Two formative men of the American Theatre (Books - A Life by Elia Kazan & Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh by John Lahr)

The life stories of two American Theatre makers monopolized my reading back in January: Elia Kazan: A Life, film and theatre director Kazan's hefty, probing memoir (Alfred A. Knopf, 1988) and Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (W.W. Norton & Co. 2014), John Lahr's deftly paced, thoroughly researched, deeply perceptive biography of the great playwright. Two men could not have had a greater influence on the structure and build of action, the feeling of innocence and epiphany, the rhapsodic music of text, the themes of individuality and of sex that were the coming-of-age of the American theatre and film in the 1930s - 1970s, than Williams and Kazan.  Two men could not have been more superficially different - Kazan was the son of Greek immigrants, born in Turkey, a scrappy fighter, and relentless womanizer, Williams a grandson of an American preacher, delicate, gay, a virgin until twenty-six years of age - but fundamentally they were remarkably similar. Aside from their obvious love of theatre, both seemed dissatisfied with the restrictions of their world, were driven to create theatre to give veiled expression to a deep sense of personal failure, both felt outsiders and compulsively pursued relief in work or, failing that, one from drink and the other from sex. John Lahr's quotes a letter from Williams to Kazan:

Two Political Dramas in One New York Weekend (Theatre - The Death of Klinghoffer & Sticks and Bones)

Some question the relevance of live theatrical performance in the age of Tivo and live streaming, but you wouldn't if you had seen two productions we attended, one off-Broadway and the other at the Metropolitan Opera.  The New Group's production of David Rabe's 1971 Sticks and Bones is a still-fresh indictment of American hypocrisy, while the 1991 The Death of Klinghoffer by John Adams and Alice Goodman, although an over-literal production fails to ignite the material, is still resonant, especially in its having been mounted against the fear (unfounded) that its content would be incendiary fodder for anti-Semites.

First the opera.  It is based on the 1985 hijacking of a cruise ship by Palestinians.  The American, British and Jewish passengers are taken hostage, and a wheelchair-bound Jewish man is murdered.  The ship's captain, rather than reporting the killing and trading lives for demands, reports to the authorities that nothing has occurred, forestalling escalation and letting the hijackers go free. It's a tactical decision, not a referendum on the value of a man's life.  One could say that the captain chose not to value Klinghoffer's life more than that of any other passenger.  As played by Paulo Szot, it was not a choice the captain took lightly.  Of course, that doesn't make it any more tolerable for Klinghoffer's loved ones.

Irrepressibly energetic (Dance - Hofesh Shechter's Sun)

Hofesh Shechter's irrepressible dance piece Sun is joyous and aggressive by turns, filled with images of war, street violence, and colonialism.  Cutout images of tribesman, sheep, and businessmen clash with his live performers who are clad in Middle Eastern garb, as commedia dell'arte clowns, and characters out of Chekhov - playfully undermining his artifice.  Wagner and Irving Berlin, tribal drums, and bagpipes are sampled in his eclectic and sometimes assaultively loud score.  A quick-cut, episodic rhythm is frantically energetic, jolting the viewer from one scene to the next.  The movement vocabulary evokes Middle Eastern and modern dance but his choreography is filled with the individual personalities of his dancers, who are a joy to experience.

Theatre - The Big Knife - Roundabout Theatre

Clifford Odet's 1948 The Big Knife takes a big slice out of old Hollywood.  A movie star needs to decide if the studio will own him or if he will own himself.  The lyrical idealist who wrote Awake and Sing is now bitter with the money he has taken from the movies, takes out a big knife, and tries to cut out his own liver.  It's not a pretty play, but it's a good one.  This production, directed by Doug Hughes, has a number of actors who can combine the ability to be vulnerable to their dying careers and their dying souls while singing Odets's theatrical 1940s vernacular.

When autobiography fails to be personal (Theatre - Mayday Mayday - Theatre at St. Anne's Warehouse)

I know Tristan Sturrock's work as a talented member of Kneehigh Theatre, which did, among other works, a brilliantly inventive theatrical adaptation of Brief Encounter.  Mayday Mayday: A True Story by the Man Who Fell is Sturrock's one-man account of his recovery from an accident which broke his cervical spine.  It is presented by his own Theatre Damfino.  It sports a number of creative moments with its spare means, and I have no doubt that its creation was useful therapeutically, but that didn't make it involving theatre. Audiences often seem unwilling to say when autobiographic works about recovery haven't made for captivating works of art, perhaps they fear their reaction will be felt too personally.  In fact, Sturrock opens the performance by saying that this was, for a long time, a story he didn't want to tell.  I can't blame him but unfortunately, I could tell that from the performance. The work uses narrative storytelling to remain distant to the experience of it. While it showcases Sturrock's remarkable physical precision and appealing presence, it doesn't live.  It is emotionally unrevealing of his experience then or his present experience with us.  I'm pleased for his remarkable good luck but wasn't won over by Mayday Mayday as theatre.

Theatre - Much Ado About Nothing

Much Ado About Nothing is certainly the most amiably nihilistic play ever written and is most appositely titled....With every exchange between the fencing lovers, the abyss glitters, and their mutual wit does not so much defend against other selves as it defends against meaninglessness. - Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

Critics are fond of declaring the near impossibility of this play's swift switches from screwball comedy to tragedy, but I thought the current production at Theatre for a New Audience pulled them off admirably, largely because they didn't overplay what is supposed to be funny and the actor's were capable of being moved by the seriousness of their characters' predicaments. Maggie Siff and Jonathan Cake (above) as Beatrice and Benedick were particularly strong.

Theatre - Old Hats

Old Hats is a delightful vaudeville from master clowns Bill Irwin and David Shiner with music by Nellie McKay (dir. Tina Landau).  It's classic clowning but there's nothing old hat about it.

A revolution without a cause (Theatre - Neva by Guillermo Calderon)

Neva, by Chilean writer and director Guillermo Calderon, is about making drama in the context of revolution.  It is set in 1905, when the Czar's troops murdered civilians for demonstrating, an event that likely helped sow the seeds of the 1917 revolution. The great playwright Anton Chekhov has just died of tuberculosis.  His wife comes to St. Petersberg, still mourning him, to rehearse his Cherry Orchard.  What is the meaning of their drama made of personal loss and love when there is real drama, with life and death stakes, taking place in the street outside?  The actors demand scenes of each other, they concoct emotions from fantasy in order to escape the pain of their lives.  Then they just a quickly knock their fantasies down, criticize each other, and turn to gossip.  The turn-on-a-dime rollercoaster ride demanded of the cast would provide for tour-de-force peformances, but the cast is a little long on effort and a little short on real feeling.  The question of the uses of drama is a provocative one to ask in a theatre, with your play as the means of asking it, but I imagine it would have been very different to ask it in Chile. Because here one has no revolutions in the street. People make fortunes to live in Brooklyn, stress about their carbon footprints, and dress like they play for a grunge band.  The disjointed Occupy Wall Street movement lasted, what - five minutes - and disappeared in time for the election. Caldeon's demand of emotional acrobatics and effects like cold, rapid-fire delivery, and mock over-dramatization would have been useful foils in actors and for a public who are already charged with political emotion.  But here, where most people come to escape fighting for their ideals so that they can earn a living, and where artists mostly romanticize being political, what you end up seeing is the strain of these artists to be filled with meaning. Calderon would have needed to alter this production for our political and social context but was evidently not able to.  As a result, I could see what he wrote, but don't think this production gave us his play at all. 

Theatre - Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Tennesse Williams 1955 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof still plays as strong and relevant in the current Broadway revival with Scarlett Johansson, Ciaran Hinds, and Benjamin Walker (dir. Rob Ashford).  Williams was the greatest lyrical voice of the American theatre. The lengthy outpourings of his tormented characters play more like arias than monologues.  All of his plays were personal, if you ask me, but this one seem to be an outpouring of his rage against duplicity in every corner of life - family, medicine, law, and religion.

Mendacity is the system that we live in.  Liquor is one way out an' death's the other.

Why is it so damned hard to talk?

Like E.M. Forster, he exhorts us to stop lying and connect to others, even if it's tough.  They couldn't have been more different writers, but both were gay, so they were familiar with the ways that society expected them to lie.

New York's Mayors In the Spotlight

He was a three-term mayor of New York City from 1934-45.  Just five feet tall and energetically motivated to do right by the common person.  They wrote a Broadway musical - Fiorello! - about him in 1959, which I saw last night, presented by Encores.  He was Fiorello H. LaGuardia.

He was another three-terrm mayor of New York City from 1978-89.  Irrepresively fiesty, he pulled the city out of near bankruptcy.  There's no musical...yet, but a documentary film about him premiered just a few days ago.  He was Ed Koch and he died this morning at 88. 

Theatre - Opus No. 7

Saw this last weekend - wonderful improvisatory and lively piece of theatre.

Opus No. 7

Dmitry Krymov Lab - Moscow School of Dramatic Art

St. Ann's Warehouse

Send in the Clowns - Judi Dench

From Sondheim's A Little Night Music - Judi Dench singing Send in The Clowns.



and, oh my god, Simon Russell Beale, Daniel Evans, Julien Ovenden, and Bryn Terfel in Everybody Ought to Have a Maid from the Sondheim Proms.

More than just speaking the speech (Theatre - The Winter's Tale by William Shakespeare)

A bunch of us did a quintessential summer in New York thing Saturday. We waited on line in Central Park for free tickets for Shakespeare in the Park. There are two shows to see. One of them is the line. The cast: New Yorkers - interested in what's going on in their city, always the expert on it, not too nosy, generally respectful of the rules (you have to be in a city of 8 million people). There were Risk players, people playing guitar quietly to themselves, nappers, those studying up for the play, those who brought their New York Times (half of it is printed Saturday), their laptops, library book readers, bookstore book readers, kindle readers, those who brought their picnic (us - whole wheat french bread with nutella, and fruit), and those who called the local deli which actually delivers to the line. They sat on benches, lay on blankets, reclined in beach chairs, and snoozed on inflatable mattresses. There were the line monitors employed by the theatre, the tourists capturing the line on their video cameras, the saxophonist playing Mozart and Cole Porter, and the conspiracy theorist parading up and down the line playing for our sympathy. Then, of course, there was also The Winters Tale by William Shakespeare.

I would call The Winter's Tale Shakespeare's redemptive comedy. It offers one of the most complex plot of any of his plays, probably his strongest female character (Paulina), and it could perhaps be thought a more "modern" play in that the dramatic situation and character trump the beauty of poetry. While I could take a bath in the language of Shakespeare's Richard II or Antony and Cleopatra, one cannot get away with just 'speaking the speech' in this play. In it Leontes, a king, is visited by his childhood friend Polixenes. He becomes rabidly suspicious that his queen Hermione is having an affair with Polixenes and eventually condemns her to death and banishes her newborn child. The child is taken away by a trusted servant and grows up the daughter of a peasant in Polixenes's country named Perdita. She eventually falls in love with Florizel, the son of Polixenes. Meanwhile, Leontes becomes a penitent and Paulina, unbeknownst to any soul, has kept Hermione alive. 16 years pass and this time it is Polixenes who becomes angry when he discovers his son wishes to marry a peasant. So the former advisor to Leontes brings the couple back to Leontes's country where the peasant is revealed as Leontes daughter, Paulina brings Hermione back to life, and the two kings are reunited in friendship, the two children marry. The end.

I find this tale of unrestrained impulse turning to regret one of Shakespeare's deepest and most touching. The plays success relies on the arc of Leontes's feelings being deeply and believably invested by the human being that plays him and in this director Michael Greif was unlucky with the casting of Ruben Santiago-Hudson who strutted about with his heart empty of anything that Shakespeare asks for, apparently unaware that he was asked to do more than speak the words loudly and clearly with some variation in inflection. The fact the playing space was well designed, making good use of the Delacorte theatre's outdoor setting, that Marianne Jean-Baptiste gave a strong performance as Paulina, that Perdita was played with intelligence and vulnerability by Heather Lind, and that Tom Kitt composed a lovely score, played live didn't matter in the end because Leonte's grief is the spine of this play. The one turn that saved the evening for me were the antics of Hamish Linklater as the clown Autolycus. He brought the text to life with colloquial ease, was responsive in the moment to what is going on around him, and filled himself with the circumstances of his character, ridiculous as those are. Usually the stagebusiness of Autolycus who is not only a rustic clown but also a conman, pickpocketing everyone around him, takes up so much energy that I don't know who the man actually is. Not in this case. Linklater seems born to the stage. His performance exuded joy. I'm looking forward to seeing him play Bassanio to Al Pacino's Shylock when the other play of this summer's season, The Merchant of Venice, transfers to Broadway later this season.

Artistic attempts to render the void and then fill it (Theatre - Teorema & Film - Up in the Air)

The two works of art I saw this weekend could not have been more different, but they both concerned people with lives of outer perfection but inner emptiness for whom a key event shatters their complacency.

One of the theatre directors I admire most, Dutch director Ivo van Hove, has a love of raw emotion exploding into unsuspecting lives and an interest in adapting either classic theatre works in provocative multi-layered ways or turning great film into theatre. I have seen many of his works - Ibsen's Hedda Gabbler, Eugene O'Neill's More Stately Mansions, Tennessee Williams's A Streecar Named Desire, Alice in Bed by Susan Sontag, and one of the best pieces of theatre I have ever seen, his adaptation of John Cassavettes cruel film Faces. Last night, members of his company Toneelgroep Amsterdam and a live string quartet, Blindman, performed his adaptation of Pier Paolo Pasolini's Teorema as part of this year's Lincoln Center Festival, one of the opportunities to see really interesting cutting edge international performing arts in New York every summer. Pasolini was an Italian avant-garde filmmaker, poet, and political activist who both led a life and composed work of passion and complexity. In Teorema a mysterious visitor enters the lives of a wealthy suburban family and shakes their empty routine to the core - for some of them this means awakening them to their basic drives for connection and sex, and for others it means stripping them clean of their trappings of wealth so that only their naked need remains. A large, grey, carpeted modern-home-like set was plopped into a large warehouse on Governor's Island in New York. So, as with many van Hove productions, the space played an important role in the theatrical experience. One had to take a Ferry and then walk 20 minutes on an Island with a compound that used to belong to the Coast Guard and now houses various artistic venues - it looks a little bit like something out of the Others compound in Lost.

In the Pasolini film, Terrence Stamp played the visitor, and his power was very much a religious one and the urges he released divine. In van Hove's adaptation, the visitor is a young vigorous man with the darker complexion and tight curls of someone who could be of Arab descent, his exact place of origin isn't all that important, what is important is that he is the "other" to the white, upper class family he visits. It is this otherness that seems to encourage these protected suburbanites to see this force in their visitor. In this production the force is more animal than divine, represented in this production by a scene the visitor enacts with a ferocious looking German Shepherd.

The visitor undoes each character in turn, but while the actors describe the acts he performs on them, in actuality it is they themselves that manipulate the visitor. He seems to become an excuse for them to release themselves, though they don't have to blame themselves for it, they can blame the unruly "other," unlike them with his darker skin, his freedom from possessions, his ease with his body. This is frequently a role "others" are given in societies. The magic and wealth that have been fictitiously given all Jews to possess, the violence and sexuality credited the black male, the bacchanalian carnality credited gay people, it seems to me that they project upon their other the force in themselves they desire most and are therefore most afraid of releasing (how Freudian of me). In any event, I found this choice a very effective one.

The text is a poetic, third-person narrative spoken by each character about himself over a microphone, creating a distance between them and their story. Yet while they narrate themselves they participate emotionally in what the character experiences in the story, so there is an alienating meld of voice-over and character, of closeness and distance that seems very much the point of the production. The people walk about holding themselves at arms length never entering their story, yet they are filled with fierce passions lying just beneath the surface. Once he has unburdened each of them of course he leaves. The cast then rip up the walls and the floor of the mod set, creating a passion-torn landscape. Then each ritualistically perform an extended monologue of where their unleashed passion took them after he had left, how they searched for him and never found him. Each character is liberated but finally undone, except for the servant, who I will discuss in a moment. Some of the images were quite effective. As the father walks naked through the rubble of his house, which is also the train station in his city, and tries to unleash a scream that can be heard above the roar of complacency, the stage picture evoked the violence of a Francis Bacon painting. Visceral, bloody like a piece of meat, a single agonized person in a space where modular walls are often visible against a larger and less clear background. I also very much enjoyed the use of a live string quartet, a rich sonority contrasting the otherwise cold palette of sound, lighting, and set, whose repertoire moves from becomes ever more atonal as the evening's dissolution progresses.

Unfortunately, I found the production somewhat undone by its own ideas. It was tied too slavishly to its pictures and theatrical rituals and shortchanged the story telling too much for my taste. The formality of having the visitor first encounter each of the family in turn and then having each of them ritualistically take turns in describing their unraveling (in the same order) became too predictable. The monologues' length did not sustain their interest given the repetitive structure and the familiarity of the physical trappings in this production which, although they partook of the language of experimental theatre, were well used cliches of the form. I have found many of van Hove's productions startlingly original, but this was not one of them. Van Hove also chose to depart from Pasolini's more religiously infused ideas, but with the character of the servant he never succeeded in replacing them with anything else. In the film, she goes home to her village and performs miracles, in this adaptation, she climbs stairs behind the set to theatrically approximate floating on a cloud, but then returns to the rubble of the set and sits smiling beatifically. I loved the performance of Frieda Pittoors, who played her, but bringing her back into the world seemed a poor choice. The cast was adventurous and I loved how generously and undemonstratively they brought themselves to the large passions of the play while speaking third-person narrative. This is a play about transformation and the actors did just that, they transformed inside and out. It gave a piece about emptiness a great deal of fullness which was very much the opposite experience that I had of Jason Reitman's film Up in the Air.

Everyone has been discussing this film as a break-through performance for George Clooney who plays Ryan Bingham, a man who fires people for a living while delivering them a cock-and-bull spiel about this being the first day of the rest of their lives opportunity. His only ambition in life is to become a 10 million mile frequent flyer. What are they talking about? I found this film a vapid exercise that never made a choice to reveal a character through complex dialogue or idiosyncratic behavior if it could do so through edited montage or cliched mannerism. And if Clooney ducked his head and shyly grinned one more time I was going to go for a long walk.

Although I don't choose to live in Omaha or Des Moines, I spent ten years in the middle of my large and various country and I thought Reitman was incapable of depicting what he put forward as average American life without mocking it. His characters perform empty rituals whether they fire people for a living or hold average jobs and aspire to fill condos and cars. Then they get married and everyone is filled with emotion for a day. No wonder all these loonies talk about the "sanctity of marriage," it seems to be one of the only times they're alive, if we are to believe this film. The combination of being the brother of the bride, discovering that his freewheeling-on-the-road-occasional fuck-buddy who he thought had the same values as he actually has a family, and the threat of becoming professionally redundant himself by a call center is supposed to humanize Clooney's character, but if he changes I didn't see it. And if he doesn't - what's this film about anyway?

Virginia Woolf has nothing to be afraid of (Theatre - God of Carnage by Yamina Reza)

I went to the theatre for the first time in, oh.... more than 8 months, last night. This from someone who used to work in the field and see three shows a week! How wonderful to live within 25 minutes of Broadway and have smart bill of fare with great casts the likes of Jeff Daniels and the inimitable Janet McTeer. The play was Yasmina Reza's God of Carnage. She wrote Art, a provocative philosophical play about the nature of the title subject that was the talk of the theatre scene in the mid 1990s. Last night's play had everything I tend to like in an evening at the theatre: serious moral questions, demands that the actors invest deeply in their circumstances, good roles served by able actors, it did not rely on a lot of spectacle - so why didn't I like it? It was because the play had little imagination, it relied on cliched rather than idiosyncratic ideas of people, and because, although its stakes were high, neither the writing nor the acting was quite up to delivering them authentically.

God of Carnage concerns two well-to-do New York couples (at least in this translation by Christopher Hampton. I would actually like to know if the French version is set in Paris and Hampton's West End version in London, with their particulars) whose young sons get into an altercation. One breaks two teeth of the other, although this act was likely provoked, it was a verbal act that precipitated the physical one. The parents get together in a gesture of working things out amicably and the evening devolves into a violent free-for-all in which the enlightened foursome become drunk and abusive themselves and, ostensibly, show their true colors, which are more savage than their children's. The play attempted to address "real" circumstances in current up-scale New York life, but was really more what you might think New York were like if your only experience of it was from Sex in the City. Honestly, this was some television idea of Soho or Upper East Side whining at its worst. Cell phones. Lawyers defending evil pharmaceutical companies, money buying couples beautiful furnishings and overpriced tulips from the Korean deli on the corner, but not buying them love. Its hyper-reality rendered it mundane. Who cares? I guess the average theatre goer probably cares because they are generally over 60 and from a high income bracket or are Broadway tourists (no offence meant) . But this play certainly did not reflect my life or the life of my friends with children, not even taking into account the fact that it carefully subtitles itself a "farce." Is that supposed to mean that we don't take its moral quandries seriously?

The s biggest joke of the evening is that one of the monied foursome barfs uncontrollably for a time. This, of course, requires a theatrical solution, since it is unreasonable to ask an actor to throw up every night. Barfing on stage or screen is a pet peeve of mine because a) it is a cliche and b) it is one of those things that the audience KNOWS is not true. Dying falls into this category too and plenty of characters in dramas do that, I know - but that is trying to address the ultimate mystery - the end of life. There is something about the basic truth of throwing up that means everyone knows you're faking it. And unless everything else the character is doing is absolutely believable, it throws the authenticity of the entire performance into question for me. If Lucy Liu had been up to the rest of the emotional requirements of her role, maybe I might have been more forgiving, but she was hard pressed to yank herself up to the dramatic demands of her barfing agony, subsequent drunk scene, and the gorgeous monologue that Yasmina Reza wrote and that is sure to become a staple of the audition scene for 40 something actresses for the next couple of years. Dylan Baker was adequate as her husband. Janet McTeer was emotionally available though sometimes strained. It was only Jeff Daniels who showed great insight and admirable vulnerability to the circumstances, an intelligent choice as he was ultimately meant to be the least feeling of the bunch. But the writing seemed to demand impossible reactions given the circumstances and the acting, understandably, was not able to justify it. Although I was happy that a play was exploring the circumstances it did and was able to laugh at some of the jokes, I didn't buy God of Carnage . Reza cannot have been innocent of the references she made to Edward Albee's great play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf - a foursome with marital problems who get drunk of an evening and reveal far too much about themselves while slaughtering contemporary values, but the homage she pays does not does not reach the level of its object of admiration either in terms of histrionics or lyricism.

History as theater as history... (Theater - Mary Stuart)

Broadway is sporting a new production of Mary Stuart. It's a new version of Shiller's classic play by Peter Oswald directed by Phyllida Lloyd and imported from London's Donmar Warehouse. I'm always glad when Broadway takes on a good play with a good team, it's too bad this production ends up being such a mixed bag. On the good side, the new version of the text is full-blooded, contemporary and accessible and except for what it takes on thematically (see below) does not draw much attention to itself. The two lead actresses are a dynamic pair, Harriet Walter and Janet McTeer are available to their circumstances, think on their feet, know how to use language but don't kid themselves that the play ends with the words they say. They both give effective and alive performances. Janet McTeer is particularly able to bring her character both a sense of grandeur and of the colloquial. I enjoyed Brian Murray a lot too, he plays the Earl of Shrewsbury with an obsequious, self-effacing exterior but a solid core, and he never pushes for effect. John Benjamin Hickey has his moments as well, but wears his English accent awkwardly and it seems to keep him from ever fully relishing the duplicitous realities of the Earl of Leicester's character. In fact, I found this production burdened often by theatrical cliche and generality, it felt very much like an opera production - long on general concept and short on human detail - and I would lay the responsibility for that at the doorstep of director Phillida Lloyd. The text and production saw much contemporary relevance in this famous story of Queen Elizabeth I of England and her insecure sense of her hold on the throne due to her rivalrous cousin Mary Stuart who is a Catholic and who flees Scotland after a coup there. She is imprisoned by Elizabeth and thus becomes a figure around which the papists and others who wished to depose Elizabeth rally. Lloyd and Oswald's Mary Stuart clearly references our own recent history and America and Britain's choice to always value security over displomacy or mercy. It is no accident, I think, that the actor Nicholas Woodeson playing Lord Burleigh, who engineers Queen Elizabeth's insecurity and strongly favors the beheading of Mary Stuart, looks so much like Dick Cheney. The production does not strain hard at all for this parallel and I found it resonant without being heavy-handed. Beyond this bold stroke of concept, I found the production lacking in subtlety of human interaction between the characters and their circumstances. It is unfortunate, for instance, that the long scene that opens the play featuring the usually able Maria Tucci as Mary Stuart's nurse and Michael Countryman as her jailer, is such a welter of stage cliches. This is one of the many details that makes this play feel like an opera. It's an "oh, you know" performance. Oh, you know, she's the old nurse. You know what old nurses are like. Just waggle your voice and your chin and look generally addled and....you know, old... and you'll be fine. If the director tried for anything more than that I would be shocked, given how good a caliber of actor she has. Hanna as played by Tucci feels like the mezzo nurse in a tired opera production, everyone always ignores those poor mezzos and focuses on the star Soprano - say Emelia to Desdemona in Otello or Alisa to Lucia in Lucia di Lammermoor. It would be nice if someone told the actors in the opening scene that they didn't have to scream the lines of the play to be heard. If they would just focus on doing something real - listening to each other, really folding that damn blanket, we might be drawn in. Now everyone coughs and rustles their programs and suffers through the exposition until the star enters. We perk up when Janet McTeer enters not merely because she played Nora so well on Broadway a few years ago, but because she speaks in what sounds like a normal voice and actually inhabits the details of her circumstances. The same problem existed in the performance of Chandler Williams as Mortimer, such a flurry of classical theater convention swirls around his generalities of young rashness - the way he throws his body about - I really don't know what he is doing or saying. But I in no way think or feel that this man is moved to eventual suicide by his new found religion or the imprisoned queen who embodies his faith. Although there are many moments to enjoy in this production, I thought that, with the exceptions already mentioned, this was lazy work, not on the part of the actors, if anything many of them work too hard, but on the part of the director. It seemed content to simply rely on its stars and its strong concept and cartoon-in the rest. I expected better.

Raw Theatre Prettied Up for Hollywood (Film - Dreamgirls)

On a completely different note, The Ragazzo borrowed the DVD of Dreamgirls from the library and we watched it last night. I saw the show on Broadway back in the early 1980s and I find the piece much more suited to the stage than film. The film is prettied up and I don't really like the pop-i-fied take on the music. I know it suits the contemporary artists they cast and the tastes of this age, but the original music had a more gospel/R&B sound to it, as did the music of the age of the story. I found it a particularly strange choice considering that the show is about having integrity and going your own way, but I get why they did it. The Broadway take also had these fantastic sections of what, in opera, one would call sprechstimme. A type of music that is both conversationally spoken and also sung at the same time. I remember this from the original Broadway show because it was an almost classical musical touch, but done in the lingo of urban African American culture that was entirely familiar to me from daily life. It was very exciting to hear and made the acting and singing one thing. In the film, although it was done with skill, lines were either spoken or sung and they were rarely acted with the energy, character, or precision of the Broadway show. The exceptions were Eddie Murphy, the man can sing, move, act, - he really is the most incredible chameleon -and newcomer Jennifer Hudson. While she does not have the seismic force of Jennifer Holliday, who created the role of Effie on stage, she brings the role and especially her big aria - I'm Not Going - a refinement all her own. And her talent just oozes out of her. Beyonce does the Diana Ross role justice and really does sing the hell out of her big song. Jamie Foxx should be singled out for a performance which, no matter which facet you examine - singing, acting, or just walking across a space - is utterly lacking in talent, charisma, or basic sense. He doesn't even emote badly, and he sure can't sing. They put seven different wigs on him and changed his costumes about 150 times. It doesn't help. He's a walking void. All in all the movie is too refined and packaged a take on this show for my taste, but it is a good story and some of the songs are satisfying. For those of you who have never seen it. Here's a link to an excerpt of the original stage production from the 1982 Tony Awards on YouTube. I remember the moment in the usually staid awards show that the audience started shouting - the place went beserk. Jennifer Holliday does not do the pretty-picture version of this part. It is down and dirty and spectacular.

Dr. Who's David Tennant attempts the indecisive Danish prince and other gob-smackers

Cam tries to avert blogertia today. Dovegrey introduced me to the meaty Mookse. And, OMG, cute-as-a-button BBC television star David Dr. Who Tennant attempts Hamlet and this review (thanks again Dovegrey) is hilarious. Then again, if you're a fan of Dr. Who, Tennant, the RSC, or Hamlet, maybe you won't find it so funny. But anyone else...

And I just came across an advertisement for a new novel - In the Land of No Right Angles by Daphne Beal who, I believe, was this very cool, very smart young woman, a Brown student at the time, who assistant directed a show of mine at my theater company in Milwaukee! I'm going to have to read it on that basis alone even though the ad threatens me with its being "A subtly resonant masterpiece."

BBC television did a three-part adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst's 2004 Booker-winning novel The Line of Beauty about 1980's politics, hypocrisy, and the lure of the superficial. I reviewed the novel here and, while the adaptation lacks some of the psychological complexity and the grace that is afforded it by the quality of the writing, it's not bad at all. Thank you New York Public Library (my Netflix).

Meanwhile, The Neuroscience of Cognitive Development - The Role of Experience and the Developing Brain continues to impress me for its conciseness and George Eliot has this to say on the subject of human psychology in Middlemarch:

We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, "Oh, nothing!" Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts - not to hurt others.

And this:

The human mind has at no period accepted a moral chaos; and so preposterous a result was not strictly conceivable. But we are frightened at much that is not strictly conceivable.

Her certainty is, at times, shattering.

One last question: can one eat too many blueberries? I hope not. Off to class.

Deep Wells (Books - Fools of Fortune & The Habitation of Dragons)

The solicitors' offices were in the South Mall, heralded by a shiny brass plate among many similar ones, all of them drawing attention to the services of legal or medical practitioners. Mr. O'Brien was long since dead, but Mr. Lanigan's presence made up for the loss. He was a person of pyramidal shape, a small head sloping into the slope of his shoulders, arms sloping again as he spread them over his desk. A chalk-striped brown suit imposed a secondary shape of its own, with a heavy watch-chain slung across a waistcoat so tightly fastened over the slope of Mr. Lanigan's stomach that it appeared to be perpetually on the point of bouncing a dozen tiny buttons, were almost lost in the smooth inclines of his face, and artificial chins, created by a stern cellulid collar, all but obscured the flamboyance of a polka-dotted brown bow-tie. Mr. Lanigan's smile perpetually twinkled.

Is that not a stupendous description? William Trevor never turns his "secondary" characters into set dressing. If they have a place in the story they always get their fair due.

In Fools of Fortune a family is gutted by a fire resulting from the war in Ireland, I won't ruin your own reading experience with more details than that. The son, still a young boy, observes how his mother changes as she becomes obsessed with the man she holds responsible for the violent act.

My mother frowned and shook her head, appearing to dismiss the subject. She said that when she was first married she used to wait at the mill every afternoon so that she and my father could walk back together to the house. 'I remember the day you were born, Willie. I remember the broken veins in Dr. Hogan's face and how his shiny boots reminded me of a hunstman. "Now, now Mrs Quinton," he said, "make your effort when I tell you."'

She poured herself more whiskey. She told me I had been creased and red, my eyes squeezed tight. And then, abruptly, she exclaimed, interrupting what she was saying:

'It's that man who's on my mind. You know how that kind of thing is, Willie? Suddenly, when you're not thinking at all it comes to you. That horrible Sergeant Rudkin, Willie.'

She went on talking about him, asking me if I could visualize him in his vegetable shop in Liverpool, selling produce to people who didn't know he had been responsible for a massacre. Would they have eaten the parsnips and cabbages if they knew? Would they have laughed and joked with him if they knew he had ordered the shooting of the dogs? She described his vegetable shop to me so minutely that she might have visited it herself, potatoes in sacks, tinned fruit on a shelf, bananas hanging from hooks.

'The Devil incarnate,' my mother said.

I find that a devastating few paragraphs. The way the mother becomes hollowed out by loss. Life moves from the present, pre-fire, to the past in an instant. I am realizing that this book reminds me of the plays of Horton Foote, but particularly his The Habitation of Dragons so redolent is it of a single moment of tragedy in a family's life. Foote writes in an unfancy American idiom of the dramas that buffet ordinary folk in early 20th century small town Texas, rather than Ireland. His words aren't inherently dramatic, they just contain the simple moments of lives unadorned, but moment builds upon moment until his characters are moved on a mammoth current of action that, in the case of Habitation of Dragons, is heart-rending. Foote is best known for the screenplays of Tender Mercies, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Trip to Bountiful. He has written for the American theater from its heyday in the 1950s and is, I believe, still writing. I have directed and acted in a couple of his plays. I consider them required reading - I cannot recommend The Habitation of Dragons enough. Trevor and Foote - two observers who gently dip their cups into deep wells.

The Automat is Gone And So is Brando - Does That Really Mean That Broadway Is Dead?

If you are a fan of theater or of acting, Broadway The Golden Age is a not-to-be-missed love song to the Broadway of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. It consists of reminiscences of many people of the theater - Ben Gazzara, Hal Prince, Stephen Sondheim, Mary Rodgers, Lanie Kazan, Angela Lansbury, Elizabeth Ashley, Maureen Stapleton, Anne Margaret, Martin Landau, Kaye Ballard, Uta Hagen, Frank Langella, Gena Rowlands, John Raitt, Barbara Cook, Elaine Stritch - I could go on and on.

The anecdotes are marvelous and, as usual, I wish there had been more actual footage to accompany them - although there are some gems - Brando in Streetcar on sound recording, footage of Kim Stanley in Bus Stop and a short moment from Lee Strassberg's production of Three Sisters with Stanley, Geraldine Page, and Sandy Dennis (Stanely's reaction to Vershinin leaving in the last act is one of the most devastating things I have ever watched), and a Hollywood screen test of the legendary Laurette Taylor, most remembered for creating the role of Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie. Her performance in that play and in Outward Bound have had such profound impact on those that saw them that the shock waves still seem to ripple down Broadway. I somehow feel I can get close to what that must have been like just by watching Ben Gazzara, and Maureen Stapleton tear-up as they remembered the multiple times they returned to the theater to watch her. Although it made me almost fiercely jealous too. I wanted to be there. I recalled as I watched it some of the memorable performances I have seen - John Raitt in Carousel (even in the 1960s, he was still fantastic in the revival), Maureen Stapleton as Birdie in Little Foxes, Roger Rees as Hamlet, Angela Lansbury in Sweeny Todd (wow), I'll even say Liev Shreiber in Betrayal, and of course the great Geraldine Page in everything I saw her in, on stage that included Agnes of God, Clarence, Viva Vivat Regina, and The Madwoman of Chaillot.

I found myself agreeing with some of the film's outlook - the golden age is dead, it will never come again, Broadway is all hype and helicopters now, it's impersonal, it's too expensive, the theater is not an integrated part of our culture any more, microphones ruin all the music. Yes it's all true. I mourn it. Miss Saigon is not West Side Story. Just the little clips we got of the golden oldies had me in tears sometimes with their immediacy, the guts that seemed to pour off the television screen, but it made me kind of resentful too - are there any great theatrical experiences out there? I've seen some, although I tend to see them off-Broadway now or in Europe. There was a part of the nostalgia of the film maker - a kid who was hoping to find 1940s Broadway when he came to New York from Indiana in the 1980s - that just struck me as whiny. Alright, coffee cost a nickel - I get it already. There are no more automats - I liked them too. Times change. We still drink coffee. We still like it. We can never see Brando as Stanley - is the theater really dead?

Anyway, what is marvelous about the film are the stories and the clips, so if you love the theater - I recommend it.