Celebration: Twelfth Night on Broadway

Stephen Fry and Mark Rylance in Twelfth Night 

Twelfth Night was first performed in Queen Elizabeth’s court, and Shakespeare wrote it for the end of the twelve days of Christmas. Tim Carroll’s all-male production, which originated at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, conveys the celebratory mood. Carroll and his actors imported it to Broadway for the holiday season, in repertory with Richard III, showcasing Mark Rylance’s performances as Richard and as Olivia. (The title cards for the two shows borrow the Renaissance spellings: Twelfe Night, or What You Will and The Tragedie of King Richard the Third.) I saw Richard III in November but I didn’t write about it because I’d already reviewed both Kevin Spacey’s Richard at the Old Vic and the brilliant production by Propeller Theatre, and I found the Globe version – also with a completely male cast that overlaps with that of Twelfth Night – uninteresting. Even Rylance’s depiction of Shakespeare’s busy, self-amused villain-king felt recycled, a compendium of tricks he’d pulled from his voluminous sleeves on other occasions. But Twelfth Night is something else again – a splendiferous entertainment in which Rylance’s hilarious, love-addled Countess Olivia is just one member of a grand ensemble.

You get into the spirit as soon as you walk into the house. The actors are still getting into costume, so those audience members who have purchased tickets to sit on the stage above the playing area become part of the general bustle as ushers escort them to their places. Once strove for a companionable cross-over between actors and audience, inviting viewers to hang out in the pub at the top of the show, and Diane Paulus’s revival of Hair encouraged dancing on the stage after the curtain call, but both these efforts felt forced. At Twelfth Night the immediacy of the actors from the start doesn’t pretend that we have some relationship with them, but it does get us excited about the treats in store.

Unexpected Treasures: Twelfth Night at the National Theatre

Doon Mackichan and Tamsin Greig in Twelfth Night at London's National Theatre. (Photo: Marc Brenner)

The finest production of Twelfth Night I’ve ever seen was by the Théâtre de Soleil at the Olympic Arts Festival in L.A. in 1984. It was as leisurely as a conversation with good friends that trails late into the night. Visually it was plush: every new scene was signaled with a quilted backdrop that tumbled down in front of the previous ones. The director, Ariane Mnouchkine, embroidered the big comic moments so they were like inspired vaudeville or silent-comedy routines, but the play paused to frame the melancholy ones, too, so the cumulative emotional effect of the evening was rich and overpowering.

I thought of Mnouchkine’s Twelfth Night at several points during Simon Godwin’s staging of the play for the National Theatre, which the invaluable NT Live series has been sending out around the world in HD. It’s a banquet of a production, and startlingly fresh. Godwin has given it a contemporary setting – Olivia (Phoebe Fox) and her female staff, led by Maria (Niky Wardley) and the clown Feste (Doon Mackichan), live in a sort of girls’ club environment, while Orsino (Oliver Chris, whom I admired in One Man, Two Guv’nors) helms what feels like a fraternity for the rich and entitled. One of the rooms in his castle is a gym where he spars with Cesario, the male persona Viola (Tamara Lawrance) has adopted, spar, and Godwin has turned one of his scenes into a fortieth birthday party, complete with balloons and party hats, that points up how slow he’s been to attain maturity. (The emphasis on gender division links the play to Shakespeare’s earlier romantic comedy, Love’s Labour’s Lost.) Even Malvolio, Olivia’s steward, is a woman: Malvolia (Tamsin Greig), though unlike the other females in the house, she most emphatically does not party. The twenty-first-century setting allows for her infatuation with Olivia, of course, and it lends a tender quality to the love that Antonio (Adam Best) exhibits for Viola’s twin brother Sebastian (Daniel Ezra), who is so grateful to Antonio for his many kindnesses, after the shipwreck that separated the siblings, that we see how much he wishes he could reciprocate – but he just can’t. It also permits a lightly homoerotic flavor to Orsino’s friendship with Cesario that enhances this comedy of sexual confusion.

Shakespeare on Love: Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, Antony & Cleopatra

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Farinelli and the King: Identity as a Straitjacket

Mark Rylance (with Melody Grove) in Farinelli and the King. (Photo: Marc Brenner and Simon Annand)

Farinelli and the King, currently on Broadway, marks the seventh time I’ve seen Mark Rylance on stage. In the play, written by his wife Claire van Kampen, he plays Spain’s King Philippe V – bipolar according to historical record but mad as a hatter in the stage version – who is cured, more or less, when his second wife, Isabella (Melody Grove) persuades the gifted castrato singer Carlo Farinelli (Sam Crane) to abandon his London career and move to the Spanish court in Madrid. Rylance may be the funniest comic actor I’ve ever seen live (in the all-male Shakespeare’s Globe production of Twelfth Night, where he played Olivia, in David Hirson’s La Bête, and especially in Matthew Warchus’s 2008 production of the farce Boeing-Boeing), but I’m not always as enthusiastic when I see him in straight roles. He was certainly effective in a supporting part in Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies, for which he won an Oscar last March, but the problem with his grandiose, scenery-chewing “straight” appearances, as Richard III (which he played in rep along with Twelfth Night) or as Philippe V, is that if you see several of them you get hip to his trademark affects – the stuttering, the interpolated “uhs” and “ums,” the brusquely cut-off phrases, the flattening out of questions so they sound like statements of fact, the deliberate end-line drops, and so on. Part of Rylance’s vocal genius is that he’s witty enough to employ for ironic effect what would be merely bad habits in most actors, like the end-line drops and refusal to put question marks at the end of questions, but what can be endlessly amusing in a comedian can become tiresome in a dramatic actor. And I’m afraid that, early in Farinelli and the King, I ran out of patience for his bag of tricks.

Illyria: Stage Folk

John Magaro and Fran Kranz in Richard Nelson's Illyria. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

Richard Nelson must be the most prolific playwright in America. Within the last several years he wrote the four Apple Family plays and the three Gabriel plays; the published texts of his work take up most of a shelf at the Drama Book Shop in Manhattan. And though I haven’t liked everything of his that I’ve seen or read, much of his work is first-rate, including some – like Nikolai and the Others, his 2013 portrait of the community of émigré Russian artists in New York after the Second World War, with Michael Cerveris and John Glover as Balanchine and Stravinsky – that deserved much more attention than it received. There hasn’t been much chatter about his latest, Illyria, which received a fine production at the Public, directed by Nelson himself, that closed a couple of weeks ago. Illyria is about the young Joe Papp, struggling to keep his first Shakespeare festival, in Central Park, alive in 1958 despite poor houses, fading finances and the menacing political climate: when the play begins, Papp (John Magaro, in a gruff, vivid performance) has just been fired from his job as a TV producer because the House Un-American Activities Committee has shown an interest in him. It’s a good play – well constructed, with a stage full of interesting, articulate characters whose conversation is well worth tuning into. And for theatre buffs, this glimpse into the scrambling, scrapping lives of young, idealistic, would-be-world-beating thespians of six decades ago has a special appeal and a special charm.

All Shook Up: Grooving on the Elvis Presley Jukebox

Ryan Mac and the company of All Shook Up. (Photo: Diane Sobolewski.)

The current production of All Shook Up, Joe DiPietro’s parodic jukebox musical, at the Goodspeed Opera House is a homecoming of sorts, since the original version, directed by Christopher Ashley, began there in 2004 before opening on Broadway the following year. It never really caught on in New York; it ran for five months and then toured the country in 2006 and 2007. Seeing the show for the first time in its revival at the Goodspeed, I honestly can’t imagine why it wasn’t a hit from the outset. I can’t say, of course, what the current director and choreographer, Daniel Goldstein and Byron Easley, have brought to the show, but the material is charming and the production is inspiriting. The twenty-five songs were all recorded by Elvis Presley (I recognized most but not quite all of them). The musical revamps the low-budget rock ‘n’ roll movie musicals of the fifties like Rock Around the Clock and Don’t Knock the Rock starring Alan Freed, the DJ credited with popularizing rock. (Freed is also the main character of the vivid 1978 film American Hot Wax, where he’s played, memorably, by Tim McIntire.)

A Giddy Thing: Much Ado About Nothing at London’s Wyndham’s Theatre (August 29, 2011)

There are worse ways to spend a summer night in London than in a lush West End theatre watching a high-octane Shakespeare production, but I have to confess that my girlfriend and I hadn’t actually planned for it. Coming on the heels of a much more orderly two and a half weeks in France, our time in London had a satisfying seat-of-your-pants feel to it, since it was essentially a pit stop en route from Paris to our final destination in Scotland  But even months earlier, when all we’d confirmed about our time in the UK were our arrival and departure dates, there was one thing we were certain of: we knew exactly where we would be on Saturday August 27 at 19:00 GMT. That night we’d be sitting in front of a TV screen watching the much-anticipated fall premiere of Doctor Who. The preceding episode of the season had aired way back in early June, and I have no shame in confessing that our twin geek hearts were genuinely aflutter with the mere idea of watching the show’s return live on British soil. (Europe is lovely yes, but we’d let our travelling interfere with our TV watching quite enough at that point in our month-long trip!) And so perhaps you can imagine our excitement when, while looking for the entrance to the Charing Cross tube station, Jessica and I stumbled serendipitously upon Wyndham’s Theatre. There, on the marquee, were the shining faces of David Tennant and Catherine Tate – both of Doctor Who fame! – headlining as Benedick and Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing. No doubt all the stars in heaven had conspired to bring us to this very moment: these were our last two days in London, and it turned out to be the last week of the show’s 3-month run. We simply had to see this play.

David Tennant and Catherine Tate in Doctor Who

And so, on the morning of Monday August 29, Jessica and I got up early and stood in line for that day’s lottery, hoping to secure two of the few remaining seats for that evening’s sold-out performance. We weren’t alone, it turned out. The line outside the theatre that morning was well populated, but buoyant. Many were coming to see the show for a second time, and true to form, the conversations we had were less about Elizabethan theatre than that Saturday’s Doctor Who episode. In the end, we left with two standing room tickets, and were grateful for them! We spent the rest of the day enjoying the Tate Modern and following a quick visit to a nearby pub, we got to the theatre a half hour early (as we’d been advised to do by the lovely woman, and rabid David Tennant fan, we’d met in line that morning) in order to secure a good standing spot for ourselves. It turned out we needn’t have worried: Wyndham’s is a fairly intimate space (especially in the Stalls), and the back of the house had a clear, unobstructed view of the whole stage. And so we waited, and watched, as every seat in the sold-out house slowly filled up.

Much Ado About Nothing and Romantic Comedy

Maggie Siff and Jonathan Cake in Much Ado About Nothing, at the Duke on 42nd Street (Photo: Richard Perry)

Ben Jonson wrote satirical comedies, Shakespeare romantic ones – and then, later in his career, the two plays that scholars have categorized as problem comedies, Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well. Of his romantic comedies, Twelfth Night runs deepest, but Much Ado About Nothing has been the most influential. Almost the entire history of Hollywood romantic comedy, beginning with the first screwball comedy, Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night, in 1934, flows from its font. These movies were the consequence of the newly enforced Production Code, which forbade the hero and heroine of a romance to jump in bed together before marriage without tragic consequences (invariably for the woman). The Hays Code office, as it was popularly known, sought to neuter romance, but screwball comedy came up with a formula that kept it sexy as well as witty. The protagonists begin as adversaries – like Peter Warne (Clark Gable) and Ellie Andrews (Claudette Colbert) in It Happened One Night – distanced by both class and temperament, yet we can feel the sexual chemistry between them. Each has to learn to get past first impressions as well as to compromise, to come halfway toward the other. Their reward is a happy ending in each other’s arms, when, to use screenwriter Robert Riskin’s metaphor in Capra’s picture, the Walls of Jericho (blankets on a clothesline) erected to keep them discreetly separate from each other in a series of motel rooms come down after the hero and heroine are safely wed.

Befogged: On a Clear Day You Can See Forever

David Turner, Jessie Mueller, & Harry Connick Jr. in On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (Photo: Nicole Rivelli)

It’s rather fascinating to sit through the new Broadway revival of the Burton Lane-Alan Jay Lerner musical On a Clear Day You Can See Forever because you keep trying to get into the heads of Peter Parnell (who revised the book) and Michael Mayer (who re-conceived and staged it). They must have thought it would work, but it’s hard to imagine how, even given the level of delusion on which the Broadway musical theatre sometimes operates – think of Twyla Tharp’s Bob Dylan musical The Times They Are A-Changin’ and Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, and didn’t someone just close a musical based on Bonnie and Clyde? On a Clear Day has a sumptuous score, but the book has always been trouble. When it began in Boston in 1965, before the original leading man, Louis Jourdan, had been replaced by John Cullum, Lerner was struggling with so many plot strands that the show ran nearly four hours, and after he’d trimmed it down to a presentable length for its Broadway opening it felt truncated, still excessively busy and random, as if he’d taken an axe to whichever overgrowths he could get at rather than melting the whole scenario down to a viable dramatic form.

The premise is complicated, to say the least. A psychiatrist named Mark Bruckner is approached by a nervous, chattering young woman named Daisy Gamble who hopes he can hypnotize her to stop smoking. He puts her under – she’s so susceptible that he barely has to say anything before she’s snoozing in his chair – and when he regresses her he discovers she had a previous life as an aristocrat in late-eighteenth-century London whose sexy portrait-painter husband wouldn’t stay faithful to her. In the course of interviewing Daisy’s witty, literate, elegant, independent-minded alter ego, Melinda Wells, Mark finds himself falling in love with her. So he spends as much time as he can with Daisy, who falls for him, mistakenly believing he’s courting her twentieth-century self – the only personality she’s aware she possesses. Mark is certainly a relief from her square fiancé Warren, who’s looking for employment with the company that can offer the best pension and who is happiest with Daisy when she’s at her most conventional.

Much Ado: Stratford Festival’s Much Ado About Nothing

Ben Carlson and Deborah Hay in Much Ado About Nothing at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival

I usually shy away from productions of Shakespeare that transpose the original Elizabethan setting to something contemporary or even exotic. And don’t even get me started on cross-dressing versions of King Lear or Hamlet. I mean, why bother? I understand the need for relevancy. But to my mind Shakespeare doesn’t need improving. If he did, his works wouldn’t have lasted more than 500 years. They are perfect specimens of the English language, timeless works of art that are also time capsules capturing the spirit and values of Renaissance England, Shakespeare’s own epoch. And so I found myself frowning when, during a recent visit to Canada’s Stratford Shakespeare Festival, I began reading director Christopher Newton’s program notes for Much Ado About Nothing which is at the Festival Theatre through to Oct. 27. In those notes, Newton (formerly of the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake) happily declared his love of Brazil, circa 1889, the year the country’s last emperor, Dom Pedro II, abdicated and was forced into exile. Say what? Rhapsodizing about palm trees and sandy beaches, anti-slavery laws and samba schools, Newton went on to say that Brazil was where he had decided to place his version of Much Ado About Nothing, larding it with sexy mulatos. I thought, get me outta here. I seriously considered making a run for it, and was already contemplating how I could leap over the row of sensible shoes (a bus full of senior citizens had decamped on the Festival Theatre for the night) in which I was planted, dead in the middle, without causing alarm. But then the lights dimmed low and there I was, bound for Brazil by way of Elizabethan England, certain I would hate every minute of the bumpy ride.

But surprise, surprise. When the action began, bathed in the honey-coloured tones of Robert Thomson’s South American-inspired lighting design, I felt myself yielding to Newton’s Portuguese-inflected staging, like a corsage orchid to the sun. Also inviting was Santo Loquasto’s late 19th-century Brazilian villa set design, dominated by an interior sweeping staircase with Azulejos floor tiles, a setting that felt warm, intimate and seductive. I was already happy to be spending time there. Its sun-kissed colours were a balm on the eyes. It didn’t take long to see that the relaxed vibe of the visual design suited a play that, while bracketed by images of war, is preoccupied with finding peace. I felt myself relax in the presence of this oasis of calm. It was obviously that Newton was not as wilfully contrarian as I had first suspected. He was definitely onto something. 

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.

High Comedies: Six Degrees of Separation and Present Laughter

Allison Janney and Corey Hawkins in Six Degrees of Separation. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

The current Broadway revival of John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation begins badly and doesn’t find its feet until its leading lady, Allison Janney, does – about two-thirds of the way through, during her reading of the speech that gives the play its title. The play, a brilliant high comedy, is about the way a young hustler named Paul disrupts the lives of a number of people whose paths he crosses, most (but not quite all) of whom belong to the New York elite of the last decade of the twentieth century. Paul is an outsider in every conceivable way: he’s black (race in this play equates to class), gay and homeless. When a moneyed M.I.T. undergraduate named Trent Conway picks him up on the streets of Boston and takes him home, Paul makes a deal with him – sex in exchange for information about the prep-school classmates in Trent’s address book, now enrolled at various Ivy League colleges. (Trent is delighted to furnish details: not only does he consider he’s getting fair return for the favor, but his sexuality has always made him feel like an outsider too; he fantasizes that he can turn Paul into such an appealing faux aristocrat that when Trent shows up on his arm everyone will just have to accept them both.) Then Paul presents himself at the doors of their parents, bleeding from a self-inflicted stab wound he says he incurred during a mugging, claiming to know their children. He also professes to be the son of Sidney Poitier, and all of the aristocrats whose homes he’s entered on false pretenses are sufficiently impressed to take him in for the night. Paul is a scam artist and a narcissist; he’s also, it turns out, delusional. He starts to believe he really is Sidney Poitier’s son, and then he believes his other invention: that he’s the illegitimate son of Flan Kittredge, the art dealer who, along with his wife Ouisa, shows him the most kindness. Six Degrees of Separation is about connection and imagination as well as class (a theme of all high comedy). But it isn’t centrally about Paul. He’s the catalyst whose interactions with those he comes across – Trent and the aspiring, adventure-seeking young actor from Utah, Rick (Rick and his wife Elizabeth also take Paul in, when they find him sleeping in Central Park) and the Kittredges – act in various ways on their imaginations. The protagonist of the play is Ouisa, who undergoes the most profound change as a result of meeting him.

Rarely Revisited: Marivaux’s The Triumph of Love

Vincent Randazzo and Avanthika Srinivasan in The Triumph of Love. (Photo: Liza Voll.)

Pierre de Marivaux was the most important French playwright of the eighteenth century – that is, of the second half of the Neoclassical period; Molière and Racine ruled the French theatre of the first half. Yet whereas Molière has never been out of fashion and Racine’s Phaedra has been kept alive (though more in the form of revisions and adaptations than through productions of the actual text), theatre companies stopped performing Marivaux almost entirely for many years. Rare as productions of English Restoration comedies are, until perhaps thirty years ago they were more frequent than revivals of The Triumph of Love and The Game of Love and Chance, Marivaux’s most famous plays. (He was, in fact, extremely prolific.) The translators and directors who rediscovered him were struck by how modern these hybrids of high and romantic comedy are, as was the marvelous English filmmaker Clare Peploe, Bernardo Bertolucci’s wife, who made a magical movie version of The Triumph of Love with postmodern touches in 2001 starring Mira Sorvino, Ben Kingsley and Fiona Shaw. But that doesn’t mean that Marivaux has exactly returned to the repertory. It’s still unusual to find a theatre with the courage to attempt his explorations of the tension between love and reason, which play with ideas from both Shakespeare and the Restoration masters Congreve and Wycherley and are witty, cerebral and demanding in their use of language. The movie of The Triumph of Love is the only version of the play I’ve ever seen, so I was sure not to miss the one that just opened at Boston’s Huntington Theatre. (It closes April 6.)

Tootsie: In Name Only

 Julie Halston, James Moye, Santino Fontana, Lilli Cooper, John Behlmann in Tootsie. (Photo: Matthew Murphy)

The new musical of Tootsie, with a book by Robert Horn and music and lyrics by David Yazbek, has “smash hit” written all over it. It’s slick and rapid-fire. The veteran director, Scott Ellis (who’s also represented on Broadway this season by the revival of Kiss Me, Kate at Studio 54), and his expert cast build the farce perfectly, so that the more complications that are piled on top of the premise – actor Michael Dorsey (Santino Fontana), whose temperament has made it impossible for his agent (Michael McGrath) to land him jobs, finally gets one by presenting himself as a woman, Dorothy Michaels – the funnier it is. Rather than set the story in the period in which the movie was made, the early eighties, Horn has contemporized it. There are #MeToo jokes – Michael’s wry aspiring-playwright roommate Jeff Slater (Andy Grotelueschen) quips that in an era when women are literally seizing power from between the legs of men, Michael is risking infuriating everyone by pretending to be female. There are jokes about sexual fluidity – when Michael, forgetting momentarily that he’s in drag, kisses his co-star, Julie Nichols (Lilli Cooper), whom he’s fallen for, instead of scaring her off since she’s not gay, she likes him so much that she decides to try to be gay. It’s all very up to the minute, and the audience at the Saturday matinee I attended screamed with laughter. I would be dishonest if I said that I didn’t have a pretty good time, too. But I haven’t the slightest idea what the hell this Tootsie is about.

Undressing: Shakespeare and Romantic Comedy

Emma Thompson & Kenneth Branagh in Much Ado About Nothing.

When Kenneth Branagh adapted Shakespeare’s comedy Much Ado About Nothing for the screen in 1993, he had the good sense to shape it like a romantic comedy. Romantic comedy may be a modern genre, but Much Ado has all the same elements – most importantly, two lovers who begin as antagonists and find their way through the friction to a romance that is deepened by the challenges they pose to one another. It also has some of the funniest romantic banter in the history of theater and Emma Thompson, as the unstoppably witty Beatrice, blazes through those lines with the exuberant physicality of an English screwball heroine.

Much Ado may be the forerunner to all romantic comedy, but there’s another association between Shakespeare’s comedies and the modern genre: that like the lovers in Twelfth Night or As You Like It, the characters in romantic comedies often court through disguise. From Ernst Lubitsch’s sublime Shop Around the Corner and Preston Sturges’ mischievous The Lady Eve to the rollicking cross-country romance of Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild with its notes of darkness, romantic comedies are about the roles we play to win love and the risks we take in finally shedding our disguises to earn that love. (Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve and Melanie Griffith in Something Wild both move through a series of disguises as the movie progresses and they fall in love with the men they try to con.) The love stories are quests for fulfilment, where the characters, through romantic surrender, throw off the defenses they have become all too comfortable in and with it the need for disguise.

Clare Danes & Billy Crudup in Stage Beauty.

Richard Eyre’s Stage Beauty (2004) is a romantic comedy about a Restoration staging of Shakespeare’s Othello where the cross-dressing disguises of Shakespearean comedy become the conceit through which the romantic partnership plays out. Set in London, at the moment when the ban against women acting on the stage was reversed, its lovers are Ned Kynaston (Billy Crudup), the last celebrity among actors who played the women’s roles, and Margaret Hughes, or Maria (Clare Danes), the first professional actress on the English stage. Stage Beauty makes those links between Shakespeare’s plays and modern romantic comedy explicit in a deliciously subversive and wittily postmodern exploration of the performance of gender and the enigma of sexuality and desire.

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.

Didacticism and Virtue at the Shaw Festival

Shawn Wright and Jeff Irving with the cast of Androcles and the Lion at the Shaw Festival. (Photo: David Cooper)

At every performance of the Shaw Festival’s production of Androcles and the Lion, George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 dramatization of the Aesop fable, a member of the audience is picked to play the lion. Other theatregoers who have been handed colored balls before the play begins are invited to throw them onto the stage at will, interrupting the dramatic action and prompting a variety of responses from the actors, who have to tell an anecdote or recite a section of Shaw’s preface to the play or share any thought that pops into their heads. This process is in the service of what Tim Carroll, the Shaw’s new artistic director, calls “two-way theatre,” which is intended to break down the barrier between the actors and the audience. Carroll directed Androcles, but his mission is visible in the productions he didn’t stage, too. In Wilde Tales, the lunchtime show, adapted by Kate Hennig from four Oscar Wilde fairy tales and directed by Christine Brubaker, children from the audience sit along the sides of the Court House stage with signs and other props; their participation is encouraged at certain points in the action. In Alan Bennett’s The Madness of King George, directed by Kevin Bennett (who trained with Carroll during his tenure as associate director at Shakespeare’s Globe in London), the house lights remain on during the performance and the cast interacts with members of the audience – especially those who are sitting right on the stage of the Royal George – just as actors at the Globe play up to those groundlings who have found standing room right below the thrust, within easy reach of the performers. Five of the six plays I saw at the Shaw began with a member of the staff – an assistant stage manager or head dresser or what have you – addressing the audience and providing some tidbits of information about his or her job.

Richard Wilbur, 1921-2017: Molière’s Emissary

Richard Wilbur passed away on October 14, 2017, at the age of 96.

Among the many achievements of the poet Richard Wilbur, who died in October, perhaps his least recognized is the work he did as a translator of neoclassical French playwrights – Racine, Corneille and especially Molière. Wilbur translated ten of Molière’s plays, originally written in Alexandrine couplets (six beats to the line), into iambic pentameter, which is a more natural meter for English speakers, as my wonderful undergraduate Shakespeare professor, Alan Levitan, liked to illustrate with the spontaneous iambic line, “Give me a chocolate ice cream cone with sprinkles.” In his introduction to his first interaction with Molière, The Misanthrope (1955), Wilbur argues, “The constant of rhythm and rhyme was needed, in the translation as in the original, for bridging great gaps between high comedy and farce, lofty diction and ordinary talk, deep character and shallow. . . . [W]hile prose might preserve the thematic structure of the play, other ‘musical’ elements would be lost, in particular the frequently intricate arrangements of balancing half-lines, lines, couplets, quatrains, and sestets. There is no question that words, when dancing within such patterns, are not their prosaic selves, but have a wholly different mood and meaning.” By way of example, he offers a prose translation of one speech from the play, adding, “Even if that were better rendered, it would still be plain that Molière’s logic loses all its baroque exuberance in prose; it sounds lawyerish; without rhyme and verse to phrase and emphasize the steps of its progression, the logic becomes obscure . . . not crystalline and followable as it was meant to be.”

Clare Peploe: All for Love

Mira Sorvino and Jay Rodan in The Triumph of Love (2001).

“One can do almost anything for love,” the aging art historian Basil Sharp (Sebastian Shaw) tells his dearest friend, the émigré English photographer Katherine (Jacqueline Bisset), near the end of Clare Peploe’s 1987 film High Season. Katherine is living on a Greek island with her thirteen-year-old daughter Chloe (Ruby Baker), but she’s broke and in danger of losing her house. Her one chance of achieving solvency is to sell a vase Sharpie gave her some years ago to a Greco-English art dealer, Konstantinis (Robert Stephens), who knows he can sell it at an exorbitant price; the trick is to get it out of Greece, which has famously declared a moratorium on the removal of national treasures. So Katherine begs Sharpie to betray his professional ethics and certify the vase a fake. The line I’ve quoted above is his justification for agreeing to do so – though, as with everything else in this vibrant, hilarious farce (which Peploe wrote with her brother Mark), there’s more to it than meets the eye.

Comedy, Verbal and Physical: The Beaux’ Stratagem, Hay Fever, & The Play That Goes Wrong

Member of the cast of The Beaux’ Stratagem at London's Nation Theatre. (Photo by Manuel Harlan)

George Farquhar’s delightful Restoration comedy The Beaux’ Stratagem is about two young men, Aimwell and Archer, described as “two gentlemen of broken fortune,” who arrive at a scheme for setting themselves up, they hope, for life. Touring the English provinces, they trade off, one pretending to be a gentleman of means and wooing a rich lady, while the other playacts the role of his servant. In Litchfield, the setting of this comedy of manners, it’s Aimwell’s turn to be the suitor. He casts his eye on Dorinda, while Archer finds himself falling for her sister-in-law, Mrs. Sullen. Unfortunately, Mrs. Sullen is trapped in a miserable marriage to a drunkard and spendthrift whose only evident reason for making the match was his wife’s money. Farquhar’s play comments on the market society that produces such dismal unions; when Aimwell finds himself actually falling for the target of his “stratagem,” he repents his dishonesty and makes a clean breast of it to Dorinda. The play is lighthearted, though, even in its political background. The English and French are at war and the English are holding the French troops in Litchfield as prisoners, but the bonds they constrain them are silken ones: they’re free to roam about and enjoy the pleasures of the town.

The play was first performed in 1707, but Simon Godwin’s richly entertaining production at the National Theatre seems to be set later – the costumes by Lizzie Clachan are Georgian, perhaps just because the clothes from that period are more lush and the shapes trimmer and more flattering. (No one who sees Clachan’s gorgeous outfits is likely to complain about the shift.) She also designed the triple-tiered set, which is built on four staircases and doubles as the home of Lady Bountiful (Jane Booker), the mother of Dorinda (Pippa Bennett-Warner) and Sullen (Richard Henders), and the inn where Aimwell (Samuel Barnett) and Archer (Geoffrey Streatfield) have put up in Litchfield. This scaffold-like construction is convenient for the frequency of scenes in which characters overhear each other’s conversations as well as serving as a kind of metaphor for the interplay of classes. Archer is playing the part of a servant (though, when Mrs. Sullen observes that his manners are “above the livery of a footman,” he covers the discrepancy by confessing that he was born a gentleman) and becomes friendly with Lady Bountiful’s valet, Scrub (dour-looking Pearce Quigley, who reads his lines in a tossed-off, lightly ironic tone that’s very funny), while flirting, in the early scenes, with the innkeeper’s amiable daughter Cherry (Amy Morgan).