Romeo and Juliet in Brazilian Portuguese, Globe to Globe Festival, 20 May 2012

How did that station wagon find its way onto the stage of Shakespeare’s Globe? The troupe of Brazilian clowns who played Romeo and Juliet this past weekend were not only touchingly funny and innately musical, they’re also, apparently, good mechanics.

In many Globe to Globe productions, it hasn’t been clear how precisely the original text has been translated. Romeo and Juliet clearly truncated the text, with a playing time of just under two hours and employing William Shakespeare as a narrator. The streamlined text cut many of the extraneous Montagues and Capulets, but retained much of the play’s romantic imagery. There were roses (still sweet, though here called “rosa”) and the inconstant moon, hung on a pole and carried by cast members. By changing the text and casting older actors, this production also managed to stop Romeo and Juliet from being whiny self-absorbed teenagers.

The production’s use of height and levels was particularly fascinating. The actors played in the yard, on the deck, inside the aforementioned station wagon, on a platform on top of it, and on ladders. The men played most of the show on stilts of varying heights and Juliet wore pointe shoes. This production reversed the usual playing of the balcony scene, placing Juliet inside the car and Romeo above her on the platform.

By subverting expectations while holding true to a beloved story, Groupo Galpão’s Romeo and Juliet created a beautiful and refreshing production.

I started going to camp when I was nine. This was proper sleep-a-way camp, eight weeks straight through, no going home for the weekends. I saw my parents once a summer, at visiting day. I was incredibly homesick. Even though, for the first two years, I had  a great time, I still begged my mom and dad to take me home. By the third summer, when the issue became something more than that, it was still assumed that I was just homesick and I should stick out the summer. I switched camps at twelve and, though I still dealt with occasional bouts of homesickness, it wasn't nearly as bad as it had been.
Flash forward to 2012. Though I went home at Christmas, I chose not to do so for the Easter holidays. Coming back from break, one of my coursemates asked how I was doing, since it had been so long since I'd been home and I do tend to miss my friends and family. The truth is, I was doing just fine until my friend Matt and his fiance Heather came to London for a few days, followed quickly by my friend David,  who spent a week with me. 
It was so great to see Matt and Heather, and to show David around my new city. I had a wonderful time. And then, Thursday morning, David got on a plane back to New York. And I cried. I cried because I was going to miss him, yes, but also because I miss everyone. It's kind of strange- I didn't go back to New York at Easter because, when I went home for Christmas, I felt like I wasn't supposed to be there. My life is meant to be in London right now and I know it. I have amazing friends, I'm seeing terrific theatre, and I'm doing good work. I know I'm supposed to be here now, but I'm missing the goings-on back home terribly. The homesickness, which somehow held itself at bay for five months, has finally reared its ugly head. I'm not ready to leave London- nowhere near, in fact. I just miss my mommy (and my dad and brother and grandparents and aunt and cousins and friends).
My grandparents and cousin Dana will be coming towards the end of next month and I'm really looking forward to seeing them. When they arrive, it will have been six and a half months since I last saw my family. That's a long, long time.
When I was a kid, I couldn't get past the homesickness. It was there, all summer long. I have enough faith in myself now that I know I can move beyond it, not let it get too much in the way. I'll be fine soon enough. London friends, I might need to lean on you a little bit more for the next couple of days. Folks back home, I love you and I miss you. 

Sweeney Todd, Adelphi Theatre, 13 May 2012

Jonathan Kent’s production of Sweeney Todd, which plays at the Adelphi Theatre through September 22nd, dismisses the show’s original Victorian-era setting, choosing instead to place the production in the Great Depression. Gone is the Steampunk set design, present in the 1979 production and in many subsequent revivals, though a version of the famous rotating box remains. Also dispensed with is the traditional white makeup of the original production, meaning the cast no longer resembles walking corpses. The wailing siren, heard each time a murder takes place on stage, is no longer the wail of a steam engine, but a call back to work for Londoners happy to have employment. As they labor, they gossip, attempting to learn what they can about the cannibalistic serial killer who has apparently just been stopped. The prologue and epilogue, “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd,” thus becomes a way of passing along information- between the people onstage, yes, but also from the actors to the audience. Dispensing with the original production design and staging concept is not a new idea, though this conception was altogether more successful than others I’ve seen. The 2005 John Doyle-helmed Broadway revival, for example, dressed its cast in quasi-contemporary attire, did away with the traditional set, large cast, and, perhaps most notably, the entire orchestra, creating a “chamber Sweeney” which was interesting but lacking in the grandeur demanded by the score. In Kent’s production, a cast of thirty fills in the set’s multiple levels well and, for the most part, sings Stephen Sondehim’s difficult music more than adequately. There is a moment when the female chorus sounds like a group of dying cats, but it works, the screeches of the women reminiscent of both the siren and the screams of Sweeney’s victims.

Luke Brady, as the romantic sailor Anthony, is the biggest disappointment of the night. When we can hear him, he sounds pretty, though he lacks passion in his performance. Peter Polycarpu’s Beadle Bamford is strange- he is well-acted and well-sung, but the two somehow don’t fit together. Michael Ball’s Sweeney is very good, but the highlight of the night is Imelda Staunton as Mrs. Lovett. She somehow manages to combine the horror of her Harry Potter Professor Umbridge with the hilarity of her Shakespeare in Love Nurse to create a Lovett who is shrewd, hysterical, and utterly frightening. She became increasingly unhinged throughout the show, but when bringing Sweeney back to earth after his “Epiphany,” she attains a new level of creepy.

The Depression-era setting becomes a metaphor for Sweeney’s psychological state. Happily the audience does not share his mood; this is a very good production of a very, very good show.

Two Gentlemen of Verona- Two Gents Productions, Globe to Globe Festival, Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre

Though billed as a performance in Shona, Two Gents Productions’ Two Gentlemen of Verona begins with an English-language prologue, affectionately adapted from Shakespeare’s other Verona-set play. In just over two hours traffic of the Globe to Globe Festival stage, actors Denton Chikura and Tonderai Munyevu portray all the characters in the comedy, milking every possible laugh from the audience. With just a few costume pieces and boundless energy, the two performers made the audience forget that Two Gentlemen is not one of Shakespeare’s best works. The story is relatively simple- Proteus and Valentine, the titular gentlemen, travel to Milan where they both promptly fall in love with the same woman, Silvia. Valentine’s Veronisi girlfriend Julia follows him to a forest outside Milan where, in true Shakespearean fashion, all is put right. The problem is the play’s ending, in which Valentine effectively gives Silvia to Proteus. This production managed to smooth over the misogynistic rough edges of the English-language text, creating an ending that was truly moving.

The festival is now in its third week. I’ve been lucky enough to see half of the sixteen titles already presented under its aegis and there has yet to be a dud. Each company has brought with them their own performance styles, influenced by the societies from which they hail. Two Gentlemen dispensed with that concept; it was a performance for a pluralistic Britain. Though the actors were speaking a foreign language, they seemed British in their aesthetic. They wore Elizabethan-style costumes, adding and subtracting pieces in full view of the audience. They played with their audience, first costuming members, then convincing others to take off their shoes, and at one point even bringing three people on stage, using them as human puppets. It was an unexpectedly “Western” take which left the audience thinking that they spoke Shona.

The production suffered a bit from being slightly presentational. Whenever the actors would transition to Proteus or Valentine, they would state their names clearly, just so the audience would have no doubt who they were. While characters were remarkably specific, especially since Sylvia and the Duke were each played at different times by both actors, only Proteus, Valentine, and Julia seemed fully-realized characters. This might not have been the fault of the production, but rather the play itself. Most men are lucky if they create one masterpiece; Shakespeare wrote many- this just isn’t one of them. Nevertheless, it’s good for a laugh, and Two Gents Productions delivered.

Babel, Caledonian Park, presented by World Stages London, Wildworks, and Battersea Arts Centre, Sunday 6 May, 2012

I got lost on my way to Babel. I’m a visitor to London and didn’t have the opportunity to seek out Caledonian Park prior to Sunday night’s performance. I had GoogleMaps leading me astray; I’m not sure what did it for the production. Urged along park paths dotted with men and women dressed in white berets and trench coats (who I deemed angels) and lined with people doing their own thing- reading books in trees, making salad, doing yoga, sleeping in real beds, was fascinatingly surreal. That surrealism vanished as soon as we entered Caledonian Park’s main field. The central clearing was dotted with tents. There was music, provided by both a band and a choir. After purchasing a spiced cider from the bar tent, I found myself being invited into a “circle of love” in a round, raised tent. I was promised games and stories, but instead found myself the object of other audience members’ curiosity; who was this American girl drinking cider on the floor? Leaving the Love Tent, I discovered a knit skyline of London, a fire artist, and a dancing Southeast Asian hermaphrodite. Every so often, an angel would speak, encouraging us to “build our new city.” It was utterly thrilling and bizarre, almost like living in an environmental production of Angels in America. I was half expecting someone to tell me to “look up.”

When night fell, the “dramatic” portion of the evening began. Where the prologue was one of the most interesting and different art instillations I’ve ever seen, the story of the play-part of Babel was simplistic, under-defined, and ended too patly to be of any real interest. There was a political message folded in there, something about the Occupy Movement and the current eviction of low-income East Londoners in advance of the Olympics, but the politics wasn’t carried far enough. We were left with more questions than answers. Why, for example, were the people so dedicated to living in the shadow of the tower? Why weren’t they allowed to stay? What were the security guards protecting? What were the angels? Aside from a tower and a bunch of people in native costume (most of whom spoke English), what did this have to do with the Tower of Babel story?

Like my journey to Caledonian Park, Babel had a few wrong turns. While I ultimately found myself in the right place, I’m not sure Babel did- though I have faith that it could, with further development on the plot of the piece.