Buckley, Jessie (1989- )

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      in Theater

      Review: First the Party, Then the Crash, in a ‘Cabaret’ Revival

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      A London production starring Eddie Redmayne pulls the audience into a hedonistic milieu. Then things get dark.LONDON — At first glance, it looks as if there’s a party happening at the Kit Kat Club, the refurbished London venue where a nerve-shredding revival of “Cabaret,” starring Eddie Redmayne, opened last weekend.Entering a side door of what was once the Playhouse Theater, you snake your way along corridors not usually open to the public and into a labyrinthine demimonde of dancers and drinks: a recreation of a seedy, Weimar-era Berlin nightclub. The auditorium has lost 200 seats in its transformation into an immersive, plushly appointed space, complete with lamp-lit tables down front for a preshow meal. In the show’s hefty playbill, the brilliant designer Tom Scutt says he has tried to bring a “queer irreverence” to the venue, which rewards close inspection of its details, like a splash of gold here and an art-nouveau flourish there.Yet the director, Rebecca Frecknall, is more interested in disturbing the audience than handing them a drink. Making a remarkable entry into musical theater after lauded productions of Chekhov and Tennessee Williams, Frecknall pulls us into a hedonistic milieu, only to send us out nearly three hours later reminded of life’s horrors.That’s as it should be given this 1966 musical by John Kander (music), Fred Ebb (lyrics) and Joe Masteroff (book) about “the end of the world,” to cite a final observation from Cliff (Omari Douglas), an American writer in 1930s Germany who is alone among the show’s principals in sensing the danger of the Nazis’ rise. Frecknall’s main accomplice in darkening the mood is her Oscar and Tony-winning leading man, Redmayne, returning to the London stage for the first time in a decade. And there’s further assistance from the Irish actress-singer Jessie Buckley, an unusually ferocious Sally Bowles.Redmayne’s Emcee brings his own distinctly shape-shifting, sinuous quality to a role that can be hard to refresh: Many still associate it with a pancake-faced Joel Grey, who originated the part onstage and won an Oscar in the 1972 Bob Fosse film. Limping or crouching his way about the circular stage, a twitchy Redmayne initially calls to mind a demented marionette, his mouth as misshapen as his psyche.He first emerges in a burst of light, his body contorted during the startling opening number, “Willkommen,” a party hat clinging to the side of his tilted head. “Life is beautiful,” he says, but something about the gravelly voice and glazed smile suggest otherwise. Appearing bare-chested soon after in the manic number “Two Ladies,” Redmayne’s Emcee is a devotee of debauchery whose true character is revealed in the antisemitic finish to “If You Could See Her,” when a nasty slur comes as the song’s brutal kicker.A dance number from “Cabaret.”Marc BrennerRedmayne’s lyric tenor lends itself well to “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” the melodic Nazi anthem that sounds sweet enough until you grasp the lyrics. The song prefigures a moral decline that reaches a nadir in the Emcee’s second-act solo, “I Don’t Care Much.” With that number, cut from the original production but reinstated for various revivals, the Emcee’s assimilation into the Third Reich is complete.Frecknall shows that such transformations passed many onlookers by — or that they were reluctant to take action while there was still time. The affair between the landlady Fraulein Schneider (the superb Liza Sadovy, in richly expressive voice) and the Jewish grocer, Herr Schultz (a likable Elliot Levey), is especially telling on this front. Fraulein Schneider sings in the wrenching “What Would You Do?” that she is too old and tired to counter “the storm” she sees approaching; Herr Schultz, meanwhile, is convinced that German citizenship will save him. But when the Emcee raises a champagne flute to the couple, we hear the cacophonous glass-shattering of Kristallnacht.Sally Bowles exists in a self-deluded class of her own: an English expat in Berlin who is heralded as “the toast of Mayfair,” but in Buckley’s take sometimes seems a scared and angry child. She sings “Maybe This Time” directly to Cliff, her lyrics about winning delivered quietly as if Sally were admitting to herself that her life has been a failure. And though she gives off the air of a thumb-sucking Shirley Temple when she first appears with “Don’t Tell Mama,” she roars the title number at the show’s climax full of fury and pain. “The party’s over,” Cliff says: The festivities have become a farewell, and a world is about to crash.CabaretAt the Kit Kat Club in London for an open-ended run; theplayhousetheatre.co.uk. More

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      in Television

      Review: ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ Cut in Half and Twice as Good

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      Josh O’Connor and Jessie Buckley star as the star-crossed lovers in a compelling stage-film hybrid adaptation.What’s written in haste may be repaired in haste. Or so the fine and fleet new “Romeo and Juliet” from Britain’s National Theater, available here on PBS’s “Great Performances,” convinces me.At 90 minutes, it is even shorter than the “two hours’ traffic of our stage” promised in its first lines but rarely honored in performance. (The entire play normally takes about three hours.) Yet as directed by Simon Godwin, this emotionally satisfying and highly theatrical filmed version scores point after point while whizzing past, or outright cutting, the elements that can make you think it was written not by Shakespeare but by O. Henry on a bender.If the cutting merely left what remains with a much higher proportion of penetrating insight and powerful feeling, that would be enough; “Romeo and Juliet,” at its best, anticipates the great later works in which complexity and ambivalence are made real and gorgeous in language. But the speed serves another function here: telling a story that’s mostly about teenagers with a teenage intensity and recklessness.Not that the stars are anywhere near their adolescence. Though Romeo is 17 or so and Juliet, 13, Josh O’Connor, who played mopey young Prince Charles in “The Crown,” is 30, and Jessie Buckley, the mysterious star of “I’m Thinking of Ending Things,” 31. Still, there’s a reason they’re called actors: They can perform the acts a play requires of them. Onstage, at any rate, that would be sufficient.Under Simon Godwin’s direction, the masked ball in this “Romeo and Juliet” is closer to a rave.Rob YoungsonOn film, we need an extra push, which Godwin and Emily Burns, who adapted the text, provide by grounding us in a theatrical world before escorting us into a filmic one. The production begins unceremoniously with the cast in street clothes, entering a theater, unmasked and vulnerable, none more so than O’Connor, with the low-slung, “sticky-out” ears he says earned him his role on “The Crown.” Sitting on three sides of a small, square, scuffed playing space, the actors are barely past the greeting phase — O’Connor and Buckley smile shyly at one another, as if across a Veronese piazza — when the play leaps out of the gate.Purists not already offended will soon have plenty to set them off. The masked ball at which the lovers meet is not exactly courtly; it’s more like a rave, and Romeo is given just two lines (instead of 10) to fall for Juliet, who is moaning at the mic like Lana Del Rey.But impurists will be satisfied that the erotic intensity between them is so palpable, even when Godwin dissipates it by cutting away from the theatrical moment to a filmed montage in some other dimension. Similarly, the introduction of a passionate gay pairing among the supporting roles makes up in thematic coherence — the plot turns on forbidden love — what it lacks in textual fidelity.The trade-offs continue throughout. The most fascinating one finds Juliet’s parents inverted, Lady Capulet (Tamsin Greig) getting most of the lines Shakespeare wrote for her Lord (Lloyd Hutchinson). Greig, so funny on the Showtime series “Episodes,” is spectacularly entertaining as she explores what besides the habitual assertion of male power might motivate a parent to threaten a daughter with expulsion. Her interpretation, underlined by “evil” music, nevertheless denatures one key feature of the play, which now suggests that the Capulets are monsters when the really terrifying thing is that they’re not. They are upstanding citizens doing what’s expected.It is that atmosphere of immutable custom and inherited hatred that the lovers are desperate to escape. But Godwin’s staging makes clear by physical proximity and by judicious intercutting that these elements are related: Romeo and Juliet’s passion is as rash and irrational as the other characters’ repression and violence. As the outlines of their love are filled in, so is the hatred around them — and so are the set (by Soutra Gilmour) and props; swords that were simple wooden dowels in Act I by Act III are knives that look menacingly real. In youth, it seems, enmity precedes an enemy just as love precedes a lover.Tamsin Greig as Lady Capulet and Lloyd Hutchinson as Lord Capulet.Rob YoungsonAt every turn we are offered insights like that until, suddenly, we aren’t. Nothing Godwin can do to make the play rough and unfamiliar — whether by having Tybalt (David Judge) urinate on a wall or by excising greatest hits like “parting is such sweet sorrow” — can help it get past the place where the lovers’ ingenuity fails along with Shakespeare’s. The plot thread by which Juliet’s fake death prompts Romeo’s real one is so absurdly flimsy that adaptations have tried for centuries to fix it; Arthur Laurents’s workaround for “West Side Story” is especially strong.For me, though, no production of “Romeo and Juliet” survives the potions of Friar Laurence; they are a lot of magick to swallow in a play about such real and serious things. That Laurence is portrayed here (by Lucian Msamati) with great dignity, not as a nutty professor, helps, raising the profound if wishful idea that faith can correct for society’s failings. Even more movingly, Deborah Findlay, as Juliet’s fond nurse, is able to temper the role’s comic elements with an immutable loyalty to her mistress, and then temper that with something darker and arguably in fact disloyal. It’s a perfect trifold performance.That’s the thing about Shakespeare, at least for me: There comes a moment in many of his plays when only the actors can preserve the emotion the plot keeps leaking. Happily, that happens here: As the tragedy narrows, O’Connor and Buckley flood with feeling.Stars will do that. In the same way an enemy is just a receptacle for enmity that already exists, a starring role is whatever a star can pour ambient emotion into. O’Connor’s essence is a silent yearning — the kind that is not extinguished but fanned by satisfaction. (This is what made his otherwise insufferable Charles almost sympathetic in “The Crown” and the nearly silent young farmer in his breakthrough film, “God’s Own Country,” so expressive.) Buckley, whose face seems transparent at times, is more about wonder; her Juliet clearly wants Romeo but, more than that, is amazed by her good fortune in getting him.Even in a more conventional production — this one was meant to be performed live onstage but was retooled for the pandemic — you need that kind of incandescence to make the play make sense. Remember that Shakespeare was a young star, too, albeit 30 or so himself, when he wrote “Romeo and Juliet.” Indeed, it often seems that his title characters, in haste and passion, wrote it for him.Romeo & JulietThrough May 21; pbs.org/gperf More