TRASK & FENN
A capsule synopsis of Ken Stone’s script suggests a sort of Sweeney Todd Meets Maurice. Schoolboys Roderick Trask and William Fenn try to pursue their not-so-secret romance after graduation, but when Trask arrives at Fenn’s London mansion for an extended visit, the lads find that what was barely tolerated by adolescents is actively opposed by adults. Faced with his father’s threat to disinherit him–and his lover Fenn’s own guilty ambivalence about his homosexuality–the handsome and manipulative Trask contrives to marry Fenn’s sister, Olivia. But the scheme only brings greater frustration all around. Meanwhile, a series of killings begin–killings attributed to one Jack the Ripper. Fenn suspects Trask.
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Director Warner Crocker deserves considerable credit for not letting the show disintegrate into a laughable mess. The production is solid and occasionally sprightly, buoyed by the crisp playing of a six-person orchestra under Judy Myers’s direction and featuring a set of handsome costumes by Patricia Hart. (Kurt Sharp’s set design is unfortunately dreary, except for a very funny pseudo-classical tomb.) Chase’s subtle and multi-leveled Trask is ably supported by Christopher Gurr’s stolid Fenn (he carries the role off fairly well, considering he joined the show late in rehearsals–his name in the program is pasted over another actor’s). Kelly Anne Clark impressively manages Olivia’s severe shift from comic foil to tragic heroine; Lisa K. Wyatt is very fine indeed as dithery Aunt Cecilia (a role whose second-act retreat has a lot to do with the show’s second-act defeat); and Fred Goudy is in excellent bass voice as Trask’s pompous papa. Ryan Johnson and Jim Blanchette, as a pair of all-knowing sissies who comment on the action, provide classic caricatures of smarmy, smothered closet queens, a telling contrast to Trask’s out-of-the-closet aspirations before he makes his disastrous compromise with convention. Having failed to guide Trask & Fenn’s authors toward a successful work, New Tuners has at least given them an impressive show.
