I’m very excited about this. I was really into Pinter in college (as were all theatre students), but I mostly knew his work from reading his plays. Other than scene work done in class by other students, the only actual full performance I ever saw was a production of The Dumb Waiter once. To actually see a professional Broadway production would be a great experience anyway, but with this cast- wow!
McKellen and Stewart are also performing Waiting for Godot The two productions are running concurrent! Godot tickets didn’t fit with my schedule, so I went with No Man’s Land- it’s not a play that I am familiar with, but I fully expect that I’ll cherish the experience.
I’m not going until the end of December, so anyone who wants an update will have to wait.
We saw The Caretaker a couple of years ago with Kyle Maclachlan and Patrick Stewart. Absolutely deadly. I’d like to see the revival of Betrayal with Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz, but it’s a short run and I don’t think we can get there. Bummer.
Stewart is a powerful stage presence but Maclachlan’s key scene absolutely stole the show.
[spoiler]When his character is sitting on the bed, slowly recounting his history and you find out he was in a mental institution getting shock therapy and other heavyweight abuse, the light irised down to his face so slowly you never noticed until it blinked out.
There was dead silence in the theater for about four seconds, and then every single member of the audience made a soft exclamation. It was spooky.[/spoiler]
I feel a twinge of sadness at realizing I’ll never see Patrick Stewart drink raw eggs as a mumbling thumb-breaker while Ian McKellen crisply delivers key lines.
“Look, it’s the name, man: THE EYE-TALIAN STALLION. The media will eat it up! Now who discovered America? An Italian, right? What would be better than to get it on with one of his descendants … nothing; I’ll drop him in three. ‘Apollo Creed Meets The Italian Stallion’. Sounds like a damn monster movie!”
Patrick Stewart as Prospero in Shakespeare in the Park was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Well-worth the 8 hour wait on the NYC sidewalk for tickets.
Wonderful! Godot is going to be the hot ticket, but No Man’s Land is a great show (I have always been partial to Pinter.) I don’t think I am going to be able to get tickets so you will have to report back.
It’s not a very long run, so I’m surprised all the tickets didn’t sell out in a couple of hours. Maybe I’ll get tickets to No Man’s Land, too. This is how spoiled you can get living in NYC: I’ve seen Stewart in The Ride Down Mt. Morgan, The Caretaker, and Macbeth, and McKellen in Dance of Death.
I am deeply in love with The Caretaker and would have loved to have seen Stewart in it. Pinter was clearly writing for Stewart, he just didn’t know it at the time. McKellen is no slouch either and is going to excellent as well.
A few years back, I saw Stewart on Broadway in David Mamet’s A Life in the Theater, with T.R. Knight. He’s a much better comedian than I expected.
I was so used to seeing Stewart playing serious authority figures, I wasn’t quite prepared to see him playing a very dim, slightly pompous, aging actor in a small repertory theater. He was very funny, and sometimes quite touching.
I saw them in Berkeley this fall, from front row center seats. Absolutely fantastic performance, and I was glad to see Billy Crudup in something. As somebody asked above, no, there were no women in the cast.
It’s an interesting production: they put a lot more emphasis on the banter and comedy than on the absurdist existential tragedy. McKellen says something in the program about not wanting to over-intellectualize the show. So it’s a funnier Waiting for Godot than you might expect.
Cool. I would have loved to have gotten tickets for Godot, but it doesn’t work with our schedule. I am not familiar with No Man’s Land but I am familiar with other Pinter works- and with this cast, I knew there was no way I’d let the opportunity pass me by.
I have no doubt it’s the kind of situation where the cast carries a certain energy from one play to the next. There’s no way that one of them is great but the other isn’t.