LIVE THEATRE: Cinderella’s Pacific Northwest “moment”

Posted @ Feb. 15 2012 10:08AM by Susan - arts-ent

Curtains rise on new productions in Seattle, Ashland and Longview

By Sara Freeman, PhD

The musical of “Cinderella,” by Rodgers and Hammerstein seems to be having a “moment” in the Pacific Northwest. Usually when theatres and their audiences think of this dominant duo of the golden age of American musical theatre, “Oklahoma!” “The Sound of Music,” or “The King and I” spring to mind.

But I’m fascinated to see how the composer and lyricist’s version of “Cinderella” is rising again: Seattle’s Fifth Avenue theatre just completed a major revival of the show, distinguished by having an Asian-American actress playing the famed Princess role and doing exciting special effects.

I got the full report on the amazing scene and costume changes from my students who went to see the show in Seattle before the holidays. This season, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival also remounts the postmodern collage production Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella originally created by Cornerstone Theatre between 1998 and 2002. This show weaves the musical together with Euripides’s Greek tragedy and Shakespeare’s proto-horror play to consider female archetypal characters. When you put them together this way, it really causes a reevaluation of the idea of Prince Charming, and the ways female virtue and power are presented. I’m hoping to make it to Ashland to see the production this summer.

At Longview’s Columbia Theatre
Best of all for the Lower Columbia region, Longview’s Columbia Theatre Association for the Performing Arts is staging its own production of Cinderella. It opens February 16 with a local cast helmed by Portland-based professional director Ron Daum. This project inaugurates the theatre’s new plan to stage an annual musical which will give the “extraordinarily talented people in this community” a chance to stretch and allow the Columbia to explore the hidden gems of musical theatre, explained Gian Paul Morelli, the executive director of the Columbia Theatre.

Few national touring companies bring rarely done musicals to the circuit, so the Columbia’s initiative will expand its range of offerings and allow the theatre to compliment the touring shows they are bringing in: “Cinderella” makes a nice pair with the touring production of “Damn Yankees” that will begin a run at the theatre on March 1, for instance. The focus on the whole range of musical theatre material also puts the Columbia Theatre on the same wavelength as organizations like the Shedd Institute in Eugene, Oregon, which each summer investigates the American songbook and produces two musicals as part of its Oregon Festival of American Music.

Daum directs for OFAM, too (full disclosure: he directed my husband Wade in a production of “Kiss Me Kate” that had my daughters singing “Too Darn Hot” all through the summer of 2010), and has worked in Longview frequently. According to the press release about “Cinderella,” Daum feels a “special connection to the theatre community” here “having worked on a number of occasions with the late Dana Brown (longtime R.A.Long High School teacher and founder of Mainstage Theatre there.)”

Quirky and inventive
The Columbia’s approach to “Cinderella” is both quirky and inventive, Morelli said. He expects that will be the primary mode for the Columbia’s homegrown productions.
“I hope we get a reputation for doing very clever productions,” he said, — ones that delight more because of ingenious theatricality than big-budget spectacle. “Cinderella” features a chorus of “shadows” who will create visual magic throughout the show. This type of invisible-yet-in-plain-sight spectacle is common in lots of traditional theatre forms, especially Japanese Noh and Kabuki. It carries the pleasure of double vision: You get to enjoy stage effects but you also get to appreciate the elegance of how they are created.

I always like seeing theatre pieces reinvented on different scales — from big to small, with different twists to make the most of a particular space, set of performers, or resources. That’s part of what makes it worth it to return to shows over and again. Right now, a return to fairy tales propels a lot of entertainment — there’s both “Grimm” and “Once Upon a Time” on TV and movie versions of “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Snow White” are coming or are already gone. So we have to ask what we’re looking for in these shows.

A hold on our culture
Maybe it’s just that an entire generation of writers read Bruno Bettelheim and Marina Warner all at once. The Cinderella motif in particular has a hold on our culture (see Peggy Orenstein’s new book Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture), and I think that makes it even more compelling to go see this show. We should talk about what Cinderella means to us: both what we love about the story and what’s worth critiquing or shifting about what it’s come to mean to us. When Michelle Myre joins Disney’s animation, with Julie Andrews, and Brandi in our heads as Cinderella, something even more interesting happens and that’s worth seeing. I’m looking forward to the show! Maybe I’ll see you there. Note: Read Ed Phillips' review of the opening night's performance by clicking HERE.http://crreader.com/2012/02/18/Cinderella-A-Dysfunctional-Family-Fairy-Tale-with-Music-

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Sara Freeman grew up in Longview and after earning bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees, is now assistant professor of theatre arts at University of Puget Sound in Tacoma.