Primrose Road

I am waiting on line. Please keep your fingers crossed that I can get through five hours without needing to make use of restroom facilities.

You know you've got issues when you're willing to sacrifice your bladder for Hamlet.

This came up on the Yugntruf email list the other day:

"The Essence" was created and is performed by Allen Lewis Rickman, Yelena Shmulenson, and Steve Sterner, three of the younger veterans of Yiddish theater. "We tell the entire history of the Yiddish theater, kinda-sorta, in eighty minutes," said Rickman. "We tell stories in English and act and sing in Yiddish -- with supertitles -- and the audience laughs and cries and whatevers. And it's 99 44/100% nostalgia-free."

"It's not just for alter kakers," explained Shmulenson.

I'd love to see this -- anything about the Yiddish theater that has the (chutzpah?) to advertise itself as being "99.44% nostalgia-free" has got to be good -- but because I teach on Long Island until 5pm on Mondays, there's no way I'd be able to make it to Manhattan by 7. In any case, the performance will take place at 325 E 6th Street, tvishn 1st and 2nd Avenues, on Monday, Feb 4th. So go do something Yiddish-y next week.

According to its own press releases, the NEA's Shakespeare for a New Generation program, part of the Shakespeare in American Communities initiative, serves to "introduce more students to the magic of live theater." Certainly (in my very humble opinion) more students should be introduced to this very real "magic." I'd like to pose a question to the readers of this blog (even those who show up here because of searches for "saturn in the eighth house" and "breast moles"): In your opinion, is "Shakespeare" an effective tool for sparking students' interest in live theater in general?

Next month, a stage musical based on Anne Frank's diary opens in Madrid. The Guardian reports:

"The Anne Frank Foundation, which jealously guards the rights to the diary - it once turned down Steven Spielberg when he wanted to make a film - has given its support. Jan Erik Dubbelman said: "This production respects the message of tolerance, within the tragedy, that we want to keep alive.""

Tolerance.

The Anne Frank Foundation is promoting "tolerance" via performers who sing and dance a Holocaust story.

The officemates who hid the Frank family -- and, of course, the thousands of Dutch citizens who hid and rescued Jews in the 1930s and 1940s -- seem to have done a bit more than simply tolerate their neighbors. It seems a bit off, therefore, to translate their acts into a feel-good message of tolerance for the twenty-first century.

"Swansong," a play centered on a possible Shakespeare/Jonson rivalry and friendship, is currently on stage at the Seattle Shakespeare Company. The play was a part of the Summer Play Festival in New York City in July '06, and I'm hoping it comes back here soon. You certainly can't beat this (courtesy of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer):

"In their day, however (the early 17th century)-- these two were like Bruce Springsteen and Bono, pop poets and showbiz superstars."

Oh, analogies.

[If you are able to catch this performance in Seattle, I'd recommend avoiding their Oxfordian POV program. However, the company otherwise seems to do some wonderful work in theater education, bringing Shakespeare, theatrics, and history into the classroom. Excellent nonpseudohistorical stuff, in other words.]

A few ways for New Yorkers to get their Shakespeare in early 2008:

1/9 - 1/20: Othello at the Bank Street Theatre.

2/12 - 3/22: Macbeth at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

3/22 - 5/2: Antony and Cleopatra at Theatre for a New Audience.

4/11 and 4/12: The Tempest at Queens Theatre in the Park/Claire Shulman Theatre.

There was also supposed to be a musical adaptation of The Merry Wives of Windsor coming to Broadway later this year; it's called Lone Star Love and stars Randy Quaid (really), but seems to have been cancelled or postponed as of now.

Tonight I am going -- with two of my favorite people in the world -- to see Cymbeline at the Vivian Beaumont Theater in Lincoln Center. I haven't been to that theater in almost a decade; the last play I saw there was The Little Foxes, with Stockard Channing, who was not Bette Davis, in the lead role. But the set was lovely, almost Chekhovian.

I will post a review after I've seen Cymbeline, a play which, much like the film Shakespeare in Love, is an entertaining fairy tale if you're not intensely familiar with Shakespeare's works, and an entertaining fairy tale full of hilarious 'in-jokes' if you are.

I was going to add to Sunday's review of The Wooster Group's Hamlet a note that every ten minutes or so, there was a rumbling beneath our feet. But I need to check into that first, because it would be embarrassing to confuse A-effects with the 6 train.

I should start with the observation that at intermission, several disappointed audience members in front of me talked about leaving. And 80% of the row did leave. I suspect that these theatregoers were expecting a performance of Hamlet, and what they saw was a performance about Hamlet.

Throughout most of the play, a 1964 Broadway performance of Hamlet starring Richard Burton was projected onto the screen behind the actors on stage. The film had originally been intended to bring a genuine theatrical experience to moviegoers; the Wooster Group's performance commented on the impossibility of bringing a genuine theatrical experience to moviegoers.

The stage set was similar to the film's, as though the film was somehow projecting itself out on to the stage. The stage action followed the film's camera angles with the help of a table on wheels and the actors' movements. The actors moved, for the most part, exactly like the actors on film. This exposed how what would have looked "natural" (and perhaps even stagelike) on film was awkward and jerky on the actual stage.

During several scenes, the screen went blank (blue), with only the word "UNRENDERED" digitally imposed on it. These were definitely the moments where this performance became a play about Hamlet, not just about the 1964 attempt to bring theater to movie houses. First, when Polonius speaks to Ophelia and warns Laertes "neither a borrower nor a lender be," we see an "unrendered" screen interrupted, just for a moment, by an interior shot of Polonius' house from Michael Almereyda's 2000 film. The "unrendered" screen appears again after a second, but Polonius delivers his borrower/lender speech in Bill Murray's voice (the audio from Almereyda's film).

Later, the Player King concedes his speech to none other than Charlton Heston, whose melodramatic Trojan War tale from Branagh's 1996 film appears on the screen in Windows Media Player (hmm ... possibly a comment on the word "player" in the digital age?) as a file named "C_Heston.mov." The characters onstage watch, engrossed at first, but then start to get bored, turning away, laying down, chatting with each other.

There was a microphone placed downstage left, where Hamlet delivers (all, I believe) his more "famous" speeches. I wasn't sure whether this was meant to suggest a hackneyed Hamlet, a self-absorbed Hamlet, or perhaps a rockstar Hamlet.

The only decision that didn't work for me was having Gertrude and Ophelia played by the same actor, who made sure to leave parts of Gertrude's dress hanging out beneath Ophelia's following her purposefully hasty costume changes. The Gertrude/Ophelia conflation has been done before, and it is, in fact, the subject of (too) many psychoanalytic "Hamlet loves Mom/Hamlet's a misogynist" readings. The Wooster Group's production did, however, rather amusingly call attention to the fact that Gertrude and Ophelia couldn't be on stage at the same time -- at "The Murder of Gonzago," after Hamlet left his mother's side for "mettle more attractive," he noted to himself, "well, we'll have to skip over all this Ophelia stuff, won't we?"

Ultimately, I believe that what made this Hamlet "new" (something not easy to do with Hamlet) was the fact that it was neither a straightforward staging of Hamlet nor a straightforward "quoting" of Hamlet, but rather a play about quoting Hamlet.

Some days, I forget I'm back in New York City.

The Wooster Group's Hamlet is currently on stage at the Public Theater this month, and Newsday's review has me excited about this production, which projects a film of a 1964 stage production on a screen behind the actors. And,

"The synchronization of stage to film is maniacally precise: The stage actors move themselves, and some free-wheeling set pieces, in tandem not only with the film actors' blocking but with camera movements, cuts and snags in the film.

Some of these visual blips have been added. The film of Burton's "Hamlet," already a low-quality live recording of a starkly casual production, has been sliced and diced to a jerky, idiosyncratic rhythm. Actors' bodies have been digitally erased, or half-erased, from many shots. And a few other "Hamlet" films - Kenneth Branagh's, Michael Almereyda's - make cameo appearances."

Employing film to produce "jerky, idiosyncratic rhythm" on stage -- characters from Hamlet shouting "fast forward!" -- Hamlet speaking "like an obsessive who's replayed the same scene over and over again on his VCR" ... I'm definitely going to have to go see this one by myself, because no one wants to sit with the woman taking notes in the theater.

I will blog a review of this and Lincoln Center's Cymbeline, which I will be seeing with people (thus, not taking notes) in late November or early December.