Pardon the self-calls. Here’s another review of The Tutor, this time from the California Literary Review. We were surprised that they came to the show, but the reviewer seemed to enjoy it, so that’s good (and luckily he came on a night when things were actually working!).
Archive for August, 2011
We’ve had 3 more performances since opening night and 2 more reviews. One from nytheatre.com and the other from Big Vision Empty Wallet, both rather positive.
Every performance has been different, mostly due to strange technical issues that we’ve had to deal with at the theatre. One day the projections didn’t work, but the live video did and yesterday the projector didn’t work (so no projections or live video) and the speakers were screwed up. It felt like the unplugged (and occasionally underwater) version of the play (which luckily seems to work just as well as the tech-heavy version). One final performance on Saturday afternoon! Hopefully everything will be in working order by then.
Opening night of The Tutor went splendidly, despite being stranded at 32nd and 5th looking for a cab 30 minutes before the play was scheduled to start. I was able to fold programs in the cab and get there right as the audience was filing in (oddly, they didn’t stop me from going in without a ticket, which is slightly worrying…). Due to the nature of the Fringe, this was our first full run in the space and other than some technical hiccups, the show went very very well. We’ve already received our first review and it’s incredibly favorable.
There are four more performances, the next one at noon tomorrow. In the meantime, I hope to sleep, maybe do some yoga, and read the newspaper.
Last weekend, I spent about 15 hours in a surprisingly comfortable seat in a custom-built theatre in the Park Avenue Armory watching 5 separate Shakespeare plays being performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company. My partner in crime, Stephanie, and I booked the tickets back in March, before The Tutor was accepted to the Fringe, before Spoken For had rehearsal space on Sunday and Monday nights, before a lot of things. The expense and the grandness of the endeavor made it an unmissable event once we committed to our “weekend of Shakespeare.”
Friday night was Romeo and Juliet. I know this play incredibly well, from studying it, seeing films, reading and seeing adaptations of the story, and yet I had never seen a production of the play. Rupert Goold (whose Enron I raved about here) directed this one and used a clever conceit to show the way that Romeo and Juliet felt isolated from the rest of the people in their world. Both were dressed like contemporary teenagers throughout the play, while all the other characters were in period dress. It was a fiery production with some terrific actors and a good way to start out the weekend. Before the show we went to a bar down the street where we spotted what could only be members of the RSC company (we later saw these self-same actors playing, among other roles, Brutus, Marc Antony and Kent– more on this later.), we hoped to find them after the show (the actors playing Tybalt and Mercutio in particular), but did not.
Saturday afternoon was As You Like It. This is another play that I know intimately from reading it in 7th grade and performing in it in 8th (I played Le Beau, which was quite possibly the low-light of my acting career, I wanted more lines and would have preferred to play a female character). I also saw an RSC production in the 90s that apparently included Joseph Fiennes and David Tennant in its cast. This production was incredibly fun. The ever-changing time periods were slightly confusing (I gathered that we went from Spanish Inquisition to Jews hiding during WWII to whenever it was acceptable to wear Converse and a waistcoat), but I stopped caring eventually and just laughed and swooned along with the merry band of exiles in the Forest of Arden. Katy Stephens was brilliant as Rosalind and Jonjo O’Neill (Mercutio from the night before) was a curious, but ultimately appropriate choice for Orlando. His emo guitar musings were hilarious and he resembled a young Matthew MacFayden.
For our “dinner break” we hiked up to the London Candy Shop on 94th and Lex to stock up on appropriate intermission snacks and returned to the pub for drinks, chicken wings and a glimpse of the Red Sox-Yankee game. King Lear on Saturday night was a disappointment. Other reviews have bemoaned its lack of emotional content and I have to agree with them. Lear is a beautifully crafted play with a truly dire conclusion and what I initially thought to be Shakespeare burnout turned out to just be a disappointing production of a play that should have been better. Individual pieces were excellent. Darrell D’Silva who played Kent and Charles Aitken who played Edgar (and Oliver in As You Like It) both rose above the oddly staged muddle of the play.
Sunday morning, we experienced strange Upper East Side passive aggressive behavior over brunch before entering the theatre for an afternoon in Rome with Julius Caesar. The night before I had researched the director, Lucy Bailey, and discovered that her husband is also her projection designer and was interested to see the result. The projections, unfortunately, were the only thing that distracted me from the intensity of the production. As a fan of technological experiments in theatre, I tend to give projections, videos and the like the benefit of the doubt. These projections, however, were cheap looking, strange and cartoonish. Sam Troughton, playing Brutus with a crutch because he tore his knee playing Romeo last month, was intense yet naive. Greg Hicks, who had seemed so different as Lear the night before, nailed Caesar with a sardonic, powerful performance. And our friend from the pub, Darrell D’Silva was a brilliant Marc Antony.
At the end of the show I was sad to think that this would be my last outing with the company. However, some last minute changes to my rehearsal schedule meant that I was able to retain my ticket for Winter’s Tale. With no context for what I was about to see, I sat on the edge of my seat (partly because I been sitting for so many hours and needed to do something different) and just followed this play about jealousy and marriage and love and deception. The design was gorgeous, the choices were sound and once again, Hicks and D’Silva were in top form. I really enjoyed the production (despite the strangeness of aspects of the play itself) and was happy to end the weekend on a note of oddly joyous revelry.
Of course, when I returned home I read online about a second night of looting in London. The footage of the looting in London and the manic frenzy in Julius Caesar seemed more similar than not. The slow and stubborn response that David Cameron made to the events reminded me of the metaphorical and physical blindness of Lear and Gloucester. The girls in Croydon drinking rose at 9:30 am and complaining about “the rich” had the same youthful ignorance as Juliet as portrayed by Mariah Gale (except they didn’t have a fierce nurse to knock them to their senses). I read somewhere recently that to fix theatre we should stop forcing Shakespeare down students’ throats. That we should show them theatre that is interesting and exciting. After last weekend, I would hazard to say (and others have surely said it before me) that there is still a timeliness to Shakespeare’s works. Not only does it give us an insight into human nature, but it reminds us that even when the worst times seem upon us, we can be revived in knowing that things can brighten and improve. For every moment in life that reminds us of Julius Caesar, may there be one that reminds us of the unexpected joy of the final scene of Winter’s Tale or of seeing the Park Avenue Armory covered in scrawled paper with missives to an unrequited love. This is what Shakespeare can do for us, if we give him (and a hundred or so employees of the RSC) a weekend of our lives.
I’ve been interviewed by Adam Szymkowicz for his excellent ‘I Interview Playwrights’ blog. Check it out here!
