Film Inspired Theater
By: Kevin Filipski |
Monday October 03, 2005 |
| It's rare nowadays to find prominent directors working both onstage and onscreen, but true giants like Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier began in live theater. |
| Theater and film have long had an intricate relationship. It's rare nowadays to find prominent directors working both onstage and onscreen, but true giants like Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier began in live theater, conquered the big screen and returned to the lure of live audiences.
Currently playing off-Broadway, Orson's Shadow is a backstage drama by Austin Pendleton about a production of Eugene Ionesco's play Rhinoceros directed by Welles and starring Sir Laurence and his young paramour Joan Plowright in 1960 London. The play is often delicious fun for movie and theater buffs, showing these two theatrical titans butting heads while rehearsing Ionesco's absurdist comedy. It's always difficult making such towering figures come to credible dramatic life onstage, and it's to Pendleton's credit that he's created several plausible characterizations: not only the two big, egotistical stars but also Plowright, Olivier's ex-wife, actress Vivien Leigh, and British theater critic Kenneth Tynan, who brought Welles and Olivier together for Rhinoceros. Aside from nagging chronology problems (Welles' film A Touch of Evil is discussed as if it were still being edited, when in fact it was already released when the Rhinoceros episode occurred), Orson's Shadow is fun, intelligent theater that touches on the colossal struggles of fame, fortune and - especially in Welles' case - failure. The current production at the Barrow Street Theater in Manhattan's Greenwich Village uses its rundown look to its advantage, and the lighting is inventive and effective to underscore the backstage melodramatics. The acting is adequate, considering the difficulty in attempting to approximate the outsized personalities of an Orson Welles, a Laurence Olivier or even a Vivien Leigh. The Light in the Piazza (at Lincoln Center through March 2006) is based on a novella by Elizabeth Spencer, but more people will know the story from the romantic 1962 movie adaptation starring Olivia de Havilland and Yvette Mimieux. No matter: Adam Guettel's musical is one of the most original to hit the Great White Way in years, highly deserving of its many accolades (notably six Tony Awards - including ones for the inventive sets, costumes and lighting which unerringly evoke 1953 Florence and Rome - although it lost Best Musical to Spamalot). For this story of a young American woman, visiting Italy with her protective mother in 1953, falls in love with a young man from Florence against her mother's wishes, Guettel has written an expressively dramatic score which comes very close to opera - and a late 20th century opera, at that. His music is melodic but often dissonant and even atonal in places. (A brilliant Act II quintet sung by the Florentine family should take its place among the best operatic moments of recent years.) The entire cast is splendid, but it's Victoria Clark as the mother and Kelli O'Hara as the daughter who are breathtakingly good - so much so, in fact, that their relationship turns The Light in the Piazza into one of the most affecting theatrical evenings in the theater in awhile. With so many jukebox musicals and other commercial fare currently cluttering up Broadway stages, how refreshing to find a musical with a heart and a brain - Guettel's marvelous music should be a model for the future direction of Broadway musicals, not the pop hits of Abba. Screen Play is prolific Buffalo playwright A.R. Gurney's latest screed against the Bush administration, making no bones about its disgust with what has happened to this country since the 2000 election. The central conceit of Screen Play - at least in its incarnation at downtown Manhattan's Flea Theater - is that it's a long-lost film that has been reconstructed for audiences by actors in a theater. The time is the year 2015, and the country under various Republican administrations has become for all intents and purposes a police state. Rundown Buffalo has become an important city once again, since its close proximity to the Canadian border allows many disenchanted liberals the chance to escape the country. The young actors breathlessly take several roles apiece, and run the gamut from subtle characterizations to out-and-out caricature. Clocking it at barely 70 minutes, Screen Play is not one of Gurney's more elegantly comic constructions, but for those who are already convinced of Bush and Company's regal incompetence - and that number seems to be growing with every new disaster - Screen Play does the job, and there are in-jokes for those of us originally from Buffalo. It's probably no exaggeration to say that the film version of Brian Friel's splendid 1964 play Philadelphia, Here I Come! has been seen by more people than of all the stage productions of Friel's drama about a young Dubliner's last night with family and friends before leaving for America. The 1975 film version was part of the American Film Theater's brief attempt to preserve great plays with great casts (it's available in one of three American Film Theater boxed sets from Kino on Video) and had wonderful performances by Donal McCann and Des Cave as the public and private selves of the protagonist, Gar O'Donnell. While not a perfect transposition from stage to screen of an eminently worthy play, the movie of Philadelphia nonetheless should be seen. The recent production of Philadelphia Here I Come! by midtown Manhattan's Irish Repertory Theater had its incidental pleasures, not least of which was its claustrophobic evocation of this small Irish burg, where the audience could literally smell the booze on everyone's breath and realize why Gar would want to leave and start again on the other side of the pond. The actors, while not up to McCann and Cave's level in the film (an admittedly tough prospect), worked well together and brought to life Friel's forcefully serio-comic skirmishes among Gar and his mum, his friends, his girl, and, last but not least, himself. |
