Philadelphia Weekly

Nobody in Philadelphia does Tom Stoppard better than the Wilma Theater. During its three decades, the theater has mounted eight of Stoppard's plays including superb productions of Arcadia, The Invention of Love, Travesties and Every Good Boy Deserves Favor (the latter with the Philadelphia Orchestra). Now the Wilma opens its 30th-anniversary season with the Philly premiere of Stoppard's latest work Rock 'n' Roll in an adroit production from director Blanka Zizka.

Spanning 22 years, the story begins in 1968. In England Pink Floyd drops group member Syd Barrett, a stunningly gorgeous and talented musician whose drug habit has led to increasingly erratic behavior. In another part of Europe, 500,000 Russian and Warsaw Pact troupes occupy Czechoslovakia. Stoppard connects these two unrelated events in an amazingly complex but touching work that juggles topics including the Greek poet Sappho, consciousness, political dissent, Communism, cancer, military occupation and the underground Czech rock band the Plastic People of the Universe.

Stoppard himself has described R&R as being about "time," which, though accurate, is too general to be especially helpful. More specifically the play is about change, and over the course of R&R's two acts we see friendships, romances, political ideologies, cultural movements and national identities evolve.

Jumping between Prague and England, the play focuses on Jan (the marvelous Barnaby Carpenter), a Cambridge grad student who returns to his native Czechoslovakia as the country is overrun by Soviet forces.

Meanwhile Jan's irascible Cambridge mentor Max (the excellent David Chandler), a professor of Marxist philosophy and a devout Communist, is facing a domestic crisis as his wife Eleanor (Kate Eastwood Norris in a tremendous performance) wages a battle with cancer. The events lead both Jan and Max to revaluate not only their political views but also their relationships with those closest to them.

Although R&R is filled with big ideas, director Blanka Zizka (who, like Stoppard, was born in Czechoslovakia) avoids intellectualizing the play. It's a smart production, but also a very human one. At one point Jan expresses his hope that Czechoslovakia will "create socialism with a human face" and Zizka smartly focuses the production more on people than ideologies.

The production's numerous musical interludes (the rock 'n' roll playlist is spectacular) features photos of ordinary people (including some from Zizka's own family) whose lives are impacted by the changing political landscape in Czechoslovakia. In a play about transformation (even the beautiful Barrett grows old and bald) the one constant is rock 'n' roll.

In the final scene the Soviets have withdrawn from Czechoslovakia and the Rolling Stones are taking the stage in Prague. It's an exuberant if admittedly sentimental conclusion, but the sense of joy is contagious. The world's greatest rock 'n' roll band has come to town and it's impossible for us not to get swept up in Jan's excitement. To some it may only be music, but to Jan and his fellow Czechoslovakians the Stones' appearance signifies the end of totalitarian rule and the arrival of freedom.

Herringbone

Encountering something unique in theater is immensely rare, which makes Herringbone (currently playing at the McCarter Theatre in a stunning production from director Roger Rees) a cause for celebration. A one-man musical starring BD Wong portraying a host of identities, Herringbone emerges as one of the most curious theater concoctions in recent memory. Adapted by Tom Cone from his own one-act play with music and lyrics by Skip Kennon and Ellen Fitzhugh, the story involves an 8-year-old boy in Depression-era Alabama whose body is inhabited by a deceased vaudevillian. Though the tale is set in 1929, it's equally accurate to describe the story as occurring presently in the mind of the performer, and in Wong's dazzling performance it becomes nearly impossible to distinguish the story from the storyteller. Both a conventional musical and an entirely original work of performance art, Herringbone takes some getting used to. But while there have been numerous plays focusing on the art of performance, few have probed the psychology of the actor as deeply or as interestingly as Herringbone. Vivid, theatrical and at times deeply disturbing, Herringbone provides a startling exploration of the art of acting.