|
|
Miss Pixie: a nice holiday change at the GAM |
BY ABBY FOX
PAWTUCKET–Any theater fan like me leaves a show at the Gamm Theatre with a
smile, enjoying the afterglow of a lively Casey Seymour Kim performance,
wondering how nice it would be to see the great funny little woman in a
show of her own.
Then along comes Miss Pixie’s Cable Access Holiday Extravaganza, playing
until Dec. 23, wherein my favorite Gamm actress has the stage (almost) all
to herself. For little more than an hour, she sings, dances, jumps around,
answers the doorbell to surprise guests and tells her jokes.
This entertainment is just right for the person who’s had enough of It’s a
Wonderful Life and A Charlie Brown Christmas and needs a non-sentimental,
farcical approach to the holiday season and all the obligations and
rituals that go with it.
Kim is one of those entertainers who’s not only a good actress but —
another treat altogether — a great personality, whom you’re happy to look
at and laugh at, whether or not her humor is always original. She can
deliver any line, take on any personality, improvise with any actor, and
the variety of expressions and gestures at her disposal makes everything
about her funny and charming.
That ability, to be a pleasure to be around as well as talented, works
well in a show like Miss Pixie’s, a spin-off of the celebrity variety
shows from the 50 and 60s, which survived from the attractiveness of the
host and his or her guests, not just because of the written material.
I presume the hard-working people of the Gamm have too many serious plays
to bite into to have time for musicals – no problem; more power to them, I
guess. But, I felt fortunate to hear Kim belt out a few well-written,
sweet and silly numbers like “December Nights of Blue and White (It’s
Christmas for the Jews),” “It’s All About You,” and “Chaim the Hanukkah
Turtle.”
While some thespians would have a hard time trying to take a couple of
playful knocks at the holidays without sounding sarcastic, bitter, or
Scrooge-ey, Kim doesn’t have that problem at all.
The only regrettable aspect of the show is a lack of someone on stage to
match Kim in wits; there’s no, shall we say, a Rowan to her Martin. (Tony
Estrella, the Gamm’s artistic director — where was he?). Another (small)
bummer is that Kim is never on stage languishing flirtatiously in a bubbly
tub, filled with holiday ornaments, like the ad for the show would have
you believe. That exciting sight, by itself, would have been worth the
price of admission.
The Gamm Theatre is located at 172 Exchange St., Pawtucket. Call
723-4266. Tickets cost $25.
|
|
|
|
Endgames by Michael Dibdin |
|
Written by Book review by Tim Wholey
|
|
End Games, a product of the imagination of Michael Dibdin, is the eleventh and last book in the detective Zen series. It’s unfortunately the last because author Dibdin died following the completion of this suspense filled story. But readers can be grateful for these tales because they take us into a land that many travelers know well on the surface, but through no fault of their own fail to scratch beneath overall appearances, often favorable as in the huge amount of beautiful art on display in this country, sometimes very unfavorable as in the way the locals operate. But putting aside the good and the bad, let’s talk about what Aurelio Zen is all about. Indeed what author Michael Dibdin is or was all about. First, taking End Games as a work of fiction, an adventure, and a thriller if you will, a passing bit of enjoyable reading and we assume entertainment, the storyline takes us to southern Italy, the Calabria region, an area steeped in ancient history and ritual and chuck full of dark secrets, secrets of the kind that outsiders should avoid and shouldn’t care to dig into. But, and there is always a but, an American lawyer comes into the picture, even if only briefly because a kidnapping occurs and said attorney is soon a corpse. Thus Zen enters the scenario, once again assigned to a part of Italy he generally doesn’t visit, and begins an investigation into what happened. A simple enough tale, however considering the ten previous novels in this series, the story becomes Zen’s 11th step into the unknown, both the territory in which he must operate, the people he must work with, strangers all, and the pros and mostly cons of a decline in what was once a thriving culture, but which has now become a center of uncertainty if not downright misery. Using the character Aurelio Zen, as he has done before, in End Games author Dibdin makes appropriate but often caustic observations about Italy’s (in this case southern Italy’s) sometimes peculiar ways. This is where Michael Dibdin concentrates his best writing efforts, bringing to life a people that he, during his lifetime, came to know so well. Like different kinds of ice cream, the population he talks about springs to life in a wide variety of flavors. Without fully being aware of it, we find ourselves becoming a real part of living the daily life of the men and women we read about. Dibdin was brought up n Northern Ireland, attended Sussex University, then took a master’s degree in Edmonton, Canada. He taught at the university in Perugia, Italy for four years. First trying his hand at the novel in l978, he soon settled into a writing career producing the eleven Zen suspense novels as well as several other mystery books as well. He lived his final years in Seattle, Washington. After a brief illness, he died in 2007.
|
|
Last Updated ( Wednesday, 03 September 2008 )
|
|
