Thoughts on Zach & Zack’s “The Rocky Horror Show,” Catalyst Repertory’s “Building Jerusalem” and American Lives Theatre’s “The Meridian Cafe”
(photo by Shotwell Photos)
Some things remain true.
Back in 2014, at an earlier iteration of Zach & Zack’s production of “The Rocky Horror Show,” I praised Zach Rosing’s inspired video work and noted that “the six-piece band so dead-on that I had to check the program to see that the music was, yes, being performed live.”
That remains the case in the current production, which played to a packed and enthusiastic crowd at the Athenaeum on the night I attended. The band rocked. The cast rocked. The audience rocked.
With the movie’s notorious audience interactions paired down to supertitled cues (as instructed in a charming pre-show video by the producers), the production played as much like a concert as it did as a coherent theater piece. Like the movie, the show loses some of its verve after the first half, but that’s no fault of the lively production and game, talented performers. Under Zack Neiditch’s direction, this “Rocky Horror” did not aim to simply mimic the movie in design or characterization but allowed actors to bring their own energies and style to roles that could, in lesser productions. Reno Moore, with a look akin to son of Sanford, offered a charmingly bewildered Brad, Julia Ammons presented an oddly moving Columbia, and Johnnie Ray Hughes forced the question of how one could find an actor with both those abs and that voice.
I’m sure more than one theater professional in the audience was left wondering how to get a crowd like this to more shows beyond Z&Z’s every-few-years “Rocky” revival.
That, more than any Agatha Christie or Sherlock Holmes story, remains a mystery.
The production runs through Oct. 31. Good luck getting tickets.
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While admiring its willingness to take on such a cryptic work, I will confess to being a bit baffled by Catalyst Repertory’s production of Michael Redhill’s “Building Jerusalem.”
A fin de siècle play set at the end of the 1800s, it brings together a batch of real-life folks – who never actually met in real life – for a bad-weather-you’ll-have-to-spend-the-night evening of parlor games, dancing, singing, and conversations on women’s suffrage, eugenics, Darwinism, religion and more. Interesting in fragments, it never quite gelled. Perhaps more knowledge of Canadian history would have benefitted my experience, but “Building Jerusalem” only sporadically rose above being an interesting exercise. A fully engaged cast certainly helped, as did a disturbingly powerful sequence making clear the horrible reality of the process of force feeding a hunger striker. Perhaps one difficult-to-forget sequence is enough.
The production runs through Oct. 25 at IF Theatre.
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I wasn’t going to say much about Lucy Thurber’s “The Meridian Cafe,” given a world premiere by American Lives Theatre (Oct. 22-Nov. 8 at the Phoenix Theatre Cultural Center) since I caught a final dress rehearsal rather than a regularly scheduled production.
But the fact that it was the most moving, charming, well-acted, strongly written, beautifully designed theater production I’ve seen in Indy in a long time, well, it would be unjust of me not to say something.
The ingredients are familiar — a diner, a boss, some staff, a regular customer, some newcomers, lots of coffee, conflicts, personal revelations — but it’s the life and heart and ache that Thurber brings to this world that makes it special. She and director Chris Saunders don’t rush the material, allowing for pauses and silences that enrich both the humor and the drama while avoiding pat solutions to her characters’ very real challenges. Having the cafe’s population filled out via impeccable casting of some top local talent is certainly a big plus.
My only gripes are extremely minor: 1. A poster image that doesn’t convey the humanity of this beautiful piece. 2. A notch too long before the final blackout. 3. The presence of Monopoly in the cafe’s small game stack. Uno or some trivia cards, maybe, but not Monopoly. (Okay, so I’m a game nerd.)
It’s a show you can take your theater-centric friend or your uninitiated neighbor to. And discuss over burgers afterwards.
