Sunday, September 24, 2000

'Expectations' more than lives up to its name

By MORRIS SULLIVAN
NEWS-JOURNAL CORRESPONDENT

DAYTONA BEACH — Charles Dickens grew up in the mean streets of industrial London, the son of a poor Navy clerk. At 12, while his father was incarcerated in Marshalsea Debtor's Prison, the boy lived alone in a lodging house and worked in a factory.

The experience left an indelible impression on the young man, who, although he couldn't have realized it at the time, had Great Expectations."

Dickens became a masterful storyteller; his greatest works are built around such universal human themes that they easily survive the absence of the debtor's prisons and workhouses that inspired them.

Seaside Music Theater's stage adaptation of "Great Expectations" opened Friday night at the Daytona Beach Community College Theater Center. From its first moments, the production promises to present a wonderfully faithful retelling of Dickens' story. Much of the time, the production lives up to expectations.

The story concerns Pip (played as a child by David Pandich and as a young man by Derrick Peterson), an orphan who lives in the "marsh country" outside London with his older sister and her blacksmith husband. One day, Pip is led to the home of Miss Havisham (Wendy Lehr), an eccentric and ostentatiously wealthy old woman who has spent most of her last 20 years obsessively wallowing in her own heartbreak.

Miss Havisham has an adopted daughter, Estella (played as a young girl by Heather Friedman and as an adult by Lindley Gibbs). The old woman has raised the beautiful girl as a living act of revenge against men, doing everything in her power to turn the girl into a cold and heartless but beautiful woman.

Upon Pip's first acquaintance with Estella, he becomes infatuated with her, and the cruel young woman delights in insulting his commonness until she finally makes him cry. Pip tells Estella he'll never cry because of her again; to himself, he resolves to become worthy of her by becoming "a gentleman."

The story turns when Miss Havisham's attorney, Jaggers (Gary Briggle), informs Pip that he will come into a fortune and is to begin immediately his transition from country commoner to London gentleman. Pip assumes, and we are allowed to assume with him, that his relationship with Estella catalyzed the enormous changes in his life. We don't learn until the beginning of the second act that the wheels were set in motion far earlier than Pip imagined, and that realization is followed by a sequence of events in which seemingly unrelated threads of plot converge in deliciously surprising ways.

This adaptation uses nearly all the crucial moments in Pip's life, and even some of the less critical but enjoyable ones. For example, the adaptation could have easily discarded a relatively minor character, the Aged Parent (Doug Landrum) of Pip's confidante, Wemmick (Benjamin Howes). However, the choice to include the character brings a wonderful warmth to the second act.

It must have been a daunting task, staging the myriad short scenes that tell this story. They jump quickly from London to the country, from one parlor to another, from blacksmith shop to the street, and from office to the middle of the river. The multi-tiered set lends itself well to this. It evokes the interior of an industrial-age sweatshop into which glide the necessary pieces that move the action from one location to another. The narration continues through the brief scene changes, so the audience never has to sit in the dark and wait.

This production works best when it's naturalistic: when the adaptation allows the characters to sink into Dickens' dialogue. Some of these scenes are remarkable. Dickens was himself an actor and founded his own company of thespians. Perhaps because of his predisposition toward the theatrical, much of his dialogue lends itself to the stage. When this adaptation lets the characters interact with the lines Dickens gave them, the result is often stunning.

For example, there is a wonderful scene in which Pip has dinner with new roommate, Herbert Pocket (Gary Cadwallader). The connection between Cadwallader's Herbert and Peterson's Pip makes the scene lively, funny and warm. The relationship between Pip and Wemmick, too, is inspired with a touching light-heartedness.

Overall, the cast competently portrays the depths of Dickens' characters, most of whom are challengingly complex. Gary Briggle conveys both the cool empiricism and underlying empathy of Jaggers, for example, and Doug Landrum manages to make Pip's benefactor and nemesis, Magwitch, both threatening and sympathetic. Both Gibbs as the adult Estella and Friedman as the younger one display her icily cruel outer shell while revealing the desperate longing for a human connection that seethes within her.

Lehr's Miss Havisham is frighteningly strange; her character retains that strangeness even as she gradually becomes sympathetic, and her final moments are deeply moving as she confronts the waste to which she's relegated her own life and those of others.

Show information

What: Seaside Music Theater's "Great Expectations."

When: Thursday through Saturday and Oct. 5-7 at 8 p.m.; 2 p.m. matinees today and Oct. 1, 5 and 8.

Where: The DBCC Theater Center, 1200 W. International Speedway Blvd., Daytona Beach.

Tickets: $20-$22; under 18, $10; college students, $12; Volusia and Flagler schoolteachers, $18-$20; available by calling the SMT box office at (904) 252-6200, (904) 255-3146, 1 (800) 854-5592. Also at the box office at 176 N. Beach St., Daytona Beach.