Archives for September 11, 2015

In today’s Wall Street Journal I report on two out-of-town shows, a Chicago revival of The Price and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival premiere of Head Over Heels. Here’s an excerpt.

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For all his fame, Arthur Miller was never all that commercially successful. Only two of his plays, “Death of a Salesman” and “The Price,” ran for more than a year on Broadway, and “The Price,” though it was telecast on NBC in 1971 and continues to receive occasional high-profile revivals, isn’t nearly as well known as “Salesman.” So when Chicago’s TimeLine Theatre Company announced that it was staging “The Price” and that the cast would include Mike Nussbaum, I knew I had to be there. Mr. Nussbaum (who is, believe it or not, 91 years old) isn’t widely known outside his home town, but he’s one of America’s best character actors. I’ve seen him in everything from Shakespeare to Sondheim, and he’s always knocked me flat. This time, however, he’s outdone himself—though not at the expense of the production, which is so unremittingly taut that I found it all but impossible to look away from the stage long enough to scribble notes on what I was seeing. Maybe that’s the definition of a really good show: one that Mr. Nussbaum can’t steal because everybody else in the cast is as good as he is….

Part of what makes “The Price” so good is that Miller somehow managed to steer clear of the bloviatory sermonizing of his other plays, “Salesman” in particular. He claimed long after the fact that it was really an allegory of America’s involvement in Vietnam, but if so, he covered his symbolic tracks so carefully that it’s hard to see what he meant. Far from being obviously political, “The Price” is a life study of the power of unacknowledged pride to corrode family ties, and though the last 15 minutes are a bit stagy, that doesn’t make them any less riveting.

Louis Contey, who directed TimeLine’s marvelously low-keyed 2010 production of “Frost/Nixon,” has worked no less subtle wonders with “The Price.” I’ve never seen four actors listen so closely to their onstage colleagues: They seem to hang on one another’s words, thereby drawing you into the sticky web of mistrust in which their characters are trapped….

Jeff Whitty’s “Head Over Heels” is a new jukebox musical in which the punkish power-pop songs of the Go-Go’s (“We Got the Beat”) are made to serve as musical accompaniment to an extremely free verse adaptation of “Arcadia,” Sir Philip Sidney’s 16th-century pastoral romance, whose sexy plot has a startlingly modern feel. I relished the ingeniousness with which Mr. Whitty has slotted the songs into the unfolding dramatic action, and Ed Sylvanus Iskandar’s production is frisky and genial. Not so, alas, the book, unless you go in for Ye Olde Renaissance Faire iambic-pentameter humor…

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To read my review of The Price, go here.

To read my review of Head Over Heels, go here.

A scene from TimeLine Theatre’s production of The Price:

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I consider the question of why classic big-cast plays are vanishing from America’s stages—and offer some suggestions for what to do about it. Here’s an excerpt.

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Three years ago, an unknown ensemble called the Bedlam Theatre Company set up shop in a grubby off-off-Broadway house and performed George Bernard Shaw’s “Saint Joan,” which calls for some two dozen actors, with a cast of four. It was the most improbable Shaw revival I’d ever seen—and the most exciting.

Today Bedlam is a major name in New York theater, as well as a sign of the times. Our cash-strapped drama companies have been increasingly disinclined in recent years to revive budget-busting big-cast plays like “Saint Joan.” I first took note of that tendency in this space in 2013, and it’s grown even more pronounced since then. To be sure, Broadway does exhume big-cast classics on occasion: “A Streetcar Named Desire,” for example, has been done there nine times, most recently in 2012. But the only plays of that kind that get done with any regularity nowadays, whether in New York or by regional companies, are such well-worn single-set chestnuts as “Streetcar,” “Death of a Salesman,” “Our Town” and “You Can’t Take It With You.” Fine plays all—but there’s more to large-scale theater than familiar staples.

The success of Bedlam’s blazingly imaginative reworking of “Saint Joan” pointed to one way for cash-conscious drama companies to present big-cast plays without dynamiting their bank accounts: Cut the casts by doubling, tripling and quadrupling the roles. Other companies have grappled with the same problem by teaming up to mount expensive shows that they couldn’t afford to produce separately.

One way or another, though, American theater is urgently in need of new solutions to the big-cast problem. Essential parts of the theatrical repertory are falling into disuse. In the hope of moving them out of the warehouse and back onstage again, I offer this list of six significant large-cast plays, only one of which has been seen on Broadway in the past two decades, that deserve to go to the top of the priority list. No, they’re not cheap to do—but they have solid track records of audience success….

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Read the whole thing here.

Vivien Leigh stars in Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, adapted for TV by Ellen M. Violett, directed by Henry Kaplan, and originally telecast in England in 1959 on ITV Play of the Week:

Bill Monroe plays “My Last Days on Earth,” which he wrote when he was being treated for colon cancer in 1981. He died in 1996:

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

“There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”

John Adams, letter to John Taylor, April 15, 1814