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By 2013, Sondheim was working on a revision in which Bobby was indeed gay. A West End revival, directed by Marianne Elliott, in 2017, went one step further, re-casting the male Bobby as a female Bobbie, and indeed rendering one of the five couples gay – all with Sondheim’s blessing.
Among the many denigrations of our era is the national disregard for evidence, where empirical proof is replaced by superstition. When a large mass of the public systematically ignores empirical evidence, and rebels against it, this presents a huge impediment to the task of moving a country forward.
Michetti’s staging of Uncle Vanya at the Pasadena Playhouse is the best production of Vanya since Louis Malle’s 1994 movie of the play (“Vanya on 42nd Street”)
They’re also haunted by the Holocaust. For those who believe that we can’t live in the past, they counter that the past lives within us: “History is floating in and above the ground, like an ocean.”
“Many of the texts are quite harsh, describing extreme anger, violence, fear, etc.” Freedman explains. “[co-translator Natalia Bratus] often falls silent as she reads, weeps quietly, falls silent again to compose herself before moving on to the next phrase.”
Solomonov predicts that the outcome of Putin’s tragic miscalculation will be national humiliation for decades to come – the kind of decentralization that Moscow loathes, as Russia has neither the resources nor the energy to retain its former empire.
Yesterday, I received a text from Moscow. “Stevka. Just to let you know what people think about the situation here. We hate this decision. We all think this is against the law. And people here are very scared what he [Putin] will do next. People don’t support this at all.”
Though it streaks across the theatrical firmament like a comet, its tail is more luminous than the substance of the object itself — an object that rattles and prattles along its trajectory, unsure of whether it wishes to be regarded as an object of insight, of provocation, of titillation or of mystification. It can be seen as any or all of those descriptions. Such ambiguity is not necessarily a virtue.
One thing remains certain: No assembly bill or virus can kill the theater. It will simply move into other spaces, like a song that orbits for a while and then returns in the future with echoes of the past. We can dream.
What the reversed County policy does, however, is throw shade on the hundreds of indoor productions being planned – including the entire Hollywood Fringe Festival, which uses tiny indoor spaces — and the accompanying confidence that the pandemic is behind us.
