Back to Victoria Theatre Reviews for the summer!

If you wish to follow my bicoastal life, please visit www.vicreviews.blogspot.com to follow my theatre-going over the summer. I look forward to returning to Boston in September and to seeing much great theatre!

Have a wonderful and restful summer, whoever and wherever you may be...
Monica

Plays Various - April and May 2009

Images, Top to Bottom: Old Globe poster for Working; poster for Picasso at the Lapin Agile [http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~bump/E603B/web/Brette/lapinagile.html]; poster for Jerry Springer: The Opera; portrait of Galileo.

Clearly, blogging is an activity of the leisure class, given my apparent inability to keep up with this self-imposed hobby when faced with multiple work pressures. Also, I was travelling a lot last month, which made it difficult to get to the theatre regularly, although I did manage to catch a show in San Diego!

Here follows some snapshot reviews of shows seen in the past month...

Trojan Barbie, which I saw in preview at ART last month was a huge disappointment. Someone needs to begin by explaining to me why we need a mashed-up version of Euripides' Trojan Women and Anne-Marie MacDonald's Good Night Desdemona, Good Morning Juliet in the first place. This hash of Greek tragedy and supposed contemporary drama was a failure and made me sorry to have to report that the two worst shows in ART's season this year were both written and directed by women (the other one was Communist Dracula Manifesto). I hope that Diane Paulus' new tenure as AD will change this sad state of affairs. It is not pleasant to see fine ART company member Karen MacDonald reduced to playing a befuddled doll repairer on holiday in Europe, who is dragged inexplicably into a modernized version of Euripides' masterpiece as a group of Trojan women being held in a refugee camp after the destruction of their city (echoes of Baghdad, Sarajevo, Sudan..take your horror pick). Her silly "My golly, what's going one here, this is just wrong!" encounters with Hecuba and Andromache were often squirm-inducing. While the show, directed by Carmel O'Reilly, featured some nice work (I especially liked the work of Paula Langton as Hecuba, Kaaren Briscoe as Polly X and Careena Melia as Helen..the latter two students in the ART MFA program) I left wishing fervently that Christine Evans had responded to the invitation to adapt Trojan Women by asking "Why fix what's not broken?" and that this ensemble had put their considerable collective talents to better use by creating a smashing new version of this ancient and timeless reminder of the price women pay in war.

Actor's Shakeseare Project offered a solid production of Coriolanus that made excellent use of an open space in the old Armoury building in Somerville. Robert Walsh directed an able cast in a highly physical interpretation that made use of martial arts and a soundscape performed by the company that often had our ears ringing with the rhythmic martial sounds of drums and hammers on metal. Benjamin Evett made for a clear and consistent Roman general brought down (as so many in Shakespeare) by his own pride. Bobbie Steinbach was slightly less successful in my view as his mother Volumnia, projecting this fiery woman's spunkiness well but not moving me with the depth of her rage and grief in the famous scene late in the play when she begs her son not to invade Rome after he has defected to the enemy. Volumnia is the mirror-opposite of Hecuba...she revels in her son's war wounds and longs for his glorious death in battle. Hecuba sees only the endless trail of destruction and despair that is the consequence of war. But overall this was a successful production that made very clear all the political and personal levels woven through Shakespeare's play.

The Old Globe Theatre in San Diego has a great reputation and I saw a lovely production of Twelfth Night there, in their outside space, a number of years ago. This time I saw the indoor revival of the 1978 musical Working by Stephen Schwartz (now famous for Wicked), based on Studs Terkel's book of interviews of working people, first seen in 1978. This new version is stripped-down to six performers who each play multiple roles as they tell us in monologues interspersed with songs about their working lives. I enjoyed this show very much, well-directed by Gordon Greenberg and featuring a talented company. A few new interviews have brought the musical forward the 30 years since its inception, including a funny one from a financier who cannot see the nose in front of his face and whose words are very ironic given the dire economic events of the past year. And the songs contributed to the show by James Taylor are outstanding, especially "Millworker" which had me wiping tears away with its opening notes (see this performed by Taylor at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2MQ04ESSx8). Don't be surprised if this remount makes its way to Broadway!

New Repertory Theatre has proved to be a consistently fine company this season, so I made sure to check out its version of Steve Martin's 1993 comedy Picasso at the Lapin Agile. The company seem to be having the requisite good time performing this rather slight but entertaining play about a fictional encounter between Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso (both well-played by Neil A. Casey and Scott Sweatt respectively) in a Paris bar in 1905. Filled with stock characters and predictable behaviour, the play amuses and offers a couple of fun surprises along the way as these two geniuses of art and science plan their domination of the 20th century. When a fictional character named Schmendiman shows up who plans exactly the same thing, based on his invention of useless commercial things, we begin to see how chance operations come into play when one person out of millions actually has the goods. Of course, when Elvis shows up as a visitor from the future late in the play, we also see that genius takes on many guises; the King's reminder to Pablo that they both owe a debt to the "Negro" in the realization of their creative powers is a rare sharp barb in an otherwise mostly pleasant and unassuming play. I enjoyed seeing two actresses I'd seen playing very heavy dramatic roles this season taking a trip onto the lighter side; Marianna Bassham who played the abuse survivor in SpeakEasy's Blackbird, and Stacy Fischer who performed May in Fool for Love, also at New Rep.

Speak Easy Theatre seems to enjoy pushing the comfort zone of Boston theatregoers, as their current production of Jerry Springer: The Opera, as with David Harrower's Blackbird, is not for the faint-of-heart. I consider myself an extremely liberal and open-minded audience member, but I doubt I have seen anything as all-out-no-holds-barred offensive as this British import, winner of everything there was to win in London 3 years ago. It's all here, folks; the profanity, the smut, the sex. Thing is, it's also an opera, albeit a 'rock-pop' opera, so creates a very strange meeting-place between high and low culture. The controversy surrounding the show, which although a huge hit in the UK has been rarely seen in the US and has not had a Broadway run, is interestingly enough around its perceived anti-religious content. Act One gives us a 'typical' Springer episode with various trailer-park trash types revealing their guilty secrets including infidelity and sexual kinkiness. The lively chorus of audience members gets us involved right off the bat with their "Jerry, Jerry, Jerry" chants and their unending insults hurled at each guest ("Fat pig", "Slut, "Chick with a Dick"...you get the idea). What keeps a high-minded elitist theatre-goer engaged through all this muck is the fact that this low-life content is delivered operatically. The quality of the music is not very high, there is not a memorable tune to be discerned throughout (as opposed to Duncan Sheik's Spring Awakening), but neither does it offend and the production features a mix of both musical theatre and opera singers. The company members all do very well in their roles, and I can only imagine what it must be like for classically trained opera singers to come into contact with songs called "What the Fuck" or "Talk to the Hand"!

Act Two shifts dramatically after Jerry is shot onstage by a disgruntled guest. His guilt-induced hallucinations take him first to Purgatory then down to Hell where a sexy red-leather clad Satan (Timothy John Smith, seen recently in Fool for Love at New Rep) tells Jerry he faces an unspeakable fate involving barbed wire and anal rape if he doesn't get Jesus to apologize for literally damning him to Hell. So a celestial version of the Springer show ensues, featuring all of the guests of Act One doubling as Jesus (in a diaper no less...don't ask!), Mary, the Angel Gabriel, Adam and Eve and finally God himself (Luke Grooms doing a great job with the song "It's Tough Being Me"). Failing in this conflict resolution effort, Jerry is about to be cast into the eternal fire when he pulls a piece of wisdom courtesy of William Blake up out of his consciousness: Everything that lives is holy. For no good reason, this placates all involved, Jerry wakes up in the real world just in time to expire and the show finishes with everyone mourning his earthly departure.

While I was immensely entertained by this show, and impressed with the polished production directed by Paul Daigneault, I left the theatre with very little to ponder on or even very much residual memory of it. The fact is, Jerry Springer is not a person of much interest for me. I consider him symbolic of the very worst of American-style commercial capitalism...if there's a buck to be made on the voyeuristic parading of the suffering of others, providing them with their pitiful 15 minutes of fame, someone's going to figure out how to exploit it. While the creators of this show may wish me to feel some overeducated liberal guilt about all this, I don't. Nor do I feel implicated as part of the 'elite' culture turning their nose up at the mostly underemployed, undereducated and totally disenfranchised people who end up on shows like Jerry Springer (or any of the endless reams of reality TV shows that have followed in its wake). At the level of delivering any kind of meaningful message I feel this show fails almost entirely, which is a shame as I think it's a missed opportunity to explore these complex issues (without losing the humor, for sure). Perhaps the problem for me was that we travel with Springer as our (anti-)protagonist, someone for whom I cannot and will never feel empathy, whereas if the opera chose to focus on and follow the journey of one or more of Jerry's guests with some real dramatic layers and deep conviction then Jerry Springer: The Opera might have something more memorable to offer.

Finally, at the end of this posting that has turned out to be far longer than expected (go figure!), I saw Brecht's Galileo produced by the Underground Railway Theatre's Catalyst Theatre Project, a science theatre collaborative with MIT (also seen this season: Einstein's Dreams). This is an exciting project, bringing together theatre artists presenting science-based plays and engaging in conversations with scientists, students and general audience members about the issues raised. The role of Galileo is one of the major male roles in drama, up there with Hamlet and Lear, and Brecht worked for nearly twenty years developing and revising this play (often with uncredited collaborators, as was Brecht's unfortunate and very politically incorrect wont!) It is not an easy play, covering as it does thirty or more years of Galileo's life, taking us from his somewhat false discovery of the telescope (presented as a stolen idea from a Dutch traveler), his formative ideas rooted in Copernicus that the Earth revolves around the sun, his writing and recantation of those ideas and his final days spent in isolation under the watchful eye of the Catholic church. Galileo as interpreted by the communist Brecht is essentially a frustrated man of the people, who publishes in Italian rather than Latin so the common man can read his work, who dreams of a science that lightens the burden of the working class, who even dreams (dangerously) about a universe that does not require a God to make sense. Along the way, he has both his students and followers and his enemies. The latter mostly are of the clergy persuasion and it they who bring Galileo to the Inquisition and press him to recant. Fascinatingly, Brecht does not show us any of the Inquisition itself, using the traditional dramatic approach (stretching all the way back to the Greeks and moving through Shakespeare along the way) of having secondary characters onstage who await (along with us) the results of his trial. The hard truth that Galileo recanted because he could not face torture reinforces Brecht's presentation of the character as somewhat a hedonist, interested in food, drink and comfort (although not sex it appears). This offers a very materialist version of events and makes Galileo's recantation understandable, bringing this giant of science off an inhuman pedestal. We also see some of the enormous contributions Galileo made to modern science including the discovery of the moons of Jupiter, sunspots and the fundamentals of classical mechanics. The latter is illustrated by Brecht ingeniously by having Galileo keep a small stone in his pocket that he often takes out and simply drops, thus confirming for himself the law of uniform acceleration.

The production is three hours long and makes many demands on a chronically ADD 21st century audience (especially in a theatre space that is kept much too cold!) as it is a play of ideas and lacks a lot of dramatic action. Much depends on the force of the central performance and luckily this show has quite a fine Galileo in Richard McElvain. He makes clear the kind of deep frustration, even rage, that geniuses who are so much out of their own time must have felt (perhaps still feel...it's hard to see genius in the present moment, as it needs the test of time in all but the rarest cases). McElvain often vocalizes his frustration with nonverbal guttural grunts and physicalizes them with stamps of his foot. The life of a man who sees so much more than those around him is made visceral in this portrayal, as is his strong sense of his work being for all people rather than his own glorification alone. His portrayal may lack somewhat in emotional levels, but Brecht was not much interested in writing that kind of drama was he? McElvain is supported well by a skilled company including a number of actors I've seen working both here at Underground Railway (Steven Barkhimer, Debra Wise, Robert Najarian) and at Actor's Shakespeare Project (Jason Bowen, James Patrick Nelson). Director David Wheeler keeps everything moving and physically interesting, making good use of various stage levels, thrust stage and multiple exit and entry points. Costumes are a bit of a mishmash of contemporary and authentic period and while I get this as a concept it gets confused and even a bit irritating at times. When an actor is dressed in a red velvet floor-length cape and we can see his pants and black sneaker style shoes underneath it just feels wrong. The problem is consistency, as some characters (Galileo's daughter for instance) are always in full authentic dress,while others are mixed. My stance is to go fully one way or the other--full-on authenticity or rehearsal clothes--but make up your mind! The set works very well, especially with the stunning enormous murals that fill the space created by designer (and mural artist) David Fichter. In sum, a strong production of a difficult but rewarding (in the ways that Picasso and Jerry Springer are not) play that reminds me what theatre is for.

FOUR PLAYS IN MARCH - ENDGAME, BLACKBIRD, FOOL FOR LOVE and TROJAN BARBIE

Photos, from Top to Bottom: Will LeBow as Hamm and Thomas Derrah as Clov in ART's Endgame; Karen MacDonald as Nell in same; Bates Wilder as Ray and Marianna Bassham as Una in SpeakEasy Theatre's production of Blackbird; ditto; Timothy John Smith as Eddie and Stacy Fischer as May in New Rep's production of Fool for Love; ART's poster for Christine Evan's new play Trojan Barbie.

Farewell to March 2009, a month that proved so busy that my beloved blog has been sorely neglected and as a result I am four plays behind! So this is playing catch-up and I will be giving short-shrift here to the plays I saw this past month.

As it turns out, only one of the 4 is really worthy of extended discussion in a critical context here, Scotland's David Harrower's Olivier-prize winning play Blackbird. So I will gloss over the other three (withholding comments on Trojan Barbie until later this week as it's currently in previews).

Of course, much has been said and thought about the great Irish playwright Samuel Beckett's work, including this play Endgame. I have always much preferred Waiting for Godot myself, finding the characters of Didi and Gogo much more engaging theatrical creations than the blind and overbearing (if helpless) Hamm and his servant/son-figure Clov. The post-apocalyptic room we find ourselves trapped in alongside these two, and Hamm's parents Nagg and Nell (trapped themselves in garbage cans) is claustrophobia-inducing and mind-numbing. Nothing happens in the play--well, almost nothing--and the most we are left with at the end is Clov's departure for the outside world. Devastated as this dead and denuded world must be, it is far preferable to the endless bickering and empty rhetoric that is bounced off the walls of their 'prison'. Of course, the inaction of the play is Beckett's absurdist point, and it is to the great credit of the four-member cast and their director Marcus Stern at ART that there as many laughs as there are in this production, and a highly physicalized performance of Clov from Thomas Derrah that raised my level of admittedly fairly low interest in this particular play up significantly. While all four actors play their parts with skill, and Stern directs with a fierce faithfulness to Beckett's text and stage directions (as opposed to a scandalous ART production in 1985, set in a ruined New York subway station, that the playwright himself condemned), it is Derrah's work here that stood out for me. With a comic lurch, as though one leg was shorter than another, a limp that invites a combination of both pity and laughter, Clov is the only mobile character on stage and every thought in his head is reflected fully in his body as portrayed by Derrah. LeBow declaims as Hamm, playing-up his deeply resonant voice in a way that works in the role (although I found Hamm's existential despair somewhat lacking in LeBow's portrayal) and Karen MacDonald and Remo Airaldi as Nell and Nagg do nice work, too, but Derrah literally dances around them as Clov. The repartee he engages in with Hamm has moments of bleak comic poetry that LeBow and Derrah toss-off with great skill. In the end, what does it all mean, this meaninglessness? Beckett gives us lots to ponder but no answers, as is his intent. And we, the audience, play our silent part in the witnessing of the final moments of futile and clownish humanity:

CLOV:
Why this farce, day after day?
HAMM:
Routine. One never knows.
(Pause.)
Last night I saw inside my breast. There was a big sore.
CLOV:
Pah! You saw your heart.
HAMM:
No, it was living.
(Pause. Anguished.)
Clov!
CLOV:
Yes.
HAMM:
What's happening?
CLOV:
Something is taking its course.
(Pause.)
HAMM:
Clov!
CLOV (impatiently):
What is it?
HAMM:
We're not beginning to... to... mean something?
CLOV:
Mean something! You and I, mean something!
(Brief laugh.)
Ah that's a good one!
HAMM:
I wonder.
(Pause.)
Imagine if a rational being came back to earth, wouldn't he be liable to get ideas into his head if he observed us long enough.
(Voice of rational being.)
Ah, good, now I see what it is, yes, now I understand what they're at!
(Clov starts, drops the telescope and begins to scratch his belly with both hands. Normal voice.)
And without going so far as that, we ourselves...
(with emotion)
...we ourselves... at certain moments...
(Vehemently.)
To think perhaps it won't all have been for nothing!
[...]

CLOV:
I'll leave you.
HAMM:
No!
CLOV:
What is there to keep me here?
HAMM:
The dialogue.
[http://www.samuel-beckett.net/endgame.html]

David Harrower's Blackbird began as a Fringe production at the Edinburgh Festival in 2005 and has gone on to successful productions in London and New York (the latter featuring Jeff Daniels as Ray), with shows in Toronto and Vancouver opening soon. Reflecting its humble Fringe beginnings, the play has a small cast of two (with a walk-on role in the final moments that packs a whallop), a minimal set of an office lunchroom littered with workers' lunch detritus, and a searing, provocative plot about an encounter betwwen a young woman and the man who sexually abused her as a young girl of 12. Or is it a love story? You see what I mean about provocative...

I'm sure there have been many walkouts at the moment 20 minutes or so into this one-act play when Una, now 27, lets us in on this nasty little secret that is the source of the extreme tension felt between these two from the moment Ray is confronted by this encounter with his past. He has paid the price for his sexual relationship with the child Una, 6 years in prison, and has moved on to change his name and location. But she has hunted him down and wants a reckoning. Why is never quite made clear by Harrower, why now, what for, what does she hope to gain? It is made clear, in the long and difficult (to deliver and to hear) monologues that recreate for us the undeniable pull these two felt toward each other 15 years earlier. Una is revealed as somewhat of a Lolita, filled with romanticized longing for this neighbour who makes the fatal error of responding to her pubescent flirtations. The complication of the narrative lies in the uneasy feeling we get that these two still feel something for each other, that calling what happened child sexual abuse is simplifying the more complicated, and messy, reality of human attractions and emotions.

The SpeakEasy Theatre production, directed by David R. Gammons (a busy man this year, having directed Lt. of Inishmore at New Rep and The Duchess of Malfi at Actors' Shakespeare Project, two other 'difficult' plays) features fine performances from Bates Wilder as Ray and Marianna Bassham as Una. Wilder plays Ray as a gentle sort of man, decent really, who is understandably discomfited by the sudden appearance of this shadow from his past. But his denial of responsibility begins to chafe at us over time, and when Una finally physicalizes her rage against him, it is a welcome release for the audience as well. We cannot but feel he deserves the punishment. But when that physical fight becomes a sexual embrace we are pushed again to see Ray's side of the story, that he is not a pedophile or a predator, that what happened between these two people was real passion, real love. Bassham digs very deep to play Una and does some fine work, never backing away from the damaging anger and hurt this young woman has carried around inside her for too long. And when she tells the story of how their flirtation was consummated one night in a beach hotel, followed by Ray's abandonment of her, it is almost unbearable.

My one criticism of the production is that I felt that the stage was too bare to be a believable lunchroom, containing only one chair (that gets thrown around quite a bit!) and a small locker upstage right. In pictures of the New York production, I see a table and a number of chairs, with a few pieces of lunchtime garbage left on the table. Much more real a setting for this encounter than the more stylized space given here, with so much garbage on the floor it becomes an overpowering metaphor for the dirt and stink and residue of this forbidden relationship, rather than something more subtle. But overall I found this to be a difficult yet rewarding theatre experience with sparse yet tightly-constructed dialogue and a sense of dramatic tension that was pervasive and never let up throughout. Not for the faint of heart, but it has its rewards.

Fool for Love by Sam Shepard makes a good pairing with Blackbird, being yet another play about forbidden love, this time of the incest variety. I have always felt this to be a terrific play, by a terrific playwright, with two fabulous roles in Eddie and May, the half-siblings of the same father (who watches, interacts with and comments on the prceedings throughout). The fourth character is the hapless Martin, who arrives to pick May up for a date at her motel room and comes smack dab into the middle of a passionate fight between these two. Eddie and May have been fighting with, and loving (off and on) each other for 15 years when Eddie shows up out of nowhere (yet again) to declare his undying love and to take May away from the dead-end life she's been living. He's a rodeo rider and she's a short-order cook; like most Shepard characters, they've lived hardscrabble lives and everything they think or feel is fully expressed, often physically. Not much repression in a Shepard play! Similar to Harrower's play, interestingly, is that this play ends with two extended monologues that reveal the 'heart of the matter', the truth of their past and how it literally destroyed the lives of both of their respective mothers. Even though their father, The Old Man, tries to intervene in this truth-telling session (with poor sweet Martin as witness), to deny that he abandoned two separate families to fates including murder and incest, the truth is spoken. Then Eddie leaves, as we suspect he always does, and May is left to pack her single suitcase and move on . And we also suspect that this cycle will continue, that these two will come careening and colliding back into each other's lives because they are in love...simple and horrible as that.

While I enjoyed the New Rep production, directed by Bridget Kathleen O'Leary, for its effective physicality and some nice work from the company, I did have one major concern. The actors playing Eddie and May (Timothy John Smith and Stacy Fischer) are very young for these roles. Their youth brings the physicality to the forefront in ways that work with the text, as Eddie tosses his lasso over the bedpost and somersaults onto the bed backwards at one point. And May can also wrap herself around Eddie, drape herself over the side of the bed and hit him upside his head a few times as well. So much youthful energy! Too much for me, in the end, as what was lost in this production is the reality that these two lovers have been ground down over a long period of time, over 15 years, by the tragedy of their father's abandonment (his presence in the play is a device, a wish-fulfillment perhaps, for these two) and the murder of one of their mothers by the other one, both of whom were married to the Old Man and ignorant of his 'other' life and family. Add onto all that family history the complete and uncontrollable passion Eddie and May have felt for each other since the moment they met. It's no wonder these two are barely surviving their lives, and I feel that actors in their mid-thirties can bring another level to the play that is missing in this production. This Eddie is too vital, too positive, to sure of himself as played by Smith. And Fischer's May is sexy and lithe and nobody's doormat, but she doesn't show us the cracks enough, the deep wells of despair. When she screams into Eddie's ear that his mother shot her mother dead, she sounds like an hysterical teenager, rather than the howl of grief (which can even be whispered) that is the reason (more than their being half-siblings) that keeps her and Eddie from ever being able to stay together. Their history haunts them too much. In my mind, these characters are scarred and wrinkled, her body is not what it once was, she's been a drinker (now 'on-the-wagon' but for how long?)...she lives in a motel room fer chrissakes...He's driving from town to town across the west, from rodeo to rodeo, damaging his body, drinking too much, sleeping with dangerous women who can't prevent him from finding his way back to May. There's nothing wrong with these two actors, although I felt Fischer to be a bit disconnected and mannered from time to time, and Smith a bit too stereotypically a 'cowboy.'

To put it plainly, I want to feel these characters' pain more than I do in this production, and my only suggestion is to let these young actors live life themselves for a decade or so, learn about the kind of toll that time takes on us all, and revisit this marvellous play sometime down the road. It's certainly a play worth revisiting, for we go to the theatre as a human laboratory for the examination of scars and scar tissue, and Shepard never disappoints with offering up plenty in this regard.

DUCHESS OF MALFI and WINTER'S TALE (January 31st and February 22nd)

Photos, Top to Bottom: Tobias Segal as Young Shepherd and Ethan Hawke as Autolycus in The Winter's Tale; Rebecca Hall as Hermione and Josh Hamilton as Polixenes in The Winter's Tale; Poster for the Bridge Project at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; Maurya Lowry, Jennie Israel and Jason Bowen in The Duchess of Malfi; Jason Bowen and Jennie Israel in The Duchess of Malfi at Actors' Shakespeare Project.

How has it been nearly a month since my last posting? Life, I guess, being busy and somewhat stressed-out in my work and including a trip home to Victoria and Vancouver that included four (count 'em!) theatre/opera performances that I am not going to review here. But I will mention seeing the mad genius Canadian puppeteer Ronnie Burkett's latest show at Vancouver's PUSH Festival, as well as a strong outing of Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing at Victoria's Belfry Theatre.

My last two shows here on the east coast half of my bicoastal life this year have been my first ever production of John Webster's revenge tragedy The Duchess of Malfi and the not-to-be-missed Sam Mendes production of The Winter's Tale (in rep with The Cherry Orchard) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Webster's play features a woebegotten widow who wishes to marry her loyal steward against her overbearing and jealous brothers' orders, and pays dearly for her actions. The Duchess comes to a sad and violent end, as does almost everyone else in this play of suspicion, secrecy and endless manipulation and retribution. What fun!

The Actors' Shakespeare Project production was directed by David Gammons, whose Lieutenant of Inishmore at New Rep was another buckets of bloodfest in the fall. Gammons is a fine director with a keen storytelling ability and focused eye for detail. Never was I unclear about who was who and what was going on in this play, as tense and paranoid conversations take place in supposed privacy that is always anything but that. The alley staging helped to foster this claustrophobic atmosphere tremendously, along with a simple and clever design of two huge doors at both ends, creating a palatial hallway. Door slams were timed for sound cues of echoing slams that reverberated and heightened the jail-like environs that became eventually a madhouse and charnel pit. What fun!

The acting was serviceable all-round with Jennie Israel playing an almost too likeable Duchess...I would like to have seen a bit more fire in her belly at times (perhaps a feminist revisionism on my part?) Jason Bowen played her steward/husband Antonio with charm and warmth and we felt his accidental slaying late in the play perhaps as the greatest loss, as he is probably the most innocent character here. The Duchess' two malevolent brothers are played with grim pleasure by Joel Colodner as a cross-dressing and lecherous Cardinal and Michael Forden Walker as the clearly would-be incestuous and psychopathic Ferdinand, who eventually kills his wayward sister. My favorite performance was by Bill Barclay as Bosola, conscripted by the brothers as a spy. He comes to see the injustice and insanity of what he is caught up in, and although he is guilty of much wrongdoing, he also tries to make amends before he too gives up the ghost. Webster writes Bosola in direct address to the audience and so we see the play through his eyes and Barclay gives the role a very contemporary interpretation; knowing, ironic and believable.

My one disappointment was in the quality of vocal work in the ensemble. In a repertory company dedicated to Shakespeare, I expected rich tones and perfect articulation and got mostly middling and pretty non-resonant voices with okay but far from crisp and precise diction. This is the area where this company needs to grow, and I'll see if there's any difference when their next show, Coriolanus, opens next month.

This past weekend I spent eight hours on a bus going back and forth between here and Brooklyn to see a three hour production of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale as performed by the joint British and American acting ensemble called, appropriately, The Bridge Project. It features some of the finest stage actors on both sides of the Atlantic working together. Film and theatre director Sam Mendes gives us a very fine interpretation of this challenging late play that features intense psychological drama in the first half that then fast-forwards 16 years into a pastoral romance/comedy and then ends up back where it starts, reuniting a royal couple torn apart by unfounded jealousy and abuse of power and celebrating the love of their long-lost daughter and her prince. (For a synopsis, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Winter%27s_Tale)

The wonderful performance space of the Harvey Theatre at BAM seems custom-made for the plays of both Shakespeare and Chekhov. A restored ruin, the architects have left much of the ruination in place (brought up to code!), so we feel we have entered a theatre with much history, including some obvious hard times; cracked plaster, bare brick walls, peeling paint, rusty supports. It's so evocative and, come to think of it, would work well with playwrights like Beckett, Brecht, Williams... One of the most interesting theatre spaces I've been in for some time. Designer Anthony Ward honors this space, and creates a great touring set (these two shows are going on to Singapore, Auckland, London and Europe) with minimalism set off by real candles in sconces hung at varying levels upstage to create a starry backdrop of candlelight. Magical. Other than this we are given a carpet, a few pieces of furniture, beautiful lighting and excellent, excellent acting throughout.

Simon Russell Beale plays King Leontes with such clarity and force, and great empathy for this misguided man who loses almost everything as a result. There is much of the tragic heroes of Shakespeare's past plays in him; the jealousy of Othello, the petty yet overblown wrath of Lear, the soul-shattering realization of what he has done that reminds me of these two characters, and others all the way back to Oedipus. Beale is a big and powerful actor and one feels he is constraining Leontes, determined to retain his dignity even as he falls apart emotionally and politically...and when he allows himself to rage he pushes us back in our seats. The much younger Rebecca Hall plays his saintly wife Hermione with verve and a strong core that keeps her queen-like even in her baseless captivity for adultery and in the hearing of the banishment of her newborn daughter Perdita and death (from grief) of her young son Mamillius. The great Sinead Cusack plays Paulina, a wonderful role of a servant who, like Lear's Fool, has the unexpected freedom in this dramatic world to take the King to task for his wrong actions. She is another powerhouse actor and the scenes between her and Beale are a real treat. Her fierce protection of Hermione brooks no opposition and it is she who has the satisfaction of bringing Leontes and Hermione back together in the play's final scene.

The American actors (who all speak with their own accents, a wise directorial choice) might seem to be up against quite a challenge in the face of this crew, yet they do well. Of course, their trump card is the movie star Ethan Hawke, who appears late in the play in the comic role of the pedlar and petty thief Autolycus. Hawke hams it up to everyone's delight, playing the guitar and warbling like Dylan, entering one scene looking like Slash from Guns 'n Roses, and addressing the audience 99% of the time. But he is ably supported by his countrymen Richard Easton who does wonderful work with the Old Shepherd, who adopts the abandoned baby princess Perdita and rises to fortune as a result, and by Josh Hamilton as Leontes' best friend Polixenes, the source of the former's jealousy and later the father of Florizel (who falls for Perdita...of course!)

The only ones who suffer slightly here are the young lovers, who barely register in the midst of this star-power, and are not very interesting roles to begin with.

The shift from dark and dramatic Sicilia to light and American frontier-like Bohemia is a jarring one, as is the 16 year time-slip (aided by a delightful monologue, delivered by Time, but here delivered by Easton as the Old Shepherd, to great effect). And there is a bit of a sense that moves in oneself and the audience of "Get on with it, we want to get back to the good stuff back in Sicilia" as we sit through a long harvest festival and hoe-down, complete with songs and bawdy dances and red, white and blue balloons. This is Shakespeare bowing to new conventions late in his career, the growing popularity of inserting musical and dance interludes into plays, but his own genius shines through in the core story of jealousy, punishment and redemption. When Perdita is introduced to Leontes by her love Florizel (who has fled to Sicilia to escape his father's disapproval of their match, as she and everyone else believes her to be a poor shepherdess), the moment is so potent, so moving. Yet Shakespeare writes the actual revelations and reconciliations offstage and reported to us by court officials. He wisely saves the major onstage revelation/reconciliation for the famous final scene where Paulina takes the King and his newly-found daughter to see the 'statue' of his dead wife Hermione. Of course the statue is the real deal and Paulina brings her 'magically' to life and into the shocked but joyful arms of her repentant husband and lookalike daughter. Cue tears.

The Winter's Tale may not rank with Shakespeare's greatest plays, but in this intelligent and well-directed and designed production, with a troupe of actors beyond compare, it is truly a theatrical delight.

Hermione: What wisdom stirs amongst you? Come Sir, now I am for you again: 'Pray you sit by us, And tell's a Tale
Mamillius (her young son): Merry, or sad, shal't be?

Hermione: As merry as you will
Mamillius: A sad Tale's best for Winter: I have one of Sprights, and Goblins
Hermione: Let's have that (good Sir.) Come-on, sit down, come-on, and do your best, To fright me with your Sprights: you're powerful at it
Mamillius: There was a man
Hermione: Nay, come sit down: then on
Mamillius: Dwelt by a Church-yard: I will tell it softly, Yond Crickets shall not hear it
Hermione: Come on then, and giv't me in mine ear (Act II, Sc. i)

CABARET and THE CHERRY ORCHARD - January 14th and 23rd, 2009

Images (Top to Bottom): Cast members of The Cherry Orchard and production poster [http://www.centralsquaretheater.org/]; Cast members of Cabaret and production poster [http://www.newrep.org/library.php, http://www.newrep.org/cabaret.php]

These two most recent theatre visits bring to mind the saying "Context is All" (supposedly attributed to Margaret Atwood in a Google search, but whatever...). After the splendour of ART's The Seagull, it is hard to go back to the okay, middling, slightly humdrum productions I saw in the last two weeks.

To begin with New Rep's production of Cabaret, I was really looking forward to this show. I saw the movie decades ago and don't really remember it, although Liza Minnelli has her finest hour, that's for sure. And I've never seen it on stage. I was there on opening night and also for what turned out to be New Rep's Artistic Director Rick Lombardo's (and the director of the show's) closing night, as he's heading off to head up the San Jose Repertory Theatre. So there were some speeches and gifts on top of the usual opening night festivities. Lombardo has clearly made his mark on New Rep, directing many shows over his 12 year stint there. Alas, this final show is not his high watermark. While serviceable, this production lacks a keen edge and falters most in the miscasting of the central role of Sally Bowles.

Cabaret has an interesting history, composed by John Kander and Fred Ebb and premiered in 1966 (with the film version following in 1972), and based on a play by John van Druten (I Am a Camera) that in turn was based on a short autobiographical story by Christopher Isherwood. In 1966, the musical must have felt very cutting-edge, set as it is in Weimar Berlin on the cusp of the Nazi regime in the late twenties and early thirties. Young American writer wanna-be Cliff Bradshaw comes to Berlin for the exciting lifestyle and quickly meets British cabaret singer/stripper Sally Bowles at the somewhat seedy but compelling Kit Kat Club. She flees from a previous liaison with the club's manager and ends up living with Cliff, and despite his proclivities to 'play for the other team', they become lovers and eventually Sally is pregnant. During all this, we also meet Cliff's friend Ernst, his landlady Fraulein Schneider, her suitor the Jewish grocer Herr Schulz and another tenant in the boarding house, prostitute Fraulein Kost. All of this action outside the club is intercut with musical numbers in the club, emceed by 'The Emcee' a part made famous by Joel Grey in the film version (he originated the role in Harold Prince's 1966 production) and more recently by Alan Cumming in Sam Mendes/Rob Marshall's' remount in 1998. As the Nazis rise to power, and the love match between Schneider and Schultz is broken off to reflect the growing fear in Germany, things get darker and darker at the club and Cliff tries to convince Sally to leave with him, to go back to America for a white picket fence future. Instead, Sally sells her fur coat for an abortion and returns to the stage at the club, singing the title song in triumphant desperation as Cliff leaves the city and country just in time.

It is a powerful combination of entertainment and drama that centres around the character of Sally, a mixed-up lower class Londoner with stars in her eyes who cannot tear herself away from the false promises of fame and glory that the Kit Kat Club promises. Her relationship with Cliff and his growing real love for her and need to protect and care for her despite her self-destructiveness is what drives the show forward. In New Rep's production we have a quite good Cliff from David Krinitt, who plays his good-hearted American-ness very well, such that we travel along with him as he realizes with growing horror what is happening as Hitler takes power. While I found him less convincing as a bisexual (downplayed in this production, and maybe the stage version itself as compared to Bob Fosse's film version with the role played by Michael York), I did find him well-cast, with a pleasant singing voice and warm stage presence. I had more trouble with Aimee Doherty as Sally. She is so clearly an ingenue, very perky and pretty and can sing and dance, no doubt. But what was missing for me was the dark side of Sally, the narcissistic side, the vulnerable side, the self-hating side that leads her to equate the degradation and exploitation of the Kit Kat Club with success of some kind. I may not be crazy about Liza, but she was so right as Sally in the movie...all the big-eyed fragility and thin-skinned bravado that you see in her...echoing for so many of us right back through her to her tragically tormented mother Judy Garland, made her a Sally for the ages. And other actresses have also played Sally, I am sure, with these same complexities; Judi Dench (yes!), Natasha Richardson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and more. When Ms. Doherty sings "Maybe This Time", pleading with herself to finally catch a chance at happiness with Cliff, to be the winner rather than the loser, it should break our hearts but instead comes across as a pep-talk. Too bad. Doherty does fare better in some of the other production numbers and carries us home with the closing title song with lots of pinache..the plucky showmanship of Sally is all there...what's missing is the tragedy.

John Kuntz does better here as the Emcee, put through his paces with a choreography-heavy show that makes the bruises I saw on some of the dancers' legs after the show obviously not makeup. But his is suitably creepy as well as somewhat tragic Emcee as he morphs into a concentration camp victim of Nazism by the curtain (an addition that Mendes brought to his revival that has stuck). Cheryl McMahon as Fraulein Schneider and Paul D. Farwell as Schultz are both fine in their work; their love affair and its sad end were quite moving. Shannon Lee Jones does nice work as the ballsy whore-with-a-heart-of-gold Fraulein Kost. And the supporting company works well together on a set that switches back from inside to outside the club with the use of sliding set pieces and revolving doors. The show is well-orchestrated by a band (in drag!) on a second level upstage. I just found the whole package a bit ho-hum, and the few directorial flourishes--such as projecting newsreel footage of Hitler onto the stage floor--didn't go far enough or deep enough for me. But as I said in my caveat above, it'll probably take me some time, or another show that shocks me into wideawakeness like The Seagull, for me to regain my critical balance. So, three stars out of five for this Cabaret.

Same again for the Central Square Theatre's production of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard (I know, I know..it's not even a fair fight is it?) Like Cabaret, I found this production serviceable but mostly uninspired. While it features some nice performances, it lacks an overarching vision that makes it more than a pleasant night out. I must also disclose my bias that I don't care for this Chekhov nearly as much as his other masterworks (The Seagull, Three Sisters, Uncle Vanya), although it does have some lovely moments.

The plot centres around landowner Madame Ranyevskaya and her family and friends, who are dealing with the forced decision to sell off her beloved cherry orchard and family home out of necessity to cover her debts incurred through a series of bad choices and irresponsibility. She returns from Paris (minus a lover who has betrayed her) to a home that she waxes nostalgic about with her brother Leonid Gayev, but that she is willing to forfeit for a return to Paris and her feckless man. Her daughter Anya and adopted daughter Varya become the victims of her folly as their lives suffer as a result. Former peasant farmer turned merchant Yermolai Lopahin saves the day and buys the orchard, thus taking over the property upon which he was raised as a serf, but cannot bring himself to ask for the hand of his beloved Varya (Chekhov was nothing if not acutely class conscious). She must go into servitude herself as her selfish adoptive mother leaves her behind to return to Paris...until the money runs out again. Amidst all this there are secondary characters who voice their positions from varied perspectives; radical student Pyotr who is preparing for revolution (which will come to Russia soon enough) and loves Anya, servants Yasha and Dunyasha who fall into lust with each other and ridicule their betters in the time-honored tradition of comedy, and old devoted valet Firs who inhabits his servitude to the bitter end.

Director Daniel Gidron brings nice clear portraits of all these characters to this production and makes the most of what is clearly a limited budget and a minimal set. Annette Miller plays Mme. Ranyevskaya with the required combination of charm and obliviousness, but she rarely lets the "Everything will be just fine" mask slip to reveal the unhappiness of this lost and self-described 'wanton' woman. Finding and mining more of these moments would deepen her work. Her brother Leonid Gayev is played by Michael Balcanoff with a ramrod spine and bluster that works well. All the younger girls in the production do nice work; Elise Audrey Manning is a sweet Anya, Varya a sharp and embittered Varya trying to break out of her own mold but failing and Darcy Fowler a warm and bawdy Dunyasha. Standout performance for me was Ken Baltin as the peasant-turned-merchant Yermolai Lopahin. His transparent love for this family he has known all his life combined with his growing sense of almost shame-faced economic superiority over them is well-wrought and touching, as is his hopeless and unspoken love for Varya. An actor with a clown-like demeanour, he brings a kind of sad dignity to the role that rings true.

The production itself is a bit rough around the edges in the design department. I'm fine with low-budget theatre... Jerzy Grotowski's Poor Theatre and all that..and believe that the finest dramatic experiences can be had with little or no design elements. For me, it's always about the actor-actor and actor-audience relationship (Read My Book!!). That said, if you're going to put your actors in period costumes, you are obliged to get it right. Unfortunately, I was distracted by costume pieces that were all wrong...shoes with elastic gores, coats with zippers that looked like LL Bean barn coats. Some of the women's dresses were quite lovely, especially Annette Miller's, and I wonder if they were borrowed or rented, as the men had less consistent costumes, including an actor in a smaller role appearing in what was clearly a polyester suit at one point! My take on this is severe, I know, but I'd prefer to watch this show with the cast in rehearsal garb than to be taken out of the constructed world of the play by costume pieces that don't fit. This is especially the case when the set design is so minimal, thereby pushing our attention even more onto what the actors are wearing. Directors and designers, take note! Lecture over...so is this review.

THE CORN IS GREEN and THE SEAGULL - January 10 and 11, 2009

Photos, Top to Bottom: Karen MacDonald as the actress Arkadina and Mickey Solis as her son Konstantin in The Seagull, directed by János Szász. (Photo: K. Mitchell. [http://www.amrep.org/media/seagull/seagull01.html]); Poster for American Repertory Theatre production; Kate Burton and her son Morgan Ritchie; mother and son in The Corn is Green; Kate Burton in the poster shot and on the cover of an issue of American Theatre [www.huntingtontheatre.org].

Well, it's a snowy New Year in Boston and a busy weekend of theatregoing that took me from everything I can't stand about mainstream contemporary theatre practice in a star-driven piece of claptrap at the Huntington Theatre to everything I love about theatre in a radical and stunning revisioning of The Seagull at ART.

Unlike everyone else in this city, it seems, I went to see The Corn is Green because I was interested in the play by Emlyn Williams, not the star of the play, Sir Richard Burton's daughter Kate Burton. I now know that the playwright was godfather to Ms. Burton and a close friend of Sir Richard, which explains a lot for it is a very musty and fusty piece. Williams was a popular playwright, screenwriter and actor in his day, but his name, alas, will not appear on the long list of historical greats of the 20th century I fear, if this is his best-known work. The Corn is Green is apparently a semi-autobiographical play about Williams' escape from the Welsh mines to the halls of Oxford with the assistance of a well-meaning tutor in the guise of a wealthy British spinster, here called Miss Moffat. She arrives in the Welsh home she has inherited as a liberal thinker of the late 19th century, a believer in universal education, including education for Welsh-speaking miners and (good heavens!) women. Moffat brings along her colorful entourage of a reformed thief turned Salvation Army soldier/cook, Mrs. Watty, and Watty's ne'er-do-well daughter Bessie. Miss Moffat sets out immediately on her zealous mission of pulling the local boys out of the mines and into a school that she will found and teach in. One of the boys, Morgan Evans, stuns her with a descriptive essay about being underground (from whence comes the play's title) and her mission becomes focussed on saving him by preparing him for an entry scholarship to Oxford. Along the way, Morgan rebels against Miss Moffat (in a Pygmalion-like showdown), sleeps with Bessie and impregnates her, and wins the scholarship and a new life. The price that must be paid is Miss Moffat agreeing to adopt the illegitimate baby, thus freeing Morgan of his obligations so he can become "a great man of England' and work towards freeing his Welsh compatriots from the drudgery and dangers of mining life.

So that's the synopsis...for my money the play should be called The Corn is Corny. It is filled with stock characters, few surprises and little dramatic tension. Characters change very little, even Morgan's greatest revelation in the play, that there is a world "over the wall" in Oxford that he realizes he longs for, is a bit so-what. His emotional show-down with his mentor is also a tempest in a teacup...he grows to resent her treating him like a machine and demands she see him for himself..and this is interesting how exactly? Clearly, I don't think much of the play, so that leaves the production.

It took me a little while watching the show to realize what was irritating me beyond the banality of the script, until I saw that a follow-spot was on Ms. Burton throughout the entire show. It would require an essay-length treatise for me to outline the multiple ways in which this offends me, but suffice it to say, it does. This is not a Broadway musical, it's a drawing room period drama! Why does she require a follow-spot, does she think we can't see her without one? I am offended by this not just because it speaks to an unbelievable star ego (which is insufferable enough), but even more so on behalf of her fellow actors, as to me this special treatment is an insult to their work. If Ms. Burton were Bette Davis or Katharine Hepburn, I might find the use of a follow-spot forgivable (and only if it were in the time period they performed this role, close to its debut in 1938), but she is not. She is an adequate enough actor, I have seen her on Law and Order and in some supporting roles in film, but she is not Vanessa Redgrave, Fiona Shaw or Kristen Scott-Thomas and her parading her 'star-power' in such a vainglorious way speaks to me of the problems with a theatre system that functions in this shallow, celebrity-driven manner (witness her appearance on the cover of American Theatre). Even worse, her son is not a particularly gifted young actor and I can think of a number of young men who could have brought more intensity, anger and passion to the role. Why were they not cast, and why was he? Don't get me started...

As for the remainder of the show, the Huntington always offers lovely design, as is in evidence here with a full set and costumes and a large acting company. Many of the supporting roles are played well, and I particularly liked the work of Huntington favorite Will LeBow as the local squire, Roderick McLachlan as Mr. Jones (manager of the estate) and Kathy McCafferty as yet another spinster (but a more soft-hearted and lovable version), Miss Ronberry. Kristine Nielsen as Mrs. Watty and Mary Faber as Bessie almost steal the show with their obvious pleasure in their respective roles, with Nielsen mining all the laughs in her part with ease and Faber playing the bad girl with a refreshing lack of conscience that really rings true (although the tight-fitting corsetted ensemble she wears in her final appearance made it hard for me to believe she had given birth 4 weeks earlier!) I also found the use of Welsh music, especially the male choruses, effective throughout.

Final word on The Corn is Green? Read Peter Brook's treatise on 'deadly theatre' and then get back to me.

My experience with Anton Chekhov's The Seagull, newly translated by Paul Schmidt and directed by Jano Szasz, was a polar opposite one to The Corn is Green, and succeeded in completely restoring my faith in the possibility for theatre to wake people up rather than put them to sleep. I love Chekhov's plays, as do most theatre (and even non-theatre!) people, for their vivid characterizations and bitterly truthful dialogue, and for the clear-eyed portrayal of the stultifying life of the minor bourgeoisie in Russia of the late 19th century. They are gems and it is a tragic loss to theatre that Chekhov died of tuberculosis at the age of 44...what other masterpieces might he have left us? That said, I have sat through a number of disappointing Chekov productions that, similar to my experience at the Huntington, felt like visiting a museum, all very precious and cut glass. How exciting it was, then, to walk into the auditorium of the Loeb Theatre and see a set design of a "theatre that's been dormant for thousands of years" (from an interview with the director in the program) designed by Riccardo Hernandez. Banks of broken down rows of theatre seats are scattered across the stage, on casters. The stage space is stripped to the brick walls, painted black, and all the props and lighting instruments are completely visible, as are the ASMs. Hanging over this dark and foreboding space are huge fragments of plastered frescoes of Russian icons by the great artist Andrei Rublev. And I mean huge...each one of the three portraits must be 10 or 15 feet across and they are angled over the playing space such that they hang precariously, almost as though they are in the process of falling onto the floor and are only temporarily frozen in their decay. And on the floor there is water, lots of water, pools of it in all parts of the stage.

When the cast enters in silence at the top of the show they slosh through this water, signifying what a significant element it will be. They sit in a bank of seats facing us for a moment while the deeply troubled protagonist, suicidal young man Konstanin, reads us a snippet of his play-within-a-play that has become the conceptual touchstone for Szasz' revsioning. All actors are in contemporary dress and there is a musical soundtrack of synthesized rock music that underpines a number of scenes throughout, including a full-on version of Guns and Roses' Sweet Child of Mine at the top of Act Two, with Konstanin riffing on the shotgun he will eventually use to blow his brains out, used as an air guitar. Toto, we're not in Kansas anymore, nor are we on the run-down estate of Konstanin's mother (famous actress and neglectful mother Arkadina) and beloved Uncle Sorin.

Instead, we are inside Konstanin's mind in the moments before he pulls the trigger, and the play is fashioned as the "life flashing before his eyes" as he recalls the emotional traumas of the past two years. Konstanin longs only for his mother's love and approval and the love of the girl across the lake, Nina, who loves him back and has agreed to perform in his 'symbolist' drama for his family and friends. Arkadina scoffs at the pretentiousness of this performance and it falls apart with Konstantin exiting in a rage. Nina is very interested in meeting Arkadina's lover, the famous writer Trigorin, as she is dreaming of fame and fortune for herself (as opposed to the idealized life of an artist that Konstanin longs for). So these characters are sent spinning and colliding into each other, fighting and falling for each other in endless combinations of ever-increasing intensity and disaster. Their trials are echoed in the people around them who, as in all of Chekov's plays, suffer varying levels of unrequited love and/or general dissatisfaction with their lives.

The brilliance of Szasz' vision is in how well it works. Suddenly, we see Konstantin's past being performed for him and by him in his own memories, complete with their exaggerations and distortions. The emotional level of intensity becomes unbelievably high throughout (an exhausting show for the company, especially as most of them are sitting onstage observing the action throughout much or all of the nearly three hour running time), with every scene raising the stakes higher than the one before. This approach might quickly become histrionic and absurd, but because we know we're in a construction in Konstanin's mind, that he is therefore the playwright and director of what we're seeing, it makes sense that everything is so high-strung and on the edge. It turns out that Chekhov stripped entirely of any modicum of good or orderly behaviour, in other words, Chekhov reduced to the Id and Ego with the Super-Ego banished offstage, is some pretty potent dramatic potion. Both Arkadina and Nina are in short dresses, bare legs and high-heeled boots (all the better to sexualize you with, my dear!), and when Arkadina has a key scene with Konstanin where she changes his bandages after a first failed suicide attempt, followed by an encounter with Trigorin where she wins him back (temporarily) from his passion for the young and vulnerable Nina, it makes sense that she pulls both men down onto the floor and wraps herself physically around them. It makes sense that Konstanin loses it (often) and throws suitcases all over the stage, ranting and raving in his rage at his mother. The echoes of Hamlet and Gertrude are made loud and clear in this translation and interpretation. And that the play ends with the gunshot, rather than the original ending of Konstanin killing himself offstage and the doctor coming on to whisper the terrible news, so as to spare Arkadina (again, temporarily), we feel that of course it must be like this, how could it be otherwise? The greatest testament I can make to Szasz' work is to say that without a doubt I will never feel about, nor see, Chekhov in the same way again.

Of course this is a hugely demanding show for the actors, who are asked to get soaking wet more than once and to throw themselves about the stage and at each other quite a lot. This version rests so much on Konstantin that a misfire in his casting would be a disaster. Fortunately, Mickey Solis plays the role masterfully, never letting up on the horror-filled self-examination that is the play inside his head. He turns a powerful flashlight on other characters at key moments, struts around in his punk plaid pants and ripped t-shirt and is both empathetic and ridiculous. There is hideous pain that he endures in his scene with Nina near the play's end--where she comes back to see him after 2 years spent with Trigorin, bearing him a child that died, being abandoned by him and reduced to a second-rate theatre career (close to prostitution in those days) that has driven her to the edge of insanity. Witnessing Konstanin rolling around in a pool of water and screaming in agony in the disbelief that Nina still loves Trigorin, makes it easier for us to understand why he welcomes the gun in his mouth. Solis seems born to play this role. ART founding member Karen MacDonald plays Arkadina with all the requisite selfishness and self-centredness required, plus the hyper-sexuality that Szasz layers on. But I have always felt Arkadina to not be a very rewarding riole to play, although it is so prized by older actresses, because she doesn't change at all...nothing moves her from her focus on herself and her needs and she is therefore a tough part to connect with, I imagine. Brian Dykstra does a wonderful job with Trigorin, making of him a kind of nihilist wolf whose disgust at himself and everything around him is palpable...the fact that he turns this disgust into fiction and art is just one of the many levels of commentary on Art made by Chekhov in this play. Another fine performance comes from another ART regular Thomas Derrah as the local doctor Dorn, who is so embittered with his life you can almost taste it. Overall, I feel the men here fare better than the women. The lovesick Masha (daughter of estate-keeper Shamrayev and his wife [who's in love with Dorn] Paulina), played here by ART Institute MFA student Nina Kassa as a goth, seems slightly beyond the actor's capabilities, both vocally and emotionally, although her physical work was nice. And Nina, played by Molly Ward, starts off well but does not go the distance for me. She is a more confident and sexual Nina than I've seen before, all long legs and ready to get down to it with both Konstanin and Trigorin, and she knows what she wants. But her final scene, one of the most challenging to make work that I know (how does one deliver all the "I am a seagull" lines and not make it look silly somehow?), she is not where she needs to be.

That scene does have a lovely directorial moment, though, which I wish Szasz had done more of in the show: At one point Konstanin can't stand hearing Nina anymore and so he picks her up and throws her down onto the stage where she goes immediately limp. He then picks her up again and almost literally throws her offstage, whereupon she turns right back around and enters again, continuing her emotional battering of him. It's like Konstanin wants to erase or destroy this memory, but he can't. And I thought about how that motif might be even more present in this ingenious and thrilling production; to have things repeat themselves, or go into slow motion or even backwards, to make this even more of a dreamscape in Konstanin's mind. I saw a production along these lines in London at the National in 2005, Theatre Complicite's production of Strindberg's Dream Play in a new translation by Caryl Churchill. I've never seen a play like it, the physical mastery and control of that company to take the audience into a dreamscape that sustains itself for 90 minutes nonstop, including whole scenes played forward and in reverse.

And this, finally, is the mark of a great theatre experience; that you begin to riff on it yourself, to imagine where the audacious and bold visions of directors like Szasz (and others) might take you when you consider the dramatic canon as living practice rather than pictures in a museum, frozen in time.

ROAD SHOW by Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman - New York City - December 6th, 2008

Images: Production photos from the Public Theater's Road Show featuring Alexander Gemignani (L, above) as Addison Mizner and Michael Cerveris (R, above) as Wilson Mizner. Credits: www.daylife.com

Like many avid theatregoers, I'd walk a mile or two on my knees to see a Sondheim show, so it wasn't much to ask for me to catch a cheap bus ride down to NYC last weekend to see his newest creation, Road Show. Formerly, called Bounce, this show has had a troubled history, having been played out of town but undergoing major rewrites over a period of many years. This most recent and quite stripped-down version of the musical is debuting for a short run at the Public. Directed by John Doyle, who has previously directed remounts of Sondheim's Sweeney Todd and Company that won critical acclaim and new audiences for those older works, we are given what I can only describe as a chamber musical from Sondheim, in contrast to his grand orchestral works of the past. But a smaller Sondheim show still has his music and its moments, both in evidence here.

Sondheim and his collaborator John Weidman (who has worked with the maestro on another chamber musical with a difficult history, Assassins) are interested in telling us the true tale of two brothers, the Mizners, who represent the highs and lows of American capitalism in their wheeling and dealing across the country in the early part of the twentieth century. The show begins and ends with them speaking to each other from beyond the grave, trying to assign blame and vent bitterness about everything that went wrong in their lives. From this opening, we travel back to their youth, as they head off to the Yukon gold rush, world travels, high society, architecture, the development of Palm Beach and Boca Raton and other adventures along the way. All throughout the brothers are fierce rivals who fall-out often, only to be drawn back into each other's lives due to an irresistible connection, even love. And all throughout their tale is told with a full chorus onstage who take on multiple roles (including their mother and father always looking on, even beyond their deaths) as they weave in and out of the Mizners' triumphs and disasters.

The show is under two hours long, without an intermission, so sets off like a freight train and never lets up, more and more paper money thrown up by the fistfuls as the brothers Mizner gamble, cheat, lie, con, and create the lives that mirror in a funhouse version of the American Dream; distorted and deceptive, now fat now thin, now you see it, now you don't. Doyle has designed the set as well as directed, and it is most effective...a stacking of boxes, crates, file drawers that open and close for actors to reach into and pull out props and to climb over and position themselves on. Costumes are suitably muted with the womens' dresses printed with newspaper headlines, but there are plenty of fun add-ons such as hats, coats and boas. The musicians are offstage, unlike Doyle's other Sondheim revivals, where the actors played the score as they sang it.

Speaking of the score, Sondheim offers some small gems here, often reminiscent of older songs in their melodies and phrasing, but that seems a slightly unfair criticism of a composer so well-known and now in his late 70's. Of course there will be echoes heard by any listener reasonably familiar with his canon of works. All the full company numbers in the show were very enjoyable, marking key points in the Mizners' life journey; "Waste", "Gold!", Addison's Trip", "That Was a Year", "You" and "Boca Raton". There is little dance in the show, but lots of action and movement that provide an effective staging of each song. Other highlights are Alma Cuervo as Mama Mizner singing "Isn't He Something" about her neglectful son Willie, who has become a New York society member through marriage to a wealthy widow, while her dutiful and loving son Addison listens on in anger and hopelessness. Addison falls in love with a young man, Hollis Bessemer, whose contacts help Addison become a successful architect to the Palm Beach elite. He and Hollis song the most moving song in the show "The Best Thing That Has Happened".

The show features a strong company, all of whom sing beautifully and can act as well (as would be expected!) But the leads carry the show and both Cerveris and Gemignani do excellent work. Cerveris has the showier of the two brother roles, as Willie is the "bad" brother who manipulates everything and everyone around him, caring little for who gets hurt or what gets lost along the way. Cerveris gives a star performance in the role, eating it up with a very large spoon, with relish. But Gemignani wins our hearts as the more nuanced and empathetic Addison, who can't escape his two-timing brother, and in the end can't even deny he loves him.

All in all a satisfying show, despite troubles with the book that doesn't offer us a more complex rendering of the Mizners or other characters in their lives. It may not rank with Sondheim's greatest achievements, but Road Show still offers us a music-filled story worth the telling...and the hearing.