Review: HUSBANDS AND WIVES Turning Heads at Haifa Theatre

From the moment you enter the theatre and see the spinning set in Haifa Theatre's stage adaptation of Woody Allen's 1992 film Husbands and Wives you can already feel what a special evening is headed your way with this production, directed by Moshe Naor and adapted by him and Amir Kliger.

Husbands and Wives presents the parallel stories of two long time married couples from the moment where one couple, Sally and Jack, decides to separate and announces the news to the other couple, their best friends Judy and Gabe. From this moment on we see how this change affects the lives of both the shocked Judy and Gabe and the confident with their decision Sally and Jack.
The play's book may not be different from the movie, as most of its script's lines are kept intact even after being translated to Hebrew, but it is somehow much funnier than the film and is staged in such a unique way, mostly due to the great assistance from set designer Sasha Lisiansky's innovative and perfectly detailed set, combining five different settings into one as they are all placed on a spinning carousel-like platform, such a thing that very much added to the smooth progress of the play. This idea is probably the only thing that incidentally created a connection between this production and Woody Allen by providing dizziness and high speed similar to his methods.

One of the more noticeable features in most Woody Allen films is of course him playing one of the characters along with his one of a kind nature, which is also true in Husbands and Wives where he played Gabe. In the play, Dvir Benedek played Gabe and even though he acted nothing like Allen usually does it felt as if he truly entered his character's mind and took his time accordingly to tell his story. Such a thing can't be said about his fellow actresses, other than Roni Goldfine who may have played the very small part of Sam, Jack's new young and modern girlfriend, but out of all the cast members she is the one that brilliantly acted in the most natural and real manner.

In contrary, while Dorit Lev-Ari played Judy in a very deep way she did at times overdo it so much that she was frequently very loud, which prevented her from being believable. Both she and Keren Tzur, who played Sally very faithfully and comically, appeared as if they were a bit stressed and kept quite a fixed level of anger without giving the variety of feelings and emotion levels as they should, though in Sally's case she is described as someone who is more likely to act that way. The guys were much more convincing in that matter, as Ishai Golan was as attentive and calm as expected from his character Michael and Sharon Alexander, who played Jack, marvelously brought a full range of emotions and every time did so in the smoothest way.

Another special feature that was different in this adaptation was the music constantly playing in the background from the on stage piano as the pianist and composer Shaul Besser also added to the feeling of time movement with both his music and occasional semi-narrating.

As in the cause of the examinations made in the play there is always the dilemma of whether changes are good or not, but in a world where we're constantly surrounded by ideas of progress and modernism maybe sometimes it's not that bad to stay in the same place and not ruin something that exists and works well. This isn't true in this stage adaptation's case as it's clear that all these changes and fresh ideas add great, new and well needed aspects to this story.

Running time: 1 hour and a half, without an intermission.

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