Archives for May 2008

The 2007-08 Broadway season (about which more here) is over at last, and I’m on the road again. My first stop was Washington, D.C., where the Shakespeare Theatre Company is performing Antony and Cleopatra and Julius Caesar in repertory in its new theater. I saw both productions last Saturday and reviewed them in this morning’s Wall Street Journal. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
What does a “traditional” Shakespeare production look like? If the phrase still makes you think of Brits in tights, then it’s a pretty safe bet that you haven’t been to a theater lately. Ever since Orson Welles tossed convention out the window in 1936 and turned “Macbeth” into a voodoo orgy set in Haiti, the old-fashioned way of staging the Bard has grown less and less common with every passing season. Nearly all modern-day directors now treat his plays as unfinished canvases on which they paint their own up-to-date theatrical pictures, sometimes to unforgettably individual effect and sometimes to unforgettably fatuous effect. Most of the best Shakespeare productions I’ve reviewed in this space–and all of the worst ones–have been revisionist stagings executed along Wellesian lines. As far as my generation of playgoers is concerned, this is what it means to be traditional.
That’s why I was excited to hear that the Shakespeare Theatre Company would be performing “Antony and Cleopatra” and “Julius Caesar” in repertory at its brand-new 775-seat downtown theater here–and that the two productions would feature a single cast dressed in traditional Roman costumes. The idea of presenting these plays in tandem may seem obvious, since they share some of the same characters, but I’ve never seen it done before, and Michael Kahn, the company’s artistic director, has opted to emphasize their commonality still further by using the same costume designer, Jennifer Moeller, for both shows and performing them on the same unit set, a stylized rendering of an Elizabethan open stage created by James Noone….
Mr. Kahn, who directed “Antony and Cleopatra,” is a smart craftsman whose past productions include a straight-down-the-center “Othello” that ranks high on my list of memorable Shakespeare productions–as well as an unintentionally comical Gen-X “Hamlet” that ranks near the bottom. This time around he’s skipped the nonsense and opted for a speedy, uncommonly vivid staging in which Suzanne Bertish plays Cleopatra as a woman of a certain age who is sexually besotted with a visibly younger Mark Antony (Andrew Long). Ms. Bertish, who made a tremendous splash on Broadway a quarter-century ago in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s stage version of “Nicholas Nickleby,” gives a performance of thrilling and alarming intensity…
David Muse, the company’s associate artistic director, has staged “Julius Caesar” to somewhat less potent effect, in part because his production lacks the clean, uncluttered directness of Mr. Kahn’s “Antony and Cleopatra.” But the results still work very well, and the cast is every bit as impressive….
* * *
Read the whole thing here.

“A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of conqueror, that confidence of success that often induces real success.”
Sigmund Freud (quoted in Ernest Jones, Life and Works of Sigmund Freud)

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:

• Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, reviewed here)

• August: Osage County (drama, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

• Boeing-Boeing (comedy, PG-13, cartoonishly sexy, reviewed here)

• A Chorus Line (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• Cry-Baby (musical, PG-13, mildly naughty and very cynical, reviewed here)

• Grease * (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here)

• Gypsy (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• In the Heights (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here)

• The Little Mermaid * (musical, G, entirely suitable for children, reviewed here)

• Macbeth * (drama, PG-13, unsuitable for children, closes May 24, reviewed here)

• November (comedy, PG-13, profusely spattered with obscene language, reviewed here)

• Passing Strange (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• South Pacific * (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)

• Sunday in the Park with George (musical, PG-13, too complicated for children, closes June 29, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• Adding Machine (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, too musically demanding for youngsters, closes Aug. 31, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:

• From Up Here (drama, PG-13, closes June 8, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:

• Endgame (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• The Four of Us (comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN MILLBURN, N.J.:

• Kiss Me, Kate (musical, PG-13, far too sophisticated for children, reviewed here)

“A belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.”
Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

There’s a lot that’s amazing about Henry Green’s novel Loving, which I continue to read in small doses. I pick it up infrequently enough that my grasp of many plot points is less than firm, but no matter. The draw is Green’s minute observation and inimitable style. Rendering the teeming emotional and social life below stairs on an Irish estate during the second world war, Green goes right to the verge of sensuous overload in his impressionistic descriptions but pulls back in his plainspoken, practical dialogue. In a way his characters’ talk functions itself as description or atmosphere–doggedly true to the way he heard people talk, it’s not meant to explain anything and in fact often serves to obfuscate the matter.
In this terribly moving small vignette from the novel, I’m interested in how colors run a little wild. To say they have symbolic weight is an understatement; more than symbolic, they’re active players in the miniature drama that plays out here, seeming to struggle with each other for supremacy over the mood of the scene and ergo its outcome.

Edith feared for Raunce’s neck. She said those draughts in the servant’s hall might harm him. Now coal was so short it was only a small peat fire she could lay each morning in the butler’s room, and she insisted that the grate Raunce had was too narrow for peat. This no doubt could be her excuse to get him to take his cup along with her to one of the living rooms where huge fires were kept stoked all day to condition the old masters.
So it came about next afternoon that Charley and Edith had drawn up deep leather armchairs of purple in the Red Library. A ledge of more purple leather on the fender supported Raunce’s heels next his you-and-me in a gold Worcester cup and saucer. Pointed french windows were open onto the lawn about which peacocks stood pat in the dry as though enchanted. A light summer air played in from over massed geraniums, toyed with Edith’s curls a trifle. Between the books the walls were covered cool in green silk. But she seemed to have no thought to the draught.
“You ever noticed that little place this side of the East Gate?” he was asking.
“Well can’t say I’ve looked over it if that’s what you’re after,” she replied. He hooked a finger into the bandage round his throat as though to ease himself.
“Next time you pass that way you have a look, see.”
“Why Charley?”
“It’s empty that’s why.”
“It’s empty is it?” she echoed dull but with a sharp glance.
“The married butlers used to live there at one time,” he explained. Then he lied. “Yesterday mornin’,” he went on canny, “Michael stopped me as he came out of the kitchen. You’ll never guess what he was onto.”
“Not something for one of his family again?” she enquired.
“That’s right,” he said. “It was only he’s goin’ to ask Mrs. T. for it when she gets back, that’s all. The roof of their pig sty of a hovel ‘as gone an’ fallen on ‘is blessed sister-in-law’s head and’s crushed a finger of one of their kids.”
“The cheek,” she exclaimed.
“A horrid liar the man is,” Charley commented. “But it’s not the truth that matters. It’s what’s believed,” he added.
“You think she’ll credit such a tale?” Edith wanted to know.
“Now love,” he began then paused. He was dressed in black trousers and a stiff shirt with no jacket, the only colour being in his footman’s livery waistcoat of pink and white stripes. He wore no collar on account of his neck. Lying back he squinted into the blushing rose of that huge turf fire as it glowed, his bluer eye azure on which was a crescent rose reflection. “Love,” he went on toneless, “what about you an’ me getting married? There I’ve said it.”
“That’s want thinking over Charley,” she replied at once. Her eyes left his face and with what seemed a quadrupling in depth came following his to rest on those rectangles of warmth alive like blood. From this peat light her great eyes became invested with rose incandescence that was soft and soft and soft.
“There’s none of this love nonsense,” he began again appearing to strain so as not to look at her. “It’s logical dear that’s what. You see I thought to get my old mother over out of the bombers.”
“And quite right too,” she answered prompt.
“I’m glad you see it my way,” he took her up. “Oh honey you don’t know what that means.”
“I’ve always said a wife that can’t make a home for her man’s mother doesn’t merit a place of her own,” she announced gentle.
“Then you don’t say no?” he asked glancing her way at last. His white face was shot with green from the lawn.
“I haven’t said yes have I?” she countered and looked straight at him, her heart opening about her lips. Seated as she was back to the light he could see only a blinding space for her head framed in dark hair and inhabited by those great eyes on her, fathoms deep.
“No that’s right,” he murmured obviously lost.

In the introduction to my edition (which is the same one linked above), John Updike points to Green’s “love of work and laughter; his absolute empathy; his sense of splendour amid loss, of vitality within weakness” and points to a further contradiction: “with upper-class obliquity he champions the demotic in language and in everything.”

This year’s Tony Award nominations were announced on Tuesday, and The Wall Street Journal asked me to comment on them in this morning’s paper:

The nominations for the 62nd annual Tony Awards were announced yesterday morning. They weren’t surprising. They almost never are. Take, for instance, the Best Musical category. Eight new musicals opened on Broadway this season, and one of them, “Glory Days,” closed after a single performance. “A Catered Affair,” “Cry-Baby,” “The Little Mermaid” and “Young Frankenstein” got sharply mixed reviews, leaving “In the Heights,” “Passing Strange” and “Xanadu,” all of which received nominations, with “Cry-Baby” thrown in to fill the obligatory fourth slot. That’s about as exciting as ordering a Big Mac and waiting breathlessly to see if it contains an extra pickle….
The Tony nominations, in short, have become an exercise in ratifying the obvious–and how could they be anything else? Broadway consists of 39 houses, four of which are run by Lincoln Center Theater, the Manhattan Theatre Club and the Roundabout Theatre Company, a trio of non-profit outfits that are marginally more adventurous than their commercial counterparts. As for the remaining 35, they’re so costly to operate that anyone who dares to bring a new show into one of them is all but begging to throw his money away. That’s why today’s theatrical producers usually play it very, very safe, importing road-tested productions that have been developed by out-of-town companies. The days when an unknown author could hope to take Broadway by storm are over.
All this explains why the Tonys have grown so lackluster in recent years: Their unsurprising nature merely reflects the safety-first institutional culture of Broadway….

Read the whole thing here.