I'm positive that there are things I'm missing from early in the year, because I only have notes through April with me now. But, in chronological order, here are my top ten plays from 2014. It was harder to narrow down than I thought it would be, and so when it was a close call I went with the ones that have stuck with me, and that I've kept thinking about long after I saw them. It's been a pretty remarkable year for shows like that.
1. Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812: This is probably cheating, since I saw it for the first time shortly after moving to NYC in 2012. I absolutely adored it then, and I absolutely adored it when I saw it again after its move from Ars Nova to a bigger midtown location. It's a rock opera, written by Dave Malloy and directed by Rachel Chavkin, adapted from a small slice of Tolstoy's War and Peace. Young, naive Natasha Rostova travels to Moscow to await the return of her betrothed, Andrey, from the wars, but finds herself enchanted by the beautiful and not wholly trustworthy Anatole. Her story eventually intertwines with that of Pierre, Andrey's best friend, unhappily married to Anatole's sister. Dave Malloy originated the role of Pierre (though he was no longer playing it by the time I saw it in 2014) and Philippa Soo, playing Natasha, is staggeringly talented and a name to watch.
The music is beautiful, the performances were spot-on, the staging was inventive and made sitting through a three-hour rock opera adaptation of a Russian novel a positive delight. Oh, also, the actor playing Dolokhov gave us free wine because we happened to be sitting with someone he knew, so... all around, everything you want from an evening of theatre.
(seriously, if anyone reading this doesn't know this show, download it at once, it's truly great)
2. Twelfth Night: Okay, this one is probably also cheating, because I also saw this in both 2013 and 2014. But it's part of the reason I'm here in London now, so that's probably important. And this production completely transformed the way I look at Twelfth Night, which I freely admit I never much liked before, and now consider one of my favorites. This production allowed me to rediscover the joy in the play, which a lifetime of watching knock-offs of the Trevor Nunn film version had almost completely sapped away. It was my first all-male production, and I found the experiment fascinating-- and also that it justified my impulse that there is more than just nerdy dramaturgical interest to be gained from understanding early modern playhouse practice as deeply as possible... which in turn helped me justify the mostly completely batty decision to come to London.
3. Cripple of Inishmaan: This play taught me that I might possibly like two things I thought I didn't: Daniel Radcliffe's acting, and Martin McDonagh's writing. Blasphemy, I know-- but the only thing I ever read of his was The Pillowman, and then I was too traumatized to read more. But Inishmaan was an utter delight, and I will be the first to acknowledge that I seriously misjudged Daniel Radcliffe's talents-- and more importantly, I think, his humbleness and his obvious dedication to working hard at the job of acting, not just coasting along as a movie star, as he obviously could.
4. Much Ado About Nothing: I was terribly excited for Shakespeare in the Park's Much Ado About Nothing, and the show far exceeded my high expectations-- mostly by completely transforming those expectations. Like Twelfth Night, this production completely changed my understanding of the essential dynamics of the play. Lily Rabe and Hamish Linklater's Beatrice and Benedick were unlike any I've seen in the best possible way: rather than being obviously the two smartest, coolest people in the room-- so that the question of their getting together only seems to be an eye-rolling matter of when-- they portrayed the quarrelsome lovers as proud and prickly, lashing out when you sense they'd rather reach out, if only they weren't too afraid of being mocked. This is not to suggest that the pair were soaked in maudlin self-loathing, but rather that their vast intelligence and genuine high spirits were also undergirded with a strong instinct for self-preservation. Most interestingly, this had the effect of raising actual questions about their eventual union. Would they actually manage to overcome their quips and fear to get together? Their public denials in the last scene read to me, for the first time ever, not just as a silly final layover before the inevitable happy ending, but a moment in which there seemed to be a real chance that they would choose pride and safety over happiness at last.
5. Two Gentlemen of Verona: My wish for 2015 is that more people start producing all-female Shakespeare that a) isn't The Taming of the Shrew and b) doesn't feel like it needs to hedge its bets with explanations, framing devices, and commentary. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival's Two Gentlemen of Verona was a perfect example of the power that simply presenting a play and letting women embody it can have. The gender decision spoke for itself: director Sarah Rasmussen wisely recognized that no more adornment was required.
6. Into the Woods: I'd never actually seen a live Into the Woods before this production at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. It's a hard play for many musical theatre fans to see, I think, because the filmed Broadway version casts such a long shadow. But Amanda Denhert's production straddled the perfect line between staking an interpretive claim and sucking the magic out of the show by privileging the director's vision above the strength of the play itself. It was, in other words, sufficiently different from the original version to shake off the specters of Bernadette Peters, Joanna Gleason, and Chip Zien, but did not feel the need to achieve this by, say, setting it in modern-day New York City.
7. Julius Caesar: Yet another production that helped me see a play I thought I knew very well in an entirely new light. As I wrote, the trouble with Julius Caesar often seems to be that all the good bits-- or at least all the famous bits-- happen in acts 1-3. But Tom McKay's beautiful, soulful Brutus so fully inhabited the heart of the play, it became not just a story of politics and assassination, but a character study that had to be followed to the bitter end.
8. The James Plays (plus part 3): I can't stop thinking about these plays. Weeks after seeing them for the second time, I had to go buy the script because I couldn't stop trying to remember lines, scenes, and moments. The last time I can remember seeing a play and it having that kind of effect, the play was by Shakespeare. The opening scene of James I might be one of the best-written first scenes I've read, full stop. I've linked them anyway, but my reviews are so far from encompassing what I've come to think and feel about these plays, because I wrote the reviews right after seeing them, and it turns out these plays take much more time than that to fully unfold.
9. Charles III: When I first read about Charles III last spring I was desperate to see it, and I'm so glad that I not only got the chance, but it was exactly as awesome as I thought it would be. I was worried that I wouldn't understand the politics of it, but Mike Bartlett's drama is much more human than that. It's a classic Shakespearean historical tragedy, and its setting in the near future rather than the past only serves, somehow, to reinforce this feeling. As the man said, what's past is prologue.
10. The Knight of the Burning Pestle : How often do you feel pure, joyful delight in the theatre? Not often enough. But what's so remarkable about Burning Pestle is that it achieves this joy without just being a confection of a play. It's terribly silly, but it's not shallow. George and Nell ground the play, radiating warmth and welcome. If more plays reminded people that there's no right way to go to the theatre, maybe more people would come.
Showing posts with label almeida theatre. Show all posts
Showing posts with label almeida theatre. Show all posts
Thursday, January 1, 2015
Wednesday, November 26, 2014
Review: Charles III
One year in middle school, my very liberal social studies teacher (the same one who went on periodic rants about how Andrew Jackson should be taken off the twenty-- which he should be, by the way) taught us about the odd little laws encoded in some of our state's land use and real estate legislation, including fun little tidbits like it being illegal to sell certain pieces of land to African Americans. Obviously these were eventually superseded by civil rights legislation, but that's also why they remained on the books, inactive. It's amusing and in some sense slightly chilling to realize that there are arcane little bits of retrograde weirdness lying dormant within our legal system, perhaps just waiting for someone who is sufficiently clever and bigoted to find a way to carve them out.
In England, of course, that vestigial legal oddity is hidden in plain sight: the monarchy. It's still there. It sucks up massive amounts of taxpayer money. They have no power, but because England lacks a written constitution, that fact is maybe more of a gentleman's agreement than a law. At least, that's the tenuous situation that Mike Bartlett's fabulous King Charles III, now on the West End after opening last spring at the Almeida, proposes.
Shortly after the death of his mother but before his own official coronation, now-King Charles is growing anxious and perhaps (as Camilla says) a bit angsty about the end of his long wait and his imminent rise to... well, not power, exactly. Anxious to make the monarchy meaningful, and spurred on by some dubious politicians, Charles declines to sign a bill into law, setting off a chain of events that seem as if they might plunge the country into civil war.
Also it's written entirely in iambic pentameter.
King Charles III is Shakespearean not only in its language and scope, but in its approach to the question of power. Prince Harry raises what I sometimes see as the central question of Shakespeare's historical tragedies: can't bring a modern prince mean not having to give away your soul? Charles himself has very much the air of Richard II-- petulant, power-hungry, and increasingly bordering on madness-- yet also undeniably appealing in his bumbling yearning for self-definition and winning candor with the audience. Tim Pigott-Smith's marvelous performance keeps the character from flying off into caricature, rooting him soundly in something touching and human.
The other characters privileged to speak to the audience are William (Oliver Chris) and Kate (Lydia Wilson), the latter of whom nearly steals the show with the revelation of an iron will and powerful ambition. There are gestures towards Lady Macbeth as she none-too-subtly steers the somewhat hapless William towards power, but Kate's masterful command of the trappings of modern-day royalty are unparalleled in the play, and she's ultimately too canny to just condemn.
The one major misstep is Prince Harry's strangely underdeveloped subplot. Disillusioned in a Prince Hal-ish fashion with life and royalty, he falls in love with a commoner, a flat Manic Pixie Dream Girl whose dearth of personality leaves their storyline nowhere to go. It's a shame, as Richard Goulding's tortured Harry serves, when he is alone, as a neat parallel to his father's crisis of self, and as mentioned above, the potential for Shakespearean-inspired exploration and allusion is rich (director Rupert Goold pointed out Harry's similarities to Hal in an interview) But Bartlett ultimately seems to lose track of the thread, tying it off in an abrupt but not unexpected manner. But this is basically the only false note in an otherwise masterfully orchestrated piece.
The morning after seeing King Charles III, I woke up to the latest from Ferguson, MO, and the grand jury's failure to indict the police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown. On the one hand, this seems to exist on an incomparably different scale from an often silly British political drama. But the question in both cases is the dangerous ease with which our democratic systems can collapse in the face of someone determined to ignore the unwritten rules, or to lean too heavily on the letter of a law we thought we'd all agreed to ignore. One of Barlett's most brilliant choices is to make Charles basically right: the bill he declines to sign is a draconian-sounding privacy law that would curtail the freedom of the press. But, as the Prime Minister in the play says again and again, the question at hand is not the content of the bill, but the principle behind Charles's action. It's not a monarch's role to dictate policy by omission any more than it seems fair for a prosecutor to manipulate an indictment.
And in this, Charles' fears and his rebellious subjects' fears are one and the same: the fear of loss of control, of society suddenly ceasing the function the way you always thought it did. That after a lifetime of waiting and preparing, it turns out there's nothing at the end of it after all. The heart of the play is deeply human, and in this Bartlett is Shakespearean once again: somehow, the stories of kings always seem to end up as tragedies.
In England, of course, that vestigial legal oddity is hidden in plain sight: the monarchy. It's still there. It sucks up massive amounts of taxpayer money. They have no power, but because England lacks a written constitution, that fact is maybe more of a gentleman's agreement than a law. At least, that's the tenuous situation that Mike Bartlett's fabulous King Charles III, now on the West End after opening last spring at the Almeida, proposes.
Shortly after the death of his mother but before his own official coronation, now-King Charles is growing anxious and perhaps (as Camilla says) a bit angsty about the end of his long wait and his imminent rise to... well, not power, exactly. Anxious to make the monarchy meaningful, and spurred on by some dubious politicians, Charles declines to sign a bill into law, setting off a chain of events that seem as if they might plunge the country into civil war.
Also it's written entirely in iambic pentameter.
King Charles III is Shakespearean not only in its language and scope, but in its approach to the question of power. Prince Harry raises what I sometimes see as the central question of Shakespeare's historical tragedies: can't bring a modern prince mean not having to give away your soul? Charles himself has very much the air of Richard II-- petulant, power-hungry, and increasingly bordering on madness-- yet also undeniably appealing in his bumbling yearning for self-definition and winning candor with the audience. Tim Pigott-Smith's marvelous performance keeps the character from flying off into caricature, rooting him soundly in something touching and human.
The other characters privileged to speak to the audience are William (Oliver Chris) and Kate (Lydia Wilson), the latter of whom nearly steals the show with the revelation of an iron will and powerful ambition. There are gestures towards Lady Macbeth as she none-too-subtly steers the somewhat hapless William towards power, but Kate's masterful command of the trappings of modern-day royalty are unparalleled in the play, and she's ultimately too canny to just condemn.
The one major misstep is Prince Harry's strangely underdeveloped subplot. Disillusioned in a Prince Hal-ish fashion with life and royalty, he falls in love with a commoner, a flat Manic Pixie Dream Girl whose dearth of personality leaves their storyline nowhere to go. It's a shame, as Richard Goulding's tortured Harry serves, when he is alone, as a neat parallel to his father's crisis of self, and as mentioned above, the potential for Shakespearean-inspired exploration and allusion is rich (director Rupert Goold pointed out Harry's similarities to Hal in an interview) But Bartlett ultimately seems to lose track of the thread, tying it off in an abrupt but not unexpected manner. But this is basically the only false note in an otherwise masterfully orchestrated piece.
The morning after seeing King Charles III, I woke up to the latest from Ferguson, MO, and the grand jury's failure to indict the police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown. On the one hand, this seems to exist on an incomparably different scale from an often silly British political drama. But the question in both cases is the dangerous ease with which our democratic systems can collapse in the face of someone determined to ignore the unwritten rules, or to lean too heavily on the letter of a law we thought we'd all agreed to ignore. One of Barlett's most brilliant choices is to make Charles basically right: the bill he declines to sign is a draconian-sounding privacy law that would curtail the freedom of the press. But, as the Prime Minister in the play says again and again, the question at hand is not the content of the bill, but the principle behind Charles's action. It's not a monarch's role to dictate policy by omission any more than it seems fair for a prosecutor to manipulate an indictment.
And in this, Charles' fears and his rebellious subjects' fears are one and the same: the fear of loss of control, of society suddenly ceasing the function the way you always thought it did. That after a lifetime of waiting and preparing, it turns out there's nothing at the end of it after all. The heart of the play is deeply human, and in this Bartlett is Shakespearean once again: somehow, the stories of kings always seem to end up as tragedies.
Friday, November 7, 2014
Review: Our Town
It feels arrogant to even try to write a review of David Cromer's production of Our Town, previously at the Barrow Street Theater in New York and now at the Almeida. The fact is that it's basically perfect. David Cromer understands Our Town, and translates that understanding into a deeply moving and perfectly simple production.
Our Town is a play that I lose track of sometimes. Like Romeo and Juliet, it starts to feel so over-discussed, so misinterpreted, so easy to over-simplify, that I find myself just riding the waves of what I'm pretty sure I know about it and forgetting what's actually there. Yes, it's a play I was utterly desperate to act in when I was about 14 and saw it as pretty much a vehicle for a super-sad monologue-- but it's more than that.
It's also a play that I think tends to take a beating when it comes to the question of "The Canon"-- because how much more insular and privileged can you get than a play that, apparently, is all about nostalgia for the good old days when everyone was Christian and white and married their high school sweetheart?
But a really good production, like this one, is a reminder that the play is more than that, too. I'm sure you can find plenty of things written by people much smarter than me about the cracks in the veneer-- Mrs. Gibbs' never-realized dream to see Paris, Simon Stimpson's drinking, all that death. But I think also there is the fact that nostalgia demands a homogeneity of audience that the play both assumes and rejects. On the one hand, the stage manager always addresses the audience with a homey, 'we're in this together,' feel. He says 'you know,' and 'you know what I'm talking about' a lot. We're assumed to be familiar with life in places like Grover's Corners, in theory.
But does that assumption spring from the fact that Thornton Wilder is assuming we, too, lived in somewhere like Grovers' Corners? Or just that we would recognize it, even if we're peering in from the outside? I found myself thinking this time through that maybe we're meant to bring the contradictions in with us. My ancestors sure as hell didn't live in Grover's Corners, they were busy on Ellis Island. But the play doesn't have to point it out for me to know it.
And, of course, none of these actors would live in Grover's Corners, either. All of the actors (American David Cromer as the Stage Manager included) employ their native accents, they are fairly racially diverse. They wear contemporary clothes. It's not about seeing yourself in them, or any pretense of universality. It's just a story.
Our Town is a play that I lose track of sometimes. Like Romeo and Juliet, it starts to feel so over-discussed, so misinterpreted, so easy to over-simplify, that I find myself just riding the waves of what I'm pretty sure I know about it and forgetting what's actually there. Yes, it's a play I was utterly desperate to act in when I was about 14 and saw it as pretty much a vehicle for a super-sad monologue-- but it's more than that.
It's also a play that I think tends to take a beating when it comes to the question of "The Canon"-- because how much more insular and privileged can you get than a play that, apparently, is all about nostalgia for the good old days when everyone was Christian and white and married their high school sweetheart?
But a really good production, like this one, is a reminder that the play is more than that, too. I'm sure you can find plenty of things written by people much smarter than me about the cracks in the veneer-- Mrs. Gibbs' never-realized dream to see Paris, Simon Stimpson's drinking, all that death. But I think also there is the fact that nostalgia demands a homogeneity of audience that the play both assumes and rejects. On the one hand, the stage manager always addresses the audience with a homey, 'we're in this together,' feel. He says 'you know,' and 'you know what I'm talking about' a lot. We're assumed to be familiar with life in places like Grover's Corners, in theory.
But does that assumption spring from the fact that Thornton Wilder is assuming we, too, lived in somewhere like Grovers' Corners? Or just that we would recognize it, even if we're peering in from the outside? I found myself thinking this time through that maybe we're meant to bring the contradictions in with us. My ancestors sure as hell didn't live in Grover's Corners, they were busy on Ellis Island. But the play doesn't have to point it out for me to know it.
And, of course, none of these actors would live in Grover's Corners, either. All of the actors (American David Cromer as the Stage Manager included) employ their native accents, they are fairly racially diverse. They wear contemporary clothes. It's not about seeing yourself in them, or any pretense of universality. It's just a story.
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