{"id":80484,"date":"2007-10-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2007-10-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/all-the-worlds-a-stage\/"},"modified":"2024-03-22T08:38:41","modified_gmt":"2024-03-22T12:38:41","slug":"all-the-worlds-a-stage","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/all-the-worlds-a-stage\/","title":{"rendered":"All the world\u2019s a stage"},"content":{"rendered":"

O<\/font>ne might define music as sound that communicates emotion without language\u2014sound, in fact, that defies and challenges language, expressing ideas that are simply not encompassed in linguistic possibility. How difficult, then, it must be to write a play about the experience of performing music; to express in words something that by definition transcends and evades words. Michael Hollinger, a playwright who started out as a musician and studied viola at Oberlin Conservatory, has set himself this challenge and risen to it with lots of flair, possibly because his intimate knowledge of both dramatic and musical forms has made him specially aware of the connections between the two.<\/p>\n

Writing of his love affair with chamber music, especially the string quartet, Hollinger remembers that \u201cI loved the intimacy of the [string quartet] form, the range and profundity of the repertoire, the way a melody becomes a supporting line as another player comes to the fore\u2014not the movement of armies, but rather the subtle interplay of voices, like characters in a play.\u201d The music itself, in the most fundamental way, is drama, but so of course is the personal dynamic of the quartet, which Hollinger characterizes as a dysfunctional marriage with four people and no sex. The idea for the play came to him in 2003, when he jotted on a scrap of paper: \u201cfour characters\u2014a string quartet. We follow this quartet through their rehearsals (& performance?). The music mirrors their personal engagements, relationships, entanglements, perhaps breakdowns.\u201d<\/p>\n

Opus, <\/i>the play that grew from this germ, is an elegantly conceived ninety-minute one-act that gives the audience a real sense of participating in the intimate and rarefied world of such a group. The Lazara Quartet, made up of Elliot, Alan, Carl, and Dorian, has been together for a number of years, plenty of time to develop into the dysfunctional marriage described by Hollinger. But divorce is afoot: Dorian (Michael Laurence), the mercurial violist, has been ousted and the remaining three are looking for a replacement. They find one in the young and inexperienced Grace (Mahira Kakkar), who while excited at being selected to join this august company entertains some trepidation, engendered by her cautious bourgeois parents, about whether or not the work constitutes a \u201creal job\u201d: will the Quartet, for example, provide health and dental insurance? The three men talk her out of defecting to the Pittsburgh Orchestra\u2014\u201cDo you really want to spent your life in thrall to a baton?\u201d they demand\u2014and the reconfigured Lazara Quartet begins practicing for their upcoming gig at the White House, where they plan to tackle Beethoven\u2019s Opus 131, \u201cthe Everest of string quartets.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the ghost of the vanished Dorian will not be appeased. Through a series of flashbacks we witness the events that led to his ejection, events which still poison the rehearsals even in his absence. Dorian had been the most gifted musician of the foursome, but because of his emotional outbursts and mental instability he had been deemed unsuitable as first violinist and relegated to the subordinate role of violist. As his longtime lover Elliot (David Beach) explains to Grace, Dorian is a visionary like Joan of Arc\u2014but would you really want Joan of Arc as leader? Instead that role has been usurped by Elliot, a more solid if less inspired character.<\/p>\n

The director Terrence J. Nolen has done a smooth job with this Primary Stages production, assembling a first-rate cast. Richard Topol does a nice job as Alan, the least complicated and temperamental member of the group, and so does Douglas Rees as Carl, the family man who sometimes has a hard time suppressing his impatience with the histrionics and self-indulgence of his colleagues, while Mahira Kakkar makes a na\u00efve and charming Grace. But these characters are all a little extraneous to the central drama, which is between Dorian and Elliot. The sexual and romantic tensions between the two are only red herrings, as it were; the real conflict is between their concepts of musicianship and their ideas of themselves. Beach does a brilliant job with the repressed, fussy Elliot, who knows deep down he\u2019s not good enough and compensates by being bossy and managerial, snidely denigrating the unchained talent he secretly envies. And the Byronic, disheveled Laurence makes us receptive to Dorian\u2019s impassioned plea for quality, for sensibility over sense\u2014on the concert stage if not in the bedroom. Opus<\/i> raises seemingly unanswerable questions about talent versus genius, the necessity or even desirability of reining in an inspired maverick, and the unspoken currents that run between group members that can either enhance a performance or upset its balance, and it does so with a smart combination of style and emotion.<\/p>\n

T<\/font>he ridiculous and wonderful musical Xanadu<\/i> is also concerned with the nature of art and inspiration, and in spite of its resolutely tongue-in-cheek attitude delivers a message that in its way is every bit as profound as Hollinger\u2019s. Xanadu<\/i> began life as an epically disastrous 1980 movie musical starring pop queen Olivia Newton-John as the muse Clio, who leaves Mount Olympus to come to earth in the unlikely venue of Venice, California and inspire a hunky chalk artist named Sonny to open a roller disco. What could they have been thinking of when they came up with this dreck? The movie\u2019s sound track contained some disco hits like \u201cEvil Woman\u201d (pronounced \u201cEe-evil Woman\u201d), \u201cXanadu,\u201d and \u201cMagic\u201d; nevertheless, the movie was so outrageously bad that everyone associated with it became a laughingstock.<\/p>\n

Douglas Carter Beane, though, the clever author of last season\u2019s The Little Dog Laughed<\/i>, has turned this idiocy into an irresistible confection: \u201cchildren\u2019s theater for forty-year-old gay people,\u201d as one of its characters puts it, although there appeared to be plenty of heterosexuals among the wildly enthusiastic crowd at the Helen Hayes Theater the night I saw it. The Helen Hayes, which is tiny, imposes production restraints, and there is something inherently funny about a musical extravaganza confined to a cramped stage. Beane, along with the director Christopher Ashley and the choreographer Dan Knechtges, has enhanced the humor by making the economy all part of the fun; there are only seven muses instead of nine, we notice, and two of the immortal sisters are actually men who double in other roles.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is 1980! The muses are in retreat!\u201d intones the immortal Zeus (Tony Roberts, as effortlessly perfect here as he has been in everything he\u2019s done over his thirty- or forty-year career). The muses agree. \u201cIn terms of art we are so<\/i> gonna have our work cut out for us.\u201d But Clio (the truly divine Kerry Butler) discerns a touch of the artist in the beefcakey Sonny (Cheyenne Jackson), and floats into his ken in the person of an earthly muse, Kira, garbed in the roller skates and leg-warmers that constituted Newton-John\u2019s peculiar \u201clook\u201d in the original film.<\/p>\n

Butler, a toothsome blonde with dead-on comic timing and a belting alto, doesn\u2019t so much imitate Newton-John as perform a sly take on her style. Her broad faux<\/i> Aussie accent is fabulous: \u201cOim Keee-raahh<\/i>!\u201d she honks by way of introduction. Jackie Hoffman as Calliope in a pair of harlequin glasses and the hefty Mary Testa\u2014who has the lung-power of Mahalia Jackson\u2014as Melpomene do a great ugly sister act and their high-volume rendition of \u201cEvil Woman\u201d nearly brings down the roof. The standouts among the supporting cast are the two male muses, Andr\u00e9 Ward and Curtis Holbrook, who throw their whole souls into Knechtges\u2019s manically kitsch choreography.<\/p>\n

The scene on Mount Olympus has most of the gods and goddesses speaking in fruity English accents except for Aphrodite, who sounds German\u2014all inexplicable until you realize they\u2019re spoofing Laurence Olivier, Ursula Andress, Claire Bloom et al.<\/i> in the 1981 film Clash of the Titans<\/i>, one of the few movies low-grade enough to rival even Xanadu<\/i>. The silliness reaches its height when all the Olympians address the intransigent Zeus with the lilting \u201cHave You Never Been Mellow?,\u201d which quickly evolves into a big production number including Medusa, Eros, and a centaur, all brilliantly costumed by David Zinn.<\/p>\n

Not every reader of this magazine will be persuaded that an evening of children\u2019s theater for forty-year-old gay people will be worth the substantial price of admission, but I think you have to be a pretty determined sourpuss to resist the wit, good spirits, and wild energy of Xanadu<\/i>. This is an offering directed at all those people who wonder why they don\u2019t make musicals like they used to: infectiously toe-tapping, as they used to say, yet very much of its time\u2014of 2007, that is, not 1980. And in its frothy and irreverent way it delivers much the same message as Opus<\/i>: that it is in the creation and performance of art\u2014even an art form as preposterous as chalk drawing or roller dancing\u2014that man achieves his most exalted state. As Kira\/Clio so memorably puts it, \u201cTo make art and be with someone you love\u2014that\u2019s<\/i> Xanadu!\u201d<\/p>\n

A <\/font>sentiment that would surely be seconded by that great lover and thespian, Shakespeare\u2019s Bottom. Shakespeare in the Park\u2019s end-of-season Midsummer Night Dream<\/i> is highly satisfactory, a reminder of what a pleasure it is to relax in the hands of an experienced commercial Broadway director. Daniel Sullivan, who has directed Broadway plays by Wendy Wasserstein, Herb Gardner, and many others, displays an easy, confident touch with comedy and has let the play flow along at its own perfect pace.<\/p>\n

The high points of the evening are the scenes with the four young lovers. Martha Plimpton, one of the most accomplished American stage actresses, is a superlative Helena, really the emotional center of this somewhat lopsided production. Mireille Enos, looking like the young Bernadette Peters before she acquired the big-star mannerisms, makes a droll and appealing Hermia, while Elliot Villar and Austin Lysy acquit themselves well as their confused swains.<\/p>\n

I call the play lopsided because while all the mortals are directed very well indeed, Sullivan has come up with a rather misbegotten look for the fairies. For one thing, they are dressed mostly in black, making them more sinister than otherworldly. What is the rationale behind this? It works not too badly with Oberon (Keith David) and Puck (Jon Michael Hill), who are presented as a magician and his apprentice, but as Titania, Laila Robins looks more like a witch than a fairy, or maybe like Charles Addams\u2019s Morticia. Robins, terrific in last year\u2019s Heartbreak House<\/i>, makes a very abrasive Titania, to the point where you have to wonder what Bottom sees in her. As the other fairies, Sullivan has cast small children who look more than a little creepy in their dark Victorian garb\u2014something like Edward Ardizzone\u2019s scarier illustrations\u2014and he has choreographed their movements too carefully; the effect is labored rather than enchanted, especially the dance at the play\u2019s end, where the kids look as though they are doing the Hava Nagila at a Bar Mitzvah.<\/p>\n

All that being said, the production is still very enjoyable, and the rude mechanicals are pure magic\u2014infinitely more magical, in their feet-of-clay style, than the fairies; their curtain call elicited a roar of approval. In the hands of really good performers these Pyramus and Thisbe<\/i> rehearsal scenes can be the best in the play. Perhaps that is as it should be, for here Shakespeare was following the oft-repeated advice to write about what you know. The oversized, beguiling Jay O. Sanders, whom I saw as a splendid Falstaff a couple of years ago in the Shakespeare\/Western musical Lone Star Love<\/i>, makes an equally splendid Bottom, while redheaded, deadpan Jesse Tyler Ferguson as Flute\/Thisbe is pure perfection\u2014as he was, too, in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.<\/i><\/p>\n

As so often with Shakespeare, the costumes (here by Ann Hould Ward) seem weirdly conceived. Presumably director and designer came up with a unifying idea behind these outfits, which are predominantly Victorian in style, but it is hard to grasp what it is when we actually see them on stage. It has some rationale with Hermia and Helena: starting the play in full regalia\u2014bustle, bib, and tucker\u2014they lose more and more layers during the course of their wild night in the forest so that by the end they are stripped down to their underwear. All of this makes sense within the context of the play, though it is a bit awkward in the execution. But there is not much unity in the rest of the costumes; Egeus appears to be a Greek Orthodox priest, while in the first scene Hippolyta looks like a Turkish belly dancer. What gives?<\/p>\n

The scenes that work best are those in which the material is presented the most cleanly, and the farther the director has to reach for an effect the more inharmonious that effect appears to the audience. The beauty of Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream<\/i> is that you cannot go wrong with it, which is why it is produced so often: it always, always works, no matter how amateurish the performers, and even little schoolchildren can do it justice. In this great play, one of literature\u2019s most penetrating treatises on human nature, the performers who work best are those who act naturally\u2014for the beauty of this work is that its people (and fairies), as Shakespeare depicts them, are at their funniest not when their behavior is most extravagant, but when it is most simply human.<\/p>\n

N<\/font>ormally in this column I try to steer clear of politics, because the subject gets its fair share of space elsewhere in the magazine and also because politics seems so often to be beside the point in theater: either something is good theater or it is not, regardless of the author\u2019s political agenda. So I did not attend Frost\/Nixon<\/i> when it first opened, and even after the great word-of-mouth and reviews I couldn\u2019t seem to find the time. But while lunching near Lincoln Center one Sunday a couple of weeks ago I was told that the show was playing its final performance that very afternoon. Finally goaded to action, I sprinted the twenty blocks in ten minutes, bought the last seat in the house, and sat down just in time.<\/p>\n

And how glad I was not to have missed it, for it was as enjoyable as advertised, and Frank Langella\u2019s Tony Award for Best Actor was well deserved. Nixon must be a hard role to play without slipping into caricature, for of course the man himself was a caricature, God\u2019s precious gift to cartoonists and standup comics, and an essentially serious play like this requires Nixon to be a human being. Langella, broad but not too broad, funny but not comic, finally poignant, gives a highly intelligent performance. He has always specialized in rather sinister characters\u2014I still remember his 1978 Broadway Dracula<\/i> with a shudder\u2014and Nixon certainly had his sinister aspects, but this Nixon, though still a formidable adversary even after his fall from power, is perversely likeable, with his heavyhanded joshing, his social awkwardness, and his occasional lightning bolts of crude directness.<\/p>\n

Peter Morgan, the author of Frost\/Nixon<\/i>, has been developing a very personal style, an intense interweaving of fact and fiction that has produced such fine work as his screenplays for The Queen<\/i> and The Last King of Scotland<\/i> and the made-for-TV<\/font> film Longford<\/i>. The technique, in Morgan\u2019s hands at least, is indubitably effective; the protagonists in all these dramas seemed to me almost more real than the subjects themselves. Forrest Whittaker\u2019s Amin in The Last King of Scotland <\/i>was even more Amin-like than the real man, as I acknowledged when I saw a documentary on the dictator shortly after having seen the Morgan film, and the same could be said for Langella\u2019s Nixon and Michael Sheen\u2019s marvelous David Frost.<\/p>\n

T<\/font>he problem is that Morgan makes up a good bit of his material, and if you haven\u2019t done very careful research then you don\u2019t know which parts he\u2019s made up and which are real. Of course this doesn\u2019t bother everyone, and maybe there\u2019s no reason it should; after all, no one except the nutty members of the Richard III<\/font> Society seem to disapprove of the manifold inventions in Shakespeare\u2019s history plays. But pedantic though it may be, I couldn\u2019t help being a little bothered by Frost\/Nixon<\/i>. Morgan, of course, had the footage from the original Frost\/Nixon interviews to work with\u2014and indeed plenty of theatergoers can remember seeing them on television back in 1977. He also worked with the memoir James Reston, Jr., one of Frost\u2019s close collaborators, wrote about the planning and careful execution of the interviews. Much of the dialogue, therefore, is genuine, and what has been invented is utterly plausible. But then, in order to create a dramatic catalyst for the play\u2019s turning point\u2014the fourth interview when Nixon, who for the first three sessions had stonewalled Frost with rambling, self-serving and irrelevant monologues, suddenly cracked and admitted to having done wrong\u2014Morgan invents a drunken midnight phone call from Nixon to Frost, in which the ex-president speaks honestly to his foe for the first and last time. The verisimilitude until that point had been such that I assumed the phone call, like the interviews, had been documented, and therefore was a little disconcerted to find that it had actually never happened.<\/p>\n

Is this cricket? I don\u2019t think so\u2014though there is no doubt that it works. Through the device of the phone call Morgan not only bares Nixon\u2019s soul for us, so far as he understands it, but also underlines a point he has been subtly making all along: that Frost and Nixon were in many ways alike, outsiders who had fought snobbery and social exclusivity to get to the top and were never able to feel immunity from those forces, however far they rose. \u201cNo matter how high we get, they still look down on us,\u201d Nixon tells Frost. This is more obvious in Nixon\u2019s case than in Frost\u2019s\u2014indeed even thirty years on it is still astounding that a man with no charisma whatsoever, let alone a privileged background, could have stormed the White House\u2014but it was true for Frost too, with his upstart, lightweight image. But Frost, as Morgan knows, had one important advantage: a man of the modern age, he understood television. More than that, he understood that in this new age of the image, politics and show business have merged until they are practically indistinguishable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Opus<\/i> at 59E59, Xanadu<\/i> at the Helen Hayes Theater, A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream<\/i> at Shakespeare in the Park, and Frost\/Nixon<\/i> at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1246,"featured_media":0,"template":"","tags":[670],"department_id":[556],"issue":[3032],"section":[],"acf":{"participants":{"simple_value_formatted":"","value_formatted":null,"value":null,"field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_65fd9fbaa0408","label":"Authors","name":"participants","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"user","value":null,"menu_order":0,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"role":"","return_format":"array","multiple":1,"allow_null":0,"bidirectional":0,"bidirectional_target":[],"_name":"participants","_valid":1}},"page_number":{"simple_value_formatted":39,"value_formatted":39,"value":"39","field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_647e2bc0c860c","label":"Page 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