Primrose Road

On Friday night, we saw the Frog & Peach Theatre Co's Richard III at the West End Theater, a small space with a huge domed ceiling on the second floor of a church on W 86th Street. The production starred Anatol Yusef as a slimy, conniving Richard with sometimes-sad, pleading eyes.

It wasn't the most original Richard III I've seen (a battle mimed amidst strobe lights? really?), though there was an interesting audience-complicity-inducing element: when Buckingham presents Richard to his subjects, the actor encouraged us to clap, and we did, even though we "knew better." At a number of moments, we were the Richard's subjects, somewhat uneasy about the man but also somehow compelled to clap.

Karen Lynn Gorney played a somewhat soapy Margaret, which nevertheless seemed appropriate to the character.

While the rather-straightforward performance wasn't quite full of the "terror, mayhem, and butchery" advertised on the company's site, it was captivating and made a Shakespeare-like use of its audience.