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.