1. LOOK AROUND,
EVERYWHERE YOU TURN IS HEARTACHE
IT’S EVERYWHERE THAT YOU GO
… VOGUE!
It’s undeniably weird to juxtapose war and high fashion, but that’s what Olena Zelenska, wife of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is doing by appearing in a cover story for Vogue. The digital edition is already online; the hard-copy magazine comes out in October.
Zelenska is getting heavily criticized for it. Columnist Amrita Bhinder tweeted, “While Ukraine is going through hell, Vogue is doing a photoshoot for the President & his wife.” As The New York Times reports, “Representative Mayra Flores, a Republican from Texas, seized the opportunity to attack the Biden administration for its financial support of Ukraine, implying it was funding vanity. Breitbart wrote a gleeful article aggregating the criticism, especially as it related to government funding.”
The Vogue article, “Portrait of Bravery”, doesn’t altogether dispel the notion that the fashion industry is full of airheads. Writer Rachel Donadio’s piece is sometimes jingoistic, as it claims, for instance, that Zelenskyy’s presidency “may yet determine the fate of the free world.” Its presentation of gender is reactionary. Donadio repeatedly emphasizes Zelenska’s maternalism, emotionality, and “soft look”: “Her luminous face and green-brown eyes seemed to capture the range of emotions coursing through Ukraine today.” And, describing an item of Zelenska’s clothing, Donadio slips into tasteless and unintentional self-parody: “I couldn’t help but think the shirt had the same rusty hue as the burned-out Russian tanks that I saw lining roads in Irpin and Bucha.”
But, as Vanessa Friedman points out in The Times, somebody at Vogue knows what they’re doing. “The new feature eschews fashion credits,” Friedman points out. “Ms. Zelenska appears polished, but the story focuses on the pain and trauma of her country and its people, as well as the couple’s relationship. None of the subjects are smiling.
“A single line under one photograph notes that Ms. Zelenska is wearing entirely Ukrainian designers and lists their names. This may seem like a small thing to most viewers, but it takes the commercial element out of the shoot. Whatever it’s selling — and it’s definitely selling something — it isn’t clothes.”
Zelenska may have had a hand in this framing, of course. She and her husband are both media savvy. As Vogue points out, “In 2003 Zelenskyy and friends, including Zelenska, started Kvartal 95, a production company that became one of the largest in the Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking world.”
The stakes for Zelenska, her country, and her family, are high. Zelenskyy is undoubtedly the number one target on Putin’s hit list. Zelenska and her children, Oleksandra, 18, and Kyrylo, 9, may collectively be number two.
And, as Friedman argues in The Times, despite the entrenched view that fashion is a frivolous subject, it is “a key part of pop culture and the rare equivalent of a global language.”
“By appearing in public, and raising issues in public, when her husband cannot,” Friedman says, Zelenska is “keeping her country’s needs alive in the international conversation at a time when other crises are vying for attention. She has, essentially, weaponized Vogue.
“She said as much to the BBC when one of its interviewers asked her to explain the choice: ‘Millions read Vogue … and to be able to speak to them direct, that was my duty,’ she said, adding, ‘I believe it is more important to do something and be criticized than to do nothing.’’
“Whatever you think of the actual piece, however you feel about the magazine in which it was published, you can’t dispute the fact that it once again put the war in Ukraine in the headlines — and in the minds of people who may not have been following it as closely as others. In that context, her interview is not just an interview. It’s a piece of battle strategy.”
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Olena Zelenska and Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the presidential office compound in Kyiv (Photo by Annie Leibovitz)
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This triptych is from The New York Times. From the left: Colm Feore, Danai Gurira, and Arthur Hughes, all playing Richard III. (Photos by David Hou, Sara Krulwich/The New York Times, and Ellie Kurttz, via the Royal Shakespeare Company)
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2. BODIES OF KNOWLEDGE
The conversation about the representation of disability onstage, especially the casting of disabled characters and disabled actors, keeps getting more nuanced — richer and richer for everybody within hearing distance.
In the New York Times article “Who Can Play the King?”, writer Marc Tracy examines three high-profile approaches to the casting of the title character in Shakespeare’s Richard III.
In the opening scene, Richard tells the audience that he is:
“Deformed, unfinish’d, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them.”
Ten years ago, the discovery of the bones of the real-life Richard III — in a shallow grave under a parking lot in Leicester, England — revealed that the historical figure had scoliosis.
It’s been decades since any reputable company has presented a white actor in blackface as Othello. And, increasingly, there’s an awareness of the benefits of casting disabled actors as Richard.
By putting Colm Feore, who is not disabled, in the role, Antoni Cimolino, artistic director of Ontario’s Stratford Festival, has declined to participate in that exploration. In a generally positive review in The Toronto Star, Karen Fricker wrote, “As much as I admired Feore’s performance, it did lead me to wonder if this will be the last able-bodied actor making a star turn as a disabled character on the Stratford stage.”
On the other hand, Robert O’Hara, who directed Richard III for the Public Theater’s Free Shakespeare in the Park in New York City this summer, blew the conversation wide open, casting Danai Gurira, a Black woman, as Richard. “Richard’s otherness becomes an entire reason for his behavior,” O’Hara told The Times. “He feels like now he has to play a part people projected onto him.” O’Hara also cast Deaf and disabled actors as several characters who aren't specifically written as disabled. The inimitable Ali Stroker, who uses a wheelchair, played Lady Anne, for instance. And Monique Holt, who is Deaf, took on the role of Richard’s mother.
O’Hara said, “I wanted to open up the conversation from ‘Why isn’t Richard being played by a disabled actor?’ to ‘Why isn’t every role considered able to be played by a disabled actor?’”
In the most straight-ahead casting, Arthur Hughes, who has radial dysplasia — which means, in his case, that he has a shorter right arm and a missing thumb — has become the first disabled actor to play Richard III in the sixty-year history of the Royal Shakespeare Company.
In this piece in The Stage, Gregory Doran, who directed the production, says that “having an actor with a lived experience of disability playing Richard III means that every moment in the play is reassessed. Arthur analyses each scene with a forensic eye, producing fresh insights on Richard’s disability and adding complexity.”
And Doran adds that, when characters call Hughes’s Richard degrading names, “they are not just hurling insults at a prosthetic, but at a vulnerable human being.”
In the New York Times piece, Ayanna Thompson, who is a Shakespeare scholar in residence at the Public Theatre, argues that colour-conscious and body-conscious casting reflect a growing understanding of how actors’ physical characteristics inflect audiences’ perceptions. “All of our bodies carry meaning on stage,” she says, “whether or not we want to acknowledge that.”
The production of Richard III at Ontario’s Stratford Festival is running until October 30. Tickets
The Royal Shakespeare’s version is at Stratford-Upon-Avon until October 8. Tickets
The Public Theatre’s production in New York City closed on July 17.
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Nichelle Nichols in Malibu in 2017 (Photo: Mel Melcon/Los Angeles Times)
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3. HAILING FREQUENCIES OPEN!
Never underestimate the power of representation.
Nichelle Nichols, who played head communications officer Lt. Nyota Uhura in the Star Trek TV series and subsequent films, died July 30 of heart failure in a hospital in Silver City, New Mexico. She was 89.
Nichols is being hailed as a trailblazer.
As this tribute in the LA Times tells us, “Comedian Whoopi Goldberg, on first seeing Nichols when she was about 9, remembered running through the house yelling, ‘Everybody, come quick, come quick — there’s a Black lady on television and she ain’t no maid!’” Playing the first Black woman on TV to occupy a position of authority, Nichols inspired a generation. As Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams wrote on Twitter: “Her kindness and bravery lit the path for many.”
As Uhura, Nichols also took part in what many believe was television’s first interracial lip-to-lip kiss. In that episode, which first aired on November 22, 1968, the writers sidestepped desire: aliens telekinetically forced Uhura and Captain Kirk (William Shatner) to kiss. But the actors rebelled to make that kiss count. The series’ producers were so worried about public reaction in the South that they tried to film an alternative version of the scene that included an embrace but no kiss. However, as the LA Times reports, “the kiss-less approach was thwarted when, in take after take, Nichols and Shatner deliberately flubbed their lines.” Finally, the actors spoke all their lines clearly so everybody could go home. But, when producers took a close look at that take, they realized that Shatner had crossed his eyes all the way through it. The producers gave up. The kiss aired in the South.
Two years earlier, after the first season of Star Trek ended, Nichols had almost left the series. She was frustrated by how little Uhura got to do and longed to return to her first love, musical theatre. She even submitted her letter of resignation to the series’ creator, Gene Roddenberry. But then she ran into Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at an NAACP fundraiser in Beverley Hills. When Nichols told King she was quitting Star Trek, he was appalled.
“Gene Roddenberry has opened a door,” he told her. “If you leave, that door can be closed. Your role is not a Black role and not a female role — he can fill it with anything, including an alien.” (LA Times)
“Besides,” said King, who confessed to being a huge Star Trek fan, “you’re the fourth in command — you’re the head communications officer.”
Nichols remembered: “He told me that it was the only show that he and his wife, Coretta, would allow their little children to stay up and watch.”
“For the first time,” King argued, “the world sees us as we should be seen. This is what we’re marching for.”
Nichols told Roddenberry that she’d changed her mind. He tore her letter of resignation to pieces.
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Here are those wacky kids Kamyar Pazandeh and Jyla Robinson in my favourite show of the summer so far, the TUTS production of Something Rotten! (Photo by Emily Cooper)
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4. SEEING THINGS
New Victoria Theatre
I haven’t seen Blue Bridge Repertory Theatre’s remount of Ride the Cyclone, but I’m still living off the fumes of the show’s 2011 Vancouver premiere. They’re strong fumes: it’s still one of the most exciting openings I’ve ever attended. The show has changed since then — it has acquired more of a narrative arc, for instance — but I’d be astonished if its camp originality isn’t still firmly intact. The book and lyrics, which were created by the team of Jacob Richmond and Brooke Maxwell, tell the story of six high-school-aged members of St. Caspian’s Chamber Choir from Uranium, Saskatchewan. They were all killed when the Cyclone roller coaster they were riding flew off its tracks. Now they’re singing in a competition to see who gets to come back to life. Musically, this show is a rich collection of genres and the script contains one of my favourite lines of all time: a gay kid named Noel Gruber says that being gay in Uranium is “kind of like having a laptop in the Stone Age. You know you have it, but there’s nowhere to plug it in.”
Here's my review from 2011. And here’s the New York Times review from 2016: Charles Isherwood called Ride the Cyclone “high-spirited and just plain fun from start to finish.” It's running at Victoria’s Roxy Theatre until August 14. Here’s where to get in-person and live-streamed tickets.
Ongoing Vancouver Theatre
When I first heard the premise for Something Rotten!, I thought, “That is so dumb” — and it is. But, in this case, dumb turns out to be hilarious. The story is set in Elizabethan England, where a struggling playwright named Nick Bottom has to come up with fresh ideas before his patron cuts him off. Unlike William Shakespeare, who’s getting all the attention, Nick is not a fountain of invention, so he consults a soothsayer, a distant relative of Nostradamus. This lesser-known prophet tips Nick off that musicals will be big in the future and, when Nick is looking for a plot for his musical and asks Nostradamus what the Bard’s biggest hit will be, the soothsayer replies "Omelette" — just missing Hamlet by that much. So Nick starts creating a show about breakfast. (According to Nostradamus, Omelette, also features a Danish.) Before the evening is over, Something Rotten! has made cockeyed references to every musical you’ve ever heard of — and they all get shoehorned into Nick’s script. Just wait till you see how Nick decides to deal with the Nazis from The Sound of Music. Under Rachel Peake’s direction, this production is impeccably performed. Standout performances include Kamyar Pazandeh’s golden-voiced, slyly comic Nick, Daniel Curalli's jaw-dropping turn as the narcissistic Bard, and Jyla Robinson’s hysterically eccentric Nostradamus. Like the rest of the evening, Nicol Spinola’s choreography is full of joyously anachronistic quirks. Something Rotten! is the most consistently satisfying show I’ve seen this summer. Make it a hit.
This Theatre Under the Stars production is running in rep in Stanley Park’s Malkin Bowl until August 26. Here’s my full review, and here’s where to get tickets.
The book for TUTS's other show this season, We Will Rock You, is also dumb, but in a bad way. A jukebox musical built on the music of Queen, We Will Rock You is dripping with so much old-fart attitude you can almost smell it. Set 300 years in the future, Ben Elton’s book features a guy named Galileo, a young prophet who’s been sent to free the minds of “the kids” by introducing them to twentieth-century rock and roll. There’s little wit in this; mostly, it’s just self-aggrandisement, condescension, and cashing in. From today’s standpoint, the attitude is basically: The music kids listen to these days is shit; they should really be more like their grandparents. That said, as with Something Rotten!, the performances and production values in We Will Rock You — under Saccha Dennis’s direction — are of a remarkably high and consistent standard. Steffanie Davis, who’s playing a corporate villain named Killer Queen, delivers the performance highlight of the evening with her rendition of “Another One Bites the Dust”, but everybody can sing, including: Danny Malena as Galileo, Jessica Spenst as his love interest Scaramouche, and Tanner Zerr and Jennifer Suratos as Bohemian rebels Brit and Oz. Brian Ball's costumes are a party and Robert Sondergaard's rock-concert set and lighting are suitably kinetic and flashy. But — and these are big buts — Elton’s book is boneheadedly sexist (Scaramouche’s feminism is dismissed as a comic quirk) and, given that We Will Rock You is a cash cow designed to exploit nostalgia, it’s hard to take seriously the show’s critique of the capitalist music industry. Queen's music is rousing, but the rest of this musical is boring.
This Theatre Under the Stars production is running in rep in Stanley Park’s Malkin Bowl until August 27. Here’s my full review and here’s where to get tickets.
For VocalEye patrons (folks with limited vision) there’ll be a described performance and a good deal on August 5. To take advantage of this offer, call the TUTS box office at 604-734-1917.
Director Scott Bellis’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream for Bard on the Beach is a prime example of Bard’s Big Mistake. Too often, it feels like Vancouver’s marquee presenter of Shakespeare’s plays is afraid of the language, afraid Vancouver audiences won’t understand it, so Bard dumbs down the plays by slathering them with coarse comic business. In this production of Dream, for instance, the hilarity of the verbal smackdown in which Helena and Hermia insult one another about their differing physical statures — “You bead, you acorn!”, “Painted maypole!” — gets lost because Bellis directs the actors playing Demetrius and Lysander to be so horny for Helena that they’re crawling around on their bellies, virtually humping the floor and trying to grab her. Carly Street, who plays Bottom, has great comic timing and she’s inventive — but she doesn’t know when to stop and Bellis hasn’t stopped her. Street breaks the play’s internal reality by inserting colloquial asides (“I have no idea what’s going on”), she indulges in cheap physical humour, stabbing herself in the crotch in the mechanicals’ performance of Pyramus and Thisbe, and she’s such a show-off that she sucks the air out of every scene she’s in. Amid the mayhem, some performances, including Billy Marchenski’s coolly sexy Oberon, survive. To their great credit, Emily Dallas (Helena) and Christopher Allen (Demetrius) also manage to maintain emotionally credible characterizations within the broad style. The physical production is gorgeous. In Amir Ofek’s set, Athens is a stark art deco ruin, and Christine Reimer’s costumes, which combine fantasy and 1920s fashion, are knockouts: in Oberon’s first entrance, he’s a walking, ten-foot-tall tree. But somebody really needs to tell Bard’s artistic director Christopher Gaze and executive director Claire Sakaki that Vancouver audiences deserve more than the condescension implicit in the apparent assumption that we won’t understand Shakespeare’s language and stories unless they’re turned into cartoons.
Here's my full review of this Bard on the Beach production, which is running in the BMO Mainstage tent until September 24. And here’s where to get tickets.
For Vocal Eye members, there’ll be described performances and good deals on Saturday, August 20 at 7:30 pm and Sunday, August 28 at 2 pm. Call 604-739-0559 to take advantage of this offer.
Upcoming Theatre
This Saturday, I’ll be seeing Paneet Singh and and Andy Kalirai’s new script, Dooja Ghar. It will be at the Campbell Valley Red Barn in Langley as part of this year’s Monsoon Festival. You can look for that review on my blog late in the afternoon on Sunday. Tickets
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Here’s the link to last week’s issue, “Headline Stress Disorder”. The popular lead item is about finding more psychologically endurable ways to tell news stories. This issue also includes a well-loved poem, Geoff Inverarity’s “The Woman Who Talks to her Dog at the Beach”. Here’s a link to the video.
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