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March 9, 2007
TT: Laughing at Lear
I kept on seeing shows while I was sick, and I report on three of them in today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, King Lear, Patrick Marber’s Howard Katz, and Craig Lucas’ Prelude to a Kiss. As you’ll see, none of them made me feel any better:Kevin Kline is smart, imaginative and unfailingly watchable—but can you really see him as King Lear? Evidently James Lapine does. Mr. Lapine, who is best known (and rightly so) for collaborating with Stephen Sondheim and staging “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” has directed the new production of “King Lear” in which Mr. Kline is currently starring at the Public Theater. Admiring both men as I do, I hoped against hope that their “Lear” would work. But it doesn’t, not at all, and though it’s not the worst one I’ve ever seen—that prize goes to Robert Falls’ comprehensively stupid production, presented last summer at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre—it’s pretty awful all the same….
Watching a play about a midlife crisis is like listening to a song cycle about prostate trouble, and Mr. Marber’s take on the old, old story is (A) stealthily sentimental and (B) far from fresh. In fact, it was around the time that Alfred Molina [the star of Howard Katz] tried unsuccessfully to go back to his wife (Jessica Hecht) that I recalled how Tony Shalhoub had been put through a not-dissimilar wringer just two months ago in Theresa Rebeck’s “The Scene.” It’s not that there’s nothing new to be said about such crises, but whatever it is, Mr. Marber hasn’t said it….
It isn’t hard to sit back and let yourself be entertained [by Prelude to a Kiss], but don’t expect more out of Mr. Lucas’ punchline-strewn fantasy about love and death, which longs to be profound but settles for sugary slickness. “How precious the time is…how little we realize till it’s almost gone,” [John] Mahoney assures us. Stop the presses—dog bites man!
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Posted March 9, 2007 12:00 PM
