At the Theater

My excited interest in the production of The Bacchae during the Lincoln Center Festival was less about Euripides, good though he is. It was my admiration for the dynamic creative team who’ve taken a few liberties with the play (which premiered successfully in 405 B.C.).

The National Theatre of Scotland’s John Tiffany, The Bacchae’s director, and the leading Scottish playwright David Greig, who adapted it from a literal translation by Ian Ruffell, are the immense talents responsible for the modern masterpiece about Scottish soldiers in the Iraq war, Black Watch. I sang the praises of that production unreservedly last season, singling out its fantastic imaginative daring and simplicity.  read more »

Notes for and against Macbeth 2008, directed by Grzegorz Jarzyna, hailed by some as a theater visionary:

I think the avant-garde Polish director should have given his contemporary take on Shakespeare’s tragedy a different title.

Throne of Blood, Akira Kurosawa’s 1957 masterpiece, is famously based on Macbeth, but its title takes us directly into another world. Set in medieval Japan, the movie uses very little of Shakespeare’s language. Mr. Jarzyna’s Macbeth 2008, which has been compared to watching a movie onstage, is set in a blood-soaked U.S. war zone, and the director rarely uses Shakespeare’s language either. But his title links this production too closely to the original play, and sets up unfounded expectations.  read more »

Let me begin at the end.

Place: Central Park. Time: almost 11:45 p.m. Play: Hamlet. Spirits: low.

Fortinbras and his army have entered Denmark at last, signaling the end. Hamlet has just died—poisoned in the duel scene—and is probably glad to be out of it. The king, the queen, Laertes, Ophelia, Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—all now dead. Only decent Horatio survives—someone, according to W. H. Auden, who’s “not too bright, though he has read a lot and can repeat it.”

Oskar Eustis’ disappointingly literal production had been an uphill slog, and I mistakenly assumed the director would end in the conventional way: At Fortinbras’ command, four captains bear the body of Hamlet away like a soldier.  read more »

“Good evening, ladies and gentleman,” the interviewer begins genially, indicating a figure now entering dramatically from the wings. “The great American sculptor … Louise Nevelson.”

The audience applauds as if on cue. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” Nevelson says. She’s alive?! You can’t tell the difference. You’re not meant to. Nevelson is being expertly impersonated by Mercedes Ruehl, who’s wearing a sort of kimono, sculptural necklace and trademark sable eyelashes (a set on each eye, lower and upper).

Where are we?

We’re in the Signature Theatre on 42nd Street. But we could be in a TV studio; the ingratiating interviewer could be James Lipton; the audience could be some kind of adoring, curious fan club; and, yes, Louise Nevelson could be alive and very well.  read more »

And so to the moment the nation and Patti LuPone have been waiting for—the Tony Awards on CBS, Sunday, June 15, at 8 p.m. What a great night it’ll be for Ms. LuPone and the diva’s devoted followers known as LuPonistas. It better be! But first things first:

Who do you think is going to take home the Tony for Best Sound Design of a Musical? Sound is pretty essential to a show, of course. (“Sing out, Louise!”) You could almost say that without it, the show wouldn’t be the same. But who on earth knows a thing about sound—except, of course, for sound designers and their nearest and dearest?

Nevertheless, I’m boldly predicting the proud winner for the coveted Best Sound Design Tony will be Scott Lehrer for his fine, unobtrusive work on Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific.

When in doubt during your Tony sweepstakes, vote for the heavily favored South Pacific in all categories.

That’s why the one and only Ms. LuPone’s lonely, heroic battle in Gypsy to wrest the Tony for best actress in a musical from sweet, adorable and bland Kelli O’Hara in South Pacific will be the pivotal drama of the evening. I have just the slightest bias in favor of Ms. LuPone. After all, Mama Rose is the ultimate challenge among all musical roles; not for nothing has the lady been called Mrs. Lear.

Ms. LuPone was born to play Rose. There ought to be no contest between her and Ms. O’Hara’s nice, clean, cockeyed optimist Nellie Forbush. Not everyone agrees, however. The Times is strongly backing Ms. O’Hara (“The Ingénue Who Roared”). The outcome is said to hang in the balance. Here’s my prediction:

Will win: Patti LuPone.

Should win: Patti LuPone.

Best actor in a musical? I’m afraid that I found the Emile of South Pacific’s Paulo Szot (“Some Enchanted Evening”) unswooningly wooden. Be that as it may—

Will win: Paulo Szot.

Should win: the dynamic Lin-Manuel Miranda of In The Heights.

And so to the best musical revival—

Will win: South Pacific.

Should win: No contest.

Best director of a musical—

Will win: Bartlett Sher for his loving, somewhat overcareful production of South Pacific.

Should win: Ask Arthur Laurents.

Mr. Laurents—the veteran 90-year-old director and book-writer of Gypsy—has complained with others that nonprofit theater productions like Lincoln Center’s lavish South Pacific are at an unfair advantage and should in any case be barred from competing in the commercial arena at the Tonys. Mr. Laurents might have a point. But he’s never made it before. …

WHEN IT COMES to plays on Broadway, it’s usually British and, of late, Irish. Three of the four nominees for Best Play are British and Irish. Four of the five nominees for best actor are British. Three of the four nominees for best director are British and Irish. All four plays in the Best Revival category were written by Brits.

Never mind.

Tracy Letts’ all-American gothic soap opera August: Osage County, hailed as a modern masterpiece on a par with O’Neill, is the clear favorite for Best Play over Tom Stoppard’s political parable Rock ’n’ Roll and Conor McPherson’s ghost story about the usual Irish drunks and ghoulies, The Seafarer.

Will win: August: Osage County, or my name is Barack Obama. Next Page >

There’s a drama critic in every man (and woman, of course). Audiences can be pretty severe critics, and, in private, theater folk can be, too. An actor-writer by the name of Mike Daisey is a rarity, however: He goes onstage to criticize theater publicly.

And it pays off, apparently. Mr. Daisey’s How Theater Failed America has now moved from Joe’s Pub to the Barrow Street Theatre downtown, and judging by the enthusiastic response he received on a recent Saturday night, a lot of people are enjoying hearing him tell us how badly theater is doing.  read more » Next Page >

It’s understandable if you think British theater holds up a burnished mirror to the bourgeois in the audience. Theater revolutions come and go, but no one absorbs them better than the spongy, resilient middle classes of England. For centuries, British theater has been dominated by the image of a white middle-class country. When have we seen a black or Asian character in the plays of Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Alan Ayckbourn and David Hare? (Or, come to that, in the work of the fashionable Irish playwrights?)

Three new dramas in town from a new generation of British playwrights are transforming the traditional stage picture and holding up a mirror to a very different England.

Ayub Khan-Din’s admired Rafta, Rafta, currently at the Acorn on Theater Row, was first produced in London at the National; the playwright has literally built his seriocomic portrait of Indian life on the ashes of old England.

Rafta, Rafta (which means “softly, softly” in Hindi) is based on an almost forgotten 1963 British comedy All In Good Time, by Bill Naughton. (It became the completely forgotten 1966 film The Family Way, starring the adult Hayley Mills in a brief nude scene.) The late Bill Naughton is best known for Alfie, but the film about the Cockney Casanova played by Michael Caine is atypical of Naughton’s working-class North Country comedies.

The original All in Good Time, like the Khan-Din adaptation, is set in the Lancashire industrial town of Bolton, where Naughton was raised. Nearby is Salford, Manchester, where Mr. Khan-Din was born. (And for the proud record, Manchester is my hometown.) Mr. Khan-Din is best known for his mixed-race comedy East Is East, and his daring transformation of Naughton’s lovable old comedy into a 21st-century Lancashire-Indian generation war is a delightful masterstroke.

It isn’t a first, however. In 2003, Tanika Gupta adapted Harold Brighthouse’s beloved Manchester comedy Hobson’s Choice (1915), and turned its tale of a dictatorial Salford shoemaker into a contemporary comedy about an Asian family in the rag trade. Brighthouse’s sentimental classic and Naughton’s social comedy belong to the same North Country school of popular theater, and at their heart, both are about traditional English values, assimilation and class.

OUTWARDLY, RAFTA RAFTA could be a knockabout, end-of-the-pier farce. Nervous newlyweds return to the groom’s cramped family home, where they keep failing to consummate their marriage. “Tap on the wall anytime,” says Dad, who sleeps with Mum in the bedroom next door to them. “I’m a light sleeper.”

In that (very) broad sense, the piece is as much a period bedroom farce as the current revival of Boeing-Boeing. And Mr. Khan-Din (or Bill Naughton) has provided us with a perfect illustration of the mysterious essence of British farce in one line: “How do you mean it hasn’t happened?”

Though there are six people in the newlyweds’ bed—the married couple, plus two sets of parents—the comedy is happily free of pop psychology. Better still, Mr. Khan-Din has created a vividly affectionate portrait of an Anglo-Asian family divided by its culture and values. How many other British plays have offered us anything similar to Rafta, Rafta’s father, Eeshwar, reminiscing about his wedding in India and the day he received the gift of a water buffalo? (His uninterested British-born son, Atul, got a BlackBerry.)

In the 1960s West End production of All in Good Time, the colossus Donald Wolfit played the uncomprehending father, a sentimental tyrant. Here, it’s the slight and most fine Ranjit Chowdhry, who leads a relaxed, first-rate cast. The outcome is an unusual and amiable new play (with a happy ending), and a director, Scott Elliott of the New Group, who excels. So does Mr. Elliott’s set designer, Derek McLane, who conjures up exactly the claustrophobic terraced house in England known as a “back-to-back” or “two up, two down.” They’re okay if you can’t afford a castle—not so great if you’re honeymooning with your parents.

DAMASCUS—PART OF the annual Brits Off Broadway Festival at 59E59 Theaters—is an ambitious comedy written by a leading Scottish playwright, David Greig, about the Middle East (of all unfunny subjects); it’s set in the foyer of a small, anonymous hotel in the Syrian capital. There, a resident pianist, Elena, functions as an extremely depressed Greek chorus. You’d be feeling low, too, if you were a Ukrainian Christian Marxist transsexual playing “Lara’s Theme” to no one in particular.

There’s a lot to relish in Mr. Greig’s unusual play—not least his wry sense of clashing global cultures; his scary awareness of the encompassing threat of unknown languages and random violence; and the marvelous central performance of his star, Ewen Bremner. Mr. Bremner (of Trainspotting) is perfect as the bumbling Paul, a Scotsman who arrives jet-lagged and stupidly innocent in Damascus to peddle an English-language educational textbook to the Syrian government.

Alas, any man hoping to sell the Syrians a textbook that includes a little moral fable about a Rabbi Samuels is so stupid he must be deranged. Furthermore, Paul’s idea of guilty romance with Muna, the uncompromising Arab intellectual (and Palestinian mouthpiece), is unbelievable; even more so her coy attraction to him. (But hotel lobbies are lonely places: Ask Elena, the miserable pianist.) Next Page >

If you ask me—and please do—who I’d like to see take home the Tony for best actor this season, it would be a genius named Mark Rylance.

Mark who?

There you are! Mr. Rylance’s wonderful performance in the retro farce Boeing-Boeing has been acclaimed by one and all, but his name still isn’t quite recognized in New York. Not like Patrick Stewart, who’s starring in Macbeth. Besides, Shakespeare is serious, and so is Macbeth, and Mr. Stewart is therefore the favorite to win the Tony.

Farce is only serious on the sly. It takes an actor as great as Mr. Rylance to bring the low culture of Boeing-Boeing to such unexpected and delirious heights. Like the veteran Mr. Stewart, he’s a leading Shakespearean, and both actors, needless to say, are British. (Two of the other Tony nominees for best actor are also British—Rufus Sewell and Ben Daniels—which makes Laurence Fishburne the only American nominee out of the five).

Mr. Rylance ran the Globe Theatre on London’s South Bank for a very successful, sometimes controversial, decade. Now 48, his memorable roles range from a Hamlet for the ages to a beguiling Cleopatra. Some think he’s slumming because he even deigns to appear in Boeing-Boeing—but I don’t. Apart from giving the finest comic performance I’ve ever seen, he’s continuing that noble, irresistible British tradition known as Bedroom Farce.

Without Boeing-Boeing—or No Sex Please, We’re British; Run for Your Wife; or, best title of all, When Did You Last See Your Trousers?—England, I assure you, would not be England.

TRUE, BOEING-BOEING WAS written by a Frenchman. But only originally. Which must be why it’s set in Paris. Nothing wrong with that. Some of the best Feydeau farces are set in Paris. Also, Molière.

Boeing-Boeing, by the Italian-sounding Frenchman Marc Camoletti, proved so popular in its 1962 British version that it ran for a record seven years in the West End and made the Guinness Book of World Records. The reason it transferred so successfully to London is because it isn’t a clever farce in the French tradition. The British distrust cleverness, particularly in the bedroom: One does not shag wittily.

Americans, on the other hand, tend to treat farce as an acquired taste. When Boeing-Boeing first came to Broadway in 1965, it lasted for 23 miserable performances. But then, it didn’t have Mark Rylance. (Nor did the deadly film version—also from 1965—starring Tony Curtis and Jerry Lewis.)

Puritan America has never quite appreciated the vast appetite of the bourgeois British theatergoer for sex and silliness. Farce enables the traditionally reserved Brits to jettison their inhibitions and sexual guilt—and have a good belly laugh at themselves. The antic genre revolves round spiraling panic and embarrassment about being caught with your pants down.

Home-grown farce has never been a staple of New York theater. Charles Ludlam’s utterly brilliant and subversive Ridiculous Theatrical Company used to be an outstanding exception downtown. As Ronald Tavel put it so memorably in Gorilla Queen, “Farce is seldom in good taste, but genitals always are.”

One of my favorite films is another notable exception to the puritan rule: Preston Sturges’ The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944) is a perfect romantic farce. Small-town girl Trudy Kockenlocker—what a name!—merrily attends a send-off party for the troops, and wakes up married and pregnant—with no memory of what happened. Sturges’ taboo-breaking masterpiece remains hilariously unique, pratfalls and all.

But look at the national tradition of farce inherited by Mark Rylance and Boeing-Boeing’s excellent British director, Matthew Warchus.

For a generation, the Whitehall Theatre off Trafalgar Square was home to the company run by the legendary farceur Brian Rix, who created the nationally celebrated Whitehall Farce (the term is used to this day by political correspondents reporting on government cock-ups). In the ’20s and ’30s, the Aldwych Theatre in the Strand was home to Ben Travers and the arguably more sophisticated genre known as Aldwych Farce. Travers wrote one of the defining lines in A Cuckoo in the Nest (1925), and it goes to the heart of the matter: “How can you spend a night in a lady’s room in a way?” Next Page >

When we think of the British playwrights we’re most familiar with, one is a political conservative for the thinking classes (Sir Tom Stoppard), another a safe middlebrow socialist for the carriage trade (Sir David Hare), and another a working-class sentimentalist for Off Broadway (the un-knighted Mike Leigh).

Where does that leave Caryl Churchill—the unrepentant Marxist-feminist poet who’s for nothing less than social, political and theatrical revolution? In my view, she’s England’s greatest living playwright.

Ms. Churchill is, firstly, the shaman of theater who transforms our sense of reality. She’s the radical contemporary dramatist who’s experimented the most, on either side of the Atlantic, with theatrical form—and made it new and irresistible. In that sense, it doesn’t matter whether you share her politics, or—heaven forbid!—“approve” of them.

In play after intelligent play—the staggering, time-bending Top Girls (1982), currently at the Biltmore; its model in role-playing, Cloud Nine (1979); or the famous Restoration Comedy about Wall Street greed that proved wildly popular with Wall Street traders, Serious Money (1987)—Ms. Churchill has proved herself a dazzlingly inventive playwright with an original mind.

Her recent, unrelenting 50-minute reflexive rant against the U.S. and Tony Blair at the Public, Drunk Enough to Say I Love You was an uncharacteristic lapse—a cartoon, a wanky indulgence. It certainly lacked the finesse of other recent work such as the apocalyptic and lyrical Far Away, the hypnotic magic realism of The Skriker, and the delightful nuttiness of Blue Heart—the one-acter in which children suddenly run out of kitchen cabinets like mice and a giant ostrich lopes into the action.

LOOK AT THE imaginative daring of the legendary first act of the all-female Top Girls: A dinner party in an Italian restaurant is being hosted by pushy Marlene, the new female boss of the Top Girls Employment Agency, and celebrating with her are five other “top girls”—Pope Joan, the mythic female ninth-century Pontiff, who was stoned to death; Isabella Bird, the Victorian traveler and writer; Lady Nijo, the 13th-century concubine to the emperor of Japan and Buddhist nun; Patient Griselda, the peasant girl who married a prince and sacrificed her children (Griselda was celebrated by Petrarch, Boccaccio and Chaucer); and Dull Gret who was painted by Brueghel and led a revolutionary assault on hell.

It’s a fantastic gathering and Shavian conversation piece across the centuries about the fate of ultimately powerless women. And how weirdly, utterly natural those mythic figures seem, mingling in the present! “We’ve come a long way,” 20th-century Marlene announces in her toast to one and all. “To our courage and the way we’ve changed our lives and our extraordinary achievements.”

It’s Ms. Churchill’s point, of course, that women haven’t come a long way at all, and that nothing has changed in spite of their achievements. Beneath the dinner party’s exotic, overlapping banter, there’s misery and sexual abuse, feminine acquiescence and nightmares that the playwright proceeds to link to the 1980s.

Ms. Churchill takes us from the surreal timelessness of the opening, to a London comedy about the rise of Marlene amid the Thatcherite callousness of her agency, to the bruising social realism of her sister’s wretched existence in Suffolk living with a dim, frightened young daughter, Angie.

Ms. Churchill writes consistently good roles for children. Angie is given the last word in the play—“Frightening”—and the play itself is saturated in fear. Angie sure frightened me. Brilliantly played by Martha Plimpton (who doubles very amusingly as Pope Joan), I kept thinking the poor girl is a distant relative of Dull Gret and that what frightened her so much was a nightmare of her nonexistent future, and that she was on the verge of beating her mother’s brains out.

Ms. Churchill does this to you. Menace is one of her insinuating notes. In the Top Girls Employment Agency, the ball-breaking women are like callous men in disguise. This middle section of the play doesn’t live up to the magic of the first. (What could?) The office scenes are sketchy, and the sexual politics of the workplace have grown familiar in the 25 years since the play premiered.

But one scene riveted me. Mary Beth Hurt, in a measured, beautiful cameo as Louise, is the living embodiment of defeated middle-aged anonymity in a man’s world. She appears to be an uninteresting woman stuck in middle management; she wants a new job in pathetic revenge for not being noticed after a lifetime’s dedication. “I don’t care greatly for working with women. I think I pass as a man at work. …” Louise is the drab descendant of the fake Pope Joan. Yet beyond Ms. Churchill’s sexual politics, I saw this short, terribly human scene as a portrait of a secular saint.

The playwright’s socialist credo verges on the reductive in the last scene’s slow-burning confrontation between Marlene and her estranged working-class sister, Joyce. Visiting home in rural Suffolk for the first time in years, the capitalist Marlene is revealed as a woman who’s lost her soul, while her socialist sister has held onto hers.

Joyce is the exhausted, furious idealist who works as a maid slogging in three jobs to put food on the table. Her guy fell for another woman. She raised the cursed, slow-witted Angie. She’s someone who deserves much, much better in life.

They all do.

“I don’t mean anything personal,” Marlene offers her sister apologetically after a vitriolic row between them about that other top girl, Maggie Thatcher. “I don’t believe in class. Anyone can do anything if they’ve got what it takes.”

“And if they haven’t?” Joyce asks.

“If they’re stupid or lazy or frightened,” she replies indignantly, “I’m not going to help get them a job. Why should I?”

Marlene’s big self-deception is that she says she doesn’t believe in class. England has never stopped believing in class. It remains the country’s dirty little secret. But for me that final scene is less a political treatise than an exceptionally moving family drama. Ms. Churchill is saying that people are suffering. They can’t just be treated like rubbish. She’s suggesting that there are catastrophic consequences to neglect, as Dull Gret does at the close of the remarkable first scene in her gutter description of her brutal battle with hell.

“We’d all had family killed,” says Gret. “My big son die on a wheel. Birds eat him. My baby, a soldier run her through with a sword. I’d had enough, I was mad, I hate the bastards. I come out of my front door that morning and shout till my neighbors come out and I said, ‘Come on, we’re going where the evil come from and pay the bastards out’ … and the ground opens up and we go through a big mouth into a street just like ours but in hell.”

In Top Girls, the winners and losers are all women. Kudos to the entire cast, the best ensemble on Broadway—Ms. Plimpton; Ms. Hurt; the excellent Marisa Tomei as Isabella Bird and Joyce; Elizabeth Marvel as Marlene; and Ann Reeder, Jennifer Ikeda and Mary Catherine Garrison, all terrific actresses.

The scenic designs of exemplary emblematic simplicity are by Tom Pye; Laura Bauer created the perfect costumes; and James Macdonald has directed the finest production of the year. Next Page >

I disagree with the critics who feel that Laura Linney has been miscast as the infamous sexual predator the Marquise de Merteuil in Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Ms. Linney’s controversial performance in the erratic Roundabout revival is living very dangerously indeed. Its unyielding ice coldness is overstylized, riveting in both its originality and waywardness, and ultimately a self-negating mistake, like an experiment in the wrong venue. But which other actress on Broadway, I wonder, is as daring as Ms. Linney?

It’s glib to think that this fine actress who’s known for her unshowy emotional honesty is unsuitable for the role of Merteuil, the “virtuoso in deceit.” Ms. Linney’s scrubbed sanctimony in The Crucible is untypical of the more intriguing range of her work in the theater (Sight Unseen) and on film (Mystic River, You Can Count on Me). There’s no reason I can imagine why she can’t be emotionally honest playing a cow.

Cow is the polite c-word for the Marquise de Merteuil. The problem is that practically all emotion has been drained out of Ms. Linney’s performance.

She hasn’t been miscast, she’s been misdirected.

Rufus Norris’ revival of Les Liaisons Dangereuses lurches from the ostentatiously starchy to the stylishly good to the heavy-handed and coarse. The British director’s overintellectualized idea of Merteuil has neutralized Ms. Linney’s emotional power to such an extent that she scarcely connects with the other actors onstage. There are long stretches when she doesn’t even look at anyone.

We’re meant to perceive her Merteuil as though she were a figure frozen in a painting.

ALL VERY WELL (and arty). Scott Pask’s elegant, unsurprising set with drapes and mirrors encourages such painterly narcissism. (The less refined emblem of the original 1986 staging was an unruly defiled bed.) But portraiture isn’t theater. It’s a director’s concept, and it’s out of sync with the rest of the production.

Given the courtly artifice and manners of the ancien régime in 18th-century France, doubtless Ms. Linney’s flawlessly mechanized stylization is historically correct. So, too, her studied, glacially slow walk or the unwaveringly precise manner in which she holds the fingers of her hands over her silk panier. But this is a Merteuil who has no fun with the games she plays.

In proto-feminist self-justification, she tells the Vicomte de Valmont—her sometime lover and unscrupulous partner in sexual conquest—“I was born to dominate your sex and avenge my own.” Merteuil is a woman who can say that her favorite word isn’t betrayal, but cruelty. She’s undeniably heartless.

And mercilessly so in Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ 1782 epistolary novel. But Christopher Hampton’s renowned stage adaptation makes Merteuil more emotionally ambiguous, while his screen version for the Stephen Frears movie starring John Malkovich and Glenn Close had her crack up when Valmont betrays their libertine pact and falls in love with his biggest conquest—the pious, married Madame de Tourvel. The opportunity is there for Ms. Linney’s bloodless Merteuil to be human!

Ben Daniels’ Valmont, on the other hand, is having far too much fun. The British actor does a lot of Fragonard-ing about the joint, too. That perfect aristocratic posture—the stockinged, shapely leg slightly bent in front of the other, the insolently arched back to the manner born (and so on). Mr. Daniels’ cheerfully depraved Valmont—a man “who never opens his mouth without calculating the harm he can do”—is looser and warmer than his co-conspirator. His shade-too-likable performance lacks insinuating danger. Next Page >

And so it’s back to the ’50s (again). “All plays are dated,” Harold Clurman wrote in steadfast support of Clifford Odets in 1970. “They are products of their time.” Yes; but everything depends on how much the dated-ness shows.

In the current Broadway revival of Odets’econd to last play, The Country Girl, it shows too much. Odets himself described the play as superficial, and he is correct. Even Clurman, who first produced the revolutionary conscience plays of Odets in the 1930s when they worked together at the Group Theatre, conceded that The Country Girl is more about the actors in it than the play—or potboiler—itself.  read more » Next Page >

And so, back to the ’50s (again), with the consciously modest Broadway musical A Catered Affair.

Modesty doesn’t really suit Broadway; it implies “good taste,” discretion, refinement, art—Stephen Sondheim. The British director of A Catered Affair, John Doyle (of the recent minimalist Broadway revivals of Mr. Sondheim’s Company and Sweeney Todd), has treated what’s essentially a wheezing old potboiler as if it were a mini-opera. It’s a rare thing on Broadway in that sense: a tearjerker that induces no tears.  read more » Next Page >

It’s no secret that much of our theater is living nostalgically in the 1950s. Coming to a theater near you: The Dancing Eisenhower Years. And why not? This season alone has seen Broadway revivals of South Pacific, Gypsy, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and, of all soapy period plays with an alcoholic hero, William Inge’s saga Come Back, Little Sheba (1950). Whatever next!

Well, later this month there’s the Broadway revival of Clifford Odets’ backstage saga with an alcoholic hero, The Country Girl (1950), directed by Mike Nichols with an all-star cast. (When hasn’t Mr. Nichols used an all-star cast?) Cry-Baby, the new Broadway musical that’s set in 1950s Baltimore (again), is an adaptation of John Waters’ affectionate parody of the rock ’n’ roll era of Elvis (again). And there’s the musical version A Catered Affair, based on Paddy Chayefsky’s 1955 TV drama and better known as the collector’s item starring Bette Davis as a Bronx housewife married to Ernest Borgnine.

The retro musicals all share an inevitable dopey dollop of sentimentality. That’s what Broadway’s for! Stephen Sondheim is regularly called in to save the day. This season’s most prestigious revival is his Sunday in the Park With George (1984), imported from that tasteful, superior place, England. But for me, the production’s raved-over digital animation isn’t an example of art on Broadway, but of Disneyfication.

It’s safe to say that revivals are safe—a much safer bet, anyway, than the shock of the new. Who takes real risks any more? Who courts danger? There are a handful of idealists and independent producers who still believe in creating theater for its own glorious, uncompromised sake. They thrive on new work. They even believe in the innate intelligence of audiences. They must be mad.

WHICH BRINGS ME happily to the good news about Adding Machine at downtown’s Minetta Lane Theatre. It isn’t a revival; it’s a wonderfully original musical.

David Cromer’s exceptional production wasn’t created in New York. It arrived here via that theatrical powerhouse, Chicago, where the Next Theatre Company is among the most adventurous in town. The gifted members of Adding Machine’s intimate ensemble might be unknown to most New Yorkers. Their performances are of the highest order. The uncommon score by Joshua Schmidt (who also wrote the witty libretto with Jason Loewith) is a near-perfect musicalization of Elmer Rice’s legendarily mordant play. Together these fine artists have created a small masterpiece.

Nothing could be less sentimental than Rice’s 1923 parable of the dark side of the American Dream in this sweet land of liberty. Adding Machine—which became known as the first Expressionist play in America—tells the bizarre story of a nobody named Mr. Zero who’s fired from his soulless job as a bookkeeper after 25 years, replaced by a cost-effective adding machine. Now, an anonymous antihero who’s symbolically named Mr. Zero would usually have me looking around for Mr. Exit. But this is very different. Played by the riveting Joel Hatch, Zero is a trapped and furious everyman whose fatal flaw is that he craves the safe and the known.

This modest show, on the other hand, is the least safe imaginable. It’s not just that our hero isn’t nice. He appears to have no life or redeeming qualities whatsoever. He’s a bigoted working stiff who murders the boss who fired him. (“I killed the boss this afternoon,” he says matter-of-factly to his endlessly complaining wife). He’d also like to kill her—but that’s more forgivable.

She’s a nightmare. In the extraordinary first scene that takes place in a cold marital bed placed upright onstage, the director gambles everything on what can only be described as the unstoppable nagging aria of Mrs. Zero. Has there ever been an opening number like it? Performed by the terrific Cyrilla Baer, “Something to Be Proud of” is an astonishing, jarring song of yammering envy and complaint. (“Oh!/ I was a fool./ A fool for marrying you./ I didn’t pick much when I picked you!”)

Every scene that follows is exactly paced, honest and complete. Zero’s confessional mini-opera in explosive defense of himself during the trial scene is a spellbinding tour de force from Mr. Hatch. (“I’m like anyone else/ What would you do?/ What would you do?/ I killed him!”). Our misogynist hero—“Women make me sick!”—is also a casual racist. (So are his neighbors.) The crude epithets spat out at dinner party—“The wops!/ The chinks!/ The niggers!/ The queers!”—make the scene unapologetically authentic. (The racism currently on display in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific is discreetly ambiguous. That’s showbiz.) Next Page >

Call me a cockeyed pessimist. While everyone else in the audience at Lincoln Center’s loving revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1949 South Pacific seemed to be in heaven, I thought I was in a retirement home.

Now, now … before I’m drummed out of town, let me say that the score is an unequalled romantic gem. But you know that. The genius of Richard Rodgers resides, of course, in his enduring, wonderful melodies; Oscar Hammerstein’s in his unpretentious simplicity and humaneness (marred, for some, by a heavy dose of formulaic sentiment). For a certain generation to recall the titles of just a few of the songs from South Pacific—let alone the score of the superior Carousel, or the unsinkable The Sound of Music and The King and I—is to start singing them.

“Some Enchanted Evening,” “A Cockeyed Optimist,” “There Is Nothin’ Like a Dame,” “Younger than Springtime,” “This Nearly Was Mine” … Rodgers and Hammerstein’s lush, extraordinary score for South Pacific, and its story of love set on a Polynesian island during the Pacific war, belongs to the era of my parents and grandparents.

It’s one of the signature 50’s shows—along with Gypsy, Porgy & Bess and that perfect musical comedy, Guys and Dolls—that defines the golden age of U.S. musicals. South Pacific ran for 1,925 performances, winning a Pulitzer Prize and nine Tony awards—a massive hit that in turn broke with tradition with its potentially explosive theme of racism.

Are it’s celebrated themes of war and race still relevant today? (Let’s leave romance out of this). After all, West Side Story’s innovatory portrait of gang warfare and Puerto Rican life in New York tenements is arguably dated in the era of In the Heights, and Brecht’s 1920’s preachy, idealistic socialism in The Threepenny Opera is nowadays “unfashionable.”

When South Pacific opened on Broadway, the connection with its audience was palpable. It spoke directly to an America that had been to war and suffered immeasurably. As Laurence Maslon writes in the informative Lincoln Center Theater Review, “That such monumental events, freighted with death and destiny, should constitute the background for a Broadway musical seems almost absurd. But South Pacific made no apologies for and few concessions to its context in human history.”

In today’s context, those “few concessions” look like a few too many. This is a musical ostensibly concerned with the reality of war and racial prejudice that manages to send audiences home happy. When the show’s irresistibly perky heroine from Little Rock, Ark., nurse Nellie Forbush, confidently announces that she’s as “normal as blueberry pie,” it’s both a call to America to celebrate a return to normalcy after an exhausting war, and a self-satisfied declaration of ordinariness.

“I’m as trite and as gay/ As a daisy in May”—well, the girl’s fallen madly in love on an enchanted evening! She’s as “corny as Kansas in August/ high as a flag on the Fourth of July!” And she’s a smug “little hick” who’s “a cockeyed optimist.” Nellie Forbush—what a name!—describes herself happily as a feisty “dope” stuck with “a thing called hope,” and at the soft, comforting center of South Pacific is the complacent personification of a 1950’s America where to be nice and normal is to be acceptable. Who or what is “normal”? Nellie Forbush! She’s meant to make you feel good about yourself—as well as things like patriotism, world wars and racism.

The revival—the first on Broadway since its premiere—has received a sometimes earnest, measured and excellent new staging at the Vivian Beaumont, with Kelli O’Hara making a fresh and wonderful contribution as Nellie, and the rising opera star Paulo Szot as a convincing if slightly wooden Emile. Directed by Bartlett Sher, the cast of 40 and the 30-strong orchestra (Thirty! And not a synthesizer in sight) are themselves nostalgic reminders of another age. Next Page >

Whether you’re seeing Gypsy for the first (or fourth or fifth) time, you’ll want to catch Arthur Laurents’ revival starring Patti LuPone at the St. James Theatre. For one thing, Gypsy is among the very best musicals ever written, and we assume that by now the 90-year-old Mr. Laurents—who created the masterly book in 1959, and is directing the show for the third time—knows what he’s doing.

He’s like a museum keeper with the only set of keys. When Sam Mendes directed the revisionist Gypsy with Bernadette Peters on Broadway five years ago, traditionalists took offense (including, reportedly, Mr. Laurents). Don’t mess with Mama Rose! (Or else.) Gypsy, the musical for people who hate their mothers, arouses intense feelings.  read more » Next Page >

You might want to think twice about seeing Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? at the Public Theatre. The radical politics of the distinguished feminist playwright aren’t giving me pause; it’s the $50 tickets that trouble me.

I’m no mathematician, but by my reckoning, $50 for an evening lasting 45 minutes amounts to $3,852 a minute. If you ask me—and please do—that’s outrageous. It’s a lot. Facts don’t lie. Caryl Churchill, the principled anti-American British socialist, is charging us proportionately more to see her extremely short play than Mel Brooks, that well-known apostle of insatiable Yankee greed and global domination, is charging for his multimillion-dollar Broadway extravaganza Young Frankenstein.

Furthermore, there are only two actors in Ms. Churchill’s play, and they don’t even sing “Puttin’ on the Ritz.” Does that seem fair to you?

Would $50 for 45 minutes (without intermission) make any difference had Ms. Churchill written a masterpiece? I say it would. And it wouldn’t. For a voluntary donation of 10 bucks, I just saw the Gustave Courbet exhibition at the Met, and I can tell you that if it comes to a choice between Ms. Churchill’s playlet and Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde, I know where I stand.

Look at it this way: A theatergoer usually likes to see a show with someone else, a spouse, a loving, patient partner, a date. That’s two tickets at $100 for 45 minutes right there. Then there might easily be dinner after the show. After all, there’s time. Make-a-night-of-it sort of thing. Compensate. Why not discuss the show with your loved one over a modest meal and a drink or two in a friendly atmosphere? Not to complain: That’s another $100-plus, unless you stick to first courses and pick.

You are now unhappy. Also, you finished discussing the extremely short play before you were even done with your insalata mista.

The night at the theater has left you dissatisfied. Traipsing home, you feel short-changed. You might think that you’ve been lectured by Ms. Churchill about lots of things you already know. You might even agree with David Mamet’s recent pronouncement in The Village Voice, titled “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain Dead Liberal.’” And it’s all because of the price-gouging, righteous anticapitalist Caryl Churchill.

DRUNK ENOUGH TO Say I Love You? is the least mature work I know of in Ms. Churchill’s considerable repertoire (which includes her 1983 Top Girls, to be revived at the Public later this season). Drunk Enough scarcely makes a play. It’s a stylized sketch, a sledgehammer rant, a glib political cartoon that arrives from London’s Royal Court Theatre much too late in the day.

A psychosexual drama of sorts, it’s about the “special relationship” between two gay men. One is named Sam (played by Scott Cohen). Sam is really America. (In case you don’t get it, your Playbill coyly describes him as “a country.”) The other, nicer fellow is named Guy (Samuel West). Think craven Tony Blair, or a self-loathing England. Guy has left his wife and children to become Sam’s submissive lover and political poodle.

The issues are old hat. (After all, Mr. Blair is toast, Mr. Bush almost toast.) The arch, fragmented dialogue—no sentence is ever completed—consists almost entirely of relentless laundry lists of real and imagined U.S. crimes against humanity, as complicit, gullible Guy grows increasingly guilty on a levitating sofa the two lovers share.

The sofa levitates a little higher with each brief scene. It must be a symbol. The British director James Macdonald wants to convince us that we’re in solemn attendance at the Temple of Art. Actually, we’re at a theatrically chic equivalent of a sermon by the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., the only difference being that the lacerating political rhetoric of the Rev. Caryl Churchill also provides us with a gay soap opera.

Will the weak, compromised Guy finally leave the callous, bullying shithead Sam? Or will Sam’s perverse fatal attraction prevail? “Love me, love me, you have to love me, you …” goes the last unfinished line of the evening—spoken, inevitably, by Sam.

Good old clichéd Uncle Sam; poor old England, eh?

TWO OR THREE memories of the greatest stage actor I’ve ever seen: Paul Scofield, who died on March 19, age 86, in the Sussex countryside where he lived with his wife of 55 years, the actress Joy Parker. I was saddened by the news of his death as if I’d known him all my life. Yet few people knew Scofield at all. Next Page >

It’s a funny old job being a critic. Each week, I confidently—fairly confidently—offer a point of view about a show. Yet if someone asks me personally what show to see, I wish they wouldn’t.

I don’t want to feel responsible if they have a horrible time. Only recently some friends of mine from out of town were planning a Broadway treat for the family and asked what I thought about Spring Awakening. I replied without thinking, “You’ll love it.” Because I did.

A week later, they told me they left at intermission. They had to shield the wide eyes of their not-so-innocent 15-year-old darling girl from all the raunchy stuff onstage. It was my fault. I should have recommended Legally Blonde.

WHADDYA GONNA DO? As I see it, Spring Awakening revolutionized the rock musical when it opened on Broadway two years ago—and it’s still the best in town. It’s an intelligent show about parenthood and adolescence that pulls off the artistic miracle of being both serious and wildly entertaining. Its brilliant staging by Michael Mayer grows out of avant-garde theater (Spring Awakening was originally produced Off Broadway). And the show is as true as it can be to the spirit of German Expressionist Frank Wedekind’s frequently banned 1891 play (given that Wedekind’s allegedly pornographic lovers are 14-year-olds).

The unexpected commercial success and audacity of Spring Awakening ushered in the new era of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s vibrant Latino love letter to Washington Heights, In the Heights, and Stew’s stoned rock-pop odyssey in search of middle-class black identity, Passing Strange. Both raved-about shows have just arrived on Broadway (also from Off Broadway). And here’s what happened to me only a week ago concerning Stew:

One of my oldest friends from London was in town and asked in that wary way people do: “Did you like Passing Strange, by any chance?”

I couldn’t imagine this was the show for her. Stew’s show is loud, and my friend isn’t. “Are you sure Stew’s for you?” I asked her tactfully. “I like him, but Passing Strange is a rock concert in disguise. It makes for a predictable musical. Have you seen Spring Awakening? Now there’s a show!”

“I’ve already got tickets for Passing Strange,” she replied, as if I were to blame. (And at $110 a pop, too.)

“Don’t listen to me,” I said defensively. “You know what critics are like. Miseries! Yet lots of them love Passing Strange.”

“But you don’t.”

“Not really.”

Stew’s coming-of-age story seems middle-aged retro to me. The star himself isn’t young. He’s an affable and unlikely rocker in his mid-40’s—a tubby middle-class troubadour from Los Angeles who’s the gifted performer, narrator, lyricist and co-composer (with Heidi Rodewald) of Passing Strange. He’s witty about racial stereotyping and his church gospel beginnings, but the real world of race riots seems to have passed him by. He veers messily between street poetry and cliché; his glib satire of avant-garde movies reveals a safe, middlebrow mind. Wryness is the keynote. There’s no fury in Stew’s story of dropping out and finding his way. Considered hip by Broadway standards, Passing Strange is sweet, unthreatening—not strange.

Another new soft-rock musical I reviewed recently, Next to Normal, is just too darn normal. Intended as an adult story about a chronically depressive housewife who attempts suicide—of all un-showbizzy things—it’s actually quite jolly, with its traditionally sentimental, uplifting closing number, “Let There Be Light.” The compromised Next to Normal is directed by Michael Greif of Rent, which was the crossover musical when it opened 12 years ago and put the mid-80’s East Village art scene onto the Broadway stage (and straight into Bloomingdale’s window displays).

WHEN BLOOMIES CO-OPTS the barrio, you’ll know that In the Heights has crossed over into a big, fat commercial hit. All the signs are that it will do just that. Next Page >

It’s amazing that choreographer Debbie Allen’s starry Broadway production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof—the first all-black version—can have so much plain wrong with it, yet still delight me. But consider this: No great playwright ever wrote so badly and so beautifully within the same play as Tennessee Williams (unless it was Eugene O’Neill).

I love Williams in spite of his flaws and because of them. He’s our poet of tender mercies who put onstage the large, damaged hearts of the dispossessed. His notoriously overheated dramas, saturated with sex and desire, preoccupied with sin and purity, contain emotions writ large. Who else but Williams would invent a character both as coarse and lyrical as Maggie the cat? And who else would have her speak these elegant lines in the Act I showdown with her drunk, indifferent husband, Brick, whom she describes as possessing “the charm of the defeated”?

“They’re playing croquet. The moon has appeared and it’s white, just beginning to turn a little bit yellow,” she says to him, and drifts into another unexpected thought. “You were a wonderful lover. … Such a wonderful person to go to bed with, and I think mostly because you were really indifferent to it. Isn’t that right? Never had any anxiety about it, did it naturally, easily, slowly, with absolute confidence and perfect calm, more like opening a door for a lady or seating her at a table than giving expression to any longing for her. Your indifference made you wonderful at lovemaking—strange?—but true. …”

Harold Clurman wrote admiringly of Williams after he first burst on the scene in the 1940’s with The Glass Menagerie: “He has no doctrine, unless it be the need for compassion.” John Osborne, whose Look Back in Anger (1956) owes a debt to A Streetcar Named Desire (1948), was the first British playwright to acknowledge the extraordinary humanity of Williams in an era when emotion was repressed on the London stage. In a ringing declaration of the poetic power of drama, Osborne memorably declared that Williams’ enduring plays of private fires and public tragedy are “worth a thousand statements of a thousand politicians.”

And in all this is found the dark, wry ironies of Tennessee Williams’ unmistakable Southerness. “Mr. Williams, would you please give us your definition of happiness?” a journalist asked him. He leaned back, rolled his eyes and replied, “Insensitivity, I guess.”

THE THREE ACTS of the Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) are arias about illusion and lies, and each outstanding act is a showdown. The first between sexually frustrated Maggie and the wracked, latent-homosexual Brick; the second act between Big Daddy, who thinks he’s beaten cancer, and the confessional Brick (“Have you ever heard the word ‘mendacity’?”); and the third the resolution and battle over who inherits the 28,000-acre Mississippi estate.

“Oh, you weak people—you weak beautiful people!—who give up with such grace,” go Maggie’s memorable last lines to Brick. “What you want is someone to take hold of you. Gently, gently with love, hand your life back to you, like somethin’ gold you let go of.”

Anika Noni Rose is a wonderful Maggie. You might remember Ms. Rose’s breakthrough role in the Tony Kushner-Jeanine Tesori musical Caroline, or Change (2003)—since followed by more traditional stardom in Dreamgirls. Ms. Rose is young and sexy and unafraid. She’s a stage natural whose innate musicality serves her very well as Maggie, with lines—according to Williams’ ornate stage directions—that are meant to be “almost sung, always continuing a little beyond her breath so she has to gasp for another.”

Ms. Rose doesn’t exactly gasp; she races and electrifies in a necessary tour de force. The play stands or falls on Maggie’s complete domination of the entire opening act in her near-monologue, with the silent Brick laid up with a broken leg on the white pillowy bed, or hobbling on a crutch to the bar for the solace of oblivion.

Williams famously wrote great roles for women, but it’s often overlooked how intelligent his women are. “When something is festering in your memory or your imagination, laws of silence don’t work,” Maggie tells Brick. “It’s just like shutting a door and locking it on a house on fire in hope of forgetting that the house is burning. But not facing a fire doesn’t put it out. Silence about a thing just magnifies it. It grows and festers in silence, becomes malignant.”

“Give me my crutch,” Brick demands.

“Lean on me,” she begs.

Ms. Rose hits all the right notes—save for an unavoidable one. As an actress, she can’t help herself: She’s gloriously alive in all she does (as Maggie declares herself to be). She’s unable to convey Maggie’s “anxious lines on her face” (as Williams describes her). But it doesn’t spoil things. Ms. Rose is giving a fantastic performance. Next Page >

In Sarah Ruhl’s Dead Man’s Cell Phone, there’s a wonderfully ghoulish true story about a cell phone that started ringing inside a coffin.

It happened in Belgium some five years ago: The grieving family of the deceased had gathered at the funeral parlor to say a private, loving farewell around the sealed coffin when they suddenly heard a cell phone ringing inside. (What makes it worse—or funnier—is that the badly shaken family subsequently sued the undertakers for negligence).

Ms. Ruhl’s latest drama—a comic fable about love and cell phones (and too much else beside)—begins very promisingly, in the bizarre vein of the Belgium story, when a man dies sitting upright in a café and his cell phone starts ringing. “Excuse me,” says the anonymous stranger named Jean who’s sitting nearby, “are you going to get that?”

Jean (Mary-Louise Parker) eventually answers the dead Gordon’s cell phone, and her quirky odyssey begins with her meeting and comforting Carlotta, the mistress he never loved. “He said you stopped time just by walking into the room,” she lies sweetly to her.

She’s like a consoling, blundering angel insinuating herself innocently into the dead man’s life and mad family via the afterlife of his cell phone. She invents narratives for everyone, including herself. “Only connect (at all cost)” is the motto of the techno age, and of Ms. Ruhl’s morality tale.

Dead Man’s Cell Phone possesses such a fresh, intriguing premise that I was immediately prepared to retract every lousy thing I’ve ever said about the pretentiousness of her other plays. Forgive and forget the twee infantilization of her Eurydice (2003) with its Greek chorus of cutely anthropomorphic chanting stones; and the overwrought pseudo-poetry of The Clean House (2004), with its lofty, bogus pronouncements such as “The perfect joke is somewhere between an angel and a fart.”

It is?

To ask how the wayward Ms. Ruhl came to be acclaimed a bona fide genius by the good folk at The New York Times is to wonder why the earth isn’t flat. (It is, actually. But only on a Tuesday). There are more of the award-winning playwright’s typically wobbly aphorisms in Dead Man’s Cell Phone, and, at best, they’re eccentrically hit and miss: “Women are responsible for enlivening dull places like railway stations.” (Just okay.) “Hermia chose a Catholic mass for Gordon because she likes to kneel and get up.” (Could do better.) “I never wear a thong. It’s like having a tampon in your asshole.” (See teacher.)

Whatever flaccid witticisms would be in store for us during Dead Man’s Cell Phone, however, Ms. Ruhl’s ghostly theme of cell life after death promised a timely, original play. (Coincidentally, I recently attended a reception in honor of the assassinated Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Dmitriy Muratov, editor in chief of Novaya Gazeta, was paying moving tribute to Politkovskaya when he suddenly produced her cell phone from a pocket and took our breath away: It was no longer a cell but an eerie, intimate sign that she’d once lived, the modern relic of a saint. With its hundreds of numbers from all over the world, it was a tragic symbol of a network of global support, and of Politkovskaya’s immense courage. Was I alone in thinking, “What if her cell phone rings right now?”)

MS. RUHL DIDN'T intend to write a tragedy, but rather a “significant” fable. She trivializes her own potential. Her ideas about cell phones—“the music of the spheres”—are unsurprising (“Nothing is really silent anymore”). We’ve become too reliant on cell phones, apparently. And they ring all the time, in all kinds of places. “Raise your hand if you’ve answered your cell phone while you were quietly urinating. Yes I thought so,” the dead man’s mother, a barracuda in fur and pearls played by the game Kathleen Chalfant, asks the audience disapprovingly. (Two or three audience members raised their hands sheepishly—all guys—as if taking part in a reality TV show).

At the same time, Ms. Ruhl’s familiar thoughts on the tyranny of cell phones are bloated with other grandiose thoughts (the Holocaust and memory; the afterlife and redemption). The play is dressed up with name-dropping literary allusions, (John Donne on the “hidden”; quotations from Dickens on the mystery of lost souls among the teeming masses). And then there’s the plain silly: The dead man turns out to have trafficked illegally in body parts (“organs for the living”). Message: We all connect in different ways, right? Next Page >

This week I report on a new musical about suicidal depression, a new play about suicidal loneliness and the revival of a classic play that hinges on suicide. And how are you today?

There’s nothing inherently wrong with the novel theme of Next to Normal, the soft-rock musical about the middle-class mom who’s a clinically depressed pill freak. Sitting across the aisle during the performance I attended at Second Stage Theatre was Stephen Sondheim, the founding father of the modern musical: urban desperation and neurosis (Company); the ravages of time and old age (Follies); Grand Guignol murder (Sweeny Todd); love and physical ugliness (Passion); lunatics and presidential slaughter (Assassins); or even newly opened diplomatic relations between isolationist America and the Japanese in 1852 (Pacific Overtures).  read more » Next Page >

Rupert Goold’s production of Macbeth with Patrick Stewart has arrived at the Brooklyn Academy of Music from London, where it was widely acclaimed as “definitive” and “the experience of a lifetime.” Though the gifted Mr. Goold’s opening scene is brilliantly unnerving, I’m not so sure that a Macbeth that doesn’t go on to terrify you can be one for the ages.

“All is the fear and nothing is the love” is the keynote of Shakespeare’s dark, monstrous tragedy of political ambition and desire. But the more the director piled on the ghoulish scenes of butchered corpses accompanied by thundering sound and light effects, spooky smoke, video and film and echo chambers for the witches, the less scary I found the production.

I know a lowbrow slasher movie when I see one. And so does Mr. Goold, who happily admits to being influenced by the genre. Not that he doesn’t have more refined sources. The director acknowledges being inspired by the walls oozing blood in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. But the Kubrickian video in Macbeth doesn’t scare us in the least; it looks like bad wallpaper.

The 35-year-old Mr. Goold isn’t making an innovative statement with Macbeth. For one thing, he’s decking it out with quite well-known images from movies (good or bad). Nothing new about that, either. But the “borrowings” only take us further away from the nightmare soul of Shakespeare’s hallucinatory tragedy.

The production—known as the “Stalinist Macbeth”—also uses documentary film of Stalin’s armies on parade projected onto the walls of the set. But those all-purpose images of totalitarian power are in turn very familiar; they no longer disturb us as the symbol of global terror; and clips of Stalin’s May Day propaganda-fest have already been used in other stage productions (Simon McBurney’s among them).

Alas, there are other stagy effects that hover on the edge of kitsch—Macbeth’s severed head (a replica of Mr. Stewart’s) held up absurdly at the close, glistening bright red like a candied apple; or the lapse when the three witches dressed as nurses break out into a rap version of “Double, double, toil and trouble” as body bags twitch rhythmically on slabs in a mortuary.

For those of us who believe in a theater of natural magic and the primacy of language, Mr. Goold’s staging comes across as frantically typical of sensory overload. His Macbeth is rarely quiet—and when it is, it’s a relief and the outcome is memorable.

Only silence is appropriate during Act IV when Macduff, the exiled future king, receives news that Macbeth has butchered his wife and children. Even words must die. They’re no use to grieving Macduff, played by the fine veteran actor Michael Feast; he cannot “give sorrow words.” When Macduff is told of the slaughter, there’s an unbearably moving, long, uncomprehending silence until finally he asks, “My children, too?”

THE PRODUCTION IS set in the 1950’s, mostly in a white-tiled military hospital and a kitchen (which is new). That brilliant opening hospital scene promising so much had the three weird sisters urgently nursing a horribly wounded soldier as he struggles to give us news of the battle and of Macbeth’s heroic feats. Then, as he lays on a table gasping for life, the nurses cut off his oxygen supply and kill him.

Well! I thought that was just great and sat forward in my seat anticipating astonishing things. But whatever way the industrial set (by Anthony Ward) is used—as hospital, kitchen or vague battlefield—it amounts to a peculiarly sterile gimmick. The bleak hospital setting worked well in the dynamic first scenes, but visiting royalty isn’t usually received in back kitchens. Nor do kings make ham sandwiches for themselves and guests. (What are servants for?)

The anonymous, steely set, with its rusty radiators, bucket and mop, and TV atop a steel cabinet/fridge, is a bleak, postmodern eyesore. There’s a cage elevator that performs old-fashioned disappea