Archives for September 22, 2010

Starting today, I’ll be filing two weekly drama columns for The Wall Street Journal. In addition to my regular Friday column, I’m going to be writing a second review for the paper’s new Greater New York section that will appear on the day after the opening of a Broadway or off-Broadway play. While this review will not be published in the paper’s national edition, it will be accessible to anyone who reads the Journal online.
I inaugurate the new regime in this morning’s Journal with a review of the New York Theatre Workshop’s revival of Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes, starring Elizabeth Marvel. Here’s an excerpt.
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Lillian Hellman lived a radical life, both politically and sexually, but when it came to her art, she was as traditional as a nun. She wrote “well-made” melodramas in which every corner of the plot is neatly tucked in, and her down-to-earth craftsmanship is one reason “The Little Foxes” was and is so popular. Not only did it run for a year on Broadway, but it has been revived regularly ever since that first production closed in 1940. I’ve seen “The Little Foxes” performed many times, and all of those stagings have been both naturalistic and true to the play’s setting, Alabama in 1900. Now, though, the avant-garde has finally come knocking on Hellman’s door: Ivo van Hove, a Flemish director who specializes in iconoclastic remixes of classics, has given us a high-concept “Little Foxes.”
Mr. van Hove’s approach to the play is easily explained: It’s a modern-dress staging performed without southern accents on a minimalist set, accompanied by minimalist music. If you see a lot of Shakespeare or go to the opera more than once a year, you’ll have seen plenty such productions, and you’ll more than likely be familiar with the rest of the tricks in Mr. van Hove’s bag. Jan Versweyveld’s set, which is presumably intended to suggest a seven-figure Manhattan duplex, contains no furniture except for a Hammond organ in the corner and a video screen on the wall that is used to project offstage scenes. Kevin Guyer’s costumes mostly run to shades of black. All the performers have clearly been instructed to act in as up-to-date a manner as possible…
You are, perhaps, getting the point? The plot of “The Little Foxes,” in which the hateful members of a family of exploitative nouveau-riche tradesmen claw one another’s eyes out over a business deal, is–brace yourself–as contemporary as today’s headlines! Thank you, Mr. van Hove, for trotting out all the clichés in the postmodern book in order to tell us something about “The Little Foxes” that anyone with a quarter of a brain in his head could figure out on his own…
The really sad part is that Mr. van Hove has put together a stageful of class-A actors to enact his simple-minded take on “The Little Foxes.” Elizabeth Marvel and Cristin Milioti, who play Regina, the villainess-in-chief, and her soon-to-be-disillusioned daughter Alexandra, turn in performances of attention-seizing intensity that are as revelatory as the production itself is trite….
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Read the whole thing here.

Ingrid Bergman plays the title role in Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, directed by Alex Segal and starring Michael Redgrave, Ralph Richardson, and Trevor Howard. The production was taped by the BBC in 1962 and broadcast in the United States on CBS in 1963. This performing version was adapted by Phil Reisman from Eva Le Gallienne’s translation:

(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

“Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory is too good.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All-too-Human