By Harry Haun
03 Dec 2007

Martha Plimpton; Jonathan Cake; Phylicia Rashad; John Cullum; Michael Cerveris; Jeff Woodman; Ezra Knight; Noshir Dalal & Jordan Dean; director Mark Lamos; Paul O'Brien & Sandra Shipley; Michael W. Howell; Louis Butelli & Anthony Cochrane; John Pankow.
photo by Aubrey Reuben

That endangered (of late) species, the Broadway first-nighter, duded up Dec. 2 for the first opening in 19 days — Shakespeare's 398-year-old Cymbeline at the Vivian Beaumont.

Being non-profit, the Lincoln Center Theater operates under a different stagehands contract that shuttered most of the Main Stem for an anguished period of inactivity. It spent this time in previews — five weeks of them, following nine and a half weeks of rehearsal — perfecting a pretty sumptuous Cymbeline, which, as far as physical lavishness goes, gave the impression of approximating that of the Beaumont's previous tenant, Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia, which spilled across its stage for seven months in three separate installments and swept up more Tonys (seven) than any play in Broadway history.

Talk about tough acts to follow, but director Mark Lamos has charged forth with passion and all-stops-out. It's his third Cymbeline — and, apparently, the charmer. The other two, he said, "were at Hartford Stage, my first season and my last. I bookended my time there."

Did his "rough drafts" have the extravagant look that his current one does? "In a regional theatre way," he proffered, meaning, of course, "No." His stratagem here is to splash the spectacle so high, wide and handsome it camouflages what is often considered one of The Bard's less-loved (and less-quoted) "late plays," and, in this, his accomplices is a dazzling design team. "Michael Yeargan, who did the sets, and Jess Goldstein, who did the costumes, have worked with me for two decades — operas and lots of theatre. Brian MacDevitt, the lighting designer, is new to me, but I just adored every single cue on that stage. He'd do his thing, and I'd literally fall down and applaud and yell and thank him."

Regardless of how Cymbeline stacks up against Shakespeare's other works, Lamos confessed a special affinity for the play. "I love how positive it is. I like its absurdities. I find them very beautiful — and very lifelike, actually. I like its whimsical nature. But, mostly, what appeals to me is the idea that the world is essentially good. That seems to be the message in this play, and — when it ends with couples reuniting, families reuniting and countries gaining peace — it's just a vision of the world that I find very, very moving."

How is he following this juggernaut? "With a one-woman play at the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park" — and probably a bad case of the bends. "It's the American premiere of an Australian play by Robert Hewitt called The Blonde, the Brunette and the Vengeful Redhead. Annalee Jefferies plays seven different roles. An amazing actress. She has done a lot of Hartford Stage, a lot of Alley Theatre in Houston and Clytemnestra for Peter Hall. And then I'm doing A Little Night Music at Baltimore Center Stage, with Polly Bergen as Madame Armfeldt. She's the only one that we have cast so far."

The bountiful Beaumont is not unfamiliar turf for set designer Yeargan (he won a Tony for stylish abstractions that suggested Florence of the '50s in The Light in the Piazza).

"It's just such a big theatre," he sighed. "We talked about fairy tales a lot for this. And color. We talked about Tibetan architecture. I've a beautiful book on Tibetan architecture and costumes and all that. And just the idea of making it rich and lush and gorgeous."

Costumer Goldstein was a collaborator on the gorgeous, creating some ravishing outfits. "We sorta invented the whole look," he admitted. "It's based on a lot of ethnic clothing from Russia and China, Mongolia, Tibet — I just kinda mixed it all up and put it together."

His next stop after this giddy high is — kerplunk! — The Homecoming, which, with its drab and dreary duds, is tantamount to coming down in an elevator real fast. Then, he said, "starting next month, we get ready for the London production of Jersey Boys."

There is one major denizen from Utopia who made it ashore to Cymbeline, and she is centrally located in the star spot: Martha Plimpton, who won a Drama Desk Award and a Tony nomination for the work in the Stoppard marathon, plays the daughter of the title king (John Cullum) — Imogen, a princess bride whose course of true love is intensely complicated by a wicked stepmother (Phylicia Rashad), a rascally bogus swain, Iachimo (Jonathan Cake), and a homicidally jealous groom, Posthumus (Michael Cerveris).

What Cymbeline lacks in familiar lines, it more than makes up for in familiar Storylines — as if Shakespeare was replaying his greatest plot tricks. There's the sleeping potion that was thought to be poison. There's the cross-dressing heroine and the near-incest that occurs when a couple of strapping youths she finds in the forest turn out to be her long-lost bros. There are the stolen accessories presented to misrepresent adultery and cause jealousy.

For all the above to unravel and smooth out into hug-everybody happily-ever-aftering requires three and a quarter hours. Nevertheless, Lincoln Center is not offering you a view from the unabridged, according to Cullum, who is in a position to know, playing a title character who has been reduced to a walk-on (albeit, a properly regal walk-on).

"The first three of my five scenes are so short," Cullum noted. "They've been cut tremendously. They've taken off the whole Roman relationship of Cymbeline to Julius Caesar. It makes the scenes so tight that you walk on — and bam! you gotta make your impression and get off, and you don't have any time to really get anything else going."

A seasoned Shakespearean campaigner, Cullum has no trouble arriving with full royal authority, ready to work. "This is the first Shakespeare I've done in New York since the Burton Hamlet," he suddenly remembered. He was Laertes for four months in 1964, and that was enough time for Richard Burton's rich theatricality to work its way into Cullum's acting. "That followed me for a long time," he conceded. "I've done two Hamlets myself since then. The first one was Burtonesque; the second one was not. And, of course, I've done Lear a couple of times, but I've never done it in New York." Continued...

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