Turning on the Ghost Light

My husband K and I are off on our first big vacation in a long while and so there will be no new posts here for the next couple of weeks.  Which is why you're now looking at the ghost light that theaters set up when they're temporarily vacant. But I've already got shows booked to see when I get back and so I hope you'll rejoin me in mid-July so that I can tell you about them.

Theater Books for Summer Reading 2013

Summer is my favorite time of the year. And one of the things I love about it is sharing this annual list of books for theater lovers to read at the beach, under a tree or, perhaps like me, on a city terrace while sipping something cool, crisp and refreshing (Prosecco is my drink of choice this summer). The books this year are a bit more eclectic than usual, which I hope means there will be something to suit your theatrical interests whatever they may be:

Showbiz, A Novel by Ruby Preston. If you’re still in “Smash” withdrawal, this may be the one for you. For Showbiz is a mash-up of fiction (the murder of a theater critic) Broadway legends (an ogre-like producer named Margolies borrows the birth name and personality of David Merrick) and the contemporary Broadway scene (everyone is competing for Hollywood stars to anchor their shows). It follows the professional and amorous adventures of a young producer named Scarlett Savoy as she tries to solve the whodunit and put on her first show. Just as with “Smash,” true insiders may wince at some of the details (I mean does anyone really call the restaurant Angus McIndoe, “The Angus"?) but the story is still a romp and Preston has already written a sequel called Staged. (You can find it here.)

 

The Year of the King: An Actor's Diary and Sketchbook by Antony Sher. The South African-born actor is as accomplished a visual artist as he is a theatrical one and both of his talents are on vivid display in this illustrated memoir of the year 1984, from the time he was approached to star in a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Richard III straight through to the triumphant opening night. It would be hard to find a finer book about the process an actor uses—or the angst he sometimes goes through—to create a memorable role. The book is also filled with cozy anecdotes about his friends and acquaintances (Michael Gambon, Laurence Olivier) and the pen and ink drawings that Sher made as he tried to envision his image of Richard. (You can find it here.)

In Sunlight and In Shadow by Mark Helprin. The main characters in this literary novel are Catherine, a young heiress trying to make a name for herself in the New York theater world; and Harry, a former OSS officer struggling to save his family business from the mob after returning home from World War II. Their love affair plays out over 700-pages and the parts devoted to the theater are smaller than I wanted them to be but the writing is gorgeous. If beautiful prose is your thing, this could be an enchanting way to while away lazy summer afternoons. (You can find it here.) 

Jack Be NImble: The Accidental Education of an Unintentional Director by Jack O'Brien. As his Tonys for Hairspray, Henry IV and The Coast of Utopia show, O’Brien is a hell of a director.  But who knew he was an equally gifted writer? I’m only half-way through this myself but O'Brien’s coming-of-age-in-the-theater memoir is shaping up to be one of the best books of any kind I’ve read this year. The heart of the book is his relationship as general factotum to the director Ellis Rabb, who founded the APA, the repertory company that took serious theater to cities across the country in the ‘60s before regional theaters were common. It’s a wonderful look back at an almost-forgotten time in American theater.  And it’s a great yarn too cause O’Brien doesn’t hold back; gossip is shared, secrets are told and the whole thing is a delight. (You can find it here.)

 

The Painted Girls by Cathy Marie Buchanan. To be honest, this isn’t technically a book about theater but its fictional account of the teenage ballerina who posed for Edgar Degas’ famous statue, is the source material for the same story that will be told in Little Dancer, the new Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens musical that is scheduled to debut at the Kennedy Center in Fall 2014 in a production directed by Susan Stroman.  It’s also a heartrending look at how difficult life could be for young girls who aspired to be on the stage in the 19th century. (You can find it here.)

The Making of Cabaret by Keith Garebian. Based on interviews with the show’s creators, this detailed chronicle tracks the evolution of John Kander and Fred Ebb’s now-classic musical from its origins in the stories Christopher Isherwood wrote about his time in Weimar Germany through the original 1966 Broadway production—and beyond, including the 1972 movie version with Liza Minnelli and the landmark 1998 Broadway revival with the late Natasha Richardson and Alan Cumming as the MC. Along the way, Garebian makes informative detours into such topics as the history of European cabarets. It's catnip for theater history junkies. (You can find it here.)

Bad Publicity by Joanne Sydney Lessner. Isobel Spice, the heroine of this mystery series, is a struggling actress who makes ends meet by taking temp jobs.  As luck would have it—and fiction demands—people keep turning up dead wherever she’s assigned and so, in between auditions, she helps suss out who the killer is. There are more red herrings in this book than you’ll find pickled at a kosher deli but Lessner, herself an actress (and, full disclosure, a friend) has a good time tossing in bits of theater lore as well. (You can find it here.)

Great Moments in the Theatre by Benedict Nightingale. Who doesn’t love lists?  And who better to put one together on the most significant productions in theater history than Nightingale, the longtime chief theater critic for The London Times?  The first production cited is The Oresteia back in 548 B.C. but the book quickly moves on to Richard Burbage’s Hamlet in 1601 (the Hamlets of David Garrick in 1742, Sarah Bernhardt in 1899 and Simon Russell Beale in 2000 get their own chapters too). Productions in Dublin, Madrid, Moscow, Paris, St. Petersburg and New York are noted but most of the shows discussed first appeared in London, including Mark Rylance’s performance in Jerusalem, which ends the book. Nightingale deftly weaves erudite scholarship, backstage gossip and personal memories into short, easily digestible chapters that can be read sequentially or at random. (You can find it here.)

And to keep things easy, here are the links to my previous summer reading suggestions:
2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

 

"Sontag: Reborn" is as Original as Its Subject

My mother gave me my first diary when I was eight years old and I continued to keep a journal into my 30s, thinking, I’m now chagrined to confess, that I might one day be famous and so should leave a road map showing how I had become so.

I assume that the young Susan Sontag had much the same thoughts. Only while I was checking out Nancy Drew on my adolescent trips to the library, she was racing through André Gide. Sontag: Reborn, the one-woman show that is ending its run at New York Theatre Workshop this weekend, provides other keen insights into what made Sontag, who died in 2004, perhaps the last great public intellectual in America and certainly one of the most fascinating.

 

I’m sorry that I’m just now getting to talking about this show because it’s one of the most thought-provoking I’ve seen this year.  Moe Angelos, a co-founder of the theatrical group Five Lesbian Brothers, has crafted a one-woman show out of excerpts from the journals Sontag started keeping in her teens. 

They're presented as an interior duologue between the younger Sontag and her older self, represented by the projection of a prerecorded image of Angelos, brandishing a cigarette and flaunting the skunk-like streak of white hair that became Sontag’s trademark in her later years.

 But it’s the younger Sontag who beguiles. Angelos makes her an earnest and often arrogant young woman, aware of her prodigious intellect (she started college at 15) and desperate to show it off. The young Susan lists the books she’s reading, the films (mainly foreign, of course) that she wants to see and, later, her wanderings across the intellectual landscape of Europe in the ‘50s.  

 

Other journal excerpts lament her marriage at 17 to a man 11 years older and the motherhood that quickly followed with the birth of her son David, whom she would leave for long stretches of his boyhood but who would eventually become the editor of her posthumously published journals. And still other entries agonize over her awakening identity as a gay woman and her tempestuous love affair with the director María Irene Fornés.

Angelos and director Marianne Weems have worked hard to find inventive ways to turn what might have been a boring reading into an engrossing theatrical experience. Sontag Reborn makes the most integrated use of video projections that I’ve yet seen. 

 

As Sontag’s observations pour out, video projections of her writing and photographic scenes of the places she describes fill large parts of the scrim, creating the feeling you’ve climbed inside her brain and are watching as the ideas are formed and her genius honed. Big kudos to video designer Austin Switser and lighting designer Laura Mroczkowski.

The play, which runs a tight 75 minutes, ends just before the publication of Sontag’s groundbreaking essay “Notes on Camp” (which you can read by clicking here).  

 

Unlike my more learned friend Jessie, who saw the show with me, I’d read very little Sontag beforehand and I had worried that Sontag: Reborn might be too heady for me. But I was riveted throughout.  

“Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas,” Sontag once said.  Hers, of course, was first class.  As is this little show.

"The Comedy of Errors" Gets Lots of Laughs While "The King’s Man" Gets At the Dark Stuff

Given a choice between Shakespeare’s comedies and his tragedies, I’ll line up on the side of the serious stuff almost every time. Which is why I was nervous when I set off to meet my theatergoing buddy Bill for a performance of The Comedy of Errors, the first of The Public Theater's Shakespeare in the Park productions this summer. For Bill loves a good laugh and I didn’t want to be a wet blanket.  So I’m happy to report that this production of the Bard’s first—and probably his silliest—comedy is an irresistible romp that got even a Grinch like me grinning. 

Now it certainly helped that we saw the show at the always-magical Delacorte Theater on the balmy first night of summer and after a luscious dinner at Storico, the chic new restaurant at the New York Historical Society, just a couple of blocks away. But I’m pretty sure you’ll have a good time regardless of the weather or your pre-show menu.  

Like so many of Shakespeare’s tales, The Comedy of Errors pivots on the themes of lost children, separated twins and mistaken identity. In this case, a long-ago shipwreck has separated two pairs of twins, a merchant’s sons (both somehow named Antipholus) and the boy slaves the father bought to attend them (both similarly called Dromio).  

One master-servant pair washed ashore in the Greek town of Ephesus, the other grew up in its nearby rival Syracuse.  Confusion ensues and hilarity reigns when the Ephesians, searching for their long lost kin, wander into Syracuse and are mistaken for their local doppelgangers. 

 

Director Daniel Sullivan cheats a bit by placing the action in a Damon Runyonesque world. The setting doesn’t have anything to do with the play but its tropes are inherently funny and somehow fit right in.

 

That giddiness is underscored by a sextet of jitterbuggers who, both before the show starts and during the scene changes, dance to the happy-go-lucky tunes of The Andrews Sisters, Louis Prima and Fats Waller.

The big-shouldered suits, nip-waisted dresses, snappy fedoras and pompadour hairdos created by costume designer Toni-Leslie James and wig designer Robert-Charles Vallance add just the right visual panache to the merrymaking. 

 

And, of course, the actors do their part too. Particularly amusing is the Duke, played with comic swagger by Skipp Sudduth, who speaks with a dese-and-dem accent and is backed up by a daffy crew of courtiers, eager to brandish their pistols and tommy guns at the least provocation. 

But the biggest laughs are provided by the show’s stars Hamish Linklater, who does double duty as both Antipholuses, and Jesse Tyler Ferguson, who takes on the two Dromios. The roles are usually played by four actors and so having just two scurry about adds to the  mayhem (subtle costume clues like the color of a hatband help you keep track of who’s who). 

 

Both actors have made their names on TV sitcoms but they’re also stage vets and old hands at doing Shakespeare in the Park and this production allows them to show off their prowess with all kinds of humor from puns to slapstick (it’s a running joke that everyone keeps beating up the Dromios). 

The play has been streamlined to 90-minutes, which is just enough time before the silliness wears out its welcome.  And everyone is having such a good time hamming it up that you’d have to be a bigger sourpuss than me to resist. 

 

But if you still feel yourself antsy for a more serious Shakespearean fix this summer, you might consider buying or renting “Shakespeare: The King’s Man,” a 2012 BBC documentary, now available on DVD, that focuses on the plays Shakespeare wrote after 1603, during the reign of James I.

The three-part series (each an hour long) is hosted by the Columbia University professor James Shapiro, which is a pretty big coup for an American.  But Shapiro has written several books on the Bard including the much acclaimed “A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599” and the more recent “Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?”  So he knows his stuff and clearly loves talking about the plays.   

 

His speculations on how the political events of the time (the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 that almost blew up Parliament, the death of James’ beloved first son Henry in 1612 at age 18) shaped how Shakespeare wrote certain plays are accompanied by visits to historical archives and places referenced in the plays and scenes of classic performances by Judi Dench, Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart among others, as well as from more recent productions by the Royal Shakespeare Company.

The plays from that period are among Shakespeare’s greatest and include King Lear, Macbeth and Coriolanus. And even the works with happier endings have dark undertones like Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest.  All very serious stuff indeed and you can find it by clicking here.

"Charles Ives Take Me Home" Loses Its Way

 

Maybe if I’d had a better sense of who Charles Ives is, I'd have had a better time at Charles Ives Take Me Home, the new play that is running at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater through June 29.

I knew that Ives was a major American composer and when I got home and Googled him, I discovered that he had been a major sports fan too. 

That little bit of knowledge made it a little easier to understood why playwright Jessica Dickey would use Ives as the pivotal figure in her three-hander about the difficult relationship between a classical violinist and his basketball prodigy daughter.

Having Ives serve as interlocutor has the potential to make the play more than a routine family drama, but Dickey fails to show why he's the right man for this job and not just a gimmick. 

Dickey has been better in the past. I’d originally wanted to see the show because I’d been so impressed four years ago when I saw her debut work, The Amish Project, an affective one-woman show about the real-life slaughter of five girls in an Amish schoolhouse back in 2006 (click here to see my review of it).   

But this time out, she struggles with the transition from the monolog format to the fuller style of storytelling that mines the complicated interplay between characters. The ones in Charles Ives Take Me Home seem more comfortable interacting with the audience than with one another. 

The play begins with a meta moment when the Ives character, who serves as its Our Town-style narrator, runs through a clever version of the pre-curtain announcement in which audience members are reminded to turn off cellphones and unwrap candies. 

He then introduces Laura Starr, a girls’ basketball coach who speaks directly to the audience as she delivers a tough-love speech to her team. 

A few minutes later, Ives brings on John Starr, Laura’s violinist dad, who studied at Juilliard, idolized Ives and, as he makes clear in his opening soliloquy, disappointed his own father who taught gym classes at the local high school and hoped his son would share his love of sports.

The monologs, which continue throughout the 70-minute show, are as strong as the ones in The Amish Project and it’s easy to imagine actors adopting them for auditions.  But the speeches are too much tell (“I looked at Charles Ives as a kind of new father,” John too explicitly says at one point) and not enough show. 

Flashback scenes to key moments between father and daughter or student and teacher are handled even less skillfully. But no blame can be assigned to the actors or to Daniella Topol's spare but lucid direction.

Kate Nowlin is amusing as the no-nonsense coach and poignant as she portrays the awkward bravado of the young Laura as she ages from grade school to college. 

And Drew McVety is equally adept at conveying the frustration of a man unable to achieve the career he’s always wanted or to forge a bond with the child he doesn’t understand.

Each is also impressively convincing at performing the requisite skill of dribbling a basketball or playing Ives tunes on the violin. Meanwhile, Henry Stram is congenial and equally adept at the piano as Ives. (Click here to read a piece about the casting process.) 

The play's fault lies with the play itself. Its conflict between the competing passions seems so rooted in personal experience that it’s hard not to imagine that Dickey is working out unfinished business with her own dad. 

That's fine. It’s what writers do. But it’s also their job to synthesize those experiences so that both they and their audiences can come to see those situations in new and unexpected ways.  

The Ives in Charles Ives Take Me Home remains too much of a cipher and that makes it hard to see him or this play clearly.

"3 Kinds of Exile" Wanders All Over the Place

Playwright John Guare has given us many enjoyable nights in the theater with such works as The House of Blue Leaves, Six Degrees of Separation and A Free Man of Color (click here to read my review of that).  

Alas, his latest work 3 Kinds of Exile, now running at the Atlantic Theater Company’s Linda Gross Theater through this weekend, doesn't come off anywhere near as well.

The best things about the show, which runs 1 hour and 45 long intermissionless minutes, are its intriguing title and its motivating concept. As the title announces, 3 Kinds of Exile tells the stories of a trio of displaced persons. 

 

All three are real-life Polish emigrés whom Guare knew or admired and he gives each his or her own playlet. Their experiences aren’t uninteresting but neither Guare nor director Neil Pepe has figured out how to make them theatrically engaging.

 

The bookends are Karel, the opening monologue in which a man recounts the story of a 12-year-old boy sent out of Poland to the supposed safety of England during World War II; and Funiage, the Brechtian fantasia inspired by the work of the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz that ends the evening. 

 

Karel is performed by the actor Martin Moran, who did his own one-man show earlier this spring and is comfortable holding a stage alone. But despite Moran’s congenial manner, my attention wandered. I’m told there’s a nice twist at the end of his tale but I missed it.

 

In Funiage, David Pittu plays Gombrowicz, a novelist and dramatist who found himself stranded in Argentina at the outbreak of the war in 1939 and never returned home. The always-game Pittu works hard but his efforts are overwhelmed by the hyperactive staging.

Pepe has filled this part of the production with all kinds of stage business. A nine-member ensemble sings, dances, does tricks with bowler hats and spouts surreal dialogue.  But it's all flash without any sustaining fire.

The centerpiece, and potentially most intriguing of the three plays, is Elzbieta Erased, a tribute to the Polish actress Elzbieta Czyzewska (say it Cha-zef-ska) who gave up a rising career in her homeland when she married the journalist David Halberstam in 1965 and moved to the U.S.

 

Their marriage didn’t last, her heavy accent made it difficult for Czyzewska to find acting jobs in this country and she died from esophageal cancer three years ago at just 72, still lamenting the hand fate had dealt her. 

 

Guare spoke at a memorial service for Czyzewska and says that he wrote Elzbieta Erased as a way to keep her from being forgotten (click here to watch a video in which he talks about his inspiration for the play).   

I once met Czyzewska at the home of a mutual friend and she told me her whole life’s story after less than 10 minutes of small talk. It is a compelling tale and it inspired the 1987 movie “Anna,” in which Sally Kirkland played the Czyzewska role.  But Guare doesn't do it justice here. 

 

For starters, Czyzewska isn’t actually a character in Elzbieta Erased. Instead, Guare and the Afro-Polish actor Omar Sangare, who appeared with her in a Polish production of Six Degrees of Separation, portray versions of themselves and, standing at podiums, tell anecdotes about their friend. 

 

Sangare is a charismatic guy but Guare, in his Off-Broadway acting debut, has little stage presence, less technique and a voice so weak that it fails to project even in the small space at the Linda Gross Theater.  

 

Still, my admiration for Guare continues despite this current disappointment. Few white playwrights create such textured roles for black actors as Guare has done in Six Degrees of Separation and A Freeman of Color and even here for Sangare.   

And that's not the only kind of reaching out Guare does.  He recently patiently mentored a trio of young playwrights on HBO’s “YoungArts MasterClass” series (click here to check it out). But when it comes to acting, he shouldn’t give up his day job. 

Move Over Hamlet, "Macbeth" Is Increasingly the Main Man for Some Major Stars

People— actors and theatergoers alike—can’t seem to get enough of Macbeth. The talented young Scottish actor James McAvoy took it on earlier this year in London A new production starring Kenneth Branagh is scheduled to run for the first three weeks in July at the Manchester International Festival—tickets sold out in half an hour, although the final performance on July 20 will be simulcast by NT Live (click here to read my Tidbit about the NT simulcast I saw of Helen Mirren's The Audience).  

On this side of the Atlantic, Lincoln Center Theater has just announced that Ethan Hawke is going to star in a production that will open on Nov. 21. Meanwhile, Sleep No More, the Punchdrunk Company’s immersive take on the play, will begin its third year next week and the versatile actor Alan Cumming is currently playing in an essentially one-man production at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre through the end of this month (click here to see clips from some other legendary productions). 

Personally, I don’t mind the glut.  Macbeth was one of the first Shakespeare plays I ever saw back when I was in grade school (the play is a great choice for kids because it’s Shakespeare’s shortest and its witches are a familiar carryover from childhood fairy tales.) 

The Bard's tale of the Scottish thane who murders his way to the throne remains one of my favorites. Neither my husband K nor I can bring ourselves to erase the PBS telecast of Patrick Stewart’s 2008 production (click here to read what I thought about it when I saw the show at BAM before its move to Broadway). 

I wasn’t that crazy about Sleep No More (click here to read my review of it). But I was totally intrigued by the idea of the Cumming production in which he plays all the characters. So I was bummed when I missed its brief run during last summer’s Lincoln Center Festival and grateful to have the chance to see the show when it moved to Broadway this spring.

This version has been set in what appears to be the criminal ward of a psychiatric hospital and the play opens as a doctor and an orderly check in a patient who is clearly in shock and streaked with blood. They remove his clothes and help him into a hospital gown, scrape blood samples from underneath his fingernails and put him to bed.  

“When shall we three meet again?” the patient asks, invoking the play’s opening lines, as the attendants leave and lock him in the room. And then, over the course of the next 100 intermissionless minutes, Cumming, who grew up in a small Scottish market town and trained at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow, acts out the rest of what actors call the Scottish play.

It’s a tour de force performance. To distinguish one character from another, Cumming changes the intonation of his voice and employs simple props like holding a towel demurely across his chest when he’s Lady Macbeth or bouncing an apple when he’s the ill-fated Banquo.  

There are several nude scenes and Cumming's emotions are on wholly naked display throughout the performance.  I found myself marveling at how he could put himself through the experience of it eight times a week.

And yet, the show isn’t a total success.  Directors John Tiffany and Andrew Goldberg create lots of business (video projections, an eerie soundscape) to hold the audiences’ attention.  But It can be difficult to follow who’s saying what, even when you know the play as well as I do.  

It is a treat to hear Cumming speak in his own accent instead of the American twang he adapts for roles like the political fixer Eli Gold on TV’s “The Good Wife,” but it can, at times, be difficult to understand his burr.

Plus, the mystery is never revealed of who the patient is, what he did or why he’s obsessed with Macbeth.  And since I’m kind of obsessed with Macbeth myself, I ended up wanting a little less of Cumming and a little more of the actual play.