Friday Night on the Upper West Side: Hudson Warehouse presents "Richard III" at the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument in Riverside Park

We waited too long, until the last performance last Sunday night, to see the Hudson Warehouse's production of The Rover, so we made certain to be at opening night for the company's spectacular debut of a stirring, bloody Richard III, directed by Nicholas Martin-Smith, whose coherent, seamless melding of character and action give the complex historical drama a stunning depth of meaning.

Having seen a number of excellent Hudson Workshop shows over the last few years, we're always amazed at the high consistency maintained by producing artistic director Martin-Smith (who also played the blithely deluded Hastings tonight), assistant artistic director Susane Lee (who seems to be a master of details), and all the cast and crew, but Richard III is one of the best productions we've been privileged to enjoy.  This is Hudson Warehouse's ninth season, and they've been staging three shows each summer -- two Shakespeare plays in June and August, and another classic play in July -- more than any other of the many fine summer free outdoors troupes out there, and they're always a pleasure to watch.

One of those pleasures is repeatedly seeing the same talented actors in a variety of disparate roles, as in the kind of old-fashioned repertory company that we used to hear about when we were kids in the 60s.  To watch performers like Amanda Renee Baker, Nick DeVita, David Allison DeWitt, Valerie O'Hara and Margaret Catov in different plays makes one appreciate more how demanding the craft of the actor is.

Sunday Night on the Upper West Side: Hudson Warehouse presents "Romeo and Juliet" at the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument

This evening we were back at the Sailors' and Soldiers' Monument at West 89th Street and Riverside Drive to see yet another intelligent and accomplished production from Hudson Warehouse, a Romeo and Juliet set within the current (and ancient) conflict in Afghanistan, directed by the endlessly inventive Nicholas Martin-Smith.

By placing the conflict between the Montagues and Capulets in a war-torn realm in which long-standing blood feuds between clans and ethnic groups hold sway, this Romeo and Juliet, in the director's words, allows the work "to dig deep into the savagery of these two families."

Here, the Montagues are the American military. Romeo, his commanding officer Montague, and Friar Lawrence and the rest of Romeo's companions, are dressed in soliderly camoflage, dogtags, and combat boots.

The Capulets, meanwhile, are dressed in traditional Afghan attire: for the men, variously, stylized versions of the cape, caftan, salwar kameez, turban, keffiyeh and Karakul black lamb hat; for the women - Juliet, her mother Lady Capulet, and the Nurse, in public this means a version of the burqa, while in the sanctuary of their home, in Juliet's case a long, flowing dress - and a lot less, once she and Romeo are intimate.

The culture clash between the Montagues and Capulets is highlighted by other differences, and it's always clear that we're in a war zone in a place of endless war.

This is the first Shakespeare in the park production where we noticed the actors ever acknowledge the air traffic overhead; when one of the helicopters that occasionally fly over Riverside Park during performances whirred overhead, Romeo at one point looked up, suggesting that in this military conflict, this noisy intrusion is both routine and threatening.

Mercutio, the most transgressive character in the drama, is an American who's gone native a bit. Played with gusto by Tyler D. Hall, who was so good in last season's Hamlet and last month's Cyrano, the wildly erratic Mercutio remains shirtless beneath a Middle Eastern cape, wearing red-lensed sunglasses. He's disgusted with the conflict, and you get the feeling he would prefer to be anywhere else - surfing in southern California, say, or at a downtown club - and both his fanciful, almost psychedelic Queen Mab speech, and upon his fatal injury at the blade of Tybalt, his repeated "plague on both your houses" seem informed by weariness of unending war.

Of course Romeo and Juliet also transgress. Their love-at-first-sight meeting at the Capulet ball and the forbidden nature of their mutual attraction and acting on it seems more dangerous because of the setting; the stakes are higher in this fierce and fiery land.

The constant violent deaths give context to the killings of Mercutio and Tybalt; when the Capulets come running and beat their breasts in anguish at the death of their nephew Tybalt (played by a fiery, fanatical Gustavo Obregon, someone you can easily envision as a suicide bomber), it echoes countless photos we've seen of Middle Eastern family members so publicly mourning violent, senseless deaths of their young ones. Yet even where cycles of violent retribution seem to prevail, romantic passions - and genuine love - can bloom in unlikely places.

The narration of the play, both the prologue and epilogue, standing on the periphery, is Friar John (Drew Rosene, who also was the genius costume designer), whose usual small part as Friar Lawrence's messenger here is expanded, and Friar John seems to be the only person who represents the outside world; he looks like a foreign correspondent, flown in from London or Paris, trying to make sense of the madness he's observing.

The Prince here, played to a saturnine fare-thee-well by Jesse Michael Mothershed, seems to be a Western-installed military governor. He wears a suit and tie, or when interrupted at leisure, a polo shirt and casual-Friday slacks. He speaks with annoyance at having been brought in from a more civilized place to preside among such barbarians.

And both sides seem barbaric. The usually gentle Friar Lawrence is played in a brilliant turn by Friar Lawrence is a military man, with the mid-South drawl of a Marine drill sergeant; he and Hamlet typically exchange salutes, and if he's a man of God, it's as a Southern Baptist no-nonsense military chaplain. It was a terrific performance.

The apparent commanding officer of the soldiers' unit, Lord Montague (Vince Philip), is gruff and distracted, and the ground troops - Nike DeVita as Benvolio (with a black death's-head heavy metal t-shirt) and J.T. Maloy as Balthasar (Special Forces?) - are Midwestern or Southern Americans who look like they've given up on ever getting out of this bloody madhouse and act accordingly.

Valerie O'Hara, who was so good last weekend as Roxane's duenna Marguerite in Cyrano, plays a similar role here, as Juliet's Nurse. But her performance in Romeo and Juliet is much different: the Nurse, though she may complain a lot and act the fool, seems to be both wise and aware of her own genuine competence. Even when veiled, she's an open book.

Hudson Warehouse mainstay David Palmer Brown, a gifted actor whom we enjoyed so much last weekend as DeGuiche in Cyrano and last summer as Polonius in Hamlet, excels as a Lord Capulet with a medieval mindset; we got the feeling he'd hardly hesitate to kill his own daughter for the sake of family honor.

Amanda Renee Baker, as his wife, seemed very much a woman of her faith and region, alternately mournful and commanding.

There was so much about this production to admire. It began raining during the scene in which Juliet is notified of Tybalt's slaying and Romeo's banishment, and a number of people started leaving as they got wetter. But mercifully, the rain stopped just like that after a few minutes, and we felt lucky to be able to move up (down, actually, on the steps) for a better seat.

As the two lovers, Amanda Ochoa and George K. Wells were moving and utterly believable. They're both baby-faced enough to convey the innocence of adolescent passion and its impulsive nature.

There's a genuine sweetness to their moments together. Romeo drops the facade he sometimes wears among his fellow soldiers - he's a nervous smoker - and Juliet, her veil removed, reveals a deep generosity in her love.

Romeo's fatal fight at Juliet's tomb with Paris - Lorenzo Villanueva gives a subtle performance as a boyish count who feels he has to adopt the role of a future warlord - dreadfully compounds the awfulness here, and Romeo knows it. Juliet's suicide, and Romeo's, came very close to being averted, but Peter (Jerry Mouse Nwosuocha) and Balthasar (J.T. Maclay) dither on their respective sides: in this impulsively vicious land, it's probably functional to delay in most cases but of course here it's fatal.

At the end, Montague and Capulet, chastened by the deaths of their young, raise their arms to signal an end to the senseless violence. But even as the Prince proclaims that the tragedy has weirdly led to the accomplishment of his mission to pacify Verona, it is hard not to have lingering doubts that peace is at hand.

This was a remarkably timely and brilliant production by director Nicholas Martin-Smith, the Hudson Warehouse cast and crew, and the play continues over the next three weekends in August.

Friday Evening on the Upper West Side: Hudson Warehouse presents "Cyrano" in Riverside Park

At the end of tonight's performance of Cyrano by the Hudson Warehouse at the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument in Riverside Park, we found ourselves fighting back tears, a testimony either to the sentimentality of an old fool or the high quality of the play we'd just seen, since it was also filled with laughs and amazingly good action sequences.

Directed by Hudson Warehouse founder Nicholas Martin-Smith, whose work we last saw a year ago in the company's innovative Hamlet, the adaptation of Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac (a play many people mistakenly believe is much older than its 1897 date, probably because of the play's 17th century setting) by Joe Hamel, who played the title role with, well, panache.

It's always great to be in this neighborhood, where we spent our summers (three blocks away from here) in 1980s, and it was nice to be out of the house on a night that wasn't so oppressively hot that we were forced to stay home and watch Everybody Loves Ramen reruns.

Cyrano is a play which most people think they know, but don't really. We suspect that most of the people who unwittingly came upon the play in progress as they were about to walk through the monument with their dog, stroller or skateboard saw the impossibly long-nosed fellow and knew it was Cyrano.

But the play is actually more than the simple story of an ugly but articulate man writing love letters (expressing his own true feelings for a hopeless love) as a favor for his handsome but inarticulate friend.

It's a rich brew with a large cast of characters, a few of them quite distinctive in their own right, and here played expertly with a cast which always works as a unit, working together - yes, taking their star turns and getting their individaul laughs, but ultimately in service of presenting a believable world and moving the story forward.

The numerous fight scenes, with swords, of course, as well as a variety of other weapons including fists, are breathtakingly skillful and hilarious. The seemingly endless battle when Cyrano legendarily took on a hundred opponents is a tour de force choreographed by fight director Jared Kirby, who's a genius at this sort of thing.

There was a historical Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac (1619-1655), a playwright and duelist, and the story is based, very loosely, on his life. He was a witty and contentious man (though he reserved his most venomous satire for the man who'd been his lover for thirteen years) who did have a female cousin who lived with his aunt in a convent, did fight in a lesser battle at Arras during the Thirty Years' War between the French and Spanish, and he had a large nose - but not all that big.

The phallic nature of Cyrano's nose has always been difficult to ignore, and queer readings of the play have concentrated on how hard it is to conceal one's true self and deepest feelings. Cyrano tries to hide his love for Roxane; Christian tries to conceal his lack of verbal ability; and Cyrano has a complex and contradictory reaction to what makes him different from other people: he can both make fun of himself a thousand times better than anyone else can (as in the wonderful variety of witty self-directed insults he suggests to dullard Valvert in the duel early in the play) yet demand that his friends make no references to his most distinguishing characteristic or face his wrath.

The pathos of his hopeless love for Roxane, as well as Christian's own inability to get Roxane to love him for his true tongue-tied self, as well as the gallant nature when each in turn is willing to sacrifice his own best interests for those of a friend, gives the play its depth, but the comedy that permeates the work - in the form of characters like the baker/steward Bagueneau (played with brilliant comic timing by Ron Dreyer, who made a great Puck last summer in Midsummer Night's Dream) and others among the soldiers, servants, monks and nobles, as well as the verbal dexterity of the protagonist, is never lost until Cyrano's death at the play's conclusion.

Joseph Hamel was a winning, friendly, volatile and extremely funny Cyrano, but his hidden melancholy side is there all the time. It's a demanding role, full of style, but the actor made it look effortless.

To the character of Roxane, Amanda Jones brought dignity, vivacity and a slight petulance (it is, after all, kind of annoying to constantly ask for witty protestations of love from someone you apparently care about); in addition to her beauty, she had the depth that made you understand why two men are in love with her.

Matt Fraley's Christian was appropriately clueless at times, but it was always clear to the audience what a kind and sensitive person Christian is. With the audience rooting for Cyrano, it's sometimes hard to make Christian as sympathetic and noble as this actor does.

As the play's nominal "villain," De Guiche - who it turns out, as we suspected, is a pussycat after all - David Palmer Brown was outstanding. He's both blustery and phumphering, dynamic and distracted, and he gets the most flamboyant costume with the long wig. It's really interesting for us to see actors we saw last season like Brown (who was Polonius in Hamlet) or Tyler Hall (here, the Friar as as well as a dashing Bertrand; last season he was one of the multiple Hamlets) or Matt Fraley (who was either Rosencrantz or Guildenstern) and Ron Dreyer again.

Other terrific cast members included Emily Rose Parman as a gentle and earthy Lise; Vince Phillip as a sensible, loyal Le Bret; Valerie O'Hara as Roxane's dithery but protective duenna Marguerite; and Chel Shipley, Ryan Patrick Lingle, Roger Dale Stude and Coulby Jenkins as musketeers and various roles.

That some of these actors have worked together before, and with the director, probably makes these Hudson Warehouse productions so special. In his director's notes in the program, Nicholas Martin-Smith, discusses his realization that what his parents shared in their fifty years together was "true love," a friendship carried in a very simple way, without ego, and how that realization compelled him to direct and produce this Cyrano.

He and the cast succeeded in conveying that "true love" - not only in the passions of Cyrano, Roxane and Christian, but in the strong feelings of friendship and camaraderie among the entire ensemble.