Theater Talkback: Guts and Glory, Onstage - NYTimes.com
AUGUST 2, 2012, 1:00 PM Theater Talkback: Guts and Glory, Onstage
By BEN BRANTLEY Let's begin by acknowledging that all actors, especially stage actors, are brave. It takes guts as well as vanity to unpack your heart in front of a live audience.
But within that courageous profession, there are those who stand out as particularly fearless. They're the tightrope walkers, the performers who straddle voids without nets or harnesses, who make you hold your breath in terror and release it in an ecstasy of relief.
Of course with actors, it takes more than guts to command our admiration. In the theater, feats of derring-do don't count for much without a big emotional payoff or a lightning flash of insight. When an actor goes out on a limb, you need to feel that you've been taken there as well and allowed to glimpse a gasp-worthy view you might never otherwise have seen.
Anyone who attended the Sydney Theater Company's production of Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya," seen in New York last month as part of the Lincoln Center Festival, would have experienced a number of expansive views, offered by almost everyone in the cast, directed by Tamas Ascher. But the member of that ensemble I'm focusing on today is Cate Blanchett, whom I'm nominating as the heir apparent to Vanessa Redgrave for dauntless and dazzling risk-taking.
In my theatergoing lifetime, Ms. Redgrave has probably been the supreme example of the tightrope- walking stage star. Though not the most technically accomplished actress of her generation (a mastery of foreign accents continues to elude her), she has regularly and boldly ventured into scary, uncharted terrain.
I remember watching her as the love-hungry Lady in Tennessee Williams's "Orpheus Descending" and thinking at first how implausible she seemed, with her big flailing gestures and a voice that evoked less the Italian matron she was portraying than an addled Scottish nanny.
But it wasn't long before her clumsy, extravagant gestures and raw expressions began to assemble themselves into a painful, illuminated map of loneliness and longing, and of pride abandoned for passion. By the end, she had taken us to that place - a geography in which Williams specialized - where love strips its victims of decorum and defenses.
When this Lady died for love, it was not with a graceful farewell but a pratfall. And the image of Ms. Redgrave falling flat on her backside had an echoing magnificence that I've never known in any other death scene.
I thought of that moment when I was watching Ms. Blanchett's performance as the gorgeous, restless, uncomfortably married Yelena in "Uncle Vanya." No, Yelena doesn't die. But as portrayed by Ms. Blanchett, she does fall down, often, in a most unseemly manner. She also weaves, wobbles, stumbles
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/02/theater-talkback-guts-and-glory-onstage/?pagewanted=print[8/6/2012 9:33:50 AM] Theater Talkback: Guts and Glory, Onstage - NYTimes.com
and, for her big love scene, tumbles like an Olympic gymnast recovering from a shaky dismount.
And for not one instant did Ms. Blanchett come across as an actress showing off. No, I was seeing only Yelena, a conscious beauty who knows she is expected to match her exquisite appearance with appropriate poses and movements.
But Yelena is a human being, which in Chekhov's universe means that grace, poise and equilibrium are at best attributes of a moment. To be a Chekhov character is to lose your footing with regularity and to land with a thud more often than anyone who presumes to dignity would like to think possible.
Though I've seen an assortment of accomplished actresses as Yelena (including Julie Christie, Janet McTeer, Julianne Moore and Laura Linney), Ms. Blanchett was the first to make me fully appreciate the character as both a disruptive catalyst and a hapless victim of the emotional turmoil that her very presence stirs up. You felt that this Yelena, while aware of her beauty, didn't own it in the way that classic femmes fatales do.
As a consequence, I found new depths of pathos and humor in Yelena, generated by the disconnect between a heavens-skimming image and an earth-scraping reality. Pretty women slipping on banana peels have always had their own comic resonance, both gratifying and discomfiting. In succumbing to such indignities, with a wildness that made you fear she might fly away altogether, Ms. Blanchett discovers a new profundity in Yelena. She is truly a figure of comedy and tragedy, which Chekhov's singularly ambivalent plays demand but seldom receive.
Like most people outside Australia, where Ms. Blanchett cut her teeth onstage, I first knew this actress only for her film work. Judging only from those performances, I would have thought of her as a more likely successor to Meryl Streep than to Ms. Redgrave.
Like Ms. Streep, Ms. Blanchett is a born mimic with an uncanny gift for replicating accents and speech rhythms. (Her Katharine Hepburn in "The Aviator" is as dead-on as Ms. Streep's Margaret Thatcher in "The Iron Lady.") And both women project a prismatic, cutting intelligence on screen that sometimes distances them from their characters. You never feel that either actress, in their movie roles, is in danger of losing control.
I didn't fully register the white-hot energy behind Ms. Blanchett's composed coolness until I first saw her onstage, when the force of it hit like the blast of an open furnace. That was in the title role of "Hedda Gabler," another Sydney Theater Company production, adapted by her husband (and co-artistic director of the company), Andrew Upton, which came to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2006.
As Ibsen's thwarted, destructive heroine, Ms. Blanchett laid siege to the stage with a tireless, hyperkinetic interpretation that ultimately warped and melted the play around her. Working in a dybbuk-like assortment of voices, at a pace that suggested a hurricane tearing through (and up) a parlor, Ms. Blanchett's performance was nearly all radioactive subtext. We rarely saw a Hedda who could inhabit any conventional society, much less be imprisoned by it.
Some critics, including my colleague Charles Isherwood, thought her Hedda was an annoying example of a narcissistic star's self-indulgence. But I enjoyed Ms. Blanchett's energy and audacity and, yes, fearlessness. And I felt that if someone could just put this ferocious genie in a bottle onstage, great art would emerge.
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/02/theater-talkback-guts-and-glory-onstage/?pagewanted=print[8/6/2012 9:33:50 AM] Theater Talkback: Guts and Glory, Onstage - NYTimes.com
That's what happened when she played Blanche DuBois in Williams's "Streetcar Named Desire," seen at the Academy in 2009. All the traits and tricks that Ms. Blanchett had brandished so flamboyantly as Hedda were still in evidence in her Blanche.
But as directed by Liv Ullman (best known as the spiritually transparent star of Ingmar Bergman movies), Ms. Blanchett strategically harnessed those qualities. The different vocal pitches were used artfully and sparingly now, to suggest a woman divided between a blithe social surface and an inward, unconquerable despair.
Even more impressively, the energy that had raged in her Hedda hadn't been extinguished. But it had been internalized. And I became aware, as I never had been before, of the sheer physical, as well as psychic, exertion that the embattled Blanche required merely to keep standing, let alone to sustain her genteel facade.
She didn't just show us Blanche DuBois versus Stanley Kowalski (played by Joel Edgerton). She gave us Blanche against the universe, and it was some prize fight. We have always known about Blanche's fear and fragility. Ms. Blanchett made us feel her bravery as well, something it takes an unusually brave actress to do. Seeing her confirm that bravery with commensurate artistry in "Vanya" was a relief and an epiphany, the blazing kind that only daredevil acting can afford.
These expert daredevils make up an elite club in the theater. For me, their ranks include Mark Rylance, for sure (as anyone who saw him in Jez Butterworth's "Jerusalem" can confirm), Liev Schreiber (on the basis of his stage work in "Othello" and "Talk Radio"), Laurie Metcalf (with performances stretching from "Balm in Gilead" in 1984 to the recent "Long Day's Journey Into Night" in London), Kevin Spacey (did you catch his "Richard III"?) and Elizabeth Marvel and Bill Camp (for their astonishing work in Ivo van Hove's actor-flaying productions).
Who are your nominations for this explorer's hall of fame? And what specific performances took your breath away with their bravery?
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: August 3, 2012
An earlier version of this post referred incorrectly to Andrew Upton's role in the Sydney Theater Company's production of "Hedda Gabler." He did not direct it.
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: August 2, 2012
An earlier version of this post referred incorrectly to the marital status of the character played by Vanessa Redgrave in "Orpheus Descending." She was not a widow.
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/02/theater-talkback-guts-and-glory-onstage/?pagewanted=print[8/6/2012 9:33:50 AM] If This Dancer’s Amigas Could See Her Now - The New York Times
August 5, 2012 THEATER REVIEW If This Dancer’s Amigas Could See Her Now
By ANDY WEBSTER
The 1966 musical (and 1969 movie) “Sweet Charity” gets a Latin makeover in the director Julio Agustin’s production at the New Haarlem Arts Theater, and it’s called for. The original could use some salsa. With its picaresque and coincidence-filled narrative; somewhat flighty title character (a lovelorn floozy, if not a prostitute, with a heart of gold); and principal setting (a dime-dance joint, already an anachronism in mid-’60s New York), the musical, originally staged by Bob Fosse, is itself a watered-down version of Fellini’s “Nights of Cabiria,” which actually did concern a prostitute and gritty issues like physical and emotional abuse and an existential take on religion. “Sweet Charity” was never one of Fosse’s more provocative shows, and Neil Simon’s quip-packed book seems sitcom-ready in retrospect.
Mr. Agustin’s take is fairly mild, lending little insight into the Hispanic-American experience today, with the exception of a few surface details: the heroine (Edlyn González) is named Caridad Esperanza Valentin; the movie star she meets and is almost seduced by, Vittorio Vidal (a charming, buff Cedric Leiba Jr.), is here a leading man in telenovelas. Jasmine Romero, as Vittorio’s jealous girlfriend, is an amusing if stereotypical spitfire.
But there is plenty to savor, not least new, exhilarating choreography by Lainie Munro for three numbers, performed by a nimble, enthusiastic ensemble stepping out to sure-footed accompaniment from Brett Pontecorvo’s small band. (“Big Spender” remains an irresistible highlight as is Fosse’s choreography in other numbers.) Helping inestimably are Mary Myers’s costumes, encompassing Panama hats, white tuxedos, purple- and-black evening attire and the Fan-Dango Ballroom’s tawdry dresses.
Aili Venho and Allicia Lawson, as Caridad’s cynical fellow dancers, are an engaging pair. And then there is Ms. González’s Caridad: slight, insecure, pigeon-toed, frail but unflagging. Ms. González keeps her character’s hope aflame, and with it the spirit of this production.
http://theater.nytimes.com/2012/08/06/theater/reviews/sweet-charity-at-new-haarlem-arts-theater.html?pagewanted=print[8/6/2012 9:14:15 AM] Loneliness and Love on the Moor - The New York Times
August 5, 2012 THEATER REVIEW Loneliness and Love on the Moor
By RACHEL SALTZ
The ghost of theater styles past hovers over “Brontë: A Portrait of Charlotte,” a one-woman show starring Maxine Linehan. Written by William Luce for Julie Harris, “Brontë” is one of those “spend an evening with a great writer” plays whose mini-vogue seems to have come and gone. (The Luce-Harris “Belle of Amherst” might have been the peak of the trend.)
Mr. Luce is a thoughtful writer, Ms. Linehan a skillful actress and “Brontë” a handsome enough production, directed by Timothy Douglas. But the show rarely sparks the imagination. It’s missing the one thing it needs: a sense of the genius of Charlotte Brontë.
Instead we get biography. Set during a single day in 1849, the play begins as Charlotte, the last surviving Brontë sibling, returns to her father’s home in Haworth in Yorkshire — “a perfect misanthrope’s heaven,” she calls it — and sits down to write a letter to her friend Ellen Nussey, called Nell. (The show is based on the women’s correspondence.)
We hear about the deaths of her sisters Emily and Anne; Charlotte’s unrequited love for her French tutor in Belgium, Monsieur Heger, and her loneliness; her bad-boy brother, Branwell; the terrible conditions at the school for clergymen’s daughters that the Brontë girls attended (except Anne); and the adoption of male noms de plume — Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell — by Charlotte, Emily and Anne.
There’s something rigorously ordinary about Mr. Luce and Ms. Linehan’s Charlotte. She’s amiable, forward thinking, witty and even tempered. Her goal: to find some comfort in love. What’s absent is a sense of the weirdness in the ordinary, which Charlotte understood as a writer. That makes this stage Charlotte sympathetic and pleasant company. But you never believe she’s the woman who wrote “Jane Eyre.”
So too the past seems bled of its strangeness, despite the presence of death. (Charlotte, though, retains a surface cheerfulness.) And even if she is the least odd Brontë, you want more Brontë oddness. There are glimmers, as when Charlotte shows us Branwell’s collection of feathers — obsessive, true to place, touched with poetry.
http://theater.nytimes.com/...-alloy-theater.html?scp=1&sq=bronte%20portrait%20of%20charlotte&st=cse&pagewanted=print[8/6/2012 9:15:31 AM]
latimes.com Joan Stein, Tony-winning theater producer, dies at 59
By David Ng
2:28 PM PDT, August 3, 2012
Joan Stein, a Tony-winning theater and screen producer whose diverse career included many Los Angeles stage productions, died on Friday at 59. She had been battling cancer and died atCedars- Sinai Medical Center, according to her husband, Ted Weiant.
Stein helped to launch several long-running L.A. theater productions, including A. R. Gurney's "Love Letters," "Forever Plaid" and Steve Martin's "Picasso at the Lapin Agile." She was the co- head of the Canon Theatre in Beverly Hills, where she worked for 10 years. She also worked as a television producer, forming a production company with Martin.
Weiant said that she had been diagnosed just four weeks ago with a rare type of cancer affecting the appendix. Stein and her husband lived in Hollywood.
In 1999, Stein won a Tony Award as one of the producers of the Broadway play "Side Man." Her other Broadway producing credits include the recent musicals "Catch Me If You Can" and "9 to 5," as well as the 2002 revival of"The Elephant Man."
At the Canon, she worked alongside her producing partner Susan Dietz. Their first success was "Love Letters," which opened in 1990, and featured a rotating cast of celebrities. While at the Canon, she also produced "Forever Plaid" and the musical "Ruthless!"
Stein left the Canon in 2000 to pursue a career in television, according to Dietz. The theater closed in 2004. "We had fun and we did good work. She was a sister to me for those 10 years," said Dietz.
Stein was a producer of "Picasso at the Lapin Agile" that opened in 1994 at the Westwood Playhouse, now the Geffen Playhouse. The play was a hit and ran for more than 300 performances.
"People say, 'You can't make a living in the theater in L.A.,' " Stein told The Times in 1995. "Well, everybody in my office is wearing clothes, driving cars, paying rent. They're making a living in the theater."
Stein's recent stage projects included "Motherhood Out Loud," which ran at Primary Stages in New York and at the Geffen Playhouse in 2011 under the title "In Mother Words." She also produced "Standing on Ceremony," a play about gay marriage, that ran at the Largo at the Coronet in West Hollywood.
Her stage career also included a stint as the managing director of the Berkshire Theatre Festival in Massachusetts.
Stein was born in New York. In addition to her husband, she is survived by two sisters and her mother.
[Updated: a previous version of this post misspelled the name of producer Susan Dietz.]
'Diner' maps new Broadway road - Entertainment News, Legit News, Media - Variety
Posted: Sat., Aug. 4, 2012, 12:45pm PT
'Diner' maps new Broadway road Musical gets workshop in New York this fall
By GORDON COX
Producers of new tuner "Diner" have clarified their plans in advance of the show's Broadway bow, now skedded for a run that opens April 10.
Instead of the previously announced tryout run in San Francisco, where the show was set to play Oct. 23-Nov. 18, creatives will use those dates for a four-week workshop in Gotham with the aim of reconceiving the staging for a smaller theater than the Curran, the 1,650-seat venue that was to have hosted the tuner.
Producers said the move was prompted by the current logjam in Broadway real estate. With the Main Stem's larger venues either occupied or already promised to other musicals, an incoming production such as "Diner" will likely find itself in one of the Rialto's smaller houses that -- usually seating between 1,000 and 1,200 -- were in the past more often reserved for plays.
According to the producers, if the show had followed the previously announced sked, creatives wouldn't have had time to rethink a Curran-sized production to fit into a more intimate New York house.
Although producers also set the April 10 opening date for the production's Broadway run, the exact venue has yet to be locked down. They added that they still hope to get the show to San Francisco prior to the Rialto, playing a tryout stint in a venue that more closely matches the size of its potential Broadway home.
Based on the 1982 film, "Diner" has a book by the film's screenwriter-helmer, Barry Levinson, and songs by Sheryl Crow in her legit debut. Kathleen Marshall directs and choreographs.
Contact Gordon Cox at [email protected]
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118057461?refcatid=15&printerfriendly=true[8/6/2012 9:11:41 AM]