Baltimore Waltz features good performances

by Matthew Falduto

City Circle - Paula Vogel's Baltimore Waltz is a very personal play written for her deceased brother. Vogel goes so far as to request theatre companies to print her brother's letter regarding his requests for his funeral in the program. City Circle did this and while I suppose it was supposed to have the effect of drawing the audience in, to me it felt like I was intruding on a rather personal story. Playwrights often use personal experiences when creating their work, but rarely so blatantly do they make that personal experience part of the show. For some, perhaps, it enriches the experience, but for me, it was rather off putting.

All that said, the actors in this show offered strong performances. Bryant Duffy, who has been a consistently good performer at a number of different venues in our area recently, is charismatically engaging as usual. He plays Carl, the brother of Anna, a young teacher who has been diagnosed with a fatal disease. Anna and Carl decide to head to Europe for one last whirlwind adventure. Duffy commands the stage throughout the show, wringing all the humor and pathos he can out of the script. Nicole Vespa, who plays Anna, turns in a fine performance as well. Perhaps she could have found a few more quiet moments for the character as she mostly seemed to have a single level of emotion, but overall she created a true character for which we developed empathy. The standout of the cast was certainly Kehry Anson Lane who played a myriad of characters throughout the show, each funnier than the previous one. Lane is well known to audiences from TCR to Riverside and everywhere in between, and the reason we see him so often is that he's just that good. He fully commits to every character, is willing to scour the words and actions for humor and drama, and presents it all in such a way that it hardly looks like he's working at all.

The set included impressive opening walls that provided a couple of interesting looks. But for a play about a journey of last hurrahs, I thought the walls could have used some color. The drab off white did nothing to enliven the scene. More troubling were the stagehands who moved benches around on stage as actors moved into place for the next scene. The stagehands didn't always seem to know where to go and were often having to awkwardly move around the actors. Once or twice could be forgiven, but as it happened over and over again, it became very distracting and pulled me out of the show every time. One hopes that this will not be an issue in future performances as they learn where they need to move to for each scene to flow smoothly into the next.

There were plenty of great moments in Baltimore Waltz. Unfortunately, the sums of the parts did not equal more than the whole, providing us with an uneven evening of entertainment.


Matthew has a Bachelor's degree in English from the University of Iowa. He has directed, acted in, and produced theater in the Iowa City area for over twelve years. He has worked with the Iowa City Community Theatre, City Circle and Dreamwell, of which he is a founder. Two of his plays have been produced in the Iowa City area. In another brief life, he also worked as a technical writer.