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March 10, 2006
TT: All about Cate
It's Friday, and I'm strictly off Broadway in this week's Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. On tap are BAM Harvey's Hedda Gabler, starring Cate Blanchett, and Lincoln Center's Bernarda Alba, starring Phylicia Rashad:Everyone who goes to the movies knows how good Cate Blanchett is, which is why the Australian production of "Hedda Gabler" in which she's currently touring is such a hot ticket. But acting in front of an audience is different from acting in front of a camera, and this was her U.S. stage debut. So how'd she do? Stupendously well--except that she reminded me of an old-time movie star. One particular old-time movie star, in fact: Bette Davis.
That's not a knock. Davis was matchless in the right kind of part, and "Hedda Gabler" might well have been her cup of wormwood, especially in the tightened-up, lightened-up "adaptation" of Henrik Ibsen's 1890 play by Andrew Upton (Ms. Blanchett's husband) that the Sydney Theatre Company has brought to Brooklyn....
Speaking of scary women, there's another show in town that you should rush to see: "Bernarda Alba," Michael John LaChiusa's musical version of the 1936 play by Federico García Lorca, which opened Monday at Lincoln Center, just downstairs from Adam Guettel's "The Light in the Piazza." Like Mr. Guettel, Mr. LaChiusa specializes in musical-theater works with the expressive weight of operas that he insists for some inscrutable reason on calling "musicals." Whatever they are, they're theatrical dynamite, and "Bernarda Alba," in which Phylicia Rashad plays the tyrannical mother of a houseful of sexually frustrated young Spanish ladies, is no exception....
No link, not even with a movie star! Buy the paper already. Or, better yet, go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will provide you with immediate access to the complete text of my review (there's a whole lot more of it), plus plenty of additional art-related coverage.
Posted March 10, 2006 12:00 PM
