{"id":750,"date":"2010-10-28T22:40:45","date_gmt":"2010-10-29T02:40:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.musicalamerica.com\/mablogs\/?p=750"},"modified":"2011-10-14T14:29:20","modified_gmt":"2011-10-14T18:29:20","slug":"deep-purple","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.musicalamerica.com\/mablogs\/?p=750","title":{"rendered":"Deep Purple"},"content":{"rendered":"

By James Jorden<\/strong><\/p>\n

Few operatic experiences\u2014indeed few human<\/em> experiences\u2014exist or, nonexistent, emerge from the imagination, that cannot be described with a quotation from that most definitive of all diva novels, Mawrdew Czgowchwz<\/em> by James McCourt<\/strong>. And so it is with the career (or should one say the life<\/em>?) of the Regie fancier. <\/p>\n

Speaking of the “grand moments” that illumine the life of the 1950s standee, McCourt writes, “One saw truth, heard it in key perhaps three times in\u00a0one perfect week, then perhaps (like as not) not again for the entire season.”<\/p>\n

It’s been a while since truth completed the hat trick of appearing three times in any sort of week here in New York, but last week I did see something very true indeed: the New York Theatre Workshop production of The Little Foxes<\/em>.<\/p>\n

From the reviews I read and from accounts of previous productions by this show’s director,\u00a0Ivo van Hove<\/strong>,\u00a0I think I was expecting something terribly outr\u00e9 and even “disrespectful<\/span>” to the classic Lillian Helman<\/strong> melodrama. It’s not that at all, and yet it defies the naturalistic style. Deliberately abandoning the play’s epoch of circa 1900, the actors make no attempt at syrupy southern accents, and much of the physical action is utterly discordant with normal expectations about the behavior of post-Victorian small town American gentry.<\/p>\n

The set by Jan Versweyveld<\/strong> is the merest abstraction of a drawing room: a sharp-sided box with walls and floor covered in carpet of the deepest midnight purple, in so shallow a pile as to look almost like wallpaper. The concrete ceiling, high by architectural standards, seems to press the space into an oppressively shallow rectangle. An internal wall suggesting a hearth opens into a square portal containing a narrow staircase to nowhere; above the gap is an ornately framed HD screen projecting what looks to be surveillance footage of offstage characters, almost always frozen in waiting postures. The room is bare of furniture until the middle of the second act, when a single brocade armchair seems to clutter the space.<\/p>\n