I spent the day with King Henry VIII and his chief henchman Thomas Cromwell in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s epic — as in very long — Wolf Hall.
I’ll tell you a little about it, but first a shameless plug for a new CD of demo tapes by Broadway composer Cy Coleman (Sweet Charity, Little Me, City of Angels) called You Fascinate Me So. Coleman sings many of the numbers along with his frequent lyricist Dorothy Fields and, unlike many songwriters, they can actually sing.
The disc is available now from Amazon on the Harbinger Records label (which just happens to be owned by my friend and theater historian Ken Bloom, who puts me up and puts up with me when I’m in New York.) Also just published is a companion biography of Coleman by Andy Propst (Applause Books), also titled You Fascinate Me So. Make them and yourself happy, buy the CD and the book. (End of plug)
So maybe you have been watching the current PBS TV series of Wolf Hall, which has the same source material — a pair of Man Booker Prize novels by Hilary Mantel — as the two-part, nearly six-hour play. In a season with several prestigious imports from Great Britain (The Audience, The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night-Time), this RSC production was touted as the class act event of the three. Sorry, but I can’t agree. In fact, I rank it third of the three.
The problem is certainly not the storyline, which follows Henry VIII’s efforts to gain a male heir and the failure of his first two wives — Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn — to give him one, thus sealing their fates. But Mike Poulton’s stage script is more history lesson than drama, hardly the “edge-of-the-seat theater” that The New York Times proclaimed it to be.
Jeremy Herrin directs an attractive, though austere production, with a fine RSC cast led by Ben Miles as Cromwell, an actor who made a splash over here in 2009 in the three-part Norman Conquests, definitely not a historical drama. Miles has a lock on one of the best actor Tony nominations, but the play was less than I was led to expect. And it felt even longer than it was.
Last up: The acclaimed, irreverent made-in-America comedy Hand to God.