Archives for July 15, 2011

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Lincoln Center Festival staging of As You Like It and another production in Cape May, New Jersey, Cape May Stage’s version of Theresa Rebeck’s The Understudy. Here’s an excerpt.
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The real star of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of “As You Like It” is the stage. In order to perform five Shakespeare plays as part of this summer’s Lincoln Center Festival, the RSC has built a replica of the 965-seat Elizabethan-style open-stage auditorium of its Courtyard Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon and installed it inside the Park Avenue Armory. That’s quite a trick–but it’s not a stunt. The 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall is one of the biggest unobstructed interior spaces in Manhattan, and the only such place where it’s feasible to mount a six-week repertory season. What’s more, the hall is large enough to be naturally resonant. You can hear the actors reveling in the acoustic “bloom” that envelops their voices–and because the audience is wrapped around three sides of the stage, the sight lines are perfect….
As for the production itself, it’s solidly made and frequently inspired, though the first half is straightforward to the point of occasional baldness. Michael Boyd, the company’s artistic director, has eschewed high concepts and given us a more or less traditional “As You Like It,” the theatrical equivalent of a warm, crusty loaf spread with the very best butter….
If you live in New York and don’t see shows elsewhere, then the RSC’s visit is by definition a big deal. But while “As You Like It” is really, really good, all you have to do to see something just as good is get out of town–or live somewhere else….
When I first saw “The Understudy,” I was struck by how the frenetic zaniness of the first half suddenly gave way to an unexpectedly serious group portrait of disappointment and disillusion. Even though both halves worked, they didn’t seem to fit together. But this production, ably directed by Roy Steinberg and very well acted by G.R. Johnson, Luke Darnell and Kristen Calgaro, makes a different impression, perhaps because Mr. Steinberg’s cast plays the first half of “The Understudy” more for truth than for laughs. While the Cape May Stage version isn’t as obviously funny as the Roundabout Theatre Company’s 2009 production, the transition to the second half of the play is smooth and seamless, resulting in a show that makes better emotional sense….
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Read the whole thing here.

“The fact is, though nobody has perceived it, that a professional play-critic is a monstrosity–a sow with five legs or a man with four thumbs. Nature did not intend him, and that is why we have to conceal our repulsion when he confronts us. A keen playgoer may see, perhaps, ten, fifteen, or even twenty plays a year, and it is for him that dramatists write and that managers dangle their bait. Your newspaper-critic may see a hundred productions in a year. The result is–let me put it with unmistakable simplicity–that he does not see any play as a normal citizen would see it. He is therefore as fantastic a freak as the Yorkshireman who ate half a dozen ordinary breakfasts. However, I must give you an example of my contention. Some years ago I glanced at a play-notice by X.Y.Z., whose conceit would be pathetic if it were tolerable, and in his notice he wrote, ‘Then the usual quartet of lawn-tennis players came on, with the usual racquets,’ and, we deduce, immediately bored X.Y.Z. Not until I had read these words did I realise, being only an average playgoer, that several playwrights must have recently used the convenient device of a tennis-party for getting their characters on and off the stage. Does not this example demonstrate in a twinkling that X.Y.Z. may black-mark a play for some effect which will seem to me and you unobjectionable and even adroit? He sees too many plays, eats too many breakfasts, is a monster.”
Clifford Bax (quoted in James Agate, Ego 8)