When I  was calling the Goodspeed Opera House the other day, I got put on hold for a  minute and heard a chorus of the Gershwin song “Blah Blah Blah”—which, if you think about it, is the perfect thing to hear over the telephone. The song appears in the first show of the Goodspeed season, My One and Only, got completely stuck in my head, and I realized it wasn’t on any of the dozen Gershwin CDs I own, not to mention any of the Michael Feinstein albums or Broadway compilations  in my collection.

So I headed to iTunes, where I was confronted with overflowing cases of the Blahs:

The Ke$ha hit. The 1986 Iggy Pop album.

The Lenny Bruce routine where “blahblahblah” becomes a courtroom euphemism for “cocksucker.”

A song by The Cardigans which graced the first season soundtrack of TV’s Sabrina the Teenage Witch.

A couple of different country and western songs.

All named Blah Blah Blah.

Then there’s the band Blah Blah Blah, not to mention the Asian pop act Calories Blah Blah, the Atom & His Package album Attention! Blah Blah Blah and the very Gershwin-sounding metal album title Blah… Blah… Blah… Love Songs… by Scum of the Earth (featuring Riggs from Rob Zombie’s band).

Though neither the 1983 My One and Only soundtrack or any early recording of the song (written for, but not used, in the 1931 movie Delicious) appears to be available, there are cabaret or concert renditions by everyone from Sarah Vaughan to Marni Nixon to blues guitarist John Miller and classical pianist Nicolas Hodges.

I ultimately opted for sheet music, and worked out the song on the ukulele. Blah, blah, blah, I know. But it’ll be cool to be walking INTO a theater humming one of the tunes.

A provocative stage note by Don Marquis, the newspaper satirist of archy & mehitabel fame. Marquis could be as sanctimonious as he could be saucy. This is from the closing Author’s Note in the published script of Marquis’ 1925 drama about the crucifixion of Christ, The Dark Hours—Five Scenes from a History.

There is certain to be in the mind of every person who has thought about Jesus some conception of how he looked when he was earth; these are ideas and ideals that would necessarily be dashed by the appearance and manner of any actor attempting to play the part. The play is built around Jesus; he is always there, his words come to the audience, and his meaning; his spirit permeates every scene; he is the play—but to show, at any time, more than a fleeting glimpse of him, to let him be seen for two hours, rising and walking and sitting and gesticulating: no. That would spoil everything; that might end in disappointing the inner vision by a parade of externalities. The mass opinion (the herd instinct we hear so much about) is right. You might show on the stage some personal conception of a Jesus who is merely a human being: but you cannot show the traditional and orthodox Jesus who is a God.

PHOTO OF AUTUMN SONATA AT YALE REPERTORY THEATER BY JOAN MARCUS.

Autumn Sonata

Through May 7 at the Yale Repertory Theatre, corner of Chapel and York streets, New Haven.

By Ingmar Bergman. Directed by Robert Woodruff. Based on a literal translation by Wendy Weckworth. Original music by Michael Attias (also Music Director). Scenic designer: Riccardo Hernandez. Costume designer: Candice Donnelly. Lighting designer: Jennifer Tipton. Sound designer: Chad Raines. Projection designer: Peter Nigrini. Production dramaturgs: Amy Boratko, Hannah Rae Montgomery. Vocal coach: Walton Wilson. Stage manager: Lindsey Turteltaub.

Autumn Sonata may be an Ingmar Bergman film. But it’s also now a Robert Woodruff stage production, with its own unique tone, measures and merits.

Adapting a film which has only four main characters, a basic household setting and a lot of back-and-forth arguing is, on one hand, a no-brainer. The film has the dimensions of a play, so it can be a play. But director Woodruff has done considerably more than turn a screenplay into stage blocking. He’s opened up its story of a fraught  mother/daughter relationship in ways which Bergman (a transcendent stage director himself) couldn’t in a movie.

The story is simple. Charlotte (played by Candy Buckley, whose cool Off Broadway credits range from The Petrified Prince to Funnyhouse of a Negro) is an internationally  celebrated concert pianist whose romantic partner recently died. She visits her daughter Eva (Rebecca Henderson), Eva’s husband Viktor (whom NY Public Theater veteran Olek Krupa plays with a patrician gruffness) and—a revelation  to her—her other daughter Helena (Merritt Janson—see my interview with her elsewhere on this site), who’s been in the care of Eva and Viktor for years. The main thrust of the drama is how Eva and Charlotte get along—first trying to appease each other, then ultimately opening up with all sorts of hurtful accusations.

On film, these simmering expressions are handled with lots of close-ups and reaction shots. There aren’t a lot of movie precedents for this sort of dialogue, unless  adapted from plays or books. Onstage, Bergman’s text plays comfortably like an O’Neill or Strindberg drama, or Marsha Norman’s ‘Night, Mother, or even Neil Simon’s The Gingerbread Lady if you want to stretch a point. Even laden with Woodruff’s technical wizardry and post-modern sensibility, this is stage drama we instinctively relate to. Autumn Sonata’s confessions and confrontations are modulated and emphasized not by cinematography or editing but by full-bodied acting. They’re Bergman’s words (translated, naturally—Wendy Weckwerth did the honors), but you appreciate the drama anew.

Woodruff magically maintains the filmic qualities of Bergman’s work—projected photo montages, harsh video-camera close-ups, soundtrack music that purposefully obliterates the actors’ dialogue—while simultaneously demonstrating the script’s value as live theater. Technically complex as it might be (the onstage crew get to take a curtain call along with the cast), this is a warm and vibrant and human production. There are emotional expressions of frailty and vulnerability all through it.

Both Bergman and Woodruff distance us from purer emotions through the overt use of camera angles (the sparse stage has several video cameras stationed around its central enclosed rectangular stage area), spatial relationships, color (or in the case of Woodruff, lack thereof—the screen projections and unpainted sets may give you the mistaken impression that the Bergman film was in black & white, when in fact it’s bright and rosy-hued) and particularly the use of music.

Despite some careful dramaturgy—Woodruff commissioned a literal translation of the film dialogue and also consulted the original screenplay and various subtitled versions—a few lines in the drama still come off clunky and unnatural. You may find, however, when you discuss the play afterward (and this is a play that demands such discussion—just plan in advance to hit a bar or coffeeshop before you go home), that the bits which you mihgt think are over-the-top or especially awkward  will not jibe with those of other Repgoers. Depending on such personal perspectives as your own childhood relationship with your parents, or your experience with the physically and mentally challenged, or your gender, you may dismiss whole scenes as too much. Bergman does steer into some hoary stereotypes of dominating mothers and long-suffering, finally outspoken daughters:

Because you never listen. Because you’re a goddam escapist, because you actually hate me and Helena, because you are helplessly trapped in yourself, because you’re always in your own way, because you carried me in your cold womb and thrust me out with loathing, because I loved you, because you thought I was disgusting and stupid and a failure.

But beneath those peaks of unbelievability (wherever you might think they are), there are mountains of careful psychological character study that you can’t dispute.

Autumn Sonata isn’t just about mother/daughter relations. It’s about communication and mental balance and the ways we choose to escape through art. All the female characters (mother Charlotte, daughters Eva and Helena) play piano, while Eva’s husband Viktor is a pastor with both a practical and a poetic side. In many scenes, the music speaks more loudly than the dialogue. There’s a tense recital where we see Charlotte judging Eva’s playing while pretending not to. Charlotte’s other daughter, the wheelchair-bound Helena, finds full dreamlike expression behind the keyboard. The cast members, who immediately assert themselves as NOT aping the performances of Ingrid Bergman, Liv Ullmann, Lena Nyman, Halvar Bjork and Georg Lokkeberg in the movie—operate on two planes, as easily bruised flesh-and-blood family and as easily transported musicians and dreamers. Impressively, each performer has a different spiritual center, different extremes, from the cold-to-vivacious swings of Candy Buckley to the flailing-to-fragile contortions of Merritt Janson to the tone-setting subdued-to-overwrought carthartics of Rebecca Henderson.

Actually seeing these women play the piano, hearing the reverberations of actual onstage instruments (including occasional cello accompaniment by Paul Brantley in the flashback role of Charlotte’s deceased romantic partner Leonardo), gives the Yale Rep production an honesty and majesty that distinguishes it from Bergman’s film. The onstage performance of soul-stirring works by Bach and Chopin is enhanced by a bracing new background score by Michael Attias, who had a hand in Woodruff’s previous two Yale Rep projects.

Attias isn’t the only designer perfectly attuned to the disparate needs of Bergman, Woodruff and the tricky Rep venue. Yale can bring resources and understanding to this project that few other theaters could. The Yale School of Drama is on the forefront of sound design (managed here by soon-to-graduate student Chad Raines, who’s performed on Yale stages himself as an actor, musician and Foley Artist) and projection design (entrusted for this show to established Peter Nigrini, though the YSD now has a groundbreaking program in projection design and uses that artform frequently in school shows). Jennifer Tipton, the only lighting designer I can imagine being able to pull off such a challenge as this (The set’s a box! With white screens all around! And tall cameras which you don’t want throwing shadows!), teaches at Yale. Most crucially, so now does Robert Woodruff, who has turned the Rep into an experimental laboratory where in recent seasons he has distilled manic Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground, with Bill Camp), combative Bernard-Marie Koltes (Battle of Black and Dogs) and this achingly beautiful, battle-weary Autumn Sonata. For a show about asserting oneself, you couldn’t ask for a better set of circumstances.

Hey, there’s a new documentary about Candy Darling opening this week: Beautiful Darling, directed by James Rasin. She was a Warhol superstar, of course, and the inspiration for two classic Lou Reed songs (“Candy Says” and the second verse of “Walk on the Wild Side”).

But before and after her Factory fame, Darling was an accomplished stage actress, in several plays by Jackie Curtis (one of which co-starred Robert DeNiro) and as Violet in the 1972 Off Broadway premiere of Tennessee Williams’ Small Craft Warnings.

Candy Darling’s also a character in the musical Pop!, which had its world premiere at Yale Rep in late 2009 (not to mention a developmental workshop through the Yale Institute of Music Theater the previous summer). That show, by Maggie-Kate Coleman and Anna K. Jacobs, is getting new productions in July at the Studio Theatre in Washington DC and next season at Pittsburgh’s City Theatre.

In the Yale Rep production of Pop!, Candy was played by Brian Charles Rooney. She was played by Stephen Dorff in the 1996 movie I Shot Andy Warhol, which covers the same events as the musical. In Beautiful Darling, her diaries and letters are read aloud by Chloe Sevigny.

I saw a terrific exhibit on Candy Darling in 1997 at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Hers was an extraordinary well-documented life, from her childhood spent in the Kim Novak fan club to the packed memorials following her death from leukemia in 1974. There are deathbed photos of her and even a farewell note she wrote for her friends to read after her death. She was just 29 when she died.

The Rasin documentary has the all-important blessing of Candy Darling’s friend Jeremiah Newton, who’s credited as a producer of the film.

Only a few hours left to hear a decent radio rendition of Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession on the BBC’s new “drama and comedy” channel, Radio 4 Extra. The channel (a revamping of BBC 7, only without the big block of children’s programming) has been running Shaw plays weekly for the past month or so. The BBC website and internet radio apps let you play (though not download) shows for a week after they’ve been broadcast. Mrs. Warren’s time is up late Saturday night, April 23.

This version of Shaw’s show about a business-minded, socially mobile prostitute and the daughter who’s been kept in the dark about her mother’s livelihood, stars Maggie Steed and Ron Cook and originally aired in 2002. The programming slot for it was 90 minutes, which when you’re doing Shaw means a lot of cutting. It ends up being extremely talky at the beginning and the end, and amusingly descriptive in the middle. I love hearing audio versions of Shaw because I always hear pithy bits which can be missed when his plays are staged, or read in book form. I’d rather hear uncut versions, but there’s been plenty to like. There’s also the fascination of hearing a decade-old rendition of a play which has recently been rediscovered as a plum vehicle for actresses of a certain age: Cherry Jones and Elizabeth Ashley played Mrs. Warren in 2010, and a production starring Felicity Kendall is  currently touring England.

New Haven, Connecticut, where I live, has regularly been ahead of the curve on this play—it had its U.S. premiere at the Hyperion Theatre on Chapel Street in 1905, and was produced at the Yale Rep in both 1981 and 2002.

What has been the Shaw slot on Radio 4 Extra (before Mrs. Warren came Candida and Arms and the Man) will be filled over the next few weeks by an audio adaptation of the Ealing film comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets (with British comedian Harry Enfield taking on the parts originated by Alec Guinness) and the two-play series The Other Side of the Hill by Peter Luke, about the Duke of Wellington.

Discovering Hamlet: Two of Britain’s Greatest Actors Stage Shakespeare’s Greatest Tragedy.

1990 PBS documentary by Mark Olshaker and Larry Klein, reissued 2011 on DVD by Athena (athenalearning.com) with bonus interviews and cast biographies. $39.99.

Derek Jacobi is King Lear April 28 through June 5 at BAM (http://www.bam.org), in a Michael Grandage production imported from London’s Donmar Warehouse (where its two-month run ended in early February).

It’s an excellent time to check out the newly released DVD of the documentary Discovering Hamlet. The one-hour film, which originally aired on PBS in 1990, chronicles a Hamlet which Jacobi directed for Kenneth Branagh’s fledgling Renaissance Theatre Company.

This is the DVD debut of Discovering Hamlet, and features not only nearly three hours of uncut interviews Jacobi gave for the original documentary but a brand new chat—with the same interviewer, Mark Olshaker—looking back on a project which could easily have (but happened not to) set him on a new career path.  At the very outset of the new interview, Jacobi says outright:

For anybody with aspirations to be a classical actor, one of the ways that you are judged, and given a membership card to the classical club, is the Hamlet, what I call the Hamlet hoop you have to jump through. And you are kind of judged on the quality of your Hamlet. And when you get old, as I am rapidly becoming, you have to go through the Lear hope—and I’ve got that coming up shortly.  I had thought Hamlet was the most difficult role, but I am now convinced it is most certainly Lear.

In the older footage, he refers to Hamlet as “an actor’s and a director’s nightmare).” More so, one imagines, when one has acted it many times and then chooses it for one’s directorial debut.

The  1988 production starred Branagh (whose Henry V film was released the following year) in a role Jacobi himself had done several times—at the Edinburgh Festival while still a teenager in the mid-1950s (in a production that originated at his boarding school), at Cambridge University, for the Prospect Theatre Company in 1977, on a world tour two years later, and for a BBC TV broadcast in 1980. In a different role in the same play, Jacobi made his London theater debut as Laertes in 1963 at the then-brand-new National Theatre. When Branagh directed and starred in his own Hamlet film in 1996, he cast Jacobi as Claudius.

This was a loaded situation—a new company studded with hot young talent and buffeted by celebrity actors in the directors’ chairs (Judi Dench also directed a Renaissance show that season).

Discovering Hamlet isn’t particularly deep. It’s a mainstream documentary that seems intended for young audiences, trying to stir up a general interest in Shakespeare. The DVD comes with a 12-page “viewer’s guide” that reads like the study guides theaters prepare for school-group audiences. Yet this is nonetheless a distinguished documentary that pauses for important insights into Hamlet from a variety of sources. It’s wonderfully democratic in how it elicits opinions from cast members large and small.

Discovering Hamlet also doesn’t overlook the tension involved in one actor passing on a treasured role to another. That this tension never gets all that taut is immaterial, and a credit to the professionalism of all involved. The fact that Branagh and Jacobi worked together regularly as actors for years afterwards seems a testament to what Olshaker, in James Lipton mode, describes as a lovefest among the actors and directors. Jacobi is shown as an agile, hands-on director who often jumps onstage to physically illustrate what’s he’s after intellectually.

All of Discovering Hamlet’s interview segments show Jacobi to be an actor at heart. But knowing what we know of his career 20 years onward—Cadfael, Breaking the Code, Schiller’s Don Carlos onstage (which he says in the Discovering Hamlet bonus interview was a career highlight), and only recently a return to directing (for the 2007 film The Riddle), narrating kids’ TV shows and recording acclaimed audiobooks of C.S. Lewis and Homer, dozens of movies and TV shows (including Dr. Who!)— adds gravity and mystery to Discovering Hamlet. Instead of continuing to explore his vast range as an actor (perhaps culminating in this year’s King Lear), where might Jacobi have gone as a director?

This documentary is about a man at a turning point in his artistic maturity—yes, not unlike Hamlet. Makes you pine for a Discovering King Lear doc.

I’m setting a criteria here. These are not showtunes redone by rock bands, or songs written for theater productions. They’re stand-alone rock songs meant to be played in rock clubs by established rock bands… inspired by plays.

1. “Desdemona” by John’s Children. A vague lyric which certainly doesn’t say anything that suggests it’s NOT about Othello’s ill-fated spouse. The shouty refrain “Des-de-MO-na! Lift up your skirt and fly” will affect how you hear that name spoken forever onwards. The band John’s Children (which had a pre-T. Rex Marc Bolan in its ranks for a few months) also did a song called “Midsummer Night’s Scene.”

(There’s also apparently an Allman Brothers song called “Desdemona,” but I could never bring myself to listen to an Allman Brothers song, not even for theatrical research. Sorry.)

2. “Waiting for Godot.” The Coctails. Ironically impatient rave-up that yelps “Don’t you know we are waiting for Godot?” Does in 2 minutes, 13 seconds, what Beckett takes two hours to accomplish.

3. “Antonin Artaud,” Bauhaus. The proto-Goth band’s bracing and exhausting tribute to the Theater and Its Double is more about a playwright/essayist than a particular play, but David J. Haskins’ lyrics brilliantly conflate Artaud’s staging theories with Artaud’s life. The closing chorus is “Those indians wank on his bones,” a reference to Artaud’s time studying the performance rites of the Tarahumara in Mexico.

4. “Sincere,” Freedy Johnston. Fast-paced acoustic rocker from the celebrated singer-songwriter’s breakthrough album, Can You Fly? “Sincere”’s lyric explains the entire plot (such as it is) of Tennessee Williams’ fantasy drama Camino Real, analyzes some of the play’s central characters, and nails its symbolism.

They think the Yank is such a jerk

Well this clown hocked his golden gloves

He ran out all ripped apart

Holding that solid gold heart

5. “Dktr. Faustus,” The Fall. Many songs, and band names, namecheck the title character of the reatest play ever written. Even more invoke the name of Faustus’ enabler Mephistopheles. Again, that’s a list for another time. (This is still a brand new site. We’re just getting started here!) But The Fall actually has a vested interest in the plot of Marlowe’s original play:

Doctor Faustus! Power showing, spits out haycart, carthorse, hay and box at the gates of Anholt. Dr. Faustus! At the court of the count, made fruits exotic pleasure-licious, appear behind curtains in winter. (Bananas! Apples! Plums!)…

And so on, right up to:

Must leave his student friends.
Faustus! Come get yer chips!
Pull my blood silhouette through the ceiling sky.

6. “Lysistrata,” Utopia. Todd Rundgren’s prog band totally Cliffs-Notes the Aristophanes comedy, without much of a sense of humor perhaps, but with a solid beat and a whole other level of pacifism. The song’s male narrator doesn’t just give up soldiering because his beloved Lysistrata “won’t let me come inside/unless I don’t go to war no more.” His capitulation to make-love-not-war is articulated much more deeply than that:

Send the boys all back to the farm

Tell the troops it was a false alarm

‘Cause if I die I want to be in your arms

And so I won’t go to war, no I won’t go to war,

Said I won’t go to war no more.

7. “Just Like Romeo and Juliet,” The Reflections. Romeo and Juliet songs deserve their own list (some other time, when ‘m feeling mushy). But I’ll throw this one in here to start the ball rolling.

Ah, all right, now, I’m speculatin’
Wonder what tomorrow’s gonna really bring
If I don’t (if I don’t) find work tomorrow
It’s gonna be (gonna be) heartaches ‘n’ sorrow
Our love’s gonna be destroyed like a tragedy
Just like Romeo and Juliet

8. “Punch and Judy,” XTC. The classic puppet show has, like Romeo and Juliet, come up in constant songs. There’s a dreary and endless Marillion prog-jam called “Punch and Judy,” but the infinitely cooler XTC actually places the relationship metaphor within a theatrical context. Describing a real-life domestic abuse situation, the song asks “This must be make-believe, ‘cos who do we know, dear, who acts like that? Punch and Judy.”

9. “For the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” The Beatles. Famously inspired by a mid-19^th century circus poster which John Lennon bought in January 1967 in Kent, England. For the most part, the characters in the song come directly from the poster.

10. “A Streetcar Named Desire,” A Thorn for Every Heart. Sometimes listed as just “Streetcar,” this 2003 emo catharsis by a five-piece from Chico Hills, California, pretty much sums up Tennessee Williams’ Southern angst without a single direct reference to a character or line from the play. It’s the kind of poem a depressed high school student might write after reading A Streetcar Named Desire in English class. Nice bass sound, though.

Submissions of similar theater/rock mash-ups gleefully welcomed. Send to chris@scribblers.us or just post as comments below.

I was talking to Goodspeed Musicals’ Michael Price Wednesday morning and was able to ask him about a gossip item that turned up just the day before on the Broadway World website. Seems that Julie Andrews will direct an adaptation of the theater-friendly children’s book she co-wrote a few years ago with her daughter Emma Walton Hamilton, The Great American Mousical. Goodspeed has been tapped to produce, probably at the Goodspeed’s Norma Terris Theatre in Chester.

Price didn’t deny the story, but says it’s way premature. The show hasn’t even been written yet, so don’t go looking for it as, say, the as-yet-unnannounced third show on the Goodspeed’s 2011 Norma Terris slate, for instance.

What the item really signifies is the solid ongoing relationship which Andrews has with the musicalmongering Goodspeed. She was presented with the Goodspeed Award for Outstanding Contribution to Musical Theatre in 2005, and the production she directed that same year of The Boyfriend (a show in which she’d made her Broadway acting debut half  a century earlier) toured nationwide.

Price didn’t mention this, but securing a production like The Great American Mousical is more evidence of the Goodspeed’s ever-deepening interest in kid-friendly musicals. Last season, for instance, there were new musical at the Norma Terris based on Roald Dahl’s James & the Giant Peach and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, not to mention the teen-friendly Band Geeks, while over the Goodspeed’s main digs (The Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam) there was Carnival!, featuring a girl entranced with peppy puppets.

James Andreassi is the founder and artistic director of the Elm Shakespeare Company, which means he spends his summers in Edgerton Park. But Jim (whom I’ve known since his college days at Tufts University in the late 1970s) works steadily throughout the year as an actor, director and theater instructor.

From April 27 through May 21, you’ll find him not directing or producing but actually acting Shakespeare again. He’s got the male title role in Antony & Cleopatra at Suffolk University’s Modern Theatre, 523-525 Washington St., Boston. For info and tickets, try http://www.actorsshakespeareproject.org or (867) 811-4111.

The production’s directed by Adrianne Krstansky and co-stars Paula Plum as Cleopatra. Loyal Elm Shakes followers will be aware of another connection between Jim’s outdoor Shakespeare company and this indoor one—Allyn Burrows, who served ESC for several summers as everyone from Hamlet in Hamlet to Miss Flora Van Huysen in The Matchmaker, is the artistic director of Actors’ Shakespeare Co., the producers of Antony and Cleopatra.

The 2011 Pulitzer prize for Drama has gone to Bruce Norris. Nice to see that the Steppenwolf style still means something in the small cast, high concept world of today. I haven’t read, let alone seen the script that won (stupidly missed it in New York, and it has yet to be published in the U.S.), but the Bruce Norris shows which I have read or seen display what lit critics used to call “a trenchant wit.” His work can black- comic, politically astute, a real satirical assault on contemporary culture. Clybourne Park is about a racial divide in Chicago based on history, celebrity, the civil rights era and the white gentrification of ethnic neighborhoods. I can think of about a zillion ways that would be relevant to New Haven and Connecticut audiences, and I hope it gets staged around here soon.
I remember when my review ran of Yale Rep’s production of Norris’ The Unmentionables (a play which had its own fraught racial and cross-cultural tensions), I got a kind email from one of its cast  members, which suggested that some audiences were having trouble with the piece and thanking me for hanging with it.
Well, now Norris is a Pulitzer Prize winner, and a prolific playwright to boot. A lot of apprehensive audiences are poised to become willing followers. Great. Get used to Bruce Norris. We need him.