PLAYBILL ON OPENING NIGHT: Cymbeline — The Curse of Utopia
By Harry Haun
03 Dec 2007
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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.
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| 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...
