Stage Beauty Review
by Jon Popick (jpopick AT sick-boy DOT com)November 1st, 2004
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The biggest problem with Stage Beauty is that it plays like an extremely light version of the still distributor-less but ridiculously entertaining Johnny Depp/Samantha Morton/John Malkovich film The Libertine. Both have the same setting, at least one common character, and stories that focus on the production of important plays. There are other problems, unfortunately. Beauty is, at least for its first 90 minutes, a poorly-balance train wreck. It would have us believe that 1661 London was populated by just a dozen or so inhabitants, since that's all we ever see regardless of where we're taken. And those dozen or so people are, for the most part, a bunch of swinging, switch-hitting, cross-dressing dandies, which makes Beauty a lot more like a John Waters film that you might expect from its trailer and pedigree.
After suffering under the puritanical reign of Oliver Cromwell, the free-thinking Charles II (Rupert Everett, The Importance of Being Earnest) lifts the ban on women portraying women on the stage. This doesn't sit so well with Ned Kynaston (Billy Crudup, Big Fish), who has built a successful career playing the female lead in productions like Othello and Romeo & Juliet. To make matters worse, Ned's dresser, Maria (Claire Danes, T3), becomes the first big actress of the day, and he is forced to help her hone her talent.
If you're thinking about Shakespeare in Love right now, your thoughts are way too ambitious because Beauty ain't even in the same neighborhood, quality-wise. Richard Eyre (Iris) jumbles genres like "comedy" and "drama" into a big pot of unrecognizable goo as he hammers home the theme of sexual politics with the subtlety of Tara Reid on her ninth drink. Danes cries in nearly every scene she's in, and Crudup, though decent here, is tough to watch knowing he left a pregnant Mary-Louise Parker to run off with his co-star. That's tough baggage to check at the door, so I thought I'd be upfront and mention it. Also, I've played Desdemona before, so I know it's not that difficult to play a bad actor in drag.
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