ROCKET TO THE MOON – REMARKABLE ODETS PLAY AT THE NATIONAL THEATRE

                           Joseph Millson  as Ben Stark and Keeley Hawes as Belle Stark

Reviewed by James Karas

Productions of the plays of Clifford Odets are a rarity and as far as I can tell there has not been any production in the Toronto area for some time except for Soulpepper’s Awake and Sing in 2009. England’s National Theatre with its broad spectrum of productions has revived his 1938 play Rocket to the Moon on the Lyttleton stage.

Rocket to the Moon is a remarkable play, an interesting period piece that is more fascinating than enjoyable. It takes place in a dentists’ office in 1938. The main characters are two dentists who share office space, a foot doctor next door and a secretary who has just been hired by one of the dentists.

Ben Stark (Joseph Millson) is married to Belle (Keeley Hawes) an officious and ambitious woman who wants her husband to do better. Her father, Mr.Prince (Nicholas Woodeson) is a wealthy widower, a bit of a wag, a restless spirit and a man who has not spoken with his daughter for years. Dr. Cooper (Peter Sullivan) is a dentist who rents space from Ben but cannot pay his bills. He has resorted to drinking.

The catalyst of the play is Cleo Singer (Jessica Raine) the secretary that Ben just hired. She is attractive, sassy, an airhead and a braggart. She wants you to believe that she comes from a wealthy family, that she does not have to work and she has ambitions of becoming a dancer.
Ben, Mr. Prince and a patient named Willy Wax (Tim Steed) all fall in love or in lust with her. All of them are in search of a rocket to the moon, something to get them out of their humdrum existence. The unhappily married Ben, the ambitious Belle, the unhappy aging man, Willy and Cleo are all looking for something that is either not there or they are unable to grasp.

It is a slow-moving and verbose play. The choice of dentists as the people who need a rocket to the moon so desperately is an interesting one. Not too many people today would associate them with people who cannot pay their rent and resort to alcohol for comfort. These are not Eugene O’Neill’s pipe-dreamers in The Iceman Cometh of around the same time. Mr. Prince has no financial troubles but he wants to marry the young girls who is not quite twenty years old while he must be over sixty.

Jessica Raine does fine work as the apparently dim-witted secretary who is nevertheless able to play the three men on her fingertips. Woodeson is colourful and suave as the old man with the fancy canes and the florid language.

Millson is the henpecked husband who is looking for a way out without being found out while Keeley Hawes does excellent work as the attractive but demanding and domineering wife who is also looking for a rocket to somewhere.

Director Angus Jackson keeps this somewhat lengthy piece moving at a good pace and in the end you do get a fascinating night at the theatre and not only for being given yje opportunity to see such a rarely produced play.

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Rocket to the Moon by Clifford Odets opened on March 30, 2011 and continues at The Royal National Theatre, London, SE1 9PX, http://www.blogger.com/www.nationaltheatre.org.uk Tel.+44 (0) 20 7452 3333

FULL-BLOODED PRODUCTION OF FIDELIO FROM ROYAL OPERA HOUSE

Reviewewd by James Karas

Fidelio, Beethoven’s only opera, is based on a libretto entitled Leonore ou l’amour conjugal by Jean-Nicolas Bouilly. That’s clear enough: we will get a story about a woman called Leonore and the moral will be the value of married love. My guess is that many people like me associate Fidelio more with false imprisonment, political oppression and the triumph of the human spirit in the face of tyranny.

Fidelio is now playing at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in a revival of production by Jurgen Flimm that first opened at the Metropolitan Opera House back in 2000. It is a full-blooded production, done in modern dress, with some superlative singing.

As the curtain rises, we see a three-level cellblock on the right with the prisoners visible. What goes on in the front of the cells? Prison Guard Jaquino (Steven Ebel) is making a proposal of marriage to Marzelline (Elizabeth Watts), the daughter of the Warden Rocco (Kurt Rydl). She rejects him because she is in love with a new guard called Fidelio (Nina Stemme).

The first chance she gets, Marzelline breaks out into the wonderful aria, “O war’ich schon mit dir vereint” (“Oh when shall I be bound to him”) and she means marriage to Fidelio. Rocco, a character straight out of comic opera, gives his blessing to the proposed marriage and some fatherly advice about the need for money to accompany love: “Hat man nicht auch Geld bei Leben” (“Love will not suffice for marriage”.

The music is lilting, the subject matter conjugal and the prisoners on our right are all but forgotten. Again, this is comic opera and highly enjoyable if a touch incongruous.

We finally learn that Fidelio is really Leonore and she is here to save her husband Florestan who has been unjustly imprisoned for his political views and is about to be permanently dispatched. Conjugal love takes the back seat as we visit Florestan (Endrik Wottrich) in the dungeon and he intones the powerful aria “Gott, welch’ Dunkel hier” (“God! This awful dark”).

Florestan’s enemy is the Military Governor of the Prison, Don Pizarro, (John Wegner), a stock evil character who wants to eliminate our noble hero. In the end Florestan is saved by Don Fernando (Willard W. White), a minister and conjugal love triumphs.

Our hero is saved by the mercy of God and the intercession of the Minister. There is no regime change or any criticism of the regime. We do not know Florestan’s political views that elicited such murderous hatred from Don Pizarro. The King is good, everybody is quite decent except for one bad apple, it seems. The human spirit is victorious, conjugal love triumphs and we have heard some exceptional music and singing in an awkwardly constructed opera.

Nina Stemme has a big and resonant voice and she delivered the role of Fidelio convincingly. Florestan appears only in Act II but German tenor Wottrich does have a tough aria to contend with and he does his job with thoroughness.

Rydl’s Rocco is bouncy at the beginning but he turns serious and humane in the second act in a fine performance. Bass-baritone John Wegner is just what you want from the nasty Pizarro, a vengeful creep you gets his comeuppance. Elizabeth Watts is a perky and wonderful Marzelline.

The Royal Opera Chorus as prisoners delivers the glorious and joyful coda praising Leonore for saving her husband and not the establishment of justice or the righting of a wrong. Beethoven wrote these great choral pieces that are worth the price of admission alone.

Mark Elder conducted the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House in a powerful delivery of the music in this thoroughly enjoyable production.

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Fidelio by Ludwig van Beethoven opened on March 29 and will be performed six times on various dates until April 16, 2011 at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London. www.roh.org.uk

CLYBOURNE PARK PROVIDES AN UFORGETABLE THEATRICAL EXPERINCE

Reviewed by James Karas

Clybourne Park by Bruce Norris provides an unforgettable night at the theatre. It is the type of play and production that calls for nothing but superlatives and stock phrases like “not to be missed” or “a must-see”. All true but insufficient to describe this brilliant play. It is now playing at Wyndham’s Theatre in London’s West End.

Clybourne Park is a screamingly funny play that is by no means a comedy but may qualify as satire. It is serious, intelligent drama that manages to evoke laughter, shock and a great deal of thought.

Toronto audiences may recall a production of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun that was staged by Soulpepper several years ago. The play is about an African-American family that wants to buy a house in Clybourne Park, an all-white neighbourhood in Chicago in the 1950’s. In those days they were referred to as Negroes, black or coloured people but that is another story.

Karl Lindner, a representative of the Clybourne Park Improvement Association visits the Afro-America family and offers to pay them off if only they would not move into the neighbourhood. The Association believes that the presence of Negro families lowers real estate prices.

Bruce Norris, a white Texan playwright, borrows Mr. Lindner from Hansberry’s play and we find ourselves in Clybourne Park in 1959 where a white couple, Russ and Bev, have just sold their house to a Negro family. As they are getting ready to move, Russ and Bev are visited by Jim, the local minister and by Karl and his congenitally deaf wife Betsy. Francine is Russ and Bev’s black maid and her husband Albert drops by too.

Russ and Bev are moving because their son, a war veteran, committed suicide in their house. This has evoked a despicable reaction and they have seen the ugly side of their neighbourhood first hand. They are moving to escape both the memory of their son’s death and perhaps much more the moral ugliness of their neighbours.

Some of the people of Clybourne Park are unsophisticated, middle Americans who are infected with prejudices and bigotry that make them simply hideous people. Norris also makes them outrageously funny.

The second act of the play takes place in 2009, fifty years later and we see the same actors playing different characters who meet in the same house. The place is in a rundown condition and the characters are distant descendants of the people we met in 1959. The neighbours are meeting to discuss the construction of a new large house where the old one stands. These people are far more sophisticated than the 1959 group. They are well-travelled, professionals and concerned about saving the neighbourhood in the face of an attempt to build large houses. The neighbourhood did go down after Afro-Americans moved in, prices did tumble but now the white families have returned and they want to change things.

Russ and Bev’s dead son plays a pivotal part in the play and it’s best that his role not be revealed. Stuart McQuarrie plays Russ in the first act and Dan, a construction worker in the second. Sophie Thompson is Bev in the first act and Kathy, a lawyer, in the second. Lorna Brown and Lucian Msamati are the African-American couple in both acts and Stephen Campbell Moore is Karl in the first act and the owner of the house in the second. Sarah Goldberg is his wife in both acts. Sam Spruell is the minister in the first half and Tom, the chair of the meeting in the second.

Director Dominic Cooke orchestrates brilliant performances from these actors. The characters are loud, talk over each other, scream, even start a fight but they are hilarious and deadly serious. Amazing performances.

This is theatre at its best.
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This production of Clybourne Park by Bruce Norris was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre on August 26, 2010 and transferred to Wyndham’s Theatre, London, on January 28, 2011 where it continues. www.clybournepark.co.uk

NO VOCAL CHORDS BARRED AIDA FROM THE ROYAL OPERA HOUSE

by James Karas

Those who saw the Canadian Opera Company’s production of Aida last October may still be shaking their heads at the shabby show that director Tim Albery put on for them. Albery preferred threadbare conference rooms over grandiose palaces, drab suits for the civilians and run of the mill uniforms for the officers. It was all a pretty depressing affair.

The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, offers something immeasurably better without resorting to a parade of animals and without emptying the British Museum of its Egyptian statues. The production directed by David McVicar relies on old-fashioned vocal and orchestral power to turn out an outstanding Aida.

The vocal charge is led by Ukrainian soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska as the Ethiopian princess with whom the Captain of the Egyptian Guard, Radames is in love. (The production has two casts and I will only refer to the cast that I saw on March 30, 2011). Monastyrska has a big dramatic voice that can be tender when need be and powerful enough to stop an army when necessary. This is old-fashioned singing with all barrels firing and a delight to see and hear.

Uruguayan tenor Carlo Ventre sang the role of Radames with force and finesse but I must admit that I have some reservations about the quality of his low notes. Aside from that he soared to his high notes and was a superb match for Monastyrska.

Mezzo soprano Marianne Cornetti was a last-minute replacement for the ailing Olga Borodina and she did a commendable job as the jealous and vindictive Princess Amneris. In the final scene, she rises above her jealousy and vindictiveness in a moving display of humanity.

German baritone Michael Volle was a strong Amonasro and British bass Brindley Sherratt was sonorous King of Egypt.

The vocal prowess was not matched by the usual accoutrements of Aida such as massive scenery, huge statues and sets from The Ten Commandments. McVicar, set designer Jean-Marc Puissant and Costume Designer Moritz Junge have opted for a minimal of sets and fairly unobtrusive costumes. A rotating dark wall is the focal point of the set and aside from some indicators of a temple and the dungeon in the final scene, sets are minimal.

McVicar prefers dark shades and the entire production is done in dark tones.

The Triumphal March is reduced to a dance with swords - a warrior dance but no parade of a couple hundred of extras accompanied by zoo animals. I missed the grandiosity of the march but with the vocal power of the present production I could do without it.

Special mention needs to be made of the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House under the baton of Daniele Rustioni and the Royal Opera Chorus under Renato Balsadonna. Both gave outstanding performances and brought out the full power and all the tenderness of this grand opera.
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Aida by Giuseppe Verdi opened on March 22 and will be performed eleven times on various dates until April 15, 2011 at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London. www.roh.org.uk

YOU MAY NOT WANT TO REMMEBER THIS TIME OF YOUR LIFE FROM SOULPEPPER

Reviewed by James Karas

Near the end of William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life, Joe (Joseph Ziegler), a folk philosopher and philanthropist of sorts and Tom (Kevin Bundy), his not-too-swift gofer get into a contest: who can stuff more pieces of gum in his mouth? The contest is supervised by Kit Carson (Stuart Hughes). The two men keep stuffing gum into their mouths and Kit keeps score. They get to about thirty pieces each and then must speak on the phone. Tom and Joe must take the disgusting wad of gum out of their mouth.

The contest seemed to get the most attention from the audience in this production by Soulpepper now playing at the Young Centre, Toronto. There is some violence and a gun shot at the end but after some 2 hours and forty minutes, you are not in the mood to care about anything.

The Time of Your Life won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1939 and there are no doubt many people who think highly of the play and the current production by Soulpepper directed by Albert Schultz. I do not share that opinion about the play or the production. Both are soporific and whatever underlying virtues the play may have they were not apparent to me.

The play takes place in a bar in San Francisco and is no doubt intended to provide a snapshot of Americana. It has twenty-five characters ranging from sailors to hookers to immigrants, to cops, and high society people. Some of them make brief appearances and some have a lot of time on stage, sleeping.

The main character is Joe who sits at a table day in, day out, drinking champagne, dispensing wisdom and sharing his wealth with others. Nick (Derek Boyes), the bar owner is a decent man who will give work and food to the hungry. Harry (Jeff Lillico) is a would-be comedian who dances and tells jokes in an attempt to get a job.

Then there is Dudley (Gregory Prest) who is madly in love with Elsie (Krystin Pellerin) and, when not sleeping at a table, is phoning her and threatening to kill himself unless she marries him. Willie (Ins Choi) has it even worse: he is supposed to be playing at a marble-game and he sits motionless, crouched over the game for much of the play.

We have Kitty Duval (Karen Rae) the hooker who wants to move on and the brutal cop Blick (Michael Simpson) and the nice cop Krupp (Oliver Dennis). There are others – 25 in all as I said - but there is no point listing them. There are dreamers, hard workers, hard luck stories and all of it adds to very little.

The fact that I do not like the play does not mean that the actors did a bad job. Ziegler portrays Joe as the benign character that Saroyan envisioned and no one can complain about Lillico as the would-be song and dance man. The play may have struck chords in pre-war America that simply do not resonate any more.

This production was initially seen in 2008 and Stuart Hughes and Joseph Ziegler won Dora Awards for their acting. I saw that production and had completely forgotten it. I looked at my review after writing this and noted that I found it awful. Perhaps I have not seen the right production yet.

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The Time of Your Life by William Saroyan opened on March 18 and will play until June 15, 2011 at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts, 55 Mill Street, Toronto, Ontario. www.soulpepper.ca 416 866-8666

MORE FINE GIRLS – PLAY BY COMMITEE SHOWS ACTING BUT NOT WRITING TALENTS AT TARRAGON THEATRE

Ann-Marie MacDonald, Martha Ross, Severn Thompson. Photo by Cylla von Tiedemann

Reviewed by James Karas

More Fine Girls is a 90-minute play that allows three actors a marvelous range for displaying their talents. The play has five authors: Jennifer Brewin, Leah Cherniak, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Alisa Palmer and Martha Ross. Three of the authors – Cherniak, MacDonald and Ross - were to star in the production but Cherniak was replaced by Severn Thompson. One of them, Alisa Palmer, directs it. If there are other plays that were written by a committee of five people, I am not aware of them.

The Fine Girls are three sisters but do not look for Chekhov’s bored and longing Russians nor Wendy Wasserstein’s witty Sisters Rosensweig. The Fine sisters in common parlance can best be described as wacko or nuts and they do provide some fun.

Jayne (Ann-Marie MacDonald) is a lesbian living on a farm where she is raising dogs with her partner. At the opening of the play she is visiting her parents’ gravesite with her sister Jojo (Martha Ross). They have not seen each other for several years (they are not sure exactly) but the three sisters are finally getting together in the family home. Well, you know that secret revelations or skeletons in the closets are in order.

The third sister, Jelly (Severn Thompson) is an artist with a 13-year old daughter who plays an important role in the play even though we never see her. All Jelly knows about her daughter’s father is that he was a cyclist in a park. She is not sure about who her biological father is either so we get an intergenerational connection to unorthodox conduct in this brilliant family. The father was a professor of English and a figure to be reckoned with.

Professor Jojo teaches Brecht but hates his work. She skipped her last lecture and she refuses to answer her phone when the dean is calling. Like her two sisters, she acts and overacts as a distraught woman on the edge but how did she ever become a professor and get tenure?

Jelly, the artist and the mother, communicates with extra-terrestrial beings and goes to the park looking for a middle-aged cyclist. She too is permitted histrionic acting.

MacDonald’s Jayne seems a bit more rooted in reality but she also exhibits some pretty wild conduct.

The play delves into family history as the sisters’ deal with the present but aside from bizarre behavior one does not get very far with anything. Having set a time limit of 90 minutes, the five authors seem to have no idea what to do when the final minute arrives and just wrap it up and go home.

That is a lot of talent for relatively little. We know that the three stars can act and overact but the script is, in the end, pretty thin. Three wacky sisters are not enough to give substance to the play even for 90 minutes. An example of trying to save a bad script occurs when Palmer allows Jojo to rummage through her purse to find her vibrating mobile long after the joke has ceased being amusing.

Five writers are not better than one and in this case the result is just a waste of writing and acting talent.

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More Fine Girls by Jennifer Brewin et. al. runs from February 22, to April 3, 2011 at the Tarragon Theatre, 30 Bridgman Ave. Toronto, Ontario. www.tarragontheatre.com

FRANKENSTEIN FROM THE NATIONAL THEATRE ON THE BIG SCREEN

Reviewed by James Karas

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is probably the best known least-read novel ever published. It has spawned not just movies and television programmes but an entire mythology around a monster called Frankenstein. We all know what he looks like and don’t bother us with the fact that the frightful creature is not called Frankenstein at all and that the latter is in fact his creator.

Nick Dear has written a new play based on the novel and Britain’s National Theatre has given it a major production directed by Danny Boyle. On March 17, 2011 the production was beamed to movie theatres around the world “live” or more or less live. The same day’s performance in London was taped and broadcast in Toronto a few hours later.

This Frankenstein is two very different products seen in succession. The first part is an almost fully fledged ballet and the second part is more of a domestic drama having to do with a scientist who created a monster.

The “ballet” portion is spectacular, complex and moving. We see the “birth” of a hideous human being. He pushes through the membrane of what could be a globe or a woman’s uterus and crawls out, deformed, sutured up and covered with slime. Like a newborn animal, he cannot stand up or speak and we witness the slow process of his finding the strength to stand up and find his voice.

The Olivier stage of the National Theatre is equipped with a massive chandelier and there are flashes of light as if the sun were making its first appearance. The creature encounters some human beings who beat him up and he ends up on a farm where he establishes a relationship with a blind old man called de Lacey (Karl Johnson). De Lacey, his son Felix (Daniel Millar) and daughter-in-law Agatha (Lizzie Winkler) are dressed like 19th century farmers but appear to be at the beginning of civilization when man turns from hunter to grower.

De Lacey teaches the creature to read and relate to “civilization” including reading Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost.

Up to this point, the creature has seen only cruelty in his encounters with people and his creator, Victor Frankenstein (Johnny Lee Miller), has only been seen fleetingly.

The scene then moves to the shores of Lake Geneva where we meet the Frankenstein family and Victor’s fiancée Elizabeth (Naomie Harris). Victor gave life to the monster in an outburst of hubris and now has to deal with it. The monster wants love and wants a woman. Victor becomes frightened of him and has the house guarded on his wedding night. The monster appears in Victor’s bedroom where his bride is waiting for her husband and rapes her.

The flashes of blinding light are almost gone during the domestic half and there is a considerable drop in theatrical excitement as compared to the “ballet” portion of the production. The sheer theatricality of the whole thing, however, is simply breathtaking.

The role of the monster is alternated between Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller. It is a defining role and Cumberbatch was playing it the night of the broadcast. He slides, slithers, cowers and dances on the stage with some extraordinary vocalizations in an unforgettable performance. The rest of the actors simply fade in comparison and no one comes close to the demands made on the actor playing the Creature.

No doubt seeing the performance live on stage would be spectacular but there were a few advantages to seeing it in the movie theatre. Some of the overhead shots and all the details that close ups can bring could not be seen by the audience in the Olivier.

The tendency in bringing live theatre and opera to local theatres via satellite is picking up and one can only view it with excitement. Most of these productions would have closed down and never been seen by most of us. Now the National Theatre, the Metropolitan Opera, La Scala and, it is hoped, other major venues could become familiar territory to us. The movie screen, however big, will never take the place of a live performance but it is much better than the heretofore alternative.

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Frankenstein by Nick Dear based on the novel by Mary Shelley was shown at the Scotiabank Theatre Toronto, 259 Richmond Street West, Toronto ON and other theatres on March 17, 2011. It will be shown again on March 31, 2011. For more information visit http://www.cineplex.com/