What's It All About?

What could have possibly stir up the long dormant ranting of the Grande Enchilada? Governor Christie's Bridgegate? That spawn of Satan, Assad, massacring his own people in Syria? Vladimir Putin (every day)?
All of the above, of course, but what got my goat yesterday was something infuriating enough, but far less tragic.
First, some background. I have seen a couple of those Broadway musicals (yes, this is today's incendiary topic) that are supposed to be about young, hip people being bohemians, all rebellious rock & roll. Apparently, nobody involved ever notices that the words "young and hip" and the words "Broadway musical" are, for the most part, mutually exclusive. If you are truly hip, then you are nowhere near a Broadway musical. And to judge from the audiences, the same goes for "young".
With the exception of Hair in its day, which has some pretty nice music and some disturbing war stuff going on, I hold this to be truth to be self-evident.
The first one of these youth-centered musicals I saw was Rent, which is supposed to be La Boheme transposed to the now defunct starving artists of the East Village (currently to be found gentrifying the far edges of Bushwick, or getting free housing in Detroit). Every single thing about that show was neither hip nor authentic, nor really bohemian, and the music was a saccharine travesty of rock. Then I saw Spring Awakening, of which I remember nothing but a bunch of intolerable young people, choreographed to act rebellious, climbing on walls.
I must alert you, I hate young people. In particular in America, they are fed on a steady pablum of personal reinforcement and cheerful, if delusional empowerment that leads them to believe they can actually do anything they set their minds to. This is not always bad (think Lena Dunham, or Mark Zuckerberg, or your precocious genius du jour), but it seems to breed an overconfidence in their own talent that we are supposed to forgive in lieu of its youthful exuberance.
Which brings me to the case in point.
Kyle Riabko, an enterprising young talent, decided to bestow the genius of Burt Bacharach on the people of his generation. This, on paper, is an awesome idea. God knows his generation needs to learn a thing or two about crafting spectacularly melodic, original, unforgettable songs. His show, called What's It All About. Bacharach: Reimagined, is where the concept went south.
I grew up with Burt Bacharach (he was huge in Mexico). Just reading the titles of the songs in the playbill brought their melodies instantly to my mind. "I Say A Little Prayer", "Do You Know The Way To San Jose", "Walk On By", "I'll Never Fall In Love Again", "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head"... etc. I was intrigued by several glowing reviews that claimed that the sparse arrangements (no Dionne Warwick, no amazing brass section) brought a fresh light to Bacharach's iconic music. Sure enough, the show sheds a new light on the songs, but not always for the right reasons.
If an opera singer sang "Do You Know The Way To San Jose", and eluded most of the quickfire notes that cascade in the second phrase (na na na na nana, nana nana nana nana), they would be torn apart by the audience. If they had to cheat and lower their pitch one register as they sang "Walk on By", I shudder to think. As I listened to the young, not particularly spellbinding performers, I did get an epiphany about Bacharach's music. The songs bloom with notes, resembling baroque arias or complex jazz melodies. But that is because of what's missing in Riabko's arrangements: they avoid many of the notes that make the songs a challenge to sing and a beauty to listen to. Some of the arrangements sound like U2, or Coldplay, some like those ubiquitous TV commercials that think they can sell you anything with a ukulele and a xylophone. Some of them were perfectly nice. The most fortunate was a quiet group rendition of "(They Long To Be) Close To You", a song so richly gorgeous that it's pretty impossible to screw up. But with any of the more challenging melodies, my sense is that the arrangements took the easy way out, leaving the audience to mentally hum the missing music. Which is not totally criminal, if done the right way. Burt Bacharach's best songs (he wrote some treacle here and there) are so intricate, the melodies so unpredictable, that even in the hands of unseasoned, if well meaning artists, they still soar.
Alas, as I watched the very young performers mug for the audience like an overgrown troupe of Mousketeers, I was reminded of the essential Noel Coward theatrical dictum: "Don't just do something, stand there". Unless you are at the opera, or a traditional Broadway musical with a dramatic libretto, you don't need to act the songs. Sing the glorious music with those crazy cool lyrics by Hal David and call it a day. The music does 75% of the work. But the cast was mimicking reading love notes, then tearing them apart, smiling maniacally, dancing halfheartedly at some stupid choreography intended to evoke youth, or in the case of the promising singer who tried her hand at a bluesy adaptation of "Don't Make Me Over", actually forcing herself to cry while looking at the floor the entire song. Honey, the tears are already in the music and the lyrics. The direction and the conception are both sophomoric and hokey.
Then, as the Magnificent Arepa cannily pointed out, how can this be a show for Riabko's "generation" if the median age of the audience is 65? Or, in my case, if it feels like watching Up With People? Arepa was reminded of the Catholic spiritual retreats of her youth, which tried, with guitars and bonfires, to seem cool and hip.
If you want to be cool and hip, you either have to be Patti Smith, or you have to play in cool and hip places, like the Mercury Lounge or the Bowery Ballroom or any cavernous hall in the boonies of Greenpoint or Gowanus. You are not hip and cool if you put on something that works too hard to be likable; that wants to behave like a Broadway show.
Which is a pity, because Burt Bacharach is the coolest and the hippest, as Elvis Costello, who was in attendance, can attest to, since he has collaborated with Bacharach. Also in attendance, and sitting right next to Costello was Mike Myers, Austin Powers to you, which was bizarre and thrilling, and ultimately mortifying. I doubt that they went for the painfully fake, utterly unhip, youthful exuberance shtick.
This show could have promise if it were stripped entirely of its annoying theatrical pretense, and packaged as an intimate recital of a bunch of amazing songs.

Dispatches from the Theater

Macbeth 
This production of The National Theater of Scotland stars Alan Cumming playing all the major roles in this fabulous play by William Shakespeare. This is a modern adaptation, and so it takes some liberties, like framing the action at a modern mental hospital where a man, Macbeth, relives the trauma of his story. In contrast to other attempts at modernizing the Bard, this one does not feel strained or arbitrary. It allows the thick and oozing darkness of the play to seep through. This is one bloody, ominous, godless, violent and dark play, and that shines through in this production, directed with verve by John Tiffany and Andrew Goldberg.
The set design is a cavernous cell in a mental hospital with an observation window where a doctor and a nurse keep an eye on the madman. A trio of closed circuit cameras help the witches appear, and the use of simple props like three chairs and a metal table to create the banquet scene; a mirror, to have a conversation between Macbeth and one of his soldiers; or just a towel, to change him into her, is witty and effective. The production is riveting. It is alive, full of energy and power.
Mr. Cumming is wonderful. It is a total tour de force to be on stage for a full two hours with no intermission, playing Macbeth, the Three Witches, Lady Macbeth, Duncan, Banquo and a couple of others. If he sometimes slides into a bit of campiness, this is one instance where indicating with body language actually helps understand which character is being played.
Cumming, thankfully, does not change voices. He does change accents once in a while, sporting a strong Scottish brogue for Macbeth, something more dainty for the Lady and a plummy British accent for Duncan. He is extremely adroit with the text. We were sitting in the next to last row of the mezzanine and we could hear every word, except when he spoke a bit too fast.
It helps to be a bit familiar with the plot, but the program has a synopsis and a cast of characters. If you go, read it. This Macbeth, a play about the violence of ambition, feels like powerful, concentrated, totally relevant Shakespeare.

Orphans
A lame attempt at conflating Pinter and Mamet, it is beyond me why anybody would want to re-stage this weak, derivative play by Lyle Kessler. But it has a cast of thousands, (actually three) so we went. Alec Baldwin is good as Harold, the gangster who insinuates himself into the home of two brothers, Treat and Phillip, played by Ben Foster and the impressive Tom Sturridge. But this play, albeit entertaining, makes no sense. Phillip (Sturridge, in a tour de force performance of kinetic energy) is mentally feeble; Treat is a petty thief who lords over him. He brings a drunk Harold into the house, finds out he is rich and decides to kidnap him, and then the tables are turned. The whole thing, as directed by Daniel Sullivan, has the feel of a toothless sitcom. And that is not the reason why one goes to the theater. I did not get the point of the play. Ben Foster, who is a talented movie actor, disappoints as Treat. However, he is an extremely welcome substitute for Shia Leboeuf, a man who if I had my druthers, would be banned from appearing on the face of Earth.

The Big Knife
Yes, it's old fashioned, yes, it's none too subtle, but I love hearing the language of Clifford Odets. Even if the play is deeply flawed, there is such heart in the writing, it's as rich as an extravagant dessert. This production is uneven, with great turns by Richard Kind, Rachel Brosnahan and Reg Rogers, and pretty much all the supporting cast, but a very miscast and lost Bobby Cannavale and a stiff Marin Ireland in the main roles, as a huge Hollywood movie star and his wife. We spent the intermission trying to recast Cannavale's part. They don't make them like they used to. 

The Assembled Parties
This was fun, entertaining, if slightly befuddling. It's the story of a goyish Jewish family in the Upper West Side and some of its secrets through the years. The cast is great, in particular Judith Light, the foremost expert in playing Jewish cantankerous matrons. Richard Greenberg's one liners are elegant and funny, but I cannot tell you that I left the theater with much more than that.

The Caucasian Chalk Circle
Brecht, even in his most feverish agitprop mode, had a rapier wit and a strong sense of irony. But this production with new music by Duncan Sheik feels like Brecht Lite. The lyrics by W.H. Auden still pack a punch, but the music, except for one song, is like generic pop music, totally wispy and forgettable. And this kind of political theater, which is not aging very well, deserves music with far more bite.
The first act is very enjoyable but the second totally fizzles out, and it goes on forever. This is one play that could use a bit of trimming and a much, much faster pacing. The cast seems to need a good jolt of caffeine. Mary Testa plays all her different characters the exact same way, wasting her considerable talent. Elizabeth A. Davis, who plays Grusha, the heroine of the play, is perfectly serviceable, but she should be more formidable. Even though one can understand the casting of the quirky Christopher Lloyd as the singer and the judge, he delivers a rambling, one note fest that gets tiresome pretty fast. He has some moments but he takes forever to say his lines. It's a long slog.

Here Lies Love
Evita Perón is conceived in her musical as a hick from the provinces with a bit of a lethal backbone. Nobody pretends she had a heart of gold (except herself). But Imelda Marcos, who did nothing to inspire the poor people of the Philippines except to go on obscene shopping sprees and carouse at Studio 54, is treated in this musical by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim as some sort of romantic heroine who could not resist the riches her bastard of a dictator husband bestowed on her, and hence turned into an unfeeling, distant, frivolous first lady. There is a lot to be mined in these rag to riches stories of women of low origins who seduce tyrants and then become tyrants themselves. I bet they were all Grade A bitches from the day they were born, but this is not necessarily what makes them great dramatic heroines, and don't look for profound human psychology in this frothy play.
I was down for the ride until the play ended on a sunny, preposterous note, even after the assassination of opposition leader Benigno Aquino. The real Imelda Marcos was a joke, an embarrassment to her country, deeply unconcerned by her country's woes, if not worse. Here she is romanticized, a bystander to corruption and cruelty, rather than a perpetrator, which is troubling. Yes, she denies her origins and behaves like a c--t sometimes, but why does she get the last laugh? If you need to put a disclaimer on the program that the Marcos couple were two evil bastards, what gives?
Some of the music is lovely and the best songs throb with a catchy, funky pulse. The title song is a horror, and unfortunately, it happens twice. The strained staging by Alex Timbers, which has the audience standing on the floor of a nightclub, and being manhandled by production assistants, while immersive and riveting at times, is also annoying. The cast is nimble, young and spirited. They deserve all the love.

Death Of A Salesman

Philip Seymour Hoffman is only in his mid-forties, but he is playing a formidable Willy Loman in Mike Nichols' fine production of this classic play by Arthur Miller, currently on Broadway. I sat way up in the mezzanine, so if I had not known that Hoffman is on the younger side, I could not have told. He inhabits this magnificent American  loser very convincingly. This is a great role and Hoffman commits to it with his every fiber. He is fierce and doddering, self-delusional, angry, tired, frustrated, funny and complicated. He is very moving. Apparently, Hoffman played the character when he was in high school, he is playing it now, and it will be awesome to see what he does with it when he gets to be Loman's age, about 15 years from now.
I was afraid that the play would be a musty old chestnut, that it may not have aged well. Even though a bit of it feels slightly quaint (less so thanks to the sharp and sprightly direction of Mike Nichols) I was surprised that it is so moving, and so resonant today. This is a play about gigantic losers. About epic, spectacular failure. It goes against the grain of the American mythology of winning. As such, Death of a Salesman fits our age like a glove.
Perhaps in 1949 Arthur Miller was a bit of a killjoy and a kvetch for portraying a tragic vision of the little guy, always striving, always struggling and ultimately losing the battle with expectation and achievement (and taking everybody down with him). Not to mention a deeply accurate portrayal of the cruelties of capitalism, even for upstanding Americans like Mr. Loman. It was the post-war era and America was doing swell. There were big cars and big houses and people made a living. People like Willy Loman were indoctrinated and intoxicated with the possibility of success, material wealth and dreams of endless prosperity.
But now that we have been taken to the cleaners by the rapacious criminals of Wall Street and the spineless government that abets them, we must feel closer to Willy Loman than any audience ever before. He's struggling to pay a mortgage, struggling to pay for appliances, to hold on to his job, alone in the vast wasteland of selfishness and feral competition that is this country. He's full of hot air and not the greatest role model for his two loser kids, and a sexual hypocrite to boot. He is a man of today.
Mike Nichols shepherds this rather clunky play through humor, tenderness, orneriness and real pathos. He has a golden touch with tone. This production is swift and entertaining, and truly devastating: a great American drama (as opposed to some of the stuff I've seen lately, like Other Desert Cities or Seminar, meaningless drama lite). I was moved to tears at certain points. And there were plenty of accompanying sniffles around me.
As an innovation, Nichols uses the set design of the original 1949 production and the original music by Alex North. I agree that there is no point in modernizing this play. It works like a charm as it is. But until I read in the playbill that the set was designed more than 60 years ago (very expressionistic and realistic at the same time), I felt it looked cheesy, given the marvels of sets we are used to in this day and age. But it is a poignant choice and it grew on me, as it enhances the more poetic aspects of the play. The music by Alex North is perfectly suitable, cinematic and tasteful, but in my view, distracting. I could have done without music, which distracts from reality and sometimes competes with the actors' lines. I assume it exists because the action travels back and forth inside the memories of Willy Loman. The play does not heave to the conventions of unity of time and place, and the music and some projections of autumnal leaves aid these flashbacks and give Loman's reveries a dream-like quality.
The cast of splendid actors is uniformly solid: Linda Emond (she made me cry at the end), Bill Camp, John Glover, Finn Whitrock, quite impressive as Happy Loman, Glenn Fleshler, Remy Auberjonois. My biggest and only beef is with Biff, a difficult role, played by Andrew Garfield (The Social Network, and soon Spiderman MCXII). Biff is another major loser, but one who sees the self-delusion in his dad, and one who has seen the truth beneath Willy's crumbling facade of authority, the only one in whom flickers a feeble ray of hope, as he struggles to be his own man and pursue his own way. But this Biff seemed to me too wimpy, too soft in the middle, and sometimes Garfield reached too furiously. I kept wishing Ryan Gosling would materialize on stage. Biff should be more of a formidable antagonist, more of a threat, to that enormous dad of his, but this one doesn't cut the mustard. He is the weak link in a very strong production of a surprisingly good play.

Other Desert Cities

Due to popular demand (that is, my friend Scott asked), I will tell you what I thought of Jon Robin Baitz's play Other Desert Cities, directed by Joe Mantello and with a stellar cast comprised of Stockard Channing, Judith Light, Stacy Keach, Justin Kirk and Rachel Griffiths.
First thing that takes your breath away is the set by John Lee Beatty. It's the living room of a mid-century home in Palm Springs and it is so perfect in so many ways, that every time my attention flagged I just marveled at the set. The lighting is spectacular too, for there is a high window behind which you can see two palm trees, and the color of the desert sky changes completely accurately from morning to dusk to night. I could write an entire paean about the set decoration, but I don't even know how to call things. However, if you ever perused an Architectural Digest from the seventies, you will immediately recognize the style. Modern, cream colored, trying hard to be tasteful.  A living room that wishes to soothe and to offend no one.
And so it is with this wealthy Republican family, the all-American Wyeths, living their retirement glory days in Palm Springs. Stacy Keach, who is excellent, plays a retired actor who was chums with Ronnie and Nancy Reagan, the astounding Stockard Channing plays his wife Polly, who insists on brandishing a goyish Texas twang even though she's Jewish, the extraordinary Judith Light plays her fucked up ex-alcoholic sister Silda Grauman (both were in showbiz in LA), Justin Kirk (from Weeds) who gets better as the play goes along, plays their son Trip, who produces a reality law show were the judges are celebrities, and Rachel Griffiths plays their daughter Brooke, an unabashed liberal who has fled to the East Coast and written a memoir about a family tragedy that threatens to tear the family apart.
Brooke's role is tough to nail. Baitz wants to confound the expectations of what he knows to be his smugly liberal audience by making Brooke's parents very charming and funny while the daughter is a monster of whining. As played by Griffiths, the one element in the production that is a tragic mistake, Brooke is a pill, and she is so grating and unconvincing, that I almost switched party allegiance on her account. There are American actresses Griffith's age who could have better understood the passage from a California golden child to a depressive, insufferable East Coast neurotic. Mary Louise Parker, a talented actress I find hugely hammy, comes to mind. That I'd rather watch her than endure Griffiths' reaching for emotion, not able to find the sympathetic nugget at Brooke's core, is saying something. Martha Plimpton, Laura Linney, Cynthia Nixon, Edie Falco, Lily Taylor, we could go on. I did not believe Griffith's grief, nor did I believe her adopted East Coastness, too blunt and unsubtle. She seems to be trying really hard. And because she is at the tragic center of the play, if you don't believe her pain, the play is thrown off balance and all the artifice in it shows.
However, the greatest joy of the evening comes from watching a trio of amazing veterans who are truly electrifying: Channing, Light and Keach. They all find layers of nuance into the broadness of their characters: Peppy Palm Springs Society Matron, Over The Hill Hollywood Drunk, Ex Handsome Bad Actor. Channing in particular blew me away. Her Polly is a no non-sense wisecracker, trying to out-goy the goys, with the core of a lioness. Light is also fiercely funny, sad and brave as crazy Aunt Silda, and Keach is sweet and thundering, totally believable as an old Hollywood star, now swaddled in wealth and grief. They are all pitch perfect. Even Justin Kirk, who at the beginning is slightly grating, finds his footing, leaves the shtick behind and delivers beautifully in the second act.
The play is well written and has many funny moments. It straddles a very thin line between comedy and melodrama. For the most part, director Joe Mantello balances the jokes with the pathos admirably, which is no small feat. Sometimes the tone falls into his particular brand of shtick where all the characters speak in weird, affected cadences that try to be naturalistic and sound extremely theatrical. This is annoying, but it seems to go away as the play progresses.
My problem with the play is that the second act is one beat stretched to the limit, with a couple of bombshell revelations thrown in to spike it up. So Brooke wrote a tell-all where the parents come across as evil, selfish people who are just interested in keeping their political connections; but different points of view reveal the fragile nature of the "truth". The truth according to whom? There is a final twist in which Brooke learns she does not know the first thing about what really happened, and in the end the play is about reconciliation. I thought the ending was a cop out. Turns out that the parents did everything they did for selfless reasons. Republicans? Selfless? Oh, dear. Maybe it's the times, and maybe Baitz is a better man than I, but I find reconciliation with Republicans to be essentially impossible and thoroughly inadvisable. Who wrote this play, Barack Obama?
I commend Baitz for not writing the liberal screed his audience wants to cheer for. I commend him for going for nuance and complexity and attempting to shed light on the myths and versions of the truth that are at the core of every grieving family. But like they say in Mexican wrestling, when I go to the theater: "Quiero ver sangre!" I want to see blood!

Spacey the III

Don't think I haven't noticed that my posts involving Shakespeare are suspiciously popular.
All ye who intend to "borrow" this for your term papers, use quotation marks or relent!
In any case, this is a review of the production of Richard III currently at BAM, starring Kevin Spacey and directed by Sam Mendes.
Kevin Spacey is a great actor. Richard III is a great villain and William Shakespeare is the greatest writer that ever was. So how's the production? Good, but uneven. Mendes has conceived a very sparse production with contemporary overtones. The costumes are modern Elizabethan (and rather boring), the stage is mostly bare, surrounded by many doors symbolizing the many victims of this proto-mass murderer. For Richard is a political serial killer, reminiscent of a Stalin, or a Mao. Thirsty for power, he kills what he fears, and because he kills so much, he fears everybody, so he has to dispose of everybody.  Homicidal tyrants have existed since day one, but it takes Shakespeare to make one into a character that clearly defines a complete psychological space.
Richard is deformed, prematurely born; it is said of him that he had teeth before he had eyes. To hear him tell it at the beginning of the play, everybody's happily carousing in times of peace,

But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamp'd, and want love's majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinish'd, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up...

(Has anybody ever written so beautifully about ugliness?) Since Richard cannot carouse, he has to scheme. He is physically a monster, and perhaps because of the cruelty of nature and society towards him, he is cruel himself. Poor Richard lived long before political correctness and bleeding hearts (a phrase that comes from this play!). One can imagine the bullying he endured. The play hurls spectacular insults at him, but fortunately Shakespeare is not from the age of pitiful self-justification. He is not as cheap as to want us to feel sorry for the guy. He makes him human, and therefore one ends feeling a pathetic sort of pity for him. What a waste of intellect, what deformity of purpose, which is what one always thinks about people who use all their mental energy for destruction. Think Assad Jr. now in Syria, or Ghadaffi, or any totalitarian monster of our age. There is a wonderful soliloquy when Richard is finally visited by conscience, which expresses the psychic isolation and engorged ego of the sociopath:

Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh.
What do I fear? myself? there's none else by:
Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I.
Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am:
Then fly. What, from myself? Great reason why:
Lest I revenge. What, myself upon myself?
Alack. I love myself. Wherefore? for any good
That I myself have done unto myself?
O, no! alas, I rather hate myself
For hateful deeds committed by myself!
I am a villain: yet I lie. I am not.
Fool, of thyself speak well: fool, do not flatter.
My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a villain.

I shall despair. There is no creature loves me;
And if I die, no soul shall pity me:
Nay, wherefore should they, since that I myself
Find in myself no pity to myself?

Excuse me while I plotz.  This profile could have been written, less adroitly perhaps, by one of those forensic psychologists at Quantico. Its modernity blows me away.  Everything is I with this man. He is alone and apart from human society. A classic sociopath.
Well, Spacey goes to town, emphasizing Richard's duplicity and his terrible need for attention. It is a powerful performance, a bit shticky, in my view, very Spacey-like, which is not bad, since he is the master of dripping sarcasm. My biggest problem with this characterization is that he screams like a maniac. Many times, the screaming obscures the words. This is unfortunate, because Richard is one of the most verbally compelling characters in all of Shakespeare. This is one Richard hell-bent on garnering attention, full of mercurial fury, but it would be more interesting if he would connive more quietly and let his fury seethe inside his crooked frame. As you saw above, Shakespeare goes to beautiful lengths to describe his physical weakness, which serves as a stunning contrast to his robust capacity for evil. It should surprise everyone at court that this pathetic cripple harbors such gigantic homicidal tendencies, but Spacey is not a wee man, nor is this a quiet performance. He wears a polio brace and has a crooked leg and a bent foot, the iconic hunchback, relies on a cane and is totally misshapen. As he ambles up and down the stage he looks suitably grotesque, but it would be far more chilling to see his power come, not from throwing tantrums, but from a powerful tsunami of a mind inside a shriveled frame. After more than three hours, the outbursts get annoying and lose effectiveness. I will confess, this reminded me of my Mom and Dad's dueling parenting techniques. Mom was a frequent hell-raiser, while Dad was a quiet seether. Guess which one sent me into paroxisms of fear? One look from my Dad's silent anger was enough to make me wither in my chair, whereas my Mom's operatic outbursts eventually caused my sisters and me to roll our eyes.
Less is always more.
Spacey shows off his verbal dexterity and riffs around with the rhythms interestingly and at breakneck speeds, if not always eloquently. Still, he has some incredible moments, as when, in a mediatic event reminiscent of the putrid piety of today's Republican candidates, he pretends to pray in church (holding a Bible as a prop, of course) as he orchestrates his usurpation of the throne. Here, he reminded me of Newt Gingrich. Richard has members of his clique actually beg him publicly to become king as he feigns modesty and surprise. This is done through a live video feed on a big screen so we can see what Spacey does best, which is to show us what he's thinking through the most minimal gestures. At one point, he coyly averts his eyes, but there is more than false modesty in this tiny act; there is a weariness which encompasses everything that has happened up to that point and everything that will happen next. Mendes equates Richard's appetite for power with the megalomaniac personality of a totalitarian dictator. It makes perfect sense for our day and age.
Spacey is valiantly over the top for the entire play, giving a physically generous, possibly quite painful, exhausting and unsparing performance that has him sweating buckets, and in a clever use of his real sweat, Richard is constantly wiping his brow, which adds a layer of sliminess to the character, sweaty like a Tricky Dick.
Alas, just as Richard's monstrous ego takes up all of the play's space, Spacey takes up all of the stage. Most of the actors are nowhere near his level. The men are mostly inconsequential. The women fare better, but except for Gemma Jones, excellent as Queen Margaret, and the actress who plays his poor mother, the rest of the actors are left in the dust, and this smacks of headliner vanity to me. Why are the two young princes Richard kills portrayed by young women? The horrifying shock of their murder is grossly diminished by this arbitrary piece of casting.
Still, for the most part, the production is visceral and bracing. Mendes has some cool visual ideas, particularly towards the end, when Richard and the good Richmond share a dream, sitting on opposite sides of a long table as all the spirits of the murdered appear to haunt one and inspire the other, and a fantastic coup de theatre when a finally dead Richard is hoisted up from a meat hanger, feet first, to dangle like a piece of butchery, himself reminiscent of all the blood he spilled.
So how is Richard human? We know he has suffered, he is unloved and worse, incapable of love himself. Shakespeare was too cool to change Richard's nature just to appease the audience. He shows how human nature is, not how it should be. There is something heroic in Richard's determination to stay true to himself, in his relentless quest for some sort of social redress. He has never known love, how would he change? I am I. He is pitiful for his ignorance of human restraint, for his incapacity for mercy. He knows what he is, and this must be so painful.

The Importance of Being Earnest

Brian Bedford as Lady Bracknell is very funny and perfect in this production of the comedy by Oscar Wilde. Lady Bracknell is blessed with some of the funniest lines ever written and Bedford delivers them with haughty, deadpan panache. Oscar Wilde's writing is awesome. The rest is uneven: the set design and the costumes are atrocious; the ugliest I have ever seen. Some members of the cast are more fortunate than others at impersonating the British upper crust. Most of them, with the exception of David Purr and Jessie Austrian, do not have quite have what it takes to land Wilde's exquisite one liners with the precision they deserve. Curiously, the one British actress in the cast I found the least intelligible and the most grating, so this is not about my usual snobbish Anglophilia. But as long as the words are understandable (and they are, for the most part), one just sits there and listens, trying not to lose even a comma. Bedford himself directed, and he seems to have directed himself to perfection, yet the rest was a bit too farcical and sometimes wobbly. I guess it is very hard to strike the right balance with this play, yet it is equally hard to be too hard on it. It is quite delightful.
Oscar Wilde sounds like a man of today, but with superior wit, charm and elegance. He is the granddaddy of some of our current wits, like David Sedaris, Simon Doonan and Paul Rudnick (they are not in the same league as Wilde, but they are funny and gay.)  Poor dear, he was born in the wrong century, way ahead of his time.

Can't resist quoting him:

Lady Bracknell:
I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square.

To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

Jack: I must admit I smoke.
Lady Bracknell: I am glad to hear it. A man should always have an occupation of some kind.

Algernon Moncrieff:
Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven’t got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die.

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his.

The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous. It looks so bad. It is simply washing one's clean linen in public.

 You crack me up, Oscar Wilde.

The Normal Heart

When is the last time you went to the theater and had a cathartic experience? I can't think of any drama I've seen in years that provoked real emotional catharsis. 
Well, this excellent revival of Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart is one intensely cathartic experience (it just won a Tony Award for best revival of a play, and deservedly so). Directed by George C. Wolfe and Joel Grey, with an excellent cast, The Normal Heart is a theatrical rant but it is a good, necessary, emotional, funny, poignant and enraging rant. Joe Mantello plays Ned Weeks, a Larry Kramer-like activist, who at the beginning of the eighties realizes that young gay men are dying in droves, but because the epidemic seems confined to them, nobody seems to care. Worse, there is deliberate neglect on the part of the health authorities and the government to help because it is an illness that attacks gay men only (which turned out to be untrue).
To see a play about the beginning of the AIDS pandemic now is just as shocking as it must have been when it was first staged, off-Broadway in the mid-80s, but perhaps for different reasons. Now there are drugs that seem to help patients live long lives, and it was reported recently that there is one patient who seems to have been cured. We don't see the devastation any more on the streets of New York, with its hosts of ravaged young men looking like living ghosts, but the devastation lives in the hearts of millions of people who lost loved ones to AIDS, including myself. And it has not gone away. People like Larry Kramer remind us that AIDS is still killing men and women all over the world. The shock today comes from realizing how indifferent we were, how deliberately we tried to look away.
What I loved about this play is that it does not let anybody off easy. Kramer was the original founder of GMHC (Gay Men's Health Crisis). He was so antagonistic and abrasive (although in the play and through Joe Mantello's deeply empathetic perfromance he is lovably so) that he was thrown off the board and then founded Act Up, which was a much more radical organization.
For people outside the gay community it's very hard to understand anything concerning gayness, let alone the fraught politics behind AIDS activism. At the time, Kramer was critical of gay promiscuity because it seemed suicidal. He got a lot of flak from the gay community who were trying to empower themselves after being in the closet for centuries. When one sees the play today, one can understand that side of the argument, but one instinctively sides with Kramer/Weeks and wants everybody to stop sleeping around and forget about the politics. 
But The Normal Heart is a good play, which is the opposite of a pamphlet. Kramer understands that human complexity, as in motives not being entirely pristine, good intentions sometimes being misguided, deeply flawed characters, and clear eyed realism makes for great drama and great truth and that individual human stories will move us to outrage and compassion. You'd have to be made of stone not to be moved by this ferocious play. The compassion in this play is fierce and relentless, it has nothing to do with the shy benevolence of a pietá. It is a fighting, screaming compassion and I had never seen anything like it on a stage.  Nor had I been to a play where half the time you could hear many audience members openly sobbing or clapping wildly at the best lines, cheering at the poignant jokes.
A seat away from me was an elderly lady who left at intermission because she didn't know what the play was about when she bought the ticket (didn't she read the poster? She has been living under what rock?). Having sat through half the play, she still refused to open her heart and her mind. Unfortunately, even with all the "progress" being made, this is the actual world we live in.
At the end of The Normal Heart you are moved and outraged and appalled and consoled by the sheer force of Kramer's voice and the stark nakedness of the production, which takes place within four white walls with words protruding from them like a news ticker frozen in time, and a list of names of victims of AIDS that keeps growing until it threatens to engulf the entire theater.
The actors are all magnificent, in particular a ferocious Ellen Barkin as Emma Brookner, a doctor who first battled against the horrible disease when no one understood what it was. Joe Mantello is also excellent. A bit over the top, but funny and furious. I really liked Jim Parsons (who apparently is on a hit TV show I know nothing about). The play is mercifully smart, funny and very touching and it is not meant as a punishing sermon for the audience, but as a window into the tragic emotional, social, cultural and political bewilderment that is AIDS.
In a leaflet you get when you exit the play, and in a paragraph written in the playbill, Kramer writes that pharmaceutical companies are the greatest evil unleashed by man on man. He is still fighting that they don't spend as much as they should on AIDS research and he claims they create medicines that palliate but do not cure. I'm glad he was moved to action and made this his cause. And I'm glad he was a talented writer before he dedicated his life to fighting AIDS.
The title of the play comes from a line in September 1, 1939, a very fitting poem by W.H. Auden.

Born Yesterday

I only went to check out Nina Arianda, a new young actress who is very hot right now.
Stepping into Judy Holliday's shoes is no small feat and Arianda is very good. She does not have that adorable wide eyed innocence that Holliday used to kill with, but her timing is excellent and so is her physicality.  At times I wished she was not so cartoony, but she makes Billie Dawn her own.
The play by Garson Kanin is both a little rusty around the edges but surprisingly timely, as it deals with the quintessential American problem of having cheaply bought political representatives and more importantly, an American people who chooses to be ignorant and uninformed and blinded by bling (or scandal or American Idol). This play has the right idea and the right feelings, but the production needs to be zipped along. It is not a farce, but a bit of fire in the pacing would help a lot.
I was actually pleasantly surprised by Jim Belushi (stepping into Broderick Crawford's shoes), perhaps because I expected the worst. Belushi is a bit of a screamer, but his Brock is truly a boor, a very dark character. I liked that in this production they emphasize the ugliness and don't try to make it cute.
However, what really pisses me off is people wooting and giving standing ovations to Robert Sean Leonard, a piece of wood whose only reason for the completely unjustified shower of adoration is that he happens to be in a popular TV show (which by the way, I don't get House, and I love Hugh Laurie). Meanwhile, Frank Wood, an excellent character actor, who nails it suavely and right on the nose without breaking a sweat, doesn't get enough love, 'cause people don't know him (he was in the excellent Flight of the Conchords, on HBO).
Stepping into William Holden's shoes is as impossible or more than Judy Holliday's and Robert Sean Leonard, probably the actor with less sexual charisma in the history of acting, is painful to watch. He is like watching dough rise. Actually, watching dough rise is more exciting. It is already a bit of a stretch that such a cultured radical as his character, Paul Verrell, would immediately fall for a ditz like Billie, but it can all happen through the magic of mutual attraction, which in this case seems to barely flow. The play doesn't make much sense in the romance department, but the direction and the actors could fill in the blanks. There were stretches when it seemed like Arianda and Leonard forgot they are supposed to be in love. When he first sees her, the moment doesn't register so when he later flirts with her it's like wha? Since when?
I kept thinking of William Holden. But him we can't bring back from the dead. So I was thinking, who could play this part with zing? Who could make Billie Dawn smolder? Liev Schreiber would be great. Even super ham Billy Crudup would be better.
I also thought that if for two hours we could all collectively forget about Tony Soprano (impossible, but we could try) James Gandolfini could be fun as Brock, as long as he used a different Jersey accent. 
But if you sit in a Broadway show dreaming of an alternate cast, something is not quite right.

Anything Goes

Yesterday, as I was wiping tears of joy looking at all that spirited tap dancing going on in Anything Goes, I was thinking, this is what is truly American. Cole Porter is truly American. Putting on a Broadway show and hoofing gloriously is unabashedly, uniquely American. So I thought that a much more meaningful display of patriotism, rather than cheer for the death of that evil bastard (I am thrilled that he died, I just don't think I should erupt in pom poms and rah rahs in public), is to listen to the songs of Cole Porter, sing and dance to the songs of Cole Porter, learn tap dancing to the songs of Cole Porter, and fall in love to the songs of Cole Porter. If none of this is possible, go see Anything Goes on Broadway and you'll get a pass.
One should not be overly nostalgic for past eras, although the gorgeous costumes by Martin Pakledinaz (so rooting for a Tony for him) are so absolutely stunning that they made me pine for the days of the great depression and the Nazis. But that is the point of glamor. Those gorgeous bias cut satin silhouettes, all that art deco make one forget that 1934 was not a bed of roses by any stretch of the imagination.
Still, listening to the work of genius that is "You're the Top", and wallowing in misery at what passes for songwriting today, one does pine for the days of when Americans were as sophisticated, urbane, witty, elegant, smart and delightful as Cole Porter.
The guy was from Peru, Indiana, so there is no excuse.
Whatever happened to us? Couldn't we have enacted civil rights, gone to the moon, vanquished the Nazis, ushered in women's lib and all that jazz, without losing our joie de vivre and panache? Without becoming ignorant, holier than thou, vulgar and uncouth?
Anything Goes is a little musty, even with a spiffy new book the jokes are gently quaint, but it is enormously charming. This is the first time I see it and it is the very first time I hear the songs of Cole Porter in a play onstage, as part of a dramatic story. I can see why he is a favorite of jazz musicians (think Sinatra, Bennett, Ella), because those songs are so good they deserve not so much to be belted out, but whispered, with the utmost articulation, in one's ear. As much as I enjoyed the show, I felt there was far too much belting going on. A song like "I Get a Kick out of You" was so much more powerful when Sutton Foster sang it quietly.  Sometimes words were lost in the belting. And Porter's words cannot ever be lost, because that is a crime.
Also, today we have amplification. The most sophisticated microphones still make good singers sound tinny. So it's hard for me to imagine, when this show was staged before, was it amplified as if with a loudspeaker, or did people belt them out au naturel? Sitting way up in the heights, I could tell Sutton Foster is a total trouper. She is also like seven feet tall. I loved Joel Grey, even with all that shtick, he was super sweet and has perfect comic timing. John McMartin was great as Elisha Whitney, the lush, I particularly loved Jessica Stone as Erma the bombshell and the wonderful Adam Godley as Lord Evelyn Oakley.

He can say it better than I ever could:

In olden days a glimpse of stocking
Was looked on as something shocking,
But now, God knows,
Anything goes.
Good authors too who once knew better words
Now only use four-letter words
Writing prose,
Anything goes.
The world has gone mad today,
And good's bad today,
And black's white today,
And day's night today,
And that gent today
You gave a cent today
Once had several chateaux.
When folks who still can ride in jitneys
Find out Vanderbilts and Whitneys
Lack baby clo'es,
Anything goes!

Broadway Scorecard

What I am about to do may seem dastardly, but I feel like doing it anyway. Here's a quick guide to what shows to see on Broadway, according to moi. Go to the TKTS booth on the day and you may be able to find 50% off tickets for most of these shows.

• Good People by David Lindsay Abaire, with Frances McDormand. A decent play but worth it just for seeing McDormand tear up the stage. Tate Donovan and Reneé Elise Goldsberry are also excellent.

• Marie and Bruce by Wallace Shawn, with Marisa Tomei and Frank Whaley. An acid, surreal romantic comedy, if you can call it that. The two leads are very good. Warning:  this play is not a crowdpleaser.

• The Motherfucker with the Hat by Stephen Adly Guirguis with Chris Rock and Bobby Cannavale. Quite entertaining, if predictable and underwritten. Chris Rock is no actor, but he can land a punch line. The rest of the cast is excellent.

• Arcadia by Tom Stoppard. If you need a very engaging mental workout, this ambitious and erudite play may be for you. A beautiful production.

• Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo by Joseph Rajiv, with Robin Williams. Subpar writing on the level of a pretentious semi-literate teenager with delusions of genius.
Avoid like the plague.

• Jerusalem by Jez Butterworth with Mark Rylance. Not as incredibly awesome as its enormous buzz but pretty brilliant. Also pretty long.

• The House of Blue Leaves by John Guare with Ben Stiller, Edie Falco and Jennifer Jason Leigh. Good revival directed by David Cromer. The dames are awesome and the play is a hoot.

• The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde. Brian Bedford is sublime and so are the oneliners. 

Jerusalem on Broadway

This play by Jez Butterworth comes with a lot of great buzz and for the most part it is quite deserved. It's a richly funny play about the current state of England, as opposed to the mythical England from Masterpiece Theater that is no more.
However, to paraphrase William Carlos Williams, so much depends upon... the seats you get. We were in the middle of the mezzanine of the rather cavernous theater and we had trouble hearing the cast. Either they are not miked, or the mikes are too low, but there were big swaths of very funny dialogue that we missed.
The play is about a rowdy character, Johnny "Rooster" Byron, who lives in an Airstream trailer in the woods and is a sort of king of the forest, and a petty drug dealer who befriends a gang of aimless youngsters who like to spend time with him, or rather, with his drugs. Because he is a one man plague, he is about to be evicted from his sylvan home by the authorities on St. George's day (the patron saint of England).
Byron is a magnificent character: a highly imaginative liar (he claims, in my favorite bit, to have had a conversation with a 90 foot giant who built Stonehenge), an anarchic presence, a thorn on the side of good customs, a manipulator and opportunist, but a good man.
Alas, I do not share the general enthusiasm for Mark Rylance. He works very hard to be funny, which makes him a ham. His commitment and physicality are admirable, but the three times I've seen him on Broadway (Boing Boing, in which I hated him, and La Bete, where he was better, but way over the top) I have found him more unfunny than not and loaded with shtick. I would love to see this play with someone else playing Byron. Someone like Stephen Mangan, who was incredible as Norman in The Norman Conquests, or someone naturally feisty, like Billy Connolly (he'd be brilliant). 
The production is very striking. The first scene is an amazing coup de theatre in which we witness the crazy revels of a drug party at Byron's and then immediately, with a clever change of lights, the morning after. The play's language is rich and abundant, teeming with jokes and dramatic allusions, and even if you know little of Shakespeare and other British tropes you get a general sense of a fierce and lively debunking of the national character.  However, at over three hours, the play becomes rather unwieldy and uneven. I really liked Act 2, when a more personal side of Byron emerges, but Act 3 spirals into sordid violence and the ending seems too remote from the tone of the rest of the play.

The House of Blue Leaves

This excellent revival of the John Guare play has a very strong cast, headed by Ben Stiller as Artie Shaughnessy, the extraordinary Edie Falco, as his wife Bananas, and Jennifer Jason Leigh doing a very funny turn as his lover, Bunny. The play is extremely funny and vicious, an American classic along the lines of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and the production, well directed by David Cromer, sustains the right balance of wackiness and discomfort, really going for the jugular. The women are all excellent, including Alison Pill, unrecognizable as a Marilyn Monroe wannabe, and Halley Feiffer as a disgruntled nun.
My only beef is with Ben Stiller, who seems a little stiff in the role. Stiller doesn't mind getting all dark. His Artie seems to emit negative energy. But this is untempered by any other traits. Stiller plays the piano and sings and acts, but there is no nuance to the character. He has a wonderful scene on the phone with his successful best friend in Hollywood, in which he goes all out in desperation, self-humiliation and embarrassment (which have always been his forte as a comedian), but I wish there were more layers to his performance. His diminished tenderness for Bananas is in the text, but the lines ring hollow; the feeling doesn't seem to be there. I think he lacks a certain working class charm, a soft spot, a silver lining.
However, his girls, as Artie calls them, are something else. Jason Leigh, an actress that is not known for her light comedic touch, or for a light touch at all, is terrific as Bunny, a vain, cruel, ignorant, contagiously bubbly Lady Macbeth of sorts. She sports a nasal Queens accent and a ridiculous jet black wig and gives a genuinely funny, spirited performance that somehow finds the likability in Bunny. Edie Falco's sweet, loony, sad Bananas is a fantastic counterpoint to Bunny's ruthless energy. Falco is funny and heartbreaking. In hammier hands, Bananas could be painful to watch. But Falco finds the perfect balance between craziness and knowingness, and does not hit a false note. The play is a hoot, and it has aged well. As our national obsession with fame has reached proportions of absurdity that John Guare may not have possibly imagined back in the sixties, when he wrote it, this savage play about the American desperation to succeed and be famous at all costs is even more resonant today. 

Arcadia

On the other hand, Arcadia, by Tom Stoppard, was thrilling and delightful. A real play, by a real playwright. A challenging, witty, ambitious and very engaging work, even if I cannot claim I grasp it in its entirety (I need to get my hands on the text). Ben Brantley's complaints about lack of intelligibility seem to have been addressed. David Leveaux's direction is beautifully paced and very smart. The cast is quite impressive, gliding through extremely challenging (and some gorgeous) speeches quite effortlessly. They all seem like they know what they are talking about in terms of Latin, mathematics and other arcana, which is already an accomplishment. The American actors acquit themselves decently with their British accents and everybody is quite good. In particular I liked Tom Riley, Raul Esparza and Margaret Colin. I was partial to the characters in the story set in the past, since the ones set in modern times, except for Esparza, were hamming it a bit too much. Billy Crudup and Lia Williams are seasoned actors but I wonder why they feel they have to mug so much. The one thing I missed, was the sense of love and passion beneath all that intellect. They all talk about it, but it is not much in evidence. Is this because they are British, or because they are so busy with the intellectual fireworks that they forget the fire in the loins?  I don't know. Still, the entire experience is bracing, a fabulous mental workout and in the end, deeply moving, and very beautiful.

The Curse of Bad Broadway Shows

Few things are more embarrassing and mortifying than to take highly intelligent, sophisticated and lovable friends to a Broadway play only to be insulted by its mediocrity and lack of a coherent reason for existing. With our long-suffering friend Jacqueline, who comes all the way from the Middle East and hence does not need further aggravation, this is the second time we fail her. (First time was that abomination Stepping Out, the Billy Joel musical).
Yesterday we attended the opening night of Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, starring Robin Williams. A crapshoot at 50% off in the TKTS booth. We paid 65 dollars for the privilege of watching a play that seems to have been written by an utterly untalented and unintelligent 15 year old. Had we seen it in a high school gym in a suburban town with the school's drama club, perhaps we'd had humored it with grudging tolerance. But still would have counseled the aspiring playwright to learn the craft and avoid repeating every half sentence seven times. And the director to instruct his actors not to bark at the audience the entire time.
This is one of the most appalling shows I've ever seen on Broadway (followed closely by A Free Man of Color). They both suffer from the same problem. They are not plays. They are tableaux. Representations. Harangues. Plays about "ideas". This one confuses drama with non stop screaming and dialogue that goes more or less like this:
Stupid American soldier:
What are they saying!!! Tell me what they are saying!!! What the fuck are they saying??
Iraqi translator:
What do you want? Tell me what you want!!! What the fuck do you want???
This goes on for two hours. 
I bet Rajiv Joseph, the playwright, thinks he is channeling Beckett and Pinter and Mamet. He needs to have the wax removed from his ears. It's reaching all the way up to his brain. 
I counseled my beleaguered friends to leave at intermission but we wrongly decided to give the play a chance. Needless to say, it got worse. We left before having to endure the further injury of wildly undeserved final curtain applause.
Since this was opening night, the audience was comprised of overdressed people (I've never seen so much plastic surgery outside of LA) that clapped every time a scene mercifully ended. I suspect they were the proud relatives of the cast and sundry investors. Robin Williams, who was the only sane person on stage, almost could not open his mouth without bursts of applause. I hate it when the audience thinks they are at a taping of The Price Is Right. Williams was the only source of respite in a horribly directed production. Like the poor tiger he plays, he is trapped in a really bad play. I was fascinated by his precision with a punch line. He has a couple of mildly funny lines, but because he is a seasoned comedian, he lands the punch lines with force and grace, making them sound funnier than they are. Alas, the play is so bad that by Act 2, it all starts sounding like shtick.
The rest of the actors are instructed to bray and scream like banshees at all times. The guys who play the American soldiers, especially the white one, are atrocious. 
Everything about this play is atrocious. I want my money, my time, and most importantly, my dignity back.

A Free Man of Color

Have you ever really wanted to like a play even though you could tell it sucks from the first two minutes? Have you ever pondered why sometimes the conjunction of a bunch of very talented people spells disaster? If you haven't and you'd like to know how it feels like, by all means check out this terrible play by John Guare, directed even more awfully by George C. Wolfe. It reminded me of the school plays we used to stage about the life of Benito Juarez when I was in second grade. A bunch of people standing on a stage declaiming at the audience for an interminable almost three hours. A didactic, expository, undramatic account of what could have been an interesting character living in interesting times. The play is almost like a pantomime, and with less frantic direction perhaps it could have been salvaged into a wanly witty but funnier, more moving play. But Wolfe has instructed all his actors to scream and ham it up and desperately reach to be funny. If you try too hard to be funny, you are anything but. They are so terrible, my throat was aching from all their screaming. It is painful to watch Jeffrey Wright make a caricature of a character who could have been charming and poignant. The only person who behaves with any dignity is Mos, formerly known as Mos Def. He is the only one who refuses to overact. The garish sets are by Interior decorator David Rockwell, the magnificent costumes (I predict Tony) are by Anne Hough and the lavish production seems to knowingly overcompensate for a static play that were it not for its trite sexual humor, would be great to stage at elementary schools all over the country. The idea is worthy: at the beginning of the 19th century in New Orleans, there was less segregation than later on. Discuss.
Since this play is about race, I will say that I never understood if the generalized stereotyping and caricature (black men have huge dicks and are great lovers, people who speak Spanish lisp and talk ridiculously, the French are fops) are meant to be ironic. If that was the intention, it was lost on me. I will go further. If I were black, this play would piss me off. Why do we need a history lesson? Why can't we have a black character, fully fleshed out, through which we can experience his experience as a free man of color? The same happened to me with Fela! Why the school pageant? Why so much exposition? Don't these extraordinary characters deserve a real drama?
I'm afraid A Free Man Of Color is the result of noble but artistically useless intentions. We should see more plays about race. Unfortunately, this one feels like we are witnessing the playwright's research. He did his historical homework, and he turned it into vaudeville.
George C. Wolfe spills a barrel of tricks on the stage to try to disguise the fact that the play is like reading about the Louisiana Purchase in wikipedia, but a lot less fun. However, there is not one coup de theatre, not one heart stopping moment in the entire evening, despite the steady parade of prancing and scenery changes. I remember seeing his original Angels in America in the early nineties. Then it seemed like a visually bracing production (of a much better play). Here we are almost 20 years later, and he's kind of doing the same old shtick.
I saw La Bete this week too, and it's not a great play but the set makes you gasp and there is a beautiful moment when the princess makes her entrance that is a simple effect of light and gold dust, but it works wonders. La Bete at least is very funny, although rambling, and the actors, Mark Rylance, David Hyde Pierce and Joanna Lumley (the magnificent Patsy from Absolutely Fabulous) know how to use their instruments. They perform in iambic pentameter with nimble and delightful musicality. Sitting through A Free Man of Color is like listening to someone scratching a blackboard with their fingernails: an aggressive assault on the ears.
This drives me crazy about many American actors. Whatever happened to voice training? Why do they sound like a screeching brake?
If this play doesn't bomb, I'll be very surprised. The applause was tired and polite. The couple next to us sensibly absconded during intermission. I considered it but wanted to see if it improved. It actually gets worse.
I'm almost looking forward to reading the reviews and see if the critics will have the balls, despite the subject matter and the sacred cows, to call out the groaner that it is.

A Behanding in Spokane

No snow, sleet or icy rain was going to prevent me from seeing the venerable Christopher Walken in a new play by Martin McDonagh (on whom I confess I have a huge crush). It was much fun.
A Behanding in Spokane is the first of McDonagh's plays that takes place in the United States. A seedy motel room represents the sorry state of affairs of our fair Republic. Walken plays Mr. Carmichael, a man who was robbed of his hand when he was a child, and has spent the last 47 years looking for it. 
The play is a bracing combo of Beckettian absurdity, lots of Mametesque profanity and McDonagh's intriguing mix of humor and violence, very similar to his excellent The Lieutenant of Inishmore. He goes to town making fun of some of our most cherished indigenous passions, like racism, political correctness, revenge fantasies and our unquenchable thirst for violence. With four characters in a hotel room he creates a pretty accurate snapshot of our quintessentially American surrealism.
America didn't use to be a surrealist country, but now it is actually going towards the certifiably insane. Unfortunately, our brand of surrealism is not of the poetic variety (like Mexico's); it's more of the frighteningly ridiculous (Sarah Palin, the healthcare fiasco, teabaggers, reality shows, the TSA, banks, you name it).  Outsiders like McDonagh can see this insanity perhaps a little more clearly than us who are mired in it. And he lets it rip, but in a subtle way, never lecturing or being topical or political. I think he is saying it is the violence and our almost innocent attachment to selfishness that are making us crazy. 
McDonagh uses the n-word, the c-word, the f-word and all its permutations with hilarious abandon. I think these words somehow have ceased to be shocking and he knows it. But there are very clever shocks in two amazing monologues. One is by Mervyn, (Sam Rockwell, terrific) free associating on his burning desire to be a hero, in a totally wrong way. He is completely inured to violence, but he has a sensitive ego.
The other one is a phone conversation between Carmichael and his mother which is all at once appalling, tender, absurd, hilarious, full of venom, rage and love. 

The way Walken speaks, it's like listening to Jazz. He riffs, he scats, he swings and I adore the way he sounds, with his creamy Noo Yawk accent. His unique rhythms are totally artificial and at the same time, naturally colloquial. It may be shtick, but it works beautifully. And he has gotten even better at putting delicious emphases in surprising places with impeccable timing. We were at the back of the orchestra and we understood every word he said, but sometimes he spoke a little too softly (on purpose, I'm sure).
Sam Rockwell is excellent as Mervyn, the nosy, weirdo receptionist. He seems very much at home on the stage, just like he is on film, but here he seems more disciplined, less quirky. Anthony Mackie is also very funny as Toby, a young pot dealer who is rather sensitive and prone to fits of tears. The one disappointment is Zoe Kazan, as Marilyn, Toby's girlfriend and dealer sidekick with a penchant for political correctness. Her voice is tinny and grating and this distracts from her performance. I didn't get a clear sense of character from her. I have been far more impressed with her in film than when I've seen her onstage.
Still, a lot of fun it was. I'm very happy I saw it.

Fela! and Race

I must confess, we did not stay for the second half of Fela!
Even despite the incredible dancing and the fantastic music, spiritedly played by Antibalas, there is something very unconvincing about the whole thing.
We saw Kevin Mambo in the title role, and not the other guy, who is supposed to be amazing. Mambo is a very good impersonator, a good actor, a fine singer, but he seems to lack energy. But I can't blame my lack of enthusiasm for Fela! exclusively on him.
I thoroughly hate when I am asked to yell back at the stage and participate. These things work only if the audience is already in a frenzy. It is the job of the people onstage to whip up the audience, otherwise the participation is forced and bogus.
I felt utterly uncomfortable (and I do not normally suffer from musical timidity). Making people shake their booties 5 minutes into the play without the requisite amount of excitement somehow reminded me of lame Disneyland entertainers, desperately fishing for sympathy.
Fela's music begs for dancing. Sitting augustly in a Broadway theater is not the right concept for it. As the review in New York Magazine mentioned, there should be a mosh pit in the front, where people can dance. This would be more honest than trying to teach white people to shake their asses and it would better honor the power of the music.
According to Joan Accocella's review in The New Yorker, Fela's story has been glossed over for the play. Well, I didn't know anything about his life coming in and I could tell that there was something overly sanitized and hokey about the proceedings. Fela! feels as authentic as a Hard Rock Café. It's the "Rent" syndrome: the lives of bohemian, revolutionary people who struggle at the edges of society do not translate well into expensive, crowd pleasing musicals for the bourgeoisie.
The writers of Fela! confuse feeble jokes at the expense of white people and little snippets of commie propaganda with provocation or rawness. They are not.
These things remind me of Disney and how they scrub clean all the rawness, the real humanity out of the original stories they adapt until they are unrecognizable.
The play is underwritten. It's a man on a stage reciting his life's story. There is no action, there is just telling, like in some sort of school pageant. I am sure that in the life of Fela Kuti there is enough material for an opera, let alone a Broadway play, but that's not what we get here. I know that people with unimpeachably authentic reputations are at the helm of this play. Bill T. Jones, Jay Z, among others, but they try too hard to please the audience. I don't go to the theater to be pleased. Or rather, I don't go to a show about the life of a genius, royal pain in the ass like Fela Kuti, to be pleased.

Which takes me to the venerable Mr. Mamet, who intends to provoke, as usual, with his new polemical play, simply called Race.
The first provocation, and this is very meta, is that according to Mamet plus ça change, President Obama or not. The issue of race is as thorny, if not worse, than ever. True.
The second provocation: here's a wealthy man, the milquetoasty Richard Thomas (John Boy from The Waltons, the casting has to be on purpose), who is accused of raping a black woman. Why, not too long ago, black men were lynched just for looking at a white girl, so this is a very interesting starting point.
Mamet just comes out and says it: we are baroquely entangled, paralyzed by centuries of prejudice, on both sides. What comes of this is people afraid to speak their minds, people getting tangled in obscure discourses of good intentions and political correctness (and ever blossoming resentments) into utter incomprehension.
James Spader, playing the head lawyer of a firm supposed to defend Mr. John Boy Walton, seems like a paragon of racial virtue when it comes to blacks, but listen to him talk about someone called Rosa González. Race is like the nine circles of hell, concentric and inescapable.
Spader is extraordinary. He is funny, has impeccable timing and is totally natural.  He rocks. The rest of the cast is excellent too, particularly David Alan Grier as Spader's partner.
However, the play seems a little sloppy. I don't expect Mamet, who is one of my favorite playwrights, to repeat the same joke in one play (it's a good joke the first time around only). This disappoints me. I also don't expect him to not dot all of his i's and cross all of his t's. Some of that happens in this play, which feels a little lazy.
We are in for a rollercoaster of ideas and paradoxes on race. Characters are not really developed. They are mouthpieces for provocative fodder. The audience is led to believe it will discover something and that something is forgotten and something else is brought up. Worse, Mamet does the David Alan Grier character a terrible disservice. After all that happens, what does this man think? He doesn't say. This is a major flaw of the play.
However, Race is brisk and fun and shocking without resorting to cheap jokes, and Mamet's direction is better than usual. Another director may have made more of character and that would have added some interesting human nuance, rather than excellent talking points.  Mamet's rhythms and idioms, to which we are now used to, could also benefit from more naturalistic direction. Still, Race is a fun, brisk play with plenty of good zingers. It's short and zippy and bracing. It made me ponder. It made me gasp. It didn't please me.

Brush Up Your Shakespeare. Not!

I'm always game for the Bard, but when you start hearing the reviews, it gives one pause. I was excited about Othello with Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Iago, only to learn that he sucks in the role. (Joel? How was the production? Was it indeed four hours of banging your head against the wall?)
Then comes Jude Law's Hamlet. Ben Brantley eviscerated the handsome Law in his review. It is a very good bad review. As much as I love the play, I really could not stand 4 hours of:

If Hamlet talks about his mind, you can bet that Mr. Law will point to his forehead; when he mentions the heavens, his arm shoots straight up; and when the guy says his gorge rises, rest assured that he clutches at his stomach. If every actor were like Mr. Law, signed performances for the hard of hearing would be unnecessary.

Shakespeare and his fabulous Dane deserve better. 
Just to show off a little bit with you, dears, I will say that I saw Ralph Fiennes' Hamlet and I liked him. He clocked in at 3 hours (places to go, people to see) yet you could hear every word loud and clear, with that sharp, beautiful timbre of his. He was just a tad impatient and very angry with the rotten Denmark. I saw him too in proto-Hamlet Richard II and he floored me (the play floored me, I had never seen it before).He went from a pompous moron of a spoiled narcissist to a man with a horrifying identity crisis. You could see the dissolution of the self onstage. I thought he was spectacular (but I do have a weakness for him. I love that he refuses to play nice for the audience).
I also saw Liev Schreiber kill as Iago in an otherwise blah Public Theater production. He was outstanding. Perfect. (My favorite Iago remains Kenneth Branagh's film turn in Othello with Lawrence Fishburne, a very decent version of the play).
However, Schreiber's Hamlet... major MEH. Mr. Ex-Enchilada and I ran into him on the street while he was rehearsing and Mr. Ex-Enchilada told him we were looking forward to seeing him in the role, and he said something to the effects of "piece of cake". We were so stunned that if he was being ironic, neither of us got it. Well, onstage it was instant karma. It all sucked.
Saw Ian McKellen as King Lear and thought he growled too much (we were alas, in the very last row, nosebleed section).
Shakespeare will humble the greatest.
So much to my chagrin, I think we are going to stick to the Shakespeare of our mind for the time being.

After Miss Julie

So many things are wrong in this play by Patrick Marber, based on Miss Julie by August Strindberg, that I don't know where to begin.
But let's start with the play. Why is it necessary to revamp Miss Julie? It's a great sordid, brutal play, and it was scandalous in 1888, when it was written. The story is timeless. It's about the absurdity of class differences and the war between the sexes.
I wrote a (yet unpublished) novel set in Mexico City that is a version of Miss Julie. Any time that a rich woman has the hots for a poor man, it's either Miss Julie or Lady Chatterley's Lover or both. Sex is kinkier whenever there is a class divide. However, Marber decides to transport the story to England in the 1940's after WWII. This seems totally arbitrary. Why not leave it where it was? The psychological destruction between the characters transcends eras, even if the class differences have been blurred in our modern age. So the 40s don't seem any different than today. Why not do it today? You don't have to live in a manor and be an aristocrat to feel superior and abusive to those who serve you. Mind games are eternal. So the play seems superfluous. It has a couple of good zingers but it is vulgar and shallow (not unlike other Marber plays).  Perhaps it is better than what it is afforded by the lackluster, absurd direction by Mark Brokaw.
The actors sound stilted and frozen, as if speaking British means pausing a full second after every word. Except for a wonderful moment of stagecraft where a mob is supposed to approach the kitchen, the production is utterly boring. The seismic shifts of mood between the actors make no sense. The fact that the driver and Miss Julie are humping feverishly as the mob approaches looks ridiculous. The whole thing is absurd and dead on arrival.
But the biggest problem is the casting. Neither Sienna Miller nor Jonny Lee Miller have the chops nor the talent to play these roles. Nothing they do makes any sense. Miss Miller is at the level of the class ham in a high school production. She couldn't play an aristocrat if it bit her in the rump. She is not of the school of British actresses that can do high style in their sleep. She's like Michael Caine, not like Michael Redgrave; that is, low class. As amply demonstrated by Mr. Caine, there is nothing wrong with that; she is just not right for this part. However, in her defense I will say that she is heard loud and clear, enunciates perfectly and has some good moments here and there, mostly when she is angry (the easiest thing to do when you are a neophyte actor). There is a semblance of character there, even if it's saddled with embarrassing amateurish tics, like what looks from afar like the constant chewing of fingernails. Mr. Miller is absolutely terrible and worse than her. He has no charisma and there is no rhyme or reason to his motivations. Half the time he mumbles. The rest, he huffs and puffs. He is stuck in a kitchen, what is he so exhausted about? It's not that there is zero chemistry between the two Millers, there is minus zero chemistry. Not a good thing when the play is about lust.
The only person with any theatrical dignity is Marin Ireland, a seasoned American stage actress, as Christine, the maid and fiancee of John, the driver. The moral of this story: Britannia doesn't always rule.
I find it really disturbing that the Roundabout Theater is cynical and craven enough to put these two young actors into such a thankless position in order to sell tickets. There are plenty of qualified actors who can play these roles and even bring box office success. These two are not them.

God of Carnage

It was better than I expected. Lots of fun, but not much else.
The set is gorgeous. The actors are all fine, but they seemed generic. Perhaps is because of the way the characters are written, more as stereotypes than as individuals. (Cf. the characters in the Norman Conquests, who are complicated people, not symbols thereof).
They are supposed to be 2 New York couples but they seemed unrelated to this city. My favorite was Hope Davis. She rocks. She is funny and real. Gandolfini is his usual adorable gruff bear, very natural but not very surprising. And Marcia Gay Harden and Jeff Daniels are fine but why do I feel they belong in Wisconsin?
Imagine Alec Baldwin in Daniels' part. That would be so much more fun. He would tear it apart. Or Marisa Tomei in Harden's part. Much more Brooklyn, much more pizazz. I also felt that the characters should be younger than these actors. Early 40s, more at stake and more to lose in the bargain.