[{"title":"Fear and Self-Loathing in Proust and the Gay Canon","url":"https://stagesscreens.com/posts/2026-09-13-fear-and-self-loathing-in-proust-and-the-gay-canon/","date":"September 14, 2026","tags":["Books"],"text":"Fear and Self-Loathing in Proust and the Gay Canon Marcel Proust’s iconic character the Baron de Charlus, his narrator tells us, is fooling himself that no one knows he’s gay. Charlus throws verbal daggers at other men he suspects to be gay, effusively praises Balzac for writing about gay people, and carelessly remarks about the good looks of the man everyone knows him (but no one admits they know him) to be sleeping with. “When Monsieur de Charlus was not talking about his admiration for Morel’s good looks,” Proust’s narrator says, “as if they were nothing to do with a proclivity—known as vice—he held forth about this vice, but as though it had absolutely nothing to do with him. Occasionally he didn’t even hesitate to call it by its name.” This passage, from the new Oxford World Classics translation of Sodom and Gomorrah, which came out last week, is perhaps a case of the floral-patterned ceramic teacup calling the floral-patterned ceramic tea pot floral-patterned. Proust lived a remarkably “out” life as a homosexual for his time, from his school days on, and was wonderfully verbose about gay matters in his writings. However, he was not above writing a friend to ask them not to discuss his orientation, or adding to the same letter a sudden unusual, and rather transparent, postscript about having just spotted a ravishing blonde woman in a cafe. When the writer Andre Gide, the most prominent French advocate for homosexuality of their time, made a remark about Proust’s sexuality, Marcel tossed off a livid letter suggesting damning remarks could be made about Gide too if he could not hold his tongue. (Carter 117.) Proust is fooling no one about his now-famous orientation, and we love him for it. So why doesn’t he seem to love the Baron for it? Why, as has often been asked, did so brave a homosexual in writing about homosexuality go so far out of his way to make his otherwise very autobiographical narrator heterosexual? The same question is asked about his Judaism, as he was part-Jewish but made the hero of his novel Christian.\nHaving spent almost exactly three months this summer reading all 3,300 pages of Proust’s great seven-volume novel In Search of Lost Time (A la recherche du temps perdu, in the original French, or Remembrance of Things Past in the original English translation), I was struck by all the things one is supposed to be struck by when reading this amazing and enduring marathon of a novel: the delicate portrait of memory and childhood, the poignant arc documenting the peak and decline of the French aristocracy at the end of the Belle Epoque, the stinging touch with the comic and the ironic. And I was excited by its close and expansive examination of a gay culture that is otherwise mostly hidden to us. Nonetheless I was also struck by how neatly the book fits a recurring theme in a certain canon of great gay works that I read in the last six months. This “canon” was selected by me at pleasure (as Eve Kasofsky Sedgwick said of the books she selected for her iconic contribution to queer literary theory, Between Men). The books I picked ranged from 1891 to 1956. The recurring theme that caught my eye in them is that they all either document or display a healthy dose of what my generation of gay persons are often inclined to call (clumsily) gay self-loathing. I know I’m using an anachronism here, applying the standards of the present to the past, and using a term that gets misused to boot. But the impact of shame in these books is striking and well worth tracking.\nIt was Sedgwick, in her second book Epistemology of the Closet, who posited that In Search of Lost Time helped form the foundation both of a newly emerging homosexual canon—and a “homophobic” canon. “Billy Budd and Dorian Gray are among the texts that have set the terms for a modern homosexual identity,” Sedgwick wrote. “And in the Euro-American culture of the past century it has been notable that foundational texts of modern gay culture\u0026ndash;A la recherche du temps perdu and Death in Venice, for instance, along with Dorian Gray and Billy Budd—have often been the identical texts that mobilized and promulgated the most potent images and categories for (what is now visible as) the canon of homophobic mastery” (Epistemology 49).\nThis brilliant observation is just about orphaned in the introduction of Sedgwick’s second iconic book. She observes this interesting truth and then moves on to other related matters. The present essay, though it’s not an attempt to enter the fields of queer studies or Proust scholarship, elaborates on Sedgwick’s fascinating assertion, by looking at the 11 or so books I coincidentally read this year that demonstrate its accuracy. They include all seven parts of Proust’s masterwork, but also Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin (1956), Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar (1948), Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912) and The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1891). Taken together they create a complicated picture of an evolution of gay literature that reveals how unavoidable shame was to the gay person in the first half of the 20th century and the last decade of the 19th.\nThe application of the word “self-loathing” to Proust is somewhat controversial. Gide complained to Proust himself that the young writer had emphasized the difficulty of the gay life at the exclusion of its joy. On the one hand the use of words like self-loathing is not an uncommon response from modern readers. One reader on Reddit three years ago, for example, made the synonym “self-hate” the centerpiece of their commentary: “The thing that started to wear me down about the later books is the gay self hate,” the Redditor wrote. “The light and intelligence of the writing gets dimmer\u0026ndash;it’s not as good because you feel it isn’t true or he isn’t saying what he really wants to say.” On the other hand, certain critics have leapt to Proust’s defense on this count. “Proust was neither an anti-Semite nor a homophobe,” Harold Bloom wrote in his book The Western Canon. “Proust’s humor can seem harsh in regard to the masochistic homosexuality of Charlus or the Jewish insecurities of the unpleasant Bloch, but we do Proust violence if we judge him to be chagrined by either his Jewish ancestry or his homosexual orientation” (Bloom 368-369).\nBut why would we assume he lacks the slightest degree of chagrin? He himself said that the pressure not to be a homosexual in his time was so great that only true homosexuals ever followed their passions. What homosexual in 1913 when Proust’s started publishing his masterpiece or in 1922 when he died halfway through could resist the influence of shame? What I would like to remember about Proust is his groundbreaking compassion and sympathy for what he called the “race” of homosexuals, “a race weighed down by a curse that must live with lies and deceit, since they know that their desire, the greatest joy in life for any creature, is held to be punishable and shameful and dare not speak its name.” But equally memorable are his bitterly negative statements about his fellow homosexuals. He could not even bring himself to endorse a movement to support their cause: “I’ve sought to forestall for the time being the terrible error which would consist, in the same way as a Zionist movement has been encouraged, in creating a sodomist movement and in rebuilding Sodom.” Proust goes so far, if satirically, as to suggest God should have smote all the homosexuals in Sodom when he had the chance:\n“All the guilty sodomists were allowed to escape, even if, catching sight of a young boy they looked back, like Lot’s wife, without being changed, like her, into a pillar of salt. That’s how they had an abundant posterity with whom this remained a habitual gesture, exactly as with those debauched women who, while pretending to look at a display of shoes in a shop window, look round at a student. These descendants of the sodomists, so numerous that we can apply another verse from Genesis to them: ‘If a man be able to number the dust of the earth, so thy seed also shall be numbered’, have established themselves over all the earth, they’ve had access to all the professions and are so easily admitted into the most exclusive clubs that when a sodomist is not allowed to enter, the black balls mostly belong to the sodomists themselves, but who are careful to lay the blame on that sodomy, having inherited the lie which allowed their ancestors to leave the accursed city. It’s possible they will go back there one day. For they certainly form in every land an Oriental colony, cultured, musical, slanderous, composed of charming qualities and unbearable defects.”\nIt is of course a mark of how good a writer Proust is that he attempted to master, and largely succeeded in mastering, both these “charming qualities” and these “unbearable defects.” But it’s easy to underestimate how stinging—and general—his depiction of the “defects” can be. Bloom is not the only one who suggests the depiction of Charlus is the only place he gets sharp about homosexuals. So does historian Saul Friedländer in his slim 2020 volume of Proust criticism, Proustian Uncertainties: On Reading and Rereading In Search of Lost Time. Friedländer attempts to answer the question I raised above, of why the narrator is heterosexual. As an example of the dual nature of Proust’s depiction of homosexuals he cites the following passage from Sodom and Gomorrah saying that Charlus:\n\u0026ldquo;…was frightening and looked like an excommunicate, the various compromises to which he had been driven by the need to indulge his taste and to keep it secret having had the effect of bringing to the surface of his face precisely what the Baron sought to conceal, a debauched life betrayed by moral degeneration. This last, indeed, whatever be its cause, is easily detected, for it is never slow to materalise and proliferates upon a face, especially on the cheeks and round the eyes, as physically as the ochreous yellows of jaundice or the repulsive reds of a skin disease. Nor was it merely in the cheeks, or rather the chaps, of this painted face, in the mammiferous chest, the fleshy rump of this body abandoned to self-indulgence and invaded by obesity, that there now lingered, spreading like a film of oil, the vice at one time so jealously confined by M. de Charlus in the most secret recesses of his being. Now it overflowed into his speech.\u0026rdquo;\nFriedländer then goes on to write as though this passage were the only negative one about homosexuality, which is far from true. He asks, quite reasonably, whether Proust had commercial motives for making his narrator straight and Christian. “I do not know,” he concludes (Friedländer 57). Bloom, for his part, rejected this line of thought. “Proust is so great an artist that his aesthetic dignity deserves our seeking aesthetic motives for what were essentially aesthetic decisions. Is it a better novel if the narrator is a Christian homosexual?” Bloom concludes, as Friedländer notes, that “it would spoil the novel’s mythology of the Cities on the Plain if the Narrator could not distance himself from homosexuals and Jews alike.” (Bloom 376). But why should a homosexual writer have to distance himself from homosexuality for aesthetic reasons any more than a straight writer must distance himself from heterosexuality for this sort of aesthetic purity?\nUltimately it hurts Proust’s credibility as a “sexologist” (something the introduction to the Oxford World Classics edition implies he aspires to be) to distance himself only from that which he himself is rather than what he is not. And it’s worth noting how far ahead of his time Proust was on sexology. “Really, Baron,” an academic character says at one point in volume six to Charlus, “if the General Board of the University ever decides to set up a chair in homosexuality, I shall put your name forward at once.” Proust presumably had no idea how real such a position would eventually be. Lest he seem too laudatory, Proust’s academic adds: “No, perhaps a special Institute of Psychopathology would suit you better.”\nProust’s own father was a sort of sexologist in his own right. A clinician who theorized about and treated sexual disorders, Achille Adrien Proust shared a great many of his theories about the “disorder” of “inversion” with Proust himself, says William C. Carter in his relevantly themed minibiography Proust in Love: “Marcel’s friend Robert de Billy saw the elder Dr. Proust’s influence in his son’s attempts to diagnose the various manifestations of sexuality, in his refusal to establish a ‘hierarchy’ of such passions, in striving to remain objective, in the belief that no ‘disorder should be glorious or shameful,’ and in understanding the relative nature of sexual mores” (Carter 18). Robert de Billy did think, that implies, that Proust too saw homosexuality as a disorder. He was of his time and that was the understanding that predominated. But if that is indeed what Proust meant by inversion then his writing demonstrates why it has taken so long for that diagnosis to shake itself from culture’s view of homosexuality. In fact, of course, it persists today despite the American Psychological Association’s removal of homosexuality from the list of disorders as far back as 1973. “Homophobic mastery,” indeed.\nThe rest of the “canon”\nPerhaps one reason that the self-loathing aspect of Proust’s writing came to the fore in my reading of the Search is that I started the year by reading what may be the greatest portrait of that emotion in the canon, Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. The book is so effective at depicting its lead character’s self-disgust in the decade before Stonewall that it seems to turn up “gay self-hate” in other works like barium sulfate turns up the image of tumors on a gastrointestinal CT scan. Hence not all of the books in my little canon are necessarily best described by the term “self-loathing,” but they all show the impact of shame on the characters and in some cases the authors. Baldwin’s lead character, a blonde, white American who frequents Paris’ gay scene in the 1950s, is seemingly incapable of carrying out a simple love affair with a hot Italian bartender without constant contradictory thoughts of disdain. A characteristic thought from our narrator about Giovanni, the Italian: “While I felt his anguish entering me, like acid in his sweat, and felt that my heart would burst for him, I also wondered, with an unwilling, unbelieving contempt, why I had thought him strong.” The narrator’s comment on members of the gay community: “Guillame’s disgusting. They all are.” Additionally, an American difficulty showing affection is contrasted ostensibly with Giovanni’s Italian manner, but implicitly with gay people specifically: “These people have a different style from us. They’re much more demonstrative. I can’t help it. I just can’t—do all that.”\nNot long after I read Baldwin’s novel I picked up Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar, a key gay-themed novel that was shocking and advanced for its era. Vidal’s book was different from Baldwin’s, less explicitly about self-revulsion. I had been expecting a somewhat butch gay romance between athletic men, which is what I’d heard about it. Vidal himself had pointed out such a story was unprecedented. “Until then, American novels of ‘inversion’ dealt with transvestites or with lonely bookish boys who married unhappily and pined for Marines. I broke that mold” (Vidal xiii). What surprised me was that like Proust the book painted a sweeping portrait of gay life in multiple scenes and communities of the American 1940s, including Hollywood’s closeted gay scene. Running through the whole book, however, was the lead character’s ambivalence about gay life. Unlike Baldwin’s narrator, Jim Willard is unambivalent about who he’s chosen for himself as a partner. But with that choice, his childhood jock friend Bob, unavailable, he distances himself from other homosexuals. Here are his thoughts after a lover, Paul Sullivan, with whom he has an ambivalent relationship, tells him he is like other gays:\n“Sullivan had revealed him to himself as just like the others, varying hardly at all from what must be a familiar pattern. With self-knowledge came alarm. If he was really like the others, then what sort of future could he have? Endless drifting, promiscuity, defeat? No. It was not possible. He was different, Bob was different. After all, hadn’t he been able to fool everyone, even those like himself, even Sullivan? Deliberately he banished the unsought revelation to that part of his brain where he disposed of unpleasant memories” (Vidal 85).\nWhen Vidal was preparing to release The City and the Pillar he sent copies of the novel to all the gay writers he admired. One of them was Thomas Mann, who lived a semi-closeted existence as a married man with many children. Mann sent back a terse word of praise and misspelled Vidal’s name. But years later, as Vidal explains in the preface to an edition of City, Gore discovered Mann had written extensively about the novel in his diaries: “Friday 24 .. [19]50. … In the evening continued reading The City and the Pillar. Interesting, yes,. An important human document, of excellent and enlightening truthfulness. The sexual, the affairs with various men, is still incomprehensible to us. How can one sleep with men”? (Vidal xviii). Death in Venice, was the third of the gay-themed classics I read this year, and the most disturbing as Mann’s lead character’s attraction is (platonically) to a child. It is often discussed in the context of self-loathing, as for example the lead, once he becomes obsessed with a boy, begins painting his face and attempting to be made up to look much younger. Mann paints the picture of how ridiculous he looks in this attempt. Uncomfortable with himself, Mann’s antihero fits into the panorama of the century’s portraits of self-loathing or at any rate self-ambivalence.\nFamously, the early works of gay literature often depicted great tragedies that seemed to “punish” their heroes. Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray is a classic example. I read an edition of the novel that featured material that Wilde had cut from the finished work at the prompting of his publishers, and that made clear what had been cut and what had not. The publishers axed sections that made clear Wilde’s painter Basil is in love with the antihero Dorian Gray, and otherwise held Wilde back whenever he got explicit. But even Wilde’s draft is darkly negative about homosexuality. As is widely known to even those who have not read the novel, Basil paints a large portrait of Dorian that ends up changing as though by magic, becoming more gruesome whenever Dorian commits a sin. In the penultimate moments of the book the portrait is hideous, and Dorian looks like a million bucks, never aging. But late in the book Basil confronts Dorian about rumors he’s been hearing. “Why is it that every young man that you take up seems to come to grief, to go to the bad at once?” Wilde had Basil ask Dorian in an early draft. The publishers had him change that line to “Why is your friendship so hateful to young men?” (Wilde 179). On the next page, Wilde’s original Basil remarks, “What about your country house, and the life that is led there? It is quite sufficient to say of a young man that he goes to stay at Selby Royal, for people to sneer and titter.” The second sentence in that line was struck out by publishers. Even the finished novel, though, is nearly explicit that Dorian’s mounting sins have to do with a certain effeminate difference that was characteristic of his author, who was eventually convicted of “gross indecency” with a younger man.\n“Fashion, by which what is really fantastic becomes for a moment universal, and Dandyism, which, in its own way, is an attempt to assert the absolute modernity of beauty, had, of course, their fascination for [Dorian]. His mode of dressing, and the particular styles that he affected from time to time, had their marked influence on the young exquisites of the Mayfair balls and Pall Mall Club windows, who copied him in everything that he did, and tried to reproduce the accidental charm of his graceful, though to him only half-serious, fopperies. For, while he was but too ready to accept the position that was almost immediately offered to him on his coming of age, and found, indeed, a subtle pleasure in the thought that he might really become to the London of his own day what to imperial Neronian Rome the author of the Satyricon had once been, yet in his inmost heart he desired to be something more than a mere arbiter elegantiarum, to be consulted on the wearing of a jewel, or the knotting of a neck-tie, or the conduct of a cane. He sought to elaborate some new scheme of life that would have its reasoned philosophy and its ordered principles and find in the spiritualizing of the senses its highest realisation” (Wilde 152-153).\nThe Satyricon is another notorious book from gay literary history, in this case Rome under the emperor Nero, and “arbiter elegantiarum” is the title its author Petronius was granted by the emperor before his fortunes turned and Nero demanded he commit suicide. In assuming knowledge of these things, and in referencing the Satyricon at all, Wilde is more than hinting to his audience what Dorian’s vice is. And as Sedgwick pointed out, the novel’s depiction of Dorian’s corruption became a foundational fixture in the canon of “homophobic mastery.”\nBack to Proust\nProust may have met Wilde (as a possibly apocryphal tale has it) and included references to the great gay writer in his masterpiece (Carter 87-89). Though France had no laws against homosexuality in Proust’s time, unlike England, Wilde’s tragedy influenced him in more than one way. He was probably emboldened and restrained, both, by his example. But the legacy of shame is one impact. Even volume one of In Search of Lost Time, though it details a heterosexual boy’s childhood in famously gorgeous detail, contains a gay scene, between two girls. When his first lesbian characters express their love, Proust’s narrator uses the word “evil” multiple times to describe them. Ostensibly this is because the girls have spat on a picture of one of the girls’ father, and the word evil is used from the girl’s perspective. But the strength of the word is to modern ears shocking as his initial description of lesbian love, particularly when you consider that he didn’t even believe evil existed until 1896, as Friedländer reports. He changed his mind about the existence of evil because of the Dreyfuss Affair, a political scandal in France the influence of which coats his novels (Friedländer 64). 1896 is before the first volume was written, but his change of mind nonetheless makes his word choice intriguing. Proust empathizes with the lesbian girl, Mademoiselle Vintueil, but the intensity of the word that he uses to portray her revulsion to her own feelings feels like it comes from an author who understood the extremity self-loathing can reach. Here’s Proust’s use of the word evil:\n“Sadists of Mademoiselle Vintueil’s sort are creatures so purely sentimental, so naturally virtuous that even sensual pleasure appears to them as something bad, the privilege of the wicked. And when they allow themselves to yield to it for a moment, they are trying to climb into the skin of the wicked, and to make their accomplices do likewise, so as to have the illusion, for a moment, of escaping from their own tender-hearted and virtuous natures into the inhuman world of pleasure. … It was not evil that gave her the idea of pleasure, that seemed attractive to her; it was pleasure itself that she saw as evil. And since, each time she indulged in it, it was accompanied by perverse thoughts that at other times had no place in her virtuous nature, she came to see pleasure as something diabolical, to identify it with Evil.”\nFrom then on, most of the depictions of lesbian love are from the perspective of jealous males, a subject that has been treated extensively in the literature, particularly in the excellent Proust’s Lesbianism by Elisabeth Ladenson. The depiction of “Gomorrah,” as the lesbian world is known in Proust, is at least as fraught from the perspective of a discussion of “gay self-hate” as the depiction of “Sodom,” as Proust calls the gay male world.\nThe complexity of Proust’s relationship to the subject is honest and perplexing and off-putting at times. What sticks with me, however, is that even Proust’s ambivalent heterosexual narrator uses the word “beauty” to describe the first male gay relationship he spies. He pours his comic skill into the scene, but pauses to remark on its poignancy: “In any case this scene was not entirely comical, it was marked by something strange, or natural if you will, whose beauty continued to increase.” The beauty of In Search of Lost Time continues to increase over time as well, even though it bears witness to an era when attitudes towards gay life were complicated even for its champions. The painful honesty in its commitment to tell multiple sides of the gay story only enriches the experience of reading the masterwork.\n"},{"title":"British television show \u0026ldquo;Number 10\u0026rdquo; got personal with Disraeli and Gladstone","url":"https://stagesscreens.com/posts/2026-08-23-number-10/","date":"August 23, 2026","tags":["Film"],"text":"British television show \"Number 10\" got personal with Disraeli and Gladstone William Ewart Gladstone ranked second, third or fourth on all five of the lists of the best prime ministers in UK history that are cataloged on Wikipedia, which includes lists compiled by The Times of London and four prominent historians. But as I noted in a blog post last year, Gladstone has never been the subject of a movie, unlike Winston Churchill, who ranks first on all of the lists, and Benjamin Disraeli, who ranks considerably lower. There is however one filmed representation of Gladstone, a fifty-minute episode of a 1983 ITV television series called \u0026ldquo;Number 10,\u0026rdquo; named for the home of the Prime Minister at Number 10 Downing Street. This month I managed to find a copy of an NTSC DVD of the series, which I’d struggled to find when I wrote that article. The show presents a character study of seven prime ministers that is unmatched by anything comparable on American television.\nThe first episode makes a solid case that Gladstone’s story is interesting enough to merit dramatic treatment. It focuses on the splashiest subject in Gladstone’s biographies, namely his habit of “night walks” on which he picked up sex workers and brought them back to Number 10 Downing Street, allegedly to reform them under the aegis of an organization called the Church Penitentiary Association of the Reclamation of Fallen Women. The $60,000 question has always been whether Gladstone, who spent time alone with these women, was really driven by altruistic motives, or whether the night walks were an elaborate cover for a simple predilection for something seamier. The episode raises that question, lets us ponder the evidence for 35 minutes, and then finally proposes its own answer: Gladstone was tortured by temptation, and was pushing that boundary, but never gave in. The show’s climax is plausibly argued. We know Gladstone to have been plagued by a hyperactive Christian conscience, marking in his diary instances of flogging himself for what can therefore rightly be known as self-abuse. The actor who plays Gladstone, Denis Quilley, looks just like the historical Gladstone, and his energetic, pompous, bombastic manner plays like a plausible read on the Grand Old Man’s demeanor. The episode is one of the best of the seven in the series, each of which covers a different prime minister.\nWhere the Gladstone episode is intriguing for the psychological study it includes, the episode dedicated to Benjamin Disraeli is fascinating for an element of psychology it excludes. The Disraeli segment is interesting in part from the standpoint of queer studies, not because it depicts him as gay but because its subject raises interesting questions for those inclined to interpret him that way. Disraeli was prime minister twice: The first time was brief, less than a year in duration, and the second time, which lasted much longer, he was in his seventies. The \u0026ldquo;Number 10\u0026rdquo; episode, entitled “Dizzy,” brings us the latter Disraeli, a septuagenarian who was nonetheless engaged in wooing two women at once. One of them, a very much married Lady Selina Bradford, received literally 1,100 letters from Disraeli. The other woman was Lady Bradford’s sister, Lady Chesterfield, to whom Disraeli proposed marriage specifically as a way of getting closer to Selina. Lady Chesterfield, who received 500 letters from Disraeli, turned him down. (Ah, but who wouldn’t have found such a proposal charming?) The letters are catalogued in a two-volume book from 1929 entitled The Letters of Disraeli to Lady Bradford and Lady Chesterfield. Biographer Robert Blake says these letters are among the great sources not only for Disraeli’s biography but for “the times until Disraeli’s death” in 1881. Blake’s characterization in his 1966 biography Disraeli of the prime minister as having ‘fallen head over heels in love with Lady Bradford” is interesting given that in a later book (Disraeli’s Grand Tour, his travelogue of Disraeli’s youthful trip through what the British called “the East” or “the Orient”) the same Blake says that his relationship with another woman named Henrietta Sykes was “the only real love in his life.” Blake also notes that “it is difficult to avoid the impression that, although flattered at the attention, and delighted to be ‘in the know,’ [Lady Bradford] never really cared for him much.” However, Blake does not speculate, as do Kuhn and Buckle, on just how passionate Disraeli’s attraction to Bradford was.\nStill, because Disraeli was a prominent dandy, a prototype for the aesthetes of Oscar Wilde’s day who was openly admired and emulated by the great dramatist, questions about his sexuality have always followed him. Biographer William Kuhn wrote a study of his sexuality titled The Politics of Pleasure in 2006, pointing out for example that Gladstone’s rhetoric against Disraeli sometimes flirted with accusation of homosexuality. Kuhn presents Disraeli as a man with an orientation “out of the ordinary,” recognized to some extent by some who knew him. Disraeli was a puzzle to our modern stereotypes: He was a flamboyant dresser with close platonic relationships with women and few but passionate, intense relationships with (especially younger) men; a man who famously married a much older woman for her money (but who, she said, would do it again for love). In what he described as an autobiographical novel, Contarini Fleming, Disraeli had his lead character explore a “love” relationship in his school days with a boy named Musaeus, in an anecdote so detailed and odd that historical novelist Maurice Edelman went so far as to depict it as a real event in Disraeli’s life. So, the modern reader might be initially puzzled by his ardor towards the 55-plus-year-old Lady Bradford. As early as 1920, seminal biographer George Buckle wrote that “Disraeli’s chivalrous devotion to women was independent of physical attraction and the appeal of youth … It is a most honourable feature in his composition that, in relation to women, as in his relation to the problems of life and eternity, he rejected absolutely any physical or sensuous standard, and poured out his devotion before an ideal, regardless of the ravages of care and time.” This language, were Disraeli not interpreted as gay, might be considered offensive: Fifty-five is, after all, pretty young to a 70-year-old, and “the ravages of care and time” is an extreme description of so young a woman even in Victorian times when life expectancies were much lower. But descriptions of Disraeli as interested intellectually in women but not physically stretch back further than that. The granddaughter of Disraeli’s contemporary Lady Londonderry wrote that “for Disraeli Woman was the perfect companion, and it is remarkable that the pleasure he experienced in female society was largely intellectual and often quite independent of physical attraction.” Kuhn, after quoting this, adds “That someone could have recognized this about him so close to his own generation is evidence that Disraeli’s contemporaries knew that Disraeli’s orientation to the opposite sex was out of the ordinary.”\nRichard Pasco plays Disraeli with a robust zeal that seems directly influenced by George Arliss’s Oscar-winning 1929 portrayal, though with more realism. The episode deftly juxtaposes Disraeli’s courting of Lady Bradford and Lady Chesterfield with the other woman in Disraeli’s life at this time: Queen Victoria, played with convincing restraint by Zena Walker. The attempt to replace Disraeli’s beloved wife Mary Anne Disraeli, who died in 1872, is depicted sensitively if somewhat puzzlingly: We never quite see what Disraeli sees in either Lady Bradford or her sister.\nThe other episodes in the \u0026ldquo;Number 10\u0026rdquo; series, all written by Terence Feely, author of a book about the personal lives of the prime ministers that bears the same title, are equally fascinating capsules in British history. Seeing Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour Prime Minister, struggle to furnish \u0026ldquo;Number 10\u0026rdquo; because he can’t afford it is as instructive in British politics as anything in the series. That’s why there’s been three generations of Tory governments, MacDonald observes in the teleplay: No one else could afford to be prime minister. The episode on Asquith seizes on a story too little told on this side of the pond at least: the extraordinary battle with the House of Lords that was necessary to the passage of the revolutionary People’s Budget, which instituted a progressive income tax and established a safety net for the poor and elderly. Also featured are David Lloyd George, Arthur Wellesley the Duke of Wellington, and William Pitt the Younger. Nothing quite so entertainingly concise has been produced for American television on the comparable figures in US political history.\n"},{"title":"Is O\u0026rsquo;Neill Forgotten? And Six Other Ruminations on the Ever-Regenerating Genre of the Musical","url":"https://stagesscreens.com/posts/2026-07-28-is-oneill-forgotten-and-six-other/","date":"July 28, 2026","tags":["Theater"],"text":"Is O'Neill Forgotten? And Six Other Ruminations on the Ever-Regenerating Genre of the Musical The hard part of having an aging legacy as a playwright is “being forgotten,” confesses Eugene O’Neill in the Goodman Theatre’s new musical Iceboy!, Or The Completely Untrue Story of How Eugene O’Neill Came to Write ‘The Iceman Cometh.’ The O’Neill character in the Goodman’s outlandish screwball comedy, played by TV’s Nick Offerman (\u0026ldquo;Parks and Recreation\u0026rdquo;), ought to know if he’s being forgotten. He begins each act with a survey of the audience: “How many of you have heard of me?” (The results are divided. The upper balcony has largely not heard of Eugene O’Neill; the main floor largely has.) “Boo yourselves if you’ve never heard of my play The Iceman Cometh.” (Lots of hearty boos.)\nIceboy! is one of seven musicals spanning quite a cross-section of the history of the genre that I happened to see in this strangely musical July. Iceboy! is not the best of them, and in many ways is the worst, but it’s the most interesting place to start. Together the musicals show the art form over time struggling against an atrophy not unlike that described by O’Neill, and often emerging triumphant.\nIceboy! It’s as though the creators of this new musical, which also stars Offerman’s wife Megan Mullally (who won two Emmys and four SAG awards playing Karen Walker on \u0026ldquo;Will \u0026amp; Grace\u0026rdquo;) had read my blog post last October titled “Is Eugene O’Neill’s reputation getting fragile?” In that blog post, I noted that O’Neill is in his longest drought on Broadway in 100 years, that until the pandemic his plays usually got performed roughly every other year, and that in the last seven years Broadway has not staged one. Meanwhile a 2020 movie depicted O’Neill as a racist jerk just in time for the revision of racial priorities the American theater affected after the killing of George Floyd. Was this the beginnings of a weakening reputation of the sort O’Neill experienced after his death, until Long Day’s Journey into Night was performed posthumously?\nNow comes this strange tribute to O’Neill, which makes much of his fading reputation, and fills the great majority of its stage time with silly gags that really have nothing to do with the playwright or his plays. The premise is that the show tells the story of how O’Neill came up with The Iceman Cometh: A caveman encased in a chunk of ice is melted in the present day and bonds with an aging actress (Mullally) doing substandard Broadway work. The show commits to the bit thoroughly, with a relentless pointlessness that O’Neill and other characters mock as it progresses.\nIt’s a telling commentary on the state of the modern musical if this is what the creators think will revive O’Neill on Broadway. In fact, one could take that as part of the message of the show, the plot of which centers around Mullally and her fiancé’s attempts to find success on the Great White Way. This show goes out of its way to avoid a point altogether, and its obvious aspiration to transfer to Broadway suggests it feels what makes it there today is not much more substantive. Thus, writers Mark Holleman (music and lyrics), Jay Reiss (lyrics and book) and Erin Quinn Purcell (book) look back at O’Neill’s heyday with nostalgia and absolutely no pretensions to taste.\nA Little Night Music Where Iceboy! erred too far on the side of the laughs, the brilliant A Little Night Music at the Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire, Illinois this month caught a perfect balance between comedy and melancholy, landing squarely where a good Sondheim musical should: reveling in ambivalence.\nAmbivalence is Sondheim’s great theme. He wrote about it most explicitly in his first solo musical, Company, which gave us so many iconic lines about indecision over marriage: “You\u0026rsquo;re Sorry-Grateful. Regretful-Happy.\u0026quot; But the theme of indecision runs throughout his work, even in his songs for the 1990s summer blockbuster Dick Tracy, in which Mandy Patinkin and Madonna sing of their plans to reveal romantic feelings, only to drop them in a fit of ambivalence:\u0026ldquo;With so much to gain, there\u0026rsquo;s too much to lose.\u0026rdquo; A Little Night Music is less explicitly about ambivalence than Company but its depiction of several simultaneous love triangles is still dripping in emotive ambiguity. Sondheim’s solo work was born in the swinging 1970s of New York after the sexual revolution, and thus there is always a sense that as the barriers of sexual propriety come down and the options for love are greatly expanded to multiple potential lovers, the result is an ambivalence about which route in life to choose. “I still want and/or love you,” one character sings in this production. “Before I met you … many things were different,” says another: “Better, worse—different anyway.” Another character describes life as “the same old routine,” and is asked “But it has its compensations?” “Yes,” she replies, “No,” she adds, “yes,” she concludes. “That’s a rather ambiguous answer,” comes the retort. And when the starring couple launch the underrated gem “You Must Meet My Wife,” there are still more ambiguities:\n“I suppose it’s time to talk about my wife.” “Boast or complaint?” “Both I expect.”\nWith several love triangles operating at once, the Marriott production brought out the Chekhov in this notably Chekhovian masterpiece. Everyone is in love with the wrong person, just as in the Russian master’s plays. But though this is staged in 1900s Sweden, it premiered in 1973 New York, rather than in Chekhov\u0026rsquo;s pre-revolution Russia, so the characters express their desires more often in that trademark ambivalence.\nChekhov used to complain that directors misinterpreted his plays as tragedies. They were really comedies, he insisted, which surprises some readers of his parades of star-crossed love triangles and suicide attempts. The best productions catch the tension between both comedy and tragedy. Similarly, when we left this production of A Little Night Music, my party debated the extent to which this musical is a farce. “It’s a slow-motion farce,” my brother asserted, picking up on the way the show slowly moved from gag to gag. “You could have had slamming and opening doors, like in a Michael Frayn comedy.” But he liked my description of it as Chekhovian rather than purely farcical. The fact is the characters have debated that very question—are we in a farce?\u0026ndash;since before the source material, Ingmar Bergman’s lovely and hilarious 1955 film Smiles of a Summer Night, inspired Sondheim to adapt it. When the situation veers towards situation comedy in the Bergman movie, one character avers, “We are not on a stage!” “Yes, but it’s still a damn farce,” her lover answers. In the number that turned out to be Sondheim’s biggest hit, “Send in the Clowns,” the composer puts that line into verse: “Was that a farce? My fault I fear. Me as a merry-go-round. You as King Lear.”\nMore so than Harold Prince’s 1975 movie of A Little Night Music with Elizabeth Taylor, or PBS’ 1991 broadcast of the New York City Opera production from Lincoln Center, which are the productions available to watch on video, this one captures the bittersweet balance between the uproariously comic and the lamentable. A very strong cast of New York and Chicago actors is highlighted by Andrew Samonsky as the romantic lead, managing to be both smarmy and likeable as the role calls for, and Veronica Garza as Charlotte, who brings a comic style that recalls Kristine Nielsen. In the end, things start resembling the multiplying marriages of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. This is a comparison oft-made to this musical, including in Woody Allen’s A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, which is also partly inspired by Smiles of a Summer Night. The emerging happiness at the end is presented as a way out of the adulterously polyamorous mix-ups: “A coherent existence after so many years of muddle.”\nOctet When A Little Night Music first emerged in 1973 it must have felt the way Dave Malloy’s Octet feels in 2026: a breath of stylistic fresh air. Octet, described as a ‘chamber choir musical,” is nothing like Sondheim, except that the lyrical zingers fly fast and furious, and that’s part of what makes it feel so urgently necessary now. Five decades after the emergence of the master, Broadway has seemingly tried nearly everything to respond to his revolutionary makeover of the musical, from imitation to counter-programming. There have been many innovations since, including Malloy’s own work (most notably Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812)but Octet’s concept is so original structurally that it makes the rest of the musical scene feel like it has been stuck in a rut. The eight short stories, all told with only a tuning pipe for instrumentation (there’s even a short, stunning symphony with both melodic and atonal movements played entirely on tuning pipes by the eight-person chamber choir), play like New Yorker stories sung in the raw. Nothing like that has been attempted before in a genre that sometimes feels out of ideas. Having debuted off-Broadway at New York’s Signature Theatre in 2019 and set for a musical adaptation soon by director Lin-Manuel Miranda, Octet is a cappella, episodic, and unlike any other musical you’ve ever seen. The new production, closing August 2, at the Goodman Theatre has already been described by Chris Jones of the Chicago Tribune as “clearly” the leading candidate for Chicago’s best production of the year.\nThe Goodman’s production, running next door to Iceboy! in its smaller studio space the Owen, is a transfer from a wildly successful North Side storefront production by the Raven Theatre. It’s hard to imagine the cast being any tighter or more kaleidoscopically diverse in the Off-Broadway production than they are here, and in fact I like many of the performers from the Chicago production better than I like the voices on the delightful Off-Broadway cast recording. Octet finds eight Internet addicts at an addicts anonymous group, sitting in a circle and sharing one by one their individual tales of woe. The first, for example, is told by a woman who got caught in a viral video having an emotional meltdown. The second song is by a young gay man apparently addicted to the video game Candy Crush. The stories progress in intensity to the climax, which appears to prove (at least to its narrator, a former atheist scientist) the existence of God. The show sheds nearly all the cliches of the musical business, offering something unique in each of its be-bopping a cappella 100 minutes. Having caught Malloy’s work first before he exploded on Broadway with Natasha, in a 2008 musical adaptation of Beowulf remounted at Harvard’s tiny Club Oberon theater, which has since been taken over by a not-for-profit, it’s thrilling to see his evolution. Miranda’s movie, which will star Amanda Seyfried, Rachel Zegler, Phillipa Soo, Jonathan Groff, Gaten Matarazzo and others, will hopefully bring his burgeoning imagination to a new audience.\nThe Abduction from the Seraglio Speaking of productions that dropped in a moment of potential transition for the musical theater, I also caught conductor James Conlon’s concert performance of Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio at Ravinia’s Martin Theatre on July 18. The show is not an opera; it’s what was known as a singspiel, which carries many of the characteristics of what we now call musical theater: spoken dialogue and songs in alternation telling a story. Abduction was commissioned by Emperor Joseph II, the brother of Marie Antoinette, in 1782 for the Nationalsingspiel, a company devoted (briefly) to creating works in the German language rather than Italian as was common with opera at the time. This was in a sense another effort to breathe life into an withering form, and Mozart’s euphonious melodies are an artistic triumph. While the company ultimately failed, Abduction has stayed in the repertoire ever since, though it is probably Mozart’s least performed canonical opera. I’ve now seen all seven of Mozart’s repertoire operas (and a few of his many, many noncanonical operas as well) in performance, so it was a milestone for me.\nMost of the dialogue in this production has been replaced by narration. Tony-winning actor Jefferson Mays (I Am My Own Wife) played both the part of the evil-turned-statesmanlike Pasha Selim and the narrator, reading in between arias Conlon’s own fascinating characterization of the show. (Much of the narration he read was also in the program in an essay by Conlon.) The narrator not only tells us what happens in the plot, but its significance, noting for example the representation of the Turkish people in Western art at the time: “The Ottoman Empire, which stopped at the gates of Vienna, had been an enormous threat. For the Viennese, the Turks were a menacing enemy. Although that was greatly diminished about a hundred years before Mozart was writing, the cultural stereotypes remained. In the theater, fear and loathing often were mitigated by rendering the Turks insignificant, evil or simply comic.” (For more on this, I recommend Larry Wolff’s book The Singing Turk, a deep dive on the representation of Turkish persons in the opera.) The narration thus was frankly more interesting than much of the comic dialogue Mozart’s librettist Gottlieb Stephanie wrote for the original singspiel. (The libretto was lifted without permission from another librettist.) The audience clearly felt the highlight of the show was soprano Kathryn Lewek, with good reason. Lewek, who holds the record for the most performances as the Queen of the Night in Mozart’s Magic Flute at the Metropolitan Opera, breathed soaring life into each of her arias. The evening turned one of Mozart’s weaker works into an absorbing two and a half hours.\nTop Hat The musical on the West End in London must have been in a somewhat dour state in 2013, because the coveted Laurance Olivier Award for Best Musical went to Top Hat, a somewhat empty if enjoyable adaption of a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie from 1935 that represented perhaps the peak of their careers. The stage adaptation never even transferred to Broadway, as most of the Olivier winners do. Over the summer I saw both the stage adaption, thanks to the marvels of modern-day streaming on PBS’ Great Performances, and the original. Maybe I saw them in the right order because I greatly enjoyed the performances of the pair who played the Astaire and Rogers roles, Phillip Attmore and Amara Okere (in a revival filmed in January 2026—this pair did not lead the Olivier-winning production) until I saw Astaire and Rogers. They are a hard pair to live up to. The plot, which is a little too flimsy for the two and half hour treatment in the stage version, concerns the Astaire character, Jerry, and his attempt to woo a woman who believes him to be his manager. One of the best reasons to watch are the many great Irving Berlin tunes that made the hit parade as a result of this show: “Cheek to Cheek,” the title song and “Isn’t it a Lovely Day (To Be Caught in the Rain).” But it’s also thrilling to see the emergence of Astaire and Rogers at the top of their game, lifting spirits in a way that no one quite has since. Tom Holland apparently just signed on to play Astaire in a biopic and plans to do all his dancing in one take, as Astaire did at the time. If he pulls off the difficult challenge, it might be the sort of role that attracts Oscar buzz.\nThe Band Wagon The brand of musical movie that had heretofore starred Astaire and Rogers was in danger of atrophying out of existence in 1953. As a lengthy essay on Band Wagon in the Paris Reviewimplied in 2017, Astaire was being eclipsed by Gene Kelly. Two years prior director Vincente Minnelli had brought Kelly great success in An American in Paris. Even more troublingly, in a plot twist the Paris Review somehow manages not to cover, Ginger Rogers had been almost completely shelved as a film star. As Wikipedia puts it with amusing bluntness, “Rogers\u0026rsquo;s film career entered a period of gradual decline in the 1950s, as parts for older actresses became more difficult to obtain.” Thus was born the concept of The Band Wagon, in which Astaire plays an aging dancing actor who has gone three years without a film role. He is passed up by the paparazzi in favor of Ava Gardner in the opening scenes of the movie. His revival comes when he is offered a new Broadway role by the biggest director in the legitimate theater. The proposal: He is to play a Faust character who sells his soul to the devil for a bit of show biz success. Astaire’s character chafes at the suggestion. Faust is high art, he objects, and he remains an entertainer. But the director convinces him that high art and low art are all show biz by singing the enduring hit “That’s Entertainment!” Nothing is said of Rogers’ predicament—Astaire simply does his dance moves with a younger woman—but for Astaire the film ended up a success, just as does its play-within-a-movie. I chose to rent The Band Wagon this month because I noticed it was the only movie musical on the American Film Institute’s Top 25 movie musicals that I’d never seen. It placed at number 17 on that list, just below Top Hat. Contrasting the two plays feels like a seminar in the trajectory of the movie musical over the years of Astaire’s career. The Band Wagon is not as consistent a source of fun as Top Hat, and the scenes depicting Astaire’s Broadway musical are deadly dull, but as a source of rumination about the musical it came at just the right time.\nHadestown “Wait a minute,” I remember thinking the first time I saw Hadestown. “We are allowed to do stuff like this?!” My initial reaction was to wonder why I hadn’t seen anything so vibrant and original in years of attending the theater. Ten years after its debut Off-Broadway Hadestown ran last week in movie theaters, with a pro-shot of a 2025 performance on London’s West End with the original Broadway cast, Hadestown still feels just as fresh and moving. The movie theater run for Hadestown has topped all other musical pro-shots at the box office, including (just barely) Hamilton, with more than $10.2 million in ticket sales in just five days of theater screenings. At the screening I saw, the much-discussed “Hadestown gasp” at the climax of the ages-old plotline was still very much audible from multiple corners of the theater. In college in the 1990s I used to ask friends why musicals could not use the sort of sounds that were exciting me at the time, with acoustic instruments, bold melodies and diversity in orchestration. When the musical Once emerged I somewhat grudgingly granted that this had finally happened. (The musical to me was a somewhat bloated adaptation of a film that had a thrived on its spareness.) But Hadestown felt like a dream come true. For whatever reason I spent most of this movie appearance with saltwater on my cheeks, perhaps in anticipation of the climactic moment when Orpheus loses Eurydice, perhaps just in awe of the brilliance of the execution.\nI did not expect to spend the month contemplating the musical, but this septet of selections ended up creating an instructive picture of the way the genre regenerates itself periodically over time. The discussion in the world of opera in particular has centered recently around Timothée Chalamet’s much-discussed dismissal of opera and ballet earlier this year. He suggested people in those disciplines are ever trying to figure out how they can \u0026ldquo;keep this thing going\u0026rdquo; even though “no one cares.\u0026quot; While only one of the selections in this review is an opera, and the musical world has not attracted quite as cynical a reproach as Chalamet’s, even the worst of this sample suggest the art form of marrying music to the stage has plenty of life left. Musicals will continue to regenerate themselves and won\u0026rsquo;t be, as Iceboy!\u0026rsquo;s O\u0026rsquo;Neill fears his plays will be, forgotten.\n"},{"title":"An Isolate from the People","url":"https://stagesscreens.com/posts/2026-06-14-an-isolate-from-people-ibsens-canon-and/","date":"June 14, 2026","tags":["Theater"],"text":"An Isolate from the People  “It might seem harsh to say so, but the truth is that I am more and more convinced that as an all-round thinker, or, more properly, as a systematic thinker, Ibsen really doesn’t fit the bill. … But of course Ibsen is Ibsen, and I should be the last to complain that he is not Herbert Spencer.” - William Archer upon meeting Henrik Ibsen, as quoted in Henrik Ibsen: The Man \u0026amp; The Mask by Ivo De Figueiredo.\nAbsent from the end of Timeline Theatre’s new production of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People are the last lines of dialogue in the original play. The lead character, Dr. Thomas Stockmann, has been driven almost out of town by a mob angry because he has revealed to them that the water in the springs of his spa town are contaminated. Focused only on the money they stand to lose, and not the risk to people’s lives, the townspeople refuse to accept the inconvenient truth about their environment. Does this 1882 plotline sound familiar today? Paradoxically, however, Ibsen ends this eternally relevant political drama not on a statement about environmental degradation, or a commitment to fight for the truth, but with an arcane observation Stockmann makes about himself. The following is from Project Gutenberg’s rather stiff 2000 translation of the play, by R. Farquharson Sharp:\nMrs. Stockmann: Let us hope it won\u0026rsquo;t be the wolves that will drive you out of the country, Thomas.\nDr. Stockmann: Are you out of your mind, Katherine? Drive me out! Now—when I am the strongest man in the town!\nMrs. Stockmann: The strongest—now?\nDr. Stockmann: Yes, and I will go so far as to say that now I am the strongest man in the whole world.\nMorten: I say!\nDr. Stockmann (lowering his voice): Hush! You mustn\u0026rsquo;t say anything about it yet; but I have made a great discovery.\nMrs. Stockmann: Another one?\nDr. Stockmann: Yes. (Gathers them round him, and says confidentially:) It is this, let me tell you—that the strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.\nIn Timeline’s excellent new production those lines have vanished. The adapter is Amy Herzog, whose self-described “new version” of the play won Jeremy Strong a Best Actor Tony on Broadway in 2024. This was the Chicago debut of that translation. “That didn’t resonate with me at all,” Herzog told The New York Times of the final line about the man who stands alone. In the place of those words, the show ends with Stockmann pledging to keep working for the truth, not alone but supported by his family. “We just have to imagine that the water will be clean and safe and the truth will be valued,” Stockmann says. “We just have to imagine…” And the lights black out. The new version stresses what a group of committed individuals can accomplish together. I wonder to myself whether I think the new version edits the playwright’s intent too broadly. But I admire Herzog’s willingness to tell the playwright to shut up and stay on-message. The edits described above replace lines that are at odds with the rest of the play, lines that always struck me as out of nowhere as a theme, certainly idiosyncratic—and more than a little too defensive of Ibsen’s own personality as a recluse without (he said) many friends.\nWhen this month I saw the Timeline show, which inaugurated the company’s beautiful new theater in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood, it was the culmination of a few months’ reflection on the cantankerous, hermetic playwright. I’d slipped a little out of touch with him over the years, though I’ve been reading and seeing his work since seeing A Doll’s House in high school. I watched every video production I could get my hands on over the years, and read almost all his major works. My personal Ibsen project this year began after I read AS Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale, a story of a biographer who tries to write a biography of a biographer who has written about, among others, Ibsen. This year’s project was precipitated by the fact that I had experienced the entire Ibsen canon, short of three plays. Except for those nagging exceptions I’d read or seen all of the 16 mature Ibsen plays that are still produced and discussed, everything from 1866’s Brand to 1899’s When We Dead Awaken. So I acquired new versions of all three of the missing plays and read them that month, in February. Last night I also saw this year’s Hedda, a new film that sets Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler in the present day. With each Ibsen play I watched or read this year, I was stuck anew by the peculiar personality that made Ibsen conclude Enemy, arguably his most timeless, accessible play, with such navel-gazing phraseology.\nIbsen is the second most produced, and probably second most important playwright of all time behind Shakespeare. But he is an odd bird. Competing 19th century Scandinavian playwright August Strindberg called him “the angriest man in Europe,” and he was always stewing in his own isolated bile. Byatt’s fictional biographer Scholes Destry Scholes has Ibsen say why he was such a loner in The Biographer’s Tale:\n“Friends are an expensive luxury; and when one sinks all one’s capital in a vocation and a mission in life, then one cannot afford to have friends. The extravagance of keeping friends lies not in what one does for them, but what, out of consideration for them, one omits to do. On that account, many intellectual shoots are crippled in oneself. I have gone through this, and on that account, I have several years behind me, in which I did not succeed in being myself.”\nIbsen’s most recent biography, Ivo De Figueiredo’s 2019 Henrik Ibsen: The Man \u0026amp; The Mask, comments on the same phenomenon:\n“The powerful and penetrating appeal of the works is interesting enough, but for a biographer, naturally, what is most fascinating is … that he, so uncomfortable and helpless in social settings, should become a star, idolised and admired across an entire continent\u0026ndash;the poor son of a merchant in remote Norway turned into a celebrated European writer. And what is most fascinating of all is that the reason for the success of this metamorphosis probably has to be sought in the tension between his social incompetence and his genius.”\nHis “social incompetence.” That’s what his biographer thinks of the man who is most alone. (Not that I can talk about someone else’s social incompetence, nor can many of the bookish and isolated writers and readers who follow folks like Ibsen, but that’s neither here nor there.) Figueiredo goes on to suggest that in the late 19th century, Ibsen was so highly regarded that “his silence was interpreted as wisdom, his aversions as principles, his quarrelsome nature as a necessary outlet for inner spiritual wrestling. Indeed, every aspect of his personality was interpreted in terms of a rhetoric of necessity that transformed every failing into a virtue.”\nHerzog’s fix to the end of Enemy suggests that might be one of the reasons that theaters keep hiring new playwrights to adapt Ibsen. Every one of the scripts I read was a new adaption of Ibsen’s work, though not all necessarily as loose with his words as Herzog was with his conclusion to Enemy. Ibsen wrote brilliant plays that were ahead of their time but contained idiosyncrasies that were behind his time. That takes creative adaptation.\nIbsen was famous for his proto-feminism, writing insightful plays about the stifling treatment of women in the 19th century like _A Doll’s House_and Hedda Gabler, each of which features a heroine who is boxed into a terrible marriage and each of whom tries to get out. But outside of his plays he denied he was concerned with women’s rights, voiced support for “absolutism” in government and showed continual skepticism of democracy. He went so far as to suggest that the proletariat should be kept in check by the use of poison, Figueiredo said, adding that such language has been ignored by critics because if it were taken seriously, he might be “ineligible” for the cultural canon.\n“If we are to take Ibsen’s extra-literary comments on politics and society seriously, it is hard to ignore the irrationalism, the contempt for the masses, the cultivation of the elite, and a certain affinity with violence and the exercise of power,” Figueiredo writes. “Taken to extremes it provides a fine ideological thread that links Ibsen’s universe of ideas to the vitalism and cults of personality of the leader-figures of the century that followed his. Had it not been for the writing.”\nIndeed, the plays don’t show the intensely explosive language he used outside of his work. But the backwardness of his politics does show up. In the second act of Enemy, a show-down occurs between Stockmann, the elite, and the people of the town. This scene contains within it the kind of anti-democratic spark that often ignited Ibsen’s off-stage rhetoric. Herzog does the best she can with this, emphasizing the fact that Stockmann is a scientific expert. This makes the debate timely in an age when the marketplace of ideas in scientific debates is often filled with those who like to say “do your own research” but mean on social media rather than in scientific literature. But even Herzog leaves in a moment, for example, where Stockmann likens the less educated to dogs.\nFor the most part the plays are so immaculately constructed that the small idiosyncrasies that reveal his politics do stand out. Essayist James Wood says the plays are almost too well-constructed. In an essay on what Chekov does right, he uses Ibsen as a counterexample, quoting Chekov himself: \u0026ldquo;But listen, Ibsen is no playwright!” the Russian master protests. “Ibsen just doesn\u0026rsquo;t know life. In life it simply isn\u0026rsquo;t like that.\u0026rdquo; Wood writes: “Ibsen\u0026rsquo;s people are too comprehensible. We comprehend them as we comprehend fictional entities. He is always tying the moral shoelaces of his characters, making everything neat, presentable, knowable.”\nSo Ibsen’s people are too comprehensible, Wood argues. But the plays I read in February all have their shoelaces a little askew in one way or another. Stockmann has his thesis about the man who stands alone. The League of Youth (1869) begins neatly as a tale of a “radical” reformer who supports democracy in Norway but ends with that same reformer selling out those leftist principles each time a deal is offered him. This is mostly a nicely tied up argument about how virtue can be misled, but it gradually hints more and more as the play progresses at Ibsen’s anti-democratic feeling, which feels less timeless than the rest of Ibsen’s work. The opening of the play sparked riots from left-leaning youth. He tried to hedge as usual without taking a side between the left and the right. He preferred to speak in enigmatic metaphors not of support for the salvation of either side’s dogma but of “torpedoing the ark,” and playing (as Figueiredo analogizes) not with chessmen on either side of the playing board but knocking out the board itself altogether.\nWhen writing Emperor and Galilean, the play he wrote next, he spent years trying and failing to find his angle on the fascinating figure of Emperor Julian, who was the last Pagan emperor of the Roman empire. After the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870, he finally found he was able to write again. But what he crafted was a somewhat politically vague ode not as much in line with the theology of his last religious work, Brand, and not endorsing either Christianity or Paganism but an unspecific “third empire” that would spring in Hegelian style from the opposition of those competing religious empires.\n“Emperor and Galilean is not the first work I wrote in Germany,” Ibsen wrote, “but doubtless the first that I wrote under the influence of German spiritual life. When, in the autumn of 1868, I came from Italy to Dresden, I brought with me the plan of The League of Youth, and wrote that play in the following winter. During my four years’ stay in Rome, I had merely made various historical studies, and taken sundry notes, for Emperor and Galilean; I had not sketched out any definite plan, much less written any of it. My view of life was still, at that time, National-Scandinavian, wherefore I could not master the foreign material. Then, in Germany, I lived through the great time, the year of the war, and the development which followed it. This brought with it for me, at many points, an impulse of transformation. My conception of world-history and of human life had hitherto been a national one. It now widened into a racial conception; and then I could write Emperor and Galilean.”\nWe are told by Archer, who wrote the introduction to an edition of the massive two-part play, that this does not mean what it sounds like, a conception of a Germanic master race. It’s about the human race, he says. And in fact Ibsen and his family (riskily) supported the French while living in Germany during the Franco-Prussian War. But again Ibsen’s words beg for an editor because his off-kilter personality gets in the way of his paradoxically shoe-tied perfection.\n“A change of front in our conception of life and of the world is no parochial matter,” Ibsen wrote in 1888. “And we Scandinavians, as compared with other European nations, have not yet got beyond the parish-council standpoint. But nowhere do you find a parish-council anticipating and furthering ‘the third empire.’” On September 24, 1887 he said, similarly, “I have sometimes been called a pessimist: and indeed I am one, inasmuch as I do not believe in the eternity of human ideals. But I am also an optimist, inasmuch as I fully and confidently believe in the ideals’ power of propagation and of development. Especially and definitely do I believe that the ideals of our time, as they pass away, are tending towards that which, in my drama of Emperor and Galilean, I have designated as ‘the third empire.’ Let me therefore drain my glass to the growing, the coming time.”\nSo he kept speaking of that third empire well after he had moved onto other plays when called on to speak politically. But it had never been clear what the third empire practically might mean.\nThe third and final play I read in February, Pillars of the Community(sometimes called Pillars of Society), was the prototype for the first of Arthur Miller’s great explorations of the conflict between public and private morality, All My Sons. Miller’s play is about a manufacturer of airplanes during World War II who knowingly let faulty airplane parts into the planes. Ibsen’s play is about a businessman who knowingly sends out ships on the seas that are not safe. In both cases the businessmen have reason to believe by play’s end that their sons were on the dangerous vessels. In some ways this was a more politically daring work than Ibsen had been writing: there were shipmen at the time who were in fact sending out ships knowingly that weren’t seaworthy, Figueiredo says. But Ibsen’s play ends idiosyncratically with a happy ending for the tycoon. “The spirit of freedom, and the spirit of truth, these are the pillars of the community” is the enigmatic final line.\nFinally, last night I watched the new Hedda by director Nia DaCosta. This film shows how hard it is to fix Ibsen for a modern audience, despite his forward-looking treatment of women. The film was a success critically in part because it was faithful in Ibsen’s depiction of a strong woman tragically trapped in a mismatched marriage and a limiting role in society. But it had the challenge all productions of Hedda Gabler do: the problematic ending. Ibsen’s Hedda has married a man who does not inspire her, to understate. She is in love with another man—or, in this new film, a woman—who has just finished a book that represents his life’s work. Hedda burns the book for spite, then hands her love a revolver, imagining his dying a “beautiful death.” He shoots himself, but in the stomach, causing Heda to recoil at the grotesqueness of the death. Details of this plot were changed in the movie.\nAfter the movie was over, the room I watched it in exploded into debate. I spent a couple of hours arguing over whether Ibsen had intended to support Hedda’s famous decision to kill herself at the end of the play in order to achieve a “beautiful death.” I felt Ibsen was critiquing aestheticism, which before the end of the 19th century put notions of what is beautiful ahead even of the idea of saving one’s own life, romanticizing suicide in much the way Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther had done at the end of the previous century. My debate partner felt there was an extent to which Ibsen was romanticizing the beautiful death himself too. We read notes from Ibsen that he’d written after writing the play: “In the fourth act when Hedda finds out that he has shot himself, she is jubilant … [Eilert] had courage. … Life isn’t tragic \u0026hellip; Life is ridiculous … And that’s what I [Ibsen] can’t bear.” One of the notes seemed to imply Ibsen did not endorse Hedda’s view that shooting oneself through the bowels is less “beautiful” than through the temple. “Do you know what happens in the novels? All those who kill themselves – through the head – not in the stomach – How ridiculous – how baroque.” This debate is a dilemma each production potentially faces: In an age of trigger warnings for the mere mention of such themes, what do we make of a playwright who forces us to debate such a gruesome point. The famous conclusion of Hedda, which has been likened to a female Hamlet, shows that strange sensibility of Ibsen’s: not quite of his time and not quite out of it.\nByatt’s novel, which started all this reflection on Ibsen for me this year, quotes Ibsen on his own social awkwardness:\n“I know that I have the failing of not coming close to those people who want to open up completely. I can never bring myself to bare myself. I have a feeling that all I have available in personal relations is a false expression of that which I bear deep within me, and which is really myself; therefore I prefer to keep it locked up inside, and that is why we sometimes seem to stand as if we were observing each other at a distance.”\nThe “rigid gnome” that was Ibsen, Byatt’s fictional biographer writes, “was obsessed with the idea of being himself. He was so very sure, it appeared, that he had a true self to be … Maybe this so-dreadfully desired, so elaborated real self was an absence of self, a freely-moving, flickering flame of knowledge and language, which should not be forced, or frozen, into any of the gestures required by the social touches and approaches through which most people discover themselves through others?”\nIbsen’s first great play, Peer Gynt, gave us the famous image of the self as an onion which when peeled leaves nothing on the inside. That’s the image Byatt is dancing around in the above prose. But there is another aspect to Ibsen’s elusive self: It is ever-present, gifting his works and damning them with that idiosyncratic uniqueness that is part of what it means to be human. Ibsen could never not be Ibsen, for better and for worse.\n"},{"title":"Don\u0026rsquo;t Say Accessible: \u003cem\u003eOpera Wars\u003c/em\u003e and the Fight Over What Opera Can Be","url":"https://stagesscreens.com/posts/2026-05-19-dont-say-accessible-opera-wars-and/","date":"May 19, 2026","tags":["Opera","Books"],"text":"Don't Say Accessible: *Opera Wars* and the Fight Over What Opera Can Be Nine pages before the end of the new book Opera Wars: Inside the World of Opera and the Battles for its Future, author Caitlin Vincent quotes a more than 40-time contemporary opera librettist about the stigma against accessibility in modern opera.\n\u0026ldquo;Librettist Mark Campbell recalled being confronted by a composer collaborator after Campbell described his music as ‘accessible’ in a public forum. ‘He took me aside and said, Don’t ever use that word again. Critics will use that against me. And I said, I didn\u0026rsquo;t mean it was dumbed down. I meant the audience will connect with it.’\u0026rdquo;\nWhen I read Opera Wars, I thought of an opera aria that managed to crack this year’s Oscar nominees for Best Song, beating out eligible pop luminaries like Ed Sheeran, Brandi Carlile, Miley Cyrus, Sara Bareilles and Stephen Schwartz to the coveted nomination. It was the first classical number to win such a nomination in a decade, according to the entertainment publication The Wrap. The aria, “Sweet Dreams of Joy” from the documentary film Viva Verdi!, is quirky and melodic, strangely flitting and soaring against piano and strings. And it is performed by an operatic soprano. In some ways it is exactly what I’ve been waiting for over more than a decade and a half of watching and enjoying contemporary opera: Something that is exceptionally listenable both inside and apart from the confines of the story, without the pop excesses of, say, “The Prayer” by Andrea Bocelli and Celine Dion, which many opera fans detest. The composer, Nicholas Pike, whose career has centered on film and TV music, says he is looking for commissions for operas and has ideas in the works.\nAccessibility is one of Vincent’s last in a long series of potential prescriptions for the salvation of opera, the challenges to the survival of which she discusses across 235 pages. There should be room for all kinds of operas, she says, including accessible ones. That is just what I wrote a few months before in an essay on the supposed death of opera 100 years ago. Vincent’s openness to a variety of different approaches to opera is part of what makes Opera Wars an enjoyable, if not exactly groundbreaking, read.\nActually, Opera Wars is less a thesis on how to save opera than a catalogue of the art form’s challenges. It is not a new philosophy of opera, unlike the last major book on the subject, director Yuval Sharon’s appropriately titled 2024 A New Philosophy of Opera. Vincent’s breezily written book, with many colloquial analogies, is perhaps best designed for newbies to the art form, particularly students of opera and singing. A former singer who later ran an opera company and worked as an opera journalist, Vincent contributes to the sizable library of state-of-the-artform books the fresh perspective of someone who ultimately quit the profession. It’s nice to add such a book to a shelf that over the years has skewed towards the critical: Opera as Drama by Joseph Kerman, Opera as Opera by Conrad Osborne, Opera’s Second Death by Slavoj Zizek and Mladen Dolar. Of this peculiar library Opera Wars is perhaps the best beginning point for a new opera observer. But opera die-hards should be prepared to see some very familiar material.\nIn many instances Vincent does not take strong positions on the questions it raises, preferring to alternate between statements on one side and then another. That may be why multiple reviewers of the book online read her chapter on “The Stage,” which outlines the battles between traditionalists and progressives in opera staging, as siding with what she calls the “Werktreue” camp over those in the Regietheater camp. One reader online noted her point that avant-garde productions of operas, like director Claus Guth’s La Boheme set in space, assume knowledge of the operas from previous viewings. “For many audiences especially in countries that don’t have a strong culture of opera attendance, that level of familiarity isn’t always present,” she writes.\nHowever, Vincent follows that argument with a defense of creative adaptation in opera direction. In fact, she ends her discussion of the subject with this remark: “One also has to consider the risk-benefit ratio of perpetually digging in one’s heels for the sake of tradition, despite its leading to backlash and alienated audiences. At what point are you holding on to an opera so tightly that you inadvertently crush it to death?” Just before that she wonders aloud whether there will be a time when traditional productions of a controversial opera like Madama Butterfly are a thing of the past, and while voicing sympathy with traditionalist audiences seems okay with that outcome. “Even now, it\u0026rsquo;s clear that productions that rely on kimonos, geisha wigs, and eye-liner—or alternatively saris and bindis, or dreadlocks and dark skin makeup—are increasingly a dying breed,” she writes. “But traditions change, evolve over time. Unlike Grandma\u0026rsquo;s apple pie, traditional stagings of Madama Butterfly have been well preserved—I count at least a dozen DVDs of different kimono-heavy productions available to buy on Amazon.”\nIn fact, Vincent makes a case that the operas performed in the country are too few and too familiar. Fully fifty percent of the US’s opera performances in the last 15 years have come from a canon of about 40 operas, she writes. If one adds in what she calls “canonish” operas like Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman and Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, the number balloons to 75 percent of the 1,500 operas performed in the last 15 years by the top 11 opera companies in the United States. But she doesn’t tell us how many operas she is calling “canonish” or what they are with the exception of those two examples. So the number 75 percent is somewhat lacking in utility; it would be fascinating to see a list of what she considers canonish. Without such a list, or at least numbers, the inclusion of the canonish operas ends up undermining her point almost more than it supports it.\nIn any case, Vincent convincingly argues that we need new operas. While taking an un-confrontational stance towards the new ones that have been written in recent decades, she gives voice to the widely-held perception that the new ones seem never to measure up in the minds of many observers. The resistance to writing melodically from opera composers may be influenced by Wagner’s and late Verdi’s famous assault on the division of opera into recitative (sung dialogue) and aria. But it’s been more than 150 years since that development. One can make a case that the libretti of recent operas are better written than many of the old ones were, and the dramatic punch can coexist with a resurgence of melody that encourages a new direction more than 100 years after atonality was introduced to opera. This is why Viva Verdi’s theme song is so encouraging. While the rest of the score is frankly undistinguished compared to the Oscar-nominated aria, the song suggests that we have not exhausted the things an operatic voice can do with melody.\n"},{"title":"Following the Great Migration, and a Month\u0026rsquo;s Chicago Cultural Roundup","url":"https://stagesscreens.com/posts/2026-04-26-following-great-migration-and-months/","date":"April 26, 2026","tags":["Theater"],"text":"Following the Great Migration, and a Month's Chicago Cultural Roundup “Whether this music came from Alabama or Mississippi or other parts of the South doesn’t matter anymore. The men and women who make this music have learned it from the narrow crooked streets of East St. Louis, or the streets of [Chicago]’s Southside, and the Alabama or Mississippi roots have been strangled by the northern manners and customs of free men of definite and sincere worth, men for whom this music often lies at the forefront of their conscience and concerns. Thus they are laid open to be consumed by it; its warmth and redress, its braggadocio and roughly poignant comments, its vision and prayer, which would instruct and allow them to reconnect, to reassemble and gird up for the next battle in which they would be both victim and the ten thousand slain.”\n– August Wilson, introduction, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, page xv-xvi\nTwo shows have opened in the last month in Chicago about the impact of the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to North in the 20th Century on Chicagoans. First, August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which tells a story of the real-life Southern jazz star Ma Rainey and her time recording in Chicago. And second, Chicago Poet Laureate avery r. young’s new opera safronia, which relays the story of a family’s century-long trek from Oscarville, Georgia northwards to a city clearly modeled on Chicago. I saw both over two weeks. Below is a round-up of reviews of those two shows with their common themes, and a month of theater that was otherwise widely varied for me, featuring four nights of opera and three stage plays.\nMa Rainey’s Black Bottom by August Wilson, Goodman Theatre\nApril 25\nMa Rainey’s Black Bottom, my second favorite of the 10 plays in August Wilson’s Century Cycle, is a standout in many ways. It is the only play in the cycle centered around a real historical person. It’s the only play set anywhere other than Pittsburgh. It’s the only play other than Seven Guitars with a lot of music, played by the actors in a live band on stage. It’s the only play that opens with white characters, demonstrating directly that the black characters live in what could be called a white man’s world. And it’s the only representation of queer life in the cycle, depicting Ma’s relationship to a sultry young siren named Dussie Mae. In the Goodman Theatre’s new production of Ma Rainey, director Chuck Smith takes full advantage of those unique characteristics to show off one of the best plays in Wilson’s oeuvre. One can tell that Smith had the chance to work with the playwright himself on a production of Ma Rainey, at the Goodman in 1997. “August Wilson actually came to our very first preview of that show,” Smith said in the program of his production of Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone in 2024, “and really worked with me firsthand in polishing it up to be a first-class show.” The cast of the new show shows the fruits of that experience, led by a husky-voiced E. Faye Butler. Having shouted and sung her way through weeks of performances already, by the time I saw her Butler was struggling with an even more raspy voice than usual, which threw off some of her comic timing but also lent a world-weary resonance to her performance. Every member of the cast lives up to her lead, with a particular standout coming from the manic, ever-dancing energy of Al ‘Jaleel McGhee’s Levee, and the more stolid wisdom of Kelvin Roston Jr. as the literate Toledo. In addition to the unique aspects of Ma Rainey, the play also captures something that is depicted throughout the Century Cycle: The exilic Black man’s relationship to history. Toledo, the only literate member of Ma Rainey’s band, sums up that relationship by likening Black people to leftovers from a historical stew: the ingredients in the stew are the various tribes of Africans who have ended up in America, he says. Once “your history is over” and “you done ate the stew,” there are leftovers: “You done made your history and it’s still there,” Toledo says. “See, we’s the leftovers. The colored man is the leftovers. Now, what’s the colored man gonna do with himself? That’s what we waiting to find out. But first we gotta know we the leftovers.” Wilson doesn’t lecture us on Black history, he lets his profound commentary emerge from every-day details and the poetry of his characters’ expressions. The picture of the Great Migration is refracted like light into this array of colorful characters. It’s Wilson’s funniest, swingingest, bluesiest work.\nsafronia, by avery r. young, Lyric Opera of Chicago\nApril 18\n“This moment is about how opera, as a genre and institution isn’t rich \u0026amp; White (or at least it shouldn’t be),” Chicago Poet Laureate avery r. young writes in the Lyric Opera’s program for his new opera safronia, for which he writes not only the libretto but also a score filled with anything but traditional opera music, highlighting instead a range of African-American musical genres. “When we talk a classical American songbook, we must understand the songs in that book come with many skins, tongues \u0026amp; stories. This new work of safronia couldn’t be set in the day \u0026amp; time it is \u0026amp; not sound like the music [its characters] listened to \u0026amp;/or sang. Therefore this new work that is safronia seeks to present opera not only as a hallelujah dance hall, but it also presents opera as everyday as weather. As close as a coat. As near as a friend.” The 3,200-plus seats of the Civic Opera House were packed with people ready for that near embrace. Largely peopled with snazzily dressed African Americans, in one of the opera’s two performances, the audience was clearly ready for young’s redefinition of opera, with amplified voices, music from gospel, funk, R\u0026amp;B, pop and jazz disciplines. One might quibble (as did Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune) that this might be more accurately labeled a new musical than a new opera, but the vibrancy and energy of the performance made safronia easily one of the highlight’s of the Lyric Opera’s somewhat dull now-completed season of 2025-26. The poet young, who prefers lower case letters throughout his work and even his own name, tells a version of his own family’s story through the fictional characters the bookers, who migrate gradually over the course of 100 years from Georgia to a town much like Chicago. For both Wilson in Ma Rainey and young in safronia, not nearly as much is different in the North in the 20th century as their characters hoped. The bookers sing that perhaps the Mason-Dixon line should have been said to be drawn at Canada, as they encounter racism in the North that equals or exceeds that of the South. The best way to understand how different this is from a traditional opera is to hear the score itself; one can hear two ensemble numbers from the show on the Lyric’s web site. “Leddimin” is a barnstorming gospel number; “norf” is a fast-paced gospel tribute to the journey northward. The poet is one of the lead singers as well, playing as he does the lead character of booker. He and Meaghan McNeal as safronia set the tone for the excellent ensemble. The opera was billed as a semi-staged concert production, but featured lively choreography and an outer-space-like series of projections that made it feel like a full production. The show will receive its first full production next season at the Court Theatre in Chicago. Much has been written about the death of opera, and while this may not be an opera in its truest form it represents a potential jolt to the art form that could not come at a better time.\nMadama Butterfly, Lyric Opera of Chicago\nApril 6\nDirector Matthew Ozawa’s Madama Butterfly at Lyric Opera of Chicago was practically designed to tick off the traditionalist opera fans. The production makes Butterfly a Virtual Reality character in a game played by B.F. Pinkerton, thus pointing out overtly that Cio-Cio-San is entirely a creation of Western minds. Having run in Utah, Cincinnati and at Yuval Sharon’s Detroit Opera (see my review of his Tristan und Isolde, elsewhere on this page), the production has garnered plenty of praise and plenty of heat. “I hate to break it to the director but *It’s not about you!!*” writes one local critic, Lawrence A. Johnson of Chicago Classical Review, an engaging writer who has had sharp words for directors who depart from the original choices. “Nobody buys a ticket to see Butterfly because the stage director is half-Japanese or to see him work out his personal identity issues onstage.” But that is pretty much exactly why I acquired a ticket to this production: The opera is about the Japanese, and I’m interested in what they have to say about it. The creative team, Ozawa says, is entirely Japanese and Japanese American, and the concept is daringly original, pointing out what has always been problematic about the opera while still celebrating its strengths. It is too bad that I left the opera disappointed, not because of its concept but because of its execution. When Butterfly commits suicide at the end, the moment is devastating for Pinkerton but not for us. What set off Johnson, who said he was preparing a positive review at intermission, seems to have been the director’s note by Ozawa. (The director is also Chief Artistic Administration Officer for the Lyric Opera.) “What experiences, perspectives, histories and biases do we bring with us as we engage with Butterfly’s story?” asks Ozawa. “When I investigate my own lens, I see that mine represents the East-West conflict that is core to Madama Butterfly. I am biracial—the son of a Caucasian mother and a Japanese father … Like Butterfly, I never felt at home in any single culture or space.” Ozawa goes on to explain that the opera was based on a French novel and an American play and short story. Elsewhere in the program it’s noted that Puccini “made at least some efforts to understand the culture,” interviewing the wife of a Japanese ambassador to Italy, possibly watching a Japanese actress then touring Europe, and “studying printed Japanese music that was available to him.” Complaints from Asian writers and viewers have mounted in recent decades about the orientalist representation in the opera, including in David Henry Hwang’s play M. Butterfly, which is itself a response to the opera from an Asian perspective. So the concept seemed fascinating to me. But the production fails to be specific about what complaints are to be made about the representation. The design of Japanese costumes and sets was consciously inaccurate, to emphasize the Western nature of the opera’s vision. But to those of us who are not experts in Japanese design it’s not clear in what specific ways; in fact the sets and costumes look more realistic than the set designed for Pinkerton’s apartment, where he uses his Virtual Reality headset. Bright pinks and whites in a futuristic living room make the Western world seem at least as unreal as the VR vision of the Eastern world. While the design is uniformly attractive, the result is that the message seems muddled. The complaint has been made about the production: if Cio-Cio-San is not real, why should we care about her trauma? I was excited to see how Ozawa reconciled this, and ultimately because his central message is less than clear the complaint gains traction. The performances and the orchestra are not at fault; all tell their part of the story credibly. But the emotional impact is blunted by the failure to see a brilliant concept through to the particulars of the design.\nThe Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Marco Antonio Rodriguez, Goodman Theatre\nApril 3\nJunot Diaz’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao intersperses scenes that depict heartbreaking repression across the history of the Dominican Republic with scenes that focus on one peculiarly nerdy Dominican in New Jersey who is obsessed with comic books, The Lord of the Rings and Robert Heinlein. That contrast is the main thing that drew me to the Goodman Theatre’s adaptation of the novel, which ran in its small Owen Theatre this winter. I have yet to read the novel, but I’d been told that its action was propelled by the suggestion that many Dominicans don’t understand nerd culture, a fascinating premise worth the ticket price. Still, the Goodman’s adaptation, written by Marco Antonio Rodriguez, does not intersperse the two settings but splits them into separate acts. The result is that the first act presents Diaz’s colorful characters largely without much of their cultural specificity and flattens the scenes into what almost seemed like an episode of “The Big Bang Theory.” When the action relocates to the Caribbean in the second act, it helps, but it’s largely too late. The characters feel almost like stereotypes. Director Wendy Mateo does the best she can with Rodriguez’s script, and Lenin Izquierdo in the title role as Oscar Wao is likeable, powerful, and appropriately eccentric. The set, livened by projections of comic book art, makes the transitions between settings aptly novelesque. But having been reduced almost to a sitcom in the first half, the production can’t fully recover its power in the second.\nTwo Sisters and a Piano by Nilo Cruz, Writer’s Theatre\nMarch 29\nTwo seemingly unrelated things happened on March 29, 2026. First, President Trump reversed his position on whether Russia could deliver oil to the energy-starved nation of Cuba. The island nation had been in dire humanitarian straits because the United States had choked off all energy deliveries through a blockade. “Cuba’s finished,” Trump said. “They have a bad regime. They have very bad and corrupt leadership and whether or not they get a boat of oil, it’s not going to matter.” The second thing to happen that day was that Nilo Cruz’s play Two Sisters and a Piano, about Cuba at the end of the Cold War, ran its final performance at the Writer’s Theatre in Glencoe, Illinois. I was there, so I couldn’t help but contemplate both how much and how little things have changed in Cuba since 1989, when the play takes place. The play was first produced in 1999, at a considerably more hopeful moment in the island’s history. But it tells of a dark moment before the dawn. The two sisters of the title are Maria Celia (Andrea San Miguel) and Sofia (Neysha Mendoza Castro), and both are locked under house arrest throughout the play, as Maria Celia and her exiled husband are both the authors of dissident literature. The piano, for its part, is their one form of recreation. The action centers around the visits of a particularly interested Lieutenant (Adam Poss) who wants both to monitor the sisters and to make love to Maria Celia. How she reacts is the central tension of the play. Just as in that day’s news, Russia is providing a glimmer of hope for a dismally depressed Cuba as the play begins, because the Soviet Union is crumbling under Mikhail Gorbachev, and the sisters have hopes that the new freedoms might spread their way. The play is anchored by strong, if occasionally slightly over-the-top performances, and it succeeds or fails largely in proportion to the extent to which Poss manages to humanize his villain. Sometimes he seems a little too suited to a wax mustache, other times his charm shows through. Ultimately the complication of the performance wins out over the temptation to project only the evil we already know about the character, and the play succeeds as a result. The set gives us both the claustrophobia and the beauty of the place and time, and the production is well paced by director Lisa Portes. Nilo Cruz’s writing is not as elegiac or as beautiful as in his Pulitzer-winning Anna in the Tropics, which I reviewed last summer after an excellent performance by American Players Theatre in Spring Green, Wisconsin. But as with Anna, the script here conveys something important about a historical moment with moving empathy. Two Sisters and a Piano captures the desperation that is now gripping Cuba again, as the entire country had been under a form of house arrest as the USA prevented deliveries of energy. The Writer’s Theatre’s production captures the desperation and fragile hope of both eras.\nTristan und Isolde by Richard Wagner, Metropolitan Opera in HD\nMarch 21\nOpera director Yuval Sharon, whose Tristan und Isolde I’ve waited for with eager anticipation for years, says that opera should aspire to the condition of poetry. “Unlike most narrative fiction, poetry possesses a natural aptitude for ambiguity,” Sharon writes in his 2024 book A New Philosophy of Opera. “It\u0026rsquo;s looser, more associative, and more interested in potential meanings that arise from familiar words being used in unfamiliar ways … Opera, born of actual poetry (the libretto), truly achieves its power when considered poetically.” This is perhaps the most important thing to consider when approaching his hit new sold-out production of Tristan und Isolde at the Metropolitan Opera, which I saw on March 21 in a packed movie theater screening room in its HD broadcast. Boasting the first set to use the full height of the proscenium arch at the roughly 3,800-seat Metropolitan Opera house in New York, Sharon’s set designer Es Devlin provides an ambiguous take on Wagner’s classic five-hour opera that involves having two sets of performers playing Tristan and Isolde at all times: One on the stage at a table, the other above the stage in one of a variety of different imaginative sets that reflect one conceptual idea or another. Sharon has said there will be as many interpretations of the set as people in the audience. It was in the second act that I really started to love the production. My take was that the floating circles, which drifted from being one circle containing both Tristan and Isolde to being two circles separating the two, and back again, represented something unique and profound about the way couple’s consciousness drifts together and apart while sleeping together. Floating together and then apart is just what happens to a couple as they dream in bed together, and Sharon’s set seemed the perfect depiction of nighttime love. It also represented both the libretto’s observations on their togetherness during the night, and separateness by day. Whatever the purpose of the set, it focused my mind more on what Wagner’s lines had to say than any of the other five Tristans I’ve seen, because I wanted to test my peculiar thesis against what Wagner had written. It also set up the even more brilliant use of what Sharon called the “table and fable” concept in act three, which was perhaps the most moving and intelligent representation of the divide between the living and the dead I’ve ever seen. The table, to the extent it represents one thing, represents the grounded, literal world, and the fable equals an elevated symbolic space that in one moment at least clearly becomes the afterlife. If you’re familiar with the opera at all you know Tristan spends the final act in and then out of a coma, desperately awaiting Isolde’s arrival on a ship. In this production, Tristan runs from the stage area (“table”) to the space above it (“fable”) as he spies the ship arriving, ecstatically singing that he will finally be reunited with Isolde. In most productions of the opera, Tristan dies just as Isolde arrives. In Sharon’s production, Tristan realizes when she arrives on the stage that he has left her world, and that he is now in the separate world of death. I heard sobs in the movie theater when that happened. The act two usage of the circles set up act three, ironically, because it wasn’t precisely the same thematic usage of the set in each act. The idea that the set in the second act meant something different than it did in the third, however slightly, meant that the third act’s more obvious interpretation was more surprising. It wasn’t all schematically intelligible and therefore packed a bigger punch. Not everything in the production works—the use of items in the “table” area (plates, a sword, etc.) as totems that project the characters into the alternate “fable” world did not sell me entirely on its concept until the second act. I liked it more and more as the show progressed. The costumes, sometimes looking like blue and green pajamas, I was less than crazy about. But the performances carry the day even when the ambitious staging does not. Lise Davidsen was the star attraction as Isolde, and mostly lives up to her billing, though I found both singers had to compete a bit much with the orchestra in the early going. Michael Spyres as Tristan was a sound match for Davidsen, singing the role with affecting clarity. The real interpretive peak of the opera happens in the final aria by Isolde, the famous “Liebestod.” Sharon has Davidsen give birth to a baby in the final moments before the aria and then sing the aria not to the dead Tristan as usual but instead to the baby. It changes everything about the way Davidsen delivers the aria—it’s gentler, more hopeful, its longing redirected to the future—and therefore contributes an entirely new thing to the long history of the opera. Not everyone, of course, prefers such revisionism. Personally I found the best articulation of a traditional objection to the projection to be a blog entry by Conrad L. Osborne, author of the fascinating book Opera as Opera: The State of Art. Osborne finds the production, like most modern productions, not to be an interpretation of the opera at all, but instead an “installation” to be interpreted itself. He is not persuaded by the notion of a poetic reading, but if that idea lights you up this Tristan might be one of the most invigorating opera experiences of recent years.\nChicago Symphony Orchestra: Riccardo Muti conducts Italian Opera\nMarch 20\nWhen I saw Puccini’s Manon Lescaut in performance in Evanston by the Opera Festival of Chicago two years ago, the last act seemed a parody of opera’s penchant for long, drawn-out deaths. Manon and her lover, Des Grieux, die of thirst for almost half an hour that felt like an hour and a half. They have been exiled to what translations of the original libretto have called “a desert plain on the borders of New Orleans,” displaying the laughable level of understanding of American geography from the at least seven people who contributed to this libretto. In fact, the swampy, wet terrain of New Orleans makes it one of the hardest places in America to die of thirst. On March 20, however, when the Chicago Symphony Orchestra performed the act under the baton of emeritus music director Riccardo Muti, the half hour demise seemed like ten minutes. Muti, who retired as full-time music director in 2023, brought the best out of tenor Francesco Meli and soprano Lidia Fridman, whose poignant and soaring vocal lines brought des Grieux and Manon to life. Fridman wore an astonishing evening gown topped with a burnt umber that gradually lightened as it wound down her torso into a vibrant flame-colored orange and then yellow, as though Manon had died at the stake rather than of thirst. The excerpt from Manon Lescaut was not even the indisputable highlight of the evening. It began with a series of deep cuts by Muti’s favorite, Giuseppe Verdi, about whom the conductor wrote an interesting book of essays that argues in essence that society will need Verdi longer than Wagner because the former creates real characters while the latter reduces his characters to symbols. That psychological dynamic was not on direct display in this program, as the Verdi selections highlighted symphonic and choral works rather than arias or duets, but under Muti’s direction the orchestra packed a dramatic punch that made one feel one had witnessed the characters’ traumas and joys anyway. Muti opened with the sinfonia to La battaglia di Legnano, a mid-career opera for Verdi that has rarely been performed, in part because censors routinely barred its revolutionary content for fear of resonance with the present day. The program for the evening calls the overture one of Verdi’s “greatest and most original,” and with its mix of energetic brass and plaintive woodwinds one can understand why. The program continued with the prelude to Verdi’s I masnadieri, a rarely produced adaptation of a Schiller play about bandits. The overture boasts a virtuoso cello solo of a sort that is rare, if not unprecedented, in Verdi. The climax for the Verdi selections was no B-side, however: “Va, Pensiero” from Nabucco is of course one of Verdi’s most performed compositions. Under the direction of former Metropolitan Opera choral director Donald Palumbo, the almost 150-member chorus gave the most remarkable performance of the piece I’ve heard, and the hushed strain of the final note still rings in my ears. Muti also conducted pieces by Giordano (from Fedora) and Catalani (La Wally). The latter aria, “Ebben? Ne andrò lontana,” featured prominently in the 1981 movie Diva, and vies for the award for the most-performed piece from a rarely produced opera. The only wrinkle in the evening was also one of its most entertaining moments, as latecomers came for seats in my row and then were chewed out by an irate Muti, who asserted that Toscanini would have thrown them out and admonished that no one comes late to an airport. It was good to have his acerbic wit back.\n"},{"title":"Spring Cleaning: A Roundup of Chicago Theater Amid the Last Two Months of Winter","url":"https://stagesscreens.com/posts/2026-03-17-spring-cleaning-roundup-of-chicago/","date":"March 17, 2026","tags":["Theater"],"text":"Spring Cleaning: A Roundup of Chicago Theater Amid the Last Two Months of Winter T.S. Eliot is known for his reservations about spring. Yet the author of the line \u0026ldquo;April is the cruelest month\u0026rdquo; wrote a friend in April 1911 to tell her about how beautiful the season was. \u0026ldquo;Paris has burst out, during my absence,\u0026rdquo; Eliot wrote, \u0026ldquo;and it is such a revelation that I feel I ought to make it known. At London, one pretended that it was spring, and tried to coax the spring, and talk of the beautiful weather; but one continued to hibernate amongst the bricks \u0026hellip; But here!\u0026rdquo; Chicago has been more like Eliot\u0026rsquo;s London than his Paris recently, but spring is almost here, so it’s time to clean out my notebook of winter stage observations from the last seven weeks of Chicago theater. After a somewhat sparse fall season for Chicago theater, with few productions that I personally found exciting, the winter has been productive. These nine shows, ranging from opera to musical theater to straight plays to one Gilbert \u0026amp; Sullivan operetta, show a little of the breadth and depth of the Chicago arts scene. They are organized in reverse chronological order, with the one I saw most recently first.\nDance of Death by August Strindberg, in a new version by Conor McPherson, Steppenwolf Theatre.\nMarch 12.\nTwenty years before August Strindberg’s 1900 play Dance of Death debuted, a Parisian neurologist named Dr. Jules Cotard first described a neuropsychiatric disorder in which sufferers believe themselves to be dead. Dubbed “Cotard’s syndrome,” and sometimes called by the wonderfully evocative names “walking corpse syndrome” or nihilistic delusion, the disorder saturates the sensibility of Strindberg’s play. Its lead, Edgar, whose toxic marriage is the subject of the play, even expresses directly the sentiment that he might have died. It’s conceivable this was an intentional inclusion: the playwright was widely read, had lived in Paris, and was fascinated with psychology. (His rival Ibsen is credited as an inspiration for Freud.) It’s more likely, though, that Strindberg picked up the notion of walking death from the romantic and gothic literature he knew well, rather than specialist psychiatric journals. In any case, nihilistic delusion is right on brand for Strindberg. His plays are often bitingly baleful and seethingly angry. Dance of Death is as good an example of both qualities as exists in his oeuvre. But in what Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre bills as “a new version” by Conor McPherson (The Weir) this month, it’s also uproariously funny. McPherson’s version is not really new: his script debuted 14 years ago in a production in London, then ran at Classic Stage Company in New York City in 2019 and even in the Chicago market at Writer’s Theatre in Glencoe in 2021. But the new version does bring a contemporary feel that serves the play well. I remember that when I first saw Dance, in a recording of its last Broadway revival (starring Sir Ian McKellen and Dame Helen Mirren from 2002) I was immediately gob-smacked by the obvious similarities to Edward Albee’s similarly bitter depiction of a bickering married couple, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Albee’s biographer Mel Gussow asserts that the similarity is not accidental, and the play’s vast influence on American theater is thrilling to trace while watching. The McKellen-Mirren production happens to have inspired the one running this month at Steppenwolf, according to an interview on the theater’s web site with company co-founder Jeff Perry, who stars in this production. But then how many productions of Dance have there been to inspire a new one? The only two other productions of the play on Broadway were both in the early 1970s. As that somewhat slim performance history implies, opportunities to see this play remain rare even in a city like Chicago or New York. However, Chicagoans got a nice double dose of the Swedish master this year, as Miss Julie (the one Strindberg that gets done much) at the Court Theatre was running concurrently with this Dance of Death. It was difficult at first not to compare Steppenwolf ensemble members Perry, Kathryn Erbe and Cliff Chamberlain to the Sir and Dame. By the end, I’d mostly forgotten McKellen but still longed for Mirren. Perry found a stylized groove not far from the one he brought to Harold Pinter’s absurdist No Man’s Land. He seems to be following McKellen’s career closely: that Pinter deep cut was also performed in by Sir Ian, in a production I saw in Berkeley in its pre-Broadway run. (Perry played the Patrick Stewart part in that show, however, not the McKellan role.) Perry brought out the hilarious but existential depths of Edgar with his Pinteresque performance. Erbe, as his wife Alice, was often very funny but she lacked the conceptual eccentricity that made Perry pop, and the life-wearied facial lines that make Mirren’s visage so rich. Chamberlain has been turning in great performances in Chicago since he helped launch the recently defunct House Theatre 25 years ago, but here his comic contributions didn’t always land, as he sometimes was inclined to substitute shouting for comic timing. The set, a toweringly tall jail converted into a residence, is just the setting for these dark ruminations on matrimony. But McPherson’s adaptation stays uproarious enough that the biting blackness of the humor does not sting much. It could even have stung a little more.\n_The Gondoliers_by Gilbert and Sullivan Opera Company at Mandel Hall at the University of Chicago.\nMarch 6\nWith its satire of the objections to democracy and republicanism, The Gondoliers is very Great Britain 1889. The Third Reform Act had just passed in 1884 under William Gladstone when it was first performed, expanding the electorate to most men, particularly in the country. The word “democracy” was only just coming out of its long-held place as a dirty word in English politics, and for many of the British political elite it still held that position. That atmosphere was the context for the comic world of the operetta, in which two republican Gondoliers discover that one of them (they don’t know which) is the king, and promote everyone to the nobility. The Grand Inquisitor, played here with crackling wit by Gabe Levi, thus delivers William S. Gilbert’s sparkling line, “When everyone is somebodee then no-one’s anybody.” (Sic.) I’ve been attending this company, Chicago’s most consistent source of G\u0026amp;S operettas, for decades. Every March they turn out another G\u0026amp;S show, usually from the canon. I’m sorry to have missed the few times they’ve stepped outside the most popular shows, such as Utopia Limited in 1993 and The Grand Duke in 1996. The Gondoliers I’ve seen them do three times, but as those shows were 14 and 23 years ago, respectively, it was time for a refresher. A university-based community company (with which my father performed in their earliest days in the early 1960s) the troupe has gobs of comedic energy and more spirit than you can find in many more professional productions, including from what I’ve seen Broadway’s somewhat odd revival of Pirates of Penzance last year with David Hyde Pierce. G\u0026amp;SOC can also be rough around the edges, but who cares? The Gondoliers is bright in multiple senses and full of bangers. It is true that in the long first half less happens than in other G\u0026amp;S operettas, as the four lovers are identified early, and united at the end after several somewhat protracted ensemble numbers. But the second half, which plunges the characters into the sharp satire of republican politics, shines. Levi as the Grand Inquisitor was the highlight; I saw the show on its second night, but already the crowd was primed to buzz and cheer just before Levi marched on stage. He takes the place another great singer named Dorian McCall occupied in the last two years, as the pirate king in Pirates and Sir Ruthven Murgatroyd in Ruddigore. The other highlight was Anna Caldwell’s vibrato-wielding Gianetta.\nDie Silbersee. Composer: Kurt Weill. Librettist: George Kaiser. Chicago Opera Theatre. Studebaker Theatre.\nMarch 4\nWhen Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht in 1930 produced their last full-length opera collaboration, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, the Great Depression had just started, replacing a chaotic economic time in which “capitalism had reached comfortable maturity, when greed was enjoying its ripe old age and hope was on its deathbed,” as The New York Times put it when the Metropolitan Opera produced that opera in 1995. Just three years later, Brecht had fled the country, and Weill had replaced him with a new librettist named George Kaiser. Together they wrote a new opera (or is it a musical? An operetta? Weill called it a “play with music.”). Die Silbersee was just given an exceedingly rare and exciting production by the Chicago Opera Theatre early this month. Weill and Kaiser now faced a different, even more difficult environment: Hitler had taken power 18 days before the show opened, capitalism had been in a state of collapse after American loans were pulled from the German economy, and economic inequality was rampant. The change from the former environment to the latter gives Die Silbersee, or The Silverlake, a spooky resonance in the present day. The show in 1930 ran for only 16 performances before the show was shut down. The Nazis were not fans of its peculiar Brechtian fairy tale vision of a poor man (Severin, played by Chaz’men Williams-Ali) shot by a policeman (Olim, played by Justin Hopkins) for stealing a pineapple. Severin and Olim then encounter a sort of Fascist villain (Leah Dexter as an aristocrat turned servant turned evil overlord). Many publications say the Nazis banned the show; the program says it was never formally banned but collapsed due to intense pressures that included the Nazi reaction. The Nazis labeled the show, and all of the Jewish Weill’s work, “Entartete Kunst,” or degenerate art. Just weeks later Weill followed Brecht out of the country. The Chicago Opera Theatre production is one of few in American history, and one of the more faithful. Harold Prince made a musical of it in a 1980 production by the New York City Opera, starring non-opera singer Joel Grey. But productions of it as an opera are infrequent. COT General Director Lawrence Edelson cut the show down from its original four and a half hours to three but added back characters who had been trimmed from prior versions. Weill’s music is a lost gem—Edelson says he left the score behind when he fled Germany, and it wasn’t rediscovered for decades. The arias lack the melodic pizzazz of Weill’s “Mack the Knife,” but they are full of gorgeous melody appropriately complicated by Weill’s trademark sixths, as well as ninths and elevenths. The production is very well designed, with fanciful costumes designed by Erik Teague, and a set that manages to be both exterior and interior at once, as the haunting specter of the Silverlake never quite leaves the set. Subtitled A Winter’s Fairytale, Die Silbersee was a perfectly haunting late winter spectacle. With themes of police brutality, the specter of fascism overtaking a community, and brooding depression of a sort reminiscent of our age of doomscrolling, the opera is as well-timed as it is well-constructed. Perhaps its lessons can help move us out of the Mahagonny City without landing in the Silverlake.\nHoliday by Richard Greenberg, based on the play by Philip Barry\nFebruary 22\nThe late Philip Barry (The Philadelphia Story) and the recently deceased Richard Greenberg (Three Days of Rain) are both sharp, witty playwrights who share a fascination with the culture of the wealthy elites of their day. Either one of them individually can knock your Bombas off with articulate comic dialogue. But fused together, as their jibes and jokes are in the Goodman Theatre’s new modern-day adaptation of Barry’s 1928 Holiday, the two playwrights pack twice the punch. Moving the action from the eve of the 1929 Wall Street crash to the eve of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, Greenberg shows how little—and how much—has changed in the realm of the rich. The update of Barry’s witticisms is seamless and effective despite its topicality. (One character, trying to ascertain whether another character is wealthy, asks by way of deduction, “Have you ever said the words ‘All Lives Matter?’” The audience loved it.) If the play were only half an hour shorter, cutting down a long, undisciplined scene in the penultimate act, it would be one of the better creations of Greenberg’s distinguished career. In fact, though it is being staged just seven months after Greenberg’s death last year, Holiday is as alive as his writing has been for years. From 2016 to 2021 Greenberg had written a string of off-Broadway shows that failed to make much of a dent in the theater world. Before that he had a trio of New York productions in 2013, all of which I saw: his critically derided Breakfast at Tiffany’s adaptation on Broadway and Far From Heaven musical both struggled to make clear why they existed. His last (justifiably) successful play, The Assembled Parties, was another witty display of its characters’ wealth that landed several Tony nominations. The 2026 Holiday also marks the return of its Tony-winning director, Robert Falls, to his longtime home at the Goodman Theatre, from which he retired as artistic director after the pandemic. Falls has assembled an amazing ensemble of mostly Chicago-based actors, led by Bryce Gangel as Linda Seton, the character played by Katharine Hepburn in the 1938 film version of Barry’s play. I know Linda is the character Hepburn plays, though I haven’t seen the movie yet, not only because I looked it up but because Gangel does such a phenomenal job of capturing Hepburn’s physicality and timing while making it entirely her own. Hepburn was so distinctive that when her movies are remade the actors who play her roles must find some way to mimic her style, as did Grace Kelly in the musical adaptation of Barry’s Philadelphia Story, High Society. The challenge of Greenberg’s dialogue is that all of the characters have a similarly crackling wit, thus each player must find his or her own way into the material. Falls’ cast does so excellently. Jordan Lage brings a stuffiness to Linda’s rich father without getting in the way of the jokes, a feat. Molly Griggs finds an entirely different energy from Linda’s as her sister while being almost equally witty. The entire cast, particularly Gangel, deserves a shot at Broadway, and there are rumblings this production is headed there. Falls will simply have to take a scalpel to the next-to-last act, and this double wit-fest should be ready to stand as an elegiac monument to these two lost talents. EurekaDay by Jonathan Spector at Broadway Playhouse, by Timeline Theatre Company and Broadway in Chicago.\nFebruary 21\nIn the Chicago debut of the Tony winning Best Revival of a Play for 2025, Eureka Day shows that it only gets timelier. When I first encountered this comic treatise on the anti-vaxxer movement, it seemed like a brilliant local play for Berkeley, California, a rare example of community journalism taking a theatrical form. (I already wrote a paragraph or two on Eureka Day in a story on the subject of theater by, for, and about a particular community, so I won’t add much here.) But after COVID-19 happened, it got more topical, and now that the top health official in the country is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., it is even more so. The audience was bursting with reactions the night I saw it, not only in what I imagine are the usual waves of rolling laughter at the key Zoom meeting scene in act one, but at all the references to anti-vax sentiment. People groaned, jeered, guffawed as Kennedy’s point of view was articulated. PJ Powers, who is the artistic director of Timeline as well as one of the stars of this show, anchors the cast with punctilious nerdiness. But the whole cast deserves plaudits for executing this well-oiled laughter machine. Modeled perhaps on Bruce Norris’ well-made plays that expose the darker undersides of liberalism while collecting laughs from audiences full of liberals, Eureka Day is not likely to age anytime soon.\nThe Outsiders. Music and lyrics by Jonathan Clay, Zach Chance and Justin Levine. Book by Adam Rapp and Levine. Broadway in Chicago tour at the Cadillac Palace in Chicago. February 18 Having seen most of the “Best Musical” Tony winners since the awards’ foundation in 1949 in one format or another, I grabbed this chance to see the Broadway tour of one I’d missed: 2024’s rollicking adaptation of S.E. Hinton’s novel The Outsiders. This one breaks a general trend in the category towards the victory of quirky, smaller-scale, artistically (as opposed to commercially) focused musicals. See Kimberly Akimbo, Maybe Happy Ending, A Strange Loop, The Band’s Visit, Hadestown and Fun Home for example. The Outsiders by contrast has a big cast and big effects, is crowd-pleasing and spectacle-oriented—and it’s also the only musical from that season to make a profit. But this is no sell-out by voters; The Outsiders is also affecting and enjoyable, as well as compact in narrative frame. Echoing West Side Story, the musical tells the story of two competing teen gangs in 1950s Tulsa, Oklahoma, the working-class Greasers and the upper-class Socs (short for “socialite”). The focus of the story is squarely on its narrator, the Greaser Ponyboy (played on this tour by Nolan White, a recent graduate of University of Michigan), and his desire to see Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke or talk to a wealthier girl without fear of harassment by the rival gang the Socs. Naturally he is not left alone by the Socs, and the gang rivalry climaxes in a powerful scene at the end of act two, which appeared on the Tony Award show. White is not the only newbie in the cast; his brother Darrel is played by Travis Roy Rogers in his professional debut, and much of the cast is young and inexperienced. The ensemble is engaging nonetheless, and as the show is more a director’s phenomenon than an actor’s not much is lost. The singers leap and spin repeatedly to the score, which is by two members of the folk-rock group Jamestown Revival. The arrangements often give prominent placement to acoustic instruments, in keeping with Jamestown’s style, though one might have expected a more rootsy score along the lines of Hadestown. This one is often pure Broadway showtune in melody and conception. Much emphasis is placed in the second half on the tragic fall of a character who heretofore played a relatively small role, but that is one of the few costs to the economization of the narrative that comes from adapting a popular novel. The Outsiders is not an outsider to Broadway razzle-dazzle, but it does have heart.\nSalome by Richard Strauss. Lyric Opera of Chicago.\nFebruary 14 Last year the Metropolitan Opera debuted a new production of Richard Strauss’ Salome in which the title character has been violated by King Herod and is followed around by seven other Salomes of varying ages to demonstrate the psyche-splitting impact of sexual abuse. That concept may have been inspired in part by this production by Sir David McVicar, which debuted first at the Royal Opera House in London in 2008 and which I saw revived last month at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. This time Salome is not seven girls, but just as last time we see her past with Herod suggested in a sequence of images accompanying the famous “Dance of the Seven Veils,” in which Salome dances seductively at Herod’s request. The projected images are typified by one in which Herod shows off his dad-bod to Salome in a full-length mirror. The clear implication is that Herod has been grooming Salome, or worse. Soprano Jennifer Holloway, who sang the role of Salome with girlish wonder, said in a Lyric publicity video that “Salome, the girl, has gotten a bad rap. Somebody said at some point, she’s done some terrible things … She has not done terrible things before this. Terrible things have been done to her by everybody in this opera. How she can get a bad rap is beyond me.” This continues a trend at the Lyric of attempts to improve upon the famously malign interpretation of women in opera over the centuries, which I wrote about when Sondra Radvanovsky attempted the same approach with Medea at the Lyric in the fall. The libretto is an edited version of Oscar Wilde’s play of the same name, edited by Strauss himself. Following the biblical story with few variations, Salome requests and gets the head of John the Baptist. Every production grapples with the necessity of having the head on stage in a different way; this one makes the odd choice of having the executioner who beheads the prophet take all of his clothes off before making the assault. Why naked, everyone wants to know? Is he trying to keep his tunic clean? Is he naked so that Salome can embrace him sensually once he presents her with the head, substituting the killer’s body for the prophet’s, to whom she was fatally attracted? McVicar answered the question for the Guardian: He \u0026ldquo;thought it was right for him to be naked because his body would show up better the blood from the head he has just cut off.” Replies the Guardian’s Erika Jeal: “Clearly.” Indeed. It’s no wonder the production bewilders many online. But it is ultimately among the more interesting productions by McVicar, who is hired so often that I have seen almost a dozen of his operas. Not as lively as his Giulio Cesare, less strange than his Macbeth. And, if the Met’s production is any indication, it is also trendsetting.\n*Cosi Fan Tutte.*Music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte. Lyric Opera of Chicago.\nFebruary 7 The flimsiest of the productions on this list is the Lyric’s Cosi Fan Tutte, set in a fancy country club in Rhode Island. (Not the most interesting of settings; hard to relate to for many of us; somewhat lacking in dramatic potential.) The singers aim for low comedy gags, but one almost doesn’t notice, as they are so uniformly unfunny that the instinct is to doze off. When, late in act one, a gag landed and the audience laughed, I straightened up and paid more attention. They’re allowed to be funny?The production commits few truly major sins but is conclusively duller than any of the five other Cosis I have seen, with one exception: the traditional production the Met replaced with a likeably splashy Coney Island-set version in 2018. Or anyway the first half of the Lyric’s was that dull. Due in part to my 94-year-old companion, who wanted to get to bed before the lengthy production ended after 11 p.m., my party left at intermission. I do not usually DNF operas. I can only pass on someone else’s observation: Chicago Classical Review says the second half was a little better than the first, but mostly agreed with me on the first half. So, if you have a chance to catch this production, you can decide what to do with this hot take.\nStereophonic by David Adjmi. Broadway in Chicago at the CIBC Theatre.\nFebruary 5\nThe online buzz for this play when it played in New York in 2023-24 was almost unanimously enthusiastic, but for some reason when the show went on tour, theater influencers on TikTok began hearing from the regional audiences that the show was long and tedious. “That’s the point!” replied one influencer who had been one of the show’s biggest boosters. (The influencer is the ever-interesting Kate Reinking.) I laughed at Kate’s conclusion initially and wondered whether this was even a show I looked forward to seeing. But when I saw the play I was surprised to find that “that’s the point” was a reasonably sound statement. Stereophonic is about the tedium and trials of the creative process, and it’s fascinating to a point. Set in a recording studio, the show follows the long, boring process of making a record, punctuated by violent arguments among the band members that mimic those that beset Fleetwood Mac while that band made its classic album Rumours. The show has a bit too little music to qualify for a musical, but the highlights of the play are consistently those moments when the band finally stops talking and starts playing. That’s a real accomplishment for Will Butler of Arcade Fire, who wrote the songs, as the comparison to Rumours is so obvious that the music has to live up to that rock masterwork. The songs play better live than on recording, but that’s what they were built for. Yet the play does lack something of a thematic punch. Ultimately the difference in reaction between NYC and regional audiences remains something of a mystery. Does the apparent brilliance of the initial production stem in part from its lack of robust competition that year? Does it say something about the quality of the performers who did the show at Playwrights Horizons and then on Broadway? Maybe so, but the cast I saw seemed able enough to me. That leaves a cultural question: What is it about New Yorkers that they want to see a band fight over a record more than those in Chicago or elsewhere?\n"},{"title":"Ranking All 13 \u003cem\u003eAndrea Chénier\u003c/em\u003e Videos","url":"https://stagesscreens.com/posts/2026-02-26-ranking-best-andrea-chenier-videos/","date":"February 26, 2026","tags":["Opera"],"text":"Ranking All 13 *Andrea Chénier* Videos Some operas reward repeat listens, but relatively few reward back-to-back repeat watches. Many librettos boil their stories down to the essentials, with a love triangle at the center and little historical or imaginative detail going on around it in the words. And they can be long, with the longest operas running six hours. (Hi, Wagner.)\nUmberto Giordano’s Andrea Chénier, however, is a rare counterexample. With a libretto by Luigi Illica (Tosca, La Bohème), the opera runs just two hours but gives a sweeping account of the cultural and political life during both the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. The experience is often more like watching a play than an opera, with an emphasis on dialogue that does not interrupt the sweep of the melodies but explores many details outside of the standard love triangle (which can be found here as well for those who love that). This packing of detail into a tight package might help explain why, in the last two years alone, at least three web sites have attempted to rank the many, many recordings of this opera: It’s fun to revisit, and one almost always catches something new in revisiting it. This is the third of those web posts. Unlike the other two, which focused on records, I am focusing on video versions as I find the opera immensely rewatchable.\nAfter watching all 13 commercially available videos that I could find, here is how they stack up.\nThe first of my predecessors in this oddly obsessive enterprise is Andrew Knapp on Parterre Box, who ranked several LPs but only a small handful of video performances, on June 14, 2024. Knapp does a great job but I disagree with him on many points and notice more than 10 video performances that didn’t make his list. A second ranking appeared while I was researching mine, on February 8, 2026. It was compiled by Carlos Manuel Delgado Nule and Yehya Alazem on interclassical.com. Nule and Alazem reviewed 11 audio recordings of Giordano’s opera but no videos, which left me an opening.\nAll 13 productions are available for purchase online, either on DVD or Blu-ray, or on streaming services. I am ranking productions, not just singing performances, with an emphasis on which production serves the wonderful libretto best.\nHere are the rankings:\n1. 2017 Cast: Jonas Kaufmann, Anja Harteros, George Petean\nDirector: Philipp Stölzl\nConductor: Marco Armiliato\nVenue: Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich\nI don’t pick this version as my favorite because all the choices work, or because they are all historically accurate. I choose it because it is the most consistently interesting. In this production Stölzl, who directed the feature film Young Goethe in Love, presents us with the best mix of realism and symbolism, interesting choices and faithful storytelling, conceptual bang and performance integrity. Stölzl’s Andrea Chénier is set in a Paris that is bursting to the seams with people. The aristocratic estate in which the first act takes place is usually presented as an enormous château, with the living room taking up the whole of the massive stage. In this production, the di Coigny estate looks more like a vertically stacked New York townhouse. The impetus for this re-envisioning is to incorporate an upstairs, occupied by the aristocrats, and a downstairs, occupied by the servants, all on one stage. The effect is to create a crowded and combustible Paris, one in which the city is literally too small for its competing classes. Not a bad vibe for 1789, when the French Revolution exploded. The first act of the opera takes place on the eve of the revolution, shortly after the storming of the Bastille, and the aristocrats at the party that constitutes the action in act one are clueless as to the severity of what is going on around them. When the servants pound on the ceiling with broomsticks, we see how dangerous the situation is for everyone concerned. A few minutes later the working classes storm through the house. This happens in every production of this opera, but here it feels more explosive than ever. The second ahistorical choice that nonetheless works even better than in some traditional productions is the costume of the titular protagonist, here played with likability, eccentricity, and power by Jonas Kaufmann. Usually, Chénier is dressed to the nines like everyone else at the di Coigny’s party. But in this production, while his attire is (barely) appropriate to the event, it is noticeably shabbier than the surrounding celebrants. He is the only one not wearing a powdered wig. The real-life poet André Chénier (whose first name is Italianized in the opera, but on whom the operatic character is based) came from a wealthy family. It was his parents who set him into the aristocratic social scene, where he made his name. Giving Chénier a scruffy outfit imports a post-19th century notion of the penniless romantic poet to the 18th century. But it makes the awkwardness of the poet’s social situation pop like in no other production, setting up the power of the drama better than any other version. Kaufmann is the best cast Andrea I’ve seen; his acting is both particular and powerful. Harteros lends a wonderful snarkiness to the opening scenes and has movie star good looks that make it easy to believe she is a fatal temptation both for Chénier and Carlo Gérard, the complicated villain of the opera (played by an able Petean). The only choice that threatens to sink this production is the decision to paint a minor character in identical makeup to Heath Ledger as the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s movie The Dark Knight. But even that choice works visually even if it doesn’t intellectually: The color, menace, and familiarity of the image provide an objective correlative that helps us instantly absorb the violence of the era. This Chénier is the most vivid, immediate, and intriguing of the videos on this list.\n2. 1973 Cast: Franco Corelli, Celestina Casapietra, Piero Cappuccilli\nDirector: Vaclav Kaslik\nConductor: Bruno Bartoletti\nVenue: Film for television, made in RAI-TV studios, Milan\nIf this motion picture rendering was as strong throughout as its first act, it would be the definitive Andrea Chénier. As it is, it has been described as the “gold standard” for the opera. The only color film version of the opera, and the only one with English subtitles, director Vaclav Kaslik’s dreamlike, colorful TV movie emulates the surreal, eye-popping style of Powell and Pressburger’s 1951 opera film Tales of Hoffman. That’s a high bar to aim for, and the first third of the film lives up to its influences. The camera work is bold and distinctive, zooming out for example from a distorted and angular view in a mirror to find Maddalena at her dressing table and then swiftly further out to find Gérard spying on her. The bright pinks, yellows and greens and unusual angular shapes of the set are somehow simultaneously very 1970s and (like Tales of Hoffman) timeless. It’s surprising how well the presentational approach works, given that Andrea is an opera that benefits from realism. The costumes and makeup, however, are not unrealistic or out of period, and the style remains unobtrusive. Unfortunately, the second, third and fourth acts drop the colorful approach and give us dark, uncreatively shot sets and static direction. When we land in a town square in the beginning of act two, the screen is so crowded with people and so unspecific in design that we don\u0026rsquo;t know where we are. Still, there is a lot to love in this recording. A scene in which the aristocrats at the di Coigny party are told for the first time of the unrest outside their windows is more effective than any other rendering of the moment as the camera gives ultra-closeups of the aristocrats’ nervousness. Then just as suddenly they absent-mindedly pop pastries, guzzle port, and indulge blithely in a pastoral ballet that shows their obliviousness to the seriousness of the moment, a scene that is always one of my favorites in the opera. Corelli is commanding, if occasionally a little over the top, and Casapietra gives some of the best readings of Maddelena’s lines that we have on video. When she tricks Andrea into reciting a poem, she is delightfully malicious. A few moments later, she plays perfectly her humiliation as the poet burns her by reciting a pointed poem about the aristocrats’ ignorance of the needs of the poor. (If she hadn\u0026rsquo;t held the pose too long, it would have stayed perfect.) It’s one of the best depictions in the opera’s full discography of that crucial scene. Cappuccilli is the most sympathetic and multifaceted of all Gérards, partly because he is so well filmed. Some have complained about the lip-syncing in the opera, which is troublesome but somehow did not bother me. The one thing that threatens to destroy the first act is the choice to have Giovanna Di Rocco in a particularly awful (both visually and morally) blackface as the loyal servant Bersi. Also, Bartoletti’s orchestra is muffled and muted. Nonetheless, this television rendering is a highlight of the bunch.\n3. 1961 Cast: Mario Del Monaco, Renata Tebaldi, Aldo Protti\nDirector: Not listed on the DVD\nConductor: Franco Capuana\nVenue: Tokyo Bunka Kaikan, Tokyo\nIf all the productions on this list happened in the same year, I would rank this one much lower. But what an amazing document of the past is this recording, which captures the mature Tebaldi at 39 in her last performance opposite Mario Del Monaco, 46. The two of them began performing Andrea Chénier together in 1949, and the liner notes of the DVD call the pair “the most golden-voiced duo of that golden age of operatic singing that blessed the world in the years after the Second World War.” At the point this was filmed, Tebaldi had been playing Maddalena for 22 years, which is a reasonable guess as to how old the real Maddalena was when she met the real André Chénier. (The poet was 27 when the revolution broke out.) So, some might say she is old for the part, but she is majestic in the role. Her maturity adds gravitas. If you read much about opera on the Internet, you know there are big crowds of fans who believe the modern singers can’t match the old ones, that voices are no longer trained as well as they once were, and that the modern director has killed the opera by being creative with time and place. (A Facebook group dedicated to hating on modern opera stagings has tens of thousands of “friends.”) I’m not in any of those camps. But this is certainly the DVD for those who are. The director, if there even was one, is not named on the DVD box. The singing is old school. And the production is traditional. I found the set, which in this black and white format looks like an old 1950s TV show set, to tell the story with a clarity as well as a realism that exceeds that of many more recent “traditional” stagings. The crowd, in Tokyo, is more enthusiastic than any crowd on any recording on this list. Japan had only been a touring spot for western opera since the mid-1950s, and Tokyo was new to a love affair with opera that (as the liner notes say) lasts to this day. Tebaldi, after a classic performance of the majestic aria “*La Mamma Morta,*” had to wait a full two minutes and 38 seconds before the action could move on (yes, I timed it), a longer ovation than any among these productions. Del Monaco, as Andrea, tops out at two minutes, tying the 1981 Domingo production that ranks below. Apparently the older the production the longer the ovations; perhaps audiences appreciated live performance more in the days before high fidelity and high definition. Del Monaco is a ham, frequently throwing his arms open or clasping his hands dramatically while singing. He also throws his arms wide to accept the wild applause after his final aria in act four. His voice is weaker than we’re used to from the great Andreas. He also literally trips, almost falling to the floor, while marching upstage to his death. This is hilarious, but wonderfully endearing, as it marks a time before polish was everything. Tebaldi delivers a regal, affecting performance for the ages. She has more vocal control than Maria Callas (who never recorded a commercial video of this opera) generally had. But one can see why Maria Callas’ acting made such a big difference in the public’s reception of opera: The cast here is sometimes stiff and sometimes over-exuberant, totally unaccustomed to the camera. The recording captures this naked moment in opera history vividly. Meanwhile, as Gérard, Aldo Protti notches a minute 40 second ovation for his great act three aria, an underrated gem that in terms of writing ranks with the great soliloquys of the theater. Protti delivers it with stern, stolid seriousness. If that’s your thing he nails it. Capuana’s conducting is lacking in energy compared to some other performances; while I was watching I happened to stop the DVD briefly and play James Levine’s 1996 performance. The difference was inescapable: Levine was more lively, more dramatic and more engaged. But this video is easily the most irreplaceable on the list.\n4. 2015 Cast: Jonas Kaufmann, Eva-Maria Westbroek, Željko Lučić\nDirector: Sir David McVicar\nConductor: Antonio Pappano\nVenue: Royal Opera House, London\nKaufmann manages to appear in two of my top five selections. McVicar’s productions tend to be handsome but somewhat uninventive, often with unnecessarily dark lighting. I’ve seen almost a dozen of his operas (including his excellent Medea, his uneven Salome and his atypically strange Macbeth) and have noticed of late that McVicar upsets few opera fans but often excites them even less. The critics likewise are often more tepid than one might expect for someone who has directed more operas at the Met than any other. He is even more successful in his native England, where the Queen went as far as to knight him. This production shares some of the qualities to which I referred, with its attention to traditional staging and historical detail over ideation. But of the purely traditional _Chénier_s, this is one of the best. I choose it for number four in part because it is such a good contrast to my number one pick, in that the historical detail has been lauded for its accuracy. Meanwhile, McVicar has always been dynamite with singers, who apparently love to work with him, and the single best performance of the concluding scene—a duet beneath the guillotine by the romantic leads—is easily this one, with Jonas Kaufmann and Eva-Maria Westbroek so desperately in love with one another that I questioned the nature of their off-stage relationship, which I never do. Westbroek’s effervescent, half-crazy, indestructible smile breaks your heart as she sings of her willingness to die for love. The pair capture both the insanity and the reason in the couple’s logic so well that it’s possible to understand (for once!) why someone would make such a macabre choice with such passion. In other productions, the death wish seems so improbable that it seems Illica only doomed his heroine because the death of the female is what\u0026rsquo;s expected in the end of every 19th century opera. Here, though, this scene is the main reason I rate the production so highly.\n5. 2011 Cast: Hector Sandoval, Norma Fantini, Scott Hendricks\nDirector: Keith Warner\nConductor: Ulf Schirmer\nVenue: Bregenzer Festspiele, Lake Constance\nWhen I saw the cover of the Blu-ray of this peculiar production, I thought it was surely too weird to succeed. But it is actually one of the most interesting and entertaining productions to watch. The set, built on Lake Constance at the foot of the Alps at the border of Germany, Switzerland and Austria, features a massive, almost 80-foot-high sculpture of Marat’s head and shoulders, peering out of the lake to depict the French Revolution leader assassinated in his bathtub. The revolutionary leader Marat is not a character in the opera but appears briefly at the beginning of act two as a sculpture: a character declares, “This Marat’s head is getting dusty.” The three stages are dwarfed by the giant head, requiring sweeping staircases up Marat’s torso for the actors to navigate between them. At several points the singers literally leap off the giant sculpture into the lake below. Even Hector Sandoval’s Chénier jumps into the water, to escape a mob after he stabs Gérard at the end of act two. Near the end of the show, giant pins emerge from the head of Marat to signify (I suppose) the violence done to him and by extension to France and Europe. The production is bookended by the scythe-carrying specter of Death himself, first in person on the stage and then projected into the center of a massive mirror just off Marat’s right shoulder. There is no reason all these high-concept shenanigans should work, but most of them do, and I recommend it to anyone who is tired of traditional _Chénier_s. Other than Stölzl’s semi-realistic production it is the only nontraditional production available on DVD. I’m barely skimming the top of director Keith Warner’s innovations, and some do not work: For example, Chénier is strangely isolated from the rest of the cast, performing above the rest of the party in a small stage designed to look like a big open book of poetry. He is the only occupant of the book for most of the show, which makes meaningful interactions with the cast below a significant challenge. Even without this challenge the competent cast is not quite up to the level of the starry competition from other productions on this list. But there is nothing boring about Warner’s crazy production.\n6. 1985 Cast: José Carreras, Eva Marton, Piero Cappuccilli\nDirector: Lamberto Puggelli\nConductor: Riccardo Chailly\nVenue: Teatro alla Scala, Milan\nThe vast, sweeping exterior settings in Paolo Bregni\u0026rsquo;s set design are the most dramatic contrast to Stölzl’s cramped stage among the lot. This is the only production in which we get to see the outside of the di Coigny estate: a giant, rectangular hôtel particulier (as grand urban mansions are known in France) surrounded by a cour d’honneur (an entrance court). When the poor march into the mansion, we see the exterior view. This is not the only remarkable vista we witness, with great sets in the middle acts and a knock-out conclusion as our view of a cold and cavernous jail cell zooms out to a moving view of the guillotine against a heartbreaking sunrise. The music is overseen by my favorite Chénier conductor, Riccardo Chailly, for whom this opera seems to be a particular specialty. His punchy, profound performances on Decca Records’ 1984 Andrea Chénier LP set with Luciano Pavarotti and the National Philharmonic Orchestra set the standard for me, particularly as remixed on Pavarotti’s classic Verismo Arias album. Carreras is not opera’s most stirring Chénier, but his performance is more than capable. I found it hard watching Eva Marton’s Maddalena not to recall the verdict of the character Mendy in Terrence McNally’s great play The Lisbon Traviata that Marton \u0026ldquo;screams her way through\u0026rdquo; this role. But, to be fair, that has more to do with the memorability of McNally’s wordsmithing than my reaction to Marton’s slightly shrieky, stiff Maddalena. Still, the sets give both singers such a dramatic backdrop that any weaknesses in the performances are forgotten, and this is often a breathtaking Chénier.\n7. 2017 Cast: Yusif Eyvazov, Anna Netrebko, Luca Salsi\nDirector: Mario Martone\nConductor: Riccardo Chailly\nVenue: Teatro alla Scala, Milan\nChailly returns to conduct this uneven but sometimes exciting production of what he aptly calls “that magnificent libretto.” The highlight of this version occurs in the opening moments, as Gérard gives his opening soliloquy, a moment that can be too talky. Here Luca Salsi’s Gérard is surrounded by the nobles of the di Coigny party, frozen in partying positions as he describes what aristocratic social life is like in 1789. I’ve always found the first lines of Illica’s libretto fascinatingly chosen: First “Let’s put this blue couch here,” establishing Gérard as a servant of the estate, and then suddenly a description of the then-current practice among young courtiers of courting older women and widows. These interesting words often get entirely lost in a haze of Italian singing in other productions. But when this Gérard actually grabs the hands and bodies of the frozen aristocrats and shapes them into flirtatious positions, it is impossible not to comprehend the lyrics. It gives us a chance to contemplate Illica’s construction of the libretto: Why, since the opera is not ostensibly about the courting of older women, does he start here? His other libretti are too disciplined for this to be mere local color, though the libretto is full of color. It feels more like thesis, setting up immediately that artists in this world survive by pleasing power. These matured ladies’ expensive dresses and poofy wigs, an artifice adopted in an effort to stay young and beautiful while retaining their power and pleasure, are symptomatic of what brings about the revolution. Plus the moment sets up a contrast with the romance between Andrea and Maddalena, which is what we’d now call age-appropriate rather than the then-fashionable May-December courting. Martone sets up that contrast better than any other director I’ve seen. Unfortunately that grabbing opening is not matched by the rest of the production. One might expect more romantic fireworks from Eyvazov and Netrebko, who are married in real life, and while their singing is powerful the pair are somewhat unfocused actors. The set is too dark and crowded with knick-knacks. I’m not sure why Andrew Knapp on Parterre Box picked this as his favorite video. For me it is a middling selection, after that brilliant opening.\n8. 1981 Cast: Plácido Domingo, Gabriela Benackova, Piero Cappuccilli\nDirector: Otto Schenk\nConductor: Nello Santi\nVenue: Die Wiener Staatsoper, Vienna\nDomingo wins the most contagiously enthusiastic response of any of the modern Andreas. He and his cast have to wait after each of his major arias through a literal two-minute ovation. The applause feels interminable when you’re watching it, but it helps one reflect on how powerful Domingo’s performance is. He captures the pride, the muscularity and the nerviness of the character, and his singing ranks with the best. The production is forgettable, however. With little to contribute to a thematic conversation, Schenk’s traditional production tells the story but is falling over itself unnecessarily not to get in its way. Benackova thrills the audience almost as much as Domingo does, though her ovations are a full minute shorter.\n9. 1996 Cast: Luciano Pavarotti, Maria Guleghina, Juan Pons\nDirector: Nicholas Joel\nConductor: James Levine\nVenue: Metropolitan Opera, New York City\nPavarotti is vocally our best Chénier on recording, with an authority and beauty that remains unmatched, but his acting is stiff and unpenetrating. The Met’s production, which is still being revived to this day, can’t quite decide whether it wants to be realistic or stylized. The opening scene for example features an ornate blue set piece that might be a wall and might be a mirror; it’s unclear which. What is clear is that it’s at an odd angle, tilted just enough to symbolize the sinking aristocracy in the final stages of its prime. This is an interesting non-literal take, but the rest of the production is set realistically, causing a mismatch. However it is the first production I saw of this opera and I can’t help but retain some fondness for it.\n10. 2025 Cast: Piotr Beczala, Sonya Yoncheva, Igor Golovatenko\nDirector: Nicholas Joel\nConductor: Daniele Rustioni\nVenue: Metropolitan Opera, New York City\nThis video will become available on the Met On Demand app later this spring. It ran in movie theaters in December, as part of the Met in HD series. It’s a revival of the same production that featured Pavarotti 30 years ago, and it’s really time for a new one. Beczala is handsome as always, robust in voice and an intentional student of other Chéniers (as his social media marketing pointed out). But his acting is not as stirring as most of the others, and there is a stolid colorlessness in his affect. Golovatenko repeatedly gets a particularly big reaction from the crowd, but he treats his character like a villain with no redeeming qualities despite Illica’s careful mixing of decency with devilishness. In an interview during intermission in the HD broadcast, Golovatenko was asked whether he thought his character felt guilty for all the mischief he causes. No, not at all, the singer replied. But half of his character’s lines are about the guilt he feels for putting the poet in the line of danger. It’s a beautifully written part, but we can see Golovatenko’s reduction of his character in the way he plays his role. His singing, though, is impeccable, and clearly thrilled the crowd. Perhaps in 10 years the Met might grant us a new production to replace this one. The current one is engaging enough to capture new fans of the opera (as it once caught me) but limited enough in its appeal to drive fans, perhaps, to these other productions.\n11. 1955 Cast: Mario Del Monaco, Antonietta Stella, Giuseppe Taddei\nDirector: Mario Landi\nConductor: Angelo Questa\nVenue: Filmed for television by RAI-TV, Milan\nThis is the oldest time capsule on the list, and this black-and-white TV movie version would be rated higher if it had English subtitles. Not that I needed them after watching 13 performances of this opera, but if you need them, this is not the best recording for you. The Metropolitan Opera Guide to Opera on Video declares “This is the best Chénier on video, and the soundtrack is thrilling to hear.” It is true that the production is in some ways tighter than the most comparable production, the 1961 Tokyo performance. Del Monaco, who stars in both, is much more disciplined here. (He is a ham on the 1961 video.) The performance lacks two big things that the later one has, however: Renata Tebaldi and the interaction with the live audience. Antonietta Stella is not one of the top-tier Maddalenas, with a somewhat unfocused acting style. At times she seems to be smiling when Maddalena would probably not be. Taddei is sharp and nuanced as Gérard, aided by the camera’s closeups, much as Gérard is in the other RAI-TV video on this list. This one is credibly shot and the sets are vivid. The quality of the film had obviously degraded before it was produced on DVD: images stop for a second and then come back to life, white flickers up from the bottom and wipes out part of the screen. But if it’s opera history you are interested in, this is a very good document. And the liner notes are almost worth the price if old opera tales are your thing. The included essays feature interesting anecdotes, such as the tale of the time Del Monaco threatened to quit the Met if General Manager Rudolph Bing hired Franco Corelli again. (Corelli won the stand-off.)\n12. 2006 Cast: José Cura, Maria Guleghina, Carlo Guelfi\nDirector: Giancarlo Del Monaco\nConductor: Carlo Rizzi\nVenue: Teatro Comunale di Bologna\nThe son of Mario Del Monaco, who stars in two of the videos on this list, is the director, costume and set designer for this 2006 production. His set and costumes are colorful and original, but somewhat baffling. What is he after having almost everyone dressed in clashing pastels with mismatched stripe patterns? The painted pastoral backdrop is lovely for the ballet sequence in act one, but out of place for the rest of the act. The sets don’t improve from there, mostly ending up dark and unintriguing. Both of the main stars, José Cura and Maria Guleghina, have big followings but also a history of love ‘em or hate ‘em reactions. (A critic for Parterre Box defends Guleghina against complaints from “many of my wise opera buddies” who find her “wild/out-of-control/harsh/shrill/erratic.” CSMusic.net says “Cura’s career is being swept along by a high-powered marketing campaign, even though his technique is too unformed to sustain it.”) I found them both weaker than most of the singers on this list, if game. Guleghina launches into “La Mamma Morta” with unusual rhythm that puts acting first and melody second, which is welcome, then mostly corrects into sameness. At the conclusion both stars literally climb their jail cell walls and gesture expansively toward the deadly dawn, which is a genuinely striking stage picture but out-and-out peculiar. That adjective describes nearly the whole two hours.\n13. 1985 Cast: Plácido Domingo, Anna Tomowa-Sintow, Giorgio Zancanaro\nDirector: Michael Hampe\nConductor: Joshua Rudel\nVenue: Royal Opera, Covent Garden, London\nThe dullest of all the recordings, Michael Hampe’s traditional production tells the full story using flats one might see the like of in a high school scene shop, with right angles only and a lot of painted bricks. The audience is not juiced the way they were in the other Domingo production on this list, with short ovations at arias and a sleepy response at curtain call, almost fizzling out before the cast even returns to bow. Domingo is solid as always, with engaging dramatic form, but lacks any special take or insight. Every time Zancanaro came on stage I was startled by his tall, skinny, heroic looks: he is the least villainous of all the Gérards, which turns out to be striking but somehow also deflating. Still, while there is less wrong with this production than the Cura production that ranked at number 12—it has period-appropriate costumes that don’t distract and tells the story with sufficient competence—it is also less interesting.\nServing the libretto\nWhatever the ranking of a given production, it\u0026rsquo;s clear to me that Andrea Chénier has a special place in the repertoire. In addition to the above-mentioned virtues of Illica\u0026rsquo;s libretto, the script is unusual in its originality. While most opera librettos are adapted straightforwardly from a single source like a novel or a play, this one has its origin in several sources, and Illica\u0026rsquo;s own imagination. The libretto draws on a novel also named for the poet, but for example neither the novel nor the historical record contains a character named Gérard, and that character is one of Illica\u0026rsquo;s greatest contributions. (The character is in the spirit of history, however, as it\u0026rsquo;s been said he is modeled on a true-to-life leader of the revolution.) The libretto is a throwback to the period dominated by Eugène Scribe, whose libretti fashioned history, fiction and invention into something similarly new. Andrea Chénier is also a distinctly visual opera, with guillotines, salons, trials, and prisons, and thus perfect for the camera. Now someone needs to make a full-blown motion picture.\n"},{"title":"The New York Times Misses Its Moment at the Met\u0026rsquo;s \u003cem\u003eKavalier and Clay\u003c/em\u003e","url":"https://stagesscreens.com/posts/2026-01-29-the-new-york-times-misses-its-moment-at/","date":"January 29, 2026","tags":["Opera"],"text":"The New York Times Misses Its Moment at the Met's *Kavalier and Clay* When the Metropolitan Opera chose to open its 2025-26 season with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, they must have felt it was a risky move. The brand-new, sweeping, three-hour adaptation of Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about two Jewish comic book makers who invent a superhero to fight the Nazis in World War Two had only played at Indiana University, as the co-producing LA Opera had canceled what was to be its debut run due to financial constraints. The top brass decided not even to give it a slot in the “Met in HD” series, which broadcasts the operas in movie theaters around the world. So when The New York Times responded to its grand opening with the headline “A ‘Kavalier \u0026amp; Clay’ Opera Doesn’t Meet Its Moment,” it seemed like a potentially serious hit to the Met’s recent ambitious, financially perilous effort to introduce as many as six new operas each season. However, after that review the full multi-week run of the opera nearly sold out every night in the Met’s cavernous 3,800-seat auditorium, and now, after I was finally able to see the opera last night in my local movie theater, I can say it seems quite clear it’s the New York Times that missed its moment.\nIt turns out Kavalier and Clay is the most thrilling and original new opera in years, and audiences would appear to agree. In addition to the movie theater run, the Met took the almost unprecedented step of adding a second run in the New York opera house in during the month of February, when the Met is usually dark. The hit comes just in time for for the Met, which announced last week it is slashing jobs and operas next season as a result of financial challenges despite taking what the Times has called desperate steps in the last few years, using up $120 million of its $217 million reserve fund in just two years and launching a controversial collaboration with Saudi Arabia in which the Met will perform there in exchange for investment in the company.\nKavalier and Clay is not perfect, and as others have noted it does not solve the art form’s long drought in melody. Composer Mason Bates writes better for the orchestra than he does for the voice, with only a few soaring arias that contribute to the art form’s storehouse of great melodies, and yet he has written a riveting orchestral score that excitingly combines electronic music with the symphonic and often soars melodically, particularly in the final scene. The score, which put new-music-loving conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin absolutely in his element, makes great use of bass and brass, with what Mason calls “Wagnerian tubas” nestling aside a unique application of mandolin. Barone complained that the opera draws too much from Danny Elfman’s scores for Tim Burton\u0026rsquo;s Batmanand Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies, but I found it fun to see an opera composer finally using the melodic advances that have occurred in film music in the last century rather than holding his nose at them. Orchestras around the world have been reckoning with how important and meritorious the contributions to classical music of composers like John Williams and Elfman have been, routinely holding days when the orchestra performs the scores while the movie plays in the orchestra hall. But operas have remained strangely old school on the subject even as observers lament that the art form has never recovered from Puccini’s death more than 100 years ago, perhaps because “Nessun Dorma” was the last sort of hit tune in opera.\nBarone wasn’t excited by Bates’ innovations; he called the score “almost always obvious.” If this reads more like a review of the Times review than of the opera, it’s a little bit personal: The entertaining, well-written review threatened to keep me from seeing this opera at all, as I tried but was unable to make a trip to New York work in the fall. I’m thrilled that the Met has overcome any impact of Barone’s verdict that the opera is “superficial.”\nThe alleged superficiality of the opera is, he alleges, rooted in what I find to be a brave and triumphant libretto by Gene Scheer. Sweeping and novelistic, it avoids falling into the trap of trying to repeat the formula of the Puccini era, in which stories were generally boiled down to a myopic focus on a single love triangle, ignoring all the other fascinating historical or thematic material that surrounds the core story. Scheer’s work reminded me of a similarly novelistic libretto on this order, Andrea Chenier, which played the Met in HD series last month. But Barone found it didn’t do justice to the sprawling 600-page novel that inspired it, finding it too simple but somehow complaining that operas are best when they are simple. “Like a skipping stone,” he wrote, “Bates’s adaptation bounces across Chabon’s novel while never really plunging into it, for a treatment that is both too much for opera and not enough: too much plot, not enough transcendence.” “Both too much and not enough” is a hard note to execute. Barone’s introduction read:\n“Opera benefits from simplicity. It is an art form of elastic time, of actions and emotions compressed and stretched to elevate drama to something more like a dream.\nBecause of that, plots tend to be straightforward, making room for the music to add complication and transcendence. Wagner’s four-part, epic “Ring” may run more than 15 hours, but it could be summarized in just a few minutes.\nMichael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier \u0026amp; Clay” is not simple. Its more than 600 pages teem with World War II-era action and lofty themes about Americanness, Jewishness, love, death and, above all, pop culture’s ability to change lives. This is the stuff of fiction that aspires to literary greatness.”\nI’m in agreement about the greatness of the novel, which I read almost a quarter century ago, but every one of the themes he implies didn’t make it into the opera in fact did: Americanness, Jewishness, love, death, and pop culture’s ability to change lives. It is true that there were themes from the novel that did not make it, such as its critique of capitalism’s treatment of Kavalier and Clay, a not-so-subtle commentary on the way Superman’s creators Seigel and Schuster were underpaid, locking them out of the massive profits their hero generated. Similarly, the opera cut the book’s exploration of the comic industry’s initial reluctance before America entered World War Two to have a superhero explicitly fighting Nazis. In this version, the comic book is greenlit right away with its superhero clubbing Hitler on the cover. Both themes could be touched upon quickly in the adaptation and would only require a few short added lines. But Barone doesn’t mention these themes, and everything he seems to miss is done brilliant justice by Scheer. In fact the libretto was so breezily conversational that despite my scouring of the score for melody I was surprised to find I often simply forgot the characters were singing. I don’t remember having that experience in an opera house before.\nThe cast sang Bates’ score ably, and both baritone Andrzej Filonczyk (Joe Kavalier) and tenor Miles Mykkanen (Sam Clay) acted their roles well and sang proficiently. A particular highlight was Edward Nelson as Tracy, a well-built and slim actor who in the story plays Kavalier and Clay’s superhero the Escapist on radio and film. I happened to catch Nelson in a brilliant production of Die Fledermaus at the Opera Theatre of St Louis this summer, and I remember wondering how a “singingactor” (as they are cumbersomely called by some critics) had managed to look so good for so many parts, be so perfectly built, and have such great acting and comedic timing skills and yet not be seen regularly at a house like the Met. Now he has.\nThe book is a little short on female energy, and Scheer responded by transforming Thomas, Joe Kavalier’s brother in the novel, into a sister. Lauren Snauffer plays that part excellently, with an ageless quality that manages to capture the look and feel of what it’s like to be a precocious 14-year-old. Meanwhile as Rosa, the love interest first for Joe and then for Sam, Sun-Ly Pierce also looked the part beautifully.\nThe real star of the show, however, is director Bartlett Sher, who has turned out perhaps the single best-directed opera I’ve seen from the Met. Ably handling a real challenge with brilliant visuals and style, Sher uses Studio 59’s brilliant use of projected animation, as well as the constantly shuffling and reshuffling set pieces, to such great effect that one wonders if the the days of the giant met sets that need 45 minute intermissions to change could be – if we wanted them to be – a thing of the past.\nIn the end, this exciting contribution to the art form ends up in the same conversation the operas usually do. The Met has openly sided with those who feel the art form is not performing in the same league as it was a century ago. “After Puccini, opera started slipping from its creative peak,” Met artistic director Peter Gelb wrote in an Opinion piece in the New York Times in 2024. “Geniuses like Strauss and Janáček followed in the early decades of the 20th century, but with a few exceptions, the second half of the 20th century produced little truly popular opera; composers turned inward, with experimental, sometimes atonal compositions that didn’t appeal to large audiences.”\nTo those concerns, Barone offers the following closing criticisms: “Bates’s music can be skillful, even enjoyable. But it is also forgettable, in the way that much contemporary opera at the Met has been since the company re-emerged from the pandemic.” He refers to the Met’s recent “house style” of “toothless scores that ask so little of their audiences, they would just be background entertainment anywhere else. That’s not what opera is.”\nBut opera is an expensive and challenging art form in which to produce new works, especially in post-pandemic financial times, and as the New Yorkers’ Alex Ross has pointed out it takes several failures to produce one success artistically. This is especially true after several decades of almost no new operas at the highest level: opera writing used to be a job, and now it’s a gig. When The Met turns out something as sharp and brilliantly colorful as The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, it deserves praise. Thank goodness audiences have stepped forward to recognize what the Times missed: potentially even a new moment in the art form.\n"},{"title":"Tom Stoppard Grew from a Man of No Conviction: An Appreciation","url":"https://stagesscreens.com/posts/2025-12-22-tom-stoppard-grew-from-man-of-no/","date":"December 22, 2025","tags":["Theater"],"text":"Tom Stoppard Grew from a Man of No Conviction: An Appreciation In his later plays Tom Stoppard almost always included a character who turns from a life of frivolous tomfoolery, of one sort or another, comes face to face with evil in the world, and recognizes his responsibility to become the change he wishes to see. That was in fact the trajectory of Stoppard’s writings themselves. He went from being a writer who avoided writing about politics — someone who said his favorite line in literature was “I’m a man of no convictions—at least, I think I am” — to being someone who wrote a nine-hour trilogy of plays on the origins of Russian socialism, and for whom almost every new play for two decades ended up carrying some kind of political theme. I loved this change in Stoppard as much as I’d loved what he’d written before the transformation. To hyperbolize as one does in the face of a loss, Stoppard’s writings were in a small way the spur for such an intellectual awakening in me as well. As young theater kids, my brother and I were interested in a wide variety of subjects—politics, history, literature, theater, film—but like a lot of humanities kids were not particularly awake to the joys of other subjects, like math and science. (It’s a cliché of journalists to say that the reason one chooses that field is to avoid math.) When we encountered Stoppard’s plays, particularly his best, Arcadia, we saw that our beloved art form could tell stories that heretofore it had not, finding literature in chaos theory, the “hard problem” of consciousness, mathematics, physics. He also made other subjects fascinating and entertaining in a way many have tried to imitate but none have equaled. His death over Thanksgiving weekend was as hard a blow for me as any celebrity death ever has been. To say he was my favorite playwright seems too tiny a tribute. He changed my relationship to the world. His personal evolution, his dramaturgy and my own intellectual maturation are versions of the same story.\nIn his first decade or more of writing plays, Stoppard was almost fiercely apolitical. As a long profile by Kenneth Tynan in The New Yorker pointed out in 1977, there was then a “split in English drama” between ”heated, embattled, socially committed playwrights, like John Osborne, John Arden, and Arnold Wesker, who had come out fighting in the late fifties” and “cool, apolitical stylists, like Harold Pinter, the late Joe Orton, Christopher Hampton … Alan Ayckbourn … Simon Gray … and Stoppard.” The article quoted Stoppard from an interview in the London weekly Time Out as saying “I used to feel out on a limb, because when I started to write you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that \u0026hellip; The Importance of Being Earnest is important, but it says nothing about anything.” Stoppard’s plays in those days were brilliant, stuffed to the brim with explorations of philosophy (Jumpers), literary figures like Oscar Wilde and James Joyce, historic figures like Lenin, artistic figures like Tristan Tzara (Travesties) and the trappings of existentialism (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, though he denied its conscious influence). But they were not political, and he was also accused of lacking a certain emotion. Again, Kenneth Tynan:\n“Not long ago, I asked Stoppard what he thought of Marlowe’s charge that his plays failed to convey genuine emotion. He reflected for a while and then replied, ‘That criticism is always being presented to me as if it were a membrane that I must somehow break through in order to grow up. Well, I don’t see any special virtue in making my private emotions the quarry for the statue I’m carving. I can do that kind of writing, but it tends to go off, like fruit. I don’t like it very much even when it works. I think that sort of truth-telling writing is as big a lie as the deliberate fantasies I construct. It’s based on the fallacy of naturalism. There’s a direct line of descent from the naturalistic theatre which leads you straight down to the dregs of bad theatre, bad thinking, and bad feeling. At the other end of the scale, I dislike Abstract Expressionism even more than I dislike naturalism. But you asked me about expressing emotion. Let me put the best possible light on my inhibitions and say that I’m waiting until I can do it well.’\nIn the late 1970s after the Tynan interview, however, Stoppard appeared to come to a kind of reckoning in both content and style. Himself a refugee from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, he wrote several plays about that country\u0026rsquo;s Communist Party and its abuses of human rights. These plays included Every Good Boy Deserves Favor, Cahoot’s Macbeth and Dogg’s Hamlet and Professional Foul. The latter features the reformed man structure I’ve described above. In the play, an ethics professor refuses to smuggle the contraband writings of a Czech dissident (modeled in part on Vaclav Havel, of whom Stoppard is both a friend and a fan) on the grounds that smuggling is unethical. Ultimately, he decides the reverse is true. He stops treating philosophical ideas as pliable fictions and takes political action based on what Stoppard believes to be patently obvious moral absolutes. Meanwhile there were changes on the stylistic front. With The Real Thing in 1984 critics heralded a breakthrough in writing believable characters with what they considered real emotions. Retaining the dazzling wit of his earlier plays but writing essentially naturalistically in terms of character development, Stoppard told the story of a fictionalized version of his own marital travails with emotion and humor.\nNine years later he combined the emotional impact of The Real Thing with the thematic razzle dazzle of his earlier works and wrote what I still consider to be the single best play of the modern era, Arcadia. In a format that was much imitated, the play alternates between aristocrats in an English countryside estate who contemplate Newtonian physics and Euclidean geometry, among many other subjects, and academics who are researching those aristocrats in the 20th Century while discussing Byronic poetry, Chaos theory, Enlightenment versus Romantic gardening, and of course love and sex. No one has ever packed so much into one play.\nBut Stoppard kept trying, and the streak of plays he wrote in the 1990s and 2000s is among the most impressive in the hundreds-year-old history of the art form. Indian Ink like Arcadia questioned the accuracy of biography, this time in post-colonial India. The Invention of Love, which might be my second favorite, has been called Stoppard’s only “gay play.” It presented the 19th Century poet AE Housman in love with a male classmate as Oscar Wilde changes the times and the word homosexual is coined. The word is a monstrosity, one character complains: Half of it is Latin and the other half is Greek!\nIn 2003 I flew to London to see Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia, a trilogy of plays about 19th Century Russian history, and wrote about the experience for a magazine. I saw all three three-hour plays in one day, an 11-hour commitment that ran from 11 am to 10 pm. This is part of the summary I wrote:\n“The [Chekhovian Russian] estate Stoppard shows us is owned by the family of Michael Bakunin, a student who will become an anarchist revolutionary and who, for us, is a one-man dramatization of Russia’s philosophical progression toward Marxism. Bakunin is obsessed with Schelling’s notion that the inner life is real, and all external life is illusion: a great excuse for a life of poetry while the czar crushes all challenges to the status quo of Slavic slavery. But Bakunin can’t avoid the impact of this exterior reality, so it’s forget Schelling, “Fichte is the man!” And then, just as all of Michael’s friends have started reading Fichte, “Hegel is the man!” Hegel, of course, will become “the man” not only to Bakunin but also to Marx. The German’s view of history as a deterministic march of progress will become the foundation of Marx’s world-changing prediction of capitalism’s doom, and Bakunin will be one of thousands of European leftists to find faith in a future proletariat revolution.”\nThe thrust of my piece was to trace Stoppard’s journey from being an avowedly apolitical playwright who described himself as a “small c” conservative who even, temporarily, endorsed Margaret Thatcher, to writing the trilogy in which, as I put it, “the heroes are all socialists and the chief question is one dear to the sort of leftists Sir Tom once alienated: Why is it we never made it to the utopia envisioned by the socialists of yesteryear?”\nFour years after that Rock ‘n’ Roll repeated a similar dynamic to the Bakunin story. A Czech PhD _s_tudent and rock music fan begins the play unwilling to take risks for the repressive situation in communist Czechoslovakia, until the story of one of his favorite rock bands brings the facts of the country’s plight into sharper relief. He compares the views in Czechoslovakia with those of a professor who teaches Marxist theory, and who holds up Soviet politics as an ideal. Meanwhile the play saturates us in rock and roll music, Sapphic poetry, the politics of Vaclav Havel and debates over materialist philosophy.\nIn his penultimate play in 2015, The Hard Problem, Stoppard features another epiphany, this time not political but moral. The show returns to the broad philosophical questions he explored in Jumpers in 1972, but this time from a scientific framework. A college student is studying “the Hard problem” of consciousness—how can you prove it exists? What is its nature? Where does goodness come from? But ultimately her belief that science can prove the goodness of humans is destroyed. Goodness, like consciousness and because it is related to consciousness, remains a hard problem. Once again the play is full of dazzling intellectual juxtapositions.\nIn his final masterpiece, 2020\u0026rsquo;s Leopoldstadt, the inevitable character forced to grapple with the political world in a new way is a kind of self-portrait. Like Stoppard, he is a Jew who has not known he is a Jew for most of his life, consequently freed from having to grapple with the worst parts of being a Jew. He meets a relative who has lost most of his family to the Holocaust and is smacked in the face by how indifferent he has been.\nMy brother and I met Stoppard, sort of, at a book signing after a panel discussion at the University of Pennsylvania. The two of us drove some 700 miles with two college friends to see him at a symposium on Arcadia. We saw him on two panels, in discussion with academics and a director from the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, and laughed as his witty rebuttal to a professor who suggested that Stoppard’s work was postmodern, and that postmodernist literature was excrement. (“What do you say to those who feel postmodernism takes things from multiple sources, digests them, and then excretes them in a different form?”) I wish I remembered what Stoppard said in reply.\nWe discovered Stoppard in college, first by seeing a mediocre production of one of Stoppard’s less amazing plays, Albert’s Bridge. Then we were blown away by reading The Real Thing. My brother acted the lead roles in Travesties and The Real Inspector Hound. And then shortly thereafter he saw Arcadia in London. These plays made him want to be a dramaturg, researching the history and intellectual content in plays like Stoppard\u0026rsquo;s. He also wrote plays that accomplished some of the sparkling combinations of intellectual references and comic themes. Stoppard’s plays made both of us read more voraciously, both about the subjects of his shows and about everything else. He made the world’s fascinating subjects more fascinating, encouraging his fans to see the connections between all sorts of things. And he did so with a wit that is unparalleled in playwrighting. He was at heart a showman. There will never be another playwright like him. He was also, like his characters, a person who underwent a transformation. The “reformed man” is not just a fictional trope. He didn’t just write about a moral awakening, he modeled it for his viewers.\n"},{"title":"Reading and Ranking All of Toni Morrison\u0026rsquo;s Novels in 30 Days","url":"https://stagesscreens.com/posts/2025-11-18-reading-and-ranking-all-of-toni/","date":"November 18, 2025","tags":["Books"],"text":"Reading and Ranking All of Toni Morrison's Novels in 30 Days I was surprised when a Google search for a ranking of Toni Morrison’s novels came up empty. Only Forbes magazine advertised “The Greatest Toni Morrison Books, Ranked and In Order,” but it turned out this meant they had listed her books in chronological order. This seems a major gap for the Internet, so I read all 12 of her fiction books in less than 30 days and have compiled my own ranking. This diverges from the subject “Stages and Screens” but is a follow-up to my last post, on why more Morrison novels have not been adapted dramatically.\nI should note that since finishing the novels, I have found one other blogger who ranked Morrison’s early novels. But I still haven’t found anyone who has ranked them all.\nMy rankings are strictly my personal preference. Here they are.\n1. Beloved (1987) This is a somewhat boring choice, perhaps, as Beloved is widely considered Morrison’s masterpiece, and she spent a fair amount of time resisting any notion that this one dwarfs the others. It does not; it’s a tough call whether to give this one number one or not, but it is in a way the thematic granddaddy of her novels, as all of them are in part about the traumatic legacy of slavery on the African American community, even when the subject is ostensibly something else, and this is the story that zooms in most specifically on that topic. In a story about Morrison’s Jazz, The New York Times described “Morrison’s overarching project of portraying and reflecting Black American life in and after slavery”, which I find not reductive but expansive in depicting Morrison’s life work. Beloved is based on the true story of Margaret Garner, a former slave who killed her children rather than see them enslaved. In this book, however, the ex-slave is Sethe, a fiercely loving mother haunted by the ghost of the child she killed. The story sounds grim, and it is, but through all of Morrison’s stylistic adventurousness and the simple, sometimes humorous style in which she writes, it is anything but a drag to read. Indeed, it’s a fast-paced, lively page turner. See, for example, the first page, in which Morrison introduces the ghost immediately, relating in matter-of-fact magical realist prose that Sethe’s two boys ran away from home because the ghost left a handprint on a cake and shattered a mirror in the house just because someone looked in it. Wry, funny, scary but with the emphasis not on fear. Jumping from one character’s perspective to another in a way that recalls Virginia Woolf but in a voice very much all her own, Morrison wraps up her masterpiece in just 273 taut and beautifully structured pages. There may never be another novel like it. If you’ve only seen the movie starring Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover, which got a bad rep but is a decent attempt to capture this uncapturable novel, then be sure to read the Pulitzer Prize-winning book. It’s a masterful experience unto itself.\n2. Song of Solomon (1977) If Beloved was Morrison’s critical breakthrough, Song of Solomon was her breakthrough in sales 10 years earlier. It was her first hit. It’s also her most playfully creative and most stylistically diverse work. The fun begins with the names of the characters: The lead character is Milkman Dead, whose name inspired the famous band The Dead Milkmen. He undergoes a perfectly cinematic journey to discover his roots, and literal sacks of gold. His aunt is named Pilate Dead. His sisters are named \u0026ldquo;Magdalene called Lena\u0026rdquo; and First Corinthians. This is the novel that most directly establishes Morrison’s unique method of naming her characters, wherein the names themselves reflect the trauma of slavery. Milkman’s grandfather, Macon Dead the first, had his name dictated by a white government employee who paid too little attention in registering an ex-slave in 1867. (Asked where he was born, Milkman’s grandfather said “Macon.” Asked what his parent’s names were, he answered “They are dead.” The employee wrote down those words on the wrong lines, and the family had acquired its peculiar name.) From the opening pages, where a black man tries to fly, to the closing pages, where one does, the novel is full of mystery and magical realism, tragedy and comedy. One can tell – just barely – that Song of Solomon is an earlier work than Beloved, as its second half relies a little heavily on an objective that Milkman himself concedes is like a fairy tale, and felt to me like that of a video game: finding hidden gold. Also, the great twists and turns of the plot are often communicated in long confessional monologues. But that just makes it fit Tony Kushner’s metaphor for great American literature: that of a lasagna, so stacked with juicy ingredients that it barley stands up. This is a contrast to Toni’s other works, which are structured so immaculately that they stand up better than Kushner’s lasagna. The overstuffed quality makes the novel feel great, and one can see here the influence of Morrison on the great August Wilson as clearly here as anywhere else.\n3. Jazz (1992) Jazz was Toni Morrison’s personal favorite of her own books, and with good reason. Having told the whole story on the first page of the novel (a married man has an affair with a young girl, then shoots her when he discovers she’s been with someone else), Morrison mesmerizingly explores the event from every angle over 200 plus pages, from what caused it beforehand, to its tragic aftermath. Told non-linearly from the standpoint of multiple characters, Jazz uses the improvisational tools of jazz music itself to comment on many aspects of the Jazz Age of the 1920s. When I read the book, I began by reading it to Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, carelessly. This made the drama described in the first page seem somewhat maudlin. So, I put on 1920s jazz music, and a whole new dimension to the title of the book came out. The music largely seems so happy; the words often describe a case of the blues, but the situations in the book made one hear something more complicated than happiness or sadness, something one of Morrison’s characters describes: danger. “She knew from sermons and editorials that it wasn’t real music,” Morrison writes of her character Alice Manfred, the aunt of the girl whose death is described on the first page of the book. “Just colored folks’ stuff: harmful, certainly; embarrassing of course; but not real, not serious. Yet Alice Manfred swore she heard a complicated anger in it; something hostile that disguised itself as flourish and roaring seduction. But the part she hated most was its appetite.” Alice cites the jazz song “Hit me but don’t quit me,” a song title so complicated in its “anger” that when I searched for the song I got a page full of results directing me to domestic violence resources. Jazz describes the sweeping subject of mass migration from the south to the north, and specifically to Harlem in the early years of the 20th century. That subject, Morrison once said, is not as big as slavery itself, the subject of Beloved. And that is why, she said, people prefer Beloved despite the fact that she prefers Jazz. But in Morrison’s hands it’s no small subject, and Jazz is some of her very best work.\n4. The Bluest Eye (1970) The Bluest Eye was Toni Morrison’s first novel and remains one of her most devastating. She wrote it at age 39 while working as an editor at Knopf in New York City, which remained her publisher to the end. It was frowned upon for editors to write, but when her co-workers discovered this novel they celebrated the fact that they had her on their staff. The Bluest Eye tells the story of a young black girl who wishes to have blue eyes. The idea came from Morrison’s childhood in Ohio. She once was debating with a friend whether there was a God or not. Morrison said she believed God existed. Her friend did not, and as evidence she said, for the last two years I have been praying for blue eyes. Her eyes remained black. The first page of the book, as with Jazz, discloses the whole plot. It isn’t pretty, the events the plot circles around. But Morrison knew she wanted to write books that were unflinching in their examination of the worst horrors in Black life. All of the prior black authors, she said in a documentary film, had flinched because they were concerned with what she calls “the white gaze.” Even Frederick Douglass, she said, didn’t write for her. Ralph Ellison, she added, sometimes said it directly in print: that there were some events too horrible to write about directly. That Morrison manages to write about these topics while her novels are so enriching and entertaining is remarkable, but it has gotten this book banned many times. Pecola Breedlove, the young protagonist named for a Douglas Sirk movie about a girl who finds herself ugly because of her racial identity, deserves broader exposure than that. Winfrey went so far as to say everyone should read the book.\n5. A Mercy (2008) A Mercy is one of Morrison’s later books but deserves to be ranked with her best. More attention is often given to her early works, but the newer stuff loses very little if any of Morrison’s power. Returning to the subject of slavery, Morrison sets the book between 1682 and 1690 in Colonial America. The book begins with the sale of a young girl named Florens into slavery. In the end we discover she has been writing much of the book on the walls of her quarters, having managed to convince a priest to teach her to read and write at a time it was illegal not only for Black persons to read but for white persons to teach them how. This elegant structure means that one has two options: To read the book more than once to get the full meaning of the early chapters, or to read it once after reading perhaps an online summary. Either way, it is one of Morrison’s most rewarding reads.\n6. Sula (1973) Sula is not merely about the title character, or her relationship with her best friend; it is about the life of a full Ohio town. The area in question is “the Bottom,” so called because its white owner once promised African Americans prime land at the bottom of a hill if they would agree to do certain difficult work for him. When the work was done, he regretted the promise, so he told them the “bottom” described the less valuable land atop the hill, as it was the bottom of heaven. That the stories of the townspeople are as fascinating as they are well before we meet Sula, and that the full sweep of the town’s tales are told in a mere 174 pages, are a testament to the unbridled power of a writer for whom this was only the second novel.\n7. Tar Baby (1981) Choosing between Sula and Tar Baby is particularly difficult. I keep flipping the two in my mind, back and forth. They both allude to the legend of the tar baby from the Br’er Rabbit stories, in which a white farmer makes a black doll made of tar to deter the rabbit from eating the farmer’s vegetables. The more the rabbit argues with the tar baby, the more deeply entangled in the tar baby he becomes. The protagonist couple in Tar Baby are like that: Jadine and Son have knock-down, drag-out fights, become chaotically enmeshed in each other’s stories, and Son resents the fact that (as he points out) Jadine was “made” like the Tar Baby by a white man. The white man is a rich candy manufacturer on a Caribbean island, whose paternalistic treatment of his Black servants ignites the story’s second half. In the first half, Son swims to that island from a ship on which he has stowed away, a fugitive on the run from an accidental death he caused years before. Their respective journeys are symbolic of the path of the African American in the late 20th century. The novel is a fast and furious read.\n8. Home (2012) Described by the jacket copy on the paperback edition implies as loosely based on Odysseus’ journey home to Ithaca in The Odyssey, Home is the one Morrison novel on the impact of war on the Black community. Frank Money is a veteran from the Korean War who travels from Seattle to Atlanta to rescue his sister. The obstacles on his journey are mostly interior, as he recovers from the scars of his time overseas in the evils of war. It is as redemptive as anything Morrison has written. Home fills a necessary gap in Morrison’s depiction of the landscape of black life over four centuries in her 12 novels.\n9. God Help the Child (2015) Toni Morrison’s last novel, written just three years before the “Me Too” movement, is in large measure about the prevalence of child abuse in the marginalized communities and its roots and impacts. It focuses on a girl who when very young falsely accused her teacher of abuse—a focus not entirely consistent with the emphases of Me Too, as one of the major threads of the movement was that accusers should be believed—but the characters are surrounded by other instances of abuse. I lost count at, I think, six separate instances of abuse. It’s only the second Morrison novel to take place in the present day (after Tar Baby) and includes the first academic character in all of Morrison. Booker is a graduate student in economic theory, and his assessment of Adam Smith and Marx is detailed in the narrative. He feels wealth is the cause of much of the world’s suffering. That narrative shifts from one character’s perspective to another. The taut novel is an interesting and fast-moving read; it is not a tract on abuse.\n10. Love (2003) Love depicts some of the downsides that have come with the Civil Rights movement, not as criticism but as an exploration of an unwritten story. Bill Cosey, dead by the time the novel opens, was a successful Black entrepreneur whose seaside resort was flocked to by African Americans of means in the days of segregation, but whose business falls apart as integration sweeps the country and his customers can go to any hotel. That would be enough for a substantive novel by itself, but Love is more about Cosey’s impact on the women in his life than about Cosey himself. It centers on the battles between his widow, Heed, and his granddaughter, Christine, who like so many of Morrison’s protagonists were best friends before he married Heed at eleven years old, in a southern state where child marriage was allowed. More than other Morrison novels, this one late in the book sinks ever so slightly into a soap opera tone, but it is rich and layered and depending on which side of the book one is gazing upon could rank higher on this list.\n11. Recitatif (1983, 2022) Recitatif, named for the French word for dialogue in an opera, is yet another story from Morrison about childhood friends who drift in and out of each other’s lives as the book progresses. But unlike the rest of her books, the conceit of this one is that it’s impossible to tell which of the two characters is white and which is black. I rank Recitatif with the novels because it has been published in 2022 as a stand-alone book, but it is really a short story. It was intended to be so, as Zadie Smith points out in a long essay in the 2022 edition that admiringly admits frustration with the book’s refusal to hint at the race of its characters. Smith notes that most novelists write copious short stories, some of which become novels, and some of which die out incomplete. It is a testament to her brilliance that Morrison always knew which she was writing and that her books are tightly and immaculately structured. This was apparently the only short story she wrote. It ranks lower than the other books not because it isn’t a quality read, but because it is slighter and is an experiment, if not a novelty act: It is indeed frustrating not to know the race of the characters. Is this our flaw, or the story’s? Morrison insists we examine that frustration.\n12. Paradise (1998) This is the last book in Toni Morrison’s so-called Beloved trilogy, which wasn’t really intended to be a trilogy but which can loosely be compared to Dante’s Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso, with Beloved representing hell and Jazz representing purgatory. It is easily Morrison’s least beloved novel, and with good reason. The book, which tells the story of a city comprising only black residents and a convent nearby, introduces character after character with little relation to one another except where they end up. The end, which is depicted in the first chapter of the novel, shows us the residents of the small town walking into the convent and shooting its female residents. With some counting the characters at more than 100, it suffers more than benefits from this excess. But it may reward repeat reads; that Paradise is last on this list only shows what a strong list it is.\n"},{"title":"Why Aren\u0026rsquo;t There More Toni Morrison Film Adaptations?","url":"https://stagesscreens.com/posts/2025-11-18-why-arent-there-more-toni-morrison-film/","date":"November 18, 2025","tags":["Film","Books"],"text":"Why Aren't There More Toni Morrison Film Adaptations? The New York Times on March 11 of this year ran a story titled “Netflix is gobbling up world literature. What could go wrong?” The sub-headline read, “The streamer keeps mounting lavish adaptations of beloved novels – and making them all feel like just more Netflix.” That headline made me wonder: With that flood of novel adaptations underway, why hasn’t there been more than one film or TV adaptation of a novel by Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison? She has been called “one of the greatest authors in American history,” and “one of the world’s most celebrated and controversial modern authors,” among many other plaudits. As a blogger about stage and screen who has also read every one of Morrison’s 12 novels, I can personally attest the novels are highly cinematic, well-suited to cinema. And since 2020, there has been a push for more dramatic works by African-American and minority authors. So what gives?\nThe first answer is that since 2020 there have been in fact two announcements made that Morrison novels are under development. First, in 2021, Deadline.com reported that director George C. Wolfe was “in talks” to write and direct a mini-series adaptation of Morrison’s Song of Solomon. A year later, in 2022, Deadline reported that HBO was planning a limited series adaptation of her Sula, from writer Shannon M. Houston, who wrote Stations Eleven, and Stephanie Allain’s Homegrown Pictures. So the news in part is good for Morrison fans. But it has been four years since the Song of Solomon adaptation was announced, and three since the Sula adaptation, and no further news has emerged online. One Toni Morrison fan said, “I’m not holding my breath.” So it begs the questions, what took so long? And what’s taking so long?\nThe Toni Morrison estate, not surprisingly, did not immediately reply to my email asking why there haven’t been more adaptations. (Morrison died in 2019.) When I googled to see whether anyone else had written about this question (I couldn’t find anyone who had), Google AI was willing to leap in and answer the question: The content of Morrison’s novels is too dark for film and TV. It is true that Morrison unflinchingly approaches the trauma that comes from a history of bondage in this country—rape, murder, sexual assault. All the devils are here, as the saying goes. As I point out it in my ranking of Morrison’s 12 novels, also posted to this blog today, she has said that even Black masters like Ralph Ellison and Fredrick Douglass shied away from telling the full story of the horrific events that accompanied slavery. Ellison, she noted, would say so out loud, speaking of horrors too dark to relate in print. Thus Morrison became a considerable scribe not only of heart and humanity but also of history’s worst evils. But one can hardly say Hollywood has shied away from these subjects when the authors were white. So Google AI’s explanation does not entirely add up.\nIt is true that Morrison\u0026rsquo;s novels often have a marked interiority, are written non-linearly out of chronological order, and jump between characters\u0026rsquo; perspectives. But even James Joyce\u0026rsquo;s famously stylistically challenging Ulysses has been made into at least two movies. This sort of experimentation in style is not a dead end for many white writers.\nAnother reason it took so long has been Morrison’s own reluctance to see her books turned into movies. Before Beloved, Morrison expressed a lack of interest in adapting her books to movies. Morrison told the Washington Post in 1977 that \u0026ldquo;the movies\u0026rdquo; were interested in making Song of Solomon. \u0026ldquo;Nobody had bought the book\u0026rdquo; but \u0026ldquo;all the right people have called.\u0026rdquo; When more than one said the book reminded them of King Lear, apparently not a comparison with which she agreed, she said she decided to let her agent handle the movie people. By 1983, still with no film made, Morrison expressed a reluctance to see her books made into films. \u0026ldquo;My students ask me when I\u0026rsquo;m going to make my books into movies,\u0026rdquo; she said in an interview with Claudia Tate that is reprinted in part on enotes.com. \u0026ldquo;I tell them I\u0026rsquo;m not terribly interested in that because the film would not be mine.\u0026rdquo;\nHowever when Oprah Winfrey decided she wanted to adapt Beloved, she was unable to find any phone number for Morrison, as Winfrey reports in the 2019 documentary film Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am (an interesting phenomenon in itself, as it had a healthy theatrical release in certain markets). She called the fire and police departments in Morrison’s hometown, and said “this is an emergency” and that she had to reach her right away. Morrison wondered how she got the number, and when Winfrey told her how, Morrison wondered how the police and fire departments got the number. Initially, she was wary of Winfrey’s proposal, asking her two sons whether they thought she should accept the offer. Her eldest son told her that she would still have the book. This is just another version. Thus, the film was somewhat reluctantly made.\nIt was neither a box office nor a critical hit, and that may have slowed down Hollywood producers for 30 more years. While Rotten Tomatoes shows a 71 percent rating for Beloved, the October release date for the film marred its chances at Oscar nominations, and for whatever reason the Academy Awards snubbed the film entirely. The movie may have been hindered in its reception by the popularity of the novel. It is impossible to recreate the magic Morrison packs into those pages. But the film is powerful in its own right, and the challenge should not deter further adaptations.\nThe reckoning in the entertainment industry that followed the death of George Floyd, leading to a greater attempt at promoting diversity in genres like film and theater, may have encountered an expiration date with the election of a new regime a year ago in America. The administration’s war on “DEI” hiring is rumored already to have led to layoffs in the entertainment industry of Black and minority employees. Multiple publications, including the New York Post and Afrotech.net, picked up reports from producers that people of color had been disproportionately affected by layoffs at Paramount last month, perhaps on the logic that the persons of color had been hired more recently. The rumors are sketchily documented, but if this is true it presents the prospect that the same employees who had been positioned to be champions of Morrison’s work might not be around to complete the projects. Time will only tell what that will mean for the adaptations of Sula and Song of Solomon.\n"},{"title":"Is Eugene O\u0026rsquo;Neill\u0026rsquo;s Reputation Getting Fragile?","url":"https://stagesscreens.com/posts/2025-10-20-is-eugene-oneills-repuation-getting/","date":"October 20, 2025","tags":["Theater"],"text":"Is Eugene O'Neill's Reputation Getting Fragile? “In 1956, the year Long Day’s Journey into Night premiered, the reputation of America’s foremost dramatist was at an all-time low,” wrote scholar Ralph L. Corrigan Jr. in a paper on November 7, 1956. “Most critics were content to think of the dramatist as an outdated, over-the-hill, third-rate thinker who had been lucky to write a few decent plays.”\nEugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey changed all that. The playwright has enjoyed a seemingly invincible reputation almost ever since that period of waning popularity. But might such a moment ever be in danger of returning? When a star-studded production of O\u0026rsquo;Neill\u0026rsquo;s Anna Christie with Michelle Williams and Tom Sturridge opens at St. Ann\u0026rsquo;s Warehouse on November 28, it will be the first time since 2020 that a major Off-Broadway production of O\u0026rsquo;Neill\u0026rsquo;s has launched, and Broadway is currently in the longest drought for productions of plays by Eugene O’Neill in the more than 100 years since it started producing O’Neill. The Great White Way has not mounted an O’Neill play since Denzel Washington’s The Iceman Cometh closed in July of 2018, making it seven years and three months and counting. And there are apparently no plans to produce O’Neill in the next season either, based on the existing lists of upcoming shows. Such a drought isn’t totally unprecedented: Broadway took a six year-plus break from O’Neill between the day Desire Under the Elms closed in May of 2009 and Hughie opened in February of 2016. But it is highly unusual. To find another break that long one must go back to the 1940s, when O’Neill was alive. For most of the century, O’Neill has been staged every couple of years on Broadway.\nPerhaps it may not be a coincidence that in September of 2020 a movie was released that portrayed Eugene O’Neill very harshly as a racist and what’s more as quite a monumental jerk. The film The Black Emperor of Broadway, based on an off-Broadway play of the same name, starred Shaun Parkes as the actor who originated the title role in O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, Charles S. Gilpin. Gilpin resisted the demands of O’Neill, played with seething obnoxiousness by John Hensley, that he say the n-word several times in the course of the play, and apparently changed many of O’Neill’s lines before being fired and replaced by future star Paul Robeson, who played the part in the movie of Emperor Jones. The Black Emperor of Broadway is rough-hewn, if attractively shot, and went straight to streaming with almost zero critical attention. Rotten Tomatoes shows only two major critics who reviewed the film. Thus, while New York producers may be more familiar with the film than the general public, it is mentioned here less because of an argument of causation than because such a portrayal exists at all.\nOne doesn’t expect this little movie would have taken down the mighty O’Neill, who still after all has his name on a Broadway theater. But it happened to come out just as Broadway underwent a reckoning on racial issues that has meant a lot of programming changes and dovetails with the themes of the movie. In September 2020 Broadway was still closed from the pandemic. But when it reopened a year later, after the death of George Floyd, producers had dramatically increased the number of plays by African American playwrights. In the season before the pandemic, only two shows were by Black authors. In the first autumn after the pandemic, seven plays were by Black playwrights – more than half the number of plays on Broadway. The change came about in part because of a movement to increase the diversity on stages around the country, highlighted by a much reported-upon manifesto titled “We See You White American Theater,” which called for no less than 50 percent of theaters’ mainstage programming to be by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) authors. The manifesto’s introduction was signed by more than 200 signatories including Pulitzer Prize-winning authors and artistic directors of major regional theaters, as well as recognizable names like Lin-Manuel Miranda, Cynthia Erivo, Sterling K. Brown and Issa Rae.\nThe racial ratio of playwrights on Broadway did not stay as dramatically changed as it was in the Autumn of 2021, and of course a national backlash against “woke” programming has competed for influence with We See You White American Theater. But it is certainly possible that Eugene O’Neill productions have been deprioritized. Some would prefer to see fewer plays by dead white playwrights. When Branden Jacobs-Jenkins won the Tony for Best Revival of a Play for his masterpiece Appropriate, he addressed the prominence of such authors on Broadway. First acknowledging a dead Black playwright, Ossie Davis, saying “without Ossie Davis I wouldn’t be here,” he then took aim at Henrik Ibsen, who was nominated in the category for The Enemy of the People. “And for those of you worried about Henrik Ibsen, he’s been dead for over 100 years and he’s already won this twice.” O’Neill has been dead since 1953 and has also won the Tony for Best Revival twice.\nI began reflecting on O’Neill’s absence from the stage the night I saw The Black Emperor of Broadway, but that film wasn’t the only reason. I had begun discussing with a friend how many O’Neill plays he had seen. I wanted to show him some of the O’Neill plays I had seen, and noticed when Googling productions of Eugene O’Neill plays around the world that almost none appear to have been produced the world over in the years since 2020’s revival of A Touch of the Poet at the Irish Repertory Theatre. This year, for example, the only production I found was in Athens, Greece, where a production of O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape was staged as part of the Eugene O’Neill Society’s annual conference. A Google search is not a bullet-proof method of investigation in such a matter, but no other productions could be found.\nIt is true that Long Day\u0026rsquo;s Journey appeared on London\u0026rsquo;s West End in 2024 with a major star \u0026ndash; Brian Cox of HBO\u0026rsquo;s Succession \u0026ndash; in the lead. So perhaps the \u0026ldquo;drought\u0026rdquo; on Broadway has more to do with the post-pandemic economics of long and heavy plays, than with the politics of his reputation. But no Broadway transfer appears forthcoming, and such productions have been rare not just on Broadway but around the globe since 2020.\nMy Google search for O\u0026rsquo;Neill productions got me thinking about the DVDs I’ve seen of O’Neill plays. Several of his shows are available on DVD in productions from the Broadway Theatre Archive, which produced dozens of plays for television in the 1970s. But many of those programs, most of which are not available to stream, are now selling online on DVD for between $50 and $100-plus counting shipping. There were a few exceptions, but to be frank I snatched most of them up. So it’s extremely rare now to find O’Neill’s plays even on DVD. No other good way exists right now to see Beyond the Horizon, the first of his four Pulitzer winners, or A Touch of the Poet, perhaps my personal favorite O\u0026rsquo;Neill play, or Mourning Becomes Electra, a rarely seen double-length drama about the Civil War. One can stream or buy cheap DVDs of the movies that have been made of some of his more popular plays, like Desire Under The Elms (1958) and Anna Christie (1930), but they are pretty old by now and many of them seem dated.\nAll this raises the question, perhaps prematurely, of whether Eugene O’Neill’s legacy could become fragile. The New York Times, for example, published a story this July about the precarious state of the finances at the world-renowned Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut, which workshops plays and musicals every summer and has been responsible for launching the careers of dozens of playwrights, plays and musicals. The financial challenges at the O\u0026rsquo;Neill Center are almost certainly not due to weakening in O\u0026rsquo;Neill\u0026rsquo;s reputation, but it adds to the picture of a shrinking cultural footprint for the theater icon.\nOn matters of race, O’Neill was both ahead of and behind his time. He wrote at least three plays starring Black actors in the 1920s, a very rare thing then. But when controversies arose about his depiction of an interracial romance between an aspiring Black lawyer and a white woman, in his cringe-inducingly titled play All God’s Chillun Got Wings, O’Neill told the NYT that he was not advocating for the union of the races. Not the sort of brave move that endears a playwright to posterity. If such problems are quietly overtaking his reputation, as perhaps evidenced by The Black Emperor of Broadway, it might be possible that the mighty O\u0026rsquo;Neill could eventually weaken. For now, the St. Ann\u0026rsquo;s Warehouse has a chance of being a triumphant return to New York for O\u0026rsquo;Neill. We\u0026rsquo;ll see how it fares in critical and audience reception. It could either mark a revival of interest in O’Neill or further evidence of an eventual eclipse.\n"},{"title":"Radvanovsky\u0026rsquo;s \u003cem\u003eMedea\u003c/em\u003e at the Lyric Opera Rehabilitates a True Anti-Hero","url":"https://stagesscreens.com/posts/2025-10-12-radvonovskys-medea-at-lyric-opera/","date":"October 12, 2025","tags":["Opera"],"text":"Radvanovsky's *Medea* at the Lyric Opera Rehabilitates a True Anti-Hero In Madeline Miller’s novel Circe, the famous title witch has occasion to speak to her niece, Medea. Circe, who turns many of Odysseus’ men into pigs before he persuades her to change them back and she gets in bed with him, warns Medea that her husband Jason is waning in his feelings for her. Medea will not listen. “They will never take Jason from me,” Medea says in the novel. “I have my powers, and I will use them.” Circe, whom Miller turns from a villain to a feminist anti-hero by empathizing with her where males have not over centuries of representations, fears the worst will happen in Medea’s case. Miller can rehabilitate Circe, but she can’t quite rehabilitate Medea. The bloody conclusion of Medea’s story is well known to most people with a passing knowledge of Greek myth. She kills both of her children to get back at her ex-husband as he marries a new bride, kills that new bride and sets fire to the temple. A hard character to rehabilitate.\nBut then, Miller didn’t have Sondra Radvanovsky in the role, as did the Lyric Opera in last night’s season opening production of Luigi Cherubini’s 1797 Medea. Radvanovsky’s torrid, spot-on performance as the blood-soaked Medea manages to get both sides of the character: her humanity and her evil. The result is that the Lyric’s Medea, a production that was originated by New York\u0026rsquo;s Metropolitan Opera three years ago, contributes to the trend toward revisions of the classics that empathize with powerful women characters who have otherwise been viewed as a menace. As stories were largely told by men through the bulk of the many centuries of storytelling, a powerful woman was a fearsome thing in myth after myth, play after play, story after story. Examples besides Medea and Circe include, as I pointed out last month, opera anti-heroines Armida and Alcina.\nThe effort to empathize with Medea was conscious in this production, as the Lyric’s web page for Medea makes clear. “I find that in any opera I do, not just with the wicked women or the dark women, but with any woman that I play, I try to understand the character’s background and find what makes them human,” Radvanovsky says in an interview on the Lyric web site. “The easy route to go is to lean into her darkness and the ‘I\u0026rsquo;m going to kill you and I hate you’ side of her. And the more interesting way to play her is to explore her changing feelings and how her emotions change at the drop of a dime. I think the audience can relate to that more because it\u0026rsquo;s more human.”\nI also pointed out in last month’s post on the new opera season that I had been disappointed that the Lyric was leading off with Medea simply because many Chicagoans saw it on movie screens in a live broadcast from the Met of a nearly identical production in 2023. Perhaps the familiarity of this production might help account for the fact that Saturday night’s crowd was somewhat undersold, with roughly half of the usually mostly full upper balcony empty. It sapped some energy from the (literal) red carpet event, which is usually packed with excited patrons in their most elegant attire. (Though any outfit is OK.) I tossed around a few theories in my head about why sales were down. The Cubs were playing what proved to be their final game of the postseason (no one knew until late Thursday night, so that wasn’t it); the news about the national guard and ICE patrolling the streets had scared off opera patrons (possible, though the streets were quiet and safe Saturday night as a judge had prevented the national guard’s immediate deployment). But those who stayed home to watch the Cubs or were scared of a government occupation missed a great show.\nMedea is an underperformed opera but not a perfect one. Director David McVicar had to overcome the problem that most of the action in the story takes place off the stage, both before the opera starts and in its wrenching conclusion. McVicar, who has directed more productions at the Met than anyone, having just edged out Met Opera legend Franco Zefferelli a few years ago, oversaw one of his most beautifully designed productions. I tend to find his work somewhat dark and dull, but this one created enough visual interest to carry what otherwise can play as sort of a concert performance as the singers tend to stand on stage and sing rather than act. In the first act, a mirror at the back of the set gives us an overhead view of the well-dressed crowd at Jason\u0026rsquo;s wedding, seemingly doubling the size of the festivities and thus also their import. In the last act, a swirl of flame created by projection shows us without question the results of Medea\u0026rsquo;s ire even as her violent acts are kept off stage as called for in the libretto.\nRadvanovsky is from Chicago but is one of the truly elite singers of her generation. An international star, in another day she would have been a household name. Her voice is unique. While Cherubini owes what little fame he has acquired mainly to the fact that Maria Callas revived this little-performed gem in the 1950s, the great Callas had a very pretty voice, a decorous if strident vibrato that emphasized the feminine more than Radvanovsky\u0026rsquo;s voice. Not necessarily what’s called for from Medea. In fact, listening to Callas’s Medea one hardly knows the story is so bloody. The music is beautiful and rarely hints at fury. Radvanovsky’s voice is beautiful too, but its upper range has jagged edges and its lower range guttural growls. Thus the wicked she-animal Medea is an ideal role for Sondra Radvanovsky. I’ve seen Radvanovsky several times, and her distinctive voice fits some roles and arias better than others. In Norma, her performance of “Casta Diva” put her powerful robust voice in an aria that calls for prettiness. I prefer Callas and Renee Fleming on that bit of bel canto. But she does not lack versatility: The New York Times last season crowned her the best of a series of sopranos who sang Tosca at the Met last year, including the more hyped (and equally brilliant) Lise Davidsen. The NYT dubbed Radvanovsky “one of the role’s finest interpreters today.”\nWhile the Met was doing its rotating Toscas last season, my brother and I exchanged quick text messages about Davidsen and Radvanovsky’s competing performances of Tosca’s classic aria, “Vissi d’Arte.” My brother commented that he thought he might prefer Sondra. I replied that “Sondra is very interesting. Her high notes are unique marvels; piercing. But she feels like she’s running to catch up against the orchestra, which actually lends to a certain powerful heft to Tosca’s pain because it’s like she is so affected by emotion that she can almost not keep up. Lise is perfection; beautiful lines of pure ice extending into the rafters. But she isn’t quite as moved by her own words. Either could be better on a given night.” My brother replied, “True. I think it was Sondra’s lack of control that weakened her \u0026lsquo;Casta Diva.\u0026rsquo;” This is the kind of debate such world-class voices inspire, putting the lie to the common claim that today’s opera stars can’t match the power of the stars of yesteryear.\nRadvanovsky was not the only major star in the Lyric’s Medea Saturday night, which got rave reviews this afternoon from both the Chicago Tribune and ChicagoClassicalReview.com. Matthew Polenzani, who is also from the Chicago area, has performed many roles at the Met and around the world. His Jason, Medea’s husband, was perfectly unlikable. One can’t help but sympathize with Medea’s husband, but Polenzani played Jason as something of a brute, helping us see the agony in Medea’s situation even more clearly. The rest of the cast, dressed like a colorful crowd at a dinner thrown by Marie Antoinette, provided a powerful counterpoint. Zoie Reams as Medea’s one loyal assistant, Neris, was particularly strong, earning an especially robust cheer during the enthusiastic curtain call. The response was well deserved even though her character could easily have prevented the infamous slaying of Jason\u0026rsquo;s offspring by picking a hiding place for Medea\u0026rsquo;s murder weapon other than the very place where the livid mother usually keeps it.\nCherubini’s score is a find for opera companies looking to stage something rarely done yet full of accessible melodies. Conductor Enrico Mazzoli (who brought brio to the production though his overture lacked the gusto of the Met’s version) on the Lyric’s web site commented that the score has the principals singing bitter, sharp lines of dialogue – horrifying lines – in beautiful, tuneful C major and G major rather than in minor keys. This, he says, is scarier than the typical way of setting horrific dialogue in opera because it’s like having someone smile at you while delivering the worst sentiments possible.\nRadvanovsky on the Lyric web site again: “This is a woman who is at the end of her rope because she loves this man so much, and she loves her children so much, she would do anything to keep that family unit together. That, to me, is the heart of the story. It\u0026rsquo;s about love and being scorned in love, and that’s a universal feeling. So many of us can relate to that kind of heartbreak. By the time we meet her in the opera, she has been chased halfway around the world, and across the ocean, to find Jason. And when she does? He\u0026rsquo;s with another woman. And well, you can imagine what happens next.”\nWhat happens next is a blood-bath. The opera runs for five more performances before disappearing from Chicago. Hopefully more people will catch this one before that happens.\n"},{"title":"As Hollywood Flounders, Many Movie Theaters Fill Seats With Old Pictures","url":"https://stagesscreens.com/posts/2025-09-29-as-hollywood-flounders-many-movie/","date":"September 29, 2025","tags":["Film"],"text":"As Hollywood Flounders, Many Movie Theaters Fill Seats With Old Pictures President Trump’s renewed promise today to execute a 100-percent tariff on film production outside the United States is a symptom of a desperate state of affairs in the film industry. The stream of grim headlines coming out of Hollywood this year shows why. “Production in Hollywood plunges to historic lows as nearly half of US projects move abroad,” read one headline in August from Senal News. The story reports that Hollywood production jobs are down by 92,000 from 2022. And it’s not just a question of local production. Box office receipts are suffering too. “The 2025 box office is off to a terrible start. Is the problem supply or demand?” read the LA Times on March 25. The story says the problem is supply. There are fewer movies in theaters, fewer movies being made, and fewer people attending the movies that are in theaters. But you wouldn’t know it from the crowds at screenings of classic films at the Music Box Theatre in Chicago. On August 14, I attended the third in a string of sold-out 70 mm screenings of a four-hour, 60-year-old sand marathon, David Lean\u0026rsquo;s masterpiece Lawrence of Arabia, in the large 750-seat main theater at the Music Box. It was a Tuesday night, and the film started at 6 p.m. and ended after 10 p.m. But the house was packed with viewers young and old and in-between. This was not an isolated incident. All over Chicagoland, movie theaters are quietly making bank screening old movies as new movie production in Hollywood sputters. Classic cinema screenings have become one of the industry’s few bright spots.\nMichael Phillips reported on this phenomenon with a very good story in the Chicago Tribune on Valentine’s Day titled, “You know who’s suddenly flocking to old movies in Chicago? Young audiences.“ He focused on the Music Box and the Gene Siskel Film Center. But Phillips didn’t quite catch the full breadth of the trend. For example, he didn’t even mention Wrigleyville’s Alamo Drafthouse Theatre, which opened in 2023. That theater sells out screenings of old movies every week, and if you don’t reserve your tickets many weeks in advance the chance is you won’t be able to see them.\nOn Saturday night September 27, I was in attendance as Phillips (who retired from his job as the Tribune’s movie critic in August) introduced a screening of Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 epic Spartacus at the Gene Siskel Film Center on State Street in Chicago. This time the showing was sparsely attended. The rest of the world seemed to be out on the streets in the Loop, many of them preparing to go to a performance by Louis CK at the Chicago Theatre across the street from us. It was the second time the Siskel center had screened Spartacus, and perhaps the seating at the first screening was more full. Hopefully the trend is not beginning to tucker out. It does put some strain on the film canon, as Alamo for example has run multiple Kubrick retrospectives in the last two years. The screening of Spartacus was a part of one of the Siskel Center’s many film series with a variety of films selected for a common theme. In this case it was a series on “The Resistance,” with several movies that feature a rebellion against an empire or institution, such as Star Wars, Malcom X, and To Be or Not To Be with Jack Benny, which I saw at the Siskel too with a comfortably large crowd. The curated fun continues this fall, most notably with a lecture-and-film series called “Interiority on Film,” highlighting cinematic representations of interior thought and states, including Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity, and Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.\nBig city arthouses are not the only contributors to this trend. Classic Cinemas Lake Theatre in Oak Park, for example, nearly sold out its huge main room twice in one day showing Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942) last year. The theater has also quietly screened Citizen Kane and other old films, including a series curated by talk radio star Nick Digilio.One wonders why these suburban theaters haven’t plunged more boldly into the classic movie business, as the new movies rarely sell as well as Casablanca did. Glenview’s Landmark at the Glen theater used to screen old movies, including Lawrence of Arabia, but has since stopped.\nThere are theaters in the city missing the opportunity as well. Landmark’s theater in Lakeview, Landmark Century Cinema at Clark and Diversey, is also attempting to get by with only new films, and so is vulnerable to the critical lack of supply coming from the film industry in the wake of the pandemic and the recent writer’s strike. The only category of film that has risen in both supply and ticket sales is horror, the LA Times piece reports. \u0026ldquo;In the mid-budget category of films—movies that might be able to make somewhere between $50 million and $100 million theatrically in the U.S.—there was a decline of 40% in supply between 2004 and 2019,\u0026rdquo; the LA Times quotes John Fithian as saying. Fithian was the top lobbyist for movie theaters until he left Cinema United, and is now the head of a consulting firm called Fithian Group. \u0026ldquo;That is $1 billion annually in lost revenues in the U.S. alone in that one category. That means almost 10% was lost just in the mid-budget category. In fact, the only genre that was increasing in supply and total grosses was horror \u0026hellip; Where is the mid-budget romantic comedy? Where is the mid-budget drama?\u0026rdquo;\nPlaying older films is not just a Chicago strategy. The big national chains have been turning to older content, too. Regal theaters remain loyal to the Fathom Events series, which screens several great older films each year. AMC no longer charges only $5 for its retro screening series, but the series still exists. Recently, after Robert Redford’s death, AMC River East in Chicago played some of his movies, including All the President’s Men and The Natural. Such curated series can help sustain the endangered species that is the multiplex. Both Regal and AMC are in serious economic trouble. Regal declared bankruptcy in recent years, though it is still operating, and AMC has continued to see revenues dropping and is $4.5 billion in debt, according to Yahoo! finance news.\nThe Music Box, by contrast, is expanding, adding a new screening room to the south of the existing theater, with its mix of first-run art films and curated older films (e.g., two retrospectives of Billy Wilder films, a short retrospective on Fellini, a series on Kurosawa). Clearly the classic century-plus-old Music Box is doing something right. In a moment when Hollywood is struggling to produce the new, the Music Box is finding life in the old.\n"},{"title":"Welcome to the 100th Opera Season After the Art Form\u0026rsquo;s Alleged Death","url":"https://stagesscreens.com/posts/2025-09-11-considering-100th-opera-season-after/","date":"September 11, 2025","tags":["Opera"],"text":"Welcome to the 100th Opera Season After the Art Form's Alleged Death A new opera season is upon us, one that in April will see the celebration of the 100th anniversary of what has been called “the death of opera.” On April 26, 1926, the great conductor Arturo Toscanini burst into tears upon completing the first performance of Puccini’s last opera Turandot. Since then, though many excellent new operas have been performed, it’s been argued that popular opera has died. The New York Times opera critic Zachary Woolfe in 2024 went so far as to say “A century on, it can be said confidently: With Puccini died the great opera tradition. There have been extraordinary works created since his death, but next to none have penetrated the public consciousness, or the core repertoire.” The century of music past “Nessun Dorma” (Turnadot’s greatest aria, which itself has been played almost to death) has been diverse and exciting, and there are more new operas than ever to get excited about in the last few years, with many different styles of classical music. However, if audiences feel something is missing in the listenability of the new operas compared with the old ones they are not entirely mistaken.\nSeemingly each book and article on opera has a new expression of this gloomy sentiment. The most sensational book of the opera season immediately passed, opera director Yuval Sharon’s A New Philosophy of Opera, for example, opens with the request that we imagine a world after opera’s death. Conrad L. Osborne in his 2018 Opera as Opera proposes that the art form is in a state of decline that began with the end of what he calls the “extended 19th Century,” or “E-19,” stretching from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to Richard Strauss.“The birthrate of repeatable works has plummeted over the past century,” Osborne writes. “It is the predictable end of an art form’s terminal stage: first the creators dry up; a generation or two later, the interpreters lose touch; a generation or two after that, the audience drifts away.” And in Mladen Dolar and Slavoj Zizek’s 2002 book Opera’s Second Death, Dolar prepared us for this very anniversary:\n“I share the view held by many that the opera is emphatically finished. Several candidates for the date of its death exist, and if the genre\u0026rsquo;s grand, melodramatic finale is to match the grandeur of its ascendancy, then the favorite of these is no doubt April 26, 1926, the first performance of Puccini\u0026rsquo;s Turandot, when Toscanini\u0026rsquo;s famous gesture — interrupting the performance at the point where Puccini\u0026rsquo;s work was terminated by his death, and leaving the podium in tears — also suspended the majestic tradition of opera and marked its demise.”\nDolar listed other potential death dates for opera (1937’s Lulu by Berg; 1938’s Dafne by Strauss) and declined to choose one terminal point, but other writers have picked the opening of Turnadot too. A book called Puccini’s Turnadot: The End of the Great Tradition makes it clear in the title where the authors think opera went wrong. A New York Times story in the 1980s picked Turandot as the end of the prominence of Italian opera, which from the art form’s beginnings had reigned supreme.\nThe autopsy results differ from author to author. Osborne says one of the biggest problems is that “operawrights” have stopped writing what he says is the one plot that almost every opera in “E-19” used (an outsider falls in love with a woman who represents everything from which he has been excluded). Dolar and Zizek muse that opera died at the very moment psychoanalysis was born, “as if, after psychoanalysis, opera, at least in its traditional form, was no longer possible.” Sharon says the problem is that “Few composers today are encouraged to move in Berg’s direction—not specifically in relation to atonality, which at this point is over 100 years old, but in the spirit of pushing musical language forward and finding an analogous musical expression for uncomfortable truths.”\nIndeed the most common autopsy finding is the absence of what before 1900 was considered great melody. Even the General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera, Peter Gelb, who has done more in the last few years than anyone else to introduce new opera to the mainstream, agrees that opera’s problem lies in the lack of melody. “After Puccini, opera started slipping from its creative peak,” Gelb wrote in an Opinion piece in the New York Times in November of last year. “Geniuses like Strauss and Janáček followed in the early decades of the 20th century, but with a few exceptions, the second half of the 20th century produced little truly popular opera; composers turned inward, with experimental, sometimes atonal compositions that didn’t appeal to large audiences.”\nNew Yorker music critic Alex Ross took on Gelb’s conclusions in an essay the following month, saying “the idea of emulating Puccini is as undesirable as it is impossible.” Ross says the current rash of new operas produced at the Met and elsewhere around the country has given opera a chance at escaping the suffocating influence of its own greatness in the 19th century. And he contests Gelb’s premise that 20th century opera has been untuneful. “If you look at playbills for American opera houses between 1950 and 1990, you see dozens of non-radical, even hummable scores by the likes of Gian Carlo Menotti, Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein, William Grant Still, Jack Beeson, Carlisle Floyd, Robert Ward, Douglas Moore, Dominick Argento, and William Bolcom,” Ross writes. But somehow the perception persists that those composers lack something that the 19th and 18th centuries did not. And even Ross in his 2007 defense of modern classical music The Rest is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century admits “Twentieth-century classical composition, the subject of this book, sounds like noise to many.\u0026quot;\nAn exaggerated, stereotypical account of the history of opera’s departure from “melody” or “tunefulness” begins with Wagner, who sometimes wrote arresting melodies that have lasted for almost two centuries as among society’s favorites (“The Ride of the Valkyries,” the wedding march from Lohengrin), but who has also been credited with liberating music drama from the tyranny of melody. Each note serves the drama in Wagner’s conception, rather than the desire of the audience to hear delightful tunes. Thus rather than recitative alternating with melodic arias that don’t necessarily move the plot lyrically, as in operas before the middle of the 19th Century, Wagner wrote hours and hours of music that communicated abstract ideas and plot without necessarily worrying about how hummable the tunes were. His later operas have been called the first modern operas. This kind of writing caught on in opera in the late 19th Century, inspiring many imitators of Wagner, and gave way in the 20th century to the then-shocking music of Stravinsky and atonal composition like Berg and Schoenberg.\nWhether opera is stuck in an unmelodic groove remains a hotly contested premise among opera fans. After theater director Michael Attenborough told the London Telegraph in 2012 that “modern opera is rubbish,” a lively group of opera fans on the discussion board “Talk Classical” called Attenborough a “crusty blowhard” and called his conclusion that modern music has “no melody” a “tired old canard.” “Has this dude ever listened to Britten?” asked another commenter. “If that’s not melodic, I don’t know what is.” Said another: “During Wagner’s lifetime, one of the most persistent criticisms of his music was that ‘it had no melody.’ This is like saying that chocolate cake has no calories! In fact, Wagner’s music is chock full of great melodies.” That it is, but it is also full of challenging music that transcends melody.\nDemanding that all composers be “hummable” is cringeworthy. It is a burden that has dogged some of our best Broadway musical composers too. Sometimes, after all, melody can be annoying, particularly on repeat listens. And subtler melodies often grow on one. Still, critics of modern opera have a point. Osborne points out that some musicians, including Stephen Sondheim, “maintain that a hit tune is merely one that is repeated a sufficient number of times, almost irrespective of merit.” But, he argues, that isn’t strictly true. “‘La donna e mobile’ is not memorable because it was sung a lot … it was sung a lot because it was memorable, instantly and persistently,” Osborne writes. And frankly this is borne out by the evidence at the time the opera was first rehearsed: before Rigoletto opened Verdi banned his cast from singing the tune outside of rehearsal, because he realized how memorable it was and feared it would be plagiarized before opening. In any case, whether you call it “hummability” or not, something is definitely different between the centuries prior to the 19th century and those after.\nSo what the next century brings us is crucial to the survival of opera. The Metropolitan Opera’s recent strategy to boost ticket sales, excitingly, has been to bank on new operas. The tactic began after two new operas, Terrence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up In My Bones and Kevin Puts’ The Hours, sold out their runs in 2021 and 2022 respectively. In the seasons that followed, the Met, which in times past went decades without staging any new operas at all, debuted between four and six new operas per season. That strategy seems to have ended, however, after last years’ season opener Grounded by Jeanine Tesori sold only 50 percent of the seats.\nThis season the Met is producing only three new operas, only one of which will be in their “Live in HD” program, in which live performances are beamed to movie theaters around the world. The first of this season’s new operas, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (a fictionalization of the creation of Superman that has two Jewish comic book writers creating a superhero to fight Nazis) is reportedly innovative musically, using “electronica” alongside classical stylings. It opens the Met’s new season on September 21. I am one of millions of opera fans who wish the Met had included it in the HD series. In fact, I liked many of the new operas Gelb introduced, even Grounded, which was panned by the Times, and find the new commitment to new work thrilling. Still, something is missing from the diverse new offerings. The new operas have been varied musically, but they haven’t broken the streak of operas without a kind of melody that would be welcomed by fans of \u0026ldquo;melody.\u0026rdquo;\nI love many unhummable operas but wonder why a few more melodic ones can’t co-exist with them on the opera scene, particularly, as Sharon points out, 100 years after atonality sprung on the scene. But just when one is considering the possibility that composers have run out of variations on the 12 notes we have, another original melodic film score emerges. This past summer was bookended for me by two events that had me ruminating on the change in melodic style in the last century. On June 1, I attended a concert at Chicago’s Symphony Center at which the world-renowned Chicago Symphony Orchestra performed (of all things) James Horner’s 1989 film score to Field of Dreams. It has always been one of my favorite scores, with its sweeping 20th Century American melodicism, and I was delighted to see it gaining acceptance as one of the great symphonic scores of the century. The CSO, like other symphonies around the country, recently have been recognizing the greatness of many symphonic scores, particularly those of John Williams, allowing them to be performed alongside the great composers of classical music for more or less the first time. This was the late Horner’s turn. As I listened, through teary eyes as did the conductor and many of the other audience members, I contemplated the striking difference in melodic style between this late century composition and that of the modern operas. I am loathe to suggest that the solution to opera’s travails is the admittedly somewhat sentimental stylings of a beloved but almost schlocky movie from the 1980s that deserves some kind of award for the most preposterous plot that somehow still works. After all, movie scores are beginning to move away from sweeping tunes as well. Cases in point: The Best Score Oscar two years ago went to Volker Bertelmann’s three-note main theme, otherwise drowning in discordant “danger music,” as my brother and I used to call it as young fans of film scores in the 1990s. Action movies have been moving towards the influence of the Chris Nolan Batman films\u0026rsquo; scores, which eschew melody for something more subtle and less tuneful. I like those scores, as well as, notably, Hans Zimmer’s brilliant and inventive Oscar-winning Dune score, even as they depart sonically from the model Williams popularized 50-some years ago. But film music often remains melodic, and the genre has rarely been accused of a melody draught, as opera has. When I first started attending modern operas I wondered why no one had tried retaining a composer like Rachel Portman (Cider House Rules, Emma), whom I have later learned did in fact compose one opera in 2002. Portman was not my favorite composer, but her sentimental melodic style is exactly what I’d expect many fans of opera who complain about the absence of melody would enjoy. This December Portman’s one opera, The Little Prince, fittingly a children’s story, will play at the Kennedy Center. Somehow the new regime there has not affected the opera offerings, which include several interesting selections. From listening to the recording of The Little Prince\u0026rsquo;s first production, I find the level of melody both intriguing and somehow disappointing. Portman\u0026rsquo;s music for me did not live up to her best film scores.\nIt’s not just the 19th Century that produced more melodic operas. On August 24, my summer ended with a wonderful concert performance of Handel’s 1735 opera Alcina in Ravinia’s intimate Martin Theatre. It was a reminder both of how beautiful early opera music was, and of the improvements later operas made in storytelling. I don’t agree with Osborne that opera needs to return to the repetitive stories of the “extended 19th Century,” which precedes Handel. I am excited by the possibilities of the art form being applied to new kinds of stories. When Grounded debuted at the Met, the Times described it pejoratively as yet another example of opera favoring stories of the suffering of women. I’ve long said opera’s great theme the treatment of women, both in a sardonic way and an admiring way. But I welcome new kinds of stories that don’t revel misogynistically in the tragedies of being female. The opportunity exists now to create new strong heroines who actually get their way. Alcina is a 18th Century tale of a villainous sorceress who seduces men, bores of them, and then transforms them into rocks and trees and animals. The story is reminiscent of Circe of The Odyssey, a sorceress who just got a more sympathetic feminist treatment in a novel by Madeline Miller, the bestselling author of Song of Achilles. It’s also a tale much like the similarly named Armida by Rossini, which is named for another seductress sorcerer who is given the treatment of a villain. Thus Alcina is in a tradition of male-authored stories about women with power, who were almost always treated negatively. The performance, staged by Chicago’s Haymarket Opera company, which specializes in early opera, was gorgeous and fascinating. But it did have me contemplating whether it would be possible to merge the tunefulness of these great pre-Enlightenment operas with modern storytelling techniques. By the way, it is still a relatively recent phenomenon that early operas have had a place at the Met. Handel was introduced to their repertoire some 40 years ago, and sparked a revival nationwide of early music. But Monteverdi has still never been performed there, and many worry that the push for new operas will push out the beautiful early music. There should be a place for both.\nSharon, who will bring his provocative, highly unusual style of directing to the Met this season with a new production of Wagner’s important opera Tristan and Isolde, says it’s unfortunate that producers feel the necessity to stage operas with Puccini-esque melody. “Even as producers put a lot of resources into the development of new work, they encourage creators to strike a chord in the pleasing direction of Puccini,\u0026quot; he writes. “The more a new opera is meant to sound like an old one (read: from the nineteenth century), the more it’s likely to please the people who are paying for it to happen. Social critique remains in the realm of the written word, to be read in the supertitles but not viscerally felt in the music.” In a wonderful series of lectures at the University of Chicago in May, Sharon explored how such a change might come about. He took a typically provocative approach, proposing that opera would be best guided by principles of “anarchy.” He presented multiple charts showing hierarchies of how opera can be produced, including one (the typical model these days) that gives the power at the top of the chart first to an impresario and then to a creatively controlling union of conductor and director, and another chart (the one he favors) in which the singers, designers, director, impresario and all the other jobs are in one circle, with no creator elevated over another. How that radical style will be executed at the Met when he directs Wagner\u0026rsquo;s full four-opera \u0026ldquo;Ring Cycle\u0026rdquo; there later this decade is yet to be seen even by Sharon: He says he has been asked already what he’s going to do on a specific rehearsal day years into the future, and has said he has no idea.\nI’ve had mixed feelings about Sharon’s sometimes brilliant conceptual style (see the post I wrote after seeing his Cosi Fan Tutte at Detroit Opera this April). But it’s clear opera can benefit from fresh ideas. Osborne looks entirely to the past – before even supertitles, which he despises in part because they tip the audience off to jokes before they are sung by the performers – for the way forward. This seems to me folly. As much as I’d like to see a creative return to melody, I don’t wish to go backwards. When Christpher Arden, a veteran opera director, tried some intellectually interesting production choices in Chicago a few years back his approach was booed, and he ended up declaring in a European publication that Chicago is a conservative town where opera is concerned. There are in fact critics who reject even the smallest of creative choices by directors, implying each opera should be performed exactly as it was originally. Perhaps for that reason, this season at the Lyric Opera of Chicago is too full of operas its fans have seen before (Pagliacci, Salome, Madama Butterfly, Cosi Fan Tutte, and opening the season on October 11 a Met production of Medea that many caught in movie theaters a couple years ago). The one promising new opera, El Ultimo Sueno de Frida and Diego, by Gabriela Lena Frank and librettist Nilo Cruz, is also being done this season at the Met. Frustratingly, it is in the HD series and the highly promising Kavalier and Clay is not, meaning Chicagoans can see Frida twice but Kavalier not at all. Thus Chicago-based opera fans this season are being treated to almost a full slate of operas they can see elsewhere.\nStill, like Cubs fans each season over the more than 100 years between world series victories in 1908 and 2016, Chicagoans and opera fans everywhere can hope that the new season presents a life after a cursed death a century ago. Even one of Chicago’s most curmudgeonly tradition-oriented critics has observed that hope springs eternal for success in new opera both artistically and at the box office. Encouragingly, The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Michael Chabon, appears to be selling well throughout its run in September and October at the Met. That company has had to withdraw tens of millions of dollars from its emergency reserves since the pandemic, and is now beginning a controversial program in Saudi Arabia to bring in new cash and avoid doing so again. But the more composers are hired to write new operas, the more likely it is that one of them will hit on a melodic style that satisfies Sharon’s desire for originality in composition. After that century of atonality it’s a question for a genius what the next great sound is. But perhaps it’s time for a new kind of melodic approach, and not merely one that apes Puccini. It will be an interesting season to watch for such signs of life.\nBooks discussed in this article\nA New Philosophy of Opera by Yuval Sharon, 2024. Liveright Publishing Corporation. Opera as Opera: The State of the Art by Conrad L. Osborne, 2018. Proposito Press.\nThe Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross, 2007. Picador. Opera\u0026rsquo;s Second Death by Slavoj Zizek and Mladen Dolar, 2002. Routledge. Puccini\u0026rsquo;s Turandot: The End of the Great Tradition by William Ashbrook and Harold Powers, 1991. Princeton University Press.\n"},{"title":"The Summer of the Dying Culture: \u003cem\u003eAnna in the Tropics,\u003c/em\u003e \u003cem\u003eCabaret,\u003c/em\u003e \u003cem\u003eThe Leopard,\u003c/em\u003e and a Mini Midwest Theater Tour","url":"https://stagesscreens.com/posts/2025-08-28-the-summer-of-dying-culture-anna-in/","date":"August 28, 2025","tags":["Theater"],"text":"The Summer of the Dying Culture: *Anna in the Tropics,* *Cabaret,* *The Leopard,* and a Mini Midwest Theater Tour The best production I’ve seen in decades of going to the highly refreshing, nationally notable countryside American Players Theatre in Spring Green, Wisconsin is running through late September. Nilo Cruz’s Anna in the Tropics is one of the most moving of a spate of works I’ve taken in recently about a dying culture facing change from without and within. Anna was one of three plays I saw on a sort of mini Midwest theater tour while on vacation this August, including that classic elegy to the 1930s Weimar Republic, Cabaret, at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Now that we seem to be witnessing a similar moment in our own time, in which half the country celebrates and the other half mourns sweeping changes in the power structure that alter the fabric of society as we know it, the theme is newly poignant.\nThe plays were a resonant follow-up to two of the highlights of my Spring. Berlin at the Court Theatre covered the same period as Cabaret but with a broader brush, making the city of Berlin itself the lead character. Prayer for the French Republic at the Northlight Theatre looks at the opposite end of World War II and its continuing impact on the people of France. Both were nominated for Jeff Awards this month.\nI also discovered a new favorite film, which is one of the great “dying culture” epics of all time. It has been around for decades but I’d never seen it before: Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard, which chronicles the impact of the Italian risorgimento on the aristocracy of Sicily in 1860. I also was introduced to Visconti\u0026rsquo;s second great film on Italian unification, Senso, which does the same for the nobles of Venice in 1866. The recurring theme of a fading world in a season of change resounded throughout my summer.\nAnna in the Tropics at APT\nAnna in the Tropics tells the story of a cigar factory in 1929 Ybor City, Florida, where Cuban workers rolling cigars are entertained and enlightened by a “lector” who reads books out loud to them. In this case, the lector picks Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. The novel turns out to have parallels to the factory workers’ lives, some of them explicit and some of them left unstated. In the former category, we have an affair between the lector and one of the cigar rollers, resulting in a triangle that mirrors the main plot in Tolstoy’s novel. In the latter camp: Both the play and the novel paint portraits of a civilization facing dramatic change. For Anna Karenina, the Russian aristocracy of the 1870s is losing its place as the ruling class to the country farm workers, some of whom were serfs. This class, the “muzhiks,” are in some cases literally buying up the land, as in Chekov’s Cherry Orchard. Tolstoy’s semiautobiographical character Konstantin Levin describes these changes in the following passage from Anna Karenina:\n“You’ll say again that I’m a reactionary, or some other dreadful word like that; but all the same it’s vexing and upsetting for me to see on all sides this impoverishment of the nobility, to which I belong and, despite the merging of the classes, am glad to belong. \u0026hellip; Now muzhiks are buying up the land around us. That doesn’t upset me - the squire does nothing, the muzhik works and pushes out the idle man. It ought to be so. And I’m very glad for the muzhik. But it upsets me to see this impoverishment as a result of \u0026ndash; I don’t know what to call it \u0026ndash; innocence.\u0026quot;\nSimilarly, the factory workers in Anna in the Tropics are a dying breed, a last vestige of a culture where the workers’ souls and intellects are treated with love and care. The lectors are disappearing, and the human cigar rollers are being replaced around the industry with machines – as are the Cubans with Americans. The smart premise of Anna in the Tropics is a pure joy to watch, not only for its sharp juxtaposition of the Russian and the Cuban, but for its spotlighting of a fully seen moment of transition in the pre-Depression world with implications for our world today. Workers in the contemporary world struggle to be treated like humans, too, in the face of threats like artificial intelligence. The play is one of my favorite Pulitzer winners in the first quarter of the 21st Century, applying poetry and politics to lives that rarely get attention. Not surprisingly, Studs Terkel, who was always interested in the treatment of the working class, is one of the few exceptions. He took notice of the lector phenomenon in cigar factories and included it in his radio program, which still airs, years after his death in 2008, on WFMT in Chicago. But Studs was unique, and Cruz is on to something almost no one else wrote about.\nI’m not the only one who thinks Anna in the Tropics is a peak production for this underrated company: The critic for Isthmus, a Wisconsin publication that regularly covers APT, wrote, “Without a doubt, this is the best show I’ve seen at APT, and among the top five theatergoing experiences of my life. It’s not to be missed. By the end, this special theater on a hill feels changed.” The theater is special, doing eight well-selected, often rarely produced plays in the woods of Wisconsin, just down a country road from Frank Lloyd Wright’s home, Taliesin. Last August The New York Times also covered American Players Theatre, under the headline “An Unexpected Bright Spot in Theater? Look to Wisconsin.” Having traveled the country seeing theaters everywhere, and having correctly predicted the Regional Tony multiple times, APT is one I’d pick for a short list for that award. It would be the first Regional Tony for Wisconsin, which might help speed its selection. It is notable in part for its beautiful setting. The stage upon which Anna was produced is located at the top of a hill, under the stars, and plays in almost all weather from May to October. APT also has a small indoor space, the tickets for which usually sell out early in the summer for the whole season. I saw Yasmina Reza’s Art there the same weekend I saw Anna. It was a highly competent production of a show that is opening for a revival on Broadway this fall.\nAfter I saw Anna in the Tropics, I looked back at The New York Times review of that show’s Broadway production in 2003, which was mounted shortly after it won the Pulitzer Prize, and it seemed as if APT director Robert Ramirez was responding directly to critic Ben Brantley’s remarks on that production. Ramirez cleaned up several of the problems Brantley reported and proved that the play is better than Brantley thought. Anna’s “confrontations and collisions are rendered in some of the most densely lyrical language since Maxwell Anderson,” Brantley wrote. “No one, It seems, is able to speak without summoning a poetic conceit. Living in Tampa is like being in ‘the mouth of a crocodile.’ Ofelia’s heart is like a swimming seal. A lover asks his beloved, ‘How does one read the story of your hair?’”\nWell, anyone can make it sound silly. What APT does is much harder: It makes Cruz’s poetic dialogue sing with an otherworldly quality that feels believable despite its heightened nature. This is partly because, unlike the Broadway production, Ramirez does not limit Anna to naturalism. In between scenes, for example, when the actors change the furniture on the set, they do so almost in ballet, staying in character and even developing the character arc but moving with abstract grace. This reminds us that the play is not aiming to simply render reality as it is, but to present something more beautiful and symbolic. That helps us swallow all the poetry spoken by factory workers whose first language is Spanish. Ramirez’s poetic stage pictures do the same thing as the dialogue is underway.\nBy contrast, Brantley thought the Broadway production was too literal to pull off Cruz’s poetry. “On the page, such rhetoric scans better than it does on the stage,” he said, adding “It makes sense that the Pulitzer judges awarded the prize to Anna without ever having seen it performed. In a less literal-minded physical production, the ornate tropes might seem less obtrusive. But [director Emily] Mann, who staged Anna earlier this year at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, N.J., where she is the artistic director, fails to find the dramatic equivalents to Mr. Cruz’s prose.” The APT production finds dramatic equivalents, including in the set change choreography.\nThe set for the Broadway production, meanwhile, was apparently minimalist, while the APT set (designed by Courtney O’Neill) had scale and scope, and many moving pieces to afford the “ballet” more action. Brantley wrote of the New York production: “The performers often look small and adrift against Robert Brill’s stark wooden set… The characters are most often arranged into horizontal lines. The contrast is presumably deliberate, to emphasize the gap between tender fantasy and harsh reality. But such naturalism also exposes the unnaturalness in Mr. Cruz’s writing, and you become overly aware of how everyone speaks in the same artificial language, even when it doesn’t suit the individual character.” O’Neill’s set at APT doesn’t have that problem, and the play comes off better for it.\nAnna’s conclusion does feel somewhat rushed in the APT production. Cruz may be to blame, but I think it’s partly the fault of an unusual casting choice so likeable it fails to prepare us for the end. Sam Luis Massaro as Cheche, a part-owner of the factory who wishes to lose the lector and buy rolling machines, is not the usual type for the role. He plays it more as a nerdy intellectual than as the “heavy” he is usually—an interesting choice but his amiability gets in the way when the character transforms into a monster. I won’t reveal what happens as the play closes, but there were gasps. The cast is otherwise one of the strongest I’ve seen on the hill. Standouts include Triney Sandoval, who also stars in Art, bringing multiple notes of strength, desperation, and comic futility to the character of the factory’s owner, Santiago. I’ve seen Sandoval more than once on Broadway, and it’s nice to see him in two meaty lead roles here in the woods. APT regular Elizabeth Ledo brings sensitivity and humor to Santiago’s wife, Ofelia. As Juan Julian, the lector, Ronald Roman-Melendez gives Jimmy Smits (who played the part on Broadway) a run for his money, bringing a similar strength of character and stability.\nCabaret at the Guthrie\nThe rapidity with which the Guthrie Theatre’s Cabaret slides from the hedonistic libertinism of 1920s Weimar to the Nazi reign of 1930s Germany is dizzying. Our view of this properly sickening transformation is introduced in this production not by the usual androgynous male as the Kit Kat Club’s Emcee, but instead by an androgynous female. Jo Lampert, who I’ve also seen in New York, objectifies the women dancers with no less oily charm than Alan Cuming, who I saw play the part on Broadway. The action is mostly limited in this production to set designer Marion William’s small square platform in the center of the huge stage of the Guthrie’s beautiful, cavernous, 1,100-seat Wurtele Thrust space, one of three stages in the gorgeous building. This lends an intimacy to the action that would otherwise be impossible in this big house, though it does seem strange as the rest of the stage is rarely used. A series of square set pieces hanging from the top of the theater represent variously a train, dressing rooms at the cabaret, and in a shocking twist, a concentration camp. But often they go unused. Director Joseph Haj, who is the artistic director of the Guthrie, uses the space to entertain and then shock us. The production does both ably.\nThe Leopard and Senso\nFilm director Luchino Visconti was a former aristocrat in Italy, and, during the years when he directed The Leopard (1963) and Senso (1954), also a member of the Italian Communist Party, so he had a unique sympathy for both sides of the economic spectrum. His nostalgia for Italy before its unification is evident in both movies, in his compassion and passion for the aristocrats, but his sympathy for the poor and working classes also shows up in a brief scene that anchors the whole of The Leopard. Burt Lancaster, whose voice is dubbed with an Italian actor’s in the version I saw but who nonetheless gives a memorably powerful performance, plays an aging Sicilian prince in 1860, as Italian freedom fighter Giuseppe Garibaldi invaded Sicily. The freedom fighters win against all odds, leading to the partial unification of the Italian states. In the scene I mentioned, Lancaster is being accompanied through the poverty-stricken streets of Palermo by a politician modeled on the Count of Cavour, the prime minister of the northern Italian state of Sardinia. Cavour, as he was known, was one of the masterminds of the new constitutional monarchy of the inchoate nation of Italy. This politician tries to convince the prince to join the new Italian senate and participate in a democratic republic that will replace the fragmented system of monarchic states that has left Sicily in dire straits economically. The prince refuses, saying that in 200 years things will be different – but worse. His position is nuanced and tenuous. “For everything to stay the same, everything must change,” he says, acknowledging that the constitutional monarchy must replace the Bourbon dynasty if the nobles are not to be subjected to what they dread most — a republic. Netflix just released a mini-series that remakes The Leopard, but the original film is so good it’s not entirely clear why that was necessary. A historian on the special features of the Criterion Collection Blu-ray says even Italians can get confused by the level of detail in the politics of Visconti’s Leopard, but I found the comprehensive political content refreshing. This was probably partly due to the fact that I’d coincidentally been reading about Italian unification. But even though it places at number 90 on the Sight and Sound 250 best films of all time, it still seems underrated to me. Haunting and sweeping, with amazing natural light photography of gorgeous Sicilian settings, The Leopard is one of the best historical epics ever made.\nTheLeopard’s spiritual sequel (though it was made first) is Senso, which picks up the action six years later in 1866, as Garibaldi moves the theater of his war to Venice. The Austrian empire is hanging on to one last province, Venetia, in which Venice is located, and this melodrama focuses on a romance between a soldier for the Austrians and a Venetian countess who describes herself as Italian through and through. She cheers on Garibaldi as he takes over, but the Austrian makes clear to her that unification will change everything she is used to. Operatic and overwrought, it’s not as good a film as The Leopard. But if you happen to like opera, as I do, this film is one for you.\nThus, as things change rapidly in America, my summer was spent watching other societies try to cling to the remainders of the normalcies they knew. Sometimes the changes are desirable, as in the liberalization of Italy during and after the 1860s, or the transition from the inequality of 19th Century Russia. Tolstoy and Visconti could afford their ambivalence. But the stories of lives left behind after the changes are full of poignancy and drama.\n"},{"title":"\u003cem\u003eThe Two Noble Kinsmen\u003c/em\u003e by Shakespeare and Fletcher in Two Rare Productions","url":"https://stagesscreens.com/posts/2025-08-09-the-two-noble-kinsmen-by-shakespeare/","date":"August 9, 2025","tags":["Theater"],"text":"*The Two Noble Kinsmen* by Shakespeare and Fletcher in Two Rare Productions No sooner did I publish my last blog post declaring that Shakespeare completists have “perhaps no bigger challenge than finding a production of all three plays in Shakespeare’s early King Henry VI trilogy” than an even rarer Shakespeare play showed up in my neighborhood: The Two Noble Kinsmen, by John Fletcher and William Shakespeare. This weekend and next it is being produced in Forest Park, Illinois by the Forest Theatre Company. As I made clear in that prior article, Henry VI is rarest in the full three-part format; it is often edited into two parts when staged. But The Two Noble Kinsmen is another holy grail for fans of the Bard. In fact, an article in the Forest Park Reviewreported that one self-described “Shakespeare completist” emailed the production’s artistic director, Richard Corley, to say she is flying in from England just to see this small, free outdoor production because she hasn’t seen it yet. “I have not talked to a single person who’s seen it before,” Corley told the newspaper.\nI have seen it before, but only on video. In fact, just seven months ago I watched Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre company in London stage The Two Noble Kinsmen on a 2021 DVD, which is I believe the first such commercial recording of a production of the play. The two productions make an interesting contrast, and though, as one would expect, it’s not Shakespeare’s best work, both productions are well worth watching.\nI should note that to some fans, an even rarer Shakespeare play exists: The Raigne of King Edward III. It was published anonymously in 1596, but has only been included in the canon by some scholars since the late 1990s. Its authorship is still contested today and even those who think Shakespeare was involved in writing it believe it was authored by multiple playwrights. So even many hardcore Shakespeare completists do not consider it necessary to see to finish seeing all of Shakespeare’s plays. It was performed by three companies in 2016: Chicago Shakespeare Theater, as part of a three-play history cycle that included Henry V and the first part of Henry VI; the Hudson Shakespeare Company as part of a history cycle that included Richard II and Henry VI parts one and two; and the Flock Theatre in New London, Connecticut. I am not aware of any productions of it since.\nThe authorship of The Two Noble Kinsmen has been contested, too, but in recent decades it has increasingly been accepted into the canon. This one, after all, was not published anonymously when it first appeared in print in 1634. It was credited as it is today to both Shakespeare and Fletcher, the latter being a younger playwright known mostly as half of the playwriting team Fletcher and Beaumont. The play, based on Chaucer’s “The Knight’s Tale” from The Canterbury Tales, tells the story of a pair of cousins who fall in love with the same woman, then fight each other for her love.\nGiven the disputed nature of its past, it was exciting to see the play performed at Shakespeare’s own Globe Theatre, or more specifically the duplicate of it that is currently staging plays the way Elizabethans saw them in London. However, as the back wall behind the stage of the authentic Globe theatre is a crowded mess of reds and burgundies with ivy growing up the walls, multiple deer heads mounted on the wall, and a statue of an ox affixed behind the actors, I found the minimalist set at the Forest Theatre Company production to be refreshing. The busy set at the Globe distracted from the action and by contrast Corley makes great use of its park space in a beautiful and little-used park hidden behind the Altenheim nursing home off Madison Street in Forest Park, using a simple white platform in the center of the park with six white pillars behind it. Much of the action took place off the stage in the park.\nThe cast at the Globe is of course more experienced. Some sections of the play, including the opening scene, are challenging to stage because they are talky, tell rather than show, and are somewhat disconnected from the main plot, which does hold one’s interest. Those sections of the play “popped” better (were easier to listen to) in the more experienced Globe production.\nBut the Forest Theatre Company’s interpretation was more interesting. Corley conceived the play as a “strange and queer love triangle.” All three leads (noble kinsmen Arcite and Palamon, and their love interest Emilia) are interpreted as having same-sex attractions when the play opens. “What fascinates me most about the play – and the reason I think it resonates today – is the way it questions gender norms and societal demands,” Corley writes in the program. “Arcite and Palamon have a friendship that is as great as any marriage; Emilia vows early in the play, as she remembers Flavina, her dead girlfriend, never to love a man.” This does get the play over one of its interpretational challenges: Palamon and Arcite go from describing themselves as “one another’s wife” to being willing to kill each other over a woman they’ve only just seen. When Mark Kiselevach (as Arcite) and Nathaniel Kohlmeier (as Palamon) portray the two kinsmen as attracted to each other, an element of violent jealousy enters the relationship that helps make clear why the sudden introduction of a woman to their dynamic is so upsetting to them.\nMeanwhile, in the Globe production the vow made by Ellora Torchia’s Emilia never to love a man goes by almost unnoticed because once again the play is all tell and no show. By contrast the Forest Park production had Flavina (Noa Zapata) actually appear on stage, as a sort of ghost of memory, wearing a mask and carrying a black rose. This addition helped Sania Henry to dramatize Emilia’s emotional journey and was one of the best choices in the production. It’s somewhat disappointing, then, that when Emilia is told she is to marry Arcite midway through the show, she literally shrugs and accepts it. It would be possible in that moment, despite her lines accepting the marriage, to deliver them with a sense of reluctance.\nAnother challenge in staging The Two Noble Kinsmen is the high amount of stage time Shakespeare and Fletcher give to a minor character named only “the jailer’s daughter,” who falls in love with Palamon and ends up going mad for love. It can either be a very funny role or something of a bore. It helps to make strong choices in portraying the character, and the Globe goes all out by casting Francesca Mills, a brilliantly funny actress with dwarfism, making visible the distance between her and Palamon. The Forest Theatre Company’s Gina Cioffi deals with the challenge by imbuing the role with both drama and comedy, whereas the Globe aims almost only at laughs.\nThe Forest Theatre Company production runs through next Sunday, August 17. It plays Friday, Saturday and Sunday at 5 p.m. in the Grove at Altenheim, at 7824 Madison Street in Forest Park, Illinois. It is free. The Shakespeare’s Globe DVD is available online from Opus Arte, which also published the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2022 Henry VI DVD that I reviewed in my last post on this blog.\n"},{"title":"Shakespeare\u0026rsquo;s \u003cem\u003eHenry VI\u003c/em\u003e: The Best Video Versions for the Completist","url":"https://stagesscreens.com/posts/2025-07-30-shakespeares-henry-vi-best-video/","date":"July 30, 2025","tags":["Theater"],"text":"Shakespeare's *Henry VI*: The Best Video Versions for the Completist A little research on the Internet, particularly on Reddit and in The New York Times, shows there are many Shakespeare fans trying to see every one of his plays performed somewhere, somehow, by somebody. Such completists have perhaps no bigger challenge than finding a production of all three plays in Shakespeare’s early King Henry VI trilogy. The plays are rarely produced, very long, and usually when performed chopped into two plays instead of three. This makes seeing Shakespeare’s trilogy in any form close to his intention almost impossible. I saw the plays in two parts in New York City in 2018 performed by the National Asian American Theatre Company, a credible production. But I hankered to see it in a format that, however edited, retained some character of the playwright’s three-part vision and structure. The fact is, very few of Shakespeare’s fans around the world live in a city like New York and even there it isn’t performed often. So, for completists, the DVD market is essential.\nThree recommendable DVD versions, from 1983, 2016 and 2022, are available. Fans do exist for a couple of older video versions that are possible to catch glimpses of online, like the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 1965 black and white production, or like the modern-dress English Shakespeare Company version from 1990. But the video quality isn’t very good for either of these. The three DVDs I’m recommending all have pros and cons. It depends on what you’re looking for which one will work best for you. I ended up watching most of all three of these video productions, though I did browse the long 1983 version, and will summarize here which version is best suited for which audience.\nThe Henry VI plays center on the title king, who came to power too early at nine months old, and grew (in Shakespeare’s telling) into a virtuous but weak king, surrounded by the Machiavellian scheming of the dukes, wives and other players who seek to take him down amid the famous “War of the Roses.”\nThough it is the most comprehensive filming available, well-reputed, and mostly deservedly so, the BBC’s1983 “Television Shakespeare” production is perilously long, with each play running close to four hours. It is available to stream on Kanopy, or to purchase on DVD. I recommend it to anyone whose priority is to see the full series as written by the Bard, but it was a bit much to recommend to the people with whom I was going to watch the plays.\nThus, I was pleased to discover that the Royal Shakespeare Companyin 2022 had recorded its COVID-pandemic-era production of all three plays and released them as a DVD set. The plays are edited, but lightly, running about 2 hours and 40 minutes each. For the most part they preserve Shakespeare’s three-part structure, although they unnecessarily tagged the somewhat dull end of part two onto the beginning of the rousing part three. If you’re looking for an edited version that nonetheless retains the character of Shakespeare’s vision, this is not a bad selection. I must warn you, however, that part one was filmed at the height of the pandemic and is not even in a theater, as are the other two parts. Part one is filmed in a rehearsal space at Stratford-Upon-Avon, and while this detracts surprisingly little it does put this version at a severe disadvantage relative to the other filmed versions. It is directed by Gregory Doran and Owen Horsely.\nAlso worth considering is The Hollow Crown TV series from 2016, which covers all of Shakespeare’s history plays, even though the Henry VI section is badly chopped down into two two-hour parts, cutting some of the best material. It’s worth considering because it has the best cast of all available versions (Tom Sturridge, Benedict Cumerbatch, Sophie Okonedo, Hugh Bonneville, Sally Hawkins), is filmed on location with the highest production values, and makes the best use of some of what in other hands is among Shakespeare’s dullest writing. If you are a more casual Shakespeare fan, and don’t care to see the full saga, this is the one for you.\nHowever, the cuts do cause pain. Harold Bloom, the late great critic of English literature from Yale, was not a fan of the Henry VI plays, calling them “bad,” but he did like one character in each part: Joan of Arc in part one, the rebel Jack Cade in part two, and the future Richard III in part three. The Hollow Crown series (directed by Dominic Cooke) cuts the first, Joan of Arc, down to almost nothing. It cuts Jack Cade altogether (!), which is a severe loss. It does much, however, to highlight Richard in part three, hyping their superstar casting of Cumerbatch in the role.\nI don’t agree that the plays are bad, probably because I’ve seen these well-staged versions of the sections that bored Bloom in print. But I do agree with him on all three of his favorite characters. Joan of Arc, called Joan la Pucelle here, is the victim of Shakespeare’s jingoism in the first play, with a less than fully positive portrayal because she is of course French and therefore at odds with the English heroes. The jingoism is most evident in Joan’s final scene, when she is burned at the stake. Desperate to avoid the flames, she protests that she is a virgin, then protests that she is pregnant (quite a reversal, as the sneering English soldiers are quick to point out), and then changes her mind more than once as to who its father is. These comic moments, amid the terrible auto de fe scene, seem strangest in the 2022 RSC version, as Joan is played with a hero’s strength by Lily Nichol. In the 1983 series Brenda Blethyn makes Shakespeare’s more complicated vision come to life, emphasizing Joan’s humble lower-class origins as well as her strength. The Hollow Crown cuts the jokes out of the stake scene, making it suitably uncomplicated for a mass audience (Shakespeare’s portrayal of Joan is offensive) but depriving us of a take on Shakespeare’s jingoistic intent. Laura Morgan’s other scenes as Joan in this series are cut to almost nothing.\nI found the Jack Cade scenes in part two to be the most engaging in the entire series of plays. Cade is believed by most historians to have been a low-born peasant. He led a popular uprising in 1450. The sequence with Jack Cade boasts the Henry VI plays’ most famous one-liner: “Let’s kill all the lawyers.” In Shakespeare’s telling Cade seeks not only to kill the lawyers but also anyone who can read or speak Latin. His attack on the educated has been compared to Trump, though it originates from the opposite end of the social ladder. The 2022 RSC version plays him for laughs, with Aaron Sidwell making of the character a highly eccentric idiot. This portrayal makes it impossible to believe he would have motivated riots by his fellow peasants. The BBC version does the best job with the Cade scenes, as Trevor Peacock captures both the comic aspects of the character and his intelligence. There is an unintentional classism in Sidwell’s rendering, and Peacock’s makes us see the potential of the power of the masses. Meanwhile, the uprising, and its bloody end, are by far the biggest gaps in the Hollow Crown series.\nCumerbatch is the best of the three Richards. Shakespeare reserves some of the Henry VI plays’ liveliest and most engaging writing for this villain’s soliloquies. As in Richard III, the hunchbacked Richard weighs his lust for the crown against the prospects of a romantic life: “I’ll make my heaven in a lady’s lap and deck my body in gay ornaments, and ‘witch sweet ladies with my words and looks. O miserable thought, and more unlikely than to accomplish twenty golden crowns!” Fans of Richard III should definitely see Part Three of King Henry VI, or at least the second half of TheHollow Crown. Ron Cook is somewhat dull compared to Cumerbatch in the 1983 Television Shakespeare version. Arthur Hughes in the RSC version, though he’s given a tiny hand to approximate Richard’s deformity, is a hunchback only when hunched over. And while his diminutive stature lends an amusing smallness to little Richard, his screen presence is also a little small for so large a role, compared to Cumerbatch.\nThe Crown series does not leave its editor’s butchery to Harold Bloom’s favorite moments. It also smushes together the characters of Somerset and Stratford together into one character, and if that wasn’t confusing enough for viewers who are trying to follow along in Shakespeare’s scripts, it also leaves a minor character named Stratford who serves little purpose. This is a shame because Stratford’s role, picking out a wife for Henry VI upon victory in France and then sleeping with her to gain access to the King, is among the most engaging. The Hollow Crown also changes the manner of death for the newly-dubbed Somerset. I didn’t much miss his being beheaded by pirates, but being beheaded by opponents in the War of the Roses doesn’t spare us Queen Margaret’s grief or the beheading, so I prefer the original.\nQueen Margaret ranks among Shakespeare’s best female bad-asses: When Henry meekly gives away the kingdom to his opponent the Duke of York (another of my favorite scenes in the whole series), she leads his armies herself to regain the crown for her son. Her scheming throughout the series recalls Lady Macbeth. Okonedo in The Hollow Crown does the best job with the various complications of this wonderfully wrought character; Julia Foster in the 1983 series was basically forgettable. Minnie Gale’s overacting got frankly annoying in the 2022 RSC version. I wished all of them had attempted a little French flavor in accent, but naturally this is hard to accomplish while speaking Shakespearean dialogue. Only one French character in any of the three DVD series attempted this sort of French flavoring, “Lewis, King of France” in the 2022 RSC version. It was a breath of fresh air when it happened, as one longs for Shakespeare to make the combatants in the wars between France and England more culturally distinct.\nAside from Cade, the series’ most interesting character is Henry himself: right-minded, deserving of power, and yet dissembling, emotional and eccentric. All three Henrys are exciting portrayals, but my favorite was Peter Benson in the 1983 BBC version directed by Jane Howell. Playing up the eccentricity, and the daintiness of this effete king, Benson gives the most powerful performance despite being too old for the young king. Sturridge is eccentric too (he usually is, in most roles) but in a totally different way: His emotional vocal affectation makes the king seem sort of mentally slow. This may be unintended, but adds a new dimension to the character. Mark Quarterly in the pandemic RSC version mostly lets Shakespeare’s writing act the character of Henry for him; he’s the least interesting of the three but among the most likeable of all of the performances among his fellow castmates. That series is somewhat overacted, probably in part because of the three it is the only one filmed in front of a live audience. Once one adjusts to this cession to the demands of projecting on the live stage, however, the virtues in the performances come through.\nIn the end, the strongest suit of The Hollow Crown is that it makes scenes which Bloom calls unmemorable into the best of high drama, making one understand how the “Game of Thrones” TV series chose the three plays as their inspiration in plotting. For real Shakespeare fans, some combination of the three DVD series is must-see viewing.\n"},{"title":"Why Aren\u0026rsquo;t There Any Movies Starring British Prime Minister William Gladstone?","url":"https://stagesscreens.com/posts/2025-07-30-why-arent-there-any-movies-starring/","date":"July 30, 2025","tags":["Film"],"text":"Why Aren't There Any Movies Starring British Prime Minister William Gladstone? Why hasn’t William Gladstone, a towering figure in British politics who was prime minister four times in the 19th Century, been the central character of any film biopics? Why has he been the starring role in only one even remotely significant play, Hugh Ross Williamson\u0026rsquo;s short-lived 1937 show Mr. Gladstone, which never made it out of London? Why has his arch-rival in British politics, Benjamin Disraeli, been the subject of so many plays and films when by contrast he was only prime minister twice and usually ranks lower in the lists of the best prime ministers in Britain’s history?\nThe fact is, filmmakers have been so dazzled by Disraeli\u0026rsquo;s positive attributes that both prime ministers have failed to get the interesting, complicated, balanced treatment they deserve. “All actors want to play Disraeli, except fat ones,” American filmmaker Nunnally Johnson was quoted as saying in the London Review of Books in 2013, almost 40 years after the last Disraeli biopic. “It’s such a showy part—half Satan, half Don Juan, man of so many talents, he could write novels, flatter a queen, dig the Suez Canal. Present her with India. You can’t beat that, it’s better than Wyatt Erp.” That may be why the Internet Movie Database counts so many portrayals of Disraeli: seven biopics about Disraeli and 14 portrayals in films that aren’t primarily about him.\nThere are actually more portrayals of Gladstone recorded on IMDB, but he’s never been the subject of a theatrical film release. Gladstone shows up in 20 movies, almost always as a scowling prude, and often a villain. But the only screen treatments of Gladstone that make him the central figure are one hour episodes on BBC television series: In 1983 an episode of “Number 10,” a British television series in which each episode covers a different prime minister, focused on Gladstone. Then in 1960 a television series of filmed plays called the “ITV Play of the Week” featured a one-hour drama entitled “Old Man in a Hurry” by (here he comes again) Hugh Ross Williamson, the author of the 1937 play Mr. Gladstone.\nBy contrast, there were films named Disraeli in 1916, 1921, 1929 and 1978. It is true that three of the Disraeli films starred George Arliss and were based on a long-running Broadway play for which he originated the role. But there was also one called The Prime Minister in 1941 and one called Invincible Mr. Disraeli in 1963. The remaining biopic was the hour episode on Disraeli in TV’s “Number 10” (the title of which alludes to the prime minister’s house at No. 10 Downing Street in London). A case can be made that it might be time for an intelligent dramatic treatment of Disraeli too, one that doesn’t treat the conservative prime minister as an unmitigated hero. After all, 1978 was a long time ago, and the films are all heavily flawed.\nBut for now let’s focus on the strange treatment of Gladstone by the entertainment industry: There is much to dislike in the Liberal prime minister, but the main reason he is most often portrayed in an uncomplicatedly negative light is that the films he is in usually feature Disraeli as a hero. One can only speculate why Gladstone has gone comparatively underrepresented in movies, but let us start with his personality. For all the reasons that Disraeli is beloved by actors, Gladstone is the opposite. He was not a Don Juan, though he did have a habit of going into the streets to “reform” prostitutes. (That was the subject of his episode in “Number 10.”) He could not write novels, though he did publish seven books of Homeric criticism. (“Gladstone read Homer for fun,” Winston Churchill quipped, “and it served him right.”) And, famously, where “Dizzy” did in fact flatter Queen Victoria, Gladstone merely infuriated her. The reasons why are keys to understanding Hollywood’s aversion. The Queen felt he treated her as though he were giving speeches to her. She may also have felt he had an irritating Messianic complex, seemingly believing that God had appointed him to fight the causes he fought. Where his supporters called him G.O.M. for the “Grand Old Man,” his rivals called him “God’s Only Mistake.” And where Disraeli was possessed of a proto-Wildean wit, Gladstone was famously humorless. This explains why Gladstone is a stick in the mud in supporting role after supporting role.\nWe think of Hollywood as liberal, but Gladstone’s reputation as “the People’s William” has not won him more favor. The strange thing is that this is not because he was a very conservative Liberal. Actually, the best untold story about Gladstone is his transformation from being what historian Thomas Babington Macauley called “the rising hope of those stern, unbending Tories” when he started in politics in the 1830s to being perhaps the primary representative of what liberalism meant in the second half of the 19th Century. None of the films or plays about Gladstone tell this story in any depth. The closest I’ve seen from a dramatic treatment of Gladstone is in the 1978 Disraeli miniseries, which suggests that Gladstone’s switch from the Tory party to the new Liberal party in 1859 was made because the leaders of the Liberal party at the time were old, giving him a much shorter path to the premiership than a Tory party led by the young Disraeli. This is probably largely true, but it doesn’t tell the full fascinating story.\nSo, if not the ideational evolution of Gladstone, what story does the one full-length dramatic treatment of Gladstone tell? Williamson’s play Mr. Gladstone quite deliberately tells the same story about Gladstone that all the other plays of the 1930s told about the G.O.M.: The 1880s Gladstone, embroiled in the controversy over Irish “home rule,” or freedom in government from Britain. In fact, Williamson wrote in an “author’s note” in the script that his play was specifically written for an audience that had already seen the other plays, an audience which of course no longer exists today. “This play was written in 1937 for the Gate Theatre Studio,” Williamson wrote:\n“That is to say, it was written for a particular audience, which might be presumed to have seen Elsie Schauffler’s Parnell and Laurence Housman’s Victoria Regina. Both these plays, in my opinion, were extremely partisan statements on political matters still recent enough to be controversial. Parnell presented what can only be described as a gross caricature of Gladstone himself, besides completely falsifying the Home Rule issue as it affected the two men. Mr. Housman seems to me to over-sentimentalize a Queen who appears to have been one of the more unattractive characters, as she was certainly one of the most unconstitutional monarchs, who have occupied the English throne. It was my criticism of these dramatized versions of history which led to the writing of Mr. Gladstone, as an attempt to present to the audience which first saw them in England the real issues of the time, conveyed as nearly as possible in the actual words of the characters.”\nAnd yet when the play was reviewed, it was criticized for being as one-sided in Gladstone’s favor as Williamson felt the other plays had been against him. As The New York Times reported on Friday, October 1, 1937, “The dramatist’s portrait of Gladstone is careful and reasonable … Nevertheless, it fails, in the opinion of critics, to do him justice. For the Times of London the fault lies in the oversimplification of the ‘Grand Old Man’s’ character, an omission of those complexities—his arrogance and humility, his tactical adroitness and passionate faith—from which arose the special character of his genius.”\nAs one might guess from Williamson’s words above, Queen Elizabeth is not portrayed favorably in Mr. Gladstone. The stage directions describe her as “undeniably ‘difficult,’’ having “surrendered her independence of judgment to the dazzling attentions of ‘DIZZY’ … in process of becoming that obstinate conservative old lady whose continual nagging almost broke even Mr. Gladstone’s spirit.” And lest that make it sound like Disraeli escapes scorn, he is described in the stage directions by a quote from Lytton Strachey, author of Eminent Victorians: “After a lifetime of relentless determination, infinite perseverance and superhuman egotism, he found himself at last, old, hideous, battered, widowed, solitary, diseased, but Prime Minister of England.” To Williamson’s credit this is a more interesting take on Disraeli than any of the films or plays titled after him offer. But the conception of drama in the 1930s thus seemed to be that if the story was told from the perspective of the Queen or Disraeli, one couldn’t also tell the story from the perspective of Gladstone. One or the other had to be a villain. This was also the tendency of historians, observed Robert Blake in an essay in 1998: “Too often biographers of these two extraordinary men have felt it their duty to see their hero’s enemy through their hero’s eyes, and to denigrate or at least sneer at the opponent almost as if the battle was still raging when they wrote,” Blake wrote. “This is absurd over a century after Gladstone’s death, and after all he outlived Disraeli by 17 years.”\nRoom remains, therefore, for a balanced portrait of both Disraeli and Gladstone on both stage and screen. That may not be the priority of Hollywood and Broadway, which for very good reason have been trying (if haltingly) to rectify the huge gaps in representation of peoples who, to put it simplistically, are not heterosexual white males. But leaving Gladstone out of our library of film history entirely leaves a gap in our historical education about the whole of the second half of the 19th Century. (A similar gap exists in United States history, where TV’s “The Gilded Age” is one of the few screen tellings of a half-century of presidents.)\nI can imagine a fun new portrait of Gladstone, one that finds humor in his humorlessness while locating interest in the conflict between the Gladstone who called himself an “out and out inequalitarian” and the Gladstone who said anyone had a moral entitlement to the vote. One that finds him haunted by the Greek Gods of Homer as much as by a rigid Christian conscience that drove him to note in his diary each time he whipped himself for lustful feelings. One in which Gladstone changes parties in part because he was humiliated by his experience in Odysseus’ homeland as the stooge of Disraeli. But also one in which he embraces new opportunities to speak to the masses in the mid-19th century, ending up partially changed by his efforts to speak to people who didn’t have the kind of aristocratic background he had overvalued. One that is honest about his deplorable racism, evidenced in his early support of slavery and the Confederacy in America. And one that is honest in depicting his attempt to recant both positions. One with a Gladstone who believed himself driven by principle even as he went from one party to the next, but who was also a lauded tactician. One in which the Liberal leader failed to pass a law expanding the vote to the working class by such tactics, only to see Disraeli pass an even stronger reform because the Grand Old Man\u0026rsquo;s supposed brilliance in tactics failed him.\nNone of those aspects of Gladstone’s story have been told yet on stage or screen.\n"},{"title":"Theater as Artistic Community Journalism: \u003cem\u003eEureka Day,\u003c/em\u003e \u003cem\u003ePurpose,\u003c/em\u003e \u003cem\u003eDhaba on Devon\u003c/em\u003e","url":"https://stagesscreens.com/posts/2025-07-15-theater-as-artistic-community/","date":"July 15, 2025","tags":["Theater"],"text":"Theater as Artistic Community Journalism: *Eureka Day,* *Purpose,* *Dhaba on Devon* The 2025 Tony Awards were particularly good for regional theater this year – and for plays by, for and about the community they are staged in, a phenomenon that is rare but of which we have a few exciting examples this year. Theater today is notoriously New York-centric. The Pulitzer Prize, for example, reportedly went 85 years before a play that had not yet played in New York was picked, from the first prize ever given for drama (to Why Marry? by Jesse Lynch Williams) in 1918 to 2003’s Anna in the Tropics by Nilo Cruz, which was commissioned by and first performed at New Theatre in Coral Gables, Florida (in the Miami area, not a city widely known for its theater). There have since been very few others, including Fat Ham by James Ijames, which won the Pulitzer while its first off-Broadway production (I saw it at the Public Theatre in New York) was still selling advance tickets. Thanks to the pandemic, it had only been staged in an online video production, by the Wilma Theatre in Philadelphia. But even more rare is when theater functions as a kind of community journalism, in which the play is written by a local resident of the theater at which it is first staged, about that community, and staged first for that community. This has been a good year for that style of play.\nThe best example of this phenomenon is perhaps this year’s winner of the Best Play Revival Tony award, Eureka Day by Jonathan Spector. I happened to have been visiting Berkeley, California while that play was running its first production at the Aurora Theatre Company, which commissioned it. Aurora, whose little space is located on the same block as the Tony-winning Berkeley Repertory Theatre, does a great job of programming for the community, though this level of localism is rare even there, and Eureka Day’s success would seem to put it in the running potentially for a Regional Tony of its own down the road. I know whereof I speak, apparently, because two years in a row recently I correctly predicted in advance of the Regional Tony which theater would get the award. One of them was Wilma, and Fat Ham was a major reason I predicted it, along with the fact that Philadelphia had gone almost 50 years without a single theater on the list despite being home to the longest continually operating theater in the country, the Walnut Theatre.\nMeanwhile, the Tony for the best new play also went to a play about the city in which it was first staged. The playwright was not a resident of that city this time, although he did live in the city while working on the play. That was the excellent Purpose by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, which I saw in its original production at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago. It tells a story about the family of a civil rights leader obviously based on Jesse Jackson and was set in Jackson’s home city of Chicago. When accepting the award, Jacobs-Jenkins said Chicago had “some of the best actors in America” and spoke movingly in favor of regional theater. “I want to thank the city of Chicago, honestly, who literally made the show what it was with their enthusiasm,” he said. “A lot of great stuff happens in New York but a lot more happens out in the regions, so use your next commercial break to Google a local theater near [you] or have a very difficult conversation with your family members.”\nThis month at Writer’s Theatre in Glencoe, Illinois, which the late Wall Street Journal critic Terry Teachout called “the number one regional theater in America” in 2016, another example has taken the stage: Dhaba on Devon Avenue by Madhuri Shekar, the author of the play A Nice Indian Boy, which was turned into a very entertaining movie this year starring Jonathan Groff. Google AI says Shekar splits her time between New Jersey, New York City and Chennai, India, but Dhaba on Devon reads like it was written by a local of Chicago’s “Little India” neighborhood on the famous Devon Avenue (6400 North on Chicago’s North Side). The play covers the evolving demographics, and the alleged decline, of the neighborhood and its still-extant restaurant scene. I saw that play this week after eating a delicious dinner at Udupi Palace on Devon. This is the way to watch it, if you ask me. (Actually, the ideal might be to see the play first and then go to Devon for Indian food, when you know what to order based on the play.)\nDhaba on Devon Avenue starts with the exciting premise of reporting in theatrical form on the state of a local neighborhood, and specifically on the evolution of the restaurant scene on Devon as Indian families from the area have in large measures moved to northern suburbs and (according to one of the characters in the play) seen their kids become doctors. The subject of Dhaba on Devon is a Sindhi clan (hailing from a region that is today in Pakistan but was in India before 1947) that owns a family restaurant on Devon that has survived for decades but is now in danger of foreclosure. The fictional restaurant in Shekar’s play is profiled by the Chicago Tribune, and while they were expecting a 30-year anniversary puff piece, the family is disappointed to find the paper focuses on the decline of Devon instead.\n“Today, Devon Avenue is purely nostalgic,” the play’s program quotes Indian suburbanite Viral Shah as saying. “I don’t think I’ve been to Devon in the last, maybe 10 years.” Shah, who was speaking to Chicago Public Radio in 2023 when she said this, was at the time helping to organize the Indian Independence Day Parade in Naperville. She was presumably promoting the parade in Naperville at the time and so might not be the best example, but the play conjures an elegiac tone from such sentiments that is compelling and heart-wrenching. Actually, my family’s experience going back to Devon (not for the first time in recent years) did not bear out the play’s thesis, as parking was still almost impossible to find, and Udupi Palace, which I first visited 30 years ago, was still pretty busy on a Sunday afternoon at 4 p.m. Many of the restaurants I’ve been going to for three decades are sill there. But the play, originally supposed to be staged in 2020 but cancelled then due to the COVID pandemic, is even more resonant now that many restaurants have shuttered after the extended closures of those years.\nI used to work in local newspapers, including a small paper renowned for covering its neighborhood in award-winning detail, so I know how big an impact community journalism can make on its neighborhood, and how important a good paper can be to a community. (That paper, like most print newspapers, has declined in some ways since.) I get easily excited by theater that delves into the shifting trends of a specific locality besides New York City. Chris Jones of the Chicago Tribune, writing about Dhaba on Devon, twice described himself as a “sucker” for local content, so he knows what I’m talking about.\nAs tantalizing as the theme is, however, I was somewhat disappointed that the play, for all its talk of the changing economic climate of Devon, ultimately rests the decision to close or open the restaurant not on elements that shed light on local trends but on fictional personal concerns of the characters. This might not be a problem if the conclusion of the play wasn’t also something of a let-down. An hour of fun and drama climaxes in the sort of explosive family argument that has been the stuff of great American theater from Eugene O’Neill to Jacobs Jenkins’s Purpose. But, as I feared, the explosion left nothing for the remaining half hour of the play but hushed reconciliation of the sort one associates with television sitcoms. I won’t say how Dhaba resolves but I was reminded of a rule Jerry Seinfeld invented when writing episode conclusions for his formula-breaking sitcom “Seinfeld” in the 1990s: \u0026ldquo;No hugs and no lessons.” There are no hugs in the end of Dhaba, but there might as well have been, and there were lessons. One doesn\u0026rsquo;t wish the play to be \u0026ldquo;Seinfeld,\u0026rdquo; but the rule feels instructive here. I wished the last 40 minutes (it ran 10 minutes over) were somewhat different. For example, The patriarch of the play’s Madhwani family, beset by Parkinson’s disease and therefore unable to fully taste his own cooking, is played by Anish Jethmalani with a sizzling intensity that is desirable but which ends up exhibiting a one-note quality that keeps the play locked in a similar tone for too long. By the last act, I wanted more variety and comedy in the mix. More, perhaps, like the balance between humor and pathos struck so deftly in A Nice Indian Boy.\nStill, there is more to like in Dhaba than dislike. The cast alongside Jethmalani is strong. Tina Munoz Pandya gives a likeable breeziness to her character, the Madhwani daughter who aspires to take over the restaurant and give it her own fusion spin with grilled paneer sandwiches and pepper-speckled ice cream. Mueen Jahan, playing the one Sindhi character who wasn’t born in the United States, is funny and moving. The dramaturgy by Karina Patel is superb, especially in a magazine distributed at the door called Backstory that features articles on the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, the history of Devon, and the changing times in the Little India neighborhood. Meanwhile the play’s set, a thoroughly realized restaurant kitchen designed by Lauren M. Nichols, is so detailed it takes just a little too long to do one of the set changes. And the smell of Indian food, which greets you when you walk into the theater, gives an authenticity that will make you eager to get back to Devon.\nUltimately Dhaba on Devon Avenue doesn’t have quite the power of Eureka Day, Spector’s thrillingly original treatise on the explosive conflict between vaccine adherents and “anti-vaxxers” in Berkeley. This might sound like a predictable subject after the pandemic until one learns that the play was written in 2017. Since then, what struck me as an excitingly local play when I encountered it in 2018 in Berkeley has acquired a world-wide universality as well as an explosive timeliness. The play centers on a kindergarten in Berkeley called Eureka Day School that becomes subsumed in a mumps outbreak, triggering a violent debate between progressive parents angry that some of the students were not vaccinated, and progressive parents adamant that vaccines are dangerous to their kids. The highlight of the play is a knock-down, drag-out flame war amongst the parents in an online chat during a broadcast of an emergency board meeting to discuss the epidemic. Many of the funniest and most explosive lines are not heard but read by the audience, as video screens give us access to the degenerating chat battle. Stylistically the play feels perhaps most influenced by the plays of Bruce Norris, who usually writes combustible arguments that expose with blade-sharp wit the foibles and fumbles of the same progressive communities who go to his plays – and who praise them most highly. See Norris’ Clybourne Park, another play by a Chicagoan staged in Chicago for Chicagoans, though it debuted in London before it ran in Chicago and before its New York productions went on to win it both the Pulitzer and the Tony. See also Norris’ The Pain and the Itch and Downstate. Eureka Day will be performed back at its original stomping grounds at the Aurora Theatre Company in Berkeley in August and September, with most of the original cast returning. The TimeLine Theatre Company, which co-produced Dhaba on Devon Avenue, will also be producing Eureka Day next January and February in Chicago.\nEureka Day showed that this sort artistic community journalism can go on to be greatly universal as well. In this case, the play went on to productions on Broadway, the West End, and Off-Broadway with well-known actors like Oscar-winner Helen Hunt, “Kids in the Hall” alum Mark McKinney, multiple-Tony nominee Jessica Hecht and Henry Fool star Thomas Jay Ryan. It has often been observed that universality is found more easily the more specific the locale and issues of the storytelling. That truism is perfectly demonstrated by all three of the plays mentioned in the headline here.\n"},{"title":"Fellini Gets Another Look After Critics Knock Him Down Several Pegs","url":"https://stagesscreens.com/posts/2025-07-09-fellini-gets-another-look-after-critics/","date":"July 9, 2025","tags":["Film"],"text":"Fellini Gets Another Look After Critics Knock Him Down Several Pegs This year the legendary film director Federico Fellini is getting his first box office test since his movies 8 ½ and La Dolce Vita plummeted in the famous 2022 Sight and Sound ranking of the best 250 films of all time, probably thanks to a reckoning on the treatment of women provoked by the “#MeToo” movement. Fellini’s most acclaimed film, 8 1/2, went from #7 in the 2012 poll to #31 in the 2022 ranking. La Dolce Vita, meanwhile, went from #36 to #60. Why Fellini’s standing dropped almost certainly has more to do with the controversies surrounding the “#MeToo” movement than it does with a new aesthetic appraisal of his work.\nA new 35mm print of 8 ½ is running all this week at Chicago’s Music Box Theatre as part of a mini-retrospective called “Five by Fellini,” on the heels of a prolonged and much-extended run for the movie at New York City’s Film Forum this Spring. The Music Box’s five Fellini films include both 8 ½ (1963) and La Dolce Vita (1960), as well as La Strada (1954), City of Women (1980) and Amarcord (1983), all five of which depict aspects of Fellini’s relationship to women. He once said that throughout his life he viewed women “from the vantage point of a pre-puberty or slightly post-puberty boy” (The New York Times, Nov. 12, 1979). That perspective is at the heart of the films’ reception both now and, as the Sight and Sound poll may show, in the eyes of history.\nThe success in New York of this new print of 8 ½, a semi-autobiographical story about a philandering film director who is creatively blocked while he deals with his own relationships with many women, came despite the fact that a disclaimer at the opening of the movie belatedly warns audiences that “15 percent” of the subtitles in this Italian film are completely unreadable. This inconvenience almost leads us to sympathize with a female character at the end of the movie who declares Fellini\u0026rsquo;s film-within-a-film has “nothing to say! Nothing to say!” After all, if we are not expected to care about 15 percent of the dialogue, how much can the film have to say? On the contrary, however, all five films have much to say, both unctuous and affecting. While 8 ½ might still be best watched in its Criterion Collection 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray disc format, which has no legibility problems at all, the pictures all reward re-visitation.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s funny that in all the press I’ve seen about the Sight and Sound poll of filmmakers and critics, none has directly drawn the connections between #MeToo, Fellini’s performance on the poll, and the results of the poll as a whole. The closest I saw an article come was a short piece in Variety that covered the drop in Fellini’s popularity and speculated that perhaps #MeToo had made his movies play less favorably. “It was reported during production that Fellini kept a note pinned just below his movie camera’s eyepiece that read, ‘Remember, this is a comedy,’” the article noted. “In the years since #MeToo, that might not be as easy as it once was.” But the Variety story didn’t mention that the rest of the 2022 Sight and Sound list had been dramatically overhauled in a specifically feminist direction, featuring a record number of female directors and a brand-new number one film of all time: Chantal Akerman’s 1975 feminist film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels. The movie displaced Citizen Kane and Vertigo, one of which had topped the list each decade for more than half a century.\nAkerman’s ascent blew many minds, not least because the film is a relentlessly thorough three-and-a-half-hour “Slow Cinema” depiction of the mundane details of the life of a woman, typified by one much-referenced six-minute sequence in which Jeanne silently makes meatloaf. The Sight and Sound poll is taken once every 10 years, and this sudden, totally unexpected top ranking for Jeanne Dielman after decades of relative stability on the list left director and screenwriter Paul Schrader speculating that “someone had put their thumb on the scales” of the poll’s tabulation. Schrader implied the vote counting had been tampered with. The real story behind the poll’s dramatic changes probably has more to do with the makeup of the voting body, which has expanded dramatically, and quite possibly now includes more women. When the poll began in 1952, only 63 voters determined the list. In 2022 it was up to more than 1,600. Previous iterations of the poll have evolved very slowly, with multiple articles over time about how “stodgy” and unchanging the list had been before the revolution in 2022.\nInterestingly, Fellini’s drop on the Sight and Sound poll was not the fault of film directors: 8 ½ tied with Vertigo for 6th on the director’s poll. But with critics and other voters the drop was steep. This disparity between directors and other voters may be explained by a few things: First, directors probably remain overwhelmingly male, while the rest of the voting body has perhaps expanded to include more women. Second, 8 ½ is a story about a film director with a creative block and thus appeals to directors who relate. And third, maybe Fellini’s lifestyle, as depicted in 8 ½, of being surrounded by many different female lovers at once is more attractive and relatable to directors than to critics.\nComplaints about sexism in Fellini movies is nothing new, as City of Women shows. That film, which tells the story of a horny heterosexual who chases after a woman on a train and ends up being led into a hotel full of thousands of raging feminists, was protested even while it was being made. One feminist newspaper addressed the actresses making the film while it was under production: “You women who agreed to participate in Fellini’s movie, you’ve sold out the movement. Didn’t you feel ashamed of yourself when you acted in those disgusting scenes, didn’t you feel pity or repulsion for yourself?” (Quoted from Frederico Fellini: His Life and Work by Tullio Kezich.) This reaction may make it sound like the film is filled with sexist sex scenes, but after a kiss in the opening 10 minutes, the film’s hapless protagonist does not even get a kiss for the rest of the movie. There are however many scenes to provoke concern. City of Women has been called a sequel to 8 1/2 , as was noted in a brief introduction before the 1980 film at the Music Box by one of the theater’s programmers. But if so, it is sort of a photographic negative sequel, because this time around the lead, played once again by Marcello Mastroianni, is not so much a lothario as a nebbish, really a self-deprecating depiction of Fellini himself. The portrayal of Mastroianni’s character is a contrast to the famously autobiographical character who leads 8 ½, the film director Guido Anselmi. The last third of that film depicts Guido’s fantasy of keeping all his favorite women in a harem, at one point literally subjugating them with a whip – and the impacts of this on his relationship with those women. This time, in City of Women, it’s the women who carry the whips, as they turn out to rule the whole town in which Snaporaz (Mastroianni) has managed to strand himself.\nNot that the portrayal of women in City of Women is flattering. Mastroianni toldreporters that the film was an attempt by Fellini and himself to understand what modern women are all about. That description makes the film much more offensive than it would be had that not been the purpose, as it shows that the pair really have no idea about women. Dave Kehr of the Chicago Reader said the film’s “hallucinatory survey of the women’s movement” is not “reactionary enough to offend or progressive enough to matter.” Roger Ebert didn’t like the film either but said Fellini was incapable of making a boring movie. That City of Women is not. It remains entertaining even as it pushes the edges of an endurable running time, at a typical-for-Fellini two hours and 18 minutes.\nThe uproar over Fellini’s depiction of the male-female divide really goes back at least to his first big hit, La Strada, about a woman (played by by Fellini’s wife Giulietta Masina) who is purchased by a circus performer who subsequently marries her, bullies her, and even rapes her. The sexual politics of La Strada probably played into a battle over the direction of post-Fascist, post-war Italy that sparked a fist fight when it debuted at the Venice Film Festival in 1954. The fisticuffs were caused by the shift from the then-dominant Italian film style of Neorealism to the new styles of La Strada and Luchino Visconti’s historical melodrama Senso, which were both seen as betraying Neorealism’s political and social priorities but in very different ways. The fight was between supporters of the two films. Masina’s character’s lack of resistance to her mistreatment probably sparked anger from corners of the audience who felt it mirrored a retreat from political engagement in Italy. Meanwhile, when researchers from the University of Oxford collected memories of filmgoing in 1950s Italy from audience members of the time, the reactions from women were often the longest and most engaged, according to an article on TheConversation.com. “They recognized [the lead female character] Gelsomina’s fragility in the face of [the male lead] Zampano’s womanizing and commands, echoing all too closely Masina’s subjugation of the whims of her own bulky husband, Fellini – he was notoriously harsh with her on set,” the article reads. “Perhaps the film also reflected their own experiences of a society in which men still very much had the brutal upper hand.” And yet audiences often react quite differently to La Strada than Fellini\u0026rsquo;s other films because of the powerfully sympathetic central performance by Masina, who echoes Charlie Chaplin and whom Charlie Chaplin called one of his favorite actresses of all time. Masina reportedly told reporters she had received many letters from women who said their absent husbands returned home after seeing La Strada, because the portrayal was so authentically compassion-inspiring. (Pope Francis called it “the movie that perhaps I loved the most” in an interview with The Jesuit Review in 2013.)\nSimilarly sympathetic viewings are often reported online of other Masina performances, most notably Nights of Cabiria (1957), though that film once again shows her in dire straits and mistreated by men. After 8 ½, Fellini seemingly attempted to make amends for the wrongs to the wife character in that film (“his idea of a liberated woman is fairly clear from the wife-character in 8 ½,” Ebert wrote in his review of City of Women. “She is severe, wears horn-rim glasses, and wants to spoil all the fun.”), casting Masina in the brilliant if overlong Juliet of the Spirits, the whole of which was described as a gift from the director to the actress. But it’s a strange gift: Fellini wrote a story about her devastation at his cheating on her, made hay of her having hired a detective to track his infidelities, made her uncomfortable by sharing her memories, disagreed with her on the meaning of the ending, and to some critics’ minds depicted her as no fun all over again. (See for example Ebert’s review of that one, too: \u0026ldquo;Certainly Fellini does not present her as someone it would be fun to be married to. She’s a house-proud little bourgeois Hummel figurine, meek, frumpy, sexually timid.\u0026rdquo;) Still, Masina’s wide-eyed facial nuance is impossible not to sympathize with, and it transforms the movies she’s in, despite thunderingly un-feminist situations, to that extent into sensitive works to feminine concerns.\nMasina is not in Amarcord, and in some ways the absence shows. The film depicts Fellini’s memories of growing up in Fascist Italy in the 1930s with so sweepingly evocative a style that Woody Allen cribbed its rhythms and notes with flabbergasting exactitude. Its depiction of women, often in closeups on their rear ends, is the clearest example of that pre-pubescent vantage point on the female sex he said he never lost. The film persuades us that this is what growing up in Rimini, Italy was like, and to the extent that it\u0026rsquo;s an accurate portrait of a time and place its depiction of such sexism serves a purpose.\nWhat Amarcord does for childhood in Rimini, La Dolce Vita does for adulthood in Rome: a vivid, stylized depiction, though the style is very different. Once again led by Mastroianni, this time as a pop culture journalist named Marcello, the film depicts his chase after Rome’s sweet life with multiple women while neglecting his own sick wife. Much of the commentary on sexism in this film centers on its treatment of liberated women, but the film is unforgiving in its description of the ends of a male-centric life of philandering.\nThe centerpiece of the Music Box’s “Five by Fellini” program is 8 ½, however. Ultimately, of course, that movie s ranking as the 31st best film of all time is not much of a fall from grace. But the change from #7 reflects the growing power of those creatures he always found so mysterious. To an ever-growing degree he must share the power of his voice with the voices of the women who react to his.\n"},{"title":"The Mind-Blowing Muny Shows Musicals Are Not Just for Geeks and Elites","url":"https://stagesscreens.com/posts/2025-06-23-the-mind-blowing-muny-shows-musicals/","date":"June 23, 2025","tags":["Theater"],"text":"The Mind-Blowing Muny Shows Musicals Are Not Just for Geeks and Elites Anyone who has the impression that Broadway musicals are just for theater kids, gays or Manhattan elites with hundreds to spend on a single ticket should travel to the center of the country to check out the The Muny in St. Louis. It just won the Regional Theater Tony Award this month, and I attended for the first time on its opening night on Monday June 16, a day declared “Muny Day” by St. Louis’ mayor to celebrate its new national status and the opening of the new season. What I found was that this 107-year-old, 11,000-seat outdoor theater, the oldest and largest in the country, which gives away 1,500 of its tickets every single summer night – even Broadway is dark on Mondays, but not The Muny! \u0026ndash; to fans devoted enough to spend the day picnicking in Forest Park to get in, is unlike anything else in the country and is a place where, you might say, everyone is a theater kid.\nWhile most musicals make millions of dollars per week on Broadway, and are viewed as big commercial enterprises (especially to fans of straight plays, which make much less even on Broadway), a certain perception of marginalization persists. Hollywood, for example, has been trying to disguise the fact that it’s making a rash of musical movies by promoting them in ads that completely fail to mention they’re musicals. This strategy was used with Mean Girls, Dear Evan Hansen, The Color Purple, Willy Wonka and even Wicked, among others. Why hide the fact thatthe characters sing in these movies if mainstream audiences aren’t turned off by theater kid fare? But The Muny was packed with families last Monday night, and though it was pretty white there it was diverse in age, with audience members from childhood to at least 94 (that would be my father, who attended with me).\nThe season at The St. Louis Municipal Opera Theatre (as it is still officially known, though it no longer performs any operas) is beginning with a rarely produced sort of Broadway “deep cut” called Bring It On, which picked up a Tony nomination for Best Musical in 2011 and was written by three previous winners of the Best Musical Tony: composers Lin Manuel-Miranda, who had won for writing In The Heights and would go on to sweep for Hamilton, and Tom Kitt, who had won for the music in Next to Normal, and book writer Jeff Whitty, who had won for Avenue Q. The musical is not Broadway’s finest, stuffed with high school cliches, but it was entertaining and played with amazing clarity to almost everyone in the 11,000 seat house, including those in the far rear free seats. In fact, though I was in the middle, I could tell this because the loudest cheers and laughter always came from the back, often at moments you’d have to be following the show closely to be laughing. The show, based on the Bring it On film series, is about a high school cheerleader who has risen in her senior year to become captain of the cheer squad until she is suddenly “redistricted” into another, more diverse school on the other side of town without a cheerleading team. Using a mix of Miranda’s hip-hop and Kitt’s showtunes, the musical charts her attempt to start a team at the new high school. Its chief virtue, amid so much that is not original, is its message: one does not have to win to succeed.\nThe Muny is located in Forest Park, a giant Central Park-like area with 1,326 acres of green space that features art and history museums, tennis courts, a golf range, lots of picnic area, and more. Finding the right parking lot for the first time in this vast park was somewhat of a challenge. Google Maps took us to the front of the theater where the roads are blocked off for VIP parking, but we found a spot in a visitor lot a 16-minute walk from the front gates and discovered on a beautiful 80-degree Monday the joy of this mind-blowing theatrical resource, nestled on a hill as a gorgeous sunset enveloped the stage, surrounded by food and beverage stands like those at a baseball stadium. There are of course concert venues as large and larger, but they don’t fill a summer schedule almost exclusively with musicals (there is one concert scheduled this summer). The theater was first envisioned over 100 years ago by the then-mayor, who stood between two trees and declared he would build a theater there, according to a speech before the show began that celebrated the new season and the Tony win.\nAttending The Muny keeps up my streak of visiting all – but one \u0026ndash; of the Tony-winning Regional Theaters, as described in a blog post last month that ranked the almost 50 theaters nationwide.\n"},{"title":"Opera Theatre of St. Louis Deserves More National Attention in Its 50th Year","url":"https://stagesscreens.com/posts/2025-06-21-opera-theatre-of-st-louis-delivers-four/","date":"June 21, 2025","tags":["Opera"],"text":"Opera Theatre of St. Louis Deserves More National Attention in Its 50th Year The Opera Theatre of St. Louis, an underrated gem that gets \u0026ndash; but deserves more \u0026ndash; national attention, celebrated its 50th anniversary this month with four solid operas that outshine the offerings of larger opera companies in many ways. The Opera Theatre received advance features from The New York Times and the Associated Press for its world premiere this summer of This House, a Harlem-set tale of ghosts and gentrification from composer Ricky Ian Gordon and librettists Lynn Nottage, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, and her daughter Ruby Aiyo Gerber. But the reviews this summer were mostly local, and I always end up wondering whether St. Louisans realize quite how special an asset this annual festival of four operas really is.\nIt was my second trip to the city to see the offerings there, having been drawn in 2023 by a new production of Treemonisha by Scott Joplin and two other operas. Most of the operas this year beat that year’s selections, which impressed at the time. The fact that the Opera Theatre’s selections are always in English takes some getting used to, and at first on that trip it wasn’t clear Mozart\u0026rsquo;s Cosi Fan Tutte benefitted from the change. But both Donizetti’s Don Pasquale and Johann Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus did this time out, from adapted librettos that were often funnier than the originals. I am not in the camp of John McWhorter, who recently wrote an op-ed in The New York Times advocating that the Metropolitan Opera should translate all its operas to English (he shouts out St. Louis as one of two houses that already do that), but it adds to the originality of the company. The thrust stage at the Loretto-Hilton Center for the Performing Arts, where OTSL mounts its operas, is one of the most intimate in American opera. In his book A New Philosophy of Opera, opera\u0026rsquo;s new \u0026ldquo;it\u0026rdquo; auteur Yuval Sharon complains that opera has long been too tied up by mammoth proscenium opera houses, with a \u0026ldquo;fourth wall\u0026rdquo; structure. This house, with seating on three sides of the stage in a room that houses only a few hundred, would seem to be close to Sharon\u0026rsquo;s ideal. Fifty of those seats are given away every night under an amazing free ticket program called \u0026ldquo;Phyllis\u0026rsquo; Tickets,\u0026rdquo; which helped me see all four of this year\u0026rsquo;s operas.\nThis House\nA line in the intriguing and engaging if ultimately somewhat disappointing This House libretto describes the fingers of a character as “lingering on a a piano key,\u0026quot; \u0026ldquo;roaming for a melody that remains elusive.” That is what much of Ricky Ian Gordon’s score sounds like: roaming for a melody that remains elusive. While it is stoked with influences that are great fun to hear float in and out, including jazz, ragtime and American popular song, most of the reviews agree the sort of melodies that blend would seem to invite rarely coalesce out of the mix. It’s the second collaboration by Nottage and Gordon, who wrote a well-reviewed opera version of Nottage’s acclaimed play Intimate Apparel at the Lincoln Center. That opera used only two pianos, and I would love to see it remounted somewhere. Any new play by Lynn Nottage is a national event – she is the only woman to win two Pulitzers in the century of the award’s existence – and this opera is exciting to watch. However, the libretto does somewhat betray its origins in a play Gerber wrote in college, lacking the focus of Nottage\u0026rsquo;s other work and relying on a genuinely stunning twist that doesn’t quite stand up to closer examination even as it moves the audience. This House tells the story of a haunted Harlem brownstone, occupied by several generations of the Walker family, as the house comes up against the threat of gentrification. As such it joins a recently burgeoning literature about neighborhood change that most notably includes Bruce Norris’ Pulitzer- and Tony-winning Clybourne Park. Like that play, This House manages an eerie collision of past and present with a ghost story. In this opera that collision culminates in a moment that drew gasps (and maybe a shocked guffaw) from the audience Friday night June 12. As evocative as the poetry is, the best writing of the evening on the subject of gentrification might be in the program’s notes by Nottage and Gerber:\n“Outside, the surrounding neighborhood is being devoured by gentrification and Black displacement, Black homes and histories erased - lost to gut renovations, the sterile chill of central A.C., and the disappearance of traditions that once defined Harlem\u0026rsquo;s heartbeat. Yet, this house refuses to surrender. As such, the house has become a form of resistance; a repository of family history and memories. The occupants, the Walker family, are tethered to the brownstone, but at times they are not sure whether they are prisoners or protectors.”\nThe last curtain call was reserved for Adrienne Danrich, whose role as the mother of the protagonist is not necessarily the largest but produced my favorite performance of the evening. Also outstanding is Justin Austin as her son Lindon, so memorable in his dual role in Treemonisha two years ago. The lead, Zoe, was sung with dramatic urgency by Briana Hunter.\nOn the left side of house, we worried at the opening of the play that we wouldn’t be able to see much of the house, as the opening view was of a white side wall that filled the stage. But Allen Moyer’s evocative set, with the house on a turntable, did end up giving us a great view of the brownstone’s interior as well as its exterior.\nThough This House is not the best opera of the four here, it is exactly the kind of thing that Opera Theatre of St. Louis should be doing and has been changing the world of opera by doing. The world premieres of both of Terrence Blanchard’s hit operas, which became the first by a Black composer to be staged at the Metropolitan Opera, were originally commissioned by and staged at OTSL. They were followed by a continuing commitment to stage original African-American works, appropriate in an almost half-Black city like St. Louis. Meanwhile I found the story of This House only growing on me and lingering as a few days elapsed after the event.\nDon Pasquale\nThe Opera Theatre of St. Louis celebrated its 50th anniversary by mounting the same opera it started with in 1976, Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, as directed by the same director who mounted it in 1976 at age 25. Since then Christopher Alden has gone on to direct at many of the major opera houses of the world, according to an introduction before the show. I’ve seen one production of his before, a forward-thinking Flying Dutchman at the Lyric Opera of Chicago that was panned by conservative audiences online but that I rather liked. The cast of this summer’s Don Pasquale also includes the leading lady from the original OTSL production, Sheri Greenawald, this time cast in a number of non-speaking and non-singing roles that add something the opera lacked: a woman onstage who is Don Pasquale’s age.\nAge, after all, is the subject of the opera. Self-described “septuagenarian” Pasquale has arranged a marriage for his nephew Ernesto, and when he discovers that (this being an opera from the 19th Century) Ernesto does not wish an arranged marriage, Pasquale decides to find a wife himself. That is expected to be a punchline – old man wishes to be married. It’s an interesting opera to revisit after the “Me Too” movement, which was largely about older men abusing their money and power to attempt to seduce younger women. That is exactly what Don Pasquale attempts, and for it he is made the butt of jokes by the younger characters. In the end, even he joins in pronouncing what is explicitly called the moral of the story: older men should not marry. Or, as this English translation puts it, older men should “act their age.” Pasquale does, and the presence of Greenawald on stage allows him to amend the original opera’s meaning from the ageist message that old men should never marry to the perhaps more modern idea that older men should marry women their own age. Don Pasquale closes out the opera playing cards with Greenawald’s character.\nAlden’s new Don Pasquale is much funnier than the last Metropolitan Opera production of this opera, directed by the late Otto Schenck and most recently performed nine years ago, largely because this one is loaded with directorial choices. Some of the many ideas work and some don’t, but scarcely a moment goes by in which Alden has not thought through a way to highlight the humor in the scenario. Schenck’s production, by contrast, though it had excellent singers, left most of the show without specific directorial choices for comic bits or interpretation. One had the sense the actors were flailing to invent comic moments themselves.\nAlden sets all of the action before a backdrop covered with what I believe are Italian Renaissance frescoes, dappled in places with Rococo cherubs. On stage in front of them at the opera’s open are a dozen actors wearing rubber old face masks. The contrast is striking because the bodies in the frescoes are largely well-shaped, young and nubile, though not so consistently so that one feels confidence in leaping to a conclusion about their raison d’etre. In the program notes Alden offers only one hint: He says his production “replaces period-specific picture postcard realism with a more open-ended fluidity, in an attempt to conjure up a psychic space in which the eternal conflict between young and old can be seen from different shifting perspectives.” When I asked an AI app to identify one of the scenes in the fresco, it told me it was Luca Signorelli’s “The Massacre of the Innocents,” which depicts the Biblical King Herod’s effort to murder all male children in Bethlehem out of fear of the town\u0026rsquo;s new baby king. If that isn’t an example of the “eternal conflict between the young and the old,” I don’t know what is. Upon inspecting Signorelli’s painting, however, it wasn’t clear that AI had correctly identified the painting. Still, perhaps the set contains similar stories of the battle between the young and the old. It’s not entirely clear – one is reminded of Sharon’s edict that operas should aspire to the condition of poetry, with not all choices perfectly understandable to the audience.\nThe program contains a few photos of the traditional 1976 production by Alden. He writes in the program notes “Perhaps some of you are saying to yourselves ‘Hmmmm … I kind of prefer how the ’76 production looked,’ but the heady controversy circling around tradition versus innovation has played a key role in keeping the mad art form called opera provocative, challenging and lively during these past 50 years.” These last three adjectives (provocative, challenging, lively) describe well the two productions I’ve seen by Alden.\nThis production stars, as Pasquale, Patrick Carfizzi, whom Met artistic director Peter Gelb called “the heart and soul of the Metropolitan Opera” in a New York Times feature headline last year. In 25 years at the Met, Carfizzi has sung almost entirely character roles, including Dr. Bartolo in The Marriage of Figaro, the Sacristan in performance after performance of Tosca, and Fra Melitone in Verdi’s La Forza Del Destino, which occasioned the article. Here Carfizzi gets a much-deserved opportunity at a meaty lead role that offers plenty of opportunity for his comic skill. He seizes on the chance with great zeal and is quite funny and satisfying to watch. The only problem is that 51-year-old Carfizzi, surrounded by these masked elderly faces, looks too young for the role. The punchline mentioned above, when Pasquale announces he’ll get married instead of Ernesto, doesn’t really land because it depends on our thinking him decrepit. It emphasizes the extent to which we feel the opera is sexist. I felt some nervousness in the laughter of the many septuagenarians in the audience when he announces he\u0026rsquo;s a member of that club. In fact, many of the laughs at his expense seemed to me to occasion some unease from the older-skewing crowd.\nSusanne Burgess, who plays the female romantic lead Norina, has several roles at the Met under her belt as well. Her strident vocal acrobatics provide many of the fireworks, particularly in the second act. The highlight is a duet with Ernesto, sung with lovely sensitivity by Charles Sy. As Dr. Malatesta, Kyle Miller tries perhaps a bit too hard at the comedy, which usually flows best by committing to the drama of the role. Trying even harder are some of the non-singing bit roles, which are overly broad even for this silly Opera Buffa, which is considered both the end of the prominence of that genre and one of its high points. This production, so much funnier than the Schenck Met production, does that high point justice.\nDie Fledermaus\nDirector Shawna Lucey’s brilliant and colorful Die Fledermaus knocks the socks off both Metropolitan Opera productions I’ve seen of this Johann Strauss II operetta. The opening scene, during the overture, features some of the sharpest, most originally choreographed comedy I’ve seen recently from stage or film (the operetta is choreographed by Sean Curran, who will work on the long-awaited debut of composer Kevin Puts’ Silent Night at the Met in the future). Set in a New York City subway in 1959 (a year Lucey chose because it was the year the first Playboy club opened), the opening scene begins with a pair of early-morning revelers returning from a costume party, in a Batman costume and a Green Lantern costume. It’s that hour of the day when exhausted late night revelers begin to collide with morning commuters in the Manhattan subway, and that’s the source of much of the comedy, as a crowd of suited subway riders spar for space on the subway bench with the sleeping Batman. In the original libretto, the character of Dr. Falke is abandoned in a bat costume by his friend Eisenstein after a costume party. In the original libretto this all happens off-stage. Here we get to see this major plot point enacted, and brilliantly so. This inciting event, it will turn out, sets the action in motion, as much of what happens after is a revenge plot on the part of Falke. The Batman costume is a perfect 1959 equivalent for the bat costume in Karl Haffner and Richard Genee’s 1874 libretto, and it sets the tone for what is to follow, including the exceptional late 1950s Greenwich Village sets and costume design by Robert Innes Hopkins. While it is true that the operetta here fails in the end to overcome the somewhat overlong and under-substantive comedy from Strauss, it stays funnier than any production I’ve seen before. Showing great comic timing and physical comedy skill one doesn’t always get from “singingactors” (as opera singers are sometimes cumbersomely called) are Jonathan McCullough as Falke, Edward Nelson as Eisenstein, Sara Gartland as Rosalinde and Deanna Breiwick as Adele. George Mannahan conducts the score with appropriate frenzy. Lucey, who has directed multiple operas at LA Opera and San Francisco Opera, delivers an original and memorable production that may prove hard for other Fledermauses to best.\nA Midsummer Night’s Dream\nWhile Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream may have become popular for its light comedy and silly gags, Benjamin Britten’s score emphasizes above all its melancholic strangeness. The Opera Theatre of St. Louis’ production explored this shadowy palette visually, to match Britten’s creeping and sliding glissandos. The production was the most polished of any of OTSL’s four this summer, a creepy delight from the first appearance of the fairies (a chorus of boy sopranos in Britten’s original score but here played by both boys and girls in green 18th century tailed suits with white wigs that light up with white Christmas lights) to the final play-within-a-play that banks the opera’s most concentrated period of laughs. Before the tyranny of the three-act screenplay format took over dramatic writing, Shakespeare sometimes ended his plays with an unusual sort of half-hour comic denouement that relieved the tension with explosive laughs after the catharsis. (Think: King Henry woos Katharine after the war is over in the end of Henry V.) Here the theater troupe in the show, the Rude Mechanicals, begin their staging of Pyramus and Thisbe after the wooded stage floor lifts up to reveal a giant moon underneath, just one of many beautiful staging effects. The most visually striking moment of all happens when Oberon literally pulls winter out of his pocket, as the midsummer forest becomes ensconced in snow in part because the fairy king keeps pulling it out of his jacket and tossing it onto the ground. Director Tim Albery’s images are well-suited to the score, gorgeously conducted by Leonard Slatkin.\n"},{"title":"Ranking the Nearly 50 Tony-Winning Regional Theaters","url":"https://stagesscreens.com/posts/2025-05-29-ranking-nearly-50-tony-winning-regional/","date":"May 29, 2025","tags":["Theater"],"text":"Ranking the Nearly 50 Tony-Winning Regional Theaters I have been to all but one of the regional theaters that have won the Tony award since it began awarding regional theaters annually in the 1970s. I have attempted a basically impossible task here, which is to rank all of them. It’s impossible because, first of all, all of them have won the award and are all (I can attest in all but one case) wonderful theaters. Secondly, no one can see all the shows produced by almost 50 theaters sprawled out across this giant country, so a ranking inevitably favors whatever random production one happens to see. Nonetheless, I have cobbled together a basis for ranking, a mix of personal preference (it’s just my opinion and someone else will and should have 50 very different rankings), a rating of the quality and originality of the programming over the years (with admittedly some theaters more closely followed then others over decades) and the theater buildings or settings, with special favor often granted to theaters with a unique mission unduplicated around the country. It is inevitable that I’ve been to some of these theaters many times, and others only once. This year’s winner, The Muny in St. Louis, is not on this list because I will be attending it this summer for the first time. Full disclosure: I am from Chicago, so I’m more familiar in some instances with the five Chicago theaters over a long term. Still, it is in a good faith effort to rank objectively that I pick as the number one regional theater…\n1. Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Chicago, IL A lot of companies on this list have had plays transfer to Broadway, but Steppenwolf’s transfers tend to be the sort of plays that move simply because of their quality, and not because of their commercial potential. Nonetheless, they prove to be commercially successful because they are so sharp, so original, so bold. When Entertainment Weekly named Tracy Lett’s Pulitzer- and Tony-winning August: Osage County the best play of the first decade of the 2000s, it was merely confirming the obvious. This month, Steppenwolf saw one of its productions win another Pulitzer, in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ Purpose. It also launched Clybourne Park by Bruce Norris, which won both the Pulitzer (2011) and the Tony (2012). Also notable are revivals like the Tony-winning production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee starring Letts and Amy Morton.\n2. Signature Theatre Company, New York, NY Until the Signature Theatre Company won its regional theater award, New York companies were not considered for the award. But the Signature made it necessary to consider New York theaters. One of the best in the country both at commissioning new work, providing time and space to creators to develop new shows, Signature’s plays have won Pulitzer nominations, such as for Jacobs-Jenkins’ Everybody. The 42nd Street theater is highly attractive, with a lobby that is one of the most comfortable and spacious nationwide, and it’s a cozy place to get coffee and buy a theater script even when one is not seeing a show there. In addition to its own plays, the Signature also serves as host to The New Group, an off-Broadway company that does sharp and original plays by and starring the likes of Wallace Shawn and Ethan Hawke.\n3. American Repertory Theatre, Cambridge, MA After 40 years down the street from Harvard Square at the comfortable Loeb Drama Center, the ART is moving to a new theater in the Allston neighborhood, to which the Harvard campus is expanding its reach. Harvard’s theater company has been a hub for both innovation, such as the interactive hit Sleep No More, and commercial hits, like the Broadway-bound, Tony-nominated musicals Waitress, Jagged Little Pill and Finding Neverland. Sometimes one wonders whether the world’s best and brightest should be producing such commercial fare, but the level of quality is always very high no matter the genre under the amazing leadership of theater legend Diane Paulus.\n4. Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Berkeley, CA My first experience at the Berkley Rep was the Broadway tryout of Ian McKellan and Patrick Stewart in repertory in Pinter’s No Man’s Land and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, which is an event anywhere. After that I went on to see Tony Kushner’s little-performed four-hour The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism with a Key to the Scriptures, in its third engagement nationally, on Pride weekend in the Bay Area. I also saw Angels in America with Randy Harrison, the Broadway tryout of the Amelie musical, and several other great shows that kept me coming back. And that’s just what I saw. The Berkeley Rep consistently brings in nationally notable shows almost every year.\n5. Goodman Theatre Company, Chicago, IL This may be the theater I’ve attended most on the list. The Goodman has sent many plays to Broadway including the recent Good Night Oscar starring Tony winner Sean Hayes in a tour de force that included a dynamic live performance of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” every night. The Goodman’s revival of The Who’s Tommy was also nominated for a Tony. The theater is also known, though, for more adventurous fare like Mary Zimmerman’s Matchbox Magic Flute. Still remembered, as well, are older plays like the Brian Dennehy Death of a Salesman, which won four Tonys including best revival, and Grapes of Wrath, which also won Tonys.The Goodman building, located in Chicago’s Loop, has not one but two beautiful theater spaces, both of which were memorably used soon after they opened for a simultaneous staging of two plays at once, Alan Ayckburn’s House and Garden, which saw the actors rushing from one room to the next to make their cues in the two shows.\n6. Williamstown Theatre Festival, Williamstown, MA Nestled in the middle of nowhere, near the lively Berkshires theater scene, is Williamstown College, where the annually interesting Williamstown Theatre Festival is based. Since its inception the summer festival has drawn major actors, including in the early days Frank Langella and Blythe Danner, and over the years Nathan Lane, Paul Giamatti, Sigourney Weaver, Matthew Broderick, Gwenneth Paltrow, Bradley Cooper, Marissa Tomei, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Renee Fleming, and many others. The festival consistently transfers shows to Broadway and there are always multiple interesting selections to book in the same summer.\n7. Yale Repertory Theatre, New Haven, CT Of the 90 world premiers at the Yale Repertory Theatre over the decades, an impressive four have taken home Pulitzer Prizes, and 10 productions have won Tony Awards. I saw several shows over the years and always enjoyed the easy train ride up from Grand Central Station on 42nd Street in Manhattan. Founded in 1966 by Robert Brustein, dean of Yale School of Drama at the time, Yale features lots of new work and often major actors like Paul Giamatti as Hamlet just before I started attending shows there. The theater gave birth to Christopher Durang’s career, as well as many other notable playwrights.\n8. Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center, Waterford, CT “The O’Neill” does not stage full productions of plays, but it is one of the most influential regional theaters in the country. It has won two Tonys, including a special award in 1979 and the Regional Theater Tony in 2010. It has also received a National Medal of Arts from President Obama. What it produces are staged readings and workshops of new plays and musicals, a form of play development the O’Neill is said to have pioneered itself. Dozens of successful plays and musicals have started at its country campus, located near the house where Eugene O’Neill himself grew up and in which he set the play Long Day’s Journey into Night, which is now a museum with docent tours. The year I went to the O’Neill our weekend kicked off with a lecture from theater critic Chris Jones about O’Neill, and Hailey Feiffer’s I’m Gonna Pray For You So Hard got its start. The O’Neill also birthed at least half of August Wilson’s Century Cycle including Fences, The Piano Lesson and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, as well as Jeremy O. Harris’ Slave Play, the musicals Avenue Q and In the Heights, and many other shows.\n9. Paper Mill Playhouse, Milburn, NJ If you’re a fan of the Broadway musical, Paper Mill Playhouse is one of the most important regional theaters in the country for your tastes. The “State Theater of New Jersey” has launched many musicals that have migrated over the Hudson River to Broadway, as well as other world premieres like Harold \u0026amp; Maude which are notable without the Broadway imprimatur. Shows they’ve launched include Newsies, A Bronx Tale, and one of the Great Gatsby musicals that filled the scene recently. Paper Mill also produces plays, featuring family-friendly fare like Lend Me A Tenor, among many others.\n10. La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, New York, NY Only the second New York theater to win the award, La Mama ETC on 4th Street in Manhattan features, as the name implies, experimental new plays including debuts by Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson and Harvey Fierstein, Philip Glass and Julie Taymor. Classified as an off-off-Broadway theater, it used to do tours internationally. I saw two shows there, including one about John F. Kennedy’s support for the arts, which is the sort of thing you can see nowhere else. The other show was a solo appearance by legendary performance artist Karen Finley. The theater, which was founded by a former fashion designer named Ellen Stewart, underwent a major renovation just after the COVID pandemic.\n11. Crossroads Theatre, New Brunswick, NJ A seminal African-American theater, Crossroads was founded on the principle that Black people didn’t need to be cast in white people’s plays so much as they needed their own theaters. Based for decades in downtown New Brunswick near Rutgers University, Crossroads is opening a new home soon that will also be home to performance groups from Rutgers.\n12. Court Theatre, Chicago, IL I’m biased, having seen more plays here than almost any other theater on the list, but I find the University of Chicago’s resident Court Theatre to be underrated, and as I traveled the country seeing the top regional theaters before Court won the award in 2022, I kept wondering why it hadn’t won it yet. The theater doesn’t transfer any shows to Broadway, but it turns out sharp original takes on the classics and new work with local casts year after year. I prefer its intimate takes on musicals like Porgy and Bess and Caroline or Change to productions in mammoth Broadway houses and look forward each year to its new lineups. The Court recently underwent a leadership change, with artistic director Charlie Newell stepping down after decades, but Newell continues to direct. I just saw his adaptation of the graphic novel Berlin, a timely and original theatrical take on the fall of the Weimar Republic to Hitler between 1928 and 1933.\n13. La Jolla Playhouse, San Diego, CA The La Jolla Playhouse, located steps from the beach north of San Diego, has been responsible for 36 Broadway transfers, according to Wikipedia. The very comfortable mainstage space lends itself to high quality technical productions, and several Broadway musicals have had their start here, including Matthew Broderick’s How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Summer: The Donna Summer Musical (which is among several productions I’ve seen at La Jolla), and 2025’s Redwood with Idina Menzel. La Jolla also workshopped the first production of Doug Wright’s Pulitzer Prize-winning I Am My Own Wife. Located on the campus of the University of California at San Diego, this is a beautiful place to see good theater.\n14. Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, Chicago, IL I’ve been going to Chicago Shakespeare Theatre since it was located on the Gold Coast, but it now has a beautiful home on Navy Pier with an intimate thrust stage modeled on Stratford-Upon-Avon’s Swan Theatre. This past year CST began transferring in productions from the Royal Shakespeare Company, which produced an excellent Pericles last year, but the local productions are of high quality too. There is also a second space, called The Yard, which houses many musicals and plays that have headed to Broadway afterwards (or ran on Broadway before), including The Notebook and the Sufjan Stevens musical Illinoise.\n15. Shakespeare Theatre Company, Washington DC Ranked in a virtual tie with the Chicago Shakespeare Company, Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre Company has also imported productions from the Royal Shakespeare Company, including a brilliant Timon of Athens starring Kathryn Hunter that also played the Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn, and which I’ve seen on its handsome DVD. That production is by the STC’s artistic director, Simon Godwin, who has also directed some great productions at the Royal National Theatre (such as Hansard starring Alex Jennings and Lindsay Ducan), at which he served as associate director. He also served as associate director of the Royal Court Theatre and associate director at Bristol Old Vic. In addition to Shakespeare productions it features plays by David Ives (who I saw produced there), Tennessee Williams, Noel Coward and many other familiar playwrights. The season is as lively in the summer as in the fall, which is not always true in regional theater. I rank it under Chicago Shakespeare Theatre only because its proscenium theater is not quite as impressive as the two rooms at Chicago Shakes.\n16. Guthrie Theatre, Minneapolis, MN One of the great regional repertory theaters the country over, the Guthrie originated Tony Kushner’s four-hour The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism with a Key to the Scriptures, for which Kushner was speed-writing pages as the play was being performed. The theater boasts a handsome building designed by French architect Jean Nouvel. The theater was founded by a group of actors who had become disenchanted with Broadway, and decided to open a repertory company doing classic plays. They now alternate classics with new works. The season last year featured their 50th A Christmas Carol, a production of the Tony-winning Lehman Trilogy, Patrick Page’s All the Devils are Here: Shakespeare’s Villians, and other plays.\n17. Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles, CA The Mark Taper Forum has been hard to place because it has fallen on hard times. The theater is among the most gorgeous I saw in America, on the brilliantly designed campus of the Centre Theatre Group, nestled between the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion (which once hosted the Oscars and is now home to the LA Opera) and the Ahmanson Theatre (which imports Broadway hits among other large-scale fare), and next to the gorgeous Walt Disney Concert Hall by superstar architect Frank Gehry. After the pandemic, the Taper spent multiple seasons dark, and has yet to announce its 2025-26 season online.\n18. Alliance Theatre, Atlanta, GA Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre has sent several plays and musicals to Broadway, including the Tony-winning The Color Purple, Elton John’s Tony-winning Aida and Alfred Uhry’s The Last Night of Ballyhoo. I saw the world premiere of the Bull Durham musical there in 2014. The artistic directors of this theater have included Kenny Leon and Susan Booth, the latter of whom went on to replace Tony-winning director Robert Falls at the Goodman Theatre.\n19. Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Ashland, OR The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which does much more than just Shakespeare, has put up 10 plays each of the last two years in its gorgeous natural surroundings far flung from any other theaters. In the early years, the festival produced only Shakespeare, and it has performed all of the Shakespeare plays multiple times over. More recently, the offerings are significantly more diverse, featuring important playwrights like August Wilson and new plays by relative unknowns. The average playgoer has seen between three and four plays at the festival in a summer for years, and the festival is a financial boon to the area.\n20. South Coast Repertory, Costa Mesa, CA The South Coast Repertory boasts a new play development program called The Lab@SCR that has birthed notable plays from Richard Greenberg’s Three Days of Rain and The Violet Hour to David Henry Hwang’s Golden Child and Amy Freed’s *The Beard of Avon.*The theater mounts about eight plays a year in multiple stages, not including a new plays festival.\n21. American Conservatory Theatre, San Francisco, CA 22. Wilma Theatre, Philadelphia, PA 23. Pasadena Playhouse, Pasadena, CA 24. Huntington Theatre Company, Boston, MA 25. Dallas Theatre Center, Dallas, TX 26. Arena Stage, Washington, DC 27. Denver Center Theatre Company, Denver, CO 28. Alley Theatre, Houston, TX 29. Seattle Repertory Theatre, Seattle, WA 30. Old Globe Theatre, San Diego, CA 31. Long Wharf Theatre, New Haven, CT 32. Actors Theatre of Louisville, Louisville, KY 33. Children’s Theatre Company, Minneapolis, MN 34. Signature Theatre, Arlington VA 35. Cleveland Play House, Cleveland, OH 36. Hartford Stage, Hartford, CT 37. McCarter Theatre, Princeton, NJ 38. Intiman Playhouse, Seattle, WA 39. TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, CA 40. Godspeed Opera House, East Haddom, CT 41. Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, Cincinnati, OH 42. Trinity Repertory Company, Providence, RI 43. Victory Gardens Theatre, Chicago, IL 44. Lookingglass Theatre Company, Chicago, IL 45. San Francisco Mime Troupe, San Francisco, CA The rankings reflect that the Victory Gardens and Lookingglass Theatre of Chicago have spent significant amounts of time closed since the pandemic, and have not rebounded to a full schedule. The San Francisco Mime Troupe does not deserve last place, but it is hard to rank against the other theaters, as it does not aspire to the same kind of quality that most of them do. It’s a cool place doing explicitly political theater in a park in San Francisco, and I thoroughly enjoyed the show I saw there, though it was hard to hear the actors.\nUnfortunately, I never made it to the Utah Shakespeare Festival, Cedar City, UT, which does mostly Shakespeare among other classics like The Importance of Being Earnest and Steel Magnolias. I also failed to make it to the first regional theater to receive a Tony, though that was decades before it became an annual award and was really a different award, in the 1940s. That theater is the Virginia Barter Theatre in Abington, VA. While I’ve never been there I have read a play that had its world premiere there, The Second Mrs. Wilson by Ruth Wolff. It’s one of two plays called The Second Mrs. Wilson staged at theaters on this list that I have read, oddly enough, the other one having been mounted at the Long Wharf Theatre, and written by Joe DiPietro.\nFinally, Theatre de la Jeune Lune, Minneapolis, MN, was closed before I began my nationwide tour of the theaters.\n"},{"title":"An Aside on \u003cem\u003eCosi\u003c/em\u003e: The WSJ Quite Agrees With Me","url":"https://stagesscreens.com/posts/2025-05-20-an-aside-on-cosi-wsj-quite-agrees-with/","date":"May 20, 2025","tags":["Opera"],"text":"An Aside on *Cosi*: The WSJ Quite Agrees With Me I just found a review of the production from the Wall Street Journal that ran just after I wrote my review. It totally agrees with me, and with a poster who read my review on another web site and wrote to say she “loved” it. The Journal’s critic says the concept \u0026ldquo;is clever and apt-at first,\u0026rdquo; but that in act two Sharon \u0026ldquo;doesn\u0026rsquo;t come up with a satisfying resolution within the opera\u0026rsquo;s rich, if tricky, original framework. Instead, he jettisons a sizable chunk of the score and tacks on an abrupt new ending. It may be the logical conclusion of Mr. Sharon\u0026rsquo;s ideas about the intersection of technology and human mutability, but it isn\u0026rsquo;t \u0026lsquo;Cosi.’\nWorse, it feels like a total letdown.\u0026rdquo; There is a paywall but here is the link: https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/theater/cosi-fan-tutte-and-the-threepenny-opera-review-directors-disrupt-the-classics-aa5b302e\n"},{"title":"Sharon’s Concept \u003cem\u003eCosi\u003c/em\u003e Brilliant and Then Disastrous","url":"https://stagesscreens.com/posts/2025-05-19-sharons-cosi-brilliant-in-act-one-all/","date":"May 19, 2025","tags":["Opera"],"text":"Sharon’s Concept *Cosi* Brilliant and Then Disastrous When the Detroit Free Press excoriated Yuval Sharon’s new AI-themed Cosi Fan Tutte at Detroit Opera, in which the women are robots designed by the men, it had it half-right. I was sold on the audacious concept in the first act, but the show went both south and overboard in the second.\nWhat sold me on it were these lines in the opening scene of Lorenzo Da Ponte\u0026rsquo;s original libretto, which melded so well with the girls-are-robots concept that I forgave it all its excesses until midway into the second act:\nDon Alfonso:\n\u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;d only like to know\nWhat kind of creatures\nAre these beauties of yours, if they\u0026rsquo;re flesh and blood and bone like us,\nIf they eat like us, and wear skirts,\nIf, in fact, they\u0026rsquo;re goddesses or women\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo;\nIn Sharon\u0026rsquo;s opera these lines are spoken just after we\u0026rsquo;ve been told that Don Alfonso is the CEO of a robot company, and that the women are being designed by the men. When I read these lines to people who saw they opera, but who had missed them as the action was underway, they couldn\u0026rsquo;t believe they\u0026rsquo;d come from the original libretto and not been added by Yuval Sharon.\nThis set up a fascinating self-aware criticism of the original libretto, in which we are invited to differ from its precepts about what women are like.\nPerhaps where Sharon went wrong was in arguing that his concept was consistent with Da Ponte\u0026rsquo;s intent; in the second act he kept feeling the need to have his character of the Al CEO explain how each twist and turn was consistent with his premise. (\u0026ldquo;But doesn\u0026rsquo;t that mean the experiment failed?\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;Not at all,\u0026rdquo; etc.) That was unnecessary, and lengthened the opera an uncomfortable 45 minutes over the length promised in the program. By the end Sharon seemed uninterested in the opera itself and too engaged in the contemporary play he wrote to frame it.\nBy the end Sharon admitted the wedding was completely inconsistent with his concept and had the CEO announce peevishly that he was just having a wedding performed because people like weddings.\nIf he\u0026rsquo;d left it as he began it, with the audience invited to respond to the opera itself rather than have it explained to them, his concept might have been successful.\nHowever it was a thrill to see the audience dig it so enthusiastically. I had traveled a few hundred miles to see this company, having become frustrated with the extent to which directors in other markets have become badgered for the slightest conceptual innovation. Sharon has built an opera scene that is the antedote to that mindset, and that challenges us to think about these multi-century-old librettos in ways that don\u0026rsquo;t merely repeat the sins of the past but allow us to use the operas to think critically about the present and the future. He has a youthful following that was with him all the way to the end of his audacious production that is like no place else in the country.\nTony Kushner once said playwriting should be like a good lasagna - so packed and layered and juicy and over the top that it almost falls down. This opera did fall down in the second act, but it was a thrill to watch the chef try to apply Kushner\u0026rsquo;s lasagna aesthetic to opera.\n"},{"title":"Stages \u0026amp; Screens: An Introduction","url":"https://stagesscreens.com/posts/2025-05-18-stages-screens-introduction/","date":"May 18, 2025","tags":["Theater"],"text":"Stages \u0026 Screens: An Introduction Allow me to share a little bit about my engagement with culture that might help you find an interest in this blog:\nLike a lot of writers about stages and screens, I\u0026rsquo;m something of a completist. I\u0026rsquo;ve visited all but one of the nearly 50 Tony-winning Regional Theaters around the country, seen all of Shakespeare\u0026rsquo;s plays in production on stage or screen, seen the full Century Cycle by August Wilson (and his one-man autobiographical show twice), seen and/or read almost all of the Pulitzer Prize winners in drama, seen nearly the full repertoire of operas as defined by the largest opera company in the world, the Metropolitan Opera, as well as many operas that aren\u0026rsquo;t in what might be called the canon, visited almost all of the major opera houses in the United States, visited almost all of the theaters in New York City, seen much of the 2010s supply of theater on and off-Broadway, seen all of the American Film Institute\u0026rsquo;s Top 100 American films, seen almost all of the Academy Awards\u0026rsquo; choices for Best Picture since 1927, and seen much of the Sight \u0026amp; Sound Top 250 in its various iterations over recent decades.\nHere I expect to explore the cultural detritus from all that reading, play-going, opera-going and film-going, look at some books about the arts, review some new and old operas, plays and films, assemble a little perspective over the decades that have passed in the arts and, in some respects, the decades to come. I hope you\u0026rsquo;ll enjoy visiting the observations that have emerged from those labors.\n"}]