[NEohioPAL] Review of Mercury Summer Stock's "Grand Hotel"

[Bob Abelman]

Mercury's marvelous 'Grand Hotel' is filled to capacity

 

Bob Abelman

 

News-Herald, Chagrin Valley Times, Solon Times,

The Morning Journal, Geauga Times Courier

Member, American Theatre Critics Association 

 

This review will appear in the News-Herald 7/22/11

 

Mercury Summer Stock's current production of Grand Hotel is a testament to the notion that less is more.

 

The play itself, by Luther Davis, is an efficient compression of Vicki Baum's complicated 1929 novel.  With music and lyrics by Robert Wright, George Forrest and Maury Yeston, it is also a song and dance adaptation of the luxurious 1932 Hollywood film of the same name.

 

Grand Hotel focuses on the intersecting lives of the eccentric guests of an opulent Berlin hotel in 1928.  On the fragile threshold of world-wide financial ruin, moral bankruptcy and war, everyone is restless.  Everyone is in desperate need of something they do not have and cannot possess.  Everyone is going somewhere but eventually end up where they began.  

 

The original 1989 Broadway production of this show won five Tony Awards, including Best Musical, but many New York critics were less than captivated.  They noted that the show generated theatricality, tumultuous atmosphere, and a churning pace but did so without the conventional elements of attractive songs and characters to care about.  

 

The show's success was largely the result of the flair of its presentation rather than the material itself.  The vast, state-of-the art Al Hirshfeld Theatre stage was filled with a lush, multi-tiered, art deco Grand Hotel set, lavish costuming, perpetual movement and period choreography, and a foreboding yet seductive aura of Expressionism.  

 

Mercury Summer Stock director Pierre-Jacques Brault does even more with less.

 

In the shoe-box that is the 150-seat Brooks Theatre at the Cleveland Play House, Brault strips the shallow and narrow stage bare.  It is so bare that the interior brick walls and the stage's antiquated infrastructure of wire rigging and ropes are fully exposed, leaving only dramatic lighting, clever staging, and the omnipresent players to tell the story and create the illusion of the Grand Hotel.

 

Expressionism is accentuated in the place of production values in this presentation.

 

With less emphasis on production values, greater attention is committed to each character's story.  As a result, and so very unlike the Broadway production, we come to care about these characters.  We become vested in their respective exercises in futility.  This, in turn, places greater focus on the detailed performances of a very gifted cast.

 

Emily Grodzik offers a tour de force performance as Flaemmchen, the self-destructive typist so desperate to be who she is not.  Her featured "I Want to Go to Hollywood" number, her tender moments with Otto Kringelein, a fatally ill bookkeeper with a lust for life, and her devastating disappoints are all played to perfection.  

 

As the bookkeeper, Brian Marshall ventures close to caricature but manages to never lose his character's humanity.  His participation in the bittersweet "Who Couldn't Dance With You?" is poetry and, in Act 2, his featured "We'll Take a Glass Together"-an uncharacteristically upbeat and rejuvenating piece of musical theatre-is a treat.

 

Another is the delightful "Maybe My Baby Loves Me" as performed by two hotel porters played by the charming Eugene Sumlin and Marcus Martin.  

 

Holly Feiler is wonderful as Elizaveta Grushinskaya, the fading prima ballerina on yet another final farewell tour played before empty houses.  Feiler captures Grushinskaya's façade of grandeur as well as her vulnerability and, while her songs are among the least attractive in the show, she performs them for all they are worth.  And she moves beautifully.

 

Also superb are Amiee Collier as Grushinskaya's sullen assistant who wants nothing but unobtainable intimacy; Dan DiCello as Hermann Preysing, a businessman in the process of losing everything; Nate Huntley as the destitute Baron surviving on charm and petty crime; and Mort Goldman as the death-obsessed, morphine-imbibing narrator of this tale.   

 

In fact, everyone in this cast is wonderful and executes Brault's clever choreography with incredible precision and passion.  All this is accompanied by a small on-stage orchestra under Ryan Neal's direction that further reinforces the notion that less is more. 

 

Stripped down to its essentials, Mercury Summer Stock's highly stylized Grand Hotel is miraculously greater than the sum of its parts.  It is a production that is revealing, wonderfully theatrical, and not be missed. 

 

Grand Hotel continues through July 30 in The Cleveland Play House's Brooks Theatre, 8500 Euclid Ave., Cleveland.  For tickets, $15 to $18, call 216-771-5862 or visit http://mercurysummerstock.ticketleap.com.
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