Regularly scheduled Winthrop Eagle baseball games definitely made the cut in the listings of Come-See-Me events in Rock Hill, April 7-16. So did Quilts of York County, Catawba Pow Wow, Sundaes with Glen &
Mother Goose, Brunch at the Womens Club, Barbeque Competition No Pork, Herps Alive Reptiles & Amphibians, and Frog Hoppin Fun. A fairly wide Charlotte Shouts range for an annual spring festival.
Yet the theatre presence in the card was suspiciously capricious. Yes, Winthrop Universitys production of William Wycherleys The Country Wife, opening on April 13, made it into the listings every night it ran. But the US Premiere of Tommy Kearneys Madonna and Me, with the playwright himself in attendance for the full run, was completely slept on, though the Edge Theatre production ran at South Pointe High School from April 7-10. And what about Belles, the first effort of the new all-woman WIP Productions? That comedy ran downtown at the Community Performance Center during the terminal 3 nights of Come-See-Me. Unacknowledged!
With their lame Frog logo and their lackadaisical publicity effort, Ive got one pointed question to aim at Come-See-Me officials in the aftermath of their 48th annual celebration. Outside of a three-mile radius of Rock Hill, do you actually expect people to come to the Come-See-Me Festival?
So during Come-See-Me, Sue and I accompanied one case in Rock Hill that was partly of the festival and one that wasnt. Of the two, I was most keen on seeing The Country Wife, my favorite Restoration comedyand the wickedest Ive ever read by from Wycherleys own Plain-Dealer. Winthrops production marked the 1st time Id seen any Wycherley work staged, and it would make a lot of incompetence and ill-will to thwart this bawdy confection.
That nearly happened in Act 1 of a five-act show that clocked in at 2:30 plus intermission, but by Act 2, I had moved from Row K to Row F. Nearly all the dialogue became audible and intelligible; the jaundiced world of Wycherley was mine again. If the set designs by Anna Sartin were far from her chef doeuvre, costumes by Janet Gray gave us a glorious view of the period, whether they were for the seventeenth Century nobles, the ladies, the sparks, the servants, the quack doctor, or the fop.
Few of the characters retained the spirit that has lingered vividly in my head since my first meeting with them in grade school. Briana Parkss interpretation of Mrs. Margery Pinchwife, the title role, was less cute and salacious than I recalled, and David Hutto Jr. made her possessive husband, Mr. Pinchwife, far more bellowing and sanctimonious than a former whoremaster needed to be. Such variations, however, are easily inside the latitude we should have a manager and his cast.
The two disfigurements from director Andrew Vorder Bruegge that consistently annoyed me were the rogue hero, Horner, and the modish fop, Mr. Sparkish. Horner has his confederate, the quack doctor, spread the rumor around London that, due to an unfortunate surgical accident, the former rake is now a eunuch. The aim of this stratagem is to reach London husbands reason to let their guards down so that Horner can make their wives. But Bruegge had Nathan Rouse change his part and his entire posture when he switched from the true serial seducer Horner to the purported eunuchfrom swashbuckler to wheedlerno matter how implausible the situation. This Johnny Depp/Tim Conway take on Horner, executed nicely enough by Rouse, diminished both the cheat and the blindness of those he deceived.
And surely Sparkish could be allowed some intelligence and nuance beyond what was bestowed on him by the perennially declaiming Shareef Elkady. His deceivers, Ann Marie Calabro as fiance Alithea and Jed Cockerell as Harcount, were but somewhat more sick than the worldly Londoners that Wycherley put on the page. Nearly on the cross were Zade Patterson and Bailey Robinson as Sir Jaspar and Lady Fidget, the prime targets of Horners eunuch magic until he is struck by Margery.
Easiest to love was Dennis DeJesus as the old Quack, over-the-top skeptical that Horners scheme would go and over-the-top astonished by how spectacularly well it does.
At the Madonna & Me premiere, only one of the seven performers passed the playwrights muster in simulating a proper Liverpool accent. So the thicker the dialect of the other performers, the more difficult it was to decipher what was being spoken and what was happening. Or to care.
We followed the intimacies and hostilities, loyalties and betrayals of a lot of friendswith various dreams, interests, and sexual orientationsas they reached adulthood during Madonnas Material Girl heyday in the early 90s. Luckily, our narrator, Adam, sported one of the lightest accents, courtesy of Jay Kistler, a winsome performer when he addressed the audience. Adam was likewise the one Liverpudlian struggling with the quandary of telling his homosexuality to his working-class buds, so the warm coreand the autobiographical truthof Kearneys work emerged relatively unscathed. It also helped that Haley Phillips, the one actress who nailed the accent, portrayed Paula, Adams most steadfast friend while struggling with a lot of tumultuous issues of her own.
Even my wife Sue, a hardcore fan of PBSs Brit comedy imports whenever she gets to see them, had difficulties comprehending much of the other repartee. She too has a pet peeve about choppy, episodic scripts that I normally dont share. In this case, I guess she has a point. An opened-up film adaptation of Madonna & Me, with honest-to-god Liverpool actors and settings, would probably pay a richer, more textured experienceprovided that it were packaged with American subtitles.
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