Out West Arts: Performance at the end of the world

The summer theater season is in full swing in San Diego where the Old Globe has recently rolled out all of their outdoor Lowell Davies Festival Theater productions for the summer. Adrian Noble has returned for the season as Artistic Director for the Globe's 2012 Shakespeare Festival and has stuck with the format of recent years with a comedy, As You Like It, a drama or history play, Richard III, and another classic play. This year the non-Shakespeare classic is Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s Inherit the Wind, directed by Noble in an attractive if somewhat golden-hued production. The play is a fantasy of the 1925 Scopes “Monkey” trial during which a Tennessee school teacher was put on trial for violating state law by teaching evolution to his students. The play is a bit more idea-oriented than narrative-oriented with its speeches from Matthew Harrison Brady, the play’s stand-in for William Jennings Bryan, and Henry Drummond, the ersatz version of
 Clarence Darrow. Of course, the fact that there are people in America who still want to have these inane 100-year-old arguments over evolution does make the show eerie, but its important to remember that the authors had other targets. The play is also a thinly veiled attack on McCarthyism in the 1950s and is as much about socially responsible critical thinking as it is about evolution. What Lawrence and Lee saw as a somewhat out of date debate about science was actually a vehicle for bigger fish.

This message still communicates with the audience, and in San Diego there were several who applauded and cheered Drummond’s passionate defense of the right and responsibility to think freely in this country. Noble doesn’t always quite manage to hit all the notes in the show, though. The leads, Robert Foxworth as Drummond and Adrian Sparks as Brady were both believable and relaxed, fleshing out their many passionate speeches with real personality. But there was something hazy and softly lit about the show with a physical sensation and busy movement among the cast that made the whole thing feel as much like The Music Man as anything else. The design and physical movement tended toward sunny, bright, and sweetly comic nostalgia bumping up against the more biting political commentary of the show. On balance, though, it’s a worthwhile revisiting of a show that does have contemporary overtones.

Far more successful was Lindsay Posner’s staging of Richard III with its graffiti covered concrete wall sections and angular modern costuming. These are not unusual visual cues for Richard III - a play most design teams find irresistible, placing it among the obvious aesthetic debris of 20th-century fascism. Posner’s team isn’t above that either, but the direction is sharp and quickly paced even in those moments when the level of angst is cranked up higher than it need be. The title role goes to Jay Whittaker who plays the villainous king often with a barely restrained glee that works well for him physically. He’s about the most handsome, physically robust looking Richard III that you’re likely to see and, while he may not look the part of a malformed despot, he makes it work legitimately in his own skin. The women in the cast are uniformly strong including Vivia Font as Lady Anne, Dana Green as Queen Elizabeth, and a particularly commanding Robin Moseley as Queen Margaret. The looming sense of dread and the inevitability of small minds is just as palpable here as in Inheret the Wind with the benefit, of course, of Shakespeare’s beautiful words. It’s a solid quality production that should rightfully highlight this year’s festival.

And, while not a part of the festival itself, right across the plaza, the Old Globe is presenting one of their two big summer indoor shows – Michael Kramer and K.S. Moynihan’s Divine Rivalry. (The other, Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage will open later this month.) The historical event behind Divine Rivalry was the real life meeting between two giants of the Italian Renaissance, DaVinci and Michaelangelo who were brought in to each paint opposing frescos at Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio – neither of which was completed. The two artists were contemporaries of one another and did meet for just such an occasion, which, in the play, is presented as a contest sponsored by none other than another Florentine contemporary of the artists, Machiavelli. Interesting fodder to be sure, but Kramer and Moynihan don’t seem to have much to offer in terms of dramatic exploration or development of the material. The show is filled with ironic and unfunny in-jokes all delivered with a winking nod to the audience. The dialog is prosaic and patently dull in much of the performance. The show almost comes off a reportage with little to no poetry. There are some attractive uses of video projection, but its not enough to lend any substance to this particular rivalry. There's plenty of time and opportunity to see most of these shows, particularly on the outdoor stage, which is always one of the highlights of the San Diego summer.

Labels: Old Globe Theater, Out of Town Theater Reviews

The thing about writing on the work of Calixto Bieito is that it puts one in the position of writing about things one normally wouldn’t in polite company. Things like anal sex. And in case you’re wondering there’s that and plenty more where it came from in Bieito’s American directorial debut, a new adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ Camino Real opening at The Goodman Theater in Chicago! which I saw in a preview last weekend. (Yes, I know that Bieito directed a touring production that was featured at BAM in the late 90s, but this is new original work specifically for the U.S.) Bieito, for the uninitiated is the undisputed emperor of shock-tactics opera throughout Europe, which of course makes him public enemy number one for American opera companies who’ve used his work, albeit through indirect references, as a marketing and fundraising tool in this country. (“You know we're doing a good job running this opera company because we’re NOT ALLOWING THAT EUROPEAN STUFF TO HAPPEN HERE!”) But opera audiences are an awfully easy group to shock, so the Goodman’s Robert Falls thought now might be the time to invite Mr. Bieito to the U.S.

After some discussion, the two settled on Williams’ late, poetic and controversial flop about the dead-end of 20th-century American culture. Williams’ original play concerns an American boxer named Kilroy who finds himself stranded in an anonymous Latin American desert along the Camino Real. The pronunciation is deliberately anglicized and often shifting throughout the course of the work. The local resort, the Siete Mares, is populated with a variety of famous literary characters who have also come to the end of the road inside Williams' own imagination including Lord Byron, Marguerite Gautier, Cassanova, Esmerelda and Don Quixote. Williams’ play eschews narrative for poetic dreamlike sequences, which could be seen as a precursor to anything David Lynch has ever bothered to put on film. Enter Bieito and his writing collaborator Marc Rosich who elected to largely rework the play dropping scenes and dialog and replacing them with Williams’ words from other places and his own embellishments to give the show a unique perspective on this most American of plays.

So what do you get? As it turns out nearly two uninterrupted hours of fascinating if no less elliptical conjecture about a culture, if not a world, winding down and crumbling in on itself. The first thing that should be said about the piece is how absolutely fantastic it looks. The show is operatic in scope with one arresting visual sequence after another. There's a sky full of neon lit signs, a sea of police lights, and multiple spinning mirror balls. All of this transpires on a empty black stage backed with a multi-panel chain-link fence. It looks as modern as can be, and the entire 13-member cast stays on stage most of the time, each in their own unique little world. Of course, the drama comes from how these little worlds collide, which they do repeatedly often with graphic results. Some get shot, others have their heart cut from their chest. Virtually everyone is sexually humiliated at some point. All of this was absorbed by Sunday’s audience with apparent ease.

But that doesn’t mean the overall story goes down easily. The evening begins with Don Quixote, who Bieito dresses as Williams himself, stumbling onto the stage disheveled, drink in hand, pulling his roll-aboard luggage. He drinks and throws up several times, finally guzzling down a bottle of pills to fall off to sleep. The play is mostly his dream of the Camino Real, which is not unlike the Eagles' Hotel California, you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. Though several characters do try along the way. There is a sort of mayor character named Gutman modeled after Sydney Greestreet's character in The Maltese Falcon and a police officer who serve to remind everyone else of their fate in the off chance they begin to forget. The show is littered with musical performances often sung by a blind woman, La Madrecita de los Perdidos, in intentionally anglicized Spanish. There’s a powerful number André De Shilds dressed as Baron de Charlus sings a version of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ "I Put a Spell On You" amid a crowded stage of luggage abandoned during false escape attempts. Kilroy, the boxer, whom we later find out is not quite the champion we thought, arrives and is soon sucked into the events as much of his clothing is lost. While there is not actual nudity in the show, a Bieito staple on the opera stage, there is still plenty of flesh on display and the ungroped crotch in this performance is a rarity.

But most intriguing about the show is how much Bieito shifts the focus away from Kilroy in favor of the resort's famous and infamous inhabitants. Most of these legendary visitors are in fact Europeans, and once Kilroy has been side-lined as a patsy, they more or less work on chewing each other up and spitting each other out. While the tragedy of the piece does come back around to the boxer in the end, Bieito’s take on things came off to me as a globalizing gesture. America both loved and reviled for its domination of world culture, has run out of options and now waits as a sacrificial lamb to the world it has helped create. Just as the days of Yankee imperialism aren’t what they used to be, the critique of the bankruptcy of American culture has become a critique of a global one.

The show is funny, often seriously so, and the ensemble cast is uniformly excellent having made total commitments to this abstract, sometimes dark vision of the inside of a particular artistic mind. I won't name them all here, but you should go experience all the performances first hand. And while it's not an edge-of-your-seat thriller, Bieito's thoughtful multi-layered text on an already abstract work left me wanting to see it again right away. It runs in Chicago through April 8.

Labels: Out of Town Theater Reviews

London stages are packed to the rafters with comedies right now. And whether this is a sign of the bad economic times or political climate, audiences here have had a wide array of high quality reasons to laugh. In addition to Graham Linehan’s The Ladykillers and Richard Bean’s One Man, Two Guvenors I caught two other quite funny ensemble casts here this weekend. The Old Vic currently has a revival of Michael Frayn’s industrial strength Noises Off playing to largely sold out audiences. Frayn’s behind—and in front of—the scenes stage comedy has been insanely successful at all times since its premiere almost 30 years ago. Director Lindsay Posner doesn’t mess with a formula that works well. Frayn’s play, much like the other one his characters are rehearsing, “Nothing On,” is all about boxes, doors and plates of sardines. There’s a huge amount of stage business, and much of the laughs and wonderment it inspires comes from the mechanics of getting all of these details right even when they appear to be random mistakes. Probably the biggest star in the cast is Celia Imrie who plays Dotty, the actress playing the housekeeper in “Nothing On.” But everyone has big moments here including Robert Glenister, Jamie Glover, Janie Dee, and Karl Johnson. It's very well done and everyone manages the physical elements well though I admit the show didn't necessarily feel urgent to me in any way which is probably more a product of the source material than the production itself.

Over at the National Theater, Dominic Cooke has put together a new staging of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors that will be part of the company’s “NT Live” broadcast season later this year. It’s a maximal production with lots of elaborate moving scenery and a full cast. Each pair of twins in this show is cast with two different actors. The Antipholi are played by Chris Jarman and Lenny Henry with the corresponding Dromios played by Daniel Poyser and Lucian Msamati respectively. Identical costumes are used to connect the twins while slight Caribbean accents are used to differentiate the pair from Syracuse from their brothers in Ephesus. It’s all meant to evoke a contemporary urban landscape, which it does quite well. Cooke has left in a bit of the physical and scatological humor that’s associated with the piece, but less so than I’ve seen elsewhere. And while Cooke doesn’t really tell us anything we don’t already know about Shakespeare’s comedy of repeated and continuous mistaken identities, he does give us some grand-scale witty moments such as the huge chase scene in the final act that comes complete with psychiatric hospital orderlies and a working police van all darting around the circular rotating stage. Despite the promise of a gritty urban setting, there's not much sense of malevolence, but it's a pleasant successful comedy.

Labels: Out of Town Theater Reviews

I dread seeing shows that I’ve read other people’s good reviews of or heard a lot of good word-of-mouth about. I dread it even more than seeing shows I’ve heard only negative things about. At least with the negative ones I know I won’t be disappointed, and if the show ends up better than I’ve heard, it’s a pleasant surprise. But with the hits, it’s easy for things to go sour in a million different ways. And it is this phenomenon that may explain why I was absolutely smitten with the National Theater’s production of One Man, Two Guvnors that ended up being my final theater experience of 2011. What a way to go.

The show is all that people have said about it and so much more. Only so often do comedies, and particularly physical comedies, turn sublime. But they do, and this is one of them. The story is a loose adaptation of Carlo Goldoni’s Commedia dell’Arte classic The Servant of Two Masters. Guvnors’ writer, Richard Bean, and its director, Nicholas Hytner, have updated the action to a more contemporary setting, 1960s Britain, while trying to preserve the hallmarks of Commedia dell’Arte performance. To adapt Commedia for contemporary audience is not new, but I don’t recall ever seeing it done so well, and so honestly. Hytner and Bean have infused their source material with the unique perspective and elements of British humor. (Or at least those elements of uniquely British humor that fit well in the Commedia setting.) The Brighton of 1963 with its changing sexual mores, skinny ties, and broadening cultural influence is perfect right down to the four-man band, The Craze, that provides original period pop songs transitioning from skiffle to rock for scene changes. But this is no ersatz Austin Powers version of Britain’s swinging sixties. The show is far more loving and affectionate in its humor. And it is far more often precisely on the mark when it comes to big laugh-out-loud guffaws. It’s one thing to laugh in a show, it’s another when you are doing so much of it that you don’t even know it’s happening.

There isn’t a weak link in this superb cast. But it is also true that Hytner and Bean are fortunate in having James Corden in the Arlecchino role of Frances Henshall. Henshall is the clever servant despite his lack of book-smarts whose half-hearted commitment to two different masters is nothing compared to his boundless commitment to food and the promise of romance. Corden proves to be masterful in the kind of physical clowning around that makes legends. I’m not overstating the case when I saw names like Lewis and Tati come to mind in this show. There is a fair amount of audience participation in the show and Corden handles all of it with ease. On the matinee I saw, Corden also confronted a man filming part of the performance with his camera, mid-improvised monologue and managed to keep everyone in stitches while stopping the offending behavior without missing a beat. It’s a shame that he (or any performer for that matter) has to deal with this kind of thing, but his ability to deal with it in a way that didn’t disrupt the show or bring the audience down was in its own way a breathtaking example of his skills.

And yet, there is a real sense of community in this cast’s performance. Tom Edden has just as many great physical comedy moments in the story and Jemima Rooper’s cross-dressing gangster part is superbly done. Daniel Rigby’s lovelorn actor Alan Dangle is perfectly pitched as is Oliver Chris’ Stanley Stubbers. But some of the funniest moments in the show happen when things go slightly off the rails and one can tell that the cast is sometimes cracking each other up as much as the audience. There is danger in this to be sure with things disintegrating into chaos, but Hytner knows when to hold back and has kept everyone reined in so far. The show was almost instantly sold out when it moved out of the NT’s South Bank home into the West End for 16 weeks, and the show and Corden will come to New York this April. Given how quickly tickets disappear for this show, I'd recommend you move on them quickly when you can.

Labels: Out of Town Theater Reviews

The Ladykillers is a comedy with a longevity almost as unexpected as the comic crime-gone-awry caper it details. One of the most successful of the Ealing Studio comedies of the post-war period (the other American audiences would be most familiar with would be The Lavender Hill Mob), the 1955 original was written by Bill Rose. Rose, who was born in America, wrote several screenplays for Ealing during his many years in Britain after the war, but he would have his biggest success in Hollywood in the 60s penning It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and wining an Oscar for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? in 1967. The Ladykillers is a rather genteel comedy about a band of criminals who move into the home of an elderly woman while posing as a string quartet in order to plan their latest robbery. The elderly woman, Mrs. Wilberforce, unexpectedly gets pulled into the plot. Things eventually go awry and comedy ensues.

The Ladykillers has now made it onto the stage in London in an update by another well regarded comedy writer, Graham Linehan, the man behind Black Books and Father Ted. Linehan is a smart writer and he knows enough not to fill Rose’s original story with snide contemporary in-jokes or cynical references. And although the play is not adverse to slapstick, it's not simply about bungling incompetent crooks. The show is still genteel, especially compared with the kind of brazen gags that populate something like The Book of Mormon or any number of other successful contemporary U.S. stage comedies. But The Ladykillers is an absolute joy to watch even with a low shock value.

A big part of the success is Sean Foley’s direction of his excellent cast. Foley recognizes that this tale can handle a bit of broad acting, and he gives the cast just enough leeway to ham things up without it overpowering the show overall. No one is spitting out scenery, but it's broad enough to make the audience feel that everyone involved is having as much of a good time as they are. This great cast includes James Fleet, Peter Capaldi, Ben Miller, Clive Rowe, Stephen Wight and Marcia Warren as Mrs. Wilberforce. They revel in moments that provide arch commentary on the changing world of post-WW II Britain. One of my favorite such moments comes when the criminals are enlisted to perform a concert as the purported string quartet for a gathering of Mrs. Wilberforce's friends. It's an obvious ploy to be sure, but The Ladykillers is done so well and is so well meaning, it's impossible not to appreciate it. The show continues its run at the Gielgud Theater in London's West End into the New Year.

Labels: Out of Town Theater Reviews

Did I mention that I saw the current revival of Stephen Schwartz’ Godspell when I was in New York recently? It apparently had slipped my mind until someone asked me about it recently and truth be told, I did decide I was going to try and catch up with all the big late 20th-century Jesus musicals this month since I’ll be seeing Jesus Christ Superstar this weekend in La Jolla. Godspell, of course, is a different beast from Weber and Rice’s extravaganza. Schwartz took a much more obtuse, non-narrative approach to the same material with a show that even today functions more as a love-in than a conventional story-driven drama. And while there’s no real proselytizing in the show, the current revival comes at you with such an overabundance of good will and conviction that it has an air of desperation about it. The show is filled with New Testament parables from the Good Samaritan to Lazarus dutifully told by a rag-tag band of young theater performers who look like they wear only clothes they bought on Etsy. It’s all about making the material real to a contemporary audience, though, so the stories are peppered with jokes and allusions to just about everything you can think of to the recent Occupy protests to Republican presidential hopefuls. At times one wishes that the feeling wasn’t quite so up to the minute, but the jokes do tend to be reasonable ones even if the overall effect can be overwhelming. Just when you’re about to catch your breath, the cast members start passing around the hand-held confetti cannons.

That’s not to say there aren’t some really enjoyable performances here. The Jesus part goes to Hunter Parrish who manages to undercut his sharp good looks enough to seem inviting as a would be religious figure. Uzo Aduba stands out among the players as well vocally as does Wallace Smith. I was also taken with Telly Leung who gets to exhibit more range and skills here to those who may be familiar with him from the recent Star Trek movie. But even these talents can get mired in all the activity going on in this show. One wonders whether further distractions are needed here, but apparently the show’s promoters think that it might be warranted. In an odd case of life imitating…well…theater if not art, just as the ensemble enters the stage at the top of the show all with their heads buried in their individual smart phones, Godspell will reportedly get its own “Tweeting” section devoted to people who wish to use their mobile devices during the performance at some point in the future. Regardless of whether or not this bogeyman frightens you, the real question will be whether any of these would-be users will actually be able to get a signal in the depths of the Circle in the Square Theater. And if so, will they be communicating about the show, or will it be about something else?

Labels: Out of Town Theater Reviews

One last New York note: I and King Lear stopped by the Public Theater on Sunday. It was Lear’s third major appearance in New York this year following the Donmar Warehouse production with Derek Jacobi at BAM in May and the RSC offering in July as part of their residency at the Park Avenue Armory. In response, the Public Theater and director James Macdonald offered a well-cast, contemporary production that promised something unique in this Lear-heavy landscape. And given how dull the RSC showing at least had been, one would think it wouldn’t have been hard to muster something with a little more spark. But Macdonald and his excellent cast haven’t come much closer to cracking the notoriously prickly King Lear than most.

The production is set in a vacant, white-walled space with a dirt floor. There are few props and the set is mostly marked by a stage-width curtain made of chains. It's a Lear that could just a easily be a Godot with a few cast changes. That curtain slowly creeps downstage through the first two acts until the storm breaks and Lear is thrown out of his daughters’ houses into the wild. By that point, the space is so constricted by the curtain that the actors stand single file at the foot of the stage. With the lightning, the curtain recedes and soon the chains are dropped in a cascading sequence in the center of the stage imitating rain. But while this like the rest of the production is attractive, it doesn’t add much to the show in terms of meaning or insight. Sam Watterston plays Lear with an unexpected uniformity. Instead of portraying the kng as a man slowly sinking into madness, Watterston’s Lear comes out crazily shouting from the first entrance resolving the issue of the his unclear motivations for prematurely dividing his estate at the start of the play. This is a constraining maneuver as well, leaving the play with relatively few places to go.

There are some surprising choices in the casting. Michael McKean is a youngish Gloucester and Bill Irwin is Lear’s fool complete with his trademark ukulele. Irwin’s performance is particularly interesting with his own clowning dovetailing nicely into the fool’s sing-song approach to speech. Kelli O’Hara gives an intriguing and multifaceted performance as Reagan. She does well to build some sympathy for the character, before her inevitable downfall. Another nice surprise in the cast was Arian Moayed. After his success in Rajiv Joseph's Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo it was interesting to see him as the heroic Edgar. But despite these individually satisfying performances, I never felt that they added up to some larger whole. The typically painful scene where the blind Gloucester is reunited with his now mad king rang hollow and flat. And so it went for much of the evening with so many other unfulfilled promises and a King Lear failing to outshine its most recent competitors.

Labels: Out of Town Theater Reviews

Broadway is lousy with writers this fall. That might seem a perpetual condition, but I’m referring to writers in the sense of those serving as characters on stage. They populate two new plays that are running just two doors down from one another on 45th street. And while superb actors portray all of them, the plays themselves that these writers inhabit are not always so successful. Let’s start with Lincoln Center Theater’s production of Jon Robin Baitz’ Other Desert Cities, which was resurrected from its Off-Broadway run two years ago and is now again seeing the bright sun of a California Christmas Eve. It’s not a happy holiday, though, for Brooke Wyeth, played with a beautiful ferocity by Rachel Griffiths. After a multi-year slump following her first celebrated novel that was punctuated with some time on suicide watch in a psychiatric hospital, she has returned to her parents’ Palm Springs home to share her latest book, a memoir, before it is published. She is anxious that her parents, a former ambassador Lyman (Stacy Keach) and his wife Polly (Stockard Channing), may react negatively to the book. In contrast to Brooke and her siblings, the senior Wyeths have a high profile reputation as right-wing Reagan Republicans and the memoir promises to drag family skeletons before the public. Brooke it turns out has good reasons to bring up some of these issues including the suicide of her older brother when she was still in school. And she is not alone in her conflicts as both her younger brother Trip (Thomas Sadoski) and her just-back-on-the-wagon maternal aunt Silda (Judith Light) are there to participate in the verbal sparing that careens back and forth between hysterical and scalding.

Baitz’ play goes for fairly big fish in a story that indirectly shadows real life figures including the Reagans and their one-time dissident author/daughter Patti Davis. The Wyeths are friends with the Reagans in the play and direct references to the parents’ right-wing connections are made repeatedly without being heavy-handed. But Polly and Lyman aren’t caricatures, and the story is as much about reconciling a family’s personal tragedy as it is how an increasingly politically fractured American population finds a common ground. The Wyeths have a deeply held commonality, but it is one steeped in a painful history and what they share won't be rekindled through simple platitudes. There are numerous searing, passionate speeches in this play, and Baitz couldn’t ask for a better ensemble. Audiences who know Light only from television may be shocked by the guts in this performance and Broadway royalty like Keach and Channing leave no doubt to how they achieved such status. Director Joe Mantello contributes a masterful feel for this particular California Desert community.

But strangely, I couldn’t help feeling somewhat disconnected from Other Desert Cities. The Wyeths are certainly filled with entertaining histories and ideas, but all of it can feel esoteric as well in a family of ambassadors, TV producers, screenwriters, and famous authors. These are American lives to be sure, but ones that are more familiar through constant exposure to television and other media than through most peoples' lived experiences. Baitz is not opposed to the melodramatic either, and some of his more glossy moments are rescued by actors who could make just about any dialog sound great.

Theresa Rebeck is not afraid of sentimentality either and her latest comedy, Seminar, is currently in previews before opening later this month. Rebeck recently gave a very funny and satisfying new play to CTG in Los Angeles, Poor Behavior, and the characters in Seminar are not much better behaved. This time there are four young authors who’ve paid a famous author and editor Leonard, played by Alan Rickman, to guide them in a ten session weekly creative writing seminar. The young authors played by Lily Rabe, Jerry O’ Connell, Hamish Linklater, and Hettienne Park (all but Rabe making their Broadway debuts) have had various levels of success so far in their careers including Douglas (O’Connell) who is about to appear in The New Yorker and has another famous writer for an uncle. Rickman is the bad boy character who dispenses terse, bitingly funny advice that is more likely to produce tears than calm reflection. Though he can be cruel, his roasts of the young writers’ own pretensions are easy to identify with. Soon the focus of the play hones in on Martin (Linklater), the wallflower and perhaps most talented member of the group. His own blossoming raises questions for everyone during this tight single act under director Sam Gold.

And like Other Desert Cities, Seminar has a melodramatic streak in it that comes to the fore in its largely comic surroundings. Rebeck is also interested in the life of the writer’s mind and the play uses the artistic process as a source of both comedy and pathos. Again excellent performances from the entire cast, especially Rabe, Rickman and Linklater, make more pedestrian moments believable. But again there’s a certain distancing going on that makes Seminar feel like it is, in fact, what it is, a play. Take for instance the many times characters read sections of text to themselves instantly and then claim they are either signs of genius or disaster. This will probably not be recognizable to many people from their own experiences reading and writing, though its likely unavoidable in a play about the writing process. Baitz gives his readers a comparatively generous scene change, and an afternoon, to get through Brooke's lengthy memoir. On the bright side, Seminar and Other Desert Cities would almost convince you that America is still a nation of serious readers, especially of fiction. Although as Leonard points out to his students, the tragedy of being a great writer is realizing that all the art you make is, in the end, made for a public that may not be up to appreciating it. Which may be the opposite problem that Rebeck and Baitz have with their own plays, which are imminently likable despite significant contrivances and a conventional theatricality.

Labels: Out of Town Theater Reviews

The Marquis Theater on Broadway is one of those products of 1980s architecture that today feels like the Battlestar Galactica (original version) upon entry. I was there recently on my last sojourn to New York and mention it now before it gets away from me. The Marquis couldn’t be farther from the decrepit crumbling turn-of-the-last-century palace where Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman’s Follies is set. And yet the revival of the show currently running there does a surprisingly good job of getting you to overlook that fact. The entirety of the theater, aside from the seating, is draped in charcoal grey drop clothes remaking the space into something different. This Cylon-like transformation (new version) is also the main order of business for Bernadette Peters who starts as Sally. She must transform from one of the brightest and most glamorous stars into a desperate, middle-aged housewife all too eager to throw away her marriage and family for the memory of 40-year-old never-was romance. It’s a bit of a stretch, and as much as I enjoyed her performance, I could never quite believe that this attractive woman was quite the loser in love she pretended to be.

Of course the other hard part for Peters and the rest of the cast is managing to take these legendary Sondheim songs back from other performers who hold onto them in our minds with a vice like grip including Barbara Cook and Elaine Stritch. Luckily, many in the cast do just that. The most successful of these belongs to stage legend Elaine Paige who gets the juicy “I’m Still Here” and runs with it. It’s a goosebump moment and everyone in the audience knows it. I was also particularly taken with Jan Maxwell as Phyllis whose bristling build-up throughout the evening barreling into “The Story of Lucy and Jessie” was marvelous. Danny Burstein was a pitch perfect Buddy from start to finish as well. And I would be remiss not to mention the Broadway debut of opera-legend Rosalind Elias who sings "One More Kiss". She shows up long enough to remind everyone exactly how to sing, leaving her own stamp in the night's comings and goings.

But even with these successes as well as a great version of “Who’s That Woman?”, this particular version of Follies felt a little off balance to me. There is both nostalgia and the bitter disillusionment of time in the show of course but Eric Schaeffer goes more for an angry version of the latter than the former. It’s a completely legitimate approach mind you, but one that can be rather cold and meticulous by the evening’s end. There are plenty of ghostly showgirls haunting their latter-day doppelgangers but even this gives off more of a haunted vibe than a fanciful one. Certainly the show is a respectable addition to the storied tradition of Sondheim revivals on Broadway and I would recommend you see it. But it doesn’t quite live up to the quality of several other recent Sondheim revivals including John Doyle’s versions of Company and Sweeney Todd or the last go-round for Sunday in the Park with George. This is a limited run through January 22 and a chance to see one of the great Broadway musicals in a high-end production, so do go see it before it is gone.

Labels: Out of Town Theater Reviews

Is it me or are the comedies of George S. Kaufman enjoying a spirited revival at the moment? I feel they are everywhere from Chicago’s Goodman Theater, which produced an excellent Animal Crackers in 2009, a feat that Oregon Shakespeare Festival will try to reproduce next season. Meanwhile, American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco will jump into the act today with the opening of Kaufman and Moss Hart’s Once in a Lifetime from 1930. I saw a preview of the show over the weekend in San Francisco and can tell you already that it’s deliriously funny with incredibly sharp wit. The plot is simple and familiar enough. Three down on their luck vaudevillians, May, Jerry, and George, leave behind their act in New York for the Hollywood gold-rush of the late 1920s when talking pictures made the movie industry seem like the motherlode for actors and wanna be stars. The three partners head out west with plans to start an elocution school to train silent film stars how to speak. It’s all very Singin’ in the Rain without the musical numbers.

But as familiar as this material may be with its jokes about how the less one knows, the faster they’ll rise in Hollywood, the production is surprisingly fresh. You can’t let your guard down in this show for an instant, which is filled with more great one liners than a dozen contemporary Broadway shows. When May meets her old friend and now famous Hollywood gossip columnist Helen on a train out west, she hatches a scheme to enlist her powerful friend in furthering her and her friends’ career goals. May chats her friend Helen up about her relationship with a powerful studio boss who passed on getting in on the ground floor with the talkies.

HELEN So he buys everything now! Why – he just signed that famous playwright – you know, May – that Armenian who writes all those wonderful plays and things.
MAY Noel Coward.
HELEN That’s Right!

Intermixed between the scenes in the show are film clips, both real and imagined, from the period to highlight the output of the Hollywood machine of the period. It’s all very spirited fun and works well due to an excellent ensemble cast. There is the simple George Lewis who may be more prepared to run a studio than anyone expects, here played by Patrick Lane opposite a street smart Julia Coffey as May. René Augesen is the nosy and wily Helen Hobart and the slow on the uptake executive secretary Miss Leighton played by Nick Gabriel in a deft piece of cross-gender casting. But it is Mark Rucker’s bubbling, fizzy direction that really keeps the show afloat. It’s a fleet two-and-a-half hours that flies by even when Kaufman and Hart’s original premise gets a little too repetitive for its own good. The period look of the show is fantastic as well, with Alex Jaeger’s flapper dresses and smart suits amidst the grand-looking art deco studio offices and trendy restaurants of an imaginary Los Angeles. It’s a gem of a show that makes comedy look easy. Forget your troubles and go see it through Oct 16.

Labels: Out of Town Theater Reviews

Greg Hicks in The Winter's Tale Photo: Stephanie Berger

The clouds parted if only momentarily on a rainy Sunday for the final day of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s residency at the Park Avenue Armory in New York as part of this summer’s Lincoln Center Festival. While the actual rain kept falling, the artistic sunshine I’m talking about finally came through with the last performance of The Winter’s Tale, easily the highlight of the entire festival. Of course, the ensemble cast was the same as it had been for all the other plays in the festival, and the director, David Farr, was the same person responsible for the rather turgid King Lear in repertory. But The Winter’s Tale succeeded where the other failed due in part to an element of fantasy. Shakespeare’s Bohemia and Sicilia are so far removed from anything historical, that there is little reason to feel indebted to any time period in particular and the need to acknowledge or ignore a set of imagery allows for an opening up. Which Farr did, by creating a very late Victorian look to each of the two kingdoms. He also allowed for some fantasy elements in the scenery as well including a stage littered with papers from dramatically collapsed bookshelves and a giant bear composed of sheets of paper and lights for eyes. All of this was not only interesting to look at, but set the stage for Shakespeare’s own magical ending where a statue coming to life is readily accepted and digested by all parties present.

Michael Boyd takes a bow with cast and crew of the RSC after As You Like It Photo: mine

The visual motif of Leontes’ collapsed library, which did so right before the audiences eyes as his mistaken cruelty becomes apparent to him, provides wonderful contrast to the later scenes in Bohemia. Preserving the physical books and pages as backdrop, the set is transformed by the colorfully imagined rustic costumes in the more overtly comic sections of the script. These scenes were more full of giddiness and joy that anything RSC offered all weekend including the entirety of As You Like It. The show again featured some of the RSC festival’s biggest MVPs including Noma Dumezweni as Paulina and a heartbreaking Kelly Hunter as Hermoine. The sound of sobbing in the audience for a happy ending as The Winter’s Tale came to a close was overwhelming and it was exciting to see this excellent company of actors and crew hit one right out of the ballpark with a production that lived up to their talents.

The cast of As You Like It Photo: Stephanie Berger

After this, I’d had high hopes at that point that the tide for the weekend had turned going into the final performance of the entire RSC residency. But As You Like It managed to bog down in one of the most strangely unfunny stagings of one of Shakespeare’s outright comedies I can recall seeing. Directed by RSC’s own Artistic Director Michael Boyd, who greeted the audience with warm thanks at the end of the show, the first half of the play is set in what appears to be an abandoned and empty Crate and Barrel. A blank white wall and stage are later pulled aside to reveal some greenery to suggest a forest, but this is bare bones stuff. And despite some wonderful performances again from actors clearly with smart comic impulses, the overly serious and frequently dour staging made the “problematic” Winter’s Tale look like a Marx Brother movie in comparison. I was happy to see Jonjo O’Neill excel here as he had as Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet. His Orlando De Boys became the centerpiece of the play that was uncertain what to do with Rosalind and Celia throughout. Richard Katz gave a memorable turn as Touchstone as well, so it wasn’t all bad news.

But as the confetti reigned down and Michael Boyd thanked the many dignitaries involved in this Herculean venture, I kept wondering from an audience perspective if it was worth it. The idea of bringing a facsimile of the RSC in their home environment to New York was an exciting idea. But as theater in its own right, this was mighty boring, especially considering the plethora of frequently fine summer Shakespeare experiences available around the country from the Public Theater’s Central Park offerings to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. And while I believe the RSC has something unique to offer when it comes to Shakespeare, the Park Avenue Armory residency rarely got to the point of showing what that was.

Labels: Out of Town Theater Reviews

Sam Troughton and Mariah Gale in Romeo and Juliet Photo: Stephanie Berger

It seemed like a great idea. Well, at least if not a great idea, a grand gesture. The Royal Shakespeare Company would pack up five productions, a company of 41 actors and crew, 21 musicians and build a 975 seat replica of their UK theater weighing hundreds of tons and ship the whole thing to New York for 6 weeks of performances in the summer. Best yet, this would take place as part of the Lincoln Center Festival inside the giant Park Avenue Armory that has become an arts venue of some note in the last few years by hosting many other grand gestures of varying level of artistic success. (Like 2008's incomparable production of Die Soldaten.) The RSC is no stranger to touring, but this visit would present something much more ambitious in scale and create a unique and special occasion. So off to New York I went to experience Shakespeare as it is currently done by the RSC. And on first seeing the construction inside the Armory’s drill hall, I was taken aback. The large metal frame of the theater has four stairwells, two elevators and a steel frame covered with giant red plastic tarps making the whole thing look like a foreboding Anish Kapoor installation. Inside the circular theater space was a thrust stage with rafters full of elaborate lighting and technical equipment through which the roof of the Armory was visible.

Greg Hicks and Sam Troughton in Julius Caesar Photo: Stephanie Berger

So with all this exciting visual set up, what could possibly go wrong? It turns out that even in the Park Avenue Armory with the RSC, the play's the thing. Sadly on this closing weekend of the festival, I’m finding out that the productions on offer despite wonderful technical values are perhaps some of the most boring Shakespeare I've come across. Of the three plays I saw on Friday and Saturday, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, and King Lear the shows have gone from mildly interesting to just barely above the threshold of wakefulness. While there are American’s who believe that no one can perform Shakespeare like the British, the RSC’s visit to New York is proving that is not sufficient for success in itself. What’s most odd is that despite different directors, all three of these productions mentioned above suffer from very similar maladies. All are marked by attractive and well-lit sets, competent casts, and beautiful, cleanly delivered language. All three of them also come off as lifeless museum pieces or dramatic recitations that have little emotional connection with audiences. It’s all very noble and grand, but decidedly unaffecting.

Greg Hicks and Sophie Russell in King Lear Photo: Stephanie Berger

Arguably the most successful production I’ve seen thus far is Rupert Goold’s staging of Romeo and Juliet. Goold flirts with the idea of presenting the young lovers as contemporary teenagers in contrast to the Elizabethan garments of everyone else in the play. The prologue and epilogue of the play are presented as audio commentary that one of the characters is listening to over a set of headphones as if at a museum exhibit. Who knows what this has to do with anything. But when the young lovers don Elizabethan garb for their final crypt dialog only to have their bodies discovered by Columbo and a now modern-dressed city of Verona, the painfully obvious point is driven home. Baz Luhrmann made a cottage industry out of this stuff a decade ago and Goold’s Romeo was timid by comparison. There were several very good performances including Mariah Gale as Juliet and a wonderful Noma Dumezweni as the Nurse. The handsome Dyfan Dwyfor filled in as Romeo as he has for several performances since Sam Troughton injured himself earlier in the run. And just to make matters worse on Saturday, an alarm in the Armory went off twice in Act I stopping the show both times. The fact that Dwyfor was plagued by a torch that refused to extinguish after several attempts in the crypt scene generating lots of unintended laughter just managed to put a cap on a somewhat exhausting performance.

The technical problems for that evening's closing performance of Julius Caesar were only slightly less comical as the audience was greeted with a complimentary, loaner Chinese fan and the information that the Armory’s A/C was out. Director Lucy Bailey’s blood and guts Roman retread veered into somnolence in the extra warmth. The production which starts with a wrestling match between Romulus and Remus, relies heavily on video projections of scenery and panels of scrims where large crowd scenes are augmented with images of extras. These cold computer generated images were only slightly more life-like than the demonstrative oratory approach to the text itself. Sam Troughton was quite good here as Brutus as was Darrell D’Silva as Mark Antony. But this battle was over long before it was engaged by any of the combatants in their mud covered body stockings. Even the battle scenes seemed slow and surprisingly non-threatening. By the time characters started falling on their swords, my interest had long since flagged.

And then there was the final performance of David Farr’s King Lear from the night before. One almost expects King Lear to be bad. It’s not an easy play and there is always that rather contrived plot device of dividing the estate to work around. Farr didn’t fare very well, and certainly not as successfully as Trevor Nunn’s former Lear for the RSC that was last seen in Los Angeles in 2007 with Ian McKellen. Farr uses a combination of WWI costuming and props with Elizabethan touches here and there. Again it's not clear what point this serves other than to evoke a period of war imagery a contemporary audience might recognize. Like the other plays mentioned here there seemed to be the slightest bit of updating to suggest some idea of freshness without actually delivering on it. Greg Hicks was a solid Lear (he also played Julius Caesar) and his daughters Goneril (Kelly Hunter), and Regan (Katy Stephens) were adequately evil and creepy. But none of the mad scenes hit home and the several moments in the play sure to bring tears to the eye fell flat under the weight of a cold and academic approach to the work. It was a slow start to be sure, but with a final day of performances to turn things around, there might be something to be said for all the construction yet.

Labels: Out of Town Theater Reviews

Cate Blanchett and Richard Roxburgh Photo: Lisa Tomasetti

When did Cate Blanchett become a big movie star? I remember liking her a lot in films. I still do. I always associated her with a sort of refined air with a hard edge underneath that probably stems more from her performance as Elizabeth I than anything. But somewhere along the line, perhaps around the time of The Aviator and her Oscar, that she seemed to jump into that Hollywood stratosphere that makes me inherently less interested in someone’s work as a rule. I think that explains why her performance on stage in Sydney Theater Company’s production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya at the Kennedy Center caught me by surprise. I’d forgotten precisely how good she is and her performance as Yelena was remarkable. As you may have read recently, Blanchett is undergoing a Renaissance, at least for American audiences, as one of the most impressive stage actors around. Her visits with the Sydney Theater Company have won rave reviews. I can attest that her performance in this particular play lives up to the hype. Her Yelena is not some beautiful, delicate flower, but a robust, if conflicted lusty, full-blooded woman. Her performance all but explodes in the second act, and yet it is not some star showpiece and she never overwhelms the rest of the ensemble.

I shouldn’t focus too much on Blanchett, however, since she is only one element in an ensemble that makes this such a great production. Hungarian director Tamás Ascher has put together a show that is physical and very bruising in a way one doesn’t always expect from Chekhov. There are out right broadly comic moments in his take right from the beginning when the dark curtain is swathed in what sounds like 1930s cartoon music. And there is an element of Punch and Judy the whole time. There is little of the refined nostalgia one often sees in Chekhov, but instead, an extended family grappling with all kinds of passions. There’s Richard Roxburgh as the long-suffering and somewhat jealous Vanya. His niece Sonya, played by Hayley McElhinney, is equally lovesick and frustrated by rejection. A magnificent Hugo Weaving is the doctor Astrov whose desire for Yelena soon brings events to a head. All of these performances are notable for they easily make the characters appear rough and tumble without the actors themselves coming off sloppy. This is not a production of furtive glances, but one of grabbing, mauling, and direct physical contact. The show feels real and lived in, not just spoken about and acted out. The mid-20th Century setting and earth tone color palette invoke Australia more than Russia, but adds to the sense of people living their lives and bumping up against each other in doing so. It's a much more refreshing approach to Chekhov than the rather dreary political version recently seen on stage in London's National Theater where The Cherry Orchard appeared earlier this summer. I, like many in the U.S. saw that as part of the NT Live series in local theaters. But for those of you on the east coast, this Uncle Vanya is the real deal and right in your own backyard. Don't miss it before it's gone next month.

Labels: Out of Town Theater Reviews

Winslow Corbett and Miles Anderson. Photo: Henry DiRocco/Old Globe 2011

San Diego’s Old Globe Theater continued its winning summer Shakespeare Festival with The Tempest. After a very satisfying Much Ado About Nothing earlier in the week, Adrian Noble’s staging of The Tempest succeeded in most ways relying on old-fashioned stagecraft. Noble is the current Artistic Director of the Old Globe’s Shakespeare Festival and one of the preeminent authorities when it comes to Shakespeare on the stage, having led the Royal Shakespeare Company from 1990-2003. His experience pays off splendidly in this rather minimal Tempest with its relatively few props and empty stage. Right from the beginning he creates perhaps one of the most exciting shipwrecks I’ve seen in this play with nothing more than some light blue parachute material, basic percussion and his cast. His sinking sailors flap their own costumes in the wind of the make believe storm in a way that references period practices in a modern way. This instinct for theatricality remains throughout with the cast providing much of their own artifice in a play at its very heart about magic.

Ben Diskant as Ariel in San Diego Photo: Henry DiRocco/Old Globe 2011

At the center of the show is Miles Anderson’s Prospero, who remains at all times somewhat above the fray going on around him. In this production, Prospero often seems on an even footing with Ariel played here by Ben Diskant. I’ve seen a lot of Ariels in my time and Diskant is certainly the most ripped abs-wise I’ve come across. And when he appears winged with his blue mane standing on end there is no doubt about the fear he can manage to conjure up in the hearts of Prospero’s targets. The other standouts in the production were the comic pairing of Adrian Spark’s Stephano and John Cariani’s Trinculo whose drunken carousing provides the counterpoint to the play.

The play itself call for music, so employing a composer is always seen as a good idea. The Old Globe brought in Shaun Davey to write music for the songs in the text as well as a few additional pieces at other points in the show. It’s atmospheric and provides needed structure for scenes such as the masque in Act IV, which in Noble’s version is conducted by a trio of puppets maneuvered by the members of the cast acting as island spirits. As with Much Ado About Nothing, sometimes the vocal and musical abilities of the cast didn’t quite live up to the music they were given to perform, but the cast was invested in those aspects of the performance throughout as well. I also wanted at times a bit more edge to the proceedings. Prospero comes off as more as kindly grandfather than a usurped nobleman. Meanwhile the tortured Caliban is more of a comic inept conspirator than a vengeful enemy of Prospero. And the ending of the show is awash in a squishy, feel-good air sprinkled with perhaps a bit more fairy dust than is necessary, ending with a valedictory song and the cast entering the audience to shake hands before returning to the stage like it was a Unitarian service. But this is a play populated with plenty of magical creatures, so too much fairy dust is certainly preferable to too little, and Noble and the Old Globe have a highly successful Tempest on stage for the rest of the summer.

Labels: Old Globe Theater, Out of Town Theater Reviews

Evan Zes and Danny Gavigan in Peer Gynt. Photo: Don Ipock./La Jolla Playhouse 2011

On Sunday, La Jolla Playhouse opened a run of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt directed by David Schweizer in a co-production with Kansas City Repertory Theater where it was seen earlier this year. Even folks who attend a lot of theater can be excused for not being familiar with the play considering that it is a notorious outlier in many ways. Written as a epic poem in 1867, it wasn’t intended for a life on the stage. But it got there anyway by 1876 retaining much of its monumental length and episodic nature, which are only two of the qualities that separate it from nearly everything else Ibsen wrote for the theater. The play can run for hours and careens through a variety of different tones and genres. It is fantastical in the extreme at points and later decidedly melodramatic. It’s the theatrical equivalent of Legos where the interest is not so much in the substrate in and of itself, but rather what certain creative teams elect to do with the material at hand.

Schweizer, who has wrangled with Peer Gynt before, starts out with some good intentions in this latest incarnation of the folkloric Norwegian wanderer. He has reduced the action to two acts that run just over two hours with intermission and a cast of five that play all of the dozens of parts still remaining in the new script. He puts contemporary dialect in his actors’ mouths and most of the roles are shared in one way or another, including Peer Gynt himself who all three male performers, Danny Gavigan, Luis Moreno, and Evan Zes, take turns playing. The women in the cast include Birgit Huppuch who is Peer’s mother and his beloved Solveig; and Kate Cullen Roberts who plays Ingrid and Anitra.

Things quickly go sour, however, when all the compacting is done. The story does maintain many of the key scenes and events in the poem and play. But the problem here is not what has been cut away as much as the tone of what remains. Certainly Ibsen produced a satirical work on contemporary ideals and aspects of what he perceived as the Norwegian national character. So while humor is not out of place, the breakneck irreverent zaniness of Schweizer’s adaptation jettisons almost everything else except for a little tired sentiment to hold the remainders together. Set in a single room shack with vaguely Nordic-looking furnishings, the set recalls a Pacific Northwestern version of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. The acting and dialog is delivered in a detached Saturday morning TV manner. It can be funny as when Peer comes up against the three headed Troll King whose extra crania provide running yucks on every line out of his mouth. There are funny accents and scatological humor and, while none of this is problematic in and of itself, there is little substance to set any of this against in Schweizer's version. More often than not, the colorful proceedings are tiresome like some low-quality theatrical event for children.

There are several lovely projection elements from Darrel Maloney that pop up intermittently, and the cast all are clearly committed to the project and do what they can with what they’ve been given. But when the show reaches for a critique of subjectivity in the West, a topic rife for lampooning in the contemporary world, it ends up groping around in the dark even when there’s plenty of brightly lit laughter.

Labels: La Jolla Playhouse, Out of Town Theater Reviews

Judy Kaye and Betsy Wolfe in Tales of the City Photo: Kevin Berne/ACTSF

Given the longstanding popularity of Armistead Maupin’s episodic Tales of the City novels of San Francisco in the 70s and 80s, it’s to be expected that the story lines would cross over into the musical world at some point. There have been at least two Tales-inspired musical projects to date. But the full-fledged world-premiere stage musical developed by Jeff Whitty with music and lyrics from Jake Shears and John Garden is by far the largest scale live theatrical experience associated with the work thus far. Tales of the City with its rich group of beloved characters and wealth of storylines is a natural choice for an excellent musical. And there is a chance that just such a musical lives somewhere within the current production now onstage at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater. But this great musical is expertly buried among so much excess in the current version of the work, it would be hard to identify it.

The show needs significant cuts, and despite the presence of two Scissor Sisters (Shears and Garden) it appears an ax may be more in order. One of the charms of Maupin’s originally serialized works are their large cast of characters and the stories' episodic natures. Over time, all of these details convey a romanticized version of a time and place that becomes greater than the sum of its parts. Perhaps for this reason, the creators have had a hard time letting go of anything in the stage version. Of course, there are nice story arcs about being true to yourself embodied by Michael “Mouse” Tolliver’s struggle to share his life with his parents and Anna Madrigal’s revelation of her many secrets. But there are too many underdeveloped static dead ends here from the polyamorous adventures of Beauchamp Day to Mary Ann’s cliffside thriller with Norman Neal Williams.

There are some lovely star turns in the show with capable songs for them to sing. Judy Kaye stars as Mrs. Madrigal, and her Act I closing number is a barn burner. Wesley Taylor plays Michael and he gives a touching beauty to a sung coming-out letter to his parents. Shears music is true to the spirit of the late-1970s with plenty of dance beats. But there are also a wide variety of out-of-the-box genre numbers from blues-influenced tunes to gospel choral bits that feel like they could have come from any other show. There's even a little The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. There is plenty dirty going on here including period-realistic rampant drug use. Some of the more dated material hits a sour note once in awhile, and there are a few odd moments where the show attempts to take material that is profoundly disturbing, such as child pornography, and pass it off as a footnote in a larger story. Maybe a little more updating was called for here an there.

The show also seems to be trying awfully hard at times and, despite some flashy numbers on the clever multi story set, the energy sometimes peters out without warning with everyone huffing and puffing away for unclear reasons. Admittedly though, as the show continues, it does grow on you somewhat. And people who go expecting to see specific things in novels they have come to know and love, won’t be disappointed. But for the uninitiated, and particularly those living outside of San Francisco, this show is going to be a much tougher sell in its current format. But there’s a great musical in there somewhere and with enough effort it could be found and exposed. And on the stage, certainly stranger things have happened.

Labels: Out of Town Theater Reviews

Mark Rylance with the London cast of Jerusalem Photo: Simon Annand

The weight of culture and history are everywhere in Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem which is currently in previews on Broadway following a highly successful run in London. The country in question is England and the title refers to the William Blake poem “And did those feet in ancient time,” that was later set by Sir Hubert Parry in 1916 into something of an English national anthem. The hymn is sung a cappella by a young woman in a pale green slip dress and fairy wings in front of a giant hand painted curtain of the English flag at the opening of Butterworth’s play. As she draws to her conclusion, the curtain lifts to reveal a strobe lit rave with pulsating electronic music taking place deep in the woods of the English countryside fueled by all stripes of illicit drugs in front of a aluminum sided camper van. It’s not subtle, but Butterworth is clearly laying down his challenge early in this comedy with a provocative “This is England.”

Of course it is really just one of many Englands, but Jerusalem focuses on the ways in which some of the more marginal characters in a small countryside town do and don’t reflect the cultural history of a land once inhabited by ancient Druids and the builders of Stonehenge. At the center of the play is one Johnny “Rooster” Byron, the drug-dealing inhabitant of the camper van who has spent the last several decades staying just outside of prison going from one alcohol-fueled bender to the next. He’s also a bit of a Green Man as well and we’re invited repeatedly to see him as representing, albeit sometimes ironically, a more ancient or essential version of the English. He’s about to be evicted from the woods around Flintock in Wiltshire and his current merry band of drug-addled teens and hangers-on are none too happy about the local estates plans to develop the wooded land he currently resides upon illegally. Of course Byron, like his romantic poet namesake, is not about to let the law or reason get in the way of his tall tales or his very low rent version of the good life. Byron is masterfully played by perhaps one of the greatest actors currently on the world’s stages, Mark Rylance, who adds yet another incomparable performance to his resumé here. He is mesmerizing for all three and a half hours of this, even when Byron drenched myself and several others sitting down front by wildly wringing out his wet hair in Act I.

Mark Rylance from the London production of Jerusalem Photo: Simon Annand

Byron has left a lot of damage in his wake including a child who he rarely sees and has served as a sort of pied piper to teens in the rural community for decades. He’s filled with stories of the countryside’s mythic past including tales of giants and magic drums and there are glimmers along the way that there may be more supernatural going on around him than meets the eye. There are moments of sentimentality, but Byron’s very existence lies in opposition to a modern corporate-driven world that has lost touch with an all too easily forgotten past.

The play includes a number of wonderful ensemble performances as well including a great Mackenzie Crook as Ginger, an unsuccessful DJ and quasi-employed construction worker who may be one of Byron’s longest-standing acquaintances. Many of the members of the London cast including Alan David as the Professor and Danny Kirrane as Davey, have continued on in New York providing wonderful and very funny turns. But there are also some American additions including John Gallagher, Jr. as Lee, a local boy who is packed up and ready to leave for adventure in Australia the day following the events in the play. Gallagher is probably the weakest link in the show more due to his ongoing mugging than any accent problems, but this is Rylance’s show and the cast is large enough overall that no individual takes up so much time as to overwhelm the many great things going on here.

I think this is a great play. And in its way, it has much the same sensibility as Tracy Letts’ intense envisioning of American in August: Osage County. Will it be a success in New York however is unclear. The play in unabashedly English and Butterworth and his team including expert direction from Ian Rickson, have declined to refit or tone down the very aspects of the play that may make it les familiar to a general theater going New York audience. But perhaps that is for the best. It has often been observed that the biggest difference between the U.S. and Europe is that Europe actually has history. And lots of it. Jerusalem in the end is about creating a national identity in the context of just such an ancient heritage and the necessary trade-offs in it. It’s not an American story, but it is a fascinating one that deserves you attention.

Labels: Out of Town Theater Reviews

The Cast of IHO Photo: Joan Marcus 2011

Although it has one of those exceptionally long titles that begs the question, why would anyone do this to a play, Tony Kushner's latest The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures couldn't be more aptly named. The work (which I'm going to abbreviate as IHO from here on out) is currently receiving it's New York premiere at The Public Theater and I had the good fortune to see all 4 hours of it while in previews on Sunday night. The title is a double reference encapsulating both George Bernard Shaw's The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism he published in 1925 as well as the founding text of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy's Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. IHO is filled with characters who've spent their whole lives thinking about communism and theology and along with suicide spend much of the play engaged in humorous and lengthy debates on these topics. The title is appropriate not only for it's content, but also it's wordy format.

Stephen Spinella and Michael Esper Photo: Joan Marcus 2011

The evening opens splendidly with Pier Luigi "Pill" Marcantonio, asserting over the phone to his gay hustler lover that there is in fact theater in Minneapolis (IHO's world premiere took place there at The Guthrie) and that he and his husband, Paul, saw an excellent production there of Shaw's Major Barbara that was only marred when an insensitive audience member's phone went off at a crucial moment. And we're off. Pill has returned to his childhood home in Brooklyn to see his father, sister Maria Theresa "Empty", and brother Vito (or V for short). They, along with their partners and aunt Clio, have come to discuss their father Gus' renewed plan to commit suicide a year after a prior failed attempt that everyone is still reeling from. Gus, a former labor organizer and current card-carrying Communist, believes he has developed Alzheimer's disease and no longer wants to live. But IHO is no rehash of 'night Mother and the elaborate plot twists and philosophical debate that follow are some of the most engaging dialog you'll hear anywhere. This is due in part to Kushner's writing, but director Michael Greif keeps the dramatic focus tight and moving.

Michael Christofer and Linda Emond Photo: Joan Marcus 2011

There are subplots galore. Pill finds himself returning to his lover/hustler during the visit home again placing his marriage in jeopardy. Empty's wife, Maeve, who is a theologian like Paul, is pregnant with their first child, and Vito has his own crosses to bear with his wife and two children. There is so much more, but the plot of IHO is all about learning the secrets of these characters' past unfold so let's leave it to say things get a whole lot more complicated and interrelated before the night is over. Often the whole cast will be onstage taking part in huge free-wheeling arguments and debates. There's a lot to say and sometimes Kushner's is so overwhelmed with it all that he lets scenes play out concurrently with multiple characters all speaking at once over each other. The spirit of GBS hangs over IHO indeed when even at four hours there is so much to say and so little time to say it in.

There are many excellent Kushner's alumni in the cast and there isn't a weak link among any of the ensemble. You have your political theorists like Gus played by Michael Christofer and daughter Empty, the labor lawyer, played by Linda Emond. There are two theologians, Paul, a scene stealing K. Todd Freeman, and Maeve, the excellent Danielle Skraastad. Clio, who has done stints both as a nun and a Maoist rebel is played by Brenda Wehle. In the middle are Pill's hustler Eli, a charming Michael Esper, and Vito, Steven Pasquale. It's a cast that is clearly working together on every level and watching their craft is enjoyment enough in the play. It's also a splendid looking production that feels especially intimate despite its large cast.

All this being said, I'm not convinced that IHO is a great play. At times it does chatter on, and not all of the elaborate sub-plots seem to be necessary to the overarching storyline. Of course there are so many of those to choose from, it would be fair to argue that all of them have their own case for legitimacy. But I never felt they all worked together at the same time. Unlike Angels in America or even Homebody/Kabul Kushner has proven that he can create disparate strains and stories and unite them under the banner of a much greater project examining our lives or the feel of a particular cultural moment. And while this multi-generational family drama aspires to that, it sometimes seemed a little muddled to me as if straining to incorporate everything in it's grasp. And while it is also not Death of A Salesman, it does use a particular American family from just a few years ago to give us an update on where we're at now. So enjoy the language and the debate. IHO runs at The Public Theater through June 12 and will open on May 5.

Labels: Out of Town Theater Reviews