A Tale of Two Actors by Nora Dunne

Robin Eldridge is all about method acting, whether intentional or not. As Victorian lady Lucie Manette in “A Tale of Two Cities,” she lays eyes on her father for the first time in 18 years.
At the same time, Eldridge reunites with actor David Rothauser — Lucie’s father, Dr. Alexandre Manette.

“In this play we haven’t seen each other in 18 years,” says Eldridge, clearly winding up to something. “That’s exactly the amount of time it’s been since I’ve seen David in real life. I was Scout and he was Attticus in ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ 18 years ago.”

It all comes full circle at the Wheelock Family Theatre. This is Eldridge’s eighth year performing at the venue.

“It definitely has been a family theater for me. Both my brother and I acted here as children and went to the shows as audiences before that,” says Eldridge. “I just kept staying connected.”
In its 29th season, the nonprofit theater presents productions for children and adults. “A Tale of Two Cities” is their adult drama.

“In this play, the top government trickles down into this horrible conflict,” Eldridge says. “Here, the theater is run by such warm people that it trickles down to the cast and crew. That’s why we come back over and over again.”

Beverly Creasey reviews A Tale of Two Cities

Revolution And Redemption
By Beverly Creasey

Here’s the reason to celebrate in these difficult economic times: Wheelock Family Theatre is still able to mount large scale productions where many theaters cannot. Their latest is Dwayne Hartford’s adaption of Dickens’ monumental A Tale Of Two Cities (playing through November 29th).

Dickens, who wrote so eloquently about human suffering, was himself victim of circumstance spending time as a child in debtor’s prison and later finding work as a child laborer in a factory. Like Sydney Carton in A Tale Of Two Cities, Dickens served as a lawyer’s clerk before finding success serializing his stories in the newspaper.

A cast of fifteen actors recreate the harrowing stories of ordinary people caught up in events surrounding the French Revolution. Justice and morality are Dickens’ bread and butter and his scope is broad. We meet dozens of characters who swirl around carton and the Manettes, as they move closer and closer to disaster, in the person of relentless Madame Defarge.

Bill Mootos as Sydney Carton functions both as narrator and principal player in Dickens’ sweeping morality tale. He falls in love with Lucie Manette (the lovely Robin Eldridge) and pledges his loyalty to her and her family despite her affection for another. Mootos is the consummate Dickens actor, navigating the delicate balance between melodrama and naturalism. His charismatic performance as the sardonic antihero carries the production. M. Lynda Robinson, too, gets the Dickensian exaggerations just right, as Lucy Manettes’s hilarious, high strung governess.

Alas, opening night goblins got into sound system on Halloween eve, making it hard to hear the actors over swelling music punctuating the mood, movie style. In addition, my theater companion had great difficulty distinguishing between London and Paris as one scene often runs right into the next and many of the actors playing both French and English do so without a change of costume. It takes a few minutes to realize that the Englishman hasn’t travelled to the continent. He’s now an entirely different character (and nationality). Hats are added for the revolutionaries in Act II which is most helpful but a good knowledge of the story ahead of time is your best bet to follow the script.

Globe Review by Terry Byrne

‘A Tale’ that packs too much into the telling

Charles Dickens’s sweeping saga “A Tale of Two Cities’’ encompasses a wide swath of history and culture to illustrate “the best of times’’ and “the worst of times’’ in London and Paris at the end of the 18th century. But condensing all the conflicts into a two-hour stage version requires some difficult choices, which adapter Dwayne Hartford is unwilling to make. The result is a Wheelock Family Theatre production that is well-intentioned, but dramatically weak. Hartford’s script feels like a Cliffs Notes version of the novel, with all the major scenes included, but with very little connection or coherence.

At the heart of Dickens’s story is the love between Lucie Manette (Robin Eldridge) and Charles Darnay (Paul Melendy), both from families at different ends of the political spectrum, who find each other and fall in love despite their complicated histories. The episodic nature of the tale - it was first published in weekly installments - allowed Dickens to play out various story lines and develop innumerable characters as he traced the days leading up to and after the French revolution. But explaining who all these characters are, and how they fit together, will make your head spin.

In an effort to pull the stories together, Hartford makes the character of Sydney Carton (the outstanding Bill Mootos) the narrator. This could work, since in the novel, the dissolute lawyer Carton is relegated to the sidelines and watches as the woman he loves, Lucie, gives her heart to another. This narrator also has the opportunity to create much-needed transitions from one city to another. But Hartford’s use of the narrator is inconsistent, and he’s never there when we need him.

Director Susan Kosoff does a good job moving her company around Anita Fuchs’s minimalist set, but she can’t figure out how to keep the production moving and too often relies on tableaus that stop the action cold. Fuchs’s framing device of broken pieces of wood misses the opportunity to provide two distinct settings, so we never know exactly where we are.

Despite his often long-winded descriptions (Dickens was paid by the word), the novel includes some terrific characters, including Carton, who makes the ultimate sacrifice for love, Miss Pross, Lucie’s governess, and Madame Defarge, who knits the injustices of the time into a long scarf. M. Lynda Robinson gives Miss Pross just the right combination of spunk and loyalty, while Jane Staab, as Madame Defarge, heads into madness too quickly, not allowing the audience to understand the grief that sent her over the edge. Their battle near the end of the story, however, is wonderfully choreographed, so that what could have been a simple cat fight becomes an epic struggle between good and evil.

“A Tale of Two Cities’’ has some terrific dramatic potential, but Hartford gets bogged down in his effort to be true to all the themes Dickens included. The unintended consequence in this production is that if you haven’t read the book, even the best of times depicted here are just confusing.

Carl Rossi Review: A Tale of Two Cities

Dale Place as Marquis de Evremonde

The Wheelock Family Theatre begins it 29th season of family entertainment with A TALE OF TWO CITIES: its production is not only excellent Dickens but makes perfect sense of Brecht’s theories on Epic Theatre, whether intentional or not, and this stirring tale of love and sacrifice during the French Revolution springs onstage like a tiger in Dwayne Hartford’s faithful adaptation, shedding a few minor characters in transit.


How can the most popular Victorian novelist become Brechtian? For starters, Mr. Dickens always wrote of England’s social conditions, her class system and the plight of her poor and downtrodden; in A TALE OF TWO CITIES, he pushed his themes to their logical conclusion: Revolution --- between Mr. Hartford and director Susan Kosoff, here is a theatre-lesson to be taught and learned. Secondly, Mr. Hartford’s characters are the stuff of melodrama --- one-dimensional types who exist to further the plot and no more (sardonic Sydney Carton becomes the “distancing” narrator) --- and Ms. Kosoff’s busy, detailed ensemble has no time to “act”; its job is to keep the wheels of revolution spinning right down to Carton’s closing lines. In other words, the characters are defined by what they DO rather than by what they ARE --- even the sentimental reunion of father and daughter, in the beginning, is but a necessary prelude to the coming storm. Ms. Kosoff’s production may be a THINKING production but it is by no means a cold one, this TALE’s pathos --- so welcome by being so unforced! --- flows whenever its characters are powerless to stop those ever-turning wheels: Carton’s intoxicated pledge to Lucie who is set to marry Darnay; the anonymous street-child crushed beneath the Marquis’ carriage; Dr. Manette’s collapse after reading aloud his own denunciation of Darcy before the tribunal; the silent trembling of a man in line waiting to be guillotined while, behind him, Carton and the Seamstress have their transcending love-duet; the slicing sounds of the offstage guillotine as, one by one, the victims make their exit. No, not cold at all, but THRILLING, and held together by Jane Staab’s Madame Defarge who, step-by-step, becomes a demented Fury incarnate: ah, her chilling stance when she realizes that the hated Darnay is not the last of his line, after all; her battle to the death with Miss Pross.... Thrilling, passionate theatre of the People and for the People --- you can’t get more Brechtian than that, what?

My heartfelt congratulations (and gratitude) to Ms. Kosoff and her ensemble for a job superbly done --- some of her actors continue to do their familiar thing, but caught up in this sweep of events, they seem brand new --- and to Anita Fuchs for her stark, functional scaffolding and suggested guillotine and to Lisa Simpson for her brisk period costumes, and so on and so on, down to the friendly ticket-takers. This is one evening of children’s theatre where the adults may well outnumber the youngsters, audience-wise (go, ye greybeards, and become children, yourselves, again!), and it runs throughout November, departing just before the annual army of Scrooges set up shop in December.

New Photos by Gary Ng

Robin Eldridge (Lucy Manette) and David Rothauser (Dr. Manette).

Bill Mootos (Sydney Carton) and Paul Melendy (Charles Darnay).