Archives for November 2013

Norman Mailer’s USA, a 1966 Swedish TV documentary:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)

“We are talking about an artist; and for the enjoyment of the artist the mask must be to some extent moulded on the face. What he makes outside him must correspond to something inside him; he can only make his effects out of some of the materials of his soul.”
G.K. Chesterton, “The Dagger With Wings”

The Wall Street Journal has given me an extra drama column this week in which to review the Shakespeare’s Globe productions of Twelfth Night and Richard III that are currently playing in repertory on Broadway. Here’s an excerpt.
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In 1997 Shakespeare’s Globe, a London theater that duplicates as closely as possible the playhouse where the King’s Men, the troupe of which Shakespeare was a member, performed between 1599 and 1613, was opened on the site of the original Globe Theatre. Now the Globe has set up shop in Broadway’s Belasco Theatre to present “Richard III” and “Twelfth Night” in repertory, staging them in a manner that is as authentic as can be contrived in a proscenium house. The uncluttered playing area is fitted out with frame-breaking stage boxes and (mostly) lit with candles, the costumes are hand-crafted 17th-century replicas designed with awe-inspiring verisimilitude by Jenny Tiramani and Claire van Kampen’s Elizabethan-style incidental music is played on Renaissance instruments. Above all, the women’s roles, as was the custom in Shakespeare’s time, are performed by men–among them Mark Rylance, who plays Olivia in “Twelfth Night.”
Needless to say, Mr. Rylance, one of the top classical actors of our time, is the draw for this ambitious undertaking. That said, it’s the productions themselves, both of which were directed by Tim Carroll, that will likely be the real draw…
Having just seen Taylor Mac’s astonishingly creative drag performance in Lear deBessonet’s Public Theater production of Bertolt Brecht’s “Good Person of Szechwan,” I expected something more out of Mr. Rylance than standard-issue camp. On occasion he supplies it, in particular when he wistfully confesses that for a woman of a certain age, “youth is bought more oft than begg’d or borrow’d.” For the most part, though, I found his acting to be over-obvious, at times blatantly so…
Mine, however, is a minority view–rarely have I seen so comprehensively crowd-pleasing a piece of comic acting–and even if you share my reservations about Mr. Rylance’s Olivia, the rest of this “Twelfth Night” is so persuasive that you’ll want to see it anyway. Not so “Richard III,” in which Mr. Rylance is giving a performance of the title role that makes a sort of sense on paper but none at all in person: He has opted to play Shakespeare’s hunchbacked monster of malignity as a milksoppy, simperingly adenoidal clown…
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Read the whole thing here.
The trailer for Twelfth Night and Richard III::

From 2003:

In New York City, drama critics don’t usually attend opening-night performances of plays. We go to press previews instead, meaning that we rarely see Famous People in the audience–they generally come to the official first night. Alas, I have a celebrity disability, meaning that I almost never recognize them in the flesh. My companion for the evening, however, was a virtuoso celebrity-spotter, and everywhere she looked she saw famous faces…from the distant past. Jack Klugman, Arlene Dahl, Joan Collins, folks like that. (I kept waiting for her to point out Walter Winchell.)
Where were all the under-70 celebrities? Or do they even come to Broadway shows anymore?…

Read the whole thing here.

“For intellectual authority, the appropriate version of Descartes’s cogito would be today: I am talked about, therefore I am.”
Zygmunt Bauman, The Individualised Society

Sir Georg Solti conducts the London Philharmonic in a 1975 performance of “Nimrod,” from Sir Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)

“A scar nobly got, or a noble scar, is a good livery of honour.”
William Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well