The Edge of the Ink: Fang Zengxian at the China Art Museum

Detail from Fang Zengxian's Shai Fo Festival. (Shanghai Art Museum.)

At the China Art Museum, Shanghai, Fang Zengxian’s Shai Fo Festival (2009) stretches nearly nine meters across the wall. The monumental horizontal scroll depicts a dense gathering of Tibetan figures, most seen from behind, their bodies compressed into an almost continuous mass of dark ink. From a distance, the painting resembles a weather system moving across white paper. Only when we stand closer does the mass separate into people, shoulders, backs, wrapped heads, heavy collars. Their bodies overlap until it becomes difficult to tell where one person ends and another begins.

Small Town: No Way Out

The company of Ogunquit's Small Town. (Photo: Gary Ng.)

Klara Zieglerova’s scenic design for the new John Mellencamp jukebox musical Small Town (at the Ogunquit Playhouse through November 1) is lovely. It’s layered and has a bright, varied palette, and it gives the director, Lisa Peterson, the choreographer, Richard J. Hinds, and the cast of twenty-three many kinds of space to cover. It even includes a downstage bridge that descends into fire-escape staircases.

Bounty Beyond Measure: Angelica Page Celebrates an Icon

(Three Rooms Press.)

“The main thing is to be able to control your instrument, which, in the actor, is yourself. Once you’ve trained the instrument to do what you want, you’re in control, you’re free.”

--Geraldine Page

Goodspeed's The Snow Goose: Honor the Source

Eric Graise, puppeteer Leah Hoffman, Ashlyn Maddox, and the company of The Snow Goose. (Photo: Diane Sobolewski.)

In Paul Gallico’s famous World War II novella The Snow Goose (written in 1941), an injured Canadian snow goose that may have lost her way during a storm brings together a young artist named Philip Rayader who has come to live in a lighthouse in the Great Marsh on England’s Essex coast and a twelve-year-old orphan named Fritha. Philip’s physical deformities – a humpback and one hand twisted like a claw – have made him a source of fear among his neighbors; accustomed to being treated like a pariah, he leads a reclusive life, feeding and caring for the local birds. But when Fritha comes across the goose wounded by a hunter’s bullet not far from the lighthouse, she overcomes her trepidation and, aware of Philip’s work with the birds, brings her to his door and implores him to heal her. He does, with Fritha’s assistance, and gives the bird a home for the winter. When the young girl keeps returning to visit the goose, whom they’ve given the name The Lost Princess for her elegance and regal bearing – and, presumably, because her strange appearance so far from her natural habitat lends her a magical aura – Philip is uncomfortable at first because he understands that Fritha’s community would hardly approve of her seeking out so unwelcome a presence. But because what turns into a friendship between them is focused on the Princess, they are able to transcend his reluctance and hers. The goose flies with the other birds when winter comes, but every spring she returns to the lighthouse. Ten years go by, and Fritha grows into a young woman whose feelings for Philip have blossomed yet become unfathomable to her. War breaks out, and when the local men are exhorted to use their small fishing boats to rescue the soldiers trapped at Dunkirk by the Nazis, Philip is determined to answer the call.

Summer Smash: The Producers at Ogunquit

Jason Kravitz, Stephanie Gibson, and Dan DeLuca in The Producers. (Photo: Nile Scott Studios.)

The inspired premise of Mel Brooks’s debut movie The Producers – that a veteran Broadway impresario, trying to save himself from prison for fraud by producing a sure-fire flop, lands on a stunningly offensive operetta with Hitler as its hero – has convinced buffs for six decades that the movie is a comic masterpiece. Well, it’s intermittently hilarious, but it’s a pretty crummy picture. On the other hand, the multi-Tony-Award-winning Broadway musical Brooks fashioned from it a quarter of a century ago, directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman, is a solid gold entertainment, the most thoroughly satisfying project Brooks ever worked on. He wrote the music and lyrics and collaborated with Thomas Meehan on the book. At the Ogunquit Playhouse, James Gray has replicated Stroman’s original staging and a tip-top company is giving it a splendid twenty-fifth-anniversary revival through September 26.

Short Takes: Farce and Children’s Theatre at Shaw and Stratford Festivals

Jeff Irving, Damien Atkins, and Travis Seetoo in Jeeves and Wooster in Perfect Nonsense. (Photo: Michael Cooper.)

P. G. Wodehouse gets the 39 Steps treatment at Shaw in Jeeves and Wooster in Perfect Nonsense (at the Court House, once more open to audiences until the renovation of the Royal George is completed). The narrative justification for turning this particular convoluted farce into a three-hander is that Bertie Wooster (Jeff Irving), inept as always, wants to write down the story of his latest misadventure but cannot do so without the aid of his indispensable manservant Jeeves (Damien Atkins). Jeeves plays himself and a host of other characters; he enlists the help of another domestic named Seppings (Travis Seetoo) who handles the remaining roles. Bertie remains Bertie throughout, while the breathless shifting in and out of multiple personalities by the other two men, often holding on by the skin of their teeth, gives the knockabout comedy a teetering acrobatic quality. As in The 39 Steps (and of course The Play That Goes Wrong and its sequels), the pleasure is in watching deft farceurs pretend to be fumbling amateurs. The co-authors, Robert Goodale and David Goodale, cite “The Works of P.G. Wodehouse” as their source material, but the plot comes mostly out of the 1938 novel The Code of the Woosters, wherein Bertie’s tyrannical aunt blackmails him into stealing an antique silver cow creamer for her husband from a rival collector. Under Brendan McMurtry-Howlett’s breakneck direction, the three actors are very funny, though the play goes on for about twenty minutes too long.

The Theatre Within the Ink

Uproar in Heaven (1979), Collection of the Shanghai Chinese Painting Academy.

The figures in Guan Liang’s paintings seem almost to have wandered out of a child’s notebook. Warriors lean at improbable angles. Mythological heroes appear slightly awkward, their bodies stretched, compressed, or tilted beyond the limits of realism. The colours arrive in sudden bursts, the lines appear hesitant, and the compositions often seem deliberately incomplete. Yet this childlike simplicity was the result of a lifelong artistic pursuit by one of twentieth-century China’s most radical modernists.

Shaw and Stratford Festivals: Twentieth-Century Classics

Julia Course and Martin Happer in Heartbreak House. (Photo: David Cooper.)

The allegorical high comedy Heartbreak House is one of George Bernard Shaw’s strangest plays; it is also, in my estimation, his greatest. (For me the other contenders are Man and Superman and Major Barbara, though I don’t pretend to have seen or read them all: he wrote more than sixty.) Set in a country house in Sussex constructed by its patriarch, Captain Shotover, in the shape of a ship, it brings together a disparate set of characters, a few of whom are related to one or another of the inhabitants but they haven’t seen each other in so long that they don’t always recognize each other. Toward the end some unidentified foreign power begins to bomb England; two of the characters are killed in the midst of attempting to protect themselves by hiding in a storage shed. And though the bombardiers move on, obviously the war goes on and for all we know it will signal the doom of civilization. In the final minutes of the drama Shaw’s characters are as witty as ever, and the mood isn’t Wagnerian, yet the play is a Götterdämmerung. Written in 1916 and 1917 and first produced in 1920, it is the playwright’s response to the First World War – the Great War, as it was called until 1939. The work it feels closest to is a masterpiece from two decades later, Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, which was released on the cusp of the war that made that descriptor obsolete. Renoir’s movie doesn’t end in an apocalypse, but the tragedy at its conclusion, the senseless murder of a national hero – a case of mistaken identity – feels like an inevitable final act of carelessness and self-involvement that embodies up the attitude of the French nouveaux riches, the new aristocracy that has replaced the old, inherited one, the death of which Renoir had chronicled two years earlier in Grand Illusion.

Musicals at Shaw and Stratford: Funny Girl and Guys and Dolls

Sara Farb as Fanny Brice (understudied by Jade Repetta at the performance our critic attended) in Funny Girl. (Photo: David Cooper.)

Since Funny Girl made Barbra Streisand a Broadway star and the 1968 William Wyler movie version enshrined what may be the greatest musical-comedy performance ever recorded, it took more than half a century for the show to generate a major revival. The one-two punch of Streisand’s stage and film triumphs created the impression that the musical was mostly a decorative shell constructed around her, despite the superb score by Jule Styne and Bob Merrill and what the threadbare musical bios of the last couple of decades – Jersey Boys, Beautiful and many others – now reveal by contrast to be a creditable book by Isobel Lennart. Funny Girl was finally revived at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London in 2015 with Sheridan Smith in the role of the Ziegfeld Follies singer-comic Fanny Brice; Smith was marvelous, but when the show transferred to the West End, her health problems delayed her appearance, and for the first half of the run she was replaced by her understudy, Natasha Barnes, who received reviews that can only be called generous. (I saw both actresses; Smith’s performance was filmed in 2018 and can be seen on BroadwayHD.) And Smith was the only reason to see it: Michael Mayer’s production, with a revised book by Harvey Fierstein, was clumsy and looked seedy. Those qualities were very much in evidence when the revival opened on Broadway four years ago, with an apparently disastrous leading performance by Beanie Feldstein, who left the run early and was replaced by Lea Michele. (It was Michele I reviewed.)

The Stratford Shakespeare Festival: Classics

André Sills and Krystin Pellerin in Othello. (Photo: David Hou.)

The question up for grabs in any production of Shakespeare’s Othello is why Iago sets out to destroy Othello and those he loves. In the 1995 movie with Laurence Fishburne, Kenneth Branagh’s motivation for Iago’s actions was straight off the surface of the text: he was angry at his general for selecting Cassio rather than himself as his lieutenant and devised a revenge that would punish both of them; Othello’s wife Desdemona, whom he convinced the Moor had been cheating on him with Cassio, is merely collateral damage. It wasn’t an especially interesting choice but Branagh was still the best thing in the picture. When Frank Finlay played it in the famous National Theatre production opposite Laurence Olivier (with Maggie Smith as Desdemona), which was filmed in 1965, his hatred of the Moor derived unmistakably from the fact of Othello’s race. But the best Iago I’ve ever seen was Andre Braugher in a splendid 1991 production at the Shakespeare Theater in D.C.. His Iago caught Othello, Desdemona and Cassio in his web – to quote the character’s own metaphor – for amusement; he was a sociopath. Braugher was the first Black Iago in my experience, and there were also clear nods to the men’s race: you sensed his shock that Othello would prefer a white guy to a brother. That element was prominent in Iobal Khan’s production for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2015, which contained a number of Black characters, some African, some Caribbean, one Indian, and depicted a complicated hierarchy where culture determined class in ways that weren’t immediately apparent. Nicholas Hytner’s version at the National Theatre in 2013 was also about class – Rory Kinnear played Iago as distinctly working-class, and his racial discomfort with the Moor was mixed up with his perception that privileged men, one Black and one white, were looking down on him.

New from Criterion: Stanley Donen's Charade

Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn in Charade. (Photo: Universal/Criterion Collection.)

In a career devoted to giving audiences pleasure, Stanley Donen was never closer to the mark than in his 1952 musical Singin’ in the Rain (Betty Comden and Adolph Green’s hilarious burlesque of Hollywood’s conversion from the silent era to the talkies) and the 1963 Charade. These are two of the most blissful entertainments in American movie history. Charade is a witty, elegant and ingenious thriller written by Peter Stone, from a story he devised with Marc Behm, that is a romantic comedy at its heart. Donen and Stone didn’t invent this hybrid; Hitchcock did, in 1935 in The 39 Steps, and he returned to it twice, in To Catch a Thief in 1955 and North by Northwest in 1959. Both these later vehicles star Cary Grant – as a retired jewel thief on the French Riviera who has to find out who is emulating his illicit style in the first and as an innocent bystander mistaken for a government agent in the second. His leading ladies are Grace Kelly (27 to Grant’s 51) and Eva Marie Saint (35 to Grant’s 55). In Charade Grant is 59 and his acting partner, Audrey Hepburn as Reggie Lampert, is 35. I don’t provide these statistics in order to invoke an unconvincing platitude about aging male stars and young female ones: no one who watches him parry and trade quips with these three stunning, sexy women should make the mistake of thinking that Cary Grant can be reduced to a man of a certain age with a taste for younger partners. With each of them, as with Katharine Hepburn in the thirties and forties, his is the art of erotic understatement, and he’s always the one who gets seduced.

Split Screen: Ogunquit's City of Angels

Tony Yazbeck and Ben Jacoby in City of Angels. (Photo: Nile Scott Studios.)

The 1989 City of Angels is one of the wittiest and most original musicals ever written. Its brilliant book by Larry Gelbart, one of America’s premier comic voices throughout a storied career, is simultaneously a musical parody of a film noir and a delectably cynical treatment of Hollywood, set in the golden era of noirs, the late 1940s. The frame story is about a successful detective novelist named Stine who lands a contract to turn one of his books into a movie, and learns the tough lessons that all the literary successes who fell for Hollywood’s tin promises had to swallow in the big-studio era, about ego, betrayal, manipulation and the bottom line. Stine considers himself too wised-up to be fooled, yet he falls for the phony geniality of the producer-director, Buddy Fidler, who softens him up with praise and then rewrites page after page of his screenplay. Buddy is a megalomaniac with a will of solid steel. And Stine is ripe for seduction – by the money, by the notion of seeing his private-eye hero, Stone, on the screen, and by the sex that hangs in the Hollywood air. His sharp-eyed editor wife Gabby opts to stay behind in New York, though she knows that her husband is historically susceptible to the appeal of available young women, and when he takes Buddy’s secretary Donna to bed Gabby sees through his attempts to cover his tracks. One of the best songs in the sensational Cy Coleman-David Zippel score, “It Needs Work,” musicalizes the moment when she tosses it in his face. The other half of the show is a series of scenes from the movie Stine is writing and Fidler is shooting, so Stine and Stone divide the leading man role, and most of the supporting players are double cast. The musical’s winning visual trick is that the Stine story is designed in color while the film-within-the-play scenes are in glistening black and white.

Louisa May Alcott: The Heroine Builder

Portrait of Louisa May Alcott by Lance Austin Olsen.

“I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship. Far away in the sunshine are my highest aspirations.”

Louisa May Alcott

Alcott was not quite the quaint homespun lady who wove utopian fables of blissful childhood dreams that her writings, or at least one segment of her complex literary persona, would have you believe. She was not afraid of storms, true enough, but that was mostly because she was a storm herself, albeit a secret storm. Unlike the writings of either Jane Austen or the Brontë sisters, Alcott was not so very interested in what she defined as domestic fiction, a term she used to categorize, though not necessarily to critique, literary works that focus on family dynamics in contrast to the dynamics of female social perspectives, despite the fact that her most famous work, Little Women (1868), would appear to do just that, at least on the surface anyway. She even defined her own alternative literary position, as distinguished from the other writers mentioned, as having a preference for what she called “sensation stories and novels” as opposed to tales of domestic intrigue or turbulence. Some readers of Little Women, Good Wives (1869), Little Men (1871), or Jo’s Boys (1886), might be especially surprised to hear her declare, albeit in a quiet voice, “I fancy lurid things.” and to acknowledge a literary debt to Johann Goethe’s turbulent Sorrows of Young Werther and his diabolically beautiful Faust drama. Active during one of the most tumultuous and horrific times in American history, when the nature and even existence of that country was in perilous question, Alcott started writing for The Atlantic Monthly in 1859, and upon the outbreak of the Civil War became an active nurse at the Union Hospital in Georgetown. A fervent anti-slavery activist and advocate of complete equality and freedom in all its forms, she was so supportive of the Union cause that she enthusiastically rushed off to enlist in its army, only to be rebuffed, for what to her was that most inane of reasons: because the military did not accept female soldiers. This enraged her, not only as a devoted patriot but also as a avid supporter of the cause of suffrage and equality for women in every walk of life. To say that she was ahead of her time would be a drastic understatement. She was an unalloyed feminist, during a time when what she wanted, though simple enough to our modern eyes, was incomprehensible to not only the government but also to family and friends in her circle. Her dispatches were featured in the anti-slavery newspaper Commonwealth and her advanced thinking, often belied by the obvious charming quality of her fiction, propelled her to the forefront of a then gestating suffrage movement. This courageous dame had guts galore, not to mention the literary skill to captivate readers with her apparent coming-of-age stories, which cleverly concealed in their charms the author’s suggestions for improving our mutual existence.

Lesley Manville in Les Liaisons Dangereuses: An Actress Becomes a Legend

Lesley Manville and Aidan Turner in Les Liaisons Dangereuses. (Photo: Sarah Lee.)

It’s not likely that many people read Choderlos de Laclos’ spectacular 1782 epistolary novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses these days, but Christopher Hampton’s dramatic version, first produced in 1985, has become, deservedly, a repertory staple. In the original West End production and again on Broadway, the matched anti-heroes, Madame de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, best of friends and former lovers who manipulate everyone around them for their amusement and to enact private revenge plots, were played by Lindsay Duncan and Alan Rickman. In the triumphant 1988 Stephen Frears movie, called Dangerous Liaisons, Glenn Close and John Malkovich took over the roles, a case of seeming miscasting that, as it turned out, worked brilliantly. (There have been two other film adaptations, a very amusing updated one from 1959 directed by Roger Vadim, with Jeanne Moreau and Gérard Philipe and an unfortunate one called Valmont, directed by Miloš Forman, with Annette Bening and Colin Firth, released the year after Frears’s. And Sarah Michelle Gellar and Ryan Phillippe are featured in 1999’s Cruel Intentions, which sets the story in a Manhattan prep school. It’s trashy but a sexy, funny diversion.)

Recent Plays: The Balusters, Fallen Angels, Top Hat and The Fear of 13

The company of The Balusters. (Photo: Jeremy Daniel.)

David Lindsay-Abaire’s The Balusters, which enjoyed a twelve-week limited run as part of the Manhattan Theatre Club season, focuses on the tensions between neighbors of different races, cultural backgrounds and predilections whose veneer of politesse cracks under the pressure of their pursuit of different agendas. It’s a distinctly twenty-first century version of a social high comedy built around a melting-pot aristocracy that’s assumed to have eliminated the exclusionary class barriers of an earlier time but hasn’t really: the old divisions keep popping up, along with the old resentments. This variation of high comedy has produced some highly entertaining American plays (like Smart People and last season’s Eureka Day) and one masterpiece, Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park. The Balusters isn’t on the same level.

One of a Kind, Twice in a Row: Legacy and Legend

“Art never saved the world. It cannot do so.”

--Marcel Duchamp

“Everyone is an artist.”

--Joseph Beuys

The 20th century. Oh how I do miss that century these days. It was a virtual dynasty of dissonance and discontinuity, a breathtakingly radical realm of overturned assumptions and collapsing complacent expectations. Almost all the accepted truths, from science and religion to literature, music and visual art, were being overturned practically on a daily basis. And the two artists profiled in two new tomes from Princeton University Press were at the forefront of the mission to alter our perceptions of what art was and what it can be expected to do to and for us. Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) and Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) pretty much invented what we now call conceptual art. But it didn’t really have a name back when they were blazing a trail through the exotic hinterland of aesthetic exploration. And these valuable books, one a collection of snappy quotations from the cheeky and provocative Duchamp, Duchampisms, edited by Larry Warsh, and the other a deeply revealing study, Joseph Beuys and History by Daniel Spaulding, each shed new light on the dazzling outer range of cultural possibility back in the daring century they so personally embodied.

Gershwin Redux: Crazy for You

The company of Goodspeed's Crazy for You. (Photo: Diane Sobolewski.)

Crazy for You is the second of three Broadway musicals – so far – to rework hit shows with fabulous scores by George and Ira Gershwin. The first was My One and Only (1983), which had begun life in 1927 as Funny Face, starring Fred Astaire with his first dance partner, his sister Adele. The most recent was Nice Work If You Can Get It (2012), which is based loosely on the 1926 Oh, Kay! – best known as the musical in which the great, one-of-a-kind English performer Gertrude Lawrence introduced the beloved ballad “Someone to Watch Over Me.”

The Five Colours of White

Ink-and-Brush painting by Zhang Shuqi. (Photo: Jason Wang.)

In the glass-and-concrete halls of the Zhejiang Provincial Museum in Hangzhou, Zhang Shuqi’s work bursts with an urgency that belies its age. Echoes of the Homeland is a retrospective of a Chinese painter long overshadowed in the West. A native of Zhejiang Province, Zhang Shuqi (or Chang Shu Chi, 1900–1957) was hailed as one of the “Three Masters of Jinling” along with Xu Beihong (1895–1953) and Liu Zigu (1901–1986), pioneers who adapted traditional ink-and-brush to a modern world. Amid the fourth-floor galleries, his flowering branches and roiling flocks of fowl feel like a living ecosystem, each petal and plume pulsing with the tensions of war, exile, and cultural survival.

Lemons: Joe Mantello Directs Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman

Laurie Metcalf, a carton of organic milk, and Nathan Lane in Death of a Salesman. (Photo: Emilio Madrid.)

When I heard director Joe Mantello was setting the current revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in a garage, I misheard it as the garage. So I assumed it meant the garage attached to the Lomans’ house. As far as reconceptions of classic American theater go, it’s not the worst idea I’ve ever heard. But no: It wasn’t the garage, it was a garage. But what set designer Chloe Lamford provides isn’t even a garage—it’s a huge industrial warehouse with a large rollup metal door and piles of debris and dirt everywhere. (That Lamford won a Tony for her set is far more unsettling than anything in the play.) The characters sleep on metal benches, eat meals at a metal table, and walk barefoot on the dirty floor. The structure earns garage-icity when the metal door ascends and Willy Loman drives his car into the warehouse to begin the play. (It ends with Willy backing the car off the stage. Symbolism.) I get that the America Dream is a lie, that Willie’s life is a big empty warehouse (I would argue that it’s actually a small empty warehouse), but do you need to hit the audience with a sledgehammer (and an ugly one at that) to make that point? Salesman isn’t a naturalistic play--there are flashbacks and fantasy sequences; Jo Mielziner’s famous set for the original Broadway production was widely seen as an expressionistic wonder -- but when the stage is so bereft of any hint of visual beauty or interest, you wonder why Willy doesn’t kill himself sooner.

Found in Translation: Wayne McGregor’s MADDADDAM, Reconsidered

Heather Ogden in the National Ballet of Canada's MADDADDAM. (Photo: Karolina Kuras.)

In 2022, I walked out of Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre and wrote that MADDADDAM — Wayne McGregor’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s trilogy of visionary novels — had gotten lost in translation, the story confounding, the choreography swallowed by its own scenography. Watching the National Ballet of Canada’s revival last Saturday night, I retract nearly all of it. This time I was not confused so much as conquered. I felt, for the first time, that I was in the presence of genius.