… all the world’s a vanity fair …
This is a mind-expanding production of Vanity Fair. It’s also funny, extravagant and visually fascinating.
Tag: Pearl Theatre Company Page 1 of 2
Relax, Moliere doesn’t need help – not this help anyhow
Is it possible for Don Juan to be dull? Unfunny? Unsexy?
The answer is yes. Oh shucks. Jess Burkle’s tedious adaptation relies on the audience identifying with contemporary lingo and clichés, rather than on new wit.
… all the stage’s a world …
The back stage magic of And Away We Go makes me think of the wonderful song about a dogged and devoted itinerant theater group in Cole Porter’s Kiss Me Kate, “We Open In Venice” (“then on to Cremona …. and on to …. and on …”). And Away We Go, too, is on the move — with the feel of a story about an equally valiant itinerant theater troupe only here the wanderings take them not just through Northern Italy but through time, back and forth. This imaginative, mind stretching extravaganza is beautifully pulled off by the Pearl Theatre group.
Review | Henry IV Part 1 by William Shakespeare | Directed by Davis McCallum | Pearl Theatre Company
If you’ve never seen Henry IV Part 1, the Pearl’s production will bring you close to it and if you’ve seen it before you’ll love it all over again.
This last assumes you’ve loved it in the past which is probable because it’s one of Shakespeare’s best loved plays, for good reasons. Among them, it’s hilarious. Falstaff is so vivid and original a character, so complex and real, that it’s hard to believe he’s a creative invention; and, in the character of Prince Hal, the play deals with issues of fundamental fascination and importance for all of us, growth to maturity.
A Moon for the Misbegotten is a tense, character driven play that demands great acting and this excellent production provides it: Kim Martin-Cotton is as fine an actress as I’ve seen anywhere and she makes the role of the tough-on-the-outside farm girl, Josie Hogan, come alive.
The play, written in 1943, takes us back to a 1923 farmhouse. Like O’Neill’s earlier play, Beyond the Horizon, currently Irish Repertory Theater, this, too, is about trying to hold on to the farm. Josie and her father Phil Hogan, are tenant farmers, and their landlord, James Tyrone, Jr., is a local boy who made it in the big city as an actor, and whose self-weary, drunken lack of self-respect leads him to mock his own success. Josie’s in love with Tyrone, but hides it behind a cynical, sluttish affect. He claims, in an affected, stentorian way, to love her, but she doesn’t believe a word, comparing her big farm girl self to the dainty women she figures he knows in the city.
… pre-vintage Shaw …
Shaw’s early play, The Philanderer of 1893, is a romantic comedy that’s as focused on the ideas of Henrik Ibsen as it is on love, and with good reason: for Shaw ideas and love were equally suffused with eros.
Shaw saw Ibsen’s A Doll’s House five times around 1893 and this iconic drama was revelatory, bringing him to the possibility of a theater of ideas. And, with his comic bent, and awareness of the pitfalls of stern moralizing, Shaw sought a humorous way to explore Ibsen’s theme of the independent woman. This led him in The Philanderer to comic exaggerations which today to me seem dated, though when the play was first produced, they may have seemed fresh and provocative. As a gauge of that, the Pearl’s program tells us that “…due to strict censorship … it was not performed on the stage until 1902.”
Click to read about The School for Lies, from Moliere’s The Misanthrope currently playing at Classic Stage –and it’s great!
… opposites attract …
There’s a magic to Moliere’s The Misanthrope and here’s what it is. It’s a play in which just about nothing happens … and yet you leave it with a big smile and the sense that you’ve seen something delightful. What is it? The
language! It’s witty and charming: it makes you feel like you’ve been at a party with vivacious, intelligent guests.
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