nytheatre.com review
by Martin Denton · October 12, 2002

Frank Cwiklik's staging of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra is spectacularly good. He's set this play of Rome and Egypt in the nascent Las Vegas of the 1960s, with the triumvirate a group of mob bosses vying for control of the casino business and the Queen of the Nile now the Queen of Burlesque. Not every detail maps or parses perfectly, but the gist is clear and unassailable: this is a play about emperors who act like gangsters and gangsters who act like emperors. And it's a show about how much we, the audience, love plays like this: we love to watch violence and we love to watch sex, no matter how many "Sopranos" stars we ban from our city parades.

Cwiklik has cut Shakespeare's long, complicated play to hone in on the good parts (see previous paragraph). Octavius Caesar, Mark Antony, and Lepidus are each proprietors of Vegas casinos who have joined together, temporarily, for mutual benefit. As the story begins, they need to deal with a coarse interloper, Pompey; and also with Antony's too-public dalliance with striptease star Cleopatra. The former problem is solved with a garrote in a steamroom; the latter is addressed by the marriage of Antony to Caesar's sister, Octavia. Antony's passion for Cleopatra is unabated, though, and will ultimately cost him his life. Caesar, meanwhile, stealthily and ruthlessly consolidates his power.

As I mentioned, the emphasis throughout is on the sensational bits: Cwiklik thinks nothing of cutting the play's most famous speech (something about age not withering nor custom staling—you've heard it elsewhere), and he is only too glad to interpolate Sinatra's rendition of "The Lady is a Tramp" as prelude to Cleopatra's death scene. This Antony and Cleopatra is all about atmosphere—the cheap noir kind, the stuff we crave in gangster flicks and smoky barrooms and glitzy Rat Pack showmanship. Practically every scene looks familiar, and it's not because you've seen another production of this play: Cwiklik meticulously recreates—with breathtaking ingenuity and panache—the whole ambience of a genre that we guiltily revel in even as we revile it.

The result is the live equivalent of a gaudy "B" movie. In the tiny, low-tech confines of The Red Room, Cwiklik manages quick-cuts, fades, split screens, montages, and even a fully staged musical number or two. This guy is—and I've said this before—a genius: there are moments of unrivaled brilliance and theatricality in this Antony and Cleoptra—scenes and tableaux where you're caught up short, enthralled and astonished by the picture you've just witnessed. The play's first act ends with an eloquent, splashy, silent depiction of carnage that, in its way, is nearly as affecting as Les Miz's barricades. A lip-synch song and dance to a Sammy Davis ditty about guns and shooting (performed with calculated bravura by an ice-cold Gerald Marsini) is the last word in bitter irony.

So a celebration of imagination and trashy storytelling becomes an expose of our appetite for same: this Antony and Cleopatra is a show that, once it hooks you, you can't take your eyes off of. The soundtrack—a collage of precisely-chosen kitsch rarities, lounge classics, underscoring and sound effects—is invaluable and masterful (it's credited to Youthquake! Studios). The ensemble of sixteen actors, many of them frequent Cwiklik collaborators, is fearless and fresh and passionately committed. Standouts include Bob Brader, who is a slimy, nasty piece of work as Caesar, and Bob Laine, soft and clownishly menacing as Pompey. Adam Swiderski (Eros, Antony's bodyguard) and Maria Hurdle (Charmian, one of Cleopatra's showgirls) each has a memorable moment just before the suicides of their respective bosses. As the titular couple, Tom Mazur and Anna Curtis get the high-strung but somehow bloodless love of this pair exactly right. (Curtis performs two striptease numbers, too; as the producers caution, this is not particularly a show for the kiddies.)

I don't usually love revisionist takes on so-called classic theatre, but I love this show. Cwiklik isn't afraid to ask if the Canon is really so canonical, and you have to respect him for that.