She has almost all the things she seeks — including grace and healing — inside her. It’s just that she hasn’t had the right mirror to reflect her innate beauty.
Violet, the title character of Jeanine Tesori’s musical about a scarred young woman who thinks that she’s too ugly to be loved, is getting a splendid embodiment by Annika Isbell for Ten Thousand Things Theater.
Director Kelli Foster Warder has chosen not to use makeup to show the character’s disfigurement, sustained when she was a child and now the impetus for a bus trip from her South Carolina hometown to Tulsa, Okla., where she hopes to be healed by a television preacher (Tom Reed).
On the bus ride for “A Healing Touch,” Violet meets a swath of Americans, including potential love interests Flick (Mitchell Douglas), a Black soldier and Flick’s fellow soldier Monty (Ryan London Levin), who is white. The action also flashes back to Young Vi’s childhood with her overwhelmed and ill-equipped single father (Charlie Clark).
In Foster Warder’s production, Violet is the only one who can see her scar and who believes so deeply in her unsightliness that she wants to reconstruct her face with features from her screen heroines, including Ava Gardner’s eyebrows, Grace Kelly’s nose, Judy Garland’s chin and Ingrid Bergman’s cheekbones.
In Isbell, we see an unadorned but striking young woman with presence and rangy acting chops. She, and Sophina Saggau as Young Vi, take us into Violet’s hurts and scant hopes.
But it is when Isbell starts to sing that she takes her character to another level. Isbell, Douglas and Saggau are deeply affecting on “Bring Me to Light,” an emotive plea for wholeness that functions across personal and religious faith. It’s the capstone number of “Violet” and one that causes chills.
The production is a gorgeous one, done, of course, in Ten Thousand Things’ signature format with Sarah Bahr’s gestural set pieces and props, Samantha Fromm Haddow’s 1960s-era costumes and topnotch theatrical talent.
