Word: davenport
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...hard to get more serious than a bus-and-truck. Coca, who has been performing for nearly 70 years, simply loves the stage. For her, the bus-and-truck is a succession of opening nights. The most fun she ever had in theater, she says, was one night in Davenport, Iowa, where we have just arrived, when she was on an earlier tour. The bus made it to the Adler theater, but the truck didn't. The cast had to improvise with furniture from the Blackhawk hotel down the street; for the sound of a telephone ringing, they used...
WRITING, COMPOSING, and directing a musical all by yourself, especially while holding a job and studying at Harvard, must be hard work. In doing exactly that with It's Really Me, Lisa Davenport '88 has clearly bitten off more than she can chew...
This premise has plenty of potential, but Davenport has made It's Really Me into little more than a musical version of St. Elmo's Fire. In fact, many of the characters from that movie seem to have found their way into the bar where much of this play...
...character try to explain themselves through Davenport's musical soliloquies, which come in two flavors: happy, upbeat, major-key ditties, and sad, brooding, minor-key ballads. All the songs have instantly forgettable melodies and lyrics, although some of the ballad melodies are mildly interesting for their complexity. The manic Cider gets the best of these, but his violent rampage during the song makes the audience laugh, destroying the song's effect...
...director, Davenport seems to have allowed her actors free rein to interpret their character as they choose and only the aforementioned actors and Mark Levine as another friend have the discipline to keep Davenport's flat characters from fading into the background. Like Davenport's direction, Jennifer Bucksbaum's pepless choreography might as well not be there at all. The occasionally good acting and sometimes clever songs cannot fill all the voids the make It's Really Me really unsatisfying...