A blog about theater and the arts
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.
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.
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.
The set of Branagh’s Winter’s Tale was magically conceived and realized, and the set of As You Like It at the National was also magical in its own way. The opening scene at court is presented as a colorful but claustrophobic office, bringing to mind the worst of a Wall Street trading office perhaps, and Orlando’s reduced status is blatantly telegraphed by showing him as one of the office cleaning staff, with his brother in a business suit.
The coup de théâtre occurs in the transition to the Forest of Arden, when the entire set is pulled up by hidden cables to create a forest of suspended desks and chairs. It’s quite stunning, and the rest of the play takes place under this tangled mass. Which was the problem for me. Why should the Forest of Arden look like a blackened post-apocalyptic landscape? Or a post-apocalyptic Ikea? And what can the sheep possibly find to graze on in this landscape? (I pass over the illogic of a wrestling match in the office, as well as Rosalind and Celia also in the office in their pj’s—Hello Kitty for Celia!—before they take off for the forest).
A Winter’s Tale is one of Shakespeare’s so-called romances, those odd late plays that somehow overcome their tragic beginnings with hard-earned love and forgiveness. I’ve seen it before and been left cold. In fact, I have an unpleasant memory of sleeping through much of the Bohemian festival at the ART some years ago. So what made the production by Kenneth Branagh at the Garrick theater different?
