Two shows this week in Manhattan. First, the mighty Hamlet, directed by Robert Icke, at the legendary Armory on Park Avenue, $84 for a seat in the gods. Second, the slightly more lowly Rise & Fall, then Brief and Modest Rise Followed by a Relative Fall of Jean Claude Van Damme as Gleaned by a Single Reading of his Wikipedia Page a Month Earlier, for $30 in a little loft above an halal restaurant (with 'Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Arabian, African AND American' food) on W. 29th, Chelsea.
I don't know if it's a case of 'you can take the girl out of Bega ...' but apparently I'd rather spend an hour in the company of two dudes playing out a version of the life of Jean Claude Van Damme using a plyboard desk and puppets, than I would watching what is billed as one of the greatest productions of Hamlet ever.
I know Hamlet is a great piece of literature; it's physically demanding for the actors, with Hamlet having about 1400 lines to learn in iambic pentameter, and I know any production that takes it on is probably wracked by anxiety over how to make 'to be or not to be' sound fresh, but dressing the cast in suits, using CCTV video (and who's not these days in the theatre), and playing a bit of Bob Dylan in the interstitials just didn't do it for me. Sadly, the three and a half hours couldn't go fast enough. The Armory is a spectacular space though, so possibly worth the sparkling wine in plastic cup for that alone.
The Rise and Fall of JCVD on the other hand, once all the funny one-liners are over, has a bitter sweet soliloquy spoken by an actor who requires a lot of imagination to morph his slight 5'2" frame into JCVD's musculature, and while lashing his body with baby oil, recounts wasted moments and lost dreams, accepting the caricature that he has now become in semi-fictionalised film versions of himself. To be or not to be, Jean Claude van Damme.
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