Musings on Musicals

Have musicals become a blight on North Coast theatre, threatening to kill off everything else? The recent wave of second-hand shows, derived from movies, TV shows and cartoons, adds to the impression. Some are done well, some badly, and most are in between. But there may just be too many of them for the health of a theatrical ecology.

 Musicals involve a lot of people, and can be costly to produce. And they aren’t always the box office hits it is assumed they would be. But it does seem that these days especially, more performers want to be in them.

One season of that wonderful Canadian TV comedy series called “Slings & Arrows” juxtaposed a Shakespeare production with a musical being developed at the same time. It was if they were being produced by two different species. They could barely communicate.

 It isn’t that bad here—many participate in musical and non-musical productions. But it has become more and more obvious that it is much easier to get a cast for a musical than for a play, especially if the play is from a different era. That’s not healthy.

 I’d only been on the job for a year or so when I wrote a column about musicals. What was true in this regard seems even truer now. In the course of this column I also wrote about my own prejudices and my approach to review. So it seems worthwhile to reproduce that column here.

 But as I noted then, North Coast theatres can do musicals well. So in coming days I’ll be posting reviews of some of the most memorable, though they weren’t always my favorites at the time.

Musings on Musicals (December 2007)

The musical is not my favorite form of theatre. Yet when I look back on the past calendar year or more on the North Coast, many of the shows I’ve most admired have been musicals. This personal paradox came into view especially in the last month or so, when I saw four of them—and had different responses to each.

 Two of these were imported shows—touring Broadway-based productions hosted by CenterArts. This is a unique species, and is a way of life for the actors and musicians involved—I’ve known a few and heard their stories. Someone here asked one of the participants in one of the touring shows where his home was. “On the bus,” he said. They tour ten months a year.

 The touring Evita and The Producers were both polished, professional shows with great sets, very good performers and production values. I hated Evita. I loved The Producers. And thereby hangs a tale.

 If you had to name crowd-pleasing forms, musicals would probably be at the top of the list, followed by physical theatre. But as it turns out, I am not a crowd. Nor am I a judge, making decisions on the basis of theatrical law and performance precedent. I am forced to confront these facts every time I write about a show, and most every time I see one.

 Tom Stoppard, who was a provincial theatre reviewer before he became an internationally acclaimed playwright, talked in several interviews about his own struggle with the reviewer’s perspective. He started out trying to review objectively, according to standards. But he learned, especially from reading the contemporaneous reviews of Kenneth Tynan, that as a reviewer, “the only thing that mattered was the effect the play had on me personally that night. That was what I was reporting on…”

 I don’t think it’s the only thing that matters, but it is vital, and even more than that, it is unavoidable. We all bring different standards, experiences and tastes to each theatrical encounter. Even though I often include objective information about the audience as well as the play, I can’t escape the sometimes inconvenient truth of being me.

 The idiosyncratic element is seldom clearer than when I see a musical. Take Evita. The production I saw at the Van Duzer was loud, flashy and, to me, empty. The music was composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber, also responsible for the enormously popular Starlight Phantom Jesus Cats Superstar Opera Express. I went in knowing that I basically detest Andrew Lloyd Webber and his ilk, who dominated musicals from the 70s until recently with gaudy, bombastic, pretentious, meretricious, vacuous productions, and lousy music.

 That’s the other thing—music is very important to me, and when I don’t like it, it’s hard to even sit through a show. However, it is possible for a show to show me something else, to change my mind—to show me a good time. Evita didn’t do that. It confirmed my worst preconceptions.

A Broadway-derived production of The Producers

 But two weeks later, The Producers charmed me and made me giddy. It was funny, provocative and stylish, and the music, while not memorable, was fun. Part of this show’s appeal is it’s something of a throwback, with roots in classic Broadway and vaudeville—which its principal author, Mel Brooks, knows very well.

Still, if the music is merely pleasant, and the rest of the show is entertaining, I can enjoy it. Such was the case with the Humboldt Light Opera’s Titanic, which was my favorite homegrown musical production of the year. But when you add memorable songs—as in North Coast Rep’s Fiddler on the Roof –there’s a fuller enjoyment.

 But I come back to my initial question—why did I like so many musicals done here recently? From one point of view, it would seem that community theatres with less than lavish resources should do smaller shows better, rather than elaborate musicals. But I think there are reasons—some more idiosyncratic than others.

Fiddler on the Roof at NCRT

 First, we’ve got a lot of musical talent and performing talent for the musical stage here, renewed by students coming to HSU. I was especially impressed that North Coast Rep could field 38 performers for “Fiddler,” while at the same time HSU had 30 for Urinetown.

 That’s good, and not so good. There’s probably a general cultural bias at work for musical over dramatic talent (from TV and concert music, etc.) but there’s also a local component. There’s not a lot of great acting or actor training here, which professional theatre actors would define as finding the truth of a part, or Laurence Olivier would describe as creating “goosebumps” in the audience by means of the actor’s art. There’s more training hereabouts for performance rather than acting, and audiences are more attuned to it.

 But there’s something else that works for me. I despise the nauseatingly smooth and homogenized style of singing I hear on Broadway musical albums. I prefer the authentic voices I hear on stages here.

A Funny Thing...at Ferndale Rep

 That goes for the production as well—the lack of glitz and overkill at a typical North Coast Rep musical (even their Chicago was more modest than the movie or Broadway versions) or at Ferndale Rep (their A Funny Thing Happened at the Forum being one of my favorites) focus attention on the essentials of the show: the performances, the music and the story. I like that.

 I offer these views partly as a past and future guide to my own inevitable prejudices. Also as some solace for the audience members I also think about—the ones who are trying to figure out why they aren’t getting why everybody around them likes the show, or the reverse. Sometimes it’s personal taste or experience, or lack of experience. And sometimes you aren’t the only one seeing a naked emperor.

 End note 2014: The two traveling shows have since been done by North Coast theatres: The Producers at NCRT, Evita at Ferndale Rep. These road shows were presented here by Center Arts. After this piece was published, coincidentally or not, I was never invited back to a Center Arts show.

Lear to Leer

Although I started my Journal column on the North Coast Prep production of King Lear by observing that it is not among the most produced of Shakespeare's major plays, that doesn't mean there aren't both regional and high profile productions--particularly recently, it seems. Ian McKellen headlined a much praised production in England, directed by Trevor Nunn (top photo.) According to the Internet Movie Database, a TV version will be released on DVD. It probably will also be shown on PBS.

But now in the works is a feature film treatment starring Anthony Hopkins as Lear (the photo is from one of his stage productions), with Keira Knightley as Cordelia (terrific actress, and not too heavy to carry!), and Gwyneth Paltrow and Naomi Watts as the evil sisters. It's scheduled for release in 2010.

In the meantime, King Lear is the play at the center of season 3 of Slings and Arrows, probably the most thematic of its 3 seasons. As usual, there are some great scenes from Shakespeare, including some amazing Lear from veteran Canadian actor William Hutt. His character does one last Lear while fighting off cancer, and dies shortly after the performance. In real life, Hutt died about a year after these episodes first aired, of leukemia at age 87. This series is available on DVD right now.

Shakespeare in the News

Yes, it's time again for the Shakespeare in the News roundup. Tonight's headline: Dr. Who and Captain Picard Star in Hamlet!
Well, it's true. The Royal Shakespeare production has opened, with David Tennant (Doctor Who on the BBC) as Hamlet, and Patrick Stewart (formerly of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but more recently the prize-winning lead in Macbeth) as both Claudius, Hamlet's stepfather, and the Ghost of his father, the King who Claudius murdered.

"The hype, it seems, was justified," began the Guardian's roundup of the reviews. Michael Billington, the Guardian's critic, one of the most eminent in the UK, wrote (according to this story) that Tennant has no difficulty making the transition from the BBC's Time Lord to Shakespeare's Hamlet, a man "who could be bounded in a nutshell and count himself a king of infinite space". Indeed, Tennant - "active, athletic, immensely engaging" - is one of the funniest Hamlets Billington has ever seen, who goes on to say that, overall, it is "one of the most richly textured, best-acted versions of the play we have seen in years". The only thing that is missing is an insight into Hamlet's philosophical nature, something Billington partly attributes to director Gregory Doran's cuts to Shakespeare's longest play, resulting in some of "the most beautiful lines in all literature" being lost.

This was pretty much the consensus view: Tennant was very good but not (yet) great, and Patrick Stewart was brilliant. Another reviewer wrote that his performance as Claudius was the "strongest, scariest" he'd ever seen, "acting of the highest order." Others also mentioned the cuts in the text as too severe, resulting in more of a revenge drama.

Billington also wrote of Tennant, "He is a fine Hamlet whose virtues, and occasional vices, are inseparable from the production itself...This is a Hamlet of quicksilver intelligence, mimetic vigour and wild humour: one of the funniest I've ever seen. He parodies everyone he talks to, from the prattling Polonius to the verbally ornate Osric. After the play scene, he careers around the court sporting a crown at a tipsy angle. Yet, under the mad capriciousness, Tennant implies a filial rage and impetuous danger: the first half ends with Tennant poised with a dagger over the praying Claudius, crying: "And now I'll do it." Newcomers to the play might well believe he will. Tennant is an active, athletic, immensely engaging Hamlet. If there is any quality I miss, it is the character's philosophical nature, and here he is not helped by the production."

Hamlet is a defining role for an actor. As Canadian actor (and star of the TV series Slings and Arrows) Paul Gross commented, actors are considered pre- or -post Hamlet. It's self-defining even for actors who never get to play the role. In their Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead DVD interviews, both Gary Oldman and Richard Dreyfus are wistful about missing their chances to play Hamlet--both felt even at that time that they were too old. Dreyfus held out some hope for being able to do a radio version, but even that seemed unlikely. Al Pacino (on his DVD called Babblelonia) felt thwarted in doing any Shakespeare when he was young because he was too ethnic.

As for Tennant's good-but-not-great reviews, that could change: not only as this production continues, but as time goes by. I remember after seeing David Warner in the film Morgan! I had high hopes for his Hamlet (1965-67.) It was in England, and I never got a chance to see it, but I was dismayed at how dismissive the reviews were, at least the few I saw. Apparently, the reviews overall were mixed. So I was surprised to see, when reading about this new production, that Warner's Hamlet is now considered so highly. Patrick Stewart calls it the Hamlet of his generation, and Billington rates it in his top ten, of productions from 1958 to 2000. (Stewart later acted with Warner in a revival of Warner's Hamlet, as well as in a notable episode of Next Gen.)

This new production also awakens intense envy of London theatregoers, who had the opportunity to see so many great actors take on this role, and for that matter the others in this play. And thanks in part to the wildly popular Doctor Who, but also to the place that theatre has in UK culture, this production is a real event--inspiring, among other things, in a newspaper feature in which critics, actors and other theatrical celebs muse on their favorite Hamlets. Veteran critic Benedict Nightingale writes that he's seen at least 40.

Readers added their favorites in the comments to this article. Though I've seen Olivier, Branagh, Gibson, etc. in their film Hamlets, the only name actor I saw play the role on stage was Kevin Kline at the Public Theatre, and I wasn't terribly impressed.

My favorite Hamlet was my first, the inaugural production of the new arts center at Knox College, where I was a freshman. A student named Jim Eichelberger played Hamlet, and he was astonishing. He went on to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, was a lead actor at Trinity Rep in Providence before becoming a star of experimental theatre, as Ethyl Eichelberger. He appeared in a production of The Threepenny Opera with Sting in the 80s. But he contracted AIDS, was apparently resistant to drugs of the time, and committed suicide in 1990--in fact, as I see his Wikipedia bio, on this very date, August 12.

Another production I liked a lot was one at the University of Pittsburgh, which had a summer Shakespeare festival, with performances in a kind of round stone castle called the Stephen Foster Memorial--very atmospheric for Shakespeare. A Canadian actor called Richard McMillan played Hamlet (I recognized him a few years ago in a small but substantive role in the movie, The Day After Tomorrow, acting with the great British actor Ian Holm.) I remember that this production started as a kind of postmodern dress Hamlet, but as the action intensified, the actors were all in sober Elizabethan costume. McMillan started out playing Hamlet as a moody young rebel with John Lennon shades, perhaps an echo of David Warner's very 60s hero.

Also associated with the new Hamlet, there was some controversy in England over celebrities possibly overwhelming Shakespearian productions. Director Jonathan Miller was critical (even though he's been known to use famous actors), but Michael Billington defended the Tennant production. It also helps that both Tennant and Stewart were trained and worked in RSC productions. The tradition of going back and forth between theatre and TV and theatre and movies is much more established in England, and Billington finds that a little screen stardom may even improve stage confidence and performance.

But Hamlet isn't the only Shakespeare in the News, not in England, oh no. Here's the breathless beginning to the Guardian story: A shiver of excitement rippled around the theatrical globe as news spread of some grubby red bricks uncovered in a muddy pit off a nondescript street in east London. Sir Ian McKellen will be making his way to New Inn Broadway in Shoreditch, one of many theatre luminaries impatient to see the site where his hero William Shakespeare learned his trade not just as a playwright but an actor.

It's The Theatre (that's what it was called) that's been lost for 400 years. Or anyway, part of its foundation--because the actual theatre was simply dismantled and transported to another location, where it became The Globe. It's believed to be the theatre where Shakespeare first acted, and where his first plays were performed.

Now that the site is known for sure, it can be properly excavated and the dimensions of The Theatre studied. Believed to have been built in 1576, it is where Shakespeare learned his craft. Its foundation was found by archeologists who had clues it might be there, while the site was being cleared for a new building: a new theatre, in fact.

This North Coast Weekend

The musical Hair continues this weekend at Ferndale Rep, and La Bete in the Forum Theatre at the College of the Redwoods. My preview of them in the Journal is here. Betti Trauth reviews Hair and La Bete in the T-S.

Concluding its two week run at the Arcata Playhouse is the experimental CRAWDADDY: A Freak Tragedy. My Journal review is here, and Barry Blake reviews it in the T-S. I guess what I'd add to my review is that some of it is strange to the point of being surreal. The bit I liked best was the story of the puppet's father who, as a cartoon character, tested the ringers in ringer washing machines by being rung through them until he was flat as a pancake. Anyway, I assume that bit is still in the show! I wonder if they kept the castrati wolf man--I'll bet there were questions about that in the talkbacks. It concludes this run Thursday through Saturday at 8 PM.

And since I'm linking to my own stuff, here's one to my Journal review of the Canadian TV series "Slings and Arrows," which I've also written about here. Oddly, Michael Fields of Dell'Arte mentioned he was watching it (he's on season 2) and asked me if I knew of it-- before he'd seen my review in the Journal published that very day.

In that column about Hair and La Bete (with a tiny mention of Helen) I also repeated my rationale for objecting to the "trailer trash" term that first appeared here. (Specifically, here.) I've had very good response to it, notably from parents (including theatre artists) and a teacher.

TV Stage: Slings and Arrows

"Slings and Arrows" is a wonderful TV series from Canada. It began with a six episode season in 2003 that told the story of a chaotic production of Hamlet at the very troubled New Burbage Shakespeare festival theatre. It's funny and intelligent, and true to both ageless theatrical behavior and the current context of commercialized and corporatized Shakespeare theatres.

A multiple prize-winner, it inspired another six episode season (centered on a production of Macbeth) , and then a third (on Lear.) In the U.S. the third season has been seen this year by those happy few with the Sundance Channel, but DVDs of the first two seasons are available.

Those who have discovered it tend to love and treasure it. It's witty, a bit unhinged, and though it specifically mocks certain Canadian characteristics, it's universal in its humor. Plus there are isolated scenes from Shakespeare's plays that are done so well as to be positively illuminating.

More Slings and Arrows

As in Shakespeare's plays, "Slings and Arrows" has doubling: the continuing story of the troubled romance between a couple with a dramatic history (Geoffrey Tennant played by Paul Gross and Ellen Fanshaw played by Martha Burns--pictured here) plus a romance between different pairings of younger characters: an insecure young movie star and a young apprentice, both acting prominent roles in Hamlet for the first time; a young couple playing the title roles in Romeo and Juliet--star-crossed in their case because up until they began rehearsing together, he was strictly gay.)

There's multiple doubling of plots, as each series focuses on one play (Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear) while at least one other is also being rehearsed (Romeo and Juliet during Macbeth); beside the drama of producing the play, there's some crisis involving the theatre itself, usually involving its manager (Mark McKinney as Richard Thomas-Jones) that also includes a romantic or at least sexual entanglement.

There's also a Hamlet's ghost trying to direct the action (Stephen Ouimette as Oliver Welles) literally the Artistic Director who is killed early in episode one, and haunts the production, even appearing in it by furnishing his skull for Yorrick's. (He returns to haunt Macbeth; don't know about season 3.) Geoffrey won acclaim playing Hamlet but then went mad. To direct this new production he feigns madness--or does he? A question they're still asking about Hamlet.