Word: vanya
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Radcliffe Crew Uncle Vanya--Loeb Aladdin--Agassiz Student Assembly Intramurals...
...actors frequently shout to be heard, which serves to exaggerate the difference in age between them and their roles. Ralph Zito turns the twisted, self-centered Serebriakov into a buoyant, strapping cartoon villain. When Vanya charges him with ruining his life in their third-act confrontation, Zito rushes across the platforms to the other side of the house, breathing heavily and staring over the audience like a character in melodrama who can't face the awful truth. But the horror of Serebriakov is that he is too full of himself to begin to understand what Vanya is talking about. Instead...
...last few years in Harvard theater but have emerged with somewhat limited personae--McCue as a clever, charming but extremely mannered performer who shines in musicals and farces, Shohet as a technically competent but brash actress whose specialty is destructive bitchiness. I looked forward to seeing them as Vanya and Sonya because both parts would demand a considerable stretch, a certain nakedness that neither has hitherto displayed. But instead of stretching to their parts, both have stretched the parts to accommodate themselves. Shohet has made Sonya, the most compassionate and heroic force in the play, a self-absorbed little bully...
McCue is a passable Vanya, but he proves unwilling or incapable of ditching his distracting mannerisms. In the first two acts he consistently plays for laughs, a crotchety jokester or ludicrous lover, jerking his body back from the waist and vocalizing like a pompous burgermeister with an occasional British falsetto. This great and silly character--simple to the point of transparency--becomes so cluttered as to be almost impenetrable. The rest of his performance is sloppy but sometimes affecting. The first night I saw the show McCue hit some surprising notes of anguish in the third...
...would have been a daring move to attempt to integrate it once or twice into the action. When it is cranked on at the end of the play, it helps to obliterate what is perhaps the most heartbreaking finale in all dramatic literature, and this Uncle Vanya slinks away, having never really arrived...