'Alice' takes on feminism with fun and tenderness
01:17 AM CST on Monday, March 22, 2004
By TOM SIME / The Dallas Morning News

FLOWER MOUND – No, feminism has not gone out of style. Especially the friendly, funny kind exemplified by A...My Name Is Alice. The 1984 music and comedy revue was conceived by Joan Micklin Silver and Julianne Boyd but written and composed by just about everyone else: Lucy Simon, Anne Meara, David Zippel, Carol Hall, Richard LaGravenese, Amanda McBroom, Steve Tesich. It still holds up, as a boisterous matinee crowd testified Sunday at Flower Mound Performing Arts Theatre.

It helps to have such a superb cast. The lineup onstage includes Beth Albright, N. Wilson King, Stephanie Riggs, Cara Statham Serber and Amy Stevenson, and they're all superb under Neale Whitmore's direction. Mark Mullino's musical direction gives a strong foundation to the gallery of terrific voices.

There's little structure to the show. It's as if Ms. Silver and Ms. Boyd put out a call for entries, and put together an exhibit of the best songs and sketches they got.

All the performers are excellent. The elegant Ms. Riggs shows an unexpected knack for broad comedy, especially in "Trash," a tribute to romance novels. Ms. Serber's achingly tender singing makes the Tesich/Simon ballad "I Sure Like the Boys" a highlight. Ms. Albright has the best moves; the depth of her dance vocabulary is revealed in the amusing "Good Thing I Learned to Dance."

Ms. King is wonderfully droll, but also gets down and dirty as a blues singer in the "Honeypot" sketch. Ms. Stevenson is always a vocal powerhouse and grand comedian, but she's also moving as an elderly woman coming to terms with her sister in the piercing ballad "Sisters."

Despite the show's all-around success, it's clear that Mr. Whitmore has no clue about feminism as a cultural force. Whenever the show satirizes the women's movement, he seems to have no idea what to do. "Emily the M.B.A." is an ensemble song about idealistic young women, one of whom becomes a corporate sellout. But instead of earnest college types, Mr. Whitmore presents the women as bow-haired bubbleheads. And the "For Women Only" poems satirize those severe, man-hating puritans the movement has sometimes spawned. But Mr. Whitmore presents Ms. Stevenson in a tiara and feather boa to deliver them in a singsong, society-matron manner. It's fine, and very much on message, to have a man direct A...My Name is Alice. But he ought to at least know a separatist from a dilettante.

A ... My Name Is Alice, presented by Flower Mound Performing Arts Theatre, 1800 Gerault Road, Flower Mound, through April 4. Thursdays at 7:30 p.m., Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 2 p.m. Tickets $15 to $25. Runs 120 min. Call 972-724-2147 or go to www.fmpat.org.