Timing is everything. And I couldn't have lucked out more with my own timing on a recent trip to Great Britain.
My arrival was on the day before most European airports were shut down due to the Icelandic volcanic ash cloud. My departure also fell on the day after aviation authorities officially reopened British airspace.
Timing also proved to be largely on my side when it came to the six shows I selected to review, which coincidentally all turned out to be by playwrights from the British Isles.
I was lucky to snag a pair of half-price tickets to a revival of Noel Coward's Private Lives. It was all the more amazing because it starred Sex and the City's Kim Cattrall and Matthew Macfadyen ( best known for playing Mr. Darcy in the 2005 Pride and Prejudice film ) .
Unlike many other TV stars who fail to deliver celebrity wattage on stage, Cattrall sparkled throughout. If you didn't know of Cattrall's TV fame as the man-hungry Samantha, you could easily have mistaken her for a British stage pro who knew just how to deliver Coward's arch repartee as the tempestuous divorcee Amanda ( By the way, Cattrall technically is a British native, but her family moved to Canada when she was a child ) .
Cattrall more than meets her match in Macfadyen, who layers on an attractive masculinity on top of Elyot's witty fey dialogue. Director Sir Richard Eyre also turned up trumps with the supporting cast of Lisa Dillon and Simon Paisley Day, who both presented pitch perfect turns as the jilted newlyweds. This stylish and star-studded London revival of Private Lives ends May 1 at the Vaudeville Theatre, but there is talk of a Broadway transfer.
One West End production that has already been fast-tracked to New York is Lucy Prebble's drama Enron, which opened on Broadway this week. Still playing in the West End, Enron is a theatrical marvel thanks to director Rupert Goold.
Prebble creatively finds pop culture-tinged ways of explaining away all what we would typically think as dry business terms. For some, the references to Jurassic Park and Star Wars may be all too simple, but her step-by-step dramatization of the notorious financial meltdown of this Houston energy corporation is easily accessible for any economics neophyte.
It is Goold's cinematic staging complete with songs by Adam Cork, choreography by Scott Ambler and projection designs by Jon Driscoll that all elevate Enron into an epic multimedia spectacle. The fine ensemble also finds pathos in what is essentially a hubris-filled tragedy about former Enron executive Jeffrey Skilling ( Samuel West, in a dazzling performance ) . Anyone skeptical about current financial reform legislation should see this play, and President Barack Obama really should have caught Enron during his recent visit to New York.
Celebrity casting seems to be reason behind the current West End revival of George Bernard Shaw's most controversial play, Mrs. Warren's Profession. Tackling the famed brothel owner of the title was British stage and TV veteran Felicity Kendal ( best known for playing Barbara in the British sitcom Good Neighbors ) .
Kendal certainly displayed plenty of sparkle as the worldly wise madam who has funded her proto-feminist daughter's college education without ever revealing what it was that brought in her wealthy allowance. Kendal's confession and later showdown with Lucy Briggs-Owen as her daughter Vivie, was good but not fully satisfying.
Some of that has to do with Shaw's play structure in which he uses characters to spout out lectures on economic inequities ( Shaw often referred to his plays as "arguments" ) . And also for director Michael Rudman's old-fashioned staging ( the main curtain was dropped for listless scene changes ) and casting choices that didn't wring out all the possible comedy of the play ( one exception was David Yelland's superbly slimy take on the aristocratic Crofts ) .
Most British theater trips aren't complete without a bit of Shakespeare, and mine came in the sung form of Benjamin Britten's 1960 opera version of A Midsummer Night's Dream.
During a weekend visit to the magnificent Chatsworth House estate in Derbyshire, I made a point to catch the final night of English Touring Opera's three-night stop at the nearby Buxton Opera House ( an exquisitely restored Edwardian gem of a theater ) .
Don Pasquale and The Marriage of Figaro ( both performed in English ) were the other works on English Touring Opera spring 2010 repertory season, but I wanted to revisit Britten's eerily scored A Midsummer Night's Dream since it's an English opera performed by an English company ( cue the waiving Union Jack ) . And it's also by a gay composer ( cue the waiving Pride flag ) .
Alas, the quality of singers didn't live up to previous productions of the opera I've seen in Colorado in 2002 and right here in the Windy City ( though director James Conway's staging made far more sense than Andrei Serban's dramatically incoherent staging for Chicago Opera Theater in 2005 ) .
Some fine exceptions include Andrew Slater's finely rounded tone and commanding stage presence as the weaver Bottom ( who humorously gets transformed into an ass, complete with enormous phallus ) . Soprano Gillian Ramm also shined as Tytania, Queen of the Fairies ( though she shouldn't have overpowered countertenor Jonathan Peter Kenny as Oberon ) .
Due to the touring nature of the opera, the children's chorus of fairies was vastly scaled back and given largely to a quartet of young women. Because of that, the opera probably didn't have the same sonic edge it usually does, though conductor Michael Roswell mostly kept things together in the pit for Britten's difficult score. Needless to say, seeing this production of A Midsummer Night's Dream has whetted my appetite for the Lyric Opera of Chicago's production this upcoming season.
During my trip, I was also able to catch Love Never Dies, the long awaited sequel to The Phantom of the Opera by composer Andrew Lloyd Webber. Look for a full review of the Phantoms ( both the original and the sequel ) in a subsequent issue.