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.

Hello, Dolly!: Ogunquit Playhouse Puts On Its Sunday Clothes

Beth Leavel as Dolly Levi and company in Hello Dolly! (Photo: Nile Scott Studios.)

Six decades on, Hello, Dolly! is seen as a prime representative of the golden age of Broadway musicals, but the fact is, that era was rolling into its final years, before rock ‘n’ roll and the bitterness of the Vietnam War wore it down. Jerry Herman and Michael Stewart’s musical adaptation of the 1954 Thornton Wilder farce The Matchmaker, set in Gilded Age New York, lasted on Broadway for seven years and toured for longer, but its producer, David Merrick, turned it into a vehicle with revolving-door stars stepping in to play the marriage broker Dolly Levi, most of them relics from the 1940s. And the musical, with its overweight production values and its thin farce plot – about how the marriage broker Dolly Levi, commissioned by the Yonkers hay and feed shopkeeper Horace Vandergelder to find him a wife, captures him for herself while abetting the courtship of three young couples – grew more arthritic as time pressed on. When Barbra Streisand took over the title role in the otherwise plodding 1969 movie, her astonishing stockpile of talents and unique old-style/new-style presence lit up the fading material like fireworks; she was a godsend. But what contemporary mountings of Hello, Dolly! have shown – from the version at the Goodspeed Opera House in 2013 to the triumphant 2017 Broadway revival to the newly opened one at the Ogunquit Playhouse – is that, liberated from the notion that audiences are paying to watch a guest star in a variety show, it can be a first-rate entertainment.

Resurgence: The Christophers

Michaela Cole and Ian McKellan in The Christophers. (Photo: Department M.)

There isn’t a sentimental moment in Ian McKellen’s portrayal of the artist Julian Sklar in Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers. Julian is a painter in the sunset of his life who hasn’t made any new work in twenty years; he’s long since faded from celebrity, but a mystique remains around an unfinished series known as “the Christophers,” which he abandoned when he broke up with the lover to whom they were dedicated. His dreadful children (amusingly sketched by James Corden and Jessica Gunning), with whom he has apparently had no relationship for years, terrified that at his death they will be left without any inheritance, hire a young artist named Lori Butler (Michaela Coel) to forge finished versions of the paintings if indeed they exist at all, or to create them if they don’t. They persuade her to apply for the job of their dad’s new assistant in order to gain entrée to his studio. But though Lori has a history with Sklar that he is unaware of and that should definitely encourage her to take his children’s side – as a nineteen-year-old aspiring painter, she endured a withering critique by him on a TV show – her response to the young Sklars’ mission turns out to be very complicated. So is Ed Solomon’s intriguing screenplay, which weighs the questions of legacy and ownership in the arts and the bearing of the personal on the artistic as no movie has since Olivier Assayas’s Summer Hours in 2008.

I Am a Camera: Three Historic Photographers

(Princeton University Press.)

“I am a camera, with its shutter open, quite passive, just recording not thinking. Recording. Some day all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, and fixed.”

--Christopher Isherwood, Berlin Stories

“A still photograph is the illusion of a literal description of how a camera saw a piece of time and space. All things are photographable.”

--Garry Winogrand

How sweet it is! When your three favourite modernist photographers get the huge exhibition and publication acclaim they all deserved separately but which is all the more illuminating and meaningful if read, studied, viewed and reviewed as an ensemble, as a hugely important creative constellation of innovative artists. Such is the joy that arrives spontaneously when one picks up this highly significant exhibition catalogue (artfully disguised as a gorgeously designed coffee table art book), Photography as a Way of Life: Minor White, Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan, published by Princeton University Press in conjunction with the Princeton University Art Museum. It is a well-earned testament to the achievements of three titans who literally defined the terms by which all photographers after them would be assessed. And the astute author/curator Brendan Fay is the ideal candidate for such a monumental undertaking: his eye and mind will help any reader or viewer, whether they are familiar with these artists or just seeing them for the very first time, come to a fulsome appreciation for what makes these photographic giants... well, so gigantic. White (1908-1976), Siskind (1903-1991) and Callahan (1912-1999), are exemplars of a certain kind of quiet seeing: an intimate and reverential attention to detail and ambience which they share in an elegant and austere manner. I often refer to them as the Vermeers of photography, and Fay’s book confirms it.

Fated and Fully Realized: A Triumphant Kismet opens the National Ballet’s Spring Season

Genevieve Penn Nabity and the artists of the National Ballet of Canada in Kismet. (Photo: Karolina Kuras.)

In the promotional video the National Ballet of Canada released ahead of Kismet, the world-premiere ballet by Jera Wolfe that opened a double bill at Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre on May 29, the Métis-Canadian choreographer speaks of a central figure on a journey, unable to outrun a destiny. Take him at his word and you’ll search the stage in vain for plot. Better to let the literal narrative go.

Dostoevsky in the Water Town

The Dostoyevsky: Man is a Mystery exhibit at the Muxin Art Museum. (Photo: Jason Wang.)

To reach the Muxin Art Museum, one first passes through Wuzhen, a historic water town in Zhejiang Province that has been carefully polished for tourism. Stone paths are kept immaculately clean, boats drift slowly through the canals, and the entire district often feels suspended in a state of permanent display. At the edge of Yuanbao Lake, the museum rises as a cluster of spare concrete volumes designed by OLI Architecture. The shift from the cultivated brightness outside to the cool, inward atmosphere of the galleries is immediate.

Lost in the Labyrinths of the Mind: Backrooms

Chiwetel Ejiofor in Kane Parson's Backrooms. (Photo: A24 Pictures.)

Kane Parsons’s Backrooms is some very clever filmmaking. The elevator pitch could’ve been “Skinamarink, but cinematic.”