TT: Science takes the stage

My first Wall Street Journal drama column of 2010 is a report from Florida on two exceptional revivals, Asolo Rep’s Life of Galileo and West Palm Beach’s Copenhagen. Here’s an excerpt.
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Sarasota’s Asolo Repertory Theatre has dared to put on “The Life of Galileo,” a large-cast play that is rarely seen in America, at a time when the sour economy is forcing most drama companies to steer clear of costly highbrow shows. Yet Michael Donald Edwards’s staging, which fields a budget-busting cast of 24, is not a bare-bones antispectacle but a masterpiece of unified design in which Clint Ramos’s modern-dress costumes, Dan Scully’s ultracontemporary digital projections, Peter West’s lighting and Fabian Obispo’s minimalist music are blended into a production whose clean, elegant look is uncommonly fresh and involving. I’ve never seen a handsomer Brecht revival.
All this would be irrelevant, of course, were the title role being played by a less magnetic actor than Paul Whitworth, who gives us an earthy, Cockney-flavored Galileo (he sounds very much like Michael Caine) whose love of sensual pleasure is at war with his iron determination to follow the truth wherever it may lead….
Unlike “The Life of Galileo,” “Copenhagen” is a genuinely popular play. Not only did it run for 326 performances on Broadway after opening there in 2000, but it still gets done with better-than-fair regularity by regional theaters around the country, partly because it’s so good and partly because it has only three characters and needs no scenery or props. What “Copenhagen” demands is first-class acting, and Palm Beach Dramaworks’ revival, directed with tautness and unexpected physical immediacy by J. Barry Lewis, supplies that commodity in abundance.
Like the company’s 2009 production of Eugène Ionesco’s “The Chairs,” also directed by Mr. Lewis, this staging takes a difficult play and makes it cellophane-clear. Christopher Oden, Colin McPhillamy and Elizabeth Dimon, all of whom are new to me, bat Michael Frayn’s arcane conversational gambits back and forth like shuttlecocks…
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Read the whole thing here.