Even back-benchers like Hal’s pal Ned Poins and the brilliantly monikered Doll Tearsheet leave a lasting impression thanks to Jude Sandy (also a pretty good name, that) and Maggie Kettering. The cast, directed by company honcho Michael Kahn, is an embarrassment of riches, actually.
It’s a Dreamworks Animation–style joke all out of key with the rest of the show, but it’s dispensed with right at the top, and it works. He’s reading a tabloid with the headline “ELVIS IS ALIVE!” just to drive the anachronistic point home. He performs the prologue in the role of Rumor, and costume designer Ann Hould-Ward interprets the Bard’s call for a costume “all painted with tongues” as a smart three-piece suit with a bowtie. Perhaps in compensation for that fool Wookie get-up he’s made to wear, van Griethusen gets to open Part 2 looking like a million bucks. Here, Keach is so good that his goodness seems inevitable, tempting a critic to speed past it to praise Matthew Amendt’s shaded, protean turn as Prince Hal, or John Keabler’s wiry, fearless Hotspur (only in Part 1, though he plays in other roles in Part 2), or Ted van Griethuysen’s hilariously pliable Justice Shallow (only in Part 2, although he does sport an alarming false beard and wig as Glendower in Part 1).
When he was in Frost/Nixon at the Kennedy Center in 2008, his transformation into the 37th president felt more revelatory, probably because he looks exactly nothing like Nixon, a real person with a familiar mug. But Keach, late of Alexander Payne’s Oscar-nominated Nebraska, has been doing this role since his twenties, and his utter command of it feels matter-of-fact. The dissolute, swollen old knight with whom king-in-waiting Prince Hal carouses in his youth only to spurn him once he ascends to the throne was a character whom Welles, who never learned self-discipline or deference and who died a corpulent beggar, understood in the marrow of his creaky bones.Īt 72, Stacy Keach-who plays Falstaff under a putty nose and padding in the Shakepeare Theatre’s clear and stirring new repertory of Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2-is already more than two decades older than Welles was when he directed himself in the part. Like King Henry V, Welles demonstrated visionary brilliance at an early age, but Falstaff was always the Shakespearean figure with whom he identified most closely. By 1964, when Orson Welles was shooting The Chimes of Midnight, his faithless but reverent mash-up of the Henriad, his stock had fallen so far he had to secure the production’s modest-beyond-all-modesty budget via the pretense of making another film entirely.