Sunday, August 03, 2008
A+E, Theater, Reviews

It’s gonna be a long night

‘Bingo,’ ‘Hallelujah’ not worth shouting about

BY BERT OSBORNE

Here's a shameless plug for The Sunday Paper's third annual theater year-in-review issue, which will set forth to honorably mention the best and brightest achievements of the '07-'08 season—coming to a newsstand near you in a mere two weeks.
 
In the meantime, there is the matter of ART Station's "Bingo" and Horizon's "Hallelujah Street Blues," a couple of shows unlikely to figure in that upcoming Aug. 17 edition. Bringing up the rear as the year's last two productions, they ring out the season with a whimper.
 
"Bingo" (written by Michael Heitzman, Irene Reid and David Holcenberg), self-congratulatorily subtitled "A Winning New Musical," gathers together an assortment of small-minded yokels, the likes of whom recall the characters from artistic director David Thomas' infamous "Honky Tonk Laundry" a few years back (or Actor's Express' more recent "The Great American Trailer Park Musical"). Severe weather strands them at their weekly bingo game, and when one of them comments about being "trapped like rats," another aptly notes, "It's gonna be a long night."
 
They include a thrice-divorced sexpot (Mary Kathryn Kaye), a superstitious dingbat (Rachel White) and the browbeating ringleader (Kathy Halenda) they'll inevitably defy. A new kid in town (Lindsey Lamb) could be the daughter of a fourth friend the others ostracized 15 years ago—but even if she's just an aspiring actress and soap-opera extra, she's come to the wrong place to be pining about her desire for "deeply textured, multi-layered roles."
 
Although it isn't especially well-performed here by Lamb, the show's only inspired moment is her "Ratched's Lament" number from an off-off-Broadway musical version of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" that the girl once understudied. With music director Patrick Hutchison leading a three-piece band, the song highlights otherwise belong to Halenda, who belts them out with impressive gusto.
 
The presumably profound moral of the piece is that "s**t happens," which may seem like an unnecessarily mean-spirited segue into Horizon's "Hallelujah Street Blues." But while "Bingo" might not be very clever or challenging, it doesn't come as much of a surprise for anyone familiar with Thomas' affinity for kind-of-dumb material. "Blues," on the other hand, is a more abject disappointment, because it's the latest work by one of our own local playwrights, Valetta Anderson ("Leaving Limbo"), and a rather singular misfire from the competent director Thomas W. Jones II (who last staged Horizon's "The Bluest Eye").
 
That the family comedy/drama can be so easily billed by the group as "'Soul Food' meets 'The Waltons'"—if not as "Tyler Perry's House of Payne" meets Anton Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard"—simply underscores how original it isn't. With an overwrought cast that includes a pair of former TV stars, Veronica Redd ("The Young and the Restless") and Taurean Blacque ("Hill Street Blues"), as two of several characters summarily described as "Mayberry misfits," the show routinely plays like an extended sitcom pilot. It's set in Atlanta, whereas "Bingo" takes place in Texas, but these people could all be neighbors in their one-dimensional banality.
 
In "Blues," a feisty matriarch enlists the aid of her unhappy children, a precocious little grandson and sundry others to take on the encroaching condo developers who want to seize her property and tear down her late husband's "enchanted" apple trees. The reality of the situation is too broadly drawn by Anderson, and Jones botches a few stylistically nondescript "fantasy" scenes. His use of mood music is superfluous and overloud, as is her supporting character of an eccentric old coot with an imaginary dog.
 
On the plus side, did I mention all the great theater we'll be covering in our third annual special edition on Aug. 17? SP