Don Juan in the Park

Central Park has its fair share of free outdoor theatre, but so does Prospect Park in Brooklyn, which is now offering an exciting production of Molière's Don Juan.

The heart of the play is not so much the great lover Don Juan himself, but his servant Sganarelle, a part Molière himself originally performed, and in this production is portrayed by Kaliswa Brewster.

Most scholars think La Grange, one of the main actors in Molière's company, probably played Don Juan, a libertine who mocks religion and has no fear of hell. The Brooklyn production has the charismatic Keeshav Moodliar in this role.

Wanting revenge on Don Juan is his spurned ex-lover Elvire, likely played by Mademoiselle Du Parc in the comedy's 1665 premiere. Du Parc was mostly known for playing tragic roles, but Elvire is a tragic figure, particularly as portrayed in Prospect Park by Michelle Veintimilla, who made her Broadway debut playing the younger version of Chita Rivera's character in The Visit.

This is a Molière play, however, so there's still plenty of comedy, such as when Don Juan goes back and forth between two lovely peasant girls named Charlotte and Mathurine (one of whom might originally have been played by Molière's own wife). Also enamored of Charlotte is Pierrot, a character right out of commedia dell'arte, and played wonderfully in the park by theatrical veteran Daniel Pearce. Pearce not only shared the stage with Glenn Close in Mother of the Maid, but has also done numerous Shakespearean roles for The Public Theater.

Naomi Lorrain succeeds performing a variety of parts in the show, but one of the most exciting performers is offstage most of the time. That is cellist Johnathan Moore, who also composed music that keeps the production rolling along. Lucie Tiberghien directs the production, which uses Stephen Wadsworth's translation.

If you're in the neighborhood, Don Juan is running until September 27th. Check it out, just don't accept any dinner invitations from strange statues.

Vampire Family Values

Last night I saw The Lost Boys, the new Broadway musical based on the 1987 Joel Schumacher film about California vampires.

The show opens with a television clip of Ronald Reagan discussing family values, setting up this adaptation as all about family. The central family of the story consists of newly single mom Lucy (Shoshana Bean) and her two sons Michael (LJ Benet) and Sam (Benjamin Pajak).

Old-fashioned family values are represented not just by Reagan, but by Michael and Sam's abusive father, who appears ghost-like in scenes, reminding us of the trauma our families can sometimes inflict. Also championing traditional values is Max (Paul Alexander Nolan), the Goldwater-loving video store owner who hires and then romances Lucy.

Opposing the idea of a traditional family is the non-traditional family formed by the vampires, who call each other brother and live together in harmony when they aren't out slaughtering the locals. Ali Louis Bourzgui plays David, the charismatic frontman for an all-vampire band that plays driving rock music and tries to tempt Michael away from his human family.

After he drinks vampire blood but has not yet made his first kill, Michael is trapped in between, as a half-vampire not fully belonging to either world. In this respect, he is like Star, played by Maria Wirries, who is alienated from the traditional world and has lost her family, but has her eyes wide open to the harm being inflicted by the outsider vampires.

The band The Rescues provided a rocking score for this musical, which has a book written by David Hornsby and Chris Hoch, two former college roommates from Carnegie Mellon University. Michael Arden (who previously directed Maybe Happy Ending) directed the piece.

The Lost Boys is more polished (and more mainstream) than Blood/Love, the other big vampire musical to open in New York this year. It's also less earnest and leans more into a camp sensibility.  However, I thoroughly enjoyed both shows.

Year's Work in Shaw

The Year's Work in English Studies is not a publication I generally review. By the time it comes out, the "year" is two years ago, but it can help in keeping up with recent trends.

Recently, a colleague in the International Shaw Society alerted me to a chapter in it written by Claudio Francesco Favazza, published this month, called "Modern Literature: George Bernard Shaw."

Much of the chapter is taken up by a review of a special issue of Shaw edited by Mary Christian on "Victorian Shaw." I wrote a piece for the issue on The Devil's Disciple, which Favazza astutely summarized:

A comparable concern with formal innovation and transformation underlies James Armstrong’s ‘Subverting the Melodramatic in The Devil’s Disciple’ (ShawR 44:i[2024] 48–61). Armstrong argues that in The Devil’s Disciple [1897] Shaw both adopts and overturns the conventions of Victorian melodrama, using them not for sensation but to expose the illusions of respectability, marriage and social order. He notes that the familiar opposition between a woman’s legal marriage and a ‘true’ marriage with another man—a theme common in melodrama—is here recast to question the legitimacy of marriage itself.

My interest in melodrama should be well known to anyone who reads this blog regularly. (I recently wrote a post about Augustin Daly's Under the Gaslight.) Though Victorian melodramas are rarely read or performed today, they can tell us a lot about the development of theatrical techniques. Favazza notes this, continuing:

Comparing the play with Sydney Grundy’s Slaves of the Ring [1894], the first melodrama Shaw reviewed, Armstrong shows how Shaw moves beyond conventional moral contrasts. Unlike Grundy’s heroine, who acts under illusion, Judith acts consciously, making her near-adultery all the more destabilizing. Armstrong also points out that the play resists the redemptive closure typical of the genre: Dick Dudgeon’s willingness to die is not an act of romantic sacrifice but a deliberate rejection of social norms. As he observes, Shaw even opposed stage interpretations that sentimentalized the relationship between Judith and Dick. In this way, Armstrong concludes, Shaw transforms melodrama’s emotional energy into a medium for cultural and ideological revolt. 

That's a fair assessment of the article. It's nice to know my work is getting read.

The Cenci

The story of the Cenci family is perhaps best known from a verse drama by Percy Shelley. However, Shelley based his play on real-life events at the end of the 16th century.

Shelley wrote in his preface to the play that it was based on a manuscript "copied from the archives of the Cenci Palace at Rome" detailing the events of 1599 that "ended in the extinction of one of the noblest and richest families of that city."

An English translation of an account of the Cenci family from the 18th-century Annali d'Italia by Lodovico-Antonio Muratori exists partially in the hand of Mary Shelley (better known for writing other things). When it gets to the part where poor Beatrice Cenci is violated by her father, the translation glosses over the details, and a note by Mary Shelley states, "The details here are horrible, and unfit for publication."

Those details were not glossed over by Alexandre Dumas, who also wrote a play about the actor Edmund Kean in addition to some books about musketeers. In Les crimes célèbres, Dumas wrote about Count Cenci not only taking his daughter by force, but compelling her to take part in orgies involving men, women, and children. While Shelley shows Beatrice as escaping torture after she was arrested for the murder of her father, Dumas depicts her being interrogated while subjected to the rope and pulley, also known as the strappado.

An image of Beatrice being tortured also appears in the play about her by Antonin Artaud, which is based on Shelley's play but also contains elements from Dumas's version of the story. (It also might have been influenced by a historical novel by Stendhal on the ill-fated family.)

For many years, a portrait of a young woman attributed to the artist Guido Reni was thought to represent Beatrice Cenci. Even if it was not her, it certainly influenced Shelley and the many other artists who have endeavored to tell her story.

If you'd like to hear her story for yourself, Red Bull Theater will be putting on a reading of Shelley's play this November.

Midsummer Rain Site

The Riverdale Shakespeare Players, a new venture bringing together Riverdale Repertory Company and the University of Mount Saint Vincent, tonight had their debut performance, with a spectacular outdoor production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Well, the course of true love never did run smooth, and neither did the course of outdoor theatre. A flash-flood warning forced the Players to preform indoors at the Hayes Theatre at Mount Saint Vincent, rather than outside in Grace Plaza as originally planned.

Co-directors Sarah Stevenson and Esther H. Cohen put a positive spin on the matter, though, noting that if you have to move indoors, you might as well perform in a space with a chandelier (which the Hayes absolutely has). The stage was decorated with flowers and greenery, so the audience at least felt like they were outdoors.

The cast was game. Elana Weinberger was a regal Hippolyta opposite Alan Cutler as Theseus. Deborah Lupkin brought some magic as the Fairy Queen Titania, warring with King Oberon, played by James Duncan. Sam Yaggy brought the Fairy King some (questionable) assistance as Puck, who screwed up the poor lovers, played by Sadie Isseks (Hermia), Michael Kashtelyan (Lysander), Annie Cutler (Helena), and Aaron Levav (Demetrius).

Of course, it would be rude to leave out the Rude Mechanicals, led by Steven Pena as Peter Quince. Matt Gordon appropriately made an ass of himself as Bottom, Andrew Small found his inner falsetto as Flute, Jennifer Firestone built the wall as Snout, and Sarah Greenberg roared mighty roars as Snug.

A Midsummer Night's Dream will be back tomorrow at the Riverdale Y, and then on Sunday at Christ Church Riverdale. Hopefully, those performances will actually be outdoors, but there are rain sites for both, just in case.

For the latest weather-related announcements, you can check out the group's feed on Instagram.

Jack Cade on the Toy Stage

 In the past, I've written about toy-theatre adaptations of such plays as Black-Eyed Susan, The Castle Spectre, The Miller and His Men, Oliver Twist, and even William Shakespeare's Macbeth.

While all of those were popular on stages during the 19th century, toy theatres also presented less known stories, including that of Jack Cade's rebellion which is featured in the second part of Shakespeare's Henry VI trilogy.

The Boys of England journal published a script for a toy-theatre version of Jack Cade; Or, The Rebel of London that is loosely based on incidents from The Second Part of Henry VI, sometimes borrowing Shakespeare's language, or at least his jokes.

In the first scene, Cade proclaims: "By my blood and sword, there shall be seven halfpenny loaves sold for one penny, and the three-hooped pot shall have ten hoops, and always be full." This is a paraphrase from Act IV, Scene 2 of Shakespeare's play, though it leaves out the quip that follows it: "and I will make it felony to drink small beer."

Perhaps the most famous line in Shakespeare's play is "The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers." The script for the toy-theatre version shortens this to "Let us kill all the lawyers." A bigger difference is the portrayal of Alexander Iden, the man who killed Cade. Shakespeare shows him as a simple man content with a small inheritance who captures and kills Cade by chance.

The toy-theatre version of the play remakes Iden into a romantic lead in love with a young woman named Violet who has been accosted by Cade and his men. Shakespeare's Iden doesn't even realize at first that it is Cade he has slain, as he is simply trying to keep the peace. This contrasts greatly with the Iden in the toy-theatre play, who proclaims patriotically, "Thus perish all traitors and foes to old England and its monarch!"

It's not surprising that scripts for toy theatres frequently simplified plots, language, and characters, making them easier for young people to understand. I spoke about this two years ago in Glasgow at a conference of the British Association for Romantic Studies. An expanded version of that talk later appeared in Theatre Notebook, if you're interested.

The Adventure of the Dancing Men

Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of the Dancing Men" is an entertaining read, but would it make a good play?

In the hands of adaptor Susane Lee, the answer is decidedly yes. On the surface, it would seem to be the least adaptable tale in the Holmes canon. After all, it's the story of a secret code (similar to Edgar Allan Poe's "The Gold Bug") with half the fun being the cyphers made up of little stick figures which were originally published with the text of the story.

Those cyphers, and Holmes's brilliant (yet elementary) decoding of them, creatively appear onstage in the version currently being performed by Hudson Classical Theater Company outdoors by the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument in Riverside Park. Some of the cyphers are drawn in chalk by the villain, Abe Slaney (played by Max Bank. Others appear on papers the actors show to the audience.

Most brilliantly, though, the actors take on the shape of the cyphers (which look like little dancing men) as Holmes is explaining how he cracked the code. The company's founder, Nicholas Martin-Smith, plays Holmes on stage, ably assisted by Quint Spitzer as Dr. John Watson. Alison Logan also gives a memorable performance both as Holmes's landlady Mrs. Hudson and as Mrs. Saunders, the loquacious housekeeper who turns out to be a rather unreliable witness in the case.

Costume designer Joy Grad provides a delightful steampunk aesthetic for the show, which also includes dancing coordinated by Karen Eterovich. Tony Mita of New York Combat for Stage and Screen ably choreographs the fight sequences. The outdoor stage works for the story, which partially takes place in a garden anyway.

Having recently seen Red Monkey Theater Group perform their adaptation of a different Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet" I was pleased to see again how delightful it can be to watch Holmes and Watson come to life on stage

The Adventure of the Dancing Men is only playing until August 16th. Don't miss your chance to see it!