REVIEW: LAST NIGHT OF BALLYHOO

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Posted: December 13, 2008 - 9:08 am

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"Ballyhoo": Kate Williams and Jill Yarbrough in Anchorage Community Theatre's production.

By MAIA NOLAN

Anchorage Community Theatre offers an alternative to conventional holiday fare with “The Last Night of Ballyhoo,” which opened Friday. There are no magical spirits or gift-bearing magi to be seen; rather, Alfred Uhry’s comedy uses the Christmas season to deal with the issue of Jewish identity in 1939 Atlanta.

“The Last Night of Ballyhoo” opens on the day of the Atlanta premiere of “Gone With the Wind” and follows the holiday adventures of cousins Lala Levy (played by Kate Williams) and Sunny Freitag (played by Jill Yarbrough) as they prepare for Ballyhoo, an annual gathering of young Jews from across the south. Lala and Sunny’s respective plans are complicated by the arrival of Joe Farkas (Kevin Bennett), a new employee of their uncle’s who has recently relocated to Atlanta from Brooklyn, and who is surprised by the extent to which Lala and Sunny’s family, and other Atlanta Jewish families, have abandoned most of the religious practices and cultural trappings of Judaism. Ultimately, and at first unwillingly, Joe forces members of the family to confront their own prejudices.

“Ballyhoo” is a great choice for a non-traditional holiday show, and the performance Friday was generally enjoyable, but on the whole the production feels fairly rough. The pacing was often uneven; there were moments at which actors clearly dropped lines; and on several occasions one performer accidentally used the wrong name in talking about other characters, which was a bit confusing. The Southern accents tend to be somewhat inconsistent; they swing between not-quite-there and over-the-top, and there are split seconds at which some actors almost veer into British accents.

Bennett’s Joe is the most consistent performance. He’s believably earnest and passionate, although he and Yarbrough don’t have quite the chemistry one might like in a pair of romantic leads.

I continue to be impressed by what ACT is able to do with its performance space. For “Ballyhoo,” Brian Saylor has designed an expansive, versatile set, one end of which transforms from a dining room to a train to a country club and back again. The only drawback is that, because the current stage setup is so wide, at times being in the center of the house feels a bit like sitting too close to the television screen. The back row might be the best choice for this show.

Still, “Ballyhoo” has its moments, most of them provided by Williams (who occasionally goes a little overboard but gets away with it because she is so thoroughly entertaining as Southern belle Lala) and newcomer Annia Windham, who plays Reba, Sunny’s mother. Windham recently moved to Anchorage from Germany by way of the Netherlands and Sweden, and while there’s an undeniably European flavor to her Southern dialect, she pulls off the accent well and delivers an excellent performance. She’s a welcome addition to the local theatrical community, and I look forward to seeing her onstage again.

“The Last Night at Ballyhoo” runs Thurs.-Sat. at 7 p.m. and Sun. at 3 p.m. through Jan. 11 at Anchorage Community Theatre, 1133 E. 70th Ave. For ticket reservations, call 868-4913 or visit www.actalaska.org.

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