http://blogcritics.org/ A sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture, politics, and technology - updated continuously. en Copyright 2005-2007 by the authors Wed, 10 Jan 2007 17:35:11 EST http://backend.userland.com/rss Blogcritics.org custom software http://blogcritics.org/ Phillip WinnSunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding. Administration0@blogcritics.org Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2007/01/10/173511.php PlaygoerI know it's hard to muster outrage over anything to do with a production of Grease. And I actually find myself not worried one bit over the integrity of the American theater, since who really cares who stars in yet another plastic Broadway revival? The people who shell out the bucks for that will deserve what they get, which is seeing two famous-for-15-minute nonentities attempt a two-hour singing 'n' dancing stunt.What is outrageous, though, is how lame a TV show Grease: You’re The One That I Want is.This is where I should disclose my guilty pleasure enjoyment of American Idol. What can I say? Deluded people proudly exhibiting their flaws to stunned silent response never fails to crack me up. But watching a cheap imitation like You’re the One makes me realize how good the FOX people really are at this stuff. Idol is brilliantly paced, immersing you in the audition room for long stretches, immediately getting you up close to both the judges and contestants. Plus, they make sure you see only the very best and very worst contestants. In You're the One they race through ten really mediocre auditions, and then break for a commercial, leaving you in suspense over what will happen to "your favorites." Favorites? I'm still trying to tell pompadour guy #1 from pompadour guy #2.Also, the desperate stretch of using "you're the one that we want" as a catch phrase (as in "is that your final answer...") is just puzzlingly ungrammatical. That British mastermind "producer" and faux-Simon, David Ian, loves to go deadpan and pause for an eternity while staring down each candidate so we can all hang on the words after "you're....". You see, either he says, "You're the one we want to go to the next round" or "You're not it." But after the tenth "you're the one," isn't this just weird?Okay, I'm sure no one else cares about that one.Actually, what he really says is "You're the one going to Grease Academy." Yes, "Grease Academy" is the next round. Or as I like to call it, Sha-Na-RADA.Finally, for a theater lover, it's impossible not to think about what must be going on behind Kathleen Marshall's calm and perky exterior. Not one of the people selected in the first episode would make it past the first minute of a real Broadway cattle call, yet she has to play ball and make nice about their few good attributes. Seriously, the talent on display was somewhere between community theater, karaoke, and prisoner rehabilitation.Think about this: the American Idol champ gets a record contract and can then be conveniently forgotten once the novelty wears off and we wake up from the show's hangover. With these two winners, America may get to turn off the TV after the big vote, but Marshall will have to live with them for four to six weeks plus the run of the Broadway production. And, on top of that, an audience will have to suffer their performances night after night. We're not talking Fantasia or Clay Aiken, folks. There are real consequences here!Of course, the dirty little secret may be... the ringers. As Campbell Robertson explained in a recent New York Times article, the rules are not excluding fully professional Actors Equity folks (i.e. members of the actors' union) from competing side by side with the "enthusiasts":Unlike Idol, You’re the One is not supposed to be exclusively an amateur night. The rules of Idol require that contestants not have any current contracts or talent representation; You’re the One, on the other hand, is simply an open casting call, for novices as well as active Broadway performers. A prospective Danny in the first episode, for example, has several national tours under his belt.But that is part of the show’s tricky balancing act. Reality television producers and viewers still love the nobody from nowhere who wins it all; the first episode puts heavy (and at times, teary) emphasis on the contestants’ personal stories. But the winners also have to hold up a $10 million musical eight times a week for at least a year, a demanding feat for a total greenhorn.“We absolutely would love for a carpenter from Idaho to be Danny,” said Al Edgington, the executive producer of the television show. “But the reality is, they have to be able to perform. If the carpenter from Idaho does end up being Danny, Kathleen may be in trouble.”This is where David Ian might have an interesting choice to make. As producer of both the TV program and the subsequent Broadway revival, does he go for solid dependable professional chops that will deliver a good show? Or, does he bet on the sheer novelty of "the carpenter" (what was that, some Christ reference?) approach paying off?What, you say? Could the casting of untalented celebrities (even 15-minute celebrities) really outperform actual quality at the Broadway box office? Never.(Or, just ask P. Diddy...) Video58016@blogcritics.org Wed, 10 Jan 2007 17:35:11 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/10/30/225951.php PlaygoerFor an unusual show, I offer an unusual review...Nine Theses on My Name is Rachel Corrie1. While it is a collection of a non-playwright’s journals, My Name Is Rachel Corrie is very deliberately constructed as a play by its “co-editors” Alan Rickman and Katherine Viner. It even has two acts — even though they’re not demarcated in the script and the intermissionless 90 minutes would seem to tell the audience otherwise. The first act introduces us to the character of Rachel, seen in the bedroom of her childhood home, as a 20-something college student and budding activist in Olympia, Washington. She tells us about Olympia, about the photos on her wall, about her impatience with her parents. She is Everygirl. The state of Israel is barely mentioned at all in this first 20 pages of a 52-page monologue. I imagine this is the most surprising aspect of the play to those coming to it with expectations fueled by the controversy. “What’s so controversial?” many find themselves asking — especially for the first 45 minutes. 2. As they have constantly stated, Rickman and Viner’s guiding principle for the play was to portray Rachel as a human being, not as a mouthpiece for a political position. But obviously her politics have defined her as a human being — both to the world and even to herself, it now seems. The interest the play takes in her, then, is as an idealist. I think what has made it both appealing and frustrating to all who encounter it — reading or seeing, London or New York — is the abstractness with which this idealism is presented for much of the evening. This is also how the play skirts the more controversial elements of Rachel’s chosen cause. No passages are included, for instance, where Rachel explains, why Palestine as opposed to, say, Darfur? The play would have us believe Rachel only wanted to do good and help people, anywhere. Surely there must have been something that got her involved specifically in this issue, and in the International Solidarity Movement. But that is left out. She is presented as an accidental heroine, who might as well have spun a globe and stopped her finger on Gaza. I also assume that if she self-identified as an international human rights activist, her diaries and emails must be virulently anti-Bush. Barely a trace of that makes it into the play. We know what side she’s on, obviously, but the character of Rachel comes off here as effectively nonpartisan. After all, that would make her less “universal,” wouldn’t it? 3. I sense a kind of '60s nostalgia at work in this project. It explains why Rickman — presumably a man formed in that politically idealistic era — would have taken on this consuming project based merely on reading some excerpts of Rachel’s journals printed in the Guardian one day. I suspect what caught his attention was not diatribes against Israel, but such heartfelt pleas as this eloquent passage which he positions at the play's climax: It is my own selfishness and will to optimism that wants to believe that even people with a great deal of privilege don’t just sit idly by and watch. What we [Americans] are paying for here [Israel] is truly evil… I’m really scared, and questioning my fundamental belief in the goodness of human nature. This has to stop. I think it is a good idea for us all to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop. These words are powerful in performance, especially as annunciated by the mature (she’s at least ten years older than the real Rachel) and classically trained Megan Dodds with all the force of Saint Joan. And it is probably the moment audiences can most poignantly “relate” to -- not necessarily in being equally idealistic themselves, but even in wishing to be. And if they don't share the utopian idealism themselves, they may recognize this impulse from their own children. 4. One of the most theatrically notable things about the play is that it is the first high-profile staging of the voice of a new generation of American leftist activists, who are not the urban proles or recent immigrants of previous eras’ rallies and walkouts. We’re not in the land of Waiting for Lefty, Sticks and Bones or even Angels in America any more. Instead these are the white suburban middle class children of hippies, who turn their idealistic dreams out onto the world more than domestic politics. My Name is Rachel Corrie documents and pays tribute to this demographic — a demographic the producers would be smart to woo to the play with cheaper ticket prices and possibly late night performances. 5. Amidst all the absractions, the best parts of My Name is Rachel Corrie are the most concrete. The meticulous detailing in Part Two of Rachel’s observations of daily life in Gaza. “60,000 people from Rafah worked in Israel two years ago,” she says, referring to the period before the latest intifada. “Now only 600 can go there for jobs. Of these 600, many have moved, because the three checkpoints make a 40-minute drive into a 12-hour impassable journey.” We hear what it’s like living day to day with her Palestinian host family; she sleeps on the floor with their children, enjoying Hollywood horror movies with them on TV. “Do you think I’m hanging out with Hamas fighters?” is her answer to her mother’s fears she’s getting involved with terrorism. When it’s laying out this information so baldly as reportage, the play hints at a Brechtian political theatre. But at its core, the play exemplifies just the opposite kind — what Brecht would call the “Aristotelian” theatre of empathy, which focuses us on an abstract, emotional, sense of individual “humanity” rather than specific historical and social circumstances surrounding the individual. In short: Palestinians are people, too. Sounds trite — but at its best, MNIRC reminds us why that sentiment is so vital to our sense of justice. For instance: some still accuse Rachel — and the play — of either dishonesty or naivete for ignoring the network of underground tunnels used to smuggle weapons from Egypt into the occupied territories — but are they really saying, therefore, there are no "innocent" Palestinians? These tunnels — which, yes, do exist — are supposed to end all argument on this subject, it seems. But by demanding that we think for just a moment of at least some residents of occupied Gaza who may really just be trying to get to work every day and feed their families, the play achieves one of the noblest goals of empathy-theatre: to shine a light on a far off corner of the world so you can put yourself in the shoes of someone whose race, religion, or nationality previously identified them in our culture as sub-human. In other words, “evildoers.” When such empathy is established, then the horrors of what Rachel condemns as “collective punishment” of a people (expressly forbidden by the Geneva Conventions and the U.N.) come home in a way that brings together the personal and political. 6. But all of this is simply narrated from the stage, not enacted. It is demonstrated through anecdote and vocal outrage, but not presented for us to see. Nor, of course, are we hearing this from the voices of the oppressed, but from this white American intermediary, an interpreter. So the very format and mission of the play — to give us “Rachel’s words” and no more — ultimately limits the emotional — and political — impact of the story she tried to tell, the facts she wanted to get out. It’s a familiar Hollywood tactic for championing the cause of oppressed people considered too “other.” Funny enough, it was especially prominent in '80s films by other liberal Brits like Richard Attenborough and Alan Parker. Mississippi Burning wasn’t about black civil rights activists, but about the white FBI agents nobly hunting down their killers. Cry Freedom wasn’t about Denzel’s Steve Biko, but Kevin Kline with a British accent trying to save him. And if you can strain your memories to recall Parker’s dud Welcome to the Paradise, the plight of interned Japanese-Americans is reflected through the heroic struggle of… Dennis Quaid! For a liberal white US/UK audience, Rachel is our “way in”, our "eyes and ears." A voice we can trust, because we like her. Would the same audience as readily trust a Palestinian narrator? Especially since the logic of collective punishment — in short, the “tunnels” argument — tells us there are none in Gaza untainted by terrorism? 7. By trading in the Aristotelian, My Name is Rachel Corrie both gains in achieving sympathy for its martyred heroine and loses in political efficacy. Brecht would have hated this play beacuse its ending points the audience in no clear direction for possible action. I think Rickman and Viner want us to come out inspired that one person could make a difference. But does ending the play with the bulldozer inspire others to take up her cause? (Vengeance against the state of Israel is certainly not encouraged. The argument that the Sharon government covered up its complicity in her death does not work its way on stage.) So, it is a sad play. Which is a large part of its appeal. A moving personal story. But this feeling of sadness seems more likely to instill fatalism in its audience than a constructive call to action. This is why this is ultimately not at all a “dangerous” play. 8. On the other hand… I can’t deny that the few passages Rickman and Viner select that do explicitly critique Israeli policy do create some refreshing political frisson in the auditorium. The first such moment occurs about 20 minutes in. Rachel is on the phone with her mother, coaching her on how to talk to the press about her own activities: Please think about your language when you talk to them. I think it was smart that you’re wary of using the word “terrorism” and if you talk about the cycle of violence, or “an eye for an eye” you could be perpetuating the idea that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a balanced conflict, instead of a largely unarmed people against the fourth most powerful military in the world.We’re just not used to hearing this position articulated so directly and unapologetically in our public discourse. Not on cable news. (Except perhaps as a two-minute hate.) And certainly not in the mainstream theatre. (Incidentally, this speech actually got applause on opening night! But maybe it was prompted by the sentence that immediately follows and concludes the above excerpt: "These are the kind of things it's important to think about before talking to reporters." So it may have been received more as a jab at the media.) By the way, there are really only a handful of such confrontational passages in the play. I reckon all of them together would run less than ten minutes. Like all great censorship fights in the theatre, the fight is over a play’s small moments, not overall argument. But these ten minutes are by far the most compelling and, yes, exciting moments in the whole piece. Not because you’ll necessary nod along with them. But it’s just always dramatically powerful when someone violates a taboo on stage. And you can’t totally discount the play’s value as political theatre when such dissident views (and, yes, even in liberal New York they are stilll dissident) are baldly stated from a public stage, even if couched in all kinds of protective layers of sympathy and sentiment. 9. In sum… My Name is Rachel Corrie spends a little too much time trying to normalize and humanize its heroine, instead of trusting her to speak through her bolder actions. Part One does get stuck in “All American Girl” mode, where Rachel’s everyday observations about growing up seem not only commonplace, but also frankly trivial compared to what we know is coming. I found myself caring a lot less about Olympia, Washington (especially a weird “Dairy Queen” digression in the midst of the Gaza story) than about her clear desire for danger and for championing the unpopular. I also ended up more interested in her Palestinian host family at one point than in her. I don’t think the problem is the documentary format. A more compelling script could probably have been culled from the same materials, if it dared to explore what was most different about Rachel, not most typical. (Typically American, typically idealistic, etc) However, by the end I could see the payoff in the arc Rickman and Viner have constructed by beginning the way they do. Rachel’s bravery at the end is all the more impressive and moving given her modest beginnings. As an “innocents abroad” narrative, it arouses some pity and terror ultimately when the journey of self-discovery turns suddenly - very suddenly - into tragedy. (In a recent look inside the play's process, Viner writes: "At the beginning of the play, Rachel could be any American teenager — and by the end, she could only be Rachel Corrie.") As for Megan Dodds, she is a forceful, eminently watchable, and downright charming actress. Rickman’s casting of her reflects a deliberate shaping of the character (the fictional/dramatic Rachel) as the “innocent abroad.” A standard “old Europe” view of Americans, after all. Dodds’ thin but statuesque physique, her blonde haired, wide- and blue-eyed spark capture what the world has always thought of as the good American. Vibrant, optimistic and unspoiled, she is the American the world used to like, before Bush came along. You can fault Rickman’s strategy of so privileging personal likeability in the character while still admiring Dodds’ talent and skill in pulling that off. And, as I’ve said, she knows how to unleash the more strident political energy and intelligence when called for. Despite the many reservations detailed above, I would still have no problem recommending My Name Is Rachel Corrie if it were a $20 ticket at, say, The Culture Project. At a quick 90 minutes, it offers plenty to think about, a strong central performance, and engages the world. But at $65, though, I don’t know what audiences will enter hoping to get out of it. As an entertainment, it’s dramaturgically slight and doesn’t consistently enough hold one’s intellectual or emotional interest. This is why I sincerely hope the producers — now confident enough to extend the play’s run through the end of the year — will see the wisdom of actively reaching out to Rachel’s ideal audience, the college students and young activists (especially young women) who are most likely to see something of themselves in her journey. Because of things like $65 tickets, our theatre so rarely addresses the young today. If this is a play for anyone it is for them, not the traditional subscribers, board members, and other gatekeepers of the current theatrical culture.My Name is Rachel Corrie Co-edited by Alan Rickman and Katherine Viner Starring Megan Dodds At the Minetta Lane Theatre Culture55084@blogcritics.org Mon, 30 Oct 2006 22:59:51 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/08/25/181925.php PlaygoerMeryl Streep returns to the stage in the year's big theatrical event and New York's hottest ticket: Bertolt Brecht's timeless war play, Mother Courage and Her Children, in New York's Central Park.My main problem with this Mother Courage is simply how bland it is. This is quite a disappointment coming from director George Wolfe, who (during his long reign at The Public) both reinvented classics (The Tempest, On The Town) and cultivated exciting new and multicultural work (Bring in Da Noise, Fires in the Mirror, and his own classic Colored Museum). The last thing I expected from Woolfe would be a Mother Courage that looked like a 2nd-company road tour of a very conservative European state theatre (if there are any). Hiring a bold showman like Wolfe to helm a Mother Courage outdoors in the park, with Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori collaborating, strikes me as a wonderful opportunity to really play with the play. I'm as reverent a Brechtian as they come, but if ever there were a chance to do something different with a classic, this special summer slot is it. Save the boring rep productions aping the Brecht model-books for the regular season. Imagine if Wolfe and company devised a 90-minute "riff" on Courage -- fully updated to reference Iraq (instead of the safe, pussy-footing winks Kushner drops into the current scripts). Now that would have been an "event." Ok, no point in reviewing what they didn't do. Still, it's Wolfe's lack of imagination that I want to focus on here. I'm interested in how much the word "tired" has come up in other reviews so far -- how tired Streep looks at the end, how tired the audience gets. To me, "tired" is exactly the adjective to describe how the whole enterprise comes off -- tired and grey. Let's take Streep's costume, for starters. Not that anyone expects "colorful" in Brecht , but she looks like a mailman! I could see the impetus for the look -- a sort of Soviet-era pastiche, bringing out a gender bending "toughness" in the character. But one need only compare the above photo side by side with images of the original Courage, Helene Weigel (AKA Faru Brecht), to see what's missing. Weigel's rags may also have been grey, but they made a powerful statement about the character's social situation and struggle. Streep's outfit I found cute, frankly, and so did she it seemed -- from all the fun she had cocking her hat and puffing Cook's pipe like Popeye the Sailor Man. In short, what's missing from her characterization, and the whole vision of the show, is the direness of the stakes, the desperation of everyone involved. Scenically, Riccardo Hernandez (also usually more creative) has once again laid out a textbook "Brecht 101" set of wooden planks and turntable stage. The famous "wagon" looks just like you expect it to look. (Again, browse around here.) Unfortunately, none of it seems to fit comfortably on the crowded Delacorte stage, which only adds to the obligatoriness of it all. There's nothing wrong, of course, with all these Brechtian trappings, per se (after all, they're part of what made Brecht Brecht), but here they're not employed to any useful effect (alienation or otherwise). There’s something half-assed about "quoting" these qualities without activating them. I got excited when Wolfe suddenly had a modern jeep drive onstage to deliver the corpse of Eilif in a chillingly modern and mechanistic manner. That was because I could finally feel Wolfe was excited. Making a choice instead of following a playbook. But such refreshing choices were isolated and few and far between. The period setting also raises some issues here. A proudly, eclectically anachronistic setting could have worked -- borrowing freely, anarchically from wars present and past. But this was still 80 percent 17th century, with things like the mailman's hat and the jeep thrown in as afterthoughts. Again, lack of commitment. Tesori's music certainly was working on the eclectic side. I'm surprised critics haven't picked up on the clear Sondheim touch in her "Song of Capitulation," a fitting Broadway style equivalent to Brecht's "shrug" of a song. But the Broadway-ness of the score throughout became a problem for me. As Peter Marks has argued, the songs become "numbers." I originally complained they didn't "fit," but of course I realize Brecht didn't want the songs to "fit" in a classic, Rogers & Hammerstein way. Still, they should conceptually fit what you're trying to say in the production. Wolfe and Tesori (and presumably Kushner, who wrote the English lyrics) have obviously agreed on an approach that casts each song as a different musical genre, alternating between Sondheim, blues, vaudeville, and then some classic "Brechtian" pastiche of Weill and Dessau for good measure. The result is an impressive versatility, but no unified vision; and more a comment on the history of American musical theatre than economic imperatives behind war. Speaking of the blues, that's for the songs of the prostitute Yvette. Another rare Wolfe "stamp" in the production is the conception of the character and the casting of African-American actress Jennifer Lewis. Lewis does a terrific job. But are her blues numbers a bit too pleasing? Is her persona a bit too winning and crowd-pleasing? Yvette is not necessarily the raisonneur and straight talker of the play, rather just another businessperson out for herself. That gets lost if the audience is waiting for them to bring on more Yvette for an encore. This Yvette could have worked better if, again, the whole production were similarly updated and reconceived for a 21st century American idiom. That Yvette had so much attitude and the rest of the production was so grey (or, frankly, white) says it all. Wolfe makes another stab at his own kind of theatricality in the climactic moment of Katrin's death. I suppose this is something of a "spoiler" since none of the reviews I've read go into detail, but when you see "Flying By Foy" in the program, you can already anticipate what's going to happen. In a moment that obviously seems to recall his most famous collaboration with Kushner, Katrin transforms into an "angel" when shot down from the roof -- a nice enough idea if it didn't have to be executed so clumsily. I know Brecht liked us to see stage mechanics, but watching a stagehand hook Katrin up pages before her big moment (so that she continues to play much of the scene in the harness), well that just doesn't fly in any aesthetic. There was no such "magic" anywhere else during the three-plus hours. In fact, it was a telling glimpse of Wolfe the romantic bursting through the faux-Brechtian facade he had been putting up all evening. As ill-suited as his romantic temperament may be to Brecht, I would have welcomed it for its honesty if he had unleashed it more consistently throughout. Had Wolfe really let loose, this could have been a wild, heretical, and thoroughly un-Brechtian Mother Courage, but still exciting theatre. In this vein, I think back to Scott Elliott's scandalous Threepenny Opera at the Roundabout a few months back. On the one hand, you can look at these two mega-productions together and conclude it's sad that two of our premiere NYC theatre institutions, who have the best of everything at their disposal, can't get Brecht right. On the other, I'll still maintain Elliott's was certainly the more watchable, interesting, and brave of the two, even if it was totally wrong. I'll take strong and wrong over safe and lame. I will say that the much commented-upon length of Mother Courage is not the problem. It's a long play, deal. While I would have been interested in a radical reimagining and recutting (if you're going to do the play as written), it will be this long, probably. The fault for making the play feel long is Wolfe's. A more unifying vision (even if the elements are, by Brecht's design, disparate and disjointed) can help, as would more prominent theatrical throughlines to take us through the evening -- a greater visual focus on the imagery of goods, exchange; leaner storytelling in the translation; a less cluttered stage; and a more consistent musical voice (and ultimately, more seismic, compelling central performance). After this and the Seagull, I'm beginning to question Streep's suitability for the stage after all. I missed out on her early triumphs at Yale and in the Papp Public days, but in these two appearances, she still seems to be playing in close-up. Her voice and body are expressive, but the former thin and the latter cautious. Streep expresses Courage's cynicism in a half-hearted chuckle, but what she needs is a true Brechtian social gestus that comes out of her whole physical action. It's simply not a big enough performance. (My first thought at intermission was that Patti LuPone is doing this role much better in Sweeney Todd. Heretical, I know.) The show has its supporters, for sure. Rob Kendt has documented and stayed on top of the response better than I tried here and here. To be fair, I can see how, if someone just loves the play and wants to hear it and see it done in a textbook, this non-intrusive fashion (free of directorial concept) could satisfy whatever conservative taste there possibly can be for Brecht anyway. (Hence, John Simon's rave!) An opportunity was missed here, though, to take ownership of this play in an American, 21st century idiom, to take advantage of the civic spectacle of a free performance in a public space and claim it for our unique moment in history, when a war is tearing us apart at home and quite possibly leading to the downfall of the American Empire. Instead we get a perfectly respectable Brecht -- which I'm sure is the last thing he would have wanted right now.Mother Courage and Her Children by Bertolt Brecht Translated by Tony KushnerMusic by Jeanine Tesori Directed by George C. Wolfe Produced by The Public Theater at the Delacorte Theater in Central ParkRunning through September 3 Culture52025@blogcritics.org Fri, 25 Aug 2006 18:19:25 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/07/14/173427.php PlaygoerI have my share of misgivings about Moises Kaufman's production of Macbeth. But I was taken aback by this objection by the New York Times' Charles Isherwood in his review: "Macbeth is not really a play about war, as King Lear is not a play about real estate."Kaufman is a theatre artist who has constantly mined the overlap of the personal and political. From his devised docu-dramas Gross Indecency and Laramie Project to his direction of I Am My Own Wife, you know he is proud to have an "agenda." (In those works that meant examining the persecution of sexual "deviancy.") So I for one was hardly surprised he would find the most political way into Macbeth. In fact, I looked forward to it!Last time I checked, Macbeth is a warrior. The play begins and ends with battle. War is the means if not the cause of his initial advancement and his ultimate undoing. Yes, there's a lot else going on and the play can be presented as an abstract psychological study. But is not "war play" at least one of the many genres the work can be conceived as? If we can have Mafia-Macbeths and fast-food chain Macbeths (any other Scotland, PA fans out there?), then War-Macbeths can hardly be off the table. (Note that any play that extracts the characters from their tribal warfare context has to substitute a social backdrop equally violent.)It's not necessary to cite the Public's own ballyhooing about its self-declared "war season" to appreciate the lengths Kaufman goes to within the production itself to announce its context. He presents us upon entering the Delacorte Theatre with sentries keeping watch amidst the distant soundscape of mortar shells and the muffled oratory of some generic "great leader." The apron of the stage is strewn with rubble, the marble detritus of an august civilization gone to the dogs. The witches soon enter not as central casting hags but as female grunts, "regulars" but in nondescript fatigues and expressionist whiteface. (Kaufman has repeatedly over his short career showed himself to be nothing if not a Brechtian.) They surround a white-haired man seated center stage, consult each other, nod in assent, and crown him. He is Duncan, of course, and they the "kingmakers." The payoff for this moment comes at the end when they similarly bless Malcolm and, in a neat interpolation, repeat the play's opening lines -- "When shall we three meet again?" Eternal recurrence? Setting us up for the sequel? (McB II?) I took it more as bluntly cynical: power corrupts, and wartime power corrupts absolutely. (To say nothing of "war powers.") It'll happen to Malcom just as it did to Macbeth. And who said Duncan was so great, either?Compelling impulses. Especially in a current Shakespearean landscape so rife with surface concepts but short on cogent interpretation. So whatever else may be wrong with this Macbeth, it ain't the war.Note I have been referring to this as the Moises Kaufman Macbeth, not the Liev Schreiber Macbeth, even though that's how you've likely most heard of it. My intent is not to slight Schreiber, whom I admire, but to stress this is a director's, not an actor's, production. Indeed it takes Schreiber the whole first act to show some individuality, so concerned is he with posing as the decent man about to be corrupted, which Kaufman's schema stipulates. Unfortunately playing good guys is not this actor's strong suit. (Would you rather see him as Ricky Roma or his wooden Gregory Peck homage in The Omen?) The first act of this staging, then, is a bit too buttoned up after the initial promise of bloody war. Entertaining his superiors at home, Macbeth dons a tux and plays Victrola dance tunes for his guests. Schreiber is so polished and collected in his soliloquies you don't feel the naked drive of the character; instead, doubt and remorse predominate with Macbeth breaking down in tears after killing Duncan. It all was a bit too "tasteful" for me.Finally, Liev lights up toward the end. (This is one of the few Macbeths -- and few Macbeths -- that got better in the second half.) His alpha-male finally breaks out and he delivers a tangibly brutish and choleric Shakespearean manic-depressive villain. In his final scenes his stumbling mighty frame suggests a bully literally drunk from his own power. His interactions with his subordinates are physically menacing and, even better, bitingly sardonic. I give Kaufman and Schreiber credit for finding an arc and "journey" for the character. Too bad it began in such a boring place.What to say about Jennifer Ehle's Lady M? There's certainly mileage to be gotten out of making the character glamorous. (Not everyone has to emulate the memorably embittered hausfrau of Judi Dench.) But there's a big difference between charming or seductive...and just pretty. Kaufman and costumer Michael Krass clearly fight the "butch" legacy by going all femme on Ehle, to the max. Like, introducing her in a pink evening gown. These trappings shouldn't necessarily sap the character's power. But Ehle seems just too...comfortable. Her flat American accent (so as not to out-class the Yank, Schreiber?) grates. Perhaps the banality of evil was intended? What we get from her instead is just another desperate housewife.Lady M's fading from the scene is another reason the production picks up in the second act. Derek McLane and David Lander's sets and lighting pull off a nice coup with the Central Park trees popping up as Birnam Wood and Rick Sordelet's stylized fights give us something different from the usual clanging and hacking. Most revisionist is Kaufman's rendering of Malcolm as proto-fascist, replete with jackboots and a 1930s standing microphone as he addresses his troops.But even the political statement falls short of potent contemporary analogy. Kaufman wants the man-made horror of war without losing or downplaying the spooky supernaturalism of the witches and their spells, and the two detract from one another. Yes, he opts to leave Banquo's ghost to our (and Macbeth's) imagination. But the Act III "witches cauldron" scene is as hokey as they come.Isherwood is wrong if he thinks the Scottish play can't also be a war play. But he's right if he means it can't be both contemporary real-world polemic and Halloween ghoolery at the same time. Culture50381@blogcritics.org Fri, 14 Jul 2006 17:34:27 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/04/26/185011.php Playgoer"All of the characters in Awake and Sing! share a fundamental activity: a struggle for life amidst petty conditions." Clifford Odets, in his introduction to Awake and Sing! (1935). This is what stage naturalism (in the sense first advocated by Zola) does best, the depiction of human beings in the context of their larger environment, their behavior and motivations shown as the products of social forces. I was distressed to hear Michael Riedel on his PBS TV show Theatre Talk dismiss, in passing, Lincoln Center's mounting of Awake and Sing! as catering to "spinster theatre." (An odd epithet for this very emotive Jewish family drama.) The remark was made while interviewing David Hare, and the larger point was theatres would rather do such "chestnuts" than more "relevant" political dramas like Stuff Happens.Oh how soon you are forgotten, Odets, once dubbed in the NY press as "revolution's number one boy"! For it was his conceit (and that of the adventurous Group Theatre who produced him) that representing on the Depression-era stage the plight of the Berger family from the Bronx was just as political an act as showing us the backroom dealings of Bush and Blair. The surprise in store to the Riedels out there is that Awake and Sing! -- when enacted truthfully and at full-force -- still grabs you by the collar more than occasionally, reminding you of the price of materialism, of an inhuman society, and, yes, even of war. Granted, the play hasn't been helped over the years by timid regional revivals, clueless college productions, and, frankly, the over-romanticizing by some of our elder theatre colleagues of the Group aura in general. To those jaded by such experiences, I especially commend Bartlett Sher's freshly considered and rigorous revival, where nostalgia is replaced by a genuinely affecting melancholy of "life amidst petty conditions." Even in its oddest and least successful choices -- especially in the scenic conception -- there's not a lazy or clichéd note to the whole evening. If all our classics were produced with this much care, we would be a healthier theatre indeed. The production also reminds us that Odets wrote for some of the greatest stage actors this country has ever known (i.e. the Group Company) and that nothing wipes away the taint of "datedness" from his scripts like good acting. His powerfully loony locutions (part Yiddish, part gangster) sound dated only in the mouths of lackluster actors. Sher's casting makes all the "dif" here, as Odets says. Especially in the two runaway roles, the sensitive tough guy -- and WWI amputee WWI -- Moe Axelrod (Mark Ruffalo) and the domineering warden of a mama, Bessie (Zoe Wanamaker).Lest any doubt Ruffalo has been spoiled by Hollywood, here is a reminder of what first captivated audiences and critics about him in Kenneth Lonnergan's early stage work. (Lonnergan, of course, being one of many American dramatists bearing the Odetsian influence in his love of the poetry of the New York streets.) Ruffalo handles Odets' language effortlessly (dare I say "naturalistically") fully internalizing its big emotions. I say "internalizing" because this is a surprisingly quiet performance, not scene-stealing bravura. But his intensity and truthfulness is always highly tangible. The result is a very warm Moe, a romantic, not just a "heel." Wanamaker likewise modulates the given extremes of her dynamic character. Even though Odets may at times seem to write Bessie as the Jewish Mother From Hell, Wanamaker doesn't show us a witch, but neither does she sentimentalize her as some generic suffering immigrant matriarch. This is just plainly a very sad, disappointed adult, clinging to the ideals society has taught her. ("Here without a dollar you don't look the world in the eye. Talk from now to next year - this is life in America.")The tinges of regret and resignation we occasionally see in her are of a woman half conscious of losing her soul. A small-framed physical presence, Wanamaker does not bully her family, but that permanently sour visage and steady low voice intimidates them -- and us -- very convincingly. Her Bessie, the antagonist, emerges surprisingly as the anchor of the play. Such unforced and subtle naturalism distinguishes all the actors in this tight knit ensemble. If the opening moments seem slow, just sit back and adjust to its rhythms. No affected immigrant- family histrionics here. Just a quiet, seemingly uneventful night at the Bergers. The "slice of life" done tastefully and expertly. It is in this context that Ben Gazzara's somewhat daring "method" performance as the prophetic grandfather Jacob, can be best appreciated. No doubt there'll be some grumbling over his grainy monotone, heavily Yiddish-accented droning. But it forces you to listen. And it's far from the stereotype of the schmaltzy old wise man this role can fall victim to. My only disappointment in the casting -- and it's admittedly not insignificant -- is in the two young protagonists, Hennie and Ralph. The former is woefully underwritten as a character and the latter is given to Waiting For Lefty-style speechifying more than heartfelt confession. But whatever small plot there is to Awake and Sing hinges on their efforts to break free from the prison of their family. The "struggle for life" is theirs most of all. It is therefore helpful to like them, and likeability and charm are not the strong suits of either Lauren Ambrose or Pablo Schreiber. Yes, both characters "got the blues," but Ambrose is too deflated and Schreiber too cold and strident to make me want to root for them. (While an asset in other roles, Schreiber's 6'3" rail-thin frame and steely-eyed demeanor don't help here. Odd casting for an underdog.) Where Sher will invite the most criticism is in his approach to the scenic conception of the play. At first what struck me about Michael Yeargain's set is how closely it resembled pictures of the original Group production. (Day bed and window stage right, dinner table stage right with a makeshift curtain dividing the two areas.) While this apartment seems way too spacious for a 1935 Bronx tenement (and even regardless of historical realism, the play does demand claustrophobia), at least Yeargain has purged all sepia tones from his tattered plain walls, daring the fill the stage with grey.Such modesty doesn't last long however, when (spoiler alert!) in the middle of the second act -- mid-dialogue, no less -- the walls begin to levitate. Sher and Yeargain then steadily remove more of the "confines" so that by play's end the space has been completely opened up and Ralph stands transcendent and "free at last." It's definitely a jarring concept.Some benefits include letting us see into the other rooms of the apartment and even the crucial stairwell beyond. (I liked the glimpse we get of Moe exposing his prosthetic leg, for instance.) But is this sudden explosion of magical realism without any preparation in Act One a wrong turn? (Especially when accompanied by anachronistic ethereal Arvo Part music?) Personally, I took more issue with the timing of these moments, especially when they drowned out valuable text. (Poor Sam Feinschriber never gets to tell his story!) The "peeling away" that happens between acts was less disruptive. Disrupting, though, seems precisely what Sher and Yeargain wanted to do, though. And that's where I find fault. The text can stand up to such interventions, but a more pervasive strategy would have to be employed to disrupt it throughout. I also am dismayed by what probably is too insecure a distrust of naturalism in any form.Did Sher think we would just get bored by three hours of "kitchen sink realism"? More likely, he was bored of it. Whatever the production gains poetically is lost in social commentary. Gone is the environment, the "petty conditions." The stage suddenly becomes just a little too pretty, in effect. Much as we mock it now, there once was a social point to the "kitchen sink." (Ironically, the disappearing of the walls, show us the sink here, but no matter.) [For some great visual images of the set -- and explanatory commentary by Sher -- see the fun "Audio Slide Show" on the NYTimes.com theatre page. ] The abstractness of the design leads to another deficiency: the downplaying of period. This is not a production outwardly concerned with the thirties. I'm sure leather jackets were around then, for instance, but isn't Moe's here a trite extravagant? (Or is it just a way to remind the younger audiences that Mark Ruffalo is cool!) The sparse set also seems deliberately "timeless" and uninformed by the world around it. (The walls are practically bare. Which may be why it doesn't seem to evoke a specifically Jewish family home either.)Then again, such historical boxing in and adherence to pictorial realism has led to the kind of nostalgia that has long cursed this play. By foregrounding the acting and the emotional worlds going on within the characters, Sher wisely reminds us what is still fresh about it. Besides, the minutiae of the thirties are always present in Odets' dialogue itself, impeccably spoken by this cast. Small caveats? The play doesn't need to be three acts anymore; there's a perfectly fine break between the two scenes of Act Two, which I'm surprised Sher did not take. Our theatergoing culture just does not seem to have the patience to sustain energy through two intermissions - especially when the second curtain comes down on a crushing fatality, not a kickline of showgirls. Also -- getting textual -- the word "nigger" is used twice in the play, both times in the sense of being worked to death "like a nigger." Sher ironically cuts it from a speech of Bessie's (the bad guy of the play) and retains it when our heroine Hennie says it. If any amending is to be made, it would make sense to do the opposite, no? Unless Sher's goal is to avoid harshening the villain and to complicate the hero. (The challenge of what to do with this word in revivals of '20s and '30s classics in general plagues directors constantly, of course.) As for Odets the Political Playwright... Those new to him might be surprised by a seeming innocuousness. (Especially in this largely apolitical production.) But it's there. Not just in the obvious, admittedly forced "happy ending" of Ralph's salvation in the cause of union activism. (A trace of the play's storied revisions.) But when Odets assembles the family before supper, and the capitalist uncle, the war vet, and the "old country" socialist all go at it, the turbulent outside world makes its unmistakable entrance.And listening to them fight over why we go to war, how we compensate workers for their labor, and what we call "success" in America, it's clearly our own world today as well. Too bad it takes a 70-year-old play to bring back on stage those realities so often ignored in our insular theatre of today. Culture46899@blogcritics.org Wed, 26 Apr 2006 18:50:11 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/03/14/080942.php PlaygoerWhat Ibsen may have done for womankind has been much debated, but for women in the theatre his gifts do keep on giving. As victimized and oppressed as Hedda Gabler and Nora Helman may be in their fictional worlds, stage divas have dominated the stage in their names ever since Ibsen's ink dried. The dynamism of these plays' protagonists is their blessing and their curse. The roles can attract star power, bringing talent, but potentially eclipsing and unbalancing the rest of each play's crucial ensemble. On the other hand, if the actress brings none of the requisite presence and depth to bear, everyone's in for a cold Norwegian night, staring at an empty fireplace. On the New York stage, stars don't get much bigger than Cate Blanchett, and I will start by attesting to the Oscar-winner's natural charisma and stage chops. This is a good start in such a massive and omnipresent role as Hedda. In Robyn Nevin's production for the visiting Sydney Theatre Company, Ms. Gabler-Tesman, as she might wish to be called today, lurks more than ever, drifting through Fiona Crombie's surprisingly (for this play) airy mansion of a set. Incessantly restless and fidgety, moving furniture pieces and disrupting flower arrangements, this Hedda would pull focus even were she not a glamour-cover movie star. At first one might be aghast at Blanchett's disregard of her fellow actors, until you realize the choice here is to make Hedda just that...well, bitchy. It's good for a few laughs up front - aided by the snappy dialogue of Andrew Upton's "adaptation" which barely refrains from outright anachronism. Blanchett's orneriness ends up working against the play, however, because it's just too winning, oddly enough - at least for the hipsters in the BAM audience perhaps new to the play. About halfway through I had to remind myself that there actually was some depth to this play, and that Hedda wasn't just a time-traveler from Sex and the City forced into a corset to endure the Ibsenite expostulating of some 19th-century stuffshirts. (Appropriately, Kristian Fredrikson's costumes inch it all up to about 1910, it seems. And not too badly.) Hedda has real emotional problems of her own. While Carrie Bradshaw might have her run away with her old flame, Ibsen makes her plan his death. What does that tell you? So the result is actually a pretty entertaining Hedda, and that's not a phrase you hear too often. But, of course, by the time you get to that gunshot at the end (which seems more random and hackneyed than ever here) you can see the problem. Hedda's not a play about just a bored woman but a mountainous passion kept at bay by bourgeois propriety and small-mindedness. It's also about some other people, too. Anthony Weigh turns in a milquetoast, but not unlikeable George (here Jorgen), whose presence shows the protagonist's problems are not necessarily all about a bad marriage. Hugo Weaving turns in a more whiskered version of his Matrix bad guy as Judge Brack, which wouldn't be too far off the mark if he didn't practically twirl that mustache so brazenly. The dead weight in the group, unfortunately, is the Lovborg of Aden Young, who generates no onstage chemistry with Blanchett (can you believe it?), thus providing no engine for the play's tragedy. If your Hedda looks like she can eat your Lovborg alive at any moment, it's time to recast. It was hard not to think back to another Hedda just over a year ago at (yes) New York Theatre Workshop - Elizabeth Marvel's rendition in Ivo Van Hove's trippy modernization. The two productions were from entirely different schools, so comparison is not really fair, and Van Hove is playing his own private game. But Marvel managed to show us in that extreme whacked-out performance the core of Hedda's diseased soul, an unforgettable portrait of neurotic, totally irrational depression. There will never be another Hedda like hers, nor should there be. But it serves as a necessary reminder that Hedda is more than a girl with "attitude."For tickets and schedule for this production go to bam.org. Culture44914@blogcritics.org Tue, 14 Mar 2006 08:09:42 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/10/24/183648.php PlaygoerSweeney Todd by Stephen Sondheim & Hugh Wheeler starring Michael Cerveris & Patti LuPone on Broadway, at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre (in previews) I've always felt that what's wrong with Sweeney Todd is that it fits just a bit too comfortably into the New York City Opera repertoire, where it has been given the ultimate stamp of prestige for a musical. But what's Stephen Sondheim doing writing a grand opera in Victorian garb? And what's a piece supposedly telling us "we all deserve to die" and we are victims of post-industrial alienation doing entertaining the Lincoln Center set in a huge glitzy opera house? (Yeah, what about Wozzeck, you'll say. Fine.) And while Sweeney always delivers some chills and some of Sondheim's grimmest music and lyrics, all the dress-up of it has struck me as not a little pretentious and disingenuous. Well British director John Doyle has rectified many of these problems. His new production--originally for his own Watermill company in the UK, now restaged on Broadway with an American cast--certainly ain't your father's Sweeney Todd. Or Hal Prince's, at least. Performed by a cast of ten on a claustrophobic stage platform of wooden planks, under harsh white lights, there's nothing lavish about it. And, except for what seems to be the setting of an old apothecary shop, nothing Victorian. Nostalgic for Angela Lansbury's cute red pigtails? Well, gone are the traditional costumes, too, in favor of a wash of generically modern 20th century blacks-and-whites. Sweeney, in his mid-size black leather coat and black skinny tie here resembles a classic gangster or Gestapo agent more than George Hearn's vintage sideburn-twirling villain in a barber's apron. By stripping away the (automatically) comforting and familiar Victorian trappings, Doyle lets us see Sweeney for the 20th century--I dare say modernist--piece it is. To call Doyle production "Brechtian" might be too facile. There is indeed a "frame" which provides layers of mediation and distance between us and the proceedings. (Basically, it's presented as the vision of the boy, Tobias, supervised by actors in white lab coats. Sweeney himself appears almost as the boogeyman of the boy's fantasies.) Doyle is actually reclaiming the show's roots in Brecht, believe it or not. I was always under the general impression Sweeney was based on an authentic melodrama by this "Christopher Bond," some forgotten 19th century hack, I assumed. But not so fast. Look at what his program bio reveals: CHRISTOPHER BOND (Adaptor), an actor/director/writer, wrote Sweeney Todd for the Stoke-on-Trent experimental Theatre. [So, presumably not in the 19th century.] He took Brecht's Man Is Man, renamed it Man Eats Man and applied it to the public domain one-act folk play of Sweeney Todd by George Dibdin Pitt who stole the story from a short story "The String of Pearls: A Romance" in the Victorian gossip magazine Penny Dreadful.To Sondheim aficionados, this must be old news, and now I'm fascinated to read more about how he happened on adapting this adaptation. (It certainly gives gives new resonance to lines like "The history of the world, my sweet/ Is who gets eaten and who gets to eat.") In reverting to this germ, Doyle opens up the whole show and shows it to us anew--that is, closer to how it was originally conceived. So while the chatrooms and gossip columns have been full of Patti LuPone Tuba jokes (yes, let your imagination run wild), what we actually see on stage is a good old "ensemble" staging. The actors don't just double as musicians for convenience or cost-saving. (Though obviously this was a financial plus for the producers who imported the show.) It is integral to the aesthetic of the production--where the playing of music becomes as important form of human expression (i.e. acting) as singing. Sometimes the effect is uncertain, or even bordering on silly (as when Johanna and Anthony sing their love duets astride matching cellos). But when, in the famous "Quartet", the Beadle the Judge loom over the lovers, plotting their schemes as they intone quiet menacing muted trumpets, a dark, subtle visual poetry is achieved the likes of which you won't find in an average Broadway musical. And because the music is seen not just heard, we pay attention to it in totally new ways. Even if traditionalists balk at the new scaled down "orchestrations" and perhaps more relaxed standard of musicianship--the payoff is that this production ends up really showcasing the dazzling score. And the experimental staging allows for even more dissonance and jarring shifts in that music to be brought out than you may be used to. Seeing how the individual instrument/actors play together in continual disharmony is, to say the least, relevant to the content of the play. The chief problem of the production, though, is exactly what Broadway considers the chief lure. Put another way: how do you create an ensemble show, with stars! I take nothing away from the pure presence and magnetism of Patti Lupone and Michael Cerveris. And they're clearly "good sports," about the whole thing. Cerveris, in particular, gave a very brave performance in the early preview I saw--wandering about the stage in quiet dementia, never charming. In short, total Wozzeck. His "Epiphany" (that crowd pleaser with the rousing chorus "We all deserve to die!") was almost out of control in its mania, but it chilled the audience into stunned silence. (Doyle's ability to generally discourage applause--even for Broadway royalty like LuPone--is admirable.) With LuPone, though, I don't doubt her commitment to the concept, only whether she is capable of giving a Brechtian performance. She can't not charm us. When it's time for Mrs. Lovett's comic numbers "Wait" and "By the Sea" alienation has left the building. Despite all Doyle's efforts to de-Broadwayize the material, LuPone is a Broadway animal, and so are Sondheim and librettist Hugh Wheeler; in LuPone's hands their jokes come with rim-shots intact. "A Little Priest" was a telling example of the obstacles to Doyle's project. I can imagine playing up the "music hall" aspect, and Doyle might have employed his actor/musicians as onstage audience to highlight Lovett and Sweeney's self-conscious performativity of the number, making it a grotesque entertainment. Instead, LuPone and Cerveris are given their (no doubt contractual) downstage center special to wow us, unencumbered, while the rest simply accompany from behind. Unfortunately the mic-ing was so thick in the theatre they still couldn't effectively put over Sondheim's famously baroque rhymes here. And so the producers get the boffo Act One finale they were counting on. Too bad it no longer fits the show.There are other times to when the avant garde concept doesn't mesh what is still at heart a Broadway piece. It even doubles back on itself at the conclusion, leading to at least two false endings to my count. Perhaps that's been addressed in previews. Perhaps they are the result of compromises between an adventurous director and "seasoned" Broadway producers (or Sondheim himself!). Sam Mendes reportedly had to submit to much correction by Arthur Laurents & co. when he tried to reimagine Gypsy, remember. (Leading to a weird hybrid of a production.) One wonders how much of what we're seeing on stage here resembles what Doyle was able to get away with in the London fringe when no one was looking. I suspect there will be great disagreement about this show when it opens in a couple of weeks, not only from Broadway and Sondheim junkies, but also critics. Sweeney is a classic and here--in its first Broadway revival, no less--it is being quite markedly reinvented. It will be an interesting test of how far an experimental aesthetic can go in a purely commercial presentation. (Another British import of a decade ago comes to mind, An Inspector Calls, which was surprisingly successful!) But even if Broadway tradtionalists balk, I hope their opposite--the downtowners, anyone who thinks they hate musicals--will get hold of some affordable tickets and check out this intriguingly dark chamber opera that just happens to be under a fancy marquee with a glitzy showbiz pedigree.For more reviews and theatre commentary visit The Playgoer Culture38434@blogcritics.org Mon, 24 Oct 2005 18:36:48 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/08/03/185759.php PlaygoerThe first, memorable, line from David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross begins: "John...John...John." It is not: "John...(applause)...John." But this being Broadway, and the speaker being immediately identifiable as a television celebrity--here, Alan Alda--the conditioned response sets in. It was at this moment--mere seconds after the lights came up--that I had a saddening, even if obvious, revelation: Broadway has now become irrevocably inhospitable to serious drama.A good production of Mamet's play might certainly be entertaining, even crowd-pleasing and laugh-out-lout funny. But it is still, at its core, a deadly serious and unforgiving piece of work, a display of animal behavior so exploitative in its preying on weakness that it could be likened to a nature documentary--"When Real Estate Agents Attack". But the current hooting, hollering, and applause-happy audiences filling the coffers at the newly named "Jacobs " Theatre (formerly the Royale, but appropriately rechristened after a Shubert mogul) are seeing their own play, not the one Mamet wrote. His play is a clinical examination of how capitalism steals our souls and our language. What's being performed in the Jacobs, more than anything else, is the titillation of hearing actors yell "fuck" in a crowded theatre.So is this just a problem of reception? Or is Joe Mantello's ultra-competent production also culpable? Mantello, the consummate "actor's director," has clearly devoted much to character work. His Glengarry I would sum up as a day in the life of a bunch of losers. Everyone has his moment, his vulnerability... and his applause-cuing exit line. Jeffrey Tambor's Aaranow is a perfect example; a fleshy dolt who is almost cute in his passivity. The character's silence is rendered as "goodness"--as opposed to a quiet, calculating mind of his own.I think any understanding of this play has to begin with the premise that these characters are not just losers--but crooks. Mantello succeeds so much in making us invest emotionally in their personal stakes that we lose the bigger perspective (and irony) of how the more desperately they fight to survive, the harder they have to "screw" their victims (i.e. the customers). Case in point: Alda's Levene. Feingold (in the Voice) was inspired in complimenting him as "Dickensian." It is indeed a wonderfully rich and full portrait of a nebbishy second-rater; Alda may be tall, but he plays a great "little guy". Problem is, you forget that when he celebrates his big sale, he's gloating over bilking an old couple out of $80,000 for swampland. (The audience also just loves it when he sticks it to his boss, young Williamson. The Broadway ticket-buyer demographics certainly work in Alda's favor.)Liev Schreiber (as Roma) is the only actor on stage in a Mamet play--and I don't just mean the put-on Chicago accent and sleazy mustache. Incredibly detailed physically (just his vain adjustment of cufflinks is an essay in character), he constantly wavers oh so subtly between charming and chilling. So while he does get all of Roma's many laughs--and the audience's constant affirmation--his manipulation of his "mark," Lingk (a subdued Tom Wopat), is so perfectly professional that we never once suspect Roma of any secret affection for the man, yet he never "winks" his villainy either.It's unseemly of me to harp on my fellow playgoers, I know, for allowing themselves to assimilate the play as boulevard entertainment--especially at a hundred bucks a pop. (At that price, who wants a play that questions the ethics of the broker who sold you the seats? or the motives of the umpteen producer names above the title?) But here we have an American play as close to a modern classic as we have. Doesn't it deserve a really gutsy, shocking staging that reminds us the American theatre can still be about something?For this and more reviews & theatre commentary, visit The Playgoer, at: http://playgoer.blogspot.com Culture33613@blogcritics.org Wed, 3 Aug 2005 18:57:59 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/06/01/162452.php PlaygoerMonty Python's Spamalot Book & Lyrics by Eric Idle, Music by Eric Idle & John Du Prez Directed by Mike Nichols On Broadway at the Shubert Theatre For tickets: telecharge.comIn short, Spamalot delivers. And here's one thing I thought I wouldn't say: thank god for the songs! Everything that is best about Spamalot is what's new, not what comes from the film of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (in which, you may trust, Playgoer is well versed). Eric Idle and Mike Nichols have created something very distinct, something just a wee bit Python, and a lot... well, Mike Nichols.As good and funny as Hank Azaria, David Hyde Pierce, and Tim Curry are in their own rights, what they offer in the "book" portions of the show is essentially a high-rent karaoke of the movie. Anyone familiar with the original only hears what's missing of the Pythons' inimitable insanity and the memory of hearing a line like "your father was a hamster and your mother smelled of elderberry" the first time. Anyone oblivious to said film might still chuckle at the silliness of all this transposed dialogue (and, admittedly, many in the audience do more than chuckle), but if this were a "straight" dramatization of Holy Grail the show just would not be a hot ticket. (The very words dramatization and Monty Python just do not go together somehow.)Hence, my slight disappointment for the first twenty minutes of the show, which--after a zany, though labored, non-sequitur of a curtain raiser--rehashes some of the movie's opening scenes. But then Nichols's forty-plus years of Broadway showmanship take over, and for the remainder of Act One you are in Musical Comedy Heaven. While gags about NBA "Laker Girls", Vegas casinos, and Andrew Lloyd Webber may seem beneath the talent involved, they embrace the silly task with such gusto, sending everything up so energetically, efficiently, and improbably that you just bathe in the ridiculousness of it all. One reason is Nichols knows to keep moving on before overkill is reached. Another is the contribution of relative newcomer choreographer Casey Nicholaw; his employment of the entire range of musical theatre gestures--from the parading of leggy chorus girls to the angular thrusts of Jerome Robbins lunges--gives Spamalot that extra savvy and, frankly, pizzazz. It's one of the ironies of good parody that it must love and even outdo the original.Not coincidentally, the show settles into this glorious groove with the entrance of an entirely new character, Sara Ramirez's Lady of the Lake. The size of Ramirez's presence bursts out of her from the moment she appears and never lets up; her intensity is totally serious and totally ludicrous and totally on key--in short, the most Pythonesque performer on the stage, surprisingly. (Her Act Two front-of-curtain diva-ballad "What Ever Happened to My Part" is the most hilarious of the show's many metatheatrical commentaries, mostly because Ramirez can both mock and sell what the number is referencing so expertly.)So what happens in Act Two? More of the same, which is fine. But that magical momentum Nichols and Idle found for forty-odd minutes has gone. Perhaps the intermission helps to dissipate that, during which you observe everyone showing off their new Spamalot toys from the concession stand. (A cow-hurtling slingshot can't be gotten at just any show, after all.) Highlights follow, to be sure: David Hyde-Pierce pulls off Idle's provocative patter song "You Won't Succeed on Broadway (if you don't have any Jews)" in perfect Noel Coward/Rex Harrison throwaway style, until he is upstaged by one of Nicholaw's most outrageous coups: a line of hassidim knights donning holy grails on their heads while executing the famous shtetl steps from the opening of Fiddler. If nothing else, such a gleefully bizarre "overdetermined" sights are rare enough on Broadway to justify a visit.) But toward the end you do sense the team running out of ideas of how to keep the show fresh, especially when they resort to audience participation at the end.The pleasures of Spamalot are thoroughly forgettable a few days later, while some people (no names) can quote the lines from the movie ceaselessly for years on end. What does that say? Earlier, I speculated that there will be no future life for a clever parody song like "The Song That Goes Like This." I should revise that prediction now that I've seen (and heard) just how hilarious the song is ("Now we change the key/ We're moving up to 'G'/ We should have stayed in 'D'")--but still this is aided by the perfectly neat context Nichols's production has put it in. A New Yorker sneak-peak article a while back quoted Nichols at a production meeting saying something like "Well of course we have to end with confetti."And so they do. And--y'know?--it works. After so much drek, it is fun to feel yourself in the hands of a master entertainer.Read this and more reviews & theatre commentary at "The Playgoer" at: http://playgoer.blogspot.com Culture30440@blogcritics.org Wed, 1 Jun 2005 16:24:52 EDT