On Stage

...Theseflaws are accented by Sean Mathias' weird direction, which recalls Bram Stoker's Dracula more readily than August Strindberg's Dance of Death...

...Captain Edgar (Ian McKellen) is the commandant of an island off the coast of Sweden, appropriately known as Little Hell...

...What begins as a dalliance soon leads to a murder plot...

...Am I? Oh...

...This allows for a mix of jazz, Creole, boogie-woogie, and other genres...

...Lighting designer Kevin Adams and scenic designer Alexander Dodge combine to make the scenery all that a heartbreak house should be, and Peter Golub's music has just the right touch of vinegar...

...have transferred the locale from 19th-century Paris to postWorld War II New Orleans...

...A stage drama, certainly...

...Hedda: Yes...

...Sir Ian McKellen may be one of the ornaments of the British stage, but like many such knights he can go over the top rather more frequently than is advisable...

...If I did—who knows what I might do...

...Edgar, who enjoys brutalizing Alice, is a cardiac case—an unusual ailment for a man who has no heart...

...For decades Ibsen's biographers have sought the identity of Hedda...

...Of all the plays that madman wrote following his breakdowns, the most accessible is Dance of Death, now at the Broadhurst Theater...

...More than half the reviewers hatedher...

...Since her work on The Producers and Music Man, Susan Stroman has become the hottest director/choreographer on Broadway...

...As the lively pickup band plays in the background, a hunky young Army veteran drops by...

...She burns the opus without letting anyone know what she has done...

...After viewing a performance of Hedda Gabler, Strindberg wrote to a friend: "It's obvious that Ibsen has just patched this together from gossip...

...a dangerous man, aren't you...

...In the first place she considers Hedda "a female Hamlet...

...the vengeful ghost of Camille takes care of everything in a bloody denouement...

...He began as a naturalist, suffered from a series of nervous breakdowns between 1894 and 1896, and was never the same afterward...

...Judge: Yes...

...Her connivance forces the annihilation of Lovborg—but ends by destroying Hedda as well...

...Emerson is the essence of the university pedant—prissy, clever about details, but absolutely blind to the big picture...

...The problem with Ibsen is the treatment of him as a holy relic...

...Small wonder that the Norwegian playwright kept a photograph of his young rival above his desk, remarking to a friend, "I cannot write a line without that madman standing and staring down at me with those mad eyes...

...Strindberg never did succeed in replacing Ibsen...

...One Norwegian psychologist, Arne Duve, has argued, not unreasonably, that Hedda is a kind of self-portrait, since Ibsen shrank from emotional attachments, too, and was never above using others to achieve his goals...

...The daughter of the late superstar, Richard Burton, makes no secret about some sources of her interpretation...

...But not to worry...

...Into this theater of war comes Alice's cousin Kurt (David Strathairn) to serve as the island's quarantine officer...

...Not a word may be changed...

...And that is precisely where the playwright wanted them...

...Haunted by guilt, she begins to see visions of Camille in her dreams, and then in her waking hours...

...Now that another woman has his attention, Hedda's interest is reawakened...

...Judge: A shortcut...

...The same cannot be said of most of the cast...

...To compensate, she has concocted a series of dances, among them a Mardi Gras number, Thérèse's "I Need To Be In Love" ballet, and a "Thou Shalt Not" fantasy...

...He and his wife Alice (Helen Mirren) have been wed for a quarter of a century, and the marriage has been a miniature purgatory as well...

...A symbol of the fin-de-siècle middle-class housewife whose identity is defined by her husband's social position...

...And now the decrepit old troll seems to hand me the revolver__But his shit will rebound on him...

...So does Santo Loquasto's looming tower and Natasha Katz' alternately harsh and gloomy lighting...

...Judge: Oh, come now...

...And it is a point which I intend to achieve with any and every means at my disposal...

...In its time the play had the capability to shock and disturb...

...To retain an audience's interest a revival needs magnetic performances and exceptional direction...

...The irony is that when Hedda and Tesman were courting, she whimsically said she admired the house and he went into debt to buy it for her...

...Mirren, normally an actress of great range, goes for the moue, the arch pose and the easy laugh...

...Judge: Yes, that's probably true...

...For one thing, he has had an unnamed ailment from infancy and "smells like a sickly child...

...Running contrary to every convention of the period, his work centered on a miserable marriage and featured brief, interrupted speeches, confused and febrile personae, and one of the most unapproachable female protagonists in the history of the theater...

...The story is trivial, the characters cardboard, the plot absurd, and the score undistinguished...

...The London Sunday Times judged the drama exciting and profound: "One of the most notable events in the history of the modern stage, for, in spite of all prejudice and opposition, it marks an epoch and launches an influence...

...Not an angel either, Alice takes pleasure in striking back with venomous insults ("You are a despot with the character of a slave...

...Laurent LeClaire (Craig Bierko) has a sad story to tell, and in a series of flashbacks he summons up the great love of his life, Thérèse Raquin (Kate Levering...

...To Thérèse, her husband Camille (Norbert Leo Butz) is a turnoff...

...Hedda: The back door...

...Hedda: I agree...

...He quickly appraises the situation: The Captain is impoverished, the food is running out, and the servants have quit because they haven't been paid...

...To those who care anything about the American musical I would say, thou shalt not waste thy shekels on tickets for this one...

...The relentlessly cheerful, supremely dull history professor is both wife-proud and house-proud, boasting loudly of their attributes to his Aunt Julie (Angela Thornton...

...One of those others was the unstable August Strindberg (1849-1912), another great Scandinavian playwright who was convinced Ibsen had based Lovborg on his own misbehavior...

...The solution: She and Laurent will take Camille out for a ride on the river, where they can spill the boat and get rid of the nonswimmer...

...But there is considerably more than intellectual self-doubt and flirtation in Ibsen's housewife...

...It still smells of the previous owner's lavender scent, and she regards it as an overstuffed cage...

...A film, possibly...

...Not at all...

...Gabler must be seen as a feminist icon overpowered by a man's world, where large social forces are at work...

...Beat...

...You are...

...A composite...

...I could be capable of anything...

...Predictably, ticket buyers lined up to see a production about which no one felt neutral, and Hedda Gabler turned out to be a great financial success in Europe and the U.S...

...Judge: Sometimes the back door can be the most exciting...

...Here, she is in under her head...

...Somewhere along the way the drunkard and his manuscript are parted...

...A somber film, starring Kate Winslet and Judi Dench, is planned for next year...

...Laurent, we assume, is redolent of manly sweat and Lifebuoy soap...

...Hedda: Like when someone is firing pistols through it, perhaps...

...When cornered...

...The cousin, who lost custody of his children in a messy divorce, is rootless and bewildered, uncertain of whom to side with...

...At the Plymouth Theater, book writer David Thompson and pop Wunderkind Harry Connick Jr...

...A book, obviously...

...Whether this is a notable accomplishment is moot—and so is the quality of Dance of Death...

...More than anything else, the decorative, useless Hedda yearns "to have some power over someone's destiny," and Eilert Lovborg is that someone...

...We first encounter this thirtysomething woman upon her return from a long honeymoon with George Tesman (Michael Emerson...

...Judge: Well, I've said all I have to say...

...I'm beginning to...

...Elvsted (Jennifer Van Dyck), a former schoolmate...

...His recovery began when he discovered the works of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg...

...Voluntarily...

...Judge: Do you think...

...Richard Greenberg's new translation is tangy enough—I liked his use of "bottomfeeders" for lowlifes, for example, but his words needed to be fleshed out by credible people, not overdrawn caricatures...

...As Brack, Yulin is sometimes a bit too malevolent, but his frosty dignity serves him well...

...Ajournalist inNorway, Ibsen's home country, called Hedda a "monster created by the author in the form of a woman who has no counterpart in the real world...

...I'm merely saying that a triangle has to be fortified and defended...

...In his fresh translation, Jon Robin Baitz brushes away the cobwebs and gives Ibsen's archaic melodrama a lively sexuality as well as a dark urgency, as in the scene between the Judge and Hedda: Hedda: So you really do need to be top dog, is that what you're saying...

...Especially if it's the only one they ve got...

...She knows his manuscript would outshine anythingher hapless husbandcould hope to write...

...This pretty, overwrought woman is in fear for her "comrade," Eilert Lovborg (David Lansbury), a wildeyed, alcoholic author who could either become famous for his new futuristic work or go over the edge into madness...

...The writer Renata Adler once noted that "Bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel...

...Zola's lugubrious treatment of adultery, homicide and revenge made for heavy reading in 1867, and for a melancholy stage adaptation in the following decade...

...in the second place her stepmother (twice) was Liz Taylor, and, she notes, "there's a little bit of Elizabeth in my Hedda, this incredibly charming woman...

...The version at the Broadhurst offers too few of these assets...

...Hedda: Hmm...

...But the best voice belongs to Butz, who has obviously spent a lot of time listening to Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett...

...for the most part his oeuvre struck quite a different note...

...Hélas, it is downhill from there...

...So it proves with the restless Hedda...

...That, I think, is the point...

...When the despairing Lovborg appears she gives him one of her father's pistols, suggesting that he die "beautifully" with "vine leaves in his hair...

...But a Broadway musical...

...During that time Mama suffers a stroke, and thus is helpless to inform the police captain (Leo Burmester) when she overhears the truth about her son's demise...

...The flesh wound never heals, and neither do the psychic injuries to Thérèse...

...Judge: No, God no...

...Judge...

...Was she a woman the playwright knew...

...I'd better go and start my busy day...

...Strathairn seems oddly out of place, an obviously American shuttlecock batted back and forth by two English players...

...To get her hands on it she first tempts Lovborg with drink, then encourages him to attend a stag party with Tesman and the aging Judge Brack (Harris Yulin), a pompous jurist who lusts after her...

...For I shall survive him and many others, and the day The Father kills Hedda Gabler I shall stick that gun in the old troll's neck...

...It is also the most unpleasant...

...Hedda: Never...

...At certain intervals director Nicholas Martin catches that urgency and the audience is swept up in Hedda's anguish...

...Actually, she detests her new home...

...Only Lansbury is out of key with the play, a headlong, all-too-modern performer who would make Prozac nervous...

...Hedda now has it, fully aware that there is no copy...

...It seems to me that Ibsen realizes that I shall inherit the crown when he's finished...

...Once he regained his sanity (if it was ever truly regained) the playwright/painter determined to be "the Zola of the Occult...

...Neither Bierko's acting nor Levering's dancing can be faulted, and as the Freudian mother...

...Before Hedda can fully express her dissatisfaction, the suffocating atmosphere is broken by the entrance of Mrs...

...He begins as a listening post, then becomes an accomplice, and finally a victim...

...Each gives new meaning to the words banal, frantic and garish...

...But when they try to carry out the scheme, Camille fights back, sinking his teeth into Laurent's neck just before the killer pushes him under for the third time...

...The opening number, "It's Good to be Home," done in a French Quarter nightclub, augurs well...

...Today it seems merely nasty and overlong...

...Kurt's offers to help are useful, but what Edgar and Alice really want is his emotional investment in their separate causes...

...and Stephen Sondheim's mysogynistic musicals...

...Even the naturalistic works were unlike anything that had come before them—including the efforts of Ibsen...

...Van Dyck is the personification of those repressed women who were Freud's first patients...

...Beat...

...The story of Hedda prompted the Saturday Review to state, "Things rank and gross in nature alone have place in the mean and sordid philosophy of Ibsen...

...Undoubtedly, too, the Swedish playwright is the godfather of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf...

...Moreover, Camille's overprotective Mama (Debra Monk) keeps ordering Thérèse around...

...The scholar/gypsy once romanced Hedda in their student days, but was repulsed when his overtures grew too passionate...

...It is not difficult to see signs of Strindberg in the domestic plays of Eugene O'Neill...

...Hedda: You're going through the garden...

...Elvsted is not the only person to be outmaneuvered...

...The latest to do so on Broadway is Kate Burton...

...Alas, his considerable talents are wasted here, as is the energy of the chorus of Broadway gypsies, the glitzy sets of Thomas Lynch, and the colorful Mardi Gras costumes of William Ivey Long...

...On the other hand, the British drama critic Justin McCarthy wrote, "Hedda Gabler is the name, to my mind, of Ibsen's greatest play, and of the most interesting woman that Ibsen has created...

...Most of the dramas he wrote afterward experimented with time and space...

...Which is fine, as long as you don't have any kind of power over me...

...Mrs...

...It is no wonder that their children have fled to the mainland, and that the couple has no social life whatsoever...

...The spirit of Emile Zola also hovers over the musical Thou Shalt Not, based on the Frenchman's wages-of-sin novel, Thérèse Raquin...

...At other times he weakens his hold on the narrative and the "through line" seems to lose its way...

...Without making Hedda a heroine, Burton embodies an intelligence gone awry, a vitality with nowhere to go but down...

...As for Laurent's neck wound, it continues to bleed a year after the lethal event...

...People don't shoot their favorite old dog, do they...

...There is also deviltry, connivance and suicidal impulses, all resulting from a corrosive ennui...

...Hedda: That sounds just a little like a threat, your honor...

...Here he overdoes the bantam strut and the dazzling smile that hides the vindictive tongue...

...She had everything, he recalls, beauty, spirit, talent, joie de vivre—and a husband...

...The Danish writer Georg Brandes thought the title character embodied "a true type of degeneration...

...To this day the play attracts large audiences, particularly when a marquee name is starred— and performers from Eleanora Duse to Ingrid Bergman to Maggie Smith have played Hedda in their time...

...Monk performs with her customary élan...