Hunky version of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange is now playing at New World Stages (photo by Caitlin McNaney)
New World Stages
340 West 59th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Wednesday – Monday through January 6, $59-$99
www.aclockworkorangeplay.com
newworldstages.com
Director Alexandra Spencer-Jones reimagines the stage version of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange as an energetic, hyperstylized gay fantasia with a cast of muscle boys but never quite achieves the rhythm that made the 1962 novel and Stanley Kubrick’s controversial 1971 film so involving. The London hit, which opened last night at New World Stages, features an all-male cast led by Jonno Davies as Alex deLarge, a juvenile delinquent who enjoys the old ultraviolence while defying all forms of authority. Alex speaks in Nadsat, Burgess’s brilliant invention, a subversive teen slang drawn from both Russian and English, but Davies’s delivery is more aggressive than poetic and is too often difficult to understand. Upon encountering one of his enemies, rival gang leader Billy Boy (Jimmy Brooks), Alex says, “Well, if it isn’t fat stinking billy bob Billy Boy in poison. How art thou, thou globby bottle of cheap grazzy chip oil? Come and get one in the yarbles, if you have any yarbles, you eunuch jelly, thou!” When Alex decides to make himself leader of his Droogs, Georgie (Matt Doyle), Dim (Sean Patrick Higgins), and Pete (Misha Osherovich) are none too happy and ultimately leave him to be caught by the police after a particularly vicious attack on an old woman (Ashley Robinson). In prison, Alex, known by his number, 6655321, volunteers for an experimental procedure, the Ludovico Technique, run by Dr. Brodsky (Brian Lee Huynh), who is attempting to erase the impulse to do evil from the minds of criminals (perhaps evoking gay conversion therapy). The Chaplain (Timothy Sekk) warns Alex, “When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man. . . . Is a man who chooses to be bad in some ways better than a man who is forced to be good?” But Alex decides that freedom is worth any cost.
Jonno Davies struts his stuff as Alex in A Clockwork Orange (photo by Caitlin McNaney)
While Davies portrays only Alex, the other eight actors play nearly three dozen roles, with Sekk standing out as the concerned Chaplain and the wonderfully smug Mr. Deltoid, Alex’s probation officer, who deliciously exaggerates certain words and isn’t afraid to tell Alex what he thinks of him, calling him “Villainy Incarnate. . . . Original Sin prowling the town.” The relatively spare set, which features three rows of seats on either side for audience members, is dark and black, with an occasional table brought to the center, a raised platform, and some oranges and glasses of milk on the back wall. The transitions between scenes and episodes of violence and rape are performed like 1980s dance videos, complete with cinematic slow motion; the soundtrack consists of original pulsating music by Glenn Gregory and Berenice Scott that incorporates Alex’s beloved Ludwig van and Rossini’s “The Thieving Magpie” alongside such club anthems as Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Relax.” You might suddenly think you’re at a rather hot Pride party as Jennifer A. Jacob’s mostly black-and-white costumes come off and on the hunky dudes. The show also includes the much-debated twenty-first chapter of Burgess’s book — which was not available in America until 1986 and was not used by Kubrick in his Oscar-nominated film because of how it resolved Alex’s story — and it brings things to a confusing halt in the play, making us wonder what it was all about. Spencer-Jones (Dracula, Gobsmacked!) seems so intent on dazzling us with the hot dancing that Burgess’s message about adolescence and maturity, religion, government control, and behaviorism gets lost. But there are still lots of oohs and aahs from the crowd when the actors really let loose and get down and dirty.