Bridge Project winds down with a drumbeat.

There was a delightful performance at the BAM Harvey Theatre the other night, when there ought to have been half a dozen.  Like the last time I saw a star turn in Shakespeare’s Richard III, the rest of the cast was not at the same level as the title character.  One might think Kevin Spacey would have enjoyed better sparring partners, but apparently he and his co-producer of the Bridge Project, director Sam Mendes, preferred safe if disappointing casting.

OK, that’s my grouse.  But I do want to be clear here.  This is a fine production in more ways than it’s not.  I have complaints. I have disappointments.  When have I not?  But the Bridge Project’s production of Richard III is more than worth seeing.  Get thee to the BAM Harvey Theatre between now and March 4th [http://www.bam.org/view.aspx?pid=3692].  But get there on time, because this starts at 7:30 sharp, in Brooklyn, and you will not be allowed to interrupt Mr. Spacey’s first soliloquy.  Nor do you want to miss it.

The company is professional.  They are all skilled at speaking verse, they’re all playing the appropriate characters in the play (out of its own time and more or less in ours).  But they’re not taking that final leap of faith; it’s as if their characters are not in life or death situations.  Except they are.

Technically this is a splendid, polished production staged with a cinematographer’s eye.  Scenic design by Tom Piper is deceptively simple, a set of dusty walls of doors allowing for the possibility of French farce.  In the second act those walls of doors open up, angling toward the infinity in which these characters continue to live on over 500 years after the deaths of their originals.  And in case you wonder who those people are, the name of the primary character in a given scene is projected — rather like locations in the television series “Fringe” — on the set.  These projections (among others by Jon Driscoll) are particularly pleasing, telling us who Richard will be speaking to, besides the audience:  The Council, or The Public, or Lady Anne.  Lighting by Paul Pyant is atmospheric.  Sound (Gareth Fry) and music (Mark Bennett, with coordination and direction by Curtis Moore) are excellent, with exciting drumming exactly when needed, building, building to an explosive crescendo in some scenes; alternately subtle, frightening undertones in others.

The production is intellectually satisfying, with many good ideas well executed, while some were not.  I dreaded most the dream sequence of Richmond (the future Henry VII) and Richard III on Bosworth Field.  This was set up to look like an informal dinner party with the present and future kings on opposite ends of the table.  Orchestration good, solos not so good. 

Kevin Spacey is terrific as Richard, funny, snide, clever, deeply damaged, and over the top (sometimes a bit too far over).  His deformed body crabs sideways, a shriveled left arm wrapped in leather, a brace supporting his crooked, in-turned left leg.  His movements are astonishing throughout the play.  He never loses this physical characterization, which takes extraordinary discipline and is doubtless quite painful.  This is a bravura performance before we even talk about his superlative use of language.  His phrasing reaches the heights of Frank Sinatra, his feel for the poetry and prose is flawless.  His asides to us, his gawping amazement of what he can get over on his relations and fellow peers of the rocky realm, he gleefully shares with us in the audience. He's a hoot and a half.

Three hours and close to a half — with an intermission after the first two hours — is a long time, and it almost worked.  However, the unevenness of the casting is the downfall of this, the last of the Bridge Project’s productions.  It’s the first production in this three-year experiment that relies on a single high-quality performer; it’s the only season with just one play instead of two in repertory. It seems poor-spirited of Messrs. Spacey and Mendes to not put blockbuster Shakespearean performers opposite Mr. Spacey. 

Chuk Iwuji is Buckingham, but is he?  Is he a leader of men, a soldier?  No, this Buckingham is just a panderer.  Lords Hastings (Jack Ellis) and Stanley (Michael Rudko), and the Bishop of Ely (Andrew Long), are these the most powerful men in the land?  Do they start in confidence and shrink in fear of the ever-strengthening monster Richard reveals?  Alas, no.  In Richard’s England, losing your position on the Council means losing your head, but these guys behave as if they are at board meetings they don’t really need to care about.

In this production the women had a lot to say — scenes and monologues that Shakespeare wrote but  which are often edited away.  It was interesting to see them, well staged, yet somehow unfinished.  The ages of women in Richard III are well represented:

-         The youngest, Lady Elizabeth, daughter of the late King Edward IV and Queen Elizabeth, does not speak and isn’t in the script — some productions include her, some do not.  I still recall a (free) production by the erstwhile Riverside Shakespeare Company that included Jacqueline Lucid as a silent but riveting Lady Elizabeth in a production more years ago than I choose to count.  This production’s Lady Elizabeth is so far upstage we can barely see her, and yet physically she did the job well.

-         Lady Anne, young widow of Prince Edward, is wickedly wooed and won by Richard before he’s king.  Annabel Scholey starts off well in the infamous wooing scene, modern, sexy, sassy, but eventually falls a bit short, particularly in her scenes with the other women. 

-         Queen Elizabeth, King Edward IV’s wife/widow and mother of the princes in the Tower — yes, those Princes — is skillfully played by Haydn Gwynne.  She is the most powerful woman on the stage, and gives Spacey a run for his money.

-         Duchess of York is the mother of King Edward IV, George Duke of Clarence, and Richard of Gloucester (later Lord Protector, later Richard III).  She has no fond feelings for her son and sings the same sour tune throughout the play.  Maureen Anderman hits the right notes, yet is uninspired.

-         And finally Queen Margaret, intoned by Gemma Jones, is the widow of the late King Henry VI, mother of Prince Edward, and, historically, dead by the time this play takes place.  She does, however, perform the function of personifying the past haunting the present.  And Shakespeare wasn’t concerned with history, just a good story.

Almost every scene of this Richard III is a well-staged picture:  Publicity stills abound.  But too many characters spoke from center and out to us instead of to one another. And no one, including the excellent Ms. Gwynne, was at Mr. Spacey’s level.  Yes, I realize the play is called Richard III, but he did not exist in a vacuum.  Spacey’s Richard had only weak resistance, since none of the actors seemed to understand their own potential power. The danger they were in did not build, it just appeared.  This was too easy a ride for Richard.  

And yet....the beat goes on.  The play still works.  And the drums are great.

Let us be clear.  This is Theatre.  No one should mistake it for history.  Time is compressed and characters do what the dramatic structure requires of them.  Their motivations are as the playwright imagines them.  Plays are plotted, constructed, wrought.  Life (and to a lesser extent, history) just happens.  It may be that the weakness of Shakespeare’s play is surrounding Richard with too many weak players.  There is no need, though, to compound this in productions that use a powerful player as Richard but don’t give him anyone worthwhile to parry with.  The Bridge Project, this great experiment of Mr. Spacey and Mr. Mendes over the past three years, deserved a better closing act.

~ Molly Matera, signing off, sighing for a second play in repertory.

A Delightful Dalliance

Love’s Labour’s Lost has never been on my short list of favorite Shakespeare plays, or even my long list. Is it even a play? A group of silly people share what passed for clever repartee at some point, and these barely connected and thoroughly unlikely scenes are eventually wrapped up at the end with a death and a promise. Sketch, revue, entertainment. A variety show? At any rate, I’ve seen it once or twice and remained unimpressed. Until Friday, December 11th.

Last night I fought the cold wind all the way to Pace University’s Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts to see the Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre of London touring company perform Love’s Labour’s Lost. I’d been to Schimmel once before for a film showing during the Tribeca Film Festival (Fellini’s “Spirits of the Dead” in which Terence Stamp seemed to be playing Peter O’Toole, but perhaps it was really himself in a Poe-ish sort of way).

The performance space had been transformed, replicating, to the greatest extent possible on a standard proscenium stage, the Globe. The staging gave us Shakespeare’s play as it was intended, ­ not because Shakespeare wouldn’t like what we do now, but because the sort of space used last night was what the King’s Men (the theatre company of which Shakespeare was a ‘sharer,’ actor, and playwright) had played in, the standard theatrical architecture of Elizabethan England. The stage juts out roundly, goes up to a second level, and provides hiding places in the way of trees painted on curtains, a ladder climbed behind such a “tree” to the second level, a balcony for the musicians available to do double duty (but that would be another play), and of course the balcony of the theatre itself, generally reserved for spectators (“gallery” in the real Globe), was also used by the musicians. Actors entered from any aisle in the orchestra available to them, the small balcony on the stage, and two routes from either side of the stage, a door up left, a door up right, and a double door center. And, of course, two pillars afford the actors more space to play around as well as seating areas. At the actual Globe, the pillars would have held up the roof sheltering the stage from inclement weather. The groundlings, in what would now be the orchestra, would just get soaked.

This isn’t theSchimmel – this is the real (new) Globe Theatre stage in London.

The Schimmel does not have the best acoustics, so actors turned away from my area (house right) were a bit difficult to hear. Yes, no miking. Remember that? Just actors’ actual voices. I loved it. These actors played to the entire house, left, right, and center. They even played to the balcony although no one was seated there.

So that’s the layout, which was exciting in and of itself, knowing that this was how the plays were originally seen. The old Globe was noisier, of course, without our modern rules or expectations of people actually paying attention to the play instead of socializing. Those audiences were as raucous as the performers, not to mention the nut shells crunching on the floor of the groundlings’ area. Since I’m feeling particularly dorky, here’s a sketch of the 16th Century Swan:


Actors were not celebrities then. Actually the descriptions of actors at the time were pretty rude. And, of course, all those marvelous female parts were played by boys. Some changes are definitely for the better. (Yes, I’ve seen several all-male productions, and they work brilliantly, differently, quite excitingly. Still, I do like to see women playing women.)

For more on the new Shakespeare's Globe in London and this production, go here: http://www.shakespeares-globe.org/theatre/annualtheatreseason/loveslabourslost/

For more architectural details, go here: http://www.sgc.umd.edu/arch.htm

Back to last night and LLL, when I realized I’d never seen it done well before. The players last night did it absolutely right, full of gambols and romps, singing and dancing, live music (not as background, the music was frequently cued and stopped by the characters themselves), raunchy sight gags and routines, and just plain fun.

The story – slight. The characters – rough sketches of later ones. This is young Shakespeare, brash, bold and bawdy, trying out his verbal skills, allowing his slight characters to be transformed into people by the company of actors.

It is said that the primary romance between Berowne and Rosaline in LLL is a precursor to, or just plain practice for the later, precisely drawn, bickering lovers Benedick and Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing. I like to think Berowne failed the challenge offered by Rosaline at the end of LLL, and it takes years to become Benedick to Rosaline’s Beatrice. Much Ado’s characters are more sophisticated, matured by life, but do bear some resemblance to these younger, sillier creatures, so I’ll go with that theory.

By the traditional labels, this play should not be called a comedy because the lovers do not end up together at the end. Years ago my friend Matthew posited that the moment those clever, witty, sassy, courageous women in Shakespeare’s plays are married or betrothed, they shut up. They stop speaking at all, or they only speak what their husbands ordain. The ladies in LLL say “no” to the young men and therefore ­-- not betrothed and still free --­ they keep on speaking wittily. Hmmm.

Pre show, the actors and musicians milled about the theatre, chatting with the audience in the half hour prior to the curtainless start. Some of the actors carried deer – a male deer and a female deer – and played a mute puppet show implying a bit of wooing. The female deer declined, but the male deer was persistent and flattering. Little did we know that the deer were Chekhov’s gun.

In the opening of the play, four young men with nothing better to do make a vow to live together for three years, abjuring all contact with the feminine sex (and naturally making laws to punish women if they come anywhere near them during that time – including cutting out their tongues! Hmmm again.) in order to devote themselves to “study.” Berowne (delightfully if not altogether articulately played by Trystan Gravelle, with an often indecipherable accent, but a marvelous wit and soaring vocal range) is the outlier; he recognizes how absurd and impossible is the pledge required by the King of Navarre (a little dorky and a little clever, sweetly played by Philip Cumbus). Nonetheless, peer pressure wins out, and all four friends sign the pledge – the other two were physically and verbally similar, almost indistinguishable, and they would have been utterly so had I been farther away from them. Both, however, were extremely funny, so cheers to Jack Farthing’s “Dumaine” and Will Mannering’s “Longaville.” Cheers to their fabulous names as well.

That’s the set-up.

Main plot line: the imminent arrival of an embassage from the King of France led by said King’s extremely marriageable daughter, the Princess of France (sharply played by Michelle Terry). The Princess is accompanied by three ladies, Rosaline (Thomasin Rand), Katherine (Siân Robins-Grace), and Maria (Jade Anouka). By the King’s new rules, these ladies cannot enter his court, so he houses them in a field, like cattle. Naturally each of the young men falls in love with each of the women, but they must be mum on this or break their vow.

Second plot line: Don Adriano De Armado is a lilting bumbling Spaniard, hilariously played to the rafters by Paul Ready. It was his entrance that really made the production kick in for me. His body and voice bounce about uncertainly, he’s sweetly absurd, with a pose he copied from an aristocratic portrait. He’s in love with the “country wench,” Jacquenetta (a hilarious Rhiannon Oliver with a voice in sweet counterpoint to her rough character), which is also against the King’s edict – no one gets to consort with females for the three years of the King’s pledge. Meanwhile, Costard the clown (played to the vulgar hilt by Fergal McElherron) is found guilty of treason for “being with a woman” (yes, that same Jacquenetta) and is left in Armado’s custody for punishment. Armado frees Costard to deliver a love letter to Jacquenetta.

Plot lines entangled: Berowne uses Costard to send a love letter to Rosaline. Costard mis-delivers the letters. This is the catalyst for confusion on which this play resides.

It’s all terribly silly. What makes this production work is the way in which the silliness is performed. From lewd jokes, hiding in plain sight, dancing and cavorting, leaping, spying, disguises and deceptions, even hunting the stag. The ladies hunt:

and that charming deer we saw in the pre-show is the victim. Not to mention the four young men. Of course, the young men break their vows, break each other’s balls over it all, woo the young ladies, who consider them untrustworthy, having witnessed them breaking vows. Oh what a tangled web.

The spell is broken by the arrival of a messenger informing the Princess of France that her father is dead. The Princess and her entourage instruct the King and each of their wooers that a betrothal, while presently impossible, may be wrung from the ladies if the gentlemen perform certain stallion-breaking duties over the next twelve months and a day.

And then everyone dances and sings!

The costumes are period and perfect, the use of the stage – nay, the whole theatre – is engaging. At the end of the interval, during which the ladies picnicked onstage, each of the four came into the audience offering slices of fruit on metal plates. Sweet. And I do believe this is the first time I’ve laughed at Holofernes’ (Christopher Godwin) manipulation of the English and/or Latin language(s), or at the performance of the Not-Quite-Nine Worthies. Dominic Dromgoole, Artistic Director for Shakespeare's Globe, directed this production, and although I doubt I can pronounce it correctly, I will remember that name and go see whatever else he offers.

So what if it’s not a play. It’s a frolic, a mere dalliance, a trifle, and a delightful one.

Love’s Labour’s Lost by William Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre of London at the Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts, Pace University, NYC. 11 December 2009.

~ Molly Matera, dancing off. Thanks for stopping by.