Theater review: "The Winter's Tale," Providence, October 2012

I saw last week that Brown/Trinity was going to stage Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale” downtown, in the Pell/Chafee Center. I bought tickets immediately.

 

 

 

 

“The Winter’s Tale” isn’t staged very often. It is an odd play, which Shakespeare most likely wrote late in life. It’s about the king of Sicily, Leontes, who becomes irrationally jealous of his wife Hermione, who (he’s completely sure) is having an affair with his best friend King Polyxenes of Bavaria. He tries to kill his friend the king, unsuccessfully; he imprisons his (pregnant) queen; he has his little son sent away.

 

 

 

The Oracle of Delphi tells him that he’s wrong about everything. He erupts into a rage, and then his wife dies, and his son. Unrepentant, he sends his newborn daughter to be eaten by wild animals.

 

 

 

One of his courtiers takes the baby girl to “the seacoast of Bohemia” (there ain’t no such place). He abandons her there, and is then (in Shakespeare’s most famous stage direction) “pursued by a bear,” who kills him.

 

 

 

The play’s last two acts are about redemption. The wife, Hermione, lives, and so does the baby girl. The son of the King of Bohemia marries the daughter of the King of Sicily. And so on.

 

 

 

It is sweet, and bittersweet.

 

 

 

This production was lots of fun. The sets were minimal: some sheets, a toy ship. A few of the actors are worth mention: Elise LeBreton, a dignified Hermione; Catherine Dupont, a wonderful Emilia; Ben Grills, a funny / dignified Shepherd; Mark Larson, a very funny Clown; and Zdenko Martin, a convincingly roguish Autolycus.

 

 

 

At the end of part one – “exit, pursued by a bear” – there was a whole chorus line of bears, performing a very athletic dance number. Then they ran up into the audience, and one of them stuck her bear-masked face into my face and growled, and I laughed like hell.

 

 

 

Then, at the beginning of Part II, after the intermission, the minstrel / scoundrel Autolycus came onstage, wearing a hat that looked just like the one I bought two weeks ago on Montmartre.

 

 

He’d taken it from under my seat. He came up into the audience after his musical number and returned it to me, very sweetly, and told me to be more careful in future.

 

 

 

Imagine! My hat’s a Shakepearean actor!

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Theater review: "Timeshare," at Brown/Trinity Playwrights Rep

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Partner and I saw the last play in the Brown/Trinity Playwrights Rep series, “Timeshare,” on Saturday night.

 

 

I love a good farce. I have a very childish sense of humor; I love it when people run in and out of rooms, and scream, and dress in ridiculous outfits, and hide inside coffee tables. (Of course, it has to be done well.  Silly is good; stupid is quite another thing.) Also, you need actors with good timing, who can scream, and cajole, and wheedle, and make funny faces, and do long ridiculous takes.

 

 

We were fortunate to have pretty much all of the above on Saturday night.

 

 

This is a traditional mixed-up family comedy: everyone (mother, father, married daughter + husband, unmarried daughter + boyfriend) shows up at the mountain cabin on the same weekend. Misunderstandings ensue. Two engagement rings are hidden, misplaced, given to the wrong recipients.

 

 

As in all good farce, there is a happy ending.

 

 

I especially liked the use – and subtle subversion – of stereotypes. There’s an unbearable Jewish mother, who turns out to be a convert. The whiny emasculated Jewish dad is also a stoner. The handsome black boyfriend (a shaygetz if I ever saw one) is Jewish. The banker son-in-law is as dumb as a bag of hammers.

 

 

All in all: nicely done.

 

 

(This is a brand-new play, and a very nice one. It takes a teeny bit too long to set the scene in the first act; I think we could have met the characters more speedily. I kept wanting it to be funny during the first few scenes, but it felt sitcom-watery. Once all six of the characters were introduced, however, the fun began in earnest, and there were few dull moments after that.)

 

 

I give high marks to three of the performers: Mark Cohen, the father; Anne Nichols, the mother; and Ben Chase, the goofily stupid/charming son-in-law. (He was my favorite: he’s tall and lanky, with an expressive face and a voice that goes from cornball to Yalie to falsetto seamlessly. We got a lot of laughs out of him.)

 

 

From “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum”:

 

 

No royal curse, no Trojan horse –

And a happy ending, of course.

What is the moral? Must be a moral . . .

Here is the moral, wrong or right:

Tragedy tomorrow – comedy tonight!

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"Principal Principle," and teaching, and teachers

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Partner and I saw a brand-new play called “Principal Principle,” by Joe Zarrow, at Brown the other evening. It’s a funny / serious look at a year in the life of four high-school teachers, seen from the teachers’ workroom. Overall, it was excellent: crisp dialogue, good use of devices like the P.A. system (what would school be without one?), and (as usual) really excellent performances by the five actresses in the show.

 

 

(It was a new play, and not perfect. The ending was a little unsatisfying. Some of the moral dilemmas seemed a little too pat. And the passage of the school year – we began in September, so we knew that intermission would be December and the ending would be May – was a little too clockwork-predictable, like the passage of time in a Harry Potter novel.)

 

 

But it made me thoughtful about the teaching profession.

 

 

Firstly, it made me (again) grateful that I did not choose teaching as a career. I am not built for it. I have tried it, fitfully, over the years, in harmless small doses that did no real harm to my “students,” and I know for a fact now that I was not constructed to be a teacher. I am tough, in my lotus-blossom way, and (in the words of Elinor Wylie) I have faced out a hundred dooms, but if I’d ever tried to be a real honest-to-god teacher, I’d have been a gibbering wreck by mid-October.

 

 

This leads me, secondly, to give honor and respect to the very many good / great teachers I’ve had in my life. One of them is actually now my Facebook friend, forty years later. She was a wonderful teacher, and is now retired, and has now dedicated her life to being an all-around wonderful human being. Other great teachers – from grade school, intermediate school, high school, college, grad school – crowd to mind. They were distinctive, and authoritative, and knew their onions. Some were funny; some were stuffily serious; some were alternately remote and chummy. (I guess that’s to say that they were, in general, various types of human beings.)

 

 

This leads me, thirdly, to say that I feel vaguely nauseous when I hear people (mostly Republicans, strangely enough) talk about teaching as if it’s a well-paid racket run by crooked unions. I wonder, sincerely, if they’re playing to the fact that there’s a significant chunk of the population that hated school, and always regarded teachers as the enemy. (You know: dullards and idiots. And there will never be a shortage of those.)

 

 

So I suppose “Principal Principle” was a pretty good play after all, if it caused me to do all this deep thinking after seeing it.

 

 

(Of course, there were two women sitting behind us eating potato chips for a while. But I turned suddenly and gave both of them the Deadly Radioactive Stare a few times, and it seemed to quiet them down (although one had a nasty cough, and kept spraying Partner with dengue fever, or whatever she had).)

 

 

(But isn’t that what theater is all about?)

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Theater review: "A Perfect Wedding," at Brown University's Leeds Theater

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Partner and I saw the latest Brown theatrical production, “A Perfect Wedding,” on Saturday night.

 

 

These college kids are talented!  They can act, they’re funny, they can sing and dance and play instruments.  Most of them (by the laws of averages) will almost certainly not be going into entertainment-related careers. (This is sort of a shame, in a way, because most of them are just as talented (if not more so) than most of the people in movies and TV.)

 

 

Then there’s the youth effect.  Partner put it best: “I like going to these shows,” he said, “because they’re all so energetic, and it makes me feel young too.”  Ditto for me. 

 

 

So: this show.  Some negatives first (which feels harsh, like bopping a puppy on the nose for making a mess on the carpet): the play was far too wordy.  Too many endless repetitive speeches.  A little too much overacting here and there.  Lots of peculiar stage accents, which did not make for a terribly comprehensible evening. 

 

 

And long, dear Jesus, the show was long.  The first act was ninety minutes, with only a few good laughs in the whole thing.  Partner and I commiserated with one another during intermission; we were trying to make the best of it, but we were both moodily considering how long the second act was going to be, and whether we’d be home by midnight.

 

 

But the second act was the payoff.  It began with some terribly long/wordy scenes too, but the atmosphere quickly changed: there was a bizarrely concocted funeral scene, with cymbals and bagpipes and conch shell, and a procession with a coffin. 

 

 

And, finally, the play took flight. 

 

 

The whole thing ends with three dynamite musical numbers, each as different from one another as night from day, and all of them done with that raw college-student energy and talent that makes the whole enterprise worthwhile.  (I won’t tell you what the musical numbers are. If you see it – and I hope you do – it would spoil it for you, I think.)  All I will say is that everyone is romping around, dancing, leaping, playing instruments and singing.  The choreography is good, and the staging works beautifully.  

 

 

We were promised audience participation, and we got it.  We even got something to eat and drink (which was perfect for me, as I was starving).  During the wedding preparations in Act Two, one of the characters came over and politely asked Partner to help him change clothes, and they worked together like professionals, and carried on light conversation the whole time.  (And a cute little bugger the actor was too.)  Whenever I hear “audience participation,” I think of getting drenched with seltzer water, or dragged on stage to be part of a Theater of Cruelty bondage/torture session.  In this production, the “audience participation” was light and funny and harmless.  “What side of the family are you on?” the character asked Partner.  “Groom’s side,” Partner said smoothly, without missing a beat.

 

 

We got home at eleven p.m., giggling, having had a wonderful evening at the theater.

 

 

I need not tell you that the play is partly about sexual politics, and gay marriage, and straight marriage, and the meaning of marriage in the first place.  These issues are beside the point.  It’s about love, and commitment, and the rituals we use to commemorate both of those things. 

 

 

The play could easily be thirty minutes shorter. And maybe less screaming.

 

 

But please keep the musical numbers just as they are.

 

 

It’s running through next weekend: the last performance is Sunday April 22.

 

 

Those of you in southeastern New England should come see it.

 

 

It will bore you a bit at first, but it will leave you laughing and singing.

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Actors acting like actors

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Partner was watching “Stage Door” a while back on TCM. If you haven't seen it, kick yourself seven or eight times, then run out and see it. Not only does it have a dream cast – Katherine Hepburn, Gail Patrick, Ginger Rogers, Lucille Ball – it's one of those perfect combinations of corny sentiment and real feeling that makes 1930s movies fun, and it's got some good laughs.

 

 

But I had an epiphany while watching it over his shoulder the other night. It was Hepburn's big “calla lily” scene; I won't spoil it for you, but she's supposed to be a Broadway actress, and she's had a big personal shock in real life, and it makes her stage performance very intense. And I suddenly realized why so many of the best movies, and musicals, and plays are about show business. The performers understand what they're doing. If you're an actor, you may have a hard time getting into the mindset of a plumber or a priest or a call-girl, but it's no trouble at all imagining what it's like be an actor - you understand all of the motivations, and all of the situations. Start listing all the good shows about show business in your head: “A Chorus Line.” “All That Jazz.” “42^nd Street.” “The Band Wagon.” “Gold Diggers of 1933.” “All About Eve.” “Sunset Boulevard.”

 

 

Oh, that last one. It's a hall of reflecting mirrors. You see Gloria Swanson screening footage of her unfinished / unreleased silent movie “Queen Kelly,” which had been directed by . . . Erich von Stroheim, who plays the sepulchral Max. Even Cecil B. DeMille has a cameo! But, for me, the creepiest scene is that of Gloria playing bridge with the group of silent-movie survivors that William Holden calls “The Waxworks”: Buster Keaton, H. B. Warner, and Anna Q. Nilsson. They look like the living dead.

 

 

How aware were they of themselves in that scene? How aware were they that they were playing themselves: washed-up, forgotten has-beens?

 

 

Oh, they were completely aware.

 

 

Too depressing.

 

 

Cue the Gold Diggers!

 

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The Brown / Trinity Playwrights Repertory Theater, 2011

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Last weekend Partner and I attended the third and final production of this year's Brown / Trinity Playwrights' Rep. Every summer for the past six years, this mini-festival has produced three brand new plays and presented them serially and – as a grand finale on the last day – as a three-play marathon. (And God bless Lowry Marshall for bringing this to fruition.)

 

 

We have seen some real winners. We were in one of the first audiences to see “Boom,” which was last year the most-produced play in America. Some years ago we saw a screamingly funny play called “Chicken Grease Is Nasty Business!,” about love and marriage and friends and a Southern chicken restaurant, and I laughed harder than at pretty much anything else I've ever seen in the theater. We have seen plays about police dogs, and video games, and a musical based on Turgenev's “Fathers and Sons.” Another favorite was a musical called “Torah! Torah! Torah!,” about a bar mitzvah gone wrong, with some really good songs, and featuring Mr. Peanut.

 

 

A few duds, too. One of the worst was last year: I won't name it, it should rest in peace. I will only say that, unless you're Chazz Palmintieri or Patrick Stewart or Hal Holbrook or Lily Tomlin, you shouldn't attempt a one-person show. Enough said.

 

 

This year:

 

 

“She's Not There.” The description was unpromising: a couple whose lives are “upended by a new person in their lives.” Sound like a lot of movies you've seen? It started out in familiar territory: a couple in their 30s, comfortable but not ecstatically happy; the man meets a younger woman who lives in their apartment building, and -

 

 

But it built from there. The dialogue was fresh and witty. The three characters try making friends, ignoring one another, eviscerating one another. At the end of the day, things aren't quite the way you thought they would be.

 

 

But it was too long. Also, there was a gimmick (whether specified by the playwright I don't know), in which the scene-changes were done by “hipster movers,” who made minimal changes to the set and did little hipster dance moves. Funny the first couple of times; tedious for the rest of the evening.

 

 

 

“The Killing of Michael X: A New Film By Celia Weston.” This was loads of fun: it integrated a lot of film into the stage action. It was dreamlike and surreal at times, and almost everyone played at least two parts, but (and this is always a good sign) we never felt lost. We kept learning more and more about the characters, and it got funner and funner as we got higher and higher in the stratosphere. I have never laughed so hard while watching someone about to have her leg amputated with a buzzsaw.

 

 

On the downside: it was too hip. Too much in-joke chatter about movies, especially Godard's “Breathless” - and if you haven't seen “Breathless,” you really have no idea what they're talking about. But this is a minor cavil. The play was generally excellent.

 

 

Finally: “My New Best Friend.” Technically, it was the best play of the three. Absolutely brilliant staging: when characters are talking on the phone to one another, they stand, they face one another across the stage, they pace and circle one another. The minimal set décor is torn apart and assembled several times. The dialogue is very witty and sharp.

 

 

But – and here's the thing – the play is, among other things, about the dichotomy between New York and California. The New York-based characters are all smart and practical and a little rueful; the California-based characters are self-absorbed, silly, vain. “It reminded me of Woody Allen,” Partner said later, and he was absolutely right.

 

 

But you know what? We saw it first.

 

 

You might see it in local theater, or on Broadway, or maybe as a movie.

 

 

But we saw it first!

 

 

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As you (may or may not) like it

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Partner and I went to see a production of “As You Like It” at Brown last weekend. Now, before I continue, you must know that I am not a Shakespeare snob. I only remembered that “As You Like It” was the play with Rosalind and Celia, and the Forest of Arden, and the “seven ages of man” speech.

 

 

As we seated ourselves, we saw some tables, chairs, and scripts lying around onstage. I am not Walter Kerr, but I know metatheater when I see it.

 

 

The first few scenes were done as mock script-readings. The characters were only approximately in costume. All the entries and exits were read aloud. This was okay, if not terribly original. But some of the scenes, especially the Rosalind/Celia dialogue, were delivered in what I think of as “Shakespearean blabbering," with the actors speaking as quickly and affectedly as possible, for "comic effect."  (Think of Michael Keaton in “Much Ado About Nothing.”)

 

 

At least they didn't use fake British accents. I still have painful memories of a production of “Comedy of Errors” some decades back, in which all the actors twitched and squeaked as if they were on heroin, with bad British accents no less. It made me want to knife myself.

 

 

The first half of "As You Like It" had some nice scenes nonetheless. One was done as a short series of black-and-white silent movies, speeded up, with the actors live on stage providing the missing dialogue in rapid paraphrase: “No, I'd love to let you in, it's great to see you, but seriously, you can't come in, your brother wants to kill you!” Later, the curtain rose on an actor dressed as a panda bear, who stared at the audience for a moment, then retreated. I think the message was: “Welcome to the Forest of Arden. It’s not a normal forest.”

 

 

Partner and I escaped to the terrace at intermission. “It's not too bad so far,” I said.

 

 

“Hm,” Partner said.

 

 

The second half of the show was less successful. The actors blurted and shouted and waved their arms. The panda came back a few times, but he/she wasn't quite so cute after a while. (This is called the Law of Diminishing Returns.) And it was long. Three hours of not-very-well-staged Shakespeare is quite a lot.

 

 

So: not so great.  But nice try.

 

 

I hope they do “Titus Andronicus” next year. That’s the one with people being baked into pies.

 

 

I’d love to see that on stage.  Maybe with a panda for comic relief.

 

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Big theatah, small theatah

 

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There was a nice little piece in the Times recently about a little play I've never heard of. It's called “Almost, Maine”; it lived and died off-Broadway several years ago; and now it's having a very happy afterlife in regional theater all over the world.

 

According to the article, it's ideal for local groups for any number of reasons. It's pleasant without being corny; it's relatively easy to stage; and it can accommodate as few as four actors and as many as seventeen, depending on how many people you need to cast.

 

 

Providence is pretty rich in theater. We have a couple of really good local companies (especially Trinity and Gamm), several smaller groups, and the colleges. I saw a spectacular “Angels In America” at Trinity back in the mid-1990s. I still remember the jolt when the angel crashed through the ceiling at the end of “Millennium Approaches”; I was expecting it, my companion wasn't; I was electrified, and he was completely paralyzed.

 

 

And that is a perfect example of something you simply cannot do, and should not even attempt to do, on a small stage.

 

 

Scale matters. Partner and I saw “Wicked” on the PPAC stage here in Providence some years ago, and it was pretty good. Then we saw it on Broadway, and Jesus Christ, it was gorgeous. In Providence, the Emerald City was a sparkly lighting effect; on Broadway, it was blinding.

 

 

So small theaters need something else. They need, in a word, to be original. I've seen “Comedy of Errors” done as burlesque, and “A Little Night Music” done with cardboard automobiles, and “Peer Gynt” done with rap numbers.

 

Long live the dinky little local theaters.

 

 

And why don't people do “The Skin of Our Teeth” more often?

 

 

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American idiots

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Emily Dickinson said real poetry made her feel as if the top of her head had been taken off.

I had that experience on Saturday.

Partner and I went to see “American Idiot” on Broadway. If you're as out of touch with popular music as I am, you will need to be told that this show is based on the Green Day album of the same name. Partner had seen some scenes on the last Tony Awards telecast and was very interested in it. I was a little dubious; I had bad memories of a road production of “Movin' Out,” the Billy Joel-inspired ballet/musical, and after an hour's worth of Twyla Tharp-style leaps and twirls to the tune of “Scenes From An Italian Restaurant,” I decided that stage shows and pop music do not mix.

I was wrong.

This is an amazing show. Everything pops. The set is a busy amalgam of rock concert, living-room furniture, fire escapes, and a compact car suspended by chains over stage right. And video screens everywhere, chattering through the whole show. And light projections, sometimes mimicking the action, sometimes commenting on it, sometimes disagreeing with it.

The talent – well, it's Broadway, you really don't make it onto the stage unless you're pretty good. Everybody in the cast was able to sing, and dance, and act, and do gymnastics, and play the guitar. I kid you not. Everybody.

And the dancing! This is not Twyla Tharp. This is angry dancing. This is ugly dancing. When the choreography was supposed to communicate fighting, or sex, I found myself holding my breath, thinking: Oh my god they're actually doing it.

And then there are the songs. Every new musical I've been to for years has had dead spots and meaningless songs. “We need a song here – go write one. How about a ballad?” (The “Spamalot” number “The Song That Goes Like This” says it better than I ever could.) “American Idiot” does not have a single wasted song or dead spot. The ballads, when they come along, are actually a welcome relief from the propulsive energy of the show; you get a chance to catch your breath before the next onslaught.

When we came out, Partner and I were both incredibly buzzed, and had to walk around for a while to get rid of the energy we'd built up during the show. New York is always sensory overload for me anyway, so I was deaf and blind for a few minutes as we jostled our way down 44^th Street.

But Partner told me a story later about something he'd seen right after we came out of the theater.

In among the crowd, he saw a mother dragging two kids – a boy around thirteen, a girl maybe fourteen - out of the theater. The boy had a rapturous look on his face; he'd obviously really enjoyed the show. And then his mother shrieked: “I don't want you to get any ideas! I don't want you to come home smelling like drugs and dragging girls home with you!”

Partner said the boy shrank into himself, going from ecstasy to sullen defensiveness in a matter of seconds. The boy turned to his sister. “You liked it,” he said accusingly. “I saw you crying.”

“I was not crying,” the sister said. “I thought it was boring.”

The mother did not get it. Maybe the sister got it and maybe she didn't.

But the boy got it.

Once the top of your head gets taken off, there's no getting it back on again.

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