Month: August 2012

Now playing at the Little Shubert Theatre off-Broadway.

More than a decade has passed since I saw The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged), but I remember the madcap play with great fondness. It's incredibly silly, of course—as any compression of several dozen works into a single production put on by just three actors on a bare-bones stage is bound to be—but it's also clever and inventive (Titus Andronicus as a cooking show—ha!), and it demonstrates real knowledge of and affection for Shakespeare's oeuvre. Complete might wear its learning lightly, but you're bound to get more out of it if you know how grotesque Titus really is, and how a Freudian reading of Hamlet works, and how the same elements really do pop up over and over again in the comedies.

Anyway, I thought of Complete when a visiting family member suggested we check out Potted Potter, which purports to cover all seven Harry Potter books in under seventy minutes. I guess I assumed it would be the same kind of thing: silly but entertaining for anyone who knows the books well (and yes, I know the books well—I'm the kind of person who happily absorbs every detail of that kind of world-building saga) and maybe even insightful on occasional. I didn't think that was too much to expect.

Sadly, it was—which still puzzles me. After all, Rowling's work is considerably more accessible than Shakespeare's, and its familiar conventions and goofy names and endearing foibles are ripe for parody (I say that with all affection). Yet unlike their more scholarly predecessors, Dan Clarkson and Jeff Turner, the writer-performers of Potted Potter, don't seem to understand that parody can't be free-floating; it must be attached to something. The target matters. Simply mugging about and changing from one dumb costume to another might be mildly amusing if your audience is feeling generous, but it hardly rises to the level of satire. Perhaps I was foolish to have expected more, but I did, and I was sorely disappointed.

Presented by the Public Theater in Central Park, on Thursday, August 2.

Into the Woods is often described as Stephen Sondheim's most accessible musical, and it probably is, but it absolutely is not as lightly pleasant and innocuous as that label might suggest. For starters, Sondheim's mash-up of familiar fairy tales—with a book by James Lapine—uses the dark Grimm accounts of the stories, not bright Disnified versions, so Cinderella's stepmother, for example, actually mutilates her daughters' feet to try to squeeze them into the slipper and Little Red Riding Hood's grandmother insists that they sew stones into the disemboweled wolf's belly to add to his torment. It's creepy.

But even beyond that, Sondheim and Lapine are more interested in the implications of the tales then the stories themselves—the passage from innocence to experience, the relationship between parent and child, the questionable good fortune of having a wish come true—and they probe those issues with good humor but absolutely no sentimentality. Into the Woods is clever and charming and funny, yes, but also disturbing and bloody and sad. The content is accessible, and perhaps some of the songs as well (though Sondheim's meandering, pattery tunes may be something of an acquired taste), but the themes are uncompromising—which is one of the things that makes Into the Woods such a great musical in the first place.

I honestly think director Timothy Sheader gets that. His elaborate production for Shakespeare(/Sondheim) in the Park is nothing if not ambitious, a genuine attempt to engage with the ideas in the text and find a new spin on them. Unfortunately, it doesn't quite work, and the sheer busy-ness of the thing is a distraction, but it's interesting, and it features some very good performances. And ultimately, it's an opportunity to hear "I Know Things Now" and "Agony" and "Moments in the Wood" and "Last Midnight" and "Children Will Listen"—songs I adore, songs for which I know every lyric by heart—and for that, well, I can forgive a lot of awkwardness.