The Damned (play)

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  • The Damned

7/21/18 (Sat), New York

An overwrought stage version of the Visconti film by man-of-the-hour Ivo van Hove, the busy avant-garde Belgian director. He’s best known for his minimalist productions, as in the interesting View from the Bridge, but here he’s taken a sharp turn to maximalist.

The saga, which broadly follows the movie plot, revolves around a rich steel manufacturer who has chosen unwisely to deal with the Nazis just as they are coming to power. The intricate story involves betrayal, greed, murder, suicide, political brutality, incest and other pleasantries, only to result in the end in the loss of the family’s steel plants to Hitler’s regime as the nation marches inexorably toward war.

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Carmen Jones

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  • Carmen Jones

7/20/18 (Fri), New York Off Broadway

Oscar Hammerstein II completed this English-language version of Carmen, reset in a black community in wartime America, just before turning to the starkly different world of Carousel, which I saw on Broadway a few days earlier. Carmen feels almost like a musical in the first place (Carousel, for that matter, sometimes feels like opera), so it makes much more sense as a Broadway show than, say, the La Boheme staging some years back. Still, the vocal requirements for this show must be a killer for an eight-performance week, and other issues, not least some less-than-PC black dialect, make productions pretty rare – the last time I saw it was in London several decades ago. So I wasn’t going to miss this.

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Fidler Afn Dakh (Fiddler on the Roof)

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  • Fidler Afn Dakh (Fiddler on the Roof)

7/19/18 (Thurs), National Yiddish Theatre

A Fiddler in Yiddish – sounds crazy, no? This was a Yiddish version that played in Israel in 1965, just a year after the show debuted on Broadway, and has evidently not been seen since. I was going to take advantage of a rare Thursday matinee – the show doesn’t play on Fri nights or Sat matinees, for reasons obvious if you’re Jewish – but a friend happened to be going that night and had an extra ticket.

As it turns out, this was not just another Fiddler. The use of Yiddish, which would have been the language of the characters in real life, provided an unexpectedly fresh perspective on the familiar show. Continue reading →

One Cut of the Dead (カメラを止めるな）

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  • カメラを止めるな（One Cut of the Dead）

8/15/18 (Wed), Tokyo

This zany film – literally, “Don’t Stop the Camera!” or “Keep It Rolling!” – has become a sensation in Japan, a low-budget little-film-that-could by a no-name director and cast that has spread like wildfire from a single out-of-the-way theater to nationwide release. Shows were sold out from morning to night in the peak o-bon holiday season. No one would tell me anything more about the film than that it involves zombies, which would normally make me turn the other way. But the word was so strong that I finally gave in to the hype and snagged a late-night ticket.

The first half-hour is taken up by an amateurish film with overripe acting and questionable direction, where actors making a zombie movie encounter actually zombies. My heart sank, and I started wondering what I was doing there. But then there comes a sharp change in gears that makes it all worth it. Continue reading →

Carousel

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  • Carousel, 7/17/18 (Tues), Broadway

I hadn’t initially intended to see this production of Carousel. The show is notoriously tricky to get right, and the last Broadway production, an import from London, set an extremely high standard. The typical British approach of darkening the material, which sank Oklahoma!, Oliver and Mary Poppins among others, worked spectacularly for this already dark show in what is still one of the best revivals I’ve ever seen. Beyond that inevitable comparison, this new production was further burdened by feminist complaints in these more enlightened times, not entirely unjustified, over the lead’s penchant for smacking his wife, making me suspect that the director would hold back from some of the show’s unpleasantries. But the word was generally good, including a rave by a good friend. So, when I ended up here after all, just five minutes before curtain (other shows were sold out), I went in with reasonably high expectations.

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Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

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  • Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

7/29/18 (Sun)

I was never a big fan of Mr. Rogers, who seemed embarrassingly old-fashioned to me back in the day even before Sesame Street was blowing the neighborhood away. But I’m regretting all those years of neglect after seeing this superb documentary of his life – his view of the role of the emerging medium of television in communicating with children, the radical ideas cloaked in his retrograde and laid-back style, his ability to reach out to children (the most difficult audience in any medium). Rogers felt that the pie-throwing and banana-peel humor of the early children’s shows were downright destructive to little minds seeking simple truths, and sought to bring kids up to his level rather than the other way around by addressing them honestly and directly. It’s difficult to imagine today how strange that must have seemed at the time, especially in the show’s childlike setup: sock puppets, crude sets, basic storylines, unhurried style, simplistic themes. But what could be cloying comes out as oddly compelling in the face of Rogers’ earnestness.

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Noh: Ukon, Yashima (右近、八島)

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  • Noh: 右近、八島 (Ukon, Yashima)

7/15/18 (Sun), Tokyo

The rarely performed Ukon is credited to Zeami, Noh’s towering genius, but was apparently revised to an unknown extent by his grandson Nobumitsu. While officially classified as a god-focused Waki Noh, it’s usually considered closer to a “third category piece” or female-centered Woman Noh. One actor told me that the stately Waki Noh tend to be boring and suspects that this piece may have been re-branded along the centuries to increase its appeal. That need may have prompted the grandson’s revision in the text, but it’s hard to know how much was changed or Zeami’s intentions in the absence of a manuscript; given that he was also a performer and thus writing for himself, he may not have been able to resist creating a juicy role in the first place. The play takes place amid the cherry blossoms, an odd choice for this blazingly hot season, but I suppose there aren’t many summer-based Noh plays to choose from compared to the vast number of shows set in spring.

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Evita (2018 tour)

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  • Evita (2018 tour)

7/6/18 (Fri), Tokyo

I hadn’t seen the stage version of Evita since Harold Prince’s original London production in 1978, which I caught 2-3 weeks after it opened. That and A Chorus Line, which was also in its initial run, were the first shows I ever saw on a West End or Broadway stage. With ACL also due in Japan next month, this is a real nostalgia trip for me. Thinking back, I realize that both productions represented a triumph of direction over material, with astonishing staging concepts that not only disguised the weaknesses in the shows but practically made them irrelevant. My experience to that point had been local or touring productions of Fiddler on the Roof and Man of La Mancha and such, so these concept-driven productions were pretty mind-blowing. Evita has been revived in various incarnations since, but this international tour is a recreation of the original overseen by Prince himself. I wasn’t going to miss it.

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Ivo van Hove’s (!) West Side Story

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  • Ivo van Hove’s (!) West Side Story

7/13/18 (Fri)

Something’s coming indeed. Hot on the heels of the unlikely news that Hollywood giant Steven Spielberg is taking on his first musical with a film remake of West Side Story, it’s been announced that the eclectic stage director Ivo van Hove is taking on his first Broadway musical with a stage production of that very same West Side Story. Odd that these are coming essentially at the same time, especially as the approaches of the populist filmmaker and decidedly non-populist stage director are likely to be vastly different.

Most notably, a press release on July 12 by veteran producer Scott Rudin says that the new stage version will not feature the classic finger-snapping dances by Jerome Robbins, who (in Robbins’ own modest words) “conceived, directed and choreographed” the original production, but use new work by contemporary dance choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. Scenery and lighting design will be handled by van Hove’s regular collaborator and life partner Jan Versweyveld, making for an all-Belgian creative team. Based on the director’s previous shows, we can expect a bare stage and lots of bare feet.

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Mitani Bunraku: Much Ado About Love Suicides (其礼成心中)

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  • 其礼成心中 (Much Ado About Love Suicides)

I see they’re bringing back the Bunraku puppet parody Much Ado About Love Suicides (Sore Nari Shinju) of 2012 by the prolific stage and film writer Mitani Koki. The show riffs on the popular double-suicide (shinju) puppet dramas of the early 1700s by Chikamatsu Monzaemon, Japan’s most famous playwright. The highly conservative Bunraku world, unlike Kabuki, has made little attempt to innovate or attract new audiences and has struggled as a result. It has been left to individuals such as Mitani and the renowned photographer Sugimoto Hiroshi to take up the mantle. Mitani is primarily known as a comedy writer (Warai no Daigaku; Welcome Back, Mr. McDonald), so expectations were generally along those lines. Here is a review of the 2013 Tokyo revival.

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Phoenix (不死鳥)

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  • 不死鳥 (Phoenix)

6/23/18 (Sat), Tokyo

Kinoshita Keisuke, who helmed the fine Twenty-Four Eyes (二十四の瞳) and Like a Wild Chrysanthemum (野菊の如き君なりき), tends to walk a fine line just this side of sticky sentimentality. In this 1947 work Phoenix, he crosses it. Continue reading →

A Critical Companion to the American Stage Musical: Brief Review

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  • A Critical Companion to the American Stage Musical (Elizabeth L. Wollman)

6/11/18 (Mon)

I don’t have much to say about this one-note history of the American musical, which is more concerned with the minority content of the shows than their quality. It discusses West Side Story in some detail, for example, without ever mentioning dance, an odd omission to say the least for this groundbreaking dance drama. In the author’s mind, the musical’s only claim to fame is that it offers roles for Hispanic characters in what she sees as an overwhelmingly white art form. Never mind that those characters were themselves created by three white guys – or, for that matter, three Jewish guys or three gay guys, if that sounds any better (all of the above, in fact). Can’t Hispanics or others create their own shows? And my guess is that Hispanics were no more numerous in the audience at that musical than at any other show – they are still significantly underrepresented among Broadway audiences with respect to their population regardless of the show’s content. This concern for a show’s PC credentials permeates the book and becomes very tiresome.

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