 Reviews
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A comedic tale of two over-the-top women
By SUSAN L. RIFE, Sarasota Herlad-Tribune
Cowboy comedy spoofs 'Johnny Guitar'
By Karen Mamone, Pelican Press
Golden Apple presents lighter side of Wild West
By Eric Delp, Bradenton Herald
A comedic tale of two over-the-top women
By SUSAN L. RIFE, Sarasota Herlad-Tribune
Anyone who grew up watching Westerns at the movie houses or on TV will find plenty to enjoy in "Johnny Guitar, the Musical," an over-the-top send-up of a 1954 movie starring Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge.
That film featured a memorable on-screen catfight between Crawford, as saloon owner Vienna, and McCambridge, as Emma, the town's primary property-owner, an embittered shrew bent on running Vienna out of town on a rail.
Listening to the soundtrack of "Johnny Guitar, the Musical," doesn't do the show any kind of justice. It's the sensationally cartoonish performances of the Golden Apple's cast that turn the show into a true comedy, with every aspect of life in 19th-century New Mexico played for laughs, including the luridly striped rock formations that surround Vienna's saloon.
The songs are cheesy beyond all imagining, but also tuneful (although you're more likely to leave the theater with Marty Robbins' "El Paso" jingling around in your head, so similar is "In Old Santa Fe" in feel to that classic).
Brian Minyard directs and plays the title character with a low-key, laconic tone that's in excellent counterpoint to Melissa Minyard's razor-sharp Vienna.
Melissa Minyard dominates the show from start to finish, with a crystalline voice and the kind of body language necessary for a woman to survive in the tough landscape of the Old Southwest. The pair, married in real life, convey a pleasing chemistry in their duet, "We've Had Our Moments."
Kyle Ennis Turoff plays Vienna's archnemesis, Emma, with shrill determination and a comic bit of homoeroticism in her duet with Vienna, "Bad Blood." She gets her chance to shine vocally on "Who Do They Think They Are," as she and a posse chase a set-up Vienna into the mountains after a bank robbery.
The Golden Apple's musicians add immensely to the pleasure of the production, with John Visser at the piano, Don Sturrock and Alan Jay Corey at keyboards, Tom Suta on drums and Marc Mannino doing fine work on guitar.
Cowboy comedy spoofs 'Johnny Guitar'
By Karen Mamone, Pelican Press
Think “Blazing Saddles” meets “Duel in the Sun” and you have an idea of the laughs, songs ’n’ simmer of Golden Apple Dinner Theatre’s campy cowboy comedy “Johnny Guitar the Musical.”
Except for the winks and nods, and some singing, “Johnny Guitar” closely follows Nicholas Ray’s (“Rebel Without a Cause”) 1954 Joan Crawford movie, one of the stranger Westerns to come down the pike.
Generally considered to be a jab at the House Un-American Activities Committee, who used the fear of communism to bully members of the Hollywood community to name names, Ray’s gender-bending plot is pure horse opera, except that the good guys are good girls, who actually aren’t all that good, in the usual sense of the word.
Here, HUAC is represented by the townsfolk of a New Mexico backwater, and led by sexually -repressed banker Emma Small (Kyle Ennis Turoff).
Emma and her minions ferret out undesirables and force others to testify against them. Her nemesis, saloonkeeper Vienna (Melissa Minyard), is a woman with a past, who has settled in the town sure that it will soon be a stop on the railroad, and make her newly opened establishment a gold mine.
Vienna is no Miss Kitty. Dressed in black cowboy gear and toting a gun, her dealer, Eddie, who spins the saloon’s roulette wheel, observes “‘I’ve never seen a woman who was more like a man.”
Emmas’s no girly-girl either. She owns the bank and most of the rest of the town, but really wants the handsome Dancin’ Kid (Jeff Pierce), a silver-miner who is, of course, crazy about Vienna.
To protect herself against Emma’s dirty tricks, Vienna has summoned old boyfriend Johnny Guitar (Brian Minyard, who also directs), a gunman who now strums a guitar instead of pulling the trigger.
The feud comes to a head when Emma pins the Kid’s bank robbery on Vienna. Johnny rescues her from the end of a lynching rope and the bad blood between the two women culminates in the fatal shootout.
The music in “Johnny Guitar, the Musical” (by Martin Silvestri and Joel Higgins, with lyrics by Joel Higgins and book by Nicholas van Hoogstraten) has a Western twang that is pleasant, if not memorable. The show was honored as Off-Broadway’s Best Musical in 2004 by the Outer Critics Circle.
The lyrics include many of the more pungent interchanges from the movie. One of the songs, “A Smoke and a Good Cup of Coffee,” takes its title from Johnny’s contention that “There’s only two things in this world that a ‘real man’ needs: a cup of coffee and a good smoke.”
Meanwhile, Vienna laments she’s been “Branded a Tramp,” and Emma delivers a xenophobic anthem, “Who Do They Think They Are?”
With plenty of spoofing of old cowboy Westerns, (1950s, melodrama-style acting, and a repeated guitar chord that magically appears whenever Johnny’s name is spoken) “Johnny Guitar” is a free-wheelin,’ hokey romp with a heavy dose of good-natured fun.
As director, Brian Minyard (who was in the original 2004 off-Broadway production of “Johnny Guitar,” playing the role of the Dancin’ Kid), leaves us feeling that an overly long first half is rushed in the second.
As always, the show is well served by resident orchestra John Visser, Don Sturrock, Alan Jay Corey, Tom Suta, Marc Mannino and Tony Russo.
Golden Apple presents lighter side of Wild West
By Eric Delp, Bradenton Herald
"Johnny Guitar: the musical" is a stage adaptation of Nicholas Ray's 1954 Western film, "Johnny Guitar" (non-musical). Ray's film was a beautifully-shot and inspired parable of the McCarthy witch hunts, famous for its quirky dialogue, quasi-Freudian psychological complexity, and the proto-feminism of its female lead roles. In other words, whether you think it was good or bad, it was a serious film.
"JG: the musical," which debuted off-Broadway in 2004, shoots (get it?) for a different tone. Like the original, it's the story of a tough saloon owner named Vienna (Melissa Minyard) and her bitter rivalry with town prude, Emma (Kyle Ennis Turoff). Vienna's just sitting around, selling some liquor and whatnot, minding her own business, waiting for the train to lay tracks through her neck of the woods and make her rich. But for obscure reasons (ranging from disapproval of drink and gambling to a secret love for the town outlaw), Emma (Kyle Ennis Turoff) wants to kill her, or at least run her out of town. The title character (Brian Minyard) rolls into town just in time to reunite with his former lover, Vienna, save her from the gallows, and fix her some eggs at the hideout. And just like in any good Western, the finale is a dramatic gunfight showdown between the two leads.
I'm not sure if it's possible to turn a serious Western into a stage musical without making it kind of inherently ridiculous, but in this instance, anyway, ridiculousness reigns.
That's cool, who needs serious social commentary out of my musical theater? And director/star Brian Minyard, who played the Dancin' Kid in the original off-Broadway run, really lets loose with that kitschy, ironic humor, boy. I'm not sure whether it was his choice, or the coincidence of the choices of the individual actors, but a certain self-aware melodrama is the prevalent acting style, turning all of the dialogue into a mockery of itself. Sometimes the style gets a bit annoying, but it's mostly good fun. Turoff as Emma, in particular, makes this style an art. Her hysterical shrewishness is awesome. I can imagine her consciously deciding to play this role like half-Wicked-Witch-of-the-West, half-Ophelia-after-she-goes-crazy, in the style of Brechtian epic theater.
The Minyards are solid, and Jeff Pierce (as the Dancin' Kid), Joey Panek and Ian Sullivan in supporting roles are also good. The music is mostly forgettable, feeling a bit tacked-on, as tends to happen in a musical adapted from a non-musical genre, but Emma's fear-propaganda in "Who Do They Think They Are?" is pretty powerful. In addition, a few of the numbers feature doo-wop style background singers in serapes and stuff, which aside from being theatrically clever, make those songs pretty interesting, musically. This show is about having a good time, acting slightly ridiculous, singing a few songs, and going home. It's not Shakespeare, or even good old Nicholas Ray. It's just a campy old-West musical-comedy that doesn't take itself too seriously.
Kim Cool, Venice Gondolier
- Eric Delp, Bradenton Herald
- Kay Kipling, Sarasota Magazine.
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