The Gimmick's The Thing in the Trendy Shows "Becoming Hamlet," "Garry Starr: Penguin Classic" and "The Real Ivanov"

“You Gotta Get a Gimmick,” that’s what the strippers in the musical Gypsy told young Louise when she and her mama Rose were looking for a way to survive in show business. And that seems to be the philosophy of several of the shows I’ve seen over the last few weeks as traditional theaters, hard pressed for cash and desperate for new audiences, have been renting out their spaces to productions that in other days might have played in some Lower East Side basement or in a Fringe festival, here or in Edinburgh.  

These shows share some dramaturgical tics. The most popular seems to be to trade on the name and therefore good will of some better known work, like a play by Shakespeare or Chekhov or maybe the whole literary canon. Another seems to be to lean in on audience participation to one extent or another. Some of these shows are clever or entertaining or provide fresh insights into old works. Some do none of those things. My thoughts about three of them follow:

BECOMING HAMLET @ The 52nd Street Project’s Five Angels Theater, thru Oct. 3

The Source: William Shakespeare’s tragedy about the indecisive Danish prince struggling to avenge his father's murder.

The Gimmick: Multiple audience members are given parts—sometimes just a line or two written on a card; at other times, long segments that are projected on screens—from some of the Bard’s most famous speeches to recite alongside the actors onstage.

The Show: This kind of participatory theater clearly worked when Daniel Radcliffe (and later Mariska Hargitay and Tracee Ellis Ross) recently did it in Every Brilliant Thing. But its main character was played by one person who provided an emotional focus for the show. Here, Damon Horowitz, who also did the adaptation, does a decent enough job of playing Hamlet but because he ends up sharing the role with at least a dozen audience members, it’s hard to work up any feeling for the character.

The set is a simple white platform. The costumes are all over the place, suggesting no time or location with Gertrude and Claudius in brocade, Horatio in a striped sports jacket and Hamlet in a fleece vest so I'm not sure what story they were telling. And the heels Gertrude and Ophelia wore looked so precarious that I worried for their safety. But as Shakespeare said, the play's the thing and here its lines are spoken from all over the room so that the poor actors who are scene partners with Hamlet don’t even know where to look when they’re speaking to him. 

In fact, the performances—both those from the professional cast members and from the recruited audience members—were uneven. Although a few of the volunteers read their parts so well that I wondered if they knew the conceit and had practiced at home with the hope that they'd have a chance to show off. 

So Does the Gimmick Work: Well, not for me. I couldn’t figure out the point of the show, not even after reading the program notes several times. I mean forget "to be, or not to be," the question this production doesn't really answer is why anyone should want to become Hamlet. 

 

GARRY STARR: CLASSIC PENGUINS @ Studio Seaview, thru Oct. 11

The Source: The penguin-logoed library of paperbacks with black and orange covers and helpful introductions designed to make high-brow literature more accessible to the hoi polloi.

The Gimmick: In this more or less solo show the actor uses titles from the Penguin books as prompts for jokey skits and physical stunts.  And oh yes, he does most of it while naked.

The Show: The Australian actor Damien Warren-Smith is so charismatic that the shock of his nudity (he starts the show wearing only a frock coat, an Elizabethan ruffle and orange flippers in homage to the titular seabird, although all of that soon comes off) quickly disappears, allowing the viewer to really focus on the athleticism, the crowd control skills and the go-for-broke silliness that animate this 70-minute show, which the friend who saw it with me described as a cross between a party at a smart boys’ frat house and the opening act for a drag show at a really cool gay bar.

Some of the stunts are funny. Some of them are intentionally gross. Nearly all, wittily directed by Cal McCrystal, seemed to be crowd pleasers and the folks who agreed to interact with Warren-Smith’s stage alter ego, the titular Garry Starr, seemed so completely game for all of them that I couldn't help thinking that at least a few of them might have been plants. Although at one point a whole section of the audience was drafted and they all seemed to be having a ball.

So Does the Gimmick Work: Yeah. This isn’t really my cup of tea but it’s a lot more entertaining than I expected it to be.

 

THE REAL IVANOV @ Classic Stage’s Lynn F. Angelson Theater, thru Sept. 19 

The Source: An early Anton Chekhov play about a man who is inept at running his estate, deep in debt, no longer in love with his ailing wife who once gave up everything to marry him and lusting after the young daughter of his more affluent neighbor.

The Gimmick:  The four-act play has been edited down to about 100 minutes and there is basically no set at all

The Story: Both the adaptation and direction are by the Chekhov scholar Laura Strausfeld but while streamlining the text is one thing, cutting back on the stagecraft is another. It makes no sense to have no furniture if you're going to have characters inviting one another to sit down and if the staging doesn't devise some artful things for them to do when they're asked to do that. 

There’s no actual audience participation but the show is performed in the round and gestures are made to people in the front row as though they are guests at events in the play. There are also a few attempts to create impressionistic moments by having the lighting change or crowding the actors on a strip of carpet but they largely come off as pretentious. And unless you already know who the characters are and their relationship to one another—always tricky in any Chekhov production—it’s too easy to get lost here.  

That confusion is exacerbated by the performances of an uneven cast. The British actor Sam Underwood is one of the show’s lead producers and stars in the title role but it often seems as though he’s wandered in from another production since he uses his own accent and gives a brooding, Method-style performance while most of the rest of the cast speaks in American English and alternates between mugging and walking through their roles. 

So Does the Gimmick Work: Afraid not. Sadly nothing here worked for me.