Back in the saddle with Bernstein and Shakespeare, Quantum and CLO

Much of what I love about this job is coincidence and synergy. Well, the parties, too. But substantive things first.

Today (OK, yesterday, since it's now past midnight) I wrote a review of Quantum's "Cymbeline," which means I was thinking about it more than you'd ever get to see in a review, even one 20 inches long such as will appear tomorrow morning (I mean today). And one aspect of "Cymbeline" I never did get to discuss is its revision of the archtypal Romeo & Juliet theme. Then later the same day, just a couple of hours ago, I saw the opening of the CLO's "West Side Story," which everyone knows (more than anyone knows "Cymbeline" at all) is a full-scale version of "R&J."

It's the contrasts among these that offer such interest. To start, there's the main difference between Shakespeare and the musical, which is that the latter pretty much obliterates the grownups, as I'll probably discuss in the review I'm about to write for Thursday's paper. Even given that major difference, the musical's Bernstein-Sondheim-Laurents story is like Shakespeare in that a socially unacceptable marriage between rival tribes is rejected, leading to five deaths in Shakespeare, three in the musical.

In Shakespeare, Mercutio, Tybalt and Paris are slain in domino fashion, and then Romeo and Juliet take their own lives in romantic despair, one mistaken, the other justified. That's why the great Leon Katz used to say "R&J" was a catastrophe for western culture, because it made romantic self-sacrifice glamorous. In the musical, Riff and Bernardo parallel Mercutio and Tybalt and die similarly, and Tony (Romeo) similarly seeks death, although with a slight twist, getting himself killed by Chino (Paris). Maria (Juliet), however, has the wit not to kill herself. Still, there's tragic waste all around.

But Leonatus and Imogen, the young lovers of "Cymbeline," are made of more pragmatic stuff. Each believes the other to be dead, but neither then seeks suicide. Indeed, Imogen wakes up beside what she believes to be the beheaded body of her love, but she survives to learn differently. Leonatus believes himself responsible for Imogen's death, but he puts his despair to good use, fighting to keep his country free, and is rewarded with his lover's rebirth.

So "Cymbeline" is the preferable mirror of human behavior, right?

I'll have to think that out some more.

"West Side Story" being the final CLO show of the season, I decided to go to the opening night party -- just as I decided to go to the party for the previous show, "Annie Get Your Gun," because it was the penultimate opening. . . . No, it was also the occasion for the annual presentation of the Julia Deberson Award to an outstanding ensemble member.

This year's winner was Ward Billeisen (right, with Van Kaplan), as I reported in my July 24 In the Wings column.

But as I say, parties are one of the perks of the job. Not that I go to them all the time. My rule is that I usually don't if I was disappointed in the show, lest I say something insincere just to be nice. And I try not to say much about the show in any case, since I don't really know just what I think until I discover that in writing the review.

But I enjoy hanging out now and then with show people. I think many critics do. This one was a good party, with an extra edge of hilarity and relief since it concludes the season. I had the pleasure of saying hi to Yurel Echezarreta, Ahmad Simmons and Steffi Garrard, the three young ensemble members I interviewed last week. (Yurel's the one who's been cast in this fall's Broadway revival of "West Side Story"; Ahmad, we'll see in Point Park dance programs; and Steffi will be in CMU's "Into the Woods.")

I also got my first look at the Capital Grill -- the CLO has a nice way of moving its party to different venues each week, and I don't get out to eat much, so that's a bonus. Now back to writing that review.

Stratford Festival: first day, sonnets and Shrew

STRATFORD, Ontario; Friday night -

Coming from NOTL to Stratford is like ascending from sea level to higher, cooler air. Not literally - Stratford's in the midst of farm country, with nary a breeze off the Great Lakes. But artistically, the view is grander, since this festival has a grander purview, concentrating on Shakespeare but also drawing on theater of all ages. (Acknowledging that focus, the theater this year renamed itself the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, as it was a half-century ago when it was new.)   

After the 2½ hour drive from NOTL, the intrepid among us opted for a matinee. Some went to "Hamlet," starring a fresh recruit from the Shaw Fest, Ben Carlson. I hear it's very fine, and if I can get back here later this summer, this will be one reason why. But I had opted for British star Simon Callow in "There Reigns Love," his own one-man version of some 75 or so of Shakespeare's sonnets.

 This was Callow's very first preview performance, so it's totally inappropriate to review what is still in the making. But of course the materials are magnificent - Callow, an imaginative actor with a comic bent as well as a fine mind and the instincts of a popular teacher, as his several books show; the sonnets, concentrating on those about the dark lady and admired young man, in which Callow (as many before him)  finds a half-sketch of autobiographical passion; the stage at the Tom Patterson Theatre, an elongated thrust with several levels, a podium, table, various chairs and a small inner audience sprawled on the forestage on pillows, through which Callow sometimes moves to stools beyond; and the outer audience, us, very much a self-selecting, Shakespeare-addicted audience likely to know the poems in advance.

Certainly I do, but it's still hard to hear such densely wrought material in such large swatches. Occasionally Callow talks about the material, and you can hear the audience's gratitude for his guidance, but mainly he moves passionately from sonnet to sonnet, even sometimes downplaying the final rhyming couplet of one to project himself quickly into the next.

(Simon Callow, left, teasing out a sonnet)

After the intermission, I was much more successful in staying in the flow of the moment, rather than letting my mind wander off on a thought just begun. In Act 1, the verse just seemed too rich and compact for theatrical presentation, but Act 2 proved me wrong - or perhaps (as so often happens in theater) I was now sufficiently warmed up to join the journey. Now, I'd like to see the whole thing again, when Callow also will have benefited from his shake-down cruise.

In the Stratford hotel elevator, between shows:

Man: You in from oot [sic] of town?
Me: Yeah. You usually are when you stay at a hotel.
[silence]
Me: [feeling that was kind of snotty] You too?
Man: Yup, from Hamilton.
Man's Wife, helpfully: But he's originally from Stratford, here for a golf tournament.
[Animated exchange about local courses.]
Me: I'm here for a weekend of theater.
[zero response]
. . . From Pittsburgh.
Man: Love those Steelers!

In the evening, we had a treat, a bold version of "The Taming of the Shrew" (at right).  

(More to come, as I keep figuring ot the software.)

Shaw Fest, second day: on marriage and all that

NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ontario; late Thursday -

 "After the Dance" sticks with you. Even a day later, after Bernstein, Comden and Green's "Wonderful Town" and Shaw's "Getting Married," the rediscovered Rattigan is still churning in my head. I'm struck by the note on the Shaw Fest web site, quoting British director Dominick Dromgoole, who connects Rattigan with Wilde, Maugham and Coward: "punished for the direction of their hearts [they were all gay, but mainly hid it, of course], [they] revenged themselves on the society that oppressed them by becoming the foremost chroniclers of that society for 70 years." You can add Evelyn Waugh to that list, not that he was gay, or not actively so. Christopher Newton, director of this production, connects the cultural malaise revealed in "After the Dance" to that satirized in several brilliant novels by Waugh.   

[I love the Shaw Fest programs. That for "After the Dance," for example, includes a director's note by Christopher Newton (of special interest because he was Shaw artistic director, 1980-2002 -- and he's been invited back, which tells you something of his standing); a three-page essay by John Bertolini, who has written a book about Shaw and is working on one about Rattigan; a note on the "lost generation," the Bright Young Things of the ‘20s, with quotes from Gertrude Stein, Waugh and James Laver; a brief note on the play's production history and a longer one on Rattigan; and 12 pictures of this production, two of earlier ones, two of Rattigan and eight of the contemporary world of the play - in addition to the usual bios and pictures of the large cast, etc. It's a trove of good stuff. The only company that gives you anything like this much in Pittsburgh (but without all the pictures) is PICT.]

"Wonderful Town," set in 1935, shares its historic moment with "After the Dance," set in 1938. The difference is that the musical is placed in the exotic bohemian backwater of Greenwich Village, USA, where no one's thinking of politics or the world situation. Comden and Green's witty lyrics are full of references to the forgotten news flashes of the ‘30s, but it's just decorative trivia. The desperate party-goers of "After the Dance" don't talk (and try to avoid even thinking) about the larger world, either, but we sure do, knowing they're going to be swept up in World War II within a few months. But in the distant USA, the war was several years further away. It feels like a colorful, fictional backwater, just the place to set a musical comedy entertainment.

There was an understudy slip in the "Wonderful Town" program, and I was initially distressed to see it was for the star, the feisty older sister, Ruth. But then I saw that the understudy was Deborah Hay, who's so strong as the desperately gay/tragic wife in "After the Dance," and I brightened up. I'm sure Lisa Horner, who normally plays Ruth, is very good - there's usually a reason one plays the role and the other understudies. But Hay more than holds her own against the sunny pulchritude of Chilina Kennedy as her sister, Eileen.

There are a half-dozen actors in common between "After the Dance" and "Wonderful Town," including Neil Barclay, so potent as the truth-talking parasite in the first and capable enough as the colorful Mr. Appopolous in the second. Savoring different performances by the same actor on the same visit is one of the special pleasures afforded by repertory theater.

Then on to "Getting Married," the relative disappointment of our Shaw Fest trio. The popular objection to Shaw is that he's more polemicist than playwright, happy to turn great swathes of stage time into a three-dimensional lecture on the topic of the day. I invariably defend him against this charge - his dramaturgy is generally pretty solid, even though he and his characters sure do like to talk. But "Getting Married" really is awfully static, rich in interesting characters, but stultified with debate.  

The subject is marriage, of course: on the day of a wedding, bride and bridegroom get cold feet because of the antiquated legal status of marriage in 1908 and the relative impossibility of divorce. She objects that the law gives all rights and power to the man; he objects to the same, which means that he can be sued for libel for the platform pyrotechnics of his politically crusading wife-to-be. So the wedding is put on hold, the guests twiddling their thumbs in the church, while all her large family and in-laws, including her bishop father, are back in the caterer's room, carrying on a grand debate on marriage and even trying to write a new marriage contract from the ground up.

That's funny enough, and Act 1 is stimulating, with the wonderful Shavian savant figure of the greengrocer (played by the consummate Michael Ball) showing more wisdom than all his social "betters." There are two other couples (one potentially a trio) with their own objections to marriage law, and we quickly realize there is no possible way to reform the institution to accommodate human variety. Indeed. I came away convinced that the mind-boggling divorce statistics of today are not proof of the failure of marriage so much as the necessary condition of its continuation.  

 But Act 2 gets lost in digressions and side debates and a couple of other characters who just don't hold the same interest, except for a deliciously dry and disapproving lawyer turned priest. For once I agree the brilliant Shaw talks his way into a theatrical morass. He does find the inevitable solution, though: the young couple slips off, makes its own deal and gets married quietly, returning to allow all the disputing relatives and unseen wedding guests to enjoy the reception.

Taken together, the three shows we happened to see out of the 11 on offer at the Shaw form a sort of seminar on the relations between the sexes, especially marriage. (You can see how other 2008 offerings would contribute: "Mrs. Warren's Profession," "A Little Night Music," "The Stepmother," "The Little Foxes," etc.!).

Best of all, I finally got that incessant "Maa-aaame!" out of my head (see yesterday's journal). In its place I have mainly the jaunty "Christopher Street" number from "Wonderful Town" - soon to be replaced by something from "The Music Man," which we'll see at Stratford.

Shaw Festival: recovering the past

NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE,  Ontario; Thursday morning --

"Dah-da-da-dah-da-da-Dah, Maa-aame! "Dah-da-da . . . . "

I can't get the damn tune out of my head, inserted there at Tuesday's CLO opening and playing on auto-rewind ever since, with no mute button in sight. Usually a familiar musical will deposit three or four tunes in that space between my ears, ordering them up on auto-scramble, especially when I'm trying to clear my mind to focus on something important, like finding just the right word to describe a reaction I can't understand until I find the word it matches . . . or a REALLY important moment, like a par putt at the climax of a $1 nassau. 

Niagara-on-the-Lake (Lake Ontario, to be precise), or NOTL as it's abbreviated, though I've never been sure just how to say that, is in the heart of Candian fruit and wine country, and our very comfortable hotel, the Pillar & Post, is in part made up of a Victorian-era canning factory. It's a little outside town -- about a 15-minute walk with my bad knee -- and I'd prefer to be right in town at the Prince of Wales, which we do use on some trips, but the P&P has its attractions, including a very prettily embowered outdoor pool which this morning (sunny, after yesterday's drizzle) is bedecked with good looking women.

But my mind is on last night's play, Terrence Rattigan's "After the Dance," which I expected to be one of those soppy moral melodramas, just the kind of play that the angry young men of the "Look Back in Anger" generation and their successors swept off the English boards.

It is that, of course, but it turns out to be much more -- in a way, a sort of rediscovery, exactly what you hope for from a big, experienced repertory company with 40-plus years of mining the (mainly) English theater of the late 19th and early 20th century -- what they call their "mandate," the period of G.B. Shaw's long and productive life (1857-1950).

"After the Dance" turns out to be nothing less than a state of the nation play, the kind of thing we expect now from David Hare, but in a subtle way. It's set in 1938, on the eve of the catastrophe of World War II, focusing on a generation just young enough not to have died in the futile trenches of WW I but casualties of that war nonetheless, their optimism and capability sapped by the pervading nihilism. No one ever refers to politics, either national or international, but we feel the anaologies between their lives and those of the nation and the world in almost every line. I'm going to enjoy exploring this in more depth for a proper review.

Recovering the past, you could call it -- recovering a play that was never a great hit when it first appeared, running for just 60 performances when it debuted in 1939, when it probably seemed already old news as the war came rushing on. It's had only a couple of revivals since. It's also recovering what the play tells us obliquely about the individual caught in the rush of history. And coming to the Shaw, as I have a couple of times a year since 1981, is also a recurring recovery of the past, since the company has such consistency of personnel, year after year, and each play vibrates with echoes of previous Shaw Fest plays in the same places. When you see something else, you see many of the same actors, wisps of the previous play still clinging to them, and you're caught in a web of remembrance, motifs and themes layered on each other, the stage reflecting back layers of your own life over that same drift of years.

I think T.S. Eliot said something vaguely related to all this in "Tradition and the Individual Talent."

Just kidding. NOTL is no place for heavy thoughts. It's a beautiful day today and the world beckons. Right now I have to get going, to help my group through the morning and make it to today's matinee of "Wonderful Town." And THAT should finally clear that "Maa-aame" out of my head.

Up and running and off to the Shaw and Stratford

 I made my first post on this new interactive journal almost a week ago, then took a long July 4th weekend, spending time in New England with the kids and the grandkids (not to mention the golf course), but now I'm back in the saddle, determined to become a regular communicant, which I'll define as at least four times per week.

This week it'll be easy to hit that mark, since I'm off to the Shaw and Stratford Festivals in the morning and I plan to keep a daily journal, such as I've done on the most recent theater trips to New York (in May) and London (March). You can access those old journals at post-gazette.com/theater (scroll down the right column), where you'll also find Montae Russell's journal from the Kennedy Center's August Wilson Cycle and Andrew Paul's from Katowice, Poland, where he directed "Stuff Happens."

[The cartoon (left) by Tim Menees combines a Daumier caricature of a self-important critic with The Bard and GBS. It was originally the logo for a 2006 American Theatre Critics Association conference at the Shaw and Stratford Festivals, but it might as well do duty also for my current foray northward -- without implicating me as the Daumier, of course.]

Right now it's the middle of the night and I'm racing to get my "Mame" review and In the Wings column done in time to get home, finish packing, grab my golf clubs (there's a nice little 9-hole course in Niagara-on-the-Lake) and meet the PG theater trippers in the early a.m. -- early, that is, for a theatrical night owl.

But first, this tid-bit from Michael Kahn, artistic director of the big Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C. He was explaining why his classical company (just as the Shaw and Stratford festivals are classical, in their different ways) also does modern plays: "The actors like to do something other than Shakespeare -- it gives them a chance to sit down occasionally and speak a few sentences as short as this one."

Now off I go. I'll report from Canada later tonight.

LATER: I didn't exactly hit the mark as I proposed -- using the new software proved more of a challenge than I expected (duh). But I'm learning, sort of.

Spooky games with Bricolage and its favorite playwright, David Turkel

Bricolage's staged reading (I saw it Monday) of David Turkel's "Stroke" was the fourth in its 2008 staged reading series, which boasts the distinction of serving as a taster menu: after all six 2008 readings (one per month) have been completed, we all get to vote on which script will get a full production.

Note that they just say we get to vote -- I don't think they guarantee that it actually WILL get a full production. Maybe our vote is just advisory; possibly, when push comes to shove, they won't be able to get the rights (if Carole Shorenstein Hays or some other big Broadway producer has intervened); anyway, they can't guarantee a production next year, because these things can take time.

NONETHELESS, I think it's a great idea. And it's worked once: the voters'-choice of the 2006 series, Bricolage's first, was Turkel's "Key to the Field," a delciously surreal horror story, which received a slam-bang production in Sept., 2007. And we are promised a production (this fall?) of "Great White, the Opera," the 2007 winner.

But fun as this is -- to be in on the creation, to sit in judgment and play hopeful producer -- I think the real pleasure of a Bricolage staged reading is less in its future prospect than its lively present. These readings are simply among the coolest theater evenings in Pittsburgh.

It starts with the crowd, stuffed with theater folk and their familiar groupies (fans, I mean) -- if you regularly get around Pittsburgh theater, at Bricolage you're sure to run into plenty of people you know. But when artistic director Jeff Carpenter asks how many people have never before been to one of the readings, it's amazing how many hands go up. The churn of familiar and new (both on stage and in the audience) is a great draw; there's a sizzle of anticipation.

You could even call these readings a sort of post-modern salon. The actual play is almost secondary tio the pre- and post-show greetings and chatter (and wine and cheese).

No, no, I'm kidding, of course the play's the thing, as the prince once said. And that's the series' second great attraction: Bricolage likes to mess around with the new and the newly-conceived (as in the new interpretation of Shakespeare's "Troilus and Cressida" that comes next, July 27-28). The company's judgment and track record are such that you know the evening will have interest, no matter how successul or finished the play may be.

Of course a David Turkel play never takes a back seat to any social occasion. He's an intriguing playwright, with just enough track record of his own to provide assurance of interest but not enough for you to know what to expect.

So what did I think of "Stroke"? Well, I'm not going to say, am I? These readings are of works in progress, sometimes early progress, and aren't really open for review. But I will say that its interplay of real and spirit worlds and its layers of reality make "Stroke" a real mind-teaser. At just about an hour, I think it's still too brief and elliptical for a fully satisfying evening of theater, but it's an intellectual teaser, with a flat sort of poetry that's surprisingly compelling. Turkel and Bricolage are a good pair.

So no review. But kudos to the cast, giving physical dimension to this speculation on spirits. Laura Lee Brautigam played the waif-woman and Nick Lehane her dead brother (or are they both dead?) -- a  compelling pair such as you might find in some very late, never published play by Ibsen. Helena Ruoti played the intensely conflicted mother and Sheila McKenna, a robust life-force.

After "Troilus & Cressida," the season's finale is Jennifer Haley's "Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom" (Aug. 24-25), another spooky play, based on a computer game. I saw it at this spring's Humana Festival, and I'm looking forward to experiencing its interplay of actual, spiritual and virtual worlds.

Come to think of it, challenging the audience to find its way amid that sort of interplay is just what theater by Bricolage is all about.

Related reads: Intervierw with Jed Harris, director of David Turkel's "Key to the Field."

Review of "Key to the Field", Sept., 2007.

Cathy Rigby soars

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'The Odd Couple' at the Public

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