Review | Elvis gets a French twist in 'Viva Bourgeois!'

BY BILL HIRSCHMAN

Special to The ....Miami.... Herald

Admittedly, it's a bizarre premise: picking up Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Moliere's 1670 satire of middle-class greed for social standing, and plopping it down in 1971 ..Graceland.. with Elvis as the buffoon who chases genteel respectability with a bulldozer

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But Paul Tei and his anarchic Mad Cat Theatre Company transform this classic into a hilarious evening called Viva Bourgeois! featuring Erik Fabregat in one of the funniest performances this year as The King after he discovered carbohydrates.

Tei has imaginatively adapted Moliere and directed his repertory family in this goofy spoof about a nouveau riche boor who lusts for acceptance from a cultured class that he cannot see is morally bankrupt. He endangers his own marriage by pursuing a parasitic aristocrat and then blocks the happiness of his daughter who wants to marry a ....commoner.''

This would have been more pointedly uncomfortable if it had been set in 2009 SoBe among the Real Housewives of sybarites. But Tei has long been fascinated by the resonances between Moliere's Monsieur Jourdain and Elvis, the consummate 20th century man with immense talent and stupendous wealth and whose ....taste is in his wallet.''

Tei finds much of his comedy in the collision of Moliere and ....Memphis..... Many passages are lovingly lifted almost word for word from Moliere's grandiloquent 17th century speech, followed by such grandiloquent asides as ....Stick a sock in it.''

But often Tei just trusts the master. As in the original, Elvis is delighted with his innate nobility when a teacher explains that Elvis' normal speech is ....prose'' -- which Elvis thinks is in the same rarefied sphere as poetry. ....I've been speaking prose for 30 years and didn't know it!'' he boasts proudly in a ....Tennessee.... twang.

The consistent jewel under Tei's guidance is Fabregat, who wanders about in a sublime mixture of genuine befuddlement and misguided certainty, echoing his turn as George W. Bush in Mosaic Theatre's Dirty Story. The fact that Fabregat is too short and doughy to ever be mistaken for Elvis makes his dead-on impersonation in a black wig, white jumpsuit and yellow-tinted glasses just that much funnier. And when he sings into an overmodulated microphone some pseudo-Elvis songs set to Moliere's lyrics, the effect is a gold-plated hoot.

The cast's wackiness and the enthusiasm over their performances is infectious, especially the chameleonic Joe Kimble as a hippy-dippy songwriter and doubling as a venal politician hitting up Elvis for a loan, and the always wonderful Erin Joy Schmidt as Elvis' wife.

So many elements are infused with wit and imagination: the set including a zebra-skin couch, the so-accurate-it's-embarrassing period costumes by Danielle Campbell, the pre-disco choreography of Caitlin Geier and, above all, Matt Corey's original score with so many Elvis-like riffs that you'll swear you've heard the tunes before.

It's a raucous, rollicking evening from ....Florida....'s most irreverent company.

Review | Playwright proves sharp with 'BroadSword'

BY CHRISTINE DOLEN

cdolen@MiamiHerald.com

Making terrific theater doesn't take huge sums of money, the work of a famous playwright, performers with an endless string of big-deal credits.

When vision, creativity and talent align, the smallest theater company can become the purveyor of major artistic pleasures. So it goes with Mad Cat Theatre's production of BroadSword, Marco Ramirez's rich new play about the heavy reunion of a metal band.

BroadSword is still a work in progress, a script that Ramirez will continue to refine until the play gets its official world premiere somewhere -- which it clearly will, since the award-winning Hialeah native is a rising star in the theater world.

Even so, for this workshop production, BroadSword gets the full-on Mad Cat treatment: a stellar cast featuring some of South Florida's most inventive performers, first-rate production values including Joe Kimble's fabulously detailed set, even an original metal song played by actors who also happen to be great musicians.

Directed by Paul Tei, who also crafts a tart and funny performance as drummer Nicky Green, BroadSword flows from Ramirez's interest in music, myths and fantasy, but it also underscores his ability to work those elements into a solid and involving story. BroadSword involves deals with the Devil -- mesmerizingly played by a dapper, peanut-gobbling Gregg Weiner -- but it is also observantly grounded in issues that resonate with the mere mortals watching it.

Ramirez weaves loyalty, betrayal, self-interest, love, loss, secrets and more into the story of BroadSword, a never-quite-made-it heavy metal band from New Jersey Both Nicky and bass player Vic Viporino (Scott Genn) still live in Rahway, having traded their rock star dreams for jobs that keep food on the table.

We meet them in the cluttered basement ''bat cave'' that was home to Richie Gomez, the crazy musical genius who wrote the band's songs -- and who, some months earlier, up and vanished. Everyone has come to mourn and remember, though Richie's body was never found. And after Becca Worth (Sofia Citarella), the no-longer-young girl from across the street shows up, so does Richie's brother Tony.

Tony ''Trash'' Gomez (Erik Fabregat), it turns out, is the guy who broke up the band when he got a better offer. He and Nicky have issues, and within minutes the two are verbally slicing and dicing each other: If Tei and Fabregat, two intricately adroit actors, were fighting with real broadswords, there would be blood all over the basement.

The mythical element, one that proves relevant to Richie's disappearance, is explained by an older stranger named Johann Arcain (George Schiavone), an expert in arcane (get it?) stories and musicology.

Unfortunately, on opening night, either Schiavone went blank or too much dialogue had been trimmed, and that vital explanation did a Richie and largely vanished.

If you're a fan of insightful, beautifully modulated writing coupled with great acting and design, BroadSword  is must-see theater. You're likely to find yourself smiling from Weiner's first jittery appearance to the last reverberating note of Fabregat's original, blazing Song for Richie.

Theatre Review: Broadsword

By Mary Damiano on April 13, 2009

Rockin' Down the Highway to Hell
Music and mysticism collide in Broadsword

By Mary Damiano

There aren't many theatres that would hand out a set of earplugs along with a program to their audience. But they do things differently at Mad Cat--this time around doing a play by Marco Ramirez that mixes heavy metal music with a strong dose of mysticism, that has even spurred a gig outside of the theatre.

In Broadsword, Ramirez and Mad Cat invite the audience down to the basement of the Gomez house in the blue-collar, working-class city of Rahway, New Jersey Friends Nicky (Paul Tei) and Vic (Scott Genn) wander down to the basement to reminisce about their friend Richie on the day of his funeral. They're later joined by Tony ( Erik Fabregat) Richie's estranged brother. The four were once members of the local band Broadsword, until Tony was lured away to be a solo singer 16 years before, effectively betraying his family and friends and breaking up the band. Later, a musical pen pal of Richie's arrives with an interesting if far-fetched story that compels Broadsword to reunite to restore Richie to the land of the living.

The plot of Broadsword is good creepy fun, but it goes deeper to examine family, friendship and loyalty. It follows a similar pattern to the last Ramirez full-length play that Mad Cat produced, Mister Beast. Both involve important off-stage characters to whom something bad happens, both have a creepy old man character who shows up with a far-fetched story about what happened and what must happen to make things right, both mix working-class values with the supernatural.

Ramirez has an ear for dialogue and finds poetry in simple lines. "Even the graffiti was faded, like a secret," says one character describing a place where Broadsword used to play. While Broadsword is a satisfying piece in most ways, it still needs some work. While Ramirez nails the relationships between the guy characters, he needs to flesh out the play's lone female character, Becca. A constant presence throughout, her connection to the guys, and the house, for that matter, is sketchy. When it is finally brought up in the second act, it feels too pat, too slap-dash. Also, the climax comes a little too quickly in the second act, a little more struggle would be nice.

Mad Cat's production is top notch, a total sensory experience. From the heavy metal posters on the walls to the empty beer bottles on the shelves, Joe Kimble captures basement-band chic. Gregg Weiner, as the enigmatic Man in White, gives a mesmerizing performance, especially in his opening monologue, massaging Ramirez's words with gleeful schmooze. Tei is dynamic, capturing the spirit and physicality of a real Jersey boy. Fabregat delivers a terrific performance, conveying the conflict and nuance in his character. Fabregat, by the way, is morphing into a unique musical performer--he rocked out as Meatloaf in Mad Cat's Mixtape last November and was part of the ensemble in Adding Machine at GableStage. Genn isn't given very much to do as the even-handed presence in the band, but he does get some good lines.

Tei, Genn and Fabregat also play their own instruments and sing a song Fabregat wrote. The guys liked playing together so much that they're playing a gig as Broadsword at a club after the April the 25 performance.

George Schiavone provides some moving and funny moments, even though he shoulders most of the exposition in the play. Kudos especially to Sofia Citerella for embodying the Jersey girl from across the street mentality, even though she's too young and vivacious for the part.  Broadsword is Ramirez's best full-length work to date and one of Mad Cat's best productions. Don't miss it.

Broadsword runs through May 2 at the Light Box, 3000 Biscayne Blvd., Miami.  For more information, visit www.madcattheatre.org

Mad Cat Theatre Dabbles in Diabolism with Broadsword

By Brandon K. Thorp

Broadsword, a new play showing at the Mad Cat Theatre Company, is the story of a fictional New Jersey metal band that never went anywhere. The guys broke up 19 years ago. Their former lead guitarist, a reclusive genius named Richie, has disappeared. He had spent his life in his mother's basement, working out arcane musical formulas on his guitar and cataloguing them on a series of cassettes. Broadsword, written by Hialeah's Marco Ramirez (who is finishing his studies at Juilliard), is set in that basement, the same basement where the band — also called Broadsword — once practiced, and where its remaining members meet now for the first time in two decades, on the occasion of Richie's funeral.

A similar production in most other theaters would proceed more or less as follows: The musicians would discover what they lost when they gave up their band. They would bare their souls, come to a realization about the fleeting nature of youth, and find "closure." Perhaps, in a scene of resolution and acceptance, they would dust off their instruments and play something somber and mature — or they would put away the childish things of rock 'n' roll and toss a last, meaningful glance at their untouched instruments as they trudge up the cellar stairs and flick off the lights. Broadsword is not that play. Ramirez is never satisfied with mere meaningfulness, nor is he content to leave Richie languishing as a "face on a milk carton." Ramirez wants to bring the fucker back.

How to do it? Well, you can bet it won't involve a private eye. Ramirez's aesthetic won't permit it. He loathes the mundane. In his plays, murders are committed not by psychopaths, but by werewolves (as in last year's Mr. Beast, which also premiered at Mad Cat). Disappeared guitarists don't hitch rides out of town; they run afoul of the Devil at the crossroads and are spirited away, leaving nothing but a set of charred footprints on the cellar carpet.

Indeed, charred footprints are all that's left of poor Richie, and the folks assembled in the basement — remaining Broadsword members Tony (Erik Fabregat), bassist Vic (Scott Genn), and drummer Nicky (Paul Tei), plus old-time fan and friend Becca (Sofia Citarella) — wouldn't know what to make of them if it weren't for the arrival of Johann Arcain (George Schiavone): a dusty, musty old musicologist and former Vatican scholar who for years has been carrying on a secret correspondence with Richie. The subject of their communication was black magic — a special kind of black magic, which the playwright invented for the occasion, that draws inspiration from old ecclesiastical fears of certain musical structures such as the Devil's Interval, Charlie Daniels songs, and old myths about virtuoso musicians who trafficked with demons. As Arcain explains: "Your friend believed, as I do, that conventional methods of looking at musical notation are limiting. And that within certain intervals — between the tones — there are new keys! Undiscovered sounds! Tones between tones!" And these tones, when combined, can do shocking things. When Arcain plays one of the cassettes from Richie's catalogue, lights flicker, glass shatters, and Broadsword's remaining members cower in fear.

In a theatrical milieu such as ..South Florida..'s, where realism proliferates and artistic weirdness — especially of the myth-making, wall-shaking, horror-movie supernatural variety — is usually repressed, it is gratifying to see a theater go balls to the wall for a premise as flaky and crazy as this one. Yet on opening night, it seemed the actors were a little uneasy with it. The notable exception was Gregg Weiner, who plays an unnamed rock 'n' roll impresario with above-it-all coolness, iced with contempt so sincere he doesn't even bother masking it. (In fact, he's downright menacing, for reasons that become clear only later.) And while the rest aren't bad, they are strangely muted. Tei, Genn, and especially Fabregat are three of SoFla's most vibrant actors, and in a show about rock 'n' roll, they should be cranked to 11, not tuned to a polite six. Their mostly soft voices and uncharacteristically leaden facial expressions made me think, Damn, bringing a comic book to life must be hard.

They get it done, though, which is enough. As Broadsword gathers momentum, its individual characters almost disappear. You don't care about them; you simply want to find out what's on those fucking tapes. As Richie's friends unravel the mystery of his disappearance and learn the terrible risks they must take to get him back, the house fills with the tingly anticipation of discovery and the nervous suspicion that lying just behind the walls of this basement is something other.

Corny? Yes. But also exciting in a way that burrows right to the guts of what most of us sense when we listen to a certain kind of music. There really is something diabolical to be heard in Robert Johnson's "Stones in My Passway" or Jeff Buckley's "Dream Brother" (to name two artists mentioned explicitly in the script), or even in sitting down at a piano and plunking out the Devil's Interval for yourself (C and F-sharp will do it). In some indefinable way, this music is dangerous — just like the song Broadsword's remaining members play in the final scene, for which Genn and Tei took a crash course in music performance. (Fabregat, who wrote the song, is an accomplished guitarist.) By then, Arcain's mystic jabberings, however ridiculous, have you half-convinced that life or death could hang in the balance of a song if it's good enough. Broadsword is an homage to that potent music, to art so powerful it can devour a man like Richie or Robert Johnson, or bring him back to life.

Hialeah playwright a voice from the MTV generation

A comic book-loving playwright -- born and bred in Hialeah -- is making waves in the theater world.

BY CHRISTINE DOLEN

cdolen@MiamiHerald.com

Marco Ramirez grew up on 68th Street in West Hialeah.   He was a chubby, brainy kid, a self-described ''dork'' who won the spelling bee at Dupuis Elementary two years in a row.

Today, the handsome Ramirez is one of the theater world's hot young voices, a master of the short-form play, an award-winning talent more influenced by comic books and MTV than by the Latino playwrights who came before him.

Now studying playwriting at New York's Juilliard School, Ramirez has seen his life this spring turn into an exciting blur of plane trips, openings, awards and what-will-happen-next suspense. Friday night, ..Miami..'s Mad Cat Theatre company opens BroadSword, a full-length Ramirez play about the reuniting members of a New Jersey heavy metal band.

Very cool, but he's a modest guy. And you can almost hear him thinking: How did a kid from Hialeah get here?''

The days leading up to this weekend have been particularly happy-hectic for Ramirez. Just last Saturday, he and actress-girlfriend Ceci Fernandez sat in a crowd of bigwigs at the Louisville Humana Festival of New American plays where his stunning little play, 3:59 am: a drag race for two actors, won him the Heideman Award (the top national honor for short-form drama) and a $1,000 prize for the second time in three years.....

Before his big night at the festival, he had another pinch-me moment. At a conference on southern literature in Chattanooga, Tenn, he was on a playwrights' panel with two Pulitzer Prize winners, Marsha Norman ('night, Mother) and Beth Henley (Crimes of the Heart). He picked up another honor while he was there -- the Bryan Foundation Award for Drama from the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

Norman, co-director of the Playwrights Program at Juilliard School, nominated him for his latest honor. Her assessment of 3:59 am, as quoted by Henley on the Bryan Award: His new 10-minute play about drag racers in the middle of the night is, without a doubt, the best 10-minute play written in the last 20 years.''

The fast-talking, soft-spoken Ramirez tries to take it all in stride. But mostly, he's awestruck.

'You can imagine my face when I walked out of the subway and got a message on my phone saying, Hi, Marco, this is Beth, Beth Henley. I'd like to talk about the panel we'll be doing together,' '' Ramirez recalls And I was like: Crimes of the Heart Beth Henley is calling my phone?''.

This may prove to be another big weekend in Ramirez's world, and not just because of the BroadSword opening. Sunday night, he'll be at the Warner Theatre in Washington, waiting to learn whether a collection of short plays he wrote on commission for the Kennedy Center -- Mermaids, Monsters and the World Painted Purple -- wins the Charles MacArthur Award for Outstanding New Play or Musical at the 25th annual Helen Hayes Awards.

It's a blizzard of attention for a guy who confesses that he blasts music and likes to wear only boxer shorts while he writes. But the people who have known Ramirez longest say they're not at all surprised by how his young career is going.

''Marco wrote a play called Domino, based on his grandfather, in high school,'' says Ana Mederos-Blanco, his former teacher in the magnet program at Coral Reef Senior High School All the men in the play talked about how they didn't want to die before Cuba was free. Marco was able to understand the family, cultural and political connections of that age group. He's an old soul.''

The worlds Ramirez creates are the work of a playwright who happens to be Cuban American and a Miamian, and you can hear heritage and home in some of his writing. But the influences he cites, besides comic books, are science fiction, action movies and, just lately, Cormac McCarthy novels and the music of Tom Waits. He's a playwright for the MTV generation, which has made many people who fret about the future of theater quite excited.

Mad Cat founder Paul Tei, who is directing and acting in BroadSword, says of Ramirez, I don't think Marco is trying to appease anyone. If he wanted to make it right away, he'd write Spanish magical realism. He'd have a goat flying in. We have similar interests: comic books, music, films, video games. His language fits our vision.''

One of Ramirez's peers in South Florida's small-but-growing community of playwrights is Michael McKeever. The two met when both wrote plays for City Theatre's popular Summer Shorts Festival, which first included a Ramirez play just a year after he graduated from high school.

The widely produced McKeever has come to think of Ramirez as a kind of ''talented little brother'' without ego or arrogance.

''He's so wise beyond his years, but at the same time, he has a really youthful spirit and an innocence. He's an old soul wrapped in the imagination of a child,'' McKeever says He's got a comic-book nerdiness, an incredible sense of humor and a razor-sharp intelligence. I believe he's going to be a superstar.''

Ramirez is working on two more full-length plays, one a ''hip-hop comic book play,'' the other about ''a missing woman, the brother who loves her and maybe some aliens.'' He acknowledges that he has struggled some in learning how to craft longer plays.

''I'm from the MTV and Nintendo generation,'' he says If I'm writing 90 pages of a play, I want them all to be as exciting as each other. But I'm learning to pace myself and look for times to be quiet and subtle.''

He doesn't want to be labeled a Cuban-American writer or a Latino playwright, nor does he want to be only a playwright. He wants to do it all. But he remains appreciative if wary of everything coming his way.

''It's easy to huff your own steam,'' he says, grinning.   Norman calls him ''a brave new writer on the edge of a stunning career'' and adds, Nobody is expecting him. But his charm and his growing understanding of the aching heart of his generation will gain him access to the best stages in America. The biggest hope of all is that his savvy neon work will bring young people into the theater to experience the inner lives of people they have only fantasized about in video games and music videos.''