FIVE BLUE HAIRED LADIES SITTING ON A GREEN PARK BENCH
Playing at:	Pumphouse Theatre
Plays until:	June 30, 2007
Theatre Company:	Workshop Theatre
Reviewed by:	Louis B.
	FULL REVIEW
User ratings:	(2 votes, average: 3 out of 5)  Loading …

You can’t beat a title like Five Blue Haired Ladies Sitting on a Park Bench to grab potential audience attention.

Judging from the excellent response Workshop Theatre is receiving for the final production of its current season playwright John A Penzotti’s ploy worked.

Penzotti’s play began as a one-act comedy for five older women.

It was such a hit he expanded it to a two-acter adding five more characters who were only referred to in the original one-acter.

It’s a sweet comedy but a comedy none-the-less even if it is about approaching and accepting death.

It needs to have a lot of pizzazz and spunk.

The five ladies of the title meet each day in a park chatting about their pasts and bemoaning their present situations.

Lala Carmichael (Jutah Hinds) still clings to the belief she’ll be the next big blues singer while Eva Reisch (Valerie Elder) reminisces about the wives of presidents she got to meet.

Eva even has the photos to prove her stories.

Gladys Feinberg (Dawn Michele) refuses to go into a nursing home with her husband Melvin (Allan Hardin) preferring to live alone in the appartment they shared for so many years.

Rose O’Connor (Zena Drabinsky) is still trying to deal with the senseless beating death of her life partner and Anna Cizano (Lynne Cousineau) is finally getting to enjoy all the forbidden fast foods denied her when she was dining out in fancy restaurants with her husband Nunzio (Bill Ouelett).

The play is a series of scenes which are really mini plays within the play and which should each achieve its own comic climax.

Saturday night they didn’t always build to the desired crescendo because the pacing was too slow.

This little play should zip along at breakneck speed even if the characters are all in their 70s.

Director Tanya Heschl has chosen to flesh out the ladies, treating them as characters rather than the caricatures they are.

These women are the stuff of sit coms so the larger they are and the louder they play moments the more fun it is for everyone.

There is most definitely pathos in each of their lives but we should sense it rather than be instructed about it.

To Heschl’s credit she was able to give a decidedly static play a true sense of action especially in the first act.

I really wanted the final brassy moment of act one to be louder and flashier.

I wanted to go out into the intermission with that song in my heart and those talent actresses on stage have what it takes to do that if they’d just trust themselves and let loose.

The second act has more zest both in the writing and the staging and, particularly, in the performances.

The battling Fienbergs are very funny as are the passionate Cinzanos.

Lala’s brother Tuffy is brought to gentle but knowing life by Jarrod Lakey and there is a real cavalier slyness to Kevin Rich’s philandering Richard Reisch.

All the actors handle their unburdening moments with sincerity and heart.

I particularly like what Drabinsky and Linda Delaney did with showing the gentleness of Rose and Shirley’s relationship.

Hinds could do with a little more sass afterall Lala means to shock with her stories at least some of the time.

It would make her poignancy with her brother in act two all the more powerful.

None of the actresses is old enough to play these roles but they do an admirable job of trying to portray age.

Michele suffers the most because she appears to be the youngest member of the cast.

She keeps losing the age mannarisms she so carefully constructed for Gladys but, to give Michele credit, she can come up with anger and frustration when her scenes call for it.

Heschl also designed the show and the clever simplicity really works.

I loved the change when the ladies enter Heaven.

Five Blue Haired Ladies charmed its audience the night I attended and that’s what it’s meant to do.