Experience History, Not passion in “Marie Antoinette”

Published March 9th, 2008

By Skip Sheffield
STAFF WRITER

It sounded like a good idea on paper.

Yet ”Marie Antoinette,” which is enjoying its Florida premiere through March 30 at Caldwell Theatre, is rather a disappointment.

Playwright Joel Gross has concocted a tale of romantic intrigue in the court of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.

Using the devise of a beautiful court portrait painter and an aristocrat who is one of her subjects, Gross imagines a romantic triangle among the painter (Janine Theriault), the aristocrat, Count Alexis de Ligne (Jason Griffith) and Marie Antoinette (Amanda Jones, recreating her original New York performance).

Janine Theriault is an exquisitely beautiful woman, and it’s easy to imagine any man falling madly for her.

Yet there is an absence of fire in her supposedly torrid affair with the handsome Count.

There is even less passion evident in the relationship between the Count and Queen Marie, who at the beginning of the play is a 19-year-old virgin, locked in a loveless marriage to the feckless King Louis.

Sofia Coppola directed a funny 2006 movie starring Kirsten Dunst as Marie Antoinette and Jason Schwartzman as a dunderheaded Louis XVI.

Alas, Louis is not in attendance in this play. Maybe he could have added some comic relief.

Instead we have long-winded speeches about class systems and the French and American Revolutions. The Count is an idealistic aristocrat who volunteers to fight for American independence.

Elisabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun, based on an actual painter to royalty, is a lowborn pragmatist who thinks the Count’s concern for France’s oppressed poor is hypocrisy.

Well it’s not, but who cares?

Then we have poor Marie, who has an inferior complex about being both an Austrian in a French court and less than spectacularly beautiful.

“Marie Antoinette” is a production in which the mind wanders to Tim Bennett’s ornate set and designer T. Michael Hall’s fashion blunders.

It’s bad enough Hall (no relation to director Michael Hall) has designed a hideous, bulbous, orangey dress for Janine Theriault- she wears the darn thing through seven years of history.

Ah well, Caldwell does some terrific shows, but this production is not one of them. At least you’ll learn something about French-American history.

Tickets are $36 and $42 ($10 students). Call 241-7432.