OUT IN THE ARTS

by D.L. Groover

WE TOLD YOU SO. If you missed any of the three Bayou City Concert Musicals benefit performances of A Little Night Music, you will get another chance on January 27 when this thoroughly satisfying concert staging is remounted at Hobby Center. Stephen Sondheim's most pleasant and winsome musical comedy waltzed to life in September through incandescent performers, a stirring chamber music ensemble under Kim Hupp, and suitably understated direction by BCCM artistic director Paul Hope and David Thome. Sondheim's patented jaundiced view of love and marriage, softened through beguiling dance rhythms and the source material (Ingmar Bergman's nostalgic tintype of a movie, Smiles of a Summer Night) was well-nigh perfectly enacted by the assembled cast as they summoned all the wit, hurt, and irony so abundant in this adult musical. I mention the following actors not to exclude the exemplary others, but for their revelatory ways with this classic theater piece: Deborah Hope's mordantly comic Countess, Alex Stutler's blustery, macho Count, Hilary Fields's seductive Desiree, Melanie Donihoo's earthy Petra, Paul Hope's befuddled Fredrik, and Sylvia Froman's wise and canny Madame Armfeldt. Now in its third year, BCCM gets better each outing, if that is possible. With sellouts at Ovations and reservations flooding in for the January encore performance, the company has exceeded the goal for its beneficiary, The Center for AIDS: Hope & Remembrance Project, as well as showcasing the best of Houston's musical theater talent. BCCM makes us smile. Sondheim should be smiling, too.

GREEK ACTIVE. Have we become so jaded that incest, suicide, disembowelment, and on-stage masturbation fail to titillate or even shock? In Phaedra's Love, her 1996 retelling of the Greek myth of Phaedra's lust for her stepson Hippolytus, English playwright Sarah Kane, whose own personal Furies hounded her to early death at age 28, tried awfully hard to evoke ancient drama's verities of pity and horror. But ultimately, she rendered this most dysfunctional of royal families numbingly normal. The glacial direction of Infernal Bridegroom Productions artistic director Jason Nodler didn't help (he took the phrase Grecian frieze literally), while Kane's interpretation of Hippolytus as a bloated, sex-obsessed couch potato, who couldn't care less when stepmom services him, completely removed him from our compassion and involvement. Obviously, Miss Kane wanted to shock more than enlighten, and Hippolytus' noble redemption rings hollow, like a cheap repro. Within Kirk Markley's resplendent neo-Attic cubed set, Tamarie Cooper, a besotted Phaedra, reigned with dignity and imbued needed life into this exercise in mythic excess, but she disappeared too quickly, dying off stage, leaving a gap in the play through which you could drive the Trojan horse. The only time the play caught fire was Phaedra's cremation. As her enshrouded body burst into roaring flame ready to engulf the tiny Axiom, terror was indeed invoked as I anxiously looked over my shoulder to see if HFD was near.

GREEK PASSIVE. The ancient world is getting a cinematic makeover not seen on screen since the golden days of Cecil B. DeMille. No less than three pictures are in the works for 2003 release. If you love sword-and-sandal flicks, or you are just a sucker for men in tunics, keep an eye on these. First out of the shoot is Alexander the Great, starring skinny little Leonardo DiCaprio as the mighty Macedonian world conqueror. Alexander had only a handful of female conquests (mostly formal political marriages), but he saved the best of himself for his boyhood friend Hephaestion, who became the highest-ranking general of the great one's cavalry. The dynamic duo was a constant pair throughout the brief years of conquest, and Alexander died of grief eight months after his beloved died of typhus. One ancient Cynic philosopher was quoted thus: "Alexander was only defeated once, and that was by Hephaestion's thighs." But do you actually think the screaming pubescent fans will stand for pouty Leo lip-locking some actor? Nor do we have any hopes for Troy, Wolfgang Petersen's multi-gazillion dollar account of the Iliad, or Fight Club Goes Greek, starring Brad Pitt as Achilles and Eric Bana (Black Hawk Down) as Hector, prince of Troy. Hector killed Achilles' beloved Patrocles, which brought an enraged Achilles into the front ranks. He then slaughtered Hector and turned the tide of the 10-year war to the Greek's advantage. But do you think newlywed Jennifer Aniston is going to allow hubby Pitt to passionately embrace a man onscreen or that the Hollywood suits and accountants will condone queer love in such a mainstream film? And then there's Hannibal, with Vin Diesel (yikes!) as the Carthaginian general who surprised Rome with his army of elephants. With biceps as big as pachyderms, he's a natural for this big lug of a warrior prince. He'll be fine, as long as he doesn't have to act.

NOVEMBER'S FINEST.

Don't forget these:

Fruit Cocktail, Theatre New West, November 8-December 28

Ballet Preijocaj, Wortham Theater Center, November 8 and 9

Dyke Action Machine, DiverseWorks, November 1-December 14

Ariodante, Houston Grand Opera, November 1-17

Frame 312, Alley Theatre, through November 24

The Drawer Boy, Stages Repertory Theatre, through November 10

Sabrina Fair, Country Playhouse, November 15-December 7.