THE HEART OF A DOG
Lookingglass Theatre
Greedily occupying a suite of seven rooms, the apartment building’s celebrity tenant is a professor who cosmetically alters the elite of a “classless” society, rejuvenating divas with monkey ovaries and offering codgers a second stab at love–at the risk of turning their hair green. His latest experiment–to turn Sharik, a mangy, streetwise Moscow mutt, into a human through a pituitary implant–misfires when the dog develops the flaws of the brawling thug who gave him his gland.
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The big credit goes to David Sinaiko. Resembling Mel Brooks at his snappiest, Sinaiko’s foul-mouthed, earthy Sharik (in a brilliant canine costume by Kent Jones, Xander Berkeley, and Heather Ann Priest) is everything Lassie never dared to be: stupid, greedy, and opportunistic. Sharikov resembles Vladimir Zhirinovsky all too completely.
He soon makes his own changes. The ardent poet Ivan is unhinged by Woland’s ability to create disaster. Institutionalized, Ivan meets the Master, who has penned an unpublished but much-condemned novel about Pilate and Jesus. The Master’s muse Margarita strikes a bargain with the devil, inducing Woland to complete the Master’s novel.
Neither as entertaining as Arabian Nights nor as original as The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, this production is no Lookingglass triumph. The novel’s excess is exacerbated by an adaptation that never seems on top of its meandering plot. The profusion of events, easy to pace when you read the novel, only daunts onstage.
