Philadelphia Weekly

At first glance Fanny Kemble's life was a series of paradoxes. She was a talented actress who hated the stage but loved drama. She cut an elegant picture onstage but was homely in person. She was a staunch abolitionist, but married a slaveholder. And she was a refined Englishwoman who spent most of her time schlepping her way across America in railway cars that were overcrowded, dirty and unhealthy.

But to playwright Tom Ziegler, who sets his play in a Philadelphia theater in 1869, Mrs. Kemble was a woman of great strength living in an age when the fairer sex was relegated by custom and law to a life of subservience.

The play's conceit is that Kemble is giving her final performance, a reading of Shakespeare's last play The Tempest. In an interesting but not totally successfully scenario, Ziegler attempts to use Shakespeare's play to cast light on Kemble's own tempestuous life.

Accompanied by a pianist (musical director Mark Yurkanin), Kemble (Jane Ridley) reads from Shakespeare's script and frequently stops to illustrate the parallels between her life and those of the characters in the play.

Born into a family of famous Irish actors, Kemble took to the stage to support her father's failing theater at London's Covent Garden. Audiences adored her, but for reasons never entirely clear, Kemble longed for a more conventional life, which she seemed to get when she met and married the aristocratic Philadelphian Pierce Butler while she toured America.

But the independent-minded Kemble was soon in conflict with her overbearing, controlling husband, a rift that increased when the Englishwoman accompanied her husband to the family plantation in Georgia. Abhorred by her husband's lack of concern about the barbaric living conditions of the plantation's slaves, Kemble divorced Butler, and during the years of the Civil War used her public persona to speak out against slavery.

It's an interesting life, and one worth telling, but the parallels between Kemble's experiences and those of the characters in Shakespeare's play seem vague at best.

The chief problem is that by trying to tell both Kemble's story and that of Shakespeare's play, Ziegler gives us little insight into either. Ridley's performance is astute without being flashy, and Mary A. Folino's costume design is fetching, but Jere Lee Hodgin's direction is conspicuously absent.

There are some interesting notions about the nature of the stage, and Kemble's assertions about Shakespeare's humanity are poignant, but unless you're already intimate with both Kemble's life and Shakespeare's play before entering the theater, it's difficult to see the connection between the two.

Mrs. Kemble's Tempest
Through Jan. 23. $24. Walnut Street Theatre Independence Studio on 3, 825 Walnut St. 215.574.3550. www.wstonline.org

footlights

Off the Record

When it comes to stage entertainment, Disney Theatricals has always presented shows featuring top-notch casts, directors and designers. This is again the case with the new touring show On the Record, the first Disney production constructed specifically for road travel. The four primary vocalists are accomplished, the design work is superb and Robert Longbottom's direction and choreography are smooth. Unfortunately, Longbottom's concept and Chad Beguelin's scenario are critically flawed. Set in a recording studio, Record attempts to shoehorn 64 Disney songs into a single two-and-a-half-hour show, a scenario that forces musical adapter/arranger David Chase to condense and mix the numbers so radically that the production often seems more like a race than a musical revue. In a vain attempt to provide some structure to the diverse Disney songbook, the songs are grouped either by theme (animal characters, sound gimmicks, etc.) or by film. Of the two approaches, the latter is far more successful, particularly in the case of the four tunes from Dumbo, highlighted by a wonderfully imaginative rendering of the classic "Pink Elephants on Parade." Occasionally the show does slow down long enough for a song to be fully realized, like the clever multilingual version of Beauty and the Beast's "Be Our Guest." But these moments are rare. Disney may have had great commercial success staging immense Broadway musicals (The Lion King, Aida, Beauty and the Beast), but when choosing songs for inclusion in Record, you wish it had shown a little more restraint. (J.C.R.)

>> Through Jan. 16. $25-$85. Academy of Music, Broad and Locust sts. 215.893.1999. www.kimmelcenter.org