Archives for October 2010

“By art alone we are able to get outside ourselves, to know what another sees of this universe which for him is not ours, the landscapes of which would remain as unknown to us as those of the moon.”
Marcel Proust, The Past Recaptured

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I report on my recent visit to Cleveland’s Great Lakes Theater Festival, where I saw new productions of Othello and An Ideal Husband. Here’s an excerpt.
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When a drama company puts on two shows in alternating repertory, it’s smart for the artistic director to pick a pair of scripts that can be played off one another–though not necessarily in an obvious way. You wouldn’t think, for instance, that Shakespeare’s “Othello” and Oscar Wilde’s “An Ideal Husband” have much of anything in common, but they prove in practice to be mutually illuminating, bearing as they do on the subject of how suspicion can wreak havoc on a marriage. Cleveland’s Great Lakes Theater Festival is mounting handsome stagings of both plays in collaboration with the Idaho Shakespeare Festival, where the two productions originated this summer, and as I watched them in close succession earlier this week, I was struck by how smoothly they fit together.
Risa Brainin’s “Othello” is a modern-dress staging whose reference points are wholly contemporary, all the way from the clamorous action-flick incidental music of Michael Keck to the central-casting performances of the excellent actors: Othello (David Alan Anderson) plays the regular guy gone wrong, Iago (David Anthony Smith) the brash, sarcastic Bill Murray-ish sidekick with a giant chip on his shoulder, Desdemona (Sara M. Bruner) the chirpy innocent who can’t believe what’s happening to her until it’s too late. The results, though unsubtle in the extreme, are also terrifically effective–and not just on their own populist terms, either. This is a blood-and-thunder “Othello” that roars down the track at several hundred miles an hour…
Nearly every production of an Oscar Wilde play that I’ve seen in recent years has been performed on a set that sought to reproduce more or less literally the Vicwardian décor of Wilde’s own time. Not so the Great Lakes Theater Festival’s version of “An Ideal Husband,” whose simple unit set, designed by Nayna Ramey, consists of a drape, some columns and a half-dozen stage-wide steps, plus enough period chairs to allow the characters to seat themselves as they please. Between the set and Jason Lee Resler’s high-society costumes, nothing more is needed to create a look that is at once stylized and stylish.
Sari Ketter, the director, writes in her program note that she conceives of “An Ideal Husband” as a “fairy tale.” To that end she fills her sparsely decorated stage with a ballet-like corps of black-clad butlers at whose seemingly magical behest the other actors come and go, a charming conceit executed with the most delicate of touches….
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Read the whole thing here.

“‘We find the vanishing vicar of Lovers’ Leap!’ ‘Sally Smith is a tea lady in a Blackpool engineering works, but it was the way she filled those C-cups which got our cameraman all stirred up!’ It’s crap. And it’s written by grown men earning maybe ten thousand a year. If I was a printer, I’d look at some of the stuff I’m given to print, and I’d ask myself what is supposed to be so special about the people who write it.”
Tom Stoppard, Night and Day

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:

• La Cage aux Folles (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• Fela! (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 2, reviewed here)

• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)

• The Pitmen Painters (serious comedy, G, too demanding for children, closes Dec. 12, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

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

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

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

• The Little Foxes (drama, G, unsuitable for children, brilliantly acted but tritely staged, closes Oct. 31, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN ASHLAND, OREGON:

• Hamlet (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Oct. 30, reviewed here)

• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, violence and adult subject matter, closes Oct. 31, reviewed here)

• She Loves Me (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, closes Oct. 30, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN CHICAGO:

• Night and Day (serious comedy, PG-13, closes Oct. 31, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN LOS ANGELES:

• The Glass Menagerie (drama, G, West Coast remounting of original New Haven/off-Broadway production, too dark for children, closes Oct. 17, off-Broadway run reviewed here)

• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, West Coast remounting of original Chicago/off-Broadway production, violence and adult subject matter, closes Oct. 17, off-Broadway run reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN CHICAGO:

• Frost/Nixon (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)

“I never got used to the way the house Trots fell into the jargon back in Grimsby–I mean, on any other subject, like the death of the novel, or the sex life of the editor’s secretary, they spoke ordinary English, but as soon as they started trying to get me to join the strike it was as if their brains had been taken out and replaced by one of those little golf-ball things you get in electric typewriters… ‘Betrayal’…’Confrontation’… ‘Management’… My God, you’d need a more supple language than that to describe an argument between two amoebas.”
Tom Stoppard, Night and Day

A 1966 TV interview with Bill Evans:

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

“Junk journalism is the evidence of a society that has got at least one thing right, that there should be nobody with the power to dictate where responsible journalism begins.”
Tom Stoppard, Night and Day