It’s Friday–do you know where I am? In The Wall Street Journal, of course, holding forth on Lincoln Center’s new production of King Lear, directed by Jonathan Miller and starring Christopher Plummer, plus an off-Broadway show, Tristine Skyler’s highly touted The Moonlight Room.
Lear didn’t do much for me:
I confess to not being much of a fan of Jonathan Miller, who has always struck me as rather too smart for his own theatrical good. That’s more or less how I’d sum up this well-bred, largely uninvolving “Lear,” which runs through April 18 on a limited schedule of performances. Shakespeare was no intellectual, and his plays don’t benefit from “thoughtful” stagings. Mr. Miller may think he’s given us a Shakespearean-style soap opera, but in his hands “King Lear” comes off more like a slide show on the perils of bad estate planning.
I had sharply mixed feelings about The Moonlight Room, but not about its young star:
As for Laura Breckenridge, she’s definitely worth watching. Like Linda Cardellini in “Freaks and Geeks,” the TV series that perfectly captured the same youthful anxieties Ms. Skyler has sought to put on stage, Ms. Breckenridge is a dark-eyed, tense-looking young woman whose very pores ooze adolescent angst. If she can play other parts as well as she plays this one, we’ll be seeing more of her. Totally.
No link. Buy the damn paper, O.K.?