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.

The Lower Zoo

Norm Lewis in Sweeney Todd at the Barrow Street Theatre.

Norm Lewis as Sweeney and Carolee Carmello as Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

            Norm Lewis’s Sweeney Todd doesn’t need the wild wig Len Cariou wore, when playing the same role in 1979, or Michael Cerveris’s flour-white makeup, from 2005.  He is unforgivingly physical, enormous, a veritable brick wall in himself.  He towers, which is a difficult proposition at the cramped Barrow Street Theatre, where he recently replaced Jeremy Secomb in the long-running production of Sweeney Todd there, and which has been retrofitted as a working pie shop.  Theatergoers chow down on meat pies in the half-hour before show-time, after which Lewis and the ensemble make up the difference by making a meal of the material.

            The most fascinating thing about Lewis’s portrayal is his eyes, which are easily observed since the actors spend most of the show prowling a room that can’t be more than two hundred feet square.  He gives, throughout, a traditional performance, with the requisite steeliness and single-minded resolve, but his eyes angle upward, dreamily – he’s impatient, as we are, for the carnage to begin.

            The director, Bill Buckhurst, hasn’t brought anything to the granular details of his staging that’s all too revolutionary – the shock to the system of this production is the closeness of it all.  The material in Sweeney Todd is so powerful that sitting in the middle of it is like being hit by a tidal wave.  Lewis, in “Epiphany,” the strongest moment in Sweeney’s character arc, clambers onto tables, roars in the faces of some audience members, and menaces others with a razor to the neck.  You can’t let go, even for a minute.  Once you’re in it, you’re in it for the long haul.

            There are downsides to this.  The seating arrangement – long, dining-hall style tables perpendicular to the main staging area – leaves many “diners” in the middle facing away from much of the action, and the actors, who aren’t artificially magnified and don’t make much attempt to compensate for it, can occasionally be hard to hear.  Perhaps it’s unavoidable now, though, that any production of this musical, Stephen Sondheim’s finest and the most dramatically perfect ever written, expects a certain measure of audience familiarity at the door.  If any lyrics are muffled, the average audience member can probably fill in the blanks.

            Same with the story.  In the continuing decades-long backlash to Harold Prince’s overwhelming staging of the original 1979 production, Buckhurst’s is minimalist, with no stage blood or gore (just red light), and one pie counter and a staircase substituting for two floors of the same building, which would be confusing if not for the fact that, like a Shakespeare play, the conventions of the story are so rooted in the tradition and the American consciousness that it gives interpreters room to play.

            It doesn’t really register that Buckhurst doesn’t play, much.  Carolee Carmello, as Mrs. Lovett, goes the safe, Angela Lansbury-tinted route, but with more of an agreeably shaded maternal instinct.  John-Michael Lyles is delightfully over-the-top as a Tobias who might have just emerged from Wonka’s Factory.  (Both are new to the cast as well.)  Otherwise, the rest of the ensemble is basically by-the-numbers.  Sondheim said of Hal Prince’s Industrial Revolution-inspired set for the original production, all done in steam-engine machinery, that Prince’s view was that this was a world that “turns out Sweeney Todds.”  This has proven to be true in more ways than one.  Todd is so flawless that it effectively functions as its own machinery, producing revival after revival, iteration after iteration, and lead performance after lead performance, every one of which is worth seeing, even without any particular innovation.  The pie shop is open for business on Barrow Street.  But, effectively, it’s already been in business, without pause, for almost forty years.

Gold Rush

Lyricst and Lyricists: From Camelot to California: The Worlds of Lerner and Loewe at the 92^nd Street Y.

Frederick Loewe (left) and Alan Jay Lerner.

            There are some evenings at the theater so carefully planned, so perfectly executed, and so designed to be ephemeral that they stick and don’t stick at the same time – the moments that don’t stay with you are replaced by a feeling of knowing the performers, of having lived in the music, and of walking on air.  Monday’s closing night of Lyrics and Lyricists’ Lerner and Loewe program, From Camelot to California, was one of those nights.

            Reviewing the events of such a night runs the risk of merely cataloguing slightly varying instances of unadulterated praise.  If I find it difficult to summarize the feel of the evening broadly, I suppose I can thank Rob Berman, the artistic director of Encores! and guest artistic director, writer, and host for the concert, whose dedication and talent more than earn him the title of the thinking man’s impresario.  His adoration for the music of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe is contagious, as it could hardly avoid being – there are thirty-three songs in the program and each one is perfect.  He also plays four-handed piano, with the conductor and pianist Mark C. Mitchell, like a dream.  For that, I suppose, I owe thanks to orchestrators Joshua Clayton and Larry Moore, who pull the astonishing trick of doing Lerner and Loewe right with only a five-piece band.

            There are five members of the cast, too: Chuck Cooper, Lilli Cooper, Bryce Pinkham, Ryan Silverman, and Lauren Worsham.  Each one could sing the telephone book and pack Radio City.  If I single out Bryce Pinkham, who was designed in a lab to do musical comedy, it’s only because I’ve seen every one of his stage performances over the last five years, and because he effectively sings “On the Street Where You Live” two times in a row and even that’s not enough.  Trying to put into words the collective and individual talent of this group of actors would be a waste of time.  They’re as good as any reasonable person could expect, and more.

            While I admit a personal bias – Lerner and Loewe are the team who made me fall in love with musical theater – there is no denying that this music is consistently profoundly good in a way few other American songbook writers could match.  Choosing highlights would be like picking a favorite child – but Lilli Cooper’s show-stopping “Show Me,” Lauren Worsham and Cooper’s heart-rending and elegant “I Loved You Once in Silence,” Pinkham’s “On the Street Where You Live,” Chuck Cooper’s “Camelot (Reprise),” and Ryan Silverman’s nearly flawless mash-up of “Gigi” and “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” (which are essentially variations on a theme) come to mind.  Perhaps the only imperfect detail in any of the performances is that, after Berman’s rhapsodizing about the perfectly placed rests in “Almost Like Being in Love,” the corresponding rests in “The Parisians” were mysteriously missing.  And Silverman muffed a lyric in “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face.”  Can you sense I’m nitpicking?

            The Worlds of Lerner and Loewe is over.  You can never see it.  It wasn’t recorded.  As Berman put it late in the show, the impermanence of our worlds, as Lerner and Loewe well knew, is what makes them beautiful.  (Berman’s inter-song narration, incidentally, is the best-written I’ve ever seen at a Lyrics and Lyricists event.)  So, absent the opportunity to recommend the show, I’m left with nothing but to say, simply, thank you, and to hope for more crystalline-perfect evenings, perhaps involving one or more of the participants in this concert, in the near future.

Watched Pot

1984 at the Hudson Theatre.

 

L-R: Tom Sturridge, Reed Birney, and Olivia Wilde in 1984.

            It is a curious fact that to reveal what makes the new play 1984, based on the eponymous novel, so good probably qualifies as a spoiler.  Given that the production is banking on the renewed popularity of its immortal source text in the wake of an administration that practices many of the tactics discussed in the book, but with less dexterity, one might assume that the audience knows exactly what’s going to happen in this British transfer as soon as they walk into the theater.  Suffice it to say that most of the things that seem bad about the play (by Robert Icke and Duncan MacMillan, also the directors) turn out to be precisely what is good about it.  The beginning of the show, which opens June 22^nd at the Hudson Theatre, is constrained, confused, and simplistic, and then, suddenly, it isn’t – and the reveal is one of the most satisfying, and revolutionary, feats of stagecraft we are likely to see on a Broadway stage any time soon.

            It would be more edifying, then, perhaps, to discuss what isn’t in the play – mostly exposition, as the piece requires, perhaps inevitably, a thorough recollection of the novel.  1984 the play isn’t so much 1984 the novel as a dream of that novel, ethereal and hard to grasp, a shell-shocked haze of a memory of an atrocity.  Big Brother’s face, the defining icon of the book and the Michael Radford film (released in the real 1984), appears not once in the play.  The supposed terrorist Emmanuel Goldstein makes only a momentary appearance on the broad corkboard screen that serves as a platform for the show’s plentiful projections (by Tim Reid, with scenic design by Chloe Lamford).  The novel had a broad supporting cast of alternately trembling and loyal members of the ruling Party.  Most of them make the jump to the play, but they are mostly drowned out by a central trio we can’t take our eyes off.

            Tom Sturridge, the fabled replacement for Shia Lebeouf in 2013’s Orphans, plays the lead, disillusioned Party stooge Winston Smith, as something close to a drooling meth-head, which is a completely legitimate dramatic choice that starts off deeply annoying and ends up connecting on a terrific scale.  Olivia Wilde, as his secret paramour Julia, is more human if also marginally less interesting than Suzanna Hamilton in the film, but she always makes more of a visual impression than anything else, and her slinky, pale Wednesday Addams of a character seems to have snuck into this production from another show, mostly to the good.  Most important is Reed Birney, late of The Humans and Man From Nebraska, whose O’Brien, a master manipulator and unsettlingly sympathetic philosopher, is so quiet, so unassuming, that in his long, bravura scene in the second half of the play, he walks away with a show so technically brilliant that carrying it must do a number on his back.

            The play achieves, mainly by dint of that aforementioned sequence, what the Radford film really never did – it’s terrifying.  Radford warned, before the nationwide art-house screening of 1984 in April, that the film would be hard to watch, but with its glorious Roger Deakins cinematography, gray-and-green fantasias, and a surprisingly calming Richard Burton, it’s actually cinematically pleasant, if not quite reassuring.  Not so the play.  Its sequences of torture (which occupy much of the final half-hour) are so brutal I was momentarily convinced I would have to leave the theater; I am, funnily enough, in a state of doublethink about recommending the play – it is remarkably good in nearly every way but hardly the thing you’d wish on your grandmother.

            The close of the play (it has one 101-minute act), the payoff of an incalculably stupid dramatic framing device that I had foolishly hoped had been abandoned earlier in the runtime, is disappointing if only because, after that Birney-dominated torture sequence, it fails to land exactly as hard as it should.  In their entirely earned confidence in their sense of the theatrical, Icke and MacMillan lean a bit too far into the meta-theatrical (Winston shouts to the audience, while being tortured, “Help me! Why doesn’t anybody do anything?”).  Luckily even that final sequence is as visually well-designed as anything on the stage this last season – only after seeing this show will you understand how one can tremble at the sight of a pink umbrella. 

The show ends with O’Brien’s hand on Winston’s shoulder, as Winston, battered, broken, and beyond reason, mutters his gratitude for being laid low at Big Brother’s feet.  If you see 1984, your reaction will not be gratitude, exactly, nor disgust, exactly, nor, certainly, will you have wasted an evening.  But if you know quite what to feel after being injected with this production in its white-hot, furious purity, you’ve got one on me.