TT: All frosting, no cake

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review two much-praised New York shows, Julie Taymor’s Midsummer Night’s Dream and Bruce Norris’ Domesticated, neither of which pleased me. Here’s an excerpt.
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After “Spider-man,” what? Julie Taymor, whose professional reputation was severely bruised two years ago when she was shoved out of the creative team that put together Broadway’s best-looking mediocre musical, has now returned to the green pastures of high art with “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” the inaugural offering of Theatre for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center. As befits the opening of a brand-new theater, Ms. Taymor’s production is a spectacular affair, not as budget-bustingly so as “Spider-man” but very much in its spare-no-expense vein. Actors fly through the air, disappear through trap doors, even grow 20 feet tall before your astonished eyes, all accompanied by the festively spooky Hollywood-style incidental music of Elliot Goldenthal, Ms. Taymor’s creative partner and real-life husband. I’ve never seen a Shakespeare staging in which more things happened in less time, and I wanted very much to like the results, which are nothing if not likable–relentlessly so, if truth be told.
What stopped me from doing so was Ms. Taymor’s near-exclusive emphasis on the visual. She has, as everyone who’s seen “The Lion King” knows, a singular ability to create poetic stage pictures, and her “Midsummer Night’s Dream” is full to overflowing of eye-popping images…
Therein lies the flaw in this production: It’s all about what you see and never about what is said. Nearly every speech is decorated with a corresponding piece of stage trickery, and it doesn’t take long before you lose sight of the play itself. It is, I suspect, no coincidence that none of the acting is memorable, or that Ms. Taymor stoops to cute Disneyish caricature whenever she pauses to characterize an individual player. Puck is Roger Rabbit, Oberon is Darth Vader, while the Rude Mechanicals come off like an updated version of the Seven Dwarves. The result is a staging that looks like a piece of performance art à la Cirque du Soleil and plays like a children’s show….
“Domesticated,” Bruce Norris’ new play, is just like “Clybourne Park,” which made him rich and famous. Only the subject matter has been changed, presumably to protect the author from well-founded charges of repetition: “Clybourne Park” is about race and “Domesticated” is about sex. Otherwise the two shows are essentially indistinguishable. Once again we are presented with a bad guy, in this case a politician with zipper disease (Jeff Goldblum, who is way too nebbishy) who commits an unforgivable sin (in a nutshell, he acts like Anthony Weiner, only worse). Once again Mr. Norris confuses the issue by briefly making the bad guy look sympathetic, after which he allows the good gal (Laurie Metcalf, who is formidable as Mr. Goldblum’s furious wife) to unmask him as a monster of carnal appetite. Once again the climax of the play is a catfight that fails to conceal the arthritic pacing of the second act. And once again it all adds up to a comprehensively phony piece of deck-stacked pandering…
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Read the whole thing here.