Hamlet
written by William Shakespeare
directed by Bill Rauch

Dan Donohue’s Hamlet is so strong, so conversational, so underplayed, so accessible that every moment of the play belongs to him.  In some productions, Hamlet shows up on stage as a wandering soul with a mouth full of pretty words.  Not here.  This Hamlet is at the knowing center of all action and activity.  The plot, the motives, the night, the story, the tragedy are all clear and all his.

This Hamlet is not a callow 20-something who wound up at school, but a deferred student with some life behind him.  More of a reflective man than an icon of dithering youth.

At the conclusion of the short-feeling 3 1/4-hour play, when Hamlet resurrects himself for the deservedly wild standing ovation, you almost feel sorry for the other cast members who were bit players on the fringe of Donohue’s spotlight.

And then, the amazement sets in. (more…)

Music Man
Book, music, and lyrics by Meredith Wilson
Story by Meredith Wilson and Frank Lacey

I keep saying that I don’t like musicals. When I walked out of The Music Man grinning, humming, and full of “do you remember when Harold Hill…” comments, I thought I was on an unnatural high. 

I was sure that after a day or so, the holes in the melodic fabric would appear, and I would become a happy, jaded nay-sayer again:  “Well, there really is only one song in the whole show, you know.”

I assumed that a dramatic, more serious play would jolt me awake as the OSF season wore on.  I would downgrade my five-star reaction to a suitable, sedate 3 or 4, and The Music Man would recede into its proper middle-of-the-pack place in the season’s rankings.

But no.  It’s been close to two months since I saw the show.  I have now attended all of the plays I bought tickets for and published my reviews.  And, The Music Man is still on top in absolute quality and in first place in my 2009 Season list.
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Paradise Lost by Clifford Odets

Oh, damn! Another performance ranking Production: Good, Play: Awful.

I was happily anticipating this Depression Era play directed by the same Libby Appel who resurrected  A View from the Bridge and provided an important and satisfying show last year.

That Arthur Miller “period piece” was heartbreakingly current. 

Unhappily, this year’s model resonates with 2009 with shared bad economic times, but it clunks down the street alone with Odets’ polemics and immutable characters.

The winning philosophical views of life in Paradise are those of an embittered communist-sounding furnace repairman, Mr. Pike played by Mark Murphey, and the budding gangster Kewpie (Mark Bedard).  These are the two whose world views prevail at the end of the play. Kewpie is an action guy, and so Odet gives Pike the coherent, detailed, eyes-open commentary on the state of the world.

And the state of Pike’s and Odet’s world is grim, grim, grim.  One-dimensional, simplistic, revolutionary,  grindingly grim. Worse, everything that happens in the play reinforces and proves the correctness of the bleakness. 

Still worse, Odet wrote this polemic in the 30’s only to renounce his politics and name names during the 1950’s Communist witch hunts.  So, not only are we listening to dated “The Decay of Capitalism” crap, it’s crap which the author himself later disowned.  It would have been a kindness to kill this play at the when the revolutionary spirit of the playwright died.

Yeah, I will also admit that part of my unhappiness with Paradise is that some part of me wants a happy — or at least hopeful — ending.  Spolier alert!  You won’t even get a possibility of an uplifting breeze at the end of this puppy.

So, what’s to like in this Paradise?  The set, the clothes, and most of the acting. 
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Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes Saavedra
Word Premiere adaption by Octavio Solis

The quest of our aging, would-be knight hero failed to pass a friend’s “So what?” test, but even she enjoyed reasonably much the journey to nowhere.  Her reaction sums up the night.

This bright, broad evening was simply fun.  Colorful, meandering, adventure-filled.  Good-spirited, obvious, raucous. Fun.

The social context of knights, by-gone chivalry, and 1600’s Spain are not part of my background.  This Don Quixote didn’t bring Cervantes’ story into the 21st Century.  The evening didn’t make universal any of the incidents in the narrative.  If anything, modern clichés like “Titling at Windmills” and the word “quixotic” gave theater-goers insight into what they were seeing instead of vice versa. So, for me, there was not much to the play-going experience.

The plot follows Quixote from one misunderstood misstep to the next.  It was a montage of cute, fun, tragic, fun.

This adaption work had no bite, meaning, or value beyond well-done entertainment.  It’s enough for a happy evening, but not enough to spend much time thinking about.
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Henry VIII by William Shakespeare

A better title of this production of the seldom-produced Henry VIII would be The Vilma and Tony Show.  The performances of Vilma Silva (Queen Katherine) and Anthony Heald (Cardinal Wolsey) alone are enough to make this an extremely satisfying evening of theater.

This play is looked down on as odd — if not downright “bad”.  The Oregon Shakespeare Festival avoids it, having last put in on 25 years ago in 1984. The audience was littered with people who are seeing Henry VIII to complete their viewing of the Shakespeare canon.

And, the plot truly is not satisfying.  There’s little sense of character development (despite the stated change in attitude of Wolsey).  The story of Henry’s reign is abandoned way before his death.  And, the resolutions that do come in this putative “history” are deus ex machina spoken completions to the storyline.  These text-based miracles are common in Shakespeare’s light-hearted comedies, but they are unwelcomed by the audiences attending more serious fare.

Enough bitching, already!

Shakespeare may have stinted on linear plot development, but he spent extra energy in crafting elegant pageant scenes and providing eloquent monologues for the protagonists. 

Vilma Silva as the pure, but soon-to-be-divorced, first wife of Henry, owns the stage.  Her costumes are exquisite: rich and regal and right. Her emotions, anger, word choice, and expressions absorbed the attention of every person in the theater. During her speeches of outrage and defiance, the outdoor venue was completely still except for Silva’s voice and movement. When she left the stage after refusing to participate in a sham trial of her marriage, the audience applauded like partisans at a rally.

Her antagonist, Anthony Heald’s Cardinal Wolsey, is straight-up, low-key, mundane evilness.  Complete, believable, rationalizing, conniving, logical Evil.  An Evil so smooth and polished that its self-centered meanness is completely recognizable 400 years after the scenes were written.  Heald’s Wolsey would be comfortable in front of a bank of microphones at a 2009 press conference.  He is unflappable and has no hesitation as he reweaves facts into a storyline that furthers his goals.  I thought of Dick Chaney puppeteering the Bush White House, but you can draw your own parallels from your own political perspective.

The scenes that Silva and Heald gave the audience by themselves justified the evening out. Powerful, intense, real, and nuanced. “Wow”-producing.
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