The Seagull

Gesammelte Informationen über Filme von, mit und über Natalie finden in diesem Unterforum ihren Platz; Gerüchteküche inklusive. Zur besseren Übersicht empfiehlt es sich, den Filmtitel in der Themenüberschrift anzugeben.
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Aleph
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Gleichermaßen respektlose wie witzige http://www.nypress.com/14/32/nyc/nyc.cfm der Seagull-Aufführung und des Drumherum.

(Link gefunden bei np.com)

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Aleph
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Aleph
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Der Autor Tony Daniel hat die Möwe-Aufführung am http://www.natalieportman.com/german/ar ... ttwoch.htm gesehen. Er ist ein Vertreter der Natalie-ist-für-die-Rolle-zu-jung-Theorie. Ausschnitte aus seiner http://users.rcn.com/tdaniel.interport/ ... t2001.html:

''Thalia and I waited in line for 13 hours yesterday and got tickets for "The Seagull," which we saw at Central Park's Delacorte Theater last night. Meryl Streep, Christopher Walken, Kevin Kline, Marcia Gay Harden, John Goodman, Philllip Seymour Hoffman and Natalie Portman. All directed by Mike Nichols, with a translation by Tom Stoppard. With the exception of Portman's flat performance (Nichols made a big mistake casting this unexceptional nineteen-year-old as Nena), it was entirely fantastic.

(..)

Like I said, Portman wasn't very good. She seemed like a woman who had stepped out of an only-decent college performance into an inspired professional production. This was a problem for the play, because Nena is pivotal -- her character informs the actions of all the others. No matter how good they were, you couldn't believe they were reacting with violent emotions to this mousy girl who seemed to have just graduated with a C average from some New England rich girl's school in Connecticut.

You can't fault Portman for being what she's not. The fault lies with Nichols, who obviously didn't give the role the thought it deserved or who, more likely, thought he could knead a Nena out of this young lady's plain flour. But Nichols is getting up there in years, and Portman ain't Dustin Hoffman as 19, in any case. An older Nena would have been a good compromise -- even, and especially, one who wasn't a celebrity. I'd have reluctantly and nicely let Portman go, if I were Nichols, and moved on to more promising material. Nena's understudy was out there playing one of the servants and I wanted very much for Portman to step aside so I could see that woman's stuff. I have a feeling the understudy was thinking the same thing as I (and many in the audience, no doubt) was.''

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Aleph
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@ Aleph
Das sind ja recht harte Worte. Wie ist denn Deine Ansicht über diese Kritik? Du hast das Stück ja auch gesehen. Würde mich mal interessieren.

Thanks,
M
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Aleph
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Beitrag von Aleph »

Meine Eindrücke habe ich in meinem http://www.natalieportman.com/german/ar ... /index.htm geschildert (siehe dort Sonntag und Freitag, 5. und 10. August). Da ich die Aufführung am 8. August nicht gesehen habe, kann ich mich zu der oben zitierten Kritik im einzelnen nicht äußern. Ich teile nur die Auffassung nicht, Natalie sei grundsätzlich zu jung für die Rolle gewesen.

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Aleph
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Aleph
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Besinnliches zum Jahresende:

Christian Morgenstern

Das Möwenlied

Die Möwen sehen alle aus,
als ob sie Emma hiessen.
Sie tragen einen weissen Flaus
und sind mit Schrot zu schießen.

Ich schieße keine Möwe tot,
ich laß sie lieber leben -
und füttre sie mit Roggenbrot
und rötlichen Zibeben.

O Mensch, du wirst nie nebenbei
der Möwe Flug erreichen.
Wofern du Emma heißest, sei
zufrieden, ihr zu gleichen.

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Aleph
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Aleph
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Es gibt eine moderne Adaption, die gerade verfilmt wird, und vielleicht den einen oder anderen Möwenfan interessiert:

http://www.seagullproject.com/

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Aleph
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Aleph
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New York Times

August 13, 2001, Monday

THE ARTS/CULTURAL DESK

THEATER REVIEW; Streep Meets Chekhov, Up in Central Park

By BEN BRANTLEY

It's been 20 long years since Meryl Streep last appeared in a play in New York. And from the evidence now available at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, she has been depriving herself and her audiences of some serious pleasure.

Ms. Streep is playing Arkadina, an aging actress of considerable charm and even greater vanity, in Mike Nichols's very starry and very spotty production of Chekhov's ''Seagull,'' which was scheduled to open last night. And when Arkadina makes her entrance, as a stage diva should, swanning down a staircase, don't be surprised if a welcoming serenade starts up in your head, like the one sung by those dancing waiters to the star of ''Hello, Dolly!''

For it is indeed nice to have this Oscar-winning actress back where she belongs. Two decades in front of movie cameras haven't diminished her capacity for looming large from a stage, and with a head-to-toe physicality that gives the lie to Pauline Kael's famous suggestion that Ms. Streep acts only from the neck up.

Known largely as Hollywood's tear-streaked queen of broken hearts, Ms. Streep is here often luxuriantly, self-mockingly funny. Yet you see the anxiety behind Arkadina's grand, silly postures; like Chekhov himself, Ms. Streep has drawn a portrait of comic ruthlessness and gentle understanding.

In other words, theatergoers who continue to wait hopefully to obtain the limited number of free tickets left for ''The Seagull,'' which has been extended through Aug. 26, are not doing so in vain. But be warned that while this production may offer, as the old MGM slogan boasted, ''more stars than there are in heaven,'' only two of those stars, Ms. Streep and Kevin Kline, shed much in the way of illuminating light.

Few playwrights demand greater instinctive harmony within an ensemble than Chekhov does. Granted, his characters are often so hermetically self-involved that they don't even listen to one another. But it is essential that we believe they all breathe the same befogged air.

Yet throughout this latest ''Seagull'' I kept feeling that I had to readjust frequencies to receive all the different stylistic signals. Mr. Nichols, a much and justly awarded director of films and plays, here appears to have encouraged his cast members to retreat to separate corners to find their characters and then come out acting.

Now when you're dealing with a company that includes the highly charged, idiosyncratic presences of stars like Christopher Walken, John Goodman, Natalie Portman, Marcia Gay Harden and Philip Seymour Hoffman, you had better make extra sure that they're speaking the same language. Otherwise you wind up with what this ''Seagull'' gives us: the feeling of watching a movie that has been spliced together from different eras and styles. And this despite the careful atmospheric handsomeness of Bob Crowley's sets and costumes and Jennifer Tipton's lighting.

The disjointedness is underlined by the miking of the actors for open-air projection, which dislocates voices to the extent you sometimes think you're listening to a performance that has been entirely dubbed, like those old internationally cast movies from Italy. And monologues are generally addressed straight to the audience, as though by on-the-spot commentators. There are sparks of electricity all over the place, but they rarely connect into circuit.

This is especially unfortunate when you consider that ''The Seagull'' is a roundelay of romantic longings. At the center of the chain are two urban visitors, Arkadina and the novelist Trigorin (Mr. Kline), to the country estate of Arkadina's ailing brother, Sorin (Mr. Walken). There they disrupt the unhappy but relatively placid lives of an assortment of frustrated souls.

Most notably there are Arkadina's son, Konstantin (Mr. Hoffman), an artistic firebrand whose greatest talent is for self-sabotage, and the provincial girl he loves, Nina (Ms. Portman), who longs to become a famous actress and falls hard for Trigorin. Chekhov uses this basic quadrangle to explore the varied forms -- all impure, but some less so than others -- of love and art, and the havoc wrought by the myopic pursuit of them.

Since Arkadina and Trigorin have already basically fulfilled their destinies, the emotional center of ''The Seagull'' has to be with the younger pair and especially Nina, as their creative and romantic instincts develop. ''To me, Nina's part is everything in the play,'' Chekhov wrote. But it's an extremely difficult role, one that perversely finds its strength in victimhood.

Ms. Portman, the ravishing young movie star who did well by the title role in the Broadway revival of ''The Diary of Anne Frank,'' doesn't yet show the fluidity to convey Nina's strength of passion as well as fragility. She's pretty, poised, intense and artificial, bringing to mind one of those earnest starlet heroines from mid-20th-century movies, like Linda Darnell or Jeanne Crain.

Mr. Hoffman's Konstantin is closer to third-generation Actors Studio. This immensely gifted performer, so splendid in ''True West'' last year, gives off real emotional ferocity and sorrow. But he's still all feelings in search of a concretely defined character.

Mr. Walken's Sorin, on the other hand, might have come from the Catskills, with his Mort Sahl-like delivery and vaudevillian antics. (You never for a second believe that he's ill.) He's sort of entertaining, but to what end? Ms. Harden's comically strident Masha also has a flavor of the Borscht Belt, as does Stephen Spinella as her hapless suitor and Debra Monk as her mother.

As the philosophizing doctor, the estimable Larry Pine takes his character's detachment to the point that he seems more linked to us than to anyone onstage. I kept thinking of the Stage Manager in ''Our Town.'' John Goodman, as Sorin's vulgar estate manager, at least makes you understand why he behaves so badly with Arkadina, and you really believe that he loves her in his clumsy way.

Mr. Kline's very postures accent the passivity in Trigorin and the attendant shirking of moral responsibility, turning spinelessness into a physical stance and an existential choice. He seems, surprisingly, less assured in his line readings, occasionally coasting on that famous romantic baritone.

But he and Ms. Streep, with whom Mr. Kline memorably appeared in ''Sophie's Choice'' in 1982, are splendid together in the erotic scene where Arkadina systematically seduces Trigorin into returning to town with her. Ms. Streep, who looks luscious in Mr. Crowley's turn-of-the-century frippery, cannily brings out the strategist in Arkadina.

She's a balance between ego and intelligence, selfishness and compassion. Self always gets the upper hand, but you're aware of the peripheral existence of nobler traits, especially in Arkadina's conflicted scenes with Konstantin.

Detractors of Ms. Streep's screen acting have complained of her overly researched approach, but you can only be grateful for the solid sense of back story she brings to this role. When you see her romping like a kid in a nursery with Mr. Walken, you suddenly know all you need about Arkadina's childhood and the extent to which she remains there.

And when she turns a perfect cartwheel to demonstrate her enduring spryness, you appreciate both the depths of her vanity and her dangerous tenacity. Ms. Streep isn't afraid of making Arkadina look foolish, and she may occasionally seem to oversignal her character's comic distaste and jealousy. But Arkadina does come from a theatrical tradition of exaggeration, of gaining applause at all costs.

Ms. Streep's performance itself is by no means selfish. On the contrary, she gives expansively to her fellow cast members, feeding them emotional cues that they mostly fail to pick up on. If this ''Seagull'' is to move to Broadway, has been speculated, it has to develop the art of reciprocity.

In the meantime Ms. Streep has left a large but finely engraved calling card with the New York theater world, serving notice that she is back and still very capable of entrancing a live audience. Let's pray that this time she stays.

THE SEAGULL

By Anton Chekhov; a new version by Tom Stoppard; directed by Mike Nichols. Sets and costumes by Bob Crowley; lighting by Jennifer Tipton; sound by Acme Sound Partners; original music by Mark Bennett; hair and makeup by J. Roy Helland; animals, William Berloni Theatrical Animals; production stage manager, Peter Lawrence. Managing director, Michael Hurst; associate producers, Bonnie Metzgar and John Dias. Presented by the Joseph Papp Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival, George C. Wolfe, producer; Fran Reiter, executive director; Rosemarie Tichler, artistic producer. At the Delacorte Theater, entrances at West 81st Street and Central Park West and East 79th Street, at Fifth Avenue.

WITH: Meryl Streep (Arkadina), Kevin Kline (Trigorin), Christopher Walken (Sorin), Natalie Portman (Nina), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Konstantin), Stephen Spinella (Medvedenko), Marcia Gay Harden (Masha), Debra Monk (Polina), Larry Pine (Dorn), John Goodman (Shamrayev), Henry Gummer (Yakov) and Morena Baccarin, Vitali Baganov, Craig Bockhorn, Mark H. Dold and Sharon Scruggs (Servants).

Published: 08 - 13 - 2001, Late Edition - Final, Section E, Column 3, Page 1
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AvE
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Im übrigen:

Am 15. Juli diesen Jahres findet der 150. Todestag von Anton Chekhov statt.

Für mich bleibt Chekhov unerreicht: Er schrieb Komödien der Verzweiflung über das Leiden und die Sehnsüchte der Menschen. Und weil man davon gleichzeitig amüsiert ist und zerrissen wird, wirkt seine Kunst so eindringlich. (Woody Allen)

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AvE
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