Barrington Stage Company of Pittsfield, Mass. is bouncing back from COVID with a vengeance. They’re in the black and up to speed, according to founding artistic director Julianne Boyd, who has programmed nine shows through October for this 28th and final season before her retirement. A Father’s Day visit yielded two superior offerings, incidentally appropriate to the occasion.
★★★★☆ Andy Warhol in Iran
The world premiere two-hander on the intimate St. Germain stage, Andy Warhol in Iran, was inspired by a real life, 1976 Tehran visit to lobby for a commission for portraits of the Shah’s wife. Author Brent Askari imagines the sort of confrontation with real life from which the pop artist always shied away: Farhad, a Hilton room service bellman (Nima Rakhshanifar), bursts in with a revolver, barking the demand that Andy (Henry Stram) accompany him to an arriving car. His group’s theory is that a world-famous celebrity’s abduction will kick-start the forced retirement of the wicked Shah Reza Pahlevi.
It might sound like a recipe for a static event. After all, the skinny, timorous Andy isn’t going to struggle for the gun; Jack Reacher he ain’t. The men will either stay in the room or leave, but they clearly won’t leave because this isn’t a movie, so the playwright will have to justify their staying in one place. But how?
Quite deftly, as it turns out. Askari brings in enough obstacles to justify the men’s confinement for 70 electric minutes. Which in turn opens the door to opportunities for captor and captive to compare their shared pasts and pain, beginning with a quick overview of U.S. involvement in Iranian history (illustrated by Yana Biryukova’s striking wall projections).
The audience gasps as Farhad reveals the scars of SAVAK (secret police) torture, with a second gasp at the surgical corset Andy must wear “to keep my innards from falling out” – a legacy of his 1968 shooting at the hands of Valerie Solanas. Both men turn out to have been shaped by the tragedies of their dads (there’s the Father’s Day connection), one murdered by official order, the other by corporate malfeasance. Askari gives the lie to those who, like Andy, airily believe that “politics is so… abstract,” willfully ignoring that politics is people, facing real, often terrible consequences.
Both performers are first-rate, with Stram excelling at the harder (because less showy) role in which he must allow us to appreciate, at once, the unique vision of a seminal artistic icon, and the everyday habits and concerns of an ordinary human being. Skip Greer directs, thoughtfully and with an eye toward maximizing suspense.
★★★★☆ Ain’t Misbehavin’
Mere blocks away at BSC’s Boyd-Quinson Stage, an exuberant company of five, plus a smokin’ seven-piece band, is delivering a capital rendition of Ain’t Misbehavin’: The Fats Waller Musical Show, a revue always good for what ails you. Originally a cabaret entertainment that ended up copping the Best Musical Tony and playing four years on Broadway, it was conceived by Richard Maltby, Jr. and Murray Horwitz as far more than a jukebox of stride-piano tunes. It’s a veritable portrait of a prewar time and place, the theatrical equivalent of a Romare Bearden collage of Harlem life with composer/pianist Thomas “Fats” Waller at its life-affirming center. (Its father-figure, if you will.) Maltby has said he always hopes that, at some point in the evening, the spectator will actually feel Waller’s presence in the playhouse, and this performance does everything it can to bring about that vision.
This is certainly the dancing-est Ain’t Misbehavin’ you’ve ever seen, which is no surprise considering director-choreographer Jeffrey L. Page has just gotten through choreographing and co-directing the dancing-est 1776 of all time (a gender-fluid, progressive reinvisioning staged with Diane Paulus at A.R.T. in nearby Cambridge). The personalities established by the first Misbehavin’ cast are still in place: the women variously flirty, cynical, or hoity-toity; one puckish fellow, the other large and big-hearted. New dimensions are added by moving them rhythmically through space; number after number turns into a distinct one-act play. (I will admit that the dancing plays some havoc with the witty lyrics, already compromised by a sound system which, on opening night at least, sacrificed crispness of diction for volume. I hope they’ll attend to the overamplification.)
Director Page – no relation to the original production’s Ken Page, of happy memory – incorporates, into the production concept, the African mask tradition known latterly as double consciousness: the idea that marginalized people have to balance being their true selves with the roles the oppressing class wants them to play. Multiple songs are infused with this code-switching notion, not least “Black and Blue” with its chilling bridge: “I’m white/Inside/But that don’t help my case/’Cause I/Can’t hide/What is on my face.” In this production, that ballad merges with a brief reprise of “Looking Good and Feeling Bad,” its title so suggestive of masquerade.
Which is not to suggest that the fun factor always associated with this revue is at all diminished. The accompaniment is in skillful hands with musical director Kwinton Gray at the piano, while Tom Ontiveros’s lighting and Oona Botez’s costumes create eyeful after eyeful on Raul Abrego’s elegant set.
As for the company, Maltby’s original cast all attained star status, and this quintet – Allison Blackwell, Arnold Harper II, Jarvis B. Manning, Jr., Anastacia McClesky and Maiesha McQueen – is equally deserving of going places. Speaking of which, should New York’s theater community be in need of an infusion of sheer high spirits, a transfer of this co-production with Rochester, NY’s Geva Theatre might well turn the trick. One never knows, do one?
Andy Warhol in Iran opened June 8, 2022, at the St. Germain Stage (Pittsfield, MA) and runs through June 25. Tickets and information: barringtonstageco.org
Ain’t Misbehavin’: The Fats Waller Musical Show opened June 19, 2022, at the Boyd-Quinson Stage (Pittsfield, MA) and runs through July 9. Tickets and information: barringtonstageco.org
