THE MORNING LINE - Boneau/Bryan-Brown 8.11.15.pdf · played here by Lauren Worsham.) From the first scenes, you can already trace the arc of the show. In coming to understand her

THE MORNING LINE

DATE: Tuesday, August 11, 2015

FROM: Melissa Cohen, Michelle Farabaugh, Jennie Mamary

Katie Aramento, Sarah Hodgson

PAGES: 12, including this page.

August 11, 2015

Benedict Cumberbatch to Fans: No Cellphones, Please

By Christine Hauser

The battle against cellphone use has another front along with Broadway — the West End.

When the actor Benedict Cumberbatch met with fans — and the glare of flash from their cameras — after a

weekend performance of “Hamlet” at the Barbican theater in London, he had a message to send.

He told them that while he doesn’t use social media, he would be very happy if they did, just not during his

performance.

“Can I ask you all a huge favor?” the actor said to fans gathered outside the stage door. “All of this, all these

cameras, all these phones,” he said pleadingly, his voice trailing off. “What I really want to do is try to enlist

you.”

“I can see cameras, I can see red lights in the auditorium. And it may not be any of you here that did that but it’s

blindingly obvious, like that one there, that little red light,” he said, pointing into the crowd.

He referred to a disruption during that night’s performance in which he had to stop and then resume his delivery

of the soliloquy beginning “To be or not to be,” which he noted was not the easiest place to have to restart. Mr.

Cumberbatch said he could see a “little red light” near the third row during the performance. “It’s mortifying,”

he said. There is “nothing less supportive or enjoyable.”

“And I can’t give you what I want to give you, which is a live performance that you will remember hopefully in

your minds and brains, whether it is good, bad or indifferent, rather than on your phones.”

Britain’s Press Association reported that Mr. Cumberbatch’s performance was halted because of a technical

problem.

The actor said there would be strict rules in place on Monday, with devices that will detect audience members

using their phones and cameras during the show and lead to their eviction. “I don’t want that to happen; that’s a

horrible way to have to police what is a wonderful thing.”

“So this isn’t me blaming you, this is just me asking you to just ripple it out there,” he said, “with your funny

electronic things.”

Mr. Cumberbatch has spoken out previously on the topic. At a “Letters Live” performance at the Freemasons’

Hall in April, he stopped his reading to ask people in the audience to stop taking pictures with their cellphones.

Mr. Cumberbatch was adding his plaint to those of a number of actors who have tried to address the scourge of

cellphone use during performances — often less eloquently.

During a recent matinee, Patti LuPone’s “Shows for Days” was interrupted four times by cellphones. At another

performance last month, she left the stage at the end of a scene and took a phone from a woman who had been

texting, making Ms. LuPone a vigilante heroine to those frustrated by breaches of theater etiquette.

In 2009, she stopped a performance of “Gypsy” to berate someone who was taking photographs. The same year,

Hugh Jackman told an audience member, “We can wait” when the person’s phone rang during a performance of

“A Steady Rain.”

At London’s Old Vic in 2014, the American actor Kevin Spacey told an audience member whose phone was

ringing during a performance, “If you don’t answer that, I will.”

August 11, 2015

Review: ‘Cymbeline’ Unspools Its Many Plot Twists at the Delacorte Theater

By Charles Isherwood Not one but two gilt prosceniums currently adorn the normally proscenium-free Delacorte Theater in Central Park, where the Public Theater is presenting “Cymbeline,” Shakespeare’s weird and wonder-filled late romance, as its second offering of the free summer season. Piled around the outer proscenium are crates, boxes and odd bits of statuary, vaguely suggesting that we are in a disused theater of some advanced age, filled with odd props.

Daniel Sullivan, the reliably fine director whose Shakespeare productions here usually have avoided self-conscious concepts, has almost made a U-turn with this disappointing staging, which stars Lily Rabe as the much-wronged heroine, Imogen, and Hamish Linklater as both Posthumus Leonatus, her good-hearted but duped husband, and the cloddish Cloten, a rather less suitable suitor for her hand — who loses his head, literally.

Period switch-ups aside, Mr. Sullivan’s previous productions forShakespeare in the Park have generally been marked by simplicity and emotional clarity, presenting the plays as truthful, albeit fanciful or painful, reflections of real human experience. Here, the emphasis is somewhat deflatingly on the artifice in “Cymbeline.”

We are encouraged to recognize that we are watching a troupe of actors in performance, presenting a fictional tale. The idea is reinforced in various ways: Several actors play two or more roles; some audience members are seated onstage; behind the raised platform stage sits a row of chairs on which actors not in a particular scene can be seen looking on, as if waiting for their next cue; David Zinn’s costumes represent a dizzying array of periods and styles, suggesting that they’ve been pulled from a jumbled rack backstage. And on the curtain of the smaller proscenium appear emblazoned in large print the words “The Story of Cymbeline.”

Granted, Shakespeare’s “story” does indeed strain credulity with its woolly and wayward plotline: that headless corpse, a wicked stepmother straight out of a fairy tale, a poison that’s really just a strong sleeping potion, royal babies kidnapped. (Although, this time, the arrival of the god Jupiter is eliminated.)

The trouble is, when the play’s strange marvels are presented inside a heavy theatrical frame, they lose some of their wonder. The appeal of Shakespeare’s romances lies in recognizing how extravagantly life can go wrong and yet be righted, and when we don’t feel the real pulse of life in the drama, the romance seeps out of the romance, and the emotional currents evaporate.

That’s more or less the case here, despite the valiant and sometimes rewarding work of the performers, a first-class bunch that also includes Raúl Esparza as the conniving Iachimo; Patrick Page as both the titular king and Philario, Posthumus’s Italian ally; and Kate Burton as Cymbeline’s duplicitous queen, as well as Belarius, the long-banished lord who swiped those royal urchins and raised them in the rough countryside as his own.

Ms. Rabe and Mr. Linklater — partners in life who have both given sterling performances in Mr. Sullivan’s prior productions (they appeared together in “Much Ado About Nothing” and “The Merchant of Venice”) —

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acquit themselves with their usual polished professionalism. Both are impeccable Shakespeareans in verse speaking and lucidity of expression.

Ms. Rabe’s Imogen, clad in sweeping white dresses that almost belie her forcefulness of mind, greets the banishment of her beloved Posthumus with a cool strength. (Both Cymbeline and his queen had planned to have her son, Cloten, marry Imogen.) When Imogen receives the heart-rending news that Posthumus believes her to have betrayed him and has forsaken her — in fact, ordered her killed — she reacts with a furious fit of agony, begging his loyal servant, Pisanio (Steven Skybell), to take her life.

Perhaps partly because the production skims the play’s emotional layers, however, Ms. Rabe doesn’t quite find access to the character’s radiant innocence and the pathos of her long suffering, making the extravagant reconciliation scene less moving than it should be.

As the grotesque comic figure of Cloten, Mr. Linklater, wearing an absurd Monkees wig, is in his element, winning laughs with the character’s juvenile peevishness and his doltishness. His Posthumus is most effective, like Ms. Rabe’s Imogen, when he’s at his most hotheaded and belligerent, fuming with spite when he believes that Iachimo has seduced his love. His remorse at discovering Iachimo’s duplicity, on the other hand, once again fails to touch our hearts.

Wearing a sleek blue suit suggestive of a Sinatra-era Las Vegas player, Mr. Esparza employs his silken voice and dark good looks to cut a manipulative figure as Iachimo. And yet the surface charm tends to obscure the almost nihilistic depths of his character: Mr. Esparza’s Iachimo is more sexy than truly sinister. (I confess I couldn’t wholly banish memories of the mesmerizing Iachimo of Liev Schreiber, who played the role in Shakespeare in the Park in 1998.)

Presiding in gray beard and male garb over the scenes in Milford Haven, where Belarius has raised the king’s sons, Guiderius (David Furr) and Arviragus (Jacob Ming-Trent), Ms. Burton is surprisingly convincing. As Cymbeline’s malicious queen, she prowls the stage in a spidery black dress with a sly smile, relishing her machinations.

And in the title role, which is often merely incidental, Mr. Page impresses with the elegance of his delivery and the austere dignity of his character. To him falls the duty of presiding over the extraordinary series of revelations in the final scene. His queen a cruel conniver! Iachimo’s perfidy exposed! His long-lost sons — found! The cross-dressed Imogen revealed!

Mr. Page’s Cymbeline reacts with a persuasive blend of shock, sorrow, gratitude and, most affectingly, mercy at the strange turns that fortune has taken. Cymbeline’s overwhelmed heart made me feel, unfortunately, the lack of a responsive echo in my own.

Cymbeline

By William Shakespeare; directed by Daniel Sullivan; sets by Riccardo Hernandez; costumes by David Zinn; lighting by David Lander; sound by Acme Sound Partners; hair and wig design by Charles G. LaPointe; music by Tom Kitt; music contractor, Michael Aarons; music director, Matt Gallagher; fight directors, Rick Sordelet and Christian Kelly-Sordelet; choreography by Mimi Lieber; production stage manager, James Latus; associate artistic director, Mandy Hackett; associate producer, Maria Goyanes; general manager, Jeremy Adams; production executive, Ruth E. Sternberg. A Shakespeare in the Park production, presented by the Public Theater, Oskar Eustis, artistic director; Patrick Willingham, executive director. At the Delacorte Theater, Manhattan, 212-539-8500, publictheater.org. Through Aug. 23. Running time: 3 hours.

WITH: Teagle F. Bougere (Lucius/Cornelius/Others), Kate Burton (Queen/Belarius), Raúl Esparza (Iachimo/Others), David Furr (Guiderius/Second Gentleman/Others), Hamish Linklater (Posthumus

Leonatus/Cloten/Others), Jacob Ming-Trent (Arviragus/First Gentleman/Others), Patrick Page (Cymbeline/Philario/Others), Lily Rabe (Imogen/Others) and Steven Skybell (Frenchman/Pisanio/Others).

August 11, 2015

Review: In ‘Unknown Soldier,’ a War Echoes Through Generations

By Alexis Soloski WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — About 10 million soldiers never came home from World War I. Many who did left something behind on those battlefields — skin, bone, spirit. In Michael Friedman and Daniel Goldstein’s affecting new musical, “Unknown Soldier,” which just closed a brief run at the Williamstown Theater Festival, an amnesiac in military dress (Derek Klena) is found in 1918, wandering around Grand Central Terminal without identifying papers. (The story seems inspired by an actual case that captivated postwar France.)

Seventy-five years later, Ellen (Jessica Phillips), a Manhattan obstetrician, is upstate, cleaning out her childhood home after the death of the grandmother, Lucy (Estelle Parsons), who raised her without much sympathy or affection. Ellen chances on a newspaper clipping headlined “Has Unknown Soldier Found True Love?” The picture shows that amnesiac man picnicking with a young woman. She is Lucy. (Her younger version was played here by Lauren Worsham.)

From the first scenes, you can already trace the arc of the show. In coming to understand her grandmother’s life, Ellen, frustrated with both her career and her marriage, will better understand her own. “Unknown Soldier” delivers on that promise.

But what makes this musical of greater interest, aside from Mr. Friedman’s typically pretty and conversational songs, is that the paths it takes to get there aren’t so predictable. The romances don’t play out as we think they will. The characters keep shrugging off stereotype.

A chamber musical in which a woman plunges into her family’s past will inevitably earn comparisons with the Tony-winning “Fun Home.”Williamstown productions don’t have a lengthy rehearsal period, so despite the sophistication of Trip Cullman’s direction, the comparisons aren’t as flattering as they may become. In this staging, one small role seemed miscast, the tonal shifts (which included several misjudged music hall songs) were awkward, and scenes set in 1973 weren’t fully integrated. The show seemed to end twice, first in the terrific 11 o’clock number, “Penelope,” which connects the women’s stories to ancient myth, then with a more subdued finale.

Still, there’s no fault here that can’t be fixed, and what the piece already has — Mr. Friedman’s score, Mr. Goldstein’s dexterous book, their shared lyrics — isn’t so easy to achieve. Even in this state, it was already a tear-jerker. I cried for each ending.

Ms. Phillips was both abrasive and moving as Ellen, and Erik Lochtefeld was winning and a little creepy as the Cornell librarian who assists her. Ms. Worsham lent her clarion soprano to the younger Lucy. And while Ms. Parsons could do gruff in her sleep, she was very much awake for this occasion.

As an 11-year-old Ellen (Clara Young) sings:

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Sometimes you see a picture

Or hear a song

Or read a letter

And a person that’s forgotten comes alive for a moment.

The people in “Unknown Soldier” never existed. But by the musical’s end, we feel that we know them. They’re worth remembering.

August 11, 2015

B6

August/September 2015

August/September 2015

August 11, 2015

A17