Britons on Broadway

...John Carlisle makes Don John a credible villain with a human side...

...That is not only because Burgess—whose use of occasional rhymes and allusive literary puns is surely preferable to previous blank verse translations—can appropriately refer to several speeches as "arias...

...Koltai's sets are spectacular on an operatic scale...

...The productions, which will move on to Washington, D.C., for a month, are of course a tiny sample of the company's current presentations...

...This year, from October 14-January 19 at Broadway's Gershwin Theater, New York theatergoers can enjoy the RSC's renderings of Much Ado About Nothing and Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac (in a brilliant new translation by Anthony Burgess...

...On the other hand, Clare Byam Shaw is not pretty enough for the part of Hero...

...The RSC and the NT make constant use of the marvels of our technological age...

...The crucial difference is that London has two permanent, nationally subsidized classical repertory companies—the British National Theater (NT) and the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC...

...The biggest hit musicals, like Caft and La Cage aux Folles, now rely at least as much on spectacle and stage effects as on their books, lyrics or music...

...And the night I saw Much Ado the audience seemed no less than enchanted, at least to judge from the prolonged standing ovation...

...Jacobi's Cyrano is already moving at the beginning of the evening, especially where he thinks Roxane is about to confess her love for him, then finds himself having to be sympathetic and supportive of her passion for Christian...

...Instead they have become vehicles for lighting and set designers, directors and actors, with the latter required to be extremely versatile practitioners of physical and vocal skills traditionally associated with musicals or music halls...

...The intention, in part, is to revitalize the classics, to keep the familiar from becoming boring...

...If this continues, the RSC may be forced to the conclusion—reinforced by the failure of its All's Well That Ends Well when it visited last year—that New York is not ready for even one of London's two classical companies...

...The way he tells Roxane that he never loved her, clearly meaning the opposite, is an object lesson in subtlety...

...There is an attractive tree-top house for Rox-ane, as well as an amazing autumnal tree, suspended in midair and symbolically dripping golden leaves, for the finale...

...Always magnetic and still often amusing, he has a special gift for making the most obscure lines and jokes intelligible that is essential in the case of Shakespeare...

...During only a two-week stay in London two years ago, I was able to see Derek Jacobi both as Cyrano and Benedick, the roles he is playing at the Gershwin, and as a fine, unusually young Prospero...

...His de Guiche in Cyrano is not entirely black either...

...I cried, I confess...

...One could be at a ballet or an opera...

...The best test of any particular approach is its impact...

...In some of his early roles he indeed displayed a humorous but very campy style...

...There are similar lessons throughout his reading...

...Some of the movement is, in fact, choreographed...

...The few that are done often appear in houses far from the center of town, and they usually suffer from inadequate resources and talents...

...The old-fashioned one-set production is about to become an anachronism...

...The presale of tickets fox Much Ado and Cyrano was hardly overwhelming...

...Audiences here pay such high prices for their tickets that even more than Londoners they seem to want a theatrical evening to provide attractions beyond the mere performance of a play, something they apparently feel can be equally satisfying on television...

...The supporting players, too, including Cusack, all live up to the RSC's ensemble reputation...

...The fading moon ending Much Ado is so similar to an effect in Cats that it may be Terry Hands' tribute to the RSC's Joint Artistic Director Trevor Nunn, who directed the musical...

...By contrast, you would have difficulty finding any classics at all on Manhattan's stages...

...Jacobi and Cusack waltz together in fading light at the end...

...This trend should make the RSC's work well-suited to the Great White Way...

...A kabuki-like team does a ritual fight as a masque at the beginning...

...A backdrop of near-Oriental trees, various partitions and balustrades, and red lights that float in the sky are among the apparitions...

...Although the play can be deeper, more involving, there is no one correct way to stage Shakespeare successfully...

...Even now John Simon finds his Benedick "effete" when overexcited, and Clive Barnes calls it "epicene...

...On Stage BRITONS ON BROADWAY BY OLEG KERENSKY The most important difference between the theater in London and in New York is not, contrary to what many think, that more shows are mounted in London...

...Jacobi used to be thought a lightweight...

...Certainly he is not the intellectual, courtly Benedick made famous years ago by Sir John Gielgud...

...The troupes even offer some supposedly noncommercial new plays...

...But it is in the last scene—when Cyrano is fatally wounded and Roxane finally discovers that it was he who wrote the letters inspiring her adoration—that Jacobi truly triumphs: He captures for us Cyrano's having matured into a figure of depth and compassion, and in the process reveals himself to have developed into a great tragic actor...

...This brings us to another myth about British theater—that the RSC and the NT do not have stars...

...A major reason for the applause is Jacobi...

...No one laughed when she said "Kill Claudio...

...Christopher Bowen looks so romantic as Claudio that one can forgive how speedily the character turns against Hero on the flimsiest evidence...

...Those who do not stay through the full three and a half hours, though, will miss the emotional core and climax of the play...

...But then this is a cool, unemotional Much Ado, staged for laughs and spectacular effects...

...Sunday in the Park with George, for example, has an irrelevant laser-beam display...

...But in part the obj ect is to assure theater goers that whatever their reaction to the interpretation of a play, they will be seeing topnotch professionals at work—Theater with a capital T. The irony is that New York does not appear to fully realize what it is getting...

...In his informative Playbill article, Sheridan Morley notes that there have been weeks when Jacobi managed the three parts plus Peer Gynt...

...Besides Jacobi, however, the stars at the Gershwin are really Terry Hands, who directed and did the lighting for both plays, and Ralph Koltai, who designed the sets...

...Thus the reception accorded this season to Broadway's Alone Together, a family comedy critics dismissed with derision, even though some admitted that it might have been a smash 25 years ago...

...I wish Bowen also played Cyrano's Christian, whom he understudies, for he has the vital good looks Tom Mannion lacks...

...As a result, you may choose among an array of impressive productions of dramatic masterpieces, from Shakespeare to 20th-century works...

...Much A do is performed on a square, mirrored stage thrust well into the audience to create intimacy and aid voice projection...

...There are additional reflecting surfaces at the back so that images can mysteriously come and go as the lighting changes...

...The sense of opera is even stronger in Cyrano...

...Both productions are typical of a recent style in British Shakespearean and classical theater: The plays no longer are allowed to speak for themselves...

...Cusack, who gives us a charming, if airy, performance, prompts so much laughter that one wonders why Benedick takes her seriously enough to challenge Claudio to a duel...

...It could perhaps succeed on London's West End, which still tolerates conventional comedies, farces and thrillers...

...But they mark the RSC's first appearance across the Atlantic in its true capacity as a repertory, providing audiences with the opportunity of comparing the actors in different roles within a season...

...In a typical month, the National Theater rotates about nine shows on its three stages, while the Royal Shakespeare Company customarily schedules four or five at its two theaters in London's Barbican complex (it also has two houses in Stratford-on-Avon...

...The companies encourage the misconception by not giving any of their actors celebrity billing...

...The two shows are ravishing...

...The battle scene—complete with flashing lights and clouds of smoke— culminates in a tableau of soldiers, alive and dead, piled in the center of the stage so theatrically that the conclusion of the fourth act could be mistaken for the end of the evening...

...Nonetheless, everyone who sees Jacobi will know he is the star of the cast at the Gershwin, just as Daniel Massey is the lead performer in the RSC's Measure for Measure, playing at present back home...

...Actually, if one counts Off-and Off-Off-Broadway, there is much more to see in New York...

...Nor is Sinead Cusack the passionate Beatrice that Dame Peggy Ashcroft was in those days...