A place to think deeply about movies
Here you will find reviews of local theatre productions the world round, with a particular focus on the Greater Toronto Area and the San Francisco Bay Area. We also review many "Digital Theatre" productions — live recordings of theatre — and explore how this new medium presents theatre productions, for better or worse. We especially focus on NTLive, RSC On Screen, and Globe Theatre On Screen productions. And we have a soft spot for modern Shakespeare productions.
Photograph 51 suggests that sexism kept Franklin conservative, reluctant to be right because as a woman, she could never, ever be wrong. Ziegler’s text depicts a woman who had all the evidence but didn’t put the pieces together because she was afraid to prematurely commit herself.
[Read more…] about Photograph 51: In praise of difficult women
San Jose Stage’s RFK, a one-man play about Robert Kennedy (David Arrow), combines a captivating lead performance with evocative projections to elevate a historically rich but dramatically flat script.
Read more about theatre on Seventh Row.
[Read more…] about San Jose Stage’s RFK brings Bobby Kennedy to life
The Adventures of Pericles was recorded in 2015 and will screen in cinemas across Canada and the U.S. in 2016 starting May 7 (May 8 and 12 in Canada). To find screenings near you, visit the Stratford HD website here.
Shakespeare’s Pericles, Prince of Tyre (rebranded by the Stratford Festival as The Adventures of Pericles) is less a play and more a series of scenes strung together. It opens with incest and runs through murder, resurrection, and the threat of sexual slavery before a visitation from the goddess Diana. Remarkably, director Scott Wentworth manages to impose unity on this unruly text by highlighting the theme of feminine virtue that runs through the play. Nevertheless, this can’t quite compensate for the weakness of the play itself.
Wentworth draws some consistency out of the inconsistent mess that is the lurching plot of Pericles by highlighting the impetus for Pericles’ wanderings: his search for a truly virtuous woman, the “pearl.” The play’s three iterations of this ideal are portrayed by the remarkable Deborah Hay. Hay takes centre stage at the opening of the production as Prince Pericles’ (Evan Buliung) would-be bride, clad in virginal white. This pure exterior conceals a tainted core: Pericles soon discovers that she has committed incest with her father (King Antiochus, portrayed by Wayne Best).
Pursued by Antiochus’ agents desperate to keep the incest a secret, Pericles decides to go island-hopping until things cool down a bit. He is eventually shipwrecked, where he meets Hay again, this time playing the role of his eventual bride Thaisa. Thaisa is presumably a “pearl” of virtue, but we have to take this on faith, as she promptly dies in childbirth on their sea voyage home. Pericles places his infant daughter Marina in the care of a nearby kingdom and apparently just leaves her there for literally years.
Marina (also Hay) grows up to be so excruciatingly perfect that her host family tries to murder her. Marina is then rescued by pirates and sold to a brothel, where her identity as the embodiment of virtue makes her a poor investment: she convinces all her clients to stop whoring and go to church. (One of these converts becomes her husband. This play is nuts.)
Having inexplicably waited over a decade to pick up his daughter, Pericles is nevertheless prostrated by the news of her apparent death. He goes wandering again, but chance reunites father and daughter in one of the few genuinely touching scenes in the play.
Pericles is then visited by the goddess Diana, who reveals that Thaisa was resurrected from the dead (!!) and has been living as a nun on another island for years. (Nobody asks why Diana couldn’t say anything earlier.) The family is reunited outside a temple: virginal Marina and virtuous Thaisa who remained sexually faithful to her husband, together with Pericles at last.
To make matters weirder, Stratford apparently decided that what Pericles really needed was tunes you could hum. It’s Pericles: The Musical! Yet the songs allow Wentworth to reinforce this production’s central conceit: the nature and value of a virtuous woman. Pericles makes this explicit after meeting Thaisa when he sings about “the pearl.” a phrase that never appears in the text of the play. Purists needn’t fear that the songs are corrupting the Bard’s language, because the first half of Pericles wasn’t written by Shakespeare but by a lesser collaborator. Anyone waiting for the good stuff will have to sit through nine scenes of characters rhyming “bed” with “dead.”
Wentworth’s minimalist staging manages to prevent this production from seeming too chaotic. Recognizing that the locations are basically interchangeable, Wentworth dispenses with sets and relies on dialogue cues alone to situate the audience. This could become confusing since actors portray multiple roles, but in fact the repeated faces lend a welcome sense of familiarity to the proceedings. Most luminous of all is Hay, whose three linked performances draw nuance from stilted dialogue. Hay’s costumes are sumptuous where the rest are plain, and she’s frequently placed in the centre of the thrust stage, where she can be best appreciated by the whole audience. Wentworth ingeniously combines all the mechanics of staging to ensure that she, not Pericles, grounds this production.
Yet even this valiant effort can’t disguise the fact that the play itself is a stinker. Nine locations and multiple one-scene characters are strung together by voice-over. The characterization is flat and the play’s first half is uninspired. Only Pericles’ lieutenant Helicanus (Stephen Russell) draws a compelling performance from this meagre material, and he is relegated to a B-plot. Pericles is worth seeing once, and this is a very good production. Though there is much to admire here, there is relatively little to enjoy.
The Adventures of Pericles was recorded in 2015 and will screen in cinemas across Canada and the U.S. in 2016 starting May 7 (May 8 and 12 in Canada). To find screenings near you, visit the Stratford HD website here.
We also recommend attending the Stratford HD screening of their 2015 production of Hamlet.
“My mummy says I’m a miracle!
My daddy says I’m his special little guy!
I am a princess
And I am a prince.
Mum says I’m an angel sent down from the sky
My daddy says I’m his special little soldier,
No one is as handsome, strong as me.
It’s true he indulges my tendency to bulge.
But I’m his little soldier!
Hup, two, four, free!
My mummy says I’m a miracle,
One look at my face, and it’s plain to see.
Ever since the day doc chopped the umbilical cord,
It’s been clear there’s no peer for a miracle like me!”
– lyrics to “Miracle” from “Matilda: The Musical” by Tim Minchin
The fantastic touring production of “Matilda: The Musical,” now at the SHN Orpheum Theatre until August 15, opens with the rollicking number “Miracle,” in which scores of children at a fifth birthday party, surrounded by their parents, parade around the stage boisterously informing us of how precious their parents have assured them they are. As a school teacher points out, “It seems that there are millions of these one-in-a-millions these days.” At the bridge of the song, we switch sets to a doctor’s office where the nine-months-pregnant Mrs. Wormwood (Cassie Silva) discovers she’s about to have a child.
It culminates with the introduction of a messy-haired blonde girl, Matilda (Mabel Tyler, full of star power), whose been fed nothing but discouragement from her parents. As the party table parts, Matilda comes forward and quietly repeats what she’s been told, “My mummy says I’m a lousy little worm./ My daddy says I’m a bore./ My mummy says I’m a jumped-up little germ./That kids like me should be against the law.” Tim Minchin’s tongue-twisting lyrics are the perfect match for the prodigy Matilda. I’ve been listening to the Broadway soundtrack on loop since catching the production, and I’m still humming it.
It’s the perfect way to set the tone for this smart, clever, humorous story of an exceptional five-year-old feminist role model. You see, Matilda is the one-in-a-million that her classmates only claim to be. Her parents may not see this, wishing that she’d set aside her books for the telly, but she keeps her mind active reading everything from Tolstoy to Dickens.
The lack of love and encouragement Matilda gets at home is tough, but she’s also got a mischievous sense of irreverence which helps her understand that it’s simply not right. As she sings in her first solo number, “Naughty,” “Just because you find that life’s not fair it/ Doesn’t mean that you just have to grin and bear it /If you always take it on the chin and wear it/ Nothing will change….We’re told we have to do what we’re told but surely/Sometimes you have to be a little bit naughty.” She’s a little crusader for justice, too!
The ‘90s, when the film version of “Matilda” was made, was the decade of Girl Power Fight The Patriarchy stories on film. In the last decade or so, audiences would do better to turn to the stage, where stories like “Wicked” and now “Matilda” offer better feminist tales than recent children’s films. What distinguishes “Matilda” from the other riffraff is not just the immense talent of all involved — even the children in the cast whose enunciation could be a bit better to do justice to Tim Minchin’s fast-paced tongue-twisting lyrics — and the terrific music, which are already uncommon feats. But the real star of this show is Director Matthew Warchus who exquisitely realizes the story in a visual spectacle that pulls your heartstrings, challenges the mind, and dazzles you with its cohesion and momentum.
Warchus’s work with the Olivier-winning set designer Rob Howell and choreographer Peter Darling is astonishingly good. All of the walls of the sets that come and go throughout the play feature letters of the alphabet, a tribute to the veneration for the written word that Matilda and Miss Honey share. The Wormwood’s house, a place of illiteracy, is all bright colours and tacky decor, with only a few, sparse, large lettered blocks, whereas the library features stacks of bookshelves to the ceiling of the stage, with ornamental letters. It’s a set that truly makes use of the inherent verticality of live theatre that Julie Taymor points out.
The story gets going when Matilda starts school where she meets her teacher, the sweet but meek Miss Honey (Jennifer Blood), who immediately recognizes how special her student is. But school is also a scary place, reigned over by the martinet Headmistress, Miss Trunchbull (the scene-stealing Bryce Ryness). The entrance to the school is a gothic, iron gate with letters interspersed throughout, just like the rest of the set. Here, they seem rather sinister. When the older kids welcome the new students with “School Song,” it’s in a minor key, riffing on the lyrics in “Miracle.” The older kids warn the new students that being a princess means nothing in this place where the Trunchbull doles out cruel punishment for even the smallest of offenses, like stealing a piece of her chocolate cake.
Once again, Matilda finds herself in a world full of unfair rules made by grown ups who aren’t nearly as clever as she is. And she uses her wits and compassion to fight to make things better. Miss Honey’s classroom is Matilda’s sanctuary, where her intellectual curiosity and precocity are encouraged. The three rows of desks set in front of a chalkboard allow for some great choreography when the kids sing in class, already in a 3×3 formation. Although Matilda is always in the back so she’s closest to us, when she stands just a few feet to the side of the corner desk, it’s a powerful statement of how different she is from everyone else.
But the threat of Miss Trunchbull is never far away, yet another wrong that Matilda must set right, because if she doesn’t, no one else will. It’s this tyranny of the adult world that leads to one of the play’s most emotional songs. As the children sit on or stand around four tall swings centre stage, they sing “When I Grow Up,” dreaming of being adults so they can stay up late and eat candy. But there’s also an innocence and sadness that’s so true to childhood. The Trunchbull may put them through torment in phys-ed because she senses “The Smell of Rebellion,” among what she calls “revolting children.” But by the end, the children take back that language, in a battle cry that’s triumphant and clever: “We are revolting children…/Living in revolting times/We sing revolting songs/Using revolting rhymes.”
I don’t think it’s possible to leave the theatre without a giant smile on your face and a melody in your heart. But there are a few things I could nitpick though I wouldn’t want these to discourage anyone from seeing this magnificent production. The play occasionally drags when we stop to hear Matilda’s story of an escapologist, his daughter, and her evil guardian. It’s key to the play’s story arc, but Tyler isn’t quite up to holding our attention through such long monologues despite how well Warchus animates these.
I’m not quite sure how I feel about the fact that the Trunchbull is always played by a man, even though Warchus initially auditioned both men and women. On the one hand, she’s a domineering caricature, a masculine figure, and the sheer towering height of a male actor yields a powerful effect. There’s a strong tradition of gender-swapping on the English stage, and there’s humour to be had, if somewhat uncomfortably, from Ryness’s oh-so-skinny legs and the giant pillow in his chest that stands in for breasts.
On the other hand, there’s a troubling, homophobic and transphobic undertone to having the evil woman played by a cross-dressed man. Is this all that different from the fact that Disney villains tend to always be “gay-sounding,” from Scar in “The Lion King” to Shere Khan in “The Jungle Book”? I’m not sure, but despite the standing ovation Ryness received for his terrific performance, something doesn’t quite sit right. But since the gender stereotypes come from the source text, it’s going to be as much of a problem to address as making Petruchio palatable to modern day audiences in Shakespeare’s “Taming of the Shrew.”
“Matilda: The Musical” plays Tuesday – Sunday at the Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco until August 15, with shows on weekday evenings at 7 p.m., Friday and Saturday evenings at 8 p.m., and 2 p.m. matinees on Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays. Tickets range from $45–$210 and can be purchased here.
A successful production of Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing” must satisfy three requirements: Beatrice and Benedick — the lovers in a merry war of wit — have to be lovable, the story needs to be clear, and the jokes have to land.
Even Kenneth Branagh’s otherwise brilliant and definitive film of the play suffered from a horribly wooden villain in its Don John (Keanu Reeves), but it didn’t matter because Branagh’s Benedick and Emma Thompson’s Beatrice were so perfect. Although Joss Whedon’s 2013 film illuminated new aspects of the play, it hasn’t reached canon because his Benedick and Beatrice were so unlikable, their verbal sparring more cruel than jovial and funny. Laura Gordon’s new production of “Much Ado About Nothing” at Santa Cruz Shakespeare passes the test, with particularly strong performances from Greta Wohlrabe scene-stealing Beatrice and Mike Ryan’s Benedick. This is one of the summer’s must-see plays.
As the production is set in the 1940s, the first sign that Beatrice is a thoroughly modern woman, even before she speaks, is the fact that she wears sensible slacks. Although Wohlrabe’s harsh American accent requires some getting used to, her overwhelming charm and stage presence are what you’ll remember. When the play opens, she and her family receive a message that the Prince Don Pedro (Kipp Moorman) will be coming for a visit with his soldiers in tow, including Señor Benedick (Mike Ryan, a convincing and funny if somewhat juvenile Benedick). She need only say a few clever words to the messenger (Sharon Shao) for us to be completely mesmerized and on her side – hardly a surprise from a woman who made Celia one of the most interesting characters in last year’s “As You Like It.”
Nina Ball’s simple but versatile set places us on the front lawn of Leonata’s estate, where there are two benches arranged in a ‘V’-shape, a second floor balcony overlooking it, and a main entrance to the building centre stage. As the balcony and façade consist of metal framing festooned with flowers, we can see the action behind the entrance, a perfect design for a play full of spies and overheard misunderstandings. When the soldiers arrive, Gordon quickly establishes that they are in two camps: Don Pedro, Benedick, and his new best friend Claudio (Josh Saleh) enter by the stairs down stage right while the melancholy troublemaker Don John (Steve Pickering, wooden and blank) and his lackeys Borachio (Turner Frankosky) and Conrade (Carlos Angel-Barajas) enter stage left. The entire production is full of this kind of economical staging, which helps to clarify characters’ relationships and move the story along.
Before long, Beatrice and Benedick find themselves in a public battle of the wits, clearly steeped in sexual tension, even if the two insist that they hate nothing more than each other. That the audience laughed at each of their verbal poniards is perhaps the best proof that this is a highly lucid and understandable production, with a cast that can deliver Shakespeare to an audience unfamiliar with the play. But Benedick, you see, is a confirmed bachelor, convinced that nothing could persuade him into matrimony. So when he discovers his dear friend Claudio has fallen for Leonata’s daughter Hero (Sarah Traisman), he’s distraught, throwing a little tantrum like a teenager: “Will I never see a bachelor of three score again?!”.
Gordon does a terrific job of foregrounding how this is a play about people interfering in the love affairs of others. In the case of Beatrice and Benedick, their friends gang up to feed each of them “lies” about how much they are beloved by each other. For these two sworn celibates, it’s exactly the push they need to stop bickering and start bonding. They hit bliss when they finally shut up and kiss. The far simpler and more basic Claudio and Hero didn’t need such interference. Even once they become engaged, they have to be prompted to speak by Beatrice: words don’t flow out easily. But Claudio is easily influenced, whether it’s Don Pedro insisting on wooing Hero in Claudio’s name or Don John’s repeated, often successful, attempts to persuade Claudio to distrust the people he loves most.
Gordon’s attempt to even out the roles in the play between the men and women results in some clever and some problematic gender-swapping — a trend in recent Shakespeare productions. The smartest and best gender-swapping is of the minor characters whose gender is irrelevant. The night watchmen become young girl (and boy) scouts, including the girl in charge (Madison Kist), a girl with an endearing lisp (Isabel Pask), and one lone boy (Napoleon Jimenez), ensuring each are easily differentiable. Sharon Shao doubles up as the messenger and Balthasar, offering a lovely singing voice and a warm presence.
But Gordon’s decision to do away with the patriarchs (Leonato and Antonio) and replace them with matriarchs — Leonata (Patty Gallagher), the Governor of Messina and her sister Antonia (Suzanne Sturn) — is problematic. The change requires few adjustments in dialogue, though it does deprive us of one of the play’s best lines: when Don Pedro greets Leonato, he inquires if Hero is his daughter, and Leonato replies, “Her mother hath told me so many times.” It loses its punch when modified for Leonata.
The bigger issue is that “Much Ado About Nothing” is a play very much concerned with masculinity and fighting against the patriarchy. Does Beatrice’s “He that hath a beard” speech fit in a play where there are almost no men aside from the suitors and the evil-doers? One of the play’s key takeaways is the damage that patriarchal judgement can do: Claudio prioritizes the word of an untrustworthy man over that of his beloved Hero; Leonata believes him; and it sends Hero into ruin. Does it really make sense that a mother would be so quick to betray and condemn her daughter?
More importantly, Beatrice is a radical feminist figure despite being written hundreds of years before we had a word for it. She’s so wise that she inspires royal men to tell her that her “silence most offends [him].” She won’t be pushed to marry anyone less than her equal in intelligence, even when a man as worthy as Don Pedro proposes. She won’t put up with Benedick doing anything but respecting her. But if her crowning achievement is to smash patriarchy, is not this cheapened when there is no actual patriarchy to bump up against? I like the principle of giving more parts to women. I’m not sure gender-swapping all of these characters in this play is ideal though it’s certainly provocative.
“Much Ado About Nothing” runs at Santa Cruz Shakespeare until August 30. In July, it plays on Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. In August, it alternates with the production of “Macbeth,” Wed.–Sun. at 8 p.m. with some 2 p.m. matinees on weekends. Tickets are $40-52. All student and youth tickets are $16 and there are discounts for military and seniors 62+. $20 rush tickets are available one hour prior to the performance. Click here for tickets and showtimes.
(L to R) Tristan Cunningham, Sean San José, Sarah Nina Hayon, and Adrian N. Roberts in California Shakespeare Theater’s Life Is a Dream, directed by Loretta Greco; photo by Kevin Berne.
Fate and plot contrivances often seem interchangeable in Nilo Cruz’s translation of Life is a Dream. But this 17th century philosophical low comedy still proves relevant today in Loretta Greco’s new production at CalShakes. When the disgraced foreigner Rosaura (Sarah Nina Hayon), dressed in men’s garments, accidentally stumbles into the forbidden and secluded prison where the prince, Segismundo (Sean San José), has been held since birth, is it fate or absurd coincidence that the prison’s overseer, Clotaldo (Julian López-Morillas), is the one man she was told would give her shelter in this land? When she surrenders her sword to him, recounting the story her mother told her about how it would help her find friendship abroad, the recognition in his eyes is hilarious. How convenient is it that she’d find him so quickly and that she’d have the perfect key to get her out of this mess? Is it any more surprising that the man who is the biggest threat to the throne, Astolfo (Amir Abdullah), is also the man that Rosaura has travelled so far to wreak vengeance on?
The absurdity of these contrivances keeps the play hovering in a state of unreality, somewhat like a dream. On Andrew Boyce’s set, royalty tend to float across the stage, as if in flight. They tend to enter upstage left on the elevated ramp, which is illuminated by white bands of LED lights on its edges and support beams. This sets the tone for a play that will involve an imprisoned prince, cousins considering marriage so they needn’t compete for the throne, people whose loyalty is torn between those they should help and those that helped them, and a large enough supply of opiates to persuade anyone into a dream state, confused about what is real and what’s not.
On a whim, the King Basilio (Adrian Roberts) decides to give his son, Segismundo, whom he’s never met, a chance to prove he’s a civilized man capable of ruling the country. A prophecy at the time of Segismundo’s birth foretold that he would be a wild creature, a beast, inclined to do terrible things. So Basilio had Segismundo imprisoned as a precaution. Of course, we’re meant to completely ignore the fact that Segismundo’s been treated so abominably throughout his life that he may have been hardened against compassion, for it had never been shown to him. Afraid that his son won’t be up to the task, Basilio has him drugged before being brought to the palace for a trial period: should it go awry, they would be able to easily convince Segismundo that the time he thinks he spent as a wealthy monarch was nothing but a dream.
As coincidence and birth right bring our leads together, it doesn’t take much to guess where it’s all headed. Although Life is a Dream is the most studied of plays by 17th-century Spanish Littplaywright Pedro Calderón de la Barca, it’s about as subtle as an ox. If you were to play a drinking game — and alcohol is permitted inside the Bruns — to drink at every utterance of “Life is a dream!” or “Am I dreaming?” during this brief play, you’d be drunk well before the major battle scenes commenced and about as confused about reality as the characters in the play. And yet between the seemingly floating ramp, the sleeping characters, and the surreal situations, we often find ourselves as perplexed as the characters about what is reality. Isn’t royal blood as arbitrary as an enchanting dream? How much of our lives are the product of our constructed narratives, only real because we dreamed them into existence?
The philosophical dialogue may be a bit blunt, but there’s humour, if simple and silly, along the way. Rosauro and her servant Clarin (Jomar Tagatac) take polar opposite approaches to dealing with authority, usually for comedic effect. Where Rosauro is deferent, respectful, and cautious, Clarin is snarky in his obedience. When forced to give up their weapons at the prison, Rosauro bestows hers upon the man of highest rank, for she believes him worthy of its safekeeping. Clarin willingly gives his up, but not without a slight jab at the guards and Rosauro: “Mine is less demanding so I’ll give it to one of the guards.” Though little more than a plot device, Clarin serves as the play’s fool, lightening what could otherwise be a rather dark mood.
Although de la Barca and Shakespeare were contemporaries, they never saw nor knew about each other’s work. Where de la Barca seems to have deliberately dumbed down his play for the masses, Shakespeare would have found a more elegant telling, with more nuanced jokes that could play to the upper and lower classes. Certainly, As You Like It and A Midsummer Night’s Dream address similar themes as this play with more more wit and subtlety.
Director Greco fully compensates for the play’s shortcomings with her terrific cast. Hayon and Lopez-Morillas are particular standouts, able to play comedy, angst, and affection with equal seriousness and believability. They even make their soliloquies seem like new revelations even as they recount predictable or even absurd plot points. They’re thoroughly real. San José is probably given the toughest material to work with, forced to repeat “Life is a dream” again and again, imbuing each with a sense of novelty. The words may grow tiresome, but he’s utterly convincing as someone who still can’t believe he’s discovered one of life’s greatest secrets.
“Life is a Dream” runs until August 2 on Tuesday–Thursday at 7:30 p.m.; Friday–Saturday at 8 p.m.; Sunday at 4 p.m. There is one Saturday matinee on August 1 at 2 p.m. Tickets range from $15 to $74. Discounted student and senior rush tickets, 30 and under tickets, military tickets, and a daily allotment of $20 tickets are available. More information can be found here.
Read more: Review: Much Ado About Nothing shines at CalShakes >>