Category Archives: Theater

Cabaret

Posted on by
Kit Kat Klub, Cabaret

(photo: author)

We took Alan Cumming’s advice and went to the Cabaret (opening number) last week. Possibly I saw the movie at some point, but I’d never seen the show on stage and was interested now because of Cumming. He was terrific, of course, and Michelle Williams was a much more suitable Sally Bowles than Liza Minelli in the movie, because the thing about Sally is, she’s not that talented. She’s never going to make it big. Or even medium. Especially then and there. The theater was designed to evoke the Kit Kat Klub, and instead of orchestra front, they’d installed tiny lamplit tables. The dancers stretched and warmed up on stage, interacting with the audience to further suggest the intimacy of a club. The band did more than play the music, the players were part of the drama, and some members doubled as dancers. An experience as well as a show.

We were not at the performance where Shia LaBeouf was escorted from the theatre in handcuffs—that was the next night. Apparently he took the night club setting too literally and lit up a smoke. Was disruptive. Said Entertainment Weekly, “Not everybody is wilkommen.”

Some video in this Today show interview with Cumming.

Related articles

Such Stuff as Dreams: The Tempest vs. Ida

Posted on by
Shakespeare, The Tempest

Sherman Howard (Prospero) and Erin Partin (Ariel) in The Tempest, Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey (photo: imgick.nj.com)

Quite a contrast recently between the nonstop cannonade of literary touchstones in The Tempest—in an exuberant and colorful production at the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, alas, only through June 22—and the oppressive restraint of the near-silent black-and-white movie from Poland, Ida, viewed the same day (trailer).

In the live—and lively—play, the portrayals by Sherman Howard (Prospero), Lindsey Kyler (Miranda), John Barker (Caliban), and especially Erin Partin (Ariel) were remarkable.

Shakespeare touches button after button with his iconic quotes: “Hell is empty and all the devils are here” (wait, that sounds like John Boehner’s voice!), “Now I will believe that there are unicorns,” “We are such stuff as dreams are made on,” “What’s past is prologue,” , “O, brave new world, that has such people in’t,” “my library was dukedom large enough,” or “he receives comfort like cold porridge,” Ida has hardly any dialog.

David Denby in The New Yorker puts a positive spin on this, saying, “I can’t recall a movie that makes such expressive use of silence and portraiture.” In Ida, instead of being carried along by a current of words, we float in a bleak, misty, ambiguous atmosphere, albeit rendered with beautiful cinematography, “every shot as definitive as an icon,” Denby says, quite truly.

But after all Shakespeare’s verbal passion, Ida felt like cold porridge indeed. Perhaps the filmmakers had some great story in mind and just forgot to tell it, because they give the barest of bones and leave viewers (me, anyway) with more questions than answers—not so much about the past, which the movie explores in sufficient glimpses—but about what is going on right now in the minds of the characters on the screen.

Agata Kulesza, does a fine job playing the aunt of the main character, a sheltered, opaque novitiate raised in a convent (Ida), played less well by Agata Trzebuchowska. The pair uncover a terrible but not uncommon World War II tragedy, and the question of whether exposure to her aunt’s earthiness will persuade somnambulant Ida to abandon the convent seems none too debatable. Bear in mind the Rotten Tomatoes critics gave it 93%, so don’t take my word for it.

Related articles

Tamer of Horses

Posted on by
Iliad, Hector, Tamer of Horses

Hector, Tamer of Horses (photo: farm6.staticflickr.com)

A wonderful play by Trenton playwright William Mastrosimone in production through 6/8 by the Passage Theatre Company. Amazing acting (Hector, played by Reynaldo Piniella; Ty Fletcher, by Edward O’Blenis; and Georgiane Fletcher, by Lynnette R. Freeman), and the well-plotted play moves along briskly, exploring the limits of teacher and teaching. The play never descends into sentimentality in dealing with a tough street kid and the middle-class couple that believes it better to try to save him than protect themselves. Direction by the sure-footed Adam Immerwahr.

The Iliad and its hero Hector, Tamer of Horses, also stars, providing enduring lessons to a generation that knows a Trojan as something you buy at the drug store. Homer’s words “take their place next to urban rap lyrics” as the modern-day Hector and the disaffected teacher “match wits in a struggle for Hector’s survival.” Passage Theatre productions appear at Trenton’s easy-to-get-to Mill Hill Playhouse. Secure parking right in front. Don’t miss it!

Related articles

Strike Up the Band!

Posted on by

The papers, original scores, and more written by George and Ira Gershwin are being made available to music scholars, performers, audiences, and students through The Gershwin Initiative at the University of Michigan. A “listening gallery” is at the U-M website link. The school will create new, definitive scores for the brothers’ many compositions, which include Porgy and Bess, Rhapsody in Blue, and An American in Paris.

The Gershwins were pivotal in developing what is now called The Great American Songbook, recently brought to a broader (or renewed) audience by Michael Feinstein, who is not only an entertainer, but relentless in his effort to preserve this era of musical history and an avid supporter of the next generation of vocal talent. No surprise, one of Feinstein’s early jobs was as assistant to Ira Gershwin, which inspired his recent book, The Gershwins and Me.

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta

Figaro

Posted on by

Figaro, McCarter Theatre, Stephen Wadsworth, Barber of SevillePrinceton’s McCarter Theatre is putting on two Beaumarchais farces—The Barber of Seville (1773) and The Marriage of Figaro (1778)—in  repertory this spring. The plays, better known in their operatic versions, are new translations by Stephen Wadsworth (opera director at Julliard). In the 1990s at McCarter, Wadsworth successfully remounted three neglected plays by 18th c. French playwright Marivaux and has a distinguished directorial career in theater and opera throughout the world.

I had the chance to see the charming actors playing Figaro and his bride-to-be Suzanne in an early rehearsal of the first scene of Figaro. They portray these two characters in both plays, a feat impossible in opera, because those works by Rossini and Mozart (musical interlude) are set in different registers and require different voices. Following the scene was a brief talk by Wadsworth.

“Comedy is the costume that politics wears,” Wadsworth said and emphasized the timing of the two works, written shortly before the French Revolution. In Figaro, the chief dilemma is that Count Almaviva, who is the employer of Figaro and Suzanne, desires to reassert an old right of primae noctis and be the one to deflower Suzanne on her wedding night. The play’s depiction of aristocratic arrogance was a significant cultural influence on the French populace, and Georges Danton himself said the play “killed off the nobility.”

To make his social satires acceptable to the powers-that-be, Beaumarchais set them in Spain, but his packed audiences got the message, anyway. “L’Escalier du Capitole” of the 1770s. Can’t wait to see them on stage! April 1 – May 4, 2014.

A Painful Memorial

Posted on by

Philip Seymour Hoffman, playwright, American Playwriting FoundationYesterday’s New York Times included a front page story and full-page announcement of the establishment of “The American Playwriting Foundation,” to make annual $45,000 grants for creators of new American plays, one of the largest awards available for this purpose today. The Foundation was established in honor of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, “who relentlessly sought out truth in his work and demanded the same from his collaborators.”

Initial funding for the Foundation came from the National Enquirer, which published an interview with someone falsely claiming to be Hoffman’s friend David Bar Katz. In its haste to print this information, the newspaper “made a good faith error” by inadequately checking its source. Katz’s subsequent lawsuit led to an apology, and “instead of seeking a purely personal reward for the harm done to him, Mr. Katz brought the lawsuit as a vehicle to . . .create something positive out of this unfortunate turn of events.”

Out of one man’s tragedy, another’s unselfishness, and the foolishness of an entity with more money than sense, miraculously, something good may rise.

My 7/28/14 review of Hoffman’s last major role, in what is both movie title and obituary, “A Most Wanted Man.”