Kevin Spacey stars as the iconic Shakespearean king at BAM in final production of the Bridge Project (photo by Manuel Harlan)
Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St. between Ashland & Rockwell Pl.
Through March 4, $30-$135
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
As the audience enter BAM’s Harvey Theater for the Bridge Project production of Richard III, the word Now is glowing on a makeshift curtain, announcing not only the first word of the concluding work in Shakespeare’s War of the Roses tetralogy but the time in which the play takes place. When the curtain rises, Richard, the Duke of Gloucester, is sitting in a chair, a flat-screen video monitor behind him showing his brother, King Edward IV (Andrew Long), as Kevin Spacey intones those famous lines, “Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this sun of York; / And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house / In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.” The technology at the opening might indicate the play is set in the modern day, but the rest of this version of Richard III, a coproduction of BAM, Sam Mendes’s Neal Street Productions, and the Old Vic, headed by Spacey, is a timeless story of the intense desire for power. Taking on the iconic role previously played onstage by the likes of John Barrymore, Alec Guinness, Ian McKellen, Kenneth Branagh, and Al Pacino and, most famously, on film by Laurence Olivier, Spacey is delightfully devilish as he orchestrates the murder of anyone and everyone who stands in the way of his ascent to the throne of England.
Richard (Kevin Spacey) woos the just-widowed Lady Anne (Annabel Scholey) in Sam Mendes’s RICHARD III (photo by Joan Marcus)
Spacey, walking with a limp that is part Porgy, part Roger “Verbal” Kint (his character in The Usual Suspects), regularly turns to the audience and makes funny faces and gestures, mugging with a wicked sense of humor as he lasciviously betrays his brother Clarence (Chandler Williams), Queen Elizabeth (Haydn Gwynne), the Duke of Buckingham (Chuk Iwuji), and even his own mother, the Duchess of York (Maureen Anderman). In one of the play’s most potent scenes, the hunchbacked Richard woos Lady Anne (Annabel Scholey), even as her husband, the Prince of Wales, lies on his back murdered, blood still oozing out of his body. Tom Piper’s set is a three-sided whitewashed wall of eighteen doors through which characters enter and leave; in the shorter second act, the stage opens up into a long, narrowing pathway that seems to go on forever, particularly effective during the battle scene; the Harvey bursts with energy when Richard, dressed like a crazed dictator, marches his way from the back, pounding his cane like a royal scepter. Spacey, who cut his Gloucester teeth playing Buckingham in Al Pacino’s Looking for Richard, a thorough examination of the work viewed from numerous angles, does at times get a little too cutesy, and several of the actors in minor roles deliver stilted lines, but director Mendes — the two previously teamed up on the Oscar-winning American Beauty — does a good job keeping the delicious story centered and focused. The final production of the Bridge Project, which in past years combined American and British actors in The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, As You Like It, and Tom Stoppard’s adaptation of The Cherry Orchard, this version of Richard III is fun and fanciful, funny and frightening, a fitting finale to this unique three-year collaboration.
Back in 2004, in reviewing Pina Bausch’s Fur Die Kinder von Gesern, Heute und Morgen (For the Children of Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow) at BAM, we wrote, “You don’t have to be a dance fan to love the always engaging Pina Bausch.” The same holds true for Wim Wenders’s loving 3-D documentary, Pina. The longtime director of Tanztheater Wuppertal, German choreographer Bausch created uniquely entertaining pieces for more than thirty years, combining a playful visual language with a ribald sense of humor, cutting-edge staging, diverse music, and a stellar cast of men and women of varying ages and body sizes, resulting in a new kind of dance theater. A friend of hers for more than twenty years, Wenders (Wings of Desire, Paris, Texas) was collaborating with Bausch on a film when she suddenly died of cancer in 2009 at the age of sixty-eight, two days before rehearsal shooting was to begin. Wenders decided to proceed, making a film for Pina instead of with her. Using the latest 3-D technology, including a specially developed camera rig mounted on a crane, Wenders invites audiences onstage as he captures thrilling, intimate performances of several of Bausch’s seminal works, 1975’s Le Sacre du printemps, 1978’s Café Müller, 1978 and 2000’s Kontakthof (Contact Zone), 2002’s Fur Die Kinder, and 2006’s 
Woody Allen’s Manhattan opens with one of the most beautiful tributes ever made to the Big Apple, a lovingly filmed black-and-white architectural tour set to the beautiful sounds of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” Once again collaborating with screenwriter Marshall Brickman, master cinematographer Gordon Willis, and Oscar-winning actress Diane Keaton, Allen’s tale of a nebbishy forty-two-year-old two-time divorcee who takes up with a seventeen-year-old ingénue (Mariel Hemingway) is both hysterically funny and romantically poignant, filled with classic dialogue (Yale: “You think you’re God.” Isaac: “I gotta model myself after someone.”) and iconic shots of city landmarks. BAM will be holding four free screenings of Manhattan on September 11, paying tribute to the iconic landmark that perished ten years ago. As Isaac says at the beginning of the film, “He adored New York City, he idolized it all out of proportion — no, make that, he romanticized it all out of proportion.” On the tenth anniversary of 9/11, there will be a lot of romanticizing going on, solemn memories, and news reports that are likely to spin way out of proportion, so sitting down for a free screening of this New York City masterpiece is a great way to take the edge off and just laugh yourself silly. 
