STAGE REVIEW : ‘RICHARD III,’ IMPERFECT SUM OF STUNNING PARTS

Three indelible scenes and a central performance dripping in evil rescue Shakespeare’s “Richard III,” final show of the season to join the Old Globe repertory, from the blandness of pageant/spectacle and bring it into the realm of theater.

One is Richard’s ill-begotten coronation. It is a stunning display of pomp and blind ambition as Richard ascends the throne, leaving his queen (Deborah May)--the widow of a man he murdered--to crumple to the floor before him.

Another is the scene of Richard dying in a convulsing heap encircled by his enemies, who repeatedly pierce the carcass with their weapons like demented whalers overpowering hard prey.

The third is Act IV, Scene 4’s lyrical expose of the evil that men do--viciously to one another, mindlessly to the women who bear and love them. In this three-queen-scene (one of the women is only a duchess, but a mother to kings), the litany of grievances iterated by the dowager, Margaret, echoed by Edward’s widow, Elizabeth, and by Edward’s mother, the Duchess of York (also mother to Richard), is a mounting cross-generational lashing out of astonishingly modern feminist temper.

Beyond all this, however, the performance that makes this “Richard” special is that of Paxton Whitehead in the title role: a carping, comical/cynical malcontent, lurching like a sly gorilla, chillingly undisturbed by his own facile hypocrisy and ruthlessness.

Wrapped around this centerpiece is a sumptuous, sweeping, traditional production directed by John Houseman. It is distinguished by striking technical values--a vaulting, breakaway set by the excellent Douglas W. Schmidt, enhanced by the dank, murky lighting of Greg Sullivan and embossed by Lewis Brown’s vivid costumes--yet marred by too high a quotient of predictability.

Like the Conrad Susa musical bridges (all surface flourish), this “Richard” is largely a complacent, if swift, reading of the play, especially in the expository scenes of the first half. Clarity is not a problem. Rote often is. The rise and fall of inflections here is as easy to anticipate as that of kings.

There are exceptions. Larry Drake makes a compassionate King Edward, whose words are always impelled by thought. (His later performance as James Tyrrel, murderer of the boys in the Tower, is beautifully tinged with anguish.)

James R. Winker is passionate, weak and terrified as the unfortunate Clarence. Frances Conroy’s Elizabeth makes a powerful transition from imperious queen to powerless widow and devastated mother. And Richard Kneeland is a properly stolid Duke of Buckingham, made to rue the day he placed his trust in the unworthy Richard.

Most perplexing remains the performance of Jacqueline Brookes as Margaret, who looks and sounds less like a queen than a displaced American cousin--a hardened pioneer lost in pre-Elizabethan England.

From Houseman, one had hoped for something of a more distinctive stamp. The complexity of Whitehead’s Richard--a man of unadulterated guile with the effrontery to claim to be “too childish-foolish for this world”--seems to beg for less spectacle and more shading in the less obvious folds of the production. But the achievement, stubbornly, remains more one of outward mass than inner subtlety.

Performances continue in Balboa Park through Sept. 22.

‘RICHARD III’ Shakespeare’s play, presented by the Old Globe Theatre, Balboa Park, San Diego. Director John Houseman. Set designer Douglas W. Schmidt. Costumes Lewis Brown. Lighting designer Greg Sullivan. Sound designer Michael Holten. Composer Conrad Susa. Dramaturge Diana Maddox. Stage manager Maria Carrera. Cast Paxton Whitehead, James R. Winker, Craig Cavanah, Tom Rosqui, Deborah May, Todd Jackson, Frances Conroy, Neal Alan Tadken, Reed C. Martin, D. B. Novak, Richard Kneeland, Oliver Cliff, Jacqueline Brookes, Thomas S. Oleniacz, Charles Janasz, Ken Hicks, Larry Drake, Kandis Chappell, Mark Hofflund, Peter Crook, Michael Gerald Barnhart, Don R. McManus and others.