Guirgis as Witness

James Baldwin wrote of William Shakespeare: “The greatest poet of the English language found his poetry where poetry is found: in the love of the people. He could have done this only through love – by knowing, which is not the same thing as understanding, that whatever was happening to anyone was happening to him.” Later Baldwin writes that one of Shakespeare’s duties as poet is “to bear witness”.

I believe that that aspect of Shakespeare’s legacy is something that Stephen Adly Guirgis shares.  His plays are the poetry of the people – the people that most works of American culture refuse to see (except in jail cells and witness stands in Law & Order) – and his great gift is to take the language of the streets and transform it into music. This year The Signature Theatre has produced two Guirgis plays: Jesus Hopped the “A” Train earlier this year and now Our Lady of 121st Street. Plot is not so important in either. Indeed, the major plot movements happen off stage. What is important is character: how individuals respond to terrible situations (some of which they are responsible) and how they try to progress on an arc to some better, more moral place. Those movements are often slow, laborious, and can be measured in inches rather than miles. Sometimes the epiphanies – as one might fight in the fiction of Flannery O’Connor – are too terrible to behold; a person’s moral compass may improve but not the material facts of their lives.

The revival of Our Lady of 121st Street, directed by Phylicia Rashad, is a propulsive production. A nun has died and her body has gone missing; that even at the end the question of whether that disappearance was a desecration or ascension (or both) fuels the ambiguity and complexity of the work on display. The real journey of the work is an internal one of the characters who have come to pay their respects. This is a rogue’s gallery of the desperate and the destitute. Those who have made something of themselves are in terms of spirit or soul no better off than those who have been left behind.

Yet, the play bristles with hope. Father Lux (John Doman of The Wire fame fuses a world-weariness into the role), who exhibits few of the talents or skills needed for a spiritual leader, senses a possible path to salvation. An alcoholic NYPD detective (Joey Auzenne) battles his own guilt over the loss of a loved one. A struggling actor (Kevin Isola), realizing he is in a stifling relationship with his boyfriend, seeks to carve his own path.

The music of Guirgis relies on rapid-fire dialogue and idiosyncratic monologues. They are entertaining, shocking, funny. Those qualities often mask that individual quests are underway, challenged by many a personal demon. The production has assembled an ensemble of actors that understands that the language is active, that is action. Among the highlights are Erik Betancourt (who also shined in Jesus Hopped the “A” Train)  and Maki Borden as two co-dependent brothers, Paola Lazaro as a bitter but highly intelligent con artist who may be the only character who gets what she truly wants, and Quincy Tyler Bernstine (the MVP from Vineyard’s The Amateurs) who commands in every scene she is in.

For more information about the show, please follow this link http://www.signaturetheatre.org but don’t wait too long because it closes this weekend.

 

Revolutionary Art or Vandalism?

In the winter of 2010, graffiti artists used an outside wall of The Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago as a blank canvas upon which to create. This Is Modern Art by Idris Goodwin and Kevin Coval, which has taken a journey from Steppenwolf in Chicago (where it was commissioned) to the Kennedy Center, now has its New York premiere at New York Theatre Workshop’s Next Door. Blessed Unrest is producing.

The play investigates two intersecting concerns. The first asks whether the graffiti on the Modern Wing’s wall is an act of revolutionary art or vandalism. The second dramatizes the process by which a work of graffiti art is created. That is a lot weight to place on the slender shoulders of a play with an 85-minute running time. I am happy to report that play and production are more than up to the Herculean task.

The primary issue of the play is whether or not the graffiti on the Modern Wing (or, indeed, any building or structure we may see in an urban space) is art. The play boldly articulates that it is. Art critics such as Tony Bennett, deploying the lens of Michel Foucault, have argued in recent years that cultural spaces such as museums reinforce a stratified class hierarchy favoring the dominant. Though a museum claims to be open to all, how it presents its space often makes it an unwelcoming place to those outside of the neo-liberal hegemony. Culture is a barrier, not a leveler. What Goodwin and Coval convey with a crystal clear clarity is how this particular act of graffiti was about reclaiming a space, about sharing a work of art with the people, all the people. It is truly revolutionary.

If the above sounds a bit too abstract, the second part of This Is Modern Art‘s mission provides the production with a strong propulsive narrative. The play digs deep into the history and practice of graffiti art. The characters know the history of their craft and are inspired by a broad spectrum of artists from Sane and Smith to Basquiat to Caravaggio. Works about artists almost exclusively focus on the inspiration and the perspiration, so the act of creation always comes across as a snap. Not so here. Goodwin and Coval take time well spent to dramatize the collaborative process of developing a tag or piece, gathering the necessary materials, planning the logistics of how and when they are going to bomb, and executing all of the above. It is a harrowing process. One of the great elements of the film Love and Mercy is on the very long and difficult process it took Brian Wilson and The Wrecking Crew to build the Pet Sounds album. The play  taps into the struggle of artistic creation and ably translates that to the medium of graffiti art.

As the three artists, Shakur Tolliver (Seven), Andrew Gonzalez (J.C.), and Landon G. Woodson (Dose) are a tight and nuanced ensemble. Each of their scenes – whether they are breaking the fourth wall or engaged in a moment of naturalism – crackles with the energy of creation, passion, rawness, anger, respect for their craft and one another, and the love of beauty. The story tends to put the spotlight on Seven, we are always aware of how essential J.C. and Dose are to the collaboration. I particularly like J.C.’s mystical engagement with his Muse. They have an absolute commitment to the material. Nancy MacArthur plays Selena, Seven’s girlfriend and lookout for the group. I was unsure of why the role was there at first as she just seemed to be a Girl Friday along quite literally for the ride, but as the play progressed, it became clear the reason for her presence as Seven’s fears began to surface more and more. The most surprising moment of the play belongs to her near the end of the evening, and it is stunning.

This Is Modern Art fully engages in how space in this country is racialized. The art that Seven, J.C., and Dose create is available to all, even the homeless, while the art in The Modern Wing is available to those who can afford it. Seven feels excluded from the society of the art world by his race, economic status, and educational achievement; his exclusion is a tragedy because as play and performance demonstrate over and over again, he is both has a compelling artistic vision and a strong work ethic. As we are increasingly confronted by exclusionary spaces from public parks to Yale common rooms to Starbucks, the play offers an urgent contribution to the conversation.

The Next Door space is a small one, and there is not much room to maneuver. So there needs to be a special mention made of the collaboration between director Jessica Burr and scenic artist KEO XMEN. They recreate the original graffiti in a way that is striking, theatrically exciting, and surprisingly cost effective.

More information about the play can be found by following this link: https://www.nytw.org/show/this-is-modern-art/

Light Shines from the Past

In the interest of full disclosure, I believe Caryl Churchill is our greatest living playwright. I aspire in my own art to craft plays as intellectually complex, emotionally devastating, and artistically graceful as hers. As a scholar, I frequently write about her work as seminal to theatrical history. So when I heard that New York Theatre Workshop was reviving Light Shining in Buckinghamshire – her 1976 deep-dive into the religious and political causes and consequences of the English Civil War – I was all in.

For an American production in 2018, there would be many hurtles to clear. First, as a nation, we are barely familiar with our own Civil War of the 19th century, so the English Civil War of the 17th century would even more remote. Second, much of the play is culled from the historical record, so the play recreates the theological and philosophical mulling of the period. Third, a Churchill play is never a straight forward affair. There is much overlapping dialogue, scenes frequently have elliptical endings, and the silences often convey as much meaning as the dialogue.

All that said, Light Shining is a remarkably resonant play for the present moment. The play dramatizes a country breaking apart. The old order is fraying, but there is also a utopian hope for a better future. Churchill brilliantly elides the spiritual and secular as the characters, many from the lower classes, try to put their mark on history, to find a place in God’s dominion. But that utopian agenda runs aground in the Putney Debates, a long scene that concludes Act I and is the lynchpin of the play. The small “d” democratic possibilities of the war against King are extinguished as Oliver Cromwell and his allies take control of the policy agenda. Cromwell merely takes Charles I’s place and institutes a government that is even more authoritarian than the executed king’s. American audiences should be particularly attuned to how property rights eclipse individual rights.

Rachel Charkin, star director of NYTW and helmer of the exceptional Hadestown, keeps the proceedings crisp, clean, and clear. She expertly blends anachronistic elements into the historical setting to anchor the audience to the fact that though the events portrayed are historical they are relevant to our contemporary political discourse. She employs a tight ensemble of six actors while disposing of the original play’s conceit of having multiple actors play the same role. The diverse cast superbly builds this obscure world pretty much with their voices and bodies alone. I was excited to see Rob Campbell in the cast. He ranks as one of the strongest Churchill actors on this side of the Atlantic, having done such admirable work in the playwright’s Mad Forest many years ago at the Cherry Lane Theater and MTC.

James Baldwin once wrote: “The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.” Light Shining demonstrates on stage how so much of we are guided by hundreds of years of history, how it is present in all we do. It also shows how utopian ideals failed in the past while offering, in its final moment (played evocatively by Mikêah Ernest Jennings), a way forward in the future.

Chekhov on Crack

Back in 1976 as part of his longer work Dogg’s Hamlet, Tom Stoppard wrote the “15-MInute Hamlet”, which includes the best known scenes of Hamlet performed at a quick clip. The cast then does it all over again, this time at the breakneck speed of two minutes. The most famous of tragedies is reduced to ridiculous farce. That is rather like the experience of Laura Wickens’s adaptation and consolidation of Anton Chekhov’s Platonov (an early and unfinished work that apparently clocks in at 5 hours) currently being presented by Blessed Unrest at the New Ohio Theatre.

I do not know the original work, but it seems to intersect with many of the plot points, characters, and themes from Chekhov’s better-known Cherry Orchard and shares some of the fervor of Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night. Director Jessica Burr has updated the design elements. If there is modern dress Shakespeare, why not modern dress Chekhov?

As a performance, there is much skill in evidence. A cast of six must serve as the population of an entire Russia villa. Since the roles they play often require them jump between genders, ages, and classes, they must demonstrate an adroit dexterity because there are times when one of their characters must then introduce the other one of the characters. The cast is energetic and game. Taylor Valentine, who plays the melancholic doctor and an aging housekeeper, appears to have a skeleton made more out of rubber than of bone as he bounces between roles, costumes, moods, and the occasional interspersion of modern dance.

This energy is quite entertaining in moments, but it does not add up too much. What we are given is the CliffNotes version of the play, moving with all haste from Chekhovian trope to Chekhovian trope. But none of it lands emotionally as we have no time to linger. Platonov (Darrell Stokes playing the role as reptilian yuppie) is the object of infatuation by several of the female characters, but we are never given a sense of the why because we are rushing far too fast from point a to point b to point c… and so on. And as the play moves to its darker conclusion fueled by the realization that Platonov is morally despicable, well, that too does not register. The audience never had the chance to experience Platonov’s allure so it cannot feel disappointment when he finally falls. Similarly, it is hard to feel for Anna (Irina Abraham) when her estate is auctioned to the outlaw Osip (Becca Schneider); it would have been wonderful to have gotten to know Osip more because he is quite the unique character in the Chekhov canon. In Stoppard this was fine because his exercise was tied to a larger work and because it intentionally satirizes a play that is achingly familiar. Platonov is not widely known, so what we are left with is Chekhov the Ride.

There is something in Platonov that speaks to the current moment of the #metoo movement – his manipulation and disposal of both his student Mariya (a sympathetic Javon Q. Minter) and his wife (Ashley N. Hildreth, long-suffering) – and could have been the focus of the adaption. I wish the adaptation had not been so literal – i.e. trying to cram everything into 90 minutes – but rather if it had pushed for a more nuanced innovation of its own, one that perhaps just carved out the relationship between Platonov, his student, and his wife. In that way, it could have been more true to Chekhov’s spirit (deeper exploration of the conflicts within characters) and spoken with greater authority to the world of its audience. As it is, though, it is just a bunch of stuff happening.

Can There be an Ordinary Muslim in the Western World?

In his debut play An Ordinary Muslim, Hammaad Chaudry dramatizes the place of a middle-class Muslim family in twenty-first century Britain. This family is at the crossroads of Britain and Pakistan (and India),  of secularization and Islam, and of tradition and modernization. The aching theme of belonging (and feeling like one does not belong) permeates the work.

Akeem (Sanjit De Silva) and Saima (Purva Bedi) are a middle-class educated married couple living in Hounslow in the Greater London Metropolitan Area. The year is 2011. They are attempting to navigate the intersections of all the cultural imperatives pulling on them, but they seem to be groping to a stronger embrace of their Muslim faith. Saima has decided to wear her hijab to work, while Akeem is up for a promotion at his bank despite the casual racism of his supervisor. They share a house with his more tradition-bound parents Akeel (Ranjit Chowdhry) and Malika (Rita Wolf), who are themselves struggling in marriage.

Chaudry nicely avoids the melodramatic paths his tale could take and focuses on the day-to-day psychological toll of what it means to be a Muslim at such a time and such a place. These characters struggle to arrive at an authentic place for themselves despite all the nets being thrown at them, and they suffer from their lack of authenticity. When do you push to express yourself truly? When do you hold back? How important is that higher end job, wealth, status? No one fully embraces an extreme position from where there is no turning back. Even David (Andrew Hovelson), the vaguely patronizing white liberal after he gets pushed to the limit, backs down rather than goes – as would happen in a drama of lesser nuance – full UKIP.

Akeem seethes with anger. The presentation of that anger, however, comes across as inconsistent, especially in the beginning of the second act. It is not clear where exactly he stands. As his wife says at one point, “You went from No Islam to Nation of Islam in about five seconds.” The structure of the play does not clarify that confusion, so as the audience we do not know if it is a product of his own turmoil or uncertain writing choices. In contrast, in the play’s coda, when the Akeem has no direction, we have a clear sense that that comes form the character.

Chaudry, however, is revelatory with the presentation of his female characters, particularly Saima and  her sister-in-law Javeria (Angel Desai). Their lives are presented in clear, sharp, and vibrant detail. Their performances fully convey their daily struggles in a society that may tolerate them as secular individuals but once the hijab goes on, all bets are off. They are flawed people with sexual needs and an articulated agency of their own. The emerging triangle between Akeem, Saima, and the Iman’s son Hamza (Sathya Sridharan) was a breath of fresh air that blew away stereotypes of a prudish religion. It is through the women that the play is most illuminating.

Jo Benney provides vibrant direction, particularly in multi character scenes where alliances shift quickly. As Chaudry continues to grow as a playwright, he will certainly build upon his gifts and better able portray the contradictory impulses that convulse a character like Akeem.

Fire and Air Neither Burns Nor Soars

It was written by a playwright of extraordinary gifts. Its director has a track record of creating magical moments on stage. It has an impeccable cast. It has a fascinating subject. Yet, the whole is not greater than the sum of the parts. And what should have been a compelling evening of theatre rarely engages the attention of its audience.

Terrence McNally’s Fire and Air, currently playing at the Classic Stage Company, should have entranced its audience with an urgent tale of the power and necessity of art. Centering on the Ballets Russe and its impresario Sergei Diaghilev (David Hodge) as the company and leader strove to create new, dangerous, and innovative performances in the Modernist vein in the crucible of war-torn and revolution-torn Europe of the early twentieth century. It is a drama rife with possibilities. But McNally – who has effectively dramatized the power of opera in Master Class and The Lisbon Traviata – fails to make the third time to charm with the ballet. The production moves quickly through the years with little context or sense of how the cataclysmic events of the time are impacting the art.

The intended portrait of Diaghilev as visionary and genius fails to connect. We are told that he is  brilliant, but we are never shown that he is. He comes across as a child, alternating between fits of privilege or fear, rather than as someone who grasps the elemental potential of dance. His sexual domination in the first act of Nijinsky (James Cusatsi-Moyer) and in the second act of Massine (Jay Armstrong Johnson) communicates not so much as the idiosyncratic but ultimately benign behavior of a mentor and genius, but, in this age of #metoo, but as abusive practices that remind one far too much of Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey. We recoil, especially as Nijinsky seems (it is really not clear) to have spiraled into madness.

The cast is game, but they are given little to do. Veteran thespians John Glover, Marsha Mason, and Marin Mazzie round out the supporting cast, but they have little impact upon the narrative momentum of the show. They observe, comment, and support Diaghilev (though, again, it is unclear as to why). The night I attended, Mazzie’s role (Misia) was performed by an understudy. Usually, that is a source of disappointment, but I do not think Mazzie would have impacted the play any more than Glover or Mason did. Hodge, the night I attended, struggled with his diction, and that was not conducive providing clarity for what was already a muddle.

The two younger performers fared better. Cusatsi-Moyer has a magnetic presence, but he seemed to be constrained by writing that demanded he only serve as enigmatic temptation. There seemed to be a fuller three-dimensional life going on behind his eyes, and it would have benefitted the production if he had been given free reign to explore that. Johnson constantly offered much-needed vitality with fresh and original choices that gave him more nuance than perhaps was intended for the boy toy du jour role.

At the end of the day, all of the talent on stage and in the production could not animate what should have been an extraordinary theatrical event.

Cocktails and Conversation

A Life Behind Bars is a revelatory solo performance by its author, Dan Ruth. Starting in the 1990’s, Ruth takes his audience on a journey through a life, like that of so many artists in New York City, that is a hyphenate: performer-bartender. His narrative also witnesses his evolution from alcoholic to recovering alcoholic, which is a fascinating position to be in as a bartender. But then again, as F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people.”

I have known Ruth for years as a director (he directed my one-act “Howard Hopped The A-Train”), but not so much as a performer. When I first read the description of the piece, I thought it would be done more in the style of a confessional with an emphasis placed upon  stark and bare prose. What Ruth delivers though is more in keeping with Anna Deavere Smith’s work; Ruth portrays individuals he has encountered across the years. His vignettes, sharply written and meticulously inhabited, form a series of interconnected short stories that lead to the inexorable conclusion.

The writing is remarkably grounded. Ruth chooses encounters that occurred at major historical events (election nights, 9/11) that help place those encounters in time. He establishes a clear internal geography of his spaces (apartment, bars) and external (how hip/not hip a particularly location is at any given time). With that  foundation secure, Ruth is then free to weave his tales that often detail the frustrations and disappointments of a person of talent trying to break through whether professionally or personally. But this is no woe-is-me story. This is catharsis. The writer/actor infuses all of his considerable gifts in constructing this staged memoir. Don’t be sorry for me, he seems to say, but instead see what it is I can do and celebrate with me in that. From moments of simple declaration to a fast and furious raw poetry that moves with the syncopation of a stream-of-conscousness witnessing to wry observations of the pervasiveness of privilege, the writing is at once deeply personal while striking tones of the achingly familiar.

The strength of the writing would not be apparent if it were not coupled with Ruth’s strengths as a performer. He creates several memorable figures including an arrogant patron with a man bun and a Linda Rickman-like theater-goer who adores Andrew Lloyd Webber. His strongest work, though, is when he plays himself with a humble honesty. That Ruth makes it looks so effortless means he no doubt spent a considerable time perfecting each moment. In her direction Tanya Moberly clearly establishes that A Life Behind Bars is more than a collection of bits, that it has a coherent whole propelling performer and audience to a dark penultimate moment before at last arriving at its more hopeful coda. I did want Ruth to explore this last portion of the story more, but given the physical exertion already required, that may be a bridge too far.

Ruth performs A Life Behind Bars in New York City (at the Laurie Beechman Theatre) and, more recently, in Los Angeles at varying intervals. He has a battery of new dates coming up in the Spring 2018. For more, fall him on his Facebook events page: https://www.facebook.com/events/762483717250293/

Passing Strange Leaves Its Mark

Though often referred to as a musical, Passing Strange is more than that. It cold be called an autobiography/memoir/meditation accompanied by musical interludes eliding with moments of comedy and tragedy. There is a lot of that going around of late (see Bruce Springsteen on Broadway). I had seen the original on Broadway where book and lyric writer Stew (he shares composition credit with Heidi Rodewald) also told his story on stage. I did not know how such a work of self-confession would work without its confessor on stage. Ten minutes into the production at The Wilma Theater in Philadelphia, I realized that my worries were without warrant.

The Wilma’s presentation establishes that Passing Strange was not a piece that could thrive only with its original cast but as a seminal and innovative piece of new American theatre that belongs in the same movement with Hamilton and Hadestown. Indeed, it feels more necessary now than it did in its initial run. The clear parallels with james Baldwin’s story land with greater force as the novelist/essayist has returned to the spotlight in our current discourse. When it arrived in 2008, it was at a moment of hope. Now, here in 2018, the spirit of liberation becomes more emphatic, more urgent. American culture is no longer “the white experience”, despite what the Administration is trying to promulgate through its reactionary policies and politics, and Passing Strange articulates that new societal reality.

Director Tea Alagić has assembled a powerful ensemble cast. The elation and, in the end, painful dawning self-realization of its protagonist that comes with the journeys of Youth (a compelling Jamar Williams leaving his fingerprints on the role) through punk-rock Europe still lands with its concluding tragic punch. The final reckoning too between Youth and Narrator (Kris Coleman who releases his anger in measured proportions), his older self, found new and dramatic dimensions as Coleman was more part of the action while when Stew did the role he was stuck to one place because of his instrumental duties.

Coleman and Williams create electricity between them in their two-hander moments. They have able support from the rest of the cast. Lindsay Smiling is wonderfully loopy in everything he does. Savannah L. Jackson and Tasha Marie Canales portray the various women with whom Youth has romantic/sexual encounters. Their prickliness and ennui allows them to tell their own stories rather than being ancillary to his story. Anthony Martinez-Briggs, whom I had seen in Flashpoint Theater’s Hands Up, successfully mines every line for its comedic possibilities. Kimberly S. Fairbanks conveys an entire life in her scenes as Mother, and she infuses her final conversation with Youth with such elegiac anticipation; her voice belongs to the angels.

The Wilma space serves the work well, allowing Alagić to paint her canvas with the language and music of the piece, the acting, and some strategic use of video in service of setting of time and place.

I have only recently begun to explore Philadelphia theatre (Arden, Lantern, etc.), and, late in the game, I have come to the Wilma. I have been pleasantly surprised by this exploration and, with Passing Strange, have come to appreciate the City of Brotherly Love as a place with a rich theatrical life.

More information by the show can be found here: https://www.wilmatheater.org

 

A Theatre of Contemplation

Usually the kind of theatre that captures my attention has a more political dimension, it has an earnest desire to convince its audience of something. The narrative propels one forward to a needed and decisive conclusion. Claire van Kampen’s Farinelli and The King is a not work of power, but of peace. It is not a construction of plot but of meditation. As 2017 gives way to 2018, this is exactly the kind of theatre we need.

Based on the historical record, Farinelli and the King tells of the famous castrato, who is brought from Covent Garden to the palace of the King of Spain. Only Farinelli’s voice can soothe King Philippe V’s troubled mind (he probably suffered from a bipolar disorder). By the play’s end, Farinelli, who has fallen in love with Queen Isabella, departs, and the King falls back into his old behavior. That’s it. That’s the plot. But that does not describe the show.

The title tells us much, and it is a play on Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I. For van Kampen’s the “King”is now the “I’. Philippe, much as we do, suffers from the crush of politics and the inevitable course of policy: war. Farinelli, as an embodiment of art (specifically music), offers escape, a positive alternative to a world moving toward chaos (the Seven Years’ War and the American and French Revolutions are in the not too distant future).

The governing idea here is that the magic of the theatre (not film magic transferred to the stage but honest-to-God theatrical magic) can offer sanctuary and solace. So we find ourselves at the intersection of the theatre, opera, music, and candlelight – especially candlelight. Originally performed at the Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse which can only be lit with means available in the seventeenth century, the strength of the piece relies on it being lit by candle and  utilizing technology only available in the Restoration. Indeed, I have a hard time imagining future productions of the work; the chances are high they will not understand this important aspect the alchemy. John Dove’s direction is as necessary to the proceedings as the script. [I am saddened that I did not get to see it the original run in London, but I did see Aidan Gillen do a reading of James Joyce’s “The Dead” in the Wanamaker, so I can only imagine the magic of Farinelli in that space.]

The role of Farinelli is shared by two performers. First, Sam Crane (who pops up in The Crown to dish the dirt on Jackie Kennedy) acts Farinelli when he is not performing, while (in my performance) Iestyn Davies becomes his voice when performing. During such moments, both Crane and Davies are on stage. I liked the split. It was simple, and it conveyed (much as Deaf West’s Spring Awakening did with the the teenagers) the division within Farinelli himself: his internal passion and longing and external hesitation and sense of self-doubt.

Anchoring it all is, of course, Mark Rylance as Philippe V. Rylance is one of my theatrical heroes, and having now seen him in Jerusalem, Twelfth Night, Richard III, Nice Fish as well as his recent television and film work, he continues his trajectory of brilliance. Though the performing the King, Rylance is in the interesting position of actually serving as the audience’s surrogate. As he becomes bewitched by the music (mostly Handel), he gives permission for the house to do the same. His (mostly) quiet performance is infectious. He builds the bridge to the music, which can only be felt and not explained. Melody Grove, whose Isabella is the prime mover and shaker in the play, rounds out the three leads and holds her own in matching wit against wit.

The script does not concern itself much beyond that. van Kampen, who is married to Rylance, skimps on the details of Farinelli’s harrowing childhood and his complex relationship with his brother. It hardly matters. One goes to Farinelli and the Kingto have the weight of the twenty-first century taken off the shoulders for a couple of hours and to find solace in beauty.

More information about the show can be found here: http://www.farinelliandthekingbroadway.com