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Review: Harbor Light's lyrical, poignant Love Song

Theater

Unkindest cuts

JULIUS CAESAR: This neurasthenic Shakespeare is slow going.

Indeed, this Julius Caesar hovers between a smoky ’60s soiree and the afterlife, the living interacting with the dead as a jazz trio tootles hits for Billie Holiday and Peggy Lee. It’s as if the characters, listlessly re-enacting errors and manipulations of the past, were demonstrating how the more things change the more they stay the same, whether in the theater of politics or behind the scenes in the sunken living rooms of human affairs. And though it makes no sense, the pleasantly impassive Lucius, sometimes lying on the red-carpeted stage, at other times quietly watching, does seem subconsciously to be directing the action, for example coming to the front of the stage to presage the attack on Caesar in the Senate in a sort of dumb show.

Nauzyciel fields some striking visual ideas, particularly the projections of the theater that make Julius Caesar look like a production in the round, the players sometimes addressing the illusory empty seats, sometimes aiming their words at the real ones (which makes us the Roman citizenry otherwise absent from the production). And since there are two projected Loebs, the second flown but available to be lowered in front of the other, the director can change the size of the playing space to close in on Caesar’s assassination, or a brooding Brutus at home mulling that “It must be by his death” before opening his contemporary digs, behind whose diaphanous drapes a sleepless and sheet-draped Portia approaches, to the black-masked conspirators.

The slinky jazz combo — bassist Blake Newman, guitarist Eric Hofbauer, and vocalist Marianne Solivan in black lamé, her hair a ’60s pile of shellacked curls — add not only mood but also ironic counterpoint. An anxious Portia, sure something is amiss at the Senate, retreats to the side stage to sing back-up on “Say It Isn’t So.” And as Brutus, filled with misgivings following his confrontation with Cassius prior to Philippi, sits on a leather couch lost in thought, Solivan sashays centerstage to purr out “Suicide Is Painless,” the themesong from M*A*S*H. I especially enjoyed the Hamlet allusion in the lyrics.