The Michigan Daily-Saturday, June 2, 1979-Page 7 Civic' painfu sta at Sondheim By JOSHUA PECK Visit the Power Center this weekend if you want to see a marvelous show. Stay away if you want to avoid a dreary production of it. It's a shame that there are no awards for ambition in theatre, for Ann Arbor Civic would win a Tony in that category. Civic has staged the pivotal work of a composer who is almost singly responsible for bringing true legitimacy to the American musical theatre. There is a deeply entrenched idea that avarice, adultery, antipathy, and other dark aspects of the human character are subjects fit only for far- Follies Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman. PowerCenterforthePerforming Arts May 31, June 1,2,3 Sally Durant Plummer. Young Sally........... StellaDeems.......... Carlotta Campion...... Phyllis Rogers Stone... senjamin Stone .... Souog Phytlis.. Young Ben ............ . Buddy Plummer ....... Young Buddy .......... ..... Mary Beth Seiler .......Susan Dawson Susan Matthews Patricia Rector .......Sandra Storrer ..,,.. ob Starring .C.... atty Hetppie Peter-John Hedlesky . .....John Stephens .........Paul Coutere cical and/or superficial treatment in any play that happens to include music. Sondheim delivered that notion a sharp slap with Follies, as well as with his other works. (The composer's latest, Sweeney Todd, is currently stunning Broadway audiences with its look at the murkiest impulse of all - that to mur- der.) ADD TO ITS subject matter vexatiously complicated trappings like characters who are the principals' younger selves, songs of every imaginable style, and a cast with a combined age of some 1200 years, and you have a musical that calls for much more than ambition. But Civic's Follies has only meager helpings of anything else. Follies takes place at a 1964 reunion- farewell party for Weissman (read Ziegfield) girls of every era. The theatre in which the burlesque belles once strutted their stuff is about to be torn down so that a parking lot may be erected in its place, and .kindly old Weissman has invited the whole bunch back for an evening of last looks and fond remembrances. Among the invited are Phyllis and Ben Stone and Sally and Buddy Plummer, all friends from the good old days. Sally, it seems, once loved Ben, who deigned to sleep with her though he in- tended to marry Phyllis all along. This triangle is re-enacted, first by the ghostly doubles, then by the contem- porary characters themselves, toward play's end. CIVIC'S CHIEF faiings are ones it has suffered from many times before: a shortage of actors, singers, and dan- cers talented enough to fill out its cast, and direction that too often seems to be muddled or, worse, altogether truant. Directors Charles Sutherland and Jim Posante's staging of the show only occasionally seems to be attempting SPRING ARTS STAFF ARTS EDITOR Joshua Peck ARTS STAFF: Sondra Bobroff, Sarah Cassill, Mark Coteman, Sara Gldherg, Eri cGraig, Jock Hender- s0n, Katie Herofeld, Anna Nissen, Christopher Potter, Nancy Rucker, R.J. Smith, Nina Shishkoff, Tom Stephens, Keith Tosolt pertinence on a par with the script's and lyrics'. Particularly in scenes where the four principals and their young doubles share the stage, blocking, motivation, and charac- terization are bungled. Even the best directors, of course, can't turn water into wine, and Follies' cast is achingly aqueous. Prime culprit is Mary Beth Seiler, whose portrayal of Sally led my companion to ask if there were a sniper in the house. Her singing alternates between being too quiet and warbling sourly. Her lines sound as if a semi-literate is reading them off cue cards, and it would probably be a fair bet that Seiler sounded exactly the same way on the second day of rehear- sal. JOHN STEPHENS does better, but not much, as Sally's loving husband Buddy. That's very surprising, as Stephens' portrayal of the family patriarch in Civic's You Can't Take It With You last September. stole the show. Here, Stephens looks as if he wishes he were elsewhere, affecting a vocalization that at times stops just short of a stammer. He also seems reluctant to look any of his fellow actors in the eye. One can't help wondering what has happened to shake Stephens' confidence during these nine months. The other two leads are much more convincing and more sharply focused on their motivations. Bob Starring, for his part, squeezes a fair portion of pathos out of his loveless plight, and gets by on sincerity in his musical numbers, in lieu of any vocal training. Sandra Storrer was heralded in these pages a year and a half ago as "the best actress in Ann Arbor," preceded only by a "perhaps," for her work in Musket's Cabaret. She has done nothing here to dissipate that claim. Some of her shortest, most straightfor- ward lines are the show's best: A woman who sat next to Phyllis i (Storrer) in the dressing room during their days in the Follies approaches her at the party, expecting to be warmly greeted. Storrer stares at her for a deliciously long moment, then icily in- tones, "You never liked me." A second later, Storrer responds to the woman's astonished glare with yet another fond memory: "That's all right; I never liked you either." JUST ABOUT every tool available to an actress is at Storrer's command. Superb timing and perfectly acidic projection of her harshest sentiments (as well as sweet, rumination over her gentler ones) merge to make Storrer's performance her second brilliant one in as many local outings. Again, though, I must return to the peccancy and pain of ever so much of Follies, for those are the qualities that settle suffocatingly on the vast majority of the evening's proceedings. In example, three consecutive numbers in the first act, beginning with "Listen to the Rain on the Roof,' test a mortal man's tolerance. The first puts an elderly couple (Marie Gilson and Alex Miller) on stage for a thankfully brief ditty with which they seem about 50 per cent conversant. "Ah, Paris" is a sup- posedly exotic song that shrinks to unintelligible nattering at the hands of Bette Ellis. "Broadway Baby" is merely uninteresting. The six numbers that comprise the Loveland-sequence are far less tedious than the rest of the show, but struc- turally, their function is just to expand on what we already know about the dep- th of the characters' personalities and their histories. An expanded bauble is just a bigger bauble.- My advice to Ann Arbor Civic's board of directors (as if anybody asked) would simply be to think small. There's really something quite pitiful about seeing the Civic masses doing battle with Power Center's huge stage and house. They're just not up to it. It's as if Mickey Mouse had taken the podium from Stokowski in that scene in Fan- tasia. Imagine him flailing his little arms, thinking he could take command of a huge orchestra solely by virtue of determination - or ambition. Jean Kerr, Kaufman and Hart, Rodgers and Hammerstein are all within the range of possibilities for a company of Civic's talent and resour- ces. Shakespeare and Sondheim should be left alone.