17 January 2008 |
Fuck me, but not up the ass.

Last week, because I'd been commissioned to review it for the Wisconsin State Journal, one of the two big local papers, I attended a performance of the Madison Repertory Theatre's embarrassingly awful production of The Diary of Anne Frank, and wrote:

You’ll laff ‘til the Nazis turn up!

There’s an awful lot of dutiful-sounding audience tittering at the Madison Repertory Theatre’s production of The Diary of Anne Frank, whose only very modest and perhaps even unintentional success is in illuminating how even those confined together in dreadful circumstances can interact in funny ways.

Humanizing eight fugitives from the Sicherheitspolizei: bold artistic choice.

From choice of material to acting to set design, this production frankly disappoints across the board. 
When you consider that it includes James Ridge, recently so incendiary in Dickens in America, as Anne’s father, you have to blame the cast’s uniformly limp, uncommitted performances on Jennifer Uphoff Gray, here making an extremely inauspicious main stage directorial debut.

On opening night, everyone in sight — except the juvenile female lead, reveling in her own precocity — seemed bored nearly stupid, as though mercilessly over-rehearsed. In the play’s best-acted scene, that in which her Edith Frank rails against Mr. Van Daan for stealing bread, Amy J. Carle briefly evokes palpable indignation -- only to revert a moment later to seeming to wonder if she should have her car serviced before or after her next audition. As Anne, a good-hearted little pain in the tuchis, local middle schooler Emma Geer never manages to suggest a life for her character beyond the line she’s reciting at any given moment.

The intrusion of the Nazis into Anne & Co.’s hiding place may well prove the most sloppily conceived and ineffective scene Madison theatre-goers will witness in 2008. On the day she was supposed to figure out how to make their appearance simultaneously random and wrenching, Uphoff Gray seems instead to have gotten her own car serviced.

Oh, what the hell, just come up the stairs when so-and-so says such-and-such.

During intermission, to remind us that there was no respite for those hiding from the Nazis, the stage lights stay up and the cast remains on stage. Precious, precious, precious. Much better, though, that scenic designer Joseph Varga had been up to the admittedly daunting challenge of suggesting claustrophobia in a huge space with clear sightlines on three sides and a 30-foot ceiling. Only lighting designer Holly Blomquist and sound designer Joe Cerqua, who make Anna’s nightmare sequence memorably frightening, are due commendation here.

At the end, as Ridge’s heretofore featherweight Otto Frank returns after the war to his family’s hiding place to agonizedly recount how his fellow fugitives died horribly mere days before the Allies might have liberated them, his fingers twitch seemingly uncontrollably beneath the cuff of his coat — in a way Mad Rep regulars will recognize as identical to when his Charles Dickens railed a few scant weeks back against cruelty and intolerance.

It really is time for this actor to find a second way to manifest anguish physically.

On the day I expected my review to appear on the newspaper's Website, I instead encountered a fawnng profile of the show's not-gifted young female lead. It began by marveling at her having worn to her interview a sweater the same color as her lovely gray eyes, and went on to reveal that she'd been chosen to play Anne only after the director had conducted a Midwest-wide talent search, and hadn't a thing to do with her being the daughter of Madison Rep's artistic director.

I took no pleasure in writing about gray-eyed Emma's annoying performance; my very strong preference would have been to be able to write an unqualified rave. But local theatre-goers are being asked to pay $48 per ticket to witness it. Is it not my job as a critic to relate what I felt to be the truth? In any event, here's the review the WSJ published under my byline:

There’s an awful lot of dutiful-sounding audience tittering at the Madison Repertory Theatre’s production of The Diary of Anne Frank, whose modest success is in illuminating how even those confined together in dreadful circumstances can interact in slightly funny ways.

But the production disappoints and at a recent performance, the cast – except the young female lead (Emma Geer) – seemed over-rehearsed. In the play’s best-acted scene, that in which Anne’s mother Edith Frank, rails against Mr. Van Daan for stealing bread, Amy J. Carle evokes palpable indignation.

The intrusion of the Nazis into Anne & Co’s hiding place, however, is ineffective. The scene should be random and wrenching.

During intermission, to remind us that there was no respite for those hiding from the Nazis, the stage lights stay up and the cast remains on stage. Much better, though, that scenic designer Joseph Varga had been up to the admittedly daunting challenge of suggesting claustrophobia in a huge space with clear sightlines on three sides and a 30-foot ceiling.

Lighting designer Holly Blomquist and sound designer Joe Cerqua, who make Anne’s nightmare sequence memorably frightening, deserve commendation.

At the end, as actor James Ridge’s Otto Frank returns after the war to his family’s hiding place to agonizingly recount how his fellow fugitives died horribly mere days before the Allies might have liberated them, his fingers twitch uncontrollably beneath the cuff of his coat. It’s performed in a way that Madison Rep regulars will recognize as similar to when his Charles Dickens railed a few weeks back against cruelty and intolerance.

In the nearly 40 years I've been writing criticism for money, nobody has ever so wantonly distorted what I'd written to make it conform to a political agenda (in this case, not hurting Madison Rep's apparently very tender feelings).

And thus ends my brief career as a freelance contributor to the WSJ.

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