Through April 2
THE RINK O’Connell & Company
By Augustine Warner
“The Rink” isn’t one of Kander and Ebb’s best works, even with a book from Terrence McNally.
The best is “Cabaret.”
However, if you have been to the theater as much as I have that doesn’t mean every production of Thirties Germany is great.
What makes a difference IS the production and the O’Connell & Company’s “The Rink” is a marvelous production, in its new home on Bailey Avenue in Amherst.
It’s still a work in progress, with the music noticeably softer in the second act than in the first act, on the night I saw the show.
It was no longer overwhelming some strong music from the cast.
Director and choreographer Joey Bucheker has a strong cast, both in music and dancing, headlined by Mary Coppola Gjurich and Aimée Walker.
At the core of the story is the rink, a worn, family-owned rink in what is apparently Atlantic City, New Jersey or simulacrum.
As our story opens, Anna (Coppola Gjurich) has sold the rink and the demo crew has just arrived and started to haul away the worn and tattered pieces of a one-time attraction.
That’s when the other owner arrives, after seven years of wandering the country with occasional postcards home, daughter Angel (Walker).
She’s upset with her mother for treating Dad Dino (David Wysocki) badly, for selling the rink and because she has a secret.
Possibly that’s because Dino’s an awful human being, perhaps influenced by drugs and alcohol and because he complains things haven’t worked out in life for him.
That happens.
Here, he drops off the face of the earth until his daughter finds him and is rejected.
This is all suffused by the dancing, particularly a tap number by the demo crew and an amazing dance number on roller skates.
The downside is Anna being attacked by the trolls who have moved into the boardwalk as it declined and the wolves come out of the woods.
The music has a couple of really strong numbers, Anna’s “Chief Cook and Bottle Washer” her “What Happened to the Old Days?”, with Mrs. Silverman (Nicholas Lama) and Mrs. Jackson (Matthew Ritler), Lama’s “Marry Me,” Angel and Anna’s “The Apple Doesn’t Fall” and Angel’s “Colored Lights.”
The new O’Connell home is an old church, with a high ceiling and the company is learning what can be done with that high roof, here with Bill Baldwin’s towering design, based around stage towers.
This is all built around the shifting cast, a well-drilled ensemble, led by Coppola Gjurich and Walker, with Wysocki and the tiny skater Piper Gabel.
“The Rink” shows what can be done with the right production, with the right on-stage and off-stage crew.
See it.
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