The Two-Play Weekend

MEASURE FOR MEASURE is a problematical play. Modern audiences have difficulty comprehending Isabella’s choices, all of the characters are unlikable, and in the final moments, the Duke may be as low and vain as the fallen Angelo.

The primary problem with the Public Theater’s bizarre production is that the audience members who do not already know the play, the characters, the story, will not have a clue what’s happening in this production by the Elevator Repair Company.

Some of the acting is fine, but the direction by John Collins is not.  Too damn clever in a concept, and greatly lacking in storytelling.  The Public Theater calls it "an experimental production."  Apparently the experiment is how to not tell the tale.  

Happily, the excellent Scott Shepherd as The Duke was comprehensible and funny and took us all into his confidence. That helped. Rinne Groff was an excellent Isabella, attempting modernity for a difficult character. Pete Simpson as Angelo was just odd, Mike Iveson as Lucio alternated between hilarious and annoying, which sounds like a good impersonation of Lucio. Vin Knight as Escalus was serviceable. Most of the cast, however, was sub-par, for which I believe the director must be held to account.

What the Public calls “technological dramaturgy” is reliance on the projection of Shakespeare’s script on the walls of the stage, presumably hoping we’d read the words we could not hear. The beginning of the play was directed for everyone’s speech to be so fast the audience could not comprehend it. It was a relief when the speech slowed to molasses as Isabel met her brother, the lusty Claudio, in prison. This pivotal scene is a painful conversation, and while it may, in reality, feel excruciatingly slow, unfortunately that is not theatrical. The long pauses may have felt emotionally earned to the actors, but not to the audience. Then the play sped back up again, dolls were tossed about, and finally the play was over.

Measure for Measure is a challenge for any director, but there’s no need to toss the baby out with the bathwater.

#

THE TREASURER by Max Posner at Playwrights Horizons is beautifully played by a cast of four (two of them in multiple roles). Unfortunately, conceptually interesting as the play might have been, it has no beginning, a muddle of a middle, and no ending.

Even as directed by the brilliant David Cromer, this doesn’t feel like a play, but a pondering.

Laura Jellinek’s spare and practical scenic design served the space well, and costume design by David Hyman fit the characters. What fit the characters even better were the wonderful actors portraying them:

• Peter Friedman in the title role — nameless, only “The Son” in the program, to whom no one refers by name. Straightforward, simple, real, and perhaps the play’s “Everyman.” 
• Deanna Dunagan is heartbreaking as the mother, Ida Armstrong — she definitely has a name, and wants everyone to know it. Ms. Dunagan shrinks rather than grows in the role, her gradual physical decline is perfection. She forces us to enjoy Ida, no matter how self-centered she was.  After all, while most women grow up to fall into the role of mother, not all of them are suited to it, or want it. Ida insists she was a child when she married and when she had her children, but then she grew up and found true love. It seemed to me that she remained a child leaving everything to her more romantic second husband and then to her children when he died.

• Marinda Anderson and Pun Bandhu play the remaining roles of The Son’s two brothers as well as a salesperson and other strangers. Each character is clearly delineated by these fine actors. It was, however, initially confusing to hear a woman playing one of the brothers.

The play, even more than the Son, asks what is really owed parents who desert their children? “The Son” clearly feels his mother demands too much and isn’t necessarily entitled to it, but also thinks he’s wrong to resent her. Ida had no guilt over her poor performance as a mother; why has The Son such guilt over what he perceives as his poor performance as a son? Dutiful as he is, because he cannot love his errant mother, he’s sure he’s going to hell.

The play is not dull because the characters — as written and as acted — are not dull. It just doesn’t go anywhere. Well, perhaps on an escalator to hell.

Note: The program, of course, includes too much opinion from the artistic director of Playwrights Horizons and the playwright, so the play cannot live up to their emotional connection with their journey with the play. Which is why such things should only be read, if at all, after the performance.

A Varied Tempest

A thickly hot night at the Delacorte Theater vaguely threatened to storm all evening, with the occasional stiff breeze suddenly ceasing as thunder rumbled.  Or was it thunder? A tumble of instruments sat stage right, a great many of them shouting and singing at the touch of percussionist Arthur Solari.  His finely tuned playing accompanied a tempest of a different sort in The Public Theater’s first production of Shakespeare in the Park’s 2015 season: William Shakespeare’s The Tempest.  The flashing lights (designed by David Lander) and booming drums of the plays’ opening storm were startling and grumbled sporadically throughout the evening leaving the weather and the story on edge.  Riccardo Hernandez’s set was functional in iron, hemp, and wood, bare catwalks with steps and ropes, augmented by a spiral staircase adding to illusions of airborne characters in the play. 

Prospero and Ariel.  Photo Credit 2015 Joan Marcus.

This summer’s production is the second time Sam Waterston has played Prospero — the first was almost 40 years ago.  He is clear, engaged, and irascible.  His skilled phrasing presents us with the poetry of the play at its best.  On occasion he seemed to strain to push the words out, while some sections ran together in my ears. Mr. Waterston is a crotchety Prospero until he takes the noble step to not only make peace with those who usurped his dukedom 12 years before, but to forgive them, a totally believable transformation in a man whose anger is spent and who now knows his daughter is safe and loved.

The Tempest at the Delacorte.  Photo credit Joan Marcus.

Francesca Carpanini plays Prospero’s daughter Miranda with sweet innocence, rendering the character’s most famous lines quite well.  Only the love scenes came off as dully as they are written (sorry, Will) opposite a competent but uninteresting Rodney Richardson as Ferdinand, son of the king of Naples.  Charles Parnell played the kingly co-conspirator Alonso sternly and well.  Cotter Smith did solid work as Antonio, the brother who betrayed Prospero and now encourages Sebastian (Frank Harts), the brother of King Alonso, to repeat history and augment it with murder.  Bernard White was an engaging Gonzalo although he appeared, 12 years after Prospero last saw him, to be much too young for Prospero to refer to him as “the good old man.”  Louis Cancelmi as Caliban was anything but deformed except in his odd speech.

Michael Greif directed a smoothly building production with good performances from his cast, with particularly memorable work by:

• Chris Perfetti as other-worldly Ariel, whose oddly echoing vocal delivery and off-balance stance served well;
• the sweet and funny Jesse Tyler Ferguson as Trinculo, who was well paired with
• the scruffily hilarious Danny Mastrogiorgio as Stephano.

Caliban, Trinculo, and Stephano.  Photo Credit:  (C) 2015 Joan Marcus

The oft-dreaded (by me) supernatural ceremonials called for by Prospero were some of the best I’ve ever seen.  The dancing and singing of melodious music by Michael Friedman blessed the ceremony of union orchestrated by spirits — Tamika Sonja Lawrence’s Ceres introduced the exceptional Olga Karmensky and Laura Shoop singing as Iris and Juno respectively.  The choreography by Denis Jones was lilting and adventurous and allowed the Ensemble to shine as sprites of the island.  These fantastical rites were so magically beautiful I was rapt and happy in them.

Michael Greif’s production was a touch uneven, leading me to wonder if it would have been as pleasurable an evening had this production been done indoors, absent the atmosphere of Central Park, the breeze through the trees, the view of Turtle Pond and Belvedere Castle beyond the set ….we will never know. The play filled the Delacorte Theatre, running about two hours forty minutes with nary a drop of rain.  A fine night out in Central Park at the Delacorte celebrating Shakespeare. 

~ Molly Matera, signing off to re-read the enchanting verse of this oh so quotable script.

Hamilton Blew Me Away

I like old musicals.  Old songs. The soaring melodies of Richard Rodgers, cleverness of Noel Coward, the wit and anguish of Cole Porter.  I thoroughly enjoyed the outlandish humor of A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder.  But I haven’t LOVED a musical play like this in I don’t know how long.

The company of Hamilton.  (Photo Credit 2015 Joan Marcus)

Sitting in the Newman Theatre at the Public, I saw what some friends have called the future of musical theatre. After almost three hours riveted to the stage, I was overwhelmed, overpowered, overjoyed by this musical play.  Hamilton is hilarious and heartbreaking as good stories and good music always are.  Of course, the story is true — Alexander Hamilton, the youngest of our founding fathers, the lowest born, with big dreams of the future of the United States.  As for the music, although I don't care for hip hop or rap and didn’t know quite what I was in for — I even brought my earplugs (required for movie houses showing most modern films) just in case the show was over amplified; it wasn’t —I found myself bowled over by the depth and catholicity of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical talent, not to mention his intellect.

Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator of the book, music, and lyrics of Hamilton, has given us beautiful songs, witty, erudite and heartfelt, in an innovative play.  And funny. The music is perfectly modulated and styled based on which character is telling what part of the story.  There’s some rap, there are lyrical ballads, songs of ambition, jealousy, anger, love, unimaginable pain.  There are vivid characters created, sung, danced before us.  History is brought to life.  The score is varied and rhythmic and melodic, Andy Bankenbuehler’s choreography exhilarating, the performances universally excellent. Thomas Kail’s direction is tight, bright, flawless.

Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton are side by side throughout the story, from Hamilton’s arrival in NYC to his death in New Jersey at Burr’s hands.  The quietly seething Burr, smoothly then passionately played by Leslie Odom, Jr., is a fine foil to Mr. Hamilton as played by Mr. Miranda.  From the lullabies each man sings to his child to political wranglings in the creation of the new country, their similarities and differences are built and grown through the play to its climax.  Burr wanted to be in the room where it happened, but it was always Hamilton.  

Leslie Odom Jr. as Burr with the Schuyler girls:  Phillipa Soo, Jasmine Cephas Jones, and Renee Elise Goldsberry

These thrilling figures are at counterpoint to one another, surrounded by the ordinary yet extraordinary people in at our country’s birth, and the actors are at the top of their game. To name but a few:  Christopher Jackson as George Washington, Daveed Diggs first as the Marquis de Lafayette and later as Thomas Jefferson, the golden-voiced Renée Elise Goldsberry as Hamilton’s sister-in-law Angelica Schuyler in counterpoint to the sweetly warm Phillipa Soo as Hamilton’s wife Eliza lead a marvelous cast of actors, singers, dancers.  And I mustn’t forget the only performer who would not be described as a person of color, Jonathan Groff, who provided a great deal of snide humor as King George.

Daveed Diggs as Marquis de Lafayette, Okkieriete Onaodowan as Hercules Mulligan, Anthony Ramos as John Laurens, and Lin-Manuel Miranda as Hamilton.  (Photo credit Joan Marcus)

Mr. Miranda’s lyrics are contemporary to us, not Hamilton, but everything about this play is contemporary from the musical and dance styles to the plot.  On this 18^th century-style stage, we experience remarkably intelligent and tuneful rollicking good fun showing us that nothing changes.  Politics, jealousy, love, faith:  people are the same.

The scenic design by David Korins was appropriately Shakespearean — a “balcony” surrounding three sides of the stage with rolling staircases.  Warm wood tones glowed even in the pre-show lighting set up by Howell Binkley.  It’s a good space, a not too large house to preserve the intimacy of the direct address from these characters to us, and pretty well raked (with more legroom than any Broadway house). 

Lin-Manuel Miranda is brilliant and has created a work of art, just magnificent. Unbearably good, unbearably painful, I want to see it again, experience it again, hear it again.  And I want to read Ron Chernow’s biography that inspired such an intelligent, educational and moving joining of music, drama, and history.

As George Washington says (in the play), "Who Lives Who Dies Who Tells Your Story."  Lin-Manuel Miranda is telling Hamilton's story. Lucky Mr. Hamilton.  Lucky us.

Here’s to Lin-Manuel Miranda, the new king of American musical theatre.  Long may he reign.

~ Molly Matera, signing off….if you miss it at the Public Theatre, Hamilton is moving to Broadway this summer.