The Hip Hop Festival

The new production of Shakespeare's Hamlet at Ashland boasts, among other noteworthy qualities, a hip hop dramaturg.  This insight offers me as good an occasion as I'm likely get to reflect on the evolution of the Ashland Shakespeare festival from comedy to farce, from farce to son et lumière, for son et lumière to hip hop, and from....well, whatever: it is almost inconceivable that hip hop will be the last stop on this cultural merry-go-round (indeed, it may be that the appearance of hip hop at Ashland is only a little less dead than Shakespeare, but I leave that for another time).

The narrow point is, of course, that Ashland 2010 is not something Angus Bowmer would have recognized or even imagined when he played Shylock and Sir Toby Belch in the first two Ashland Shakespeare performances back in 1935.    This sounds like a lead-in to a rant on "young folks nowadays" or "how come they don't teach Greek and Latin any more..." or the Shakespearean equivalent.  Not quite, but let's explore the point.

For starters: I have complained before about the farceification of the Ashland Shakespeare agenda.  My point is not that we need solemnity--plenty of Shakespeare is falling-down funny and indeed, too many performances are not as funny as they ought to be.  Rather, I've argued that Ashland Shakespeare tends to fall into farce (or more generally, physical comedy, slapstick) because they're a little shaky on the more distinctive (and perhaps more elusive) Shakespearean stuff.  There's also a second, related but more sinister, reason: they do farce because they are good at it.   To a man with a hammer, everything is a nail. To  a man with a rubber nose and a Klaxon, everything is a pratfall.

Sometimes, as I suggest, this is perfectly fine.  The Hamlet hip hop, for example:  others will think it a travesty, but I don't agree.  The thing is, they used it primarily for the "play within a play" scene.  And that's a scene where, so far as I can tell, Shakespeare is parodying himself (or his own crowd) and a few modern liberties are quite within the spirit of the occasion.   It got a bit nerve-wracking, I admit, when the hip-hop seemed ready to escape the confiines of the play-within-a-play and to take over the whole show.  But it didn't, for which we can breath a sigh of relief.

Contrast Darko Tesnjak's presentation of Twelfth Night.  When I read the program blurb,  I suspected he really didn't have a clue what he was up to.  I think the production bore out my intuition although not necessarily in ways that I anticipated.  For my money, Twelfth Night is not an easy play to get your mind around.  Its love story, operating within a network of stage conventions, is so subtle and restrained you can almost miss it.  Its pure comedy begins raucous but verges into rancid, close to mean.   You need extraordinary talent to hold the parts together (I do think Trevor Nunn got it mostly right).  Tesnjak didn't seem to have any clear idea what it was about, but he knew he had a troupe of talented clowns and a first-rate props department and a cadre of high-quality technicians.  So he let it drift into a downmarket version of cirque du soleil.

I can't say it didn't "work." Lots of it "worked" just fine; certainly the audience loved it.  No, wait; maybe better to say that part of the audience loved it.   For the Ashland audience these days is an oddly schizophrenic affair.  Something north of 30 percent look like retired college professors, with spouses and at least semi-solvent state funded pensions.  Another 30 percent (plus) are 15-18 year olds, enjoying a high school walkaround and dreaming of how they will bag medical school to go make their mark behind the footlights.

Which made me realize that Ashland does have a problem to which I haven't given any thought before, although I'm sure they have.  That is: they've got to find something--whatever, anything--to do to attract young blood before all the wrinklies and crumblies exit the stage.

I bet, and more important I bet Ashland bets, that the kiddies love it when they bring in da noise, bring in da funk.  And maybe they do.  And maybe I do too, maybe more than I admit.  As I say, these guys are good at what they do. 

Put in an even more general context, I'm sure that part of what we're seeing here is natural evolution: institutions are like empires (or, I guess, empires are like institutions): they grow, they mature; they develop more and more constituencies who have to be fed or otherwise kept at bay.   Fine, that's as it has to be.  My point is only that I hope the Shakespeare doesn't get lost in the process.  If  so, Ashland will lose not only its original reason for being, but an intrinsically good reason for being, even today.  Sure, there are plenty of Shakespeare festivals around the country, and I suppose you could say it's no real loss if one falls by the wayside.  But I suspect there aren't many where (for all my complaints) you have such a bedrock of institutional memory.   It would be a shame to see it dissipate.  Besides, who is ever going to drive hundreds of miles into the boonies just for a festival of hip hop?

Ashland Shakespeare Note: the un-Branagh

Regular communicants at the shrine of Underbelly will recall Buce's test for any performance of Hamlet: when Ophelia says "Oh, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!" do we believe her? Have we seen that Hamlet is indeed a "noble mind" or is he merely something else--as, for example, an infantile twit?

Dan Donohue's Hamlet at Ashland flunks that test (directed by Bill Rauch) flunks that test which is a pity because he does so many parts of the role so well. But that's the trouble: Hamlet is many parts, and rarely if ever does one actor get all--or even a lot--of them right. Hamlet can be petulant, impulsive, self-absorbed, and Donohue can be all of these things. Many have noted that the play Hamlet, though a tragedy, is perhaps the funniest of the tragedies, and Donohue can make it funny (Donohue is, if nothing else, a highly skilled technician who can acocmplish the highly elusive task of getting his mouth round a handful of Shakespearen verse in a manner that makes it intelligible to a modern audience--even when he is speaking too fast, which he sometimes does).

But that's only part of the story. Hamlet is also a prince, the heir presumptive to the throne of Denmark. To make it work really well, we have to see that he has the qualities, at least incipient, that will mature into kingship.

And even more than mere kingship, there are moments when Hamlet achieves a kind of solemn dignity that makes us stop and catch our breath. The Hamlet who says "you shall nose him as you go up the stairs" is also the Hamlet who says "There ’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow or "... and yet what is this quintessence of dust?"

Which brings us to my favorite Hamlet--Kenneth Branagh. A lot of people aren't crazy about the Branagh Hamlet, and I can concede some of the point--there are a lot of things wrong with it. But for my money, Branagh is the one modern Hamlet who really conveys the since of Hamlet as a great Renaissance prince, who captures the dignity and the hint of majesty that I advert to above.

Perhaps the interesting point is that Branagh in spite (or becaue?) of his dignity and majesty, never really captures the petulant schoolboy or the frivolous crown. You never feel that he Branagh's "mad prince" is mad even north by northwest. Donohue's Hamlet knows how to fake madness for the family and may have a touch of the real thing.

The point may be that there are simply too many changes of register here: that nobody is going to get them all in the same performance (and we might not be able to assimilate it if they did). So Donohue may qualify as the un-Branagh, the one who gets exactly right precisely those parts at which Branagh is not so hot.

Aside from Donohue, there were a lot of other aspects of the performance that were good, if not exactly great. Perhaps the best was Richard Elmore as Polonius in what must be his 300th season at Ashland. Elmore understands that Polonius is funny, but does not lose sight of the fact that he is also a mean-spirited bully. Jeffrey King as Claudius looked a little too much like Daddy Warbucks to be completely convincing. And while you could believe him as a man who wanted to hang onto his job, you never felt that he understood the full dimensions of kingship.

Greta Oglesby played a Gertrude who didn't seem quite to grasp the point that her new husband is a murderer. I think this is a legitimate reading of the text, but it leaves her as merely a distraught mother, which isn't as rich a role to play.

A couple of fun facts: Hamlet's age is a problem in any production because Shakespeare made it a problem. I once saw a 19-year-old play Hamlet as a 19-year-old. I believe Donohue is 41, which would make him one of the older 19-year-olds in theatre history. And about five years older than Branagh was when he gave it his more mature reading in 1996.

Ashland Theatre Note: Pride & Prejudice

You may remember the Madison County rule of movie adaptation: to make a good movie adapted from a novel, you need a mediocre novel. Something like The Bridges of Madison County, say, is far more likely to be a successful movie than all those pious yawners from Merchant-Ivory. The reason is clear enough: start with a good novel and you'll have to leave too much out; you'll wind up with an audio-visual aid where the best the audience can do is to try to remain the absent good stuff.

Evidently it works for stage plays too. Pride and Prejudice, at the Angus Bowmer theatre in Ashland this week, makes it clear that you can take the story line and a good many of the astringent one-liners from Jane Austen's most beloved novel but you can't keep the subtlety, the nuance or (perhaps this is most important) the rhythm, the pacing, the feel for time and the change of seasons.

Facing down into this kind of a void, Ashland fell backward into what it knows best how to do: broad burlesque, with lots of good-natured almost-clowning. It worked in a way, but I suppose it worked best among those who didn't know anything about the novel beyond the Cliff Notes. Devotees of the novel--I sat through the show with a couple--on the available evidence were likely to find it a kind of desecration.

Exhibit "A" was the casting of James Newcomb as Mr. Collins, the fawning and frightened little time-server clergyman who is there to remind the heroine that there are worse things in the world than not being married at all. Newcomb's Collins is a hoot and it is not, strictly speaking, out of keeping with the character in the original. But Director Libby Appel allowed Newcomb to transform it into a star turn, a standup routine that became its own reason for being.

Exhibit "B" would be Judith-Marie Bergan as Mrs. Bennett, the daft and bewildered mother of all those marriageable young ladies. I see that Bergan is in the rota also this spring for Mistress Quickly in Henry IV and you have to wonder if she got her characterizations mixed up: it would be interesting to see if Bergan's Eastcheap inkeeper turns up as a befuddled Hampshire matron. In any event, her Mrs. Bennett has far more of the fishwife about her than you'd ever expect to find in a country house.

But Exhibit "C" would be the whole tone of the piece. No doubt it was funny and no doubt that Austen is funny. But Austen's wit is quicksilver, gone before you can catch it; Ashland's is one step down the line towards Curly, Moe and Larry. And perhaps more important, Austen's wit is sauced with an undercurrent of sombre unease. For step back and think for a moment--husband-hunting is inherently comic, but these five Bennett girls really do have a problem: fail in the marriage competition and they will find themselves--well, probably not exactly out on the street, but very likely dependent on the famously unreliable good graces of some relative stranger. Moreover Mr. Bennett: no doubt about it he is a witty man--he has some of the best lines in the novel and the play. But he has somehow arranged life so his nearest and dearest face a life of penury and he treats it all with an air of merry indifference. The genius of Austen is that you never quite forget unsettling ironies like this even while he is making you laugh.

There is another problem here, and this one may lie in the novel itself: Mr. Darcy, the young man of ten thousand a year who lies at the center of the action. Face it, Austen wasn't really very interested in her young men, except insofar as they provide furniture for the young ladies. This is excusable in a book where you can concentrate on so much else (although even in the book, you somehow sense that the marriage of Elizabeth and Darcy is going to be one of the most tempestuous that Derbyshire has ever seen). On stage, Mr. Darcy has to be himself, and you find yourself thinking he might have done better had he tried to be someone else.

Overheard in Ashland: Now it Can Be Told

Outside the Angus Bowmer Theatre in Ashland:

--I sat in Angus Bowmer's lap!
--Of course that was a long time ago...
--I was forty-three!

Ashland Theatre Note: The Best Cat

Ashland's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is the best rendition of that old chestnut that I've never seen. This actually isn't saying a lot: I always thought the original movie version was a mess, under the affliction as it was of Hayes Office prurience and the wretched miscasting of the so-frequently-miscast Paul Newman. The more recent, with Rip Torn and Tommy Lee Jones was interesting but strange, as Torn tried to figure out how to play an understated Big Daddy and Jones tried to figure out how to respond (I never saw the original stage version, but Barbara Bel Geddes and Ben Gazzara did sound like the right casting).

So it's a low bar, but the Ashland's rendition was impressive on its own terms--in particular Danforth Comins, who accomplished what has always seemed to me like a near-impossible acting task: try to make something interesting out of young Brick, whose objective in life is to turn himself into a nullity. Brick spends the whole of the first act--and a good deal of the remainder--with clipped, half-sentence responses, designed to put the lid on anything remotely like human connection. Comins has emerged for me as one of the genuine stars in the Ashland firmament--successful with a whole spring of unappealing characters. I'd count Bertram in All's Well that Ends Well; Coriolanus; Cassio in Othello, and Orlando in As You Like It. I'm beginning to think this might be intentional on his (or his director's) part: anybody ought to be able to make something fun out of Mercutio, say, or Benedick. Win with these unwinnable parts and you have something really to be proud of.

Stephanie Beatriz as Maggie did herself credit with a character who must be daunting in a different way. It must be a bear to learn in the first place; she must have some of the longest uninterrupted speeches in the standard stage repertoire. And she's got to do it in some kind of southern drawl. Beatriz' drawl sounded like it was carefully practiced, but practiced. Craftsmanship is to be admired, but real craft is making them forget the craft, and I don't think she ever got quite to that point. Incidentally, I see by the blurb that she went to Stephens, which I had thought of as a natural breeding-ground for girls like Maggie: I wonder if she was playing her sorority sisters?

Michael Winters as Big Daddy had his handicap: specifically, that anybody who plays this part will fall under the shadow of Burl Ives, the original role-he-was-born-to-play avatar of the part (this may well explain why Rip Torn went out of his way to come up with an approach so different). Winters gave it salty energy with a lot of humor and just a touch of menace: you've got to give him a lot of credit, even if he never quite escaped the sway of his great ghost.

A more general point: I take it that Cat is the one play people are mostly likely to remember of Tennessee Williams these days? Moreso than Streetcar Named Desire, which did so much to define his reputation in his own lifetime? I suppose I can see why: heaven knows it has energy and humor and pathos. But the structure doesn't strike me as quite successful. The issue of homosexuality fits naturally into the context, although I'm not sure Williams brings it off quite as successfully as perhaps he would have hoped. In the end, the play is more about talk--a lot of it, pretty good talk--than it is about character or action. And if all Maggie needed to do to get laid was to take away his booze, how come she didn't do that months ago?

Lubitsch/Laszlo Watch

But you can't say this: I've seen two productions in the last week in lines hatched by Hungarians named Laszlo. And they both have Ernst Lubitsch in their DNA.

One, the Ernst Lubitsch movie, Trouble in Paradise, derives from a play by the Laszlo Aldadar, The Honest Finder. The other, She Loves Me, a musical on stage at the Ashland Shakespeare Festival, dervies from another playwright--this one Miklós László. Miklós, in addition to all those acute accents, gets his own Wiki page; no such luck for Aladar.

She Loves Me is perhaps the latest in a whole string of knockoffs, notably Lubitsch's 1940 Shop Around the Corner and the Hanks/Pfeiffer Ryan(!)You've Got Mail. Paradise also has gone through a number of reincarnations.

I leave it for graduate students to chart all the points of convergence and comparison.