Travesties

Last night, I saw Roundabout Theatre Company's production of Tom Stoppard's wonderful play Travesties.

The play is an extremely witty farce Stoppard wrote after reading a biography of James Joyce. Stoppard was fascinated by a brief account of Joyce taking part in a production of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest in Zurich, Switzerland during the First World War.

Peter McDonald plays Joyce in this production, and pulls off both the ridiculous sight gags and the occasional magic trick Stoppard's script requires him to perform. The protagonist of the play, however, is not Joyce, but Henry Carr, who worked for the British Consulate at the time and was recruited to play the lead in Earnest. (As Travesties mentions repeatedly, the lead is not Earnest, but "the other one.")

Tom Hollander plays Carr, and it's easy to see why he received an Olivier Award nomination when he played the role in London. (This production, directed by Patrick Marber, was originally done at the Menier Chocolate Factory, which previously transferred a revival of Sunday in the Park with George to Roundabout.) Carr begins the play as an old man, remembering not just Joyce, but also the communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin and the dadaist poet Tristan Tzara, who as it so happens, were also in Zurich at the same time as Joyce.

Dan Butler plays Lenin, and Seth Numrich plays the monocle-wearing Tzara, who flirts wildly with a young woman named Gwendolyn (who by chance has been helping Joyce as he writes Ulysses). Gwendolyn is not a historical figure, and her resemblance to the character of the same name in The Importance of Being Earnest is not coincidental. As the play proceeds, we quickly perceive that Carr has gotten quite a bit mixed up in his head, and his memories cannot be entirely relied upon. Scarlett Strallen, who plays Gwendolyn, can more than be relied upon, however. An alumna of such farcical comedies as A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder, she's very much in her element in Travesties.

The same is also true of Sara Topham, who plays the librarian Cecily, another character who appears to have walked out of The Importance of Being Earnest and into Carr's memory. Topham played the title role in Saint Joan at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake last summer, and she was also quite memorable as Beatrice-Joanna in Red Bull's production of The Changeling the year before that. In Travesties, she shows remarkable versatility, performing a racy table-top dance in Carr's imagination, and then later appearing as an old woman who helps to set the historical record straight.

Tickets for Travesties are on sale through the middle of June, so book now. It's rare to get a chance to see this Stoppard gem, and even more rare to see it performed this well!

A Stage Within a Stage

Meta-theatricality is wonderful on stage... when it works.

In Leonid Andreyev's short play Requiem, for instance, the set is described as "The replica of a small theatre." On one side is a stage, and on the other are puppets set up like an audience. The acton takes place on the stage within a stage, and at the end of the play the character of "Theatre Manager" has a long monologue, seen only by the puppets in the audience, and of course by the real audience watching the whole thing.

Requiem is a symbolist drama from 1916, very earnest and very dark. Yet a similar set-up is used by a play of a very different sort: Broadway's A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder. Set designer Alexander Dodge placed upon the stage at the Walter Kerr Theatre another stage, an elaborate Victorian proscenium stage in fact, complete with footlights and a lush, velvet curtain. Since all musicals are highly theatrical, and since the play's imaginative Edwardian setting has its own sense of heightened realism, the meta-theatricality works wonderfully.

Robert L. Freedman and Steven Lutvak's A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder is based on Roy Horniman's 1907 novel Israel Rank, about a young man who murders a number of people in line to inherit a title, finally inheriting it himself. That novel was also the subject of a film with Alec Guinness called Kind Hearts and Coronets. The play was in development for years, and eventually made it to Broadway, no thanks to the holding company that owns the rights to the 1949 film. In spite of the fact the story is in the public domain, the company filed a baseless copyright suit against the show's creators. Thankfully, a judge threw out the frivolous suit, paving the way for countless audiences to enjoy the show.

Though I've been wanting to see the play for a while, it was only this afternoon that I finally got to watch it. I was certainly not disappointed. Freedman and Lutvak's songs are delightful, especially the opening number, "A Warning to the Audience," as well as "I Don't Know What I'd Do," a song sung by one of the protagonist's two love interests. That role, Sibella, was taken by Scarlett Strallen, an actor who impressed me greatly last year as Lady MacDuff in Kenneth Branagh's production of Macbeth.

What really struck me about this production, however, was Dodge's beautiful set. By lowering and raising the curtain on the stage within a stage, the crew can seamlessly perform set changes while the play continues in front of the false proscenium. Plus, while tables and chairs to the sides of the stage are basically realistic, the set pieces on the stage within a stage can look like painted flats. The more stylized set pieces fit right in, and they add immensely to the humor of the play.

Upon occasion the proscenium itself is used, as arms and faces pop out of openings, or the protagonist is forced to climb up its side. Even the show's finale manages to make use of the proscenium arch.

Broadway might be worlds away from Andreyev's symbolist drama, but it certainly has learned a thing or two about how to make meta-theatricality work.

Macbeth at the Armory

Last night I arrived at the Park Avenue Armory to see Macbeth, co-directed by and starring Kenneth Branagh. You have to understand that when I was in high school, I watched Branagh's Henry V even more than I watched Star Wars, and that's saying a lot. For me, seeing Branagh live on stage, playing one of the greatest Shakespearean roles there is, wielding a broadsword to a score composed by Patrick Doyle, just like he did in Henry V, was the chance of a lifetime. And no, I was not disappointed.

When I arrived at the Armory, things were a bit chaotic. This was only the third performance of the show, and some of the ushers were giving me conflicting information, so it seems not all of the kinks had been worked out yet concerning how to get the audience inside. How difficult could that be? Well, this is not your ordinary theatrical experience.

Upon getting my ticket at the will-call booth, I was given a green-and-white wristband with my clan name on it. I was in clan Macduff, which is clearly the best clan ever. After all, nothing bad could ever happen to someone in Macduff's family, right?

As I left the box office area, a young woman dressed in vaguely medieval clothing greeted me as a member of her clan. She instructed me to have a look around the armory, but to make sure I eventually gathered with others upstairs in our clan room so we could prepare for battle. Macduff would be the first clan to process onto the field, she said.

If you go to Macbeth at the Armory, I recommend that you use the restrooms in the basement, rather than the one unisex bathroom on the second floor. (There's also a lady's room on the second floor, so this is less important for women, but guys on the second floor were waiting forever to pee. "Welcome to our world," sigh all of my female blog readers in unison.) I spent a good deal of time in line rather than getting to see the different rooms in the armory. Fortunately, I had seen them before, but if you've never been to the Armory, go early. The building is delightful to explore.

I got to the Macduff clan room just as people were starting to process. I grabbed a program, complete with my clan name and tartan, and proceeded down to the drill hall where the performance is. A hooded figure rang a bell and opened a gigantic wooden door into... a heath! Yes, they had built a Scottish heath INSIDE the armory! Figures with torches (not flashlights, real torches) led us down a long stone path, with mud and clumps of vegetation on either side of us. Before us was a structure made of monoliths resembling Stonehenge.

We filed up a long flight of stairs behind the scaffolding that supports the bleachers. Be forewarned, you don't have comfortable Broadway-style seats for this show. You will be sitting on hard wood for the next two hours. The audience is on both sides of the action, with the Stonehenge-type ruins on the one end, and a church-like structure on the other. In the church area, a lone woman stands before a mass of candles. Looking in the other direction, you can see the other clans processing into the performance area.

When the play begins, rain comes down onto the two armies battling on the dirt below, creating a wonderful mixture of mud for the rest of the performance. The witches are delightfully creepy, and the fight scenes are choreographed with the deliberate intensity of a dance. That shouldn't be surprising, as co-director Rob Ashford is best known for directing Broadway musicals like Thoroughly Modern Millie, Curtains, and Evita. The lighting in the Armory is so controlled that a shift in the lights can reveal a set piece you didn't even realize was there. Plus, the heath is inevitably used again on a couple of occasions, with our hooded friends (listed in the program as "Ensemble") filling out the cast so that it really can look like an army is marching into battle.

Branagh is the most original Macbeth I've ever seen, at one point spouting out line fragments as if he is truly mad, and at another running lines together to make even the familiar "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" speech ring with new resonances. He's also the only Macbeth I've ever seen who managed to outshine Lady Macbeth. (Her part is so well written, not even Patrick Stewart was able to completely eclipse his co-star in the play on Broadway.) This isn't to say I didn't thoroughly enjoy Alex Kingston as Lady Macbeth. Best known as River Song in the Doctor Who television series, Kingston is coldly manipulative as Lady Macbeth, even when passionately kissing her husband.

The rest of the cast is relatively unknown, but standout performances were given by Jimmy Yuill as Banquo and Scarlett Strallen as Lady Macduff. Yuill appeared in the Royal Shakespeare Company's famous production of Nicholas Nickleby and then later as Captain Jamy in Branagh's Henry V. He also played the Friar in Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing, Constable Dull in Love's Labours Lost, and Corin in As You Like It. Strallen I had not heard of before, but she apparently does a lot of musical theatre, and replaced Ashley Brown in the Broadway production of Mary Poppins.

Tickets have got to be hard to get, but there are a limited number of rush tickets available for $19. If it's at all possible for you to see Macbeth, see it! This is a performance you do not want to miss.

MACBETH