OnStage is presenting All My Sons, directed by James P.
This staging is less memorable than that of Xanadu, but the enduring acuity of Miller’s play ultimately carries the day. Though these scenes are pivotal to developing the antagonist relationship between Ratched and McMurphy, the show is not lost in these moments though a little tightening would push this production up another notch.Having opened its 35th season earlier this year with a rousing production of the parodic musical Xanadu, Chula Vista’s OnStage Playhouse goes in a very different direction with Arthur Miller’s sobering family drama All My Sons. I would suspect certain decisions were made in the rehearsal process to cause this to be purposeful except that these scenes clearly do not match the intensity and style that is seen throughout the rest of the play. There are some wonderful moments that are bookended, most notably by the scenes where the patients are engaged in group therapy, where the characters seem to wander aimlessly.
Though this production is a little sluggish to start, when it finds its legs it really runs and when the cast finds themselves, they run as one well-oiled machine.ĭirector James McCullock did well in helping this cast unpack and find some great moments that keep this production humming but the direction seems uneven at times. Specific and nuanced, I found his reactions so convincing that I kept looking for people that were clearly not there. George Bailey's portrayal of Martini was another standout. His chemistry with Schmitz is palpable and believable and deliciously uncomfortable at the climax of the play. Looming large is the gripping portrayal of Chief Bromden by Kurt Kalbfleisch who brings a subtle warmth and whole lot of heart to a character who is the stark narrator of this play. The band of reprobates backing up these two features a few more stand-out performances. With such a large cast on such a small stage, these two big performances keep the gears of this production grinding and the tension between these two is palpable, uncomfortable, and achingly effective. In the play it is this battle of ego and will that plays out and wonderfully so by Carla Nell as the wretched Ratched and Stephen Schmitz as McMurphy. McMurphy, a convicted pedophile and rapist, cast as the protagonist. However, in the adaptation, it is Nurse Ratched who becomes the solitary heavy and Randall P. Often unchecked and with broad authority, thousands of patients who were given to these psychiatric hospitals underwent medical experiments and tortuous procedures that irrevocably altered their lives and abilities.
Set up to cast the medical establishment and institutionalism as the villain, the original novel places the infamous Nurse Ratched as the lackey, the representative, or the "long arm" of the medical machine that often overstepped its authority in a book that successfully shed light on a system that was quite literally out of sight and out of mind for many in this country in the 1950s and 1960s. Quietly producing some of the highest quality low-budget theatre this region has to offer, their offering of the literary classic "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" is raw, touching, and features a delightful ensemble of miscreants who do well to Dale Wasserman's adaptation of the Ken Kesey novel.
The cast of 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' at OnStage Playhouse (Source:Courtesy of OnStage Playhouse)ĭown in the South Bay, among the boutique shops and restaurants and banquet halls that line Chula Vista's Third Avenue Village, sits the little theatre that could, OnStage Playhouse.
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