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The scene of Mother Ginger and her Polichinels from a previous performance of the Harbor Ballet Theatre’s ‘The Nutcracker.’ Photo from John Worell

There’s no stopping Port Jefferson’s Harbor Ballet Theatre.

For the 24th year, the theatre will have its dancers and residents on their toes with its annual production of “The Nutcracker.” John Worell, executive artistic director of the performance, said he and his wife Amy Tyler started the production as a means for dancers from various dance schools to work with professionals in a full-length ballet. Now, the production is a tradition in the community.

“We would be killed if we stopped. It’s become such a part of the Dickens Festival and the community and the school,” Worell said. “We have made it 24 years … but we plan to go further than that.”

Current soloist for the American Ballet Theatre Craig Salstein and the theatre’s former principal dancer Ashley Tuttle are returning to reprise their roles as the Cavalier and the Sugar Plum Fairy in the show. Tuttle is also a Tony-nominated dancer for her performances in “Moving Out” and “Come Fly Away.”

Shannon Christ and Hannah Smith,  seniors from Earl L. Vandermuellen High School, are also returning for their last performance in the ballet. Both Christ and Smith are excited for the performances on Dec. 4, 5 and 6 this year. Smith described the nearly 75- to 80-member cast as a big family, saying that everyone bonds during rehearsals. Sara Jaffie and Jack Worell also return to play Clara and The Nutcracker for another year.

While these dancers have remained the same, some aspects of the play haven’t. Aside from changes in props, setting and dancers, Worell said the ballet’s battle scene changes every year according to the skills of the cast.

“If I have strong mice, then they can pick the soldiers up. If I don’t have strong mice, then they just battle around the stage,” said Worell, who choreographs the battle scene every year. Worell didn’t mention what his plan was for this year’s battle scene.

Overall the choreography will remain the same unless Worell and Tyler, who owns the ballet company, decide to let another choreographer take the lead on the production (typically the choreography doesn’t change until a new or guest choreographer takes over.) While “The Nutcracker” is a popular ballet production around this time of the year, it is the tradition that keeps people coming back every year.

When Tyler’s company started the production in 1991, three or four other dance company’s performed the play on the Island. Now, around nine company’s perform this ballet around the holidays. What separates Tyler’s company from the others is how they tell the story. Unlike some productions of “The Nutcracker,” the audience can see Clara in the beginning and how she and the story progress.

Audience members can decide if the story is a mere dream or rooted in reality on Dec. 4 at 8 p.m., Dec. 5. at 3 and 8 p.m. and Dec. 6 at 3 p.m. at the Earl L. Vandermuellen High School auditorium, 350 Old Post Road, in Port Jefferson. All seats are $24 with senior and group rates available. For more information call 631-331-3149.

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Emily Dowdell and Bobby Peterson star in ‘Bonnie & Clyde’ Photo by Tim Pappalardo

By Charles J. Morgan

Hold on to your wallets! The famous bank robbers Bonnie & Clyde are back and they are wreaking havoc at the Noel S. Ruiz Theatre at the CM Performing Arts Center in Oakdale. The play follows the original plot, with the two of them featured as folk heroes on one level and as public evildoers on another. This twofold approach is what drives CM/PAC’s startling production of this folk opera based on the book by Ivan Menchell, featuring Don Black’s lyrics and Frank Wildhorn’s music.

Bonnie and Clyde do their murderous thieving throughout the southwest in the Depression-torn early thirties. They are characters who awaken in the concupiscible hearts of the non-criminal majority as two who have escaped the dust bowl, the breadlines and outright poverty by doing one thing: taking.

There is balance however. In three different segments, there is a revival meeting in which a fiery evangelical preacher, in maximum decibel, proclaims the Gospel. There is a very slight element of excess here, but what better way for the authors to show that Bonnie and Clyde are criminal outcasts. These revival scenes are among the best in the show. There is even an element of choreography in them.

Bonnie is seen as a celebrity wannabe who even writes poetry. It is doggerel. Yet even as they were on their murdering spree, making headlines, some local newspapers actually published it.

Clyde is a semi-literate, dirt-poor son of a share cropper who shirks all kinds of gainful employment in favor of “taking,” as does his sycophantic brother “Buck.”

Their criminal career was neatly depicted by the set. The indefatigable Patrick Grossman is the set designer and director. Wearing the former hat, he had a system of flats and slats that went from stage right to stage left and were used vertically, there being no need to do any shifting. A vignette of Bonnie and Clyde in bed, or in the act of robbing a bank, as well as the revival scenes would be seen as one or more of the slatted flats were opened and closed — most effective. He also devised a system of projecting flashing contemporary newspapers. Wearing the other hat, Grossman was confronted with the always pressing problem of interpretation and blocking. His talents in this field extend to excellence. He made them real, even down to a consistently applied southwestern accent.

The multi-talented Emily Dowdell played Bonnie Parker, coupling her powerful soprano with coyness, assertion, self-pity and an outcry for love admirably. Clyde Barrow was played by Bobby Peterson with a far-ranging tenor and believable toughness both in solo and duet.

Briggs Houston played the role of Marvin “Buck” Barrow, Clyde’s brother. His voice was a middle-register tenor. His somewhat lumbering attitude and his death scene were done to perfection. Shannon Cunningham was Blanche, Buck’s wife. She had great stage presence coupled with a caressable soprano. She suffused the loyal wife role with high morality for Buck. Her performance was impressively consistent.

Then there was Carl Tese as the revivalist preacher. Talk about power! He shook the rafters with the Decalogue, the Beatitudes and John 3 with the range of heavy artillery. ME Junge was Trish, a small part for the leading choreographer; but she is a trouper.

In the musical numbers, the preacher and “congregation” performed “God’s Arms Are Always Open” with, well, dynamism, and Bonnie and Clyde’s duet in “Dyin’ Ain’t So Bad” told it all.

Musical direction was handled, as usual, by Matthew W. Surico on piano and a solid pit band that featured Kevin Merkel on synthesizer, Christian Wern on bass, Michael Villarico on drums, Diana Fuller and Lauren Carroll on guitars, John Dumlao on violin and Eric Albinder and Andrew Lenahan on woodwinds. It was the pit band effect Surico always achieves that gave body to the whole show. Kudos to the entire cast for a job well done!

The CM Performing Arts Center, 931 Montauk Highway, Oakdale will present “Bonnie & Clyde” through Sept. 27. Tickets range from $20 to $29. For more information, call 631-218-2810 or visit www.cmpac.com.

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This is going to be hard. I want to tell you about a highly original, marvelously acted, adventurous piece of musical theater I saw on Broadway last weekend, but I don’t want to give away much of the plot. I would hope you would see the play, as I did, knowing almost nothing about the details except that it has the highest number of Tony nominations this year with 12, alongside “An American in Paris,” and concurrently has garnered spectacular raves from critics and audiences.

For a play to be so applauded, it would have to be creative and break new ground for narrative, music and staging. “Fun Home” does all that. Performed at the Circle in the Square Theatre on 50th Street just off Eighth Avenue, and billed as a family tragicomedy, the show is adapted by Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori from Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel, based on a memoir she kept through the years of her growing up.

OK, I will tell you it is both a coming of age and a coming out story. If you are the least bit uncomfortable with either of the themes, you should not see the play because the events portrayed are sometimes raw. And they are raw because they are heartbreakingly honest.

We all try to understand our parents, even more so as we age, because these are the two people who made us. In understanding them, we come to better know ourselves. So I will tell you further that the narrator of the play is the daughter and she is chasing her memories, trying to understand and come to terms with her father.

Memories have an evanescent, shimmering quality to them and that makes them hard to pin down with certainty, even in our minds, much less on a stage. Therefore the device that this play employs is particularly interesting. There are three actresses who play Alison, the narrator, at different times of her life — as an 8-year-old, a 19-year-old and her current age of 43 — as she looks on and occasionally cringes at what the other two say and do, If you think about it, we all react that way sometimes when we think of our younger selves.

So in this universal yearning to know our parents, some of the particulars of this family are unusual and in the viewing, they are wrenching. As has been said before, all happy families are happy in the same way, but unhappy families are unhappy uniquely.

Bruce, the father of three bright and imaginative children, is a high school English teacher, a restorer of old houses, the proprietor of a funeral home in a small Pennsylvania town and the husband of Helen, Alison’s mother. But his life is more than that, as divided personally as it is professionally, and therein lays the rest of the plot which I really am not going to tell you, however hard this is. I don’t want to ruin the surprises.

I will share with you, however, that the staging cleverly involves trapdoors opening and closing to disgorge and swallow up at different times objects in the home as large as the grand piano. When the lighting dims, it serves as a curtain would between scenes in a more conventional theater. And the music, highly original and opera-like as it is occasionally spoken and sung, perfectly carries forward the storyline and fills in the unsaid.

It is sometimes made up of big, brassy show tunes and sometimes of heartfelt yearnings.

Michael Cerveris and Judy Kuhn head up the cast in this poignant, provocative and haunting human drama, made all the more soulful because it is a real family we are watching. As they sometimes say on movie screens when the film ends, this story is based on actual events.

This musical play has gone in a new direction and can be as forthright because of the times in which we live.

Taboos can be spoken of out loud, and secrets can be revealed both on stage and in real life in an unprecedented way. This is both cathartic and liberating for audiences, as great art always is.

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