Let'sTalk Off-Broadway

Madame Bovary a musical based on the novel by Gustave Flaubert, adaptation, music and lyrics Paul Dick, direction and choreography Marlene Thorn Taber, PASSAJJ Productions

This musical adaptation conveys to a remarkable extent the epic scope and compelling narrative force of Flaubert’s novel.  One is intent, watching the musical, on catching every word and the meaning of each episode in the personal saga of Emma Bovary, beautiful and given to romanticism but in other ways not truly remarkable.  What a lot of havoc romanticism can cause!  The songs are abundant, and carry us effectively through the emotional phases of the narrative;  musically they were somewhat expectable.  For me, the best of the songs are the ones that are tough and "realistic."   

Emma Bovary is a provincial French woman with a sense of wanting something larger, more  upper class, more all consuming -- hard to put a finger on it but something different from the stifling middle class existence fate has handed her.  In the musical we first meet her, and her fantasy romanticism, at her wedding to the dull, unimaginative, and much older doctor Charles Bovary where, in the midst of the ceremony she -- as a theatrical aside -- is wishing her marriage were taking place at midnight.

From there on the marriage continues to disappoint:   “Tick tock, tick tock” she sings with ironic monotony, bored on the marriage bed.   But how to create that something better, more luxurious, more outstanding for herself?

Roger Rathburn as Charles,  Hayley Hoffmeister as Emma.  Photo:  Andrew Nuzhnyy.

The musical does a fine job of developing Flaubert's theme  that for a woman of her time and station, the road to something better -- whatever better is -- lies not in herself but in finding -- and hooking -- the right man.  Her brief concerns about the import of "holy matrimony" don't stop her from entering into an erotic though at the time unconsummated relationship with Leon, a young student -- they share a meeting of the minds and a picnic basket -- and when he leaves to study law in Rouen (not Ruen as in the program), she's easily seduced by a wealthy landowner, Rodolphe  -- who won't, however, "save" her either.

As a salve to her yearnings and disappointments, Emma takes to buying luxuries for herself and her lovers -- on her husband's credit.  Faced with bankruptcy for her husband, she pulls on her old sexual self-confidence once again to lure money out of her lovers but, it turns out, they’re not that interested.  Eventually, though, as the tradesman Homais sings in a wonderfully nasty show-stopper song, the piper must be paid.  It’s fascinating that whatever our assumptions about 19^th-century provincial France, the final disaster is caused not by her infidelities but by money.

The focus on that fiscal bottom line reminds that Flaubert set this story during the monarchy of King Louise Philippe I in the period of 1827-1846, characterized by the rise of the middle class.  (Why, according to the program, the musical is set in the 1890’s is beyond me, and makes the reference to the King irrelevant.)

Naturally the adaptation of a long, famously and beautifully detailed novel into a viable musical requires enormous condensation and leaving out, and an important reason the musical retains its narrative thrust is Paul Dick’s skill in doing this.  I think, though, that omitting Emma and Charles Bovary’s daughter was carrying streamlining too far:  the daughter is truly essential to understanding Emma’s character, conflicts and actions, and to the story as a whole. 

Hayley Hoffmeister as Emma sings with skill and strength and acts with uninterrupted focus, elements in this main character largely responsible for the unremitting vitality of the musical.  Perky as she is, though, I feel she is miscast in this show:  her accent, movement style and expressiveness speak much more of the American west or mid-west than of 19^th-century France, and her contemporary hair bob is so notably anachronistic it's distracting.  (During the show, I kept thinking she’d be great in Oklahoma and I’ll be darned -- according to the program notes which I first read after, as I usually do, she received her BA and Master’s in Music Theater Performance from Oklahoma City University).  

Among the good roster of performers, those who best transport us across the Atlantic to 19th-century France are Eyal Sherf and Christopher G. Taft.  As the seducing landowner, Sherf conveys wittily, while always staying in character, a fascinating snaky allure and a European flavor:  he convinces us that for Rodolphe, Emma is never more than a plaything and yet, at the same time, how deeply he's affected by her beauty.  You believe his desire.

There’s an allure all its own, and a big, satisfying  voice, in Christopher G. Taft’s calculating, leering, and bottom line realistic Homais.  He brings both brutality and poignancy to another of his show-stoppers, “Why Not Me?” 

Madame Bovary, the musical -- a rich evening of theater!

L-R   Eyal Scherf as Rodolphe, Hayley Hoffmeister as Emma, Roger Rathburn as Charles.  Photo:  Andrew Nuzhnyy 

Madame Bovary plays at the Roy Arias Stage IV Theater on Manhattan’s West 43^rd Street through June 2.  For more information and tickets, click on live link of title.

                                                                                       Yvonne Korshak

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Old-Fashioned Prostitutes (A True Romance), written, directed and designed by Richard Foreman, presented in association with Ontological-Hysteric Theater, at the Public Theater

Richard Foreman and the Ontological-Hysteric Theater that he founded in New York City in 1968 have been icons of avant garde theater.  He’s made a number of statements about his philosophical and theatrical purposes touching on, e.g., “total theater,”  “minimalist theater,”  “primitive,” etc., but statements are not theater.  Just what do we have in Old-Fashioned Prostitutes?  Stunning style, no substance. 

Entering the theater brings you to a marvelous bright world of bumble-bee colors -- golden yellow and black -- dominating in staccato rhythms: equidistant punctuations are everywhere.  In terms of design, an underlying grid, overlaid with a wide variety of visual excitements, stretches from the backdrop of the stage half-way through the theater, along the walls and on overhead strings.  It’s a powerful stab at a total visual experience.  It’s complex (what happened to minimalist?), rich, surprising, and makes you keen for the play.

Then the play opens and from the first banalities, you realize you’ve already seen the best part.  An aging man, looks back on his encounters with prostitutes in Venice, and in particular on his his ambivalent longing for one named Suzie.  Raised up by his memory, Suzie vamps with a lot of European style and confidence.  Her friend Gabriella is more uncertain and flapper-like winsome -- finger to cheek and two cute knees pressing in to each other.  Prostitution hasn’t taken a toll on either of them and their costumes are terrific.

The solipsistic philosopher George Berkeley is referred to and philosophical words are uttered.  The actors are busy and vividly costumed.  Nothing much happens in theatrical terms.  OK, we’ve seen it:  the spectacle wears thin, Emperor’s New Clothes style.   The hour length of the performance seems a long time.   See it for the design, just don’t expect a play.  The grid design has its roots in early 20^th-century Cubism.  Things here make one think of a colorful old-fashioned typewriter,  sound and all, exploded large.  Is this all still avant garde? 

The cast does a good job with the material:  David Skeist (Alfredo), Stephanie Hayes (Gabriella), Alenka Kraigher (Suzie), Rocco Sisto (Samuel), Nicolas Norena (Bibendum [aka Michelin]).     

Old-Fashioned Prostitutes plays at the Public Theater in downtown Manhattan through June 6.  For more information and tickets, click on live link of title.    

Yvonne Korshak

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Roof Garden Installation by Imran Qureshi, Metropolitan Museum of Art May 14 – November 3, 2013 (weather permitting)

Raising awareness of difficult and agonizing aspects of existence has a powerful place among the purposes of art.  Qureshi’s roof garden installation certainly does that.  The installation refers to the bombing of a Sufi shrine in Lahore, Pakistan in 2010 that took many lives and wounded many more.  The paved floors of the beautiful, garden-like shrine were left bloody as you can see in photos at this link, (note paving in the last of the series).  Go to the roof of the Metropolitan Museum and you will see similar paved surface painted a bloody red, with splotches and drops intermingled among the forms of blooming flowers, memorializing the incident and heightening awareness.  

I admit to being disappointed.  The roof garden installations, up to this year, have often been challenging intellectually and artistically, but they've always been gorgeous, and one leaves feeling elated.  Three gardens come together at this distancing height:  the city itself with its great surrounding skyscape, the garden of the park, and the garden of art.  The roof has been an oasis of joy -- as in last year's Cloud City of Tomas Saraceno.

The roof garden has also provided an ideal locale for art in three-dimensions: expansive sculpture and architectural gardens.  This year, with all that space and sky above, it’s a let-down to emerge onto the roof and, directed by the art, to look down, at painting flat on the paving stones.  The museum is currently undergoing large scale renovations and is surrounded with scaffolds and temporary walls, so the flat surface may have been chosen for its easier installation logistics -- nothing huge had to be hauled up there with cranes and pulleys like last year!

Qureshi, born in 1972 in Hyderabad, Pakistan, used to create small works on paper that resembled miniaturist books made for the Mughal court in the 16^th to 19^th centuries:  he inserted into this physically small, precise form contemporary images.  Then he exploded, as an artist, from the small page to large scale site-specific works, enlarging his landscapes and the scope of his contemporary ideas, and using acrylic paint.  It's interesting to see, though, that even in this vast, terrace-sized work, he maintains his dainty touch of the brush in his painted flower petals, some delicately tipped with white as you can see in the close-up photo, second from the top.

One looks down instead of up, and not to an oasis of joy, that's for sure.  Still, Qureshi’s painted pavings, rooted, it would seem, in grief and the desire to bear witness, have a strength of their own.

In connection with the exhibition, the book, The Roof Garden Commission:  Imran Qureshi, is available.The exhibition and its publication were conceived by Sheena Wagstaff, and organized by Ian Alteveer.

The Roof Garden is open every day (weather permitting) that the Museum is open, and admission to it comes with admission (recommended) to the museum.  It's very pleasant -- oasis-like -- that sandwiches, espresso, and other snacks and drinks are available on the roof daily from 10 a.m. until closing (weather permitting) and a cocktail bar is open on the Roof Garden on Friday and Saturday evenings from 5:30-8PM.  Click on live link, for more information. 

Yvonne Korshak

Comments very welcome.  Scroll down below the picture, click on "comments," write in comment box and click on "post,"  Emails are private -- no emails ever appear with comments.  Photos 1, 2 and 4 -- Installation views of The Roof Garden Commission:  Imran Qureshi (2013).  Photo 3 -- Imran Qureshi creating his site-specific work for The Roof Garden Commission project on the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden.  Photos are Metropolitan Museum of Art/Hyla Skopitz 

 

The Notebook of Trigorin by Tennessee Williams, a Free Adaptation of The Seagull by Anton Chekhov translated by Ann Dunnigan, directed by Laura Braza, the Attic Theatre Company

Whatever Williams may have worked out for himself in this 1981 exercise of adaptation, he didn’t do Chekhov any good, much as he admired the Russian playwright.  Evidently it was important to Williams to write this play it but it's of interest mainly to those with an active concern with theater history  -- in that these are two very great playwrights and it could be said anything they did is of interest.

The play -- Chekhov pure or filtered through Williams -- is a web of unrequited love.  The characters gather on the estate of Sorin, brother of the famous actress Arkadina, who has come to vacation there with her lover Trigorin.  He is a successful and conventional writer, a foil for Konstantin, Arkadina’s son who, with his passionate, youthful belief in a need for “new forms” for literature, is staging his avant-garde play on an improvised outdoor stage.  Konstantin is in love with his actress, Nina who, in short order, falls in love with Trigorin (which might leave Konstantin available for Masha, the Steward’s daughter, who loves him passionately but it won’t happen).

The drama of the powerful first act of The Seagull -- and it retains some of its power here -- centers around Konstantin’s desire for his mother’s praise, attention and respect, and her laughing dismissal of his play which she finds absurd, with its all talk no action.  “Ah,” she whispers with amused irony to her worldly companion Trigorin, “recitative.”  Chekhov in this episode gave us great talk and action -- and we did not need Masha to tell us before hand, as she does in Williams’ adaptation, that Arkadina “will despise the play this evening and make no secret of it.”  Here, as elsewhere, what Chekhov implies, Williams highlights with a magic marker.

Williams pushes hard to cast light on the fascinatingly equivocal relationship Chekhov created between Arkadina and Trigorin.  What is the nature of their bond?  Trigorin chafes at its restraints yet they remain together, his fling with Nina, and the baby produced from it, notwithstanding.  Williams responds to the ambiguities by making Trigorin bisexual, inserting flings with men as well as that with Nina, a characterization that in the context seems forced and somewhat implausible. 

In Chekhov’s play, Dr. Dorm is a loving personality who, as a nature romantic, assigns passionate longings to the power of the nearby lake.  Dorn, in Chekhov, is a ray of hope amidst the bevy of dysfunctional characters.  In keeping with his own tragic vision, Williams’ turns him into a heartless misogynist.  

The earlier part of The Notebook of Trigorin, has more the feel and flavor of Chekhov, and as the play progresses Williams' tragic sensibility and vision of characters living in a world of their own illusions become more dominant.  As in the characters of Trigorin and Dorn, this produces distracting disjunctions.  Williams pulls a rabbit out of the hat at the very end in a grand gesture by Arkadina.  It’s wondrously theatrical, and the one point where, for a moment, I felt Williams has actually improved on Chekhov, until I realized that Arkadina, narcissistic but in touch, would not have done it:  Blanche Dubois of Streetcar Named Desire might well have.

Michael Schantz conveys the confidence, and underlying agitation of Trigorin, the successful author and alluring man.  Jeremy Lawrence is amusing and touching as the estate owner, Sorin, who confronts in old age his failure to achieve his two goals:  to marry and to be a writer. 

Beyond them, the acting is lackluster, one of the casualties of which is that the symbolic power of the seagull Konstantin shoots and presents to Nina as a love gift is lost.  Charise Green as Arkadina throws herself into arguments with effective no holds-barred emotionality but fails to convey the famous actress’s charisma.  She characterizes the narcissistic, dominating woman by screams so grating that I tucked in turtle-wise every time I saw them coming; otherwise she adopts an intimate affect so quiet a lot of her lines couldn’t be heard.   

According to the program, Williams wrote this adaptation to make the “quiet” “delicate” Chekhov more accessible to American audiences.  “Our theatre has to cry out to be heard at all …”   But quiet, delicate Chekhov has done very well in America and around the world, as has Tennessee Williams, both deservedly.  Just not in this hybrid.

The Notebook of Trigorin  plays at The Flea Theater in NYC’s Tribeca district through May 18^th.  For more information and tickets, click on live link of title.

Yvonne Korshak

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FILM NOTE: Kon-Tiki, directed by Joachim Ronning and Espen Sandberg, with Pal Sverre Valheim Hagen as Thor Heyerdahl, from Norway

Kon-Tiki is one of the world’s great stories -- not so well told in this movie BUT the story is SO good it’s worth seeing the movie anyhow.

It's an astonishingly audacious adventure.  The Norwegian ethnologist Thor Heyerdahl in 1947 crossed the Pacific Ocean from Peru to Polynesia in a raft to prove a scientific point. 

Heyerdahl, who had done field work in Polynesia believed that compelling cultural similarities between South America and Polynesia indicated that Polynesia had originally been populated by migrants from Peru.  This countered prevailing scientific opinion that Polynesia had been populated from Asia:  after all, it seemed impossible for early people with primitive technology to travel the 5,000 miles across the Pacific it takes to get from Peru to Polynesia.  Any cultural similarities between South America and Polynesia were written off as the result of independent inventions in Peru and Polynesia. 

Heyerdah saw a way to prove his point:  he’d make the journey.  So, with his crew of six, he built a primitive balsa wood raft, no modern materials, and, trusting on the currents to carry them there, drifted motorless from Peru to Polynesia. 

A tiny raft in the Pacific ocean for a little over three months -- the journey was fraught with difficulty.  The balsa wood began to get soggy, the raft lay lower and lower in the water, storms, high waves, sharks, whales, exposure all took their toll.  And when they did sight land, a razor edged reef nearly finished them off.  The movie gives dramatic coverage to all these threats to their lives and obstacles and to their triumphant arrival in Polynesia.

So what, then, is wrong with the movie -- outside of the fact that Pal Sverre Valheim Hagen lacks  Heyerdahl’s grit , though other actors come across convincingly as outdoorsmen and adventurers? 

It is episodic and not smoothly continuous.  On the current-driven raft, the big threats -- men overboard, whales, sharks, powerful thunder and lightening storms, towering waves -- appear like vignettes in a Disneyworld tracked boat ride -- there they are, now they’re past, what’s ahead?  The time in between -- daily tasks, food limitations, exposure, and boredom -- are referred to but not shown.  For example, after one crisis Heyerdahl tells the crew to get back to their tasks:  what are they?   What do you need to do daily on a drifting balsa raft?  A lot? or not much? 

The film shows what happens consecutively but is skimpy on how it happens.   There are views of the raft being built in Peru but we don’t get the sense of the mechanics of it, the how.  Raising money for the project is referred to but how did he succeed?   These kinds of nitty-gritty which make Heyerdahl’s book of 1950, Kon-Tiki: Six Men Cross the Pacific on a Raft, so compelling, are not made vivid.   When a storm arises, we see its bigness, men clinging to posts, water washing over everything, but we don’t get the narrative of a storm with the clarity the movies usually give such scenes. 

The film short-changes Heyerdahl’s intellectual purpose.  I found this truly beyond annoying.  In the early scenes, the Heyerdahl character states clearly his scientific purpose to prove that humans could have rafted from Peru to Polynesia, but by the end the importance of the Kon-Tiki expedition is related to its inspirational effect on future explorations, sending men into space, etc.   Irrelevant.  Heyerdahl didn’t prove that Polynesia was populated from Peru, but he did prove that contact between them was possible. 

He broke through the fixed idea that there was no contact between the Americas and Polynesia, and showed that the cultural similarities may be the result of the movement of humans and the ideas they carry with them.  He provided a new lens to view all scientific information touching on these regions, and that, as he thought, for early humans, water was a road, not a barrier.

Not that is was ever an easy trip!

So should you see the movie?  Yes.  Heyerdah’s proving his point is one of the great adventure stories of all time -- physical and intellectual, and here’s a chance to know about it.

And if you have a chance, read the book.

Yvonne Korshak

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This Side of Neverland, Rosalind and The Twelve Pound Look , two one-act plays by J. M. Barrie, directed by J. R. Sullivan, The Pearl Theatre Company

... beyond Peter Pan ...

Best known now for Peter Pan, J. M. Barrie was a popular playwright in early 20^th-century London and here’s a chance to see two of his witty and enjoyable comedies -- about grown-ups.

The first of these, Rosalind, is a real gem.  A beautiful, popular actress has donned a shapeless housedress and floppy slippers, and lets her hair go, holed up in a rural boarding house where she takes on the persona of her own mother just to get away from it all, to find respite from her frenetic London life where she's relentlessly the center of attention.

Having happily loosened her stays, she bothers to chat with no one except the amiable, ordinary owner of her boarding house, until coincidence draws to the boarding house one of her adoring London swains, an upper class recent university graduate.  Over the course of a revelatory conversation, he discovers that this frumpy, pleasant 40-year old he's talking with is not the mother of the glorious young actress he fancies himself in love with but very the actress herself, whom he's failed to recognize under her housecoat.  As she plays it for all it’s worth, he scrambles to figure out what to do with his ardor?  Be true to the 40-year old?  Or to his 23-year old self?   He believes in love.  He wants to do the right thing.  And what will happen when a telegram arrives offering the actress the role of Rosalind in As You Like It?

One thing is sure:  there will be a stunning transformation of a 40-year old frump into a dazzling 20-something … well, she’s actually 29:  Barrie takes care to keep the play totally plausible.

Rachel Botchan is enchanting as the dowdy “mother” and equally so as the glamorous young actress -- she’s so amused, so in control -- and her transformation from old and plain to young and glamorous (Miss Botchan looks beautiful both ways) is a powerful reminder, as Barrie surely intended it, of the joys and ironies of appearance and illusion.  I’ve seen Miss Botcham is several roles -- she’s always compelling but here she’s a wonder.  Sean McNall brings his own amused charm to the double part of playwright Barrie moving in and out of the play and the young man in love.  As the boarding house owner, Carol Schultz is a solid foil of middle-aged realism for the actress whose life is a bouquet of possibilities -- even at the "advanced age" of 29.

In the second play,The Twelve Pound Look, Sir Harry is about to be knighted, and both he and his wife, who is heavily loaded with bling, are delighted at the prospect.  Kate, a typist arrives to prepare his “thank you” letters and it turns out that she, through coincidence, is Sir Harry’s former wife, who'd left him years before.

Sir Harry is one of those men who cannot grasp why any woman upon whom he’s lavished everything costly, including his high position, would leave him (I wondered about it, too), but nevertheless he's assumed all along that she left him for another man.  Who was he?  is the imperious question repeated in Harry’s accustomed-to-answers voice.  With some amusing game playing, the truth is revealed -- she left Sir Harry not for a man but for a typewriter, cost 12 pounds, or more truly, she left him for the independence of making her own living.  It could happen.  But in this play it doesn't ring true.

The Twelve Pound Look  is nearer to farce than Rosalind.  This is not A Doll’s House, though it comes thirty years later than Ibsen’s iconic play of a married woman struggling for independence.  Still, The Twelve Pound Look  is entertaining, and good to know about.  And the episode in which Sir Harry, before the adoring eyes of his wife, practices his moves for the ceremony of Knighthood is one of the great comic scenes, performed with flawless timing and wit by Bradford Cover.  Rachel Botchan -- in another of her evening's magic transformations -- is appropriately peppery as Harry’s liberated ex-wife.  And Sean McNall, in the role of J. M. Barrie on-stage, conveys an author’s ironic distance and insight, while playing also a punctilious butler.  

Live piano with tunes like “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows,” performed by Carol Schultz, send us pleasantly to the past.  And, for its own touch of the past, a stage curtain is used inThis Side of Neverland .  I love the immediacy of current plays with stages open to the audience but the curtain opening onto that other world of the imagination is a pleasure of its own.

This Side of Neverland  plays at The Pearl Theatre on West 42nd Street in Manhattan through May 19th now extended through May 26th.  For more information and tickets, click on live link of title.

Yvonne Korshak

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Kafka’s Monkey, based on “A Report to an Academy” by Franz Kafka, adapted by Colin Teevan, starring Kathyrn Hunter, directed by Walter Meierjohann, Theatre for a New Audience

Kathryn Hunter in Kafka's Monkey.  Photo:  Keith Pattison

Kafka’s Monkey is original, creative and one of the great theater experiences.  It brings together a great author, a talented playwright, and a brilliant actor so, after the fact, one might say “how could it be otherwise.”  Still it’s totally unexpected.   After all, a play consisting of an invited speech delivered by an African chimpanzee to an august Academy is … well, unlooked for.     

A captured chimpanzee, to make the best of the violent situation which robbed him of his freedom, has through diligent observation and imitation adopted the skills, manners and characteristics of a human being.  He’s here tonight, five years since his capture and arrival in England, to present an invited address to a lofty, probably scientific, Academy audience -- and yes, we are that audience.  His know-how and referential world are completely human, his British English perfect.   Under his white tie and tails, though, and in his movements, we can see that his bodily transformation to human is less complete:  he has a chimpanzee’s long arms, broad chest, and swinging gate.   His name is Red Peter -- and therein hangs a tale. 

Kathryn Hunter’s portrayal of two natures in a single being, and her delivery of his speech in which he narrates the details of his capture, his gruesome shipboard journey, and his brilliant “humanizing” adaptation is among the most memorable performances in theater.  A petite woman acts the role of a chimpanzee who’s acting the role of man.  Think about that.  She creates the character and his world.  In calm, discursive moments, Red Peter is most thoroughly the man -- his right palm pressed to the small of his back in an elegant, upper class gesture.   But when the emotion of his narrative builds, his chimpanzee physicality presses forward as he takes positions that are contorted for a human, natural for a chimp, or -- with a ladder prop -- leaps across branches and hangs precipitously among the trees.

Hunter makes her dancer’s strength and flexibility into the very essence of a chimp.  She conveys a Chaplinesque poignancy in conveying the life events and psychic travels of the dislocated, ingenious primate, thrust from Eden.  As the adaptor Colin Teevan notes in the program, “… using his own brutal experience of the ‘world of me’ as a mirror, he deftly inverts the situation to make his speech a reflection upon humanity.”  Humans come out pretty loathsome but the earth is stuck with them.  We're stuck with ourselves.

Like "Metamorphosis" and others of Kafka's animal stories, "A Report to an Academy," has received as many interpretations as there are interpreters.  Just as the chimp survives by using intelligence and self-discipline to adapt to the more powerful humans at a sacrifice of aspects of his true self,  so humans have survived in the face of all-powerful nature by using intelligence and self-discipline at the expense of their natural instincts;  and, colonial peoples have survived in relation to their colonial masters in parallel ways; and Jews (since Kafka was Jewish) have survived and adapted similarly in the context of a dominant Christian culture, and so on.  

The many interpretations are most all "right" and able to co-exist, because the story is a parable of power relationships.  Its resonant layers of meaning, its philosophical, political and psychic range, and its strength of characterization, beautifully transmitted by the Colin Treevan, underlie this compelling theater experience.

This is for sure:  during the narrative, the large audience was silent and intensely focused -- except for moments of laughter, and actor-audience interaction.  With all its seriousness, Kafka's Monkey is a comedy, or much like a comedy, and true to comedies, it ends in marriage -- of a most surprising,  and inevitable, kind.

This is the New York premier of the London production by the Young Vic.  It’s a privilege to see Kafka’s Monkey and it’s here for a short run so I’d say -- get to it!

Kafka's Monkey plays at the Baryshnikov Arts Center on West 37th Street in Manhattan through April 17.  For more information and tickets, click on live link of title.

Yvonne Korshak

Comments very welcome.  Scroll down, click on "comments," write in comment box and click on "post."  Emails are private -- no emails ever appear with comments.

Photography and the American Civil War, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, April 2 – September 2, 2013

This exhibition is very interesting and also somewhat disappointing.

Inevitably, among the over 200 photographs relating to a vast defining event, the American Civil War, some are powerful in the way one would expect -- photos of battlefields, of prisoners, of the injured and dead, and of the destruction the war wrought on all sides.   In sheer numbers, however, the weight of the exhibition is skewed toward studio portraits,small tintypes and cartes de visite, as well as formally made medical photographs of ghastly war injuries.   So many “indoor” photos take away from the sense of the huge scale of events and the truth of a war fought for overarching issues by hordes of men on famous fields of battle.

Captain Charles A. and Sergeant John M. Hawkins (full photo captions below*)

Many kinds of intimate scenes of the daily lives and experiences of Confederate and Union soldiers are sparsely represented or not at all.   There are none representing the draft riots in NYC which turned murderous (for a recent play about these, "Banished Children of Eve," click here).  Also, there seems to be an avoidance of some of the most dramatically powerful Civil War Photos in favor of lesser known ones, even if by well known photographers.  It’s admirable to use an exhibition to extend viewer’s knowledge, but what may seem “iconic images” to Civil War buffs or photograpy experts are unfamiliar to a host of 2013 museum goers;  many of the greatest photographs aren’t on this exhibition’s walls which -- combined with sense of too many formal portraits -- make the exhibition less compelling than it might have been.

Still, there’s a lot to see, absorb, and think about.  Speaking of cartes de visites -- those small photos made in multiples that could be given to friends and others -- one of the most powerful works in the show is that of Sojourner Truth, the name she took for herself, who, escaping from slavery in 1826, became an active abolitionist as well as advocate for prisoners' and women’s rights (for her astonishing autobiography click here).   In a switch of powerful irony, she -- who had at 9 years been sold in a slave auction -- sold a photograph of herself to raise money to aid freedmen; hence her caption, “I sell the Shadow to Support the Substance.”  

Sojourner Truth, "I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance"  

Today's political campaign buttons don't have portraits because we have plenty of opportunity to know what candidates look like.  When Abraham Lincoln ran for President,  though, people were less bombarded with images so face recognition was part of the game, as seen in this 1860 presidential campaign medal with Abraham Lincoln’s portrait -- before he grew his beard. 

Photography was brand new at the start of the Civil War -- its conventional beginning date is 1848 -- and yet there were approximately 1,000 photographers on hand to capture all aspects -- yes, more than here represented -- of the War.   750,000 men died in the course of it -- 20% of those who fought and about 2.5% of the total population --  and photographers, such as Timothy O’Sullivan, photographed the dead on the battlefield, with no attempt to censor images that might “disturb” the populace as happened for a time during the war in Iraq;  on the contrary, photographer Matthew Brady, for whom O’Sullivan worked, was celebrated for an exhibition in 1862 in New York for bringing home war’s reality.       Field Where General Reynolds Fell, Gettysburg, July 1863

Many survivors came home maimed, and the exhibition has a remarkable number of medical photographs taken by Dr. Reed Brockway Bontecou and included in his private medical teaching album.

The tintypes, though both overabundant and at the same time somewhat lost in an exhibition of “Photgraphy and the American Civil War,” are fascinating and would merit a small exhibit of their own where one could absorb each of them without distraction.  Many are staged:  soldiers, newly enlisted and off to war, would have their photos taken in uniform and with weapons (often photographers’ prop).  They're idealized -- all look handsome and on the ready, drawing their swords, etc., and they convey all the virtues of courage, intelligence and ethical strength, as in the portraits of Charles and John Hawkins (top, right).   Here and there among them one catches a more intimate glimpse into personality, as in the portrait of a Union private (R);  looking in to his expressive eyes, one wonders he fared. 

The exhibition succeeds in making the point that its important to look beyond the famous photographer Matthew Brady to appreciate the many other talented photographers with names less known or anonymous active in photographing the Civil War.  As an exhibition, "Photography and the American Civil War" is neither comprehensive nor unified by a particular focus, and its decisions seem somewhat idiosyncratic -- but it’s history, our history, and well worth seeing.     Ruins of Gallego Flour Mills, Richmond, 1865  

"Photography and the American Civil War" runs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art" through September 2.  For more information on the exhibition, its catalog, and on visiting the museum, click on live link of title.

Yvonne Korshak

Comments very welcome.  Scroll down below photo captions, click on "comments," write in comment box and click on "post."  Emails are private and never appear with comments.

*Photo captions(from top): Unknown artist, Captain Charles A. and Sergeant John M. Hawkins, Company E, "Tom Cobb Infantry," Thirty-eighth Regiment, Georgia Volunteer Infantry, 1861-62.  Quarter-plate ambrotype with applied color, David Wynn Vaughan Collection.  Photo:  Jack Melton.  Unknown artist, Sojourner Truth," I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance," 1864.  Albumen silver print (carte de visite) from glass negative, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Alfred Stieglitz Society Gifts, 2013, Image:  Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY.  Unknown Artist, after an 1860 carte de visite by Mathew B. Brady, Presidential Campaign Medal with Portraits of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin, 1860.  Tintypes in stamped brass medallion, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, The Overbrook Foundation Gift, 2012.  Image: The Metropolitan Museumj of Art, NY.   Timothy O'Sullivan, Alexander Gardner, printer, Field Where General Reynolds Fell, Gettysburg, July 1863.   Reed Brockway Bontecou, Union Private John Parmenter, Company G, Sixty-seventh Pennsylvania Volunteers, June 21, 1865.  Albumen silver print from glass negative, cfarte de visite, Collecdtion Stanley B. Burns, M.D.  Image:  Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY.   Unknown Artist, Union Private, 11th New York Infantry(also known as the 1st Fire Zouaves), May-June 1861.  One-sixth plate ambrotype, Michael J. McAfree Collecdtion.  Image:  Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY.  Alexander Gardner, Ruins of Gallego Flour Mills, Richmond, 1865. Albumen silver prints from glass negatives, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1933.  Image: Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY.         

Eurydice’s Dream, directed and choreographed by Jessica Burr, text by Teddy Jefferson and Matt Opatrny, created by the ensemble, a blessed unrest production, presented by The Interart Theatre Development Series

Sonia Villani as Eurydice and Marco De Ornella as Orpheus.  Photo Alan Roche

This is a vibrant, imaginative and creative play, formed in part from the myths of Echo and Narcissus and Orpheus and Eurydice.  It’s drenched in dance and music, and beautifully performed by an exceptionally talented ensemble.

It’s a play all about liminality and carries the vision of a gaze into the unconscious -- a very bright and exuberant world.  Eurydice's Dream spectacularly maintains a tension between consistency and narrative flow -- narrative sense-making and the free form of inner life.  It’s tremendously impressive. 

While truly an ensemble piece, the touchstone is the character of Eurydice, bitten by a viper on the day of her marriage to the musician Orpheus, and carried off to the underworld where Orpheus succeeds -- with great difficulty as always! -- in finding her, only to lose her to the lord of the Underworld by yielding to temptation -- disobeying the injunction  not to look back as she follows him upward to the daylight.  One glance and she’s gone forever. 

Woven in is the story of Narcissus, loved by the nymph Echo but too in love with his own beauty to respond to her fully, seeking instead --impossibly, fatally -- to embrace his own lovely reflection in a stream.   Blended with the ancient myths are contemporary passionate embraces and equally elusive loves, fleeting glimpses of men loving men and women loving women, circling around the tantalizing and fragile affair of Amerika and a man native to the Central or South American country she’s visiting.

L-R Andrew Dahl (Orcus, lord of the Underworld), above Marco De Ornella (Orpheus), Darrel Stokes (Foreigner) under Jessika D Williams (Amerika), Tatanya Kot (Echo) kneeling before Jason Grifin (Narcissus)  Photo:  Alan Roche

The stage is gorgeously painted cosmic blue interpenetrated with stars:  gravity loses its hold to the dark trees painted sideways on the floor.  The whole field of vision is active, like the screen of ones own inner life where episodes spin into central focus but the margins are dynamic and exciting.  There are no dead spaces in Eurydice’s Dream -- wherever you look is alive, and worth considering.

Among the uniformly excellent performers, some are exceptionally individualized, and these provide a particularly arresting aspect for the whole production.  These intensely specific characters are one of the reasons that from beginning to end one never wants to stop looking -- even blinking at Eurydice’s Dream seems a nuisance.  Central to all, Sonia Villani as Eurydice is a fine dancer, a focused, passionate actress, and a comedian with a tragic seriousness, particularly stunning in her episode as the rubber faced Sound Mimic in a circus side show.  She conveys a seamless combination of vulnerability and backbone that makes her Eurydice unforgettable.  I’d love to see her play Gelsomina, the young woman in La Strada (and would make a point of seeing her in any role she takes on.)

With terrific dancing, acting and singing, Marco De Ornella brings unabridged male power to the role of Orpheus, combined with an inventive freshness.  Jason Griffin’s remarkable ectomorphic beauty convinces and surprises as Narcissus.  His physical battle with an intractable surface representing the so-near and yet impossibly far image in the stream is powerfully rendered and beautifully choreographed.   Jessika D Williams brings a striking physical vitality to the role of Amerika and exceptionally focused, subtle facial expressions.  

It’s to the choreographer's credit that much happens at once in Eurydice’s Dream but one can take it all in -- there are no conflicts about “where to look” as in a multi-ring circus, it’s all there for you as if it's all a part of you. 

I found the added story of the “Glass Eye” didn’t add anything, and here and there the text seemed to flatten out but, pretty much throughout, Eurydice’s Dream is tone perfect in its vision of impermanence and transition as fundamental features of love and life.  It's filled with transformations and yet holds on to its story line.  Ovid, the famous teller of the classical myths in his Metamorphoses -- transformations of form and being -- would love it.  

Eurydice's Dream plays on Mondays, Fridays, Saturdays and most Sundays through April 22 at the Interart Theatre on West 52nd Street in Manhattan.  For more information and tickets, click on live link of title;  also check blessed unrest's facebook page.  

Yvonne Korshak    

Comments very welcome.  Scroll down, click on "comments," write in comment box and click on "post."  Emails are private -- no emails ever appear with comments.   

The Tragedy of King Arthur by Arthur Phillips, directed by Jordan Reeves, The Guerilla Shakespeare Project

L-R Jordan Kaplan as Lawyer, Eric Emil Oleson as Father, Jacques Roy as Arthur, and Tom Schwans as Professor.  Photo:  Debby Goldman

 

Taking as its starting point that “Nobody really likes Shakespeare,” this play, adapted from Arthur Phillips’ book, The Tragedy of Arthur, is annoyingly arrogant, along with its failed humor and confused and banal “plot.”  As a Shakespeare sendup this might have worked as a ten-minute skit, but not as a three-hour play

Here’s the idea:  Shakespeare really wrote a play entitled The Tragedy of King Arthur but it was lost to posterity.  Now, an often jailed forger of petty items such as store coupons has bequeathed to his son, who is in fact the prolific author Arthur Phillips -- note that Arthur -- the original folio … or is it a forgery?

Which is it? that is the question.  An incredibly valuable folio of a lost play by Shakespeare? or a fake? 

In order to find out, the play is read through -- semi-produced in a helter-skelter deconstructed way -- by Arthur, his sister Dana, and various others.  But the answer is quite clear from Phillips’ first pseudo-Shakespearean line, heavy as lead.  Not for an instant could anyone think Shakespeare had anything to do with this play, yet the question remains “open” for three long acts.

Playwright George Bernard Shaw took on Shakespeare -- but to prove his own mettle, he wrote plays like Shaw, not Shakespeare.

One gets the impression, though, that Arthur Phillips thinks he’s doing a pretty good job of writing Shakespeare (whom he doesn’t think much of anyhow, which may make it easier), since the overstressed pentameter (meant to be funny?) is filled with slack metaphors and the play throws in a bunch of Shakespearean tropes: sword play, soulful soliloquies, ducal rebellions against the anointed king, etc.  Meanwhile, the character of our modern day Arthur, Phillips, Hamlet-like, works out his relationship with his dead father who appears on stage from time to time, no surprise there.

Evidently Phillips finds repetition at the heart of Shakespeare because the play is very repetitive:  there’s not one spoof of Shakespearean sword play but three or four.  A messenger bears bad tidings and is promptly killed, a humorous (?) take on messengers in Shakespeare and on diplomatic immunity but if anybody found it funny the first time, they certainly didn’t laugh at the repeats.  Anyhow, after the intermission, there were fewer people left in the audience to laugh. 

The set, a past-present deconstruction of an author’s study and castle parapet, is cute and -- advertisement for myself style -- features a prominent, illuminated blow-up of Phillips’ novel, The Egyptologist.  The actors, with one exception, are competent, including Jacques Roy as an energetic Arthur.  He made three (once is never enough here) very heavy, flat footed jumps from too high a perch that made me worry for his knees;  they didn’t illuminate the character or the action, though, but seem to have been done to wake up the audience.

The Tragedy of King Arthur plays at TBG Theatre on West 36th Street in Manhattan though April 7, 2013.  For information and tickets -- and a different view of the play -- click on live link of title.

Yvonne Korshak

Comments very welcome.  Scroll down, click on "comments," write in comment box and click on "post."  Emails are private -- no emails ever appear with comments.

Good News! Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC will be open 7 days a week starting July 1, 2013

 Good News! 

Metropolitan Museum of Art to Open 7 Days a Week
Starting July 1

Will Open Mondays throughout Year for First Time in 42 Years

As of July 1, 2013, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will open to the public 7 days a week. This new schedule will go into effect at both the Museum’s main building on Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street in Manhattan and at The Cloisters museum and gardens, its branch museum for medieval art and architecture in Fort Tryon Park in northern Manhattan.

Also as of July 1, the Museum’s opening time each morning will change to 10:00 a.m. (from 9:30 a.m.). Otherwise the hours at both locations will remain the same. The new daily schedule as of July 1 in the main building will therefore be:
Friday and Saturday 10:00 a.m.–9:00 p.m.
Sunday–Thursday 10:00 a.m.–5:30 p.m.

And the new schedule at The Cloisters museum and gardens will be:
March–October: Open 7 days, 10:00 a.m.–5:15 p.m.
November–February: Open 7 days, 10:00 a.m.–4:45 p.m.

Both locations will be closed January 1, Thanksgiving Day, and December 25, and the main building will also be closed on the first Monday in May.

The Metropolitan Museum has been closed on Mondays since 1971, with the exception in recent years of the Holiday Mondays program—in which the Museum has been open on a few holidays each year that fall on Mondays. The final Holiday Mondays to be observed before the new 7-day schedule goes into effect on July 1 will be March 25 and April 1 (during Spring Break), and May 27 (Memorial Day).

Full details on admission, group tours, and visitor amenities—including dining, shopping, and parking—are available at www.metmuseum.org/visit or 212-535-7710.  Also visit the museum's web site for current information and hours, since these changes will not take place until July.

About The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the world’s largest and finest museums, with collections of nearly two million works of art spanning more than 5,000 years of world culture, from prehistory to the present and from every part of the globe. The Metropolitan Museum’s main building, located at the edge of Central Park along Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, and The Cloisters museum and gardens, its branch museum for medieval art and architecture in northern Manhattan, welcomed 6.28 million visitors last year. For additional information about the Museum, please visit www.metmuseum.org.

 

 

 

 

 

     

The Mound Builders by Lanford Wilson, directed by Jo Bonney, Signature Theatre, The Pershing Square Signature Center

A group of archaeologists and others attached to them are holed up in and around what’s referred to as a modest, rustic cabin -- but the set presents us with a vast lodge -- engaged in excavating a series of mounds in Illinois left by pre-Columbian tribes.   Early in the play our sympathies fall with them, as high minded scholars seeking to advance knowledge about an early civilization, led by the august Professor, August Howe. But the play is clever in that the self-interested  local, a macho brute of a guy, Chad Jasker, who wants to make his fortune developing the land, gains on our sympathies, or at least our understanding, at the same time that we are learning more and more about how crude and self centered he is.    

That’s the lineup:  and the issues of The Mound Builders, first presented at Circle Repertory Theater in 1975, remain timely;  conflicts between those who move in the sophisticated, international world of scholarship and locals, archaeologists and land developers; by an easy extension those who want to dig things up in order to know more and those, like Native Americans protecting ancient burials for any number of reasons.  And all this comes with the inevitable meditation on the blind destructiveness of time, and how all our mounds eventually crumble.

We know what Chad Junker wants and we sense what lengths he’ll go to get it. 

In contrast to our clarity about Chad, a problem with the play, told in flashbacks, is that the archaeological activities of this group aren’t vivid or convincing.  The play never leaves the house, an odd choice for a story about field work.  Sometimes somebody goes out the door to unseen the site.  Mention is made of students living in tents.  But this doesn’t convey the intensity and focus of a dig, or the dawn to dusk activity of working archaeologists.   A scene where some artifacts of this ancient people make it to the house and are -- not counted or catalogued but -- more or less tossed around is something of a travesty. 

Also vitiating the conflict between archaeological and local interests is the presence in the house of several non-archaeologist family members.  The most vividly written character is the cynical, seen-it-all, ailing Delia K. Erickson, who has all the best lines but has nothing to do with the plot.  Her three initials presumably refer to the decay of … western civilization ... all civilizations … more on that time-mneditation stuff.

The upshot is that the play is somewhat engaging for a time but the implausibility and slack tone of the archaeological segment  -- from the characters and their motivations to the vagueness of the dig -- intrude more and more so that one's interest, like the great civilizations, unwinds.

The Mound Builders  plays at the Pershing Square Signature Center through April 14th, 2013.  For more information and tickets, click on live link of the title.

Yvonne Korshak

Comments are very welcome.  Scroll down, click on "comments," write in comment box and click on "post."  Emails are private and never appear with comments.

 

The Old Boy by A. R. Gurney, directed by Jonathan Silverstein, Keen Company, at the Clurman Theatre on Theatre Row

This is a middling play -- if you see it you’re not sorry but you don’t need to see it.   Gurney is very talented at engaging the viewer with recognizable character types involved in contemporary topics.  The Old Boy was first produced in 1991. 

Sam, a slick but decent politician running for Governor returns, in the 1990’s, to his New England prep school to dedicate a building to a man, now deceased, whom he once knew as a student, Perry.  He’d been Perry’s “old boy”, his assigned friend and mentor, back in the 1960’s, and the two had genuinely bonded.  Perry’s mother, Harriet, is there for the ceremony, donating the building in her son’s honor, along with Alison, Perry’s former wife.  Perry, Sam learns, has died in vague circumstances.

What could those circumstances be?  It doesn’t take long to see where Gurney’s going.  As the play moves between the here and now of the 1990’s to back when the boys were at school together in the '60’s, we quickly catch on, via flashbacks, that Perry was gay, though not “out,” not even to himself.  Back then Sam, the extroverted jock, and Perry, the introverted bookish opera lover, had developed a close “opposites attract” friendship, with an erotic undertone, obvious from Perry, but also from Sam, it’s suggested, a reminder of the ambiguities of sexuality.  They were such buddies that Sam, burdened with an attractive but low class girlfriend, Alison, had killed two birds with one stone, ridding himself of a nuisance in Alison and resolving his unease about Perry’s homosexuality, by arranging for Perry and Alison to marry, bringing about their constrained marriage in which, for a long time, Perry lived a lie.   

The suspense now, in the 1990’s, shifts to:  what will Sam say at the dedication speech in honor of his friend, with his friend’s mother on hand nervously listening?  Will he maintain the platitudes that will be useful for his election as Governor, as his gung ho aide urges him to do?  Or will he courageously transcend political considerations and speak the “truth” about the way individuals and society conspire to constrain disapproved passions and desires?

Up at the podium, Sam presents his speech to his audience -- us --  and Gurney is right in saying on his web site that the under-dramatized presentation of the speech is a weakness of the play.  That’s not the worst problem with the speech, though.  Sam’s speech assigns blame for Perry’s death in a way that doesn’t make sense.  The fact that this way of seeing blame springs from the kindness and well meaning heart of the playwright doesn’t paper over a real disconnect between the argument in the play and rationality.  It’s too much of a stretch, and evaporates the play’s plausibility. 

Some of the characters, particularly Sam as the sure-of himself-politician and Bud, his fast talking aide, are stereotypes.  Others are more fully drawn.  Chris Dwan gives an arresting performance as the adolescent Perry, gradually coming to know himself, sensitive, unsure but with a backbone.  Marsha Dietlein Bennet is effective in a fascinating role: she morphs from the low class girl who first went off with Sam because she wanted to know where all those boys on vacation came from to a widow of an upper class man struggling to free herself from her overbearing mother-in-law.

Tom Riis Farrell brings humor and touching emotion to the predictable role of the Minister, Dexter, who was short listed for Headmaster but didn’t get the job “because I wasn’t married.”   We understand, Dexter (actually, devoted as he is to the school, he doesn't have the style of a prep school Headmaster).  The actor among all, who’s so good she makes one absolutely forget that she’s a “character” or that we’re watching a play is Laura Esterman as Perry’s dominating -- and heartbroken -- mother. 

The Old Boy plays at the Clurman Theatre, Theatre Row on West 42nd Street in Manhattan through March 30th.  For more information and tickets, click on live link of title.

 Yvonne Korshak 

Comments very welcome.  Scroll down, click on "comments," write in comment box and click on "post."  Emails are private and never appear with comments.

Henry IV Part 1 by William Shakespeare, directed by Davis McCallum, The Pearl Theatre Company

If you’ve never seen Henry IV Part 1, the Pearl's production will bring you close to it and if you’ve seen it before you’ll love it all over again.

This last assumes you’ve loved it in the past which is probable because it’s one of Shakespeare’s best loved plays, for good reasons.  Among them, it's hilarious.  Falstaff is so vivid and original a character, so complex and real, that it’s hard to believe he's a creative invention;  and, in the character of Prince Hal, the play deals with issues of fundamental fascination and importance for all of us, growth to maturity.

The play moves between the broad canvas of politics and war--a Scottish rebellion against King Henry IV--to the intimate--father and son, husband and wife, and that unforgettable friendship that doesn’t quite fall into any one category between Hal and Falstaff.

What makes this so delightful a production of Henry IV Part I  is Dan Daily as Falstaff.  He’s superb—big bellied, of course, taller than anybody else around, with the vitality, wit joie de vivre and touch of sultry wickedness one wants in the character.  He's an epicurean, with the allure and paradoxes that idea contains.  It’s fascinating to see this large man--and I mean really large--completely light on his feet, leaping on a table, doing a jig.  One sees and feels Falstaff's thoughts--calculating or willful, assertive or accepting of a reversal--for a compelling cognitive instant before he speaks. 

The question of Prince Hal's maturity makes one pause, though.  What does it really mean in this particular play?  We meet Hal as a a wayward libertine under Falstaff's spell, but that changes when his royal father is faced with imminent war.  Then Hal buckles down, putting his easy pleasures aside to support his father's cause and become a fighter.  One could call this "taking on responsibility."  Or one can question human purposes, and the meaning of responsibility. 

Bradford Cover as King Henry IV conveys the tension in this powerful personality aswarm with conflicts:  his threatened yet adamant royal authority, and his disappointment with his pleasure loving son melded with underlying love.  Shawn Fagan captures the eruptive and wry personality of Hotspur, though the character could use more physical heft.  John Brummer is less original as the libertine and then chastened Prince Hal.  He isn't Daily's match, which limits the rapport between Hal and Falstaff.  As the Scottish rebel Douglas, Sean McNall gets the prize for the most authentic and charmning Scottish accent. 

Though not usually my favorites, the battle scenes in this production are a high point, staged with passionate and convincing one-on-one duels, metal on metal.  They've been  exhaustively rehearsed to the point of total actors’ ease, so the fights seem completely spontaneous. 

Above all, though, this Henry IV Part 1  is about Dan Daily’s Falstaff, which I think Shakespeare would have enjoyed.  I sure did.    

Henry IV Part 1  plays at the Pearl Theatre on West 42nd Street in Manhattan through March 17th.  For more information and tickets, click on live link of title.

Yvonne Korshak

Comments very welcome.  Scroll down, click on "comments," write in comment box and click on "post."  Emails are private and never appear with comments.

Donnybrook! The musical of the movie The Quiet Man, music and lyrics by Johnny Burke, book by Robert E, Mcenroe, directed by Charlotte Moore, based on a short story, The Quiet Man, by Maurice Walsh, The Irish Repertory Theatre

The world doesn’t need this musical.  Set in a fictional Irish village, Innisfree, in the 1920’s, it’s about the “cute Irish,” and their quaint ways including the great fun of settling conflicts with a brutal, free-for-all fight -- a “donnybrook.”

The central idea, from Maurice Walsh's 1933 Saturday Evening Post short story, is interesting -- an Irish-American boxer, having killed a man and determined never to fight again, returns to his Irish village where he's forced into a fight mandated by custom (the “donnybrook”) in order to uphold the honor of his village bride. 

Sean, arriving in town, immediately falls in love with the feisty Mary Kate who immediately falls in love with him.  But Sean angers her brother, Will, by topping his bid for some land, so Will tries to prevent the marriage and --when it does take place through some chicanery -- withholds Ellen’s dowry.  Sean doesn’t care about the money but -- Irish custom -- the dowry is bottom line, because it represents her honor.  When Sean refuses to fight Will for the withheld dowry, Mary Kate, with an implausible lack of interest in her beloved’s state of mind about fighting, resorts to sexual blackamil, refusing to consummate the marriage.  Through the machinations of a subplot things work out but not before there’s a -- yes! -- donnybrook, where Sean manages not to kill anybody including his wife's brother -- that would have been a problem -- but the outcome is never in doubt, and we’re not really worried about this or anything in this show, in which the stereotype characters don’t engage ones concern.

The cast doesn’t have much to work with in these trite characters, although there are flashes of dramatic tension in James Barbour ‘s performance as the American boxer, particularly when he’s singing, but the show seems too small for him.

The songs and music, some traditional and others written for the show, are largely predictable although a few, such as “But Beautiful,” have more character and are familiar -- the musical had a short run on Broadway in 1961.  The song “The Loveable Irish,” with its refrain “I hate the Irish,” is offensive;  Sean lists everything he finds wrong with the Irish until, at the end, he sings “but I’m Irish, too” as if that makes it OK to pour out so many negative stereotypes on a group of people, but it doesn’t.

Donnybrook! plays at the Irish Repertory Theatre in Manhattan's Chelsea district through March 31.  For more information and tickets, click on live link of title.  DONNYBROOK! extended through April 28th

Yvonne Korshak

Comments are very welcome\ ... scroll down, click on "comments," write in comment box and click on "post."  Emails are private, no emails ever appear with comments.

Isaac’s Eye by Lucas Hnath, directed by Linsay Firman, The Ensemble Studio Theatre and The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

Isaac’s Eye takes as starting points what it asserts are a few “truths,” (e.g., Newton stuck a needle into his eye as a scientific experiment, Newton was engaged once but never married) to construct a play about the young Isaac Newton.  The truths are arbitrarily selected and some are suppositions,  even though they’re chalked onto a blackboard that, we’re told, holds genuine truths, which is not playing fair with the audience!  While the first act has some point to it, the second trails off into unsupported, drawn out material that doesn’t add up to any insight or interest. 

The first act brings together two scientists with different points of view in a potentially meaningful conflict: Robert Hooke as a proponent of experiment, and Newton, depicted as believing he has an intuitive “God told me so I am certainly right” genius.

After several letters from Newton seeking admission to the Royal Society of London, Hooke, the Society’s Curator of Experiments, comes from London to visit Newton in his rural hamlet intending to shut down the youthful competitor or at least delay him a few decades.  Driven by genuine scientific curiosity, however, Hooke is drawn into wanting verification of an experiment in which Newton plunges a needle into his eye, causing a prismatic breakdown of light into color, thus proving that light is formed of particles, not waves.  As I read Newton’s notes, which you can find at this link,  what he describes he saw in the needle-in-the-eye experiment differs from what is recounted in the play, and doesn't demonstrate that light is particles, but I’m not a scientist so perhaps I’ve missed something.

At any rate, in Newton’e Eye, Hooke’s urges that Newton repeat the experiment using an objective subject who has no vested interest in the outcome.  This leads to the revelation that Newton lied about ever having done the experiment at all, on himself or anybody else -- he just “knows” he's right about what would happen if one did it because his father died before he was born and so he’s closer to God.  This gross violation of the empiricism Hooke represents creates some interesting conflict in Act I, which would be meaningful except that according to his written notes, Newton did the experiment and there’s no reason to believe he lied to Hooke.  Historical drama has broad license but arbitrary playing with the audience under the guise of telling a truth is ... well frankly it’s a turn-off.

In Act II, Hooke drinks too much, makes bathetic noise, all but seduces Newton’s girl friend Catherine, and is uncovered as a child molester -- anything to keep things going.   We move from over-stretched historical license to fantasy when Newton, finally trying the experiment on himself -- and abandoned by Hooke, Catherine, and everyone else because of his nasty, self-involved temperament -- spends a month or so unable to move out of a chair, with the needle in his eye.

The actors wear modern casual dress and speak in contemporary language which starts things off with an appealing immediacy.  In Act I, Haskell King provies a persuasive portrait of Newton’s self-involved and ambitious personality.  Kristen Bush brings warmth and dignity to the role of Catherine, the woman friend he never can quite bring himself to propose to although by Act II, her script driven deviousness and emotional turnabouts have broken through this character’s plausibility. 

Michael Louis Serafin-Wells brings charismatic vitality and humor to the serious minded but pleasure loving Hooke.  Jeff Biehl is engaging as actor/narrator, and also a man dying of the plague, desperate enough to agree to let Newton stick a needle in his eye in one of the play’s more gruesome scenes.  Plague at the time was known to be highly contagious (Newton, like many, fled to the country to escape it), yet neither of these two smart men appears concerned about hands on experimental contact with pustule-covered man dying of the disease:  Newton sticks the needle into the dying man’s eye, Hooke holds him down, and together they haul out the corpse and throw it in the river.

At times in Act I, I thought Newton’s Eye was heading for the level of the the Ensemble Studio Theatre and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s brilliant production of Photograph 51, about Rosalind Franklin and her role in the discovery of the DNA double helix, also directed by Linsay Firman, but no such luck.

Isaac's Eye plays at the Ensemble Studio Theatre in Manhattan's Clinton district, midtown west side, through February 24.  For more information and tickets, click on live link of title.

                                                                                   Yvonne Korshak

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The Vandal by Hamish Linklater, directed by Jim Simpson, The Flea Theater -- returning March 22-31, another chance to see it!

Bleak bleak bleak -- a bold way to start a play, but it works wonderfully.  Strangers, a woman and a boy, on a cold, road at night, next to a cemetery, waiting for a bus, but the vivid characters bring it to warm, pulsating life -- which is exactly the point. 

              Noah Robbins as the boy and Deirdre O'Connell as the Woman. Photo Joan Marcus

Through snow dusted tombstones, a path runs in diminishing perspective to the distance:  read infinity.  The bus is late.  The woman sinks into herself, her coat hanging crooked, too thin for this cold night.  Things couldn't be worse.  She has some ominous connection with the nearby hospital.  She’s unresponsive to the fast-talking teen-ager who works to engage her with everything from philosophical riffs to brash seduction.

When, grudgingly, she takes his $20 bill to buy him (he’s under age) beer and Doritos we meet the third person in the play, the convenience store owner who turns out to be the boy’s father though, oddly, he hasn’t seen his son in a long time.

There are two exceptionally fine scenes in this show.  One, is the boy's monologue born from musing on the orange Dorito powder that sticks to one’s fingers and that takes off, zooming like a comet from far to near and back again, from microcosm to macrocosm, inside to outside, being and nothingness -- it's a virtuoso piece in writing and delivery, so fast and canny I’d like to hear it again.

The other is the scene between the man and the woman in the convenience store, replete with the familiar and the uncanny, a merchant’s know-how in the face of stolen credit cards and the human connections that can override things done by the rules.

We’re in good hands with this convenience store owner.  One enjoys the                Deirdre O'Connell as the Woman and Zach Grenier as the Man. Photo Joan Marcus 
strong capability and masculinity, combined with burred-over vulnerability Zach Grenier brings to the role, though Grenier’s a touch too cosmopolitanism for this rural corner of upstate New York.  Deirdre O’Connell is touching as the woman who’s been through so much she’s almost -- but not completely -- drained.  The unhesitating speed with which Noah Robbins pours out the boy’s cosmic fast talk makes you feel he knows everything, which, through his strange circumstance, he almost does.     

The outcome of this short play, involving the man and the woman, is pat and, when one comes right down to it, although the boy is the most interesting and surprising character, what happens doesn’t depend on him.  I felt that this loose cannon of a character was compensating for the fact that what actually happens in the play is not unusual or striking.  Yet, there's a governing intelligence throughout that, though the play has some of the thinness of a practice one-acter, gives it a serious resonance.  The intelligence of the language, the overall dramatic aura, those wonderful scenes, and the fine acting are compelling.  The evocative set by David M. Barber fulfills the contrasts of realism and fantasy, intimate and cosmic, around which the play winds. 

What will this young playwright do next?  Having seen The Vandal  -- and having loved Linklater’s spectacular performance in David Ives’ School for Lies at Classic Repertory Theatre -- I’ll be on the lookout for his next play, whether he writes it or acts in it!   

The Vandal plays at The Flea Theater in Manhattan's Tribeca through March 3, 2013.  ***  For more information and tickets, click on live link of title.  ***NOTE:  The Vandal  returns to the Flea Theater March 22 - 31.

Yvonne Korshak

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Picnic by William Inge, directed by Sam Gold, Roundabout Theatre Company

Picnic is a huge delicious ice cream of a fantasy you don’t even have to feel guilty about giving in to it because it comes in the guise of hard bitten realism.  I loved it. 

The action takes place in a small town in the midwest in and around the houses of Flo Owens and Helen Potts and the yard between them.  The set, always on view, is so familiar and warmly lit, from the worn white wood frame houses with enticing glimpses through the windows to the appealingly familiar junk around, that one can hardly wait for the play to begin.  The play doesn’t disappoint.    

Into this tight little corner of Kansas, where several women of of a range of ages happen to be living, comes a stunningly handsome, aggressively virile young man, Hal, a drifter taken in by Mrs. Potts who, according to the more prim Flo, has offered hospitality in exchange for odd jobs to too many wandering guys before.  Carrying heavy bushels of wood with his shirt off, Hal electrifies the woman of all ages -- it’s amusing, and it has truth.  

We know almost immediately that we have to worry about whether Hal, with his run-ins with the law, edgy, self-defeating ways and remarkable abs will or won’t end up with Madge, Flo’s lovely eighteen-year old daughter, his equal in gorgeousness and like him without a college diploma in her future (she’s a salesgirl at the dime store). 

Sure we worry -- Madge, as beautiful as a girl can be (she was Miss Neewollah, Halloween spelled backward younger sister Millie explains) is courted by Alan, the local rich young man who’s in college, and has an affluent and loved future to offer her.  It would be terrible if Hal’s sexual magnetism caused Madge to throw aaside her secure future, even if Alan does seem a little wimpy.  Terrible.  Tch tch.  Only it’s what we ardently hope for throughout the play.   

There’s going to be a Labor Day picnic that night and everybody’s excitement is focused on that getting away from the usual -- like the picnic on the island in Porgy and Bess  where Crown pulls Bess into his sexual orbit, away from Porgy.  We fear that trouble will erupt at this picnic, for which Mrs. Potts has baked the pies (the only way an old woman can get noticed is through her pies, she laments, with some satisfaction).  And in fact “trouble” does erupt -- but not at the picnic.  Madge and Hal never make it there.  They discover their love, both passionate and profound.  And in that, they start on a path to discovering their own womanly and manly selves.  Picnic’s not just about sex, after all.  They change, they go deeper, which is what makes this so satisfying a play. 

Not that all obstacles are past them, however.  Not by a long shot.  Hal -- darn it, Hal! Stay out of trouble! one thinks -- has another run-in with the law and has to flee across the river (we reassure ourselves remembering he was West Coast diving champion).  But in this tight corner of mothers who have exerted too much inhibiting pressure on their daughters, maturity and independence are at the heart of the play.    

Beautiful Madge, as played by Maggie Grace, has a frail delicacy which makes the toughness she finds within all the more powerful:  she’s seems to need protection, until she discovers the strength to risk all, through the transformative power of love.  Sebastian Stan brings out Hal’s blend of pride, sexual magnetism, and sense of ill-fated outsider.

Elizabeth Marvel is humorous and all-out emotional as the school teacher Rosemary desperate for marriage with the amiable but stuck-in-his ways Howard, played by Reed Birney (they don’t make it to the picnic either).  Ellen Burstyn is amusing as Mrs. Helen Potts (she keeps that remnant of a brief, passionate marriage -- Mrs. -- in defiance of her mother).   Millie, played by Madeleine Martin, is the more readily independent of the Owens’ daughters, though I wish that the designers of this show hadn’t used “darker” and “shorter” to signify “less beautiful.”    

The bringing into the open of all of the women’s strong sexuality, with Hal the catalyst for revelation, must have been electrifying in the conservative 1950’s when this play was first produced:  it remains fresh.

Although large cultural issues of class conflicts, pressures to conform and puritanical narrow mindedness are referred to in Picnic as if they matter, they don’t seem to cast a genuine menace on the little enclave between Mrs. Potts’ and Mrs. Owens’ houses.  Picnic never has you too worried.  Conflicts arise from characters and, deep down, we know that the characters are going to work it out and that the play will turn out the way we hope.

Picnic tells a story of ordinary people made extraordinarily engaging through the playwright’s crafting of their characters and understanding of their hopes, fears, plans and passions.  It's funny, moving, inspiring, and wrapped in a package of sensual allure.     

Picnic plays at Roundabout’s American Airlines Theatre on 42^nd Street West of Broadway through February 24^th, 2013.  For more information and tickets, click on live link of title.

Yvonne Korshak

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Clive by Jonathan Marc Sherman, based on Bertolt Brecht's Baal, directed by Ethan Hawke, The New Group

What a disappointment!  I went to Clive because of two actors, Ethan Hawke, who was outstanding recently in Chekhov's Ivanov at Classic Stage, and Vincent D’Onofrio whose superb acting I watch with fascination on “Law and Order CI” and was excited at the chance to see him on stage.  The upshot:  Hawke gives a stellar, energetic, balletic performance in a play that goes nowhere and has no reason for being, and D’Onofrio’s great gifts are beside the point in the role he plays.     

Clive is a talented, successful but self-defeating singer-musician-songwriter whom women flock to and whom he treats badly, one after the other after the other.  That’s pretty much the play.  The four women, all sexually used and rejected in various brutal ways, are hard to tell apart except for one, Clive’s friend’s girl, who stands out because she starts off as virginal and wearing little girl white knee socks  -- virginal for the friend, that is, but not for Clive, who attracts her with his irresistible sexual pull and drives her to death. 

Eventually Clive, having killed another friend, the bearishly good natured Doc, played by D'Onofrio, flees to Canada where he dies dissolutely and decidedly unloved.  This is not a development, because Clive is a dissolute narcissist from start to finish -- he doesn’t change.  That’s the main reason why we don’t need this play.  Hawke is magnetic but he needs a decent vehicle.

Still, it's amazing that he can give so physically and emotionally all out a performance twice on Saturdays!   

D’Onofrio’s greatness lies in his subtlety that lets you know what's going on inside his head -- there are small changes in his face and body language that signal large outward and inward events.  Even when he lets loose emotionally, he illuminates the character, now and through his history.  Here, as Doc, he plays a big guy who mainly squeezes out animal growls and snarls like someone trying not so playfully to scare a child -- not much nuance there.   (Why, Mr. D’Onofrio, would you ever take this part?) 

The set, by Derek McLane, is stunning -- a beautiful abstraction made of the differently textured bottoms of whiskey bottles and beer cans, with an allover heavenly tone of silvery blue.  Open to view when one enters, it makes one all but certain there's a wonderful evening of theater ahead.  There isn't.  Clive's a parcel of wasted talent. 

A reader wrote in with the link for David Bowie's performance in Brecht's BAAL -- well worth a visit:   https://www.google.com/search?q=david+bowie+baal+youtube&aq=0&oq=david+bowie+baal+y&aqs=chrome.1.57j0.7017&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

Clive plays at Theatre Row, The Acorn Theatre, on West 42nd Street in Manhattan through March 9.  For more information and tickets, click on live link of title.

Yvonne Korshak

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Working A Musical, from the book by Studs Terkel, adapted by Stephen Schwartz and Nina Faso, with contributions by Gordo Greenberg, Prospect Theater Company at 59E59 Theaters

… singing about work …

People talked about working in Studs Terkel’s oral history book of 1974, Working:  People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do -- in Working, the musical, they sing about it.

It’s a great idea -- as composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz -- of Godspell and Wicked --  thought when he first brought Working to the stage not long after the publication of Terkel’s book.  Revised and performed through the years, in its current version it’s an engaging and at times moving series of fine musical numbers (though I wish there were no rhymes, see below), beautifully performed by a cast of six who, all in all, take the parts of twenty-six characters and sing in the ensemble.

With the words taking the lead, as they should here, and with some excellent music by leading professional composers, we catch the poetry, the accuracy and the deep feelings behind what people said to Terkel:  a fireman (L), a felt dyer in a luggage factory (what a hard, messy, grinding job that is) , an interstate trucker, a cleaning lady, a housewife and others -- now singing what they like and don’t like, and what meanings they find and don’t find -- in their workaday work.  All except for Joe, retired, who has that to tell us about.  The performers segue in and out of their sung vignettes on the lower part of the handsomely designed stage as a fine foursome of musicians play behind a scrim above.  

Work has ground down some of the workers:  through Marie-France Arcilla’s singing of the assembly line dyer of felt pads, I felt empathy with her, caught in a messy, exhausting trap.  Some workers are weary but Maggie Holmes (R), singing the cleaning lady, let me share her hope that there will be a better life for her daughter -- to be addressed by her last name (I wondered how that daughter’s doing, 38 years later).  Jay Armstrong Johnson as the mason conveys an inspiring pride:  stone lasts, and leaves you “Something To Point To,” the title of the last -- uplifting -- song in the show.

On the other hand, Joe Cassidy, as the publicists who made more money than most, conveys the emptiness of not having anything to point to after years of work (maybe; it’s ambiguous).  Nehal Joshi (below L) gives an hilarious edge to the ex-newsroom assistant who makes plain to the audience what he himself can’t see, that is, why he can’t keep a job: in all his parts he touches the heart with his blend of sadness and wry humor.   Saving the best for last (my best but my friends had other favorites):  the performance of Donna Lynne Champlin (R) as the gutsy waitress proclaiming of her job, “It’s an Art;"  it's memorable -- a first rate musical theater moment.  (I looked after seeing the show and sure enough, that was one of the few songs written by Stephen Schwartz himself.)

Two things troubled me about this production, the microphones, and the rhymes. 

These six performers are all fine singers and actors:  why oh why were they miked???  There’s no need for it -- as professionals, they know how to make themselves heard.  (And the show is in a rather small theater.)  The microphones the performers wear diminish the sense of immediacy that draws one to “live theater:”    

I found that the rhymes in the songs, though often clever, undercut the authenticity that Working depends on.  The strength of the show lies in our awareness that we’re hearing the very words spoken by real people from different walks of life -- and real people don’t (at least not very often!) talk in rhymes.  Without that sense of the genuine, this already loosely jointed musical thins out toward a series of show songs.

Though it doesn’t quite jell as the unified musical the creators intend, Working is highly entertaining and satisfying, like an exceptionally varied and unusually thought provoking evening of cabaret. 

Working  plays in midtown Manhattan at 59E50 theaters through December 30, 2012.  For information and tickets, click on live link of title.                                                                                           Yvonne Korshak

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Restoration Comedy by Amy Freed, directed by Ed Sylvanus Iskander, featuring The Bats, The Flea Theater

Watch  out for that that telescope! ...  Allison Buck as Amanda, Seth Moore as Worthy. Photo Aaron Zebrock
                    ...elixir of joy …

Winter doldrums? … Let Restoration Comedy completely restore you!

Magic unfolds in the relatively small performing space of the Flea Theater flanked by a few rows of audience seats.  That central space comes alive with color, wit, music, dance, energy.  In fact the energy spills from the stage throughout the theater -- at the entrance actors costumed in the flounce and style of the 17^th Century greet you with drinks and mill everywhere to talk with you, get to know you in the way of director Iskander’s immersive theater -- seen last season in the Flea’s masterful production ofThese Seven Sicknesses.   

This ebullient cast, drawn from The Flea’s resident company of young actors, will even tell you -- if you ask -- that "restoration comedy" refers to the plays produced in England in the late 17^th Century, notably rakish in reaction to banning of theaters and anything that smacked of abundant pleasure under the Puritans.  True to its tradition, Restoration Comedy is filled with alliances, dalliances, gender bending, word play inuendo, and a dose of plain old polymorphous sexuality. 

Couples entwine, bottoms are bared (this might not be one for the children), the play lets loose.  Snooping through a telescope on her husband making love to another woman, Amanda wonders if this current passion of his is "double jointed.”  But for all its advocacy of anything goes, this is not in your face aggressive like Hair  -- there’s a delicacy to it, just as there is to the extraordinarily lovely colors that fill the stage, the creative choreography, and the marvelous music that’s everywhere.   It’s real subject -- joy of life . 

In keeping with a play that questions whether everyone should be held to marital fidelity or if it's too much a one-fits-all straightjacket, the plot's starting point is the marriage of a pure and virtuous woman, Amanda, and John Loveless, a libertine seeker of sexual variety.  Joined in holy matrimony -- but can they possibly be right for one another?  The play seeks to find out via a positive maze of ins and outs and wildly funny characters and situations.  To help save his friend’s marriage (and putting aside, of course, the fact that he's madly in love with her), Loveless's best friend, Worthy, sets about teaching Amanda the art of sensual variety:  she turns out to be an enthused pupil!

                James Fouhey as Loveless and Stephen Stout as Foppington.  Photo Aaron Zebrock 
So much happens in the play -- and in the intermission which is fairly wild with singing by talented cast members, dancing, and drinks and hors d’oeuvres for all -- that the play needs strong and individualized performances from the main characters to hold the narrative line.  James Fouhey dominates wonderfully as Loveless -- wry, amused, exotic, bemused, leaping across the stage with his long body.  Allison Buck is charming and amusing as Amanda in both her personae -- holding firm and giving in as the apt pupil of the amorous Worthy, played with a kind of sophisticated understatement by Seth Moore.  Stephen Stout is a real show stopper as the outrageous alluring sensualist, Foppington.  His accent, sounding the way the old typography looks, is worth seeing the play for in and of itself.  Thank you, Stephen Stout, for so many deep laughs!  But everyone is no less than perfect in their many parts. 

In fact everybody who has had anything to do with this play does what he or she does superbly.  There's an entire troupe of first rate dancers, with fresh and imaginative choreography by Will Taylor -- not the kind of group shuffling around the stage that sometimes goes by the name of “choreography.”  In designing the costumes, Loren Shaw found a way to make them both amusing and beautiful:  I understand they’re all hand sewn, one more gauge of the sheer quality that's sewn into every inch of this production.  I’d like to mention everybody but this is one ambitious project:  I count a cast of 40 (the NY Times critic was impressed recently because Golden Boy on Broadway has a cast of 20).  Hah!  Eat your heart out Broadway:  Off- and Off-off Broadway are where it’s at!

There’s an infectious idealism at the Flea -- as if everybody is feeling “isn’t it wonderful what we’re doing!”  And it is.  Why anybody who wants to go to the theater would go to anything but Restoration Comedy is beyond me -- unless, of course, you don't feel like laughing.

Restoration Comedy  plays at The Flea Theater on White Street in NYC's Tribeca through December 30, 2012.  For information and tickets, click on live link of title.

                                                                                            Yvonne Korshak

Comments very welcome.  Scroll down below the photo, click on "comments," write in comment box and click on "post."  Emails are private and don't appear with comments.                                                Ensemble.  Photo Aaron Zebrock

 

Golden Boy by Clifford Odets, directed by Bartlett Sher, Lincoln Center Theater at the Belasco Theatre

After great success with his plays Waiting for Left and Awake and Sing!  in 1935 -- and a stint of movie writing in Hollywood -- Odets returned to Broadway with Golden Boy in 1937.   Being familiar with the first two plays, I looked forward to a chance to get to know Golden Boy.   I wanted to like it.   I even expected to be excited by it.

Here’s my view:  Golden Boy is a pretty good play, and could be powerful with great actors, particularly a resonant actor in the part of Joe Bonaparte, the young boxer.   In this production, the pretty good play has pretty good actors and a good attempt to bring the world of boxing on stage -- but none good enough to overcome the thinness of the characterizations.  It tells a dramatic story but with stereotypes, and the fundamental premise, that Bonaparte has potential as a great violinist is never made convincing so -- much to my surprise -- I found it somewhat tiresome.  (A review of an earlier production says Odets himself thought the situation implausible, though the reviewer doesn’t mention the source.)

Joe Bonaparte is a young kid with two talents -- for the violin and for boxing (welterweight division).  Caught in this conflict between art and filthy lucre -- reflecting a similar conflict in Odets’ life that took him temporarily from Broadway (“art”) to Hollywood (“filthy lucre”) -- Joe gives in to the lure of fame and money. 

Bonaparte turns a deaf ear to the tactful, loving attempts of his father, a music loving Italian, to keep him on the straight and narrow high level career path as a violinist, while the boxing lure is sweetened all the more when Joe falls in love with Lorna, the girlfriend of his good guy manager, Tom.  Sure enough, in his quick rise to near the top in the boxing world, he breaks his hands, ruining them for the violin in a point of no return which was, however, inevitable from the start.  He’s so good at anything he does -- violin, boxing -- he becomes a contender fast, at which point the mob, in the person of sharp dressing Eddie Fuseli, enters to buy a piece of him with an offer that can’t be refused.

The setting and characters are gritty -- boxers, trainers, gangsters, cops, as the cast list describes the extras.  One of the cleverest and most interesting aspects of the play is the way Odets has the brutal boxing matches occur offstage, with their bloody outcomes conveyed to the audience through what happens in the dressing room, giving us an intimate view of the vast gladiators’ combat taking place out there.  The production tries to be gritty:  scenes set in club gyms include well choreographed sparring boxers.  But the arrangement of the mechanical rolling in and out of set changes is distracting and out of tone with the play.

Seth Numrich, who plays Joe Bonaparte, is a good actor and summons up a lot of passion -- and even develops a tougher “New York accent” -- as the physical and psychological conflicts intensify, but he’s just too refined and delicate for the part.  I understand William Holden played Bonaparte in the 1939 film:  this I want to see.  Meanwhile, I thought what the young Brando would have done with it.  At one point a punch drunk boxer nags his manager to arrange a match with Bonaparte and the manager tells his boxer he'll “never make [Bonaparte's] weight,” but the punch-drunk guy looks a lot thicker and stronger than Numrich, and a lot more at home in the world of in-and-off-the-ropes.

Danny Mastrogiorgio has a chance to show some appealing subtlety in the play’s relatively complex role of Bonaparte’s self-interested but not ruthless manager.  Yvonne Strahovski does as well as one can with a stereotyped character, the not-so-dumb blond boxing manager’s girl friend amd she looks great in those wonderful '30's clothes, narrow and with shoulder pads.

Anthony Crivello as the mobster Eddie is Tough, Premptive, Scary, Snappily Dressed and un-nuanced (again I found myself wishing for Brando, now in his Godfather guise).   Joe’s father, Tony Shalhoub, is just too angelically good, as is Joe’s union organizer brother, Frank, played by Lucas Caleb Rooney, though Frank’s head wound, won for a cause of helping his fellow men is an interesting foil to Joe’s bloody wounds won beating up another guy in the boxing ring.  Joe’s father’s spiritual Jewish soul mate, Mr. Carp, played by Jonathan Hadary, is so superficial in his “deep” mutterings and name dropping of philosophers that he makes you smile.  Carp's an extraneous character -- he makes his weak stab at giving the play “universality” and disappears.      

The play gives a look at the underside of the boxing world and its extremes of brutality, and treatment of the boxers as “meat” -- there are bloody moments that make you catch your breath.  But we never really understand why Bonaparte is as he is, what makes him run -- it can’t be just because he’s a little cross eyed, can it?   Especially since we never see that at work or believe it.  I'd say the trait of “cross eyed” was tossed in to help individualize Odets’ unclear characterization of his main character.

I can imagine that actors who draw on deep inward resonances -- like the method actors for whom it was written, and who played in the original production -- would help to overcome inconsistencies and superficialities.  This would allow the play’s best qualities to emerge.  The story is somewhat implausible but -- one can suspend disbelief.  The glimpse of a tough milieu not well known to many of us is fascinating.  And the rush to the heights and descent to the depths -- recalling The Great Gatsby  -- holds great drama.  This production is paced so briskly and brightly that the actors don't have the chance to give their fullest, and the play's genuine strengths are not fulfilled.  Still, in a Broadway season sparse on serious plays, this may do well, and I sort of hope it does.  With a play so well meaning, it's hard not to be in its corner.

Golden Boy  plays at the Belasco Theatre (a gorgeous theatre worth seeing in its own right) on West 44th Street in NYC.  For more information and tickets, click on live link of title.

Yvonne Korshak

Comments are very welcome.  Scroll down, click on "comments," write in comment box and click on "post."  Emails are private and never appear with comments. 

***WIN TWO FREE TICKETS TO Clifford Odets' Golden Boy on Broadway HERE! ***

Pinterest contest for GOLDEN BOY.

the winner receives two tickets to the show and dinner for two at Saju Bistro

To enter, here's the link:

 

 http://pinterest.com/lctheater/golden-boy-contest/.  

The contest runs through December 9.  CLIFFORD ODETS' GOLDEN BOY! 

 

AT LINCOLN CENTER THEATER AT THE BELASCO THEATER ON BROADWAY    (these are live links for more information)

Matisse: In Search of True Painting, Metropolitan Museum of Art, December 4 2012 – March 17, 2013

… translations …

 

 Le Luxe I, 1907 *  (*full captioins below)                       Le Luxe II, 1907-8

Although this large exhibit covers most of Matisse's painting career, it has a specific focus: to bring together examples of the many pairs, trios and series of copies and reinterpretations of notably similar subject matter and composition, such as Le Luxe I  and Le Luxe II, above.  Usually (when the order of their creation is known) Matisse’s versions move from greater realism and detail to abstraction.

In this he’s like van Gogh who called these kinds of versions of his own work “translations,” and I think that’s a profound term;  it sees “realism” and “abstraction” as different artistic languages connected by a bridge.   Since a key theme of the modern movement was a development toward greater and greater abstraction, it's not surprising that Matisse’s versions show his fascination with exactly that:  the relationship between “realism” and “abstraction”. 

     

 Young Sailor I, 1906                                     Young Sailor II, 1906

Young Sailor I  is a good example.  It was painted from life, in a small town in southwestern France, with a teenager as a model.  In striking contrast, Young Sailor II  was painted not from life but from the earlier painting --Young Sailor I :  it's a "translation".   In creating Young Sailor II, Matisse also was thinking about van Gogh’s L’Arlesienne, which he loved and had tried unsuccessfully to buy for himself some time earlier.  One sees in Matisse’s Young Sailor II  an overall pink background like in one of van Gogh's version of L’Arlesienne , and also van Gogh-like tense lines, “simplifications” and “deformations”, as artists called the new abstractions.

Here comes a value judgment: van Gogh’s painting of L'Arlesienne  -- a photo of it is on hand in the exhibit -- has much more psychological and emotional depth than Matisse’s -- it’s a portrait.  Matisse's sitter is more incidental to the painting.

 

Still Life with Purro I, 1904                         Still Life with Purro II, 1904-5

The exhibition is arranged chronologically so that, although that's not its main purpose, one can follow major periods, influences and the locales in which he worked through most of Matisse’s career.  In Still Life with Purro I, for instance, we seem him absorbing ideas from Cezanne, such as modeling form through color, and multiple points of view, while in Still Life with Purro II we see him drawing more from the pointillist application of color of Paul Signac. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

     L. Notre-Dame, ca. 1900

     R.  Notre-Dame, 1914

In the four paintings of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris (two shown here) from similar views that span the years from 1900 to 1914, we see the artist conjugating the “same” subject from representation to abstraction.   How different from Monet, who also paint series of cathedrals but for a different reason -- to capture differing effects of light.

Matisse’s self-aware interest in the development and process of his own art led him to commission photographic records of the development of several paintings.  The exhibit includes a large series of photographs -- a real treasure -- one illustrated here, chronicling the development of the painting that finally emerges as The Large Blue Dress; an added fillip is the inclusion of the actual skirt of the dress sewn and worn by the model.

 L. The Large Blue Dress, 1937  R.  Photo of The Large Blue Dress in process 

 

 

Matisse is a lavish, sensuous artist, his true subject above all is Joie de Vivre, the title of one of his paintings (not on exhibit here).  On the deepest level, his claim to fame, in my view, rests with his determination to paint something so elusive as "joy of life" -- almost as elusive as, say, the light that Monet yearned to capture on canvas -- talk about an impossible task!  Or the psychic bridge of inner emotional experience connecting human beings that van Gogh strained to construct.  By definition, mine anyhow, the great artists try to do what can't be done and then -- as far as is humanly possible -- do it!  

Not all of his many series are included, of course, but the gathering of so many pertinent examples has been done with fine curatorial intelligence and is highly illuminating.  As others have noted, in Matisse joie de vivre can be tamed to merely decorative.  But many of the paintings are gorgeous.  And to see paintings that were certainly linked in the artist's mind brought together, physically set next to each other, is truly a unique opportunity.  It's hard to imagine it will ever happen again.  

And making those comparisons for yourself as you go along ... the game of "Look how he changed it!" is sheer fun. 

For more information, click on link to Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Yvonne Korshak

Comments very welcome:  scroll down, click on "comments," write in comment box and click on "post."  Emails are private and never appear with comments.

 

* Le Luxe I, 1907, oil on canvas, 82 11/16x54 5/16 in (210x138 cm(m Centre Pompidou, Musee National d'Art Moderne, Paris, Purchase, 1945; Le Luxe II, 1907-8, distemper on canvas, 82 1/2x54 3/4 in (209.5x138 cm), Statens Museum fur Kunst, Copenhagen, J. Rump Collection; Young Sailor I, 1906, oil on canvas, 39 1/4x32 in (99.7x81.3 cm), Collection of Sheldon H. Solow;  Young Sailor II, 1906, oil on canvas, 39 7/8x32 5/8 in (101.3x82.9 cm), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection (1999.363.41);  Still Life with Purro I, 1904, oil on canvas, 23 1/4x28 1/2 in (59x72.4 cm), Private collection; Still Life with Purro II, 1904-5, oil on canvas, 11x14 in (27.9x35.6 cm), Private collection; Notre-Dame, ca. 1900, oil on canvas, 18 1/8x14 3/4 in (50x65 cm), Tate: Purchased 1949; Notre-Dame, 1914, oil on canvas. 58x37 1/8 in (147.3x94.3 cm), The Museum of Modern Art, NY, acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest and the Henry Ittleson, A. Conger Goodyear, Mr. and Mrs. Robert Sinclair Funds, and Anna Erickson Levene Bequests agiven in memory of her husband, Dr. Phoebus Aaron Theodor Levene, 1975;  The Large Blue Dress, 1937, oil on canvas, 36 1/2x29 in (92.7x73.7 cm), Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. John Wintersteen, 1956    

 

George Bellows, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, November 15, 2012 – February 18, 2013

Stag at Sharkey’s, 1909, oil on canvas, 36 1/4x48 1/4 in (92x122.6 cm), The Cleveland Museum of Art, Hinman B. Hurlbut Collections, c. The Cleveland Museum of Art

As I began to walk through the George Bellows exhibition, I felt this is the greatest American painter ever!  That’s how powerful the early paintings are.  In front of those large and powerful canvases such as Stag at Sharkeys, it took awhile to even start thinking of his powerful competition among American painters … including Thomas Eakins who had a great influence on him.  In Forty-Two Kids, he paints slum kids swimming and sunning in and around the East River, depicted with all their skinny, adolescent awkwardness, but seen with a kind of Rembrandesque sense of beauty and dignity in the un-ideal. 

Forty-Two Kids, oil on canvas, 42x60 1/4 in (106x153 cm) , Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, Museum Purchase, William A. Clark Fund.  Photo Mark Gulezian

Bellows came to NYC from Columbus, Ohio, and fast became associated the painter and teacher Robert Henri and, first “The Eight” and then the Ashcan School of the early 20^th Century -- young American realists who believed in painting contemporary American life, especially urban life, ash cans and all.   He was and is the best.   Using a free brushstroke, derived from the impressionists, he depicts city scenes, parks, slums, waterways, and the inhabitants.

His heavy impasto, often to the point of painting in relief, and the passion he brings to each stroke of the brush reminds one of van Gogh, though he doesn’t share van Gogh’s focus on complementary colors, and uses color naturalistically and, especially in his portraits, often with a Rembrandt-like depth of tone and focused lighting.

The exhibition includes several portraits of “unimportant people” like Paddy Flanigan, with the concentration, enlaring composition and focused lighting that had once been applied only to portraits of the wealthy and high born.    How wonderful! … though I doubt it paved a smoother path for these poor kids.   One of my favorite paintings in the exhibition is the portrait of the child who brought Bellows his laundry every week, Little Girl in White (Queenie Burnette) of 1907, her own crisply laundered white dress fanned in fresh folds like a spray of lilies.

Paddy Flannigan, Winter 1908, oil on canvas, 30 1/4 inx25 in (76.8x63.5cm), Erving and Joyce Wolf

Generally he’s a great painter of the color “white” in which he finds extraordinary richness and
variety.   I love his  scenes of  snow in and around the city.   One of the engaging and illuminating features of this exhibition is the placing next to Bellows’ paintings photographs of similar subject matter:  his paintings of the vast excavations – with snow -- for Pennsylvania Station with photographs of the excavations, a photo of a sea painting by Winslow Homer’s next to Bellows painting of a similarly viewed crashing wave.

Blue Snow, The Battery, 1910, oil on canvas, 34x44 in (86.4x111.8cm), Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, Museum Purchase Huwald Fund

In time, his painting became less forceful, though his subject matter expanded to include brutal victimizations of war and racism.  In The Massacre of Dinant, he painted an atrocity committed by the Germans in their invasion of Belgium during World War I. 

Massacre at Dinant. 1918, oil on canvas, 49 1/2x83 in (125.7x210.8 cm) Greenville County Museum of Art, Gift of Minor M. Shaw, Buck A. Mickel and Charles C. Mickel, and the Arthur and Holly Magill Fund

The painting shows a great deal of thought, not only about the massacre but about other artists.  Life in this painting is vertical, death is horizontal.  The the frieze-like arrangement of the standing figures, with their heads on one level, and the horizontal proportions of the canvas, hark back to Courbet’s Burial at Ornans , while the dramatically foreshortened renderings of the dead figures reach to the Renaissance and Mantegna's Dead Christ, and later, Manet’s painting of the Pieta:  Thus Bellows conveys that the deaths of these "ordinary" men carry the spiritual weight of the death of Christ. 

Elsewhere in this exhibition, we see Bellows cloak other victims of brutality in spiritualized martyrdom:  in The Law Is Too Slow (1923),  light and posture link the death of a lynched Black to that of Christ on the Cross.  One thinks of -- and feels -- Goya's title -- One Cannot Look -- for an etching in his series The Disasters of War, depicting  unspeakable cruelty.  Bellows' paintings and lithographs of the atrocities of war do look back to the Disasters of War, though they lack the horrific sense of inevitability in Goya's works. 

In Bellows' later works, faces -- generally not his strong point in paintings with many figures -- become bland and masklike, even cartoon-like, as

Tennis at Newport, 1920, oil on canvas, 43x54 in (109.2x137.2 cm) James W. and Frances McGlothlin

in Tennis at  Newport.  Figures lose their elastic dynamism.  One of the strongest of the late paintings depicts the Dempsey - Firpo boxing match.  Though it shows Dempsey in full fall (based on a photo of the event), compared with the shocking immediacy ofShag at Starkeys (at the top of this page), Dempsey and Firpo looks staged.  The virtuoso drawing and slick finish of Dempsey and Firpo come at the cost of loss of the passion in the brushstroke that appears to be essential for Bellows’ full artistic expression.

Dempsey and Firpo, 1924, oil on canvas, 51x63 1/4 in (129.5x160.7 cm) Whitney Museum of American Art, Purchase, with funds from Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney.  Photo Sheldon C. Collins.

The artist becomes tamed in his later works.  He seems to have become too focused on trying out for himself what other artists did.  Of course he always learned from others, as all artists do, but there’s a needed balance.  His greatest works draw direct inspiration from the world he saw around him:  he soaked it up, made it his own and painted it.  In the later works he shifted his balance too heavily toward -- so to say -- letting other artists, past and current, into his studio and look over his shoulder.

He died at the age of 42 from complications of a ruptured appendix, having led a full though tragically short life and having painted some of the greatest works produced by an American artist.  This beautifully organized and fully representative exhibition gives you the chance to see, enjoy and marvel at them. 

                                                                                          Yvonne Korshak

Curators are Charles Brock and Franklin Kelly of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and H. Barbara Weinberg and Lisa M. Messinger of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  A catalog, audio tour and educational programs are available.  For further information and planning a visit, click on this live link:  Metropolitan Museum of Art

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Ivanov by Anton Chekhov, translated by Carol Rocamora, directed by Austin Pendleton, with Ethan Hawk as Ivanov, Classic Stage Company

Ivanov is not as perfect a play as Chekhov’s Three Sisters  (at Classic Stage) or The Cherry Orchard, which came later,  but I enjoyed it even more -- filled with fascinating and amusing characters, it spills over into a rambunctious panorama of life.  That’s all the more amazing because -- characteristically Chekhov -- the characters like to proclaim that they're  “bored ” but the play is vital and engaging -- how does he do it?  One thing:  the writing is marvelous.  And in this Classic Stage production, the acting is superb, and Austin Pendleton's naturalistic, soft-voiced direction highly effective in drawing you in and making you believe.

Ethan Hawk gives his all:  he understands every nuance of Chekhov’s portrait of the anguished, depressed Ivanov and portrays it vividly through voice, facial expression, and movement -- he fairly dances through the part.  His is a particularly individualized performance, but all the actors are perfectly cast and draw the most of humor and meaning from their parts.

Ivanov, a landowner in late 19^th-century Russia, is in straightened fiscal circumstances, is married to a woman he no longer loves, and has let his once ambitious agricultural plans for his estate fall by the wayside.

Plenty of reason to be depressed in all that, and so we first meet him lying in his rumpled white linen suit on his rumpled bed in daytime, fitfully trying to read.   Interruptions, such when the steward of his estate comes in with a shady -- read modern exploitive -- money-making scheme, exasperate him.  Reminders -- as from the well-meaning, pompous young doctor, that Ivanov should save his wife Anna, who is dying of tuberculosis, by taking her for a long rest in a warm climate -- exasperate him even more.

Sorry for himself as he feels, though, Ivanov is not a victim:  he’s brought his woes on himself, but he’s created a victim in his wife.  Five years ago, he passionately wooed her, and she gave up Jewish faith and her family for love of him.  Had he, back then, wooed her for her money?  so that his “falling out of love” is really disappointment that when she converted to his Russian Orthodox faith she lost her dowry?  Or did the stifling cloud of his depression simply descend upon him as Chekhov, a medical doctor, knew can happen?  We’re never sure.  One thing is clear:  Ivanov is not a good man -- but a fascinating theatrical character, and fascinating to women.

Now Anna's doctor is continually hammering at Ivanov to take her away for warmth and rest while Ivanov abhors the idea of being alone with her.  Anyhow, he doesn’t have the money.  He evades all pressing issues by going over to the Lebedevs' estate where things are a lot more fun, even though he’s harassed by Zinaida Lebedeva, a tight-fisted  money lender, for the 9000 roubles he owes her.  There are a variety of acquaintances, characters, jokes, his warm friend, Paul Lebedev, and -- brandy in the punch -- the Lebdev’s 20-year old daughter, Sasha, who’s infatuated with him. 

Anna and her faithful advocate and doctor follow him there, only to catch him kissing Sasha, which leads Anna to believe that Ivanov has always been false, their love a sham from the start, that the bitterest pill for a sick woman.   How Chekhov works out these situations of love and betrayal ... well, let’s just say Ivanov finally does something forceful. 

Such rich, abundant, fully realized theater as Classic Stage’s production of Ivanov  takes you beyond yourself.  Chekhov creates a full world that offers the bright, stimulating pleasure of attentiveness for the duration of the play.  And the characters are so alive, amusing and vivid that they stay with you in your world afterwards. 

Ivanov  plays at Classic Stage Company in Manhattan's East Village through December 9th, 2012.  For information and tickets, click on live link of title.

Yvonne Korshak 

Comments very welcome.  Scroll down, click on "comments," write in comment box and click on "post."  Emails are private -- no emails ever appear with comments.

FILM NOTE – Simon and the Oaks, with Bill Skarsgard, Helen Sjoholm, Jan Josef Liefers, Stefan Godicke, directed by Lisa Ohlin, in Swedish with English subtitles, based on the novel by Marianne Fredericksson

. . . not a dragon tattoo but a . . .

Simon and the Oaks is about two families with characters so vivid, attractive and complex that one becomes totally absorbed in them, worries for the obstacles they face and cares to the very end about how things work out for them.

Two families, very much opposite, are drawn tightly together on the eve of World War II:   the rural, home-grown Swedish Larssons and the urban, well-to-do, Jewish Lentovs who are in Sweden as fugitives from Nazi Germany.  Each family has one son, who feels alienated from the expectations of his own family and, friends in school, the boys Simon Larsson and Isak Lentov are each powerfully drawn to something in the other’s family.

We meet Simon as a dreamy boy reading in an oak tree that has become so magical it speaks to him.  Finding a real friend in Isak is a step in his maturity, and in the Lentov’s home he glimpses a world of art, culture, wealth and glistening chandeliers that he feels is somehow his own.  But Isak, who’d been brutally savaged by Nazis in Germany when he was four years old, now experiences intense anti-semitism in school, and, as the Nazi presence extends in Sweden, witnesses his terrified mother’s murderous/suicidal breakdown that sends her to a mental hospital.

For these reasons, by the time his father, Ruben Lentov, arranges for Isak to live with the warm, welcoming Larssons, Isak has become withdrawn, unresponsive, near to catatonic.  It’s not the tenderness of the loving Larsson mother, Karin, nor the friendly loyalty of Simon, but the understanding of the demanding, down-to-earth work-oriented father, Erik Larsson, who engages Isak in his carpentry, that pulls the boy out of his shell, and ultimately saves him.

So, as they grow to maturity, Isak loves building with wood; Simon loves music.  Each boy disappoints his own father and finds a spiritual kinship with the father of his friend. 

It’s engrossing to watch this extended family whose members we have come to know and like so well, and that like most families includes a good admixture of conflict, jealousies, frightening illnesses, and lots of love -- all, and especially the love, beautifully conveyed in this movie.  The family is far more complex than it at first seems:  and the film tells us that just as a child can have more than one "father," he or she can have more than "mother."  As the boys become men, the family grows to include romantic false starts, the women they love, and a first grandchild -- a Lentov, but she belongs to all of them.

There’s a fascinating connection between this film and Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo , millenium trilogy -- I haven’t noticed the point made though I’d guess it’s very well known in Sweden where the novel Simon and the Oaksis, like Stieg Larsson’s books, a best seller.  And so, it’s not for nothing that the Erik, Karin and Simon’s family name is Larsson.

Like Larsson’s stories, Simon and the Oaks pushes aside the idyllic view of Sweden as an enlightened nation to reveal its flaws, including class divisions, xenophobia and anti-semitism.

And Simon and the Oaks has its own girl with a tattoo -- but the tattoo of numbers worn by Ruben Lentov’s niece, Iza, is chillingly different from Lisbeth Salander’s dragon.  We first meet Iza at the end of World War II, when she has just been liberated from Buchenwald, and she’s a skinny, high cheek boned, suspicious, ironic, frenetic man-eater (Katharina Schuttler) who looks just like Noomi Rapace in the role of Lisbeth Salander in the Swedish version of the “Tattoo” film.  But though her hair's cut close to her head like Lisbeth Salander's, for Iza it’s not about style or affect:  her hair was shaved off by the Nazis in the Buchenwald and has only just begun to grow back, a gauge of how recently she was a prisoner.  Lisbeth Salander’s world-famous tattoo expresses her rebelliousness, savage temperament, alienation: Iza’s tattoo is not a personal “statement”, but a row of numbers tattooed against her will into the young girl's forearm in Buchenwald.

There are many Biblical allusions in Simon and the Oaks-- so many, and I'll only mention a few, that they weigh down the movie.  But of particular interest for a film about a family of Christians and a familoy of Jews who become one family, many of the Biblical allusions involve reconciling the Old and New Testaments, Christians and Jews.  Erik Larsson is a divine-like figure:  he’s way bigger than everybody else, inspires absolute confidence and is projected as having a particular power:  when Simon asks Ruben if he is having an affair with Karin, Ruben answers that no man can match Erik. 

Erik is a stern father, like the God of the Old Testament, but -- as if we're watching the New Testament coming into being -- he is persuaded, to let Simon go to his chosen school, for example, like the merciful God of the New Testament.  Like the earthly father of Jesus, Erik is a carpenter and he and Isak focus in on building the best boat, symbol of salvation.  Some of these Biblical allusions seem forced: for example, when Simon wants to go to the “fancy” school that Erik distrusts, Erik resists, than yields by saying Simon can go to school on one condition, if Isak wrestle with his father:  watching this odd match, one thinks “Jacob Wrestling With The Angel.”  The episode seems forced.

There’s a pure mother -- virgin-like in that she’s never had a child -- and a fallen woman, a Magdalene.  Isak tells two jokes that underline the religious associations, though he doesn’t seem to be a boy to tell jokes.

Several writers have commented that Simon and the Oaks is weighed down with too many incidents and turns of plot -- a common problem in movies made from big novels.  I think it's not the richness of events and characters that weigh the movie down, but the not fully integrated symbolism that doesn't emerge naturally but seems impressed on the film.  Ultimately Ruben, the Jewish father, does prove a match for Erik, the Christian father -- besting him for once in what we take it to be an ongoing hand-wrestle challenge: happy families, but I didn’t believe it for a moment.

So Simon and the Oaks may try to do too much:  tell an intensely human family saga with many family characters over time and against the historical background of World War II, and bringing out the horrors of Nazism, and probing into negative aspects of Swedish society, and carrying on a conversation with the Stieg Larsson books, and creating a metaphorical structure that reconciles the Old and the New Testaments.  It’s a little heavi handed, that last point but in all those other ways Simon is fully successful.  Quite an achievement!  See Simon and the Oaks -- it’s compelling, illuminating, and filled with a sense of human truths.

Yvonne Korshak

Comments are very welcome:  scroll down, click on "comments," write in comment box and click on "post."  Emails are private -- no emails ever appear with comments.

Heresy by A. R. Gurney, directed by Jim Simpson, The Flea Theater

Heresy is topical, very funny, and totally enjoyable modern parable filled with references to today’s politics and based, roughly, on the life of Christ.  Some of the characters have Biblical names, like Mary for the mother of Chris, her idealistic, purist son currently in jail.  But Gurney’s a wonderfully surprising playwright so you can't guess from that what to expect.  

We’re in the office of Pontius, a government VIP whose preferred term of address is The Decider.  Mary and her husband Joseph, old time friends of Pontius from the roaring sixties (they call him Ponti, a nickname he feels is now beyond his dignity) are trying to get their now powerful friend to get their dreamy, off-beat son out of jail.  All the shenanigans are taken down on the computer by Mark (Tommy Crawford), an orderly intern (meaning : [1] he gives orders and [2] isn't paid).  Matthew, Luke and John are nowhere in sight.

There’s a Kafkaesque search to find out just where in the vast and enhanced National Security bureaucracy Chris is being held. 

L-R Danny Rivera as Pedro, Ariel Woodiwiss as Lena, Kathy Najima as Phyllis, Reg E Cathey as Pontius.  Photo Hunter Canning

Eventually he’s located and with the help of a gorgeous Venus named Lena (short for Magdalena) is rescued and -- although we never set eyes on him -- we can assume he’ll be OK for the short term: when it comes to ultimates, Gurney leaves things pretty open-ended.

All the actors, briskly paced by director Simpson, draw great satisfying laughs from Gurneys witty lines and ridiculous situations -- played seriously as they have to be to be funny.  I particularly loved Kathy Najimy as The Decider’s dotty but not stupid wife -- an enthused fulfiller of the great patriotic mandate to shop.  The expressions that cross her face reflect her thoughts with the accuracy and breadth of the great comic actors and she has the voice to go with it.  The most originally observed character is Mary, whom Annette O’Toole brings to vivid life as a skinny, intense remnant of  60's  idealism (we see where her son   

      Reg E. Cathey as Pontius and Annette O'Toole as Mary,   Photo Hunter Canning

gets it), ready to jaw with anybody.  Ariel Woodiwiss as Lena is seductive and cannily able to grasp what really matters to her man.  Reg E. Cathey as Pontius ponders with great authority as the not-so-decisive Decider.

There are a lot of laughs, yes.  But in one sequence the characters, speaking out of their individual viewpoints and personalities, tell what each of them would do for the sensitive, volatile Chris when he’s freed from prison, each having a different idea.  Gurney turns this, on the dime, into an inspiring moment -- as in, seriously inspiring.  How he does it -- I’d best leave it to you to find out when you see the show.  I was deeply moved. 

Claudia Brown’s outstanding costumes characterize the actors quickly in this fast farce, and enhance the play's fascination. 

L-R Steve Mellor as Joseph, Kathy Najimy, Reg E. Cathey, Annette O'Toole  Photo Hunter Canning  

Pontius wears a truly scary pair of black, knee-high boots.  Mary’s plaid drab button-down-the-front dress worn with purpley-fuschia tights characterizes not only the role but the 60’s epoch (Super-Earnest-Skip-The-Tie-Dye Type):  in motion, this is a geniusy costume worn by a terrific actress.  Phyllis’ claret red gown (it's a little different from the photos) is absolutely Phyllis.

Heresy is a very refreshing play!

 Heresy plays at the Flea Theater in NYC's Tribeca through November 4th.  For more information and tickets, click on live link at the start of this paragraph.

Yvonne Korshak

Comments very welcome.  To comment scroll down, cliock on "comment," write in comment box that opens up and click on "post."  Emails are private, no emails ever appear with comments.

NORTH, conceived by Christina Ritter and Jennifer Schlueter, written and directed by Jennifer Schlueter, the for/word company at 59E59 Theater

 … aviation pioneers …

Interestingly, diaries give an important slant on a character but they aren't a last word!

A play about an encounter among three early aviators, Charles Lindbergh, whose first solo flight across the Atlantic electrified the world, his wife Ann Morrow Lindbergh, a pioneer aviator and talented writer, and French aviator and writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery is an intriguing  idea, but NORTH, even though drawn from their writings, doesn't characterize these historical, intensely charismatic figures consistently or believably.

 In 1939, it happened in fact that Anne Lindbergh met St.-Ex, as we fast learn to call him, when he wrote a preface for her book about flight, Listen! The Wind.  Though she never saw him again, her diaries reveal the encounter loomed large in her emotional life.  This play, taking off from that incident, sets Anne at the apex of a love triangle with two men, Charles and St-Ex.

The loss of the Lindbergh’s first child in the famous kidnapping of 1932 caused the actual Anne as well as Charles huge and lasting grief but -- this feisty woman went on to have five more children and become a successful author!  One can’t recognize the woman who flew five continents, published 13 books, won major awards in literature and aviation in the skittish, timid Anne of NORTH (Chrstina Ritter).

An undercurrent of petty complaining runs throughout: e.g., Anne has to write at a kitchen table, though this woman of privilege could have had any writing set-up she wanted.  Anne’s arbitrary responses and motivations are a main flaw of this play.  What on earth is she trying to do that she isn’t in fact doing?  What does she want?  What does St.-Ex (Christopher Marlowe Roche) have that Charles (Kalafatic Poole) doesn't have?  The diaries may read this way in part, but this doesn't square with the real life persona or create a compelling character.

Anne seems rocked by that fact that her husband uses a black pencil in editing her writing:  well, gee, what writer enjoys being edited?  though they all benefit from it. There’s a sense that Charles, the forthright man of action, somehow doesn’t understand her as much as the poetic St.-Ex, but Charles takes an engaged and appreciative interest in her work, reads it carefully, and -- wrapping her in his jacket on a chilly night -- is considerate and tender.  All St.-Ex has to offer is words words words and these aren’t particularly telling.

The Lindberghs' reputation suffered on the eve of World War II when they appeared to all the world as German sympathizers and took a strong public stance of keeping the United States out of the war.  At one point in the play, an independent-minded Anne stands up to Charles, opposing his identification as the Jews as one of the causes of the coming war, but in the subsequent scene when she writes an isolationist book arguing for U.S. non-intervention in the war, the play "excuses" her by indicating she's under Charles’ thumb.  Is she her own person or his creature?  Which is it? Whichever the playwright finds convenient in using the play to create an apologia for Anne.

The highly creative staging is marked by an imaginative compression of ideas.  The characters sit on swings suspended from above, swing on them twirl them toward one another and away, the motion of the swings echoing their fluctuating emotional states and relationships while at the same time providing a backdrop of height and space central to these aviators' lives.  In this context, it's fascinating to consider the swing's long history of conveying flirtation and beyond -- to erotic elation, as for example in Fragonard's famous 18th-century painting, The Swing. 

In contrast, a tall, gravity rooted ladder provides another venue for the characters’ physical agility as a stand-in for their physical courage -- and at the same time is the immobile reminder of the kidnapping in which the baby was carried off down a ladder.  Congratulations on this fine design to Scenic Designer Brad Steinmetz, Lighting Designer Anjeanette Stokes and Choreographer Karen Mozingo.   

NORTH plays at 59E59 theater in mid-town Manhattan through October 28th.  For more information and tickets, click on live link of title.

Yvonne Korshak

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Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee, with Tracy Letts, Amy Morton, Carrie Coon, and Madison Dirks, directed by Pam MacKinnon, Steppenwolf Theatre Company

This is an excellent production of a very well written and engrossing play that leaves off with an unpleasant sense of sound and fury signifying not much. 

It’s about a husband and wife who constantly argue and undercut one another.  This is done under the guise of what's supposedly a significant psychological, even philosophical, revelation involving a mutually held illusion but in my view that’s a highfalutin pretext: the unlikely revelation is no more than a justification for a tremendously skilled playwright to write a total orgy of witty, sharp, well observed nastiness between a married couple.  That can be a lot of fun, but it's also pretty sordid.

George and Martha (Father of our Country?  First Family?), married for 23 years, know just where to wound the other in their back and forth bickering.  She’s the daughter of the President of a small New England college.  He’s an ironic, underachieving Professor of History -- well, only Associate Professor after all these years, as Martha is given to reminding him and the young couple, Nick and Honey, who come by for a nightcap after a faculty party.

Nick’s a new faculty member in the Biology Department and Honey’s his frail, giddy wife -- like Martha without a job to call her own.  It’s already late when they arrive at Martha and George’s book strewn house where they all hang out until dawn, with more drinking from the 1950’s appropriate portable bar than any four people could realistically down and remain alive in that length of time.

What keeps you engrossed is the marvelously written dialog, above all the vicious, canny backbiting between Martha and George.  Each knows where the other hurts, and each seems to have as a life purpose to dig in to that spot and twist the knife.  They do this with lean, sophisticated, quick, witty repartee which is fascinating to follow.  If the play’s worth producing, that’s why.  And if this production is worth seeing, it’s largely because Tracy Letts and Amy Morton are brilliant in their parts, the the laid back and ultimately protective George, she the no-holds barred harridan with a hidden illness at the core.  These are two great actors at work on superb dialogue and for that I’m glad to have seen the play. 

Carrie Coon is clever and at times hilarious as the prim, rich academic wife with a brandy addiction who dances, as she tells us, “like the wind.”   Madison Dirks does a workmanlike job as the opportunistic newly hired biologist who’s willing, though not able, to sleep with faculty wives including -- make that especially -- the University President’s daughter, in order to make it up the academic ladder.

The set -- with the oriental rugs and books piled up in the fireplace -- is appealing and recognizable as the living room of entrenched college faculty.

But the picture of the academic life doesn’t ring true.  George, we hear disparagingly from Martha, “writes papers”:  being that productive at this middling school, he'd certainly have become a full Professor by now if the playwright -- setting him up as Martha’s target -- hadn’t needed him to be a flop.  There's no reason that the new hotshot biology faculty member would have to assume that the road to success was sleeping with faculty wives.  Publish or perish is more like it and ambitious Nick had better get started writing some papers of his own.  These characters don’t come across as real people -- they’re outlandish -- but the dialog is so good you hardly notice.  The big revelatory ending is forced, and not really believable.  But Amy Morton’s emotional rendering is so powerful you believe it while it’s happening -- this great actress believes it, so while she's at it, you do.  

The real illusion here is based on Albee’s skill, strong enough to give you the illusion while you’re watching that Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is about something important.  It isn’t.  Nick and Honey -- before they’re completely soused -- worry that they’ve been dragged in on an indecorous husband and wife fight that they shouldn’t really be watching and they're right.  It didn't do them any good.  The play's long on laughs but short on humanity.       

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?  plays at the Booth Theatre on West Broadway in Manhattan.  For information and tickets, click on live link of title.

Yvonne Korshak

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Something Wild, three one-act plays by Tennessee Williams, directed by Ken Schatz, Pook’s Hill

... as good as it gets ...

Pook's Hill, a new theatre group, is presenting three one-act plays by Tennessee Williams -- 27 Wagons Full Of Cotton, Hello From Bertha, and This Property Is Condemned.   It's hard to imagine a better evening of theater -- and you know it from the moment 27 Wagons Full Of Cotton begins ...

We're in Mississippi cotton-growing country with two business rivals and a beautiful, big but somewhat childish woman, Flora, one of Williams great characters.  Jake, Flora’s husband -- coarse, fat, and pretty brutal -- burns down the cotton gin of rival gin owner Silva Vicarro so as to get to gin a profitable 27 wagons full of cotton.  While Jake’s off ginning, Vicarro --sleek, smart -- comes by to even the score by seducing Flora.  Unlike crude Jake, Vicarro knows the woman needs “understanding”, and sets to winding in Flora in a seduction every bit as subtle, brilliant and erotically drawn out as that in The Glass Menagerie. 

Samantha Steinmetz turns in a masterful performance as Flora, aware of what men are “after,” vulnerable, resisting, falling back on wily but transparent flirtation smiles and evasions, remembering what she ought to be doing, worrying that she isn’t doing it: the world of her character is fully expressed in the expressions that cross her face, the modulations of her high strung, nervous voice, the shifts in her body.

Flora is at the play's heart but Brian Gianci as the canny and opportunistic Vicarro and Jack Haley as tough, obtuse Jake are equally just plain perfect in the roles.  And is Vicarro really any less a brute than Jake -- or any of the other men Flora’s encountered?  

Hello from Bertha is shorter, more of a sketch than a full play than 27 Wagons Full Of Cotton , but very moving.  Set in a brothel, it focuses on a prostitute, Bertha, not glamorous and “done up” but exhausted and crazed, heartsick over a man she believed in back when they had “good times.” Goldie, the Madam, is ready to throw the now useless girl out which, for Bertha, means a charity ward -- the end of the line.  Desperate on all counts, Bertha imagines and re-imagines the letter she’ll write to the man in futile hope -- he's married now -- that he'll rescue her.   Her hope, fueled by memories and desire, wrestles mightily with despair in her grief stricken soul. 

Andrus Nichols’ passionate performance as Bertha is so unrestrained it’s almost a surprise at the curtain call to see her as a calm, accomplished actress.  Vivienne Leheny’s effective performance emphasizes the tough, business sense of the madam who needs to get the sick girl out of the room but but still conveys a spark of human kindness, a humane reluctance that is, however, to no practical effect.  Imani Jade Powers is gentle as the young prostitute, Lena, to whom Bertha dictates her letter.  Does Lena recognize her own older, tragic self in Bertha?  Williams' tenderness toward his characters bathes these marvelous plays in a breathtaking humanity.

This Property is Condemned  is a play of two children -- twelve or thirteen -- set near the railroad tracks, each missing school for a different reason. Tom thought the day would be windy and good for flying the kite he's fiddling with.  The young girl, Willie, though, doesn't go to school anymore, but is living on the margins, alone in a house that's been condemned.  Her family’s long gone, her sister -- and for Willie a glamorous memory -- was a prostitute.  Willie’s getting by -- sporadically -- the same way.  Both Tom and Willie have dreams.  It doesn’t look like Willie’s will come true.   But -- Williams doesn’t leave anyone out -- is Tom really on the safe track as he first appears in contrast to Willie?  After all, he's misgauged the weather, playing hookie for nothing on a day with no wind, his kite grounded.   

Tess Frazer is superb as Willie in her frayed, pretty blue tattered finery and skinny bare feet, poignantly still trying hard, testing herself by walking the rails.  David Armanino gives a strong portrait of a young but already opportunistic young man.  This Property Is Condemned was made into a movie in 1966 with Natalie Wood and Robert Redford.  It’s such a good play it whets the appetite to see the movie. 

But most of all I'm looking forward to pook’s hill's next production -- in fact it’s hard to wait!

Something Wild  plays at the Abingdon Theatre Arts Complex, the Dorothy Strelsin Theatre, on the West Side of Manhattan through October 6th.  For information and tickets, click on live link of title. 

Yvonne Korshak

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The Anderson Twins Play The Fabulous Dorseys, written and directed by Pete and Will Anderson, 59E59 Theaters

For a thoroughly enjoyable time, go see The Anderson Twins Play The Fabulous Dorseys at 59E59.

Here’s how it goes:  it’s not a theater, for the time being, but a nightclub from the 1920’s or ‘30’s, think speakeasy, draped in red with little round candle-lit tables instead of regular audience seating -- if you like you can bring a drink you’ve picked up at the Mezzanine bar down below.  Settle yourself in and listen to six wonderful musicians play jazz like Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, interspersed with hilarious clips from the 1947 film about the Dorsey brothers in which the Dorseys played themselves -- how fascinating -- and it gives you just enough of the story line of their lives for fun and interest without taking away from the great jazz the band is playing. 

There’s another marvelous film insert I’ll leave for you to discover -- but what a laugh!

Flanking the group the twins, Pete and Will -- two players both accomplished on the saxophone, clarinet and flute (a little amazing!) -- whip through their changes of instruments, solos, ensembles and improvisations.  They're more or less look-alikes though not identical and it's fun to watch their individuality -- musical as well as in personality.  Between them is Jon-Erik Kellso on the trumpet, Ehud Asherie’s on the piano at right, and behind are Dave Baron on bass and Kevin Dorn on drums -- what a feast! 

One wonderful jazz piece after another, from “Tangerine” to “Way Down Upon the Swanee River,” from ensemble to solo, the fast-paced jazz lifts the spirit.  Among favorites ... Kellso's thrilling solos ... Asherie dazzling picking up from where (filmed) Art Tatum  left off ... Will Anderson's virtuoso tour de force playing Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee” -- what an enchanting piece of music.  And, yes, you hear the bee.  But these are six outstanding musicians in a jazz fest filled with favorites!

Go!  You’ll have a great time -- and come out of the theater with a big happy smile.

The Anderson Twins Play The Fabulous Dorseys plays at 59E59 Theaters in midtown Manhattan through October 7.  For information and tickets, click on live link of title.

 Yvonne Korshak

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JOB by Thomas Bradshaw, directed by Benjamin H. Kamine, featuring The Bats, The Flea Theater

... why do the righteous playgoers suffer? ...

The story of Job reinterpreted by a contemporary playwright:  what an intriguing idea.  Exotic times and places -- here the ancient Near East -- are appealing.  And a play that takes you to supernatural venues, like Heaven, as this play does, and to actually “see” God, at home, so to speak, always have an extra magnetism.  I was really looking forward to this play.  But Bradshaw’s Job is intellectually incoherent, weak on character, and brings no insight into the iconic story to the question asked by the story of Job:  Why do the righteous suffer?  

Instead it has the most graphically cruel, bloody, violent, and sadistic depictions of any play that I have ever seen (and my guess is that has ever been produced). 

Back there in the ancient Near East, righteous Job starts off as a man of stature -- he’s a Judge in his community -- and wealth -- he has huge holdings in land and livestock, and he has a loving wife and family.  Truly he’s been blessed by God and he responds with piety and burnt offerings.  But -- it’s easy to be good when things go well for you -- Satan works out a deal with God to test Job’s piety by loading Job down with misfortunes.

Soon Job’s son seizes his sister, Job’s daughter, in brutal lust, beats her, and -- the girl’s all-out attempts to fight him off turning into involuntary twitches -- strangles her to death -- and with the help of a huge drop of his own saliva to his penis, rapes her.  (Is it counted as rape if she’s dead? a character questions later.)

Still Job does not curse God.

But his wife curses Him plenty and is out the door.

Subsequently Job is castrated by victims of his earlier justice, the lumps of Job’s testicles -- and penis -- falling bloody but unmistakable to the stage floor.  Plop.  And plop.

Naturally, the victims, father and son, cut out Job’s eyes.   (Boils would seem good after this.)

The brutes topple the wounded man over in his chair.

Then they take the chair.

Sean McIntyre as Job with Marie-Claire Roussel as Esther.  Photo by Hunter Canning

Job’s eye bandages, his patriarch-in-the desert type cloak, and the whole stage is a bloody mess for the rest of the play. 

By the time Job's cattle, sheep and goats are stolen, why should anyone care?  

There are scenes in Heaven where an easy-going God fecklessly keeps in bounds the rivalry between his two sons, Jesus and Dionysus (there are a whole lot of other of God’s sons scratching at a closed door), and chats with Satan about just how far they should take this Job thing.  

So far, although some of Job’s misfortunes are newly invented, the story has -- roughly -- followed that of the Book of Job.  There’s a new twist, though, at the end which I won’t reveal -- it’s just another graphic presentation of disgusting, brutal violence unmotivated by anything the playwright has developed through the play.

The Flea Theater’s crew of outstanding young actors has less to work with than usual because the characters, even including such potentially rich figures as Job, and God, are thinly written, and ultimately are not sympathetic or arresting.  God is cute.  Job is bombastic.  The choreography is flat and obvious, compared with that seen at The Flea recently in its masterful production of These Seven Sicknesses, where The Bats had the chance to fulfill their outstanding and varied talents.   

It’s conceivable that all this voyeuristic violence could have a point, but it doesn’t.  It’s there for its own sake.  There is no new way offered for looking at the story of Job, no insight into why the righteous suffer, no idea that could carry one’s thoughts to a new place.  It's hard to square the wishy-washy "what's the point of this play?" problem with the clarity of purpose and driving development in Bradshaw's fine, earlier play, The Bereaved.

I thought for awhile the idea might be that Job caught on to the fact that God was merciless and so, following God’s example, became merciless himself but when I asked the playwright in a “talk-back” after the performance if that was “the idea,” he gave the uncommitted answer that he had for most questions, “It’s open-ended.”   But open-ended is one thing;  intellectual inconsistency, unmotivated action, arbitrary characterizations … these take you nowhere.  

JOB plays at the Flea Theater in Manhattan's Tribeca through November 3.  For information and tickets, click on live link of title.  NOTE;  It's been announced that JOB is coming back to The Flea Theater -- Thomas Bradshaw's JOB is returning to The Flea to run  January 4 - 28.

Yvonne Korshak

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Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

        ... a popular artist ...

This is a fascinating exhibit, stimulating for its irony, humor, kaleidoscopic glimpses at American culture in the last 50 years, and interrelationships between artists with Warhol the creative, generating the fulcrum. The overall impression is busy and dazzling. The 150 works, about a third of them by Warhol himself, hold surprise, even for those familiar with “Pop Art” and its variety of spin-offs.  Some of the surprises are owed to the intelligence and imagination with which the curators juxtapose Warhol’s paintings, sculptures and films with those of other artists, forming insightful connections.  (Full information on photos at bottom of page.*)

The exhibition is divided into five thematic sections: “Daily News: From Banality to Disaster,” “Portraiture: Celebrity and Power,” “Queer Studies: Camouflage and Shifting Identities,” “Consuming Images: Appropriation, Abstraction, and Seriality,” and “No Boundaries, Business, Collaboration, and Spectacle.”

Among his early works, his homey, cartoon-like “Icebox” of 1961 (below right*) is personally interpreted through the hand of the artist working with a brush, like traditional works of art, but it already shows Warhol’s artistic interest in ordinary, kitchen-oriented, objects, a tradition with roots in the earliest Dada works, like Duchamp’s found object, the Bottle Dryer.  Looking forward rather than backward to focus on  Warhol’s influences on others, the importance of Dada, a truly groundbreaking movement in the 20th Century, was missed in this exhibition.  (I'm wondering, are we to be concerned that the food in the icebox will spoil with the door held open so long?)

In little time Warhol moved to emotionally distanced representations, notably the iconic Campbell’s soup can, 1962 (top of page*), which is painted though with a constrained cool, and then to the more mechanically multiple silkscreen such as the stacked coca-cola bottles (left*), launching Pop Art. 

And, speaking of coca-cola ... at first sight, Ai Weiwei's “Neolithic Vase with Coca-Cola Logo" of 2010 (below*) made me smile -- but, second thought, is this really something we want done to a hand made ceramic vase that has come down through the millennia, 5000–3000 BC ?  (What a beautiful jar.)  Well, new art often seems destructive, even as it builds -- no wonder we call it “cutting edge.”
Or, by applying the logo to the ancient work, is Weiwei saying -- with Warhol -- that wherever and whenever there have been humans, there has been commerce? 

That commerce is the essence of the human?

Or that humans dirty their nest?

Or ... that coca-cola being everwhere, it even made it to the neolithic?

Warhol’s amalgamation of art and commerce, and the spin-offs by others, spawn a string of thoughts. 

Warhol's portraits of celebrities like Jackie Kennedy (right, below*)  have drawn attention like magnets.  Does Warhol do something "value added" in making these silk-screened multiples with color variations?   Is he merely exploiting or is he making art?  For me, the most thought-provoking aspect of the celebrity portraits is that Warhol wouldn’t think that question mattered. But should we think these questions matter? For me, his celebrity portraits are unacted upon, and void of the mind of the artist, and so ultimately boring.

Jeff Koons’ fantasy-ridden Michael Jackson and Bubbles (below*) is spectacular, but cruel.  It's made of porcelain, lavish and physically fragile like Jackson himself.  Life size and detailed, shiny and gilded, it smacks of costly  production.  The white, smooth surface reflects Jackson's whitening of his skin, and pretty feminizing.   Jackson's glamour, conspicuous consumption, and childishness. are all there.  You feel the mind of the artist at work in every detail of this arresting piece, as well as its tremendous technical virtuosity -- reason enough to see the exhibition -- not that there aren’t plenty of others.  But, spectacular as it is, the lack of human sympathy in this portrait, that coldly asks the question, who's the monkey? disturbs me
For all the brain cells that gets pricked, aroused and tickled by Warhol and others, one work is deeply moving: Richard Avedon’s photo portrait of Truman Capote (no photo available, unfortunately).  The finesse of the printing, the tonal subtlety that embraces the bulge in Capote's forehead that visualizes his intelligence, the sense of knowing another human being turns ones thoughts to Rembrandt, not to Warhol. 

The exhibition argues for Warhols’ liberating role with regard to sex andgender in art in the section “Queer Studies: Camouflage and Shifting Identities.”  Again, looking back, to the Italian Renaissance, for example, one can find examples equal in daring, and  the absence of that historical perspective is limiting.  Some of the images are rather profound expressions of searching self-knowledge, such as Warhol’s self portrait, his likeness almost lost in camouflage.  Others, such as Robert Gober's Untitled (right) can bring a sort of smile. 

In Cindy Sherman ‘s photographic portrait of herself as Marilyn Monroe in her Norma Jean guise (left*), the tension in the contrast between the appropriated image and Sherman’s modification packs an immediate ironic and amusing punch.  The exhibition might have reminded us that artists have always borrowed (or as Delacroix put it, "stolen”) from other artists and images, but the earlier artists generally sought inspiration and instruction in great works of art.  In contrast, ithe modern to contemporary artists, removing the appropriated images from their contexts, and modifying them, eat away at the overt meaning of the known or recognizable images, illuminating new meanings and critiques.

Again, this didn’t begin with Warhol:  adding a mustache, like a grafitti'd subway ad, to a photographic image of the Mona Lisa, Duchamp deconstructed the iconic image in his L.H.O.O.Q. , and did some powerful gender bending, well before Warhol's multiple silk-screens of the Mona Lisa .

Talk about irony, for the dynamic medium of video, Warhol chose to record the most undynamic subjects -- people, ordinary or not, at their most banal and monotonous, as you can see for yourself in the exhibition.  Irony is the sharpest shovel for digging deep into understanding, and a savior of sanity! But even irony, alone, is not worth more than one look. 

The exhibition ends with a large room wall papered in Warhol’s repetitive cows, and above wafting plastic clouds, blown gently by the electric fan.  Regard Warhol, because you can't disregard him.  See the exhibition -- you'll have a good time. 

Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City through December 31, 2012.   For more information about the exhibition and its catalog, click on live link of title.

The exhibition is organized by Mark Rosenthal as guest curator, with Marla Prather, Curator, Ian Alteveer, Assistant Curator, and Rebecca Lowery, Research Assistant, in the museum's Department of Modern and Contemporary Art.

P.S.  The education and outreach aspects of the exhibition are sponsored by none other than ... Campbell's Soup!

 Yvonne Korshak

Comments very welcome. Scroll down, click on “comments,” write in comment box and click on “post.”  Emails are private -- no emails ever appear with comments.

*Photographs, in order: Andy Warhol (American, 1928–1987) Big Campbell's Soup Can, 19¢(Beef Noodle), 1962, acrylic and graphite on canvas, 72x54 1/2 in. (182.9 x 138.4 cm), The Menil Collection, Houston, c The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York;  Andy Warhol, Icebox, 1961, oil, ink, and graphite on canvas, 67 x 53 1/8 in. (170.2 x 134.9 cm), The Menil Collection, Houston, c 2012 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York;  Andy Warhol, Green Coca-Cola Bottles, 1962, silkscreen, acrylic, and graphite on canvas, 82 3/8 x 57 in. (209.2 x 144.8 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, c The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York;   Ai Weiwei (Chinese, born 1957), Neolithic Vase with Coca-Cola Logo, 2010, paint on Neolithic vase (5000-3000 BC), 9 3/4 x 9/34 x 9 3/4 in. (24.8 x 24.8 x 24.8 cm), Mary Boone, New York, Courtesy:  Mary Boone Gallery, New York;   Andy Warhol, Red Jackie, 1964, acrylic and silkscreen on canvas, 40 x 40 in. (101.6 x 101.6 cm), The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. c The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York;  Jeff Koons (American, 1955), Michael Jackson and Bubbles, 1988, Porcelain, 42 x 70 1/2 in. (106.7 x 179.1 x 82.6 cm), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, c. Jeff Koons;  Robert Gober (American, born 1954), Untitled, 1990, Beeswax, wood, oil paint, human hair, 18 7/8 x 14 3/4 x 7 1/2 in., Collection of Rachel and Jean-Pierre Lehman, Courtesy of the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery;   Cindy Sherman (American, born 1954), Untitled, 1982, chromogenic print, ed. 43 of 125, 15 7/16 x 7 1/8 in. (39.2 x 18.1 cm), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York. 

The Train Driver, written and directed by Athol Fugard, with Leon Addison Brown and Ritchie Coster, SignatureTheatre

 … inadvertent …

Among the Fugard plays I’ve seen, this -- possibly excepting the iconic The Island  -- is the finest.   It’s intense, with a driving force.  Especially interesting, although race figures importantly, the tragedy isn’t driven by race but by common humanity -- weaknesses and all.  I wonder if some would argue that point.  It’s certainly not characteristic of Fugard.  But just as the characters transcend race, so does the play’s driving idea.

It’s set in what first seems an off-putting, grubby, sandy, junk cluttered cemetery for those who die unclaimed and unknown, on the outskirts of Port Elizabeth, South Africa, but in time it comes to seem a kind of glorious kingdom for the black caretaker-grave digger, Simon.  The junk is transfigured into something most precious.  An obviously mentally agitated man, Roelf, who’s white, throws himself on the dusty scene with powerful fury, looking for the burial of a black woman he can only describe by her haircovering, a "red doek," and her dead infant -- so he can curse at her.

Why?  She's ruined his life.  Roelf's a train driver and a black woman, with her infant in her arms, had stepped in front of his train to kill herself and the child.  The impossibility of braking the moving train in time, the screech of the brakes, the knowledge of rolling over the woman and child and pulverizing them -- the sheer horror -- has forced this relatively ordinary white guy, who shares  characterizing disdain for Blacks of his kind and place, into a frenzy of searching, guilt, heightened awareness, and insanity that has forced him to lose his job, home, wife and family and landed him, desperate and volatile, in this woebegone place.

Roelf periodically pulls out a poignantly small newspaper clipping with the account of the train accident, biting down on the pain, and reminding us that the play is “true,” that is, based on a actual incident.  The clipping mentions that the train driver received psychological counseling -- obviously not enough to cleanse him of his killing the woman and child.  The psychologist reminded him that, given the braking time of a train, he could not possibly have avoided the accident.  Still Roelf can find no peace in his shattered soul. 

At night the cemetery is visited by violent men, and by feral dogs who come to dig up bodies, which is why Simon works hard with his shovel to dig the holes deep.  We wonder if, at nightfall, the wary Simon will let Roelf into his shabby, pick-a-piece-here-and-there cabin, and are touched when he, without emotion, and not disturbing his own routine, does.

What a subtle shift of relationships!  Simon has a home, of sorts, more than Roelf, a regular White guy, who's been thrown out of the house forever because his despair pushed him to raging destructiveness.  Simon warms up some beans for himself in a can over a candle and sleeps under a blanket.  Roelf sleeps on the floor. 

The cautious bonding between these two traditional arch enemies is brilliantly nuanced.    When they begin to use those formal, sentence-introducing words, “My friend, we take note.  My friend.  In the Beckett-like, existential gloom of the cemetery, the traditional enemies, prejudiced Afrikaner and wary Black South African, come together.

And as Roelf continues his driven search for the woman's grave, he gradually reealizes the meaning of this cemetery for unclaimed bodies and the implications for the lives of those buried here.  With the shock of hitting new territory, he recognizes what drove an unknown woman to place herself and her baby on the tracks of an oncoming train -- despair.  Raw empathy opens him to a new horror that displaces his obsession with vengeful cursing:  a human being can live and die belonging to no one.  Now he yearns to re-write the past so that he can put things to rights, he can claim her at her death. 

Energized by his new purpose, heedless of risk, not stopping for night, Roelf digs frenetically to find the woman's burial.  But it's Roelf's turn to cause an inadvertent tragedy -- for Simon.  Collateral damage.  As Roelf said early on of the woman who stepped in front of his train, if only people who wanted to commit suicide would just jump in the river, sparing others from involvement.

This outstanding play is brought to life by two magnificent actors.  Ritchie Coster conveys the lean, driven Roelf with his voice, his expression, his entire body in a great, generous performance:  the actor gives all.  (I missed some words because of the Afrikaner accent.)  Leon Addison Brown is powerful as Simon, large, dignified, uneducated, intelligent, wary but with human warmth: he holds the fulfillment of the play in his hands in the unforgettable last lines.

Directed by author Fugard, this is in all facets a brilliant production. Christopher H. Barreca’s design for the cemetery and Simon’s cabin, ingeniously included and heartbreakingly “furnished,” is tonally perfect, and real … I’ll never forget that sand, those hubcaps.  Stephen Strawbridge’s lighting makes one feel the passage of days within the play’s short running time, and Doug Wieselman’s original music supports the emotional content unobtrusively, allowing the Fugard’s dynamic action, canny dialog and magnificent language to come through.

For each man kills the thing he loves, 
Yet each man does not die.

                                                      Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol

The Train Driver  plays at the Pershing Square Signature Center in Manhattan’s Clinton district, West 42nd Street, through September 23rd.  For more information and tickets, click on live link of title. 

                                                                                   Yvonne Korshak

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OFF-BROADWAY ON LONG ISLAND – Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific, directed by Robert Boedeker, The North Fork Community Theatre, Matttituck, Long Island

... a complete world ...

Looking for an enchanted evening?  You couldn't find a better one than an evening spent at South Pacific -- beautifully produced and played by the North Fork Community Theatre.  

To hear right off the bat those wonderful show stoppers --- Some Enchanted Evening … A Cockeyed Optimist … Bloody Mary… and … well, it’s tremendously moving.   Of course what makes it powerful are the strong performances.   It’s almost shockingly beautiful when -- you’ve barely taken your seat -- Ryan Beodeker, as the mysterious French expatriate Emile De Becque, opens his expressive voice to Some Enchanted Evening and, before you’ve had a chance to recover from the power, Tess Leavay as Ensign Nellie Forbush surprises with A Cockeyed Optimist with her marvelous full range, totally professional voice and delivery.   We’re in great hands!

Set during World War II in and around a U.S. naval base, South Pacific focuses on two love stories, one between Nurse Nellie Forbush, the self-described “little hick” from Arkansas and Emile De Becque, the wealthy French planter with an equivocal past, who meet at a dance on the base on an evening whose enchantment, thanks to music, has risen to the realm of the great communal mythology.  

The other love story is that of Lt. Joseph Cable who comes to the base on a secret mission of great import and the native girl, Liat, the daughter of the lusty, vulgar, commercial-minded and oh so smart Bloody Mary, played with energizing vitality by Christina Stankewicz -- she’s just what you want in the part.  The adversities in the first story lead to growth and the deepest possible love and understanding;  those in the other lead to tragedy.   Through their stories we hear Rodgers', Hammerstein's and Logan's** sense of the tragedy of prejudice and vision of common humanity.     

For a wonderful South Pacific, Emile and Nellie have to be outstanding performers and passionate lovers and that's what we have here.  Tess Leavay is an all-round perfect Nellie!  She sings, dances and acts and completely captures the character of the bouncy, adorable nurse who grows to full womanhood through her experience and love of Emile.  Kelli O’Hara was a delight in the part at Lincoln Center Theatre in Manhattan a couple of years ago -- Tess Leavay seems to me her equal, and brings a kind of naturalism to the part that adds to its fullness.

When Nellie washes that man right out of her hair in a shower on stage* -- in the midst of all the fun, you really feel how hard it is to wash him out of her heart (though I wish she'd gotten a little wetter).  Frolicking in her over-sized sailor suit at the Thanksgiving Celebration (what a touch of genius that scene is !) with the irrepressible seabee Luther Billis (William Finn), she is some Honey Bun !  So’s Finn as Billis – in his grass skirt and coconuts, singing, dancing, and swarming all over the stage with irresistible charisma.          

Ryan Beodeker’s Emile is a seductive European with a wonderful French accent (so consistent I was really surprised to hear his American accent in at the end of the show when he spoke to the audience about the important project North Fork Community Theatre is engaged in to fully purchase its theatre).  As well as having a beautiful voice, he’s a fine actor and whether he’s gazing intently at Nelly, wooing her with words or singing to her, one feels what one has to feel -- his ardor.   These are all complex, fully woven characters and yet they come across with the direct hit of sheer romance.  

Abby Tyler and Peter Gwiazda play Emile's children "of mixed blood" with poise and grace, singing their song, Dites Moi, with uncloying, lovable simplicity. 

This is a full South Pacific -- 31 terrific performers in the cast and 11 in the orchestra that plays behind the lush, seductive tropical scenery, all put together seamlessly, with vitality and deep understanding by Director Robert Boedeker, Musical Director Jacob Boergessen, and the performing and production cast.

South Pacific is all the Bali Ha’i anyone could ever want.  If you try, you will find it -- at North Fork Community Theatre in Mattituck.

South Pacific plays at the North Fork Community in Mattituck, Long Island through Sunday, August 12th.  For more information on times and tickets, click on live link of title.

*Quiz:  In what current film does a character sing on stage in the shower?  (And is that where Woody Allen got the idea?)  Click here for answer -- to the first question.

Yvonne Korshak

*South Pacific's music was written by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, book by Oscar Hamerstein II and Joshua Logan, and was adapted from James A. Michener's Pulitzer Prize winning novel Tales of the South Pacific of 1947.  It premiered on Broadway in 1949 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1950. 

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FILM NOTE -- To Rome With Love, written and directed by Woody Allen

... keep laughing,Clown ...

With breathtakingly beautiful photography -- and the people are as fascinating to see as the city -- Woody Allen weaves together stories of lovers, Romans and visitors against the background of Rome.  As Allen, who acts in the film, tells us -- along with a few other things he wants us to know -- it's colored with a sweet nostalgia.

A young architect at the start of is career and his life of love, Jack (Jesse Eisenberg) is torn between his beautiful normal girlfriend, Sally (Greta Gerwig) and her best friend Monica (Ellen Page), a baby-faced over wise package of seduction who looks cute and talks dirty-suggestive.  Alec Baldwin is on hand as an architect in mid life, John, who retraces his own youthful time in Rome looking over Jack’s shoulder -- warning him of pitfalls and amused by the human comedy, with the delicious back-to-the past mystery and flavor of Midnight in Paris. 

Talk about fantasy -- Leopoldo Pisanello (Roberto Benigni) is an ordinary man swept up for no particular reason into a world of fame and glamour -- a hilarious study of media celebrity make-or-break.  Out of the blue, he walks the red carpet at movie premiers, effortlessly gets impossible to get reservations at fancy restaurants, has gorgeous women throwing themselves at him, and is interviewed on tv, his every choice, every detail of his existence -- does he shave before or after breakfast? does he wear boxers or briefs -- a national mania, that is, until someone else gets “picked”.  It’s a wonderful if outlandish satire played straight -- everyman down-to-earth and vulnerable -- by Benigni.  Life dishes out heartaches to everybody -- celebrities and unknowns -- Leopoldo’s erstwhile chauffeur tells him when the glory is over, but being a celebrity is better.  Thank you, Woody, for that info.

A newly married couple, Antonio and Milly, arrive in Rome but chance separates them and sets powerful temptation in their way -- and what seductions these are.  Antonio wins a pre-paid prize -- Penelope Cruz as Anna, a call girl -- simply gorgeous in a red dress, and with wonderful comic timing in the part.  Cruz is great.  Milly -- well it’s a little complicated -- is romanced by a famous movie star, Luca Salta (Antonio Albanese) from whom we learn that you don’t have to be handsome to be incredibly seductive (and it’s in himself, not just his fame and power).  It’s not how things turn out for her, though -- what happens is even funnier.

A pretty young American girl, Hayley (Alison Pill), looking for street directions, is aided by a handsome young Italian, named, of course, Michelangelo (Flavio Parenti) who offers to take her to her destination -- and that’s not much fantasy except here they get engaged!  For me, the sheer side-splitting laughs of the film spin out of their story.  Jerry (Woody Allen), Hayley’s father, an opera director fighting retirement, age and death -- Allen all the way -- arriving with his wife Phyllis (Judy Davis) to “meet the family,” shakes hands with Michelangelo’s father, a hard-working undertaker Giancarlo (the great tenor Fabio Armiliato) and from there we go to sheer wild hilarity.  Because Jerry discovers that Giancarlo has a great voice but only under very specific circumstances -- he has to be singing in the shower* -- which the entrepreneurial Jerry manages to reproduce at La Scala.  There Giancarlo sings Pagliacci, who clowns through his grief -- a glancing Woody Allen self-portrait.  And the great singing that fills the screen and the theater -- that’s part of the thrill of the movie too.  Wow! 

Leaving the theater, I heard people say, “Well, it’s entertaining,” in a sort of downplaying way.  Maybe so.  I thought the sheer intensity of the fantasy and abundance of its fulfillment, rooted in truly observed characters and satire, sends the film soaring.  This film casts humor into sheer joy.

* Quiz:  In what other theatrical story does a character sing onstage in the shower?  (And is that where Woody got the idea?)  For answer -- to the first question -- click here. 

Yvonne Korshak

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FringeNYC -- New York International Fringe Festival August 10-August 26, 2012 - for when, what and where and ticket information (press release)

Tickets Now On Sale For
*** NEW YORK INTERNATIONAL FRINGE FESTIVAL ***
16th Annual Festival Runs August 10 - 26, 2012

Tickets are now on sale for The 16th annual New York International Fringe Festival (FringeNYC), the largest multi-arts festival in North America, which runs August 10th - 26th, 2012.  FringeNYC will offer programming by 190 of the world's best emerging theatre troupes and dance companies in 20 venues in Lower Manhattan. With attendance topping 75,000 people, FringeNYC is New York City’s fifth largest cultural event (just behind New York International Auto Show, Tribeca Film Festival, New York City Marathon, and New York Comic Con). A complete list of shows with schedules is now available at www.FringeNYC.org  -- a downloadable guide is also available.

FringeNYC shows run 2pm - midnight weekdays and noon - midnight on weekends. Tickets are $15 in advance ($18 at the door) at www.FringeNYC.org or 866-468.7619. Discount passes for multiple shows will also available.  In 2012, many of New York City's most prominent downtown performance venues will host productions from around the globe as part of FringeNYC including SoHo Playhouse, Players Theater, Cherry Lane Theatre, La MaMa, New Ohio Theatre, Theatre 80, HERE, The Living Theatre  Connelly Theater, The Kraine, and Gene Frankel Theatre. For more information visit www.FringeNYC.org

In 1997, New York City became the seventh US city to host a fringe festival, joining Seattle, Chicago, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Houston, Orlando and San Francisco. In its first 15 years FringeNYC has presented nearly 3000 performing groups from the U.K., Canada, Poland, Ireland, Japan, China, Singapore, Germany, the Czech Republic and across the U.S., prompting Switzerland's national daily, The New Zurich Zeitung, to declare FringeNYC as “the premiere meeting ground for alternative artists.” In November 2007, FringeNYC was honored by Mayor Michael Bloomberg with the Mayor's Award for Arts & Culture for "showcasing the best and boldest theater and performance by both established and emerging artists," and "presenting work that reflects the excitement and energy of the contemporary theater world - locally, nationally and abroad.” The festival has also been the launching pad for numerous Off-Broadway and Broadway transfers, long-running downtown hits, and regional theater productions including Urinetown, Never Swim Alone, Debbie Does Dallas, Dog Sees God, 21 Dog Years, Krapp 39, Dixie’s Tupperware Party, Silence! The Musical, Matt & Ben, Bash'd, The Irish Curse, Jurassic Parq and The Fartiste and as well as movies (WTC View, Armless) and even a TV show (‘da Kink in My Hair). FringeNYC is a production of The Present Company, under the leadership of Producing Artistic Director Elena K. Holy.

Press Contact:  Ron Lasko @ 212-505-1700 x. 11, ron@spincyclenyc.com

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Off-Broadway on Shelter Island, Long Island – The Tempest by William Shakespeare, directed by Sarah Hankins, music by Melanie Closs, at Sylvester Manor's Windmill, Green Theatre Collective

... Prospero on Shelter Island ...

At the beginning, Ariel heads the storm tossed boat like a great, gleaming figurehead, thrown now this way now that by the waves and wind but at the same steady, distant, a spirit beyond the terror of those aboard who grip the ropes that are the boat in this wondrously outdoors presentation of Shakespeare’s Tempest by the Green Theatre Collective.  It’s brilliant staging by Sarah Hankins, acrobatic, all-out acting, and a hint of things to come in this outstanding production.

The play is presented on the lawn facing the windmill dating to around the time of The Tempest, on the Sylvester Manor farm.  Bring a blanket to sit on -- the actors have laid out blankets, too, with minimal props and costume changes (here a scarf, there a jacket).  A rope lying on the grass marks the stage.  No barriers.  How quickly we are in their world!

Jessica Giannone as Ariel, masked, wields some magic, helped by a masked Spirit.  Photo Robert Ruben  

Prospero explains to Miranda the circumstances which brought them to this island where, beyond themselves, there are only Ariel, the gross, sensual Caliban, and some numinous spirits hovering between being and imagination.  Prospero has to provide an explanation because, through his magic, and the powers of his spirit servant Ariel, their isolation is about to end with the landing of a parcel of Europeans whom Prospero for his own purposes has drawn in from the shipwreck.  Among them are Prosperos' evil brother Antonio who usurped Prospero’s Dukedom of Milan and Antonio’s friend Alonso, the King of Naples.

With the arrival of the shipwrecked men, Shakespeare wastes no time to show us that while raw nature -- the island before Prospero arrived -- is rank with witchery and torture, the civilized Europeans are no better.  Greed and drunkenness abound, murderous plots arise on the dime.  No one in power is safe: not Antonio, nor Alonso, nor Prospero himself.  Aptly, and in keeping with the interpenetration of the natural world and the workings of human beings that suffuses this production, as the conspirators spun their plots, an osprey seeking prey circled high above the actors and audience.

Two of the venial retainers, Stephano and Trinculo, coming upon Caliban, take refuge with him, tease him, delude him, mock him and exploit him -- all the things that “civilized” people do with those they regard as “savages” -- and this is written early in the Age of Exploration.  The actors bring to life Shakespeare's wildly inventive comic situations, madly imaginative misunderstandings and gross and profoundly witty jokes of double meanings with such vitality, athletics and exuberance the the audience burst into applause.

Dave Shaw as a Caliban leaps, over-excited by the new brew -- wine -- that David Gautchy as Stephano (L) and Brendan Boland as Trinculo (R) have introduced him to.  Photo:  Robert Ruben 

Miranda’s naïve wonder offsets the cynicism of the wheeler-dealers -- but how trustworthy is love at first sight?  The first of the shipwrecked men she sees is the handsome young Ferdinand, son of Naples' King.  Setting eyes upon his good looks (the only men she's known up to now are Caliban and her father), she's thrilled at what she regards as an emissary of a brave new world.  (Would it were so.)

Reading a man's good looks as virtue can get a girl into a lot of trouble but luckily Ferdinand’s as much in love with Miranda as she with him: he doesn’t let her down, and holds to the vows of pre-nuptial chastity Prospero exacts from him -- and, youth being youth, it's lucky the wedding comes soon!  It’s attended -- enhanced, enlarged, enchanted -- by wonderfully singing spirits of the island.  Another creature of nature joined the cast when, just in time for the wedding, a grey dove, bird of love, lit on the edge of the windmill’s roof and watched the proceedings from its high perch.

Prospero accomplishes all his purposes:  he recovers his Dukedom, chastises his brother appropriately -- but finds it in himself to forgive, and settles his daughter into a royal marriage.  Now he can fulfill his promise to free Ariel, and set aside his powers to enchant, parallel with Shakespeare who sets aside his powers to enchant -- by ending the play.  But first Shakespeare reminds us of his purposeful desire -- to entertain.  That he does.

The naturalism of the production makes the play very close, clear and immediate.  Never has Prospero’s isle seemed more magical.  Never has being outside, and near the actors, seemed more essential to the full experience of theater -- except, that is, for last summer, when this talented group of strolling players in this same venue produced an unforgettable As You Like It.

Melanie Closs’s music is so delicate and evocative that when the characters speak of the unearthly beauty of the music on Prospero’s island, one hears it just that way.  It’s part of the magic.

The six fine, young actors of the cast all play several parts except for Jessica Giannone, who plays, leaps, dances, and sings the ubiquitous Ariel.

Often they play their opposites.  David Gautchy, who plays the wise but mysterious Prospero, is also Stephano, the drunken steward who cavorts with Trinculo and Caliban.

Dave Shaw is an aggressively physical, athletic, distorted figure of a man as Caliban -- as well as the courtier Gonzalo who in kindness had originally saved Prospero and the baby Miranda.

Hal Fickett, a love smitten Ferdinand, uses inventive body language to convey a cynical Sebastian.

Gina Fickett plays the wonder-filled ingénue, Miranda, who becomes a woman through her love for Ferdinand, and quickly takes on a mannish gait and voice to play none other than Prospero’s evil brother, Antonio.

Brendan Boland is the brooding King of Naples who believes his son is lost at sea, and also an agile drunk, Trinculo, who seeking cover from a storm, finds himself sharing a blanket with the decidedly smelly Caliban.

I felt what theater at its best can make you feel -- exhilarated and enlarged.  I thought -- and think -- I'm lucky to have seen Green Theatre Collective's The Tempest.   Try your luck, too!

The Tempest  played July 14th and 15th at Sylvestor Manor, Shelter Island and plays at Quail Hill Farm, The Apple Orchard, in Amagansett July 18th, 19th, 20th, 21st and 22nd.  For times, tickets, and other information, click on live link of title.

David Gautchy takes a bow in the white jacket that "makes him" Prospero the Duke of Naples, with left to right Hal Fickett, Gina Fickett, Dave Shaw and, far right, Brendan Boland.  Jessica Giannone is (unfortunately, apologies Miss Giannone) behind David Gautchy, maybe because Ariel does disappear in the end.   Photo:  Robert Ruben
                                                                                            

                                                                                            Yvonne Korshak

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OFF-BROADWAY ON LONG ISLAND -- Men’s Lives by Joe Pintauro, adapted from the book by Peter Matthiessen, directed by Harris Yulin, Bay Street Theatre, Sag Harbor

... endangered species ...

Men’s Lives tells the story of what happens to fishermen on the East End of Long Island when the forces of change and politics put an end to the only way they know to make a living.  No more skeining with big nets, comes the law from Albany.  And with that, their way of life, based on a tradition of 300 years, is sucked out from under them the way, when you’re standing near the surf, the waves pull the sand out from under your feet.

In order to dramatize Matthiessen’s epic book, Pintauro makes the sensible dramatic choice of focusing on a single iconic fisherman’s family, a father who knew the good times and huge hauls, his three sons who all love the fisherman’s life, and a tough, loving, mother who owns the old house set in sand dunes facing the sea.  Nevertheless, so much is said rather than shown, one feels one’s being informed rather than engaged.

As the story unfolds on a set evoking the sand dunes and the cries of sea birds, we learn that times have been hard -- Alice, the mother, recently and in secret, took out a mortgage on the house to keep food on the table but still, the men are seeing the sparsity of the great game fish, the striped bass, as cyclical, sure they’ll come back.

When William, the youngest boy, is washed overboard and drowns, the family draws upon a stoic fatalism, part of their fisherman’s inherited way of life, and holds together.  But they can’t overcome the second blow: the NY State government in Albany bans their way of fishing for stripers, seining with big nets.  This legislation is favored by environmentalists and based on environmental and fish stock benefits but, it’s indicated, the real force behind the legislation is self-serving political pressure brought to bear by wealthy sports fisherman, ‘the rod and reelers.”

The play fails to sort out the significance of the environmental issue.  Is Walt, the father, really correct in thinking that because in the past there have been swarms of fish, they'll be there in the future?  Experience and common sense indicate that sweeping the seas with large nets leads to endangered fish populations.  (Sometime the loaded, heavy fishermen’s nets needed to be dragged in with the use of tractors, a point not made in the play.) 

But whatever the truths of the issues, the fact is that these men’s admirable qualities of stamina, muscle, intimate knowledge of the fish and the waters, and courage against the elements are now useless, and so they feel irrelevant, helpless and without purpose.  They drink, they flounder at other jobs, they die prematurely.  Their fishing dory -- open boat -- breaks up, their house collapses, becoming no more than an odd-shaped lump among the dunes.  Only Peter, representing the author Matthiessen, who has wandered as a character throughout the play, sympathetic to the fishermen’s plight but unable to help, survives and comes in to his own purpose, to bear witness.

Men’s Lives tells an important story of what happens when a way to earn an honest living becomes obsolete.  It is a tragic story and highly topical, particularly in a world of fast technological change.  Here and there the play comes to dramatic life, particularly when Deborah Hedwall as a gritty, determined Alice is pushing her men -- unfortunately to do the impossible.  In a memorable episode, Scott Thomas Hinson as Popeye, the friend, dances his own drowning.  Generally, though, I didn’t believe these actors had the wind in their hair and the waves at their back -- especially Peter McRobbie, a fine actor but who here as the father, Walt, who would seem more at home with a pipe and a good book in his study than on that small open boat. 

Joe Pintauro’s play Raft of the Medusa, also about a group of men struggling to survive against great odds, with the sea as metaphor, and recently presented off-Broadway in NYC, has far more intrinsic drama.  But what Men’s Lives lacks in drama, it partially makes up for in history.  I read the book awhile back but I’m glad to have seen the play as a refresher, all the more because I know how nowadays you can fish a full day east of Gardiner’s Bay, where these men took their boats, without catching a single striped bass “keeper” -- even the once incredibly abundant blue fish, described in the play, are hard to find.

This is the 20 year revival of the play that inaugurated the Bay Street Theatre in 1992.  Men's Lives has special meaning for being played in Sag Harbor, on Long Island's East End, and the play itself, first presented during a Baymen’s protest, and with several Baymen attending the first performance, has its own dramatic history.  For more on its background, and for other information and tickets, click on this live link: Men’s Lives.

Yvonne Korshak

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OFF-BROADWAY IN LONG ISLAND -- My Brilliant Divorce by Geraldine Aron, directed by Matt McGrath, with Polly Draper, Bay Street Theatre, Sag Harbor

This is a one-person show in which Angela, a 44-year old woman, recounts the story of her divorce, from her husband’s abrupt announcement that he's leaving her through her stages of coping -- better and worse. The play itself is mainly cliché and the pleasure of watching it -- and it is fun if you find yourself there -- is thanks to Polly Draper’s fascinating style, backed up by the stunning set.

Polly Draper is worldly and vulnerable at the same time.  She’s tall and slim and wears her clothes marvelously.  She’s beautiful and not overdone.  She’s wry and sad, amusing and just the OK side of desperate.  She’s fun to be with, even in her miserable predicaments.  The set matches her in an abstract way, vertical, sleek, askew but balanced.

We learn what happens to her and her inward responses through direct monolog as well as dramatic interchanges in which Miss Draper voices several parts, shifting among multiple accents and from male to female at a fast clip.  Divorce is a rotten story: and whether you’ve gone through it or not, you know enough to recognize its ins-and-outs and phases. 

She copes with her shaken sense of self-worth, her husband leaves her for a younger woman (the universal “bimbo”, of course).  Her grown daughter is distant and no help.  Her mother ranges from disinterested to accusatory.  She herself ranges from self-righteous to self-accusatory (the play could have used more of Angela looking into herself and learning; what it provides of that is cursory.)  The absent husband ranges from initial generosity -- “You will want for nothing” -- to war over money that brings her to near-poverty.  She needs a job but, as a woman out of the job-market, and fiscally well taken care for many years, she's lost her skills -- an all-too common stuation.  She thinks she wants him back but, when the opportunity actually arises, she doesn't act.  Now he wants to "return home", now he’s on to yet another bimbo.

She hangs in there through it all, and moves to a better place.  Had she also moved to a deeper self-knowledge, the play would have more heft.  As it is, it’s something like a stand-up comic bit, one with some good laughs, thanks to Miss Draper’s timing in conveying her own rueful understanding of all that befalls her.  It's light fare, not really a play but a skit blown up to a play.

My Brilliant Divorce plays at Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor, Long Island through June 24.  For more information and tickets, click on live link of title.

Yvonne Korshak

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Tiny Dynamite by Abi Morgan, directed by Matt Torney, with Christian Conn, Blake DeLong and Olivia Horton, Origin Theatre Company at 59E59

… if only I’d …

If only I could have a do-over!  What a frustrating experience it is to fail to come up with the right words at a critical moment – and pay for it, it seems, forever after. Tiny Dynamite gives a chance for a do-over.

Lucien and Anthony are friends on their annual get-away-from it all rural vacation, paid for by Lucien, a regular guy, though somewhat shy, employed in “risk management.”  Anthony’s a risk taker, imaginative, energetic and disorganized -- he’s never totally recovered from a lightening strike when he was 6 years old.  They encounter Madeleine, an appealing, down-to-earth, take-care-of-herself any which way kind of girl when she delivers their groceries.

Anthony's full of fun, if not fully competent.  Lucien's a staid breadwinner.

Which one will Madeleine go for?

What will be the two guys’ alternate courting styles?

And will the romantic rivalry wreck their long-standing friendship?

Anthony and Madeleine are beautifully invented characters, and watching them in action is the heart of the play’s fun.  Anthony's zany but on target about people, aware of his own mental deficiencies but not over wary, almost OK mentally, and so physically and emotionally appealing, as athletically portrayed by Blake DeLong, that one roots for him, or at least I did.  Madeleine is an alluring fantasy of a girl drifting but sure of herself, and, as acted by Olivia Horton, not only amusing but wonderfully amused.  Joy of life seems on their side.

We learn gradually that spontaneous as this triangle seems, with plenty of "let's have a picnic," “let’s go swimming” and “let’s make love”, this triangle is emotionally fraught, a replay of an unfulfilled one from the past in which Lucien the shy one, hadn’t come up with … those right words.  Now, thanks to Anthony -- in a long line of fascinating saintly fools in literature and theater -- Lucien gets another chance.

Does he take it?

And even more important -- do we care?

Unfortunately Lucien as a character just can’t compete with the charisma of Anthony and Madeleine, yet he’s the one on whom the others’ actions ultimately turn. This makes the motivations seem forced, assigned by the playwright instead of growing naturally out of the characters' personalities.

Christian Conn as Lucien has the unenviable job of being the “organization man” in this three-some.  In terms of the play he’s central but in terms of the play’s appeal he matters the least.  Go see this play to enjoy Anthony and Madeleine cavort with their bound-about physicality and sense of the possibilities of summer, close-up in an intimate theatre (two seating rows deep), two beautifully observed and wonderfully recognizable characters who are great fun to watch.

Tiny Dynamite plays at 59E59 Theatre in mid-town Manhattan through July 1.  For more information and tickets, click on live link of title.

Yvonne Korshak  

Comments very welcome.  Scroll down, click on "comments," write in comment box and click on "post."  Emails are private -- no emails ever apppear with comments.                

2011-2012 Patrick Lee Theater Bloggers Awards -- Independent Theater Bloggers Association

The Independent Theater Bloggers Association (the “ITBA”) is proud to announce the 2012 recipients of the Fourth Annual Patrick Lee Theater Blogger Awards, (the “the Patricks”).   Patrick Lee was one of the ITBA's founding members. Patrick, who passed away suddenly in June 2010, was an erudite, passionate, and tireless advocate for theater in all its forms. Patrick was also the ITBA's first awards director, and was a regular contributor to Theatermania and TDF Stages.

 The 2011-2012 Patrick Lee Theater Blogger Award Winners:

OUTSTANDING ENSEMBLE PERFORMANCE

"Peter and the Starcatcher"

CITATIONS FOR EXCELLENCE BY INDIVIDUAL PERFORMERS (Across Off-Broadway, Off-Off Broadway, and Broadway

Nina Arianda in "Venus in Fur"

Christian Borle in "Peter and the Starcatcher"

Philip Boynkin in "The Gershwins' Porgy & Bess"

Danny Burstein in "Follies"

James Corden in "One Man Two Guvnors"

Santino Fontana in "Sons of a Prophet"

Judy Kaye in "Nice Work If You Can Get It"

Judith Light in "Other Desert Cities"

Jan Maxwell in "Follies"

Lindsay Mendez in "Godspell"

Terri White in "Follies"

OUTSTANDING NEW BROADWAY MUSICAL

"Once"

OUTSTANDING NEW BROADWAY PLAY

"Peter and the Starcatcher"

 OUTSTANDING BROADWAY MUSICAL REVIVAL

"Follies"

OUTSTANDING BROADWAY PLAY REVIVAL

"Death of a Salesman"

OUTSTANDING NEW OFF-BROADWAY PLAY

"Sons of the Prophet"

OUTSTANDING OFF-OFF-BROADWAY PLAYS

"Samuel & Alasdair: A Personal History of the Robot War" at The New Ohio Theatre

&

"She Kills Monsters" at the Flea Theatre

UNIQUE OFF-OFF BROADWAY EXPERIENCE

"The Tenant" by Woodshed Collective

 CITATION FOR EXCELLENCE IN OFF-OFF BROADWAY THEATRE

The Flea Theatre

OUTSTANDING SOLO SHOW/PERFORMANCES (Across Broadway, Off- Broadway and Off-Off Broadway

Hugh Jackman, "Back on Broadway"

Denis O'Hare, "An Iliad," New YorkTheatre Workshop

Zoe Caldwell, "Elective Affinities," Soho Rep

Juan Francisco Villa,  "Empanada for a Dream," presented by Ballybeg at Barrow Group 

Stephen Spinella, "An Illiad," New York Theatre Workshop

Daniel Kitson, "It's Always Right Now Until It's Later"

Lorinda Lositza,  "Triumphant Baby"

OUTSTANDING NEW OFF-BROADWAYMUSICAL

"Now. Here. This."

 

The ITBA, is comprised of bloggers who regularly see live performances in all forms in New York City and beyond.   Members are in New York, Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis, and London.  For further information and a list of our members, see our website at www.theaterbloggers.com.  If you are interested in learning more about the ITBA, email info@theaterbloggers.com.  To invite the members of the ITBA to your show or event, please send an email to  invite@theaterbloggers.com

 

Cloud City by Tomas Saraceno -- on the Roof ... and above it – The Metropolitan Museum of Art Roof Garden, through November 12, 2012 (weather permitting)

Cloud City is a shimmering, spacious delight that plays with space and gravity and takes you to a new place.  What an adventure! 

What do you see when you arrive at the roof?  a very large  structure with lots of angles mirroring the sky and everything around it  --  webs and frames recall a geodesic dome only all the geometries here are irregular.  It defies any simple equations and seems freely morphing -- like a kind of globular life.  From some angles it rests calmly;  from others it reaches out into space.  There’s a paradox:  it seems floating and immaterial even as you see with your eyes that it’s weighty and built and cabled to the roof and with a mighty base.  It’s not just something to look at:  those climbing in, around and above animate it with the vitality of life itself -- sure-footed life that is (those who aren’t sure-footed are counseled to skip the climb).

But whether you climb or not, your reflection reaches its angled heights.  Take a picture from below of your reflection up there, as in the photo on the left. Everyone who visits makes it to the clouds in one way or another.  Everyone  there becomes a citizen of Cloud City

Some facts:  Cloud City was commissioned and made specifically for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s roof garden.  It consists of 16 interconnected modules made of transparent and reflecting materials and – to give you a sense of scale -- it’s 54 feet long, 29 feet wide and 28 feet high.  While this Cloud Cities is site specific it’s part of a series of works by this Argentinian artist that suggest an ecological continuum between our world and space.  It brings with it a sense of habitation, suggesting a sketchy vision of new and creative human environments, on earth and in space. 

Buoyant ands gleaming, Cloud City lifts the heart and shines in the imagination.

Art on the roof – among the great treasures of Summer in NYC. 

This is the 15^th year the Metropolitan Museum has presented art on the roof.  Last year it was Anthony Caro on the roof, the year before that Doug and Mike Starm's site-specific Big Bambu.

Fun to know:  Refreshments – sandwiches, snacks, desert, beverages including espresso, cappuccino, iced tea, soft drinks, wine and beer – are available at the little café on the Roof Garden daily from 10 am to closing (weather permitting).  An “ARTini” bar is open on the Roof Garden  Friday and Saturday evenings 5:39 – 8 pm.

Museum hours generally Fridays and Saturdays 9:30 am – 9 pm;  Sundays, Tuesdays-Thursdays 9:30 am – 5:30 am.

For more information on visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Cloud City, on the Metropolitan Museum’s suggested admissions prices (what you pay is actually your option), and, if you wish, for requesting tickets for climbing in the structure, click on www.metmuseum.org/saraceno .  Tickets for climbing up into the structure are timed and limited so if you think you want to do that, check the site and make your plans.    

Yvonne Korshak

Comments very welcome.  Scroll down, click on "comments," write in comment box and click on "post."  Emails are private -- no emails ever appear with comments.

Cloud City is fascinating but that other city -- NYC -- seems even more fascinating ... ! 

 

FILM NOTE – The Intouchables starring Francois Cluzet and Omar Sy, directed by Olivier Nakache and Erik Toledano (in French with English titles)

                                                    … opposites attract …

This movie is a delight.  The Intouchables is about a hugely rich French man who became paraplegic in an accident and hires against the odds a big Black man originally from Senegal to be his caregiving man -- his arms and legs essentially and to take care of him in every way -- and the liberation they each bring to each other in their different ways.  It's a comedy, with lots of joyous laughs and continually interesting characters.  The photography is stunning, with the contrast between the totally gorgeous rich house, and the child-crammed chaotic apartment in the housing projects of the Paris suburbs where the Black man's family lives powerfully well described.

The contrasts between the two men are fully drawn:  Philippe, in late middle age, is a lover of classical music and literature and an art collector.  He’s The Establishment, living in his luxurious, serene mansion filled with a sense of hereditary and current imnportance -- but he’s physically helpless.  Far from The Establishment, Driss is a petty thief, Black and poor, with a brutal rupture in his past:  as a boy, he was sent by his parents from his home in Senegal to Paris to live with an Aunt and, as the movie begins, Driss’s Aunt, having given up on him, throws the big, muscular, unruly guy out of her apartment. 

He only interviews for the position of Philippe's caregiver because he needs a signature to verify he’s looked for work in order to qualify for his government “benefit”.  But in the face of the more apparently qualified candidates who line up for the job, Philippe hires him.  Improbable, yet all the more wonderful because we know that this film is based on a true story.  Philippe recognizes Driss's  outstanding vitality:  not only his exceptional physical strength -- the very opposite of his own limp limbs and useless back -- but also his originality and emotional daring, a dynamism that was once his own but is now largely sapped by his incapacity.

They have a lot to offer each other.  Rambunctious Driss pulls Philippe out of himself, caring for him in the bodily sense, but also driving him to new adventures which Philippe can enjoy with the wonderfully strong surrogate arms and legs of Driss always there to protect him -- except for occasional distractions.  Philippe has a few adventures to show Driss, too.  And Driss, though stricken by an evening of 4 hours ahead of German opera, absorbs a great deal not only about art and literature but about a mode of being in which one can work toward what one wants, and control a measure of ones existence.

And eventually Driss engineers a romantic interest for Philippe -- and for the housekeepr Yvonne.  In fact, great, big, unangelic Driss is a sort of Cupid in this movie. 

Francois Cluzet as Philippe is elegant, sophisticated, and -- seeking a way beyond his incapacity -- is ready to seize the day: his subtely allows us to understand the suffering his paralysis causes him, and there’s also great appeal in his readiness to enjoy -- and all that money has a charisma of its own, which helps him get the girl.  Omar Sy as Driss is so big, his physical power, his know-how, his fast learning curve, and fundamental ethical quality inspire so much confidence, that you have to love him just as Philippe does.   This down and out ex-con is a man who, it turns out, is truly one who takes good care … of Philippe and others.  It’s a funny, unexpected and inspiring character beautifully acted by Sy.

The Intouchables is very much like the movie The King’s Speech.  In both, a funcctional incapacity in someone at the top, Philippe’s paralysis, the King of England’s stutter, catalyzes a meeting with an aide far down the social and economic scale -- Driss;  George VI’s  speech therapist.  The unlikely connection, loaded with incongruities ripe for laughter and touching moments, develops into a deep friendship.  And all the better in this type of film, neither of these is fiction:  both of these profound relationship are based on real life, and, in fact, lasted beyond the time frame of the movie, for the rest of all the characters’ lives.  In this way, both films project a gratifying sense of some fundamental unity of our society, and the resolution of class conflicts -- of racial conflict as well in The Intouchables.  Both films leave us feeling that we’re all in it together and that our common humanity transcends class, economic disparities, and contrasts in opportunity.  It’s a spurious sense of unity -- and one of the reasons we go to the movies.  You’re filled with a happy glow while applauding the film with every one else in the audience, while leaving the theater, and beyond.  No wonder these are both, as The Intouchables describes itself, “crowd pleasers.”  And. yes, I still feel the glow.

Yvonne Korshak 

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Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman, directed by David Staller, The Irish Repertory Theatre and Gingold Theatrical Group

Man and Superman is a totally delightful evening of theater that lifts you from yourself with enjoyment and -- thinking about it after -- reminds you of what theater is all about.  It couldn’t be better.  It’s a romantic comedy as well as a play of ideas that spins off from the story of Don Juan, particularly the Don Giovanni of Mozart’s opera, though with a bit of Faust, and Milton's Satan thrown in.  Shaw subtitled it "A Comedy and a Philosophy."

With the death of her father, Ann Whitefield, an entrancing and feisty young woman, is placed in the hands of two male guardians (even though, in early 20th-century England, she has a mother) Jack, a young, wealthy, and wittily ironic iconoclast and author of theThe Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion, and the older, stuffy, conventionally minded and reactionary Roebuck Ramsden.

The free thinker Jack and the old guard Ramsden agree on only one thing: that Ann should marry Octavius who adores her.  But she only toys with his infatuation, giving him the affectionate but romantically dismissive nickname, Ricky Ticky Tavy.  We -- and the characters -- catch on to a love triangle:  Octavius loves Ann who loves Jack AND we can tell that Jack loves Ann, too, but he is so leary of being ensnared in marriage that he doesn’t recognize that he loves her … or at least, he’s the last to admit it. 

There’s another pair of lovers, Violet, Octavius’ sister, secretly married to Hector, son of an American millionaire.  And there’s Straker, Jack’s car mechanic and chauffeur, representative of the proletariat -- who has many of the really great lines, but don't worry, there are plenty left over for everybody else.  This play is a feast of language.  No wonder Shaw compared himself to Shakespeare.

The whole crew goes driving in two cars, when cars are still a novelty, from England to Spain, all the way South to Granada. There, dislocated from their home base in England, the imagination opens to new vistas. 

On the road, Jack and Tanner are held up for their car by the exotic, mysterious brigand, Mendoza: that night, falling asleep in the wilds of Mendoza’s desert, Jack dreams the great and famous scene of “Don Juan in Hell”.  Before our eyes, asleep on the desert floor, Jack rises, dressed in embroidered vest and bandeleras, knee ties and, finally, the plumed hat with the swooping brim of his own distant ancestor, Don Juan.  He's now in hell, and a Faustian Mendoza, dark and dapper, has become in Jack's dream the Devil in sleek dinner dress.  The two argue, words flowing bountifully, the great issues of human existence, relationships between men and women, capitalism and the exploitation of labor, human nature and life on earth, and the question of whether it's better to spend eternity in heaven or in hell.  Like everything in this play drenched with ironic opposites, that's a surprisingly tricky question.  

When Ann, much to her own surprise, arrives in hell, her costume -- Gypsy bodice and fluffy white bloomers -- is as witty, expressive and eye-filling as Don Juan's.  Ramsden -- now the Statue, Ann’s father Il Commendatore in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, drops by on a visit from heaven:  “I have my share of vanity," he says, "for as a young man I was admired by women, and as a statue I’m praised by art critics.”

Which then is, actually, the better place to be?  Heaven seems boring, and Hell has turned out to be a pleasure palace.  No fire and brimstone here, the Devil’s a gentleman for whom “beauty is good to look at ... music is good to hear ... love is good to feel ... and they are all good to think about and talk about.”   But, Don Juan retorts, “Here there is nothing but love and beauty. Ugh!”

Don Juan is a reformer, a prophet burdened by the evils and injustices of the world and seized by a purpose beyond himself -- to improve the world.  As a Philosophic man, he seeks heaven where he can contemplate the Life Force and affect things for the better.   How is not clear but one thing’s for sure: “The philosopher is Nature’s pilot,” he says … “ to be in hell is to drift; to be in heaven is to steer.” 

To which the Devil plays a really top card in the deck -- the freedom card:  “I prefer to be my own master and not the tool of any blundering universal force.”

Women seek improvement in their biologically driven way, through propagation that may lead to a superman:  thus they are central to the Life Force and Ann, as things turn out, is no exception.  Watch out, Jack.

It’s hard to remember a play so perfectly cast as this one. The acting is universally superb.  Max Gordon Moore plays Jack with manly strength combined with scampish vigor of a stand-up comic that fully expresses his iconoclastic take on absolutely everything.  Janie Brookshire is tough and charming as the Life Force at work.

Jonathan Hammond is irresistible as the seductive Mendoza, a cynical realist except that romantic love drives this worldly sophisticate to write dreadful poetry. 

As Octavius, Will Bradley stops at exactly the right place short of camp in expressing his idealizing romantic love, not man enough for Anne but man enough to carry an eternally broken heart. 

Brian Murray fascinates as the rigid but not heartless Ramsden, dense but not a fool;  one believes everything this wonderful actor does and at one and the same time marvels at how he does it.

Laurie Kennedy as Mrs. Whitefield, Paul O’Brien as Malone, Margaret Loesser Robinson as Violet, Brian Sgambati as Straker, and Zachary Spicer as Hector are all amusing, touching, and true to their parts.   That these highly individualized characters work together so well as an ensemble is surely due to the vision of the Director, David Staller. 

So who wins the heaven vs. hell argument between Don Juan and the Devil?  As the Devil says, “… men get tired of everything, of heaven no less than of hell … ”  But you won’t get tired of this play!  Man and Superman takes ones breath away with its succinct and knowing brilliance, and with the magic of that other world that Jack discovers when he dreams his dream. 

Man and Superman  plays at the Irish Repertory Theatre in Manhattan's Chelsea district through June 17, 2012 EXTENDED through July 1st!  For information and tickets, click on live link of title.

Yvonne Korshak

Comments very welcome.  Scroll down, click on "comments," write in comment box and click on "post."  Emails are totally private -- no emails ever appear with comments.

 

Don’t Dress For Dinner by Marc Camoletti, adapted by Robin Hawdon, with Ben Daniels, Dam James, Patricia Kalember and Jennifer Tilly, directed by John Tillinger

Don’t Dress for Dinner  -- and don’t see this show either.  I went because I read somewhere it was really funny.   It is, for about ten minutes.

But the rest is an uninspired cliche -- though well performed in madcap farce style -- a play about a weekend somewhere outside of Paris where the English husband thinking his English wife will be elsewhere invites his French mistress (though Jennifer Tilly makes no attempt to seem French in the role) and hires a French cook for a really sweet time but things get complicated when a family friend the wife is having an affair with shows up and the wife decides to stick around so everyone has to pretend that the cook is really the family friend's girlfriend -- or his niece, depending who's being lied to -- and that the mistress is the cook who doesn’t know how to cook and yellow gooky food ends up all over the lap of the family friend so then ...  oh well, you get the idea. 

It’s all thoroughly predictable including the fact that who ends up with who is a mere matter of who's available -- in a word it’s crude.

The funny part?  Early on, in Act I, when the mistaken identities first get going, the plain-girl cook, wittily played by Spender Hayden, enthusiastically takes on the part of an ultra-sophisticated high class French woman who tosses down her drinks and dances the tango with gusto.   And for a brief while, Jennifer Tilly is amusing as the mistress thrust into role of the cook who doesn’t know her baked alaska from her quiche -- basically she plays herself and that’s kind of fun.

There’s a bit of the women taking off their tops almost in sight of the audience, and Tilly eventually emerges in a soft porn corset and garter belt outfit which she makes the most of -- she really is an uninhibited performer!  And I did enjoy her throaty, little girl voice. 

But you can be sure this sitcom a) goes on too long and b) ends -- no surprise here -- with a routine "whoever's left over" partnering up for sex that leaves a bad taste that all but wipes away the interlude of good fun in Act I. 

 Don’t bother.

Don't Dress For Dinner , produced by Roundabout Theatre Company, plays at the American Airlines Theatre on West 42nd Street in Manhattan.  For information and tickets, click on live link of title. 

 

Yvonne Korshak

Comments very welcome.  Scroll down, click on "comments," write in comment box and click on "post."  Emails are private -- no emails ever appear with comments.

End of the Rainbow by Peter Quilter, with Tracie Bennet, Michael Cumpsty, Tom Pelphrey, Jay Russell, directed by Terry Johnson

End of the Rainbow tells the story of the last weeks of Judy Garland’s Life.  Addicted to drugs and alcohol, and debt ridden, she’s spiraling downward -- but her personality, on and off-stage, is as charismatic as ever.  In London for a concert series, she’s staying in a lavish suite in a high end hotel (great set) with two men in tow: the young lover, Mickey, she's taken on as her manager because he's good looking -- not the best reason to hire a business manager -- and who's in it for what he can get out the fading star, and Anthony, her long-time piano accompanist, who's gay, loyal, and truly loves her. 

Judy uses her star-power charm and desperate excess in dizzying rotation to get whatever she wants.  When the hotel manager demands payment, she stands on the window sill threatening to jump, confident that, she tells Mickey and Anthony, the hotel won’t want Dorothy splattered all over their pavement.  And they don’t.   But mostly what she wants is booze and pills, which she sneaks or wheedles from the two men who are trying to keep her sober enough to make her performances.  

Judy’s performance are fully staged with Anthony at the piano and a full on-stage backup band.  Tracie Bennet, as Judy, belts out the great songs associated with Garland.  Sometimes being juiced intensifies Judy’s performance.  At other times it’s a hazard -- she forgets her lines, forgets which song she’s singing -- yet, she can get away with it.  Her audience, broad but with a strong gay component, forgives her, loves her for her forceful delivery of the songs, loves her for her goofs, just loves her. 

Anyhow, if she isn’t high, she won’t go on.   Realizing this, Mickey changes tactics:  he feeds her habits, revealing he’s only in it for himself (Judy tried to think otherwise but we've known he’s a sleaze bag all along).   Anthony offers to take her away from all this to a quiet protected life but she turns him down.  And, we learn, that not much after this Judy dies from an overdose, said to be accidental but suicide’s been in the air from that first foray on the window sill.     

The situation is a framework for Judy to sing some wonderful songs of the 50’s and ‘60’s associated with her, including of course “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”.  The play is just a vehicle:  in that, it's like cabaret but while Bennet is an excellent vocal stylist in a torch singer’s mode -- not quite Garland’s -- it’s not a voice you'd go to cabaret to hear.  She’s fun to watch, and costumes are gorgeous and her way of moving within them exciting, but hard as she works, she doesn’t have an irresistible voice:  Judy Garland did.   

It’s as an actress, though, that Bennet is superb, petite, and with a dancer’s flexibility and stamina, and gives a fine portrait of an alcoholic, drug ridden, physically jerky, desperate and proud star.  But the play is all on the surface, making no attempt to give insight into the source of Judy’s personal anguish¸ and the repetitive plot is mainly a lot of her going for the bottle, or the pills, and reeling around with their effect.  The suspense is mainly about will she or won’t she be able to get through her radio interview?  Her performances?  

As Anthony, the brilliant actor Michael Cumpsty comes across well with a Scottish accent and tender caring for Judy.  Handsome Tom Pelphrey's wooden performance as the stud, Mickey, indicates that the casting director's reasons for hiring him were as thin as Judy's.  

I didn’t see Judy Garland come to life in End of the Rainbow, nor hear her voice nor her style.  The show’s gotten some “rave” reviews and -- full disclosure -- the audience all around me seemed to love it, and gave Traci Bennet a standing ovation.  But I found, in spite of Miss Bennet’s fine performance, the play was so thin, and the great songs and Garland delivery so attenuated, End of the Rainbow was disapointing. 

End of the Rainbow plays at the beautiful Belasco Theatre in Manhattan's mid-town, just east of Broadway.  For information and tickets, click on live link of title. 

Yvonne Korshak

Comments very welcome.  Scroll down, click on "comments," write in comment box and click on "post."  Emails are private:  no emails ever appear with comments.

 

OFF-BROADWAY IN PROVENCE – La Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul de Vence, France and Joan Miro's world

Joan Miro, large blue stained glass at Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul de Vence, France, detail

The wild flowers are yellow and purple and the hills are terraced with olives, and amidst it is what I will always think of as Miro-Land -- the Fondation Maeght, founded by Marguerite and Aime Maeght in 1964 for modern art, which remains a uniquely private museum.  Unique also:  it's open every day of the year "sans exception" -- I love the spirit of that!  And the total dedication.

Great modern artists have outstanding works here, but the Spanish artist Joan Miro in particular is everywhere and it’s his inventive genius, his sense of surprise -- his sheer joie de vivre that brings it all to life.   Not surprising, perhaps in that he was integral in the planning of the fondation, working with Marguerite and Aime Maeght, art dealers, art lovers, friends of art and artists and philanthropists, in the planning and development of the fondation which was inaugurated in 1964.

There’s some paradox in Miro’s art:  it's often whimsical and his paintings characteristically include miniaturist units suggestive of the smallest things -- microscopic views of one-celled life forms.  And yet none of the moderns is more fundamentally monumental.  A vast Miro tapestry, 20 x 35 feet, hung in the lobby of Number 2 World Trade Center:  its destruction was the greatest artistic loss that occurred in connection with the destruction of the towers.  (That's my personal view, but I was interested recentlly to learn that it was also the most expensive loss.)

And the tapestry makes the point that though many think of him mainly as a painter Miro worked in many media, small and large, sculpture in bronze, wood, and many kinds of stone, ceramics and stained glass, as well as tapestry. The first gallery I spent time in at the Fondation Maeght is the one dedicated to, taken over by and suffused 

 

                                                   Miro, La Fourche, 1963, bronze, Fondation Maeght

with the colors of Miro’s large blue stained glass double window (illustration at very top).  Matisse’s Chapel in nearby Vence the day before disappointed (more on this to come): Miro’s double window in intense blues and jewel colors reaffirmed the joie de l'art.

Outside is Miro’s Labyrinth, a garden where – beyond looking – one explores on foot and so becomes joined with Miro’s world of surreal transformations.  Free form wandering takes one through the polymorphic Gaudi-esque L'arc (left), made in concrete, and among enigmatic sculptures that seem to pulsate with life with a primal form and intensity, a fanciful ceramic wall spout filling a lusciously refreshing blue mosaic pool that sparkles with visitors' tossed coins.  And -- beyond any whimsy -- Miro’s La Fourche (above right) is a tall punctuation and another kind of thought: homage to the Spanish peasants, Miro’s countrymen, who raised their pitchforks as weapons against Franco during the Spanish Civil War.   In terms of immediate impact, it holds its own with Picasso's Guernica, and indeed, Miro holds his own among the greatest modern artists ( and surpasses Matisse -- at least in Provence!).  I came away feeling more than ever the strength and magnitude of his work.  How did I ever miss the Fondation Miro dedicated to his art in Barcelona?  I guess my head was too turned by Gaudi there.  Have to go back!

There’s much more to see here than Miro.  A stabile by Alexander Calder greets you.  A mosaic, Les Amoureux, by Marc Chagall and La Vie, the largest easel painting Chagall ever made, although he made even larger murals, such as the two that define the façade of Lincoln Center for the Arts in New York City.  There’s a powerful Leger as large as the Chagall and outdoors Leger’s wall mosaic.  An entire court is given over to a battalion of figures by Giacometti.  A pool (right) with fish is by Georges Braque (there's a surprise).  The building (which I liked best for its interior spaces and the courts and gardens) is designed by the Spanish architect Lluis Sert, a Catalan like Miro. The Fondation Maeght has to be on the this I must see list for any lover of modern art.

Joan Miro, L'Oiseau lunaire, marble, 1968, Fondation Maeght

For further information, click on live link of title in first paragraph.

Yvonne Korshak

Comments very welcome ... scroll down, click on "comments," write in comment box and click on "post."  Emails are private -- no emails every appear with comments.

Tribes by Nina Raine, directed by David Cromer, Barrow Street Theatre

Tribes is a cleverly written, witty and engaging play about a “problem.”  The surface problem involves deafness.  A young man who is deaf and a young woman who is going that way fall in love.  But more importantly it’s about in-groups, others, "us and them,” and the virtues and limitations of the human tendency to collect into -- tribes.  It's a play that's funny, engrossing, and doesn't make intellectual compromises.

Billy is the deaf, beloved, youngest child of Christopher, a smart, arrogant, rigid and closed-minded academic and Beth, an amused mother who in spite of her easy-going nature and sensitivity doesn’t always get it.  Daniel is a vaguely beat, mildly schizophrenic older son and Ruth is the frustrated singer daughter.  Part of the charm of the play is the intensity with which one feels this as a genuine family -- with all of everybody’s issues, it still seems nice to belong, and sitting in the audience in-the-round above the beautifully lit family dinner table, one feels a part of it.  This play comes to us from the UK, and this is a British family.

And they do have plenty of issues.  Billy learned to speak vocally and is a skillful lip reader, but he has to keep reminding his family to do their speaking -- and screaming at one another, often with very amusing repartee -- in his direction so he can know what’s going on.  The strain’s enough to make him give up at times, and ultimately he's drawn to Sylvia, a woman who can truly understand his communication frustrations because she’s the child of deaf parents and is herself now, in young adulthood, going deaf.  It would appear to be a match made in heaven.  She teaches him sign language, giving him a new entry into the deaf world.

The play is filled with clever and meaningful criss-cross relationships.  Billy was born deaf to hearing parents, Sylvia was born hearing to deaf parents. Billy has never heard. Sylvia is moving from fully hearing to fully deaf.  She fights deafness as a terrifying handicap that’s pulling her into its grasp.  Billy, a new enthusiast, buys into the idea that deaf is not a handicap, only different.

And while Billy, and soon Sylvia, can’t hear anything of what's around them, Daniel, Billy’s schizophrenic older brother, is bedeviled by imaginary voices.

The course of love never runs smooth takes an orignal turn.  Billy embraces deafness and Sylvia; Sylvia resists deafness and Billy, or at least his enthusiasm for the deaf world.  Because having now learned sign language, after a life-time of being forced to use verbal language by his father, Billy comes to feel alienated from his talky-talky family and ultimately abandons them in favor of full identification with the deaf.   He loves the deaf social occasions.  He blooms.  And he gets a job, belying the dependency his family assumed.  Sylvia, fighting deafness all the way, hears with disgust, while she still can, the atonal monotony that’s coming into her speaking voice from diminished hearing feed-back.  She comes to detest the deaf social gatherings, “always the same people.”  Tribes -- all tribes, the playwright makes clear -- offer a sense of belonging; tribes are parochial and limiting..

Tribes is a stimulating play, superbly acted, with an alluring set and lighting, and perfectly paced.  No wonder its NYC run has just been extended to September!  While the story focuses on Billy’s conflicts and journey of self-discovery, all the characters are fully written and pleasurably idiosyncratic, which means, it may not be a pleasure to live with all these types but it sure is fun to watch them in theater.

Tribes plays at Barrow Streete Theatre in NYC's West Village through September 2, 2012.  For further information and tickets, click on live link of title.

Yvonne Korshak

Comments very welcome.  Scroll down, click on "comments," write in comment box and click on "post."  Emails are private -- no emails ever appear with comments.