Critic at Large
I’m hoping to post my report (Finally!) from my visit to the World’s Largest Dinosaurs exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History before the weekend’s out. My review of the Classic Stage Company’s production of The School for Lies will have to wait until I’ve actually seen the play.
Which I’m going to do. Sunday. It’s back to New York for me and my notebook and penlight. As I’ve said, I’m trying to make theater reviews a regular feature Fake Rolex Watches here, but New York is actually a bit of a haul, which means setting aside money for train tickets or for gas, parking, and tolls the times I have to drive down, like this weekend. So, if you can swing it and would like to help send a critic to camp, a small donation would be much appreciated.
Meanwhile, coming up, for your viewing pleasure, a video of the costume designer for The School for Lies, Tony Award winner William Ivey Long, describing how he developed his design concepts for this production. The School for Lies is David Ives’ new translation/revision/adaptation of Moliere’s The Misanthrope. I was a little surprised to see CSC’s doing it in period dress, although, why not? The reason I was surprised is that way back when I saw an excellent college production of The Misanthrope that was set in present-day Hollywood and redefined the play for me as a contemporary comedy!
It was very clever how they pulled it off. It was almost wholly done through the power of suggestion. The characters were dressed in California casual. The set suggested that the house was architecturally a beachfront mansion, although I can’t remember if the view out the large windows that made up most of the back wall was actually of the ocean at night or if that was implied by the lighting. There was a smattering of contemporary music, mostly heard in snatches as the door to the room where a party was in progress opened and closed. But otherwise it was played just as Moliere wrote it. Having read it before I went to Fake Rolex Submariner Watches For Sale see it and then gone back to give it a quick re-read it afterwards, I don’t think they changed a line. The program said the setting was Celimene’s house in Los Angeles and that’s all it took. That’s all it ever takes. Which is how Shakespeare was able to give Bohemia a sea coast.
By the way, if you’re ever in an argument over whether or not Shakespeare wrote his own plays with someone who insists he couldn’t have because the plays contain details of places only a sophisticated and rich world traveler and not some middle-class country bumpkin with a grade-school education could have known, ask the snob why Shakespeare’s Venice doesn’t have any canals and how characters wind up shipwrecked in a landlocked country.