The Europeans

Reviewed for Theatermania.

Thérèse Raquin

Photo/Stan Barouh

Neal Bell's brilliant adaptation of Émile Zola's 1867 novel Thérèse Raquin puts a stake through the heart of dry naturalism. With a sense of Ibsen's modernism, he focuses on the stark apathy Raquin feels toward marrying her cousin, Camille ("I can't be frightened to death; I'm already dead and this is hell"), which is all the better for showing her sexual awakening at the hands of the roguish Laurent. Adding to this is Jim Petosa's romantic direction, which finds clever ways to mix such morbidity with dashes of sweetness: ravenous passion, indeed. Much credit to the cast, too: as Raquin, Lily Balsen (like a younger, more innocent Helena Bonham Carter) is haunted by an actual ghost, but what moves us is the way she is haunted by genuine regret. It's a shame that Scott Janes isn't allowed such range, but his Laurent is nonetheless solid, as are the terrific turns of Willie Orbison (Camille) and Helen-Jean Arthur (Camille's mother), both of whom are sharpened by a different sort of passion: rage. It's easy to be poetic, but hard to justify such language, as Thérèse Raquin has done. That's easy to say, but not at all hard to believe for those who have seen it.

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Euan Morton at Castle On The Hudson

photo: Juan Jose Ibarra

I’ve been nursing a mad man crush on Euan Morton’s voice ever since he starred as Boy George in Taboo, so I was especially pleased that he opened his delightful set at Castle On The Hudson with that show’s “Pretty Lies”. (Bonus for Taboo fans: Liz McCartney in the audience. See picture.) Accompanied by a single piano, Morton sailed through an eclectic set of songs – the Nat King Cole standard “Smile”, “Danny Boy”, Roy Orbinson’s “You Got It”, the Eurythmics’ “Why”, a song from the musical Caligula - with assured seamlessness, partly thanks to the easy, unpretentious charm of his banter but also thanks to the depth of feeling in each interpretation. I laughed, I cried, I got wood. His voice may be smooth and pretty and his tone sweet but what is especially outstanding about his singing is how much emotion he puts into his interpretations while judiciously maintaining a vocal restraint and a gorgeous tone; it’s not for nothing that he counts Karen Carpenter among his vocal influences. I’m not often a cabaret person, but this was bliss.

Archbishop Supreme Tartuffe

Reviewed for Theatermania.

Telethon

Photo: Carl Skutsch

Three residents and two staffers of a group home for the disabled coalesce into a bickering but affectionate "family" in this witty and entertaining one-act. On some level, as playwright Kristin Newbom demonstrates, the disabled and the staffers aren't so different. The cast shines, Ken Rus Schmol directs smoothly, and Kirche Leigh Zeile's costumes are hilarious. But the real star of this show is the sparkling script. Ms. Newbom has a surefire sense of rhythm. Watching this Clubbed Thumb production is like listening to a brilliant piece of music executed with precision and filled with surprises, funny, touching, and sometimes both.

Arcadia

Tom Stoppard can be a problematic playwright. While his brilliance is undeniable, his shows can be tough slogs through encyclopedic swamps of (not always compelling) information. However, Arcadia, arguably his masterpiece, boasts a perfect balance of math, history, satire, love, sex, compassion, humor, ego, and witty repartee. It demonstrates, in a fascinating, funny, and heartbreaking three hours, that humans' ability to understand anything (particularly each other) can be severely limited by their circumstances, prejudgments, and, well, humanity.

The plot can't really be done justice in less than a few hundred words, but, in brief: Arcadia takes place in the same room in the early 1800s and the late 1900s. In the early 1800s, the gawky, insatiably curious, child genius, Lady Thomasina, is being tutored by Septimus Hodges, who is smart enough to recognize her genius but not quite smart enough to understand her discoveries. In the 20th century, academicians are trying to understand the people in the 19th through the clues/detritus they left behind: notebooks, poetry, blueprints, letters. Multiple assignations are carried out, much plotting is done, discoveries--correct and incorrect--are made, and enough funny lines are said to fill a dozen plays written by ordinary mortals (for example: "Her chief renown is for a readiness that keeps her in a state of tropical humidity as would grow orchards in her drawers in January").

The recent production of Arcada at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, did full justice to this wondrous work. It would be lovely if someone brought it to New York.