So... in many conversations I've had with friends lately, the topic of Critic-O-Meter has come up, and people will say something like "Your site gave that show a B! But I think it sucked!" with enumerations as to why. The opposite also occurs.
So I would like to invite you, dear reader, to consider each Critic-O-Meter post as a wonderful opportunity to discuss (anonymously if that makes you more comfortable) your response to a particular show if you saw it. Did you like it? Did we misread someone's grade of it? What did you respond to? Let us know! Have at it, theatrelovers.
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Saturday, February 28, 2009
Friday, February 27, 2009
Our Town
GRADE: B+
By Thornton Wilder. Directed by David Cromer. Barrow Street Theatre.
Chicago director David Cromer (who made a splash in NY last with The Adding Machine) returns with a fresh, stripped-down take on another 20th-century American classic, Thornton Wilder's Our Town. Most critics either adore or admire its unsentimental style, its matter-of-fact modern-dress, and its intimate in-the-round staging, though a vocal minority of medium-to-strong dissenters would clearly prefer a sweeter tone. Many critics can't resist giving away Act III's stunning coup de theatre (and shame on them for doing so). Other highlights in this gathering of notices: John Simon's astonishingly prescriptive review ("The Stage Manager, whom Cromer plays, has to be a mature, mellow, pipe-smoking New Englander") and Charles Isherwood's perfectly pitched elucidation of how the play's theme converges with Cromer's conceit (or vice versa).
Wall Street Journal A+
(Terry Teachout) A re-creative landmark, at once arrestingly original and essentially faithful in its approach to the author's well-loved text...As usual with Mr. Cromer, most of what happens in this production is pretty much what the author had in mind, only more so...The result is a performance that doesn't feel like a performance at all. It's as though the actors were simply showing us the play, an illusion underlined by the fact that Mr. Cromer has cast himself as the Stage Manager...Mr. Cromer's seemingly artless anti-acting is central to the effect of this production, in which the wall that separates illusion from reality becomes as porous as the one that separates the actors from their audience. The other actors follow Mr. Cromer's lead effortlessly...Yet their characterizations are sharply detailed and often unexpected...None of them resorts to the too-easy charm that can turn Wilder's tough-minded realism into soft-hearted nostalgia...I don't use the word "genius" casually, but David Cromer may fill the bill.
New York Observer A+
(John Heilpern) Revolutionary...It’s a model of everything fine that can be achieved in a revival of a mythic play...How the new production appears to exist simultaneously in time past and present is some kind of theater miracle. This is no Our Town as a comforting slice of folksy Americana. (Wilder never intended it to be that.) The production’s rhythmic, unfolding picture of small-town American life is extraordinarily real and immediate, and its abiding spirit still speaks to us. The sentiment is honestly earned; the utterly natural acting of the splendid ensemble is admirably artless. This is a great production that takes us to the heartbeat of Thornton Wilder’s original tragic intention. And it takes us there quietly, without fuss. In its vast simplicity and force, Our Town is exhorting us all to live every minute, every second, every day of our lives as if we are blessed.
Talkin' Broadway A+
(Matthew Murray) You may not hear the earth crack over the echoes of your palpitating heart or see decades of artifice dissolve through your tears, but you'll still feel them washing you away. David Cromer's magnificent production of Our Town at the Barrow Street Theatre renders you that blissfully helpless: It exposes you to every conceivable emotion, but never in the way you expect. It's hilarious one moment and devastating the next. It's inimitably intimate, yet more expansive than the Atlantic Ocean. It contains practically nothing, but says everything. It is as close to perfect as theatre gets...I counted three astonishing coups de theatre in Act III alone; I might have missed a few others because I was crying so hard.
Nytheatre.com A+
(Martin Denton) All that this review should say is: see David Cromer's production of Our Town at Barrow Street Theatre. I have loved this play for 30-some years, and I feel privileged to have seen, here, a production that seems to do it complete justice. Cromer's vision of Thornton Wilder's play—now more than 70 years old—is as straightforward, spare, and unsentimental as I could ever have hoped for. Nothing is imposed on the piece, although some surprising re-envisioning here and there has clarified and honed some of the themes in ways that feel miraculous for their pure simplicity. This Our Town issues jolt after jolt of human recognition, and has a cumulative power that, to my mind, is unmatched by anything currently on stage in NYC.
Talk Entertainment A+
(Oscar E Moore) Thornton Wilder must be chatting up a storm with his cemetery friends about this one. It is absolutely astounding...Every family should see this incredibly moving production where we are told that in order to love life we have to have life and to have life we have to love life and that we should not be blind to what is important. To really look at each other to really listen to one another and to love one another before it is no longer possible to do that. It’s a beautifully written, theatrical text that is brought to its full potential by this incredible ensemble cast.
The New York Times A
(Charles Isherwood) Modest but highly rewarding...A sturdy staple of the American theater — professional, amateur and educational — since its Broadway debut in 1938, “Our Town” has become so familiar that its homespun surfaces can sometimes obscure its mournful philosophical depths. In Mr. Cromer’s staging the artifice of theater that Wilder sought to strip away — by heightening it, paradoxically — is even further dissolved by the immersion of the actors in the audience, or the audience in the playing space, depending on how you look at it...The folksy warmth in which the play is often saturated is scrubbed off too...You may feel a little deflated at first. Where’s the heady perfume of nostalgia? The lyric feeling for small-town life? The affectionate tone that suggests that all these quaint old rituals — the milk delivery, the courtship at the corner drugstore — are freighted with a poignancy and significance born of extinction? Nowhere to be seen, and good riddance. “Our Town” is not a play about the evaporated glory of simpler yesteryears. On the contrary, it whispers to us the urgent necessity of living in the here and now...The production keeps us continually in the present moment, not obscured by the dark anonymity of spectatorship but visible to one another and to the actors. It expresses with a fine clarity the idea that theater is not, ideally, an escape from life but a means of entering into it more fully.
New York Post A
(Frank Scheck) The bucolic New England hamlet of Grover's Corners has never looked quite as forbidding as it does in the revival of "Our Town" that opened last night. This production, imported from Chicago and directed by David Cromer ("The Adding Machine"), restores a bracing dose of acidity to a play that's too often been treated as sentimental treacle. Thornton Wilder's play was actually avant-garde for its time, and its view of life and death is tinged with as much bitter reality as sweetness. Cromer's revelatory staging restores these qualities, and its physical and emotional intimacy allows the audience to share the experiences of the characters with an almost uncomfortable closeness.
NY Daily News A
(Joe Dziemianowicz) Because the story is set in the early 1900s, it's easy to conjure period-postcard quaintness. But the riveting new production at the Barrow Street Theatre trades nostalgia and Whitman Sampler sweetness for an unsentimental reading. Without overhauling the text, it effectively wipes dainty images from your mind. It's a tougher "Town," and more relevant and urgent for it...Though the plot is familiar, this production makes you curious about what might happen next...Indeed, there are a couple of surprises, including an amusing grace note that lets the audience in on the act. The other is a doozy that stirs the imagination and the senses and sends you out on to the streets of Grover's Corners, oops, sorry, the West Village, deeply touched.
New Yorker A
David Cromer’s startlingly raw production of the Thornton Wilder classic, staged in the close quarters of the Barrow Street Theatre, has all the immediacy, vitality, and wit of “Adding Machine,” his musical triumph of last year...Cromer plays the Stage Manager, narrating with matter-of-fact intensity, and the actors wear contemporary clothes and forgo quaint accents. Stripped of distancing theatrical conventions and sentimentality, Wilder’s script and its simple, primal themes of daily life, marriage, and death stand out in all their beauty and anguish.
Time Out NY A
(David Cote) Chicago director David Cromer and two dozen visiting and local actors revivify this American classic—not just by wearing modern street clothes and refusing to ape a New Hampshire accent—but by meeting this frighteningly profound play head-on, without sentimentality or the false balm of nostalgia...Wilder’s script glows with folksy pathos, but these performers don’t fish for laughs or cheap tears. In true Chicago-stage fashion, it’s a muscular, unfussy reckoning with a great work, totally contemporary, yet true to the original.
AM New York A
(Matt Windman) Most choose to perform the play because of its low-cost style, but without understanding why Wilder demanded no frills. As a result, audiences tend to think that “Our Town” is dated and boring. Luckily, a damn good production in town has arrived to remind us of the play’s original brilliance...Though his modern dress production is not revisionist, he manages to remove the fake, folksy sentimentality that is now associated with the play. Using a direct and simple approach, he finds deadpan humor and highlights its darkness and sorrow.
American Theatre Web A
(Andy Propst) Regardless of how audiences might have experienced this chestnut about life, family, love and death at the turn of the last century in Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, nothing could prepare them for director David Cromer's re-imagining of the work, which remains entirely true to the spirit of the script and delivers a stunning emotional blow.
Gothamist A
(John Del Signore) Cromer is delightfully dry and businesslike as the Stage Manager, describing the people and places of Grover's Corners without a drop of nostalgia. And his ensemble delivers nuanced and compelling performances; watching them, we feel we're observing ourselves muddle through life here in desperate 2009, not our distant ancestors—though unlike us, they're tuned into the change of seasons, not changes in Facebook status. From the first beat, the production is consistently humorous, then gradually mesmerizing, so that by the third act, when Cromer breaks from Wilder's minimalist instructions with a virtuoso burst of hyper-realism, the impact is revelatory. It's then that Wilder's premise, that life passes us by while we "move about in a cloud of ignorance," hits the chest with full force...Do not miss this.
Lighting and Sound America A-
(David Barbour) Provocative and highly original...Cromer strips away the layers of folksiness and sentimentality that have accrued to Wilder's script over the decades, leaving intact its melancholy heart...Thanks to this approach, each scene sounds as if it could have been written yesterday....It's also true that, in his bid to avoid easy tears, Cromer overplays his hand: Jennifer Grace's otherwise well-drawn Emily turns a little strident as she recalls the beauty of the life she has lost...Even with its few missteps, this is an Our Town to remember. If you think you know the play, think again.
CurtainUp A-
(Elyse Sommer) What makes this Our Town compelling enough for another look, even if you've seen innumerable productions as well as the movie version, is that it's as close as you can get to actually feeling that you're not in a theater but right in Grover's Corners. It has a simplicity and immediacy that plays down the often too saccarine [sic], over-idealized image of small towns and instead hones in on the inescapable beginnings and endings that make up life no matter where and when we live...Dressed in jeans and tee shirt so he could easily be mistaken as an audience member, Cromer handles his acting assignment with naturalness and considerable wry humor...The extreme intimacy and actor-audience integration does make the stylized activities too distracting, especially the cooking chores performed with make-believe pots and pans...However, this is a minor quibble that does not diminish the overall virtues of this refreshing and deeply satisfying production.
Associated Press B+
(Michael Kuchwara) Thornton Wilder's "Our Town" has been astonishingly reinvented by director David Cromer in an intimate yet unsentimental production that resonates with a clarity that breathes new life into one of the 20th century's great American plays...Over the years, the bleakness of "Our Town" has been obscured by reverential treatment, not to mention the homespun, genial quality of many of its stories — its fond recollection of the good ol' days that probably weren't all that fine. Cromer, who also portrays the Stage Manager in this revival, will have none of this saccharine nostalgia, although the evening has its moments of well-earned sweetness and a modest laugh or two...Cromer's Stage Manager has the efficiency and personality of a factory foreman. He doesn't do avuncular...The unshowy performances by the large ensemble cast don't undermine the play. But there is noticeably fine work by Jeff Still and Ken Marks as the patriarchs of the Gibbs and Webb clans.
Village Voice B+
(Michael Feingold) Wilder's Our Town already is a gem, a work so ingrained in American culture that an experienced theatergoer can be shocked to discover lines in it that he doesn't know. David Cromer's cunningly un-cunning production administers many such salutary shocks, making the play's dark cosmic vision shine simply by draining away all its sentiments, including its fondness for bygone small-town New England folkways...Cromer's canniness won't be to everyone's taste, but it'll stick in your brain, and bring Wilder with it.
Theatermania B+
(David Finkle) Cromer has accomplished so much on a floor-level playing area with Wilder's poetically quotidian story about life in Grover's Corners that his eventually consigning a sequence in the devastating third act to something more closely resembling a realistic scene in a proscenium setting ends up seeming like a surprisingly misguided notion. On the plus side, he has asked lighting designer Heather Gilbert not to turn the house lights down but only to dim them somewhat from act to act, and seen to it that costume designer Alison Siple dresses the cast in contemporary street clothes so that his message about the audience being the cast and the cast being the audience is indisputably driven home. Significantly, Cromer has also tapped himself to be Wilde's [sic] famous Stage Manager -- which may be why he delivers the lines with the inflections of a director on the first day of rehearsal explaining to his cast what he's after.
Total Theater B
(Simon Saltzman) Every director of Our Town has a responsibility to keep the life in Grover’s Corners earnestly simple and touching. If director Cromer might be faulted for taking a somewhat plodding rather than purposeful path to reverence, the key roles have in their favor a stylistic conformity. Emily’s romance with the half-petrified, half–ardent George is unquestionably the heart of the play. Jennifer Grace, as Emily, has an appealing naturalness that works beautifully as a catalyst for George’s romantic interest...Time goes by so quickly that we need a Stage Manager. There is no attempt, however, by Cromer to affect the resonance of an all-knowing New Englander who talks to both the townsfolk and the audience. He rather simply sets the stage and guides us with a wisely informed nonchalance through the joys and sorrows that tie a town.
Financial Times C+
(Brendan Lemon) For me the shock of the new Our Town, off-Broadway, is not that David Cromer's staging reinvents Thornton Wilder's 1938 classic, as reviewers last year in Chicago argued, but that it recalls, almost exactly, a concept I saw in a high-school production 30 years ago...It is not surprising that some clever high-school director would have beaten Cromer to the punch. What is genuinely alarming is that sophisticated big-city critics could think Cromer's concept especially novel or daring...If I found Cromer's cast a little too deliberately amateurish, I credit him for allowing the work's motifs to bloom. Those themes - the tragic velocity of life, the simultaneously mundane and magical nature of daily rituals, the elusiveness of experience - have lost little of their poignancy over the past 70 years.
Backstage C
(Adam R. Perlman) In Cromer's hands, the cozy hamlet has become a frosty little town. This, by the way, is not the effect I feel Cromer, who also plays the Stage Manager, intended. The staging brings the actors up close, with Michele Spadaro's scenic design reconfiguring the already intimate Barrow Street Theatre into a three-quarter thrust, with plenty of room for the cast to roam about the audience...Like John Doyle, another lauded director from outside the New York bubble, Cromer...employs minimalism in the hunt for truth. But it's one thing to strip down a multimillion-dollar musical and quite another to denude an already minimalist work...There is, of course, something gratifying about being close to the action...Parked up close, watching the cast pass on Wilder's dialogue with a quick, contemporary delivery, I didn't feel like I was watching American life, but a foreign concept of it. The play may still be called Our Town, but it feels far from it.
Variety D+
(Marilyn Stasio) Helmer David Cromer takes a hatchet to 70 years of saccharine productions of "Our Town" by deconstructing Thornton Wilder's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1938 masterpiece half to death. Grover's Corners, N.H., circa 1901, is no longer a microcosm of America before it was transformed by war and industrial development, but a dreary place inhabited by folk whose simple-minded ways are frowned upon by actors in modern dress...Wilder was no sentimentalist, either, and the stark, expressionistic production he outlined in his stage directions was extraordinarily radical for its time. It was never his intention to romanticize the harsh realities of a rural life, but to fix the simple rituals of day-to-day life in America within the context of the ancient past and the eternal tomorrow...So, in a sense, rising-star Chicago helmer Cromer...is beating a dead horse. The play doesn't need a corrective, just a fair reading...The actors insert themselves among the audience, playing in such close quarters that the sense of detachment is lost...The avoidance of sentimentality is admirable, but the almost complete lack of emotion in this performance style is so extreme it amounts to anti-sentiment.
Bloomberg News F+
(John Simon) A mindless demolition job. Where to begin? Cromer, who last year did a decent job directing the musical “Adding Machine,” benefited there from a sensible proscenium stage and far better collaborators. Above all, he did not also claim the leading role for himself...The Stage Manager, whom Cromer plays, has to be a mature, mellow, pipe-smoking New Englander, with the proper accent and manner that come with the territory. He must not be a youngish, Chicago smartass, whose humor is not good-naturedly empathetic but snidely patronizing. Similarly, no one in this production sounds right or even has the right look -- can you imagine the ladies of Grover’s Corners, over a century ago, running about in pants, as they do here (costumes by Alison Siple)? Almost everyone is flagrantly miscast -- too young, too old -- and in many cases just plain bad. True, it is a large cast, and better actors want more money, but should our present recession extend all the way back to 1901 New Hampshire?...Has there ever been a Stage Manager who, like Cromer, viciously banged on a table? Or who ended the play wielding a BlackBerry?
Theater News Online F
(Sandy MacDonald) Is a little charm too much to ask? As both the director of and the actor playing the stage manager in Thorton Wilder's 1938 classic Our Town, David Cromer is emotionally retentive to the point of begrudging...Wilder took the bold (for then) step of busting through the fourth wall. Cromer's company has taken the not-so-bold step of setting the action in and among the audience, under the punishing glare of lights bright enough to interrogate by. The intended subtext- "They are us!"- seems both over-obvious and overworked...All that the rejiggering really accomplishes is a lot of frustrating sightlines and virtually no chance that we'll ever let our imaginations slip into the quaint early 20th century setting which the text depicts in such loving detail...My internal Etch-a-Sketch strove in vain to erase these contemporary intrusions, along with the actors' grating modern postures and diction. The worst offender by far is Jennifer Grace, who plays Emily-that sweet, shielded country flower-like a riot grrl with a major grudge...Thorton Wilder wrote a fine, spare, enduringly modern play, which neither needs nor deserves arty, redundant gussying-down.
Wall Street Journal A+ 14; Talkin' Broadway A+ 14; Nytheatre.com A+ 14; Talk Entertainment A+ 14; NYO A+ 14; The New York Times A 13; New York Post A 13; NY Daily News A 13; New Yorker A 13; TONY A 13; AM New York A 13; American Theatre Web A 13; Gothamist A 13; LS&A A- 12; CurtainUp A- 12; Associated Press B+ 11; Village Voice B+ 11; Theatermania B+ 11; Total Theater B 10; Financial Times C+ 8; Backstage C 7; Variety D+ 5; Bloomberg News F+ 2; Theater News Online F 1; TOTAL: 264/24=11 (B+) (GRADE)
Read On »
By Thornton Wilder. Directed by David Cromer. Barrow Street Theatre.
Chicago director David Cromer (who made a splash in NY last with The Adding Machine) returns with a fresh, stripped-down take on another 20th-century American classic, Thornton Wilder's Our Town. Most critics either adore or admire its unsentimental style, its matter-of-fact modern-dress, and its intimate in-the-round staging, though a vocal minority of medium-to-strong dissenters would clearly prefer a sweeter tone. Many critics can't resist giving away Act III's stunning coup de theatre (and shame on them for doing so). Other highlights in this gathering of notices: John Simon's astonishingly prescriptive review ("The Stage Manager, whom Cromer plays, has to be a mature, mellow, pipe-smoking New Englander") and Charles Isherwood's perfectly pitched elucidation of how the play's theme converges with Cromer's conceit (or vice versa).
Wall Street Journal A+
(Terry Teachout) A re-creative landmark, at once arrestingly original and essentially faithful in its approach to the author's well-loved text...As usual with Mr. Cromer, most of what happens in this production is pretty much what the author had in mind, only more so...The result is a performance that doesn't feel like a performance at all. It's as though the actors were simply showing us the play, an illusion underlined by the fact that Mr. Cromer has cast himself as the Stage Manager...Mr. Cromer's seemingly artless anti-acting is central to the effect of this production, in which the wall that separates illusion from reality becomes as porous as the one that separates the actors from their audience. The other actors follow Mr. Cromer's lead effortlessly...Yet their characterizations are sharply detailed and often unexpected...None of them resorts to the too-easy charm that can turn Wilder's tough-minded realism into soft-hearted nostalgia...I don't use the word "genius" casually, but David Cromer may fill the bill.
New York Observer A+
(John Heilpern) Revolutionary...It’s a model of everything fine that can be achieved in a revival of a mythic play...How the new production appears to exist simultaneously in time past and present is some kind of theater miracle. This is no Our Town as a comforting slice of folksy Americana. (Wilder never intended it to be that.) The production’s rhythmic, unfolding picture of small-town American life is extraordinarily real and immediate, and its abiding spirit still speaks to us. The sentiment is honestly earned; the utterly natural acting of the splendid ensemble is admirably artless. This is a great production that takes us to the heartbeat of Thornton Wilder’s original tragic intention. And it takes us there quietly, without fuss. In its vast simplicity and force, Our Town is exhorting us all to live every minute, every second, every day of our lives as if we are blessed.
Talkin' Broadway A+
(Matthew Murray) You may not hear the earth crack over the echoes of your palpitating heart or see decades of artifice dissolve through your tears, but you'll still feel them washing you away. David Cromer's magnificent production of Our Town at the Barrow Street Theatre renders you that blissfully helpless: It exposes you to every conceivable emotion, but never in the way you expect. It's hilarious one moment and devastating the next. It's inimitably intimate, yet more expansive than the Atlantic Ocean. It contains practically nothing, but says everything. It is as close to perfect as theatre gets...I counted three astonishing coups de theatre in Act III alone; I might have missed a few others because I was crying so hard.
Nytheatre.com A+
(Martin Denton) All that this review should say is: see David Cromer's production of Our Town at Barrow Street Theatre. I have loved this play for 30-some years, and I feel privileged to have seen, here, a production that seems to do it complete justice. Cromer's vision of Thornton Wilder's play—now more than 70 years old—is as straightforward, spare, and unsentimental as I could ever have hoped for. Nothing is imposed on the piece, although some surprising re-envisioning here and there has clarified and honed some of the themes in ways that feel miraculous for their pure simplicity. This Our Town issues jolt after jolt of human recognition, and has a cumulative power that, to my mind, is unmatched by anything currently on stage in NYC.
Talk Entertainment A+
(Oscar E Moore) Thornton Wilder must be chatting up a storm with his cemetery friends about this one. It is absolutely astounding...Every family should see this incredibly moving production where we are told that in order to love life we have to have life and to have life we have to love life and that we should not be blind to what is important. To really look at each other to really listen to one another and to love one another before it is no longer possible to do that. It’s a beautifully written, theatrical text that is brought to its full potential by this incredible ensemble cast.
The New York Times A
(Charles Isherwood) Modest but highly rewarding...A sturdy staple of the American theater — professional, amateur and educational — since its Broadway debut in 1938, “Our Town” has become so familiar that its homespun surfaces can sometimes obscure its mournful philosophical depths. In Mr. Cromer’s staging the artifice of theater that Wilder sought to strip away — by heightening it, paradoxically — is even further dissolved by the immersion of the actors in the audience, or the audience in the playing space, depending on how you look at it...The folksy warmth in which the play is often saturated is scrubbed off too...You may feel a little deflated at first. Where’s the heady perfume of nostalgia? The lyric feeling for small-town life? The affectionate tone that suggests that all these quaint old rituals — the milk delivery, the courtship at the corner drugstore — are freighted with a poignancy and significance born of extinction? Nowhere to be seen, and good riddance. “Our Town” is not a play about the evaporated glory of simpler yesteryears. On the contrary, it whispers to us the urgent necessity of living in the here and now...The production keeps us continually in the present moment, not obscured by the dark anonymity of spectatorship but visible to one another and to the actors. It expresses with a fine clarity the idea that theater is not, ideally, an escape from life but a means of entering into it more fully.
New York Post A
(Frank Scheck) The bucolic New England hamlet of Grover's Corners has never looked quite as forbidding as it does in the revival of "Our Town" that opened last night. This production, imported from Chicago and directed by David Cromer ("The Adding Machine"), restores a bracing dose of acidity to a play that's too often been treated as sentimental treacle. Thornton Wilder's play was actually avant-garde for its time, and its view of life and death is tinged with as much bitter reality as sweetness. Cromer's revelatory staging restores these qualities, and its physical and emotional intimacy allows the audience to share the experiences of the characters with an almost uncomfortable closeness.
NY Daily News A
(Joe Dziemianowicz) Because the story is set in the early 1900s, it's easy to conjure period-postcard quaintness. But the riveting new production at the Barrow Street Theatre trades nostalgia and Whitman Sampler sweetness for an unsentimental reading. Without overhauling the text, it effectively wipes dainty images from your mind. It's a tougher "Town," and more relevant and urgent for it...Though the plot is familiar, this production makes you curious about what might happen next...Indeed, there are a couple of surprises, including an amusing grace note that lets the audience in on the act. The other is a doozy that stirs the imagination and the senses and sends you out on to the streets of Grover's Corners, oops, sorry, the West Village, deeply touched.
New Yorker A
David Cromer’s startlingly raw production of the Thornton Wilder classic, staged in the close quarters of the Barrow Street Theatre, has all the immediacy, vitality, and wit of “Adding Machine,” his musical triumph of last year...Cromer plays the Stage Manager, narrating with matter-of-fact intensity, and the actors wear contemporary clothes and forgo quaint accents. Stripped of distancing theatrical conventions and sentimentality, Wilder’s script and its simple, primal themes of daily life, marriage, and death stand out in all their beauty and anguish.
Time Out NY A
(David Cote) Chicago director David Cromer and two dozen visiting and local actors revivify this American classic—not just by wearing modern street clothes and refusing to ape a New Hampshire accent—but by meeting this frighteningly profound play head-on, without sentimentality or the false balm of nostalgia...Wilder’s script glows with folksy pathos, but these performers don’t fish for laughs or cheap tears. In true Chicago-stage fashion, it’s a muscular, unfussy reckoning with a great work, totally contemporary, yet true to the original.
AM New York A
(Matt Windman) Most choose to perform the play because of its low-cost style, but without understanding why Wilder demanded no frills. As a result, audiences tend to think that “Our Town” is dated and boring. Luckily, a damn good production in town has arrived to remind us of the play’s original brilliance...Though his modern dress production is not revisionist, he manages to remove the fake, folksy sentimentality that is now associated with the play. Using a direct and simple approach, he finds deadpan humor and highlights its darkness and sorrow.
American Theatre Web A
(Andy Propst) Regardless of how audiences might have experienced this chestnut about life, family, love and death at the turn of the last century in Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, nothing could prepare them for director David Cromer's re-imagining of the work, which remains entirely true to the spirit of the script and delivers a stunning emotional blow.
Gothamist A
(John Del Signore) Cromer is delightfully dry and businesslike as the Stage Manager, describing the people and places of Grover's Corners without a drop of nostalgia. And his ensemble delivers nuanced and compelling performances; watching them, we feel we're observing ourselves muddle through life here in desperate 2009, not our distant ancestors—though unlike us, they're tuned into the change of seasons, not changes in Facebook status. From the first beat, the production is consistently humorous, then gradually mesmerizing, so that by the third act, when Cromer breaks from Wilder's minimalist instructions with a virtuoso burst of hyper-realism, the impact is revelatory. It's then that Wilder's premise, that life passes us by while we "move about in a cloud of ignorance," hits the chest with full force...Do not miss this.
Lighting and Sound America A-
(David Barbour) Provocative and highly original...Cromer strips away the layers of folksiness and sentimentality that have accrued to Wilder's script over the decades, leaving intact its melancholy heart...Thanks to this approach, each scene sounds as if it could have been written yesterday....It's also true that, in his bid to avoid easy tears, Cromer overplays his hand: Jennifer Grace's otherwise well-drawn Emily turns a little strident as she recalls the beauty of the life she has lost...Even with its few missteps, this is an Our Town to remember. If you think you know the play, think again.
CurtainUp A-
(Elyse Sommer) What makes this Our Town compelling enough for another look, even if you've seen innumerable productions as well as the movie version, is that it's as close as you can get to actually feeling that you're not in a theater but right in Grover's Corners. It has a simplicity and immediacy that plays down the often too saccarine [sic], over-idealized image of small towns and instead hones in on the inescapable beginnings and endings that make up life no matter where and when we live...Dressed in jeans and tee shirt so he could easily be mistaken as an audience member, Cromer handles his acting assignment with naturalness and considerable wry humor...The extreme intimacy and actor-audience integration does make the stylized activities too distracting, especially the cooking chores performed with make-believe pots and pans...However, this is a minor quibble that does not diminish the overall virtues of this refreshing and deeply satisfying production.
Associated Press B+
(Michael Kuchwara) Thornton Wilder's "Our Town" has been astonishingly reinvented by director David Cromer in an intimate yet unsentimental production that resonates with a clarity that breathes new life into one of the 20th century's great American plays...Over the years, the bleakness of "Our Town" has been obscured by reverential treatment, not to mention the homespun, genial quality of many of its stories — its fond recollection of the good ol' days that probably weren't all that fine. Cromer, who also portrays the Stage Manager in this revival, will have none of this saccharine nostalgia, although the evening has its moments of well-earned sweetness and a modest laugh or two...Cromer's Stage Manager has the efficiency and personality of a factory foreman. He doesn't do avuncular...The unshowy performances by the large ensemble cast don't undermine the play. But there is noticeably fine work by Jeff Still and Ken Marks as the patriarchs of the Gibbs and Webb clans.
Village Voice B+
(Michael Feingold) Wilder's Our Town already is a gem, a work so ingrained in American culture that an experienced theatergoer can be shocked to discover lines in it that he doesn't know. David Cromer's cunningly un-cunning production administers many such salutary shocks, making the play's dark cosmic vision shine simply by draining away all its sentiments, including its fondness for bygone small-town New England folkways...Cromer's canniness won't be to everyone's taste, but it'll stick in your brain, and bring Wilder with it.
Theatermania B+
(David Finkle) Cromer has accomplished so much on a floor-level playing area with Wilder's poetically quotidian story about life in Grover's Corners that his eventually consigning a sequence in the devastating third act to something more closely resembling a realistic scene in a proscenium setting ends up seeming like a surprisingly misguided notion. On the plus side, he has asked lighting designer Heather Gilbert not to turn the house lights down but only to dim them somewhat from act to act, and seen to it that costume designer Alison Siple dresses the cast in contemporary street clothes so that his message about the audience being the cast and the cast being the audience is indisputably driven home. Significantly, Cromer has also tapped himself to be Wilde's [sic] famous Stage Manager -- which may be why he delivers the lines with the inflections of a director on the first day of rehearsal explaining to his cast what he's after.
Total Theater B
(Simon Saltzman) Every director of Our Town has a responsibility to keep the life in Grover’s Corners earnestly simple and touching. If director Cromer might be faulted for taking a somewhat plodding rather than purposeful path to reverence, the key roles have in their favor a stylistic conformity. Emily’s romance with the half-petrified, half–ardent George is unquestionably the heart of the play. Jennifer Grace, as Emily, has an appealing naturalness that works beautifully as a catalyst for George’s romantic interest...Time goes by so quickly that we need a Stage Manager. There is no attempt, however, by Cromer to affect the resonance of an all-knowing New Englander who talks to both the townsfolk and the audience. He rather simply sets the stage and guides us with a wisely informed nonchalance through the joys and sorrows that tie a town.
Financial Times C+
(Brendan Lemon) For me the shock of the new Our Town, off-Broadway, is not that David Cromer's staging reinvents Thornton Wilder's 1938 classic, as reviewers last year in Chicago argued, but that it recalls, almost exactly, a concept I saw in a high-school production 30 years ago...It is not surprising that some clever high-school director would have beaten Cromer to the punch. What is genuinely alarming is that sophisticated big-city critics could think Cromer's concept especially novel or daring...If I found Cromer's cast a little too deliberately amateurish, I credit him for allowing the work's motifs to bloom. Those themes - the tragic velocity of life, the simultaneously mundane and magical nature of daily rituals, the elusiveness of experience - have lost little of their poignancy over the past 70 years.
Backstage C
(Adam R. Perlman) In Cromer's hands, the cozy hamlet has become a frosty little town. This, by the way, is not the effect I feel Cromer, who also plays the Stage Manager, intended. The staging brings the actors up close, with Michele Spadaro's scenic design reconfiguring the already intimate Barrow Street Theatre into a three-quarter thrust, with plenty of room for the cast to roam about the audience...Like John Doyle, another lauded director from outside the New York bubble, Cromer...employs minimalism in the hunt for truth. But it's one thing to strip down a multimillion-dollar musical and quite another to denude an already minimalist work...There is, of course, something gratifying about being close to the action...Parked up close, watching the cast pass on Wilder's dialogue with a quick, contemporary delivery, I didn't feel like I was watching American life, but a foreign concept of it. The play may still be called Our Town, but it feels far from it.
Variety D+
(Marilyn Stasio) Helmer David Cromer takes a hatchet to 70 years of saccharine productions of "Our Town" by deconstructing Thornton Wilder's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1938 masterpiece half to death. Grover's Corners, N.H., circa 1901, is no longer a microcosm of America before it was transformed by war and industrial development, but a dreary place inhabited by folk whose simple-minded ways are frowned upon by actors in modern dress...Wilder was no sentimentalist, either, and the stark, expressionistic production he outlined in his stage directions was extraordinarily radical for its time. It was never his intention to romanticize the harsh realities of a rural life, but to fix the simple rituals of day-to-day life in America within the context of the ancient past and the eternal tomorrow...So, in a sense, rising-star Chicago helmer Cromer...is beating a dead horse. The play doesn't need a corrective, just a fair reading...The actors insert themselves among the audience, playing in such close quarters that the sense of detachment is lost...The avoidance of sentimentality is admirable, but the almost complete lack of emotion in this performance style is so extreme it amounts to anti-sentiment.
Bloomberg News F+
(John Simon) A mindless demolition job. Where to begin? Cromer, who last year did a decent job directing the musical “Adding Machine,” benefited there from a sensible proscenium stage and far better collaborators. Above all, he did not also claim the leading role for himself...The Stage Manager, whom Cromer plays, has to be a mature, mellow, pipe-smoking New Englander, with the proper accent and manner that come with the territory. He must not be a youngish, Chicago smartass, whose humor is not good-naturedly empathetic but snidely patronizing. Similarly, no one in this production sounds right or even has the right look -- can you imagine the ladies of Grover’s Corners, over a century ago, running about in pants, as they do here (costumes by Alison Siple)? Almost everyone is flagrantly miscast -- too young, too old -- and in many cases just plain bad. True, it is a large cast, and better actors want more money, but should our present recession extend all the way back to 1901 New Hampshire?...Has there ever been a Stage Manager who, like Cromer, viciously banged on a table? Or who ended the play wielding a BlackBerry?
Theater News Online F
(Sandy MacDonald) Is a little charm too much to ask? As both the director of and the actor playing the stage manager in Thorton Wilder's 1938 classic Our Town, David Cromer is emotionally retentive to the point of begrudging...Wilder took the bold (for then) step of busting through the fourth wall. Cromer's company has taken the not-so-bold step of setting the action in and among the audience, under the punishing glare of lights bright enough to interrogate by. The intended subtext- "They are us!"- seems both over-obvious and overworked...All that the rejiggering really accomplishes is a lot of frustrating sightlines and virtually no chance that we'll ever let our imaginations slip into the quaint early 20th century setting which the text depicts in such loving detail...My internal Etch-a-Sketch strove in vain to erase these contemporary intrusions, along with the actors' grating modern postures and diction. The worst offender by far is Jennifer Grace, who plays Emily-that sweet, shielded country flower-like a riot grrl with a major grudge...Thorton Wilder wrote a fine, spare, enduringly modern play, which neither needs nor deserves arty, redundant gussying-down.
Wall Street Journal A+ 14; Talkin' Broadway A+ 14; Nytheatre.com A+ 14; Talk Entertainment A+ 14; NYO A+ 14; The New York Times A 13; New York Post A 13; NY Daily News A 13; New Yorker A 13; TONY A 13; AM New York A 13; American Theatre Web A 13; Gothamist A 13; LS&A A- 12; CurtainUp A- 12; Associated Press B+ 11; Village Voice B+ 11; Theatermania B+ 11; Total Theater B 10; Financial Times C+ 8; Backstage C 7; Variety D+ 5; Bloomberg News F+ 2; Theater News Online F 1; TOTAL: 264/24=11 (B+) (GRADE)
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Fire Throws
GRADE: B-
Adapted from Sophocles' Antigone and directed by Rachel Dickstein. Music by Jewlia Eisenberg. Ripe Time at 3LD Art & Technology Center. (CLOSED)
The questions running through reviews of Rachel Dicktein's contemporary dance/theater re-vision of Antigone are: Does her double-Antigone concept work, and does the high-tech video design add anything to the ancient myth? Though the consensus answers seem to be "not really" and "no," most critics nevertheless enjoy themselves, with the vocal exceptions of the Times' Claudia La Rocco and the Voice's Tom Sellar.
Theatermania A-
(Andy Propst) Vibrant...Dickstein's chief innovation is to have the story unfold from the perspective of two Antigones. There is "Antigone Who Was" (played with earnest passion by Laura Butler), the fiery young woman who disobeys the edict of her uncle, King Creon (the commanding John Campion) and buries her brother Polyneices after he's killed during a siege he's instigated on the city of Thebes. And there's "Antigone Who Is" (the haunting Erica Berg), an incarnation of the character from the afterlife, who is revisiting her tragedy and brings a fascinating level of insight into her younger self's intentions...Dickstein's vision for the piece as a whole commands one's visceral attention. Jewlia Eisenberg's original score -- for strings, a single clarinet, percussion, and voice -- gives the entire production an otherworldly quality...While there are moments in which Dickstein's script thuds into banality, these lapses are brief and the production always rebounds quickly.
Talkin' Broadway B+
(Matthew Murray) Heavily stylistic, heavily choreographed, and heavy-duty reconstruction of Sophocles’s version of the age-old myth...If the story’s specifics don’t entirely satisfy, its visual interpretation almost completely does...Dickstein’s script is not especially creative in addressing this, but her direction...is startlingly adept at making two millennia worth of history up-to-the-moment trenchant. Maya Ciarrocchi’s video and projections - which feature a boomingly ghostly Teiresias (Juliana Francis-Kelly) and a number of filmic special effects - threaten to diminish the performers who for the most part blaze with life. The exception is Campion’s Creon, who’s so hysterically affected he seems more removed from the human race than he does from the impact of his self-serving laws.
Offoffonline B+
(Li Cornfeld) With its vivacious chorus, original score, live orchestra, Balinese dance, aerial choreography, and video projections, Fire Throws invokes layered, mythic grandeur in retelling Sophocles' Antigone. Yet, narrated by an older, wiser, introspective Antigone, the production is oddly reminiscent of the final scenes of Our Town. The production's intrapsychic interpretation of Antigone posits that Antigone's contemporary status as cultural icon is among the most dynamic aspects of the Sophocles play, yet Fire Throws never fully makes good on that supposition. Erica Berg leads the production with disciplined calm as “Antigone who is” or, as described by writer-director Rachel Dickstein, “the 2400 symbol she has become, looking back on her story and searching for the person inside the icon"...Happily, the story she narrates is a unique, graciously rendered depiction of the drama. Under Dickstein’s direction, the crossing of multiple disciplines creates a textured, cohesive whole that enhances the epic nature of the story.
That Sounds Cool B
(Aaron Riccio) Dickstein starts on the right foot: the haunting image of a girl in a long, flowing red dress, repeating slow, yogic movements...The play continues swift-footedly, too: whether it’s the influence of Baris Tunggal warrior movement or not, the image of blood-red silk slashing smoothly through the air is effective...The one element that isn’t working is the unaffecting videography. Maya Ciarrocchi’s work is fine, but it doesn’t compliment or enhance what’s already there...Dickstein must know this—after all, her writing, choreography, and directing speaks to the economy of theater. If presence is not the point, why bother introducing a second Antigone? If immediacy is overvalued, why bother to perform Jewlia Eisenberg’s music live? This isn’t saying that the shadows that the fire throws on the wall behind her aren’t a cool effect—it’s just a note that Fire Throws can be more than just an effect.
Time Out NY B
(Paul Menard) A visually stunning adaptation...Invoking the multidisciplinary ritualism of ancient Greek drama, Dickstein combines sculptural dance and live gamelan music with projected video to envelop 3LD’s monochromatic stage with ravishing imagery and sound. The video feels largely extraneous, but so what; with a few scraps of fabric, stark lighting and a rigorous ensemble, Dickstein clearly has all she needs to create visual poetry. Too bad the script isn’t nearly as lyrical as the movement. Dickstein’s swirling hybrid of traditional Balinese choreography and violent modern dance is far more poignant than her script, which lacks the intensity of Sophocles’ heightened verse. Moreover, the double-Antigone conceit never really pays off; instead of an insightful reworking of the ancient tragedy, we’re inadvertently given a pedestrian retelling of it. Thankfully it’s Dickstein’s physical text that comes through loudest.
New Yorker B
Rachel Dickstein’s high-tech adaptation of “Antigone” splits its heroine in two: while one Antigone (Laura Butler) enacts the well-worn events of the tragedy, another (Erica Berg) stands out of time, reflecting on the action and revealing a tinge of regret beneath her iron will. This device provides some psychological coloring, but at heart it’s still the same old story of autocracy and defiance locked in a shouting match. Dickstein’s truer innovation is in the visual language she creates, a striking blend of movement and video projection that conveys a fragmented yet distinctly ancient world. It’s an aesthetic that calls out for a more deconstructed “Antigone” than the grandiloquent text allows.
New York Times C-
(Claudia La Rocco) Ms. Dickstein attempts to humanize Antigone even as she deconstructs her. Such a structure has the potential to astound. (Just look at the poet Anne Carson’s brilliant explosion of one of Hercules’ labors in her ravishing book “Autobiography of Red.”) But if you’re going to give us the inner world of a figure like Antigone, you had better give us something more than this. Simple, almost decorative dance passages never seem essential to the play’s thrust, while Jewlia Eisenberg’s score, performed live by her ensemble, Charming Hostess, is more pleasing than powerful. And what would Sophocles have said about this dream nonsense?...Ms. Dickstein’s additions and insights are all so normal and expected. Set within the grand and severe territory of Sophocles’ original, the resulting amalgamation seems rather humdrum and ham-fisted.
Village Voice D
(Tom Sellar) Supersaturated with ideas and elements that are not meaningfully executed...Equally heavy of hand is Dickstein's disastrous choice to use double Antigones: "Antigone who was" (Laura Butler) watches "Antigone who is" (Erica Berg) as the character wanders aimlessly through her memories. Adding to the glut of misguided impulses are a clumsy video clip of the oracle Teiresias (Juliana Francis Kelly) and rushed Balinese-style dances breaking up an otherwise declamatory staging. Like too many pieces I've seen at 3LD, Fire Throws is over-teched at regrettable expense: Everything's conceptualized, but nothing gets thought out theatrically. Ultimately, the urgency and clarity of the tragedy's narrative disappear in a miasma of half-formed ideas.
Theatermania A- 12; Talkin' Broadway B+ 11; Offoffonline B+ 11; That Sounds Cool B 10; Time Out NY B 10; New Yorker B 10; NYT C- 6; Village Voice D 4; 74/8=9.25 (B-)
Read On »
Adapted from Sophocles' Antigone and directed by Rachel Dickstein. Music by Jewlia Eisenberg. Ripe Time at 3LD Art & Technology Center. (CLOSED)
The questions running through reviews of Rachel Dicktein's contemporary dance/theater re-vision of Antigone are: Does her double-Antigone concept work, and does the high-tech video design add anything to the ancient myth? Though the consensus answers seem to be "not really" and "no," most critics nevertheless enjoy themselves, with the vocal exceptions of the Times' Claudia La Rocco and the Voice's Tom Sellar.
Theatermania A-
(Andy Propst) Vibrant...Dickstein's chief innovation is to have the story unfold from the perspective of two Antigones. There is "Antigone Who Was" (played with earnest passion by Laura Butler), the fiery young woman who disobeys the edict of her uncle, King Creon (the commanding John Campion) and buries her brother Polyneices after he's killed during a siege he's instigated on the city of Thebes. And there's "Antigone Who Is" (the haunting Erica Berg), an incarnation of the character from the afterlife, who is revisiting her tragedy and brings a fascinating level of insight into her younger self's intentions...Dickstein's vision for the piece as a whole commands one's visceral attention. Jewlia Eisenberg's original score -- for strings, a single clarinet, percussion, and voice -- gives the entire production an otherworldly quality...While there are moments in which Dickstein's script thuds into banality, these lapses are brief and the production always rebounds quickly.
Talkin' Broadway B+
(Matthew Murray) Heavily stylistic, heavily choreographed, and heavy-duty reconstruction of Sophocles’s version of the age-old myth...If the story’s specifics don’t entirely satisfy, its visual interpretation almost completely does...Dickstein’s script is not especially creative in addressing this, but her direction...is startlingly adept at making two millennia worth of history up-to-the-moment trenchant. Maya Ciarrocchi’s video and projections - which feature a boomingly ghostly Teiresias (Juliana Francis-Kelly) and a number of filmic special effects - threaten to diminish the performers who for the most part blaze with life. The exception is Campion’s Creon, who’s so hysterically affected he seems more removed from the human race than he does from the impact of his self-serving laws.
Offoffonline B+
(Li Cornfeld) With its vivacious chorus, original score, live orchestra, Balinese dance, aerial choreography, and video projections, Fire Throws invokes layered, mythic grandeur in retelling Sophocles' Antigone. Yet, narrated by an older, wiser, introspective Antigone, the production is oddly reminiscent of the final scenes of Our Town. The production's intrapsychic interpretation of Antigone posits that Antigone's contemporary status as cultural icon is among the most dynamic aspects of the Sophocles play, yet Fire Throws never fully makes good on that supposition. Erica Berg leads the production with disciplined calm as “Antigone who is” or, as described by writer-director Rachel Dickstein, “the 2400 symbol she has become, looking back on her story and searching for the person inside the icon"...Happily, the story she narrates is a unique, graciously rendered depiction of the drama. Under Dickstein’s direction, the crossing of multiple disciplines creates a textured, cohesive whole that enhances the epic nature of the story.
That Sounds Cool B
(Aaron Riccio) Dickstein starts on the right foot: the haunting image of a girl in a long, flowing red dress, repeating slow, yogic movements...The play continues swift-footedly, too: whether it’s the influence of Baris Tunggal warrior movement or not, the image of blood-red silk slashing smoothly through the air is effective...The one element that isn’t working is the unaffecting videography. Maya Ciarrocchi’s work is fine, but it doesn’t compliment or enhance what’s already there...Dickstein must know this—after all, her writing, choreography, and directing speaks to the economy of theater. If presence is not the point, why bother introducing a second Antigone? If immediacy is overvalued, why bother to perform Jewlia Eisenberg’s music live? This isn’t saying that the shadows that the fire throws on the wall behind her aren’t a cool effect—it’s just a note that Fire Throws can be more than just an effect.
Time Out NY B
(Paul Menard) A visually stunning adaptation...Invoking the multidisciplinary ritualism of ancient Greek drama, Dickstein combines sculptural dance and live gamelan music with projected video to envelop 3LD’s monochromatic stage with ravishing imagery and sound. The video feels largely extraneous, but so what; with a few scraps of fabric, stark lighting and a rigorous ensemble, Dickstein clearly has all she needs to create visual poetry. Too bad the script isn’t nearly as lyrical as the movement. Dickstein’s swirling hybrid of traditional Balinese choreography and violent modern dance is far more poignant than her script, which lacks the intensity of Sophocles’ heightened verse. Moreover, the double-Antigone conceit never really pays off; instead of an insightful reworking of the ancient tragedy, we’re inadvertently given a pedestrian retelling of it. Thankfully it’s Dickstein’s physical text that comes through loudest.
New Yorker B
Rachel Dickstein’s high-tech adaptation of “Antigone” splits its heroine in two: while one Antigone (Laura Butler) enacts the well-worn events of the tragedy, another (Erica Berg) stands out of time, reflecting on the action and revealing a tinge of regret beneath her iron will. This device provides some psychological coloring, but at heart it’s still the same old story of autocracy and defiance locked in a shouting match. Dickstein’s truer innovation is in the visual language she creates, a striking blend of movement and video projection that conveys a fragmented yet distinctly ancient world. It’s an aesthetic that calls out for a more deconstructed “Antigone” than the grandiloquent text allows.
New York Times C-
(Claudia La Rocco) Ms. Dickstein attempts to humanize Antigone even as she deconstructs her. Such a structure has the potential to astound. (Just look at the poet Anne Carson’s brilliant explosion of one of Hercules’ labors in her ravishing book “Autobiography of Red.”) But if you’re going to give us the inner world of a figure like Antigone, you had better give us something more than this. Simple, almost decorative dance passages never seem essential to the play’s thrust, while Jewlia Eisenberg’s score, performed live by her ensemble, Charming Hostess, is more pleasing than powerful. And what would Sophocles have said about this dream nonsense?...Ms. Dickstein’s additions and insights are all so normal and expected. Set within the grand and severe territory of Sophocles’ original, the resulting amalgamation seems rather humdrum and ham-fisted.
Village Voice D
(Tom Sellar) Supersaturated with ideas and elements that are not meaningfully executed...Equally heavy of hand is Dickstein's disastrous choice to use double Antigones: "Antigone who was" (Laura Butler) watches "Antigone who is" (Erica Berg) as the character wanders aimlessly through her memories. Adding to the glut of misguided impulses are a clumsy video clip of the oracle Teiresias (Juliana Francis Kelly) and rushed Balinese-style dances breaking up an otherwise declamatory staging. Like too many pieces I've seen at 3LD, Fire Throws is over-teched at regrettable expense: Everything's conceptualized, but nothing gets thought out theatrically. Ultimately, the urgency and clarity of the tragedy's narrative disappear in a miasma of half-formed ideas.
Theatermania A- 12; Talkin' Broadway B+ 11; Offoffonline B+ 11; That Sounds Cool B 10; Time Out NY B 10; New Yorker B 10; NYT C- 6; Village Voice D 4; 74/8=9.25 (B-)
Soul Samurai
GRADE: A
By Qui Nguyen. Directed by Robert Ross Parker. Ma-Yi Theatre Company and Vampire Cowboys Theatre at HERE Arts Center. (CLOSED)
Ladies and gentleman, we present to you the best-reviewed show, and the first A grade, in Critic-O-Meter's admiteddly brief history. Critics find Vampire Cowboys' frenetic new mash-up of martial arts, blaxploitation, and graphic novels airtight and entertaining, with an ambitious use of multimedia and a literally kickass cast headed by the magnetic Maureen Sebastian. The play's irresistible urban argot inspired That Sounds Cool's Aaron Riccio to a pen charmingly slangy notice, including the first use of "sick" as a superlative I've ever read in a New York theater review.
Blog Critics A+
(Jon Sobel) Need to pump yourself full of urban adrenaline? Soul Samurai is one long, sustained blast of the stuff. With unflagging energy and nary an ounce of dramatic flab, playwright/fight director Qui Nguyen riffs on post-apocalyptic science fiction, Fangoria horror (specifically vampire lore), blaxploitation films, karate movies, samurai/ninja subcultures, and gangsta rap bravado....It's also sexy, and full of noisy joy...It has a youthful, athletic cast with more energy than a solar flare, and talent to match.
Nytheatre.com A+
(Martin Denton) Has HIT written all over it. Savvy off-Broadway producers should be pushing each other out of the way to get to HERE Arts Center so that they can be the one to move what feels like the Next Big Thing in Theatre to the long commercial run it doesn't just deserve but commands...Offers a happy and rare combination of pop-culture-guilty pleasure and smart, sophisticated storytelling...All the innovations that Vampire Cowboys have been working on these past five years come together here in an evening that's loaded with energy, style, humor, intelligence, and a surprising amount of heart.
That Sounds Cool A+
(Aaron Riccio) Badassss...It'd be accurate to say that Soul Samurai is played to the hilt except that this group is working with a pure blade--nothing slows this show down...Something's always being flipped, which keeps Nguyen's fight choreography feeling fresh...Not only is it dazzlingly creative, but it's also never confusing: Sarah Laux and Jessica Wegener's sick costumes make it easy to distinguish bad guys from good guys, and Nick Francone's set and lighting make for clear, quick transitions from location to location (projections provide the details)...At last, Vampire Cowboys Theatre has found the right balance of action and adventure, creativity and control. Soul Samurai isn't just their best show, it's one of the best shows in the city, and until you see it, you'd better just shut yo' mouth.
Time Out NY A
(Helen Shaw) Explosively funny Foxy Brown–meets–Kill Bill goof. Shoguns and 70s style reign over a dark New York of the future, vampires infest Brooklyn and one woman takes revenge against the undead. Outfitted with stop-motion animation, awesome puppetry and a pimped-out wardrobe, Soul Samurai kicks the Vampire Cowboys recipe up a notch; the script has the complexity of a graphic novel, without sacrificing its zinelike homemade sweetness.
Village Voice A
(Andy Propst) It's smart and funny stuff that's deftly supported in Robert Ross Parker's sure-handed production, where Asian theater traditions are ably blended with Nguyen's exhilarating fight choreography. David Valentine's puppets and Nick Francone's intentionally cheesy videos are, like the rest of the show, side-splittingly funny and slyly intelligent.
Backstage A-
(Mark Peikert) Even if, unlike me, you don't have a fondness for petite women brandishing large weapons, Soul Samurai offers plenty of charm and entertainment. Equal parts 1970s samurai flick, blaxploitation, and post-apocalyptic NYC grit, it tells the tale of the meek and mild lesbian Dewdrop (Maureen Sebastian), who toughens up when her lover is killed by a gang of vampires running Brooklyn...Unfortunately, Nguyen, who also choreographed the riveting fight sequences, lets his play down when it comes to the climactic battle between Dewdrop and Lady Snowflake, giving us the evening's one uninteresting battle. That lapse is happily compensated for by the consistently clever use of multimedia...And boy, do those actors work...Soul Samurai, a glorious melting pot of influences and inspirations, is theatre at its best.
Theatermania A-
(Dan Balcazo) A pop culture explosion of influences ranging from comic books to Blaxploitation films, Qui Nguyen's Soul Samurai, now at HERE Arts Center, is a wildly funny, action-packed delight...The work is stylishly directed by Robert Ross Parker and showcases Nguyen's dynamic (and often hilarious) fight choreography...The piece both utilizes and subverts racial stereotypes through snappy dialogue (including a kind of parody of ebonics), larger than life mannerisms, and tongue-in-cheek satire. It includes plenty of plot twists and a variety of narrative strategies such as direct address, traditional dialogue scenes, lots of fights, flashback sequences, film and animation (directed by Parker and designed by Nick Francone, who is also responsible for sets and lighting), and short interludes that tell the origin stories of various key characters. My favorite is a puppet theater piece in which Sally tries to shut out the cries of the world--represented by an adorable and expressive puppet designed by David Valentine, and manipulated and voiced by Jon Hoche.
Offoffonline A-
(Samantha O'Brien) Vampire Cowboys have, once again, proven themselves masters of action-adventure theater...Even with such a dark premise, the show is infused with geeky glee. From the impromptu breakdancing to the witty battle banter and pop culture references, Samurai is ultimately a very playful presentation. Complementing the violent saga, there are puppets with Avenue Q-style attitude and other multimedia touches, such as a great stop-motion film about a forbidden love between a ninja and a samurai starring, naturally, pieces of fruit. All playing multiple roles, the five-person ensemble nails the goofy-yet-hip style of Nguyen’s script...The show seems just as much fun for the actors as the audience. You can’t even fault them when they break into an accidental chuckle...There are some weak spots in the show...However, small inconsistencies do not ruin what is overall an extremely exciting piece of theater. See Samurai before it’s too late.
Blog Critics A+ 14; Nytheatre.com A+ 14; That Sounds Cool A+ 14; Time Out NY A 13; American Theatre Web A 13; Backstage A- 12; Theatermania A- 12; Offoffonline A- 12; TOTAL: 104/8= 13 (A)
Read On »
By Qui Nguyen. Directed by Robert Ross Parker. Ma-Yi Theatre Company and Vampire Cowboys Theatre at HERE Arts Center. (CLOSED)
Ladies and gentleman, we present to you the best-reviewed show, and the first A grade, in Critic-O-Meter's admiteddly brief history. Critics find Vampire Cowboys' frenetic new mash-up of martial arts, blaxploitation, and graphic novels airtight and entertaining, with an ambitious use of multimedia and a literally kickass cast headed by the magnetic Maureen Sebastian. The play's irresistible urban argot inspired That Sounds Cool's Aaron Riccio to a pen charmingly slangy notice, including the first use of "sick" as a superlative I've ever read in a New York theater review.
Blog Critics A+
(Jon Sobel) Need to pump yourself full of urban adrenaline? Soul Samurai is one long, sustained blast of the stuff. With unflagging energy and nary an ounce of dramatic flab, playwright/fight director Qui Nguyen riffs on post-apocalyptic science fiction, Fangoria horror (specifically vampire lore), blaxploitation films, karate movies, samurai/ninja subcultures, and gangsta rap bravado....It's also sexy, and full of noisy joy...It has a youthful, athletic cast with more energy than a solar flare, and talent to match.
Nytheatre.com A+
(Martin Denton) Has HIT written all over it. Savvy off-Broadway producers should be pushing each other out of the way to get to HERE Arts Center so that they can be the one to move what feels like the Next Big Thing in Theatre to the long commercial run it doesn't just deserve but commands...Offers a happy and rare combination of pop-culture-guilty pleasure and smart, sophisticated storytelling...All the innovations that Vampire Cowboys have been working on these past five years come together here in an evening that's loaded with energy, style, humor, intelligence, and a surprising amount of heart.
That Sounds Cool A+
(Aaron Riccio) Badassss...It'd be accurate to say that Soul Samurai is played to the hilt except that this group is working with a pure blade--nothing slows this show down...Something's always being flipped, which keeps Nguyen's fight choreography feeling fresh...Not only is it dazzlingly creative, but it's also never confusing: Sarah Laux and Jessica Wegener's sick costumes make it easy to distinguish bad guys from good guys, and Nick Francone's set and lighting make for clear, quick transitions from location to location (projections provide the details)...At last, Vampire Cowboys Theatre has found the right balance of action and adventure, creativity and control. Soul Samurai isn't just their best show, it's one of the best shows in the city, and until you see it, you'd better just shut yo' mouth.
Time Out NY A
(Helen Shaw) Explosively funny Foxy Brown–meets–Kill Bill goof. Shoguns and 70s style reign over a dark New York of the future, vampires infest Brooklyn and one woman takes revenge against the undead. Outfitted with stop-motion animation, awesome puppetry and a pimped-out wardrobe, Soul Samurai kicks the Vampire Cowboys recipe up a notch; the script has the complexity of a graphic novel, without sacrificing its zinelike homemade sweetness.
Village Voice A
(Andy Propst) It's smart and funny stuff that's deftly supported in Robert Ross Parker's sure-handed production, where Asian theater traditions are ably blended with Nguyen's exhilarating fight choreography. David Valentine's puppets and Nick Francone's intentionally cheesy videos are, like the rest of the show, side-splittingly funny and slyly intelligent.
Backstage A-
(Mark Peikert) Even if, unlike me, you don't have a fondness for petite women brandishing large weapons, Soul Samurai offers plenty of charm and entertainment. Equal parts 1970s samurai flick, blaxploitation, and post-apocalyptic NYC grit, it tells the tale of the meek and mild lesbian Dewdrop (Maureen Sebastian), who toughens up when her lover is killed by a gang of vampires running Brooklyn...Unfortunately, Nguyen, who also choreographed the riveting fight sequences, lets his play down when it comes to the climactic battle between Dewdrop and Lady Snowflake, giving us the evening's one uninteresting battle. That lapse is happily compensated for by the consistently clever use of multimedia...And boy, do those actors work...Soul Samurai, a glorious melting pot of influences and inspirations, is theatre at its best.
Theatermania A-
(Dan Balcazo) A pop culture explosion of influences ranging from comic books to Blaxploitation films, Qui Nguyen's Soul Samurai, now at HERE Arts Center, is a wildly funny, action-packed delight...The work is stylishly directed by Robert Ross Parker and showcases Nguyen's dynamic (and often hilarious) fight choreography...The piece both utilizes and subverts racial stereotypes through snappy dialogue (including a kind of parody of ebonics), larger than life mannerisms, and tongue-in-cheek satire. It includes plenty of plot twists and a variety of narrative strategies such as direct address, traditional dialogue scenes, lots of fights, flashback sequences, film and animation (directed by Parker and designed by Nick Francone, who is also responsible for sets and lighting), and short interludes that tell the origin stories of various key characters. My favorite is a puppet theater piece in which Sally tries to shut out the cries of the world--represented by an adorable and expressive puppet designed by David Valentine, and manipulated and voiced by Jon Hoche.
Offoffonline A-
(Samantha O'Brien) Vampire Cowboys have, once again, proven themselves masters of action-adventure theater...Even with such a dark premise, the show is infused with geeky glee. From the impromptu breakdancing to the witty battle banter and pop culture references, Samurai is ultimately a very playful presentation. Complementing the violent saga, there are puppets with Avenue Q-style attitude and other multimedia touches, such as a great stop-motion film about a forbidden love between a ninja and a samurai starring, naturally, pieces of fruit. All playing multiple roles, the five-person ensemble nails the goofy-yet-hip style of Nguyen’s script...The show seems just as much fun for the actors as the audience. You can’t even fault them when they break into an accidental chuckle...There are some weak spots in the show...However, small inconsistencies do not ruin what is overall an extremely exciting piece of theater. See Samurai before it’s too late.
Blog Critics A+ 14; Nytheatre.com A+ 14; That Sounds Cool A+ 14; Time Out NY A 13; American Theatre Web A 13; Backstage A- 12; Theatermania A- 12; Offoffonline A- 12; TOTAL: 104/8= 13 (A)
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Three Sisters
GRADE: C
By Anton Chekhov. Directed by Christopher McElroen. The Harlem Stage Gatehouse. (CLOSED)
The response to the Classical Theatre of Harlem's Three Sisters leaves me wondering whether any of these critics saw the same play. CurtainUp's Gregory Wilson considers this the best Chekhov of the season (a season which included Ian Rickson's celebrated production of The Seagull), while Time Out NY's Adam Feldman felt pretty much the opposite. New York Times's Neil Genzlinger wasn't too thrilled with the show, but did like Roger Guenveur Smith's Vershinin, while The Village Voice's Christopher Grobe praised almost everything except Smith's performance.
CurtainUp A
(Gregory A. Wilson) In the end the real credit for the success of this production has to go to director and CTH co-founder Christopher McElroen, whose interpretive touches are uncannily accurate. McElroen strikes every right note, from intelligent and energetic staging to pacing to coherency of theme, and the result is a truly memorable performance. I saw a version of "Three Sisters" years ago in Seattle and found it competent but forgettable; in light of this superb production, though, I think more may have been wrong with that first take than I had ever considered. At his best, Chekhov can tap into the deep truths of humanity as well as any playwright, and this is Chekhov at his best. If you only have time for one work of classic theater this year, make it this one.
Village Voice A-
(Christopher Grobe) The production is full of excellent performances, which you can watch in minute detail thanks to the intimacy of the wide, shallow stage nestled between two banks of seating. The familiar dynamic, for instance, among the three sisters (played by Sabrina LeBeauf, Amanda Mason Warren, and Carmen Gill) is finicky and finely tuned. One performance, though, threatens to derail the whole project. As Vershinin, Roger Guenveur Smith seems to have landed from a different planet, or at least a different play. Sing-songy and glassy-eyed, this Vershinin--usually a pivotal figure in the play's romantic plot and moral debate--seems, instead, like an absurd bit-part.
Variety C-
(Sam Thielman) This is a busy play, and what it needs most is a firm hand guiding the audience from playing area to playing area as the show's interlocking stories unfold. The danger a director working with actors of varying skill levels on "Three Sisters" (or any Chekhov play) faces is distraction, and that's this production's biggest problem. When Solyony (Phillip Christian, overdoing the weirdness of a weird character) and Tuzenbach begin to debate, it's hard not to mentally wander across the stage to see what some of the other characters are doing... The show is aided immeasurably by designer Troy Hourie, whose all-Persian-carpets-all-the-time set is slowly rolled up and taken away as the Prozorov estate decays. Even with its many flaws, it's difficult not to recommend this production. "Three Sisters" is so hard to stage that it doesn't get done often enough, so theatergoers should jump at the chance to be moved by images like Masha, simultaneously pitiable and infuriating, weeping over her lost lover before her awkward, loving husband Kulygin (Jonathan Peck). There's a great deal of moving characterization here, but a better staging would provide much, much more.
The New York Times C-
(Neil Genzlinger) From Midtown, the subway ride up to the Harlem Stage Gatehouse feels a bit like the trip to Yankee Stadium: similar duration; roughly the same direction. For the current staging of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” at the theater, that seems fitting, because this is a production that, like the Yankees, has an assortment of stars but somehow never feels like a team effort. Maybe this is intentional on the part of Christopher McElroen, who directed this joint production of Harlem Stage and the Classical Theater of Harlem. This is, after all, a play about dissolution — of relationships, of dreams, of a social order — and a certain directionlessness is built into its characters. Still, the title siblings, different as they are from one another, ought to seem as if they were sisters; the others who populate their insular world ought to feel like old acquaintances. Here the actors often appear to be building their characters in a vacuum.
Theatermania D+
(Dan Balcazo) No one can sit still for very long in Classical Theater of Harlem's revival of Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters, now at Harlem Stage. The characters are constantly alighting from the furniture, repositioning themselves, and sometimes even spinning around in circles. This restlessness may be an outward reflection of Chekhov's theme of discontentment that runs throughout the play, but it's also indicative of the uneven quality of director Christopher McElroen's production, which tends to skim the surface of the work rather than delving into its depths. As eldest sister Olga, Sabrina LeBeauf races through the majority of her lines without connecting to the meaning behind the words. However, she's much better when not speaking, and some of her nonverbal reactions to other characters are acutely expressive. Middle sister Masha is played by the charismatic Amanda Mason Warren, who does a fine job throughout most of the evening, but slips into an overly melodramatic mode towards the play's conclusion. As youngest sister Irina, Carmen Gill does just enough to convey her character, but doesn't go that extra step to make a memorable performance.
Time Out NY F+
(Adam Feldman)Christopher McElroen's blobby production of the play is not, shall we say, Moscow-ready: What should be theater about a community comes off as community theater. Sabrina LeBeauf plays Olga, the spinster schoolteacher; Amanda Mason Warren is the moody Masha; and Carmen Gill is the dreamy Irina. They have moments here and there (Warren when she is being emotional, Gill when she isn't), as do Reg E. Cathey as the dissolute doctor and especially Josh Tyson as the kindly baron. But small moments of credibility can't compensate for the production's gallery of slapdash portraits.
CurtainUp A 13; Village Voice A- 12; Variety C- 6; New York Times C- 6; Theatermania D+ 5; TONY F+ 2; 44/6 = 7.33 (C)
Read On »
By Anton Chekhov. Directed by Christopher McElroen. The Harlem Stage Gatehouse. (CLOSED)
The response to the Classical Theatre of Harlem's Three Sisters leaves me wondering whether any of these critics saw the same play. CurtainUp's Gregory Wilson considers this the best Chekhov of the season (a season which included Ian Rickson's celebrated production of The Seagull), while Time Out NY's Adam Feldman felt pretty much the opposite. New York Times's Neil Genzlinger wasn't too thrilled with the show, but did like Roger Guenveur Smith's Vershinin, while The Village Voice's Christopher Grobe praised almost everything except Smith's performance.
CurtainUp A
(Gregory A. Wilson) In the end the real credit for the success of this production has to go to director and CTH co-founder Christopher McElroen, whose interpretive touches are uncannily accurate. McElroen strikes every right note, from intelligent and energetic staging to pacing to coherency of theme, and the result is a truly memorable performance. I saw a version of "Three Sisters" years ago in Seattle and found it competent but forgettable; in light of this superb production, though, I think more may have been wrong with that first take than I had ever considered. At his best, Chekhov can tap into the deep truths of humanity as well as any playwright, and this is Chekhov at his best. If you only have time for one work of classic theater this year, make it this one.
Village Voice A-
(Christopher Grobe) The production is full of excellent performances, which you can watch in minute detail thanks to the intimacy of the wide, shallow stage nestled between two banks of seating. The familiar dynamic, for instance, among the three sisters (played by Sabrina LeBeauf, Amanda Mason Warren, and Carmen Gill) is finicky and finely tuned. One performance, though, threatens to derail the whole project. As Vershinin, Roger Guenveur Smith seems to have landed from a different planet, or at least a different play. Sing-songy and glassy-eyed, this Vershinin--usually a pivotal figure in the play's romantic plot and moral debate--seems, instead, like an absurd bit-part.
Variety C-
(Sam Thielman) This is a busy play, and what it needs most is a firm hand guiding the audience from playing area to playing area as the show's interlocking stories unfold. The danger a director working with actors of varying skill levels on "Three Sisters" (or any Chekhov play) faces is distraction, and that's this production's biggest problem. When Solyony (Phillip Christian, overdoing the weirdness of a weird character) and Tuzenbach begin to debate, it's hard not to mentally wander across the stage to see what some of the other characters are doing... The show is aided immeasurably by designer Troy Hourie, whose all-Persian-carpets-all-the-time set is slowly rolled up and taken away as the Prozorov estate decays. Even with its many flaws, it's difficult not to recommend this production. "Three Sisters" is so hard to stage that it doesn't get done often enough, so theatergoers should jump at the chance to be moved by images like Masha, simultaneously pitiable and infuriating, weeping over her lost lover before her awkward, loving husband Kulygin (Jonathan Peck). There's a great deal of moving characterization here, but a better staging would provide much, much more.
The New York Times C-
(Neil Genzlinger) From Midtown, the subway ride up to the Harlem Stage Gatehouse feels a bit like the trip to Yankee Stadium: similar duration; roughly the same direction. For the current staging of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” at the theater, that seems fitting, because this is a production that, like the Yankees, has an assortment of stars but somehow never feels like a team effort. Maybe this is intentional on the part of Christopher McElroen, who directed this joint production of Harlem Stage and the Classical Theater of Harlem. This is, after all, a play about dissolution — of relationships, of dreams, of a social order — and a certain directionlessness is built into its characters. Still, the title siblings, different as they are from one another, ought to seem as if they were sisters; the others who populate their insular world ought to feel like old acquaintances. Here the actors often appear to be building their characters in a vacuum.
Theatermania D+
(Dan Balcazo) No one can sit still for very long in Classical Theater of Harlem's revival of Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters, now at Harlem Stage. The characters are constantly alighting from the furniture, repositioning themselves, and sometimes even spinning around in circles. This restlessness may be an outward reflection of Chekhov's theme of discontentment that runs throughout the play, but it's also indicative of the uneven quality of director Christopher McElroen's production, which tends to skim the surface of the work rather than delving into its depths. As eldest sister Olga, Sabrina LeBeauf races through the majority of her lines without connecting to the meaning behind the words. However, she's much better when not speaking, and some of her nonverbal reactions to other characters are acutely expressive. Middle sister Masha is played by the charismatic Amanda Mason Warren, who does a fine job throughout most of the evening, but slips into an overly melodramatic mode towards the play's conclusion. As youngest sister Irina, Carmen Gill does just enough to convey her character, but doesn't go that extra step to make a memorable performance.
Time Out NY F+
(Adam Feldman)Christopher McElroen's blobby production of the play is not, shall we say, Moscow-ready: What should be theater about a community comes off as community theater. Sabrina LeBeauf plays Olga, the spinster schoolteacher; Amanda Mason Warren is the moody Masha; and Carmen Gill is the dreamy Irina. They have moments here and there (Warren when she is being emotional, Gill when she isn't), as do Reg E. Cathey as the dissolute doctor and especially Josh Tyson as the kindly baron. But small moments of credibility can't compensate for the production's gallery of slapdash portraits.
CurtainUp A 13; Village Voice A- 12; Variety C- 6; New York Times C- 6; Theatermania D+ 5; TONY F+ 2; 44/6 = 7.33 (C)
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Othello
GRADE: B+
By William Shakespeare. Directed by Arin Arbus. Produced by Theater For a New Audience at the Duke on 42nd St. (CLOSED)
I'm pretty sure this is the first production in Critic-O-Meter's brief history to get two A+s and a D+. Othello is one of the most produced Shakespeare plays in America this season and, if reviewers other than Backstage's Andy Propst are to be believed, the current New York production is one of the best you're likely to see. Particularly ecstatic are TheaterMania's David Finkle and the Times' Charles Isherwood, who delivers a review that can only be called "career-making" for director Arin Arbus. It's most likely this review that lead to the show being completely sold out as of 8:30AM yesterday. For his part, Propst finds the show somnambulent until its final third.
Theatermania A+
(David Finkle) Arin Arbus' production of Othello, being presented by the Theatre for the New Audience at the Duke on 42nd Street, is as near perfect a production of the eternally startling tragedy as a Shakespeare fan would hope to encounter. Or, for that matter, as any lover of old-fashioned blood-stirring melodrama would hope to meet in a dark and shadowy theater. Everything about it -- as it unfolds on Peter Ksander's somber minimalist set -- is bloody good though immaculately stage-blood-less.
The New York Times A+
(Charles Isherwood) The spring theater season this year is enticingly rich, both on Broadway and off. But I suspect it will not bring a Shakespeare production to equal the gripping “Othello” now blazing across the stage of the Duke on 42nd Street Theater, courtesy of Theater for a New Audience. I can say this partly because Shakespeare has unfortunately become a relative rarity on major New York stages, but primarily because this production is so terrific... The director, Arin Arbus, might just be a star in the making, or to put it less glibly — and more realistically — a potentially important artist. The associate artistic director of Theater for a New Audience, she makes an extraordinary Off Broadway debut with this production.
Associated Press A
(Jennifer Farrar) That "green-eyed monster," jealousy, lurks beneath the action and finally explodes in a stunning off-Broadway production of Shakespeare's Othello. Tension and treachery build in equal measure, as the ruthless Iago (played with casual brilliance by Ned Eisenberg) plots against his boss, General Othello, the "noble Moor," given a bravura performance by John Douglas Thompson... Tightly directed by Arin Arbus, the briskly paced production by the Theatre for a New Audience utilizes a plain, thrust stage with just a few quick changes of furniture. Two doors, two balconies and a couple of steps down off the stage comprise Peter Ksander's simple, functional set design... For its powerful performances, this "Othello" should not be missed.
Variety A If it's true that all you really need to put on a great show is two boards and a passion, then Theater for a New Audience proves the dictum with its austere production of "Othello." As helmed by Arin Arbus, Shakespeare's domestic tragedy has been stripped of its stage trappings and presented virtually in the raw. With no fussy sets or costumes to lean on, a brilliant cast finds the freedom to focus on the elements of the play that matter most: the tortured psychology of its characters and the language of the gods who created them to suffer.
The Daily News B+
(Joe Dziemianowicz) The green-eyed monster also rears its ugly (and, in this case, definitely deadly) head in the Theatre for a New Audience's sturdy rendering of "Othello," where a whiff of suspicion leads to a half-dozen deaths... Though the production design is spare, director Arin Arbus shows a keen eye for detail. It seems like Desdemona treasured the beloved handkerchief Othello gave her so much she had the pattern copied for a bedspread. A nice touch, since she's blanketed in love and death by the final fadeout.
NYPost B+
You don't find Shakespearean productions more low-con cept than the Theatre for a New Audience's Othello. Performed on a bare stage with simple props and no stars, this solid revival conveys the melodramatic power of the work, especially in the gripping final section.
Village Voice B
(Alexis Soloski) While this absence of interpretation is refreshing and the performances are generally good, it's difficult to ascertain what sparked Arbus's interest in this particular play, which the great critic A.C. Bradley described as "the most painfully exciting and the most terrible" of Shakespeare's tragedies. There's care in the way Arbus shapes the stage pictures and in her direction of the scenes, particularly the soliloquies, but the individual parts—though artful—never quite resolve into an awful, inevitable whole.
CurtainUp B-
(Gregory A. Wilson) This isn't a bad production by any means; there are some nice touches, especially in the scenes involving Desdemona and Emilia, and Shakespeare's quality will almost always shine through if given the opportunity. But as I've said before, Theatre for a New Audience is one of the most consistently excellent companies we have, and this isn't up to its usual standard. In the end, that may be the risk one takes in concentrating so much on the tree of racism that the forest of the play is missed in the process.
Time Out NY C-
(Helen Shaw) For three acts, Thompson radiates the humor, intelligence and decency of pre-fall Othello. He and new bride Desdemona (Juliet Rylance) are great chums, and he laughs off Iago’s earliest slanderous insinuations. This is a general you’d want to have a beer with. But the play demands an earthshaking fall into madness and jealousy, and neither Eisenberg’s broad sly-dog stylings nor Thompson’s palpable sweetness can generate the required thunder. Director Arin Arbus does little to help them. She works on an aggressively simple set from Peter Ksander, who gives the actors a thrust stage and minimal obstacles. The intimacy is right; the blocking is wrong. Arbus ignores those sitting on the sides, freezing her tableaux when they ought to stay fluid.
Backstage D+
(Andy Propst) Clocking in at nearly three hours, director Arin Arbus' stuffy staging of Othello only sparks to life during its last 60 minutes, when leading players John Douglas Thompson as Othello and Juliet Rylance as Desdemona let go with Shakespeare's passion and poetry, and the result is astonishing... This Othello may end with a satisfying explosion, but until then it's a less than electrifying experience.
TM A+ 14; NYT A+ 14; AP A 13; VA A 13; TDN B+ 11; NYP B+ 11; VV B 10; CU B- 9; TONY C- 6; BS D+ 5; TOTAL = 106/10 = 10.6 B+
Read On »
By William Shakespeare. Directed by Arin Arbus. Produced by Theater For a New Audience at the Duke on 42nd St. (CLOSED)
I'm pretty sure this is the first production in Critic-O-Meter's brief history to get two A+s and a D+. Othello is one of the most produced Shakespeare plays in America this season and, if reviewers other than Backstage's Andy Propst are to be believed, the current New York production is one of the best you're likely to see. Particularly ecstatic are TheaterMania's David Finkle and the Times' Charles Isherwood, who delivers a review that can only be called "career-making" for director Arin Arbus. It's most likely this review that lead to the show being completely sold out as of 8:30AM yesterday. For his part, Propst finds the show somnambulent until its final third.
Theatermania A+
(David Finkle) Arin Arbus' production of Othello, being presented by the Theatre for the New Audience at the Duke on 42nd Street, is as near perfect a production of the eternally startling tragedy as a Shakespeare fan would hope to encounter. Or, for that matter, as any lover of old-fashioned blood-stirring melodrama would hope to meet in a dark and shadowy theater. Everything about it -- as it unfolds on Peter Ksander's somber minimalist set -- is bloody good though immaculately stage-blood-less.
The New York Times A+
(Charles Isherwood) The spring theater season this year is enticingly rich, both on Broadway and off. But I suspect it will not bring a Shakespeare production to equal the gripping “Othello” now blazing across the stage of the Duke on 42nd Street Theater, courtesy of Theater for a New Audience. I can say this partly because Shakespeare has unfortunately become a relative rarity on major New York stages, but primarily because this production is so terrific... The director, Arin Arbus, might just be a star in the making, or to put it less glibly — and more realistically — a potentially important artist. The associate artistic director of Theater for a New Audience, she makes an extraordinary Off Broadway debut with this production.
Associated Press A
(Jennifer Farrar) That "green-eyed monster," jealousy, lurks beneath the action and finally explodes in a stunning off-Broadway production of Shakespeare's Othello. Tension and treachery build in equal measure, as the ruthless Iago (played with casual brilliance by Ned Eisenberg) plots against his boss, General Othello, the "noble Moor," given a bravura performance by John Douglas Thompson... Tightly directed by Arin Arbus, the briskly paced production by the Theatre for a New Audience utilizes a plain, thrust stage with just a few quick changes of furniture. Two doors, two balconies and a couple of steps down off the stage comprise Peter Ksander's simple, functional set design... For its powerful performances, this "Othello" should not be missed.
Variety A If it's true that all you really need to put on a great show is two boards and a passion, then Theater for a New Audience proves the dictum with its austere production of "Othello." As helmed by Arin Arbus, Shakespeare's domestic tragedy has been stripped of its stage trappings and presented virtually in the raw. With no fussy sets or costumes to lean on, a brilliant cast finds the freedom to focus on the elements of the play that matter most: the tortured psychology of its characters and the language of the gods who created them to suffer.
The Daily News B+
(Joe Dziemianowicz) The green-eyed monster also rears its ugly (and, in this case, definitely deadly) head in the Theatre for a New Audience's sturdy rendering of "Othello," where a whiff of suspicion leads to a half-dozen deaths... Though the production design is spare, director Arin Arbus shows a keen eye for detail. It seems like Desdemona treasured the beloved handkerchief Othello gave her so much she had the pattern copied for a bedspread. A nice touch, since she's blanketed in love and death by the final fadeout.
NYPost B+
You don't find Shakespearean productions more low-con cept than the Theatre for a New Audience's Othello. Performed on a bare stage with simple props and no stars, this solid revival conveys the melodramatic power of the work, especially in the gripping final section.
Village Voice B
(Alexis Soloski) While this absence of interpretation is refreshing and the performances are generally good, it's difficult to ascertain what sparked Arbus's interest in this particular play, which the great critic A.C. Bradley described as "the most painfully exciting and the most terrible" of Shakespeare's tragedies. There's care in the way Arbus shapes the stage pictures and in her direction of the scenes, particularly the soliloquies, but the individual parts—though artful—never quite resolve into an awful, inevitable whole.
CurtainUp B-
(Gregory A. Wilson) This isn't a bad production by any means; there are some nice touches, especially in the scenes involving Desdemona and Emilia, and Shakespeare's quality will almost always shine through if given the opportunity. But as I've said before, Theatre for a New Audience is one of the most consistently excellent companies we have, and this isn't up to its usual standard. In the end, that may be the risk one takes in concentrating so much on the tree of racism that the forest of the play is missed in the process.
Time Out NY C-
(Helen Shaw) For three acts, Thompson radiates the humor, intelligence and decency of pre-fall Othello. He and new bride Desdemona (Juliet Rylance) are great chums, and he laughs off Iago’s earliest slanderous insinuations. This is a general you’d want to have a beer with. But the play demands an earthshaking fall into madness and jealousy, and neither Eisenberg’s broad sly-dog stylings nor Thompson’s palpable sweetness can generate the required thunder. Director Arin Arbus does little to help them. She works on an aggressively simple set from Peter Ksander, who gives the actors a thrust stage and minimal obstacles. The intimacy is right; the blocking is wrong. Arbus ignores those sitting on the sides, freezing her tableaux when they ought to stay fluid.
Backstage D+
(Andy Propst) Clocking in at nearly three hours, director Arin Arbus' stuffy staging of Othello only sparks to life during its last 60 minutes, when leading players John Douglas Thompson as Othello and Juliet Rylance as Desdemona let go with Shakespeare's passion and poetry, and the result is astonishing... This Othello may end with a satisfying explosion, but until then it's a less than electrifying experience.
TM A+ 14; NYT A+ 14; AP A 13; VA A 13; TDN B+ 11; NYP B+ 11; VV B 10; CU B- 9; TONY C- 6; BS D+ 5; TOTAL = 106/10 = 10.6 B+
That Pretty Pretty; or The Rape Play
GRADE: B-
By Sheila Callaghan. Directed by Kip Fagan. The Rattlestick Theatre. (CLOSED)
Early reviews of Sheila Callaghan's aggressive new meta-satire of pop-culture misogyny are pretty evenly divided, even within themselves. Critics seem to agree that the play's nonlinear riffing is zany and a little scattershot, but they differ on whether that's an asset or a liability. But even those turned off by the show's violence tend to praise the fearless cast.
Nytheatre.com A
(Loren Noveck) Tricky, exciting, and darkly funny...What makes the play so interesting is that almost every element is simultaneously operating on multiple levels...The play constantly shifts our perceptions of what's "real" inside its own play-world, what we take for granted and then are forced to reconsider. The more Callaghan seems to be stripping down, stylistically, to a conventional form of theatrical realism, the more the play traffics in—and mocks—utterly familiar conventions...Callaghan's work tends to be linguistically dense, thick with lyric, metaphor- and image-packed prose, and it's fun to see her show an incisive and often wickedly funny ear for naturalistic dialogue, especially in the scenes between the guys. The many tonal shifts make this a tricky piece to stage, and director Kip Fagan and the wonderful ensemble show extraordinary precision in keeping the lines demarcated both between the various scenes/layers and within the scenes as the characters shift among the various planes of self-awareness and naturalism/caricature/posturing. All the design elements work, too.
CurtainUp A
(Jenny Sandman) While I'm uncertain about what actually happens and what it means, I can say this with certainty: I loved it. This is one of the most fun, most seemingly random, and most high-energy shows I've ever seen. I laughed out loud more than I do at stand-up comedy routines, and I could not have predicted anything that happened to save my life (which is a good thing). That Pretty Pretty; or, The Rape Play could be seen as a feminist polemic against men, male power, and the "boys will be boys" mentality, but any attempt at a unifying theme is really an afterthought...Don't expect it to make sense. Just sit back and enjoy the ribald, shameless, and exuberant ride. The pieces do start to tie together in the very last scene, but only in a basic way. The cast is fantastic....Director Kip Fagan has expertly shaped what could be an imagistic mess into a play with momentum and power.
Offoffonline A-
(Li Cornfield) A loopy meditation on rape culture, That Pretty Pretty is sometimes shrewd and sometimes silly. The play makes its points elliptically rather than directly and has a lot of fun with its own conceit: a screenwriter works through his own gendered emotional baggage while harboring under the delusion that he is creating a feminist screenplay. It’s a sneaky device that allows the play’s loosely connected scenes to cover a wide array of styles, excuses textual inconsistencies, and permits plot lines to wholly change course at whim. The mutability of the play’s world will frustrate audience members eager to know the rules from the get-go; better to sit back and enjoy its horrific humor while allowing the play to explain itself...The versatile cast shifts with boundless energy between genres that range from high comedy to kooky melodrama to torture porn and back again.
New Yorker B+
(John Lahr) Gives you plenty of rape and nothing pretty. I’m not sure what the play is about, but, then, it seems, neither is the author, Sheila Callaghan, a talented writer new to me. The evening is a submersion in the anarchy of ambivalence: variously a rant, a riff, a rumble—about our notions of naturalism, objectification, perversity, and beauty...There’s sass and sarcasm in Callaghan’s high-energy punk writing, which feels like early Sam Shepard in the way that it dumps the author’s zany inner world in the audience’s lap. Whether it will ever turn into anything but the sound of its own mocking voice, only time will tell.
Talkin' Broadway B+
(Matthew Murray) One of the funniest theatrical takes on categorically unfunny subjects since Martin McDonagh made a fall-down riot of domestic terrorism in The Lieutenant of Inishmore. Alas, Callaghan does not possess McDonagh’s peerless plotting ability, his nimble way of approaching an unexpected joke from five directions simultaneously, or his on-the-sleeve social conscience. That makes her play, which has been decisively but wobbily directed by Kip Fagan, more mirth-inspiring than insightful. But even if Callaghan works too hard to drive home her points - and if they’re usually blunted when she does - you can’t help but be grateful for the zany trip to the underworld she makes possible...The excess does begin to wear after a while.
Time Out NY B+
(David Cote) Sheila Callaghan seems to have put third-wave feminism, Gen-Y gender confusion and macho writerly clichés in a blender set to high speed. Her manic, angry, deftly constructed That Pretty Pretty; or, the Rape Play whipsaws between laughs and squirms as Callaghan trawls the mucky depths of male-constructed femininity. Fans of Pirandello and Dennis Potter will recognize Callaghan’s main stylistic strategy: driving a wedge between her characters and their onstage, equally fictitious author...It’s not as dark or substantive as it could be, but the author is imaginative enough to avoid preachiness. Director Kip Fagan’s extremely talented cast (Joyce, a consistently engaging performer, gets to show off her comic chops) navigates the nihilism and hurt of the script. Perhaps by saying several things at once about sexism and desire, Callaghan speaks something new.
Village Voice B+
(Alexis Soloski) Funny, scary, messy, and forthrightly feminist...A program note warns that the play "contains violent episodes and sexual content," an unusually mild description of the panoply of beatings, murders, and rapes that ensue. Callaghan satirizes the recent portrayal of women by male writers through a series of metafictional scenes—deliberately outdoing the boys in raunchy, profane, and icky sex. It's remarkable that director Kip Fagan manages to make clear delineations among the various modes the play demands—the extremely fictional, the sort-of fictional, the filmic, the more-or-less real, etc. Of course, the script necessitates that the actresses succumb to indignities as bad or worse than those supplied by male writers—like a scene of Jell-O wrestling. Callaghan declines to offer a woman-friendly alternative; it's a troubling play and must have been difficult to write.
New York Times B
(Jason Zinoman) A raunchy, savvy and only partly successful black comedy...If the first half of this wandering play brings to mind a feminist version of George C. Wolfe’s “Colored Museum,” Ms. Callaghan eventually shifts gears to reveal a screenwriter, Owen (a very sly Greg Keller), and his war veteran friend Rodney (Joseph Gomez), who may or may not be the “authors” of the earlier scenes. There is an attempt here at a more realistic style, but Ms. Callaghan and the director, Kip Fagan, maintain the broad strokes of a cartoonist.
NY Press B
(Leonard Jacobs) Think of Callaghan's play as a subversive revue featuring literal and figurative vignettes inspired by the topic of rape...With mind-blowing images and soul-crushing language flowing wildly, director Kip Fagan avoids the quicksand trap of pacing things too slowly, though a dinner scene midway through is such a non sequitur I defy him to explain it. Mostly he's whipped the actors into screaming, energetic whirlwinds, which at least gives you something to watch when the play feels most unmoored. And if you're totally mystified, wait for Owen's speech about his mother near the end; note Keller's ingenious delivery. It would be insulting to classify this speech as Callaghan's intended meaning for the play, for it lacks one. But it does crystallize her take on how boundaries of decency can be irrevocably distorted.
Variety C-
(Marilyn Stasio) In the abstract, Sheila Callaghan's offbeat satirical comedy...sounds like outrageous, intelligent fun. A cartoonish comeback to male violence against women, this feminist rant features two strippers who take murderous revenge on right-wing anti-abortionists, and then post their exploits on the Internet. Among other topics dear to its black heart, show rails against slacker guys who think of women as sex objects and literary guys who write stuff that feeds that perception. But due to self-indulgent writing (that shouldn't reflect on the game cast), much of the fun is lost in sloppy execution.
Talk Entertainment D+
(Oscar E Moore) How far is one willing to go to show some of the horrors of human vices in the hope of bringing about some improvement? Angry Sheila Callaghan has gone about as far as she can go with her new theatrical outing...The acting by the cast of five in this burlesque of inhuman behavior is very good. Excellent in fact. The content, however, left me cold as a witch’s tit – the metaphor is apt, all things considered. How can anyone warm up to characters so vile?...Kip Fagan does his best to clarify as director but it’s a hard row to hoe.
Theatermania D
(Patrick Lee)Sheila Callaghan takes aim at some of the misogyny in pop culture by skewering a male screenwriter with an adolescent view of women. Unfortunately, the skewering amounts to glib mockery and the play, lacking fresh substantive social critique, quickly becomes tedious...If the play seems driven by righteous anger, it hasn't been focused for maximum effectiveness. Callaghan's fight-fire-with-fire strategy is severely limiting to begin with, since there are only so many appropriate audience reactions to vulgarities. And it is further complicated by a needlessly messy mash-up structure that isn't especially clarified by Kip Fagan's direction. The play's most powerful scene, a mostly pantomimed absurdist parody at a dining table where the men dominate the women, doesn't seem to belong to the world of the play.
New York Post F
(Frank Scheck) The sort of deliberately provocative but juvenile effort the Rattlestick seems compelled to champion. This absurdist satire about misogyny and sexual violence would have felt tired decades ago..."Some people just don't have the stomach for social commentary," the filmmaker says. "Well, f - - - 'em. Not my audience." If this is the playwright's idea of social commentary, count me out.
Nytheatre.com A 13; CurtainUp A 13; Offoffonline A- 12; New Yorker B+ 11; TONY B+ 11; VV B+ 11; Talkin' Broadway B+ 11; NY Times B 10; NY Press B 10; Variety C- 6; Talk Entertainment D+ 5; Theatermania D 4; NY Post F 1; TOTAL: 118/13=9.08 (B-)
Read On »
By Sheila Callaghan. Directed by Kip Fagan. The Rattlestick Theatre. (CLOSED)
Early reviews of Sheila Callaghan's aggressive new meta-satire of pop-culture misogyny are pretty evenly divided, even within themselves. Critics seem to agree that the play's nonlinear riffing is zany and a little scattershot, but they differ on whether that's an asset or a liability. But even those turned off by the show's violence tend to praise the fearless cast.
Nytheatre.com A
(Loren Noveck) Tricky, exciting, and darkly funny...What makes the play so interesting is that almost every element is simultaneously operating on multiple levels...The play constantly shifts our perceptions of what's "real" inside its own play-world, what we take for granted and then are forced to reconsider. The more Callaghan seems to be stripping down, stylistically, to a conventional form of theatrical realism, the more the play traffics in—and mocks—utterly familiar conventions...Callaghan's work tends to be linguistically dense, thick with lyric, metaphor- and image-packed prose, and it's fun to see her show an incisive and often wickedly funny ear for naturalistic dialogue, especially in the scenes between the guys. The many tonal shifts make this a tricky piece to stage, and director Kip Fagan and the wonderful ensemble show extraordinary precision in keeping the lines demarcated both between the various scenes/layers and within the scenes as the characters shift among the various planes of self-awareness and naturalism/caricature/posturing. All the design elements work, too.
CurtainUp A
(Jenny Sandman) While I'm uncertain about what actually happens and what it means, I can say this with certainty: I loved it. This is one of the most fun, most seemingly random, and most high-energy shows I've ever seen. I laughed out loud more than I do at stand-up comedy routines, and I could not have predicted anything that happened to save my life (which is a good thing). That Pretty Pretty; or, The Rape Play could be seen as a feminist polemic against men, male power, and the "boys will be boys" mentality, but any attempt at a unifying theme is really an afterthought...Don't expect it to make sense. Just sit back and enjoy the ribald, shameless, and exuberant ride. The pieces do start to tie together in the very last scene, but only in a basic way. The cast is fantastic....Director Kip Fagan has expertly shaped what could be an imagistic mess into a play with momentum and power.
Offoffonline A-
(Li Cornfield) A loopy meditation on rape culture, That Pretty Pretty is sometimes shrewd and sometimes silly. The play makes its points elliptically rather than directly and has a lot of fun with its own conceit: a screenwriter works through his own gendered emotional baggage while harboring under the delusion that he is creating a feminist screenplay. It’s a sneaky device that allows the play’s loosely connected scenes to cover a wide array of styles, excuses textual inconsistencies, and permits plot lines to wholly change course at whim. The mutability of the play’s world will frustrate audience members eager to know the rules from the get-go; better to sit back and enjoy its horrific humor while allowing the play to explain itself...The versatile cast shifts with boundless energy between genres that range from high comedy to kooky melodrama to torture porn and back again.
New Yorker B+
(John Lahr) Gives you plenty of rape and nothing pretty. I’m not sure what the play is about, but, then, it seems, neither is the author, Sheila Callaghan, a talented writer new to me. The evening is a submersion in the anarchy of ambivalence: variously a rant, a riff, a rumble—about our notions of naturalism, objectification, perversity, and beauty...There’s sass and sarcasm in Callaghan’s high-energy punk writing, which feels like early Sam Shepard in the way that it dumps the author’s zany inner world in the audience’s lap. Whether it will ever turn into anything but the sound of its own mocking voice, only time will tell.
Talkin' Broadway B+
(Matthew Murray) One of the funniest theatrical takes on categorically unfunny subjects since Martin McDonagh made a fall-down riot of domestic terrorism in The Lieutenant of Inishmore. Alas, Callaghan does not possess McDonagh’s peerless plotting ability, his nimble way of approaching an unexpected joke from five directions simultaneously, or his on-the-sleeve social conscience. That makes her play, which has been decisively but wobbily directed by Kip Fagan, more mirth-inspiring than insightful. But even if Callaghan works too hard to drive home her points - and if they’re usually blunted when she does - you can’t help but be grateful for the zany trip to the underworld she makes possible...The excess does begin to wear after a while.
Time Out NY B+
(David Cote) Sheila Callaghan seems to have put third-wave feminism, Gen-Y gender confusion and macho writerly clichés in a blender set to high speed. Her manic, angry, deftly constructed That Pretty Pretty; or, the Rape Play whipsaws between laughs and squirms as Callaghan trawls the mucky depths of male-constructed femininity. Fans of Pirandello and Dennis Potter will recognize Callaghan’s main stylistic strategy: driving a wedge between her characters and their onstage, equally fictitious author...It’s not as dark or substantive as it could be, but the author is imaginative enough to avoid preachiness. Director Kip Fagan’s extremely talented cast (Joyce, a consistently engaging performer, gets to show off her comic chops) navigates the nihilism and hurt of the script. Perhaps by saying several things at once about sexism and desire, Callaghan speaks something new.
Village Voice B+
(Alexis Soloski) Funny, scary, messy, and forthrightly feminist...A program note warns that the play "contains violent episodes and sexual content," an unusually mild description of the panoply of beatings, murders, and rapes that ensue. Callaghan satirizes the recent portrayal of women by male writers through a series of metafictional scenes—deliberately outdoing the boys in raunchy, profane, and icky sex. It's remarkable that director Kip Fagan manages to make clear delineations among the various modes the play demands—the extremely fictional, the sort-of fictional, the filmic, the more-or-less real, etc. Of course, the script necessitates that the actresses succumb to indignities as bad or worse than those supplied by male writers—like a scene of Jell-O wrestling. Callaghan declines to offer a woman-friendly alternative; it's a troubling play and must have been difficult to write.
New York Times B
(Jason Zinoman) A raunchy, savvy and only partly successful black comedy...If the first half of this wandering play brings to mind a feminist version of George C. Wolfe’s “Colored Museum,” Ms. Callaghan eventually shifts gears to reveal a screenwriter, Owen (a very sly Greg Keller), and his war veteran friend Rodney (Joseph Gomez), who may or may not be the “authors” of the earlier scenes. There is an attempt here at a more realistic style, but Ms. Callaghan and the director, Kip Fagan, maintain the broad strokes of a cartoonist.
NY Press B
(Leonard Jacobs) Think of Callaghan's play as a subversive revue featuring literal and figurative vignettes inspired by the topic of rape...With mind-blowing images and soul-crushing language flowing wildly, director Kip Fagan avoids the quicksand trap of pacing things too slowly, though a dinner scene midway through is such a non sequitur I defy him to explain it. Mostly he's whipped the actors into screaming, energetic whirlwinds, which at least gives you something to watch when the play feels most unmoored. And if you're totally mystified, wait for Owen's speech about his mother near the end; note Keller's ingenious delivery. It would be insulting to classify this speech as Callaghan's intended meaning for the play, for it lacks one. But it does crystallize her take on how boundaries of decency can be irrevocably distorted.
Variety C-
(Marilyn Stasio) In the abstract, Sheila Callaghan's offbeat satirical comedy...sounds like outrageous, intelligent fun. A cartoonish comeback to male violence against women, this feminist rant features two strippers who take murderous revenge on right-wing anti-abortionists, and then post their exploits on the Internet. Among other topics dear to its black heart, show rails against slacker guys who think of women as sex objects and literary guys who write stuff that feeds that perception. But due to self-indulgent writing (that shouldn't reflect on the game cast), much of the fun is lost in sloppy execution.
Talk Entertainment D+
(Oscar E Moore) How far is one willing to go to show some of the horrors of human vices in the hope of bringing about some improvement? Angry Sheila Callaghan has gone about as far as she can go with her new theatrical outing...The acting by the cast of five in this burlesque of inhuman behavior is very good. Excellent in fact. The content, however, left me cold as a witch’s tit – the metaphor is apt, all things considered. How can anyone warm up to characters so vile?...Kip Fagan does his best to clarify as director but it’s a hard row to hoe.
Theatermania D
(Patrick Lee)Sheila Callaghan takes aim at some of the misogyny in pop culture by skewering a male screenwriter with an adolescent view of women. Unfortunately, the skewering amounts to glib mockery and the play, lacking fresh substantive social critique, quickly becomes tedious...If the play seems driven by righteous anger, it hasn't been focused for maximum effectiveness. Callaghan's fight-fire-with-fire strategy is severely limiting to begin with, since there are only so many appropriate audience reactions to vulgarities. And it is further complicated by a needlessly messy mash-up structure that isn't especially clarified by Kip Fagan's direction. The play's most powerful scene, a mostly pantomimed absurdist parody at a dining table where the men dominate the women, doesn't seem to belong to the world of the play.
New York Post F
(Frank Scheck) The sort of deliberately provocative but juvenile effort the Rattlestick seems compelled to champion. This absurdist satire about misogyny and sexual violence would have felt tired decades ago..."Some people just don't have the stomach for social commentary," the filmmaker says. "Well, f - - - 'em. Not my audience." If this is the playwright's idea of social commentary, count me out.
Nytheatre.com A 13; CurtainUp A 13; Offoffonline A- 12; New Yorker B+ 11; TONY B+ 11; VV B+ 11; Talkin' Broadway B+ 11; NY Times B 10; NY Press B 10; Variety C- 6; Talk Entertainment D+ 5; Theatermania D 4; NY Post F 1; TOTAL: 118/13=9.08 (B-)
Monday, February 23, 2009
Mabou Mines DollHouse
GRADE: A-
By Henrik Ibsen. Directed by Lee Breuer. Mabou Maines at St. Ann's Warehouse. (CLOSED)
Mabou Mines' famous reimagining of Ibsen's proto-feminist classic returns to Brooklyn after a world tour (it first debuted there in 2003). Critics do more than simply "get" the show's deconstructive conceits--actual little people in the male roles opposite full-sized women, a miniaturized set, a self-consciously melodramatic performance style--they positively revel in its provocations, and, a few quibbles aside, even find them revelatory.
CurtainUp A
(Jenny Sandman) The "illusion" of Ibsen's structure is rendered quite literally in Mabou Mines' DollHouse. All the women, inclding Nora, are over six feet tall. All the men are cast dwarfs. And Death is taller than them all...This is a breathtaking production, revealing the full genius of director Lee Breuer...and his company Mabou Mines. While it is three hours long, every moment is filled—with sight gags, with sounds, with fresh perspectives. Sometimes a production can turn a classic play completely inside out and somehow reveal the play's true nature, which is exactly what happens here. Nora is rendered vital and modern, while we feel the true extent of her repression. It's simultaneously a deconstruction, parody and homage to Ibsen's classic, and plumbs depths of emotion I've never seen in any other production of this play...It may be the only Ibsen production I've ever fully enjoyed.
Show Showdown A
(Wendy Caster) A brilliant, thrilling, superb, eye-opening, thought-provoking, heart-breaking, entertaining night in the theatre...Supports and illuminates the original work by physicalizing the entrapment of late-19th-century women as they distort themselves, inside and out, in desperate attempts to fit into the emotional doll houses in which they must live...The funniest scenes can be the most chilling, and vice versa.
Backstage A-
(Adam R. Perlman) Thoroughly entertaining...In case you're wondering what the secret ingredient is, I'll tell you: midgets. Nora is Gulliver in a land of Lilliputians. It's pretty obvious what this is meant to unlock...Adding to the mise en scène, the dollhouse here exists in a silent-movie world where prancing and snarling are status quo. With an assist from the music of Eve Beglarian and the choreography of Eamonn Farrell (developed with Martha Clarke), major monologues become small spotlit star turns. To be sure, there are tradeoffs in such a highly stylized presentation. It's hard to fight through the alienation to care about any of these characters, and it's nigh impossible to believe in any changes they make...But the real treat is Mark Povinelli's towering Torvald. Equal parts lust and disgust, he's the type of tiny tyrant you might struggle to slam the door on.
New York A-
(Boris Kachka) It's almost impossible to re-create the shock Ibsen's A Doll's House once elicited; challenging the patriarchy doesn't cut it anymore. But the Mabou Mines troupe has been managing it ever since DollHouse debuted at St. Ann's Warehouse, in 2003 (where it returns this week after a world tour.) Casting the male roles with actors under five feet tall, the company delivered the ultimate surprise: an avant-garde gimmick that works on almost every level.
Nytheatre.com B+
(Nicole Bournas-Ney) Lee Breuer and Mabou Mines attempt to take Ibsen's seminal work both forward and backward in time simultaneously, staging what can only be called a post-feminist melodrama. For the most part, the company does an excellent job of creating a unified and compelling production, but occasionally this challenge causes the production to lose its balance...The cast of this production is stellar...Maude Mitchell, whose Nora is the lynchpin of the production...gives a really excellent performance...The weakness of this production is its very long first act...This production is worth seeing, if for no other reason (and there are many other reasons), than to experience a jaw-dropping example of how much an artist can change a play, and explore his or her own vision, while barely changing the original text at all. Seeing a bald and nude Nora talking about women's self-sacrifice with the familiar line, "Thousands of women do it every day," certainly alters, in an exhilarating way, the traditional identity of Ibsen's play as a staple of classic Western drama.
New York Post B+
(Frank Scheck) Performed on a stunning set that resembles a, yes, dollhouse--including small-scale furniture on which the women literally have to contort themselves--it provides an ironic visual metaphor for Ibsen's classic examination of male domination. Whether that brilliant conceit is enough to sustain the show's nearly three-hour running time is another question. Undeniably audacious and imaginative, "DollHouse" is probably more fun to think about afterward than to actually sit through...Not everything works. But for every audacious idea that exasperates, another enthralls. And when the actors are allowed to settle down, they often deliver moments of brilliant intensity...And when Nora makes her famous exit, the devastating effect it has on the husband and children she leaves behind is more powerful than in any traditional production I've ever seen.
Time Out NY B+
(Helen Shaw) This visual correlative for Ibsen’s 1879 diagnosis of the modern marriage packs an unusually contemporary punch. Without “updating,” Breuer emphasizes how couples can cosset and diminish each other, how baby talk corrupts even the strong. Sadly, in exploding one set of sexual clichés, Breuer lights the fuse on a host of height-based stereotypes. The show works (even after a wearying six years on the road): DollHouse still stuns with its cleverly melodramatic affectations, Narelle Sissons’s crimson Victoriana set and a mind-blowing operatic conclusion. But Povinelli and the other little people in the cast are symbols first, people second. Breuer undercuts erotic moments with stale stagehand humor and makes easy equations (small = childlike), and Povinelli responds by forcing his performance. Mitchell’s work, though, remains a miracle—it is her staggering prowess as an actor that towers over us.
CurtainUp A 13; Show Showdown A 13; Backstage A- 12; New York A- 12; Nytheatre.com B+ 11; New York Post B+ 11; TONY B+ 11; TOTAL: 83/7=11.87 (A-)
Read On »
By Henrik Ibsen. Directed by Lee Breuer. Mabou Maines at St. Ann's Warehouse. (CLOSED)
Mabou Mines' famous reimagining of Ibsen's proto-feminist classic returns to Brooklyn after a world tour (it first debuted there in 2003). Critics do more than simply "get" the show's deconstructive conceits--actual little people in the male roles opposite full-sized women, a miniaturized set, a self-consciously melodramatic performance style--they positively revel in its provocations, and, a few quibbles aside, even find them revelatory.
CurtainUp A
(Jenny Sandman) The "illusion" of Ibsen's structure is rendered quite literally in Mabou Mines' DollHouse. All the women, inclding Nora, are over six feet tall. All the men are cast dwarfs. And Death is taller than them all...This is a breathtaking production, revealing the full genius of director Lee Breuer...and his company Mabou Mines. While it is three hours long, every moment is filled—with sight gags, with sounds, with fresh perspectives. Sometimes a production can turn a classic play completely inside out and somehow reveal the play's true nature, which is exactly what happens here. Nora is rendered vital and modern, while we feel the true extent of her repression. It's simultaneously a deconstruction, parody and homage to Ibsen's classic, and plumbs depths of emotion I've never seen in any other production of this play...It may be the only Ibsen production I've ever fully enjoyed.
Show Showdown A
(Wendy Caster) A brilliant, thrilling, superb, eye-opening, thought-provoking, heart-breaking, entertaining night in the theatre...Supports and illuminates the original work by physicalizing the entrapment of late-19th-century women as they distort themselves, inside and out, in desperate attempts to fit into the emotional doll houses in which they must live...The funniest scenes can be the most chilling, and vice versa.
Backstage A-
(Adam R. Perlman) Thoroughly entertaining...In case you're wondering what the secret ingredient is, I'll tell you: midgets. Nora is Gulliver in a land of Lilliputians. It's pretty obvious what this is meant to unlock...Adding to the mise en scène, the dollhouse here exists in a silent-movie world where prancing and snarling are status quo. With an assist from the music of Eve Beglarian and the choreography of Eamonn Farrell (developed with Martha Clarke), major monologues become small spotlit star turns. To be sure, there are tradeoffs in such a highly stylized presentation. It's hard to fight through the alienation to care about any of these characters, and it's nigh impossible to believe in any changes they make...But the real treat is Mark Povinelli's towering Torvald. Equal parts lust and disgust, he's the type of tiny tyrant you might struggle to slam the door on.
New York A-
(Boris Kachka) It's almost impossible to re-create the shock Ibsen's A Doll's House once elicited; challenging the patriarchy doesn't cut it anymore. But the Mabou Mines troupe has been managing it ever since DollHouse debuted at St. Ann's Warehouse, in 2003 (where it returns this week after a world tour.) Casting the male roles with actors under five feet tall, the company delivered the ultimate surprise: an avant-garde gimmick that works on almost every level.
Nytheatre.com B+
(Nicole Bournas-Ney) Lee Breuer and Mabou Mines attempt to take Ibsen's seminal work both forward and backward in time simultaneously, staging what can only be called a post-feminist melodrama. For the most part, the company does an excellent job of creating a unified and compelling production, but occasionally this challenge causes the production to lose its balance...The cast of this production is stellar...Maude Mitchell, whose Nora is the lynchpin of the production...gives a really excellent performance...The weakness of this production is its very long first act...This production is worth seeing, if for no other reason (and there are many other reasons), than to experience a jaw-dropping example of how much an artist can change a play, and explore his or her own vision, while barely changing the original text at all. Seeing a bald and nude Nora talking about women's self-sacrifice with the familiar line, "Thousands of women do it every day," certainly alters, in an exhilarating way, the traditional identity of Ibsen's play as a staple of classic Western drama.
New York Post B+
(Frank Scheck) Performed on a stunning set that resembles a, yes, dollhouse--including small-scale furniture on which the women literally have to contort themselves--it provides an ironic visual metaphor for Ibsen's classic examination of male domination. Whether that brilliant conceit is enough to sustain the show's nearly three-hour running time is another question. Undeniably audacious and imaginative, "DollHouse" is probably more fun to think about afterward than to actually sit through...Not everything works. But for every audacious idea that exasperates, another enthralls. And when the actors are allowed to settle down, they often deliver moments of brilliant intensity...And when Nora makes her famous exit, the devastating effect it has on the husband and children she leaves behind is more powerful than in any traditional production I've ever seen.
Time Out NY B+
(Helen Shaw) This visual correlative for Ibsen’s 1879 diagnosis of the modern marriage packs an unusually contemporary punch. Without “updating,” Breuer emphasizes how couples can cosset and diminish each other, how baby talk corrupts even the strong. Sadly, in exploding one set of sexual clichés, Breuer lights the fuse on a host of height-based stereotypes. The show works (even after a wearying six years on the road): DollHouse still stuns with its cleverly melodramatic affectations, Narelle Sissons’s crimson Victoriana set and a mind-blowing operatic conclusion. But Povinelli and the other little people in the cast are symbols first, people second. Breuer undercuts erotic moments with stale stagehand humor and makes easy equations (small = childlike), and Povinelli responds by forcing his performance. Mitchell’s work, though, remains a miracle—it is her staggering prowess as an actor that towers over us.
CurtainUp A 13; Show Showdown A 13; Backstage A- 12; New York A- 12; Nytheatre.com B+ 11; New York Post B+ 11; TONY B+ 11; TOTAL: 83/7=11.87 (A-)
The Book of Lambert
GRADE: C-
By Leslie Lee. Directed by Cyndy A. Marion. La MaMa E.T.C. (CLOSED)
Adrienne Cea of Offoffonline and Jason Fitzgerald of Backstage found much to enjoy in this first staging of Leslie Lee's 30-year-old play, but they are the only ones. In the play, an African-American ex-English professor named Lambert moves into an abandoned subway station after a break-up with his Caucasian girlfriend. Most critics find the story dated, the dialogue unrealistic, the characters one-dimensional, and the acting uneven, though they mostly admire Andis Gjoni's sets.
Offoffonline A
(Adrienne Cea) Leslie Lee's bleak drama, "The Book of Lambert" is a strong, unflinching character study of six souls wasting their lives away in the shadowy corners of a subway station. When the play opens, each character stirs in his or her sleep, eventually stretching to life to reveal the events of the past that have anchored their present. The obstacles range from small faraway memories to unsettled insecurities to the most debilitating neglect and disapproval from unloving parents... With this sizeable heaping of heavy subject matter, "The Book of Lambert" could easily feel as weighty as its characters' troubles. Fortunately, Lee keeps the action fast-paced, colorful, and at times even humorous.
Backstage A-
(Jason Fitzgerald) The play's imagery is delicate and sophisticated, as in the oranges -- tragic because so banal -- that Zinth bruises to get a rise out of Otto. Lee emerges as one of America's great poets of race relations in the interracial love affair between Lambert and his "Juliet," Virginia, which unfolds less as a romantic melodrama than as a condemnation of white liberal hypocrisy. She loves for the same reason she leaves him: his "black magic."... Still, La MaMa E.T.C. has given The Book of Lambert a fine -- and overdue -- world premiere. Clinton Faulkner as Lambert is a dead ringer for a young Denzel Washington and a revelation as a leading man. Andis Gjoni's set is deep and decrepit enough to be a picture of the play's journey into the dark, and the haunting lights from a facsimile subway tunnel are a reminder of the darkness that always accompanies the path to light.
Nytheatre.com D+
(Allison Taylor) When you piece together the various episodic scraps (the dream sequences, the memories, the non-sequitur scenes), Lambert clearly want to explore racial strife and gender relations. But those efforts are prevented by Marion's dreamily disjointed direction and Lee's stream-of-consciousness writing. Most importantly, Lee's characterization of Lambert remains distant, hollow in all his howling, despite the best efforts of Clinton Faulkner. Never whiny in his complaints and always noble in his lecturing, Faulkner endows Lambert with real distress, with a genuine need for...well, something. The play's episodic chaos might otherwise be frightening, but without that central character fleshed out and the throughline dimly lit, there's nothing with which to connect and no place to fear going... Somewhat oddly, Lambert's visual components do not seem to match the surreal nature of the acting and the writing. Andis Gjoni's set—a smattering of mattresses, blankets, and well-placed pieces of junk—highlights the comfortableness that this outcast group has created, rather than the inherent eeriness and loneliness of a subway tunnel. In turn, rather than depicting a needed sense of creepy grittiness, Russel Phillip Drapkin's shadowy lighting more often theatrically spotlights the play's emotional moments.
New York Times D+
(Rachel Saltz) At two and a half hours, “Lambert,” which has been reworked and updated, feels overlong and overcrowded with ideas, a piece still searching for focus. It’s not all heavy going. Mr. Lee can be funny. “You know what I’m sayin’?” one character asks another. The reply, “Don’t count on it.” At times, though, the subway platform resembles an insane asylum, with all the crazies talking past one another. Some of what they say is interesting, but much of it fails to register as it floats by untethered. The production, directed by Cyndy A. Marion, occasionally has a similarly frantic quality, and Ms. Marion allows some of the performances to devolve into shtick.
Village Voice D-
(Alexis Soloski) Lee has updated some of the language and likely fiddled with the play's mix of realism and absurdum, but he's left in a wealth of extraneous dialogue and some fairly unreconstructed views of women, sexual desire, and race. Yes, Lambert's girlfriend is portrayed as naive, but it's difficult to imagine a cutie so blinkered that she'd exclaim to her black beau, "Gonna be a SOUL sister. Yeah, I'm gonna laugh like you black people do. Yeah, and I'm gonna dance the way you all dance, too." Then she offers a helpful demonstration. Like the script, Cyndy A. Marion's direction doesn't require more than one dimension from her actors, though old hands Arthur French and Gloria Sauve, and occasionally Clinton Faulkner as Lambert, transcend the text. Rather than include this play in Lees canon, it's best consigned to the apocrypha.
Theatermania F+
(Patrick Lee) The playwright has assigned a dominant trait or problem to each of his six characters; it's no wonder that they register as types rather than as believable flesh and blood people... The dialogue is overloaded with exposition -- in dull sequence, we learn how each character has come to live underground -- but the play is entirely free of surprise and of tangible dramatic conflict. This is especially apparent with the main character, a former English professor, and African-American, named Lambert (Clinton Faulkner) who we're told is suffering profoundly after a break-up with white society girl Virginia (Heather Massie). We see the two in ponderous, overly talky flashbacks that consist of their not-at-all believable fights: she has a jungle fever fetish, longing to be his "white chick soul sister," until she takes him home to disgrace her family. We learn all this in declamatory speeches, rather than in dramatized scenes, that bear little resemblance to how people actually talk.
That Sounds Cool F
(Aaron Riccio) Given that Leslie Lee is an OBIE-winning playwright whose First Breeze of Summer was just very well received at Signature, let's just call this passion project of his a Wesley Willis moment. Not to be dismissive, but there's a reason this play hasn't been produced in its thirty-year life. As for other reasons: the narrative device of a memory play crouched in realism doesn't work.
Offoffonline A 13; Backstage A- 12; Nytheatre.com D+ 5; New York Times D+ 5; Village Voice D- 3; Theatermania F+ 2; That Sounds Cool F 1; TOTAL: 41/7 = 5.86 (C-)
Read On »
By Leslie Lee. Directed by Cyndy A. Marion. La MaMa E.T.C. (CLOSED)
Adrienne Cea of Offoffonline and Jason Fitzgerald of Backstage found much to enjoy in this first staging of Leslie Lee's 30-year-old play, but they are the only ones. In the play, an African-American ex-English professor named Lambert moves into an abandoned subway station after a break-up with his Caucasian girlfriend. Most critics find the story dated, the dialogue unrealistic, the characters one-dimensional, and the acting uneven, though they mostly admire Andis Gjoni's sets.
Offoffonline A
(Adrienne Cea) Leslie Lee's bleak drama, "The Book of Lambert" is a strong, unflinching character study of six souls wasting their lives away in the shadowy corners of a subway station. When the play opens, each character stirs in his or her sleep, eventually stretching to life to reveal the events of the past that have anchored their present. The obstacles range from small faraway memories to unsettled insecurities to the most debilitating neglect and disapproval from unloving parents... With this sizeable heaping of heavy subject matter, "The Book of Lambert" could easily feel as weighty as its characters' troubles. Fortunately, Lee keeps the action fast-paced, colorful, and at times even humorous.
Backstage A-
(Jason Fitzgerald) The play's imagery is delicate and sophisticated, as in the oranges -- tragic because so banal -- that Zinth bruises to get a rise out of Otto. Lee emerges as one of America's great poets of race relations in the interracial love affair between Lambert and his "Juliet," Virginia, which unfolds less as a romantic melodrama than as a condemnation of white liberal hypocrisy. She loves for the same reason she leaves him: his "black magic."... Still, La MaMa E.T.C. has given The Book of Lambert a fine -- and overdue -- world premiere. Clinton Faulkner as Lambert is a dead ringer for a young Denzel Washington and a revelation as a leading man. Andis Gjoni's set is deep and decrepit enough to be a picture of the play's journey into the dark, and the haunting lights from a facsimile subway tunnel are a reminder of the darkness that always accompanies the path to light.
Nytheatre.com D+
(Allison Taylor) When you piece together the various episodic scraps (the dream sequences, the memories, the non-sequitur scenes), Lambert clearly want to explore racial strife and gender relations. But those efforts are prevented by Marion's dreamily disjointed direction and Lee's stream-of-consciousness writing. Most importantly, Lee's characterization of Lambert remains distant, hollow in all his howling, despite the best efforts of Clinton Faulkner. Never whiny in his complaints and always noble in his lecturing, Faulkner endows Lambert with real distress, with a genuine need for...well, something. The play's episodic chaos might otherwise be frightening, but without that central character fleshed out and the throughline dimly lit, there's nothing with which to connect and no place to fear going... Somewhat oddly, Lambert's visual components do not seem to match the surreal nature of the acting and the writing. Andis Gjoni's set—a smattering of mattresses, blankets, and well-placed pieces of junk—highlights the comfortableness that this outcast group has created, rather than the inherent eeriness and loneliness of a subway tunnel. In turn, rather than depicting a needed sense of creepy grittiness, Russel Phillip Drapkin's shadowy lighting more often theatrically spotlights the play's emotional moments.
New York Times D+
(Rachel Saltz) At two and a half hours, “Lambert,” which has been reworked and updated, feels overlong and overcrowded with ideas, a piece still searching for focus. It’s not all heavy going. Mr. Lee can be funny. “You know what I’m sayin’?” one character asks another. The reply, “Don’t count on it.” At times, though, the subway platform resembles an insane asylum, with all the crazies talking past one another. Some of what they say is interesting, but much of it fails to register as it floats by untethered. The production, directed by Cyndy A. Marion, occasionally has a similarly frantic quality, and Ms. Marion allows some of the performances to devolve into shtick.
Village Voice D-
(Alexis Soloski) Lee has updated some of the language and likely fiddled with the play's mix of realism and absurdum, but he's left in a wealth of extraneous dialogue and some fairly unreconstructed views of women, sexual desire, and race. Yes, Lambert's girlfriend is portrayed as naive, but it's difficult to imagine a cutie so blinkered that she'd exclaim to her black beau, "Gonna be a SOUL sister. Yeah, I'm gonna laugh like you black people do. Yeah, and I'm gonna dance the way you all dance, too." Then she offers a helpful demonstration. Like the script, Cyndy A. Marion's direction doesn't require more than one dimension from her actors, though old hands Arthur French and Gloria Sauve, and occasionally Clinton Faulkner as Lambert, transcend the text. Rather than include this play in Lees canon, it's best consigned to the apocrypha.
Theatermania F+
(Patrick Lee) The playwright has assigned a dominant trait or problem to each of his six characters; it's no wonder that they register as types rather than as believable flesh and blood people... The dialogue is overloaded with exposition -- in dull sequence, we learn how each character has come to live underground -- but the play is entirely free of surprise and of tangible dramatic conflict. This is especially apparent with the main character, a former English professor, and African-American, named Lambert (Clinton Faulkner) who we're told is suffering profoundly after a break-up with white society girl Virginia (Heather Massie). We see the two in ponderous, overly talky flashbacks that consist of their not-at-all believable fights: she has a jungle fever fetish, longing to be his "white chick soul sister," until she takes him home to disgrace her family. We learn all this in declamatory speeches, rather than in dramatized scenes, that bear little resemblance to how people actually talk.
That Sounds Cool F
(Aaron Riccio) Given that Leslie Lee is an OBIE-winning playwright whose First Breeze of Summer was just very well received at Signature, let's just call this passion project of his a Wesley Willis moment. Not to be dismissive, but there's a reason this play hasn't been produced in its thirty-year life. As for other reasons: the narrative device of a memory play crouched in realism doesn't work.
Offoffonline A 13; Backstage A- 12; Nytheatre.com D+ 5; New York Times D+ 5; Village Voice D- 3; Theatermania F+ 2; That Sounds Cool F 1; TOTAL: 41/7 = 5.86 (C-)
Astronome: A Night at the Opera
GRADE: B+
By Richard Foreman and John Zorn. Directed by Richard Foreman. The Ontological-Hysteric Theater. (CLOSED)
Critics and audiences who follow Richard Foreman's annual downtown avant-stravaganzas tend to be converts to his unique theatrical vision, but there's nothing dutiful about the acolytes' praise for this year's installment, which Foreman created alongside the eclectic downtown composer John Zorn. Though the Times' Brantley doesn't feel that the two auteurs are on the same page, and most critics duly note the rock-level volume of the playback (free plugs provided for sensitive ears), most find the piece raucous and stimulating. UPDATE: George Hunka's late-coming review makes some fresh and deeply informed points.
Gothamist A
(John Del Signore) This year's Gothic baroque extravaganza is more dynamic than the past few years, in which Foreman experimented with film and a more subdued stagecraft. For now at least, he's dropped the film and picked up avant-garde composer John Zorn, who's composed a feral, heavy metal score for the show...It's a real panic, and a challenge to describe...Approached without any expectation for traditional narrative, Astronome: A Night at the Opera is as "entertaining" as any boulevard comedy, if not more so. What we have here is a taut hour of ritualistic frenzy, sans answers, and if you enjoy art that revels in what l like to call "What the fuck?" moments, you'll love this...Zorn's score is cacophonous but not abusive; if you've attended Bowery Ballroom lately you'll be fine with the volume level (though complimentary earplugs are handed out just in case).
Time Out NY A
(David Cote) The most energized and wildly fun Foreman offering in years. Gone are the mesmerizing video screens of the last three seasons; this one is all ear-pounding rock, weird voiceovers and unending manic activity by a mostly silent cast of seven. In its dense, nightmarish inventory of images, noses, fruit, wagging tongues and giant saltshakers figure prominently...Foreman is 71, but Astronome comes across as the work of a young, angry director...Who knows where this great director will head next, but wherever it is, he’s not going quietly.
Village Voice A-
(Tom Sellar) Hold on to your Viking helmets: While operatic in emotion, Zorn's recorded score doesn't aspire to that genre in any conventional sense. The human voices we hear let out orgiastic shrieks and groans, whispering, whimpering, and murmuring mysterious words and phrases. Zorn's soaring instrumentals—at rock-concert volume—move from throbbing, contemplative bass lines into raucous ecstasy. (Given Astronome's reliance on aural intensity, it's a shame we can't hear it with live musicians)...Astronome offers us what a night at the opera always should: a head rush and a quick trip to the sublime.
That Sounds Cool B+
(Aaron Riccio) Textual analysis seems a little pointless, though, given the way in which Hebrew and English letters are spiderwebbed across the set, alchemical diagrams come wheeling out, and a woman in all black (Deborah Wallace) keeps attempting to erase an already clean blackboard. It's also hard to put a straight face on actors going in and out of a giant nostril and mouth, something that seems reminiscent of Double Dare, or the long-tongued lounge "singer," a green-skinned Tony Clifton (Jamie Peterson). What's necessary, by Foreman's rules--"I don't see it, you don't see it, nobody sees it except the man stumbling upon it quite by accident"--is to just experience it. Watch the symmetrical moments, the tightly choreographed shaking and collapsing. See the blinking photo flashes, the swinging pendulum, the out-of-place bras. Listen through the throat-clearing music...His play isn't painful, nor really disturbing, and there are enough oddly wonderful and curious things to fascinate the intrepid theatergoer.
The New Yorker B+
There’s no singing in Richard Foreman’s new “opera”—a collaboration with the composer John Zorn—or dialogue, unless you count the occasional repetition of the recorded words “MendelSchwartz” and “stage fright,” or the sound of loud retching. There’s no plot or recognizable characters. There’s just seven actors in capes and dog snouts doing nonsensical things: mindlessly cleaning the wall with a pillow, pulling crumpled paper out of a giant nose with long tongs, masturbating, whipping each other, carrying around a giant snake-like object with a blow-up doll’s head. All the while, extremely loud guitar music with little or no melody shrieks and thumps in the background (ear plugs are provided). It’s an hour-long punk-rock nightmare meant (if anything is meant at all) to remind us that, though life is neither coherent nor pleasant, it can sometimes be weirdly fun.
Backstage B+
(Ronni Reich) Both Foreman and Zorn vividly bring out the work's dark themes with uncommon candor, lucidity, and depth. But together they are often overstimulating, with each one's contribution vying for focus. In its concept, hour length, and execution, Astronome is a challenging piece to experience. The show begins with a warning about volume and instructions for inserting the earplugs the company provides. While the music can only be heard and felt at full force without them, this performance is not for the faint of ear or the faint of heart.
The New York Times B
(Ben Brantley) Disconnectedness is a staple of the mind-jolting, self-contained universes that Mr. Foreman has been creating since the late 1960s. Life as presented by this enduring artist is a cosmic vaudeville show in which the material world shifts, melts and shocks...But I’m not sure that the artistic gap between what’s seen and what’s heard in “Astronome” is entirely intentional. This is the first time in my experience of Mr. Foreman’s shows at St. Mark’s Church that he has given equal billing to a collaborator. He and Mr. Zorn...may well be conceptual soul mates. But their styles never truly meld here.
Superfluities B
(George Hunka) Foreman's Ontological work has always seemed sui generis the work of an individual consciousness struggling with itself; now, though, he welcomes the aesthetic consciousness of another artist as an equal rather than an element serving a larger project. So technique and form shift to accommodate Zorn's aural vision in Astronome, and it's the sound of the play which marks its first shift. Foreman's soundscapes, as he composes them, are textured, nuanced and frequently multi-layered; Zorn, at least in his score for Astronome, utilizes loud blurts and raging rhythms – there are no Schubert songs in this production, at least none that I could recognize...Leaving the sound and much of the "language" to Zorn allows Foreman to concentrate on blocking and visual design, and here Foreman has produced his lushest visual work in years...For all that, though, it's not as satisfying a piece as Foreman's recent Ontological creations...Perhaps the most evident clue to Foreman's arm's-length distance from this provocation (a necessary distance, given Zorn's equal contribution) is that, for the first time perhaps in the 40-year history of Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric work, the director is nowhere to be found in the playing space; normally seated in the audience, running an effects board, Foreman this year absents himself from the performances, allowing the production to whir along without his metaphorical oversight...He's missed; his absence from his own consciousness in this case is disquieting.
Gothamist A 13; Time Out NY A 13; Village Voice A- 12; That Sounds Cool B+ 11; New Yorker B+ 11; Backstage B+ 11; The New York Times B 10; Superfluities B 10; TOTAL: 91/8=11.38 (B+)
Read On »
By Richard Foreman and John Zorn. Directed by Richard Foreman. The Ontological-Hysteric Theater. (CLOSED)
Critics and audiences who follow Richard Foreman's annual downtown avant-stravaganzas tend to be converts to his unique theatrical vision, but there's nothing dutiful about the acolytes' praise for this year's installment, which Foreman created alongside the eclectic downtown composer John Zorn. Though the Times' Brantley doesn't feel that the two auteurs are on the same page, and most critics duly note the rock-level volume of the playback (free plugs provided for sensitive ears), most find the piece raucous and stimulating. UPDATE: George Hunka's late-coming review makes some fresh and deeply informed points.
Gothamist A
(John Del Signore) This year's Gothic baroque extravaganza is more dynamic than the past few years, in which Foreman experimented with film and a more subdued stagecraft. For now at least, he's dropped the film and picked up avant-garde composer John Zorn, who's composed a feral, heavy metal score for the show...It's a real panic, and a challenge to describe...Approached without any expectation for traditional narrative, Astronome: A Night at the Opera is as "entertaining" as any boulevard comedy, if not more so. What we have here is a taut hour of ritualistic frenzy, sans answers, and if you enjoy art that revels in what l like to call "What the fuck?" moments, you'll love this...Zorn's score is cacophonous but not abusive; if you've attended Bowery Ballroom lately you'll be fine with the volume level (though complimentary earplugs are handed out just in case).
Time Out NY A
(David Cote) The most energized and wildly fun Foreman offering in years. Gone are the mesmerizing video screens of the last three seasons; this one is all ear-pounding rock, weird voiceovers and unending manic activity by a mostly silent cast of seven. In its dense, nightmarish inventory of images, noses, fruit, wagging tongues and giant saltshakers figure prominently...Foreman is 71, but Astronome comes across as the work of a young, angry director...Who knows where this great director will head next, but wherever it is, he’s not going quietly.
Village Voice A-
(Tom Sellar) Hold on to your Viking helmets: While operatic in emotion, Zorn's recorded score doesn't aspire to that genre in any conventional sense. The human voices we hear let out orgiastic shrieks and groans, whispering, whimpering, and murmuring mysterious words and phrases. Zorn's soaring instrumentals—at rock-concert volume—move from throbbing, contemplative bass lines into raucous ecstasy. (Given Astronome's reliance on aural intensity, it's a shame we can't hear it with live musicians)...Astronome offers us what a night at the opera always should: a head rush and a quick trip to the sublime.
That Sounds Cool B+
(Aaron Riccio) Textual analysis seems a little pointless, though, given the way in which Hebrew and English letters are spiderwebbed across the set, alchemical diagrams come wheeling out, and a woman in all black (Deborah Wallace) keeps attempting to erase an already clean blackboard. It's also hard to put a straight face on actors going in and out of a giant nostril and mouth, something that seems reminiscent of Double Dare, or the long-tongued lounge "singer," a green-skinned Tony Clifton (Jamie Peterson). What's necessary, by Foreman's rules--"I don't see it, you don't see it, nobody sees it except the man stumbling upon it quite by accident"--is to just experience it. Watch the symmetrical moments, the tightly choreographed shaking and collapsing. See the blinking photo flashes, the swinging pendulum, the out-of-place bras. Listen through the throat-clearing music...His play isn't painful, nor really disturbing, and there are enough oddly wonderful and curious things to fascinate the intrepid theatergoer.
The New Yorker B+
There’s no singing in Richard Foreman’s new “opera”—a collaboration with the composer John Zorn—or dialogue, unless you count the occasional repetition of the recorded words “MendelSchwartz” and “stage fright,” or the sound of loud retching. There’s no plot or recognizable characters. There’s just seven actors in capes and dog snouts doing nonsensical things: mindlessly cleaning the wall with a pillow, pulling crumpled paper out of a giant nose with long tongs, masturbating, whipping each other, carrying around a giant snake-like object with a blow-up doll’s head. All the while, extremely loud guitar music with little or no melody shrieks and thumps in the background (ear plugs are provided). It’s an hour-long punk-rock nightmare meant (if anything is meant at all) to remind us that, though life is neither coherent nor pleasant, it can sometimes be weirdly fun.
Backstage B+
(Ronni Reich) Both Foreman and Zorn vividly bring out the work's dark themes with uncommon candor, lucidity, and depth. But together they are often overstimulating, with each one's contribution vying for focus. In its concept, hour length, and execution, Astronome is a challenging piece to experience. The show begins with a warning about volume and instructions for inserting the earplugs the company provides. While the music can only be heard and felt at full force without them, this performance is not for the faint of ear or the faint of heart.
The New York Times B
(Ben Brantley) Disconnectedness is a staple of the mind-jolting, self-contained universes that Mr. Foreman has been creating since the late 1960s. Life as presented by this enduring artist is a cosmic vaudeville show in which the material world shifts, melts and shocks...But I’m not sure that the artistic gap between what’s seen and what’s heard in “Astronome” is entirely intentional. This is the first time in my experience of Mr. Foreman’s shows at St. Mark’s Church that he has given equal billing to a collaborator. He and Mr. Zorn...may well be conceptual soul mates. But their styles never truly meld here.
Superfluities B
(George Hunka) Foreman's Ontological work has always seemed sui generis the work of an individual consciousness struggling with itself; now, though, he welcomes the aesthetic consciousness of another artist as an equal rather than an element serving a larger project. So technique and form shift to accommodate Zorn's aural vision in Astronome, and it's the sound of the play which marks its first shift. Foreman's soundscapes, as he composes them, are textured, nuanced and frequently multi-layered; Zorn, at least in his score for Astronome, utilizes loud blurts and raging rhythms – there are no Schubert songs in this production, at least none that I could recognize...Leaving the sound and much of the "language" to Zorn allows Foreman to concentrate on blocking and visual design, and here Foreman has produced his lushest visual work in years...For all that, though, it's not as satisfying a piece as Foreman's recent Ontological creations...Perhaps the most evident clue to Foreman's arm's-length distance from this provocation (a necessary distance, given Zorn's equal contribution) is that, for the first time perhaps in the 40-year history of Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric work, the director is nowhere to be found in the playing space; normally seated in the audience, running an effects board, Foreman this year absents himself from the performances, allowing the production to whir along without his metaphorical oversight...He's missed; his absence from his own consciousness in this case is disquieting.
Gothamist A 13; Time Out NY A 13; Village Voice A- 12; That Sounds Cool B+ 11; New Yorker B+ 11; Backstage B+ 11; The New York Times B 10; Superfluities B 10; TOTAL: 91/8=11.38 (B+)
The Winter's Tale
GRADE: B+
By William Shakespeare; Directed by Sam Mendes; At the Brooklyn Academy of Music (CLOSED)
As might be expected with a script as strange as Shakespeare's late-period romance The Winter's Tale, critics are divided over how Sam Mendes reconciles the play's largely tragic first three acts with its pastoral comedy fourth and its redemptive fifth. Several reviewers think Mendes overdoes it a bit with his quasi-Wild West take on the country bumpkins of Act IV (lead by a widely praised Ethan Hawke), but Backstage's Adam Perlman feels the exact opposite.
NYTheatre A+
(Mitchell Conway) Simon Russell Beale gives an incomparable performance as Leontes in The Bridge Project's production of The Winter's Tale, directed by Sam Mendes. In fact, every performance is marvelous. The design components are stunning. This show is remarkable!
Just Shows To Go You A
(Patrick Lee) Sam Mendes’ production of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale is a wondrous, gorgeous gem... Simon Russell Beale, Sinead Cusack, Rebecca Hall, Ethan Hawke and Richard Easton are all outstanding; it’s too rare a pleasure to see an ensemble so thoroughly comfortable with Shakespeare’s language and rhythms. In previous productions I’ve seen, the play’s finale has never worked; here, I was moved to tears.
AMNY A
(Matt Windman) It’s now official. Year one of the three-year transatlantic Bridge Project – uniting an equally mixed group of English and American actors to perform classical plays in repertory under the direction of Sam Mendes – is a shining success... he biggest delight of the cast is Ethan Hawke in the comedy relief role of Autolycus, Bohemia’s thieving troubadour. With a guitar in hand and a beggar’s cup in the other, Hawke is dressed as a poor, disheveled drifter and later as an Alice Cooper rip-off.
NYPost A
(Frank Scheck) That [Mendes] staging of this "problem play" is so coherent and entertaining is a testament to the promise of this burgeoning company. Along with their superb production of "The Cherry Orchard," it immediately establishes The Bridge Project as a force to be reckoned with.
NY Daily News A
(Joe Dziemianowicz) An uneasy mix of dark tragedy, boisterous comedy and magical fantasy, The Winter's Tale is deemed one of Shakespeare's "problem" plays. But Sam Mendes' elegant production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music so skillfully reconciles jarring moods and jumps in time, you're apt to wonder, what's the problem?
American Theater Web A
(Andy Propst) An exceptional evening of Shakespearean theater...t by the time the action shifts back to Bohemia, theatergoers have been both moved and amused, and thus, the fairy tale ending that waits in store for Leontes and the rest has an almost inescapable emotional impact. These are characters for whom theatergoers have come to care, almost unquestioningly, and a happy end seems to be the only just thing for them all. It's rare that this romance, one of the trickiest in the canon, can inspire both extremes of emotions in audiences while telling the story in what feels to be a lucid, unified manner, and theatergoers should certainly consider a trip to BAM before this limited engagement ends.
Newsday A
(Linda Winer) Like the Chekhov, this one has been directed by Mendes, the multi-tasking English director of such wildly different adventures as Cabaret and Revolutionary Road. Where his flourishes felt superimposed on the poetic naturalism of Cherry Orchard, however, the fantastical touches help connect the uneasy halves of revenge tragedy and bumpkin comedy in Shakespeare's unwieldy, often unpleasant, ultimately ravishing, mystical romance... When Shakespeare abruptly switches to the countryside, the noble acting turns to inspired comedy, complete with concert and bawdy dance. Richard Easton is delicious as the dim old Shepherd and Ethan Hawke is almost shockingly hilarious as a rogue channeling Bob Dylan's troubadour period.
TheaterMania A-
(David Finkle)
With his late dramas like The Winter's Tale, now at BAM as part of The Bridge Project, Shakespeare entered his own maturity, promoting forgiveness. Fortunately, no real forgiveness is necessary where Sam Mendes' lucid, tough-minded, and ultimately charming production of this problematic play -- which is ordinarily considered a play about death and rebirth but is just as much about the related importance of penitence and its humane reward -- is concerned.
The New Yorker B+
(Unsigned) Shakespeare’s late drama is full of stylistic curveballs, swerving from court tragedy to bawdy pastoral and back. But Mendes binds the play together on the strength of stagecraft and of his compelling cast, which includes Simon Russell Beale, Sinéad Cusack, Ethan Hawke (channelling Tom Waits as the pickpocket Autolycus), and the sonorous stage beauty Rebecca Hall.
Associated Press B+
(Unsigned) The Winter's Tale is a strangely schizophrenic play, but director Sam Mendes has found the heart in this odd Shakespearean romance and made its disparate pieces work. He has directed the production, now on view at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Harvey Theatre, with elegance, skillfully weaving its strands of tragedy and comedy into a blissfully satisfying theatrical whole.
NYTimes B
(Ben Brantley) The first 90 minutes of this “Winter’s Tale” — in repertory at the Harvey Theater of the Brooklyn Academy of Music with Mr. Mendes’s imbalanced but enjoyable version of Chekhov’s “Cherry Orchard,” which opened last month — have a pure emotional strength that leave you open mouthed and teary eyed... [but] The play’s second half is largely set 16 years later in Bohemia, which has been envisioned as a sunny frontier land, in the style of the movie musical “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.”I assume that the contrast between these worlds is meant to make witty contrasting use of the Bridge Project’s bi-national cast of British and American performers. But the hee-haw hoedown sensibility registers as a knee-jerk artistic choice, and Mr. Mendes doesn’t seem to feel at home here. I’ve seen Wild, Wild West interpretations of Shakespeare comedies too many times, and they’re usually strained in their rustic jollity and bawdiness...Nonetheless, that final act in Sicilia is absolutely gorgeous.
Bloomberg B
(John Simon) This being a romance, all ends well, improbabilities and even impossibilities be damned. But it is hard to accept two things even in a fairy-tale: the famous stage direction, “Exit Antigonus pursued by a bear” and the final scene, with the statue of dead Hermione coming to life to welcome her lost and found daughter. Among the other high points of Sam Mendes’s revival are a most creditable bear and, no less admirable, Hall, posing as Hermione’s statue with perfect immobility. Other elements of the production, however, are less impressive. Beale is a well-spoken actor strikingly lacking charm and physical appeal. His Leontes forfeits the modicum of sympathy the outrageous king must command. As King Polixenes, the dutiful Josh Hamilton displays scant regal presence.
Variety B
The Winter’s Tale lurches from tragedy to comedy to romance, its schizophrenia cemented from scene one, when the infant prince of Sicilia ponders his choice of bedtime story: “Merry or sad shall it be? As merry as you will. A sad tale’s best for winter.” The play traditionally resists categorization, but the heart of Sam Mendes’ production is rooted firmly in pathos and sobriety, making Shakespeare’s act-four departure into boisterous pastoral revelry a rude interruption to the dramatic flow. While it doesn’t smooth out the unevenness, this elegant staging is so poignant in its sorrowful moods that the evening is both suspenseful and satisfying.
Village Voice B-
(Michael Feingold) The main reason to see The Winter's Tale (BAM Harvey) is Ethan Hawke's Autolycus, a character perfectly if un-Shakespeareanly "placed," by Hawke and composer Mark Bennett: a guitar-strumming flimflam artist out of a revisionist '60s Western by way of a North Beach coffeehouse... Otherwise, Mendes catches the play's shape tidily, but the passion it demands is mostly lacking.
Backstage C+
(Adam R. Perlman) A sad tale may be best for winter, but is it best for The Winter's Tale? Sam Mendes certainly seems to think so, for in his star-studded new production -- playing in rep with The Cherry Orchard at BAM -- he has conceived of the late-Shakespeare romance as a muted tragedy. This is not an insupportable approach, but this being the Bridge Project, he might have done more to link the tragic and comic elements. As it stands, you might have a richer evening of theatre if you arrive after intermission.
Wall St. Journal C-
(Terry Teachout) Mr. Mendes and his British-American cast have reconfigured Shakespeare's complex, coincidence-laden play as a semi-modern domestic melodrama whose 19th-century setting sheds no clarifying light on the text, just as the actors, fine though they are, mostly fail to find the music in the verse. As Leontes, the king whose mad jealousy smashes up his happy family, Simon Russell Beale, an actor whom I admire, seesaws inexplicably and monotonously between two notes, one high and the other a little less so.
NYTR A+ 14; NYP A 13; JSTGU A 13; ND A 13; NYDN A 13; ATW A 13; TM A- 12; AP B+ 11; TNY B+ 11; NYT B 10; BB B 10; VAR B 10; VV B- 9; BS C+ 8; WSJ C- 6. TOTAL = 166 /15 = 11.06
(B+)
Read On »
By William Shakespeare; Directed by Sam Mendes; At the Brooklyn Academy of Music (CLOSED)
As might be expected with a script as strange as Shakespeare's late-period romance The Winter's Tale, critics are divided over how Sam Mendes reconciles the play's largely tragic first three acts with its pastoral comedy fourth and its redemptive fifth. Several reviewers think Mendes overdoes it a bit with his quasi-Wild West take on the country bumpkins of Act IV (lead by a widely praised Ethan Hawke), but Backstage's Adam Perlman feels the exact opposite.
NYTheatre A+
(Mitchell Conway) Simon Russell Beale gives an incomparable performance as Leontes in The Bridge Project's production of The Winter's Tale, directed by Sam Mendes. In fact, every performance is marvelous. The design components are stunning. This show is remarkable!
Just Shows To Go You A
(Patrick Lee) Sam Mendes’ production of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale is a wondrous, gorgeous gem... Simon Russell Beale, Sinead Cusack, Rebecca Hall, Ethan Hawke and Richard Easton are all outstanding; it’s too rare a pleasure to see an ensemble so thoroughly comfortable with Shakespeare’s language and rhythms. In previous productions I’ve seen, the play’s finale has never worked; here, I was moved to tears.
AMNY A
(Matt Windman) It’s now official. Year one of the three-year transatlantic Bridge Project – uniting an equally mixed group of English and American actors to perform classical plays in repertory under the direction of Sam Mendes – is a shining success... he biggest delight of the cast is Ethan Hawke in the comedy relief role of Autolycus, Bohemia’s thieving troubadour. With a guitar in hand and a beggar’s cup in the other, Hawke is dressed as a poor, disheveled drifter and later as an Alice Cooper rip-off.
NYPost A
(Frank Scheck) That [Mendes] staging of this "problem play" is so coherent and entertaining is a testament to the promise of this burgeoning company. Along with their superb production of "The Cherry Orchard," it immediately establishes The Bridge Project as a force to be reckoned with.
NY Daily News A
(Joe Dziemianowicz) An uneasy mix of dark tragedy, boisterous comedy and magical fantasy, The Winter's Tale is deemed one of Shakespeare's "problem" plays. But Sam Mendes' elegant production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music so skillfully reconciles jarring moods and jumps in time, you're apt to wonder, what's the problem?
American Theater Web A
(Andy Propst) An exceptional evening of Shakespearean theater...t by the time the action shifts back to Bohemia, theatergoers have been both moved and amused, and thus, the fairy tale ending that waits in store for Leontes and the rest has an almost inescapable emotional impact. These are characters for whom theatergoers have come to care, almost unquestioningly, and a happy end seems to be the only just thing for them all. It's rare that this romance, one of the trickiest in the canon, can inspire both extremes of emotions in audiences while telling the story in what feels to be a lucid, unified manner, and theatergoers should certainly consider a trip to BAM before this limited engagement ends.
Newsday A
(Linda Winer) Like the Chekhov, this one has been directed by Mendes, the multi-tasking English director of such wildly different adventures as Cabaret and Revolutionary Road. Where his flourishes felt superimposed on the poetic naturalism of Cherry Orchard, however, the fantastical touches help connect the uneasy halves of revenge tragedy and bumpkin comedy in Shakespeare's unwieldy, often unpleasant, ultimately ravishing, mystical romance... When Shakespeare abruptly switches to the countryside, the noble acting turns to inspired comedy, complete with concert and bawdy dance. Richard Easton is delicious as the dim old Shepherd and Ethan Hawke is almost shockingly hilarious as a rogue channeling Bob Dylan's troubadour period.
TheaterMania A-
(David Finkle)
With his late dramas like The Winter's Tale, now at BAM as part of The Bridge Project, Shakespeare entered his own maturity, promoting forgiveness. Fortunately, no real forgiveness is necessary where Sam Mendes' lucid, tough-minded, and ultimately charming production of this problematic play -- which is ordinarily considered a play about death and rebirth but is just as much about the related importance of penitence and its humane reward -- is concerned.
The New Yorker B+
(Unsigned) Shakespeare’s late drama is full of stylistic curveballs, swerving from court tragedy to bawdy pastoral and back. But Mendes binds the play together on the strength of stagecraft and of his compelling cast, which includes Simon Russell Beale, Sinéad Cusack, Ethan Hawke (channelling Tom Waits as the pickpocket Autolycus), and the sonorous stage beauty Rebecca Hall.
Associated Press B+
(Unsigned) The Winter's Tale is a strangely schizophrenic play, but director Sam Mendes has found the heart in this odd Shakespearean romance and made its disparate pieces work. He has directed the production, now on view at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Harvey Theatre, with elegance, skillfully weaving its strands of tragedy and comedy into a blissfully satisfying theatrical whole.
NYTimes B
(Ben Brantley) The first 90 minutes of this “Winter’s Tale” — in repertory at the Harvey Theater of the Brooklyn Academy of Music with Mr. Mendes’s imbalanced but enjoyable version of Chekhov’s “Cherry Orchard,” which opened last month — have a pure emotional strength that leave you open mouthed and teary eyed... [but] The play’s second half is largely set 16 years later in Bohemia, which has been envisioned as a sunny frontier land, in the style of the movie musical “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.”I assume that the contrast between these worlds is meant to make witty contrasting use of the Bridge Project’s bi-national cast of British and American performers. But the hee-haw hoedown sensibility registers as a knee-jerk artistic choice, and Mr. Mendes doesn’t seem to feel at home here. I’ve seen Wild, Wild West interpretations of Shakespeare comedies too many times, and they’re usually strained in their rustic jollity and bawdiness...Nonetheless, that final act in Sicilia is absolutely gorgeous.
Bloomberg B
(John Simon) This being a romance, all ends well, improbabilities and even impossibilities be damned. But it is hard to accept two things even in a fairy-tale: the famous stage direction, “Exit Antigonus pursued by a bear” and the final scene, with the statue of dead Hermione coming to life to welcome her lost and found daughter. Among the other high points of Sam Mendes’s revival are a most creditable bear and, no less admirable, Hall, posing as Hermione’s statue with perfect immobility. Other elements of the production, however, are less impressive. Beale is a well-spoken actor strikingly lacking charm and physical appeal. His Leontes forfeits the modicum of sympathy the outrageous king must command. As King Polixenes, the dutiful Josh Hamilton displays scant regal presence.
Variety B
The Winter’s Tale lurches from tragedy to comedy to romance, its schizophrenia cemented from scene one, when the infant prince of Sicilia ponders his choice of bedtime story: “Merry or sad shall it be? As merry as you will. A sad tale’s best for winter.” The play traditionally resists categorization, but the heart of Sam Mendes’ production is rooted firmly in pathos and sobriety, making Shakespeare’s act-four departure into boisterous pastoral revelry a rude interruption to the dramatic flow. While it doesn’t smooth out the unevenness, this elegant staging is so poignant in its sorrowful moods that the evening is both suspenseful and satisfying.
Village Voice B-
(Michael Feingold) The main reason to see The Winter's Tale (BAM Harvey) is Ethan Hawke's Autolycus, a character perfectly if un-Shakespeareanly "placed," by Hawke and composer Mark Bennett: a guitar-strumming flimflam artist out of a revisionist '60s Western by way of a North Beach coffeehouse... Otherwise, Mendes catches the play's shape tidily, but the passion it demands is mostly lacking.
Backstage C+
(Adam R. Perlman) A sad tale may be best for winter, but is it best for The Winter's Tale? Sam Mendes certainly seems to think so, for in his star-studded new production -- playing in rep with The Cherry Orchard at BAM -- he has conceived of the late-Shakespeare romance as a muted tragedy. This is not an insupportable approach, but this being the Bridge Project, he might have done more to link the tragic and comic elements. As it stands, you might have a richer evening of theatre if you arrive after intermission.
Wall St. Journal C-
(Terry Teachout) Mr. Mendes and his British-American cast have reconfigured Shakespeare's complex, coincidence-laden play as a semi-modern domestic melodrama whose 19th-century setting sheds no clarifying light on the text, just as the actors, fine though they are, mostly fail to find the music in the verse. As Leontes, the king whose mad jealousy smashes up his happy family, Simon Russell Beale, an actor whom I admire, seesaws inexplicably and monotonously between two notes, one high and the other a little less so.
NYTR A+ 14; NYP A 13; JSTGU A 13; ND A 13; NYDN A 13; ATW A 13; TM A- 12; AP B+ 11; TNY B+ 11; NYT B 10; BB B 10; VAR B 10; VV B- 9; BS C+ 8; WSJ C- 6. TOTAL = 166 /15 = 11.06
(B+)
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