Kerr already displayed a notable talent as a Harvard undergraduate in the early sixties. Following advanced training in London, he has been performing many roles in the Midwest and far West, including major Shakespearean ones. All this experience has paid off. His classical delivery is impeccable, his mean mien expressive, his ruthless efficiency chilling. And his "moiety of the world" speech is a lesson in how to make the most of the extraordinary poetic diction that permeates this play. This is a gem of a performance--one that dazzles with the sharp and cold gleam of a sapphire. It is, simply, head and shoulders above every other performance in the show, and by itself worth a trip to behold.
In both plays, William Larsen is capable as the weakest of the triumvirs, Lepidus, and his tippling aboard Pompey's ship is amusing. Lee Richardson's Enobarbus is strangely disengaged from its context, and his voice is not musical enough for what are some of the most gorgeous passages ever penned. Michael Levin's Pompey, Steve Karp's Menas. Joseph Maher's Agrippa, and Joseph Lambie's Eros are among those who need more vocal guidance. Peter Thompson scores points as the once-bitten-talee shy Messenger, and Rosalind Harris is properly sweet as Octavia.
Robin Wagner has well captured the contrast between stern Rome and luxuriant Egypt in his sets; especially striking are the warm golds that adorn Alexandria, and the 15-foot-high double columns that support Cleopatra's monument--all skillfully lit by Marc Weiss. John Morris's music is markedly better than what he provided for Caesar, though it is still a bit obvious in its quasi-exotic effects.
Despite all the things wrong with this Antony and Cleopatra it was worth doing--particularly as a companion piece to Julius Caesar and as a vehicle for Philip Kerr's Octavius, which we are not likely ever to see excelled.
A rattling good production of a ripsnorting play is rounding out the American Shakespeare Festival's summer schedule. For the seventh season in a row, one non-repertory. This time it is Major Barbara, one of Shaw's most brilliant achievements.
As Shaw so loved to do, he here took a plausible intellectual position, and proceeded to push it to an outrageous extreme in order to scandalize his audience, while at the same time treating it to a devastating display of wit. Shaw's mouthpiece is Andrew Undershaft, a munitions manufacturer, who holds that mankind's worst crime is poverty, that punishment should be abolished, and that the only two things necessary for salvation are money and gunpowder. Opposed to him is his daughter, a major in the Salvation Army, whose wrestling of conscience are the heart of the play.
Director Edwin Sherin has elicited a remarkable set of performances from his fourteen main characters, with only two exceptions. Lee Richardson's Undershaft is best of all-forceful and unshakeable from start to finish. (And he really plays the prescribed tune from Doninetti's Lucia on a trombone). Lady Brit is his separated wife, a woman given to bossing and tossing off epigrams--clearly modeled on Lady Bracknell in Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, written a decade earlier. Jan Miner, in a performance that brings to mind Jessica Tandy, is doing in this role far and away he finest work I have ever seen from her.
Edward Herrmann (looking like a youthful Charles de Gaulle), Maadelon Thomas and John Tillinger are all entertaining and splendidly idiosyncratic as members of the household's younger generation. As the Barbara of the title, Jane Alexander is appealing enough; but she does not summon up sufficient ardor and commitment to offset her father, so that the play is thrown slightly off balance.
The one failure in the cast is Peter Thompson, who portrays Adolphus, professor of Greek and Barbara's fiance. Shaw fashioned the role as an affectionate parody of the great Classics scholar and translator Gilbert Murray. Thompson, surrounded by players with flawless British accents, comes out as thoroughly American. It is as though someone like Henry Fonda were to pop up in the middle of the Old Vic company.
When we move to Salvation Army headquarters, we find another group of characters, all of whom speak carefully nurtured low-class accents. Phillip Kerr is outstanding as the mustachioed cockney Bill Walker--swaggering, snarling, pugnacious, unrepenteat. His performance is all the more impressive for managing to obliterate every trace of his work as Octavius in the two Shakespeare plays. As the starving Peter, Joseph Maher is eloquent whether silent or speaking.
William Ritman has ingeniously solved the problem of whisking us from Lady Brit's lovely house, with its profusion of potted plants, to the makeshift Army shelter and, later, to Undershaft's foundry, with its gigantic experimental cannon. And Jane Greenwood has provided appropriate Edwardian costumes.
I do have to voice my annoyance at the director's unwillingness to trust Shaw's text. For some reason he felt it advisable to alter a number of phrases and to make some substantial cuts in the latter portion of the script. Gone are the remarks about Undershaft's Jewish partner Lasarus; gone are some delectable barbs aimed at Parliament; gone is Adolphus's philosophizing about power. Surely, Mr. Sheria, in a performance that runs two hours and twenty minutes, we could hold our seats for ten minutes more. But thanks for doing so well with what you consented to give us.