Stratford Festival
Through October 25
LITTLE WOMEN Avon Theatre/Stratford Festival
At its heart, “Little Women” is a story about a mother and her four daughters trying to get by in wartime, with a husband and father who has left for the front lines to serve as a chaplain.
This is the American Civil War, the great turning point of U.S. history, as two halves of the nation fight to decide the fate of a country, “Half slave and half free.”
In the end, the North won.
That left the South in financial ruin, more than 700,000 dead and the focal point of the war, the formerly enslaved, not necessarily much better off than before, with the Ku Klux Klan and other groups, sharecropping and the “Black Codes” allied to make sure they weren’t slaves but they were as unfree as the power structure could ensure.
Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women” and “Good Wives” have been combined by playwright Jordi Mand and the Stratford Festival into an over-stuffed mass of every social justice issue.
That means a play listed as one of the Schulich Children’s Plays totaling nearly three hours, clearly more theater than either of my sisters could have handled when they were reading “Little Women.”
Both became lawyers at a time when that was discouraged, perhaps encouraged by the story of Jo March growing up in the writer’s town of Concord, Massachusetts, seemingly all male writers.
In a sense, what Alcott did was mix an impecunious father, a survivor mother and four possible life choices for a woman of those Civil War days and what happens to those four fictional young women in an age of disease, class distinctions, wealth disparities and desire for the lives they want.
Director Esther Jun took a lavish production budget and worked with set designer Teresa Przybylski to create a grand spectacle of a show, with moving set elements, dancing from a far different age than Alcott’s and some really strong performances.
That strong performance from Allison Edwards-Crewe as Jo starts badly, with a lot of gamboling around out of time, clearly under Jun’s direction and eventually turns into a wonderful look at a young woman trying to make her own way as a writer for money at a time when that was just not allowed.
She becomes the novelist, turning her story of growing up in hard times into this classic American tale of growing up, surrounded by obstacles, and creating a good life.
The key weakness in this production and in others I have seen and that includes a recent production from Road Less Traveled Theatre, using a different script for “Little Women,” is the failure to show what mom Marmee (Irene Poole) went through in holding the family together in horrible circumstances.
I recognize this is the story of her four daughters, but she shaped them, kept them fed and sheltered and held the family together to let them grow and develop.
As time goes by and we move into the three adult women, they are fine persons, good mothers and a teacher, while mourning sister Beth (Brefny Caribou), victim of a disease we wouldn’t even recognize in today’s supposedly vaccinated world.
In a way only a novelist could create, the three survivors meet the right guys who can mate with women out of their time, Jo with Professor Bhaer (Rylan Wilkie}; Amy (Lindsay Wu) with Laurie Laurence (Richard Lam); and, Meg (Veronica Hortigüela) with John Brooke (Stephen Jackman-Torkoff), good mating we can only wish for.
The audience in the Avon Theatre was filled the day I saw this show with people who knew the story and supported Jo’s quest for a life different from most of the women who surrounded her, even in an intellectual town like Concord.
"Little Women" is a spectacle filled with good performances, including the really annoying characters like Marion Adler’s Aunt March, and the supportive and helpful James Laurence (John Koensgen).
Even so, that audience was clearly filled with women who at a young age, sat and read Alcott’s tale of Beth, Meg, Amy and Jo and their dreams of a better life.
A.W.
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