West Side Terri by Terri Mowrey, FronteraFest 2013

by Michael Meigs

We've all lost ourselves in cinema dreams. In her charming hour with us in West Side Terri, Terri Mowrey takes the audaciously simple concept of re-enacting for her audience the 1961 film of West Side Story. 

The music, the quips and the scenes live in most of us. Robert Wise and choreographer Jerome Robbins took the musical by Leonard Bernstein and Steven Sondheim and converted it into memorable American folk myth, a Romeo and Juliet story with exciting cinematography, social consciousness, compassion, jazzy dance and a fine tearjerker of an ending. The moral was voiced by Doc, the aggrieved old pharmacist, after death and disaster intervened: "Why can't you kids just get along?"

Terri's fiction is that she's at home in her apartment with its proud Mexican-heritage decorations when that noisy neighbor upstairs starts playing loud music, yet again. She realizing that this time he's playing the whole soundtrack of West Side Story. Delighted, she goes off into her dream and takes us with us, retelling the film, singing along, scooping up props from around the living room and dancing with the abandon of an eight-year-old and the charisma of an adult.

We enjoy the music and recall the scenes. In the course of this hour-long frolic, we get tidbits about the movie -- for example, that dazzling aerial shot at the opening is swooping down toward desolate blocks that before too long would be converted to Lincoln Center; andJerome Robins was taken off the choreography because the film was running over budget). We also learn about Terri herself. She tells us of her terrible disappointment when in 1992 ("yes, I'm that old") she blew her audition for the character of sexpot Anita, perhaps because she wanted it so very much. She recalls an episode in elementary school when an awkward Hispanic boy was shunned because his parents sent him to school with a burrito for lunch, packed in a thermos.

Terrri loves the film but she's no purist; she's happy to knead the characters to suit her own fantasies. A mezzo, herself, she dismisses Maria, the lead played by Natalie Wood, referring to her as 'that soprano.' She undercuts the amiable but forgettable Tony portrayed by Richard Bemer by giving him dull-witted reactions and the voice of Keanu Reeves. She laughs a bit at the frills of the Puerto Rican characters and at the absurdity of finger-snapping, pirouettes and pliés. She's having fun. Her vivid and often surprising renderings of familiar scenes are a delight. Older and more experienced now, perhaps wiser, she's still enchanted by the sweep of tragic romance. Her enthusiasm is a reminder how much we're all shaped by the myths of our times, and how willingly we embrace them.

Jay Fraley, a talented actor and relatively recent transplant from southern California, brought Terri to Austin to do this piece, originally performed to acclaim with the Monkey Wrench Collective in Orange County. Thanks to him and to Terri for a happy time.

EXTRA

Click to view Terri Mowrey's program sheet for West Side Terri

Moonlight and Magnolias, Penfold Theatre at City Theatre, November 4 - 21

by Dr. David Glen Robinson

Moonlight and Magnolias by Ron Hutchinson is a romp and a challenge for comedic actors. Penfold Theatre Company is giving it a go in the City Theatre behind the Shell station on Airport Boulevard, exciting the audience members who actually manage to find the venue.

The play is relatively new, published in 2004, but it is set in Hollywood, 1939, specifically in the the executive office of Producer David O. Selznick (Ryan Crowder). Shooting of Gone With The Wind (GWTW) has started, but Selznick still does not have a filmable screenplay.

Ryan Crowder (image: Kimberley Mead)

In absolute desperation he summons newspaperman/script doctor Ben Hecht, who hasn't even read the novel. In desperation Selznick locks himself, Hecht (Dave Buckman) and director Victor Fleming (Jay Fraley) in his office with an immense, heavy 1930s typewriter and a supply of bananas and peanuts. Selznick and Fleming act out the scenes to an incredulous Hecht. Selznick gives them all five days to produce the screenplay on which the fortunes of the entire studio are riding.

Apparently this scenario is literally true, a verified episode of GWTW lore. Playwright Ron Hutchinson, a Hollywood insider himself, came across this dramatic gem, thought, “Look, a comedy!” and loaded in a play’s worth of Hollywood trivia and gossip and a few heavier social themes. Voila, Moonlight and Magnolias.

Penfold Theatre took full advantage of the play’s comedic potential. The set, props and costumes were period and accurate down to the early twentieth century copy of Life magazine and other magazines on the coffee table. The rear projection image of Tara kept us on-theme throughout, and the video of excerpted scenes from GWTW was a lagniappe.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Spirits to Enforce, Capital T Theatre at FronteraFest LF, January 19-30 and February 10 - 12

With 12 superheroes on stage, who ya gonna call? I picked over the suite of portraits at Capital T Theatre's website and I was seriously tempted by blonde Jenny Gravenstein as The Page with the come-hither eyes, particularly since Capital T is using her for one of its promo posters.

That would be a sexist indulgence in fantasy, though, so I settled on Austin newcomer Jay Fraley, who mans the central slot at the phone bank as Emory (secret identity: Ariel; yes, that Ariel, and a hint as to just why these impoverished superheroes, victorious so recently against Dr. Cannibal and his hoardes, are trying to raise donations so that they can put on a theatrical production of The Tempest).

Besides, Fraley has more than a passing resemblance to playwright Mickle Maher of Chicago's Theatre Oobleck. And when the super-rubber hits the road, Ariel's performance in the theatre before a crowd including Dr. Cannibal as chief theatre critic is a self-confessed disaster. Judging from the rest of this speedy, hectic, amusing play, that's just the sort of joke that Maher would play on himself.

Capital T's first-time director Gary Jaffe puts all superheroes on stage, all the time. They hardly move from their stations at the telethon table, except for LaTasha Stephens as The Bad Map, but the psychic energy sizzles. Jaffe has assembled a cast that is its own microcosm of valiant Austin actor-heroes, all of them in their 20's and 30's, most of them familiar and welcome to theatre junkies. They mirror pretty well the very demographic that Capital T has courted so successfully over the past couple of years: energetic folk who are smart, self-referential, creative and a touch arrogant.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .