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Saturday, September 10, 2011

Review: Wars & Whores: The Henry IV Musical

By Toby Zinman

  This rollicking musical from The Underground Shakespeare Company starts with a famous phrase from Henry IV, Part One -- “civil butchery” -- and uses it as a lyric, adding, “It makes us into men.”  So it looks, briefly, as if this musical version of Shakespeare’s history play has a political agenda.

  That soon vanishes, though, and the show continues as a parody (travesty? burlesque?) that in spite of itself sometimes captures the emotional power of the real thing as some good actors with strong singing voices do the play justice.

  Prince Hal  (Gary Kurnov) and his rival, Hotspur ( Dave Kurnov — that the actors are brothers and look very much alike adds an extra dimension) square off, and, once again, fat Falstaff (Eric Johnson) is banished, while King Henry (Rob Bobst) despairs of his profligate son.

  There are two show-stopping songs, and both belong to the outstanding Dave Kurnov: “Make Love From a Horse” and the hilarious “Talkin’ Richard Two Two-Timin’ Blues.” (Once Hotspur becomes the star of the show, the play’s meaning shifts.)

  Conceived and directed by Benjamin Kamine, with music and lyrics by Jeffrey Barg, the show survives the burden of the Rotunda’s terrible acoustics  (not to mention the hardness of the pews and the heat). 

$10. 7 p.m. 9/11 at the Rotunda, 4014 Walnut St.
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About Philly Stage
Howard Shapiro reviews and writes about theater for The Inquirer, and has been on staff since 1970. He's had many posts at the newspaper, including cultural arts editor and editor of the Weekend section. He's twice been the editor of the Travel section, for which he writes frequently. He began writing theater criticism a decade ago, and has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, an Internews fellow in Greece, and a fellow at the National Endowment for the Arts' Journalism Institutue in Theater and Musical Theater, where Robert Brustein was among his mentors. He teaches arts criticism and travel writing at Temple University, and is Broadway critic for the NPR-affliated stations of the Classical Network.


Toby Zinman's night job since 2006 is theater critic for the Inquirer. She also is a contributing writer for Variety and American Theatre magazine. Her day job: Prize-winning prof at UArts, author of four books about four playwrights (Rabe, McNally, Miller, Albee), and doer of scholarly deeds (winner of five NEH grants, Fulbright lecturer at Tel Aviv University, visiting professor in China). Her 'weekend' job as a travel writer provides adventure: dogsledding in the Yukon, ziplining in Belize, walking coast-to-coast across England, and cowboying in the Australian Outback.


Wendy Rosenfield has been writing freelance features and theater reviews for The Inquirer since 2006. She was theater critic for the Philadelphia Weekly from 1995 to 2001, after which she enjoyed a five-year baby-raising sabbatical. She also writes the ArtsJournal blog Drama Queen. She was 2009 and 2010 Guest Critic for the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival's Region II National Critics Institute, a 2008 NEA Fellow in Theater and Musical Theater, and a participant in the Bennington Writer's Workshop. A graduate of Bennington College, she is inching toward a Master's degree in Liberal Arts at the University of Pennsylvania. She also is a fiction writer, was proofreader to a swami, publications editor for the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and a Brownie Girl Scout troop leader.

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