The Rake Magazine

There are two things that need to be done, I think, when adapting a Shakespeare play. First, respects must be paid to the language — the actors must own their lines, the director must choose the emphases that suit his/her interpretation best. And second, the cast must act as translators, using their bodies to re-interpret the script and make it relatable for the modern audience, so that thumb-biting, say, can actually be perceived as an offense. For the most part, Four Humors Theater's staging of Romeo and Juliet, showing this weekend and next at the Bedlam Theater, accomplishes these tasks.

It's a minimal production. Romeo (Jason Bohon) wears jeans and a hoodie; Juliet (Elise Langer) is in a jersey dress. (Both sport ergonomically designed Puma sneakers.) Aside from a tire swing and a couple moveable screen doors, the set is mostly bare, which is nice — there's no gimmickry.

Director Jason Ballweber has taken obvious pains to make this an intimate performance. When Romeo wanders into the crowd and begins to direct his speech to audience members, there's a genuine feel to it; it seems he's actually speaking to the theatergoers, not just reciting his lines in one's personal space. Throughout, Bohon sustains his role well. He plays a thoughtful Romeo, humanizing the character's rather absurd (rather pubescent) passions and moods — he's gloomy, sure, but never becomes melodramatically morose.

Likewise, Langer adds a good bit of levity to Juliet's character. She delivers her speeches like a fourteen-year-old girl talking to her friend on the phone — a sort of rapid-fire, valley-esque style that makes one believe she has butterflies fluttering in her head. At first it's a bit hard to get used to — she's rushing through the lines and it's difficult to catch the meaning of the bard's words — but after a scene or two, when the audience is able to settle in, it's actually delightful. Impressive, even.

Finally, Kimberly Richardson turns out a fantastic performance as Juliet's nurse. Ballweber has invested a particular amount of weight in this role, turning the nurse into one of Shakespeare's ‘fool' characters, as from Twelfth Night or Puck from A Midsummer Night's Dream. Dressed something like Mrs. Doubtfire, she's the wise old lady with her fingers in everyone's business, her ward's interests closest to her heart. Maybe the most effective scene of the play is late in the second act when Juliet and her nurse meet in the Capulets' orchard. The nurse has just come from the friar's with news of Juliet's wedding, and Juliet has to wring it out from her. The nurse paces up and down the bowling-lane-like stage, feigning woe, avoiding Juliet's questions, causing her to go into something like hysteria. And then, just as the audience is beginning to wonder how serious she is, Richardson flashes a quick smile to the crowd, letting us in on her joke, before she goes on tormenting the young lover.

It's a good, light approach to the play — typical of the Four Humors style that has won them so much praise in the last few years. When the minstrels begin to sing a medieval rendition of "Gin and Juice," one is reminded of the 4HT production of Bards, wherein the chorus de-modified the Wu-Tang Clan's "C.R.E.A.M."

At times, though — especially in the first few acts — the staging sacrifices feeling for humor. The balcony scene is where we first get a real look at Juliet's flighty character, and here she seems a bit too concerned with making sure the audience knows how cute she is than with her connection to Romeo. Also, though a Shakespeare play isn't a Shakespeare play without a little cross-dressing, casting choices make the exchanges between Mercutio and Benvolio often seem ripped from an episode of Will and Grace.

That said, the airy first half makes the darkness of the second half that much more clear. When the tragedy begins to unfold, we haven't been so bogged down by melancholy that we can't stomach anymore. Rather, we're ready for the sadness when it comes, and as tragicomedies go, it is all the more poignant.

In the 1972 Bob Fosse film Cabaret, an American Sally Bowles, played by Liza Minnelli, falls in love with a rambunctious Englishman who is — as she is — having an affair with her bisexual boss. Whereas in the 1966 stage play Cabaret, it was Sally who was English, her boyfriend who was American, and there was a wholesome subtextual storyline about their elderly landlady's romance with a Jewish fruit merchant.

In the Ordway's current production of Cabaret, there's a little bit of each mixed in.

Putatively, this Cabaret is the stage play of '66, with an English Sally and a regal German landlady (played by the absolutely magnificent Suzy Hunt). But it also alludes to the male-on-male dalliances of its hero, the American writer Cliff Bradshaw, which is confusing because the complications here are completely ignored. In fact, other than the single reference to his cruising days, Bradshaw, as played by Louis Hobson, comes off as a well-scrubbed prude. And when Sally turns up pregnant with a baby she claims could be anyone's, he immediately volunteers — no qualms about her decided female-ness — to make her his wife.

In between there are dance numbers introduced by the "emcee" (Nick Garrison), a shiny-headed bald man wearing lipstick with an impossible loud and grating voice. He's impossible to love at first, as he descends from the ceiling in the Cabaret sign's "C," but by intermission he is impossible not to. A feat that Garrison effects by being alternately funny, self-deprecating, clownish, and sad.

There is also that strident back story about the Nazis: they are infiltrating the club through the person of Ernst Ludwig, Bradshaw's patron and friend. Ludwig is a tall, ebony-haired Aryan who somehow riles the entire club into raising their arms to the Third Reich. The fall-out comes first when gentle Herr Schultz, the fruit seller, has a brick hurled through his window. And then when Bradshaw, the stalwart American, gets beaten because he refuses to put up with all that Gestapo guff.

I wish I could say that I loved this play. I do love the Ordway; I think it's as stately a theater as the Twin Cities has. The set was amazing: morphing from nightclub to modest rooming house with the twitch of a few items, by evening's end lit with colored bulbs that gave it a festive, garish air.

There were some truly outstanding performances — the best by far by Ms. Hunt who infused her Fraulein Schneider with imperious yet tentatively regal carriage. Her voice was pure starch and honey. I could have listened to her all night. Unfortunately, though, most of the songs were sung by Tari Kelly who played Sally Bowles. And while she was a dead ringer for Minnelli (at least from Row S) her theory seemed to be that sheer volume would make up for feeling or finesse.

The dancers were lovely and scantily-clad in a pleasing, authentically bawdy 1930's Berliner sort of way; God knows, I like hot pants and fishnets and sequined bras as much as the next red-blooded American girl. There's even a very charming moment during Money Makes the World Go Round when Monopoly money drifted from the rafters and into the audience, twirling in the twinkling lights.

But in the end, as the curtain came down, I felt as if all the brilliant parts of the Ordway's Cabaret had not quite added up to something as whole and extraordinary as I would have liked. True, they missed the mark by a very small margin — and this may be fixed by Tuesday, the official opening night — but as it is there are uneven edges. The first act was too long; the second felt incredibly rushed.

More important, the story was not consistent. I wanted either a playboy love interest or a wide-eyed gee golly one, not a weird mish-mash of the two. And without that, the production fell just short of what it should.

Not that you would have known to see the audience at the end. I know. . . .I've been beating this drum for years. But NOTHING to my mind marks Minnesotans as more universally ignorant than the standing ovation, which is obligatory at every single concert, opera, comedy routine, and play. I am sick and tired of going to shows that are good but not great and watching everyone around me jump out of their seats like so many obsequious, brainless cows.

Yes, I feel strongly about this. But to my mind, it's like over praising a child for efforts that fall short. How is a toddler to learn if you keep showering kisses down because he or she piddled almost in the potty? By doing this, you simply reinforce the puddle on the floor.

And so it is with the stage, where standing ovations for performances that are almost but not quite extraordinary, like Cabaret, lower the bar. Which given the talent and resources and venues we have here in town is a goddamn shame.

Although it was one of the last plays he wrote, Gem of the Ocean falls first chronologically in August Wilson's 10 plays about the black experience in 20th century America. It's not his best — Fences and The Piano Lesson both won Pulitzers — but Penumbra Theatre puts on a solid interpretation at the Guthrie.

Wilson typically keeps the action contained in one location: the setting for Gem of the Ocean is the parlor of a 285-year-old "soul cleanser," Aunt Ester (Marvette Knight), in 1904 Pittsburgh. Aunt Ester imparts the wisdom of a woman who has experienced almost 250 years of slavery and survived the Civil War. At the play's climax, Ester's parlor is transformed — through blue lighting, stark shadows, and befitting sound — into a slave ship, the Gem of the Ocean. She leads a young man, Citizen Barlow (Cedric Mays), through a mystical experience to the City of Bones, where he confronts slavery, the man who died for his own crime, and, ultimately, freedom. The scene reflects the play's theme as articulated by Ester: "What use do we make of our freedom?"

Unfortunately, the journey to the City of Bones has nearly as much gimmick as it does depth. Mays is convincing as he is shackled supernaturally to the slave deck of the Gem of the Ocean and as he faces the consequences of his past crime. But the device of this magical voyage accomplishes little that could not have been achieved in "reality."

Wilson is a master at using more realistic, and more convincing, devices as the central conflict of a narrative. In The Piano Lesson, it's a piano, co-owned by a brother and sister, carved with the faces of two ancestors. The sister never wants to depart with the piano, and her brother, eager to buy land, wants to sell it — a conflict of preservation of history versus moving on. In the first scene of Fences, a character tries to conceal a watermelon, a device that Wilson uses to reverse the racist connotation of the watermelon-loving minstrel. The Gem of the Ocean does not approach this level of subtle but powerful symbolism.

Director Lou Bellamy, founder and artistic director of Penumbra Theatre, is well positioned to bring Gem of the Ocean to the
stage. He won an Obie Award in 2007 for directing Wilson's Two Trains
Running in New York City, and he directed Penumbra's production of The Piano Lesson earlier this year. His comprehensive understanding of Wilson's work is apparent on the stage. The characters are eccentric without going over the top, and the conversations they have in Aunt Ester's parlor are truly engaging.

Black Mary (Austene Van), who lives with Aunt Ester, is a jilted woman who nevertheless remains compassionate. Eli (Abdul Salaam el Razzac), who also lives with Ester, is agitated with Citizen in the first scene, but he eventually employs him to build a wall. Eli remains calm and relaxed throughout the rest of the show, saying, "This is a peaceful home," when people stop by to visit. He has frequent, long conversations with Solly Two Kings (James Craven), a man who once helped with the Underground Railroad and now sells dog poop as fuel, about the black community's difficult adaptation from slavery to free society.

Black Mary's brother, Caeser (T. Mychael Rambo), is an Uncle Tom character who one can't help but be angry with (and even sympathize with him a bit) for his deplorable decisions as an enforcer of the law. The only remaining character, Rutherford Selig (Terry Hempleman), is a white salesperson who fills only a minor role in the plot.

Knight plays a lively almost-300-year-old, but because Ester is such a
mystical figure, and because Wilson reveals in King Hedley II that she
lives to be 366 — hence she has almost a century of life remaining in Gem of the Ocean — her youthful portrayal of an elderly woman is not distracting.

Citizen's transformation from a nervous young man in the first act to a
confident man who confronts his demons could have been more delicate, but this lies more in how the play is written than how the character was acted.

The play, about personal redemption, justice and the law, and the meaning of freedom, is not a must-see, but it is a strong production.

Performances will run through May 18 on the McGuire Proscenium Stage at the Guthrie. There will be post-play discussions following the May 3 & May 14 matinees.