Nominations for the 2013 Helen Hayes awards were announced last week, and left me puzzled, to put it mildly. I do not understand how the uninspired Ethan McSweeny-directed Midsummer Night’s Dream was nominated for Outstanding Resident Play and Outstanding Director, while the far, far better Strange Interlude was passed over for both those honors and received just one nomination, for the marvelous Francesca Faridany as Nina.
I am generally unimpressed with Ethan McSweeny as a Shakespeare director. I have seen three Ethan McSweeny-directed Shakespeare productions – Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, and Midsummer Night’s Dream – and not one has led me deeper into the play. While I have no quarrel in theory with updating the settings of Shakespeare productions, McSweeny shows the dangers of such an approach. His productions always seem more focused on his conceit than on the play itself. This all came to a head in Midsummer Night’s Dream, which was definitely the worst of the three McSweeny Shakespeare productions I’ve seen (Much Ado may not have been thought-provoking, but its excellently cast Beatrice and Benedick gave it a lot of charm).
One would think that making sure the language comes across would be a focus of any Shakespeare director, but the opposite happened here. For most of the performance, the language seemed to be the last thing the director focused on. Judging by the program notes, making the production magical was a huge focus, yet the most magical element of Midsummer, its entrancing poetry, was so lost in this production as to be practically nonexistent. I think this was the single largest reason why the production, despite some lovely visual moments like the snowstorm entrance, was so decidedly unmagical (the backstage setting and the fairies’ costumes – more “Lovely Ladies” in Les Miserables than magical sprites – didn’t help the magic either).
Titania, Oberon, and the four lovers had seemingly no feel for the poetry of the language and were pretty uniformly one-note and shrill. Puck stood out in contrast because he was the only one of the seven who was universally understandable and who consistently conveyed the music of the language. Listening to him was a relief.
I (I hope fairly) blame the director for this. Had the problem been confined to one or two characters, I might have laid the fault at the actors’ doors, but it seems unlikely that all six – Titania, Oberon, and the four lovers – were simply not up to Shakespeare, especially as I think both Titania and Oberon were veterans of the Stratford Festival in Ontario. That the problem was so universal suggests to me that the director simply didn’t make language and poetry a priority. Nowhere was this more obvious than at the end of Act I, where the characters’ words were lost completely in the literal mud-slinging going on onstage. (I’d love to see a director come up with something more interesting than the characters gradually losing their garments and sinking into a mud fight – that trope seems a little stale by now.)
The production did improve a bit when the mechanicals were on stage – vocally and dramatically they came across more clearly than Titania/Oberon and the lovers, and they were often genuinely funny – but they were not enough to redeem the play as a whole.
If I was bewildered by the nomination of Midsummer for Outstanding Resident Play and Outstanding Director in a Resident Play, I was not at all bewildered to see that Francesca Faridany was nominated for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Resident Play for her performance in Strange Interlude. What does defy understanding is that Midsummer was nominated for Outstanding Play and Director while Strange Interlude was not. Michael Kahn had far less to work with in Strange Interlude than McSweeny did with Midsummer, given that, as reviewers pointed out, Strange Interlude seems unlikely to stand the test of time, but Kahn, aided by a magnificent cast, managed to make the performance of a not-so-enduring play quite mesmerizing. Everything worked together in Kahn’s production – the cast, the sets, the costumes, the direction – and I was drawn deeply into the characters and the story. Francesca Faridany as Nina was splendid and richly deserves her nomination. I would have nominated Robert Stanton (Charles Marsden), who was in every way Faridany’s equal, as well, and Michael Kahn should have been nominated as director.
[Funny aside: During one of Strange Interlude’s intermissions (the play is almost four hours long), I was eating a cupcake at the bar in the Harman foyer, when Michael Kahn walked up next to me. He glanced over at me, and I took the opportunity to say how much I was enjoying the production … only I am nearly positive he thought I was talking about the cupcake! Fortunately I realized this mid-observation and managed to make it clear that I was talking about the play. The degree of fervor with which I spoke was a little much for a cupcake. :-)]
I’d love to hear others’ thoughts on the nominations (or on Midsummer and Strange Interlude). Any reactions?
No comments:
Post a Comment