Mayfield stages lock-down lock-solid hit with socially distanced rock musical
After the success of its modest but adroit production of Shaun Smyth’s one-man show Playing With Fire, the Mayfield Dinner Theatre has decided to go into full lockdown-busting mode.
They are still strictly adhering to the AHS rules and have reconfigured the theatre with attendant restrictions and modifications. Social distancing is emphasized with a minimum distance of two meters between the tables. Masked attendants show you to your seat which is backed by clear, tempered glass. Gone is the signature buffet, replaced with an augmented fixed menu.
Their second post-pandemic production is a return to full season mode with Keep Calm & Rock On, another in their hugely successful pop music series. It plays until Jan. 17.
The Mayfield for its annual Christmas show had planned to do Rock of Ages, a Broadway smash that featured the hard rock years in pop music. Keep Calm & Rock On seems designed for those who missed that show with all its head-bangers, hair-rockers, metal-heads and bands that featured aggressive vocals, distorted electric guitars, bass guitars, drums and keyboards. Did I mention they were also loud?
In this program, Artistic Director Van Wilmott interestingly outlines some of the production problems faced in bringing such a complex show to the stage. Rock songs call for stentorian volumes from the singers, which made rehearsing in masks a great challenge. Director Kate Ryan, set designer Ivan Siemens and the Mayfield production team had to devise a set that allowed the performers to sing, dance and interrelate within the Covid restrictions. They came up with a two-level expansive set that has the performers seamlessly dashing into enclosed Plexiglas booths – called “boxes of rock.” The mind-trick here is that the glass quickly becomes invisible. The five person cast, undoubtedly the most hard-working troupe in show business, energetically run up and down stairs and from bubble to bubble and dash out on stage for choreographer Christine Bandelow’s ingenious dances. In the words of the script, the resultant set “looks a little like a ’60s afterschool TV special.” Somehow it all works.
The script by resident muse Will Marks (and Poppy Topalnitsky) is clever, funny and one of the best ever penned for a local Mayfield production. It concerns a five-piece rock band that tore itself apart at the height of the hard rock phrase. They are brought back by some cosmic force to participate in a contest. They must play together to make, points and every once in a while they are given a task. Such as, “You must go back and clean up every room you trashed and look after every baby you fathered on the road.”
Rock On features much of the same stock company that has shown themselves preternaturally able to reinvent themselves into reasonable facsimiles of the pop stars we know so well. Since they are so well chosen by Wilmott (and so evenly talented) it’s best just to list them: Jahlen Barnes, Pamela Gordon, Kieran Martin Murphy, Erica Peck, Brad Weibe. Some stand-out moments including two numbers from Pamela Gordon – Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ I Put a Spell On You, and a memorable transformation of Kris Kristofferson’s Me & Bobby McGee in a driving rock arrangement. Murphy and Peck reconstruct the Why Don’t We Do It in the Road from rutting invitation to rock ballad. Peck takes out ownership of Joan Jett’s I Hate Myself For Loving You and Barnes shines in Wild Cherry’s platinum hit Play That Funky Music. Other songs include Because You’re Mine and She Came in Through the Bathroom Window.
Once again the driving small-but-mighty Mayfield house band is able to project sounds that range from symphonic to hard rock. It includes Steve Hoy on drums, Paul Lamoureux on reeds and keys, Jennifer McMillan on keyboards and vocals, Derek Stremel on bass and Harley Symington (yoemanly summoning memories of Stevie Ray Vaughan, Richie Faulkner and James Hetfield) on guitar and vocals.
Masterful director Ryan keeps up a breathless pace, and with the considerable support of Matt Schuurman’s well chosen and fluid video design, the whole production is wrapped up with an entertaining Christmas bow.
I must admit that I dozed through much of the historical hard rock era – (certainly not this lively production). It’s not really my kind of music. Watching all the white hairs in the audience who support the Mayfield – I wondered if they, like myself, were hearing much of the music for the first time.
Said one patron, “The songs all sound the same to me.”
Photos by Ryan Parker
