BAM Goes Shakespeare

The Winter’s Tale
Brooklyn Academy of Music
The Observer

BAM is the pleasantly explosive shorthand used, on letterheads and occasionally in conversation, to denote the Brooklyn Academy of Music. This is actually an arts complex: easily accessible from Manhattan by subway, safely accessible by cab. 

BAM is the current focus of one of the lesser-known American dreams: that of establishing a classical repertory company in New York. Frank Dunlop, fresh from the Broadway triumph of Scapino, was put in charge of such an attempt a few years ago, but his reign was shirt-lived. BAM is now trying again under another British director, David Jones. 

He has made a qualifiedly hopeful start. It was venturesome to begin with one of the trickiest of all Shakespeares, The Winter’s Tale, and heartening that the audience seemed ready both to follow the story and to laugh at the jokes. They made the average British spectator seem blasé. But as such a spectator myself, I was disappointed to find nothing — except a lively well-sung Autolycus from a black actor, Joe Morton — that suggested a distinctively American approach to Shakespeare. 

The production and design seemed merely pale replicas of standard Stratford practise; if one more RSC director introduces a rocking-horse into the early scenes at Leontes’s court, people will begin to think that Shakespeare put it there. Expectedly, the two most authoritative performances came from the two players with the greatest Shakespeare experience: Marti Maraden (from Stratford, Ontario) as Hermione, and Sheila Allen, who injected some refreshing wit into Paulina’s remonstrances, though I felt she erred in not wiping the smile off her face when hastily married off at the end. The rest of the playing suggested that the actors chosen by Mr. Jones from the resources offered by America’s regional theatres needed more experience in the genre.