Colonial Players

Colonial Players opens its 59th season Aug. 31 with Michael Hollinger's Incorruptible, an irreverent, politically incorrect farce set in a French monastery during the Dark Ages. If the badinage heard before a scheduled rehearsal at Colonial Players' theater at 108 East St. in Annapolis is any indication of how funny this cast and crew can be, we're in for a comic treat. Sunday's mood was decidedly playful with barbs flying at a fast TV-sitcom pace. Dressed in his brown monk's robe, Jamie Hanna became the good-natured target of such lines as: "Why do I want to sip Frangelico when I look at you?"

The Colonial Players' opener, Langford Wilson's "Talley's Folly," is, as its hero suggests, "a waltz, 1,2,3; 1,2,3, a romantic story."This unsentimental romance demands much from its two actors, who have to make their characters' complexities intelligible while eliciting the audience's sympathy. The director must set a lively pace for this show and make the dialogue sing.Director Anne Ellis manages to do this, setting a restrained but lively pace, punctuated with a stillness that heightens the tension of the drama.

Adaptations are never easy to bring off.And adaptations of classic theater by the likes of Aristophanes, Sophocles and Moliere are darned near impossible.How do you capture enough period nuances to do honor to the original while switching venues, modifying characters and bringing the declamatory poetic style of yesteryear alive for contemporary audiences?The folks at Colonial Players know how, because they have just opened a production of Moliere's hilarious 17th-century comedy, "The Learned Ladies," that's almost as feisty and fizzy as it must have been when France's greatest comic playwright had them rolling in the aisles at Versailles during the august reign of his benefactor, King Louis XIV.I doubt that the Sun King's retinue would have comprehended the hillbilly accents of the Nashville social climbers who provide the grist for Moliere's satirical mill in this adaptation by Freyda Thomas.

The return of Neil Simon's "Barefoot in the Park" to the Colonial Players stage as part of the group's 50th anniversary celebration brings with it impressive debuts of three performers and a director at the theater on East Street in Annapolis.Todd Withey, a veteran of Anne Arundel Community College's Moonlight Troupers, and Denise Levien give strong performances as Corie and Paul Bratter, the beleaguered newlyweds living in a fifth-floor walk-up in a building full of eccentric characters in New York.

Colonial Players completes its 50th season this month with "Angel Street," a mystery set in Victorian London first performed by the company in 1950 and again in 1972 as "Gaslight."Much of the first act drags because it is centered around two tiresome stereotypes: Bella Manningham (played by Dianne Hood), a depressed woman confined to her home and desperate for the approval of her husband, who is trying to convince her she is mad; and Nancy (Jan Kleckner), the saucy maid competing for Jack Manningham's attention.

When county schools start a new year Monday, a new theater season will soon follow.Colonial Players Inc. opens its season Sept. 3 with Lanford Wilson's "Talley's Folly."With its yearlong 50th anniversary celebration just ended, Colonial Players seems to be all but woven into the fabric of Annapolis.In the 1999-2000 season, the all-volunteer troupe continues the tradition of offering a variety of productions, including its annual musical comedy. Anticipated every season is Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," long a treasured part of the Annapolis holiday tradition.

The Colonial Players will launch their 50th anniversary season Sept. 4, and it includes a mix of dramas, melodramas, comedies and a musical, all of which the company previously presented.From Sept. 4 through Oct. 3, the players will present N. Richard Nash's "The Rainmaker," a 1954 play about a con man who gives hope to drought-stricken farmers by convincing them he can make it rain. "The Rainmaker" became a 1956 film with Burt Lancaster in the title role and was first done by the Colonial Players during their 1959-1960 season.

Colonial Players opens 1998 with "My Three Angels," a comedy by Sam and Bella Spewack set in the penal colony of French Guiana in 1910.The show, which opens tomorrow and runs Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays through Feb. 14 at the theater on East Street in Annapolis, is based on "La Cuisine Des Anges" (The Cooking of Angels), by French playwright Albert Husson.It follows three convicts who try to help the beleaguered Ducotel family, beset by problems with finances and romances.For one thing, the family members are about to lose their jobs operating the local general store.

Ben Jonson revealed the comic dimensions of greed in his classic 17th-century satire, "Volpone." In the mid-20th century, Larry Gelbart set the plot and characters in the San Francisco of the 1880s and called it "Sly Fox."Near the end of the 20th century, the Colonial Players in Annapolis give us a production of Gelbart's play that finds all the humor in the sin of avarice.In the title role of Foxwell Sly, Frank B. Moorman delivers another first-rate performance.His expressive face and gestures display a wide range of emotions, even without dialogue, as Sly pretends to be terminally ill and ready to leave his estate to a deserving heir.

Here we are at the start of the holiday shopping season. Santa Claus has arrived at the malls, and Ebenezer Scrooge, the skinflint of Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," soon will be along to sing and dance at two Annapolis-area theaters.One version of Dickens' 155-year-old story, with original music by Doug Yetter and Michael Hulett, opens Saturday at Chesapeake Music Hall on U.S. 50, east of Annapolis. This is the production's fourth year, which is how long Yetter and Sherry Kay have owned the theater.

In its second play of the season, Colonial Players delivers Richard Greenberg's "The Violet Hour," riveting, reflective theater that takes the audience into nostalgic and challenging territory. It is to my knowledge the first work performed in the area of the acclaimed contemporary playwright. He has written 27 plays, receiving numerous awards, including the Tony and Drama Desk, and is revered for his intellect and unpredictability. Set in 1919, "The Violet Hour" tells the story of a Princeton University-educated independent publisher launching his business and trying to decide which of two authors' books to publish - a friend's over-written work containing some brilliant writing, or that of his current love interest, a seductive African-American singer's honest autobiography.

Colonial Players opens its 61st season with John Patrick's "The Curious Savage," a 60-year-old comedy rarely staged locally. This gentle comedy is given life by a new CP director and several debuting actors, who get the season off to a pleasant start. Patrick, a post-World War II author, won a Pulitzer and a Tony for his 1953 stage adaptation of "Teahouse of the August Moon" and later enjoyed success as a screenwriter. His "Savage" asks whether the so-called sane people of the outside world are as wise as the eccentric folks inside a sanitarium.

Colonial Players is a rarity among local nonprofit community theaters: financially secure and supported by a large subscriber base. This all-volunteer company has fewer expenses than other local performing groups and can afford to venture into bold new directions. For its 61st season, Colonial Players mixes classic plays with cutting-edge theater. The first step in embarking on a new season is selecting the plays. Aware that "not all shows will please everybody," CP president Carol Youmans said, "we try to create a slate that is important to actors and directors."

Former screenwriters Michael Sutton and Anthony Fingleton created Over My Dead Body in 1984 as a play to salute classic mystery writers like Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. Their play features a trio of once-famous mystery writers whose elegant works have been replaced by sleazy, too-realistic current bestsellers. These writer-friends are the founders of a club for mystery writers - the Murder League in London, where they meet and decide to craft and commit the perfect murder to restore the mystery novel's rightful importance (despite the probability that they will be caught)

There's much to admire in Colonial Players' current production of the 1963 musical She Loves Me, based on a timeless love story of two anonymous pen pals who by day are competing shop clerks in a perfumery. Set to catchy, lilting tunes, this Old World story is brought to life by a talented 17-member ensemble directed by Beth Terranova, who recently won a 2009 Washington Area Theater Community Honors (WATCH) award for Best Director for CP's Hauptmann and who is proving her versatility with this musical confection.

Les Liaisons Dangereuses is British playwright Christopher Hampton's 1965 dramatization of the Laclos novel published in 1782 describing the French aristocracy's licentious indulgences. Such 18th-century indulgences can be viewed in Colonial Players' current production, at which opera glasses may be useful for a closer view of the Chevalier Danceny au naturel. In two pages of director's notes, Craig Allen Mummey explains that Laclos chronicled the pre-revolutionary libertine behavior of actual members of the aristocracy, noting that "today people still use sex as a weapon, a sport or a religion" much as those 18th-century libertines did. This rococo period was a time when, Mummey says, "manners largely took the place of morals, with adultery nearly a virtue and jealousy uncouth," later adding that "amidst this decadence we find Valmont and Merteuil at the height of their powers as the play begins."

Colonial Players continues its 60th season with the first of its three abbreviated weekend offerings in Lee Blessing's 1988 political drama "Two Rooms," a play that celebrates love. A husband and wife are political hostages across miles - he imprisoned by Lebanese radicals, and she in the study of their Washington home. It is their love for each other that allows them to cope with the ordeal. Protagonists Michael and Lainie Wells are American teachers who had worked in Beirut where Michael was captured by terrorists and, as the play begins, has been held for more than a year.

As the third and final production of its opening season, Standing O is introducing its Chesapeake Academy black box theater audience to British playwright William Nicholson's The Retreat from Moscow. With this play, Standing O founder and artistic director Ron Giddings continues the mission of Anne Arundel County's newest theater company to offer little-known recent theater gems to local audiences. Nominated for three Tony Awards in 2004, The Retreat from Moscow tells the story of an English couple, Edward and Alice, who are dealing with a dying marriage of three decades.

The second presentation of Colonial Players' 60th anniversary season of plays celebrating love is David Lindsay-Abaire's 2006 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Rabbit Hole, which takes an unflinching look at a couple coping with the accidental death of their 4-year-old son. Rabbit Hole stirs the senses and is enlightening in its portrayal of family members - husband and wife and her sister and mother unable to help each other as they each work alone through...

"One of the prettiest sights in this pretty world is the privileged classes enjoying their privileges," says journalist Mike Connor in The Philadelphia Story, now at Colonial Players in Annapolis. The show is a visual feast, with well-dressed, attractive characters and elegant furnishings illustrating the lifestyle of a Philadelphia Main Line family engaging in drawing-room repartee. The most requested show by Colonial Players subscribers, The Philadelphia Story was chosen to open the 60th-anniversary season.