In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review two important revivals, the Public Theater’s Plenty and Lincoln Center Theater’s Falsettos. Here’s an excerpt.
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Big news for serious theatergoers: The Public Theater has just given “Plenty” a major New York revival, the first one since the play came to Broadway 34 years ago and established David Hare as a central figure in modern English-language drama. It’s a signal event, a comprehensively satisfying production that features a blowtorch-hot performance by Rachel Weisz.
Originally performed in 1978, “Plenty” is a historical panorama, at once intimate and sweeping, set in England, France and Belgium between 1943 and 1962. At the center of the action is Susan (Ms. Weisz), who spied behind Nazi lines when she was 17 years old, an experience so terrifying—and thrilling—that it has permanently scarred her psyche. Nothing about her present-day life can measure up to it, least of all her unhappy marriage to Raymond (Corey Stoll), an ever-so-proper British diplomat. Having lived on the jagged edge of danger, Susan is now expected to comport herself with immaculate tact, suppressing the passionate idealism awakened by her wartime service whenever it collides with the needs of Her Majesty’s Government. Instead, she does exactly what she wants to do at all times, thereby sabotaging Raymond’s career and leading him to conclude that she is not merely devoid of discretion but unstable to the point of actual insanity.
Is Susan’s erratic behavior a reasonable response to the careerism and conformity of the world around her? Alternatively, might she really be crazy? Or does the answer, assuming there is one, lie somewhere in between? “Plenty” leaves the question open…
Ms. Weisz’s blazing performance, like the play itself, is ambiguous enough to permit multiple interpretations. At times her Susan seems quite mad, but she always draws back from the brink, and you find yourself wondering how best to interpret her willfully self-destructive behavior. Mr. Stoll is no less adept at conveying Raymond’s mounting frustration…
“Falsettos,” the William Finn-James Lapine musical that hit big on Broadway in 1992, has now returned there in a well-cast Lincoln Center Theater revival directed by Mr. Lapine with his usual skill. Today, though, its once-controversial subject matter—the decision of a married father (Christian Borle) to leave his wife (Stephanie J. Block) for a man (Andrew Rannells) who dies of AIDS in the second act—has long since become a trusty staple of stage and screen. So how does “Falsettos” hold up now that gay marriage is the law of the land and AIDS has ceased to be an uncommutable death sentence?…
The first act, “March of the Falsettos,” remains impressive. Notwithstanding Mr. Finn’s inability to write once-heard-never-forgotten tunes, the musical numbers are cleverly crafted and the overall tone is appropriately tart, this being a show in which no one is very likable. (The title of the first song, “Four Jews in a Room Bitching,” sums up “March of the Falsettos” pretty comprehensively.) In “Falsettoland,” by contrast, a hideously painful situation is portrayed with a sincere but cloying sentimentality…
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To read my review of Plenty, go here.
To read my review of Falsettos, go here.
A scene from the 1985 film version of Plenty, directed by Fred Schepisi and starring Meryl Streep and John Gielgud: