Measure For Measure - A Twofer & Nun Nicer
Thursday, July 11, 2013
 |
| Lois Anderson |
Yesterday evening my wife Rosemary and I attended the opening of Bard on the Beach’s production of William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure.
For those who read Harold Bloom on Shakespeare or
do some digging around before seeing a Shakespeare play you might then know that
the title of this complex play comes from Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. Saint Matthew wrote in 7.2 of the King
James Version
For with what judgment
you judge, you will be judged; and with the measure you use, it will be
measured back to you.
Saint Luke, the physician, was a tad
more poetic in 6.38:
Give, and it shall be
given unto you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running
over, shall men give into your bosom. For with the same measure that ye mete
withal it shall be measured to you again.
Before yesterday’s
performance, Bard on the Beach Artistic Director Christopher Gaze stood up on a platform and
gave his own version of the Sermon on the Mount
(not really!) and explained briefly (the talks are called In a Nutshell)
the mechanics of Measure for Measure. For those new into Shakespeare, these
little talks are wonderful. And if not new suffice to note here that Gaze could read a shopping list and make it sound like Shakespeare.
Scholars including
Gaze call this play one of Shakespeare’s Problem Plays because of their
complexity. While Measure for Measure is indeed a comedy and very funny in many
parts the idea of a man (my take) The Duke, played by Andrew Wheeler at his most
Hestonian Moses mode, playing God with his subjects is not all that funny.
It is for that reason
that I consider this Bard on the Beach production of Measure for Measure a twofer. For the
price of one admission ticket you get two plays. One is a serious intellectual
pursuit that will set you thinking and the other an extremely funny, lively
musical in which Lois Anderson is the Queen of the Night.
Actor and Director (so
many of Bard players are both and not only that many are also musicians) John
Murphy has a love for jazz so he switched Shakespeare’s location for the play
from Vienna to New Orleans and with Anthony Pavlic he composed music influenced
by blues and Dixieland. One song which Murphy told me is simply called
Isabella’s Song (sung by Isabella, Sereana Malani) is a killer song which I
would have sworn was a long lost Gershwin. What helped Isabella’s Song and
every entry of Searana Malani to the set, were the two costumes (one white, one
pink) designed by Costume Designer Mara Gottler who would make of us all as
Angelo says:
Never could the
strumpet
With all her double
vigour, art and nature,
Once stir my temper:
but this virtuous maid
Subdues me quite.
II,ii.183 -86
The musicians in this
production are also actors or perhaps you might want to reverse that. Anton
Lipovesky, Lucio, (a composer in his own right) played a mean banjo, Benjamin
Elliott, Froth/Bernardine, was great sitting or standing on the upright piano
and not bad with the accordion (I hate this instrument). It was nice to see
Dustin Freeland on a tuba (how often do you get to hear this instrument in a
small ensemble?), Chris Cochrane on clarinet and Luc Roderique (who plays the
soon to lose his head Claudio, was pretty good on the snare drum and playing it
while standing.
But the star of the
band has to be Bonnie Northgraves on trumpet. With my eyes closed (when was not
distracted by her thighs and fishnets) she sounded like Herb Albert channeling
a trumpet player from the Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlán. Northgraves in
combination with the whorish shenanigans of an over-the-top Lois Anderson
playing Mistress Overdone was enough to help me remember that I was watching a
comedy and not the tragedy that this play almost is.
To add to this fun was
the impervious-to-anything Dustin Freeland who plays the Provost, fine foil to the-about-to-burst-red-in-the-face-cop Elbow, Chris Cochrane and, most certainly,
David Marr who in this year’s Arts Club Theatre production of My Turquoise
Years proved that he was not only a very serious actor, but a funny one, too. I
always thought that David Mackay who plays Angelo (has a preference for novices
in sex, the character, not the actor) was the funny man and Marr the serious one. Have they made a pact to
switch career paths?
I can never get enough
of Bernard Cuffling playing a not-yet-winged angel. In Measure for Measure he
portrays the sympathy of an angel. He may be the only actor on stage that may
truly believe the words of Matthew in that Sermon on the Mount:
For I say unto
you, That except your righteousness
shall exceed the
righteousness of the scribes and
Pharisees, ye
shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven.
So then, it is clear
that Christ is not speaking about imputed righteousness in verse 20. Rather, He
is teaching us that if we are to enter the kingdom of God,
This means that we must obey the Word of God more than the scribes and
Pharisees. The scribes and Pharisees were scrupulous in tithing, for example,
and the Lord commended them for doing so. But at the same time, He charged them
for ignoring the weightier matters of the Law: judgement, mercy, faith, and
love of God (Mt 23:23; Lk 11:42). And that is precisely (my take) on Andrew
Wheeler’s performance as the Duke. Both he and Escalus, Bernard Cuffling tries
to find a way out of the conundrum of how to not execute the hapless Claudio.
It is here, after
having see Bernard Cuffling in one of the last acts appear before The Duke
wearing a beautiful white tutu and wondering why throughout the play the cast
randomly wears costumes and masks.
Bard on the Beach
publicist, Cynnamon Schreinert (as efficient as she is) answered my query, most
kindly, about Cuffling’s skirt that there was a reference to all hallow’s even
in the beginning of the play. She could have been less patient and simply told
me to read the extensive notes of the excellent Bard On the Beach programme.
This is it and it
happens in Act II, Scene I:
POMPEY
Sir, but you shall come to it, by your
honour's
leave. And, I beseech you, look into Master
Froth
here, sir; a man of four-score pound a
year; whose
father died at Hallowmas: was't not at
Hallowmas,
Master Froth?
FROTH
All-hallond eve.
Director John Murphy
put the play in New Orleans.
Costume Designer, Mara Gottler, with a keen, not entirely justified (and who would care?) leap and
perhaps in cahoots with Murphy had the events of the play happen around and during the
evening of Halloween. This gave her a nice excuse to design costumes that went
from over the top to serious and that constant shift added to my pleasure of
the two plays that the one play is. Measure for Measure entertained me and it
made me laugh. On the serious side I felt I went home with lots to digest. The
best of both worlds indeed was both.
