Warm Washington Reception for ‘Stand-Up’

“Stand-Up Tragedy,” Bill Cain’s play about hope and despair in a Manhattan Catholic boys’ school, follows its Mark Taper Forum premiere and its successful run at Hartford Stage with yet a third new setting at Washington’s Arena Stage. The reviews are heavily weighted in favor of director Max Mayer’s vision of the piece.

The production, critic Bob Mondello of City Paper says, may not be as “emotionally affecting” as the first two stagings, but it “roars, jokes, and screams at the top of its lungs.” He calls it “breath-catchingly theatrical,” and says, “your body isn’t likely to unclench for hours afterward.”

“Stand-Up Tragedy” is an “eminently right presentation,” according to Chronicle Express’ Lou Robinson, that is “powerful and satisfying.”

Two dissenters: B. Whitney Wyckoff of the Broadside objected to the “excessive foul language” and thought the play “a bit too long” and “emotionally draining.” The Washington Times’ Hap Erstein said the evening “seemed to be a repetitious tape loop” but liked “dazzling staging techniques and impressive performances,” particularly the “mesmerizing young Luis Ramos” in the juvenile lead.

The general tone of the reviews was captured by the Washington Post’s David Richards, who felt he’d had “an exceptional theatrical experience.” Commenting on the play’s “vitality” and “blinding energy,” Richards pinpointed Mayer’s direction--”his restless, relentless staging suggests a Jackson Pollock action painting in the making.”

A FINE MESH: The networking of regional theaters goes on. Hartford Stage’s production of Corneille’s “The Illusion,” which closes tonight, was directed by Mark Lamos, who was assisted by Los Angeles director Brian Kulick, who directed “Illusion” at New York’s Perry Street Theatre last year and was supposed to direct Corneille’s comedy-fantasy in the last slot of Taper, Too’s last season until it was postponed to make room for the first production of “Stand-Up Tragedy.”

Hartford continues the Los Angeles connection on March 30 with the East Coast debut of Jo Carson’s “Daytrips,” which premiered last fall at the Los Angeles Theatre Center.

THE MUSIC MAKERS: Creators of musical theater who have recently found commercial (and nonprofit) production costs an insurmountable hurdle are being given a running start through a new “for-profit” organization called New Musicals, the inspiration of director Harold Prince and producer Marty Bell.

Based in two theaters at State University of New York at Purchase, the “laboratory” will provide full productions of new works by experienced musical theater authors, with the object of sending them on to either Broadway, the regional theater circuit or the international market. The project’s partners include Capital Cities-ABC Inc., Columbia Artists Management Inc. and Jujamcyn Theatres; they have anted up close to $10 million for the first season.

“I want to help the shows make money for writers and directors so they can stay in the theater,” Bell told Variety.

New Musicals’ first season opens May 1 with a musical adaptation by Terrence McNally (score by John Kander and Fred Ebb) of “The Kiss of the Spider Woman,” directed by Prince and starring John Rubinstein and Kevin Gray.

OUT OF SITE: An item in Morning Report last week suggested that plans to reconstruct Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in South London, a safe 350 yards from the original site, might be halted. Not so, says Sam Wanamaker, who heads the Shakespeare Globe Center project. Research at the original Globe site, which is necessary to complete the reconstruction, has been delayed briefly because exposure to air might damage the original foundations (they’re already under a historic “listed” late Georgian building). But “excavation” by either radar or other advanced techniques will proceed in two to three weeks to uncover the design specifications that are necessary for the reconstruction to continue, says Wanamaker.