"The Last Night of Ballyhoo"

A real joy: "The Last Night of Ballyhoo" at Theater J housed at the Ed Lavitch DC Jewish Community Center.  The play was written by Alfred Uhry who also wrote "Driving Miss Daisey" and like that play deals with what it was like to be Jewish in Atlanta in a bygone time.  Seen the cusp of WW II, the focus is not.  Instead, Uhry resurrects a historical celebration called Ballyhoo as the frame  for his story-telling.  Ballyhoo was a major happening in the southern US Jewish cultural world wherein young men and women would descend upon Atlanta for a week of socializing and fun that would culminate in a cotillion--the highlight of the social calendar.  It was so popular a phenomenon that it drew participants from as far away as Richmond, Virginia all the way to Lake Charles, Louisiana.

The Ballyhoo that coincided with Christmastide of 1939 was of particular interest to two sister-in-laws who shared a home with the older one's brother and each had a daughter ripe for Ballyhoo festivities. In the end, each makes it to the party with an elegible young man.  The recipe provides ample laughs from start to finish as well as a canvas upon which to explore other aspects of southern/American Jewish culture of the era.

I loved the cast top to bottom and really thought the standouts were the two adult sister's in laws.  Julie-Ann Elliot as Reba Freitag had all of the best comic moments in the play and she hit them with panache and a subtlety at times that just caught the laugh in my throat.  Susan Rome played the slightly older, Boo Levy a socially obsessed and clandestinely delusional Ballyhoo-stage mother to a crisp tee!  I had seen her in an earlier production at Theater J and had no doubts about the strength of her acting.  Josh Adams played Peachy Weil, the entitled southern German Jew five generations removed from Deutschland (Generations before it WAS Deutschland!) with a great confidence.  I've seen him in two other productions in the past year where he played very different characters and I like him.  He has a lot of potential.  The other suitor was played by someone new to me, Zack Powell.  Zach could have been James Franco for all the striking similarities and I look forward to seeing him in the spring play the sassy southern drag queen in the Round House Production of "The Legend of Georgia McBride".  It will certainly determine if he's for real or not.

The costumes were beautiful.  And I can't help by thinking that the Ballyhoo dress worn by Shayna Blass as Lala was not borrowed from the St. Louis Repertory Theater's 1999 production of the same--it's absolutely the same dress that graces the cover of their playbill from their staging of this production.  Think a cross between Carol Burnett's Bill Macky wonder from her skit "Gone With The Breeze" and a Christmas tree!  But the real marvel was the set.  OMG--stunning was my immediate thought and I never saw any reason to bother replacing it.  Truly a triumph of design and execution.