Top Shows of 2025

Anyone who remembers the New York theatre scene from before the dreaded covid shutdown knows that this city has yet to fully recover. Theatre today is simply less ambitious, less imaginative, and less interesting than it was before 2020.

Still, there are some exceptions. Last year, there were a few remarkable shows that made my annual top-ten list, including Broadway's re-imagining of The Great Gatsby and a new production of the Giuseppi Verdi classic La Forza del Destino at the Metropolitan Opera.

This year, I have a new list of the best shows I saw in New York City that opened since January 1st. That doesn't include some of the excellent productions I saw outside of New York, including Sunday in the Park with George in Pittsburgh or Dear Liar in Niagara-on-the-Lake, not to mention my own workshop of After an Earlier Incident at Theatre of Western Springs.

10. Nongod - This trio of one-act plays by Leon Lone was a pleasant surprise. Seeing ancient deities from Egypt, Russia, and Mexico come to life on stage turned out to be both funny and emotionally engaging.

9. The Wild Duck - Ibsen classics other than A Doll House or Hedda Gabler are few and far between in the U.S., so I was delighted that Theatre for a New Audience announced they would reviving The Wild Duck. Maaike Laanstra-Corn gave a striking portrayal of Hedwig.

8. The Lady From the Sea - What was I saying about Ibsen classics? Even better was Susane Lee's adaptation of The Lady From the Sea, performed appropriately right on the Hudson River. Lee reset the play in Canada, but kept its spirit, and the outdoor venue was delightful.

7. Pygmalion - Gingold Theatrical Group always does a good job with their shows, and this year's production of Bernard Shaw's most famous comedy was no exception. Synnøve Karlsen, now famous as young Cassie from television's Miss Austen, made her New York debut as the irrepressible Eliza Doolittle.

6. Kowalski - Gregg Ostrin's play about an imagined meeting between Tennessee Williams and Marlon Brando was a hit Off-Broadway at The Duke on 42nd Street. There have been plans to move it to Broadway. If that happens, you'll want to see it. In addition to probing into the creation of the American classic A Streetcar Named Desire, it's a great vehicle for two fine actors.

5. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay - While it's true that the second act wasn't as good as the first, this new opera based on the Michael Chabon novel of the same name still wowed audiences, in part due to sets and projections by 59 Studio. Fortunately, it's coming back this spring, so if you missed it in the fall, you can still catch it at the Met beginning February 17.

4. Wine in the Wilderness - Classic Stage Company had been planning this revival of the classic Alice Childress drama for quite some time. With direction by LaChanze, it hit all the right notes. The set designed by Arnulfo Maldonado wrapped the audience around the action, making the riot outside feel shockingly close, and Grantham Coleman once again gave an amazing performance.

3. The Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse - Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley's new musical perfectly channels pop music from earlier in the century while telling a story of the Internet stardom (and helldom) of today. The New Group deserves kudos for bringing it to Off-Broadway audiences, and for featuring some incredibly gifted young performers, including Patrick Nathan Falk, Keri René Fuller, Luke Islam, and Milly Shapiro.

2. Dead Outlaw - An even better new musical that premiered this year on Broadway (transferring from an Off-Broadway run last year) was Dead Outlaw, which tells the fascinating real-life story of Elmer McCurdy, who literally couldn't pull off a crime to save his life. Itamar Moses, David Yazbek, and Erik Della Penna were able to hilariously tell the tale while at the same time evoking scenes of sheer pathos. Like Yazbek's Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, this show deserves a long afterlife with regional and community theatres.

1. Moby-Dick - The best show I saw this year, though, has to be Jake Heggie's opera Moby-Dick, which made its Met premiere earlier this year. Though the piece first premiered at the Dallas Opera 15 years ago, this was the first time New York audiences were able to see and hear it live. Having written my own stage adaptation of the Herman Melville novel, I have lots of opinions on how to best stage the story, but the union of sets and projections seemed flawless in this staging, and the music is some of Heggie's best. The tenor Brandon Jovanovich also made a profound Captain Ahab.

That's the list. I know! Two operas and only a single work from the Broadway stage, and that one which premiered Off-Broadway first. The dynamics of New York theatre are certainly changing.

Escapists

 If you love comic books and you love opera, then the Metropolitan Opera's production of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a must-see event.

Based on the Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel by Michael Chabon, the opera tells the story of two Jewish men in 1930s and '40s New York trying to raise money to get relatives out of Europe. Sam Clay can't draw well, but he loves telling stories, and his recently arrived cousin Josef (now Joe) Kavalier is an art-school graduate looking for a job. Together, they invent a comic book character, the Escapist, who comes to rival Superman and Batman.

The first act of the opera is brilliant. Joe (Andrzej Filonczyk) tries to get his sister Sarah (Lauren Snouffer) to New York on a ship called the Ark of Miriam, which has been arranged by the activist Rosa Saks (Sun-Ly Pierce). Fortunately, he has more than enough money to do this once the Escapist becomes a hit not just in comic books but also in a radio program starring the actor Tracy Bacon (Edward Nelson). Romantic sparks start to fly not just between Joe and Rosa, but unexpectedly between Tracy and Sam (Miles Mykkanen).

Librettist Gene Scheer did a wonderful job adapting Moby-Dick as an opera, tweaking the iconic novel in a way that paid homage to the original without having to follow it in every detail. He manages to navigate the adaptation of Chabon's novel well in the first act, but then departs so dramatically from the book in the second act that the audience is left with mood pieces inspired by Chabon rather than the innovative storytelling of the novel.

While I was familiar with the music of Moby-Dick's composer, Jake Heggie, I did not know much about Mason Bates, the composer of Kavalier & Clay. Apparently, Bates is famous for introducing electronic music into orchestras, which might not work for most stories set in the '30s and '40s, but since this opera deals with the fantasy world of comic books, electronic sounds actually fit in rather well.

The sets and projections by 59 Studio aren't quite as impressive as those used in Moby-Dick, but they are still amazing, particularly when comic book panels pop up on the wall behind the live actors. The entire production is staged lavishly by Bartlett Sher.

This production is playing until October 11th. Last night's performance appeared to be sold out, so get your tickets while you can! You won't want this opportunity to escape.

Moby-Dick, the Opera

As an opera fan who wrote his own stage adaptation of Moby-Dick, I definitely had to see the Met's premiere of Jake Heggie's musicalized version of the novel.

The libretto by Gene Scheer makes some interesting choices, including having Queequeg open the show. The novel's narrator (who asks us to call him Ishmael) is considerably downplayed, and is referred to as "Greenhorn" rather than by a name.

When I wrote my adaptation, I cut the character of Pip. It's a long book, and something had to go, so as a practical matter, getting rid of the cabin boy meant I didn't have to worry about cringe-worthy moments where adults badly try to perform as children.

The opera uses another solution, that employed by Orson Wells in his stage adaptation Moby-Dick Rehearsed, which is to have an adult female perform Pip's role. Soprano Janai Brugger sings the role of Pip with a voice that soars above the voices of all the men on the ship.

Scheer's libretto focuses, however, on Captain Ahab, portrayed by tenor Brandon Jovanovich. His challenge to the forces of the universe rings out (fittingly) with an operatic intensity. The climactic confrontation between him and the whale is staged assuming that we all know the story, but is powerful, nonetheless.

In many ways, however, the star of the show is not Jovanovich but the design. Never have I seen set and digital projections work together so well as in this production. Performers literally climb the walls, and the projections turn the environment into boats, masts, ocean waves, or whatever else is needed.

The opera is playing this month only, closing on March 29th, so get your tickets while you can! This is a ship you won't want to miss.

Best Shows of 2024

When New York theatre shut down in 2020, I had to come up with a list of the top shows I missed due to the pandemic.

Since then, theatre has come back... very slowly. Each year I've hoped that the next year would be better, but sadly theatre in New York--and in the United States in general--is in a sorry state, less diverse, less original, and less interesting than it has been in a long time.

That doesn't mean there haven't been any good shows this year, and I've been fortunate enough to see a few of them. (Though some of the best plays I saw, including Mrs. Warren's Profession and Fable, were far from New York.) Here's my list of the top productions that opened in New York City in 2024:

10. The Heart of Rock and Roll - Yes, jukebox musicals are way overdone, but this delightful romantic comedy featuring the songs of Huey Lewis and the News won me over, in part due to the comic acting of McKenzie Kurtz.

9. Stereophonic - Even when it was Off-Broadway, Stereophonic was getting incredible buzz, much of it deserved. It's true that if you're not a Fleetwood Mac fan you won't be able to appreciate it as much of some of your neighbors in the theatre, but it's still worth seeing.

8. The Hills of California - Similar to Stereophonic in theme and scope but more ambitious in terms of its use of theatricality, Jez Butterworth's The Hills of California was a must-see play for me. Though not as successful as some of his previous work, it still packs an emotional punch.

7. A Wonderful World - I went into this bio-musical about Louis Armstrong somewhat skeptical, but I was pleasantly surprised to see how deftly the show treated its subject, one of the transformational geniuses of popular music in the 20th century. Also, having Tony-Award-winner James Monroe Iglehart play Armstrong didn't hurt.

6. Blood of the Lamb - If this Off-Broadway drama wasn't on your radar, it should have been. Arlene Hutton's eerily prophetic play about the human costs of increased legislation over women's bodies took medical and legal discussions beyond abortion to the multitude of cases that arise when pregnancies, wanted or not, go differently than planned.

5. Cabaret - Speaking of politics, this year's revival of the John Kander and Fred Ebb classic Cabaret felt more relevant than ever, not so much due to tinkering with Joe Masteroff's book as from a fresh interpretation by director Rebecca Frecknall. The immersive nature of the performance brought in a lot of press, as did some star actors, but the highlight of the show is Bebe Neuwirth's portrayal of Fräulein Schneider.

4. The Devil's Disciple - Bernard Shaw's comedic melodrama about the American Revolution is one of my favorite plays, but its large, mostly male cast makes it tricky to get staged. Director David Staller came up with an intriguing solution in adapting the play for a cast of five women. Oddly enough, it worked, in part due to an amazing ensemble led by Folami Williams. With a run straddling a controversial presidential election, this production gave audiences plenty of food for thought.

3. Suffs - If anything, Shaina Taub's musical about the women's suffrage movement was a bit too politically relevant this election year. It can be infuriating to watch a group of well-meaning activists fight one another rather than join forces to achieve something, but that's exactly what happened at the beginning of the 20th century, just as it happens all-too-often today. Taub's catchy songwriting provided the perfect medium to tell the complex story of how the 19th amendment was finally passed. Sadly, the show is now closing.

2. La Forza del Destino - If you missed the Metropolitan Opera's production of Giuseppi Verdi's rarely performed La Forza del Destino, you might have a while to wait for another chance. The opera has been said to be cursed ever since the baritone Leonard Warren died on stage during the show while singing at the Met in 1960. This year's production was instead blessed by amazing performances by Lise Davidsen as Leonora and Judit Kutasi as Preziosilla. If the Met announces the opera's return in its next season, definitely try to go.

1. The Great Gatsby - Though it was snubbed by the Tony Awards this year, the best show I saw in New York in 2024 was Kait Kerrigan, Nathan Tysen, and Jason Howland's new musical adaptation of The Great Gatsby. The lyrics are delightful, and the elaborate sets and musical numbers are impressive. Jeremy Jordan, Eva Noblezada, Noah J. Ricketts, and Samantha Pauly all give strong performances, but the real star of the show is F. Scott Fitzgerald's story, which is presented in a manner that is both faithful to the original novel and still relevant to audiences today.

Sadly, there weren't a lot of runners-up this year, but these shows prove it's still possible to make great theatre in New York.

The Forces of Destiny

Last night I saw the premiere of the Metropolitan Opera's new production of La Forza del Destino by Giuseppi Verdi.

The opera has a reputation for being unlucky at the Met, given that the baritone Leonard Warren died on stage while performing it in 1960. No such disasters occurred last night, and the audience particularly cheered soprano Lise Davidsen, who played the heroine Leonora.

Though the role of the young gypsy Preziosilla (who in this contemporary-set production, is simply an entertainer) might not be as coveted as that of Leonora, it still gives performers a chance to shine. In this production, it was played by a singer making her Met debut, Judit Kutasi. Hopefully she'll be returning to the Met frequently in the future.

Verdi and librettist Francesco Maria Piave based the opera on a Spanish play by Ángel de Saavedra called Don Álvaro o la fuerza del sino. The 1835 drama was important for bringing Romanticism (a bit belatedly) to the Spanish stage. The opera also adds a scene with a pedlar selling goods to soldiers, based on Friedrich Schiller's drama Wallenstein's Camp.

The Met utilized a modern-looking setting, which aided by massive projections, seemed to me to echo the war in Ukraine. The characters are battered about by war and fate, caught up in forces of destiny they cannot control. In the end, Christian forgiveness seems to be the only way out of the cycles of vengeance portrayed in the opera.

This production is playing until March 29th. If you're a fan of opera in the grand manner (and at four acts, it's not exactly short), I heartily recommend it.

Robert Dighton's Caricatues

The author Dion Clayton Calthrop said in an article about the Regency-era artist Robert Dighton, “The essence of caricature is polite laughter and polished attack.” That description seems to fit Dighton’s theatrical portraits, which are well worth a look.

Dighton was born in 1752 and lived until 1814. He first exhibited his work at the Free Society of Artists when he was only seventeen, and he continued to exhibit from 1769 to 1773. In 1775 he exhibited some drawings at the prestigious Royal Academy, but his fame came from more popular works.

In December of 1806, Dighton published a portrait of Angelica Catalani, the famed opera singer who caused much controversy on the London stage. Rumored to be mistress to the brutal politician Lord Castlereagh, Catalani became a target of numerous xenophobic attacks. Dighton's hand-colored caricature of her is sympathetic, though, showing her in the opera Semiramide by Rossini.

Another famous caricature Dighton did was of the actor Stephen Kemble, who was famous for playing Falstaff without needing any extra padding for the role. Kemble allegedly weighed 18 stone, about 250 pounds. Sadly, Dighton's depiction of Kemble playing Hamlet is less than sympathetic.

By the way, Kemble was brother to both John Kemble and the enormously popular Sarah Siddons. Here's his vision of Siddons as Elvira in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's play, Pizarro:

Dighton's son Richard followed him into the print-making business. Richard Dighton later engraved a portrait of William Farren, an actor known as "The Cock Salmon" (don't ask) who famously appeared as Sir Peter Teazle in The School for Scandal, also by Sheridan.

Farren, by the way, essentially acted as stepfather to the Victorian actress Helen Faucit. Much to Faucit's embarrassment, Farren had carried on an illicit affair with her mother. The actor did eventually marry his live-in mistress, but only after Faucit's father died.

And you thought your parents were embarrassing....

Hildegard of Bingen

The appropriately named series "Music Before 1800" brings early music to New York City in the fitting venue of Corpus Christi Church on the West Side.

In February, I went there for a concert of music by the opera composer Joseph Bologne, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges. Today, however, they featured pieces by a much earlier composer of music drama, the 12th-century nun and mystic Hildegard of Bingen.

Hildegard essentially invented the morality play with The Order of the Virtues. The piece featured a cast of singing women portraying virtues including Humility, Charity, and Fear of God, and a single man (originally played by Hildegard's secretary) who played the devil. The devil was also the only one who did not sing, since apparently the holiness of music was beyond him.

The Tiburtina Ensemble who performed today did not enact The Order of the Virtues, but they did sing some of Hildegard's most famous hits, including "Ave generosa," "De patria," and my personal favorite, "O Ecclesia." That last one is a sequence recalling the story of St. Ursula, who was martyred along with a number of maidens she was leading in their quest to follow God. 

You can hear the Tiburtina Ensemble perform part of another medieval music drama, Visitatio Sepulchri, here.

God of Arms

This afternoon, I went to a concert at Corpus Christi Church that featured the music of famed swordsman, revolutionary, and opera composer Joseph Bologne, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges.

I actually wrote a play about the Chevalier in collaboration with Lorraine Goodman, a former opera singer who has also directed a number of operas herself. Bologne was a mixed-race composer who in the 18th century was just as famous for his sword fighting and amorous adventures as he was for his music.

This isn't the first time I've heard his music in concert. Not long ago, a small company in New York performed a chamber version of his opera L'Amant Anonyme, which was quite lovely. Former First Violin of the New York Philharmonic Gabriel Banat wrote the definitive biography of the composer, The Chevalier de Saint-Georges: Virtuoso of the Sword and the Bow. It's well worth a read.

A number of years ago, the CBC aired a special on Saint-Georges entitled Le Mozart Noir that later was released on DVD. (Yes, I own a copy.) A new movie, Chevalier, which presents a fictionalized version of his life, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and is scheduled for a general release in April. Yes, I'll be going, but it would also be lovely if producers of plays took an interest in the Chevalier as well.

The play Lorraine and I wrote is called God of Arms after a title Saint-Georges held that was bestowed on those whose skill with the sword outshined all others. The Chevalier excelled not only with the epee, though, but also with the violin bow and the conductor's baton. 

If you're interested in the play, please contact me!

Cholera and the Theatre

The most recent issue of Theatre Journal has an interesting article by Mia Levenson about the effects cholera epidemics had on New York theatres during the nineteenth century.

Cholera is a deadly illness that was first identified in India, but in the 1820s and 1830s it spread rapidly across the world, devastating Paris, London, and eventually reaching the United States. Though cholera is a waterborne illness, people in the nineteenth century believed it was caused by "bad air" which led more health-conscious audience members to avoid the theatre.

In 1832, when cholera first hit New York, three large theatres served Manhattan—the Park Theatre (near what is now City Hall), the Theatre at Richmond Hill, and the American Theatre at the Bowery. The Park Theatre (pictured here in an illustration from 1822) was probably the most prestigious, presenting Italian operas and classic plays by William Shakespeare. The Theatre at Richmond Hill was further north and newer, having just opened the previous year in 1831. The Bowery was a more working-class venue, presenting melodramas and other popular works.

Even after cholera arrived in New York—with the first death from the illness being reported in June of 1832—the theatres still remained open. On Independence Day, the Bowery put on a patriotic drama called Cradle of Liberty, and though Richmond Hill was closed on July 4th, two days later it staged the popular comedy The Heir at Law. The Park Theatre also plowed ahead with its summer season, but unfortunately receipts were low, and it had to operate at a loss. On July 21st, the epidemic was peaking, with 311 new cases recorded and 104 deaths. That night, only ninety people attended the Park Theatre, which had a capacity of more than two thousand.

The Bowery was the first of the three theatres to shut down due to the epidemic, closing its doors on July 7th. The theatre's manager later ran a newspaper advertisement stating that the company "deems it a duty to the Public at large to announce the closure of the American Theatre until the alarm now existing has subsided." Richmond Hill, which could only hold about half as many people as the Park and the Bowery, waited until July 25th to put out a similar notice. The Park continued to stage plays for the rest of the month, announcing its closure on August 1st. Cholera, much like COVID almost two hundred years later, completely shut down theatre in New York.

Our own pandemic kept theatres shuttered for far longer, though. By August 20th, all three major theatres in New York had resumed performances. Like today, they advertised the safety measures they were taking (whether effective or not). Levenson reproduces a playbill for the Bowery that displays the word "VENTILATION" in large, capital letters.

Fortunately, New York constructed the Croton Aqueduct in the years following the epidemic, bringing fresh water to the city and reducing the impact of future waterborne illnesses. Still, cholera returned in 1849, beginning in the Five Points neighborhood and rapidly spreading throughout the city. Another wave hit New York in 1866.

By then, improved sanitation meant that death tolls were far lower, and the theatres remained open. One can only hope that when future epidemics arise, we, too, will be better prepared, and won't have to shut down the theatre yet again.

Four Saints in Three Acts

Gertrude Stein is one of those authors whose work often seems difficult and dense, until one hears it performed, after which its playfulness can be downright delightful.

I remember hearing a recording of Stein herself reciting her poem "If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso." It was a revelation. "Oh," I suddenly realized, "it's supposed to be funny!"

Audience members who come see David Greenspan performing Stein's play Four Saints in Three Acts might be in for a similar revelation. Stein's script, which was famously used as the libretto for an opera by Virgil Thomson, can be puzzling to read, in part because it contains more than four saints and is longer than three acts.

The piece is not meant to be simply read, however, but performed, and Greenspan is a winning choice to interpret difficult materiel for a contemporary audience. Fans of experimental musicals might remember his portrayal of "Other Mother" in Stephin Merritt's stage adaptation of Neil Gaiman's novel Coraline. More recently, he performed a solo-version of Eugene O'Neill's epic drama Strange Interlude.

Though Four Saints in Three Acts is being presented by the Lucille Lortel Theatre, it isn't performed at the Lortel's storied Off-Broadway theatre in Greenwich Village. Instead, Greenspan performs the work in a smaller, more industrial-feeling space, The Doxsee, recently opened by Target Margin in Brooklyn. Though the theatre's block on 52nd Street south of Sunset Park is mostly filled with warehouses and auto-repair shops, scenic and lighting designer Yuki Nakase Link has made the space feel as homey as possible with an enormous carpet and draping white curtains.

With a nearly bare stage inside a bare-bones theatre, the focus is all on the performer. Greenspan, working together with director Ken Rus Schmoll and dramaturg Jay Stull, has clearly gone over every inch of Stein's text to try to make it as accessible as possible. How accessible can one make lines like "Four saints it makes it well fish"? Well, I'm not sure, but it's fun to watch someone at least try, especially an actor as warm and good-humored as Greenspan.

When I saw the play last night, the audience seemed hesitant to laugh at parts. After all, Stein is a serious writer, isn't she? Being serious doesn't mean one can't have a sense of humor, though, and I imagine Stein would encourage us to embrace her play's sheer silliness.

And that, I think, would definitely make it well fish.

Photo credit: Steven Pisano

The Visual Life of Romantic Theatre

Yesterday, I tuned in for a very informative online panel on "The Visual Life of Romantic Theatre" which previewed some of the work that will be published in a forthcoming book offered by University of Michigan Press.

Diane Piccitto and Terry F. Robinson hosted the event, which began with with a fascinating talk by Susan Brown on the diary of Mary Rein, who oversaw the design and construction of costumes at Drury Lane beginning in the late 18th century. While we don't have any of her own sketches of costumes, we do have images of costumes she designed and constructed with the help of the theatre's wardrobe staff.

One thing I found fascinating was that even though performers were generally expected to supply their own costumes, many of the dresses Rein recorded making were for the leading ladies of the stage. In one case, she provided a dress for the star actress Dorothy Jordan for her "personal use" though the outfit might also have been worn on stage as well. Though scenery costs far eclipsed theatre expenditures on costumes, Brown argued that clothing was an important part of Romantic spectacle.

Next, Uri Erman spoke on the Italian singer Angelica Catalani, who was rumored to be mistress to the controversial politician Lord Castlereagh. Erman showed a cartoon by James Gilray entitled "Delicious Dreams!" The image, which dates from 1808, shows a cat (-alani) whispering into Castlereagh's ear. Foreign opera singers like Catalani became a target for xenophobic forces. They also were used by those who opposed the encroachment of opera into London's patent theatres, replacing the castrati, which had previously been used as images of operatic monstrosity, but by the 19th century had fallen out of favor.

I was particularly excited to hear Danny O'Quinn discuss the Romantic toy theatre. Though toy theatre production increased during the Victorian period, he said it was essentially a Regency art form. O'Quinn discussed William Webb's toy theatre version of Aladdin, which showed several Aladdins in different positions, so they could be switched in and out during the performance. This, he said, made changes in character indistinguishable from the changes in physical objects frequently used in pantomime. O'Quinn also mentioned that screens were sometimes used by toy theatre performers to hide the operators and make the performance all the more dramatic.

Deven Parker spoke about a play that was frequently adapted to the toy theatre, Isaac Pocock's The Miller and His Men. She noted that play texts could serve to mediate live performances, helping the reader to visualize what would otherwise be seen on stage. Even the use of punctuation--such as dashes--can help convey to the reader what the visual experience of watching a play is like.

Last to speak was Dana Van Kooy, who discussed Obi; or, Three-Fingered Jack, a play by John Fawcett about the Jamaican folk-hero Jack Mansong. The piece premiered at the Haymarket Theatre in 1800 with Charles Kemble as Mansong, and Maria De Camp as Rosa, the plantation owner's daughter.

It was a great panel, so I'm glad I tuned in for it!

The Battle of Hernani

Today, February 25th, is the anniversary of the so-called "Battle of Hernani" when partisans for and against Victor Hugo fought in the auditorium of the Comédie-Française.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the Metropolitan Opera streamed this evening (available until Friday night) Giuseppe Verdi's operatic version of the play, Ernani. Like the original play, the opera is not terribly realistic, but it wasn't meant to be. It was the plot's over-the-top Romanticism that provoked audience members to resort to fisticuffs back in 1830.

The title character of the play is a bandit who gets into an unlikely love triangle with the beautiful Doña Sol, the King of Spain, and Doña Sol's elderly guardian Don Ruy Gomez de Silva. During the pivotal third act, the guardian has arranged to marry Doña Sol against her will, but Hernani shows up in disguise. Ruy Gomez offers hospitality to Hernani, not aware of who he is, and then the king shows up and carries off the would-be bride.

Sound crazy? It gets even crazier. Ruy Gomez refuses to give up his guest in spite of the fact that he really wants him dead, so duty-bound he is to the laws of hospitality. Hernani needs to go and rescue Doña Sol, but Ruy Gomez won't let him leave until he makes a promise. In order to escape and save his love, Hernani gives a horn to Ruy Gomez, promising to die when his enemy sounds the horn, if he will only give him a chance to rescue Doña Sol.

The fourth act takes place in a chapel that holds the tomb of Charlemagne. The king is awaiting his election as Holy Roman Emperor, but conspirators, including both Ruy Gomez and Hernani, are planning to assassinate him. The king (naturally) hides inside the tomb and surprises the conspirators. It turns out that Hernani is actually the exiled John of Aragon, the king is elected Emperor Charles V, everyone gets pardoned, and Doña Sol finally becomes engaged to her one true love. (That would be John/Hernani.)

You know what the problem is with giving your sworn enemy a horn and promising to kill yourself as soon as he sounds it and calls for your death? Well, sometimes he waits until the fifth act, shows up at your wedding, and then sounds the horn so you have to die. Then you and your bride both end up taking poison, your rival kills himself, and the whole stage gets littered with bodies.

Verdi's opera ends a bit differently, with Hernani (called Ernani) and his love (called Elvira in the opera) stabbing themselves instead. Also, old Gomez de Silva also doesn't off himself at the end (at least not in the Met's production). The lovers get to die to beautiful music, though, and that makes all the difference.

The Battle of Hernani in 1830 fell short of an all-out riot. A few people were arrested, but the play was allowed to finish, and it went on to run for a total of 39 performances. The Met's production won't be available for nearly that long. It disappears at 6:30 pm on Friday, so catch it while you can!

Heimat

Hermann Sudermann's play Heimat (Home) takes place in a respectable, middle-class German home of the 1890s. It also never fails to make that literal home stand in for the larger bourgeois respectability the play critiques.

In the opening stage directions, Sudermann describes the home as being decorated with "Steel engravings of a religious and patriotic character, in tarnished gold frames." Behind the sofa is a portrait of the patriarch's first wife "in the costume of the sixties." Seemingly, not much has changed in the past 30 years.

Well, one thing that has changed is that Lieutenant-Colonel Leopold Schwartze now has a new wife, though he seems to have paid neither of his spouses much attention. He says in the first act, "It's only right that an old soldier should dedicate the little strength left him by the throne to the service of the altar. Those are the two causes to fight for." Other than the emperor and the church, little interests him anymore.

In Act II, Schwartze's estranged daughter Magda, who is in town for a music festival, reconciles with him. Looking around the house she hasn't seen in twelve years, she declares, "Just to think that I am at home! It seems like a fairy tale." The house does not look to have changed a bit, other than that the family dog has died. What has changed is Magda herself. "From that door to the window, from this table to the old bureau, -- that was once my world," she says.

Magda's world has opened up considerably, as she is now a famous opera star. Her father is scandalized that she does not travel with a respectable lady chaperone as dame d'honneur, but Magda does what she likes. Now that she is back home, though, she feels the oppressive pull of the old ways. "The paternal authority already stretches its net over me again, and the yoke stands ready beneath which I must bow," she says. In spite of her misgivings, she decides to stay with her family while in town.

While there, Magda receives an unexpected visitor, the respected Doctor von Keller, who in his student days had known her in Berlin. (Known in the Biblical sense, by the way....) Magda's face turns white when she hears his name, but she receives him, and then reveals that after he abandoned her, she bore a child. She spurns her former lover, saying: "Who are you? You're a strange man who gratified his lust and passed on with a laugh. But I have a child, -- my son, my God, my all! For him I lived and starved and froze and walked the streets; for him I sang and danced in concert-halls...."

Unfortunately, the secret cannot be kept from Magda's father, and when he finds out the truth about his daughter, he resolves to challenge von Keller to a duel. Before he can do that, though, von Keller arrives and agrees to marry Magda. For Schwartze, this would solve everything, but Magda refuses the man, for a second time defying her father. This is too much for the old man to bear, and he perishes, dying of a stroke.

So what is Sudermann's ultimate judgment on the home? Is it a stifling prison that needs to be escaped? Or a salvation that is scorned by the wicked? The play never quite makes up its mind, which is why Sudermann was scorned equally by traditionalists and the avant garde alike. For years, though, many people in the middle loved his plays, particularly Heimat.

Intermission

Today, I had to go to Midtown for a chiropractor's appointment, and since I was in the neighborhood, I wanted to swing by Amy's Bread. That meant walking through Times Square and the theater district.

There, in the middle of a mostly empty Times Square, across the street from a shuttered Gap and underneath an advertisement for The Twilight Zone, was a trashcan that had on its side the message: "Embrace the Absurd."

Well, I guess that's typical 2020. In New York City, our mayor has defended police officers who disgraced their badge and uniform by driving head-on into protestors. Not to be outdone, the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue had his Attorney General violently clear a public park in order to hold a photo op in front of a church.

Are we living in the Twilight Zone? (Sadly, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery are no longer living in it....) Theater is banned, libraries are closed, and none of us knows how much of a country is going to be left when we get up in the morning. Is this the absurd we're asked to embrace? Well, the world is starting to look like a Samuel Beckett landscape. Endgame, perhaps...?

Somehow, police brutality, military action against protestors, and grand presidential blasphemy have made us forget about the deaths of more than 100,000 Americans due to a completely foreseeable viral outbreak. You know, you would think the deaths of 100,000 people would be hard to forget, but this is 2020. Broadway hasn't forgotten them, which is why it will remain closed until at least after Labor Day, and possibly not until next year. The Metropolitan Opera has officially said they won't reopen until the new year.

Optimists point out that an outbreak of the plague might have prodded William Shakespeare to write King Lear, but temporary theater closures have a way of becoming more or less permanent. Outbreaks of plague in Stuart England preceded a political crisis that led to the theaters being shuttered for a generation, with drama banned from 1642 to 1660. Can we really trust our political leaders, who mismanaged a pandemic, ordered the military to mobilize against our own people, and are now seemingly claiming divine right? What else might they try to pull?

Well, if you're looking for a sign of better things to come, head down to the Broadhurst Theatre on 44th Street. That's where I saw the life-affirming proclamation "ONLY INTERMISSION" above the once and future home of Jagged Little Pill.

The Alanis Morissette/Diablo Cody musical was not at the top of my list of things to see, but I think if I could watch it now, I would fall head over feet. (I know! Isn't it ironic?)

A Call to Action

The arts are one of the most important drivers of the nations's economy. According to the U.S. government, they contribute more than $760 billion a year. That's more than warehousing, more than transportation, more than agriculture.

At least that was true prior to the national shutdown due to COVID-19. America's farmers have enjoyed massive subsidies for years, and an outright bailout by the Trump Administration after our trade war made it impossible for them to make money. As for transportation, both the airlines and the automobile industry receive subsidies and bailouts. But (with the exception of a few NEA dollars Republicans are still trying to take away) not the arts.

Today, all arts organizations are in trouble, and through no fault of their own. Even organizations that built up sizable cushions couldn't be expected to go months having their doors shut by government mandates... especially when the government is refusing to pick up the tab for the mess it created itself through a ridiculously inept response to a pandemic... a pandemic so foreseeable that health experts have been issuing warnings for years.

Yet while the federal government is borrowing huge sums of money to bail out for-profit businesses so they can maintain profits and continue to pay their executives, there has been very little done to aid arts organizations. Perhaps the arts, like libraries and churches, are non-essential. (But not nail salons and tattoo parlors. Those are essential, apparently.) Either that, or it's because businesses can provide bribes--I mean campaign contributions--to politicians, while theaters, libraries, and churches tend to be restricted in their ability to do so.

Some theaters will weather the storm. The Metropolitan Opera, which has laid off employees but continues to provide streaming services to its patrons to keep engaging audiences, will probably get through this mess intact. So will the Public Theater, in spite of their cancelling the free Shakespeare in the Park that has been offered for decades. (That was a loss-leader for them, anyway.) Other theaters, however, have already shut their doors. The Secret Theatre, which operated on a shoe-string budget in Long Island City, couldn't afford to keep paying rent on a space they were forbidden to use. I guess that means there's more space to build luxury condos in LIC.

The question is, will anyone want those luxury condos after we systematically murder off everything that was good about Long Island City, and indeed, New York? Epidemics never stopped people from flocking here in the past. Washington Square Park is built on a mass grave of about 20,000 corpses, the majority of them victims of Yellow Fever. (We thought that the 21st century would be the first century in the history of civilization not to have to dig mass graves. Guess what? We were wrong, as Hart Island can bear witness.) In the past, the museums and theaters in New York always stayed open, even during the Great Influenza that began in 1918.

Though previous (and far more deadly) epidemics ate into the profits of Broadway shows and reduced the number of visitors to museums and galleries, they never shuttered them. Now, the government has ordered these places closed, and it seems to have no real plan to help them get through this mess and reopen again. If political leaders don't take action, we will be a much poorer city (and nation) for having squandered the most important assets our society possesses, while letting bankers and business executives once again walk away with ridiculous amounts of taxpayer funds. But it isn't bankers and hedge fund managers that make New York great. Disease never kept people from the city before, but what drew them here, even at the risk of their lives, is being destroyed.

If we really wanted to, there are many things we could do to save arts organizations, rather than throwing them under the COVID bus while rescuing Wall Street yet again. For one, we could provide loan forgiveness for all nonprofits through the Main Street Lending Program and the Economic Stabilization Fund. All for-profit businesses are eligible for loan forgiveness (essentially free money) if they have up to 10,000 employees or $2.5 billion in revenue. As we've seen, a lot of major corporations have taken advantage of the program to avoid "laying off" top executives, even as they have slashed payrolls of the people who actually do the work. Nonprofits, however, are ineligible unless they have at least 500 employees.

Wait a minute, didn't I say that big organizations like the Met and the Public were the ones most likely to make it through this thing anyway? Yup, but they're the ONLY ones eligible for money right now. Very few theaters have 500 people on their payroll. (And I'm pretty sure NONE have more than 10,000, so the upper limit is irrelevant to performing arts.) Why the 500-employee minimum? Well, like I said, the small fry can't bribe--I mean, make campaign contributions to--politicians. Writing out virtually every theater in America while making sure that small "businesses" including hedge funds are eligible for free taxpayer subsidies is absurd, but exactly what one would expect from the present Administration. That's why Congress has got to act not just to expand the existing programs, but to create special safeguards for the arts.

At a time in which we are providing massive amounts of money to for-profit corporations, it is unconscionable that we are continuing to ignore the needs of the non-profits that provide the lifeblood of our city and our nation. Remember, this is an industry that's 4.2 percent of the GDP, which means it's FOUR TIMES bigger than agriculture! If farmers deserve bailouts for the self-inflicted wounds caused by the trade war, why do we expect a much larger industry to go it alone during the self-inflicted chaos caused by the government's ineptitude in handling a virus?

Perhaps it's because farmers are good, honest people, while artists are a bunch of godless heathens who don't deserve to live. Given the coldness with which this country has treated the more than 100,000 Americans who have died of the virus, many of them in the New York City area, that appears to be precisely the attitude our government has adopted.

Well, I've got news for you, Washington. The artists aren't the ones who are godless.

Lucia di Lammermoor

One bright spot amidst the current darkness is that the Metropolitan Opera, which had to shut its doors due to COVID-19, has been streaming operas online for free every night.

I caught Bizet's Carmen and Verdi's La Traviata, and last night watched Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor. That last opera is based on a Sir Walter Scott novel, The Bride of Lammermoor.

Though I've never read the novel, I do have a copy of Scott's poetry that I picked up at John K. King Books in Detroit. It contains some of the poems that Scott interpolated into the novel. For instance, Lucy Ashton (the Lucia of the opera) sings this song in Chapter II:

               Look not thou on beauty's charming,
               Sit thou still when kings are arming,
               Taste not when the wine-cup glistens,
               Speak not when the people listens,
               Stop thine ear against the singer,
               From the red gold keep thy finger;
               Vacant heart and hand and eye,
               Easy live and quiet die.

If that's not ominous enough for you, a prophesy appears in Chapter XVII that doesn't sound too good for her lover Edgar, who is Master of Ravenswood:

               When the last Laird of Ravenswood to Ravenswood shall ride,
               And woo a dead maiden to be his bride,
               He shall stable his steed in the Kelpie's flow,
               And his name shall be lost for evermoe!

Hey, no one ever said this was going to be a comedy! Kelpies, by the way, are shape-shifting water spirits, and the Met's production had a wonderfully creepy ghost that appeared by an old fountain.

Tonight, they're showing Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, so I should tune in now!

Conference Closed

Well, the International Conference on Romanticism is officially closed now, my paper on Lord Byron's play Manfred is done with, and tomorrow I'll be heading back to London to spend time with my sister.

I've been attending two conferences back to back, having just finished the Romantic Facts and Fantasies conference in Nottingham, sponsored by the British Association for Romantic Studies. I've been enjoying Manchester, though, and some of the excellent papers here.

Wednesday night, Marlene Daut gave a keynote address on "The Age of Haitian Romanticism, which introduced me to a number of Haitian playwrights, including Juste Chanlatte and Henri Chauvet. She also discussed how the French writer Alphonse de Lamartine wrote a play about the Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint L'Ouverture and was both influenced by Haitian writers and praised by them.

Thursday morning there was a great session on Romantic music and its composers. Though it is quite late to be considered Romanticism proper, Amanda Hsieh gave an interesting talk on Franz Schreker's opera Die Gezeichneten, which is based on a play by Frank Wedekind. Next, Amy Garnai delivered a fascinating paper on the friendship between dramatist Thomas Holcroft and composer Joseph Haydn, who spent time in England. The final paper in the session, which was by Barry Cooper, looked at aspects of Romanticism in the life and music of Beethoven. He naturally talked about Fidelio, but also discussed Beethoven's oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives. I'm afraid I'm not familiar with that one, but now I want to hear it!

Today I took part in an article writing workshop, which was helpful. Though the conference officially closed today, there was supposed to be an outing tomorrow to the Peak District National Park for some hiking. Unfortunately, the heavy rains recently have led to concerns about a dam in the area bursting, and rail service has been disrupted. The conference planners had to cancel the trip, so I'll probably spend some time at a museum tomorrow before returning to London.

Once back in the U.S., I'll be quickly off again, to see my play The Love Songs of Brooklynites at the Theatre of Western Springs outside of Chicago. It's been a busy summer, but in a good way!

Nicolas Levasseur

I frequently write about nineteenth-century British actors on this blog, but today I'm going to write about a bygone performer from France, instead.

His name was Nicolas Levasseur, and for a while now, I've kept a postcard of him on my bookshelf. You can see him below in the role of Bertram in Giacomo Meyerbeer's 1831 opera Robert le Diable.

The postcard comes from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and was given to me on the basis of a bit of a misunderstanding, since I am quite interested in the play Bertram by Charles Robert Maturin. Whoops! Wrong Bertram.

No matter. He's still a striking figure. But if I'm going to display his postcard on by bookshelf, I probably should know a bit about him. I mean, other than his living from 1791 to 1871 and making his debut at the Paris Opera in 1813 and that sort of a thing, since anyone can find that out from Wikipedia. Like I did.

No. What's really interesting to me is his performance in Robert le Diable. The Meyerbeer opera had a libretto by Eugène Scribe and Germain Delavigne. It told the story of Robert, Duke of Normandy, a notorious party boy who drank, gambled, and womanized to his heat's delight. In the first act, however, his foster sister Alice warns him against a mysterious companion. That companion was Bertram, originally played by Levasseur.

And who is Bertram? Well the title of the opera should give you a clue. He's Robert's long-lost father who is in league with demonic forces. His plan is to get Robert to sign away his soul to the devil so he can be with his son forever. (See? Family values!) Alice overhears the plot, though, and ends up saving the day.

Levasseur played plenty of other roles, too. The V&A has images of him in the role of Marcel in Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots and Bazu in Fromental Halévy's Le Drapier. Neither role is quite as diabolical as Bertram, though.

The Postdramatic and Its Discontents

It has become trendy in recent years to speak about "postdramatic" theatre. The idea is that drama can create an overall mood and emotional connection to the audience without being... well... dramatic.

It might seem odd for drama theorists to be anti-drama, but the idea is hardly new. While some scholars see the origin of a postdramatic theatre in the 1960s, way back in the 1890s it was Symbolism that prophesied a theatre without traditional realistic plot structure.

One of the great practitioners of Symbolism was the Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck. His play Pelléas and Mélisande, which premiered in 1893 in a production directed by Aurélien Lugné-Poe, was roundly attacked by critics. Lugné-Poe draped gauze in front of the playing area and intentionally used low lighting, so the audience literally had a fuzzy view of the action. This created a dream-like atmosphere that was the antithesis of the Realism then popular.

Perhaps even more outrageous was the obscurity of the play's plot. It is filled with water imagery, such as when the heroine, Mélisande, appears at the beginning of the play, crying into a spring. She is not from here, but from somewhere far, far away. She is lost, and is gazing down at a crown at the bottom of the spring. Someone gave it to her, but now, she doesn't want it anymore.

"Ah-ha!" cries the veteran audience member of well-made plays. "We're going to find out who this young woman is! She clearly has a long backstory that will be revealed throughout the drama, and eventually we'll find out who she is, where she comes from, who gave her the crown, and the significance of it falling into the spring."

Nope. We find out none of that. Though after she marries Prince Golaud, Mélisande does later gaze into an old fountain together with her brother-in-law Pelléas. She drops her ring in the fountain, never to get it back again. When Golaud questions her about the ring, she claims she dropped it near the sea. (Why not tell him the truth about the fountain?) He sends Mélisande to search for it in a seaside cavern, together with Pelléas.

Later, Golaud takes Pelléas down into the underground passages beneath the castle where there appears to be a subterranean lake. You know. Just 'cuz. It isn't so much that there is no cause and effect. Rather, cause and effect follow the emotional sense of the drama. Maeterlinck builds up water image after water image, not to mention imagery involving hair, light, and gold. These images create the emotional response of the audience, not sensationalistic plot points.

Last night, I saw Claude Debussy's opera based on Pelléas and Mélisande performed by the Metropolitan Opera. The music was beautiful, and Paul Appleby and Isabel Leonard did wonderful jobs in the title roles. Marie-Nicole Lemieux was exceptional making her Met debut as Geneviève, Golaud and Pelléas's mother. So, did the audience love it?

"Nothing happens!" I kept hearing people complain. And it's true. Very little happens in the opera from a plot point of view. The opera, like the play it's based upon, does a wonderful job creating mood and providing the material for reflection and contemplation. It does not, however, provide the operatic drama of a heroine leaping from the battlements or a hero throwing himself on the limp body of his consumptive lady love.

So if you're not down with the postdramatic, I recommend you skip Pelléas and Mélisande. However, if you want to experience the intensity Symbolism is capable of in a world class venue, go now. The opera is only playing through the end of the month.

Theatre in the Age of Reason

During the eighteenth century, Europeans were riding high on a wave of scientific progress. Over the course of the previous hundred years, Galileo Galilei had revolutionized astronomy using a telescope for observations, William Harvey had forever changed anatomy by postulating how the heart circulates blood, and Anton van Leeuwenhoek had opened a whole new world for biology by using a microscope to observe life forms previously invisible. Then, in 1687, Sir Isaac Newton laid the foundations of classical physics with his Latin treatise Principia Mathematica. Newton's work in particular led to a new spirit of optimism. The eighteenth-century poet Alexander Pope paid tribute to Newton's achievement when he wrote: "Nature and Nature's Laws lay hid in Night: / God said, 'Let Newton be!' and all was light."

While Newton's work didn't illuminate everything, people in the eighteenth century began to feel that everything in the universe could be known if it were only studied rationally. A few monarchs still ruled with absolute power, claiming authority directly from God. However, in 1715 Louis XIV of France, the greatest of such monarchs, died. He left his five-year-old great-grandson to be king. People not just in France but all across Europe dreamt of how they could remake the world along more rational lines. Individuals who discarded tradition and superstition in favor of reason and science viewed themselves as enlightened, and the era in which they triumphed became known as the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment influenced the theatre as well. The free-thinking Scandinavian nobleman Ludvig Holberg wrote a series of comedies mocking old ways of doing things and championing reform. In his most famous play, Jeppe of the Hill, the play's protagonist has a long monologue explaining why he drinks so much, arguing that alcoholism is a rational response to the miseries of life. The following year, Holberg premiered a new play in Copenhagen, The Lying-In-Room, in which a pregnant woman going into labor finds her many visitors cause her greater pain than child birth. Another Holberg play, the gender-bending comedy The Beautiful Bridegroom, was recently made into an opera by the American composer Dan Shore.

In France, Enlightenment ideas frequently drew the ire of the government, in part due to the actions of the philosopher François-Marie Arouet, better known by his pen name, Voltaire. Most famous for his witty works of satire, Voltaire attacked foolishness and corruption wherever he saw it, but most especially in the Roman Catholic Church and the French establishment. The Comédie Française agreed to perform Voltaire's first play, an adaptation of Oedipus, in 1717. However, before they could stage it, the author was arrested and thrown into the most notorious prison in Paris, the Bastille. He was released the following year, after which the theatre finally performed the play, earning Voltaire much critical praise.

Voltaire's next two plays were failures, and after a dispute with a nobleman, he was imprisoned in the Bastille a second time. The government later released him, on the condition that he go into exile in Britain. It was there that Voltaire met John Gay and other English playwrights. Eventually allowed to return to France, Voltaire had to avoid Paris, where he was routinely attacked and his writings publicly burned. This was the price of criticizing people in power.

Over his long life, Voltaire continued to produce plays in addition to works of philosophy and history. His tragedy Zaire was largely a success, but his play Mahomet drew criticism, not because it attacked the founder of Islam (though it did), but because people rightly perceived that the true object of the play's scorn was the fanaticism of the Catholic Church. Voltaire frequently disguised his criticism of France by setting stories in far-off lands, as was the case with The Orphan of China, an adaptation of the Yuan-era Chinese play, The Orphan of Zhao. Though these plays did not send Voltaire back to the Bastille, they didn't win him many friends in high places, either. Yet by the time he died, Voltaire's literary achievements were grudgingly recognized. In 1778, the 83-year-old author rose from his sickbed to attend his last play, Irene, receiving tremendous applause. A few months later, he died.

By the time of Voltaire's death, criticism of French society and the French government was becoming much more common. The playwright Pierre Beaumarchais scored a huge hit in 1775 with his comedy The Barber of Seville. While the play nominally takes place in Spain, it pokes fun at the French upper classes, showing an aristocrat who is unable to marry his love without the help of a lowly barber. In 1781, Beaumarchais wrote a sequel, The Marriage of Figaro, which went even further, showing the barber outwit the very nobleman he helped in the previous play. After reading the piece, King Louis XVI ordered it banned, in spite of entreaties from his wife, Marie Antoinette, who found it hysterically funny. Three years later, the ban was lifted, and aristocrats flocked to the theatre to see themselves made fun of by a playwright with humble origins.

The Marriage of Figaro is sometimes credited with helping to bring about the French Revolution, but as it so happens, Beaumarchais was involved even more explicitly in revolutionary activity. He helped run guns and supplies to the British colonies during the American Revolution and was intricately involved in a number of spy rings. His sympathies were clearly with the Enlightenment ideals embodied by Voltaire, and he published many of Voltaire's works posthumously, having them printed in Germany to avoid French censors. Beginning in 1787, Beaumarchais became involved in a series of legal battles as his enemies sought to discredit him. Though many in the aristocracy embraced Beaumarchais and his work, others feared the violent disruptions that might be caused by critiques of those in power.

Those fears proved to be well founded. On July 14, 1789, a mob in Paris stormed the Bastille, the prison that had not only once held Voltaire, but had in fact become a symbol of all the oppressive forces opposed by the Enlightenment. The mob's actions sparked a revolution that led to the execution of the king and queen and a Reign of Terror that would take many other lives as well. The social divisions criticized by Voltaire, Beaumarchais, and others had finally brought European civilization to a point where violence seemed the only way to right the wrongs at the heart of society. The age of reason dissolved into an age of violent emotions.