Xanadu promises zany fun

Glimpse : Take the music of Jeff Lynne’s Electric Light Orchestra and have it collide with the mania of 4-wheel roller derby in 1980 Los Angeles.

Remember the Olivia Newton John disco song called “Xanadu” ? This is a  90-minute comedy sprung by that song but add the roller skates, add Chorus Line leg warmers, Greek muses, a sidewalk chalk artist, creativity block, potential suicide, two “ugly sisters” and the threat of condominium development in Los Angeles DTES. Say what ? Christopher Isherwood of the New York Times called it a musical both “indefensible and irresistible”.

Does it work ? Slickity tunes and slickity costumes will a join a bunch of slickity characters, we’re promised, and from what I’ve read the dialogue is wonderful cheesy. For me, the Jeff Lynne songs “Strange Magic” and “Dancin’” alone would be enough to make me go because I’m a sentimental slob when I feel like it.

Xanadu was a huge hit in New York in 2007-2008, so I find it  Unimaginable! that a professional troupe under Director Dean Paul Gibson could fail to produce the summer’s feel-good winner. Proof will be in how well the ball bearings spin along with the 8-track tunes.

 

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A good and capable Macbeth

Director Miles Potter’s version of the play sets a journeyman’s eye upon the script and its challenges, no question. There is yeoman service given to the schizoid setting, plot and characterization that all feed into one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays. While skilled in execution in most respects, the production did not find me leaving the tents doing fist-pumps while gushing “Yes! Yes!”  More Salieri than Mozart, one might say.

 Signal : for the first time in all the years I’ve attended mainstage Vancouver performances, not even one audience member rose to give the cast a standing-o on June 19^th.  Typically it’s 50% or more in this city.

In parsing the play, most observers point to what they see as the contrasts between the Macbeths as civilized gentry who then succumb to witches’ portents, ambition, motive-&-opportunity – all of which “conspire” to “make” them evil.

 

I say from Moment 1 Macbeth’s ego augered him down into his bedrock essence. Of the bearded sisters’ initial prediction he would be King of Scotland, Macbeth muses immediately : “If good, why do I yield to that suggestion / Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair / And make my seated heart knock at my ribs, / Against the use of nature? Present fears / Are less than horrible imaginings : / My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical / Shakes so my single state of man that function / Is smothered in surmise / And nothing is but what is not.”  [Aside : The line “Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair” could not be improved upon – in 100 lifetimes by 100 different writers – one iota.]  Point is Macbeth’s brain conjures the prospect of ugly mischief to achieve his destiny from the get-go.

Throughout, Bob Frazer’s catch of Macbeth vacillates, as the script does. Robust man-of-action braggadocio toggles with introspective soliloquies that are both poetic and edgy.  Still, I think I was looking for some psychic consistency, some fundamental underlying menace that doubts and feints can only masque : a  17^th century warrior Nixon. 

For her part, Lady Macbeth (Colleen Wheeler) displays nefarious inclinations from her first soliloquy, too : right off she says her husband lacks the “illness” that should attend to ambition. “Thus thou must do, if thou have it / And that which rather thou dost fear to do / Than wishest should be undone.” She knows only brute force will win Macbeth the throne. And she lets us know right smartly she’s his go-to gal, his bloodlust seductress.

British homeopathist Anna Thorley had occasion to write about these characters, thus : “The fundamental problem with the Macbeths was that they were joined at the hip, undifferentiated as a man and woman and frighteningly dependent on one another. She was identified with masculine attitudes, manifesting in aggression and cruelty; he was cut off from his manhood, completely unable to withstand the pressure she put upon him. Both were estranged from feminine sensibilities, intent on manipulating their outer situation with no regard for the consequences for the soul.”  Anyone familiar with yin/yang concepts would have no argument there. Once Macbeth “murders sleep” neither of them find that sweet peace in their bed or in their heads any longer.

 So. Back to Bard. Here is my cut at it – bad pun intended, given the numerous swordfight scenes, all of which were well *executed* thanks to swordsman coach Nicholas Harrison.

Highest kudos go to sound designer Murray Price who, when Director Potter told him he wanted a “claustrophobic, internal, edge of mania type of closeness” in the soundscape, Price simply delivers up a Grammy.

 

The liner notes say Macbeth’s backdrop comprises “sounds that we don’t so much hear, but feel. They resonate in our bodies or our subconscious…”  Between the leitmotif of ravens squawking and owl scrills, there was a sub-sub-woofer trend reminiscent of the 2010 World Cup vuvuzelas that buzzed away constantly. Once or twice I was uncertain whether the other overhead commotion was from Price’s recordings or helijet ambulances screaming toward St. Paul’s – but whether by design or accident or both, all the ambient audio tension worked wonderfully well.

The setting with its moorish screen backdrop cutting out English Bay plus the many mists and smokes pumping out effluent throughout enhanced the dark and equivocal mood of the play immensely.  For its part the gothic arch set had nothing particular to recommend it but was functional, especially the subterranean entrance that was used to good advantage.

Blocking and stage business – other than the fight scenes – I found somewhat fixed and ploddy, not unlike what one sees in opera. Except for Frazer’s excellent interpretation of the Banquo ghost scene – on balance perhaps the best performed scene in the play.  In it Frazer showed terrific animation and true existential angst as he sustained Emotion #4 of 4 – fear – the other three being mad, sad, glad.  Wheeler was ever-so-equal to Frazer in this scene with her sardonic dismissal of his manhood, both in word and action.

Duncan Fraser as Doctor (“More needs she the divine than the physician”) / 2^nd murderer / Old Siward gives each role his all with both overt and subtle effect.  Bernard Cuffling as King Duncan could not have been more endearing or elegant.  But special mention has got to be reserved for John Murphy’s excellent porter – not just in the knocking / Gates of Hell /dipsomania scene, but throughout. True consistency of character and comic menace – very fun indeed.

Two clangers : Lady M / Wheeler when she shrieks after the Banquo-ghost episode : “Stand not upon the order of your going / But go at once!” Rosie O’Donnell could not have executed it worse. Well, maybe.

Bob Frazer’s “Out, out brief candle…” turn should have been Sisyphus grimly facing the rock, yet again, but this time nearly opting for suicide himself – consumed by core visceral pain, not just situational distress. It came off as an aloof philosophical daydream.  Still, his lingering silent pause at the end of this most renowned and familiar speech of the play almost compensated.

In sum, this is Bard. This is summer(?) in Vancouver. So go, dress v-e-r-y warmly, avoid the popcorn (in its 23^rd season as well) and enjoy.  “Yeoman” and “professional” all the way through with a few moments of blue spark.  I may have wanted more or different, but this Macbeth is worth your shekels regardless. 

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Mr. & Mrs. Macbeth – having a look…

There is no mystery key to unlock the characters of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Except to mimic the poet himself from the play @ I /iii /143 : “Come what come may / Time and the hour run through the roughest day.”

Violence, horror and mayhem you say ? Let us not forget that with Macbeth we are faced with a vicious warrior. He disembowels the rebel traitor Macdonwald, who was loyal to the Thane of Cawdor who led the charge to unseat King Duncan. Not only kills Macdonwald, he also beheads him and pikes the bleeding trophy in triumph. To reward him, Duncan bestows Macbeth with the title Thane of Cawdor after Cawdor is in turn hunted down and summarily executed for his treason – a slightly-too-obvious bit of irony and foreshadowing on BillyB’s part some might argue.

What is profound about Macbeth is Shakespeare’s intuitive sense, pre-Freud and pre-Jung by a few centuries. We are complex bodies. We have no children so we kill others’. We worship our wives; we kill others’ who adore theirs as much. We exalt our leaders, but kill them when they obstruct our greedy plans. We have heart. We have dinners with wine and mutton just like other mortals do. We breathe heavily while dancing horizontal. We feel and hurt. We loathe. We conspire against those who stand in our way. What most we do is we think. We think. We think. And when we think, we conjure demons – women with beards – who enflame and tumesce our frightful obsessive fantasies.

The wacko Macbeths lack two things, primarily. Insight into the personal devils loose in their brains and their bowels. And no governor on their base impulses, barely a half-wit of superego in their collective souls. The id and ego juices excited between them are fueled by testosterone and estrogen, shared hormones of horror. Any guilt they feel might be rational but is not visceral – borne of words, not guts or spirit. Still, whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.

A word or two about plot. Macbeth is also brilliant current events from the early 1600’s. It exploits the blow-up-Parliament-and-the-King conspiracy of 1605 that is known by the somewhat benign title of The Gunpowder Plot starring Guy Fawkes. (What will a mere 36 barrels of gunpowder under the House of Lords do but flatten Parliament and a square mile around it, too?)  So not quizzical that a preoccupation with regicide results along the Thames precisely when BB writes this script. Further to the history of the day, Macbeth references the Catholic/Anglican split between Scotland and England and disparages the closet Catholics of Albion who “equivocate” why they didn’t attend Anglican matins. Much made of this in the porter knocking scene. Not to forget for a second how suspicions and hatreds were the communion of the day – all in the spirit of Jesus Christ, of course.

In the end BillyB knew he’d penned a classic in Macbeth and he ran with it, furiously, which is part the reason it’s so punchy from Moment 1 and, unlike Shrew, so short and tight.  Also a potboiler that slavers up jealousy, rage, ambition, sex, revenge and good old-fashion personal guilt in a grisly but fascinating drama that is anything but melo.

The challenge for a director in 2012 is to give such despicable human impulses as the Macbeths’ a contemporary gestalt in which to make new sense, if that’s possible, not just the same-old hisses and shouts.

We shall see what Director Miles Potter hath wrought.

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Good (albeit slightly uneven) outing at Bard with Shrew

Zoom Spot :  Director Meg Roe had the right idea how to make Taming of the Shrew more palatable to contemporary sensibilities. Her audience is well-tuned-in to feminism and the increasingly prominent GLBT sexual culture, after all.  Solution ? Slapstick! this 400-year-old script, slapstick it bigtime. Lots of nods and winks directly at the audience, call Mantua “Montreal”, inject a slew of pratfalls both real and metaphorical. But mostly let lead Lois Anderson as Kate fully exaggerate her amygdala. Let her be Princess Bitch of the ages. She's two cats fighting in the alley all by herself. Pure comic stuff that Anderson aces. It works because slapstick is but irony writ large. The only *message* to take away is this : “None of our silly shenanigans are to be taken at face value!”  Where the current production is true to that game plan, the play wings along cleverly. Kayvon Kelly as Grumio, Shawn Macdonald as Gremio and newby Anton Lipovetsky as Lucentio all execute wonderfully well. Never do these characters spiel off Billy Bard’s words with even a soupcon of face-value denotation. As Petruchio, however, John Murphy resorts to rote-recitation too often, alas. The switch is not all his fault, for sure -- BillyB's contradictory characterization of Petruchio as a "kill her with kindness wife abuser" doesn't help. Worse yet, Kate's final speech : a fine mess indeed. On balance, however, Shrew is another fun Vancouver summer evening with English Bay and the twinkly lights of the West End as Bard's signature backdrop. Add in the omnipresent rainstorms, street sirens, and medic helicopters going Whumpa! Whumpa! overhead as they race toward downtown hospitals, and you come away satisfied this first play of the 23rd season in the tents with Bard gives you, on balance, decent bang for the consumer buck.

Review

I was hoping for a nuanced representation for contemporary eyes from Meg Roe's direction of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew. Some recognition, say, that this is not just male chauvinist piggery writ large (see Preview below). More emphasis how bully-vs- bully morphs into lover-to-lover.

Roe’s version asks you to suspend your biases about political correctness and face the fact that Kate has as little emotional intelligence as Petruchio. Two psychosocial misfits who stumble and bumble into one another : both greedy, one for power, the other for security. They find each other. And maybe swap life roles in the process.

Fact is Kate treats her sister Bianca no better than Petruchio treats Kate herself : lots of sarcasm, dismissive disdain, physical violence. Whether in Shakespeare’s patriarchal culture or today’s GLBT world, such conduct is not much to giggle at. Unless it’s slapstick. Unless the bullying crosses gender stereotypes and applies to all two-legged creatures regardless of sex.

In slapstick, as the word implies, people bop and boff one another, just like the Three Stooges four centuries later. They smart-mouth and smart-ass each other. They hoodwink each other. They seduce each other.  Shrew should never be looked at as a précis of universal moral “truths” -- just a goofy, edgy play on manners-of-the-day meant to be taken 100% frivolously, both then and now.

Further along these lines – skip ahead if this bores you – Shrew was written at the end of the 16th century A.D.  It was conceived as spunky ironic fun on the wholly Christian turf of England.  Whether closet Catholic or eager Anglican, Billy Bard was surely steeped in the 10th Commandment from Exodus 20:17 : “Thou shalt not covet they neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet they neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s.”  The operative word being “thing”.  To Petruchio, Kate is a “thing”. And for his part Petruchio may be anatomically and metaphorically both an "a" and "p", but in Kate’s patriarchal time he was “it” -- her meal ticket and guarantor of a squishy life. Simple as that. So it’s the sexual energy between “thing” and “it” that makes this play still relevant, whatever the times. 

From the opening scene, Lois Anderson’s Kate has a voice that either wilts flowers or shatters glass. Unlike the film version as portrayed by Elizabeth Taylor, she doesn’t bosom forth with fake rage at 150 decibels.  Anderson “finesses” Kate’s shrillness nicely. For his part, Petruchio (John Murphy) can’t find a core identity like Richard Burton did in the film with his sardonic and lecherous heh-heh-heh laugh constant throughout. Between Roe’s direction and Shakespeare’s lurchy script for this character, Mr. Murphy can’t seem to decide whether he’s ironic wit or macho pig or just faintly bored much of the time. His delivery of lines oscillates constantly as among these personna such that there’s no “person” at the end of it all, only role-playing.

But for all the foreplay, as it were, most disappointing of all was the final soliloquy by Anderson as Kate. Why Roe had her deliver it straight-up, with not a whiff of triumphant irony, is simply beyond me.  To make Shrew really work in 2012, Kate's speech has to project this sentiment : “We two have found each other because I am as bad-to-the-bone as you are.  The only difference is I recognize it, so I can suck up to you and laugh at you while you are still stuck being you. Yet in some perverse way I think I love you. You jerk.”

Had Kate's previous stage business not been superior, I would agree 100% with GBS (see Preview below) that her final speech -- taken at face value -- can't help but offend ear and eye in equal measure.  How else to respond to her invite to Petruchio -- I'll paraphrase -- to "let my hand be squashed beneath thy foot, O lord and master"...? 

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Taming of the Shrew : sexist misogyny ?

Plot quicky : Younger sister Bianca is a hottie and the lust in many suitors’ eyes. But older sister Katherine (Kate) is not yet married. So father Baptista rules Bianca is off-limits until sis ties the knot first. Enter Petruchio. He marries the feisty Kate who is what cowgirls today might call “hard twist”: a strong, no-nonsense, shoot-from-the-lip kind of free agent. The rest of the play tracks their marriage demonstrating how Petruchio overcomes (“tames”) Kate’s hard twist mind and tongue (“shrew”) until she becomes compliant and adoring – to a fault.

The controversy continues : To say the play has been disparaged as male chauvinist piggery writ large hardly captures the debate that has raged for centuries – even from its first performance in 1594.

I have no doubt that as a nascent suffragette in 1895 my grandmother would likely have agreed with George Bernard Shaw’s assessment of this play: "No man with any decency of feeling can sit [the final act] in the company of a woman without being extremely ashamed", he said, dismissing the popular 300-year-old play as “altogether disgusting to modern sensibility”.

Still, many see Petruchio’s words as irony, not misogynistic sarcasm. For example, Kate hisses to her father that Petruchio is “one-half lunatic” and “a mad-cap ruffian”.  Petruchio immediately retorts that to his mind Kate “is not hot, but temperate as the morn” and “modest as the dove”.  Some academics claim Petruchio’s words are but reverse psychology to woo her into genuine affection and love for him despite the fact she became his “chattel” via a steal-of-a-deal – a dowry with lots of cold hard cash from her papa.

Given all this, what is it that keeps acting troupes performing Taming of the Shrew and audiences flocking to see it now 400 years later ? The word to explain it is simply “art”. Shakespeare at his worst is still art unlike any previous or subsequent drama practitioner has managed to create. On an utterly facile level think of Shrew as analogous to the Joel and Ethan Coen film Fargo that “celebrates” greed, dishonesty, and wife-slaying amidst assorted other scenes of mayhem and murder. All conduct and values I, like most, abhor. Still, Fargo remains one of my favourite all-time USA movies. Such paradox might help explain Shrew, too.

Starting May 31^st at Bard on the Beach main-stage at Vanier Park on English Bay with the Pacific Ocean as backdrop.

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Song-&-dance good as it gets in High Society

Zoom Spot : Huzzah’s to High Society in spades. The exuberance and crispness and outright fun the performers have in this old-style musical comedy will excite even the most dour sourpuss in your household. The Arts Club’s performance outshines in every way the miscast and largely insipid 1956 movie starring Grace Kelly, Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra. Outshines it by uncountable lumens. And to this viewer the key is not the Cole Porter music that was adapted to the original and unlikely script of The Philadelphia Story. The key is Director Bill Millerd’s casting, first and foremost, followed quick-step by Valerie Easton’s choreography of the actors individually and collectively. Not to mention an extremely clever set by Alison Green, great mood lighting by veteran Marsha Sibthorpe, a perfect-pitched jazz orchestra led by Ken Cormier, and the period-piece costumes, particularly for the servants, designed by Phillip Clarkson. Don’t be cheap -- shell out the ducats to see all of this in perfect concert and harmony in Act II’s song-&-dance routine Let’s Misbehave if for no other reason.

                                                               
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Over dinner before the show I wrote the following as a proposed Apologia for what I thought I was about to see on the Stanley Theatre stage in ACT’s version of High Society :

In the current socioeconomic mileau, High Society could only be a Tea Party phenomenon. Its sole focus is on the well-heeled 1% with not even a momentary glance back at the Occupy 99% cadre.  Doubtless the decision to mount HS was made probably 8-10 months prior to the Occupy movement that catapulted to the world stage in September, 2011. Thus what follows is aimed at prospective viewers in 2012 who will “suspend disbelief” and enjoy witnessing the trials and tribulations of the 1% crowd in Newport, Rhode Island, USA circa 1938.

On the day Ontario police watchdog Gerry McNeilly condemned the actions of Toronto police at the G20 summit two years ago, my proposed Apologia above didn’t strike me as in the least cynical.  Just existentially contextual.

Bill Millerd and crew “forced” me to scrap that approach. Watching the production May 16, I was able, like Leonard Cohen, to “put a cap on my concussion and dance”.  To let a silly, goofy plot be rescued by excellent theatre antics and skills.  As I watched I was put to mind of the wonderful choreography from the 1950’s movie Seven Brides for Seven Brothers that was tight beyond measure.

The storyline of High Society is borderline offensive to anyone with a wit of social conscience. It’s sexist, ageist, anti-intellectual, champions the rich and floats in what the script identifies as “an alchemy of alcohol”.  Not easy to get more politically incorrect than all of that in 2012. 

The chief character is one Tracy Samantha Lord, who around age 30 is about to marry a second time after a first failed practice marriage with her childhood sweetheart Dexter Haven, a yacht designer.  The play is set mostly on the eve of her 2nd bout of nuptials, this time to bourgeois striver George Kittredge, a mining CEO whose umbra is class neurosis. He represents new money, which is bred of “youth and skill”. Old money is “age and treachery”. And we all know who wins those showdowns.

On this evening Tracy entertains a series of lusty and marital thoughts about not only her fiancée, boring George, but also of her ex- even as she flirts vigorously with a writer from a gossip-rag like the The Enquirer. His party invite was handed out as a bribe to kill a pending expose about Tracy’s dad who's been canoodling with a young dancer in New York.  In 2012 only Tea Partyers care about the peccadilloes of the social elite. Those “bright but synthetic qualities” New York Times critic Bosley Crowther derided back in ’56. Plastic values even in post-war 50's boom times, nevermind nearly 60 years later...

As Tracy, Jennifer Lines executes a near flawless rendition of this princess-ditz. Her dazzling smile and more-than-just-capable singing voice put Grace Kelly’s feeble shrill efforts to shame (though Grace pretty well managed that mediocrity on her own without any need for comparison to prove the point). Tracy’s younger sister Dinah played by Bridget Esler almost upstages every scene she’s in – that just-pre-teen smart-ass who zaps zinger lines with professional cadence.  Norman Browning as dipsomaniac and lecherous Uncle Willie pulls down regular slugs of gin and weavy dances with caricature accuracy.

Daniel Arnold is perhaps a bit teenybopper in his swooning over Tracy. He claims a bolshy soul but then drools at her every glance. Todd Talbot as Dexter grows into the part as the play rolls on, his bedroom choreography during Just One of Those Things as good as Ted Danson doing those endless pirouettes in the flik Body Heat a few decades back. 

Still, it is the servant group of Kayla Dunbar, Brandyn Eddy, Timothy Gledhill, Seana-Lee Wood and Melissa Young whose choreography and dance-stagehand routines ratchet this play up from not just good, but great great fun.  

As Zoom Spot says : “Don’t be cheap -- shell out the ducats to see all of this in perfect concert and harmony in Act II’s song-&-dance routine Let’s Misbehave if for no other reason.”

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Fizz-&-froth-&-fancy dress -- and Cole Porter

In ACT's promotion for High Society that opens Thursday, local arts editor and podcaster Daniel Ralston ends an insightful 9-paragraph history of the original movie The Philadelphia Story and the musical re-mount of 1956 with this comment on the seduction of theatre nostalgia : "High Society invites its audiences to compare an imagined past and an all-too-real present."

With 18 songs by Cole Porter set in Gatsby-era Eastern Seaboard mansions, this ain't Coors and cotton candy country. We are promised petit fours for one silk glove and French bubbly for the other, without the Scott Fitzgerald existential angst underpinning it all.

Anyone who marveled at the top-10 film of 1956 starring Grace Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong will easily be teased into watching their celluloid antics translated to stage business.  Director Bill Millerd and cast will surely try to please 2012 sensibilities in the rich confines of the Stanley.

The plot is pure froth and nonsense : about a rich and spoiled naif on the eve of her second wedding. She pirouettes and giggles and suffers(!) the competing attentions of her fiance, her ex-husband, and a gossip-rag reporter throughout a night of incandescent partying.  Come dawn one almost hears Scarlett whinging to Rhett : "Where shall I go ? What shall I do ?"

Still, let's compare.  We live in an epoch of rap and worse; The Baconator; Steve, Obie and Mitt; the Eurodrone; Al Qaeda semtex underwear; Quebecois youth rioting over dollar-a-day university fee hikes -- in such a world as this maybe the fizz and fuzz and silly goings-on by a bunch of USA nouveau riche from the post-WW II boom years is just right. What other Rx for the 2012 neuralgia and dyspepsia we suffer -- only Timothy Leary's Turn on, tune in, drop out ! it seems.

To borrow from Daniel Ralston again : "A blend of nostalgic film associations, catchy Porter scoring, and the allure of the carefree 1950's [might be] the perfect cocktail."

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