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!

Supposes

The Italian Renaissance writer Ludovico Ariosto is most famous for his verse epic Orlando Furioso. However, he also wrote plays, including the highly influential comedy I Suppositi, notable for a 1566 English translation by George Gascoygne called Supposes.

Ariosto's first comedy, La Cassaria (The Coffer), premiered in 1508 at the court of Cardinal Ippolito in Ferrara. It was a hit, and the next year Ariosto premiered I Suppositi at the palace of the duke. Both plays were originally in prose, though Ariosto later wrote verse versions of them.

Both plays are also examples of commedia erudita, the learned comedy of scholars, which differed from commedia dell'arte, which was produced by professionals. Commedia erudita looked to classical Roman drama for inspiration. I Suppositi borrows in part from Terence's comedy The Eunuch and even more from Plautus's play The Captives.

In the first act, we learn that the young scholar Erostrata has switched places with his servant Dulippo. (Gascoygne spells the names Erostrato and Dulypo.) This is similar to the way Philocrates switches places with his slave Tyndarus in The Captives, but in Ariosto's play the motive is different. The false Dulippo (really Erostrata) uses his servant disguise to sleep with the beautiful Polinesta (Polynesta in Gascoygne's spelling).

Polinesta's father Damon, who is similar to the parsimonious Pantalone in commedia dell'arte, wants to marry her off without having to pay a dowery. That's why he favors a match with the old doctor of law Cleandro (Cleander as Gascoygne has it). Cleandro is like the Dottore figure in commedia dell'arte, and similarly has some long, rambling monologues. In the first act, he says (in Gascoygne's translation):

It becometh not a man to praise him selfe; but, indeede, I may say, and say truely, that my knowledge hath stoode me in better steade at a pinche than coulde all the goodes in the worlde. I came out of Otranto when the Turkes wonne it, and first I came to Padua, after hither, where by reading, counseling, and pleading, within twentie years I have gathered and gayned as good as ten thousande ducats.

That incident in Otranto, which the Ottoman Turks seized in 1480, putting much of the population to the sword and enslaving the rest, will become important later. First, however, we get a plot where the false Erostrata convinces a gentleman traveling from Sienna to pretend to be his father. Things get complicated when the real Erostrata's father arrives from Sicily. If this sounds a lot like the subplot in William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, now you know where the Bard picked up some of his ideas.

Of course, Ariosto was borrowing from others as well. The parasite character in I Suppositi, Pasifilo (or Pasyphilo according to Gascoygne), is based of Ergasilus from The Captives. Like Ergasilus, Pasifilo is always on the lookout for a free meal. When told he should supervise what is prepared for supper, he replies:

By the masse, if you should have studied this sevennight you could not have appointed me an office to please me better! You shall see what dishes I will devise.

Ariosto's borrowings from The Captives goes far beyond just the parasite character.  We learn that Cleandro's son was sold as a slave to Erostrata's father, just as Hegio's son was stolen and sold as a slave in Plautus's play. In the end, Erostrato married Polinesta (without Damon having to pay a dowery) and Cleandro is content having recovered a son and heir. All ends happily.

Ariosto went on to compose other comedies, including Il Negromante (The Necromancer) and La Lena (Lena). He left another play, I Studenti (The Students) unfinished at his death, though it was completed by his brother Gabriele. It is I Suppositi, however, that has had the most influence of his comedies, at least in the English-speaking world.

Constancy Unrewarded

Faithfulness to a job has always been a fool's errand. Constancy is inevitably unrewarded. In fact, "Constancy Unrewarded" is the subtitle of Bernard Shaw's comical blank-verse drama The Admirable Bashville.

Shaw wrote the piece as a mocking adaptation of his most famous novel, Cashel Byron's Profession. Of course, Shaw is known as a dramatist, not a novelist. Being Shaw's most famous novel is like being the most popular kid on the math team. It's hardly something brag-worthy.

After being rejected by nearly every publisher in Britain, Shaw had the piece published in a socialistic periodical. The novelist Robert Louis Stevenson thought the best thing about the book was a footman named Bashville, who falls rather hopelessly in love with his aristocratic employer, Lydia Carew.

The relations between wealthy patrons and a servant class hardly even deemed human is on display on Broadway right now, not in an unlikely revival of The Admirable Bashville, but in the imported Korean musical Maybe Happy Ending, which I finally caught up with last week. Though ostensibly a futuristic piece of science fiction, the play skewers the relationships the wealthy have with the people they employ so long as it's convenient for them.

In Maybe Happy Ending, we are introduced first to Oliver, a Model 3 robot who has been left by his former owner James in what appears to be a studio apartment where he can listen to records and enjoy a lifetime subscription to Jazz Monthly. Oliver's orderly routine is interupted by the robot across the hall, a Model 5 named Claire, who in spite of her more convincing human-like manner has a less robust battery than the Model 3s and requires frequent charging.

Just as Bashville's love for Lydia can never be reciprocated, Oliver will forever pine for James, the former owner he idolizes. In Shaw's story, Lydia feels a tinge of guilt for not being able to reward her servant's constancy. Similarly, James in Maybe Happy Ending feels such remorse for having to retire his outmoded Model 3 that he sets Oliver up in what he hopes will be a humane resting place for retired robots, even though it's essentially just a glorified warehouse for unwanted junk.

Even more poignant in the musical is the story of Claire, the Model 5 who knocks on Oliver's door. Her former owner gifted her designer clothes and even a car. (Model 3s can't drive, but 5s can.) She is aware, however, that the woman she served did this because she is rich, not because she actually cares about her. Shaw's admirable servant eventually professes love for his employer, but robots like Claire are apparently incapable of love. We learn that Claire received a profession of love from her owner's husband, which led to the humans warehousing her so they could deal with their own messed-up relationship.

The thing is, while our society might treat employees like robots, we are in fact capable of love, pain, regret, and all of the other emotions our owners (oh, wait, employers) can experience. In Maybe Happy Ending, Oliver and Claire do eventually fall in love, or at least think they do. Being that both are now obsolete and replacement parts are no longer being manufactured, their time together is limited, though. Eventually, both will run out of battery life.

Today, A.I. thieves and other wealthy exploiters are making workers across the world increasingly obsolete. Offers of early retirement or retraining to older workers betrayed by the system they helped to build and maintain often seem like little more than warehousing for old robots. Perhaps it eases the consciences of those with power, but if we are to discover our own maybe happy endings, it will have to be on our own.

It seems there is no more help for the victims of economic exploitation in real life than there is for the discarded servants of fiction.

A Man of the People

I've written before about the actor Edmund Kean's working-class associations, including his membership in the notorious Wolves Club.

William Hazlitt, a theatre critic who admired Kean, frequently linked him with the common man. "Mr. Kean's acting is not of the patrician order," he wrote in the London Magazine in 1820, "he is one of the people, and what might be termed a radical performer."

Seeing Kean as the title character in William Shakespeare's Coriolanus, Hazlitt deemed him a failure. Since "the prevailing characteristics of the part are inordinate self-opinion, and haughty elevation of soul," Kean simply lacked the aristocratic grace to play the role, Hazlitt thought. Instead, Kean "descended into the common arena of man," which might have been good for other characters, but not Coriolanus.

Similarly, Hazlitt was disappointed at seeing Kean in the regal title role of Shakespeare's King Lear. Of course, Kean wasn't exactly acting Shakespeare's Lear, as he was performing Nahum Tate's adaptation of the play with a happy ending. Still, Hazlitt found Kean's performance "altogether inferior to his Othello."

The parts of Kean's Lear that Hazlitt found most affecting were the ones where he was least royal and most human. He singled out this speech Lear has when reunited with Cordelia:

Pray, do not mock me;

I am a very foolish, fond old man,

Fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less;

And, to deal plainly,

I fear I am not in my perfect mind.

Methinks, I should know you, and know this man;

Yet I am doubtful; for I'm mainly ignorant

What place this is; and all the skill I have

Remembers not these garments; nay, I know not

Where I did lodge last night. Do not laugh at me,

For, as I am a man, I think this lady

To be my child Cordelia.

Hazlitt wrote that on speaking the last words, the great actor "staggered faintly into Cordelia's arms, and his sobs of tenderness, and his ecstasy of joy commingled, drew streaming tears from the brightest eyes."

That was the Kean that Hazlitt wanted to see, and it appears to have been the Kean most of his other fans wanted as well.

Under the Gaslight

Augustin Daly's 1867 melodrama Under the Gaslight first provided the stage with the image of a helpless victim tied to the railroad tracks.

Who was that helpless victim? A beautiful damsel in distress? Nope. He was a one-armed Civil War veteran who was trying to thwart the villain's wicked plans.

The damsel in distress was the one who takes a hatchet, brakes out of the railroad station where she is locked up, and saves the man. This scene was hardly apolitical, as the veteran remarks after being saved: "And these are the women who ain't to have a vote!"

Under the Gaslight catapulted Daly to success when it first opened at the New York Theatre under the management of the Worrell Sisters. It followed a rich gentleman named Ray Trafford who is in love with Laura Courtland. She appears to be from a good family, though Ray later learns that as a young child Laura was rescued from a life of crime as a six-year-old pickpocket in the employ of a criminal named Mother Judas.

When the secret gets out, Laura runs away, wanting to save her sweetheart from a socially disastrous marriage. The audience gets to see various well-known New York locations onstage, including Delmonico's Restaurant, the "Tombs" jail and courthouse, and a pier looking out over Jersey City. At one point, Mother Judas throws Laura off of the pier, and Ray leaps in after her. The audience must have been on the edge of their seats.

It is the next act that contains the play's true sensation scene, though. It opens in Long Branch, New Jersey, where the fashionable rich New Yorkers have all assembled. They are being shadowed, however, by Mother Judas and the villainous Byke, who claims to be Laura's father (though this turns out to be a lie). Snorkey, who like many disabled veterans at the time was making his living as a messenger, tracks Byke to a railroad station at Shrewsbury Bend. It is there he is overpowered and tied to the tracks.

Onstage trains nearly missing their victims became a staple of melodrama. The year after Under the Gaslight opened, Irish dramatist Dion Boucicault tried to go one better, and have a near-miss with an underground train in London in his play After Dark. Daly sued Boucicault, claiming that scene infringed on his copyright.

Under the Gaslight doesn't get revived very much these days, unlike some Boucicault plays, including The Streets of New York. Still, it's great fun!

Heathers

I missed Kevin Murphy and Laurence O'Keefe's musical Heathers when it was originally Off-Broadway, but now it's back at New World Stages, incredibly dark and incredibly fun.

The musical is based on the cult-hit film from the 1980s about teenage suicide (don't do it) and the effects it has on a high school. This was long before Dear Evan Hansen, and the film's take on adolescence is far too bleak for Broadway.

Off-Broadway, on the other hand, seems a perfect venue. I thought the musical might put the act break after the first death, but no. Like the film, the play starts out pitch black and keeps getting darker. The actual first-act closer "Our Love Is God" is simultaneously soaring anthem and sickening satire.

Obviously, the show had to musicalize the immortal line "I love my dead gay son!" That song becomes the opening of the second act (but with a fun twist from how it appears in the movie). There's also some fun audience participation involving the teacher Ms. Fleming, played by Jeannette Bayardelle.

Isabella Esler is pretty perfect in the leading role of Veronica Sawyer. John Cardoza as J.D. appears to be doing a Christian Slater impersonation, just as Christian Slater in the film confessed to essentially doing a Jack Nicholson impression. In both cases, it worked. The three Heathers, Zan Berube, Jackera Davis, and Ava DeMary, all look like they're having the time of their lives.

If you get a chance to see the show, I heartily recommend it. Just don't drink anything the cast hands you...

Perfect Strangers

A while ago, I was doing some research on A.R.T. in Boston, and I saw they were putting on a musical called Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York).

"Why on Earth," I wondered, "would a theatre in Boston be producing a new musical about New York City?" The answer, of course, was it was in development for Broadway, having already played London's West End.

The piece was written by Jim Barne and Kit Buchan, two Brits who channeled their enthusiasm for far-off, exotic New York into the character of Dougal, a young man from the United Kingdom visiting the U.S. for the first time. Dougal is a bit... much.

Fortunately, his naive enthusiasm is balanced by Robin, a New Yorker who grew up in Flatbush and currently works at a coffee shop in Manhattan, waiting not for her big break, but to figure out what it is she wants to do with her life. Right at the top of the show, we get a musical contrast in their attitudes as he sings the soaring anthem "New York" and she has a quiet but beautiful number called "What'll It Be" as she begins her day in the coffee shop.

The show promises the plot in its title, but for greater context, the cake in question is a wedding cake, and the reason the two people are strangers is that they are related to the couple getting married in different ways. (He's the groom's estranged son, while she's the bride's younger sister.) Things get complicated when a layer of the cake gets dropped, but rather than going in the expected direction of the two protagonists trying frantically to fix their mistake, the play makes a curious turn in the Act One closer "American Express" as they decide to go all out with a borrowed credit card.

While the bride and groom never appear in this two-character play, we do get a sense of them, and the more the play goes on, the more we feel their pending matrimony will be a disaster, and a dropped cake is the least of their worries.

I finally caught up with the play this past weekend, and I have to say it is delightful. If you have a chance to see it, go.