On the Road: Violet at the American Repertory Theater

Coordinating anything in incessantly busy Harvard Square is difficult, but trying to mount a professional-grade production of a musical on a moving bus traveling around the square seems like an exercise in pure masochism. Nevertheless, director Sammi Cannold has pulled off this trying logistical task, staging Jeanine Tesori and Brian Crawley’s Violet in a variety of locations around the square, most notably a bus that stands in for the one that’s the main setting of the show. What’s far more impressive, however, is how Cannold has managed to scale her production to its intimate setting, giving what could have been a shallow gimmick some vital depth. Cannold’s production comes as part of American Repertory Theater’s “Mini Series,” a number of small-scale performance events geared towards tiny audiences that, depending on the show, range in number from twenty-five observers to a lone spectator. It’s not the first time Cannold has directed the show in this way: she did an earlier version in the same manner at Stanford in 2013.

Violet has some lovely music, and the Roundabout Theatre’s 2014 revival with Sutton Foster in the title role featured a strong cast, as Steve Vineberg noted for this site at the time. I mostly agree with Steve’s take on the show’s strengths and weaknesses, especially with regards to some flaws in the plot, based on Doris Betts’s short story “The Ugliest Pilgrim,” which book writer Crawley does little to alleviate. Violet follows its eponymous lead character on a journey from North Carolina to Oklahoma, where she hopes to meet a faith healer who can cure the disfiguring facial scar that resulted from an incident in her childhood and causes people to react to her with shock and disgust. Along the way, she meets not one but two handsome soldiers who fall in love with her. That part’s fairly straightforward, but there’s also another narrative strand, told in flashbacks that weave in and out of the present-day story, involving Violet’s relationship with her father. It might have partly been a function of the unique staging (more on that in a moment), but I found parts of this backstory confusing, especially in the scene when it merges with her quest in Oklahoma and leads her to believe that she’s been cured.

A Puzzle of a Play: The Glass Menagerie at American Repertory Theater

Zachary Quinto, Cherry Jones, and Celia Keenan-Bolger in The Glass Menagerie (All photos by Michael J. Lutch)

The audience stood and cheered at the end of the performance I attended of The Glass Menagerie at Cambridge’s American Repertory Theater, and a few weeks later Ben Brantley in The New York Times made it sound like one for the ages. I wish I could echo that proclamation of greatness and the sentiments expressed in that ovation. This production of Tennessee Williams’ beloved play, directed by John Tiffany (represented on Broadway last season by Once, which began at A.R.T.), is performed with tremendous fervency by the four-person cast – Cherry Jones as Amanda, Zachary Quinto and Celia Keenan-Bolger as her children, Tom and Laura, and Brian J. Smith as the Gentleman Caller. Nico Muhly has supplied lovely incidental piano music, Natasha Katz’s lighting is gorgeous, and the non-realist set design by Bob Crowley (who also did the costumes) is lyrical and evocative. An abstracted pyramid of scaffolding stands in for the fire escape attached to the Wingfields’ Depression-era St. Louis apartment, and a reflecting pool with a quarter-moon dipped in it provides a downstage frame for the action. I have no idea what that pool is supposed to signify (Brantley’s explanation, that it’s “the abyss of being lost,” doesn’t make sense to me in terms of the text, and it isn’t even good English), but every now and then one or another of the characters wanders to the edge and sways toward it, as if in danger of tumbling in. That’s one example of the movement provided by Steven Hoggett, who collaborated with Tiffany on Once as well. I loved the strangeness of the movement in Once, but it was really choreography; here it intrudes on the play, and the actors are so obviously not dancers that it feels awkward, even occasionally embarrassing. I felt the same way about some of the staging, too, like the way Laura enters at the top of the play and exits at the end through the back of the living-room couch, and the miming of the meals. It’s OK, I guess, that Tiffany wants to do without silverware, but it’s absurd to imagine Tom would eat with his fingers or lick up the last traces of food on his plate. This is nonsense of a specifically A.R.T. brand. And it’s less forgivable that there’s so little on stage in the way of furniture and props that we don’t get to see the photograph of the absent Mr. Wingfield that Tom repeatedly draws our attention to, or that all we’re shown of Laura’s titular glass collection is a single figure.

The White Card: Be White, Baby

Patricia Kalember and Karen Pittman in The White Card. (Photo: Gretjen Helene Photography)

For the production of Claudia Rankine’s play The White Card, about race in contemporary America – a co-production of American Repertory Theater and Arts Emerson – scenic designer Riccardo Hernandez has built a black-box space inside the stage of Boston’s downtown Emerson Paramount Center. Except that it’s a white box, with the audience seated on painful white chairs, tennis-court style, on either side above the narrow cream-colored playing area (with matching furniture). The symbolism is painfully obvious. Moreover, having wriggled back and forth on those goddamn chairs for eighty intermissionless minutes, perhaps I may be permitted to advance the theory that the level of discomfort, too, is deliberate. Could this be director Diane Paulus’s take on Brechtian theatre – keeping the audience alert at what amounts to a droning lecture on white privilege by literally making us squirm?

Politico: Robert Schenkkan's All the Way

With the U.S. government in shutdown and voting rights in peril in a number of red states, it’s hard not to feel nostalgic about All The Way, Robert Schenkkan’s chronicle of the year between Jack Kennedy’s assassination and the 1964 re-election of LBJ, which just wrapped up a sold-out run at American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, MA. (The title is, of course, derived from his campaign slogan, “All the way with LBJ.”) The political landscape covered by the play’s three hours is thorny: as the curtain falls, many of the architects of the Civil Rights movement feel betrayed by the president, who has overseen the passage of the Civil Rights Act but has had to excise the section on voting rights, and who failed to support the seating of the Mississippi Freedom Democrats with full voting privileges at the Democratic Convention. J. Edgar Hoover (Michael McKean) has ramped up his campaign to discredit Martin Luther King (Brandon J. Dirden), who has just won the Nobel Peace Prize, ferrying tapes of his motel-room adulteries to his wife Coretta (Crystal A. Dickinson). And LBJ has turned his back on his aide, Walter Jenkins (Christopher Liam Moore), after Jenkins was arrested, drunk, for solicitation in the men’s room of the Washington YMCA during the celebratory aftermath of the election. The play is about the political costs of social gains, about the balancing act of power, careerism and social change, and its subject is the last great old-style political animal to occupy the White House. But I don’t imagine there was anyone sitting in the house at Wednesday’s matinee who wouldn't opt for the world of Schenkkan’s play, where social progress is held dear, over the one we walked back into at the end of the afternoon.

Its built-in appeal to a contemporary liberal audience doesn’t make All the Way a good play, however – and that includes the rabble-rousing scene where David Dennis of CORE (Eric Lenox Abrams) yells up and down the aisles, demanding to know if the treatment of blacks in Mississippi can be called fair and just. At the matinee, audience members yelled back in support, though the show had, in my estimation, hit a low point: a playwright and director – Bill Rauch – who rev up a crowd so they can feel virtuous for being on the right side of a half-century-old political issue are merely indulging in a theatrical form of ass-kissing.

Farewell to John McMartin (1929-2016)

From left: Alexis Smith, John McMartin, Dorothy Collins and Gene Nelson in the 1971 production of Follies.

During my junior year in college, Stephen Sondheim’s Follies tried out in Boston and I saw it on opening night, with John McMartin – who died last week, at the age of eighty-six – in the leading male role. The musical is set at a reunion of showgirls in the about-to-be-torn-down Broadway house where they appeared in annual editions of an elaborate revue, and the main characters are two couples – one-time chorines and best friends and the men they married – whose lives turned out to be marked by longing, regret and increasing bitterness. McMartin played Ben Stone, celebrated diplomat and author, who starts out by denying that he wishes he’d lived his life differently, then falls in love all over again with the woman he didn’t marry (played by Dorothy Collins) – or rather, with his romanticized memory of her and of the man he used to be. I’ve never forgotten McMartin’s devastating performance. In act one, when he sang “The Road You Didn’t Take,” Ben’s supposed refusal to admit that his might not have been the right road, McMartin’s pebble-strewn tremolo conveyed the heartbreak and the escalating rage bubbling up beneath his insistence. It remains one of the greatest dramatic performances of a song I’ve ever experienced in a theatre. At the last televised birthday tribute to Sondheim, in 2010, McMartin reprised it. He was eighty by then, but astonishingly his rendition had lost none of its emotional power.

Pierogi, Pop Music, and Portentous Comets: Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812 at ART

Denée Benton as Natasha, in Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812. (Photo: Evgenia Eliseeva)

During the intermission of Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812 at American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, my friend turned to me and said, “This is probably the future of theatre.” It was meant more as a statement about the difficulty of providing a unique, compelling theatrical experience that could draw people otherwise content to watch Netflix at home than a compliment to the show, although the production is quite enjoyable. As a conventional stage musical, Great Comet certainly isn’t perfect, but the immersive nature of its staging elevates it and makes it something more vital and exciting than it would be in a more traditional form.

Fizzling Out: Burn All Night at Club Oberon

As I walked out of Burn All Night, a new musical running at the American Repertory Theater’s Club Oberon, I found myself feeling oddly upbeat about the fact that I’d just seen a thoroughly average piece of immersive mainstream theatre. As I’ve written before with regards to the ART’s production of Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, this increasingly popular style of staging plays in such a way as to draw the audience into the dramatic action offers at least one potential answer to the question of how theatre can distinguish itself as it competes with a myriad of entertainment options for audiences’ attention. Contrary to the title, this latest offering won’t set the world on fire, but there are elements of its music and staging that partially counteract its glaring weaknesses as a play.

Burn All Night ultimately tries to make a statement about the impending global cataclysm that, thanks to our poisonous politics and abuse of the environment, seems at times almost inevitable. However, the real disaster here is Andy Mientus’s book, which follows the romantic entanglements and personal conflicts of four young people. The main character, Bobby (Lincoln Clauss), is a stereotype, the wide-eyed naif who ditches the stifling atmosphere of Real America for the boundless possibilities of New York City. The backward, provincial hellhole from which he escapes? Pittsburgh. I’m no Steelers fan, but I’m still not clear on what’s so awful about this metropolis of western Pennsylvania, and Mientus doesn’t help matters by giving Bobby a series of phone conversations with his widowed mother that mostly make you feel bad for the poor woman, who’s stuck worrying about her absent son while the world ends.

The Tempest: A.R.T.’s Magic Show

Nate Dendy, Tom Nelis, and Charlotte Graham in The Tempest  (Photo: The Smith Center/Geri Kodey)

The American Repertory Theater’s new mounting of The Tempest is part nineteenth-century-style theatrical spectacle, part magic show – overlapping entities). The adaptors and co-directors are Aaron Posner and Teller (of Penn and Teller), and the magic, which includes card tricks, cheeky bits of business like a kinetic hankie with a will of its own, and real stage sorcery (Prospero levitates a sleeping Miranda in act two), is witty, ticklish and occasionally dazzling. The idea of Teller working on a production of this particular Shakespearean romance, with its sorcerer protagonist, struck me as irresistible, and I was high on him after seeing his documentary Tim’s Vermeer, in which an inventor deconstructs and then reproduces the Dutch master’s particular brand of magic – his process for developing his distinctive approach to realism. So I had high hopes going in. But this Tempest is more than I could have wished for.

Young Twits: Amy Herzog's 4000 Miles

In Amy Herzog’s 4000 Miles, playing an extended run at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, a young man named Leo (Gabriel Ebert) lands on the Manhattan doorstep of his eighty-something grandmother Vera (Mary Louise Wilson) in the middle of the night after biking across the country. He’s a hippie, she’s an old-style Jewish leftist, and they’ve always had a companionable relationship. At this juncture she’s trying to cope with the ravages of age and he’s hiding out, avoiding his parents in St. Paul, avoiding dealing with the death of his best friend Micah on the trip, and attempting to pretend that nothing’s changed in his romantic relationship with Bec (Zoë Winters), who’s furious at him for not showing up at Micah’s funeral.

Herzog wrote one of the few compelling new plays of the 2010-2011 season, After the Revolution, which was lucky enough to receive a fine production at the Williamstown Theater Festival that was repeated in New York at Playwrights Horizons. After the Revolution made good on a terrific idea. Set at the end of the millennium, it was about a young woman, a third-generation Jewish leftist, who graduates from law school and starts a foundation dedicated to defending members of marginalized groups. (Her first cause is an attempt to get a new trial for an incarcerated Black Panther.) She names the foundation after her late grandfather, a cult hero among American Communists, who was blacklisted during the McCarthy era. Then a new history of the period comes out that furnishes evidence that he was actually a Soviet spy. Herzog examines the issue from the point of view of the young woman, whose idealism is shattered, and from the point of view of her father, her uncle and her grandfather’s widow, who stick to the loyalties they’ve grown up with – and she refuses to resolve it. The play ends with the widow telling her step-granddaughter that, in taking an ethical stand against her grandfather, she’s no different from the American right-wingers who oppressed liberals and leftists in the fifties, and Herzog refuses to hold out hope that these two women can ever reconcile.

Never, Never: Finding Neverland

Under Diane Paulus’ leadership, Cambridge’s American Repertory Theater – once a bastion of the avant-garde – has become a clearing house for Broadway-bound shows. In the two years since she took over as artistic director, Paulus has sent five plays on to New York: her own revivals of Porgy and Bess and Pippin; Once (which began as a workshop at A.R.T.); the latest revival of The Glass Menagerie, starring Cherry Jones; and the first part of Robert Schenkkan’s LBJ biography, All the Way (which began its journey across the country at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival). I saw all of them in their A.R.T. incarnations except for Once, and they were all sell-outs; Boston is evidently thrilled to be a tryout town once again, as it was for most of the last century. But even though I didn’t care for most of the productions I saw at A.R.T. in its old form, Paulus’ blatant commercialism is a little unsettling, especially since two of the shows bore her name as director.

Her latest is Finding Neverland, a musical adaptation of the 2004 movie that covers the period during which J.M. Barrie conceived his 1904 stage play Peter Pan. If you watched the Tony Awards this year you already know about the show, because – in that benighted telecast’s most bizarre moment – we were treated to a preview of the musical, which opens on Broadway next season: Jennifer Hudson sang one of the tunes to four little boys standing in for the Llewelyn-Davies brothers for whom Barrie becomes a surrogate father. Appearances notwithstanding, Hudson is not expected to take over the role of James Barrie, which is being played by Newsies star Jeremy Jordan.

Peter Pan: An Awfully Big Adventure

David-Birrell as Hook, and-the-Lost-Boys, in Peter Pan, at London's Regent Park. (Photo: Tristram Kenton)

When you attend a play in the Open Air Theatre in London’s Regent’s Park for the first time, your expectations for the actual dramatic experience may be diminished by the beauty of the space itself: it seems that a theatre company wouldn’t have to do much to make an audience happy on a lovely summer’s night. And though I’ve encountered exceptions to this rule, outdoor theatre is typically restrained in its ambitions and certainly in its production values. But Regent’s Park Theatre Ltd. turns out to be a venue for imaginative directors and designers with outsize dreams, artists who clearly think of working in outdoor theatre as an opportunity to try out ideas that are too crazy for the West End and too extravagant for the fringe theatres. Four years ago I saw a wonderful production there of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera with stagecraft so elaborate that watching the stage hands negotiate it added a daredevil circus element to the proceedings. (That was especially true the night I saw the show: it was the first preview, and not all the mechanical problems had been worked out.)

Early this month I saw Peter Pan at Regent’s Park in a version, directed by Timothy Sheader and Liam Steel, that was conceptually brilliant, visually breathtaking and deeply moving – the most thrilling evening I spent at the theatre in a month of seeing plays in London. James Barrie wrote Peter Pan in 1904, but Sheader and Steel have set it a decade later, during the Great War. Jon Bausor’s set looks initially liked a bombed-out factory framed by scaffolding and derricks, on one of which hangs a tattered Union Jack; beneath is a trench erected from torn sides of metal and random lumber. A bomb explodes and the factory turns into a military infirmary where a handful of nurses tend to the wounded: to one young man whose eyes are bandaged, to another who cries out in agony for his mother, to a captain who is fitted for a hook to replace his blown-off hand. One of the nurses (Kae Alexander) retrieves a copy of Peter Pan from under the pillow of the bandaged soldier (Patrick Osborne) and begins to read it aloud to the entire ward, and the play within the play begins. The nurse turns into Wendy Darling, the bandaged soldier (who knows the text off by heart and recites some of it along with her) becomes her brother John, and the rest of the soldiers and nurses in the ward take the other roles. Other uniformed men are stage hands, scaling the heights of the set to manipulate the harnesses that hold Peter Pan (played by Hiran Abeysekera, he’s the only actor on stage who appears only as a fantasy figure) and the Darling children (Thomas Dennis is Michael) as they fly through the air. Naturally, the captain who has lost his hand (David Birrell) shows up again as Hook.

Celebrating 20 Years: In Conversation With George Randolph, Founder of Toronto's Randolph Academy For the Performing Arts

George Randolph with David Mirvish

Chances are, if you’ve gone to the theatre anywhere in North America lately, you’ve witnessed something of the Randolph Academy for the Performing Arts in action. Since its founding in a Toronto church basement 20 years ago, the performing arts school has produced two generations of theatre professionals modeled after the old Hollywood tradition of the Triple Threat – that is, a performer who, in equal measure, can sing, dance and act. First coined by the likes of Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney when they were kids performing in musicals some 70-years ago, the Triple Threat was a relatively unused term in Canada until George Randolph, an American-born hoofer, came to Toronto to literally shake things up. Trained at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, the former dancer with Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal arrived in Toronto in the 1980s at time when the city was being transformed into Broadway North. The big shows of the Great White Way were then crossing the border in record numbers, lured by local theatre impresarios like Garth Drabinsky and Ed Mirvish. Audiences were hungry for them, but the country didn’t have the manpower to sustain them. Theatre professionals here were either dancers or singer or actors. Rarely were they all three at once. They hadn’t had the training. Spying an opportunity, Randolph threw himself headlong into the void, eventually creating a signature Triple Threat program that is today the envy of much of the theatre world as he explained recently in conversation with Deirdre Kelly. Read on to find out how the Randolph Academy started and where it’s going next.

Classic American Musicals: Porgy & Bess and Show Boat

Porgy and Bess

Diane Paulus’s production of Porgy and Bess, which is running at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge (where she’s artistic director) before heading for Broadway, came encumbered with controversy. Shortly before it opened Paulus, playwright Suzan-Lori Parks (who revised the DuBose Heyward script), and star Audra McDonald gave interviews to The New York Times and The Boston Globe trumpeting their mission to render the classic 1935 American opera accessible to twenty-first-century audiences and made a lot of other fatuous comments in addition.

Stephen Sondheim answered with a furious and brilliantly argued editorial in The Times that took apart their remarks one by one. Evidently Sondheim’s objections had some effect on the production – Paulus, Parks and the composer Diedre L. Murray, who had reworked the final scene of the show to make it more uplifting, restored the original ending. Sondheim was careful to separate out the hype from the work itself, expressing the hope that Paulus’s Porgy would turn out to be as exciting as the cast promised – in addition to McDonald, it stars Norm Lewis as Porgy and David Alan Grier as Sportin’ Life – while reiterating the importance of acknowledging the magnificence of the opera that George and Ira Gershwin and DuBose Heyward had fashioned from Heyward’s 1925 novella. Among other corrections, he pointed out the iniquity of renaming the show The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, when Heyward and not Ira Gershwin made the most substantial contribution to the libretto – a fact that anyone familiar with Ira Gershwin’s lyrics can spot ample evidence of, whatever he or she may think of them. (Sondheim is not an Ira Gershwin enthusiast; I am.) 

The Royal Shakespeare Company, At Home and Abroad: Macbeth, As You Like It & The Winter's Tale

Aislín McGuckin & Jonathan Slinger in Macbeth.

The Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Macbeth at Stratford-on-Avon this season, staged by artistic director Michael Boyd, has something to do with the cult of Edward the Confessor and something to do with the desecration of Catholic churches during the Reformation, but you have to read the essays in the program to understand the connections, and even then they're not terribly clear. A directorial concept that you need liner notes for can't possibly work – especially in the English theater, where you have to lay out three or four pounds for a playbill. Years ago I saw a production of The Cherry Orchard at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts that filled the stage with constructivist cardboard cut-outs: I was baffled until I consulted the director's note at intermission and found that he thought the play was about the Russian Revolution and he was convinced that its tone was hopeful. This explanation didn't remove my bafflement, merely redirected it. You can do a lot with a classic text, but if your ideas don't sync up with what's on the page then perhaps you'd be better off calling it something else. And you'd be better off going all the way and changing the text. (Punchdrunk's popular haunted-house reimagining of Macbeth, an environmental piece which combines scenes from the play with images out of Hitchcock and leaves out the dialogue entirely, is appropriately titled Sleep No More.) The director's note in the Cherry Orchard program didn't mesh with the lines about the drowning of Ranevskaya's little boy or the loss of her estate, and in Boyd's Macbeth there's a large enough gap between the text and the visual links to these two historical periods for the whole production to fall into it. I'm sure hardly anyone in the audience has any idea why Ross (Scott Handy) reappears in the second act in a white priest's robe with an enormous cross around his neck or why there's a broken stained-glass window above the stage and a pile of rubble upstage.

Saint Infidelity: The Circle and Yours Unfaithfully

Clive Francis and Jane Asher in The Circle. (Photo: Ellie Kurttz)

The two most interesting plays I’ve encountered in London over the past two weeks are century-old high comedies by English playwrights that challenge sexual mores. Both are receiving admirable productions. The Circle by W. Somerset Maugham was first produced in 1921 and long ago vanished from the repertory; it has been taken up by the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, with Tom Littler directing. (The last Broadway revival, in 1990, starred Rex Harrison, who died during the run.) Yours Unfaithfully was penned in 1933 by the actor and writer Miles Malleson but remained unproduced until Jonathan Banks, the artistic director of Mint Theater Company, staged it in New York in 2016. He helms the current edition at the Jermyn Street Theatre, with a British cast.

Tough Shakespeare: All's Well That Ends Well & Cymbeline

Ellie Piercy as Helena/Janie Dee as the Countess of Roussillon. (Photo: Nigel Norrington) 

All’s Well That Ends Well provides too many obstacles for a modern audience to be anyone’s favorite Shakespearean comedy, so it doesn’t get revived very often. But though it isn’t a sublime romantic comedy like Twelfth Night or As You Like It or A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Much Ado About Nothing, and though it isn’t dark enough to be as provocative as Measure for Measure, I think it’s a beautiful play, and John Dove’s version at the Globe this summer reminded me why I love it. Like so many of Shakespeare’s plays, it’s essentially a fairy tale. When the King of France (Sam Cox) is rumored to be on his deathbed, Helena (Ellie Piercy) travels to Paris from her home in Roussillon – where she’s the ward to the Countess (Janie Dee) – with the medicine bag she inherited from her father, whose medical skills were so elevated they were indistinguishable from white magic. Helena is one of those feisty Shakespearean comic heroines (like Rosalind and Viola) who, with her heart in her mouth, sets out to change her fortunes. She’s desperately in love with the Countess’s son Bertram (Sam Crane), who has gone to the court of France to serve the king, a close friend of his own late father’s. (Dead parents figure importantly in the plot, especially through their surrogates. The King, seeing Bertram’s father in him, assures him, “My son’s no dearer,” though he mostly acts as a disapproving father to him as the plot unfolds. Both the King and the Countess serve Helena in loco parentis.)When she offers to cure the King, whose doctors have pronounced his case hopeless, she stakes her life on the line, but in return she asks him to match her up with any young man in the kingdom. And since this is a fairy tale, her medicine works, and he presents all the most eligible bachelors in the court for her to survey.

In Dove’s production, she dismisses them with record speed and then indicates Bertram as her choice. And the poor bastard is thunderstruck. In many – I would guess most –  productions of All’s Well he doesn’t even know she’s alive, but here he’s quite fond of her; they grew up together, and in the scene between them before he takes off for Paris he’s playful with her before he kisses her on the forehead and asks her to watch over his mother in his absence. (Piercy makes it obvious that that’s not the kind of kiss she’s been hoping against hope from him.) But she’s the daughter of a poor doctor and his mother’s ward – he’s never thought of her as his wife. And he balks at the King’s insistence on telling him whom he should marry. But from the King’s point of view, his honor’s at stake because of the promise he’s made Helena, so he makes it crystal clear to Bertram that if he refuses to marry her he’ll regret it. So the young man makes a pretty and entirely rhetorical speech that places himself in his monarch’s hands – and then runs off on his wedding night with his friend Parolles (James Garnon) to join the army and fight in Florence, in a war that France hasn’t officially joined but that the King has permitted his young warriors to serve in if they so choose. (That Shakespeare makes it a war of no special consequence seems deliberate; it undercuts the virtues we might be moved to see in a young man whose motivation is service to his country, not adventure and escape.) Bertram leaves a letter for Helena proclaiming that he will never sleep with her until she can produce the ring on his finger, which bears the Roussillon family crest, and a child fathered by him, an impossibility on the face of it. But Helena has come so far out of love for him that she takes the next extraordinary step: she starts a rumor that she has died, disguises herself as a pilgrim and follows him to Florence, where she persuades a young woman Bertram has been courting, Diana (Naomi Cranston) to agree to bed him if he will give her his ring. What follows is the bed trick, a staple in the dramatic repertoire of Renaissance plays. In the darkness of night, he makes love to a woman he believes to be Diana but who in fact is Helena. Having obtained both his ring and his seed, she comes back from the dead in the final act carrying his child and they live happily ever after.

More Sounds of Music: Hair, Oliver!, & On a Clear Day You Can See Forever

The company of Hair. (Photo: Emma Rothenberg-Ware)

Daisy Walker’s production of Hair at Berkshire Theatre Group begins badly, with rather mechanical by-the-numbers choreography (by Lisa Shriver) on an ugly, perplexing set (designed by Jason Simms) that consists of a wall with opaque windows and a double-tiered wooden platform. Where is the action supposed to be taking place? This isn’t a question you’d ask with an abstract, open unit set, but the wall tells us we’re inside a building, so we want to know what kind of building. And why a building at all? Hair is about hippies interacting with each other and with the straight world, presumably on the streets of New York or (in the first half of the 1979 movie version) Central Park; it hardly makes sense to place them inside some room – especially this one, which looks like a recreation hall in a summer camp. The young actors, a mixture of professionals and others just out of actor training programs working toward earning their Equity cards, generate a lot of good energy, but they’re restricted by the space and the staging.

That is, until after intermission. The second act of this Hair is exponentially better than the first, despite the fact that it’s act two of the musical that is classically problematic because a long acid-trip sequence weighs it down. Unexpectedly, the choreography loosens up and showcases the performers more effectively, and the ensemble comes together – you start to believe in them as a “tribe,” to use the term the book writers, Gerome Ragni and James Rado, adopt for them.

Three Comedies from Different Eras

Carlo Goldoni’s 1746 comedy The Servant of Two Masters, which translated commedia dell’ arte into scripted form, was mostly consigned to the reading of theatre history scholars until Giorgio Strehler, Jacques LeCoq and Amleto Sartori mounted their famous production in Italy in 1947 and brought it back into the public consciousness. In it, an Arlecchino figure – a tricky servant – manages to serve two employers simultaneously without either of them knowing it, and without realizing that they’re separated lovers. (One, the story’s heroine, is disguised as a man.) The play is entertaining but I prefer One Man, Two Guv’nors, Richard Bean’s revision, which was given a tip-top production at the National Theatre in London by Nicholas Hytner that has moved to the West End. (It was recently shown widely on HD.)

Bean has transplanted the Goldoni text to 1963 England – providing just enough distance from the audience’s experience to allow for a stylized period farce – and the scenes are interspersed with songs by Grant Olding, who leads a combo in shiny mauve suits called The Craze. (Olding, who sings lead vocals and plays guitar, wears heavy-frame specs like Buddy Holly.) The songs evoke a variety of early-sixties groups, including Herman’s Hermits and, inevitably, The Beatles. The servant with two governors is Francis Henshall, played by the ingenious James Corden, whom aficionados of British film will recall from Mike Leigh’s All or Nothing and Hytner’s The History Boys. His employers are a prep-school twit named Stanley Stubbers (Oliver Chris) and the woman of his dreams, Rachel Crabbe (Jemma Rooper), who hatch a plan to emigrate to Australia after Stanley kills her twin brother Roscoe in self-defense; in the meantime Rachel pretends to be Roscoe to keep everyone off the scent. That means that she also has to pretend to be engaged to a brainless ingénue named Pauline (Claire Lams) – a match of convenience arranged by Roscoe, who was gay, and Pauline’s Mafioso dad, Charlie “The Duck” Clench (Fred Ridgeway). Pauline is really in love with a highly dramatic actor named Alan Dangle (Daniel Rigby) whose father (Martyn Ellis) is the slippery solicitor Charlie and his friends typically employ to get them out of scrapes. The other characters, rounding out the cast of commedia types, are “The Duck”’s wised-up bookkeeper Dolly (Suzie Toase), the object of Henshall’s amorous inclinations, a Caribbean called Lloyd (Trevor Laird) who runs a pub-restaurant, and a pair of waiters (David Benson and Tom Edden).

A Moor and Two Jews: Shakespeare and Marlowe in Stratford and London

Phoebe Pryce and Jonathan Pryce in The Merchant of Venice. (Photo: Tristram Kenton)

Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice is a romantic comedy in which Shylock, the Jewish moneylender who goes to court to collect his pound of flesh from the bankrupt merchant Antonio, is merely the obstacle the hero and heroine must overcome in order to get to their deserved happy ending. He vanishes from the play at the end of the fourth act, so that the entirety of the fifth can concentrate on the trick Portia and her maid Nerissa play on their new husbands, Bassanio and Gratiano, getting them to give away the rings that were their brides’ special gifts to the supposed young judge who rescued Bassanio and his law clerk (really the two women dressed in men’s clothing). The ingenious legal trick Portia employs to release Antonio from his bond to Shylock is necessary to ensure Bassanio’s and Portia’s marital happiness because Bassanio entered into that unholy agreement with the moneylender in order to bankroll Bassanio’s courtship of Portia. Once the case is over, frivolity can resume. And though high school English classes still, apparently, teach The Merchant as a serious drama about anti-Semitism rather than an example of it – just as they did when I was in high school in the sixties – the fact is that, as directors have proven in productions since the Holocaust made the play at least a bone of contention, the only way to fix the problem in it is to rewrite it. I’ve seen three Merchants that did so brilliantly. In the famous Jonathan Miller production from 1970 (televised in 1973), with Laurence Olivier as Shylock and Joan Plowright as Portia, Shylock is presented as a tragic hero; Miller cut the lines that put him in an unflattering light, like the aside that includes his feeling about Antonio, “I hate him for he is a Christian.” Both Trevor Nunn’s 1999 version at the National Theatre, set in the Fascist 1930s, with Henry Goodman as Shylock and the Broadway production Al Pacino starred in, under Daniel Sullivan, in 2010, in different ways, sketched a landscape of such racial hatred that Shylock’s conduct toward Antonio seemed like a lamentable but completely understandable response to his own treatment at the hands of Christians. (The young men Antonio hangs out with in Nunn’s version are little more than privileged thugs.)

Jonathan Pryce gives an intelligent, often tender performance as Shylock in a new production at Shakespeare’s Globe, directed by Jonathan Munby, that does a more than adequate job of rearranging the context so that Shylock isn’t just a villain who gets what he deserves. What he gets in the play, when his suit collapses under Portia’s scrutiny, is poverty – half his goods go to Antonio (Dominic Mafham), the other half to Lorenzo (Ben Lamb), the Christian who has eloped with his Shylock’s daughter Jessica (played by Pryce’s daughter Phoebe Pryce) – and a forced conversion to Christianity. (Jessica has already converted to marry Lorenzo.) Munby stages a baptism scene, in which Pryce’s Shylock cringes as the priest pours holy water over his head; meanwhile Jessica, reading the letter from her father Portia has handed her, intones a Hebrew prayer in counterpoint to the Latin one everyone else on stage is singing (and which she, too, finally joins). She’s the last person on stage as the lights go down. Munby was obviously thinking of the way Miller ended his Merchant, with Jessica (Louise Purnell) alone reading the letter while in the background we hear the Mourner’s Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, which is also recited by Orthodox Jews when a son or daughter marries out of the faith.