JJ Awards: Who wowed our theater critic onstage in January
Our critic introduces monthly awards to honor great performances onstage and behind the scenes.
Twenty years ago, in my third year as the Post-Dispatch theater critic, I created my own annual awards. I called them the Judys (what else?). They are virtual awards — no statuette, no money, nothing. They’re just my way of giving one last round of applause to all the artists, onstage and backstage, whose work impressed me in the preceding calendar year.
Now I am happy to introduce something extra: the JJ Awards. (As it happens, my middle initial also is J.) And I plan to give them every month to work I’ve seen in just the last four weeks.
Why? Well, why not? How can you ever be “too generous” with acknowledgment, which is what awards really are all about?
To the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, for the national recognition it received for “Until the Flood.” The Rep commissioned this play about the 2014 death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, written and performed by Dael Orlandersmith, and staged its premiere in October 2016. Now the production has opened at the Rattlestick Theater in New York’s Greenwich Village.
Orlandersmith and “Until the Flood” have received excellent reviews, notably in the New York Times and Variety. And both publications were smart enough to mention the Rep in their coverage.
To New Line Theatre’s Scott Miller, who invited anybody who was interested to come to a public reading of “The Zombies of Penzance.” What a fun night! The free reading drew a big, strikingly youthful crowd to the Marcel Theater. (They had to bring in extra chairs.)
And members of the audience, in both their laughter and their comments, gave useful feedback on the new Gilbert and Sullivan parody to writer Miller and composer/orchestrator John Gerdes. “The Zombies of Penzance” opens the next New Line season with a full production in September.
To Jim Burwinkel, who designed the set for the Black Rep’s production of “Fences.” My mother used to say that she didn’t think it was fair when wealthy women were recognized for their style. She said women who manage stylish looks without benefit of big budgets were the ones who deserved applause.
Stage design presents a parallel. Some shows have to be gorgeous, but there’s nothing glamorous about “Fences,” which takes place in the backyard of a working-class Pittsburgh home in the 1950s.
But Burwinkel gives his setting proportion and drama, as well as delicious glimpses inside the house. Through the back door, for example, you could see a small chest topped with a fancy commemorative plate. Whom did it honor? President Abraham Lincoln? Inventor/scientist George Washington Carver? Poet Phyllis Wheatley? With one intriguing touch, Burwinkel invites us into the Maxson family’s home and world.
To designer Felia Davenport, whose costumes provided instant insight into the characters in the New Jewish Theatre’s production of “The How and the Why.” Rachel (Sophia Brown), a brilliant graduate student in evolutionary biology, looks like a warrior in thick boots and a combat jacket — and, in her male-dominated field, a warrior is how she sees herself.
The professor she visits, Zelda (Amy Loui), is a legend in the field, her status and outlook communicated by her tailored trousers, high-heeled pumps, and above all by her folkloric jewelry, a symphony of silver and beads. I began to wonder if Davenport raided the bureau drawers of Washington U.’s entire female faculty.
To Susaan Jamshidi for the scene in “Faceless” in which she yells at her (absent) boss in the ladies’ room mirror. In the Studio Theatre of the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, Jamshidi plays a brilliant lawyer who has been roped into prosecuting a young woman because, as a Muslim in a hijab, she can say what a white man can’t.
Angry, frustrated and on the verge of tears, she lets out her feelings in presumed seclusion. In this very brief scene — really, a speech — Jamshidi gives “Faceless” a face that many (most?) women can recognize. A lot of us have spent time in workplace restrooms in the same frame of mind. We can relate.
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