It is comforting to think that a show never gets better after a first act you don’t like, especially if you’ve made the decision to leave at the interval. But for those poor unfortunate souls who left at either of the intervals in Anne Washburn’s Mr Burns, which woke up audiences at the Almeida over the summer, there will be no chance for them to make amends for the gravity of their mistake. The three acts of the show differed strongly but it was the pseudo-opera of the final act that blew me away with its spectacular vision, aided by Tom Scutt’s glorious set and costumes (not taken from his personal collection, he assures me) which adroitly captured the entirely distinct worlds of each act.
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(c) Marc Brenner |
The general awesomeness of the third act of Our Town too
For the second time in three shows, the Almeida managed to deliver an absolute “doozy of a third act”, this time managing to cram not one but two stunning coups de théâtre into the short but superlative final segment of this all-American classic. Not having seen a production of the show before, the uniqueness of David Cromer’s interpretation might have been a little lost on me but there was no doubting how inventive and illustrative his bare-bones approach was from the start. And as the (metaphorical) curtain rose on the last act, suitably titled ‘Death and Dying’, Cromer and designer Stephen Dobay took the breath away with a first evocative piece of staging and then raising the actual curtain, went in for the kill with a second which perfectly brought home the power of Wilder’s message.