Peter Bergman Theater Reviews

"It's Jewdy's Show: My Life As a Sitcom" by Judy Gold and Kate Moira Ryan. Directed by Amanda Charlton. At Williamstown Theatre Festival.

Growing up with television provided a respite for Judy Gold from her Jewish, New Jersey existence. Sitcoms showed her how "real" families lived and treated one another. Half-hour bites of TV reality gave her the impression that somehow life could be wonderful with a mother who wore pearls to make dinner, teachers who were supportive and huggy, where friends of all races and financial backgrounds would coexist easily and it was OK to be a lesbian (just as long as you never discussed it with your mother). All of it the perfect fodder on which to raise a stand-up comedian who just happened to be a 6-foot, 3-inch-tall lesbian Jewess. Who had two sons. And wanted her own sitcom. Really.
That is the premise for a one-woman play at the Nikos Stage, part of the Williamstown Theatre Festival, with almost-familiar songs about a girl named Judy Gold who lived that life described above.

Is the show autobiographical? I would say it is. Is this public declamation of the story of how an emotionally abused child grew up -- incessantly -- to become a national treasure of little value worth your time? I would say it is.
Judy Gold is a funny, tall, talented woman. Her story, as she tells it in about 80 minutes without intermission, is hilarious. And don't worry about the ethnic humor or the sitcom references. If you miss one now and then, she will probably tell you why and not apologize for the joke or your inability to understand it.
The show plays out on a set designed by Andrew Boyce that provides ample space for Judy's memories, and some of yours as well, to be emphasized by photography. Marcus Doshi lights the show so that Judy is always the brightest spot on the stage, and Alex Neumann provides enough sound to make you wonder about how many people are actually in this show and where they might be hiding.
In the course of the evening, Gold gets to play both her parents and her sister, her lover and her sons, and her new lover and a psychiatrist. She gets to chat with television producers about her life as a sitcom. She manages to show us, rather than simply tell us about, her childhood, her college years, her early days in New York City, her life on the road and her relationship with the two boys she raises as a somewhat single mother. If you have ever wondered what a tour-de-force is, you can see for yourself as the actress and comedian puts herself through the paces of exposing as many sides of her personality and the personae who surround her as humanly possible in the time allowed.
Frankly, if she had added another 10 minutes, it would have been just fine with me. Her choices are wonderful, and her comedy is both droll and affective. And effective, too. For this short run in a theater with limited seating, the options allowed are run, do not walk, to the box office for tickets.

"It's Jewdy's Show" plays at the Nikos Theatre at the Williamstown Theatre Festival at 1000 Main St. in Williamstown through July 4. For tickets and information, call the box office at 413-597-3400 or visit wtfestival.org.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 9:30 PM | Permalink

"The Secret Garden," book and lyrics by Marsha Norman, music by Lucy Simon. Choreographed and directed by Karla Shook. At the Mac-Haydn Theatre.

Melodramatic emotions abound in the musical "The Secret Garden." Young Colin Craven hates everyone and everything, especially himself, because a genetic disorder will result in his early death. Young Mary Lennox, orphaned by a cholera epidemic in India, is lost in a world she cannot connect with emotionally. Archibald Craven has shut his emotions away after the death of his wife in childbirth and only will visit his ailing child when the boy is fast asleep, and he cannot look at his ward, Mary, because she reminds him of his late wife. Neville Craven believes that nothing can be done for anyone without ordering them about and making them miserable as he is miserable about losing the woman he loved to his brother. And then there's the housekeeper at Misselthwaite Manor, who believes that orders are meant to be carried out without question and without pause.
That is what confronts you at the Mac-Haydn Theatre for the moment, and though there is a lot of music in this show, don't expect to come out singing the hits. There are no hits.

However, there are some top-notch performances, hits of a different kind, to be sure. First on the list is Christopher Violett, who plays the role of Dickon, usually cast as a teenager, but here a young man of 23, perhaps. He appears late in Act 1 and takes over the show with two songs: "Winter's On The Wing" in that act and "Wick" in Act Two. He is dynamic and strong with a beautiful voice and an aptitude for character acting. Bravo!
As Mrs. Medlock, the housekeeper (has there ever been a housekeeper whose first name is Miss?) is the absolutely perfect, if wasted, Monica M. Wemett, a company stalwart who will hopefully be used to the full extent of her talents later in the season. In this role, she is cold and forbidding and very much in charge of things. She does this all very well indeed. But seeing her on stage makes you want more from her, and the role denies her that opportunity.
Martha, Dickon's sister, is played to perfection by Colleen Gallagher and Colin's mother, Lily, is sung beautifully by Caitlin Fischer.
The Craven brothers are played by Kenneth Ruth (Archibald) and Ben Jacoby (Neville). These men are marvelous in their roles, and best when they duet on "Lily's Eyes" and sing about the sisters Lily and Rose in the second act.
The girl playing Mary Lennox is always at the center of the show, and as good as Daisy Eagan was in the 1991 Broadway production, it was never enough to make me understand a two-year run of this show. In the current production, Lily Page took center stage and made the most possible of the role. She has a genuine talent, this young girl, and hopefully we will have the opportunity to watch her grow into a fine performer. For right now, she does beautifully in the part and gets to play it in the July 3 and 4 matinees.
The supporting players and the chorus do a fine job most of the time in this show. Except as described a paragraph or so below.
Lighting designer Andrew Gmoser has added set designing for this production, and he has done well. Dale DiBernardo has provided classic costumes, and John D. Smith does well by the score, considering the limitations imposed on the orchestra at this theater.
What is hard to understand is how the director, Karla Shook, whose career was developed on this stage over a lengthy period of years, could have learned so little about staging a show for theater-in-the-round. Admittedly this is the hardest form to work in, but she has years of experience as a featured and star player. I cannot begin to tell you the number of times Mary Lennox -- whose story we are watching -- was surrounded by massively tall and bulkily dressed choristers, only to remain completely hidden from the audience.
I can recount the sloppiness of the direction in terms of watching masses of people parade constantly in and out of scenes that only called for a sense of presence. There is no way to describe the amateurish mess of the visuals she prepared for this show. Perhaps a musical like "Park," with only three characters, is where this director should have started her directing career. At least with something like that, she wouldn't have been able to upstage her leading lady, something I commented on in this company's production of "A Chorus Line" in a previous season.
This will never be my favorite musical, and this production leaves me as cold about it as ever. Some wonderful performances, however, make it a watchable show, and the sweetness of the story will win over many people, I am sure. At least this isn't the company's three-week-run choice. That is still to come.

"The Secret Garden" plays at the Mac-Haydn Theatre, located on Route 203, just north of Chatham, N.Y., through July 4. For information and tickets, call the box office at 518-392-9292.

J. Peter Bergman sleeps in Pittsfield, but spends his days with poet Edna St. Vincent Millay in Austerlitz. For more of his reviews, check out advocateweekly.com or his own website, berkshirebrightfocus.com.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 9:29 PM | Permalink

"The Last Five Years," book, lyrics and music by Jason Robert Brown. Directed by Anders Cato. At Berkshire Theatre Festival.

First, says the rule book on asking God for a favor, praise him. Next, tell the tale and thank God all along the way. Then, ask for something, and end quickly with praise in advance. It may work for prayer/requests, although not often I suppose, but it rarely ever works in the theater. Jason Robert Brown has written four musicals ("Parade," "The Last Five Years," "Urban Cowboy" and "13") that I'm aware of, and in each of them, he follows this course of action: praise, beg, thank and praise again. It's a decent formula. It just doesn't work.
And it really doesn't work in the current production of "The Last Five Years" at the Berkshire Theatre Festival.

Here's the premise: a couple examining their relationship and marriage over the course of the last five years from meeting to divorce. They sing songs in turn -- first her, then him. At the end, we know as much or as little as we assume we knew at the beginning, and we understand very little about their relationship.
As in others of his shows, the hero is Jewish -- Jamie Wellerstein, played by Paul Anthony Stewart. The woman he falls in love with is not Jewish -- WASP Catherine Hiatt, played by Julie Reiber. When produced off-Broadway in 2002, the show ran for exactly two months and starred Leo Norbert Butz and Sherie Rene Scott. It also spawned a lawsuit when the author's ex-wife sued him for custody of her own life; apparently, his show too closely mirrored their own marriage.
It's always an odd thing to discover the art as history/history as art aspects of a theatrical work. We are usually asked to take sides in a stage dispute, but here there is no involving of the audience in such a way. The two simply tell their stories in song, he starting at the beginning of their affair, she working back to that incident from their final moment together as he walks out the door. In the course of time, they each sing 14 different songs. Frankly, they are both so musically unpleasant at times and so unrealistically characterless that no sympathy goes pouring out to either, leaving us with a debacle of a musical.
It sounds a bit humorless as I re-read what I wrote, but the truth is there is some humor in here, just not enough and not genuine enough to be anything other as seen through the light bulb that glares down on both characters. Pale and colorless, it is hard to grasp what they're singing about half the time.
The songs are basically inseparable from their characters, and I can also say this: I could almost never hear, or at least understand, the character of Jamie, while I could hear every word sung by Catherine. That should make me more sympathetic to one, but it didn't. It just aggravated me. So, make me a promise: No being sympathetic here, no taking sides!
With not liking the characters, and not truly appreciating the loud music, this is a hard show to enjoy. There are some fine character songs, nothing you'll hear Madonna wail out on or anyone arrange for jazz piano. High on my list to hear again somehow are his "The Schmuel Song" and her "A Summer in Ohio." Both tell narrative tales about somewhat interested, if odd, individuals.
In the course of untrue love, their paths cross for "The Next Ten Minutes" right in the middle of the five years examined here. While director Anders Cato has kept the pair relatively mobile, here he brings them together physically, and we can almost comprehend the motives of young lovers when things begin for them. Cato has also placed multiple musical tools in their hands and kept them moving around the BTF stage with as much freedom as possible.
All of those efforts are not enough to make this a pleasant musical drama. Further, and this seems to be a trend at this theater nowadays, the show has been designed to obliterate active views of the sound stages. A large square box cuts off sightlines in Lee Savage's otherwise attractive set. For many years, a false perspective has been used to create space that can be worked on and lit in. Let's vote now for false perspective again, a viewable show, visible to all.
Jeff Davis takes the role of lighting designer here, and through his extraordinarily crafty eye, he has managed to smoothly move the story along as light alters and changes, fades and remains. His use of color, generally subtle but not always, illuminates the underside of each song. The costumes designed by Laurie Churba Kohn are fine. A movement consultant, Rachael Plaine, has apparently coached the two on falling, jumping and other odd motions that crop up.
It doesn't add up to a hill of beans, however, when the material all of this production is hung on is merely gauze. This tale, told in this imaginative way, should reveal something likable about its characters, but in this case, that doesn't really happen. We just have two mismatched people who make themselves as testy and unbearable as possible.
I have to admire the courage of a theater company when they take up the cudgel for little-known works. That is certainly the case here. Even the cast of two, with four musicians dressing up the set, makes this innovative 90 minutes without an intermission evening into something oddly unforgettable. But I'd rather leave a musical humming a tune, or repeating a lyric phrase, instead of shaking my head saying, "Why? Why?"

"The Last Five Years" runs through July 10 at the Berkshire Theatre Festival's Main Stage in Stockbridge. For information and tickets, call the box office at 413-298-5576 or visit berkshiretheatre.org.

J. Peter Bergman sleeps in Pittsfield, but spends his days with poet Edna St. Vincent Millay in Austerlitz. For more of his reviews, check out advocateweekly.com or his own website, berkshirebrightfocus.com.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 9:28 PM | Permalink

"Mengelberg and Mahler" by Daniel Klein. Directed by Emile Fallaux. At Shakespeare & Company.

In the midnight of his life, living in a chalet he had built for himself in Switzerland, the Dutch-born German conductor Willem Mengelberg waits out his final years in exile. For years the artistic force behind Amsterdam's Concertgebauw Orchestra and a champion of the music of Gustav Mahler, who was his close friend, Mengelberg defied traditions to bring the finest music of the unknown composers, expatriates, Jews, Russians and so on, into the bright lights of public exposure. It seems he made one major mistake: He underestimated the difficulty that would follow his not abandoning his post during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands; he didn't understand how the public and how his own native government would assess his actions.
For him, music was different from other "things." Music was not national, music was a force, an emotion, a means of enrichment that all could share equally, an entity that had no politics. As the world learned subsequent to World War II, music could express so much more than just its own internal beauties, darknesses and emotional accessibilities. Wagner was banned from performance in America and other countries when it was discovered how strong a role his music had played in the Nazi psyche, for example.
For Mengelberg's attitude during the occupation, the Central Honorary Council for Art determined in 1945 to impose a sentence that forbade him from ever conducting in the Netherlands again. He found that others were reluctant to hire him. He had conducted his orchestra -- depleted of Jews and other undesirables by the Occupation forces -- and made guest appearances in Germany and other occupied countries. His actions were seen as overtly political. After a long struggle and two legal cases, on Oct. 20, 1947, he received a reduction of his sentence from a lifetime ban to one of six years, until 1951. He died in that year, never to have made his return to his extraordinary music career.
On stage at the Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre at Shakespeare & Company, Daniel Klein's one-man play "Mengelberg and Mahler" finds the elderly man alone in his mountain retreat, working his way through the logic that has removed him from the one thing that gives him pleasure, satisfaction and a true picture of his place in the world.
He relives key moments, conversations, relationships both professional and personal, and even times on the podium. In 85 minutes of internal torture, the composer lives out the angst-filled months of 1947.

He is played with lyric sensitivity by Robert Lohbauer. While the actor seemingly knows and understands the inner and outer conflicts of the person, he is also not a conductor of Mahler. There is a lot of underscore music in this play, excerpts from the first five symphonies, and Lohbauer acts his way around and through them brilliantly. As good as he is at the character and the Dutch accent, he is flawed to that same degree in his mock conducting, and that diminishes his work and the character's ultimate believability. This is too bad, really, for the play is very well-done, and his acting in the role is equally fascinating.
Director Emile Fallaux has given his actor the stage and moved him through a remarkable number of emotional and moral changes. It is clear that his sensitivity to the piece is almost super-charged with honesty and clarity. There are a few moments where the conductor's sanity is challenged, and Fallaux has either allowed or led his actor into subtleties that play out extremely well.
Lighting designer Stephen Ball has provided a dim view for most of the intense evening, and it is within the darkness of Mengelberg's brain that we find the man. This point of view is sometimes disquieting, for the actor is distanced from us.
Playing throughout the season, this is a play that will grow as the actor continues to don the trappings of this frustrated human being who only did what he thought was right and never truly understood that what he did was something the world would find so very wrong. In 1946, he wrote a friend, "If I had done something I could understand it, but I never got involved in anything!"
That was his problem, and on stage in Lenox, he is working through that logic, hoping to make his way back into what had always been his personal world. I think watching him do it is an important part of this summer's activities.

"Mengelberg and Mahler" plays in repertory through Sept. 10 on the Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre stage at Shakespeare & Company, located at 70 Kemble St. in Lenox. For performance schedules, ticket availabilities and prices, call the box office at 413-637-3353 or visit shakespeare.org.

J. Peter Bergman sleeps in Pittsfield, but spends his days with poet Edna St. Vincent Millay in Austerlitz. For more of his reviews, check out advocateweekly.com or his own website, berkshirebrightfocus.com.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 8:01 PM | Permalink

"Sweeney Todd," book by Hugh Wheeler, music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. Directed by Julianne Boyd.

A brilliant idea turned into a Broadway hit in spite of production difficulties that nearly destroyed two buildings and dwarfed the proceedings to a point where there was almost no show at all inside a building when Harold Prince produced and directed Stephen Sondheim's masterwork "Sweeney Todd" way back in 1979. Prince destroyed a factory, took it apart and reassembled the skeleton of it inside an overly large new theater in New York City. He added moving grids and removable bridges that seemed to be in motion more frequently than the large cast moved. Together he and the songwriter mounted a production that used the steel framework to create a theatrical event that screamed of steel. It was a Grand Guignol conceit, a form of theater meant to strike fear into the hearts of the observers in the audience. It worked, and the show ran for a long time, exhausting Len Cariou and Angela Lansbury, then George Hearn and Dorothy Loudon. Revived twice in New York, audiences have also seen Bob Gunton and Beth Fowler in 1989 and Michael Cerveris and Patti LuPone in 2005.
Now it is in Pittsfield at the Union Street headquarters of Barrington Stage Company. The company is reduced in numbers, the orchestra is nine pieces, the set is simpler with a catwalk that crosses the upper reaches of the stage and there is a cast of character actors who can make even the oddest member of the human race into the most honest, up-front and realistic creatures on the face of the planet. It's a transition that works to the benefit of the piece.

Always an intimate show, that intimacy now pays off handsomely in this wonderful theater that puts every seat seemingly within reach of the stage. When the siren screams now, and it screams a lot in Act Two, you almost feel the threat of something imminent coming toward you, for you.
Jeff McCarthy, let me start by saying, is a terrific Sweeney Todd. His good looks make it hard to dislike him, and the closeups we get in this more intimate setting provide a rationale for his revenge on the mankind of London that becomes more human that it has ever seemed. His singing voice is powerful and strong. His gestures are appropriately wide. His facial expressions are sane and secure and mask his madness even at the end of the show. But the way he portrays the ironic insanity of his character is remarkable. This is, perhaps, McCarthy's finest hour on our regional stages, or his finest two and three quarter hours, at any rate.
As his inspiration for the final strokes of insanity, Mrs. Lovett, there is Harriet Harris. When it was announced that she would play the role, the choice seemed so perfect, an antic clown who could follow in the footsteps of Lansbury and Loudon, bringing her own sarcastic sensibilities to a role that had never taken that tone. As directed, however, she is more a clone of Lansbury without Angela's singing skills. Harris's voice is a drone's voice, toneless most of the time and off-pitch with regularity. Her romantic scenes, however, have a sweetness that are unexpected and her final confrontation with all that goes wrong around her is brilliantly played. She's just not what was expected and so disappoints.
Ed Dixon plays Judge Turpin better than anyone else has done so far. His rendition of the song Johanna restores an historic theatrical moment so dramatic it overcomes the melodrama. He is terrific at exposing the dark side of the Judge, motivated less by love than by pure lust. His crony, the Beadle, is played nicely by Timothy Shew.
The young lovers are a bit disappointing. Sarah Stevens as Johanna tends to be a bit shrill and that takes away some of the girl's intended beauty and allure. Shonn Wiley as Anthony sings beautifully and has a youthful enthusiasm, but he makes a slightly awkward hero. There is absolutely nothing wrong with his performance, he just seems to be out of place in Anthony's skin.
As Tobias, the slightly feeble-minded assistant who falls in, accidentally, with Todd and Lovett, Zachary Clause is marvelous. There seemed to never be an awkward moment for him, never a misplaced intention or a missed musical note either. The remaining principal players were all fine and the chorus was smashing. The orchestra, conducted by Darren Cohen, was perfectly situated and made marvelous music.
The sound man, who may or may not be sound designer Ed Chapman, pushed the musicians and singers mikes to extremes, which didn't seem necessary.
The physical production was, for the most part, brilliant. Wilson Chin's set worked to perfection and Philip S. Rosenberg's lighting design was darkly brilliant. Jen Moeller's costumes were a mixed bag, giving us a 19th century that was all over the place in time and visions and a bedlam, the mad house concept, that reeked of mid-20th century.
All in all, it's wonderful to see this show in the intimate setting that it so needed. There are enough great qualities in director Julianne Boyd's visionary production to make this a hot ticket item and a must-see production. Don't let the negatives above dissuade you from buying a ticket; just go prepared to enjoy everything good about The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

"Sweeney Todd" plays at Barrington Stage Company at 20 Union St. in Pittsfield through July 17. For tickets and information, call the box office at 413-236-8888 or visit barringtonstageco.org.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 7:58 PM | Permalink

"K2." Directed by Wes Grantom. At Berkshire Theatre Festival.

A test of friendship lies at the core of the play "K2." The problem with that is we don't really know much about the friendship that's being tested.
Harold and Taylor both climb mountains as a hobby. Taylor is a lawyer. Harold may be a scientist, or theoretical physicist, or hypothetical drugged-out hippy. It's never been clear to me, and this is the third production I've seen of this play.

I saw it on Broadway in April 1983 with Jeffrey DeMunn (Tony-nominated) as Taylor in a production that only ran for 85 performances. I saw him do it at Syracuse Stage the year before. The set was phenomenal for these two productions: Ming Cho Lee's sheer cliff of plexiglass with snow pots and a ledge 26 feet above the stage with a climb of 55 feet in all for Taylor to mount in his effort to rescue lost ropes he needs for a proper descent. When DeMunn lost his footing and fell, held only by the rope and the rope held by his co-star, supposedly ailing, and he was suspended in mid-air, it was staggering for both heart and mind.
At the Unicorn Theatre, the Berkshire Theatre Festival's second stage, things are not quite so Ming and Terry Schreiber (designer and director). There is still a tinge of fear watching the two actors maneuver on a short-ended shelf suspended over the stage in a mountain wall set by Kenneth Grady Barker that does a lot with a little.
The actors in this new presentation also do a lot with a little. Greg Keller plays Harold and Tim McGeever is wearing the role of Taylor. The role fits him nicely. Harold has a badly injured leg and our concern for him is real; it seems from the outset he may never make it off the mountain other than by free-fall sacrifice of his life. The less showy of the two roles, it may have been written down from the intensity that I recall from the '80s, where loose language filled the stage, causing many in the Syracuse audience to leave in anger before the first half-hour mark had been reached. That language is not much in evidence here, leaving me to wonder if the play has been cleaned up or if the actors, working under Schreiber, just had free rein to augment their roles as they deemed it necessary.
These are, after all, two very intelligent men. Invectives aren't necessarily their only out. The actors in Stockbridge take that approach, and the idea of friendship and its responsibilities takes center stage in this offering. How far will Taylor go to rescue his friend before he gives in to necessity? How literal will Harold be in relaying information on his own condition to keep his friend trying to save him? When will the two realize that their only hope is in the separation of friendship and responsibility?
Keller is excellent as Harold. He matches intelligence and drug culture insights brilliantly. This is a '60s man in the '80s, older, wiser, more faithful to a vow. His body loses mass as the play progresses and is less solid and secure, more frighteningly dangerous to himself and Taylor.
McGeever, as said, wears his role proudly. He scales mountains, literally, as he plays this part, and while his fall may not have the spectacular aspects of previous Taylors, he is still very much in control of our fear mechanism as he takes risk after risk.
Wes Grantom has directed a production of this nerve-rattling play in a slightly modest and meek fashion, it seems to me. There are no mistakes -- how could there be when the entire play is scaled to the Unicorn and remains steadfastly loyal to its surroundings -- but the risks seem somehow more theatrical and less real. He has certainly developed well-defined characters who do not require endless streams of curse-words to make their points.
The set is a curious pastiche of things, but works for its actors and so must be accounted a fine rendering of a mountain wall for a theatrical context. The lighting by Shawn Boyle works well, even when it turns itself into an avalanche. Laurie Churba Kohn seems to have shopped a perfect pair of costumes (this production is underwritten by the Arcadian Shop, which may have something to do with this).
All in all, "K2" is a better experience in many ways than I thought it could be on a small scale. Worthwhile for its performances, certainly, it is guaranteed to chill down a hot summer night in the Berkshires.
"K2" plays at the Unicorn Theatre at the Berkshire Theatre Festival on Route 7 in Stockbridge through July 3. For schedules, information or tickets, contact the box office at 413-298-5576 or visit berkshiretheatre.org.
J. Peter Bergman sleeps in Pittsfield, but spends his days with poet Edna St. Vincent Millay in Austerlitz. For more of his reviews, check out advocateweekly.com or his own website, berkshirebrightfocus.com.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 10:51 PM | Permalink

"Julius Caesar" by William Shakespeare. Directed by Jonathan Croy. At Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox.

Nothing is more confusing than genius. William Shakespeare was a genius who was able to write equally well in the genres of comedy, tragedy, history and poetry. He wrote more very quotable lines than any other playwright in history. He left indelible images that sing in the brain, whether or not we realize the source. For many people who are unfamiliar with his work, there is still an unrealized affinity for what he created.
No play in his lexicon proves this better than "Julius Caesar." Every time you think you've never heard "this" before, along comes a zinger that makes you sit up and take notice. In Shakespeare & Company's current production, a low-budget road-show with a vibrant young cast of only six players, there are no pauses to let those overly familiar lines lull an audience into a comfort zone. Director Jonathan Croy keeps the play moving along, tightening the suspense and overwhelming the senses with his rapid costume and hairstyle changes so reminiscent of farce theater and dragging his audience along with his players until it seems that Shakespeare is only for the young, and we are restored to youth.

"Ambition should be made of sterner stuff," Marc Antony says in his funeral oration over Caesar's body. Andy Talen as Marc tosses that line to his listeners and waits for them to throw it back, and without realizing it, the audience at the Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre nods in agreement. Talen's own youth makes his friendship and admiration for his friend so much brighter than it normally seems to be when an older actor takes the role. He touches different parts of our hearts in his moving rendition of these speeches. "This was the most unkindest cut of all," he rants as he shows us Brutus' point of entry with a knife in Caesar's destroyed cloak. Marc Antony is the star of his own Shakespeare play, but in "Julius Caesar" he finds his greatness, a point easily made by Talen even as his character betrays another friend later in the second act.
"Beware the Ides of March," a voice calls out to Scott Renzoni's Caesar, a warning he does not heed, not really. His wife, Calpurnia, tries to make him listen to reason, warning him that "wisdom is consumed by confidence." Renzoni has a gentle transition from adoration of this woman to smarminess as he ignores her fears and premonitions. Renzoni plays the pompous politician well and takes us through his character's untimely death with movement, gesture and expression that genuinely bring us into the action. His last words in Act 1 -- "et tu, Brute" -- are not chilling as much as they are definitive. He plays a man who knows what is happening and also understands why.
Ryan Winkles plays the unpopular role of Cassius, the plotter. His youthful good looks make it clear that ambition knows no sweeter home than in his perfectly coifed head. Sean Kazarian is his brother, his friend, his partner in crime, Brutus. "Cowards die many times before their deaths," Shakespeare wrote for Caesar to say, and this certainly describes the two men portrayed here. Kazarian is a trembling, unsure Brutus who makes the most of his funeral oration, briefer than Marc Antony's and more deliberately pointed toward personal sacrifice of a tyrant to the good of the people. This political ploy is still apparent today in our own political arena.
"Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look; he thinks too much: Such men are dangerous," Caesar proclaims early of Winkles' character. It is a proclamation that Winkles carries to its all-too-necessary conclusion as he destroys Cassius before our eyes. Shakespeare's brilliance as a storyteller is best seen in this role and in Winkles' definitive playing.
The other two players in this young company are Katharine Abbruzzese and Dani Cervone, who mix wives, soldiers, senators, servants and Romans into their performances with a stunning alacrity.
The style of this production is that of a Shakespearean "second" company sent out to the provinces with functionally brilliant costumes by Govane Lohbauer, a simple set by Christian Schmitt and effective lighting by Stephen Ball (not Shakespearean, but what the heck). The fights, choreographed by Winkles, work well, and the sound of steel on steel is still heart-wrenching (don't sit in the front row if you can help it).
Croy has pulled together an enjoyable two-hour show from the massive historical drama, reducing the play to its essence and leaving the brilliance of its philosophical utterings to play out in our hearts and minds. These youth-oriented productions are among my favorite things at Shakespeare & Company. I advise you not to miss it.

"Julius Caesar" plays at the Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox through June 13. For information and tickets, contact the box office at 413-637-3353 or visit shakespeare.org.
J. Peter Bergman sleeps in Pittsfield, but spends his days with poet Edna St. Vincent Millay in Austerlitz. For more of his reviews, check out advocateweekly.com or his own website online at berkshirebrightfocus.com.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 9:37 PM | Permalink