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November '15 Digital Week IV

Blu-rays of the Week

Code Unknown 

(Criterion)
Austrian director Michael Haneke—the enfant terrible of contemporary European cinema—made this extraordinarily unsettling and prescient drama in 2000, and its premise about unmoored refugees in Europe still resonates, perhaps even more so now than it did in a pre-Sept. 11 world.
 
Although Juliette Binoche is top-billed—and magnificent, as always—this is an ensemble cast in every sense of the word, whose relative unfamiliarity gives Haneke's film an authentic quasi-documentary look. The Criterion Blu-ray’s sharp image is marred by artifacts; extras include a Haneke intro, two Haneke interviews and an on-set documentary.
 
Deep in My Heart
Passage to Marseille 
(Warner Archive)
One of the more unheralded Hollywood musicals of its time, 1954's Deep in My Heart tells the life story of Broadway composer Sigmund Romberg (Jose Ferrer), cramming no less than 22 of his tunes into Stanley Donen’s sturdy musical biopic like the title song; but best of all are great song-and-dance numbers by Gene Kelly and his brother Fred, and by Ann Miller, who positively kills it on "It."
 
In Michael Curtiz’s 1944 Passage to Marseille, Humphrey Bogart plays a French resistance fighter who leads a group of escaped prisoners from French Guiana. This nail-biting drama, a reunion of the star and director of Casablanca, daringly utilizes the flashbacks-within-flashbacks technique of the novel it’s based on. Both films have superlative hi-def transfers, Deep in color and Passage in B&W; extras include vintage cartoons and shorts.
 
 
 
 
 
 
Gloriana 
(Arthaus Musik)
The Tsar's Bride 
(Bel Air Classiques)
Benjamin Britten's grandest opera, Gloriana premiered for the 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, dramatizing the fraught era of Her Majesty's earlier namesake: this glittery 1984 staging complements the laser-like focus of Sarah Walker as Elizabeth I. Britten's dramatic instincts rarely fail him, even if some of his music here is less than his best. 
 
The Tsar's Bride, Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov's classic 19th century opera, is transformed by director Dmitri Tcherniakov into a pointless Eurotrash exercise that needlessly modernizes a drama inextricably linked with Russian history. The amazing soprano Olga Peretyatko impresses in the title role, at least. Both operas look and sound good on hi-def.
 
No Escape 
(Anchor Bay)
Poor Owen Wilson and Lake Bell have to pretend to be interested as they implausibly dodge all manner of southeast Asian terrorists and other villains, all while managing to protect their two young daughters from most of the mayhem.
 
Pierce Brosnan, who shows up periodically as a shadowy British secret agent, is fun as a kind of gruff 007, but whenever he’s not onscreen, the movie just goes through the action-movie motions. The hi-def transfer is excellent; extras comprise a commentary, deleted scenes and interviews.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Requiescant 
(Arrow)
Director Carlo Lizzani’s 1967 spaghetti western stars Lou Castel—who made such an impression in Marco Bellocchio’s extraordinary debut 1965’sFists in the Pocket—as a gunman who helps rid a Wild West town of a cartel of bad guys. Castel gives a solid performance, and even director Pier Paolo Pasolini shows up as a priest, while Lizzani showed that there’s more to the then-revived western genre than the Sergio Leone epics that are most remembered. The new Blu-ray transfer is first-rate; extras include interviews with Lizzani and Castel.
 
Ricki and the Flash 
(Sony)
One of Jonathan Demme's most inconsequential films stars Meryl Streep as a has-been rocker whose vagabond lifestyle screeches to a halt when she returns to her adult children's lives after decades. Demme's offhand style keeps things going even when little happens—which is often—but even though Streep finds some depth in Ricki, Diablo Cody's script has so little conflict that there's more drama over what song Ricki and her band (including a game Rick Springfield) will do next.
 
Kevin Kline and Audra MacDonald shine as Ricki's ex and his new wife, while Mamie Gummer (Streep's real-life daughter) plays her onscreen daughter with little persuasiveness or charm, unfortunately. The movie looks good on Blu; extras are featurettes and deleted scenes.
 
 
 
 
 
 
The Voyeur 
(Cult Epics)
That unapologetically sleazy Italian director Tinto Brass made this quasi-pornographic 1994 drama that at times cleverly (and at other times ineptly) shows a married man sexually dealing with his gorgeous but unhappy young wife and his elderly—but still virile—father’s sexy and seemingly willing nurse.
 
There’s a fine line between erotica and porn that Brass nonchalantly criss-crosses, and there are genuinely erotic moments, mostly involving Katarina Vasilissa as the voyeur’s young wife. Lone extra is a Brass interview.
 
DVDs of the Week
Exhibition on Screen—The Girl with the Pearl Earring 
Exhibition on Screen—The Impressionists and the Man Who Made Them 
(Seventh Art)
These succinct 90-minute documentaries illuminate the background of some of the most famous artworks ever painted: and the often elusive geniuses behind them, from the Vermeer masterpiece hanging in the Mauritshuis in The Hague, Netherlands, to the French masters' works in such institutions as Paris' Musee d'Orsay.
 
One quibble: since these amazing paintings need high-definition to do justice to their unique use of color, it's too bad that these are only DVDs and not Blu-rays, which would further show off their every nook and cranny. But for anyone who loves art—and Dutch and French art in particular—these are most informative overviews.
 
 
 
 
 
 
Gone with the Wind—The Remarkable Rise and Tragic Fall of Lynyrd Skynyrd
(MVD)
The fast rise—and horrific fall—of Lynyrd Skynyrd, one of the best Southern rock bands of the 1970s, is chronicled in this almost too exhaustive documentary that includes tasty archival footage of the band performing some of their best songs from “Sweet Home Alabama” to “Gone with the Wind,” and interviews with surviving members, producer Al Kooper and music experts.
 
That the band proper ended in 1977 with the plane crash that killed charismatic frontman Ronnie Van Zandt and others is inarguable, despite a band claiming to be Skynyrd that's still touring: but the band's legacy remains great songs. Extras are additional interviews.
 
Stations of the Cross 
(Film Movement)
Director Dietrich Bruggemann's austere drama follows troubled teenager Maria, whose family belongs to a morally strict church, and who slowly realizes that maybe not everything in the world is evil, causing rifts at home and at school.
 
Bruggemann's formal style—14 chapters mimicking the stations of the cross at Jesus’ death—is equally strict, although it isn't hard to decipher how it ends, but his intelligence and rigor, coupled with Lea van Acken's astonishing portrayal of Marie, makes this a must-see movie that's not easily forgotten. Extras are a director's commentary and Bruggemann's short, One Shot.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
The Wind in the Willows 
(Warner Archive)
In this 1987 Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass’s adaptation of the beloved children’s story by Kenneth Grahame, an amusing cast led by Charles Nelson Reilly, Roddy McDowell, Jose Ferrer and Eddie Bracken  voice the animals who play out the wise and timeless tale.
 
With a half-dozen tuneful numbers sung by the likes of Judy Collins (who handles the title song), Willows has the typically basic Rankin-Bass animation, but for those looking for pleasant if not particularly compelling family fare, you could do worse.
 
CDs of the Week
Carl Nielsen—Symphonies and Concertos 
(Dacapo)
New York Philharmonic music director Alan Gilbert has made it his mission to record the most important orchestral works of Danish composer Carl Nielsen, and this four-disc set brings together his six symphonies and concertos for violin, flute and clarinet.
 
The orchestra's playing on the symphonies—especially the masterly Fourth, the Indistinguishable—is energetic and expressive, and the concerto soloists—violinist Nikolai Znaider, flutist Robert Langevin and clarinetist Anthony McGill—acquit themselves admirably; these live performances provide a valuable glimpse of a composer often overshadowed by his Nordic contemporary Jean Sibelius.

On Broadway—'Misery' with Bruce Willis; 'Allegiance' with George Takei

Misery
Written by William Goldman; directed by Will Frears
Performances through February 14, 2016
 
Allegiance
Music & lyrics by Jay Kuo; Marc Acito, Jay Kuo and Lorenzo Thione
Directed by Stafford Arima; choreographed by Andrew Palmero
Performances through September 25, 2016
 
Laurie Metcalf and Bruce Willis in Misery (photo: Joan Marcus)
 
Misery began as a trashily effective Stephen King novel, followed by a trashily effective Rob Reiner movie, which won an Oscar for Kathy Bates as the ultimate deranged fan, Annie Wilkes, who first saves the life of her favorite author, Paul Sheldon, then takes her revenge after reading his latest novel and discovering he killed off her favorite character, Misery Chastain.
 
It's a clever enough conceit, as some of King's story ideas are, even if—after devouring his novels as a gullible teenager—I realized how excess verbiage and an aw-shucks style made his books unreadable once I became aware of good writing. William Goldman—who also wrote the script for the Reiner movie—has streamlined the story further for the stage, distilling the cast to three: Paul, Annie and Buster, the local sheriff who finally pays for his inopportune visits.
 
In a trashily effective—if not especially taut—90 minutes, Miseryonstage provides the same thrills of its earlier incarnations, although why this version is necessary is another question. It serves as a vehicle of sorts for Bruce Willis as Paul, who spends most of his time either prone in bed or in a wheelchair, hunt-and-peck typing out a new novel. Willis barks out his crude lines credibly enough and even gets in a few profanity-laced insults at the woman Paul comes to loathe after initially thanking her for digging him out of his car in a blizzard.
 
But the play, movie and novel all belong to Annie, and onstage Laurie Metcalf gives a persuasive and just enough over-the-top portrayal of a self-sufficient woman who just happens to be crazy. Metcalf happily doesn't ape what Bates did in the movie, making Annie more pathetically than evilly monstrous in her desperate attempts to "keep" her beloved author.
 
Will Frears directs efficiently on David Korins' revolving set, which cleverly shows off Annie's house from the bedroom where much of the action takes place to her kitchen and outside porch. Despite its lack of forward momentum, this Misery gets the job done.
 
Lea Salonga and George Takei in Allegiance (photo: Matthew Murphy)
 
A painfully earnest venture, the new musical Allegiance covers the same ground as Alan Parker's film Come See the Paradise: that horrible moment in American history when, after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government rounded up Japanese-Americans and sent them to internment camps. Such worthy subject matter needs exploring, but both the 1990 film and the musical are marred by contrived storytelling and slathered-on sentimentality.
 
Through clunky expository dialogue that over-elaborates about everything—there's discussion of the term "gaman," which someone actually explains to another character (but really us) that "it means 'to carry on'"—implausibly soap-operaish plot turns (including the fatal shooting of our hero Sammy's pregnant fiancée Hannah) and perfunctory songs that alternate between soaring ballads and soaring anthems, Allegiance dramatically wrong-foots it at nearly every turn.
 
What helps improve things are the staging and performances. Stafford Arima's directing and Andrew Palermo's choreography move the large cast about fluidly, making even a problematic sequence as soldier Sammy leading his unit into a suicide mission in Italy work, with Howell Binkley's boldly impressive lighting putting us in the midst of the carnage; similarly, Binkley and Palermo visually illuminate a wordless sequence about the Hiroshima atomic bomb. 
 
Telly Leung is an engaging and charismatic Sammy and Lea Salonga makes a belated (and welcome) return to Broadway by showing off her beautiful, clear-as-crystal voice as Sammy's sister Kei, while Star Trek actor George Takei—on whose family's experiences the show is based—is immensely likable as both the kids' grandfather Ojii-Chan and the older Sammy. Also making strong impressions (despite having little to work with) are Katie Rose Clarke as the idealized nurse Hannah and Christopheren Nomura as Sammy and Kei’s stern father Tatsuo.   
 
Based on a gut-wrenching subject that current events keep relevant,Allegiance relies on a first-rate cast and production to provide its emotional force.
 
Misery
Broadhurst Theatre, 235 West 44th Street, New York, NY
miserybroadway.comm
 
Allegiance
Longacre Theatre, 220 West 48th Street, New York, NY
allegianceonbroadway.com

November '15 Digital Week III

Blu-rays of the Week
The Bat
A Bucket of Blood 
(The Film Detective)
In 1959’s The Bat, an especially disjointed horror movie about a faceless man (the actor has a stocking over his head) who terrorizes women, Agnes Moorehead and Vincent Price help mitigate the fact that it’s forgettable in nearly every way.
 
Roger Corman’s A Bucket of Blood (also 1959), which follows a crazed artist whose bizarre and lethal new way of creating is exposed as murder, is so insane that even uniformly bad acting doesn't entirely bury it: the nutso premise helps keep it afloat for its brief 65-minute duration. The hi-def transfers are acceptable, nothing more.
 
Before We Go 
(Anchor Bay)
A guy smarting over a breakup and a gal who missed the last train out of Grand Central Station meet cute(ly) and bond over a night together in Manhattan has more contrivance than would seem possible in a 90-minute drama.
 
Although his directing debut is far from auspicious, Chris Evans does well as the sax-playing good Samaritan, while Alice Eve gives an even more nuanced portrayal of the woman he helps out. The Blu-ray transfer looks terrific; lone extra is a brief Evans interview.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Black Sails—Complete 2nd Season 
(Anchor Bay)
In the second season of this explosive high-seas guilty pleasure, the storylines and pirate intrigue both thicken while the women (played with zest by Jessica Parker Kennedy, Hannah New and Clare Paget) steal scenes pretty consistently from their male costars.
 
This season’s 10 episodes should satisfy those who like their pirate soap operas alternately intimate and epic. The series looks sumptuous on Blu-ray; extras comprise several featurettes.
 
Eric Clapton—Slowhand at 70: Live at the Royal Albert Hall
Nazareth—No Means of Escape 
(Eagle Rock)
To celebrate his 70th birthday, Eric Clapton performed at London's Royal Albert Hall in May by running through his five-decade career as the preeminent British blues guitar god. His incendiary guitar work on "Key to the Highway" and "Crossroads" remains peerless, but it's surprising that he still insists on digging out the dull acoustic version of "Layla" instead of the fiery original. But that's the only quibble with this memorable two-hour musical showcase.
 
Although not as well-known as Aerosmith or Guns'n'Roses—just two artists influenced by them—Scottish hard-rockers Nazareth have endured for four decades, despite member changes and other ups and downs, as this release's 50-minute retrospective documentary and new 75-minute concert show. "Love Hurts" and "Hair of the Dog" would be career highlights for any artist. Both releases look and sound spectacular in hi-def. Slowhand includes the entire concert on two CDs; Escape has additional interviews and an acoustic number.
 
The Hobbit—Battle of the Five Armies: Extended Edition 
(Warner Bros)
In the final film of his epic trilogy based on J.R.R. Tolkien's first Middle Earth adventure, director Peter Jackson continues the drawn-out narrative he began with the Lord of the Rings trilogy: but The Hobbit is but one-third the size of Rings, so why stretch it out nearly as long, along with the extra 20 minutes added to the extended edition?
 
Whatever the reason, it all looks fantastic on Blu-ray, and fans will find much to admire. But the real motherlode is the two discs' worth of extras—nearly ten hours—of everything you'd want to know (and some things you didn't) about Jackson’s onscreen vision, along with a commentary and the final part of a New Zealand featurette. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Kurt Cobain—Montage of Heck 
(Universal Music)
More than 20 years after his suspicious death, Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain still exerts a strange hold on his many fans, as that legendary aura has only grown: and that’s sort of what director Brett Morgen punctures in his fastidious, evenhanded documentary that's built around Cobain’s own recordings and drawings, shown to touching effect along with well-used (because not overdone) animation.
 
Interviews with Kurt’s widow, family members and a former bandmate—Krist Novoselic, not Dave Grohl, who was apparently unavailable, to the film’s detriment—round out this defiantly unhagiographic portrait. On Blu, the film looks quite good; extras comprise bonus interviews.
 
The Man from U.N.C.L.E. 
(Warner Bros)
In this noisy reboot of the ‘60s TV espionage drama starring Robert Vaughn, director Guy Ritchie goes for the glitz, overwhelming a game cast—Henry Cavill, Armie Hammer and the usually spectacular Alicia Vikander—with so much inane plot twistiness, loudly thudding action sequences and colorful international locales that whatever might have made this an entertaining two hours has turned to mud.
 
Ritchie’s insistence on flashy gadgetry and visual gimmickry over coherent storytelling and better acting makes this pale in contrast to the original series. The film does look first-rate on Blu; extras are several featurettes.
 
 
 
 
 
 
Mr. Holmes 
(Lionsgate)
In director Bill Condon's engaging fantasy, 93-year-old Sherlock Holmes' retirement is shaken by things beyond his control, especially his own fading memory: he attempts to find some semblance of peace before he completely loses command of his mental faculties.
 
Ian McKellen makes a fun Holmes, Laura Linney is her usual commanding self as his housekeeper, and Milo Parker is superb as her young son who finds the key to Holmes' final sleuthing days. The film's hi-def transfer is sharp and clear; extras are two very brief featurettes. 
 
Two Men in Town 
(Cohen Film Collection)
Alain Delon might have been a pretty face but he also could get down and dirty with the best of them, as in Jose Giovanni’s 1973 drama about an ex-con who, even while falling in love and starting anew, can never escape the cycle of violent crime, especially when a nosy detective ends up dead.
 
Veteran actors Jean Gabin and Michel Bouquet also give fully-realized performances, giving this familiar tale more authenticity. The restored film has received an immaculate transfer; lone extra is an audio commentary.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
DVDs of the Week
Marie's Story 
(Film Movement)
This unforgettable drama about a deaf and dumb French teenage girl could be the Gallic Miracle Worker, but shrewd director Jean-Pierre Ameris has instead made an enriching study of how two disparate and desperate people discover that they can spiritually feed each other, even with blindness, deafness and mortality at the forefront.
 
Ameris works miracles with deaf actress Ariana Riviore as Marie, whose onscreen forcefulness is complemented by Isabelle Carre who, as the nun who becomes Marie's Annie Sullivan, gives a bracing portrayal of grace and bravery. The movie looks and sounds glorious, its striking cinematography and sound (including sparingly-used solo cello music) underscoring this unique relationship. Extras are an interesting 26-minute making-of featurette and an Iranian short, Motherly, about a deaf woman. 
 
The Stanford Prison Experiment 
(IFC)
A disturbing psychological study underlining the questionable methods of Stanford professor Philip Zimbardo, Kyle Patrick Alvarez's drama recounts Zimbardo's 1971 prison experiment, which attempted to see how quickly people act as dominating guard or cowering prisoner.
 
Although it makes pertinent points about people subjected to cruelty and torture—and the Abu Grahib scandal exploded in 2004, Zimbardo was brought up—the movie almost too unrelentingly explores its subject in two hours, which creep by so slowly as to become  diminishing returns, despite excellent performances by a cast led by Billy Crudup's Zimbardo. Extras comprise a director commentary and featurettes.
 
 
 
 
 
 
A Tale of Two Thieves 
(Virgil Films)
The 1963 great train robbery, which has entered crime lore as one of the most daring heists ever, still raises questions about exactly what happened and who was involved, and Chris Long's documentary places one of the men—Gordon Goody—squarely at its center. Goody, now in his mid-80s, discusses his own criminal career and part in the robbery.
 
Even at a mere 69 minutes, the movie feels padded, its robbery reenactments and archival footage of swinging London and interviews with other, marginal people complementing Goody's tale. It makes for an interesting but less than enthralling documentary about a rich subject.
 
CDs of the Week
Guillaume Lekeu—Complete Works 
(Ricercar)
When he died at age 24 in 1894, Belgium's Guillaume Lekeu was already an accomplished composer, but the biggest tragedy of his early death from typhoid was that it snuffed out in its infancy the artistic career of someone who was already a prolific and important artist, as this eight-disc set of all of his extant works proves. 
 
I was mainly familiar with Lekeu’s chamber music, and this set's string quartets, trios and sonatas comprise lengthy, yearning movements similar to the structure of the late, great Schubert quartets and quintets, with solo piano pieces and songs that are equally accomplished.
 
The orchestral music, which has hints of Wagner throughout, sounds less essential than the chamber work but still shows off a first-rate orchestrator and melodist. The performances by many different soloists and ensembles are first-rate on these discs, and the music is varied enough to, once again, let us bemoan what was lost when Lekeu died and exalt in what he did compose.

On Broadway—Keira Knightley's Debut in 'Thérèse Raquin'; Mike Bartlett's 'King Charles III'

Thérèse Raquin
Adapted by Helen Edmundson, based on Emile Zola's novel; directed by Evan Cabnet
Performances through January 3, 2016

King Charles III
Written by Mike Bartlett; directed by Rupert Goold
Performances through January 31, 2016 

Keira Knightley and Matt Ryan in Thérèse Raquin (photo: Joan Marcus)
 
Making her belated Broadway debut is an intense, trenchant Keira Knightley as the title character in Thérèse Raquin, an adaptation of Emile Zola's tragic 1871 novel (and 1873 play) about a stifled young wife who takes a lover, helps him kill her husband and is literally hounded to death by the husband's restless spirit.
 
Giving a typically fierce and intelligent portrayal of the drab, spinsterish woman craving for physical intimacy with someone other than her loathsome husband Camille, Knightley throws caution to the wind embodying Thérèse, who literally jumps into the arms of Laurent, her husband's boyhood friend who conveniently appears one day, consummating an intense affair that leads to murder and madness.
 
Helen Edmundson's adaptation is unafraid to be melodramatic—Zola was a master at making melodrama thrillingly poetic—which creates a space for the characters to act as if they're in soap opera which in a way they are. Director Evan Cabnet cannily twists the screws ever more tightly and tautly, with Beowulf Borritt's arresting set—properly claustrophobic inside the family home and ironically spacious outdoors—preparing the couple to march inexorably to the ultimate comeuppance. 
 
Aside from Knightley's controlled, incisive acting, Judith Light is at first funny then later most affecting as Camille's smothering mother: she's especially good in the extremely tense moments when she tries (but fails) to finger Thérèse and Laurent as Camille's killers after an incapacitating stroke. Gabriel Ebert perfectly shows off Camile's annoying cloddishness, while Matt Ryan, a charismatic Laurent, has such palpable chemistry with Knightley that the adulterers' sexual encounters are charged with the lustful energy that makes Thérèse Raquin such smoldering theater.
 
Lydia Wilson and Tim Pigott-Smith in King Charles III (photo: Joan Marcus)
 
Mike Bartlett, author of King Charles III, made a provocative splash with his play Cock a few seasons ago: the New York Times defiantly still refuses to print its title (they nonsensically call it Cockfight Play). His latest, a big hit in London and proving to be the same on Broadway, is a speculative drama, or "future history" as he calls it, about the death of Queen Elizabeth and the ascension of Prince Charles to the throne: a good enough subject about which a lucid and lacerating political drama could be written.
 
But Bartlett wants more, so he makes his play faux-Shakespeare: rhyming couplets, blank verse, ghostly apparitions, Prince Hal in the form of Harry, Lady Macbeth in the form of Kate. Such gimmickry does his play a disservice by leaning so heavily on the Bard: there's a moment when Kate alludes to King Lear by saying "For nothing comes from nothing said," and at the performance I attended, a woman behind me excitedly whispered to her companion, "I know where that's from!" Don't we all, dear lady.
 
After taking the throne, King Charles wants to become more hands-on running the monarchy and gets involved in defeating a bill that makes freedom of the press a thing of the past. However, the prime minister, the opposition leader and Charles' own son William—next in line to the throne—want him to stand down and allow the political process to play out without royal interference. This disagreement, soon embroiling the new king in abdication talk, is the crux of the little conflict the play has, which is probably why Bartlett dives fully into Shakespeare allusions that give gravitas to what, in essence, is basically (to take a cue from Bartlett and steal from the master) much ado about nothing.
 
Director Rupert Goold gives King Charles III a high gloss that adds Shakespearean elements of its own: but his often effective pageantry doesn't prop up the ginned-up national crisis at the play's center. The second act, in which very little happens dramatically and is often excruciating to sit through, also isn't helped by Jocelyn Pook's music, which lands somewhere between excruciating Philip Glass minimalism and hollow choral writing. 
 
Goold and Bartlett have trouble fitting the subplot about restless Prince Harry and his commoner girlfriend Jess into the main storyline, so much so that Richard Goulding's Harry and Tafline Steen's Jess seem to be in a completely different play: in this, King Charles III falls far short of Shakespeare's miraculous ability to juggle multiple plots and slip effortlessly between high tragedy and low comedy.
 
Happily, the cast, which avoids easy caricature, is smashingly good, with Goulding (Harry) and Steen (Jess) joining formidable costars Oliver Chris (William), Lydia Wilson (Kate) and Margot Leicester (Camilla), with Goulding and Leicester actually looking like their real-life counterparts. If the worthy Tim Pigott-Smith is only intermittently overwhelming as he speaks Charles' soliloquies, it's because Bartlett's words aren't nearly as pregnant or penetrating as Shakespeare's. That's an impossibility for pretty much every writer, but since Bartlett himself has made the comparison, it must be pointed out, to his play's detriment.


Thérèse Raquin
Studio 54, 254 West 54th Street, New York, NY
roundabouttheatre.org

King Charles III
Music Box Theatre, 239 West 45th Street, New York, NY
kingcharlesiiibroadway.com

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