Theater on Both Sides - Cast of Titans

'Tis the season of Mamet. Ben Brantley took care of Anarchist at the John Golden theater, but as for Glengarry Glen Ross, despite having begun previews on Nov. 11, the reviews are not yet out.  This is because it doesn't open until the 8th of December.  Officially this is because of Sandy, unofficially this is because Al Pacino supposedly doesn't know his lines.

To be perfectly honest, I'm not entirely sure Pacino was the right choice for his role.  In this production, he plays Levine.  He is ageing and failing; he can no longer sell and is grasping at straws.  Al Pacino is ageing, but he reads - to me at least - as a bit too confident for the role.  He really was perfect in the movie as Roma (played excellently in this production by Bobby Cannavale) and Jack Lemmon really was the quintessential Levine.  The other roles of the play are cast perfectly (John C. McGinley is perfect as Moss), but I have some serious reservations about Pacino.  I feel terrible about saying this, but it's the case.  It's just enough to draw me out of the world of the play slightly.
The world of the play is really ingeniously crafted.  The entire first act is set in a Chinese Restaurant, which is brought to life brilliantly with little touches like a child's high-seat or the subtly shifting window (the pattern of a window is cast onto the set in the cool tones of night from a different angle for each scene).  It really is a believable Midwestern Chinese restaurant.  When the action shifts to the office of the real estate company, you really feel like there's something in every filing cabinet.  For me, it called to mind the set of Gatz at The Public which was actually stocked with the theater's tax returns from many years back to make it look like a real office.

The production is certainly worth it.  It features some titans of acting.  But I'm not entirely certain that it is worth the hype of the marquis name.  Al Pacino is doubtless a great actor, but I'm not entirely sure he was right for the part.  The show does not suffer with regard to quality because he is in it, it suffers some with regard to believability.  Al Pacino's Levine doesn't read to me like someone who would take the drastic step of stealing the leads that are so crucial to the action of the play.

Theater on Both Sides - A Repeat Experience

It's amazing what one actor can do for a show.
My second English class took another trip into the city today, this time for Peter and the Starcatcher.  Some readers will know that I have already seen this show (my previous blog post is linked to;  I'm always surprised by how much of a pretentious ass I sound like when I re-read posts...) and they'll know that I loved it.  Or they just refreshed their memories.  Either way, Peter and the Starcatcher was awesome the first time around.  Not so the second time.  I mean it was good.  It was very good.  It was still quite funny.  But some of the humor is a little blunt.  The puns are somewhat obvious.  I hadn't realized that because Christian Borle played them so subtly.  He did not ham it up.  The new Black Stache is a much campier actor; so the show is still funny, but not in the same way.  It felt smarter the last time I saw it.
The staging is still remarkable.  Lighting and Sound America did an interesting piece on the show in their July 2012 issue which informed me on a number of interesting factors (I would link to it, but I can't find it).  The proscenium arch is decorated with what is essentially gold painted trash, which is an interesting touch.  Everything seems a little bit thrown together, like a bunch of people got together in a mostly empty space and decided to put on a play, and the proscenium adds to that.  It looks like part of the gilded interior of the theater, but it's made of hundreds of everyday objects.  Which is really cool.  I'm not sure what that means from a critical perspective, but it's cool.

Perhaps some of my nonplussed reaction to my second trip to the Brooks Atkinson theater stems from my new-found dislike of Peter Pan.  The reason this show was on the schedule for my class was that we read the original version of the book (not the play) recently.  And you know what?  Peter is an asshole.  This play references the original material in interesting ways, but I can't escape from understanding those references.  In the final monologue, they quote, round-about-ly, the last line of the book "so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless".  I understand that reference and it makes me angry.  Peter is a dick to everyone.  He forgets people and kills people and doesn't care.  This is held up as the ideal of the one child who never grew up.  Now, I think you need to grow up a little to be humane.

In any event, the production was very different.  Was it fun?  Yes.  Would I still recommend it?  Probably not...

Theater on Both Sides - Como el muguito en la piedra

Pina Bausch's last work was on stage at the BAM opera house.  For some reason, it felt odd to see a dead woman's choreography.  We see dead dramaturges' plays - Shakespeare, Brecht, Beckett, et al. - but those are written words.  Not movement.  I feel like movement should be more ephemeral.

Setting that minor oddity aside, Como el muguito en la piedra (Like moss on a stone) is a beautiful piece.  After Pina's sudden death, it became a hot commodity and has been touring since.  It takes a lot from Chilean tradition and history, which was especially cool for me as a Spanish speaker.  Setting aside the music which was either instrumental or with lyrics in Spanish (in fact the title of the piece comes from Violeta Parra's "Volver a los 17"), the piece incorporates actual dialogue which I thought was an interesting choice.  Women in jewel tone dresses float across the stage and, often, men in dark suits try to hold them back.  Going through the year in AP Spanish Lit, I have reached a unit of works on machismo y feminismo, so this idea is especially relevant.   The piece begins with a woman on all fours, yelping like a dog as she is first carried in that position by two men, then lifted like a marionette by a group of male dancers.  The interplay between the male and female dancers is fascinating.  The opening scenes of both acts are very male dominated - I have already described the first snippet of the piece and the second act opens with a man greeting women as they enter his home for a party not by name but by descriptors like "the blue one" or "the little one" - to a very harmonious moment where the company is lined up diagonally playing with the hair of the person in front of them to even a moment that seems almost female dominated where the men mirror the movement of the women but always seem one step behind.  

Technically... well, I wasn't really paying attention to the minutia of the tech performance.  I know, readers will be disappointed (assuming that ), but I was really caught up with the dance.  One obvious aspect of the design was the stage.  The stage was completely white and completely bare, but the deck separated to form these wild cracks in the ground.  Inspired by Chile in many ways, it is unclear whether this is seismic activity, the Atacama desert, an Andean glacier, the cracks through which so many fell through during the Pinochet regime (many of the songs used and pieces themselves reference the disappeared), or simply dying earth.  

It was truly beautiful.

Starstruck

I get lights in theater.  Even if I hadn't known that a specific effect existed, I can often figure out how they were done just from experience and reading.  That was not so for Peter and the Starcatcher.  I looked at that show and thought to myself: "I do not know how that was done."  It was awesome.  That ladies and gentlemen is what Tony Award winning lighting design looks like.  Speaking of technical Tonys (which get next to no love during the broadcast), Peter and the Starcatcher swept the "Design for a Play" awards.  Lighting design, costume design, scenic design, and sound design all went to this show.

Now I fully recognize that all that alone is not enough to put most people in seats.  It's enough for me to want to go see a show, but I recognize that that's not so for most people.  But what is enough is the fact that the entire production is amazing.  From the beginning prologue (it's very Henry V) to the final look (which to me becomes even more striking in memory), the play completely immerses the audience in this particular version of Victorian England.  It has basically two major sets - one for the ship The Neverland and one for the island on which they are shipwrecked - and the cast makes them come alive with perfectly in unison motion. If the ship moves, they tilt.  It's genuinely remarkable how they make the docks of Victorian London and the deck of The Neverland come alive simply by moving.  When they get to the island, lighting design takes over to distinguish between the different environments.  With a shift, the stage transforms from a sandy beach to a jungle to a mermaid grotto.  And the show is really freaking funny.  In discussions about the chest around which the plot of the show revolves, Molly (the only female actress) explains that Starstuff (the contents of the box) makes you who you want to be; if you're good it will make you better, but if you're evil and want to take over the world, if you're a person like "Genghis Khan, or Caesar, or Ayn Rand" (quote from the show) it would be devastating if you were to come into contact with the Starstuff.  In short, pretty much everything is that funny.

Go see this show.  If the tech Tonys weren't enough, Christian Borle (who plays Black Stache) won for Best Actor in a Featured Role in A Play.  So there's that...

Talkers Be Not Do Gooders...

I hope I caught that right.  If I did, it's from Richard III.  Specifically, the Richard the III featuring Kevin Spacey playing now at BAM.  And it's awesome.  Seriously, you should all go see it.  I think the ballonatic Menendes' Bridge Project has finally turned out something worthwhile.  Since this is Shakespeare, I'm going to go ahead and spoil the ending a bit because its been around for 400 years.  If you are averse to that, read no further.

Richard III is Shakespeare's second longest play (after Hamlet), but you wouldn't know it to see this production.  There's never a dull moment in the court of England when Kevin Spacey is present, and even when he is off stage there is rarely a pause in the action.  As he himself says, this play is destined either for heaven or for hell; and while Richard himself is certainly going to hell, this play is ecstatic. If only for the technical feats of focusing on the lights, check out the play for the staging.  The multi-doored set seems to have a single light focused on each door, which let me tell you is a feat.  I'd love to sit down with this lighting designer to talk to him about his shadows, because they were gorgeous.  It is impossible to escape the feeling that the sun is setting on all of them. This sense is compounded by the projections, the text of which seems to lengthen faster or slower depending on when each character dies.  And a lot of them do.  The omniscient, mad Queen Margaret curses the whole court within 45 minutes, and they all seem to meet the fate she sets out for them.  It is she that places x-es on each door as each character passes on, creating an inescapable sense of predetermination.  It seems that the characters could do nothing else but fall.

As for the bunch-backed, toad himself, I have nothing but wonderful things to say.  Spacey seems to taunt the rest of the cast with his grotesqueness of character and physiognomy.  It seems that he's testing them to see how far they'll let him go.  All in all, he manages to take in Anne - whose father and husband he has killed - various lords and dukes, the princes regent, and the populace of England (thanks to a spectacularly media savvy Buckingham); all the while telling the audience how much he should be hated.  And not for his physical features.  He seems to have come to terms with that.  No, we should hate him because he has consciously decided to be a villain.  And he loves it.  He begins the play with a Nixonian sweating problem, graduates to the Kim Jong Il-style aviators, and ends the play strung up by his feat a-la Mussolini.  As I said, the staging is spectacular, but it is made that much better by the way the actors play with the space.  (Yes, I just gave credit to the actors.  Deal with it.)  They know exactly how to run their show, and they make a truly memorable Richard III out of a spectacular technical environment.

So go see this show.  NOW.