The Best of What We Saw in 2024: Triangle Region Theatre and Dance

TRIANGLE REGION, NC – As it turned out, the region’s theater and dance communities couldn’t sustain the initial feverish output they achieved after finally being allowed to re-enter theaters and other public venues when the COVID-19 pandemic began to wane in 2023. 

But if there were fewer shows in 2024, it still unfolded as the year of strong ensembles, as companies across the region repeatedly doubled down on productions whose smaller number of cast members – including three remarkable one-person shows – were clearly coming off of some very deep benches when it came to talent.  

BEST PRODUCTIONS

All shows listed in chronological order.

Fat Ham, PlayMakers Repertory Company

The strongest ensemble of any regional production this year grounded North Carolina native James Ijames’s Pulitzer prize-winning reset of Shakespeare’s Hamlet among barbecue royalty in a small town in Eastern North Carolina. In an achingly authentic performance, actor Heinley Gaspard as Juicy, the Hamlet character, ultimately led a constellation of younger, disaffected queer cousins (vividly portrayed by Mengwe Wapimewah, Nate John Mark and Jamar Jones) to reject the narratives of self-denial, domestic violence and retribution that often seem pre-ordained for Black families in our culture. Sabrina Guillaume-Bradshaw’s costumes popped as director Jade King Carroll evoked memorable work from the artists above and Rasool Jahan, Kathryn Hunter Williams and Samuel Ray Gates as untrustworthy family matriarchs and patriarchs – even if Ijames’ shark-jumping final scene was left unsolved.

Skeleton Crew, Justice Theater Project

Kalimah Williams brought bedrock believability to Faye, the gritty, aging lesbian union steward in the final work of Dominique Morisseau’s three-play “Detroit Project.” As the American auto industry’s imploding in 2008, Faye is forced to play a real-life version of “Lifeboat” with conflicted plant manager Reggie (Moses T. Alexander Greene) to keep as many people employed as she can when the last Detroit stamping plant is threatened with closure. Actors Malcolm Green and Camryn Sherer probed the economic and social tensions of deeply dimensional characters Dez and Shanita in this ensemble piece, under Dr. Nadia Bodie-Smith’s insightful direction.

Rhapsody in Blue, Carolina Ballet

In artistic director Zalman Raffael’s second, much more satisfying take on Gershwin’s Jazz Age masterpiece (a decade after his initial 2013 assay for Carolina Ballet), the choreographer plunged principal dancers Mia Domini, Madeline Rogers and Kiefer Curtis, and a 14-person corps featuring Rachel Robinson and Bilal Shakur Smith, deeper into the predominant patterns that shaped much of the culture – and the architecture, furnishings and lives – of metropolitan city dwellers during the 1920s. 

There’s no coincidence to the degree that Domini, Rogers and Robinson dominated this work. After the 19th Amendment passed, the economic prosperity, increased mobility and rapid social changes including the rise of flapper culture meant that a single woman in her 20s could define her life on her own terms during the Roaring ‘20s in New York to a degree that her predecessors never could.

As Raffael’s choreography and Shomaree Potter’s costumes overtly referenced the sleek lines and sharp, angular patterns of Art Deco, the women not only reveled in the opulence and exuberance that surrounded them. They also observed and participated in ecstatic, romantic – and cautionary – relationships that played out among supporting dancers, before Domini led the troupe in an exhilarating, triumphant final sequence. 

could be worse, real.live.people

Three years is a long time to ponder the ways in which your art form may have been undermining you as a woman in some ways, all along: a long time to wonder if that art form is still actually capable of supporting and nourishing you at all. 

In that time, you can wonder what you’re going to say and do about all that, when you finally get to perform again. 

If you finally get to perform again. If your body will still be capable of doing it when the world finally gets to again.

Choreographer Anna Barker had plenty to think about during the first years of the pandemic, and much of it was in evidence during could be worse, her company’s first live performance in six years’ time at Walltown Children’s Theatre. 

She and artistic partner Leah Wilks roasted to a crisp a number of conventions in ballet, popular and modern dance – taking out a corps de ballet of childrens’ Bozo punching bags in the process. Then the pair made sure we knew the literal price they paid and were paid for it all, as an AI app’s toneless voice listed a litany of temporary gigs, commodities, expenses and payments. 

These came before a final sequence in which Wilks’ character had to acknowledge and accommodate a body no longer capable of a certain extension. 

The prospect of a body approaching the end of its performing abilities in dance triggers a reckoning: a looking forward and a looking back. Was it worth it? Is it worth it now? Will it have been worth it, in the end? 

Barker and Wilks left us with this challenge: If the answer to any of these questions is “not entirely,” what can they (and we, as a community of practice) do at this point to change it? 

Art, RedBird Theater

When actor Jock Brocki played Marc as a talk radio host with an axe to grind about the culture wars, we knew director Jeri Lynn Schulke had perfectly placed Yasmina Reza’s 30-year-old comedy of (mostly bad) manners in the very present moment. The takeaway? When a culture’s this politically polarized, all friendships become a lot more brittle. Actors David Berberian and Derrick Ivey (who also designed the nimble set) completed the intimate, inspired ensemble, in a revelatory re-reading of a script we only thought we knew already. Quite an achievement. 

Grand Horizons, Honest Pint Theatre

In the first of two long overdue starring vehicles this year, actor Lenore Field’s crisp septuagenarian matriarch unceremoniously pulled the plug on a 50-year-old marriage in a late bid for autonomy and agency. In Bess Wohl’s dramatic family comedy from 2020, Paul Newell’s career-best work as her stick-in-the-mud hubby and Kevin Varner and Brook North’s takes on her bewildered, grown-up boys made it abundantly clear why mama’s been needing to leave – well, all of them. Dorothy Recasner Brown, Lormarev Jones and Thomas Porter filled out a strong ensemble under Susannah Hough’s direction.  

Jane Eyre, Theatre Raleigh

After working on it for most of the last decade, composer Paul Gordon and playwright John Caird used an optimal spring production at Theatre Raleigh to finalize (and stream to a worldwide audience) the chamber version of their hit Broadway musical adaptation from 2000. Under Megan McGinnis and Andy Collopy’s brisk, sure-footed stage and musical direction, a compliment of 11 actors with Julie Benko and Matt Bogart as the leads propelled this sweeping romance across Caird and Gordon’s panoramic adaptation. Superb production values included Elizabeth Newton’s fluid yet focused, broad-ranging sets under Jeremy Diamond’s atmospheric lights, Mark Sorensen’s period costumery and Eric Alexander Collins’ superb sound design. The year of the ensemble continued to unfold with notable supporting character work from the up-and-coming Ella Frederickson as Helen Burns, Chanda Branch, Stacia Fernandez, Rob Hancock, Elliot Lane, Anne Scaramuzzo, Tedd Szeto, Soraiah Williams, and child actor Ada Manie as young Jane.

A House (after Ibsen’s Ghosts), Burning Coal Theatre

The task? Take Henrik Ibsen’s brooding meditation on the disasters that arise among five people clinging to a hypocritical moral code in a coastal Norwegian village. 

Then adapt it for a cast of one.

Given the hairpin turns in the uncomfortably intimate exchanges between Ibsen’s characters, it should have been nearly impossible to achieve. Yet Burning Coal artistic director Jerome Davis and actor Lucius Robinson, co-founder and creative mainstay of the innovative Delta Boys (who kept astounding regional audiences during the 2010s), surpassed these challenges in adaptation, direction and acting with élan and expert technique. Davis’s fusty set design and Juliana Babcock’s pallid lighting perfectly conveyed the stultifying social order of the time, while Beth Gargan’s nimble costume design abetted the quick changes the show demanded.   

enVISION: The Next Chapter, ShaLeigh Dance Works, American Dance Festival

The second installment in choreographer ShaLeigh Comerford’s series of collaborative dance works designed to share the embodied realities of people living with sense impairments attempted to add the experiences of deaf people to last year’s experiential bridgework between the lives of the blind and sighted communities.

In some senses the addition proved a bridge too far, when the primacy of sound – in spoken words narrating a troubled relationship, audio descriptions, and Omar Ruiz-Lopez’s piercing violin over Eric Hirsh’s evocative, ambient soundscape – seemed at points to all but eclipse experimental strategies to convey the lives of the deaf and hard of hearing. 

Still, the impact of literally stepping into the world of the differently-abled – with sighted audience members blindfolded, or hearing guests outfitted with (imperfect) earplugs – and letting oneself be guided through a sensory tour that deconstructs the senses, remains a profound experience, one that can reorient our relationship with our bodies, our senses, our fellow humans and our world.

It’s likely a fork in the road is coming up: future installments may well have to focus on deafness alone, or other senses in singular subtractions. It’s equally clear though that Comerford’s work needs to continue. 

A Kid Like Jake, Vixen Theatre

In another welcome return, Michelle Murray Wells, who founded the influential independent Raleigh company Sonorous Road in the 20-teens, resumed public practice in a new company whose useful inaugural production found something a lot more real – latent homophobic bigotry, to be specific – when it scratched beneath the liberal veneer of a “nice” urban professional couple. 

As an early childhood education specialist (played with trademark integrity by Benji Jones) began pointing out, gently then more firmly, that her four-year-old son might be queer, Alex, the title character’s mom (played with depth by company co-founder Lorelei Lemon), dove deeper into denial and other neuroses before an explosive second-act showdown left no doubt about the issues before us – or the caliber of work from these actors and this director. A solid showing from Seth Blum as her codependent husband Greg and rising actor Nunna Noe completed yet another strong ensemble piece.

Silent Sky, Center Theater

Less than a year after Jenny Latimer’s notable children’s theater initiative moved into the ArtsCenter’s former headquarters in downtown Carrboro, the group was ready to assert its bona fides among the best of the region’s independent adult theater companies as well.

Excellent design and production values across the board, Tracy Bersley’s strong direction and notable acting checked all the boxes with Lauren Gunderson’s biographical drama about the life of pioneer astronomer Henrietta Leavitt.

In his second fantastic full-room theatrical makeover of the year (following his work for Raleigh Little Theatre’s Trouble in Mind), accomplished set designer Derrick Ivey transformed the main theater space (which had always been architecturally dysfunctional) into an intimate, elegant, in-the-round black box. He was more than ably abetted by veteran designer Jenni Mann Becker’s lovely, celestial lights and Alex Thompson’s sensitive sound design, which augmented composer Gil Talmi’s ambient score. 

The old-school scientific equipment and period furniture that prop designer Eric Jacobs created fit hand-in-glove with Chandler Vance’s costumes to form with all the rest a seamless world, one century ago, populated by a quintet of pensive souls. 

Latimer impressed in the lead role, as did Kathryn Brown as Henrietta’s sister, Margaret. Staci Sabarsky easily reprised her robust work from the show’s regional premiere two years ago at Burning Coal. Erin Kent’s well-starched take was a perfect fit for manager and suffragette Annie Jump Cannon, while Kevin Hunter Kesling found all the awkward notes in astronomer and potential suitor Peter Shaw. 

Bull Durham, Theatre Raleigh

As with the professional retooling (and international broadcast) of Jane Eyre, above, Theatre Raleigh again cast a calculated eye well beyond the Triangle’s – or the state’s – community of practice, in a developmental production of the Broadway-hopeful musical Bull Durham. Ten years after screenwriter Ron Shelton’s first tryouts in Atlanta, the current iteration was leaner, stronger, with better work from leads Carmen Cusack as Annie Savoy and Hamilton standout Nik Walker as Crash Davis. Savvy composer Susan Werner’s soundtrack smoothly shifted gears between roots, rock and vintage r&b, from sanctified gospel rave-ups, bad-to-the-bone blues and second-line funk from New Orleans to the celebratory 11 o’clock number, “Every Woman Deserves to Wear White.”

But is it finally ready for Broadway? Expect to find out in the coming year. 

 

 

Native, EbZb Productions, Reclaiming Our Time

Noted actors J. Mardrice Henderson and David zum Brunnen have now gone to the mat – twice – on the friendship-ending split between novelist Richard Wright and playwright Paul Green. In 2023, the pair played out the ultimately irreconcilable differences between the authors in EbZb Productions’ award-winning independent film, The Problem of the Hero. Before and after that, EbZb has presented the actors in touring productions of Native, the live stage version of the story, written by regional playwright Ian Finley.

The gloves came off early in September’s revival of the show at North Raleigh Arts and Creative Theatre. In the play, it’s two weeks before Orson Welles opens the Broadway version of Wright’s Native Son, and Green has arrived in New York to find that the ending he wrote for the stage adaptation has been changed.

After he blames producer John Houseman for the rewrite, Wright tells Green that he wrote the changes himself. 

What follows is a sharp-toothed, closely argued debate on politics, free will and racial justice. In it, Wright is ultimately forced to serve notice that Green’s interests in a spiritual, eleventh-hour redemption for Native Son’s protagonist Bigger Thomas cannot be reconciled with the realities of the world Wright came from and still lives in – a world that Green has never known, and therefore cannot write about with authenticity. 

As the argument intensifies between the two, Finley makes clear how little Green, for all of his experiences growing up in the South, can actually see and therefore understand the world in which racial stigmatism circumscribes all aspects of a Black person’s life. 

“Bigger Thomas has no choice in what he becomes,” Wright asserts. “That is what it means to be a poor Negro in America.” When Green dissents, on what will be the last day of their acquaintance, Wright finally, bluntly, cuts him off. “[Y]ou do not know. You don’t have the right to disagree… [T]his isn’t just a question of ‘determinism vs. humanism.’ This is about who has the right to tell this story. And like all rights, it has to be earned.”

Crisp performances, discerningly directed, embodied a sharp script that lays bare the limits of Green’s liberal empathy and good intentions, at a crossroads in the culture at mid-century.

The Eschatology of Terence McKenna, Hypothetical Future, Raleigh Fringe Festival

“I was sitting in my apartment in Los Angeles holding a crack pipe full of DMT,” Jonathan Fitts said at a precipitous point in his solo show at the Raleigh’s Fringe Festival, “and all I could think about was how disappointed my mother would be if she could see me right now.”

By then, Fitts, a spellbinding storyteller, had already taken us in his broad-ranging psychotropic travelogue from a Denny’s in a retirement village that had been Florida’s epicenter for sexually transmitted diseases to the shores of the Amazon, where Yale anthropologist Michael Harner underwent an ayahuasca ritual in the 1960s. Between these poles, we’d lingered with him on a sun-drenched lawn at Appalachian State, a karaoke dive bar on the sad end of Sunset Boulevard – and, just possibly, places beyond the dimensions of what we believe to be reality. Fitts takes us there, in vivid and very granular descriptions of the eerily similar altered states and visions reported by scientists who’ve studied native hallucinogens over the last 60 years.

Eschatology deals with the search for final meanings. In one of the most skeptical, candid – and certainly the oddest – work of cultural journalism mixed with autobiography I’ve seen on stage in years, Fitts witnessed and documented that quest, not only in the work of Harner and McKenna, a controversial ethnobotanist ultimately dubbed “the Timothy Leary of the 1990s,” but also in the lives of Chester Bennington, the late former lead singer for Linkin Park, Fitts’ grandfather and the monologist himself. 

He did so, weaving the disparate threads of his narratives with the self-assured focus of a Spalding Gray: a bemused participant, bearing close and at times poetic witness to the extremes humans have gone to, for millennia, to explore beyond what Aldous Huxley called the doors of perception, and to divine the human condition.

Changing Same: The Cold-Blooded Murder of Booker T. Spicely, Process Series, Mike Wiley Productions

Most shows with 25 characters on stage have a cast list greater than one. 

That, however, is not the way Mike Wiley started his career some 25 years ago. Before his recent large-ensemble works and collaborations, Wiley meticulously researched, wrote and performed a series of original solo shows, exploring crucial but largely unremembered events in the history of Black Americans. 

What set these works apart even further? Wiley’s remarkable abilities as an actor to define and perform more than twenty different characters in the same show.

Changing Same was by far the better of his two collaborations this year with playwright Howard L. Craft. In it, Wiley convened a community of witnesses to raise the forgotten story of an Army private murdered by a Durham bus driver in July 1944, one of a number of Black soldiers killed in that era on American soil by Southern racists, before they ever saw battle.

Under Joseph Megel’s expert direction, Wiley repeatedly turned on a dime, theatrically shape-shifting among a throng of characters.

As an Army intelligence officer stressed that the “situation” could not be allowed to “get out of hand,” and a smug Black businessman worried how bad protests against the killing might be for business, gradually we learned why Spicely’s name goes mostly unremembered to this day. 

Skyler Clay’s atmospheric locational projections work with Michael Betts II & Naveed Moeed’s ambient soundscapes on Dave Griffie’s four-chambered set to situate us in a number of humid Southern locales. 

Wiley’s work was sharpest when it held the people of the past – and we in the present – equally accountable for addressing racial injustice. As guitarist Corbie Hill played live back porch music, a 90-year-old narrator with an on-the-nose name of Gideon Storm ultimately confronted us:

“The real history of this land is brutal, and what Black people have faced has been brutal…The next question is, what are you going to do about it?”

HONORABLE MENTION: Twelfth Night, South Stream Productions

Budding auteur Hayley Phillipart knew Shakespeare’s overproduced and underimagined romantic drama was ripe for roasting, in a January show that also knowingly lampooned the show-on-a-shoestring trials of a poorly funded and understaffed independent theater company. A standout lead performance from Barrett as Olivia, with memorable supporting work from Olivia Griego doing double duty as boorish Malvolio and romance novel reject Sebastian, along with the clueless fratboy Natalie Turgeon made of Aguecheek; Akilil Holder-Cozart’s wicked Maria; Julie Oliver’s sharp-witted Feste and Brook North’s simp for the ages, Orsino, made this production a treat. 

OTHER BEST DESIGN

Jekyll & Hyde, NCSU University Theatre: Jayme Mellema, set; Joshua Reeves, light; Laura J. Parker, costumes, makeup, hair; Eric Alexander Collins, sound

Trouble in Mind, Raleigh Little Theatre: Derrick Ivey, set

A Little Night Music, Burning Coal: Xiang Li, set; Matthew Adelson, light

Hitchcock Blonde, Brave New Classics: Ryan McDaniels, animated credits 

Arabella, Scrap Paper Shakespeare: Emma Szuba, costumes

 

OTHER BEST MUSICAL DIRECTION

Jekyll & Hyde, NCSU University Theatre: Michael Santangelo

 

OTHER BEST LEADING PERFORMANCES

Dan Oliver, Romeo & Juliet, Stone Soup

Tim Artz, Anna Christie, Firebox Theatre

Jason Christ, Teal Lepley, Hitchcock Blonde, Brave New Classics

Morgan McFalls, Laura Parker, The Crucible, Henderson Rec Players

Michael Tourek, Heather Shore, The Curse of the Starving Class, Theatre Raleigh

Laurel Ullman, The Rainmaker, Burning Coal

 

OTHER BEST SUPPORTING PERFORMANCES

A Little Night Music, Burning Coal: Margaret Ellen Christensen; Christian Hunter; Byron Jennings; Sarah Winter 

Romeo & Juliet, Stone Soup: Emily Levinstone

Hitchcock Blonde, Brave New Classics: George Jack

Romeo & Juliet, Scrap Paper Shakespeare: Nancy Huffaker, Simon Kaplan, Andy Li, Chloe Oliver, Collins Wilson

The Crucible, Henderson Rec Players: Arin Dickson

A Girlfriend’s Guide to the White House, RedBird Theater: Jane Allen Wilson 

The Rainmaker, Burning Coal: Preston Campbell, Carl Martin, Dan Oliver

 

OTHER BEST ENSEMBLES 

Dancing at Lughnasa, Firebox Theatre: Tamara Farias, Cassie Ford, Abigail Heckenberg, Cora Hemphill, Amanda Lee Anderson

Copenhagen, Burning Coal: Ian Finley, Lynda Clark, Brian Linden 

Arabella, Scrap Paper Shakespeare: Callie Banholzer, Bryson David Hoff, Simon Kaplan, Collins Wilson