COMFORT and JOY

SC Shakespeare's A Christmas Carol delivers the holiday spirit

For a joyous dose of holiday cheer, treat yourself to Santa Cruz Shakespeare's A Christmas Carol, now playing at the Veterans Memorial Hall in downtown Santa Cruz. Now in its second year, this seasonal revival of Charles Dickens' beloved Christmas chestnut is recalibrated for the stage by SCS Artistic Director Charles Pasternak, who also co-directs, with Alicia Gibson.

 

The festivities begin as soon as you enter the hall, with sweet treats, warm drinks, and popcorn (merrily popping away in a vintage popper) for sale on the way into the theater, which is festooned with green garlands and red bows on all sides.

 

Even with a streamlined cast of only five adults and two children, and a single, functional set, this production manages to evoke the majority of Dickens' vast array of eccentric characters, its time-traveling adventures, and all of the story's large-hearted humanity.

 

Much of this is achieved by the actors slipping in and out of character to trade narration duties, enhancing scenes with snippets of Dickens' observational prose from the original novella. All the actors take part in this round-robin of narration that keeps the story moving briskly along, except for Mike Ryan, as protagonist Ebenezer Scrooge. Onstage throughout as the "grasping, greedy, covetous old sinner," Ryan's job is to sneer and glower at everyone else in the first half, cower before the supernatural spirits, and ultimately embrace his redemption with wholehearted glee, and he delivers with his usual panache.

 

 Julie James, Artistic Director of the late, lamented Jewel Theatre Company, pops up in several key roles. She's Marley's Ghost — dragging his chains and shrieking his despair over his misspent life, in a scene so shrouded in stage fog and bleached of color, it looks like a black-and-white movie — (kudos to Lighting Designer Stephen Migdal) — and also the ebullient Ghost of Christmas Present, in her holly wreath crown and lavish fur robes. Most fun is her cackling Mrs. Dilber, the housekeeper looking to sell Scrooge's meagre effects to the rag-and-bone man after his lonely demise.

As Old Joe, the rag-and-bone man, Eddie Lopez is just as funny, in a boisterous departure from his main role as poor, but warm-hearted Bob Cratchit, Scrooge's much put-upon clerk. Among other roles, he also plays Scrooge as a young man in flashback, in love with stalwart and loyal Belle (Charlotte Boyce Munson), whose love he squanders in his single-minded pursuit of wealth and power. Munson also does a nifty about-face as Scrooge's nephew, Fred, infused with a lusty holiday spirit he's determined to impose on his sour old uncle, whether he likes it or not. Andrea Sweeney Blanco essays a pair of devoted wives, plucky Mrs. Cratchit, and nephew Fred's cheery bride. She also brings a tender and graceful gravitas to the role of the Ghost of Christmas Past, shepherding the reluctant Scrooge through the youthful dreams and wretched mistakes of his past.

 

On opening night, Joseph Pratt Lukefahr was effective as both the lonely boy Scrooge, and cheerful Tiny Tim, as well as the sassy street urchin Scrooge sends to buy a turkey for the Cratchits. Sigrid Breidenthal did a lovely job as child Scrooge's sister, Fan, and the Cratchit's number two daughter, Belinda.

 

Christmas Past's angelic white satin gown and glittering snowy halo, along with Christmas Present's elaborate robes, are the standouts among B Modern's gorgeous costume design. But every article of clothing is rich in period and thematic detail, from the ladies' Victorian gowns and the suits, waistcoats and toppers of the gentlemen, down to the decaying rags of Marley's Ghost.

Scenic Designer Bennett Seymour's rotating, two-story spiral staircase morphs into everything from Scrooge's counting house to the floating plateau from which Scrooge and the Ghosts view the mortal world, to the cozy Cratchit family hearth.

 

As a self-confessed Christmas Carol nerd (as I've expressed many times in these digital pages), I've devoured dozens and dozens of versions, on stage and screen — big and small —  ­and I'm always interested in new takes on the material. I admire the economy of Pasternak's pared down production, which feels consistently rich in spirit. Although I do miss the joyful sight of the Old Fezziwig and Mrs. Fezziwig dancing at their Christmas party (even though Dickens' prose in the narration brings the scene vividly to life). And it seems like the Cratchit family is short a couple of kids.

 

A particularly festive touch in this production is the liberal use of traditional Christmas carols strategically inserted throughout to reflect upon, and enhance the story. (Orchestrated to an incredible offstage mix tape by Music Director Luke Shepherd that sounds as if there's a live combo secreted somewhere within the folds of the curtain.) All of the cast members sing beautifully, and their harmonies are  especially lovely. The show begins with the robustly caroling cast members carrying lit candles through the darkness as they parade down the aisle to the stage, and it ends with the entire company onstage (and the audience on its feet) joining in on a rousing "We Wish You A Merry Christmas" to sing us all out into the night, infused with a renewed holiday spirit.

 

(Santa Cruz Shakespeare's A Christmas Carol plays through Wednesday, December 24, at the Veterans Memorial Hall in downtown Santa Cruz.)

 (Photos by Kevin Lohman (Top, 3, 4) and Shmuel Thaler (2))

MENAGE á DOG

Wife vs pet in funny JTC season closer Sylvia

If you share your space with a pet, chances are you talk to the little critter. (Oh, go on, admit it!) You're probably convinced your pet understands what you say (even if he chooses not to respond), and that you can tell what he's thinking.

But you never have an actual conversation with your pet, in which each of you speaks and responds to the other. Not unless you're in the play, Sylvia. In this 1995 comedy by prolific playwright A. R. Gurney about a man, a woman, and a dog, everybody talks to the dog — and the dog talks back.

A new production of Sylvia is the crowd-pleasing final offering of Jewel Theatre Company's 2016-17 season. The show is literally back by popular demand: it was a huge hit when it was first produced at JTC in 2009, and has been much-requested ever since. For this reprise edition, director Diana Torres Koss has assembled the original four-person cast, and they make the most of every syllable of Gurney's funny script.

Greg (Shaun Carroll), who works in the financial industry, comes home from the park one day with a stray dog called Sylvia (Julie James), an excitable, overly-affectionate lab-poodle mix — to the dismay of Greg's wife, Kate (Diahanna Davidson). 

James and Carroll: smitten

 With their children out of the nest, Greg and Kate have just relocated to an apartment in New York City from the suburbs. Kate is eager to pursue her new career teaching Shakespeare to inner-city kids. But Greg is facing a midlife crisis, fractious with his boss over a job he hates.

At this stage of her life, Kate doesn't want the responsibilities of a dog. But Greg gets unlimited support from Sylvia; they adore each other, and Kate starts to feel like the third wheel.

Sylvia is not meant to be a magically talking dog, like a canine Mr. Ed. It may be that we're simply witnessing the personality that Greg and/or Kate project onto her onstage, as their marriage is tested. But James has a high old time in the role emulating doggy behavior. She scratches, she sniffs, she leaps into Greg's arms shrieking "I love you!"

Grooming brings out her inner French Poodle

When nervous or excited, her "bark" is staccato cries of "Hey! Hey! Hey!" And when Sylvia spies a cat in the park and goes ballistic, James is hilarious, lunging and spewing verbal invective.

The more anthropomorphic the part becomes, the funnier James is, strutting like Kate Moss after her first trip to the groomer, or turning coy and trampy when Sylvia comes into heat. She's abetted in these transitions by B. Modern's sly costumes; she dresses Sylvia in overalls and high-tops when she's homeless in the park, with increasing use of black leather, lace, and heels, as the dog comes into her own.

Carroll and Davidson are great as the couple caught up in this unlikely ménage a trois. And J. T. Holstrom is  a riot in his three roles: a macho guy in the park giving Greg tips on canine psychology; a snooty female friend of Kate's who suffers the business end of Sylvia's curiosity; and an ineffectual marriage counselor of indeterminate gender.

I didn't actually buy it toward the end when Sylvia, the dog, lectures Kate about what love is. But I didn't care by then, since the show is so entertaining.

BIPOLAR EXPRESS

Mental disorder handled with heart, wit, in exuberant Next To Normal


One of the most interesting things about the Jewel Theatre Company is its choice of material. Sure, they produce their share of the classics — Pinter, Shepard, Athol Fugard, Noel Coward — but Artistic Director Julie James also has a sharp eye for innovative work less familiar to local audiences.

Case in point: Next To Normal, the exhilarating second production in JTC's  ongoing 12th season. This show also marks the company's first anniversary in its new space, the Colligan Theater at The Tannery (where they opened last November with Guys And Dolls).

Next To Normal is also a musical, but there's nothing old-school about it. Produced on Broadway in 2009, the show won a couple of Tonys, along with a  Pulitzer Prize, for its audacious depiction of a wife and mother with bipolar disorder whose struggles to cope with her husband, her family, and herself, are surprisingly universal.

Schmitto, with Payne: outstanding

With music by Tom Kitt and book and lyrics by Brian Yorkey, this is not the kind of musical that comes with show tunes and a chorus line.

It's more like a rock operetta, with almost non-stop music provided in this production by an onstage jazz-rock combo (ably led by keyboardist Katie Coleman) and a cast of six terrific singers.

The music ranges from lyrical to powerhouse, the lyrics are insightful, and the singers perform it in an endlessly inventive series of duets, quartets, and counterpoints.

The story revolves around Diana (Lee Ann Payne), a suburban housewife struggling to get a grip on herself in order to hold her family together. Husband Dan (Christopher Reber) has stuck with her through all the peaks and valleys of her illness.

Payne and Reber: getting a grip

Son Gabe (the outstanding Coleton Schmitto) is the apple of his mother's eye. Teenage daughter Natalie (a poignant, affecting Brittany Law), a scholastic overachiever, also plays keyboards, embracing the classical precision of Mozart as an antidote to the chaos at home.

Payne sings up a storm; she captures Diana's wry wit, and articulates the emotional terrain of each number. Reber's rumpled, loyal Dan, trying to do his best, partners her beautifully. Married in real life, they last appeared onstage together for JTC in the fabulous film noir musical, Gunmetal Blues. (He was the gumshoe; she was the blonde who popped up in all the female roles.)

James (who also directs this production) keeps the action brisk and the audience engaged. The exuberance of this production is what live theatre is all about.

ALL ABOARD

Jewel Theatre Company on-track with season opener 'Streetcar Named Desire'

These days, Tennessee Williams' groundbreaking drama, A Streetcar Named Desire could seem as quaint and mannered as the fading, delusional Southern belle at its center.

But the old girl holds up surprisingly well in the smart new production of Streetcar that launches the twelfth season of Jewel Theatre Company.

First produced onstage in 1947, the play was controversial for daring to whisper (obliquely) about taboo subjects like homosexuality, sexual promiscuity, and rape. It examines the erosion of Southern gentility, in the hothouse flower that is Blanche DuBois, exposed in the merciless glare of the postwar modern world represented by her rough-hewn working-class brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski.

But Williams knew that the perceived elegance of the Old South — built on generations of slavery and repression — was as much an illusion as Blanche's fragile image of herself as a genteel lady.

Schindele and James: culture clash

These are no longer considered scandalous, or particularly new ideas. But director Susan Myer Silton sets them up vividly in her JTC production. The story is set in the French quarter of New Orleans, and one of Silton's coolest innovations is to place a three-man jazz combo on a wrought-iron balcony overlooking the stage; they play the actors in and out of scenes, subtly punctuating the action, but never overwhelming it.

Stanley Kowalski is played by Brent Schindele, previously seen in a dinner jacket, tinkling the ivories as the lounge pianist in JTC's delightful film noir musical, Gunmetal Blues. His performance here is a pretty nifty about-face. Erika Schindele (she and Brent are married in real life) plays his wife, Stella, with strength and compassion. The Kowalskis  enjoy a strong physical, if sometimes volatile, relationship.

Stanley and Stella: volatile

But their marriage is strained when Stella's older sister, Blanche (Julie James), arrives. A spinsterish onetime high school English teacher, Blanche spins a tale of woe about how the family home (a Mississippi plantation called Belle Reve), has been "lost," as the elder generation died out.

Alternately reproaching Stella for "abandoning" the family that Blanche had to care for, and buttering her up as her "precious baby sister," Blanche has nowhere to go, and her travel plans are indefinite.

Blanche deplores what she considers the Kowalski's miserable living conditions in their two-room apartment, and finds Stanley crude and common. Stanley suspects her of cheating Stella out of the family inheritance; he loathes her superior attitude, her interference in his marriage, and her pretense to gentility, which he considers a phony act.

And the clash of wills between them only intensifies. (Read more)

All photos ©2016 Steve DiBartolomeo-Westside Studio Images

ON TRACK

David Ledingham as Sky Masterson, & co

JTC inaugurates new Tannery space with spirited Guys and Dolls

The second production in Jewel Theatre Company's eleventh season is more than just an evening of theatre. It's an invitation to come check out the company's spanking new performance space, the Colligan Theater, at the Tannery Arts Center.

Enter the complex from the main parking lot, and the Colligan is the first building to your left (next door to the Radius Art Gallery). With raked seating for 200 patrons above the stage (the incline is gradual, not nosebleed-steep), there are no bad sightlines.

And while the space seems enormous compared to JTC's previous venue, the microscopic Center Stage, it still feels intimate in terms of the viewer's relationship to the performers.

Christopher Reber and Julie James

 To inaugurate this new space, JTC mounts a production of the crowd-pleasing, vintage musical, Guys and Dolls. Originally produced in 1950, but set in the '30s, the show is based on the short stories of Damon Runyon, and populated by his usual cast of lovable Broadway denizens on the outskirts of respectability—gamblers, bookies, and chorus girls.

The JTC production is a bit slow out of the starting gate, but picks up steam in the second lap and gallops to a strong, exuberant finish.

The show features the ever-likable Christopher Reber as Nathan Detroit, David Ledingham as gambler Sky Masterson, Cornelia Burdick Thompson as straight-laced Salvation Army captain Sarah Brown, and JTC Artistic Director Julie James as showgirl Miss Adelaide (having a high old time with her Bronx accent and racy stage numbers like "Take Back Your Mink.")

Diana Torres Koss: Runyon-esque

But the best coup is casting JTC veteran Diana Torres Koss in the male sidekick role of Nicely Nicely. Her Runyon-esque patter, dialect, and attitude are perfect, and she delivers some of the best songs.

The property is a bit dated at times. Viewers may cringe at the comic subplot of Sky getting Sarah drunk to loosen her up (she thinks she's drinking a milkshake). But this is a family show, so he doesn't do anything but beam at her indulgently when she sings her big epiphany song.

Likewise cringe-worthy is the wheezy idea put forth in the ladies' duet ("Marry the Man") that all a woman wants to do is force a makeover on her man the minute he puts a ring on it.

But otherwise this lively production successfully launches JTC's new home.
(Read complete review in this week's Good Times)

MIND GAMES

Davidson, Carroll: head-smacked.

JTC closes season with bittersweet comedy 'Woman In Mind'

Santa Cruz's Jewel Theatre Company is the little company that could. Artistic Director Julie James, works miracles with limited resources, mounting ambitious, professional theatre in tiny local spaces like Center Stage (where JTC has been the resident company for the last five years). James' eagerness to tackle everything from Beckett to Sondheim to Athol Fugard, from musicals to West Coast and World premieres, makes her company consistently worth watching.

For the finale of JTC's Tenth Anniversary season, James presents Woman In Mind, a bittersweet comedy of disillusion by popular British playwright Alan Ayckbourn. First produced in 1985, the play starts off as a jaunty comedy about a midlife suburban woman confusing her fantasy of perfect family life with the far more mundane reality. Ayckbourn's play quietly evolves into something much more poignant, and this production, directed by James herself, strikes both its sad and funny highlights with effective precision.

The story begins with protagonist, Susan (Diahanna Davidson), prone in her modest garden with a strange man kneeling over her, spouting gibberish. Turns out she has just performed the classic slapstick comedy maneuver, stepped on a garden rake and smacked herself in the head, a short trip to oblivion from which she is just now waking up. The man is a medical doctor, Bill Windsor (Shaun Carroll), who's just summoned an ambulance, his nonsense words finally resolving into ordinary English that Susan was mishearing in her delirious state.

A perfect English garden of the mind.

It's daring to start off with a scene so disorienting to the audience, and Ayckbourn wisely sticks to Susan's increasingly suspect and fractured perspective for the rest of the play. As soon as Bill goes back in the house, the drab brick wall of Susan's yard becomes a gateway to an extravagant English garden, full of mazes and hedgerows. (Kudos to Set Designer Kent Dorsey and Lighting Designer Mark Hopkins.)

Through this gateway pour Susan's doting husband, Andy (David Arrow), adoring daughter, Lucy (Danielle Crook), and devoted younger brother, Tony (Jimmy Allan). They seem to have wandered in out of a 1930s Noel Coward play, in their sporty white outfits (costumes by the great B. Modern), wielding tennis racquets and glasses of vintage "champers." The giddy Susan assures them all that she's perfectly fine.

Davies, Torres-Koss: too true to be perfect.

Except that she's not quite. We know something is up as soon as the somewhat bumbling, but good-hearted Bill comes back out and makes reference to family members Susan at first doesn't acknowledge. Her real-life family, as we soon learn, led by stodgy husband, Gerald (Chad Davies), an Anglican clergyman who neglects her for the book he's writing about the history of the parish since 1386.

Then there's frazzled Muriel (the ever-stalwart Diana Torres-Koss), the widowed sister to whom Gerald is devoted, whose culinary attempts have everyone quaking in fear. Aimless son, Rick (Nat Robinson), has joined a cult that forbids him to speak to his parents.

Fantasy family: too perfect to be true.

There are plenty of laughs as these two worlds begin to collide (including a comic Q&A expertly lobbed by Davidson and Carroll, with the recurring punchline "since 1386," including how long Gerald has been working on his book). Arrow, Allan, and Crook are all hilariously suave and arch as the fantasy family, and Davies maintains a vague, melancholy dignity as poor, plodding Gerald.

But this production doesn't really get going until the second act, coming together at last, even as its heroine unravels.

It's not simply that Susan retreats into idle romantic nonsense; the process by which she's become disengaged with her life has been involuntary and devastating. Once content as a wife and mother, she feels abandoned now that no one needs her any more. In her prickly conversation with son Rick, we see how they wound and infuriate each other, despite their best intentions. Finally, even her perfect alternate family starts to get on her nerves.

Davidson's Susan is onstage throughout, and her sharp, yet aching performance helps JTC end is tenth season on a high note of dramatic complexity. (This show plays through June 28.)


(Photos by Steve DiBartolomeo.)

GEM at the JEWEL

Dueling sibs: Mike Ryan and Julie James

Sharp writing, great cast, highlight JTC's 'Complications From a Fall'

For the fourth production of its Tenth Anniversary season, Jewel Theatre Company has plucked out a plum. Santa Cruz's own Kate Hawley bestows a gift on JTC and its lucky patrons with her new play, Complications From A Fall. This is the World Premiere of Hawley's play, a witty, often breezy comedy about a  serious subject—aging parents, and the grown children reluctantly deputized to care for them.

The play has everything to recommend it to theatre companies large and small. It can be staged on a single set (with a few inventive flourishes, like those dreamed up for the JTC production by director Paul Whitworth). The cast is small, consisting of four terrific acting parts. And the subject matter is universal—parent-child relationships, sibling friction, family secrets, and memories, lost and found. Hawley skillfully mines this material for life-sized humor, without resorting to farce, or cheapening the drama of the situation.

An agitated Helen (Julie James), a spinster-ish university professor, is fuming in the house of her elderly, bedridden mother. She's awaiting the arrival of her younger brother, Teddy (Mike Ryan), a scruffy musician in an obscure rock band that's perpetually on the road. Helen has been their mother's caretaker since the older woman took a fall awhile back, but she has a scholarly conference to attend so Teddy has to come home for a few days to help out.

Teddy faces his first hurdle when his mother (infuriating, yet beguiling Nada Rowand) wakes up; she recognizes him as her beloved son, but keeps calling for the previous hired caregiver, Lucy. His sister has told Teddy she let Lucy go because pieces of their mother's jewelry kept disappearing, but Mom becomes so distressed, Teddy calls in Lucy (an engaging Audrey Rumsby) for back-up.

Everything works, from B. Modern's effective costumes and Kate Edmunds’ smart set design (its walls covered with the handwritten script of old letters), to the wartime-era pop songs that play between scenes in this thoughtful and entertaining production. (Read more)

RANDOM ACTS OF LUNACY

Julie James and Danny Scheie: frenzied plots

Orton's crazed spirit lives in JTC's hilarious 'What the Butler Saw'

Spoiler alert: there is no butler in What the Butler Saw. But there's plenty to see and enjoy in Joe Orton's scabrously funny 1967 comedy as performed by the Jewel Theatre Company. It's a slamming-door farce in which the set's four doors repeatedly slam, identities are mistaken, switched, disguised and deconstructed, thwarted sexuality drives the plot, and anarchy runs riot over all. 

In other words, business as usual for Orton, the working-class Brit whose subversively witty comedies blazed across the London theatre scene during his brief mid-1960s career.

Yes, this production references the '60s, from the British Invasion soundtrack that greets audiences on the way to their seats, to B. Modern's mod-influenced costumes. But Orton's comic style is timeless; his tweaking of authority and cheeky disdain for hallowed traditions and bourgeois propriety would be equally at home on a 16th-Century Commedia dell'arte stage or last night's cable TV comedy series. And the excellent JTC team mines the material for every possible laugh.

Josh Saleh, Mike Ryan, Audrey Rumsby: gender-switched

This production continues JTC's fertile association with Shakespeare Santa Cruz alumni. Director Art Manke (whose credits include the wonderful The Three Musketeers) stages the piece with verve and clarity. 

Mike Ryan notches up another entertaining performance as the head of a tony private psychiatric clinic, whose aborted attempt to seduce his dewy new secretary, and his increasingly frazzled attempts to conceal this fact from his virago wife (expertly played by Julie James), lead to mayhem in Orton's frisky plot. 

Ryan and Saleh: anarchy vs. propriety

 Also on board is the hilarious Danny Scheie as another shrink, visiting the clinic on behalf of the British government. As the principal authority figure, it's his function to misinterpret evidence, misconstrue motives, and misdiagnose everyone else as a raving lunatic—and Scheie wrings the most out of every syllable of caustic observation and gleeful epiphany.

Audrey Rumsby, as the secretary, and Josh Saleh as a bellhop roped into the action are delightful as the young innocents caught up in the crazed lies and schemes of their elders; they are the ones most often stripped down to their skivvies and forced to switch clothes and genders to suit the others' frenzied plotting.

The message here is that no amount of personal aplomb or official prestige can save you from random acts of lunacy in the Orton universe. (Read more)

(The JTC production of What the Butler Saw plays through May 25 at Center Stage in Sant Cruz. Visit the JTC website for ticket info.)

Photos by Steve DiBartolomeo, WestsideStudio Image.

HOME ON THE STAGE

Diana Torres Koss and Christopher Reber

JTC stages folksy, lighthearted musical revue "Pump Boys and Dinettes'

After the intellectual acrobatics of its last offering, Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, the Jewel Theatre Company does something completely different  in Pump Boys and Dinettes, a lighthearted, country-pop musical revue. The Center Stage theatre space is transformed into a roadside diner somewhere along Highway 57 in North Carolina, where a six-man musical combo and two perky waitresses invite the audience in for two fleet hours of songs, dancing, and good times.

With book, lyrics, and music written collectively by John Foley, Mark Hardwick, Debra Monk, Cass Morgan, John Schimmel, and Jim Wann, Pump Boys and Dinettes was first produced on Broadway in 1982. JTC Artistic Director Julie James has appeared in three different out-of-town productions of the show, and had so much fun, she decided to direct this production for JTC, in which she also co-stars as one of the waitress/co-owners of the Double Cupp Diner (along with Diana Torres Koss).

James and company set the folksy, down-home tone right off. Even as patrons are still finding their seats, the musicians are milling around on stage, tuning up and joking around, while the waitresses, in their pink uniforms and paper caps rove up and down the aisles, welcoming everyone in and chatting them up. Ron Gasparinetti's cozily overstuffed set (coffee counter and stools, pink china on the shelves, black and white checkerboard floor, a neon gas pump sign on one side and a "Diner" sign on the other) deftly evokes the kind of homey place where waitresses in beehives call you "Hon."

Brent Schindele and Julie James lead the company in song

 Fans of JTC's terrific film noir musical, Gunmetal Blues, from last season, will be pleased to know that two of its stars reunite in this show. Christopher Reber (the gumshoe in Blues) stars as the guitar-strumming front man in the diner band, and Brent Schindele (beloved in Blues as lounge singer Buddy Toupee) is back at the piano keys.

With its good humor and hard-working cast, Pump Boys and Dinettes is an ideal prelude to the holiday season, a low-stress entertainment that will keep you smiling. (Read more)

DUELING DIVAS

Julie James (L) and Diana Torres Koss (R)

Queens struggle for power in JTC's ambitious Mary Stuart


Two great divas from the local theater scene play two of the greatest divas in history in Mary Stuart, the inaugural offering of the Jewel Theatre Company's 2012-2013 season. This historical play dramatizes the conflict between Queen Elizabeth Tudor of England and her cousin, Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, a volatile pair of queens brought to life con brio at Center Stage by JTC veterans Diana Torres Koss and Julie James.

When director Susan Myer Silton went looking for a property with strong female roles, it's easy to see why she pounced on this one. Based on an 1800 German play by Friedrich Schiller and given a spiffy new translation by English playwright Peter Oswald in 2005, Mary Stuart distills the complex power struggle between the two queens into a subtle war of wills and words as both women navigate the often conflicting demands of honor, politics, religion, the obligations of queenship, and the vagaries of the human heart. (Read more)

Btw, exciting plans are afoot for JTC next spring when the intrepid home-grown company partners with Shakespeare Santa Cruz. The fruit of this intriguing collaboration will be an evening of two one-act plays by Harold Pinter. One For the Road, directed by SSC Artistic Director Marco Barricelli, will feature Paul Whitworth, Mike Ryan, and Julie James. The Lover, will be directed by James and feature Ryan in the cast.

Play dates are April 25 - May 12, 2013, so mark your calendars now!

SPLITTING HEIRS

Toxic family ties explored in JTC's engrossing 'Hello & Goodbye'


Two of Santa Cruz's best known and most dependable actors receive a gift of a play in the Jewel Theatre Company's new production of Athol Fugard's Hello & Goodbye—a gift that keeps on giving back to local audiences in this intense evening of dramatic theater. Played with both terrific brio and aching subtlety by Mike Ryan and Julie James, and directed by Bay Area theater veteran Jessica Heidt, Fugard's two-character drama emerges as an incisive, microcosmic look at family, class, and cultural dysfunction in the South Africa of the recent past.

The story is set in 1965, the year in which the play was written: Nelson Mandela had just been sent to prison, apartheid policies were in full flower, and the white Afrikaner minority was struggling  to maintain its political control over an increasingly rebellious population. But the viewer doesn't have to know anything about South African history or politics to be moved by the core tale of fractured family dynamics as a pair of adult siblings confront each other, themselves, and the twisted legacy inherited from their parents. (Read more)