May 2012
4 posts
Home News: Shakesblog @ TAC
Dear readers:
I am proud to announce that Millman’s Shakesblog is joining the Arts and Letters page at The American Conservative. I’ve been blogging for TAC for a few months now on other topics, and have been eagerly awaiting the moment, now arrived, when they bring my theatre criticism under their general wing.
Apropos of the name of the magazine, I should stress that I don’t...
Ich und Du in Iraq: Donald Margulies's Time Stands...
At the college I attended, history majors were required to write a thesis in their senior year. I was interested at the time in early colonial (16th century) Latin America, and in particular the attempts by Spaniards and native peoples to make sense of each other’s cultures in their own cultural terms. (I was very impressed by Inga Clendinnen’s study of this process in 16th century...
A Tragedy of Homeric Proportions
And now for something completely different: Macbeth acted out by the voices of “The Simpsons.”
No, really.
Rick Miller is the inspired lunatic responsible for MacHomer, a one-man show in which Miller, doing the voices of dozens of Simpsons characters, acts out a version of Macbeth that is recognizably a version of Shakespeare’s tragedy. Apparently, he got the idea during the...
Playing It Straight: The Maids and A Midsummer...
Camp taste is a kind of love, love for human nature. It relishes, rather than judges, the little triumphs and awkward intensities of “character.” … Camp taste identifies with what it is enjoying. People who share this sensibility are not laughing at the thing they label as “a camp,” they’re enjoying it. Camp is a tender feeling.
The quote is the...
April 2012
1 post
More Double-Features: From George VI to The Book...
Two new installments in the weekly double-feature feature:
- Ian McKellen’s “Richard III” and “The King’s Speech”
- “A Serious Man” and “The Tree of Life”
Enjoy!
March 2012
4 posts
Beelzebub Has a Devil Put Aside For Me
My review of the CSC’s production of Brecht’s Galileois now up at The American Conservative website. Check it out!
New Double-Feature-Feature
Over at my other blog I’ve started a new feature: the weekly double-feature, two great movies that you wouldn’t think go together, but that I argue do. This week: “The Philadelphia Story” and “Blue Valentine.” Check it out.
Stratford's Torch Has Been Passed
Regular readers know that my wife and I are long time patrons of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, a landmark institution in the history of classical theatre and a key vehicle for the continuation of the classical tradition. Stratford just announced that Antoni Cimolino - the ultimate insider, having grown up professionally at Stratford from actor, to director, to Executive Director, to General...
#SeussSpeare
This is really too good. Highlights:
“Peaseblossom and Mustardseed, bring me some brew!” said the Ass on the Grass to Thing One and Thing Two.
I do not bite my thumb at you. I bite my thumb, though. Yes, I do!
I sat there with Juliet./We sat there, we two,/And I said, ‘How I wish/I were no Montague.’
Oh look! Here comes Malvolio! Those yellow stockings have...
February 2012
4 posts
Shakespeare's Action Hero
My review of Ralph Fiennes’s movie, “Coriolanus,” based on the Shakespeare play, is now up at The American Conservative. Do check it out.
A Brooklyn Traviata
I’m not really knowledgeable enough about opera to say anything much about the City Opera production of La Traviata that opened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this weekend. But I had the privilege of seeing a full dress rehearsal last week, and the final act had me in tears. Unsophisticated tears they may have been, but no less salty for that.
Check it out.
Trotting It Out Again
A “War Horse” in theatrical parlance is a show that is broadly familiar and broadly popular, one that you can always trot out to reasonable success without having to think too much about it. There’s a joke that you can always tell when a Shakespeare company has had a bad season, because the next year they’ll programMacbethandA Midsummer Night’s Dream, two of...
Spacey's Richard Talks To Us, His Director Talks...
We took my son, when he was not yet six years old, to see Hamlet at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. His one-sentence review after the show?
“Hamlet talks too much when nobody is listening.”
Hamlet is the most renowned of Shakespeare’s über-soliloquizers, but he’s not the first. That title properly belongs to Richard of Gloucester, the white boar - Richard III.
...
January 2012
3 posts
All The World Is One Big Chelm
In Isaac Bashevis Singer’s famous story, “When Shlemiel Went To Warsaw,” a man from Chelm - an idiot, a shlemiel named, appropriately enough, “Shlemiel” - goes on a journey to see far off Warsaw. He doesn’t get far before he tires and lies down for a nap, leaving his boots pointing in the direction he was going so he would know where to go when he waked. A...
Send In The Clowns
Speaking of Beckett, two other theatrical highlights of December for me were a pair of productions of his short works: Krapp’s Last Tape, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, starring John Hurt and directed by Michael Colgan, and a collection of really short works assembled by directors Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne into an evening called Fragments, presented by Theatre For a New...
A Chekhov Experiment
Finally catching up with the remaining shows from 2011, and I’ll start with one of the best of the year: Classic Stage’s production of The Cherry Orchard, which, if you can believe it, is actually still running; you could see it this weekend if you could only score a ticket.
The Cherry Orchard is the most experimental of Chekhov’s major plays. Indeed, it feels to me like the...
December 2011
1 post
Keep Talking To Keep From Speaking Out
Why do we tell stories - really?
James X, a one-man show from Ireland that I saw last week in a downtown Manhattan theatre space, appears to be a story about cruelty, suffering and shame - and to whom shame properly belongs. It’s an indictment of the Irish social welfare and juvenile justice system - of a state and a church and a society that collaborated to perpetrate terrible cruelties on...
November 2011
1 post
Modern Family
I saw two plays recently, both contemporary, one of which I liked (Nicky Silver’s The Lyons now playing at the Vineyard Theatre with Linda Lavin in the lead) and one of which I didn’t (Adam Rapp’s Dreams of Flying, Dreams of Falling, recently mounted by the Atlantic Theatre Company at the Classic Stage space, with Christine Lahti in the lead), but both of which set me to...
October 2011
4 posts
A Man From Stratford
On THE man from Stratford:
There’s quotation that appears on the Shakespeare Oxford Society’s website that seems to me to inadvertently undermine the very claim it intends to make. It says this:
“Those who believe de Vere was Shakespeare must accept an improbable hoax, a conspiracy of silence involving, among others, Queen Elizabeth herself. Those who side with the Stratford man must...
What We Talk About When We Talk About What We're...
My other very-overdue review from Chicago is of Steppenwolf’s impressive production of Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park. In a nutshell, Norris’s play is A Raisin in the Sun told from the white perspective. I don’t think that’s how Norris himself would put it, exactly, and I don’t think that’s exactly what he intended. But I think that’s roughly what he...
Three questions to ask your local... →
From the always-insightful Alan Jacobs:
1) You argue that William of Stratford couldn’t have written The Plays because he was too poorly educated, while The Plays demonstrate great learning. Are you willing to argue this position consistently? John Keats had an extremely limited literary education, but nevertheless wrote poems that demonstrate a pretty high level of learning — or did he?...
A History Of Violence
I have been extremely remiss in not writing anything for an entire month since I saw the Hypocrites’ marvelous production of all seven of Sophocles’s surviving tragedies, billed as Seven Sicknesses. The whole thing takes four hours, including two intermissions, one of which features a felafel dinner (included in the price of admission), but this isn’t Mourning Becomes Electra -...
September 2011
8 posts
He Didn't Say Play On What, But I Still Think It's...
A good rule for art and life is: do what you love. Other people may appreciate or not appreciate what you do, but at least you’ll know why you did it.
It’s a rule Des McAnuff clearly followed in his music-stuffed production of Twelfth Night. And, speaking for myself, he was playing my tune.
The production reconceives Twelfth Night as a jukebox musical. Feste, the jester (played by...
Redeeming Time
I am generally averse to works of theatre that revolve around ideas about science or mathematics. I liked, but didn’t love Proof. I liked, but didn’t love Arcadia. Scientific metaphors that some authors find fecund - and obviously many audiences agree - seem sterile to me. I suspect it’s because, to my mind, scientific ideas can’t really serve as metaphors - rather, we use...
One! Two! Three!
That’s the title of the Billy Wilder film, starring James Cagney, based on the Ferenc Molnar play The President. The film is one of my personal favorites; when I heard the play (in an adaptation by Morwyn Brebner), which was a huge hit at Shaw in 2008, was being revived, I had to see it.
The play is basically the climactic action that concludes the movie. The premise is: Mr. Norrison, the...
Merrily We Roll Along
Geraint Wyn Davies’s other starring role this year is as Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor. This is, let’s not beat around the bush, not a very good play. I don’t merely mean that it’s not first-rate Shakespeare. Troilus and Cressida is a structurally problematic play. Two Gentlemen of Verona is a hodge-podge with a weird and unsatisfying ending. Timon of Athens has a...
The Thoroughly Midcentury Modern Musical
As it happens, Lerner and Loewe’s two most celebrated musicals - My Fair Lady and Camelot - are being staged right now at rival Canadian theatre festivals, the first at Shaw and the second at Stratford. Taking in the two shows on successive nights, I was struck by how similar the two shows are:
- Both feature male protagonists with pretensions to culture (Higgins) or civilization (Arthur)...
Mine Eyes Have Seen
Antoni Cimolino is an interesting figure in the history of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. He began his career there as an actor in the late 1980s, before shifting to a combination of administration and stage direction. He’s now the General Director of the Festival. He is, like his mentor, the late Richard Monette, a home-grown leader, someone who has spent his career at the...
A Bit Of The Old Ultra-Violence
Titus Andronicus was one of the most popular plays in Shakespeare’s lifetime, but its longer-term critical reputation has been decidedly mixed. Sam Johnson thought it was so bad as to be unplayable. Tennessee Williams called it his favorite Shakespearean play, precisely because of the “blood and guts” literally and metaphorically on display; this is a story about furiously...
The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even
Speaking of plays where all relationships are a struggle for dominance, the week before last we went for the second time to see the current, extraordinary Stratford production of Pinter’s The Homecoming. Now, my knowledge of Pinter is exceedingly limited. The only Pinter I’d seen prior to this production were the two one-acts staged in New York this past fall - The Collection and A...
August 2011
8 posts
A Winningly Ill-Humored Love
I went into the Stratford production of The Misanthrope thinking, you know, this is really a play that needs to be set in a high school. You’ve got a group of people who are essentially powerless and useless - having been deprived of any independent power by the absolutist king Louis XIV - but who are, by virtue of this very dependency, essentially equal, and who, because they are all...
The Good, The Bad and the Ugly
At the other extreme from Jesus Christ Superstar - in terms of funding, exposure, and theatrical style - is the production of Richard III now playing at the Tom Patterson theatre. This has been described by many critics as overly traditional, but I don’t think they go far enough. This isn’t a traditional production; it’s, for lack of a better way of putting it, a reactionary...
Hosanna Hey-Sanna Sanna Sanna Ho!
There are actually two productions at Stratford this year where a principal character is greeted with “hosannas.” And now, having seen the other one, I finally understand what the fuss is about.
The fuss about Andrew Lloyd Webber, that is. My experience with his work has been relatively limited. I saw Cats (stupid) and Joseph (cute, but negligible) as a kid, and last year at Stratford...
Off, Off You Lendings!
The word, “Hosanna” is actually two words from biblical Hebrew and Aramaic: “hosha” (that’s Aramaic; the biblical Hebrew would be “hoshiah”) which is the imperative form of the verb “to save” or “to redeem” (i.e.: “save!” or “redeem!”) and the word “na,” which is a term indicating a request of a...
What Am I Doing Here?
I don’t mean here as in where I am physically - that’s Canada, the promised land, where I’ve already seen six productions at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival that I haven’t gotten around to writing about. I mean here as in on this blog, writing about theatre. What is the purpose of this activity?
The question comes to me because I’m still hoping to take this blog...
Doleful Matter Merrily Set Down
Belatedly finishing up the shows I saw in New York before I left town, I’m going to say a few too-brief words about an excellent production of The Winter’s Tale that was part of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s celebrated residency this summer at the New York Armory on Park Avenue.
The Winter’s Tale is one of my favorite plays. I don’t have the time right now to go...
The Fantasticks
This was a problematic season at the Delacorte: in addition to All’s Well That Ends Well, we were treated to a riveting production of another “problem play” - Measure For Measure, one of my favorite plays and one that I’ve rarely seen done to my satisfaction.
The play presents numerous problems to a director and the actors in the company. Isabella is an extremely difficult...
Love's Labours Won
Assuming it’s not the title to a lost sequel to Love’s Labours Lost, I’ve always favored the theory that it’s an alternative title to All’s Well The Ends Well, Shakespeare’s highly problematic romantic comedy. There is no play in Shakespeare’s canon, that I’m aware of, where love, if that’s what is won in the end, is so plainly the product of...
June 2011
3 posts
Old Fools Are Babes Again
That’s Goneril’s assessment of her father almost immediately after he comes to live with her, and it is the touchstone of Derek Jacobi’s highly-acclaimed performance in the title role in the Donmar Warehouse production of King Lear, recently mounted at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. From his first moments on stage, Jacobi is playing, putting on a show for his daughters and his...
Heartbreak House
At the other extreme theatrically from a head trip like Sleep No More is the head-y but emphatically not trippy latest from Tony Kushner, the endlessly (and, really, entitled) Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures, playing the last few weeks at the Public Theater. The title’s double allusion to Shaw and Mary Baker Eddy does an excellent...
Next In Line For the Throne
So the Stratford Festival’s Artistic Director, Des McAnuff, has announced his retirement after the 2013 season. The last time Stratford was faced with a resignation at the top, they foolishly decided to divide the kingdom. I think it’s safe to say they won’t try that again any time soon.
I know essentially nothing about the possible leadership options - I don’t even live...
May 2011
7 posts
An Extraordinarily Difficult Play to Stage...
I’ve now seen a half-dozen straight stage productions of that play and I can say that, so far, I’m inclined to agree with Geoffrey Tennant’s assessment. Macbeth is, indeed, extraordinarily difficult to stage effectively. When the staging isn’t terribly effective - a problem with a production I saw in 1995 with two excellent Canadian actors in the leads - the play is limp...
"So long as you use this formula, you can put your...
I’m working now on a screen adaptation of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens (not doing it for anybody at present, just doing it - though I hope, of course, to take it somewhere) and have been thinking a lot about setting in film versus stage adaptations of Shakespeare.
Shakespeare onstage is frequently done not in period but in some non-period setting. This is sufficiently common that, in...
The Invention of Love, and the Love of Invention
Talent is a funny thing, maturing according to the muse’s timetable and not that of the artist. Some, like, say, Orson Welles, reach extraordinary heights with their earliest efforts, only to see so many of their subsequent projects fall short - due to overambition? an uncompromising ego? or the sheer smallness of the ordinary mortals with whom they find themselves surrounded? Others,...
Liar Liar Pants On Fire
Almost caught up on theatre reviews - there are two productions of Macbeth that I’ve been saving until I see Sleep No More, at which point I can review them all together. Other than those, the only thing I’ve left out is CSC’s recent production of Double Falsehood.
Double Falsehood purports to be a version of the lost Shakespeare/Fletcher play Cardenio. All I can say is if...
A Far Cry From Kensington Gardens
I was downright fulsome in my praise of the recent production of Treasure Island in Fort Greene, so it might surprise you to learn that I was downright disappointed in the very theatrically inventive and engaging Peter and the Starcatcher, the final performance of which I caught at New York Theatre Workshop last weekend.
It surprised me. The production was really outstanding; the cast uniformly...
Elder Eldad the Rain King
A man goes on a mission. He is sent deep into the jungle, to confront a world of cruelty and insanity almost beyond his comprehension, and certainly beyond anything he was trained to deal with. Faced with impossible odds, he goes off-script, begins to improvise in ways that alarm his superiors. They tell him his methods are unsound, withdraw his commission, order him to return home, but he refuses...
Dying is Easy. Comedy is Hard
A commenter asks “What do you see as the distinction between tragedy and comedy in classical theater?” I started to answer in a comment, but it got too long, so I’m promoting my answer to a post.
First of all, I have to question the notion that Shakespeare is classical theatre. Shakespeare obeyed none of the classical unities from Aristotle - there is never unity of action...
April 2011
3 posts
Diary of a Madman
The other show that played recently at the Public was the surprisingly powerful Compulsion, written by Rinne Groff and starring Mandy Patinkin as Sid Silver, a thinly-veiled fictionalization of Meyer Levin. Silver “discovers” the Diary of Anne Frank, hustles it through the process of publication in America, and gets permission from Otto Frank, Anne’s father, to adapt the play for...
Then I Love Thee, Because Thou Art A Woman
I have my own ideas, needless to say, of how to stage Timon, though of late (given my other ambitions), I’ve been rethinking them as possible ways to adapt Timon for the screen. I’m going to indulge myself by sketching out one of my ideas here.
The Steward should be a woman. I’ve gotten a lot of pushback on this, but that resistance has only made me more convinced that...
