IF YOU GO
What:Tuesdays With Morrie by Mitch Albom and Jeffrey HatcherWhere: Caldwell Theatre Company, 7901 N. Federal Hwy., Boca Raton, through May 11When: 8 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, 2 p.m. Wednesday and Sunday (some 2 p.m. Saturday and 7 p.m. Sunday shows)Cost: $36 and $42Info: 561-241-7432 or www.caldwelltheatre.comInspiring and tender-hearted, Tuesdays With Morrie is a story -- told as a memoir, a made-for-TV movie, a two-character play -- that has touched millions upon millions of people.
Count the audiences at the Caldwell Theatre Company, where Morrie is running through May 11, among those millions.
This isn't the first time the stage version of Tuesdays With Morrie has been done in South Florida. Miami's Coconut Grove Playhouse presented the play, adapted by Mitch Albom and Jeffrey Hatcher from Albom's runaway bestseller, in the fall of 2005 as the first show of the playhouse's ill-fated 50th anniversary season -- the season that a mired-in-debt historic theater with a national reputation abruptly shut down.
Boca Raton's Caldwell, at 33 one of the region's oldest theaters, is doing just fine, however. It is winding up its first season in the new $10 million Count de Hoernle Theatre with a production of Morrie that realizes just about all of the play's potential.
The script, it should be noted, isn't as beautifully crafted as Albom's slim 1997 memoir. But it does re-create the life-altering experience its author had after he happened to catch his college mentor on an episode of Ted Koppel's Nightline in 1995.
Morrie Schwartz (Peter Haig) was a Brandeis University sociology professor who had been both teacher and friend to Albom (Jim Ballard). The student had promised to stay in touch. He didn't. Bailing from the risky career in music that Schwartz had encouraged him to pursue, Albom instead became a wildly driven and highly successful sports columnist and commentator.
But that night on Nightline, Albom once again heard a man who had meant so much to him sharing wisdom and life lessons. And he also learned that his teacher was dying of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease.
Tuesdays With Morrie is about their reconnection, about the student learning how to live a better, more fulfilling life. It is about fear, courage, guilt. And love, which Schwartz pronounces ``the only rational act.''
On Tim Bennett's abstract, autumnal set, director Michael Hall crafts a Morrie that tugs at the heart and earns the tears it coaxes forth at the end. The masterful Haig is a jaunty, cheery Morrie, a man with an open heart and a pragmatic courage. Ballard isn't quite crazed enough in the Mitch-as-workaholic scenes, a quality that's needed to set the stage for Albom's transformation. But he and Haig connect, finding the inspiring grace in a relationship that transcended death.
