Witty and Eccentric, HAY FEVER Makes a Mad Dash at ISU

It's tough for today's young actors to pull off the sly and sardonic insouciance that oozes out of a Noel Coward play. Blithe Spirit, Design for Living, Private Lives... The characters live in a sophisticated, droll world where everyone is excessively witty, excessively self-involved and excessively crazy. These people don't talk, they banter or speechify. They don't walk, they saunter or stroll or float. And they don't sit -- they pose languidly against the nearest chaise longue.

All of those eccentricities are in full force in Sonja Moser's production of Coward's Hay Fever for the Illinois State University School of Theatre and Dance. Moser has put her cast through the paces to bring to life the swoony, swanny postures that signify Coward's world.

Hay Fever is set in the early 20s, in a country house a few hours from London. The Bliss family -- former theatre diva Judith; her husband David, a novelist; and their balmy children Sorel and Simon -- have taken up residence here, amusing themselves by bickering and fussing, playing parlor games, maybe indulging in a bit of tennis or punting up the river. Each Bliss has invited a guest from the the city for the weekend without telling each other or their put-upon maid Clara, who used to be Judith's dresser when she was on the stage. So into their midst stumble athletic young Sandy Tyrell, vampish Myra Arundel, proper diplomat Richard Greatham and sweet young flapper Jackie Coryton. At the mercy of the Blisses and their whims, each of the four guests get kissed by someone unexpected, some of them get accidentally engaged, and almost no one gets breakfast.

Among the cast, Bethany Hart stands out with her take on Judith, whose amazing eyelashes and histrionics land her somewhere in the area of Norma Desmond by way of Carol Burnett. Or maybe Alexis Carrington. Kaitlyn Wehr is perfect and perfectly lovely as Sorel, a fresh-faced Judith, Jr., while Colin Trevino-Odell knows exactly what to do with Richard, the stuffy diplomat who is way over his head in this bunch. The rest of the cast keeps the humor afloat, from Kyle Chandler Fitzgerald's goofy Daniel-Radcliffe-esque Simon to Eliza Palumbo's naive ingenue, Alejandro Raya's hale fellow well-met, Gabriela Rivera's sloe-eyed vamp, Lauren Sheffey's clumpy housekeeper and Nico Tangorra's twitchy novelist who doesn't know his Rue St. Honoré from his Rue Boissy d’Anglas. Special mention should be made of Anne Olsen, who comes on board with the world's least flattering headgear as Amy, an extra maid who is generally not on stage. Olsen gives this new character a real spark of insanity in just the right places.

Overall, this Hay Fever is funny and fresh, with a frisky pace that serves it well. Katie McCasland's charming, wrap-around scenic design puts some of the audience smack-dab in the action, properly framing the show and supporting its hijinks, while Jess Ray's costume design is both stylish and flashy in shades of red and purple, with especially entertaining looks for Judith and Sorel Bliss.

It looks great and moves well, and Pete Guither's piano playing as well as Wehr's performance of a pair of Gilbert and Sullivan ditties add to the atmosphere. I'd do away with the extended song that closes the show, however. It brings absolutely everyone back on stage to make fun of show biz and that doesn't really work in the context of the show or the action we've seen, even if it does give all the actors a chance to sing.

Opening night of Hay Fever was sold out, so you are advised to make a reservation for the remaining five performances.

HAY FEVER
by Noel Coward

The School of Theatre and Dance at Illinois State University
Westhoff Theatre

Director: Sonja Moser
Scenic Designer: Katie McCasland
Costume Designer: Jess Ray
Lighting Designer: Kyle Techentin
Sound Designer: Caisa Sandburg
Stage Manager: Marissa Talarico

Cast: Kyle Chandler Fitzgerald, Bethany Hart, Anne Olsen, Eliza Palumbo, Alejandro Raya, Gabriela Rivera, Lauren Sheffey, Nico Tangorra, Colin Trevino-Odell and Kaitlyn Wehr.

Remaining Performances: September 25, 26 and 27 at 7:30 pm, September 27 and 28 at 2 pm.

Running time: 2:10, including one 10-minute intermission

Catching HAY FEVER Next Week?

It seems like Illinois State University's fall semester has been underway for forever. It's really only been a bit more than a month. But that's plenty of time to get a cast and crew ready for Noel Coward's Hay Fever, a 1924 comedy about an eccentric theatrical family enjoying a weekend in the country.

I call the Bliss family theatrical even though Judith, the mother in the mix, is the only one with a career on the stage. Judith has supposedly retired, but she's still quite the diva. Her husband David is a novelist, while their son Simon fancies himself an artist and daughter Sorel is an ingenue who longs to be "a fresh, open-air girl with a passion for games."

They're all more than a bit crazy. When they take to their country house for the weekend, each member of the Bliss family invites a guest, unbeknownst to the others. Let's just everybody is planning a flirtation with someone. Judith has invited a handsome young boxer named Sandy, while David's guest is Jackie, a dippy but pretty flapper, Simon's is a vamp named Myra and Sorel's is Richard Greatham, a diplomat with a stiff upper lip and more of a sense of propriety than the other nuts and bolts in the bunch.

Once they're all jumbled together in one household -- tennis, anyone? -- things get crazy quickly. The Blisses are already 'round the bend, but their guests and their put-upon housekeeper Clara (she used to be Judith's dresser when she was on the stage) will have to move fast to keep their wits about them.

Hay Fever is not the best-known among Coward's plays, but it does enjoy fairly regular revivals. It's hit Broadway four times, the most recent in 1986. Closer to home, Illinois Wesleyan University put it on a year or two ago. But now Illinois State University and director Sonja Moser are offering their own take on this lighter-than-air confection from 1924.

Moser is known for her singular, often physical approach to material. Her Electra, a show she directed at ISU and then moved to Chicago's Mary-Arrchie Theatre Company, was both musical and meta-theatrical, with country rock songs, a lot of mud and loads of energy.

What will an artist like Moser do with a bon bon like Hay Fever? We'll have to wait till September 24 to find out.

This Hay Fever stars MFA acting candidate Bethany Hart and undergrad Nico Tangorra as Mom and Pop Bliss, with Kaitlyn Wehr and Kyle Fitzgerald as Sorel and Simon. Eliza Palumbo will play Jackie, with Alejandro Reya as Sandy, Gabriela Rivera as Myra, and MFA actor Colin Trevino-Odell as Richard. Lauren Sheffey will play Clara, the housekeeper, with an added character named Amy played by Nicole Greco.

Hay Fever plays in ISU's Westhoff Theatre from September 24 to 28. You can get more information here or go here to order tickets.

ISU Completes Casting for Fall CPA and Westhoff Shows

The Department of Theatre and Dance at Illinois State University has conducted their annual fall auditions, meaning the shows you'll see at ISU's Center for the Performing Arts and Westhoff Theatre this September, October and November now have actors attached.

The first show of the season will be Noel Coward's Hay Fever, a daffy 1924 script about an eccentric family enjoying a weekend at their home in the country. Father David Bliss is a novelist, while mother Judith is an overly dramatic grande dame of the theatre. Their children Sorel and Simon are just as flaky as their parents, enjoying playing games and tricks to keep themselves entertained. Each member of the Bliss family has invited a guest for the weekend without telling anybody else, which adds confusion (and a few extra crazy people) to the equation. Tennis, anyone? Sonja Moser will direct Hay Fever for ISU, with a cast that includes MFA actress Bethany Hart as Judith and Nico Tangorra as her husband David. Sorel and Simon will be played by Kaitlyn Wehr and Kyle Fitzgerald, with Lauren Sheffey as Judith's former dresser who is now the housekeeper and Eliza Palumbo, Alejandro Raya, Gabriela Rivera and MFA actor Colin Trevino-Odell as the hapless guests. Nicole Greco will appear as Amy, a character who appears to have been added to Hay Fever for this production. Look for Hay Fever at Westhoff Theatre from September 24 to 28.

Sarah Ruhl's In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play) is a very different kind of drama. MFA directing candidate David Ian Lee will take the reins of Ruhl's frisky look at how women might've come to discover the pleasure of the vibrator back at the end of the 19th century. For ISU's Center for the Performing Arts, MFA actors Colin Lawrence and Natalie Blackman have been cast as Dr. and Mrs. Givings, the couple who discover a new use for electricity, with Allison Sokolowski and Graham Gusloff as a patient and her husband, Brandi Jones as a wet nurse with a different outlook, Dario Carrion as an artist who makes an impact on the household, and Kelly Steik as the doctor's assistant. In the Next Room will take the CPA stage October 2 to 11.

Next up is Quiara Alegria Hudes's Water by the Spoonful, which won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It is the second of three "Elliot" play by Hudes, all involving an Iraq war vet named Elliot Ortiz who has a tough time adjusting to life back in the US. Water by the Spoonful shows us not just Elliot, but his mother and his cousin, as well as a group of friends who only know each other through an internet support group for recovering addicts, charting the difference between the families we're born with and the families we create for ourselves. Water by the Spoonful is scheduled for Westhoff Theatre October 23 to November 1, with MFA candidate Leah Cassella directing MFA actor Ronald Roman as Elliot, Lauren Pfeiffer as his cousin Yasmin, Eddie Curley as a phantom of Elliot's imagination, and Jaime Taylor, Joey Banks (also in the MFA acting program), Anastasia Ferguson and Hananiah Wiggins as the denizens of the online forum.

Continuing the list of strong female playwrights represented on this year's ISU schedule, Lynn Nottage is up next. Nottage is another Pulitzer Prize winner, although she took that award for Ruined in 2009 rather than By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, the 2011 play to be directed by Don LaCasse for ISU. Vera Stark is funny and irreverent, a take on a black actress from the 1930s who leapt off the screen and into Hollywood history. Vera was a maid in real life before she played one for Hollywood, but she was a big hit before she suddenly disappeared forever. What happened to Vera Stark? We'll find out November 6 to 15 in the Center for the Performing Arts, with MFA actress Faith Servant as Vera, Mary DeWitt as the star who plays Vera's high-maintenance boss on and off the screen, Brianna Haskell and Gabrielle Lott-Rogers as Vera's friends, also looking for stardom, Dan Machalinski and Wesley Tilford as a director and studio head, and La'Mar Hawkins as Vera's one great love. That's all in Act One. In the second act, they all take different roles as a panel of academics and TV guests trying to solve the Vera Stark mystery.

There will also be a production of David Mamet's Oleanna, that misogynistic potboiler about a feminist student with an agenda who tries to take down her male professor, apparently taking place in Centennial West 207 at some point in the semester. The eighth MFA actor in the program, Robert Michael Johnson, has been cast as the professor opposite Betsy Diller as the student.

To keep up to date on all of these productions, visit ISU's Upcoming Events page, check out their Productions page, or take a look at the CPA Facebook page. The graphics in this post are all taken from other productions or printed versions of the plays. When ISU releases the graphics for their productions, I will try to update it with those.

Look Out! November Crashes into Theaters with Every Possible Option

Time to binge on the last of the Halloween candy and toss the pumpkins away. November is here!

Although it's easy to get fussy about November as the days get shorter and the weather takes on a certain chill, there's also a lot to keep you occupied and away from sad songs like "November Rain," "November Blue," and the one where November has tied Tom Waits to an old dead tree. Take a deep breath, put away the November songs, and jump into...Thanksgiving! Pie! Lots and lots of pie!

As well as dancing Irish sisters, David Sedaris, a crazy acting class at Heartland, Monty Python at Community Players, Angels descending from on high, and Noel Coward at IWU...

And founding father Alexander Hamilton, he of the ten-dollar bill, on stage at Illinois Wesleyan's E. Melba Kirkpatrick Laboratory Theatre. In Tim Slover's Treasure, directed by Michael Cotey, Hamilton is caught in a web of ambition, greed, carelessness, righteousness, honor and betrayal. What happens when a brilliant man with the country's best interests at heart finds himself the victim of his own baser instincts? Politics as usual, that's what. You'll find Treasure's themes of individualism vs. federalism and entrenched wealth vs. opportunity very, very current. Treasure has only two more performances, tonight and tomorrow at 8 pm.

Meanwhile, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles of yesteryear appear at the Art Theater Co-op in Champaign. What's not to love about turtles who act like human teenagers, trained by a sewer rat to fight crime? They were all the rage in comic books and cartoons of the 80s, and they got a bunch of different movies, including the one from 1990 being screened at the Art. Not only is the Art offering this mutant classic movie on November 1, 2, 3 and 7, but they're also selling pizza at the Friday and Saturday shows. Cowabunga!

Dancing at Lughnasa, Brian Friel's evocative memory play about an Irish family in the 1930s, opens tonight at Illinois State University's Center for the Performing Arts. ISU professor Lori Adams directs this sweet, sad play about the Mundy sisters, played by and Natalie Blackman, Faith Servant, Fiona Stephens, Jaimie Taylor and Elsa Torner, with Arif Yampolsky as their brother Jack, and Robert Johnson as our narrator, who steps back into his childhood to tell this story.

University of Illinois professor Henson Keys appears the aging magician Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest, which continues through November 3 at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts in Urbana. Robert G. Anderson directs this very different take on the The Tempest, which focuses on Prospero's exploitation of the island on which he has found himself marooned, bringing in "the ecological implications of theatre making while working to implement sustainable practices." This production has been presented in association with the Department of Landscape Architecture and the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois.

David Sedaris brings his brand of dry wit and wry humor to the Bloomington Center for the Performing Arts on November 6, including readings from "Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls," his newest collection of essays, and a book signing. The next night, the BCPA hosts Dr. John, that master of voodoo-meets-R&B-meets-funktastic-piano who wrote "Right Place Wrong Time," won six Grammies, and made the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame. That's a very interesting one-two punch for November 6 and 7.

Annie Baker's Circle Mirror Transformation, a luminous and lovely play about four very different people who take an Adult Drama class at a small community center in Vermont, opens with a special pay-what-you-can preview on Thursday, November 7. Illinois State University professor Cyndee Brown directs Circle Mirror for Heartland with a cast that includes Cathy Sutliff as Marty, the teacher of the class, and Julia Besch, Dean Brown, Cristen Monson and Aaron Thomas as her students. You will see hula hooping, counting, the personification of trees, confessions and, yes, transformation on stage before you, with performances November 7-9, 14-17 and 21-24. Check out showtimes here or reservation information here.

Community Players opens Monty Python's Spamalot, the stage musical lovingly ripped off from the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail, on their stage with a preview on November 7 and regular performances November 8-10, 14-17 and 21-24. Chris Terven leads the cast as King Arthur, with John Bowen as Sir Lancelot, Spencer Powell as Sir Galahad, Charles Boudreaux as Sir Bedevere and Sharon Russell as The Lady of the Lake. Marcia Weiss directs this epic farce, which manages to pack in all the familiar Python bits like the French taunter and the Knight of Ni (both played by Dave Krostal) as well as a lot of spoofing at the expense of the Great White Way. Click here for all the details about Community Players' production.

And the theatrical offerings on that very popular weekend are not over yet! MFA director David Ian Lee brings part II, the Perestroika half of Tony Kushner's masterpiece Angels in America, to Centennial West 207 that very same weekend. This "gay fantasia on national themes" looks at America in the 80s, when the AIDS crisis was just beginning, Ronald Reagan was in the White House, evil lawyer Roy Cohn was straddling the former and the latter, and a new century was about to crack wide open. Both Millennium Approaches and Perestroika were produced in ISU's Westhoff Theatre (the old Westhoff Theatre), with Patrick O'Gara directing the shows as part of the 1998-99 and 1999-2000 seasons. I have to think Lee will have a different take than O'Gara did, and it will be intriguing to see Perestroika by itself. I've seen Millennium as a stand-alone before (at the University of Illinois) and I had to wait a year between Millennium and Perestroika on Broadway, but otherwise... I've always seen them performed together. This will not be my first black box Angels, however. The Station Theater in Urbana did a bang-up job with both pieces, under the direction of Steven M. Keen, way back in 1996.

If you thought that was all the theater that could possibly open on November 7, you would be wrong. Clybourne Park, Bruce Norris's take on Lorraine Hansberry's classic A Raisin in the Sun, opens in the Studio Theatre at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Illinois that very same weekend. Clybourne Park has emerged as one of the hottest plays of the past few years, earning Norris a Pulitzer and a Broadway run whose cast included U of I theatre alums Crystal Dickinson and Brandon Dirden. The U of I production is directed by Lisa Gaye Dixon and features Akua Sarhen in the role Dickinson played, and Preston “Wigasi” Brant in the role Dirden understudied.

Urbana's Station Theatre opens Come Back Little Sheba on November 7, as well, with performances until the 23rd, while across town Parkland College in Champaign goes with November 14 to start its production of Jon Jory's stage adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Phew! A show not starting on the 7th!

November is a little late for Hay Fever, but Noel Coward's droll comedy about a theatre family in the 1920s taking its act to the country is a welcome sight well past the allergy season. Illinois Wesleyan professor Nancy Loitz will direct Hay Fever for McPherson Theatre from the 19th through the 24th, with 8 pm performances on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, and a Saturday matinee at 2 on November 24.

I would be remiss if I did not mention the Fred Astaire appearance at the Normal Theater, with Holiday Inn, a lesser effort that stars Bing Crosby as a man who opens a hotel/nightclub in Vermont that's only open on holidays. It's a precursor of sorts to White Christmas, what with the Irving Berlin score that includes the song "White Christmas," although this one is black and white and has some creepy blackface stuff for Abraham Lincoln's birthday. Fred plays Bing's ex-partner, a dancer named Ted Hanover who keeps getting into romantic triangles with singer Bing. Holiday Inn plays the big screen at the Normal Theater from November 21 to 24, followed by another holiday classic, Miracle on 34th Street, from November 28 to 30.