|
|
|
|
| Theater |
The Revenger's Tragedy
by Thomas Middleton
at the National Theatre
Director: Melly Still
Designers: Ti Green and Melly Still
Cast:
Duchess : Adjoa Andoh
Ambitioso : Tom Andrews
Duke : Ken Bones
Spurio : Billy Carter
Lussurioso : Elliot Cowan
Gratiana : Barbara Flynn
Supervacuo : John Heffernan
Piero : Peter Hinton
Vindice : Rory Kinnear
|
| Huntley Dent |
July 21, 2008 |
| Shockeroo playhouse...
I was walking past the Embankment last night when three girls ran by wearing plastic devil’s horns that lit up red in the dark. They whirled away, dancing to a nearby reggae street band. A fitting epilogue to Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy, just letting out at the National Theatre. The doings onstage were pretend Satanism, too. The National exists to keep classic plays alive, but Middleton’s carnival of gore, which piles up eight bodies in the last scene alone, leaving not one named character alive, made the audience laugh – not what the playwright intended. What began as shock value turned into a bloody Feydeau farce by intermission, and the last half played like Monty Python awaiting Eric Idle to prance out with an executioner’s axe. Calling Nankipoo. The actors weren’t winking at us, but there’s only so much oozing crimson you can take. 
|
|
As You Like It
by William Shakespeare
Hampshire Shakespeare Company
Director: Chris Rohmann
Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, July 19, 2008
|
| Heidi Holder |
July 23, 2008 |
| For nearly twenty years, the Hampshire Shakespeare Company has provided theater-goers in the Pioneer Valley with their requisite summer fix of outdoor Shakespeare. Their latest offering, a fast-paced production of As You Like It, staged on the lawn (and patio, and fire escape) of the Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies at U. Mass., shows what can be done, lean and mean, with a well-directed company and a good setting. (On other nights the show is staged at the Hartsbrook School in Hadley.) Of course, this work in particular benefits from an outdoor setting. One of Shakespeare’s “green world” comedies, As You Like It features shenanigans in the woods, with disguised lovers, amorous shepherds, exiled courtiers, and a wayward fool all crossing paths. But the play has, from the start, other, darker elements. |
|
All’s Well That Ends Well
by William Shakespeare
Shakespeare & Company
Founders’ Theatre
June 20 - August 31
Directed by Tina Packer
Cast:
Nigel Gore - Lavache
Elizabeth Ingram - Countess of Rossillion
Jason Asprey - Bertram, Count of Rossillion
Dennis Krausnick - Lafew
Kristin Villanueva - Helena
Kevin O’Donnell - Parolles
Douglas Seldin - A Drummer Boy
Timothy Douglas - King of France
Peter Davenport - Amor Dumaine
Alexander Sovronsky - Dumaine Soldat
Ginya Ness - Reynalda/and Widow Capilet, mother of Diana
Rondrell McCormick - Duke of Florence
Morganne Davies - Mariana
Brittany Morgan - Diana
Grace Trull - Violenta
Mike Allen Moreno - First Soldier
Andy Talen - Second Soldier
|
| Michael Miller |
July 23, 2008 |
| This production is so full of life and so intuitively likeable that I find it difficult to criticize anything in it. Of course its not perfect, but Tina Packer and her cast got the spirit of Shakespeare performance just right—on their own terms, and even the scratchy singing and the less assured among the actors served their purpose within the expectations of the production. To get the bad out of the way at the beginning. The fine actor Nigel Gore will be the first to admit, I hope, that he is not a Roger Daltrey. Tina Packer did not intend for him and the other actors who opened their mouths to sing to turn All’s Well That Ends Well into a rock opera—well, not quite. But Gore and some of his companions excelled at the world-weary rasp, or croak, or gasp of the life-worn child of the sixties, who has seen love and desire come and go many times over. Their fuzzy diction, the limitations of the sound system, and my ears (I’ve always been challenged by picking out the words in rock music.) also served the benevolent purpose of postponing my coming to terms with the elaborate lyrics Tina Packer has concocted from medieval troubadour songs and Shakespeare himself...but more of that later. |
|
Three Sisters
by Anton Chekhov
Translated by Paul Schmidt
Directed by Michael Greif
Williamstown Theatre Festival, July 19, 2008
Natasha - Cassie Beck
Irina - Aya Cash
Chebutykin - Michael Cristofer
Vershinin - Stevie Ray Dallimore
Masha - Rosemarie DeWitt
Fedotik - Cary Donaldson
Andrei - Manoel Felciano
Kulygin - Jonathan Fried
Olga - Jessica Hecht
Solyony - Stephen Kunken
Ferapont - Peter Maloney
Anfisa - Roberta Maxwell
Baron Tuzenbach- Keith Nobbs
Rohde - Joe Tippett
|
| Michael Miller |
July 22, 2008 |
| Life is good: two Chekhovs in one week! And the first one, Erica Schmidt’s Uncle Vanya at Bard, was so very satisfying! However, in real life just as in Chekhov’s world, the convenient fiancée gets killed, the attractive officer gets transferred, and somehow we never get to Moscow, at least in the present emergency, Michael Greif’s obnoxiously slick and clumsily executed production of Three Sisters at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. This is unfortunate, since it is the only classical play in their season, which has been impressively successful so far. |
|
Broke-ology
Williamstown Theatre Festival
Nikos Stage July 9-20
Written by Nathan Louis Jackson
Directed by Thomas Kail
Set designer Donyale Werle
Ennis - Francois Battiste
Malcolm - Gaius Charles
William - Wendell Pierce
Sonia - April Yvette Thompson
|
| Lucas Miller |
July 17, 2008 |
| Seldom have I witnessed such riotous laughter as at the Williamstown Theatre Festival’s production Broke-ology, now enjoying its world premier under the direction of Thomas Kail. It is not only a story of economic hardship and the family problems that result from it (as the title suggests) but one which explores the importance of pursuing one’s dreams. |
|
| Uncle Vanya
by Anton Chekhov
Bard Summerscape
Fisher Center for the Arts, Theatre 2
July 16, continues through July 20
translated by Paul Schmidt
Directed by Erica Schmidt
Mark Wendland, set designer
Michelle R. Phillips, costume designer
David Weiner, lighting designer
Cast:
Peter Dinklage - Vanya
Ritchie Coster - Astrov
Lynn Cohen - Marina
Robert Hogan - Professor Alexander Serebriakov
Taylor Schilling - Yelena
Mandy Siegfried - Sonya
Kate Skinner - Maria Vasilyeva
Robert Langdon Lloyd - Telegin (“Waffles”)
|
| Michael Miller |
July 18, 2008 |
|
The core of Erica Schmidt’s brilliant production of Uncle Vanya is in fact its shell. On the impressively broad and deep stage of the Fisher Center’s Theatre 2, set designer Mark Wendland made an enormous room with a low ceiling, which was both desolate and claustrophobic. Most of the wall space is covered with peeling wall paper decorated with an endless forest of birch trees in autumn...
Erica Schmidt exploits the set’s expanse and the characters’ awkwardness, confusion, or drunkenness to introduce long pauses or to draw out a simple action to extreme length. This is not the ambiguous, multivalent pause of Harold Pinter and Jonathan Miller; it rather expresses the characters’ rooted despair and the futility of their situations.
|
|
The Year of Magical Thinking
a play by Joan Didion
based on her memoir
directed by David Hare
with Vanessa Redgrave
|
| Huntley Dent |
July 17, 2008 |
Death and the maiden...
I avoided Joan Didion’s bestselling The Year of Magical Thinking, for two reasons. One, I practice magical thinking, which crops up among primitive tribes and schizophrenics as the belief that your thoughts can change reality. I don’t mind being in the company of schizophrenics because the greatest spiritual teachers share the same belief. How else could faith move mountains? Didion views magical thinking as akin to delusion, a desperate tactic that the mind resorts to when reason fails. If my first excuse seems eccentric, it’s backed up by an uneasy sense that Didion had done something creepy and narcissistic with grief. Now that The Year of Magical Thinking has been transformed into a one-woman show for the iconic Vanessa Redgrave, I had a chance at the National Theatre last night to prove or dispel my trepidations. |
|
| New Connections, a season of short new plays created by established writers and performed by young people. For more details, click here.
High-profile writers including Mark Ravenhill, Abi Morgan, Jack Thorne and Bryony Lavery have written plays for this year’s festival.
The search for identity pulses through New Connections 2008: for acceptance and survival in modern Britain, for racial equality in 1960s South Africa, by deception in magical allotments, during white-out in a snow blizzard, through parenting, through faith, or by comic mistakes of social networking.
It Snows, by Bryony Lavery & Frantic Assem, performed by Sandbach School, Cheshire
Burying Your Brother in the Pavement, by Jack Thorne, performed by RSAMD Youth Works, Glasgow
3 – 8 July Olivier, Lyttelton & Cottesloe Theatres
|
| Huntley Dent |
July 10, 2008 |
I hope the British never shut up. Riding across town to Oxford Circus, a harried woman got on my bus with her daughter in tow. The little girl was a constant chatterbox. Her mother (and the rest of us) suffered in silence until the following exchange occurred:
Mother: Don’t you ever get bored with yourself?
Little Girl: You’re mental.
I tucked this away in my mental file along with the drunk who got on my bus last year and said to the driver, “I have no money. Would you accept a poem?”
Precocious kids came to mind at the National Theatre last night. I bought tickets, I thought, to two experimental plays on the big Olivier stage, but the music booming before the curtain went up was Euro techno hip hop, and the mostly young audience started performing The Wave (as fans do at Wembley and the Super Bowl). I discovered that I was at a festival of youth theatre companies, finalists who won the right to strut their stuff at the National after competing in fifteen regional semi-finals. The temptation was to bolt for the outdoors, but the first play, It Snows, turned out to be a musical slash happening of jaw-dropping skill.
|
|
Fat Pig
at the Trafalgar Studios, London
Written and directed by Neil LaBute
with Kris Marshall, Joanna Page, Ella Smith, Robert Webb |
| Huntley Dent |
July 11, 2008 |
| “A man’s a man for a’ that.” Few careers have begun as aptly as Neil Labute’s. First noticed for a cruelly ironic indie film, “In the Company of Men,” he has remained true to its theme of men who cannot love taking it out on women who try to love them. The slug line for the movie still brings chills of revulsion: “Two business executives--one an avowed misogynist, the other emotionally wounded by his girlfriend--set out to exact revenge on the female gender by seeking out the most innocent, uncorrupted girl they can find and ruining her life.” The fact that the girl happens to be deaf went so over the top that someone should have sniffed out Labute’s Swiftian slyness. Few did. Feminist nerves were rubbed raw, and in all the commotion his name was made. |
|
|
Two of a Kind: Ronan Noone’s The Atheist and Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole
Williamstown Theatre Festival
Directed by Justin Waldman, with Campbell Scott/
DVD Criterion Collection
|
| Lucas Miller |
July 7, 2008 |
| It is hardly surprising that Justin Waldman’s production of Ronan Noone’s The Atheist is already being hailed as the best play of the Williamstown Theatre Festival so early in the season. In form, it is a dramatic monologue. The audience listens to the stereotypically amoral and inconsiderate American journalist Augustine Early talk about his rise to disreputable fame, after tainting the lives of so many (though, ironically, he seems to have an unfortunate case of the Midas Touch, making his victims more famous than himself). |
|
| TR Warszawa: Macbeth 2008
Presented by St. Ann’s Warehouse, Susan Feldman, artistic director; in association with the Polish Cultural Institute in New York. At the Tobacco Warehouse, Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park, Dumbo, Brooklyn. Performed in Polish with English supertitles.
Adapted from William Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” and directed by Grzegorz Jarzyna; sets and costumes by Stephanie Nelson and Agnieszka Zawadowska; music by Abel Korzeniowski, Jacek Grudzien and Piotr Dominski; lighting by Jacqueline Sobiszewski; video design by Bartek Macias; special effects designed by Waldo Warshaw.
Cast:
Cezary Kosinski - Macbeth
Aleksandra Konieczna - Lady Macbeth
Tomasz Tyndyk - Banquo
Michal Zurawski - Macduff
Danuta Stenka - Hecate
Miroslaw Zbrojewicz - Duncan
Jacek Poniedzalek - Lenox
Jan Dravnel - Seyton
|
| Michael Miller |
July 9, 2008 |
| In preparing this review—more in that than in actually witnessing the performance—I had to remind myself that this is not the play which has come down to us as Shakespeare’s Scottish Play with some conspicuous additions by Thomas Middleton, as well as some other cuts and adjustments. It is rather Macbeth 2008, Gzregorz Jarzyna’s adaptation of the play. What made this hard was that it resembled Shakespeare’s play in so many ways that I couldn’t help thinking about it and making comparisons. Jarzyna’s spectacle even includes several excerpts from the best-known speeches in the play, inserted into the crude, obscenity-ridden dialogue that Jarzyna has created in the style of contemporary Hollywood film, especially the work of his hero, Ridley Scott. If I had been able to attend the lecture Jarzyna gave at the Polish Cultural Center about a month before the much-publicized opening of his show, I’d have been better prepared, and perhaps more resistant to comparisons with the Jacobean play, so admirably presented by a company from the Chichester Festival barely a mile distant from its venue in the armpit of the Brooklyn Bridge. All Mr. Jarzyna’a lights, noise, and bodily fluids amounted to pretty feeble stuff in comparison with the all-too-familiar words of the old play. His purpose is to present the story of Macbeth as a nightmare, as if the play were not nightmarish enough in itself. |
|
That Face
at the Duke of York's Theatre
by Polly Stenham
Director: Jeremy Herrin
Design: Mike Britton
with Lindsay Duncan, Hannah Murray, Matt Smith, Catherine Steadman, Julian Wadham
|
| Huntley Dent |
July 5, 2008 |
| Tube riders litter the train with newspapers, which other riders pick up to alleviate their boredom. Coming home last night I saw a grisly headline on one of these throwaways, “Sixth Stab Murder in Week of Death.” In London? The first sentence of the story was horrifying. “A schoolboy has been stabbed to death with a foot-long knife by a gang of thugs in south London.” It was within memory that a single shooting death made national news. Compared to America, the UK is still a kingdom where the lion lies down with the lamb. Verbal and psychological violence are another matter. |
|
Relocated
at the Royal Court Theatre
written and directed by Anthony Neilson
with Frances Grey, Phil McKee, Stuart McQuarrie, Katie Novak, Jan Pearson, and Nicola Walker
|
| Huntley Dent |
July 7, 2008 |
| Clouds over Sloane Square, and the posh and spicy girls known as Sloane Rangers weren’t tramping around with a slew of shopping bags over their arms. Or not that I could see two days ago. A wag has renamed them the trustafarians, which seems to be sticking. I had a drink with a new friend named Warwick and told him that he and I were the only two people in the bar named after castles. “Presumably,” he said. We had met while waiting to troop into the tiny, dark, primitively ventilated Upstairs at the Royal Court Theatre to be assaulted by Relocated, a stage provocation that has divided the critics while scaring off the public. |
|
| Rowing to America, A Play |
| Kitty Chen |
July 4, 2008 |
|
Scene 1: The stage is bare. The sky is midnight blue, with a crescent moon and a few stars, the sound of waves slapping the side of a boat. GIRL sits on a box or bench, rowing with oars. She is weary. SISTER is in shadow. In GIRL’s first speech, SISTER may speak some of the lines simultaneously or alone.
GIRL
I'm rowing to America. The only thing I brought with me is a picture of a smile. Here in my head. Strong and radiant like the sun. The smile of my sister.
"When we grow up and go to America, everything will be all right," she would say to me. She told me all sorts of things about America. Have you heard them too? She said the streets are paved with gold lamé. A dollar a day keeps the doctor away. Apple pie and huckleberry finn for breakfast. Milk and honey flow down the avenue Fifth Avenue. A chicken in every pot-pie. Where the sun never stops shining, and spacious skies are blue, and amber grains are always waving at you. . . When we get there, we will wave back. Look, Sister—they have come to greet us! Hello! Hello! We are here—we have come to America!
|
|
Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm
Almeida Theatre, Islington
July 4,2008
Paul Hilton - Johannes Rosmer
Helen McCrory - Rebecca West
Paul Moriarty - Ulrik Brendel
Veronica Quilligan - Mrs Helseth
Malcolm Sinclair - Doctor Kroll
Peter Sullivan - Peder Mortensgaard
|
| Huntley Dent |
July 4, 2008 |
| Far from celebrating our independence day, the British are probably trying to forget America and the whole era when Tony Blair was Bush’s poodle. After a miserably cold, damp spring, there was a national scare over strawberries – specifically, that the crop would go moldy and rot in the fields. Strawberries and cream are de rigeur for finals at Wimbledon. Now it’s finals weekend and the berries came through. But there’s a smell of black mold seeping out under the doors of the tiny Almeida Theatre in Islington. Ibsen is afoot, and the fate of souls is being tossed around on stage like a medicine ball. A very heavy medicine ball. |
|
George Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara
National Theatre, London
Director: Nicholas Hytner
Snobby Price : Paul Anderson
Charles Lomax : Tom Andrews
Barbara Undershaft : Hayley Atwell
Bill Walker : Ian Burfield
Jenny Hill : Katharine Burford
Bilton : Martin Chamberlain
|
| Huntley Dent |
July 1, 2008 |
| The long nights are already on the wane, but one leaves the theatre with a glow on the horizon, and a newspaper can be read outdoors well after nine o’clock. Fresh off the plane (i.e., as grungy as five-day-old socks) I tried not to go groggy at the National Theatre’s production of Shaw’s Major Barbara. Putting on a play by Shaw is like sticking your head out of a foxhole to see who shoots. Nobody could be more fusty and out of favour (perhaps the two Barries, James and Philip), but the London critics were mostly happy and none were snarky. |
|
| George Bernard Shaw, Candida
Berkshire Theatre Festival, June 30, 2008
Anders Cato, director
Jayne Atkinson - Candida
Michel Gill - the Reverend James Morell
David Schramm - Mr. Burgess
Finn Wittrock - Eugene Marchbanks
Samantha Soule - Proserpine Garnett.
Jeremiah Wiggins - the Reverend Alexander Mill
|
| Michael Miller |
July 1, 2008 |
|
I sincerely hope that nothing I say will encourage the Berkshire Theatre Festival to lower the standards for their season openers. The wonderful Unicorn production of Pinter’s The Caretaker raised my expectations so high that I find it impossible to rationalize the shortcomings of the season’s mainstage production of Shaw’s Candida, which was consistently awful, often painfully so. The production brought back an age when it was not quite proper for summer theater to be any better than third rate and even worse for anyone to be dissatisfied with it. One would have thought that this age had never passed over the distinguished Berkshire Theatre Festival, now celebrating its eightieth anniversary with this revival of a play that was part of its first season. Fortunately, Shaw built his play, first performed in 1897, like one of the Majestic battleships of the time, and his wit and human understanding are stronger than rivets and steel. If the BTF production proved that, it is at least something.
In fact Candida is a play in which we should find a mirror, with all the forced purposefulness of our own times and its attendant trust in “values.”
|
|
| Williamstown Theater Festival, Nikos Stage
Beyond Therapy
by Christopher Durang
Directed by Alex Timbers
Charlotte - Kate Burton
Prudence - Katie Finneran
Bruce - Darren Goldstein
Stuart - Darrell Hammond
Bob - Matt McGrath
Andrew - Bryce Pinkham
|
| Michael Miller |
June 19, 2008 |
| The Williamstown Theatre Festival got off to a comfortable start with quite an entertaining offering by WTF familiars. Playwright-Actor Christopher Durang has appeared in Williamstown in both capacities. Katie Finneran is beginning her second WTF season as Prudence. Director Alex Timbers and Matt McGrath are both in their fourth season, and Kate Burton, of course, is a fixture, now in her 18th season. Beyond that, there is also an element of nostalgia in Beyond Therapy, which was first produced off Broadway in 1981 and on Broadway in a revised version in 1982. Not everybody will realize what a different place the world was back then. Hence the program notes attempt to explain this through a comparison with Sex and the City, which is steeped in the values of the turn of the century, when it started. Even that is beginning to recede into the past. |
|
| Harold Pinter, The Caretaker
Berkshire Theater Company, Stockbridge
Jonathan Epstein – Davies
James Barry – Mick
Tommy Schrider – Aston
Eric Hill, director
Jonathan Wentz, set design
|
| Michael Miller |
June 16, 2008 |
| Harold Pinter is still very much alive, a potent and welcome presence in the world because of his political work, but when The Caretaker, or any other of the plays from the height of his fame in the theater, is produced, most of us take it as a classic from the past. After all Pinter’s announcement in 2005 of his retirement from the stage marked a significant break, and the world has changed significantly since the sixties. His powerful Nobel Prize lecture, Art, Truth, and Politics, meticulously prepared and taped by BBC 4, shows his current way of reaching his audience in a time when indifference, commercialism in the media, and unofficial censorship make it virtually impossible to get salutary and unpleasant messages across to anyone who is not already convinced. We deal with people who disagree with us by marginalizing them. When he wrote The Caretaker in 1959, his first commercial success, he established himself as the quintessential all-round man of the theater. |
|
| August: Osage County
by Tracy Letts
Steppenwolf at the Music Box Theater, New York
directed by Anna D. Shapiro
Ian Barford - Little Charles
Deanna Dunagan - Violet Weston (Oct 30, 2007-Jun 15, 2008)
Kimberly Guerrero - Johnna Monevata
Francis Guinan - Charlie Aiken (Oct 30, 2007-Jun 15, 2008)
Brian Kerwin - Steve Heidebrecht
Michael McGuire - Beverly Weston
Madeleine Martin - Jean Fordham
Mariann Mayberry - Karen Weston
Amy Morton - Barbara Fordham
Sally Murphy - Ivy Weston
Jeff Perry - Bill Fordham
Rondi Reed - Mattie Fae Aiken (Oct 30, 2007-Jun 15, 2008)
Troy West - Sheriff Deon Gilbeau
|
| Michael Miller |
June 17, 2008 |
| As I mulled over the play I had just seen, the much-acclaimed August: Osage County, over some bad, overpriced feijoada, I found myself probing around for just what had been lacking in the evening. I left the Music Box Theater thinking that it was perhaps not that strong a play. I liked its length (or perhaps out on the Plains people would conceive it as breadth) and its rambling quality. Most of its dozen characters were unattractive in one way or another, but I’d grown fond of them over the past three hours. On the other hand, I perhaps felt mildly frustrated that I didn’t know more about the characters, that too much was left open. (I won’t retell the story here. If you can’t quite follow the following streamof dysfunctional relatives, you should see the play or read it. You won’t regret it.) I found myself wondering what brought Bev together with Violet in the the first place. There must have been something, before the pills and the alcohol took over. Then it takes more than Mattie Fae’s word to convince me about what brought her together with Bev, presumably his frustration with Violet. Is the result of this adultery with his sister-in-law really enough to put the man into such a depression that he kills himself years later? On the other hand, it’s more than enough that he has come to the realization that “life is very long,” and the “the world is gradually becoming a place where I do not care to be anymore.” Bev is—or was—a poet, but his years of inactivity had been so long that it’s hard to imagine that it still bothered him. All he had to do was to stay drunk. Now Barbara, his daughter, followed in Beverly’s footsteps and became an academic. She and her husband left home for Colorado—a tragic abandonment of her parents in the eyes of some, because they could both find jobs there, but we never find out what her academic interests were, what her work life was like. As least we know that it didn’t offer her the same sexual temptations it proferred her soon-to-be-ex-husband, Bill. Weren’t these trivial questions? Perhaps, but I believe that fact that they kept appearing suggested that something was thin in the background to let them through. |
|
| I Am My Own Wife
by Doug Wright
starring Vince Gatton, directed by Andrew Volkoff
Barrington Stage Company, Stage II
|
| Michael Miller |
June 10, 2008 |
| As a teenager under the Third Reich and son of an enthusiastic and rising party member of brutal ways, Lothar Berfelde found himself maturing into an especially difficult situation. From a very early age, he had felt himself to be a girl in a boy’s body. Disgusted by Lothar’s precocious effeminacy, his father had forced him to join the Hitler Youth, but eventually a Lesbian aunt enlightened him about cross-dressing and gave him an authoritative book on the subject, Magnus Hirschfeld’s book, Die Transvestiten (1910), which became his Bible, as it reminded him that he was not alone in the world. He killed his father with a rolling pin, as Väterchen threatened to kill his mother and the entire family. After psychiatric examination he was judged sane and sentenced to four years in juvenile prison. East German society was no more tolerant of homosexuals, but Lothar was able to pursue his inclinations, changing his name to “Lottchen,” formally Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, the Berlin suburb in which he had grown up, and where he continued to live, obsessively collecting furniture and other objects from the Gründerzeit, that is, the age of Bismarck, a period of growing national wealth and security, the “world of assurance” (viz. Am. “insurance”), as Stefan Zweig called it, which was to collapse with the First World War. |
|
|
Black Watch
from the Natonal Theatre of Scotland
Written by Gregory Burke
Director - John Tiffany
|
| Lucas Miller |
April 19, 2008 |
|
The Iraq War is an infuriating abomination and I am more than happy to see anything that attacks it. I am also, as it happens, not against seeing fine theatre. Therefore, I was delighted to see two birds killed with one stone at the National Theatre of Scotland’s production of the Edinburgh Festival hit Black Watch at the Scottish Exhibition & Conference Centre (SECC) in Glasgow, as the play continues its tour through the UK, and then on to North America. [Since its first performance at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2006 in an unused drill shed, Black Watch has played before sold out audiences and won numerous awards, not only the Fringe First, but South Bank Show Award for Theatre, the Critics’ Circle Awards (to John Tiffany as Best Director) and others. It played to sold-out audiences at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn in October-November 2007, and will return there in October 2008. - ed.]
The production is unique in its dynamic approach to theatre and accessibility. Because it is “building-free,” it travels well, each time creating a different experience for a different audience. The primary objective, as always it should be, is to entertain. This is achieved through an interesting integration of acting, singing, dancing, and technical effects. At the SECC, the theatre was set up in a peculiar way, with the stage nestled between two large bleachers running parallel to one another.
|
|
|
|
| Michael Miller |
March 28, 2008 |
| If the first performance of Macbeth (most likely some time in 1606 or 1607) was a historic event, it would have been that chiefly because it was the first time that a Scotsman was ever presented on a London stage as anything other than an object of ridicule and contempt. This obviously had much to do with King James’ Scottish origins, not one of his more popular traits, but surely to be respected, at least in public. But that is not Shakespeare’s only effort to please the monarch. James set great store by his descendence from Banquo, a major theme in the play. There is also a good deal about the nature of kingship and political legitimacy. Witchcraft, a favorite topic of James’, on which he wrote a learned treatise, is close to its core and ubiquitous, even amplified by interpolations which provided an opportunity to make the witch scenes even more vivid through music, spectacle, and dance.
|
|
The Glass Menagerie
By Tennessee Williams
The Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, 11 January - 9 February
Presented by special arrangement with The University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee.
|
| Lucas Miller |
February 12, 2008 |
| From time to time, the American expat, no matter how unpatriotic his sentiments may be, develops a certain homesickness for his motherland. This regret may take on a gluttonous form, causing a longing for hamburgers, fried chicken, hot dogs or “freedom fries.” Being rather put off by the thought of an heart attack, I decided to feed my cravings instead by attending Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh, directed by Jemima Levick. |
|
| Peter Gill's production of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, with Penelope Keith as Lady Bracknell, at The King's Theatre, Edinburgh—now at the Vaudeville Theatre, London, opening Jan. 22, 2008 |
| Lucas Miller |
October 15, 2007 |
When one is in town, one amuses oneself; when one is in the country,one amuses other people.
Oscar Wilde, from The Importance of Being Earnest
It was with this truthful witticism in mind that I withdrew myself from the unpleasant drudgery of a Wednesday evening to “Bunbury” along to Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest at the King’s Theatre in Edinburgh.
The house was absolutely full, with people of all ages in attendance. The production was brilliantly cast, with Penelope Keith as the perfectly pompous Lady Bracknell, William Ellis as the insatiable Algernon Moncrieff, and Harry Hadden-Paton as Jack Worthing in the country, Earnest in town. The secondary actors were likewise impressive, assuming their roles with unmitigated excellence,conveying commendably the wit and satire of the play. The production was directed by Peter Gill whose vast dramatic experience was made clear by his management of the production.
|
|
| Dialogue ONE International Theatre Festival (Click here for picture gallery.)
directed by Omar Sangare
December 6 - 8, 2007
‘62 Center for Theater and Dance, Williams College
|
| Michael Miller |
December 13, 2007 |
| “There are no monologues. You are involved in dialogue at least with the Universe itself.”
December 6, 2007, 7:30 PM
Mme. Tussaud, LIVE
Ilya Khodosh ’08 as Meyer Lansky
Amanda O’Connor ’10 in The Last Battle of Lannes (Jean Lannes)
Terence Tamm ’08 in On the Rocks (Jack Kerouac)
Andres Lopez ‘09 as Bud (Marlon Brando)
December 7, 2007, 7:30 PM
Mme. Tussaud, LIVE
December 8, 2007 from 2:00 PM to 9:30 PM
2:00 PM Vamping - Kali Quinn, GUTworks, directed by Jonathan Maloney and assisted Daniel Burmester
3:30 PM Oblivious to Everyone - Jessica Lynn Johnson
6:00 PM American Cake - Jonathan Pereira, directed by Kristen Williams
7:30 PM Story of My Dovecote - Herbert Kaluza, directed by Johannes Talmon-Gros
8:30 PM Closing Ceremony and Reception
The pleasant, but potentially mind-numbing routine of holiday entertainment was relieved most satisfyingly this past weekend by Dialogue One, a new international theater festival of solo performances at Williams College. Its founder, Omar Sangare, Assistant Professor of Theater at the College is to be thanked warmly for this serious and extremely stimulating festival, which will be an annual event.
|
|
| Hobson's Choice, Chichester Festival Theatre Travelling Production, at the King’s Theatre, Edinburgh |
| Lucas Miller with Michael Miller |
November 30, 2007 |
|
Directed by Jonathan Church; John Savident, Hobson; Carolyn Backhouse, Maggie Hobson; Dylan Charles, Will Mossop.
The eternally popular play, Hobson’s Choice by Harold Brighouse, tells the story of Henry Horatio Hobson, a misogynistic alcoholic who lets his business slide, tyrannizes his three daughters, viciously abuses his pub mates, and falls down a basement door in a drunken stupor, premiered at the Gaiety Theatre in Manchester in 1916, when news from the trenches grew increasingly grim. Today attitudes have changed even more than they had between 1880, when the play is set, and 1916. It is easy to imagine how Mike Leigh or Mike Nichols might handle the subject. (Actually, I think Leigh, a native Salfordian, would work wonders with the play.) As undesirable as alcoholism and domestic abuse are...
|
|
| Tim Supple's Indian Midsummer Night's Dream Comes to Edinburgh |
| Lucas Miller |
November 2, 2007 |
| It has become fashionable for directors to take liberties with the plays of Shakespeare. Usually I thoroughly disapprove of such productions. But, one must keep an open mind, as I found last Thursday at a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the King's Theatre in Edinburgh, directed by Tim Supple. This production was done in the languages of India, modern and ancient: English, Hindi, Bengali, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, and Sanskrit. The culture of the Indian people, their languages, their music, and their customs, all contributed to the wonderful success of this production. |
|
| R. C. Sherriff's World War I Classic Journey's End on Broadway |
| Michael Miller |
reprint from BFA, March 20, 2007 |
| Before I go any further, let me say that the Broadway production of R. C. Sherriff's classic World War I play, Journey's End at the Belasco Theatre, is not to be missed at any cost, even if you have to brave the Taconic Parkway in a blizzard or get stung with a Manhattan parking ticket. Director David Grindley, who was responsible for the immensely successful London production, which ran for over two years in the West End and went on two national tours, sensibly understood that Sherriff's realist masterwork is no period piece, requiring no condescension, updating, or manipulation of any kind. The production owes its success to the directness and honesty of the play, which remains as powerful as when it first opened in 1928. All Grindley and his excellent, almost entirely American cast have to do is mind the details. The only contemporary interventions in the production are a curtain painted with the famous recruiting poster of General Kitchener fingering out prospective recruits, and a memorial wall covered with names of the dead, against which the cast take their curtain calls. These may edge it somewhat in the direction of an anti-war message—which was in fact not the intention of the author—but not stridently so, and they were effective in their own right. Kitchener's iconic summons to arms both sets the period of the action and tranposes it into the present, and the memorial wall adds solemnity to the conclusion and brings the evening's grim entertainment into a universal dimension. It is hard for a realistic and honest treatment of war not to carry a pacifistic subtext, but, I believe, it is precisely the tension between Sherriff's realist aesthetic and its inevitable implications that make Journey's End so fascinating after more than seventy-five years. It was, almost surprisingly, this anniversary and not the current war which inspired the 2004 London revival, not to mention the 2005 production at the Shaw Festival at Niagara-on-the-Lake. There is something almost miraculous in the freshness of Journey's End. It has been called a "minor masterpiece;" it is possibly time to forget the qualification. |
|
|
|
|
