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Milwaukee Rep
Jan 6 2012
Cast:
Gabe Goodman: Tim Young
Diana Goodman: Sarah Litzsinger
Natalie Goodman: Laurie Veldheer
Dan Goodman: Kevin Vortmann
Henry: Danny Henning
Doctor Fine/Madden: Jarrod Emick
I'd heard good things about this show, but only one song from it. I was a little prepared for it to be sort of a downer, but actually, it wasn't. It had a reasonably happy ending, and nobody died.
It's about a family. The mother is struggling with some pretty severe mental illness, and her husband and daughter are trying to deal with it.
A lot of the music was surprisingly upbeat. And this was definitely a rock opera. There were some spoken lines, but not a ton. I haven't listened to the soundtrack yet, but I think that it's pretty much the whole show. There were also a lot of songs where people were singing at the same time, which I am always a fan of.
The set was interesting. (I think I always say that). There was a model of a house suspended in mid-air in the center of the stage, all lit up. The rest of the set was very metallic, with steel beams and platforms and railings all over the place. However, when the lights came up on the set, then I could see that actually, yes, it did look like a house - it looked like a dollhouse, a house with the side cut away.
I totally got taken in by the opening of the play too. My seat was on the aisle, and as the lights were starting to dim, this guy came down the aisle past me. I didn't think too much of it, just figured he was darting in at the last minute, or maybe he'd run out to the lobby for something. But he kept walking down the aisle and onto the stage. While the overture played, he just sort of stood there looking at the small house, before leaving the stage.
The whole cast was awesome, but I know who my favorite was. I think that they all had quite difficult roles to play.
First we had Diana, a mother, who is slowly falling apart. She is bi-polar, depressed, and hallucinates. There were only a few points in the play where she seemed to actually be having problems, but from the way that people reacted, it made it pretty clear that this was a reoccurring thing. There was a lot more implied about here than was actually shown. Her first "breakdown" was her spreading bread out on the floor, in a sort of trail across the "kitchen."
One thing they did with Diana that I thought was pretty cool was her costuming. Over the course of the play, she went through a range of her illness. At the start of the play, when she wasn't doing well at all, she was wearing a red bathrobe. Later, at her therapist, she was wearing a red blouse and some tan colored pants. In the hospital, she sang a song about how well she felt for the first time in a long time, and she was wearing an all white hospital gown. Later, after treatment when she was still doing pretty well, she was wearing a white blouse and tan skirt. When relapsing started, she added a redish cardigan to her outfit. And at the end of the play, when things were a bit ambiguous, she was wearing black and white. I thought that the use of color to indicate her mental state was pretty subtly effective.
Dan was the father, Diana's husband. I liked him quite a bit, but I tend to like characters with glasses. He was trying so hard to keep his family together, and as the show progressed, it was pretty clear that the troubles his wife was having were starting to wear on him. It was also quite clear in this show that he really did love his family, and his wife. Sometimes he came off as a bit aggressive, but he was very frustrated. Some of my favorite songs in the play were his. "I Am The One" is a song that he sings to his wife about how he has always been there for her. He's the one that is most hopeful during the course of the entire play that Diana will "get better." Most of the things he does in the play are to make his wife "better." Of course, when he decides to ignore the advice of the therapist, things sort of go wrong. I liked him though, and I liked his songs: "I Am The One" (as I said before), "I've Been", "A Light in the Dark", "A Promise." Overall, I'd say that Dan was just a Good Guy and I liked him a lot.
Natalie is their daughter. Her mother thinks that she's weird. I liked her introduction, when Diana said that Natalie is a "freak", because at the time Natalie was frantically working on homework, at 3 in the morning. I felt bad for Natalie, having to deal with the stress of her troubled mother. She's desperate to get out of that house and to go college. Her plan is to get a music scholarship. Natalie has her power song: "Superboy and the Invisible Girl" because her mom favors her brother over her.
When Diana goes off her medication, Natalie decides that the pills should not go to waste, and she starts taking them. Very quickly, their perfect over-achieving-(ignored) daughter turns into a wild girl, getting high off her mom's drugs and going out clubbing. This was shown pretty well in her clothing, as she started to look a bit more "red." A disaster in their family though, snaps Natalie out of that life.
My favorite character in the play had to have been Henry, Natalie's boyfriend. She doesn't particularly like him at first, because she likes classical music and he likes jazz. She also doesn't like him because he's an admitted stoner. It makes his words to her about not taking her mom's pills hard for her to listen to though. I guess pot is one thing, taking prescription drugs for someone else is quite a bit different. When initially presented, Henry seemed to be the oddest character. He was pretty stereotypically a stoner, compared to Natalie's pretty straitlaced ways, but as the show progressed, they switched roles. I think that with all the stuff that was going on in Natalie's life, it sort of made sense that only a character like Henry could actually be her rock, and he definitely was. He handled the big Reveal pretty well, considering. At the end of the play, he and Natalie are pretty firmly established as a couple. She tells him that he's the third thing on her list of stuff that's messed up about her life. He was cutely pleased about that. It also helped that when he sang, he sounded very nice indeed.
Over the course of the play, Diana had two therapists, Doctor Fine and Doctor Madden. The first one basically just kept drugging her and the second one was a bit more effective. Madden just talked to her, a lot, trying to work through her problems. He told her to "Make Up Your Mind" if she wants to get better again or not. He seemed like he was a good therapist, as he was willing to try all sorts of different things with her, but respecting her wishes not to use any medication.
Last but not least, there's Gabriel, (aka Gabe), Diana's son. (The afore mentioned Superboy) He was the one that walked onto the stage at the beginning. Thinking about it now, that was the perfect entrance for his character. He had a very pretty voice. The show started off by him coming home very late from wherever he was. Diana scolds him and then sends him off before Dan comes down, because Dan would be upset if he came home so late. He had some nice songs, "I Dreamed a Dance" and "There's a World." Another song that he sang that wasn't exactly pretty, but it was pretty powerful was "Aftershocks." And then of course, "I Am The One."
He unnerved me a little bit though, I must say, with how he was running around on the top level of the set. I always worry about people falling when they're up high and kinda dangling off things.
I'm not sure if I had a favorite song or not. I liked "My Psychopharmacologist and I" for the title if nothing else. Diana's therapist was running through some very complicated directions for all the medication that she was taking. And then all of a sudden, he comes out with "If Train A leaves Boston…" My mom and I just about died.
"Perfect For You" and it's reprise (Henry and Natalie) were very sweet songs. "I Miss the Mountains" was a rather powerful song sung by Diana.
"I Am The One" was the only song that I'd heard before, and I liked it before, still do. I kinda wonder if that one was difficult to get used to performing or not, but I'm not an actor, so I have no idea how easy it is to completely ignore the person you are singing a duet with, even if they're practically shouting in your ear.
"Wish I Were Here" is a song that Diana sings when she's unconscious and going in for surgery. Natalie joins in with her, because she's currently high, and somehow that allows them a connection. Diana was rather confused to see her daughter in her dream. There were some fun lines about that.
They did a song where Dan and Diana, and Henry and Natalie were singing together, which was pretty cool. The song was "Why Stay? (Girls)/A Promise (Guys)." The guys pretty much dramatically tell the girls why, even through all of the problems (Diana's mental issues and Natalie's drug problems) the guys stay. I liked that song.
I liked the original version of "I Am The One," but the Reprise of it was pretty powerful too. Without Diana around, Gabe and Dan confronted, and comforted each other.
The finale of the show, "Light" was pretty awesome too. As I said before, the show ended on a much more upbeat note than I expected it to be. While the problems were not all resolved, it was all about how they were going to move on. Diana and Natalie grew a bit closer together, and Diana has decided that she is going to confront her problems. And somehow, they will get through all of this. They'll never be normal, but they'll be something next to normal. That's the best they can hope for, and it's all that they want.
Some elements of this show are kinda spoilery for people who don't know the twist, so some of my comments about the major things that would be spoiled are in this entry http://dyanarosejill.livejournal.com/16776.html