By Tina Arth
I rarely expect “surprise” to figure as one of my principal
reactions to a Broadway Rose production. My usual responses are awe at the
vocals, band, musical direction, and acting, with a hefty dose of wonder at the
tech work that brings their musicals, big and small, to life. I am often
familiar with the play, and if it’s new to me it still can be easily slotted
into one of a few basic categories: big Broadway-style musical, concert-like
small show, quirky dark or light comedy, cute holiday revue. “Darkly comical
metaphysical rock musical” is not a phrase I ever anticipated using for a
Broadway Rose review – until now. The Portland-area premiere of Fly By Night, a collaboration by
playwrights Will Connolly, Michael Mitnick, and Kim Rosenstock, is really quite
wonderful – one of those shows that stays with you for days as you muse over
the mixture of darkness and light, text and subtext, isolation and connection,
simplicity and complexity that make this production so compelling and
memorable.
Director Issac Lamb and his cast tell the story of a single
year – from November 1964 through November 1965 – in the lives of six people
(plus a narrator), culminating in the Great Northeast Blackout of 1965. The
lives of two sisters from South Dakota, a humble sandwich maker and his boss, a
bereaved widower, and a wannabe Broadway promoter intersect (helped along by
the narrator/fortune-teller, who also plays the girls’ mother as needed). The
storytelling is honest about its non-linear nature and makes liberal use of the
narrator as a guide, so the audience has no trouble following forward and
backward leaps in chronology. Key themes revolve around connections – between
spouses, parents and children, lovers, siblings, old friends, one’s own
memories, and ultimately between humans and the universe. Chance encounters and
seemingly random choices lead inexorably to the show’s heartbreaking finale,
where key characters finally are able to find a measure of hope, comfort, and
peace from each other.
Joe Thiessen gets many of the best comic moments and makes
the most of them as he cheerfully shifts from omniscient narrator to cold South
Dakota mama to soothsayer. The competition for nostalgic pathos is tight
between Gary Norman (the widower “Mr. McClam”) and Tim Blough (deli owner
Crabble). Blough captures Crabble’s working class despair to perfection, and
simply sparkles with life during his two turns directing traffic – once in
memory, once in real life. Norman wins the day, however – not with his
character’s pathological grieving and desperate numbness, but when he allows
himself to feel again. In the simple but beautiful “Cecily Smith,” he delivers
the line that perhaps best sums up the whole show: “Life is not the things that
we do – it’s who we’re doing them with.”
The heart of the show is the curious love triangle of the
two sisters and the sandwich-maker. Malia Tippets (“Daphne”) is charming but unstoppable
in her furious search for stardom, and expresses through ”Daphne Dreams” and ”I
Need More” the futility of trying to validate herself by seeking the approval
of others. Rebecca Teran is everything the authors could have wanted in Miriam
– cute, winsome, enthusiastic, impossibly kind and sincere – and she tells us
everything we need to know in her exquisite and poignant delivery of “Stars I
Trust.” If Miriam and Daphne had grown up in in New York, rather than South
Dakota, we might not be able to accept their attraction to Benjamin Tissell’s
sandwich maker “Harold” – an awkward, lonely drifter nursing dreams he’ll never
pursue while life just sort of happens to him. “Circle In the Sand” becomes his
anthem to lack of direction, but when he grabs hold of life in Act II’s “Me
With You” Tissell completely nails his character’s expansion: “I never dreamed
that I could feel a great deal better than just fine,” and we see the man
beneath the mayonnaise, meat, cheese and lettuce.
Music director/conductor/pianist Jon Quesenberry ties the
whole production together in a neat musical bundle – vocal ensemble and band
work beautifully to tell and sell the story. Lighting is key in the show, and
designer Gene Dent creates a magical world of light and darkness building up to
a powerful, light-filled denouement.
I rarely rush to buy soundtracks of new musicals, but “Fly
By Night” is one that I must have – not because of the elegance of the songs,
but to remind me of the almost Taoist harmony the authors successfully project
through this memorable show. As with many little known shows, audiences are
strongly advised to see it now –it may not be back in the area for a long, long
time and it should not be missed.
Fly By Night is
playing at Broadway Rose’s New Stage, 12850 SW Grant Avenue, Tigard through
Sunday, October 23d.
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