Mamma Mia! is, I’m told, “Buffalo’s favorite musical,” which means it can sell out a full week at Shea’s, even after having been to town a number of times before. The current national tour is a trimmed-down version, with smaller chorus and simplified set, but the cast delivers the full wattage of the original and the opening night Buffalo audience on Tuesday did its part to get the joint rocking to a disco beat. I doubt if most audience members can tell the difference.

The Third Story

Susie McMonagle is especially appealing as Donna (Meryl Streep in the movie, and often Buffalo’s Corinne Melançon on Broadway), the unconventional mother of a young bride-to-be. John Hemphill recreates that ABBA sound to perfection as dad candidate Sam Carmichael. Rose Sezniak is adorable as Donna’s well-intentioned trouble-maker of a daughter, Sophie.

Despite its odd premise (Sophie reads Mom’s diaries to find that there are three possible candidates to be her Dad, and invites all three men to her wedding), the show is certainly more wholesome than, say, Sweeney Todd—which is about murder and cannibalism. Still, its happy exuberance propels us through ABBA song after ABBA song with clever invention and non-stop surprises, and leaves us as cheerful as if we’ve been waltzing through Nazi Austria with Maria von Trapp. It is disconcerting to hear such cheesy tunes capture so much of one’s own life so perfectly.

Rachel Tyler plays the oft-married and oft-divorced Tanya, the role played by Buffalo’s Christine Baranski in the film, and is wonderful in her “Does Your Mother Know” turn with Adam Michael Kaokept, an actor born to play Barnaby Tucker in Hello Dolly! Kittra Wynn Coomer similarly makes the most of her portrayal of Rosie, with a no holds barred performance. Martin Kildare provides great laughs as the Australian dad candidate; and Michael Aaron Lindner is splendid as the banker dad with the headbanger past and a well endowed checking account.

A proliferation of low-brow jokes make great teen fodder of this quintessentially low-brow entertainment. The show also serves to bring back the adolescent in the over-50 set.

REPORT ON LIFE SO FAR

Over at the ALT Theatre in the Great Arrow building, the ALT Theatre Company is gamely giving a go to a new non-narrative theater piece, Report on Life so Far, written and directed by Drew McCabe. In a series of vignettes, McCabe’s cast runs the gamut of contemporary fears: from terrorism, to cyber relationships, to environmental poisons. The talented cast gives a hundred percent to the handsomely presented material, which has an extremely youthful tone—impassioned and highly dramatic. While the material is uneven, it is fascinating to watch this small company find its theatrical voice.

THE AMERICAN PLAN

Meanwhile, in New York, Mercedes Ruehl and Lily Rabe are terrific as a mother and daughter remarkably different from those in Mamma Mia! in Richard Greenberg’s The American Plan. Ruehl plays Eva Adler, the wealthy and clever Teutonic mother of emotionally vulnerable Lili. When a young gentleman with secrets comes courting at their summer home in the Catskills, Eva unleashes the full power of her wiles. Greenberg’s work has only been seen in Buffalo once, the Studio Arena Theatre production of Three Days of Rain, a production overshadowed by tales of that theater’s financial woes. Like Three Days of Rain, The American Plan is a marvelously complex, insightful and engaging evening of theater.

THE THIRD STORY

Also in New York, Charles Busch’s latest work, The Third Story, starring himself and Kathleen Turner, has been extended at the Lucille Lortel down in the village. Set in the post World War II era, Turner plays a Hollywood screenwriter who is being squeezed out of the studios and also out of her son’s life. She pays a visit on the young man, where he has retreated to Nebraska, and tries to encourage him to collaborate on a new script with her. As she brainstorms ideas, she takes encouragement in the notion that it is the third idea that is usually the winner. Together they fantasize three overlapping plots with identical themes, a fairy tale, a science fiction film, and a gangster picture in which Busch plays a queen of the underworld and a Russian witch. I saw the world premiere production in La Jolla and was quite amazed at the overhaul Busch has given the material, which is streamlined, clarified, and even funnier than before. When in New York, Charles Busch is one of the great treasures of the American Theatre, and The Third Story presents him at the height of his art.

The late James Whitmore

JAMES WHITMORE

Finally, on a sad note, the great character actor and Buffalonian James Whitmore died this week. The New York Times obituary mentioned his birth in White Plains, but not his subsequent growing up and early theatrical experiences here in Buffalo. That’s sort of like saying that Buffalo’s Katharine Cornell was German because she was born in Berlin during her father’s brief medical internship. When last he appeared at Studio Arena Theatre, Whitmore reminisced about his early years in Buffalo, working for Miss Keeler at Studio Theatre and raising hell downtown with young Charles Durning. The gradual loss of Studio Arena, a slow decline that took about 20 years, leaves us disconnected from a larger theater world in many ways. We should not surrender those connections or our history so easily. James Whitmore was a Buffalonian, and we mourn his passing.