Birthday Candles

 
Birthday Candles
Roundabout Theatre Company
American Airlines Theater
March 29, 2022 

Photo courtesy of Roundabout Theatre Company

How do you measure a life?  Through its celebrations?  Its loses?  Its accomplishments?  Its hardships?  Noah Haidle ponders that question in his play Birthday Candles.  The action takes place on the many birthdays of his main character, spanning almost one hundred years.  Director Vivienne Benesch finds the pearls in each of Mr. Haidle’s tender moments, and this stellar cast string them together to deliver a stunning theatrical experience.

It is Ernestine’s (played by Debra Messing) seventeenth birthday.  Her mother, Alice (played by Susannah Flood), teaches her how to bake her special birthday cake so part of her will live on in tradition.  Ernestine is distracted by her dreams of finding her place in the cosmos and auditioning for the role of King (Queen) Lear in her high school play, but she does learn how to bake the cake.  The action flows seamlessly into her eighteenth birthday.  Her neighbor, Kenneth (played by Enrico Colantoni), surprises her by coming to her party two hours early.  Ernestine is baking the cake as her mother taught her.  Kenneth asks Ernestine to the prom.  She turns him down and tells him to go home and return in two hours.  When Matt (played by John Earl Jelks) shows up early, Ernestine does not send him home, and she does accept his request to take her to the prom.  In an instant, it is eighteen years later.  Ernestine and Matt’s two teenage children (played by Christopher Livingston and Susannah Flood) are celebrating Ernestine’s birthday.  Ernestine is preparing the cake her mother taught her how to bake.  The story continues to flash forward, celebrating the joys, disappointments, and turning points of the coming years on each birthday in Ernestine’s long and abundant life.

Debra Messing, Christopher Livingston, & Susannah Flood
Photo courtesy of Roundabout Theatre Company

The cast plays numerous roles throughout the story as Ernestine’s children grow up and have children of their own.  Each distinct character weaves a pattern of love and connection.  Each birthday repeats tradition, sayings, gestures, and sentiment as the characters face the challenges and truths of the present year.  Debra Messing grows and blossoms as Ernestine.  She captures your heart the minute she enters and does not let go throughout the action of the play.  Her physicality shifts as her character ages and her heart expands.  She creates genuine and endearing relationships with each character in the story.  Susannah Flood, Enrico Colantoni, John Earl Jelks, Chrystal Finn, and Christopher Livingston all deliver authentic, heart warning performances.

Birthday Candles is a much needed reminder of what is important on this journey we call life.  It is playing at Roundabout’s American Airlines Theatre through May 29.  Go see it! 

Domenick Danza

Travesties

Travesties

Roundabout Theatre Company

American Airlines Theatre

April 5, 2018

Photo courtesy of Roundabout Theatre Company

Tom Stoppard’s Travesties is receiving a tremendous revival by Roundabout Theatre Company.  Director Patrick Marber is in sync with Mr. Stoppard’s rhythms and humor.  The cast magnificently delivers the bite in the sarcasm and the punch in the irony.  The political and social commentary is clear and relevant, and makes an even more impressive statement when you realize it was first performed in 1974.

Tom Hollander as Henry Carr
Photo courtesy of Roundabout Theatre Company

Henry Carr (played by Tom Hollander) pieces together the stories from his younger days in 1918 after the war in Zurich, Switzerland.  First there was his acquaintance with Tristan Tzara (played by Seth Numrich), the Romanian radical free thinker who helped find the Dada movement.  Next was the meeting with James Joyce (played by Peter McDonald), while he was writing Ulysses.  Then there was his run-ins with Lenin (played by Dan Butler) at the local library.  The discourse over revolution, socialism, art for art’s sake, and art for social commentary commands the air when these characters collide.  The comedy rises when Gwendolyn (played by Scarlett Strallen) and Cecily (played by Sara Topham) mistake the identities of Henry and Tristan.  This parallels the plot of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest, a play in which James Joyce convinces Henry to star in. 

Tom Hollander, Dan Butler, Patrick Kerr, Seth Numrich, & Patrick Marber
Photo courtesy of  Walter McBride, Broadway World,
& Roundabout Theatre Company 

Tom Hollander and Seth Numrich are mesmerizing as Henry Carr and Tristan Tzara.  Peter McDonald and Dan Butler boldly embody the characters of James Joyce and Lenin.  Patrick Kerr is underplayed perfection as Bennet, Henry Carr’s butler.  The entire cast works as a tight ensemble.  Their timing is impeccable.  Their physicalities are broad and energetic.  They bring light to Mr. Stoppard’s strong statements about art and humanity, which ring truthfully and vigorously.

The set design by Tim Hatley is full of surprises, allowing for numerous exit and entrance points and a wide variety of levels.  Lighting by Neil Austin is crisp and succinct, and greatly enhances the timing of the humor and the enthusiasm of the absurdity.

Photo courtesy of Roundabout Theatre Company

From the Roundabout Theatre Company program notes:  “A travesty is a ‘debased, distorted, or grossly inferior imitation’ of something; can also be defined as an artistic imitation of something in a ridiculously inappropriate style; Travesties is a travesty of The Importance of Being Ernest and other literary sources; characters in Travesties are travesties of the real people they are based on.”  This production sharply focuses on these four statements, bringing valuable insight to the purpose of art and how our involvement in it makes us human

Travesties is running at the American Airlines Theatre through June 17. 

Domenick Danza