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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
In 2001, the British director Sam Mendes announced the end of his run as artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse, the flashy and successful London theatre he had co-founded nine years earlier. Under Mendes's supervision, the Donmar had been transformed from an unused rehearsal hall for the Royal Shakespeare Company to the focal point of theatrical chic. For the most part, Mendes had staged contemporary plays, ranging from David Mamet's "Glengarry Glen Ross" to David Hare's "The Blue Room," in which Nicole Kidman briefly appeared nude, and David Auburn's "Proof," starring Gwyneth Paltrow. Mendes also directed a tricked-up version of "Cabaret" (more raunch, more drugs, more Weimar), which opened with Alan Cumming in the lead role. (The production is still Willkommen-ing audiences on Broadway.) In short, he established the Donmar as a thinking man's boutique Palace. He mounted plays with enough credibility to draw serious theatregoers, as he appealed to the general public's guilty thrill at seeing stars of a certain pedigree join the footlight parade. There was nothing particularly unusual in this approach. Hollywood-focussed packaging infects Off Broadway, too; think of the Public Theatre's 2001 production of "The Seagull," with Meryl Streep, Natalie Portman, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Christopher Walken, Marcia Gay Harden, Kevin Kline, and others--it was like a DVD with too many features. But Mendes knows, in his post-Peter Brook way, that the play is not the thing; the star is, no matter how ill-equipped he or she may be for the exigencies of the stage. He knows, too, that the theatre nowadays is to movies what jazz is to pop music: it has a certain cachet, but few prefer it to the populist-minded alternative. As Mendes said, after directing two movies--last year's "Road to Perdition" and the...
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