Aug. 2, 2013 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

Brecht’s Mother Courage and her Children now playing at Tina Packer’s Shakespeare and Co. theatre under the insightful direction of Tony Simotes, is one of the greatest plays of the 20th century. The play is set in central Europe in the 17th century during the Thirty Years’ War, which was fought largely between Catholics and Protestants.

The play demands a large cast and style of production that is deliberately alienating as it weaves together its story in a series of scenes, songs, and projected text summaries and it is never stagy. These are real people. The plot concerns Mother Courage’s unsuccessful attempt to feed and care for her children, two sons and a daughter, during the dozen years that the play covers. She has set herself up with a wagon pulled onto the stage and from it she makes her living selling food and goods to soldiers.

The wagon becomes a symbol always onstage reflecting her restless life and questionable prosperity. By the play’s end, it is a dilapidated cart and she is like an animal pulling it. Olympia Dukakis is marvelous in this, her 5th time grappling with the convoluted character. Although she is on stage most of the time, she never draws attention to herself if stress belongs to another character.

The play opens as she and the children drag onstage the cart in which she and they live. Her co-stars, Apolo Dukakis as the Chaplain and John Douglas Thompson as the Cook, each bring their own relationship and attraction to Mother Courage’s conniving. Each role is played competently.

All members of the cast are well drawn, and the audience cannot help being drawn by the most vulnerable. Of the 3 children, Kittrin, who hears but cannot speak, played by Brook Parks, moves through this role convincingly, giving her life (and the red shoes she finally gets), to save all the children in the village from attack.

Despite calamities, this play is not depressing. The characters and situations that Brecht has woven into his play have produced a gem. It is a joy to have been able to see it on a local stage. Director Tony Simotes and Olympia Dukakis have pooled their talents to create an evening in the theatre this reviewer hopes to have the time to see again before it closes in September.

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Aug. 2, 2013 performance reviewed by Ann St. Clair

When the lights go up on an allusively radical, nearly-bare stage (designed by Patrick Brennan) at the Tina Packer Playhouse at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, we are plunged into Bertold Brecht’s concept of war as a complex, completely human endeavor. And when Anna Frieling ironically nicknamed Mother Courage for her decision to drag her canteen into what would become the 17th Century’s Thirty Years War appears before us in her homely cart, pulled by her two hapless sons, Swiss Cheese (Ryan Winkles) and Eilif (Josh Aaron McCabe), and accompanied by her mute daughter, Kattrin (the deeply expressive Brooke Parks), we aren’t distracted by cannon, we see people. War, Mother Courage sings, is many things to many people, but it demands survival or death of all it touches.

On every level, director Tony Simotes has chosen a brave path. He has staged it as written, resisting the temptation to make its lessons obviously contemporary, and by doing so he has kept it universal. He has assembled a strong ensemble cast, led by the fine Olympia Dukakis, who brings the powerful wisdom of a serious life in the theater, and the experience of having played Mother Courage before. And if her projection on opening night was sometimes uneven, her understanding of her complex character and the predicament of her beleaguered family never flags, or fails to touch the audience. Even as we laugh at her dead-eyed analyses of war and commerce, or want to cry out when she haggles over the amount of the ransom fee for her son’s life, she breaks our hearts. And even as we recognize The Cook’s overwhelming selfishness, John Douglas Thompson draws us to him with his character-driven charm. The Chaplain (Apollo Dukakis) shows himself as less a man of God than a speculator in the broad marketplace of ideas and men. After all else is stripped away, the characters agree that beliefs and those who want to believe them remain.

Arthur Oliver, usually known for the imaginative elegance of his costume design for theater, ballet and opera, has outdone himself in making every article of clothing in this play tell its own eloquent, sometimes painful story. At every turn, he confronts us with the ironic beauty of suffering and decay because heroism no less than deceit and cowardice yields loss. In her defiant strut Yvette (Paula Langton), the classically opportunistic camp follower expresses the spirit and vulnerability of us all. People in all times live, or try to live off war. It’s always all around us: thirty years, one hundred years, ten or twelve. We love war and we hate it. We hardly know how we create it; we seem unable to end it for long. Wars bring wealth to some, a meager living to others, and degradation to many. And this is the lasting appeal of Mother Courage and Her Children so affectingly brought to life at Shakespeare & Company.

Mother Courage is a character not simply torn by contradiction but by internal as well as external conflict. She is not quite lovable, but we can see her try to do the best for herself and her family in terrible situations, even as our minds plead: “pay attention to the human value, Courage, not the numbers.” We leave the theater wiser and stronger for having met her. She is us.

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June 23, 2013 matinee performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

Heroes, the translation by Tom Stoppard of Le Vent Des Peupliers by Gérald Sibleyras, was enough to lure me to a matinee at Shakespeare and Company’s Bernstein theatre on a rainy afternoon. I knew nothing about the play except that several friends whose opinions I valued had urged me to see it. Thinking back I realize none of the friends had told me why, beyond the generalities.

The cast is top-notch, three actors who all have been with the company, playing leads for the past 20 years, Jonathan Epstein, Malcolm Ingram, and Robert Lohbauer. And Kevin Coleman, who directed, has been with the company turning out gems since it began here in the Berkshires many years go. All impeccable and deserve hurrahs.

The setting of the play is the terrace of a retirement home for veterans of World War I but three men have been there until the time of the play’s present 1959. The acting occurs on the terrace….at the back are 5 great French windows and one thinks that this will be a farce with doors swinging back and forth but only one door ever opens. An added member to the cast is a huge 200 pound German Wolfhound dog.

(And backstage are formidable NUNS!)

And off in the distance are poplar trees to which the original title of the play refers – “Le Vent des Peupliers” by Gerald Sibleyras. The wind in those poplars fuels what happens in the play. HEROES may just be the most moving play you see all summer.

Shakespeare & Company tickets contact information

Get details: 2013 Shakespeare & Co. schedule.

• 70 Kemble Street
• Lenox, MA 01240
• phone: 413-637-1199
• www.shakespeare.org

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Feb. 9, 2013 performance reviewed by Ann St. Clair.

Christmas is past, but Shakespeare & Co. has given us an early Valentine, The Liar, a sparkling, hilarious adaptation by David Ives of Pierre Corneille’s only comedy. It is brilliantly directed by Kevin Coleman, whose thirty years of acting, teaching, theatre training, and directing have been honored nationally as well as by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Coleman’s experience and innate good taste allowed him to guide his excellent young actors to know exactly where to be zany and where to back off, making this originally French farce dance across the stage of the Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre with generous joy.

The plot turns on the almost congenital lying of a young man (Dorante played by David Joseph) newly arrived in Paris, carrying a large street map and determined to conquer the city by sheer force of imagination. Mistaken identity and young love play their usual ebullient parts in this intricate tale, but while there are some funny tricks involving opening and closing curtains in Patrick Brennan’s flexible, evocative set, the dialogue—a canny blend of crisply understandable iambic pentameter and deliciously surprising up-to-date rhymes gives some of the greatest pleasure. Words are king from the rhyming of lubricity with duplicity to the invention of something called “powdered health” which is described as tasting like a “minty dentifrice.” All of this is supposedly taking place in the seventeenth century.

Dorante’s tall tales rival any in the theater; their subject matter is racy, urbane, naïve and utterly unbelievable. Yet they manage to take in everyone on stage at least somewhat and for a time—from Cliton, played by Douglas Seldin who immediately rips off his “Servant for Hire” sign when Dorante promises to pay him for his services—to the beautiful, tongue-tied Lucrece (Emily Rose Ehlinger), to the lovely Clarice (Alexandra Lincoln), whom Dorante thinks is Lucrece. And then there is Dorante’s father Geronte (played by Jake Berger), who wants to marry him to the niece of an old friend, and Dorante’s long-lost school friend, Alcippe (played by Enrico Spada), who has a very twenty-first century commitment problem and has been secretly engaged to Clarice for two years. And did I mention that Dorante thinks she’s Lucrece?

Add to all of this, twin serving women (Ives’s own outrageous creation) named Isabelle and Sabine, both played by Dana Harrison) who enchant two of the young men on stage and all of the audience with their very different romantic inclinations. Mr. Joseph and Mr. Spada duel (as it turns out without once using the swords amusingly held and withheld by Marcus Kearns as Philiste) across the stage, and in typical Shakespeare & Co. fashion, into two sections of the audience. Geronte (temporarily Dorante’s “dupe de jour”) turns his tapping hobbles into high-stepping boogie when he hears that he may become a grandfather.

But when the liar is caught in his own snares, expect no pat Aesop-like morale. The happy ending is oh, so French, oh, so wonderfully funny and satisfying. This froth is augmented by Govane Lohbauer’s usual marvelous costumes, especially for the hopelessly un-chic liar. The sound cues, whether musical or effective noises enliven all. The lighting designed by Michael Pfeiffer illumines a Parisian street scene, an afternoon tea, and the Tuileries—not to make them real, but to turn them to magic. But then who wants reality at this time of year in a world in the state it’s in? The object is to delight. And delight The Liar will in Lenox through March 24th. It’s an evanescent cure for mid-winter in the northeast.

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Shakespeare & Company tickets contact information

• 70 Kemble Street
• Lenox, MA 01240
• phone: 413-637-1199
• www.shakespeare.org

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Review of Feb. 9, 2013 performance of David Ives’s adaption of Corneille’s “The Liar” at Shakespeare & Co., Lenox, MA.

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August 25, 2012 matinee performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

Terry Teachout’s Satchmo at the Waldorf at Shakespeare and Co. is a STUNNING production, one of the most exciting new plays to have premiered in a challenging Berkshire summer season.

Starring John Douglas Thompson, the play begins as solo performance. The time is March 1971 and Louis Armstrong, greatest jazz musician of the 20th century, is backstage at the Waldorf preparing for what may be his last performance. The man is aged and ill. As he sinks into a chair, he puts reaches not for his golden horn but gropes for his oxygen inhaler. Gradually, talking to himself he copes with his infirmities.

Thompson is Armstrong. And then, without warning he becomes Joe Glaser, his mob-connected manager, and tone and especially language with the F word entangled in most sentences and his over-bearing personality smashing through, rule the stage. Thompson is suddenly taller, dominating.

Then just as suddenly Glaser is gone. But one has feeling of two men on stzage. Yet on the stage is only Armstrong, limping, pill taking, trying to cope with the costume change required for the next Waldorf “set” for which he must leave at the end of this ninety minute play, which no longer seems just a play but an action in which we are involved. And to further complicate, but clearly easy to follow, a third character, Miles Davis appears on stage, briefly.

Armstrong does not play his golden horn. This is not a musical play in that sense, although it is a very musical play. One that manages to sweep us into Armstrong and the music with which he dominated his generation.

The simple set on which this magic takes place is the thrust stage, the only scenery the long back-wall mirror, the light bulbs that define it indicating character shifts. Various little groups of furniture compose the acting area. Simple but striking.

Thompson is so dynamically each character he assumes, one is at loss to find magic words to define his talent. Whatever it is, it is so mesmerizing that even if some audience members may feel shocked by language, or feel they should be, the final applause was so rapid that the audience was standing by the time the lights were back on.

This is an unusual play. About Louis Armstong. Some come because they at least remember he recorded Hello Dolly. Some come because they admire Thompson the actor. Whatever, the stage is steeped in talent. Love it or hate it. The experience is well worth it.

Shakespeare & Company tickets contact information

• 70 Kemble Street
• Lenox, MA 01240
• phone: 413-637-1199
• www.shakespeare.org

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July 28, 2012 Matinee reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

It is with joy that one can cheer Olympia Dukakis’ and Tony Simotes’ version of The Tempest now playing at Shakespeare and Company in Lenox. They have taken risks that could have been disastrous. These included not least the changing of the sex of the leading character, the time in which the events in the play occur moved to the 20th century, and the locale changed to a Mediterranean island. None of this mattered. Instead, for the play, it added only joy and deliverance. Anyone not familiar with Shakespeare’s original version could well have believed that the play was exactly as written and originally played.

As staged in its current version, the magic words are still there, the marvelously limned characters still speak them and the stage is awash with discovery and a strange joy. The setting is simple, the stage relatively bare, one tall bare tree sufficing for many glorious opportunities. Other slight bits were effortlessly risen from the floor or whirled in by the actors. Stage-filling musical numbers whirled in opposing groups with their agenda—demanding changes or plotting to recover territory lost.

In the midst of it all, the innocence of the juvenile love scene between Miranda (Merritt Janson) and Ferdinand (Ryan Winkles) was played with such naivete that one could literally feel behind it the will of Prospera (Olympia Dukakis) hoping it to evolve into the daughter she loved becoming Queen of Naples.

In costuming one delights in that of the anemic Caliban, (Rocco Sisto) his skin washed to baby-like contrast to that of any other on stage. Shakespeare gave him the (at times) the innocence of those marvelous lines, the isle full of noises of which he cried to dream again. Director Tony Simotes gave him the stage location from which to deliver them. Of such moments is a beautiful play made.

Music seemed to wash over the whole play, and the stage again and again was filled with groups of valiant women abetting Prospera or other groups plotting conquest and ruin.

Every actor could, and should be mentioned and praised and is so in this brief hurrah as is praise for those in the theatrical arts contributing to this inspired joyous production. Each could be singled out such as Ariel (Kristin Wold, light as a feather) or Gonzalo (Apollo Dukakis ever ready with sane, calm observation) or Jonathan Epstein as the uproarious Stephano, butler to the King of Naples (Thomas A. Rindge, a deserving loser.) These and more deserve mention.

As for Olympia Dukakis, she knew what she wanted the play to say and saw that the play and her lines said it with controlled intensity. Her mother love in which she told her daughter of her previous life vibrated through the play in all the scenes that followed. Musing on the play as he drove me home, my son remarked, “And to think that when it was played in Shakespeare’s day, if the character had been changed to Prospera, it would have been played by a man.” And that boggles the mind. Rejoice that in the current production we have Olivia Dukakis playing it.

Shakespeare & Company contact info.

• 70 Kemble Street
• Lenox, MA 01240
• phone: 413-637-1199
• fax: 413-637-4274
• www.shakespeare.org

Continue reading Review of The Tempest at Shakespeare and Company

July 21, 2012 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

Rarely can one say of a play that includes a cast of six that each character is perfectly cast and that zany as each role was, tore through the antics on stage with such brio that one loves him and is moved by his antics and his attempt not to accept but to cope with “reality.”

Director Kyle Fabel is responsible for the perfect casting, interweaving and maneuvering the marvelous actors who whirl through Herb Gardner’s A Thousand Clowns on the Berkshire Theatre Festival’s Fitzpatrick stage, where a prat fall is nothing, only a prone position is an expectation.

The play is an endearing poignant comedy. Every character in it is real. And human. Flawed but hanging in. Agile, hysterical, trapped in situation and personality.

The plot centers around Murray (C J Wilson), a day dreamer who walks off his job as joke writer for for a kids TV show about a Chipmunk and in so doing risks losing custody of his young precocious nephew Nick (Russell Posner), and in come more clowns, the social workers to join those already on stage.

Murray who sets it all in motion keeps the plot a-boil with his dry humor, one liners, his over powering need to keep his apartment full of lovingly collected junk and his more over-powering love for his twelve year old nephew who has a few foibles of his own. He is trapped between his hate of sham and his love for others and is one hundred percent human.

Nephew Nick attempts to bring sanity into his uncle’s zany existence. It is he who attempts to blind-side the social workers, but Nick too has his problems trying to protect his uncle and be marching in that uncle’s zany band at the same time. In this cast he must be agile and resourceful and fills the bill.

As for the social workers, Sandra (Rachel Bay Jones) being female, feline and given to tears and agile with the movements of a household pet and James Barry as Albert, buttoned tight into his clothes and his life, provide grist for the hysteria mill.

In smaller roles Murray’s bother and agent Arnold (Andrew Polk) who attempts to introduce reality into Murray’s foibles but who is himself caught in the grubbing for money with awful TV mishmash, and especially Leo (Jordon Gelber) whom we first meet through his voice being thrown into a wastepaper basket. He has the awful physical girth to be terrifying as Chipmunk and is terrified of being drummed out of Murray’s life. This is a fun and funny play.

All of these magnificent actors hurtle physically through the events that occur during the mad house that this play concerns. The props alone must have kept half a dozen apprentices on hand every minute backstage. And the stage had to whirl back and forth as zanily as the plot, to a different locale, or just to a different décor as the romance came and went. It was as whirled about as often as the charactrs were staring at the ceiling.

This is a wonderful, hilarious play, beautifully presented; so glad I went!

Continue reading A Thousand Clowns at Berkshire Theatre Festival

June 30, 2012 matinee reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest now playing at Williamstown Theatre Festival is a smashing success. Director David Hyde Pierce’s weaving the joys of Wilde’s one-liners with the accents of Damon Runyan’s mobsters in a delightful English setting (where in 1932 mob members have migrated to escape mob problems in the good old USA) works magnificently. And having the versatile and competent Tyne Daly play Lady Bracknell is icing on the cake. It is a role all the great 20th century English actresses have played to our enchantment.

Having given that glorious rave, one must admit that the first act was flat. The Wilde dialog was there but brought almost no laughs or response from the audience. The two male leads seemed underplayed and even the dominating entrance of Lady Bracknell and her daughter not enough. And then, after intermission, the curtain came up on the glories and praises that prompted the opening of this review.

The setting as in the script had changed to the country and the skies were blue and the roses blooming in the garden where Cecily (Helen Cespedes), spirited and delightful and very sure of herself, and Miss Prism (Mary Louise Burke), a zitsy family retainer, take the play immediately to its Wilde level where the pedantic clergyman Rev. Chasuble (Henery Stram) carries it along.

No sooner are he and Miss Prism gone, the stage is activated by the challenging arrival of Gwendolyn (Amy Spanger) to spar spiritedly with Cecily over who Earnest might love, only soon livened by Algernon (Louis Cancelmi) on a Bunbury trip, pretending to be John’s brother, to fall conveniently in love with Cecily. And of course suddenly levels are elevated further by the arrival of John Worthing, (Glenn Fitzgerald) dressed in deep mourning for a non-existent brother and, dynamic on his own turf, demanding Algernon leave.

Act 3 set inside the house at the country estate is even more dynamic and hectic. All the tangles of act 2 are resolved and the actors are all in splendid form. But the real glory of Act 3 is Tyne Daly. She dominates casually, it would seem, from her chair. But she has within her a heart of steel. She makes it look easy. That is her glory. It is nice to have her in the Berkshires.

Williamstown Theatre Festival contact info.

• 1000 Main St. – Rt. 2
• Williamstown, MA 01267
• Box office – 413-597-3400
• web: wtfestival.org

Continue reading Review of The Importance of Being Earnest at Williamstown Theatre Festival