Today I am conflating THE WEEKEND READ with my LETTER FROM LONDON #5. That means it is open to all subscribers, both free and paid, because that is what THE WEEKEND READ is on Saturdays. THE WEEKEND READ will be back in its original form next Saturday with a curated essay or a one-off one by me.
In Part One of this two-part LETTER FROM LONDON, I wrote about the performances of JODIE COMER in Prima Facie, NICOLA WALKER and IWAN DAVIES in The Corn Is Green, ANGEL BLUE in La traviata, and TAMARA TUNIE in The 47th. I also gave a mention to the revival of Wagner’s Lohengrin at the Royal Opera. So let’s pick up from there. If you haven’t read that LETTER, please consider circling back to it. I had planned to put most of Part Two behind a paid subscriber wall. But I decided to conflate it with THE WEEKEND READ in the hope that some of you free subscribers will decide to become paid ones as you realize how committed I am to this. Indeed, I write about incongruity below and its importance to the art of acting. I often write about how I find sacredness itself in the incongruous. So maybe incongruity as a marketing tool - reading this for free will convince you to get a paid subscription for $5 a month or $50 a year - will also work in some way. And if it doesn’t, it won’t affect the work or my output. I am taught that I am only responsible for the work, not the results. So here is the latest example of the work. Thank you for reading it.
On to the performances.
RALPH FIENNES
(1) I have already reviewed To Kill a Mockingbird now on the West End at the Gielgud Theatre and Straight Line Crazy at the Bridge Theatre in previous LETTERS FROM LONDON. But they contain two of my favorite performances from all my theatre-going in April. RALPH FIENNES plays city planner and New York powerbroker Robert Moses in Straight Line Crazy. I have remarked to several friends since when raving about him in this David Hare play that “I think Fiennes has been waiting to be older all his life. He is now a character actor who is still a leading man.” I wrote in LETTER #2 that it is as if he were “Spencer Tracey if he had been fathered by Laurence Olivier.” I throw around the word “grace” a lot, so much, in fact, that it can be rather ungraceful of me. Fiennes would never think of throwing it back at me for using the term to describe him for he possesses the deepest, kindest kind. It is pitch perfect because it is never pitched at us; it exists in stillness, the hardest thing to attain on a stage. His talent on the screen is lovely to behold. But he seems imbued by it onstage. It doesn’t seem to be performative, this grace, even though he is so graceful within his work which contains a balletic muscularity. He is completely within his own body as incongruously he reaches the spiritual summits of great acting. Indeed, incongruity is what is required to descend into oneself to reach such a summit outside of oneself. There is also a sense of service to his art. It is acting of the highest order. He is so damn gifted. To witness his gift is ours.
JUDE OWUSU
(2) There was also a sense of grace in the dignity more than just displayed in the outstanding performance of JUDE OWUSU as Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird. I wrote about him in LETTER #3. I think if I were pushed to cite the one scene that will stick with me from this trip it would be the scene in which he takes the stand at this trial for being wrongly accused of sexual assault. I would love to see Fiennes and Osuwu in a two-hander. Maybe Albee’s The Zoo Story or Pinter’s The Dumbwaiter. Wait. RAFE SPALL , who is playing Atticus Finch currently and is giving another favorite performance, is scheduled to leave To Kill a Mockingbird on August 13. The other Ralph would make a magnificent Atticus Finch.
FRANCES MAYLI McCANN and JORDAN LUKE GAGE in BONNY & CLYDE/Photo by Darren Bell
(3) Two of the biggest surprises for me in April were the two young leads in the musical Bonne & Clyde now playing at the Arts Theatre. I had seen this musical on Broadway when it premiered and like most Frank Wildhorn musicals it left me a bit exhausted with its march of blaring numbers that each sort of sounded like the previous one. There is a bombastic quality even to his ballads. I do remember being impressed by Jeremy Jordan as Clyde and remarking that he looked like the love child of Jackie Kennedy and Clark Gable. But I was even more impressed with Merle Oberon-lookalike JORDAN LUKE GAGE. Jeremy Jordan just wanted to make us swoon. We swoon at Gage, but he also touches our hearts somehow, this gangly gangster who longs to be grown-up and confuses that longing with a lawless life on the run. I didn’t see Gage as Romeo in & Juliet, the cult musical phenomenon on the West End that I hear is finally moving to Broadway. I’m sure he has a built-in audience from having originated that role. But he will certainly expand it starring in this production that is much better than the Broadway one because out of necessity it had to be pared down - thank God - and has been so in brilliant and tasteful ways by director and choreographer Nick Winston, which improves the show. I’m his newest fan, too.
Bonnie is played by the immensely appealing and talented FRANCES MAYLI McCANN. Bonnie’s neediness is kneaded into her portrayal but toughens into an anti-heroine who refuses - like the actress herself - to sentimentalize her own longing in the show for fame even if it means she no longer longs for a future. McCann mines the fatalism in being a femme fatale and make us forget all about Faye Dunaway in the film who depended more on her blonde lithe looks to entice us. McCann, dark-haired and shorter, rightly gives short-shift to enticement and enthralls with her smokier looks and with a voice that can soar when needed but soften when you least expect it. She too can touch your heart and make you believe in the romanticism of the outlaw life before you are reminded it often ends in tragedy. It would be its own tragedy if this terrific production of this problematic musical doesn’t have a longer life itself after its limited run at the Arts Theatre.
FRA FEE and AMY LENNOX in CABARET/Photo by Marc Brenner
(4) Another pair I liked more than the original cast is FRA FEE and AMY LENNOX in Cabaret. The production racked up the Olivier Awards and Eddie Redmayne and Jessie Buckley won Oliviers for their roles as the Emcee and Sally Bowles. I saw the very first preview of this production back in November and did not like it at all. I still don’t like the production and never believe it is set in Berlin in the 1930s. I just think it exists in its misconception, and I am usually a big fan of the director Rebecca Frecknall. I love the stage but I don’t like staginess for its own sake. Frecknall won an Olivier as well so I am an outlier about this, although there seems to be an American/British divide in reactions to this productions. Brits are eating it up. Americans are rolling our eyes The Emcee has been re-conceived is a highfalutin clown with a big wardrobe allowance. At least, Fee makes him more menacing than Redmayne did who has lots of notes to his talent but menacing ain’t of’em. Lennox does Jessie Buckley better than Jessie Buckley does. Her rendition of “Cabaret” at the Oliviers was what made me want to see the show again. She transcends my rather glib description of being a better Buckley than Buckley. I am a huge fan of Jessie’s, but Amy is a better Sally. They are in the show until June 25th.
JOEL HARPER-JACKSON. A portrait he posted of himself at his Instagram
(5) I am posting an interview with JOEL HARPER-JACKSON next week here at SES/SUMS IT UP and will write more about his performance when it posts. But he goes toe-to-toe and heart-to-heart and talent-to-talent with JONATHAN BAILEY (another favorite performance) in Mike Bartlett’s Cock at the Ambassador Theatre on the West End directed by Marianne Elliott. Both Bailey and Harper-Jackson are giving performances that reverberate in ways that the play itself doesn’t even demand of them. They are both openly gay men so maybe that frees them up to rattle the rafters of the Ambassador with a kind of ripened, fearless virility. Ripened? Even that sentence’s utilization of such a term has a discomfiting pungency to it. When I saw the play in New York, it was set in a boxing ring and it was downright pugilistic. But dammit this production is pungent. It pulsates. And it does so with a scarred heart (but not a scared one) melded together by these two brave actors.
MARCELINO SAMBE IN THE REHEARSAL STUDIO FOR SWAN LAKE. Posted at his Instagram.
(6) The most thrilling performance I’ve seen was not by an actor but by a dancer, the Royal Ballet’s MARCELINO SAMBE, who is only the second Black male dancer to be made a principal at the Royal Ballet. I saw Sambé in Frederick Ashton’s Rhapsody and had never seen dancing quite like it - muscular and lyrical and technical. He too is fearless in art and one of the things that does not scare him is joy. It leaps from him as if it too possessed the perfect saut de chat. As thrilled as I was to be witnessing his dancing, the dancer himself seemed just as thrilled to be able to be right there in the sweaty, swellelegant midst of it. His is a glorious talent. One glories in it. Bravo.
YASMINE NAGHDI from her Instagram.
(7) And while we are talking about dancers and the Royal Ballet, I just have to write an appreciative sentence about the arms of ballerina YASMINE NAGHDI . Ashton’s choreography makes you consider the importance of heads in a way I had never considered before. But Naghdi always makes me aware that the beauty of her line extends to her arms. In Ashton’s Scenes de ballet, she reminded me that she has the best arms in ballet.
ROBERT LINDSAY
(8) Finally what would a rundown of London performances be without a mention of ROBERT LINDSAY. I saw him give a spectacular and surprising performance as the paterfamilias, an eminent IVF scientist, of a deeply dysfunctional Upper Westside Manhattan family in playwright Alexis Zegerman’s The Fever Syndrome at the Hampstead Theatre. Seventy-two now and craggy of face, he more than ever finds the relaxation within a performance and resides there. There was a kind of aural choreography to his mumbling growls at the ends of some of his sentences as if he were manifesting his character’s internal monologue. He reminded me a bit of Brian Cox in Succession if Logan Roy had ever tried on a pair of tap shoes. When speaking to The Guardian while the play was still running Lindsay said, “I’ve decided now, I’m going to enjoy my age in this profession. I’m gonna celebrate my age and not get fucked up by it. How women cope with it, I’ll never know.” And then he turned back to the play’s ruefulness which made a case for it as one of nature’s forces. “‘I made mistakes,’” he quoted his character. “‘Yeah. Life is full of mistakes. Life itself is a mistake. One genetic mutation after another’”
I think great performance are filled with the mutated mistakes of the rehearsal process A mutation of a mistake might just be a definition of manifested artistry itself, and of art.