Lady, Be Good! (Shedd Institute)

Only once in a blue moon do Mrs. Sgt. T and I go out for live entertainment.  Almost never.  This is one of the reasons it didn't bother us to move from a metro area of a millionish to one a tenth that size:  even with world-class music and theater venues all around us we hardly ever went out. 

But last night we did.  Saw a poster in a coffee shop and needed a night out and so we found ourselves at the Shedd Institute in downtown Eugene seeing a performance of Lady, Be Good.

Lady, Be Good!  It came at a good time.  In the last year, unbeknownst to my blogging self, I've been gradually (okay, maybe a little half-heartedly) exploring the Great American Songbook via jazz interpretations of it (there's a great series of Verve discs...).  And it got me intrigued by things I never would have approached willingly a couple of years ago - musicals, namely, and especially of the archaic Broadway variety.  I found myself excited about the prospect of hearing some of these songs (I only knew "Fascinating Rhythm" and "Oh, Lady Be Good") in their original context, sung straight.

I wasn't disappointed.  It's local theater, okay, so it wasn't perfect.  The orchestra took a while to get warmed up - they played the overture and everything, which was nice (it quotes from "Rhapsody In Blue," which had premiered not long before this shows did in 1924), but they didn't really hit their groove musically until near the end of the first act.  Same went for the actor/singer/dancers.  Their comic timing didn't really click until the second act.  It was a half-staged production - full costumes, minimal props, singing and dancing at the front of the stage, but dialogue delivered in read-through fashion with a narrator.  It might have been better if they'd gone ahead and acted the thing;  it might have helped with their timing.

But at its worst it was still entertaining.  And for most of the second half they managed to bring the farce alive, so that you could see how it was supposed to work.  They even pulled off the Charleston number in quite nifty fashion - nobody can match Fred and Adele, especially the Fred and Adele in my imagination, but these dancers at least made me feel like I could imagine Fred and Adele. 

Yeah.  So now I've seen a Gershwin musical, I've floated on the gentle swing of "Lady, Be Good" and "So Am I," I've had "Fascinating Rhythm" stuck in my head for twenty-four hours, I've, you know, figured out why all that fringe is there on flapper dresses.  And for the hundredth time, in the hundredth different way, I'm thinking what a surprisingly cool town the Euge is.  Only a hundred thousand people, in the middle of nowhere, Oregon, and yet I can go downtown and see a revival of a 1924 Gershwin musical.  And it's pretty okay.

That's all.

Hamlet at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival

The other thing we saw at OSF was Hamlet, and this was splendid, more than enough to wash away the bad taste of Throne of Blood. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately for you, O Reader), I don't know if I have anything much to say about it. Certainly not as much as I had to say about Throne of Blood. I mean, this Hamlet was awesome. Just amazing. But I'm a babe in the woods when it comes to Hamlet. I saw it on Boston Common a few years ago, and I've seen Kenneth Branagh's film (twice!), and of course I've read the play a number of times...but I wouldn't dream of saying I know anything about it.

This series of posts on Bardolatry talks about some of the distinctive aspects of this production: I particularly want to second what Murphy says about the decision to make Hamlet's father deaf, even at the expense of some of the Bard's verbiage:

...having Hamlet and the Ghost communicating in sign language—one might describe it almost as their “private” language—also served to produce the (in my experience, unique) effect of putting the father-and-son pair in a sort of psycho-spiritual bubble, contra mundum; a bubble that excluded all others and highlighted Hamlet’s isolation. The relationship between father and son portrayed in most productions comes across as distant, severe and (on Hamlet’s part) rather worshipful, even awestruck. In this production the father/son relationship is portrayed as having been loving and paternally intimate, which makes Hamlet’s reaction to his father’s tale of murder all the more harrowing.

(snip)

Finally, in the OSF production’s captivating use of sign language—for me it put the icing on the cake, as it were—there were several very nice bits of stage business when we see, in a couple of key scenes, Gertrude and even Claudius breaking briefly into sign language when speaking of the late King Hamlet. These fleeting moments from the ancien regime seemed to signal, as it were, breakings-in of conscience and former ties of familial love into the toxic little Gertrude/Claudius bubble—that “rotten” thing poisoning Denmark.

This really captures something excellent about this production: it got the feeling of the relationships between the characters absolutely right. The brother-sister feeling between Laertes and Ophelia, the father-children feeling between both of them and Polonius, and of course Hamlet and his father and mother, and even uncle. I think what Murphy's suggesting - and I saw this - is that when Gertrude and Hamlet and Claudius break into sign language when speaking of the late King, it's force of habit: these are people who are used to speaking simultaneously in sign and by voice, for the benefit of the King as well as each other, and it's entirely natural that they'd slip back into that old habit at moments of high nostalgia and/or emotion. Natural, and more important for the play, affecting: touching.

This was a very emotional Hamlet. (It's here that I think the best aspects of OSF come through: I called Throne of Blood pandering; the flip side of that is the emotional intensity and accessibility of this Hamlet, populism of the best kind.) The philosophical aspects of the play are there for all to appreciate - you can't escape them, and this production does its best to highlight them too (I like the idea of having the rest of the action onstage stop like a freeze-frame when Hamlet steps out to do a soliloquy). But mostly what we get is a production in which everybody's emotions and the actions that spring from them make visceral sense. We feel Hamlet's turmoil, his grief, his frustration, his anger. His despair.

The wordless play-before-the-play that they've added is important here. (If you go, get there when the doors open so you can see the whole thing.) I'd love to somehow return to a state of innocence where I knew nothing about the play, so that I could learn about Hamlet's character the way the first viewers presumably did - so that I could let Shakespeare introduce him to me cold, and see what effect that would have on me. That's impossible, of course, for almost anybody coming to the play today: by the time Hamlet is first mention, much less appears onstage, we all know what's eating him. The play-before-the-play acknowledges that, and makes our first entry into the play through Hamlet, rather than through the watchmen: for a full half hour we see Hamlet utterly motionless in front of his father's coffin after the funeral, while the mortuary personnel mill around putting away chairs and jawboning in the back of the chapel. We learn everything about Hamlet here: not only that he's young and handsome in his mod suit and sunglasses, but that he's both much more upset by his father's death than anybody else (he's the last one in the chapel) and that he's capable of incredibly concentration (he sits motionless, lost in thought, for thirty minutes). In short we see the ingredients of his obsession, his madness, right here. We can identify (and it helps that Hamlet is dressed and played as a recognizable neurotic hipster, so that the ironic pirouettes of the soliloquys feel like the manic word-riffage of someone raised on rap); we can feel him. It's not strictly Shakespeare, but it quite effectively works with Shakespeare to lead us into the play.

Throne of Blood at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival

We went down to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland a couple of days ago. For those who don't know, despite the name this isn't a summer event sort of thing: it's a nearly year-round repertory organization that basically dominates this little town in Southern Oregon. Several plays running concurrently in three major venues, including a mock-up of the Globe. They do Shakespeare, yes, but also other works of classic and contemporary theater, and they do, on the whole, a fantastic job. We went down last summer and saw a couple (I seem to have neglected to write anything about them: if I can remember enough maybe I'll try to rectify that), and I have to say that with the sort of self-deprecating attitude with which Oregonians seem to view most things about their state, I wasn't expecting much. I came away incredibly impressed by the seriousness and professionalism of what I saw. So now we're trying to make an annual tradition out of going down for a night and seeing a couple of plays. Someday we want to stay a week and see everything...

The main attraction for us this year was Throne of Blood. This is OSF guest director Ping Chong's adaptation of Kurosawa's adaptation of Macbeth. Now, it so happens that this is one of my favorite Kurosawa films: I've lost count of how many times I've seen it. In fact, I've taught it twice, meaning I've gone through it taking scene-by-scene notes: I know it as well as I know any film. The idea of seeing a stage adaptation of it in English, at a festival where the Shakespearean aspects of it would doubtless be emphasized, was really intriguing. I wouldn't have missed this.

I was very disappointed.

Kurosawa's film transposes Shakespeare's story to warring-states-era Japan, turning Macbeth into a typical Sengoku warrior. Much has been made over the fact that Kurosawa gives us a Macbeth without any of Shakespeare's words - not too difficult, perhaps, given that he's making the film in Japanese, but in fact all the more amazing for that reason - he manages to bring the story to life with the same primal power of Shakespeare's version, without the benefit of the poetry.

It's also, I think, a definitively modern reading of Shakespeare, despite the medieval trappings, but that's a subject for another post. Here what's worth emphasizing is that Kurosawa only slightly modernizes the setting - we're still in an era of swords and battles and pikes and feudal loyalties. And Kurosawa adopts a quasi-premodern dramaturgy, as well, famously bringing in elements of Noh. The music (shrill flutes and drums) is the most obvious for a Western audience, but more important is the blocking: in several scenes, Washizu (Macbeth) and Asaji (Lady Macbeth) move just like Noh actors on a stage. My favorite example is Asaji's strange pacing while Washizu is killing his lord: it's virtually a kusemai, and it perfectly expresses her anxiety.

Between Shakespeare and the Noh, then, Kurosawa's film would seem to be a natural for translation to the stage. Certainly the transition would have posed problems as well: not just supplying the lack of Kurosawa's inimitable visuals, but coming up with a script. I was eager to see what they'd do in this regard: would they simply use Donald Richie's subtitles (or Linda Hoaglund's)? Would they come up with a new, complete translation of Kurosawa's script? Would they - and this was a tantalizing idea - adopt Shakespeare's lines whenever they could?

In short, I imagined all sorts of possibilities for bringing the profound seriousness of Kurosawa's vision to the stage, and maybe even combining it with the Shakespearean heritage that would have been more remote to him, but more accessible to the OSF's audience.

Instead what we got was, in a word, pandering. The script was a mishmash of untranslated Japanese phrases badly mouthed by actors who can't speak Japanese, inelegant dialogue modified (it seemed) from the subtitles, and overwrought pseudopoetic fill-ins both for things the subtitles didn't translate and for scenes that the director felt needed to be added. All of this was delivered in a staging that emphasized stereotypically Japanese elements without being true to a Noh vision, or any other; a staging that for most of the time used film projected on a strip of screen above the stage, in a move that seemed at first like a bold appropriation of cinematic elements but ended up feeling like a cop-out, as any difficult-to-stage elements were simply presented on film.

Lemme unpack that rant a bit. The overall tone of the production was Orientalist in the extreme. They made the decision to have the actors, who were with one key exception native speakers of English, deliver several of their lines in Japanese. Without subtitles (which they could have offered, using the ubiquitous screen - they in fact did subtitle the prerecorded chant that opened and closed the play), and often without precisely translating them in ensuing English dialogue. Of course they seldom did this so that you'd actually miss anything if you didn't speak Japanese - so the net effect was of a mild kind of alienation, so that the audience would feel something like they were watching a foreign film.

This in and of itself might not be a disastrous idea. I think I disagree fundamentally with the idea of foreignizing Throne of Blood rather than making it feel more intimate to the audience, of emphasizing the idea that this is something exotic rather than a valid and comprehensible modern take on universal ideas, but never mind that. If they'd been more consistent and persistent about providing the illusion that one was watching Kurosawa's film come to life, it might indeed have been interesting. Maybe dress all the actors and sets in black and white, maybe deliver even more of the lines in Japanese with subtitles, maybe... Lots could have been done.

But they didn't follow through. The Japanese phrases in the dialogue were left hanging there like little paper lanterns, just creating atmosphere; the set designs, while clearly meant to recall Kurosawa's, were neither barren enough to truly suggest Noh (or a black-and-white film) nor lively enough to really make the most of the chance to present this in color. Take the blood-stained walls of the sealed room, such a key setting in the early part of Kurosawa's film. In black and white, the blood stains is just another shade of gray on a gray wall - part of the effect was in showing us this rough-textured wooden wall and forcing us to imagine that part of this texture was blood. Very effective in black-and-white, and of course it could have been tremendously effective in color on a stage, too, giving us a huge crimson spatter for example. Instead this wall is represented by a mildly grubby standing screen. Neither fish nor fowl.

And the Noh elements - well, there were certainly nods toward the distinctive movements of the main characters in the film. But in the play these were mixed in with, and the Noh elements thoroughly drowned out by, random bits of kabuki, chanbara, and Takarazuka. Instead of the quiet intensity and unbearable tension of Noh-via-Kurosawa, we got a hodgepodge of colorful Japaneseness.

I have to mention the one Japanese cast member, the Takarazuka alumna Ako as Asaji. She was certainly the most fun to watch, with her melodramatic, heavily-accented delivery and her exaggerated movements. But the Takarazuka influence overwhelmed whatever delicacy might have remained in the adaptation: her high-camp approach, in fact, seemed to set the tone for the rest of the production, which included in-joke references to the titles of other Kurosawa movies, and the kind of clown repartee that Shakespeare's tragedies wisely include but which Kurosawa had carefully eliminated.

I almost wish they had done the whole thing as camp. Then it might have been something. What it was instead was pandering: they put gaijin actors in Japanese costume, then had them act "Japanese." They put a Japanese actress on and had her act super-Japanese. They gave themselves the safety-net of the screen, so that things like the march of the forest at the end could simply be projected - forget about using stage ingenuity to solve that problem. They filled in things that Kurosawa had chosen to leave blank: the whole bit about Macbeth hiring Murderers is left out, so that we don't know if Washizu has ordered the killing of Miki until after Washizu has seen Miki's ghost. But this version adds a clumsy scene before the banquet just to remove any doubt. Lame.

Just to make it clear: I'm not saying Shakespeare was lame to include such a scene. I'm saying that Shakespeare was a great artist who knew what he wanted to do and did it to great success. And so was Kurosawa. This play was neither, to its infinite detriment.