All the world's a stage Archives - Page 23 of 30 - Capital Critics' Circle / Le cercle des critiques de la capitale

Nice Fish: A Reverie on Life

By Jane Baldwin | January 29, 2016

Louis Jenkins’s poem, “The Afterlife” begins: “I didn’t get it,” they are saying.

“Older people are exiting this life as if it were a movie.”

He says, “It didn’t seem to have any plot.”

Those words characterize Mark Rylance and Jenkins’ play Nice Fish, now appearing at the American Repertory Theatre, which they adapted from Jenkins’s prose poems. With its short non-linear scenes, it seems more a piece of performance art than a play. This remark is not meant as a put-down; I enjoyed the performance. It is reminiscent of Beckett’s plays in which the characters inhabit a predominantly empty world.

At the same time, the work projects a Prairie Home Companion quality, no surprise since Louis Jenkins has appeared on the radio show reading his poetry. Like Prairie Home Companion, his poetry frequently portrays distinct Minnesota characters and culture. That quality is even more forceful in the play where the actors bring a theatrical reality to the work. …

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Twelfth Night Rocks at ArtsEmerson.

By Jane Baldwin | January 24, 2016

Photo: Robert Day

Since its inception in 2010, ArtsEmerson has been committed to bringing a variety of high quality theatrical productions from around the world to Boston. More recently, the theatre’s mandate has been modified to attract an audience that better reflects the diversity of the city. How does the Bard’s Twelfth Night or What You Will, fit into ArtsEmerson’s new vision? The very name Shakespeare is a turn-off for many who struggled and yawned their way through the plays in school.

Enter Filter Theatre and their ninety minute, eight performer abridged farcical version of Twelfth Night, which first opened in 2006 to great success in the UK. The British company specializes in devised works and revising classics. Twelfth Night, however, has been more devised than revised. Taking their cue from the play’s opening line, “If music be the food of love, play on,” Filter emphasizes music – essentially rock – sometimes to the detriment of the play and its poetry. Dialogue and characters are cut or, as in the case of Sebastian, Viola’s lost twin brother, almost so. Consequently, the plotline suffers as does the exposition.

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Sondheim on Sondheim: An Evening with the Great Man and His Music

By Jane Baldwin | January 20, 2016

Photo Mark S. Howard

Boston’s Lyric Stage, a professional theatre company, demonstrates its commitment to the city by hiring mainly local performers, musicians, and technicians. It shows its commitment to talent through its long-term policy of inclusive casting. The majority of their productions are new American plays that have recently been released to the regionals. Artistic director Spiro Veloudos has a particular fondness for musical theatre.

Veloudos’s current show, Sondheim on Sondheim, devised by James Lapine, is a paean to the great composer-lyricist. It is at once a live musical revue and a filmed documentary. Sondheim wrote one new number for it, the autobiographical God. Set designer, David Towlun and lighting designer Chris Hudacs create the impression of Broadway at the opening with two glittering marquees that cover the Lyric’s upstage balconies. Later, the marquees become screens projecting images that pertain to Sondheim’s life. Center stage, hangs an enormous screen, primarily used to show interviews with Sondheim at various stages of his more than half-century career. The actors perform on a rectangular platform and the stage itself.

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Jack Charles versus the Crown: An actor from the Black Theatre Movement in Australia knocks us out of our seats!

By Alvina Ruprecht | January 17, 2016

Photo: Bindi Cole

The NAC studio will never be the same again and it is clear that the sensitive and strong handed guidance of director Rachael Maza has been central to our encounter with Uncle Jack Charles. Tramping on stage followed by his three musicians, Nigel Maclean, Phil Collings and Malcolm Beveridge, Uncle (Elder) Jack Charles moves into Emily Barrie’s multiply focussed set, sits down at a potter’s wheel , plunges his hands into the drippy muddy clay as the wheel spins, getting deep into that substance from which his ancestors came and from the land where his history emerges and brings people closer to their origins. An art form he began while he was in prison and which obviously liberated his artistic spirit.

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Violet: A Stirring Musical

By Jane Baldwin | January 15, 2016

Photo: Glenn Perry. “Alison McCartan and Dan Belnavis in Speakeasy Stage production of Violet.

The 2015-2016 season marks Boston’s SpeakEasy theatre’s twenty-fifth year. To celebrate the event, artistic director Paul Daigneault has brought back the musical Violet, which he first staged in 2000.

Violet is a dramatic and emotional piece, composed by Jeanine Tesori, adapted from Doris Betts’s story “The Ugliest Pilgrim” by the lyricist Brian Crawley. It is somewhat expressionistic in style in that it is achronological, moving back and forth from Violet’s childhood to 1965, the play’s present. As a young girl (Audree Hedequist), was struck in the face with an axe and left disfigured. How disfigured, the audience never learns, since the actress’s face is unmarked. Other characters comment on her scar, but we see no one shun her. Self-conscious, she keeps a lock of hair covering one side of her face much of the time.

Having inherited a little money after her father’s death, the adult Violet (Alison McCarten) takes a Greyhound from the small town of Spruce Pine in North Carolina to Tulsa, Oklahoma in the hope of being miraculously cured by a television evangelist (John F. King). She dreams of looking like the movie stars in the magazines she pores over.

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Jack Charles Versus The Crown ILBIJERRI Theatre Company (Melbourne, Australia). A Remarquable Performance.

By Patrick Langston | January 15, 2016

Photographer Bindi Cole

At one point in this remarkable show about his own life as a damaged Indigenous person in Australia and the collective experience of colonized Aboriginal people almost anywhere, Jack Charles sings the 1957 Connie Francis hit Who’s Sorry Now?

It seems an odd choice, this very white song by a very white singer from a very white time in America. Charles, backed by the tight, three-piece band that plays on and off through the show, sings the song in a jaunty, absolutely straight fashion, so while you know it’s meant to be ironic (after all, how sorry are we really about our treatment of Indigenous peoples?), his delivery leaves the import entirely up to us. Heck, he may even be singing the song, one of several in the show, just because he likes it.

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Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 Light up the Theatre.

By Jane Baldwin | December 21, 2015

Photos: Evgenia Eliseeva/American Repertory Theater

Mimi Lien’s extraordinary set for Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 plays a vital role in the success of this beautiful production. Cambridge’s Loeb Drama Center remade its playing area expanding the idea of theatre in the round into immersive theatre where performers mingle with the audience. This musical piece is set in a cabaret where every audience member is a guest. A minority of the public sits at tables in front of, to the side of, behind, and on the stage, sometimes joined by actors playing a scene. The predominant playing area has several levels. For most of the show Pierre, at times with musicians, at others alone, is in a prominent sunken circular space where he plays the piano, sings, and berates himself. A similar space holds a group of audience members. The larger public shares the theatre proper with performers, particularly the ensemble who at times race up and down the stairs, while singing and playing instruments, and stopping to perform, especially dance, on specially built platforms.

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Jane Eyre: an adaptation of the novel that translates verbal description into spacial artistry”

By Alvina Ruprecht | December 18, 2015

Photo from the site of Front Row Centre.

The National Theatre of London’s adaptation of Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre that reached us live by satellite recently was the result of a collective effort on the part of all the actors, so we were told during interviews conducted during the intermission. Ultimately, it was Sally Cookson who imposed the final directorial choices, intent on emphasizing the strength of this legendary heroine, who survived çruel treatment at the hands of her “step” family .

The play opens with the birth of little Jane who is passed on to her Aunt upon the death of her uncle and from that point on, much attention is focussed on the aggression and meanness to which she was subjected as a young girl. Madeleine Worrall as Jane Eyre in this early portion of the play purses her lips, squints, tightens her facial muscles and shows us what a tough little creature she is becoming as she swallows the insults, the taunting, and vicious behaviour of her cousins and aunt who toss her off though she were some filthy Cinderella. The fable becomes an adult horror story that allows our heroine to rise out of the emotional rubble and establish her own strong presence as a mature woman.

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Benjamin Britten’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in South Africa

By Jane Baldwin | November 23, 2015

Photo: Courtesy of the theatre company

Isango Ensemble, the South African opera company, which delighted Boston audiences in 2014 with their lively production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, recently returned to the city. Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream was one of two operas – Carmen, the other – that they brought to ArtsEmerson’s Cutler Majestic Theatre. The performers, who hail from South Africa’s townships around Cape Town, perform classical operas that have been reconceived and reculturated. Although all the performers are Black, one of the principal goals of the company is to build a diverse audience representative of a unified, but multi-cultural South Africa. Therefore, since most libretti are written in European languages, the operas are translated into South African tongues with English predominating. Unfortunately, the multiple languages and accented English can make it hard to follow the show. Supertitles would help greatly.

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La nuit des assassins: une création prometteuse de Ricardo Miranda

By Capital Critics Circle | November 19, 2015

Roland Sabra, Madinin-art.

La pièce « La nuit des assassins » écrite par José Triana à Cuba en 1964 a connu et connait encore un succès mondial plus particulièrement en Amérique du Sud et en Europe. De quoi s’agit-il ? Enfermés dans un grenier deux sœurs et un frère imaginent, miment, mettent en scène l’affirmation hégélienne bien connue selon laquelle« les enfants sont la mort des parents ». Prurit boutonneux, crise d’adolescence, révolte contre le Père ? Se contenter de cette lecture serait bien superficielle. Les frères Castro ne s’y sont pas trompés. Ils y ont vu un appel à la résistance à l’oppression et leur sens développé de la démocratie, comme chacun sait, a conduit au début des années 1980 José Triana à l’exil en France.

Il y a donc Lalo et ses deux sœurs, Beba et Cuca livrés à eux-mêmes, père et mère absents, et qui vont donner libre cours à leurs fantasmes de meurtre, d’assassinat de leurs parents, noyés dans l’illusion régressive que la liberté consiste à se débarrasser de la loi fût-elle simplement dans sa formulation première, familiale. S’affranchissant de toute contrainte formelle ils incarneront tour à tour leur rôle, celui des parents, des voisins, des forces de l’ordre, de la justice jetant le spectateur dans un trouble volontaire. La déconstruction apparente du fil narratif qui en résulte est l’image de la déconstruction de l’ordre social produite par la disparition du principe d’autorité.

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