‘Menagerie’ Sparkles Despite Some Flaws

A Noise Within usually treats the classics with scrupulous fidelity to original intent--a little too scrupulous, in the case of the company’s otherwise powerful “The Glass Menagerie.”

Co-directors Julia Rodriguez Elliott and Geoff Elliott resurrected a distracting device that was dropped before Tennessee Williams’ play opened on Broadway in 1945. Titles for each scene and slides that depict some of the items mentioned in the text are projected onto a screen above the stage.

The titles, mostly drawn from phrases in the text, certainly do no harm and in a few cases, serve as helpful little grace notes, pointing out the play’s ironies.

But the slides are another story. Perhaps they’re intentionally hazy because this is a memory play, but some of them verge on being indistinguishable. Others are painfully literal. When Laura and her long-awaited Gentleman Caller discuss the school nickname he gave her--”Blue Roses” (he had misunderstood when she told him she had pleurosis)--we see a slide of, yes, blue roses. No, thanks.

It’s odd that Williams ever thought up this slide show in the first place. In his notes for the acting version of the text, his description of the slides concept immediately followed another passage in which he blithely dismissed the importance of “the photographic in art.” Go figure.

At least Williams acknowledged that he didn’t regret omitting the device from the Broadway production. So why did A Noise Within feel compelled to bring it back--and then to obscure the sight lines of the slides with the top of Thomas Buderwitz’s evocative set?

The cast is superb, with co-director Elliott’s Tom and Deborah Strang’s Amanda especially pointed, funny and furious. Strang moves seamlessly from “that awful sufferin’ look,” when she confronts her daughter about the fiasco at business college, to a gleeful little bounce with which she illustrates the concept of “vivacity.”

Elliott may have slightly miscast himself; he’s too handsome in comparison to Stephen Rockwell’s Gentleman Caller. But he maintains a sardonic buzz in his voice that prevents his Tom from lapsing into dreaminess. Mother and son both speak the Southern cadences with precision and passion.

Ann Marie Lee sheds no new light on Laura but does the traditional Laura beautifully. Though Rockwell’s Gentleman Caller hardly looks like an ex-dreamboat, he conveys a genuine can-do spirit.

Music selected by the directors and Michael Welsh’s original score resourcefully range from tango to “Ave Maria,” to great effect.

* “The Glass Menagerie,” A Noise Within, 234 S. Brand Blvd., Glendale. Friday, Saturday, Wednesday, 8 p.m.; also Oct. 24, Nov. 6, 7, 16, 20, 21, 27, 30, 8 p.m.; Oct. 27, 7 p.m.; Nov. 16, Dec. 1, 2 p.m. $20-$24. (818) 546-1924. At Annenberg Theatre, Palm Springs, Nov. 23, 2 and 8 p.m.; (619) 325-4490. At Norris Theatre, Rolling Hills Estates, May 16-17; (310) 544-0403. Running time: 2 hours, 25 minutes.