Two companies that dazzled New York last season with highly praised pairs of plays are back this spring.
The first is Theatre For A New Audience, which last year presented two highly regarded Shakespeare productions (Hamlet and Othello), who is currently mounting Measure For Measure directed by Arin Arbus (who helmed the aforementioned TFANA Othello).
Measure For Measure is not as satisfying a drama as either of those great tragedies; indeed it is usually classified as a “problem play.” Arbus’ problematic production has moments of comedy—best delivered by Jefferson Mays. Mays excels as Vincentio, the oddly aloof Duke of Vienna. He is charming, fey, quirky, and always engaging on stage, providing a bizarre, if ultimately benevolent royal. read more
Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you’re by now well aware of Glee, the new Fox TV show whose first full season starts this fall. The comedy centers around Will Schuester, a young high school teacher played by Matt Morrison, who tries to resuscitate the school’s ailing show choir, and judging from the one promo episode that aired last May, it is riotously funny—P.C., the show is not. (The creator of the show is Ryan Murphy of Nip/Tuck and Popular fame.) Fox has waged an unusually long, intense P.R. campaign that started with the airing of that single episode, followed by relentless advertising, online contests, and other promos. It certainly doesn’t hurt that Jane Lynch, who plays a wickedly cutthroat cheerleading coach at the fictional high school, is in the cast—my kids have been endlessly repeating her waterboarding and hepatitis jokes all summer. Yes, in the middle of the most serious economic mess we’ve seen in a long time is an extremely silly television show about … singing. Interesting.
A few weeks before Glee was set to air on television, I spoke with Ralph S. Opacic, who is the founder, president, and executive director of the Orange County High School of the Arts. Matt Morrison graduated from OCHSA in 1997, and went on to do music theater, including South Pacific, Light in the Piazza, and Hairspray.
Opacic and I spoke about how he went about starting an arts school back in the 1980s, the ongoing effort to get funding for his school, what Matt Morrison was like as a high school student, and what on earth “show choir” singing is. Full disclosure: I am old enough that when I attended public high school “show choirs” did not exist. read more
The revival of Arthur Miller’s 1947 play All My Sons, currently on Broadway, has been dividing critics. Some praised director Simon McBurney’s approach, which eschews the strict naturalism so beloved on the Great White Way in favor of a certain stylization, while others disliked the production for pretty much the same reason (though they tended to word their objections along the lines of, “I can’t feel for the characters”).
I fall squarely in the first camp—if you happen to be in the New York area, this is one of the finest nights at the theater you can find—and one of the reasons is that in addition to its aesthetics (this is a starkly designed but very elegant show), the production offers a point of view on the material. In other words, McBurney is no mere illustrator: He’s thought about the play and gives us his interpretation of it; it’s then up to us, the audience, to argue about whether or not we buy his reading. Sure, interpreting material is what directors are meant to do, but watching All My Sons, I was reminded of how rarely it actually is the case.McBurney, for instance, is very smart about when happens onstage when someone’s talking. read more
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