Word: reiffel
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Playwright-lyricist-composer-actor-director David Reiffel '79 displays a prodigious talent in the first three of these roles, the ability to step in quite competently in an emergency in the fourth, and an inability to step out in the last. A director with more detachment might have added the perspective and staging skills necessary to pull together a strikingly uneven cast into a production more consistent than this. As it is, strong, tight scenes are followed by ones where clever lyrics and even plot are lost to often-weak voices and to a very competent but overly vigorous orchestra...
...matter casts. Written by Marc Blitzstein in the depths of the depression. Cradle paints the struggles of infant unionism through a severe but jazzy stylization. The single piano hammers in the background as the residents of "Steeltown, U.S.A." battle the manipulations of the inexorable, cigar-chomping "Mister Mister" (David Reiffel). Mister Mister owns the factories and the town newspaper and heads the union-busting Liberty Committee, his wife bribes the preacher to fan war hysteria so steel prices will stay high, while his henchman track down dirt on the heroic labor-organizers who are trying to bring about a social...
...audience does thrill to it. Rhetoric though they be, Miller's fiery prophecies of revolution, Reiffel's well-padded complacency and the workers' vignettes of woe create a momentum that overcomes the pragmatic 1980s assumption that "nothing is ever that simple." Director Josh Milton's fine sense of timing and placement melds the difficult mancuvers of lockstep group motion and robot-like dance rhythms to reinforce a visceral feeling of brewing social pressure, of the inevitable coming explosion...
Into this quiet disarray bursts Randall (Jake Lamar), a schizophrenic, self-proclaimed "young gentleman of color" (this is set in 1961); an impossibly jive, cool dude who proceeds to play a tense game of thrust and parry with Mr. Glas, the store-owner, (David Reiffel). As the two are gradually getting a feel for one another, in bursts a young Jewish girl (everyone seems to burst into Slow Dance) on her way to have an abortion and about to faint...
...OTHER ACTORS, though facing lesser challenges, capture almost as high a pitch of intensity. The vaguely Old World accent of Mr. Glas, at first simply a deadpan foil for Randall's wit, soon begins to play vigorously against him with ironic understatement. Reiffel plays the role with all the control that it demands, sharing in the sense of rapid-fire, back-and-forth timing that make Glas's exchanges with Randall--whether dramatic or humorous--come off so well. The control holds up when it is most needed, at the play's conclusion, when Glas reveals much about his past...