Not since Hedwig and the Angry Inch have I so enjoyed a one-person musical about an internationally ignored female artist overshadowed by her famous male partner as much as I enjoyed Rebecca Simmonds and Jack Miles’ enchanting In Clay.
Making its American premiere at Signature Theatre, following sellout runs in London, the jazz-infused portrait of early-20th-century French ceramicist and painter Marie-Berthe Cazin doesn’t have too much else in common with hard-rocking Hedwig. Except that both shows are powered by a knockout batch of songs, and the galvanizing force of a woman reclaiming her time, her art, and her story.
Also, Marie-Berthe Cazin actually existed (1872-1971), though history has largely relegated her to just a footnote in the fame of her sculptor and ceramicist husband Michel Cazin, his artist father Jean-Charles, and painter mother Marie.
But secretly, Michel owed much of his success to Marie-Berthe, whose artwork he sometimes would pass off as his own. Here, now, embodied and sung exquisitely by Alex Finke, she’s bursting to let that secret out, and let herself be known.
The songs and script — with book and lyrics by Simmonds, and music and lyrics by Miles — serve as soul-baring, funny, sharply perceptive vehicles for her tale, as she regales us from her top-floor apartment studio in 1930s Paris.
Realized in fastidious detail via Tony Cisek’s canny scenic design, the apartment, with its beamed ceilings and skylight, and shelves of books and decorative art pieces, more than satisfies as a Parisian artist’s fortress of solitude. It looks like a cool, cozy spot where you might pull up a pillow and kick back to the French-inflected jazz of the show’s four-piece band, led on piano by music director Matt Herbert.
The show’s main instrument, Finke wields impressive range and vocal control taking us down the winding path of Marie-Berthe’s life. Kimberly Senior’s direction keeps her comfortably active around the studio, throwing clay on a pottery wheel or dancing by herself, occupied with being, more than performing.
Marked by joys and triumphs, as well as personal and professional betrayals, love, loss, even war, Marie-Berthe’s story is shaped not just by her passion for art, as expressed in opening song “End,” and her artistic tutelage under patriarch Jean-Charles Cazin, the subject of jaunty tune “Talent.”
She’s also greatly influenced by her lifelong friendship with Henriette Tirman, an artist who enjoyed far greater renown in their day, yet always championed the work of her peer Marie-Berthe. The sweetly uplifting “Two,” in which Marie-Berthe sings of the perfect union of “Just we two,” posits Henriette as the first true love of Marie-Berthe’s life, albeit a platonic one.
Staunch feminist Henriette sees Marie-Berthe giving up her power to her husband and calls her out on it. She challenges and pushes her friend to assert her own artistic identity, outside of her husband’s shadow.
A powerful catalyst for change, in the world at large, and in her circle of friends, Henriette turns out to be the hero Marie-Berthe needs, and another revelation in the show’s enlightening excavation of this unsung history. Finke’s appealing portrayal of Henriette adds yet another rich layer to a brilliant performance in which she persuasively switches between multiple characters, often within the space of a verse or a line.
Of course, she does all that while singing the house down, hitting notes of sorrow and seduction, and everything in between, dramatizing and exhibiting the power of an artist whose talent won’t be denied.
In Clay (★★★★☆) runs through Feb. 1 at Signature Theatre, 4200 Campbell Ave. in Arlington, with Pride Night performances on Jan. 9 and 23, and Discussion Night performances on January 7 and 27. Tickets are $47 to $97. Call 703-820-9771, or visit sigtheatre.org.
About halfway through Jay Kelly, Noah Baumbach directs a love scene. I don't mean that there is a sex scene (those rarely appear in Baumbach's cinematic universe, except the mortifyingly awkward kind). I mean that Baumbach himself appears onscreen, in a wink-nod cameo, as a fictitious filmmaker, choreographing an intimate scene between our hero, Jay Kelly (played in flashback by Charlie Rowe), and an actress playing his wife (Eve Hewson), who becomes his real-life paramour, though not real real-life, but -- ah, who's to say what's real anyway?
Baumbach has never been the sort of director to place himself onscreen, but the indulgence fits with a certain metatextual thread in Jay Kelly, a wry Hollywood satire and wistful character study infused with the director's signature familial discord. Here is a film about making sense of your life when, as Jay puts it, "all my memories are movies"; a film about sifting through the thin thread that separates public persona and private identity. How much of your life is real when millions of people know and adore you for playing someone else? And what about the real family you neglected to pursue those celluloid dreams -- is it too late to make amends?
Is willowy Londoner Bella truly going mad, or is her enigmatic husband Jack carrying out a devious plot to convince her she's losing her mind? And if so, to what end? In modern terms, Bella is desperately pondering whether Jack is trying to gaslight her into thinking she's going insane.
The terminology and the plot of Johnna Wright and Patty Jamieson's Deceived, now at Everyman Theatre, derive from Patrick Hamilton's Victorian thriller Gas Light, which premiered in 1938, before being adapted into the Oscar-winning 1944 film Gaslight, starring Ingrid Bergman as distressed newlywed Paula.
As director Joe Calarco put it to the press night audience at Signature Theatre's Fiddler on the Roof, he had a simple pitch for what would become his twentieth Signature production.
For his Fiddler, Calarco -- whose 2017 Jesus Christ Superstar at the Northern Virginia theater still ranks as tops among the handful I've seen -- envisioned a table in the round. The family table, the community table, where so much that matters in life happens, would serve as the center for this telling of the musical composed by Jerry Bock, with lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, and book by Joseph Stein.
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