Hope to see you soon, she has him sign off, affectionately. Your Odysseus.<\/p>\n
Directed by Emily Maltby for the York Theater Company, with music direction and orchestrations by David Hancock Turner, Penelope paints its title character as the author of The Odyssey. Its a promising twist, and it builds on an established idea that The Odyssey, a work abundant with substantial female characters Penelope, Athena, Calypso, Circe, even the sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis is not a male creation.<\/p>\n
The novelist and critic Samuel Butler, in the 1890s, theorized that a woman must have written it. The classicist Robert Graves whose Butler-inspired 1955 novel, Homers Daughter, imagines a Sicilian princess as the author of The Odyssey called it a poem about and for women, its hero notwithstanding.<\/p>\n
Penelope, at the Theater at St. Jeans on Manhattans Upper East Side, feels like a musical about and for men. In its cast of 10, there are just three women, including Britney Nicole Simpson, who makes a lovely Off Broadway debut in the title role. It is not through any shortcoming of hers that this ostensibly female-centric show, as a program note puts it, is so enamored of its male characters: the five tiresome suitors; Penelope and Odysseuss son, Telemachus; and especially Odysseus. Penelope snaps into focus only in Act 2, when the wandering king returns and takes over a plot that had always been about his absence anyway.<\/p>\n
If you are looking for a vividly written Penelope, you would do better with Madeline Millers 2018 novel Circe, in which Penelope is indelible, and surprising, in a small supporting role. Here, though, the story that Kellogg (book and lyrics) and Weiner (music) tell suffers from a failure of imagination, as if making her a weaver of tales rather than of cloth gives her definition enough. (In The Odyssey, she promises to wed as soon as she finishes a weaving project, then unravels her work each night.) She does have Odysseuss nurse, Eurycleia (an expert Leah Hocking), to conspire with, but wheres the rest of her orbit?<\/p>\n
If, on the other hand, you are looking for an old-fashioned, comfort-food kind of musical with goofball humor, unpretentious songs and a heroine who is just fine with the world never knowing that she wrote one of its classics (I, for one, had trouble swallowing that concession), Penelope may be a good fit.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Go here to read the rest:<\/p>\n
Penelope Review: Adrift Between Ithaca and Progress - The New York Times<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hope to see you soon, she has him sign off, affectionately. Continue reading