Idealism and Identity: Camelot and Out of Character

Dakin Matthews as Pellinore and Ken Wulf Clark as King Arthur in Camelot. (Photo: Daniel Rader.)

Over the years I’ve grown wary of revivals of Lerner and Loewe’s musical Camelot, but that’s not because, over the six and a half decades since it opened on Broadway, it’s acquired a reputation for having unsolvable book problems. For last season’s production at Lincoln Center, Aaron Sorkin overhauled Lerner’s book – whether in an effort to rescue it or to make it more appealing to a twenty-first-century audience wasn’t clear, but Sorkin’s rewrite was disastrous. It was also unnecessary. I’ve known Camelot all my life and I think it has a script of remarkable depth and substance. As a little boy in love with theatre, I saw it on Broadway with the original cast and I’ve never forgotten the experience. Based on T.H. White’s The Once and Future King and set in a magical version of medieval England, the musical is about the birth of idealism and the struggle to keep it alive in a world that defaults so easily to the embrace of human vices. It’s a hunk of a show, all right, but that’s because, like Fiddler on the Roof and Hamilton, it presents a layered, complex narrative with resonant themes embedded in it. And so it makes demands on directors, designers and actors that are perilously difficult to fulfill.

I take no pleasure in reporting that almost no aspect of the production that just opened at Barrington Stage in the Berkshires comes close to meeting those demands. Alan Paul, Barrington Stage’s artistic director, is returning to the play after having directed it at the Shakespeare Theater in D.C. in 2018, but his staging is inelegant, and the more people he gathers on the stage the more awkward it becomes. Here are a few pertinent examples. Near the end of the first act the newcomer to King Arthur’s Round Table, the Frenchman Sir Lancelot (Emmett O’Hanlon), jousts with the three most skillful champions in the court, defeating each handily and then, praying over the body of the last one, miraculously brings him back to life. The simplest and clearest solution to the problem of how to stage this scene would be to show the court watching an enthralling spectacle that we can’t see. But Paul puts the jousters on risers above the stage, one at the edge of each wing, and has them pretend to be engaging in armed combat. But since they’re nowhere near each other, the action is confusing and doesn’t make basic sense, even on a symbolic level. There’s nothing for us to watch except two actors at a time thrusting their weapons into the air in the general direction of each other.

The second-act scene where  Mordred (Danny Kornfeld), the villainous illegitimate son of King Arthur (Ken Wulf Clark), catches the queen, Guenevere (Ali Ewoldt), in bed with Lancelot and tries to arrest them for adultery and treason is crowded and clumsy. But so is the entire courtship. Lerner’s libretto makes it clear that though these two are in love, they have been careful to bury their sexual desire – to love one another from afar. It’s only when Arthur’s absence from the palace for one night that their resistance breaks down. Either Paul misunderstood the details of the love triangle plot or he ignored them because he didn’t buy their sexual reticence. But he didn’t take out the dialogue in which they tell each other (more than once) that they’re not acting on their impulses, so from the moment we see them alone together at the beginning of act two, the staging contradicts the dialogue.

Paul’s work with the actors is even worse. In the dialogue scenes and even more egregiously in the songs, they’re rarely content to play the subtext and let Lerner’s text, which is both witty and beautiful, do its work. In the two first numbers, Arthur’s “I Wonder What the King Is Doing Tonight” and Guenevere’s “The Simple Joys of Maidenhood,” which in different ways convey the anxiety of young royals who have been betrothed to each other without ever having met, Clark and Ewolt add so many embellishments – acting teachers call this commenting on the lines, and it’s not meant as praise – that, ten or fifteen minutes into the three-hour evening, you’re already exhausted. Clark’s reading of the big speech where Arthur relays the story of how he became King of England – the tale of the sword in the stone – is grounded and affecting, and I felt a wave of relief that the actor had settled down. But I was wrong: a few minutes later he was wandering around in the text again. Clark seems like a talented actor with the ability to play Arthur, but he’s been badly misled by his director. So has almost everyone else on the stage, including the chorus. The only member of the cast who seems to know exactly what he’s doing is Dakin Matthews, in the dual roles of Merlyn, Arthur’s wizard tutor, and King Pellinore, who meanders into Camelot on a quest for some magical creature and ends up staying and becoming Arthur’s close friend and confidant. Matthews played these characters at Lincoln Center last season and it’s a treat to see him recreate them.

Camelot has a stupendous score, and since even mediocre regional theatre musical revivals generally manage to come up with first-rate singers, it startled me to discover that this production is as weak musically as it is dramatically. Of the soloists, only Ewoldt has a strong and melodic enough instrument to handle Loewe’s music; even the ensemble sounds rough and sometimes off-key, though I think part of the problem at the performance I attended was with the sound. I’m not sure why the musical director, Darren R. Cohen, didn’t encourage Clark, who has an impressive speaking voice, to take the reliable Sprechstimme (“talk speech”) option, as Richard Burton did in the original production and Rex Harrison did four years earlier in Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady. Not to put too fine a point on it, this Camelot just doesn’t sound good. Furthermore the actors indulge in entirely too much shouting, and the Boyd-Quinson Stage is too small to stand up to it.

This is a musical in which magic is the prevalent motif, yet Lee Savage’s scenic design is drab. Lia Wallfish, recreating Ana Kuzmanić’s original costumes, and especially the lighting designer, Christopehr Akerlind, work hard to provide the color that’s missing in the sets. I was grateful for their contributions, just as I was grateful to Dakin Matthews for finding his way into the text rather than dancing around it. I know Camelot is tough to pull off. But I don’t think it has to be this challenging.

Ari'el Stachel in Out of Character. (Photo: Caelan Carlough.)

Out of Character, currently being produced by Berkshire Theatre Group, is a one-man show written by and starring Ari’el Stachel. Stachel won a Tony Award for his portrayal of Haled, the Egyptian trumpeter who idolizes Chet Baker, in The Band’s Visit; if you were lucky enough to see it on Broadway with the original cast, you probably remember the way Stachel’s Haled used a reference to Baker as a pick-up line and especially the charming scene where he mimes for a terrified young Israeli local (Daniel David Stewart) the moves he needs to make a connection with a woman he is attracted to. When Tom McCarthy’s film The Visitor was turned into a musical at the Public, Stachel was cast in the part of Tarek, the undocumented African immigrant whom the protagonist (David Hyde Pierce, in the role Richard Jenkins had created in the film) befriends after he returns to a Manhattan pied à terre he hasn’t occupied in several years and finds the young man and his girlfriend living in it. The Visitor had a long gestation period; its opening was delayed by the pandemic and by the time it finally opened, discussions with the cast over whose story it belonged to – the white owner of the apartment or the young Black couple – had become turbulent and resulted in major rewrites. Stachel, who was at the center of those debates, wound up leaving the cast before the first preview. (The Public’s statement described the decision as mutual on the part of the actor and the organization.)

This incident is peripheral to the script of Out of Character: Stachel merely alludes to having been cast and later fired. I assume the legal restrictions prevented him from addressing it head-on, but I mention it here because the one-man show focuses on the actor’s struggle with his cultural identity, and obviously whatever happened during the preparation of The Visitor had to have formed part of the impetus for Out of Character. Stachel was born in Berkeley to immigrant Yemenite Jews and has had a hard time integrating those three elements – Jewish, Arab, American. Growing up, he hung out with Black kids and tried to immerse himself in their background; when he became an actor he pushed back against the way the shows he went out for were being cast. (Initially, he tells us, he was turned down for The Band’s Visit because he didn’t register as sufficiently Arab.)

Stachel is charismatic and bursting with energy and talent; it’s very easy to watch him alone on a stage for seventy-five minutes, and Out of Character is quite entertaining. The problem I had with it was that, both as a character study and as a dramatic argument, it doesn’t hang together. Ari’el has had a lifelong issue with anxiety; he imagines it as a character inside his head named Meredith who is tyrannical and punitive, like the dominant alter in a man with multiple personality disorder. (In fact, whenever Meredith shows up, Stachel goes for a models that are too familiar from sources like The Three Faces of Eve and Sybil to be convincing.) His other pattern is a tendency to run away when he feels trapped or stressed out: he keeps dropping out of schools, and though he has fallen in love with acting he even leaves the undergraduate acting program at NYU for a while before reconsidering and popping back in. I can see the connection between his anxiety and his dropping out, but the script’s attempt to link them to his cultural discomfort feels superficial.

For me, it had another effect, too, that I’m almost embarrassed to mention, since this is, after all, Ari’el Stachel’s story and the correct response from a contemporary audience would be to accept it just as he’s offering it. But it doesn’t always come across as sincere – particularly when he evokes October 7. I understand how the war between Israel and Palestine could generate profound interior conflict within a Jew whose family came from Yemen, but Stachel doesn’t explore his Jewishness (though he does a wonderful impersonation of his Jewish papa) sufficiently for us to understand what it means to him. In Out of Character he registers as more of a showman than an actor; we respond to his theatricality more than to the emotions he claims have prompted him to put together this piece.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.