Reviews
What is Melodrama? · Seating Chart · Piano, Popcorn & Sing-Alongs
FAQ's · Reviews · Picture Gallery
Diamond Circle Melodrama
more than meets the eye
June 29, 2004
By Jeff Mannix
Special to the Herald
Get a grip on your broadsheet, you're about to have a belief shattered. The Diamond Circle Melodrama is as fine a professional stage show as we have seen in Durango.
The talent, staging, lighting, direction, choreography, costuming and the use of live music is a testament to the tenacity of artistic director Jeannie Wheeldon and the 43rd consecutive year of the nation's only authentically historical melodrama.
During the climax of "Under the Gaslight," from left to right, Byke, played by Joshua Fingerhut, ties up one of the heroes, Snorkey, played by Scott Reynolds, as Anissa Hartline's character, Laura, looks on.
OK, the plot of a melodrama is, by today's taste, corny. The formula is simplicity itself: The virtuous hero fights off the despicable villain for the hand of the virginal heroine but not without unfathomable evil-doing, last-minute complications, unforeseen disloyalties and purely love-borne naiveties. A variety of parenthetical characters carry the plot from one camp to the other, providing suspense, comic relief and exposition.
But wait a minute. Isn't that the formula for all the television sitcoms and most of the motion pictures made today? The plots of today's dramas vary as extravagantly as the demands made upon an industry to feed tens of thousands of movie theaters and hundreds of thousands of television hours, and except for the obviously sensational product, contemporary drama is still the fight against evil for the triumph of love.
The melodrama, though, is from simpler times, tougher times, when life was poorer and laughs and entertainments were hard to come by. The melodrama was in its heyday during the 1880s and 1890s, and the Diamond Circle Melodrama draws its scripts from that era. It produces them true to form, including the meticulous live piano underscoring, exaggerated choreography, authentic costuming and the patented facial mugging, stentorious delivery and animated pace that once made melodrama the cat's meow.
A high society character, played by Gabe Tate, left, and Mrs. Van Dam, played by Laurel Lynn Collins, right, threaten one of the heroes in "Under the Gaslight," Ray Trafford, played by Brian Barth, center, to reveal his deep, dark secret.
Today, when everything is packaged in the form of entertainment, when it takes pertinacity to avoid the clamorous theater of news, nature, travel, education, advertising and what passes for music, the simpler experience of the old-fashioned melodrama is delightfully refreshing and, if you can clear from your mind the faux sophistication of being artistically "with it," downright fun.
The two shows being staged this year by the Diamond Circle Melodrama are scripts written in 1892 and 1878 by Augustin Daly and Steele MacKaye, "Under the Gaslight" and "Hazel Kirke." They're both splendid, lean scripts that build with emotional intensity from the first word spoken until the exhausting egalitarian conclusions. Each evoked wet eyes in the audience at times, along with many open-mouthed smiles - often at the same time - thanks to the skilled manipulation of the cast and the subtle, almost subliminal piano underscoring of the very talented Don French.
It would be hard to rate the talent of the ensemble cast; the pace of the scripts and the determined directing by Jeannie Wheeldon in "Under the Gaslight" and Ginny Davis in "Hazel Kirke" left no room for malingering or lapses of effort. But special mention must go to Gabe Tate, a former Durangoan. In each play he acted the messenger of discovery, with his meatiest part and best performance in "Hazel Kirke." Tate, a young man who is in the ascension phase of his career, has comedy bred in the bone and pulled more laughs out of both audiences with often nothing more than a raised eyebrow.
And since the door is open, it would be remiss not to mention the loveliness and complete believability of the virtue of our heroines, Kathryn Bourell and Kira Cauthorn, who effuse chastity, beauty, compassion, loyalty, sympathy and sex appeal even in their Victorian bodices - not something you should try at home. Brian Barth played the hero with aplomb, and at the Saturday night opening of "Hazel Kirke," physically showed just what 6,500 feet elevation can do to a New York City actor. He was lovable, though, and just the man to harness all this chastity.
Josh Fingerhut, Laurel Lynn Collins, Anissa Hartline and Scott Reynolds rounded out the cast and were each talented, energetic and critical to these vignettes of prevailing justice.
Each show finishes the evening with a vaudeville review that's just dumb funny, especially the olios following "Hazel Kirke," and particularly the ventriloquist and lap-dummy act of Barth and Fingerhut. It's good stuff.
Suck up your pride, put aside the pretext that you know anything about performance art, and get down to the Diamond Circle Theatre to see Jeannie Wheeldon's Melodrama. It's a winner.