A blog about theater and the arts
Matthew Lopez’s new play, The Inheritance, is a massive, nearly 7-hour work, performed in two parts, which we saw over two consecutive nights. It’s an intriguing re-working of Forster’s Howards End, imagined as a story of gay life in 21stcentury New York. Forster himself (“Morgan” in the play) appears as well, helping the young men of the play tell their story.
Last night I saw Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change. It’s a memory play, a sung-through musical created with the composer Jeanine Tesori. Reconstructing his own childhood, Kushner places us in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where Caroline is the black maid for a Jewish family in some distress. The mother has recently died, the father has remarried, the young son Noah hates his stepmother and reveres Caroline, who seems to him the all-powerful ruler of her domain: the laundry room in the basement.
The third big portrait show here in London is the Modigliani exhibition at the Tate Modern. The Soutine show at the Courtauld is small and impressed me within its very narrow range. The Cézanne at the National Portrait Gallery is a big show and provides lots to think about. This Modigliani is also a big show, but I’m not convinced that’s entirely a good thing.
Like Network, Ink tackles the role of the media in today’s world. In James Graham’s new play, it’s 1969 and the young Rupert Murdoch has just purchased The Sun and is determined to disrupt the comfortable elitism of Fleet Street journalism.
Also like Network, the play features stellar actors moving with propulsive energy through a spectacular set. Unlike Network, it’s subtle and nuanced. It rejects any temptation to preach or make easy judgments.
I’m still sorting out my feelings about Network, the new stage adaptation of the 1976 movie about Howard Beale, the “I’m-mad-as hell-and-I’m-not-going-to-take-it-anymore!” newscaster. Is it a timely revival of a prophetic piece about the role of media and global corporations taking over our lives? Or is it self-important and meretricious?
A day after seeing An American in Paris at the Dominion, I went to Dominic Cooke’s production of Follies at the National. An American in Paris is an exercise in nostalgia, with its predictable love story and Gershwin tunes. We go to bask in the make believe that Broadway perfected in the first half of the 20th century. Follies is no such comfort food. To paraphrase George Elliot’s assessment of Middlemarch, Follies may be the American musical written for grownups.
Sondheim deconstructs the nostalgia of the old musical and brings us to very dark places in this show. For all the darkness, though, I never feel that he rejects the sweet innocence of the older American musical. The music in this show is a remarkable combination of Sondheim’s contemporary worldly sophistication along with loving homages to the old Broadway masters.
How strange to see in just a few days two compelling exhibits of portraiture!
The Cézanne blockbuster at the National Portrait Gallery encompasses some 50 paintings, and I find myself struggling (as I did with Soutine) to determine how much these paintings reveal of their subjects and how much they show us the painter’s distinctive way of seeing a confusing, baffling world.
My first stop on this London trip was to the Courtauld Gallery to see a small but spectacular show of Chaïm Soutine’s portraits of hotel staff. The cumulative effect of these 21 portraits of bellboys, pastry cooks, and chambermaids is far greater than the sum of its parts. What makes this so?
Like much of Stoppard, Hapgood can be baffling at times, but nothing is really quite so puzzling as the fact that it bombed when it was first produced back in 1988. I saw it with Kate Burton at the Williamstown Theatre Festival and liked it immensely, so I was interested in seeing it again. It’s a spy story set during the cold war, interspersed—of course!—with lectures on particle physics. It’s not perfect Stoppard, but it’s good enough Stoppard, and that makes it sufficient pleasure for me.
It was odd to see Macbeth and Linda on successive evenings, given their opposing qualities. Carrie Cracknell’s production of Macbeth felt muddled in intent and production; Linda, Penelope Skinner’s new play, hammered home its message with relentless effort. Both had remarkable sets: Macbeth’s was brutally simple, Linda’s elaborate and elegant.
This Macbeth uses a stripped down text, coming in under two hours with no interval. The set, too, is stripped down. A claustrophobic concrete tunnel with a small opening at the back of the stage creates a kind of vertigo, and the occasional sliding wall completes the feeling that one is in a terrifying space. In fact, it becomes increasingly clear that we are in an Abu Ghraib-like place, with body bags, traumatized heroes (Macbeth with PTSD?), and victims covered in plastic hoods before their throats are slit.
