I was in transit on Friday and couldn’t post the usual weekly Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. My column, filed from the road, featured a pair of shows I saw in New Hampshire. The first was The Man Who Came to Dinner, performed by the Peterborough Players and starring James Whitmore:
Sixty years ago, a 25-year-old ex-Marine named James Whitmore made his acting debut at a summer theater in New Hampshire. From there he went straight to Broadway, won a Tony, got snapped up by Hollywood and became a familiar face, appearing in “The Asphalt Jungle,” “Planet of the Apes,” “The Shawshank Redemption” and countless other films and TV shows. But Mr. Whitmore never forgot where he came from, and in recent years he’s been performing once again with the Peterborough Players, the much-admired troupe that gave him his start. This month, at an age when most actors would be content to sit back and let the kids strut their stuff, he’s playing Sheridan Whiteside in “The Man Who Came to Dinner.” It’s a long, tough part, and I wondered as I drove up to New England whether an 85-year-old actor, however talented, could possibly summon up sufficient energy to make it work. I didn’t need to worry. Mr. Whitmore sailed through it like a youthful trouper, gleefully nailing each and every punch line to the back wall of the converted 18th-century barn in which the Players have been performing since 1933….
The second was Damn Yankees, performed by the Seacoast Repertory Theatre:
Ninety miles east of Peterborough, the Seacoast Repertory Theatre, whose home is a charming harbor town just across the Piscataqua River from Maine, presents a year-round schedule of familiar musicals and straight plays. Resort-town theater can be a dreary affair, but the Rep’s bare-bones revivals are unpretentiously engaging, in part because of the 230-seat basement auditorium in which they’re performed. The amphitheater-style seating is unusually intimate, and John McCluggage, the company’s new artistic director, makes the most of it. The young actors in his production of “Damn Yankees,” which is currently playing in repertory with “West Side Story” (more about that musical next week), do without microphones, scaling their singing to suit the size of the house. You wouldn’t think that a big, brash ’50s musical about a baseball team would work in such close quarters, but it comes off quite neatly….
No free link, and Friday’s Journal will already have vanished from most newsstands, so I suggest the smart option if you want to read the whole thing: go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you instant access to my drama column and all the rest of the Journal‘s excellent and extensive arts coverage. (If you’re already a subscriber to the Online Journal, my column is here.)