Things have calmed down–somewhat–on Broadway, so my Wall Street Journal drama column covers only two plays this week, Mark Twain’s Is He Dead? and Mark Lamos’ Lincoln Center Theater production of Cymbeline. Here’s a preview.
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“Is He Dead?” is a farce about the art world that vanished into the author’s files and didn’t reappear until it was discovered in 2001 by a scholar and optioned by a producer. Six years later, it has opened in a ritzy production directed by Michael Blakemore (“Noises Off”) and starring Norbert Leo Butz (“Dirty Rotten Scoundrels”). The results are shriekingly funny–I don’t know when I’ve heard a New York audience laugh louder or longer–in large part because of Mr. Butz, whose performance is a veritable masterpiece of mugging.
Don’t be fooled by the flackery, though: “Is He Dead?” may be “by” Twain, but it’s a quaintly amateurish piece of work that wouldn’t have run for ten minutes on Broadway had David Ives not “adapted” the script to within an inch of its life. The author of “All in the Timing” and “Mere Mortals,” is one of this country’s smartest comic playwrights, and a line-by-line comparison between the published version of “Is He Dead?” and the one currently being performed at the Lyceum Theatre is the equivalent of a postgraduate course in How to Make Large Numbers of People Guffaw. Mr. Ives has retained Twain’s original situations, most of his characters and a fair number of his lines, but he has cut, rearranged, punched up and otherwise transformed them so extensively as to deserve credit not as the play’s adapter but as its co-author….
“Cymbeline,” which Shakespeare wrote toward the end of his life, is an imaginative retrospective in which he simultaneously deployed all of the time-honored devices that drove his plots: the weak king, the spunky heroine who dresses up as a boy, the misguided husband induced by a scoundrel to test his wife’s love. George Bernard Shaw called it “stagey trash of the lowest melodramatic order,” and though that was mere envy speaking, there have been plenty of other equally knowledgeable commentators who failed to grasp what Shakespeare was up to. Henry James dismissed “Cymbeline” as “a florid fairy-tale, of a construction so loose and unpropped that it can scarce be said to stand upright at all,” and it’s true that most productions fail to weave the play’s variegated strands into a convincing fabric.
Not so this one. Greatly aided by Michael Yeargan’s sumptuously simple sets, Jess Goldstein’s gorgeous costumes and Mel Marvin’s savory incidental music, Mr. Lamos takes a cue from his parallel career as an opera director and gives us a “Cymbeline” that flows with the irresistible forward momentum of a piece of music. Resplendent pageantry, knockabout comedy, haunting lyricism: All are blended in just proportion, sweeping us toward a climax in which surprise after surprise is detonated like an extra-long string of firecrackers….
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To read the whole thing, go here.
UPDATE: I took Maud with me to see Is He Dead? To find out what she thought of it, go here.
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
