Moreintelligentlife.com is the website of Intelligent Life magazine. Articles about Arts, Lifestyle, Travels, and Ideas

Penis jokes are a hoary chestnut of the stand-up comedian. Ever hear the one about the Catholic who converts to three different branches of Judaism and—surprise!—gets circumcised anew each time? You will if you go see "Circumcise Me", an autobiographical one-man, off-Broadway show by Yisrael Campbell.

Yisrael—Chris to his friends back in Penn-Wynne, Pennsylvania—has been telling the true story of his conversions and genital depredations for a few years now, mainly through a club stand-up routine. "Circumcise Me" is a wider project, his first aimed at a general audience, which weaves the wince-inducing aspects into a larger meditation on spirituality, alcoholism, Middle East politics and life in Florida. Dressed, as he puts it, “for 17th-century Poland” (black hat, black coat, beard and peyot, or religious side curls), Campbell is surprisingly nonplussed for someone who has just made the jump from playing events at Jewish community centres to an extended run off-Broadway.

After a show one night, Campbell sat down with More Intelligent Life to answer a few questions about jokes, Judaism, faith and cheeseburgers.

More Intelligent Life: I’ve seen your stand-up act (in the Berkshires). This is your first one-man show, and it has a lot more sadness and drama. Have you recently been exploring your emotional side?

Yisrael Campbell: I’ve been doing for years the hour of stand-up you saw. I wanted [this show] to be more relevant to both Jewish and non-Jewish groups. I picked up a producer along the way, and she sold me on the idea that it had to be a piece of theatre. Unless your name is Jackie Mason, people want to see a dramatic arc.  read more »

The late Arthur Miller has once again confounded critics who claimed that his plays would not stand the test of time. A revival of “A View from the Bridge”, his dark domestic drama set in 1950s Brooklyn, has just opened on Broadway. In a recent preview of this production, directed by Gregory Mosher, a packed audience sat transfixed as the woeful narrator warned of the show’s “bloody” preordained conclusion.

The show has already enjoyed quite a bit of press for marking the Broadway debut of Scarlett Johansson, who stars opposite the brilliant Liev Schreiber. Given the power of Hollywood starlets to pack theatres, regardless of their skills on stage (a mediocre Katie Holmes helped sell out a limited run of “All My Sons” on Broadway in 2008), sceptics were quick to roll their eyes. Yet Johansson-reined in with modest clothes and dark hair—makes for a convincing 17-year-old Catherine, the fraught object of her uncle’s desire. Schreiber, as the tormented Uncle Eddie Carbone, swaggers about the stage and once again steals the show. But Johansson certainly holds her own.

“A View from the Bridge” is not as well known as Miller’s “The Crucible” or “Death of a Salesman”. But like the others, it captures the tragedy in the ordinary. With the lyricism of an epic poem (complete with a one-man Greek chorus-Alfieri, the lawyer-narrator, played by Michael Cristofer), Miller tells a simple story that leads unswervingly to its nightmarish end.  read more »

"Ben Hur: Live", an extravaganza that is travelling around Europe (next stop: Gelsenkirchen, Germany), has had a slew of mixed notices. This is to be expected when theatre critics review a stadium show. Theatre often relies on a peculiar intimacy between performers and audience members, which can change night to night. "Ben Hur: Live", however, depends on the pomp and spectacle of an epic film. Having caught the show during its premiere stint at London's 02 Arena, I can say that it neither succeeds nor fails by these measures. It just falls in between.

Fifteen years in the making, at a cost of €6m, "Ben Hur: Live" is the grand and rather bonkers vision of Franz Abraham, a Bavarian impresario. In just under two hours, a cast of 400 Russians attempt to recreate one of the most sprawling and ambitious movies of Hollywood, complete with a bewildering array of horses and props. It takes 50 trucks to transport the show from one venue to the next.

Yet for all its grandstanding, "Ben Hur: Live" has at least part of its tongue in its cheek in a way the Oscar-winning, overlong film never did. Our hero Judah (Sebastian Thrun), together with his friend (and ultimate nemesis) Masalla (Michael Knese), gallop around the arena with huge grins and colourful red-and-blue outfits, tossing off clunky lines in Aramaic and Latin. This "tale of Christ" might be the world’s biggest-budget pantomime.

Steward Copeland, erstwhile drummer for the Police, composed the music and narrated the London shows. He sporadically strode onstage in a spotlight to interact with a piece of scenery or ride a horse. (With his swept white hair and black suit, he was a shoo-in for Jerry Springer.)  read more »

“And Juliet is the sun? Or the moon?”  In a clever take on the game of telephone (or Chinese whispers), the Nature Theater of Oklahoma, an experimental theatre company, asked some their friends to recite what they remembered from Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet". The unedited transcripts of these phonecalls now form the script for a charming new show at The Kitchen in downtown New York.

Performed in the tight Elizabethan diction of a bad Shakespeare company, these monologues include every painful pause and stammer of the recorded originals. Robert M. Johanson and Anne Gridley are both amusing as the doomed lovers. Johanson's emphatic, sneering delivery includes a healthy spray of saliva (or its promise), while Gridley's tremulous pout is accompanied by an ecstatic warble. "I’m not sure if they banged or not", she says, eyebrows knit together, forefinger in the air, in a particularly humorous recollection. (Their own half-baked bits of Shakespeare were included in the transcripts.)

In these shaky memories, "Romeo and Juliet" is refracted as a whodunnit. No one can remember which character died first, or who killed whom with what weapon, or why Juliet took the seemingly fatal sleeping potion in the first place. Equally fun are the brave forays into character analysis–Paris was so boring; wasn't there a bumbling nurse?; Mercutio was certainly gay–and famous speeches gone awry.  read more »

New York may have the Rockettes, but Washington has ...a big tree in front of the White House?  It’s nice to look at, but hardly makes for an evening’s worth of entertainment. But this year the city unveiled a new holiday tradition of its own. Septime Webre, the artistic director of the Washington Ballet, offered a decidedly local twist on Tchaikovsky’s "The Nutcracker". 

This timeless Christmas ballet has been reimagined many times, but Webre's version strikes a particularly patriotic chord. His Nutcracker Prince was none other than George Washington, ballet tights and all (what would Martha think?), while the dastardly Rat King was a red-coated and rather sinister looking King George III (British expats were left to squirm). Centuries of political tensions aside, the sight of America's powder-wigged first president prancing about the stage was a fantastic one. Indeed, it’s astonishing the parallel hasn’t been made before: both had a knack for saving the day, both saw enormous fashion potential in tight pants and both had wooden teeth.   read more »

The Trojan War was a popular subject of Elizabethan drama. England at the time was mired in a war with Spain; Queen Elizabeth was old and her passing could unleash a civil war, due to factional disputes and the lack of a clear successor. Audiences treated to the rape of Helen and the sack of Troy at the turn of the 17th century could see something of themselves in the story of infidelities, vanities and butchery.

William Shakespeare's “Troilus and Cressida” and Thomas Heywood’s “The Iron Age” are complements from that period. The Bard tells a tale of love and warrior rivalries at the end of the Trojan War, while Heywood chronicles the battles of the war itself, from beginning to end.

These two plays have been elegantly fused together by Brian Kulick, the artistic director of the Classic Stage Company in New York, an off-Broadway company that reinterprets classical repertory. Kulick's adaptation leaves much of the verse intact, though trimmed considerably and with the action reshuffled. (“To defend myself in the aesthetic court of law,” Kulick said in an interview with me, Shakespeare’s plays have always been tinkered with, even in his own day.) At two hours and 45 minutes, the performance demands something of the audience. But much is returned.  read more »

Edinburgh Festival-goers get used to coming across a lot of shows that are good, and very few that are top-class. This year, one show was streets ahead of the rest: “The Last Stand to Reason” by the Pajama Men, two men from Albuquerque who always perform in their pyjamas, possibly because they could make you laugh in their sleep.

They received almost off-puttingly good reviews–five stars apiece from the Times, the Guardian and the Telegraph. I bought eight tickets for a group ranging from an impatient nine-year-old to some jaded forty-somethings, and then sat there wondering if the experience could possibly live up to all the praise. It did. The show was funnier than the funniest comedian, even though it slowly revealed itself as theatre rather than comedy–the breakneck sketches are all connected, forming a great tapestry of observational wit.

Shenoah Allen is the one on the left with the rubber face; Mark Chavez is the one with the ruffle-worthy hair. Together they are electrifying. “We know each other so well,” one of them says, “we sometimes finish one another’s...” – "...Sandwiches,” says the other.

"The Last Stand to Reason",  Soho Theatre, London, December 7th to January 9th

~ TIM DE LISLE  

Earlier this month I wrote a piece about Edward Albee, a revolutionary American playwright. It got quite a response from readers. Some swore at me; some calmly pointed out that I must be out of my mind to write such things about such a great man. I laughed it off. After all, what is the value of an opinion piece if it doesn’t inspire heated discussion and the occasional angry rant sprinkled with profanity?

The trouble is that something terrible has happened since I wrote that piece. One of the main criticisms I lobbed Albee’s way was that he was too protective of his work. He wouldn’t let a director touch his plays unless he knew for certain that his original vision would not be distorted in any way. Fair enough, some might say. But where did that leave the role of the director in the creative process?

What is terrible is that I now know how Albee feels. A short time after this piece was written I found myself in the throes of a creative battle. There I was, terrified and alone, clutching my newly written work in my hands. And there he was, The Director, somewhat inexperienced and altogether too cocky, eager to rip my play to shreds with his “creative vision”.

“This is my first time,” I cooed. “I don’t know anything about writing for the theatre. Please be gentle.”

“There’s nothing to fear,” he said. “But when your play is performed, all the female parts will be played by men in drag.”  read more »

David Cromer is one of the most in-demand directors in American theatre today thanks to his acclaimed off-Broadway revival of Thornton Wilder's "Our Town". Cromer has upcoming productions in Chicago (a revival of “A Streetcar Named Desire” this spring) and New York (a revival of “Picnic” for Lincoln Centre Theatre is scheduled to open next autumn).  His Broadway debut in “The Neil Simon Plays” was halted abruptly last week, but his off-Broadway "Our Town" continues to move audiences at the Barrow Street Theatre.  read more »

When John Simm left drama school, in 1992, it was a good time to be a chippy northerner. A new breed of television writers were slouching southwards and ripping up the rulebook: Jimmy McGovern’s “Cracker” had a fat, bolshie, Scottish alcoholic as its hero; Paul Abbott and Russell T. Davies’s “Touching Evil” revolved around a Geordie cop who thought and looked like a criminal. Simm—born in Leeds, raised (like Abbott) in Burnley, and exposed young to the granite audiences of working men’s clubs, by his musician father—was a casting director’s dream.

Simm cut his teeth in “Cracker”, then made his mark as the directionless hedonist Danny in “The Lakes”. He shone as the over-committed reporter in “State of Play”, and as poor, tortured Sam in “Life on Mars”, forever trapped in a kipper tie, a brown shirt and the macho world of 1970s policing. It’s no accident that writers as inventive and crowd-pleasing as McGovern, Abbott and Davies kept working with him. Simm tugs at the edges of his roles, pulling them out of two dimensions and into three—or, in the case of the Master, Doctor Who’s fearsome nemesis—four.

His face is made for television: it’s delicate-boned, and he keeps his head still, to let the audience connect with his eyes—dark, pinpoint-steady and often enigmatic above a pouty-serious mouth. His forehead, fine-skinned and mobile as a child’s, registers every wrinkle of emotion like wind blowing over water. And while his characters can be hard to like—Sexby in the over-ripe civil war drama “The Devil’s Whore” was brutal—they’re marked by a kind of pity, as if snared by their own humanity.  read more »