During the first 20 minutes of about The image of Dorian GrayThe adaptation of Broadway from Oscar Wilde’s novel as a woman’s show with Sarah Snook, production poses a truly disturbing question: “What if you were watching television, instead?” At the top of the hour, Snook enters on stage without fanfare, surrounded by crew members – really, they should also be considered as artists – who will spend the next two hours filming it with compact cameras. She takes place behind The gigantic vertical screen in the middle of the stage, examines a lens and speaks to the two -dimensional public.
The following is a reading per heart of the beginning of the book – I’m almost sure, at least, because I have never read it. Snook makes the narration and the dialogue, then the scope develops, but only in a way. Soon, Snook is costumed as Dorian – one of the many characters she plays – and moves around the scene, fundamentally, just this performance, as the young man poses then desperately admires a painting of himself. Filling the show is a pre -recorded work: other snook performances superimposed on the screen or have killed in audio. In a dinner sequence, for example, she performs live as Lord Henry while depicting guests – all with their own elaborate costumes and ways to speak – on the Broadway Jumbotron. In an adaptation of a story on vanity, the actress does not play with anyone other than larger than life versions of herself.
It is not an overestimation of saying that I despised this style of theater, if you could even call it so. While the words were intoxicating and the charismatic interpreter, the presentation was cheap and deficient. Although I sometimes have admired how screens can extend a Broadway scene, this time they felt like a shortcut. The plethora of snooks would have done something neat if I did not look in a theater. But Broadway demands more than the camera gadgets. I saw shows of a person where an artist lives in a multitude of characters without the benefit of technology or even costumes, and it was like magic; This act of multiplication was nothing more interesting than a synchronization exercise. The narration, convincing at the beginning, felt redundant as characters on the screen simply did the things that were described. The idea of risk was practically nonexistent; As long as Actress One Live stopped talking at the right time, everything was predetermined to take place gently. It was automated work – performance that doesn’t need real time thought– And therefore looked like the antithesis of the theater.
But if this opening was a stain on an environment, the rest of the show worked to wash it. The image of Dorian Gray Finally kisses his theatricality and uses his screens as collaborators, instead of crutches, in the service of an exciting tragedy.
Part of this subsequent success is thanks to the structure of history – it opens with members retained from society with small minds full of mind, then plunges into more monstrous and mystical acts that all work to isolate Dorian – but there is a lot of inventiveness of the spectacle itself. Small sets quickly built, like the room where the image is stored, feel large when the camera amplifies them. The POV shots where the public assumes the role of the portrait by looking at Dorian provides a very clear window on his turmoil. The use of current selfie filters seems to be a bad idea on paper but is actually quite intelligent, highlighting the way people distort their own image in search of impossible standards. The best of all are the chaotic moments – a couple of song breaks and a few more macabre things than that – where Snook plays a character duplicated from several angles through the range of screens. In these sequences, Gray Dorian Capture something immersive, related and theme on the theme: this anxious feeling of looking in a mirror (or a phone camera) from all possible angles until you find the one that soothes you.
It is a precarious balance, by ensuring that the screens increased the action live and did not supplant it – the highest point, a prosecution in the woods which was filmed in real woods, stumbles with the collision of theater and captured nature. But for the relentless pursuit of virgin youth at all costs, there is certainly no more important tool than the camera.
Is it even more critical for the show than Snook herself? After a few deliberations, I would say no. While I initially rolled my eyes when it was silent during pre -recorded bits, the amount of living prose it offers during the night is presented in a memorization feat. None of his characters, even the small parts, does not feel made incompletely, and his energy gives the story an F1 rhythm, even at two hours without intermission. My best comparison here is Robin Williams at the top of his habit of cocaine, jumping between the voices without ever reporting, but that does not do him justice.
I don’t really want anyone who tries what she is doing, although the commercial success of this program can certainly announce a trend. I prefer that my theater is created in the moment as much as possible, and the agitation that enters a spectacle of a person night after night is a large part of the attraction for me. By telling this particular story at this particular moment, however, Gray Dorian manages to connect with modern concerns concerning the human cost of artificial beauty that Wilde prophesied in the 19th century. In the end, it may be a little reassuring, in fact, that he did it with nothing more ostentatious than words on a page.
