sundry items

So by now our schedules are overflowing with All The Online Things -- leaving us to wonder what they did for fun during lengthy pre-internet quarantine periods, but I'm sure historians have weighed in on this elsewhere on the intertubes -- so, apart from the standard issue binge-watches and nightly opera streams, we'll highlight three items for this week:

The NTLive stream on YT (to sometime Thursday GMT) is A Streetcar Named Desire with Gillian Anderson, worth catching if you missed it in theaters and/or in the theatre;

Complicité's The Encounter, which originally streamed on The Space website when they were still doing that kind of thing, is up through tomorrow -- you will need headphones but the soundscape work is more than worth the price of admission;

and Folk On Foot's Front Room Festival 2 goes live tomorrow at 9am ET -- the first one was pretty excellent, went smoothly, and raised a bucket of cash for UK artist relief, and the lineup for the second round is just as stellar. Will likely be housed on YT for a time, if you're bound for other plans.

The truth of what we are: Richard II @ NTLive

A few weeks ago we took advantage of a lull in the snow to take in the NT Live of Simon Russell Beale's Richard II, in a very stripped down and streamlined version from the Almeida Theatre directed by Joe Hill-Gibbons. RII is a wordy play with a big cast and a lot of complicated ground to cover, so clocking in at two hours is quite a feat of editing.

And edit they did. The play is stripped of props, costumes, a lot of its text, and doors. Three walls and a floor of riveted industrial steel plates contain every scene, with a luminescent ceiling that provides most of the lighting. Nobody leaves or enters -- nobody can leave or enter, which is pretty much the point -- and the whole cast (in street clothes except for a gold paperboard crown) is on stage at all times. Everyone but Richard and Bolingbroke shuffle roles. Saskia Reeves, who starts the play as Bushey, plays all her other roles smeared in the blood of her first character's execution. There is something poetic, if uncomfortable, in that, nor is anyone spared: buckets line the walls marked Water, Soil, and Blood, and over the course of the play, used for various purposes, their contents mire this scepter'd isle and her people in an inescapably vile slough of ambition, betrayal, and murder. Nowhere is this better brought home than in the comedic yet horrifying lightning-round of internecine accusation and gratuitous gage-casting that Bolingbroke (Leo Bill), newly-crowned, realizes he is completely powerless to stop. He looks very tired by then.

Given the lack of frills and extras, blocking and choreography count for a great deal. Much is accomplished by various clusterings of the secondary characters, whose function is often chorus-like and underscores the precarious nature of allegiance under duress. You can't always tell who any of them are or where they're placing their bets, but in the end of course it doesn't matter.

Simon Russell Beale gets to start the play with Richard's ending soliloquy, a device that frames history as theater and makes everything flashback until the speech comes around again toward the end of the play. Certain other changes are deftly managed, like the garden scene where normally the Queen would be in conversation with her ladies - the ladies' lines are given to Richard here. So it becomes a dialogue in which Richard's sense of self as king is briskly torn down as each frivolous pastime he offers, each remnant of his days of safety, is rejected in favor of some grim alternative in this new reality.

SRB made his name as an actor on his keen sense of detail in a line, and he is no dogmatic follower of inherited interpretation or straitjacketing adherence to meter. So, in any text you think you know well, he can make a chasm open up suddenly at your feet. Here, in the Westminster scene, it was when he's asked leave to go "Whither you will, so I were from your sights", and Bolingbroke says "Go some of you and convey him to the Tower." There's a moment's hesitation as Richard processes what that means, and we feel some of that sudden vertigo - that palmer's walking staff would never be an option.

carpe scaenam

under no circumstances should you ask me about...

It is something of a landmark occasion when your Erstwhile Area of Inquiry ventures into your morning commute to the Borg Cube via a mention in The Writer's Almanac, but hey, it's the 21st century, and it's the guy's 258th birthday. So for that, here's your Random Don Carlos Trailer of the Week, courtesy of Epik Hotel

Don Karlos - Teaser from Epik Hotel on Vimeo.

Harry Dean Stanton, 1926 - 2017

Probably the only time I've ever thought "Dude, NO, do NOT rescue the cat!"

Otherwise, HDS's presence in a movie was like the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval if the seal was an anarchy A.

Schiller Time

The Special Envoy asked this week about the difference between work time and what she termed "Schiller time" -- by which she means the difference between wage slavery and the stuff one is really supposed to be doing. The stuff, that is, with meaning.

But since the internet loves brevity and youtube videos may stand in for discourse these days, I suppose the response is a bit this



Before the experts weigh in, yes, this is not a particularly canon (in the nerdy superhero flick sense of that term) bit of the opera. Schiller's Elisabeth de Valois has been dropped at the Spanish court alone, an isolated person in a play of isolated people, so she doesn't have the luxury of bidding farewell to a homie, only to one of the people she refers to in weaker moments as her jailers. All the more impressive, in a way, that the prisoner stands up for the prison guard, the servant of an authoritarian narrative whom Authority has just ruthlessly decontextualized. If the libretto of the opera loses a bit in the change, Verdi makes up for it in that final chorus. It's the punctuation of Elisabetta's vocal line and its final three note descent that turns them from onlookers to witnesses. Say what you will about the man as a composer, when it came to adapting canon works for the opera stage, his musical shorthand was second to none.

Meantime, after a lengthy hiatus, here's your Random Don Carlos Trailer of the Week, courtesy of Salzburger Landestheater, wherein the salient metaphor appears to be ice cubes.

John Hurt 1940 - 2017

Monarchy: how clear about it did I have to be?

— William Shakespeare (@Shakespeare) December 20, 2016

a little scene to monarchize

After a long wait filled with vague prophecy about the actual PBS release date, the other shoe drops on The Hollow Crown with Henry VI, part 1. Spoiler alert: The blood of English continues to manure the ground.

opening night verdict

Win.

sundry items

Harriet Walter, who will be Prospering in Brooklyn early in the new year, has a book out next week on a career's worth of Shakespeare, and she's written a short intro for The Arts Desk. Meanwhile, Janet McTeer, currently on Broadway in Josie Rourke's Les Liaisons Dangereuses revival, has a profile in The New Yorker.

Susan Graham's recital for Boston's Celebrity Series earlier this month has been archived on the WCRB site, and last spring's Boston Baroque Magic Flute with Nicholas Phan is also there, plus a bunch of other interesting things are currently inhabiting the WCRB archive if you click around.

nettle for the day

This is either the absolute worst time for a revival of Les Liaisons Dangereuses on Broadway or possibly the best time.

The Merchant of Venice @ Shakespeare & Co, Lenox

Tina Packer's production of The Merchant of Venice, played in the round with minimal staging and more or less period costumes, drops us in the middle of a frontier society where all kinds of identities are jostling for space. It opens on a masked revelers' dance party (anachronistically Bruno Mars), which gradually breaks up until a handful of diehards pass out in place. The arrival of morning is marked by a muezzin, and small groups of people -- a couple of Muslims, some Jews, a pair of Christian monks -- pass by the heap of last night's partiers, looking askance but going on about their business, and we realize it's the Rialto. The Merchant Antonio wakes, and admits he is sad, and we are off.

The Merchant (John Hadden) has a thing with that boy Bassanio (Shahar Isaac), but that boy Bassanio is moving on, there's an opportunity in Belmont, a lady with a fortune, and well, you know, those kinds of gentlemen's agreements were never meant to last, not in a city with profit at its heart. Packer's Shakespearean Venice is not the mythical melting pot of a dominant mercantile city, but a vast and intricate network of social and ethnic tensions, where religion, class, gender, race, and sexuality form constantly shifting fields of conflict. Antonio, who has famously spat upon Jews, has the spit of others to contend with himself, and he's losing the love of his life to a woman whose own future is bound by a capricious patriarchal game.

But in spite of the fact that the Merchant owns the title, this play is not about him. One of the choices an actor playing Shylock has to make is how to place him in or against the society with which he comes into conflict, and accent is often a big part of the role. Jonathan Epstein's Shylock is unaccented -- or rather, in a sea of accents, he speaks in the same accent Antonio does -- and it makes the character matter-of-fact and believable, erasing lines that would make him a single Other representative of a community of Others. One of the points of this Shylock is he is his own man, and his actions are his own, and the adamant position he takes vis a vis the bond is his own.

It also gives the sense that when Shylock expresses his anxiety in terms of loss of property, that that's a social script he's fallen to using because it's required and expected. Epstein's Shylock is profoundly weary of that game, a thin pretense that's tossed away in the famous line about the stolen ring -- "I had it of Leah when I was a bachelor" -- in the same way he'll toss away his kippah and tallit katan in the face of "Balthazar"'s reading of the Law (presented in this production as much a vengeful doubling down as Shylock's own).

It's the heart that counts, and one of the finer aspects of this production is the way in which people are surprised by the moral failings of themselves and others. In the trial scene, as Tubal declares his dismay at Shylock's unbending will, so the maid Nerissa (Bella Merlin) registers a growing shock at her mistress Portia's (Tamara Hickey) equally exacting cruelty. Likewise Jessica (Kate Abbruzzese) realizes that Lorenzo (Deaon Griffin-Pressley) is not the man she took him for, as he takes to verbally and then physically abusing the servant Lancelot (Thomas Brazzle), once (possibly still) her only friend. In fact this dynamic is one of the most interesting in the production, as both Lorenzo and Lancelot are played by black actors. So Lancelot, master of authority-challenging satire, enraged by Lorenzo but constrained by class, makes his final entrance into their presence literally shouting Dixie. Lorenzo comes out of that encounter looking shell-shocked, so perhaps there's hope for him. But after news of the trial comes to Belmont, Jessica is clearly wondering if the world she's escaped into will turn out infinitely worse than the one she had before: herself, her father, and her friend as yet undefeated by this brave new world that has such people in it.

the whole depth of a tale: R&J at the Millionplex

If you hang around the Republic long enough you might guess I'm not a huge Kenneth Branagh fan by the lengthy and detailed disquisition (Jeremiad?) you might be a party to should the topic arise. He's sort of the Puccini opera of Shakespeare actors - he's got a limited bag of tricks, and you're going to see every one of them, in everything he does.

As a director he has his moments (I was pretty much meh on his Hamlet film but I will say it's the only time I've ever bought the Hamlet/Ophelia backstory). But again, a bag of tricks. He likes to mess with setting. He likes to make visual reference to old movies. He likes to cast against type. He likes to cast Derek Jacobi.

So, his Romeo & Juliet: Setting messed with? Check. Visual reference to old movies? Check. Casting against type? Check. Derek Jacobi? Bingo!

The fair Verona where he lays his scene is a slightly post-WWII Italy -- some recovery has taken place, there's food to be eaten, champagne to be drunk, parties to crash, but the old stone walls of Christopher Oram's set are pocked with bullet holes. The attempt at a post-war feminine lightness - dresses, hairstyles, manners -- speaks of hard times past and better days in the offing. But we're stuck in a world (In a world...) being drawn in different directions at once, somewhere between Fellini, Godfather-esque verismo, and film noir.

This last is perhaps more driven home in the cinemacast than it was in the theater, as they elected to film it all in black & white. It makes a point, but I'm not sure technically you can have it both ways -- it's wearing on the eyes after awhile, which a black & white film (a good one) should never be.

Lily James is good as Juliet -- a Juliet who's been around the block a bit more than most Juliets, but war is like that. She manages to make the verse conversational, and she's convincing, although Branagh doesn't give her much of a character arc to work with. She ends pretty much where she began, except dead. Richard Madden as Romeo does a really great Young Branagh imitation -- he delivers the lines exactly as the boss would have done. He does it really well. One wishes he wouldn't.

The two of them are nice to look at. Can't say I was all that sorry at the end. Mission accomplished left somewhat undone.

However...

Regular readers of this blog also know that when a casting choice in a standard rep work plants a signpost pointing off in some other direction, I get a little less slumpy in my chair. So the evening begins with an over-long Branagh voiceover telling some lengthy anecdote about Oscar Wilde in his last days in Paris being a jumping-off point for casting Derek Jacobi in the role of Mercutio. Usually a kind of hyper, sometimes fairly annoying, but young character, prone to poetic overdrive, here he's an old aesthete who likes to hang out with the boys. And they with him, critically. He's prone to poetic overdrive, yes, but Jacobi, whose Shakespearean acting style is nowadays slightly tipping over into Old Skool, brings exactly the right amount of heightening to heightened speech. His Mercutio isn't having a series of verbal seizures so much as he's picking out finely detailed fancies to distract himself, and everyone else, from the misery they've all recently lived through. It's clearly a technique that's kept him alive all these years. Only when he comes to speak of love, it isn't with the simple disdain of a footloose young man. Instead it's the cover for a whole life lived with those types -- Romeo's types -- of earnest declarations just out of reach. Or if in reach, impossibly dangerous to the touch. This Mercutio's flights of fancy and humor have a bright sheen of desperation and despair.

So it's when black-shirted Tybalt comes around, sword drawn and on the hunt for Romeo, that Mercutio, after a lifetime of blood dealings with blackshirts, and remembering in his bones all the old grievances and the long buried friends and lovers, picks up a sword for the last time.

Branagh likes to drive a truck through things. If you were going to floor it, this would be the place. He didn't, though, not quite. But the signpost alone was worth the somewhat unsatisfying rest of it.

His Kiss, the Riot: Hadestown @ New York Theatre Workshop

It was about a decade ago we were sitting around on a patch of grass at the (much-missed) Champlain Valley Festival, when a friend of a friend said "I'm writing an opera" and played the first few songs of the set that would become Hadestown, her musical adaptation of the Orpheus myth. Then a year or so after that we were roadtripping back up to Vergennes (the town hall this time) to see Anais Mitchell and a bunch of Vermont musicians perform the finished product, as it was then: a semi-staged song cycle, with mic stands proudly in the way. It worked really well, and I told the Mutual Friend it reminded me a lot of Mahagonny. Then a few years later came the album, and several rounds of the show in various locations with various people -- Orpheus might be Justin Vernon or Jefferson Hamer or somebody else entirely, Persephone might be Ani DiFranco or Thao Nguyen or somebody else entirely. And that Hadestown had its day, and then Mitchell moved on to other projects.

Then came the news that Hadestown was being developed into a fully-staged theater piece with the director Rachel Chavkin. And then it was cast, and then it opened, and here we were, back with the Mutual Friend, way down, way downtown on 4th St. in the East Village.

Some things have been added (dialogue, some new songs), and some things taken away (Cerberus), but what they've created is a tight piece of musical theater in two acts that grabs the attention and hangs onto it. The black box space of the NYTW now contains an amphitheater -- risers in the semi-round with the largest variety of vintage straight-back chairs this side of a New York State Museum warehouse. There's a tiny bar tucked underneath the risers, too, so when you walk in you can buy water, wine, and beer -- which, contrary to usual practice, you can take into the theater with you, and you should, because there will be a toast to Persephone and a toast to Orpheus and you should have something on you to toast with. 

The cast is excellent across the board. As Orpheus, our guitar slinging hero, Damon Daunno has a challenging vocal line to wrangle, ranging from high tenor to falsetto (on 2010's studio album this part is sung by Justin Vernon of Bon Iver), but he manages it well. Nabiyah Be conveys all the doubt Mitchell gives Eurydice, supplemented by the dialogue she's been given. "I play the lyre," says Orpheus, introducing himself. "A liar and a player, too," says Eurydice, with more than a touch of jaundice. Persephone (Amber Gray), jazz diva in a spring-green floral-print dress with flowers in her hair, is well-matched with Hades (Patrick Page), the real player, in black shirt (open-necked), black jacket, black pin-striped pants and black boots, slick as an oil spill out of Tartarus; Hermes (Chris Sullivan) is a whiskey-voiced, world-weary MC, guide and messenger; The Fates (Lulu Fall, Jessie Shelton, Shaina Taub) are tough and unpredictable, with harmonies like a deck chair in the sun one minute and the edge of a cliff in a stiff wind the next. (Also they play violin, accordion, and tambourine, which Wagner's Norns could never boast.) Lastly the fantastically tight band, which swings Mitchell's changes of musical register -- from wistful passages (Flowers) to audience participation barn-burners (Our Lady of the Underground) -- and Michael Chorney's multifaceted orchestration with tremendous skill and verve.

It's less of an opera now, and more of a musical, but the story is intact and so are the politics. There was half-time crowd comment of how prescient the political aspects are -- the denizens of Hadestown are employed by the Big Boss in building a wall to keep out the have-nots. But this is not so much prescient as a reminder that, as the Orpheus story is not a new story, the Wall is not a new phenomenon, either in election cycle rhetoric or in execution.

The run has been extended through July 3 now July 31st.

A little something from the good old days...

your random Don Karlos trailer for the week

I would totally go see this one



Previous episode here

the law of writ and the liberty: Maxine Peake's Hamlet @ the artplex HD

Maxine Peake doesn't rewrite the playbook on Hamlet, but it's a respectable effort in a big field of recent respectable efforts. Where in other productions the Ghost is the catalyzing agent that impels Hamlet down the path that ends [spoiler alert] with Horatio and Fortinbras as the last men standing, Peake's Hamlet is clearly already well down that path from the opening dinner table awkwardnesses. (Also, btw, there is no Fortinbras as they cut all of Denmark's knotty foreign relations entanglements.)

This directorial strategy has a plus side and a minus side. The minus side is it makes for a somewhat one-note main character. And as such we, the audience, miss the transformations, the steps become more of a slide. The famous indecisiveness, as addressed in Hamlet's speeches, seems less in evidence, which in turn makes those speeches less convincing. (nb: this may be precisely the point.)

On the plus side, the more like wallpaper the main character becomes, the more secondary characters stand out. This may be the first production I've ever seen where I was actually interested in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as characters. Peake's Hamlet really has no decisions to make -- the train is never not going to the station. But what that makes evident is the collateral damage to Hamlet's "friends", actual or potential: R & G, of course, and Laertes and Ophelia, but also the Players, scattering in a panic at the termination of their performance, when they realize they've been used as pawns in a game that could turn out very badly for them. This Hamlet is one willing to throw anyone under the bus without much worrying about the consequences.

In fact as soon as the Ghost appears we are calling into question the whole enterprise: John Shrapnel plays both the Ghost and Claudius, the only difference between them is the clothes. But Hamlet is a play about appearance and sham, and masks are everywhere. The "Hyperion to a satyr" comparison Hamlet makes to Gertrude (Barbara Marten) is a visual one -- "Look here upon this picture and on this." If there is no physical difference, and the text abjures psychology, then who's to say Claudius is any worse than the brother he's usurped? And who's to say Hamlet's "revenge" has any meaning whatsoever?

Director Sarah Frankcom makes it clear to us that Rosencrantz (Jodie McNee) and Guildenstern (Peter Singh), two punk kids with accents from some other part of town, have never darkened the doors of Elsinore. Gertrude knows of them, as any mother might who makes it her business at least to know the names of her children's friends. Claudius is uncertain of their names, "Moreover that we did long to see you" becoming a bit of lip service even more patronizing than usual here. And they, unlike much smarmier versions in other productions, seem to be both genuinely concerned and leaping at the chance to hang out with a mate so often out of reach, whether off at school or mewed up behind castle walls and protocol. Unlike the Players, though, they don't quite know when to bail out, finally trapped between Claudius's "need we have to use you" and Hamlet's own somewhat sociopathic agenda.

The casting of Maxine Peake doesn't make for much in the way of a gendered understanding of the title role. Her Hamlet is androgynous, rough-voiced, trickstery, but not quite a challenge to convention. But there are interesting things happening in the margins: Rosencrantz, Marcellus and the Player King, the grave diggers, and Polonius are all explicitly gender-swapped. In the case of Rosencrantz, this means she and Hamlet have had a passing thing, which a bit ups the ante on each one's (real or perceived) betrayal of the other.

In the case of Polonius -- Polonia here -- it changes the relationship with Ophelia in the way recent gender-swapped Tempests have altered, and expanded on, the relationship between Prospero and Miranda. When Polonia (Gillian Bevan) says "I do know, when the blood burns, how prodigal the soul lends the tongue vows," you know her mind's eye is looking down the long road of her own past and seeing her daughter's likely future.

The upshot: worth seeing, full of interesting choices, but we're still waiting for an actress to really drag this role kicking and screaming out of its conventions.

sundry items

Some of you may be interested in the talking heads livestreams from the Opera America conference. Bernard Foccroulle, GM of Aix, is up next at 10:45am ET today.

BBC Radio 3 is having a little Shakespeare festival, so they've posted up a new Winter's Tale, with Danny Sapani and Eve Best, and with music by Tim van Eyken (also playing Autolycus), whom the hipster folkies among you will know from before he did the music for War Horse. It's up for another ten days or so.

Next after that is Ian McDiarmid's King Lear, which should be around for a couple of weeks yet.

WNYC's Studio 360 has a segment on the new opera JFK (and also an interview with Tilda Swinton).

carpe scaenam