The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
Blank Canvas’ struggles for balance on precarious tightrope that is ‘Side Show’
Other productions have struggled with material, as does this one with small budget
So the elephant act in the room is that the 2014 Broadway revival of Bill Russell and Henry Krieger’s “Side Show” — a musical about the real-life carnival life of conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton — was as short-lived as the original 1997 production, which closed after just 91 performances.
The revival delves deeper into the backstory of the twins. And it tightens its focus on their personal journey in the 1930s from obscurity to fame to heartbreak at the hands of promoter Terry Connor and trainer Buddy Foster.
But the reasons for the show’s inability to find an audience beyond a cult following still can be found in the production of it at Blank Canvas Theatre in Cleveland. And, with a theater company that produces big musicals with small budgets on a small stage, director Patrick Ciamacco introduces a few problems of his own amid some significant triumphs.
The musical — more of an operetta, really — is told almost exclusively through song. Its score offers the Hilton sisters gorgeous power ballads such as “Who Will Love Me as I Am” and “I Will Never Leave You” that are reminiscent of Krieger’s brilliant work in “Dreamgirls” and which the very talented Stephanie Harden as Violet and Becca Ciamacco as Daisy deliver with charm, immense feeling and lovely harmonies. Sideshow patrons should be paying their one thin dime to listen to them sing, not ogle at their connective tissue.
Jake, the girls’ personal protector, is given a power ballad of his own called “You Should Be Loved,” which the silver-throated Daryl Kelley knocks out of the circus tent along with other songs found mostly in the second act.
They are supported by a superb seven-piece band under Anthony Trifiletti’s direction, which contributes much of the production’s much-needed professionalism considering its few scenic bells and whistles, limited space for limited choreography and a straying spotlight with a mind of its own.
Many of the show’s other songs employ clunky and often pedestrian lyrics in their efforts to provide necessary exposition and to progress the storyline, which seem to challenge the hard-working but vocally inconsistent ensemble assigned to perform them.
The ensemble’s costuming by Luke Scattergood and Jenniver Sparano is at the heart of the biggest problem facing this production. It surfaces in the opening number, “Come Look at the Freaks,” where we are introduced to the Hilton twins’ sideshow family: the Three-Legged Man (Andrew Keller), the Geek (Vince Matia), the Fortune Teller (Day Ash), the armless Venus di Milo (Julie C. Okuley), the Dog-Faced Boy (David Lenahan), the Hermaphrodite (Katie Jerome Taylor), the Human Pin Cushion (Jacob Schafer), Lizard Man (Joe Gibson), the Bearded Lady (Susan M. Wagner), the Tattooed Woman (Leah Kraynak), Bird Girl (Meredith Aleigha Wells) and their tyrannical handler Sir (John J. Polk).
The play suggests that there is a fine line — for the sideshow performers and those of us in the audience — between being a freak and being unique. “We are all flawed in some way” is the moral that drives this play and that turns these monstrous characters into metaphors.
The metaphor is turned murky in this production due to the low-cost devices used to define each side show performer. The clearly artificial strap-on leg for the Three-Legged Man, the blatant bodysuit that gives the Tattooed Woman her ink, the poorly crafted elements adorned by the Hermaphrodite, and so on, are disingenuousness. The unintentional message they relay seems to be, “We are not really what we seem” rather than, “We are more than we appear.”
Why not learn a lesson from the Broadway production of “The Elephant Man,” where costuming and prosthetics are cleverly replaced with fine acting and the audience’s imagination?
Also murky are the portrayals of Terry Connor and Buddy Foster by Joel Fenstermaker and Ian Jones. To the actors’ credit, these are shallowly drawn characters on the page, but the performers have trouble getting their heads around Terry’s insincerity and Buddy’s sexual ambiguity, so they appear even shallower on the stage.
As the Broadway shows demonstrated, even a toptier production of “Side Show” is a balancing act on a precarious tightrope that audiences found intriguing but wanting. It is unlikely that Blank Canvas’ patrons will respond any differently.