Why doesn’t the New York Shakespeare Festival brush up its Shakespeare, or at least make it more festive? Instead, it tends to deck out the comedies with a kind of red-nosed jollity and the tragedies with a dark air of murky melodrama.
I know that Shakespeare in the Park has become a New York institution, and that it’s free – except for the expenditure of time – and one shouldn’t be unkind or snobbish about it.
After all, if bad Shakespeare was good enough for Joe Papp, why shouldn’t it be good enough for his successors? Why take its failings to heart?
And once in a while our Shakespeare in the Park works: a Kevin Kline will shine, or a Christopher Walken will transfix as Iago. In 1978, there was a kindly remembered “Taming of the Shrew” at the Delacorte, starring Meryl Streep and Raul Julia. So it’s not always bad.
Well, perhaps not, but the present offering of “The Taming of the Shrew,” at the newly refurbished Delacorte Theater, is absolutely horrid. Not a stone is left unturned in a relentless quest for cheap laughs.
As so often is the case with the New York Shakespeare Festival, the director, this time Mel Shapiro, provides scant evidence that he has any particular concept of what the play might be about, or, even if he has, any coherent approach to demonstrating it.
For one vital thing, the company is either miscast – notably in the case of Allison Janney’s screechingly one-note Katherine – or so encouraged to gag on gags that the production becomes little more than a pile of shtick.
The one exception to all the madly exaggerated mediocrity is provided by the quiet comedy of Max Wright’s piquant and comparatively restrained Christopher Sly. His performance shines like a good deed in a naughty world.
As a director, Shapiro had his moment of glory in the park nearly 30 years ago when, helped out by John Guare and Galt MacDermot (“Hair”), he staged a musical version of “The Two Gentleman of Verona,” which went on to win Broadway fame and kudos.
With memories of that musical perhaps lingering in his ear, Shapiro has introduced an intrusive barbershop quartet of singing monks, offering faintly bawdy Italian ballads translated by electronic subtitles.
Oddly enough, after a time, the intrusions became almost welcome. Of course, by then I was eagerly listening for the sound of passing aircraft to relieve the monotony of this overdone vaudeville.
The scenery by Karl Eigsti is at its best at first sight, when it resembles the floral and landscaped exterior of a faux-elegant Italian pizza parlor.
This is a poor show, all the worst for involving a number of very good actors sent whirling and tumbling through the text, apparently attempting anything for a laugh, short of Shakespeare’s purpose. That purpose is surely to provide a very funny parable of men, women and Elizabethan society, of love, manners and mutual respect.
Today, some 400 years after the play’s first production, the idea of a shrew and the necessity of her taming has changed a great deal: A wife is no more considered a husband’s chattel than that same husband is considered a king.
But what could have hardly changed in a mere four centuries is the human heart, of which Shakespeare had consummate knowledge. A proper production of “The Taming of the Shrew” would surely leave one with an understanding of its continued validity, rather than the jangled memory of skits from a scattered sitcom incomprehensibly rendered in an Elizabethan mode.
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Usually in my business you learn to know what it is you think – or, if you don’t know, you learn how to keep convincingly evasive about it. But I don’t honestly know exactly what I thought about Arje Shaw’s play “The Gathering,” currently at the Jewish Repertory Theater, situated at Theater 91 on 91st Street, between First and Second avenues. Though I think I know what I felt.
And I was moved. I realize that this argumentative play is flawed and corny. It concerns the wrongs and (possible) rights of President Reagan’s 1985 visit to Germany’s Bitburg Cemetery, where Nazis are buried, and the resultant controversy, particularly in the Jewish community.
I recall being outraged at the time, although not as outraged as Shaw’s hero, a Jewish patriarch and Holocaust survivor, who with his grandson goes to the cemetery to protest, much to the embarrassment of his own son (the boy’s father), who happens to be a speechwriter for Reagan.
At the cemetery, they encounter a German guard too young to have known the war but clearly a “good” German. The play is a tad contrived.
Yet I did find its themes of Jewishness, revenge, guilt, compassion, forgiveness, unforgiveness and fatherhood strangely muddled but oddly moving. Indeed a play, even an unduly contrived play, that leaves hardly a dry eye in the house cannot be all bad.
And I have no doubt whatsoever about the sheer magnificent conviction that Theodore Bikel brings to the grandfather who survived the Holocaust. This is being, not acting.