Saturday in Ashland: A Wilde and Nosy Guy

[djonn]

The two shows we saw on Saturday were a study in contrasts.  As I observed to others in the tour group in one of the post-play discussion sessions, it felt rather like an illustration of basic physics principles relating to the conservation of energy.

The matinee was Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, and it was as hilariously staged as one might wish.  The Ashland company tends to be very, very good at drawing-room farce, and this production was no exception -- crisply timed, briskly delivered, and vividly designed. 

Not everyone was universally impressed.  The handful of tour-group members who were most familiar with the play's text (and had seen several other productions) expressed moderate disappointment with the Ashland staging -- in particular, they thought it veered too far into slapstick toward the end and felt that notable lines were not always given the emphasis they deserved.  The majority of the group, however -- myself included -- was well pleased; I'd count this the second-strongest of the weekend's presentations, and the most energetically acted.

By contrast, the evening's Cyrano de Bergerac, on the outdoor stage,  was a considerable disappointment.

The show had been much anticipated, in part because the actor signed to play Cyrano (Marco Barricelli) is a longtime Festival favorite with a loyal fan base. However, it turned out that Barricelli was not peforming (he had apparently been called away on a family emergency)-- the understudy took over Cyrano, and was replaced in turn in the small roles he had originally held.

Having noted the change of leads, I should add that the understudy's performance was emphatically not the source of our dissatisfaction with the production.  Ashland trains its understudies very, very well, and in the handful of instances over the years where I've seen understudies perform, I have always been extraordinarily impressed with their seamless integration into the shows.  That professionalism came through as much in Cyrano as it ever has; our frustrations (and the tour group was in substantial agreement about the presentation) lay elsewhere.

One fundamental problem -- in multiple senses of the word -- was that the play was long.  The playbill indicated a 3-hour running time (counting two intermissions); in fact, we went over that by about ten minutes.  Pacing was slow, the staging as a whole lacked energy (it had all, apparently, gone into Earnest that afternoon), and scenes seemed drawn out and lifeless.  By the time Cyrano's lengthy death-scene in Act Five, one wanted him to die and get it over with despite the rich emotional content of the material.  The strong consensus among the tour-group (at least those still awake after the show ended) was that the running-script could have benefited greatly from careful but significant cutting.

And so to bed.

To be continued....