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PLAYBILL.COM'S THEATRE WEEK IN REVIEW, Oct. 17-23: August Company
By Robert Simonson
23 Oct 2009
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After Miss Julie's Sienna Miller takes her Broadway bow
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| photo by Aubrey Reuben | People can't stop messing with Strindberg.
Acknowledging the Swedish playwright as a master of modern drama on one hand, dramatists and directors use the other hand to continually find ways to improve upon, reinvent and modernize Strindberg's landmark works.
The most noteworthy example of such literary surgery arrived on Broadway this week in the form of After Miss Julie, British playwright Patrick Marber's (whose own Closer owes a lot to Strindberg) new take on Miss Julie, the famous 1888 play about class, sex, power and relationships. It opened on Broadway Oct. 22, with the headline-making Sienna Miller in the title role, and Marin Ireland and Jonny Lee Miller supporting.
Opinions were split. Some thought Marber — who transposes the play to an English country house on the eve of Labour's historic landslide in 1945 — managed to smartly update the tale of class war, while others thought the revision was not an improvement on the original, while still others wondered why the play had to be revisited at all. Most reviews focused and the success or failure of Sienna Miller's performance. A few major critics felt she wasn't up to the challenge, while several lesser reviewers thought Miller came through with a persuasive performance, and she and her fellow Miller (they are not related) charged the play with sexual energy.
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Unlike, say, Shakespeare, or even his contemporary and fellow Scandinavian Ibsen, Strindberg is rarely accepted straight on America's biggest stage. Witness the new Creditors, now playing at La Jolla Playhouse. Like the Marber, the new take is apparently so different from the original that it's actually credited to another playwright — Doug Wright. (I wonder how Marber or Wright would feel if, in 50 years time, their plays were newly "authored" by other writers.)
Stated La Jolla Playhouse artistic director Christopher Ashley, "Commissions represent a core component of our artistic mission, and we couldn't be more excited to help originate Doug's latest creation." Ahem.
Wright (I Am My Own Wife, Quills, Grey Gardens, The Little Mermaid) also directed the production, to play to Oct. 25. Reviewers found the piece taut, if talky, which good performances from Omar Metwally, T. Ryder Smith and Kathryn Meisle.
Meanwhile, London's Donmar Warehouse (where After Miss Julie began) announced is was bringing over its production of Creditors to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in April 2010. Alan Rickman stages David Greig's new version of the drama.
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Back to Broadway.
Director Christopher Ashley and librettist Joe DiPietro must be feeling pretty good this week. Four years ago they brought the rock-driven All Shook Up to Broadway and did only fair, getting lukewarm reviews and running two thirds of a year. This year, they returned with Memphis, with a score by David Bryan, and a story about about a radio DJ who aims to change the color and sound of rock music. (The show also gives Chad Kimball his first starring Broadway role.)
Expectations were not especially high, but the show received a surprising warm welcome upon opening Oct. 19. Critics said it was entertaining and exhilarating, with great dancing and performances and a musical personality of its own. The notices were certainly the best in years for DiPietro, who's taken a beating in the time since I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change hit the world. A few detractors of Memphis found it synthetic and formulaic.
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Brian d'Arcy James in Shrek
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| photo by Joan Marcus |
The news wasn't as sunny for Shrek the Musical, which announced it will play its final performance at the Broadway Theatre on Jan. 3, 2010, following 441 performances and 37 previews.
Never a rock-solid hit along the lines of other cartoon-to-stage musicals like The Lion King, the relatively short run marks a disappointment for DreamWorks Theatricals, whose first stage venture this was. It also leaves composer Jeanine Tesori and librettist David Lindsay-Abaire still searching for their first Broadway musical hit.
The national tour of the family-friendly musical based on the DreamWorks film and kid-lit favorite will launch at Chicago's Cadillac Palace Theatre for a limited engagement, July 13–Sept. 5, 2010.
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The Public Theater has made an addition to its schedule. It will stage a full production of the Alex Timbers-Michael Friedman rock musical with that catchy, catchy title, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson in March 2010.
The show is about that severe, tousle-headed man on the $20 bill, "Old Hickory" himself, who beat back the British in the Battle of New Orleans, threatened to smash the Electoral College and the Bank of the United Stages, and was arguably about as rock and roll a president as the nation ever had. Beside Jackson, characters include John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren, and James Monroe – more presidents in any musical since Assassins!
It will begin previews March 23, 2010.
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"Sex and the City" star Kim Cattrall and Matthew Macfadyen, who played Mr. Darcy in the 2005 film version of "Pride and Prejudice," were announced to star in the West End in a new production of Noel Coward's 1930 comedy Private Lives, which is revived roughly once every six or seven years in London. Guess we could call this production "The Cougar Coward"; Cattrall is Macfayden's senior by 18 years. It will begin performances Feb. 24. Prior to the West End, it will preview at the out-of-town Theatre Royal in Bath. The production will be directed by Richard Eyre.
The British-born Cattrall has previously appeared in the West End in productions of Whose Life Is It, Anyway? at the Comedy Theatre in 2005 and David Mamet's The Cryptogram at the Donmar Warehouse in 2006.
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Berkeley Repertory Theatre opened the West Coast premiere of Tiny Kushner, a collection of five short plays by Pulitzer Prize winner Tony Kushner on Oct. 21.
Tiny Kushner includes the short plays titled (get ready) Flip Flop Fly!; East Coast Ode to Howard Jarvis; Terminating or Sonnet LXXV or "Lass Meine Schmerzen nicht verloren sein" or Ambivalence; Dr. Arnold A. Hutschneker in Paradise; and Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy.
Any here is your handy-dandy Kushner key:
Dr. Arnold A. Hutschnecker served for many years as Richard M. Nixon's psychotherapist.
Howard Jarvis was an anti-tax activist who was responsible for passage of California's famous Proposition 13 in 1978.
Sonnet LXXV: As in Sonnet 75, as in Shakespeare.
"Lass Meine Schmerzen nicht verloren sein"—translated as "Let not my sorrows end in vain," a quote from Richard Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos.
"Flip, Flop and Fly"—a famous standard by blues singer Big Joe Turner.
Ambivalence: The feeling one doesn't get when confronted with a Tony Kushner play title.
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