Word: victorian
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Posters for the production advertise it as "a new vision," one which will shock those familiar with the play's often lush productions. Foley's Antony and Cleopatra's is set in the Victorian Age, and Cleopatra's Egypt is a drab bedroom furnished only with a frumpy wooden four-poster bed. Instead of flowing and exotic garments, Cleopatra and her two dowdy maidservants wear corsets and stiff, dull-colored Victorian dresses with high collars...
...orders her to kill him, kills herself instead. Feinstein's Antony is memorable and portrayed excellently, but the helplessness of his character makes one view his emotional tirades like those of a child. Everyone, save Cleopatra and Caesar, seems to float alone through the story, which is why the Victorian setting works perfectly. The sterility and repressed nature of the Victorian era bridges the characters; this stiff society would not have acknowledged such gaps in personal relationships...
...Oscar and Lucinda Bold heiress, sensitive clergyman, sinful passion, a trek into the wilderness. Sounds like one of those "classic" novels you'll never get around to. Don't despair. Gillian Armstrong and her stars, Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett, find something feverishly unsettling under the black robes of Victorian propriety...
...Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde Using court records, newspaper accounts, diaries and other historical documents, writer-director Moises Kaufman re-creates the courtroom battles that destroyed the career (and ultimately the life) of the late-Victorian playwright, wit and homosexual bon vivant. The cleverly stylized history lesson, playing off-Broadway and in San Francisco, is also a poignant study of an artist brought down as much by his own hubris as an intolerant society...
...this "updating" cleverly defuses the touchiest issue inherent in The Mikado: Gilbert and Sullivan's mythicized Japan is based in large part on condescending and underinformed Victorian colonialist views of the Far East--and, while nobody really wants to point the finger of accusation at the most beloved of English musical comedians, the fact is that the authors' presentation of other nations and peoples were often less than politically correct. (After all, some of the original lyrics to "I've Got a Little List" would make modern audiences' ears burn). Contemporary productions of the play often transfer the setting...