by Bret Fetzer

Beauty of the Father

Seattle Repertory Theatre

Through May 15.

Hamlet: More Honour'd in the Breach Than the Observance

Straight-Edge Theatrics

Through May 16.

The Tavern

Seattle Public Theater

Through May 23.

Yankee Doodle Dandy!

5th Avenue Theatre

Through May 16.

Beauty of the Father is a terrible title but a lovely play. Written by Nilo Cruz, who won 2003's Pulitzer Prize for Anna in the Tropics, Father revolves around a painter in Spain named Emiliano whose daughter Marina has come to live with him after the death of her mother. Upon her arrival, she begins to flirt with an Arab perfume seller named Karim who lives with her father, not realizing that she's disrupting a delicate domestic balance between the two men and Paquita, a woman who has married Karim (at Emiliano's request) so he can stay in the country.

Observing all of this, and periodically chatting with Emiliano, is the ghost of Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca. Lorca has great lines--at one point, he holds a comic conversation with a puppet version of himself--and actor Jonathan Nichols steals every scene he's in with a wry mixture of grace and bemusement. The plot lacks propulsion and what the conclusion amounts to I couldn't say; but the characters are so carefully drawn, their interactions so carefully observed--and the play's tone floats so effortlessly between humor and sorrow--that their world becomes a living, breathing place that's deeply enjoyable to visit.

Yankee Doodle Dandy! argues that George M. Cohan, best known nowadays as a composer of jingoistic songs (including "Yankee Doodle Boy," "Over There," and "It's a Grand Old Flag"), was the father of that bastard art form, the musical. This particular example of the genre cuts back and forth between show-stopping song and dance bits from Cohan's shows and brief scenes of his life. The musical numbers, while well executed, have no emotional impact--they're presented with only a hint of their original context, and Cohan preferred crowd-pleasing sentiment to anything that might actually stir one's heart. He praised soldiers without ever going near warfare himself; though personally generous, he fought the formation of an actors' union; he cheated on his wives; in general, he was charming but self-centered--his patriotism was an extension of his own mammoth ego. The skeletal, cliché-ridden script never persuades us to care about him. If you want to see energetic singing, dancing, and flag-waving, the cast is certainly capable (particularly Judith Blazer as Cohan's first wife, Ethel). But there's not much beyond that.

Dandy also claims that Cohan's play The Tavern won him the critical acclaim denied to his musicals. After seeing Seattle Public Theater's production, it's hard to imagine a time when this flat, clumsy, repetitive script--about a mysterious vagabond in an isolated alehouse on a stormy night--could have held an audience rapt. But then, if this production had taken place at a junior high school, it would have tested the tolerance of the actors' own parents. The entire cast shouted and flailed their hands, presumably in search of a comic, melodramatic hamminess, which they never found. Even more idiotically, every time an actor took a step on stage, someone in the small balcony above the audience beat on a drum. Perhaps in the second act there was some justification for this relentless thump, but within 10 minutes I had a headache. I couldn't bear it; I fled at intermission.

The program for Hamlet: More Honour'd in the Breach Than the Observance comments that Shakespeare's audience saw his most revered tragedy (in which the untimely death of his father torments an eloquent young prince) as "an entertainment right there on the same level as tethering a wild animal and poking it with a stick." This ingenious reworking of the script by director Rushton Howard is not only blessedly free of pretension and sterile respect, it takes remarkable chances with the play, some whimsical (Polonius, an elderly windbag, dispenses his advice on Post-it notes) and some strikingly illuminating (Ophelia, not Hamlet, recites the famous "To be or not to be" speech, which--along with other bits of staging--makes her character a more compelling partner to the philosophical prince than has any other production of the play I've seen). The second half of the show has not been as rigorously or intriguingly reconceived as the first--but overall this Hamlet is stimulating, actually funny, and will challenge the assumptions of anyone interested in Shakespeare. It's clearly a labor of love by Howard and his cast of only four actors, who deserve to have a little of that love returned.

editor@thestranger.com