Jamie Terrazzino), Alice has become her cousin’s very vocal opponent, regarding the social programs of the New Deal as un-American handouts, suspecting that Franklin Roosevelt maneuvered the country’s entry into the war for political gain and dismissing Eleanor’s U.N. achievements as merely symbolic. By the play’s final scene, set in 1962, they’re contemplating the future of another family that seems destined to dominate American politics, the Kennedys.
This is the kind of play where conversations serve as history lessons, and there’s a lot of information spoken aloud that, while keeping the audience up speed on the two characters’ stances on important events, can be a little didactic at times. But director Frances Hill has two wonderfully accomplished stage actors giving the play vibrancy.
Trezana Beverley (Tony winner for the original Broadway production of Ntozake Shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf) plays young Eleanor Roosevelt as a timid young woman who is dazzled by her cousin’s lively confidence before growing into a respected leader who only steps into the spotlight for the benefit of the less fortunate.
Mary Bacon (Special Drama Desk Award for her continuing body of work) bursts onto the stage as a young Alice Roosevelt who revels in her ability to shock and entertain, but turns sardonically bitter when the public’s rejection of the men who represent her political leanings render her irrelevant.
If Eleanor and Alice were playing on Broadway with two movie stars in the roles, it would be considered an event. At Urban Stages, it’ll have to settle for being an extraordinarily captivating evening of live theatre.
The first time I saw Annaleigh Ashford on stage…
…it was in an early version of Next To Normal called Feeling Electric, which was focused on Amy Spanger’s Diana’s relationship with her doctor (played by Anthony Rapp), who she envisions as a rock star.
Ashford played the darkly humored daughter, who had a line about school shootings that would never be used in a show today.
She’s now knocking ‘em dead as Sweeney Todd’s darkly humored Mrs. Lovett, opposite Josh Groban in the title role. Taking it in a couple of weeks ago, when the lights went up for intermission, I was especially impressed at how the pair, under Thomas Kail‘s direction, had the audience rolling with laughter during the musical’s act one closer, “A Little Priest”, a 44-year-old comedy song from a show so popular, you would assume most of the customers this early in the run would already know the jokes.
I remember watching Angela Lansbury and Len Cariou performing the number from a top row of the Uris Theatre during a preview of the original production, when director Harold Prince had the stars delivering the clever wordplay of Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics and Hugh Wheeler’s dialogue as high comedic banter. It was fresh and very funny.
I also remember reading in Ken Mandelbaum beloved volume about flop musicals, Not Since Carrie how in the 1968 Broadway musical Golden Rainbow, there was a staged moment where every night Steve Lawrence seemed to make his wife and co-star Eydie Gorme break character and laugh uncontrollably in the middle of a scene. Audiences loved it, and in the days before social media you could get away with people thinking it was a one-time occurrence. (Until you ran into somebody who says the same thing happened when they saw the show.)
What’s so hilarious about what Ashford and Groban are doing eight times a week, is that the characters themselves are making each other laugh uncontrollably. Not an evil, maniacal laugh of two villains planning a killing spree, but the sincere, charmed laughter of two people falling in love.
It’s written into the script that Mrs. Lovett has always been attracted to the barber upstairs, and that Mr. Todd is so emotionally wounded by the circumstances that landed him into jail, he really doesn’t notice. Groban’s extra-grim Mr. Todd is so focused on revenge that when Ashford’s Lovett begins plotting in amusing patter, Sweeney seems not only surprised at the deviousness of her scheme, but also that he’s once again able to laugh; perhaps for the first time in years. And then he seems determined to make Mrs. Lovett laugh. And she does; both at his humor and at the spontaneous way she has finally discovered how to unfreeze the man’s heart.
And for a few minutes, before the bloodshed begins to overflow, the joy of finding someone who can make you laugh uncontrollably becomes the most romantic moment currently seen on Broadway.
Maybe it was just me, but I sensed a bit of knowing anticipation in the audience when Karen Finley started mixing flour with water on the Laurie Beechman Theatre stage…
For better or worse, history and popular culture has deemed a permanent connection between Karen Finley and any type of food, ever since the accomplished performance artist who attacked censorship and oppressive societal norms in her work only gained national exposure when Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina described a performance of hers as little more than smearing chocolate sauce on her naked body in his effort to disband the National Endowment For The Arts.
Helms was referring to a performance piece of Finley’s titled We Keep Our Victims Ready, where the artist did cover herself in chocolate and other forms of edibles as symbolic gestures accompanying her words about patriarchal smothering.
On a personal note, I credit Finley for inspiring one of the high points of my failed career as a playwright. While a member of Trevor Hasselfree’s audience participation murder mystery troupe, I penned a show titled DOA at the NEA, with a character delivering a performance art piece suggested by Finley’s It’s Only Art, the story of a trip to a museum where the art has been removed and all that remains are signs giving the reasons each piece was regarded as too offensive to display before the public.
In my play, a wonderful actor named Meg Arader performed It’s Only Oliver!, a performance art piece about going to see a performance of Oliver!, only to find it had been canceled because aspects of the popular musical had been deemed too offensive. The monologue climaxed with the character singing “Food, Glorious Food” while, yes, smearing her body with every edible mentioned in the lyric.
Karen Finley in COVID Vortex Opera Kitty Kaleidoscope Disco (Photo: Max Ruby)
While I wouldn’t say Finley’s COVID Vortex Opera Kitty Kaleidoscope Disco gave me a sense of nostalgia, it did bring back memories of aspects of the past few years I haven’t thought about in quite some time, starting with clips of those 7pm applause breaks that took place every evening to honor health care workers that provided a soundtrack accompanying the artist’s entrance, dancing through the audience in a fringe-ornamented hazmat suit.
After assuring that she got tested that morning, Finley advised us last Saturday that this was her first time putting this material in front of an audience, and the packed house enthusiastically responded to her suggestion that we all discover together what exactly it is.
It wasn’t long before Finley was in a confused frenzy of rage, in a piece trying to sort out the conflicting views regarding masking, distancing, isolation and the dangers of getting it wrong.
“Bring me back the simple life,
When not giving a fuck was a worthy option.”
“Turns out none of us really knew how to wash our hands,” she marvels in a piece about the country’s newfound hygiene standards.
Additional topics include the national obsession with calming videos of snuggling animals, the sudden baking fad that swept the country and which social events can effectively be done over Zoom.
There are costume changes galore, which are admittedly a bit time-consuming, but that improvised do-it-yourself feel has always been a charm of Karen Finley’s performances.
That, and an insistence that art can provide a pathway to resolve the injustices and inequalities that continue to plague us, whether we go masked or unmasked.
“Find your secret garden and come out to play.”
Curtain Line…
Can I keep my phone on at a Broadway musical if it’s just to use Shazam?