Archives for January 13, 2012

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I report on the Broadway revival of Porgy and Bess and a Florida production of God of Carnage. Here’s an excerpt.
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It ought to be good news that “Porgy and Bess” is back on Broadway for the first time in 35 years. Sad to say, the new version, which is billed by express order of the Gershwin brothers’ estates as “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess,” is a sanitized, heavily cut rewrite that strips away the show’s essence so as to render it suitable for consumption by 21st-century prigs. If you’ve never seen or heard “Porgy,” you might well find this version blandly pleasing. Otherwise, you’ll be appalled.
The “Porgy” “problem,” if you want to call it that, is twofold. “Porgy and Bess” is a full-scale opera, not a musical–an uncut performance runs for three and a half hours–and it is written in dialect, which makes some modern-day listeners squirm. Hence this nannyish adaptation, in which Suzan-Lori Parks has neutered DuBose Heyward’s book to make the characters seem more dignified. (Old version: “Crown dead, ain’t he?” New version: “Crown is dead. Or do you know different?”) Among other ludicrously euphemistic touches, the grievously crippled Porgy, who in the opera must ride around on a goat-drawn cart, now walks on his own with what Ms. Parks calls “a modest cane,” suggesting that there’s nothing wrong with the poor fellow that couldn’t be fixed up by a visit to his friendly neighborhood chiropractor. Diedre R. Murray has done comparable damage to the score, tarting up some numbers, “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin'” (pardon me, “I Got Plenty of Nothing”) in particular, almost beyond recognition. Her musical tampering is tasteless, condescending and, above all, unnecessary: Anyone who thinks that George Gershwin’s great score needs to be “modernized” in order to make it palatable to Broadway audiences is by definition unqualified to touch a note of it.
Diane Paulus and Ronald K. Brown, the director and choreographer, have given this Disney-style “Porgy” an emotionally null staging that is utterly devoid of any sense of place….
“God of Carnage,” whose film version was released a couple of weeks ago, had already been making the regional-theater rounds for the past year and a half. Small wonder: Yasmina Reza’s four-character stage farce, which tells the tale of two well-heeled married couples who come to blows after their children get into a playground scrap, is a lightweight, deftly wrought comedy of bad manners that can be mounted without breaking the bank (it requires a single set). Having reveled in Matthew Warchus’ star-studded 2009 Broadway production, I was curious to see how “God of Carnage” would hold up when played by less familiar faces, so I flew down to Fort Myers to check out the Florida Repertory Theatre’s production.
I’m delighted to report that Florida Rep’s staging, directed with hair-trigger precision by Dennis Lee Delaney, is at least as good as the Broadway version, and better in one respect: The casting is less predictable. On Broadway, the presence of James Gandolfini and Jeff Daniels signaled from the start that the husbands weren’t as nice as they looked. Not so Craig Bockhorn and Chris Clavelli, whose transformation into beasts of prey is a well-kept surprise….
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Read the whole thing here.

“People always try to find base motives behind every good action. We are afraid of pure goodness and of pure evil.”
Eugène Ionesco, Paris Review interview (Fall 1984)