Red

Photo: Joan Marcus

The artist Mark Rothko (Alfred Molina) sits staring at a canvas. His new assistant, Ken (Eddie Redmayne), enters stage right, dressed in a suit and nervous. Rothko points at a canvas and asks Ken, "What do you see?" He then holds forth for minutes before allowing Ken to answer. As Rothko pontificates on art and bosses Ken around, the arc of the play becomes predictable to anyone familiar with theatre and with bio-plays in particular. However, John Logan's Red (directed by Michael Grandage) is more about art, language, and ideas than plot, and in those arenas it fascinates and provokes. Both performers are top notch, and Christopher Oram's scenery brilliantly explicates and supports Rothko's art, belief system, and life.

Sunday In The Park With George

**** (out of 5 stars)
Arden Theatre Co.
Philadelphia, PA

I think we can all agree that there's nothing like a well-executed Sondheim score. Having felt a little gypped after being offered a six-person orchestra in the current Broadway revival of A Little Night Music, and a measly five-person orchestra in the recent Broadway revival of Sunday In The Park..., the promise of a fifteen-person strong orchestra was sufficient enough to lure me down to Arden Theatre company's Sunday... in Philly. Good call, because there's something kinda gorgeous going on down there. This well-executed, lovely-sounding, beautiful-to-look-at regional production in many ways, trumps the Studio 54 revival. The sound of the show is near perfect with its meaty orchestra and cast of Broadway caliber singers. The projections, created especially for this production, are far more subtle and not the least bit heavy-handed like in the Broadway revival (though in the Act 2 "Chromolume #7" sequence, Arden's stage was a thrilling explosion of colorful animation). Stand-out performances included Jeffrey Coon's thoughtful, pensive George, and Maureen Torsney Weir's elegant and emotional delivery of "Beautiful" as the Old Lady. And when orchestra and cast join together in Act 1 and 2 "Sunday" finales? Forget about it. Thumbs way up.

Sarah Ruhl's Passion Play

It is the rare play that dares to span over 400 years, but Sarah Ruhl's Passion Play is nothing if not ambitious. Ruhl's three-and-a-half-hour epic ponders love, betrayal, belief, and hatred and numbers among its characters Queen Elizabeth, Hitler, and Ronald Reagan (all acidly depicted by the wry T. Ryder Smith). Many cast members play similar characters in the three time periods, and their changing allegiances reflect each time and place as well as the effects of playing such sacred characters as Jesus and Mary. The show is funny, moving, and often beautiful. I wish I could see it again; its myriad relationships, ideas, and images were too much to take in on one viewing.

Joking Apart

Photo: Gili Getz

Chalk up another success for the T. Schreiber Studio. Its latest production, Joking Apart, does full justice to Alan Ayckbourn's hysterically sad, sadly hysterical story of the golden, lucky Richard and Anthea and their not-so-golden, not-so-lucky, frankly envious friends. Taking place over twelve years, Joking Apart limns the erosions of relationships, the dreams that don't come true, and the humiliation of not living up to one's own standards. Despite this grim description, the play is a riot, and director Peter Jensen and actors Alison Blair, Michael J. Connolly, Anisa Dema, James Liebman, Sebastian Montoya, Michael Murray, Stephanie Seward, and Aleksandra Stattin manage both the heartbreak and the humor with assurance.

Amerissiah

Photo: Larry Cobra

The Amoralists' current production, Amerissiah, is the story of a man who thinks he's god, his struggle with cancer, and his impressively dysfunctional family. It sort of believes in miracles, and it sort of doesn't. Starting with the huge moose head that dominates the set, much is left unexplained. The characters in Amerissiah live at the top of their lungs, brandishing their desires like pulsating neon swords. This high-energy, even cartoonish writing and acting worked to great effect in the Amoralists' wonderful previous production, Happy in the Poorhouse. In Amerissiah, however, too many of the characters and situations are ugly, from unsuccessful toilet humor to a father-daughter team who embezzle millions of dollars by neglecting to purchase the health insurance they promised their employees. I guess Amerissiah fits perfectly with the company's stated mission of producing "work of no moral judgment." But is that goal desirable? Is it even possible? For me, it was hard to care much about Amerissiah, and I guess that is at least partially a moral judgment.

Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson (revisited)

In my review of Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson, I wrote, "However, the whole of Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson is somewhat less than the sum of its parts, mostly because director and book writer Alex Timbers, while extremely creative, sometimes seems more interested in clever theatrics and cheap (albeit funny!) jokes than in the painful history he is exploring." The more I thought about the show, the more I thought that its politics were offensive. But I wasn't sure, so when a friend wanted to see the show, I joined him for a second viewing. (Warning: I discuss the ending of this show and of Cabaret below.)

Andrew Jackson was responsible for the mistreatment, forced relocation, and deaths of thousands of Native Americans. The show mentions that some people view him as an "American Hitler," and one of its last images is a poignant silent tableau of displaced Native Americans. But then the handsome, energetic Benjamin Walker comes bounding out to sing yet another song as Andrew Jackson, rock star. At the curtain call, one of the white performers is killed by a Native American, and she never gets up to take her bow--the final image of the show is the dead white girl. In other words, the Native Americans are ultimately presented as murderers and honoring them is nothing more than lip service.

Compare this to the end of Cabaret, with its tableau of the victims of ethnic cleansing: prisoners in a concentration camp. And that's the actual end, that lingering image of evil. To have had the Emcee prance out to sing one more "look at me, aren't I funny" song would have been perceived as--and would have been--in bad taste. To have one of the Nazis come out to sing a cheerful, "aren't I lovable" song at that moment would have been unimaginable. Yet what Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson does is the equivalent.

A defense I have heard of Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson is that the hero-ization of Jackson is supposed to be ironic. Okay, I kinda buy that. But (1) the Native Americans still should have had the last word/image, and (2) there was nothing ironic about the dead white girl at the end.