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December 1, 2006
TT: Broadway's big week
At last, a hat trick--I praise three new Broadway shows, John Doyle's revival of Stephen Sondheim's Company, Tom Stoppard's Voyage, and David Hare's The Vertical Hour, in this week's Wall Street Journal drama column:In an act of recreative genius, Mr. Doyle has knocked the cobwebs off "Company" and turned it into an utterly contemporary chronicle of marriage and its discontents, one whose implications have never been more immediate.
Like Mr. Doyle's 2006 revival of "Sweeney Todd," this is a small-scale production in which the 14 members of the cast double as their own onstage orchestra, playing everything from piccolo to double bass. It's no stunt, either: By making their own music, the actors create an atmosphere at once intimate and intense, and Mary-Mitchell Campbell's astringent new orchestrations strip away all the tired pop-music clichés of Jonathan Tunick's original arrangements. Add in David Gallo's appropriately glossy lucite-and-lacquer unit set and Mr. Doyle's bracingly Brechtian "presentational" staging, in which the performers mostly play to the audience rather than to one another, and you get a show that looks and sounds less like a leave-'em-laughing Broadway musical than an avant-garde theater piece. No, this isn't your parents' "Company"--it's better....
Tom Stoppard might just be a great playwright, and "The Coast of Utopia," the trilogy of which "Voyage" is the first installment, may well prove to be a great work of art. That remains to be seen, at least by me, for I haven't yet been to "Shipwreck" and "Salvage," the second and third parts of "The Coast of Utopia" (they open on Dec. 21 and Feb. 15). I can already tell you, though, that "Voyage" is that rarest of theatrical experiences, a thrilling play that makes you think--hard.
Taken together, "Voyage," "Shipwreck" and "Salvage" constitute a grandiose meditation on the inscrutable workings of the Law of Unintended Consequences. The principal characters, Michael Bakunin (Ethan Hawke), Vissarion Belinsky (Billy Crudup) and Alexander Herzen (Brían F. O'Byrne), were a group of passionately idealistic 19th-century Russian intellectuals who, in a supremely tragic act of historical irony, helped catapult their country out of one tyranny and into a worse one. In "Voyage" we see them as angry young men, at once besotted with art and philosophy and enraged by the rigid authoritarianism of life in Imperial Russia--and at play's end we watch in horrified awe as they turn fatefully from reflection to action....
Mr. Stoppard is an artist fascinated by political ideas. David Hare, on the other hand, is a political playwright with artistic instincts, and in "The Vertical Hour" he gives them the upper hand. The result is a show far more convincing than "Stuff Happens," Mr. Hare's illustrated lecture on the wickedness of the Bush administration, which played to whoops of self-satisfied delight at the Public Theater earlier this year. "The Vertical Hour" is about the Iraq war, too, but this time around Mr. Hare has gone to the trouble of embedding his opinions in a domestic drama of no small subtlety, and though his characters are symbols, they're also fully believable as human beings....
No free link, and I'm really sorry about that--it's been at least a month since I had anything good to say about theater in New York, and I'd like to get the word out. Fortunately, you can always buy a copy of Friday's Journal and look up my column in the "Weekend Journal" section, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you instant access to my review, among countless other good things. (If you're already a subscriber, the review is here.)
Posted December 1, 2006 12:00 PM
