Thoughts and Critiques

A blog about theater and the arts

Jellicle Cats Came Out Tonight

by Lisa on posted in

In case you haven’t been paying attention, Cats: The Jellicle Ball is not the Cats you think you know—the one set in a junkyard that played for 18 years on Broadway and then was made into a bafflingly bad movie. (Or so I’ve heard. I haven’t made it past the trailer.)

No, this Cats has been mashed up with New York’s queer ballroom scene, with its houses and competitive dance categories. If none of this means anything to you, stop reading now and go watch Paris Is Burning, the classic documentary from 1990.

It’s not that T. S. Eliot was queer, or that Andrew Lloyd Webber’s original production of Cats envisioned such a reading. But what’s remarkable is how natural the fit is between the Eliot/Lloyd Webber creation and queer ballroom culture.

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King Lear at Hudson Valley Shakespeare

by Lisa on posted in

The new theater at Hudson Valley Shakespeare has changed the way I think about theatrical space.

I’d heard about the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival for years, but it was only after reading in the New York Times about its new outdoor performance space that I decided I would go to this year’s two Shakespeare productions, King Lear and As You Like It.

For decades, the company has performed in a tent, but they have now built for themselves a permanent open-sided structure. A roof that looks like a turtle shell covers the audience and stage space, while leaving open a breathtaking view to the north that serves as backdrop to the action.

I’ve been to other outdoor theaters. All of them, even the theaters of ancient Greece, framed the action against some architectural backdrop. What makes this one distinctive is this lack of enclosure behind the stage.

And here’s what makes that design so remarkable. An outdoor space bounded behind the actors suggests that even if the world behind the audience might extend indefinitely, the action we are watching is contained in a particular playing area. At Hudson Valley, by contrast, the audience is limited to the seats under the turtle shell; it’s the playing space that suggests it could run to infinity.

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The Boy Went to Bed: The Erlkings Perform Schubert

by Lisa on posted in

On January 31, my friends and I marked Schubert’s birthday listening to a remarkable quartet, the Erlkings, at Wigmore Hall in London.

This crossover band from Austria is fronted by an American baritone/guitarist who sings everything in English translation. They specialize in Schubert (their name comes, of course, from “Der Erlkönig,” one of his small masterpieces), but they have branched out into Schumann and Beethoven as well, taking early 19th-century art songs and turning them into contemporary popular song.

Well, that makes them sound just a bit horrible to a lover of Schubert like myself, but—trust me!—they’re splendid, thoughtful interpreters of the songs. Or don’t trust me, and see for yourself on the streaming platform of your choice.

The reason I’m writing about them now, though, is the way their performance of that namesake song has been sticking in my head. “Der Erlkönig,” if you don’t know it, is a poem by Goethe, best known today through its terrifying musical setting by Schubert. A father rides through the night with his feverish child, who sees and hears the seductive, menacing Erlking—an otherworldly figure who coaxes, cajoles, and finally threatens him. The accompaniment’s relentless gallop—cello, tuba, and percussion here taking the place of Schubert’s fortepiano—mimics the horse’s hooves while the singer rapidly alternates between narrator, father, son, and Erlking. The father finally reaches his home, but the song ends brutally: “In his arms the child was dead.”

But when Brian Benner reached the end of the song in the performance I attended, instead of “the boy was dead,” he sang, “the boy went to bed.”

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Evil Comes to Town: High Noon and Kenrex

by Lisa on posted in

One plays in the West End at the prestigious Harold Pinter Theatre and stars Billy Crudup and Denise Gough. The other plays at The Other Palace, an intimate off-West End venue, and stars Jack Holden and … well, Jack Holden.

High Noon is the prestige offering, and it’s dead on arrival. Like the West End production of Dr. Strangelove several years ago, it takes existing intellectual property and leaves one wondering: who thought this was a good idea? Each film is already perfect on its own; neither needed to be reinterpreted for the stage. (A further question, to which I have no answer, is why I thought I should buy tickets for either of these.)

To be fair, High Noon, like Dr. Strangelove, remains relevant. Writing during the McCarthy era, screenwriter Carl Foreman shaped the film as a commentary on Hollywood at a moment when studio executives readily abandoned artists who ran afoul of HUAC. Foreman himself was blacklisted, moved to London, and had his passport confiscated.

The problem is not that High Noon has nothing to say to us today, but that this production doesn’t seem to know what that is. Like the movie, it unfolds roughly in real time, as Marshall Will Kane waits for his would-be killer to arrive on the noon train. But the play generates no theatrical tension. Billy Crudup—a wonderful actor but an odd choice for the Gary Cooper role—feels more like Cory Ellison on The Morning Show than like the taciturn hero of this story. The supremely talented Denise Gough, in the Grace Kelly role, occasionally sings a line or two of Bruce Springsteen, to no apparent effect.

I can think of a few possible reasons for the choice: Springsteen as American mythmaker or as working-class moralist. But if the director had a clear intention, it never registers theatrically. (And is “I’m on Fire” really the best choice for this Quaker lady?)

Stories of frontier justice depend on tension: the moral, social, physical pressure must continue to build, and here it simply doesn’t. Kenrex, by contrast, puts us on the edge of our seats throughout. Unlike High Noon, it is wildly entertaining.

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A Smudge of Paint on Paper: A Master Revises his Play

by Lisa on posted in

I’d never before seen Tom Stoppard’s Indian Ink, so I read it ahead of the new production at the Hampstead Theatre. Written around the same time as Arcadia, it touches on some of the same concerns, particularly Stoppard’s suspicion of scholars who confidently gather the traces of their subjects’ lives into interpretive edifices of biography. Hermione Lee—Stoppard’s own very fine biographer—notes that this was also the moment when Stoppard himself began to worry about how his life would be told.

Like Arcadia, Indian Ink tells its story via two time frames. A young and tubercular Bloomsbury poet, Flora Crewe, goes to India for her health (“Have you seen the British Cemetery?” asks the incredulous British Resident’s attaché.) On the other side of the stage, we see in the present day her surviving sister, now an elderly woman, providing tea and cake to the bumptious American biographer who presses her for more information about the poet who died young in India.

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A Room of Their Own?–or a Space Not Quite Theirs

by Lisa on posted in

On a recent Thursday in New York, I had an odd experience transitioning from my matinee (The 25th Annual Putnam Spelling Bee) to my evening show (Liberation). What was so odd was that these two wildly different shows were both set in that quintessentially American public space: a high school gym.

The resemblance between The 25th Annual Putnam Spelling Bee and Liberation largely ends there. Still, the shared setting says something a bit depressing about American civic life. Our public architecture is so impoverished that a high school gym has become the default setting for our gatherings, whether spelling bees or consciousness-raising groups—or the knitting circle one of the women in Liberation thought she was attending. I count myself fortunate, in fact, that I was able to see both shows in proper theaters. Small community productions (of Spelling Bee, if not Liberation) might very well take place in high school gyms when their communities lack any dedicated theater space at all.

But what struck me most was how differently these two shows use the same setting—and what that difference reveals about who gets to transform a space, even temporarily, into something of their own. That high school students would gather in their gym for a spelling competition makes sense. In fact, there’s a nice bit of irony there: these nerds, who are no doubt bullied in gym class, get to use that same space to strut their stuff, to show that they, too, can be champions.

But where the gym allows for an empowering reversal in Spelling Bee, it reads quite differently as the meeting place for Lizzie’s consciousness-raising group in small-town Ohio in 1971. These women are gathering in order to establish themselves as autonomous adults, not as afterthoughts in a male-dominated world. That they gather in a gym, largely coded as male and adolescent, only emphasizes how little room there is for them to be themselves.

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Does Tosca Have Anything New to Say to Us?

by Lisa on posted in

Louisa Proske’s dark, unsparing production at the Glimmerglass Festival this summer convinced me that it does, her radical staging offering a fresh perspective on the fragility of freedom in our own time.

Proske, a young German director, had already caught my eye with a revelatory staging of Handel’s Rinaldo two years ago. Her take on that baroque plot reimagined the tale as the fantasy of a young boy (the stellar Anthony Roth Costanzo) confined to a hospital bed. It became a deeply moving story about imagination’s power to transform the tragedy of a premature death.

Her Rinaldo was uplifting, her Tosca anything but. Where her Handel staging suggested how the power of imagination could redeem tragedy, her Tosca takes an already bleak story and makes it still more devastating. Tosca is also a story about imagination—think of the lovers singing ecstatically about their life together after what they think will be a mock execution—but we can’t help but feel the senselessness of their deaths by the end of this production.

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“Could Even a Little of It Have Been Mine?” Nannerl Mozart and the Loss of a Woman’s Voice

by Lisa on posted in

“Nobody saved my letters. There was nothing interesting in them,” laments Nannerl Mozart, as imagined by Sylvia Milo in her remarkable performance piece, The Other Mozart, recently performed at Next Stage in Putney.

Maria Anna Mozart, known as Nannerl to her family, was four years older than her brother Wolfgang and similarly gifted as a performer. Their father, Leopold, took them on tour through the great music capitals of Europe while they were both still children, and contemporary notices often spoke of her brilliance on the keyboard. Though Leopold himself once called her one of the most skillful pianists in Europe, that did not prevent him from insisting that she end her public performances once she reached marriageable age. Wolfgang would go on performing, composing, and auditioning for a court position. Nannerl was to stay home, attract a good husband, and perhaps supplement the family’s income through teaching.

Milo herself plays Nannerl in a show where costume and set are one and the same. Covering the entire stage is a voluminous dress whose center rests on a metallic corset. She begins this one-woman show in period undergarments, traversing the enormous dress, finding letters and other objets de mémoire in its folds. The dress becomes, in effect, a kind of embodied archive of her life.

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Viola’s Room: Following the Light, Losing the Thread

by Lisa on posted in

The instructions are clear before we enter Viola’s Room, Punchdrunk Theatre’s latest immersive performance piece: always follow the light. If—no, when—you find yourself in total darkness, remain where you are, listening to Helena Bonham Carter’s narration of this ghost story in your binaural (spookily realistic!) headset. When you see a new light appear, follow it through the labyrinth, moving as slowly or as quickly as the light does.

This is a very different experience from Punchdrunk’s celebrated Sleep No More. There are no actors, just Bonham-Carter’s deceptively soothing voice. We don’t engage with an installation at our own pace. We enter as a group of six and explore this environment at a pace dictated by the many lights, some fuzzy lamps on the ceilings, others will-o’-the wisps that dash ahead, still others spotlights on artifacts we are meant to examine.

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John Proctor is the Villain: These Girls Would Like to Get a Word In

by Lisa on posted in

I wasn’t eager to see Kimberly Belflower’s new play John Proctor is the Villain. Though I understood and sympathized with the implied premise, it sounded a little too on the nose, perhaps a bit of feminist agitprop. (I dislike message plays, probably even more when I agree with their politics than when I don’t.)

But when the excellent reviews appeared a few days before I left for New York, I squeezed it into an already crowded schedule. (Three plays on Saturday? Why not?) And what a delightful surprise it turned out to be!

The title suggests this might be a reworking of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, but it portrays a very different sort of crucible: a high school in rural Georgia in 2018, where a group of 11th grade girls are trying to form a feminism club in the wake of #MeToo.

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