24 ARTS Review of reviews: Stage & Music
“Perfection is the rarest of stuff,” said
Terry Teachout in The Wall Street Journal.
“But that is what All the Devils Are Here
gives us.” A one-man online show written
by and performed by “one of America’s
greatest classical actors,” it opens a win-
dow on an “insufficiently appreciated
aspect” of William Shakespeare’s genius:
his creation of villains so memorable and
deeply considered that they changed our
understanding of villainy. Patrick Page has
played his share of Broadway villains, most
notably in Spider-Man and Hadestown,
and he possesses a bass voice “so resonant
that it can actually make your theater
seat shake.” Here, he doesn’t even needStage magic: Page with his book of spellsAll the Devils Are Here
++++to change costumes to effect his transfor-
mations, becoming, among others, Iago,
Shylock, Lady MacBeth, and a Richard III
whose hair-raising smile is “so horrific that
you half expect to see fangs.”Page speaks to the audience as not just pas-
sive witnesses to his various performances,
“but also as fellow scholars examining the
text with him,” said Maya Phillips in The
New York Times. To any Shakespeare buff,
“the contextual analysis is a touch light,”
offering little more than a thread connect-
ing the members of Page’s rogues’ gallery.
Even so, “Page asks worthwhile questions:
Is Iago a sociopath? Does Shylock reflect
Shakespeare’s early prejudices, and does
Othello later subvert them?” And when
Page shifts from one villain to another, or
from lecturer to baddie, “it’s like watch-
ing a chameleon change hue before your
eyes.” In the final scene, taken from The
Tempest, he conveys Prospero’s change of
heart before closing the book before him
and breaking a staff in two, symbolically
breaking the spell he’s cast on us. That
trick didn’t work for me, though: “I’m
still utterly beguiled.” $25 at shakespeare
theatre.org, through July 28Smithtown
++++
“A quartet
of appealing
actors” has
been assembled
to make the
most of this
new online
play, said
Michael Schulman in The New Yorker.
Set in a Midwestern college town, Drew
Larimore’s drama gives a monologue
each to Michael Urie, Ann Harada, Colby
Lewis, and Constance Shulman as the
four characters discuss their links to a
recent local tragedy and reveal the ways
that blundering uses of digital communi-
cation precipitated the central event. The
script itself is so thin “it barely demands
a paper clip,” said Jesse Green in The
New York Times. Yet somehow the
four actors take the foolish characters
they’ve been given and deliver “riveting”
performances anyway. “It’s often said
that great actors can make compelling
drama just by reading the phone book.
But should they?” The question is worth
asking, because the pandemic-friendly
format of Smithtown could make it
a popular choice of regional theaters
everywhere. $20, tskw.org, through
March 13The second solo album
from the frontwoman
of Paramore arrives
less than a year after
the first, and it’s “more
solo than ever,” said
Jon Pareles in The
New York Times.
Hayley Williams recorded it in her home
studio, and like other quarantine albums,
its songs often have “a folky acoustic
guitar, strummed or picked, at their core.”
She easily handles keyboards and drums
as well, though, and maintains a highly
polished sound throughout this breakup
record, whose 14 tracks highlight her “gift
for melody” and “careful emotional bal-
ancing: rage and self-criticism, insecurity
and conviction.” Don’t expect the arena-
ready vocal stylings that helped make
Williams a punk-pop star, said Mary Siroky
in ConsequenceOfSound.net. Here, the
32-year-old “stays comfortably in her lower
register, spinning stories instead of span-
ning octaves.” The album feels like “a collec-
tion of quiet, yearning, grieving love letters,”
some written to the world, some to herself.
As luck had it, “rather than tuck them away,
she chose to share them with us.”
Canadian singer-
songwriter Tamara
Lindeman “has a voice
that begs to be heard:
delicate but steady, a
breeze that can build
toward a gale when
the situation demands
it,” said Justin Curto in NYMag.com. On
Ignorance, her ever-changing band drops
all remnants of its folk origins. The new
Weather Station is “more electric than
ever,” drawing on the precision of jazz and
the groove of disco to create an eerie, driv-
ing backdrop for what might loosely be
described as an “album-length statement
about climate anxiety.” The new sound sug-
gests “a Millennial Joni Mitchell fronting
jazzy versions of LCD Soundsystem or the
National,” said Jonathan Bernstein in Rolling
Stone. Lindeman’s lyrics, meanwhile, range
from a confession of stage fright (“Parking
Lot”) to a reveling in the planet’s beauty
(“Atlantic”) to a reckoning with capital-
ist greed (“Robber”). She has created “a
breakup record with her own dying planet,”
and it solidifies the 36-year-old as “one of the
most audaciously inventive auteurs working
in the broad singer-songwriter tradition.”“You don’t need a
sprawling band the
size of Parliament/
Funkadelic to bring the
funk,” said Hal Horowitz
in AmericanSongwriter
.com. Hammond B-3
organist Delvon Lamarr
has put together an instrumental-only
trio that’s now “one of most talented and
funkiest acts around.” Though the Seattle-
based group has built its reputation on live
performances that can get a crowd danc-
ing, the music on its “exhilarating” new
studio album “will hold anyone’s attention.”
Lamarr, guitarist Jimmy James, and pocket
drummer Grant Schroff work up grooves
that are “as thick and deep” as any since the
heyday of organ jazz legends Jimmy Smith
or Jack McDuff. The trio does mix things up,
said Thom Jurek in AllMusic.com. After the
“biting, meaty” guitar vamping of the open-
ing track, we get “bright, summery” soul
jazz in “Girly Face” before descending into
the relatively sinister “From the Streets.”
Start to finish, though, I Told You So is
“grittier, edgier, and more confident” than
the trio’s first two albums. “Hands down, it’s
their best outing yet.”Hayley Williams
Flowers for Vases/Descansos
++++
The Weather Station
Ignorance
++++Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio
I Told You So
++++A homebound HaradaSh
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