2015-257-E Arts - Deep Dish Theater Company Arts Grant

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DocuSign Envelope ID: F859AB28-066D-45E9-BB24-D873BDC015A0 Under Paul Frellick's deft direction, Pearah's Dorante whistles along some imposing self-erected precipices as he tries to keep Cliton, father Geronte(robust Warren Keyes) and prospective paramours Clarice and Lucrece(glittering Rebecca Bossen and soulful Maryanne Henderson) in the dark on different facets of his life. In their midst, Nagel's cockeyed read on the bellicose Alcippe suggests a refreshing 15th-century take on"Weird Al"Yankovic. The occasional snag is the iambic pentameter Ives employs throughout. When it works,well over half the time, the practice is theatrical meringue. When the inevitable clunkers land, it's a fallen stage souffl6. Dorante's improbable second-act credo begins with a tag on Shakespeare: "All the world's a lie, and the men and women merely liars." But instead of using this to confirm some darker truth of human nature, Dorante finds liberation and limitless possibility in it. When all meaning is a mere invention to distract us from the void, the liar"turns to poetry our daily prose ... to dazzle us[and] reweave the tapestry with brilliant colors from his endless spools." In the right hands, Dorante reminds us, a lie can be performance art. As a culture, we used to know this. The popularity of The Monti and The Moth bids us to remember that our predecessors once regularly held similar contests—called tall-tale competitions and fish-tale festivals—for the best- told lies, instead of truths. Were those practices still commonplace, would we be more or less inoculated against far less beneficial untruths—the ones that have crept into our politics and political reporting? .a Photo by Jonathan Young ® Matthew Hager and Roman Pearah in The Liar Regional companies very rarely stage the same show in the same season. Since any given stage show has a finite audience, two adjacent runs split that group—and potentially cut their houses in half. Then there's the unwanted specter of head-to-head competition. For the thoughtful theatergoer, parallel productions let us place two creative teams side by side and assess their differences in artistic vision and execution. But if you're on the marketing and development side of either company, you might not want those comparisons made available, much less inevitable, among the general public. Temple Theatre closes its 2014115 season with HAIRSPRAY, the John Waters musical that Raleigh Little Theatre performed in the same season in September. Director Peggy Taphorn and imaginative set designer Steven Harrington don't force an able Emily Hubbard, as central character Tracy Turnblad, to open the show as singlehandedly as the RLT production did last fall. Instead, opening number"Good Morning Baltimore"takes us on a vivid and fully populated whirlwind tour—first of Tracy's teenage bedroom, then the scuzzy sides of her neighborhood walk to school.