(Tóibín’s article appeared in the London Review of Books,
Balzac’s Sarrasine tells the story of a young woman’s wonder at the strange appearance of an old man at a party in Paris. Balzac has tremendous fun describing the man. First his clothes: he is wearing ‘a white waistcoat embroidered with gold’ and ‘a shirt-frill of English lace, yellow with age, the magnificence of which a queen might have envied’. Then the face: ‘That dark face was full of angles and furrowed deep in every direction; the chin was furrowed; there were great hollows at the temples; the eyes were sunken in yellow orbits. The maxillary bones, which his indescribable gauntness caused to protrude, formed deep cavities in the centre of both cheeks.’ And it was not just his furrows and hollows, it was his make-up: ‘We often see more hideous old men; but what contributed more than aught else to give to the spectre that rose before us the aspect of an artificial creation was the red and white paint with which he glistened.’ The man also wore a light wig, ‘with innumerable curls which indicated extraordinary pretensions to elegance’. He wore gold earrings and ‘a fixed, unchanging smile, the shadow of an implacable and sneering laugh, like that of a death’s head’. The smell he exuded added to the sport; it was ‘a musk-like odour of the old dresses which a duchess’s heirs exhume from her wardrobe during the inventory’.
Stage Voices Publishing for archived posts and sign up for free e-mail updates: http 2015:// www.stagevoices.com/ . If you would like to contribute a review, monologue, or other work related to theatre, please write to Bob Shuman at Bobjshuman@gmail.com.
(Robin Pogrebin’s article appeared in The New York Times, 9/24; via Pam Green.)
“Dames at Sea” is that unusual show that everybody seems to know about but few people actually know. Or, if they did see the show at some point, it was probably outside New York, since “Dames” has long been a staple of school, community and regional theaters, thanks to its toe-tapping, umbrella-twirling buoyancy and a manageable cast of six beaming principals. (Full disclosure: This reporter knows every word to every song, since her mom played a star-spangled Joan in a 1972 production at the Saltaire Yacht Club on Fire Island.)
Stage Voices Publishing for archived posts and sign up for free e-mail updates: http 2015:// www.stagevoices.com/ . If you would like to contribute a review, monologue, or other work related to theatre, please write to Bob Shuman at Bobjshuman@gmail.com.
(Peter Crawley’s article appeared in the Irish Times, 9/28.)
“The normal thing is just not going to work for me, you know?” So says Marya, a young woman wondering what to do with her long-stalled life in Dick Walsh’s intriguing new play for Pan Pan.
In Annabell Rickerby’s fascinating performance, an artful display of artlessness, Marya need not be especially worried about normality. A figure in leopard-skin leggings and an elaborate leg-brace, she shares a house with her cantankerous, invasive father (Des Nealon) in an isolated part of the country, praying to her dead mother, taking advice from a sullen but sanguine friend (Una McKevitt).
Stage Voices Publishing for archived posts and sign up for free e-mail updates: http 2015:// www.stagevoices.com/ . If you would like to contribute a review, monologue, or other work related to theatre, please write to Bob Shuman at Bobjshuman@gmail.com.
(Michael Sommers’s article appeared in The New York Times, 9/24; via Pam Green.)
Shakespeare in love? How about Shakespeare in a jam?
That is the scenario in “Equivocation,” a dark, thoughtful comedy by Bill Cain that is currently enjoying its Garden State premiere at the Shakespeare Theater of New Jersey in Madison.
It is 1606, and Shakespeare — here called Shag; short for Shagspeare — has been commissioned by King James I to dramatize the “true history” of The Gunpowder Plot, an actual episode that saw a band of Catholic nobles conspire in 1605 to blow up the English Parliament and kill King James.
Just before the massacre was set to occur, an anonymous letter tipped off the authorities to kegs of gunpowder hidden in a cellar. The perpetrators were soon seized, tortured, tried and executed.
Stage Voices Publishing for archived posts and sign up for free e-mail updates: http 2015:// www.stagevoices.com/ . If you would like to contribute a review, monologue, or other work related to theatre, please write to Bob Shuman at Bobjshuman@gmail.com.
(Charles Isherwood’s article appeared in The New York Times, 9/27.)
One of the great musicals of the last decade was born anew on Sunday, when the thrillingly inventive Deaf West Theater production of “Spring Awakening” opened on Broadway at the Brooks Atkinson Theater. Any qualms theater-lovers might have about this being a premature, whiplash-inducing revival — the original closed in 2009, after all — will vanish like frost in strong sunlight when the young cast of both hearing and deaf actors floods the stage.
Deaf actors in a musical? The prospect sounds challenging, to performers and audiences alike. But you will be surprised at how readily you can assimilate the novelties involved, and soon find yourself pleasurably immersed not in a worthy, let’s-pat-ourselves-on-the-back experience, but simply in a first-rate production of a transporting musical.
Stage Voices Publishing for archived posts and sign up for free e-mail updates: http 2015:// www.stagevoices.com/ . If you would like to contribute a review, monologue, or other work related to theatre, please write to Bob Shuman at Bobjshuman@gmail.com.
(Laura Collins-Hughes’s article appeared in The New York Times, 9/22; via Pam Green.)
The rhyme about sugar and spice and everything nice has always been absurd. Anyone who’s ever been a little girl can tell you that much. But Madeleine, the faintly disheveled menace at the center of Genevieve Hulme-Beaman’s poignant and engrossing solo play, “Pondling,” is in particularly misleading disguise as a darling moppet.
With bows in her hair and patent leather shoes on her feet, one of her white knee socks sagging at half-mast, she pedals around her Irish village on a My Little Pony bike, entertaining two impossible fantasies: to become “a beautiful swan lady” and to win the affection of one Johnno Boyle O’Connor, an exotic older man of 14.
Stage Voices Publishing for archived posts and sign up for free e-mail updates: http 2015:// www.stagevoices.com/ . If you would like to contribute a review, monologue, or other work related to theatre, please write to Bob Shuman at Bobjshuman@gmail.com.
At the Next Wave Festival, the director-performer Thaddeus Phillips presents a travelogue exploring the misadventures of international passage. Sept. 30-Oct. 3.
In a new play by Robert O’Hara ("Bootycandy"), directed by Kent Gash, a group of siblings gather in a park to confront their sister about her drug abuse. In previews. Opens Oct. 8.
James Macdonald directs Caryl Churchill’s political drama from 1979, set in colonial Africa during the Victorian era and in contemporary London. In previews. Opens Oct. 5.
An homage to nineteen-thirties musical comedy, first produced Off Broadway in 1968, with a book and lyrics by George Haimsohn and Robin Miller and music by Jim Wise. Randy Skinner directs. In previews.
Lupita Nyong’o ("12 Years a Slave") stars in Danai Gurira’s play, directed by Liesl Tommy, about the captive wives of a rebel officer during Liberia's second civil war. In previews.
In D. L. Coburn’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play from 1976, directed by Leonard Foglia, James Earl Jones and Cicely Tyson play two nursing-home residents who square off in gin rummy. In previews.
Joe Mantello directs a drama by Stephen Karam ("Sons of the Prophet"), about a man who brings his family to celebrate Thanksgiving at his daughter’s dilapidated apartment. In previews.
LCT3 presents a new play by Abe Koogler, directed by Lila Neugebauer, in which an ex-con (Marin Ireland) finds work at a slaughterhouse and tries to reconnect with her teen-age son, a staunch vegetarian. In previews.
Clive Owen, Eve Best, and Kelly Reilly star in this enigmatic love triangle by Harold Pinter, directed by Douglas Hodge for the Roundabout and featuring original music by Thom Yorke. In previews. Opens Oct. 6.
Irish Rep presents John McManus’s play, directed by Ciarán O’Reilly, in which an old Irish farmer is visited by a real-estate developer who wants to convert his land into a golf course. In previews. Opens Oct. 1.
Marylouise Burke and Holland Taylor star in a new comedy by David Lindsay-Abaire, directed by David Hyde Pierce for Manhattan Theatre Club, about two women in assisted living who are forced to share a room. In previews.
The puppeteer Basil Twist stages this musical ghost story, featuring Joey Arias and Julie Atlas Muz as the real-life sisters who founded the Abrons Playhouse, a century ago, and are now back to haunt it. Opens Oct. 7.
Annaleigh Ashford, Matthew Broderick, and Julie White star in Daniel Sullivan's revival of the A. R. Gurney comedy, about a New York couple and their dog. In previews.
Keira Knightley makes her Broadway début in Helen Edmundson's adaptation of the Émile Zola novel, in which a woman in a loveless marriage enters a torrid and murderous affair with her husband’s friend. Evan Cabnet directs the Roundabout production. In previews.
Stage Voices Publishing for archived posts and sign up for free e-mail updates: http 2015:// www.stagevoices.com/ . If you would like to contribute a review, monologue, or other work related to theatre, please write to Bob Shuman at Bobjshuman@gmail.com.
(Andrew Dickson’s article appeared in the Guardian, 9/28.)
An army straggles along the beach in improvised encampments; they have been here nine long years. Inside the walls, the city waits. The noose of history tightens; this battle can only end one way.
After taking the oldest playtext in the western canon, Aeschylus’s The Persians, up to a firing range in the Brecons (2010) and offering a rewired Coriolanus inside an aircraft hanger (2012), for their latest journey theatremakers Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes begin where so much of it began, with Homer’s epic. Staged in four roughly two-hour chunks, this National Theatre Wales production does not attempt the full span of 24 books, but – employing the five slender volumes of translations-cum-adaptations on which poet Christopher Logue toiled for over 40 years – offers a distilled version of one of the oldest narratives in existence. Achilles broods, the Greek and Trojan armies spar, then hunker down; Patroclus meets his maker. The gods, callous and cold-eyed, supervise everything.
Stage Voices Publishing for archived posts and sign up for free e-mail updates: http 2015:// www.stagevoices.com/ . If you would like to contribute a review, monologue, or other work related to theatre, please write to Bob Shuman at Bobjshuman@gmail.com.
Musician and producer Brian Eno has spoken about how arts and humanities are seen as "a luxury" while science and maths are viewed as important and "part of what makes Britain great".
The former Roxy Music star has called for a "rethink" of culture due to "complete confusion" around the subject and picked up on what Education Secretary Nicky Morgan said about STEM subjects – science, technology, engineering and maths.
Delivering the annual BBC Music John Peel Lecture, he said he heard Ms Morgan claim it was a good idea for students not to go into arts and humanities because they did not offer job prospects as good as the STEM subjects.
Stage Voices Publishing for archived posts and sign up for free e-mail updates: http 2015:// www.stagevoices.com/ . If you would like to contribute a review, monologue, or other work related to theatre, please write to Bob Shuman at Bobjshuman@gmail.com.
(Sali Hughes’s article appeared in the Guardian, 9/26.; via Pam Green.)
Her 70th birthday is just around the corner, but the celebrated actor shows no signs of slowing down, shutting up or becoming invisible. We salute her fearless approach to fashion
Mirren, who doesn’t bother to call herself a feminist (because “it’s just fucking obvious”), is more immediately concerned about class inequality in the acting world. In a recent Weekend interview, Julie Walters said that the profession would no longer even be an option for someone from her modest background. Mirren and Walters are cut from not dissimilar cloth: Mirren was born Helen Mironoff to a Russian immigrant father and working-class mother from West Ham, who both told her she could never be an independent woman unless she went out and earned money. She grew up with her brother and sister in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, on a tight family budget (her father drove a cab and worked as a driving test examiner). The Mirrens – her father had anglicised the (at one time quite grand) family name when Helen was a little girl – were, and still are, very close. Like Walters, she attended vocational college (studying teaching) rather than drama school, but got her big break through theatre groups: at the National Youth Theatre (Ben Kingsley, David Suchet and Ian McShane were contemporaries), she was spotted by director Trevor Nunn. “In the 60s and 70s, the Youth Theatre was so important,” she says. “That’s the one organisation that cuts right across. And you still need some sort of financial support, even there. It’s very tough.
“I couldn’t afford to go to drama school. To become an actor was a dangerous thing, financially. But, on the other hand, it was doable and I don’t know whether it is any more. It’s gone back to only really posh kids being able to afford to be actors.”
Stage Voices Publishing for archived posts and sign up for free e-mail updates: http 2015:// www.stagevoices.com/ . If you would like to contribute a review, monologue, or other work related to theatre, please write to Bob Shuman at Bobjshuman@gmail.com.