La Bête
Opening Night: October 14, 2010
Closing: January 9, 2011
Theater: Eugene O'Neill Theatre
American playwright David Hirson’s rollicking 1991 play, La Bete, is a comic tour de force about Elomire (David Hyde Pierce), a high-minded classical dramatist who loves only the theater, and Valere (Mark Rylance), a low-brow street clown who loves only himself. When the fickle princess (Joanna Lumley) decides she’s grown weary of Elomire’s royal theatre troupe, he and Valere are left fighting for survival as art squares off with ego in a literary showdown for the ages.
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October 14, 2010
There are many contenders for the title of the most obnoxious person on Broadway. I’m sure you could rattle off a dozen deserving candidates. But though it’s early in the season, one man has already put in his bid with such insistently annoying — and supremely entertaining — style that we may as well concede the honors to him right now. Mark Rylance, step forward and claim your crown.
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October 14, 2010
Mark Rylance dazzled audiences with his high-octane physicality in the recent Broadway revival of Boeing-Boeing, and the Tony Award-winning actor proves to be equally astonishing in Matthew Warchus’ often hilarious revival of David Hirson’s 1991 rhyming-verse play, La Bete, now at the Music Box.
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October 14, 2010
At the top of David Hirson’s faux-Moliere souffle, “La Bete,” the astoundingly intense actor Mark Rylance flawlessly delivers a monologue — a rhyming, tour de force, just-can’t-stop logorrhea — that occupies something like 400 lines of script on the page and takes at least a half-hour to deliver on a Broadway stage.
READ THE REVIEWOctober 14, 2010
When the play "La Bete" debuted almost 20 years ago, it exposed a trans-Atlantic fault-line: It bombed on Broadway but then won the best new comedy award in London. Now a revival is back in New York after receiving a warm reception in the West End. Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/lifestyle/broadway-return-of-la-bete-with-mark-rylance-and-david-hyde-pierce-may-leave-you-speechless-104990134.html#ixzz12OGoYRvu
READ THE REVIEWOctober 14, 2010
Mark Rylance is a fool’s fool. Belching, bragging, accompanying his own self-aggrandizing soliloquies with stunning four-part flatulence, he tears into the first half of La Bête, David Hirson’s 1991 meta-Moliere oddity, with a 400-line megalogue. In rhymed couplets. Not a syllable of which, I’m happy to report, isn’t uproarious.
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