Archives for May 24, 2019

The thirty-second episode of Three on the Aisle, the twice-monthly podcast in which Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I talk about theater in America, is now available on line for listening or downloading.

Here’s an excerpt from American Theatre’s “official” summary of the proceedings: 

In this episode, the critics speak with composer/lyricist David Yazbek, who is nominated for the best score Tony Award for Tootsie. The critics chat with him about his “odoriferous” songs, including his work on Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and The Band’s Visit. He also discusses songs he wishes he had written, including the theme from Shaft.

In addition, the critics talk about shows they’ve seen lately: Grief Is the Thing With Feathers by Max Porter at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, The Plough and the Stars by Sean O’Casey at the Irish Repertory Theatre Off-Broadway, and J.T. Rogers’s Oslo playing at Round House Theatre in Bethesda, Md.

We’d also planned to answer some questions from our mailbag, but all three of us had so much fun chatting with Yazbek that we decided on the spur of the moment to let the interview segment run extra-long. I think you’ll hear why—not only is he a terrific talker, but we found him to be extraordinarily forthcoming.

To listen to or download this episode, read more about it, or subscribe to Three on the Aisle, go here.

In case you’ve missed any previous episodes, you’ll find them all here.

I review two Chicago-area productions in today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, Chicago Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Writers Theatre’s Next to Normal. Both are extraordinary. Here’s an excerpt.

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Theater in Chicago has a bold immediacy that sets it apart from what you see elsewhere in America, and Barbara Gaines’ new Chicago Shakespeare “Hamlet” is the embodiment of all that is best and most distinctive about it. A cunningly abridged modern-dress-and-pop-music staging that eschews the tired clichés of that genre, this “Hamlet” flies across the stage with the gut-ripping speed of a slug from a .45, featuring a performance of the title role by Maurice Jones that is flat-out spectacular….

Costumes notwithstanding, this is not a high-concept “Hamlet” but a down-the-center revenger’s tale of grief run amok, a tragic thriller that begins by the grave of Hamlet’s murdered father and ends with a stageful of corpses. What happens in between unfolds on a thrust-stage set that suggests a black hole of despair, one around which Mr. Jones stalks like a starving panther. The technology, like the décor and music, is very much up to date—you’ll be astonished by the way in which Ms. Gaines and her designers conjure up the dead king’s ghost—but the emotions are timeless.

It’s a tribute to Mr. Jones’ acting that he makes so colossal an impression in a production whose cast includes a goodly share of Chicago’s top actors…

When I bristle at a show everyone else loved, I occasionally catch myself wondering whether my head was screwed on tightly enough. That’s why I decided to review a Chicago-area revival of “Next to Normal,” the 2008 Brian Yorkey-Tom Kitt pop-rock musical about bipolar disorder that won a Pulitzer Prize for drama and knocked out most of my colleagues. Unlike them, I found its portrayal of mental illness to be prettified and glib, and wondered whether “Next to Normal” might be more believable when mounted by David Cromer, America’s greatest stage director, for Writers Theater, America’s finest regional theater company. Sure enough, it is, to a degree not far from staggering….

As always, Mr. Cromer finds the tough center of truth in a script and puts it on stage as simply as possible, intensified by a poetic naturalism to which he alone holds the key. In his hands, “Next to Normal” becomes the story not of a crazy diva-mother who gets all the best tunes but of a nuclear family shattered by a sickness too strong for love. Everyone and everything, even the offstage pit band, is satisfyingly understated, including Keely Vasquez, who plays Diana, the manic mother who goes off her meds. Ms. Vasquez is so plausible that she comes across not as a singing actor but as a mom-next-door who stuns her neighbors by slashing her wrists….

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Read the whole thing here.

The trailer for Hamlet:

David Cromer talks about his revival of Next to Normal:

An excerpt from a performance of Merce Cunningham’s Septet, telecast in 1964. Cunningham is the male dancer. The score is Erik Satie’s Three Pieces in the Form of a Pear:

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

“you have to love dancing to stick to it. it gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive. it is not for unsteady souls.” 

Merce Cunningham, Changes: Notes on Choreography