GroundWorks Theatre’s production of Adam Rapp’s Blackbird explores the harrowing, starkly compelling descent of two woebegone losers. Ex-army vet Bayliss and teen druggie Froggy inhabit a Lower East Side squat, a chaotic one-room hellhole that effectively represents their own interior desolation. The 30-ish, lower-middle-class Bayliss (Jack E. Chambers) has serious back troubles that challenge his every movement. He’s also sterile and, worst of all, incontinent, and when Chambers cleans and diapers himself at the top of Act 2, we are struck both by the character’s painful humiliation and by the actor’s ability to conduct such a controversial piece of stage business without bringing undue attention to himself.
Occasional stripper and sometime prostitute Froggy (Megan Murphy) is a hollow-eyed suburban girl whose life has gone awry. Heroin’s her main problem, but when she drops bombs into her conversation—she’s pregnant, for one—even Bayliss’ fifth of Jack Daniel’s can’t dull just how desperately she needs help that he can never supply. Murphy, a darling of the local musical comedy scene, has been transitioning of late into darker, more realistic fare, and with this tautly difficult performance she finds the blackness of pathos often enough while conveying the glimmers of a neglected young girl beneath her character’s dissipation.
If Rapp’s script were a piece of music, it would have defined movements but no crescendos. Every key moment takes us lower, and yet the strange and inevitable purpose of Bayliss and Froggy’s relationship never comes into question. Blackbird is a love story, after all, and its unifying principles have nothing to do with romance or sex or good looks. Theirs is a love stripped down to essentials: unmitigated psychic devotion and the provision of mutual security and support, no matter how shameful the surrounding circumstances.
Blackbird is the kind of drama that justifies the existence of off-off Broadway lofts and Chicago storefront theaters—those venues where tough, poetic plays allow us to glimpse fearlessly into the naturalistic. For all its unpleasantness, it is a vastly rewarding piece of theater. Under Robert A. O’Connell’s freeform direction, Chambers and Murphy manage this untoward yet well-tempered vehicle with restraint, clarity and, finally, an alien passion that allows us to understand the true strength of their bond.
Barbed whimsy in ‘Iolanthe’
Iolanthe may be a lesser piece in the Gilbert & Sullivan canon, but it’s still the brilliant work of two composers who set the benchmark for achievement in light opera. The new Nashville Opera production, under the spirited direction of Roger Stephens, offers a festive and sure-handed display of stagecraft, yet the most indelible impression is left by Gilbert’s breathtakingly crafted libretto, which peppers giddy dialogue with comic social barbs.
What is pure whimsy now—a chorus line of overstuffed, self-satisfied members of the British Parliament—must have teetered on the edge of scandal when it first premiered in London in 1882. Yet Gilbert’s words about class, politics and the law still ring with mirthful truth. That the peerage is challenged by the denizens of a fairy world—with the stakes being love—only accords the author further license to indulge his fanciful ideas to charming and hilarious effect, while composer Sullivan weighs in with a tuneful score that unself-consciously references the styles of Mozart and Mendelssohn.
Stephens deserves huge credit for his knowing, playful staging, which begins with a bevy of Arcadian fairy lovelies traipsing gaily across the proscenium. From there, we’re on to an intoxicatingly cagey tale pitting mortals vs. magic, all pulled off with sarcastic humor, consistently engaging singing, and the delightful strains of the Nashville Symphony, under the able baton of conductor William Boggs.
The principal players put to rest the old saw that says opera singers can’t act—and they do so gleefully while unleashing expressive vocals. Melissa Parks and Kirsten Gunlogson are the firm-voiced mezzo-sopranos, while Julie Cox, as the ingenue Phyllis, is the coloratura soprano whose lilting bel canto acrobatics remind us that we’re not witnessing mere musical comedy. The men are every bit as gifted, with bass-baritone Craig Irvin winning over the audience with his lovable turn as a steadfast army private. Gary Aldrich, as the Lord Chancellor, handles the show’s most famous number, “Nightmare Song,” with a breathless aplomb that earned him a rousing round of applause on opening weekend.
Nashville Opera performs Iolanthe twice more, Feb. 10-11 at TPAC’s Polk Theater.
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