"1776" - The Muny (1999)

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"1776" The Muny, Reviewed by Denise Hill [summer 1999]

from www.kdhxfm88.org/reviews.html


"1776"

The Muny
Reviewed by Denise Hill

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1776 is a musical story of the two months leading up to the
Declaration of Independence. It focuses on the efforts of John
Adams and Benjamin Franklin to convince a reluctant Continental
Congress to rebel against the British Crown. The play is
human and irreverent and the current Muny production absolutely does
it justice from Steven Gilliam's beautiful backdrop of
downtown Philadelphia to Jack Everly's lively musical direction.

Robert Westenberg and Victoria Mallory's John and Abigail Adams shone
as quite the sensible Boston couple who negotiate
pins for saltpeter while admitting that they miss each other. Their
duets were beautiful and well-staged and their characters
absolutely distinctive. In fact, one of the strengths of this
production is that all of the actors made their roles unique and every
one of them created a memorable character.

Gary Beach turned in a tour de force performance in the role of the
easily led Richard Henry Lee of Virginia and Jay Garner's
libidinous Benjamin Franklin was a crowd-pleaser. Mark Jacoby was the
perfect John Dickinson from Pennsylvania; my only
complaint was that there were some mic problems during "Cool, Cool,
Considerate Men" and I couldn't hear the richness of his
voice as well as I would have liked.

"Mama Look Sharp", which ended the first act in this production, was
haunting in no small part to the efforts of Cincinnati College
Conservatory of Music student Randy Harrison. Although a small role,
he has a beautiful voice and his Courier had stage presence; I look
forward to seeing his career blossom in the years to come.

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1776 is a long show, with a runtime of about 3 hours. But this Muny
production keeps the pace lively and makes the time fly.
It's an evening of great fun and it's worth braving the St. Louis heat
to enjoy. 1776 runs at the Muny in Forest Park
through August 1st. Call 314-534-1111 for tickets.

@темы: theatre, 1999

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One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. Reviews.

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timesunion.com/AspStories/storyprint.asp?StoryI...
Cuckoo touches Berkshire crowd

By MICHAEL ECK, Special to the Times Union
First published: Sunday, July 15, 2007

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review
STOCKBRIDGE, Mass. -- Randle Patrick McMurphy is crazy. Like a fox.
He gets into a little trouble, he gets sent to the work farm. Work on
the farm is too hard, so he gets himself sent to the funny farm. Easy
enough.

But it doesn't take long before McMurphy realizes that the loony bin
is not quite the free ride it seemed from the outside.

McMurphy is the hero -- some would say anti-hero -- of Ken
Kesey's "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest."

Jonathan Epstein is playing McMurphy in the Berkshire Theatre
Festival's current revival of Dale Wasserman's 1963 stage adaptation
of the novel. Hooray!

Epstein refuses to offer bad work onstage, and he alone could carry
this production; another hooray, because he doesn't have to. Director
Eric Hill has assembled an excellent cast; put them on a fantastic
set (from Karl Eigsti); and guided the proceedings with a steady hand
and sensitivity.

Friday's opening audience laughed when they were supposed to; gasped
when they were supposed to; and certainly came close to tears when
they were supposed to, too. Hill wasn't being manipulative -- simply
true.

McMurphy, of course, is the self-satisfied, brawling gambler who
lands at a Pacific Northwest asylum and immediately tries to take
over the place. He meets his match in Nurse Ratched, who runs the
ward like a dictator.

Sparks fly when they face off -- literally and figuratively -- with
McMurphy eventually being stunned by electroshock and silenced by
even more draconian measures.

Epstein, as noted, is fantastic. His graying hair is dyed red and
underneath it he is all Irish fireball. He makes the role -- played
by Kirk Douglas on stage and Jack Nicholson on screen -- his own.

Linda Hamilton plays Ratched, and while the portrayal is not as
riveting as her appearance in last season's "The Night of the
Iguana," it is still strong work.

From an acting standpoint what might be most impressive is the
performance Hill draws from Randy Harrison. It's Harrison's third
year with the festival and he has finally shone with the brightness
he's been suggesting all along. He is perfect as the virginal wreck,
Billy Bibbitt.

The rest of the inmates are well played, too, by Tommy Schrider,
Jerry Krasser, E. Gray Simons III, Robert Serrell and Stew Nantell.

Austin Durant tackles Chief Bromden, who is the narrator of both the
book and the play (but not the film). Durant brings the right mix of
dignity and pity to the character and he does not disappoint in the
important famous final moments of the play.

"Cuckoo's Nest" is timely, too. It asks important questions about who
is sane and who is not; who should be behind locked doors and who
should be free.

These are questions we should all ask ourselves, and the piece
certainly prompted far-ranging, difficult and bittersweet
conversation in my car on the way home from the Berkshires.

Well, well worth seeing. Michael Eck, a freelance writer from Albany,
is a frequent contributor to the Times Union.

Theater review"ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST" Performance reviewed:
8 p.m. FridayWhere: Berkshire Theatre Festival, Main Street,
Stockbridge, Mass.Running time: 2 hours, 50 minutes; one
intermissionContinues: 8 p.m. Monday through Saturday; Matinees, 2
p.m. Thursday and Saturday. Through July 28Tickets: $37-$64Info:
[phone]Web site: http:// www.berkshiretheatre.org

********

www.variety.com/review/VE1117934191?refCatId=12...
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
(Berkshire Theater Festival, Stockbridge, Mass.; 415 seats, $64 top)
By Frank Rizzo

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Tommy Schrider, Ron Bagden, Jonathan Epstein and Randy Harrison star in Berkshire Theater's presentation of 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.'
A Berkshire Theater Festival presentation of a play in two acts by Dale Wasserman, adapted from the novel by Ken Kesey. Directed by Eric Hill.
Randle P. McMurphy … Jonathan Epstein Nurse Ratched … Linda Hamilton Billy Bibbit … Randy Harrison Dr. Spivey … Ron Bagden Chief Bromden … Austin Durant Scanlon … Jerry Krasser Dale Harding … Tommy Schrider Martini … Robert Serrell Chetswick … E. Gray Simons III Aide Williams, Turkle … Anthony Stockard Candy Starr … Crystal Bock Aide Warren … Sheldon Best Ruckley … Stew Nantell
Dale Wasserman's adaptation of Ken Kesey's counter-culture novel still packs a punch, despite the obviousness of the authority-challenging theme and the indelible memory of the heavily Oscared 1975 Milos Forman film. In helmer Eric Hill's thoughtful staging for the Berkshire Theater Festival, the inmates take over the aslyum -- and the production -- but in dramatically grounded ways. The solid ensemble and well-measured melodrama of the narrative make for a satisfying production, even if this "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" doesn't quite make it into the audience's hearts.
It takes a while to adjust to Jonathan Epstein's Randle P. McMurphy, the charming lug of a con man who thinks a stay in a psych ward is better than prison. Working against Epstein is an unnatural red dye job and the fact that the actor is well past the rebel character's charismatic prime. But his truthful perf ultimately wins out via actor's craft and will. Like his character, Epstein succeeds by his bravura relentlessness, humor and nerve. By play's end you realize McMurphy is an antihero for the ages, not just of an age.
Not so successful is Linda Hamilton's Nurse Ratched. Hamliton, who scored last summer as the lusty Maxine in "Night of the Iguana," seems unable to find the right pitch as the unnaturally serene control freak.
Instead her sing-songy speech evokes a vacant presence that could qualify her for admittance to the institution -- not a woman whose unnerving calm belies absolute power. She rallies for her final scenes which require her to break from her artificial veneer, but the shift comes too late.
Randy Harrison gives a rich and poignant perf as the stammering, cowering Billy Bibbit. Harrison builds a well modulated arc as Bibbit gradually finds the nerve, inspired by McMurphy, to stand up for himself, only to unravel under Ratched's chilling threats.
Austin Durant gives his stoic Chief Bromden a psychological complexity, and Tommy Schrider's effeminate Dale Harding is also a standout.
Production values are first-class in the summer staging. Designer Karl Eigsti's psych ward is a detailed model of institutional depression, lit with the right amount of practicality and despair by Matthew E. Adelson.
There's little one can do with the sсript's dated indulgences, especially the Chief's rambling flights of woeful poetry, the flashes of colored lights and slo-mo effects. But the cast finds the humanity and credibility to make the lurid, sometimes over-the-top writing plausible and the work's payoff still powerful.
Sets, Karl Eigsti; costumes, Jessica Risser-Milne; lighting, Matthew E. Adelson; sound, J Hagenbuckle; production stage manager, Alan Filderman. Opened, reviewed July 13, 2007. Runs through July 28. Running time: 2 HOURS, 35 MIN.
With: Rebecca Leigh Webber
Contact the Variety newsroom at [email protected]
Date in print: Tue., Jul. 17, 2007

*********

www.edgeboston.com

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
by J. Peter Bergman
EDGE Boston Contributor
Sunday Jul 15, 2007

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Go inside the mind of an Indian chief who has been diminished by the
world he knows into a hulking shell of a man, a shell that
communicates internally but not externally. See the world of denial
through his eyes and experience the lust of a man for size, and
nothing more, the restoration of his stature in the world. That is
what Dale Wasserman, the playwright who brought us this adaptation of
Ken Kesey's novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, would like us to
know, from the inside out. He wants us to feel what this man feels.
He finally allows us to know the reasons why Chief Bromden has taken
refuge inside himself, behind his mind, behind his abilities. One
more thing this playwright and novelist team have accomplished: they
bring the chief a gift, a man named McMurphy, a gift in human form
who opens the doorway to his capabilities, his capacities to achieve
stature. It's an incredible gift.

In its initial run on Broadway the gift was played by Kirk Douglas, a
man whose notorious grin has been seen on the face of maniacs; it was
a smile that gave away his own character's madness. In the movie,
Jack Nicholson in the same role brought that overly familiar grimace
that nowadays screams "Here's Johnny" to anyone familiar with his
other edge of madness role in that Stephen King film.

On the mainstage at the Berkshire Theatre Festival we have Jonathan
Epstein who embraces the role of McMurphy with a full-face smile that
is sometimes one of genuine amusement, sometimes a cover for other
emotions. In fact, that smile may be as memorable as the other two in
my memory because of its variation, its ability to astound, confuse
or ingratiate. Epstein's smile, his grin, his grimace is the key to
his interpretation of this role and it is one of the finest
performances of his local career.

He is joined by an exceptional cast in this large cast show. Linda
Hamilton, with a smile of her own that seems to convey anything but
amusement, is Nurse Ratched. Her control, both of her emotions and
her intent, is alarming as she warmly encourages participation from
the inmates in her ward of the asylum while already prepared to bring
them down with her concept of discipline. Hamilton is startlingly
strong as she encourages McMurphy to fail by insisting that he
succeed. She is almost, but never quite, a charmer.

Austin Durant as Chief Bromden almost walks away with the show. This
actor has become one of my favorites in just two seasons. I am
pleading with the management of the BTF to promise me (and the
public) that they will always find him a role each and every season.
As the man who wants to restore himself, but has no tools to use, he
is both compelling and engaging. His power is not in his size but in
his honesty. Even the craziest internal monologues he has a genuine
spirit that carries his performance to a higher plane of reality.
Once he becomes a participant in the plot of the play he rips our
hearts to shreds as he engages with his cohorts and finds himself
again.

That emotional resolution is denied to Billy Bibbit, played with
warmth and with physical frustrations by Randy Harrison in what I
think is his finest work on this stage. He has a moment in the second
act where his Billy is almost whole again and when he loses it,
crumples it up and throws it away at the feet of Nurse Ratched, it is
one of the most touching and heart-rending moments in this highly
emotional play.

Crystal Bock is a wonderful Candy Starr, the prostitute who "mock-
marries" Billy. Robert Serrell is a wonderful Martini, making us see
what he sees. E. Gray Simons, III turns Cheswick's anger and angst
into mini-monuments that crumble into dust the instant they are
erected. Tommy Schrider gives Dale Harding all of the peculiarities
he can, both physical and vocal and leaves an indelible impression.
The entire ensemble delivers nicely. It's a joy to watch them play
out their mental and physical disabilities.

But at the center of it all is McMurphy. Epstein's performance, as
already noted, is his very best work in a long time. Under Eric
Hill's classic direction, McMurphy takes second place to Chief
Bromden, a balance that has been hard to achieve in previous
productions. Hill and Epstein allow him to be the fulcrum in this
eerie balance board of a work. Often taking center stage for his
bigger moments, he melds into the picture when necessary. Hill brings
Bromden to the forefront slowly over time, even though we are seeing
the whole McMurphy experience through the chief's eyes. When he and
McMurphy finally connect it is moving and when they play their final
scene together, mute and emotional, it is devastating.

This is tough theater. This is hard, biting satirical drama. There
are laughs, but they are often uncomfortable laughs. There are tears,
but they linger behind the eyes. There is sense in all the nonsense
and silliness in the tragedies that shouldn't be. There are also
clichés, but what are those if not realities we're accustomed to in
our own lives. Reality is on the stage in Stockbridge and it's alive
with possibility.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest plays through July 28 at the
Berkshire Theater Festival in Stockbridge, MA. Ticket prices range
from $37 - $64. For complete schedule and availability call the box
office at 413-298-5576 or visit www.berkshiretheatre.org.

J. Peter Bergman is a journalist and playwright,living in Berkshire
County, MA. A founding board member of the Berkshire Stonewall
Community Coalition and former New York Correspondent for London's
Gay News, he spent a decade as theater music specialist for the
Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives at Lincoln Center in NYC, is the co-
author of the recently re-issued The Films of Jeanette MacDonald and
Nelson Eddy and a Charles Dickens Award winner (2002) for his
collection of short fiction, "Counterpoints." His features and
reviews can also be read in The Berkshire Eagle and other regional
publications. His current season reviews can be found on his website:
www.berkshirebrightfocus.com. He is a member of NGLJA.


*********

www.masslive.com/entertainment/republican/index...

Fans of the 1975 movie "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" might feel
so attached to it that they would hesitate before seeing the play,
which actually preceded the movie by a dozen years.

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But the finely nuanced production at the Berkshire Theatre Festival
would lay those doubts to rest. While maintaining the anchoring role
of the rebellious hero Randall P. McMurphy immortalized by Jack
Nicholson, it shifts the focus to The Chief, who is the narrator in
Ken Kesey's 1962 novel.

The movie swept the Academy Awards, but Kesey sued the producers
because it took the viewpoint away from the character of the
schizophrenic American Indian, Chief Bromden.

Dale Wasserman, who wrote the play in 1963, is more faithful to the
original. The play provides an opportunity to see, hear and feel
Chief Bromden's vision of society as an engine that, as director Eric
Hill explains in his program notes, "robs everyone of their free
will, replaces their human interiors with rusted parts, and controls
them through retrofitted electronic devices planted in their brains."

It's a paranoid vision, but only slightly more extreme than the state
of things in the ward, which, as the doctor says to McMurphy, "is
society in miniature."

With scenic design by Karl Eigsti, lighting by Matthew E. Adelson and
sound design by J Hagenbuckle, the stark transitions between The
Chief's narration and the ward bring many senses into play. Sometimes
The Chief takes us to a shadowy world where we hear scary sounds like
cranking and grinding, and at other times he brings us to a place of
bright colors that come up behind the grated windows along with music
evoking nature and tribal ritual.

And when he returns to his inner world and the action refocuses on
the ward, the light turns harsh and white, befitting a place where
Nurse Ratched and her staff make every attempt to bleach out any
signs of personality.

The patients' individuality cannot be snuffed out, and the drama
comes when they go along willingly as McMurphy organizes a rebellion.

Under the direction of Hill (the last artistic director of StageWest,
Springfield's former resident theater company), the play effectively
establishes a tension between antic behavior and poetic sensibility.

Austin Durant embues The Chief with a quiet dignity. In the role of
McMurphy, Joseph Epstein has a swagger in his step and a glint in his
eye; he's charming and erascible at once, though perhaps too jovial
for us to totally believe in the anger that fuels his outburst and
antagonism for his nemesis, Nurse Ratched, played by Linda Hamilton
with perfectly clipped diction, a patronizing manner and a frozen
smile on her face.

The other residents include Martini (Robert Serrell), who
hallucinates and flits about the stage; Cheswick (E. Gray Simons
III), with a permanently exaggerated furrow in his brow; and the
childlike, insecure, stammering, Billy Bibbit (Randy Harrison), who
constantly plays with his shirt neck in an unsuccessful effort to
hide behind it.

They are a finely delineated, vulnerable bunch, funny and sad at the
same time and, ultimately, heartbreaking.


********

myvanwy.tripod.com/companies/btf/cuckoosnest.ht...

ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, July, 2007

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One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is exactly the same enormous anti-
establishment 1960's melodrama that I remembered it to be. And I
enjoyed it thoroughly.

In an interview with a member of the BTF PR staff, playwright Dale
Wasserman noted that he had only written two highly successful
scripts � ...Cuckoo's Nest and Man of La Mancha � and that they told
exactly the same story, and he's right. Both tales deal with people
who go outside the system and the system nails them for it. Therefore
both obviously have some heavy Christian overtones, because Jesus of
Nazareth was the ultimate system-bucker, and boy, did he get nailed!
In ...Cuckoo's Nest the point is driven home rather obviously by the
almost constant presence of the lobotomized Mr. Ruckly who spends his
days spread-eagled against the back wall, convinced that his hands
have been nailed up crucifixion style.

So in case you didn't get the message, Randle P. McMurphy is a
sacrificial lamb. He gives his life so that The Chief may live.

The story is set in a very black-and-white power system � a mental
institution. The patients are not acceptable to society at large, and
the staff are. Therefore the staff are always right and the patients
are always wrong. There is no argument. The patients are officially
crazy* or they wouldn't be there. They have no real rights.

McMurphy, who is faking his mental illness to avoid jail, knows that
he isn't crazy and that he has rights, and he asserts them. It is sad
but true that in general, if you tell a group of people that they are
incompetent and have no rights, they come to believe you and behave
as if this is the truth. For the patients on this ward, McMurphy is a
reminder that they are still human beings with personal rights and
dignity. McMurphy's nemesis and the ultimate representative of The
System is Nurse Ratched. In her film incarnation, Nurse Ratched was
named the fifth greatest villain by the American Film Institute,
after Hannibal Lecter, Norman Bates, Darth Vader and the Wicked Witch
of the West. My, my! On the stage she gets right up in your face
considerably less, but her cold clinical manipulation of human souls
is no less chilling.

In Eric Hill's fine production currently on the Main Stage at the
Berkshire Theatre Festival McMurphy is played by the very talented
Jonathan Epstein, Nurse Ratched by Linda Hamilton, star of the
Terminator movies and TV's Beauty and the Beast (there she was the
Beauty, here she is the Beast), and Chief Bromden by Austin Durant.
The entire cast is uniformly excellent, but the performances of these
three actors is key to the overall success of the production.

The minute I learned that Epstein had been cast as McMurphy, my heart
sang. Of course he would be wonderful, and he is. Epstein is capable
of generating tremendous energy and machismo, two traits key to a
successful portrayal of McMurphy. My only tiny quibble is his
eyebrows, which seem to have disappeared which I find very
disconcerting. Eyebrows exist for the sole purpose of making our
facial expressions easier to interpret, something that is especially
important in the theatre where people are trying to read faces from a
distance. I think this is a product of Epstein's eyebrows, and the
hair on his head (but not, inexplicably, his beard), having been dyed
quite a light red for this character. I think that someone should
take an eyebrow pencil and darken them up a bit.

Hamilton, who has played "ball-busting" women on film, is, in real-
life, a petite almost fragile looking woman. She plays Nurse Ratched
as a tightly controlled instrument � absolutely methodical and
unswerving in her sense of duty and power. Hamilton brings Nurse
Ratched's power from her center, rather than from any exterior show
of strength. Hamilton also suffers from bi-polar disorder and is a
public advocate for the rights of the mentally ill. I would be very
interested someday to hear her personal take on Nurse Ratched and the
system she embodies.

Durant is appropriately hulking to play the Chief, but to me he was
never convincing in his catatonia, his emerging relationship with
McMurphy, or his final arrival at a place where he is ready to go
back out into the real world. I actually worried about him as he
climbed out that window because I was convinced that this Chief was
not ready and couldn't survive.

Far stronger were the supporting "Acutes" � Randall Harrison as the
timid, stuttering Billy Bibbit; Tommy Schrider as the nervous and
effeminate Dale Harding; and Robert Serrell as the hallucinating
Martini were all excellent. Harrison's rendering of Billy's final
defeat at the hands of Nurse Ratched was brilliant and profoundly
moving. It clearly set her up as the guilty party, allowing
McMurphy's attack on her and the disaster that follows to play out
smoothly.

Stew Nantell did an excellent job as the lobotomized and frequently
crucified Ruckly. He remained firmly within his character but also
softly in the background for most of the play, a running commentary
on the system and its victims.

On a lighter note Ron Bagden was amusing as the weak-willed Dr.
Spivey, and Crystal Bock was both hilarious and touching as Candy
Starr, the "loose woman" to whom Billy loses his virginity. Floozies
are people too, and Bock never let you forget that.

Ken Kesey's novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, published in 1962,
was based on Kesey's own experiences working as an orderly in a
mental institution. Even though Wasserman has revised his 1963 sсript
several times, the play is still set in 1960 and reflects the mental
health system in place in the late 1950's. I believe this may lull
some people into thinking that places like this no longer exist.
While there have been great advances in medication for mental
illnesses, and there is some more public acceptance of and tolerance
for the mentally ill, I can tell you from personal experience that
psychiatric wards are still run on much the same social and
disciplinary system as the one depicted in the play. The legal status
of patients, voluntary and committed, is about the same too.

I suppose what I am trying to say is that it would not be hard to
find places like the ward depicted in this play all across this
country today.

Other than the Christian imagery, the other major theme in this play
is electricity. The Chief perceives the world as a giant Combine,
powered by human souls. McMurphy tries, and fails, to lift the heavy
generator box in the rec room. The Chief and McMurphy both undergo
electroshock therapy. And the scenes are opened and closed with the
sharp sound of a large electrical power grid surging on and then
winding down into rest, effects for which we have lighting designer
Matthew Adelson and sound designer/composer J Hagenbuckle to thank.

Karl Eigsti has designed a wonderful set. It looks exactly like a
room in a decaying early 20th century institution � the walls covered
in peeling layers of hideous institutional green paint � while giving
the cast many levels and nooks and crannies to play in. Nurse Ratched
and her staff rule from a raised, glassed-in booth stage right.
Again, Hagenbuckle has done a fine job of creating the muffled
quality of the miked voices that emanate from that booth, announcing
medication time or group meeting or trying futilely to bring McMurphy
into line.

For all its familiarity, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest remains a
powerful tale of the power struggle between humankind's need for
conformity and its need for individual expression. This is a great
play to see with the teenagers in your life, as it gives voice also
to the generational struggle between young and old, wisdom and
ambition. This is an exceptionally fine production. I encourage you
to go.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest runs through July 28 on the Main
Stage at the Berkshire Theatre Festival (box office 413-298-5536)
between Rts. 7 & 102 in Stockbridge. The show runs two hours and
forty minutes with one intermission and is suitable for ages 13 and
up.

copyright Gail M. Burns, 2007


*********

www.curtainup.com/btf07.html#One%20Flew

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

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In the 1960's, the counterculture commentary and pop psychological
insights of Dale Wasserman play based on Ken Kesey's novel were no
doubt revolutionary. In 1975, the movie starring Jack Nicholson and
Louise Fletcher won its stars Oscars and again the semi-simplistic
face off between equally matched antagonists was seen as vindication
for the "us vs. them" attitude of the time period. The anti-hero was
all the rage and Randle McMurphy's sociopathic wise guy was the
perfect foil to Nurse Ratched's manipulative controlling villain of
the psychiatric ward�an obvious symbol of the greater world.

Though the thematic messages are still relevant, the play seems to
have not aged as well as we could have hoped. The current production
at the Berkshire Theatre Festival seems to lack the vitality that
could make such a predictable plot stun its audience with a deeper
quality of interpretation.

Dale Wasserman, who also wrote the book for Man of La Mancha,"focuses
on a small time criminal, Randle McMurphy, and his nemesis, Nurse
Ratched. They immediately vie for power over the ward and each other.
Ratched uses her authority to control the inmates, masking her
hostility and vindictiveness with pseudo-psychological treatment;
this serves to drive them into hopeless despair and deeper psychoses.
The other patients slowly rally to McMurphy's carefree but rebellious
attitude as he incites them to oppose Ratched and her demoralizing
tactics. Soon the inmates are actually enjoying McMurphy's antics and
the atmosphere on the ward undergoes a refreshing change. He realizes
that Nurse Ratched enjoys baiting the men and belittling them in the
group therapy sessions which have become a crippling game rather than
a therapeutic process. . McMurphy's combative and independent spirit
changes the tone of the sessions, the ward and the men's lives.

The play rehashes the formulaic clash where the downtrodden and
insane are really the heroes and the rulers are the blind, decadent
old order in need of change. Dr.Spivey is the beleaguered,
ineffectual bureaucrat who leaves the ward in Ratched's
administration rather than take her on and do his job.

The audience is involved with the actions of the various characters,
but the only one who expresses his subjective impressions of the
action swirling around him is the allegedly catatonic Chief Bromden.
In a series of monologues directed to his dead father, he observes,
using symbolic language, the hell of this white man's torture
chamber, where mind-numbing drugs, isolation, electric shock,
lobotomy and worse, boredom, are just a few of the barbarities
practiced on the inmates. His pithy statements hint at the truth of
this antiquated mental health system which in the 60's and 70's was
lagging behind the other advances in technology and medicine.
Bromden's statement "They're putting people in one end and out comes
what they want," enigmatically suggests the end of the play.

Jonathan Epstein's McMurphy is defiant and strong as he attempts to
thwart Ratched's absolute control of the ward. His McMurphy is a
likeable rogue who is used to outsmarting the system with a wink and
a smile. Ratched, played by Linda Hamilton, appears to be using the
same calming drugs administered to her patients. Her zombie-like
performance is almost a dial tone, which robs Epstein's McMurphy of
the ability to escalate into the brutal battle which is brewing.

The secondary roles are a mixture of supporting and distracting.
Randy Harrison's Billy Bibbit is especially touching as a young man
dominated by his mother, abetted by Nurse Ratched. Tommy Schrider
should be effete, but instead he is effeminate as Harding. Austin
Durant's Bromden is effective though sometimes a little too
ponderous. Jerry Krasser, E. Gray Simons III, Robert Serrell and Stew
Nantell perform well as the other inmates.

Eric Hill's direction, like Epstein's performance, is muted by
Hamilton's lack of malevolent subtext. Her prim and proper Sunday
school teacher demeanor does not allow the production to reach its
full potential. Rather it just sort of grounds to a halt as McMurphy
comes to his already obvious end.

Karl Eigsti's set depicts a properly dingy institutional ward room,
with run down mismatched furniture, as cast off as the inmates of the
day room. Ratched's booth from which she oversees the space should
dominate the center of the stage where she monitors her charges with
an omniscient eye. The drama of her big brother presence is limited
by the fact that the booth is set off to the side, where the entire
audience cannot observe her constantly observing the men. Even the
stage construction crimps the power that should emanate from such a
spiteful force. The lighting design of Matthew E. Adelson casts
effective shadows and utilizes various effects to accentuate
Bromden's interior monologues.

This was a breakthrough piece of literature in the context of its
time. Therefore, one should take the opportunity to experience it
for, despite its shortcomings, there is much to be appreciated in
this production.
�Reviewed by Gloria Miller.

Editor's Note: The play was last revived on Broadway with Gary
Senise, see Review
ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST
Written by Dale Wasserman, based on the novel of Ken Kesey
Directed by Eric Hill
Cast: Ron Bagden (Dr. Spivey), Sheldon Best (Aide Warren), Crystal
Bock (Candy Starr), Austin Durant (Chief Bromden), Jonathan Epstein
(Randle P. McMurphy), Linda Hamilton (Nurse Ratched), Randy Harrison
(Billy Bibbit), Jerry Krasser (Scanlon), Stew Nantell (Ruckley),
Tommy Schrider (Dale Harding), Robert Serrel (Martini)l, E. Gray
Simons III Chetswick(), Anthony Mark Stockard (Aide Williams,
Turkle), Rebecca Leigh Webber ()
Scenic Design: Karl Eigsti
Costume Design: Jessica Risser-Milne
Lighting Design: Matthew E. Adelson
Running time: 2 � hours (one intermission)
Berkshire Theatre Festival, POP Box 797, Stockbridge, MA, 413-298-
5576; www.berkshiretheatre.org
7/10/07-7/28/07; opening 7/13/07
Mon-Sat at 8 pm; Thurs and Sat at 2 pm; tickets $45-$67
Reviewed by Gloria Miller based on July 13th performance


*********

Danbury, CT NEWS TIMES
www.newstimeslive.com/news/story.php?id=1059761...

Theater NEWS
Jul 24 2007 4:15 AM
Classic battle of wits and wills in 'Cuckoo's Nest'
Strong drama about asylum inmates' battle against 'the system' and
cold-blooded Nurse Ratched
By Chesley Plemmons
THEATER CRITIC

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Theater NEWS

Jul 24 2007 4:15 AM
Classic battle of wits and wills in 'Cuckoo's Nest'
Strong drama about asylum inmates' battle against 'the system' and
cold-blooded Nurse Ratched

By Chesley Plemmons
THEATER CRITIC

Few battles of wills are as chilling and, at the same time, as
devilishly funny as the one between Randle P. McMurphy and Nurse
Ratched. They're the protagonists in Ken Kesey's 1962 novel, "One
Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."

Dale Wasserman's stage adaptation, later made into an immensely
successful film, is the current production at the Berkshire Theatre
Festival is Stockbridge, Mass. Under the intensely escalating
direction of Eric Hill, Kesey's dramatic duel between a free-spirited
rebel and a controlling member of the establishment still registers
as engaging and entertaining. Somehow, however, the emotional shocks
and visceral excitement seem weaker than remembered. Perhaps in the
40-plus years since its debut, the ordinary man has rebelled so often
against bloated, self-serving authority that the edge of that
struggle is less cutting.

At any rate, "Cuckoo's Nest" will still get you cheering for the
underdogs, here defenseless inmates in a mental institution somewhere
in the Pacific Northwest, and hissing the villains -- inept,
seemingly unfeeling hospital administrators and, in particular, the
cold-blooded Nurse Ratched.

In fairness, to the subject at least, while the inmates are anti-
heroes, some sympathy should be felt for hospital workers who must
cope with willful disobedience and true psychopaths.

McMurphy, a small-time con man, cagily feigns mental illness to avoid
prison and a work gang. It's his misfortune to be assigned to a ward
supervised by Nurse Ratched, one of the theater's chilliest
villainesses.

Jonathan Epstein, a veteran and popular actor in the Berkshires,
plays McMurphy and his appearance is so altered you may look twice to
see if it's really him. With hair and sideburns dyed red and wearing
a cutoff T-shirt, Epstein looks like a toughie from the wrong side of
town.

Ratched is played by Linda Hamilton and while she cuts a chiseled
portrait she underplays to the point of passivity. It's hard to get a
verbal slugfest going, which many in the audience will anticipate
from the Jack Nicholson/Louise Fletcher film, when one of the
combatants is nearly benign. Hamilton can be forgiven much of that
for the part is written in a coolly controlling way and while the
intimacy of film makes such impressions easier to convey, the stage
requires a vocal intensity that would be in contrast to the
character. Needless to say, Ratched still remains a despised figure
and a scary one -- using drugs and discipline to wear down the
inmates' wills. Her rules forbidding laughter are diabolical.

What makes "Cuckoo's Nest" so much fun, in addition to McMurphy's
rebellious ways -- hilariously interpreted by the usually restrained
Epstein -- are the other inmates. ***Randy Harrison, who is becoming
one of this theater's sharpest players, is Billy Bibbit, a
stuttering, suicidal young man with nagging virginity issues in
addition to an unsympathetic mother. Harrison, who was so good as
Mozart in last year's "Amadeus," reveals the flip side of genius --
fear and dangerous insecurity.***

Dale Wasserman's sсript is truer to Kesey's novel than was the film
and the character of Chief Bromden (Austin Durant), a near catatonic
Indian, is returned to the center of the story. His monologues frame
the play's subtext about freedom at any cost.

Others in the colorful cast include Tommy Schrider as the effeminate
Dale Harding; Robert Serrell as the truly unhinged Martini; Stew
Nantell as Ruckly, whose Christ complex causes him to stand against
the wall "crucified"; and Jerry Krasser as Scanion, a Santa Claus-
like bomb maker.

As Candy, the easy virtue friend of McMurphy who gets slipped into
the ward for a party to deflower Billy, Crystal Bock is both teasing
and compassionate. E Grey Simons III, Anthony Mark Stockard, Ron
Bagden, Stew Best and Rebecca Leigh Webber round out the excellent
cast.

Scenic designer Karl Eigsti is responsible for the creepy sets tinged
with bluish lights. The control booth, from where Ratched supervises
the ward floor, looks like a prison watch tower and for good reason.
J Hagenbuckle's sound design is filled with the jolting sounds of
prison doors and other noises that conjure up imprisonment.

Jessica Risser-Milne's apt costumes are not likely to cause a
fashionista to call for a reservation at the hospital.

"Cuckoo's Nest" is essential a man's drama and the strong
performances by Epstein, Harrison, Durant and the other nutty, not-so
nutty characters makes turning the tables on Nurse Ratched and
the "system," or "Combine" as the Chief likes to call it, seem an
easy business.

Despite its many pluses, this production could use more of a good
fight.

"One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" plays through Saturday at the
Berkshire Theatre Festival, Main Street, Stockbridge. Performances
are tonight through Saturday at 8 p.m. and matinees Thursday and
Saturday at 2. Tickets are $37 to $64. Students with ID receive 50
percent discount. Call the box office at [phone] or purchase
online at www.berkshiretheatre.org.


*********

www.berkshirebrightfocus.com/berkshiretheatrefe...

Berkshire Bright Focus...
On Theatre, Music, Visual Arts and more!

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Dale Wasserman, based on the novel by Ken Kesey. Directed by Eric Hill
Reviewed by J. Peter Bergman

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In Eugene, Oregon, I discovered during an early June visit, there is a memorial statue to the writer, Ken Kesey. He is seated on a bench reading to children. Presumably he is NOT reading excerpts from his scathing novel about the treatment of mental patients in an institution just invaded by a faker named Randle P. McMurphy, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." For a perspective in the play, read on.

"...working to restore you to the outside."

Go inside the mind of an Indian chief who has been diminished by the world he knows into a hulking shell of a man, a shell that communicates internally but not externally. See the world of denial through his eyes and experience the lust of a man for size, and nothing more, the restoration of his stature in the world. That is what Dale Wasserman, the playwright who brought us this adaptation of Ken Kesey’s novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, would like us to know, from the inside out. He wants us to feel what this indian chief feels. He finally allows us to know the reasons why Chief Bromden has taken refuge inside himself, behind his mind, behind his abilities. One more thing this playwright and novelist team have accomplished: they bring the chief a gift, a man named McMurphy, a gift in human form who opens the doorway to his capabilities, his capacities to achieve stature. It’s an incredible gift.

In its initial run on Broadway the gift was played by Kirk Douglas, a man whose notorious grin has been seen on the face of maniacs; it was a smile that gave away his own character’s madness. In the movie, Jack Nicholson in the same role brought that overly familiar grimace that nowadays screams "Here’s Johnny" to anyone familiar with his other edge of madness role in that Stephen King film.

On the mainstage at the Berkshire Theatre Festival we have Jonathan Epstein who embraces the role of McMurphy with a full face smile that is sometimes one of genuine amusement, sometimes a cover for other emotions. In fact, that smile may be as memorable as the other two in my memory because of its variation, its ability to astound, confuse or ingratiate. Epstein’s smile, his grin, his grimace is the key to his interpretation of this role and it is one of the finest performances of his local career.

He is joined by an exceptional cast in this large cast show. Linda Hamilton, with a smile of her own that seems to convey anything but amusement, is Nurse Ratched. Her control, both of her emotions and her intent, is alarming as she warmly encourages participation from the inmates in her ward of the asylum while already prepared to bring them down with her concept of discipline. Hamilton is startlingly strong as she encourages McMurphy to fail by insisting that he succeed. She is almost, but never quite, a charmer.

Austin Durant as Chief Bromden almost walks away with the show. This actor has become one of my favorites in just two seasons. I am pleading with the management of the BTF to promise me and the public that they will always find a role for him in each and every season. As the man who want to restore himself but has no tools to use, he is both compelling and engaging. His power is not in his size but in his honesty. Even the craziest internal monologues he has a genuine spirit that carries his performance to a higher plane of reality. Once he becomes a participant in the plot of the play he rips our hearts to shreds as he engages with his cohorts and finds himself again.

That emotional resolution is denied to Billy Bibbit, played with warmth and with physical frustrations by Randy Harrison in what I think is his finest work on this stage. He has a moment in the second act where his Billy is almost whole again and when he loses it, crumples it up and throws it away at the feet of Nurse Ratched, it is one of the most touching and heart-rending moments in this highly emotional play.

Crystal Bock is a wonderful Candy Starr, the prostitute who "mock-marries" Billy. Robert Serrell is a wonderful Martini, making us see what he sees. E. Gray Simons, III turns Cheswick’s anger and angst into mini-monuments that crumble into dust the instant they are erected. Tommy Schrider give Dale Harding all of the peculiarities he can, both physical and vocal and leaves an indelible impression. The entire ensemble delivers nicely. It’s a joy to watch them play out their mental and physical disabilities.

But at the center of it all is McMurphy. Epstein’s performance, as already noted, is his very best work in a long time. Under Eric Hill’s classic direction of this play, McMurphy takes second place to the indian chief, a balance that has been hard to achieve in previous productions. Hill and Epstein allow him to be the fulcrum in this eerie balance board of a work. Often taking center stage for his bigger moments, he melds into the picture when necessary. Hill brings Bromden to the forefront slowly over time, even though we are seeing the whole McMurphy experience through the chief’s eyes. When he and McMurphy finally connect it is moving and when they play their final scene together, mute and emotional, it is devastating.

This is tough theater. This is hard, biting satirical drama. There are laughs, but they are often uncomfortable laughs. There are tears, but they linger behind the eyes. There is sense in all the nonsense and silliness in the tragedies that shouldn’t be. There are also cliches, but what are those if not realities we’re accustomed to in our own lives. Reality is on the stage in Stockbridge and it's alive with possibility.
◊07/14/2007◊



********

www.lasplash.com/publish/cat_index_Entertainmen...

One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest - Berkshire Theater Festival Review
By Keisha7

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Jonathan Epstein, Linda Hamilton, Sheldon Best, and Anthony Mark Stockard in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is the infamous tug-of-war between the not so crazy upstart Randle P. McMurphy and Nurse Ratchet, the head Nurse of a ward for the mental ill in an institution circa 10906. McMurphy thinks he'll get out of doing five months hard labor by spending five months in the loony bin. After all, how hard could it be to act crazy, right?
McMurphy (Jonathan Epstein) finds himself locked up with the acutely mentally ill patients run by tyrannically stern Nurse Ratchet . Right away, McMurphy introduces cards with naked ladies and gambling and ideas like independent thought into the ward of misfits. He suggests exercising the democracy of this "democratic ward." But most of all, he wishes to "pull the plug" on that head nurse.

Linda Hamilton in Berkshire Theatre Festival’s Main Stage production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
In this production, Nurse Ratchet (Linda Hamilton) makes no dispersion of her motives. There is no question of whether her character feels she is doing all this for the good of the mental ill patients. This Nurse Ratchet is about control and manipulation of the weak, emasculating the patients with shame - or as she likes to put it "Cooperation and order." She sees this McMurphy as an immediate threat to her domain.

Austin Durant in Berkshire Theatre Festival’s Main Stage production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
The point of view of Dale Wasserman's stage version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is the narrative voice of the strong and silent Chief Bromden (Austin Durant). Assumed deaf and mute, Bromden communes nightly with his dead father, depicted in the production by Durant standing isolated under a harsh twisting spotlight while eerie, metallic drones give voice to what Bromden calls, "The Combine". The Combine symbolizes all things mechanically and unnatural, such as electric shock therapy in the Disturbed Ward. The unnatural, things without a soul are what destroyed Bromden's father and what he fears the most.
This mental ward is comprised of the usual suspects, as it were. Dale Harding (Tommy Schrider) is the obsessive neurotic, harboring homosexual inclinations which prevent him from satisfying his wife with the giant "knockers". Spastic Martini (Robert Serrell) is a compulsive who feels compelled to close all distances by running full speed from Point A to Point B. That is, when he's not hallucinating a conversation with one of the imaginary people in the room.

Tommy Schrider, Robert Serrell, Jonathan Epstein, E. Gray Simons III, and Randy Harrison in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Billy Bibbit (Randy Harrison) is a man-boy with a stutter and suicidal tendencies, fueled by feelings of persecution from the outside world that laughs at him and his damning, disapproving mother. Scanlon (Jerry Krasser) is the elderly bombmaker and Ruckly (Stew Nantell), the only Chronic in the ward, is a catatonic with a Christ complex. Ruckly stands "crucified" against the wall everyday, a constant reminder of what happens to patients who do not obey Nurse Ratched.

Jonathan Epstein and Crystal Bock in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
To say that McMurphy has a kind heart, may be a bit of an overstatement. However, Epstein's portrayal is that of the definitive reluctant hero. He enters into the power play with Ratchet strictly as a gambling man, as an amusement and what he thinks is easy money. But he never intended for his sense of morality to engage. Several times the McMurphy character forsakes the cause of empowering the inmates when he reexamines what he personally has to lose. But in the end, he can't help but stand up for those who can not stand up for themselves. Or as Chief Bromden so eloquently put it, "How can I be big if you're not?"
McMurphy's ultimate display of defiance is to throw a party where his hooker friend Candy (played by the lovely Crystal Bock) will relieve Billy Bibbit of his virginity.

Randy Harrison and Jonathan Epstein in Berkshire Theatre Festival’s Main Stage production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
The face off between McMurphy and Ratchet is a good one. Epstein and Hamilton seem equally matched in their metaphoric roles of good and evil, conformity versus free-spiritedness, with each character possessing their own unique devices to win the favor and minds of the patients on the ward. Even until late in the second act, you're not sure who is going to win this war of wills (unless of course you come in knowing how it ends).
All of the inmate performances were sufficiently accompanied by physical ticks from knit-picking and thread chewing to the classic random screaming of expletives. However, for me, Tommy Schrider is the stand out star of this ensemble.

Tommy Schrider in Berkshire Theatre Festival’s Main Stage production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
As the hyper-neurotic Dale Harding, he is the leader, the spokesman and "Biggest Nutjob" in the ward; that is until McMurphy comes along. And even after, Schrider's Harding is a contradiction whose body crumbles into a cower on cue one moment, then manages to credibly grows a backbone right in the nick of time. He is forgivable flamboyant and surprisingly lucid if you can just follow along on his rants until he gets to the end of his flowery expositions. I thoroughly enjoyed every aspect of Schrider's performance. Well done.
Perhaps the best compliment to performance was given during the "talk back" session with the actors following the July 16th show. An audience member said "Where is that middle-aged gentlemen from the second act. I don't see him up on stage there. He was really great."

Anthony Mark Stockard in Berkshire Theatre Festival’s Main Stage production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
As it turns out, the actor was on stage. That compliment was extended to Alabama State Grad Anthony Mark Stockard. The actor performed a dual role as young, menacing Aide Williams, and hunched over, elderly night Aide Turkle whose rich a cappella renditions of 60s pop tunes (such as Fatso Domino's Blueberry Hill) was a delightful dab of sweetness within the play. It's true, he was very good. I look forward to seeing more of Stockard's work (playing young or old).
Kudos to Karl Eigisti's scenic design where chain-link fencing feigned the illusion of stained glass against lavender colored "glass" and a day room in a mental institution where the color, and the life of the space are slowly fading away.

The set in Berkshire Theatre Festival’s Main Stage production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
J Hagenbuckle's sound design does a splendid job of tracking Chief Bromden's spiritual re-awakening. The play's soundtrack moves from the brutal cranking sound of machinery and drones, to the organic bellowing of wind and rushing of water, to the playing of the tribe flute over the course of the two acts. Very nice touch.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is the second of four Main Stage productions for the 79th season of the Berkshire Theater Festival. The show is currently running through July 28, 2007.
Berkshire Theater Festival
6 Main Street
Stockbridge, MA 01262
For Ticket information:
Order online 24 hours a day
or call Summer Box Office: 413-298-5576
[email protected]
www.berkshiretheatre.org/index.php

Photo Credit: Kevin Sprague


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www.artseditor.com/html/opinions/0707_cuckoo.sh...
07.25.07 theater

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One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest at the Berkshire Theatre Festival
Tucked away in the mountains at the Massachusetts-New York border, the Berkshire Theatre Festival is a hidden treasure of Northeast regional theater. In the midst of its 79th season, the company mixes lesser-known and experimental works with theatrical standards, such as its current production of Dale Wasserman's stage version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which runs through July 28th.

The play and the Ken Kesey novel that inspired it are, of course, no longer what the general public thinks of when they hear the title of this seminal work. That privilege is reserved for Miloš Forman's 1975 film version. The Festival's staging, however, emerges from the shadow of that cinematic staple to stand in its own right as a powerful depiction of rebellion in the face of unthinking order.

The capable and assured direction of Festival mainstay Eric Hill brings to life a mental ward of the early 1960s, where the inmates live in fear of the autocratic Nurse Ratched (Linda Hamilton). It is a credit to Hill and his ensemble that this familiar story does not become dull or predictable, even if one knows what is going to happen as felon and con artist Randle P. McMurphy (Jonathan Epstein) arrives and begins to shake up Ratched's cultivated status quo.

Hill takes advantage of scenic designer Karl Eigsti's confined playing space to highlight the nature of imprisonment and its effect on McMurphy and his fellow patients. The actors are in constant motion around the stage, ping-ponging from one end or level to another, searching for breaches that do not exist. With McMurphy as a catalyst, the entire ensemble begins to release the emotional and physical energy that this ceaseless activity has created, with results alternately thought-provoking and explosive.

The lead actors, for their part, bring to their roles a novel approach that is vital in escaping the indelible portrayals of Forman's film. Hamilton, best known to audiences for her depiction of Sarah Connor in the Terminator films, creates a Ratched that is almost kind in her cruelty, truly believing that she is doing right by her patients with her probing of their emotions and tortuous imposition of discipline. Epstein, meanwhile, plays McMurphy as a physical brute, more shrewd than smart, his manic grin and rapid-fire jokes covering for his fear that he may have gotten in over his head.

If there is another tentpole supporting this tragic circus besides Hamilton and Epstein, however, it is most certainly Austin Durant as Chief Bromden, the deaf-mute Native American who, in both the novel and play, narrates events at the asylum. Hill stages these monologues with Durant alone on stage, bathed in otherworldly light as he speaks of the mechanical social conformity he calls "the Combine" over the distant grinding of machines (kudos to J. Hagenbuckle's evocative sound design). Durant's chameleonic intensity and depiction of Bromden's gradual return to agency strike the necessary chord of tension and import. Only recently graduated from college, Durant promises to bring a magnetic presence and abundance of talent to the stage for years to come.

The rest of the ensemble make their presence felt as well. Of particular note is Tommy Schrider as Dale Harding, flamboyant president of the patients' council. Somewhat less remarkable is Randy Harrison's (Queer As Folk, Wicked) turn as Billy Bibbit, the stuttering, suicidal neurotic. Harrison brings little that is unexpected to the role of Billy, doing a serviceable job but never probing beneath the text to summon nuance or originality.

Overall, the Berkshire Theatre Festival's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a marvelous staging of the piece. A product of its time, it somehow never feels dated. Its message of social discontent and the costs and rewards of freedom are as relevant today as when Kesey put pen to paper forty-five years ago, and Hill and his company have created a powerful reminder of those truths.

— Patrick Hume

@темы: 2007, theatre

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Actor says teens should be portrayed with respect, reality (Oct. 2002)

[moveforever]

Actor says teens should be portrayed with respect, reality from www.knoxnews.com [October 11, 2002]

By Terry Morrow, News-Sentinel television writer
October 11, 2002

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PASADENA, Calif. - Actor Randy Harrison doesn't like the rap teenagers get on television.

"So often teen stuff is marketed toward a teen audience and really patronizing and condescending," says the star of "Queer As Folk" and the cable TV movie "Bang Bang You're Dead" (airing at 8 p.m. Sunday on Showtime).

"I know because I am the one who has to embody teenagers. If it is (junk), then I would know."

The baby-face Harrison looks all of 16, though he is 24. Because he has played teens his entire career, he says he can spot a poor teen project a mile away.

Many TV projects aimed at teens don't really speak to them, he says.

"I have been playing teenagers my entire career. It's important (teens) are handled with respect on television," he says.

Claire Fisher of "Six Feet Under" is a realistic teen, he says. Justin, his character on "Folk," is also a well-defined teen character.

"They are not role models," he says. "They are just three-dimensional characters."

On "Queer As Folk," he plays a lonely gay teenager having an affair with an adult. The graphic sexual content of the show isn't something he always supports.

He calls his character's affair "codependent" and "abusive."

But "I have to do it," he says.

"I signed on to do it. I was aware of it. I still would argue for the merits of it and that people see it.

"I have to remind myself of that when it gets most redundant. ... The sex lives of these characters are the center part of this show, so I have to remember that."

"Bang Bang You're Dead," his first TV movie, focuses on school violence as seen through the eyes of a student (Ben Foster), who is a victim and at risk of becoming a perpetrator.

Harrison plays Sean, the leader of a subversive clique that challenges the school's bullish elite. By being subversive, his group, nicknamed the Trogs, represents a danger to the school's well being, too.

The movie is based on the hit play of the same name. The show was so successful that it is often staged in schools to help open dialogue about violence.

"What drew me to this (movie) was the fact it handles a subject that is taboo but not in a way that glorifies it or takes advantage of the taboo subject matter to draw an audience," he says.

"I think it handles school violence in a honest and respectful way."

In his own life, Harrison had a plan to survive high school.

"I was careful to surround myself with supportive people," He was open about his sexual orientation in high school, but he realized everyone else might not feel the same way. "I got away from people who were destructive," says Harrison, who is gay.

He attended school in Atlanta.

"There's been a growing anxiety just in our national character and ... it's exacerbated by adolescence," he says.

For many teens feeling isolated, he says, "there's no outlet to have any kind of catharsis."

To make it worse, "violence is so romanticized in our culture," he says, "and there's so much greater access to weapons and so many factors play into it."

Nowadays, Harrison says he hears from fans who "feel less isolated" because of his work.

"One thing that sort of redeemed me and helped me feel less alone when I was in high school was art, was literature, was theater, was music," he says.

"I have found it is a great relief to find characters to whom some people can relate."

Copyright 2002, Knoxville News-Sentinel Co.

@темы: 2002

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"Randy Harrison Interview: Ibsen's Ghosts at Berkshire Theatre Festival" (Aug 2009)

[BloodVessel]

Randy Harrison Interview: Ibsen's Ghosts at Berkshire Theatre Festival
The Actor Talks About Renewing a Classic
Posted by Larry Murray on berkshirefinearts.com; August 5,2009.


Randy Harrison outside the rehearsal studio. Larry Murray photo.

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When Berkshire Theatre Festival Artistic Director Kate Maguire announced Ghosts for her 2009 season (August 12-29 on the Main Stage), it was clear that this was not going to be some embalmed museum version of a classic. In a year of austerity, she could have chosen to stick to a routine and traditional offering of Henrik Ibsen's 1881 play. It would find an audience because it is one of the great works that moved the theatre into realism, dealing frankly and openly with tough sexual and familial issues.

But one look at the creative team and it was clear that something special was up. This Ghosts is going to be a fresh adaptation put together by Director Anders Cato and BTF Dramaturg James Leverett. Last year they rethought Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot.

Reunited from that earlier cast are David Adkins and Randy Harrison, together with other BTF regulars Jonathan Epstein, Mia Dillon and Tara Franklin. These names might not be household words, but for BTF regulars, the cast alone makes this Ghosts special.

To explore what was going on, we headed down to Stockbridge to talk again (2008 Interview) with actor Randy Harrison (see bio below). The rehearsal studios at BTF are very simple, even primitive. They are nestled into a wooded lot that also contains the "camp" kitchen where the actors and apprentices eat their simple meals. The sun was out at last, and with it at his back, through the battered old screen door came Harrison, making a beeline for the tape recorder and me. He was all smiles, and we chatted amiably before settling into what would be a serious discussion.

The Berkshire Theatre Festival has slowly become his regular summer home. The Festival is an artistic and spiritual resource where he retreats to try new things and challenge himself. "It is all of those things to me, plus I get a lot of new opportunities here," he said happily.

Opportunities like playing the son Oswald in Ghosts for the first time. In the play his mother, Mrs. Alving (Dillon), is keeping secrets from him, worsened by horrible advice from a puritanical preacher, Manders (Adkins), and complicated by an infatuation with the maid Regina (Franklin) and her devious father, Engstrand (Epstein). Into this household returns the more worldly Oswald, who is mortally ill. The character is a contradiction, someone who is full of life but facing a death sentence. I wondered just how Harrison was playing the son, as someone with vitality, or as a gloomy Gus.

"That's one of the interesting aspects," Harrison answers, "Oswald talks so much about the joy of life, and that's reflected in his painting. But it is this same vitality that is so much a part of him that killed his father. His dad was not able to express himself like that." In the play it is clear that Mr. Alving was a frustrated man who simply had no outlet to express his own joie de vivre in that repressive society.

"His mother says that for all his life his father was stuck in this gloomy town, one completely devoid of real passion and that there was nothing but business and social status." Back then it was all a matter of simply keeping up appearances, of conforming to the rigid strictures of the Victorian era. "Yes, and so the father self-destructed." But because Oswald had his painting, "He was also able to have a great deal of vitality and life."

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We moved on to the subject to the forces assembled for the production, including director Anders Cato. Last year they had a couple of extra weeks of rehearsal time for Godot, thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. With that they had the luxury of time that let them examine every line of the Beckett play.

"We got so spoiled," admitted Harrison. "That was awesome. I just love working with Anders Cato, it's so comfortable and he's such a great guide. He makes you want to work harder, to get more deeply invested in the play. Every time he speaks about some aspect of it, it just triggers your imagination." Cato is known for being able to bring out the best in an actor. "He's very clear and articulate about what he wants. Also, he's very good about talking about things that are hard to talk about. He just knows how to guide an actor in a way that doesn't just tell you what to do, but that opens it up both within the play and inside your own imagination."

The last time we spoke, Harrison pointed to Jim Leverett, the BTF Dramaturg, as one of his biggest helpmates in working out his character's role. "He always has such a wealth of knowledge, just having him in the room - especially in the beginning - is great." The work of these literary specialists is little known and appreciated outside of the theatre world, but a good one can provide the clues and pointers that raise a production from competent to transcendent. "There's a lot of brain power there to be tapped," he adds.

For all its realism and insights, most of the translations of Ghosts suffer to one degree or another from being stiff and starched. Since Cato and Leverett collaborated on a new translation, this could smooth out the problems of the older texts. It would be wonderful if the new sсript were less Victorian and more contemporary. "It is," said Harrison, "I am finding it more natural and easy to speak." As the actors try out the new translation, there are still more changes as the words move from written to spoken. "There's been a little of that, but it's minimal."

Working on the new show with Harrison is a cast of actors who have become, if not family, certainly good friends and colleagues. They've been on other projects together, and have come to share a common language. "That's one of the really special things about working here," he enthused, "When you get to work with people you already know, they have a shorthand and a wit that you respect and trust." Powerful stuff. "You start further ahead than you would in a more ordinary process," he noted. You also have a shared language. "Usually when I start a rehearsal process in New York when I don't know anybody, or the director, I'm like really nervous at the beginning. Even though you try not to be that way, or spend too long trying to seek approval or figuring out how you need to talk to people, and how the process works, it happens."

Getting up to speed in any new job takes time, that's to be expected, of course. But if there are only a couple of weeks to learn and put together a two hour show, the edges can be very rough. "Here we all know each other, and we can start right there. There are no nerves, no beginning worries." Of course, with any new task, there is always the worry about whether things will turn out well. "There's always fear," Harrison points out, "But there's so much less that you have to contend with. Which is really nice."

The actor worked with Mia Dillon in both Equus and Amadeus at BTF and he reports that in her role in Ghosts, as his mother, "I am starting to feel that way towards her. In the play, the son doesn't actually know his mother that well. He's been away from the house most of his life, from when he was seven to age 20. We were just staging the final scene, and I am starting to feel the mother in her. It's funny how that happens."

In the play, Ibsen recounts the years they were just following society's prescribed roles, and as it unfolds, the two are finally getting to know each other. Harrison explains: "Of course they both have ideas about the mother-son relationship, but the last time he was home was two years ago. They exchanged letters and that sort of thing, but they are still negotiating what its like to be with each other and who they are.

"Towards the end of the play he is talking about how he has no love for his father and she asks if he loves her, and he answers by saying that well, he knows her. The awesome thing about Oswald is that he knows it is over for him, that he is going to die. There's no bullshit about him, you know, he cuts everything straight to the bone. So much of the play is about her dealing with the lies and hypocrisy, and the need to fix things, or cover them up, and trying to accept the reality while he is just direct and to the point."

It is always a source of amazement that hundred year old plays can tell us so much about life today. We have more freedom, but the same repressive, spirit deadening cultural and religious forces are at work in our current society. "I find Ibsen really relevant. This play, and his Dolls House, they still speak to us. We spend so much time role playing, trying to be who we think we are supposed to be, instead of actually looking at ourselves and figuring out who and what we really are."

In the final moments of the play, Oswald is sitting in his chair repeating "The sun, the sun..." Does that have a double meaning to you? "There is a double meaning in about everything Oswald says," Harrison responds. "There are a lot of ironies, even bitter ironies, in his words. Especially so in the beginning, before he reveals what his situation is, that he is dying from syphilis.

"Another example is when he tells his mother that yes, he has come home to stay, because he hasn't made any plans to go back to Paris. I'm here for a while, and the audience doesn't know yet what he knows: he has come home to die." His fate is sealed. "Oh yes, and he's there to make arrangements."

Then in a twist in the play, he falls in love with Regina, the maid. "I don't know if they did actually fall in love," Harrison speculates. "She seems aware of what Oswald really came home for, and the great love between him and his mother. Oswald also sees that Regina is young and carefree, and doubts whether she could follow through on what is required, to be his nursemaid for the next 40 or 50 years. Yet he wants to get away from dreary Norway, and he knows if he goes back to Paris, he will never return."

So it seems their great flash of love dissipates as the play goes on, I prompt. "You know, you're asking me to give away all the secrets and endings," Harrison smiles.

That was the idea. And in the process, he's managed to raise everyone's curiosity, making this wonderful old play sound new again.

About Randy Harrison

Born in Nashua, New Hampshire, Randy Harrison first set foot on stage at age seven. One of his first roles was as Peter Pan in a Pace Academy production of Peter Pan. He received his BFA in Theatre from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. He went on to appear at numerous regional theatres, including the Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati, (Violet) St. Louis Municipal Theatre (1776) and the Forestburg Playhouse as well as productions of A Midsummer's Night Dream, The Real Inspector Hound and A Cheever Evening.

His breakthrough role came, surprisingly, in the 2000 American version of Queer as Folk, where he played Justin, a complex gay character who grows up on screen over a period of five years. He also made waves in the made-for-television movie Bang, Bang, You're Dead in 2002. Following that, he made his Broadway debut as Boq in Wicked, and appeared as Young Tom in the Guthrie's Glass Menagerie . He co-founded, with Marci Adilman, the Arts Bureau (tAB) which has produced works for both stage and film. Last summer they shot their first feature film, Return Shift Escape which is now in its final editing stage.

His long association with the Berkshire Theatre Festival began in 2005 when he played Alan Strang, the lead character in Equus. In July 2006 he played Mozart in Amadeus. In 2007 he returned to play two roles, Billy Bibbit in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Frank Gardner in Mrs. Warren's Profession. Last summer, his portrayal of Lucky in Waiting for Godot (Review Here) received particularly good notices, including a rave review from Variety.

He was most recently seen in New York City in the Public Theatre production of The Singing Forest by Craig Lucas, with Olympia Dukakis and Jonathan Groff.

His stage performances have continued to attract younger audiences, even as he has continued to develop a depth of character and increasingly mature techniques as an actor. The Berkshire Theatre scene is richer for his presence.

About Tickets

Ghosts begins previews on August 12, officially opens on August 15 and closes on August 29. Berkshire Theatre Festival Main Stage performances are Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evenings at 8pm, Wednesdays at 7pm, with 2pm matinees on Thursdays and Saturdays. The box office number is 413.298.5576 and is open Monday to Saturday from 10 am to 8 pm. There are special discounts for Berkshire Residents. You can also visit their website for online ticket ordering. www.berkshiretheatre.org/

Галерея:

Randy Harrison and Jonathan Epstein were in BTF’s One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest together. All BTF photos by Kevin Sprague.


Tara Franklin appeared with Randy Harrison in Amadeus.


Randy Harrison and David Adkins worked together in last year’s Waiting for Godot at BTF.


Harrison and Epstein were also in Amadeus at BTF.

Most recently, Olympia Dukakis and Randy Harrison appeared in "The Singing Forest" in New York. Photo by Michelle V. Agins.


Harrison tries his hand at filmmaking in Return Shift Escape. Source: the Arts Bureau (tAB) Photo by Sam Gezari.


Randy Harrison dresses for the Norwegian winter
in Ghosts.

@темы: Ghosts, 2009, theatre

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From the BTF Newsletter (Aug 2009)

[BloodVessel]

From the BTF Newsletter (Aug 2009)
Randy Harrison
Osvald in Ghosts

Randy Harrison knew he wanted to be an actor from the first time he saw a play. When he was ten he began acting in community theatre and hasn't stopped since. At eighteen he went to the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music and received a BFA in theatre. After graduating, he continued his training in New York City over the next five years by taking classes and workshops. He studied with Ron Van Lieu, who now runs the Yale School of Drama, and Siti Company, where he learned Suzuki.

This is Randy's fifth season with BTF. His first show was Equus, back in 2005. "I was going crazy in New York, I was like why am I still in New York; I need to be in the beautiful Berkshires." He enjoys coming back to the Berkshires because he gets to work with familiar faces and friends. In fact, in Ghosts he knew everybody in the cast and had worked with everyone before except one. BTF creates "such an amazing and supportive environment to be an artist in."

Q & A:

~ What is your dream role to play?
I don't have a dream role. I will tell you that the roles I have played here are some of the best that I have ever played. For me it has always been about working on plays by particular writers, more than the roles themselves. I enjoy being able to work on plays by writers that I admire and love. The fact that I have worked on Shaw, Ibsen, and Beckett here is amazing. I do want to play Uncle Vanya when I am an older man, but it isn't something I will play anytime soon.

~Random fact about yourself?
I have been fired from every job besides acting that I have had. I got fired from waiting tables, being a bag boy, temping at a bunch of different companies, and being a caterer. I can't do anything else but act.

@темы: Ghosts, 2009, theatre

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"Randy Harrison Talks About Waiting for Godot" (July 2008)

[BloodVessel]

Randy Harrison Talks About Waiting for Godot
Extended Rehearsals Underway at Berkshire Theatre Festival

Posted by Larry Murray on berkshirefinearts.com; July 21, 2008.

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Samuel Beckett
Beckett's first major and successful play originally opened in a tiny space in Paris in 1953, and was as bewildering then as it is today. The Berkshire Theatre Festival performs Waiting for Godot from July 29 to August 23 in their smaller 122 seat Unicorn Theatre. There are less than 3,000 tickets available for the entire run, and it will be the hottest ticket of the Berkshire summer season.

What a strange yet familiar play Samuel Beckett wrote, so full of meaning for some, but to be honest, it also has its detractors. Those who prefer conventional plays often find it, as Vivian Mercier once summarized, "An evening of theater in which nothing happens, twice."

Perhaps that is because Beckett broke all the rules, and distilled the conventions of theater down to their minimum. The set is spare, plain, with nothing more than a bare tree beside a path. The plot is... well, there really isn't one. The action is simply two homeless tramps who while away their time waiting for the arrival of someone named Godot. There is little character or plot development. The most excitement is when Lucky and Pozzo appear to provide momentary diversions. It is as if you are sitting on a park bench, doing nothing more important than simply people watching. Endlessly fascinating, but what does it all mean? And does it have to mean anything? At least it passes the time.

Needless to say, those who have seen earlier productions of this enigma play will be back for another fix, hoping that maybe this production will provide some new insights and answers to the lingering questions. But Waiting for Godot is always the same, there are few answers, just lingering questions. Sure there is lots of humor, a little vaudeville, and some dramatic tension, even the suggestion of suicide. And a vague feeling that the solution to all the questions may finally arrive.


Randy Harrison
Having been bitten, bad, by the Beckett bug, I turned to actor Randy Harrison for help in understanding Godot. This fine actor has been performing since age seven, and found early success and fame soon after finishing college, playing the character Justin in the Showtime series Queer as Folk. The series lasted five seasons and 82 episodes and typecast him in many people's minds.

But he has been hard at work in live theater, earning his chops, by taking on roles that will let him further develop his craft. This is the fourth summer he has worked with the Berkshire Theatre Festival. His role as Lucky in Waiting for Godot is about as against type as this actor can get. We spoke with Harrison about the upcoming production which is now in rehearsal. It plays July 29 to August 23.

Note: Since this appeared, there has been a second interview, in August 2009 anticipating his appearance at the Berkshire Theatre Festival, in the classic Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen.

The Interview

LM: Glad to see you back in the Berkshires. How are the rehearsals going?

RH: I've been here for four summers now, and I love it. I feel so lucky to be able to spend time here.

We've had rehearsals underway for two and a half weeks now. I never worked on Beckett before. I love Beckett, so I was really excited to have the opportunity to work on a Beckett play.

LM: Did you bring any Beckett baggage with you?

RH: Nothing much beyond a love of it.

LM: The play can be a daunting challenge.

RH: I didn't feel scared really, I just felt really, really excited about it. There's so much academic stuff, so much to study and think about it, and I just tried to scrape it all away and start fresh.

LM: They say that Bert Lahr (who was in the original Waiting for Godot) didn't understand a line of what he was saying.

RH: I don't think you necessary need to. I just tried to be with the director (Anders Cato) and the sсript as I see it. It grows for me, and I think for all of us, every time we say it out loud. I worked with Anders last year on Mrs. Warren's Profession and it is great to have him at the helm again.

LM: So how did it come to be that you got Lucky?

RH: One day Kate Maguire just asked me on the phone. And I knew she had been thinking about doing it. She just loves Beckett and she managed to get a grant for some extra rehearsal time.

read more

LM: The NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) Grant is a precious gift of much needed development time for the production.

RH: It is just amazing, and we really need it. I am sure we could have put it up faster, like on a normal schedule, but it is so helpful to have the extra time. We're never rushing. We can talk about every moment of the sсript. The depth of the play expands over time, I think.

So much of Beckett is like living in a different world as a group. So to inhabit this bizarre and fascinating place together, and to have the time to explore it has really helped us as artists.

LM: Have you thought much about Lucky's character? How are you approaching the role?

RH: You know the first thing I did was to memorize that speech, (the famous five minute rapidly spoken monologue) just getting through that, you know, and then a lot of the physical stuff. I mean it has been growing a lot during rehearsal. I needed to get up and hold all those bags, see what it felt like to be burdened like that, to have a noose around my neck, to have David Schramm calling me "pig" and "hog". To just be there and figure it all out organically. The line readings then grow out of the situations.

LM: In some ways there is more information about the character of Lucky than any of the others in Godot.

RH: The characters talk about him a lot more, like his drooling...

LM I was thinking about his life as a slave, Pozzo complains: "He used to dance...He capered. For joy. Now that's the best he can do." There's even a line about being used up and tossed away like an old banana peel.

RH: Right, he has been exhausted.

LM: So, are you off-book yet?

RH: Pretty much. I just stuffed the last ten lines into my head last night. We'll see how they stick. Takes a while, so much of it is rhythm and repetition. And to hear myself do it a few times out loud before I feel confident.

LM: Have you looked up some of the unusual words like apathia, aphasia and athambia?

RH: Ah, yes. Apathy, uncaring, can't hear and unaffected, indifferent. We have a terrific dramaturg here, Jim (James Leverett) has given us all so much information and been really helpful.

LM: One analysis I read about Lucky is that he is a metaphor for Christ.

RH: I've heard that. It's interesting how much people think about it. Another take on it is that Lucky was intended to be about Ireland, and Pozzo was England. But my initial read on it was that it is more of a class thing. But it is all of those things. It is many layers and it is just simply what it is. You follow the sсript, and the audience will project what is a personal meaning for them, now they will see it. The problem is that while it is all of those things, you can only pick one to play.

LM: Are there any other Beckett works you would like to do?

RH: So many. I'd like to do all of them. I love Play, Endgame, Krupp's Last Tape. But I probably won't do Beckett again for a while. I am lucky to be able to play Beckett right now. You must be older, ideally, to do all of it.

LM: So this is the fourth or fifth role you have played at Berkshire Theatre Festival. Alan Strang in Equus, Mozart in Amadeus, Billy Bibbitt in One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, and Frank Gardner in Mrs. Warren's Profession are the ones I remember. Are there other roles you would like to play?

RH: Haven't thought about it in a while. I used to have this huge list but I know I would like to play Tom again in Glass Menagerie.

LM: Let's talk about that for a moment. That earlier production at the Guthrie in Minneapolis was unusual in that it had two Toms, an older narrater one, and a younger one who was the son. Since you were the young Tom, you didn't get to make the famous closing balcony speech.

RH: And I certainly hope to someday be able to make those narrative speeches. It was a really interesting project, totally different from the standard. We had to work together for each of us to play half of the same role, and make sure we were working in unison to create the picture of a single character for the audience. I think it worked for the audience, but it was frus...hard for us to really gauge, because we didn't get the full arc of what was really intended.

LM: I didn't see the production, but it is much discussed. Were you both on stage at the same time?

RH: Yes, we were often on stage together. He would describe me as I stood there. We did initially have some dialogue together, but I think that ended up being cut. But he was describing me, and himself as I stood there.

LM: One of the things that is striking about your career is that you had quite a bit of training in musical theatre, but you seem to have drifted to more dramatic roles. Certainly there are plenty of challenges in straight theatre, but how about music, is that still on your to-do list?

RH: I love music, but by the time I graduated from theatre school - Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music (CCM) - I knew I wouldn't be satisfied doing just music. I love - even adore - some of what is being done in musical theatre but I don't necessarily like everything that is being done these days. Sure I worked and made money, but I also felt unsatisfied somehow.

LM: You did a stint as Boq in Wicked on Broadway.

RH: Right. And I loved doing it. But I felt it shouldn't be forever.

LM: There are some videos of your performance in Wicked online, one taken from the mezzanine and one from the balcony.

RH: Isn't that illegal, violate copyright rules?

LM: Of course. They won't be up for long, I'm sure. Legality aside, thanks to YouTube, you can see bits and pieces of great performers and performances that otherwise would never be in public circulation....Piaf, Merman, Jolson.

Let's turn to your earlier years. What happened to the daring fellow who did a production of a Mark Ravenhill play in college? Why aren't his works produced more often?

RH: Oh you mean Shopping and Fucking? I imagine audiences and producers are afraid of it. I also wonder why Sarah Kane (a brilliant but bold British playwright who died before the age of 30 in 1999) isn't represented more, though getting rights to her work is as difficult as Beckett once was. They are doing, let me think, not Phaedra's Love but her first play (Blasted) at the Ohio in New York.

LM: Some people thought Ravenhill would emerge in ten years as the "new" Beckett.

RH: But it seems that Kane is emerging as the voice of that period. I have seen three different productions of her plays. I have been seeing a lot of French theater lately, and have been interested in more contemporary French writers who haven't been produced in the states, or translated into English.

LM: Like who?

RH: Bernard-Marie Koltès. I've seen a bunch of his work recently. And I have a bunch of friends in who have companies in New York who are doing new work as well. The Debate Society are friends of mine who do fascinating new work. The Nature Theatre of Oklahoma who had a big show at the Ohio this year called No Dice and are touring all over Europe.

LM: And the SITI Company, aren't they doing interesting things?

RH: They have a Radio Macbeth and then I think they may be doing The Seagull.

LM: They have something in the works in the American Museum Cycle about the Berkshire's own Norman Rockwell, called Under Construction.

RH: I am interested in how they are going to approach that. He was a great artist.

LM: New plays are often difficult at first. Here's a copy of the original 1956 review of Godot by Brooks Atkinson in the New York Times. He too found it puzzling though I think he suspected it was going to be an important work.

Let's get back to your role, have you found that Lucky's speech is full of musical cadences? When I read it aloud I found it had a beat.

RH: It is the music of it that makes it possible to memorize it. I don't use the device intentionally, but especially near the end, where there is less logic, that can be assigned to it, in order to keep it memorized, I find the rhythm and the tone propels me forward and I find myself continuing to speak even when I am not sure what's coming and it is the music of it, the rhythm of it.

LM: It is quite a tour de force.

RH: It's beautiful. It's just gorgeous. And it's powerful in a way that is not intellectual. You can't explain exactly why. Even when the words don't string together in a sentence that quite comes to a conclusion, there is so much power in just the way the words are assembled. It's amazing.

LM Since re-reading it I can't get the phrase "quaquaquaqua" out of my head.

RH: It apparently is based on a French word which means like facing in all directions. Not that anybody would know.

LM: One explanation I read was that it was based on a Latin word meaning therefore.

RH: Interesting. Pozzo uses qua beforehand, "qua sky" but I think it's meant differently.

Pozzo: "Will you look at the sky, pig? (Lucky looks at the sky.) Good, that's enough. (They stop looking at the sky.) What is there so extraordinary about it? Qua sky. It is pale and luminous like any sky at this hour of the day. "

There is this amazing workbook from the Berlin production that Beckett directed, I think it was in the late 70's. It has all of his notes on the show. It was an extraordinary and definitive production of Godot. Even he divides the speech up into four sections, it's really helpful.

LM: I noticed that it is the one speech in which he does not designate pauses, just one long speech with few breaks along the way.

RH: Even "Not I" has dot dot dot (ellipses) so you can know when to breathe.

LM: In some ways studying Beckett is like delving into Shakespeare's words.

RH: It is very similar in the way it expands when you speak it. You know, some things you get the logic of it, you understand the intention of the line and you say it, it and that's it, it doesn't go any deeper. With Shakespeare you find the more you speak it, the deeper and deeper it resonates within you. It's amazing.

LM: Ever feel sorry for Lucky, he never gets to put down those damned suitcases...

RH: He does when he dances. When he falls.

LM: ...and they are not full of sand.

RH: No. At least he is able to sleep. Some of the characters can't sleep. I'd love to be able to sleep everytime I hit the ground.

LM: Beckett's authorized biography was titled Damned to Fame, it is said that he despised notoriety, didn't like it very much. Do you relate to that at all?

RH: Of course, I would hate being famous.

LM: What else can be said about this production, what haven't we covered?

RH: I hope the audience finds it as amazing as I have. I haven't had to rehearse for a few days because they have been working on Act II before I enter, but we ran Act I last week and I just can't get over this play. The humanity in it just kills me. For example when the boy entered - it was the first time I saw the end of Act I - it just touched me so deeply. I find it so heartbreaking, but comforting, too. I find the humanity in it to be the most rewarding (aspect), there's no sentimentality. I don't find it...cynical. I think some people just think of it as being so bleak, but there is such humor and life and humanity in it.

LM: It faces the facts.

RH: Yeah. I feel like the fact that he honestly just faces the facts of the human existence, is what makes it so, so earned, the humor and everything.

LM: I took a couple of pictures of the set under construction, and it too looks pared down to its simplest possible form.

RH: Oh yeah?

LM: I tried to find the tree under construction, and see you have one here...

RH: A fake one. I'll have to walk over there and see how it is coming.

LM: It's a great day to do that. But you have a rehearsal soon, right?

RH: Exactly.

LM; Well, thank you for sharing your insights.

RH: You're welcome.

Галерея:

Harrison at our early morning interview. Larry Murray photo.


Equus introduced Randy Harrison to Berkshire audiences in 2005 through the character Alan Strang. All BTF photos taken by Kevin Sprague.


Randy Harrison as Mozart in the 2006 Berkshire Theatre Festival production of Amadeus.


In One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest he played Billy Bibbitt to Jonathan Epstein’s McMurphy


Billy Bibbitt was another unusual role for Randy Harrison in the 2007 BTF production of One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest.


In Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Randy Harrison and Xanthe Elbrick delivered memorable performances.


In the 2007 Berkshire Theatre Festival production of Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Harrison played Frank Gardner.


Randy Harrison as Tom Wingfield in the Guthrie production of Tennessee Williams� The Glass Menagerie. Directed by Joe Dowling. Part of the Guthrie Theater 2007 season in Minneapolis. Photo by T. Charles Erickson


Harrison draws quite a few fans to the Berkshires to see his work. Kevin Sprague photo.


A Young Samuel Beckett


Bert Lahr (r) salivates at the idea of eating the simple carrot being offered by E G Marshall in the original 1956 Broadway production


The bare bones original 1953 Paris production of Godot with Lucky in the foreground.


The set for Waiting for Godot under construction.


Set building is a team effort.


The simple Berkshire Theatre Festival rehearsal studio where Waiting For Godot is being prepared.


Randy Harrison contemplates an answer.


Randy Harrison as Lucky in Waiting for Godot at the Berkshire Theatre Festival. Kevin Sprague Photo.

@темы: 2008, Waiting for Godot, theatre

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THE GLASS MENAGERIE, reviews

[moveforever]

www.playbill.com/news/article/105161-PHOTO-CALL...

PHOTO CALL: A Minneapolis Menagerie

By Greg Kalafatas
24 Jan 2007

Tony Award winner Harriet Harris and Randy Harrison star in the Guthrie Theater's production of Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie, which officially opens Jan. 26.

Joe Dowling directs the production, which features Harris — a Guthrie company member in the '80s — as Amanda Wingfield and Harrison as Young Tom Wingfield. The company also includes Jonas Goslow as Jim O'Connor, Tracey Maloney as Laura Wingfield and Bill McCallum as Older Tom Wingfield. The limited engagement will play through March 25 on the Guthrie's McGuire Proscenium Stage.

Here's a look at the new production:

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*******
www.variety.com/review/VE1117932791?refCatId=33

OnStage: 'Menagerie' mother superior
Harriet Harris, playing desperate, determined mother Amanda Wingfield
in "Glass Menagerie," hopes to ace a legendary character.

By Rohan Preston, Star Tribune

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'The Glass Menagerie'

Jim Gehrz, Star Tribune

THE GLASS MENAGERIE

What: By Tennessee Williams. Directed by Joe Dowling.

When: 7:30 p.m. today-Sat., 1 p.m. Sun., 7:30 p.m. Tue.-Thu., with
matinees on select Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays. Ends March 25.

Where: Guthrie's McGuire Proscenium stage, 818 S. 2nd St., Mpls.

Tickets: $22-$52. 612-377-2224.

Web: www.guthrietheater.org.

Special event: 7:30 p.m. Feb. 12, Director Joe Dowling will lead a
conversation with "Menagerie" star Harriet Harris at the Guthrie.$15.
OnStage

OnStage: 'Menagerie' mother superior



A stage portrait skillfully painted
The role of Amanda Wingfield, the fallen southern belle who tries to
maintain a sense of gentility under indigent circumstances in "The
Glass Menagerie," has been played by many notable actors, including
Jessica Tandy and Laurette Taylor onstage and Katharine Hepburn on film.

But there has not yet been a definitive performance, to hear Harriet
Harris tell it. Not until she walks the boards tonight at the Guthrie,
where the play opens.

Harris, best known for playing acerbic talent agent Bebe Glazer on
TV's "Frasier" and for depicting the mysterious sister of nosy murder
victim Martha on "Desperate Housewives," is taking up the raiments and
condition of someone the playwright, Tennessee Williams, described as
having "endurance and a kind of heroism." In this memory play set in
St. Louis, she seems unbowed by Depression-era circumstances that
crush others.

The role is one Harris has been dreaming about since age 13. In fact,
the play prompted the Texas native to become an actor.

"I read it at that impressionable age and knew that there was nothing
else for me -- nothing," she said after a recent rehearsal. "I was at
an age when I was trying to detach [from my mother] and I wondered if
I could survive on my own or as a galaxy of my mother."

If doing "Menagerie" notches a life goal for Harris, it also helps
explain why this Tony-winning performer who lives in Southern
California would spend winter in Minnesota.

Hers has been a career of success on both stage and screen, playing
dramatic roles and comic ones. A versatile performer, Harris received
her formal training at Juilliard, an august institution, no doubt, but
not one known for producing funny men and women.

"People think of Juilliard as a place for drama, but there are many
comedic talents that have come out of the school -- Robin Williams,
Patti LuPone, Kevin Kline," she said.

Guthrie credits

In the mid-1980s, Harris was a member of the Guthrie acting company
for a season, playing Elmire in "Tartuffe" and Titania in "A Midsummer
Night's Dream." While she went on to do some movies and a lot of
television, Harris never gave up the stage. She won her Tony for
playing a Chinese-accented procurer of white slaves in "Thoroughly
Modern Millie."

For her "Millie" role, that of Mrs. Meers, she used the most horrid
Chinese accent -- one so bad that two of the Asian-extracted members
of the cast said it was good. And that was her point.

"You don't have real villains anymore," Harris said. "Villains are
just too nice, but villains need to be evil. You need to know why you
dislike them."

Amanda is a sort of departure for Harris. She fits readily into the
canon of Williams' fallen southern belles. Deserted by her husband,
she sells magazine subscriptions in order to raise her two children --
Tom, an aspiring poet who seeks escape in his imagination, and Laura,
her crippled daughter for whom she wants to find a good husband.
Theirs is a life of extreme privation. Amanda tries to keep it all
together.

"This sсript is like a map of Paris," she said. "It keeps looping
around the central thing that happened, always coming back."

Harris' insights into her character, and her readiness to try new
things in rehearsal to find the right tones, have impressed director
Joe Dowling.

"She's able to find the most immediate detail in every line -- it's
wonderful to watch it because she brings incredible acting instincts
to the part," he said.

"I have rarely worked with a performer whose instinct is so well-tuned
to her character, moment by moment, that she can so easily create a
total sense of the reality of who this person is."

Dowling joked that he's glad that Williams is not around to pop in on
rehearsals. The playwright would be surprised. Dowling and his Guthrie
team chose to have two actors play Tom Wingfield. "Queer as Folk" star
Randy Harrison was cast as the younger Tom, with Guthrie regular Bill
McCallum playing the older Tom. Tracey Maloney, in what could be a
Guthrie break-out, is Laura.

"Amanda is not a mother who has the luxury of self-pity or feeling
sorry for herself or any of that stuff," said Harris. "She has to
forge on for her family. She's like so many mothers today: Put your
shoulder to the grindstone and go."

*******

www.twincities.com/mld/twincities/entertainment...

Sitcom sideshow makes for fragile 'Glass Menagerie'
BY DOMINIC P. PAPATOLA
Theater Critic

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The play is an iconic one and so is its opening image: a flicker of
light as Tom Wingfield fires up a cigarette before launching into the
sad, gauzy remembrances of his mother, his sister and her glass
menagerie.

That scene is canted in the new Guthrie Theater production. Rather
than having Tom represent playwright Tennessee Williams, he
effectively becomes Williams, complete with swishing hand gestures,
melodramatic brow-wipes and arch, enhanced Southern accent.

We'll see another Tom in a minute, when actor Randy Harrison enters
the stage to spar with the controlling Amanda and kid-glove the
crippled Laura. But the play is bracketed by a different actor, Bill
McCallum, working like hell to justify the obtrusive presence of a
middle-aged, nattily dressed queen who's been thrust into
narrating "The Glass Menagerie."

It's not a particularly enlightened choice by director Joe Dowling:
We learned in high school that the play is semi-autobiographical and
that the writer born Thomas Lanier Williams was gay. Nor is it
especially informative: Though it explains where Tom was really going
all those nights he was out "to the movies," it doesn't shed much
insight into the passel of demons with which the character wrestles.

Dowling makes other unconventional choices. Instead of an all-out war
between Amanda and Tom, he presents us with a richer, more
complicated family dynamic. By incorporating the gently clasped hand
here, the wryly understanding half-smile there, he allows a genuine
affection between Tom and Amanda that makes Tom's ultimate decision
to abandon his family seem all the more poignant.

Harrison carries this burden with aplomb, positioning young Tom as a
restless kid at once resigned to and resentful of the
responsibilities that have been thrust upon him.

Laura is somewhat de-emphasized in this scenario — she's no longer
the only bit of glue holding the family together — but Tracey Maloney
still affects a presence that haunts, from her chest-heaving attacks
of nervousness to her heartbreakingly moist-eyed smile when Laura
receives her first — and most probably only — kiss from a gentleman
caller.

Working in perilous counterpoint, though, is Dowling's choice to play
up the ironic side of Williams' sсript for comic effect. Harriet
Harris' Amanda is the most complicit in this decision. With her
cackly voice and her ability to cock an eyebrow or cast a glance just
so, she can twist a line just enough to lever laughter from the
audience. The Gentleman Caller is a catalyst in the play, but in this
staging, Jonas Goslow's dandelion-wine-swigging Jim O'Connor is more
of a lightweight.

Allowing some levity into the proceedings is fine, but the play's
emotional gut-punch is lost if the cast can't reel the audience back
in with the play's aching final moments. It worked on Friday's
opening night, as the set pieces and the characters slowly parted and
withdrew into darkness as the shattered Laura blew out her candles.

But there will be nights when cast and audience won't be able to
recover from their collective foray into sitcom and will stumble on
the tricky path trod by this staging of "The Glass Menagerie."

Theater critic Dominic P. Papatola can be reached at
dpapatola@... or at 651-228-2165. IF YOU GO

What: "The Glass Menagerie"

When: Through March 25

Where: Guthrie Theater, 818 S. Second St., Mpls.

Tickets: $42-$27

Information: 612-377-2224

Capsule: This two-Toming staging trods a tricky path.

*******

www.variety.com/review/VE1117932791?refCatId=33

Posted: Tue., Feb. 13, 2007, 11:35am PT
Regional
The Glass Menagerie
(McGuire Proscenium Stage, Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis; 700 seats; $52 top)
By Quinton Skinner

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Tracey Maloney, left, Harriet Harris and Randy Harrison star in the Guthrie Theater's reprise of Tennessee Williams' ``The Glass Menagerie.''
MINNEAPOLIS A Guthrie Theater presentation of a play in two acts by Tennessee Williams. Directed by Joe Dowling.
Amanda Wingfield - Harriet Harris Tom Wingfield - Randy Harrison, Bill McCallum Laura Wingfield - Tracey Maloney Jim O'Connor - Jonas Goslow
Tennessee Williams' claustrophobic terrain in "The Glass Menagerie" is familiar turf by now, and it's difficult to imagine a take on the work capable of widening an audience's eyes. Yet the Guthrie stages the play with uncommon freshness and winning vigor in a production that captures Williams' bleak poetry while offering unexpected new possibilities. Director Joe Dowling also introduces a radical new concept in the casting of Tom.
The plot is iconic: Long abandoned by her husband, Amanda Wingfield (Harriet Harris) lives with her children in a run-down apartment, where she prattles on about her Southern belle past and frets for her psychologically stunted, fear-driven daughter Laura (Tracey Maloney). Son Tom (Randy Harrison) supports the women by working a dead-end job, all the while disappearing at night and generally seething with frustration and futility.
Dowling extracts precise and soulful performances from his cast. Maloney's only flaw is being too lovely for the part of the ostensibly homely Laura, though she compensates with a timid, eager-to-please girlishness and painful vulnerability.
Harris throws out all manner of unexpected angles, leavening Amanda's typical brittle anxiety with textures of brashness and assured humor that provide welcome warmth to family scenes typically experienced as undiluted discomfort.
Harrison plays young Tom with an appropriate mix of yearning and frustration, transparently wanting nothing more than to do right in an impossible situation.
It's with the knowledge that the narrative is heading toward a dead end that Dowling makes an innovative choice: splitting the part of Tom into two, with Bill McCallum handling the monologue aspects of the sсript spoken by the older version of the character. McCallum channels Williams himself, and while the gambit might have been labored or trite in lesser hands, here it's a revelation. The actor lends weary gravity to the memory sections of the narrative, while Harrison is freed to devote his energies entirely to portraying the character as a troubled youth.
The test of Dowling's strategy is whether its seams are visible from the audience. They are not; in fact, one easily imagines Williams writing his sсript with such a staging in mind. Finally, McCallum takes one tortured look back at the lost ruins of his past as Maloney's Laura slides silently into the void on Richard Hoover's bold set (seedy realism in the apartment, twisted steel and busted neon all around).
A mix of the familiar and the new, Dowling's staging of this frequently revived play, appropriately turns out to be the best production to date in the first season of the new Guthrie.
Sets, Richard Hoover; costumes, Ann Hould-Ward; lighting, Jane Cox; sound, Scott W. Edwards; production stage manager, Chris A. Code. Opened Jan. 20, 2007. Reviewed Jan. 26. Running time: 2 HOURS, 30 MIN.

*******

citypages.com/databank/28/1365/article15109.asp

Spotlight: The Glass Menagerie

by Quinton Skinner
January 31, 2007

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For those who slept through high school English: The Glass Menagerie
depicts the Wingfields, who have fallen on hard times more than a
decade after being abandoned by the family patriarch. Mother Amanda
(Harriet Harris) sells magazine subscriptions over the phone and
prattles on annoyingly about her genteel Southern upbringing. Sister
Laura (Tracey Maloney) is a child in a woman's body, unable to do
much of anything but withdraw into a fantasy world of glass
figurines. Brother Tom (Randy Harrison) works at a menial job, gets
up to no good at night, and seems on the verge of some spectacular
personal meltdown. Joe Dowling gets tight yet energetic performances
from the core of his cast in this vibrant and accomplished Guthrie
production. Maloney's Laura is a standout, transparently terrified of
every moment of life. Harris is the linchpin of the operation,
though, and she responds by lending Amanda both a fire and sort of
demented charm. This characterization vivifies a role typically
played as shrill and brittle (she also gives us some of that, mind
you, as there's no way around it). Williams tightens the screws
ruthlessly, and the second act sees the arrival of Jim (Jonas
Goslow), here even shallower and more galactically clueless than one
remembers. Dowling splits the part of Tom between Harrison and Bill
McCallum, the latter tackling the older Tom's soliloquies with
bittersweet humor. The tactic is most effective when Harrison and
McCallum share the same space onstage, their dialogue overlapping.
This show manages to capture the bleak poetry of Williams's dialogue
while wringing humor from it. Though in a couple of instances the
jokiness may be a little too broad, hints of levity are welcome in
this train-wreck take on family life. More willing to confront the
ugliness is set designer Richard Hoover: His ugly, cramped apartment
is ringed by malfunctioning neon signs and swaths of corroded metal,
the Wingfield's rot writ obvious until the end, when it all slides
silently into the darkness.

*******

www.bostonsplash.com/

The Glass Menagerie Shines Once More at the Guthrie

By Keisha7

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The strike of a match in complete darkness lights a cigarette.

A spotlight slowly fades up on Narrator, Tom Wingfield, age thirty-
five, standing on a bare stage. His monologue paints a portrait of
the hard times in which this "memory" will take place. Wooden
skeletons of buildings, fire escapes of metal and neon signs shining
pink, fly in weightless from the rafters. Thus begins the Guthrie
Theater's latest production of Tennessee Williams' "The Glass
Menagerie."


Widely regarded as one of Williams' most autobiographical works, "The
Glass Menagerie" is the tale of The Wingfield Family. Amanda
Wingfield, played by Harriet Harris, is a dignified Southern Belle
who has found herself up north, left by her husband 16 years prior,
with her glory days of cotillions and handsome gentlemen callers well
behind her. But that doesn't stop her from talking about it
incessantly.

Tom, played by Randy Harrison, is the restless son who has become the
reluctant breadwinner for his family, even though all he wants to do
is follow in his father's footsteps and run off to find adventure or
possibly become a writer. Laura, played by Tracey Maloney, is the
strikingly shy daughter who spends all her time listening to old
records and polishing her glass animals, because the very thought of
socializing or working makes her violently ill.

In this particular winter, Amanda learns that her daughter has
skipped out on typing school because "it gives her indigestion."
Since learning a vocation is a hopeless option for Laura, Amanda
embarks on the next logical step: to find her daughter a husband. She
harasses Tom into asking a friend from the warehouse over for dinner.
And it is this unwitting "gentleman caller" who suddenly becomes the
potential answer to the entire family's prayers.


Director Joe Dowling's interpretation of the Tennessee Williams
classic makes an interesting choice that is sure to have purists of
the play up in arms. Dowling divides the role of the son Tom, into
two parts. Tom is both the Narrator (Bill McCallum) that guides the
audience through this memory and Young Tom himself (Harrison) within
the memory. Someone who saw the play the same night as me actually
said that "Tennessee Williams would roll over in his grave. Ok, maybe
not, but he would certainly sit up."

However, as a storytelling device, it does works. Tom the Narrator
preserves the illusion of the memory by being the only person to
break the fourth wall. Moreover, it is an opportunity for the
audience to see how Tom feels about what he did in his youth. It was
wonderful to watch this character remember how hot his temper ran,
and feel again his profound pity for his crippled sister and witness
his persistent disdain for his mother. At the very least, splitting
the character in two provides a fine example of how compelling an
actor can be just in presence, without the luxury of actual dialogue.

Harriet Harris' Amanda is amazing with the constantly nagging and
shaming and manipulating of her adult children. She needles Tom
to "sit up straight", "don't drink too much", "Chew, chew!" For the
better part of play, you want to strangle her for Tom. Just when the
character becomes most irritating, Harris makes us believe it is all
a manifestation of a desperate mother's love.

Randy Harrison's Tom has the good fortune to be the only character in
the play that will actually challenge Amanda. Their scene work is
remarkable. Together they create a mother-son relationship that is
such a train wreck, peppered with animosity and ridicule, that you
just can't look away. On contrast, during the middle of Act One, the
two characters find themselves in a silent war of wills, in which Tom
allows his mother to win by being the first to apologize. And for a
brief moment, the audience sees the love that has been lost between
them.

Williams anoints Jim, the Gentleman Caller, as the play's "symbol of
what could be". As such, this production's Jim is a walking, talking
platitude, cheerfully repeating phrases someone else told him to say
and still trying to convince himself as he repeats them. Jim was a
welcomed dose of comic relief in a play filled with tension. Jonas
Goslow portrays Jim as a cross between the junior varsity jock and a
love-hungry puppy. His scene work with Maloney in slowly bringing
Laura out of her shell is truly well paced and well acted by both.

And after the wonderful mood set by the lights and music were over...
After the great acting that had me rooting for a different character
each scene... Once the play was done, my prevailing feeling was: It
made me feel uncomfortable. But I count that as another success of
the production.

Despite the many laugh-out-loud moments in the show, "The Glass
Menagerie" is a story of family dysfunction that does not have a
happy ending. The play serves as a timeless reminder that it's not
that uncommon to wake up one morning and find that your family, your
friends, your life have nailed you into a "two by four situation". So
be careful to whom and for what you compromise your identity. Because
what you should do for love and what you must do for self-
preservation are often polar opposites.

"The Glass Menagerie" runs Tuesday through Sunday, January 20 - March
25, 2007, at The Guthrie Theater's McGuire Proscenium Stage, 818
South 2nd Street, Minneapolis, MN 55415

Call Box office for showtimes and ticket availability. 612-377-2224

www.guthrietheater.org

*******

Rochester, MN. Post Bulletin

Local Entertainment
Review -- The 'Glass' is full of missed opportunities
2/15/2007 8:26:57 AM
By Jay Furst

The Post-Bulletin

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Tennessee Williams might have this to say, paraphrasing himself,
about the Guthrie Theater's new production of his first
masterpiece, "The Glass Menagerie": "No playwright can do worse than
to put himself at the mercy of a misguided director."

There are qualities to admire in the Guthrie staging, directed by
artistic director Joe Dowling, but the casting and performances are
uneven, and Dowling's notion of splitting the role of Tom Wingfield
into two parts, one as young actor and one as a jaded, dissipated
narrator, is a calculated gamble that doesn't pay off.

The show opened in the Guthrie's new proscenium theater in late
January and continues through March 25.

For showtimes and ticket information, call toll-free 1-877-44STAGE or
go online to www.guthrietheater.org.

The play premiered in 1944 and lays the groundwork for just about
everything Williams would later write -- the richness of his poetic
language, the Southern themes, the power of alcohol, the illusion of
beauty and lust, the bitterness of memory -- it's all there to be
explored again and again in his later, greater plays.

Harriet Harris is mesmerizing as Amanda Wingfield, the faded and
slightly daft Southern beauty who was abandoned by her husband and
now tries to hold her family together in diminished circumstances.

Though better-known for her role on TV's "Desperate Housewives,"
Harris is a Tony Award-winning actress who was a member of the
Guthrie company in the mid-1980s, and she beautifully conveys the
grandiose and suffocating sadness of Amanda.

Randy Harrison, star of "Queer as Folk," is effective as Tom, her
son, who works in a warehouse to pay the family's rent but longs to
see the world and write great poetry.

The other three actors in this ensemble cast -- Jonas Goslow, who
plays Jim, the much-anticipated "gentleman caller," Tracey Maloney as
Tom's dysfunctionally shy sister Laura and Bill McCallum as the
unscripted narrator -- fail to make much of an impression. Maloney is
simply too remote and inward-turned as Laura to really engage the
audience.

There are many effective moments, including the final one, where the
fine scenery designed by Richard Hoover pulls apart, the narrator
expresses his regrets for abandoning his sister and Laura blows out
her candles. But generally, the wistfulness at the end is more for
missed opportunities in this staging.

*******

www.mndaily.com/articles/2007/02/01/70544


February 1, 2007

Walking on broken glass
The Guthrie presents Tennessee Williams' Depression-era play 'The
Glass Menagerie'

By Haily Gostas

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Before he mastered the art of the Southern Gothic storytelling style
and penned Pulitzer Prize-winning greats like "A Streetcar Named
Desire" and "Cat On A Hot Tin Roof," legendary American playwright
Tennessee Williams tested the waters with 1944's "The Glass
Menagerie," an uncompromisingly candid (but arguably amateur in
comparison) portrait of a fragile Depression-era family. "The Glass
Menagerie"

After his first play, a fluffy comedy about two sailors looking for
love, sank without much success, he found inspiration in the newer,
more expressionistic forms infiltrating American writing at that
time. To Williams, the fusion of tragi-romantic poetics with
unabashed naturalism was the only right way to weave the Wingfield's
story, currently being retold at the Guthrie Theater .

Professors and playwrights regard the show as classic, and there is
no denying the themes of single parenting and economic crises as
unfortunately prevalent to modern times. Still, it is easy for the
common theater-going public to view "The Glass Menagerie" as outdated
in its depictions of the social and political landscapes of old.

Plus, Williams' early works seem doomed to exist in the shadows of
what was to come.

Director Joe Dowling conveys a difficult project as best as possible,
despite the play having been performed three times prior at the
Guthrie alone. The result is a mild-mannered but faithful rendition,
saved especially by its excellent acting.

Dowling daringly chose to split the role of Tom, the haunted
Wingfield brother and son, between two separate actors. An older,
more detached version (Bill McCallum) serves as somewhat of an
unorthodox narrator, unfolding the action from the first scene
onward, yet reinforcing that he is simply recounting a memory of what
once was.

Set in 1930s St. Louis, "The Glass Menagerie" follows the determined
but suffocating matriarch Amanda (Harriet Harris), desperately trying
to provide for the future of her family after her husband's
abandonment 16 years prior, and in the midst of World War II's
financial uncertainty.

The younger of the two Toms (Randy Harrison) reluctantly assumes a
warehouse job and becomes a budding alcoholic when his obligation as
breadwinner to his mother and sister suppresses his sense of
adventure and dreams of becoming a poet. His little sister Laura
(Tracey Maloney) is a kind beauty burdened by a slight limp that has
made her painfully shy and obsessively nervous. Her only solace is
the collection of glass animals she lovingly keeps, and the retreat
into private, childlike worlds it allows her.

Worried her daughter will become an old maid (and doggedly fueled by
her own desires and disappointments), the meddling Amanda puts
perhaps too much faith in Laura's lone "gentleman caller," as the
arrival of the dopey but charming ex-high school hero Jim O'Connor
(Jonas Goslow) could be the final factor that makes or breaks them
all.

Though all the actors possess an impressive understanding of their
characters, the Tony Award-winning Harris carries the show. She does
an unflinchingly powerful job tackling the role of aging Southern
belle Amanda, who could easily fall victim to a shrill, selfish
interpretation. Harris gives her plenty of heart and humanity - a
mother who above all else wishes happiness for her children but who
realizes she, like the glass menagerie, is not eternally untouchable
and can shatter under the cruel realities of her time period.

"The Glass Menagerie" was - and is - good but not great. In
retrospect, you can see the seeds of true greatness Williams would go
on to sew. Even in its 63-year-old status it remains a very young,
somewhat unpolished work entirely dependent on the interpretations of
its continuing productions.

Still, the attempt is there, and the effort and energy from a well-
rounded cast and crew like the Guthrie's are what keeps "The Glass
Menagerie" timely and timeless.

*******

steveonbroadway.blogspot.com/2007/02/glass-mena...

The Glass Menagerie (The SOB Review)

The Glass Menagerie (The SOB Review) - McGuire Proscenium Stage, Guthrie, Minneapolis, MN

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***1/2 (out of ****)

No doubt, purists will lament that director Joe Dowling has taken too many liberties with Tennessee Williams' classic play The Glass Menagerie, which is currently playing a Guthrie stage. Given the play's semi-autobiographical depiction of Williams' own emancipation from the clutches of his mother, protestations over Dowling's artistic freedom may be a bit ironic.

For those who hold the original stagings of Williams' works sacrosanct, the most egregious element of this production may be found in Dowling's decision to split the Williamsesque Tom Wingfield in two. Randy Harrison portrays the younger Tom, while Bill McCallum takes on the older one. The latter not only serves as narrator, but essentially becomes a specter looking upon the proceedings much like the portrait of his long-deserted father hanging on the Wingfields' living room wall.

But if there's an actual force that lingers, even when she's not on the stage, it is Harriet Harris as Tom's manic mother Amanda. Given that Williams once sardonically referred to his mother as "a little Prussian officer in drag,” it takes a volcanic performance to make every seismic shift one to be feared. Harris erupts with a volatile mix of authentic neurosis and delusional charm to make you believe she understands the archetype Williams intended perfectly. An actor's actor if ever there was one, Harris masters this role with clarity and precision, even when she's not speaking a word. Hers is one of the best performances of the year.

There are other winning performances. Tracey Maloney imbues "crippled" daughter Laura with a haunting luminescence that shines as brilliantly as the light through one of her beloved glass figurines, particularly when she's caught up in the possibility that her love for Jim O'Connor might actually be reciprocated.

As the tender Jim, stunningly bereft of self-awareness, Jonas Goslow is a revelation. Once the ever-popular high school boy who could do no wrong, Jim now struggles to rebuild his sense of affable confidence after losing his way for reasons never enunciated. I've previously seen Goslow in Guthrie productions of The Real Thing and Hamlet, but this is the first time I've seen him so genuine and vulnerable.

For his part, McCallum offers a poignant take as the elder Tom that hints at the air of sophistication to come for this erstwhile "Shakespeare." Then there's Harrison's portrayal of the younger Tom. Often trying to find the appropriate voice for Tom, Harrison is all over the map -- literally. While Williams places this drama in St. Louis, Harrison's forced accent alternately sounds like it's from the Deep South or New England, with hints of New Orleans thrown in for good measure. Still, Harrison ably handles this pivotal role reasonably well, particularly in going toe-to-toe with Amanda.

There is much to recommend in Dowling's insightful, respectful and surprisingly entertaining production, and near as I can figure, none of Williams' beautifully poetic language has been altered. Certainly, sticklers may not approve of Dowling's dramatic tinkerings, but they've made for a very chilling evening that actually illuminate the darkest parts of Williams' soul. To me, that's the mark of a great production.

This is Steve On Broadway (SOB).

*******

Theater review: 'Glass Menagerie' has strong cast, but playwright would be spinning
The actors are smooth and skillful, but you are left to divine how the play is meaningful today.
By Rohan Preston, Star Tribune
Last update: January 27, 2007 – 10:14 PM

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THE GLASS MENAGERIE
What: By Tennessee Williams. Directed by Joe Dowling.
When: 1 p.m. today, 7:30 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday with matinees on select Wednesdays and Saturdays. Ends March 25.
Where: Guthrie's McGuire Proscenium stage, 818 S. 2nd St., Minneapolis. Tickets: $22-$52. 612-377-2224.
Web: www.guthrietheater.org.
Special event:At 7:30 p.m. Feb. 12, Dowling will lead a conversation with "Menagerie" star Harriet Harris at the Guthrie. $15.
Tennessee Williams should be rolling over in his grave just about now.
Guthrie Theater Director Joe Dowling has staged, and his cast has delivered, a production of "The Glass Menagerie" that is, for better and worse, unlike productions past.
This "Menagerie," which opened Friday on the theater's McGuire Proscenium stage, is smooth and skillfully acted, with an especially terrific performance by Harriet Harris as anxious, determined matriarch Amanda Wingfield.
It is just that this production, which maximizes the humor in an otherwise droll, downer of a sсript, splits one character, Tom, into two roles, the play's narrator and Amanda Wingfield's son. It works well enough, although it seems unnecessary, especially since Bill McCallum, the mustachioed actor who play the narrator, bears a resemblance to playwright Williams.
This production left me feeling impressed by its artistry, including the fact that Richard Hoover's industrial set materializes at the opening and dematerializes at the end of this memory play.
But I was left pondering, how does this play, first performed in 1944, speak to audiences today?
The Wingfield family is stuck in a deep rut. The father, "a telephone man in love with long distance," abandoned his wife, Amanda (Harris) and their children Tom (Randy Harrison) and Laura (Tracey Maloney) 16 years ago. That leave-taking was so traumatic, it pauperized the family, warping them. So they live in their heads, with Tom writing poetry, Amanda reminiscing about past suitors and Laura taking meticulous care of her glass animals.
Tom, who stepped in to help support the abandoned family, is now considering leaving in order to escape his overbearing mother and his physically disabled sister who has never had a date. But before he leaves, he has arranged for a gentleman caller, Jim O'Connor, to visit his sister. Laura's first date is a former schoolmate who peaked in high school and now works at the factory with Tom.
Amanda goes all out in trying to impress Jim, but he seems to betray her efforts.
There's a lot of talking in "Menagerie," which lighting designer Jane Cox has illuminated fairly sharply. But there's not much action.
Today, editors on TV are able to make reality programs out of such situations, but in the theater we want to tell Tom and Amanda and Laura to get up and go. Break out of the rut. Get on with your lives.
What I love about Williams is that there is always something that remains unspoken that needs to be blurted out. His works mine the anomie and terror just below the surface of polite society.
Of course, one can read too much biography into his work. And I'm not an advocate of such an approach. I might argue with splitting of the role of Tom, but I wouldn't argue with the performances.
As Amanda, Harris is a sharp-tongued, wily and ever-inventive mother who lives in the past as protection against her present. Harris embodies, in her faded clothes and aging frame, Amanda's history and hopes. Her gloss on Amanda is entirely credible.
With her limp and shyness, Maloney does a wonderful job as Laura. Harrison is a bit combustible, but he does not overact. He and Jonas Goslow, as O'Connor, round out a fine cast.
Rohan Preston • 612-673-4390 • [email protected]

@темы: 2007, theatre

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"A Tale of Two Toms" (January 2007)

[BloodVessel]

A Tale of Two Toms

Randy Harrison and Bill McCallum share the plum role of Tom Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie at the Guthrie.

Posted by Michael Portantiere on theatermania.com; Jan 23, 2007.


Randy Harrison in The Glass Menagerie
(© T. Charles Erickson)

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"It's very exciting when you know a play so well from seeing it and then you actually do it," says Joe Dowling, director of the Guthrie Theater's unusual new production of Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie. "The first time I saw this play was many years ago in Dublin. It was a little odd hearing the Irish actors trying to deal with the Southern dialect, but the richness of the play came through. Even though it's a great American poetic classic, it translates to every culture."

Like so many theatergoers before them, Guthrie audiences are laughing and weeping at the joys and sorrows experienced by Tom Wingfield, his painfully shy sister Laura, and their domineering, exasperating, loving mother Amanda as they live through the Great Depression in a small St. Louis apartment. The Menagerie cast includes Tony Award winner Harriet Harris as Amanda, Tracey Maloney as Laura, and Jonas Goslow as the "Gentleman Caller." What makes this production unusual is that Dowling has split the role of Tom between two actors: Randy Harrison, best known for his work as Justin Taylor on TV's Queer as Folk, and Guthrie favorite Bill McCallum.

"Tom is quite clearly 22 in the play," notes Dowling, "and I suppose he's in his late 30s or early 40s when he's looking back and narrating. Often, the role is cast somewhere in the middle of that age range, to bridge both of those worlds. Randy was so compelling when he auditioned for us in New York, but I wondered: 'Could a Tom who looks that young and vulnerable be believable as the older man looking back?' So I thought, why not split the role? In the stage directions, Williams writes that 'the narrator is an undisguised convention of the play; he takes whatever license with dramatic convention that is convenient to his purposes.' I thought, 'Okay, I'm going to take you up on that, Tennessee!' "

Harrison, whose stage credits include the Berkshire Theatre Festival productions of Amadeus and Equus, is delighted to have a go at Tom. "I've been in love with this play since I was a young teen," he says. "They did it at my high school in Georgia, but I didn't get cast. That production was the only one I've ever seen -- but the play is so brilliantly written that, when you read it, you immediately understand what the characters are experiencing and fighting for. And it's so fluid that it feels so different every time we run it. I'm excited that we have a nice, long run, because it's going to be great to live in this play for a while."

Of the two-Tom concept, Harrison remarks: "It's fascinating, and I definitely think certain things about the sсript are illuminated that aren't always clear when it's done as written. Bill McCallum and I look a lot alike, and we have a few moments of simultaneous speech to help tie us together. There are also moments when he's observing the action. I think the audience is more aware that the play is this person's memory, and that there's some distance between where is now and what he's remembering."

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McCallum has made an attempt to meld his characterization with Harrison's. "Randy has the bulk of the stage time," he says, "so I've tried to match my own voice, movements, and gestures to his. We listen closely to each other, and I've been watching how he stands, where he holds his weight. I think it's believable to the audience that the guy Randy is could grow up to be the guy that I am. For my money, the splitting of the role adds another level of complexity or depth to the story; you actually see the play as a retrospective, and you're more aware of the repercussions that the younger character's choices have had on the course of his life."


Bill McCallum in The Glass Menagerie
(© T. Charles Erickson)

"Older Tom is never on stage alone," explains Dowling. "Young Tom is always there with him. There's a definite sense that this man is devastated by his memories. Of course, Williams was really writing about his sister Rose; she had a lobotomy and, for the rest of his life, he was guilty over the fact that he didn't prevent it. When you know that, the line 'Blow out your candles, Laura' becomes very, very meaningful."

McCallum wholeheartedly concurs: "At the end of the play, when you have Laura and Amanda left on stage, young Tom standing with his back to them, and older Tom saying, 'Here's what happened to me after this' -- well, the moment is just a little bit more devastating than usual."

@темы: 2007, The Glass Menagerie, theatre

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'Randy Harrison's Tennessee Waltz' (Lavender, January 2007)

[BloodVessel]

Splendor in the Glass
Randy Harrison’s Tennessee Waltz
by John Townsend; LAVANDER MAGAZINE



In 1944, master gay playwright Tennessee Williams rocked American theater and society with The Glass Menagerie. Its poetic, yet unsettlingly candid, view of the Wingfields, a family abandoned by their father and husband, now ranks as one of the towering achievements of 20th-Century American drama.

The Glass Menagerie is especially relevant in 2007, given the awareness of the American public about single parents battling rocky economic times. Moreover, in subtle ways, this classic, which was inspired by Williams’s own personal experiences, codifies the playwright’s struggle with his homosexual orientation.

It’s fitting that the current Guthrie Theater revival features Queer as Folk star Randy Harrison as protagonist Tom. Indeed, given the sensitivity he revealed in that landmark television series, Harrison’s casting seems nothing less than ideal. If Williams’s spirit is out there peeking in on us, he must be ecstatic that Harrison essentially is playing him.

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I spoke with Harrison recently about Williams, his play, director Joe Dowling, and Queer as Folk.

Q: I think of Tom Wingfield as a kind of surrogate for Tennessee Williams himself, and I feel like much of his restlessness and his disquietude has to do with being gay. Of course, Williams couldn’t write about that openly in the 1940s.
RH: I don’t think that’s the largest aspect of it, but I think it’s huge. I think the frustration he’s experiencing in the home has to do with his being an artist more than anything, and his realization that it’s going to be impossible for him to follow that dream [by] staying with his family.
I think [Tom’s homosexuality] could be part of it, but it totally depends upon the actor’s take, because it’s not implicit. It’s not actually in the text. It’s definitely a part of what he’s going through. Certainly, there is a lot going on that’s unspoken about him, and between him and his family.

Q: What have you been doing to research the play and your interpretation of the character?
RH: I’m reading Williams’s memoirs now. I’ve read a few biographies, and almost all of his plays. I’m thinking I’m almost filled up on the biographical information at this point, and I need to just come back to the play.

Q: But there is a lot of him in the play.
RH: A huge amount.

Q: It’s certainly valid for you to be examining his life and work. What are you discovering about Williams? I’ve read the memoirs. He was pretty wild.
RH: He was. The memoirs are amazing, just because they take place so much later than when he wrote the play. The character is hugely based on him, but it’s a work of fiction ultimately, and you need to be responsible to the sсript of the play, not to any biographical information. But I’m amazed at how honest the memoirs are.
I had this image of his just being this mess later in his life. But they’re so astute. I know there were exaggerations and things that were left out, but they’re so honest. You really understand why his characters and his plays are so indelible in the way he writes his memoirs. You have to remind yourself of the time he wrote them—1972.

Q: They were cutting-edge. And they contain all that wrenching stuff about his mother, Miss Edwina, and his sister, Rose. Just heartbreaking.
RH: Devastating.

Q: It seems like there’s a lot that surfaces in Amanda, Tom’s mother, that we find in Miss Edwina, and a lot in Laura, Tom’s sister, that we find in Rose.
RH: A huge amount, but more about Amanda.

Q: Many actresses will tell you that Williams wrote some of the best female characters in all of drama. And you played in one of the most groundbreaking series in the history of television. Your character, Justin, is very patient, nurturing, supportive, and he’s very sweet. I recently watched the episode where you play his winning the King of Babylon studly beauty contest.
RH: Eight years ago!

Q: That’s one big reason why it will be so interesting for your TV fans to see you play Tom. He’s a very restless character—a real contrast.
RH: It feels very, very different.

Q: You’ve done a lot of musical theater.
RH: I haven’t done a lot of musicals in a while. I sang in college, so it was an easier way to get my Equity card, and to start working professionally. There are a lot more opportunities in it. About three years ago, I did Wicked, and since then, I’ve been doing just straight theater—Amadeus and Equus.

Q: You portrayed the lead roles in those two very demanding pieces. And this one is also very demanding—one of the plum men’s roles in American drama. Many would call it the plum role for a young American actor.
By the way, many people in the local queer community are very happy that the Guthrie has been doing Tennessee Williams plays more regularly since Joe Dowling has been Artistic Director.
Before his tenure, it seemed like Anton Chekhov and other great playwrights were emphasized. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but Dowling’s interest in Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams has been wonderful.
Miller was hetero, but his social consciousness was second to none, and so is automatically adored by most queer theatergoers. And Williams’s unmistakably queer sensibility gives us a window into how that sensibility had to be expressed in the decades before Stonewall.
Dowling has this instinctive understanding of the mid-20th-Century American world these two giants encompassed. His production of Death of a Salesman a few years back was just spellbinding. He captured that dance between gritty reality and delicate memory. And The Glass Menagerie also dances that dance.
RH: He’s phenomenal, and he really understands family. And maybe this is why you think he’s done such good work with American classics, because so much is about family. He’s so very astute about family dynamics.
A majority of this play is about this give-and-take—this pushing and pulling that happens within families. And he’s been remarkable about getting in there with us. He has such a keen eye, and such an understanding of who’s winning and who’s losing as far as the pushing and pulling.
Those kind of things really set people off when they’re in that pressure-cooker environment, being in a small home with a family—which is what Death of a Salesman is about.

Q: There’s something Williams talks about regarding shared family pain in Memoirs that comes through The Glass Menagerie as well.
The play’s characters, Tom and Laura, brother and sister, exist in their St. Louis tenement apartment after they had lived in a much more accepting, sylvan, and gentler environment down South.
St. Louis is this comparably harsh, horrible reality for them. Williams says in his memoirs that he feels that when his own family moved to St. Louis, it was traumatic for both him
and Rose.
They found themselves ostracized, judged negatively and snobbishly by those in their community and neighborhood there. They didn’t have the same brusqueness and coarser vocal rhythms that others around them had. And they were looked down on for not having as much money.
RH: Oh, yeah. The way in which the family is isolated from the rest of the community in St. Louis. In the play, it’s not indicated whether or not they were born in the South, and moved there, or if they had been there the entire time, and just the mother was from there. But we’re choosing that we actually went on the same journey Tennessee Williams had when he left Mississippi.

Q: I think that’s the right way to go with it.
RH: Right. The family is isolated from the rest of the community both by their being Southern and being poorer. But it is the Depression, and there’s this sense that everybody—all of America—has been forced into this desperate situation. It comes through in his monologues.
And I think they’re more isolated for being Southern. The mother comes from an entirely different reality than the one they’re attempting to live in right now. I think that’s a huge thing that’s making Tom completely restless—his being a part of that other world, and then coming back to this world.
And as he grows up, he more and more realizes the world that his family has erected—his mother specifically, but Laura, too—that he’s been forced to live in, is an illusion. And he has to separate from that in order to engage with reality, and become an adult and an artist.

Q: Great point. The mother, Amanda, goes on about her gentlemen callers, and has this sort of Antebellum South romanticism gone haywire.
RH: Right. And it’s the Depression. It’s not happening anymore.

Q: That’s another thing that I think makes the play more relevant now than, say, only a decade ago. It has a new pertinence now, because we’re seeing a starker division between rich and poor in American society. We’re always finding evidence about the disappearing middle class.
Though that division has surely been creeping up on us since the ’80s, people are now more acutely aware of it. There seems to be less hope for the future, and there’s a desperation just below the surface now.
Amanda comes from a time when there were no government-funded safety nets, and now, more of our safety nets have been cut. In Amanda’s heyday, you had to have means when you were old, or a financially solvent husband who would leave you enough to live on when he died.
She talks about pitiful cases of desperate women she saw in the South—like she’s haunted by that.
RH:“Birdlike women.” That’s right.

Q: Well I can’t wait to see you in this. You are perfect for this role. Now, I must ask you about Queer as Folk. When did you last work on it?
RH: It’s been about two-and-a-half years.

Q: It really portrayed gay characters on their own terms in a brutally honest and funny way. It showed that you can keep your soul, even in a sex-drenched world.
RH: You know, it’s not a world that I’ve ever been a part of, so I’m not in a position to know if it was accurate or not.

Q: I think it’s a brilliant show. It compels queer people to look at themselves.
RH: It’s definitely gritty.

Q: Do you miss doing it?
RH: No. It was a wonderful job. I did it for five years. It was a long time, but it was a wonderful break for me. I learned so much working on it, but I was ready to move on when it was over.

The Glass Menagerie
Jan. 20-Mar. 25
Guthrie Theater
818 S. 2nd St., Mpls.
[phone]
www.guthrietheater.org

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@темы: 2007, The Glass Menagerie, theatre

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"Amadeus" reviews

[moveforever]

Epstein shines as a bitter Salieri
By MICHAEL ECK, Special to the Times Union
First published: Sunday, June 25, 2006


STOCKBRIDGE, Mass. -- I would pay good money to see Jonathan Epstein
in "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown."

Luckily, I don't have to. One of the perks of being a theater critic
is that you usually don't have to pay for tickets. And one hopes that
Epstein would never feel the need to take on the round-headed role of
the young Mr. Brown.

But it would be good, if he did. I'm sure of it.

Instead Epstein is playing Antonio Salieri in Eric Hill's production
of Peter Shaffer's "Amadeus" at Berkshire Theatre Festival.

It's a magnificent portrayal; truly worth the price of admission on
its own.

I'm quite positive other people were onstage with Epstein, I just
don't know if I can recall them.

In Shaffer's play, Antonio Salieri, court composer for Joseph II of
Vienna, rails at heaven for giving his nemesis, Wolfgang Amadeus
Mozart, the talent he desires.

"My quarrel was never with Mozart," he says, "but with God."

He gives 10 years of his life to this bitter struggle, and another
three decades following Mozart's death in 1791.

One feels in Epstein's performance the weight of those years, the
sting of Salieri's shame and the obliterating force of the
character's own self-proclaimed mediocrity.

Epstein turns half a man into a tower.

It's cliche to say one actor can do more with his eyebrows than
another can with his entire body, but Epstein breathes life into that
saw. His grimaces in the first few minutes of Friday's opening spoke
volumes; his simple act of picking up a sweet off a tray painted a
broken life.

As noted, there were other people on the stage (I think).

Randy Harrison, who appeared in BTF's production of Shaffer's "Equus"
last season, fares much better here as Mozart.

He dives into the character's libertine ways with a laugh that's lost
and uproarious at the same time -- in other words, right on target.

Still, he does not quite seem the force of nature that the sсript
asks for.

A large ensemble surrounds the sparring composers, with strong work
from Tara Franklin as Constanze Weber and Ron Bagden as Baron
Gottfried van Swieten.

Hill is a fine director, heavily influenced by Tadashi Suzuki. He
uses movement, rhythm and sound to surround the action. Even when the
scenes are realistic there is a heightened edge, and occasionally,
gloriously, Hill simply eschews realism altogether.

He is helped by a crack design team, including Matthew E. Adelson,
whose lighting seems scored, rather than programmed.

In one defining moment Adelson magically merges Salieri and Mozart's
shadows, with the latter seeming to swallow the former.

It is the play in microcosm.

When Epstein finishes this run of "Amadeus" he will begin preparing
for his next role at BTF, in the one-man show Via Dolorosa (which
plays Aug. 30 to Oct. 21).

I, for one, can't wait.

Michael Eck, a freelance writer from Albany, is a regular contributor
to the Times Union.

Theater review

'AMADEUS'

Performance reviewed: 8 p.m. Friday

Where: Berkshire Theatre Festival, Main Street, Stockbridge, Mass.

Running Time: 3 hours, 20 minutes; one intermission

Continues: 8 p.m. Monday through Saturday; matinees, 2 p.m. Thursday
and Saturday; through July 8

Tickets: $43-$59Information: [phone]

Web site: www.berkshiretheatre.org

*******

" ... engrossing, soul-shattering, multifaceted."
June 23, 2006 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall.


Amadeus by Peter Shaffer
Directed by Eric Hill
With Jonathan Epstein and Randy Harrison
Opens: June 23
Postscript: June 26 Closes: July 8

Berkshire Theatre Festival | berkshiretheatre.org
P.O. Box 797, Stockbridge, MA 01262
Administration Offices: 413-298-5536; FAX:[phone]
E-mail:info@...

It is hard to untangle the many strands of genius that flood the stage during
the seemingly short three hours that Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus takes to unfold,
gloriously, as the opening play of the Berkshire Theatre Festival's 2006 season.

So much of the production is beguiling that it is almost impossible to pin-point
who is responsible for this magnificent production.

Director Eric Hill freezes his characters into dynamic stage pictures, drawing
on his skills with Suzuki technique, and playwright Shaffer has written the
static moments that call for such skills. Reading the play one can visualize
them, but Hill’s spacing and placing, from the angle of character’s wrist to the
positioning of the ensemble, are his own, graphic and startlingly right.
The cast in Berkshire Theatre Festival’s Main Stage production of Amadeus. Photo
by Kevin Sprague.

He is on the mark in his casting of the two antagonists, the diabolical but
strangely appealing Salieri (Jonathan Epstein) and the leaping, mercurial Mozart
(Randy Harrison).

Shaffer has written truly great roles for his two leads and in this production
they are played greatly.

Salieri frames the play as narrator, old and near death and finally, unbelieved,
eager to declare his guilt. In the dramatic scenes from the past that form the
body of the play, he at first only distains the upstart crow, Mozart. He
declines to believe that the God to whom he has promised to offer his own
supposed genius could betray him.

But as he comes more and more to distrust his own gifts, despite worldly
success, and to be forced to see Mozart possesses magic that he Salieri has been
denied, his machinations to destroy Mozart become more and more diabolical. By
the play's end he has not only destroyed his rival but has lost all faith in his
own pact with a redeemer whom he finally judges not to exist at all.

Harrison gives us a Mozart capable at one moment of being revolting (if funny)
in his vulgarity, and in the next moment being forgiven because of the pure and
perfect music that wells up beneath, behind, and above his shenanigans. One
loves him as one deplores him, and an essential child-like goodness radiates
beneath his vulgarity. He accepts his genius as a given, even though in his
adult years few believe in it.

As his young wife Constanza, Tara Franklin, in a secondary role, is versatile
from her first bawdy entrance as a mousy-wousy pursued by Mozart, through her
gallant defense of his music and sharing of his poverty, to her final role of
almost-mother, cradling the dying boy-man in her arms. She is especially
effective in the scene where, to help Mozart, she shames Salieri in his
seduction plot.

All in the supporting cast are strong and effective, many playing several roles
and all serving as scene changers with efficiency. All have obviously enjoyed
some Suzuki training, evident especially in certain mute, but vital,
appearances.

The play is engrossing, soul-shattering, multifaceted. The first act has the
audience aroar with laughter at Mozart’s caprices and Salieri’s discomfort.

But in Act II, as Salieri’s hate for Mozart (and for God who seems to have
betrayed him) deepens, the audience is totally silent. No one coughs, whispers,
rattles a program; all just listen in a stunned awe as the music deepens and
subtle light-changes color the background until all is blood-red and shadow
patterns weave the background. Designer Matthew E. Adelson must have employed
every key on his light board and every light hanging from the ceiling.

And in this play which demands intricate, sometimes brief, notes on a piano and
at other times long background selections of Mozart’s glorious music, sound
designer Nathan Leigh has scored the play well. Karl Eigsi has designed the
gilt-edged 18th century, two procenium set called for by the sсript with a
meticulous eye for detail, as has Olivera Gajic for the period costumes.

As narrator and villain, Epstein orchestrates the play, vainly insisting, for no
one will believe him, that he is indeed a murderer, abandoned by God. He begs
for a forgiveness that he was unable to ask of Mozart, even as the Requiem
sounded in his ears.

There is great irony in the play. The mediocre Salieri gains honor and fame, but
knows he never possesses genius, while Mozart, every gene in his body quivering
with genius, dies feeling a failure, unable to make the world listen.

This play is so rich in so many ways and presented with such insight and talent
that I wish it were possible to see it several more times during its too-brief
run in Stockbridge. But seeing this production once has been a memorable
experience and one I urge you to share. This is a play you will have hard time
forgetting.

*******

"The Patron Saint of Mediocrity"
By Peter Bergman

When a playwright wins an award for his work it generally means
that the work is special. Peter Shaffer won every award for his play
about composer Antonio Salieri, Amadeus, including the Tony Award,
Outer Critics Circle Award, Evening Standard Drama Award and the
British Theater Critics Award. For his screenplay Shaffer also won an
Academy Award. That screenplay has now become a problem in any new
production of the play. Written six years after the play premiered it
took Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as its central character. For today's
audiences of the play that film is what they remember. Its changes
from the playwright's original intent in his stagework make the play
something of a freakshow as it celebrates Salieri, Mozart's musical
rival, instead of Mozart. This is a play, not about genius, but about
mediocrity dealing with genius. That's very different.

Salieri, in this play, is a petty and jealous man whose soul was
tormented by the knowledge that his younger compatriot in composition
was more talented, more gifted than he had ever been. His
understanding of the born genius is at the root of his inner conflict
and that soul-torturing conflagration inspires his plotting. He
challenges God - formerly he had thanked God - on the topic of
talent. God answers the challenge by making Salieri successful and
keeping Mozart on the fringe of true success. God wins the battle,
right up to the end. Salieri ultimately commits suicide, but even
that act does not change his success ratio - he lives and no one
believes his final cries of triumph over his rival Mozart. No one
cares enough.

This is good drama, but somehow in its three-hour production of
the play, the Berkshire Theatre Festival doesn't make the drama come
alive. It looks beautiful in its recreation of the 1700s Viennese
court of Emperor Joseph II with a good and functional set by Karl
Eigsti and costumes by Olivera Gajic. It sounds lovely with its
incorporation of Mozart's music on soundtrack. It is peopled with
actors of ability and character and charm, yet not one of them seems
to be living in his space. Instead they come across the footlights as
puppets playing parts. Those footlights, part of the design by
Matthew E. Adelson, create massive shadows that should be threatening
but only seem vaguely odd after a while. There is no life on that
stage.

Randy Harrison plays Mozart. He is physically vibrant and
vocally silly and, at center stage completely in character as the
foolhardy young genius fully aware of his capabilities. He is
believable, but yet catch him when he's not at the center of the
action and he's waiting, visibly waiting for his next Mozart moment.

James Barry and Tom Story as the gossips, the Venticelli, do
everything they can to keep the action alive and moving. Roles cut
from the film almost completely, they enlighten us with their
perspective on the off-stage movement of careers and personal lives
that we do not see. They are the rhythm of the play, the drumbeat of
the prose. Director Eric Hill almost never allows them to share
space, but keeps them moving or posing at distant ends of the stage,
never allowed to be the gossips they are, but merely to act as
onstage "offstage voices" and so they cannot bring to life the
concept of courtier cretins.

The players in the lives of Mozart and Salieri are decently
handled by a group of actors who do what they can to keep things real
and possible. Stephen Temperley and Bob Jaffe are the best of them.
Walter Hudson is the least imperious Emperor I've ever seen and Ron
Bagden seems out of place in his costume and wig. Tara Franklin is
excellent as Mozart's wife.

Jonathan Epstein as Salieri is the biggest problem on stage.
There is no anguish in his soul as he mourns the loss of his own
importance, as he laments his lack of talent revealed to him through
his understanding of Mozart's genius. There is no reality to his
cries of redemption and forgiveness. He is just about as one-note in
his performance as Salieri's music is portrayed in the sсript. As the
central figure of the play, the real "Amadeus" the "beloved of God",
he just isn't at the top of his game. Perhaps this is the director's
biggest failing. He doesn't imbue his musical lord of mediocrity with
anything but mediocrity. That doesn't work. Salieri's genius must be
revealed at its own level and not submerged in monotone.

******


Сurtainup
Amadeus
By Elyse Sommer

One of the numerous stunning tableaus in the Berkshire Theater Festival's revival of Peter Shaffer's Amadeus
(Photo: Kevin Sprague)



Jonathan Epstein & Randy Harrison as Salieri and Mozart in Amadeus.
(Photo: Kevin Sprague )


www.curtainup.com/amadeusberk.html
Last summer, The Berkshire Theatre Festival revived one of Peter Shaffer's two best known plays, Equus. Now the Festival has launched it's 78th season with Shaffer's even more wildly successful Amadeus, a mystery-melodrama that feels biographical but is the playwright's own take on the rumors swirling around composer Antonio Salieri's envy-driven plot to destroy the younger and more talented Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Randi Harrison, who played the mysteriously passionate and troubled Alan Strang at the center of Equus, is back, this time as Mozart during the last ten years of his all too brief life. For all their differences, these plays have much in common. As Salieri, disdains the bumpkin-like behavior of Mozart even as he recognizes and envies his genius, so the psychiatrist treating young Strang in Equus, finds that the boy's wild passion stir feelings of inadequacy and, yes, envy.
Both revivals are testaments to theater as a fluid rather than a frozen art and how directors can give revivals of a play exciting new visual and thematic interpretations without changing the basic text. And, while there are authors (or their executors) who insist on their plays being mounted exactly as written, many welcome fresh interpretations and often view their texts as works in progress, rewriting them from production to production. David Hare (whose one person play Via de la Rosa concludes the BTF season) made numerous changes in Stuff Happens between its production in London and the more recent one at New York's Public Theater. Tom Stoppard has announced that his mammoth Coast of Utopia will be different and less mammoth when it comes to Lincoln Center.

Peter Shaffer is another case in point. The Amadeus I saw in 1999 on Broadway and last Friday night in Stockbridge use a text that's been altered since the play's 1980 to 1983 run at the Broadhurst Theater. The story is the same but the focus is much more on the embittered kappelmeister's relationship to God.

While Shaffer used bits and pieces from Mozart's life, this is a work of imagination. Essentially it's Salieri's story, a flashback by the dying composer to his ten years of dealing with the realization that all his worldly success is meaningless when compared to those of Mozart, the socially inept boy-man. Salieri's envious rage takes the form of a decade of spiteful acts. Though Mozart is his victim, the embittered composer's real battle is with the God who has given him dubious gift of being the only one in his time to recognize Mozart's greatness. In fighting that battle Salieri destroys himself as well as Mozart (the man -- but not his music).

With its large ensemble, Amadeus is a good choice for BTF as it gives many of its summer interns a chance to be on stage. But, of course, the parts affording the most scenery chewing opportunities belong to the actors playing the two composers.

Jonathan Epstein, best known in this area for his work as one of Shakespeare & Company's leading character actors, struck me as an ideal choice to star as this production's Salieri. He indeed ably shifts from wry irony and Machiavellan duplicity to agonized fury and is a commanding presence from the moment he rises from his wheelchair to exchange a Turkish cap for a wig to help him shed the forty years needed to play the thirty-one-year-old establishment favorite. He walks in and out of the flashback scenes with an apt air of disdain. It would be unfair to carp about the usually high octane actor's somewhat subdued performance since he was clearly struggling with a heavy cold on opening night -- and doing so with bravura the-show-must-go-on spirit.

I would have liked to see director Eric Hill reign in Randy Harrison's excessive scatological playfulness with his Constanze (the appealing Tara Franklin), and focus a bit more on his unflagging belief in his musical gifts and the fascinating snippets about how a piece of music evolves. No complaints about Mr. Hill's stunning staging, as usual influenced by his Suzuki training. The original upstage light box design that gave the audience a peek of the stuffy, conformist 18th Century court life from Salieri's further downstage 19th century view is now a painted scrim in an ornate frame. This scrim as well as some sheer blue curtains open and close for some breathtaking tableaus of members of the court of Emperor Joseph II (Walter Hudson).

The Emperor's short attention span (even Mozart's most gorgeous music can't overcome his constant unwillingness to listen to something that he declares has &quo;too many notes") and his assorted courtiers' preference for what's safe and familiar (meaning Salieri's music) bring newly relevant reminders of our current President as well as the bottom-line producers who control today's theater.

The various courtiers include Stephen Temperley, who is also the playwright (his delightful Souvenir made a BTF stop on its way to Broadway last summer and a new play, The Pilgrim Papers will be at BTF's Unicorn next month) and Bob Jaffee, another double hat wearer (he adapted and starred in a Beckett anthology and then you go on a few BTF seasons ago). Ron Bagden, an actor I've seen and admired elsewhere, seems under used as the only member of the court who sees Mozart as a breath of fresh air but does little to help him.

Unfortunately, there are times when everyone seems to spend too much time standing around (okay, I know that's what people in this kind of setup do, but in this case it tends to make an already overly long play seem even longer). However, whenever things tend to move at a too leisurely pace, along comes the gossipy two-man chorus known as Venticilli 1 (Tom Story ) and Venticilli 2 (James Barry) with another "I can't believe it" sequence to enliven things -- not to mention, to remind you that it's gossip not hard historical evidence that drives Shaffer's assumptions about what happened between these composers.

A not to be overlooked star contributor to this production is Matthew E. Adelson. His subtle lighting at one point creates an unforgettable dual vision of the two composers, with Mozart's shadow appearing to eradicate Salieri's.

If Amadeus leaves you yearning for a full evening of Mozart, you don't have far to go or long to wait. On July 5th, the Berkshire Opera Company (413-442-9953) is presenting a one night Mozart Birthday celebration at the Mahawe Performing Arts center, featuring local diva Maureen O'Flynn and others.

To read my review of the 1999 Broadway production of Amadeus go here . Finally, a trivia question: Who played Salieri's prize pupil Katherina Cavalieri in the movie version? Answer: Christine Ebersole, the same Christine whose WOW performance in Grey Gardens, helped to propel this musical adaptation of the documentary about two impoverished, quirky Jackie Kennedy cousins to a Broadway booking for next fall.

Amadeus br> Playwright: Peter Shaffer
Director: Eric Hill Cast: Jonathan Epstein as Antonio Salieri and Randy Harrison as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Also Ron Bagden as Baron Gottfried van Swieten, James Barry as Venticelli One, Tara Franklin as Constanze Weber, Walter Hudson as Emperor Joseph II, Bob Jaffe as Count Johann Kilian von Strack, Tom Story as Venticelli Two and Stephen Temperley as Count Franz Orsini-Rosenberg
Set Design: Karl Eigsti
Costume Design: Olivera Gajic
Lighting Designer: Matthew E. Adelson
Sound Design: Nathan Leigh
Movement Direction: Eric Hill
Additional Movement: Isadora Wolfe
Running Time: Approximately 3 hours with an intermission
Main Stage, Berkshire Theatre Festival, Stockbridge, MA 413-298-5576 or vwww.berkshiretheatre.org
From June 20 to July 8; opening June 23.
Monday through Saturday evenings at 8pm with matinees at 2pm on Thursdays and Saturdays.
Tickets: $37 to $64. Students with valid ID receive fifty percent discount.
Reviewed by Elyse Sommer based on June 23rd press opening.

*******

Review by Seth Rogovoy, critic-at-large, Berkshire Living


AMADEUS by Peter Shaffer
June 20-July 8

Directed by Eric Hill
Starring Jonathan Epstein as Salieri and Randy Harrison as Mozart

rogovoy.com/news1208.html


The Berkshire Theatre Festival kicks off its 2006 Main Stage season
with a bang with a most appropriate production of AMADEUS in this
250th anniversary year of Mozart's birth. But more than that, the
Peter Shaffer play celebrates the art of theater itself, and is given
a production that emphasizes the theatrical conceit, the complicity
between the audience and the actors, and underlines the themes of the
play itself -- the notion of creativity as a spiritual undertaking or
gift.

These are themes that were closely aligned to those explored in last
year's BTF production of EQUUS, also by Shaffer and also featuring
Randy Harrison, but here they are forefronted in the staging,
lighting, costumes, and Shaffer's very neo-Brechtian sсript.

Fortunately, any awkwardness brought about by Shaffer's clunky
efforts to implicate the audience in the play's action are smoothed
over and even made graceful by the stellar cast and crew assembled
for this production. The lion's share of the credit goes to Jonathan
Epstein, whose commanding, dynamic presence and maturity is tailor-
made for the role of the envious Salieri, the court composer who at
any other time would have been considered a top-notch artist, but in
comparison to the upstart prodigy Mozart is destined to be seen, by
others and most heartbreakingly by himself, as a professional
mediocrity.

Thus is Salieri plunged into anguish and torment, railing largely
against the God he believed in but whom he now curses.

In spite of the name of this play, the story is Salieri's, and
Salieri himself tells it. The entire play, in fact, is framed by
Salieri's direct address to the audience, breaking the fourth wall,
acknowledging that what is about to take place is a play, even to the
point of having the house lights turned on -- just one of many times
throughout the evening that Matthew E. Adelson's evocative lighting
design does as much as any other element to aid the telling of the
story.

From the beginning the drama is heightened by the delayed entrance of
Mozart, whom we keep hearing about but don't meet until nearly a half
hour into the play. When we finally meet him, it's very much through
Salieri's eyes, eavesdropping on a salacious, scatalogical tryst he's
having with his wife-to-be. Those familiar with Timothy Hulce's
portrayal of Mozart in the film version of AMADEUS will recognize
many of the same behevioral tics and characteristics -- the high-
pitched squeal of delighted laughter, the obsession with flatulence
and elimination -- but Randy Harrison puts his own stamp on the
characterization of Mozart, as an outwardly devilish, fun-loving
individualist who sees through so much of the hypocrtical formality
of the old feudal order in its waning days. That same impulse to
overthrow the old order, to shake things up, runs through his music,
we will learn.

After observing Mozart up close, Salieri concludes that "goodness is
nothing in the furnace of art," and thus rids himself of his self-
imposed virtue in a sort of Faustian attempt to gain prominence
through other means. The lighting grows dark and moody as Mozart's
fortunes wane while Salieri's wax, seemingly succeeding at having
gained through deceit and manipulation what he could not by other
more honest means.

Epstein's challenge is complicated, as he needs to go back and forth
from narrating the story as an elderly mjan at the end of his life --
maybe at the end of his rope -- and then revert to acting in the
moment, learning what it is that we have already seen him know. Few
actors could have pulled this off with such commanding authority, and
it's hard to imagine a single performance later this season rising to
the level of Epstein's.

Harrison hits all the right notes as the exuberant, insouciant
Mozart. His is a very outward-based performance, which works for the
most part, as the sсript emphasizes the brash outwardness of his
character and relies on our knowledge of his music to convince of his
inner genius. The two were at odds in the second half, however, when
Harrison is given a big speech about the role of opera and music,
it's a funny and dynamic speech, but also a serious one, and here was
the moment when we could have been given a glimpse into the inner,
deeper Mozart, but Harrison came up short, seeming a little
unconvincing, or rather, unconvinced in his internal commitment to
what he was saying. One can easily imagine, however, that over the
course of the run of the play Harrison will grow more comfortable
with this soliloquy, and find the inner depths that as of opening
night were still elusive to the actor as well as the audience.

The supporting cast also hit all the right notes, led by Walter
Hudson's pitch-perfect, clueless ruler, Joseph II. His sycophantic
court were all duly servile yet each brought something unique to
their roles.

The play looked and sounded terrific (kudos also to sound designer
Nathan Leigh), and it's hard to lose with an evening of Mozart
brought to life by characters from his time. This most theatrical of
plays, a musical without music, a theater work about art and
creativity, sets the bar high for the rest of BTF's mainstage season,
as well as that of all the Berkshire summer theater festivals.

BTF's AMADEUS is an incredibly entertaining, funny, musical night at
the theater that reminds us why we need theater to answer the most
important questions about how we live our lives.

--Seth Rogovoy, Berkshire Living, critic-at-large

*******


variety.com
Amadeus
By FRANK RIZZO


www.variety.com/review/VE1117930933?categoryid=...
(Berkshire Theater Festival, Stockbridge, Mass.; 415 seats; $64 top)

A Berkshire Theater Festival presentation of a play in two acts by
Peter Shaffer. Directed by Eric Hill.

Antonio Salieri - Jonathan Epstein
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Randy Harrison
Constanze Weber - Tara Franklin
Joseph II - Walter Hudson
Baron van Swieten - Ron Bagden
Count von Strack - Bob Jaffe
Count Orsini-Rosenberg - Stephen Temperly
Venticelli One - Tom Story
Venticelli Two - James Barry


You would think that, faced with a choice between a genius composer
who speaks for God and a musical hack, there would be no contest. But
Peter Shaffer's "Amadeus" stacks the deck, giving his protagonist
Antonio Salieri the irresistibility of an ordinary Everyman evolving
into evil. Jonathan Epstein's perf is as delicious as the brandied
chestnuts his character savors in this summer season opener in the
Massachusetts Berkshires.
It may be the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth, but it's Salieri
Day in Stockbridge in this sharp and stylish production, helmed by
Eric Hill. At the center of it all is Epstein's narrator-protagonist,
a devout, hard-working and generous man who made it to the position
of Viennese court composer.

When upstart prodigy Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Randy Harrison) arrives
on the scene,his staggering musical gifts are evident only to
Salieri, who in recognizing Mozart's greatness bitterly realizes his
own mediocrity.

Epstein displays all the icy charm of a compassionate conservative,
all the cold-hearted management skills of a corporate climber, all
the cool PR know-how to seemingly support while actually stifling the
new kid on the block. Salieri's piety turns poisonous as he works
behind the scenes to keep Mozart down, manipulating the tone-deaf
courtiers and the simpleton emperor (marvelously played by Walter
Hudson). Though Salieri fails at seducing the composer's young wife
(Tara Franklin), he succeeds with priest-like guile in playing Mozart
like a Stradivarius.

After starring in Berkshire Theater Festival's "Equus" last year,
Harrison returns with another Shaffer battle between man and his
god/gods, giving Mozart a vibrant physicality, energy and joy. The
virtuosity is so overwhelming it cannot be contained in his body:
Harrison jumps, skips, kicks and practically levitates onstage as he
gets carried away with his music -- as well as his libido.

But Harrison's scatological man-child is oddly endearing, too. He is
playful more than petulant, passionate about music (even if it is
just his own), with a chastened boy's regret in knowing he has gone
too far. His second-act decline is rich in emotional detail, with
just the right modulated sparks from his former self to buoy his last
gasps of genius.

Shaffer's highly theatrical and confessional conceit provides one
juicy scene after another and remains engaging for the audience.

But just as Mozart was criticized by the emperor for having "too many
notes," Shaffer's melodramedy -- especially in act two -- suffers
from having too many words, or at least repeating its themes,
detailing court history and chronicling Mozart's many falls to a
fault with one aria after another. The puckish coda, however, offers
the right grace note for the play.

Production values are enviable for a summer staging, with veteran
designer Karl Eigsti's handsome set serving the play as well as the
period with a smart framing device, enhanced by Matthew E. Adelson's
lighting that illuminates the court's splendor as well as its shadowy
intrigues. Olivera Gajic's costumes don't scrimp on the petticoats,
ruffles and wigs.

Only the thin sound system undercuts the need to experience the
grandeur and beauty of the music at its fullest.

Sets, Karl Eigsti; costumes, Olivera Gajic; lighting, Matthew E.
Adelson; sound, Nathan Leigh; production stage manager, Jason
Hindelang. Opened June 23, 2006. Reviewed June 24. Runs through July
8. Running time: 3 HOURS.

With: Robin E. Cannon, Travis G. Daly, Joshua Davis, Aaron Costa
Ganis, Mac Morris, Sara Oliva, Meg Wieder.


******

'Amadeus'
Genius and the voice of God
Theater Review, By Jeffrey Borak Berkshire Eagle Staff
Tuesday, June 27


www.berkshireeagle.com/fastsearch/ci_3985342

STOCKBRIDGE — At the age of 16, Antonio Salieri — as posited by Peter
Shaffer in his play "Amadeus," which is opening Berkshire Theatre
Festival's 78th season in theatrically and intellectually lush
fashion — strikes a bargain with God. In return for making him a
composer and granting him "sufficient fame to enjoy it," Salieri
pledges to live a virtuous and compassionate life and to honor God
with his own music. The very next day, an opportunity presents itself
out of the blue. Interpreting this opportunity as God's response,
Salieri sets off to Vienna to study music. He eventually catches the
favor of Emperor Joseph II and rises to popularity and prominence in
the court, where he becomes Court Composer and, eventually,
Kapellmeister.
At the same time Salieri arrives in Vienna to begin his studies, a 10-
year-old prodigy named Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is traveling through
Europe playing, composing, gathering a reputation which precedes him
as he makes his way to Vienna.

For Salieri, music is a means to an end, a service.

"We were learned servants," Salieri says of this peers. "And we used
our learning to celebrate average men's lives. We took unremarkable
men ... and sacramentalized their mediocrity."

Salieri (Jonathan Epstein) sets out to keep his pledge to God. He
tutors, he composes music that is workmanlike, mediocre, as ordinary
and average as the audience his music is meant to serve. But when
Salieri hears Mozart's music for the first time, he realizes that God
has not kept faith with him. Salieri hears God's voice in Mozart's
music. He is the only one in Joseph's court who understands the
genius of Mozart's work and finds it impossible that God would create
such genius in a man as reckless, foul and raw as Mozart.

Where Salieri is measured, reasoned, dutiful, someone who plays by
the rules, Mozart is pure passion — impetuous, impulsive, childish as
well as childlike, scatalogical in his language, a libertine. But his
artistic soul ...

"I bet you that's how God hears the world," Mozart says with the fire
of discovery. "Millions of sounds ascending all at once and mixing in
His ear to become an unending music, unimaginable to us.

"That's our job ... we composers, to combine the inner minds of him
and him and him, and her and her — the thoughts of chambermaids and
Court Composers, and turn the audience into God."

Betrayed by God, Salieri decides to block God on earth by using his
influence to block Mozart in the emperor's court and destroy him.

"Amadeus" is, in many ways, a lumbering, cumbersome work, especially
as it moves deep into its second act. But in the hands of Epstein,
Harrison, and director Eric Hill, "Amadeus" is as richly entertaining
as it is thought provoking.

Hill's direction is focused and, despite this play's layers, lean.
His production flows with cinematic ease and balletic grace. This is
a study in light and dark; manners and mannerism, on the one hand,
raw passion and boundary-breaking on the other.

Hill has placed Epstein and Harrison at the center of a fine ensemble
of young artists and BTF veterans — chief among them, Tara Franklin
as Mozart's wife, Constanze, Walter Hudson as the Emperor Joseph II,
Stephen Temperley as Count Franz Orsini-Rosenberg, director of the
Imperial Opera, and James Barry as one of the two Venticelli who
attend Salieri and feed his angst ... for a price.

As Mozart, Harrison more than rises to Shaffer's occasion in a richly
passionate, often touching portrayal that knows its boundaries even
when Mozart does not.

Epstein commands respect even when he is at less than peak form.
Here, however, he is in full command of his art and his craft in a
role for which he clearly seems to have been destined. His shifts in
Salieri's age are smoothly achieved — a seamless shift in timbre, his
physical rhythm (never have I seen Epstein so nimble on stage).
Sometimes the shift is in no more than a breath.

Spitting fury and contempt, Epstein's Salieri is self-protective,
sardonic, bitter. He is hobbled by a complex blend of confusion,
envy, admiration, and resentment.

Salieri is a man of modest and mediocre musical talents, a country
Catholic ill-equipped to deal with the nuances of the court. At the
same time, he is a man of wit whose face-to-face encounter with his
mediocrity is as affecting and poignant as it is absurd and laughable.

Salieri might well have appreciated the irony. His mediocrity shines
in Epstein's prodigious talent.

*******

Boston Globe STAGE REVIEW
Command performance
A mesmerizing Salieri shines in 'Amadeus'
By Louise Kennedy, Globe Staff | June 30, 2006


STOCKBRIDGE -- If you're anything like me, you looked at the opening
title for Berkshire Theatre Festival's mainstage season and thought,
``Hmm, `Amadeus.' Do I really need to see that again?" Well, yes, you
do. First of all, Eric Hill's beautifully conceived and brilliantly
executed production of Peter Shaffer's Tony-winning play provides
three hours of purely theatrical experience. The effects it achieves
will be new to those who know ``Amadeus" only from the 1984 film, for
they are ones that only live theater can give: the effortless flow of
idea and movement, the synthesis of live speech and living image, the
old-fashioned magic of people making a story breathe.
Hill uses Karl Eigsti's elegant set to maximum effect, one moment
arranging artful tableaux of sumptuously costumed Viennese courtiers
within a giant gilt frame, the next setting the characters whirling
through a central space defined by faux-stone columns, and the next
shrinking the focus down to a single figure crouched in a chair. All
of this is aided immeasurably by Matthew E. Adelson's complex but
unostentatious lighting, with its virtuosic use of color, intensity,
and shadow to lead our eyes exactly where Hill wants them to go.

Mostly, where they go is to the central figure: not Mozart, though
Randy Harrison plays him with wonderfully elfin vulgarity and vigor,
but Jonathan Epstein's towering portrayal of Antonio Salieri, the
``patron saint of mediocrity" whose envy and fury at God's apparent
favoring of his rival composer are Shaffer's chief concern. If for
nothing else, this ``Amadeus" was worth staging as a showcase for
Epstein's absolute mastery of his art.

The fascinating question, as you watch him use every modulation of
voice and every variation of facial expression at his considerable
command, is how someone can be at once so utterly theatrical and
utterly persuasive. Epstein's Salieri is not ``realistic"; he speaks
theatrical language, uses theatrical gestures, takes greedy theatrical
bites of a sticky theatrical pastry. His every sniff is staged. And
yet he is completely, convincingly real. By the top of the second act,
when Salieri says, ``You must understand me, not forgive," the only
possible response is , ``Yes, we do."

All this leaves aside the old issue of whether Shaffer played too fast
and loose with musical history in painting Mozart as a potty-mouthed
child and Salieri as a malignant manipulator. I'd have to guess that
he did, but I'd also have to say that, watching Epstein and Harrison
playing off each other and the rest of the excellent cast, I didn't
much care.

These are Shaffer's Mozart and Salieri, not history's, and what they
may fail to tell us about historical truth they more than make up for
in emotional and moral truth.

To see the play of emotions across Epstein's face as Salieri hears
Mozart's music for the first time is to sense the torments of
aesthetic ecstasy, professional jealousy, and personal despair that
this merely competent composer must have felt in the presence of raw
genius. ``Agonizing delight," Shaffer has him call it later, and we nod.

In every quivering smile that becomes a sneer, every tear concealed by
a scowl, every rage and whisper and croaking prayer, Epstein has
already shown us all the depths of agony, and of delight, that
``Amadeus" wants us to know.

*******

Metroland Magazine (Albany, NY) June 29, 2006
The Tragic Touch By Ralph Hammann




metroland.net/back_issues/vol29_no26/theater.ht...

Amadeus

By Peter Shaffer, directed by Eric Hill

Berkshire Theatre Festival, through July 8

Last year in a review of the Berkshire Theatre Festival's production
of Peter Shaffer's Equus, directed by Scott Schwartz, I wrote, "It
would have been exciting to see what vigorous direction Eric Hill
might have brought to this piece, which is clearly not ideal stomping
ground for Schwartz." The answer is that the BTF's former flirtation
with Shaffer has become romance under Hill's sure-footed direction.

As in that earlier play, Shaffer is again trying to find a modern
means of locating the tragic forces in a world where the Gods have
become the gods and man's epic struggles with them have been
supplanted by less- cathartic battles with computer freezes and
heating bills. It has been argued that tragedy, in the classic sense,
is dead in the modern world. Irony, absurdity, leaders like George
Bush and bad productions of Shakespeare would seem to have dealt the
mortal blows. Fortunately though, writers like Arthur Miller and
Shaffer have kept the tragic sense alive even when, in the case of
Amadeus, it is couched in a melodrama.

As in Equus, Shaffer (like Miller) is concerned with the plight of
rather-more- common beings than the giants of Sophocles. Amadeus
takes its title from one of its principle characters, Wolfgang
Amadeus Mozart, but its true protagonist is Antonio Salieri, musical
advisor to Frederick II, emperor of Austria. Until Mozart bursts into
the Viennese court, it is Salieri who is the star composer despite
the fact that his music is at the ochre end of mediocre. However,
whatever talent he lacks as a composer, Shaffer's Salieri is cursed
with a superb musical ear that makes him both recognize and resent
Mozart's genius. Worsening Salieri's situation is Mozart's childish
and frequently coarse behavior. To be in the company of an artist who
is so gifted and uncouth, Salieri takes personally as an insult from
God.

The compelling action of the play is Salieri's attempt to redress God
by destroying Mozart. But Salieri is not a simple villain; he has a
conscience, and therein lies the tragedy - if the production has a
strong Salieri. It is little surprise that the BTF strikes no false
notes with Jonathan Epstein in that role. Epstein rises to the
challenge of playing the villainous and self-tormented character just
as the audience rises in appreciation of this consummate actors'
gifts.

What does surprise is that Epstein is not thrilling in the role.
While far better than F. Murray Abraham in the egregious, watered-
down film version, Epstein doesn't plumb the depths nor find the
majesty that David Suchet did in the 2000 Broadway revival. Where
Suchet commanded the stage and subtly inhabited Salieri, Epstein
holds the stage in a performance that seems a bit studied at times.

What also surprises in Eric Hill's customary vital direction is a
merciful shift in how Mozart is presented. With Randy Harrison in the
role, we are finally given a Mozart who, despite his vulgarities, is
likeable, charming and believable. While the childish laugh (that
became a trademark of all the Mozarts I have seen portrayed in
Amadeus) is still there, it is silly without becoming caricaturishly
annoying. Even though his Mozart speaks most of the same words as
actors before him, Harrison makes us both hear and feel them. And
with a more dimensional Mozart, Salieri's action has far more
consequence. Here he not only destroys a musical genius, but also a
flesh-and-blood man as opposed to a braying jackass begging to be put
out of our misery.

From Tara Franklin's comely Constanze Weber to Walter Hudson's obtuse
Emperor to Bob Jaffe's angular Count, the supporting cast is
uniformly strong and, courtesy of Olivera Gajic's sumptuous costumes,
variedly colorful. Karl Eigsti's appropriately heavy set is lit
perhaps a bit too brightly by Matthew E. Alderson and makes too
frequent use of fully opening and closing white curtains.

******

Back Stage The Actor's Resource
Review: 'Amadeus'
July 06, 2006 By Michael Eck


www.backstage.com/bso/esearch/article_display.j...

Antonio Salieri, if we believe playwright Peter Shaffer, yearned for
immortality. And he got it -- just not on his own terms.

Jonathan Epstein, as Salieri in the Berkshire Theatre Festival
production of Shaffer's Amadeus, plays this paragon of mediocrity, the
man who may have murdered Mozart, as a towering figure -- a
characterization in keeping with Shaffer's vision of Salieri as a man
at war with heaven. "My quarrel was not with Mozart, but with God,"
the character explains.

His portrayal is also flat-out brilliant. Epstein has spent many years
ensconced in the Berkshires at Shakespeare & Company, but his recent
work with BTF has allowed him to explore a greater variety of roles,
and he's clearly relishing the challenge. He opens the play in a
wheelchair, a tired old man raging at time and history. But he is
transformed as he steps back a few years to find himself at the court
of Austria's Joseph II, seemingly on trial, with his belabored
compositions being judged against the shimmering elegance even of
Mozart's tossed-off ditties. Epstein dons a wig to become the younger
Salieri, in full view of the audience, but it's not simply a change of
costume. It's a profound metamorphosis, and the actor telegraphs it
with a richly pregnant, magnificently silent pause. As Salieri,
Epstein finds all the beauty the composer was striving for but missing.

There are other people onstage in Amadeus, but to lesser effect. Queer
as Folk star Randy Harrison fares much better as Mozart than he did as
Alan Strang in BTF's 2005 production of Shaffer's Equus. But even
though his young Mozart is randy as a goat and smug as a genius, the
performance still pales. Harrison catches the character's irreverence
but not his wit. In supporting roles, Tara Franklin is strong as
Mozart's wife, Constanze; Ron Bagden is appropriately dour as Baron
Gottfried van Swieten; and Walter Hudson is foppish and delightfully
over the top as the emperor.

Amadeus is very well directed by Eric Hill. His plentiful work at BTF
has been hit-or-miss, but it is never less than invested and
adventurous. He makes the play a complete sensory experience from the
first beat, exploiting the natural tension of the sсript in the process.


Karl Eigsti's set is a stagy affair that suggests the opera houses of
the era while feeling distinctly modern, with neon surrounding the
picture frame that cradles the ensemble. But Matthew E. Adelson's
lights and Nathan Leigh's sound are more central to Hill's telling.
Often the designers are Epstein's real co-stars. In a scene in which
Salieri succumbs to the raw beauty of Mozart's music despite his
hatred for all the insouciant composer represents, Epstein is silent,
standing in dim light as the music flows around him. No words are
spoken, but so much is said.

Amadeus runs June 23-July 8 at the Berkshire Theatre Festival, Main
Street, Stockbridge, Mass. Tickets: [phone]. Website:
www.berkshiretheatre.org.

*******

Admirable 'Amadeus' at Berkshire Festival
By Chesley Plemmons NEWS-TIMES THEATER CRITIC (Danbury, CT)
Published 01:00 a.m., Sunday, July 2, 2006



www.newstimes.com/news/article/Admirable-Amadeu...

If God is the villain, who could possibly be the hero?
In Peter Shaffer's 1980 Tony Award-winning drama, "Amadeus," 18th
century composer Antonio Salieri claims the title.
How could he, a devout musician, sworn to God's allegiance to write
music to enrich the soul, have been passed over by the Almighty in
favor of the vulgar, libertine Mozart?
Shaffer's speculative, provocative and thoroughly engrossing drama is
the season opener on the Main Stage at the Berkshire Festival Theatre
in Stockbridge, Mass., and I haven't seen a more riveting production
of this duel between genius and mediocrity since the Broadway
original.
Shaffer's heady mix of fact and dramatic fantasy suggests that
Salieri was wounded not so much by Mozart's superior musical talent
as by his assumption God had chosen someone he considered morally
inferior to himself on which to bestow the chance gift of brilliant
spontaneity.
His renouncing of his vows to God and his obsession with destroying
Mozart becomes a poison that infiltrates not only his life but that
of the music world of Vienna.
The play opens with the infirm Salieri, a patient in an asylum.
Rumors hiss throughout the city that he has confessed to complicity
in the death of Mozart.

Did he poison the gifted composer or was he simply trying to link his
name forever to someone greater than himself? In what he says are his
last hours, Salieri gives us his version of what happened - believe
it or not.
Paralleling the play's two levels between veteran and newcomer, the
festival production boasts two most commendable actors in the roles
of Salieri and Mozart.
In perhaps his most brilliant performance - I've seen him triumph
repeatedly over the years as one of the pillars of the nearby
Shakespeare & Company - Jonathan Epstein makes Salieri a moral
chameleon with whom we can sympathize, but are yet repulsed by.
Randy Harrison, who made a striking debut in last season's "Equus"
here, demonstrates again that he is a disciplined, versatile actor.
His Mozart is rude, unbridled, yet aware of the gift he has been
given: "I am a vulgar man - but my music is not."
Audiences today are probably going to be just as shocked as they were
a quarter of a century ago with Shaffer's references to the young
composer's apparent fondness for the scatological.
The festival production is handsome to the nines, with elegant
costumes by Olivera Gajic and period-evoking sets by Karl Eigsti that
have the look of an Ivory Merchant film brought to life.
Eric Hill is the director and he never let the evening slip into the
doldrums of swooping costume drama. Among the many in his well-cast
ensemble, I particularly admired the steely performance by Tara
Franklin as Mozart's wife, Constanza; Walter Hudson's as the brighter-
than-given-credit-for Joseph II, and Ron Bagden as Mozart's most
consistent supporter in the back-stabbing royal court.
James Barry and Tom Story were amusing in a variety of roles,
particularly as a pair of street gossips.
"Amadeus," which Mozart took for a nickname, is a Latinized version
of a Greek word that means "Loved by God." Had Salieri understood the
truth of that connection, perhaps he would have let this sleeping
genius lie.

@темы: Amadeus, 2005, theatre

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`Queer As Folk' Star Randy Harrison Embraces `Amadeus' Role; (june 2006)

[moveforever]

`Queer As Folk' Star Randy Harrison Embraces `Amadeus' Role; It Is,
He Says, `Exactly What I Want To Be Doing' from Hartford Courant [June 18, 2006]

Story By FRANK RIZZO COURANT STAFF WRITER| Photos by CLOE POISSON
THE HARTFORD COURANT




Randy Harrison's a long way from Babylon.

For five years Harrison played the blond, boyish and not-so-innocent Justin Taylor in Showtime's "Queer as Folk" series. At the height of the show's media blitz, the actor was named "the post-gay gay icon" by New York Magazine, and fans associated him with his party-boy character who frequented the show's fictitious Pittsburgh gay dance-bar called Babylon.

Harrison publicly smiled at all the attention - and privately cringed.

Since the show's run ended last year (the DVD of the final season was released last month) Harrison has chosen an unexpected career path. Instead of pursuing roles in television and film, where his youth, good looks and "Queer" persona could be exploited, he is working on his stage credits in demanding roles that range from Shakespeare to "Amadeus."

Last summer he played Alan Strang in "Equus" at the Berkshire Theatre Festival, giving a strong and sympathetic performance as the stableboy who blinds six horses. This month he returns to the theater, where he stars in the title role in "Amadeus," playing the driven genius composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The play opens Tuesday and continues through July 8.

At a recent interview in Manhattan's East Village, we meet at a breakfast hangout not far from where Harrison used to live. Wearing jeans, T-shirt, and a slight stubble, the 28-year-old easily blends into the far-from-chic neighborhood where young artists have not yet emerged. He is polite, serious and, one senses, a little wary about the interview.

Talking about growing up wanting to be an actor seems like a safe place to start.

Harrison was born in Nashua, N.H., where the arts - and especially theater - played a big part in his boyhood. He started acting at 7 in school, community shows and summer theater camp in the Catskills at Stagedoor Manor.

When he was 11, Harrison's family moved to the Atlanta suburb of Alpharetta. "But I still consider myself a New Englander," he says.

In high school (it was the time of Kurt Cobain and grunge), he was "that brooding theater guy." He attended the respected theater program at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.

Not being tall, dark and a baritone kept him out of musical leading man roles. "It was easier to push me into the chorus," he says.

But Harrison did not take well to being pushed.

Frustrated, Harrison wanted to show there was life for him beyond musicals. He quit the show he was in during his senior year and, with a few friends, staged his own production of the provocative British drama with the unprintable title, "Shopping and ****ing"

"In a conservatory that strict, it was seen as a radical act," he says. "But I learned that if opportunities aren't coming to you as an actor, you have to make your own opportunities."

As graduation neared, it was clear to Harrison that his future was not going to be in musical theater. When it seemed everyone else in his class signed on with agents looking for the next Broadway musical star, he was passed over. After graduation, he managed to find one agent, but only on a free-lance basis. As he was contemplating his next step - Los Angeles was the leading option - an audition for a new cable series came up, for the role of the 17-year-old Justin.

Within days, he was flying off to begin shooting in Toronto.

"It totally changed my career," he says.


Harrison says he never felt comfortable about the publicity surrounding the TV show, which became notorious for presenting one slice of gay life - sex, drugs and dance clubs.

"[The attention] was all bizarre, and it embarrassed me, for some reason - then and now," he says.

"It's frustrating when people don't look at the work as just the work," he says. "The show was the show, and our job was to act in it, but it sort of became us representing something bigger, and it shouldn't have. It will be easier in the future to look back to see what it all might have meant - if it meant anything else than just being a TV show."

Though `Queer as Folk' rewarded Harrison with exposure and money (he bought a house in Brooklyn), "it became frustrating because it was five years of doing a similar thing, even though my character changed a lot over the series, thank God."

He worked during breaks from the series: in a made-for-TV film, "Bang, Bang, You're Dead"; off-Broadway's "A Letter from Ethel Kennedy"; and as Baq in a 2004 summer run of the Broadway musical "Wicked," where he was seen by director Scott Schwartz, son of the musical's composer.

When Schwartz was casting "Equus" for the Berkshire Theatre Festival, he thought Harrison could be right for the role of the troubled and intense teen.

When Harrison's name was placed on the list, there was an immediate buzz around the office, says the theater's executive director Kate Maguire.

Harrison says his visibility on "Queer as Folk" helped in landing the role. "I don't know if I would have gotten to do `Equus' if I didn't have the guarantee of bringing in a certain amount [of attention] because of `Queer as Folk.' I might not have even got to audition if it wasn't for the show. But I was asked back [for `Amadeus'] because of `Equus,' not because of `Queer as Folk.'"

Maguire says "Amadeus" is selling at double the numbers "where we were last year for this slot and there are nights in this run when you can't get a ticket. It has a lot of do with the title of the play but a lot has to do with Randy because people call and ask for `the Randy Harrison show.' We have people calling from all over the world - Germany, Japan - who are part of his fan club who are coming to see the show."

Maguire calls Harrison "A natural. Talented beyond his age. And an actor who is searching out ways to deepen his talent. While he was part of a TV show which brought him some notoriety, he's also very concerned about taking care of his talent."

Harrison has studied with Anne Bogart and performed with her SITI company, most recently as Lysander (as well as Flute and Cobweb) in "A Midsummer-Night's Dream" at the Alabama Shakespeare Company last month. Bogart says Harrison has "a real appetite for the stage and what is asked for a stage actor. That's just who he is. He's also a theater mensch."

For "Amadeus," he is directed by Eric Hill, Maguire's husband who was director of performance training at UConn's theater program before leaving to head Brandeis University's theater department in 2004. Hill is also a teacher of the Suzuki Method, an acting technique that is physically intensive.

Harrison's seriousness of purpose paired with his choice to downplay his fame, sometimes keeps his at arm's length to outsiders.

"I've never had this conversation with him," says Maguire, "but I get the sense that Randy believes in order to take care of that talent he needs to remain somewhat private." (When asked at the end of the interview about his personal life - he simply says he is involved in a relationship.)

And after "Amadeus?" Did the "Wicked" stint make him think about returning to the musical stage again?

"No, no, I mean ...no." Then he pauses. "I will always love to do musicals - every once in a while. But if you get known for doing primarily musical theater it's really hard to do other things like Shakespeare. It's important to me that I don't get stuck anywhere, to not just being that `Queer as Folk' boy or that musical guy. But it's always a fight and it can be frustrating when you're just trying to prove to people what you're capable of doing.

"My ultimate goal was always - and still is - to do great theater in New York or regionally, mostly non-musical theater. What I'm doing now is exactly what I want to be doing. What I'm trying to do now is do these great roles wherever I can do them with good casts, good directors. Now that I have some financial security - which is an amazing feat to have at my age as an actor - I feel like I can make these choices. I just want to become a better actor every time I act. I want to really challenge myself and I think the only way to do that is on stage."

Contact Frank Rizzo at [email protected].

"Amadeus" begins performances Tuesday and continues through July 8 at the Berkshire Theatre Festival in Stockbridge, Mass. Tickets are $37 to $64. Tickets and information: 413-298-5576,

@темы: Amadeus, 2006, theatre

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LITTLE BITS: Dance between celebrities has twists and turns (May 2006)

[moveforever]

LITTLE BITS: Dance between celebrities has twists and turns by Krista Richmond [May 18, 2006]

crossville-chronicle.com/columns/x960620548/LIT...

LITTLE BITS: Dance between celebrities has twists and turns
By Krista Richmond / Chronicle lifestyles editor

"Hey guys! I'm actually running late. I hope you enjoy the show," he said as he ran past us into the theatre in a blond blur.

And so ended my brush with the fame of Randy Harrison, who starred in Showtime's Queer As Folk and is finishing a run in the Alabama Shakespeare Festival's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. It was a highlight for this fan but also made me wonder about the impact of celebrity journalism.

My friend and co-worker (who introduced me to Queer As Folk) and I traveled to Montgomery to see Randy in the production. And we weren't the only ones. I was sure we wouldn't be — Queer As Folk has a very devoted following — but what did surprise me was that the audience seemed to consist of a significant number of Randy fans.

In fact, we sat next to two other fans, and there were several others scattered around the Festival Stage. If you looked hard enough, you could tell who was there to see the play and who was there to see Randy. The permanent smiles and random giggles gave it away. At one point in the show, Randy's Lysander proposes to his love, Hermia, played by Akiko Aizawa. After Lysander's most heartfelt declaration, Hermia turns the audience and mouths a silent "YES!" with fists in the air. This reaction got several laughs from audience members who were probably thinking they would react the same way.

The same held true for the backstage tour we took the next morning. Out of the approximately 12 people on the tour, the only people not to mention Randy's name directly were an older couple. I think our tour guide figured out why the rest of us were there. I asked him about the Festival's sales. I was curious to find out what kind of financial impact Randy's fans would have. His response (with a knowing grin): "We've done pretty well the last couple of weeks."

After the tour, we stood outside the theatre chatting with some other Randy fans close to the actors' entrance. While we were talking, some of the cast members arrived for that day's matinee, including Randy. That's when the brief but very memorable encounter took place.

Now, I see nothing wrong with what we did. I don't think of it as "stalking." I think of it as "creative autograph seeking." Stalking implies something scary — that's what the girls who scream, cry and profess their undying love do. Creative autograph seeking is merely attempting to meet a celebrity and have something signed.

Therein lies the difference between fans such as myself and fangirls — that contingent of admirers who are almost rabid in their devotion. Fangirls want him. Fans, like me, want him to be happy. For me, getting an autograph from Randy has nothing to do with professing undying love and everything to do with professing my endless gratitude. It would be a small moment in time when I might be able to say, "Thank you. Your work has struck a chord with me, and I wanted you to know how much I appreciate what you do," and have something to remember the auspicious occasion.

The rights of celebrities seem to be discussed endlessly. Of course Mr. Harrison has a right to privacy, and I have absolutely no desire to interfere with those rights. However, I feel that I also have rights as a fan. I have the right to ask politely for an autograph, and he has the right to politely refuse, which is exactly what happened in this situation. We asked nicely and didn't push, and we were given acknowledgement and an explanation.

I think the surroundings are also an important factor. In this case, I was at a theatre supporting the work of Randy Harrison the actor, not in some public place pestering Randy Harrison the person. I, for one, am much more interested in what play he's doing next than who he's dating. Any personal information he chooses to share with his fans is up to him. Anything he keeps to himself is obviously none of my business.

I couldn't help but wonder what kind of impact celebrity journalism has in creating these fangirls. I was struck by just how much information some of them were able to gather. So much of it was traded among the group that, frankly, stalking would have been easy. Fortunately, we are mature fans and not fangirls. While the media might share some of the blame for showering attention on celebrities, I don't believe we are divulging such details as the color of Randy's car or the tags on it.

The way "celebrity" is portrayed in the media is particularly important to me as a journalist. The world of celebrity journalism discredits what I do for a living and the craft that I love, and celebrities tend to put plenty of blame on the media. But not all of us are willing to cause a wreck with a celebrity for a story. And not all of us are hiding in bushes just waiting to get a snapshot of the latest starlet without make-up. Where is the news in that?

To me, there seems to be a simple solution. If the event is significant for some reason, then the media should cover it. If it insignificant, then there is no reason for news coverage. As a responsible journalist, I look at the news value. For example, Angelina Jolie aiding the people of Darfur is newsworthy. Angelina Jolie going to the grocery store with her children is not. And I believe the public knows the difference.

The dance between journalists and celebrities has more twists and turns and ups and downs than a quickstep, but the fact remains that we rely on each other. Celebrities use us to promote their latest ventures, and we use them to sell what we publish and broadcast. The music is still playing in this relationship, so I suppose the only solution is to take another spin around the dance floor and try not to step on each other's toes.

Although this isn't a review, I have to take a moment to say just how good Anne Bogart's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream was. The set, sound and actors combined flawlessly into a truly creative presentation. Randy's Lysander was full of passion, both love and hate, and his performance as Thisbe was charmingly hilarious. I miss seeing him on my television screen, but after seeing him on stage, I understand that it is a natural home for him. And as a fan, he has my best wishes.

Krista Richmond is the lifestyles editor for the Crossville Chronicle. Her column is published periodically.

@темы: 2006, theatre

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Equus reviews (July 2005)

[moveforever]

Harrison gallops well
published July 17, 2005
By Jeffrey Borak

EQUUS. A play in two acts by Peter Shaffer. Directed by Scott Schwartz; scenic designer, Beowulf Boritt; lighting designer, Kevin Adams; costume designer, Jess Goldstein; sound designer, Ray Schilke; movement consultant, Gus Solomons Jr. Through July 23. Eves.: Mon.-Sat. 8. Mats.: Thu., Sat. 2. Berkshire Theatre Festival, Main Stage, Route 102 (Main Street East), Stockbridge. 298-5576; [phone] begin_of_the_skype_highlighting [phone] end_of_the_skype_highlighting. 2 hours 45 minutes

Frank Strang.........................John Curless
Jill Mason.............................Tara Franklin

Alan Strang........................Randy Harrison

Heather Solomon.............Roberta Maxwell

Nurse......................................Jill Michael

Dora Strang..............Pamela Payton-Wright

Dr. Martin Dysart...................Victor Slezak

Harry Dalton...........................Don Sparks

Horseman/Nugget.................Steve Wilson


Horses/Chorus: Richie duPont, Joe Jung, Brad Kilgore, Ryan O'Shaughnessey, Brian Sell


STOCKBRIDGE -- Martin Dysart, the central figure in Peter Shaffer's haunting drama "Equus" -- which is being given a less-than-haunting production at the Berkshire Theatre Festival -- is in trouble.
The fortysomething child psychiatrist is going through a midlife crisis that he is being made to confront head-on.

Dysart has lost touch with his passion. It's as if he views life, his life, from a clinical distance. He spends what leisure time he has at home leafing through books on ancient Greek history, particularly the gods. He spends three weeks a year in Greece on vacations whose well-ordered structure allow Dysart to indulge his interest from a civilized separation.

But what Dysart (Victor Slezak) has managed to bury in an increasing workload hits him square on when he takes on the case of a troubled 17-year-old, Alan Strang (Randy Harrison), who, using a metal spike, has blinded six horses in the stable where he works.

Strang is passion unplugged. He regards the horses in the stable -- one in particular, Nugget, whom he rides, naked, in the dead of night through the fields around the stable -- with religious awe and fear. That worship, Dysart says at one point to a friend, Heather Salomon (Roberta Maxwell), a magistrate who has brought Dysart this case, is Strang's core. "He's a modern citizen for whom society doesn't exist," Strang tells Heather. "He lives one hour every three weeks, howling in a mist.

And after the service kneels to a slave who stands over him obviously and unthrowably his master. Many men have less vital with their wives.

"That boy has known a passion more ferocious than I have felt in any second of my life. ... That's what his stare has been saying to me all this time -- 'At least I galloped. When did you?' I'm jealous, Heather, jealous of Alan Strang."

This issue of the cost of being civilized -- the risk of losing one's passion as the price of the civility society imposes upon us -- is a common theme in Shaffer's writing. It does, however, find its most eloquent and theatrical expression in "Equus." How ironic, then, that in mounting this play at BTF director Scott Schwartz has drained "Equus" of much of its primal theatricality.


From a technical standpoint, this is a terribly busy production -- distractingly so -- with its shifts of scenic elements. Moreover, the rhythm is erratic. Scenes do not flow naturally or easily into one another.

Slezak's Dysart also is somewhat problematic. Slezak has yet to find the balance between Dysart's clinical dispassion on the one hand and the roiling unease on the other. Slezak too often buries Dysart in intonations that smack of grand classical tragedy excess.

With the exception of a notably unsteady Pamela Payton-Wright as Strang's mother, the supporting cast is strong, especially John Curless as Strang's working-class father and Tara Franklin as a young woman whose attraction to Strang proves fateful. And there is Harrison's blazing, go-for-broke performance as the troubled Strang, a youth who is both captivatingly naive and, at the same time, out there at the extreme.

In finding an extreme the production as a whole misses, Harrison clearly gallops.

Jeffrey Borak can be reached at [email protected] or 496-6212.


"...reaches such stunning, visceral, and astounding heights..."

July 15, 2005 performance, reviewed by Frances Benn Hall
Equus at Berkshire Theatre Festival

Victor Slezak, Ryan O'Shaughnessy, Joe Jung,
Randy Harrison and Steve Wilson
Photos by Kevin Sprague

Rarely in our contemporary theatre do we have the opportunity to experience catharsis, that purging of the emotions by pity and fear that leads to exaltation. Good plays, well done, are the staple willingly applauded by Berkshire audiences of summer theatre

But the Berkshire Theatre Festival's production of Peter Shaffer's Equus reaches such stunning, visceral, and astounding heights that it leaves one knowing to have lived through an emotional experience one will always remember with a sort of awe.

Knowing the play well, having seen it performed over the years and having read it with students in my college classroom, I brought my admiration for it to the theatre, along with visualizing a staging along the lines described meticulously by Shafer in his text as to be played out on a bare square stage, surrounded by actors and audience, while a battery of lights shone down on a clinical operation.

What I experience instead was a play in which the six towering white pillars, set at first symmetrically against a black cyclorama were to whirl in and out in countless configurations, realistic and clinical, domestic and tasteless, surreal and limitless, and in the case of the stabled horses, beautiful and poignant.

This setting, designed by Beowulf Boritt, bathed in the lighting of Kevin Adams, and washed by the sounds (gongs as well as music) of Ray Schilke provided the area on which the multiple scenes could unfold.

And then there were the horses, Nugget and his five stable-mates, a chorus of dancers who dancing doubled as stage hands, gloriously horses in the great masks they at times wore, whirling as the great strap-like manes streamed behind them. Choreographer Gus Solomons, Jr. had honed the young strong bodies into strength and beauty. He had taken his "horses" to a local stable to observe the horses’ movements so they could evoke those movements as they performed in Jess Goldstein's costumes — ones in which they could become rider as well as horse — real and unreal.


Peter Shafer's Equus at Berkshire Theatre Festival

Ryan O'Shaughnessy, Joe Jung, Steve Wilson,
Randy Harrison, Victor Slezak, Richie DuPont,
Brian Sell and Brad Kilgore

The plot of this play is well known: a psychiatrist is challenged to search for the reasons a seventeen year-old boy would, in one evening, blind six horses. And his search becomes a detective story (as horror-filled as the search of Oedipus) as he gradually moves to revelation, both of the boy's motivation and of his own life, and of the great sin he feels he is committing in "curing" the boy.

The last line in the play is spoken by the psychiatrist, "There is now in my mouth, this sharp pain and it never comes out." He has made the child "normal" and never again will the child equate equus with god, or know passion.

To bring this off at the level of emotion that envelopes the audience, however, demands strong actors and the stage is full of them. Director Scott Schwartz has cast them well and moves them about with expert timing and consummate skill in his use of space and mood.

Randy Harrison as Alan Strang the distraught teen-ager becomes the character from the moment he chants his first singing commercial. He has experienced an ecstasy the doctor has never been capable of. He hides his secret; his domestic, religious, and sexual conflicts as long as he can, even gleefully reversing the roles and interrogating the doctor, but finally, seduced by a fake "truth pill," he is stripped naked to curl up in his bed — a "normal" young boy who will never again know passion. Every moment is beautifully and convincingly played.

As Martin Dysart, Randy’s unwilling psychiatrist, Victor Slezak is heart-wrenching, in self-deprecating monologs and in confrontations with the boy. Unhappily married, bound to a boring wife, unable to feel his life has had any meaning, he envies the child he must "heal" and try to transform into a life as meaningless as his own. His tragedy is as deep as Alan's and as wrenching in its immediacy. He knows he is lost and accepts his loss with a defeated objectivity.

As Dysart's friend, Roberta Maxwell, who refers Alan from her court to Dysart's reluctant care, unwittingly helps defeat him as she mistakenly urges him to relieve the child from his pain. She is compassionate, convincing, energetic and well cast and though never revealing it, probably loves (and understands) the psychiatrist more than his wife ever has.

Alan's mother, played convincingly, defensively, and movingly by Pamela Payton-Wright, has unwittingly brought both religion and horses into Alan's mind. It was she who read to him of horses, especially the biblical ones, and who, when the religious picture of a Christ replete with many wounds was taken from his wall, helped him replace it with the picture of a horse to whom Alan could transfer his god image. She will never understand what she did, but she did all in ignorant love.

His father played by John Curless is brutal, ignorant, and self-defensive. His puritanical wife's bed drives him to slip off to porno movies. His character is an unsympathetic one and he so plays it. He plays a role early in the tragedy when he drags young Alan off the sea-side horse and sets the stage for much that follows. He inhabits his role convincingly.

Tara Franklin moves winningly through her minor roll of Jill, the girl who by introducing Alan to sex will bring on the tragedy. She undresses with self-confidence and moves in her nudity with grace and no embarrassment. She understands, too late, that her open giving of herself under the all-seeing eyes of horses, has toppled Alan's fragile world.

Nugget (Steve Wilson), chief horse and also a horseman, brings his grace and physique to the horseback scenes. It is to him that Alan kneels. He deserves it as actor as well.

Such praise may seem over-effusive; it is written in euphoria. I went to this play expecting to enjoy it and came away humbled by my simple expectations. I thought I knew the play well, but at this production found myself engulfed in it more deeply than seemed possible. I am grateful for the experience.


variety.com Equus
By FRANK RIZZO

(Berkshire Theater Festival, Stockbridge, Mass.; 415 seats; $58 top)

A Berkshire Theater Festival presentation of a play in two acts by Peter Shaffer. Directed by Scott Schwartz.

Dr. Martin Dysart - Victor Slezak

Alan Strang - Randy Harrison

Frank Strang - John Curless

Dora Strang - Pamela

Payton-Wright Hesther

Salomon - Roberta Maxwell Harry

Dalton - Don Sparks

Jill Mason - Tara Franklin

Horseman/Nugget - Steve Wilson

Nurse - Jill Michael

Mon., Jul. 18, 2005

To make Peter Shaffer's "Equus" more than an unusual why'd-he-do-it, you have to have a leading character compelling enough to make his belabored middle-age angst forgivable. Unfortunately for this summer production in the Massachusetts Berkshires, the doctor (Victor Slezak) is out, but the patient is very much in, with a strong and sympathetic performance by "Queer as Folk's" Randy Harrison.

Slezak is Dr. Dysart, an overworked and overwrought child psychiatrist at a provincial hospital. He's going through personal and professional menopause when he encounters a patient whose extreme case awakens in him untapped primal passion.

But a pedestrian perf depriving the character of intellectual vigor, humor and drive cripples the play's gait. It also highlights the work's shortcomings. Here the lead character is less a searcher of alternative gods than an academic bore who drones on about the glories of antiquities.

The play lacks the punch it had years ago when John Dexter's stark staging and the shocking story line with its Psychology Today patina (not to mention the nudity and expressionistic depictions of studly actors as horses) first dazzled auds.

Now it's more of a classic Brit mystery with well-timed revelations, connect-the-dots motivation and eyebrow-arching exchanges. (When Dysart tells a colleague that he is thinking about giving his patient a placebo, she responds, "You mean a harmless pill?")

There are still nicely crafted parallels between patient and doctor, their shared dreams and nightmares, their sense of displacement, their search for a purer purpose. Shaffer also none-too-subtly compares the rituals, sacrifices and incantations of Christianity -- including its S&M homoeroticism -- with worshipful believers of a decidedly different mythology. But with such an indulgent and uninteresting guide as Dysart, these revelations are more prosaic than profound

However as Alan Strang, the 17-year-old stable boy who inexplicably blinded six horses with a metal spike, the blond and beatific Harrison takes the production on a glorious ride. He clearly breaks down the adolescent obsession that makes unbridled devotion the most dangerous of drugs.

John Curless makes Alan's working-class father contemptible and sad. Pamela Payton-Wright nicely straddles the conflicts of motherly love and religious zeal. Tara Franklin as the self-possessed Jill, with whom Alan has a disastrous sexual encounter, is sharply drawn.

As the magistrate who implores Dysart to take the boy's case, Roberta Maxwell, who played Jill in the original Broadway production, gives a perf both dignified and warm. Steve Wilson provides egalitarian dash as the horseman on the beach and the equestrian panache as the noble stallion Nugget. (Costumer Jess Goldstein's horse heads are handsome and haunting.)

For this proscenium production (Dexter famously staged it in a wooden _ square), designer Beowulf Boritt crowds the stage with rolling tiled pillars and a wall of hay that takes a tumble at the play's violent climax -- sort of the last straw of dramaturgy. That's followed by a blaze of blinding lights that scorches the aud's retinas and diffuses the last soliloquy of the play. Helmer Scott Schwartz also milks Shaffer's ocular symbolism with overly watchful direction wherein everyone seems to be staring at each other.

Sets, Beowulf Boritt; costumes, Jess Goldstein; lighting, Kevin Adams; sound, Ray Schilke; production stage manager, Marjorie Hanneld. Opened, reviewed July 16, 2005. Runs through July 23. Running time: 2 HOURS, 40 MIN.

Date in print: Tue., Jul. 19, 2005, Gotham



rogovoy.com EQUUS

7.19.05
BERKSHIRE THEATRE FESTIVAL
Main Stage
EQUUS by Peter Shaffer
Directed by Scott Schwartz
July 12-23, 2005

EQUUS is not an easy play to produce. At this point in history, it's almost a relic, a somewhat dated piece of psychological drama forever stuck in its era (the 1970s) partly because of its theme and outlook (a post-Aquarian view of Freudian psychology, freedom, and sexual liberation) and partly because of the 1977 film version starring Richard Burton. The play, or at least scenes from it, have already become cliches of acting classes around the world, and as written, the heavy-handed, expressionist symbolism is antiquated and even a little high-school-ish.

All the more reason to give director Scott Schwartz and his design team credit for a well-rounded, compelling production currently running on the Berkshire Theatre Festival's Main Stage. This well-acted, well-executed portrayal avoids some of the pitfalls, such as the play's preachiness, and deals with some of the more problematic technical challenges -- such as the presence onstage of six horses -- with ingenious stagecraft, set design, and choreography.

In fact, there is a lot to praise about this production, including its swift pace (considering it runs nearly three hours with intermission), its sound design (kudos to Ray Schilke for some apt musical choices, especially the Genesis piece at the movie theater), and the acting. As written, EQUUS is something of a melodrama, presenting actors with the great challenge of making grand statements of philosophy seeming like natural speech. The cast of this EQUUS more than meets the challenge, especially Victor Slezak in the unenviable role of Dr. Martin Dysart. At times Slezak seemed to battle with the role, dropping lines and losing his accent, but he came out swinging in the second act and wrestled it, and the audience, to the ground.

Randy Harrison is excellent as Alan Strang, the disturbed teenager who inexplicably blinds six horses. Again, it's a role that's ridden with cliches, but Harrison plays it believably, and handles the challenge of acting the last quarter of the play in flagrante delicto.

The supporting cast, including Pamela Payton-WRight as Alan's prim, religious mother, Tara Franklin, as Alan's would-be girlfriend, Jill, and John Curless, who nearly steals the show in the role of Frank Strang, Alan's tormented, hypocritical father, also deserve kudos.

But mainly, Scott Schwartz deserves the most credit for assembling an intelligent, thoughtful production, one that doesn't shy away from the play's inherent challenges, but rather accepts them for what they are, and looks to reinvent EQUUS for a new age, breathing new life into a play that previously seemed destined for the nostalgia circuit. Not to beat a dead horse, but as Schwartz shows so eloquently and elegantly, there's life in this EQUUS, yet.


A CurtainUp Berkshires Review
Equus
By Elyse Sommer



Victor Slezak as Dr. Martin Dysart & Randy Harrison as Alan Strang
(Photo: Kevin Sprague)
It's been thirty years since Equus, Peter Shaffer's psychological detective story about a teenager and his homo-erotic, spiritual relationship with horses galloped away with the Tony for Best Play as well as a Drama Critics Circle Award. The play, while revived occasionally, has not been done as much as some titles in the canon of trailblazing dramas from the final half of the twentieth century. For one thing the steamy mix of a childhood encounter with a galloping horseman, dysfunctional parenting and its effect on a sensitive youth is daunting to stage. The text is talky, with the protagonist-sleuth called on to memorize super-sized monologues during his dual struggle with his own demons and those that drove his 17-year-old patient Alan Strang to bafflingly blind six horses. That struggle clocks in at a Shakespearean length rather than the currently in favor of a 90-minute nonstop play. The chorus of human equidae is difficult to make believable, and in a less than stellar production can too easily seem ludicrous and cause unintended laughter.

All this said, Berkshire Theatre Festival and director Scott Schwartz deserve our thanks for giving us a chance to revisit this now middle-aged play -- or, for those who know only Sidney Lumet's true-to-the original film adaptation starring Richard Burton and Peter Firth, to experience it live. The on stage nudity no longer shocks. Edward Albee's The Goat: Who Is Sylvia, has brought Shaffer's exploration of normalcy via a mythic and erotically charged animal-human relationship full circle. But even with its softened by time edge and some questionable directorial choices, Equus, remains a heady rumination on parenting, psychiatry and passion.

The BTF production is fortunate to have Victor Slezak to take on the demanding role of the play's narrator and main player, Dr.Martin Dysart. Besides being masterfully at ease with the lengthy chunks of dialogue as well as the emotional demands of the role, Slezak makes the most of the text's metaphoric richness (as in his rueful "There is now, in my mouth, this charp chain. And it never comes out" and the dark the humorous lines with which Shaffer punctuates the text (for example, when he ironically deprecates his calling with "one great thing about being in the adjustment business: you're never short of customers"). Randy Harrison, perhaps best known to most people through TV's Queer as Folk, is not as nuanced an actor as Slezak or as adept at Brit-speak, but he's a perfect physical fit for the other key character, Alan Strang.

Though inspired by a news story about a teenager who had for no apparent reason blinded several horses, Equus is strictly a work of imagination. The crime from the news story is what lands young Alan Strang in an English mental hospital. He's been sent there by Hesther Salomon (her name and the role she plays a nice bit of symbolim), the magistrate in charge of the case, in the hopes that her friend, the respected child psychiatrist Dr. Martin Dysart, can restore his sanity so that he can function as a normal member of society. What makes Alan's deed so unfathomable is that he tended these horses with loving devotion as a weekend stable hand for over a year. Dr. Dysart does manage to unlock the young man's troubled psyche, but something about Alan's spiritual and sexual journey into madness also shines a reflecting light on his own passionless life, which ultimately raises the issue of whether curing Alan will condemn him to a life that can only be lived at a dull, steady pace, never at an emotionally invigorating gallop.


Members of the Equus chorus
(Photo: Kevin Sprague)
Unlike many of today's playwrights who include fairly minimal stage directions in their scripts (perhaps because this suits the current era of director driven theater), Shaffer was very specific in his vision for the play's look, feel and sound. Director Scott Schwartz has opted to depart quite drastically from the original staging concept: a square of wood set on a circle of wood with three benches on which the various members of the cast remain seated and visible throughout. Instead, with the help of set designer Beowulf Boritt, Schwartz has created six tall columns to suggest a horse barn. These columns are moveable and double as walls in the hospital. The upstage wall also changes to fit various scenes. As lit by Kevin Adams, it's all quite dynamic, especially when the stables come alive with the horse figures.

Ultimately, the departure from the playwright's intended simplicity tends to distract from and upstage the drama and diminish the impact of the play's mystic aura and the secondary characters, especially Alan's parents, Dora and Frank Strang -- though I have no complaints about the performances of John Curless as the dominating atheist socialist and Pamela Payton-Wright as the mother whose fanatical religious bent unwittingly lays the foundation for Alan's spiritual confusion. Roberta Maxwell's Hesther (she played Dora in the original production) is somewhat too dispassionate and judge-like as the voice of civility and the sounding board for the increasingly conflicted Dysart.

Tara Franklin is fine in her small but crucial role as the girl who introduces Alan to the stable owner (Don Sparks, in an even smaller but also well-played role) and unwittingly causes the explosion that follows their movie date (that shadowy movie scene is one of play's highlights). The black palette in which Jess Goldstein has dressed and masked the horse chorus smacks a bit of S&M bikers but Richie duPont, Joe Jung, Brad Kilgore, Ryan O'Shaughnesey, Brian Sell are theatrical and plausible; so is Steve Wilson as the God-Horse Nuggett and also the Horseman who gives the toddler Alan a ride at once thrilling and traumatizing.

Even if you end up wishing, as I did, that this were a less busy and showy production, one that trusted Shaffer's words to provide the pyrotechnics, this Equus is well worth seeing, if only for Victor Slezak's bravura performance. A caveat: Now as thirty years ago, this is not for kids or anyone squamish about nudity.

@темы: Equus, 2005, theatre

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In the Berkshires, three productions explore life and love with passion (July 2005)

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In the Berkshires, three productions explore life and love with passion. By Ed Siegel from Boston Globe [July 21, 2005]
articles.boston.com/2005-07-21/news/29221054_1_...


STOCKBRIDGE -- Passion is one of those things in life we all want. Or
do we? What if the price of passion is to lead a life without money,
status, or any of the things we say we'd sacrifice in the name of love
and happiness?

That's the issue facing several characters in three productions in the
Berkshires: A psychiatrist envies his patient's passion in ''Equus,"
Petruchio vies for the heart of Kate in ''The Taming of the Shrew,"
and two couples grope for the gold in ''The Wharton One-Acts."

Peter Shaffer's ''Equus" walks a thin line between profundity and
cliche. A psychiatrist who goes on and on about his jealousy of a
young man who blinded six horses with a metal spike? It can be a bit
much, especially when the actor playing Dr. Dysart, Victor Slezak, is
so unconvincing.

And yet there's so much else that's right with Shaffer's writing and
the Berkshire Theatre Festival production that the 1973 play still
works. In fact, given the rise in turn-of-the-millennium
fundamentalism around the world, the religious issues in ''Equus" seem
fresher today than ever, with true believers of all kinds seeking a
state of rapture and nonbelievers trying to make sense of things in a
dispassionate way.

Randy Harrison, a star of Showtime's ''Queer as Folk," is one of the
primary reasons for BTF's success. As the young man who turns on the
horses he loves, Harrison produces a finely etched portrait of
sublimation. He transfers his passion for Jesus to one for equus and
other sources of ecstasy. What he conveys on an even deeper level is
how innocence can so quickly turn to guilt. His religious mother and
stern father have made stirrings of any sort seem sinful to him.

Dysart is the man assigned to lead him back to ''normalcy" following
his criminal act, but Dysart's passionless life makes him wonder
whether taking away someone else's desire is worth the price.
Unfortunately, Slezak looks and sounds as if he has watched the film
version starring Richard Burton too many times. Burton pulled off the
difficult part; Slezak just seems silly.

Director Scott Schwartz fills the stage with Jungian masks and
expressionistic staging as he explores the Freudian dangers of
repression and transference that Shaffer details in the sсript. The
result is riveting, particularly when the six horsemen prance about
the stage with such sensuality.

@темы: equus, 2005, theatre

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'Equus' is tethered to tame production (July 2005)

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'Equus' is tethered to tame production By Michael Eck [July 20, 2005]

Special to the Times Union
First published: Wednesday, July 20, 2005

STOCKBRIDGE, MASS. -- Seventeen-year-old Alan Strang has blinded six horses, digging at their eyes with a hoof pick.
It's Dr. Martin Dysart's task to determine why; and beyond that to help exorcise the demons that have driven the boy to such desperate action.

Peter Shaffer's play "Equus" created quite a controversy on its premiere in 1973. More than 30 years later, it still retains the power to shock, but not in the production currently on view at Berkshire Theatre Festival.

Director Scott Schwartz has created a show with impressive visuals and a few strong players, but it seems he has forgotten about the raw psychological energies and traumas that drive Shaffer's sсript.

Victor Slezak is solid as Dr. Dysart. He needs to be. He is onstage throughout the entire play.

Slezak portrays Dysart as a man of many layers. Shaffer paints him into a stalled marriage, he puts dreams of ancient Greece in his head and he even makes him envy Strang for the very passions that push him over the edge. Slezak defines each of these traits, despite the fact that he is essentially a very talking head.

It's good work.



The physicality of the play belongs to television actor Randy Harrison who plays Strang.

Harrison is simply not ready for the role.

Throughout much of the first act, he is cardboard. He speaks words without portraying them -- and it's folly to attribute that to the fact that his character has shut down.

In the second act -- in which Strang begins to reveal the reasons behind his actions -- Harrison actually seems afraid of the character. He delivers lines as though he is standing beside himself, and his expressions of desire for the young stable girl, Jill Mason, are wooden and unconvincing.

The fact that so much of "Equus" hinges on Strang's tangle with nature, religion and sexuality -- he is the victim of a messy mix of the Bible, western movies, children's books, English socialism and raging hormones -- is mooted by Harrison's lack of a performance.

The supporting cast includes Tara Franklin as Jill and Roberta Maxwell as magistrate Hesther Salomon; Maxwell, curiously, played Jill in the original Broadway production of the play.

As noted, Schwartz's "Equus" is quite visually striking, benefiting from the combined skills of set designer Beowulf Boritt, costume designer Jess Goldstein, lighting designer Kevin Adams, sound designer Ray Schilke and choreographer Gus Solomons jr. Solomons, who appeared as a spirit in the recent BTF Unicorn production of August Strindberg's "The Father," is responsible for the movements of the half-dozen actors who play the all-important horses.

"Equus" is rarely produced outside of ambitious college venues, so it's worth a look if you've never seen it. But remember, there is much more to Alan Strang than Randy Harrison can muster. Michael Eck is a freelance writer from Albany and a regular contributor to the Times Union.

THEATER REVIEW

'EQUUS'

When/Performance Reviewed: 8 p.m. Tuesday Where: Berkshire Theatre Festival, Main Street, Stockbridge, Mass. Running Time: 2 hours, 40 minutes. One intermission Continues: 8 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday. Matinees, 2 p.m. Thursday and Saturday Tickets: $36-$63 Info: [phone] begin_of_the_skype_highlighting [phone] end_of_the_skype_highlighting, www.berkshiretheatre.org

@темы: equus, 2005, theatre

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From Times Union (Jul 2005)

[moveforever]

`Equus' star prefers the stage to TV work, Talking about life on stage, on television by Steve Barnes from Times Union [July 17, 2005]




`Equus' star prefers the stage to TV work

STEVE BARNES Senior writer
Section: Arts-Events, Page: I1

Date: Sunday, July 17, 2005
Randy Harrison doesn't want to talk about "Queer as Folk."


Although he has co-starred since its inception in the groundbreaking Showtime series about a group of gay men and lesbians in Pittsburgh, Harrison has nothing in particular to say about "QAF." "It's over," he says, the first of many such variants Harrison will utter during a two-hour conversation over sushi in a Great Barrington, Mass., restaurant. He says, with a sense of completion, "I had a wonderful time, but I'm done with it." (He wrapped up shooting "QAF" 's fifth and last season in March; the series finale airs July 31.)


Rather than discussing Justin Taylor, his pretty-boy artist character in "QAF," Harrison is eager to spend time analyzing Alan Strang, the troubled teen he portrays in the Berkshire Theatre Festival's production of the Peter Shaffer drama "Equus." The play runs through Saturday on BTF's main stage in Stockbridge.


First of all, Harrison says, "The play is so much more substantial than the show."


Realizing the magnitude of his understatement, he adds, " `Equus' is one of the most significant English-language plays of the past 30 years. Anybody who hasn't seen it or read it, needs to, if they care at all about theater or literature."


The same cannot be said of "Queer as Folk." Though sociohistorically important as the first American series to focus on fully rounded gay characters almost to the exclusion of heteros, the series amounts only to an adult soap opera. It's more notable for steaminess than thrilling dialogue or thematic profundity.


The shocks of early "QAF" seasons derived primarily from the novelty of seeing, on TV, soft-core sex scenes between two (or more) men; after characters ventured into a bar's backroom for grunt-and-moan sessions with anonymous hunks for the umpteenth time, "QAF" began to feel repetitive.


The play's the thing "Equus," in contrast, even 32 years after its premiere, maintains the power to electrify and challenge audiences. Shaffer's masterpiece uses a horrifying central event to examine our capacity for passion, worship and pain. As the play opens, Alan, Harrison's 17-year-old character, is brought to a mental health facility for treatment by Martin Dysart, a psychiatrist. Alan's crime: blinding six horses with a spike.


Delving into Alan's mind causes Dysart to confront his own - and society's - spiritual atrophy, the result of a consumer culture that tolerates only enervated conformity. Dysart discovers that the boy, who worked part time in the stables where the attack occurred, would take a certain horse out for occasional night rides. Those jaunts functioned as the centerpiece of an elaborate ritual of exaltation constructed by his anguished psyche.


Dysart, who endures a loveless marriage and is vitalized only by carefully planned annual vacations to Greece, says, "That boy has known a passion more ferocious than I have felt in any second of my life. And let me tell you something: I envy it. ... I watch (my wife) knitting, night after night - a woman I haven't kissed in six years - and he stands in the dark for an hour, sucking the sweat off his God's hairy cheek!"


Says Harrison, "The play's about so much, it's hard to talk about it."


Relevant today He instead makes a case for why it matters: "I think the play is so current, maybe even more than when it was written. I look at consumerism and popular culture, I look at the rise of fundamentalist religion, I look at everything happening in our culture, and I think the play is completely relevant today."


He continues, "People today don't connect with things that are greater than what you can buy and what celebrity you're obsessed with, and because of that we're spiritually frustrated. We're entrapped by the shallow (strictures) we place on our lives and our minds."


The richness of the material in "Equus," and the chance to play a character as complex as Alan, prompted Harrison to pursue the role despite the brevity of BTF's run. (Excluding previews, there are just 11 performances.)


"The play is something I've wanted to do forever, and it's performed so rarely that this might be the last time I could do the role," he says.


Harrison is 27 but looks much younger; his being cast to play 17 strains no credulity. (Concidentally, when the actor started on "QAF" his character was also 17, which added some scandal to his character's sizzling sexual initiation.)


The length and difficulty of Alan's role requires the experience of years, says "Equus" director Scott Schwartz.


"Randy's very talented, but he's still had to work very, very hard," says Schwartz, who promises that Harrison will be "marvelous" as Alan. Also in the cast are Victor Slezak, a character actor with two decades' worth of stage and screen credits, as Dysart; and Roberta Maxwell, who is a judge in the current production but originated the role of Jill, Alan's would-be girlfriend, in the original Broadway production of "Equus" three decades ago. (Anthony Hopkins was Broadway's first Dysart, followed by Richard Burton, who also was Dysart in the unfortunate movie version.)


Feeling confident Harrison says the challenges of playing Alan excite rather than intimidate him.


"It's one of the biggest and technically hardest parts I've done onstage, but I feel completely ready to take it on," he says. "I'm old enough, I know the play, I've thought about it, it's been in my subconscious for years, and I feel the confidence to do it."


He was more daunted when he started shooting "Queer as Folk." Mere months after earning his theater degree from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music and moving to New York, Harrison was cast in "Queer as Folk." Although a stage veteran, he had never before worked in front of the camera.


Early in the show's run he watched his performance as Justin in dailies - raw footage of a scene after it's been shot - and in finished episodes. That practice quickly stopped.


"I haven't seen the show in years," Harrison says.


"Pretty quickly I was comfortable with what I was doing, and it was redundant to watch the show. There was so much of the same material - it was so familiar, I'd done it before - that there was no purpose to watching it," he says. "So much of acting, for me, is becoming less self-conscious; to spend an hour a week watching work I did (months before) wasn't helpful to me. I enjoyed the show, enjoyed my work. It's done. I've moved on. I had to move on."


Artistic value These days, he considers himself a New York stage actor, auditioning against thousands of other 20-somethings for desirable roles. He just happens to be semi-famous and in the enviable position, courtesy his "QAF" salary, of being able to buy an apartment and chose parts for their artistic appeal, not just to pay the rent.


"I made more money than I ever expected I would," he says. "I'm lucky. I know it. I never expected to be on television. I thought I'd be a theater actor, work my way up, work my way to Broadway eventually. All of a sudden I'm on TV.


"But now I'm back to auditioning. That's what's important to me," he says. "I don't want to be any more famous than I am. I don't want to be recognized on the street. I don't want to be a leading man in big-budget Hollywood movies. I want to be an actor, primarily on stage, doing challenging, interesting and diverse roles. `Equus' is a good start."



Talking about life on stage, on television
Section: Arts-Events, Page: I4

Date: Sunday, July 17, 2005
Actor Randy Harrison, 27, has played Justin Taylor, a gay artist and part of a group of friends in Pittsburgh, in the Showtime series "Queer as Folk" since 2000. Its fifth and final season, currently airing, concludes July 31. Locally he is co-starring in "Equus," running through next weekend at Berk shire Theatre Festival in Stockbridge, Mass.


On the frank sexuality of "Queer as Folk": "It's fake. People think (filming simulated sex) means more than it does to the actors. What you see in the finished show - that's not anything like what the experience was shooting it. It's funny that (viewers) think that they've seen anything, really. I mean, half the time it's not even me; it's other people's body parts."

On why performing theater in the Berkshires is more artistically rewarding than being on a high-paying TV series broadcast internationally:

"It's a safe environment in which to take risks, and that's something you don't have in television. You just don't. Everything on TV's a time crunch, people are manipulating you to get certain things done, everything is about money and time and saying the line this way because that's what the producer wants."

On performing as a summer-replacement actor in the Broadway musical "Wicked" in 2004:

"I had 11 rehearsals and never did it with the cast (beforehand). I'd done it with the stage manager, and I had one rehearsal with some standbys and some understudies. Then I was making my Broadway debut!"


On the future of the "QAF" cast:

"I think we are all looking forward to distancing ourselves from each other - not in a bad way, just different and apart. It's also a trap to get back together, to work together, too soon. We're going to have to establish ourselves as actors separate from our characters. We won't do anything immediately, but we all respect each other as actors, so I would say, yeah, sometime we'll end up working together again - not collectively but at some point individually."

On being one of the few openly gay actors working on TV:

"It wasn't even a choice, really. I never would have been closeted. It's just absurd to me. And it really doesn't matter. I can't imagine myself pursuing the type of career that my being openly gay would prevent me from having."


On ending up as an unintended spokesman for gay causes:

"I've been asked to comment on so many (gay) issues that I have nothing to say about. As an individual, I do believe in those things, support them, but I'm not a spokesperson. I don't want to be a spokesperson. It's never a position I wanted to be in or asked for. I've gotten definitely way more offers to do appearances to make money for certain (gay) organizations than I have job offers to be an actor, which is terrible."


- Steve Barnes

@темы: 2005

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Randy Harrison: Beyond QAF from Edge Boston (July 2005)

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Randy Harrison: Beyond QAF from Edge Boston [Jul 14, 2005]
www.edgeboston.com/index.php?ch=entertainment&s...

by Robert Nesti
EDGE National Arts & Entertainment Editor
Thursday Jul 14, 2005



Randy Harrison had just moved to New York in the summer of 2000 when he was offered a plum part in what promised to be a controversial new series: 17-year old Justin Taylor in Showtime’s American version of “Queer as Folk.” In a matter of weeks he was filming the series in Toronto (the stand-in for Pittsburgh where the series was set,) and within the year in the media spotlight as the high school student who finds himself involved with that city’s leading hunk, advertising guru Brian Kinney (Gale Harold.) Their incendiary sex scene on the opening episode certainly pushed the envelope even for cable, and help set a pattern that made the series a break-out hit for the cable network long second banana to HBO.

Today the hit show, which has become a gay cultural icon over the past 5 years, is in its final weeks; and Harrison is returning to the stage -- his first love -- this summer as one of the leads in “Equus,” Peter Shaffer’s 1974 play that’s being given a production at the Berkshire Theatre Festival through July 23. The blonde, 28 year old actor may still be thought of as Justin, who evolved from a naive teen in the thrall of the sexually-charged Brian to a gay-smart, independent young adult over the length of the series; but he now hopes to put the series behind him with fresh projects, such as the role of the seemingly adjusted stable boy named Alan Strang who blinds a half-dozen horses for no apparent reason and is sent to be cared for by a psychiatrist, Dr Martin Dysart in a mental hospital.

It was a part he has wanted to play since he first came across the play while attending college a decade ago in Cincinnati, and was able to secure an audition just as “Queer as Folk” was winding down production. What attracted him to it are Alan’s psychological complexities.

“First of all the role is enormously challenging,” he explained last week. “We just had a run through today and I’m about ready to collapse. It’s thoroughly exhausting and challenging in every way -- emotionally, intellectually, and physically. And it’s a great play – it’s one of the great plays of the past 30 years. Its themes are so relevant and substantial and universal; when the opportunity came around, I jumped at it.”

A hit in London and New York (where it ran for more than 1200 performances,) “Equus” is based on a real event, which sparked the imagination of Shaffer who conceived of it as psychological thriller in which the doctor must breakthrough into the boy’s psyche to understand what drove him to commit such a hideous crime.

“In the play the magistrate talks to the doctor telling him that Alan needs to see him because otherwise he’d be demonized by the community and no one would want to help him. He had committed the kind of hideous crime that no one wants to think about with any complexity -- they simply want to label him and put him away.

But as the play develops the doctor is in a dilemma in that if he cures me he feels he’s taking away my individuality by putting me in a different set of shackles. So the question at the center of the play is he helping me to achieve my greatest potential, or simply making me what society thinks as normal? It’s a struggle for him, but in the end he decides to help me because he sees that Alan wants to be helped. But he never really acknowledges if this is the better choice.”

How does Harrison respond to a character who commits such a reprehensible act?

“He’s a difficult guy to relate to, but I personally have to like him. When I prepare for the role, I learn to empathize with him -- putting my self where he is. So I do like him. But I wonder if I encountered him on the street in a certain situation without the knowledge of him I have now that I would. He’s a fascinating character to play, and exhausting. I’m so exhausted after a full day of rehearsal that I can’t do anything else. I’m just not functioning on such a high level at the end of the day because it is so draining. But I don’t bring home any of the baggage from the show because it is just so draining to carry around.”

As he was in virtually every episode of “Queer as Folk,” Harrison will be nude in the play. The difference, though, is that he won’t be doing on film (where, he admits, the highly-charged sex scenes were more technical than erotic, with lots of stopping and starting,) but this time on stage in a love scene with a young woman in the stables.

“I’m very comfortable with it (the on-stage nudity.) I’ve done it before, before “Queer as Folk, and it doesn’t bother me in the least.”

Nor does being one of the few openly gay actors to emerge from the series (along with Peter Paige and Robert Gant.)

“I came out when I was 16 and didn’t think of ever as being an issue. When the show came about I never really thought about it, and I don’t have any regrets about it. Right now I’m looking forward to becoming a working actor again and putting Justin behind me. I love the theater. It’s definitely going to be what I’m focusing on for now. Last summer I did “Wicked,” which was a lot of fun; but I don’t want to focus on musicals. I get much more satisfaction from a role such as Alan.”

Harrison came to maturity with Justin, but he recalls having very little input into his character with whom he didn’t personally identify with. He’s never been a club kid, and when he got the part had to do research on the role by going to such clubs as Splash in New York where he lives.

“Sometimes I would say Justin wouldn’t do that, but more often we would have to buckle down and figure out a way to pull it off because the head writers were also the executive producers, so there wasn’t as much give-and-take in certain situations. It was their show, it was their creation. They wanted it the way they wanted, and it was our job to make it happen.

“And I was very happy to have played the part. Absolutely. I’m glad I’ve been able to help closeted gay teens see that there are not alone in the world.”

As for the future, he’s hasn’t anything planned after “Equus,” but looks forward to returning to New York where he lives and pursuing what may come next.

At the Berkshire Theatre Festival, Main St, Stockbridge through July 23. Performances are Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday at 8 p.m.; Thursday and Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m. Tickets are priced from $43 -- $63, and are available by calling| 413.298.5576.

@темы: 2005

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"QAF" -That's a wrap. (April 2005)

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"QAF" -- That's a wrap, from planetout.com [April 5, 2005]


(перевод на русский moveforever.diary.ru/p184694465.htm)

"QAF" -That's a wrap.

by Charles Kaiser

April 5, 2005


Nothing like it ever happened before on television, and if the anti-obscenity zealots on the FCC get their way, nothing like it will ever happen again.
"Queer as Folk" has offered the rawest view ever of a certain swath of young urban gay life: an 83-episode extravaganza that began with a 29-year-old man running his tongue farther down the backside of a 17-year-old boy than any tongue had ever traveled on American television. Then came the fucking, the meth, underage hustling, wild lesbian lovemaking, occasional gay-bashing and a foul-mouthed waitress (Sharon Gless), who introduced herself by urging her customers to eat at least "some of your protein off your plate."
Late last month it all came to an end forever, as the final scene of the Showtime series was filmed at eight o'clock on a chilly Toronto morning. That night, after everyone had gone home for a nap, there was an intimate cast dinner for 20 in a private dining room in one of Toronto's many underground malls, followed by a wild dancing-wrap party for two hundred the next night at Ultra, a Toronto discotheque. Although the fifth season won't air until May 22, the 83rd and final episode of the revolutionary series is now safely in the can, and cast members are already starting their lives over in Los Angeles, New York or British Columbia.
Five years ago, I was the first reporter on the set. The piece I wrote for New York magazine dubbed the program "The Queerest Show on Earth" (the moniker stuck), and the article told of the nervousness among its producers over whether Showtime would replicate all of the edginess of the British original created by Russell T. Davies. (In the end, the network never flinched.) Almost all the actors were press virgins then -- most of them little-known thespians who had never given an interview in their lives. After I wrote my story, I bonded with several of them, especially Michelle Clunie, who played one of the bombshell lesbians, and her splendid boyfriend, the actor Stewart Bick. So when Michelle invited me back for the final wrap, how could I resist?
I was eager to be part of the long good-bye to a show that did more than any other to bring gay life into the American living room. While big-city critics sometimes panned it, it did more to demystify gay men and lesbians in small towns across America than anything that came before it. And it produced a constant stream of fan letters from gay teenagers, many of whom reported that only after forcing their parents to watch it were they able to come out to them.
It also branded Showtime as something other than an HBO also-ran and paved the way for "The L Word," which was green-lighted during "QAF's" first season.
In the era of Bush and DeLay, the question is whether pay cable will ever again do anything with this much gay sex -- and this much honesty about gay sex.
At the moment, having just flown in from my New York City home, I was more interested in a good meal and some companionship. Friday night I dined with Michelle and her fellow "lesbian," Thea Gill, at Dimmi, a cozy Italian restaurant. Then I dragged them to Church Street, the main gay drag they had mostly avoided during their five years in Toronto, where the show was shot, though it was set in Pittsburgh. Fans mobbed them everywhere, especially at Woody's, the grand-daddy of Toronto gay bars. The two actresses -- who have done almost everything two girls can do together with their clothes off, in front of a movie camera -- were in the throes of separation anxiety.
Although they only play lesbians on television (Thea has been married for 12 years to Brian Richmond, the noted Canadian dramaturge and stage director), they developed an emotional intimacy that sometimes mimicked a romantic relationship. "I've been saying good-bye for the last two weeks," Thea told me over a glass of red wine. "It was difficult doing the last love scene with Michelle -- holding Michelle for the last time; I felt it was the most real we'd ever been. I'm going to miss 'Lindsay' [Thea's character]; part of me is kind of dying with her. Michelle and I are lifelong friends now. Gale [Harold] has been like a bit of a guardian angel for me, a brother to all of us really. They're all my best buddies -- all in different ways."
For everyone involved, from crew to cast, the show was more than a glamorous job: It became a mission. Michelle will "miss the family; I'll miss going there and feeling so ridiculously safe on that set -- as comfortable as we feel in our living room. Dan [Lipman] and Ron [Cowen] [the executive producers and principal writers] are not your typical producers. They're sweethearts, and I think vicariously they had children through 'Queer as Folk.'"
The next night, at the cast dinner, Michelle, Thea and I darted into a side room next door -- and the two of them spontaneously broke out in an amazing a capella duette of "Me and Bobby McGee." That was my favorite moment of the whole weekend -- when I was their audience of one.
The boys were equally impressive. Randy Harrison, the blond "Justin" whom Michelle calls "wise beyond his years," was just 22 and right out of college when I first met him -- and he used my first piece about the show in New York magazine to come out publicly. Peter Paige -- "Emmett" -- was the only other openly gay cast member among the original cast members, although Gale Harold -- "Brian" -- is the most gay-friendly straight man I have ever met.
Randy was grateful for the experience: "Under no other circumstance besides this bizarre job would I have had a chance to learn from such extraordinarily artistic and intelligent people," he said.
But after he demanded (and got) a final hug from Sharon Gless, he was ready to move on: "If you sign a five-year contract, no matter how idyllic the situation, after a few years it's going to feel like a prison ... and it's difficult to feel like a puppet whose literal body is used to make other people a lot more money than you, while the negative repercussions of 'your body as product' continue to invade your privacy, your home and mildly corrode your life." Randy hopes to find sanity, improbably enough, in New York City, where he has just moved into in a new apartment with his boyfriend -- the journalist Simon Dumenco.
Gale Harold, who played Justin's lover, Brian, also felt relieved: "It's good to be done. But it's a little bittersweet to be leaving Canada -- and its more benevolent socialist vibrations."
Scott Lowell, who played "Ted," found the last weeks especially trying -- he spent "night after night ending each night weeping" as he said good-bye to different members of the crew. Dean Armstrong, whose character, "Blake," almost killed Ted in the first season with a drug overdose, was particularly upset at Scott's real-life disappearance: "I was talking with Scott on the phone and he was packing up -- and my heart sank into my stomach," Armstrong said.
Lowell comes out of the show with two big additions to his life: his girlfriend, Claire Sakaki, a Toronto theater producer whom he met on a blind date set up by Peter Paige, and a new house he bought last summer in the Hollywood Hills. As for the public impact of his character, Lowell finds himself getting hit on almost equally by men and women in the street: "I think everyone just wants to take me to the nearest psychiatrist."
The youngest actor on the show is 20-year-old Harris Allan, who played an HIV-positive hustler named Hunter, adopted by "Michael" (Hal Sparks) and "Ben" (Robert Gant). The fan mail that made him the happiest included a note he got from a gay boy who said the show enabled him to come out to his parents, and compliments from former hustlers who found his performance utterly convincing. When he started the show at 17, some of his high school classmates were uncomfortable with the show's explicit content, "but they came around for sure." He is the only cast member who has moved back into his parents' house, with his older brother, in downtown Vancouver. (His mother is also his manager.)
Co-producer Ron Cowen is proud the show lasted for 83 episodes -- longer than "The Sopranos" or even "Sex in the City." "I think we've said everything we wanted to say, about HIV and AIDS; the crystal meth addictions; discrimination; a political climate that's becoming far more conservative and oppressive; gay parenthood; the conflict in the community between the assimilationists and those who want to continue a queer lifestyle, whom Brian represents. I think there's a huge conflict between those two elements right now."
Dan Lipman, Ron's partner in life -- and work -- agreed: "I think we've kept the edge, we've kept the sexuality up; we've kept the tone very much in tact -- the characters are very edgy. The one amazing thing about the experience is that Showtime, through two regimes, has never censored a story or censored a character; they've given us carte blanche for five years. That is a remarkable thing."
After the cast dinner, six of us piled into a Cadillac Brougham stretch, (the chauffeur identified it as a 1994 model, but Gale and I were sure it was from '85, judging from the taillights) and headed for Ted's Collision on College -- "a real bar bar," as Michelle put it. Fortunately, Toronto bars close at 2 a.m., which gave us all just enough time to recover in time for the next night's final, final wrap.
The following evening I met Michelle at her apartment. There were packing boxes everywhere, but there were also 12 ice cubes and one bottle of Chivas Regal. When Thea joined us at 8 p.m. so we could go to the final gathering together, Michelle insisted on dressing her all over again -- to make sure she looked as sexy as possible for her farewells. She draped Thea in a wine-colored Gucci knockoff top (with a large hole exposing her navel) and a necklace with a butterfly made of Swarovski crystals. Michelle gave Thea both of them. "I said keep them -- or the next time I'll see you we'll trade necklaces."
Then it was off to five more hours of dancing and drinking with 200 members of the cast and crew and their significant others. As the DJ cranked up "Sympathy for the Devil," Michelle and Thea began to jitterbug. Everyone crowded around to get a final photo of the golden couple. Until "QAF," Thea had always been slightly afraid of expressing herself through her body. But tonight that feeling was finally gone for good. "I actually learned to fucking dance at that party!" Thea said. "I've never had that sensation before. I feel like my body has freed up!"
The show itself had liberated a whole segment of American life, and the world of television will never be quite the same again.

Charles Kaiser is the author of "The Gay Metropolis" and "1968 in America." He is completing a book about a French family who fought in the Resistance in Paris during World War II.



pictures from the article

@темы: 2005

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"Issues Over the Rainbow". Party 93.1 radio (March 26, 2004)

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Randy Harrison's interview with MarkyG at "Issues Over the Rainbow". Party 93.1 radio [March 26, 2004]





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Marky G: My guest this morning is as handsome in person as he is on television. We've watched him lose his innocence, grow up and become out and proud young man. He's now the hot guy on Showtime's Queer as Folk Randy Harrison, he plays Justin, glad you're here.

Randy: Hello.

MG: You've got so many fans, people love you, and you've given a sense of pride to so many young people that yes, you can come out and become something 'cause you do, you were always involved in something.

Randy: Yeah it's odd though. I mean it's Justin who did it, it's not me. It's the character who's moved people and really affected people's lives and, you know, it's an honor to play him in that people sort of associate me with that, because he's changed a lot of people's lives.

MG: Yeah, and I guess I should be kind of careful to not cross that line because I know that Randy and Justin are very different people..

Randy: Yeah but, you know, people always-- I've been playing this character for four years. I've been in people's homes being Justin for four years, so it's hard for people, it's normal for people not to really differentiate.

MG: Well let's first talk a little about Justin.

Randy: Yeah.

MG: Let's talk about his maturation as a character. He burst onto the scene in season one as this kid like, okay I guess I'm gay, I'm having these feelings, I'm going to go down to the gay part of Pittsburgh..is that an oxymoron or..? *laughs*

Randy: I think there is like one, one, one street; maybe one, there's like one gay bar.

MG: Right exactly, it certainly isn't what we see on Queer as Folk but we love that street, we love that street. So you're standing out there and you run into the infamous Brian Kinney.

Randy: Right.

MG: And the two of you kind of, he's your first hook-up.

Randy: Yeah, he was.

MG: That whole thing, that was a major experience. Talk about first love, I mean maybe you can even mix a little about your own personal life and maybe the life of Justin, how it is to meet that first guy.

Randy: Yeah, my own personal story is nothing like Justin's, but I mean, I think for Justin, at that time, he represented so much. He sort of.. Justin was able to project a fantasy of what he needed this person to be, and Brian is so withholding that, you know, he never had to be proven wrong by a real personality exerting itself, at least at the beginning of their sexual relationship. So it's really convenient for him, and powerful.

MG: Yeah but he knew what he wanted, and he kept going after him.

Randy: Yeah he knew what he wanted, but he didn't even know what Brian was. It was childish, really.

MG: Did it ever bother you that they had kind of set you up with a character that was considerably older than you, and...

Randy: No, no, no.

MG: I guess with playing with Gale, I mean how much could that really bother you, right? Whether it's an actor or as a person.

Randy: Right, no, it never bothered me, but I actually wanted, 'cause Justin in the British series was fifteen, and I wanted to play fifteen. I thought he, Justin should be fifteen at the beginning, but they thought it would be too controversial, I guess.

MG: A lot of people would be astounded to know you're nowhere near seventeen.

Randy: No, never was.

MG: *laughs* You're consider, I what.. how old are you today?

Randy: I'm twenty-six.

MG: Twenty-six. So it was about, you were twenty-five, I guess, twenty-four, twenty-three when you..

Randy: I was twenty-two when we started.

MG: Wow.

Randy: Yeah.

MG: Okay so the two characters meet, and they form this really great relationship that's full of all kinds of problems and...

Randy: It's highly dysfunctional

MG: manipulation

Randy: I mean it's not the greatest thing in the world

MG: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess I should even rephrase it, it is. It's highly dysfunctional

Randy: Yeah.

MG: on your part. You're a schoolboy

Randy: Right.

MG: in high school, you're dealing with all kinds of emotions. And that's something I want to talk about, because a lot of the listeners that are out there today are our younger listeners

Randy: Right.

MG: They're going to high school, they have to deal with the same thing you did, getting beaten up or harassed in school from that fellow classmate, etcetera.

Randy: Right.

MG: What do you say to young people who are going to high school today and dealing with this whole whether to come out or not issue?

Randy: You know what, for me, it was things like this, it was things like this show, it was things like books and music and movies and, I mean, what this show must be that helped comfort me and helped me get through, know that, you know, always know there is a community out there for you. There are people who accept you. You need to try to be strong. It's hard, I feel silly lecturing people, I mean everybody has to go through a different path to figure out how to do it, you know, if they need to get out. It's always really personal.

MG: It's so hard though, when you have to hold those emotions in and you don't allow yourself to be who you are because you're afraid of the outside peer pressure.

Randy: Right. Yeah, yeah, I can't imagine.

MG: Justin is a perfect example. He said, "Screw it, I'm..this is who I am"

Randy: Yeah, he's such a.. I mean I love that about him, and I had a similar experience. It's hard for me to relate just..I couldn't deal with it. I couldn't allow myself to live like that for very long, and you know, was out really early, and was always, found a community where I felt like I could be myself.

MG: We talked a little earlier in another segment about the prom that night. Let's go to Justin for a second, if you can put yourself into Justin's shoes for a minute.

Randy: Okay...

MG: Okay? That prom was so emotional, so beautiful to watch two men, two guys, a young guy go to his prom and be with his significant other, openly, brazingly, emphatically, I could come up with a million other words to describe it, but it was beautiful.

Randy: That's great.

MG: What did you feel when you were doing it? As Justin?

Randy: Justin fe..*laughs* Justin felt, I.... God *laughs again*

MG: I mean come on, you had to have some emotion at the same time, even though it's Randy.

Randy: I mean.

MG: playing Justin.

Randy: It was just, I mean, I was trying to play that Justin was happy his boyfriend was there, you know? He was able to dance with his boyfriend. I don't feel like, at the time, for Justin, he was trying to make a statement. He just wanted to be able to dance with his boyfriend. He wanted him to be there too. Also, you know, that entire season, Brian is completely withholding from Justin, never gives him even an inch, as far as comforting him or making him feel like he's loved, or even respected by him. So, I think a lot of the reason it was so powerful was that it was really the first time that Brian gave Justin any indication that he cared about him in even the slightest way.

MG: And of course we know that Brian had to deal with some really heavy emotions when Justin got gay bashed--

Randy: Right.

MG: Talk about that a minute, and how that felt to have to play a character that, just because he was who he was, right after the gay prom, the most beautiful night in Justin's life, he gets bashed over the head simply because he's gay.

Randy: Right. I mean playing that scene was really easy for me but really hard for Gale, because I mean, I just had to get knocked over the head *laughs*

MG: Yeah.

Randy: And Justin never knew what happened, so I never even had to play that that happened really, I just needed to know when the fake bat was gonna hit me and how fast I had to fall. *laughs*

MG: Well I will say that from my standpoint, in all four seasons, the best acting I saw on the show was his portrayal of emotion, to you.

Randy: Yeah, he's....

MG: When, I mean oh my god, he really, really hit it.

Randy: Gale's fantastic, yeah.

MG: Randy and Justin are very different in life. I know that you embrace yourself as an individual, not necessarily gay or straight. That's important to you, at least from what I've read.

Randy: Oh really?

MG: Oh I'm it's not true?

Randy: No, I mean I say I'm gay, but it gets tedious talking about labels all the time.

MG: Yeah, and I think that's my point

Randy: Yeah, yeah

MG: You want to be recognized as a person, not gay not straight, just...

Randy: It would be nice if someday that was how it was, but it certainly isn't now.

MG: What's your dream? What would you like as a dream? How would you like this world to be?

Randy: *laughs* I couldn't begin to answer that question...

MG: No?

Randy: No!

MG: I mean would you like it to be where everybody's equal? I-- I mean I guess I'm even self-prophecizing but does it get difficult sometime knowing that you're a gay man playing a gay icon in a film like Queer as Folk?

Randy: You know, the only thing that I get frustrated with is if people know I'm gay, the presumptions people have of what I'm going to be, and especially because I'm in Queer as Folk, and Queer as Folk represents ultimately a really small subset of the gay community. So they have a tiny, narrow expectation of what I'm going to be as a human being, you know, and it frustrates me because I have no shame of being gay, but the second I say I'm gay, people expect me to be this very specific thing that I'm not. So I feel like I'm always having to prove people wrong and say, you know, "No, just because I'm that doesn't mean that I'm this, this, this, and this and, you know, it doesn't mean I know what color you should paint your wall." I mean people assume that we're stereotypes and..

MG: Right, right

Randy: I feel like a lot of we're portraying is just making those stereotypes harder and more solidified and confirming a lot of people's worst beliefs about us.
MG: What would people be surprised to learn about Randy Harrison that they might think they know, but he's nothing like that? He's even blushing a little bit here.

Randy: No, no *laughs* I'm just trying to think. I don't know. People always think I listen to club music because Queer as Folk's a clubby show. That's the main one that always happens. I mean people just assume I'm a Justin, so anything that I'm not that Justin is is something that people have wrong about me.

MG: Okay anything you wanna share with us on what's gonna happen this year, just a little tidbit.

Randy: It's a good one. It's a good season, you guys are gonna like it.

MG: Little tidbit, little tidbit.

Randy: There's a lot. Justin has a lot of moves forward career-wise in a way that changes his relationships with the people in the show. Also, a..a really good friend of his gets bashed at the beginning of the season, which brings back a lot of, uh, issues, unresolved issues he had about his own bashing, and there's a lot of drama.

MG: Okay well you can watch Randy Harrison as the very charming, sexy Justin on Queer as Folk. Okay thanks Randy, pleasure having you here.

Randy: Thank you very much, thank you.

перевод qafcollection.diary.ru/p182493110.htm

@темы: 2004

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Season 5 premiere, Out Of The Closet TV (May 2005)

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Season 5 premiere, LA, Out Of The Closet TV [May 18, 2005]




Randy Harrison


Ted: We got Justin from Queer As Folk, Randy Harrison. How are you doing?

Randy: Good, how are you?

Ted: I'm great, I'm Ted from Out of the Closet Tv.

Randy: Good.

Ted: Great job with your character, I mean we've seen you grow up right in front of our eyes.

Randy: I know!

Ted: So what are you thinking going into the screening of your last season?

Randy: I'm thinking, it's over. I don't know, it's, it's too many things to really calculate

and differentiate everything I'm feeling. I'm saying goodbye to the entire cast right now,

I mean I don't know if we'll ever be together again like this, so...um...I'm excited.

Ted: What do you have to say to your fans?

Randy: Enjoy the last season. I hope, I hope it's enough for you, cuz it's all your'e gettin'...

Ted: And where can they learn more about you online? You have a fanclub website?

Randy: No, nothing official, no. (Ted: Come on, you guys!)

In fact, most that you find online is not true!

Ted: Really?

Randy: Yeah, you know it's a lot of....yeah.

Ted: A lot of bs?

Randy: A lot about, you know, things that people accumulate from...

from various innaccurate sources and...

Ted: What's one thing you learned being a part of this group?

Randy: Oh....

Ted: Main theme...

Randy: Main theme? Oh ,I can't, I can't, I can't boil it down to that.

Ted: Too big?

Randy: Yeah, a lot of little things, more than any large, gigantic thing.

Ted: So what's it feel like to be like one of the sexiest people to gays and lesbians

all across the world? I mean, that must be like a total...

I don't know if it's a thrill to you or not?

Randy: Honestly, I don't feel it. I mean, I..I..I..I mean, if you...I don't know if it's true

but if you say....it's not something (Ted: Come on!) you feel on a day to day

level or ever really notice hanging out with your friends and going to work...

Ted: You are in the most popular gay relationship in the entire world.

Randy: Is it? Maybe?

Ted: Name one more popular!

Randy: I don't know, I don't know.

Ted: Exactly. And name 2 cuter people in a relationship.

Randy: We're not really in a...yeah, it's..I mean...

Ted: Yeah, see? You're...just take it in...

Well, thank you for the difference you made...

Randy: Oh...

Ted: And we look forward to that final season.

Randy: Thank you, enjoy it. It's a good one.



Sharon Gless, Peter Paige, Scott Lowell, Hal Sparks, Randy Harrison, Ron Cowen

@темы: видео, 2005