I had thought that I'd never see a really first-class Macbeth, because the play requires two over-the-top performances--Macbeth and his Lady--and you couldn't expect two that strong in the same place: like matter and anti-matter.
I think the current Ashland offering pretty much proves me wrong: Peter Macon as the King and Robin Goodrin Nordli, seen yesterday with a pig-snout on her nose, were just about as powerful and evenly-matched a pair as you could hope for. The result was all you could want in a Macbeth: rapid, scary, pathetic, blood-and-thunder theater dynamic enough to hold any live audience, with enough inner life left over to win forgiveness from an academic. Macon, who turned in a good Othello last summer, seemed even better suited for the role of the King: eager, ambitious, warm-hearted and just gullible enough to think that he could do it. Nordli, who seems to have tackled just about every fat female part in the canon, was mostly his match, although Macon did have a kind of raw energy that would just spill over the rest of the stage whenever he was present.
But Mrs. Buce adds--and I think she is right--that the director did betray Nordli in one important respect: she stepped on Nordli's big speech. That would be the mad scene, the one where Lady Macbeth says "out, damn spot," and "who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him." Nordli started out at the top of a long ramp, her face in shadows; she was followed by three children in black who seemed to be a part of the witches' intern program. By they time you could see her, you realized that she was covered with so much--what, pancake makeup? A mask?--that was supposed to make her look crazy and just made her look like she was on crystal meth. I can't for the life of me understand why they didn't just let Nordli be Nordli and finish her lady's life with all the range and subtlety she had displayed all along.
Besides the leads, there is surprisingly little in Macbeth that you really remember. For a company that likes to hoke it up so much, the witches were surprisingly conventional--at the beginning, almost perfunctory, although they picked up steam later. Josiah Phillips, such a fine Sancho just yesterday, was a bit of a disappointment as the Porter (a matter of some personal concern since this is the only Shakespearean role I still want to play). Rex Young as Banquo presented a ghost sufficient to scare the bejeeezus out of us. As to the rest of the young men, I admit I kind of have trouble keepimg them all straight in my mind anyway.
Macbeth may not be the greatest Shakespeare play, but it is the greatest something-or-other. In particular, it is my hands-down pick for the ideal "first play" in high school. I know, teachers always fall for Romeo and Juliet on the mistaken notion that the kids will like it because it is about young love. They forget that it is an old person's view of young people. Not to mention that dialog in Romeo in Juliet is some of the most stylized and in the canon. Meanwhile Macbeth is all murder, madness and betrayal and what's not to love about that?
Showing posts with label Ashland 2009. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ashland 2009. Show all posts
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Ashland Theater Note:
Goldoni and Cervantes (Updated)
Underbelly groupies will recall that I've complained before about how the Ashland Shakespeare folks will step on the Shakespeare in favor of the comic stage business. But I think I've also said that they are pretty good at the stage business.
Two cases in point. One: Carlos Goldoni's The Servant of Two Masters--adapted, as we might say, for the modern stage. Goldoni, who died in 1792, wrote plays with about the speed and care you would expect from Law & Order or a Bollywood film studio, so there is no particular need for reverence here and adaptation is no crime. The plot is easily accessible. It's about, well, a servant who has, well, two masters, and hilarity ensues. The framework is perfect for bringing out all the stuff that Ashland does best. The script itself--the verbal humor--is good-natured but forgettable, not designed (or designed not) to offend anybody, like a Scott Simon NPR monologue. The clowning is mostly first rate, although in a generally high-quality cast, it is the servant, Mark Bedard, who pretty much runs away with it. Bedard, who was a relatively minor newcomer to the company just last year, has an impressive bag of physical tricks: he can sit, fetch, beg, play catch, shake hands and roll over--indeed, just about anything except come to heel or play dead. The rest of the cast was fine but I was particularly taken with Richard Howard and David Kelly as the commedia dell'arte mainstays in the piece. They're somewhat similar in style: they've both played Richard II. They've both been at Ashland forever; they must have worked together before, and it is amusing to watch them work off riffs that must have been in the making since sometime back in the early 90s.
My only real reservation about Servant is that the audience, to put it crudely, wasn't drunk enough. This kind of mindless clowning is good fun for an hour or so but after the intermission you start looking at your watch. The cast dabbled a bit in audience interaction: they almost got upstaged in repartee with a quick-witted stranger named Ralph, and some guy in the first row quite gratuitously kicked Bedard in the butt (he responded with aplomb). A bit more groaning, hooting and obscene yelping could only have enhanced the experience.
Example two: Don Quixote, another modern adaptation. It was the props department who had a field day on this one. You had puppets of all shapes and sizes and conceptions, and one intern even got to play the back end of a horse. Dear Mom: The good news is that I will have a part in a play.... (Checking the program notes, I see that her previous experience includes The Vagina Monologues and something claled The Little Coochi Snorcher That Could; maybe the back end of a horse is an improvement).
The, the puppets were lovely. Casting was serviceable all around (oak leaf cluster to Josiah Phillips as Sancho Panza), though once again I found myself diverted by a meta-point from Ashland history. That is: for the "priest" and the "barber," the director cast Mark Murphy Prybil, another pair of Ashland veterans. These two have been around the Ashland company almost since the time of Cervantes himself: I remember them particularly from 17-18 years ago as more or less of a two-man show in something called "Voice of the Prarie." As with Howard and Kelly, it was fun to watch these two guys riffing off each other still, or again.
The scripting was serviceable, but at the end of the day I think the whole thing fell a bit flat. At its best (in the first act), you could say it was a set of Cliff Notes on the novel, with the respectful solemnity of a Merchant-Ivory soaper. Unfortunately, this fealty brought in some of the worst features of the novel as well: its gratuitous violence, its general slackness, its lack of a long story arc. In the second act, the adapter, in what must have been a fit of desperation, shifts gears away from Quixote himself into a story-within-a-story about Cardenia and his odd love life; I wouldn't be surprised if a good chunk of the audience (this certainly includes me) just had trouble figuring it all out.
Two cases in point. One: Carlos Goldoni's The Servant of Two Masters--adapted, as we might say, for the modern stage. Goldoni, who died in 1792, wrote plays with about the speed and care you would expect from Law & Order or a Bollywood film studio, so there is no particular need for reverence here and adaptation is no crime. The plot is easily accessible. It's about, well, a servant who has, well, two masters, and hilarity ensues. The framework is perfect for bringing out all the stuff that Ashland does best. The script itself--the verbal humor--is good-natured but forgettable, not designed (or designed not) to offend anybody, like a Scott Simon NPR monologue. The clowning is mostly first rate, although in a generally high-quality cast, it is the servant, Mark Bedard, who pretty much runs away with it. Bedard, who was a relatively minor newcomer to the company just last year, has an impressive bag of physical tricks: he can sit, fetch, beg, play catch, shake hands and roll over--indeed, just about anything except come to heel or play dead. The rest of the cast was fine but I was particularly taken with Richard Howard and David Kelly as the commedia dell'arte mainstays in the piece. They're somewhat similar in style: they've both played Richard II. They've both been at Ashland forever; they must have worked together before, and it is amusing to watch them work off riffs that must have been in the making since sometime back in the early 90s.
My only real reservation about Servant is that the audience, to put it crudely, wasn't drunk enough. This kind of mindless clowning is good fun for an hour or so but after the intermission you start looking at your watch. The cast dabbled a bit in audience interaction: they almost got upstaged in repartee with a quick-witted stranger named Ralph, and some guy in the first row quite gratuitously kicked Bedard in the butt (he responded with aplomb). A bit more groaning, hooting and obscene yelping could only have enhanced the experience.
Example two: Don Quixote, another modern adaptation. It was the props department who had a field day on this one. You had puppets of all shapes and sizes and conceptions, and one intern even got to play the back end of a horse. Dear Mom: The good news is that I will have a part in a play.... (Checking the program notes, I see that her previous experience includes The Vagina Monologues and something claled The Little Coochi Snorcher That Could; maybe the back end of a horse is an improvement).
The, the puppets were lovely. Casting was serviceable all around (oak leaf cluster to Josiah Phillips as Sancho Panza), though once again I found myself diverted by a meta-point from Ashland history. That is: for the "priest" and the "barber," the director cast Mark Murphy Prybil, another pair of Ashland veterans. These two have been around the Ashland company almost since the time of Cervantes himself: I remember them particularly from 17-18 years ago as more or less of a two-man show in something called "Voice of the Prarie." As with Howard and Kelly, it was fun to watch these two guys riffing off each other still, or again.
The scripting was serviceable, but at the end of the day I think the whole thing fell a bit flat. At its best (in the first act), you could say it was a set of Cliff Notes on the novel, with the respectful solemnity of a Merchant-Ivory soaper. Unfortunately, this fealty brought in some of the worst features of the novel as well: its gratuitous violence, its general slackness, its lack of a long story arc. In the second act, the adapter, in what must have been a fit of desperation, shifts gears away from Quixote himself into a story-within-a-story about Cardenia and his odd love life; I wouldn't be surprised if a good chunk of the audience (this certainly includes me) just had trouble figuring it all out.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Ashland Theater Note: Henry VIII
Well, I've completed the set: 55 years ago this summer, I saw my first live Shakespeare performance: a presentation of Much Ado About Nothing with the late Ellis Rabb as Benedick. Last night at the Ashland Shakespeare Festival, I saw Henry VIII. My friend Hal said: will you be having some sort of a celebration? Well, no, actually, I had forgotten I hadn't completed the set a few years before. A few years ago, when Ashland did Two Noble Kinsmen, I figured I could count that as the last, forgetting Henry VIII. This was a palpable error: for my money, there's a lot more of Shakespeare in Henry than there is in 2NK.
But two thoughts about Henry VIII. One, you can see why it is not performed more often. And two, Shakespeare may sometimes have written mediocre plays, but he never wrote an uninteresting play--never wrote a play that wasn't worth watching, that you couldn't chew on, couldn't get something out of.
Henry VIII confirms the point. You probably do have to love Shakespeare to have the patience to stick it out with this play: it's pretty static,. with a lot more pageantry than dynamism. Still it some fine characterization (Catherine of Aragon; Cardinal Wolsey) and a few bits of really dynamite verse. And something else, a bit harder to pin down: a peculiar Shakespearean sensibility, a tang, consistent throughout and strong enough to hold it all together. Hard to put my finger on exactly what it might be but it's somthing you find also in the other late plays--I mean The Tempest and Pericles and Winter's Tale. You have to admit that Shakespeare may have been a bit bored with his job by this time, and you probably do have to stretch to enjoy it. But in the end, you can come away satisfied.
I said I'd never seen Henry VIII before: I need to qualify it a little. Again back in the 50s, I stood outside on the lawn and peeked in on a festival-under-the-stars production of it. I didn't stay long, but I did hear Cardinal Wolsey say:
But two thoughts about Henry VIII. One, you can see why it is not performed more often. And two, Shakespeare may sometimes have written mediocre plays, but he never wrote an uninteresting play--never wrote a play that wasn't worth watching, that you couldn't chew on, couldn't get something out of.
Henry VIII confirms the point. You probably do have to love Shakespeare to have the patience to stick it out with this play: it's pretty static,. with a lot more pageantry than dynamism. Still it some fine characterization (Catherine of Aragon; Cardinal Wolsey) and a few bits of really dynamite verse. And something else, a bit harder to pin down: a peculiar Shakespearean sensibility, a tang, consistent throughout and strong enough to hold it all together. Hard to put my finger on exactly what it might be but it's somthing you find also in the other late plays--I mean The Tempest and Pericles and Winter's Tale. You have to admit that Shakespeare may have been a bit bored with his job by this time, and you probably do have to stretch to enjoy it. But in the end, you can come away satisfied.
I said I'd never seen Henry VIII before: I need to qualify it a little. Again back in the 50s, I stood outside on the lawn and peeked in on a festival-under-the-stars production of it. I didn't stay long, but I did hear Cardinal Wolsey say:
Had I but served my God with half the zealWell, if I could remember only one bit, I suppose this was a pretty good choice.
I served my king, he would not in mine age
Have left me naked to mine enemies.
Saturday, August 01, 2009
Ashland Theater Note: Much Ado About Nothing
If you were casting Much Ado About Nothing for the Ashland Shakespeare Festival, you could not go wrong by assigning the role of Benedick to David Kelly. He's angular and zany like a scarecrow in a high wind, but he has a mind fast enough to keep up with Benedick's (pardon, Shakespeare's) own lightning quick wit. And he has flawless command of the perilous undercurrents of the Shakespearean line--here, mostly prose which is, I suspect, even harder to deliver than verse.
But they gave him a bathtub. Or, some sort of a Renaissance garden pond. Anyway, Kelly duly stumbled into it, to the accompanying howls from the delighted onlookers. Later he spouted water like an offshore whale. And then he bounded out, clinging to his package under the now-skintight polyester.
Every bit of it was good, satisfying physical comedy, but there is a problem here: by turning the scene over to the fountain, Kelly and the director succeeded in tossing away one of the best comic speeches* in all the canon: Benedick's astonishment, confusion, rage, evasiveness and embarrassment at the discovery that (as he is led to believe) the lady really loves him.
Many attentive observers will say I am being too harsh. Granted, when Kelly rolls out of the deep and says, "This can be no trick!" he got a laugh. But he is supposed to get a huge laugh. It's important in its own right, and it is supposed to set the audience for what follows--t0 make them ready to rollick. They were ready to rollick but because of the water, not because of the language. So Kelly more or less rattled his way through the rest of the speech while caterwauling around the stage in his dripping togs. When he got to "doth not the appetite alter?"--which should be another show-stopper, I don't think the audience noticed.
Attentive friends will recognize a common theme here: the trouble with Ashland is that they're so often unwilling to let Shakespeare by Shakespeare, just to trust the text.
I admit, "trusting the text" requires acting skill of a high order: you have to be willing to play around with pregnant pauses, Jack-Benny-like. You have to be willing to yank some lines tight and then let them loose like a coiled spring. You have to do all kinds of tricks which, in the wrong hands, will turn into portentous hamminess. But my guess is that Kelly is just the kind of guy who can do it right, and it is a shame to se him wasted in this way.
A quaint irony is that there is one part of Much Ado a that is ideally suited to pratfall comedy, and that is the Dogberry business--all that stuff about the constable and the watch. It can be falling-off-the-chair funny; I've seen it so. But it's not really in the language: just running round saying "I am an ass" gets a little boring after a while unless it is plumped up with some imaginative business. Here Ashland offers Tony DeBruno. He's another fine actor: I still have fond memories of his work in a play about the village golem, in what may have been his first season. But he's not a pratfall kind of guy. He knew where the jokes were, and he gave them all a suitable touch of delusional pomposity. But he never really threw himself into it in a way that would have been entirely suitable to the scene.
[Aside: at least they did better with the constable scenes here than Kenneth Branagh's crew did in their movie version. The Branagh game never seemed to grasp that this stuff is funny; they played it for weird, and weird is pretty much what they got.]
As the complement to Kelly's Benedick, we had Robynn Rodriguez as Beatrice. She's surely one of the all-round most ingratiating people in the company: warm-hearted and full of vitality, with just enough of an edge to keep you interested. She's also up to the rat-a-tat machine gun fire of the wit (although she did seem to have a bit of a lisp, which I don't think I ever noticed before). But for all of this, she didn't quite seem to get the jokes. Or her timing was off, or she didn't have any. It was a shame. Her natural warm-heartedness and Kelly's dynamism carried them through, but it left you longing for more.
Aside from the leads-it may be because of the difficulties in the leads that I found myself marveling over just how good, technically, so many people in this company are, or have become--in particular, Peter Macon as Don Pedro and Sarah Rutan as Hero. Skill of this order is only noticeable when it isn't there. They (and indeed, most of the company) did it so well you scarcely notice. I am a bit miffed at Don Pedro, though, for more or less throwing away one of my favorite bits of Shakepearean rhyme:
* For the text of "This can be no trick," offered as an audition piece, go here.
But they gave him a bathtub. Or, some sort of a Renaissance garden pond. Anyway, Kelly duly stumbled into it, to the accompanying howls from the delighted onlookers. Later he spouted water like an offshore whale. And then he bounded out, clinging to his package under the now-skintight polyester.
Every bit of it was good, satisfying physical comedy, but there is a problem here: by turning the scene over to the fountain, Kelly and the director succeeded in tossing away one of the best comic speeches* in all the canon: Benedick's astonishment, confusion, rage, evasiveness and embarrassment at the discovery that (as he is led to believe) the lady really loves him.
Many attentive observers will say I am being too harsh. Granted, when Kelly rolls out of the deep and says, "This can be no trick!" he got a laugh. But he is supposed to get a huge laugh. It's important in its own right, and it is supposed to set the audience for what follows--t0 make them ready to rollick. They were ready to rollick but because of the water, not because of the language. So Kelly more or less rattled his way through the rest of the speech while caterwauling around the stage in his dripping togs. When he got to "doth not the appetite alter?"--which should be another show-stopper, I don't think the audience noticed.
Attentive friends will recognize a common theme here: the trouble with Ashland is that they're so often unwilling to let Shakespeare by Shakespeare, just to trust the text.
I admit, "trusting the text" requires acting skill of a high order: you have to be willing to play around with pregnant pauses, Jack-Benny-like. You have to be willing to yank some lines tight and then let them loose like a coiled spring. You have to do all kinds of tricks which, in the wrong hands, will turn into portentous hamminess. But my guess is that Kelly is just the kind of guy who can do it right, and it is a shame to se him wasted in this way.
A quaint irony is that there is one part of Much Ado a that is ideally suited to pratfall comedy, and that is the Dogberry business--all that stuff about the constable and the watch. It can be falling-off-the-chair funny; I've seen it so. But it's not really in the language: just running round saying "I am an ass" gets a little boring after a while unless it is plumped up with some imaginative business. Here Ashland offers Tony DeBruno. He's another fine actor: I still have fond memories of his work in a play about the village golem, in what may have been his first season. But he's not a pratfall kind of guy. He knew where the jokes were, and he gave them all a suitable touch of delusional pomposity. But he never really threw himself into it in a way that would have been entirely suitable to the scene.
[Aside: at least they did better with the constable scenes here than Kenneth Branagh's crew did in their movie version. The Branagh game never seemed to grasp that this stuff is funny; they played it for weird, and weird is pretty much what they got.]
As the complement to Kelly's Benedick, we had Robynn Rodriguez as Beatrice. She's surely one of the all-round most ingratiating people in the company: warm-hearted and full of vitality, with just enough of an edge to keep you interested. She's also up to the rat-a-tat machine gun fire of the wit (although she did seem to have a bit of a lisp, which I don't think I ever noticed before). But for all of this, she didn't quite seem to get the jokes. Or her timing was off, or she didn't have any. It was a shame. Her natural warm-heartedness and Kelly's dynamism carried them through, but it left you longing for more.
Aside from the leads-it may be because of the difficulties in the leads that I found myself marveling over just how good, technically, so many people in this company are, or have become--in particular, Peter Macon as Don Pedro and Sarah Rutan as Hero. Skill of this order is only noticeable when it isn't there. They (and indeed, most of the company) did it so well you scarcely notice. I am a bit miffed at Don Pedro, though, for more or less throwing away one of my favorite bits of Shakepearean rhyme:
Good morrow, masters. Put your torches out.====
The wolves have preyed, and look the gentle day
Before the wheels of Phoebus round about
Dapples the drowsy east with spots of gray.
Thanks to you all, and leave us, fare you well.
* For the text of "This can be no trick," offered as an audition piece, go here.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Ashland Theater Note: Equivocation
Bill Cain's play Equivocation, which premiered at the Ashland Shakespeare Festival this spring, seems almost tailor-made for the Ashland audience. It's about Shakespeare. It's got a lot of Shakespearean in-jokes, together with plenty of the one thing Ashland does best--farce. And it's all played out on a platter of Arthur-Miler-like moral earnestness that is bound to sooth and comfort the dedicated Ashland audience.
Cain certainly hit his mark, if the audience here last night is any gauge: they were hooting and hollering. And I grant him this --there was a lot to enjoy. Cain is polished at the kind of rim-shot dialog exchange that you can only learn from long practice in a real theatre. The farce was great--the climax of the show as a ten-minute sendup on Macbeth, which was certainly the funniest Macbeth I've ever seen and which, considering how many ponderous, marmoreal and overwrought Macbeths there are in the world, might just be the best Macbeth I've ever seen.
Cain's problem, I suspect, is that there isn't any other audience in the world that is going to like this item anywhere near as well, if at all. It's just too inside. And beyond the details, the play is rather a mess. Well--the core plot idea is good enough: King James I asks (orders) Shakespeare to write a play about the Gunpowder Plot. Shakespeare puzzles over how to save his skin while telling the truth. That's a good enough setup for a lot of dialog exchanges about "speaking truth to power" but in the end, he just throws it all away and does Macbeth instead.
Say wha--? For the ordinary (non-true-believer) theatre-goer, I suspect that this is just too much to handle. Meanwhile for contrast--I can't help but wonder if Cain wasn't inspired by Tom Stoppard's great score with Shakespeare in Love a few years back, which he turned into such a successful movie (I've seen it several times, and would gladly watch it again). The thing is, Stoppard achieved the trick of throwing a bone to the faithful--realistic Shakespearean atmosphere--while putting together a show that was funny and sexy that you could enjoy without a particle of insider knowledge. Most of what Cain does here would be lost, I suspect, on any but the truest of true believers.
A word about the politics in the play. Let's stipulate that torture is a bad thing. But to say as much to the Ashland audience is not precisely an act of moral courage: indeed, I suspect if you scored Dick Cheney on the hubba hubba metre with this crowd, with a scale of 100 he might hit a one. Torture is bad, true enough, but to go on and on about it with this crowd is about as tough as dynamiting whales in a barrel. Early on in the play (but I don't have a script) someone says something about the purpose of the theatre is to give you a feeling that you have improved without really changing anything. Exactly right.
So taken overall Equivocations strikes me as a pretty specialized taste. A solace for Cain is that Ashland has plenty of those, and so he is likely to be able to bask in a successful run for the full season.
Cain certainly hit his mark, if the audience here last night is any gauge: they were hooting and hollering. And I grant him this --there was a lot to enjoy. Cain is polished at the kind of rim-shot dialog exchange that you can only learn from long practice in a real theatre. The farce was great--the climax of the show as a ten-minute sendup on Macbeth, which was certainly the funniest Macbeth I've ever seen and which, considering how many ponderous, marmoreal and overwrought Macbeths there are in the world, might just be the best Macbeth I've ever seen.
Cain's problem, I suspect, is that there isn't any other audience in the world that is going to like this item anywhere near as well, if at all. It's just too inside. And beyond the details, the play is rather a mess. Well--the core plot idea is good enough: King James I asks (orders) Shakespeare to write a play about the Gunpowder Plot. Shakespeare puzzles over how to save his skin while telling the truth. That's a good enough setup for a lot of dialog exchanges about "speaking truth to power" but in the end, he just throws it all away and does Macbeth instead.
Say wha--? For the ordinary (non-true-believer) theatre-goer, I suspect that this is just too much to handle. Meanwhile for contrast--I can't help but wonder if Cain wasn't inspired by Tom Stoppard's great score with Shakespeare in Love a few years back, which he turned into such a successful movie (I've seen it several times, and would gladly watch it again). The thing is, Stoppard achieved the trick of throwing a bone to the faithful--realistic Shakespearean atmosphere--while putting together a show that was funny and sexy that you could enjoy without a particle of insider knowledge. Most of what Cain does here would be lost, I suspect, on any but the truest of true believers.
A word about the politics in the play. Let's stipulate that torture is a bad thing. But to say as much to the Ashland audience is not precisely an act of moral courage: indeed, I suspect if you scored Dick Cheney on the hubba hubba metre with this crowd, with a scale of 100 he might hit a one. Torture is bad, true enough, but to go on and on about it with this crowd is about as tough as dynamiting whales in a barrel. Early on in the play (but I don't have a script) someone says something about the purpose of the theatre is to give you a feeling that you have improved without really changing anything. Exactly right.
So taken overall Equivocations strikes me as a pretty specialized taste. A solace for Cain is that Ashland has plenty of those, and so he is likely to be able to bask in a successful run for the full season.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Ashland Theater Note: All's Well That Ends Well
I've groused before that the good folks at the Ashland Shakespeare Festival operate at less than their best when doing Shakespeare himself. Maybe I should revise that: over the years, they have proven somewhat shaky at the big ones: mediocre at Hamlet, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, that sort of thing (though here is a pretty good Othello and here a passable Tempest). But a couple of years back, we saw a really impressive King John. And last night, we took in a convincing rendition of (are you ready for this?) All's Well That Ends Well.
All's Well is a tough nut for Shakespeare fans. It's not precisely a bad play--there is a lot of interesting stuff in it--but at the best of times it is a deeply unpleasant play, where it is near impossible to leave the viewer with anything a really wants to hang onto. The Ashland venture owes a lot of its success to Danforth Comins in the lead as Bertram. The boy seems to have a knack for not especially likeable people: he turned in an impressive Coriolanus last summer, and in other outings he has done Cassio (in Othello), Orlando (in As You Like It) and Benvolio (in Romeo and Juliet). His Bertram is young, full of high spirits, not overbright, but blessed with enough natural charm that you forget how he is really a rotter.
For Helena, his long-suffering adorer (stalker?), they took something of risk: they gave it to Kjerstine Rose Anderson, who played it as a more or less comic bumpkin. Okay, bumpkin is too strong. But this Helena, for all her human appeal, is unpolished: she slumps, she shuffles, she loses words (i.e., on purpose): if she went to finishing school, she surely never finished. It's basically the same schtick she tried as (the other) Helena in Midsummer Night's Dream. I don't think it worked in Dream. For this Helena, seasoned Shakespeareans may regard the bumpkin approach as old stuff but it was new to me (I tend to think of Helena as more in the line of dignified and long-suffering). Maybe it works; it's certainly something to think about, which is perhaps recommendation enough.
Outside the leads, the most noteworthy device may be that they have dressed the play up with a "Clown," who presides, inter alia, over an introduction and an epilogue. My first thought was -- uh oh, they're not trusting the script again, they've gone to panic mode and chosen to camp it up. But not really. What they've done is to stitch together a bunch of stage business onto a single thread of characterization, and in the end, yes, it probably does help to give unity and consistency to the whole. Necessrily a lot of the credit here goes to the actor, Armando Durán, who seems to be able to make his comedy delicate and unintrusive.
They've made somewhat the samer use of G. Valmont Thomas as Lafew, and also in a whole bunch of ensemble parts. Over the years, Thomas has honed a comic persona as the stuffy and clueless (yet somehow likeable) hanger-on who can add a tactful note of good nature to an otherwise tense piece of business. Doesn't work for everything, works nicely here.
When I say "they," I suppose I mean Amanda Dehnert, the director. Apparently she is new to Ashalnd. From a scan of her credits, I infer that she doesn't do a lot of Shakespeare. Maybe that is all for the best; maybe it keeps her from being inhibited in tackling this, one of the most challenging items in the Canon.
[That makes two: who would have guessed it? This is actually the second really good All's Well I've had the privilege of seeing in the past few years. The other was this eye-opening production back in 2006 in New York.
Cute Trick: There's a cute little narrative trick in the film that they run at the end that will be intelligible to anyone who is quick-witted and observant, and who remembers Newhart or St. Elsewhere. Mrs. Buce caught it, although I don't think she watched either.
All's Well is a tough nut for Shakespeare fans. It's not precisely a bad play--there is a lot of interesting stuff in it--but at the best of times it is a deeply unpleasant play, where it is near impossible to leave the viewer with anything a really wants to hang onto. The Ashland venture owes a lot of its success to Danforth Comins in the lead as Bertram. The boy seems to have a knack for not especially likeable people: he turned in an impressive Coriolanus last summer, and in other outings he has done Cassio (in Othello), Orlando (in As You Like It) and Benvolio (in Romeo and Juliet). His Bertram is young, full of high spirits, not overbright, but blessed with enough natural charm that you forget how he is really a rotter.
For Helena, his long-suffering adorer (stalker?), they took something of risk: they gave it to Kjerstine Rose Anderson, who played it as a more or less comic bumpkin. Okay, bumpkin is too strong. But this Helena, for all her human appeal, is unpolished: she slumps, she shuffles, she loses words (i.e., on purpose): if she went to finishing school, she surely never finished. It's basically the same schtick she tried as (the other) Helena in Midsummer Night's Dream. I don't think it worked in Dream. For this Helena, seasoned Shakespeareans may regard the bumpkin approach as old stuff but it was new to me (I tend to think of Helena as more in the line of dignified and long-suffering). Maybe it works; it's certainly something to think about, which is perhaps recommendation enough.
Outside the leads, the most noteworthy device may be that they have dressed the play up with a "Clown," who presides, inter alia, over an introduction and an epilogue. My first thought was -- uh oh, they're not trusting the script again, they've gone to panic mode and chosen to camp it up. But not really. What they've done is to stitch together a bunch of stage business onto a single thread of characterization, and in the end, yes, it probably does help to give unity and consistency to the whole. Necessrily a lot of the credit here goes to the actor, Armando Durán, who seems to be able to make his comedy delicate and unintrusive.
They've made somewhat the samer use of G. Valmont Thomas as Lafew, and also in a whole bunch of ensemble parts. Over the years, Thomas has honed a comic persona as the stuffy and clueless (yet somehow likeable) hanger-on who can add a tactful note of good nature to an otherwise tense piece of business. Doesn't work for everything, works nicely here.
When I say "they," I suppose I mean Amanda Dehnert, the director. Apparently she is new to Ashalnd. From a scan of her credits, I infer that she doesn't do a lot of Shakespeare. Maybe that is all for the best; maybe it keeps her from being inhibited in tackling this, one of the most challenging items in the Canon.
[That makes two: who would have guessed it? This is actually the second really good All's Well I've had the privilege of seeing in the past few years. The other was this eye-opening production back in 2006 in New York.
Cute Trick: There's a cute little narrative trick in the film that they run at the end that will be intelligible to anyone who is quick-witted and observant, and who remembers Newhart or St. Elsewhere. Mrs. Buce caught it, although I don't think she watched either.
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