Great review of David’s new show in The Wall Street Journal.
Playwright David Hirson and director Matthew Warchus are brave to revive La Bête, only a modest success when first seen here in 1992. You can understand why an audience might find it difficult. First, it’s written in rhyming couplets. Second, it’s set in the 17th century, in a French chateau. Third, it’s about the friction between a classically formal playwright (Elomire, an unsubtle anagram for Moliere) and Valere, an exponent of dumbed-down comedy, and their rivalry for the patronage of a very rich French Princess – not much to get excited about there, apparently.
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Nice review from Variety. Really would love to see this play, I’d say Mark Rylance is just gobsmacking!
Strategies don’t get riskier than this: Take one heavily award-nommed Broadway bomb from 1991, set up a new London production and add a locked-in five-month Broadway transfer. Happily, thanks to seriously smart creatives helmed by comedy maestro Matthew Warchus, this ebullient revival of David Hirson’s high-art-vs.-commerce comedy La Bete is largely a winner. But it’s a case of how to succeed in business while really trying and often too hard.
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This critic really dug it. I like her description of it as “grown-up panto.”
We’ve waited for this one, in wondering hope. Joanna Lumley! David Hyde Pierce who was Niles Crane in Frasier! A Broadway transfer in the bag, and our own peerless changeling sprite, Mark Rylance! It even promised a debate: high culture versus populism and the conscience of the artist. Wow!
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Here’s the Financial Times‘s take:
Which touches us more, highbrow art or lowbrow farce? That is the question that powers David Hirson’s oddball comedy; it is also a dilemma that the director Matthew Warchus has delighted in tackling before, with his brilliant productions of Boeing-Boeing and Ayckbourn’s The Norman Conquests. But, in spite of the ingenuity of the piece, in spite of Warchus’s excellent pedigree, and in spite of a cast with impeccable comic credentials – Mark Rylance, Joanna Lumley and David Hyde Pierce – this show doesn’t fly.
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One last review for today! Here’s the Associated Press verdict.
It’s easy to see why La Bete wasn’t belle of the ball on its first run in 1991, lasting only 25 performances on Broadway. David Hirson’s play is a self-referential comedy about the battle between art and commerce, set in 17th-century France and written in mock-Moliere rhyming couplets. No wonder audiences were wary.
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There seems to be a pattern emerging from the La Bête reviews – Rylance is explosive, DHP is subtle, and the whole thing, while intriguing, doesn’t quite excel. Check out the What’s On Stage review – they also have a handy roundup of reviews.
Maybe the anticipation of seeing Mark Rylance, Joanna Lumley and David Hyde Pierce together on one stage in American playwright David Hirson’s La Bête, a theatrical comedy of rhyming couplets set in the 17th century court of Languedoc, was too much.
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Here’s The Guardian‘s rather mixed review. Comes with a cool pic though!
I’ll say this much: David Hirson’s piece of Broadway-originating, pastiche Molière seems less smugly self-admiring than it did on its first appearance in 1992. That may be because Hirson now gives the action an uninterrupted flow; it may be because Mark Rylance virtuosically adorns the current cast; but I suspect the real change stems from director Matthew Warchus, who has discovered a hidden tension in what at first seemed a dramatically inert piece.
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The Independent gave La Bête three out of five stars on its opening night. Check out the review HERE.
“La Bête” is a “beast” and a “fool” in French, and it’s one of the puzzles in Matthew Warchus’s colourfully inflated, Broadway-bound revival of this 1992, 17th-century oddity that you never really know to whom the title refers: the actor, the writer or the patron.
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David is really becoming the go-to guy for concerts celebrating theatrical legends – first Kander and now Sondheim! David hosted Sondheim’s two birthday concerts at the New York Philharmonic earlier this week, and also sang ‘Beautiful Girls’ from Follies (with Patti LuPone, Audra McDonald, Bernadette Peters, Elaine Stritch, Donna Murphy and Marin Mazzie, as you can see from the photo). Here’s the New York Times‘s glowing review:
From Broadway’s prodigious boy wonder to its beloved aging monarch: for Stephen Sondheim, whose forthcoming 80th birthday on March 22 was celebrated in a thrilling concert at Avery Fisher Hall on Monday evening, it must have seemed like a hop, skip and a jump from one to the other. Inside the hall, where the mood was more exhilarated than elegiac, an unspoken question hung in the air: where did all that time go?
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Here’s a piece from the wonderful New York magazine about Monday’s gala honouring John Kander, hosted by David. Sounds like it was a great show! Also – Chita Rivera is 77?!
To any die-hard theater geek, a show that begins with Joel Grey and ends with Liza Minnelli ranks as a good one — so well done, Monday night’s benefit for the Vineyard Theatre! The evening, honoring John Kander (of legendary Broadway songwriting duo Kander and Ebb) was hosted by a dependably droll David Hyde Pierce, who told bad theater jokes (“I’m hosting, so it’s a gay-la”; “We wanted to capture the perfect tenor for this evening — and we did, he’s waiting off stage”) and gave a wonderfully deadpan rendition of ‘Ten Percent’, a lost Chicago ode to theater agents.
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