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HONK! January 29 - February 28

ASL - Final Performance! A Tale of Two Cities

A Tale of Two Cities

Based on the book by Charles Dickens.

ASL/AD performance: Sunday November 29 at 3:00

Discounted tickets available! Use the discount code: ASL and tickets are only $15

Set during the tumult of the French Revolution, The Reign of Terror, A Tale of Two Cities vividly dramatizes the intertwined fortunes of a French Aristocrat who reject’s his family’s tradition of terrorizing the lower classes and a drunken lawyer who finds meaning in life through an requited love. This new adaptation of the Dickens classic poses questions as pressing today as they were two centuries ago.

How does one prioritize loyalty?

Is violence ever justified?

What are the costs to society of a citizenry divided between rich and poor?

Can a single act of honor and love counteract a world filled with hatred?

And, in the face of war and terror perpetrated in the name of a broader cause, what is the definition of a life well lived?

ASL Consultant: Mikey Krajnak

ASL Interpreters: Aaron Malgeri & Gabrielle Weiler

Audio-describer: Vince Lombardi

Cast:

Bill Mootos* (Sydney Carton)

Jane Staab* (Madame Defarge)

Paul Melendy* (Charles Darnay)

M. Lynda Robinson* (Miss Pross)

Robin Eldridge (Lucie Manette)

David Rothauser* (Dr. Manette)

And with Kortney Adams*, John Davin*, Jonathan Overby, Cliff Odle, Tara Henry, De’Lon Grant, Dale Place*, Brian Quint *Members of AEA

ASL/AD: Sunday November 29 at 3:00

Tickets: $15 ASL

Box Office: 617-879-2300 tickets@wheelock.edu

Survival Guide at Boston parents Paper

Boston Parents Paper by Diedre WIlson

The Best of Times, the Worst of Times
A Tale of Two Cities is a Must-See for Parents and Older Kids

Tweens and teens see their share of media content that’s more appropriate for adults. And the programming – whether on TV, in films or on the Web – often involves gratuitous and graphic violence. There’s no remorse, no hint of the devastating after-shocks that result from mindless physical and verbal abuse.Why, then, would I recommend that these adolescents book a seat at a Wheelock Family Theatre (WFT) performance of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities this month? Because it puts young people in the same room (instead of in front of a screen) with inspired actors dramatizing one of the finest pieces of literature in history. And because the message this story so effectively conveys is that violence and blatant disregard for humanity is never without chilling and heart-wrenching devastation.

For kids who spend too much time viewing gory corpses on TV’s CSI and Law & Order or horror flicks on the big screen, A Tale of Two Cities offers a soul-searching taste of violence and the enduring, if sometimes tragic, power of love. It’s absolutely worth seeing for its lessons in history and humanity.It is the story of two classes – the rich and the poor – in the months leading to the French Revolution of the late 1700s, when peasants rose up against a powerful, heartless aristocracy and demanded change. The actors in this WFT production keep both adults and adolescents completely absorbed in the story of Charles Darnay, the Frenchman who tries to distance himself from a hated family of aristocrats; Sydney Carton, the hard-drinking lawyer who, deep down, wants only to do something meaningful with his life; Lucie Manette, the kindhearted woman loved by both Darnay and Carton; and her father, Dr. Manette, the victim of wrongful imprisonment by the aristocracy. Pushing the plot toward its tragic conclusion are Madame Defarge and her husband, two commoners working toward a revolution against the rich to end the poverty, cruelty and injustice both have seen too much of.

The set is stark – skeletal structures depicting a city on the verge of disaster, the sound of a dropping guillotine heard off stage over and over again, a flood of red lighting against dark silhouettes of actors. Madame Defarge, played as bitter and increasingly enraged by WFT co-founder Jane Staab, will strike a chord. She is demonic in her understandable fury. Carton’s sacrifice for both Lucie Manette and a France in freefall will inspire young people and inject feelings of depth, pride and heroism – something you don’t always get in today’s television dramas.WFT is celebrating its 29th season as an award-winning family theater that annually presents a drama, a musical and a play for young children on the campus of Boston’s Wheelock College. A Tale of Two Cities runs through Nov. 29 at the theater located at 200 The Riverway, Boston. The show runs Friday nights at 7:30 p.m. and Saturdays and Sundays at 3 p.m. Ticket prices range from $15-$25.See it. Take your older kids. The discussions – and the thoughts – that will follow will be well worth it.Deirdre Wilson is the senior editor of the Boston Parents Paper.

Dan Willens in Beantown Bloggery

Wheelock Family Theatre has produced here a greatly approachable introduction to Charles Dickens's most famous novel, A Tale of Two Cities. Dwayne Hartford's updated language makes the narrative accessible to the modern audience, even to those who may not be familiar with the novel itself. In order to keep the script at a reasonable length, Mr. Hartford has also trimmed the tale to its essentials--it is tightly focused on the major plotline of the novel and the 10 or so characters around which it revolves.

Particularly notable performances come from Bill Mootos as Sydney Carton (who also acts as the narrator) and Jane Staab as Madame Defarge. Mr. Mootos aptly represents Carton's initially dogged cynicism, as well as its gradual softening towards his eventual redemption. Ms. Staab's portrayal of Madame Defarge's lust for vengeance, on the other hand, heightens intensely as the plot reaches its climax. The costumes are rich and convincing, and the set, austere by design and with only a few changing elements, is cleverly used to represent everything from the galleries of a London courtroom to the streets of Paris during the storming of the Bastille.

Wheelock Family Theatre, true to their mission of engaging the whole family in the theater experience, has also spent the time to create a helpful study guide providing discussion questions for the audience. At each show, they also offer an event (in our case, a debate on the themes of the narrative) to further encourage audience discussion and participation.The play is runs through the end of the month so you've got two more weeks to kick it in gear and get over there and see it.

Sheila Barth Review

Chelsea Times, Everett Independent, Salem State Newspaper
Wednesday November 18, 2009

Many will remember studying Charles Dickens’ classic tale of the French Revolution, “A Tale of Two Cities,” as high school freshmen, so the fact that Wheelock Family Theatre is recreating it on stage with an impressive cast is exciting.
Dwayne Hartford’s over two-hour adaptation of Dickens’ gut-wrenching tale is intriguing enough to keep the audience’s attention, interweaving its bi-country characters and plot in this 18th century of class separation, nobility vs. selfishness and romance, with deadly festering, vengeful overtones.
However, something gets lost in the shuffle, which, hopefully, can be easily corrected. The production has several elements of good theater- a stark, barren, ugly structure of tri-level, angular wooden posts, with platforms, designed by Anita Fuchs, and simplistic props that emphasize the ugliness of the era. Lisa Simpson’s costumes with brocade and lace elegance and elaborately, curled wigs for noble’s strike an overt contrast to the peasants’ homely attire. However, when actors playing multiple roles wear the same costume but are thinly camouflaged by simple touches, it’s confusing. Also because the play switches quickly from Paris to London, yet everyone is speaking English regardless of their role. M. Lynda Robinson’s line as proper British nanny Miss Pross is laughable when she laments in Paris, “Oh, why doesn’t everyone speak English?” Uh, they are…
There are real attempts at humor to lighten this masterful story of self-sacrifice, love and revolution, which seem sorely out of place. With a festering revolution, a child killed by a nobleman’s carriage, murder, unreasonable incarceration In France’s Bastille, the ultimate, frightening guillotine execution committed offstage but with Dewey Dellay’s terrifying sound effects and recorded crowds cheering at each bloody swipe of the blade-this isn’t funny, folks.
The problems rest with Susan Kosoff’s direction. The actors don’t project enough, making it difficult to hear them, so the audience is reliant on two stage monitors projecting the dialogue. While reading the monitors, we’re distracted from powerful scenes.
Lighting designer John R. Malinowski adds poignant touches, especially during bloody scenes, when he drenches the background in red light, but overall, rapid scene changes from Paris to London are indistinguishable.
Also, there’s allegedly a strong resemblance between self-effacing, alcoholic, cynical British lawyer Sydney Carton and French aristocratic immigrant Charles Darnay, but with slender Paul Melendy as Darnay and larger-built Bill Mootos as Carton, the only apparent likeness is their brown wigs. Both deliver find performances, though. Melendy is believably honorable as a French nobleman who renounces his birthright and heritage because of his father and uncle’s cruelty to the lowly masses and servants, while Mootos is impressive as the play’s narrator and hero. His soliloquies and ultimate sacrifice are moving.
Jane Staab as bloodthirsty, vengeful revolutionary Mme. Therese Defarge, who knits incessantly as she calmly plots her overthrow of royalty and nobility, is effective, as is John Davin as her husband, Ernest Defarge. Pretty Robin Eldridge as sweet Lucie Manette is also fine, but she speaks too softly. David Rothauser as her befuddled father, Dr. Alexandre Manette, who was unjustly tossed in the Bastille Tower-No. 105- arouses our sympathy; Cliff Odle as banker Jarvis Lorry and in two lesser roles is fine, as is veteran actor Dale Place in three roles- the evil Marquis de Evremonde, British lawyer Stryver, and governor of the Bastille.
Playwright Dwayne Hartford said his adaptation is relevant to today’s society and times- the best of times, the worst of times, with genocide, revolution, poverty and greed occurring globally. This is the right time to see “A Tale of Two Cities,” but with some simple changes.

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.