Buntport Theater

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A woman dressed from head to toe in furs stands on a stage draped in white fabric. She looks cold.

Westword- Buntport’s dazzling Sweet Tooth hits the spot

The opening scene of Sweet Tooth is mesmerizing: a bare stage, a woman in a fur coat standing in front of a white sheet and singing “It’s cold.” A hand appears from behind the sheet offering a glass, sprinkling water on the woman, and then the sheet is removed to reveal a rose-colored living room filled with various strange portraits of this same woman. We discover she isn’t really cold.

Des Esseintes did much the same. Inspired by reading Dickens, he decided on a visit to London. But having gone to an English restaurant in Paris where he found the clientele repellent (“laymen with broad pork-butcher faces and bulldog muzzles, apoplectic necks, ears like tomatoes, wine-sodden cheeks, bloodshot, foolish eyes”), he decided he didn’t actually need to experience the island itself; it was represented sufficiently by the restaurant and a guidebook. George and her people read Dickens, too, though they don’t really like his work, and their approach to life is similar.She’s George, a wealthy eccentric who has retreated from the world like Jean Des Esseintes in Huysman’s Against Nature, a quintessential work in the decadent-aesthetic turn-of-the-century tradition (think Oscar Wilde). George has decided to create a hermetically enclosed, aesthetically perfect little universe for herself, one in which artifice is elevated above nature and a simulated event is superior to the event itself. With the help of two devoted followers — Hortense the maid and the artist George calls Mister (because there’s no male equivalent to the word “mistress,” and she doesn’t like “gigolo”) — she invents fake interludes to appreciate.

Pastry being about as artificial as cooking gets, the three eat a lot of desserts, and the result is predictable. George gets a toothache — meaning she has to deal with a very real, pressing and painful reality. A dentist is called in, a practical, low-key guy called Dr. Manette (another Dickens reference), and the group invites him into its shared fantasy life. Will he break through the enameled craziness with his forceps and angled mirror, or move deeper and deeper into the rosy-tinted trap following a trail of poisoned sweets?

There’s a lot of wit and ingenuity here, and also guts: When the Buntport Theater actors come up with an original concept, they tend to ride it through to the bitter end, not shying away from the craziest implications, exploring every possible crevice. Which makes Sweet Tooth as intellectually stimulating as it is lively and funny.

The theme goes beyond ideas about art versus reality. George isn’t just a solitary aesthete like Des Esseintes. She’s a monstrous and destructive narcissist, a controller and manipulator, a deeply sick woman with the power to draw others into the depths of her sickness. She can get Dr. Manette to see a mouth full of inflammation and decay as beautiful, persuade Hortense to sacrifice her very self, and play poor Mister like a sad little puppet. “The dark parts give me trouble,” George observes early in the play, and soon enough, those dark parts threaten to swallow the light.

Sweet Tooth is a collaboration with musician Adam Stone, and he provides a series of strange, passionate and funny songs on such topics as abscessed teeth and Pear William cake.

This is a generally dazzling piece of work. But while Hannah Duggan’s Hortense is unpretentiously self-effacing and Erik Edborg does a sterling job of portraying an ordinary dentist caught in an extraordinary situation, as George, Erin Rollman comes across like every movie diva you’ve ever seen in an old film, and Brian Colonna is all fluttering mannerism as Mister. These are both excellent actors — it’s Rollman’s stillness and gravity that makes the opening scene such a stunner — but rather than playing people who behave artificially, they play the artifice itself, unleashing a horde of tics, shticks and pecadilloes we’ve seen from them too many times before. It’s enough to make your teeth hurt.

-Juliet Wittman, November 1, 2012, Westword

A woman sits in a large red rocking chair and smiles at the camera. She’s dressed entirely in red. Everything in the room is red. Her portrait, painted in red, hangs on the wall.

North Denver Tribune- Buntport Nails Another Gem with Musical Sweet Tooth

Developed from scratch (as always) by the six brilliantly creative Buntporters and collaborator Adam Stone, Sweet Tooth is the story of a woman, George (“because that is what she should be called”), and her two companions, or more aptly “enablers.” George is obsessed with the artistic and aesthetic. Because the real world can never live up to her standards of beauty and art, she has isolated herself in her home, with her maid Hortense and her “Mister” to immerse her in “experienceless experiences” which emulate reality, but with complete artistic control. This strange existence would continue unabated if not for the reality of a painful abscessed tooth, which becomes so severe that a dentist is brought in, abruptly bringing the real world with him. The results of this clash are unexpected, and the second act brings a resolution and an unsettling integrity to George’s life.How do they do it? Sweet Tooth, Buntport Theater’s latest original creation, is a fully developed two-act musical that builds an absurd world that seems reasonable, and then injects reality into that world, with unexpected results. There is the usual Buntport humor, but it is not as dominant as in past productions, and is imbued with thoughtful and challenging content. The music is fully integrated into the production, with some more traditionally structured songs, and other sections of sung dialogue, adding another dimension to the performance throughout. I was moved, intrigued, entertained, fascinated, and fully engaged throughout this amazing production.

Normally in a review, I summarize the premise of the story, then talk about the director, cover the acting, and then the design. Buntport completely messes that up. Everything is integrated into a whole, and there are never lines between the different aspects of the production. That said, the elements normally attributed to the director were well coordinated and fit perfectly with the story. The formal staging and blocking throughout reinforced the aesthetic focus of George’s world. The choreography carried that even further. The attention to detail and internal consistency throughout was remarkable — much of it in the background, not clearly noticeable, but always there.

Erin Rollman is George, “smitten by unreality.” The story and show revolve around her. Rollman brings complete credibility to this absurd role. We watch her, and her actions and reactions make this strange situation believable. She can emotionally turn on a dime, and she uses her very expressive face wonderfully. Hannah Duggan is Hortense, George’s devoted maid, and the enabler of the staged experiences. When the level of that devotion is raised in the second act, Duggan makes the unbelievable seem almost natural. Brian Colonna is Mister, George’s lover, companion, and personal artist. His character is less completely drawn into George’s world, and has real world concerns because of his love for her. Erik Edborg brings the real world into the sanctuary as Dr. Manette, the dentist called in for a house call. Edborg initially presents a start contrast and reminds us how strange George’s world that we had become used to really is. But then like us, he is drawn into it, but as we watch him change, we realize that the stakes were higher than we thought.

Buntport develops the sets and costumes in the same way they do everything, and this show highlights the benefits of that approach. The show opens with flowing white drapes indicating a vast expanse of cold and snow, but they are then ripped down to reveal an oddly proportioned very red room, which impeccably captures how a room in George’s home would look, unnatural though it is. The caving scene is an example of the unique yet brilliant effects of Buntport’s collaborative design approach — it was remarkable. As an experienced lighting designer, it is difficult for me to admit this, but no traditional lighting designer could have conceived anything as unique and effective as the lighting for this scene.

The Buntport actors are not professionally trained singers, and musically, they are not pitch-perfect all the time, but that is not a problem. They have added vocal amplification while singing, which really helps balance the voices and music, and makes it easier to understand the lyrics, which is important for following the story. Rollman’s singing voice is very good, and the others do not try to do more than they can, keeping the music consistent. Adam Stone’s music has variety and is integrated well into both the plot and the overall production concept.

It continues to amaze me that Buntport Theater can consistently create fully developed productions from nothing in a few months. Sweet Tooth is the latest proof of this, but even more so. This musical is brilliant, funny, challenging, and unsettling.

-Craig Williamson, October 31, 2012, North Denver Tribune

In the foreground a man contemplates a plate of pastries. A woman dressed in work coveralls looms in the background. The room is well decorated and entirely red.

ColoradoDrama.com- Sweet Tooth

Having introduced us to their own school of opera last spring, with Tommy Lee Jones goes to the opera alone, the inimitable ensemble follows up with an intriguing confection, Sweet Tooth, a Buntportesque operetta (music and lyrics by Adam Stone, additional lyrics by Chessy Normile, book by the ensemble), the company’s 32nd world premiere.

Opera buffo was never like this! The queen of theatrical voguing, Erin Rollman stars as George, a reclusive and eccentric patron of the arts. Much like the Archduke Ferdinand purportedly said of Mozart’s eternal celestial compositions — “… too many notes!” — George has it in for Charles Dickens’ plethora of words (written in serial form, to maximize commercial sales), because his touchstone novels keep her from being the chronicler of her own life, in the moment, every moment.

George has a point, that life can be art, much like Zen, we suggest, which practices mindfulness in many forms — just sitting (Zazen), flower arranging, gardening, baking, archery, tea, etc. — with the goal of expanding these meditative states to all waking and dreaming consciousness.

Only, in this case, George’s art has taken a fatalistic turn, like Jehovah’s Witnesses who watch their children die rather than allow emergency medical care. But George has her reasons, and a penchant for being the observer, not the subject, begging the question: If the highest erudition of life is metaphor, what place do our instincts (including those related to survival) have in such a cerebral universe?

Unlike the Jehovah’s Witnesses, George is imposing restrictions only on herself — and, to a degree, on her personal assistant, Hortense (Hannah Duggan) and her kept man, Mister (Brian Colonna), a painter, who humor their compelling, independently wealthy sponsor.

Duggan shines as the gatekeeper to George’s red-saturated world. Perhaps this is all a dream engendered by some indigestive experience of Mark Rothko — while listening to opera as he painted — though the clashing green patterns worn by Mister argue for an alternate interpretation involving Matisse. Who knows what free-associations pass through Buntport’s gray matter?

If there is a surrogate for middle-of-the-road bourgeois sensibilities in this alternate universe, it is Dr. Manette (a circumspect and then delightfully transformed Erik Edborg), a dentist contracted (by George!) to provide a visceral, yet third-person, experience of what to expect when dealing with a problematic sweet tooth.Colonna’s eclectic affectations as Mister are a send up from a newly discovered dimension lying somewhere between naughty British humor and the flamboyant excesses of the French court before its abused subjects made the guillotine famous.

While Hortense takes the hit for George, and George begins her passage to another world, we are left examining the nature of this self-described “dark musical comedy,” in this case a genre-bending brew of sophisticated intellectual jokes and commentary wrapped in a post-modern series of settings and arias that recall the psychological introspections of Brecht/Weil and Sondheim more than the tragic and comedic portraits of Verdi or Rossini.

Within such a world, one wonders, sometimes, where the cathartic experience takes place. This was one of those “sometimes.” As Aristotle noted, catharsis is de rigueur in tragedy, though we can only extrapolate what the great philosopher might have said about comedy (the manuscripts having been lost). We assume he would concur that “laughter is the best medicine.”

Where that leaves us with Sweet Tooth is digging deeper for a cathartic thread. If we wrap all of the musical’s multifaceted genre elements within a larger envelope of “theatre of ideas,” we find an intellectual catharsis somewhere in the sparsely populated aethers, among overlapping subsets of various Platonic forms. Shaw was the master of this, of course, but he was able translate philosophical idealism into characters with whom theatregoers could identify, and thus share in the transformative moments (his introductory essays to his plays provided an excellent means of defining topics from which he created character relationships in which topical discussions found natural expression).

Applying this Shavian approach to George, we land in Limbo — not an unfamiliar place for the human race. If you’ve seen The Three Penny Opera (an excellent rendition at Miners Alley Playhouse closed on October 21st), you may recall that Brecht inserted a “substitute ending” to send the audience home on a high note after deftly mocking and eviscerating the state of civilization. Isn’t this ambiguity in The Three Penny Opera‘s finale much like the coma in Sweet Tooth‘s coda? Perhaps, though Sweet Tooth‘s tenuously extended intellectual themes would likely reveal more harmonics by reading the script — of which, ironically, Dickens would approve — rather than hearing it pass quickly in dialogue a number of decibels below the soundtrack.

-Bob Bows, October 25, 2012, coloradodrama.com

A man sits center wrapped between two women. The women seem to be having fun. The man looks worried.

Denver Post- Buntport’s “Sweet Tooth” is a blast of intellectual nitrous oxide

Yet, I can’t help but celebrate the happy occurrence as being, if not divine, at least cheeky, providence.Granted, the opening of the delirious musical “Sweet Tooth” and the arrival of a newly gussied up Blu-ray of “Sunset Boulevard” to my mailbox are purely coincidental.

Because Buntport Theater’s latest collaboration with composer-lyricist Adam Stone features a character who bears more than a passing resemblance to Gloria Swanson’s in Billy Wilder’s classic. And yes, perhaps there’s a touch, too, of Carol Burnett’s hilarious skit about Norma Desmond.

With her red turban, her vivid red salon and her ready-to-do-whatever-it-takes devotees, George (Erin Rollman) is quite a piece of work. The question that eats at her is: Is she the piece of artwork she desires to be?

You see, George is so bent on curating reality, making it perfect, that she becomes a recluse. She never leaves her home, not even for a medically necessitated emergency.

Instead with game assistance from her loyal servant Hortense (Hannah Duggan) and her sometime paramour and portrait painter Mister (Brian Colonna), she re-creates adventures — from North Pole travel (“baby, it’s cold inside”) to a spelunking foray that plunges the stage and the audience into darkness.

The first musical number “It’s Cold,” finds George decked out in fur — hat, coat, muff — trying her darndest to create a frozen tundra. Hortense mans a fan and splashes her with ice water.

Only George’s attempts are starting to fall short of the aesthetic perfection she hopes for. On top of that, she has a tooth in need of a dentist.

Will a dental emergency nudge our eccentric friend back toward reality or instead provide her an opportunity to achieve her grandest creation? Will Dr. Manette (Erik Edborg) bring a dose of common sense and a shot of Novocaine to the zany proceedings or get drawn into George’s feverish endeavor?

Such is the hilarious set-up of “Sweet Tooth.”

“Sweet Tooth” is Buntport’s third collaboration with talented and evolving composer-lyricist Stone. In their second, 2010’s”Jugged Rabbit Stew,” an angry bunny contemplated his destiny. It won the Ovation Award for best new work that year.

The Buntport collective has made a bold habit of ginning up absurd scenarios that take on quandaries that have been the stuff of philosophical head-scratching for ages. For instance, can a brilliant simulation — a.k.a. “art” — be better than the real thing?

This sounds heavy. Instead, with perfectly timed performances by a remarkably attuned ensemble and rich work from Stone, it’s spry, at times silly and always smart. Consider it intellectual nitrous oxide. It won’t hurt a bit.

-Lisa Kennedy, October 25, 2012, Denver Post

A woman strikes a strong pose, arms akimbo, center stage. The room she stands in is entirely red and decorated with her portraits.

Sweet Tooth

SING AND FLOSS DAILY

A musical about what it means to curate your life down to the most grotesque details.

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