Like Dial "M" for Murder, playwright Frederick Knott's other classic thriller, Wait Until Dark works only if it spins its audience into a spine-tingling case of the frights. RTC's version, directed by Regan Adair, has potential--actor Halim Jabbour makes a creepy-but-handsome villain in the Stanley Tucci mode--but the scare tactics didn't gel on opening night. Confused light cues spoiled some of the suspense, then an onstage door got stuck and wouldn't open at a crucial point in the action. When the knob finally unjammed and the character stepped in, everyone laughed and applauded the unintentionally comic goof. It didn't help that throughout that first performance, lead actress Elizabeth VanWinkle kept shotgunning her lines and forgetting that her character is supposed to be blind. Problems such as these keep an audience planted firmly against the back of their seats, instead of on the edge of them.
Wait Until Dark matches a blind girl just learning to cope with her disability against three veteran criminals who are unaware, at first, that she can't see. Suzy Hendrix (VanWinkle) is a Greenwich Village housewife blind as the result of a recent accident. Husband Sam (Zack Menendez), a photographer, treats her handicap as a mild inconvenience (mostly for him) and leaves her alone for long stretches in their basement apartment while he flies off to Canada on assignment or works in a studio blocks away. Suzy's part-time helper is an unreliable and sneaky 14-year-old neighbor, Gloria (Meredith Lindsey).
Somehow, through Sam's travels, Suzy comes to possess a doll that contains a hefty cache of heroin. Three drug traffickers--Harry Roat Jr. (Jabbour), Mike Talman (Bill Sebastian) and "Sergeant" Carlino (C. Todd Young)--track the drugs to the Hendrix apartment. But instead of just doing a quick and logical smash-and-grab to snatch the stash from the nearly helpless Suzy, the thugs work up a bizarre con game. Talman pretends to be a longtime friend of Sam's, dropping by for a visit on a pass through New York City. His mild manner and soothing voice help him gain Suzy's trust. Roat, as father and son characters, convinces Suzy that her absent husband has had an affair with a woman whose corpse has turned up near the apartment. Carlino pretends to be a police sergeant investigating the case and watching the place for Sam's return.
The point of the elaborate scheme is to turn Suzy into a blithering paranoid, willing to hand over the doll without reporting anything to the cops. But instead of withering under pressure, Suzy is empowered by it. When she finally, finally, figures out that she's been duped by the no-goods, she uses her blindness as an advantage, leaving her would-be attackers literally in the dark. The climax is a life-or-death struggle that takes place in silhouette against the pale, cold light of an open refrigerator door.
When they're not stumbling over their dialogue or the furniture, the RTC cast isn't bad. Flicking a switchblade nicknamed "Geraldine," Jabbour's Harry Roat Jr. is believably slick and sinister. With or without a hairpiece (he goes both ways in this show), Jabbour is a hottie, all manly musk with a top note of danger. He's the only actor in the ensemble who seemed fully rehearsed and at ease with lines and blocking on opening night.
The henchmen, played by Sebastian and Freeman, would be scarier without all the twitching and pacing. And how strange that Freeman's face and arms look like they've been smeared with olive oil. Young Meredith Lindsey is appropriately gawky as Gloria, but she, too, rushes lines and looks nervous about where to jump next on the bi-level set.
Maybe a few performances into the six-week run of Wait Until Dark, VanWinkle will settle into the role of Suzy and get better at playing sightless. When one of the con men tosses plates and laundry onto the floor, Suzy shouldn't delicately step over and around them. She's blind, remember?
And because of an overheard argument between confused theatergoers at RTC, here's the background trivia on Wait Until Dark. It was a Broadway hit in the mid-'60s starring Lee Remick as Suzy and Robert Duvall as Harry Roat Jr. Audrey Hepburn earned an Oscar nomination as Suzy in the 1967 film opposite Alan Arkin (not James Coburn, as one man insisted to his wife...that was Charade). The play was revived to chilly reviews on Broadway in 1998 starring Marisa Tomei and Quentin Tarantino.
Now onto a musical about Broadway that will never be a hit Broadway musical. Yankee Doodle Dandy!, playing a few more performances at the Music Hall at Fair Park, is a heartwarming, toe-tapping tribute to that grand old man of American musical theater, George M. Cohan. Then there's Act 2.
The first 90 minutes of Dandy! really are. The story of Cohan's rise from turn-of-the-century vaudeville act to the top of a Broadway marquee is told in flashback, the older Cohan played by Richard Sanders (the nebbish newsman from TV's WKRP in Cincinnati), the younger by Sean Martin Hingston.
All the old songs get sung in this production, which was written and directed by David Armstrong for Seattle's 5th Avenue Theatre, where this touring company originated. There's "Give My Regards to Broadway," "Harrigan," "You're a Grand Old Flag," "Over There" and the title tune. The show over-credits the Irish-American Cohan with inventing the Broadway musical as we know it. Scenes from several of his shows are excerpted, providing evidence of why Cohan's music survives but the shows they came from haven't.
Hingston is a triple-threat performer as Cohan. He's a spiffy comedian, and his buoyant dancing mimics some of the stiff-kneed moves Jimmy Cagney gave to Cohan in the 1942 bio-flick Yankee Doodle Dandy (no exclamation point needed for that one). Hingston also shows off a Gene Kelly gymnastic quality in his tapping. Big singing voice, too.
There's just too much of everything in this show. The almost nonstop tap dancing, flag-waving and scenery-changing in Yankee Doodle Dandy! become red, white and boring in the plot-heavy second act. In his later years, it turns out, Cohan was a bitter old coot who tried to stop Broadway actors from forming a union by hiring scabs for all his shows.
The finale of Yankee Doodle is a ding-dong doozy, so profoundly overblown and ill-conceived it's painful to watch. As old Cohan (Sanders) fake-walks one last time down Broadway (just like Chris Guest and Parker Posey faux-strolling in Waiting for Guffman), costumed dancers from Cats, Chorus Line, Cabaret, Chicago and modern musicals that start with other letters of the alphabet strut and prance around him like a Bob Fosse nightmare. A tribute from Broadway's "children" to a musical pioneer? Who knows and who cares? By this point in a very long night, you're ready to stick a feather in this crap and call it macaroni.
