by Jack Gohn | May 17, 2015 | The Close Up, Theater Reviews and Commentary
There are times it’s hard to credit that 1776 is even a musical. In this retelling of the drafting and signing of the Declaration of Independence, there is some singing and some dancing, and even some laughs, but little effort to follow the tried-and-true path to rousing musical success. This is fundamentally a tale of a group of men sitting in a room debating, and Peter Stone, author of the book, gives us – a group of men sitting in a room debating. And yet the work has considerable power and appeal, and it is not strange either that it won the Tony for Best Musical in 1969, or that Toby’s has revived it.
by Jack Gohn | Apr 26, 2015 | The Close Up, Theater Reviews and Commentary
In the end, Lorca’s rebellion against an ethos which says no to so much human feeling and sexual passion, which gives such veto power to unthinking conventionality and religious diktat, states a timeless theme. That does not mean that every aspect of Lorca’s articulation of that rebelliousness is equally timeless He may have had one foot in Brechtian agitprop, according to the conventions of which Bernarda could be a two-dimensional villain, Cruella de Vil in a mantilla. That dated kind of oversimplification is the most important thing a modern production must rescue Lorca and the play from. Bernarda too is a victim, whether Lorca fully understood it or not himself.
by Jack Gohn | Mar 18, 2015 | The Close Up, Theater Reviews and Commentary
If charming and silly are your thing, you’ll have fun at Thirteen Dead Husbands by Tom Horan. Set in ‘a Paris of the Imagination,’ it centers around Dee-Dee (Cassandra Dutt) the ‘most beautiful girl in the world,’ whose stunning looks come with a serious drawback. The drawback: You marry her, you die promptly of some kind of unpredictable catastrophe. When the action starts, she has already been widowed twelve times, and has a trunk-full of wedding dresses to prove it. The question then becomes what kind of man would now seek Dee-Dee’s hand, and what are his chances (of matrimony, and if so, of survival) if he does?
by Jack Gohn | Feb 21, 2015 | The Close Up, Theater Reviews and Commentary
As we hear the voice of the “real” Tokyo Rose, it does seems that her sometimes guttural, sometimes screechy, sometimes seductive tone emanates from the Japanese national spirit and no mere individual. Yanagi is almost certainly right that the authorities convicted the wrong Tokyo Rose, but the main point isn’t that, but rather that the spirit of Tokyo Rose was ethereal, ephemeral, and not subject to being captured, either by soldiers or even by memory. Except for recordings of her voice, she is absent.
by Jack Gohn | Feb 15, 2015 | The Close Up, Theater Reviews and Commentary
There is much more to Ruined than Mama’s turn as a sort of Auntie Mame-of-the-Ituri-rainforest. It is also the unflinching story of how, in the words of Salima, men wage war “on [women’s] bodies.” Rape is not simply “what soldiers do,” to quote scholar Mary Louise Roberts’ recent book on the sexual behavior of World War II GIs in Normandy; particularly in contemporary warfare it is a form of combat, aimed at destroying societies. The scene in Act Two where Salima describes what happened to her is not only uncomfortable, it is a display of raw theatrical power and a tutorial about the mechanics of social destruction in the wake of rape.
by Jack Gohn | Feb 15, 2015 | The Close Up, Theater Reviews and Commentary
And that, I think, is the not terribly secret, not terribly original explanation of Baltimore’s new “overnight” status as a theater town: it was the work of three generations at least: one to build the community theaters, one to build Center Stage, and one to build almost everything else upon that foundation. And if you were sleeping like Rip Van Winkle, you might have missed it.
I lived in London and Vienna before coming to the United States, and grew up mainly in Ann Arbor. I was writing plays and stories as early as grade school. My undergraduate years at the University of Pennsylvania, where I first reviewed theater, for the college paper, were succeeded by graduate study at the Johns Hopkins University, where I earned a doctorate in English Literature.