Category Archives: CCT

Review: `Pete ‘n’ Keely’

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Opened Sept. 13 at California Conservatory Theatre

Swingin’ sweethearts jazz up tuneful Pete ‘n’ Keely
three stars Cute kitsch

If the names Steve and Eydie mean anything to you, keep reading. If not, go watch High School Musical again.

Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme are, in my humble opinion, fantastic. Together and alone they’re great singers (few female vocalists have Gorme’s bravura belt), and the fact their husband-and-wife team — complete with dusty marriage jokes and corny banter — is still going strong (they have concerts booked through next March) only attests to their timeless appeal.

The comic musical revue Pete ‘n’ Keely is, in many ways, a tribute to Steve and Eydie. Like their real-life counterparts Pete Bartel and Keely Stevens made it big in the 1950s as a husband-and-wife singing duo whose mainstream popularity faltered in the late ’60s.

But unlike Steve ‘n’ Eydie, Pete ‘n’ Keely are divorced and attempting a comeback with a live NBC reunion special.

That’s the premise for the aptly named Pete ‘n’ Keely, which makes its Northern California debut at San Leandro’s California Conservatory Theatre.

This is an in-between kind of a show. It’s part musical revue, with well-known songs like “Fever” and “Lover Come Back to Me” bumping up against new material by Patrick Brady (music) and Mark Waldrop (lyrics). And it’s part book musical, which means writer James Hindman is attempting to tell a story.

The musical revue part works best, at least it does in director Michael Ryken’s CCT production.

Diana Torres Koss as Keely has an admirable set of pipes — even Eydie Gorme might sit up and take note, which is saying something. She makes singing seem effortless, and she has no problem being heard over the three-piece “NBC Orchestra” (Tania Johnson, keyboardist/musical director; Taylor Still, drums; Travis Kindred, bass).

Ron Pickett as Pete isn’t quite as successful making himself heard all the time, but when he kicks his bright tenor into gear, his pure tones are more than audible.

Given that most of this nearly two-hour show is music, there’s a whole lot to enjoy.

The idea is that it’s 1968, and we’re the studio audience as Pete and Keely go live in attempt to revitalize their careers. After 12 years of marriage, cross-country tours and a Broadway show, their almost inevitable divorce pretty much killed their careers.

Keely’s latest album, “Keely a-Go-Go,” is being given away as a promo for Swell shampoo (“They put the oooh in shampoo”), and Pete’s performances in dinner theater musicals are getting him nowhere.

Hoping to rekindle the magic, an aging Pete and Keely hit the airwaves with their theme song, the catchy “It’s Us Again,” and take us on a journey through their lives together.
We see Keely as a child performer (“Daddy”); we see how Pete and Keely met in an Italian restaurant (“Besame Mucho”); and we see how they made a splash on the “Milton Berle Texaco Star Theatre” (a pure camp “Battle Hymn of the Republic”).

Along the way we get one-liners like this from Pete: “Those 12 years together were three of the happiest years of my life.” Or this from Keely: “Age is a number, and mine is unlisted.”

Most of the show consists of duets, with some — a sweet “Secret Love” the oh-so Steve and Eydie-esque “This Could Be the Start of Something Big” — recalling the kitschy enjoyment of great old variety shows. Curiously the solos, “Fever” for Pete, “Black Coffee” for Keely, aren’t nearly as interesting.

The medley from the (fictional) flop Broadway musical Tony ‘n’ Cleo, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra,” is truly awful — by design, though not as funny as it should be.

When the show attempts to get serious, with Keely depicted as a lush and Pete as a philanderer, the show loses steam. Their fight during the song “Love,” during which they scream, of course, how much they hate each other, is a low point.

The happy ending is forced, and the believability factor that we’re watching a live television broadcast flies right out the window.

But when Pete ‘n’ Keely is swingin’, which it is much of the time, it’s a real ring-a-ding time. But Steve and Eydie have nothing to worry about.

For information about Pete ‘n’ Keely, call 510-632-8850 or visit www.cct-sl.org.

Review: “Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean”

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Julia Mitchell (left) is Mona, Eleanor Mason Reinholdt (center) is Sissy and Candice M. Milan is the mysterious Joanne in California Conservatory Theatre’s production of Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. Photo by Patrick Tracy.

(opened Jan. 25, 2007)

A group of friends gathers at a small-town Texas reunion to untangle the knots of the past. One of the friends raises her Lone Star beer bottle in a toast.

“To James Dean,” she says. “Long live the dead.”

The dead, the missing, the transformed and the crazy all receive equal stage time in Ed Graczyk’s Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, now at San Leandro’s California Conservatory Theatre.

If Graczyk’s drama is known for anything other than its cumbersome title, it’s as a minor 1982 film directed by Robert Altman and starring Cher, Kathy Bates and Karen Black.

If a Sam Shepard Western somehow got mashed up with Steel Magnolias, the result might be something like Jimmy Dean, an enjoyable mess of a play that grazes potent subjects ranging from gay rape to Hollywood delusion to breast cancer. There are even attempts to explore transgender issues, female bonding and loss of faith.

As they say in Texas, boy howdy, that’s a lot of territory to cover in a two-hour play. But Graczyk manages to give the dusty drama a little weight amid the lurid details.

Director Linda Piccone never lets the pace lag as she unfurls the story of the Disciples of James Dean, a group of teenagers in McCarthy, Texas, a town not far from Marfa, where James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson filmed Giant in 1955.

Mona, the leader of the Disciples, is Dean crazy. She got to be an extra in some of the Giant crowd scenes, and the sad thing is that experience turns out to be the high point of her life.

Twenty years after Dean’s death on Sept. 30, 1955, the Disciples are reuniting at the near-decrepit town’s dingy 5 & Dime (effective set by Ric Koller, lighting by Malcolm Carruthers).

Mona (Julia Mitchell) never left McCarthy, and neither did the vivacious Sissy (Eleanor Mason Reinholdt). Both women still hang out with the God-fearing 5 & Dime owner, Juanita (Mary Gibboney).

Turn-out for the reunion is disappointing, with only three out-of-town visitors: rich and sassy Stella May (Monica Cortes Viharo), always-pregnant Edna Louise (Heidi Wolff) and mysterious Joanne (Candice M. Milan), whom no one can quite place.

The action shifts back and forth between 1975 and 1955, with Danielle Perata, Kerry Wininger and Sean Grady (left with Mitchell) playing younger versions of the Disciples.
The actors keep the melodrama to a minimum _ a mercy given Graczyk’s tendency toward twangy, often purpleish prose.

Reinholdt goes even further and finds a damaged, compassionate soul under Sissy’s bravado. Viharo’s strong comic instincts make the most of an underwritten role, and the younger actors are all excellent.

Mitchell handles the difficult role of Mona well and connects to the character’s paralyzing fear of death, an undercurrent that threatens to transform Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean from a pulpy soap opera into a serious drama.