Eugene weekly., June 28, 2012, Page 25, Image 25

theater
Actors Cabaret Farts
in Your General Direction
Some 600 years ago, at the battle of Agincourt,
British forces clashed with the French in a fi eld of mud
— a carnage of superiorly armored French nobility and
their horses sliding to collective death in the soggy soil.
Replace the soldiers with a gaggle of comedians, singers
and dancing girls, and you have the riotously uncon-
trolled, hysterically slippery Spamalot.
Spamalot, playing through July 7 at Actors Cabaret
of Eugene (ACE), is billed as “a new musical lovingly
ripped off from the motion picture Monty Python & the
Holy Grail.” With Python alum Eric Idle handling the
book, the script is a nearly verbatim take on the fi lm,
with song and dance numbers tucked in at the most
iconic moments.
King Arthur (a thoughtful Ken McClintock) and the
rest of his “silly English Cunigits” take off on a quest
for Christ’s lost cup, meeting up along the way with
such less-than-perilous adventures as a battle with the
Black Knight, wise words from Tim the Enchanter, and a
shrubbery-loving tête-à-tête with Knights Who Say Ni.
ACE has a delicate tightrope to walk, balancing be-
tween delivering on our collective Monty Python nostal-
gia and creating something completely different. Most
of the cast delivers, though a few actors overreach in
their ambitions to be Pythonesque. Particularly tricky
is the role of the French taunter, whose lines (see head-
line) are as recognizable — and I’ll argue as great, in
their genre — as Hamlet’s ‘to be or not to be.’ Cameron
Walker fl at-out kills it as the feisty Frenchman.
Diva-rifi c Megan Hammon delivers as the Lady of
The Lake; Trevor Eichhorn shines as a not-so-brave
Sir Robin. And, as the historian, Bill Furtick offers a
sense of order to this chaotic piece of theater. The
killer bunny is genius.
Spamalot runs June 22 through July 28 at Actors
Cabaret of Eugene; actorscabaret.org or 683-4368.
— Anna Grace
WWW.EUGENEWEEKLY.COM
Shattered Glass
Among the many tart, tangy pleasures of The Glass Menagerie at Cottage Theatre, you can count the thrill of love at
fi rst sight — I mean the opening glimpse of director Alan Beck’s set design. Awash in a mauve glow hinting at sepia-tones
and rust, the stage becomes a diorama (or vivisection) of Tennessee Williams’ fi ctional St. Louis fl at: The apartment, and
all that goes on inside, is viewed through the spiny exoskeleton of the tenement’s beams and girders.
“I was hooked on the idea of an apartment morphing into a prison of the soul,” says Beck, whose design —a
gorgeous monstrosity of domestic entrapment and cosmopolitan creep — suggests the tension between intimacy and
claustrophobia that drives so much of Williams’ work.
This scenic ingenuity alone is enough to elevate such an iconic American classic. But Beck has also gathered
a talented cast to fl esh out Williams’ bittersweet meditation on the persistence of memory and the shattering of
desperately held illusions. Kory Weimer brings urbane melancholy to Tom Wingfi eld, the play’s narrator; as Amanda,
Tom’s suffocating mother, Gloria Lagalo seethes with not-so-quiet desperation; Nicole Trobaugh emanates angelic
heartbreak as Tom’s sister Laura; and Bob Buechler is strong as Jim, the gentleman caller.
These elements, along with some fi ne fl ourishes by Beck — snippets of old black-and-white movies, evocative original music
by the director’s brother, Jim Beck — work to make this version of The Glass Menagerie at once reverent, period-precise and
idiosyncratically modern, a faithful retelling that’s also haunted by the playwright’s ghost and tinted by the director’s passion.
“Menagerie has always moved me,” Beck says. “If you’ve ever wrestled with the difference between what you dream and
what you must do, Menagerie makes you re-face that difference. I think those are universal themes that will never die.”
The Glass Menagerie plays through July 1 at Cottage Theatre; cottagetheatre.org or 942-2934. — Rick Levin
EUGENE WEEKLY JUNE 28, 2012
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