THEATER: 'KING STAG'
By MEL GUSSOW
Published: December 19, 1984
BOSTON ANDREI SERBAN has opened the season at the American Repertory Theater with a vivid production of Carlo Gozzi's Orientalized fairy tale, ''The King Stag.'' Filled with the marvelous costumes, masks and puppetry of Julie Taymor, this 18th-century charade should appeal to the fanciful at heart as well as the young in age.
At first glance, Gozzi would seem to be an anomaly, a traditionalist who was wedded to commedia del'arte at a time when his archrival, Carlo Goldoni, was advocating a more realistic, psychological approach to theater. Gozzi is best known today as the author of the original plays that inspired the Puccini and Prokofiev operas ''Turandot'' and ''The Love of Three Oranges,'' both of which Mr. Serban has directed in recent productions. This is Mr. Serban's season of Gozzi.
As the director demonstrates in ''The King Stag,'' Gozzi was an early Italian precursor of our contemporary fabulist theater, which takes ancient myths and turns them into relevant morality tales. It is a kind of pageantry that has been practiced by the Bread and Puppet Theater, the Talking Band and Miss Taymor herself.
Though one feels Mr. Serban's directorial imprint throughout the show, there are equal contributions from Miss Taymor and the set designer, Michael H. Yeargan. All three, collectively, have realized Gozzi's fantastical world.
''The King Stag'' transports us to the Kingdom of Serendippo, a court that is densely populated with plots and counterplots. The King is searching for a Queen, auditioning candidates rather than simply choosing Angela, who, alone among the applicants, loves the King rather than his kind. Soon we are on a royal hunt in the Forest of Miracoli where kingly souls mysteriously pass from human to animal form.
Each of the characters is emblematically masked and clothed; there is no confusing the heroes and the villains. The masks themselves are works of theatrical art, exceeded only by the puppets, which are as lifelike as Bunraku. From a talking parrot to a flying bear of huge proportions, they become an animated animal kingdom. Miss Taymor is able to project a considerable range of expression in her creatures, especially the figure of a feeble old man, who temporarily becomes the bony receptacle for the migratory soul of the handsome young king.
Behind the masks, one can spot the mimetic skills of Thomas Derrah as the King, Diane D'Aquila as his Queen to be, Dennis Bacigalupi, Lynn Chausow and Priscilla Smith. Miss Smith is cast as the comic villainess, a garish apparition who prides herself on her taste for ''hoot cootoor.''
Each is tutored in Mr. Serban's brand of commedia - bright and broad enough to be understood by the most youthful members of the audience. If ''The King Stag'' is, ultimately, not as much fun for adults as Mr. Serban's Moli ere melange, ''Sganarelle,'' it is because the text (adapted by Albert Bermel) is not on as frolicsome a level as the conceptualization.
For some odd reason, the director has decided to precede the 90-minute ''King Stag'' with an appetizer, a ''Gozzi Surprise.'' This 25-minute lampoon of the opera ''The Love of Three Oranges,'' is, in a word, a lemon. Fortunately, the main course is a festive holiday concoction.
Once Upon a Time THE KING STAG, by Carlo Gozzi; English version by Albert Bermel; directed by Andrei Serban; sets by Michael H. Yeargan; costumes, masks and puppetry by Julie Taymor; lighting by Jennifer Tipton; original music by Elliot Goldenthal. Presented by the American Repertory Theater, 64 Brattle Street, Cambridge, Mass. CigolottiJohn Bottoms DurandarteRodney Hudson BrighellaHarry S. Murphy SmeraldinaPriscilla Smith TruffaldinoDennis Bacigalupi TartagliaRichard Grusin ClariceLynn Chausow PantaloneJeremy Geidt AngelaDiane D'Aquila LeandroChristopher Moore DeramoThomas Derrah
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The New York Times, cronica la The Merchant of Venice, ianuarie 1999
THEATER REVIEW; From Serban, The Shylock Of Yesteryear, A Go-To Guy
Let Shylock be Shylock! is the unspoken motto of Andrei Serban's daringly unapologetic production of ''The Merchant of Venice.''
Shed no tears for the Jewish moneylender of Mr. Serban's design. Shylock may be cruelly maligned by the Christian hypocrites in Shakespeare's difficult play, with its anti-Semitic overtones, but in this version he has hardly been conceived as a figure to touch the heart. Though it has become customary to render Shylock with compassion, as in Peter Hall's 1989 Broadway production, in which Dustin Hoffman's dignified pillar of a Shylock endured the taunts and a shower of spittle from his enemies, Mr. Serban breaks with modern practice and gives us something more like the sinister Shylock of yore.
Thanks to the capable conjuring of the actor Will LeBow, Shylock is imagined in this visually striking modern-dress staging at the American Repertory Theater as a Venetian go-to guy who holds the beautiful people of the canals in as much contempt as they hold him. (The performance might appeal to the literary critic Harold Bloom, who in his new book on Shakespeare argues for just such a ''comic villain'' of a Shylock).
Just how spiteful a piece of work is this villain is revealed in Mr. LeBow's rendition of the famous ''Hath not a Jew eyes?'' speech. Routinely treated as a plea for understanding, it is instead delivered here as a caustic act of self-mockery, intended to patronize his bigoted audience, the Venetian dilettantes Solanio (Stephen Rowe) and Salerio (Jeremy Geidt).
Only when the embittered loan shark has them laughing along with him does his voice rise in sudden anguish and fury: ''And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?'' That this is a man who savors his singleminded pursuit of his pound of flesh is never in doubt; in the climactic courtroom scene, where he is called upon to claim the flesh owed him by the merchant Antonio (a shrewdly lugubrious Jonathan Epstein), he even draws a circle in red on the torso of his victim and theatrically traces it with a knife.
The sleek affability of Mr. LeBow's seductive portrayal imbues this Shylock with a visceral authority, a power to make things happen, which also makes him the most compelling feature of Mr. Serban's often absorbing production. But ''The Merchant of Venice'' is much more than the tale of a moneylender's humiliation; its more central concern is the romantic comedy of the wooing of Portia (Kristin Flanders) by Bassanio (Andrew Garman) and other sillier suitors. It's these lighter moments that trip up Mr. Serban, who seems much more in his element elucidating the cosmic complexities of ''Merchant'' than in realizing the gently comic ironies in the love story.
It may be that the hideous resolution of the Shylock subplot -- can an enlightened audience identify with a heroine who utters lines like ''Tarry, Jew'' or feel anything but squeamishness at Shylock's forced conversion? -- insinuates itself like an odor that can't be washed out. Still, Mr. Serban, who did such a fine job in Central Park last summer framing the humane qualities in Shakespeare's troublesome ''Cymbeline,'' has his actors take wide swings at the comic interludes, like overeager croquet players. The result is a tactlessness that undoes some of the production's finer points.
''Merchant'' is in part about the unraveling of riddles in language and law and the unmasking of people who are not what they seem. In this vein, the scenes encompassing the elaborate riddle that Portia poses for her suitors are bizarrely broad and consequently sophomoric; the young actors portraying princes from Morocco and Spain, for instance, are encouraged to play cartoon characters who throw off the play's rhythms, and Ms. Flanders and Portia's lady-in-waiting Nerissa (Nurit Monicelli), engage in an affected style of banter at an unnecessary remove from sincerity. While the play has Portia outwitting Shylock in court, Ms. Flanders never manages to challenge Mr. LeBow for primacy onstage.
Mr. Serban is a restless experimenter, so his Shakespearean ventures tend to be jampacked with ideas good and less good. One of his best notions here is the decadent and sexually ambiguous world of Antonio, the merchant of the title, who takes the disastrous loan from Shylock, with its peculiar terms, to finance the effort of his friend Bassanio to romance Portia.
The beauty of Venice and Belmont, as suggested by the Adriatic pastels in the lovely folding screens by Marielle Bancou and William Bonnell and lighting by Michael Chybowski, turns out to be a mirage. The scenic charm is as superficial as the slick, two-faced Venetian businessmen themselves, who make deals with the Jewish moneylender, only to revile him behind his back. (At a costume ball, they even resort to garish masks with exaggerated Semitic noses.) Dressing them all in natty European suits, it seems, is a reminder by Mr. Serban and his inventive costume designer, Catherine Zuber, that empty-headed bigotry has many contemporary disguises.
In this false paradise, Mr. Serban finds little to romanticize. Portia sermonizes grandly to Shylock about the quality of mercy, but she and the rest of Venice are complicit in a merciless dismemberment of Shylock's fortune, his faith, his very identity. It is the director's eloquent thesis, in fact, that Shylock and his Venetian tormentors are more alike than different; the vengeance envisioned by Shylock is symbolically carried out by his Christian adversaries. To drive home the point, perhaps unnecessarily, Mr. Serban creates a final dumb show in which Antonio -- who by Portia's verdict appropriates Shylock's wealth -- is locked in a dance with the masked Shylock. The borrower and the lender are now as one. Mr. Serban's uneven cast is an impediment. Several of the younger actors simply do not add their own pound of flesh to these mysterious characters, which gives the play an only partly lived-in quality. As he did with Liev Schreiber's vital Iachimo in ''Cymbeline,'' though, the director finds in Mr. LeBow a lead actor who helps us greatly in our navigation of the dark side. THE MERCHANT OF VENICE By William Shakespeare; directed by Andrei Serban; music composed by Elizabeth Swados; sets by Christine Jones; screen designs by Marielle Bancou and William Bonnell; costumes by Catherine Zuber; lighting by Michael Chybowski; sound by Christopher Walker; musical direction by Michael Friedman. Presented by the American Repertory Theater, Cambridge, Mass.
Let Shylock be Shylock! is the unspoken motto of Andrei Serban's daringly unapologetic production of ''The Merchant of Venice.''
Shed no tears for the Jewish moneylender of Mr. Serban's design. Shylock may be cruelly maligned by the Christian hypocrites in Shakespeare's difficult play, with its anti-Semitic overtones, but in this version he has hardly been conceived as a figure to touch the heart. Though it has become customary to render Shylock with compassion, as in Peter Hall's 1989 Broadway production, in which Dustin Hoffman's dignified pillar of a Shylock endured the taunts and a shower of spittle from his enemies, Mr. Serban breaks with modern practice and gives us something more like the sinister Shylock of yore.
Thanks to the capable conjuring of the actor Will LeBow, Shylock is imagined in this visually striking modern-dress staging at the American Repertory Theater as a Venetian go-to guy who holds the beautiful people of the canals in as much contempt as they hold him. (The performance might appeal to the literary critic Harold Bloom, who in his new book on Shakespeare argues for just such a ''comic villain'' of a Shylock).
Just how spiteful a piece of work is this villain is revealed in Mr. LeBow's rendition of the famous ''Hath not a Jew eyes?'' speech. Routinely treated as a plea for understanding, it is instead delivered here as a caustic act of self-mockery, intended to patronize his bigoted audience, the Venetian dilettantes Solanio (Stephen Rowe) and Salerio (Jeremy Geidt).
Only when the embittered loan shark has them laughing along with him does his voice rise in sudden anguish and fury: ''And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?'' That this is a man who savors his singleminded pursuit of his pound of flesh is never in doubt; in the climactic courtroom scene, where he is called upon to claim the flesh owed him by the merchant Antonio (a shrewdly lugubrious Jonathan Epstein), he even draws a circle in red on the torso of his victim and theatrically traces it with a knife.
The sleek affability of Mr. LeBow's seductive portrayal imbues this Shylock with a visceral authority, a power to make things happen, which also makes him the most compelling feature of Mr. Serban's often absorbing production. But ''The Merchant of Venice'' is much more than the tale of a moneylender's humiliation; its more central concern is the romantic comedy of the wooing of Portia (Kristin Flanders) by Bassanio (Andrew Garman) and other sillier suitors. It's these lighter moments that trip up Mr. Serban, who seems much more in his element elucidating the cosmic complexities of ''Merchant'' than in realizing the gently comic ironies in the love story.
It may be that the hideous resolution of the Shylock subplot -- can an enlightened audience identify with a heroine who utters lines like ''Tarry, Jew'' or feel anything but squeamishness at Shylock's forced conversion? -- insinuates itself like an odor that can't be washed out. Still, Mr. Serban, who did such a fine job in Central Park last summer framing the humane qualities in Shakespeare's troublesome ''Cymbeline,'' has his actors take wide swings at the comic interludes, like overeager croquet players. The result is a tactlessness that undoes some of the production's finer points.
''Merchant'' is in part about the unraveling of riddles in language and law and the unmasking of people who are not what they seem. In this vein, the scenes encompassing the elaborate riddle that Portia poses for her suitors are bizarrely broad and consequently sophomoric; the young actors portraying princes from Morocco and Spain, for instance, are encouraged to play cartoon characters who throw off the play's rhythms, and Ms. Flanders and Portia's lady-in-waiting Nerissa (Nurit Monicelli), engage in an affected style of banter at an unnecessary remove from sincerity. While the play has Portia outwitting Shylock in court, Ms. Flanders never manages to challenge Mr. LeBow for primacy onstage.
Mr. Serban is a restless experimenter, so his Shakespearean ventures tend to be jampacked with ideas good and less good. One of his best notions here is the decadent and sexually ambiguous world of Antonio, the merchant of the title, who takes the disastrous loan from Shylock, with its peculiar terms, to finance the effort of his friend Bassanio to romance Portia.
The beauty of Venice and Belmont, as suggested by the Adriatic pastels in the lovely folding screens by Marielle Bancou and William Bonnell and lighting by Michael Chybowski, turns out to be a mirage. The scenic charm is as superficial as the slick, two-faced Venetian businessmen themselves, who make deals with the Jewish moneylender, only to revile him behind his back. (At a costume ball, they even resort to garish masks with exaggerated Semitic noses.) Dressing them all in natty European suits, it seems, is a reminder by Mr. Serban and his inventive costume designer, Catherine Zuber, that empty-headed bigotry has many contemporary disguises.
In this false paradise, Mr. Serban finds little to romanticize. Portia sermonizes grandly to Shylock about the quality of mercy, but she and the rest of Venice are complicit in a merciless dismemberment of Shylock's fortune, his faith, his very identity. It is the director's eloquent thesis, in fact, that Shylock and his Venetian tormentors are more alike than different; the vengeance envisioned by Shylock is symbolically carried out by his Christian adversaries. To drive home the point, perhaps unnecessarily, Mr. Serban creates a final dumb show in which Antonio -- who by Portia's verdict appropriates Shylock's wealth -- is locked in a dance with the masked Shylock. The borrower and the lender are now as one. Mr. Serban's uneven cast is an impediment. Several of the younger actors simply do not add their own pound of flesh to these mysterious characters, which gives the play an only partly lived-in quality. As he did with Liev Schreiber's vital Iachimo in ''Cymbeline,'' though, the director finds in Mr. LeBow a lead actor who helps us greatly in our navigation of the dark side. THE MERCHANT OF VENICE By William Shakespeare; directed by Andrei Serban; music composed by Elizabeth Swados; sets by Christine Jones; screen designs by Marielle Bancou and William Bonnell; costumes by Catherine Zuber; lighting by Michael Chybowski; sound by Christopher Walker; musical direction by Michael Friedman. Presented by the American Repertory Theater, Cambridge, Mass.
Benvenuto Cellini, Berlioz regia Andrei Serban, cronica din The New York Times
Since its troubled premiere at the Paris Opera in 1838, Berlioz's ''Benvenuto Cellini'' has intrigued and befuddled opera companies, stage directors and audiences. It's a curious work -- call it an epic historical comedy -- that exists in several conflicting versions. And it either boldly or confusingly (depending upon your perspective) juxtaposes diverse operatic styles in trying to tell the story of Cellini, the 16th-century Italian sculptor, goldsmith, miscreant and self-aggrandizing memoirist.
Many conductors enormously respect the score, which abounds with inventive and engaging music. But over the years not many companies have stepped up to produce it. I've encountered the work only twice: the 1975 American premiere by the Opera Company of Boston under Sarah Caldwell with Jon Vickers in the title role, and on Thursday night at the Metropolitan Opera.
It was the opening of the company's first production ever, by the director Andrei Serban in his Met debut, with James Levine conducting and the tenor Marcello Giordani in the title role. This is the second installment of the Met's celebration of the 200th anniversary of Berlioz's birth, the first being ''Les Troyens'' last spring.
Mr. Serban's production crowds the stage with dancers, extras, surreal props and more commedia dell'arte antics than you would have thought possible to fit into a night at the opera. When he and the production team, including the set designer George Tsypin and the costume designer Georgi Alexi-Meskhishvili, took their joint curtain call, they were greeted by a mixed chorus of lusty boos and ardent bravos, which essentially encapsulated my own reactions.
The clumsy plot focuses on a breakthrough moment in Cellini's life, when he was about to cast the monumental statue of Perseus with the severed head of Medusa. In the opera, Pope Clement VII has commissioned the work over the opposition of his scheming Vatican treasurer, Balducci, who favors a mediocrity, the sculptor Fieramosca, whom he plans to marry to his lovely young daughter, Teresa. But Teresa is smitten with Cellini. The ensuing story tells of Cellini's attempt to hoodwink Balducci, win Teresa, secure a pardon for inadvertently stabbing a monk at a brawl -- and cast his statue, a feat he pulls off in the triumphant final scene.
Berlioz extracted his popular ''Roman Carnival Overture,'' from portions of ''Benvenuto Cellini,'' which takes place in Rome during revels for Shrove Monday, and Mr. Serban's production is like a three-ring circus.
The set is dominated by a huge, rotating, semicircular house of translucent marble with twin twisting staircases. Scaffolding and ladders lean against the inside walls, bringing to mind those Renaissance paintings in which ladders symbolize the arduous route to heaven.
A constant swarm of commedia dell'arte characters flit across the stage and poke out of windows. In a heavy-handed touch, Berlioz, in the person of a red-haired, lanky man in a 19th-century waistcoat, wanders about the stage observing the action and jotting down notes.
In his Met debut, the choreographer Nikolaus Wolcz has devised some stylized, jerky movements for a roster of brawny men who portray Cellini's fellow metalworkers. At one point two Adonislike youths appear wielding swords and wearing nothing but fig leaves: idealized apparitions of Perseus and Medusa? It may not have made sense, but you can bet that for about 10 minutes most people in the house were not paying much attention to their Met Titles.
Still, however fanciful or alluring the antics and images, there is just too much going on. Apparently the staging was even more cluttered before Mr. Serban was prevailed upon by the Met to thin things out a bit.
His work stood in contrast to Mr. Levine's, who captured the score's high spirits but also its subtlety, tenderness and grandeur. The music constantly surprises you with its shifting meters, elusive rhythms and roving harmonies.
Even the comedic bits are often delicate and graceful, for example, the gossamer trio in the first scene, sung by Cellini, Teresa and the hidden Fieramosca. Would that more of those qualities had been reflected in the staging.
Many conductors enormously respect the score, which abounds with inventive and engaging music. But over the years not many companies have stepped up to produce it. I've encountered the work only twice: the 1975 American premiere by the Opera Company of Boston under Sarah Caldwell with Jon Vickers in the title role, and on Thursday night at the Metropolitan Opera.
It was the opening of the company's first production ever, by the director Andrei Serban in his Met debut, with James Levine conducting and the tenor Marcello Giordani in the title role. This is the second installment of the Met's celebration of the 200th anniversary of Berlioz's birth, the first being ''Les Troyens'' last spring.
Mr. Serban's production crowds the stage with dancers, extras, surreal props and more commedia dell'arte antics than you would have thought possible to fit into a night at the opera. When he and the production team, including the set designer George Tsypin and the costume designer Georgi Alexi-Meskhishvili, took their joint curtain call, they were greeted by a mixed chorus of lusty boos and ardent bravos, which essentially encapsulated my own reactions.
The clumsy plot focuses on a breakthrough moment in Cellini's life, when he was about to cast the monumental statue of Perseus with the severed head of Medusa. In the opera, Pope Clement VII has commissioned the work over the opposition of his scheming Vatican treasurer, Balducci, who favors a mediocrity, the sculptor Fieramosca, whom he plans to marry to his lovely young daughter, Teresa. But Teresa is smitten with Cellini. The ensuing story tells of Cellini's attempt to hoodwink Balducci, win Teresa, secure a pardon for inadvertently stabbing a monk at a brawl -- and cast his statue, a feat he pulls off in the triumphant final scene.
Berlioz extracted his popular ''Roman Carnival Overture,'' from portions of ''Benvenuto Cellini,'' which takes place in Rome during revels for Shrove Monday, and Mr. Serban's production is like a three-ring circus.
The set is dominated by a huge, rotating, semicircular house of translucent marble with twin twisting staircases. Scaffolding and ladders lean against the inside walls, bringing to mind those Renaissance paintings in which ladders symbolize the arduous route to heaven.
A constant swarm of commedia dell'arte characters flit across the stage and poke out of windows. In a heavy-handed touch, Berlioz, in the person of a red-haired, lanky man in a 19th-century waistcoat, wanders about the stage observing the action and jotting down notes.
In his Met debut, the choreographer Nikolaus Wolcz has devised some stylized, jerky movements for a roster of brawny men who portray Cellini's fellow metalworkers. At one point two Adonislike youths appear wielding swords and wearing nothing but fig leaves: idealized apparitions of Perseus and Medusa? It may not have made sense, but you can bet that for about 10 minutes most people in the house were not paying much attention to their Met Titles.
Still, however fanciful or alluring the antics and images, there is just too much going on. Apparently the staging was even more cluttered before Mr. Serban was prevailed upon by the Met to thin things out a bit.
His work stood in contrast to Mr. Levine's, who captured the score's high spirits but also its subtlety, tenderness and grandeur. The music constantly surprises you with its shifting meters, elusive rhythms and roving harmonies.
Even the comedic bits are often delicate and graceful, for example, the gossamer trio in the first scene, sung by Cellini, Teresa and the hidden Fieramosca. Would that more of those qualities had been reflected in the staging.
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