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lillibetThe ART is currently running Cardenio, a play by Stephen Greenblatt and Charles L. Mee based, loosely, on what we think we might know about the lost play by Shakespeare by the same title.
Overall, this was a fun show, and that alone makes it stand out from the usual ART mainstage fare, which tends (IMHO) to tilt a little too far toward the "educate" of "educate and entertain". It does still have operatic singing in foreign languages, just so you don't forget where you are, but it's a pretty lighthearted romp for all that.
How much is it like Shakespeare? Well, either "not much" or "very much," depending on your perspective. The back-story (friends from college celebrating a wedding in an Italian villa owned by the groom's actress-mother), language and the performance-style are both very modern, except in the play-within-a-play sections which preserve the bits of The Double Falsehood (an eighteenth century adaptation supposedly from a found and then lost original script) that scholars judge most likely to have been actually written by the Bard. Unfortunately for us pentameter geeks, the longest section of that is performed as a one-man show by ART regular Remo Airaldi in a highly comic, but neither mellifluous nor easily parsed, faux-Albanian accent.
Interestingly, this version of Cardenio reverses the play-within-a-play structure of the source material, an episode of Don Quixote, so that instead of Anselmo's story being an aside within Cardenio's, it's vice versa. That structure is certainly one of which Shakespeare was fond and the similarities don't stop there. The structure of the scenes--a bunch of people enter and talk and then all but two go off and then another one comes in and is left alone for a soliloquy (or, in this case, a disco karaoke number)--is straight out of the Bard's playbook. And the random song and dance (or song-and-dance) numbers fit right in. The playwrights also peppered the dialogue with many references and snippets from Shakespeare's work, as well as a couple of "what is acting?" and "why does theatre matter" bits that were well-intended if heavy-handed.
Unsurprisingly for the ART, the production values and acting levels were very high. In the announcements before the show, Tommy Derrah talked about how much fun this show has been for them and I think that really showed. At the same time, I think that any play that hinges on men's sheer panic at the thought of their wives' possible infidelity has a hard time getting traction with a modern audience. And the neat-and-tidy ending that was Shakespeare's comedic stock in trade has worn thin over time. With those caveats in mind, I would give this a score of "good" rather than "great," but it was a fun evening of theatre and an interesting and ambitious project and I'd love to see the ART doing more of the same.
Overall, this was a fun show, and that alone makes it stand out from the usual ART mainstage fare, which tends (IMHO) to tilt a little too far toward the "educate" of "educate and entertain". It does still have operatic singing in foreign languages, just so you don't forget where you are, but it's a pretty lighthearted romp for all that.
How much is it like Shakespeare? Well, either "not much" or "very much," depending on your perspective. The back-story (friends from college celebrating a wedding in an Italian villa owned by the groom's actress-mother), language and the performance-style are both very modern, except in the play-within-a-play sections which preserve the bits of The Double Falsehood (an eighteenth century adaptation supposedly from a found and then lost original script) that scholars judge most likely to have been actually written by the Bard. Unfortunately for us pentameter geeks, the longest section of that is performed as a one-man show by ART regular Remo Airaldi in a highly comic, but neither mellifluous nor easily parsed, faux-Albanian accent.
Interestingly, this version of Cardenio reverses the play-within-a-play structure of the source material, an episode of Don Quixote, so that instead of Anselmo's story being an aside within Cardenio's, it's vice versa. That structure is certainly one of which Shakespeare was fond and the similarities don't stop there. The structure of the scenes--a bunch of people enter and talk and then all but two go off and then another one comes in and is left alone for a soliloquy (or, in this case, a disco karaoke number)--is straight out of the Bard's playbook. And the random song and dance (or song-and-dance) numbers fit right in. The playwrights also peppered the dialogue with many references and snippets from Shakespeare's work, as well as a couple of "what is acting?" and "why does theatre matter" bits that were well-intended if heavy-handed.
Unsurprisingly for the ART, the production values and acting levels were very high. In the announcements before the show, Tommy Derrah talked about how much fun this show has been for them and I think that really showed. At the same time, I think that any play that hinges on men's sheer panic at the thought of their wives' possible infidelity has a hard time getting traction with a modern audience. And the neat-and-tidy ending that was Shakespeare's comedic stock in trade has worn thin over time. With those caveats in mind, I would give this a score of "good" rather than "great," but it was a fun evening of theatre and an interesting and ambitious project and I'd love to see the ART doing more of the same.
