Review: John and Jen by Penfold Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Working with Michael McKelvey of St. Edward's University, the budding Penfold Theatre has occupied relatively unexploited theatre territory in Austin: the contemporary intimate musical. John & Jen has a genre resemblance to their pioneer show The Last Five Years. Two actors in an intimate space, with most of the story told in song and complex, sophisticated accompanying music. On his website, composer Andrew Lippa calls it a "chamber musical."
The music is scored for keyboard, cello and percussion. That ensemble constituted by Steve Saugey, Jeanette Cannata and Trevor Detling remains unseen. Their melodic, jumpy, at times yearning lines establish the moods that carry the action, but the actors' voices are primary throughout. MTI, the firm that licenses the rights, offers you at its website a sampler of 30-second nuggets from the principal numbers.
The unnamed singers in those samples have a considerable amount of Broadway smarm in their voices, the vocal attitude that suggests look at me, I'm so cute/adorable/funny/talented.
Sarah Gay and Andrew Cannata don't have that prissy attitude. They don't need it. In Penfold's John & Jen they are, instead, projecting with conviction the title characters. All three of them.
This 1995 show tells Jen's story, from the early 1960s through the late 1980s. In each act she is dealing with a young man named John --initially, her kid brother, five years younger than she, and in the second act, her son. Jen fits directly into the baby boomer cohort, fleeing home for college in New York City, glorying in the freedoms and fashions of the Age of Aquarius. Her baby brother struggles on at home under the disciplinarian father whom Jen despises. In the second act Jen is older, marginally wiser, more fearful and fixated in suffocating fashion upon the boy who carries his uncle's name.
Andrew Cannata has the job of growing up twice in this script. The first act features some charming and evocative brother-and-sister play before Jen leaves home. In the second act Cannata's distress with his Mom is presented in more artificial, formulaic fashion, as she embarrasses him by rooting too loudly for him at baseball games and in one number they go through a brittle, artificial talk show game examining her motives. Jen is always older and more informed than her Johns; in the second act she manages to grow up sufficiently herself to push her son out of the nest.
Clever stage business for both actors and Cannata's appealing openness keep us wrapped up in the process. Both of them have fine voices and offered a sophisticated, nuanced delivery of a script and partition that sounded challenging to my untutored ears. We like them both, as characters and as actor/singers.
Penfold promises to hike northward to Round Rock for its 2010-2011 season, where the bill of fare will change up a bit -- spoofed Shakespeare and David Mamet's two-person drama about sexual harrassment Oleanna. They'll also do the reliable Plantagenet costume drama The Lion in Winter by James Goldman, better remembered for the 1968 film version with Peter O'Toole and Katherine Hepburn -- reportedly back in Austin at the Rollins Theatre of the Long Center.
So you'd better get your chamber musical fix now, while it's available, at the Hideout down on South Congress Avenue.
Unsigned review at AustinOnStage.com, February 8
Review by Jeanne Claire van Ryzin at Statesman A360 "Seeing Things" blog, February 8
alt ALT review for Austinist.com, February 10
Review by Avimaan Syam for Austin Chronicle, February 11
Review by Ryan E. Johnson for examiner.com, February 15
Rob Faubion's interview of Producing Artistic Director Ryan Crowder, AustinOnStage, February 16
EXTRA
Click to view the program for John and Jen by Penfold Theatre
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John and Jen
by Andrew Lippa, Tom Greenwald
Penfold Theatre Company
