Two Gentlemen of Verona – Not!

Posted on January 25, 2012 by Steve
Natalie Mitchell, Andrew Veenstra, Miriam Silverman and Nick Dillenburg

Photo of Natalie Mitchell, Andrew Veenstra, Miriam Silverman and Nick Dillenburg by Dented Lens Photography.

There’s a rumble going on – it starts in a suburban parking lot created from sheet metal and a few yellow lines on the stage of the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Lansburgh Theater. (The playwright has simply called for “an open space.”) The kids there aren’t all right – they’re wild, into fighting and drinking and carrying on, staying up all night.

And we’ll soon find out the cause – hormones, and teen angst. This blaze of energy kicks off PJ Paparelli’s new production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, just opened and rocking the stage in downtown D.C.

How you feel about this production will be guided by a lot of things, and not all of them are visible on the stage. Do you like updated productions of the Bard? Do you find the anachronistic display of the stuff of everyday life — from cell phones to handguns — a problem on the classic stage, or does it tickle your sense of possibility, and confirm the idea that Shakespeare can be relevant today?

I’ll state my bias.  I used to run in the other direction when Shakespeare was produced in a setting that self-consciously placed a story in a space and time engineered to show how smart and “creative” the director was. I’ve gotten over it.  Committed directors have been transporting Shakespeare anywhere they like for decades now, sometimes with stunning success and at other times with abject failure.

What matters are the results.

Are we swept into the life on stage, of whatever era? And does Shakespeare’s story, whether it happens in a setting that reminds us of his day, or of ours, teach us, to paraphrase Harold Bloom, what it means to be human?

Here’s how the PJ Paparelli lays out his vision: “‘Two Gentlemen’ reminds me of wealthy suburban life, where parents are wrapped up in their worries about the crashing economy and teenagers are left to their own devices. Our challenge is to allow the play to exist in its period while also releasing the energy and the echoes of today’s world.”

You may not know the story. Young Proteus (Nick Dillenburg) is in love. Not a little bit in love, a lot in love. He’s in love with Julia (Miriam Silverman), who is willing to give him a chance. They make love. They exchange rings.

Thou, Julia, thou hast metamorphosed me,
Made me neglect my studies, lose my time,
War with good counsel, set the world at nought;
Made wit with musing weak, heart sick with thought.

Valentine (Andrew Veenstra) is the best buddy of Proteus. Perhaps his name signals that he will be more constant in love. He is on his way out of town, seeking his fortune and his own love, in Milan.

There, the Duke’s daughter Silvia, a stunning Natalie Mitchell, is dodging the advances of her fiancé Thurio, as she basks in the attention of young Valentine.

Proteus follows Valentine to Milan, and is struck once again by love – this time for his buddy’s girlfriend, Silvia. He is willing to betray Valentine, and jettison Julia. When Valentine is exiled from Milan by Silvia’s father the Duke, Silvia holds firm against the advances of Proteus. Meanwhile Julia, dressed as a boy, follows Proteus to Milan.

But first, an unsettling moment. Julia, in despair, takes a knife and cuts herself, reminding the audience that she is a troubled teen of today. This is startling and feels like it could be out of place. It puts the audience on guard that modernizing the play may take us into uncomfortable territory. It’s about this time you have to remind yourself that this is, after all, a comedy. Perhaps you’ll be reassured that nothing really awful will happen to anyone. If so, you can skate by the cutting and the coming pistol play, as each of the young protagonists threatens to blow out his brains.

They don’t. And, in the end, everyone is happy, forgiven, reunited.

And there’s a dog – a cute, obedient, funny, and thoughtful cur, who effortlessly steals every scene he’s in. In this season of dog performers (what, no Oscar nod for Uggie?), the Shakespeare Theatre is right up to the moment here, too.

So does the play “work?” I left the theater cursing at the miraculous, too-easy ending and the changeable and immature attitude about something as serious as love that made me want to wring shallow Proteus’s neck, but nevertheless made me hope that he and Julia, and Valentine and Silvia would be happy.

They’d come alive for me. That’s all I ask for in a night of theater.

 

Posted in arts news, Theater | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Krapp’s Last Tape – John Hurt Creates Beckett’s World in D.C.

Posted on December 8, 2011 by Steve
John Hurt, Krapp's Last Tape, photo by Anthony Woods

John Hurt in the Gate Theatre’s production of Krapp’s Last Tape. Photo by Anthony Woods.

John Hurt – his face a topographic map of disappointment and failure – sits at a desk as a light above him slowly blooms. He is Krapp. His life, crap. As Samuel Beckett introduces him to us in Krapp’s Last Tape, he is a man who has seen better times, made manifest by the tapes he recorded in earlier days, which will be his companions and ours for an hour in the dark. This Gate Theatre production played at Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre Company earlier this month, one of only two U.S. venues for the show.

“Box three, spool five.” That’s the tape Krapp goes hunting for – after a pantomime that lasted, by the count of one audience member, 20 minutes. Maybe this silence does seem to last nearly forever, but it’s the magical time when we get to know the character. The dazed stare. The obsession with bananas. The mix of clown and yogi.

With Beckett, you never forget that things are happening on a stage, in a theater. But instead of distancing, what you get is intimacy. Hurt tests the limits of the light that binds him to a square of stage. He leans in and out, probing. He can break through the light to retrieve his boxes of tapes, but they are elsewhere in his house, or waiting in the wings. It doesn’t matter.

What are we to imagine of Krapp’s earlier life? There are the hinted-at digestive troubles, for which the bananas are both cause and cure; the inability to connect with people; the troubling realization that previous years were momentarily more hopeful, although the current collapse echoes a lifelong routine of isolation and despair

Why do we watch any production of this claustrophobic and dispiriting play? We want to see the magic of an actor, here a star in his prime, embodying Krapp’s worthless and meaningless existence. The power of Beckett’s craft, and Hurt’s is that this turns the hurt and damage in our own lives upside down, and the play becomes an ode to perseverance and personhood.

What keeps me alive and keeps me from slitting my wrists after seeing the best of Beckett performed by brilliant artists is a line like this: “Perhaps my best years are gone. I wouldn’t want them back.” We forge ahead. Regret isn’t really a viable option. The moments we live still have the ability to come alive, even if we are sitting alone, listening to our slightly more hopeful selves, or someone else’s, recorded on tape a very long time ago.

Posted in arts news, Theater | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Silver Docs Film Festival- Nine Years On

Posted on June 26, 2011 by Steve

Sundance is all the way out West. And I’ve only been lucky enough to attend Austin’s cool South by Southwest once. But having a film festival almost literally in my backyard is a hoot. And for a lover of documentaries, to know that the movies people are going to be talking about all year are cycling through town, all at once, is a small miracle.

Age of Champions is more than anything why I went to the Festival this year. After all, working for AARP, I have to keep up with all things ancient, and the athletes in this film, all tough competitors in the world of senior sports, top out at 102. (Although that fellow sadly passed away before he could see the film open).

The inspirational stories of, yes, trash talking grandmas on the basketball court, and a pair of 90+ swimming brothers from here in DC, left the audience standing and cheering. I won’t be surprised if that film wins the audience award, for which the director and producer shamelessly appealed.

But the real brilliance at the festival was in a new film by Steve James, who stood the documentary world on its ear  with Hoop Dreams in 1994. What was special about that film? It was to many eyes a new kind of documentary, with all the excitement, pacing, character development, and emotional pull of a fiction feature, and yet it was about real people and their lives.

James has struck documentary gold again, with The Interrupters, about a group of hardened Chicago gang members who are dedicated to ending gang violence and retribution and have had great success in stopping the kind of tit for tat murder that is the currency of Chicago gang life. The film is based on the reporting of Alex Kotlowitz, who first wrote the story for the New York Times Magazine.

The film is riveting for its nearly 2 1/2 hour running time, and introduces an incredibly vibrant and stunning character, Ameena Matthews, whose father is Jeff Fort, one of the city’s “most notorious gang leaders,” according to the filmmakers and who was herself a feared gang enforcer.

I’ll have to make time to write about some of the other great films I saw last week – a doc about the world’s most creative restaurant, a final meditation from photographer Tim Hetherington, killed this spring in Libya, a sad and sweet music movie about the group Swell Season, whose name gives the film its bittersweet title, and The Revenge of the Electric Car, from the same filmmaker who documented its murder. My eyes hurt. But they hurt good.

Posted in arts news, film | Tagged | Leave a comment

‘Black Watch’ Gives Audiences a Welcome Beating

Posted on January 31, 2011 by Steve

Scott Fletcher as Kenzie and Jamie Quinn as Fraz in the National Theatre of Scotland’s production of 'Black Watch'. Photo by Manuel Harlan.

Black Watch, from the Scottish National Theatre, pummels you into submission. It’s loud and flashy (literally), and meant in every way to convince us civilians that explosions and death are more than we could handle. And yet it’s also meant to explain why these young Scottish soldiers do what they do – not for country, or even family, but for each other: for the regiment, the squad, the patrol, the smallest possible unit of their fighting force.

Arriving at the theater, the audience is met by prison-style searchlights. The perimeter is being guarded. After a few announcements assuring us that medical help is in place in the theater, and that anybody leaving the audience won’t be reseated amidst the mayhem, the show begins with earsplitting guitar music, not the expected bagpipes. Those are saved for later.

The scene is a Scottish pool hall, and the Black Watch veterans are awaiting the arrival of a researcher who has called and asked to gather their Iraq war stories. It’s not the stories so much as the imagined sexual favors they expect from the researcher that have opened the door – so the soldiers’ disappointment is keen when the researcher turns out to be a man; the girl they expected had merely set up his visit.

The questioner represents playwright Gregory Burke, who really did conduct interviews with veterans from the Black Watch Brigade to create this work. He makes fun of himself by embodying the expected fears of the vets – he asks the obvious, stupid questions. But soon enough we are transported, as we always knew we would be, to Iraq, where the Scottish troops had been asked to back up an American force of much greater strength in an ill-advised holding action that will end badly.

When they first arrive in Iraq, the soldiers are cocky and up for anything. They can’t believe that the incoming fire puts them in any danger. But as the mortars and other explosions, signified by crashing sound and flashing lights, become a regular feature of their lives—and ours in the audience—they begin to take their toll.

The action shifts fluidly from home to battlefield and back—an embedded reporter on the front lines substitutes for the interviewer at home, and then the interviewer is suddenly transported to Iraq along with the soldiers. An older commander tries to elicit the men’s loyalties to home, regiment and country; an experienced sergeant claims that girls will flock to the soldiers once they’re back home.

Yet all but the youngest know better—home will bring dislocation and exile from the common and peaceful things in life, and bad memories. The pool hall is devoid of women; they’re rarely even talked about. The war has spoiled these men for life.

At the show’s opening night, there seemed to be some hesitation and an occasional lack of cohesion. Perhaps it was the last minute cast substitution, not even announced in the theater, which thrust an understudy into a starring role.

But in the days after seeing Black Watch, as the show sank in, the strands seemed to pull together. What stuck in the mind was a choreographed scene where all the men, in small groups, sprinted to corners of the stage, where they found their parade ground distance by sticking out their arms to touch their mates’ shoulders. They then marched a few paces, and sprinted to another corner. But as the sprinting continued, a man would stumble, then recover. Then another man would stumble, and fall, and be helped to his feet by his buddies.

All of a sudden, the military precision seemed not fearful, but a temporary and futile holding action, putting off the inevitable stumble. There could be no more apt metaphor for war.

Posted in arts news, Theater | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Candide – Optimism Triumphs in Washington

Posted on December 26, 2010 by Steve
Lauren Molina and Geoff Packard (photo; Scott Suchman)

Lauren Molina and Geoff Packard (photo: Scott Suchman)

Boom buh da paaah! The Overture to “Candide,” along with the Symphonic Dances from “West Side Story,” are Leonard Bernstein’s gifts to the orchestral repertoire. After hearing the opening fanfare of the Candide overture a hundred times rocked by a full symphony, there’s no way that the dozen able players in the Mary Zimmerman production of Candide now at Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre wouldn’t sound a little anemic. (The show, running through January 9, is a co-production with Chicago’s Goodman Theatre.)

But the scaled-down sound also helps emphasize the humor and irony inherent in the very first notes of Bernstein’s wonderful score. Boom buh da paaah! indeed. By the time the overture is over, we’ve heard that figure enough times to know that the grand and glorious world it introduces may hold a few contrary notes. The “best of all possible worlds” the show pretends to celebrate at its open will be our own misshapen, problem-strewn globe.

Voltaire’s satire Candide; or The optimist, written in 1759, held many enticements for Bernstein and his collaborators in the mid-1950s. The war in Europe, with the extermination of millions of Jews, gypsies and homosexuals, was a fresh wound. Then came our own country’s announcement, via two atomic bombs, that American power was here to stay. The Soviets had a different idea – and a Senator named Joseph McCarthy spun the Soviet threat to his own ends, and subjected the political and artistic communities to a purge that defined the early part of the decade.

Instead of taking any of these issues on directly, Bernstein, lyricist Richard Wilbur, Hugh Wheeler who shaped Voltaire’s story into a picaresque play, and a star-studded cast of contributors including Dorothy Parker, Stephen Sondheim and Lillian Hellman, adopted and adapted Voltaire’s story of a young orphan, Candide (Geoff Packard) taken in by a noble family in German Westphalia, who is tossed out to seek his fortune in the world after falling in love with his adoptive sister Cunegonde (Lauren Molina).

Director Mary Zimmerman (a MacArthur Foundation “genius”) has further molded the stew that is Candide to fit the ensemble style she created over several decades with the Lookingglass Theatre in Chicago, and with other companies around the country. Candide is forever gaining and losing sidekicks as he pursues happiness and Cunegonde, sailing across cardboard seas, accompanied by tiny ships, with the set shapeshifting moment by moment, the atmosphere and the environment created by the clever use of bodies working together to create living stage pictures.

Hollis Resnik as Old Lady (photo: Scott Suchman)

Hollis Resnik as Old Lady (photo: Scott Suchman)

Along the way, for comic relief, they pick up the Old Lady (Hollis Resnik), who on account of having just one buttock, has a heck of a time getting comfortable, especially in the sitting position. Resnik’s clowning nearly steals the show whenever she’s on stage – but that’s not a criticism. The show, clocking in at about 3 hours, seems long, and her moments are a necessary distraction.

As Candide, Packard must somehow maintain the sunny worldview that the play mocks, and sing in a sweet and unaffected manner. He nails this. And Molina’s Cunegonde is given some of the most ravishing music ever written for a Broadway soprano. You understand why opera companies comfortably perform Candide.

But the length, and the show’s wacky journey around the world from Westphalia to the New World and back to the Old, have always been the “problem” of this otherwise promising show, which stayed just a few months in its original incarnation on Broadway. In 1956, Walter Kerr wrote in the New York Times: “Three of the most talented people our theater possesses—Lillian Hellman, Leonard Bernstein, [and director] Tyrone Guthrie—have joined hands to transform Voltaire’s Candide into a really spectacular disaster.”

Here’s the problem: Where do you go after nearly every character in the show has been beaten down, killed (and sometimes resurrected), betrayed and blindsided? Does the final profession of love for our world and our fellow man — “Make Our Garden Grow” — even belong in the same show as the bitter and wildly ironic satire that is the only thread sustaining us through the hours?

Zimmerman has no choice but to go for broke at the curtain, to try to knit the threads together: she marshals Bernstein’s soaring melody and harmony, with the cast literally on its knees begging our indulgence, to provide the pleasure that only a brilliant, transcendent piece of music can give us. Yet somehow, the bitterness and the humor remain intact as well.

It’s no wonder that flowers mockingly bloom out of a hundred tiny holes in every dimension of the set during “Garden Grow.” We know, though Bernstein didn’t, that the century still awaited the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom!) and mass killings from Cambodia to Africa. Still, one needs to wake up every day. And we thank Zimmerman for sending us out into the streets singing rather than slitting our wrists. And thanks Lenny. And Voltaire. We needed that. All of it.

Posted in arts news, Theater | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Not enough heat in this “Light in the Piazza”

Posted on March 15, 2010 by Steve

Hollis Resnik, Margaret Anne Florence, Nicholas Rodriguez, photo by Scott Suchman

No I haven’t heard every musical produced on Broadway in the past decade – but I’d be surprised to find any show more ravishingly beautiful, more lyrical or sweeter than “The Light in the Piazza.” Is there a musical gene that runs in families? We don’t know for sure – but since Light’s music and lyrics are written by Adam Guettel, grandson of musical theater legend Richard Rogers (“Oklahoma,” “South Pacific,” “The King and I,” “Carousel”), he may be the best evidence yet that musical genius can be inherited.

“The Light in the Piazza” has just opened in Washington, in a production directed by Molly Smith, for Arena Stage. It hits all the right notes – but something is missing. The show ends up feeling thin. The lovely voices, the beautiful set, the strong performances don’t set off a river of tears, or even provide a fully engaging evening of theater. Why?

The problem starts with the concept. This is described as a “chamber” version of the show, with a reduced orchestra of five (electric piano, harp, violin, cello, and double bass) sitting in for the larger, original band, which featured a group of fifteen musicians with more strings, winds, some percussion, and a far lusher sound. Chamber versions of musicals have gotten popular in the past few years – and the cost savings are not the only reason. A small backing ensemble, presented on stage as part of the action or embedded in the scenery, can add an element of closeness and intimacy missing from a bigger orchestra.

But, in this case, the meaning of the show is carried not only by the pitches, harmonies, and voices – but by the sheer power of the music, including its timbre, rhythm, and loudness. With fewer instruments, some depth is palpably gone.

But what’s absent most of all in this production is a spark that would allow us to believe in and care about the relationship between the two young people, Clara and Fabrizio, who “meet cute” when her hat blows off in a Florentine square, he catches it, and the two fall hard for each other.

It’s 1953. Margaret Johnson has brought her daughter Clara to Europe with some hope that she can provide for her a better, richer life than she herself has lived.

The obstacle to that life is a mysterious and clearly mid-century malady – Clara, when she was 12, was kicked in the head by a pony – leaving her with a subtle but permanent brain injury. She is, literally, damaged goods, in the view of the day. She is a woman, but childlike, and in the eyes of her mother, unlikely to find a mate.

Despite her pessimistic outlook, Margaret slowly begins to feel hope for her daughter’s life as a woman. Maybe Clara can find a match far better than Margaret’s own loveless marriage to an unimaginative lump back home.

The show then becomes the story of how can Margaret can carry her daughter over the finish line, helping her find love and avoid disappointment with Fabrizio, and hide her daughter’s volcanic ups and downs and unsettling insecurities from Fabrizio’s family.

Guettel takes an operatic approach to his music. A number of tunes that a classical composer might call motifs, reoccur in the show and hook our subconscious with the emotional content and shape of their melodies.

Since it’s set in Italy, and features swaths of dialogue sung by Fabrizio’s family in Italian – it almost seems as if the entire subplot about his squabbling brother and his parents is inserted to emphasize the operatic aspects of the show…

But there’s no doubt, in the end, that this is an American musical in all its glory. As the couple makes a commitment to stay together forever, Guettel the lyricist spotlights the magic of Guettel the composer as the lovers sing “I think I hear the sound of wrap your arms around me” followed by phrase upon phrase of wordless song on open syllables of “ah.” What is the sound of “wrap your arms around me?” We hear it, and are ourselves in love.

But the stage picture that keeps returning to my mind is the image of Clara and Fabrizio coyly chasing each other around a hotel bed – before their first kiss. Yes, it’s a children’s game because Clara is childlike and Fabrizio naïve. But, God, if you don’t believe they really want each other as adults, deeply and sensually, then the fabulous and intimate connection this music carries in its every note is wasted. And that, in the end, is the feeling of a missed connection that I carried out of the theater.

Posted in music, Theater | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Stacy Keach, King Lear, D.C. 2009

Posted on July 1, 2009 by Steve

Stacy Keach as King Lear, Howard Witt as The Fool

(Stacy Keach as Lear, Howard Witt as The Fool; photo Steve Mencher)

The king’s three daughters have a chance to claim their inheritance, as “King Lear” opens. He’s stepping down. To get their fair share of the kingdom, all they have to do is tell daddy how much they love him.

Goneril and Regan have been practicing. They love him madly, truly, deeply, and extravagantly. More than their own husbands, they tell him. More than life itself. But when young Cordelia, the third sister, is asked what she has to say to best her sisters, she can add no more than “nothing.”

“Nothing,” says the king, “will come of nothing.”

Shakespeare, in this melancholy guise, is an existentialist, a pessimist, a man for whom tragedy is not complete unless it’s accompanied by murder and madness. A man at home in the land of nothing.

Director Robert Falls knows this side of Shakespeare. The artistic director of Chicago’s Goodman Theatre and Tony-winning director of several of its triumphant transfers to Broadway, Falls has set “King Lear” in Eastern Europe, as an untethered state drifts into chaos, anarchy, and ethnic cleansing. He has found commonalities in the breakup of Lear’s kingdom and the bloodshed that ensued after Marshal Tito died in 1980 or the uncertainty after Romania’s Ceausescu was executed.

Count me among those who passionately hate Shakespeare that’s updated for the sake of variety or “engagement” with modern audiences. The conceits usually fall apart by scene two, when you wonder why these modern folks are spouting iambic pentameter. So why does this production work?

I’d say it’s because of the absolute conviction of the actors and production team. Their passion and commitment are bent to the common work of telling this spellbinding story. We all have fathers, of course. And for those of us with daughters, don’t we crave their love, their acceptance, their agreement to carry on our hopes and dreams in ways more ineffable than sons could?

Did I mention that I saw “King Lear” on Father’s Day? Robert Falls, perhaps having heard that I’d suggested running our “King Lear” story at AARP on Father’s Day grinned at me conspiratorially when he saw me, asked if I was having a good time, and assured me he was. “Father’s Day,” he muttered, eyes gleaming. Couldn’t tell if he was making fun of me or sharing a joke.

Yes, a good time was had by all. As Gloucester’s eyes are gouged out like so much troublesome jelly. As Lear slides into madness and hopelessness. As, one after another, the characters in the play are shot, stabbed, garroted, raped, and murdered.

So what’s good about it? What are we “enjoying?” First is craft. It’s quite a kick to see Stacy Keach stretching himself to explore every cranny of this aging monarch. He is by turns wily, furious, absent, volcanic, and always believable and human. It’s the performance of a lifetime for a man who has had a career that never moved in a straight line. MacBird, Hamlet, Macbeth, Mike Hammer, and the voice that launched a thousand documentaries. Here he seems at home on stage, after wowing Chicago in this role in 2006, and surviving a stroke last spring. He’s alive, and loving it.

The second great pleasure of this production is to be in the presence of what I might call a Chicago school of ensemble acting. I’ve been enjoying this tsunami of energy since my days in Chicago in the early 1970s, and most recently in the fabulous work of Mary Zimmerman. Chicago’s best directors and the actors they work with seem to operate at a fever pitch; they trust each other to be brave and unselfish, and turn themselves inside out in public.

Did I mention that Bob Falls is a madman and a genius? He knows that “Lear” – a play about love and pain, about seeing and nothing, about power and corruption – is expressed in every syllable of language on the page, and every gesture made by every person on stage. There is no wasted sound or motion in this “Lear.” It moves like a runaway freight train. The work he does in animating “Lear” is work all directors do. He just does it as well as anyone working today.

This particular train, by the way, is on the road to Hell, where we are deposited, spent and weary at the end of the evening.

Michael Kahn’s Shakespeare Theatre Company, presenting “Lear” in the nation’s capital through the end of July, has been warning Washington for months about this show. Expect nudity and extraordinary violence, they said. In fact, they were so concerned about possible offense to the unwary that the show comes literally with a warning sticker that it is for “Mature Audiences Only.” We’ll pray it finds them.

Posted in arts news, Theater | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Waiting for Godot: Second Acts in an Uncertain World

Posted on June 7, 2009 by Steve

Nathan Lane and Bill Irwin in Waiting for Godot

A dog came in the kitchen
And stole a crust of bread,
Then cook up with the ladle,
And beat him ’til he was dead.
Then all the dogs came running
And dug the dog a tomb
And wrote upon the tombstone
For the eyes of dogs to come…
(repeat)

Is there a name for this kind of Escher-like song that winds around and bites its tail and provides the promise that it could go on forever? Let me know.

So. Bill Irwin as Vladimir, one of two existential tramps, has come on stage singing this ditty to open the second act of “Waiting for Godot.”

The second act, always an Everest for a playwright to conquer, is especially important to ‘Godot,’ since it is a play about such fundamental questions as: what does our life mean? What is memory? If our being here is a result of God’s work, is it an act of bad faith on His part? And if God has written Act I, what’s the evidence it actually happened, and who’s in charge during Act II?

Spoiler alert.  Did we mention that this heavenly playwright, director, puppet master, or phantasm–God, Godot, God-Oh–never comes?

And yet we wait.

Meanwhile – in Bill Irwin’s singing, I found the meaning of a play nearly everyone acknowledges as one of the towering achievements of 20th century drama. The hit production, extended through July, represents the first time since its New York premiere in 1956 that “Waiting for Godot” has returned to Broadway.

Back to Irwin. The funny thing that happens at the top of Act Two is that after Irwin finishes his song, he keeps singing the rest of his dialogue. I don’t believe that’s a stage direction. There certainly isn’t a score. Yet every word is sung with carefully considered pitch and rhythm. Perhaps he sang all the way through Act One as well, but now there’s no way to go back and be sure.

The content is almost secondary. Vague stuff about the Bible, and whether we’re surrounded by the souls of all the people who ever lived. Perhaps we’re already one of those dead. We fear that we’re here on earth living in a meaningless dream.

“Let’s go. We can’t. Why not? We’re waiting for Godot.” Beat.

What’s funny, too, is that Irwin is sharing the stage with one of Broadway’s best and most accomplished musical comedy stars. And Nathan Lane as Vladimir’s partner in life, Estragon, refuses to sing.  Instead, he communicates using every inch of his body. With a turn of the head here, a spray of “air quotes” there, a slightly raised eyebrow to top it all off, Lane reminds us that we are in the presence of an actor used to owning the stage, yet fully comfortable sharing it. But there’s no shtick. No trademark Nathan Lane wiseguy-isms. Or not too many.

At this point in thinking about Godot, I went back to find out which part–Estragon or Vladimir, Nathan Lane or Bill Irwin–was originally played by Bert Lahr, best known as the rubber-legged Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz. It was Estragon–the member of the duo with fewer questions, more time for dreaming, and a bit higher highs and lower lows. Perhaps when the Wizard of Oz is next revived, in some medium, Lane can return the favor by playing the scaredy-cat without a lion’s courage.

Second Acts. As we grow older, is change possible? The barren tree, which dominates the set of grey rockpiles has sprouted mysterious and rather useless leaves during intermission.

Is that change? Do people in command, like the brutish Pozzo played by an imperious and physically imposing John Goodman, change, even if it’s not to their advantage? And what of Pozzo’s slave, the ironically named Lucky? Are we surprised when he insists on handing his own chains to master Pozzo, as if to reinforce his powerlessness, and ours? (With four spectacular performances, John Glover’s feral Lucky is the only one recognized with a Tony nomination.

Goodman plays the Second Act as a beached walrus, a killer whale who has forgotten how to kill. Yes, kings and emperors die. Ashes to ashes. Pozzo is blind. Sans eyes, sans teeth, as Shakespeare had it, sans everything.

So what are we to take away from Godot? What keeps us from rising out of our seats at the end of Act Two, and slitting our wrists about the hopelessness and meaninglessness of waiting for something that is sure never to come?

What sustains us? The waiting itself? Friendship? The power of words to conjure up a human world that, in flashes, almost makes the whole thing worthwhile? Maybe.

Or maybe it’s song. Bill Irwin’s magical addition to Samuel Becket’s language gives it the wings that are only latent on the page. Ideas, emotions, our physical beings, the tone and smack of music, matter. We matter.

And then there’s laughter.  Maybe that’s what makes life bearable. There’s plenty of evidence in this warm and funny production that laughter can heal. Almost as much as the evidence that it cannot. This can’t be mere happiness of course. Laughing, as Vladimir know, grabbing his nether regions to staunch the pain from every chortle, hurts.

Still. That’s the conundrum. One of the funniest plays ever written about nothingness and existential dread sends the crowd out into the street on a Wednesday afternoon, happy to face another set of blows. That’s why Godot is good and great.

Now if I could only get to London, where Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart are dazzling audiences in Godot this summer, my life would be complete.

Posted in arts news, Theater | 3 Comments

Siento Hermosa (West Side Story 2008)

Posted on January 5, 2009 by Steve

West Side Story: Matt Cavanaugh and Josefina Scaglione“I Feel Pretty.” Or “Siento Hermosa.” The brilliant and problematic stroke of genius in this new production of West Side Story, seen at Washington’s National Theater, is not only to have real Latinos playing most of the Sharks, but to have them sing and speak in Spanish, as well as English.

So why do I feel robbed, rather than pretty?Well, one of the great pleasures of WSS is to hear the poetry of songs like “I Feel Pretty/Oh so pretty/I feel pretty, and witty and bright/And I pity/Any girl who isn’t me tonight.”

And although I speak some Spanish, I’m not good enough to appreciate whether Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Spanish translations catch the quicksilver poetry of the young Stephen Sondheim.I’m told that the early previews in Washington (I caught the show on December 30, and the plan was to open to the press January 7) included supertitles so that English-only speakers could understand the large sections of Spanish in the show. They’d done away with the translations by the time we caught WSS – presumably on the theory that most of the audience would catch on to the action in this well-known and well–loved show, and that the slight feeling of disorientation English speakers might experience was a good metaphor for what Spanish speakers cope with upon coming to America.

[Read about West Side Story in Spanish or English]

Perhaps. But as anyone who has seen and loved West Side Story over the past 50 years will tell you, the Spanish/English problem is not the main reason why the show sometimes refuses to play. The problem, as my cousin Marc says, is all those tough guys dancing around. The Jets and Sharks want to kill each other, but Jerome Robbins has them dancing with each other instead.I’m absolutely sure that this was exciting, even thrilling, in 1957. But since the movie came out in 1961, the dancing has effectively killed much of the drama in WSS, at least to my eye and ear.

Beyond that – the cops, especially Officer Krupke, seem all wrong in this production; the musical arrangements sometimes seem out of sync; and it’s far too easy to leave the theater dry-eyed and unaffected by the drama.

Arthur Laurents, the show’s librettist (and the director of this production) who is now 90 years old, has tried to reimagine the show for an America where Spanish is now on the verge of becoming our semi-official second language. He’s also juiced up the anger and psychosis of the gang members to avoid the prancing killers problem. But unless the show changes significantly before it gets to Broadway, there could be a major train wreck.

Photo by Joan Marcus. Josefina Scaglione as Maria and Matt Cavenaugh as Tony.

Posted in arts news, music, Theater | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Garrison Keillor’s New York

Posted on December 17, 2008 by Steve

Garrison KeillorAppearing in the elegant Feinstein’s at Loews Regency, Garrison Keillor is engaging, maddening, entertaining, and just about perfect. The maddening first – Keillor is a storyteller who sings, and this is a singing nightclub act. He’s musical to a fault, and has a breadth of knowledge about American song that approaches his host’s (Feinstein knows everything about the American songbook). Now and then one longs for a little less personality and a little more legato… but who am I to judge…

The storytelling of course, is practiced, and perfect. Guy Noir makes an appearance, which fits better than a trip to Lake Wobegon. And Keillor settles in for a story of lost love that bows to O’Henry, without relinquishing his own place in the narrative firmament. (photo credit: Brian Velenchenko)

It’s a pleasure to spend time in Keillor’s company in this small room, when so much of your experience of him has been either on the radio, or in a big theater, or in the slightly misfiring film that was made of Prairie Home a few years back. Here, Keillor is the host of an intimate party… with accompanist Rich Dworsky ably commanding the Steinway… sharing his favorite songs, telling stories about his first visits to the big city and giving great thanks to the unnamed assistant who rescued his first short story from the slush pile and helped it find a home in The New Yorker. And thus, he says, a career was born.

Favorite moments – the music of Irving Berlin – “All Alone” and “What’ll I Do”; “Save the Last Dance,” by under-appreciated master songwriter Doc Pomus; and settings of sonnets that Keillor himself writes – a CD of these is on the way in 2009.

As any fan knows, Keillor is masterful in blending his voice in perfect harmony. When I saw his show, he had asked his radio guest of the night before, Andra Suchy, to stay on and do a few numbers. Keillor’s harmony sometimes overwhelmed her melody, but, hey, it was his show. “Man in Tux in Red Shoes with Piano” runs Sunday nights through December 28th.

Posted in arts news, music, public media, public radio | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment