Nathan Mohebbi, Shannon Lee Clair and Casey Burke (Photo by Cooper Bates)
Reviewed by F. Kathleen Foley
The Odyssey Theatre
Through November 23
When the lights go up on Bluebeard’s Castle, you’ll notice the fog machine is working overtime. Atmosphere predominates — mist, shadow, echoes — in this musical adaptation of the French fairy tale about a monstrous nobleman who butchers a succession of wives.
Atmosphere is the show’s chief virtue as well as its most obvious failing. Basking in the shadowy-spooky ambience, you may be distracted from the weakness of the actual plot, a vertiginous affair that lurches between the dire and the romantic, without much logical progression.
Writer/director Sofia Streisand has mounted Bluebeard in several European venues prior to this American premiere at the Odyssey Theatre. Elena Khanpira is listed as co-writer and lyricist, while Sergey Rubalsky and Artem Petaikin are credited as composers. Additional songwriters Nancy Magarill and Terra Naomi are the adaptors for this English production.
Despite the program note that states the setting is “sometime in the past or the future,” this is patently a period piece, as evidenced by the vintage costumes. A years-long war between the religious fundamentalists of the North and the life-loving denizens of the South has just concluded, with the North triumphant and the South in ruins.
Southerner Judith (Casey Burke) has just been awarded as a spoil of war to military commander Henry (Nathan Mohebbi), the current lord of the bleak and joyless castle where the action transpires. It takes a while for us to figure it out, but Henry, despite his initially threatening manner towards Judith, is not Bluebeard. He is actually the son of Bluebeard, whose victims’ dying agonies still echo through the castle’s blood-soaked walls.
Determined to uncover the castle’s secrets, Judith wheedles Henry into handing over the keys so that she can investigate the castle’s mysterious rooms, one by one. Meanwhile, a ghostly “victim” (Shannon Lee Clair) wanders through the premises in a bloodied nightgown, issuing ominous warnings to the new bride.
The couple’s dawning passion gives way to suspicion, then gives way to passion, then gives way to suspicion. In a vulnerable moment, Henry divulges that, as a child, he stood by helplessly while his father killed his mother. Tit for tat, Judith has also witnessed her mother’s murder by Henry’s troops. Her sudden recollection seems a weirdly belated epiphany in the exponentially more confusing plot.
Mark Guirguis’s clever scenic features a series of flats that pivots to reveal the castle’s various rooms. Leigh Allen’s lighting design is effectively murky, sometimes to a fault. However, it is Rubalsky’s magnificent sound design, all creaks and moans and things that go bump in the night, that is the most memorable component of the design elements.
Burke and Clair have the kind of pure, sweet singing voices that one seldom hears in this era of straining, sliding vocalizations. Although they outstrip Mohebbi in that regard, he makes up for it with an impressively fiery performance. All three strain to deliver the goods in this uneven piece, but it’s a hard sell.
The Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., L.A. Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m. thru Nov. 23. (310) 477-2055. OdysseyTheatre.com Running time: 80 minutes with no intermission.
