Cymbeline, Theater for A New Audience, New Victory Theater

A friend of mine couldn't use their ticket, so they gave it to me, and I was very glad to have an opportunity to see some live Shakespeare, as it had been 2 1/2 years since I had last done so.  I wasn't able to see the Lincoln Center production of Cymbeline from three years ago, so I was especially intrigued this particular play.  I thought the show was very good. It was presented by the Fiasco Theatre, composed of MFA graduates from the Brown University/Trinity Repertory program, and features six actors playing fourteen roles, which they more or less do with a straight face until the final sequence. The play was streamlined in terms of scenes and characters, and featured an explanatory prologue, but I don't feel it detracted from the piece, although I would really have to see the play in its' unaltered from to know for sure.  I had never seen Cymbeline before, so this was my first exposure to it. I wish I had seen the Lincoln Center production from 2007 but I wasn't in NYC then.  I thought the cast was very good all-around, but some of them were better than others. I was impressed with how they shift characters.  The actress who plays the Queen/Belaria, Emily Young is especially good and makes her performance seem effortless. Two of the actors, Noah Brody as Posthumus and Ben Steinfeld as Iachimo are also the co-directors, which makes me wonder what the rehearsal process. I think it's also quite amazing how much they cast can do with two crates, a fabulous trunk, and a white sheet as their set along with a few hand props and musical instruments.  I think it's a very accessible production with some great stagecraft.  It's a great way to introduce people to Shakespeare, especially a play which is one of the lesser-known works of the Bard.  The play runs through January 30, so you have one more week to catch this wonderful and intimate production, which is right next door to Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark, at the opposite end of the theatrical spectrum and which I will not talk about in this post.

A Little Night Music- Broadway, Walter Kerr Theater

I realized that I never actually posted a review when I saw A Little Night Music last month. I had a really great seat in Row D of the right orchestra, and I was looking forward to seeing the show because I love Bernadette Peters and Elaine Stritch, as they are both Broadway institutions, specifically in connection to Stephen Sondheim musicals.  I had seen a regional production of A Little Night Music over a year ago, so I knew the plot and had some familiarity with the score.  I liked the opening "Night Waltz" with the majority of the cast on-stage, as it worked well in getting the audience into the realm and atmosphere of the play. Bernadette Peters was quite marvelous as Desiree, she really inhabited the role of the traveling actress, frequent lover, and sometime mother. Her line readings were imbued with a world-weariness and her performance felt very lived-in and naturalistic. Ms. Peters has a very distinctive voice and personality and I thought it served her well in this role, and allowed her to really make the role her own, separate from previous portrayals.  The whole house was quiet when "Send in the Clowns" began.  I have not seen Catherine Zeta-Jones in the role, and so I can't really draw comparisons between the two, but I don't think that Ms. Zeta-Jones could have brought a believable portrayal to the role that Ms. Peters did, and would have stuck out apart from the rest of the cast. Her Tony Awards performance certainly left a lot to be desired.  Seeing the show during Ms. Zeta-Jones' tenure would have been "event theater", all about seeing her live performance, and now I think seeing the show is more about experiencing the show as a whole, with less emphasis on the individual cast members.

Ms. Peters commanded the stage and had the requisite chemistry with Stephen R. Buntrock, who gave a wonderful performance himself as Frederik, the lawyer in his 40's married to a virginal 18 year old who he has known since she was a child (Ramona Mallory in the role of Anne, originated by her mother Victoria Mallory in 1973).  Mr. Buntrock reminded me of Brent Barret in physical appearance,  had great stage presence and singing voice, and was a believable partner/foil for the many other characters he comes into contact with. At times, his Fredrick seemed to be a bit too much of a ham and a buffoon, but it didn't detract too much from the proceedings. Ms. Mallory is quite good as Anne, coming to terms with being a wife and an adult while still very much a child. The one weak link in the cast seems to be Hunter Ryan Herdlicka, who doesn't seem to do much as Henrik other than be awkward and mope around. I didn't really care much about his plight, perhaps because I already knew what would happen. Erin Davie and Leigh Ann Larkin seemed almost underused as Countess Charlotte Malcolm and the lusty maid Petra, but they made great use of their time onstage, Ms. Davie in particular having some great one-liners.  I had previously seen Bradley Dean, who plays Count Carl-Magnus Malcolm, on the national tour of Spamalot, and he seems to do his better work in hammy roles.  He looks older than Aaron Lazar, and I think that is a good thing for this character.  His character is the villainous buffoon of the show, and Mr. Dean did a great but not spectacular job in the role. Still very entertaining though. Elaine Stritch was a hoot as Madame Armfeldt.  Her dry delivery worked well with the role of the crotchety guardian of Frederika (played brilliant by Katherine McNamara) and exasperated mother of Desiree, and she showed her human side as well. The liebersingers were also great with their interludes and song snatches between scenes. I throughly enjoyed this production and I'm glad I got a chance to see it before it closed.

The King's Speech

This is my second movie review, and I feel it's somewhat fitting for this blog since the film has a very theatrical feel to it at times.  I've always enjoyed historical fiction, and this movie was getting a lot of awards buzz, so I was attracted to seeing it for those reasons in addition to also liking the cast a lot as well. Colin Firth was superb as Prince Albert, who became King George VI. Helena Bonham Carter was also fabulous as his wife, the future Queen Elizabeth.  Geoffrey Rush had a method to his madness as Dr. Logue the speech pathologist, and the cast was stocked with so many other wonderful actors: Michael Gambon as King George V, Jennifer Ehle as Mrs. Logue, Derek Jacobi as the Archbishop, Eve Best as Wallis Simpson, and Timothy Spall as Winston Churchill, complete with cigar and a pompous scowl.  He communicated a lot of the character through his posture and mannerisms alone. I highly recommend this movie to everyone interested in history, England, or good acting.  It's a great example of how a movie should be put together, because even though the outcome is known ahead of time, there is still dramatic tension and buildup. This reminds me of the musical 1776, where even though we all know that the Declaration of Independence will be ratified and signed, the play does a great job of making us forget that in the moment of watching as we follow Thomas Jefferson and John Adams' actions. I hope that The King's Speech will inspire other similar movies about real-life events, so that people will learn more about historical events through watching them.

How Do You Know?

I figured I would post some movie reviews here as well, mix it up a little bit. I often see movies on Sunday afternoons, because I don't have to put as much planning into it as I do with seeing plays and finding affordable tickets. Plus movies make for better conversation since, on average, people see more movies than they do plays.

Last Sunday, I saw How Do You Know?, created by James L. Brooks. The movie was actually fairly disappointing. We barely saw Reese Witherspoon play softball, for all the media attention about it. We didn't see Owen Wilson play baseball at all. I expected more to happen in the movie, the stakes just didn't feel high enough.  Even the plot of Paul Rudd facing prison time due to his father's actions felt muddled and not serious.  Most of the actors appear to be walking through the film, although Paul Rudd puts some effort into his performance, and Kathryn Hahn is quite funny as Paul Rudd's pregnant and devoted assistant. This movie could have been so much better than what it was. Rudd and Witherspoon have some nice chemistry in a scene or two. The film also seems to end quite abruptly, it could have used another scene or two.  Overall, a very disappointing film and not really worth the price of admission.

Oscar Song Nominees

Something I was recently thinking about, as Oscar nominations come out soon.  This is meant to be one long thought, and so I am writing this from memory and not fact-checking.  In recent years, it seems like the Best Song Winner is not actually the best song, or not a song with as much recognition as other nominees. I have also wondered whether a movie having multiple songs nominated had the effect of cancelling each other out, specifically in the cases of Dreamgirls and Enchanted. Both of these movies had three songs nominated. In the first case, it was "Listen", "Love You I Do" and "Patience". In the latter case, the selected songs were "How Do You Know?", "Happy Working Song", and "So Close". And none of those six songs won, and I thought a plausible explanation is that each of them were getting some votes, but they split the Academy's preferences and allowed an underdog candidate to sneak in. But then I thought back to The Lion King ("Circle of Life", "Can You Feel the Love Tonight?", "Hakuna Matata") and Beauty and the Beast ("Belle", "Be Our Guest", "Beauty and the Beast") in the 1990's. Both of those movies had three songs nominated from their scores. And both of them won Oscars for Best Score and Best Song. Aladdin and The Little Mermaid each had two songs nominated ("Part of Your World" was not nominated?) , and they also walked away with Best Score and Best Song. I would like to point out that five of these six examples had the involvement of Alan Menken or Tim Rice. Alan Menken also won Best Song and Score for Pocohontas featuring "Colors of the Wind." So I guess it's a newer trend for the votes to be split among the songs without one being a clear winner. Can anyone else think of movies which had multiple songs nominated in the last 30 years? Now I actually am interested in doing the research.

The update to this post is that I don't think any other movie has had more than one song nominated that wasn't listed above and I'm glad that Randy Newman won the Oscar for "We Belong Together" from Toy Story 3 and that a traditional nominee finally reclaimed the award after some very disappointing winners the last few years. Hopefully this will reverse that trend and there won't be as many obscure and untraditional winners. On a related note, can we have more time devoted to the performance of the songs on the telecast? That has also been bugging me, the small amount of time devoted to performance on a bloated telecast.

La Bete, Music Box Theatre

I have a lot of blog entries to write from the last few weeks and bring everything up to date, so this will be the first one in that series.  I'm hoping for some effort to pay off this week, and it is hard to find the energy to put more effort in, so the current efforts need to carry over.

I saw La Bete last Monday because I didn't win the West Side Story lottery, and I didn't know about the blizzard discount at Billy Elliot.  I need to hope for another blizzard I guess. La Bete is closing January 9 and I heard good things about Mark Rylance's performance and the creativity involved on David Hirson's part in writing a play mostly in verse, so I decided to check it out rather than not seeing a show at all.  My seat was in a mezzanine box, but there was no one sitting in the first row of left mezzanine, so I moved there when the usher at the top of the stairs disappeared. Much better viewing experience, and I could see the actors' faces and expressions very well when the show started. Very weird non-verbal prologue with the cast at a feast as operatic music played and the Asian maid watched from downstage right. Then there was a funny scene with David Hyde Pierce and Stephen Ouimette, a fine Canadian actor, culminating in the appearance of Mark Rylance and a very long monologue as he prattles on about dinner and theater. He's very funny as the boorish, socially awkward actor/street artist, but I found him to start to get annoying after a while and was looking forward to the end of his monologue so that the other characters would talk. He was very funny for the 15 minutes that he commanded the stage, but it wasn't moving the play forward after a while.

The best part of the play is the fact that most of the lines are in rhyming verse, but they are comedic and make sense.  It almost feels natural to hear people converse that way and finish each other's couplets.  Mark Rylance gives a showy performance as the idiot savant Valere with his long hair and fake teeth and outrageous actions, but the heart of the play is David Hyde Pierce as Elomire, the playwright/director of a French theater troupe residing at the court of the Princess played by Joanna Lumley with amazing vocal power. The play focused on the Princess' insistence that Valere join Elmomire's troupe over the objections of Elomire, who doesn't trust Valere as part of an ensemble and resents the notion that his art is equal to that of the blubbering street artist. I actually side with Elomire in this debate.  Valere seems quite self-absorbed and self-serving, not to mention very think and unable to pick up on expressions and cues from those around him. He reminds me of a people I know, which is possibly why I started to get annoyed with him and why I thought the play tended to fizzle out. Greta Lee is funny as Dorine the adolescent maid, and I think she could have been utilized more. The other actors in the cast really were only in one long scene and hence under-utilized as well. The play ends with Elomire leaving the troupe rather than be forced to cooperate with Valere, who wins over most of the other actors in the troupe with his bizarre comedy.  Overall, the play was pretty good, and I loved the library set used for most of the play, so if you have a chance to see it this week, it's worth an evening. Or part of an evening. The play is about two hours and no intermission.