Italics are mine

New York City

A few weeks ago I went to New York City. This was the trip I was supposed to take the week when my father called to say my mother was going to die and I had to cancel. In fact, the trip I was supposed to take was much shorter -- a few days -- but when I was able to reschedule some time after my mother died, I decided to go all out and do what I love most, attending a lot of theater performances in New York City. 

It was a phenomenal trip. I stayed in three different hotels, each close to the performing arts venues I was going to visit at the time: first in Brooklyn close to BAM where I saw A Little Life and Hamlet (A Little Life in Dutch, directed by Ivo van Hove, the production was gorgeous but the topic is so depressing that I had, like many other attendees, to speed-walk to the exit at intermission, and Hamlet in German with a zany energy that was invigorating), then on the Upper West Side where I saw the NY Philharmonic and Don Carlo at the Met as well as Straight Line Crazy in midtown (the performances besides the Wednesday matinee were sold out, given that Ralph Fiennes was starring in the title role), and then in Midtown/Theater District where I had to get back to the Upper West Side to see the Paul Taylor Dance Company (hotel snafu) and I also saw the musical Into the Woods (definitely a Broadway staple, although it is more touristy than the sort of New York entertainment I usually seek), The Piano Lesson (with Samuel Jackson in a play directed by his wife and also starring the son of Denzel Washington, and I have been so out of the New York theatre scene over the past few years that I didn't even realize the woman with Jackson in her name was Samuel's wife and the man with Washington in his name was Denzel's son, until they made their entrance on stage and Samuel Jackson got a lot of applause but the man with Washington as his last name also got a lot of applause and it wasn't until intermission that I realized why), and Death of a Salesman, which was phenomenal although the review in the New Yorker tried to convince you otherwise.

I wish I could have found the time to go to the Whitney for the Hopper exhibition and to the Metropolitan Museum because I will love the Met no matter what is on display, but I already found myself lucky to take this trip after all the darkness that befell my family over the past few months. New York City theater exhibits a level of innovation and creativity that other cities just cannot display if they want to satisfy their customer base, and I always leave the City feeling refresh and exhilarated. I hope to be back in the spring/summer for a couple of key theater productions. We will see if I can make it happen. In any case, I went back to my daily life with more energy and creativity than I had had in years. I am so happy I was finally able to take this trip. My mother would have been proud.

The Director's Voice

 I love this book so much. Years ago (maybe nine years ago?) when I still lived in Pennsylvania, there was a time period where I got tired of taking the Bieber bus to New York City and I would drive down to Washington DC quite frequently and I saw Henry IV Part 1 twice at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in DC because it was that good. And I went to college in Paris, France, so I like to think I know what good theater is like. That Henri IV Part 1 was really, really good. (And I loved the Tom Hiddleston TV series but that was not live theater.) Anyway, in the Shakespeare DC bookshop when I was in town to watch Henry IV Part 1, I bought The Director's Voice volume 2, about more recent interviews (at the time) of directors, and I remember seeing The Director's Voice later in the bookshop (maybe the second time I drove down to catch Henry IV Part 1 again) and at the time I decided I didn't know enough about the times where those directors had made theater to connect with what they had to say in interviews. Frankly, I don't think any of the names resonated with me. (!) 

But I am where I am now and I bought this book on a recent trip to New York City (Drama Book Shop, I love you), and once I started reading it I could not put it down. It was fascinating to hear theater landmark names like JoAnne Akalaitis or Zelda Fichandler or Harold S. Prince express themselves when time has made them become stultified. This is an important book for anyone who cares about theater directing.

Finally, a funny aside is that my current employer is mentioned in two interviews (out of twenty-one) in the book, and in the second of them it is mentioned more than once. Theater is not a discipline that my employer currently seems to include in its strategy for greater academic preeminence, but I have also read about my employer in another theater-related book, and they are ranked in the top 25 drama programs in the world in Hollywood Reporter, so I think they are good, even if they don't play a leading role in the current strategic plan, for whatever reason.

The two directors with ties to SMU mentioned in the book are John Hirsch and Garland Wright. The other university that gets mentioned a lot in the book is Yale, so it is all to SMU's credit that it was mentioned in the book too more than once. SMU alum Garland Wright tragically died at 52 of cancer and we are left to imagine the impact he could have had on American theater if he had lived longer.  

This was a phenomenal book I could not put down and I recommend it to anyone interested in theater, especially directing.

Best modern dance DVD: "If the dancer dances"

This is one of the very best modern dance DVDs I've ever watched, and maybe the best. We are treated to the rehearsals by a New York modern dance company troupe of a dance by Merce Cunningham. They struggle with a style that is not their own, under the watchful eye of Cunningham-trained dancers sent to help them master the new material. The grace and originality of the movements is breathtaking. The personality of the dancers and trainers comes through. They are all united in a deep respect of Cunningham's dances, and I found this movie far more interesting than the Cunningham DVD that was released recently. Highly recommended.

Virtual New York City weekend

A few weeks ago I was supposed to New York City for a long weekend. I was really looking forward to it, since my kind of people are in NYC rather than in Dallas. (I like the things of Dallas, the museum, the symphony, the indie bookstores, the restaurants, but I need to go to NYC once in a while.) Needless to say, the pandemic put a brutal end to any hope I had of going. So I figured for this post I would daydream about what I would have done if I had gone. 

I was supposed to land on Friday afternoon, and on Friday evening I was going to see Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? at the Booth Theatre. I've loved this play since I've seen the movie with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, although I was never particularly fond of black and white movies that are black and white on purpose when they could have been in color. The show closed during previews when Broadway was shut down, so it never got to premiere, but what a cast it would have been: Laurie Metcalfe as Martha, Rupert Everett as George, Joe Mantello directing. I hope they film it for television to recoup their costs. The play has so much to say about thwarted ambitions and pent-up anger and outright delusions.

The following day, I was going to go and see the Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art exhibition at the Whitney, and of course I couldn't be in that neighborhood without stopping at the Rubin. Maybe the Whitney show will be rescheduled (the website says "dates to be announced") but I'm not sure I'll be able to get back to New York any time soon so I got myself the catalog of the exhibition instead. Thank you, online shopping. That evening I was going to attend the New York Philharmonic concert conducted by Jaap van Zweden himself (the music director of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra before he got the NYC job) with Mahler's First on the program and Daniil Trifonov playing Mozart.

The next day I was going to attend a matinee at the Metropolitan Opera of Maria Stuarda. This was one of the last operas I saw at the Met before I moved to Texas and I was truly amazed by the set and the voices, so I wanted to see it again and relive the magic. This was not to be. That day I would also have gotten brunch and/or dinner  with local friends, or perhaps a friend down from Boston. I miss face-to-face interactions. Some other time, I suppose. 

Then on Monday I was going to see the Dorothea Lange: Words and Pictures exhibit at MoMA and attend the lecture at the New York Historical Society (Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition and American Complacency). None of that came to pass, obviously, but I ordered the Lange catalog in another round of online shopping from Dallas. As of this writing, the Lange exhibition is supposed to open online instead. 

I suppose I would have eaten on the Upper West Side at Irving Farm Coffee Roasters, Sweetgreen and Nice Matin. I suppose I would have had a wonderful time, if the pandemic had not struck. But with the pandemic of course the trip was out of the question. Better to stay safe, and read those museum catalogs from Dallas instead. 

Review of "Nureyev: A Portrait"

This is a far better documentary than "Fonteyn and Nureyev". The dance excerpts better showcase Nureyev's exceptional artistry and the movie also includes an interview with the dancer where he reflects on his career and shows great thoughtfulness. We get a good sense of how difficult Nureyev's life was before he was admitted to the dance school in Leningrad and of course the way he tells some stories of his own life, such as his interactions with Balanchine, are spellbinding. The movie doesn't hint at Nureyev's troubles with drugs that "Fonteyn and Nureyev" mentions once but frankly I didn't feel it was a big loss, although I would have loved to know more about his inner demons. The part about his return to the Kirov decades after his defection was very moving. Contrary to "Ballerina", "Prima Ballerina" and "Fonteyn and Nureyev", this is a documentary about a dancer where you get some sense of who the dancer was, behind the dancing. And his dancing was out-of-this-world. A must-buy if you like dance. 

Review of "Max Lorenz: Wagner's Mastersinger and Hitler's Siegfried"

I recently came across this 54-min documentary about the life of German tenor Max Lorenz (1901-1975), who was recognized as one of the best heldentenors of his generation. The DVD is out of print but I was able to fetch a used copy in excellent condition on Amazon at a great price (the last reasonably-priced copy, in fact). The movie is also accompanied of a 74-minute CD of musical excerpts of Lorenz singing Siegfried. The movie soundtrack, of course, is full of Lorenz's performances too. I've known about Lorenz ever since I started researching that novel I'm finishing about a French opera singer during World War II, loosely inspired by the life of French soprano Germaine Lubin, who sang Isolde at Bayreuth in 1939 opposite, you guessed it, Max Lorenz. Yet, I didn't expect to find a documentary about him.

For those of you who have stumbled upon this blog post at random, it helps to know that Bayreuth in those days was a Hitler stronghold. The festival boss, Winifred Wagner, Richard's daughter-in-law, and Adolf Hitler himself were close friends, linked by their love of opera. I didn't know that Lorenz had much of a story worth telling, but in fact he had, as a homosexual with a Jewish wife whom he fiercely protected. The documentary contains several movie-worthy moments such as the time where Winifred Wagner was ordered not to employ Lorenz again because he had been caught in a compromising situation with a young man, situation that ultimately led to a lawsuit, but Winifred Wagner refused to let him go, and the time where Nazis came to arrest her and her mother while Lorenz, who had been assured they'd be protected, was not at home, and Lorenz's wife dialed a special number the wife of Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels had given her in case of emergencies, and after ten minutes the soldiers were ordered out of the house. 

The documentary also has breathtaking pictures of the Semperoper in Dresden and the Vienna State Opera, where Lorenz made his debut (followed by appearances at the Metropolitan Opera), and of the Festspielhaus at Bayreuth. The end of Lorenz's life made me a bit sad. He knew he had scaled great heights he could never reach again and after his wife's passing he seemed very lonely. But he left such a mark on the opera world that he is still remembered today, and he also came across as a man of integrity who dared be himself at a time where that was far from accepted and did his utmost to protect the people dear to him when they were in danger. After the war Lorenz became an Austrian citizen, died in Salzburg and is interred in Vienna.  

Hamlet: Laurence Olivier vs Kenneth Branagh

Among Shakespeare's tragedies Hamlet usually leaves me cold. I love Richard III, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Henry IV (Part 1 more than Part 2, like most people), Henry V, Anthony and Cleopatra, but Hamlet and King Lear are two plays that have long failed to move me in any meaningful fashion, except complete and crushing boredom in a lackluster Globe production of King Lear back in Boston in 2015. (I also saw Hamlet in 2011 at Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival and frankly have no memory of it.) But after watching a very good production of Hamlet at Shakespeare Dallas a few days ago, I decided to finally watch the Hamlet DVD starring Kenneth Branagh I had bought some time ago, and true to myself, I couldn't resist getting the video of Laurence Olivier's Hamlet for comparison. 

Before I go on, I want to give a special mention to my go-to book on all things Shakespeare, Shakespeare after all, by Marjorie Garber, which has a chapter on each Shakespeare play. Quoting the book's description on Amazon.com: "A brilliant and companionable tour through all thirty-eight plays, Shakespeare After All is the perfect introduction to the bard by one of the country’s foremost authorities on his life and work". I bought it a few years back at the Barnes & Noble at 82nd and Broadway on the Upper West Side (of course I mean New York City) and it has stayed with me ever since. Garber starts her chapter on Hamlet by commenting on how many expressions we find in it have passed into common language and I have had the same feeling.

I am partial to Laurence Olivier, since I adore his Richard III and enjoy his Henry V (although when it comes to Henry V, no one comes close to rivaling Tom Hiddleston's performance in my book), and I also treasure black-and-white movies from the 1930 and 1940s, so it will come as no surprise that his Hamlet handily wins the contest for me, in spite of the creepiness of having 40-year-old bleached-blonde Olivier play Hamlet while 29-year-old Eileen Herlie reprise the role of his mother Gertrude, which she had also played on stage. (The creepiness hits a high when Gertrude kisses her own son on the lips several times in Act I Scene 2. As a side note, after those Shakespearean debuts, Heirle spent 32 years in the cast of the soap opera All My Children. I suppose people pay their bills however they can, and soap operas might have been a more lucrative source of income for her than theater. Yet, one cannot escape the thought that her talent might have been better served elsewhere.)

I particularly loved the use of light, shadow and framing, always striking in Olivier's movies. The bit about Rosencrantz and Guilderstern is cut, unfortunately, as are other bits to keep the movie's length at two hours and a half, which at times gives the movie a chopped feel, but many parts were spellbinding throughout, from Hamlet's interaction with the Ghost to his discovery that Ophelia is dead at the cemetery and to both Hamlet and Laertes being pulled into actions beyond their control, Laertes being used as a pawn by the King, Hamlet being forced by the King to take part in a duel, lust for power throwing the kingdom in disarray, as well as the moment Gertrude understands the drink is poisoned and drinks it to save her son. I've never cared much about the play, but I couldn't stop watching this movie.

In the past, I have always found the plot very contrived, especially the play within the play (curiously, the use of a ghost as a plot device doesn't bother me at all), although one has to give Shakespeare kudos for the idea of meta theater. I've also never cared much for the Hamlet-Ophelia romance. Watching Olivier's Hamlet, I found myself truly enjoying the play for the first time, perhaps because the production values of the movie are high without being lavish as in the Branagh DVD, so one gets the impression that each set could be a theater set, except that the camera seamlessly follows the actors from a set to the next.

Now, to be fair to the Branagh DVD, I felt it had better ensemble acting, while the Olivier movie is plainly an instrument to showcase Olivier's acting. For instance, in the Branagh DVD, the scene where Polonius announces to the King and Queen he might have found out the reason of Hamlet's trouble is a textbook case of great acting, the actors feeding off each other's response as if they had never heard those lines before. Branagh's version of Hamlet also keeps Guildenstern and Rosencrantz. At four hours, though, I have to admit I found it too long. In fact since it comes in 2 DVDs and the length of the first DVD was 2 1/2 hours, I initially thought it was the whole play and the second DVD contained extras. Shakespeare's time was very different from ours and maybe it made sense back then to have 4-hour-long plays as entertainment, but I just have too many things to do (including fun things, I'm not just talking about work - simply, I'm talking about doing and creating things instead of consuming them, in particular TV watching) to put up with 4 hours of Hamlet.

While Olivier had cut maybe a little too much of the part about the itinerant theater troupe, Branagh keeps too much of it, and then imposes on us ridiculous flashbacks of Hamlet and Ophelia sleeping together, apparently to suitably titillate the 1995 viewer. (There is no way Ophelia would have let that happen. She is from a good family and knows she would have had zero chance of having Hamlet marry her then.) Kate Winslet does make a better Ophelia than Jean Simmons, who later became a star (she was only 19 when she starred in Olivier's movie and it shows), although Simmons does an outstanding job in the madness scene - the scene where she puts flowers in her hair and sings to herself. Winslet is shown in a straitjacket, and the movie of many irrelevant or ridiculous flashbacks doesn't even show her floating away in the meadow. The sets on the Branagh movie are sumptuous, and Branagh keeps the bit about the conflict with Norway that is erased from the Olivier movie, which casts the protagonists in a very different light: how irresponsible of them to indulge in those internecine battles when danger is looming. Overall the Olivier movie, spare and with its stunning use of light, is a better version of Hamlet. I just wish Gertrude hadn't been 11 years younger than her son and hadn't kissed him on the mouth. That was just creepy. Thankfully it happens only in one scene and as the movie progresses the viewer is completely engrossed in the action. The cuts each lead made only shed important light into what Olivier and Branagh viewed as the essence of the play. For Olivier it is clearly a family drama about power and revenge. Branagh puts Hamlet in a bigger picture of conflict with another country, adding a layer of betrayal.

Perhaps one day someone will hit the sweet spot and provide a  3 1/4 - hour movie version of Hamlet that perfectly balances all its elements. But no movie will ever capture the feeling of watching the play on stage. To get a sense of the behind-the-scenes work that goes on in preparing a production, Discovering Hamlet featuring Derek Jacobi and Kenneth Branagh provides a good introduction to the world of theater. 

Lynn Nottage's Play "Sweat" at Dallas Theater Center

Some plays receive awards because the competition the year they were in the running turned out weak. Others receive awards because they are so good that they crushed any competition they might have had, dazzling with their plot turns and delivering sucker-punches that leave the viewer deeply moved long after seeing the play. Lynn Nottage's Sweat, in a solid Dallas Theater Center production at the Kalita Humphreys Theater, belongs to the second category. 

It is hard to know what to write about the play without giving away key plot points so I will start by staying the obvious: go and see it. The first scene didn't quite work for me (one of the actors was overacting), but the production quickly hit its stride and had me riveted on my seat, in spite of the narrative structure going back and forth between 2000 and 2008. Every conflict in that play was pitch-perfect. Some of the scenes that took my breath away include the one where the woman who joined the factory at age 18 talks about the dreams she had had of quitting after 6 months and going to visit the world with her boyfriend (but she chose to remain at her blue-collar union job instead and never left Berks County), the violence that is hinted at in the blurb of the play finally happens (it is not quite what you think) and the very last one that shows the aftermath at the bar. I was also moved by the depiction of the two drug addicts in the play, especially the one who doesn't start out as a drug addict. 

The play hit close to home because I spent 11 years in Lehigh Valley, PA (12 years if you don't count my sabbatical), which is mentioned once in the play, and Reading, PA was only one hour drive away. I met once someone at Air Products once who lived in Reading, I'm not sure if it was because his family was from there or if it was because he was able to afford a big house for very cheap, but I remember someone talking about the very high poverty rate already back then, and having seen the Lehigh Valley after the demise of Bethlehem Steel, I can believe Reading was named the city with the highest poverty rate in America back in 2011. (The poverty rate was about 40%. I am told things have been improving.)

For me those workers who gather at the bar after their shift could have been Bethlehem Steel workers in Bethlehem, PA back in the early 1990s. I've stopped viewing Bethlehem as home a long time ago (I love Dallas too much to be nostalgic about it), but I've lived the longest there of any place I've lived since I moved to the U.S., so it still means something to me to watch a play about people who could have been my neighbors back then. 

Because of the recent layoffs of 43 employees at the Dallas Morning News, including their culture critic Chris Vognar, the play, which features a strike and someone who crosses the picket line to do the job at much lower pay than what an union employee would require, also made me think in unexpected ways about today's economy. Undoubtedly this free review of a play I've seen on my own personal blog does not affect the long-term economic prospects of theater critics and other culture journalists, but what of free professional review sites that are financed through advertising? Yet, people have the right to do what they want - write for free to get their names out there, read for free to avoid paying for content they can find online easily.

Newspapers still haven't found a compelling way to define and sell a financially viable product. After reading about the re-organization, I felt that the Dallas Morning News wants to focus on local news and not on news about books or movies that readers can glean from the New York Times Review of Books or rottentomatoes.com. Yet there is value in hearing multiple experts on the same topic, particularly when they disagree with each other. Perhaps syndicated columns would work best, with multiple newspapers in different markets sharing the cost of paying an employee's salary and benefits. Or should journalists develop a fundraising or patronage model? It is time to try groundbreakingly innovative solutions to the problem of newspapers' financial viability in the digital age - something that goes beyond defining the specifics of a paywall. 

Quite obviously, unpaid reviewers do the job of paid reviewers for free. We like to think that a byline in the Dallas Morning News or the Dallas Observer is a sign of quality while some blogs would be better left unseen, but clearly that was not enough to keep the Dallas Morning News employees their jobs. Sweat only talks about unionized factory workers, but the increased precarity of just about every job in the United States is staggering. Tensions run high in the play between the union workers and management, the union workers and the young man who crosses the picket line, the white workers and the non-white workers. Tensions run high in the country too. The play offers no solution, except for the theme of education as a way out of this mess and a glimmer of decency in the last scene. But plays don't have to make policy. They have to move us, to shake us, to increase our understanding of our fellow countrymen, and to make us view the world in ways we hadn't imagined before. Sweat succeeds superbly.  

Musings on Maria (Callas)

Back in December I finally got to see the movie Maria on Callas, a documentary that recounts Maria Callas's life based on her own interviews and the interviews of people who knew her. It is heavy on the interview snippets and footage of the time and light on the big picture, but I still enjoyed it tremendously. As much as I love opera, I've never much listened to Callas, until I saw Norma in DC back in 2013 (time flies...), wanted to get a recording and ended up with this, where she sings her signature role at La Scala. I loved it so much I spent an inordinate amount of time listening to it again and again on my 3-hour road trips when I was driving down from B'lem to Bethesda and back, but it didn't make me want to hear Callas's singing in other roles.

I'm also fortunate to have this recording of her, offered by a student and his mother after he had graduated (long story as to why, which I can't get into in order to protect the student's privacy), and that book+CD combo I got at the Juilliard Book Shop a few weeks before I left the East Coast, thinking it'd be nice to know more about Callas and then finding other things to read. I never got around to listening to the CD from the book+CD combo until I saw Maria on Callas and then I was floored by how good she was and saddened by the way her life turned out. 

After seeing Maria on Callas I watched Tony Palmer's movie about her, a more traditional documentary that gives a better analysis of her life. In both movies Callas proves herself very shrewd in commenting on human nature, people who betrayed her or tried to bring her down, although she didn't give details, yet she allowed Aristotle Onassis's betrayal to completely destroy her. The Tony Palmer movie explains the constant battle between Maria the woman and Callas the artist: after she had scaled unheard-of heights as a soprano, she also wanted to know a sweep-her-off-her-feet love story. (She had married a much older man who served as her manager.) Onassis, Greek like her, was one of the richest men of the world, although the movie presents him as a womanizer and a shady character. Callas was particularly vulnerable because her voice started giving signs of strain so it became all-important for her to "go out with a bang". Marrying Onassis would have provided that bang. Instead, Onassis dumped her and married Jacqueline Kennedy - a woman far less talented than Callas, but evolving in powerful circles and more conventionally attractive.   

Now, if Onassis hadn't come about, would the end of Callas's life have been much different? It wouldn't have taken the turn of a Greek tragedy, but given the signs of strains on her voice, it is unlikely that she would have remained in the opera world much longer. What would she have done? She tried to reinvent herself, directing operas and conducting masterclasses, but her heart wasn't in it. What a terrifying prospect, to have been put on earth to mesmerize the world doing one thing, to have done it, and then, as someone quoted her as saying to him (I paraphrase), to spend the days waiting for death to come.

"Antony and Cleopatra": RSC vs NTLive

 Not too long ago I got to see the NTLive (National Theater) broadcast of Antony and Cleopatra, with Ralph Fiennes and Sophie Okonedo in the title roles. This is the advantage of living in a wonderful city like Dallas, with so many the cultural opportunities, including theater broadcasts at the Angelika right next to SMU. I’ve always been fond of that play, because it is the first Shakespeare play I ever saw, back in 2009 at the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival, and it so happens that PSF will present a new production of the play this summer. After seeing the broadcast I watched the DVD of the 2017 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) production directed by Iqbal Khan and starring Antony Byrne and Josette Simon. For this blog I want to compare the two, but for those of you who don’t have the time to read blog posts past their first paragraph, my one-line review is that the RSC version is superior in every way.

First, the setting. The RSC version wisely keeps the play in ancient times, while the NTLive production sets it in some vaguely modern setting where army officers, some of whom arrive in submarines, wear neat, clear-colored, freshly ironed military fatigues or crisp military uniforms that make them look like they are wearing Halloween costumes. It has become fashionable to set Shakespeare plays in modern times, and when the plays tell us something about mankind’s unbridled ambition or thirst for power, there certainly is a case for the transposition. Recent broadcast productions of Julius Caesar and Macbeth did so to great effect. But Antony & Cleopatra is about the love between two sovereigns, and there is little to be gained in reminding us that love for a woman can bring a man down, except to emphasize the fact that women rulers might have been more common in the Antiquity than today. In addition, designers in the NTLive production, in the pre-show features, made a big fuss about Cleopatra’s dresses, including the replica of a yellow dress that Beyonce is said to have worn but this made Cleopatra look like a bored housewife from the upper society circles who is more interested in looking sophisticated than ruling over a country. In fact Cleopatra looked like her husband was off to war and she didn’t really rule over anything except the heart of an old soldier from the enemy’s camp. The Cleopatra in the NTLive production looked like “the wife of”. She was so enamored of Antony it looked like a miracle Antony was the only one who had to worry about power intrigues and place coups. In contrast, the Cleopatra in the RSC production looked like a queen. It wasn’t about her clothes, usually fairly simple although elegant, but it was about the way she carried herself, and little details like the manner her hair was pulled up high over her head. That was a woman ruler I believed in. I do have to give NTLive’s Sophie Okonedo credit for an outstanding last scene at the monument (with a live snake!) She really nailed it there.

My favorite actor in the NTLive production was Tunji Kasim as Julius Caesar, who gave a solid performance as a poised and determined young leader, but there was a clearer theme of generation rift in the RSC production where all the young men seemed hotblooded and eager to fight.

I found myself quite bored by the NTLive production, which pretended to offer something fresh in giving Antony’s camp the look of an army of today and shed no new insight on the play, giving it instead a vague hybrid look. At times I was so bored I started imagining more thought-provoking productions, including a gender-bending one I dubbed Antonia and Cleopatro, in a world where women wage war and men rulers are oddities. (If you’re going to talk about female rulers today, you might as well emphasize the lack of them full out.) Other ones I thought about were set during the Vietnam War with a U.S. general in love with a Vietnamese woman, or something in Russia in the eighteenth century with Cleopatra looking like Catherine the Great.

Everything in the RSC production was superb, from the sets to the costumes to the lighting, and the change of expression in the actors’ faces, for instance when Cleopatra learns Antony married Octavia or Antony is told Cleopatra is dead, shows a dimension of theater acting that places both Antony Byrne and Josette Simon among the great actors of our time.