Washingtonpost news updates: ‘Two Gentlemen of Verona’: Harman Hall musical, if not trippy, is worth the trip

Friday, March 2, 2012

‘Two Gentlemen of Verona’: Harman Hall musical, if not trippy, is worth the trip

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‘Two Gentlemen of Verona’: Harman Hall musical, if not trippy, is worth the trip

Text SizePrintE-mailReprints By Nelson Pressley,

It’s fair to think of the 1971 Tony-winning musical “Two Gentlemen of Verona” as “Hair II”: same composer (Galt MacDermot), same gestalt (antiwar, pro-sex, whirling hippies, whoo!).

Glow sticks were being handed out at the door over the weekend for the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s giggly concert version of the show, although that seems about as close to trippy as director Amanda Dehnert wanted to get. The performance, which closed Sunday, was not especially Day-Glo vibrant or free-love lusty — and from “Night Letter” to “Hot Lover,” the quick-hitting rock tunes percolated with pheromones. But it was a flip, frisky evening and often wonderfully sung.

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This “Two Gents” at Sidney Harman Hall was the second of a pair of concert stagings offered by the STC this season, one of the events marking Michael Kahn’s 25th year as artistic director. (The first concert was “The Boys From Syracuse” in November.) The musical neatly complemented the troupe’s intense staging of Shakespeare’s knotty early comedy of the same title, playing at the Lansburgh Theatre. Neither the play nor the musical, both dealing with pals angling for the same dame, get produced much. Showcasing them together is a bit of an event.

The concert can’t really make an airtight case for “Two Gents,” which is routinely denigrated as a fluke Tony winner over Stephen Sondheim’s “Follies.” But the nearly three dozen lighthearted rock-funk-gospel-blues numbers are still a lot of fun as they whiz by, and Thursday’s packed invited dress performance was filled with standout musical and comic turns.

The linchpin was Terence Archie: As Valentine, the nobler of the suitors, he was a one-man throwback to the early 1970s, combining James Brown footwork with big, throaty Tom Jones vocals. Archie’s a gas, and his duets with the rock-solid Eleasha Gamble (as love object Silvia), powered by deepening groove from the electric band, grew from sultry to rousing.

It got bigger and sillier. Ken Page had a loopy gospel turn as Silvia’s father, the Duke. Robin De Jesus got laughs with simple declarative sentences as the clown-servant Speed. Tom Deckman was wifty as Cupid and Thurio (Silvia’s fiance), while Javier Munoz and Arielle Jacobs — like De Jesus, veterans of Broadway’s “In the Heights” — created a bit of heat around the drama of the would-be lovers Proteus and Julia.

The youthful-looking chorus leapt at each chance to sing and dance, and the band played with sass, which means you’d love for the company to keeping finding reasons to do these concerts. If this “Two Gents” was not quite the full early ’70s social meltdown bliss-out experience, it was still more than enough to keep you snapping your fingers on the way home.

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