The production DVD is now available to purchase in our Etsy shop!

http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=17562964

The Foppish Dandies turned 1 year old on November 16! Nov 16, 2007 was the opening night for Bat Boy: The Musical. One year later, the Dandies are still alive (at the very least un-dead) and kicking ideas around into high gear.  Lots of interesting projects coming up this year and beyond.

Watch this trailer in High Definition (HD) on Vimeo.

40th Street Stage production is highly visual – and adventurous

By Mal Vincent
The Virginian-Pilot
© October 16, 2008

THE SPIRITS are everywhere, making us see things and do things we shouldn’t.”

Add dark, ominous music and very little lighting, and you get the idea.

These are the opening lines in the quite daring and innovative world premiere stage adaptation of the classic German horror film “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” at the 40th Street Stage in Norfolk.

Its ominous tone is more threatening than what follows (as, in fact, was the case in the original film, released in the United States in 1921 and hailed by some as the granddaddy of all horror films). Philip Odango, directing a cast of some 20 screaming and cowering souls, has somewhat faithfully adapted the original script by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer and serves up a campy, highly entertaining version that incorporates film mixed with somewhat berserk live actors.

There is an eerie musical score by two Finnish composers who use keyboards, drums and percussion in a Phillip Glass-like way that too often refuses to stay in the background. Framed by black-and-white set designs, there is an angular suggestion of off-kilter madness. The audience is surrounded by actors who refuse to stay on any given stage. The result is highly visual. And adventurous!

Perhaps it’s not altogether frightening, but this, nonetheless, is entertaining. But is it German Expressionism or just overacting? You can take your choice, but consider that it is difficult to go over the top with this material. Dramatically, it doesn’t hold together, but illusion may be enough.

Christie Whiting in the role of the rotund, threatening Dr. Caligari is something of a local, mature Cinderella story. She’s worked backstage for years – among other places as stage manager for Symphonicity, the symphony orchestra of Virginia Beach. She returns to the stage with the lead role here – effectively suggesting a ranting mad man. The cross-sex casting only adds to the bizarre mood, along with a nose that would make both Jimmy Durante and Cyrano de Berge-rac look anemic. Odango apparently has a thing about casting women in men’s roles. He also cast a female in the lead role of his vampire musical, “Bat Boy.”

One female audience member reported that she got the biggest fright of all when she ran into this version of Dr. Caligari in the ladies’ room before the show.

Caligari has an act in which he trots around his version of the sleeping dead, the somnambulist Cesare, who, upon the commands of the doctor, rises from the titular cabinet to answer questions from the audience. When Alan, a particularly foppish young man (played with flair by Logan Bennett), inquires how long he will live, he gets the bad news: “Until dawn tomorrow.” Be assured, Alan’s dead body is imminent.

A well-matched film by Ben Fuglaar accompanies many of the scenes and, at least in the performance I attended, was perfectly aligned with the onstage dialogue and action. I am told not all performances worked so well. It is an audaciously ambitious notion to try such a mixed-media effort with live actors conversing with screen characters. The best intermixing is a murder that is committed by a screen image upon a live, but quickly expiring, onstage actor. Timing is all-important.

German Expressionism, of which this film was a prime example, calls for bold strokes and, consequently, one can excuse the snarling and contortions that are sometimes more overwrought than stylistic.

The bad doctor shows up to explain the obvious – that there are “paranoid delusions” and “maniacal hallucinations” evident. And the screams! Anna Sosa as Jane and Lisa E. Munson as Brunhilde have sets of pipes that could rival Metropolitan Opera standards. It would be surprising if they couldn’t be heard across the street in Fellini’s restaurant. How long before the cops show up?

Sosa also displays quite a head of hair, which covers her entire face for certain stalking scenes.

The arrival of Caligari, and subsequent murders, occur in the midst of a love triangle among Jane, Alan and Francis, the narrator.

When Alan is murdered, the authorities think it might have been Francis. In the category of staccato delivery and strange British accents, Alec Gillam, as Francis, fares least well, mainly because his role has more lines.

Ashley Christopher Leach is properly thin, stark and white-faced as Cesare, a part originally played by Conrad Veidt (the Nazi in “Casablanca”). (And is there any doubt that Johnny Depp’s Edward Scissorhands was modeled after this character?)

In the supporting cast, Teddy Powers is particularly toothy and charismatic as a suspected killer.

Highest praise of all should go to the hair and makeup design of Grace Swiney for quite a group of unique faces.

The finale, setting everything up as possibly a dream, was something of a cop-out back in 1921 – however, the original film is often mentioned as one of the first to suggest that realism was not necessary in films.

Odango and the producing Foppish Dandies company obviously have proper respect for the original, but they allow us to have fun with it in modern terms.

It’s a Halloween hoot that gives you something to do while you’re waiting around for a movie remake to someday be made by the likes of Tim Burton, David Lynch or Guillermo del Toro.

In the meantime, the local stage is the only place that has this.

Something new from something old.

Mal Vincent, (757) 446-2347, mal.vincent@pilotonline.com

Port Folio Weekly
October 14, 2008
Montague Gammon III

An eerie violin and spectral violinist introduce an especially interesting, and perhaps important, piece of local theater.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, adapted by Philip Odango from the classic 1919 film of the same name, is a mixed media phantasmagoria melding components as disparate as a freak show and serial killings with the nature of reality itself.

It possesses a rare and compelling theatricality, exploring performing space and visual and aural and emotional avenues of expression, in ways that may not break totally new ground, but which are sufficiently uncommon to serve as novel. Caligari also manages to be genuinely entertaining, no small feat for youthfully generated avant garde theatre.

The Caligari production team, most notably lighting, sound and video designer Ben Fuglaar and Odango, as director and scenic designer, have brought to fruition a remarkably coherent vision deserving serious attention and discussion.

Costumer Debi McGill, hair and makeup designer Grace Swiney, mask designers Christie Whiting and Anna Sosa, propsperson and production manager Donna Dickerson and film lighting designer Phil Duffy, along with composers Matti Paalanen and Teemu Vehkala, all deserve praise for their important contributions.

The show’s coherence makes overlooking its low budget, painted plywood superficialities easy. Some of the acting has something like that same quality, the actor showing through the character. Again, that’s forgivable in this context. Yet Ashley Christopher Leach, as the fortune telling sleep-walking Cesare, gives a remarkably compelling, almost wordless performance – Don’t sit front and center if you are easily unnerved! Anna Sosa is consistently sharp as the victimized romantic lead Jane.

Caligari is exactly the sort of production for which small, risk taking theatres such as 40th Street Stage exist. When the gamble works, as it certainly does here, it’s also the sort of show that local audiences need to see.

Good evening and welcome to the new home of The Foppish Dandies & Co., an independent theatre company in Southeastern Virginia. Celebrating it’s one year anniversary with a critically-acclaimed stage adaptation of the German expressionist 1920 film ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’, the Dandies is managed by producing technical director Donna Dickerson and artistic director Philip Odango. The Dandies aspire to assimilate creatives who are inspired to collaborate and experiment on projects that focus on and serve the Big ‘A’ Art. We cultivate talented and visionary techs and actors who really want to become part of an experience bigger than themselves. A person who sees a Dandy production will galvanize their peers to become enthralled in that experience.