Review: THE TEMPEST at Denver Center For The Performing Arts

The Denver Center's The Tempest is crisp, clean and fast-paced. Director, Chris Coleman, and dramaturg Leean Kim Torske bring remarkable clarity and purpose to the storytelling, with judicious cuts that make each scene feel vital to the play as a whole. The production never drags, which, frankly, most Tempests do.

The cast is, for the most part, excellent. Rob Nagle's Stephano and Sean Scrutchins's Trinculo make a terrific pair of clowns, with Nagle playing particularly well to the audience. Erika Soto's Ariel is energetic, poised and deeply vulnerable. Janiah-Camile François is a standout as Miranda, threading the needle between comedy and tragedy by simply playing her part honestly. Entire worlds pass across her face.

My favorite performances of the evening, however, came from Rajesh Bose's Antonio and Ben Cherry's Sebastian, two characters I've generally encountered as rather uninteresting schemers. Here, they are gregarious, charming and funny. They genuinely enjoy one another's company. They are also capable of atrocities.

That combination makes them considerably more interesting than the usual pair of villains lurking around the edges of the story. Their cruelty doesn't cancel out their charm, nor does their charm excuse their cruelty. They're simply recognizable people, which makes their capacity for violence all the more disturbing.

Bose's response to Prospera's forgiveness was deeply emotional. The production is staged in the round, and I happened to be sitting in the quarter of the audience that could see his face as Prospera addressed him. Antonio grew misty-eyed, genuinely penitent. It felt like a gift to be able to witness that small, private moment in the midst of such a large theatrical event.

Kevin Copenhaver's costumes for the islanders are spectacular. The play is forever calling Caliban a "fish," which can be difficult to compass in performance, but the crab claws incorporated into Moses Villarama's costume not only make the text make sense, they give the character great physical action and an element of fear. Miranda's dress is lovely, like a piece of sea glass, but Ariel is the standout.

Birdlike feathers protrude over Soto's back, giving her movement an entirely new dimension. When Ariel is emotional, little quivers can be seen trembling across her entire back. It's an excellent costume, both beautiful and extraordinarily useful to the actor. It also made me clock how often Ariel is called a bird or a chick in the text. I've known this play for years, and somehow the costume made me say, "Duh." I always like when a production does that.

The music, performed by Sarah Statler, is similarly welcome. Statler has a beautiful voice, especially when joined in harmony by Soto's Ariel. The modern selections help drive the pace, but the Shakespearean tunes particularly stand out as lovely and haunting. The recurring love motif of "Unforgettable" began to weary me after a while, as did the oft-repeated "The Windmills of Your Mind." These are minor qualms, however, in a sea of welcome that the music brings to the production.

My major criticism of the evening is Prospera. And, perhaps more significantly, the direction of Prospera.

For me, The Tempest can’t fully work unless Prospera is deeply human. The play's overwhelmingly beautiful revelation, that "the rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance," loses much of its force if we're learning that lesson from a wizard rather than a human being.

Jacqueline Antaramian's Prospera does all the Prospera things: the low, gravelly "Shakespeare voice," the slow cadence, the broad gestures. The delivery grows positively larghissimo for particularly famous lines. But these choices feel more like familiar Shakespearean conventions than expressions of a recognizable person. There is authority and gravitas in abundance, but precious little access to the woman beneath them.

Especially with Antonio and Sebastian played with such humanity, I wanted a Prospera who would bring me along on her journey. Instead, I found myself distanced by the gravitas. The production makes the other characters' stories so clear that Prospera's emotional distance becomes all the more conspicuous. When forgiveness finally arrives, I was significantly more moved by the man receiving it than by the woman offering it.

There is one other choice I found genuinely baffling, particularly in a production whose direction and dramaturgy I otherwise admire: the quasi-framing device of "I dreamed last night that I had magical powers."

What the heck was that?

The inserted language feels childish and unnecessary. The device never becomes substantial enough to justify itself, and its intrusion at the end is particularly unfortunate.

The Tempest already has one of the great concluding monologues in Shakespeare: "As you from crimes would pardoned be, / Let your indulgence set me free." It's a triumph of theatrical language, an appeal that reaches beyond Prospera and the play itself to ask the audience for an act of grace.

Those words could linger in the air like a bell.

Instead: MAGICAL POWERS!

The addition deadens the resonance of language that needed nothing more from the production. It's an especially strange choice from a creative team that has otherwise demonstrated such confidence in Shakespeare's text.

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