PICKET TICKETS: RICHARD III

I saw Al Pacino's Looking for Richard at Worldwide Plaza some time ago (you know, when it was the cheap movie house), but I only (finally!) saw Shakepeare's Richard III this month, in the briskly-paced Classic Stage Company production starring (and co-directed by) Michael Cumpsty (most familiar to me from his roles in Copenhagen and Democracy).

I thought the play started on a shaky footing, and I can certainly imagine productions more fully fleshed, both in terms of staging and character development, but the quality of the acting and the strong, centuries-old story won me over by the end. As noted by Charles Isherwood in The New York Times, there's an especially good scene between Cumpsty and Maria Tucci, who plays Queen Elizabeth. Much of the time the play's characters seemed almost like cannon fodder biding their time until Richard doles out their fates (Henry Miller once imagined a Hamlet production along those lines) but in this particular scene there the interplay of their personalities generated genuine and eerie electricity.