Happy Endings

As You Like It at the Bay Street Theater

 

(L-R: Quincy Tyler Bernstine, Hannah Cabell, and Andre de Shields in Much Ado About Nothing.)

            John Doyle, the director of the new production of As You Like It at Sag Harbor’s Bay Street Theatre, is a genius at stripping away the clutter to reveal the inner harmony of his chosen pieces – see his Sweeney Todd, Company, or The Color Purple, all Tony winners for Best Revival, or his off-Broadway production, earlier this year, of Pacific Overtures.  It’s confusing, then, that this As You Like It, seemingly fun and seemingly well-cast, is at its weakest when the stripping shows through.  Mr. Doyle, who also designs the set, gives us an effectively bare stage that never feels more than bare, and a reduced text in which any passing aficionado of Shakespeare could note the edits.  It’s a pretty small play as it is to be reduced to a company of ten and a two-hour running time – and it shows.

            The play is a co-production of Classic Stage Company in New York, where it goes after completing its run here on September 3^rd, thus Mr. Doyle, the artistic director at Classic Stage, thus Ellen Burstyn, as Jaques, the depressive courtier, and Andre de Shields, as Touchstone, the clownish sophisticate.  Ms. Burstyn, presumably, was attracted to the part in pursuit of Jaques’ immortal “All the world’s a stage” speech, but it doesn’t stand out in her largely subdued performance.  The biggest reactions go first to her wry observation that she can “suck the melancholy out of a song as a weasel sucks eggs” and, second, her delivery of one of Shakespeare’s best jokes, a dismissal of a mooning lover with a trenchant “You speak in blank verse.” 

Mr. de Shields, meanwhile, can’t fully puncture the dated humor to deliver a satisfying buffoon, though he does have a remarkably strong scene near then end, as an audience member is pulled up onstage to play his rival in love, William.  (It’s a lot more satisfying than it sounds.)  As he turns away from the befuddled spectator on his exit, Mr. de Shields gifts us with a warm, almost nostalgic smile, a subtle commentary on the ridiculousness of the conceit.  The issue with our two star turns, I conclude, is that Ms. Burstyn isn’t allowed to be a clown, and Mr. de Shields isn’t allowed to be a sarcastic fly on the wall.  Maybe some recasting is in order.

The story isn’t as impenetrable as in some Shakespeare comedies, merely multilayered, as set after set of misbegotten lovers mistake identities and swoon at distant partners in the court-in-exile of Duke Senior (Bob Stillman, genial) in the Forest of Arden.  The only twist here is that Mr. Doyle has recognized – wisely, in my opinion – the likeness of the play to a musical, dotted as it is with the lyrics to songs Shakespeare himself wrote.  The production puts them front and center, in an arrangement not so much Jazz Age (as the literature at Bay Street suggests) as Dust Bowl.  The eminent Stephen Schwartz is conscripted to write the music, which is promising, but they’re rushed, under-amplified, and under-orchestrated, and the end result is disappointing.  With truly great songs (as Mr. Schwartz, history shows, can write without undue effort), this could be a great show.  It’s not.  It’s nice, but not great.

Where it’s nice, it’s because of earnestness and commitment like that of the two female leads, Quincy Tyler Bernstine and Hannah Cabell as cousins Celia and Rosalind.  Ms. Bernstine’s Celia is a perpetually aghast sidekick out of a romantic comedy, while Ms. Cabell’s Rosalind is a wide-eyed innocent, who plays off her co-star with aplomb. While not revolutionary, they’re at least consistently funny.  The production as a whole could stand to adapt a little of their yin-and-yang interplay, as leaning too far on the side of reduction – as Mr. Doyle does here – leaves us with, to borrow the title of a different comedy, much ado about nothing.

Over the River and Through the Woods

A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Delacorte Theater.

Alex Hernandez and Annaleigh Ashford in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

           The question of whether Annaleigh Ashford is God is at this point open, but an addendum to her rapidly broadening scriptures can be found at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, in Lear deBessonet’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which runs through August 13^th.  Ashford’s Helena doesn’t so much steal the show as much as renders it irrelevant by comparison.  She is one of the world’s great physical comics, and her jerky, Harpo Marx-tinged jilted lover represents a completely different approach to her art than either her fluid Essie Carmichael in 2014’s You Can’t Take it With You or her lusty dog in the 2015 Sylvia; she represents the only convincing reason to see the play.

            Not that deBessonet doesn’t do her best.  Long relegated to the gala productions of new, hastily assembled Shakespeare musicals that play the Delacorte in September, she brings to Midsummer, her Shakespeare in the Park mainstage debut, a taste for agreeably frothy surplus reflected in David Rockwell’s fairy-lit set and Clint Ramos’ remarkably loud costumes.  A band plays New Orleans-inflected swing, and Marcelle Davies-Lashley, a great singer, wails Justin Levine’s new compositions.  The cast is stacked – Ashford, Phylicia Rashad, Danny Burstein, Kristine Nielsen, and more.  The atmosphere is celebratory and in hopeful search of a new approach to the material, but none’s found – the fairy monarchs Oberon (Richard Poe) and Titania (Rashad) are tedious; Burstein’s game as Nick Bottom but doesn’t bring anything new to the character (as he didn’t in the latest Fiddler); Nielsen’s Puck is playful and meta – forever glancing over her shoulder at the audience as Oberon pontificates – but less than worthy of her evident talent.

            Most disappointingly of all, deBessonet cannot salvage the bulky and dramatically inert second act.  The warring couples – Helena and Demetrius (Alex Hernandez), Hermia (Shalita Grant) and Lysander (Kyle Beltran) – are married five minutes in, and the drama resolved, to make way for a play within a play led by Bottom, a wannabe actor, and several attempts at an ending.  (DeBessonet doesn't help matters by making each one – especially the wild dance party fronted, once more, by the remarkable Ashford – feel more final than the last.)  Though it looks gorgeous, it feels something like a waste of time.

            Those lovers are by default the most exciting of the various interlocking storylines, if only because, at the risk of repeating myself, the show makes sense when Ashford is on stage.  Her specificity and precision as an actress cannot be overstated, and her presence makes her fellow actors better, especially Hernandez and Beltran. When Nielsen’s Puck rubs the flower of love in their eyes to cause them to fall for Helena, their energy level, too, seems to magically jump, and one particular scene, a brawl among the four lovers, comes close to theatrical Nirvana.  But it’s over all too soon, and Titania must be given room to drone, Puck to giggle, Bottom to ham.

            And the thing is – it’s nobody’s fault.  From director on down, every participant in this production is professional, polished, and energetic.  But it’s the wrong play.  There’s something appealing about doing Midsummer in the middle of the park, wild and woolly and yet magical in its order and location.  But the text is by and large weak, one of the only plays Shakespeare didn’t crib from some other source, and it shows.  As with The Tempest, the author falls over himself at play’s conclusion to apologize for his own work – the impish fairy Puck tells us "You have but slumber'd here / While these visions did appear / And this weak and idle theme / No more yielding but a dream.”  The haze and color and intermittent glory of deBessonet’s production is rather like a dream, if only a dream that some day, some way, Annaleigh Ashford will find the platform she deserves. 

Active Shooters

Assassins at Encores! Off-Center.

Clifton Duncan (far left), Steven Pasquale (upstage center), and the cast of Assassins.

            The curiously subdued production of Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s Assassins playing at New York City Center through July 15th as part of Encores! Off-Center is really more like two shows.  The first stars Steven Pasquale as a grandiose, booming John Wilkes Booth, a force of history whose obsession with being understood by future generations drives him to inspire presidential assassinations throughout history.  This show could stand to be shorter.  The second stars Clifton Duncan as the Balladeer, a charming man on the street with his hands in his pockets and his sleeves rolled up who recounts the stories of misguided presidential assassins with a genially shrugging grin on his face.  This one could stand to be much longer.

            Or maybe it’s three shows.  There’s the Pasquale starrer, which is more like an opera, and the Duncan starrer, which is more like a musical, and then there’s another show, about, mostly, Samuel Byck (Danny Wolohan), who tried to kill Nixon, Sara Jane Moore (Victoria Clark), Ford, and Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme (Erin Markey), ditto.  That one’s more like a comic straight play, full of Weidman’s most palpable toxic fear and anger, and it’s great, and they’re all great in it.  But... maybe it’s four shows, because one can’t leave out the entirely separate historical pastiche of revue-inflected one-off numbers like “Unworthy of Your Love” or “Something Just Broke…”

            You get the idea.  The strength of the original productions of Assassins, in 1990 (Off-Broadway) and 2004 (Broadway), was that they provided showcases for craftsmen at the top of their game.  They were invitations for melodic experimentation (Sondheim), pitch-black satire (Weidman), and explosive, transformative performances (Victor Garber as Booth in 1990 and Neil Patrick Harris as the Balladeer in 2004).  Though the show was and is perfectly integrated, it’s delicate, and one element of weakness, one instance of poor casting, one moment of resting on Sondheim’s laurels, and those four or five or six shows don’t coalesce into the perfect, if uncomfortable, evening at the theater that Assassins can be.  Unfortunately, that’s what happens here.

            Let’s talk about that first show to start.  Imperfectly cast, disparate in tone, and practically inaudible (the sound design, by Leon Rothenberg, is not up to his standards), the sections of the show that feature the titular assassins under-serves some remarkable performers (Alex Brightman, as Giuseppe Zangara, and Pasquale first among them) and front-loads some undeserving ones -- like Steven Boyer (as John Hinckley, Jr.), who can’t sing, and Ethan Lipton (as the menacing Proprietor) who can’t sing or act.  Unlike most semi-staged Encores! Concerts, in which scripts are used sparingly and subtly, three-quarters of the way through the production the actors all suddenly emerge with binders, which are never again to leave their hands, almost like they got part of the way through rehearsing and ran out of time.  Boyer, so miraculous in Hand to God, focuses so hard on playing the guitar during “Unworthy of Your Love,” Hinckley and Fromme’s pitch-perfect ode to the objects of their obsession, that he effectively forgets to project.  Everyone involved in this production, up to and including the director, Anne Kauffman, appears to have been studying really hard for something in the lead-up to this production, but it doesn’t appear to have been the text.

            What a breath of fresh air is that second show!  Clifton Duncan, a dynamo who’s long deserved his break, gets it here as the narrator, a relaxed, happy-go-lucky take on the Balladeer.  He’s the best singer in the show by far, and connects with the audience right from the start -- his second sung line, the politically relevant wisecrack “Every now and then the country / Goes a little wrong,” was followed by applause so thunderous it threatened to turn into a standing ovation.  Remarkably, the show, which is by and large sleepy, is worth seeing merely for his performance.  Unluckily, that performance is stunted by another directorial mistake -- the great appeal of Neil Patrick Harris’s turn in the same role on Broadway was the deadening shock of watching our only friend on stage morph into Lee Harvey Oswald, a historical empty vessel at the end of his rope, by show’s end.  In Kauffman’s take, Oswald is played by Cory Michael Smith in what amounts to a cameo, and the Balladeer disappears without warning, without any resolution to a great, sinister character arc.

            This makes the show sound worse than it is mainly because the production makes the show seem worse than it is.  Assassins is a masterpiece, plain and simple, but the trouble with Kauffman’s production is that it doesn’t hit on why that is.  Nobody on stage, from Pasquale to Brightman, is the least bit scary.  If a chorus line of homicidal maniacs can flit through the background of an audience’s world without blinking an eye, then either New York has started to desensitize its citizens or, to quote Sondheim, in this case, “something just broke.”

I Wonder What the King is Doing Tonight

Hamlet at the Public Theater.

 

Oscar Isaac, kneeling, and Peter Friedman, supine, in Hamlet.

            The first casualty in Sam Gold’s production of Hamlet, which opens July 14^th at the Public, is the carpeting.  Over the course of the production, a tray of lasagna, a cup of seltzer water, two large-ish flower pots full of dirt, and water from a hose allowed to run for upwards of five minutes (the latter three items mingling into a caked mud by the end of the play) conduct a frontal assault on the red wall-to-wall that ornaments David Zinn’s otherwise spare set.  This is actually rather fitting, since the production itself is kind of a mess.

            What stops Gold’s direction from being completely self-indulgent is largely his lead, and the reason for most of the hype surrounding the production.  Oscar Isaac is returning to the Public, his launch-pad, after years sneaking into international super-stardom as a chameleonic blend of a character actor and a leading man who stole Inside Llewyn Davis, Ex Machina, and now the Star Wars franchise.  Isaac, a small, shifty-looking figure with hooded eyes, is, far from overwhelmingly charismatic – indeed, his appeal seems not to come so much from the way he acts as the way he is, all the time.  He is not a particularly secretive person, but it is impossible to imagine what he’s like when he isn’t on stage or screen, if only because he is so with us then.

            Accordingly, Isaac doesn’t electrify the production upon his first entrance, which he makes during the live curtain speech, as if to conceal it.  It’s only when he leaves, and is absent for much of the third act, that the audience realizes that the considerable frame Gold has constructed sags without its tentpole.  “It is too long,” complains Polonius (Peter Friedman) at one point during a player’s lengthy speech, but Hamlet is rapt, and we with him; it’s only when he’s gone that the whole thing begins to seem a bit much.

            “Much,” incidentally, refers to the play’s runtime, which is advertised at three and a half hours but is actually closer to four.  This makes room for some great dramaturgy, most relevantly the play’s open dialogue with its existence as a play; all of the monologues are given and directed to the audience, like secrets shared.  It also, unfortunately, leaves space for terrible dramaturgy, like Gold’s apparent belief that the late King Hamlet and his brother, Claudius (both played by Ritchie Coster doing Ben Kingsley) are effectively the same person.  Further, it short-changes the terrific actress Gayle Rankin, whose Ophelia, given no room to play, is confused and unfounded.  It doesn’t help that she has to spend much of that unfortunate third act singing (there are four separate songs in the act, and the actors don’t appear to have any idea how to play them – is this a musical?).

            This is unsurprising for Gold, whose productions continually make choices that are almost self-consciously weird – the first scene of his Hamlet, which is considerable in length, is played in complete darkness; his New York Theater Workshop Othello was interrupted by a dance sequence to “Hotline Bling.”  But this is by no means entirely a bad thing – as evidenced by his decision, bizarre and unconventional, to play the first two acts of this Hamlet as comedy.  It works.  With no apologies, the first two-thirds of the play are hilarious almost from start to finish – and it’s hugely fun to watch.  Isaac, who spends most of the play without pants on, is the ringleader of an effective circus of mistaken identity and pratfalls.  Keegan-Michael Key, late of Key and Peele, plays Horatio as a frazzled second banana, and nearly steals the show.  And it’s great.  Really and truly great. 

Any complaint with this production is likely to deal with what the point of the whole thing is, and indeed, as a piece of drama this version of Hamlet is almost entirely without consequence.  But like all of Gold’s work, it’s so deeply intimate that by its end one can read the actors like friends, and Isaac and his company are probably having more fun doing the play than the audience has watching it.  You are likely to forget, upon leaving the theater, that most of the characters wind up dead, and make a note to invite them all to your next get-together.

Orange Julius

Julius Caesar at the Delacorte Theater.

(L-R: Tina Benko, Gregg Henry, Teagle F. Bougere, and Elizabeth Marvel in Julius Caesar.)

            At Thursday night’s performance of the Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar, the thesis of which is essentially that murdering Donald Trump would be a massively bad idea, a Trump supporter, standing outside the theater, spent approximately three-quarters of its two-hour runtime shouting a repeating array of phrases which sounded as if they included “Support President Trump,” and, in an unknown context, “Washington, D.C.!”  At the end of the show, another Trumpist (or Trumpkin, or whatever you will), dressed in a visor and American flag sport coat (which should've been a dead giveaway) ran down the middle aisle and unfurled an enormous red-white-and-blue flag emblazoned with “Trump 2020: Keep America Great.”  (The temporal implications of this, incidentally, given that it assumes that America will be made great and must be kept that way in some sort of status quo-to-be, are fascinating).  The flag-bearer’s apparent rebelliousness was somewhat undercut by the fact that he by definition would have had to wait outside the Delacorte Theater for five hours the same morning in order to sit through the entire performance and then make his statement.  Clearly, self-defining as the “opposition” is a messy business.

            This is further emphasized by the opacity of the imperfect show itself, which runs through June 18^th.  It’s this production that’s got a number of right-wingers, for whom setting foot in a theater under any circumstances would probably be considered a minor act of treason, all riled up – Caesar, in this version, as played by Gregg Henry, is unapologetically Donald Trump, with a blonde bouffant, a heavily accented-wife, and a fondness for gold and ties that appear to be eight feet long.  Based on the hugely overcompensatory backlash from the Trump-allied or -adjacent media (including the hilarious National Review headline "New York's Overrated Cultural Institutions"), going to see this show feels something like an act of defiance, especially given that, with the American political divide in the state it's in, one conceivably risks more than the effort of obtaining a ticket by going to see it.

The process of transposing the sixteenth-century play about events from 44 BC to the present day, undertaken by Public Theater artistic director and director of this production Oskar Eustis, has resulted in some confusing inconsistencies – Marc Antony (Elizabeth Marvel) stirs up a popular rebellion against Brutus (Corey Stoll), who’s murdered Caesar, for example, and the resulting movement at first appears in the guise of street protestors, but later is represented by SWAT team thugs who mow down (different) protestors.  Eustis gets caught up in the same conundrum that conflicted Shakespeare himself – whether Caesar’s allies, avenging an obscene act of political violence, or Brutus’s, self-described freedom fighters, are really the good guys.  The answer, of course, is that neither group fits that description, which may be why this production so resembles last summer’s Troilus and Cressida, which was also morally uncertain, set in our time, and featured Stoll as a steely military strategist, but was, partially thanks to Stoll’s excellent Ulysses, infinitely more complicated and interesting than this Caesar.  Here, Stoll, usually gratifyingly ambiguous, is utterly conventional; though practiced and professional, he brings no new approach to the role – and the same can be said of most of the enormous ensemble, including Marvel’s female, rootin’-tootin’ version of Antony, who is never as much fun as she promises to be.

The one actor who lives up to expectations, perhaps unsurprisingly, is Henry as the Trumped-up Caesar.  His blustery, larger-than-life performance is far from an impression – for one, by necessity, his tyrant is infinitely more articulate than the real thing – but, mainly thanks to Leah J. Loukas’s wig designs (he’s a handsome guy), he looks the part, and ably highlights the parallels between the two men.  One particular scene, in which Caesar lounges in a bathtub and sweet-talks his wife, Calpurnia (Tina Benko, marvelous if underused), is the funniest thing I’ve seen at the Delacorte in a long time, especially given the incredible kicker that the tall, broad Henry, rising from the tub to greet Brutus and his cohort, reveals himself to be stark-naked, resulting in what is certainly the only sexually-tinged response to Trump imagery an audience of die-hard liberals is likely to be heard to give anytime soon.

             Henry’s presence on the stage is so enjoyable that upon his character’s death, at the end of Act Three (which, contrary to what knee-jerk think-pieces you might have read, is actually pretty mild compared to the aforementioned protestor massacre), the air goes out of the play like helium from a punctured balloon.  That, unfortunately, means that there are still two and a half acts left to go, and what started out as a pitch-black satire gradually mutates into a dour march through the requisite history-play battles, reconciliations, and suicides.  Eustis, clearly, didn’t really want to stage Caesar, per se; he just wanted to make a point about our political situation, and it’s well-taken, if only to the degree that anyone who watches this production will realize that removing Trump from the stage through uninformed acts of brutality, compared to allowing him to collapse from the world stage in glorious slo-mo, would be much less fun.