[NEohioPAL]Lakeland: Review of BARRYMORE

[Martin Friedman]

--0-1476547840-1185027147=:52887
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

                                            Barrymore’ at Lakeland is tour de force for actor   
            Mitchell Fields offers a nuanced portrait of self- destructive theater icon John Barrymore.   Reviewed by: FRAN HELLER Contributing Writer

The name Barrymore is synonymous with theater.   There’s the Barrymore Theatre on Broadway, for example, is named after Ethel Barrymore. Earlier comedies about the Barrymore clan include “The Royal Family” by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber, and Paul Rudnick’s “I Hate Hamlet.” The legacy continues with John Barrymore’s granddaughter, screen actress Drew Barrymore.

“Barrymore” by William Luce is a mostly one-person bio-show about John Barrymore, the youngest of three famous siblings born into an illustrious theatrical family that spanned four generations. The show is at Lakeland Community College Theatre through July 28. Written for Christopher Plummer and the Stratford Theatre Festival of Canada, where it had its world première in 1996, the play transferred to Broadway and bagged a Tony for Plummer in 1997.

As drama, “Barrymore” is wanting, but as a tour-de-force performance piece by the estimable Mitchell Fields in the title role, it is a thoroughly satisfying evening of theater. Under Martin Friedman’s well-paced direction, Fields commands the stage as the alcoholic, self-destructive Barrymore, once considered the greatest actor of his generation.               Keeping the audience engaged is a formidable task for any actor in a solo show. There are a few discernible dips in timing, and Fields’s tipsy gait is an on-again, off-again swagger. But these are minor tics compared with Fields’s nuanced portrait of the legendary actor who once reached for the stars before plummeting to earth. His Barrymore is funny, moving, bawdy and tragic; everything good theater should be.

In the original production, which I saw on Broadway, the character of the prompter is heard but remains unseen until curtain call. In this production, Friedman places the prompter off-stage but in full view of the audience. It’s a deft touch, adding energy and tension to the dialogue. Andrew Narten is excellent as the prompter Frank, who feeds Barrymore his lines and nourishes his ego.

The play takes place in New York City one month before John Barrymore’s death. The year is 1942, a few months after Pearl Harbor, and as Barrymore wryly notes, his effort to revive his career pales in comparison to a world filled with horror.

Barrymore has rented a theater for one night in an effort to resurrect his title role in Shakespeare’s “Richard III.” Keith Nagy’s rendition of the backstage of a theater littered with props, racks of costumes, an assortment of trunks, and a tall ladder is spot on.

The play opens (and closes) with a scratchy taped recording of the real Barrymore. Sporting a three-piece suit, fedora and signature mustache, Mitchell Fields sails across the stage on a moveable garment rack of costumes. Without skipping a beat, the slightly inebriated Barrymore digresses into a litany of risqué jokes, humorous imitations, and slivers of biography as he tries to recall King Richard’s lines.               “We were the theater’s royal family, and I was the clown prince,” says John in a self-mocking tone that threads the entire play. Between the self-parodying and the laughs, there are glimpses of Barrymore’s professional and personal life.

Like Lionel and Ethel, John reluctantly became an actor, and like his siblings, he held a dim view of “the family business.” He describes acting as a scavenger profession, a junk pile of all the arts in which “we three were trapped in the family cul-de-sac.”

Both John and Lionel wanted to be painters; Ethel aspired to be a pianist. But as Ethel would later recall in an interview, “we went into acting not because we wanted to, but because it was what we knew best.”

Already a matinee idol and famous actor on stage and screen in 1920, John Barrymore is urged by young playwright Ned Sheldon to tackle the classics. John’s affection for Ned is palpable.               At age 38, Barrymore delivers a triumphant performance as “Richard III.” Two years later, he reached even greater success as “Hamlet” in a performance described as the best of the century.

But Barrymore detested long runs, and after beating Edwin Booth’s record as Hamlet by one performance, he left the show and sailed for Europe. His Hamlet in London was also a triumph, and he continued to make movies, (about 60 in a 25-year span), but eventually his self-inflicted, punishing lifestyle proved his undoing. According to sources, by 1936, he could no longer remember his lines, which doctors attributed to his excessive alcoholism. He died at age 60. Both Ethel and Lionel would outlive him by a number of years,. with Lionel even continuing to act from a wheelchair.

John’s personal life, including four marriages that he describes as “bus accidents,” was a disaster. Among all the children, he was the one most haunted by his demonic father, whom he feared he would emulate. (The elder Barrymore spent the last two years of his life in a mental institution, suffering from syphilis and alcoholism.)

Barrymore’s mother died when the children were teenagers. Because his parents were always on the road, John and his siblings were raised by their grandmother, whom Barrymore affectionately called Mum Mum. He creates an endearing picture of his actress grandmother, Mrs. John Drew, whom he proudly describes as the first woman to run a major American theater, the Arch Theatre in Philadelphia.               There are adequately mimed portraits of Lionel and Ethel, gossip columnist Louella Parsons, a sanitarium director named Frau Himmler, and silent-film star John Gilbert, whose high pitched voice proved a disaster in the talkies.

Fields really shines is in his delivery of “To be or not to be.”Spoken in a voice barely above a whisper, Hamlet’s soliloquy becomes a requiem for the actor’s ravaged spirit. Fields’s honey-voiced rendition of “What a piece of work is man,” another Hamlet soliloquy, raised a lump in my throat.

Fields’s complete transformation in the second act as Richard III is amazing. Credit belongs to costumer Craig Tucker, wigmaker Winn Douglass, and Nagy’s battlefield lighting.

Our endless fascination with how the once famous have fallen is satisfied in this fine production of a legendary icon of American theater. 



       
---------------------------------
Be a better Heartthrob. Get better relationship answers from someone who knows.
Yahoo! Answers - Check it out. 
--0-1476547840-1185027147=:52887
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

                                            <DIV>Barrymore’ at Lakeland is tour de force for actor   <div class=byline align=left></div>  <TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=180 align=right border=0>  <TBODY>  <TR>  <TD><IMG src="http://images.townnews.com/clevelandjewishnews.com/content/articles/2007/07/20/features/arts/carts0720.jpg" border=0></TD></TR>  <TR>  <TD class=cutline>Mitchell Fields offers a nuanced portrait of self- destructive theater icon John Barrymore. </TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>  <div class=content align=left>Reviewed by: FRAN HELLER Contributing Writer<BR><BR>The name Barrymore is synonymous with theater.   <div align=left><SPAN class=content>There’s the Barrymore Theatre on Broadway, for example, is named after Ethel Barrymore. Earlier comedies
 about the Barrymore clan include “The Royal Family” by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber, and Paul Rudnick’s “I Hate Hamlet.” The legacy continues with John Barrymore’s granddaughter, screen actress Drew Barrymore.<BR><BR>“Barrymore” by William Luce is a mostly one-person bio-show about John Barrymore, the youngest of three famous siblings born into an illustrious theatrical family that spanned four generations. The show is at Lakeland Community College Theatre through July 28. Written for Christopher Plummer and the Stratford Theatre Festival of Canada, where it had its world première in 1996, the play transferred to Broadway and bagged a Tony for Plummer in 1997.<BR><BR>As drama, “Barrymore” is wanting, but as a tour-de-force performance piece by the estimable Mitchell Fields in the title role, it is a thoroughly satisfying evening of theater. Under Martin Friedman’s well-paced direction, Fields commands the stage as the alcoholic, self-destructive Barrymore, once
 considered the greatest actor of his generation.</SPAN>   <TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 align=right border=0>  <TBODY>  <TR>  <TD></TD></TR>  <TR>  <TD class=cutline></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>  <div align=left><SPAN class=content>Keeping the audience engaged is a formidable task for any actor in a solo show. There are a few discernible dips in timing, and Fields’s tipsy gait is an on-again, off-again swagger. But these are minor tics compared with Fields’s nuanced portrait of the legendary actor who once reached for the stars before plummeting to earth. His Barrymore is funny, moving, bawdy and tragic; everything good theater should be.<BR><BR>In the original production, which I saw on Broadway, the character of the prompter is heard but remains unseen until curtain call. In this production, Friedman places the prompter off-stage but in full view of the audience. It’s a deft touch, adding energy and tension to the dialogue. Andrew Narten is excellent as the prompter
 Frank, who feeds Barrymore his lines and nourishes his ego.<BR><BR>The play takes place in New York City one month before John Barrymore’s death. The year is 1942, a few months after Pearl Harbor, and as Barrymore wryly notes, his effort to revive his career pales in comparison to a world filled with horror.<BR><BR>Barrymore has rented a theater for one night in an effort to resurrect his title role in Shakespeare’s “Richard III.” Keith Nagy’s rendition of the backstage of a theater littered with props, racks of costumes, an assortment of trunks, and a tall ladder is spot on.<BR><BR>The play opens (and closes) with a scratchy taped recording of the real Barrymore. Sporting a three-piece suit, fedora and signature mustache, Mitchell Fields sails across the stage on a moveable garment rack of costumes. Without skipping a beat, the slightly inebriated Barrymore digresses into a litany of risqué jokes, humorous imitations, and slivers of biography as he tries to recall King
 Richard’s lines.</SPAN>   <TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 align=right border=0>  <TBODY>  <TR>  <TD></TD></TR>  <TR>  <TD class=cutline></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>  <div align=left><SPAN class=content>“We were the theater’s royal family, and I was the clown prince,” says John in a self-mocking tone that threads the entire play. Between the self-parodying and the laughs, there are glimpses of Barrymore’s professional and personal life.<BR><BR>Like Lionel and Ethel, John reluctantly became an actor, and like his siblings, he held a dim view of “the family business.” He describes acting as a scavenger profession, a junk pile of all the arts in which “we three were trapped in the family cul-de-sac.”<BR><BR>Both John and Lionel wanted to be painters; Ethel aspired to be a pianist. But as Ethel would later recall in an interview, “we went into acting not because we wanted to, but because it was what we knew best.”<BR><BR>Already a matinee idol and famous actor on stage and
 screen in 1920, John Barrymore is urged by young playwright Ned Sheldon to tackle the classics. John’s affection for Ned is palpable.</SPAN>   <TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 align=right border=0>  <TBODY>  <TR>  <TD></TD></TR>  <TR>  <TD class=cutline></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>  <div align=left><SPAN class=content>At age 38, Barrymore delivers a triumphant performance as “Richard III.” Two years later, he reached even greater success as “Hamlet” in a performance described as the best of the century.<BR><BR>But Barrymore detested long runs, and after beating Edwin Booth’s record as Hamlet by one performance, he left the show and sailed for Europe. His Hamlet in London was also a triumph, and he continued to make movies, (about 60 in a 25-year span), but eventually his self-inflicted, punishing lifestyle proved his undoing. According to sources, by 1936, he could no longer remember his lines, which doctors attributed to his excessive alcoholism. He died at age 60. Both
 Ethel and Lionel would outlive him by a number of years,. with Lionel even continuing to act from a wheelchair.<BR><BR>John’s personal life, including four marriages that he describes as “bus accidents,” was a disaster. Among all the children, he was the one most haunted by his demonic father, whom he feared he would emulate. (The elder Barrymore spent the last two years of his life in a mental institution, suffering from syphilis and alcoholism.)<BR><BR>Barrymore’s mother died when the children were teenagers. Because his parents were always on the road, John and his siblings were raised by their grandmother, whom Barrymore affectionately called Mum Mum. He creates an endearing picture of his actress grandmother, Mrs. John Drew, whom he proudly describes as the first woman to run a major American theater, the Arch Theatre in Philadelphia.</SPAN>   <TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 align=right border=0>  <TBODY>  <TR>  <TD></TD></TR>  <TR>  <TD
 class=cutline></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>  <div align=left><SPAN class=content>There are adequately mimed portraits of Lionel and Ethel, gossip columnist Louella Parsons, a sanitarium director named Frau Himmler, and silent-film star John Gilbert, whose high pitched voice proved a disaster in the talkies.<BR><BR>Fields really shines is in his delivery of “To be or not to be.”Spoken in a voice barely above a whisper, Hamlet’s soliloquy becomes a requiem for the actor’s ravaged spirit. Fields’s honey-voiced rendition of “What a piece of work is man,” another Hamlet soliloquy, raised a lump in my throat.<BR><BR>Fields’s complete transformation in the second act as Richard III is amazing. Credit belongs to costumer Craig Tucker, wigmaker Winn Douglass, and Nagy’s battlefield lighting.<BR><BR>Our endless fascination with how the once famous have fallen is satisfied in this fine production of a legendary icon of American theater.</SPAN> <BR clear=all></div></DIV><p> 
      <hr size=1>Be a better Heartthrob. <a href="http://us.rd.yahoo.com/evt=48255/*http://answers.yahoo.com/dir/_ylc=X3oDMTI5MGx2aThyBF9TAzIxMTU1MDAzNTIEX3MDMzk2NTQ1MTAzBHNlYwNCQUJwaWxsYXJfTklfMzYwBHNsawNQcm9kdWN0X3F1ZXN0aW9uX3BhZ2U-?link=list&sid=396545433">Get better relationship answers </a>from someone who knows.<br>Yahoo! Answers - Check it out. 

--0-1476547840-1185027147=:52887--