"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.

A Great DVD Set for Musicals Lovers

The folks at Warner Bros. emailed to ask me if I’d be interested in receiving and reviewing their new DVD box set of movie musicals. I get offers like this a lot and I tend not to respond because I don’t want B&Me to become a shill for companies that can afford to pay for their own advertising.  But this offer was too good for any lover of theater or movie musicals to ignore. For the “Best of Warner Bros. 20 Film Collection: Musicals,” issued as part of the studio’s 90th anniversary celebration, brings together 20 of the top movie musicals of all time.  

And that’s not an exaggeration. Warner Bros. produced the first feature-length talkie in 1927 and it was a musical, “The Jazz Singer,” starring Al Jolson. Over the next 60 years, Warners released such classics as “42nd Street,” “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” “The Wizard of Oz,” ”Singin in the Rain,” “A Star is Born,” “Cabaret”, “Little Shop of Horrors” and “Hairspray.”

My technical knowledge of DVDs could be packed into a sewing thimble with room to spare so I can’t say much about the aspect ratio, resolution, sound quality or any of those terms that techno buffs toss around, except to say that the movies I checked out looked and sounded OK to me.

However I can say that most of the titles in the set are as evocative for me as a madeleine was for Proust. I spent hours watching James Cagney’s portrayal of master showman George M. Cohan in “Yankee Doodle Dandy” because it was a standby on the old “Million Dollar Movie” series that used to air repeat showings of one film for a week when I was a kid.  And I still got a kick out of watching the jaunty Cagney perform his distinctively stiff-legged dance numbers, including the title song and Cohan's signature "Give My Regards to Broadway."

 

Similarly, I have seen every incarnation of “A Star is Born” (including the 1976 remake with Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson) but there is no besting the  1954 version of this showbiz morality story with Judy Garland and James Mason (although I can’t figure out why the set producers left out all the great extras that are on the disc already in my DVD library).

Meanwhile, the movie version of John Kander & Fred Ebb’s Cabaret, which two friends and I enjoyed so much when we first saw it that we stayed for a second showing (which movie theaters used to be more tolerant of) is slightly different from the staged version but just as terrific and showcases Liza Minnelli at the top of her game. Plus its disc includes several featurettes including one in which Minnelli and her co-stars Joel Grey and Michael York reminisced in 1997 about the making of the movie and the genius of their director Bob Fosse.

It was great to make some discoveries too. I’d never seen “Broadway Melody,” which like so many of the films in the set is a backstage musical.  It opens with a cacophonous scene that recreates the music rooms of Tin Pan Alley where songwriters hawked their ware to publishers and producers, signaling right from the start that this movie is going to be a loud-and-proud musical. The film’s not-so-subtle “nancy boy” jokes made me flinch but it was sweet to see how fleshy chorus girls used to be.  

The entire 20-disc set is just $70 on Amazon.com, which is a bargain when you consider that watching these films, particularly if you do it sequentially, is like taking a course in the history of movie musicals, where almost everyone involved deserves an A.

The Sparseness of "The Cherry Orchard"

There should be no such thing as the definitive production of a play. Particularly not one by Shakespeare. Or by the Greek playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Or by Chekhov. And yet, a few days before I went to see The Bridge Project’s production of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, I watched the 1962 Royal Shakespeare Company version of the play that was recorded for the BBC. It starred Peggy Ashcroft, John Gielgud, Dorothy Tutin, Ian Holm and Judi Dench. And although a recorded version of a play almost always suffers in comparison to a live one, watching that nearly 50-year old interpretation of the final play Chekhov wrote before his premature death at 44 may have ruined me for any other.

That’s certainly how I felt as I sat at BAM’s Harvey Theater watching the recently opened production of The Cherry Orchard, directed by Sam Mendes, with a new translation by Tom Stoppard and a cast lead by Sinéad Cusack, Simon Russell Beale, Rebecca Hall, Richard Easton and Ethan Hawke. The Bridge Project is a collaboration between artists on both sides of the Atlantic and the same production will be presented over the next six months at The Old Vic in London, as well as in Singapore, New Zealand, Spain, Germany and Greece. It’s a noble idea. The people involved are first rate. Most of the critics have raved. And yet, I was unmoved.

I confess I’ve always had a harder time with Chekhov than with Shakespeare or even the Greeks. But I loved the limited-run production of The Seagull that opened on Broadway last fall. The Cherry Orchard's story about people living above their means and poised on the brink of great societal change seemed even more timely. And the talented folks involved in the production made it all the more appealing. The minute I first read about the show, I emailed my pal Bill to see if he were interested and then ordered tickets for us to see it.

We met at the theater in downtown Brooklyn an hour before the 7:30 curtain. Zagat lists some nearby restaurants but all I ever see are fast food joints when I’m walking from the subway to the theater. So Bill and I decided to grab a bite at the lobby bar in the Harvey. According to a recent article in the British newspaper The Guardian, eating at theater bars has become increasingly popular in London (click here to read an evaluation of some of them).

I wish the practice would catch on here since a bar meal tends to be cheaper than one at a restaurant, not an inconsiderable benefit in these pinched-purse times. The Harvey bar’s menu is mainly sandwiches but my pulled pork was tasty and Bill seemed to enjoy his roast beef. There was Junior’s cheesecake for dessert and you can’t beat that. The small plastic cups of wine—though overpriced—didn’t hurt either.

If only the show had been as satisfying. Don’t get me wrong, there were good things about it. Cusack was touching as Madame Ranevskaya, the middle-aged aristocrat who is so unable to adjust to the changing times and her declining fortunes that she plans a party instead of tending to the threatened auction of her estate. Cusack was so poignant that Bill wondered at intermission why she isn’t better known in this country like her equally talented contemporary Helen Mirren.

The always formidable Beale captured the ambivalent mix of reverence and resentment in Lopakhin, a former peasant on the family estate who has become the wealthiest man in the area. But Morven Christie failed to convey the endearing distractedness that the young Judi Dench brought to the role of Anya, Ranevskaya’s daughter, and she didn't replace it with any other distinctive quality. Similarly, while Paul Jesson was fine as Ranevskaya’s prissy brother, no one does prissy like Gielgud.

I know. It’s silly to compare. And maybe the current cast members will grow into their roles and make them their own as they explore their characters over the weeks and months to come. But there are other things that are totally fair game to criticize. Mark Bennett’s incidental music called far too much attention to itself. Mendes’ visual imagery paid far too much homage to The Coast of Utopia. The entire production seemed much like the magic tricks the family governess performs in the show: well executed and yet failing to amaze.