ReVISIONIST HISTORY IN THE MAKING

by Tom Chesek
Red Bank Orbit

Steven Brinberg brings his uncanny and un-campy Streisand characterization back to Asbury Park, when ReVision Theatre Company presents a special performance of FUNNY GIRL.

Red Bank has the Two River Theater Company and its gleaming, glass-facade showplace of a home stage. Long Branch boasts the New Jersey Repertory Company, which works some pretty potent magic in its converted downtown storefront while they preparing for an eventual move to new custom-made digs.

There’s a third professional stage company headquartered in this neck of Monmouth County, and if you haven’t quite processed the name ReVision Theatre Company, don’t sweat it. The based-in-Asbury Park troupe is still really getting itself established, having set up shop in Asbury’s historic VFW building with a busy slate of classes, workshops and readings.

And when we say it’s “based in Asbury,” we do mean that its members use the whole city as their canvas; inhabiting historic halls, rejuvenated business buildings and long-vacant boardwalk structures like a bunch of wondrous hermit crabs.

These are the guys, after all, who famously teamed with boardwalk developers Madison Marquette to convert the amazing Carousel building into a viable venue for live performance — something it had never managed to be in its long history — when they mounted their smash revival of Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical last summer. And to think they almost considered moving to Paducah.

An actual season’s worth of entertainments was always on the drawing board for ReVision’s triad of Producing Artistic Directors (Thomas Morrissey, David Leidholdt and Stephen Bishop Seely; all veterans of Manhattan’s Genesius Theatre), and this past Saturday night, the partners and board president Bob Angelini convened a special season announcement party at Mattison Park Restaurant, itself a re-visioned bank building. Red Bank oRBit, as you probably figured, was on the scene, working the room and knocking back rootbeer martinis.

The cast of ReVision Theatre’s HAIR posed with the groundbreaking show’s co-creator James Rado, when he took in one of their sold-out performances last August.

Cast members of Hair were on hand, performing numbers from the 1967 show as well as from a couple of the new projects announced onstage by the producing partners. As Liedholdt, Morrissey and Seely revealed to the packed house, the ReVision company’s inaugural season begins in earnest on December 4, with the East Coast premiere of Scrooge in Rouge, a “British music hall Christmas Carol” that puts a manic spin on the well-roasted holiday chestnut.

In the comic piece conceived and adapted by book writer and lyricist Ricky Graham, a circa-1900 theatrical troupe is in the midst of preparations for their Christmas Carol show when seventeen of the twenty actors take ill — leaving three intrepid players to perform 23 Dickensian characters in what can only be described as a tour de farce. Presented at Asbury’s VFW Post 1333 on Lake Avenue and Bond Street, the show offers sixteen performances through December 28.

ReVision returns in 2009 with Kingdom, a “Hip Hop musical” study of two friends from the barrio whose need to belong — in this case, to the Nation of the Latin Kings — tears them apart. Featuring a score by Aaron Jafferis and Ian Williams, the show runs from April 16 to May 3 at the VFW building.

Last summer, the ReVision crew presented a one-shot fundraiser event at the historic Paramount Theatre; a revival of Hello Dolly! starring Carol Channing tribute artist Richard Skipper in the role made famous by Channing herself. “In the spirit of Dolly,” ReVision takes over the Paramount once again on July 11 for a benefit performance of the Jule Styne-Bob Merrill musical Funny Girl. Steven Brinberg, an actor-vocalist whose celebrated portrayal of Barbra Streisand has won him raves throughout the cabaret circuit (including Tim McLoone’s Supper Club) channels Babs as Fanny Brice in the show that made her a star.

Still coming together as we post this, ReVision’s summer-show production of The Full Monty comes to a location that’s yet to be determined, on the confirmed dates of August 12 through September 6. Acclaimed playwright Terrence McNally wrote the book to David Yazbek’s musicalization of the hit British film, in which a group of unemployed steelworkers find a new sense of purpose as male strippers. Doing this show in the round at the Carousel would make it the Full Monty and then some.

Info on single-ticket prices and subscription plans can be found right here. Watch Red Bank oRBit for updates; and we’ll let David Leidholdt have the last word.

“We have three specific challenges,” says the veteran director. “To find pieces that represent us, to develop shows that are able to be produced anywhere — and to get people off the beach and into the theatre!”