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MARY STUART Gets Rave Reviews In Variety, Associated Press & More
By: Gabrielle Sierra Jun. 03, 2009
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The Donmar Warehouse production of Friedrich Schiller's MARY STUART, in a new version by Peter Oswald and directed by Phyllida Lloyd, opened on Sunday, April 19 at the Broadhurst Theatre (235 West 44th Street). The production stars Janet McTeer as Mary, Queen of Scots and Harriet Walter as Queen Elizabeth I.
The production, which received rave reviews from critics, is nominated for seven Tony Awards, including Revival of a Play, Actress in a Play (Janet McTeer, Harriet Walter) and Director of a Play (Phyllida Lloyd). McTeer is also the winner of the 2009 Drama Desk Award for Actress in a Play for her performance.
Here are some recent stories featuring the production:
Associated Press: Queen to Queen: McTeer, Walter talk Tonys and more By Douglas J. Rowe
Queen to Queen's sofa. Your move.
Janet McTeer and Harriet Walter bookend the couch in McTeer's dressing room. The two British actresses are both nominated for best actress Tony Awards, and while they're both pleased by the honor, neither likes the idea of competing.
"It's not nice. It's no fun," McTeer says. "But we would, both of us, absolutely adore if Phyllida got one, because she's a genius."
She's, of course, talking about Phyllida Lloyd, the director of the critically acclaimed Broadway drama, Mary Stuart.
Walter plays England's Queen Elizabeth I and McTeer the title role of Mary, Queen of Scots. McTeer has already picked up this year's Drama Desk Award for her portrayal of the doomed Mary, and she has a Tony for her performance in A Doll's House, in 1997.
To read the complete article, click here: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iuH7eRzP_XBmIiL5SA5HKjwvrK5wD98IGAVO0
New York Magazine Command Performances As the Queen of Scots or Mrs. Churchill, Janet McTeer demands attention. By Jesse Green
A Broadway beheading was never such a high as it is for Janet McTeer in the title role of Mary Stuart. Though the Scots queen has been imprisoned, rained upon for twelve solid minutes, and sentenced to death, she goes to the ax happily, beaming with faith. "And since I am still her when I come offstage," says the strapping McTeer, "that happiness comes with me-at least until I fall asleep two hours later."
Great performances are forged in the tension between an actor's sufficiency and insufficiency: Janet McTeer is clearly not Mary Stuart, and yet, for those three hours, eight times a week, Mary Stuart can only be Janet McTeer. To turn what could easily have been a botch into a triumph (McTeer is up for her second Tony award in June) takes technique-and then "years of practice" to make it disappear. "You should be able to do it like driving a car," she says-or like a plane whose wheels retract after takeoff.
To read the complete article, click here: http://nymag.com/arts/theater/features/56906/
New York Times Forget the Ingénues; Cue the Grown-Ups By Patti Cohen
In Mary Stuart the British stage actress Harriet Walter, 58, is the 16th century's most powerful woman, Queen Elizabeth, while Janet McTeer, 48, is her nemesis - roles that have earned them both nominations for best actress at the Tony Awards.
In film "women's roles on the whole are defined in terms of their family relationship to the hero," Ms. Walter said from her basement dressing room at the Broadhurst Theater, not far from a tank that collects the 400 gallons of water it takes to produce an onstage thunderstorm. "They are the wife, the girlfriend, the mother, the daughter. Rather than being the center of their own story, they're usually a planet revolving around a male figure."
"It's not that you want the big central roles necessarily," she continued. "It's just that you want your person to have a life outside, to be a complex three-dimensional person who isn't just there to offset somebody else or fulfill a function in the story."
To read the complete article, click on the following link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/theater/24cohe.html?scp=1&sq=Cue%20the%20Ingenues&st=cse
The Leonard Lopate Show, WNYC Radio Girls and Women
The new production of Mary Stuart is the first Broadway revival of the show in 40 years and we're joined by two of its stars: Janet McTeer and Harriet Walter.
To listen to the interview, click on the following link:
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/lopate/episodes/2009/05/22
Bergen Record A water-drenched speech By Bob Feldberg
Sometimes, a scene in a show, or a performance, hits you in a certain way.
It may have something to do with excellence, but it needn't. It's just a moment that jumps out and plants itself in your brain, to stay.
As a fond farewell to the 2008-09 Broadway theater season, here are some of my memorable moments:
In Mary Stuart, rain falls in one of the key dramatic scenes. But it isn't that showery kind of precipitation you sometimes see in a production.
This is a downpour, a drenching, flooding rain. And as a soaked-to-the-skin Janet McTeer, playing Mary, Queen of Scots, delivers her most intense speech of the evening, you wonder whether she'll finish it before contracting pneumonia.
To read the complete article, click here:
Backstage Tony Talk A roundtable chat about craft and career with six nominees for Broadway's biggest honor By Simi Horowitz
Back Stage: Was there ever an artistic turning point when you saw the approach to acting in a new light?
Harriet Walter: One of the moments that unlocked something for me was a production of All's Well That Ends Well. In England I did it with Peggy Ashcroft. She was in her 70s, and I was in my late 20s, early 30s. It was a difficult part for me and I was working myself up to tears and torment-the right state to be in for that character-while Peggy Ashcroft would be sitting calmly in her chair, getting the little details right, like where her bag was going to be placed. Her performance was so simple and so immediately direct and there was no fuss. And I remember her saying, "The audience doesn't really know if you're crying. Just get to that moment in the play, and you'll reach it when you reach it. You're taking yourself out of the time of the play if you're trying to cook yourself up into something." She started that lesson that I'm learning every night: that I just sit and receive and exist in the moment. But it takes 30 years to get there. It was a lesson of peeling away, simplifying, and not putting yourself and your angst in the way of communicating.
To read the complete article, click here:
http://www.backstage.com/bso/news-and-features-features/tony-talk-1003977682.story?imw=Y
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