Word: sellars
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...this musty, dusty atmosphere of doom that director Peter Sellars '80 is trying to drive away with his production of Handel's Julius Caesar. Updated, polished, and stocked chock full of yucks, in Sellar's hands this baroque warhorse becomes a close cousin of a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta. Or two or three or four operettas. This production is four hours long. Granted, Handel wrote music as God meant music to be, but the theory that "Excess is best" holds only for sex and money...
...audience and the cast; by Act III, countertenor Jeffrey Gall (Julius) was cracking, and soprano Mary Westbrook-Geha (Cornelia) looked like she would have been grateful for a throat lozenge. A fifth of the audience was missing, too. The ridiculous length of this show trips up many of Sellar's interesting staging and acting ideas; the cast is so intent on remembering their lines, hitting the notes, and getting the blocking right that they can only make a gesture at acting...
...much of Orlando's appeal lies in the sheer playfulness with which Sellars has approached it. Where the original staging calls for Zoroastro the magician to conjure up a fountain to hide a furtive lover, Sellar's project supervisor summons up a drinking fountain, from which Angelica casually takes a sip. In the conclusion of the original, when Zoroastro calls for a potion, he receives it from the claws of an eagle descending out of the sky. Sellars's Zoroastro receives his potion in the claws of The Eagle--the Apollo 11 lunar module, that is. (In both cases...
...fault is so egregious, however, as the excessive length of this production. Sellar's Lear runs more than four hours. It tests our endurance with strange visual effects that add little to an understanding of the play. The notorious storm of Act III wails for an hour amidst pendulous light bulbs, harsh spotlights, rolling rocks, flickering candles, blinking headlights of a sleek Lincoln Continental, and the disturbing whine of steel cellos. Yet Sellars wants more. On comes a snake of worklights, four television sets and two Polaroid cameras with flash bulbs. Sellars uses every corner of the stage, from...
...pity. Instead, this Lear alienates us, erects a barrier between the stage and the audience, makes us struggle to stay in our seats. We throw up our hands. We do not want to watch TV, to see the results of the New Hampshire primary or an Ajax commercial on Sellar's quartet of black and white sets. We do not want to watch Lear struggle across the stage yanking a Snoopy doll and babbling incoherently...