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| June 13–29, 2003 |
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| CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE |
Photographs by George
Wada
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What's a mother to do when her
daughter would just kill for a lead role in the school play?
The Bad Seed meets All About Eve meets Gypsy (gone bad) in this
zany musical farce. An entertaining ride on the highway of parenting,
with rest stops at dysfunctional junction and stage-struck psychopath
overpass.
Cast: Amy Stevenson; Stacia Goad-Malone; Lana Whittington;
Coy Covington; Arianna Movassagh; Jenny Thurman; and Mary-Margaret
Pyeatt. |
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| Tom Sime, The Dallas Morning News
(Excerpt) |
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Talent is the bad seed in Ruthless!
This hilarious spoof musical pays loving tribute to "talent
– inherited and unstoppable – dragging generation
after generation into the spotlight".
Melvin Laird (music) and Joel Paley (book, lyrics) recycled
the conventions of Broadway musicals and movie melodramas into
this riotous pastiche. Director-choreographer Andi Allen and
music director Adam Wright have made sure every note, every
gesture, every inflection is delivered with great precision
as well as with tongue in cheek. They've assembled a dream cast
for this parody of The Bad Seed, Gypsy, All About Eve and just
about everything else made on stage or celluloid before 1962.
It's the sketch as high art, and for its effervescent duration,
that's enough.
Ruthless! loves trash, and it's catching. Stacia Goad-Malone
is superb as Judy Denmark, a perky housewife straight out of
a '50s fantasy; her daughter Tina, a tap-dancing prodigy with
a killer technique, played to perfection by Lana Whittington.
When Tina loses the lead in the school play to classmate Louise
(Arianna Movassagh), we know Louise isn't long for this world.
For Tina's already out-of-control ambition has been fanned to
murderous intensity by glamorous talent agent Sylvia St. Croix,
deliciously rendered by Coy Covington. Drag is Mr. Covington's
specialty, and does he get a workout here, changing outfits
and wigs every five minutes or so. Suzi Shankle and Bill Bullard's
costumes are a gas. Jenny Thurman is grandly funny as Tina's
teacher, Miss Thorn. Like most of the cast she throws herself
wholeheartedly into the character to create her gemlike caricature.
This Ruthless! is seamless. |
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| Perry Stewart,Star-Telegram (Excerpt) |
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This show has been called the
stage mother of all musicals. Now comes a new production (by
the Uptown Players of Dallas) that pushes the satirical envelope
with applaudable results.
The smallest and liveliest member of director/choreographer
Andi Allen's fine cast is Lana Whittington, who seizes the spotlight
as Tina, the bad seedling who would kill for the lead role in
her school's production. Whittington is the comic spark that
launches Ruthless!; Mother Judy's transformation keeps it alive
in Act II. Stacia Goad-Malone, handles the character's two personalities
deftly, reveling in the vocal jokes in composer Marvin Laird's
score. The gleeful absurdity is embodied in Sylvia St. Croix,
a talent agent traditionally played by a male actor in drag.
That duty here goes to Coy Covington. His signature expression,
generously employed, is a cross between a snarl and a twitch.
Helping him achieve the Sylvia look are racks of marvelous (and,
at times, outrageous) outfits designed by Suzi Shankle and Bill
Bullard. Covington sometimes changes costumes twice in the same
scene, greeted each time by applause and laughter. Covington,
Whittington and Goad-Malone form a winning team.
Jenny Thurman
marshals vocal nuance and body language to superb effect on
Teaching Third Grade. Arianna Movassagh shines in a pair of
songs. Amy Stevenson endears herself to actors everywhere as
an evil theater critic whose credo is I Hate Musicals. Sound
designer Virgil Justice gets into the act on that number. Mary-Margaret
Pyeatt has a nice comic turn late in the show as a journalist
whose running gag is based on a mispronunciation of the word
thespian. |
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| Arnold Wayne Jones, Dallas Voice
(Excerpt) |
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It seems like ages since I saw
a curtain – an actual red velvet curtain – rise on
a Dallas stage to announce the opening of a play. It certainly
feels right here.
This play, a riotously campy musical that throws back
to an earlier era when curtains were de rigueur, would not be
the same without it. The play is perfect silliness. Ruthless!
is so marvelously creaky, so decadently outrageous and nostalgic,
every over-the-top moment only serves the greater purpose of
portraying seething villainy with wanton fun.
Director Andi
Allen, working with a devilishly clever script by Joel Paley,
keeps the kitsch factor ratcheted high, and each of the actors
portrays some variation of a character from the golden age:
[Coy] Covington as Rosalind Russell in Auntie Mame; [Stacia]
Goad in the long-suffering Joan Crawford-Nancy Kelly part in
the first act, and the glamorous Joan in the second; Jenny Thurman
as Suzanne Pleshette or Eve Arden, wisecracking her way into
trouble.
If the jokes often beg for a rim shot, the cast plays
them perfectly. They set the tone for the outlandishness without
ever mugging like merciless vaudevillians. When Tina is sent
away for committing a crime, she appears in Brillo pad wig
and tattered orphan clothes of Annie. The entire cast has
a ball with their parts, but no one does a better job than
Covington in his deliciously ripe performance. Few men get as
many costumes changes as Covington gets as Sylvia, and his
final scene evokes one of the most side-splitting reactions
by an audience in recent memory. But Ruthless! offers everyone
with a prime opportunity to shine, and they sparkle like diamonds. |
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