THEATER: "The Crucible" Is Bedlam In Every Way

THE CRUCIBLE *** 1/2 out of ****
BEDLAM AT THE CONNELLY THEATER 

I wasn't in the mood to see a new production of The Crucible. That's hard to justify since it's my favorite Arthur Miller play and the all-but-forgotten film version is to my mind a masterpiece. Plus, I've never seen a great stage production. But there you are: I just wasn't in the mood. It can run nearly three hours! And didn't we just see it? Yes, if by "just" you mean three years ago on Broadway.

So what? It's Bedlam and that much-lauded company has mounted some of the best shows in recent years. If it's faced a little bedlam off-stage, well that might just be the kick in the pants it needs after some recent work that was less thrilling than usual. Whatever the reason, whatever the cause, it turns out I was absolutely in the mood to see a new, strong production of The Crucible. Indeed, three exceptionally well-acted, entertaining hours with Bedlam is far preferable to a 70 minute show with no intermission that plods along.

A modest caveat: it is three hours and the Connelly has just one tiny, unisex bathroom with three stalls. So plan accordingly. The only torture should be onstage, not while you wait anxiously in line during intermission.

But do plan to see it. This Crucible thrillingly reminds us why Bedlam made such a stir in the first place. Their production is beautifully cast, fluidly directed and so clear-eyed that what you're seeing is not some flashy troupe calling attention to itself or imposing some conceit on top of a show. What you see is a great play held up to the light.

The first clever touch is the staging. A semi-circle of seats are on the stage area while most of the audience is seated stadium style. The Connelly also has a second level with lighting and the such so the sense of a world on trial is vivid. You enter the theater and go around a hanging bit of plastic to this area. But when the show begins that plastic collapses and the first scenes are staged in the "lobby" area. It immediately expands your ideas of where the story begins and ends.

Those opening moments are performed in a manic, almost vaudevillian style. It's hyped-up realism and off-putting. But before you know it the show settles down into naturalism. I seem to recall this Bedlam gambit before: open with an artificial style that underlines the theatricality of what you're seeing and then the vast majority of the play will seem all the more "real" thanks to the contrast. My guest says I'm nuts and they haven't done this before. Whatever your thoughts on this throat-clearing approach to the text, it passes quickly.

Soon you're caught up in Arthur Miller's drama, famously written in the heat of the McCarthy Era. It's the late 1600s at the Massachusetts Bay Colony and teen girls are caught dancing in the woods. This is scandalous and one of them collapses into a faint. Or perhaps she just feigns illness out of fear for her preacher father's anger. Nonetheless, her sleep seems bizarre, so a Rev. Hale is called in to rule out anything unnatural (ie demonic). Before you can say "broomstick," accusations of witch craft are flying.

The girls put the blame for their misdeeds on a Bahamian servant and she turns it right back on them. The net widens. More and more women are accused of witchery. One woman insists a midwife is a witch, merely because this woman resents giving birth to one stillborn child after another. One man accuses another simply because he lusts after the fellow's land.

Hovering about them all is Abigail, the teen who leads the other girls in panicked testimony about witches and possession and being unable to breathe when a sinner scoffs at them. Abigail slept with the married man John Proctor only to be turned out by his wife. She bluntly tells John his wife will die and Abigail can take her place. John must sully his good name to reveal Abigail's treachery and even then, who will believe him? The town has gone mad and anyone who dares to question the court's proceedings soon finds themselves hauled before it.

Truett Felt and Ryan Quinn in The Crucible. Photo ©2019 Ashley Garrett

It's a chilling tale and the hysteria, the sheer panicked insanity that overcomes the people of the colony is captured very well by director Eric Tucker and his team. Truly, this is theater as it's meant to be, theater that engages the imagination with just a few props and inventive staging. John McDermott created the set design that makes a plus out of the Connelly's lack of a backstage or any other niceties found in most theaters.

A few desks and chairs and a bed frame are pushed this way and that to take us to the preacher's home, a public hearing, John Proctor's house, the outdoors, the place where prisoners are held before execution and so on. Truly it's almost magic. During a scene, the entire cast leaps into action and suddenly a judge on the stage floor is perched on a chair above a stack of tables, peering down at a witness with an awful intimidation. At other times, witnesses are suddenly perched precariously on chairs against the far wall -- they too are above the audience but their position is vulnerable and exposed, not imposing. Often this is accomplished in a babble of overlapping dialogue, heightening the tension of these unhinged times and keeping us off balance. Give two actors flashlights, turn off all the lights and suddenly John and Abigail are meeting in the dead of night for a confrontation which exposes them both as surely as those beams that stab out of the dark. Credit to lighting designer Les Dickert and costume designer Charlotte Palmer-Lane for their key contributions.

You won't find any agenda in this production, no artificial lens through which to view the play. It's just Arthur Miller's story delivered in all its complexity. And the cast is terrific, top to bottom. Ryan Quinn keeps John Proctor from being too self-righteous. Susannah Millonzi is his equal as Elizabeth, a woman who can be too easy to blame as a cold shrew. Millonzi shows an Elizabeth hard on herself most of all. Truett Felt has the tricky role of Abigail, managing to be hateful without ever playing the villain. Forgive me for not mentioning everyone, but they're all good. No one is trying to excuse or explain their characters. Paul Lazar's Judge Danforth is of course proud and pompous, aghast by the suggestion he might have been fooled by little girls. Yet Lazar doesn't begin and end with this one idea so clearly suggested in the text. Like Abigail, he's scary in his determination, but no villain.

And full credit to the director Tucker who plays Rev. Hale. I always remember Hale as the real villain and I'm always happily surprised when this earnest man of God realizes the error of his ways and struggles to mitigate the damage. In the past, Tucker has sometimes seemed more focused on directing than his own performance. But here he gives a very good, nuanced turn that is creepily sincere at the start and fully human at the end. Even after he strongly doubts the claims of Abigail and the others, when they weep and wail and point to the spirits hovering over them, his Hale stares up earnestly, even removing his glasses to try and get a better look. It's funny but also shows this man's mind and heart is always open to the truth.

It's not quite perfect. As a show opens, the tendency is to sag a little. Here's hoping Tucker and the cast look to tighten things up. It's a three act play but on Broadway it ran two hours and 45 minutes. This one runs three hours and those fifteen minutes matter. A few moments could be shortened, especially the calm stretches. Better we feel ourselves hurtling towards the finale than ever catch our breath. And while the only score comes from whistling that underlines a few scenes, it's not effective when the show uses that whistling as a fade-out at the very end. They had their finale and should have plunged us right back into darkness, not let the moment fade away. Nonetheless, right now and at this length, The Crucible reminds you forcefully of what you love about theater in general and Bedlam in particular.


THEATER OF 2019

Frankenstein: Under The Radar Fest at the Public ** 1/2
Minor Character: Under The Radar Festival at the Public ***
Ink: Under The Radar  Festival at the Public  ** 1/2
Choir Boy ** 1/2
White Noise ** 1/2
Kiss Me, Kate ***
Ain't No Mo' *** 1/2
Ain't Too Proud **
The Cradle Will Rock * 1/2
Mrs. Murray's Menagerie *** 1/2
Oklahoma! (on Broadway) ** 1/2
Socrates **
The Pain Of My Belligerence *
Burn This **
Hadestown *** 1/2
All My Sons * 1/2
Tootsie ** 1/2
Ink ***
Beetlejuice **
Estado Vegetal ***
Hans Christian Andersen * 1/2
Cirque du Soleil: Luzia ***
BLKS ** 1/2
Moulin Rouge ** 1/2
Bat Out Of Hell **
Unchilding **
Sea Wall/ A Life ** 1/2
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child ***
Betrayal *** 1/2
Fifty Million Frenchmen ** 1/2
Freestyle Love Supreme ** 1/2
Derren Brown: Secret ***
(A)loft Modulation * 1/2
The Great Society **
I Can't See *
Heroes Of The Fourth Turning ** 1/2
Chasing Rainbows: The Road To Oz ***
The Glass Menagerie (dir Austin Pendleton & Peter Bloch) **
Terra Firma (debut of The Coop theater company) **
Forbidden Broadway: The Next Generation ***
Dublin Carol ** 1/2
Soft Power **
The Decline and Fall of The Entire World As Seen Through The Eyes Of Cole Porter ***
For Colored Girls ** 1/2
Scotland, PA **
The Sound Inside *** (great cast, clumsy ending)
User Not Found **
Enchanted April **
DruidShakespeare: Richard III * 1/2
Broadbend, Arkansas **
Einstein's Dreams * 1/2
The Crucible (by Bedlam) *** 1/2



Thanks for reading. Michael Giltz is the creator of BookFilter, a book lover’s best friend. It’s a website that lets you browse for books online the way you do in a physical bookstore, provides comprehensive info on new releases every week in every category and offers passionate personal recommendations every step of the way. He’s also the cohost of Showbiz Sandbox, a weekly pop culture podcast that reveals the industry take on entertainment news of the day with top journalists and opinion makers as guests. It’s available for free on iTunes. Visit Michael Giltz at his website. Download his podcast of celebrity interviews and his radio show, also called Popsurfing and also available for free on iTunes.

THEATER: "Einstein's Dreams" Too Elusive For Reality

EINSTEIN'S DREAMS * 1/2 out of ****
PROSPECT THEATER COMPANY AT 59E59

Alan Lightman's charming novel Einstein's Dreams was a best-selling sensation in 1992. Lightman's day job is a physicist and his first and best work of fiction playfully combines both disciplines. In it, he imagines Einstein is working on his Theory of Relativity and dreams about the various ways one can think about time. What if time really did stand still? What if time proceeded in circles? Or skipped and stuttered or reversed itself unexpectedly? Each dream of time is captured in a fragmentary passage lasting just a few pages at most. It's not really a novel or even a collection of short stories, but more like a variation on a theme.

Lightman lets you feel you grasp certain abstract scientific ideas, all while entertaining you thoroughly. But there's no plot to speak of, no over-arching thread. It's just fanciful fun. Even the packaging of the book added to its appeal: Einstein's Dream was about 5 inches wide by 7 inches tall, almost a square, friendly little book. It fit into your hands comfortably and made this Italo Calvino-like work quite approachable. Instead of thinking, a book about physics and running away, you saw it and smiled and picked it up.

I read it, I enjoyed it and not for a single moment did I think, this should be adapted for the stage! It's one of those works that would seem to resist a transformation into film or theater or TV. Of course, I felt the same about Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Turn that daunting, philosophical novel into a film? Absurd! Turn the classic Powell-Pressburger movie A Matter Of Life and Death into a stage play? Ridiculous! 

Well, as a film, Unbearable became another masterpiece. As a play, A Matter Of Life and Death was a disaster. But hey, they tried! So anything can be turned into anything else and the less likely, perhaps the more remarkable it will be if you get the alchemy right.

Apparently, people have been trying and trying with Einstein's Dreams ever since it was published. Per Wikipedia, this work has been adapted endlessly into plays and song cycles and dance pieces and here a musical, one that first debuted in 2005. As far as I know, none of them have worked. This version is no different. Joanne Sydney Lessner did the book and Joshua Rosenblum did the music and they both worked on the lyrics. Here, Time is personified into a dream-like lover for young Albert Einstein. He keeps dreaming of Time in all her fickle possibilities and she teases him on towards the revelation of the Theory that will make him immortal.

Little of this works, despite a game cast that struggles to sing the awkward songs the creative team  crafted. However, the Prospect Theater Company has given this ineffective mess directed by Cara Reichel an exceptionally handsome production. Einstein's desk at the patent office sits on a round dais stage left. A staircase on stage right swoops up to a wide platform on the second level. Striking design work covers the stage floor with expected but effective details of time and the such. And a giant round clock face hangs above the stage, serving as a screen for countless projections, the vast majority of which are impressive and on point.

David Bengali did the excellent projection design and Sidney Shannon the period-friendly costumes. Kevin Heard dealt with the sound design that balances actors, singers and a fine six-piece orchestra led by music director and pianist Milton Granger, not to mention various subtle sound cues. And the ravishing scenic design is by Isabel Mengyuan Le. It's a pleasure to behold while you wait for the show to begin and something to study when the show quickly goes awry. I remember very little of the musical's feverish attempts to give the erudite and funny and odd musings of Lightman some sort of plot. But the set? I'd love to spend more time with it.

THEATER OF 2019

Frankenstein: Under The Radar Fest at the Public ** 1/2
Minor Character: Under The Radar Festival at the Public ***
Ink: Under The Radar  Festival at the Public  ** 1/2
Choir Boy ** 1/2
White Noise ** 1/2
Kiss Me, Kate ***
Ain't No Mo' *** 1/2
Ain't Too Proud **
The Cradle Will Rock * 1/2
Mrs. Murray's Menagerie *** 1/2
Oklahoma! (on Broadway) ** 1/2
Socrates **
The Pain Of My Belligerence *
Burn This **
Hadestown *** 1/2
All My Sons * 1/2
Tootsie ** 1/2
Ink ***
Beetlejuice **
Estado Vegetal ***
Hans Christian Andersen * 1/2
Cirque du Soleil: Luzia ***
BLKS ** 1/2
Moulin Rouge ** 1/2
Bat Out Of Hell **
Unchilding **
Sea Wall/ A Life ** 1/2
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child ***
Betrayal *** 1/2
Fifty Million Frenchmen ** 1/2
Freestyle Love Supreme ** 1/2
Derren Brown: Secret ***
(A)loft Modulation * 1/2
The Great Society **
I Can't See *
Heroes Of The Fourth Turning ** 1/2
Chasing Rainbows: The Road To Oz ***
The Glass Menagerie (dir Austin Pendleton & Peter Bloch) **
Terra Firma (debut of The Coop theater company) **
Forbidden Broadway: The Next Generation ***
Dublin Carol ** 1/2
Soft Power **
The Decline and Fall of The Entire World As Seen Through The Eyes Of Cole Porter ***
For Colored Girls ** 1/2
Scotland, PA **
The Sound Inside *** (great cast, clumsy ending)
User Not Found **
Enchanted April **
DruidShakespeare: Richard III * 1/2
Broadbend, Arkansas **
Einstein's Dreams * 1/2
The Crucible (by Bedlam)



Thanks for reading. Michael Giltz is the creator of BookFilter, a book lover’s best friend. It’s a website that lets you browse for books online the way you do in a physical bookstore, provides comprehensive info on new releases every week in every category and offers passionate personal recommendations every step of the way. He’s also the cohost of Showbiz Sandbox, a weekly pop culture podcast that reveals the industry take on entertainment news of the day with top journalists and opinion makers as guests. It’s available for free on iTunes. Visit Michael Giltz at his website. Download his podcast of celebrity interviews and his radio show, also called Popsurfing and also available for free on iTunes.

BOOKS: Is Finance The Root Of All Evil?

Book lovers and anyone ready to take on inequality, check out my review of "The Finance Curse" By Nicholas Shaxson! It's exclusive to Book and Film Globe!  See an excerpt below.

We’re in the midst of a bull market when it comes to books on inequality, the ills of Wall Street, tax justice and how to fix the whole damn mess. Though well-intentioned, many of these books have flaws.

The Finance Curse gets it just right. Journalist Nick Shaxson has written for The Guardian and works with the Tax Justice Network. Here he provides a sharp history of finance and the many storied criminals of the past, among them robber barons like Rockefeller and his ilk. Then Shaxson smoothly and lucidly dives into a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of global finance and how it’s swallowing up the world economy. 

At the heart of his story? Not Wall Street, but London. The British Empire led to its second empire of inherently criminal tax havens. And that led to the Bill Clinton/Tony Blair Third Way of neo-liberalism to Ireland’s paper Celtic Tiger right up to the rapacious hedge funds and private equity firms of today....

Read the rest only at Book and Film Globe! 

THEATER: Good Intentions No Substitute For Good Melodies In "Broadbend, Arkansas"

BROADBEND, ARKANSAS ** out of ****
TRANSPORT GROUP AT DUKE ON 42ND STREET

Good intentions do not a good musical make. Composer Ted Shen's heart is in the right place with this odd duck of a two-hander show. In Act One, nursing home orderly Benny narrates an on-going feud between two women at his place of work in 1961. Then this widowed father of twins feels compelled to join the Freedom Riders fighting for justice in the deep South. He shadows a bus filled with a rainbow of protestors, protects a friend when the police move in, gets proudly arrested and finally heads back home though he'd love to ride on that bus to the next town.

In Act Two, it's 1988 and the struggle continues. Benny's daughter Ruby is in a cemetery looking for the strength to carry on. We soon realize Benny was killed by a policeman just miles from home. And now his grandson is in the hospital after being brutally beaten by yet another lawless cop. For all we know, that cop might be the grandson of Benny's murderer. Will it ever end?

The stage is filled by just two actors and they are far and away the best and only reason to check out this piece. As Benny Justin Cunningham fills the stage with his warmth and presence, even if the elderly women he briefly assays aren't terribly distinct in our minds. As Ruby, Danyel Fulton has the less interesting half yet she too brings complexity and passion to a part that offers little of that on its own.

Sadly, they are not enough. The tech elements are minimal but even those go astray. Lighting cues by Jen Schriever don't clearly indicate when Cunningham is tackling a different character, though sometimes they seem to do so. The costumes by Peiyi Wong don't seem period enough. And director Jack Cummings III doesn't mold all this together to give the two actors the support they need and deserve.

Photo by Carol Rosegg ©2019

But it all begins with this essay/history lesson disguised as a work of theater. Though the two acts are intimately connected, the first act is written by Ellen Fitzhugh and the second by Harrison David Rivers. The music and additional lyrics are by Ted Shen.

Curiously, about half of act one involves that feud between two women. One is the owner of the nursing home while the other is a patient. They bicker and fight over a game of Scrabble. But really their fight is over the man they shared: the patient's husband left her for the much younger owner of the nursing home, but not before the wife wounded him with a steaming hot iron. Benny claims to be refereeing the two women and making peace but really he's just narrating their story. Cunningham doesn't create two distinct women but that's partly the fault of Fitzhugh since their voices tend to blur together. Abruptly this ends and Benny goes off on his civil rights crusade.

The big problem? The feuding old biddies are by far the most interesting and fresh part of the musical. Their story feels like a story, not a noble speech dressed up as a story. And yet, they have nothing to do with the rest of the evening. Half of act one is devoted to this essentially separate tale and then switches over to civil rights. I suppose you could pretend they make peace and so can blacks and whites, but that's quite the stretch.

The other half of act one flows right into the story of Ruby, the daughter of Benny. here actress Fulton has far fewer roles to tackle. It's essentially a monologue and not a particularly fresh or interesting one. Worst of all, the presentation glides back and forth between dialogue and music. Shen seems wary of anything approaching an actual song or memorable melody. Part 5 of "The Bridge" sticks briefly in the mind as Benny sings about how "It's such a comfort to take the bus." And Ruby comes briefly to life via song when she remembers her twin sister telling anyone who would listen that their mom was a backup singer for Diana Ross.

That's it. The rest is sincere, principled, polite, sometimes politely righteous and even angry! But always, always forgettable. I can't figure out why the story of two feuding old ladies takes up half of act one. I certainly know all why they wanted to illuminate the bravery of the Freedom Riders and show how that struggle goes on. (Act Three might easily have jumped to Black Lives Matter.) But whether you're creating a musical about shopping or slavery, you better have the songs. As Duke Ellington and Irving Mills put it, it don't mean a thing.... See, you knew how to finish the lyrics ("...if it ain't got that swing") without me telling you. High art should not mean a disdain for the low appeal of a catchy tune.


THEATER OF 2019

Frankenstein: Under The Radar Fest at the Public ** 1/2
Minor Character: Under The Radar Festival at the Public ***
Ink: Under The Radar  Festival at the Public  ** 1/2
Choir Boy ** 1/2
White Noise ** 1/2
Kiss Me, Kate ***
Ain't No Mo' *** 1/2
Ain't Too Proud **
The Cradle Will Rock * 1/2
Mrs. Murray's Menagerie *** 1/2
Oklahoma! (on Broadway) ** 1/2
Socrates **
The Pain Of My Belligerence *
Burn This **
Hadestown *** 1/2
All My Sons * 1/2
Tootsie ** 1/2
Ink ***
Beetlejuice **
Estado Vegetal ***
Hans Christian Andersen * 1/2
Cirque du Soleil: Luzia ***
BLKS ** 1/2
Moulin Rouge ** 1/2
Bat Out Of Hell **
Unchilding **
Sea Wall/ A Life ** 1/2
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child ***
Betrayal *** 1/2
Fifty Million Frenchmen ** 1/2
Freestyle Love Supreme ** 1/2
Derren Brown: Secret ***
(A)loft Modulation * 1/2
The Great Society **
I Can't See *
Heroes Of The Fourth Turning ** 1/2
Chasing Rainbows: The Road To Oz ***
The Glass Menagerie (dir Austin Pendleton & Peter Bloch) **
Terra Firma (debut of The Coop theater company) **
Forbidden Broadway: The Next Generation ***
Dublin Carol ** 1/2
Soft Power **
The Decline and Fall of The Entire World As Seen Through The Eyes Of Cole Porter ***
For Colored Girls ** 1/2
Scotland, PA **
The Sound Inside *** (great cast, clumsy ending)
User Not Found **
Enchanted April **
DruidShakespeare: Richard III * 1/2
Broadbend, Arkansas **



Thanks for reading. Michael Giltz is the creator of BookFilter, a book lover’s best friend. It’s a website that lets you browse for books online the way you do in a physical bookstore, provides comprehensive info on new releases every week in every category and offers passionate personal recommendations every step of the way. He’s also the cohost of Showbiz Sandbox, a weekly pop culture podcast that reveals the industry take on entertainment news of the day with top journalists and opinion makers as guests. It’s available for free on iTunes. Visit Michael Giltz at his website. Download his podcast of celebrity interviews and his radio show, also called Popsurfing and also available for free on iTunes.

THEATER: "Richard III," A Schemer Undone By Greed, Violence And A Poor Production

DRUIDSHAKESPEARE: RICHARD III * 1/2 out of ****
LINCOLN CENTER'S WHITE LIGHT FESTIVAL 
GERALD W. LYNCH THEATER AT JOHN JAY COLLEGE

Richard III is undone by distrust. This cruel manipulator is never trustworthy so he can't imagine anyone else being trustworthy either. Ultimately it makes him paranoid and incapable of holding onto the power he has so ruthlessly seized.

But DruidShakespeare: Richard III is undone by too much trust. All ideas are welcome no matter how unconnected to one another they might be. The mishmash of sets and costumes and periods and acting styles turns what was a dully traditional production at the start into a confusing bore by the end.

Happily, they found a solid Richard in Aaron Monaghan. He scuttles about the stage a la Antony Sher and proves charmingly evil. Has Shakespeare ever written a more appealing villain? If his vocal tics seem increasingly desperate by the end, we can pretend it's the character spiraling down rather than an actor trying to hold together a production spinning out of control.

Photo by Robbie Jack ©2019

Playing off a reference to a slaughterhouse, the entire stage is framed in harsh metal by set designer Francis O'Connor, with all the trappings of a modern slaughterhouse, including the dirt-covered floor and a cattle gun (the weapon employed by Javier Bardem in No Country For Old Men). Tall metal doors line the sides and the back. All that's missing is a maze to lead the royal cattle to slaughter so they won't realize what's happening until the last moment.

Richard pops out of a grave site and launches into his opening gambit of winning over the audience to his wicked, wicked ways. "Now is the winter of our discontent...."  The bodies do pile up, with Richard wooing and wiling away towards and past and around his victims. He keeps his eye on the throne of England, symbolized by the crown resting on a skull displayed in a box hovering above the stage. It's almost within his reach.

The show sort of works, for a while. Richard's wooing of Lady Anne (Siobhán Cullen) has a power that can't be matched when a similar scene is reenacted again and again throughout the play. Richard's rapport with Buckingham (Rory Nolan) sort of convinces. And the anachronistic cattle gun wielded is ok, though Marty Rea's monotone executioner soon pales.

Many of the supporting performances simply fall flat, their lines delivered without purpose or meaning. But the story moves along on its own momentum just enough to get us to act two.

Photo by Richard Termine  ©2019 

Nothing is dramatically different in act two except all the poor choices you ignored in act one become inescapable. While Druid mainstay and co-founder Maria Mullen has fun miming the confusion and easily played emotions of the Lord Mayor, the uninteresting secondary performances pile up as much as the bodies. Even something as minor as the actress playing one of the Princes in the Tower doubling as a page annoys when the costumes by O'Connor (and Doreen  McKenna as co-costume designer) do so very little to set the two roles apart. And the clothes become increasingly odd, such as the sort of metallic bronze and silver royal cape Richard III dons after being crowned king. It's echoed by the red metallic cape uneasily sported by Richmond in the final battle, a piece of clothing that clashes unpleasantly with his odd regalia and almost gets tangled up in the climactic sword fight.

Worse is the cartoonish, massive hood sported by an executioner called in to dispatch the beloved tykes in the Tower. Presumably used to allow one actor to more easily double up on roles, it looks like something out of a Looney Tunes cartoon. (The actor's cartoonish gravel pit of a voice doesn't help.) Worse than that are the somewhat similar cheap black hoodies sported by servants and the like who rush in with a stream of bad news for Richard. The action starts to look like a Monty Python sketch. A rain machine drips throughout the show here and there as you keep wondering what exactly is falling from the ceiling until the rain scene happens and you think, ah, that's what that was! Worse, it drips pretty consistently throughout the scene after it's supposed to stop.

The night before the battle, Richard's army sets up tents for the king, tents which are made of long neon polls lit in red. Why, one can't imagine. Then they turn to pale blue, indicating, it seems, that night has come. Richard gets into his tent but then the other tent turns red again and in pops Richmond for his nap. When the battle is about to commence, they are clumsily lifted up into the rafters, the poles bouncing off one another and seemingly alive like the legs of neon spiders. It's a distracting and bizarre choice from start to finish.

Scene after scene passes woodenly, such as the meeting/confrontation of the royal women. Queen Margaret scores the most points, as always, thanks to her venomous curses, but not enough to wake the moment up. The lighting by James F. Ingalls rarely sets one moment off from the next. The music by Conor Linehan crashes in obtrusively once or twice to announce the beginning of an act or that something exceptionally dramatic might be going on. A vague mist appears every once in a while, uncertain as to whether it's wanted or not before timidly slipping away again. And the battle choreographed by David Bolger is simply inept.

As a final dashed-off thought hoping to tie it all together, Richmond (Frank Blake) is crowned king only to echo the misshapen and scuttling spider silhouette of Richard. Does power corrupt? Perhaps, but it's certainly not been the through line of a show devoted to a traditional take on Richard as an inherently cruel man, not one bent by the weight of the crown.

Director Garry Hynes co-founded the venerable Druid in 1975 and has undoubtedly delivered the goods before, though we've had precious few chances to witness it in New York. Still, her work here is slapdash and poorly thought out. Unlike England, a play needs a ruthless leader.


THEATER OF 2019

Frankenstein: Under The Radar Fest at the Public ** 1/2
Minor Character: Under The Radar Festival at the Public ***
Ink: Under The Radar  Festival at the Public  ** 1/2
Choir Boy ** 1/2
White Noise ** 1/2
Kiss Me, Kate ***
Ain't No Mo' *** 1/2
Ain't Too Proud **
The Cradle Will Rock * 1/2
Mrs. Murray's Menagerie *** 1/2
Oklahoma! (on Broadway) ** 1/2
Socrates **
The Pain Of My Belligerence *
Burn This **
Hadestown *** 1/2
All My Sons * 1/2
Tootsie ** 1/2
Ink ***
Beetlejuice **
Estado Vegetal ***
Hans Christian Andersen * 1/2
Cirque du Soleil: Luzia ***
BLKS ** 1/2
Moulin Rouge ** 1/2
Bat Out Of Hell **
Unchilding **
Sea Wall/ A Life ** 1/2
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child ***
Betrayal *** 1/2
Fifty Million Frenchmen ** 1/2
Freestyle Love Supreme ** 1/2
Derren Brown: Secret ***
(A)loft Modulation * 1/2
The Great Society **
I Can't See *
Heroes Of The Fourth Turning ** 1/2
Chasing Rainbows: The Road To Oz ***
The Glass Menagerie (dir Austin Pendleton & Peter Bloch) **
Terra Firma (debut of The Coop theater company) **
Forbidden Broadway: The Next Generation ***
Dublin Carol ** 1/2
Soft Power **
The Decline and Fall of The Entire World As Seen Through The Eyes Of Cole Porter ***
For Colored Girls ** 1/2
Scotland, PA **
The Sound Inside *** (great cast, clumsy ending)
User Not Found **
Enchanted April **
DruidShakespeare: Richard III * 1/2
Broadbend, Arkansas



Thanks for reading. Michael Giltz is the creator of BookFilter, a book lover’s best friend. It’s a website that lets you browse for books online the way you do in a physical bookstore, provides comprehensive info on new releases every week in every category and offers passionate personal recommendations every step of the way. He’s also the cohost of Showbiz Sandbox, a weekly pop culture podcast that reveals the industry take on entertainment news of the day with top journalists and opinion makers as guests. It’s available for free on iTunes. Visit Michael Giltz at his website. Download his podcast of celebrity interviews and his radio show, also called Popsurfing and also available for free on iTunes.

THEATER: "Enchanted April" -- The Charming Tale That Cannot Fail (Much)

AN ENCHANTED APRIL ** 1/2 out of ****
THEATRE ROW

It's 1922 and four women -- four strangers, really -- impulsively find themselves renting the castle San Salvatore on the coast of the Mediterranean for the month of April. It's absurd. A castle? For the entire month of April? Sunshine? And wisteria?

They all have their reasons. Lotty is a timid soul but when she spots an ad offering a castle for rent she somehow gins up the nerve to approach another woman in her club. They've never spoken despite attending the same church on Sundays. Lotty plants the idea and her friend Rose Arbuthnot tries to resist but then suggests maybe simply writing for the particulars wouldn't be so wrong. Before you know it, they're advertising for roomies to share the expense and up pop the dour Mrs. Fisher and the glamorous Lady Caroline Dester. They all decamp to Italy and the romantic setting conjures up the usual magic. The women blossom, become friends, romances are begun or rekindled with loved ones and it truly is enchanted.

That's the essential plot of The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim. It was published in 1922, between the wars and is the sort of light comic novel the British do better than anyone else. Heck, as far as I can tell, no one else even tries to write these sorts of books. It's sweet, perceptive, very funny in the kindest and most charming sort of way and well why not say it...enchanting. One hundred years have come and gone and I can recommend it unreservedly.

It's been turned into a play several times, a radio play, a few musicals and two feature films. The most recent movie is perhaps the most popular adaptation of all. That 1991 film was nominated for an Oscar and tweaked the story ever so slightly, as most adaptations can and must. Joan Plowright was especially good as the starchy Mrs. Fisher and really you can't beat the Mediterranean for sumptuous settings.

 

Here it comes again. You really can't go wrong with this story and the romantic idea of an Italian vacation to stir the soul. (E.M. Forster pulled the same trick with A Room With A View.) I'm not sure why but they've changed the title to An Enchanted April, which seems more random and annoying than the 1991 film insisting on just Enchanted April. Otherwise, the book changes by Elizabeth Hansen are reasonable choices.

In the original novel, Rose Arbuthnot is unforgivably religious and finds her husband's career as a popular writer churning out biographies of royal mistresses distasteful and embarrassing. It also mentions they lost a child. Here Hansen downplays the Puritanism and gives Rose a sad monologue about her guilt over the little boy's death. In the novel, the impossibly beautiful Lady Dester is just bored of being chased by every man alive. Try as she might to be dismissive or rude, everyone is charmed by her every utterance. Here, she is haughty, which is fine. She's also haunted by the recent horrors of the war, where Lady Caroline worked as a nurse and saw her share of suffering. In many ways, she is suffering from PTSD. Those changes lead to some other modest plot changes but it's all fine and good. Four women come to Italy, clash a little, loosen up and take a plunge into newer and better lives.

The big problem is the score. C. Michael Perry did the music and he and Hansen tackle the lyrics. It's all recitative tunes, with aimless, meandering melodic lines, the sort of thing people think of as a la Stephen Sondheim though of course Sondheim always offers great melodies. You rarely get anything approaching a proper song, just vocalizing about the lovely view or this and that from a modestly voiced cast. It wouldn't matter that most of the performers are not belters if they had some charming tunes to deliver. But alas, the flowers bloom but the songs do not. This being a musical, that is a fatal flaw.

The story rescues things, as it always does, along with two standouts. Leah Hocking captures the genial charm of Lotty, who puts the plot into motion and constantly insists something will happen because she can see it. This could be ditzy or silly or jokey but Hocking makes Lotty irresistible. Alma Cuervo is costumed to echo Plowright to a t. Happily, her performance is not a carbon copy but Cuervo's own thing. Though why they felt the need to have her slam her cane to the ground and shout "Brilliant" at the very end is beyond me. It was hardly a catch phrase of hers and simply underlined the lack of oomph from the finale.

With a very modest budget, the women were costumed nicely by Matthew Solomon, though I doubt Lady Caroline would have worn a flapper costume to any dinner at the castle and Jim Stanek's suit could have been a little more period appropriate. A little dab of Brylcreem (or rather its precursor since that came out in 1928) would have helped him too. The idea of white umbrellas serving as a backdrop was fine and the sets by William Armstrong did the job despite very few resources. The music was provided by two players though here again the musical choices were unhelpful. Better just two pianos instead of having one chintzily try to echo the sound of strings.

Still, for a brief moment it all works. Mrs. Fisher sings "This Feeling," a song about a tingle of excitement and pleasure she hasn't experienced since her youth.  Better than any other tune, it reveals character and pushes the plot forward. Cuervo makes the most of it, the song approaches a melody and for a moment you forget the modest backdrop, the performer and just get caught up in the moment. This feeling doesn't happen very often, but it's a treat when it comes.


THEATER OF 2019

Frankenstein: Under The Radar Fest at the Public ** 1/2
Minor Character: Under The Radar Festival at the Public ***
Ink: Under The Radar  Festival at the Public  ** 1/2
Choir Boy ** 1/2
White Noise ** 1/2
Kiss Me, Kate ***
Ain't No Mo' *** 1/2
Ain't Too Proud **
The Cradle Will Rock * 1/2
Mrs. Murray's Menagerie *** 1/2
Oklahoma! (on Broadway) ** 1/2
Socrates **
The Pain Of My Belligerence *
Burn This **
Hadestown *** 1/2
All My Sons * 1/2
Tootsie ** 1/2
Ink ***
Beetlejuice **
Estado Vegetal ***
Hans Christian Andersen * 1/2
Cirque du Soleil: Luzia ***
BLKS ** 1/2
Moulin Rouge ** 1/2
Bat Out Of Hell **
Unchilding **
Sea Wall/ A Life ** 1/2
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child ***
Betrayal *** 1/2
Fifty Million Frenchmen ** 1/2
Freestyle Love Supreme ** 1/2
Derren Brown: Secret ***
(A)loft Modulation * 1/2
The Great Society **
I Can't See *
Heroes Of The Fourth Turning ** 1/2
Chasing Rainbows: The Road To Oz ***
The Glass Menagerie (dir Austin Pendleton & Peter Bloch) **
Terra Firma (debut of The Coop theater company) **
Forbidden Broadway: The Next Generation ***
Dublin Carol ** 1/2
Soft Power **
The Decline and Fall of The Entire World As Seen Through The Eyes Of Cole Porter ***
For Colored Girls ** 1/2
Scotland, PA **
The Sound Inside *** (great cast, clumsy ending)
User Not Found **
Enchanted April **
DruidShakespeare: Richard III **
Broadbend, Arkansas



Thanks for reading. Michael Giltz is the creator of BookFilter, a book lover’s best friend. It’s a website that lets you browse for books online the way you do in a physical bookstore, provides comprehensive info on new releases every week in every category and offers passionate personal recommendations every step of the way. He’s also the cohost of Showbiz Sandbox, a weekly pop culture podcast that reveals the industry take on entertainment news of the day with top journalists and opinion makers as guests. It’s available for free on iTunes. Visit Michael Giltz at his website. Download his podcast of celebrity interviews and his radio show, also called Popsurfing and also available for free on iTunes.

THEATER: To Delete or Not To Delete, That Is The Digital Question in "User Not Found"

USER NOT FOUND ** out of ****
BAM NEXT WAVE AT GREENE GRAPE ANNEX


The UK theater company Dante or Die specializes in site-specific performances. Hotel rooms, self-storage units, ski lifts -- they've been there, done that. The company's latest show is User Not Found and it takes place in an actual café, in this case Brooklyn's Greene Grape Annex near BAM. As part of the Next Wave festival, Dante Or Die delivers a mediation on grief in our digital age. Audience members aren't just seated in the intimate space of a working café. They're also given headphones and a cell phone which displays key bits of information like text messages and social media posts. As with so many envelope-pushing shows, you can't help feeling more time was spent working out the bells and whistles of how it will all work rather than the actual story.

That story is a familiar one. Terry (played by Terry O'Donovan) is occupying his usual seat at the local coffee shop, pointing out other regulars and their various quirks. Then Terry gets a text from a friend expressing their deep sorrow. That, of course, would send a chill down anyone's spine. But Terry has to receive eight more (and a phone call from an older woman, which he doesn't answer) before ponderously texting back that he doesn't know what has happened. What are people texting sympathies about? And then it clicks. Terry dated Luca (sic) for about nine years and then Luca broke up with him. And now Luca is dead. As Terry says, first Luca left him and now Luca's left the world.

Terry is distraught, as anyone would be. Clearly Terry hadn't gotten over the break-up yet. As if the pain and grief weren't bad enough, Terry discovers a very modern twist to all this. When they were still together, Luca named Terry his digital executor. Terry now has full access to all of Luca's social media accounts and must decide what if anything should be preserved and what should be tidily erased from the internet. It's the five stages of grief, 2.0.

Possibilities abound. Luca blocked Terry from his Facebook account (and presumably Twitter et al), which Terry says he appreciated -- less possibility of turning into an online stalker, he confesses cheerily. Now Terry can see exactly what Luca has been up to since they separated. Did Luca have an online journal? Did he have an account on a gay dating app? Did he have an account on a gay dating app before they broke up? But none of the voyeuristic possibilities are explored. No secrets are revealed.

Instead, Terry grieves over his lost love while looking at public Facebook posts and the like. Terry also reconnects with Luca's mother Maria who, in one of the show's few subtle touches, mentions in a text she regrets not asking Terry to speak at the memorial. Really, he just mourns and remembers why he loved Luca in the first place and all those digital files help him do so. Terry might just as easily be sorting through Luca's closet or cleaning out his desk drawer, clutching a beloved t-shirt or discovering a birthday card Luca tucked away. The result would be the same.

Technology adds very little to User Not Found. The piece is a monologue and the information we get via headphones and cell phone (or should I say mobile?) is minimal and mostly unnecessary. It begins with some scene-setting music by Norah Jones and background chatter. But why over headphones? In fact the room is filled with the music before we put on the headphones so it makes a seamless transition. But why transition at all? Most of the time, we're not hearing the inner thoughts of Terry. We're watching him talk out loud and then hearing the audio feed. It leaves his performance at an unnecessary remove.

Further, the texting and other visual information is generally clunky and slow. Why does it take Terry so long to text someone to ask what the heck they're offering condolences about? And when he does text it's very cumbersome indeed and I can't imagine why. The same is true when Terry scrolls through Luca's social media. It takes forever and is quite unrevealing.

Terry focuses in on one photo of Luca holding a balloon and it was actually more powerful just to listen to him describe it rather than actually look at the darn thing. Hmm, we can look at a music video from one of Luca's favorite artists...or we can watch Terry talk about that annoying pop artist and eventually break down as the song hits him emotionally. And when Terry describes a leopard (or panther? or lion? some cat-like creature, anyway) coming into the café and prowling around the other customers it's a lot more interesting to imagine than anything we might see on screen. Yes, they sweeten the mix with the howl of the creature, but Terry already fired our imagination without it.

Again and again, the bells and whistles of the tech got in the way. With the audience isolated in headphones for much of the show, I understood why they sweetened the mix with some low-key canned audience laughter at appropriate moments. Still, it was distracting. Other ideas worked better, like the time Terry was leaving a voice mail message...and kept leaving it on the audio track but in real life addressed us and said his message was even boring himself. Terry struggles to remember some moments...and photos of them appear blurry on the screen of the mobiles we're holding. A fine idea though it had little dramatic impact for me. Ditto the many abstract videos meant to convey the emotional turmoil Terry is undergoing. A little better was the use of that one photo of Luca holding a balloon. As Terry went on about it, the photo became subtly smaller and smaller until it seemed to float away into the distance on the phone screen. Again, this was more interesting than impactful but at least it showed them trying.

The piece was written by Chris Goode and directed by Daphne Attias, who co-founded the company with actor O'Donovan. As Terry, he offers an immediate intimacy with the audience, not to mention some wonderful body work as he rolls and crawls and glides around the room at one key moment. But strip away all the toys and the monologue itself is banal. If there were any insights at hand, I was too busy looking at my cell phone to catch them.

Worst of all, the show never even starts to grapple with the question it insistently raises: if you could delete your digital legacy when you die (or a loved one's after they're gone), would you? In the show, that's apparently just a simple yes or no answer and Terry makes a choice. But he barely scratches the surface of how he makes his decision or why.

Isn't there some curating to be done? If every image of a loved one is stored online on their Facebook or Twitter account, would you want to just delete them all? How about choosing the best? How about asking the man's mother if she'd like some or all of those photos to be placed in an online album she can access? Or printing the best in a book you give her? Are there images of your former lover and his new boyfriend? Do you save those? Do you reach out to the lover? If you're the only person with control over all these potential memories, isn't it important to think about everyone else? And what does it mean to save a static Facebook page? Do you really just want it sitting there? If the person who died only had four Twitter posts ( like Terry does), why then it's not much of a decision. Get rid of it. Since Luca had tens of thousands of Twitter posts, you've got some thinking to do. Are they just boring images of the meal he's eating? Or is there a thread, a celebration of the life he led or the causes he championed or the friends he had that are reflected by those posts? Then you get to the dating apps (be they Grindr or OKCupid) and a whole other host of ethical questions arise. And hey, does the loved one who just died have online friends you knew nothing about? How much of our life are we leading online? Is it meaningless or does it have substance and import and matter?

As you can see from above, overseeing the social accounts of some who died raises a host of practical and philosophical questions. In dealing with them, we should learn more about Luca while Terry would perhaps reveal more about himself, what Luca means to him and how Terry views this life. Instead, Terry makes his choice and that's it, beyond a quick aphorism. What does this decision mean to him? We don't know.  And the bells and whistles of technology can't distract us from realizing that.


THEATER OF 2019

Frankenstein: Under The Radar Fest at the Public ** 1/2
Minor Character: Under The Radar Festival at the Public ***
Ink: Under The Radar  Festival at the Public  ** 1/2
Choir Boy ** 1/2
White Noise ** 1/2
Kiss Me, Kate ***
Ain't No Mo' *** 1/2
Ain't Too Proud **
The Cradle Will Rock * 1/2
Mrs. Murray's Menagerie *** 1/2
Oklahoma! (on Broadway) ** 1/2
Socrates **
The Pain Of My Belligerence *
Burn This **
Hadestown *** 1/2
All My Sons * 1/2
Tootsie ** 1/2
Ink ***
Beetlejuice **
Estado Vegetal ***
Hans Christian Andersen * 1/2
Cirque du Soleil: Luzia ***
BLKS ** 1/2
Moulin Rouge ** 1/2
Bat Out Of Hell **
Unchilding **
Sea Wall/ A Life ** 1/2
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child ***
Betrayal *** 1/2
Fifty Million Frenchmen ** 1/2
Freestyle Love Supreme ** 1/2
Derren Brown: Secret ***
(A)loft Modulation * 1/2
The Great Society **
I Can't See *
Heroes Of The Fourth Turning ** 1/2
Chasing Rainbows: The Road To Oz ***
The Glass Menagerie (dir Austin Pendleton & Peter Bloch) **
Terra Firma (debut of The Coop theater company) **
Forbidden Broadway: The Next Generation ***
Dublin Carol ** 1/2
Soft Power **
The Decline and Fall of The Entire World As Seen Through The Eyes Of Cole Porter ***
For Colored Girls ** 1/2
Scotland, PA **
The Sound Inside *** (great cast, clumsy ending)



Thanks for reading. Michael Giltz is the creator of BookFilter, a book lover’s best friend. It’s a website that lets you browse for books online the way you do in a physical bookstore, provides comprehensive info on new releases every week in every category and offers passionate personal recommendations every step of the way. He’s also the cohost of Showbiz Sandbox, a weekly pop culture podcast that reveals the industry take on entertainment news of the day with top journalists and opinion makers as guests. It’s available for free on iTunes. Visit Michael Giltz at his website. Download his podcast of celebrity interviews and his radio show, also called Popsurfing and also available for free on iTunes.

MOVIES: "American Dharma" Bum Steve Bannon

AMERICAN DHARMA * out of ****

If you want to make a film about the denizens of a small town, you call someone like director Errol Morris.

If you want to take down a two-bit shyster, once upon a time you called Mike Wallace and ordered up a hard-hitting expose for 60 Minutes. 

But Mike Wallace interviewing a thoughtful intellectual? No. Errol Morris confronting a doofus doing damage? No thanks. Confronting is not in Morris’s DNA. 

And that’s how we arrive at the worst film of Morris’s career....

Check out the rest of my review only at Book and Film Globe!