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Regional Reviews: St. Louis The Diary of Anne Frank Also see Richard's review of Antigone
In this updated version, a few alterations to Anne give us a young woman who's even more immediate and alive and honest. And even a little bit reckless at heart. The 1997 brush-up, by Wendy Kesselman, makes her more real, and further demonstrates Anne's powers as a diarist, as when we hear of her adolescent fantasies. There are reportedly alterations, too, that put more emphasis on the faith-lives of the characters on stage. I just happened to have been born into the wrong faith-life to figure it out, even though I'd just seen the play and the film less than two days apart. As the revisions come from the original diary itself, you might say they just de-Bowdlerized a well-known story, dramatized for stage and film by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett. The results of the re-write are even more compelling (and truthful) than what we have come to think of as "the original." And this version, directed for the stage by Gary Wayne Barker, is everything you want it to be. Therefore, I suppose, it's also everything you dread, too. Mr. Barker and delightful Samantha Moyer (in the title role) give us an Anne who is endlessly alive: in the throes of passage from childhood to adolescence. Knowing her ultimate fate gives everything a double-edged quality, of joy and tragedy racing off in opposite directions. Bobby Miller (recently voted the city's best actor in an online poll) plays Anne's father, and carries with him all the crushing burden of returning to the attic years later, after the war. Amy Loui, as Anne's mother, has fire burning behind the walls of her old-world façade, and Leo B. Ramsey is remarkable, almost wildly alive as the boy, Peter Van Daan, but never going too far. There's a burgeoning, claustrophobic "lifeboat" feeling, as the pressure takes its toll (the Frank family must hide in a spice warehouse attic after the German occupation of Denmark in World War II). Then the Van Daans show up, followed by a bemused dentist (another frequent "best actor" honoree, Terry Meddows). One of my favorites, Jason Grubbe, is Mr. Van Daan, the man of insatiable appetites, and Margeau Steinau his wife, still glowing deliciously from a life of local glamor in Amsterdam, before the rise of Hitler. Taylor Steward does well showing the first cracks in the desperate situation as Anne's older sister, and Eric Dean White tries to appear upbeat as the war, and the hunt for Jews in hiding, wears on. Does it matter, in the end, that we have this additional, life-affirming evidence of a 13- and 14-year-old girl coming to terms with her own impossible circumstances? Yes, it matters a lot, because the more honest and real she becomes, the more powerful her story. Through November 2, 2014, at the Jewish Community Center, just west of Lindbergh Blvd. on Scheutz Rd. For more information visit www.newjewishtheatre.org. Cast Production Staff * Member, Actors Equity Association, the professional union of actors and stage managers in the USA. Photo: John Lamb
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