This week in TONY, a longer-than-usual review of Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia-Part One: Voyage, which battered me, like most of the critics, about the head & neck with its elephantine, encyclopedic exhaustiveness. It's a first-rate ideological soap opera, staged with orchestral, painterly assurance by Jack O'Brien and fiercely acted by a generally excellent cast. Do I wish that Lincoln Center Theater had spent $10m over the last 5 years commissioning an American playwright to attempt such an intellectualized dramatization of, say, the American Revolution? Sure. But I'm part isolationist and tired of ceding our money, attention and awards to British imports. Even if I loved Shining City, The Pillowman and The History Boys. Anyway, that's another, old, tired story. Coast of Utopia is event theater and while at times inert and ridiculous, has been rendered into a highly entertaining production. Although, to be honest, there were times when I wasn't even sure if it was a play or just a textual performance by Stoppard. Its attempt to marry farce & Chekhovian elements to several volumes' worth of philosophy and history verges at times on the Monty Pythonish absurd. It's all contrivance. Either you tingle with Stoppard's contrivance or you don't.
And a fine companion piece to that review is this week's take on The Radio City Christmas Spectacular. If my New England ancestors, the Puritans, were to see this holiday abomination, they'd probably burn the damn building down. Certainly, this is one of the most irrelevant, secular, un-fundamentalist versions of the Nativity Story you're going to find, but it still annoys me. (For those who don't know, the Spectacular is basically a regular burlesque-era girlie show on a holiday theme with Santa, elves and ice-skating shoppers, ending with a 10-minute dumb show representing the birth of Christ, i.e., the Living Nativity.) Call me an intolerant jerk, an orthodox atheist, but I have a feeling that some of these tourists will return home from the ersatz religiosity of the Spectacular, attend their megachurch big-truck rallies, and fail to see the theological irony.
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