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| Ruthless! |
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Killer Combination: Showbiz parody 'Ruthless!' achieves its ambition
By Tom Sime / Excerpted from Dallas Morning News 6/15/2003 ©2003 Talent is the bad seed in Ruthless! This hilarious spoof musical pays loving tribute to "talent - inherited and unstoppable - dragging generation after generation into the spotlight." ...Melvin Laird (music) and Joel Paley (book, lyrics) recycled the conventions of Broadway musicals and movie melodramas into this riotous pastiche... Director-choreographer Andi Allen and music director Adam Wright have made sure every note, every gesture, every inflection is delivered with great precision as well as with tongue in cheek. They've assembled a dream cast for this parody of The Bad Seed, Gypsy, All About Eve and just about everything else made on stage or celluloid before 1962. It's the sketch as high art, and for its effervescent duration, that's enough. Ruthless! loves trash, and it's catching. Stacia Goad-Malone is superb as Judy Denmark, a perky housewife straight out of a '50s fantasy...her daughter Tina, a tap-dancing prodigy with a killer technique, played to perfection by Lana Whittington. When Tina loses the lead in the school play to classmate Louise (Arianna Movassagh), we know Louise isn't long for this world. For Tina's already out-of-control ambition has been fanned to murderous intensity by glamorous talent agent Sylvia St. Croix, deliciously rendered by Coy Covington. Drag is Mr. Covington's specialty, and does he get a workout here, changing outfits and wigs every five minutes or so. Suzi Shankle and Bill Bullard's costumes are a gas...Jenny Thurman is grandly funny as Tina's teacher, Miss Thorn... Like most of the cast she throws herself wholeheartedly into the character to create her gemlike caricature... this Ruthless! is seamless. Satire takes center stage in 'Ruthless!' By Perry Stewart / Excerpted from Ft. Worth Star-Telegram 6/17/2003 ©2003 This show has been called the stage mother of all musicals...Now comes a new production (by the Uptown Players of Dallas) that pushes the satirical envelope with applaudable results. The smallest and liveliest member of director/choreographer Andi Allen's fine cast is Lana Whittington, who seizes the spotlight...As Tina, the bad seedling who would kill for the lead role in her school's production...Whittington is the comic spark that launches Ruthless! Mother Judy's transformation keeps it alive in Act II. Stacia Goad-Malone, handles the character's two personalities deftly, reveling in the vocal jokes in composer Marvin Laird's score...The gleeful absurdity...is embodied in Sylvia St. Croix, a talent agent traditionally played by a male actor in drag. That duty here goes to Coy Covington. His signature expression, generously employed, is a cross between a snarl and a twitch. Helping him achieve the Sylvia look are racks of marvelous (and, at times, outrageous) outfits designed by Suzi Shankle and Bill Bullard. Covington sometimes changes costumes twice in the same scene, greeted each time by applause and laughter. Covington, Whittington and Goad-Malone form a winning team...Jenny Thurman marshals vocal nuance and body language to superb effect on Teaching Third Grade. Arianna Movassagh shines in a pair of songs...Amy Stevenson endears herself to actors everywhere as an evil theater critic whose credo is I Hate Musicals. Sound designer Virgil Justice gets into the act on that number. Mary-Margaret Pyeatt has a nice comic turn late in the show as a journalist whose running gag is based on a mispronunciation of the word thespian. Summer camp: Ruthless! sharpens razor wit with excellent cast - We have a winner: From The Bad Seed to Mommie Dearest, Uptown Players' Ruthless! is a fun evening of playing Spot the References By Arnold Wayne Jones / Excerpted from The Dallas Voice 6/20/2003 ©2003 It seems like ages since I saw a curtain - an actual red velvet curtain - rise on a Dallas stage to announce the opening of a play...it certainly feels right here. This play, a riotously campy musical that throws back to an earlier era when curtains were de rigueur, would not be the same without it. The play is perfect silliness...Ruthless! is so marvelously creaky, so decadently outrageous and nostalgic, every over-the-top moment only serves the greater purpose of portraying seething villainy with wanton fun... Director Andi Allen, working with a devilishly clever script by Joel Paley, keeps the kitsch factor ratcheted high...and each of the actors portrays some variation of a character from the golden age: [Coy] Covington as Rosalind Russell in Auntie Mame; [Stacia] Goad in the long-suffering Joan Crawford-Nancy Kelly part in the first act, and the glamorous Joan in the second; Jenny Thurman as Suzanne Pleshette or Eve Arden, wisecracking her way into trouble...If the jokes often beg for a rim shot, the cast plays them perfectly. They set the tone for the outlandishness without ever mugging like merciless vaudevillians. When Tina is sent away for committing a crime...she appears in Brillo pad wig and tattered orphan clothes of Annie... The entire cast has a ball with their parts...but no one does a better job than Covington in his deliciously ripe performance. Few men get as many costumes changes as Covington gets as Sylvia ...and his final scene evokes one of the most side-splitting reactions by an audience in recent memory. But Ruthless offers everyone with a prime opportunity to shine, and they sparkle like diamonds. |