Let'sTalk Off-Broadway

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

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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

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War Horse, based on Michael Morpurge's novel, adapted by Nick Stafford in association with Handspring Puppet Company, Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center, from National Theatre of Great Britain

Seeing War Horse in its current production is a powerful experience -- the kind one has to be glad one had and feel concerned for everyone who hasn't had the chance.   “You must see it” I have said in the three days since I did, to all my friends.  

It’s well known that it’s a story about a boy and a horse and that the horses in the play are represented by wonderful puppets -- “puppets” sounds small -- think horse size.

Without seeing it, what’s harder to know are the elements of sight and sound that convey the passage of time, travel across the earth, and what it looks like and feels like to be everywhere from the English countryside to trench warfare and bombardments in France during World War I, and how these affect the humans and horses we come to love --  especially the horses.  All told, War Horse, as my friend puts it directly, is one of the great anti-war masterpieces.  Some have found the story sentimental:  but a great anti-war masterpiece isn’t sentimental.

Billy Narracott, son of an English farm family, raises from a colt the horse he’s named Joey until, at the start of World War I, the horse is sequestered by the cavalry.  Broken-hearted at the loss, and fearful for Joey’s safety, Billy runs away to become a soldier so he can search for Joey across the wartime landscape of France.   We follow Billy’s  and Joey’s independent experiences with the brutal war -- Billy never wavering in his determination to save Joey, and Joey’s minute-by-minute will to survive. 

Billy carries in his pocket a sketch of Joey -- torn from a friend’s drawing pad -- the way Billy's army buddies carry photos of their girlfriends.  Against the dark backdrop of the play is a long, narrow “window,” the torn and ragged edged sketch paper magnified -- and through this window we see the realities of place, time, and action that surround Billy, and Joey, and every other creature, sometimes as filmed bombardments, sometimes as charcoal sketches of  French rooftops.  The torn papers, small and large, express torn-up lives, as well as the fragmented view of war any one individual has.   War itself becomes a character in War Horse.

Frantic from the violence and din, Joey attempts to jump a barbed-wire barrier, but the coiled wire traps his legs like the tentacles of an octopus.  While the opposing sides, English and Germans, each debate among themselves in their separate trenches how to get hold of the horse without being killed by the other side, Joey fights the wire, becoming more and more entrapped, brought to a tangled standstill, exhausted, head bowed, on a raised platform that is ground level, the men being below in trenches. 

Elevated, isolated, in a glaring spotlight, Joey recalls -- he sums up -- all martyrs, including Christ on the Cross, the barbed wire Joey’s crown of thorns, an association heightened by the crown of roses a little French girl had worn in one bright moment shortly before.  The human actors represent individual lives:  Joey universalizes experience.

Born of a draft horse and a “hunter” -- a thoroughbred -- Joey combines the capacity for hard, repetitive work and the spirit of daring and outstanding achievement.   Billy raised Joey as a hunter but -- because of a bad bet made by his father -- was forced to teach him to pull the plough.  How this figures in Joey’s story once he’s gone to war is a breath-taking turn of the plot (so good its makes you say inside, “Thank you, Author!”) -- and it's also part of Joey’s transformation into a universal symbol.  Joey survives:  Topthorn, a pure thoroughbred -- and so less universal -- doesn’t.

Joey, Topthorn and the other horses that seem so real are not “realistic” in the purely visual sense:  we see through their cage-like structures and moving joints while visible humans on-stage adjust their limbs and bring their backs to quiver as they snort over the oats, or carry a cavalryman.  But the designers have so understood the fundamental truths of horses that they are as much characters -- or more so -- than the human actors.  

It’s not possible to separate the impact of the play from this particular production but so what if you’re deciding whether to see this War Horse, that we’re privileged to have at the moment in NYC.   

War Horse plays at the Vivian Beaumont Theater in NYC's Lincoln Center.  For more information about the play, its history, and the astoundingly talented team that created the production, and for tickets, click on live link of title. 

Yvonne Korshak

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Who's going to Broadway shows? Broadway Audience Demographic Study -- thanks to Ken Davenport

Ken Davenport, producer of Broadway and off-Broadway shows, posted on his blog,  http://www.TheProducersPerspective.com , a summary of the Annual Broadway League's report about the demographics of the Broadway Audience 2010-2011.  Thank you, Ken.  Here it is:

The demographics of the Broadway Audience 2010-11 Executive Summary:  In the 2010-2011 season, approximately 62% of all Broadway tickets were purchased by tourists. 65% of the the audiences were female. The average age of the Broadway theatergoer was 44 years. 83% of all tickets were purchased by Caucasian theatergoers. Broadway theatergoers were also quite affluent compared to the general United States population, reporting an average annual household income of $244,100. Broadway theatergoers were a very well-educated group.  Of theatergoers over 25 years old, 78% had complete college and 39% had earned a graduate degree. The average Broadway theatergoer reported attending 5 shows in the previous 12 months.  The group of devoted fans who attended 15 or more performances comprised only 6% of the audience but accounted for 33% of all tickets (4.1 mission admissions). Playgoers tended to be more frequent theatergoers than musical attendees.  The typical straight play attendee saw eight shows in the past year; the musical attendee, five. The use of the Internet to purchase tickets has been steadily increasing.  In this season, 44% of respondents said they bought their tickets online. 35% of respondents reported having purchased their tickets more than one month prior to the show. The most popular sources for theatre information were Broadway.com, The New York Times and word-of-mouth. Word-of-mouth was by far the most influential factor in show selection. In general, advertisements were not reported to have been influential in making the purchasing decision. 74% of the Broadway audience said that some kind of incentive (discounts, freebies, add-ons) would encourage them to attend shows more often.

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2010 - 2011 Patrick Lee Theater Blogger Awards -- Independent Theater Bloggers Association

The Independent Theater Bloggers Association (the “ITBA”) is proud to announce the 2011 recipients of the Third Annual Patrick Lee Theater Blogger Awards.   Patrick Lee was one of the ITBA's founding members. Patrick passed away suddenly last June, and 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 2010-2011 Patrick Lee Theater Blogger Award Winners:

 

OUTSTANDING NEW BROADWAY MUSICAL

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson

 

OUTSTANDING NEW BROADWAY PLAY

Jerusalem

 

OUTSTANDING BROADWAY MUSICAL REVIVAL

Anything Goes

 

OUTSTANDING BROADWAY PLAY REVIVAL

The Normal Heart

 

OUTSTANDING NEW OFF-BROADWAY PLAY

The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity

 

OUTSTANDING NEW OFF-BROADWAY MUSICAL

The Kid

 

OUTSTANDING OFF-BROADWAY REVIVAL (PLAY OR MUSICAL)

Angels in America, Part 1: Millennium Approaches

 

OUTSTANDING SOLO SHOW/PERFORMANCE (ALL VENUE CATEGORIES)

Michael Shannon, Mistakes Were Made

 

CITATIONS FOR OUTSTANDING OFF-OFF BROADWAY SHOW

Feeder: A Love Story

Invasion!

The Caucasian Chalk Circle

Belarus Free Theater's Discover Love

Black Watch

ReWrite

 

UNIQUE OFF-OFF BROADWAY EXPERIENCE

Sleep No More

 

OUTSTANDING ENSEMBLE PERFORMANCE

The Scottsboro Boys

 

CITATIONS FOR EXCELLENCE BY INDIVIDUAL PERFORMERS

Nina Arianda, Born Yesterday

Laura Benanti, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

Reed Birney, A Small Fire

Christian Borle, Peter and the Starcatcher

Norbert Leo Butz, Catch Me If You Can

Bobby Cannavale, The Motherfucker with the Hat

Colman Domingo, The Scottsboro Boys

Sutton Foster, Anything Goes

Josh Gad, The Book of Mormon

Hamish Linklater, School for Lies

Joe Mantello, The Normal Heart

Arian Moayed, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo

Lily Rabe, The Merchant of Venice

Mark Rylance, Jerusalem

Michael Shannon, Mistakes Were Made

Benjamin Walker, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson

 

CITATION FOR EXCELLENCE IN OFF-OFF BROADWAY THEATRE

La Mama

 

The list of the 2011 recipients of The Patrick is read by Susan Blackwell, Heidi Blickenstaff, Jeff Bowen and Hunter Bell, the cast and creators of the acclaimed [title of show] and who are currently collaborating on Now. Here. This.", a Developmental Lab Production at the Vineyard Theatre: http://www.vineyardtheatre.org/show-now-here-this.html.   A video of their reading is on Youtube at  http://youtu.be/-aC4viVcP2Y  which was filmed by ITBA member Jesse North. 

 

The ITBA, is comprised of bloggers who regularly see live performances in all its 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, our website is 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.

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Born Yesterday by Garson Kanin, starring Jim Belushi, Nina Arianda and Robert Sean Leonard, directed by Doug Hughes

Born Yesterday by all accounts was a wonderful play when it opened on Broadway in 1946, it's been a wonderful movie (a couple of times) and it's a wonderful play today.  It's a love triangle with a "message."

Harry Brock (Jim Belushi), a rich, junk yard owner hoodlum who's made a pile during World War II, comes to Washington D.C. to stop Congress from passing laws regulating businesses -- especially his.  Thinking his "dumb blond" show girl mistress, Billie Dawn (Nina Arianda) needs some polish to fit in with the fancy Washingtonians he meets -- like the corrupt Senator he's paying off to further his cause -- he hires Paul Verrall (Robert Sean Leonard), a writer for The New Republic, to give her some education.  Soon Billie's books abound in Brock's opulent two-story hotel suite -- and what a set, with its lavish, winding staircase!  

Billie takes to reading voraciously -- looking up the hard words in a heavy dictionary -- and her learning gives her new awareness of Brock's dishonest shenanigans and brutality, while she and Paul fall in love.  Billie and Paul's plot involving Paul's position as a journalist to "tell all" foils Brock's corrupt plan:  together they beat the big money and save the democratic process!

This is a beautifully written, hilarious and perfectly acted play.  Arianda and Belushi are masters of comic timing and bounce off one another's lines in a way one feels one could watch forever.  Belushi has great appeal as the crude, cigar smoking, rags to riches gangster tycoon who's sure money can buy anything.  This play isn't only about what Billie learns:  Brock learns, too -- that he's wrong about that.  Though types, none of these characters is a caricature.  Belushi in moments of anger and regal command lets out all the emotional stops but he manages to convey not only Brock's toughness and brutality but a softer, even tender inner level -- kept well hidden!  That's quite a trick.

Nina Arianda, who just a year ago attracted attention in her first off-Broadway play, David Ives' Venus in Fur, hits the level of real star power in Born Yesterday.  Part of the humor, and a touching aspect of her character as Billie, is that, tall and long legged, she struts around the stage in sexy black lace lingerie that's incidental to her though not to others, whether she's struggling to understand a book or beating Brock at gin rummy.  And that silent gin rummy game between Billie and Brock -- it's all in the action -- is truly one of the great classic scenes in theater and is itself a reason to see this play, especially as these two do it.

Among the smaller parts, I was particularly enchanted by Patricia Hodges playing the corrupt Senator's wife, clinging to her upper class decorum while watching her husband paid off by the arrogant Brock.

The issues are timely.  Billie and Paul win out over Brock, and they aren't the only winners:  so are the American people, as the play takes pains to make clear.  As Brock's in-house lawyer Ed Devery (Frank Wood) tells him, not all Senators are for sale.  Education -- Billie -- and the free press -- Paul -- are bulwarks against special interests:  together they produce a win for democracy.  One leaves Born Yesterday moved, smiling, and inspired by belief in education, the free press, and democracy.  

Born Yesterday  plays at the Cort Theatre on NYC's West Broadway.  For further information and tickets, click on live link. 

Yvonne Korshak

p.s. Watched movie of Born Yesterday, Billie Holliday and Billie, Broderick Crawford as Brock and William Holden as Paul -- the play is better than the movie!  

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Independent Theater Bloggers Association -- 2nd Annual Awards

... Here are the 2nd Annual Awards by the Independent Theater Bloggers Association ...

 

Award Announcement Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCokJ6PDZaA

OUTSTANDING NEW BROADWAY PLAY
Red

OUTSTANDING BROADWAY PLAY
REVIVAL
A View From The Bridge

OUTSTANDING NEW BROADWAY
MUSICAL
American Idiot

OUTSTANDING BROADWAY MUSICAL REVIVAL
La Cage
Aux Folles

OUTSTANDING NEW OFF-BROADWAY PLAY
Circle Mirror
Transformation

OUTSTANDING NEW OFF-BROADWAY
MUSICAL
Yank!

OUTSTANDING OFF-BROADWAY REVIVAL
The Glass
Menagerie

OUTSTANDING OFF-OFF BROADWAY SHOW
Viral

OUTSTANDING
SOLO SHOW
A Boy And His Soul

OUTSTANDING ENSEMBLE
PERFORMANCE
Circle Mirror Transformation

CITATIONS FOR EXCELLENCE BY
INDIVIDUAL PERFORMERS
Nina Arianda, Venus In Fur
Kate Baldwin, Finian's
Rainbow
Desiree Burch, The Soup Show
Rebecca Comtois, Viral
Viola
Davis, Fences
Jon Michael Hill, Superior Donuts
Douglas Hodge, La Cage Aux
Folles
Sarah Lemp, The Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side & Happy In The
Poorhouse
Laura Linney, Time Stands Still
Jan Maxwell, The Royal Family
& Lend Me A Tenor
Bobby Steggert, Ragtime & Yank!
Amy Lynn
Stewart, Viral

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The Habit of Art by Alan Bennett, directed by Nicholas Hytner, starring Richard Griffiths and Elex Jennings, simulcast of the play presented by the National Theatre, London

reviewed by guest writer Mark Haggard

 

I saw The Habit of Art “live” in a cinema well outside London, as did thousands across North America, though not on Broadway, under the new NTLive initiative, using high-definition satellite relay. This is a new technological compromise between live theatre and cinema (long-focus lenses and ingeniously unobtrusive camera technique ensure a better view than from the stalls). It’s worth a debate in its own right (does one clap and laugh aloud ?) However, the play’s the thing.

The Habit of Art is lashed with literary allusions and interlaced levels of realty. The title itself starts us into the play’s complexity, referring, as later revealed, primarily to the inability of
the artist to do other than he must do, the compulsion to be creative. But a habit is also a garment, and in the vernacular, the default reading of the term is that of a bad habit. And so we’re launched into ambiguity linking the levels of discourse.

 

Poet W.H Auden and composer Benjamin Britten collaborated in the late 1930s and early 40s (in New York), but then split with some lasting bitterness. The core of the inner play-within-a-play is an imagined meeting and reconciliation between them in Oxford in the early 1970s, not long before their respective deaths. The Actors periodically hold the Author to account for some aspects of this inner play (upper case here denotes the Characters in the outer play, which is about the rehearsal of the inner one). A pragmatic Stage Manager runs the rehearsal in the absence of the Director which enables the Actors to interrupt the inner play’s dialogue with a wider range of comments than would otherwise occur, and a range of layered humour. Switching from Britten-cum-Auden to within-rehearsal comments and back again is quickly established as something to be expected. When Author is asked whether Auden would actually have said certain of the part’s words, he smoothly provides research-based facts which support the realism, though counterfactual, of the inner play. Ahah, insights into the playwright’s art.

 

Two of the Actors are otherwise engaged, so their parts are talked through (and hammed up) by Stage Manager and Assistant, these burlesques serving like Shakespearian light-relief scenes. The Commentator in the inner play is a journalist, Carpenter, interviewing Auden in the first act. He has two levels of edit mode above the portrayal of a quasi-historical Carpenter (done with considerable dramatic license): these are as commentator (think ancient Greek chorus) within the inner play to provide grandiose historical/biographical comment, and as disgruntled Actor, the most querulous and most identified with his part of all. There’s irony in his complaint to the Author that his part is “just a device”. This makes it an existential threat to the Actor playing Carpenter, leading to the funniest lines in the play; he wants it to be something more but can’t quite express what, a neat summary of the human condition. The similarities and contrasts between parts and Actors’ real personalities (sexuality, incipient senile dementia, reserve vs. assertiveness, personal foibles) regularly intrude through banter and back-chat, offering solid fare of out-jokes for those who don’t get all the cultural, theatrical and university in-jokes.

 

The complexity is comprehensive and deeply structured. The real Auden and Britten had been going to collaborate on an opera of Death in Venice, and in the inner play Britten has been

proceeding slowly and with ambivalence on several counts. In a discussion that feeds the theme of the craft of art, they talk over reviving this project. Despite the detachment encouraged by rapid switches between layers of reality, Auden’s exhortation to Britten that he must never give up on the creative impulse, even if his music has now gone out of fashion, is deeply moving. 

 

The erudite discussion, chiefly by Auden, of the content of Death in Venice concentrates on
age-boundaries and the division of responsibility in seduction, openly articulating the theme of homosexuality. Thomas Mann, his main character Eschenbach, the real Auden and Britten were all in their ways gay, with a preference for the under-age. It is not entirely clear whether in 2010 this is an essential or incidental detail, such that the ideas and structure of the play might equally have been supported by heterosexual fascination with people almost two generations

younger, some under-age, and remained acceptable.

Self-reference in art is writ large in The Habit of Art; for the repressed Britten, self-revelation is a major fear. This sexual theme is set up early with the appearance of the rent boy, a mixture of ingenuousness, worldly-wise competence and low humour, though only developed toward the end. In Author’s play, this character is to represent the exploited (not just sexually) and the
unacknowledged, at whose expense art flourishes — the play within a play accordingly entitled Caliban’s Day, Caliban as the exploited savage. But by this point the action has become thematically crowded and Bennett doesn't create enough space for this interesting idea, although it’s ingenious that the rent boy, whilst not being highly educated, has already without artificiality been shown to have emotional and cultural insight. The ending is retrieved by orderly exits and realistic everyday winding-down conversations, then a beautifully theatrical turning out of the lights by the Stage Manager.

Mark Haggard

 

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RED by John Logan, with Alfred Molina and Eddie Redmayne, directed by Michael Grandage

... the red and the black ...

RED is an intimate play about a profound painter in whose soul a Manichaean battle between life and death is played out on his canvases by a struggle between red and black.  The subject is the painter Mark Rothko and the playwright focuses on a key period in his life, when he's designing a complete, coordinated group of large paintings for the expensive, high-rollers' Four Seasons Restaurant, under construction in NYC.  On the one hand, he's glad to be making the big bucks and creating his first total environment.  On the other, he's uneasy that his work, quasi religious and inspiring of meditation, as he sees it, is headed for a restaurant filled with earthbound, self-interested, fashionable people.  Hardly the right atmosphere.

But he keeps painting, and talking, mostly on a high philosophical plane to the young painter he's engaged as a helper in his insulated studio, dominated by vast canvases with their varying balances of red and black.  The two men spar for the duration of the play, the young one, Ken, always trying to get something from Rothko -- instruction, insight, fatherly attention -- and Rothko resisting, reminding him he's nothing but an employee.

Much of the language is magnificent and intricate, drawn from Rothko's own writings -- and he was a prolific and subtle writer.  The interactions between Rothko and Ken can be intense, as in a remarkable, though self-conscious, scene in which, working the big brushes together to prime a huge canvas in Rothko's russet pigment, the two painters engage in a frantic ballet.  Although there are only two human actors, the struggle between the life-affirming red and the black of death, makes the colors themselves protagonists in the play.  The struggle in Rothko's soul is made visible through the battle of the colors we see on his on-stage canvases.  Sometimes red dominates, sometimes it seems gasping for breath under pressure from black.   

The color red wins out in this play ... for now.  Still, if you didn't know that Rothko eventually committed suicide, you'd know it's going to happen in the future, but not yet:  that's the creative victory that's the true theme of the play.  In other victories for "red," the two painters reach a resolution that seems true-to-life and quite touching -- Rothko teaches what's really important for a young artist to learn, and nothing sentimental about it.  Red wins, also, in terms of Rothko's final choice with regard to the Four Seasons commission.  And the audience wins in gaining a close look at the sheer tenacity of the creative will.  Alfred Molina is compelling as the oh-so intelligent, tormented and brutally determined Mark Rothko, and Eddie Redmayne does the job as the needy young painter.

This well conceived but relatively short, two-person play seems somewhat distant on the full-size, though artfully managed, proscenium stage.  Working with his dominant stage presence and large size, Alfred Molina does all that's possible to off-set the discrepancy between the theater and the play, and he's helped by the looming canvases.  Still RED, I think, would feel more natural in a more intimate theater or a theater in-the-round.  All in all, a small play in a big theater with enough strength to come through and illuminate a lot about Mark Rothko and his art.  

RED plays at the Golden Theater in NYC west of Broadway through June 13, 2010.

Yvonne Korshak

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Oleanna by David Mamet, directed by Doug Hughes, with Bill Pullman and Julia Stiles

     ... he said, she said ...

Oleanna is a parable of social revolution along the lines of Bonfire of the Vanities or Animal Farm.  It doesn't have the internal consistency that's made those a kind of starting point for thinking, but still, it resonates. 

What first hits one is the glamorous set, a vast and luxurious professor's office beyond anything in the Ivy League, let alone an office for an untenured college prof at Oleanna.  It's used to underline the power and class disparities between the Professor and the student but spells, "this isn't real." 

Carol, a college student in danger of failing a course visits her Professor, John, in that office to understand why she's not doing better and get him to give her another chance.

Each is under pressure, Carol not to fail, and John because he's currently under consideration for tenure.  Mamet ups the stakes for John:  betting on a post-promotion raise, he's settling on a bigger and better house ahead of time (what's the rush?  I doubted he'd be that foolish.)  Carol doesn't "get" what John tries to explain about her academic weaknesses and John becomes frustrated and over-excited about that and everything else.  Mamet sure knows how to set up a conflict and write peppery dialogue to go with it, complete with naturalistic interrupted sentences, and these fine actors have perfect timing.

The script begins its slide into unbelievability, though, about those academic weaknesses.  The sentence John reads aloud from her paper is illogical, but no liberal arts student who attends all classes, listens attentively, takes copious notes, checks in with the teacher in his office for more clarification, who is from a lower class background, and who really tries like Carol, fails courses because of her writing -- certainly not in recent history.  (If they did, who'd be left in class?)

John's hyper state leads him to do several things not quite right for a Professor dealing with a student.  He reveals too much emotional intensity about personal and professional topics, from problems closing on the house and the too constant phone calls to the ideas in his book (of course required reading).  He tries too hard to get Carol to understand not only her academic difficulties but his professional opinions and mind set.  Once or twice he sits on the same sofa:  watching, one can see not great judgment but nothing truly out of hand.  Carol, meanwhile, seems quite unintelligent, her responses so off the point we wonder how she could have pulled together even a badly written paper.

After a time, Carol returns to the office, having filed complaints with the tenure committee about John on several points, raising John's level of tension.  She visits again, and then again, each time having raised the ante from complaints about his teaching to more sensational charges, from the tenure committee to the courts.  Their power arcs intersect as intensifying threats send John downward toward fear and despair and Carol upward on an impact surge.  With the speed of light, Carol changes from being verbally weak to throwing off sophisticated, politicized arguments about gender and class with astonishing fluency.  

We know he didn't do much of what she claims to get him into big trouble, but that she's turned emotionally driven phrases and gestures into hard-edged errors and crimes in order to destroy him.  Since it's just her word against his, however, he's helpless, or so we're to think.

Oleanna is most effective in its open-ended exploration of its secondary theme, class conflicts in the academic context.  Carol, who "has worked really hard to get here," is enraged that her college professor has written about education, the very system that pays him and lets him live better than anything she ever knew, in a sarcastic and dismissive way.  She has a point.

To punch home his main political argument, however, Mamet forswears the consistent character development of his Speed-the-Plow, off-Broadway last year, and American Buffalo, reviewed here below.  Oleanna is written with dramatic power, but it would be a more compelling exploration of victimization through untestable sexual harassment charges, and generally of determining guilt without witnesses, if the thought "that's not real," didn't keep intruding. 

Oleanna plays at the Golden Theatre, 45th Street West of Broadway, NYC.

Yvonne Korshak

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Shakespeare's Hamlet starring Jude Law, directed by Michael Grandage

 

... a two man show ...

Sometimes theater goers will say of classic plays, "I sawThe Seagull -- or A Doll's House -- or Hamlet -- recently, I'm just not ready to see another one".  Fair enough, but Jude Law puts such a distinctive mark on Hamlet that, believe me, you haven't seen this, ever.

His Hamlet is a younger man than most seem to be (regardless of the actor's age).  His performance is athletic, unquestionably charismatic (the audience applauds after every great scene like after an aria in an opera), and openly vulnerable.  He listens to others intensely, and his words, thoughts and actions come as genuine responses flowing from within -- the script falls away and Shakespeare's character emerges as a real, conflicted, engaged man.  He's all over the stage.  He gives himself completely, with a great actor's generosity, to the performance.

Law does full justice to the astonishing poetry without any archaic distance to separate us from the language -- we hear the way he talks.  In this he's helped by the production's unobtrusive modern dress that underscores the play's timelessness.  You hardly notice whether the actors are wearing Elizabethan costumes or not.

The youthfulness of this Hamlet lays an interesting slant on his tangled involvement with his mother, his father, and the saturated sexuality of his mother's new marriage to his murdered father's brother.  "Why doesn't he kill Claudius?"  "What's his problem?"  To the many answers to that central puzzle, Law brings what seems to me a new take -- though a man physically, he's still somehow a boy living at home caught up in youthful conflicts.  The care with which he listens to others and himself suggests he's still formative.  He's not yet ready for the burden that's placed on him. 

If only the rest of the actors were as good as Law!  They are uniformly routine stereotypes in the way they play their characters (Claudius, Gertrude), some seem to be thinking about something else (Horatio), some are strained (Ophelia) and some are downright dull (Laertes).  They mostly spring from London's Donmar Warehouse theater that has a big reputation, simply not lived up to in this production.

All the weight of the play is on two men's shoulders -- Jude Law and Shakespeare.  Luckily they're both in brilliant form! 

Hamlet plays at the Broadhurst Theater, 44th Street West of Broadway, through December 6. 

p.s.  How interesting that two film actors created two outstanding Shakespearean characters this year -- Jude Law as Hamlet and Philip Seymour Hoffman as Iago in Othello, reviewed here below.

  Yvonne Korshak

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Exit The King by Eugene Ionesco, starring Geoffrey Rush and Susan Sarandon

                                                    ... everything theater ...

Exit the King is a hilarious parable, transported to the other worldly by marvelous music, dazzlingly written, with profundity hidden behind the comic mask.  It's everything theater should be -- including outstanding performers and a brilliantly intelligent production.  You could not have a better time than at Exit the King.

Aristophanes lives on in Ionesco's wild tale where anything can and does happen because that's how life is.

The set is dominated by vast, "kingly" but drooping drapery -- with Goyaesque drawings, like a Metropolitan Opera set making way for a new production.  Everything about this play is about endings.  King Berenger, played by Geoffrey Rush in one of the greatest performances I've seen, is dying.  (Rush is so good you just don't want it to ever end.)  We're told that the King will be dead by the end of the performance -- the characters check their watches now and again to see how much time he has left.

Queen Marguerite seems wryly, even coldly, willing to let things take their course -- she's a puzzle we don't understand fully until the end -- in contrast to Queen Marie, his second and younger wife, a frail vessel of those pesky human emotions of love, grief, and resistance to the inevitable.  The King, a classic clown with German Expressionist smears of face paint, does not want to die, and his rationales, explanations and feints are those we all share -- talk about "universal."  Only he's so funny.

From the start we know it's not only the King who's dying.  The clock's ticking also on his once enormous kingdom, greatly reduced in size and power because of his neglect, to the point where now the pond is lapping at the fence posts.  One thinks of polar bears puzzling it out on a melting block of ice.  The play is prescient, written in 1962.

An individual dies and an entire world vanishes -- we often think that narcissistic union (or confusion) of microcosm and macrocosm is peculiar to humans and for much of the play that seems to be the topic.  But toward the end meanings crescendo and masks fall away.  Susan Sarandon -- regally -- removes her Queen's cloak to reveal fully her vibrant green gown.  Nature herself, there she is!  The inevitable, the truth!  Muse-like -- there's so much that's Classical about this zany, "absurdist" play -- she leads the King to where he must go.  Her role swells and the shrinking Kingdom shows its true face.  It's not only Berenger's:  it's the human kingdom, our world -- the big one -- that we've neglected, muddied, handed over to entropy without a fight ... and now beyond recall.

Early on, railing frantically against inevitability, the King comes up with an argument from nature:  "Death's not natural.  That's why nobody wants to do it."  Only death, it turns out, is natural.  If we've had any doubts, by the end we've heard it from Nature herself.

Exit the King plays at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, Broadway, NYC, through June 30th.

                                                                                       Yvonne Korshak

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On Broadway -- Schiller's Mary Stuart, a new version by Peter Oswald, starring Janet McTeer and Harriet Walter

                                                          ...  whose history ? ...     

The situation of Mary Stuart is that Elizabeth I, the Protestant daughter of Henry VIII (see here below), is Queen of England and Mary, formerly Queen of the Scots, a devout Catholic, is in prison in London for murdering her husband and plotting against the English throne.  Egged on by various plotters and courtly connivers, the two engage in contest of wills:  Mary seeks to be freed, while Elizabeth hesitates to execute her for ethical reasons and to avoid turning her into a martyr for the Catholic cause.  Mary is finally executed, Elizabeth claiming it was done without her specific bidding.

How then does Friedrich Schiller turn this into a play in which the beheaded Mary is seen as victorious and Elizabeth, who in fact goes on to reign as a great Queen, as vanquished?  Good writing, professional production and excellent acting mask the fundamental nonsense. 

Mary has quite a resume.  She has murdered her husband, married his murderer, been thrown out by the Scots as their Queen and engaged in several murderous plots.  Yet Schiller, and Oswald, envision her as spiritually superior to ElizabethI, a beloved Queen who strengthened the arts, crafts and commerce of her nation, prepared it militarily to ward off threats from powerful enemies, and fostered the great flowering of Elizabethan England. 

This play has been called "revisionist" but it's just biased.

The two go hair to hair.  At the end Mary, who is purged of all her sins in a lengthy confession while bathed in a heavenly light, goes toward the execution block calmly, gorgeously dressed and magnificently coiffed with a gold hair net.  Elizabeth, on the contrary, comes onstage irascible, then isolated and forlorn, and without her elaborately braided costume wig -- her short underneath hair looks as if it had been chopped with a hedge shears.  How interesting, a purposeful twisting of fact by the playwrights to shaft Elizabeth, since Mary's lost wig was the one that really figured in this execution.  According to the accounts, when the executioner held up Mary's severed head, her glamorous auburn wig fell off, revealing her gray hair.  That's not my idea of how to come out a-head.  :-)

Mary Stuart was first produced in Germany in 1800.  Schiller, in this revolutionary period, fired by romantic aspirations, was inspired to write an anti-monarchical account of Elizabeth ... but Mary Queen of Scots is no standard bearer for liberation. 

Mary Stuart plays at the Broadhurst Theatre in NYC through August 16th.

                                                                                       Yvonne Korshak

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Lets Talk Off-Broadway -- New Thoughts on A Man For All Seasons ... on Broadway and in film ...

note:  We are happy and grateful -- and fascinated -- to have received a guest blog with new information on A Man For All Seasons.  For the review of the production this blog is responding to, see LetsTalkOff-Broadway -- here below.  It helps me understand why the production seemed somewhat flat to me ... how about you? YK

                          ... once the script leaves the playwright's hands ...

The original play had a character in it called "The Common Man" who showed up in various different disguises, such as a river boatman, etc., and constantly commented on More's impeccable and self-sacrificing conduct with words that basically expressed the thought, "Yeah, right, but still I  gotta go home and feed the missus and walk the dog, so I gotta do what I can do to earn a living!" and such.  This character was cut from the movie script, and for some reason the people who presented the new production at Roundabout decided to keep that cut in place.  In my opinion they made a great mistake, and I would not have allowed it, were it up to me -- which it was not.  I guess they all thought he was irrelevant -- leave the audience to think that -- but he wasn't.  This character kept saying everything you and I -- and the audience was thinking:  things like "Like man, give them what they want and go home to that great woman who is waiting for you!"  In my opinion they cut out, in effect, the catalytic character who made the play work!

                                                                                                          Art Asher

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Of related interest, see reviews here of A Man for All Seasons, and Vivat Rex! Exhibition Commemorating 500 Year Anniveresary of the Accession of Henry VIII, here above.

Lets Talk Off-Broadway -- Dividing the Estate by Horton Foote, Directed by Michael Wilson, at the Booth Theatre

Dividing the Estateis a tv sitcom elevated to Broadway.  A south Texas family gathers at the family manse to tussle over the large farming estate pinched by encroaching urbanism, a bow to Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard.  No one in this family is rich any more, some are nearly destitute, and all at one time or another are pushing for Mother to divide the estate so they can get theirs.  The Matriarch dominates the dining table and the children, servants, and significant others take their places in equally expectable ways.  Even the deaths that occur are totally predictable, as are the jokes.

Why are these characters so involved in irritating one another?  References to past relationships are vague:  a brief conversation about who Mother and Father may have loved most is blown off.  We never understand the roots of the peculiarities of their hostilities, as we do, say, in August: Osage County, so in spite of a few thin laughs one can squeeze from human foibles, all that's left is type characters squabbling over money.  Lacking rich material, the fine cast, headed by Elizabeth Ashley as Stella, the Mother, seem driven to mugging and rolling their eyes a lot in order to keep things going. 

Dividing the Estate is presented by Lincoln Center Theater, by arrangement with Primary Stages.

                                                                                                              Yvonne Korshak

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Lets Talk Off-Broadway -- American Buffalo by David Mamet with Cedric the Entertainer, John Leguizamo and Haley Josel Osment at the Belasco Theatre

                                    ... Creative Transformation ...

Van Gogh, in his painting The Night Cafe turns a down and outers' bar into a Church, recreating its denizens in the process.  In David Mamet's American Buffalo, we come to see a low-life junk shop as a home and its loser occupants gain a big win -- a family.

This play is in many ways the opposite of A Man for All Seasons, recently reviewed below.  Instead of men in hgh positions loftily debating issues of Universal Importance, it's about three at the bottom of the ladder planning a heist with profanity peppered language.  These men have vast failings but genuine feelings they don't themselves know until the hot circumstances and cause and effect of the failed heist bring them deeper understanding.

"Teach," played brilliantly by John Leguizamo, is violent, bitter and clutchy for love.  Bobby, played by Haley Joel Osment, is just a kid but already, we assume, tossed around by life and dropped down on a path of crime.  Donny Dubrow, played by Cedric the Entertainer is the stable, though opportunistically criminal, owner of the wonderously cuttered junk shop -- an alter ego of the rich clutter of lived lives.  They seem like losers but when, through a series of torturous misfires they come to understand the love that keeps them together, sublimity enters.  They're in a new place -- though it's still Donny's junkshop. 

It's too bad this play has a limited run and is closing tomorrow, November 23 but, having just seen it, I'm reviewing it because there'll be other chances to see it.  Like the object of desire in the play, the American Buffalo nickel, it's an American Classic.

                                                                              Yvonne Korshak

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Lets Talk Off-Broadway -- A Man for All Seasons by Robert Bolt, Starring Frank Langella as Sir Thomas More, Roundabout Theatre Company

                                        .... A mixed bag ....

A Man for All Seasons is founded on a topic of great inherent power:  the collision of individual conviction and state power.  The play is well written, well constructed, and given every advantage in the fine acting of Frank Langella and the excellent production by Roundabout Theatre.

Why then does it fall flat?

Because Sir Thomas More has all the virtues while his enemies have all the vices.  That's not human nature nor history and so, as drama, it doesn't ring true.

King Henry VIII and his lieutenant, Cromwell, override the opposition of Thomas More and others to wrest an independent Church of England free from the grasp of the Roman Catholic Church.  The historical context is highly ambiguous in terms of "right" and "wrong."  Yet More in this play is all high minded, personal conviction, the King is a callow youth and libertine devoid of political purpose -- a vast oversimplification of this empire builder -- and the passionate Protestant Thomas Cromwell is a conniving, power hungry Iago -- though not endowed with Shakespearian charisma.

The play recounts More's fall from royal grace to poverty, imprisonment and execution because of his principled stand -- his refusal to sanction the King's divorce from his wife of nineteen years who had not borne him a son, and his marriage to Anne Boleyn, the very acts that catalyzed the King's leap for his nation's independence from the Roman Catholic Church.  At the play's end, More is beheaded for his refusal -- "I will not bend" -- to sign the Act of Supremacy that made Henry VIII the Supreme Head of the Church of England.

You'd never guess that Cromwell, who some see as the originator of the English Reformation, was as devoted to his vision of a sovereign England as More was in his loyalty to Rome.  History tells us that More persecuted Protestants and was not opposed to burning at the stake for heretics, although he tolerated his Lutheran son-in-law.  Evidently he was a mixed bag, like everyone else.  Outstanding theatrical experience and skills at play in this production can't mask the strain of covering up the overly simplistic view of A Man for All Seasons.

It's interesting that so far this Fall there have been four plays that focus on the conflict between individual conscience and the power of the state -- A Man for All Seasons, The Grand Inquisitor, Galileo, and Antigone, all discussed in posts here below.  Three of them focus in one way or another on the Inquisition.  Is this a category?  Theater of the Inquisition?

A Man for All Seasons is playing at American Airlines Theatre on West 42nd Street in New York City.

Of related interest, see New thoughts on A Man For All Seasons in post above, and Vivat Rex! Exhibition Commemorating the 500th Anniversary of the Accession of Henry VIII in post above.

                                                                                      Yvonne Korshak

               

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