TT: Shav vs. Shakes

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, I pull a switch and report on two Shakespeare festivals at which I saw a pair of plays by George Bernard Shaw, Arms and the Man at the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey and Mrs. Warren’s Profession at California Shakespeare Theater. Here’s an excerpt.
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“Arms and the Man,” Shaw’s first great box-office success, remains one of his most enduringly popular plays, but it’s been some time since it received a New York production of any consequence, the last Broadway revival having been in 1985. Now Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, a company that has yet to let me down–I’ve seen five shows there since 2006, all of them memorable–is doing the old boy proud with an exceptionally stylish version that hits all the high notes.
The metaphor is an appropriate one, for “Arms and the Man” is an “anti-romantic comedy in three acts” (Shaw’s phrase) in which he deploys the high-flying rhetoric of 19th-century opera to twit those benighted creatures of flesh and blood who behave as though the real world worked that way. It starts out as a love story in which the starry-eyed Raina (Nisi Sturgis) awaits the return of her gallant and heroic Sergius (Anthony Marble) from the Serbo-Bulgarian War. Then a cynical enemy soldier (Sean Mahan) who has been fighting too long to have any illusions about the nature of war upsets Raina’s plans by hiding out in her starlit bedroom, and all at once a classic change-partners farce plot starts ticking away….
Revivals of “Mrs. Warren’s Profession,” in which Shaw satirized laissez-faire capitalism by purporting to show that prostitution was one of its natural consequences, used to be comparatively rare in this country. Times have changed, though, and what was once a hugely controversial play has received no less than two high-profile American stagings this summer, one by California Shakespeare Theater and one by the Shakespeare Theatre Company of Washington, D.C., with the Roundabout Theatre Company’s upcoming Broadway revival set to open in October.
Never having seen Cal Shakes in action, I chose California over Washington, and was mightily impressed by their production, staged by Timothy Near in the company’s 545-seat amphitheater, one of the most beautiful outdoor performing spaces in America, located not far from San Francisco. Performed on an open stage in a broadly comic style that is nicely suited to an outdoor venue, Ms. Near’s version of “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” is an arresting blend of Vicwardian décor and modern energy…
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Read the whole thing here.