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.
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